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.

Big Government Conservatism

Ever since Barack Obama's inauguration, Republicans and their conservative base have been yelling bloody murder about big government. The Tea Parties are all about the United States Constitution and the problem with Barack Obama's Big Government. Events today, however, seemed to remind me of a time before "Obamacare" and the reemergence of the American Regulatory State, and also seemed to remind me of exactly how short our attentions are as a people.

Does anybody remember our last president? President Curious George? President W. Bush? That lovely cowboy of a president that you wanted to have a beer and then go to evangelical church with? Well, I was reminded of him today when I read that, in all of our recent libertarian originalist craze, a federal court found that FCC bans on indecency and obscenities were UNCONSTITUTIONAL (as it went against our first amendment in the bill of rights). I had forgotten that from 2001-2008 Big Government did not mean high taxes, strict regulations, universal health care, government impinging on economic freedom, but it instead meant something entirely different: federal amendment to constitution defining marriage in order to get rid of the prospect of gay marriage, ban on stem cell research, trying to overrule Roe v. Wade, federally-funded abstinence sex-ed courses, etc. etc. The list can go on and on when it comes to the Big Government activism of the Bush Years for a socially conservative agenda.

What is amazing to note is that it bothered nobody except die-hard libertarians that conservatives were doing this. In fact, I would bet that the majority of the electorate that voted red in 2004, voted that way because they saw Senator John Kerry as the lefty hippie candidate who was going to let gay people become happily married (I know, right! How dare he!). Conservatives should start recalling this before they go crazy with tea party fever against big government and realize that its not big government they don't like, its the big government of Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi that they don't like. Otherwise, suck it! If you wanna go constitutional on us, we'll go constitutional on you... if you didn't want your kid to be exposed to the FILTH that is Bono saying "fuck" or Janet Jackson revealing her boob on national television, then that is just too bad because now the "big government" won't cover your kids ears and eyes for you.

Ideology in America

It has occurred to me that bipartisanship for President Obama right now might as well be a total pipe dream. It is not, however, for the political reason that many might be considering. While it is true that the GOP has been largely obstructing everything the President has been trying to do in order to make his presidency a political failure, I see at least some of this obstruction as legitimate ideological difference and honest to god dissent with everything that Obama represents as a liberal.

The public tends to look at politicians these days as lying, stealing, cheating pricks that believe in nothing more than whatever they are told to believe in by their highest campaign contributors. I wouldn't contest the idea that this is likely the case for many politicians in Congress; however, I do not believe that it represents all of them. We the People are going to have to realize that the consequence of living in an America so ideologically divided is common legislative deadlock and stalemate and the consequential perception of a government that can't do anything at all.

The truth is, America is actually totally divided. That we are divided over social issues such as abortion, contraception, gay rights goes without saying. The real divisions that are being seen in politics today are the divisions over absolute political philosophy. The interesting thing to me is where exactly those divisions are found. The Left and the Right are not only divided on policy, or the means by which they intend to effect change in America, but are instead divided along the lines of what it is that they want to see America become.

The Left Wing in America values equality, whether that equality be civic or monetary in nature. Civic equality refers to equality under the law. It is under this banner that gay rights has become a cause of the left. Monetary equality on the hand refers to equality of our purses. It is an idea that is socialist in nature (and that isn't a bad thing, in my opinion, though that may seem anathema to the America Right), but also philosophical. In order to understand our actions, we have to have to follow them to a logical conclusion. What do liberals, at heart, want to see? If you go down the road of public education, public transportation, the New Deal and the Great Society, wealth redistribution through high income taxation, and the such, what you find at the end of this long path is a society in which all the people are equal. Putting aside race, ethnicity, religion, where you work, where you live, all of the categories we put ourselves in, the future for a modern left-winger is a land of true equality, where everyone is more or less in the middle class. Those who make a lot more are taxed until they make (probably still a lot more but) closer to what the median income of the nation is. Those whose labor is worth less than the median income will find that they have to pay less taxes and such. It is not "fair" in most senses of the word, but the social outcome is promising (from a liberal's perspective).

