Progressives on Parade

Crooked Timber is an avowedly progressive blog. (Unsurprisingly, nearly all the contributors are academics; none are in reality-refereed fields.) A recent entry, Brother, that's socialism. You know it is. lauds an "impromptu" speech by David Simon (creator of The Wire ) at this years Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney, Australia.

There is a reason for the scare quotes. That is the Guardian's characterization, perhaps looking to provide an excuse for incoherence. However, I find it singularly difficult to believe that a headliner for this event would go all the way to Australia, while giving no thought to what he was going to say.

Cutting straight to the chase, Simon asserts the US is arguably the most broken country in the world. Here is why, paraphrased:

Inequality. He's not a Marxist, but. "The ultimate tragedy of capitalism is its dominance without regard to a social compact …" He hates the notion that profit is the metric by which we measure the health of our society. He dates that to 1980. Between then and the beginning of the 20th century, the US created a consumer class by the the ongoing compromises between capital and organized labor. Then 1980 and poof, we suddenly believe in trickle down economics, and that a free market knows best,

… where now libertarianism in my country is actually being taken seriously as an intelligent mode of political thought. It's astonishing to me. But it is. People are saying I don't need anything but my own ability to earn a profit. I'm not connected to society. I don't care how the road got built, I don't care where the firefighter comes from, I don't care who educates the kids other than my kids. I am me. It's the triumph of the self. I am me, hear me roar.

Therefore socialism. And because the US isn't socialist, it is a horror show:

You're seeing a retrenchment in terms of family income, you're seeing the abandonment of basic services, such as public education, functional public education. You're seeing the underclass hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs that is in fact merely a war on the poor and has turned us into the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we've put in American prisons and the percentage of Americans we put into prisons. No other country on the face of the Earth jails people at the number and rate that we are.

Therefore socialism, because:

The idea that the market will solve such things as environmental concerns, as our racial divides, as our class distinctions, our problems with educating and incorporating one generation of workers into the economy after the other when that economy is changing; the idea that the market is going to heed all of the human concerns and still maximise profit is juvenile. It's a juvenile notion and it's still being argued in my country passionately and we're going down the tubes. And it terrifies me because I'm astonished at how comfortable we are in absolving ourselves of what is basically a moral choice. Are we all in this together or are we all not?

And Americans are idiots for the debacle of a debate over something as basic as healthcare policy [He said this despite six weeks of the unfolding disaster that is Obamacare in action]. So imagine how bad Americans are going to be when it "… comes to something as complicated as global warming.

Group health insurance is socialism, you idiots. And because it is, that is just the same as doing it for 300 million Americans. Americans are stupid because they don't get that.

Therefore, more New Deal. Which won't happen because the popular will is completely suppressed. Therefore, America is the most broken country in the world.

You can judge for yourself, but I think my summary fairly represents what he said.

Which is so astonishingly incoherent that it is hard to know where to start. Capital and organized labor can compromise in exactly the same way as electricity and doing the laundry. He can't have been alive since 1980 and glibly dismiss trickle down economics. He likes his strawmen by the squadron. He attributes to capital effects for which it cannot be the cause. Libertarians aren't fans of the war on drugs; by the way, where is the socialist paradise that has legalized them? Not satisfied with a mere squadron of strawmen, he concocts an entire army. He is a perfect example of why the Church of Warmenism is so attractive to progressives. He has no idea how it came to be that employers purchase health insurance, and can't understand the difference between a company and a society.

And we are the idiots?

So far, not really worthy of a post. Another progressive smugly mowing down straw armies by hurling talking points grabbed almost at random from the progressive bag of bollocks is hardly news. Far more interesting appalling is the thread that followed, from which there come such gems as:

#16: We are propagandized into a culture of the self, which Simon alludes to. [I am a firm believer in free speech, but if I was the Head Dude What's in Charge, the first thing to go would be passive voice. Why is that practically the progressive default writing style?] … The Left is not going to get anywhere in these circumstances without accepting class warfare as a fact, and without accepting the necessity of destroying individuals and institutions on the Right. [I think we have found Dzerzhinsky's replacement]

#17: The big problem, as I see it, with social democratic politics is that is has been true to its Marxist roots in embracing a deterministic notion of historical progress and so, almost a century after Bernstein called it into question, just haven’t given the problem of the parliamentary road to democratic socialism any serious attention. Part of that laziness of vision might be because of a ambivalence to the more decentralized strategies favored the cooperative movement, the unfavored sibling to the institutions of Big Labor and the Welfare State (almost everywhere except for Sweden interestingly). But whatever the cause, it is a problem that needs attention. [If you have a taste for leaden prose, progressives are far more likely to satisfy than anyone else. Why is that?]

#33: Expropriation must precede, logically and historically, the creation of democratic processes.

#48: My favorite kooky little gem would be having governments (at any level, but especially the national level) going into business as competitors of private business. Key areas of re-industrialization (consumer electronics, clothing and textiles, etc.) would be targeted by chartering, and initially capitalizing, co-operative, employee/ government-owned, manufacturing entities of various kinds, with an eye to moving gradually toward worker-ownership and operation of virtually all industry …

… Increase taxable base for SSI to 500g and means test. [Progressives really do love expropriation.]

#55: Expropriation is an attitude, a recognition that there is no private property or personal rights.

Communities, as opposed to collections of individuals are formed, I believe, at the moment and in the act of public open (at least to themselves) expropriation. [I'm sensing a pattern here.]

#76: There will and must be crime, even if it is nothing more than illegal strikes and mass demonstrations and occupations of property and public spaces (and who can question, really, the legitimacy of the outbursts of spontaneous rage that can seize whole communities?). The question is always: How much crime, and how much, if any, violence? That is the nut, and it’s a hard one.

#101: The [US] “Constitutional Republic” is probably the most efficient anti-democratic system, creating as I said a Leviathan to limit democracy and implant authoritarianism in the minds of the citizens. Elitist and propertarian.

And the esteemed David Simon wonders why we idiot Americans are so suspicious of socialism.

Just like breathing

It has been pretty obvious for quite some time, to anyone paying attention, that this President is an extraordinarily mendacious fellow.  Most of the lies didn't matter to people, they were too far removed from their existence to be of any consequence.  "If you like your health insurance, you can keep your health insurance," is entirely different kind of lie.  Cancellation notices can't be spun.  Lies and lies about lies and lies about lies about lies just make the matter worse.

Andrew Klavan has a video and some thoughts to share:

It is now apparent to any honest observer that Obama is a rank incompetent too arrogant and foolish to alter his political philosophy even after reality has proven it false. As his record at the time of his original candidacy should have warned us, he has no business in the Oval Office. He simply isn’t up for the job.

And what is extra tragicomical about Obama’s spectacular failure is that so many of the journalists who cover him are ALSO content to have him play rather than be the president — just as they themselves are content to play at heroically helping the poor and minorities even as their left-wing policies make the poor even poorer and the marginalized more marginalized still.

The reason for this is that both Obama and many of our journalists were trained in the post-modern academy where they were taught that there is no such thing as moral truth but only culturally inculcated narratives. In such a world, the moral narrative that can be drummed into the head of the populace is the truth that wins. Convincing people that a good has been achieved is the same as achieving it.

