Scandalous Client Service at the IRS

A super-power and a gigantic capitalist democracy can’t work unless certain necessary and unpopular functions of government are performed objectively by professionals.

The policy machinery of the State Department can change its hue before and after elections. It can, for instance, become intensely interested in the oil sands of northern Canada and soon forget that Alberta is a Canadian province.

The professionals who manage America’s nuclear deterrent and money supply, however, must be above suspicion. Otherwise, it would be less easy to sleep at night. The IRS is also one of those institutions that must be widely trusted. Americans are free to dislike the IRS, especially at tax time. But, they must believe that it’s not organized to favor the ins and harass the outs.

Trust in, if not affection for, the IRS is central to the “honor” system that efficiently and peacefully collects most of the tax revenues Washington needs to function.

Consequently, the recent allegations that IRS officials have consciously “targeted” Tea partiers and rich Republicans deserve immediate attention. Indeed, it was appropriate and not suspicious over-kill for Obama to use the word “outrageous” every time the allegations are raised.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle needn’t restrain themselves in their efforts to find out what happened and take whatever action is required to restore the credibility of an essential agency of modern government.

However, since neither American democracy nor American lives were lost, we should be able to have a little fun with the victims in this story. Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker offered up the possibilities rather quietly.

“It’s important to review why the Tea Party groups were petitioning the I.R.S. anyway. They were seeking approval to operate under section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code. This would require them to be “social welfare,” not political, operations.”

It’s just possible that the political illiterates at the IRS--like first year students facing an exam question on a lecture they skipped--tripped over what these strange, angry groups were actually proposing.

The aggrieved, so-called conservative, applicants for 501(c)(4) status loathed George Bush’s “compassionate conservatism”, were determined to stop Obamacare and, at least in their dreams, also repeal Social Security and Food Stamps. As well, they thought that in his heart Obama was still a “social worker”. Nevertheless, they wanted the benefits that go with being designated a “social welfare” organization by the IRS. They weren’t run-of-the-mill Republicans and they didn’t want to be seen as merely ad-hoc groups of Americans mobilizing primarily to take America back from an African socialist.

Since these organizations existed to do things and, in this case, spend a lot of other people’s money, IRS anthropologists probably did ask a lot of questions--certainly far more questions than busy libertarians like to answer. Congressional investigators will determine, however, whether or not their conduct was partisan and inappropriate: whether or not this new force for social progress faced systematic harassment, or widespread, or only localized curiosity.

The wider allegation that the IRS systematically audited and intimidated outspoken Republicans needs further fleshing out. However, in that exercise we should recall that the Obama presidency has left the rich far richer than they were the day he was sworn into office. It will also be remembered as an era of extraordinarily outspoken, extreme, and bitter partisan rivalry. 

The 400pp/m Milestone: A Time to Rage? Or Stop and Think?

Our world just reached a scientific and strategic milestone: humanity was told to do whatever it takes to avoid reaching atmospheric concentrations of CO2 gases of 400pp/m. That ceiling was exceeded last week. No plan has been launched—with the necessary champions—to get us back under it. We’re sailing along in unchartered heavens and seas.  

For the time being, however, the surest voices in the climate change movement are content to rage: to deploy the same divisive excuses that have been dividing us for centuries. We are facing a transformative threat and that threat’s prophets read like 19th-century pamphleteers.

Here’s Britain’s environment author George Monbiot:

“The problem is simply stated: the power of the fossil fuel companies is too great. Among those who seek and obtain high office are people characterized by a complete absence of empathy or scruples, who will take money or instructions from any corporation or billionaire who offers them, and then defend those interests against the current and future prospects of humanity.

“This new climate milestone reflects a profound failure of politics, in which democracy has quietly been supplanted by plutocracy.”

Al Gore offered an easier and simpler message, telling Torontonians, “There is only dirty oil and dirtier oil.” Presumably, we can continue to use the stuff—or try to stop it—whether our actions profit friends or foes, or not.

After comparing the policy effectiveness of the United Nations to “a small boy with olive oil on his hands trying to pull a whale from the water,” Nicholas Thompson of the NewYorker presents a more imposing concern:

“We can ask that China do a little better; there are a million little things that make emissions lower and our lives better. But the West created this problem through gluttony; we can’t solve it by demanding the asceticism of others.”

