David Brooks: To Form a More Blinder Union

In this article, David Brooks lays bare the warp and woof of his ideal America.  He introduces his philosophy, aptly described by Matt Welch as banal authoritarianism, by way of whining about the lack of puissance in today’s memorials and monuments:

If you go to the Lincoln or Jefferson memorials in Washington, you are invited to look up in admiration. Lincoln and Jefferson are presented as the embodiments of just authority. They are strong and powerful but also humanized. Jefferson is a graceful aristocratic democrat. Lincoln is sober and enduring. Both used power in the service of higher ideas, which are engraved nearby on the walls….

The monuments that get built these days are mostly duds. That’s because they say nothing about just authority. The World War II memorial is a nullity. It tells you nothing about the war or why American power was mobilized to fight it…  Even the more successful recent monuments evade the thorny subjects of strength and power. The Vietnam memorial is about tragedy. The Korean memorial is about vulnerability.

One could say Mr. Brook’s foray into architectural criticism is a dud.  As Jesse Walker notes, Robert McNamara represents the quintessential authoritative force of the Vietnam War, but a “commanding Lincoln- or Jefferson-style monument to Robert McNamara would be perceived as a perverse joke, and rightly so.”  Check out Mr. Walker’s article and links for why the Vietnam memorial is pretty awesome as is.




The second half of the article gets down to the core of Brooksian political philosophy (of which symbolic architecture criticism is a mere offshoot).  Brooksian metaphysics hold that individuals are made to be docile followers of a few exalted leaders.  He uses the rest of the article to diagnose what he sees as our "followership problem."  So, the monumentally boring word-vomit about our national monuments allows Mr. Brooks to ask (and then answer) this burning question:  “Why can’t today’s memorial designers think straight about just authority?” 

Fortunately, David knows why.  Ya see, first:  “We live in a culture that finds it easier to assign moral status to victims than to those who wield power.”  He fears too much time is devoted to “stories” about “oppression, racism, and cruelty.”  Hence, precious little air-time and deep, personal reflection is given to the myths that have propped up illegitimate leaders since time immemorial.  As a self-professed master of political science and philosophy, Mr. Brooks knows very well how story telling allows totalitarians to enthrall their oppressed masses.  But I guess we should know the level of concern Mr. Brooks has for oppressed victims.  

The next culprit, in Mr. Brooks mind, is “our fervent devotion to equality, to the notion that all people are equal and deserve equal recognition and respect.”  Surely, Mr. Brooks’ view of equality is more nuanced than this sentence suggests, so I won’t mock him quite yet.  He goes on:  “It’s hard in this frame of mind to define and celebrate greatness, to hold up others who are immeasurably superior to ourselves.”  How does one disentangle this claim?  I’ve already given his premise a generous reading, so I’ll forgo interpretation of this particular non sequitur.  Let’s just say, it is a bizarre indictment of a free society. 

As we approach the denouement, Mr. Brooks reveals his fundamental gripe about the state of our republic.  With the Congress' public approval rating hovering in the teens, Mr. Brooks places the blame squarely on the nation’s leaders damn society of gadflies we’ve become:

But the main problem is our inability to think properly about how power should be used to bind and build. Legitimate power is built on a series of paradoxes: that leaders have to wield power while knowing they are corrupted by it; that great leaders are superior to their followers while also being of them; that the higher they rise, the more they feel like instruments in larger designs. The Lincoln and Jefferson memorials are about how to navigate those paradoxes.

Nobody denies the paradoxes inherent in political power.  Precious few understood the paradoxes of political power better than Publius.  In their writings, presented to the American people as The Federalist Papers, they presented a theory and design of governance that recognized the grave dangers and limited role of national power.  Nowhere in their writings did they suggest, as Mr. Brooks does, that good government required “good followers—able to recognize just authority, admire it, be grateful for it, and emulate it.” 

No, quite contrary to Mr. Brooks, our founders warned of a complacent citizenry.  Madison recognized that, “no government, any more than an individual, will long be respected without being truly respectable.”  His co-author Hamilton (closest in philosophical bent to Mr. Brooks, though still miles away), said of the people, “that their confidence in and obedience to a government will commonly be proportioned to the goodness or badness of its administration.”  And Thomas Jefferson, Minister to France while the Federalist Papers were being written, wrote at length about how much faith citizens should place in the “authorities”, and puts it succinctly here:  “Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone.” 

