Democracy And Leftism

Welcome friends!

I’ve probably mentioned before but I suspect the essentially ambiguous feelings most or perhaps all American conservatives and most likely world conservatives hold toward political democracy is closely related to their apparent inability to maintain a clear and consistent definition of what they mean by “liberalism,” “leftism,” and “socialism.”  They’re two sides of the same coin.  The essential issue is that the political power arrangements generated by democracy are fundamentally inconsistent or at least potentially inconsistent with the economic power arrangements generated by our current distributional system including the labor market and inheritance laws for example.  Let’s discuss.

Political democracy as commonly conceived today with every adult having a single vote is an inherently egalitarian affair.  It distributes political power equally at the level of voting at least regardless of the voter’s wealth, credentials, or merits however specified.  One may be socially responsible or a selfish jerk, a genius or a clod, wise or foolish, rich or poor; it just doesn’t matter as far as voting goes.  Everyone gets one vote and one vote only.  Well, there may be some exceptions for people convicted of certain serious crimes or residing in prison and so on but let’s not get bogged down in details and absolutes, shall we?  For the most part our interpretation of political democracy is quite egalitarian in spirit at least when it comes to voting.

The distributional mechanisms we have in place for allocating economic power, that is to say inheritance laws, labor markets, investment markets, lotteries, and so on, are of course not similarly egalitarian in spirit or practice.  They distribute power based on various considerations some arguably under an individual’s control at least to some degree and some arguably not, and these mechanisms famously lead to very unequal results.  When it comes to economic power some people have quite a bit indeed; others don’t have much or in some cases any at all.  That’s especially the case here in the USA but it’s also true albeit to a lesser extent for other democracies having more-or-less market-based economies.  Discussions relating to the distribution of economic power here in the USA tends always to be fraught and characterized by profound and rancorous disagreements about not only value or ethical issue of what ought to be involved but factual issues relating to what is currently involved.  

There is a fundamental conflict or at least potential conflict between these two varieties of social power.  Economically powerful fat cats rule our economic system in the sense their every passing whims take precedence via their superior purchasing power in the marketplace over even life and death matters of less economically powerful people.  When it comes to productive resources going toward building a third vacation home for Mr. Moneybags or lunch for the guy under the bridge there’s no question where those resources will go.  However, when it comes to the realm of political power we don’t take the necessary steps to ensure the same results.  If left to our democratic political system with one person one vote some of the passing whims of the economic elite may go unfilled and the life and death matters of the less economically powerful, the hoi polloi if you will, may end up being addressed possibly with tax dollars from the wealthy elite.  Anger and resentment on the part of these exalted personages are all but inevitable.

Clearly I’m simplifying the situation quite a bit.  Although voting may be a one person one vote affair it’s surely no secret we’ve set up our democratic political system to include various mechanisms by which the wealthy can convert economic power to political power.  We have an in-built bias in the sense taking time out of one’s career to run for political office is largely the prerogative of people one might generally describe as at least moderately wealthy.  In 2014 for example more than half the members of Congress had a net worth of one million dollars or more, which may not seem all that much these days until one considers the median net worth of adults here in the USA is only about forty-five thousand dollars.  Thus, if one considers self-interest to play any role at all in what our politicians are up to or even if one thinks one’s perceptions of life are perforce molded in some way by one’s own life experiences then the interests of the wealthy elite must be more than proportionately represented by our elected representatives.  Of course, raising funds is a major part of any political campaign in this country and that relies very directly and heavily on catering to the wishes of the economically powerful.  Wealthy CEOs and banking and investment types also wield some degree of non-democratic political power because there is a feedback between general economic performance and the political fortunes of those in office so if those business leaders feel a candidate is not doing them right they may just put off a few investments or slow things down a bit.  Indeed, every politician here in the USA is expected to be “pro-business” or “business friendly,” which in practical terms means catering to the desires of wealthy CEOs and the other economically powerful people who make decisions for those businesses.  Political lobbying of course is also something one associates mostly with economically powerful industries and professions.  One expects lobbying efforts on behalf of let’s say relatively wealthy medical doctors to be significantly more politically potent than lobbying on behalf of fry cooks or what have you.  Moving back a step from the front lines money obviously plays a great role in convincing and cajoling potential voters into falling in line.  A great army of people have ridden the conservative money train over the years ranging from academic economists and political scientists and historians to the clown army that daily disseminates false and misleading conservative rhetoric on internet, radio, and TV.  Indeed, the entire conservative discourse involving “minimizing” government, government not “interfering” with the “free market,” “drowning government in a bathtub,” fighting so-called “activist”government, and stressing the ostensibly inherent futility and counter-productive nature of government attempts to address distributive issues in the form of helping out struggling people or indeed government attempts to address any social problem or issue at all are most reasonably seen as simply elaborate rhetorical exercises, marketing campaigns if you will, designed to support the primacy of the economic power of the wealthy elite expressed through their market power against the egalitarian democratic political power expressed through the voting power of the hoi polloi.  To put in a nutshell, in our particular formulation of political democracy money talks.  Money talks a lot.  Indeed, it can sometimes be hard for anyone else to get a word in edgewise.

The apparent ease with which the wealthy elite of the nation are able to dominate and manipulate our democracy for their own benefit is probably the main reason so many conservatives feel ambivalent about political democracy rather than actively opposed to it.  Basically, it all seems to have been working out rather well for them these past several decades.  The economic power of the wealthy elite has grown by leaps and bounds while the economic power of pretty much everyone else and in particular the so-called middle-class has stagnated.  So political democracy is not seen as an imminent threat by most conservatives but more of a perpetual annoyance and potentially serious future threat; something to be concerned about to be sure, but not the sort of thing that would cause one to fly into a panic and throw the baby out with the bathwater.   Not yet anyway.  Besides, they’ve given it a go in the past and the results have been less impressive than they might have hoped.  The wealthy elite of mid-twentieth century Germany assuredly thought they had it made in the shade when they helped install authoritarian despot Adolph Hitler to keep democracy at bay, but they underestimated his megalomania, murderous racism, war mongering, general moral depravity, and rank ineptitude on matters social, political, and military.  On the other hand, conservatives in some other nations have had rather better results.  Nominally “communist” China is a politically authoritarian state with a robust market economy very much along the lines of what elite supporters of the old German fascist movement probably had in mind.  In short, it would be a mistake to suppose conservatives have any sincere commitment to political democracy at the level of principle or value.  However, they appear to recognize that eliminating it is a dangerous game to play and one that can very easily although not necessarily end rather badly for them.  Taking everything into consideration conservatives here in the USA appear to prefer the relative stability of a democratic system as long as they can control it and use it to further their own interests and only their own interests; democracy as plutocracy if you will.