Our politicians are all on the take and we are gluttons. Plutocrats block our ears to reason; we can’t save our own skins, let alone give others a helping hand. If most of this were true—and not just the toxic possibilities of high-definition television and Netflix—our civilization would have collapsed long ago. Baby booms, passenger jets, family cars, air conditioning, global tourists, and Al Gore’s lecture circuit wouldn’t exist. Consequently, greenhouse-gas levels would be fine and life expectancy levels would still be stuck in the 50s.

The doomsday milestone at hand, however, is not the exhaustion of our ability to solve big problems. Rather, what is at hand is the failure of a set of grandiose calculations by climate change bureaucracies and advocates. People today are not unable to reason; they’re simply being offered unimpressive solutions.

The movement hoped that multilateral diplomacy, atmospheric science, and abstemious documentaries would eventually shame North Americans into state-imposed reductions of fossil fuel consumption. Sometime after we’d squealed in public long enough, China and the rest of the developing world would start to restrain their consumption as well. (All this global restraint, of course, would have to be sufficiently severe as to accommodate over a billion more consumers in this century, joining the ranks of hundreds of millions already desperately hungry to secure residential electricity, central heating, and practical ways to get to work in today’s mega-cities.)

The movement has now realized that North Americans aren’t ready to leave the table. It has retreated, therefore, into euphemisms about “putting a price on carbon” and damning oil producers for continuing to produce the stuff. (Needless to say, a wicked capitalist without a ready buyer is already on the way to become a harmless bankrupt.)

What to do? 

When the problem of global climate change comes up, question talk of global plans and personal sacrifice. 

Saving the planet is more important than saving the face of the United Nations. Thousands of new bike lanes may save thousands of lives, but they won’t save the planet.

North Americans have been global problem-solvers before—when they were acting like North Americans. We succeed by finding solutions not by practicing and selling restraint. We didn’t abate the AIDS epidemic or significantly reduce world hunger by eating less or asking Africans to join us in having less sex.

The world would be best served if our scientists and engineers stayed away from the pulpit and concentrated on affordable alternatives to fossil fuels and more efficient ways to use energy generally.

North Americans won’t be shamed into acting on climate change. Furthermore, they will want to treat each other fairly in doing their share internationally. On the other hand, Washington and Ottawa politicians should be able to talk openly about a harmonized carbon tax, in the context of a simulative fiscal policy, along with an unprecedented commitment to energy R & D, if their proposals were actually designed to solve the problem.

Is Obama too presidential to be a great president?

Undaunted by Barack Obama’s landslide victory last November, Peggy Noonan has returned to her abiding complaint: Barack Obama is not likeable, he’s too formal, and too self-important to fill the boots of men like Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and now even George Bush. Last week, in her column "The Presidential Wheels Turns", Noonan compared Obama unfavorably against all four former presidents still alive and able to attend the opening of George Bush’s Library. Here’s how she compares the two star performers:

“He (George Bush) thought he was luckily born, quick but not deep, and he famously trusted his gut but also his heart. He always seemed moved and grateful to be in the White House. Someone who met with Mr. Obama during his first year in office, an old hand who'd worked with many presidents, came away worried and confounded. Mr. Obama, he said, was the only one who didn't seem awed by his surroundings, or by the presidency itself.”

Barack Obama, too, spoke sincerely of Bush’s likeability at the Library proceedings, "To know the man is to like the man, because he's comfortable in his own skin.”

Setting aside the saccharine screed Noonan employs in her partisan columns, is she making a serious point? Are presidents usually more relaxed than Barack Obama? Has his presidency been diminished by his spotty ability to help other self-important people feel comfortable?

(First, we should clear something up. Obama was describing past-president George Bush—a man seemingly enjoying his retirement—when he used that tired cliché about being comfortable in his own skin. Of course, we can’t really know George Bush’s state of mind when he was actually making presidential decisions. Today, memoirs from old White Houses uniformly contain only lawyered regrets and assurances that every one slept peacefully when there was time.)

The appearance of self-assurance is important in public, especially in dangerous times. When a president is speaking to Congress or just one of those Washington gossips that Noonan calls “old hands,” he daren’t show nervousness. Can you imagine a young president in the spring of 2009, asking strangers whether he ought to nationalize the banks or reintroduce the Gold Standard? And whether anyone in the room understood what Larry Summers was talking about?

