Thursday, December 31, 2015

Republicans, Nazis, and the Conservative Menace

Welcome friends!

Looks like this will be my last post for 2015.  Instead of doing an end of the year summary or clearing up any little stories I might have missed as I’ve done in the past I think one aspect of this last year was significant enough to warrant a final post all to its own.  Can you guess?  Yes, I’m talking about the rise of populist windbag politician par excellence Donald Trump; the one man who I feel most fully expresses the great garbage heap lying at the head and heart of today’s conservative movement.  What’s interesting about that?  Well, it seems to me we’ve never had a politician in this country so closely resemble one of our most despised foreign enemies from the dark days of the twentieth century, Adolf Hitler, and yet remain so beloved and admired by good old boy conservatives right across the USA.  It’s been an eye opener for me.  But that’s fine.  Knowledge is good.  Let’s talk about it... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Thursday, December 17, 2015

Have A Supererogatory Christmas

Welcome friends!

The holiday season is upon us once again so I thought I should do some sort of special post in honor of the occasion.  I suppose I can’t talk about the manifold dangers posed by international conservatism every time out although that would certainly be easy enough.  Let’s do something Christmasy.  Of course, I should probably clarify that as an atheist and humanist what I think of as Christmasy is something relating to the brotherhood and sisterhood of all humankind (and it’s not getting any easier let me tell you) not the fabricated birthday of some ancient holy man / supernatural entity.  I’m thinking ethics not religious mumbo jumbo.  Fortunately I just read an entry in a little philosophy for common folk book I glance at now and then to pass the time entitled Fifty Philosophy Ideas You Really Need to Know by Ben Dupre.  I think I’ve mentioned it before.  It’s a collection of little two page blurbs introducing various philosophical ideas from a layperson’s perspective.  Anyway, this time out I read the blurb on an issue called supererogatory acts, which is a fancy term for what one might call heroic acts or acts going beyond the call of duty.  Do you ever encounter ideas you think have BS written all over them?  Someone is blabbing way and you’re listening to be polite but in the back of your mind you’re thinking what a crock?  Well, that’s the feeling I was having.  Let’s talk about it.

The basic idea is that some people apparently suggest there’s some sort of philosophical conundrum about heroic acts based on the argument that if just taking the normal non-heroic line is perfectly ethically acceptable how can one say that certain acts that go beyond the normal non-heroic line are even better ethically speaking... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Friday, December 4, 2015

Conservatives Run Amok

Welcome friends!

I almost did another post on the ongoing comedy revue known as the Republican Party but it’s probably getting a little monotonous.  If I covered every bit of cringeworthy claptrap coming from the motley pack of buffoons conservatives have put forward as their candidates for President of the US I’d never have time for anything else.  I must admit I was tempted to address the latest anti-terrorist idea put forward by Republican front runner Donald Trump, which was to murder the families of terrorists.  Is the guy self-consciously modeling himself after Adolf Hitler or is it just coincidence?  One never knows with American conservatives.  Or maybe all conservatives are just pretty much the same at some level?  Anyway, I read an entertaining rebuttal by an Israeli anti-terrorism expert who explained patiently murdering the quite possibly entirely innocent families of terrorists would not only be immoral and basically a war crime but ineffective as well.  I wonder, how stupid is the Stupid Party anyway?  Do conservatives think this is all a big joke?  Do they think they’re doing some sort of extended TV comedy skit?  I do eventually want to do a post on the GOP’s attempt to erode support for our democratic government by gutting the ability of the IRS to enforce the tax code but I’ll save that another day.  Setting aside the Republican scourge I then thought I might do something on the latest crazy Muslim attack (CMA).  No, not the one in Paris; I’m talking about the one here in sunny Southern California in which a couple of lovebirds named Farook and Tashfeen Malik murdered fourteen unarmed people and wounded an additional twenty one at a holiday party at some sort of facility for the developmentally disabled.  Who shoots people working at a school for the disabled?  Well, yes, probably the same sort of person who shoots people at a holiday party.  Point taken.  Fortunately the cops tracked them down and helped them reach their final destination in short order so it was all over pretty quickly but you know that sort of thing is also getting a little monotonous.  News Flash!  Crazy Muslim terrorists like to murder innocent unarmed people!  Details to follow!  Thankfully I then noticed a story on something that is actually probably also depressingly commonplace but at least something I haven’t written about recently so let’s just go with that one.  The story involved a US Marine murdering a transgendered woman in the Philippines and getting handed a laughably lenient sentence of six to twelve years in jail.  I mean honestly.  Hello!  Is there anyone out there other than me interested at all in what we used to call justice?  Well, let’s talk through the damn thing and be done with it... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Friday, November 20, 2015

GOP Joins ISIS To Foment Discord

Welcome friends!

I actually had something else lined up for today but unfortunately events intervened once again and I decided to instead say something relating to our many Parisian comrades who were gunned down a few days ago in the latest CMA (i.e. crazy Muslim attack).  Before anyone gets unduly annoyed and starts running after me with the cutlery let me just clarify that the correct way to parse that phrase in my opinion is “crazy Muslim” attacks; not crazy “Muslim attacks.”  Yes, it makes a difference, which I’ll discuss shortly.  Of course, my blog is mostly about ideas so it wasn’t entirely clear to me what I should say.  I started out well enough, “murder bad,” but then found myself at a bit of an impasse.  You know me.  I need something to unravel or work through or clear up or confront or rebut.  Fortunately the group commonly known here in the US as the Stupid Party, the by now mind numbingly conservative Republican Party, managed to get it twisted and start talking about refusing Syrian refugees, closing mosques, conflicts between civilizations, etc.  Not exactly a fitting tribute to our fallen brothers and sisters in my opinion.  A bit irritating really.  Hey, now we’re getting somewhere!

Let me start out by acknowledging the small kernel of truth in the conservative argument, which is that Islam (by which I mean the Islamic religion as opposed to the collection of people living in various Middle Eastern countries) seems to be having a bit of a problem with violent interpretations... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Thursday, November 5, 2015

Yesterday’s Tomorrowland

Welcome friends!

I was watching some cinematic fluff the other day about a genius (of course) karate (of course) girl (bet you didn’t see that one coming!) who travels to the future (of course) with George Clooney (why not?) to save the world (of course) and I found that rather than daydreaming as I normally would under such circumstances I became vaguely annoyed.  Of course, I don’t particularly mind becoming vaguely annoyed over this sort of cultural artifact because it gives me a reason to sit down and think through what set me off.  After a few minutes of rather lackluster cogitation I determined in this case it was probably the awkward mishmash of two competing views of human society and history that rubbed me the wrong way.  Well, that and the fact that the more prominent of the two I consider ancient hogwash.  Let’s talk it through.

