For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, democracy was a very difficult word to use in public debate. In C19, this was because most of what was written about democracy was hostile, and therefore characterized by a ready slide from ‘rule by the people’ to ‘mob rule’. Tocqueville stood out as a relatively sympathetic, but critical writer, on American democracy.

In C20, the problem was the opposite. Nearly everyone (except the Nazis) claimed to advocate and practice democracy of some kind. In particular, the Soviet Union claimed that it was the real democracy because the revolution had destroyed the ruling class that manipulated the supposed democracies under capitalism.

Now, however, all this is behind us, and democracy is a simple word again. The only serious opponents of democracy at present, reactionary Islamists like Al Qaeda and the Taliban, make no pretence of being democrats. Afghanistan under the Taliban was not a “people’s democracy’ or even an “Islamic republic’, it was an ‘Islamic emirate’.

Definition: Democracy means almost exactly what the person in the street uses it to mean without a definition. The crucial components are that governments should be chosen through free, fair and regular elections and that political decisions should be made either by elected governments or by (free and fair) direct popular vote.

There remains some tension between the representative and direct approaches, and this is the subject of occasionally overheated rhetoric, with one side or the other claiming to be the only genuinely democratic approach. In practice, however, nearly all democratic systems rely on representative government for day-to-day functions,while uisng plebiscites and referendums for a variety of special purposes including constitutional change and symbolic issues such as flags and anthems. Citizen-initiated referendums are used in a few countries, notably the US and Switzerland, but their impact, for good and bad, has not been nearly as great as was hoped by their advocates and feared by their opponents.

A trickier problem for democracy has been the relationship between legislatures and executives. Both have been claimed at different times as the true repository of democratic legitimacy. Advocates of the executive have used the theory of the mandate to back their claims, but to little effect.

Even more surprising than the ease with which we can define democracy is the fact that most countries now have a broadly democratic form of government, though imperfections abound. In a world where lots of things are going badly, this is a reminder that the general trend is still positive.

As I argued here, the US right’s campaign against “political correctness” was something of a fraud. But the general point that, in any given political context, certain ideas are unthinkable and certain words are unspeakable is surely true.
Some times are worse than others in this respect, and I think Ross Gittins is correct to say that the pressure of political correctness is growing in Australia.

It seems to me that, in these days of unending chatter about current affairs, there’s a growing list of things you’re not allowed to say. For instance, you’re not allowed to say that, for the leader of the free world, George Bush doesn’t seem very bright.
You’re not allowed to say that John Howard won the last election by playing on the public’s fear of foreigners. You can’t say that, if life in the bush is so terrible, there’s no law stopping people moving to the city.
You can’t say that splitting up Telstra would be a good thing. And you can’t say that most company takeovers end up being bad for business.
But, above all, you can’t say that Australians aren’t overtaxed.

Gittins makes the point, well-known to everyone who has studied the subject that, because of the interaction of taxes and means-tested transfer payments, the highest effective marginal tax rates are those faced by low-wage families.

Despite their generally individualist views, economists have a penchant for collective statements. In the early days of the Depression, much of the US profession signed a statement opposing the (disastrous, or at least unhelpful) Smoot-Hawley tariff.

Last year, 300 Australian economists (over 30 per cent of the profession) signed a statement supporting ratification of Kyoto. A widely-publicised counterpetition attracted only a handful of credible signatories and was never released.

Also last year, 17 prominent economists submitted a brief to the US Supreme Court in the Eldredge vs Ashcroft case, opposing the extension of copyright.

Now comes the news that 400 economists (including 10 Nobel prizewinners) have signed a statement condemning Bush’s tax cuts. The list has some big names (Arrow, Samuelson, Solow, Stiglitz) but, unlike the Kyoto and Eldredge statements, cannot be described as representing a broad range of views. Most of the signatories are ‘saltwater’ (Keynesian-interventionist) economists, so-called because they tend to be located on the East (Harvard, MIT) and West (Berkeley) coasts. The ‘freshwater’ (Chicago, Minnesota,St Louis) guys have mostly steered clear. Still, I’ll be surprised to see many of them endorsing Bush on this one.