Historically, of course, conservatives were much more forward about grafting a plutocratic ethos onto political democracy.  In the early days of American democracy for example we restricted voting in most jurisdiction to male land owners of European descent (i.e., “whites”), in other words, the wealthy elite of the day.  Nor have conservatives necessarily been bashful about putting forth similar proposals today.  I don’t have any references but I do seem to recall a few years back reading about some academic economists (of course) and conservative political scientists recommending various schemes by which political voting power might be made more consistent with economic power such as combining voting with willingness and ability to pay or equivalently just giving rich people more votes than poor people.  Indeed, American conservatives’ present hero, President Donald Trump, has been openly flirting with rather blatant anti-democratic ideas by attacking our democratic institutions and separations of powers, attacking the free press, attacking higher education, lauding the Chinese model of authoritarian government combined with market based economy, and most recently making thinly veiled threats of political violence involving the army, the police, and I believe some sort of biker gang.  Don’t ask me; that’s just what I read.

Acknowledging the fundamental conflict between political democracy and our current distributional mechanisms so important to conservative economic ideology can feel awkward if like many others of my vintage one was weaned on the belief conservative economic ideology and political democracy are natural complements and as a unit opposed to the ostensibly equally natural complements of leftist state socialism or communism with anti-democratic authoritarian government.  Feels a bit odd to split the pair and discuss the anti-democratic ethos lying at the heart of conservative economic ideology, or to consider authoritarian political systems committed to market economies such as contemporary China, or indeed to take up the pros and cons of that strange beast democratic socialism.  It can take a bit of mental effort to see the earlier story was essentially incorrect and indeed misleading, which brings up an interesting question: was it all a bit of Cold War rhetoric purposefully designed to get everyone on the same page fighting International Communism, or was there some reasonable basis for honest and sincere writers and intellectuals getting the wrong end of the stick?

Historically the association of political democracy with what we now know as conservative economic ideology may have made a bit more sense than now.  For example, consider the earlier iteration of the conservative leftist split in which the role of the wealthy elite was played by the hereditary aristocracy (i.e., kings and queens, nobles, and all their various courtly hangers on).  In its heyday the aristocrats held both economic and political power and in that sense their society was in a sort of balance although whether salutary or not depended no doubt upon one’s situation.  As market economies developed the so-called commoners began to develop some economic power of their own very much upsetting the power balance of old medieval society.  The eventual move toward political democracy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, initially consisting largely of the restricted plutocratic version of democracy I just mentioned, was very much addressed to bringing the political power of these financially successful commoners more into line with their newfound economic powerful against the traditional and hereditary political and economic power of the old land-owning elite of the ancient feudal order.  So, yes, at that moment political democracy was aligned with the development of the market economies that feature so significantly in conservative economic ideology albeit typically in misleading or incorrect ways.  

However, that was clearly by no means an essential relationship.  Already by the nineteenth century and especially now in the twenty-first century the conservative versus leftist split is largely a struggle between the wealthy elite of existing market economies playing the role formerly played by the old aristocratic elite and wielding both political and economic power facing off against the hoi polloi playing the role formerly played by the commoners with the twist that rather than the conflict being triggered by the hoi polloi obtaining some measure of economic power without commensurate political power our current conflict has been triggered by just the opposite: the hoi polloi have some measure of political power without commensurate economic power.  As a result, these latter day commoners threaten always to take steps to bring their economic power more into line with their political power at the expense of the political and economic power of the wealthy elite by using their voting power to force democratic government to “interfere” with existing market systems and distributional arrangements to increase their own share in the proceeds.  Hence political democracy, at one time instrumental in establishing the political power of the wealthy elite, has in some ways proved to be a double-edged sword.

Given this state of affairs it is perhaps not surprising some people find it difficult to bring their thinking up to speed on the differences between left and right.  Some people seem to have their heads stuck firmly in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century struggles of commoners against the feudal aristocracy.  Other people seem mired in the various anti-democratic authoritarian movements of both right and left in mid-twentieth century Europe and Asia.  The debate in this country between the left and right often has a surreal quality as people talk passionately past one another using inconsistent terms and frames of reference.  It’s all a bit comical really.  Let me bring some order to the chaos.  

At this point in our history the economic debate between left and right is no longer about abolishing market structures.  The issue is whether and if so how to regulate those markets and associated legal institutions and to revise the distributional results of those market systems to bring them more into line with what our ethics recommend.  The view that democratic government has the right and duty to regulate markets to improve their performance and also to potentially revise market results to address popular values relating to distributional issues corresponds here in the USA anyway to what people call variously liberalism / leftism / democratic socialism.  This view is entirely consistent with neoclassical economic theory in the sense that theoretical rationales exist for regulating many real-world markets and of course distributional issues are outside the scope of economic theory and hence logically must be addressed another way such as for example via democratic government.  (See my post Economic Theory And Then Some, April 12, 2018, or my tab on Economics with Hansel if you’re stuck on this very common point of confusion relating to what economic theory says and doesn’t say about distributional issues.)  The opposing view that democratic government must be prevented from “interfering” with real world markets and other existing distributional mechanism such as inheritance laws and in particular has no business redistributing resources to address voters’ beliefs and values relating to distributional issues corresponds here in the USA to what people call conservatism or sometimes as in my case economic conservatism to differentiate it from the rather different religious form of conservatism, which is based more on adherents of certain religions carving out legal exceptions for themselves or forcing others to adhere to their beliefs.  

