Responsibility Is For The Poors

Paul Ryan fixing Obamacare.

Let's talk about responsibility.

When you break something, you have a responsibility to fix it. When you do your damnedest to eradicate the health care of millions of people, you damn well better have something better to replace it. Unless your aim is to cause great suffering, which it well might be in this case, it's not enough to say that Obamacare is terrible and will destroy the healthcare system so it has to go. You must replace it with your oh-so-much-smarter and better new system.

When you don't, all your complaints about the new system don't mean anything. You wanted the system broken. You demanded its failure. You fought tooth-and-nail to kill it. You don't get to just walk away from that and shrug your shoulders and go back to your well-paid career rat-fucking the poor. You are responsible for your actions.

And make no mistake: McArdle doesn't care about the people who need insurance. She doesn't want the Republicans' greed and incompetence to ruin Republican political success.

My husband is, of course, completely right that it’s not clear what other problems this solves. It will not, for example, make the looming possibility of a "death spiral" in the individual market any less possible, and indeed may make it more likely. Passing this bill would certainly ensure that Republicans will 100 percent own any ensuing death spiral, and will have little luck whining that it was gonna death spiral anyway, because Obamacare. In other words, even if we leave aside any policy effects, this bill will be a disaster for the long-term political fortunes of the Republican Party.

It doesn't hurt that the Koch shops are against the Republicans' methods of killing Obamacare. They want it fully repealed.

 Heritage Action, Freedomworks and Americans for Prosperity -- three of the biggest groups that Republicans will need to help them whip their right flank into voting for this thing -- have all come out hard against it. Avik Roy and Michael Cannon, two of the leading opponents of Obamacare in the policy community, have both panned it. You’re not exactly seeing enthusiastic cheers from the journalists who opposed Affordable Care Act, of which I am one. See? This is me, emphatically not cheering. If such a thing is possible, I am actively failing to cheer.

If McArdle is waiting to be praised and petted for not liking the results of her own labor, she is going to wait a very long time.

McArdle gives the reasons why she is against the Republicans' plans, which are mixed in with her usual lies and deceit about Obamacare and too tedious to discuss. Then she tells us that she simply can't understand why Republicans decided to pull down Obamacare without having a replacement.

I don’t understand what Republicans are trying to do with this bill. What do  they think will happen after they proudly proclaim that they’ve repealed Obamacare—followed in short order by the complete implosion of the individual market? Do they really imagine that they will be allowed to leave the rubble-filled lot there and proclaim that they’ve undone President Obama’s mistake? Or that, having watched them destroy the individual market, voters will be eager to let Republicans touch any of the other structures cluttering up America’s health-care policy landscape?

She should have thought of that when she was predicting that Obamacare would destroy health care and must be stopped immediately. She watched Republicans do nothing viable to replace Obamacare with a functioning market yet for seven years yet she yelped constantly to kill it. Now she shakes her head and fumes that her political party will be hurt by their and her actions.

If Republicans cannot get up the will to bear those costs, then they should do nothing, and start preparing their rebuilding strategy while they wait for the flaws in Obamacare’s structure to bring down the individual market on its own. Neither strategy is painless, because the ossified mistakes of earlier policy making have taken all the cheap and attractive options off the table. But either is better -- for America, and for the Republican Party -- than setting new mistakes in stone.

After  eight (or more?) years of Republicans rat-fucking Obamacare,  McArdle became convinced that it was damaged enough to die on its own and she is not best pleased that her ego or career might be dinged by a loss of Republican power. The sick, dead and suffering are beside the point.

The Megan McArdle Experience: "A Lie Is Not A Lie" Is Not A Lie

Justice is blind, not stupid.

It's an unfortunate fact of life that if you want Paul Ryan to kill Obamacare, you have to defend the Trump Administration. When Trump falls, all hope of taking health insurance away from sick kids also falls. Therefore, Megan McArdle managed to drag herself to the keyboard to support racist AG (for now) Jeff Sessions. Let's take a look at McArdle's propaganda, just for lols.

McArdle begins by attempting to minimize the unbelievable parade of scandals, mistakes, and rat-fucking that is the new Republican Administration.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is the center of Washington’s scandal-du-jour.

Minimize the scandals as a daily occurrence, and therefore unimportant. (Please note that there was no scandal-du-jour during the Obama administration.)

The allegation: Sessions lied to Congress about contacts with Russia, which feeds into worries that the Trump campaign was somehow in bed with Vladimir Putin, and may even have had something to do with the hacking of the Democratic National Committee.

At issue are two meetings that Sessions had with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak while the campaign was going on -- and while Sessions was a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Sessions says that he routinely met with ambassadors from many nations as part of his Senate duties, and that nothing happened. Democrats say that it’s suspicious -- and that the fact that he lied to Congress about them makes those meetings more suspicious still.

Democrats asked Sessions if he met with Russians during the campaign. Sessions said no. He lied. It is very clear.

After perusing these alleged “lies,” I don’t think Democrats have the slam-dunk case that many on social media were claiming this morning.

Oooh, not only are they alleged lies, they're so-called lies. And the fact that Sessions was caught re-handed lying to Congress isn't a slam-dunk case that Sessions lied.

Mostly, the “lies” seem to come down to the difference between written and oral language.

And this is where I started laughing. McArdle is not all tedious propaganda and liberal insults. She is also quite the comedian. Of course her "reasoning" is nonsense, but so is her "intellect" and "morals."

To see what I mean, consider the substance of these two alleged falsehoods. The first came during Sessions's [sic] confirmation hearing, when he had the following exchange with Senator Al Franken:

FRANKEN: CNN just published a story alleging that the intelligence community provided documents to the president-elect last week, that included information that “Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump.” These documents also allegedly say “there was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government.” Again, I’m telling you this as it’s coming out, so, you know. But if it’s true, it’s obviously extremely serious, and if there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?

SESSIONS: Senator Franken, I’m not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it.  

FRANKEN: Very well.

The second was a written response to a letter from Senator Patrick Leahy:

LEAHY: Several of the President-Elect’s nominees or senior advisers have Russian ties. Have you been in contact with anyone connected to any part of the Russian government about the 2016 election, either before or after Election Day?

SESSIONS: No.

Now, I don’t know whether Sessions has been in contact with Russian officials or not about the election; neither the senator nor Kislyak have chosen to confide this information to me.

Note the attempt to add to the confusion by adding the words "about the election." Sessions was asked if he met with the Russian. He said no. He lied.

It's hard for me to remember that McArdle is a "journalist," not a propagandist, and evidently it's hard for McArdle to remember this as well. Let's find out if Sessions did indeed meet with a Russian official or not. Maybe some "newspaper" has "reported" on it.

Then-Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) spoke twice last year with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, Justice Department officials said, encounters he did not disclose when asked about possible contacts between members of President Trump’s campaign and representatives of Moscow during Sessions’s confirmation hearing to become attorney general.