As I mentioned previously we start out with the tiresome trope of the Genius Child.  Just that alone sets me a little on edge... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Christians Strike Again and Again and Again

Welcome friends!

I’m curious.  Are you one of those people so enamored of religion you simply cannot or will not recognize its all too obvious dark side?  In your opinion is religion an unequivocally positive word?  Are you perhaps a Christian who thinks people who do bad things in the name of religion simply have the misfortune of subscribing to the wrong religion?  Well, if you are then I’m afraid you may have some explaining to do.  I’m referring to an article I read in the newspaper the other day about an ostensibly Christian church rather ironically named the Word of Life Christian Church in the US state of New York that recently saw six of its parishioners taken into custody for beating a young man to death, inside the church mind you, and nearly managing to do the same to his younger brother.  Did I mention two of the miscreants were the teens’ parents?

Yes, it seems the ever so holy Bruce and Deborah Leonard along with at least four of their fellow church members were holding what police chief Michael Inserra rather euphemistically described as a “counseling session” to address the spiritual state (whatever that might be) of the two young brothers, Lucas (age 19) and Christopher (age 17), and the counseling ended with Lucas dead and Christopher in the hospital... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Thursday, October 8, 2015

Libertarianism, Fascism, and a Goat

Welcome friends!

I’m aways amused by any story involving so-called libertarians, those supremely confused and quite possibly deranged extreme economic conservatives who argue all our complicated social and ethical issues can be resolved by an appeal to liberty but who are insufficiently loony tunes to embrace anarchism.  Hey, we all like liberty.  But you know that only gets one so far, right?  One issue of course is what is freedom anyway and how does one get it?  Imagine an anarchy like I don’t know, let’s say Somalia.  Are the people free?  You mean from the rule of law?  Sure.  How about free to walk down the street without their neighbors shooting them in the head with an AK-47?  Probably not.  So are they free or aren’t they?  I don’t know.  Depends what you mean.  Another issue is that in the context of the liberal ethos one’s personal freedom is a perfectly acceptable moral reference when one is talking about behavior that does not impinge in any serious way on anyone else but in situations in which one’s behavior does impinge on other people freedom just isn’t a very helpful concept because both parties have a claim to freedom but only one of them will end up having his or her way.  So how do libertarians convince themselves they can solve everything with an appeal to liberty?  If that’s what they really do I suppose the most likely explanation is they accept certain laws and political institutions and social arrangements and conventions so fully and so unquestioningly they fade into the background and appear to libertarians to disappear altogether so that freedom in a general sense and freedom in the context of a particular legal, economic, and political framework seem to run together.  When libertarians talk about liberty what they’re really talking about is not having to deal with criticisms and potential revisions of the institutions they so adore and would like to remove from the table altogether (the criticisms and potential revisions, not the institutions).  Why not just say something like I accept our current labor market and various other means of distributing economic power and the market system for distributing goods and services based on that economic power and whatever assorted other legal and political institutions one cares to throw in?  What’s liberty got to do with it?  Why the smokescreen?  I don’t know.  I know many conservatives love rhetoric and take a rather pragmatic approach to democracy so it’s tempting to suppose we’re dealing with a sort of bait and switch situation in which they would like to suggest we’re talking about endorsing freedom, which surely most people including especially liberals would wholeheartedly support in the proper context, when we’re really talking about the complicated and potentially dubious ethical proposition that whatever happens under our free marketish economic and legal system is ethical gold.  But who knows?  They might be sincere.  They might just have psychological blinders.  Some of them might think they’re talking about anarchism.  Some of them might be mentally challenged and not thinking clearly.  Hey, I’m just throwing out some possibilities.

Anyway, knowing how I feel about libertarianism in general I’m sure you can appreciate the hearty laugh I got when I read about the Libertarian Party candidate for the US Senate for the great southern swamp we call Florida, a 32-year old lawyer (it figures) named Augustus Sol Invictus (that would be Majestic Unconquered Sun in plain old English, in case you were wondering), who admitted recently that a couple of years ago he killed a goat in some sort of pagan ritual and drank the poor creature’s blood as a way to “give thanks” to the “god of the wilderness.”

Now the bit about sacrificing a goat and drinking its blood is noteworthy enough but the thing that really got my attention was what Adrian Wyllie, the Libertarian Party chairperson for the state of Florida, said when he resigned in opposition to Mr. Invictus’s candidacy, which was that Mr. Invictus is a self-proclaimed fascist who promotes starting a “second civil war.”  Mr. Invictus denied it and claimed he is the victim of a smear campaign orchestrated by Mr. Wyllie, although he did admit white supremacists did indeed support his candidacy.  And when we say white supremacists we are of course referring to Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, and people like that.  So there is some point of connection going on there somewhere.

Now assuming Mr. Wyllie is correct and Mr. Invictus does indeed consort with what passes for fascists in this country (not serious Old World political fascists by any stretch of the imagination; in a contemporary American context we’re talking about ignorant rednecks with guns who would like to victimize minorities if only the repressive American police state would get off their backs) one has to wonder what sort of mental gymnastics might lead one to combine liberty and fascism.  Talk about strange bed fellows.  I suppose you know the authentic old time fascists associated an excessive interest in one’s personal liberty with the sort of corrupt and effete scoundrel they imagined would prefer to live in a liberal democracy and they would have wasted no time at all pounding Mr. Invictus to a bloody pulp for even mentioning it.  Ah but there’s the rub!  Like the institutions that make up the “free market” for an economic conservative, if one is a violent bigot and agrees with what one imagines a fascist state might want to do as far as minority relations are concerned then the whole repressive apparatus of the fascist state may well fade into the background leaving only the perception of one’s liberty to finally do what one would have liked to do in the first place.  You know what I mean.  “I’ve wanted to kill that awful minority kid for some time but I can’t because of all those oppressive laws against murder.  My precious personal liberty is being violated.  But under a fascist state I imagine I’ll be able to murder people right and left.  My liberty will be restored!  Oh glorious day.  I’m going to join the Union of Libertarian Fascists right away!”

Maybe I’m just imagining things.  I don’t really know that Mr. Invictus thinks highly of both fascism and libertarianism.  I was only going by what the former chairperson of the Libertarian Party for the state of Florida said and of course he might be making it all up.  Seems a little odd he would but then again pretty much everything having to do with libertarianism seems a little odd to me.  Maybe I’m thinking too much.  It’s not like libertarianism is some sort of serious political philosophy.  Just a bit of fun for people too stupid for the Stupid Party.  Heck, I can’t even make heads or tails of the massive conservative support for that guy with the funny hair and he’s the leading Republican candidate to be President of the US.  That’s mainstream Republicanism right there.  Why in the world would I imagine I could ever make sense of the crackpot libertarian wing of the conservative movement?  Probably best to just have a good laugh and move on to something a little more sensible.