Roger L. Simon had this to offer:

I suspect that Obama’s core belief — his key religious value, if you will — is an American form of taqiyya — the Muslim dictate that it is permissible to lie to non-believers for the preservation of Islam. He believes in left-wing taqiyya. (Ironically, taqiyya is largely Shiite and Obama wishes to negotiate with Shiite Iran, masters of the lie.)

Now I do not think for a second that Obama is a Muslim any more than I think he is a Christian. He is a typical postmodern agnostic who only goes to church — and then rarely — for political purposes. But he grew up in the Islamic world in the midst of the psychological climate of taqiyya, with preservation of the group taking precedence over even the hint of democracy. And that climate harmonized completely with his other influences — anti-imperialism augmented by Alinksyite methods, themselves anti-democratic.

He never had a moral basis for honesty. Lying, from the Choom Gang through Reverend Wright and beyond, was his lifestyle. And he had the consolation that he was lying for a better good. No one ever told him otherwise. If that goes on for long enough, you lose contact with truth. It becomes almost a non-existent phenomenon, an irrelevancy.
In a very real way, Obama’s confluence of influences has replaced traditional religion and become a religion — with everything he does based on faith, but not a faith that has anything to do with God.

VDH weighs in  here

What is the common denominator of the Obama administration’s serial scandals — the Justice Department’s spying on AP, the IRS targeting of conservative groups, the NSA surveillance, the lies about Benghazi and the ACA — and much of the White House damage-control rhetoric? In a word: the advancement of postmodern notions of justice at the expense of traditional truth.
 
By the 1980s, in law schools, university social-science departments, and the humanities in general, the old relativist idea of Plato’s noble lies was given a new French facelift. Traditional morality and ethics were dismissed as arbitrary constructs, predicated on privileged notions of race, class, and gender. The new moral architecture did not rely on archaic abidance by the niceties of “truth,” which simply reinforced traditional oppressive hierarchies.

Instead, social justice by definition transcended the sham of traditional ideas of truth and falsity. The true became the advocacy of fairness, while the real lie was the reactionary adherence to a set of oppressive norms. All this was faculty-lounge fluff, but soon it filtered out into the larger culture.

Not to be outdone the point is made by  Daniel Greenfield: see this

If You Don’t Trust Americans to Choose Their Own Health Insurance…

… Why would you trust them enough to tell them the truth that they won’t be able to choose their own health insurance?
The elitism implicit in progressivism makes deceit mandatory.

If Americans are little more than apes who can sorta be trusted to drive cars, but not to pick them out, then they aren’t advanced enough to be told the truth. And indeed that is the rationale that was advanced for Obama’s plan lie.
It’s behind the resistance to the Upton Keep Your Plan Act.

If Americans are too stupid to know what’s good for them, then you have to lie to them and lie to them some more. When they lose their plans and get outraged, tell them that their plans were bad substandard scam plans.
Progressives lie casually because they don’t view the people whom they are lying to as being advanced enough and evolved enough to be worthy of the truth.

And if they did believe the American people deserved the truth and deserved to make their own choices, they wouldn’t lie to them.
That’s what this conflict is really about. That’s what the clash between Socialism and the Free Market, between slavery and freedom is about.
The left doesn’t feel bad about lying, because it doesn’t view the people it is lying to as having the same degree of personhood, intelligence and legal rights as they do.

Like I said, the prez is particularly mendacious.


More about the rhetoric here 

Except for diehard, "true believer" progressives, it has finally begun to dawn on Americans that ObamaCare was sold to us under false pretenses. But the selling of ObamaCare was accomplished not only with lies. It also relied on the clever use of rhetoric: the language of persuasion. But even now, after the lies have been exposed, the rhetoric just keeps coming.

...

What I'm in the market for is a little truth in advertising. But all I hear is dishonest rhetoric, such as the claim that with ObamaCare some 30 million Americans now have health insurance. That's a reference to the ObamaCare expansion of Medicaid. But Medicaid isn't insurance; it's welfare. Equating a "free" government program with private products willingly bought by consumers with their own money might qualify as some lamer kind of rhetoric.
Progressives have a knack for drawing distinctions were none exist and for lumping together things that should be kept apart and distinct. It's called rhetoric, and we need to be able to recognize it if we don't want to be sold a bill of goods again.

And then we have this here 

 Every morning the media paws through a dictionary looking for the most innocuous ways to describe Obama’s big health care lie.
...

Obama wasn’t the first politician to lie. He won’t be the last. But most politicians who lie don’t have an army of reporters swarming around them to explain that they didn’t lie, but just inflated their misspeaking. One man did not get up in front of the microphones and cameras and lie over and over again. The entire liberal establishment lied. And it’s still lying.

The media’s lies and excuses, even more than the original Obama lie, reveal why liberals can never be trusted.

If Obama had only lied about being on crack or with an intern, that might be an impeachable act, but an understandable human failing. But he wasn’t lying to cover up something shameful that he did. He lied because he didn’t think Americans deserved to keep their health plans… or the truth.
Obama lied because he is a liberal.

That Obama would lie was an inevitable as the sun rising in the morning and the taxman coming in the spring. The lie was baked into the nature of the progressive movement that he identified with and its social experiments with human lives for the greater good that he participated in.

Lying isn’t incidental to a liberal. Liberal is another word for liar. Someone who believes, as Obama and his media cronies do, that Americans are too stupid and ignorant to be trusted to choose their own health care, isn’t about to trust them with the truth.

Liberals don’t believe that the people they lie to are their equals. If they did, not only wouldn’t they lie to them, but they wouldn’t subscribe to a skewed leftist take on liberalism that compels them to take away choices from people for their own good.

You don’t take away someone’s right to choose unless you think that they are inferior to you.
...

If you think that the average person is a moron, then the only answer is to set up to a totalitarian system to nudge the marching morons into the death panels for their own greater good while lying to them that the death panelists are really the judges for the next hot talent competition.

If ordinary people don’t deserve the basic decency of being allowed to make decisions about their own health care, then they also don’t deserve the basic decency of not being lied to their faces about those decisions being taken away from them.

If Obama had trusted and respected Americans, he wouldn’t have lied to them about ObamaCare. But if he had really trusted and respected them, he wouldn’t have inflicted ObamaCare on them.
Obama’s crime isn’t the lie. The lie is the cover-up of the crime. The crime is that Obama packaged a tax, a welfare program and a government takeover of health care together and called it reform.
The media has shown that Obama’s lie was no isolated incident by lying about the lie for the same reason that he told the lie. The health plan lie wasn’t the lie of one politician protecting his reputation; it was the big lie of a liberal establishment protecting its agenda.

The liberal media manipulates its readers, listeners and viewers the same way that liberal governments manipulate their citizens. Unlike Clinton’s lie, Obama’s lie was not one man’s mistake, but a movement’s arrogance. And not only hasn’t Obama stopped lying about his lie, but the media and the rest of his movement haven’t stopped lying about his lie.

Obama’s big health care lie shows why liberals can’t be trusted. Any movement that believes its members are superior to ordinary people cannot be trusted to represent them or to tell them the truth.

Andrew McCarthy explains the scheme behind the Obamacare fraud.

I could go on and on but, let's conclude with some fun:

"Selling hope's like selling soap, son, I'll tell you why
You can't make either one without a little bit of lye"

Well, last one by Ed Driscoll.

