political science

Remember the morning you picked up the paper, looked at the front page and read that Pluto was no longer a planet?

I too, was reading through the usual channel of media this morning and read an article discussing the debate over BPA by Ken Blackwell. (http://biggovernment.com/2010/01/05/the-left-goes-to-war-against-science...) 

Rather than a planet, the article introduced an issue currently being debated in Congress about the chemical called bisphenol A.  While less of a household name than Pluto, it is nonetheless under-going a similar re-assessment. 

Although the chemical was deemed safe under the Bush Administration, the liberals in Congress have decided to spend more time on removing its approval by the FDA than legislating on something much more significant, like creating jobs during the biggest recession since the Great Depression (but that's for another post)....

Have you heard of BPA?  Probably not.  BPA stands for bisphenol A, a chemical found in common household plastics.  I posted on this chemical just a couple months ago.

Yesterday, the Milwaukee, Wisconsin Sentinel printed a story on the chemical stating:

"The ubiquitous chemical is found in everything from hardened plastics to the lining of metal food containers and is present in the urine of more than 93% of American adults and more than 90% of newborns."

This same story goes on to say that the chemical is dangerous, but fails to name any side effects or quote a specific amount of deaths caused by exposure to it.

So I ask, why the persistence?  What would a ban on this chemical accomplish?

Based on the facts, it seems the only possible outcome would be a layoff of thousands of workers whose companies produce and use this chemical in plastics, and raise the price of plastic-ware for consumers.

War on American businesses, indeed.

There’s a weird symmetry between the Right and the Left. It’s difficult to articulate, but it’s becoming clearer to me now. They’re both Keynesians, only in different domains. The Left are Keynesians about economics, the Right are Keynesians about political strategy. The trouble with either is that Keynesianism doesn’t work very well anywhere it's applied.

Lest I lose my reader straight out of the gate, allow me to explain in simpler terms the defining characteristics of what I’ll call the “Keynesian Model.” This model:

1. Deals almost exclusively in macro-level aggregates.

2. Holds that these aggregates are mostly informative.

3. Information can be successfully used for macro purposes.

For example, in economics, Keynesians want to tweak or “stimulate” the economy by raining largess on particular sectors to stimulate aggregate labor demand, say.

But the trouble with this way of looking at the world is:

I. The micro-level is where most of the action is.

II. The devil of the economy is in the details of billions of individual means-ends actions, coordinations and transactions, which makes knowledge mostly local.

III. These details are far to complex to be reduced to aggregates and manipulated to positive effect.

Now, I believe the Left has figured out I-III in the political domain, though sadly not in the economic (indeed, I seriously doubt they care about the micro mechanisms of economic growth at all, as I argue here.  Keynesian policies of the Obama Administration are merely a pretext for the end of consolidating power, economics be damned. But I digress.). The point is, the right seems to be under a similar spell, except in their approach to political strategy.