Capitalism and Human Beings

It's been said before and I want to say it again for everybody to hear: human beings and capitalism go together like jews and chinese food (and trust me, I know all about jewish love for chinese food). Capitalist lobbyists, such as free market and conservative think tankers, love to say stuff like this without actually thinking about the greater implication. Yes! Human beings and capitalism go together perfectly! Capitalism is amoral, vicious, glorious, beautiful, darwinian, unapologetic, etc. and so are human beings.

You know what doesn't go so well together?

Human beings, Capitalism, and Christianity...

Yeah, okay... you can yell at me as much as you want for that but you cannot deny that capitalism (shut up, conservatives) is utterly in opposition to the ideas of Christianity. It is not very strange, when one thinks about it, that many "European Welfare States" are not called "Social Democracies," but rather, "Christian Democracies." That is what they are: capitalist countries that, infused with the christian ethic, actually care about its citizens and keep them from being exploited by the effects of the amoral market economy that is capitalism.

WE don't happen to look at it this way - oh, no... WE are Americans! We believe in FREEDOM and SMALL GOVERNMENT! We don't believe in taking care of one another like those free-loading European hippies (aka Christian Democrats).

Americans (at least the ones that I am thinking of and i'm not going to point fingers) are at the epicenter of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, the christianity they claim to adhere to so often (as we are a christian nation after all!) at least should infuse in them the ideals of community, of charity and helping thy fellow man, of caring for the poor and the needy, of NOT desiring to be rich and be materialistic. On the other hand, these same people favor an economic and political system that is utterly apathetic to the needs of anyone, that encourages people to only care about their own self-interests, that encourages the idea that if you are poor it is your own fault and it should be your own job to get out of it, and that ONLY worships the bottom line: $$$

In my opinion, if you are a true christian then you would call for not a small government but an efficient government, you would be MUCH more willing to give up tax dollars to serve the needs of the poor than to serve the needs of the Pentagon and their bombing campaigns against foreign generally muslim peoples, you would be for a very strong safety net (that is what jesus would do), as well as for universal health care. You would be in support of amnesty for illegal immigrants because they are human beings too and deserve to be treated as such. You would be in support of ending sanctioned torture of prisoners by the US Government.

If you read this and then go on preferring to call yourself a christian and then yell about how you don't want your tax dollars being taken away and given to some teenage welfare mom then i'd say this entire argument went just about right over your head.

The Trickle Down

It's a bit late so i'm not going to write for a very long time but I do want to get a thought out of my head. I was just listening to liberal economist Joseph Stiglitz on youtube talking about the financial crisis and the problems with how we are dealing with it. He made a comment about "trickle down" economics and how he's viewed it in practice and it doesn't work. I do, fundamentally, agree with him, but I think it should be explained further than that.

Trickle down theory is supply side economics, a.k.a. let those who will invest (the rich) have as much money as they can so that they can invest and eventually put money into the system, allowing everyone else to have a job and a nice salary, etc etc. Okay, so it sounds like it makes sense. I mean, I'm not going to try and explain some bullshit formula that proves it is right or wrong. The point that those on the left always make is that it tends to increase income inequality. The point that those on the right tend to make is that either, no it doesn't (though i just don't trust them, I can read statistics for myself thank you) or everything equalizes in one way or another. The latter is the more interesting thing that I'd like to say. Stiglitz claims that trickle down doesn't work. Well, what i think the last 30 years have shown us is that it does "work." The real question is, what exactly does it mean for a theory to "work?" Through the massive deregulation of financial markets, the huge cuts in taxes that primarily came in the 1980s, and other such policies credited to the "supply siders," the United States experienced a huge boom in growth. Is this what it means for a theory to "work?" I'm fairly sure the right wingers don't care what the effect is on the average person - if the economy is growing than everything is all good.