The fact that we speak of the creation of an universal middle class is more or less what makes this a legitimate American vision. America has always been the middle class nation, partly because of its history of having infinite shares of land to give out. Lefties saw their middle class nation disappear with the oncoming effects of the industrial revolution and decided to act. The effects of this change in opinion were the populist movement, progressive movement, the New Deal, and the liberal consensus. Then all of a sudden, everyone realized that the rules that were put in place were not working out so well and were actually causing the economy that powered the middle class to stagnate. Thus began the next revolution: The Reagan Revolution. Once again, individuality and freedom was more important than equality. The interesting paradox is in the fact that what was freedom was also debilitating to the middle class.

The Right wing tries to make itself for the working man, for the American Middle Class, but in reality it is not. The American Right wing cares not for equality, even at the expense of the Middle Class, but rather cares about Liberty and tradition (which by the way is something of a paradox, though no right winger seems to acknowledge that fact). One can look at the American Right as being, to some extent (at least on the liberty side), children of the teachings of author Ayn Rand. Rand's novels and writings espouse a vision of reality in which all men are not at all created equal. Human beings come in all shapes and sizes, all amounts of intelligence, all amounts of skill. The strong, in her view, whether they be strong in will, in intelligence, in creativity, in whatever, deserve to have all of the money and power that they can possibly build up. In other words, the CEOs on Wall Street are smarter than everyone else. They power the economy with their financial innovation. They deserve to make $120 million dollars! And those who do not share in their intelligence or their power do not deserve a part of their income. There is no space for equality in a world where every human being gets what he deserves for what he can do. If they can't do anything, they are worthless and deserve nothing. This doesn't sound very different from the views of say Sharron Angle, Republican senate nominee in Nevada, who recently said that once she is in the Senate she would first fight to make sure she ended unemployment benefits for the jobless... because, you know, they couldn't keep their jobs, so they must be worthless. Maybe if they must keep themselves from starving to death, they'll find a job quicker - no, they'll probably end up stealing or starving, but great idea Sharron.

The logical conclusion of the American Right wing is a world in which there is true liberty, at its best and worst. Those who are strong in mind or body (or in connections of course) will get ahead, and the government won't get in their way. The government won't be their to take away any of the millions that they make. Any of the billions, perhaps, that they make. Those who are unsuccessful will starve and then will no longer be in the American Gene Pool. Oh, no! The American government will not be a welfare state for the weak! Let them all starve! If we feed them they will procreate!

Does that sound too extreme? It should; however, it is more or less what South Carolina Lt. Governor Andre Bauer was saying when he spoke of his view on free public school meals for hungry children. He said that feeding the children would be analogous to feeding stray animals and watching them procreate....nicely done, sir!

On the other hand, the American Right has absolutely nothing to do with Ayn Rand (and this is where that great paradox comes into play!) As i said before, the American right is all about BOTH Liberty and Tradition. Ayn Rand hated everything about tradition and in fact hated religion itself. Her favorite symbol was $, her religion, capitalism. She acknowledged that her views were anti-christian morality - because they were! It is true that calvinist thought (which greatly influenced America) puts much importance on hard work, and predestination comes hand in hand with success; however, it is still unchristian at least in my opinion to let the poor and the needy starve. How can any self-proclaimed Christian allow themselves to get rich while they watch the poor wither away and die? How can any Christian take away unemployment benefits to the jobless in a time when there is 1 job for every 5 job applicants???

I apologize. I did not mean for that last part to become a liberal rant :)

I don't assume that everyone would find the left wing future i projected an exaggeration. I don't assume most people will find it very attractive either (nope, it's too socialist - which is funny because it is really just the 1950s in many ways). But i do hope that they don't find the Right Wing future attractive either. The Right Wing future is one where a middle class, as we consider it, no longer exists. It is one of extreme economic freedom and growth, no doubt. But it is also one of vast inequality. Where one man can make as much as 2 billion other people if he is just smart or connected enough to steal it from them.

to be continued...