References

Senate candidate in Florida admits drinking goat blood.  BBC.  October 5, 2015.  http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34450057.

Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Freemarketcare II

Welcome friends!

Did you catch the story in the newspapers about US-based Turing Pharmaceuticals increasing the price of a drug used by some AIDS and cancer patients by about four thousand percent virtually overnight from about $14 per pill to $750 per pill?  It’s been in all the papers.  Seems the drug in question, Daraprim, has been around for decades but Turing only acquired the rights recently, hence the rather abrupt price adjustment.  The CEO of Turing, thirty-two year old multimillionaire and former hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli, defended the company’s pricing policy saying he was just trying to make a profit, claiming the previous owners of the drug had been “giving it away,” and calling a reporter who questioned his judgment on the matter a moron.  Which of course from the perspective of people like Mr. Shkreli is exactly what someone would be if he or she didn’t raise the price of whatever he or she was hawking to whatever the market would bear.  That’s just basic economics.  Supply and demand.  Now in Mr. Shkreli’s defense I see he was in the news even more recently saying that having heard the public outcry he now intends to reduce the price to something a bit more affordable although in the story I read he declined to say what that might be.  One assumes it would not be the previous give away price.  I should also point out the company claims it provides the drug to about half the people who use it at no cost whatsoever and has plans to expand its charitable drug program.  So apparently if you’re in whatever class Turing Pharmaceuticals believes deserves charity then you have nothing to worry about.  I’m not sure who that might be.  Unemployed bankers?  Just joking.  I’m confident they run a perfectly reasonable means based system.

One might have expected this situation to foster an interesting debate between economic conservatives who believe whatever happens on the free market is ethical gold from liberals who conventionally take a more nuanced stance on such matters and are equally conventionally branded economic morons by conservatives.  .. Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Thursday, September 10, 2015

Kim Davis, Religious Exemptions, and Fatassism

Welcome friends! 

I was just chuckling over the latest news item on Kim Davis.  If you haven’t been reading the papers recently she’s that mildly frightening backwoods county clerk from Kentucky or Tennessee or some such place who has been in the news recently for refusing to carry out her official duties in terms of issuing marriage licenses to gay people.  Why was she doing that you ask?  Didn’t the Supreme Court just rule on that recently?  Why yes but like every conservative Ms. Davis is mostly concerned with what she herself wants to do.  In the vernacular, she don’t need no stinking laws.  Thus, like every other obnoxious power grabbing petty local bureaucrat who has ever lived she apparently felt entirely justified in doing whatever the hell she wanted to do.  In this case she looked into her blinkered heart and determined that at least in her little neck of the woods only straight people would be getting marriage licenses no matter what those power grabbing Supreme Court big shots in Washington might say about it.  To make a long story short they carted her off to the local slammer and her deputies ended up doing her job for her.  But I just read the other day she’s out again.  Maybe now she’ll do her job and then again maybe she won’t.  Don’t worry though.  Conservative Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, offered to take her place in jail the next time she flouts the law.  I think they should take him up on the offer.  The best case scenario would be for Ms. Davis to get canned and Mr. Huckabee to serve a long jail term thus ensuring he cannot harm any innocent bystanders via electoral mishap... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Thursday, August 27, 2015

Immigration

Welcome friends!

I thought I might say a few words about immigration this week.  I can’t say it’s something I think about very often myself but I infer from the headlines some other people are interested.  I was just reading the other day about some issues generated by Germany’s oversized efforts to handle the flood of desperate poor people trying to escape, sorry I meant emigrate, from the myriad dysfunctional hell holes, sorry I meant countries, in the Middle East and Africa.  And of course here in the US we have Trumpo the Clown wanting to build a wall around the US and fretting about Mexican rapists.  Oh, there’s been a lot of talk.  A lot of talk.  Most of it pretty damned idiotic.  But talk is good, so let me put in my two cents worth.  Nothing too novel or profound mind you; just a couple of observations to pass the time.

One aspect of this issue is what one might call the cultural or social aspect and my thought on this aspect is that I think people are prone to silly over simplifications that tend to lead nowhere in particular.  The issue has to do with the value of diversity versus homogeneity or social cohesion and it’s just not really that simple.  Let me tell you what I’m talking about.

On the one hand we have people who seem to me to place the most extraordinary emphasis on the most insignificant of issues.  I’m talking about people who object to immigration because immigrants talk funny, dress funny, eat funny vegetables, follow funny religions, listen to funny music, and so on.  I have to say this sort of thing always sets me on edge because diversity in these areas seems perfectly acceptable to me.  Indeed, as a proud proponent of the old timey notion of the USA as a cultural melting pot I’ve always considered an amalgam of cultures to be inevitably stronger, more robust, and more beautiful than any single culture could ever be.  A nation with a healthy mix of cultural backgrounds gives everyone involved exposure to different ways of living and thinking and not only leads to better everything (by which I mean food, music, art, literature) but also just a more open and intellectually curious sort of cultural life.  That’s why the idea I sometimes hear from foreigners that the US has no real culture of its own and that it’s just a conglomeration of other cultures tends to irritate me just a little bit.  That is our culture or perhaps I should say our meta-culture.  That’s what makes us who we are.  The opposing attitude is of course conservative exclusivity and that is certainly nothing new.  That’s been going on a long, long time.  We wouldn’t have the country we have now if the conservative anti-immigration movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had succeeded in stemming the tide.  I suppose we would have been stuck in some vast provincial backwater chock full of white Protestant rednecks.  (I mention Protestants only because part of the old time nativist ideology in this country was to consider Catholics potentially dangerous outsiders.  You should know they’re all pretty much the same to me.)  Churches, honky tonks, lynchings, and shoot outs in the parking lot.  I’ll take the US we actually have now if you don’t mind.  And the funny thing about conservative exclusivity of course is that it isn’t typically limited to foreign persons but applies equally to all manner of other ostensible outsiders: poor people, racial minorities, sexual minorities, and in some benighted countries they  even manage to throw in the female half of the human race.  Can you imagine?  I have to laugh when I read about some of these counties where these sorts of traditional conservative values hold sway.  Were you wondering why your country can never seem to compete with the US along any dimension at all?  Well, gosh I don’t know.  Could it be you only accept contributions from half or perhaps even fewer of your citizens?  The ones that meet your fabricated and completely arbitrary qualifications.  But I’m sure you have your own explanations, right?  Probably some kind of conspiracy of godless liberals or something along those lines.  Yeah, that probably makes more sense.