Liberalism and leftism supports the primacy of political democracy and the egalitarian distribution of political power expressed in our voting system and is prepared to revise our economic system and the results of our economic system on that basis and indeed to strengthen the egalitarian quality of our political system by reducing the role of economic power in politics.  Conservatism and right-wing ideology in general supports the primacy of our existing mechanisms for distributing economic power and the unequal distribution of economic power that governs activity in the marketplace and is increasingly prepared to revise our democratic political system to defend those social power arrangements including eliminating or undermining the egalitarian components of our political system by strengthening the role of money in politics.  These two perspectives are locked in a fundamental and inescapable conflict.  Only time will tell which will eventually emerge victorious.  You know where I stand on the subject.  Not much question about that.  Long live American democracy!

References

Congress Is Now Mostly A Millionaire’s Club.  Andrew Katz.  January 9, 2014.  Time.  http://time.com/373/congress-is-now-mostly-a-millionaires-club/.

America’s Middle Class: Poorer Than You Think.  Tami Luhby.  CNN.  https://money.cnn.com/2014/06/11/news/economy/middle-class-wealth/index.html.

Handouts

Welcome friends!

Can we talk about handouts?  I was reading some online comments the other day to just remind myself how conservatives talk about economic issues and one recurring theme or perhaps more accurately meme involved the idea of opposing “handouts” as for example in the phrase “the reason I consider myself a conservative is that I don’t like handouts.”  Seems reasonable.  Who likes handouts?  Maybe I should be a conservative.  However, it then occurred to me that like much of conservative ideology the proposition as stated is empty rhetoric with all the substance existing only in the unstated details.  It’s rather like people who defend their ethical beliefs on the grounds they believe in supporting “goodness” misleadingly implying those who disagree with them must support “badness” and leaving it up to critical readers to take the logical and necessary next step of asking what exactly they mean by goodness.  Because of course real ethical debates are never or seldom about supporting or not supporting goodness in the abstract are they?  They’re about differences in how one defines what is good, what behaviors one considers good.  That’s what creates the problems.  Seems similar to what we have with this concept of a handout.  One isn’t really saying anything at all when one proclaims one’s opposition to handouts unless one takes the next step and explains what one has in mind and why one opposes them.  Absent that it’s really just an empty gesture, a bold stand against all the straw men supporting handouts.

So let’s get a bit into the details of what we might be talking about when we talk about handouts shall we?  For me the word “handout” has a pejorative ring to it that suggests something that is not ethically justified.  As such, I would suggest it’s impossible to separate the concept of a “handout” from one’s thoughts on distributional issues.  That is to say, I think the most reasonable interpretation of a handout is a distributional result that one feels does not have proper ethical justification.  As such I would suggest a generally market-based system of the sort we have here in the USA is rife with handouts.  Assuming one believes the distribution of economic power should have something to do with the behavior of the individuals in question the biggest handout of all would have to be our traditional system of inheritance.  By setting up a legal system in which one’s economic power depends on parentage rather than personal merit we’re basically setting up a system based on handouts to arguably undeserving people.  Another common sort of handout would be the sort of nepotism one sees in family owned companies in which owners install their offspring in management positions no matter their relative merit.  Again, it certainly appears to be a system of handouts allocating economic power in a way that has no convincing justification in terms of individual merit.  Another sort of handout would be tax codes that favor the wealthy both indirectly by giving them a tax bill smaller in terms of practical hardship or disutility than the tax bill for the less well off and also directly by allowing them various deductions and write-offs that can reduce their tax bill to zero as was apparently and famously the case for our resident billionaire president Mr. Trump.  More expansively I have to wonder if distributional results based on anything beyond individual effort are entirely justified on an ethical basis and hence a form of handout.  Let’s take inborn talents or abilities like intelligence.  Although they presumably allow one to contribute more per unit of effort one needn’t do anything particularly noteworthy or laudable to receive such gifts of nature so why exactly should they be rewarded by our distributional system?  Perhaps even the returns on inborn talents and abilities are in the nature of a handout when considered in terms of individual merit as opposed to contribution to society?  So, yes, like many online conservatives I suppose I also consider myself to oppose handouts, which is simply to say I think our distributional system should have some ethical justification although the exact principles may be open to discussion.  But in my case my opposition to handouts leads me to reject rather than endorse conservatism.  Odd isn’t it?

Now of course one suspects although one can never be certain many conservatives would disagree with my examples of handouts.  Presumably they believe those distributional mechanisms and results are entirely justified in ethical terms.  What they tend to have in mind is an entirely different category of distributional policies typically departing from either our existing distributional arrangements or some favored subset of those mechanisms typically what they consider market arrangements.  So for example if we as a society vote to provide a poor person with publicly funded medical care then many conservatives likely believe that person has received a handout of exactly the sort they oppose.  Although I can see some reasonable ethical debate might be involved I would suggest health care may be something we might consider a public good and available to all so in this example I would oppose classifying such results as handouts and see them instead as perfectly justified distributional policy.

I’ve tried to think a bit about other definitions of the word “handout” that don’t involve the thorny ethical component.  The only real alternative I was able to come up with is that despite the pejorative ring one may interpret the word “handout” to refer to anything that alters what would otherwise happen under whatever distributional arrangements we have in place.  For example let’s say we set up a system whereby all profits from more efficient production go to CEOs and stockholders, but some workers organize and demand and receive a share.  I suppose in that case one might say workers managed to get a “handout” not in the sense they did something devoid of possible ethical justification but simply that they ended up with more than they would normally have gotten under existing distributional arrangements.  In that case, opposing “handouts” would translate to opposing any alteration of the existing distributional patterns no matter how ethically justified or unjustified those arrangements may be.  That’s fine.  In that case what I just described as handouts from my perspective would not be handouts and the non-handouts I hypothesized might be considered handouts from a conservative prospective would be handouts.  So it solves that problem.  But of course in that case the sentiment that one “opposes handouts” seems oddly amoral.  One is saying one supports the results of current distributional arrangement regardless of whether they’re ethically justified or not.  Seems a bit odd.  Indeed, it’s hard for me to interpret such a statement without inferring some implication that supporting whatever distributional arrangement one happens to have has its own ethical significance in the sense that regardless of whether it’s good or bad or ethical or not it’s what we have and the most important overriding ethical principle is to not alter whatever we have.  But honestly I can’t imagine anyone taking such an ethical principle seriously.