We say leaders should be relaxed and we note approvingly that leadership is a lonely business. Politicking may be as relaxing as golf. But decision-making isn’t. Getting to the right decision isn’t relaxing work. And it’s lonely—for one thing, because leaders can’t show their misgivings in public.  

After just one panic attack in the House of Commons in the mid-20s, Winston Churchill never spoke in public again without speaking notes. He would have loved the teleprompter. Also, he acknowledged that he had misgivings every time he committed British forces to action. President Dwight Eisenhower smoked 4 packs of cigarettes a day during his tenure as commander of Allied Forces.

These nervous gentlemen were not nervous in public. However, those who miss the style of the Reagan and Bush presidencies should at least accept that governance isn’t the same as horseback-riding. Helping the helpers relax isn’t the job of productive executives or presidents.

Finally, would Obama have been more successful in his first term and now in his second term if he were less formal—less presidential—in his dealing with his opponents in Congress and with disaffected journalists?

America is definitely ready for a female president. However, was America ready in 2008 to elect, ready in 2012 to re-elect, and ready in any time in the foreseeable future to elect a black politician noted for being “comfortable with his own skin”? A man, for instance, as inarticulate and as teary as George Bush, as promiscuous as Bill Clinton, or as vulgar and as manipulative as Lyndon B. Johnson?

Would he even win an affectionate rating from Peggy Noonan? 

Terrorism, sociology, and personal freedom

It’s human to look for connections. We do it when we hear that a friend has cancer. And we do it every time an individual—or two brothers in Boston—go out and succeed in killing total strangers. Raising concern for the “root” causes of violence if you’re a Canadian Liberal, or the possibility of bureaucratic negligence if you’re an American Republican, is unsurprising; it’s human nature, it sounds constructive, and it is widely associated with analytical and sophisticated thinking.  

Nevertheless, liberal-minded people as well as libertarians should actually be comforted by Barack Obama and Stephen Harper’s focus on the crime of terrorism and the resolve of their governments to punish those individuals found guilty of willfully taking their politics out on the lives of others.

Harper’s complaint about “practicing sociology” was partisan and, consequently, politically untimely. And Obama’s reluctance to talk about “radical Islamists” is being exploited by his opponents. Nevertheless, is it reasonable—and, more importantly, is it safe—to imply that the bombings at the Boston Marathon on April 15 just might not have happened: if our national governments paid greater attention to minority-group individuals, their politics, and their grievances, or, on the other hand, if they more aggressively monitored edgy individuals and damned extreme rhetoric and radical movements?

Should our governments connect what people think and how they express themselves peacefully—in a free society—with acts of premeditated violence?

The implications of choosing "yes" are not any safer than lashing out emotionally.

Should we contemplate shifting our alliances in the Middle East in the hope of mollifying potential domestic terrorists? If America drives some individuals crazy, should Canada try to be less American? Should all of us be less hostile toward the political and religious points of view we despise in order to avoid terrorist violence?

In democracies, minorities—gays and French Canadians, for instance—can persuade majorities to retreat from and surrender old policies by persuading them that those old policies are unjust. Is terrorism simply politics on speed?

Senator Lindsey Graham wonders whether the US security behemoth “let its guard down” in Boston because it did nothing about the Tsarnaev brothers even though the older brother, Tamerlan, had already said hateful things on YouTube about living in a nation of “Christian infidels.” Yesterday, the New York Times ran a profile of his younger brother, Dzhokhar. It found hints of a “dark side”; a smart, promising, popular 19-year-old who’d, nevertheless, “alluded to disaffection with his American life and the American mind-set.”

Keep digging. He may also be hooked on Wire and Mad Men.

Should Obama and Harper hire more sociologists, political psychologists, and computer engineers to daily monitor the private utterances and activities of a far higher percentage of American radicals and landed immigrants? If radical Islamist thinking causes middle-class North Americans to commit murder, do we make radical political utterances a crime too?

In a free country, a young man needn’t mask his “dark side.” Our governments shouldn’t be told by us to respect our privacy and, at the same, be expected to know what everyone is thinking—if they don't happen to think like us.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky spent a lifetime struggling to understand how individuals decide to commit cold-blooded murder. We shouldn’t ask our politicians, their scientists, or their unbelievably powerful computers to try to figure us out now.