These eminent thinkers analyzed the “paradoxes” of state authority through a liberty versus power paradigm.  Perhaps Mr. Brooks cognitive dissonance stems from his belief that the “liberty vs. power” paradigm is no longer “germane.”  

In this thoroughly creepy article, Mr. Brooks reveals that his optimal vision of government requires a dramatic societal change in the way citizens relate to their overlords.  He longs for a society that keeps the common man in check by making sure they remember their place in the “hierarchy”.  Intellectuals must praise the government ten times before they publicly criticize one abuse of power, lest the plebeians dare question their affinity to the political class.  Politicians will more effectively serve the common good once transparency watch-dogs are replaced by boot-licking bards of state.  As an added bonus, class warfare would be no more, since all the grunts of society would feel a common bond through their interminable obeisance to shared leaders.  Alas, Mr. Brooks reveals whence his long called-for solidarity and unity must come:  an all out campaign to subvert the common individual to the grandeur of the state.

University of California Great for Office Planners and Construction Companies, Not So Much for Students

Later this month I will move from my comfortable abode in San Diego to the (not currently) frozen tundra of Montreal.  What do California and Quebec have in common?  They are both suffering from a tumultuous crack-up in higher education.  Students in Quebec are protesting (or striking, as they like to call it) against proposed increases in tuition. 

Similarly, rising costs have irked California students, leading to smaller-scale protests over the last several years.  Yesterday, the San Francisco Chronicle ran an opinion piece with a proposed solution for rising tuitions:  cut the growth of middle management:

While the growth of the faculty and regular workforce of the University of California has kept pace with the growth of student enrollment over the past two decades (about 40 percent cumulative increase), the ranks of ‘management and senior professionals’ have swelled 220 percent in that period.

These educational institutions have some explaining to do, wouldn’t you say?  If higher tuition and fees are “unavoidable,” why have we been spending so much money on construction and office planners?   Customers, shareholders, and other inquiring minds deserve a convincing explanation about these outsized (and ongoing) expenses in the face of ballooning prices.  The article cautions against holding your breath:  "University administrators have yet to provide a compelling reason for why management growth is outpacing that of other employees by 5 to 1."

Administrators stumble over themselves to justify these extra-educational costs.  Universities must update facilities and a top-rate staff helps things run smoothly, they insist.  But nobody doubts the need for periodical renovations and office staffers.  One need only read the full report on which this article is based to see that the costs are extraordinary.  The question is:  do we need this much?  And can it be justified in this climate?

The answer is we don’t need it, and it should be stopped.  Nonetheless, university administrators insist on continuing all construction projects, despite rising costs that become more unaffordable each day, because, they say, so much money is already sunk into construction. 

Perhaps.  But California’s “universities and colleges are now paying a staggering $1.1 billion a year in interest on those construction bonds.”  It is like New Years Eve party-goers’ logic:  we’d be fools not to pay $750 for tickets to the open bar.  And now that we’re here and drunk, we might as well pay for an overpriced room for the night.  Sorry buddy, you could have stayed home, and you could have taken a taxi.  In 2010, the Legislative Analyst’s Office reported that campuses could make fuller use of existing facilities, but where's the excitement in that, right?

Higher-ed money was surely wasted over the past two decades.  The appropriate question ought to be:  why did this happen?  And how did schools get away with ballooning extra-educational costs while price spun further out of control? 

Administrators and their sympathizers offer up one plausible excuse for rising tuition: when public funding goes down, universities are forced to raise student tuition and fees.  Whenever schools announce tuition increases, they almost always link it to reduced state spending.  Should we take their word for it?  Probably not.  As former president of Harvard, Derek Bok, famously observed: “universities share one characteristic with compulsive gamblers and exiled royalty: there is never enough money to satisfy their desire.” 

The numbers presented by higher-ed administrators, unsurprisingly, belie their case.  Neil McCluskey, associate director at Cato's Center for Educational Freedom, examined a graph from the State Higher Education Executive Officers, and it shows that universities consistently raise tuition and fees when state funding goes down and when it goes up.  Trends such as this make Bok’s statement seem less and less hyperbolic.   

While funding matters, there must be something else driving the spikes in costs and tuition.  Enter the controversial Bennett Hypothesis.  The name comes from a 1987 op-ed in the New York Times written by Reagan Education Secretary William Bennett.  At the time, tuition was rising and schools were clamoring (dubiously) about the necessity of tuition hikes to offset cuts in government funding.  Bennett responded:

If anything, increases in financial aid in recent years have enabled colleges blithely to raise their tuitions, confident that Federal loan subsidies would help cushion the increase.

