Thursday, December 22, 2016

Will Absolute Power Corrupt Trump And The Other One Percenters Absolutely?

Welcome friends!

I know I usually do a special holiday post this time of year but I’m hardly in the mood with darkness, ignorance, and ugliness on the ascendency everywhere in the world including my beloved homeland the USA.  My heart is just too heavy this year to do anything light and amusing.  Well, no more light and amusing than when I try to get all weighty and serious anyway.  Instead, I thought I’d take yet another whack at something that’s been on my mind a lot lately: the rather remarkable divergence in how many liberals and conservatives perceive the motley collection of inexperienced (in terms of national policy) billionaires and millionaires president-elect Trump has assembled to head up his administration.  To put things in a nutshell for those who haven’t been reading the papers recently (which I would understand well enough) Trump’s team raises all manner of red flags for many liberals but seems to be viewed as a welcome breath of fresh air by most conservatives.  I suppose it mirrors the reactions of the two camps to the roughly similar issue of the potential conflicts of interest of the One-Percent President himself.  Liberals are very concerned.  Conservatives can’t fathom why.  It got me thinking I should delve into the origin of this obviously quite fundamental difference in perspectives yet again.  Hey, anything worth saying once is worth saying twice or however many times I’ve said it now.  How many times did president-elect Trump lie about President Obama being unable to produce his birth certificate?  At least I’m sincerely trying to be truthful and helpful.

Being a lifelong liberal myself and probably typical of the breed in certain respects I suppose I can speak to that side of the issue so let’s just do a little overview of how things look from the first floor of my modest ivory house if one wants to think of it that way.  After that I’ll move on to the more challenging portion of the exercise and try to imagine how conservatives must see things.  Then I’ll wrap up with a few issue that make it very difficult or I suppose if I’m being honest pretty much impossible for me to fully understand the conservative perspective in the hope that some conservative might read it one day and explain it in print, in which case I can do the whole exercise again but presumably with a much improved take on the conservative perspective... 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 8, 2016

Trump's Secret Weapon: Baby Talk

Welcome friends!

I know I was supposed to stop talking about the clown now he’s elected at least until he actually has a chance to do something unfortunate so I suppose the week of January 20, which is alarmingly close so let’s enjoy the last few weeks of stability and sanity while it lasts.  However, I did want to just report on one positive turn of events because believe me right now any positive turn of events is something to be savored.  If you remember last time I was saying how much we all stand to lose if Trump actually delivers on any of his many and varied campaign promises.  We could see the elimination of a great deal of the progress we’ve made these past several years and in some cases decades on a great number of different fronts: global warming, the environment more generally, nuclear proliferation, women’s reproductive rights, equal rights for gay people, race relations, distributive concerns, the minimum wage, unions, the national debt, Wall Street regulations, attempts to reduce the influence of big money in politics, freedom of the press, etc.  I said if we’re lucky the man may have been just talking out of his ass during the campaign and now he’s gotten what he wanted, a platform to look after his own financial interests as well as the financial interests of his relatives and buddies in the one percent, perhaps he’ll conveniently forget all the ignorant and destructive bullshit he’s been peddling these past months.  (By looking after the financial interests of the one percent I’m talking about things like reducing their tax bill, doing away with the estate tax to facilitate the creation of family dynasties most likely consisting in the not so distant future of the usual spoiled and feckless layabouts no doubt in line from birth to become Republican presidents themselves, removing regulations designed to prevent them from dominating the political process, eliminating social programs designed for people who are not them, etc.) I suggested that might be our one ray of hope because the man did mention at one point during the campaign if he were elected president he intended to act more “presidential” and presumably not carry on the offensive and ignorant jackass persona he found so politically rewarding during the campaign.  I remarked on it at the time.  The signals are mixed but we may be getting some indication that yes, President Trump may be at least marginally saner than Candidate Clown.

Not sure what I’m talking about?  Maybe a few examples might help.  I saw an article a week or two ago that involved a meeting between the clown and Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe... 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 24, 2016

Distributional Issues and Trumpism

Welcome friends!

I wish you all a healthy and happy Thanksgiving!  I know if you’re a liberal like me you may be struggling with the holidays this year given our particularly ominous political and economic situation; however, to quote my favorite fictional gay headmaster Professor Dumbledore, “Happiness can be found in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.”  With that sage advice in mind I determined to find among the huge risks and setbacks we now face with respect to the environment, our national security, the economy, the national debt, human rights, education, free speech, democracy, and so many other aspects of life something positive to say about the movement that brought us the clown president.  And you know after a few glasses of some perfectly acceptable wine I think I might have found something.  We may be nearing the time when people other than us liberals will be willing to talk openly and honestly about distributional issues.  Why do I think that?  Because by all accounts distributional issues may have played a large role in this last election.  Indeed, I was reading an article in the New York Times that mentioned twenty-six of the thirty lowest income states voted clown.  Talk about your trends.  Of course I’m sure income is probably correlated with some other potentially relevant characteristics like education but anyway there’s at least some prima facie evidence distributional matters may have played a role.  Some people may have finally figured out they’re missing out and may have finally decided to do something about it.  It’s unfortunate what they’ve decided to do about it is so opaque, unlikely to succeed, and bundled with so much conservative garbage but at least perhaps we can now acknowledge the distributional elephant in the room.

Yes, I find it more than a little ironic the American working class has apparently chosen finally to start looking after its interests by going with President-elect Clown and the other conservative one percenters given the traditional conservative line, the line that led many people to accept without question the desirability of free trade and the free movement of labor and so on in the first place, is that we needn’t worry about distributional issues because everything is handled adequately by the free market and any interference with that miraculous clockwork mechanism will doom us all to penury.  As I’ve always been careful to point out the free market is indeed good for many things in many circumstances.  However, as liberals and critics of neoclassical economic orthodoxy have argued for years free markets don’t necessarily always work as planned depending on the characteristics of the particular markets under consideration and equally or more significantly they don’t necessarily do a good job addressing distributional issues.  That is to say, they don’t necessarily deliver money and jobs to people we may think need money and jobs such as for example our compatriots in lower income states who ended up voting clown.  So I think we can all agree it’s good we’ve moved beyond the sort of simple minded conservatism we’ve been accustomed to these past several decades.  Seems other people may have decided distributional issues matter after all.  The free market is not the answer to everything that ails us.