So let’s summarize.  Everyone with ethical beliefs relating to distributions, so let’s just say everyone, will naturally dislike handouts defined as distributional changes having no ethical justification, so expressing one’s disdain for handouts is essentially expressing nothing at all.  The real difference between liberals and conservatives does not involve how they feel about handouts in the abstract but what they feel constitute handouts, and getting to that issue involves discussing distributional issues.  In other words, what we have with the conservative complaint against handouts is basically yet another instance of conservatives wanting to argue in favor of their distributional beliefs without doing the hard work of actually presenting relevant arguments.  As such it’s rather similar to the standard misinterpretation of economic theory I’m always banging on about by which economic theory is made to appear to address or even resolve distributional issues it never really could.  Indeed, it’s hard to avoid the feeling one of the founding ideas behind conservative ideology is to always avoid discussing distributional issues plainly and honestly.  That to me is reason enough to fight against conservative ideology.  We can discuss any distributional issues we like but let’s hold the line against any dishonest and manipulative ideology that tries to argue about distributional issues in indirect and misleading ways rather than honestly and honorably after the fashion of liberals and leftists.

The Crazy And The True

Welcome friends!

I was listening to a little talk by a psychologist at my workplace the other day on managing stress and anxiety.  Not because I feel particularly stressed or anxious although one might reasonably suppose I might be given the enduring damage American conservatives in rural areas of the country are doing to the USA just now.  But no, not really.  That’s how life goes sometimes.  Our unfortunately rather large block of less informed voters clamor for something they don’t really understand and once they get it start clamoring for the opposite in an endless cycle of ignorance that with any luck tends slowly toward the positive but which threatens of course to go spinning wildly out of control at any moment landing us all in the proverbial ditch of history.  One does what one can but honestly one can’t expect too much.  That’s the way democracy works.  We try to keep everyone on board by being willing to take one step back for every two steps forward.  We obviously took a really big step back this last time around.  No, I’m talking about a step of truly prodigious proportions.  Maybe this time we’ll need to take quite a few more conventionally sized steps forward to get back where we were in the not so distant past.  Might take a while.  But it’s a difference of size rather than kind.  No, I attended the talk in question not because I felt stressed thinking about the long-term prospects of the USA or other western democracies but for general knowledge.  As fate would have it the very first point the fellow made, the old saw about the importance and value of appreciating the difference between things one can control and those one cannot and the proper mental and emotional response to both, got me thinking of a very fundamental disagreement between conservatives and liberals relating to just that point.  From the liberal perspective conservatives habitually assign a great many things to the category of things under one’s personal control that truly are not while one supposes from the conservative perspective liberals must be viewed as doing just the opposite, assigning a great many things to the category of things not under one’s personal control that truly are.  The psychologist in question mentioned he had worked in mental crisis situations and with criminals and so on and in his considered opinion this issue was the single most helpful issue to address when attempting to resolve the psychological component of such cases.  It got me thinking it makes a lot of sense people may need a bit of help sometimes sorting this out given our very fundamental social disagreements on this issue.  But I wonder if we really disagree or if conservatives are just talking funny as they do sometimes.  Maybe it would be worthwhile to spend a few moments to talk it out.

What makes me suspect conservatives might simply be talking funny is it has been my experience conservatives often use language for rhetorical effect rather than simple communication or discussion.  They say things for the behavioral reaction they think or hope they may generate rather than to express what they really think or engage other people honestly on whatever the issue may be.  I suspect this has long been the case but it has become increasingly and indeed screamingly obvious ever since Mr. Trump has burst upon the political stage.  The man is famous for talking absolute rot and then changing it about every which way depending on the audience and reception.  To put it bluntly, the man lies incessantly and outrageously in a rather transparent attempt to appeal to the emotions of people to get them to do what he wants.  His conservative Republican base is famous for at least claiming to understand this and not being bothered by it at all.  Indeed, by all accounts they appear to expect it and love him for it.  They feel if it helps him do what he wants to do then what’s the problem?  The man’s casual relationship with the truth is something they respect and accept as evidence the man is truly one of them on some fundamental level.

Why would anyone pretend some things are under one’s control when they really are not?  Well one reason that comes to mind is something akin to cheerleading.  We have a large self-help industry here in this country that makes a lot of money from people looking for someone, anyone, to encourage them and give them ideas about how to be more successful financially.  One of the mantras of these self-help gurus is one should act as though everything is under one’s own control to provide oneself with the greatest possible incentive to do the best one can.  The thinking appears to be if one acknowledges some things are not under one’s control then one may be a little too prepared at the first sign of difficulty to throw up one’s hands and bemoan one’s fate rather than working as hard as one can to overcome whatever it is.  This theme shows up in all manner of funny places for example Yoda’s disjointed bit of pseudo-wisdom to young Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars film:  “Do.  Or do not.  There is no try.”  I suppose he might have been talking about some context in which everything was arguably under one’s control and the only issue was one’s determination to do or not do a thing but that’s not normally the sort of context in which one would say one intends to try to do something is it?  One generally doesn’t try to sit on one’s ass all afternoon and stare into space.  One does.  Or does not.  As the case may be.  However, to accomplish more advanced tasks in the real world one generally needs a little help or co-operation or at least neutrality from some things outside one’s control.  One tries to drive to the convenience store to get a six pack of beer moments before the store closes for the night but one’s car breaks down on the way.  Wah wah.  So why would wise old gnarly Yoda spout off such idiotic claptrap?  Well, he’s not just a Jedi Knight.  He’s also a Self-Help Guru.  He’s  player, coach, and cheerleader all rolled into one.  Actually that’s not a particularly attractive image but anyway I’m sure you get my point.  Sometimes one says things that are not necessarily true to encourage other people to do their best at whatever it may be, in the case of Luke Skywalker to complete his training and save the princess in one movie rather than the usual three.