What we have to realize is that trickle down economics does create product. It is just not product that is good for everyone. Think of all the technological advances since the 1980s, all of the products that have come out, all of the comforts that we have gained, all of the money that could have been made in the past 30 years. There was a lot of it out there. The thing that must be understood is that trickle down economics did not fail... it led to its logical conclusion. What was the logical conclusion of trickle down economics? Well, apart from the financial crisis and the recession, we are living in it. Think back to 2005.... that was the product of trickle down economics. The politicians and economists let the economy kind of just go wherever it wanted to go because their theories said, and probably were correct in saying that, markets are most efficient. What they didn't ask themselves was whether markets would really serve EVERY American best. The answer to that is undoubtedly no. The economy was allowed to go loose and, consequently, millions of jobs were lost in some sectors (by certain people), millions of jobs gained in other sectors (by different people), billions of dollars made by one small group of people, billions of dollars lost by a lot of other groups of people.

The market had spoken. Meanwhile, we had been seeing some of the greatest economic growth in human history. If the market knows best and there was simultaneously huge amounts of growth... did trickle down economics really fail the United States? Hmmmmm....

Let's call people what they are

In the United States, we have the bad habit of mislabeling. These days, mislabeling is a major problem in politics. The labels of liberal and conservative don't really mean much anymore. In saying this, what I mean to say is that these labels don't represent what they once came to mean. They have been warped by our politics and our culture.

Let's look at reality. The word conservative today means many things. It generally brings to mind: lower taxes, reduce size of federal government, get rid of entitlements, bolster national defense, and order society by institutions of family and religion etc. Conservatism as an idea, however, doesn't entirely fit into this definition. Conservatism literally means conserving the institutions that are already put in place, by the rationale of society changing slowly, evolving over time. The Tea Partiers cannot call themselves conservative activists. If their plan is to dismantle the federal government down to its bare essentials, they are not conservatives but radical libertarians. If we speak of conservatives as the people who conserve the institutions that already exist, we cannot consider anyone who wants to dismantle the welfare system, drastically reform social security, dismantle systems of regulatory oversight, and generally dismantle the federal government.

What conservatives of today really are, for the most part, are classic liberals. They are, paradoxically, conservative in the sense that they are conserving the original LIBERAL constitution of the United States. All of the founding fathers were children of the Enlightenment, liberals of their time, fighting the conservatives of their time who represented the powers of monarchy. They wrote the U.S. Constitution with the liberal values of the Enlightenment in mind. Conservatives today are trying to preserve that vision - the liberal vision of 1776. The vision that every human being, when left to his or her own devices can make himself/herself into anything they want to be. That is quite a liberal way of looking at humanity. In my opinion, conservatives have something of a contradictory position, and probably wouldn't have much reason to call themselves conservative if they weren't also obsessed with traditional social institutions such as family and church (not that liberals hate family or church).

Liberals of today should be calling themselves what they are. If they actually do follow the words that they seem to preach, the label they deserve would be Social Democrats, Democratic Socialists, etc. "Liberals" put in place social safety nets, welfare systems, increase taxes on the rich to spread the wealth to the poor and middle class, legislate for labor rather than capital (at least historically... maybe not from 1994-2008), regulate the economy in order to protect the working class from economic downturns. If they actually did this job efficiently and honorably, they would deserve the label social democrats... but since they don't do this job efficiently or honorably, most of the time, they deserve the label of "Democrat."

The essence of the idea of being Liberal is sometimes mismatched with the idea of Progressivism and Social Democracy. Liberalism should, ideally, be more associated with someone like Ron Paul than Barack Obama. Liberalism in its very nature is obsessed with freeing constraints and allowing human beings to flourish with as little control as possible. The so-called liberals in this country are not always so happy about freeing constraints and controls... in fact, they quite like controlling the economy if they can get it to act the way they want it to act.

When FDR put in place the New Deal, he was in a sense radically altering the way our government worked and the people of our nation lived (although it is important to note that he was acting towards the logical conclusion of the former "Progressive Movement"). He raised taxes on the rich, created safety nets for the poor and working class, put in place massive corporatist controls on the economy - in some ways aided to the creation of the middle class society of the 1950s and 1960s, which if studied in its entirety was massively socialist in nature, if we are to call it by its true name. Of course, the post-war era wasn't marxist. It was socialist in the sense that it was more equitable and that the government made it that way.

I am not suggesting that we get used to calling Ron Paul a radical liberal or Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi socialists (although it might be amusing). I'm not exactly saying that the majority of Democrats and Republicans are "conservatives" (because they feel totally fine to just preserve the institutions that already exist and not really do much else). The point of this was that the meaning of all words changes over time. The meaning of documents and ideas change over time as we change. Glenn Beck would probably hate to be called a liberal, but his heroes (the founding fathers) would hate to be called conservatives. What are the implications of this? No idea... maybe i'm just writing for writing's sake.

