Here are two legalistic reasons that the president should simply ignore the debt limit if Congress fails to raise it by August 2 (or whenever the federal government surpasses the limit and faces default).

First, after Congress passed the most recent increase in the debt limit, it passed a budget that would necessarily cause the debt limit to be exceeded. The budget supersedes the debt limit law. It is impossible to follow both laws, so the president is free to choose to follow the budget.

Second, the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution, section 4, states, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” The current debt of the US was authorized by the laws that required the various expenditures made in the current fiscal year, and so it “shall not be questioned.”

I would be the first to admit that these are legal judgment calls, and there are other plausible readings of the law and constitution. But if Congress fails to raise the debt limit and the government defaults, the results will be disastrous. On the other hand, if the president openly exceeds the debt limit, what happens?

1. Congress sues him, but the Supreme Court will, if it follows its own precedents, dismiss the suit.
2. The House impeaches him. That is not an outcome that any president should welcome; at a minimum, it brings discredit on the House. But impeachment is better for our  constitutional system than defaulting on the debt would be. And it would probably pay off very well for this particular president, as Members of the House from swing districts would be forced to vote on the articles of impeachment, and then the Senate would refuse to convict. Two Democratic presidents in a row would emerge stronger after being impeached.

There is, of course, a third option: the president could agree to enough of the Republicans’ demands for structural changes in the federal budget and the role of government in America that they would raise the debt limit. But that presents three problems: deep cuts in vital programs during a near-recession, complete abdication of this president’s and all his successors’ power, and severely diminished odds of being reelected.

To be clear, I think the Congressional Republicans have a right to negotiate for the budgetary and policy outcomes that they want. That is what the regular budget process is for–the Congress must pass and the president must sign a set of tax and appropriations bills. They negotiate until they agree, and if they miss the deadline, the government goes into temporary shutdown. The collateral damage to the rest of us is limited. In contrast, missing the debt limit deadline by even five minutes means default. Therefore, using the debt limit vote as a lever for policy change is unacceptable.

(Berkeley, CA) Two recent novels that are impossible to avoid comparing are Jonathan Rabb’s Rosa: A Novel and Jeb Rubenfeld’s The Death Instinct. Both are set in the immediate aftermath of World War I in a great city of a combatant power (Berlin and New York, respectively). Both involve mass murder, terrorism, and a political conspiracy. Both include cameo appearances by major historical figures: Freud and Madame Curie in The Death Instinct; Einstein and Käthe Kollwitz in Rosa. Both involve revolutionary ideas: psychoanalysis and communism. Both foreshadow the horrors that will follow in the 20th century. In both cases, the protagonist is a tough urban detective who gets sucked into politics for the first time as he tries to solve the original crime. A beautiful but troubled waif plays a significant role in each book.

Since the comparison is unavoidable, I must say that Rabb’s novel is far better. The characters are much more complex, the issues more serious, and the emotional pull much stronger from Rabb’s flawed protagonist than from Rubenfeld’s idealized heroes.

On a flight to California, I am reading Xavier de Souza Briggs’ important book Democracy as Problem Solving (MIT Press, 2008), plus a set of yet unpublished chapters by diverse authors on similar themes. They are making me critical of a basic distinction in political theory. Often, we think that a process is “democratic” if everyone has an equal voice or impact–or at least an equal right to have an impact–on public decisions. Government is “efficient,” on the other hand, if it works well, generating public goods and reducing public “bads.”

These two values may conflict. Mussolini is said to have made the trains run on time. I am on a plane, so I cannot check whether that is true, but if it is, it would be an example of efficiency without democracy. On the other hand, an endless meeting may be democratic but is not efficient. Given the complexities of administering large institutions, it seems that democratic values should predominate when major decisions are made (usually in elections and legislation). Efficiency should become paramount at the phase of implementation or administration, when the people’s will is enacted by professionals.

That is a standard theory, but here is the problem. What people actually talk about and try to accomplish when they participate democratically is solving problems. Politics is not a sport, in which rival teams compete for the love of the game. It is a purposive activity that matters only to the extent that problems are solved. A democratic process that is totally inefficient is worse than annoying and discouraging. It is actually a kind of contradiction. People can’t come together as equals to solve problems but not solve the problems. The proper measure of “democracy” encompasses efficiency as well as equality.

Several points follow. First, if there is a tradeoff between equality of voice and efficiency, the conflict is internal to democracy. We may sometimes have to bite the bullet and reduce equality to enhance efficiency, in the name of democracy. On the other hand, if we value both, we should work to reduce the tradeoff. When equal voice enhances efficient outcomes, we have a clear win.