On the other hand it seems quite possible at least some conservatives truly struggle distinguishing things under one’s control from things that are not.  One of the lines of ethical criticism of the distributional results generated by a free labor market involves just this sort of thing.  The argument is the real world labor market rewards not just effort of the sort one might reasonably suppose to be under one’s own control but a variety of things are not necessarily under one’s control including one’s innate abilities and talents, the quality of one’s early education, the conditions surrounding one’s education including did one have bigger things to worry about such as not getting knifed in the school corridor on the way to lunch, one’s level of family support for education and later in the labor market including helpful connections, even things like what’s going on in the macroeconomic environment at different stages of one’s life and technological developments and so on.  It’s why liberals are generally prepared to dispute the ethical standing of market distributions and willing to consider ways to change them up to help out people who may be struggling for reasons they have very little control over.  Conservatives of course tend toward just the opposite line of reasoning.  Many apparently feel the labor market unfailingly rewards effort and right behavior so to put it in a nutshell rich people are good and poor people are bad.  Under conservative ideology helping poor people is illogical and immoral because they’re getting exactly what they deserve.  Psychologically one would suspect this approach might appeal to the ego of wealthy people although of course it’s also shared by many salt of the earth conservatives who are struggling to make ends meet, which seems a bit weird and self-destructive to me but then I suppose one does tend to see quite a lot of weird and self-destructive behavior in that particular echelon of society.  Hmm, never really thought about it before but I wonder which way the causality runs on that?  You don’t suppose they do all manner of funny things because they’ve managed to convince themselves they’re pretty worthless and have little to contribute anyway so what difference does it make?  I hope not.  That would be such a waste, wouldn’t it?  And of course I haven’t brought up the issues surrounding those elements of our distributional patterns that don’t necessarily involve the labor market directly such as inheritance and that sort of thing.  I’ve mentioned before the jarring disconnect between the conservative conviction that distributions are the result of things mostly under one’s control and indicative of individual merit and their hatred of inheritance taxes and so on that, if supported, would appear to strengthen their case.  Hard to imagine the sort of personal effort a sperm or egg or maybe fetus would need to expend to be born to wealthy parents and eventually and all but inevitably sit at the apex of our little economic pyramid isn’t it?

But do these conservatives really believe their labor market as ethical arbiter model or is this another case of language being used for rhetorical effect alone?  Probably the most well known ethical principle that can be attributed to conservatives with any degree of confidence at all is that greed is good.  As far as I can tell most conservatives believe greed is like the mysterious Force in Star Wars.  It’s the glue that holds the world together.  Under this perspective the big problem with acknowledging there may be a case for changing something up to help people other than oneself is that it runs counter to the dictates of personal greed. One may have to pay more taxes or in the case of a wealthy cad like our president pay any tax at all.  Further, the conditions under which one is currently thriving may change and not in a way that necessarily improves one’s own situation.  It may appear to be to one’s benefit to claim everyone is getting what he or she deserves on the market and to try to convince other people of that fact even if one doesn’t actually believe that to be the case at all. Some people argue against this line of reasoning by appealing to one’s long term greed or enlightened greed in the sense that in the long run one may reasonably expect do better in a stable thriving society than in a society full of struggling, desperate, and sometimes violent and unreasonable people but getting people to think of the future and give up small current gains for potentially much larger long term gains is always a tough sell.  Anyway, the whole argument is neither here nor here for purposes of this post.  I’m not trying to resolve or even shed light on any of these arguments per se.  I’m just trying to speculate on what conservatives really think about what is and is not under one’s personal control. 

So where does that leave us?  I don’t know.  I must admit my head is starting to spin just a little bit.  I may be going into some sort of mental crisis myself trying to think it all through.  I wonder if the psychologist from my workplace makes house calls?  Just being funny.  I think I’ve got a handle on it because I haven’t been able to take conservatism seriously for some time now.  I harbor no illusions I control everything affecting my economic situation or more broadly my destiny.  I just do what I can and hope for the best.  I neither throw in the towel at the first sign of difficulty nor rage against the machine when things don’t go according to plan.  I’m satisfied if I’m doing OK and I wish everyone were doing similarly OK.  I’m proud of my own modest role in my accomplishments but I don’t sprain my arm patting myself on the back because I appreciate a lot of other people were involved and a good portion of the result was likely due more to the luck of the draw than anything else.  But then I’m a liberal so of course that’s what I would think isn’t it?  That raises an interesting question.  I wonder how much we might save collectively on our mental health if more people were liberals and talked sensibly and honestly about economic matters?  Seems to me it might be quite a lot.

Market Distortions and Redistribution

Welcome friends!

I was reading some online commentary on President Trump’s various attempts to implement the latest conservative brainstorm “economic nationalism” (i.e. socialism sans taxes) though tariffs and trade wars and so on when I ran across something that struck me as a particularly apt illustration of the way a too casual familiarity with economic theory can impair one’s thinking.  The commenter I have in mind opposed Trump’s tariffs because he or she felt the resulting market “distortions” would inevitably hurt “everyone.”  It was the sort of pseudo-economic theorizing one suspects many people forced to sit through Economics 101 might espouse and that academic economists who should know better seem never in any hurry to correct mostly likely because many of them find this kind of nonsense furthers their own value judgments.  I know I’ve probably talked about it before let’s say a million times but what the heck let’s make it a million and one shall we?

I did a short summary of the overall gist of neoclassical economic theory in a recent post so maybe we don’t need to go over all that again so soon.  If it’s already faded from your memory please take another look at paragraph four (“OK, so here’s our little one paragraph refresher …”) from my post entitled The Problem with Economic Theory and Then Some from April 18, 2018.

So what’s going on with the argument that market distortions inevitably make everyone worse off?  I suppose we must be starting from the rather dubious or at best only partially correct presumption we’re operating under a perfectly competitive market structure (i.e. what casual or maybe in this case we should just say sloppy thinkers misleadingly characterize as “The Free Market” although there is no particular reason to suppose any real unregulated market would freely tend toward this particular market structure) and that the “distortions” under consideration alter the results that would have otherwise fallen out of that ostensibly happy situation.  What’s wrong with that?  Doesn’t economic theory say if we mess with perfectly competitive markets we’ll diverge from socially optimal results and make everyone worse off?  Nope.  Not really.

