The Hunting of the Snark

Pigpile!

2012-01-27T15:08:00.002-06:00

If you ever wanted to see a group of raving lunatics swarm over Megan McArdle with blood in their eyes and venom in their keyboards, skip on over to What Did Ron Paul Know, and When Did He Know It? It's rather refreshing to see libertarians use their slash and burn techniques each other instead of liberals.

Added: Combine the McArdle commentariat--selfish, smug, racist and elitist--with the Ron Paul commentariat--conspiracy-minded, empty-headed, racist and unable to work a caps lock--and what do you get?

Ken Magalnik2 hours ago
I'm far from Ron Pauls biggest fan, but are you saying that race-bating should disqualify one from office?

mike1 hour agoin reply to Ken Magalnik
No, she's saying editing a racist newsletter should disqualify you.

kitkatt18 minutes agoin reply to mike
and that it's 'ok' to vote for a guy that hates white people, since hating on white people isn't racism in Megan's and Obama's world

JoshlNHB15 minutes agoin reply to kitkatt
White people suck.

marshuff14 minutes agoin reply to JoshlNHB
you suck

JoshlNHB13 minutes agoin reply to marshuff
Shut your Jew face.

marshuff10 minutes agoin reply to JoshlNHB
Shut your butt ugly face

James Russell Lowell would be so proud.

Unspoken Assumptions

2012-01-27T14:35:00.000-06:00

While I admire people who adopt tremendously, Nancy French's Corner post on her adopted daughter strikes me as more than a little off.

The Joy of Pretty Things

By Nancy French

In 2008, we decided to adopt. At first, like many couples who hear of the dreaded “one child” policy, I wanted to adopt from China. However, when we contacted our agency, the wait for a Chinese baby was four years. Instead we decided to go the quickest and most affordable route.

And so, several months — and a lot of paperwork — later, we got our referral photo from Ethiopia. She was a 14-pound two-year-old with a large head and twiggy arms. She was wearing camouflage, and it was noted on her file that she had experienced “extreme starvation.”

In retrospect, she wasn’t that cute, but we were blinded by love and adoration. My son, who was eight at the time, printed off her photo and took it proudly to school.

She "wasn't that cute"? What a thing to say in print.

“Is that a girl?” a classmate asked. “Are you sure?”

On the way home from school, my son was devastated. “Why does she wear boys’ clothes if she’s really a girl?” he asked, his pride pricked by his friends’ doubt. “Are we sure?”

We weren’t. As with everything adoption-related, it’s hard to know much with certainty. Information is hard to come by. Language barriers and other factors make it hard to really figure out the truth. It’s an exercise in trusting God’s sovereignty.

I sure hope that little girl doesn't want to be an engineer. The family might think she's really a guy. Or a lesbian.

A year and a half ago, my family traveled to Africa and met two-year-old Konjit, an apt name which means “beautiful.” My blonde-headed kids were amazed at her rich, brown skin and her dark-brown fuzz on the top of her head. The orphanage had shaved her hair off almost completely. It was probably a good thing — so much was changing in our family. I cannot imagine actually getting a new kid and learning how to feed, bathe, and take care of her exotic hair without sharing the same language.

"Exotic"? " "Fuzz"? "A good thing"? And a woman with children needs to learn how to feed and bathe them? I am relieved that French let the girl's hair grow at all. And have her children never seen an African-American before? Either French is an idiot or her Baron Munchausen tendencies are acting up again.

French goes on to tell us how her daughter grew to love pretty clothers, even running around on their new wood floors in her favorite boots.

“Naomi,” I said sternly. This is the new first name we chose to go with her African name. It means “pleasant.”

She refused to call her child by her real name? Why? She's a person, not a puppy you got from the pound. Our names are part of our identities.

“You’ve either got to stand still or take off those boots.”

She stood still, right in that spot for a very long time, motionless.

As I looked at that little brown girl trying too hard to maintain the style and beauty of those little brown boots, I smiled. And I finally said, “Okay, go ahead and run around.”

My reluctant permission was like a gunshot at a race. She smiled and ran around the house with even more joy. And with every clomp, she drove poverty and death a little further back into her past.

No child should be that obedient; it's a sign of deep insecurity. And why was French just watching her "for a very long time"? French might want to rethink this whole Conservative Mommy gig. She comes off as a little loopy and it cuts into her time servicing Mitt and Ann Romney.

Elite Ratiocination

2012-01-25T11:04:00.000-06:00

Megan McArdle has a question:

Can the Rise of the Internet Explain D.C. Zoning Fights?
By Megan McArdle

Does she have an answer? She is, after all, a graduate of the Booth School at the University of Chicago, the Ivy League's University of Pennsylvania, and exclusive, expensive Riverside Day School. Let's see what hundreds of thousands of dollars of schooling taught our Megan.

DC's young gentrifiers are, even as gentrifiers go, disproportionately well-connected to the internet.

Okay, it's a theory. Let's take a look at her evidence.

Indeed, I wonder if Amazon isn't partly responsible for the pace of gentrification here. In the neighborhoods that are currently gentrifying, the retail corridors were destroyed in the 1968 riots and never really came back; it's no joke living in a neighborhood like that without a car.

Well, that's two statements: the people who are moving in to old neighborhoods are connected to the internet, and Amazon in particular is speeding up gentrification by eliminating the need for most physical stores. The evidence that supports McArdle's suppositions and wondering must be next.

Most of the affluent "new" people I know in DC are like my husband and I: they order everything they can over the internet. We don't need much in the way of brick-and-mortar retail; what we need is bars and restaurants, and maybe a salon or two. If you are not so thoroughly web-ified, you almost certainly want a much more retail-heavy commercial district.

"Everybody I know does it" is rather a small (and unverified) sample. Perhaps McArdle is just teasing us to get us to continue reading, the little scamp. The proof must be somewhere!

All of which is another way of saying that your neighbors cause externalities.

Wait a second. I must have missed something. Here is the following text:

. . . unless Amazon delivers bulky stuff to your door. Most of the affluent "new" people I know in DC are like my husband and I: they order everything they can over the internet. We don't need much in the way of brick-and-mortar retail; what we need is bars and restaurants, and maybe a salon or two. If you are not so thoroughly web-ified, you almost certainly want a much more retail-heavy commercial district. And while many of the "old DC' residents are of course on the internet and social media, many others cannot afford broadband connections, or credit cards--and given their older age skew, many others probably simply aren't that comfortable with, or interested in, shopping online.

I'd been thinking of the bar-and-restaurant complaint as a convenient shorthand, rather than something that is almost literally true: the gentrified districts in DC boast very little other than places for young people to gather and refresh themselves. Not nothing, but much less than, say, the streets I grew up on in New York.

Lots of statements, no links or numbers. Hmmmm. That's strange. It's almost as if McArdle is simply assuming that everyone else in the world is just like her, with the same needs, wants and motivations. There must be some chain of argumentation somewhere, right?

All of which is another way of saying that your neighbors cause externalities.

Strange. We have a hypothesis and conclusion, but no evidence. How can you verify a hypothesis with no data? That's crazy. You can't just state something is true because you think it is true, or it seems to be true, or that if it is true for you then it must be true for everyone else. You actually have to look at the numbers to check if your theory is true.

The corollary of that is that it is not irrational to want to control who moves in around you--or even to want to maximize the number of people who are like yourself. The more people there are like you, the more the neighborhood will suit your needs.

And here is yet another unproven conclusion based on invisible data. The only thing this paragraph proves is that McArdle wants to live in a homogeneous bubble.

I'm not saying that we should cater to this desire (in either the gentrifiers, or the gentrified). But we shouldn't act like it's necessarily crazy or evil, either.

Which provides the moral justification for pricing the neighborhood's older inhabitants out of their own neighborhood, by increasing expenses and decreasing livability for the middle class residents. But McArdle is not finished, so maybe there is hope for data after all!

* (Note: there's a another sort of argument that takes place when the neighborhood has already gentrified, and the residents band together to prevent new people from coming in to block their views and compete for free street parking spaces. But these arguments are basically pretty naked displays of self interest, so I've left them out.)

I hate to break it to the business and economics senior editor of The Atlantic, but saying that everyone else is shit out of luck because McArdle can order what she needs online is a pretty naked display of self-interest as well. If McArdle had bothered to do any research about gentrification in DC she might have noted this:

In the District, white households raked in a median income of $99,220, while black households made $37,430 and income amongst hispanics hovered right above the city’s $60,798 median.

In “changing neighborhoods,” marked by rapid development and rising prices, the task of preserving affordable housing looms large.

Demographic changes on H Street since 2000

“The question is how do you develop in a way that allows low-income communities to stay in place,” said Derek Hyra, the author of a forthcoming book on gentrification in D.C.’s Shaw neighborhood. “Redevelopment has sought to move poverty out of the city.”

D.C. is the ninth most expensive rental market in the country, asking $1,461 for a two-bedroom apartment at fair market rate, according to the National Housing Conference, a D.C.-based research group. The group says housing is defined as “affordable” when the rent or mortgage payment does not exceed 30 percent of the tenant’s income.

A D.C. resident has to make $58,440 a year for a 2-bedroom, fair market apartment to be affordable, using this metric. A fifth of D.C. residents struggle on $22,314 or less.

The study also looks at five sectors that are hiring the most nationwide. Four of them—groundskeeper, janitor, office clerk, and security guard—have average salaries far too low to make rent, let alone home ownership, affordable in the District.

Income inequality is high in DC, as is joblessness for the poor. The population in DC is booming, and the richer inhabitants are supplanting the poorer ones, who are moving farther out from the city center. Also, not all the gentrifiers are white and not all the people who were displaced were forced out because of income. The issue is far more interesting and complex than McArdle presents it.

But McArdle uses Amazon to buy toilet paper, therefore Amazon is a reason her neighborhood gentrified quickly. QED! Which makes it very odd that McArdle would present her theory as a question.

What a wonderfully easy way to get rich.

Those Knees Are Looking A Little Ragged

2012-01-19T11:45:00.003-06:00

Journalists were never intended to be the cheerleaders of a society, the conductors of applause, the sycophants. Tragically, that is their assigned role in authoritarian societies, but not here -- not yet.

-Chet Huntley

That was then--this is now.

After informing us that The Welfares (and we all know who they are) will violently take the streets if bankers are forced to have smaller bonuses, McMoron McArdle doubles down on the offensiveness. Her distaste for those below her on the social and economic ladder couldn't be more obvious, but in her world ass-kissing the rich is the new black, and McSycophant is nothing if not stylish.

SYCOPHANT, n. One who approaches Greatness on his belly so that he

may not be commanded to turn and be kicked. He is sometimes an editor.

As the lean leech, its victim found, is pleased
To fix itself upon a part diseased
Till, its black hide distended with bad blood,
It drops to die of surfeit in the mud,
So the base sycophant with joy descries
His neighbor's weak spot and his mouth applies,
Gorges and prospers like the leech, although,
Unlike that reptile, he will not let go.
Gelasma, if it paid you to devote
Your talent to the service of a goat,
Showing by forceful logic that its beard
Is more than Aaron's fit to be revered;
If to the task of honoring its smell
Profit had prompted you, and love as well,
The world would benefit at last by you
And wealthy malefactors weep anew --
Your favor for a moment's space denied
And to the nobler object turned aside.
Is't not enough that thrifty millionaires
Who loot in freight and spoliate in fares,
Or, cursed with consciences that bid them fly
To safer villainies of darker dye,
Forswearing robbery and fain, instead,
To steal (they call it "cornering") our bread
May see you groveling their boots to lick
And begging for the favor of a kick?
Still must you follow to the bitter end
Your sycophantic disposition's trend,
And in your eagerness to please the rich
Hunt hungry sinners to their final ditch?
In Morgan's praise you smite the sounding wire,
And sing hosannas to great Havemeyher!
What's Satan done that him you should eschew?
He too is reeking rich -- deducting _you_.
-Ambrose Bierce

Let's look at this again: :"Still must you follow to the bitter end Your sycophantic disposition's trend,
And in your eagerness to please the rich Hunt hungry sinners to their final ditch?" It seems that for every Golden Age of robber barons we must endure their boot-lickers telling us to bow before the rich and serve them.

I've said before that I don't care about income inequality per se, and that focusing on it seems more like institutionalized envy than sound policy. I care about the absolute condition of the poor--do they have the basics of a decent life? And I care about whether income inequality itself produces some sort of structural advantage in the political system. (I'm skeptical).

What possible advantage could one have by being very very rich while everyone else is poor? I just can't think of a single one. If a few people have almost all the money, and therefore almost all the power, and all the access to all the advantages money buys, how could that possibly hurt the poor? Anyone who thinks that having the nation's wealth concentrated in a few hands is unhealthy for the economy is just, well, jealous of the super-smart, super-hard-working, super-wonderful rich, who deserve everything they get!

Frederick: I thought we liked stripes this year.
Cruella De Vil: What kind of sycophant are you?
Frederick: Uh... what kind of sycophant would you like me to be?

On the other hand, income mobility is a very important issue. Regardless of how far the top is from the bottom, children born in America should have an equal chance to move from the latter to the former. This is especially important given that so many of the highest-paid jobs are also the most pleasant.

Many people apparently agree with me: the issue of income mobility has become more prominent in policy debates over the last few years. And yet I submit that this agreement is entirely theoretical. How many of the people reading this blog would actually tolerate a one-in-five chance that their children would end up poor?

Because that's what income mobility actually means. It doesn't just mean giving a lift to the folks at the bottom--superior health care, better K-12 education. Everyone in the country cannot be above average. For the poor to have a better shot at ending up in the top quintiles, the folks in the top few quintiles have to run the risk of ending up in the lowest.

This is how this woman thinks. There it is, her weltanschauung and raison d'etre and all those other cool foreign words, spread out for the world to see in all is sickening glory. The only goal in life is to claw your way to the top, it's either you or me, and let's face it--just between us upper middle class Atlantic readers--it's going to be me on top, and not them.

"But if you say, you can still pass the violations over, then I ask, hath your house been burnt? Hath your property been destroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then you are not a judge of those who have. But if you have, and can still shake hands with the murderers, then you are unworthy of the name of husband, father, friend, or lover, and whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward and the spirit of a sycophant." ~ Thomas Paine

Who among the parents fighting so hard to get their kids into a good school is going to volunteer to have their kid give up the slot in the upper middle class? People are willing to accept a certain amount of slippage, but only as long as it comes with added job security (government) or special fulfillment (the ministry, the arts)--and even in the latter cases, Mom and Dad will often be strenuously arguing against following your calling. But how many doctors and lawyers would simply glumly accept it if you told them that sorry, junior's going to be an intermittently employed long-haul trucker, and your darling daughter is going to work the supermarket checkout, because all the more lucrative and interesting slots went to smarter and more talented people?

I thought we lived in a meritocracy? God knows McArdle has spouted those words often enough. Now we are told that the upper middle class must keep out the smarter and more talented members of the lower class to preserve their own privilege, which just happens to be McArdle's main goal in life. Which also makes her a conservative, not libertarian, but McArdle does not mind elbowing out real libertarians if it gains her an advantage. For we live in some zero-sum game in which every time someone else makes good, McArdle is deprived of some of her birthright.

To a first approximation, none. Oh, of course, middle class families do have those spectacular screw-ups who end up stuck in dead-end jobs, and they don't expel them or anything. But they would not cooperate with any system that made such a result fairly likely--and that is what we're actually talking about, when we're talking about rising income mobility. Someone in society is going to end up doing crappy jobs, because trash needs to be hauled and Alzheimer's patients need to have their diapers changed. The primary job of a middle class parent is to ensure that their children are not those people.

To a well deserving person God will show favor. To an ill deserving person He will simply be just.
-Plaut

One of the reasons this is so hard is that so many of the problems poor people deal with are created by living near other poor people. Most poor people are not criminals, but most criminals are poor people, because crime actually doesn't pay (very well).

This is what happens when you don't prosecute Wall Street thugs and thieves: Megan McArdle gets to yammer in the Atlantic about how criminals are poor people who caught criminality from their degenerate neighbors. Crime paid very, very well for bankers, but this is ass-kissing, not journalism.

Most poor people take out their trash, maintain their homes, and stay off drugs--but the kind of people who don't do those things are disproportionately likely to end up in poverty. Which is to say, in your neighborhood, if you are poor--shooting at each other and hitting bystanders, breeding vermin that migrate into your living space, pilfering your stuff to support their drug habit.

Someone has to live near those people; whatever your expectations for antipoverty policy, it surely does not include the end of drug addiction and slovenly habits. But should it be your kid? Would you want them to have a one-in-five chance of living in those conditions? (Or the different, but not necessarily less miserable, conditions of rural poverty?) Of course not. You'd do anything you had to in order to keep that from happening.

McArdle ignores the cocaine-fueled upper class like Larry Kudlow and his ilk, as well as her own pot-smoking friends and relations. They aren't drug addicts, they are---uh---fighting for economic and civil freedom! That's it!

And so middle class parents do. They pay lip service to mobility, but they work damn hard to make sure that their kids don't get exposed to a peer group that might normalize dropping out and working low-wage, dead end jobs, or going on welfare.

No matter how deeply ideologically committed you are to public education and income mobility, you will not leave your kid in a high-poverty school where gangs are valorized and college is not--or even in a working class school that will close off the chances for admission to Harvard. You'll agitate against zoning that would bring poor people in (though of course, not because of the poor people, it's just that, you know, the character of the town is quiet single family houses and the infrastructure won't support multi-family plus we don't really have the social services here and they'd be much better off in Camden, actually.) With other like-minded parents, you'll take over the school and reshape its priorities to match those of the upper-middle class. Or you'll move to a different school system, naturally talking about the enrichment programs rather than the more affluent, education-focused peer group you're buying for your kids.

The one thing you will not say--unless you are isolated in a rural area with exactly one school and no critical mass of similar parents--is, "Oh, well, I guess the best we can hope for is a third-tier state school." It is no accident that the middle class bits of the New York City school system have managed to hijack the best resources for themselves, in the process building a pretty good public school system which exists cheek-by-jowl with a very lousy one.

Income mobility is one of the pillars of the American dream, one of the basic precepts of American Exceptionalism. And McArdle simply denies it. She is upper middle class, her audience is upper middle class, therefore income inequality is just fine and income mobility is a bad thing that might rob them of something, somewhere, somehow. This paean to selfishness, this laudatory lavatory paper, this I-got-mine-fuck-you-Jack--it contradicts everything we are supposed to hold dear. It's not that McArdle is selfish and greedy and miserly. It's that she feels perfectly at ease admitting it. She does not fear any kind of retribution whatsoever, socially or professionally. No priest is going to denounce her--she has no religion but money. No friends will shun her--they are as eager for wealth and power as she. And of course the more servile she becomes, the richer she becomes. It's win-win, if you are a lackey with no pride, morality or shame.

Remember, this is the meritocratic system we're talking about. This is the system that was supposed to break the spine of the old aristocracy of wealth and pull--and did, only to replace it with one that seems to be even more ruthlessly effective at shielding their children from competition.

And that's the optimistic case--the case that assumes that there is virtually no parental transmission of real economic virtues, through genetics, intensive nurturing, or through the learned behaviors and peer effects that conservatives bundle up as "culture". Obviously, as you introduce those sorts of elements into the model, for which the sorts of interventions one can imagine run from horribly difficult to morally monstrous, the picture gets rather bleaker.

It will be very hard, I believe, to state in what respect the king has profited by that faction which presumptuously choose to call themselves his friends.

If particular men had grown into an attachment, by the distinguished honour of the society of their sovereign; and, by being the partakers of his amusements, came sometimes to prefer the gratification of his personal inclinations to the support of his high character, the thing would be very natural, and it would be excusable enough. But the pleasant part of the story is, that these king's friends have no more ground for usurping such a title, than a resident freeholder in Cumberland or in Cornwall. They are only known to their sovereign bv kissing his hand, for the offices, pensions, and grants, into which they have deceived his benignitv. May no storm ever come, which will put the firmness of their attachment to the proof; and which, in the midst of confusions. and terrours, and sufferings, may demonstrate the eternal difference between a true and severe friend to the monarchy, and a slippery sycophant to the court! Quantum infido scarrtB distabit amicus. --Edmund Burke

We should be talking about income mobility--it's probably the most important moral challenge facing our society. But I very much doubt that we'll end up doing much more than talk.

Not as long as McArdle has anything to say about it. The funny thing, however--and there is always a funny thing, thank God--is that nobody despises sycophants more than the rich and powerful.

"I, uh... I want to thank you all for coming here tonight and drinking all of my booze." [the guests laugh] "No, really. uh..." "To all of you, uh, to all of you phonies, all of you two-faced friends, you sycophantic suck-ups who smile through your teeth at me, please... leave me in peace. Please... go. Stop smiling. It's not a joke. Please leave. The party's over. Get out."-Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins

How To Become A Rich And Successful Pundit

2012-01-16T15:24:00.001-06:00

David Brooks sees a member of the elite and does what comes naturally.

The more authoritarian you are, the more successful you will become. We are speaking of followers, not leaders, as leaders are born, not made. Authoritarian leaders will richly reward their servants who are so eager to obey that they do not even need to be given orders. Which brings us to David Brooks.

There are two questions concerning Mitt Romney’s service at the private equity firm Bain Capital. The narrower question is: Did Bain help ailing companies and add value to the economy or did it plunder dying firms? The larger question is: Does Romney’s success in business tell us anything about whether he would be a successful president?

Wave bye-bye to the first issue, the one filling the headlines, because you will not see it again. Questioning the ways of the elite will not do anyone any good here, and Brooks knows his duty. He will pull a McArdle and substitute his own, less politically dangerous, issue for discussion. It's a very clumsy bait and switch but talented hacks are rare, and usually British. Brooks worships power with his entire soul and that was all he needed to gain his present social and political prominence.

Let’s tackle the bigger question here.

At first blush, business success would seem to be good preparation for political success. A C.E.O. learns to set priorities, manage organizations and hone analytic skills. But these traits are more transferable to being a mayor, which is more administrative, than to being president.

Moreover, for every Michael Bloomberg who successfully moves from business to politics, there is a Jon Corzine, Donald Rumsfeld, Donald Regan, Meg Whitman or Carly Fiorina — former executives who were either unsuccessful in political office or who couldn’t get elected in the first place. If you look back over history, you see that while business success can sensitize a politician to the realities other executives face, there’s little correlation between business success and political success.

It's like Bush never existed. He did far more damage than we realize; the right seems to emit a collective shudder whenever Rick Perry reminds them of his predecessor.

The traits that actually correlate with successful presidencies have deeper roots.

Of course they do. Calling someone a CEO president doesn't have the same connotations that it had in Bush's time so presidents must now be something else, something.....Mittens-y.

First, successful presidents tend to be emotionally secure. They have none of the social resentments and desperate needs that plagued men like Richard Nixon. Instead they were raised, often in an aristocratic family, with a sense that they were the natural leaders of the nation. They were infused, often at an elite prep school, with a sense of obligation and responsibility to perform public service.

Our elite are infused with noblessnoblesse oblige? We are supposed to swallow this after our financial industry spent the last year demanded thanks for running the economy into the ground? Have we not heard the elite tell us endlessly that we must end the entitlement society? It's like Occupy Wall Street never happened, inequality never rose, social mobility never fell. The eternal sunshine of the empty mind illuminates everything Brooks writes.

Equally wacky is the notion that being bred for greatness installs emotional security. Just as often it installs callousness, selfishness and arrogance.

Whether it is a George Washington, a Franklin or Theodore Roosevelt or a John F. Kennedy, this sort of president enters the White House with ease and confidence, is relatively unscathed by the criticism of the crowd, is able to separate the mask he must wear for public display from the real honest self he knows himself to be.

Oh, now we're supposed to approve of self-esteem?

This sense of emotional security can also be found in great military leaders, like Dwight Eisenhower, and in serenely successful movie stars, like Ronald Reagan.

If I were a One-Percenter I'd think this David Brooks fellow is a marvelous chap. His appreciation of the quality of the very rich, their inherent superiority, is superb. Give this man a column at the Times!

Second, great presidents tend to have superb political judgment. In his essay on this subject, Isaiah Berlin defines political judgment as “a capacity for integrating a vast amalgam of constantly changing, multicolored, evanescent perpetually overlapping data.”

A president with political judgment has a subtle feel for the texture of his circumstance. He has a feel for where opportunities lie, what will go together and what will never go together. This implicit knowledge is developed slowly in people like Harry Truman or Lyndon Johnson who have spent decades as political insiders and who have a rich repertoire of experiences to draw on.

But--but--they weren't raised in wealth, bred by prep schools to rule the universe. How could they be great?

It also comes from voracious social contact. It comes to leaders who have a compulsive desire to be around people and who can harvest from a million social encounters a sense of what people want and can deliver.

"Compulsive desire to be around people" doesn't always go with emotionally secure.

Third, great leaders have often experienced crushing personal setbacks. This experience, whether it’s Lincoln’s depression or F.D.R.’s polio, not only gives them a sense of sympathy for those who are suffering, but a personal contact with frailty. They are resilient when things go wrong. They know how dependent they are on others, how prone they are to overconfidence. They are both modest, because they have felt weakness, and aggressive, because they know how hard it is to change anything.

Okay, now our candidates should have experienced personal tragedy, which surely will prove that they have that "empathy" thing that liberals are always droning on about.

Finally, great leaders tend to have an instrumental mentality. They do not feel the office is about them. They are just God’s temporary instrument in service of a larger cause. Lincoln felt he was God’s instrument in preserving the union. F.D.R. felt he was an instrument to help the common man and defeat fascism.

This sense of being an instrument gives them an organizing purpose. It gives them a longer perspective, so they don’t get distracted by ephemera. It means their administration marches in one direction, even though it is flexible and willing to accept incremental gains along the way.

In sum, great presidents are often aristocrats and experienced political insiders. They experience great setbacks. They feel the presence of God’s hand on their every move.

I haven't read anything this creepy since I read that Rick Santorum took his dead newborn home to show to his kids, like it was show-and-tell day at the morgue. The arrogance of his belief that God favors us above all others, the literal worshipfullnessworshipfulness of his attitude towards power, the authoritarian love of knowing one's place--David Brooks is an utterly devoted sycophant and authoritarian follower.

Unfortunately, we’re not allowed to talk about these things openly these days. We disdain elitism, political experience and explicit God-talk. Great failure is considered “baggage” in today’s campaign lingo.

Says the man with the column in the Times. But Brooks is overcome with disbelief that everyone does not worship the rich as he does. The rich have the political experience of the poorer politicians, who doggedly worked their way up the ladder of power, because Brooks says so. Their failures are great failures, that benefit the rich by increasing their wisdom. And they are personally backed by God. God! He's, like, the best endorsement any politician ever had!

Today’s candidates have to invent bogus story lines to explain their qualifications to be president — that they are innocent outsiders or business whizzes. In reality, Romney’s Bain success is largely irrelevant to the question of whether he could be a good president. The real question is whether he has picked up traits like emotional security, political judgment and an instrumental mind-set from his upbringing and the deeper experiences of life.

Look into his soul, not his bank account or public record. How can Brooks not be humiliated by his subservience, his naked power worship?

We’ll learn more about that as he confronts brutal attacks that now besiege him.

This is why there was never any doubt who would be the Republican nominee. Romney is One Of Them and the others are not. The Republicans did not run anyone who might have had a chance against him, which made the rat race for the nomination even more amusingly fake, and now the party has dropped all pretense and is ready to offer us a constant stream of Romney-worship and devout praise.

Expert Opinion

2012-01-11T10:02:00.000-06:00

Sometimes being a knee-jerk contrarian, always eager to assume that the little people who serve you are inept, is not a good idea.

Megan McArdle is once again telling us far more than we need to know about her personal life. This time she is discussing her medical condition, one of her favorite subjects.

Medical Advice for the New Year: Don't Get Sick

By Megan McArdle

I have a family history of high blood pressure, so naturally when I saw that the Wall Street Journal had a piece up on "starting early for cardiovascular health", I clicked through.

The article said that "[b]ringing high blood pressure under control at any time reduces risk of disease. But not letting it creep up in the first place can be even better." McArdle is verklempt, because nobody knows anything ever and nobody can do anything ever in her philosophy.

[Y]ou'd really be surprised to learn how little control hypertension patients have over their condition. Yes, there are risk factors. But without medication, my blood pressure routinely spikes over 155 even though I have a perfectly normal BMI. It began creeping up in my mid-thirties for no obvious reason.

Actually, there is one obvious possibility.

That did not stop my doctor from offering ridiculous suggestions as to how I might control it. In her defense, she was a resident in internal medicine, and was presumably required to give me ludicrous advice by whatever shadowy figure was supervising her and actually making the decisions. First she came back and told me that a glass of wine with dinner more nights than not was "really a lot" of drinking, in a tone that would have been more appropriate had I confessed that I frequently woke up on the floor of our living room, surrounded by empty scotch bottles that I couldn't remember having purchased.

If McArdle drinks more than 9 drinks a week (5 oz of wine is one drink), she is considered a higher risk drinker. (A standard wineglass is a little over half full when it holds 5 oz of liquid.) Someone whose criteria for buying a house included bars within walking distance and who says she drinks at least four times a week could easily exceed a safe drinking level, and McArdle's response is quippy but unwise. You don't have to drink until you pass out to drink too much and these guidelines are for healthy people, which McArdle is not. She has Hashimoto's Thyroiditis and asthma, as she has mentioned several times.

McArdle's doctor told her to cut back on salt, which she decided was stupid advice.

It made more sense just to ignore her advice, as I'm sure that everyone else she gave it to did. (And with good reason: the evidence that reducing your salt intake has a big impact on your blood pressure is pretty mixed.)

McArdle links to fellow professional contrarian John Tierney, whose article is far from convincing but who is as against government intervention as McArdle.

I am sure that it would, in theory, have been better for me to not have developed high blood pressure in the first place. It might also have been better for me to be 5'10 instead of 6'2--and unfortunately, I have no idea how I could have achieved either stunt.

Nor did most of the people in the study cited by the WSJ; according to the authors: "The prevalence of hypertension treatment in this study is low because of the time period during which these cohorts were initiated". The Journal compresses this to "patients who curbed their levels in the Circulation study did so only with lifestyle changes " but that is not actually what the authors said. Rather, they said that they don't know why people's blood pressure fell. People whose blood pressure fell did see smaller increases in body mass index and cholesterol than those whose blood pressure rose. But those things were still increasing, not decreasing. So:

Decreases in BP may have been due to lifestyle changes, as suggested by the changes in body mass index and total cholesterol, although it is possible that differences were due to random variation or regression to the mean.

So what we really know is that if your blood pressure is high, and then falls, it is better than if it just stays high--and it's even better if it doesn't get high in the first place. Except we knew that before. Having high blood pressure is bad for you. So is getting Lou Gehrig's disease. But it is not very useful to tell people that they will be better off not contracting these conditions.