Another Brick in the Deficit Wall

I've talked about both our deficits and our taxes before. I wouldn't say I've necessarily had any change of heart but there are new things that I'd like to bring up that recent events have seemed to underscore. As a generally left-leaning kind of guy, I tend to look at things from a liberal perspective; however, I do try to look back and see the big picture on occasion.

The truth is, there is politics and then there is reality. The great rule of governance is that, ideally, we can't let politics get in the way of the realities of policy. This is something that the left and the right, and to some extent the center, don't seem to grasp in any sense. The Democrats have recently shown that they are little more than what the Republicans originally painted them as: spoiled rich kids that throw money at every problem. The Democrats recent state aid bill was a perfect example of this. In order to save a load of state jobs (such as those of teachers and cops), the Democrats sent the states a nice aid package. Sure it will likely save the jobs of the teachers but... it doesn't solve the many problems that we are facing. The education system in this country is fairly terrible, meanwhile its been proven over and over that simply throwing money at the teachers won't solve anything. And again, we are still facing huge deficits that are not being solved by throw money at everything politics.

Meanwhile, on the Republican side of the aisle, we find politics and reality colliding in a just as destructive way. Ideologically and philosophically, I can understand the reasons behind extending the bush tax cuts in times like we have now. I wouldn't have understood them at the time but now it kind of makes sense, at least from the view of a supply side economist. Times are bad, businesses need investment and capital expansion and all of that stuff, so investment by the rich wouldn't be a bad thing. Okay. Deficit Hawks (other than Ron Paul, maybe), however, need to be realistic. If we are going to cut down social security in order to make it fiscally viable, if we are going to gut health care reform and reform medicare, then we cannot continue this path of ridiculous defense spending either. The deficit, undoubtedly, has some of its roots in entitlements; however, the massive deficits that we have today that built themselves over the last eight years were not due to entitlements. 9/11 caused something like a total doubling of the defense budget in this country. It is no wonder we now have a deficit like never before.

You want to be a real deficit hawk? Alright, let's make the retirement age 70, let's limit social security's reach to certain income brackets (we're not socialists after all!), but let's also get out of Iraq completely, get out of Afghanistan completely rather than trying to fulfill the foolhardy mission of rebuilding a nation. If Republicans believe, ideologically, that the government cannot fix the United States, why would we be able to fix another country?

The Problems of Americans

I haven't written anything in a long time. I guess I could say there have been personal issues in my life that kept me extremely out of the mood to do anything even slightly creative.

I don't want to take my life's frustrations out on politics but i must say... I am goddamn sick with our government. I am sick of all of these corrupt and/or incompetent Democrats who make the left out to be one huge hypocritical joke about limousine liberals who don't even pay the taxes they enacted on their own limousines. Hypocrites that AT BEST criticize the rich (those they claim don't pay their fair share) while potentially hiding the fact that they are also rich and all wish to stay that way, regardless of how much they tend to pander to the poor and working class. Meanwhile, they help enact taxes on the rich that they themselves try their hardest to evade (like Charlie Rangel evading income tax and John Kerry evading state taxes on his yacht... yeah enough said).

Meanwhile, on the other side, what do you find? Most likely you will find a group of highly misinformed Americans spouting nonsense about how tax cuts fix everything and the free market is the only way to go (meanwhile it is the free market that is causing some of the most troubling of problems for the American people).

I don't care how "American" the idea of a "free market" is, it is not very American in my opinion that what we are finding ourselves in a caste society devoid of any social mobility whatsoever. In this country, there is the mass upper class... well-educated (private/or good public high school and private college), with fairly high-paying secure jobs (though in a sense, this recession has effected both); and a mass underclass... with an education that most likely ends at high school though might continue into a public college. The mass underclass these days is plagued by the rising costs of education and the stagnation of their family income. They are therefore much less likely to be able to pay for a higher education or are more likely to have an enormous household debt, which is never good.