Good god! It was possible to find out if Sessions met with the Russian ambassador! We know he lied about it because we saw the testimony just now in McArdle's quote. Case solved! It's Miller Time!

But let’s assume for the nonce that he wasn’t. 

I'm sorry, what?

 But let’s assume for the nonce that he wasn’t. 

Are you shitting me?

But let’s assume for the nonce that he wasn’t.  

Why the hell would I do that? Except to write a half-ass post off the top of my head that attempts to make my party look like anything but the World Of Fail that they are.

Was his response to Patrick Leahy’s letter reasonable? Eminently. It is reasonable even if, in the course of a meeting on some other topic, the ambassador idly asked how the campaign was going.

And we're off to the races, if by races you meant inept propaganda, and I do. McArdle follows with a bunch of irrelevant bullshit which I will present in full because she accuses you of lying if you don't quote her.

Sessions was an early Trump surrogate, and it would have been unsurprising for the ambassador to ask about the race in passing; if Sessions then replied with campaign boilerplate little different from what he was saying in public, that is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a meaningful contact with a foreign power. Anyone at the Kremlin could have gotten the same information by turning on CNN.

But what about the exchange with Franken? This was what really seemed to seize the imaginations of Twitter this morning, where cries of “perjury” were flying left and right. Well, OK, mostly left, actually. I don’t think, however, that those charges are going to stick.

Which is why Sessions recused himself, no doubt. Because the "allegations" didn't "stick."

Franken offered a lengthy preamble suggesting that the Trump campaign had been exchanging information with the Russians, then asked him what he’d do if there was information that someone in the Trump campaign had communicated with the Russians. In the time-honored tradition of congressional hearings, Sessions said he hadn’t had any such communications, had no knowledge of such communications, and therefore wouldn’t speculate about the hypothetical.

If you read the latter part of this exchange extremely strictly, chopping off the preamble, then you can argue that Sessions was technically untruthful.

The triumphant return of "technically true but collectively nonsense"!

The problem is that this is not how verbal communication works. The left is attempting to hold the attorney general to a standard of precision that is appropriate for written communication, where we can reflect on preceding context and choose exactly the right word.

Sessions was under oath. Those are the standards he is being held to. Fortunately for McArdle, her readers are mostly not very bright and will accept any excuse, because this latest attempt at "reasoning" is unbelievably lame.

Oral language is much looser, because it’s real time.

Under.
Oath.

Real time means that we don’t have 20 minutes to puzzle over the exact phrasing that will best communicate our meaning.

Sessions was being approved for the head of the justice department. Lawyers and judges are ruled by exact words and phrases. And "no" is actually extremely clear.

(For example: Reading this column aloud will take you perhaps five minutes. It took me nearly that many hours to write.) 

This may seem like an odd aside to you. It's not.

This must have taken less than a half hour to write and is her only post this week. Propagandists have great work schedules.

— Susan of Texas (@SusanofTexas) March 1, 2017

What took 5 hours? Her refusal to do any research, even to read the facts? Her reason-free reasoning? Her stream-of-consciousness rationalizations?

On the other hand, our audience is right there, and can ask for clarification if they are confused.

Demanding extreme clarity from an oral exchange is unreasonable.

Why do we even bother with trials if people are incapable of answering questions under oath? Silly liberals.

No doubt when P. Suderman, boy Reason dogsbody, proposed to her she refused to accept unless he submitted it in writing.

Moreover, everyone understands that this is unreasonable -- except, possibly, for the chattering classes, who spend their lives so thoroughly marinated in the written word that they come to think that the two spheres are supposed to be identical. Most ordinary people understand very well that there’s a big difference between talking and writing (which is why most people, even those who are dazzling in conversation, have a hard time producing fluid and lively prose).

So much bullshit.

That’s not to say that it’s wrong to investigate the Trump administration’s ties to Russia. Investigate away! If the Trump campaign knew about, or colluded with, the hack on the DNC, then Trump should be impeached. But at the moment, we have no evidence that Sessions committed a crime, much less attempted to cover it up. The court of public opinion is probably going to require somewhat better facts to convict.

 So much dishonesty.

There's a footnote:

One reason that we writers spend so much time thinking about precise wording, and larding our prose with extra paragraphs meant to clarify exactly what we’re talking about, is that language is rife with ambiguity. This is why, at one time, Annapolis cadets were required to take a class in which they would write orders, and their fellow cadets would tear them apart looking for ways that a simple order could be misunderstood. It’s also one reason so many people get into so much trouble on Twitter: they write like they talk, but stripped of cues like context and facial expression, what they say is very easily taken the wrong way.

This passage might seem odd too. Again, it's not. McArdle and I tussled on Twitter, and that'll be the content of my next post.

Love And Money: Marriage The McArdle Way

It's Valentine's Day and Megan McArdle's thoughts naturally turn to love, which means money. Join me as I mock the woman whose rat-fucking is screwing with my life. Remember, as we rummage through the crystal ball of her head, that McArdle's interests, experiences, and speculations begin and end with herself.

This Valentine’s Day, if you’re in a long-term relationship, resolve to do something really romantic: talk about money.

Megan McArdle, M.A., MBA, FU, ignores the fact that outside of the top 10% or so, most couples discuss money every time they go out. Can we afford to go out, where can we afford to go out, what can we afford to eat or drink, what about a babysitter, is there gas in the car, and so on.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that my husband spontaneously proposed in the middle of a household budget meeting. You may therefore conclude that the McSuderman household has somewhat … unusual … ideas about what constitutes romance.

So what you're saying is that P. Suderman saw your income, bank balance, expenses, and assets and proposed on the spot.

But what’s more romantic than “until death do us part”? And substantial research shows that fights about money are one of the most common stressors on couples, and a very good predictor of divorce. One recent study found that it’s not having money troubles that send couples to divorce court, but the inability to agree on what to do about them.

Then that study ignores the stress of poverty and is useless, which is why McArdle later points out that lack of money creates stress.

In a consumer society such as ours, money is fundamental.

Yes. Yes, that's very true. We are in a "consumer society." Money is fundamental to consumerism. McArdle has a fine grasp of the obvious. It's not "Consumerism, according to Webster's Dictionary, is-" but it's very close.

Our purchases aren’t just about stuff we’d like to have; they’re about signaling who we are, to ourselves and other people. Money is one of the most important ways we shape choices about our lives. Naturally, when someone else gets involved in those choices, there’s going to be conflict.

Not so fast, missy. If your sense of yourself depends on the amount of money you have, you are very confused about both money and identity. When people base their identity on their wealth, they must convince themselves that wealth confers an abundance of positive characteristics on them, even when this is obviously untrue. If your self-esteem depends on your wealth, you are really in trouble. Such people could become greedy beyond words, because adults with no self-esteem almost never are satisfied. Nothing material can feel such a void, although not for lack of trying.