The article that McArdle read discussed rising blood pressure in aging men. The advice would be appropriate for them, if not her.

You can treat the condition, of course--but to my chagrin, even well-controlled hypertension is not the same thing as having normal blood pressure. Whatever underlying process is causing my blood pressure to rise is also probably damaging my cardiovascular system, even when the blood-pressure itself reads normal. Moreover, at least as far as I know, doctors don't give you blood pressure meds when your BP hits 121. They wait until you're, well, hypertensive, or close to it. That's because there's substantial error in blood pressure readings (you're having a bad day, you were late and ran up the stairs, you're scared of hospitals). They don't want to put you on diuretics for years to treat that rumor you heard that your company might be having layoffs.

Of course, you should exercise--but research seems to indicate that it's good for a few points, not a drop from "Stage 2 hypertension" to "normal". And you should quit smoking--but much to my surprise, smoking apparently doesn't cause high blood pressure. Maybe you should eat less salt, too, but the evidence that this will improve your hypertension is not all that convincing. Even losing weight, the most plausible intervention, seems to generate modest improvement, not radical reduction. All of these things together, at the most generous estimates, would not have reduced my blood pressure below 120/80.

Don't get me wrong: hypertension is a serious condition; it's imperative to treat it, and it would be even better if we could avoid it entirely. But I only know one sure-fire way to keep your blood pressure from rising, and that's to avoid reading articles telling you that you really shouldn't have become hypertensive in the first place.

McArdle does not believe fat people can lose weight, poor people can have discipline, or rich people can be greedy and make bad decisions. Things just happen for no reason and there's nothing we can do about it. Experts don't know anything, governments can't help people, the poor we will have with us always. This casual disregard for logic and reason and hand-waving dismissal of expertise can have very detrimental effects.

For instance, evidently McArdle was so busy dismissing everything her doctor told her that she did not ask about a connection between her autoimmune disease and high blood pressure. According to the American Heart Association, the two are associated.

Much Ado About Nothing

2012-01-08T14:19:00.002-06:00

Digby is worried about Rick Santorum's views about birth control.

[Kathryn Jean Lopez is] mischaracterizing the (very silly) article, which suggested that using birth control is causing infertility ---because women are waiting too long to get pregnant. It's idiotic but I'm guessing it's the next big paternalistic ploy by the forced childbirth brigades --- too many dizzy gals are damaged by waiting too long to conceive that the choice must be taken out of their flighty little hands.

She goes on to complain about having to pay for birth control --- which is going to be the hook these zealots will use to whittle away at women's access and then ends with this:

In this campaign, Rick Santorum has not been lecturing us about so-called social issues. But he gets asked about them, and he answers honestly. Can’t we be honest about what he is saying?

Here's what he's saying (go to the end):[snipped video]

"The state has a right to [make a law outlawing the right of married people to use birth control], I have never questioned that the state has a right to do that. It is not a constitutional right, the state has the right to pass whatever statues they have.

And he explained very thoroughly elsewhere that he believes birth control is wrong unless sex is procreative it "becomes deconstructed to the point where it's simply pleasure."

I think we understand him very well.

So what? It's not our responsibility to tell the president what to do. If he wants to make it harder to get birth control (like Obama) or outlaw it altogether (like Santorum, in his wet dreams) then that's his right. Making it harder to get birth control will get Obama more votes and if we make a fuss then we'll discourage Democrats from voting and Obama might lose. And then we might end up with no birth control at all. Of course that will happen anyway because the right will always demand more concessions for the sheer joy of exerting control over their ideological enemies and Obama will always give in to get more votes. Obviously he does not have to worry about losing Democratic votes because they will always choose the lesser of two evils.

I really don't care because it doesn't affect me; I can afford to work around the law and where there's an outlawed drug there's always a black market. Just like I don't care if Obama murders Muslim children because it doesn't affect anyone I know personally.

For The Greater Good

2012-01-04T15:35:00.000-06:00

Poor Megan McArdle. Always a bridesmaid and never a bride, intellectually speaking.

The economist equivalent of a brawl is going on between Paul Krugman and the guys at Marginal Revolution. I'm not going to pile into the dispute directly--I prefer both the style and substance of Marginal Revolution, but am well aware that Paul Krugman has forgotten more economics than I will ever know.

Of course McArdle will not address an actual argument; that takes effort.

However, I will note that the commenters Paul Krugman sends to other sites harbor a very strange faith in his predictive powers. When other economists dispute something that Paul Krugman has said, they tend to rejoinder that the reason Paul Krugman is obviously a more reliable source than this crappy ideological hack they're speaking to is that, unlike YOU, Paul Krugman has gotten things right over and over.

But it takes no effort to accuse Mr. Krugman of sending commenters to other sites. Or to say that if you ever get anything wrong then obviously you're not reliable. McArdle gets almost everything wrong and is very unreliable but almost everyone has different standards for the other side than they have for themselves.

What is so strange about this belief--aside from the collective hyperlocal amnesia that prevents them from remembering that yes, even the great Paul Krugman has made some bloomers in his time--is that the examples of his Nostradamus-like powers are not, in fact, at all special. Chief among them--the sort of Ur prediction upon which he has apparently made his reputation--is "calling" the housing bubble in 2003.

This is chief to McArdle because it is one of the few things she did not get wrong, and since she free rides off the intellectual efforts of others (in this case Pam Woodall, as she mentions below), that's not exactly a brilliant achievement. This is the woman who said that the US would not have a recession, after all.

Contra the fuzzy recollections of his readers, this is not an example of unusual foresight unparalleled in the world of journalism. I called the housing bubble a full year earlier than he did, in 2002. The Economist was writing about the global housing bubble even earlier than that, thanks to Pam Woodall's fearsome analytic talents.

This is obviously not a sign that I am possessed of near-superhuman foresight, because while I foresaw the collapse, I did not foresee it leading to a run on the money markets, or any of the other specific events of 2008. Neither, as far as I am aware, did Paul Krugman. Nor, for that matter, Nouriel Roubini, who was predicting a crisis, to be sure, but a completely different crisis from the one we actually got, one that would be triggered by America's persistent current account deficits and dollar devaluation.

McArdle believed what she was told. Krugman based his analysis on the information he had at the time. To compare the two is the worst sort of preening.

So far, none of the people who have urged me to recognize Krugman's superior analytic abilities on the grounds that he called the housing bubble, have changed their minds and agreed with me when I informed them that I "called" it even earlier than their sage. Nor have they switched their allegiance to The Economist, which has been quite sharp about Krugman in its time.

I get the feeling that Krugman himself rather encourages this touching faith in his unusual forecasting abilities, and more generally, the notion that the only reason he is such a flaming jerk to economists he disagrees with is that they really are, every one of them, too stupid to count to twenty with their shoes on. His latest response to Marginal Revolution is a case in point:

I plead innocent. I only treat people as mendacious idiots if they are mendacious idiots.

Seriously: I have some big disagreements with Ken Rogoff, but if you use the little search box up there on the upper right and enter "Rogoff" I think you'll find that I have always treated him with respect. On the other hand, enter "Heritage" and you'll find me pretty scornful -- but with very good reason! And I always document what I'm saying.

This is true, as far as it goes: in my recollection, he always has been pretty respectful to Ken Rogoff.

But allow me to suggest--gently, gently!--that this might not be quite the whole story. For those of Krugman's readers who are not familiar with Ken Rogoff's oeuvre beyond what they have read of it on Paul Krugman's blog, it's worth noting that Ken Rogoff has not, in the past, been shy about shredding Nobel Prizewinners who made the mistake of going all Defcon 1 in Professor Rogoff's vicinity. And that it's generally agreed that the last time this happened, he got by far the better of the argument.

Paul Krugman is a brilliant man with a very fine memory. Though this angle probably eludes most of his readers, I doubt it's eluded him.

It's all about austerity and Keynesian economics. McArdle believes that a consumer spending-based economy will recover by slashing spending and Krugman does not. It should be obvious who is right but McArdle doesn't care about right or wrong. It might be wrong to lie and obfuscate but she has no choice--if liberals control the direction of the economy the entire financial industry will collapse.

She just chose the lesser evil.

Get Out Your Handkerchiefs

2012-01-01T22:14:00.000-06:00

You have to love The Corner. If only William F. Buckley, arrogant elite, were still alive to see how his legacy has degenerated into a collection of racists, torture apologists, pious nitwits and the terminally uncool. NR interviews Steven King (R-Subconscious) who tells them:

Santorum’s surge: “I think Santorum has arrived in third place,” King says. “His ascension has been impressive. The question is whether he can win. I’m not as much of an optimist about that; I don’t see that happening. But his timing has been excellent. Another week wouldn’t help Rick Santorum. He’s already done everything he could do. In the end, I think he’ll get to third, and that will be a result of hard work, of pounding the ground.” In sparsely-populated western Iowa, Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, has found a way to connect with Midwestern conservatives, King says, making a national race very local, from visiting all of Iowa’s 99 counties to pheasant hunting with local pols. “He’s even a good shot,” King chuckles.

First comes the pounding, then the surging. And hey, look out for Santorum shooting his gun.

Running In Place

2011-12-30T15:28:00.000-06:00

Andrew Sullivan:

If I got beaten to a pulp for being gay, any president is required to enforce the laws against assault, as are the local police. There is absolutely no need for hate crimes laws to bring violent individuals to justice. If the authorities tried to turn such an assault into a hate crime, I would strongly object. I am not a gay person first and foremost. I am a person. I need no liberal sanctimony to remind me of that.

It must be child's play to yank Sullivan around on a string. He refused to support hate crime legislation because he doesn't want people to think of him primarily as a gay person yet he is a conservative, who are people who think of him primarily as a gay person. And the people who do see him as a person first must be rejected because they are liberal, and liberals are not elite, and Sullivan is an elite, and elites are conservative. But conservatives see Sullivan as a gay man, not a person, and Sullivan is a person, not a gay person, but Sullivan is conservative....

Here is a visual representation of the inner workings of Sullivan's mind:

More Adventures of the Crystal Skull

2011-12-30T14:00:00.000-06:00

Shorter Megan McArdle: My house will hold its value. But DC schools are poor.

Private school is the answer! Sure, you won't be able to spend as much money on kitchen appliances but the alternative is working hard to improve your local school, and that would just encourage the moochers and looters.

Hypocrite

2011-12-30T09:27:00.000-06:00

Dear, devout Elizabeth Scalia, professional Catholic, has written often of the evils of abortion. No doubt she feels the same way about contraceptives, which are strictly forbidden by her Catholic Church. Elizabeth enthusiastically supports the Catholic Church's right to refuse to pay for birth control for its employees.

Elizabeth has two children.

Not four, or six, or twenty, Duggar style. Two.

I guess Catholic rules are for everyone else and Elizabeth's super-duper-special brand of devotion means she can pick and choose which child-bearing laws she will obey, in true cafeteria Catholic fashion.

From the Guttmacher Institute:

WHO NEEDS CONTRACEPTIVES?

• There are 62 million U.S. women in their childbearing years (15–44).[1]

• Seven in 10 women of reproductive age (43 million women) are sexually active and do not want to become pregnant, but could become pregnant if they and their partners fail to use a contraceptive method.[2]

• The typical U.S. woman wants only two children. To achieve this goal, she must use contraceptives for roughly three decades.[3]

WHO USES CONTRACEPTIVES?

• Virtually all women (more than 99%) aged 15–44 who have ever had sexual intercourse have used at least one contraceptive method.[2]

• Overall, 62% of the 62 million women aged 15–44 are currently using a method.[2]

• Almost one-third (31%) of these 62 million women do not need a method because they are infertile; are pregnant, postpartum or trying to become pregnant; have never had intercourse; or are not sexually active.[2]

• Thus, only 7% of women aged 15–44 are at risk for unintended pregnancy but are not using contraceptives.[2]

• Among the 43 million fertile, sexually active women who do not want to become pregnant, 89% are practicing contraception.[2]

Control over my reproductive system for me, but not for thee.

Every time a woman says she supports the Catholic Church's rules on family planning, ask her if she has ever used contraceptives. The answer will be yes, and I see no reason why we should listen to people who want everyone else to live by onerous, dangerous rules that they will not follow themselves. If Elizabeth has never used contraceptives that information is important as well, since women's reproductive decisions are matters of public concern, not private decisions made by her family in consultation with her physician.

Clueless

2011-12-29T13:35:00.001-06:00

Oh no, Megan McArdle! Are the protesters interfering with your shopping?

Our Shop 'Til You Drop Princess is driven to pout by all the careless, clueless protesters who don't even care that they are inconveniencing her, or, worse yet, costing her money!

The head of DC's Fraternal Order of Police sent a rather blistering open letter to Mayor Vincent Gray, chastising him for not admitting that the Occupy DC protests are causing a rise in crime, as neighborhood policing resources are pulled away in order to police the protests.

One needs to take this with a grain of salt--gentrification is creating a lot more opportunities for muggings and property crimes, which may have something to do with the spike he identifies. And he's clearly got other issues with the Mayor over budget cuts and the rate of new hires.

He does indeed. Mr. Baumann seems very upset with the mayor because 400 policemen were fired. We cannot, however, understand why Miss Megan is suddenly on the side of a union representative, since unions, as we all know, only want to preserve jobs for incompetent workers who don't want to actually work.

Nonetheless, it's a plausible case. And it highlights an inherent tension that Julian Sanchez wrote about well in November: these protests are not simply about the protesters v. "the 1%". The protesters also impose costs, possibly significant costs, on the surrounding communities. And the protesters themselves seem to refuse to acknowledge this--that they are not simply a representative of "the 99%", but also often at odds with a significant portion of that larger population.

McArdle will never acknowledge the need to protest or the legitimacy of the protesters' complaints. She does not care about income inequality at all, supports bankers at all costs, and giggled at her idea of hitting protesters in the head with a 2x4 before they did any damage. God only knows what she thinks should be done to protesters who might possibly cost her money--probably evisceration.

Now, I'm sure that the members of OccupyDC would contest the need for extra policing.

Especially since the police were guarding the 1%, not the 99%, from the protesters.

But the active protests certainly do--sometime before Thanksgiving, I spent about twenty minutes trapped behind a handful of people who had decided to march down K Street at rush hour. They absolutely did need the large police escort that they had in order to keep angry drivers (not me) from running them over.

A handful of people delayed her trip home! Off with their heads! Or perhaps the heads of the "large police escort," who seemed to be the ones actually blocking most of the traffic.

And even the passive part of the protest had, last time I was down there, become a magnet for homeless people, with the attendant worries about petty crime and acting out by the mentally ill.

It does not occur to Princess Megan that a decent society would take care of its homeless and mentally ill. She just wants them safely out of sight, under a freeway overpass perhaps, or dead in a ditch.

It seems to me that a movement claiming to represent the 99% should consciously take these costs into account--particularly over the longer term. A one day crime spike is not a big deal. A three month increase is a pretty sizable cost, particularly in a city that already has a very high crime rate.

Now, which was a greater source of this crime spike--firing officers or having a protest? We might be able to find out but that would take work, and McArdle doesn't do work. Total crime is up 10% from the previous year, according to Mr. Baumann's statistics, with 9% of that increase being property crime. Burglaries are down 24% but robberies without a gun are up 34%. The greater meaning of the statistics is not clear; the economy has been worsening and DC "has the fastest population growth in the US", both of which could be large contributors to the crime numbers. But let's not bother with nuance; Megan McArdle does not like the idea of protesting income inequality and therefore Occupy DC must be blamed for any increase in crime.

For the life of me, I cannot understand why our libertarian pin-up girl is so worried about the police anyway. If libertarians had their way the government would let private businesses handle her security, or she could always hire her own police force. But McArdle is only libertarian when she is being paid to be libertarian, and would never, ever want to take on the entire expense of her protection and safety. She does not want the taxpayer to pay for schools or health care because she had her daddy and her boss to pay for those, but since she cannot find anyone to pick up that tab for her, she is perfectly willing to spread the cost among the rest of the taxpayers.

The Jon Swift Memorial Roundup Rides Again!

2011-12-29T10:26:00.000-06:00

Batocchio has put up his Jon Swift Memorial Roundup 2011 at his blog Vagabond Scholar. There is a lot of great stuff there, and I added my post on Occupy Wall Street and Jane Austen as well. Take a look! I especially like the post on the plans to eliminate public schooling so our multi-billionaires can make more money scamming families just trying to educate their children.

You Are Next

2011-12-27T16:35:00.000-06:00

Megan McArdle says she wants you to save more. Why?

But the most important thing is this: don't start looking for reasons you can't. If you hunt hard enough, you'll find them. Unfortunately, those reasons aren't going to do a damn thing to pay your house payment if you get laid off, or keep you in prescription drugs when you retire.

Because if she has anything to say about there will not be any social spending at all. Just enough charity to keep the mob from rioting will be more than enough, and no government action is otherwise needed.

Let's try to make this simple for McArdle.

The rich wanted more money so they took it.

Now they are much richer and the middle class is much poorer.

Income data indicate that the middle class, including the upper middle class, have seen far slower income growth than the top 1% since 1980.[39][40] While its income increased as fast as that of the rich in the years following the second World War, it has since experienced far slower income gains than the top. According to economist Janet Yellen "the growth [in real income] was heavily concentrated at the very tip of the top, that is, the top 1 percent."[40] Between 1979 and 2005, the mean after-tax income of the top 1% increased by an inflation adjusted 176% versus 69% for the top 20% overall. The fourth quintile saw its mean net income increase by 29%, the middle income quintile by 21%, the second quintile by 17% and the bottom quintile by 6%, respectively.[38] The share of gross annual household income of the top 1% has increased to 19.4%, the largest share since the late 1920s.[41][42][43] As the U.S. is home to a progressive tax structure the share of net-income received by the top 1% is smaller, and the share of the middle class consequently larger, than their shares of gross pre-tax income. In 2004, the top percentile’s share of net income was 14%, 27.8% less than its share of gross income, but nonetheless nearly twice as large as in 1979, when it was clocked at 7.5%.[38] The reduced size of the share of aggregate share of income, both pre and after tax, of the middle class has been attributed to the reduced bargaining power of wage earning employees, caused by the decline of unions; a lessening of government redistribution;[44] and technological changes which have created opportunities for certain people to accumulate far greater relative wealth very quickly (including larger markets due to globalization and Information Age technologies allowing faster and wider distribution of work product).

The notion that the middle class is shrinking is controversial because the economic boundaries that define the middle class vary. Households that earn between $25,000 and $75,000 represent approximately the middle half of the income distribution tables provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. Over the past two decades, the number of households in those brackets decreased by 3.9%, from 48.2% to 44.3%. During the same time period, the number of households with incomes below $25,000 decreased 3.5%, from 28.7% to 25.2%, while the number of households with incomes above $75,000 increased over 7%, from 23.2% to 30.4%.[45] A possible explanation for the increase in the higher earnings categories is that more households now have two wage earners.[46] However, a closer analysis reveals all of the 7% increase can be found in households who earn over $100,000.[45]

The change has not always been in the same direction. Poverty rates increased early in the 1980s until late in the 1990s when they started to go back down. Since 2000, the percent of all people living in poverty has risen from 11.3% to 15.1% in 2010.[45][47]

A study by Brookings Institution in June 2006 revealed that Middle-income neighborhoods as a proportion of all metropolitan neighborhoods declined from 58 percent in 1970 to 41 percent in 2000. As housing costs increase, the middle class is squeezed and forced to live in less desirable areas making upward mobility more difficult. Safety, school systems, and even jobs are all linked to neighborhood types.

Thieves go where the money is.

Now that the 90% have been milked dry, the 9% will surely be next. That is where the money is.

It's called the 1%, not the 10%.

Authoritarian Parenting

2011-12-23T11:57:00.002-06:00

There is no way I will be able to give this post the attention it deserves, so a quick post will have to suffice. Let me start by saying:

Megan McArdle, without quite knowing that she is doing so, decided to discuss authoritarian child-rearing, the better to peddle her libertarian, contrarian bullshit, the only skill she has to offer the world. Since every thought that ever wafted through Indiana Galt's Crystal Skull ends up on her blog, we must (painfully, regretfully and cringingly) acknowledge that reproduction is on the McArdle mind, and a Happy Announcement might be forthcoming at some time in the future. Fortunately the human mind has created immensely strong methods of self-protection, such as denial and hysterical blindness, so we will merely offer this observation and move on, never to return. (God willing.)

McMommy quotes Darshak Sanghavi discussing the shift away from spanking children, as the present generation of parents begin to realize the enormous damage to self-esteem and self-sufficiency that occur when parents see children as property. For all their talk of personhood, conservatives (which includes McArdle) do not see children as persons, with their own will, interests, feelings and needs. Raised to obey and deny their own autonomy, they demand obedience and deny autonomy in and from their children in turn. The purpose of conservatism is to conserve the contemporary power structure, something they learn from their parents, who demand all power and control in the parent-child relationship. If they didn't get any love, tolerance or acceptance from their parents, then by God neither will their kids. Sanghavi says:

Without really realizing it, we zeroed in on a style of parenting that sociologist Annette Lareau calls "concerted cultivation." This is, I think, what separates those who hit kids from those who don't, and divides largely along socioeconomic fault lines. As popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, Lareau tried to document how these differences emerged. The issue wasn't that one group was more or less lenient with bad behavior. Instead, middle- and upper-class parents tended to treat children as peers, with the pint-sized ability to make choices, respond to reason, and have valid emotions. It's not a huge leap then to see children as having nascent civil rights that conflict with regular corporal punishment.

Such a view underlies the approach of Supernanny or How To Talk, where parents make behavior charts or create token economies for rewards, answer questions with explanations, and encourage kids to accept and express their feelings. According to Lareau, such discipline tends to be self-reinforcing, and part of a broader ecology of parenting. As a result, these children who experience it develop an "emerging sense of entitlement"--a trait that may carry some negative connotations but generally correlates with better verbal skills, school performance, and a sense that they can actively shape the world around them.

If a child learns that he is important and valued, that he has the right to his own opinions and can trust his own judgement, he is less amenable to control from others. He does not spend his life trying to find parent substitutes in religion and politics. He does not grow up filled with anger at how he was mistreated, or resentment that he is forced to obey all authorities and cannot make his own choices. He does not try to compensate for the lack of love and unconditional acceptance in childhood with consumerism (*ahem*) or sex or alcohol and drugs. And he is much hard to control and mistreat than the authoritarian follower that was raised to obey and "trust" and "have faith" instead of question and defend himself from abuse.

McArdle, of course, does not address any of these issues. It's rather difficult these days to argue that children deserve or need to be hit. Instead she simply begins to ramble about a pet peeve of hers utterly unrelated to the issue she is purportedly discussing.

I wonder, however, if "better" is quite the right word. It seems to me that what parents have discovered is a much, much more intensive form of parenting than their grandparents employed. The elaborate charts and systems of incentives are enabled by the fact that modern children are effectively monitored by adults every waking hour until they become quite old.

Just what we all want--advice based on "I wonder" and "it seems to me." Why bother with science when one can simply do a gut-check? McArdle has decided that raising a child to think and feel for himself is the same thing as helicopter parenting (which she conflates with safety issues), an authoritarian practice in which parents expect the child to achieve in ways that flatters the parents' ego. It is just another form of authoritarian parenting and not at all related to raising a child who knows himself, is confident and empathetic, and reasons rather than blindly obeys. But McArdle has the chance to put in a plug for several of her pet theories and science be damned, McArdle has something to say!

Naturally she starts off by talking about herself. For Mrs. Megan McArdle, her own experiences are sufficient to asses everyone else's.

My grandmother literally never worked outside the home a day in her life. But she would have been bewildered by the intensive parenting of today's "stay at home Moms". When my mother got home from school, my grandmother gave her a cookie and told her to go outside and play. She was not supposed to come back until dinner--rain or shine, sleet or snow.

My mother, who was also home when we were young, did not let us run around outside by ourselves, because I grew up in Manhattan. However, from a very young age, I spent quite a lot of time running around between apartments in my building, where there were four other girls approximately my age. At nine or ten, I walked to school by myself across many New York streets, and past several housing projects. While my mother (and I) always knew approximately where I was supposed to be, I was not directly supervised during most of my free time.

Today's kids seem to be not only supervised but regimented; most of their time is supposed to be spent in some sort of structured activity. This makes it very easy to create elaborate reward systems, because there is all this elaborate surveillance that makes it very easy to monitor compliance.

None of this has anything to do with hitting your kid, but McArdle pointedly does not want to talk about that. Different parents have different comfort levels based on their experience and situations. Parents who were attacked as children or who knew people attacked as children are going to be much more cautious than those who assume that the odds of their child being mistreated are vanishingly small. City or town, working or not, wealthy or poor--these all affect parents' decisions as well. But naturally the world begins and ends with McArdle, and since she was safe as a child then so is everyone else.

But if kids are unmonitored most of the time, then I wonder how well that works. It strikes me as plausible that a world in which kids spend more time unsupervised requires a parenting style more reliant on swift punishment for detected wrongdoing than rewards for good behavior.

McArdle is really talking about what she thinks of as conservative and liberal parenting styles. Conservatives punish their children to teach them right from wrong and liberal parents just praise them all the time so they will grow up vain and egotistical, which they call "self-esteem." Conservatives good, liberals bad.

To be sure, my mother was actually quite well watched--by all the other mothers on the block. But while you could be quite sure that an adult would report it if they saw your kid doing something really wrong, it's much less likely that they're going to tell you that Sally deserves her tidyness gold star for the afternoon because she threw her litter in the garbage can.

All that monitoring and incentivizing probably is better at turning out kids who are able to successfully negotiate the hierarchical American university system.

McArdle adores her theory that liberal academia is just like conservative business world, only more hypocritical because of their totally unfair and mean ideological drive to keep all conservatives out of the liberal club. McArdle has often fumed that conservatives are not able to take over academia and that conservative ideas based on ideology and bullshit do not command the same authority and respect as ideas based on fact and reason. Naturally she also declares that it is liberals who are hierarchical. Rubber, glue, etc.

But crotchety as I am, I find it sort of creepy--and anecdotally, as the first generation of what David Brooks calls "Organization Kids" enters the workforce, employers are apparently complaining that they have an outsized sense of entitlement combined with a difficulty coping with unstructured tasks. Obviously, I'm not advocating a return to an era of brutal beatings. But I'd like to think that there's some alternative to raising children in a sort of well-padded, benevolent police state where no action is too small or large that it can't be managed with an appropriately placed gold star.

McArdle has kind of a Bloody-Mary-urban-legend theory about David Brooks--if she says his name often enough he will magically appear and help her career. Naturally she sees self-esteem as a sense of entitlement and "wonders" if respecting children will make them weak and unfocused. And naturally anti-authoritarians are the ones with a police state, not authoritarian regimes. When she has a child you can bet your bottom dollar that he or she won't have any self-esteem at all, except that which is given to the child by his or her mind-boggingly expensive prep school, the better to prepare little Milton Pinochet McSuderman for his future career as a Master Of The Universe.

Somebody--Anybody--Save Me

2011-12-21T12:15:00.001-06:00

So Andrew Sullivan is endorsing Ron Paul as the voice of reason who will save the Republican party, thereby once again establishing himself as someone who is incapable of thinking in more than one dimension.

I regard this primary campaign as the beginning of a process to save conservatism from itself. In this difficult endeavor, Paul has kept his cool, his good will, his charm, his honesty and his passion. His scorn is for ideas, not people, but he knows how to play legitimate political hardball. Look at his ads - the best of the season so far. His worldview is too extreme for my tastes, but it is more honestly achieved than most of his competitors, and joined to a temperament that has worn well as time has gone by.

I feel the same way about him on the right in 2012 as I did about Obama in 2008. Both were regarded as having zero chance of being elected. And around now, people decided: Why not? And a movement was born. He is the "Change You Can Believe In" on the right. If you are an Independent and can vote in a GOP primary, vote Paul. If you are a Republican concerned about the degeneracy of the GOP, vote Paul. If you are a citizen who wants more decency and honesty in our politics, vote Paul. If you want someone in the White House who has spent decades in Washington and never been corrupted, vote Paul.

Ah, the never-ending search for an authority worthy of the great Andrew Sullivan. Naturally Paul's racism and sexism do not bother Sullivan in the least. After going over all the reasons why Paul is a nut, Sullivan says:

Paul's libertarianism may be the next best thing available in the GOP. It would ensure real pressure to make real cuts in entitlements and defense; it would extricate America from the religious wars of the Middle East, where we do not belong. It would challenge the statist, liberal and progressive delusion that for every problem there is a solution, let alone a solution devised by government. As part of offering the world a decent, tolerant conservatism, these instincts are welcome. As an antidote - and a very strong one - to the fiscal recklessness and lawless belligerence of Bush-Cheney, it is hard to beat. The Tea Party, for all their flaws, are right about spending and the crony capitalism it foments. So is Paul.

Sullivan just isn't very bright, is he? We have ample proof in the corpus of Megan McArdle that it is possible to be highly educated and even intelligent in certain areas, but a fundamental lack of intellectual honesty invariably leads Sullivan into making poorly reasoned decisions. He will always make the decision that flatters his ego and always turn his back on those he considers beneath him. You can never trust an authoritarian leader, even (or especially) when you agree with him.

My Tribute To Christopher Hitchens

2011-12-20T15:59:00.003-06:00

Christopher Hitchens died recently and many writers mourned the death of the man who introduced them to famous people and made them feel important. His alcoholism was celebrated and his death-mongering was feebly regretted. Or was it the other way around? Either way, the world celebrated his intellectual achievements and diamond-cut prose. For example:

Now, why is this? Why is it the case?, I mean. Why are women, who have the whole male world at their mercy, not funny? Please do not pretend not to know what I am talking about.

All right—try it the other way (as the bishop said to the barmaid). Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women? Well, for one thing, they had damn well better be. The chief task in life that a man has to perform is that of impressing the opposite sex, and Mother Nature (as we laughingly call her) is not so kind to men.

"Hitch" goes on to explain that evolution made men funny but not women. Women do not compete for men, they just stand there looking stunning and men compete for them. Of course this only works if you are stunning; if you are not you do not matter, most especially to "Hitch." After all, who wants a plain woman that nobody will envy you for sleeping with? Ha ha! "Hitch" did not become an elite to sleep with ordinary women!

And if you need proof, a study at Stanford that looked at 10 women's response to a cartoon gave you all the proof you would need.

Slower to get it, more pleased when they do, and swift to locate the unfunny—for this we need the Stanford University School of Medicine? And remember, this is women when confronted with humor. Is it any wonder that they are backward in generating it?

But "Hitch" does allow that some women are funny; ones who are not "real" women.

In any case, my argument doesn't say that there are no decent women comedians. There are more terrible female comedians than there are terrible male comedians, but there are some impressive ladies out there. Most of them, though, when you come to review the situation, are hefty or dykey or Jewish, or some combo of the three. When Roseanne stands up and tells biker jokes and invites people who don't dig her shtick to suck her dick—know what I am saying? And the Sapphic faction may have its own reasons for wanting what I want—the sweet surrender of female laughter. While Jewish humor, boiling as it is with angst and self-deprecation, is almost masculine by definition.