Originalism and its Internal Irony

Conservatives, particularly Tea Partiers, have decided lately to go back to the U.S. constitution in order to define their political philosophy. They cite the originalism of Antonin Scalia, for instance, as a guiding principle and disagree with such federal actions as health care reform and environmental regulation as "unconstitutional," etc. etc.

There is, however, some internal irony in their idea of originalism. It begins here:

The Constitution of the United States was not written simply by masters of political philosophy as we generally like to believe, but was instead written largely by politicians who were trying to balance out the needs of individual states with the need for control. A lot of what finally became constitutional law was originally made under compromise - between big and small states, northern and southern states, etc. Our master document is not exactly a holy scripture of american politics. State's Rights proponents have to remember that it was because of the inherent flaws of the weak central government put in place by the Articles of Confederation (a document that i wager a lot of these Tea Party patriots would have loved had they lived at the time) that brought about the creation of the Constitution.

The major arguments at the time are not unlike the one's that we see now: The Federalists wanted a stronger, central, "big government," while the Democrats wanted a weaker, smaller federal government that gave most rights to the states. In this way, I would see the tea party members of today most likely following the ideas of Democrats of the time such as Thomas Jefferson. It was the same Thomas Jefferson, however, that said, "The Earth belongs always to the living generation. Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right."

In other words, according to the ideals of small government President Jefferson, the constitution of the United States has expired - many times, in fact.

Though I am not suggesting that we simply throw away our constitution, I do believe that Jefferson had a point. The constitution as it was written in 1789 is not exactly as relevant as it could be to We, the Americans of 2010. There were no cars in 1789, no cell phones, no TV or internet or mass media really beyond newspapers and books (both of which regrettably are soon to be only history), no space travel, no nuclear weapons, no guns that could fire more than 3 bullets per minute. The idea of originalism is excessively conservative (in its literal definition) to the point of virtual lunacy - the point where one looks at 2010 and wishes they could wake up in 1789. Originalism contradicts the very ideas of one of the most important Founding Fathers. If Antonin Scalia or Robert Bork want to live in 1789 that is their business, but this is 2010, gentlemen.

Furthermore, if originalists want to cite the Founding Fathers as their examples, they may not want to look at the actual history. If they do, they will find that many of the actions taken by the first presidents entirely contradicted the constitution, as they realized that it had restricted them to the point of not allowing for sound governing (for example, the creation of the Bank of the United States by Washington and the Louisiana Purchase by Jefferson, both unconstitutional from a strict constructionist, originalist perspective).

If the constitution does still have relevance to us it is as a Living Document that changes meaning as we change our interpretation of it. And if Tea Partiers want to live in an America where individuals are not protected from corporations, where we apologize to BP for the evil governments treatment of it after it DESTROYED and polluted our homes, then in my opinion they also wish they were living in 1789 (when the Constitution was written and there were no large corporations, just FYI) and do not deserve our attention.

The Deficit

Over the last two years, American and Europeans alike have gone from freaked out about the financial collapse and its implications (i.e. a new global great depression) to totally freaked out about deficit problems.

Now, i'm not saying that we do not have a major deficit problem. We do. WE REALLY REALLY DO. Just ask former U.S. Comptroller General and Head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) David Walker. He held this job under Clinton just around the time that we built up the huge surplus and continued to hold the job under Bush when we lost it completely (not to point fingers). Walker says that the crisis has to do with the fact that politicians have promised literally trillions of dollars worth of middle class entitlements to Americans ever since the Great Depression. At the time, programs such as social security and (later on) Medicare, among others, seemed at least somewhat financially sane because old people didn't survive very long and there weren't very many of them. There weren't many seniors as compared to the number of people in the workforce that would be paying for these programs with their income and pay roll taxes.

