Like Most Republicans, Paul Ryan Can't Think For Himself-- And Only Reads Discredited, Failed Economists

Econ 4 is the OccupyWallStreet of the economics profession. In fact, I first became aware of the group when I saw their statement of support for OccupyWallStreet and watched the video statement they several of the economists made about it. Both are here.

We support the efforts of the Occupy Wall Street movement across the country and across the globe to liberate the economy from the short term greed of the rich and powerful one percent.

We oppose cynical and perverse attempts to misuse our police officers and public servants to expel advocates of the public good from our public spaces.

We extend our support to the vision of building an economy that works for the people, for the planet, and for the future, and we declare our solidarity with the Occupiers who are exercising our democratic right to demand economic and social justice.

Don't expect Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, The Hermanator or Mitt Romney to sign on to the list of distinguished economists behind this statement. Don't even expect them-- nor the Republicans in the House like Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Fred Upton (to name just three of the worst) whose political careers are built on the edifice of protecting the special interests of the one percent at the extent of their own constituents-- to even understand any of this. To a shill like Paul Ryan, the study of economics begins and ends with the mediocre adolescent ravings in Ayn Rand's "greed is good" novels. Unlike, Rand-- or Ryan-- James Boyce of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst is a real economist. I'd like to quote his short statement about why he's backing OccupyWallStreet.

"One of the key issues is the extent to which governments get captured by relatively wealthy and powerful interests, who turn the government away from serving the public towards serving their particular set of interests."

But, let's me honest with ourselves, not all conservatives are as congenitally stupid and corrupt as Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and Fred Upton. I want to quote from a 2001 Corey Robin article in Lingua Franca, The Ex-Cons: Right-Wing Thinkers Go Left. You've probably already heard of Reagan era war strategist Edward Luttwak, but let's catch up with him after he fled both the Nazis and the communists in Europe and escaped to America in his early 40s.

Edward, meet your worst nightmare, Bishop Romney

For most of his adult life, Luttwak waged a militant struggle against communism. Inspired by a strategic military vision that connected the Gallic Wars to the civil wars of Central America, he worked closely with the U.S. Defense Department as a consultant, advising everyone from junior officers to the top brass. But Luttwak was more than a cold warrior. He was a warrior, or at least a fervent theorist of "the art of war." Whereas generals thought victory depended on aping management styles from IBM, Luttwak made the case for ancient battlefield tactics and forgotten maneuvers from the Roman Empire. Luttwak urged the military to look to Hadrian, not Henry Ford, for guidance. It was an arduous struggle, with officers more often acting like organization men than soldiers. Once again, Luttwak found his preferred way of life threatened by the culture of capitalism.

Luttwak first gained notoriety in Britain, where he settled after receiving his undergraduate degree in economics at the London School of Economics. In 1968, he published Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook. The twenty-six-year-old author dazzled his readers with this audacious how-to guide, prompting a delighted John Le Carré to write, "Mr. Luttwak has composed an unholy gastronomic guide to political poison. Those brave enough to look into his kitchen will never eat quite as peacefully again." In 1970, Luttwak published an equally mischievous piece in Esquire, "A Scenario for a Military Coup d'État in the United States." Two years later, he moved to the United States to write a dissertation in political science and classical history at Johns Hopkins, conducting extensive research using original Latin, German, French, English, and Italian sources. The result was the widely praised The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire. While in graduate school, Luttwak began to work as a consultant to various branches of the U.S. armed services, ultimately making recommendations on everything from how NATO should conduct tactical maneuvers to what kind of rifle soldiers in the El Salvadoran military should carry.

