Columbia City Paper

By Baynard Woods

I drove from Washington to South Carolina for Thanksgiving. South Carolina’s representatives probably flew home. If they had driven, they would have learned something about capitalism.  For anyone who may have forgotten, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations articulates three major ‘laws of capitalism.’

1. Self-interest (it is better for the nation as a whole when I seek what it good for me)
2. Competition (it is better for the nation when people compete economically)
3. Supply and demand (prices are set through the complex balance of availability and desire).

All three of these argue that economic health is determined by millions of small actions rather than centralized orchestration. These ideas sound right (unless you’re reading Ayn Rand in which case the same ideas sound like the ridiculous ravings of a b-movie idiot). But are they?

I thought a lot about this as I sat stalled in an infinite line of red break-lights beaming through the dreary rain in Northern Virginia. Like economic interactions, highway traffic patterns are also determined by the effect of millions of small actions. And in the world of holiday travel, Smith’s laws fall apart. Supply and Demand doesn’t quite fit. But in the complex system of traffic, competition and pure self-interest are bad for us all.

Here’s the classic example. Lane closed ahead, merge right. We all know what happens. Some people go ahead and merge right. But there are those who will not merge right until the very last moment. They speed ahead, zooming past everyone waiting to get through the bottleneck. When the left lane finally closes and all of those competitive self-interest drivers cut their way into the line in the right, they slow the traffic behind them for miles back. In fact, it turns out that those drivers are the ones who create the jam in the first place. Nobody would be waiting at all if it were not for the people who looked out only for their own best interests.

When Smith wrote the Wealth of Nations the world’s population was small and disconnected. Capital could not be transferred electronically. There were no complex derivatives. There were no speed limits for horses and buggies because their speed was limited by nature. Traffic laws and even drunk driving are not strictly enforced where populations are small. DeMint, Wilson and other conservatives argue that what worked for the horse and buggy should work for the race car.

They want you to make a Smoky and the Bandit gamble. “Keep your foot hard on the peddle, never mind the brakes, let it all hang out cause we got a run to make,” the immortal Jerry Reed sang. If you don’t make it back to Atlanta from Texarkana with that case of Coors, you lose your retirement, your savings, and your job.

Jim DeMint and Joe Wilson are like Big and Little Enos Burdette, the evil Texans who orchestrate the whole thing in the 1977 Burt Reynolds vehicle. Except, they’re gambling with your money. They don’t want to do the right thing. They say what they say to get the votes of people frustrated by our slow advance forward.

Sure, slow progress is frustrating. We don’t like traffic jams. And we don’t like the Highway Patrol. But, when we’re stopped in a traffic jam, we don’t listen to the maniac in the car beside us yelling “gun it” and honking his horn. If you wonder what could happen if the Big and Little Enos get their way, just remember back to 2005. DeMint championed privatizing social security. If you want something to be thankful for this year, imagine what it would be like if your Social Security as well as your 401k was in the trunk of the car in flames at the bottom of an economic gully. Our elderly would be devastated this holiday if we had listened to DeMint. So, next time people talk about Big Government wanting to kill grandma, remember, they’re actually talking about Big Enos DeMint.

By Andy Brack

On the day newspaper headlines screamed that the state Ethics Commission accused Gov. Mark Sanford of 37 violations, the governor’s sense of humor remained intact.  When asked how he would like his terms as governor to be remembered, he said, “Better than today.”

Then during another of his Rotary Club apology tours across the state, Sanford paused 9 seconds to consider the question.  He highlighted two areas he hoped to be remembered for:

Investment. He pointed to $8 billion in job-creating business investment over the last two years.  He briefly highlighted some initiatives, such as tort reform and tax policy, that improved the “soil conditions” for small businesses to thrive better.

Land conservation. Sanford said more land had been protected under his administration than any other.  In turn, that improved the state’s attractiveness and quality of life.  Since funding for the S.C. Conservation Bank started in 2004, more than 152,000 acres have been set aside at a cost of $80.6 million.