 The president and the officials around him are the product of the same progressive version of higher education that simultaneously excises politics from the study of government and public policy while politicizing education. This higher education denigrates experience; exalts rational administration; reveres abstract moral reasoning; confidently counts on the mainstream press to play for the progressive political team; accords to words fabulous abilities to remake reality; and believes itself to speak for the people while haughtily despising their way of life.

For a certain type of Postmodernist, perhaps a Rococo Marxist,  eventually this chronic lying  becomes involuntary, just like breathing.

FOOLs

Arnold Kling describes an acronym:

I like to use the acronym FOOL, which stands for Fear Of Others’ Liberty. I think that many of us are FOOLs. I count myself a FOOL, at least to some extent. 

Once you are a FOOL, then you may be willing, yea, eager, to delegate the job of constraining someone else’s liberty. We don’t all want to be policemen or prison guards, but most of us are glad that there are people doing those jobs. 

If I delegate the job of constraining someone else’s liberty, then, unless I happen to be a despot, those who have the power to constrain someone else’s liberty have the power to constrain my liberty as well. That is roughly what we mean by equality before the law.

Yup, we're FOOLs we are, one and all.  Some more than others.

Right Effect, Wrong Cause

Yesterday the NYT proffered its latest The Great Divide column. Before I go any further, in the NYT's own words:

The Great Divide is a series on inequality — the haves, the have-nots and everyone in between — in the United States and around the world, and its implications for economics, politics, society and culture. The series moderator is Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, a Columbia professor and a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist for the World Bank.*

This latest instructional column from the enlightened to the rest of us, How Can We Jump-Start the Struggle for Gender Equality? purports to demonstrate that something went wrong during the Vanguard's Righteous March to Parity Between the Sexes. Besides, that is, all those fussy dimorphic details which, since they are unimportant to the Vanguard are unimportant in fact.

[Starting in the 1960s, the] traditional division of labor by gender was challenged from all sides. Women’s share of the labor force, husbands’ share of housework, the integration of occupations once categorized by gender and women’s share of management jobs all rocketed upward from the 1970s till sometime in the 1990s. Women went from earning fewer than 10 percent of law and medicine degrees in 1970 to earning almost half of them by the early 2000s.

I don't think it is possible to cogently argue that, circa 1968, women were not subject to all manner of legal handicaps due to their choosing poorly as to which team they were to be conceived into. Similarly, I think that no matter how hard you might look, or no matter how many rocks you might wish to overturn, you would be hard pressed to find anyone wishing to reimpose all those petty, demeaning, senseless shackles.

Wonderful, even more indefensible nonsense for history's ash heap. Game over. Post over, sans point.

Not so fast, wonder wings. After making occupational advances across the board for two decades …

… the movement toward equality stopped. The labor force hit 46 percent female in 1994, and it hasn’t changed much since. Women’s full-time annual earnings were 76 percent of men’s in 2001, and 77 percent in 2011. Although women do earn a majority of academic degrees, their specialties pay less, so that earnings even for women with doctorate degrees working full time are 77 percent of men’s. Attitudinal changes also stalled. In two decades there has been little change in the level of agreement with the statement, “It is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.

There are a couple things worth remembering here. Just as Jim Crow laws were a grotesque imposition on blacks because of their race, women were also subject to nearly endless impositions because of their gender. In the early 1960s, it was difficult for women to own property, obtain credit, and were barred from many jobs. And we must give credit where it is due. Progressives were the ones taking on Jim Crow, and tearing down the equally pervasive, demeaning, and unjustified subjugation of women.

And then they succumbed to Progressivism's twin diseases: submerging individuals within the group, and rampaging hubris. Both are on prominent display in the quoted para above, and throughout the article. It doesn't matter what individual women, or men, want; only that groups adhere to Progressives' insistence upon the only equality that matters — outcome. Attitudinal changes have "stalled", because they fail to adhere to the Progressive notion of what constitutes the correct attitude.

Progressives fancy themselves as being reality based and, ipso facto, correct in their every thought and deed. Whether Creationist or Dawkinsian, there is precious little disagreement to be found that women and men have always faced very different life challenges. Yet it is the Dawkinsian Progressive who falls, and falls hard, for the belief, as religious as anything you might find in revealed texts, that evolution stops at the neck line.

According to Dr. Cohen, sociology professor and author of a coming-real-soon-now book "The Family: Diversity, Inequality and Social Change", the blame lies with men and society. Men haven't moved into traditionally female occupations, and our society has failed to implement work-family policies oriented towards promoting gender equality.

Unfortunately for Dr. Cohen's Progressive vision, reality bites.

Here is a list of “non-traditional” (i.e., less than 25% female) occupations.

As it turns out, there are quite a lot of them, with an average female participation rate of roughly 10%. Taking a for instance, it is hard to imagine how work-family policies, no matter what they might be, differentially impact nursing and being a mechanic. Yet nursing remains overwhelmingly female, and any occupation with the word “mechanic” attached is at least 96% male. (My occupation, pilot, is 98.7% male, despite a cornucopia of job offers for any qualified female.) It appears that the other foot can be shod with the same shoe: women don't appear the least inclined to move into traditionally male occupations.

Maybe something more than stalled attitudes is involved. Maybe a great many women are concluding that, given a choice, they would far rather be nurses than mechanics. And just as many men are wondering why they would want to be primary school teachers when they could be working on cars.

If that is so, and the list of still “traditional” occupations suggests it is, then perhaps evolution didn’t stop at the neck line, and, consequently, equality of opportunity should not be expected to yield anything remotely resembling equality of outcome. Maybe, just maybe, unfair evolutionary discrimination has tilted the playing field in many more directions than just plumbing and upper body strength. Mechanical aptitude is unfairly — by Progressive standards — distributed. So why should we attribute to "stalled attitudes", or defective work-family policies, that which is far better explained by nature itself?

Which points at a fundamental objection to Dr. Cohen's urging us to imitate Iceland's family policies, and chiding "frightened traditionalists" in the US who are, poor benighted dears, averse to state-run child care.

There's even a term for it: Parity Error. So long as women are not eager to become mechanics, pilots, carpenters, masons, welders, ad nauseum, then men must do those things.

According to Dr. Cohen, If you want a society in which men are welcome and willing to be day care workers, you may need a workplace culture that accepts — or encourages — fathers’ spending more time at home with their children. To unblock the path toward gender equality, these policies may be the best ideas we have.

Until he concocts policies that encourage women to do things they resolutely refuse to do, then the best ideas Progressives have are no better than bolting a kick-stand on a tricycle.

---

* The reality deficits in this piece are so glaring and central that whatever Dr. Stiglitz' brilliance in economics, he is utterly devoid of skeptical moderation.

Postmodernism, it's continued relevance

In a recent post on this blog I linked to a Lee Harris column which asked "why isn't socialism dead?"  The key point was that socialism lives on in the dimension of myth.  The author concluded that piece:

This is why socialism isn't dead, and why in our own century it may well spring back into life with a force and vigor shocking to those who have, with good reason, declared socialism to be no longer viable. It is also why Georges Sorel is perhaps even more relevant today than he was a hundred years ago. He knew that it was hopeless to guide men by reason and argument alone. Men need myths -- and until capitalism can come up with a transformative myth of its own, it may well be that many men will prefer to find their myths in the same place they found them in the first part of the twentieth century -- the myth of revolutionary socialism.