On the other hand we have some people who seem unwilling or unable to exercise any judgement at all when it comes to acceptable and unacceptable immigrants.  Diversity is just fine for some issues but as I’m sure I must have mentioned before we do need everyone to agree to some minimal set of basic values relating to how we intend to interact with one another.  You know the type of thing I mean.  Accepting the political system under which we live must surely be one of them.  I don’t mean agreeing with every detail but agreeing simply that there are acceptable and unacceptable ways to voice one’s displeasure and to try to change things up.  Writing a blog is fine.  Bombing someone’s house is not.   Other sorts of values might be involved as well.  Freedom of speech (within limits), freedom of (and from) religion (within limits posed by the existence of other people), respect for other people including women and minorities of various types and so on.  We need to keep in mind many would-be immigrants come from failed or at least struggling states that never heard of any such thing as democracy or the rule of law or even respect for other people.  We shouldn’t simply take for granted that prospective immigrants will share our meta-values.  The USA is by no means a suitable environment for everyone.  Some people arriving on our shores should be invited to return to their original place of residence as quickly as possible.

What tends to really set me on edge when it comes to discussions of these cultural issues is the simplistic all or nothing idea that we must either accept any old immigrant spouting any manner of antisocial nonsense or become like latter day Nazis and fret about protecting our precious and delicate cultural heritage from the depredations of ostensibly inferior foreign influence.  It seems to me there’s a pretty big patch of ground in the middle we should be focusing on.  I’d like to hear a lot more about what belongs in our set of basic meta-ethics and a lot less about how the clerk at the local convenience store can’t speak proper English.

The other big aspect of this whole immigrant question to me has to do with economics by which I mean in this case jobs and profit.  One important component of this issue is that when we bring in new people or anyway allow people to enter willy nilly we create a larger pool of would-be workers and thus erode the bargaining power of existing workers.  One presumes this must be why many conservatives of the economic sort as opposed to the social sort advocate open borders and why working stiffs and domestic unemployed and underemployed people tend to be the most agitated about the idea.  Think of it as a sort of union busting technique.  Not that I’m sure anyone needs such a technique at least here in the US.  Conservatives have managed to convince most workers they don’t need no damn union and they should just mail the greater part of their paychecks directly to their CEOs and be thankful the job creators have blessed them with an opportunity to work at all.  Yes, nothing better to keep wages down and profits up as an army of unemployed poor people grasping at any opportunity.  Well, at least as long as there’s someone around to buy whatever the army of impoverished workers is producing.  Yes, it seems to be yet another one of those tragedy of the commons affairs where private incentives may not lead to optimal results.  Lowering wages is good for any particular company but if everyone does it one may wonder if effective demand will become an issue.

I was thinking just then of unskilled and semi-skilled labor but I think the same basic issue applies to skilled labor.  Many foreign countries have very respectable educational systems but no place for their graduates to go. It’s quite possible for employers to pick up more highly qualified candidates at lower cost if they bring in people from other countries, assuming they can’t simply ship the job itself to the foreign country and be done with it.  Similar situation.  It’s good for business or that particular business anyway, but is it good for the nation including the displaced workers?

Wait.  Now I think we might be getting somewhere.  The issue seems to me to revolve around whether we have some sort of responsibility to look after the people who are living here now.  Ah yes, distributional issues.  The ones we’re bad at because we seem to never want to discuss.  Damn.  This is going to be like pulling teeth.  Well, what the heck.  Let me just get the ball rolling.  Yes, I think “societies” matter, which I suppose must put me in some sort of socialist camp according to how conservatives think of these things.  I feel we must have some responsibility to get the people currently living in the country gainfully employed.  If we don’t have enough trained workers for whatever job then I suppose we should really train some people.  Does that mean we will miss out on some potential cost savings or we might have to turn down the most suitable candidate considered at a world wide level?  Hmm.  I suspect it might.

However, it’s not as simple as that because of course we don’t just live in a national society.  We also live in a world society as part of the human race here on planet Earth.  So what are our responsibilities with respect to people living in foreign countries?  Shouldn’t be worried about them not having jobs?  It seems to me we should because people are people after all.  But how exactly does that play out?  Does it imply we should hire them ourselves?  Does it mean we should do more to help other countries to develop their economies?  I hate to get all awkward about it, but what if it comes at the expense of our own development?  That’s seems like a tough one and it’s complicated by the fact that whenever one takes on responsibilities for people living outside one’s political and legal system everything gets much more difficult.  You know what I mean.  You try to give some aid to wherever and the emir pockets the money and promptly moves to a villa in the south of France.  I know we have some worldwide legal institutions but it does present some sort of argument for more and better, does it not?  But I suppose that’s another whole can of worms, right?  Many conservatives will start banging on about the dangers of world government (keeping in mind many conservatives are opposed to the idea of any government at all, let alone a government that includes foreigners) and at the same time some foreign potentates will start banging on about how dare anyone interfere with their money making schemes, sorry, I mean their domestic economic policy.  But anyway those are the sorts of things we should be talking about.

That’s all well and good you say but what about the nitty gritty?  What should we do while thinking this all through (or more likely studiously avoiding thinking it all through)?  Well, OK, let’s get all practical about it.  I think here in the US we should stay the course and maybe put a bit more resources into managing illegal immigration if some people are concerned about it.  I don’t think it makes sense to go all crazy about it.  If you’re living next to a country or a region of a country with a lot of unemployed poor people they will try to sneak across the border.  They’re not going to just lie down and die.  I would do exactly the same thing.  I’m not sure fixing this issue without fixing the underlying causes is even possible but what I do know is that seriously trying would probably require some pretty draconian and also pretty expensive policies.  Talk about building a wall around the US.  Anyone want to guess what building a wall around the US would actually cost?  And what do we get for it?  A reduction in illegal immigration?  Nice.  Yes, our infrastructure may be crumbling and the train just fell in the river because the bridge collapsed but we have one hell of a wall.  You can see it from space!  How about staffing and maintaining the wall?  Because you know people will naturally try to circumvent it once we build it, right?  They’re not going to just stand there and look at it in awe.  They’ll be trying their best to go over it or tunnel under it or most likely through it.  And of course we would then also have to worry about the alternatives.  Walking across the border or hitching a ride in a pickup or whatever might be the cheapest way right now but probably people will shift to planes and boats if necessary.  More difficult and more costly to be sure but where there’s a will there’s a way.

The ironic thing is that setting aside the rapists the vast majority of these illegal immigrants are honest hard working folk who are just doing what they feel they need to do to survive and make a buck.  Kind of hard to think of them as any sort of serious villain.  And my understanding is that in many cases they’re actually working in jobs that domestic workers don’t want anyway because they don’t pay enough or are too difficult.  That is to say, it’s not even clear to me how much displacement of domestic workers is actually going on.  I suspect if we ever really found a solution to illegal immigration certain sectors of our economy in certain regions of the country might very well grind to a halt entirely.