Unfortunately the policies this new generation of conservatives apparently intend or profess to intend to use to address these distributional issues raise quite a few issues of their own.  For example, one solution they’ve been throwing around is trade restrictions.  Now in case economics and history are not your strong points I should point out that although trade restrictions are sometimes helpful for some firms and some workers in the short run from a distributional perspective they typically don’t work very well in the long run because other countries tend to enact their own trade restrictions in retaliation and the next thing you know we’re all making a whole lot less of whatever it was for a lot higher price than we were formerly.  It’s one way of addressing distributional issues relating to firms and workers in some industries otherwise at risk of losing out to international competition but it comes with some pretty significant risks as well.  I’d be a lot more satisfied to give it a try if we had all sat down and discussed it rationally and sensibly and decided it was the best way to address this issue but it’s hard to avoid the suspicion conservatives have hit on this approach not out of reasoned consideration but because they want to address distributional issues in a way that doesn’t make government influence in resolving the issues too obvious because in the eyes of traditional conservatives that would amount to socialism.  If government acts behinds the scenes (relatively speaking) to rig markets to give more acceptable results I suspect conservatives feel they can better maintain the pretense government is always bad and unnecessary and markets always good and efficient and so on.  Given the conservative elite’s flair for simple minded rhetoric and the conservative base’s flair for going along with whatever the economic elite feels inclined to feed them it will be incumbent upon us liberals to clarify what’s going on here.  We had a free market in the form of international free trade and some people basically tanked so we’re now rigging the market to make it turn out better for them in the short run.  It’s basically a form of redistribution because although some of us may be better off at least in the short run the rest of us will be paying the cost in terms of higher product prices.  Now if we can finally drop the need to accommodate traditional conservative market worshipping let’s think if there are other more sensible ways to get that same distributional result that don’t involve some of the costs and risks of trade restrictions.

The story relating to the free movement of labor is similar.  Again this is something that has long been lauded by traditional conservatives.  According to traditional conservative free market ideology if we bring the workers of the world into one vast free market for labor we’ll all be better off.  Worrying about the economic well-being of one’s fellow workers in one’s own particular country is a form of socialism.  It’s the same theory that underlies the traditional conservative antipathy to unions.  Unions are bad because they interfere with the free market for labor.  But it seems the new breed of conservative is willing to acknowledge a free market for labor in the international context can have unfortunate distributive effects on workers in formerly high income nations.  Hard to imagine such workers having much bargaining power if they’re competing with an army of unemployed poor people from other countries.  (Or if one is a conservative and has trouble perceiving the role of bargaining power in resolving distributional issues let’s just say it’s hard to image many workers landing good jobs at reasonable wages under those conditions.)  This is presumably where all this wall business fits in.  Again, I get the idea but I’m not sure demonizing and deporting undocumented immigrants and building a wall are really the best policies to address it.  And again I’m not sure this solution is the result of a rational discussion or just what happens when one tries to solve a problem without really talking about it directly.  You know what I mean.  We’re not talking about restricting the free movement of labor or the value of free markets in general.  We’re just talking about ejecting some bad hombres.  Anything else is just a side effect.  Wink wink.

The other approach I’ve been hearing about involves rebuilding some of our national infrastructure, which is actually something we badly need and that could also help out on the distributional front by putting some people to work doing something useful who might be unemployed or underemployed if we leave the market to its own devices.  This is a long standing liberal priority that brings to mind nothing so much as the successful policies of the New Deal in the 1930s that did so much to ameliorate the impact of the Great Depression.  But again even here I seem to detect some peculiarities.  Instead of doing something simple and sensible such as using tax revenues to pay people to rebuild infrastructure we’re apparently talking about some complicated program designed to change the incentives for other people to do it or something like that.  Again I wouldn’t be as concerned if I thought we had sat down and discussed it and decided this approach works best but I can’t help but wonder if the reason they’ve hit on this approach has more to do with ideological blinders and image than with economics.  How we can use government to fix a problem but maintain the fiction we don’t need government and market forces are doing it all?  Have government do something behind the scenes to change market incentives and then laud private business for responding to those incentives.  Is that honestly the best and cheapest way to get this done or are we basically footing the bill for conservatives to preserve their ideology?

Finally it’s unfortunate the new breed of conservative has managed to combine important elements of the liberal agenda like addressing some of the distributional issues associated with free markets and paying attention to public goods including rebuilding infrastructure with traditional conservative concerns like disregard for the environment; oppression of minorities be they racial, religious, or sexual; union busting; bellicose militarism; and the endorsement of policies designed to enhance the wealth and power of the economic elite (for example weakening the progressive income tax, reducing the social safety net, eliminating the estate tax, etc.)  Equally unfortunate is that the man they’ve chosen to implement these ideas is so unattractive and disreputable along so many dimensions and being one of the one-percenters who has prospered under our current arrangements has such strong incentives to not rock the boat or at least to be very careful how he rocks it.  Even if one accepts the possibility the clown administration may actually attempt to address some of these long-standing liberal concerns in its own twisted way it seems quite possible to me what it gives with one hand it may take back with the other.  Hard to see how it will all play out in the end.  Will the situation of struggling American workers actually improve or will the only people whose situation improves in the long run turn out to be President-elect Trump and certain other members of the ruling class?  Were workers played for chumps by rich people eager to gain political power to purse their conservative social agenda and further their own economic interests or do some member of the economic elite honestly have the best interests of struggling American workers in mind?  I suppose only time will tell.  But at least some issues are on the table now that formerly were not.  That must be a sort of progress don’t you think?  We can all be thankful for that.

References

A Jolt of Blue-Collar Hope.  David Leonhardt.  The New York Times.  November 22, 2016.  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/opinion/a-jolt-of-blue-collar-hope.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region.

Thursday, November 10, 2016

Trump Schlongs America

Welcome friends!