For those with more than a passing familiarity with economic theory the issue here will be self evident.  Our ostensible conclusion runs smack into the prohibition within neoclassical economic theory against making so-called interpersonal utility comparisons, that is, ranking or rating economic outcomes that differ from one another by at least one person being better off and at least one worse off (typically discussed in absolute terms although I’ve been thinking for a while now it might be more interesting and relevant to redo the whole thing in potentially more ethically relevant relative terms since we know humans and even some of our fellow primates tend to think of fairness in relative rather than absolute terms).

Let’s just clear this up right now to avoid any confusion down the road.  Let’s say we actually have a perfectly competitive market system but some people are tanking: they can’t find jobs, they’re out of money, they’re living in the woods scrounging food from the dumpster behind the old convenience store.  (Republicans were in the news recently complaining about some UN committee having the audacity to mention severe poverty of this sort in the USA so to play nice with conservatives for now let’s just present this as an abstract thought experiment without laying out the evidence any such controversial phenomenon actually exists.  All some of us have to do to witness this sort of thing is drive down the street and have a look around but I infer for those living in same fancy gated communities seeing a poor person living in the woods behind the old convenience store would be the equivalent of the rest of us seeing Bigfoot strolling through our backyards).  In case you were wondering there’s nothing in economic theory that says no one will tank if we have a perfectly competitive market system.  That would depend on conditions affecting the demand and supply of labor.  Anyway, let’s say we change something.  We do some tariffs, we start a trade war with China, Europe, Mexico, Canada, or heck let’s just say the rest of the world, we run some sort of jobs program, we redistribute resources directly using taxes.  Whatever.  Doesn’t really matter for this post.  Indeed, let’s follow the philosophical thought experiment approach and take everything to extremes to make things more obvious.  Let’s say we take all the institutions that support a perfectly competitive market, roll them into a big ball, and throw them in the trash.  Let’s say the economy crashes entirely and in a short while everyone other than those people we were just discussing, the former tankers, drop dead on the streets.  However, let’s say the former tankers do a little better than they were doing previously.  Imagine they’re particularly adept at scrounging what they require from the detritus of our lost civilization much like the heroes of so many juvenile video games.  Again doesn’t really matter why they’re doing better for our little thought experiment.  Let’s just say for the sake of argument they are.  Talk about your market distortions, right?  What does economic theory say about the ranking of this situation compared to the previous one?  Nothing.  That’s what happens when one deals with a theory that ostensibly looks only at a sort of utility defined in a way that renders interpersonal utility comparisons impossible.  Why?  We don’t know whether the postulated increase in “utility” on the part of the former tankers outweighs the loss of “utility” of the multitudes.  Not really the answer you were looking for?  No, I get it.  Does seem a little weird.  I guess that’s why people fudge it.

One way people fudge it is to give pride of place to the distribution of goods and services falling out of any particular expression of an ostensibly perfectly competitive market system (by which I mean the result of a perfectly competitive market given some initial distribution of resources) and characterize other potential results as “distortions” including other results that could be obtained by redistributing resources and then moving to a new perfectly competitive market outcome that differs from the former by some people being better off and some worse off, which falls into the category of comparisons that are not really supported within economic theory.  Out of nothing something.  It’s like a miracle of philosophy.  I mean honestly if one had a choice between a distorted result and an undistorted result which one would choose?  Who needs interpersonal utility comparisons if we can make a choice on that basis?  Just being funny or trying to anyway.  The language is clearly contrived to establish a ranking of outcomes that is not supported by the actual theory that language purports to express.  One can see the same phenomenon in the terms “distributions” and “redistributions” with the implication the initial distribution must have some higher ethical standing than the subsequent and derivative redistribution.  But of course under economic theory really they are entirely on the same level.  Our current distribution expresses certain value judgments external to economic theory relating to the economic power that should rightfully go to different people and a redistribution would express other value judgements.  If we ever actually made such a redistribution those who held the former set of value of judgments would be talking about redistribution.  Same values, different terms.  In other words the basis of any given distribution cannot be evaluated against any other given distribution (or redistribution if you will) under economic theory.

Another way people fudge it is to claim these so-called market “distortions” inevitably make “everyone” worse off, which is essentially a rather transparent way of trying to avoid the awkward issue of interpersonal utility comparisons entirely.  It presents a local optimum based on a given distribution of resources as a global optimum across all potential distributions of resources. It’s fine if you think so but it isn’t economic theory.  That would be your own idiosyncratic value judgement based on I know not what.

So why do these pseudo-economic pronouncements appear so plausible to the inadequately educated?  Why whenever anyone discusses distributional issues is someone sure to pipe up that we dare not redistribute resources because that would distort the labor market and hurt everyone?

Well, setting aside the obvious incentives for economists who like the current distribution and don’t mind at all if people get the wrong end of the stick about what economic theory says about it, the answer must lie in the peculiar dual role of labor in economic theorizing.  On the one hand labor is an input of production like let’s say a lump of coal or a hammer.  Under a given distribution of resources supply and demand will set a price for that input.  If you start with a different distribution of resources you will get a different pattern of supply and demand and the price will of course be different but never mind let’s just look at whatever we have right now.  If we assign a different price to some non-labor input then I suppose one might reasonably say we’re distorting the market and creating inefficiencies.  So why can’t we say the same for labor?  Well, the funny thing about labor is that it’s not really the same as any other input in one significant respect: labor is the only input we associate with the generation of utility, which is what neoclassical economic theory is ostensibly all about.  People generate utility by fulfilling their needs and desires.  Lumps of coal and hammers do not generate utility in this way.  This is not a small difference because it means changing the price of labor very quickly gets one into the sort of interpersonal utility comparisons that cannot be made within the context of economic theory.  Another way of expressing this is to say there’s nothing sacrosanct about the price of labor under any particular perfectly competitive market result.  If one doesn’t like it for any reason based on one’s ethical reasoning and wants to change things around using redistribution schemes of one sort or another a serious economist will be agnostic about whether such change makes sense.  There is no one “true” price of labor to which we must adhere to get the maximum amount of utility according to economic theory.  We can change the relative price of labor whenever we like without losing utility or more accurately without knowing whether we’ve lost or gained utility.