I feel I’ve been talking a while now.  I could probably go on for days but let me just wrap it up.  I think our first objective should be to cool everything down a few hundred degrees.  I have no problem at all entertaining sensible improvements in how we control unauthorized immigration but let’s not shoot ourselves in the foot here.  If some people have managed to sneak in at some point and they’ve been living and working here the past however many years and the sky hasn’t fallen then maybe it’s not the end of the world.  Maybe it’s easier, cheaper, and just all around nicer if we can just try to find a way to get them fixed up legally now.  Maybe we can just concentrate on doing a little better job in the future?  Not a perfect solution but life is so often imperfect, wouldn’t you say?  Just trying to keep it real.  And if ever we think we can stand to talk openly and honestly about economic issues let’s take up the thorny distributional issues that underlie what’s going on here.  I realize that’s probably not going to happen any time soon.  I can already hear conservatives ranting and howling about socialists and new world orders and all that stuff.  But one day.  It’s not going anywhere until we do.

Thursday, August 13, 2015

Archie Trump for President!

Welcome friends!

I was reading the other day about a clown convention covered by Fox “News” or some such outfit and it got me thinking about the vast gulf separating conservative and liberal thinking about one’s civic duty in terms of voting or perhaps about what makes a person a suitable candidate to become president of the US.  I suppose they’re both moderately interesting questions but for me the ambiguity is the most intriguing element; the eternal struggle to get at what conservatives really think.

Lest you get the wrong end of the stick I suppose I should mention I don’t normally spend a lot of time on conservative politics.  It’s been some time since I’ve come across anything I would consider novel or interesting from that side of the aisle.  Indeed, I suspect the last time they had an original insight was probably around 1850 or so.  God and rich people pretty much sums it up.  Sorry, I meant the “free market.”  It’s been pretty much the same story for over a century now.  Well, maybe they do a bit of repackaging now and then.  You know; uptown or downtown, hot or cold, divinely ordained or natural order or socially optimal or Pareto optimal, that sort of thing.  Certainly not anything that would command one’s attention on a regular basis but good for a laugh now and then.

What got me a little more interested than usual in the workings of the conservatives’ perpetual wind machine was a humorous little story I read the other day about arch-conservative, billionaire, reality TV show personality, and front runner for the Republican nomination for president of the United States Donald Trump.  The story was a quick listing of what the author of that article considered some of Mr. Trump’s more asinine utterances from a catalog that must now number in the hundreds if not thousands and surely requires daily updating... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Thursday, July 30, 2015

Religion Can Be Toxic to the Young

Welcome friends!

I read a couple of news items recently that got me thinking about the often harmful intellectual and emotional effects of religion as well as the general inability of religious people to perceive these deleterious effects so I thought I might say a few words about that this week.  I suspect this post may be a bit challenging or dare I say annoying for some of my more spiritually minded readers and I do have some concerns about that.  Not concerned enough to shut the hell up of course.  Let’s not go crazy.  I’ve hardly ever been that concerned about anything.  But concerned enough to suggest that if you’re of a particularly otherworldly temperament and you’re a sensitive soul and especially if you tend to perceive critical discussions of your cherished beliefs as personal insults and even more so if you tend to react to perceived insults of that sort by running after random people in the street waving meat cleavers or what have you may I invite you to stop reading right now?  I don’t intend at all to challenge the ideas of anyone who is in no fit mental or emotional state to entertain any such challenge.  Come back next time and maybe I’ll be discussing something you can digest a bit more easily.  Or then again probably not, but you can always give it a try.  Are we good?  For everyone else; let’s talk.

The story that got me thinking about this issue involved a young homegrown American Muslim terrorist who appears to have been a normal kid until his father, who had emigrated from the Middle East many years before, decided it would be a good idea to get the kid in touch with his heritage and in particular his religious heritage.  He packed the kid off to some sort of religious school out in the Syrian desert somewhere and the kid came back unhappy, unfriendly, and kind of weird.  The police eventually arrested him for plotting to kill random people in a terrorist attack.  The father was duly shocked and couldn’t fathom how such a thing could have happened.  I didn’t save the reference although it shouldn’t be too hard to find.  Sorry about that.  Anyway, doesn’t really matter because as luck would have it we promptly had a similar story about a different young homegrown American Muslim terrorist, this one named Mohammed Abdulazeez, who managed to actually murder a few random people.  I think the final body count was five in that case including a young twenty-one year old fellow by the way, which is the kind of thing I find particularly irksome now I’ve gotten a bit up there in years and everyone else has gotten correspondingly younger.  All unarmed people of course just going about their everyday work although in this case I think their everyday work was at least related to national defense in some way.  Similar situation to the first story although I think I read Mr. Abdulazeez was also a drug addict and had mental problems and so on so maybe the cases are not exactly the same because of these sorts of complicating factors.  Anyway,  he was apparently able to hold it all more or less together until, like the young fellow in the other story, he took a little holiday to Syria only to return a bloody minded murderer.  Shock, amazement, and surprise all around.

How could such things happen?  Well, you know I love a good mystery so of course I immediately started thinking about potential mechanisms by which trips to Syria might transform previously unobjectionable if somewhat troubled young people into murderous terrorists.  I hate to bring up an awkward point but I suspect it may have something to do with religion.  Not necessarily Islam per se.  I don’t know enough about Islam to make that sort of argument and I most likely never will.  No, I mean religion in general.  The entire religious thought process.

I hope I’m not going out on too much of a limb when I suggest many young people are prone to experiencing a certain amount of difficulty transitioning to adult life.  (I know I had a hell of a time myself.)  I suppose this has probably always been the case quite possibly due to biological phenomena (I think I read somewhere one’s brain is undergoing major development and reorganization a good deal later than one might have expected) but it is probably more than ever now at least in the US due to the toxic influence of economic conservatism and the ensuing lack of sympathy and concern for other people and hence absence of any meaningful connection to other people or to society in general.  Of course, money, maturity, and experience all tend to act as buffers to the ignorance, cruelty, and greed that are some of the most salient features of the little world we’ve made ourselves, so if one manages to live long enough and be moderately successful in the world of work and finances one may hope to one day become totally insensate to the ugliness of our world, at least until the world hits one on the head with a rock some fine evening when one is out walking the dog.  Now young people typically live in a rather different world, which is to say, the real world.  They’re not often floating about in a state of benumbed smugness in an insulated cocoon of gated privilege.  No, they’re more often out there rubbing shoulders with the unfortunate bits of our system every day.  It’s stressful.  As one might expect they can develop all manner of unfortunate mental and emotional problems.  In these cases it’s probably natural for religious folk to think they’ll help the kids out by offering them a hit of religion.  In my opinion that’s probably just about the worst thing one can do in this situation.  Pushing religion to an already stressed young person in a misguided attempt to make him or her feel better is like trying to make a homeless person more comfortable by giving him or her a hit of crack cocaine.  It may be well intentioned but one shouldn’t be too surprised if it doesn’t end well.