Which brings us back to Megan McArdle.

Those conflicts are obviously made easier when you have more money. There’s margin for error and disagreement without catastrophe or stress. But as financial advisers can attest, a dedicated spender can easily find ways to run through 20 percent more than he or she earns, regardless of how much that is. That spending isn’t necessarily on flat-panel televisions and speedboats; it may be on a house in a good school district. But no matter where the money goes, if you strap two spenders together, they’re both apt to end up in financial disaster. And if you strap one of those spenders to a saver, you end up with years’ worth of fiery arguments.

I think we can conclude that P. Suderman, spender, is strapped to M. McArdle, saver. Forever.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that that budget meeting has been the foundation of my marriage in more ways than one.

I believe you. 100%.

We do not agree on all money matters. There is considerable divergence in household views, for example, on the relative merits of high-end stereo equipment and expensive kitchen appliances.

I'm not a expert on technological matters but I think "guys spending money on expensive stereos" is passé, although it probably sounds a lot better in her head than "guys spending a lot of money on video cards, speakers, microphones, games, virtual reality equipment, and combustible 'snacks.'"

But we did agree that we had to agree on how the money would be spent. And having already had those discussions, through some hard times (Peter was laid off a few weeks after we moved in together) we knew even before we tied the knot that we could come to such agreement.

Two libertarians, self-selected for selfishness and mistrust, with the tendency to see those with less wealth as looters and moochers. They can exist both in perfect agreement and inevitable conflict.

Too many courting couples have a delicate reluctance to get down into the nitty-gritty of how they’re going to arrange their money: how much to pool, and how to spend those collective funds. Like a Victorian bride picturing her wedding night, they have only the vaguest notion of what is supposed to happen, but they imagine that money matters will sort themselves out easily as they drift along on a cloud of ecstatic love.

To make her unnecessary advice seem more urgent, McArdle invents a narrative of virginal, naïve Mid-Century teenage spouses, shyly opening their purse and wallet to each other for the first time.

What they often get instead is glorious fights when one party wants to put aside 15 percent of their salary for retirement and another 5 percent for emergencies, while the other wants to live for the day and let the future take care of itself.

I TOLD YOU SO.

My sympathies are naturally with the careful saver. But we’re not talking about retirement planning today; we’re talking about love. And if you want that love to last, what you do with the money is less important than being on the same page about it.

And that page says that they'll save for a rainy day and pay off the mortgage early and put away a lot away for retirement, when the spender is far too old to enjoy it.

Which means that if you’re considering marriage (or a functionally equivalent long-term partnership), you should have that conversation as soon as possible.

That conversation should include near-term budgeting. But it also needs to lay out the long-term goals that you both want, whatever they are: a big wedding, nicer cars, education for the kids, travel, a cushy retirement. You need to try setting a plan.

And since the saver has more money than the spender and has already drawn up the budget and spreadsheets and has the MBA while the spender has a kick-ass stereo and an English degree with a concentration in movie reviews, the saver usually gets her way.

And then you need to see if your partner can keep to it, or if they do as so many people end up doing when these plans are attempted: sheepishly confessing that they stopped trying to keep to the budget four days into the month, making secret purchases, blowing through the money that was supposed to go into the car fund on a spontaneous night out with the boys.

Oh, P. Suderman. You shouldn't have. That must have been a very awkward budget meeting after your The Hangover weekend.

Someone who repeatedly cheats on you with money can reform, to be sure -- but you should see strong signs of that reformation before you tie the knot, rather than hoping that marriage will somehow change them into someone they haven’t been.

He learned to be a good boy.

And what if you’ve already married that special darling who can’t seem to stick to a financial plan? What if you’re already having those fights?

Well, that’s an even better time to have that conversation. If you’re already fighting constantly about money, you need to stop blowing up over individual purchases and crises, and start hammering out a long-term plan that both of you can live with. The more distance there is between you two in how to handle money, the more detailed that planning needs to be, because you can’t rely on inertia to do any of the work for you. It is not the naturally thrifty who need a microscopically attentive monthly budget; it is those who look up at the end of the month and wonder where all the money went.

"How much do you need for coffee?
"I don't know, $6 a day?"
"Can you get by on $5 a day? Now let's talk about your cab fare."

It might not seem like the most idyllic way to spend your Valentine’s Day. On the other hand, it might ensure that you have plenty of happy Valentine’s Days to come.

And if not, DC is a not a community property "state." McArdle wins either way.

Pointing And Laughing At Megan McArdle

As we all know, there is nothing I can do to stop well-paid propaganda. Megan McArdle will continue to earn a small fortune by rat-fucking her country to screw the looter and moochers and get lower taxes. But I can do one thing.

Laugh my ass off.

As much as I would enjoy taking credit for the cocktail party meme, McArdle's readers, many of whom are Trump supporters, are perfectly eager to call her an effete liberal snob without any help from me. She is on the east coast, went to an Ivy League school, and is in the media, therefore she is assumed to be a liberal cocktail chatterer.

Maybe the constant criticism over her anti-Trump views is getting on her nerves. Maybe her hit count is going down as Trumpers gain ascendancy and #NeverTrumpers lose it. Maybe she's just a liiiiitle less useful to her backers as she once was. She was hired to be honey for the wingnut bees, and the bees are beginning to give their Queen the stink-eyes.

McArdle has about half a dozen posts that she recycles endlessly in her blog, radio and tv appearances, her book, and speeches. As her commenters have noticed in the past.

At this point the fun tirade ends, but I want to add one comment from a reader to demonstrate the kind of person she is attracting and chooses not to reprimand. I have a feeling we are going to hear this kind of argument again.

I don't think Bannon will stop with Muslims. I don't think any of the Trumpers will either.

McArdle Knows Best

Megan McArdle has written multiple posts saying the Democrats should quit fighting and give up because they'll never win. Like the poisonous witch in Tangled, she attempts to undermine liberals to exploit them for her own gain while telling them that it's for their own good. She is so very concerned about their well-doing, you see, and wants to help them because Mother Knows Best.

Mother McArdle:  

You want to go outside? Why, liberals...!  

Look at you, as fragile as a flower  

Still a little sapling, just a sprout  

You should stay up in your ivory tower

Liberals: I know but-

Mother McArdle:  

That's right, to keep you safe and sound, dear  

You were so sure this day was coming  

Knew that soon you'd lord over all the rest  

Soon, but not yet

Liberals: But--

Mother McArdle:  

Shh! Trust me, pet  

Mother knows best  

Mother knows best  

Listen to your mother 

It's a scary world out there  

Mother knows best  

One way or another  

Something will go wrong, I swear  

Filibuster,  

Escalation, blowback  

From vituperation  

And Trump

Liberals: No!

Mother McArdle: Yes!