Then there was a anomaly that began right after world war II: the baby boom. All of a sudden, a goddamn huge amount of babies were born because of all these soldiers coming home ready to start families and such. That was 60-ish years ago.... now that huge population of people is just starting to require social security and Medicare. If it seemed like a financial burden on the government before, now these entitlements are practically insane.

In addition, there are other problems with government that are causing this deficit, some that tends to peeve conservatives and some that tend to peeve liberals. Conservatives hate the fact that public-sector unions are bleeding the system dry through (comparatively) high salaries, pensions, and benefits. Liberals hate the fact that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are costing the tax payers hundreds of billions of dollars (in fact that number has just recently passed a trillion).

Our deficit problem IS real; however, the real question that we have to ask each other is how we would like to deal with it. Do we want to deal with it now, during a recession (or actually a period of very slow recovery) when the country is still stumbling and fragile, at a time when it is actually very important that the government spend money because nobody else really can? It's an odd question: what do we prize more, long-term economic stability? or long term economic stability? If we forget about the fragility of the economy right now and decide to cut government spending, the recession will jump on us again (because consumer spending is way down and the government is the only body that can really effect growth right now) and it won't go away any time soon. If we forget to fix the deficit, it will literally bleed the entire nation dry of its life blood in the long term, to the point that in thirty years all of our combined tax money will barely be able to pay the INTEREST on the debt that we've built up.

California is a state with a hell of a load of debt. In fact, the state of California is facing a budget deficit this year of $19 billion. In order to deal with this, Governor Arnold "Governator" Schwarzenegger decided recently to cut the pay of almost all state administrators from $20 an hour to minimum wage ($7.25 roughly, I believe). That might help... But it won't really. The state is a great example of the problem with this country... we love for governments to do things for us but we do not want to pay for them. In California, the state has a lot of jobs given to it by the people. One job that has virtually been taken away from the government is tax collection. This state has had huge tax cuts in the past few decades, largely because the public votes on them in referendums. GREAT IDEA.

Liberals and Conservatives alike have to realize something very important about reality. To liberals i say this: the government can't do everything for everyone. Maybe some government can (sweden...) but definitely not this one in its current condition. It is so large and wasteful that any entitlement has become a fiscal anvil to carry around. Conservatives, however, have to realize something just as if not more important: the government can't do nothing! The government has certain jobs in the modern world, jobs that may have not existed in 1776 but jobs that must exist now in order to protect the people, and jobs that COST MONEY. We have been tricked into thinking that tax cuts will pay for a deficit. If conservatives want to pay for the deficit, they have to become realistic about raising taxes at some point (which by the way is another way to get us back into a recession, but they don't seem to care much about that).

If conservatives do not believe it is their job to spur job creation (which is exactly what Sharron Angle, the Republican running against Harry Reid in Nevada, said recently), then that is all good to me. I just want them to raise taxes already so that can balance out this deficit. Cutting spending won't do it because there are things in this country that are literally impossible to cut: conservatives will never cut defense spending, liberals will never cut welfare spending... etc etc. Because we are in this conundrum, the only solution to skyrocketing deficits is tax increases. Just think about this, in the 1950s, the top tax rate was 90% on the extremely rich. 90%!!!! Now its no more than 35 or maybe 40%, while our government has grown larger and larger and with usually good reason.

A lot of left-leaning economists would definitely disagree with what i've just said. Paul Krugman (nobel prize winning economist and New York Times columnist), for instance, believes that the fact that we are focusing on our deficit is the wrong move to take and that we need to continue focusing on stimulus. The conservative talking point to that is that we are mortgaging our children's (well, my) future. In reality, it isn't quite that simple. If we don't get the economy to grow now, "our children" won't have any money at all. These economists argue that this is the time for stimulus, and when the economy is totally back on track (WHICH RIGHT NOW IT IS NOT), then we can fix the deficit. We'll raise taxes and people will be able to pay them just like during the late Clinton Years.

Hmmmmmmm.....