But after we’ve done our redistribution won’t there by another pattern of supply and demand for labor based on that distribution of resources and another price of labor from which we dare not diverge for fear of not attaining a perfectly competitive market result?  Nope.  We’re basically just back where we started.  If we notice something amiss with that distribution based on whatever ethical theory we’re using to think about distributions then there is nothing in economic theory to suggest we should not change it again.  That is to say, the ostensible optimality of any given perfectly competitive market outcome is really contingent on our accepting the ethical credentials of the resulting distribution of goods and services.  In other words, markets are meant to serve us; we’re not meant to serve markets.  We evaluate markets and determine how well they are working based on our ethical beliefs relating to distributions; we don’t look to markets to tell us what to think about distributions.

Whenever I do these little posts I’m always careful to point out I’m not really arguing for or against any particular distribution.  I may do so in another post but my concern here is simply to clarify what we’re talking about.  If you like the distribution we have now and don’t want to see any redistribution that’s perfectly fine with me.  For purposes of this post anyway.  We can discuss it some other time.  But in that case your conclusion is not and cannot be derived from economic theory.  Indeed, your conclusions most likely do not involve the concept of utility at all but are probably based on some notion of what different people deserve and why and how those considerations are captured or not in real life labor markets.  Similarly, the idea that redistribution schemes like tariffs or what have you inevitably harm everyone is a rather far-fetched claim that cries out for substantiation. It’s fine with me if you think so.  I’d love to hear your theory.  But if you think that result has been established by economic theory you may need to dig out the old textbook and take another look.  In other words all I’m suggesting is that people speak up honestly for their values and stop talking rot.  And to any academic economists who may be reading this post please stop facilitating people talking rot.  It’s your field not mine.  It shouldn’t be left to people like me to clean up your mess.  Not really my job.

The Different Worlds of Liberals and Conservatives

Welcome friends!

I was just marveling yet again at the mighty chasm that has opened up in what seems like a  very short time indeed between mainstream conservatives and liberals here in the USA.  It’s a commonplace by now or perhaps even already a cliché to say these two halves of the population live in different worlds but that’s really the only way to describe the phenomenon.  Of course, I’m sure we’ve all known or heard of people who inhabit different worlds due typically to mental illness, personality disorders, substance abuse, social isolation, and sometimes even idiosyncratic genius.  Such people appear more or less randomly on the right and left of the political and economic spectrum.  However, this new phenomenon is different.  We’re talking about huge tracts of the country and millions of people one had only a short time before presumed were for the most part reliably inhabiting one’s own world suddenly vanishing and then reappearing as strange unrecognizable denizens of a foreign and distant land.  It’s really like nothing in my experience.  Certainly we had plenty of social divisions and political and economic disagreements during other eras for example the 1960s but this one feels somehow different.  Those earlier social upheavals were gradual, expected, anticipated, even dare I say more or less understood.  The one we’re witnessing now is something I wouldn’t have believed would or could ever happen despite my sincere efforts to follow the twists and turns of conservative ideology over these past several decades.  I’m certainly in no position to try to explain the darkness that has fallen upon us; however, I thought this time out I might at least comment on the characteristics of the chasm itself to just remind future researchers of the mighty dimensions of the issue they may one day think to explain.

One issue that has become increasingly clear is conservatives and liberals hold very, very different values.  Well, OK, I guess we already knew that so I suppose I should say instead the differences between the values of conservatives and liberals are more comprehensive than we previously realized.  Indeed, cataloguing these manifold differences is clearly beyond the scope of a short blog post but maybe I can at least mention a few highlights.  

Liberals support political democracy based on the egalitarian notion of one person one vote.  Conservatives have become very suspicious and critical of this arrangement and appear fascinated with the myriad ways in which democracy may lead to less than ideal results on particular issues at particular moments in time.  They’ve become obsessed with the idea of shrinking the role of democratic government or in the striking imagery of some of their leaders “drowning it in the bathtub” by choking off necessary tax revenue.  Lately when conservatives talk about our democratic government they present it as just one more iteration of some generalized notion of “government” broadly conceived and thus comparable in their eyes to any other iteration such as fascism or totalitarian communism.  

Liberals are very concerned about the corrosive influence on our egalitarian democratic system of government of eminently non-egalitarian big money.  Conservatives leery and disapproving of the egalitarian basis of political democracy see no such problem.  They applaud the ability of wealth to dominate our political system and wish to enhance it as much as possible  

Viewing political systems as valuable mostly in terms of social control to enforce the wishes of a relatively small cadre of economically powerful people conservatives here in the USA like conservatives around the world encourage the idea of combining religion and government thus rejecting one of our traditional core principles: freedom of conscience and the separation of church (or more broadly religion) and state.  Liberals support our traditional values when it comes to the ability of citizens to choose to follow the religion of their choice or indeed no religion at all if they feel so inclined.  

Because American conservatives view government primarily in terms of social control and the legitimization of economic power similarly to other conservatives around the world rather than as a system of public deliberation and debate meant to be distinct from the structures of economic power generated by our interpretation of the market system and our laws governing the distribution and dissemination of wealth they despise the free press because of its ability to criticize and document the failures and shortcomings of their administration.  Liberals supporting the democratic process and taking it seriously consider a free press very important to our way of life and consider critical commentary and debate a sign the press is taking its social obligations seriously.  

Similar considerations apply to education including particular subjects such as critical thinking.  Liberals taking the democratic process seriously consider an educated and informed populace essential to a healthy democracy.  Conservatives are suspicious of education and wax eloquent whenever possible about their ostensible love of the ignorant and uneducated.  They argue vociferously against classes in subject areas like critical thinking, philosophy, logic, history, and the humanities in general.  

Liberals taking the democratic exercise seriously believe our society can accommodate and benefit from diversity along dimensions intrinsic to people’s constitution and logically and philosophically irrelevant to their duties as citizens, such as gender, sexual orientation, race, cultural background, and so forth.  Conservatives believe passionately that such diversity weakens the structures of social control that operate through contrived or enforced uniformity of opinion and belief and hence tend to believe any diversity inevitably weakens the nation.  They yearn for a society run by and for wealthy “white” heterosexual males with Christian religious views.  