I can see why "Hitch" thinks women are not funny; when you redefine every funny woman out of existance, of course you are left with no funny women. But fear not, "Hitch" gives us lots of more reasons why women are not funny. They don't like to appear smart before men because then men won't want to sleep with them. (Which manages to insult both women and men.) But most (and worse) of all, they have....WOMBS!!

But "child" is the key word. For women, reproduction is, if not the only thing, certainly the main thing. Apart from giving them a very different attitude to filth and embarrassment, it also imbues them with the kind of seriousness and solemnity at which men can only goggle. This womanly seriousness was well caught by Rudyard Kipling in his poem "The Female of the Species."

...

Men are overawed, not to say terrified, by the ability of women to produce babies. (Asked by a lady intellectual to summarize the differences between the sexes, another bishop responded, "Madam, I cannot conceive.") It gives women an unchallengeable authority. And one of the earliest origins of humor that we know about is its role in the mockery of authority. Irony itself has been called "the glory of slaves." So you could argue that when men get together to be funny and do not expect women to be there, or in on the joke, they are really playing truant and implicitly conceding who is really the boss.

And we all know how powerful women are, how men only seem to be the ones who rule countries and religions and societies. "Hitch" says so, and he has to be really smart because he name-drops Kipling and Mencken and Thurber and Nietzsche all in the same article! And none of them are women, which proves that women aren't funny.

Humor, if we are to be serious about it, arises from the ineluctable fact that we are all born into a losing struggle. Those who risk agony and death to bring children into this fiasco simply can't afford to be too frivolous. (And there just aren't that many episiotomy jokes, even in the male repertoire.) I am certain that this is also partly why, in all cultures, it is females who are the rank-and-file mainstay of religion, which in turn is the official enemy of all humor.... And because fear is the mother of superstition, and because they are partly ruled in any case by the moon and the tides, women also fall more heavily for dreams, for supposedly significant dates like birthdays and anniversaries, for romantic love, crystals and stones, lockets and relics, and other things that men know are fit mainly for mockery and limericks. Good grief! Is there anything less funny than hearing a woman relate a dream she's just had? ("And then Quentin was there somehow. And so were you, in a strange sort of way. And it was all so peaceful." Peaceful?)

For men, it is a tragedy that the two things they prize the most—women and humor—should be so antithetical. But without tragedy there could be no comedy. My beloved said to me, when I told her I was going to have to address this melancholy topic, that I should cheer up because "women get funnier as they get older."

Observation suggests to me that this might indeed be true, but, excuse me, isn't that rather a long time to have to wait?

Happily "Hitch" must wait no longer, what with being dead and no longer anxious to sleep with beautiful but humor-deficient women, who, now that "Hitch" is gone, are getting the last laugh after all.

A Study In Stupidity

2011-12-20T13:10:00.000-06:00

When you live in a soap bubble-thin fantasy world of superiority and persecution, no detail is too small to overlook. The entire world must conform to the fantasy or the bubble will pop and reality will rush in to take its place. And, as we all know, reality has a liberal bias and must never be allowed to darken the door of the mind.

Take Charles C. Johnson, who cannot watch the new Sherlock Holmes movie without trying to twist it to conform to his ideology. He is peeved that Moriarty, who organized the criminal underworld and took a cut of its profits, is depicted as greedy and evil instead of just evil.

Alas, [director guy] Ritchie goes a trope too far by having Moriarty do it all for a buck. In a tired story line you have seen or heard many times before, Moriarty is hoping to make money off Europe’s descent into chaos and mechanized slaughter. It’s capitalism, not a love of crime, that sets him in motion, and even his capitalism is based not on evil genius but on keen insight that a war is coming anyway and he might as well profit. A profiteer he may well be, but the sinister element is missing.

In so doing, Ritchie cheapens Moriarty’s evil. The specter of mass killing hangs over the film for a moment, only to be banished by the awesome power of mechanized Europe. This wouldn’t be bad if it were more fully explored. Holmes and Watson note the coming of the automobile, but only dimly notice the tanks, machine guns, and modern cannon, all of which make their deafening debut.

...

It would have been far more fun and far more interesting to return to the old Moriarty and Holmes of Doyle’s beautiful series. Theirs was a real game and a deadly one, played for love of the game. Moriarty kills because he can and because he leaves no loose ends. So evil is Moriarty, and so clever, that he is almost too powerful even for Holmes — “the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen,” as Watson describes him. Doyle’s Holmes knew well the danger Moriarty presented. “If I were assured of your eventual destruction I would, in the interests of the public, cheerfully accept my own,” he told him in “The Final Problem.” Holmes knows what Moriarty is, just as he knows who he is.

Holmes, who loves the public interest, never loses his ethical focus in Doyle’s work. He knows that “all great criminals have a complex mind,” and so submits his own mind to the pursuit of something far more worthy: justice. “I am not the law, but I represent justice so far as my feeble powers go,” he explains in one story. Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, for all its $125 million budget, isn’t sure of its focus at all. Maybe the sure-to-follow sequel will set it on the right path.

Nobody who profits from capitalism or worships power wants to be told that ordinary-or even extraordinary--people act out of greed and their acts end up killing or harming millions of people. They want a black and white world of good and evil where evil is a disembodied force stalking the land, for which nobody is directly responsible. They do not want to know that their leaders are ordinary, petty, selfish, greedy men who attain enough power to do whatever they want and ignore the consequences.

Mr. Johnson is a real piece of work.

Charles C. Johnson dual majored in economics and government at Claremont McKenna College. He is a native of Boston, but now lives in Los Angeles and New York.

He is the founding editor of the award-winning news site, The Claremont Conservative, a daily blog devoted to Claremont Colleges’ news from a conservative/libertarian perspective.

He served as editor of the award-winning independent monthly, The Claremont Independent, where he broke stories about the Arabic department head’s ties to Hezbollah and compulsory racial sensitivity retreats for resident advisors. His coverage of two pro-life students being banned from campus for asking a question resulted in a complete overturning of their sentence and an administrative apology, just seven days later.

He has spoken on using technology to defend freedom at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s annual event. He has worked as a research assistant to Alan M. Dershowitz and for the Kauffman Foundation, America’s largest foundation dedicated to economic research and entrepreneurship. He has served as an opposition researcher for the Pollak for Congress campaign, among others.

He has served as a research assistant to Charles Kesler, editor of the Claremont Review of Books.

At 22, he serves as a Claremont Review of Books Fellow at the Claremont Review of Books and as a research fellow at the Henry R. Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World at Claremont McKenna. He is currently writing his Honors Government thesis on Calvin Coolidge. He has won both the Robert F. Bartley and the Eric Breindel Collegiate Fellowship at the Wall Street Journal.

He was selected for a prestigious Honors Fellowship with the Institute for Intercollegiate Studies and his journalistic work has been recognized by the Cato Institute. He is the winner of the prestigious award for government, the Harrison Fellowship.

His work has been published in The Claremont Review of Books, City Journal, National Review Online, The American, The Weekly Standard, Big Hollywood, Big Government, The Pope Center for Higher Education, American Thinker, and The New York Sun. On campus he has written for The Claremont Independent, The CMC Forum, and The Student Life.

Please email him at chuckwalla1022@gmail.com. He loves fan -- and hate -- mail.

Also:

Charles C. Johnson is the winner of this year's Eric Breindel Collegiate and ISI's Devos Leadership awards. He is also a recent Robert F. Bartley Fellow at the Wall Street Journal, and a Robert Novak Fellow at the Phillips Foundation.

The Robert Novak Fellowship. Now there's a high honor. And it comes with its own traffic sign.

Money, awards, jobs: all yours for the taking, as long as you help criminals steal everything they can get their hands on. Johnson obviously is very fond of Sherlock Holmes. Too bad he doesn't realize that he is working for Moriarty's side, and that Holmes would be as disgusted by him as he would by any other eager little minion.

Gods And Monsters

2011-12-19T12:24:00.000-06:00

In Business We Trust

Since propaganda is designed to appeal to people's fears and wants, it's interesting to take it apart and see what tactics our authoritarian leaders will use and which emotions they will try to manipulate. Writers always reveal themselves in their work, even when it is propaganda. Let's look at a fine bit of crowd control ostensibly written by Jeb Bush for The Wall Street Journal.

Congressman Paul Ryan recently coined a smart phrase to describe the core concept of economic freedom: "The right to rise."

We start off by identifying our group via a name check of our leader. We now know exactly what the author will say and with whom he will be aligned and authoritarian followers will automatically be receptive to what he has to say.

Think about it. We talk about the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right to assembly. The right to rise doesn't seem like something we should have to protect.

"I'm one of you" is only half of the identification process. Authoritarian leaders must also allude to those outside of the tribe and remind their followers that they are in danger from The Other.

But we do. We have to make it easier for people to do the things that allow them to rise. We have to let them compete. We need to let people fight for business. We need to let people take risks. We need to let people fail. We need to let people suffer the consequences of bad decisions. And we need to let people enjoy the fruits of good decisions, even good luck.

Repetition for effect, a fundamental propaganda tool. Simple declarative sentence for simple minds. The propagandist admits that people are having a hard time and are not getting rich in this, the land of milk and honey. He pushes competition over cooperation, which would decrease his own power and increase the power of the people. He tells us that people should be fighting to help businesses, placing the needs of businesses over the needs of people, which is why Megan McArdle is trying to convince us that corporations should have the right to walk away from unsuccessful property deals and people should not. The propagandist, like the slave dealer, wants to take away people's civil rights to make money, the crassest and most immoral reason possible.

Jeb Bush says that the power that he has and wants to keep actually belongs to the people--that they are taking the risks and gaining the reward or suffering the consequences of their actions. The propagandist utterly ignores the facts, that businesses took the risk, gained the rewards, and dumped the risk on the taxpayer. He wants to make Big Business into an authority that must be protected and supported at all costs to humans.

That is what economic freedom looks like.

It certainly does, unfortunately.

Freedom to succeed as well as to fail, freedom to do something or nothing. People understand this. Freedom of speech, for example, means that we put up with a lot of verbal and visual garbage in order to make sure that individuals have the right to say what needs to be said, even when it is inconvenient or unpopular. We forgive the sacrifices of free speech because we value its blessings.

Civil rights, the rights of the people, are conflated with business rights, the rights of the rich who control the economy. By constantly dangling the hope of wealth in front of the poor, the propagandist is able to get away with giving legal rights to corporations. The authoritarian leader simultaneously takes away the civil rights of the people but that is only discussed when The Other does it. He also throws in a little Christian dog-whistle and flag waving to reinforce the bonds of the tribe and distract the follower from his slight of hand.

But when it comes to economic freedom, we are less forgiving of the cycles of growth and loss, of trial and error, and of failure and success that are part of the realities of the marketplace and life itself.

"Free market" is a lie. Money is power and power does not want freedom, it wants control.

Increasingly, we have let our elected officials abridge our own economic freedoms through the annual passage of thousands of laws and their associated regulations. We see human tragedy and we demand a regulation to prevent it. We see a criminal fraud and we demand more laws. We see an industry dying and we demand it be saved. Each time, we demand "Do something . . . anything."

Leaders do not want their followers to realize that their leaders actually make plans and carry them out, leaving everyone else poorer. "Jeb Bush" pretends that the people accidentally curtailed their own freedom by "letting" elected officials make laws. In the same paragraph he says that the people demanded those laws out of a knee-jerk emotional reaction to society's problems. So Bush is simultaneously pinning responsibility for our economic problems on the people and absolving them of responsibility for the problem. Followers do not accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions since they give up all power to their leaders. The contradiction might seem a little crazy but authoritarian follows judge themselves by how well they obey, not by how well they think.

As Florida's governor for eight years, I was asked to "do something" almost every day. Many times I resisted through vetoes but many times I succumbed. And I wasn't alone. Mayors, county chairs, governors and presidents never think their laws will harm the free market. But cumulatively, they do, and we have now imperiled the right to rise.

Leaders have succumbed to human weakness by giving in to the people and now "we" have hurt ~~Baby Jesus~~ the Free Market.

Woe to the elected leader who fails to deliver a multipoint plan for economic success, driven by specific government action. "Trust in the dynamism of the market" is not a phrase in today's political lexicon.

The foolish people demand government action and do not have faith in their Free Market religion. The followers are not trusting their authority. Again, business is placed above humans in the authoritarian line-up.

Have we lost faith in the free-market system of entrepreneurial capitalism? Are we no longer willing to place our trust in the creative chaos unleashed by millions of people pursuing their own best economic interests?

And in case you didn't get the point the first time, here it is again, using the touchstone word "faith." Faith is a good thing, right? God demands faith and so do all the other authorities. Do you not trust your leaders? They are looking after your economic interests! Except when they aren't!

What happens next is rather interesting. Despite the libertarian dog-whistles, the little hints that libertarians are One Of Us, "Jeb Bush" does not support Ron Paul and the latter must be subtly isolated as The Other, so that his followers toe the Republican authoritarian line.

The right to rise does not require a libertarian utopia to exist. Rather, it requires fewer, simpler and more outcome-oriented rules. Rules for which an honest cost-benefit analysis is done before their imposition. Rules that sunset so they can be eliminated or adjusted as conditions change. Rules that have disputes resolved faster and less expensively through arbitration than litigation.

More repetition, and a sentence that neatly puts libertarians in their place, on the fringes. Worse of all, they are pegged as dreamy Utopians, the same claim made of liberals. Could there be anything more embarrassing to an American authoritarian follower than to be equated to a hippie?

In Washington, D.C., rules are going in the opposite direction. They are exploding in reach and complexity. They are created under a cloud of uncertainty, and years after their passage nobody really knows how they will work.

Nobody knows anything ever.

We either can go down the road we are on, a road where the individual is allowed to succeed only so much before being punished with ruinous taxation, where commerce ignores government action at its own peril, and where the state decides how a massive share of the economy's resources should be spent.

Fear! Statism! Fascism!

Or we can return to the road we once knew and which has served us well: a road where individuals acting freely and with little restraint are able to pursue fortune and prosperity as they see fit, a road where the government's role is not to shape the marketplace but to help prepare its citizens to prosper from it.

Or money! Glorious, powerful money!

In short, we must choose between the straight line promised by the statists and the jagged line of economic freedom. The straight line of gradual and controlled growth is what the statists promise but can never deliver. The jagged line offers no guarantees but has a powerful record of delivering the most prosperity and the most opportunity to the most people. We cannot possibly know in advance what freedom promises for 312 million individuals. But unless we are willing to explore the jagged line of freedom, we will be stuck with the straight line. And the straight line, it turns out, is a flat line.

Stick with me, kid, and I'll make you rich. That is all it takes to manipulate and control. Where would our con men be without greed?

Rich People Hate You

2011-12-14T11:25:00.002-06:00

At the very least, they think you are poor because you are weak. By blaming the victim, so to speak, they can ignore any guilt they might feel for working to ensure that even more people will suffer poverty. They can also enjoy that very special little thrill that social dominators enjoy so, the thrill of knowing that they can preach virtue to the millions they grind into poverty. It's not enough to have oh, say, an eclair. You have to have the eclair and then eat it in front of a starving child while lecturing her on gluttony.

...

As I wrote in an op-ed for the Daily that came out today, it's all too common for well-meaning middle class people to think that if the poor just had the same stuff we do, they wouldn't be poor any more (where "stuff" includes anything from a college education to a marriage license to a home). But this is not true.

You silly liberals might think that the poor just need money and then they wouldn't be poor anymore but you are wrong.

Welfare reform, by pushing mothers into work, produced real if modest improvements in most measures of average well-being. But as Jason De Parle documents, it didn't make them act like middle class parents. They were still single mothers with a lot of kids and no very helpful men available, and their kids did not start going to school more--in fact, more work hours meant the kids were less carefully supervised, and the daughter of one of the three women he followed got pregnant at 17, continuing a major portion of the "cycle" that welfare reform was supposed to break.

There is a cesspool of underlying assumptions built into Miss Megan's worldview. She assumes that the poor is made up entirely of Black women and their (presumably illegitimate) children, who actually make up 41% of the families in poverty headed by a single mother. (She could always look up the information but that would cut into her "me time." )

If poor people did the stuff that middle class people do, it's possible--maybe probable--that they wouldn't be poor. But this is easier than it sounds. As John Scalzi once memorably put it, "Being poor is having to live with choices you didn't know you made when you were 14 years old." Which often means, he might have added, spending your whole life doing the sort of jobs that middle class people sometimes do when they're 14. It isn't that people can't get out of this: they do it quite frequently. But in order to do so, you need the will and the skill--and the luck--to execute perfectly. There is no margin for error in the lives of the working poor.

Here McArdle assumes that the poor chose to be poor because they are incapable of doing otherwise. McArdle chooses to believe that everyone gets what he deserves because she wants to think that she deserves everything that she has. McArdle publicly aired her feelings of guilt for making an expensive, utterly unnecessary purchase in the Wall Street Journal so she could emphasize how it was a reward for her hard work, work that she, as a "middle class" person, performed due to superior work ethic and strong moral fiber. McArdle earns a living by writing propaganda for corporations. It is not like being a journalist, where you supposedly want to tell the truth, or an advertising copywriter, where you are up front about your motives and status as employee. It is lying to unsuspecting people in the hopes of secretly achieving your political/economic gains. It is stealing from the poor to give to the rich, the antithesis of all moral teachings.

McArdle is not a sociopath and is capable of experiencing guilt and regret, whether or not she chooses to do so. Naturally she usually chooses to not do so. McArdle frequently writes about how people cannot overcome their baser instincts, as she does in this piece, no doubt because she makes little effort to overcome her own. She is morally lazy, part of a class that cannot be bothered to think about others because she has created a lovely imaginary world of superiority that she would rather live in instead. Her moral self-indulgence leads to genuinely evil acts, such as taking Koch and Bradley money to write propaganda. Evil people are usually not serial killers lurking in the city shadows or plucking banjos by the crick. They are callous, morally lazy, greedy, pleasure-loving, self-indulgent and deeply insecure people who always take the easy way out. They are the Juice Box Villagers, the Pentagon pencil-pushers, the money-grubbers, the casually cruel. They are the people who were never loved, do not know how to love, and will spend their entire lives trying to find some way of killing the emptiness that never goes away.

And some problems are collective problems. It's all very well to say that poor women shouldn't have kids unless they can find a solid man to help raise them. (And I agree that this is a superior strategy). But men with solid jobs are rather scarce in many poor communities, not least because we've imprisoned so many of them. What you're asking poor women to do is actually, for most of them, to not have babies. This is an easy edict to deliver from a comfortable middle class home where you have all the kids you want. It probably sounds pretty shitty, however, to the poor women who you are blithely commanding to spend their lives alone.

This bizarre little bit of fake sympathy is supposed to undermine your middle class bourgeoisie morality and liberal sympathy for the suffering of minorities and reinforce McArdle's point.

Poor people are people who make decisions.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the face of evil. One soft little sentence, a sad-yet-brave sentence that manfully faces the truth and sorrowfully accepts it, wishing only that you, too, will accept this simple fact--that the poor chose to be poor and therefore deserve to be poor. Of course she is too cautious to say exactly what she means, which is that poor people are people who make poor decisions. That is a much more quotable line, and McArdle knows that propagandist must be exceptionally cautious and never overplay their hands or people will stop believing their lies.

They are not a combination of circumstances that can be tweaked to make them stop acting like poor people.I'm not arguing against incentives, or a safety net--I favor a generous EITC, substantial (if usually brief) unemployment benefits, etc. I think that the low salaries available to people who are not cut out for school represent a real problem for our society (unfortunately, not one I have any idea how to solve, which is why I rarely blog about it). And I also think that welfare reform was a good idea. But I chafe at the supposition that anything as simple as "jobs" could fix the problems in poor schools, or poor lives.

Nobody can do anything ever, so don't raise my taxes to help the poor.

A girl I grew up with basically voluntarily dropped out of the middle class and into the underclass, complete with a baby by her 30-year-old drug dealer boyfriend who then went to jail. She got her GED because she didn't like the strictures of school. She has worked at a series of low wage jobs--sometimes quite hard, working two jobs at a time. She's also lost a lot of jobs, and it's hard to believe that it's all bad luck. She's on the Section 8 waiting list, and has at various times been on other forms of state assistance. She buys her 5 year old daughter a cell phone and a television for her birthday, but takes little interest in her education. Her family is completely horrified.

Well, that proves it. If an acquaintance of McArdle was too stupid or undisciplined to stay chaste and in school, that means that all poor people chose to be poor, such as the mentally ill, the physically ill, the elderly, widowed mothers, men who can't find work, and children with unstable parents. And now McArdle is telling us that not only do the poor make bad choices, they do so because they have poor characters. But since argument by anecdote is a valid method of argumentation, I can tell the story of a girl I am acquainted with who had a baby in high school but did not end up poor because her very wealthy, very Republican parents supported her and the baby. She ended up living happily ever after amid great wealth. Her pregnancy was, of course, an accident, not a choice, and despite her history of reckless choices her parents supported her instead of cutting off all contact. McArdle does not address why her acquittance used drugs and had a drug-dealer daddy-substitute because such thoughts might lead to uncomfortable questions that would undermine her belief that wealthy people such as herself earned everything they have through personal merit.

What program would fix this festival of dysfunction? Would a higher paying job make her get out of bed even when she doesn't feel like it? To assume that there is something that could change her behavior is to assume away her agency.

Oh, those silly, paternalistic liberals!

Obviously, most poor people did not choose to be poor in the same stark way: she doesn't have racial prejudice against her, grew up in a middle class home which would happily have paid for college (and which sent her sister through a PhD program), and still has access to cultural and (limited) financial capital that people who grow up in a housing project don't. But I use her story to illustrate a point: while she may have had far more choice in the matter, she is poor because she does the things that poor people do. Is it meaningful to say that she has agency in her poverty, while "real" poor people (ie., people who grew up that way) don't?

A middle class parent after a long and crappy day at work struggles to deal with the kid's school because other parents expect it, because they were raised to treasure education, and because people will work harder to avoid loss (a kid who drops out of the middle class) than to achieve gains (a kid who makes it into the middle class). Also, that middle class job probably isn't as miserable as changing diapers on Alzheimer's patients, or cleaning houses, so you have more psychic energy to spare. Or you can blame a "sick culture" or personal laziness, as some conservatives do--at some level, it doesn't matter. Poor people are actually choosing not to hassle with their kid's school. It's a real choice that they have made. There is no reason to assume that you will be able to override it if you just get the policy levers in the right position.

McArdle did not do very well in school by Ivy League standards. She has admitted that she was pushed and prodded and coddled the entire way by private schools that were making a small fortune on her tuition. Her parents were able to buy that special treatment for their little darling because they had a lot of money. And if you are rich enough you don't have to hassle with your child's education at all; that is what headmasters, teachers and tutors are for. But, despite the fact that the poor are poor because they make bad choices, it doesn't matter if parents make bad choices or just don't have the time and energy to help their children succeed in school. Either way the poor are poor because they-or maybe their parents or grandparents--chose to be poor.

If little lower class Megan McArdle had drifted through school she would have ended up in a state school at best, competing for average-paying jobs with all the other middle-of-the-road young people. Money made all the difference in her life but that little fact doesn't flatter her ego.

What I am struggling to say is that however much those choices are now inflected by what went before--and the problems of other people in their families and communities--they are choices. We understand that the middle class girl I grew up with is driving her situation by behavior that is probably not very amenable to outside influence. Why do we assume that people who grew up poor are somehow more pliable?

It is her own fault; she was not pliable and led astray by circumstances of birth.

As adults they are the products of everything that has happened to them, and everything that they have done, but they are also now exercising free will. If you assume you know the choice they should make, and that there is some reliable way to entice them to make it, you're imagining away their humanity, and replacing it with an automaton.

And you wouldn't want to objectify the poor, would you? That would be wrong, and we all know how much liberals care about morality.

Public policy can modestly improve the incentives and choice sets that poor people face--and it should do those things. But it cannot remake people into something more to the liking of bourgeois taxpayers. And it would actually be pretty creepy if it could.

Oh, those creepy liberals, with their eugenics and social engineering! It is much better to let the poor continue to be poor because it is exactly what they chose to be and no more than they deserve.

McArdle reinforces her statement that not having a job has little to do with being poor in the comments.

McMegan18 hours agoin reply to SeanLM

I don't even think it's that--certainly not for education. Many of the largest problems in the lives of the poor stem from being around other poor people. The majority of poor people are not criminals, but the majority of criminals are poor people, preying on other poor people, and if you live in a poor neighborhood, you will be troubled by your proximity to that minority. Living in a poor neighborhood means your kids have greater opportunity to find a peer group that valorizes dropping out of high school. Etc. What does adding "jobs" do to this mix? It's a solution that can work for one person, who can move away from the problems. But if we chopped off the top of the income distribution, and distributed it among the poor, they would still be forced to live near poor people and go to school with them. There would be actual problems that money fixed--dentistry, better cars, less hassle with the various problems that acute money shortages cause. But not most of the big ones.

Excuse me, I have to go take a shower now and try to scrub the cloying self-love and callous selfishness off my skin.

Add It To The List

2011-12-09T10:21:00.001-06:00

Because I am a helpful sort of person, I wish to recommend this kitchen appliance to Mrs. Megan McArdle. It will be perfect for her cosy little nest.

It costs two thousand pounds so McArdle can once again buy her appliances abroad and amaze her neighbors by being the only one on the block with a coffee maker covered with Swarovski crystals.

Ghosts Of Christmas Lists Past

2011-12-09T10:07:00.002-06:00

You know you want it.

Megan McArdle's Christmas kitchen gift list is out again and is much like the old ones, with a few notable exceptions. Evidently entertaining her dinner guests with a list of her appliances and utensils was not enough and now the entire world must know the contents of her kitchen cabinets. McArdle includes a lengthy list of reasons why she (if not you*) is right to buy a $1500 mixer/saucier, entirely missing the reason her purchase was criticized. When you make a small fortune trying to eliminate Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, insurance reform, corporate taxes, corporate regulations, and public schools while preaching austerity for everyone not being paid by right-wing billionaires, it's rather bad form, as McArdle would say, to flaunt your wealth.

Or, as one commenter says:

Tom Doran 3 hours ago
Oh, Megan. Bless you, but this is why revolutions happen.

McMegan 3 hours ago in reply to Tom Doran
Really? The majority of the things on this list cost less than dinner for three at McDonalds.

Tom Doran 2 hours ago in reply to McMegan
It's more the existence of this entire industry of ludicrously-specialised gadgetry for culinary obsessives. Also, the combined worth of all the kitchen accessories you own or have owned must be in the tens of thousands of dollars by now.

This is more my personal hobby horse, however. It's like your "Megan Tax" aimed at expropriating those with an excessive sense-to-money deficit; obviously you'd be horrified if such a thing actually happened, as I would if you were shot as a bourgeois enemy of the people.

However, you must admit: Marie Antoinette would totally have a Thermomix.

*McArdle:"The verdict: unless you're so rich that it just doesn't matter, I'd think hard about buying one."

The House Always Wins

2011-12-07T09:11:00.000-06:00

Shorter Megan McArdle: It is with deep and abiding regret that I say that banks that make bad loans in Europe must never lose money or the poor will suffer.

Long version:

We can agree at the injustice of transferring money from moderate-income pensioners to wealthy bondholders. But I think the even more important question is what makes the average Joe better off. And it's not clear to me that "stiffing the creditors" is the right answer.

For starters, some of those creditors--maybe a lot of those creditors, depending on the country--are insurance companies and pension funds that serve the aforementioned Average Joes. But leave that aside. Europe is not, at least as I understand it, making the creditors whole because of their abiding love for foreign holders of European sovereign debt. They're stepping in and guaranteeing this debt in order to prevent a run on their banks and their bond markets.

Runs on financial markets, as far as I can tell, do not righteously limit their damage to rich jerks who didn't need the money anyway. In fact, the people who suffer the worst from a rapid contraction of the credit markets are the poor. They're the ones who actually end up hungry and on the street when companies start failing and they can't get jobs.

Now, perhaps you think that Iceland proves that default works. But I think that even the serious proponents of this idea recognize that this is a contested notion which is far from bulletproof. Ireland might be doing better now if they'd just told the bank creditors go go get stuffed. They also might be in much worse shape. We don't have a whole lot of data points here.

In the case of the current eurodeal, it seems to me that announcing that debtors are getting haircuts on their Italian or Spanish sovereign debt--or even failing to convincingly close off that possibility--would create the very outcome that they're trying to prevent: an all-out run on a bond market that is too big to save, and a follow-on collapse of banks that have bought too much Italian or Spanish debt.

Maybe this would be the best thing in the long run. But when I think about the histories of the Great Depression I've read, I have to say that it's certainly not obvious to me that making the creditors eat their losses is the safest and best options.

But even stipulating that it is, you can certainly see why the governments in question are frightened of the immediate consequences--and why they might try to stave them off, even at great expense.

Don't get me wrong--I think this is a pretty bad plan. But I'm not actually sure Europe has any obviously better plans left open to them.

This is why McArdle claimed that defaulting didn't help Argentina: Banks that make bad loans must always be made good. Moral hazard, like taxes, is for the little people.

For Their Own Good

2011-12-06T11:40:00.000-06:00

From The Hill:

GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said Thursday that “really poor children” have bad work habits and no knowledge of how to make an income “unless it’s illegal.”
Doubling down on his argument that children in poor neighborhoods should be employed as janitors in schools, Gingrich argued that the best way to teach children in poor neighborhoods good working habits is to put them to work as soon as possible.

“Start with the following two facts,” Gingrich said Thursday at a campaign stop in Iowa.

“Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works, so they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday,” Gingrich said.

“They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash’ unless it’s illegal.”

Gingrich said every successful person he knows started working at an early age in explaining his position that schools should hire poor children in their neighborhoods for part-time jobs as assistant librarians or assistant janitors.

“I come around to this question,” he said. “You have a very poor neighborhood. You have kids who are required under law to go to school. They have no money. They have no habit of work. What if you paid them part-time in the afternoon to sit at the clerical office and greet people when they come in? What if you paid them to work as the assistant librarian?”

“What if they became assistant janitors and their job was to mop the floor and clean the bathroom?” Gingrich added.

...

The comments from Gingrich echo the argument he first made in November, when he called child labor laws that might prevent the hiring of school children as janitors as “stupid.”

“This is something that no liberal wants to deal with,” Gingrich said at the time. “Core policies of protecting unionization and bureaucratization against children in the poorest neighborhoods, crippling them by putting them in schools that fail has done more to create income inequality in the United States than any other single policy.

“It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid.”

There were many people just like Newt Gingrich back in the day.