This is the challenge that capitalism faces in the world today -- whether it will rise to the challenge is perhaps the most urgent question of our time, and those who refuse to confront this challenge are doing no service to reason or to human dignity and freedom. Bad myths can only be driven out by better myths, and unless capitalism can provide a better myth than socialism, the latter will again prevail.

I prefer to use a term other than capitalism as do most of the readers of this blog.  There are even bigger problems than word usage.  There is a combination of the myth of socialism and the propagation of a toxic idea meant to undermine the ability of a free society to defend itself.  Dr. Sanity offers the following:

 What are these "dangerous trends that began decades ago"? To understand what is happening in the world today, one must understand the a philosophy that has taken root in Western Civilization and brought us to this point in history--and, yes, ideas really matter; and when you are basing your society on bad ones, then you can expect bad things to happen.

The philosophy that is behind these dangerous trends is Postmodernism; and Barack Obama represents the culmination and embodiment of the perfect postmodern demagogue.

There have been prior posts on this blog   dealing with Postmodernism as well as  additional posts at at Dr. Sanity blog.  She continues:
 

We can think of the four pillars--POLITICAL CORRECTNESS, MULTICULTURALISM, RADICAL ENVIRONMENTALISM, and TERRORISM-- as the foundation for both the socialist revival (particularly in the Western hemisphere recently) and for the rapid advancement of the Islamic Jihad and Islamic fundamentalism.

Below is a flow chart that has been adapted from Stephen Hick's book, Explaining Postmodernism (p. 173), which summarizes the evolution of these four strategies/pillars of leftist/progressive thought; and though I have written about it before, it is well worth repeating over and over again as the perfect postmodern storm that swirls around approaches a Category 5; and as reason, truth, and reality are belittled and ignored by our leaders:

The refusal to accept failure combined with the spawn of Postmodernism gives the radical left considerable ability to undermine freedom.

Eternal Flame

I'm not talking about the eternal flame at the grave site of JFK, this being the 50th anniversary of his death.  Well let me get right to it...

In light of the horrors brought about in the twentieth century by the revolutionary myth of socialism, it is easy to sympathize with those who believe mankind could not possibly be tempted to try the socialist experiment again. If the liberal rationalist Renan was surprised that "Socialists were beyond discouragement" at the beginning of the twentieth century, how much more surprised must his contemporary counterparts be to discover that socialism is also beyond discouragement at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Yet this is a lesson that Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez, under the guidance of their mentor, Fidel Castro, seem determined to impress upon us.

It may well be that socialism isn't dead because socialism cannot die. As Sorel argued, the revolutionary myth may, like religion, continue to thrive in "the profounder regions of our mental life," in those realms unreachable by mere reason and argument, where even a hundred proofs of failure are insufficient to wean us from those primordial illusions that we so badly wish to be true. Who doesn't want to see the wicked and the arrogant put in their place? Who among the downtrodden and the dispossessed can fail to be stirred by the promise of a world in which all men are equal, and each has what he needs?

Here we have the problem facing those who, like Hernando de Soto, believe that capitalism is the only rational alternative left after the disastrous collapse of so many socialist experiments. Yes, capitalism is the only rational method of proceeding; but is the mere appeal to reason sufficient to make the mass of men and women, especially among the poor and the rejected, shut their ears to those who promise them the socialist apocalypse, especially when the men who are making these promises possess charisma and glamour, and are willing to stand up, in revolutionary defiance, to their oppressors?

The shrewd and realistic Florentine statesman and thinker, Guicciardini, once advised: "Never fight against religion...this concept has too much empire over the minds of men." And to the extent that socialism is a religion, then those who wish to fight it with mere reason and argument may well be in for a losing battle. Furthermore, as populism spreads, it is inevitable that the myth of socialism will gain in strength among the people who have the least cause to be happy with their place in the capitalist world-order, and who will naturally be overjoyed to put their faith in those who promise them a quick fix to their poverty and an end to their suffering.

Earlier in the article the author states:

  Instead, he argues that it is only by refusing to accept the failure of socialism that one can become a "true revolutionary." Indeed, for Sorel, the whole point of the myth of the socialist revolution is not that the human societies will be transformed in the distant future, but that the individuals who dedicate their lives to this myth will be transformed into comrades and revolutionaries in the present. In short, revolution is not a means to achieve socialism; rather, the myth of socialism is a useful illusion that turns ordinary men into comrades and revolutionaries united in a common struggle -- a band of brothers, so to speak.

Sorel, for whom religion was important, drew a comparison between the Christian and the socialist revolutionary. The Christian's life is transformed because he accepts the myth that Christ will one day return and usher in the end of time; the revolutionary socialist's life is transformed because he accepts the myth that one day socialism will triumph, and justice for all will prevail. What mattered for Sorel, in both cases, is not the scientific truth or falsity of the myth believed in, but what believing in the myth does to the lives of those who have accepted it, and who refuse to be daunted by the repeated failure of their apocalyptic expectations. How many times have Christians in the last two thousand years been convinced that the Second Coming was at hand, only to be bitterly disappointed -- yet none of these disappointments was ever enough to keep them from holding on to their great myth. So, too, Sorel argued, the myth of socialism will continue to have power, despite the various failures of socialist experiments, so long as there are revolutionaries who are unwilling to relinquish their great myth. That is why he rejected scientific socialism -- if it was merely science, it lacked the power of a religion to change individual's lives. Thus for Sorel there was "an...analogy between religion and the revolutionary Socialism which aims at the apprenticeship, preparation, and even the reconstruction of the individual -- a gigantic task."

So the eternal flame of the socialist myth will continue to burn in the hearts and minds of some.  It is why socialists can not tolerate competing belief systems and why they do not respect the rights of the individual or a preference for voluntary cooperation instead of coercion. 
 

What Happened in 1973?

Via Russ Roberts at Cafe Hayek, here's an interesting chart related to income inequality:

One thing that's interesting, is that in the last 100 years, the very rich did not get that much richer than everybody else.

Russ dissects the chart:

Let’s just look at the bottom 99%, the clear light circles. Put all your biases aside for a moment. Just look at it and try to summarize what you see. I see four different eras. From 1913 until roughly 1940, it’s flat. From 1940 to 1973, it’s rising almost steadily, roughly tripling. Then for 20 years, 1973–1993, it’s basically flat. Then in 1993, it starts to rise but the increases are erratic.

I would describe it slightly differently.  There was a brief spike up during WWII, then things were roughly flat till around 1950 which is when Income Growth for the bottom 99% started rising steadily.

Russ wonders why the change in 1973:

When the left talks about the middle class being “hollowed out,” or stagnation in the standard of living of average American, they like to blame it on declining unionization, a fraying social contract between business and labor, or the rich hoarding more for themselves and leaving less for the rest of us via tax policy or regulation. But none of these kinds of explanations are likely to explain the sharpness in the change of the rate of growth starting in 1973. Private sector unionization has been declining steadily since 1950. I don’t think the social contract got revised in an especially tough way in 1973. And I don’t think the rich had a big confab in 1973 when they remade public policy. Was there a big change in tax policy or regulation in 1973? If there was, I missed it.

His explanation?  Well, I'll let you go directly to Cafe Hayek to find out the cause of flattening Income Growth for the bottom 99% starting in 1973.