When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, Luttwak was at the top of his game. A fellow at Georgetown's Center for Strategic and International Studies and a frequent contributor to Commentary, he argued that the United States should accelerate the high-tech arms race, forcing the Soviet Union into a contest it could not win. Reagan's closest advisers eagerly welcomed Luttwak to their inner circle. Just after Reagan's election, Luttwak attended a dinner party in Bethesda, along with Jeane Kirkpatrick, Fred Iklé, and other luminaries of the Republican defense establishment. Richard Allen, who would become Reagan's first national security adviser, worked the crowd, pretending to dispense positions in the administration as if they were party favors. As the Washington Post reported, Luttwak declined, explaining over chocolate T"a Maria pie, "I don't believe scribblers like myself should be involved in politics. It's like caviar. Very nice, but only in small quantities." When pressed by Allen, he joked, "I only want to be vice-consul in Florence." Allen responded, "Don't you mean proconsul?"

The prep-school gladiator bonhomie evaporated before the end of Reagan's first term. Luttwak may have been an invaluable asset when pushing for more defense spending, but he made enemies with his loud-- and ever more sarcastic-- criticisms of Pentagon mismanagement. In 1984, he published The Pentagon and the Art of War, where, among other things, he depicted Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger as more of a slick used-car salesman than a genuine statesman. Military politicos struck back, dropping Luttwak from a roster of pro bono Pentagon consultants (he continued to do contract work elsewhere in the defense establishment). In 1986, Weinberger explained to the Los Angeles Times that Luttwak "just lost consulting positions from total incompetence, that's all."

But it was more than Luttwak's criticisms of Weinberger in The Pentagon and the Art of War that got him in trouble with the Defense Department. His real mistake was to go after the military's conduct during the Vietnam War. Luttwak downplayed the armed forces' favorite explanations for their defeat in Vietnam-- weak-willed politicians, the treasonous press, a defeatist public. He argued instead that America's warrior elite had simply lost the taste for blood. During the Vietnam War, he wrote, "desk-bound officers" were always "far from combat." Their penchant for "outright luxury" had a devastating effect on troop morale. Although Julius Caesar "retained both concubines and catamites in his rearward headquarters, ate off gold plate, and drank his Samian wine from jeweled goblets," when he was on the front lines with his soldiers he "ate only what they ate, and slept as they did-- under a tent if the troops had tents, or merely wrapped in a blanket if they did not." By contrast, American officers refused "to share in the hardships and deadly risks of war."

Pointy-headed bureaucrats also sapped the military's strength, according to Luttwak. Always looking to cut costs, Pentagon officials insisted that weapons, machinery, and research-and-development programs be standardized. But this only made the military vulnerable to enemy attack. Standardized weapons systems were easily overcome; having overwhelmed one, an enemy could overwhelm them all. When it came to the military, Luttwak concluded, "we need more 'fraud, waste, and mismanagement.'"

Top generals were obsessed with efficiency partially because they learned the methods of business management instead of the art of war. For every officer with a degree in military history, there were a hundred more "whose greatest personal accomplishment is a graduate degree in business administration, management or economics." "Why should fighter pilots receive a full-scale university education," Luttwak asked in The Washington Quarterly, "instead of being taught how to hunt and kill with their machines?"

The ultimate source of the military's dysfunction was its embrace of American corporate culture and business values. Like Robert McNamara, whom President Kennedy transferred to the Pentagon from Ford Motor Company, most defense secretaries were in thrall to "corporate-style goals." They sought the least risky, most cost-effective means to a given end. They preferred gray suits, eschewing "personal eccentricities in dress, speech, manner, and style because any unusual trait may irritate a customer or a banker in the casual encounters common in business." Officers were merely "managers in uniform," Luttwak told Forbes. But, he noted, "what is good for business is not good for deadly conflict." Although "safely conservative dress and inoffensively conventional style" might work in an office, they could be deadly on the battlefield; they squelched bold initiatives and idiosyncratic genius. Intimating that capitalism had colonized-- indeed destroyed-- spheres of society that were not strictly economic, Luttwak came perilously close to identifying himself with leading voices from the Marxist tradition-- Jürgen Habermas, Georg Lukács, even Marx himself.