Damn.  I was really looking forward to taking a long hot shower to wash away the filth of the seemingly endless presidential campaign season and lo and behold it looks like we’re destined to suffer through at least another four years of ugliness, self serving lies, egotistical boasting, insults, bullying, pouting, pussy grabbing, bigotry, misogyny, unbridled greed, and ignorant inane bullshit of every description.  No, I’m not talking about the scary drug addled old hobo who hangs out behind the convenience store.  I’m talking about the president-elect of the USA.  It’s a new thing.  Never really had anyone like that in the Oval Office before.  Trumpkins must be celebrating at Klan rallies and Neo-Nazi hoe-downs in small towns and farming communities all across the country.  Well, I suppose I might as well put off bathing for the next several years.  When our unfolding national nightmare finally ends in four or possibly eight years I’ll head off to a nice health spa for a months long regimen of cleansing and detoxification.  Too bad we can’t so easily wash away the stain on our national history.  George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and now … drumroll please …. Donald Trump!  No soap in the world can remove that unsightly blemish from our list of presidents.  Nope.  It’s there forever or at least as long as they keep records of such things.  Well, maybe it serves us right.  I think some of us had begun developing a certain degree of optimism about the future.  Impatient at the rate of change perhaps but confident we were inching in the right direction.  Perhaps it’s for the best in the long run we’re reminded now what a comically backward self destructive fascistic banana republic much of our population wishes fervently to create.  I was looking forward to the election cycle ending so I could get back to discussing some other things but now it’s ended I’m too depressed and sick at heart to talk about much beyond the impending national calamity about to overtake us so let’s just take a few minutes to mourn together.

Was I being overly dramatic just then?  How bad can it be really?  I guess that was a silly question.  It can be very bad.  Very very bad.  If President-elect Clown manages to deliver on even a small fraction of the idiotic claptrap he’s been peddling the past several months or in many cases years we’re well and truly screwed... 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 3, 2016

Domestic Terrorism Takes Root in Oregon

Welcome friends!

Looks like the race for the presidency is really heating up, right?  Who could have predicted the head of the FBI would try to play king maker and jump in at the last minute with a breathless albeit vague declaration that a few weeks back his agency found some emails that seem to have some connection with Hilary Clinton?  Will it turn out to be “bigger than Watergate” as Trumpo triumphantly proclaimed?  Or will it be nothing at all?  Hey, your guess is as good as mine.  The funny thing is it doesn’t matter; we’ll only know after the election.  The real news here is not the emails but the news or pseudo-news about the emails.  Anyway, now that FBI has entered the fray it seems we have a real horse race on our hands.  Will we get a corrupt lying incompetent buffoon or a Nasty Bitch?  Sorry, I meant Nasty Woman just then.  Speaking in the vernacular.  They both have pros and cons.  The buffoon might be entertaining but potentially horribly destructive and embarrassing.  The Nasty Woman might know what she’s doing but she’s so uppity and cold.  I can feel myself shriveling up as I write.  Tough call.  I remember watching the Three Stooges as a child so I do appreciate buffoonery.  I can picture the scene.  President Trumpo the Clown shows up at a fancy schmancy diplomatic event at the White House with a bunch of foreign eggheads and politically correct milquetoasts.  Some elegant older lady, let’s say a 2 or 3, asks him if they will serve canapés.  Trumpo declares confidently, “Why soitanly!” and slips into the kitchen to heat up a can of peas.  He emerges with a bowl of warm peas only to slip on a banana peel and fall into a dignified foreign duchess small hands grasping at her crotch.  Outraged she picks up a cream pie from the sideboard and throws it at him but he ducks and it hits a smirking Mike Pence who proclaims loudly, “That never happened!”  I’m telling you every day will be hilarious!  We’ll never know what manner of lunacy might happen next.  Will the government default on its debt?  Will we have another Great Depression?  Will we lose our jobs, our savings, our houses?  Will we have health insurance?  Will we have nuclear war?  Will we dissolve Congress and do away with democracy?  Will we have race war?  Will we have a war of religion?  Will we construct a Great Wall around the continental USA?  Seriously, I think we might die laughing during the next few years.  Hey, there are worse ways to go.  And what if it’s the Nasty Bitch?  Well, I guess we’ll survive well enough so that’s the good side but just imagine the damage to the egos of all those dimwitted older rural white men out there.  Oh won’t someone think of the childish?  The emails, the emails!  Well, let’s wait a week and see how it all plays out before getting too worked up shall we?  With a little luck everything might still turn out OK.  No, what I wanted to talk about this week was not the impending election but something that strikes me as every bit as ominous in its own way: the recent acquittal of a band of armed domestic terrorists by a sympathetic or perhaps just craven jury right here in the good old USA.  Did you ever wonder how those swarthy foreign countries end up with roving bands of armed lunatics they seem entirely incapable of doing anything about?  Well, wonder no more.  It’s basically the same reason we apparently intend to allow bands of armed lunatics to operate freely here in the USA.  The people demand it.  So nice when mysteries like that are solved isn’t it?

Yes, the story I’m discussing this week involves that armed “militia” that took over a federal building in rural Oregon a while back... 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 20, 2016

Conservatives Attempt to Undermine American Democracy

Welcome friends!

I suspect I might have only a few weeks left to discuss one of the most illuminating political movements in recent years: the attempt by elements within the conservative Republican Party to install lying egoist billionaire playboy Donald Trump as president of the USA.  Looks like it’s not going to pan out of course and I never really thought it would but that’s not the interesting bit.  The interesting bit is they’ve gotten nearly half the country to go along with their little scheme.  It’s really quite remarkable and something that as a younger man I would have confidently predicted could never happen.  In my youth conservatives were always banging on about their values as though they and only they had them.  Makes me laugh now.  I guess we didn’t realize the values they were talking about were things like pussy grabbing, telling outrageous lies, insulting people, and making a quick buck.  Well, making a quick buck maybe.  I suppose we all suspected that was one of the primary values they had in mind.  But I guess we didn’t know it was the be-all and end-all.  Apparently the conservative position is if one makes a buck one can do and say whatever one likes.  Yes, the rich are very special people.  One doesn’t want them to shrug and let the whole world slip from off their shoulders.  That would be like some kind of Greek tragedy.  By the way, I suppose I should clarify that when I mention conservatives in this post I’m talking about the mainstream conservatives of today.  Trumpkins.  People who live mostly in the sparsely populated central regions of the nation.  I know there are still a certain number of more reputable and high minded people who rather confusedly also want to call themselves conservatives and have been doing whatever they can to shut Mr. Trump down.  Those are the people I consider the honorable opposition.  We may disagree on many or I suppose just about all values and facts but at least we agree on a few things such as talking and acting like reasonable adults, speaking honestly and plainly, trying sincerely to straighten things out.  I miss the days when such people were in charge of the conservative movement in this country.  It was a lot more fun to engage the “enemy” on the field of ideas like gentlepeople than to engage them on the streets of Crazy Town as we do today.  Didn’t think much of it at the time but I guess everything is relative.