The problem with foisting religion on mixed-up young people is that religious thought is basically an archaic pre-scientific not entirely rational emotion-based belief system that is totally foreign to anyone who has gone through a modern educational system.  When the modern and pre-modern worlds collide inside a troubled young person’s head strange things can happen.  Like what?  Well, I suspect they can very easily lose their already tenuous ability to evaluate arguments in the cool light of human reason because the principles of secular epistemology, logic, and science don’t necessarily line up very well with whatever mental or intellectual procedures, if any, are associated with various brands of religions thought.  A kid with no exposure to religious thought and hence no intellectual defense against the various strains of brain rot they represent is a sitting duck for any wily evildoer with a flair for eloquence.  Indeed, you may have noticed many of the most virulent religious extremists, I mean the ones who blow up little kids, run people over with cars, murder passers by with meat cleavers and so on, tend to be people who formerly had no religion at all.  Quite often they’re gang members or drug addicts or petty criminals and so on.  My understanding is that many or perhaps even most of the really psychotic killers in the Middle East have emigrated from the slums of Europe.  

The sad thing to me is there’s really no reason for this to be the case.  Education and knowledge are surely the only reliable cures for religious fanaticism and violent extremism and here in the US at least we have a quite respectable educational system.  We might not always get the top scores but then again unlike some other countries we tend to not want to give up on anyone.  Our kids should have plenty of intellectual ammunition in the form of a commitment to rationality, critical thinking, logic, secular philosophy, and the scientific method to deal with the far fetched rantings of any foreign cleric with aplomb.  Unfortunately that’s apparently not always the case.  Even though the fundamental bases of our education system are indeed reason and science we seem to have made a rather unfortunate pact with conservative forces to not enter into any sort of discussion that might reflect poorly on religion.  We have all manner of other educational requirements: language, mathematics, writing, economics, history, art, physical education.  But when it comes to the really big issues like epistemology and ethics and so on we’re just afraid to go there.  Why?  Well, let me explain.  It’s because we try give religion a big old pass.  We don’t want to offend anyone.  The implicit message for young people is that normal intellectual principles are fine and dandy for some things but just don’t really apply in a religious context. When it comes to religion we basically have this notion that one should believe whatever ones feels one ought to believe or feels disposed to believe.  This normally works out fine because most of the religions we’ve traditionally dealt with on a regular basis have been rather benign at least in recent memory, although that certainly wasn’t always the case.  And most people can eventually figure it out on their own, which is why religion in general is gradually losing its icy grip on the back of the neck of modern culture.  But it doesn’t always work out that way.  If a kid is not particularly quick on the uptake or if someone gets to them before they can figure it all out then the stage is set for something rather unfortunate to occur.

Of course, if a kid already has some exposure to religious thought then he or she has an advantage in the sense that relatively innocuous religion can crowd out more unfortunate permutations in the same way beneficial bacteria in the human gut can crowd out harmful bacteria.  This raises an interesting question.  Well, I think it’s interesting anyway.  The question is whether one is doing a kid a service or disservice by proactively introducing what one hopes is a relatively benign form of religion.  I feel it’s an interesting question because I can see two sides to the argument.  I just gave the pro side.  Against that we have the potential issue that once one gets a kid to accept these archaic forms of thinking as just as legitimate in their own way as more modern forms one may very well have facilitated unsavory people waltzing in later and convincing the kid to do literally anything.  It’s a high risk strategy.  “Yes, my son or daughter, you should believe in utter nonsense that has no basis whatsoever in human reason or science but just remember to always be careful which brand of utter nonsense you believe in.”  And then we have the psychological issues that go with having the kid’s parents involved.  Some kids crave their parents’ approval and if that means throwing reason and science out the window that’s what they’ll do.  Other kids want to separate from their parents and if their parents promote one brand of religious claptrap they will inevitably look for another most likely contrasting brand.

Well, I don’t really know the answer to this question of course.  Maybe religious inoculation sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t.  But I suppose you can probably guess what I think about the issue.  In my opinion parents are playing with fire when they subject their kids to religion.  We should be responsible adults and teach our kids philosophy, logic, science, critical thinking, and secular ethics.  They can take up and decide about religion later when they have the intellectual and emotional tools to evaluate those sorts of arguments.  We should give them room and time to grow not jump in there and brainwash them and hope for the best.  Try not to become like the bewildered dad in the story I was discussing earlier and end up wondering how your little darling could have become a crazed murderer despite all your crazed religious exhortations to the contrary.  Let’s just give the kids a break for once.

References

Chattanooga shooting: New details emerge about the gunman.  Scott Zamost, Yasmin Khorram, Shimon Prokupecz, and Evan Perez.  July 20, 2015.  CNN.  http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/20/us/tennessee-naval-reserve-shooting/index.html.

Thursday, July 16, 2015

The Pope, Greed, and Capitalism

Welcome friends!

Can we talk about greed?  I’ve been wanting to take this up again ever since Pope Francis appeared in the papers recently describing an “unfettered pursuit of money” in suitably anachronistic terms as “the dung of the Devil.”  The fact he would say such a thing seems unremarkable to me.  Isn’t that part of the whole Christian theme of respecting the poor?  One of the nobler sentiments of the whole enterprise in my opinion.  No, the interesting bit for me was not what the Pope had to say but what came after.  Many commentators at least here in the US immediately claimed the Pope had said capitalism was the dung of the Devil.  That got me thinking again about the tendency among certain economic conservatives to associate capitalism with greed and hence to believe greed is good presumably because one is ostensibly most useful to society if one is most attuned to the pecuniary incentives expressed in market forces and thus most liable to provide what society evidently values most highly.  I’m sure I must have said a few words about this idea before but it’s been a while so maybe it’s time for another go. It’s not like it’s going anywhere soon.

My first thought on this whole conservative greed is good narrative is that, yes, greed can operate as a driving force for human activity, which I suppose might sometimes be useful activity, by which I mean something other than selling drugs or stealing someone’s car, etc.  However, there would appear to be any number of other such wellsprings of human activity that would fall into pretty much the same category.  People can also be motivated by insecurity, egotism, a lust for power, hatred, fear, cruelty, and any number of other less than entirely savory emotions and feelings.  People can also be motivated by the nobler emotions: love, kindness, duty, honor, and so on.  So why are conservatives always so hung up on greed as the great motivating force?  Well, I don’t know.  It might just be that’s the motivation they’re most familiar with and it just falls out of the familiar tendency of rich conservatives to love and respect themselves and their own motivations and desires above all others.  However, given the close association between conservative ideology and certain branches of economic theory I’ve often wondered if some element of that theory or perhaps bastardization of that theory may have something to do with it.  That’s what I’d like to discuss today.