During the talk (and after the self-imposed obligatory apology for letting people down with his extramarital affair), Sanford asked Rotarians to urge state lawmakers to make a few specific policy changes – what he called “rifle shots” – to help set the course on a new direction.   Among the suggestions:  restructuring the state Budget and Control Board into an executive Department of Administration overseen by a governor; allowing the governor and lieutenant governor to run on the same ticket; changing some constitutionally-elected officers into appointed positions; setting spending limits; improving economic development; and reforming the state Employment Security Commission.

None of his proposals were new.  As he discussed them, what was remarkable was how the sometimes rambling, professorial rhetoric had not changed, but how the wind was gone from his sails.   He was a fellow talking the talk, but who seemed really tired of walking the walk.

Sanford said he had become a big fan of these policy rifle shots because he “I thought there was more power in the executive branch than there was.  And we took some bigger bites than were achievable.

“Little bites are indicative of the ways that more policy has to change. … We have a political system designed to guard against revolutionary change.”

* * *

And so it would be revolutionary if South Carolina’s legislators actually turned Sanford out as governor.  While a House subcommittee started work on an impeachment bill this week, caution is in order.

At this point, Sanford is accused not of any felony, but of ethics violations, each of which carry about a $2,000 civil fine.  Although some GOP lawmakers remain mad, embarrassed and highly irritated with how the governor behaved over the summer, the real question is whether these ethical allegations are aggravated enough to throw out a weakened weak governor out of office.

Yes, he’s made some mistakes.  But flying business class instead of coach doesn’t reach the level of impropriety envisioned by the framers of our state constitution.  It’s better for a governor to get off a 14-hour plane trip a little refreshed than to go into immediate meetings with bad jet lag from being cramped in a coach seat.

His campaign spending might have some minor problems, but that’s not unexpected with millions of dollars and hundreds of events over several years.  Most of the legislators “sitting in judgment” of Sanford probably wouldn’t meet the standards they’re setting for Sanford in their own campaign spending.

And sure, he might have used some state travel in questionable ways.  But remember, governors and their families live in a bubble imposed by the job.  They have big pressures on them to try to maintain normalcy.

Bottom line:  Sanford has been weakened by his affair.  His legislative initiatives are pretty much dead on arrival in the General Assembly.  But he hasn’t reached the threshold of serious wrong to be turned out of office according to the law in the state constitution.  Instead of obsessing on Sanford in 2010, lawmakers should spend their time on real problems – getting better jobs for people, improving education and bettering health care.

Andy Brack, publisher of S.C. Statehouse Report, can be reached at:   brack@statehousereport.com.

Students study the psychology peacemaking

The men and women in the Corps [of Cadets] live and study under a classical military system…. About a third of the graduating classes accept military commissions.

– from The Citadel website

By Will Moredock

Since 1842, The Citadel has been training men (and now women) for business, science, politics, and other fields, but most famously, for war. It is, after all, the Military College of South Carolina, and takes its Sword Drill, Summerall Guard and Long Gray Line Parade quite seriously. Its cadets and graduates have fought in every American war since 1861.

That’s why I found it curious that Dr. Will Johnson of The Citadel’s Department of Psychology would be teaching an Honors level course called the Psychology of War and Peace – with the operative word being peace.

“I had the idea a couple of years ago,” Johnson said. “I wanted to explore what the field of psychology can offer in terms of topics beyond straight military training. Peacemaking is touched on in political science, but there is no study of the subject based on human nature….I wanted to look into that nature and ask if we are just aggressive machines and built to fight.”

Johnson thinks he is alone among the nation’s military schools in studying the psychology of war and peace. He has found nothing like it in the curricula of the Army, Navy or Air Force academies.

Yet he is in good company within the field of academic psychology. Since 1990, the Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict and Violence has been a division of the American Psychological Association and, according to its website, is “a home for psychologists who work to promote peace within nations, communities and families.”