Liberals: But--

Mother McArdle:  

Also many  

White Working Class Men, and  

Stop, no more, you'll just upset me  

Mother's right here  

Mother will protect you  

Darling, here's what I suggest  

Snub the commie  

Stay with Mommy  

Mama knows best

Mother knows best  

Take it from your mumsy  

On your own, you won't survive  

Knee-jerk peaceniks,  

Elite mandarins,  

Please, they'll eat you up alive  

Half-baked ideas,  

Positively Marxist  

And a bit, well, hmm fascist 

Plus, I believe  

Gettin' kinda slutty  

I'm just saying 'cause I wuv you  

Mother understands  

Mother's here to help you  

All I have is one request, liberals?

Liberals: Yes?

Mother McArdle: Don't ever ask to win an election again.

Liberals: Yes, Mother McArdle.

Mother McArdle: I love you very much, dear.

Liberals: I love you more.

Mother McArdle:  

I love you most  

Don't forget it  

You'll regret it  

Mother knows best

The Bitch Is Back

Megan McArdle has finally given us Part II of her earth-shattering takedown of Elizabeth Warren but I need to ease back into the McArdle Death Spiral Watch gradually. If I plunge in head-first I might crack my head on concrete.

Before I continue, I would like to remind the reader that McArdle is about to see her years of work come to fruition: she'll be able to take health care away from my kids. Nothing personal, I'm sure. It's just that stepping on my children was necessary to climb the ladder of success.


Today's amuse bouche is another glimpse into the crystal skull of Mrs. McSuderman. In these interesting times of Trump, market rumblings, Davos, and cabinet nominees, McArdle inexplicably takes time off from stabbing Obamacare to opine about divorce. She is very much against it, as any woman would be who has a husband who's surrounded by libertarian interns who believe that Great Women sleep from Ubermensch to Ubermensch until they end up in Galt's Gulch, sleeping with its Aryan king. Or New York, sleeping with the son of somebody important, whichever comes first.

McArdle, who is 43, is very happily married to P. Suderman, 34, and is strongly convinced that men and women would remain happy if they never divorced. You might think you want to divorce your spouse and take up with someone who spends less time calculating the amount of interest she is accruing daily and more time spending her money while you are still young but you don't. You stay right where you are, mister, happily married to the ball and chain.

Conservative women accept the price they are told to pay to belong to the tribe with money and power: they must think of themselves as produce with a limited shelf life, who must advantageously trade their assets for a husband's assets. Naturally, being conservative, they consider their assets to be youth, beauty, reproduction, and income ability.

Rich spouses are one of nature's greatest gifts and of course every male conservative wants his elite wife to have an elite income; it's a sign of social status and personal worth for them both. When you are the richer spouse, however, there is a danger of looting and mooching during a divorce. He can take half of your assets and blow them all on interns, Uber rides during snowstorms, and grass! But income is merely one of the problems resulting from divorce.

The older a conservative woman become, the further down the Marriageability Ladder she slides. Personal income is always a great consolation but conservative women have internalized their group's sexism and can't really be happy unless they fit in with the group and its mores, decorating themselves with cosmetics and pink linen and acquiring a husband and progeny. Therefore conservative women are deeply vested in the pipe dream of eliminating divorce, and McArdle is already at a disadvantage.

Let's look at her assets and judge their quality.

Youth-like the famed parrot, her youth has ceased to be.
Beauty- pining for the fjords
Reproductive Willingness-shuffled off 'is mortal coil
Income Ability-excellent, which is a negative, not a plus

So yes, Megan McArdle thinks that you should not be able to get a divorce, and by "you" she means you, Peter.

Unbeknownst to me, family lawyers apparently call January “divorce month.” As the Christmas tree is thrown out and the wrapping paper cleared away, the empty Champagne bottles taken out behind the garage, Google searches for terms like “divorce lawyer” and “file for divorce” spike. Many of the people researching how to untie the knot will probably not do so. But some will.

That's true. December is slim pickings, since most people don't want to give their kids a divorce for Christmas.

Brad Wilcox and Samuel Sturgeon of the Institute for Family Studies suggest that there might be good reason to hold off, particularly if you have kids. Of course, there might be good reason not to hold off! But the majority of divorces involving kids don’t come from “high conflict” marriages or situations involving abuse; Wilcox and Sturgeon point to data indicating that most divorces come from couples who are still basically functioning as parents.

This is McArdle so I assume that the Institute for Family Studies is comprised of the usual right-wing suspects and lo and behold, it is. Fortunately for me, someone has already done the legwork: Philip N. Cohen.

The new kid in the right-wing foundation sandbox is the Institute for Family Studies. They are “dedicated to strengthening marriage and family life, and advancing the well-being of children, through research and public education.”

IFStudies gives off a distinct Brad Wilcox essence. That’s not just because its mailing address is the same as that of the Ridge Foundation (which you’d have to describe as “shadowy”), whose 1099 filings list Wilcox as its president. It’s also that one of Ridge’s directors was one Ernest “Skip” Burzumato, who is the managing director of IFStudies, program director at Wilcox’s National Marriage Project, and an adjunct professor of sociology at Bridgewater College. (Aside: at Ridge, Wilcox in 2011 paid himself $35,000 — a little more than Ridge got from the Bradley Foundation “to support the National Marriage Project.”)

Mr. Wilcox is also "a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute." Of course.

 Billionaires, like the clergy of old, profit when the lower classes are trusting and biddable. They would far rather have the lower classes pitted against each other than have the lower classes united against the upper classes. If people begin to blame billionaires for their killer capitalism, something untoward could happen. It would be far better for all concerned if the poor believed that their poverty was entirely their own fault and if they would only marry and work hard, they would be successful and happy. And that takes propaganda.

Counterintuitively, kids whose parents divorce amid flying crockery and lurid accusations may actually do better, post-divorce, than kids whose parents unhappily fizzle out. But if you think about it for a while, that’s not all that surprising. In homes with major conflict, divorce brings a certain measure of peace and stability. But if your parents are basically civil to each other, divorce could come as an unwelcome surprise.

This construct is typical of McArdle; she uses it often to seem smarter. You won't believe this obvious thing that most people already understand, but after I explain it to you, you will!

Our parents, our family unit, are the first and most bedrock fact of our lives. Suddenly breaking that apart -- for no reason apparent to the children involved -- shakes a faith in the world that will never be rebuilt in quite the same way. Moreover, divorce often means downward economic mobility. Unless you are hugely wealthy, splitting your income across two households means that sacrifices have to be made by both parties, and often, that financial stress is added to the emotional upheaval of unraveling two lives.

McArdle's parents are divorced.  Based on information that McArdle has let drop, the West Side apartment was sold at some time, her father bought a sea-side cottage somewhere nearby that must have been very expensive and is about to slide into the rising sea/sinking shore, and I assume her mother also acquired a residence.