Oh, Free Market Capitalism

I've been thinking lately and have come upon a realization: in the world of real politics, the "free market," as spoken about by conservative think tanks, Republicans, Tea Parties, etc., is actually not very different from "communism." That may come as a shock to read, but just hear me out.

Think about this. Free Market Capitalism and Communism are two systems that have been tried and have both seemingly failed... or have they? (I say failed for free markets in reference to such occurrences as the Great Depression and the Great Recession of now, and failed for communism in reference to... every communist country ever) Well, every proponent of both systems has basically the same argument: "Oh, well that example wasn't actually in a system of communism/free markets!" Think about it. Any radical leftist will say that the Soviet Union wasn't actually a communist country, but that it was a flawed dictatorial state socialist country or some other form of words like that. They will say that real communism has never been tried and therefore we can't judge it and say it was a bad idea. Similarly, proponents of a free market system say that the failures of the American economy under so-called "free markets" (as during the Great Depression in the 1930s and in the financial collapse of the late 2000s and now), cannot be attributed to the failings of free market capitalism because in reality we never actually had a free market system to begin with. Wait, what?

Ok, let's go back just a bit. Just a few years ago, the economy seemed to be doing just peachy (in fact it seemed to be doing super fantastically) and at the time politicians and pundits and economists were saying that this was the triumph of the free markets... in other words the triumphs of globalization, free trade agreements, the de-unionization of American Labor, the deregulation of the economy (and particularly the deregulation of finance), etc. etc.

However, now that the bottom has fallen out of the economy, unemployment is skyrocketing, consumer spending is dwindling, and the world is seemingly collapsing, it seems as if those who once heralded the age of free markets are now screaming about how the collapse was caused by the very fact that we didn't actually have free markets. Now the idea is that of course free market capitalism didn't kill the economy, it was actually the fact that government intervention is STILL too heavy in the economy.

The fact that most of the regulatory boards that had once kept a close watch over the economy were castrated by the "Neoliberal" Republican Agenda of the last 30 years seems to be completely irrelevant. The regulatory systems that were put in place a long time ago were being run by members of the very industries and companies they were supposed to regulate (this is exactly what happened in the case of the Gulf Oil Catastrophe and the MMS). So in the end, I cannot imagine how government regulation can be seen as the reason that the financial sector collapsed bringing the economy to its knees.

But putting aside my rant for a moment, I just want to point out what this as taught me: just like real communism, real "free market capitalism," in which the government has ABSOLUTELY no role in the economy is a system of ideals that will never be put in place ever, and so we will never really know if it is as perfect as they say it is. The reason being is this: free market capitalism leaves nothing in control by anyone. It is quite literally the system of freedom. That, however, is a problem for governments simply because it is duty of the government to protect the people. What would be the point of having a government if it could protect you from invaders but not from let's say the changing course of the times? The very nature of the invisible hand, like God, is the "give and take." If a government is meant to preserve the "general welfare," as the constitution put it, then it cannot avoid the problems that might arise if the markets were allowed to be entirely free and therefore free to potentially screw over the country in natural economic downturn.

The free marketeers have a point. Look at any point in American history when there was a major economic catastrophe and most likely it was caused by some kind of market manipulation by outsiders (read: government). For example, in all of my liberalness, I've often cited the existence of robber barons during the late 19th century as being a sign that free market capitalism was a bad thing; however, the economy of the late 19th century was not actually a free market because (throughout US history, in fact) there have always been large import tariffs mandated by the government in order to protect domestic industry. This is called Protectionism. So in other words, robber barons, one could argue, had the opportunity to become so filthy rich because their industries were being protected against foreign products. That is just as anti-free market as any regulation that was put in place during the 20th century.

(I realize now after paragraphs of writing that i must specify what i mean when i say "free market capitalism." I am not referring to the free market capitalism that simply fosters private ownership of property and of the means of production. I am referring to the "free market capitalism" that conservatives and libertarians peddle... the definition of free market capitalism as a system of private ownership and enterprise that is entirely unregulated.)

I could probably say more about this but for now... i'm exhausted.