This sparked a whirlwind of studies, some discrediting and some supporting the Bennett Hypothesis.  Over the last two decades, the studies have kept apace.  One reason for the deluge of research is that both student aid and tuition have continued their upward march.  So, after two decades, has the Bennett Hypothesis scored a knock-out? 

Nope, no knock-out.  You see, most defenders of the Bennett Hypothesis also understand the lessons of FA Hayek and Karl Popper.  As in any social science, it is impossible to isolate the variables of aid and tuition.  McCluskey works with stacks of empirical studies and logical evidence strongly affirming Bennett’s claims, yet he freely admits that there is no “definitive proof”.  Modesty sure is refreshing.

Scholars from the other side, such as the Vice President of the American Council on Education, treat any variant of the Bennett Hypothesis as a “pernicious myth”.  Advocates bent on increasing the dollars spent on education shove pesky empirical studies, and simple economic logic, under the rug.  Acknowledging the Bennett Hypothesis disrupts their agenda.  Unfortunately, this approach keeps the media from examining what may appears to be a large piece of the puzzle.

And the missing puzzle piece may help answer our earlier question:  how do schools get away with ballooning extra-educational costs while hiking tuition at the same time? 

As Mr. McCluskey notes, “students are able to cover the incessantly rising prices" of college education.  How?  With an ever-increasing cheap bowl of taxpayer cash in the form of student aid.  Universities, keen to their consumers’ situation, operate with an understanding that this bowl will always get refilled.  This reveals a pretty logical explanation for the price inflation in higher-ed. 

Costly construction projects and explosive growth in middle management should give pause those willing to maintain the student aid status quo, regardless of their assent to the Bennet Hypothesis.  Any service provider who responds to problems of affordability in this manner is operating under a perverse system of incentives.   

But many people want Congress to double down on these incentives.  Nobody wants to argue for limiting students’ access to cheap government aid.  It is easier to blame the outsized costs of college on the picayune demands of skinflint taxpayers.  All I’d ask is that people remember this:  there is only so much money universities can put toward educational needs, but they can, and will, always find a reason to expand buildings and create unnecessary office jobs.  Saving students from their student loans will redouble our commitment to this damaged system, leaving society less wealth, less quality education, and more wasteful and fraudulent higher-ed expenditures.   

Public Sector Unions and Governance

For over a year, unions and lefty pundits have been up in arms about the Scott Walker.  Union members and sympathizers took to the streets.  Passions were high, and, at times, scenes out of Madison appeared chaotic. 

Unions likened their public protest to the righteous, impassioned calls for democracy in Egypt. 

Really?  Ok.  Let’s forget that Governor Walker was democratically elected.  Forget the fact that Walker enacted the reforms on which he explicitly campaigned (with the help of the elected legislature).  On Wednesday, Team Union received their second (or third; maybe fourth, fifth) chance at democracy. 

The democratic results were resoundingly clear:  Wisconsin voters favored Governor Walker’s efforts to pare back the financially crippling, government-backed advantages enjoyed by public sector unions.  

Team Union’s reaction reveals the inveterate and pervasive nature of their grievance:  they covet the state-backed guarantee of control and power to which they’ve become accustomed, and to hell with the rest of the electorate.  This much was clear from the beginning, and their phony cries for democracy were belied by their equally phony comparison to Egypt.  As Chris Edwards aptly put it back in February 2011:  “While Arabs are fighting to end extraordinary overreach by government, Wisconsin union protesters are fighting to preserve it.”

Lest you think I am being hard on unions, let me make this clear:  I have no quarrels with unions qua unions.  I quarrel only with the laws that trample on the rights of non-union workers, employers, and consumers.  In fact, laws like the NLRA undoubtedly trample on people’s rights, but they also hamstring unions in ways I do not condone.  As the recall was objectively about public sector unions, a discussion about private sector unions will wait for another day. 

Why Public Sector Unions?

First of all, were the actions taken in the budget-repair bill justified?  Yes.  Basically, the crippling fiscal effect of public pensions forced Wisconsin’s hand.  This is something Walker's opponent recognized in their 2010 race.  Completely neutral budget analysis showed that Wisconsin faced a $3.6B deficit in the coming two-year budget cycle.  Sweetheart deals for public workers contributed to the red ink, and it was only going to get worse down the road with demographic shifts.