While the Soviet Union still existed, Luttwak was able to channel his contempt for managerial and corporate values into proposals for military reform. The struggle against Bolshevism fully captured his imagination, speaking to principles of individualism, independence, and personal dignity that he had learned as a child of Jewish atheists. Luttwak's parents taught him, he says, that "you wanted your shoulders out walking down the street. The master of your fate. Not to walk hunched, afraid that God will punish you if you eat a ham sandwich." He continues: "There was a certain contempt about piety. Piety was not seen as compatible with dignity." Dignity, he goes on, "is what we were defending in the Cold War. It was ideological. It was very fitting for me to be in the United States, to become an American, because the Americans were and are the ideological people. They were perfectly cast to be enlisted in an ideological struggle."

But now that the battle against communism has been won, Luttwak has lost interest in most military matters; he no longer sees any compelling ideological reason to care about strategy and tactics. "Security problems and such have become peripheral, for all countries and for people, for myself as well. I don't engage my existence in something that is peripheral.... There was a compelling imperative to be involved. There isn't now."

...Military struggle may no longer hold any ideological allure for Luttwak, but his disaffection affords him the time and intellectual space to confront the enemy he has been shadowboxing his entire life: capitalism itself. "The market," he says, "invades every sphere of life," producing a "hellish society." In the same way that market values once threatened national security, they now threaten the economic and spiritual well-being of society. "An optimal production system is a completely inhuman production system," he explains, "because...you are constantly changing the number of people you employ, you're moving them around, you're doing different things, and that is not compatible with somebody being able to organize an existence for himself."

Although Luttwak writes in his 1999 book Turbo-Capitalism, "I deeply believe...in the virtues of capitalism," his opposition to the spread of market values is so acute that it puts him on the far end of today's political spectrum-- a position that Luttwak congenitally enjoys. "Edward is a very perverse guy, intellectually and in many other ways," says former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, one of Luttwak's early champions during the 1970s. "He's a contrarian. He enjoys confounding expectations. But I frankly don't even know how serious he is in this latest incarnation." Luttwak insists that he is quite serious. He calls for socialized medicine. He advocates a strong welfare state, claiming, "If I had my druthers, I would prohibit any form of domestic charity." Charity is a "cop-out," he says: It takes dignity away from the poor.

The only thing that arouses Luttwak's ire more than untrammeled capitalism is its elite enthusiasts—the intellectuals, politicians, policy makers, and businessmen who claim that "just because the market is always more efficient, the market should always rule." Alan Greenspan earns Luttwak's special contempt: "Alan Greenspan is a Spencerian. That makes him an economic fascist." Spencerians like Greenspan believe that "the harshest economic pressures" will "stimulate some people to...economically heroic deeds. They will become great entrepreneurs or whatever else, and as for the ones who fail, let them fail." Luttwak's other b'te noire is "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap, the peripatetic CEO who reaps unimaginable returns for corporate shareholders by firing substantial numbers of employees from companies. "Chainsaw does it," says Luttwak, referring to Dunlap's downsizing measures, "because he's simpleminded, harsh, and cruel." It's just "economic sadism." Against Greenspan and Dunlap, Luttwak affirms, "I believe that one ought to have only as much market efficiency as one needs, because everything that we value in human life is within the realm of inefficiency--love, family, attachment, community, culture, old habits, comfortable old shoes."

Imagine if one of the networks was smart enough to get Luttwak as a host for one of the 30-some-odd Republican "presidential" debate shows. How much more elucidating would it be for American voters-- even Republican-American voters-- to hear Luttwak questioning self-professed capitalist boosters like Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, than a string of questions from the war criminals and Koch-paid shills from the AEI? Or perhaps we should hope for a moderator like Irving Kristol or William F. Buckley, the intellectual godfathers-- pre Herman Cain-- of neoconservatism. Corey Robin quotes them in The Reactionary Mind admitting, as though they were describing Mitt Romney, that "American conservatism lacks any political imagination, which has always been, I have to say, a property of the left." That was Kristol. Buckley is even harsher: "The trouble with the emphasis with conservatism on the market is that it becomes rather boring. You hear it once, you master the idea. The notion of devoting your life to it [the way Romney, Ryan, Cain and Gingrich have] is horrifying if only because its so repetitious. It's like sex." I just threw up in my mouth.