Anti-Anti-Trust: The Standard Oil Case

I've concluded over years of occasional study that Antitrust law does more harm than good, particularly when viewed from perspective of the consumer.  There are a wide variety of subtle reasons why I believe this and my plan is to occasionally write about various aspects of those reasons.

I approach many narratives with skepticism, and the Antitrust narrative is one of those.  When looking at Antitrust cases, I've noticed that the glorious narrative of noble "Trust Busters" courageously fighting uber-powerful, evil corporations for the benefit of the consumer doesn't hold up very well and is quite dependent on spin.  In other words, the facts don't speak for themselves.  The following is one example (from ANTITRUST: THE CASE FOR REPEAL by Dominick T.. Armentano):

The conventional account of the Standard Oil case goes something like this.  The Standard Oil Company employed ruthless business practices to monopolize the petroleum industry in the nineteenth century.  After achieving its monopoly, Standard reduced market output and raised the market price of kerosene, the industry's major product. The federal government indicted Standard under the Sherman Act at the very pinnacle of its monopolistic power, proved in court that it had acted unreasonably toward consumers and competitors, and obtained a divestiture of the company that helped to restore competition in the petroleum industry. 

This account has almost nothing in common with the actual facts.  It is not possible to review the entire history of the case here, but a summary of the government findings against and actual conduct of Standard Oil will serve to make the point. 

The Standard Oil Company was a major force in the development of the petroleum industry in the nineteenth century.  It grew from being a small Ohio corporation in 1870, with perhaps a 4-percent market share, to become a giant, multidivisional conglomerate company by 1890, when it enjoyed as much as 85 percent of the domestic petroleum refining market.  This growth was the result of shrewd bargaining for crude oil, intelligent investments in research and development, rebates from railroads, strict financial accounting, vertical and horizontal integration to realize specific efficiencies, investments in tank cars and pipelines to more effectively control the transportation of crude oil and refined product, and a host of other managerial innovations.  Internally-generated efficiency allowed the company to purchase other businesses and manage additional assets with the same commitment to efficiency and even to expand its corporate operations abroad. 

Standard Oil's efficiency made the company extremely successful: it kept its costs low and was able to sell more and more of its refined product, usually at a lower and lower price, in the open marketplace.  Prices for kerosene fell from 30 cents a gallon in 1869 to 9 cents in 1880, 7.4 cents in 1890, and 5.9 cents in 1897.  Most important, this feat was accomplished in a market open to competitors, the number and organizational size of which increased greatly after 1890.  Indeed, the competitors grew so quickly in the years preceding the federal antitrust case that Standard's market share in petroleum refining declined from roughly 85 percent in 1890 to 64 percent in 1911.  In 1911, at least 147 refining companies were competing with Standard, including such large firms as Gulf, Texaco, Union, Pure, Associated Oil and Gas, and Shell.

So, before and during the period when Antitrust action was brought against Standard Oil, prices were plummeting and Standard Oil's market share dropped significantly.  Harm to the consumer was nowhere to be seen and, in fact, consumers benefited hugely from the price drop.

There are quite a number of other Antitrust cases like this that follow this "Anti" narrative.  The common wisdom is often just a particularly spin and narrative which don't reflect the facts particularly well.

Textin' in the Girls Room

My daughters aren't allowed to use their phones at school.  So when they need to reach me during the school day about rides or other after school activities, they sneak into the girls room to use their phones to text me.

In my day it was "Smokin' in the Boys Room:"

Now it's "Textin' in the Girls Room." The new lyrics would be:

Textin' in the girls room
Textin' in the girls room
Teacher don't you fill me up with your rules
Everybody knows that textin' ain't allowed in school!

The $317,000 Question

With the rollout of Obamacare being such an epic fiasco that using the term risks libeling epic fiascos, it's easy to lose sight of the problems Obamacare was meant to address in the first place.

Perhaps that is too generous.  That the healthcare system in the US is a shambolic contraption is an assertion that can probably be made without fear of contradiction, even on the internet.  But nothing I read in the run-up to Obamacare's passage, or since, has seemed to this glorified heavy equipment operator of even coming close to properly conceiving the problem, never mind the inherent tradeoffs in any conceivable "solution".  

(In the following, I am going to make notional assertions, most of which I'm not going to source, as a basis to conceptualize what is in play.  Which is kind of like saying I'm making it all up; keep in mind that since my argument is conceptual, it does not rely upon numerical exactitude.)

In the developed world, 21st Century edition, almost everybody dies from disease or decrepitude, rather than misadventure. To simplify things, assume that everyone dies from illness or old age.  To simplify even further, so far as healthcare goes, the difference between the two is without distinction.

As a first approximation, all people have, from the point of view of the health care system, a bathtub shaped lifecycle:  significant involvement in the beginning, quickly dropping to very little involvement, until shortly before the end, roughly two years, when the demand for health care resources quickly rises.

Oddly, that healthcare lifecycle cost doesn't vary a heck of a lot with lifespan: it is the sides of the bathtub that matter, not how wide it is.  The proximate cause of our ultimate demise isn't particularly germane to its cost.  Non-smokers live longer than smokers, but they die no more cheaply.

Time for a hard fact: on average, the lifecycle cost to the healthcare system of a human is $317,000.

Already, the first conceptual hurdle is staring us in the face:  anyone using the words "health" and "insurance" next to each other is to demonstrate for all to see a comprehensive inability to grasp what insurance is about.  To wit, insurance pools risk.  A great many homeowners buy fire insurance, very few of them have their homes go up in smoke.  But if all houses were built knowing in advance that they would eventually burn down, there would be nobody around to take the other side of that bet.  As David Cohen, a longtime member of the PJA, memorably put it, the fire insurance market consists of bets by homeowners that their houses will burn down, and counter bets by insurance companies that they won't.  

Clearly, when it comes to healthcare costs, that doesn't apply, because all the houses, or near enough as makes no difference, burn down.  So what healthcare "coverage" really amounts to is cost shifting.

That is what poses the question at the top of this post.  Assume everyone lives to 75, and the average per-capita lifecycle cost is $317,000.  The simplest answer to that $317,000 question is to leave it up to the individual.  Ignoring troublesome things like inflation and interest return, all good libertarians will start self-funding their own life cycle costs from the git-go, to the tune of $4300 per year.  

That doesn't sound like much, except that for a good libertarian family of four that ends up at close as darnnit to $17,000 a year.  For some of us libertarians, while that is indeed a chunk o' cash, it is manageable.  However, not everyone is above average, and $17,000 per year would go some considerable way towards crowding out some of the luxuries in life. Like food and clothing.  

To make an expensive problem worse, healthcare is not merely a commodity. If my neighbor's house burns down, and they neglected to bet that it would, tough.  In my travels, I have been places (socialist, oddly enough) where that is apparently the attitude to the physically afflicted.  That simply isn't on the cards here in the US.  We will not tolerate the prospect of people with gaping, oozing, chest wounds panhandling.  

Looking at this problem from a life-cycle cost point of view has already led to a couple inescapable conclusions.  Paying for healthcare requires cost-shifting from the healthy to the sick, from the young to the old.  

Viewed through the prism of an insurance bet, it makes sense for a healthy mid-20s male to forego health care "insurance" altogether, or go with a high deductible catastrophic policy and self-insure up to the deductible.  Similarly, it doesn't seem to make much sense for me, having some time ago undergone that special operation, to nonetheless be required to pay for maternity coverage. 