Unlike most modern-day private sector workers, public workers receive a defined benefit plan.  Regardless of how the retirement plan performs in the market, beneficiaries are guaranteed a generous payout upon retirement. 

There is an ongoing debate about how much the state workers contribute versus how much the taxpayers contribute to the retirement fund.  Union backers claim that public sector workers fund much of their retirement through deferred pay.  Unfortunately, this is a dubious claim.  The Koch-funded, conservative propaganda machine known as the Wisconsin Office of State Employment Services reveals on their website that public employees contribute at most 0.8% of their earnings toward the pension plan and “executive status” employees contribute 0%. 

Under Walker’s reforms, affected public employees* will contribute between 5.8% and 6.65% of their earnings toward their guaranteed pension.  On average, they will be asked to pick up 12.6% of their health costs.  A pretty sweet deal considering private sector workers pay on average 21% of their health costs.

In reality, this may be too little to prevent disaster.  State and local governments have been lousy when it comes to calculating the cost of future liabilities.  Some studies estimate that Wisconsin's retirement fund was 54% unfunded - that's a $63 trillion hole.  And if you disagree that it is a hole, it is certainly a risk worth addressing.  

Limit Collective Bargaining Rights, Too?

Is it necessary to limit the power of public employees to collectively bargain?  Yes.  Two words: unchecked power.  Public unions wield their power in a different environment than their private sector counterparts.  The government has a monopoly on the goods and services they provide.  On top of this, when a union has a monopoly on labor (i.e. they can extract dues from all public workers, regardless of the worker's consent), the disastrous results are highly predictable.    

Unions naturally push for higher wages and benefits, and in the public sector, there is no countervailing pressure that will tend to keep costs at a sustainable level.  Private unions can only ask for a level of compensation that allows the company to remain competitive over time, lest the company goes under (or elsewhere) taking the jobs with them.    

In the government sector, taxpayers must take the goods and services the government offers.  The lack of competitive forces is only the beginning, though.  The costs of excessive compensation are dispersed among all taxpayers.  The unions, on the other hand, are a concentrated and highly influential political force.  They almost always favor increases in public spending because they personally benefit from an expanded government programs. 

Moreover, when politicians give outsized benefits to unionized public workers, they receive immediate gratification in the form of campaign donations and votes, but the cost to the taxpayer only comes due down the road.  This is why public workers’ salaries (which must be paid every year) remain fairly normal, while future compensation is goosed.  And this doesn't even get into the problem of pension spiking.

Behind closed doors, the bureaucrat and the union boss negotiate beyond scrutiny.  As I’ve only briefly demonstrated, these parties’ interests are pretty much aligned.  This leaves the taxpayer, the one with skin in the game, without effective representation.  The politician fails to be the faithful fiduciary of the average citizen.**  This suppresses the proper agency relationship guaranteed to citizens of a free society.  It is, therefore, no surprise that we see windfall transfers of money to the politically connected in boom times, and an unsustainable calamity in lean times. 

It’s not the End of Democracy, I feel Fine

Seeing where I'm coming from on this issue, you may be able to understand my surprise at some of the reactions.  Among these, the obits for democracy are the least sensible.  I harbor no schadenfreude against this guy, but I disagree more than a little with his cries that Walker's second electoral victory signifies the death of democracy in America.   

In fact, something closer to the opposite is true.  On Tuesday, voters were shaken out of a long slumber, and, regardless of what some will say, it’s unclear that it was a partisan victory.  Even people who voted for Barret last election have come around to see the iniquity of the current public union status quo.  

In Wisconsin, public polls show 69% of voters favor transferring new public hires into a 401(k) style retirement account, and 75% favor requiring public workers contribute more to their pensions and health care.

Alexis de Tocqueville famously noted that the greatest threat to a democracy’s survival is the ability of its members to vote themselves into bankruptcy and financial ruin.  Wisconsinites looked this monster in the face, and they decided to back away.  Democracy in America is not dead, it is trying to survive.

The Others Spoketh Too Much, Thus Killing Democracy

The President of the National Education Association, a union, took to the New York Times to claim that message of the Wisconsin recall is “the peril of corporate dollars” in our elections.  Of course, it's the catch-all boogeyman of Citizens United.  Unfortunately, the deriders of political speech have picked a case that is especially unsympathetic for their cause.  