The Manufacturers Record published an article against attempts to bring an end to child labor (4th September, 1924)

This proposed amendment is fathered by Socialists, Communists, and Bolshevists. They are the active workers in its favor. They look forward to its adoption as giving them the power to nationalize the children of the land and bring about in this country the exact conditions which prevail in Russia. These people are the active workers back of this undertaking, but many patriotic men and women, without at all realizing the seriousness of this proposition, thinking only
of it as an effort to lessen child labor in factories, are giving countenance to it.

If adopted, this amendment would be the greatest thing ever done in America in behalf of the activities of hell. It would make millions of young people under eighteen years of age idlers in brain and body, and thus make them the devil's best workshop. It would destroy the initiative and self-reliance and manhood and womanhood of all the coming generations.

A solemn responsibility to this country and to all future generations rests upon every man and woman who understands this situation to fight, and fight unceasingly, to make the facts known to their acquaintances everywhere. Aggressive work is needed. It would be worse than folly for people who realize the danger of this situation to rest content under the belief that the amendment cannot become a part of our Constitution. The only thing that can prevent its adoption will be active, untiring work on the part of every man and woman who appreciates its destructive power and who wants to save the young people of all future generations from moral and physical decay under the domination of the devil himself.

Appealing to people's consciences to end child labor was unsuccessful.

It took the Great Depression to end child labor nationwide; adults had become so desperate for jobs that they would work for the same wage as children. In 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which, among other things, placed limits on many forms of child labor.

It is always about money. The goal of Corporate America is to lower wages, eliminate benefits and unload expenses onto the taxpayer. The obscene income disparity that results is then blamed on the powerless. This method works in America because we are accustomed to dividing ourselves into the haves and have-nots by race. We drown out our guilty consciences by claiming we are morally superior (exceptional) because we are raised in a "Christian democracy."

All photographs are by Lewis W. Hine.

Success!

2011-12-04T12:02:00.001-06:00

Congratulations to Senior Editor Megan McArdle on her raise (which we assume she received). We hope your career at The Atlantic and its assorted affiliations continues to earn you all the respect and admiration you deserve.

And many thanks to Geoffrey Zoref, who made the wonderful meme above. Who could forget her words of wisdom and the beneficial effect they have had on the world?

Best Wishes On Your Endeavor

2011-12-01T17:56:00.000-06:00

There was a discussion in the comments of one of my posts (I can't remember which one) in which we noted that McArdle seemed to be working a bit harder than usual. Her posts had more data and she attempted to be more fair-n-balanced. Now we know why.

One of the reasons that women are paid less than men is that they don't negotiate. The advice that follows is usually, "Well, negotiate!" But in fact, women don't negotiate for very good reason, as Kevin Drum points out....

Some woman or women unknown (we have absolutely no idea who) was negotiating for a raise (or perhaps applying for a new job). McArdle said she and P. Suderman, boy house toy, make over $300,00 a year, so we can see how she, or someone like her, must be suffering.

For some reason, this post comes to mind:

Why not food stamps?

By Megan McArdle

Jan 24 2008, 5:52 PM ET 187

1) The poor don't need more food. Obesity is a problem for the poor in America; except for people who are too screwed up to get food stamps (because they don't have an address), food insufficiency is not.

2) Food stamps only imperfectly translate into increased cash income, meaning that the poor will spend . . . more money on food.

3) If the increase in food stamps takes the form of expanded eligibility, rather than larger grants, the administrative issues and public outreach will delay your stimulus until well after it is no longer needed.

4) The limits on the type of goods available to food stamp consumers, and the growing season, mean that some (it's hard to say how much) of the food stamp spending will simply draw down perishable stocks rather than generating new economic activity. Eventually this will probably generate more economic activity, but probably well after your stimulus is needed.

5) The economy doesn't need a food sector more distorted by daft government programs than it already is. If you want to give money to the poor, give it to them. Even if they spend it all on drugs, it will hardly be much worse than spending it all on increasing their already astronomical obesity rates.

Meanwhile, liberal bloggers need contributions because you don't have to pay people to tell the truth, they are driven by innate decency to do so. You have to pay people to lie.

Enjoy your gastropubs and $1500 kitchen appliances, Mrs. McArdle. You earned them.

Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking Part 7

2011-12-01T13:37:00.001-06:00

Oh, Hank!

Chapter 8

The John Galt Line

In this chapter a train goes through a tunnel.

But let's start at the beginning. Our story resumes with a conversation between Eddie Willers, who at Dagny's command is keeping her seat warm as Vice President of Taggart Industries, and a nameless worker. Because Rand is utterly uninterested in anything not Ubermensch-ish she does not bother give us the worker's side of the conversation. Instead we have a nearly two page monologue in which Eddie fawns over Dagny and celebrates her accomplishments and flair. Rand said that Dagny is herself, although more healthy and energetic, and Rand doesn't miss a chance to wallow in self-glorification. A good writer (or a good person) would show flaws as well as good traits to humanize her characters but Rand was neither. Rand needed to glorify the few at the expense of everyone else; her bad guys are uniformly repulsive and wretched and her good guys are flawless. Rand's writing began as an escape into a happier world of imagination but over time hardened into a mean-spirited attack on everyone who refused to play along with Rand's inflated views of herself.

Her greatest pleasure was inventing plots. And when the plot had been put into words, she discovered the heady feeling of living in the world of her own creation. She experienced the joy of creating a world more interesting than the world around her, of creating purposes more important than the purposes around her, of creating characters more admirable and heroic than the people around her. She was discovering, without yet the words to name it, the Aristotelian principle that the fiction writer creates the world "as it might be and ought to be."

When Rand inserted herself into her stories she, too, became greater, more important, and more interesting than anyone else. ~~Rand~~ Dagny takes a moment to rest in her new office, two nearly empty rooms in an abandoned building next to her old office.

[Dagny] glanced at a jagged crack on the wall of her office. She heard no sound. She knew she was alone in the ruins of a building. It seemed as if she were alone in the city. She felt an emotion held back for years; a loneliness much beyond this moment, beyond the silence of the room and the wet, glistening, emptiness of he street, the loneliness of a gray wasteland where nothing was worth reaching; the loneliness of her childhood.

...

She stood, in a room of crumbling plaster, pressed to the windowpane, looking up at the unattainable form of everything she loved. She did not know the nature of her loneliness. The only words that named it were: This is not the world I expected.

Dagny feels her body longing for someone to give her the same kind of satisfaction and joy that her work gives her. As she rubs against her desk (yes, you read that correctly), she longs for a man who can give her that kind of satisfaction. A shadow falls across the room; a man disappears into the shadows. Who could it have been? Francisco D'Anconia warned her than John Galt would come for her but he also warned her that he would behave strangely, which Dagny also ignored. She is left to wonder for another 800 pages.

Hank Reardon is faring better than Dagny. Despite the anguish of being forced to sign over most of his industries he is determined to succeed. His Reardon Metal bridge is rising and that gives him the energy to soldier on. He meets Eddie at his hotel which, despite the overall decrepitude of the city, manages to serve Reardon orange juice over crushed ice on a crisp, white tablecloth. Rand pays no attention to consistency or reality; her half-dead city has virtually no street crime and Dagny walks through the city in the middle of the night, dressed to the nines, and nobody accosts her. The city is falling apart when Rand wants it to and operates efficiently when she doesn't want it to. Reardon tells Eddie that all will be well, and to not worry about the scum.

Reardon laughed. "Eddie, what do we care about people like [Jim Taggart]?" We're driving an express, and they're riding on the roof, making a lot of noise about being leaders. Why should we care? We have enough power to carry them along--haven't we?"

Ayn Rand is balm to the soul of authoritarian leaders, who believe that rules are for the little people. But Rand's characters are stiff with a kind of honor; they don't mind supporting the scum as long as the scum leaves them alone. They loathe unearned honor or respect and glorify both natural ability and ability gained through hard work. Libertarians, that is authoritarian wanna-be leaders, try to claim superior status without actual living up to that superiority. Bob Altemeyer describes (pdf) these "social dominators."

They thrill to power in and of itself. They want to control others, period. (Make that, “exclamation mark!”) Their name says it all. And they come bundled with a shock of nasty attitudes that completes the package.

Social dominance scores correlate very strongly with [...] answers to the Power Mad scale. High scorers are inclined to be intimidating, ruthless, and vengeful They scorn such noble acts as helping others, and being kind, charitable, and forgiving. Instead they would rather be feared than loved, and be viewed as mean, pitiless, and vengeful. They love power, including the power to hurt in their drive to the top. Authoritarian followers do not feel this way because they seldom have such a drive to start with.

[...]

In a similar vein, remember those “group cohesiveness” items in chapter 3, such as, “For any group to succeed, all its members have to give it their complete loyalty.” We saw that authoritarian followers endorse such sentiments. But social dominators do not. Oh sure, they want their followers to be super loyal to the group they lead. But they themselves are not really in it so much for the group or its cause, but more for themselves. It’s all about them, not about a higher purpose. If trouble arises, don’t be surprised if they start playing “Every man for himself” and even sell out the group to save their own skin.

[...]

Empathy. Here’s an easy one. How empathetic, how compassionate do you think dominators are? Not very, right? You got it, for they agree with statements such as “I don’t spend a lot of time feeling sorry for people less fortunate than me,” and “I have a ‘tough’ attitude toward people having difficulty: ‘That’s their problem, not mine.’” And they disagree with, “I feel very sorry for people who are treated unfairly” and “I have a lot of compassion for people who have gotten the bad breaks in life.” For high social dominators “sympathy” indeed falls, as the saying goes, between “ship” and “syphilis” in the dictionary. (Well, maybe that’s not the exact saying, but this is a family web-site.)

Altemeyer says that social dominators don't believe in equality.

Given all of this, do you really believe the social dominator who says people should have to earn their success in life? He’s quite willing to let the children of the rich get rich merely through inheritance. Do you trust him when he says he’s in favor of a level playing field? He’s against programs that would give the disadvantaged a better chance. Does he really believe the poor can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, or is he content to let them face an uphill struggle that very few can overcome? It doesn’t bother the social dominator that masses of people are poor. That’s their tough luck. And some racial groups are just naturally inferior to others, he says. Justice should not be applied equally to all. The rich and powerful should have advantages in court, even if that completely violates the concept of justice. Who cares if prejudice plays a role in the justice system? He certainly doesn’t. The “right people” should have more votes than everybody else in elections. And so on.

If you stare deeply into the souls of social dominators, they believe “equality” is a sucker word. Only fools believe in it, they say. And if people took equality seriously, if society did try to provide equal opportunity for all, and if the playing field really were made level so that bootstraps could be pulled up and multitudes of lives bettered, the social dominator knows he would get less. And he very much dislikes that notion. He says so.

This is how social dominators can tell us that insider trading is no big deal, that we live in a meritocracy instead of a country with third-world levels of economic inequality, and that if workers are permitted to retire instead of working until they die, they will get lazy and greedy. They genuinely believe that rules are for the little people and do not hesitate to take advantage of every opportunity for personal profit while lecturing the poor on morality and humility. Some sheep are a little smarter than others, however, so the elite and their servants dress up their greed and callousness with pretty bows and ribbons, calling them a philosophy and their adherents people of principle. Think tanks are formed, magazines are financed, fellowships are handed out with great ceremony, large prizes are awarded. But in the end it's nothing but propaganda to disguise greed and exploitation.

In Atlas Shrugged, however, it is the scum and lice who collaborate on propaganda that attacks the Ubermensch. Libertarians routinely use tactics that their heroes looked upon with disdain and disgust, such as making excuses for failure and using propaganda. The tactics used to fight Reardon are very familiar to those who read libertarian and conservative propaganda. Facts are useless, the people are told. Magazines, newspapers, pundits and radio hosts all spread the message that Reardon metal is unsafe. The unions refuse to let their men work on the John Galt Line so Dagny calls for volunteers, who line up for the honor of working for her. When the work is nearly completed, Dagny calls a press conference.

The reporters who came to the press conference in the offices of the John Galt Line were young men who had been trained to think that their job consisted of concealing from the world the nature of its events. It was their daily duty to serve as audiences for some public figure who made utterances about the public good, in phrases carefully chosen to convey no meaning. It was their daily job to sling words together in any combination they pleased, so long as the words did not fall into a sequence saying something specific.

Substitute "corporate good" for "public good" and you will have every Koch or Bradley-fed libertarian magazine that exists. The newspapermen are shocked that Dagny and Reardon state they are in business to make money; in RandLand money is a dirty word. Dagny invites everyone to witness the first train run and tells them that she (and Reardon) will be riding along. When the day arrives she is swept away with joy at her success, the only joy in life, according to Rand.

Only if one feels immensely important, she had told [Reardon], can one feel truly light. Whatever the train's run would men to others, for the two of them their own persons were this day's sole meaning. Whatever it was that others sought in life, their right to what they now felt was all the two of them wished to find. It was as if, across the platform, they said it to each other.

...

She looked at the crowd , and she felt, simultaneously, astonishment that they should stare at her, when this event was so personally her own that no communication about it was possible, and a sense of fitness that they should be here, that they should want to see it, because the sight of an achievement was the greatest gift a human being could offer to others.

Rand describes how the train's crew gathered to make this first run to Denver and Ellis Wyatt's oil fields, with contemptuous, indifferent looks of superiority at the rabble. For Rand, these qualities are both natural and right; who could not feel contemptuous, indifferent and superior when looking at scum? It's no more than they deserve for their inferiority. The newsmen are caught up in the excitement despite themselves; the sight of all that superiority makes them wish to be superior as well. As the train flashes across the countryside at 100 mph, Dagny sees old men and boys lining the track, guarding it against sabotage. The stations they pass are covered in decorations as railwaymen celebrates Dagny's great accomplishment and Ellis Wyatt is there to help her down when they make their triumphant arrival. He welcomes them to his home and that night she and Reardon have sex in the spirit of mutual triumph and contempt.

It was like an act of hatred, like the cutting blow of a lash encircling her body; she felt his arms around her, she felt her legs pulled forward against him and her chest bent back under the pressure of his, his mouth on hers.... He was not smiling; his face was tight, it was the face of an enemy; he jerk her head and caught her mouth again, as if he were inflicting a wound.

She felt him trembling and she thought that this was the kind of cry she had wanted to tear from him-this surrender through the shreds of his tortured resistance. Yet she knew, at the same time, that the triumph was his, that her laughter was her tribute to him, that her defiance was submission, that the purpose of all of her violent strength was only to make his victory the greater-he was holding her body against his, as if stressing his wish to let her know that she was now only a tool for the satisfaction of his desire-and his victory, she knew, was her wish to let him reduce her to that. Whatever I am, she thought, whatever pride of person I may hold, the pride of my courage, of my work, of my mind and my freedom-that is what I offer you for the pleasure of your body, that is what I want you to use in your service-and that you want it to serve you is the greatest reward I can have.

Reardon tears off Dagny's clothes and give her more looks of contempt. Dagny gladly gives herself to him and rejoices that he takes what he wants, which is the only way for proper Ubermenschen to live.

... [T]hey had moved by the power of the thought that one remakes the earth for one's enjoyment, that man's spirit gives meaning to insentient matter by molding it to serve one's chosen goal.

The world and its people exist to fulfill the needs of the Special, and when the lice and scum forget that, it is time for them to be eliminated.

You Are What You Buy

2011-11-28T10:28:00.002-06:00

image fromm here

Anyone who has ever worked in the service industries knows that for many people, making a purchase is a little power trip. A consumer is a thing to be cherished, courted by corporations, lauded by politicians, envied by the other Consumer-Americans for his ability to publicly demonstrate his wealth and therefore power. And people often get a little thrill from imitating those with more money and power by shopping where they shop or buying what they buy. It's like going on a cruise or staying at a hotel; for a few days you live like the rich, pampered with new, clean, expensive surroundings and servants to wait on you. We've all seen people trip out on this power as well, insulting the waitress or demanding immediate service or being needlessly critical. We've also seen people spend far more than they can afford or need to spend as they are driven to seek more power in their social and professional sphere. You have to spend money to make money, they say, and some people spend money freely in a futile attempt to satisfy an inner need for power, acceptance and self-esteem. (Which is another reason why our corporate overlords and their servants hate self-esteem.)

Which brings us back to our case study for emotional dysfunction, our symbol of status-seeking, our icon of ignorance, Megan McArdle. These are difficult times for Consumer-Americans. With thousands of people gathering en mass across the country to protest the stranglehold our elite have on our necks and criticizing our winner-take-all consumer society, Megan McArdle's entire raison d'etre is at risk. All this commotion in the streets might hamper McArdle in her quest to buy entrance to the upper crust, her ultimate and most precious goal. McArdle dimly realizes that she is doomed to fail since, partially through her own efforts, the rich have become so very, very rich that she will never be able to earn enough to join them. She will never be anything but a useful idiot who will be willing to pick up the tab for the lesser elite in the hopes of rubbing shoulders with the truly elite one day. But at least she can have the same toys as the rich, God and Visa willing, and for now that is close enough.

A few months ago, I became the proud, and slightly sheepish, owner of what must be the world's most expensive food processor. The Thermomix costs about $1,500. It not only chops the food but weighs the ingredients and cooks them for you while stirring constantly. Perfect hollandaise and flawless béchamel can be produced in minutes with virtually no effort.

After seeing one last summer in the home of a friend, I promised myself one if I completed a particularly large and time-consuming research project. By the time I did, I was no longer sure that I wanted to spend the price of a good chair or a bad car on a kitchen-counter appliance. But I went ahead and ordered one. However guilty the pleasure, I couldn't resist the joy of the long-planned splurge.

McArdle knows that it is declasse to discuss how much one spends for a purchase but how else can you excite admiration and envy from your audience? McArdle observed the proprieties by pretending to be abashed by her extravagant purchase but quickly gets to the main point: Consumerism is under attack and nobody is more willing to rush to its aid than Megan McArdle. And because no honest person can support the enormous consequences of our third-world level of inequality, McArdle must begin with a little bit of dishonesty.

Nor, it seems, can any of my countrymen. For decades, Americans have wallowed in credit, shunned savings and delighted in debt. In 1982, the personal savings rate was 10.9% of disposable income, by 2005 it had fallen to just 1.5%. It has since rebounded, but remains a measly 5%.

As everyone who read this article noted, people are "wallowing" in debt because wages are not rising and they are losing jobs right and left. Americans also refuse to admit that they no longer can afford a 1960s-style middle class comfort because they are exceptional and exceptional people do not become poorer, they only become richer. For decades they elected leaders who promised them more money, mostly by cutting taxes, but that didn't work out very well as cutting taxes helped the rich a great deal more than the middle class. To undercut Americans' growing unhappiness some corporate-sponsored pundits made a career of chiding the middle class for their greed and spending habits in an attempt to deflect blame from the rich to the rabble. Genuine concerns about the nature of American society and consumerism are mocked as the pundits celebrate the joys of spending money in this, the best of all possible worlds.

All this profligacy supports a rather vibrant cottage industry in polemics against consumerism. Authors as varied as the economist Robert H. Frank (1999's "Luxury Fever") and the political theorist Benjamin R. Barber (2007's "Consumed") have ganged up on what they see as the particularly unequal and excessive American spending habits. Unsurprisingly considering their abhorrence of waste, they are avid recyclers; the same arguments, behavioral economics studies and anecdotes appear time and time again. Access to credit makes consumers overspend. Materialistic people are anxious and unhappy. The conspicuous-consumption arms race is unwinnable. Down with status competition! Down with long work weeks, grueling commutes and McMansions! Up with family time, reading and walkable neighborhoods! The effect is rather like strolling down the main tourist strip in a beach town: Each merchant rushes out of his shop, gesticulating wildly and showing you exactly the same thing that you saw at all the previous stores.

This passage is just embarrassing. McArdle does not attempt to discuss Frank and Barber's arguments because the facts might interfere with her goal of supporting corporate consumerism. Instead she addresses an emotional argument that she hopes to deflate by being even more emotional herself. McArdle flings out exclamation points and knee-jerk conservative cliches about liberal arguments, waving her arms about in the same method she attributes to her ideological "enemies" to deflect criticism from coherent arguments and unwanted conclusions.

The latest person to open up shop on this boardwalk is Baylor marketing professor James A. Roberts. "Shiny Objects: Why We Spend Money We Don't Have in Search of Happiness We Can't Buy" runs mostly true to form, its main innovation being to add financial self-help advice to the usual lectures. The book includes not only exhortations but actual instructions—how to make a budget, get out of debt and save for retirement.

It's a thorough survey of both academic research on consumerism and basic finance advice. Still, I first ran into an argument I hadn't seen before somewhere around page 200—that the perfect surfaces of modern products hasten the replacement cycle because they show wear so badly—and well before then Mr. Roberts had fallen into some of the terrible habits of the genre. Though less openly contemptuous of the spendthrift masses than many of his fellow scolds, he still exudes that particular sanctimonious anti-materialism so often found among modestly remunerated professors and journalists.

It's no surprise that Dr. Roberts is on McArdle's Naughty List. He has said:

There are “his and her” spending patterns…but the desires that motivate consumption are only superficially different. “Women generally value their appearance more than men, which can lead to retail therapy; men value social recognition…both trying to build self esteem from different directions.” Women tend to doubt their financial acumen might shop “in order to take comfort in the trappings of financial success.” Men, more optimistic, just want to strut their stuff. “How big your collection of power tools or music boils down to feelings of self-worth.”

And:

The research is overwhelmingly clear…The more materialistic you are, the less happy you are…we’ve been told by Madison Avenue that happiness can come through the mail.

Telling McArdle that money does not buy happiness is futile since spending money makes her very, very happy and increases her feelings of self-worth. Since McArdle cannot imagine any other way of feeling good about herself she is deeply threatened by any attempts to take away her source of happiness.

Here are some of the things that upset him and that "document our preoccupation with status consumption": Lucky Jeans, bling, Hummers, iPhones, 52-inch plasma televisions, purebred lapdogs, McMansions, expensive rims for your tires, couture, Gulfstream jets and Abercrombie & Fitch. This is a fairly accurate list of the aspirational consumption patterns of a class of folks that my Upper West Side neighbors used to refer to as "these people," usually while discussing their voting habits or taste in talk radio. As with most such books, considerably less space is devoted to the extravagant excesses of European travel, arts-enrichment programs or collecting first editions.

McArdle attempts to frame any discussion of inequality or consumerism in the only way that she can understand, a way that fits in with her preconceived notions, prejudices and neuroses. Liberals are elites who are just jealous of more successful elites and liberal elites look down on conservatives out of snobbery and that evil, dreaded "self-esteem" thing they all have. All academics are liberal elites but they are poor elites, who substitute egg-head competition for consumer competition because they are poor.

One of the running themes of the economist Robin Hanson's excellent blog is that arguments like the ones found in these books are actually an elite-status proxy war. They denigrate the one measure of high-visibility achievement—income—that public intellectuals don't do very well on. Reading "Shiny Objects," you get the feeling that he is onto something.

Consider the matter of status competition. Mr. Roberts, like so many before him, argues that conspicuous consumption is an unhappy zero-sum game. But this is of course true of most forms of competition: Most academics I know can rank-order everyone in the room at a professional conference with the speed and precision of a courtier at Versailles. Any competition, from looks to money to academic credentialing, both consumes a lot of resources and makes many of the participants feel bad about themselves. Why, then, does the literature on status competition always tell us that we should redistribute capital gains or inheritances and never tell us that we should redistribute academic chairs or book contracts?

In your face, liberals! This childish and threadbare argument seems utterly devastating to McArdle. If academics think inequality is so bad why don't they give up some of their hard-earned rewards, huh? Huh?? Naturally McArdle is delighted to find a way to fight back against all those evil liberal academics, with their pipes and leather patches and class envy. Sadly, she is disappointed again.

And so I was excited to see that Rutgers history professor James Livingston had written "Against Thrift: Why Consumer Culture Is Good for the Economy, the Environment, and Your Soul." The book sets out a provocative thesis: Since about 1920, net private investment has not correlated very well with GDP growth, as conventional wisdom has it. To hear many commentators talk, you would think that growth increases basically in tandem with savings and investment, but in fact the numbers bounce around a lot.

Note that McArdle very seldom addresses actual numbers; a wise choice considering her innumeracy. She will never win an argument on its merits and she know it.

Consumption, not investment, is the key to prosperity, Mr. Livingstone argues; most of our recent woes, especially the housing bust and subsequent disaster, stem from excessive savings, driven by rising inequality. Rich savers with no particularly productive outlet for their capital create bubbles, he says, when society would be better off if ordinary people, and the government, had been given the money to spend rather than save. (Though "Against Thrift" is an argument against saving, it interestingly ends up in the same place as most arguments for it: with a call for greater government redistribution of incomes.)

But the question of whether saving is always productive is an important one. In the present crisis, the global economy has been damaged by serial stampedes of desperate investors seeking a safe-but-lucrative spot for their excess capital. Money fled housing bonds to money-market funds, money markets to sovereign debt, sovereign debt to gold. It now looks as if the euro may end up getting trampled to death by the herd. So savers do pose dangers.

Yet Mr. Livingston places far more weight on his favorite statistic about net private investment than it will bear, reaching the ludicrous conclusion that "economic growth since the 1920s did not require net private investment or net capital formation." Since 1947, the real value of businesses' tangible assets (everything from machine tools to the buildings they're housed in) has roughly doubled. Would we really be just as well off if it hadn't?

McArdle deliberately ignores the fact that 70% of our economy is based on consumer consumption. (If she does not know that fact she should be running the Recipe Corner of the Podunk News Gazette, where she would still be ignorant but do less harm.) Despite having just said that Americans were wallowing in credit, she also does not acknowledge that credit has been keeping the consumer economy afloat, credit helped drive bubbles, and when credit dried up, so did the economy.

Mr. Livingston doesn't address this. He also attributes the "global savings glut" of the past decade to excessive wealth even though Asian central banks probably played a larger role than rich Americans and claims that the "Bush tax cuts" caused the housing bubble by leaving those over-saving rich with too much money to play with even though three-quarters of the lost tax revenues stayed in the hands of people making less than $250,000 a year—the de facto threshold for "rich" established by the Obama administration.

McArdle blames Asian banks for loaning money to America instead of America for borrowing money from the Chinese and Japan to finance wars and tax cuts for the rich. This enables her to claim that income inequality isn't as bad as it seems to be.

These are not small omissions; they are central rebuttals to his thesis that Mr. Livingston ignores. After sketching out his interesting but badly incomplete thesis, he simply moves his book onto a series of somewhat tedious meditations on consumer culture, heavily larded with confusing references to luminaries like Freud, Marx and Marcuse. These are confusing not because they are hard to parse but because there is no obvious reason for their inclusion.

Again, McArdle does not address Livingston's arguments, she just calls them confusing, incomplete, tedious, and larded-up with irrelevancies. Why work hard on analysis when you can simply tell everyone that you are right and the other side is wrong?

Like their forebears in this robust polemical genre, neither Mr. Livingston nor Mr. Roberts gets us much closer to answering the essential questions: What makes American consumers spend as they do—and is it a bad thing? For some thoughts on these matters, I'd suggest turning to James B. Twitchell's "Living It Up" (2002), a wry account of the author's own complicated relationship with luxury brands that explores the moral and psychological aspects of our free-spending ways without seeming to be a paternalist rant against the folly of BMWs. "The pleasure of spending is the dirty little secret of affluence," says Mr. Twitchell, a professor of English literature and advertising at the University of Florida. "The rich used to do it; now the rest of us are having a go." He is keenly alive to the risks—and occasional risibility—of American-style consumerism. But he never pretends not to understand its undeniable appeal.

What do you have against spending money, Mr. Academic? It's fun for the whole family! And now that she has recommended a pro-shopping book, McArdle's job of examining our consumer culture in a time of economic crises is done. Let's bring it on home, sister!

The money I spent on a Thermomix, after all, would have more prudently gone into an emergency fund, or retirement savings. Yet having spent it, I really do enjoy my little robocooker, and not because it is (embarrassingly) more expensive than all the other food processors on the block. It has significantly improved the number and tastiness of meals I make from scratch and thus my standard of living. Was it worth $1,500? Hard to say, but I wouldn't sell it back.

Of course not. If she gave it back she couldn't tell us that it is more expensive than any other food processor on her block and raised her standard of living above that of the masses, who will never have a $1,500 appliance, the schmucks.

God bless consumerism and God bless Corporate America, who paid McArdle so much money to support corporations that she can afford to blow the price of a used car on a kitchen appliance while poverty soars and children go hungry.

See also TBogg, Charles Pierce, DougJ, and Rugosa.

Holiday Trivia

2011-11-26T13:38:00.000-06:00

Needs molasses

Today I give thanks for our One Percenters, our libertarian self-professed experts, our Village of Idiots who persist in believing that inheriting luck and fortune is the same thing as earning luck and fortune. Watching our jumped-up, wanna-be leaders pretend to be experts is always good for a chuckle.

asymmetricinfo Megan McArdle
If you're one of those people searching for a pumpkin pie recipe, may I recommend this one? http://bit.ly/tYHOen
23 Nov Favorite Retweet Reply

She has such confidence in herself, bless her heart. It's too bad she doesn't have the faintest idea how to bake. But we are supposed to believe that McArdle came from a long line of culinarily intimidating bakers since McArdle's mother was a caterer, just as we are supposed to believe that our elite know what they are doing because they graduated from elite schools. Why bother with facts when you already know you're special?

The link leads to this:

Mom's Pumpkin Pie
I can't tell you how different homemade pumpkin pie is from the awful stuff that gets served in restaurants and bakeries. I wouldn't use the latter for anything but emergency spackle, or checking erosion in a gully. My mother's pumpkin pie on the other hand, is sublime. And easy!

1 cup sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp cloves
1/2 tsp salt

Combine all of the above and add 1 1/2 c pumpkin (one "one pie" can)

Mix in 1 beaten egg and a cup of milk

Put in an unbaked pie shell and bake at 400 for 10 minutes, then turn the oven down to 350 until done, about 1 hour, until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean.

Posted by Jane Galt at November 24, 2004 09:41 AM

Not only is her recipe sublime, but bakery pies are good for nothing but spackle! Which is strange because McArdle's recipe is very close to the recipe on the back of a can of pumpkin but with several important and unfortunate changes.

Pumpkin pie is a custard pie, which means it is thickened with eggs. It is similar to a cream pie, which is also made with milk and eggs, but cream pie fillings are often thickened with cornstarch or flour as well. The eggs, milk, sugar and flavoring create the custard and the more eggs and milk you use, the more rich, firm, and silken the custard becomes. The recipe on the pumpkin can uses two eggs and 12 ounces of evaporated milk, I add one more egg and a lacing of molasses for a very rich, custardy pie. One egg and 8 ounces of milk would, at a guess, result in a mealy pie with none of the richness provided by the thickened, sweetened milk and eggs. I would also check the pie well before the hour is up; the pie should be cooked until the filling is just set, quivery but not loose.

It's like McArdle has a grudge against flavor and won't let it in the house. Any day now I expect The Atlantic or the New American Foundation to pay her a fat fee to write a cookbook.