The study of peace and conflict is relatively new and its application within a military environment is groundbreaking. Yet, the need is clearly there. History and current U.S. military policy are strewn with examples of how military force and diplomacy were used wisely and wastefully.

“The purpose of our military is to promote our national interest,” Johnson said. “But what is the national interest?”

After World War II, our interest lay not to further crushing Germany and Japan, but in rebuilding them economically and installing democratic governments. The result has been one of the most remarkable transformations in history, assuring more than 60 years of relative peace and stability. Likewise, Western Europe was secured against Soviet Communism by the aid and good will of the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift, as much as the presence of the Third Army and the Strategic Air Command.

Those lessons seem to have been lost 20 years later, as America blundered into Vietnam, fighting an enemy we never understood. The mistake cost us 58,000 lives and untold wealth and prestige.

There is the expression that, when the only tool in your box is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. If America’s military leaders had more tools in their collective box, perhaps they would have more ways of promoting American interests in an increasingly complex world. Many observers feel that too many times in recent decades U.S. leaders have reached for the hammer in making critical strategic decisions, when a more subtle tool might have served better.

Right now the CIA and the Army are engaged in a program to peel off layers of Taliban resistance in Afghanistan through economic and political initiatives. Of course, such an approach requires seeing the Islamic militia not as a monolithic enemy, but as a collection of groups and individuals who come to the cause out of different motives, with different levels of commitment.

This is not the kind of thinking that some political and military blow hards like to engage in, but sometimes asking questions first can prevent shooting later. Understanding why people fight and why they cooperate could be a valuable part of military training, Johnson said.

“We are beginning to understand that sometimes success is not so much survival of the fittest,” Johnson said, “but survival of the fittest within a helping and cooperative scenario.” Considered in that light, the problem of promoting national interest may be one of identifying and framing the right scenario, rather than identifying and bombing targets. Johnson understands that not all challenges can have a peaceful resolution, but none will have a peaceful resolution unless it is sought. It may take a special sensitivity and training to see that possibility.

There are three students in Johnson’s trial class and he is pleased with the results as the semester winds down. There are no immediate plans to teach the class again, but he hopes to have another chance to teach it in the future. It would be a good investment for The Citadel and for the U.S. military.

See Will Moredock’s blog at www.charlestoncitypaper.com/blogs/thegoodfight.

a.k.a., Return of the Generation Gap

I’m a cartoonist, columnist, writer and editor. So most of my friends are cartoonists, columnists, writers and editors. And a few publishers. One topic towers all over all others in my circle of friends: the future of journalism. Print media is in trouble; online media is ascendant. But consumers don’t pay for online content and online advertisers pay much less for x readers online than they do in print. As NBC CEO Jeff Zucker famously warned last year, the media is “trading analog dollars for digital pennies.”

But not everyone is worried. Many aspiring journalists and cartoonists in their twenties have embraced the Web. They don’t dread a future without print–they welcome it. If newspapers and magazines are going under, say these e-vangelists, they have no one to blame but themselves. “Considering most political journalism is editorializing disguised as reporting, what would be the big deal,” asks Shawn Mallow, a blogger at Wizbang.com. “Does anyone have any illusions as to which way the New York Times leans in its political reporting?”

At Techcrunch.com Erick Schonfeld adds low quality to the list of old media sins: “The newspaper industry wants to go back to the world before the Web, when each newspaper was a small media bundle packed with stories, 80 percent of which sucked…News sites can no longer capture reader’s attention with 20 percent news, and 80 percent suck.”

Remember the “generation gap”? In the 1960s and 1970s, it described the cultural chasm between rock ‘n’ roll-loving hippie Baby Boomers and their stodgy Lawrence Welk-watching parents. It came back in the 1990s, when snotty twentysomethings wrote books like “Generation X” and “Revenge of the Latchkey Kids,” deriding their Boomer elders as sentimental, selfish and unaware.