Second, there is no good reason to distinguish between legislation and administration, or deliberation and implementation, or talk and work–because all these are problem-solving activities. The same pair of values, equality of voice and efficiency of outcomes, should be maximized at all times. Concretely, that means promoting public engagement in administration as well as in law-making unless efficiency suffers excessively as a result.

Finally, I would like to register a small resistance to the rhetoric of “problem-solving.” Political action can be directed at solving problems, conserving what exists, exploiting new opportunities, defining common identities, or creating goods. If we insist, we can call all those purposes “problem-solving,” but I think the word “problem” invokes too narrow a set of issues.

Apparently, it was Harvard Business School professor Howard H. Stevenson who first called entrepreneurship “the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control” (PDF).

If you decide how to allocate a budget, personnel, or other resources that you have in hand, you are administering. If you make those allocations collaboratively, you are negotiating or deliberating. If you plan a ten-million-dollar house in your mind, without having any way to get the $10 million, you are daydreaming. If you have the capacity to seize someone else’s resources, you are stealing. But if you come up with a plausible plan to raise $10 million in voluntary investment capital, you are an entrepreneur.

You can be an entrepreneur (as opposed to a mere administrator) inside business, government, academia, or the nonprofit sector. Wherever you work, you must make plans that involve resources that you can get but don’t yet have.

The definition is not narrowly individualistic. In fact, Stevenson says,  “Entrepreneurship is greater when successful members of a community reinvest excess capital in the projects of other  community members.” So my entrepreneurship may depend on your behavior, and vice-versa.

Entrepreneurship, on this definition, does not hinge on novelty. Entrepreneurs seek resources beyond the ones they control, but they need not do so in original ways. Starting a humanities center on your campus is entrepreneurial even if there are hundreds like it on other campuses.

I suppose this definition is a little fuzzy. If you are required to propose next year’s budget, and there is a chance it will be cut, your proposal is sort of entrepreneurial. You are pursuing resources that you don’t control. But this kind of situation sounds like regular administration unless the odds of success are low and a great deal of creativity is needed to get the funding. At the other extreme, if you come up with a crazy new business plan, you are merely daydreaming, unless the odds of success are moderately good.  Since being entrepreneurial seems to depend on operating in a zone of moderate uncertainty, entrepreneurship isn’t sharply delimited from other ways of operating. Also, since efforts either succeed or fail, it can be hard to tell whether an initiative was entrepreneurial. If it works, it looks like administration; and if it fails, it looks like daydreaming.

Finally, entrepreneurship isn’t good; it is a morally neutral category. But it is useful, nonetheless.

A couple of recent research reports have crossed my desk regarding young conservatives.  First, RK Research has a poll of 1,000 college students. As a preface, they note that young people are not always a Democratic constituency: majorities of young Americans have voted for the Republican presidential ticket three times since 1972 and came close in another three elections. But the last decade saw a generation gap, punctuated by Barack Obama’s ability to take an unprecedented two-thirds of the under-30 vote in 2008.

The RK Research poll contains some insights for conservatives who want to make inroads with college students (who are just a subset of young people). For one thing, issue priorities are interesting:

All college students:

1. Education
2. Economy
3. Health Care
4. Civil Liberties
5. Government Ethics
6. National Security

Republican college students:

1. National security
2. Education
3. Economy
4. Economic Freedom
5. Government Ethics
6. Balanced Budget

All college students rank military strength and national security as the Republican Party’s #1 and #2 strongest areas of performance. The challenge for Republicans is that their brand seems to be strongest when it comes to national security, but only Republican college students rank that as a high priority. Some of the Party’s leading national issues do not play well among college students, even the Republican ones. Economic freedom comes in at #4 for the college Republicans; abortion, at #13; and social values, at #14. Education trumps all of those at #2. I would recommend the Republicans emphasize constructive policy positions on education, including higher education.

Meanwhile, this paper by Mukand and Kaplan finds that young people who registered to vote in California right after 9/11/2001 were more likely to register as Republicans than those who registered right before 9/11/01, and they have stayed more Republican since then. This is an interesting contribution to the general literature on voting, because it suggests that formative  experiences have lasting effects. It also suggests that today’s young Republicans (a relatively small group) may be especially motivated by concerns about national security–in which case the  Republicans’ priorities of tax cuts and social issues will not play particularly well with them. After all, the RK Research poll was conducted before Osama bin Laden was killed in a mission authorized by a Democratic president.