Most freshwater economists are deficit hawks who would want to see expenditure cuts before they supported tax cuts. The main possible exceptions are followers of James Buchanan, whose arguments have formed the basis of the Bushies rationale that Republican deficits are good because they constrain the spending of future Democratic administrations. Looking at the budget projections, though, I suspect most Buchanan fans will find this argument less appealing as a basis for fiscal policy than it was as an intellectual jeu d’esprit.

Update Alan Greenspan’s testimony to Congress was generally critical of the large deficits proposed by Bush. But the NYT headline Greenspan Throws Cold Water on Bush Tax Plan is a bit of overstatement, or maybe wishful thinking.

According to The Times, public support for Blair and New Labour has collapsed as a result of his support for war with Iraq. Labour is just a point ahead of the Tories and Blair’s personal ranking is behind that of the antiwar Liberal Democratic leader Charles Kennedy.

Blair’s bogus dossier was a minor news item here and in the US but it is a big story in Britain, and has severely undermined the case for war.

Paul Krugman expresses perfectly my biggest single concern about war with Iraq

though you don’t hear much about it in the U.S. media, a lack of faith in Mr. Bush’s staying power – a fear that he will wimp out in the aftermath of war, that he won’t do what is needed to rebuild Iraq – is a large factor in the growing rift between Europe and the United States.

The contrary danger is that he will do too much – embracing the Perle-Wolfowitz-Pipes doctrine of a war against the entire Arab world, driven ultimately by the concerns of the Likud Party, rather than by any realistic assessment of US or world interests (or for that matter of an enlightened view of Israel’s interests). But wimping out or losing interest seems more likely.

Something of a followup to the last piece, from 5 December, looking at the paradox that:

The latest Labor landslide at the weekend reinforces the great paradox of Australian politics. Labor is in office, and looking comfortable in all the States and Territories, but seems doomed to endless Opposition at the Federal level.

I got some useful discussion on this from readers of this blog. I’m finding more and more that the blog provides a useful sounding board for ideas I can then develop for a larger, but less focused/informed/passionate, audience.

Another AFR Op-Ed piece from 21 November. Here’s the Introduction and conclusion:

More than a year after losing an election with a ‘no-policy small-target’ strategy the Labor Opposition still has no discernible policies, at least on domestic issues. Foreign policy will at best be neutral for Labor. To win, Labor needs to focus attention on basic domestic issues.

…

Labor has similarly concentrated on point scoring in relation to the various levies introduced by the government to fund ‘extraordinary’ items of public expenditure. With at least half a dozen such levies at last count, and more having been mooted, these fiscal expedients provide a tempting target. But despite the dislike of some economists for ‘hypothecated taxes’, special-purpose levies make a valuable contribution to public understanding, by making clear the link between desirable items of public expenditure and the taxes required to pay for them.

Rather than scorning the government’s reliance on levies, Labor should exploit this precedent. A Medicare style levy at a rate of 1 or 2 per cent could fund substantial new expenditure on education and the environment while allowing the ragbag of existing levies to be scrapped. Unlike the spurious idea that the sale of assets can be used to finance current expenditure, the revenue from a levy would provide Labor with a genuine ‘war chest’ for financing election promises, and one that the government would be unable to match.

For the moment, it is probably too optimistic to suppose that any political party in Australia would advocate an increase in standard rates of income tax to finance improvements in health, education and the environment. But ultimately, those who will the end must will the means.

As I predicted, Saddam has accepted Blix’s demands accepting U-2 flights, allowing private interviews with scientists, handing over at least some documents and promising legislation banning weapons of mass destruction (for what that’s worth). This will probably ensure a positive report from Blix on Friday. One important point about this is that it is evidence that Saddam is rational, therefore deterrrable. A refusal to back down on points like this would have been suicidal on his part.