Economically liberals see any number of potential ethical issues with how economic power is allocated by market systems, which of course goes some way toward explaining the significance they attach to political power generated by egalitarian democracy.  Conservatives see no such issues.  They’re all in when it comes to the basis and implications of our current distribution of economic power.  Indeed a good part of their rationale for opposing democratic government is precisely the fear egalitarian political power might be used to counteract, thwart, or even redistribute the much more ethically reliable economic power.  Under the conservative view if people are homeless, or jobless, or hungry, or even I suppose dying on the street corner, that’s all good and exactly as it should be because that’s what the market decreed and the market is an infallible arbiter of such things.  The conservative mantra is that greed is good; not honesty, not knowledge, not civility, not humane values.  Greed is their one and true objective and wealth the only characteristic they respect.  

These value differences reach even to the level of personal behavior.  Liberals believe the sort of low behaviors demonstrated by President Trump, lying, cheating on one’s wife, paying one’s mistress hush money and later sending people to threaten her, spreading baseless rumors and innuendo, insulting people, trying to enflame low prejudices for personal gain, skipping out on one’s bills, avoiding paying taxes, and so on should preclude him from holding positions of public responsibility.  Conservatives see no problem with that sort of thing and indeed feel it makes Mr. Trump very smart and uniquely suited to be president of the USA.  

When it comes to values conservatives and liberal are poles apart.  At one time in the not so distant past conservatives were cast as uniquely interested in values and referred to as “values voters” but it should now be clear to even the most obtuse of observers both conservatives and liberals take their values seriously but those values are very, very different indeed.

Moving away from the issue of the astonishing differences in values where only a few years ago most people might have suspected to find many points of similarity we arrive at some very stark differences in epistemological beliefs, that is, beliefs relating to how we should evaluate statements as true or false.  When it comes to statements about the physical world liberals tend to support the scientific method.  Conservatives famously believe the scientific method is simply one method of defining what is true among any variety of equally legitimate others including notably religious dogma.  According to their assessment one should be free to declare as true whatever one finds most appealing or consistent with one’s chosen worldview.  Science may say something about the age of the Earth or whatever and the Bible may say something else.  Both are true.  Take your pick.  

When it comes to evaluating claims made in the news media liberals tend to support the prevailing method of checks and balances and the records of reliability that govern serious news media.   They recognize of course that thenews reports both facts as well as opinions and values and endeavor to keep an eye on both by getting their information from a variety of historically reliable sources and referring to expert and academic assessments of claims and counterclaims.  Conservatives have become famous for their penchant for characterizing inconvenient news as “fake” apparently muddling the positive and the normative.  They feel news reported by mainstream media is biased and unreliable preferring to characterize as “true” unsubstantiated, unverified, and impossible to replicate claims from any number of offbeat and generally unevaluated information sources based apparently solely on how they feel about the ostensible facts being presented.  This difference in particular has created enormous communication difficulties as even the basic facts of any number of issues have been transformed into what is now cast as a matter of personal opinion and the mutually agreed starting points for discussions of important social issues have gradually vanished to near zero.

Then there is yet a third area which I think liberals and conservatives face very stark differences.  I’m referring now to their use of language.  Liberals consistent with their respect for democracy, freedom of speech, science, education, and the power of human reason tend to use language as an honest attempt to express and discuss ideas and values.  It has gradually become clear that conservatives think of language very differently and in rather more practical terms as primarily a tool one can use to manipulate others into doing one’s bidding.  This was very clearly demonstrated during Mr. Trump’s campaign for the presidency in which liberals found themselves constantly pointing out the falsehoods and inconsistencies in Mr. Trump’s utterances only to find indignant conservatives explaining they knew the man was not speaking honestly and they understood he was not to be taken literally.  In their assessment liberals were missing the whole point.  Mr. Trump was using language not to express what he really thought about issues but to establish emotional bonds with his listeners.  His emphasis was on expressing humor, anger, and resentment in an entertaining way (or what passes for an entertaining way for our less educated and intelligent comrades) to ingratiate himself with his political base.  Factual accuracy and even honesty had nothing to do with it.  

This manner of communicating that was never meant to be taken either literally or seriously has famously continued on into Mr. Trump’s presidency with the man spewing out seemingly randomly all manner of outlandish and inconsistent claims with a smirking disregard for the norms of normal mature conversation.  It’s largely this feature of contemporary conservatism that has made many liberals who may have previously attempted to engage conservatives seriously and honestly determine we are now too far apart intellectually for such an effort to be useful.  Liberals talk to one another honestly and reasonably and try to preserve the integrity and point of democracy. Conservatives lie and pose and try to manipulate other conservatives into doing whatever provides them with economic power, preserves their economic power, and weakens political democracy.  

I would suggest a good part of this may be a natural outgrowth of the differences in education, training, and experience of liberals and conservatives.  Liberals of course tend to be better educated and understand and respect the power of human reason and sensible discourse.  They often work in academia and the sciences.  Conservatives tend to have more practical backgrounds with an emphasis on such business related fields as marketing, advertising, and other forms of consumer deception and manipulation.  

Thus on top of the gigantic differences in values and the striking differences in epistemological beliefs we have the awkward reality that conservatives and liberals are not even using language the same way and in particular conservatives are not using language to engage with liberals in good faith to discuss and explain their beliefs and values.  Not surprisingly the level of public discourse in this country has fallen to new lows of stupidity, rudeness, and pointlessness.

Will American democracy be able to withstand the dire intellectual and moral threat posed by contemporary conservatism as expressed by the Republican Party and its legion of supporters?  Wait.  Didn’t I just ask that same question last time?  Well, it’s an important question so I suppose it’s fine to pose it again.  Will American democracy be able to withstand the dire intellectual and moral threat posed by contemporary conservatism as expressed by the Republican Party and its legion of supporters?  I don’t know.  We’ve seen many other cultures and systems around the world and throughout history devolve into mindlessness, greed, violence, and dysfunction, and there is no reason to suppose the USA is immune to the forces that have dragged these other nations inexorably to their dooms.  But fretting about the future is such a tiresome and unproductive exercise isn’t it?  All we really have to do now is resolve to argue against the intellectual and moral rot of conservative ideology to the best of our abilities.  The future of the nation may well depend upon it.  Long live the liberal ethos!  Long live democracy!