Let me just start out by saying economic theory does not explicitly or literally portray greed as good.  Therefore, trying to figure out how some people might have gotten this impression requires a bit of detective work.  I see two main suspects in terms of elements of economic theory that might plausibly be related to such a belief.  One is the common assumption within economic models that people have unlimited wants, that is, that holding everything else constant people tend to prefer more to less.  That might seem a little farfetched concerning particular goods.  I like hummus but how much of the stuff can one person eat?  But if we’re talking about money I guess that assumption seems rather reasonable to me.  I think most people could always do with a bit of extra cash even if they intend to save it for a rainy day, pass it out to loved ones, or even hand it out to whosoever they might think of as the deserving poor.  Is that what we normally mean by greed?  I don’t think so.  Greed to me carries the implication of countervailing ethical considerations and one inappropriately choosing mammon over more suitable goals.  I suppose that’s what the Pope was getting at when he mentioned the unfettered pursuit of money.  The pursuit of money fettered so to speak by an attention to ethical concerns is a whole different kettle of fish.

Let’s move on to our second suspect lurking within economic theory, which I feel must be this whole business of utility and so-called welfare economics and so on.  You know what that means, right?  Another opportunity for me to talk about one of my pet peeves: what I consider the incomplete if not entirely incoherent social philosophy represented by neoclassical economic theory or as I’m always careful to say possibly a mangled popular interpretation of that theory.

I think to appreciate what’s going in the endlessly fascinating world of economic theory it helps to understand a little something about the history of the discipline.  The first thing one needs to know is that Adam Smith and the other bewigged old timers who got the ball rolling were amateur theologians and ethicists as much as they were scientists. They were not concerned simply to predict human behavior.  No, these people were mostly what were known as “deists” and had the rather grandiose agenda of establishing the world had been set up by a benevolent deity in such a way the natural laws of human behavior would inevitably lead to optimal outcomes if only people could refrain from mucking up the works.  That’s why the imagery that clearly most resonated with these writers involved things like natural laws, invisible hands, clocks, and so on.  Now I feel it’s quite likely these early writers were indeed concerned to establish that a certain amount of greed was both natural and good at least under the right conditions.  No doubt they looked around and saw a whole heck of a lot of greed and said to themselves, well, apparently greed is a natural condition for the human animal and must therefore fit into the divinely ordained social order.  It’s well known Mr. Smith at least was not so simple minded as to suggest greed was good always and everywhere.  He made some rather pointed remarks about greed.  But his general conviction was clearly if we set things up the way the good Lord intended, which he associated with nature despite the rather obvious human effort required to set up and maintain those particular natural conditions, then greed would function as nature had intended and would lead to beneficial results for us all.

Fast forward a few decades and both economic conditions and intellectual life had moved on.  Some people had been working to formalize economic thinking using the concept of utility, which was at that time defined within the field of economics pretty much the same as it was within the field of ethical philosophy.  However, something odd and clearly rather disconcerting for some people started to happen.  Serious philosophical ethical utilitarians began to cast doubt on the notion the results of any old free market were necessarily really what one ought to consider socially optimal.  Not all that surprising I suppose.  By this time the industrial revolution had made some people fantastically wealthy but had kicked many people up and down the street and some people right off the end of the pier.  Sort of like what information technology is doing today.  Anyway, after what must have seemed an interminable series of novels about suffering street urchins and so on some people began to wonder if they might have missed some important ethical principle along the way.  People were beginning to look askance at the prevailing social order based on free market ideology.  The field of academic economics was in crisis!

Fortunately an Italian fascist named Vilfredo Pareto stepped into the breach along with a number of other like minded souls.  The solution Pareto and others hits upon was to gut the concept of utility within economics by defining it in a way that made it irrelevant to ethical issues involving conflicts between the needs and desires of different people.  That is to say, they switched from using utility to mean a measure of welfare one could compare across people to more of a subjective feeling one could only meaningfully investigate in the context of a single person.  Comparing utility across people was recast as impossible in an (economic) utilitarian context but curiously enough not because they simply explicitly chose to redefine it that way but ostensibly at least because of practical measurement issues.  (The argument was that one could reliably infer someone preferred A to B if that person was given a choice and opted for A, but there was no comparable method for inferring utility across different people.)  The basic idea was that even if all outward appearances suggested one person might generate more utility from some resolution of some conflict of desires, say two people wanted a doughnut and one person was starving and really really needed the doughnut but someone else wanted the doughnut to hang on the dashboard of his or her horse and buggy, assuming such contraptions had dashboards, there was no way to tell which resolution was better based on utility because the subjective feelings of utility associated with the latter might very well be greater than the utility associated with the former.  That is to say, the buggy man or woman in this case might have been one of those superconductors of utility whose passing whims are associated with more utility and are thus more important under this conceptualization of utility than the seemingly more pressing desires of lesser mortals.  With this innovation the discussion of utility within economics and within serious ethical philosophy parted ways perhaps forever.

Economists had found a way to shut down pesky discussions of redistribution based on utilitarian concerns within the field of economics but had they thrown the baby out with the bath water?  Did economic theory still have sufficient intellectual content to convince people of the superiority of the status quo free market system?  Could they still establish interfering with the free market was always a big no no?  Well, that’s an interesting question.  They did and they didn’t.  Or let’s say they did to a small degree that was enough to get some people thinking maybe they did to a much larger degree.  What they established was if one is at a distribution that addresses all one’s ethical issues and so on, and certain conditions prevail (i.e. the well known conditions required for a so-called perfectly competitive market), and one does not currently have the institutions that go with a free market, then one can demonstrate using the stripped down version of utility with seemingly very little potentially divisive ethical content whatsoever that one should be able to improve upon one’s situation by moving to free market institutions.  Of course, that wouldn’t necessarily hold true if adopting those free market institutions moved one to some other distributional result that did not adequately address one’s ethical concerns or even if one’s ethical concerns included the relative standing of different people (because the result is based on demonstrating that under these conditions one could make at least one person better off while making no one worse off in an absolute sense, which of course is entirely consistent with making one person worse off relative to another person).

To further confuse the hell out of everyone economists also developed this notion that they were no longer even talking about social ethics in general terms.  They were simply talking as economists constrained by working with the peculiar stripped down version of utility we’ve been discussing and as such they didn’t have any basis to discuss the mysterious ethical concerns other people might have about how to resolve interpersonal conflicts and hence with distributional issues in general.  They never explicitly suggested other people could not or should not discuss these important and ubiquitous ethical issues.  To this day careful economists will always try to make clear that distributional concerns are outside their purview and if one has ethical beliefs relating to resolving interpersonal conflicts of desire then one should always feel free to redistribute to address those concerns.