Such is the problem that plagues American society. Oh, but it doesn't end there. You see, I could give the garden variety left wing argument that there should be some kind of equalization in America, but that would not fix the problems that we tend to have. Like it or not (and the left tends to not like this part), our problem is not only in our economy but in our culture at large. Let's say the government did somehow take lots of money from the mass upperclass and give it to the mass underclass through wealth redistribution or something of the sort. This would not sort out the problem of culture that plagues America. Our problem, to some extent, is that we are in fact Americans - and that no matter how much money we really have we feel entitled to act like Americans.

Americans, regardless of income, are obsessed with the life that is being "middle class," even though a mass middle class hasn't existed for decades. Americans, though of course not all of them, take vacations when they can't actually afford them, buy TVs and other modern pleasures when they don't need them. They spend money that they do not have on things that they do not need, rather than spending that money on things that make sense like paying down that mortgage or financing their child's education. I hate to sound cynical about Americans but it wouldn't surprise me if the world the Left created, a world that in many ways mimicked the 1950s (with mass unionization, high taxes on the highest tax brackets, "wealth redistribution," etc), was not very much unlike our own in the sense that legislatures could not change culture. The wealth that would be spread through left-wing agendas (though i agree with them in principle) would not change how people spend their money. Many families might use their higher wages to buy more useless crap rather than finance their child's education.

If that is the country that we live in, will any drastic change in our politics really alleviate that pain?

TAXES!

There are certain things that I do not understand about the free market argument against certain policies of the Obama Administration. I understand that free marketeers see high income taxation as a way of deterring entrepreneurship and investment and therefore deterring growth in the economy; however, economic growth is not always the most important factor in making policy decisions.

Conservatives have always had a strange relationship with taxes. Some wish to lower taxation to "starve the beast," or in other words, lowering revenue in order to force a reduction in government size and spending; however, this is NEVER the real case because government doesn't by its very nature get smaller (history has concluded in my opinion that governments may change hands but they don't tend to change shape and system). As our nation ages, its systems become more complex and the government is required to change with it...making changes that rarely if ever involves shrinking. There are other conservatives, however, like John Kyl and Mitch McConnell who believe that tax cuts do not detrimentally affect revenue (they are believers in the Laffer Curve, the theory that describes a tax rate peak that will produce the most revenue, after which revenues decline). It is my opinion that the conservatives either don't really understand this theory or intentionally use it as an excuse to cut federal income taxes on those who already pay very little considering the amount of money they make.

Why do high income taxes, which could be used to build schools, repair roads, fix the rest of our crumbling infrastructure, and of course fix our deficit, scare the entire nation into anti-government rage? Americans may not want to hear it but we will not be able to pay back our deficit without increasing taxes to much higher rates than we've seen in a long time. It may seem like ancient history now, but back in the 1950s - at our glorious height of prosperity - the eisenhower administration had a top tax rate of 90%! Now, okay, i will admit that 90% is ludicrous (although, remember that was only for the extremely rich). Under the Kennedy Administration (and along the lines of the Laffer Curve), tax rates dropped to 70% - a fact that conservatives never stop talking about. After all, Kennedy cut taxes! Oh my! Yes a democrat cut taxes - from 90% to 70% not from 35% to 25%. The Laffer curve is a CURVE.... 70% is i would wager much closer to the peak efficiency of tax revenue collection than 25% or even 35%. The latter figures are the numbers of fiscally moronic demagogues, perhaps those that figured they could use a huge deficit crisis as a reason to shrink government and reduce spending(which isn't going to happen either way, just so you know, with two wars on our plate!).

Here is my general message: If you want to live in a country with realistic low taxes, go to a country with no transportation or energy infrastructure, with no public schools, with a military that is badly underfunded and has no ability protect its country, with no social safety net, where those who can't make ends meet starve on the street (soon to be the USA by the way). If you like our military, our roads, education, etc. be realistic and stop fighting taxation. If you want those things and still hate your taxes, go talk to China - they own all of our debt.

On the New Culture War of Free Enterprise

Recently, I re-watched an interview between Daily Show Host John Stewart and free enterprise think tank American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks in which Brooks discusses his book The Battle: How the fight between Free Enterprise and Big Government will shape America's Future. I want to say outright that I don't disagree entirely with what Brooks is trying to get at about the changing shape of the culture wars in this country (I should also say I have yet to read his book - I'm basing this post on the interview itself); however, there are certain things that were said in this interview that I would like to think about.