Speaking of things that are now apparently acceptable but never were formerly how about Trumpo the Clown’s contention that the election has been rigged?  Well, I guess that only applies if he loses.  He’s said if he wins the election he considers that evidence it was above board but if he loses that shows it must have been rigged.  Funny sort of proposition isn’t it?  Something not quite scientific going on there... 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, October 7, 2016

Singapore Conservatives Repudiate Free Speech

Welcome friends!

I read a recent news item on current events in Singapore and it occurred to me I’ve been so preoccupied with the comic stylings of Trumpo the Clown I’ve been neglecting the obnoxious antics of conservatives in other parts of the world.  Let’s take a quick look this week at what some foreign idiots have been up to recently shall we?  The story that caught my eye involved government authorities in Singapore tossing a seventeen year old kid named Amos Yee in jail on the charge of posting online videos and comments critical of Christianity and Islam.  Yes, it seems they determined such criticism might prove more than their feeble minded compatriots can handle.  Technically they found the kid guilty of “wounding religious feelings” and noted by way of explanation his unwelcome brain activity could “generate social unrest.”  Apparently it’s Mr. Yee’s second jail term in as many years.  The government of Singapore just can’t get the kid to shut up.  He was previously booked into Hotel Singapore on the charge of insulting a former ruler of the place.  Don’t you just love and respect countries like that?  I shudder to think what might have happened had he insulted the current ruler.  I’m having a mental image of some martial arts nut whacking his bottom with a great bamboo pole or something like that.  Wait, did that happen to some other kid?  Can’t remember.  But someone was beating someone, that’s for sure.  Anyway, that’s one brave kid, right?  He certainly deserves the respect of liberals and humanists everywhere.

Social conservatives are always trying to pull something like this aren’t they?  Clearly they believe their noxious claptrap can only flourish if no one is allowed to discuss or criticize it and you know I think they might be on to something... 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!

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

The Government Made Me Do It

Welcome friends!

I read an interesting article the other day about what I think must be one of the central mysteries of our time.  Why are undereducated underemployed economically struggling older rural while people so attracted to spoiled self-obsessed fabulously wealthy jet setting big city liar and all around shyster Donald Trump?  Talk about your strange bedfellows.  I know a lot has been made of Trump’s efforts to tap into every low sentiment one can find in small town America: racism, nationalism, nativism, religious intolerance, misogyny, hatred of sexual minorities, and so on.  I get that part.  He has clearly tapped into a previously unused political resource.  But it’s not like he’s some kind of political genius.  We all knew such deploring sentiments were out there.  It’s just that no one else was sufficiently disreputable to go there.  But is there something else this segment of conservatives finds appealing about the man?  Something a bit more positive perhaps?  Something people who don’t live in Oklahoma or Texas or other such places might hope to understand?  Well, much to my surprise I’m starting to think there may be.

The article I was reading discussed an apparently common attitude among such people that the US government is the source of all that ails them.  Yes indeed.  They don’t attribute their financial difficulties on anything you and I might think about: technology, industrial organization, trade, demand, unemployment, commodity bubbles, and so on... 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 8, 2016

Profiling and the Ethics of the “Free Market”

Welcome friends!

I was just reading an article on what sounds like a rather interesting book with the whimsical title Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O’Neil.  It got me thinking not only about racial profiling but also and more generally about the ethics of unregulated markets so I thought I’d say a few words about that this week.  I suppose I may be neglecting the antics and inanities of conservative presidential candidate Trumpo the Clown, who apparently is now tied with Hilary Clinton in the polls.  Remarkable in a way but just nothing very interesting.  I suppose it’s entertaining in the way reality TV is entertaining but it certainly presents one with precious little to think about.  It’s not like the man represents anything in particular.  He doesn’t really have a serious platform as far as I can tell.  Just some things he sometimes says and sometimes denies plus a lot of pouting and posturing.  Actually I suppose it’s more like a cheap horror movie.  I see stupid people.  Wait, that was actually a pretty good movie.  Well, you get the idea.  How about this one?  Only two things scare me!  One is nuclear war.  What’s the other you ask?  Stupid people!

Anyway getting back to my topic for today the subject of Ms. O’Neil’s book is the way certain formal or informal mathematical algorithms and models can have a rather large effect on one’s life even though one may not realize they even exist or know how they work or might find their use morally repugnant.  She’s talking about things like the models some banks use to set rates for loans that often include all manner of considerations such as one’s neighborhood, the models some employers use to determine suitable candidates for promotion based on personality tests and various other quantifiable characteristics, and the models some judicial systems apparently use to determine appropriate prison sentencing based on various characteristics of convicted perpetrators including not only prior convictions and previous police encounters but again their neighborhoods and the criminal records of family and friends.  Ms. O’Neil finds these common uses of statistical algorithms and models unfair and believes they perpetuate poverty along racial lines because they stack the deck against people living in certain neighborhoods.  Of course, she notes these algorithms can theoretically be used for good as well as bad so we can’t really fault mathematics or model building in general.  No, the problem lies in how we choose to use them. Basically the same situation we have with technology and other artifacts of human ingenuity.  We might have a hundred hate filled carnivals of stupidity in the conservative blogosphere but then we have my own blog in the liberal blogosphere like a shining beacon of light in the darkness.  The problem isn’t the existence of blogs; it’s what we make of them.