Deep Thinkers

2011-11-22T13:14:00.000-06:00

It's not easy being a shill for the rich. You have to constantly come up with new ways of telling everyone that high levels of inequality are just fine-n-dandy while the facts are telling everyone otherwis, the little tramps. Fortunately for Megan McArdle, she has people like David Brooks to do her thinking for her. Since he has a New York Times column, obviously the key to literary and punditary success is copying everything Brooks says and does. When he finally kicks the bucket the Times will naturally offer his job to her since the only things that will have to be changed are the by-line and photo.

(Note: we are saying the facts are little tramps, not McArdle. As we all know she couldn't possibly be a whore who would sell out her fellow countrymen for a high-priced cocktail and taxi fare because whores are poor and McArdle is not.)

But we digress. Now that Brooks has led the way, McArdle tells us that the Blue Staters are fooling themselves when they think income inequality is a big problem, for Blue inequality is just fine and proper while Red inequality is the real problem.

The Great Work Divide
Business Nov 22 2011, 11:01 AM ET 54
Reihan Salam has an interesting post on income inequality in which he notes that executives of days past used to consume a lot more of their "income inequality" in the form of corporate perks. Salam attributes this to the fact that there was more within-firm skill inequality; I'd chalk it up more to the tax code, which in 1986 was changed in various ways that made it much more attractive to pay your employees in salary, and much less attractive to pay them in the form of lavish expense accounts and magnificent private office space. The notion of an executive washroom with its own special key now seems mostly ludicrous, but it was an actual thing--and I'm not sure that giving executives special bathrooms is actually noticeably less corrosive to social cohesion and personal happiness than giving them fatter pay packets.

We are supposed to believe that executives no longer have perks, after McArdle defended tax breaks for executive jets. She lies like she breathes--badly.

This particular passage struck a nerve with me:

In a sense, the sorting mechanism at firms like Apple happens before you join the firm: its employees are homogeneously high-skilled, now that manufacturing, etc., has been off-shored. So while a firm like Pepsi might have had a range of employees at different skill levels, that is somewhat less true of the iconic technology firms of our own era.
It suddenly occurred to me that this is a standard feature of the work lives of blue state elites: almost all of their contact is with people just like them. Same education, usually the same few states of origin, and a pretty uniformly shared set of values about what work is for and how it should be done.

McArdle took Brooks' ball and ran with it. It's not that income inequality is high, it's just that education inequality is high. And we all know that education inequality is due to laziness and immorality. Just stay in school, don't have kids, work hard, and you too will become a corporate CEO!

These people tend to vote Democratic. Small-business owners, who work in much more diverse environments, tend to vote Republican. I'm not going to speculate on why this might be so--but I suspect that it matters.

All liberals are elites who live in blue states, work with people educated at elite institutions, and have elite jobs. They don't run businesses and aren't poor or Black or Hispanic or old or female. They are elites, except when they are not. Therefore any liberal who is concerned about income inequality is just being jealous of his more successful elite bretheren.

Where would we be without Megan McArdle to think for us, and David Brooks to think for Megan McArdle?

What Good Is Power If You Don't Use It?

2011-11-22T11:28:00.001-06:00

There is nothing more fun than taking your little power-mobile out for a spin by inflicting repressive control over others. After all, what use is power if you don't, well, use it? Sure, you can tell yourself that you are a powerful stud the likes of which the world has never known, you can feel the power caressing your ego, telling it oh baby, baby, you're the bestest, smartest, most wonderful person of power in the whole wide world and everyone else had better do what you say--for their own good, of course.

Now, this works best if you actually have a lot of power, mainly because you have a lot of money. If you don't have any money to speak of and nobody listens to you or does what you say, you have to find another way to feel powerful. You have to find someone so weak that your teeny tiny amount of wealth and power is enough to control them or you have to borrow someone else's power--preferably both. And you still don't have enough power to get them to do what you say. You still don't have beautiful women (or men) hanging on your every word. Your kids don't show you the proper amount of respect for your position as The Head Of The Family as sanctified by God, and even your church doesn't flatter your ego enough, no matter how many times they tell you God loves you just the way you are. God doesn't put money in your pocket and beautiful women in your non-existent sports car, now does he? And your boss tells you what to do and you know that you are only one bad mistake or bit of bad luck away from losing that job and being utterly powerless yourself.

But the great thing about America is that it has so many poor people, especially poor women and children, and who could be easier to push around than women and children? Nobody cares if they suffer--indeed, they prefer it--so when all else fails, you can always massage your ego and flex your power muscles by telling women what they can and cannot do with their own bodies. Everybody else does it and, as we all know, that means it's okay. Look at all the churches--most of them have an iron grip over the lives of the women they own. If controlling women was given the thumbs-up from God, who are we to argue with His time-tested method of control?

Let's let Matthew Hanley, co-author of Affirming Love, Avoiding AIDS: What Africa Can Teach the West, explain why the Catholic Church insists on interfering with Africa's attempts to control the spread of AIDS. He is interviewed by Kathryn Jean Lopez, who genuinely seems to believe that it is inappropriate for a woman to have any power over her life whatsoever, and that every time a female enjoys sex she makes Baby Jesus cry.

Condoms may protect some people from some infections some of the time, but that is far from saying they are effective or constructive as public-health policy. HIV transmission rates have remained constant here for the past decade; even Dr. Anthony Fauci of the NIH (National Institutes of Health) took to the pages of The Washington Post recently to characterize, in unusually strong terms, our AIDS- prevention efforts as a failure — although he still dared not emphasize behavioral changes.

Your question got me thinking of, perhaps, another way to put it: One might fairly interpret the “Pope’s best interests” as something akin to the common good — since he is charged with safeguarding matters of faith and morals which are conducive to it — rather than the particular interests of Joseph Ratzinger, the individual man.

It's not that people feel powerful or gain power by controlling others, it's just that the churches must control others because they need to be controlled. If you didn't have the church the priests wouldn't be able to control your behavior and the common good would suffer. You are good and you don't want to suffer, especially because of something that someone else did! And by the way, the church needs more money for the bishop's fund and the capital improvements fund and the retired priests' home and the Vatican since without the church there would be nobody to keep the people from sinning and going to hell and you don't want to go to Hell, do you? And don't forget to donate to all the non-profits fighting abortion, which are doing God's work by paying huge salaries to their spiritual leaders. Remember, money equals power, power equals control, and control equals more money. It's the Circle of Profit!

[...T]there are certain truths we can all come to recognize, as they are accessible to reason. As we point out in the book, the great pre-Christian philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle recognized that sexual promiscuity damages the wholeness and well-being of a person. So did many other writers of antiquity and from the Jewish tradition.

[snip]

Many traditional African cultures themselves prized virginity and held marriage, faithfulness, family life and the like in high regard. Catholic leaders in Africa have noted that its core teachings on sexuality are neither impossible not incompatible with its own traditions. So believers and nonbelievers alike can recognize that chastity, far from being an arbitrary external constraint, helps a person lead a well-integrated life and is essential for human fulfillment. Without it, discord and turmoil proliferate.

Without control you would have no control! There would be discord because people would disagree with you and you wouldn't be able to force them to do what you want. There would be turmoil as you think about your powerlessness in the face of all that activity you can't control. People live and die, have sex and babies, eat and sleep and bury their dead and they don't think about you at all. You mean nothing to them! YOU, the most important person in the history of the earth, the pinnacle of perfection and the epitome of excellence. And nobody cares! They just do whatever they want and ignore you!

Well, you will have something to say about that. You'll just take away their condoms, their birth control, their abortion clinics, their Aid to Dependent Children. See how they like that! We'll see who's powerful after you reduce them to lives of frustration and poverty. They'll be sorry they didn't listen to you tell them how to live their own lives.

We'll see who has the power around here.

OccupyAmerica

2011-11-21T10:16:00.001-06:00

Occupy Missoula is in need of money and aid. Taryn Hart at The Plutocracy Files has more, including information on the police harassment they are experiencing. FireDogLake's OccupySupply is donating winter gear to the Occupy movement and is another good way to help. They "ship 100% union made, American manufactured cold weather gear to occupations."

One of the best ways to fight corporations is with the one weapon we have that they fear: spending power. Turning our backs on corporations by using credit unions and buying from non-corporate sources is an important step in undermining their power.

People Of Merit

2011-11-19T15:11:00.000-06:00

Megan McArdle would like to remind us that America is a meritocracy and if the elite exclude everyone else it's just because they are far too busy running the world to spend time sifting through the rabble.

The hardest thing about the meritocracy's tyranny is that they're not necessarily doing it on purpose. It's just a convenient shorthand for a group of people who are really busy.

(yap yap)

The Ivy League is full of smart, interesting people. But it is not full of all of the smart, interesting people in the country, or even a majority of them. And given the resumes required to get there, it produces a group of people who are narrow in certain predictible [sic] ways. (I include myself in this: just because I can see it operating doesn't mean I can escape it.)

The problem is that actually seeking out a wide variety of graduates would be much more expensive and time consuming. Why spend the effort searching for "best" when you can easily access "very, very good"?

After years of telling us that CEOs are irreplaceable, the Best and Brightest, it seems they are now the Good Enough. McArdle says that the elite merely are saving time by hiring only from the Ivy League, which their money has stuffed with their own progeny and the children of the fellow elite. Naturally when their children graduate the elite will give them a good job, which is no less than they merit in our meritocratic times.

It would be nice if Megan McArdle read her own magazine; namely, 68% of the Sons of the 1% Work at Their Dad's Company by Dino Grandoni. The more elite a graduate is, the greater the chance that he will get his job from his father.

Nepotism and wealth go together according to a study published in the Journal of Labor Economics. The researchers found that 68 percent of the sons of top-percentile income earners have at some point by the time they're age 33 taken a job at a firm their father also worked. That's significantly higher than the 55 percent rate for the sons of the second-highest percentile of earners and the 40 percent average for all income levels. Though the data was limited to Canadian males, the researchers were able to point to several factors that could be at play, some nepotistic and some not. While high earners tend to be self-employed or at least tend to hold sway over hiring decisions at their companies, the pattern could also involve "the formation of values and preferences" -- basically, that fathers tend to raise kids who would fit into their companies well. Whichever hypotheses turn out to be the most important, one of the study's authors, Miles Corak of the University of Ottawa, thinks it proves that something other than meritocracy is at work. He writes on his blog:

If the members of the top 1 percent are there because of connections or political power—rather than by the force of their talent, energy, and motivation—then we should be rightly critical about claims that they merit their fortunes, and question the contribution they make to economic productivity.

While she will be one of the first to support such income inequality, McArdle does manage to have just the tiniest bit of sympathy for the little people if she knows one personally.

Forget about the effects on society, though; this is terrible for organizations. You see this in Washington all the time--a friend who went to a lesser-known state school said he could always tell the people he wasn't going to like when he met them at cocktail parties, because the minute he told them where he'd gone to school, they became extremely interested in going to get another drink or find the cheese dip. This is one of the smartest, most consistently interesting and original, most talented writers I know. Having actually attended one of those elite schools that apparently make you fascinating, I can attest firsthand that statistically, the elitists were vanishingly unlikely to be as interesting as the person they abandoned because he'd gone to a state college.

McArdle has related this anecdote before. One wonders who is this extraordinarily talented young person, whom McArdle is so passionate in defending while supporting his detractors. Sorry, anonymous person. You just didn't make the cut because your parents couldn't get you into the Ivy League, and someone who knows you and cares about you shrugs her shoulders at the injustice and snobbery. Not all of us have enough merit to rise to the top.

Maybe this extremely talented young man will find a job with a billionaire who needs great writers to support his deregulation plans. Re-reading your favorite passages of Atlas Shrugged will only cheer you up so many times before you need to find someone who will give you what you deserve.

It's The Government's Fault

2011-11-18T12:29:00.000-06:00

Shorter Megan McArdle: My doctor wouldn't listen to me, therefore death panels.

Our Moral Elite

2011-11-16T10:59:00.000-06:00

There are no witches, zombies, giants or gods, despite what we read in the Bible. There were no pagan gods. Athena, Zeus, Ishtar, Mithras and all the rest are fictional. There are no demons or angels, no gods or goddesses. Satan does not exist and does not tempt good people do bad things. A miasma of evil does not stalk the land, entering the hearts of the unaware and ungodly. There is only us and our physical world, which holds more than enough mystery and wonder, beauty and terror, to satisfy even the most spiritual and metaphysical of people.

The Devil does not persuade us to make the wrong choice. We are responsible for our own actions (within limits) and we make our own choices (consciously or unconsciously). When we deliberately choose to harm another person or let them be harmed by our inaction, we are not under supernatural attack. We make a bad choice, usually for selfish reasons. That choice might be small or large, casual or deliberate, reluctant or eager--but it is a choice and we make millions of them in our lifetimes. Very often we don't know the consequence of our choices but the consequences occur nonetheless, so we can only try to make the right choice, trusting that doing the right thing for the right reason will do no harm. We are small creatures who live only for an instant, and sometimes we must just trust ourselves and leave the rest to fate.

A person who trusts himself and tries to be true to himself has been taught that the pain of others is just as real and important as his own pain and therefore he has developed empathy. He has been given unconditional love and therefore he believes he has worth and is a good person. He wants to keep those extremely gratifying feelings of self-worth so he makes choices that will ensure he does not lose them. He does good because it makes him feel good.

It's difficult to control someone with a strong sense of self-worth and self-esteem. It is difficult to play on his fears and weaknesses because does not try to hide from them, he accepts responsibility for making the right decision despite his fears and failings. He does not looking to anyone else for approval or instruction and he does not dismiss his own judgement when it is questioned. If he makes the wrong decision he faces the consequences of his actions and does not blame anyone else for his own choices.

It's not easy being anti-authoritarian but since obedience to authority leads to a lifetime of guilt, fear and confusion, it sure beats the alternative.

Case in point: Mr. Ross Douthat, spiritual and political advisor to the erudite masses.

Bad and mediocre people are tempted to sin by their own habitual weaknesses. The earlier lies or thefts or adulteries make the next one that much easier to contemplate. Having already cut so many corners, the thinking goes, what’s one more here or there? Why even aspire to virtues that you probably won’t achieve, when it’s easier to remain the sinner that you already know yourself to be?

But good people, heroic people, are led into temptation by their very goodness — by the illusion, common to those who have done important deeds, that they have higher responsibilities than the ordinary run of humankind. It’s precisely in the service to these supposed higher responsibilities that they often let more basic ones slip away.

I believe that Joe Paterno is a good man. I believe Joe Posnanski of Sports Illustrated, the brilliant sportswriter who is working on a Paterno biography, when he writes that Paterno has “lived a profoundly decent life” and “improved the lives of countless people” with his efforts and example.

I also believe that most of the clerics who covered up abuse in my own Catholic Church were in many ways good men. Of course there were wicked ones as well — bishops in love with their own prerogatives, priests for whom the ministry was about self-aggrandizement rather than service. But there were more who had given their lives to their fellow believers, sacrificing the possibility of family and fortune in order to say Mass and hear confessions, to steward hospitals and charities, to visit the sick and comfort the dying.

They believed in their church. They believed in their mission. And out of the temptation that comes only to the virtuous, they somehow persuaded themselves that protecting their institution’s various good works mattered more than justice for the children they were supposed to shepherd and protect.

We are only as good as the decisions we make but Douthat has a very different point of view. He believes we are either good people or bad people and that bad people do bad things because they are weak and know that they are bad. But good people are virtuous and heroic, and if they do a bad thing it is only because they were trying to hard to do good things. "Somehow" they ignored their inner goodness to make the wrong choices.

Douthat does not explain how this strange thing happened because it is impossible to reconcile a person of empathy and goodness with someone who will pass around a pedophile priest like an appetizer at a cocktail party. Someone hard and cold enough to ignore child rape makes decisions based on self-interest. To make others act in your self-interest and not their own you need power, and to maintain power you need an authoritarian hierarchies. And you need flunkies who will tell the masses that they have no power, they are bad and helpless and must be controlled.

The loathsome David Brooks is less overtly religious than Douthat but bases his decisions on the same type of belief system.

People are really good at self-deception. We attend to the facts we like and suppress the ones we don’t. We inflate our own virtues and predict we will behave more nobly than we actually do.

David Brooks is very fond of telling people that they are bad. He tells us that self-esteem leads to vanity which leads to immorality which leads to sin. It is vain to think that you are a good person; you are bad and must be told what to think and do, according to the value system you are given by your elite.

As Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel write in their book, “Blind Spots,” “When it comes time to make a decision, our thoughts are dominated by thoughts of how we want to behave; thoughts of how we should behave disappear.”

In centuries past, people built moral systems that acknowledged this weakness. These systems emphasized our sinfulness. They reminded people of the evil within themselves. Life was seen as an inner struggle against the selfish forces inside. These vocabularies made people aware of how their weaknesses manifested themselves and how to exercise discipline over them. These systems gave people categories with which to process savagery and scripts to follow when they confronted it. They helped people make moral judgments and hold people responsible amidst our frailties.

And yet despite the fact that the elite gave us moral systems to tell right and what is wrong and punished us when we disobeyed, people still did bad things--often while enforcing those very moral systems. Since one of the ways the elite maintain their power over people is through the enforcement of moral systems, they certainly are not going to tell everyone that the elite are at fault. No, it's the fault of the little people, who are vain and think they are so wonderful when David Brooks knows for a fact they are not.

But we’re not Puritans anymore. We live in a society oriented around our inner wonderfulness. So when something atrocious happens, people look for some artificial, outside force that must have caused it — like the culture of college football, or some other favorite bogey. People look for laws that can be changed so it never happens again.

Commentators ruthlessly vilify all involved from the island of their own innocence. Everyone gets to proudly ask: “How could they have let this happen?”

The proper question is: How can we ourselves overcome our natural tendency to evade and self-deceive. That was the proper question after Abu Ghraib, Madoff, the Wall Street follies and a thousand other scandals. But it’s a question this society has a hard time asking because the most seductive evasion is the one that leads us to deny the underside of our own nature.

Brooks depends on our ability to evade responsibility for our actions, which authoritarian followers hand over to the elite, and deceive ourselves when the elite tell us to commit immoral acts. He would be powerless without it, and he would be a much, much poorer man. So would Ross Douthat and Megan McArdle and all the rest of their wretched lot, and that is why our elite is currently telling us that we would never, ever make the obvious, moral decision when its consequences would threaten an established power structure.

The Moral Vacuum Of Authoritarians

2011-11-15T11:19:00.001-06:00

Megan McArdle read about the Penn State cover-up and wondered how such a terrible thing could have happened. In a later post, she inadvertently demonstrated how.

I have been thinking some more about the Penn State case, and why McQueary and Paterno did what they did. And I have come to the conclusion that most commentators are overlooking a rather obvious contributing factor: they liked Sandusky.

The authoritarian "leader" identifies with the powerful, not the victim, so her first impulse is to protect them from loss of power. Authoritarian relationships are based on power, not on emotional ties, but such naked wielding of power is socially unacceptable, so the authoritarian leader cloaks his use of force with emotional words. It makes no sense at all to talk of liking Sandusky. Anyone who liked him before they caught him raping a child would certainly not like him after. Certain personal qualities, such as the need to rape children, are definitely a relationship-killer. Empathy for the victim and fear of violation would destroy any empathy for the rapist. But that would assume that one is capable of empathy, of feeling what others feel.

McQueary grew up in State College; his family was friends with Sandusky, and of course, Sandusky had coached him. Paterno had worked with Sandusky closely for years. And if you think about what you would have done in a situation where you caught someone you love and respect in that position, is it really so obvious, as the chest thumping punditariat proclaims, that you would have leaped into the shower, beaten the snot out of him, and frog marched him to the police station after you rescued the kid? Really? You'd have done that to your father, your favorite uncle, your best friend, a beloved mentor?

On a trivial level, McArdle's writing is offensively hackneyed. On a more important level it is just offensive. Yes, we would turn over a rapist we knew to the police. Rapists are dangerous. They rape people. Rape is a very bad thing that hurts people terribly. But this must be spelled out to authoritarians, since rape is partially a crime of power, and they get all confused about whether or not a crime of power is wrong.

It is chest-thumping to say we would get the rapist away from the child he is currently raping and call the police. No frogs would need to be marched, no rapists would need to be beaten. (He could easily be shoved and knocked down). A few steps, grab the kid, wipe your hand on your shirt, pull out your phone and call the cops while getting a towel for the kid. The fact that McArdle creates an imaginary situation to make stopping the rape much more difficult and less attractive is utterly astonishing. People will do terrible things while defending power, as the entire Penn State case shows. But because they are protecting the rapists' enablers and the bankers' thefts and the industrialists' polluting, they must go through a complicated process of denial, which McArdle helpfully outlines below.

Think about what that really entails: overcoming all the shock and horror, the defensive mechanisms that make you question what you're really seeing.

This case is so striking to us all because it is, for once, utterly clear what should have been done: stop the rape and the rapist. Nobody needs to search his soul, despite the genuinely shocking nature of the sight. There was no visual ambiguity, no question of what one was seeing, which is not always the case. The rapist was caught in the act. A defense mechanism is to protect one's self; the only question is what McArdle would be protecting herself from.

The total destruction of a long relationship as soon as you name it out loud and accuse him to his face.

The (private) act would not do that? Only the public act of turning the rapist over to the police?

The actual physical logistics of grabbing a naked sixty year old man, detaching him from that child, and then pounding on him for a while as a ten year old you don't know watches.

Strawman. But the words "you don't know" are extraordinarily important and show up again in the comments, where McArdle and a commenter have the following exchange.

eannie 2 hours ago
What if it was your kid in the shower being raped by Sandusky? It has nothing to do with beating up on Sandusky, it only had to do with rescuing the child . He might have stopped a stranger from beating a dog, but he couldn't overcome the bonds of friendship and loyalty to rescue a little boy? Maybe so.
Flag 1 person liked this. Like ReplyReply

McMegan 1 hour ago in reply to eannie
Oh, I'm quite sure that he would have stopped Sandusky from molesting a boy he knew well. In-group/out-group distinctions are an unfortunate feature of human existance. Saying "Well, only bad, authoritarian cultures like Catholic priests/football programs" is itself manifesting exactly the thinking that made McQueary's cowardice possible.
Flag 1 person liked this. Like ReplyReply

Statements like these should bar people from public life but of course they will not. McArdle has no idea of how repulsive her sentiments are because she has no idea that it is genuinely possible to care about what happens to people we don't know. Empathy for anyone outside of her small circle of family, friends and acquaintances is impossible for her. She does not care if anyone suffers or is even killed by the policies she is paid to push.

Snug and smug in her in-group, McArdle declares that building a society based on a hierarchy of power and maintaining power by persecuting those outside the power group is just structural, just something that everyone has to put up with because that's the way things are done. Then McArdle gets in a kick at the critics of authoritarianism, since the silly-headed muggins don't recognize the necessity of obedience to power and scapegoating the powerless. Finally, McArdle goes out in a blaze of glory by claiming that those who denounce authoritarian power structures and their abuses are abetting authoritarian power structures and their abuses.

My god, this woman is worth every penny. She has raised power-worship and naked manipulation to a fine art; her prose gushes forth with an endless stream of Randian invective and moral degeneration. She is Aphrodite, born on a wave of propaganda, who gave herself to the god of war and gave birth to moral monsters such as this post.

The fact that the minute you go to the police, you will have utterly ruined this man's life: he will be jobless, friendless, and branded as the worst sort of pervert by everyone in the country--oh, and also, in protective custody so that the other inmates in jail don't, like, kill him.

Have empathy for the rapist, not the little boy.

That's a pretty huge emotional hurdle to leap in the ten seconds or so that McQueary had to do the right thing. Isn't it quite understandable that your instinct might be to get away? To look for some way that didn't have to involve jail? Wouldn't it be a huge relief to tell your superiors and let someone else take care of it?

She still hasn't mentioned the naked raped kid standing there. McArdle quotes Andrew Sullivan, who emphatically states that he would help the child, but she finds his attitude "blithe." McArdle asks, what about the Jews, huh? You think you'd rescue them but most people didn't out of fear and conformity. So there!

Oh, well, that's an extreme example, you may say; McQueary was at no risk of life and limb. Fair enough, but one can name dozens of less dangerous situations where only a small minority actually does the right thing, but everyone believes that they woulda. Consider, for example, child abuse (sexual or otherwise) in families. How often is the offender actually reported to the police, and how often do the families simply keep the kids away from Grandpa because, well, you know. I'm sure at some level they worry about other kids Grandpa might be touching--but they also worry about what would happen to Grandpa in jail, and the rest of his family in the court of public opinion.

For an authoritarian, what you say is much more important that what you do behind closed doors. The group will still accept you as long as you bow to their power and live by their rules, within their parameters of what is and isn't acceptable. McArdle reminds her tribe of this fact--it's okay to act immorally because everyone does it; that is, the group says it's okay.

When you find out that someone you know is a pedophile, that doesn't erase your knowledge that they're also a human being. It does in the public mind, of course, but it's very different when you know them.

No--and I cannot emphasize this enough--it isn't.

We are evolved to live in small groups, with very deep loyalty to the other members. In most situations, this is in fact a completely laudable sentiment. But this is the dark side: it is very hard for us to betray the members of those small groups to which we belong, particularly if we have strong emotional bonds to that person.

All attention is concentrated on obeying the power structure, conserving it and maintaining it. The powerful is the group. The little boy is not and betraying him is irrelevant.

Sigh. Let's get this over with.

There is a scientific name for people who are not bound by these sorts of ties: sociopaths.

Or: McArdles.

And as I understand it, they do not, in fact, make excellent agents of justice, because they don't care about the victims, either.

Indeed they don't. McArdle spends another two paragraphs reminding her readers of their place in the greater order and justifying letting a rapist go because he's a friend but she obviously recognizes the difficulty of the task and so goes for the audience's jugular, using an argument that she know will work because it has worked for her.

Can you really be so sure that you'd have stepped in right then? Can you honestly say that you've never cut slack for people you like and respect, and maybe people who also happen to have some impact on your career? You've never kept silent while they were doing something that you were pretty sure was really wrong? I'm not talking about looting the company coffers or molesting children, necessarily--maybe it's the friend who cheated on his wife, or the one who's occasionally rather nasty to his children, or I don't know, a political administration who you like but who also does some stuff that is really pretty bad. If you have found yourself making excuses to let them--or yourself--slide, then you know basically how McQueary felt.

McArdle does not understand that some people make moral decisions based on their own values, not the values given to them by the elite authority. Here is true moral relativity, since morals are not absolute and are not based on a person's personality and core values. They are based on whatever the authoritarian leaders want their followers to think and feel, whatever will benefit those leaders.

That doesn't excuse what McQueary did. His reaction may be common, but it was still wrong.

Public obeisance to the (fake) standards of the group duly noted.

And we encourage others to do the right thing by forcefully declaring what that right thing is, and shaming those who fail to live up to even a very difficult standard.

You don't have to do it as long as you agree to say it and force everyone else to say it as well.

But categorizing his act as depraved and incomprehensible is unhelpful. It's unfortunately normal, and entirely comprehensible. Saying otherwise allows us to write off what happened at Penn State to evil people, or a "culture" full of nasty, macho football lovers. It allows us to avoid confronting the real problem, which is that people are evolved to form intense bonds that often trump more abstract principles . . . and also, to be very good at coming up with excuses for not doing what they should at great personal cost to themselves.

McArdle's specialty is taking concrete situations, muddying them up, and declaring the entire situation is too abstract to understand or act upon.

Of course, that's not neat and convenient: we don't get to think that the problem is localized to far off people who are nothing like our wonderful friends and relations. But I think it's perhaps more likely to help us prevent such happenings in our own backyard.

Of course it will abet such happenings, but that's the whole point of McArdle's post, isn't it.

Remember, it's not about McArdle, it's about the attitudes and beliefs that have been ingrained in her and millions of other people. But their words are useless before the truth, which is why they work so hard to hide and deny it.

Guest Post

2011-11-11T08:28:00.000-06:00

I have a guest post up at Naked Capitalism called "The Comfort Of Others" in which I discuss income inequality, Jane Austen, and the 1%. Austen's understanding of the consequences of money, rank and power in our everyday lives was impeccable.

Unoccupied

2011-11-10T14:14:00.000-06:00

Shorter Megan McArdle: Trying to punish the financial industry for its "mistakes" will create another Depression.

Longer Version:

The things that fix economic crises are not always intuitive. As Brad De Long himself once remarked to me, it is nearly impossible to bail out the financial system without also bailing out people who are long assets--aka financiers and rich people. But oh, how that flies in the face of our intuitions! It should be true that the most prosperous system is the one which severely punishes everyone who didn't monitor the soundness of their investments. We feel, very deeply, that financial and economic efficiency should mirror our intuitive sense of justice. And probably it does, mostly, when you're living in a hunter gatherer tribe.

But in a complex world where mistakes are easy and detecting them is not, I just don't think this holds truet. The "just world" described above is not some bourgeois paradise; it is the western world during the Great Depression. It was not a better world for everybody; it wasn't even a better world for anybody that I can think of. After it had finished punishing people who made stupid decisions, it went on to wreak brutal vengeance on a lot of people who had been quietly minding their own business. Bank runs can afflict the soundest banks, if depositors panic.

Those poor bankers and their mistakes! Where is liberals' sense of fairness when it comes to them?!?

One can name dozens of examples of things that violate our sense of fairness and obligation, and thereby make us all richer, from limited liability to bankruptcy. But people most won't believe it. Oh, they may believe the part of it that supports some larger "fairness" agenda they're committed to. But their support is almost always piecemeal: try getting a liberal who loves easy bankruptcy to give a second chance to bankers who made a few stupid money decisions, or convincing conservatives who are avid for tort reform that debtors who ran up credit cards with unwise investments in expensive but rapidly depreciating motor vehicles and consumer electronics might also need legal protection from the fullest extent of their past mistakes.

Like Cassandra, McArdle has been a lone voice in the wilderness, warning both erring sides from the all-seeing, all-knowing, perfectly balanced middle. Greedy consumers and a "few stupid money decisions" created this crises, not deliberate acts of fraud and malfeasance, and a wise realist and impartial observer like McArdle can only shake her head, press her little hand to her forehead, and sigh at the incivility that surrounds her.

You can try to explain to all of them why their sense of outrage is rather beside the point in the face of a looming financial explosion which is going to make everyone much worse off if it reaches critical mass. You can also go home and try to explain this to your microwave, for all the good it will do. As anyone who has ever spoken to a five year old knows, the sense of fairness is one of the most primal and intractable cognitive instincts we have. In the best of times, it takes years to change public opinion about what is fair. These are not the best of times, and we do not have years.

In the years that I have been doing just that, it has been a losing battle on most fronts. Especially as regards the financial crisis, where the reaction is usually that I am either a worthless dupe, or a paid shill, for the banking industry.

A person can be both. Let's not underestimate our elite.