But that is making the mistake of parsing a lifecycle into discreet events, then not checking to see if the sums add. Virtually all women have children, virtually all men become fathers, and essentially everyone living in the high-clover that precedes middle age will find themselves elderly.

Thus far, it sounds like I am making an argument for a single-payer system.  That is the seemingly obvious solution.  After all, if lifecycle costs are largely invariant, and are too high for the less well off, then those considerations pose a powerful moral argument for a system of redistributive taxation and cost shifting.

Unfortunately, single payer systems suffer the same problems to which socialist solutions seem prone: rationing, and pervasive shabbiness.  Moreover, single-payer systems free ride on the US healthcare market for innovation.

Instead, we first need to look at the US healthcare system posing two problems:  cost and affordability.  

Obamacare's fundamental problem, leaving aside the rampant fraud required for its passage, and then the staggering effort to first find, then harness, all the universe's incompetence for its implementation, was in taking a fiendishly difficult problem and trying to solve it all at once (as opposed to the GOP, which, SFAIK, has been entirely missing in action on this).

Instead, the better approach would have been to first address cost.  A great deal of the healthcare we consume does no good.  What is useful is almost always (except in more competitive realms such as elective plastic surgery and orthodontia) far more expensive than other activities that seemingly require similar skills and resources.  Even though healthcare isn't simply a commodity, it isn't immune from supply and demand; healthcare policies seem designed to shield the consumer from cost, leading to overconsumption.  The medical profession is decades behind aviation in adopting standardized procedures; inevitably there are more medical errors, more litigation, and less defense against litigation due to the absence of standards.  End defensive medicine.  The scope of healthcare is (thanks to some truly goofy court decisions) far too wide; infertility isn't fair, and I am sure that to some it comes as a crushing disappointment, but that may not be, to others, sufficient cause for having their wallets lightened.  None of this requires a massive federal bureaucracy, or thousands of pages of incomprehensible legislations, or truckloads of regulations to implement legislation.

Oh, and end the tax code's insane preference for employer purchased healthcare (Full disclosure:  this is an admission against interest.)

Yet even if we managed all that, and entered that nirvana where we purchased only what was useful, and its cost stood nearish to reality, it would still be too expensive for many to find affordable.  

Which is where the nut gets really hard to crack.  No one, not even the Rethuglicans and Teahadists, (who, as we all know, are eternally disappointed because we don't have enough poor people, and the ones we do have don't suffer nearly enough) is the least bit interested in people foregoing useful medical treatment due to lack of money.  Yet it is just as clear that given the scope of modern medicine, the cost of delivery will never be low enough for the affordability problem to disappear.

What then?  

IMHO, the least worst option is something akin to the Earned Income Tax Credit.  A per capita amount that is deemed (note the passive voice here -- it hides a great deal) sufficient to purchase adequate health coverage.  Obviously, this would require increasing taxes on the well off, but this amounts to making explicit that which is already the case -- cost shifting to those with extensive coverage.  Then I would pair that with a Health Savings Account that would be allowed to accrue indefinitely.  The consequence would be allowing more people over time to effectively self-insure, while exposing providers to price sensitivity.

By failing, for whatever reasons, to outline the problem President Obama certainly sold a bill of goods to Americans, and may well have done so to himself, as well.  He squandered an opportunity to make a systematic approach to a fiendishly difficult problem, instead succumbing to the curse of Progressives: a fetish for process and bureaucracy.  The result in the short term, has been a website that makes the Costa Concordia seem brilliant, and, in the long term, an adverse selection problem that will leave Obamacare with a far bigger hole below the water line.

Unfortunately, the Republican contribution to dealing with this ongoing sucking chest wound has proceeded no further than blank stares and slack, drooling, jaws.

The choice between Obamacare and [crickets], gives new meaning to the phrase "Stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea."

[Apologies for any disorganized thinking and writing, or offenses against grammar and clarity.  There is no time left for any of that high-falutin proof reading stuff.]

Big Power Corrupts Bigly

In 2010, General Electric (NYSE:GE) had revenues of $149 billion.  That's larger than the gross domestic product of all but about one-quarter of the countries on earth.  General Electric may also be the most diverse company in the world, involved in everything from jet engines to coffee makers, power plants to sealants, finance to lighting, and General Electric's "economy" is more diverse than the economy of many nations and most governments. They have over 300,000 employees working all over the world.  General Electric is currently number 6 on the list of Fortune 500 companies.  They are almost a nation unto themselves.

In 2010, GE had profits of $14,200,000,000, of which $5,100,000,000 was earned in the United States, yet GE paid no U.S. taxes:

...low taxes are nothing new for G.E. The company has been cutting the percentage of its American profits paid to the Internal Revenue Service for years, resulting in a far lower rate than at most multinational companies. 

Its extraordinary success is based on an aggressive strategy that mixes fierce lobbying for tax breaks and innovative accounting that enables it to concentrate its profits offshore. G.E.’s giant tax department, led by a bow-tied former Treasury official named John Samuels, is often referred to as the world’s best tax law firm. Indeed, the company’s slogan “Imagination at Work” fits this department well. The team includes former officials not just from the Treasury, but also from the I.R.S. and virtually all the tax-writing committees in Congress.

Other huge companies are also using hordes of lawyers and lobbyists to collude with the government to avoid taxes and let others bear the burden of funding the government:

While General Electric is one of the most skilled at reducing its tax burden, many other companies have become better at this as well. Although the top corporate tax rate in the United States is 35 percent, one of the highest in the world, companies have been increasingly using a maze of shelters, tax credits and subsidies to pay far less. [...] 

Such strategies ... have pushed down the corporate share of the nation’s tax receipts — from 30 percent of all federal revenue in the mid-1950s to 6.6 percent in 2009.

And Big Government, including Obama, is definitely a willing player in the collusion:

Obama ... has designated G.E.’s chief executive, Jeffrey R. Immelt, as his liaison to the business community and as the chairman of the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, and it is expected to discuss corporate taxes. 

“He understands what it takes for America to compete in the global economy,” Mr. Obama said of Mr. Immelt, on his appointment in January, after touring a G.E. factory in upstate New York that makes turbines and generators for sale around the world. 

A review of company filings and Congressional records shows that one of the most striking advantages of General Electric is its ability to lobby for, win and take advantage of tax breaks.

I don't mean to pick on GE.  While they've been the most successful at the tax avoidance game, Big Money (Wall Street), Big Pharma, Big Oil, Big Military, etc. all have been quite successful at collaborating with Big Government to fleece the rest of the country via favorable tax and regulatory treatment for these important election campaign donors.  The Bigs fund the elections of the politicians and bureaucrats and the government largess is the return payment for that funding.

The solution is quite simple.  First, eliminate the corporate income tax completely, especially since it only represents 6.6 percent of all federal revenue anyway.  This will immediately eliminate all the current collusion and corruption.  This should actually be moderately easy to get through Congress, if not right now, then eventually.

Second, institute a revenue tax (NOT income tax), on all revenues over some amount, say $10 billion, with no loopholes, and increasing rates as revenues increase beyond $10 billion.  If economies of scale still favor the company even with the revenue tax, fine.  If not, the shareholders will force a breakup of the company because the new pieces will then be more profitable in aggregate because each piece will be smaller and able to avoid the tax on revenue.  This would help reduce the number of Bigs and their inherently corrupt relationship with Big Government.