On the other hand, my predictive powers fail me in working out what’s going to happen after that. The US has predictably dismissed the concessions, but the points at issue were referred to in very strong terms in Powell’s speech. With the exposure of the bogus Blair dossier (cited very favourably by Powell) and the apparent refutation of claims about a chemical weapons plant operated by Al Ansar in northern Iraq, the US case for war has weakened substantially in the past four or five days. It seems unlikely that the UNSC will pass the kind of second resolution the US wants, at least for the moment.

Of course, what matters is whether Blair can manage to drag the UK into a war. He seems to have a solid Cabinet (but you can never tell, of course) and he’s trying hard to avoid a Parliamentary vote which would certainly produce large-scale defections.

I’ve been looking at the parallels between the frauds perpetrated by pro-gun academic John Lott and his anti-gun counterpart Michael Bellesiles. But there’s an equally interesting parallel between the cases of John Lott and Trent Lott. Both acted in an indefensible fashion, and no-one seriously tried to defend them. Rather, the establishment media made a collective decision that Trent Lott’s pro-segregationist comments were ‘not news’. It was only sustained pressure from bloggers that made them change tack, with first a trickle and then a torrent of print and electronic media commentators piling on to demand Lott’s resignation .

In the John Lott case, the roles are reversed. The blogging establishment, as represented by Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit covered the topic reasonably fairly until Lott’s defence case started to fall apart with the exposure of the Mary Rosh sock puppet and the shyster antics of Lott’s chief defence witness David Gross. From then on, the topic was dropped like a dead fish. Reynolds even used the exact words of the old media establishment “not news”.

Unsurprisingly, the old media did not share the view that a prominent and controversial academic posing as a former student of the opposite gender and writing glowing testimonials for himself was ‘not news’. They haven’t yet managed to get up to speed with Lott’s putative survey but they are already well ahead of the blogging establishment on this one.

Sad to say, the blogosphere’s self-congratulation after the Trent Lott affair has proved premature. With a few honourable exceptions (notably Julian Sanchez and Michelle Malkin), the dominant group of pro-gun libertarians have proved just as keen on self-censorship as the established media. Reynolds has already settled nicely into the role of Howell Raines at the NYT, and his ukases on what is and isn’t news seem to be just as effectively enforced.

The claim that Reynolds tends to wimp out by declaring a debate closed as soon as he sees that he’s losing has been made quite often, but is hard to prove – after all one blogger can only cover so many issues in one day. But the Lott/Rosh case is about as clear-cut as I can imagine. Meet the new media boss, same as the old media boss!

The real cost of regime change Australian Financial Review 7 November 2002. In this piece from three months ago, I prognosticate a bit, estimate the costs of a war and look at some of the more dangerous postwar options

The big danger is that the US will seek to use Iraqi resources to offset the costs of the invasion, thereby turning a war of liberation into an old-fashioned war of conquest. Lawrence Lindsey, economic advisor to President Bush has argued that a conquered Iraq could be induced to expand oil production and drive down the world price. The resulting savings in import bills would, he suggests, more than offset the cost of the war.

New York Times columnist William Safire has voiced a more extreme scenario circulating within the administration. A ‘democratic’ Iraqi government would, he asserts, repudiate Iraqi debts to, and contracts with, countries such as France and Russia that had failed to back the US with sufficient vigour and instead contract on favourable terms with the US and its allies.

Leaving aside the dangerous political implications, the economic consequences of these proposed policies would be disastrous. An expansion of Iraqi oil production would take years to organise. In the interim, OPEC would have every incentive to drive the price of oil to $40 a barrel and beyond.

The idea of debt repudiation is even worse. The US is not only the world’s financial centre, but the world biggest debtor nation, with gross obligations running into the trillions. The suggestion that a US-controlled government should repudiate debts to score political points casts doubt on the credit of all debtors, not least the US itself. If a US invasion goes ahead, and this suggestion has not been scotched, holders of US government debt would be well advised to get out before the market as a whole wakes up to the economic implications of unilateral pre-emption.