The people on the right who can explain it all in terms of moral hazard, and the people on the left who can explain it all in terms of insufficient regulation/punishment of bankers, can wrap economic and moral theory up in a neat package that claims to deliver justice and prosperity. All I've got to offer is messy tradeoffs.

I am very much afraid that the euro zone is about to plunge us into phase two of the global financial crisis--and that as with the Great Depression, phase two may be even worse than the dismal years we've just endured. In search of fairness, we may all get a lot more justice than any of us really wants.

As we are all suffering, let's not worry about things like justice and fairness. That way leads to ruin.

Presidential Material

2011-11-08T11:40:00.001-06:00

This is definitely one of the sleaziest things I've seen: Herman Cain sent out a hit piece on one of the now-numerous women who accused him of sexual molestation or harassment. At National Review On-line, Katrina Trinko says "The Cain campaign" released personal, legal and economic information about Sharon Bialek, for obvious reasons. Cain is only reinforcing his image of a person who does not follow rules of basic decency and he looks rather stupid as well for releasing this information himself instead of tossing the red meat to the hounds, to tear apart.

When The Idle Poor Become The Idle Rich

2011-11-08T11:15:00.000-06:00

The Deserving Rich

2011-11-08T11:03:00.000-06:00

She works much harder than you do.

Before we examine Megan McArdle's post on meritocracy, let us take a moment to marvel at the literary irony. McArdle is living proof that we do not live in a meritocracy; her very presence at what used to be an American literary institution gives lie to her entire premise. McArdle cannot think, read, write or count (a quadruple threat!) yet has reached an extraordinarily high position in the public sphere thanks to her father's money and influence. As McArdle conveniently forgets to mention in her post, she has admitted that money bought her prep school education, her prep school's name bought admission to university, her university's name bought admission to graduate school, and all the above bought contacts who helped her make her way into the upper echelons of the high-paying media. Yet she, like most of those who did not earn their position, writes under the assumption that we do indeed live in a meritocracy and--more important--when that meritocracy fails us, it is just one of those things, those crazy little things that nobody can stop and is nobody's fault.

I don't care about income inequality. I care about the absolute condition of the poor--whether they are hungry, cold, and sick.

That is why she tells us that the poor are too fat and the sick should pay far, far more than they can afford for private insurance.

But I do not care about the gap between their incomes, and those of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Nor the ratio of Gates and Buffett's incomes to mine. And I'm not sure why anyone should. Other than pure envy, it's hard to see how I could somehow be made worse off if Bill Gates' income suddenly doubled, but everything else remained the same.

Since everyone's income did not remain the same and in fact incomes dropped, her disregard is proof of callousness, not lack of envy.

But while I do not care about gaps and ratios, I do care about opportunity. It is fine that CEOs earn many times what their workers do--but it is not fine if some are born to be workers, and others to be CEOs. And unfortunately, that increasingly seems to be the story in America, as Scott Winship outlines in a fine new piece for National Review:

There is no such thing as a fine piece for National Review. Although McArdle might be reading the tea leaves and planning for her future, after the Atlantic finds a younger, cuter female blogger.

If you're reading this essay, chances are pretty good that your household income puts you in one of the top two fifths, or that you can expect to be there at age 40. (We're talking about roughly $90,000 for an entire household.) How would you feel about your child's having only a 17 percent chance of achieving the equivalent status as an adult? That's how many kids with parents in the bottom fifth around 1970 made it to the top two-fifths by the early 2000s. In fact, if the last generation is any guide, your child growing up in the top two-fifths today will have a 60 percent chance of being in the top two fifths as an adult. That's the impact of picking the right parents -- increasing the chances of ending up middle- to upper-middle class by a factor of three or four.

That paragraph captures the essence of the problem--and also, why we may well despair of solving it. How would upper-middle-class parents feel about children who had only a 17% chance of achieving a household income above $90,000? They would be horrified. And then they would busily start using the full scope of their talents--their financial resources, their educational skills, and their social capital--to "fix it".

Arguably, this is just what they've done. Rocked by the shattering forces of the Depression and World War II (and flush with the prosperity of the postwar years), the old moneyed elites of the Northeast and Midwest did something really remarkable: they voluntarily abdicated their position. Ivy League colleges threw open their doors to the bourgeois masses, and cut back on the Saint Grottlesex crowd. The old WASP bastions democratized or were swept away by nimbler competitors who didn't scruple to sacrifice profits because it might look bad to the boys in the club. First Jews, Irish, and Italians, and then later blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, burst through doors that had once been reserved for the sort of people who got married and buried at St. Thomas Church.

It's like she never heard of lawsuits that ended racial and religious discrimination.

They were joined by the children of undistinguished WASP families from America's small towns, suburbs, and tenements.

Who could afford to work their way through school, way back when before economic inequality skyrocketed.

The architects of the transition envisioned a shift to a new meritocratic society in which the circumstances of one's birth didn't matter--only hard work and talent. But that hasn't happened. Instead, we have a system that has less mobility than the old, forthrightly aristocratic version.

Research suggests that by the time they were in their 40s, American children born in the 1950s should have experienced the same earnings mobility as their Swedish counterparts if the economic payoff for additional schooling were not so much higher in the United States -- and, more important, if that payoff had not grown so much between generations. And educational mobility in the two countries -- the connection between parent and child schooling -- was actually very similar for this generation. Opportunity for top slots may therefore have been as widespread in the United States as in Sweden.

However, evidence indicates that American children born since the 1950s have had lower educational mobility than children in Sweden and other Western nations. And recent research indicates that the link between parental income and educational advantages on one hand and child academic outcomes on the other is stronger in the United States than in other Western countries.

You can argue about why this is--are the upper middle class transmitting real skills, or pull? But does it matter? As an editor at The Economist once noted to me, it's actually rather more worrying if what they're giving their children is a strong education and an absolutely ferocious work ethic. An aristocracy that simply bequeaths money and social position to its children will eventually fall. And [sic] aristocracy that bequeaths the actual skills required to earn more money than everyone else is self perpetuating.

Here it comes--the "the rich are rich because they work so damn hard" theory. We can actually find pundits who declare that hedge fund managers work more hours than poor people, therefore the poor are lazy and the rich are a meritocracy. Utterly ignored is the fact that often the poor don't have jobs, which really cuts into those hours worked, and that the rich have put many people on part time or contract status to avoid paying them benefits and decent salaries.

And self-legitimating. The old aristocracy was, I think, at least dimly aware that it wasn't quite fair for them to have what they had by mere virtue of being born to the right parents.

But they never tell themselves that, do they? They say that they work harder and studied more and put off having children.

But in the new aristocracy, it is rarely enough to just get born to the right parents; you also have to work very hard.

See?

(Higher earning men are now more likely to work more than 50 hours a week than are men in lower earnings quintiles.) Whatever the systemic injustices, it's also quite clear to everyone . . . even parasitic leeches of investment bankers . . . that their salaries only come as the result of frantic effort.

Remember, according to McArdle there was no fraud in the banking industry, just systemic failure and bad luck.

The ability of one's parents to confer such enduring advantages is obviously unfair. And while I don't want to say that a society cannot last that way--obviously, many have, for hundreds of years--I don't think it's healthy for society. It is hard to get civic engagement, or respect for the law, when the bottom 40% or so feels that the game is rigged.

It's also worrying because, as Ross Douthat points out in the Times, recently, the meritocracy hasn't done such a great job. Oh, it's easy to cavil--the old moneyed elite didn't do such a great job in the 1920s, now did it? But I think that rather misses the point: shouldn't the educational meritocracy, which really is very different from the combination of WASP elites and up-from-nowhere untutored operators, have done better?

Yes. And they didn't.

Oh, I know--you want to break out your favorite whipping boy. Barney Frank, Milton Friedman, the CEOs of Fannie and Freddie, Ronald Reagan, Alan Greenspan . . . we've rehearsed the list a hundred times over the last few years, and I know you'd be happy to give one more dramatic reading.

Cute--putting Barney Frank and Fannie/Freddie in with the people who cut tax rates and lowered interest rates to the bone.

But as I think Ross is saying, this overlooks a more important question, which is why the system went wrong. Don't tell me it got hostage to the wrong ideology--tell me why all those professors we paid millions of dollars to study economics couldn't provide a convincing rebuttal to that ideology in advance of the crash.

Because telling the rich what they wanted to hear made economists rich?

Don't tell me that regulators were stupid or bankers got greedy until you first explain to me why tens of thousands of very well educated people, most of them graduates of colleges and professional schools that had aggressively winnowed them based on intelligence, barely outperformed a bunch of upstart micks, third-generation coupon-clipping WASP dimwits, and central bankers who still worshipped the barbarous relic of the gold standard?

Because it made them rich?

The new meritocracy doesn't seem to be much better, on any dimension, than the old aristocracy. It's just more persistent, in every sense of the word.

We work harder, so you can't! But it's all good, because this is the best of all possible worlds and we all get what we deserve in life. Which is why Megan McArdle is rich and you aren't.

Our Bright And Shining Elite

2011-11-06T10:48:00.002-06:00

His CDOs flew too close to the sun.

Shorter Ross Douthat: Alas, if our meritocracy had only been taught humility!

I don't know if Master Ross came up with this all on his own like a big boy or if he heard it in a sermon during Mass but this meme has legs. All our elite need is a little Old Time Religion and they can go back to ruling the world just like God and Nature intended.

It's strange, however, that Ross doesn't mention money once when discussing why our elite screwed the chunky pooch. It's all they're-to-smart-for-their-own-good and if-only-they-had-accepted-Jesus-as-their-personal-savior. There is no mention of how the rich became much richer or the immorality of income inequality.

Sigh. If only we had smart and moral people to lead us, like little Ross Douthat!

Power v

2011-11-04T10:37:00.004-05:00

Most of us act out of emotion most of the time; emotions are instinctive and often overwhelm logic and reason. Almost everything that is important to us--love, family, self-esteem, fears and dreams--is heavily guided by emotion. But we insist that we make decisions based on facts and logic when we usually look to facts and logic to support our emotion-based decisions. We make choices and decisions that make us feel good and avoid painful emotions.

A lot of people derive a great deal of pleasure from gaining superiority over others, it feeds their ego and eases fears and insecurities; power both alleviates and creates great fears. The "winners" in our society will never have enough money or power because the pleasure does not come from being rich, it comes from feeling superior to another individual or group. Once you gain a little power you must continually press for more, to fill an unfillable need for the ego-stroking that power provides.

Power is a verb. Power is not a thing to be won or lost. It is a relationship and it only exists when it is wielded. People do not hold power over us, they demand the power and we give it. When we start exerting power, the relationship changes.

Power is also an incredible high but it only stimulates the pleasure centers when it is demonstrated. It was utterly illogical for the Wall Street elite to go out on their skyscraper balcony to drink champagne before the Occupy Wall Street Protesters. They did it anyway, laughing, because it felt great to know that they are far more powerful than the rabble below them, the little mice scurrying about the cobblestones and squeaking about their short, unimportant little lives. The Enron boys laughed about screwing Granny. Our presidents laugh as they send drones and soldiers off to die. The problem with being one of the 99% percent is that there are so many of them and everyone knows value is based on scarcity.

Coming up next: Megan McArdle whips out her magnifying glass and examines the unfortunate phenomenon of disgruntled youth taking to the streets.

(edited after posting)

Young Pundits In Love

2011-10-30T16:40:00.003-05:00

Look out, K-Lo. Mitt Romney has a new stalker, one allowed to be out after 10:00 at night.

What Tax Dollars Can’t Buy By Master ROSS DOUTHAT

OVER the last 30 years, the U.S. economy has generated more large fortunes and more stress for the middle class. While the rich have grown extraordinarily rich, median wages have barely increased, the costs of health care and higher education have jumped, and socioeconomic mobility has lagged behind that of other developed nations. Americans have never begrudged the wealthy their success, as long as they had a chance to rise higher than their parents, and perhaps get rich themselves. But our era of diminished expectations is putting that in doubt.

My God, that Ross Douthat is a reasonable, knowledgeable man! He acknowledges our problems and disappointment in a balanced, middle of the road way.

From the drum circles of Zuccotti Park to the hustings of Barack Obama’s re-election push, a suddenly invigorated liberalism thinks that it has the answer to this angst: a renewed demand for higher taxes on America’s richest 1 percent. And if all you care about is reducing measured income inequality, then the Occupy Wall Streeters and their Democratic admirers have it right. Tax millionaires sufficiently and you’ll end up with a more equal society. The tallest poppies will be trimmed, and some of their income will find its way to someone’s else pocket.

Sure, if all you care about is a society in which an obscenely wealthy few lord over the teeming masses, on whom they are inflicting ever more poverty and control. But would it be fair to pick the pockets of the rich? Yes, they use more resources while pushing more and more of their operating expenses on the taxpayer, but let's face it, if you want to tax their money you'll have to take it out of their cold, dead hands. All that money buys a lot of mercenaries.

But true social mobility and broadly shared prosperity are not so easily achieved. Remember that those tax dollars, once collected, would not be disbursed with perfect effectiveness to the most deserving members of the American middle class. Instead, they would be used to buy a little more time for our failing public institutions — postponing a reckoning with unsustainable pension commitments, delaying necessary reforms in our entitlement system and propping up an educational sector whose results don’t match the costs.

And if you were to tax the rich, Mr. and Mrs. Middle Class, it's not like you'd get the money anyway! It would all go to the undeserving old fogies and little "urban" kids. Not you.

More spending in these areas won’t necessarily buy us more mobility. The public-sector workplace has become a kind of artificial Eden, whose fortunate inhabitants enjoy solid pay and 1950s-style job security and retirement benefits, all of it paid for by their less-fortunate private-sector peers. Some on the left have convinced themselves that this “success” can lay the foundation for a broader middle-class revival. But if a bloated public sector were the blueprint for a thriving middle-class society, then the whole world would be beating a path to Greece’s door.

So the best thing to do is to let the rich evade paying taxes. Just like Greece.

Our entitlement system, meanwhile, is designed to redistribute wealth. But this redistribution doesn’t go from the idle rich to the working poor; it goes from young to old, working-age savings to retiree consumption, middle-class parents to empty-nest seniors. The Congressional Budget Office’s new report on income inequality points out that growing Medicare costs are part of the reason upper-income retirees receive a larger share of federal spending than they did 30 years ago, while working-age households with children receive “a much smaller and declining share of transfers.” Absent reforms, this mismatch will only grow more pronounced: by the 2030s, Medicare recipients will receive $3 in benefits for every dollar they paid in.

If the rich pay taxes they'll just go to pay the old people's hospital bills. What do you care?--you're not old.

Then there’s the public education system, theoretically the nation’s most important socioeconomic equalizer. Yet even though government spending on K-to-12 education has more than doubled since the 1970s, test scores have flatlined and the United States has fallen behind its developed-world rivals. Meanwhile, federal spending on higher education has been undercut by steadily inflating tuitions, in what increasingly looks like an academic answer to the housing bubble. (If the Occupy Wall Street dream of student loan forgiveness were fulfilled, this cycle would probably just continue.)

And don't even get me started on the kids, the losers.

The story of the last three decades, in other words, is not the story of a benevolent government starved of funds by selfish rich people and fanatical Republicans. It’s a story of a public sector that has consistently done less with more, and a liberalism that has often defended the interests of narrow constituencies — public-employee unions, affluent seniors, the education bureaucracy — rather than the broader middle class.

What does the middle class get when we tax the rich? Nothing! Those selfish, greedy unions and old folks and schoolteachers grab it all!

The alternative to this liberalism should not, however, be the kind of reverse class warfare currently being championed by the not-Romney candidates in the Republican field, whose flat-tax fantasies would ask working Americans to bear more of the burden for public institutions that have been failing them for years.

Ummmmm, Romney. Sigh.

Rather, it should be a kind of small-government egalitarianism, which would seek to reform the government before we pour more money into it, along lines that encourage upward mobility and benefit the middle class. This would mean seeking a carefully means-tested welfare state, a less special interest-friendly tax code, and a public sector that worked for taxpayers and parents rather than the other way around.

He'd get rid of government and thrash those liberal special interest groups and lift good freedom-loving Parent-Americans up from the clutches of the teeming masses.

This was the potential message that had some of us excited about the prospects of either a Mitch Daniels or a Chris Christie candidacy. Given his background and his bank account, Mitt Romney is an unlikely champion for a more egalitarian conservatism. But it wouldn’t be the first time that an American patrician has emerged as a champion of the common man.

Oh Mitt, how patrician is your nose and how noble is your brow! Lift your mighty swift flaming sword and pierce your enemies with it! Love us, protect us, tell us we're special!

Subsidy Is The Best Policy

2011-10-24T10:41:00.000-05:00

Megan McArdle was forced to switch from a debit to a credit card when new regulations led to the elimination of her frequent flyer perks. Some commenters, both predisposed and well-trained by the little missy to exhibit public demonstrations of callousness towards others, excoriate her for expecting them to subsidize her airline upgrades. Other commenters do a thorough job of dismantling McArdle's extended whine and marvel at the hypocrisy of her expectations. A good time is had by all but McArdle, so let's pull up a chair and watch the show. Sometimes the best thing to do is just get out of the way and let the funny speak for itself.

Gepap 2 days ago
What a whinner you are McArdle. Durban turned a hidden fee into a transparent fee at worse, and you complain? Jesus.

McMegan 15 hours ago in reply to Gepap
No, that's not right. He slapped a price control on interchange fees, with the result that the fee was charged somewhere else.

Price controls are not "more transparent"; they shift the fee into some other form. Price controls on bread are not "more transparent" because we now really notice that we have to spend seven hours waiting in line for a loaf, whereas before the "excess" cost was "hidden" in the price of the goods we bought.

gyshrestha 10 hours ago in reply to McMegan
So why do you think retailers should subsidize your airline perks, seriously

McMegan 10 hours ago in reply to gyshrestha
Why do you think people with low-balance bank accounts should pay higher fees so that Wal-Mart doesn't have to? Seriously.

gyshrestha 10 hours ago in reply to McMegan
because, it is not your inalienable right to have a debit card. Use cash if you don't want to pay for debit card service.

gyshrestha 10 hours ago in reply to McMegan
basically, you want a subsidized debit card service on retailers money

McMegan 10 hours ago in reply to gyshrestha
Or, alternatively, they want a subsidized payment system on my money. It costs them money to handle cash and checks.

gyshrestha 10 hours ago in reply to McMegan
well, now do not beat around the bush, miss. If it costs retailers money to handle cash, so be it. it still costs them money to process charges. you are implying that retailers are getting the payment system for free, no they pay for it. only that it was more predatory before. now if the banks want to pass the costs to customers they should be able to, you are using the service, if you don't want to use it, do not, use cash like old days, why should retailers subsidize the populace

gyshrestha 10 hours ago in reply to gyshrestha
doesn't that make sense in your black and white world

gyshrestha 10 hours ago in reply to gyshrestha
i will give you a good analogy, imagine you lived back in 1800's, you, Megan is a hardworking entrepreneur, you own a salon in Still Water, OK. The payment mode of the day is, say its Lima. Now, everything is well and good. the world is flat and bankers are rich and making money, then all of a sudden Master Cardos open a bank in your town, then he introduces his own currency, lets say, Nola. Then, he sends a messenger to every residents in the town and inform them, if they bring their Lima and use Nola in the town, he will give all of them cash back of 2%. Now, all the residents would obviously do as Master Cardos want because we are all self interested individuals, but Master Cardos charge all the merchants in the town 3 % to convert the Nola into Lima, the same Lima which they have to use to buy brewski from next town or pay their employees who live in the next town where they do not use Nola. Now, merchants in the town was not happy with change at first but they took the idea anyways, slowly the rates started creeping up and closed around five percent. then, it came to be known that another town in the south has same system but the rate over there is less than one percent, there are no significant cost differences, so the merchants rebelled against the banker, Master Cardos and called a senator and have him revised the rate to 2.5 percent, this is what happened, crazy

gyshrestha 10 hours ago in reply to McMegan
because, it is not your inalienable right to own a debit card, use cash, you freeloader

Remember that McArdle said she was using the Doug Ramsey system, in which one uses cash for daily expenses, not debit cards. No doubt she figures she is saving money by using the card to subsidize her airline upgrades.

gyshrestha 10 hours ago in reply to McMegan
It is not similar to price control at all, you have two big entities colluding and you worry about price control, it is not like setting price for a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread in traditional sense, do not set everything in black and white term, it's like putting checks and balances to predatory pricing by firms who control majority of the market and the product they sell is indispensable to modern form of commerce

McMegan 10 hours ago in reply to gyshrestha
It is not only similar to a price control, it is in fact, a price control. They have capped the fee at a set price, which is the definition of a price control. Are you unfamiliar with the legislation, or with the concept of price controls?

gyshrestha 9 hours ago in reply to McMegan
i know about the legislation because i am a small retailer myself, now, it is a price control, i do not deny it, but all price controls are not created equal, you are just crying wolf because the government took an action and it irked your libertarian skin, and you set it in black and white terms, if you were to be truthful, you will also inform your readers about who controls the market, how they set the price, and who pays for the service.

gyshrestha 8 hours ago in reply to McMegan
you compared soviet price control on bread to government fixing predatory pricing in highly unregulated service category where there is no competition at all, Genius!

Wilson263 2 days ago
But even less do I like cramming my extra long legs and my back problems into cattle class for long-haul flights, a problem I currently solve by using my accumulated miles to upgrade to first class.

Surely this is a problem that can be solved by accepting more Koch money!?!?!?!

vkg123 2 days ago in reply to Wilson263
her elitism is really beginning to show. Too lazy to even look for a "maybe lost" card even. DC must be bad for her.

Alsadius 2 days ago in reply to vkg123
Didn't look or didn't find? Or should I say, didn't read or didn't think?

realcynic 2 days ago in reply to Alsadius
Well, gee, if her card was cancelled by the issuer and no replacement was offered, what does it matter whether she has the card in her possession or not?

AAdvantage decides to shaft her by taking away all the miles from her debit card, refusing to transfer it to her new AAdvantage credit card - but it is Dick Durbin's fault?

How does that make sense even in McMeganWorld?

McMegan 15 hours ago in reply to realcynic
Who said my miles didn't transfer? They're in my frequent flyer account; they transferred just fine. I'm just annoyed about having to use a credit card, when I was perfectly satisfied with my debit product.

TimSims 11 hours ago in reply to McMegan
Will your viewpoint change if, in the fullness of time, the cost of using debit of cash for most transactions is lower than the cost of using credit, as the case used to be back in the 80s, before CC companies started strong arming merchants?

Might you be able to save enough money flying coach on short flights to simply afford the upgrade to first class out of your own pocket? Or is this an issue where your employer was reimbursing you for your tickets, but letting you keep the miles? If so, it sounds like you were siphoning corporate funds (legally) and now you're just upset that you need to go to an extra bit of trouble to do so.

If I'm mis representing your viewpoint, please let me know.

McMegan 11 hours ago in reply to TimSims
It has long been perfectly legal for merchants to offer a cash discount. In fact, some gas stations do. You might ask why most merchants don't, and whether this tells us something about the likelihood that they will rebate more of their interchange fees gains to us than our banks did.

TimSims 11 hours ago in reply to McMegan
Actually a lot of retail CC agreements expressly forbid offering cash discount, just as many forbid retailers from refusing a CC even for trivial purchases of a dollar or less. These types of clauses are now forbidden, which gives retailers a lot more leeway to offer discounts (as well as refuse to let you use your CC to buy a pack of gum).

I haven't seen a gas station in Illinois offer a cash discount since the 80s, even though at one time, they ALL had a separate price for cash. I don't think I've seen any retailer offer a cash discount for anything in the past 20 years.

McMegan 11 hours ago in reply to TimSims
Those clauses are not legal, and haven't been for a long time: http://www.fdic.gov/regulation...

gyshrestha 8 hours ago in reply to McMegan
here is a link for you Megan,the statue only cover credit cards, not the debit cards, http://usa.visa.com/personal/u...

There is a lot more; more ignorance, more snark, and more information on debit and credit cards--from commenters, of course. Who could have known that complaints about not getting free upgrades to first class would have irritated so many people during these hard times?

Danke Schoen: An Ode To The Rich

2011-10-23T11:29:00.001-05:00

Danke Schoen: An Ode To The Rich by Miss Megan McArdle
(also posted in the comments at Alicublog, whose commenters are always a source of inspiration--thanks, guys!)

Danke Schoen, 1%, Danke Schoen.
Thank you for all the loot I gain.
The Aspen Institute was the place we'd meet,
First class seat, Atlantic's treat, sure is sweet.

Danke Schoen, Ubermensch, Danke Schoen.
Pay for lies, no need to explain.
I recall, the economy's fall.
How I fluffed your cause, without a pause, ignoring laws.
That's not all.

Danke Schoen, Masters, Danke Schoen.
Thank you for pensions down the drain.
I can see middle class poverty.
Futures inter-twined, for all time, yours and mine, that is fine

Danke Schoen, Elite, Danke Schoen.
Thank you for economic gain.
Imported cars and exclusive bars
My expensive home, stove and fridge in chrome, Danke Schoen.

Zombie Lies

2011-10-21T15:22:00.000-05:00

Anyone can succeed in America!

Megan McArdle is most concerned.

I doubt Occupy Wall Street will be assuaged by learning that the top 0.1% now only receive 8% of the income earned in the US, even if that number is the lowest it's been since 2003.

But I think it does matter. If we think there's a real problem, we need the best possible data so that we can understand its contours. Income inequality has been rising for so long that people have started to assume that it has just kept rising, even when the data show otherwise. We don't want to spend years focused on income inequality, only to learn that the financial crisis fixed it for us.

McArdle has taken to declaring that the Occupy Wall Street crowd is just a bunch of angry kids who can't get a job out of college but she gives herself away with this post on income inequality. She realizes that the protesters are concerned with the increasing concentration of wealth (and therefore power) into fewer and fewer hands and so she attempts to minimize inequality. America is no longer the land of opportunity and while some zombie lies never seem to die, the lie of upward mobility is finally beginning to sustain some damage. By ignoring wealth inequality and downplaying income inequality, McArdle does her very best to reanimate that zombie.

Income inequality:

Wealth inequality:

Now that McArdle has diverted attention from growing inequality, she shifts the focus to a plausible-sounding explanation for public unrest.

(If income inequality is declining, what's all that happening on Wall Street? Well, for one thing, the data I've seen seem to show that whatever has been happening to incomes, unemployment inequality remains very much with us.)

In McArdle's mind it has now been definitively established that the Occupy Wall Streeters are a bunch of bored, out of work kids who are protesting until they they find a decent job. Her prescription for dealing with lasting joblessness is a modest amount of unemployment benefits doled out to the masses. Otherwise, we should simply let the banks continue to make record profits while the middle class sinks further into poverty.

McArdle benefits from inequality; the very rich provide an inexhaustible supply of funds to keep the propaganda flowing. Incentives matter, as McArdle often tells us, and she has all the incentive in the world to downplay wealth inequality.

Why has income inequality been rising since the 1980s?

Maybe that's why.

Deleted Post

2011-10-19T10:49:00.000-05:00

I deleted a post because it's not clear who is right and who is wrong. It's too bad because McArdle made up a grossly wrong chart, which I found very amusing, and indulged in a choice bit of reality massaging. But despite the considerable wrongness, she might have been right about one aspect (not mathematical or economic, of course), so I decided to pull the post.

The Free Market

2011-10-18T11:25:00.002-05:00

A Galtian CEO of a private hospital, Cleveland Clinic, decided to cut costs by giving his employees monetary incentives to become more healthy. Ordinarily Megan McArdle would be first in line to support the rights of a CEO to make more money without interference, but this time there's a slight hitch to her libertarian giddy-up.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I'm pretty skeptical. Let's start by asking what the selection bias was. Cleveland fired two high-profile doctors who wouldn't quit smoking. One imagines that employees who do not want their employer nannying them about their gym time and alcohol consumption probably decline to work at the Clinic.

Since the point was to get rid of expensive employees, it's strange that McArdle would bring up selection bias as a negative, since it is very much a positive in this situation. Argument fail.

Selection bias will produce good results for the selecting organization, but you cannot replicate its results on a nationwide scale; fat, smoky people have to work somewhere (or go on welfare). If this became common, you'd see legislative pushback in the form of discrimination lawsuits and legislation. I'm betting there are more obese workers/voters than there are people who hit the gym five days a week.

Why should Cleveland Clinic care if others can't copy their methods due to a shortage of doctors? Not that McArdle has proven a shortage would happen. Let's look at some--now what do they call them again? Oh, yeah, facts.

In the past month Drs Derek Smith and Peter Leggat published a comprehensive international review of tobacco smoking in the medical profession from 1974-2004. The study showed that in countries like the United States, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, smoking rates have dropped dramatically among doctors, from 15-20% in the 1970’s to around 5% at the end of the 20th century. However, such low smoking rates are not uniform among doctors across the world.

So it seems that it might be quite easy to find doctors who don't smoke. Since the hospital's employees are losing weight and becoming more healthy, it doesn't seem that exercise is a deal breaker either. The doctors who refuse to quit smoking or eating excessively can just go to work for themselves or another company. In a free market economy there are always jobs available, ensuring that any corporation that makes up onerous rules will be punished when people refuse to work for them.

There's also the question of lifetime cost profile. Cleveland mostly isn't covering people in that expensive last year of life; that honor tends to go to Medicare and Medicaid. Cleveland saves money if its workers have fewer smoking-related problems, but if that keeps them alive long enough to get Alzheimer's, their lifetime health cost may go up.

Again, irrelevant. The hospital is concerned about its health care costs and bottom line, not the government's.

Now, you can certainly argue that it's still a net gain--people live longer, healthier lives. And I agree that longer and healthier lives are a worthy goal. But from a cost perspective, I suspect that there's less to the Cleveland model than meets the eye.

The journalist did not bring up one fact and used two irrelevant arguments to bolster her claim, and her gut feeling is not an adequate replacement for facts and reason. It certainly is easy to be the business editor for The Atlantic.

The only question is why McArdle would take up arms against one of the holy CEOs. Perhaps she is worried that The Atlantic will copy the Clevland Clinic and force her to quit smoking, drink less and exercise more. If it does, McArdle can just teach it a good free market lesson by quitting and getting another one of those plentiful journalist jobs that pays six figures a year.

Ka-Ching!

2011-10-13T16:01:00.001-05:00

We want to wish Megan McArdle the best of luck tonight as she emcees the Koch Family Picnic, also known as the Institute For Humane Studies 50th Anniversary Dinner. The chairman, Charles G. Koch, will make a speech and new Institute initiatives will be discussed. No doubt a good time will be had by all, as they plan a happy, regulation-free future.

A little background:

History

The Institute for Humane Studies was founded in 1961 by Dr. F. A. "Baldy" Harper, a former economics professor at Cornell University. Part of a generation that had lived through two devastating world wars and seen the rise of numerous totalitarian dictatorships, Harper set up an institute devoted to research and education in the conviction that greater understanding of human affairs and freedom would foster peace, prosperity, and social harmony.