First of all, Citizens United freed the speech of large labor unions just as much as it did corporations.  It is a bit disingenuous to fall back on the evil court decision when unions were some of the first and biggest actors to take advantage of the newly lifted restrictions back in June 2010. 

It is true, in the present election, Walker’s supporters decidedly outspent the opposition.  But was money the deciding factor?  Consider the fact that 9 in 10 voters had made up in their minds before May.  Moreover, of those who made up their minds in the last month, nearly 30% went for Barrett.  Those facts emit a stench of wasted money more than anything.***

Related issues were presented to the voters in San Diego and San Jose, California.  San Diego’s Propositions A and B aim to save money and are largely opposed by union forces.  San Jose’s Measure B reigns in unsustainable public worker compensation.  On a whole, supporters of these measures outspent their labor opponents (not the case for spending on Proposition B, unions pumped in over $1M dollars), but the gap was less than in Wisconsin.  Still, voters supported each of these measures by between 60 to over 70%.    

To be sure, I favor unrestricted political speech for all based on principle.  Still, it seems especially unfair to rail against shady corporate paymasters when your side loses in its bid to lock in generous and unsustainable compensation—compensation that comes at the great expense of all members of society, especially the private sector working class.

But is it Right to Void Public Worker’s Settled Contracts?

Some libertarian-minded people argue that the state should not lower public compensation by meddling with the contracts on which public workers have come to rely.  As a supporter of contract freedom, I have sympathy for this line of reasoning.  However, I tend to agree with Richard Epstein’s argument that these are illegitimate contracts:

“Those bloated union pensions and salaries were the product of the illicit gift of collective bargaining rights by legislatures, who by their oath and position are fiduciaries for the public, not the unions. But this case of abject self-dealing should make these contracts ‘voidable’ so that they can be set aside, if needed, by the government, after which these benefit packages could be modified to match comparable packages in the private sector.”

In an optimal world, the union bosses would pay the difference to public workers in order to fulfill their expectations under the voided contract.  In fact, I think a craftier attorney than I could make a case for that.  Nevertheless, public workers are fully aware of their agency relationship with the union.  The taxpayers, shut out of this process and too often sold down the river by lily-livered politicians, deserve the protection in this situation. 

After the votes in Wisconsin, San Jose, and San Diego, other parties may require protection of a more physical sort.  Check out this protester’s advice for Wisconsin’s Lieutenant Governor, Rebecca Kleefisch.  He tells her she better run, get the F out of the state because we are coming for you.  Asked to elaborate on this notoriously vague and cliché threat, he explains that “hopefully the colon cancer takes her before we get her.”  (Kleefisch was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2010.  On a less serious note, this usage of the word hopefully was granted grammatical clemency earlier this year). 

On the night of the election, an infuriated Barrett supporter slapped the mayor after he conceded the race to Walker.  The twisted and the violent should be attributed to the individuals and not to the group they represent. 

Another form of churlish browbeating pervades the public sector movement, and it is more indicative of the public union’s modus operandi.  Steve Maviglio, organizer for an umbrella group for the state’s major unions, told the San Francisco Chronicle that, “Chuck Reed [San Jose Mayor] will never get union support again as long as he lives.”  This is no idle threat.  Since the 1960s, public unions have enjoyed great success in shackling politicians of both parties.  Sadly, Americans with the least political clout paid for these shackles.  Hopefully Tuesday’s elections portend a future where independents, democrats, and republicans find a common desire for a governance structure able to face up to our shared fiscal reality.  

*Police, fire fighters, and others were exempted from the reforms.  Police and fire fighters are valuable members of society, but their compensation is just as much of a problem as other public workers.  Sadly, this is reminiscent of the hapless way in which many Republicans have caved in to unions over the years: under the guise of a public safety and tough on crime schtick.  

**This article only touches on one side of the crappy deal politicians have dealt us.  Their untoward affair with public unions have arguably lowered the goods and services they provide, most notably public schools.  Most egregiously, unions are allowed to extract union dues from any non-consenting public employee, and they then use this money to lobby against school choice.  The power structure allows unions to stand in every single door in which a taxpayer may gain a little bit of exit from the diseased system.

***On the other hand, the increased expenditures coming from both sides seems to have increased voter turnout.  Lovers of democracy can’t complain about that.