Poof! There went McArdle's only hope of ever living on the Upper West Side and running into Jonah Goldberg while walking her dog, not that she's bitter that he nabbed a liquor and grocery store heiress and she didn't. Now she will never run into celebrities while picking up coffee. Nobody would gasp with envy when she casually revealed her address. Eckington is appreciating nicely but it just isn't the same. Damn you, divorce!!

And let's not even talk about the drain of a divorce and two households on her rightful inheritance.

Small wonder, then, that the children of divorce tend to have worse outcomes on various measures than the children whose parents stay together: According to Wilcox and Sturgeon, “Divorce typically doubles or triples the odds that children will experience depression, delinquency, school failure, or future relationship difficulties.”

But children aren’t the only reason to consider sticking it out. Divorce may be emotionally and financially traumatic for children, but it is also, of course, emotionally and financially traumatic for adults.

::nods wisely::

And it’s not clear that in the end, people who leave low-conflict marriages end up any happier than those who stick it out through a rough patch -- even a years-long rough patch. Some people consider divorce at one point but don't go through with it. When they are asked about it later, most of them say they’re glad they didn’t do it. One study compared people who divorced with people who didn’t, finding that the people who didn’t divorce ended up as happy as those who did. Sixty-four percent of them even reported that they were happily married.

You think you're home free and then the Mater and Pater decided that after 40 years of marriage they can't stand a couple more decades for the sake of the children and throw in the towel. It's beyond selfish. They already wasted 40 years, they couldn't tough it out for another decade or two? Sunk costs!

Of course, there’s a risk that some of this finding is what social scientists call “selection effect.” The people who considered divorce, but didn’t do it, might not have been as unhappy as the people who took action.

It would be surprising if selection effects didn’t account for at least some of these findings. It would be even more surprising if selection effects accounted for all of them.

We have a script in our heads about what divorce does, much of it lifted from the divorce revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Two people meet … they fall in love … they develop irreconcilable differences, or they grow apart, and must split so that at least one of the parties can develop into their truest, highest self.

Another McArdle technique is to parrot a conservative cliché about liberal behavior and pretend to vanquish her strawman.

But more recent research suggests a very different truth about happiness. As Daniel Gilbert argues in the brilliant book "Stumbling on Happiness," unless our circumstances are truly unbearable, our brains will seek to find their natural level of happiness, like floodwater evening out across a plain. Whatever we are stuck with … whatever we commit to … we will find ways to make it work -- and we will be just as happy with it as we would have been with any other outcome.

I have not read Mr. Gilbert's book but after looking at its Amazon page and remembering every other book McArdle discussed, I suspect she misinterpreted the book through her own blinkered ideology, which is pretty funny because the book is about "the foibles of imagination and illusions of foresight that cause each of us to misconceive our tomorrows and misestimate our satisfactions."

Under this theory, all other forces being equal, those who avoid divorce end up with the same long-term level of happiness that they would have had post-divorce … and they skip the short-term financial and emotional pains of separation.

Picture McArdle in thirty years. Picture leaving McArdle in thirty years. Some things are worth short-term pain.

So a lot of people who are thinking about observing National Divorce Month might be better off if they delayed the festivities for a while and started hunting for reasons to celebrate their marriage instead.

You hear that, Peter? You have been warned.

In Which Megan McArdle Explains Altruism To The Masses

My dear readers,

Many of you have notified me that you are concerned about the economic injustices inherent in gift-giving. Every year, like a communist clockwork, we are expected to give up our hard-earned money to buy presents for others, presents that they probably don't even want. The "holiday season" demands that we rack our brains thinking of something to give a "loved one" that one barely knows. You end up giving them something useless and they end up giving you something you already have, which is a tremendous waste of money that you could have spent on yourself.

Call me Scrooge if you must! But also admit that you don't know your own mother's likes and dislikes enough to think of something to buy her, and after "long thought" you usually resort to the first thing you see when you walk into Macy's: those discount packaged bath salt or perfume sets. Now, now! Don't bother to deny it! People only say that their children share experiences with them, or discuss their likes and dislikes. Actually, they maintain a comfortable silence and simply grab something handy at gift-giving times.

Why do they force themselves to let the moocher and looters drag them down to their levels? We think of interactions between people as a single economic action, where the rich are aristocrats and the poor are sheep to be shorn, but in fact every American also lives in the "gift economy," where people give you things for nothing, with the expectation of you returning the favor in the future. You can keep down expenses on cab rides and improve the consumer experience by asking your sister to take you to the airport and she'll do it because she expects you to return a favor at a later time.

Now, don't try this economic model if you are running a government! Communism failed because Stalingrad refused to feed and walk the dogs when Leningrad went out of town with Moscow! And the reverse is also true: alas, spouses fail to understand why you expect to be remunerated for your time and effort in the bedroom.

Reciprocal altruism is inefficient compared to cash, but exchanging equal amounts of cash would be silly. However, if one person gives more cash than the other, the former is obviously more committed to the relationship and the other side is being cheated, eroding their relationship. This is why we don't let cash intrude in intimate transactions, such as sex. Trying to figure out what to charge each other for services rendered would be a nightmare of complexity and subjectivity, not to mention hurt feelings. What if she felt that a certain activity was worth $100 and he felt her performance was worth no more than $20, the going market rate on the street? Chaos would be inevitable.

So no matter how fond you are of money, go ahead and buy that heavily discounted, unwanted gift for the woman in your life. The old dear will be happy just to have paper and ribbon to play with, an you will probably get a fat inheritance down the line.

Coming In Last In The Human Race

One of the many reasons that Megan McArdle is a terrible person is that she thinks she can-and, god help us, should-school Ta-Nehisi Coates on race.

Re: Walter Scott. When DA sounds like the defense, can't really be surprised by a mistrial. This is incredible.https://t.co/ZWHnM1jAnQ pic.twitter.com/DeRIoNrGSX

— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) December 5, 2016

The verdict is a travesty, but it’s not crazy or weak for prosecutor to address defense case head on, or to concede points they can’t win on https://t.co/iLMUrUGGuL

— (((Megan McArdle))) (@asymmetricinfo) December 8, 2016

Coates is perfectly clear; when both sides believe that a Black man should expect to be murdered if he is disobedient to authority, the Black man never has a chance for justice. The problem is that Megan McArdle agrees with the prosecutor and defense. McArdle is so authoritarian that she assumes the cop had a right to shoot and kill a man for not following orders. (Coates' commenters pointed out that Black men get shot for sitting in a car as well, which McArdle ignored.)

The problem with saying, "Eh, he should have expected to be killed," is that it sounds racist to normal people and McArdle has an image to uphold, at least in her own mind. So McArdle must come up with some socially acceptable reason to be an authoritarian racist (maybe!), and she quickly latches on the idea of pretending Coates is talking about legal strategy, not systemic racism.

Her idiocy was noticed:

@asymmetricinfo @tanehisicoates That's such baloney. The victim had no effective representation. This makes me sick.