What we’re talking about here seems to me to be simply another form of the “profiling” we discussed previously in a law enforcement context.  (See my post Race and Bad Cops from July 14, 2016.)  The fascinating thing about this issue to me is that as Ms. O’Neil points out the issue is not that the statistical inferences are wrong.  I assume they’re probably true.  If for example we’re just talking about banks making up numbers and willy nilly charging people in some neighborhoods unnecessarily high rates for their loans one wonders why some other banks or other financial institutions don’t find it worthwhile to enter those markets and undercut those banks.  The interesting issues occur when the inferences are spot on but we just don’t like when people use them.

Now I should say having had the good sense to be born with a suitably pale complexion and having never travelled to the Dark Continent or spent much time in the various other darker hued portions of the world I’ve never really faced racial profiling per se but I’ve certainly faced the general concept in other contexts.   One example off the top of my head is that I recall as a young man who had finally attained whatever the age of majority was at that time, 18 years I suppose, I was legally entitled to enjoy a nice beer with my pizza but after a year or two of gastronomic bliss some policy wonk discovered adults of my age were statistically more likely to be involved in alcohol related car accidents than were older people and I was unceremoniously dumped back into the category of underage drinker.  Had there been a  problem with my drinking and driving in particular?  No, not at all.  The problem was I had something in common with some people who did, specifically that we shared the same age, and I paid the legal price for that unfortunate chronological affinity.  It was profiling of course but in a guise that passed largely without comment in the social discourse of the time.  And the interesting thing is without a crystal ball or some other special technology to assess my individual drinking and driving habits the statistical inferences were assuredly correct.  Based solely on my age I’m sure I was more likely to have been involved in an alcohol related accident than some other people.  I’m sure I can find similar arguments that could be used against me today but I suppose that’s one of the benefits of age.  Try that sort of thing on me now and one might just find oneself falling into the very same category one day.  You know, I’m sure everyone is better off not drinking but if we’re going to start prohibiting people from doing things I’d much rather it was you than me.

So if the statistical inferences are correct what’s the problem with profiling anyway?  Well, the problem is clearly it contradicts the common ethical principles of individual responsibility and innocent until proven guilty.  As a young man I didn’t appreciate losing my ability to have a glass of beer because some other young idiot drove his or her car into a tree.  Along similar lines I doubt any of us feel very comfortable penalizing someone who scrupulously pays his or her bills on time because he or she has the misfortune of living in a neighborhood with a bunch of deadbeats.  The information may be fine.  The statistics may be correct.  We just don’t like using information that way.  I basically feel about profiling the same as I did when I wrote about it in a law enforcement context.  Haven’t changed my opinion at all.  I have no problem with profiling per se if what we’re talking about is using whatever information we have to stop crime.  The police should pay more attention to people who are statistically more likely to commit crimes for whatever reason.  However, that doesn’t extend to police actions that negatively affect innocent people who fall into that category.  I don’t support police stopping people or harassing people or behaving in any way differently toward people based on their statistical likelihood of being a criminal.  Innocent until proven guilty.  That’s my motto.  But if you want to investigate a robbery it probably makes sense to start with the unemployed young man with the gun in his car before moving on to grandpa sitting on the porch swing reading the evening news.  We can’t banish common sense but we can prohibit treating people like criminals when we know they might not be and in fact most likely are not.

This time out since we’re discussing these issues in an economic context as well it occurs to me the business about the loan rates illustrates a general point I’ve tried to make about so-called free markets in many other contexts.  Markets do what they do.  If there’s information relevant to making a buck then businesses in an unregulated market will use it.  Normally that’s fine but in some funny cases like the one we’re discussing right now it’s not.  Markets aren’t magic.  There’s no invisible hand making everything come out right.  If one doesn’t see any ethical issues with what’s happening in a particular market then great; no need to do anything.  If one does see some ethical issues then one will want to get in there and regulate or do something to make it come out in a way one finds more ethically appealing.  It’s the same general sort of issue I usually discuss in the context of distributional issues.  The market will certainly distribute good and services.  Don’t worry about that.  But what matters for the market doesn’t necessarily correspond or anyway fully correspond to what one may feel ought to matter.  I guess my point is only a fool bases one’s ethics on what happens in a market rather than assessing what happens in a market using one’s ethics.  I know we all have different ethical opinions and so on but can we at least agree we’re going to discuss ethics and not get sidetracked into supposing the issue involves some technical aspect of economic theory?  How about this plan?  Why don’t you jot down what you find ethically appealing or repugnant as the case may be about how our labor market and other relevant markets such as the stock market and so on distribute wealth in this country?  I’ll do the same and discuss it in a future post.  We can compare notes.  It’ll be fun.  Let’s see how far apart we really are on these issues.  Plus I won’t have to talk about why economic theory is not a suitable basis for a coherent theory of social ethics yet again.  Happy days!

References

Math is racist: How data is driving inequality.  Aimee Rawlins.  CNN Money.  September 6, 2016.  http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/06/technology/weapons-of-math-destruction/index.html?iid=TL_Popular.

Thursday, August 25, 2016

The Museum of African American History and Culture

Welcome friends!

I was just reading a little news item on the imminent opening of the new Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC.  Have you seen pictures of it?  Interesting and attractive building if a bit somber in color for my tastes.  Anyway, it got me thinking a bit about ancestors and “race” and so on so I thought I might as well say a few more words about that this week.  