Limiting the number of large and powerful companies would be a good thing since, to paraphrase Lord Acton, power corrupts and big power corrupts bigly.

Symbol, Information Channel, and Meaning

My wife and I visited Indonesia in the early 1990s and did a lot of hiking to visit quite a number of old temples and ruins.  We were quite shocked to encounter a huge number of swastikas adorning these temples in various forms.

We later learned that the swastika symbol has been in existence for 5,000 years and that the Sanskrit meaning of the word "swastika" is "it is good."  The information channel from the creators of the temples thousands of years ago to my wife and me was so intensely corrupted by the Nazi's adoption of that symbol, that our first reactions assumed some sort of virulent antisemitism, hatred, violence, and murder.

I've had the humorous opportunity to watch two daughters and their friends evolve in their choice of clothes between the ages of 13 and 16.  At 13, an overwhelming percentage choose to dress totally inappropriately every possible chance they get.  The 13 year old boys take very little notice as they're not yet ready to "appreciate" that sort of thing.  16 to 19 year old boys take a lot of notice, and that makes this period rather dangerous for everyone involved.

The 13 year old girls believe that the message they're sending is something like, "hey, I can dress like the popular stars of the world." The message is intended only for other girls with which they associate.  They have no idea what message they are sending to the slightly older boys.

The humorous part is that these same girls at 15 or 16 are often appalled and ashamed of how they had dressed when they were 13.  At that point they understand how the message of their dress was received by many others (especially the boys) and they dress much, much more conservatively.  And little sisters who are now 13 get quite a talking to by their older sisters when the younger ones start dressing like sluts - the older sisters often make mom look quite permissive! This is definitely an example of how the channel transmitting the information badly distorts the intended meaning on the receiving end.



Embarrassingly, I either never knew or had forgotten what a confederate flag looked like.  Like the swastika above, it has extreme negative connotations, the topmost being extreme racism towards blacks, including being pro-slavery.  Unlike those who adorned their temples with swastikas thousands of years ago and couldn't possibly guess that their sacred symbol would have horribly negative connotations in the distant future, someone who waves a symbol at a political rally doesn't have that excuse.  The best defense is a fairly lame one, and is that like the naive 13-year old girls discussed above, he didn't understand how poorly the message of waving a confederate flag in front of the White House would be received by a substantial majority of the citizens of the United States, including both liberals and conservatives.

That does, indeed, seem to be the excuse.  Here is an excerpt of something he's written about the event in response to the negative press coverage:

"You sit behind your laptop and type articles about people you don’t know. You sit there and think you know the true meaning of the confederate flag, but in truth you only know what people have told you.Did you know that the confederate flag was flown on the USS Columbia ( CL-56) during WWII. 

"You would be surprised that the confederate flag is often used as a symbol for culture and to display love for one’s country. So to sit there and say you know me is a lie. I fought for my country, My family and my friends."

And according to Wikipedia, that is all true.  Nonetheless, by being oblivious to how the information channel would color and deliver his message, he managed to single-handedly paint the tea party, conservatives, marines specifically, and the military in general, as racist - at least in the minds of many liberals and conservatives.

Shrinking Hours and Obamacare

Small business is sometimes said to be the engine of jobs creation in America.  If so, the following chart doesn't bode well for employment opportunities in the future with Obamacare coming on line.

Hat Tip: John Goodman's Health Policy Blog

Ferguson v. Krugman

As I've made clear in various post and comments, I never go out of my way to read Krugman anymore, especially since various colleagues and acquaintances send me his columns fairly often.  The following four articles by Niall Ferguson (Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University; Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University) are a good example of why I don't read Krugman:

Krugtron the Invincible, Part 1

Krugtron the Invincible, Part 2

Krugtron the Invincible, Part 3

Civilizing the Marketplace of Ideas

Here is a brief excerpt from the last article:

As economists go, they do not come much mightier or more influential than Paul Krugman. A Nobel laureate who teaches at Princeton University, Krugman is also a columnist for the New York Times, whose commentaries and blog, “The Conscience of a Liberal,” are read with an almost religious fervor by liberal (in the American sense) economists and journalists around the world. He is a Twitter superstar, with more than a million followers. [...] 

Krugman has been the intellectual equivalent of a robber baron, exploiting his power to the point of driving decent people away from the public sphere – particularly younger scholars, who understandably dread a “takedown” by the “Invincible Krugtron.”

For those who find Krugman's columns powerful and true, the above articles won't convince you otherwise. However, they will give you a description from an excellent and concise historian of what some of us see when we view Krugman and his writings.  And from there, you can imagine that if you encountered someone who looked like that to you, you'd probably ignore him as well.

Divided We Stand

Sweden is often held up as an example of an excellent political-social-economic system, especially by those on the Left.  And while it's possible to quibble over the numbers, it's pretty hard to deny that in virtually every measure of well-being of a society, Sweden ranges somewhere from quite good to top notch.

As a result, everybody can probably learn something of value by studying Sweden.

I'm no exception.  What I've learned from looking at Sweden over the years is that 2 to 20 million people is a really nice size for a country.  It's big enough to have the diversity of talents and desires to form a vibrant economy, yet small enough that the people have a feeling of belonging and camaraderie with their fellow citizens.  It's big enough to support the necessary institutions of government and trade in the modern world, yet small enough that the government feels accountable to the citizens. It's big enough to create and accumulate wealth, yet small enough that it's worthwhile for citizens to protect their property and country from those who would use political power to take it.  All of the advantages of being big enough, but not too big.

When the United States declared independence in 1776, the population was about 2.5 million, a nice size. But even at that small size, the founders focused on forming a federation, with the individual states keeping the vast majority of legislative power and a high level of autonomy, even though each state only had a few hundred thousand people.

A few hundred thousand in this day and age may be too small to support itself effectively.  But what Sweden proves, unequivocally, is that 9 million is definitely not too small.

The United States has over 100 times as many people when it was founded.  It has also concentrated the power in the central government.  This has led to an Angry America where tens of millions of people don't have a feeling of belonging and camaraderie, don't feel that government is accountable to them, and feel like they are being taken advantage of by the ruling political class.  I believe this has led to constantly rising hostility, government shutdowns, out-of-control government spending, subdued economic growth, and a desperate and hopeless feeling on the part of many that their country, and a place where they can live in peace and prosperity, has been irretrievably lost.

My belief is that if we could reduce the population of the United States to 9 million people, the vast majority of these problems would go away.  310,000,000+ people is not a manageable size.  9,000,000 people is.

Obviously, it's not possible to reduce the population, even though it would be an interesting experiment to send 300,000,000 million people to Sweden and see how it goes there.

The only possible approach is to split the country into smaller Pieces.  Around 50 Pieces would work well, leaving, on average, 6.2 million people per Piece.  Each Piece would be given complete sovereignty over itself. I would suggest that all the Pieces form an alliance for mutual defense and foreign relations, sort of like a mixture of NATO and NAFTA.  They could call this alliance the Northern American Pieces, or NAP.

Then people could move to the Piece that best fit their ideology and way of life and that would diffuse the anger in Angry America.  The Pieces would let people in other Pieces live in peace and prosperity.  Divided we stand, united we fall.