— (((Deborah))) (@DebFenning) December 8, 2016

@DebFenning @tanehisicoates The purpose of representation is to win the case, not to make stirring speeches.

— (((Megan McArdle))) (@asymmetricinfo) December 8, 2016

The purpose of a defense is to convince 12 men/women to acquit the defendant. If a stirring speech sways the jury, the defendant wins. It is moronic to pretend persuasion is never attempted or is never successful. But that's our libertarian princess; the point is not to be smart, it's to look smart enough to fool her readers and keep the money flowing into her bank account and out of her Amazon account.

McArdle knows she must make a nod towards humanity but it's clear that she doesn't care about justice. She does, however, care about pecking away at her Black former colleague and defending her race.

Success Is Its Own Reward

Megan McArdle won. All the writing, research, and time I've expended was a complete waste. I prevented nothing and convinced almost nobody. America supports McArdle's ideas and voted into office the people who will carry them out.

I am not sure they understand this; I'll never forget a tv interview I saw at a huge anti-abortion rally. The reporter asked a young woman what she would do if she got her way and abortion and her access to birth control were outlawed.

She replied, "Oh, the Democrats would never let that happen."

She's not the only one.

@SusanofTexas @edroso I guarantee Megan will, sadly, get virtually none of her policy preferences in a Trump admin

— Lurker (@red_boxer0) November 16, 2016

There is nobody to stop them. The Republicans will control all levers of government before long. Progressives and liberals have no power to do anything. McArdle wanted Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare gone, and it looks like she'll get her wish.

Let the washing of hands begin, because there's no shame in joining the Trump administration.

In 1975, the economist Milton Friedman gave a series of lectures in Chile, as well as a small amount of advice to Augusto Pinochet, the country’s right-wing dictator. The advice was not on how to best crack down on political dissent, or where to hide the bodies of dissidents you were trying to disappear; it involved economic policy, and was advice that was similar to what he’d have given any government. Nonetheless, Friedman’s left-wing critics somewhat predictably used this brief interlude in a decades-long career to tar him and his ideas.

I could sit and discuss the economic plans created by the Chicago Boys School and the CIA but that would take a lot of time and work, which would just be a waste. Pinochet pushed through his economic plans by using political repression, including dogs trained to rape women. McArdle thinks it doesn't matter. "Everyone has to be paid by someone."

Pinochet's regime carried out many gruesome and horrific acts of sexual abuse against the victims. In fact, several detention sites were solely instituted for the purpose of sexually tormenting and humiliating the prisoners. Discothèque (La Venda Sexy) was another one of DINA's main secret detention centers. Many of those who "disappeared" were initially held in this prison. The prison guards often raped both men and women. It was at this prison where internal repression operations were centralized. Militants anally raped male prisoners, while insulting them, in an attempt to embarrass them to their core.^[38]

Women were the primary targets of gruesome acts of sexual abuse. According to the Valech Commission, almost every single female prisoner was a victim of repeated rape. Not only would military men rape women, they would also use foreign objects and even animals to inflict more pain and suffering. Women (and occasionally men) reported that spiders and live rats were often implanted on their genitals. One woman testified that she had been "raped and sexually assaulted with trained dogs and with live rats." She was forced to have sex with her father and brother—who were also detained.^[39]

Pinochet's men tortured their victims of course.

One torture method which was very commonly used was the "grill" or "La Parrilla." In this torture, electricity was fed from a standard wall outlet through a control box into two wires each terminating in electrodes. The control box gave the torturers the option of adjusting the voltage being administered to the prisoner. The naked prisoner was stretched out and strapped onto a metal bedframe, or a set of bedsprings, and tied down. He or she was subjected to electrical shocks on several parts of the body, especially on sensitive areas like the genitals and on open wounds. The Valech Report includes a testimony of a Chilean man who was interrogated by prison captors. They took off his clothes and "attached electrodes to his chest and testicles. They put something in his mouth so he would "bite his tongue while they shocked him."[32] In another method, one of the wires would be fixed to the prisoner (typically to the victim's genitalia) while another wire could be applied to other parts of the body. This caused an electric current to pass through the victim's body, with a strength inversely proportional to the distance between the two electrodes. A smaller distance between the electrodes led to a stronger current and thus more intense pain for the prisoner. A particularly barbaric version of the "grill" was the use of a metal bunk bed; the victim was placed on the bottom bunk and on the top bunk, a relative or friend was simultaneously tortured.

Most prisoners suffered from severe beatings, and broken or even amputated limbs. At Villa Grimaldi, DINA forced non-compliant prisoners lie down on the ground. The captors ran over their legs with a large vehicle, and crushed the prisoners' bones.[33] The assailants also beat prisoners in the ear until they became deaf, and entirely unconscious; this torture method was called the "telephone."[34] Most of the acts of punishment were intended to severely humiliate the prisoners. At the Pisagua Concentration Camp, captors intimidated prisoners by forcing them to crawl on the ground and lick the dirt off the floors. If the prisoners complained or even collapsed from exhaustion, they were promptly executed.[35] Prisoners were also immersed into vats of excrement, and were occasionally forced to ingest it.[

You might have noticed, if you could stomach reading that material, that our government committed some of these same tortures against Iraq prisoners. Before you say, "It can't happen here; nobody would let it happen," remember that it already has and we already did. We could have impeached Bush or at least sent him to jail after the fact but we went shopping instead.

When people worship their leader they think he can do no wrong. If he does do wrong, they just say that it's not wrong when he does it because he's one of us, he's a good guy. And good guys only do good stuff, so anything bad is really good. Bush committed crimes. Obama refused to prosecute him. Obama wanted to work with Bush's people and Obama wants us to work with Trump's people. Obama will let Trump's people torture and kill just as he let Bush's people get away with torture and killing. He had the power to stop it and refused. He no longer has that power and even if he does change his mind, it's far too late.

If you still think the elite care about you and work to make your life better, I can't help you.

If McArdle doesn't care that her alma mater helped Pinochet, she certainly won't care if they help Trump. We must make sure that the government functions smoothly when people are interred in camps. Which we also have done before. Muslims were already put on a government database and that was fine with us.

Whether Friedman should have advised Pinochet has long been a matter of cocktail-party debate in right-wing circles. Is it better for experts to send a message by withholding their expertise? Or if you have good advice to give, is it better to offer it to bad governments -- to benefit their people, even if incidentally the advice benefits the bad governments as well? The utilitarian calculus is, to say the least, unclear.

Sadly, the people of Chile did not benefit from The Chicago Boys' assistance and it's safe to assume that Americans will not benefit from the actions of libertarian and conservative Good Germans either. In fact, we might come to regret any cooperation with the Trump Administration, but as is invariably the way, we will be sorry much too late for the victims to re-animate and go back to shopping for the greater glory of capitalism.

