The Foundation of Political Economy Jude Wanniski January 26, 2001

Memo To: Students of SSU
From: Jude Wanniski
Re: The Foundation of Political Economy

This first lesson of the winter semester was first presented at SSU as the opening lesson of the fall semester in 1999. A few changes have been made to bring it up to date. Our practice is to alternate the courses at SSU beginning with the political concepts of political economics, then moving to economic concepts, first a course in money and banking, then a course in fiscal policy and public finance. There is no hard wall between the topics covered as in real life politics and economics are intertwined. Some of the material will be similar to what you may be taught in a brick-and-mortar university, as opposed to our virtual university. Aristotle and Plato, for example, are still basic to all the models. For the most part, though, the perspective and the paradigms are new and distinctive and relevant to today’s world. The course material changes from one cycle to the next, but at times we do repeat lessons that are basic and need little alteration.

This first lesson will be as basic as it gets. The reason I think we must begin this way is that in my own experience as a student of political science at UCLA, 1955-59, there was no such foundation laid. The professors threw enormous amounts of information at me, in lectures and textbook studies, and when I got my BA degree in Political Science I really did not know what I had learned. Twenty years later, when I wrote The Way the World Works, I did realize that I had learned far more in school than I thought at the time, but that it had to come together with my life experience.

Life experience is what political economics is all about, from day one. The most basic lessons we get in life begin from the day we are born. We are political animals. But so are other species of mammal. All the primates arrange themselves in societies, but so do elephants, lions, tigers and bears. So do ants and bees, for that matter. When I mean basic, I mean basic. We think of the Law of the Jungle as a place where only the most fit survive, as individuals. But survival also depends on those who have learned over eons to cleverly arrange themselves in collectives. In the history of the world, the human species has thus far won the competition to be the species of life superior to all others. I say "thus far" because we can't assume that history is over now that we are on top. There are surely life forms even now arranging and rearranging themselves in collective and individual combinations with the real possibility of getting to the top -- by simply wiping out mankind. For our purposes, we can put these possibilities aside, on the assumption they are not very likely to occur in the next fifty years, which is the outside span of time that students of politics today will exert an influence on the shape of the civilized world.

In The Way the World Works, which I wrote in 1977, my observations of the universe of human political economy led me to the idea that the family unit is the most basic form of government. Because the large world of politics is so complex, it makes no sense to have students at the beginning of their studies be asked to grapple with that complexity -- before they have thought through the most basic forms. Once you grasp all the combinations and permutations of a family dynamic, you can much more easily understand the complexities of a world of 6 billion people. We learn the way the world works first from our mothers and fathers and siblings, the way they first learned it from their parents. Soon after we learned to say "Mama," we learned to say "hi" and "bye-bye," forms of social expression. We learned rules of civilized behavior that preceded civilization by tens, even hundreds of thousands of years, rules that involved collective rewards or punishments to those entering the family or clan. What we do now at the national and international level may be more elaborate -- requiring legislatures, bureaucracies and courts of law. The basic building block is still the same. A family is a mini-nation state. When I wrote TWTWW, I thought perhaps this formulation was an original insight, but years later I realized I'd picked up the fragment of the idea from A History of Political Theory by George H. Sabine. It is the book I used at UCLA when I took a course in this topic in 1957:

Aristotle accepted from the start the point of view of the Laws, that in any good state the law must be the ultimate sovereign and not any person whatsoever. He accepted this not as an acceptance of human frailty but as an intrinsic part of good government and therefore as a characteristic of an ideal state. The relation of the constitutional ruler to his subjects is different in kind from any other sort of subjection because it is consistent with both parties remaining free men, and for this reason it requires a degree of moral equality or likeness of kind between them, despite the undoubted differences which must exist.

This distinction between different kinds of rule is so important for Aristotle that he returns to it again and again, and it had evidently been an object of early interest with him. The authority of a constitutional ruler over his subjects is quite different from that of a master over his slaves, because the slave is presumed to be different in nature, a lower sort of being who is inferior from birth and incapable of ruling himself. Aristotle admits, to be sure, that this is often not true in fact, but at all events it is the theory upon which slavery is justified. For this reason the slave is the master's living tool, to be kindly used, but still used for the master's good.