But of course the devil is always in the details and in this case the details involved how economist spun their economic policy recommendations.  The underlying conceit was that as a first approximation we should treat all free market results as equivalent and just concentrate on getting to any one.  Once there we can then worry about adjusting for distributional issues as a second step.  The problem is that’s not consistent with how the world actually works at all.  Labor markets and distributional concerns are intimately mixed up with people’s feelings about what constitutes free market institutions and hence cannot really be separated out that way.  It’s entirely unrealistic to imagine one can talk about optimal economic institutions without at the same time bringing up the ethical issues associated with distributional concerns such as who should be getting what.

The practical result of this unfortunate mishmash is that we have some conservatives and economists stuck in the eighteenth century with Adam Smith and his buddies talking about natural laws and clocks and so on, we have some conservatives and economists stuck in the nineteenth talking about how capitalism maximizes total utility and fretting about capitalism versus communism and so on, and we have yet other economists and conservatives stuck in the middle of the twentieth century talking about how we’ve demonstrated the social optimality of free market institutions in general all the while acknowledging and then promptly dismissing distributional issues with a wave of the hand.  I think people in all three of these groups can very easily get the idea if things are going to be natural or socially optimal or whatever then we all need to act as much as possible like the simplified actors that feature in their economic models and respond and react only to the pecuniary and material considerations that are discussed in those models, in other words, that we all be greedy.

However, more careful economists and liberals know that’s not what we’re really talking about at all.  For one thing, even if one wants to muck about with the type of utility discussed in economic theory no one ever said that type of utility only arises from money or goods and services.  One could theoretically derive utility from anything including following one’s ethical beliefs about not being greedy.  Economic models address economic matters and thus concentrate on things like money and goods and services but the issues typically addressed in those models do not represent the totality of human experience.  For another thing, as I just finished discussing the ethical considerations one can imagine might serve as counterparts to greed fall into the category of ethical issues relating to distributional concerns and thus are explicitly not addressed within the context of economic theory.

Oh hell, let’s just have a practical example.  Let’s say one could make a buck putting desperately deprived kids to work in the old coal mine.  (Hey, I’m just trying to make it interesting by setting up a situation where there are some plausible countervailing ethical issues to making a buck.)  However, one has some moral reservations.  One thinks kids should really be sitting around on couches playing video games.  Does economic theory establish one has an ethical obligation to society to be greedy and haul the kids off to the mine?  No, it doesn’t.  One may get more utility from following one’s own ethical theories relating to what kids should be doing than from selling a boxcar of coal.  What about the unmet demand for coal and the fact that society was apparently willing to pay for coal but was not actually offering up anything to have kids sitting about playing video games?  Well, for one thing under the strictures set up within economic theory one can’t really compare the utility of the decider in this case to that of anyone else or any combination of anyone else so there’s no way to tell if the sort of utility discussed within economic theory would be higher if the kids play video games or work the old mine.  Second, all one really has is an indication that people value coal.  One doesn’t have information relating to the potential utility other people might derive from living in a society where kids are not working in coal mines.  That’s not a product one buys on the market.  One might be able to get at that issue indirectly through the political system maybe by seeing what sorts of labor market regulation people are willing to adopt.  And notice I’m not even talking about the utility of the kids because I wanted to abstract away from that issue.  (Yes, assuming the kids share one’s belief they should be playing video games rather than working in coal mines that would represent yet another of those pesky distributional issues I’ve been discussing.)  So does economics establish that greed is good in this example?  No, not at all.  Put briefly, the institutions we tend to call the “free market” or in the case of pugnacious old timers “capitalism” and extol based on the very limited demonstration of the optimality of those institutions in modern neoclassical economic theory does not really involve anyone necessarily being greedy nor does it recommend anyone be greedy.

But the story doesn’t end there although like you I rather wish it did as I’ve already written considerably more than I intended.  We also have the complicated collision of the scientific and ethical elements of economic theory or in the parlance of that old time philosophy I still feel makes a lot of sense, the positive and the normative.  The quasi-ethical stylings of welfare economics is really only one aspect of the field of economics.  Today there are many scientifically minded economists who think all they’re really trying to do with their models is predict behavior.  They’re not interested in trying to convince anyone that anything in particular is socially optimal.  Now according to the assessment of these people their models tend to work well enough to suggest we can think of people as behaving like the actors in those models.  In other words, according to many of these economists, economic theory establishes not that people should be greedy but that they are in fact greedy.  Now of course this by itself doesn’t support any ethical conclusions relating to greed.  Maybe the world would be a better place if economic models didn’t work so well.  However, I can imagine people thinking something along the lines of maybe people just can’t help being greedy so why fight it?  Or maybe everyone is doing it so what’s the big deal?  Indeed, I read about a study a little while ago that found exposure to economic theory was associated with an increase in greedy behavior.  But now I’m just talking about psychological issues like framing what one considers normal behavior.  I’m not talking about justifiable ethical conclusions relating to greed because of course there is no reason to suppose that even if one is in fact greedy one must remain greedy or that it is good for one to be greedy.  Again, economics interpreted as a modern social science does not and cannot establish that greed is good.

I suppose I’ve been going on long enough.  Let me just summarize and close it out.  Greed in the sense of preferring more to less if there are no ethical considerations involved seems unobjectionable.  And if it gets one off the couch then I suppose we can say greed is good in that particular context.  Greed in the sense of elevating the pursuit of material gain to a position of ethical preeminence is not necessarily good depending on how one feels about whatever other considerations we’re talking about.  Economic theory properly interpreted does not imply or rely upon people being greedy.  If one wants to follow the old timers and associate the free market institutions discussed within economic theory with something called “capitalism,” then capitalism also does not imply or rely upon greed.  Personally I’ve never seen much use for such an ambiguous and ill-defined term as capitalism given the limitations of the conclusions relating to free market institutions one can actually derive from modern economic theory.  I prefer to say if the necessary conditions hold (and they sure as heck don’t always) and no other ethical considerations are involved (by which I mean distributional issues that may be associated with one’s ethical beliefs be they utilitarian, rights based, or what have you, and there often are such issues) then free market institutions seem fine.  If the proper conditions don’t hold or one has ethical concerns then I suppose one might feel the need to change some things up.  Do we really need a term for that?  How about common sense-ism?  Get real-ism?  Whatever.  In other words, there might be a lot of greed about right now but there doesn’t have to be.  We can get along just fine without it.  On a more personal level let me just say I like to make a buck as much as the next guy but I think I have to agree with the Pope on this one: the unfettered pursuit of money is indeed the dung of the Devil if one wants to get all medieval about it.  And you know the Pope and I don’t always see eye to eye.  So that’s something.