Well, on the right today, it's no longer just cocktail-party chatter. A lot of #NeverTrump wonks are likely to find themselves torn between being #NeverTrump and being wonks -- between their consciences and their callings.

No worries. McArdle doesn't have a conscience. Problem solved.

But that's not really the problem, is it? McArdle doesn't want future job prospects harmed by collaboration with Trump and doesn't want liberals to sneer and insult her at cocktail parities, which evidently are the most important events of her life.

I don't see a moral obligation for anyone to serve in a Trump administration.

Phew! That's a relief. Too bad she immediately contradicts herself, though.

But people who opposed Donald Trump, on both the left and right, should commit right now to one thing: We will not tar good people for joining the Trump administration. Their motives will not be questioned, and if things do turn out as some of his critics fear, the people in his foreign and domestic policy apparatus will not suffer guilt by association. It is just too important that Trump have good advisers.

Actually.

Now that you bring it up.

There's no point in fighting; we lost and we'd lose again. But nobody says we can't make the winners miserable in their success. Sure, McArdle is greedy and ambitious. There's nothing we can do about that. But McArdle and all her little cohorts desperately want to be cool, too. They think working for the White House will unlock Maximum Cool, so at the very least we should make sure they understand that that will never happen. It's the only thing liberals control.

Trump will be the least policy-savvy president in history. He has built no ideological framework for future policies, much less a set of detailed proposals. He has few advisers, in part because so many of the usual contenders have come out against him.

Here is where McArdle makes her mistake, however. For one thing, she went to Asia after the election. The jockeying for position is going on without her, although I am sure a lot of emails are whizzing their way around the globe while McArdle attempts to see if she can leverage Trump's win into another upwards failure.

The second thing is that Trump has his own people and Trump believes in loyalty. He also enjoys being spiteful and punishing people who crossed him. McArdle herself is beneath Trump's notice but she has prominently promoted the #NeverTrump failure, and that's not going to disappear from the internet. McArdle and her friends might be able to skim some money off of the Trump administration but that's not a given.

Now he is going to have to have advisers. He is going to have to staff regulatory agencies. He is going to have to decide about policy priorities, and push legislation to advance them. If smart, competent people refuse to be a part of that, because they think it’s likely that they will suffer permanent stigma from having joined his team, then Trump's administration will still do all those things -- but it will do them poorly, and the nation will suffer.

The nation will suffer anyway. The only question is, will people help Trump like Good little Germans, or will they do everything in their power to slow down, distract, delay, or destroy his presidency? "I was just following orders" is for Nazis, not Americans.

The most vital area for Trump to staff with good people is his foreign policy and defense team. Those people will be making decisions in a short time frame, and often behind closed doors, with little public check on their thought process. But his domestic team matters too. These are the folks who will have to make thousands of decisions that affect our daily lives, from education to what companies are allowed to merge. If his cabinet is filled with inexperienced folks or narrow activists, those decisions can be disastrous. So if a good person enters the administration, don’t question his judgment or her character. Applaud.

Make sure that Trump has good people in office while they compile lists of Muslims to jail. You wouldn't want to slow down that process. When Trump makes up his kill list (just like Obama!), he'll need competent people to carry out his orders. And when our few remaining separate corporations merger, they'll need lawyers to explain how having one source for a product will actually lower prices.

During the Bush years there was a cottage industry of liberal economists who dinged conservatives like Greg Mankiw and Glenn Hubbard for saying complimentary things about policies that were, let us say, somewhat less than well-supported by economic science. Needless to say, such cheap shots could easily have been taken at folks like Austan Goolsbee and Jason Furman during the Obama years. I didn’t take them.

If McArdle didn't insult someone, it's because she thought they might be useful some day in advancing her career. Goolsbee was her former professor.

Good economists in an administration cannot come out and say “This is bad policy,” for obvious reasons; their job is to have those conversations internally, and then support their boss’s decisions. That will also be the job of an adviser in a Trump administration, and we want good people in there making the good arguments.

Because Trump will care what people say, and listen to advisers who don't agree with him, and implement advice he disagrees with. For the good of the party he trashed.

When I tweeted a much shorter version of this thought this morning, I was beset by angry progressives talking about “Vichy” and “quislings” and saying that they wanted the Trump administration to fail as spectacularly as possible. While I understand the grief that those people are feeling, America, and the world, cannot afford this kind of thinking. There are things more important than political fights. One of them is making sure that the man in charge of the world’s biggest rich economy, and its biggest nuclear arsenal, has smart and sober-minded people around him. We all need to do everything we can to make sure that’s the case.

McArdle did everything possible to bring this moment to fruition. She demonized liberals and fought their policies tooth-and-nail. Paul Ryan and Goldman, Sachs will guide the economy now. She must be thrilled and we should remind her every minute of the next four years that she is getting exactly what she wanted. Any disasters will be of her own making, and liberals will have no power to stop anyone. But we can make those cocktail parties and comment sections just a little less fun for the princess.

McArdle wants the status quo because it made her rich. Sure, it could have more free market fairies, but she doesn't want it disrupted. She wants stocks to stay high, bonds to stay safe, housing costs to rise, taxes to fall, and regulation to disappear. She want to enrich herself and her useless husband. But now she might have more market freedom than she thought, and she wants everyone to ensure that her success in destroying liberal governance doesn't blow back on her.

She wants us all to work very hard in protecting her assets, while she continues to try to destroy ours. But thanks in part to her efforts, we no longer have the power to protect her money and now she's on her own.

I don’t know if Trump will ask people I admire to serve in his cabinet; I don’t know that they will be willing to serve if he does. But whoever does serve will have my respect for their willingness to take on a difficult job; my most charitable assessment of their motives; and my fervent hope that they will prove to be able stewards.

It's too late. McArdle won. The Free Market won. And now she will get her hard-earned reward.

(You already read Roy Edroso, right? I thought so.)

Let The Right One In

Megan McArdle does what comes naturally.


There was a rumor going around a long time ago that Megan McArdle was up for a job at The New York Times but was rejected.  I have no idea if this is true, but I do know that McArdle has complained several times about the lack of right wingers in the elite professions. Like Ross Douthat, McArdle thinks of herself as part of a conservative intelligentsia, a small number of persecuted souls who are being unfairly excluded by liberal Mandarins who have taken all the cool jobs and won't let them in.

[The Chinese Mandarin] system produced many benefits, but some of those benefits were also costs. A single elite taking a single exam means a single way of thinking: The examination system also served to maintain cultural unity and consensus on basic values. The uniformity of the content of the examinations meant that the local elite and ambitious would-be elite all across China were being indoctrinated with the same values.