Generational détente has prevailed since then. Gen Xers born in the 1960s and early 1970s are now in their 40s, America’s culturally dominant age group. Sure they’re inheriting the country just as it’s collapsing. But whining is unbecoming when one of your own has just been elected president. Laid-off Xers (many of them canned by media companies) are coming to grips with failure, causing them to go easier on Boomers, whom they’d previously blamed for everything from global warming to blowing the chance for a revolution back in 1968. Stuff happens. We get that now. How’s that alimony payment working out for you?

Besides, we Gen Xers get along with Gen Y types, who are roughly 25 to 35 years old these days. We’re both cynical, distrusting of authority, pessimistic about our economic prospects, and dig a lot of the same music and movies. Generation gap? We’re too cool for that.

Now here come the Millennials to wipe that smug we-still-listen-to-the-Dead-Kennedys look off our faces. Generational demographic gurus William Strauss and Neil Howe define the Millennials as Americans born after 1982–at this writing, people under age 27. Gen X never saw them coming. Now they’re challenging Xers–and the generation gap is back.

This generation gap is the opposite of previous versions, in which young insurgents attacked their elders for being too arch and moralistic. Like Mulder in “The X Files,” they desperately want to believe: their leaders, their government, their corporate executives. And they really want to believe in technology. In my little world of journos, they toil on blogs like the Huffington Post for pennies or nothing at all, perfectly happy because they’re sure it will pay off someday. How? They don’t know, but “someone”–some tech company, some entrepreneur–is bound to figure it all out. When those of us in our 40s point out that there’s no evidence to support contentions such as theirs–my favorite is that online ad rates are bound to go up someday, just because–these Young Turk Millennials mock us as washed-up has-beens.

Young people mocking old people for being too cynical is weird.

According to Mssrs. Strauss and Howe, however, this clash was inevitable. Xers are one of four recurring generational archetypes in American society and in Great Britain before the colonies. (They trace these cycles back to the War of the Roses in 1459.) Gen Xers, they argue convincingly, are a “nomadic” generation. According to Wikipedia: “Nomads are ratty, tough, unwanted, diverse, adventurous, and cynical about institutions. They grow up as the underprotected children of an Awakening, come of age as the alienated young adults of an unraveling, become the pragmatic, midlife leaders of a crisis and age into tough, post-crisis elders…” Serious columnists aren’t supposed to quote Wikipedia, but I’m Gen X. I’m ratty. I break rules.

Millennials are a “heroic” generation. They “are conventional, powerful, and institutionally driven, with a profound trust in authority”–i.e., perfectly programmed to be intensely disturbed by Xers. If you’re the gullib–er, trusting–type, what could be more threatening than to have a generation that doesn’t believe in anything be your elders?  “They grow up as the increasingly protected children of an unraveling, come of age as the heroic, team-working youth of a crisis…” That last part is dead on. When U.S. society came apart at the seams in the 1970s and 1980s, Millennials’ Boomer parents smothered and coddled them. Now they’re working for Teach for America. Or at a paid internship. Something will work out. Someone will think of something. Besides, with Boomer parents, money isn’t a big worry.

A recent blog post at DailyCartoonist.com brought it home for me. “I’m starting to not comprehend Ted Rall’s politics at all,” wrote Jesse Levin, almost certainly under age 27. “His current slate of strips basically targets Obama’s lefty ineffectuality. His blog rails against Bush…Things may not be black and white, but where on Earth do ya stand as a political cartoonist? Unless you’re just an independent spraying hateful buckshot at all authority figures, I think Ted’s logic centers are failing on several levels.”

“An independent spraying hateful buckshot at all authority figures.” Sounds like the perfect definition of a Gen X pundit to me. And perfectly calibrated to piss off up-and-coming Millennials.

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir “The Year of Loving Dangerously.” He is also the author of the Gen X manifesto “Revenge of the Latchkey Kids.” His website is tedrall.com.)