History demonstrated the great capacity of humans to solve their problems through "the practice and potentials of freedom," and Harper envisioned this as the primary focus of the Institute for Humane Studies. "Not in government or force, not in slavery or war, but in the creative, and thereby spiritual, power of freedom, shall our inspiration be found," he wrote in an early proposal for the Institute.

Based for many years in Menlo Park, California, IHS moved in 1985 to Fairfax, Virginia, and associated with George Mason University. At George Mason, IHS has been able to pursue its mission more effectively in cooperation with other organizations affiliated with the university. 50 years later, IHS continues the work begun by Baldy Harper, cultivating a growing network of more than 10,000 students, scholars, and other intellectuals who to serve in the battle of ideas.

And nothing says freedom like the freedom to poison your fellow Americans and trade with its "enemies" as you get rich, rich rich! I hope that McArdle is charging them a small fortune or will get some quid pro quo for her Koch-employed husband; the Koches can afford it and no real Libertarian would ever work for free.

Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking Part 6

2011-10-13T10:43:00.000-05:00

Dagny and Hank survey their Colorado paradise.

Chapter 7 The Exploiters And The Exploited

It's all about capitalism.

When Miss Megan "Jane" McArdle-Galt reviewed Atlas Shrugged: The Movie!, she did not hesitate to express her disappointment.

The worst part is that the movie is a bad caricature of what people think that libertarians believe. The genius of capitalism is nowhere to be found--in this movie, "business" mostly consists of shuffling papers around a desk, telling your fellow capitalists how great they are, and instantly promising to deliver metal for a railroad bridge without probing trivial matters like how much metal will be required, when and where the bridge will be built, and how much the customer might be willing to pay. This makes the capitalists who go on strike seem very little different from the "looters" in Washington who they are supposed to be fighting: they're all a bunch of pompous windbags delivering prim little lectures to each other. The only real difference is that in the middle of the movie, the capitalists get to ride a cool CGI train.

Of course, [Ayn] Rand's many critics will claim that this is all there was in the book. But that's not true. The movie left out the things that could have made it gripping: the aesthetic that deftly mixes comic books, film noir, and WPA murals; the reverance [sic] for genius and innovation; the stories that dramatize pure principle. These things are barely name checked, much less used. The best stories--like the nationalization of the San Sebastian mines, or the attempt by the 20th Century Motor Company to run its business along the lines of the communist motto "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need"--are compressed into two lines, explained ineptly.

Chapter 7, all 80 glorious pages of it, digs deep into the "genius of capitalism." As depicted by Rand, the genius of capitalism resides in its purity; it punishes failure and rewards merit without prejudice or favor, as long as the looters-n-moochers don't get their dirty hands on it. As depicted by Megan McArdle, capitalism is a magical system that automatically resides in near-perfect balance between corporations' desire to make a profit and customers' desire to buy products. All things being equal, of course; these versions of capitalism depend on the assumption that capitalism ensures a equal playing field in which one group is not able to gain a disproportionate amount of power or information over the other because of this magical state of equilibrium. After all, if customers buy a bad product they will not buy it again and the company will go broke, and what company wants to go broke? None! Therefore in a capitalist society customers will never be unaware of bad products or services, corporations cannot amass excessive amounts of power, and equilibrium will always be maintained.

As for the corporations' workers, they exist in the happy state of equilibrium as well since they can always leave and get another job if they don't like their wages or working conditions. Under capitalism they can never be underpaid or exploited, since capitalism's perfect equilibrium provides jobs for anyone who is willing to work.

In other words, for Atlas Shrugged's depiction of capitalism to be realistic, one must divorce it from all context and utterly ignore any reality that manages to sneak in under the dark of night. Rand is respected for having lived through the Russian Revolution and having seen the wholesale theft of property by the state. However, it doesn't do you much good to endure hardship if you don't learn anything from it. The only thing Rand learned was that it was better to be the elite than the poor masses. Rand's audience was the prosperous middle and upper classes of the late 1950s, raised on American exceptionalism and enjoying the advantages of a booming economy, a large manufacturing base, and an educated working class. Rand had to invent a reason for her version of America to crush the masses and she chose the one thing that she abhorred more than anything else in the entire world--more than socialism or fascism or revolution or starvation.

Feelings.

Rand's looters and moochers want to drag down the elite Galtian Ubermenschen because the masses are weak and stupid. The looters-n-moochers (let's call them scum for short, Rand's other favorite term for the 99%) get angry and jealous when confronted with the superiority of the Galts. The scum want to punish the Galts for being so smart and pure and good so they try to stop them from being successful. It is so unfair that some people (like little Alisa Rosenbaum) are smarter than everyone else and get good grades without even trying (like Alisa Rosenbaum) but nobody likes them and all the other girls won't even talk to them, not that they'd talk to them anyway because they can't even think their way out of a wet paper bag like she, Alisa Rosenbaum, can. Rand did not understand emotions and resented being judged on emotional terms. She could always feel superior on an intellectual level and thus did not want anything messy and unknown like emotions to interfere with that happy state.

As we return to our story, Dagny Taggart is doing her damnedest to get the Rio Norte Line to Colorado, which we are informed holds infinite natural resources when the rest of the country is depleted. Dagny is exhausted from convincing various manufacturers to take her business; she spend most of her time trying to shovel buckets of money into businessmen's pockets but alas, they all are terrified of the prospect despite everyone's declining revenues. The nation's infrastructure is literally falling apart due to the mysterious disappearance of the few competent people in the world. Without these few, these happy few, the nation is falling apart at the seams. Since there is only a tiny number of people in the world who can do anything, when they disappear the world starts to sink into a sticky morass of inaction and failure. Over in reality, where we live, we know that when a Steve Jobs dies another will eventually take his place since there are millions of intelligent, competent people in the world, many of whom are kept from achieving by circumstance and lack of opportunity and who would jump eagerly into any gap left by a Galt-going Master of the Universe. But Rand was convinced of her Great Man theory and nothing would ever change her mind. There are superior people who hold up the world and everyone else is just scum that rides the coattails of the rich and successful.

Lesser men are stupid and cannot understand complicated things like math and science. Dagny wants her entire rail line built of Reardon metal but her engineers don't want the responsibility of working with an unknown quantity, foundries don't want to revamp their factories to handle the higher melting point, and companies she depends on for parts are going bankrupt right and left. This is one of the sections that Megan McGalt must greatly enjoy, for it is filled with the failings of her enemies and the triumph of her ideological heroes. Atlas Shrugged does not, as McGalt says, probe "matters like how much metal will be required, when and where the bridge will be built, and how much the customer might be willing to pay." It is not filled with the glories of capitalism as manufacturers sell to merchants, merchants sell to customers, and customers invest in manufacturers, all in perfect balance. Capitalism is a complete and abject failure in Rand's world, because the Superior People, the people who actually count, are constantly being insulted by the scum. Their feeling are hurt--where's the love? where's the appreciation?--so they go Galt, leaving poor Dagny to rage and fight to save embattled capitalism with only Hank Reardon to turn to for help.

She looked at the spikes in the rail at her feet. They meant the night when she had heard that Summit Casting of Illinois, the only company willing to make spikes of Rearden Metal, had gone bankrupt, with half of her order undelivered. She had flown to Chicago, that night, she had got three lawyers, a judge and a state legislator out of bed, she had bribed two of them and threatened the others, she had obtained a paper that was an emergency permit of a legality no one would ever be able to untangle, she had had the padlocked doors of the Summit Casting plant unlocked, and a random, half-dressed crew working at the smelters before the windows had turned gray with daylight. The crews had remained at work, under a Taggart engineer and a Reardon metallurgist. The rebuilding of the Rio Norte Line was not held up.

Remember that morality is for lesser mortals in Rand's world. Her serial killer fascination revealed that Rand's idea of achievement was not just creating someone great, it was imposing one's will on others while doing so.

Rand was broken by the Bolsheviks as a girl, and she never left their bootprint behind. She believed her philosophy was Bolshevism’s opposite, when in reality it was its twin. Both she and the Soviets insisted a small revolutionary elite in possession of absolute rationality must seize power and impose its vision on a malleable, imbecilic mass. The only difference was that Lenin thought the parasites to be stomped on were the rich, while Rand thought they were the poor.

It is irrelevant that Dagny broke the law and contributed to the culture of corruption that ostensibly disgusts her when others indulge in it; she has her railroad spikes and that is proof of her superiority. Her will is stronger than those in the government and legal system and her purpose is more pure than that of the fools who are incapable of appreciating visionaries. Dagny gets her own way because she is better than everyone else and she is better than everyone else because she always gets her own way. It's win-win for the Ubermenschen. This is one of the "stories that dramatize pure principle," in McGalt's words, as Dagny does not hesitate to use money to shift the balance of power towards herself. Principle be damned, Dagny has a railroad to build.

Fortunately Randians, like all authoritarians, do not demand adherence to principle from their leaders, who are supposed to be above rules. Just as authoritarian parents do not hold themselves to the same standards they demand for their children, authoritarian followers do not hold their ideology or ideological leaders to high standards. When Libertarians discovered Ayn Rand took government benefits when she was old and sick they all made up excuses for her behavior. A genuine Ubermensch would never suck off the public teat like any common moocher, he would rather die than lower himself to behave like the scum. But authoritarians believe that the rich are different and go by other, more tolerant rules; producers carry the rest of the world on their shoulders and one must make allowances.

Meanwhile Reardon is facing roadblocks as well. A government official in the service of the major US industrialists pressures him to sell Reardon metal to take it off the market. The official says that the metal will throw existing companies out of business but says he is "thinking in terms of the country as a whole, we are concerned with the public welfare and the terrible crises" of unemployment. Unemployment will not be improved by closing Reardon's conglomerate of businesses but Rand is not concerned with the little details of reality or consistency; a monopoly's attempt to control its market share is socialist because she says it is. Reardon threatens to kill the government lackey and refuses all offers, even those that would make him richer. Reardon metal is better than steel and excellence must and will triumph; it is the only source of joy in Rand's world and the only reason for living.

But the government declares Reardon metal unsafe and Dagny fails to convince the head of the national Science Institute to support the new discovery. He ignores her plea to support a simple fact, the excellence of Reardon metal. She is incredulous that a scientist could ignore the truth so he finally admits that it would embarrass the government if a private individual were the source of a brilliant new innovation. Since the government can't do anything ever, it must destroy those who can. This explains why Randians will never admit that the government has supported great and lucrative innovations; their ideology declares that it could not happen because only brilliant lone individuals could ever be successful. Governments can't do what individuals can do because only a few rare Supermen are innovative geniuses.

In desperation, Dagny convinces her brother James to give her the Rio Norte Line to finish building on her own. She assumes all responsibility for the socially unpopular line and tells James to take care of the paperwork, thereby relieving herself of anything that might mar her bright and shining purpose. Francisco refuses to help finance her project and once again Dagny is tossed into a spasm of distress at his uselessness. Battered but unbowed, Dagny vows to rename her line the John Galt line, in defiance of all the hopeless, helpless scum determined to drag her down.

In Atlas Shrugged the scum say that nobody can do anything ever and nobody can know anything ever. They believe in writing the laws to benefit a small monopoly of industrialists, eliminating competition and suppressing invention. They want to stand athwart history yelling stop, preserving their ancestors' Christian morality and preventing any changes in their world or worldview. These are the looters and moochers, which makes it odd to see Libertarians, the champions of capitalism, constantly repeat the words Ayn Rand considered beneath contempt. Libertarians do the very things that they accuse the looters and moochers of doing; they say there's nothing anyone can do about failure because it's built into the system. In fact, failure is the key to success, a phrase that would have enraged Rand.

In no time at all--really, it's on the next page--Dagny has her financing, from all the other Ubermenschen who recognize genius instantly when Dagny approaches them with her plans. Reardon tosses a check for a million dollars in the kitty, orders are pouring in from one Ubermensch to another, and Dagny is thrilled. She and Reardon are in perfect synchrony as they conduct business together, as business talk is the talk of love in Rand's world. Little does she know that under Reardon's cold exterior, he is seething with agonies of love for Our Dagny, or rather seething with urges to dominate her and force her to submit to his will, which is the same thing as love to Rand.

Do you know what it's like, to want [you].... for that degrading need, which should never touch you, I have never wanted anyone but you.... I hadn't known what it was like, to want it, until I saw you for the first time. I had thought: Not I, I couldn't be broken by it..... To bring you down to things you can't conceive--and to know that it's I who have done it. To reduce you to a body, to teach you an animal's pleasure, to see you need it, to see you asking me for it, to see your wonderful spirit dependent upon the obscenity of your need. To watch you as you are, as you face the world with your clean,proud strength--then to see you, in my bed, submitting to any infamous whim I may devise, to any act which Ill perform for the sole purpose of watching your dishonor and to which you'll submit for the sake of an unspeakable sensation.... I want you--and may I be damned for it!

Dagny is unaware of the rape fantasy unrolling in Reardon's mind, which is a great pity since her greatest wish is to be forced into submission by a cruel, ruthless, emotionless Master, so she could cower at his feet like a Frank Franzetta alien princess. But soon Reardon has more important things to worry about. The anti-competition law passes and Reardon is overcome with grief and despair. How could they drag him down so? A "screaming pain without content or limit" courses through Reardon, and he is temporarily overcome with the burden of living in a world of looters and scum who have all ganged up against him to bring about his destruction.

All of Rand's heroes are constantly persecuted by the weak and immoral, barely able to keep their heads up due to the scum's omnipresent efforts to drag down the superior men. Forty years after teenage Alisa's family lost everything to revolution, the fear, hunger, and paranoia were just as strong, even when she no longer had any reason for those emotions. All of Rand's characters are always at a fever pitch of emotion; they constantly cry and scream and shriek, rocketing from euphoria to despair and back again. Yet Rand also tells us that the only happy moments in their lives are those devoid of any emotion but triumph, that only emotionless people are able to think, create or rule the scum of the earth. Reardon and Dagny can only find happiness through eliminating anyone or anything that distracts from achieving greatness, and the little girl that dwelled in the heart of cold, self-obsessed Ayn Rand could think of nothing better than eliminating the one inescapable thing that plagued her for her entire life--those inexplicable, inconvenient, heartbreaking emotions and the inferior humans who insisted on feeling them.

Coming Soon: Atlas Shrugged: The Mocking Continues

2011-10-09T10:14:00.001-05:00

The 1% has a message for you.

Authoritarian Mothering

2011-10-06T18:14:00.000-05:00

The Corner at National Review has a new page called The Home Front. It's the Woman's Corner of the Corner, in which working women complain about liberal women who don't marry, poor women who marry but don't stay married, and men who don't marry and therefore never become civilized. In between are complaints about reality tv, school lunches and SpongeBob Squarepants. It is a one-stop whine extravaganza. My favorite post so far, however, whines about self-esteem, something that these women do not want their children to have.

It seems Jennifer Kaczor, despite being a conservative mother, has had a few problems with her seven children. In "Trouble With A Teenage Padawon," she relates the sad tale of her teenage daughter's involvement with...a boy. It seems that her 14-year-old was sneaking around to see her boyfriend, having wisely assumed that her mother would not let her have a normal teen relationship. Kaczor relates how she had no idea of the sneaking and had to be informed of her daughter's actions by the mother of the boyfriend. To punish her daughter, Kaczor told the girl to stop seeing the boy, took away her phone, and patted herself on the back for her good parenting. Then she tells us how daughter immediately switched over to communicating with the boyfriend via computer. It's a typical tale which will no doubt end in an unfortunate early marriage or college years spent making up for lost time, but Kaczor seems to have enjoy the martyrdom she endures for her children.

However, the best was yet to come. In You Can’t Keep My Child Down, No Matter How Hard I Try!, Kaczor tells us how she ensures that none of her children will ever have any self-esteem if she has anything to say about it.

Well, it’s over. Summer vacation, that glorious time of year when parents don’t fret about their children’s I.Q, is over. The beginning of a new school year means the beginning of a new race, and though Vicki Abeles was quite right in her assessment that we are racing to nowhere, it seems most people still want to get there first. In an effort to reassure themselves, parents will soon be bragging about the academic achievements and sporting conquests of their offspring. Everyone’s self-esteem will be exceedingly high. Except mine. And my kids’. I’m not sure which came first, my distaste of high self-esteem, or my lack of anything to warrant it. Either way, in the Kaczor family, we’ve taken to bragging about our humility.

Already Kaczor has fallen into the sing-song patter of someone who has read and recited the same words a thousand times, like a church liturgy. She begins with an appeal to the tribe's vanity ("academic achievements and sporting conquests"), raises an obligatory boogeyman, ("we are racing to nowhere"), denigrates the opponent ("Everyone’s self-esteem will be exceedingly high"), claims exceptionalism ("Except mine"), and finally blows a Christian dog-whistle ("humility"). She is thorough, if nothing else.

Training starts early with the intention of developing a child who is astonished by the smallest compliment.

How horrible. Children need love and praise to feel good about themselves. They want to be good and need to be taught how to understand themselves. These Cornerites don't even think their children deserve basic politeness.

Toddlers are told to “put a sock in it.”

That teaches him that he is not respected because people don't have to be polite to him. It teaches his siblings the same lesson.

“Not everything that passes through your little mind needs to be verbalized,” I explain.

You're stupid, shut up.

Later, when the kids start school and are told by well-meaning teachers that “there are no stupid questions,” I take them aside and inform them that, in fact, most questions are stupid. “Don’t just raise your hand to raise your hand,” I warn, “any dolt can do that.” “And for God’s sake, if you don’t know the answer, don’t raise it at all.”

Kids don't volunteer when they don't know the answer; they do their best to avoid attention. All a child will get out of this advice is that dolts ask a lot of questions.

And when visiting other people’s homes, I instruct them to “make yourself scarce.” “Don’t stand around waiting to be entertained: the less the hostess sees of you, the better she’ll like you.”

People don't like you. Go away.

You might think that my kids are emotional wrecks. Ha! The truth is, it’s not easy to keep a child down. My kids are very nearly as full of themselves as their peers are.

Which is why she is about to describe the depth of her son's insecurity, to her approval.

In addition to occasionally telling them that we love them, my husband and I made the mistake of telling them how much God loves them. Once that cat was out of the bag, there was no stopping them. Had we added to that arsenal, praise for every half-witted comment or slapped-together art project, we’d have raised children who were Disney Channel parodies of themselves.

This woman is deluding herself. It might make her feel godly to say Jesus loves you this I know, but an abstract concept is no substitute for a parent. If God's love were sufficient to give everyone self-esteem, we wouldn't have so many malevolent authoritarians.

Still, it’s a battle. The other day my nine-year-old, who fancies himself a young Johnny Carson, was going through his entire repertoire of voices during the bitter end of a road trip. “George!” I screamed. “Put a sock in it!” My husband, worried that I might be stifling a lucrative career, asked me if I thought I might be doing just that. Before I could answer, George announced his intention to become a squirrel when he grows up. “No dear,” I replied, “I don’t think so.”

George is irrepressible. But my other children have taken my training more seriously. William, a tall boy of eleven who resembles Huck Finn in taste and temperament, is used to teachers and coaches’ being disappointed in him. His homework, when completed, is forgotten. His calisthenics are lazy, and his running is lackadaisical. Other than his shy smile and intermittent kindness, he’s earned no real self-esteem and, consequently, has no real self-esteem. In short, he’s my kind of kid.

In other words, he's eleven. Boys his age are often like this. But children should not have to earn self-esteem; the very least parents can do is pass on to their child a belief that he is valued and loved. Authoritarians believe the child owes the parent obedience and that showing love means enforcing obedience. Since they do not have much empathy, they discount the distress they are inflicting on their child.

[snip]

We have gone too far in praising kids and giving them seriously inflated ideas of themselves. This, I guess, could be dismissed as relatively benign, except that science has shown that the higher a person’s self-esteem, the less moral they tend to be (see Dr. Baumeister’s research).

Kaczor links to a google search that does nothing to prove her claim. Baumeister says, "Psychologists everywhere were persuaded that if only we could help people to accept and love themselves more, their problems would gradually vanish and their lives would flourish. They would even treat each other better." He concluded that such programs didn't work and therefore self-esteem should be replaced with self-control. Like many conservatives, Kaczor thinks self-esteem is the same as vanity.

In other words, the more they think of themselves, the less they think of others. The second conversation happened in the same way, but this time, the daughter didn’t just enjoy dancing, she was, according to her dear mama, “a dancer.” Yes, and my 15-year-old daughter who contrives excellent excuses for not cleaning her room is not just argumentative, she’s “a lawyer.”

I have never told my children that they are “athletes.” I have told them to be good sports, to encourage their teammates, to listen to their coach, and to play hard. This summer, William began playing basketball, and I issued the usual instructions. Because of his height, I told him to get as many rebounds as possible. But William is an erratic player. For the time being, you get what you get with William. Following one game in which he did not play particularly well, he turned to me and said, “That’s it. The coach hates me. And, by the way, I’m flunking basketball.”

“Flunking basketball?” I repeated. “You can’t flunk basketball. It’s not even a class! You are not flunking basketball.” I assured him. “Wanna bet?” he countered. “The coach hates me, he thinks I’m horrible, and he’s flunking me.” Confused by this sudden outburst, I demanded to know why William was taking such a hard view of things. “I saw his clipboard, Mom, and there is an F next to my name! Explain that!” he challenged.

In case you aren’t a big basketball fan, I’ll explain it to you as I explained it to William. “The ‘F,’ you nut, stands for “‘Forward.’” It took a second to register, and then William looked at me with his shy smile. “That makes sense,” he concluded, “because Gordie has a ‘G’ next to his name and he’s not just good, he’s really good.” “And Alex has a ‘C,’” William continued, “and he definitely deserves an A.” I put my arm around William’s waist and pulled him toward my chest. “And you, my little friend, don’t deserve an F.” I insisted. William just shrugged and smiled. If he keeps this up, I’ll soon be as insufferable as the other mothers; bragging about my son, “the martyr.”

Two things:

First, even eleven year olds know that they don't get a grade for after school activities and also know that G is not a grade. It's hard to believe that Kaczor made up this charming anecdote but it is hard to believe she didn't.

Second, why would she brag about her son acting like a martyr, especially after she has just bragged about his self-esteem?

Dennis Prager agrees that self-esteem is bad.

We think too highly of ourselves.

Self-esteem frequently runs counter to goodness. Raising children with self-esteem sounds great, but when unearned — which it usually is — it leads to bad results. In fact, it is people who do not have particularly high self-esteem, people who feel that they constantly have to prove their worth, who are more likely to act good. And it is violent criminals who have the highest self-esteem — “I am better than others and can therefore do whatever I want.”

Sadly, no. People with low self-esteem will do terrible things to feel better about themselves, including crimes and cruelties such as emotionally abusing their children.

Charming

2011-10-06T08:45:00.000-05:00

It's not "We are the 1%" but it's close.

McArdle might want to rethink that whole twitter thing. It's much harder to maintain a facade of civility when speaking extemporaneously.

There She Goes Again

2011-10-04T12:55:00.001-05:00

(click to view--if you dare)

Authoritarianism has an infinite capacity for self delusion.

More Memories

2011-10-03T11:42:00.000-05:00

The crimes of Koch Industries are finally making some news. Since we are revisiting the past today, let's take a look at Megan McArdle's defense of The Brothers Grimm against accusations of supporting supposed grass-roots tea parties behind the scenes.

The question is whether, as [Yasha Levine and Mark Ames] basically asserted, Charles Koch masterminded a vast attempt to create the impression of popular support for a project in order to apply political pressure, while hiding his involvement through front groups that manufactured wholly imaginary popular support.

As far as I can tell, FreedomWorks a) isn't funded by Charles Koch and b) hasn't hidden its involvement. Their central thesis does not jibe with the facts available to me. Indeed, it seems deeply weird, because getting tea and a hundred or so people together in front of a government building isn't exactly an expensive endeavor. Last I heard, the DC operation was borrowing the megaphone they used, and getting the tea for free from some tea company.

This doesn't mean I endorse what FreedomWorks does--I frankly don't know enough about the organization to have an opinion on its operations. It merely seemed to me that their specific charges about the tea parties were insufficiently backed up with specific facts. Playboy has published some great journalism in its time. The ratio of speculation-to-evidence in the Levine and Ames piece was thus disappointing, especially since it was rapidly taken up as gospel truth by substantial sections of the lefty blogosphere.

Perhaps Yasha Levine and Mark Ames have some hard facts--or hell, even an untrustworthy anonymous source--who can substantiate some of these claims. If so, I wish they would provide them. Or at the very least, stop hurling unsubstantiated accusations at anyone who dares to point out the weaknesses in their case.

Of course McArdle was wrong, which is especially embarrassing since her husband is a former Koch rat-fucker and evidently lied to her by omission regarding the Koches' fake grass-roots activity.

Full disclosure: It's pretty much an open secret in DC, but given the content of the article I'm discussing, I think I ought to mention that I live with Peter Suderman, who once worked for Freedomworks. Other than giving me the name of the right employee to email to make inquiries (no word back yet), I haven't asked him about his former employer, and he hasn't told me anything. I debated whether to write about this, but since I'm not actually defending Freedomworks, I think it's kosher.

McArdle wrote five posts denying Ames and Levine's Koch articles and her live-in boyfriend, her "soul mate" and the love of her life, said nothing, evidently preferring to let her look like a fool rather than admit the Koches paid for fake grass-roots campaigns.

Memories

2011-10-03T10:33:00.001-05:00

Earlier this year Megan McArdle wrote an article about Iraq's economy, claiming that "freedom is bad for business."

Apparently, freedom and democracy themselves may actually be creating many of the most severe problems in the economy—our virtues, and not our sins, may be what’s hurting Iraqis.

It seems that bombing a country back into the stone age is not the source of Iraq's economic problems; it's the fault of Iraqi incompetence, Iraqi corruption and Iraqi rules and regulations. I helpfully mentioned one more possible source of Iraq's economic problems: the ignorant, ideological, barely post-pubescent Heritage Foundation legacy pledges that screwed up everything they touched.

HugeEuge 7 months ago
Amazing level of bureaucracy -- some considerable organized effort to write a lot of laws and regulations, if not much effort to coordinate them or make them practicable. Were these laws laws and regs on the books in Saddam era or only post invasion? And I wonder how they compare to say Jordan or Syria, or whether there has sprung up a large informal economy outside the regulations, as can happen in countries where the formal organizations of the state are strong and developed enough to write lots of (insane) laws but not strong enough to enforce them.

Very interesting article (and also the blog post), too bad it's not really practical for MM to go there for a month or two to do some on-the-ground reporting on the issue. Outside the daily news stories, most of what I see about Iraq is written with a view to settle scores or revise history about who was right blah blah blah. I apologize, I don't mean to sound patronizing, but it really is refeshing to read a feature about Iraq that isn't all about the government/civil unrest or trying to score political points by putting a gloss of one color or another on the situation etc.

susanoftexas 7 months ago in reply to HugeEuge
I too think Ms. McArdle should go to Iraq to see for herself. She could get behind the official lies and talk to Iraqis and get the real story.

You're also right about those ideological lenses--some people might have mentioned how Bush hired new college graduates from the Heritage Institute to run the economy, which didn't work out at all, no doubt because governments can't really do anything right. Ms. McArdle totally left that out, which proves that she is fair.

McMegan 7 months ago in reply to susanoftexas
My columns are of limited length; I left more words on the cutting room floor than made it into the piece. The purpose of the column was not to rehash old political complaints; it was to describe the situation in Iraq as it exists today. I understand that you probably think that fixing blame on the Bush administration is much more interesting and important than wasting words describing cement factory privatization, transparency, or the oil infrastructure. I can only plead that my editors disagreed.

susanoftexas 7 months ago in reply to McMegan
Ms. McArdle, are you saying that your editors cut out your bit on the CPA?
Susan

McMegan 7 months ago in reply to susanoftexas
I'm saying my editors were not interested in a 2500 word column on why we shouldn't have invaded Iraq and how George Bush sucks; they were interested in 2500 word column on what's happening now. The former topic has been covered exhaustively; the latter has not. I didn't write about the CPA, the invasion, the violence that followed, or any of the other reasons that the invasion was a bad idea, because the column was not about the invasion; it was about the economy.

susanoftexas 7 months ago in reply to McMegan
You avoided my question. If you can go back as far as Ninevah surely you can mention the time in which the US was supposed to establish a working economy after we invaded and overthrew the government. It is obviously and overwhelmingly pertinent to the present state of Iraq's economy.

McMegan 7 months ago in reply to susanoftexas
It wouldn't have changed anything in the story; it wouldn't have even helped fix blame on the Bush administration, since I make it clear that he invasion he spearheaded caused the chaos. The subject of the piece was not exactly how bad was George Bush. To me, the most important questions about Iraq are not whether events there decrease the relative status of George Bush, the GOP, or the people who supported the war. As a result, I cut material on the invasion that didn't actually change the conclusion of the story. Or are you arguing that a Democrat-led invasion would have resulted in a safe, prosperous Iraq?

susanoftexas 7 months ago in reply to McMegan
So you left out or cut out any CPA information because you didn't want to discuss Bush's failure to install an economic infrastructure.

Yet you did discuss the lack of economic infrastructure.

'Gunter argues that the U.S. invasion, by taking out the centralized apparatus of Saddam’s regime, unleashed what he calls “entrepreneurial corruption.”'

And

"If all you do is remove the totalitarian state, without building the institutions that support markets, the result can be corruption even more pervasive, and corrosive, than the regime you replaced."

So the only thing you left out was why those institutions were not built--because the CPA didn't build them. You emphasize government regulation and the corruption and rent-seeking" of Iraqis instead. That is changing the conclusion of the story.

You surely remember that the CPA "lost" $12 billion dollars, which would have gone far in building new organizations. You stated "Instead, the major problem is creating political and social institutions that support a vibrant, entrepreneurial business culture." yet you ignored why that culture wasn't built--the CPA, filled with Heritage Foundation members.

JamestheWanderer 7 months ago in reply to susanoftexas
OK, Susanoftexas, we get it already; you hate George Bush, he is the Devil's favorite son, and until he is hanged-and-drawn-and-quartered-with-his-bowels-burned-alive-bef0re-his-face he will not have been sufficiently punished (and maybe not even then).
Can we move on now, to other subjects?

susanoftexas 7 months ago in reply to JamestheWanderer
Ms. McArdle is trying to convince her audience that we must practice austerity instead of stimulus spending and that we must eliminate Social Security and Medicare. Her reasoning is flawed, just as it was for the bank bailout, which she supported, the war, which she supported, and the shadow banking industry that brought down the economy, which she supported.

Ms. McArdle's support for everything is based on her ideology, which tells her that governments are incompetent, the markets always equalize, and regulation strangles business. If any of these ideas are ever proven wrong, McArdle makes up excuses and arguments that attempt to cover up that fact and convince her audience that the world is mistaken and her ideas are correct. Such as, corruption and government regulations impeded Iraq's economy, not the economic conservatives at the Heritage Foundation.