The first thought that crossed my mind was that “African American” is only one sort of American among many so can we expect to see similar museums for the other sorts as well?  I guess we already have a museum on the national mall for “Native Americans” so they’re covered.  What about “European Americans?”  I know we have a generic museum of American History but that’s supposed to cover everyone, right?  Actually I’m not sure all  “European Americans” had the same sort of experience.  My understanding of the bad old days is that some European immigrants faced a heck of a lot more difficult time than some others.  I’m thinking just now of the Irish and then later the Italian immigrants but probably others as well.  Indeed, I think for some time the USA had special restrictions on immigrants coming from the swarthier and less Protestant parts of Europe.  Are we going to now just lump all “European Americans” together or should we have separate museums for “Irish Americans,” “Italian Americans” and all the various other European subgroups?  How about “Hispanic Americans?”  They were here as long as anyone else or I guess in some parts of the country were actually here first.  How about “Asian Americans?”  We have a couple of very nice museums devoted to Asian art and culture but none specifically relating to the “Asian American” experience that I know about. And you know early “Asian Americans” in particular faced a lot of discrimination.  We had plenty of Chinese immigrants working on our early transportation infrastructure who I’m sure faced all manner of bigotry and commentary relating to their foreign ways when they first arrived.  And it’s no secret the US government rounded up “Japanese Americans” during WWII and sent them to internment camps in the desert just in case they had sabotage on their minds.  Didn’t round up any “German Americans,” “Italian Americans,” or “Spanish Americans” that I know about.  Weird.  Anyway, this line of thinking got me wondering whether there was something special about “African Americans” that made a museum to their history and culture more appropriate or anyway more urgent than museums devoted to the history and culture of some of these other groups.  After the requisite ten minutes of thinking I decided yeah probably.  If we’re going to start devoting museums to subgroups of US citizens African Americans seems an appropriate group to follow Native Americans, who must surely take pride of place as the group most adversely affected and maligned by the creation of our nation.  So let me talk about that for a few minutes.  Then I’ll say a few words about my use or I guess overuse of quotation marks and explain why I think we should be a little careful how we talk about subgroups and race and ancestry and history and culture and all that stuff.

So what makes “African Americans” so special?  ... 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, August 12, 2016

The Conservative Embrace of Nonsense

Welcome friends!

I was just reading another article that brought to mind the curious love affair some conservatives seem to be having with utter nonsense.  It’s getting rather comical.   Indeed, I suspect Mr. Trump’s main credential as a conservative must be that he peddles unadulterated poppycock.  I think conservatives have confined themselves to talking nonsense for so long they’ve developed a positive taste for it or if they still don’t like it at some level at least can no longer detect it.  Hey, it happens.  Like eating salt.  What tastes salty?  Whatever is slightly saltier than the last thing one ate.  If the last thing was a potato chip you’re in trouble.  Same thing with nonsense.  How idiotic does Trump have to sound before conservatives notice and begin to have reservations?  Apparently pretty damned idiotic indeed.  What is all this pre-Trump nonsense I’m talking about?  Well, I discussed last time the curious notion that having a so-called free market will solve all our economic woes and in particular ensure a fair and equitable distribution of resources.  Don’t know where they got that from but they’ve been saying that for decades.  They may have been saying that since Victorian times.  Nothing that happens in the world and no developments in the field of economics seem capable of changing that conviction.  The article that got me going this week addressed a slightly different but just as long lived conservative talking point: the importance of cutting taxes and shrinking government.  The article simply pointed out there is no real empirical evidence for this idea.  Indeed, countries with faster growing economies tend to have somewhat higher taxes and larger governments.  Of course as the article pointed out this might be because people in countries that are doing well simply have higher expectations with respect to their governments dealing with social issues.  Countries are not necessarily growing faster because they have high taxes and large governments.  The point is simply the data show in the real world higher economic growth rates tend to go along with higher taxes and larger governments for one reason or another.  Given this state of affairs one wonders why conservatives are so adamant about this particular policy prescription.  Indeed, after listening to them talk about this idea for decades I rather suspect it’s the only policy idea they really have.  At least they seem to trot it out no matter what is actually happening in the world.  Did Wall Street generate a stock market crash that threatened the economy?  We need to lower taxes and shrink government.  Is most of the wealth going to a small group of people at the top?  We need to lower taxes and shrink government.  Do we have a bunch of unemployed poor people with guns shooting one another and random other people as well?  We need to lower taxes and shrink government.  Kind of like the old snake oil one could find at the local agricultural fair.  Good for whatever ails you.

But of course the great underlying question is why are conservatives drawn to this sort of thing?  Why don’t they seem to care about facts? ... 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 28, 2016

The Great Conservative Non-Debate on Distributional Issues: Free Markets At Home And Abroad

Welcome friends!

A couple of posts ago I was talking about Brexit and I mentioned I noticed something a bit odd about how conservatism reared its ugly head in that context so I thought I’d take another look at that this week.  If you read my blog at all you’ll know I’m always interested in sorting the odd bits.  I don’t really have the time or inclination to do any intellectual heavy lifting in my little blog.  I mentioned I have a day job, right?  But I consider clearing up this sort of confusion whenever I can my humble contribution to the common good; my way of helping those who want to think seriously about real issues.  And believe me in our culture those people need all the help they can get.  The prevailing mode of discourse here in the USA and I suppose other western democracies tends toward a combination of one-sided advocacy derived I suppose from our adversarial judicial system and idiotic infomercial-style political marketing designed to manipulate people into doing things.  To state the obvious this mode of discourse is not at all addressed to clearing up confusion.  Indeed, if the various proponents of this mode of discourse feel confusion might help them get what they want then confusion is what they will peddle.  Seems quite often the case from what I can tell.  Well, OK, I suppose addressing the confusing bits helps me as well.  I’m not just doing it for other people.  My brain just feels better when it’s not tied up in knots.  Always sets me a little on edge when someone says something that doesn’t really make sense and everyone else carries on as though nothing happened.  That’s usually when people start talking past one another, which is something that always annoys the hell out of me.  I mean really what’s the point?  There’s already too much meaningless noise in the world.  Let’s not add to it.  If you suddenly find you no longer understand what the other fellow is talking about don’t get angry and start insulting people like some conservative hothead, just back it on up until you figure out what happened.  Probably just a bit of confusion involving some ambiguous language or something like that.  But people are so impatient these days.  I know our time in this world is limited but isn’t it better to clear up one little issue at a time so those who come after us have something solid to build upon than to tell the tale of all humanity only to find out we got a little mixed up on page one and someone else has to do the whole thing over again?  Show a little humility for goodness sake.  Case in point.  Conservatives and distributional issues.  What’s their position?  Clear as mud.  Doesn’t stop them foaming at the mouth about it, does it?  Let’s see if we can shed a little light on the subject.