And voters show some good judgment for a change

The motorcycles will not be roaring in Myrtle Beach again any time soon. In an ugly off-year municipal election that was largely a referendum on the Grand Strand’s traditional motorcycle rallies, voters sent the bikers a clear message that they are not welcome.

The election was also a referendum on a controversial former mayor and voters have sent him a message, as well.

In a state famous for its dysfunctional politics (and about to become more famous when the General Assembly impeaches Gov. Mark Sanford in a few months) Myrtle Beach has enjoyed the reputation as being its most dysfunctional city. Yes, there are municipalities where officials are more corrupt, eccentric or just plain stupid. But Myrtle Beach is one of the largest cities – and surely the most famous – in our state. People in Europe, Canada and Ohio, who never heard of Greenville or Columbia and think Charleston is in West Virginia, these folks by the millions have “Myrtle Beach” scrawled boldly on some page of their calendars and dream giddily of the day when they will load up the SUV or board a jet for the Carolina coast.

Yes, Myrtle Beach is South Carolina’s gateway to the world, the destination for 14 million golfers, snow birds, sunbathers, spring breakers, country music fans and pole dance connoisseurs. And some of those tourists have been motorcyclists – hundreds of thousands of them – arriving in two enormous rallies each May. Their numbers, the sounds of their machines and their generally rowdy behavior have become such a problem in recent years that local residents demanded something be done. Last year, Myrtle Beach City Council took action with a series of ordinances – including the state’s only helmet law – designed to throw cold water on the biker parties. And it worked. This past May the bikers stayed away in droves, leaving some hotels, restaurants, bars ands strip clubs hurting.

In a town where everything is taken to excess, there was a backlash and it was hard and mean. Many local business people, as well as hardcore bikers, banded together to fight City Hall. Business Owners Organized to Support Tourism (BOOST, to its friends) sued Myrtle Beach over the helmet law and alleged nefarious and unholy alliances between city council and Myrtle Beach Chamber of Commerce. There were charges of slander and libel. Lawyers held news conferences and posted nasty letters on the web.

Into this storm of acrimony strode a familiar figure, one who surely felt right at home in such an atmosphere. Mark McBride was first elected mayor of Myrtle Beach in 1997, defeating a 12-year incumbent in a campaign that set new standards for sleaze and duplicity in local politics.  (See my account of that campaign from my 2003 book, Banana Republic – A Year in the Heart of Myrtle Beach atwww.charlestoncitypaper.com/blogs/thegoodfight.)

In eight divisive, vitriolic years as major domo, McBride got into fisticuffs with a council member in an executive session, came up on the short end of dozens of 6-1 votes, and never accomplished a single important reform or initiative. In those years he established himself as a family-values crusader and gay basher, willing to use thinly veiled racist rhetoric and to stand on both sides of several critical issues as he felt the political winds change.

One of those changes was his attitude toward motorcycle rallies. He even called for banning  them altogether in 2005, when anger against the spring rallies was at fever pitch. That year he famously made the statement that he felt at times like “nudging” a motorcycle with his car. The remark flashed through the biker community via the internet, causing some 80 bikers to show up at a city council meeting in what they called a Ride Against McBride. A few weeks later the voters replaced McBride with the more seasoned and stable John Rhodes. It was under Rhodes’ leadership that city council finally took action to tame the motorcycle rallies.

All the while, McBride had been waiting in the wings, and with the support of BOOST he jumped into the recent fray to regain his old office and make Myrtle Beach safe for bikers again. Nobody commented on the fact that only four years earlier he had called for shutting down the biker rallies. The bikers needed a candidate and he needed a constituency. It was classic Mark McBride.

In the end, Myrtle Beach voters decided they had seen enough of McBride and motorcycle rallies. In the recent municipal election and November 17 runoff, they re-elected John Rhodes with 55 percent of the vote and rejected the BOOST city council slate. It was a good day for clean government and quiet streets.