It's a matter of reason, fact and results, not emotion. We cannot afford to continue to listen to flawed reasoning and people who disregard facts.

JamestheWanderer 7 months ago in reply to susanoftexas
"Ms. McArdle is trying to convince her audience that we must practice austerity instead of stimulus spending and that we must eliminate Social Security and Medicare."

So the cure for sky-high debt is MORE debt? We must maintain unsustainable programs created by long-dead ignorant politicians until we die?

"Ms. McArdle's support for everything is based on her ideology, which tells her that governments are incompetent, the markets always equalize, and regulation strangles business."

But-but-but - governments ARE incompetent; mine has wasted every dollar I sent them for my retirement on waste, fraud, pork projects and rewarding their cronies. The markets may or may not equalize; they can also collapse, which this one will once QE-to-infinity is shown not to work. Regulations do strangle business, which is why no one is getting hired these days and high unemployment continues. Why can't we STOP doing what doesn't work, and find something else that does?

"It's a matter of reason, fact and results, not emotion. We cannot afford to continue to listen to flawed reasoning and people who disregard facts. " Your emotional defense of Social Security and Medicare despite their unsustainable design is noted; your flawed reasoning in regard to curing debt with more debt I have pointed out. Shall I stop listening to you?

susanoftexas 7 months ago in reply to JamestheWanderer
I am unable to evaluate your contribution to the conversation due to your substitution of repetition for argument.

JamestheWanderer 7 months ago in reply to susanoftexas
I accept your concessions that you do not understand economics, the concept of "unsustainability" or the proper role of government in society. Don't feel bad, probably more than half of the population doesn't understand any better than you do.

susanoftexas 7 months ago in reply to JamestheWanderer
Do you have an proof whatsoever of your statements, or will you simply keep repeating them? You say the government is incompetent while using the services it provides for you while being protected by its military. You live under the constitution written by politicians long-dead. "Free market" means more than quantitative easing. The recession is the reason hiring is so poor; regulation greatly rose under Bush.

I have not defended SS etc, I have noted flaws in McArdle's reasoning. Your answers are based on the emotion you accuse me of, you don't back up anything you say with facts, and you inject irrelevant considerations into the conversation. You prove nothing, add nothing and have poor manners, and this conversation is at an end.

JamestheWanderer 7 months ago in reply to susanoftexas
"You say the government is incompetent while using the services it provides for you while being protected by its military." The Mafia provides "services", and has really effective "protection" and "military" branches; how is our current government all that different?

"You live under the constitution written by politicians long-dead. " Which you obviously do not understand or value, since you are advocating "stimulus" which is NOT a Constitutional duty of the government (and for that matter, neither is SS, Medicare or any of a number of other current activities).

""Free market" means more than quantitative easing." Free markets are the OPPOSITE of quantitative easing; have you ever studied economics?
"The recession is the reason hiring is so poor; regulation greatly rose under Bush. " This recession is a consequence of government interference in the economy; Austrian economists understand this, although Keynesians do not. And as for the expansion of regulation, do you recall hearing about several 2000+ page bills passed by Congress in the last two years? The ones we had to "pass to find out what was in them" as one politician put it?
YOU BROUGHT UP "eliminate Social Security and Medicare" in your post; THAT is an implicit defense of SS, or you wouldn't have used it as a criticism of McArdle. I have noted your errors, and your emotional responses so far. I have proven your lack of understanding, and I gratefully concede the one thing you have correct:

" this conversation is at an end." because I can't converse with someone who can't listen and understand.

So as we watch Megan McArdle write seven-count-'em-seven posts (here, here, here, here, here, here, and here) attempting to light a fire under the Solyndra story and gin up a scandal to create a blaze of controversy and pain for liberals, let us remember that the disappearance of TWELVE BILLION DOLLARS entirely sliipped Miss Megan's mind, leaving not even a ripple as it disappeared into the murky depths of her misbegotten soul.

ADDED: Make that nine posts on Solyndra.

Friedrich Hayek Took Government Benefits

2011-09-30T17:43:00.000-05:00

Oh, this is beautiful. From Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism:

Mark Ames, who has been doggedly on the trail of the Koch brothers, found a delicious failure to live up to his oft-repeated standard of conduct by a god in the libertarian pantheon, Friedrich Hayek. And this fall from grace was encouraged one of the chief promoters of extreme right wing ideas in the US, Charles Koch.

[snip]

On August 10, 1973, Koch wrote a letter appealing to Hayek to accept a shorter stay at the IHS, hard-selling Hayek on Social Security’s retirement benefits, which Koch encouraged Hayek to draw on even outside America.

This should put Hayek in some sort of libertarian circle of hell, along with Ayn Rand, who took Medicare and Social Security payments when she was diagnosed with lung cancer.

If Hayek didn't save enough money to pay for his own medical care, why didn't richer-than-God Koch pay for it instead of helping Hayek sponge off the taxpayer?

They took the government benefits because they needed them, just as people need them today. They could have refused out of principle; the writer Isabel Paterson, a friend of Rand, did just that. But it's a lot easier to tell others to give up something they need than to do it yourself, and people are very good at making up excuses for why everyone else must sacrifice but they cannot.

State-Sanctioned Murder

2011-09-30T16:45:00.001-05:00

If one person can be assassinated--killed without due process of law--then anyone can be assassinated.

Less Measurable Megan

2011-09-30T11:37:00.000-05:00

Another Shorter Megan McArdle: Paying for performance is too hard unless you're talking about teachers. And that science thing? Just a fad.

The Center Of The Universe

2011-09-30T11:35:00.001-05:00

Shorter Megan McArdle: Screw the post office; I don't need it anyway.

If she doesn't need it, you don't need it. The world revolves around Miss Megan McArdle--it's her world and you just live in it.

*Some Commandments Optional

2011-09-26T13:48:00.001-05:00

James 1:26 ESV
If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person's religion is worthless.

Via driftglass and TBogg, we see Ross Douthat has perpetrated another atrocity. It takes a brave man to say that we're doing people a favor by executing them, but Ross Douthat is that man. It is, quite possibly, the laziest argument I have ever heard in my life, and I read Megan McArdle every day.

Douthat is a graduate of a prep school and Harvard. He is the youngest ever op-ed columnist for the New York Times. He undoubtedly is paid six figures for his work. Yet the best he can come up with about the religious and political issue of capital punishment is an essay that would be failed by a high school teacher.

Douthat says that by holding executions we shine a spotlight on the criminal justice system and bad prison conditions and therefore holding executions is a good thing, even if we accidentally-on-purpose execute an innocent man. The argument seems to rest on his belief that it's perfectly okay to kill criminals, or innocent guys as long as they have already been born.

IT’S easy to see why the case of Troy Davis, the Georgia man executed last week for the 1989 killing of an off-duty police officer, became a cause célèbre for death penalty opponents. Davis was identified as the shooter by witnesses who later claimed to have been coerced by investigators. He was prosecuted and convicted based on the same dubious eyewitness testimony, rather than forensic evidence. And his appeals process managed to be ponderously slow without delivering anything like certainty: it took the courts 20 years to say a final no to the second trial that Davis may well have deserved.

For many observers, the lesson of this case is simple: We need to abolish the death penalty outright. The argument that capital punishment is inherently immoral has long been a losing one in American politics.

The argument that we should outlaw abortion has also long been a losing one, but Douthat doesn't care about that. He will use popularity when it helps him win an argument and morality when it will not. Hypocrite Act #1.

But in the age of DNA evidence and endless media excavations, the argument that courts and juries are just too fallible to be trusted with matters of life and death may prove more effective.

If capital punishment disappears in the United States, it won’t be because voters and politicians no longer want to execute the guilty. It will be because they’re afraid of executing the innocent.

Douthat ignores moral arguments against capital punishment; the Catholic Church is against capital punishment because "only God can take a life" but oddly Douthat ignores that basic directive. Hypocrisy #2.

This is a healthy fear for a society to have. But there’s a danger here for advocates of criminal justice reform. After all, in a world without the death penalty, Davis probably wouldn’t have been retried or exonerated. His appeals would still have been denied, he would have spent the rest of his life in prison, and far fewer people would have known or cared about his fate.

There is no way of knowing this and it wouldn't matter if it were true. The argument is ludicrous on its face. Reformers care about injustice and cruel living conditions as well as the death penalty, and the attention Davis received didn't do him any good in the end. Douthat doesn't care about the living conditions of poor minorities and others he has deemed guilty, and pretending he suddenly does is Hypocrisy #3.

Instead, he received a level of legal assistance, media attention and activist support that few convicts can ever hope for. And his case became an example of how the very finality of the death penalty can focus the public’s attention on issues that many Americans prefer to ignore: the overzealousness of cops and prosecutors, the limits of the appeals process and the ugly conditions faced by many of the more than two million Americans currently behind bars.

Or we could, you know, focus on these things without killing anyone. Focusing on them while killing people has not proven effective so far.

Simply throwing up our hands and eliminating executions entirely, by contrast, could prove to be a form of moral evasion — a way to console ourselves with the knowledge that no innocents are ever executed, even as more pervasive abuses go unchecked.

As long as anyone suffers we can execute prisoners. Funny how that works out.

We should want a judicial system that we can trust with matters of life and death, and that can stand up to the kind of public scrutiny that Davis’s case received. And gradually reforming the death penalty — imposing it in fewer situations and with more safeguards, which other defendants could benefit from as well — might do more than outright abolition to address the larger problems with crime and punishment in America.

This is also Ross Douthat's anti-abortion argument, by the way. Let's eliminate abortion so we can end those divisive abortion arguments and concentrate on how we can end abortion!

This point was made well last week by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, writing for The American Scene. In any penal system, he pointed out, but especially in our own — which can be brutal, overcrowded, rife with rape and other forms of violence — a lifelong prison sentence can prove more cruel and unusual than a speedy execution. And a society that supposedly values liberty as much or more than life itself hasn’t necessarily become more civilized if it preserves its convicts’ lives while consistently violating their rights and dignity. It’s just become better at self-deception about what’s really going on.

You tolerate prison rape, right? So why won't you tolerate executions too? Where is your consistency, Liberal America?!

Fundamentally, most Americans who support the death penalty do so because they want to believe that our justice system is just, and not merely a mechanism for quarantining the dangerous in order to keep the law-abiding safe. The case for executing murderers is a case for proportionality in punishment: for sentences that fit the crime, and penalties that close the circle.

And here we see the real Ross Douthat. Not the fake religious man--the real thing. Only God can take a life. Period. The Church does not make exceptions, not for dying parents or babies, not for unwanted children, not for criminals, not for anyone. Jesus was executed as a criminal, remember. When he said, "Whatsoever you do to the least of my brother, that you do unto me," he wasn't advocating for more public executions, you know. This is not a matter of opinion, a suggestion, or an interpretation. Jesus said turn the cheek, not turn the dial on the electric chair. Douthat's religion is fake. He may have plastered a Christian veneer over his bundle of neuroses and OCD disorders and say "God" a lot but he is not a godly man, and certainly not a Catholic.

Instead of dismissing this point of view as backward and barbaric, criminal justice reformers should try to harness it, by pointing out that too often our punishments don’t fit the crime — that sentences for many drug crimes are disproportionate to the offenses, for instance, or that rape and sexual assault have become an implicit part of many prison terms. Americans should be urged to support penal reform not in spite of their belief that some murderers deserve execution, in other words, but because of it — because both are attempts to ensure that accused criminals receive their just deserts.

Romans 12:16-19 ESV
Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”

Abolishing capital punishment in a kind of despair over its fallibility would send a very different message. It would tell the public that our laws and courts and juries are fundamentally incapable of delivering what most Americans consider genuine justice.

Yes, God forbid we should think our criminal system is unfair.

It could encourage a more cynical and utilitarian view of why police forces and prisons exist, and what moral standards we should hold them to.

Heaven forbid we should think that the powerful use the police and judicial system to keep the sheep in line.

And while it would put an end to wrongful executions, it might well lead to more overall injustice.

Because nothing would be more unfair that to stop executing innocent people.

It's Delightful

2011-09-24T11:19:00.001-05:00

Some writers are more fun than others. In fact, they might make you want to break out into song.

The night is young, the skies are clear
And if you want to go walkin', dear
It's delightful, it's delicious, it's de-lovely

The premise of [David Brooks'] piece was that he, Brooks, was a "sap" for believing Barack Obama when Obama pledged, after his election, to rise above partisanship and "move beyond the stale ideological debates that have paralyzed this country.

For Brooks, "rising above partisanship" always means "not criticizing the rich," so you can kind of guess where he's going with this article. He references the recent Obama speech that hinted at tax increases for the wealthy, always a no-no on planet Brooks, where such proposals are always interpreted as "class warfare" and "angry populism."

I understand the reason why
You're sentimental, 'cause so am I
It's delightful, it's delicious, it's de-lovely

Even Brooks wouldn't dare come out and try to justify [taxing millionaires less than poorer people]. Everyone knows things like hedge-fund exemption are morally indefensible. But the top-1-percenters and their slobbering wannabe acolytes like Brooks defend them anyway by avoiding specifics and retreating into words like "fairness" and "centrism," while deriding any call for changes to the tax code as insurrectionary populism/socialism.

You can tell at a glance what a swell night this is for romance
You can hear, dear Mother Nature murmuring low "Let yourself go"

I defy David Brooks to come out publicly and explain how it's fair that he should pay more than twice the tax rate that Paulson or George Soros pays. I think about this every April when I send my check off to the IRS, and it makes me want to go on a tri-state killing spree. But it apparently doesn't bother Brooks, who defends this system in the pages of the Times over and over again, showing everyone that he's actually not being sarcastic when he calls himself a sap.

So please be sweet, my chickadee
And when I kiss ya, just say to me
"It's delightful, it's delicious, it's delectable, it's delirious,

Brooks knows [Obama might just be campaigning], which is why he doesn't sound terribly worried about these reforms actually happening. He just objects to the tone of the debate, and to the very idea that we should even ask if everyone is paying his fair share. Brooks has many allies in the punditry world, who voice similar objections, which should tell you a lot about the chances for actual reforms. If we can't even get rich pundits to object to being personally screwed by the system, if we can't even get those people to talk about it, it'll be a long time before we get around to seriously considering making changes.

It's dilemma, it's de limit, it's deluxe, it's de-lovely"

Hide Your Sheep

2011-09-23T11:47:00.002-05:00

Shorter Jonah Goldberg: Because some death row inmates are guilty, innocence or guilt doesn't matter when executing death row inmates.

Bonus Goldberg quote:

[U]ntil they [liberals] can explain why we shouldn’t have a death penalty when uncertainty isn’t an issue — i.e., why McVeigh and Brewer should live — they’ll never win the real argument.

Yes, he actually says that if you leave out the question of whether or not a death row inmate is guilty, there is no reason not to execute inmates.

Say, this is kind of fun. If you leave out the question of whether or not Jonah Goldberg has sex with animals, there is no reason not to say that Jonah Goldberg has sex with animals.

Jonah, you're a genius.

Who has sex with animals.

Donate Now!

2011-09-22T12:48:00.000-05:00

Jonah Goldberg appeals to the generosity of his readers, as NRO-Online has another pledge drive.

Every time I write one of these pitches I hear from readers who think this approach — what marketing experts and economists call “this PBS crap” — is un-conservative, even vaguely socialist. The argument seems to boil down to: If we can’t make it in the market without passing the collection plate among the congregation, we must be doing something wrong.

I just don’t get this. Churches and synagogues ask for donations; does that make them socialist or liberal? We know that conservatives are more generous with their money than liberals are. Are all those philanthropic rightwingers just saps, or crypto-socialists, or crypto-socialist saps? Are they secretly giving to liberal causes? NRO makes some money from advertising. The print magazine makes money from advertising, subscriptions, and cruises. But it doesn’t cover everything. In effect, NRO works for tips. And the tips, unfortunately, have to come from you, the reader.

Conservatives don't believe in tipping, as Dr. Helen told us.

NRO straddles two worlds.

Much like Larry Craig.

We are a for-profit organization that rarely makes any profit to speak of, and whatever profit we do make goes back into the mission.

Minus salaries, of course, salaries that ensure NRO writers can vacation in Paris.

I think at this point you can guess what the mission is: to make the case for conservative policies and ideas as best we can. Part of that business model requires asking the people who get value — however defined — from this site to pitch in as best they can.

[obligatory liberal bashing]

If you can’t swing sending us a few bucks, don’t. If you don’t think we’re worth it, don’t.

Never give an authoritarian permission to do something he wants to do anyway. After decades of "keep your hands off my money," most people will refuse to part with one God-given dime.

But if you can afford it. And if you do think we’re worth it. If you think the message is right and the arguments are right and the cause is right. Then please help out as best you can. We need the money to keep doing what we do. That’s not socialism; it’s math, as the president might say.

Donate, folks, so Jonah can afford a main clause to go with all his subordinate clauses.

Always Wrong, Never In Doubt

2011-09-21T12:44:00.000-05:00

Hahahahaha! Megan McArdle is so amusing.

The only way to actually ensure that no millionaire, anywhere, pays less than 20% on their annual income would be to essentially suspend the rule of law for wealthy people, and give the IRS power to seize income from rich people at will within some very broad guideline about fair shares. This strikes me (she said, with dramatic understatement) as a very bad idea.

Yeah, taxing the rich more would necessitate suspending the rule of law.

Let's take another look at a chart Barry Ritholtz put up a while ago.

Remember, we can't raise taxes on the rich because they would never pay them.

Megan McArdle Is A Very Special Person And Don't You Forget It

2011-09-21T11:51:00.001-05:00

If you were to pin down Megan McArdle and get her to admit she lies, obfuscates or spins the truth to serve her corporate masters, your efforts would be a waste of time. McArdle still peddles her little lie that most drug company profits come from the US and therefore the US must overpay for drug prices or innovation will die. Facts are irrelevant, something to manipulate to earn a fat paycheck, and McArdle usually ignores corrections of facts. The one thing that McArdle can't ignore, however, is an attack on her image, her perception of herself. As it is almost wholly false it must be upheld at all costs or the universe will collapse.

jesse 19 hours ago

If real wages for low-end workers should be lower but aren't because of nominal wage stickiness, we might as well get the adjustment out of the way and address the underlying issues. Leveraging stickiness to prop up real wages makes about as much sense as implementing protectionist trade policies to safe manufacturing jobs that are no longer economically sensible.

Also, if you're really not sure about Yglesias's position on this issue, you really should read his blog more often. Agree with him or not, he knows how to blog--(mostly) short posts, makes points beyond smugly kicking dirt on other peoples' ideas, etc. You could learn a thing or two.

McMegan 19 hours ago in reply to jesse
Yglesias and I have different styles. I'm sorry mine doesn't appeal to you.

It's not a matter of intellectual standards or even bloggy standards--it's all about McArdle's style, which means McArdle's personality. McArdle attempts to convince her audience by smothering them with words, many many words loaded with emotion instead of facts and reasoned arguments. She pours her three-sizes-too-small heart into trying to convince her audience that her Randian fantasy life is everyone's reality. To attack her work is to attack her persona, the fake personality she has adapted to hide her insecurities and faults.

jesse 19 hours ago in reply to McMegan
You often vaguely claim to have policy preferences, but you seem to hide them, unless I'm missing something (and I admit I don't read the 5000 word posts). But here's a simple question, what rate of inflation in the US do think would be ideal?

McMegan 19 hours ago in reply to jesse
Not sure, but I tend to think that there are costs as well as benefits to higher inflation.

Mushy middle-of-the-aisle pap, designed to elevate McArdle above the common man and evade any chance of being caught in error. We all make mistakes but some of us can't admit it because our "mistakes" are deliberate attempts to lie to the public for personal gain. You can't defend a dishonest argument and McArdle doesn't try. McArdle's endless series of strawmen are an attempt to evade responsibility for her actions and maintain her facade of superiority.

jesse 19 hours ago in reply to McMegan
Since when do people claim that there are no costs associated with higher inflation? No policy--except maybe my demand that God to buy the world a diet Coke--comes without costs.

It's easy to be the guy on the sidelines throwing stones when you won't ever take a position, but that doesn't contribute much to the conversation. But like you said, it's your blog.

McMegan 19 hours ago in reply to jesse
You consider this "throwing stones"? I was simply pointing out a possible effect. Is that not allowed?

McArdle changes the subject to get the discussion farther away from the original point--her lack of due diligence and paucity of economic knowledge.

jesse 19 hours ago in reply to McMegan
Of course it's "allowed." I just wish you would grapple with the cost-benefit trade-offs, rather than just pointing out costs (which is what I perceive you to do most if not all of the time). Doing that is just as deficient as only talking about the benefits (which plenty of people do, of course).

But McArdle can't, because she is a propagandist. She isn't paid to make an honest, balanced assessment.

McMegan 19 hours ago in reply to jesse
And when was the last time you wrote a blog comment asking them to stop only talking about the benefits of various liberal-favored proposals and focus on the costs? Could you perhaps provide a link?

Oh yeaaaah? What about liberals, huh? Look over there at them! They're the guilty ones! Note that she does not actually name any liberal because if you do they tend to respond and tell you to justify your accusations with quotes and facts.

jesse 19 hours ago in reply to McMegan
I quit commenting at Yglesias because of the new login system, but I used to do that sometimes over there. (Though I don't think it's accurate to say he sits around trumpeting the adminstration's plans as unalloyed goods.) I don't read Drum. Sullivan doesn't allow comments. The other blogs I read don't touch on economic policy.

Anyway, what kind of response is that? Why not just say "I know you are but what am I?"

Snicker.

McMegan 19 hours ago in reply to jesse
I'm suggesting that your perceptions of my overcritical nature may be jaundiced by the current targets. I didn't notice you complaining when I was yelling at the Republicans for the debt ceiling nonsense, even though I hardly went out of my way to point out the potential upsides of their posturing.

You see, when McArdle supports the elite she doesn't care if it will help conservatives, liberals or libertarians, as long as the elite is happy. That means she's fair-n-balanced.

jesse 18 hours ago in reply to McMegan
Sure I'm biased. But a couple of points: First, the debt ceiling stuff was pure nuttery.* I'm not asking for mythical "balance"; I'm asking for better engagement with genuinely tough issues where the status quo and alternative proposals have costs and benefits. I want to know which trade-offs are better and which are worse, or a way of deciding which are better/worse. I know there are no clear answers, but we have to have actual policies.

Second, my posting patterns depend more on my mood and the vagaries of my schedule than anything else.

* The left is full of nutteriness, too. And I enjoy a good takedown of that stuff. I read fewer of them because there's no chance that we're going to move to Maxine Waters's fantasy land, but there was a real chance that the US was not going to raise its debt ceiling, to catastrophic effect. Thus, that issue was more salient to me, you and everybody else.

mmoskwa 2 hours ago in reply to jesse
I wish I could Like this a million times. Arguing over whether your partisan interpretation of something is the best thing, or simply very good, is beyond boring, hence my avoiding most lefty blogs. But seriously, a lot of these posts are simply headers on top of a bunch of "government is always the problem, QED" comments, and I think a lot of that is because a) she doesn't really moderate the threads for completely redundant crap like that, and b) posts like this wherein the whole point is to say "look what this liberal is saying now! it's wrong."

I'll go with Door Number 2.
Cue the ever-present sycophants in the comment section.

TreeJoe 18 hours ago in reply to jesse

Jesse,

I hope you realize how vague your comments are - you wish for something different to occur. If only it would be different, it'd be better!

She usually does grapple to some degree or another with trade-offs. I'm not saying she's a master at it, but I don't know what all goes into her average blog post versus other things in life. And I think, rightly or wrongly, Megan often uses her commenters to attack things - i.e. provide a degree of balance or other perspective.

Note that she pretty much never says, "Other people are idiots and my stance is right". She'll say, "I disagree and here's why".

There's a good amount of balance here, which is why I personally come back. In August, I actually felt the balance was shifting too much and started reading less....I mention that as a self-reflection on how much balance matters to me.

jesse 18 hours ago in reply to TreeJoe
I agree that there's good content here. That's why I read the blog. I wish it was better, though, and I've tried to outline ways that I think it could be improved. I think that my suggestions are fairly specific, though I understand that you think they're unclear. At any rate, McMegan is a big girl and can ignore me or ban me or whatever if she doesn't appreciate that kind of engagement.

But to re-raise my point from earlier, I think it's pretty remarkable that McMegan--the illustrious Atlantic's econ blogger--doesn't have a position on the appropriate level of inflation in the US. I think she'd add way more value by working out a position on that issue and discussing it.

Just as soon as someone tells her what to think she'll be right on it.

She's Just Not Very Bright-Again

2011-09-14T13:45:00.000-05:00

Let's watch Megan McArdle play dumb. She does it so well.

I confess that I'm flummoxed by the people who think that the only possible explanation for Rick Perry's decision to mandate Gardasil (HPV) vaccination--or the only likely one--has something to do with a minor campaign donation, or the fact that his former Chief of Staff ended up working for a pharmaceutical firm.

Perry's practice of trading favors for campaign donations is very well know. Nobody cares because this is Texas, where money is the only criteria for social acceptance and nobody cares how you made it. We already know politicians sell themselves out cheap and McArdle has always dismissed the possibility of ethical behavior in politics anyway. But if McArdle wants to embarrass herself by saying that she's shocked people would accuse the political process of corruption, that's her prerogative.

I like me a good Public Choice horror story as much as anyone, but can we really categorically rule out the possibility that Rick Perry thought that mandating Gardasil was a good way to fight cervical cancer, which claims the life of around 4,000 women every year

Yes. The man has public prayer meetings and never met a fetus that he didn't clasp to his bosom and vow to protect from evil liberal abortionists. He just signed an abortion sonogram bill into law.

Why is someone who is so utterly, abysmally, comprehensively ignorant of political events think that everyone is dying to hear her baseless, vacuous opinions?

This Is Not A Blog Post

2011-09-13T14:31:00.001-05:00

This is not a post, it is just some thoughts on a very interesting and entertaining article.

Via Brad DeLong: David Graeber: On The Invention Of Money

Last week, Robert F. Murphy published a piece on the webpage of the Von Mises Institute responding to some points I made in a recent interview on Naked Capitalism, where I mentioned that the standard economic accounts of the emergence of money from barter appears to be wildly wrong. Since this contradicted a position taken by one of the gods of the Austrian pantheon, the 19th century economist Carl Menger, Murphy apparently felt honor-bound to respond.

In a way, Murphy’s essay barely merits response. In the interview I’m simply referring to arguments made in my book, ‘Debt: The First 5000 Years’. In his response, Murphy didn’t even consult the book; in fact he later admitted he was responding at least in part not even to the interview but to an inaccurate summary of my position someone had made in another blog!

We are not, in other words, dealing with a work of scholarship. However, in the blogsphere, the quality or even intention of an argument often doesn’t matter. I have to assume Murphy was aware that all he had to do was to write something—anything really—and claim it rebutted me, and the piece would be instantly snatched up by a right-wing echo chamber, mirrored on half a dozen websites and that followers of those websites would then dutifully begin appearing across the web declaring to everyone willing to listen that my work had been rebutted. The fact that I instantly appeared on the Von Mises web page to offer a detailed response, and that Murphy has since effectively conceded, writing an elaborate climb-down saying that he had no intention to cast doubt on my argument as a whole at all, only to note that I had not definitively disproved Menger’s, has done nothing to change this. Indeed, on both US and UK Amazon, I have seen fans of Austrian economics appear to inform potential buyers that I am an economic ignoramus whose work has been entirely discredited.

We've seen this a million times. We cannot fight every lie and the elite's stream of lies is infinite. Politicians and Megan McArdles are cheap, comparatively speaking.

At this point, it’s easier to understand why economists feel so defensive about challenges to the Myth of Barter, and why they keep telling the same old story even though most of them know it isn’t true. If what they are really describing is not how we ‘naturally’ behave but rather how we are taught to behave by the market—well who, nowadays, is doing most of the actual teaching? Primarily, economists. The question of barter cuts to the heart of not only what an economy is—most economists still insist that an economy is essentially a vast barter system, with money a mere tool (a position all the more peculiar now that the majority of economic transactions in the world have come to consist of playing around with money in one form or another) [10]—but also, the very status of economics: is it a science that describes of how humans actually behave, or prescriptive, a way of informing them how they should? (Remember, sciences generate hypothesis about the world that can be tested against the evidence and changed or abandoned if they don’t prove to predict what’s empirically there.)

Or is economics instead a technique of operating within a world that economists themselves have largely created? Or is it, as it appears for so many of the Austrians, a kind of faith, a revealed Truth embodied in the words of great prophets (such as Von Mises) who must, by definition be correct, and whose theories must be defended whatever empirical reality throws at them—even to the extent of generating imaginary unknown periods of history where something like what was originally described ‘must have’ taken place?

Authoritarians and anti-authoritarians have different goals. Authoritarians want to obey authority while anti-authoritarians must rely on facts. They cannot rationalize reality away because they know that they, not others, are responsible for their own decisions and they must accept the consequences of their actions. To create plausible excuses for this weak abdication of responsibility, authoritarians must make up lies. Creating a new reality, living a lie, makes you crazy, so here we are as a country--crazy, delusional and broke.

The persistence of the barter myth is curious. It originally goes back to Adam Smith. Other elements of Smith’s argument have long since been abandoned by mainstream economists—the labor theory of value being only the most famous example. Why in this one case are there so many desperately trying to concoct imaginary times and places where something like this must have happened, despite the overwhelming evidence that it did not?

It seems to me because it goes back precisely to this notion of rationality that Adam Smith too embraced: that human beings are rational, calculating exchangers seeking material advantage, and that therefore it is possible to construct a scientific field that studies such behavior. The problem is that the real world seems to contradict this assumption at every turn. Thus we find that in actual villages, rather than thinking only about getting the best deal in swapping one material good for another with their neighbors, people are much more interested in who they love, who they hate, who they want to bail out of difficulties, who they want to embarrass and humiliate, etc.—not to mention the need to head off feuds.
Even when strangers met and barter did ensue, people often had a lot more on their minds than getting the largest possible number of arrowheads in exchange for the smallest number of shells. Let me end, then, by giving a couple examples from the book, of actual, documented cases of ‘primitive barter’—one of the occasional, one of the more established fixed-equivalent type.

It's always personal. Holding up a facade at all times is exhausting and authoritarians want nothing more than to be able to let down the false front and let the real man or woman out: the unloved child who traded obedience for acceptance and who channels all his ensuing anger and resentment outward at safer targets. Authoritarians must obey authority, conservatives must conserve. Anything that does not conform to authoritarian dogma is disregarded or shouted down.

Vacation!

2011-09-12T11:16:00.000-05:00

I am going on hiatus for a few weeks to catch up on work and give the brain a rest. I hear there is a whole world out there and now that it's no longer 100 billion degrees outside I want to check it out. I'll try to post a little but I need to get away from politics for a while and work on other projects.

Susan