Political authority differs also from that which a man exercises over his wife and children, though the latter is certainly for the good of the dependent as well as for that of the father. The failure to distinguish household from political authority Aristotle regarded as one of Plato's serious errors, since it led him in the Statesman to assert that the state is like the family only larger. The child is not an adult and even though he is ruled for his own good, he is still not in a position of equality. The case of a wife is not so clear but apparently Aristotle believed that women were too different in nature from men (though not necessarily inferior) to stand with them on the peculiar footing of equality which alone permits the political relationship. The ideal state, therefore, if not a democracy, at least includes a democratic element. It is a "community of equals, aiming at the best of life possible" and it ceases to be constitutional or genuinely political if the discrepancy between its members is so great that they cease to have the same "virtue."

It never hurts to begin a course of study in politics by checking out Aristotle and Plato. They may not have figured out all the possibilities leading to the ultimate political ideal, but they did put down the basic conceptual foundations. In this case, it was Plato who saw "the state is like the family only larger." Aristotle pooh-poohed the idea because women have some say in the family, but they don't in the state, and children are ruled for their own good and have no say. At the time, the parallel did make less sense than it does now. But this goes to show that Plato had a surer grasp of the ideal on this particular matter. In the intervening 2500 years, the state has steadily evolved to look more like the family. It clearly functions better when women are included in the policymaking process, as they are in the family, and the youth vote has not hurt at all as the voting age dropped to 18 from 21. The family unit is indeed the basic building block of the nation state, and we can see in it all the shadings of democracy that Aristotle thought desirable in the state.

In TWTWW, I'd posed a political problem for the family government, when I suggested the two parents and three children had to decide whether to go to the mountains or the shore for the summer vacation. A poll showed the vote to be 4-to-1 in favor of the shore, with both parents in the majority. Why does the family then go to the mountains? Because in the course of the discussions, one of the children makes such a passionate plea for the mountains that the others give way, perhaps with the promise that they will go to the shore the following year. In modern politics, political candidates will spend millions of dollars taking polls of the electorate, to find out what they want, and then promise to do just that, only to be defeated by another who seems to side with the minority. This is why public-opinion polls are so unreliable in forecasting the outcomes of elections, especially when election day is at a distance. Voters converse with each other as they mull the options and candidates, frequently voting quite the opposite of the tastes they said they preferred at the outset.

As in the above example, the political function of a family unit is to assess the available family resources, the reasonable goals over varied time schedules for the family and for individual members of the family, and to allocate resources in a way that promises the highest return on investment of time, energy, talent and money. We expect nothing less from our mayors and city councils, governors and state legislatures, and President and Congress. In the family, the mother and father and the children who are old enough to reason constitute the electorate. They and the younger children and other household members -- grandpa and grandma perhaps -- constitute the population. Aristotle was, of course, correct in noting that women have a different nature than men, although they are not inferior. This derives solely from the fact that they bear the children, which means they almost always assume the responsibilities of child-rearing as well. The nature of the male derives from his freedom from childbirth, hearth and home, which dictates his role as provider.

In the Oriental world, the yin and the yang of an individual or family or institution must be in balance if there is to be harmony. The yang component is masculine, positive and light. The yin component is feminine, negative and dark. This simply means the yang has the optimistic bent in arguing for the deployment of family resources, pushing for growth, while the yin argues on behalf of caution and economic security. The United States government is harmonious when its yin and yang are in bipartisan balance with each other and the demands of the times. The Republican Party can be thought of as the Daddy Party and the Democratic Party as the Mommy Party. The passage of the 1997 Budget Deal, included a cut in the capital gains tax which the Daddy wanted, and tax credits for education which Mommy wanted. It was the first evidence of bipartisan harmony in quite a few years. If you make a list of the things the GOP stands for and a list of things the Democrats stand for, you will quickly see that Republicans are more risk-oriented and Democrats more security-minded. In matters of national security, though, the Daddy Party always seems to prefer to spend more money on better weapons, while the Mommy Party argues that some of that should go to social programs, education of the kiddies and health of the old folks.

Of all the nation states, the United States is the only one which has a two-party system, which I tend to believe is one of the reasons why it has proven to be a superior system of governance to those nation states that have multi-party systems or one-party dictatorships. In the late 1960s and 1970s, which were chaotic in the United States, there were arguments from some experts, like Henry Kissinger, that the U.S. was at a disadvantage to the Soviet Union, because we had such an elaborate system of policy debate between the two parties. The Soviets could move much faster, he argued, because of their simple one-party system. The argument never impressed me, because I thought of the nation state as a family government grossed up. If Kissinger were right, single-parent families would be superior to two-parent families, because mom or dad would not have to reach a consensus with the other. It is when mom and dad consciously attempt to hammer out differences and reach consensus that yin and yang are in balance and the family resources are deployed with greatest efficiency. The multi-party systems in most of the world's parliaments are also less efficient, because they are never quite forced to find the most harmonious path. They can cop-out by electing several parties that have to scrounge about to find fractional coalitions.