First let me just say the conservatives I’m talking about this week are economic conservatives so if happen to just say just conservatives later on keep that in mind.  I’ll think a bit about social conservatives and distributional issues another day but you know I think social conservatives are generally more concerned with other issues like forcing other people to follow their religious precepts and getting one over on minorities and bashing gay people and fretting about immigrants for cultural as opposed to economic reasons and so on.  As far as distributional issues go they’re probably fine with whatever they think we have now or had before depending I suppose on how well they’re doing.  No, when it comes to distributional issues economic conservatives are the more interesting case to me because they typically profess to have some substantive views on the subject although usually it turns out they don't or at least none they’re willing to share.

Now when one thinks about economic conservatives and distributional issues the preeminent intellectual construct that comes to mind must be the so-called “free market.”  I say so-called because I suppose what most conservatives have in mind when they talk about the free market is the model of a perfectly competitive market from the neoclassical economic theory they most likely vaguely remember from their freshmen year in college.  My impression is people who think more seriously about such things, such as most but by no means all economists, consider the term “the free market” hopelessly vague, anachronistic, and politicized.  Real markets can have all sorts of characteristics that cause them to diverge more or less dramatically from the theoretical model of a perfectly competitive market so the question of what really happens when one doesn’t regulate real markets, which I suppose must be one common interpretation of the word “free” in the phrase “the free market,” is very much an open question.  Nor is it the case that left to their own devices most real world markets will tend over time toward the perfectly competitive end of the spectrum.  Nor are such markets “free” in the sense they allow everyone to do whatever he or she wants.  One still needs property rights and contracts and cops and prisons and so on.  I suppose one could say one is free to do whatever one is allowed to do under that system but then again I suppose one can say that about any distributional system.  Indeed, I suppose it must be the case some people at the bottom of the wealth spectrum would experience more practical economic freedom under a different sort of distributional system.  Other people too maybe.  (If you like to think about such things you may want to glance at my musings on some of the more ambiguous elements of the concept of freedom in my posts Freedom I and II from November 1 and 28, 2013, respectively.)  Let me put in this way.  In my rather too many years of graduate study in economics I don’t really recall hearing anyone use the phrase “the free market.”  I’ll go ahead and use it here to keep the authentic flavor of conservative discourse.  Just keep in mind that what I’m actually referring to and what I think economic conservatives are actually referring is the theoretical model of a perfectly competitive market from neoclassical economic theory.  We can just assume for purposes of this discussion that model is a close enough approximation to enough real world markets we can just discuss that model and “the free market” interchangeably.  (Just to be clear, I don’t actually think that’s the case at all but I’m not sure it matters for what I’m trying to say this week so let’s play a little game of the imagination and say we can to keep things moving.)

So, as I was saying, most of the relatively serious economic conservatives I’ve met believe all distributional issues will be adequately addressed as long as we have a free market including of course that important and rather distinctive portion of the market governing labor.  My impression has long been these people believe under the conditions discussed in the neoclassical model of perfect competition everyone will get what he or she deserves.  Those who should be rich will be rich, those who should be poor will be poor, and those old hobos who should starve to death in the woods will starve to death in the woods.  If we have a free market then all will be right with the world as far as distributional issues go anyway.  My understanding is most conservatives believe any further discussion of distributional issues would place one firmly in the despised (by them) “socialist” camp with the moochers and takers who are trying to upset the natural order of things and get something other than what they really deserve.

However, although I’ve found pretty much all economic conservatives profess to base their ethical thinking about distributional matters on neoclassical economic theory I’m not sure they’re all on the same page about how that is actually meant to work.  One must keep in mind academic economists have long given up pretending they have a coherent ethical theory about distributional issues and how such issues relate to the model of perfectly competitive markets.  Indeed, the branch of economic theory dealing with such matters, so-called welfare economics, has eschewed such overt ethical arguments since at least the middle of the last century.  However, I think it’s fair to suppose many economic conservatives never got the memo.   As I’ve pointed out in a number of other posts modern welfare economics takes an entirely different approach to supporting policies designed to produce and maintain “the free market” that purports to imply nothing about the ethics of distributional systems including those associated with a free market for labor.  Of course some confused people (including some confused economists) believe they can use neoclassical economic theory to establish the ethical superiority of “the free market” based solely on what they call “efficiency” in the context of the model of a perfectly competitive market (not to be confused with the “efficiency” you and I use in everyday speech) and setting aside distributional issues entirely, which they suggest we can handle as a second step some old way or other later on.  Doesn’t really work of course, as I’ve also pointed out in many previous points.  If distributional issues matter, which of course they do, they render it impossible to say anything definitive about the desirability of any given free market / perfectly competitive market outcome using modern welfare economics because any given free market outcome will necessarily come bundled with a distribution.  Free market outcomes with no associated distributions are theoretical constructs that exist and can only exist on paper.  It’s true neoclassical economic theory demonstrates if one has no unresolved distributional issues then a perfectly competitive market looks pretty good but that’s not the same thing at all.  And of course fixing a distribution once one is in place without “interfering” with “the free market” for either products or labor is basically a logically impossible task.  The result of this confusion is that some economic conservatives support the distributional system associated with “the free market” in exactly the same way as their nineteenth century predecessors.  The only difference is that because they profess to have not taken up the ethical issues associated with the distribution of economic power they can’t be bothered to explain their reasoning to anyone, which has the convenient attribute for conservatives that no one is in a position to refute them or even engage them in conversation on the topic.  It’s an intellectual sleight of hand I’ve discussed in many other posts so I won’t go into it again here.  My point is it’s not serious stuff for serious people.  Just a little mind game some conservatives have long been satisfied to play amongst themselves.

