The Enlightened Despot

If your local Chrystler dealer is having a going-out-of-business sale, you’d better act fast - the sale could be off soon, an not because they’ve gone out of business. Back when we were giving billions of dollars to automakers, it was important for lawmakers to emphasize that the money came with the requirement that the corporations be downsized and otherwise restructured with an ever-hopeful eye toward some day becoming profitable. As part of that process, GM and Chrystler announced they were closing over 2,000 dealerships nationwide. Congress is now working to make it clear that cost-cutting was never meant to entail spending less money in the districts of Congressmen. A bill to keep the dealerships open now has 221 co-sponsors in the house, enough to pass. Jim Manzi has an excellent, though brief, analysis:

The practical effect would be to reverse or prevent the vast majority of dealer closings that were a key component of the auto restructuring plans. This seems only fair, as the dealers paid good money for these politicians.

Felix Salmon thinks the Senate will put a stop to the madness. Here’s hoping, though the Senate version of the bill already has 14 sponsors. That’s a far cry from 60, but it’s a depressing start. So, just who are these clowns? Some highlights:

• Ted Kennedy. It’s extremely unlikely that Kennedy will ever vote on this. It is insane that legislators have to physically make it into the building to vote, without exception, but then again, it’s also insane that, knowing this, we continue to elect so many very old people. Why Kennedy thinks he needs to take a purely symbolic stand in support of a piece of graft that no disinterested party could possibly support is beyond me.
• Ron Paul. There must be some nutty piece of reasoning that makes this move fit his ideology, but I confess I can’t figure it out. Perhaps all the recent government intervention in the economy has driven him (more) insane. Or maybe he’s just in it for loot with the rest of them.
• Iowa and Minnesota. Five out of five Iowas Representatives, six out of eight from Minnesota, both Iowa Senators (including the bill’s principal sponsor), and Tom Harkin from Minnesota. Al Franken is late to the party, so we’ll see. Apparently these states are tired of being accused of ruining our farm policy, and want to prove they can screw up the economy in other ways too.

Other sponsors from both houses worth mentioning: Maxine Waters (natch), Barney Frank (chair of the relevant committee, big fan of getting paid), Frank Lucas (no, really, that’s his name), Adam Smith (ditto. I believe the kids call this sort of thing ‘ironic’. They should cut that out), John Murtha (always thinking up clever ways to remind me how much I dislike him), Mark Begich (where there’s graft, there are Alaskans), and, finally, John Kerry, who is too boring to be worth a pithy insult.

Sarah Palin doesn’t understand why people won’t accept her stated reasons for quitting at face value. Kevin Drum is somewhat sympathetic. Stanley Fish thinks the pundits searching for an angle are more dispicable than Palin herself. They are all way off the mark.

Human interaction would be pretty difficult if it weren’t the default assumption that most people were telling the truth most of the time. Most utterances are fairly trivial; we can generally assume that people aren’t lying to us about the weather, because even the slightest inclination toward honesty would be sufficient to outweigh any possible incentive to lie about such a thing.

Of course, it is customary to give people the benefit of the doubt even when they do have a tangible incentive to lie. Our attitudes toward lying and liars make even this a good bet under many circumstances. Since we tend not to associate with people who have proved to be dishonest in the best, our odds get better with time. And since people are generally rational enough to save their lies for situations in which they are unlikely to be found out, a ceteris paribus assumption of honesty works out fairly well.

If, however, we are concerned only with figuring out what is actually true about the world, and have no interest in common courtesy - as we shouldn’t in analyzing the public actions of political figures - there is no reason whatsoever to make this assumption. That a politician says that x is true when the stakes are high and the chance of being proven a liar are essentially zero (even if a scandal breaks, no one can prove she was lying about her motivation here) should barely count as prima facie evidence for the actual truth of x. When the politician in question is Sarah Palin you can drop the qualifiers: that Palin is quitting for the reasons she gave is no more likely than if she had said nothing at all. Which is to say, not very likely at all.

As always, a little David Hume is instructive:

It is, therefore, a just political maxim, that every man must be supposed a knave.

Every woman, too. And in Palin’s case, it isn’t just a supposition.