Your Guide to Obamacare

In case you were wondering why they're having trouble with the software for the exchanges (click on thumbnail for larger size image)...

Hat Tip: The Belmont Club

Angry America

"Life is choice."

That's what life is to me, anyway.  While not the standard definition of human life, the dead make no choices. Someone in a coma is alive in some sense, but we don't hold them up as an example of vigorous human life. I think of someone in a coma as more "existing" than alive.  To be fully alive is to make choices continually and experience the consequences, good and bad, of those choices.  No choices, no life, rather mere and bleak existence, which for me, is little or no better than being dead.

The choices that form the basis for human life need not be rational choices.  They can be choices made by, or for the purpose of satisfying, the lower brain.  As far as I'm concerned, the usefulness of the rational, conscious portion of the brain in the vast majority of decisions is hugely overrated and often counterproductive.

"Human sociality involves something like an adaptive evolutionary arms race in the capacity to deceive and the capacity to reveal deception." Joseph Carroll

I subscribe to the hypothesis that the large size of the human brain is in large part due to the huge evolutionary advantage of being able to deceive others and detect being deceived by others.  Consciousness is an emergent property of that capability and is thus an indirect artifact of the tool of deception used by the lower brain to further its agenda.

"Building on Byrne and Whiten's concept of "Machiavellian intelligence," [in Why We Lie, David Livingstone Smith] presents a scenario for a genetic 'arms race' in human evolution between deception and detection, and its implications for the development of our big brain and its capacities. If the reader finds this something of a stretch, Byrne and Whiten's most recent data show that among infrahuman primate species, frequency of deception is directly proportional to size of neocortex." [emphasis added] Irwin Silverman

A critically important part of modeling deception and therefore deploying and detection deception, is self-deception, and intelligence seems to significantly increase the likelihood of self-deception:

"More than 90% of professors think they are in the top half of their profession."

As an indirect artifact of deception, our consciousness, the thing each of us refers to as "me," is mostly just along for the ride and is pretty much at the mercy and command of the lower brain which is where the real "me" resides.

The illusion of conscious control, while overwhelmingly strong (very possibly due to self-deception), is unconvincing when I give it careful thought.  Anything our conscious mind wants to do is at best a request to our lower brain since the lower brain comes between "us" and the control of musculature via the nervous system.  The opposite isn't true - the lower brain can completely ignore the conscious brain and do whatever it chooses without any interference of conscious thought.  Consider the many important life situations where it is clear that our consciousness plays a minimal role.  These include:

• Love: Falling in love is in no way a rational process.  We don't make objective measurements and consciously decide to fall in love.  It's our lower brain that determines our attraction to potential mates and then we rationalize why we fell in love after the fact.
• Sex: Need I say more? While I, of course, have always been in complete conscious control of my sex drive and have never ended up in situations that my rational self would consider non-optimal (if you believe that one, I'm better at deception than I thought), it seems that the vast majority of men and a non-zero number of women end up not infrequently motivated to do things by their lower brain sex drives that are nearly certainly counterproductive by any rational analysis.
• Acts of high stress, emotion, altruism and heroism: These pretty much happen with our conscious self just going along for the ride with little or no influence on our own actions.  For these sorts of actions, there's often just not enough time for us to consciously process the situation, so our lower brain just takes over completely.
• Food:  Have you ever been on a diet and found yourself eating something, like a piece of cake, that you're sure you didn't consciously intend to eat?  Usually, we just sort of zone out when we do stuff like that, but next time you're in that situation, try consciously focusing on the experience.  I've found it to be very odd.  You might be able to fight it and win (i.e. stop yourself from eating the piece of cake), but I find it disconcertingly difficult and that it takes an enormous amount of energy.

And that's the rub.  While our consciousness can sometimes negotiate with our lower brain and influence the outcome, it's very tiring and wears us down.  Any time our conscious analyses are in conflict with our lower brain desires, we eventually run out of stamina and the lower brain gets its way.  That's why so many people fail on diets, for example.

Sartre goes into a cafe. He says, "I'd like cup of coffee, no cream." 

The waitress says, "I'm sorry, Monsieur Sartre, but we're out of cream. Would you like that with no milk?"

In 1992, California enacted a mandatory helmet law for motorcyclists.  I've always worn a helmet when riding a motorcycle and I had ridden motorcycles for tens of thousands of miles prior to 1992.  Yet I remember being angry with the passage of that law.  Why, you might ask, would I possibly care since I always wore a helmet anyway?  I'm not sure, but I'm guessing that it's because it took away a choice. Every time I got on my motorcycle, I chose to put on my helmet.  That choice had been taken away. And with that choice, a bit of life.  I felt a little less alive and a little more like I was just existing.

"Man is not a rational animal, he is a rationalizing animal." Robert Heinlein

Emotions emanate from the lower brain.  We feel anger, for example, and then try to figure out why we're angry, and that makes us a rationalizing animal.  Sometimes it's obvious.  Sometimes, as in the helmet law example above, it's not obvious at all.  Sometimes, it's unfathomable why we're angry, yet we still try to figure it out.  That's because it's painful, as in emotional pain, to be angry, and like every living thing with a nervous system, humans are designed to escape and avoid pain.

America is angry.

On one side, conservatives, tea-partiers, libertarians, etc. are angry, and while they rationalize it into different reasons, a common underlying theme is destruction of choice. A myriad of regulations and abuses interferes more with their lives, and even when the growing effect of those isn't direct, it's more and more noticeable and in-your-face every day.  Obamacare is the latest insult and many consider it a direct and massive destruction of choice.

That analysis may be completely wrong, of course.  They may be angry for some completely different set of reasons.

Or for no reason at all.

What is certain, is that they are angry.  And that they'll do anything possible to escape the pain of being angry.  Including, for at least some of them, finding that a significant risk of destroying America is perfectly acceptable.  The anger may or may not be rational or even rationalizable.  The response to the anger, which is to destroy that which is making them angry, is perfectly rational.

This makes America's progressives angry.  This anger is perfectly rational and explicable.  After all, they are the majority, they have the mandate, the power, and the moral high-ground to enact programs that will make the country and the world a better place.  And this relatively small minority of conservatives and their allies is getting in the way, resisting at every step, gumming up the works, and purposefully damaging the country with their  temper tantrums and other reactions due to their uncontrolled anger.  Who wouldn't be angry at that?  I certainly would be.

Everybody is angry.

What should be immediately obvious, is that there is no possibility of a rational, reasoned debate.  This is about a strong difference of opinion of lower brains.  This is an emotional conflict, not a conflict of reason. Even if you believe that the Democrats are completely rational, the Republicans certainly are not, nor can they be, about the intrusions of the progressive agenda into their lives.  There are no solutions, within the structure of American government, that will alleviate the anger.

Can a society with so much anger survive?

Heading Clovis's Direction

The other SWIPIAW and I are heading to Machu Picchu and the Galapagos this afternoon.  Back in three weeks; I hope I don't miss too much while I'm gone.

Inaccessible Link Error Fixed?

So I think I fixed the problem with the template that was keeping people from clicking on comments buttons and other links that happened to be to the right of the Andertoons widget.

Sincerely, A Concerned Citizen

For those of us who believe in vast conspiracy theories...

Hat tip: xkcd