I commend Arthur Brooks for going on a liberal talk show knowing for sure that he is going to get a debate (although i won't be happy until he goes on Real Time with Bill Maher). Brooks, however, seems to be under the impression that every liberal is automatically Michael Moore. I will admit that Moore's movie, Capitalism: A Love Story, was itself hostile to capitalism and free enterprise as an ideology and system; however, most people, even among those (like myself) that agreed with some of what Moore was saying, will admit that we don't want to get rid of capitalism in the United States anytime soon or ever. We're not naive, young socialists as these free marketeers want to paint us, and I would also argue that Obama himself isn't a socialist either. What we want is for the government to be able to protect the entrepreneurship of small business owners from the predation of Big Business (which, admittedly, from any modern liberal's perspective is much more dangerous sounding than Big Government).

Brooks did make some interesting comments in his interview that I would like to mention. He mentioned that there is no such thing as a totally free market system in a real world situation and that the government does have the job of protecting citizens from such things as oil spills and corporate corruption and predation. This would mean that, if i understand Arthur Brooks correctly, he does support "regulation," (which i previously assumed was anathema to these free enterprise think tankers). What he said he was against, for instance, was bank bailouts by the government - in other words, he is against the same thing that Michael Moore and many other hardcore liberals were against ...Wait, what?

Okay - so Brooks was against corporate welfarism. But then again, who isn't against corporate welfarism? And where exactly does Brooks lie on our lovely political spectrum? There is something that must be gotten straight. Who were for and who were against the bail outs of wall street banks? The extreme LEFT and RIGHT were both against bailouts, before and after they became part of President Obama's early program. Just ask Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul what they think of the bailouts. Chances are you will not get very favorable responses.

Now, i'm very confused because this doesn't seem to be a matter of what party you are from anymore. The bank bailouts were proposed at first by a Republican administration (President Bush, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke) and then were taken on and passed by a Democratic Legislature (Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, and Chris Dodd, to name a few). I don't believe there was any ideology at work here other than perhaps ruthlessly centrist pragmatism. Sure it was unfair corporate welfarism; however, it was particularly necessary when one considers the facts: these were the biggest financial institutions in America and a systematic failure of each would have caused the potential collapse of the world economy (the ensuing failure would make our "Great Recession," look like a blip on the screen in our economic history).

So Arthur Brooks is basically saying that we would have been better off had we let some of the biggest financial institutions in the world collapse and liquidate themselves. Hey, he might be right in the very very distant long run (it's always good to shake things up), but I guess the government decided it wasn't willing to allow the nuclear annihilation of our economy. So they did what they were told (by just about all economists) was the right thing to do in the circumstances. Ideology be damned! That, to me, doesn't show that government wants to take over the economy in some kind of American form of European Socialism, which Brooks seems to be arguing in his book and in the interview.

If Brooks isn't against regulation of corporations and isn't against private-sector unions (which i also assumed he would be against), what is it exactly that he is against and what exactly is he proposing that Obama is doing to our nation that is changing our culture so much?

Brooks commented on The Daily Show about a war of cultures between the 30% of those in the nation that are open to "socialism," and the 70% that have a cultural attachment to our free enterprise system. The problem that i face (and i might not have such a problem if I read Brook's book, which I intend to do) is that I don't know what socialism means to him. For instance, I'm sure only the radical lefty fringe (which is VERY limited in this country) actually wants to get rid of private ownership. I come from a total lefty-liberal perspective and definitely frown upon ridding America of private ownership and private enterprise. Most liberals in this country don't see their form of "socialism" as some statist system that looks to Stalin and Mao for inspiration - as badly as Tea Partiers may want to believe it.

We experience "socialism" everyday: the elderly love their medicare, veterans have the VA, and i'm absolutely sure that, as dysfunctional as they can be, nobody would argue that the nation would be better off without public schools. Just the idea of having a "public sector," could be considered socialist by some... but it really isn't. In reality, real SOCIALISM is a system in which the government (or "the people") control the means of production. That is not the case in America and it never will be, regardless of which party takes control.