In the domestic context most conservatives have long believed if one is not getting what one thinks one should be getting the problem cannot involve the free market itself since that always leads to socially optimal outcomes but from someone interfering with the free market.  Indeed, I read an article just the other day that discussed a recent poll that estimated seventy-one percent of US citizens feel the economy is “rigged.”  The language is noteworthy because instead of attributing their economic woes to the essential dynamics of our free-ish market system and thinking of serious solutions the idea the economy is rigged leads them to suppose the solution lies with a purer form of the free market that will eliminate the rigging.  I get the idea.  If only we could get the free market free enough then everyone would finally get what they truly deserve.  But why do people think that?  I don’t know.  It’s certainly not in modern economic theory as I just explained.  I know.  I’ve looked.  Surely it can’t be from a study of history.  When we actually had a purer form of the free market back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries we had all manner of labor unrest and lots of people who certainly didn’t feel they were getting what they should be getting.  So I don’t know.  And how exactly do these people think the economy is being “rigged” anyway.  I mean rich people rule market systems.  That’s the nature of the beast.  They can start businesses, they can take chances, they can invest in stocks, they can relocate and retrain and switch field and whatever the hell they want to do, they can buy what they want, they can live where they want, they can contribute to politicians to get their way, and they can buy and manipulate the media or a good portion of it anyway.  Is that what people mean when they say the economy is rigged?  Because a purer form of the free market would not prevent any of those things happening.  Nor does the free market have any internal mechanism to address things like producing enough jobs to go around or generating fair wages or keeping a lid on unjustified inequality or anything like that.  It might do that under some conditions.  Might not under others.  Indeed, increasing concentration of wealth in a select few and the corresponding impoverishment of the majority is perfectly consistent with a free market under certain conditions relating to the initial distribution, technology of production, and labor and product market characteristics.  So why this unshakable conviction on the part of conservatives that the tantalizing but apparently never fully attainable free market will solve all economic issues?  If you ask me it’s because we don’t talk seriously about such matters and people cling to what they think they know even when what they think they know has no real basis in either fact or theory.

However, and this is the interesting bit to me and the part I really wanted to talk about this week, Brexit in the UK and the remarkable popularity of the comic stylings of Trumpo the Clown here in the USA have demonstrated the existence of a rather large group of nominally economic conservatives who profess to relate their thinking on distributional issues to free market ideology in a domestic context but rather confusingly not in an international context.  These conservatives are more than happy to call anyone who talks about distributional issues relating to market systems in a domestic context socialists or communists but they themselves oppose the free market in the form of free trade deals and the free movement of labor or jobs in an international context based on what would appear to be distributional concerns.  It doesn’t really make sense to do both of these things at the same time, which I suppose must be what annoys the hell out of the first group of economic conservatives who take their market worshipping seriously or at least want to use that as their story.  Indeed, I don’t really know what to make of this new group myself.  They don’t seem to fit cleanly into any of my previously delineated categories.  Not even sure what to call them.  Given their apparent domination of the conservative Republican Party here in the US should we think of them as the real economic conservatives and consider the group who talks up the free market as a panacea for all that ails us a bunch of out-of-touch or perhaps intellectually dishonest windbags?  Or are the logically consistent market worshippers the real economic conservatives and the group that supports free markets in a domestic context but opposes them in an international context a bunch of populist wooly headed know nothing pseudo-conservatives?  I don’t know but they all sound like conservatives of one sort or another to me.  I think what’s going on with this new group of conservatives is they’re paying attention to their self interest and are convinced people talking about distributional concerns relating to the free market in a domestic context implies domestic poor people picking their pockets and taking their jobs while conversely people not talking about distributional concerns relating to the free market in an international context means foreign poor people picking their pockets and taking their jobs.  One infers these people are not expressing their distributional views honestly, similar to what I suspect other conservatives are doing but even more obviously and egregiously.  I get that they feel they deserve better paying jobs and more money but why exactly?

Basically the distributional effects of implementing free market ideology in the international context has split the conservative intellectual elite if one wants to think of them in those terms of business tycoons, rich people, old school Republican Party elites, certain academics and amateur social philosophers from their more plebeian supporters who apparently never really gave a second thought to what the first group was actually saying but were convinced they would come out ahead if they went along with whatever it was.  The conservative elite has continued on with their same old story but it has apparently finally dawned on their rank and file supporters that at least as far as importing cheap labor and moving manufacturing overseas they’re getting screwed.  I suppose it’s mostly a positive development.  A little more thinking and it might dawn on these people the free market solves everything story isn’t as strong as they’ve been led to believe even in a domestic context and for the same reason: distributional issues matter.  We’ll all be liberals at that point and we can move on to actually solving some things.  Of course in the short term we have to put up with the awkward growing pains of this portion of the conservative base in the form of characters like Trumpo the Clown belching out an incoherent mishmash of contradictory ideas no reasonable person can decipher.  But how much damage can the guy really do in four years?  Oh.  A lot?   Well never mind; life goes on.  Two steps forward and one step back.  That’s the way of the world.

We liberals also have our share of disagreements but we don’t really have this particular problem because in general we’re just willing to talk about distributional issues a lot more openly and honestly than are most economic conservatives.  We know distributional issues matter.  I say it all the time.  We know simply having a market system doesn’t necessarily address all distributional issues.  I say it all the time   We know talking about things like freedom and liberty is a red herring if we’re really talking about distributional issues and resolving interpersonal conflicts of needs and desires.  I say it all the time.  We’re not surprised at all some conservatives have thoughts on distributional issues that aren’t captured in free market ideology.  How could it be otherwise when the whole argument ostensibly relating the two is nothing but an intellectual sham?  We should sit down and discuss distributional issues some time.  No, it’s not class warfare.  Ignorance never solves anything.  It might hold something at bay for a little while but that’s not the same thing at all.  If only the conservative elite would give up their program of obfuscation and misdirection and start talking seriously about such matters we might actually get somewhere.  You’d think they’d start doing that now to close ranks if for no other reason but maybe their shared hatred of liberals and humanists will be enough to keep them together for now.  Who knows?  Only time will tell.  Here’s a happy thought.  If the conservative Republican Party loses yet another presidential election here in the USA maybe future conservatives will be more willing to discuss distributional matters openly and honestly.  Wouldn’t that be a breath of fresh air?  Say it with me now!  I’m with her!  I mean, I sure as hell can’t be with him, can I?  Let’s not be ridiculous.

References

71% of Americans believe economy is ‘rigged.’  Heather Long.  CNN. June 28, 2016.  http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/28/news/economy/americans-believe-economy-is-rigged/index.html?iid=EL.