Poor Newt Gingrich, the former GOP Speaker of the House. As a warrior, fighting his way to control of the House of Representatives, he was marvelous. But as the Daddy in the family, with President Clinton the Mommy, Newt failed miserably. He argued for risky tax cuts that were designed not by his old supply-side friends, but by his new macho pals in the Christian Coalition. These were to be paid for not by "dynamic scoring," which Gingrich scorned as the sissy way of doing it, but by assuming cuts in the school-lunch program and Medicare costs. The national electorate sided with Mommy, especially when Daddy not only threatened to shut down the government -- and twice did so -- but also threatened to default on the national debt unless he got his way. The electorate might have preferred a different Mommy, but when presented with the option of Bill Clinton or Bob Dole + Newt Gingrich, the prospect of a unified Republican government managing the national family was just too scary.

Even the addition of Jack Kemp to the Republican presidential ticket headed by Senator Bob Dole in 1996 did not help enough. Kemp is in the Mommy wing of the Daddy party, by which I mean he is closer to having a harmony in his yin and yang. No Republican leader is as closely identified with minorities as Kemp, which is the reason President Bush picked him to be his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Remember the Kemp debate with Vice President Al Gore? Six times during the debate, Gore warned that the Dole 15% tax cut proposal was a "risky scheme." Gore, of course, is pure Mommy, the leader of the Mommy wing of the Mommy party, which is why I was always dubious that he could be elected President. More than any other issue he is identified with is Global Warming, which he proposes to secure the people of the United States against by slowing world economic growth. This is Big Mommy. In his race for President last year, Gore mentioned Global Warming in his acceptance speech to a Democratic convention that sat on its hands. There was almost no applause. Gore rarely mentioned the topic in the campaign as his advisors saw it was not one that would move votes into his column.

George W. Bush won without the popular vote, even as he tried to present himself as a “compassionate conservative,” i.e., in the Mommy wing of the Daddy party. The elections were the closest in American history, as the electorate not only divided equally on the executive branch, but also on the legislative branch. The voters seem to be demanding that the two parties put aside their partisan differences and attempt to get along with each other. The voters have had enough of feuding parents. They want reconciliation and a happy family.

This metaphor of the family unit as the smallest unit of political economy is more useful than any other I can imagine for entering a study of political economics. It is especially useful now that students of political economy face the responsibilities of leadership of the family of nations in what amounts to a new American imperium. If you cannot relate political behavior to the politics into which you were born, you will make an understanding of history and the current world political flow of history more difficult than it really is. We'll have other metaphors in the lessons ahead, but will return to the family from time to time to relate seemingly complex situations to those close to home.

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Serious students will find it useful to read Chapter 3 of The Way the World Works, "The Electorate Understands Economics." If you do not have the book and cannot find one in your local library, you can buy an inexpensive paperback at our virtual bookstore. I will be referring to it throughout the semester, you should have a copy. Here is an example of what you will find:

A child's principle trading partners are his parents, and perhaps brothers and sisters. When the child is six or seven years old, he has to formally be taught money values, and the idea of a currency being a medium of exchange. By that time he has learned most of what he is going to learn in his lifetime about general trade and money concepts. Even before a child can communicate verbally, it is clear he has learned the precision that trade involves. That is, the child wants something from mother and knows something must be traded in return, and that those two somethings will be of roughly equal value. The child is happy when the terms of trade are struck and mother seems happier too. The message that both sides seem happier from trade is one repeated thousands of times in early childhood.

"If you eat your dinner, I will give you an ice cream," says mother to the toddler, who has thus far shown no interest in eating. A variety of economic concepts are directly involved in this offer of trade. ( p. 47)

The Sabine History of Political Theory from which I studied in the 1950s happily is still in print and still is used as a text in some of the better schools of political science. It's a book you will be happy to have in your library for the rest of your life. A copy of Aristotle's Politics would not hurt either. You can access that on line along with his other works and the works of Plato.