The American Mandarins, McArdle says, went to the same schools as she and worked the same sort of elite jobs as she, but they had it easy all their lives. Like the kids in her exclusive prep school who had more money than her (she says),  the Mandarins have it easy. They didn't get fired from their jobs at Merrill Lynch before they even started. They didn't suffer through two humiliating years of unemployment. They didn't wear shabby dresses or crawl under desks running wires while old men leered. They didn't have to run a copy machine while their friends met with authors and senators and hedge fund managers. They didn't have to shill for drug companies on their blog. They didn't have to go back to school at the Institute for Humane Studies and start their careers all over again. They just shot straight from one success to another. Unlike her.

The road to a job as a public intellectual now increasingly runs through a few elite schools, often followed by a series of very-low-paid internships that have to be subsidized by well-heeled parents, or at least a free bedroom in a major city. The fact that I have a somewhat meandering work and school history, and didn't become a journalist until I was 30, gives me some insight (she said, modestly) that is hard to get if you’re on a laser-focused track that shoots you out of third grade and straight toward a career where you write and think for a living. Almost none of the kids I meet in Washington these days even had boring menial high-school jobs working in a drugstore or waiting tables; they were doing “enriching” internships or academic programs. And thus the separation of the mandarin class grows ever more complete.

  Indeed, Megan McArdle. Indeed.

Like Ayn Rand, McArdle laments that the Mandarins never learned to appreciate the real business of America, which is running a business. They never have to soil their beautiful minds with money worries.

[...M]any of the mandarins have never worked for a business at all, except for a think tank, the government, a media organization, or a school—places that more or less deliberately shield their content producers from the money side of things. There is nothing wrong with any of these places, but culturally and operationally they're very different from pretty much any other sort of institution. I don't myself claim to understand how most businesses work, but having switched from business to media, I'm aware of how different they can be.  

In fact, I think that to some extent, the current political wars are a culture war not between social liberals and social conservatives, but between the values of the mandarin system and the values of those who compete in the very different culture of ordinary businesses--ones outside glamour industries like tech or design.

The Merrill Lynch Mandarin who fired McArdle without even knowing her name and the Mandarin girls she went to school with who always had new clothes and the Mandarins who sneered at her conservatives friends who worked for National Review and all the other Mandarins who were keeping her from getting on tv and in The New York Times--they think they're all that and a bag of chips.

And like all elites, they believe that they not only rule because they can, but because they should. Even many quite left-wing folks do not fundamentally question the idea that the world should be run by highly verbal people who test well and turn their work in on time. They may think that machine operators should have more power and money in the workplace, and salesmen and accountants should have less. But if they think there's anything wrong with the balance of power in the system we all live under, it is that clever mandarins do not have enough power to bend that system to their will. For the good of everyone else, of course. Not that they spend much time with everyone else, but they have excellent imaginations.

The Mandarins' grandfathers were super rich while McArdle's grandfather ran a(n) (extremely lucrative) gas station. Prep school must have been brutal. Add on 6'2" and a pack of Rich White Girls who lived on breath mints and were constantly bitchy from hunger, and no wonder McArdle hates the elite as much as she worships them. McArdle is one of them yet she is nothing like them, she assures us. The red blood of American business runs through her veins, while the Mandarins are effete and mindless.

All elites are good at rationalizing their eliteness, whether it's meritocracy or “the divine right of kings.” The problem is the mandarin elite has some good arguments. They really are very bright and hardworking. It’s just that they’re also prone to be conformist, risk averse, obedient, and good at echoing the opinions of authority, because that is what this sort of examination system selects for.

Therefore the Mandarin class of liberals needs people like Megan McArdle, Ross Douthat, Jonah Goldberg, Peter Suderman, and the rest of her friends and co-workers to keep them honest and true. Anti-authoritarians, every one.

Bring The Right Wing Into The Mainstream Media

How can the Republican Party keep another Trump candidacy from derailing its future electoral chances? Forget messing around with the primary system. If Republicans want a party that can win, says Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post, the first thing they need to do is to “drain the right-wing media swamp.”

“It is, after all, the right-wing radio, TV and Internet fever swamps that have gotten them into this mess,” she writes, “that have led to massive misinformation, disinformation and cynicism among Republican voters. And draining those fever swamps is the only way to get them out of it.”

I could point out that Rampell is remarkably ungenerous in ignoring the many serious conservative journalists who spoke out early and often against Donald Trump, including an entire “Against Trump” issue of the National Review, the elder statesman of right-wing journalism. (The National Review also printed an editorial unequivocally stating that then-President-Elect Barack Obama was a natural-born U.S. citizen.)

 McArdle's dishonesty shines like a vampire in the moonlight. Even conservatives are saying that the right created its own monster by encouraging hatred to inflame their followers to vote or give money. McArdle ignores the entire history of the right wing and protests that Trump's competitors were against him from the start. That doesn't make up for the last 60+ years but McArdle is a shill and shills don't have to make sense. They just have to make money.

She also ignores the recent history of National Review, with its staff of racists, god-humpers and fetus-fondlers, and neocon genocide fanboys. If you pretend the fever swamp doesn't exist, you can pretend you are being unfairly excluded from exclusive jobs because you are conservative, not because your ideology is a notorious failure and your fellow travelers are stupid, lazy, immoral, and greedy.

None of this had much effect on folks like Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, nor does it seem to have appreciably damaged Trump. It’s unclear how the Republican establishment critiquing Fox News and talk radio would be any more effective.

Yes, once you create a monster it's rather difficult to kill it. Especially when you pretend you never created it in the first place.

Let me suggest a better strategy. Liberal journalists who want to drain the “fever swamps” should not be pointing the finger at Republican politicians. If they want to get people out of the swamp, they’ll have to make room in the castle.

Naturally the only way to drain the swamp of racists, sexists, neo-cons, and failures is to give them exclusive jobs at the top of the financial and social ladder. Letting them suffer the whims of the free market would be too, too cruel and unfair, and the Mandarins would also suffer if they excluded the only voices of Reason, Morality, and Industry.

The media is overwhelmingly liberal. It tends to mirror the left-to-center-left spectrum of the social class from which most journalists are drawn. That affects coverage, which right-wing readers pick up on.

Yes, liberal journalists, I’m saying that the media is biased, and I know you don’t see any evidence of that, because that’s how bias works: You don’t notice it when you share the bias. No, my loonier Republican readers, I am not confirming your belief that journalists deliberately slant their coverage to achieve political ends or even just to provoke you.

McArdle occupies higher ground than Mandarins and conservative fever swamps. Her earthy connection to the working man and her superior intellect give her a unique perspective than enables her to tell everyone else what to do and how to think. From the earlier post quoted above:

Though I completely lacked the focused ambition of the young journalists I meet today, I am a truly stellar test-taker, from a family of stellar test-takers. I have a B.A. from Penn and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago, credentials that I am well aware give me an entree that other people don't have. Nor do I think that these are bad things to have. Verbal fluency, fast reading, and a good memory are excellent qualities—in a writer.

Despite the fact that she also has told us she was an indifferent student with indifferent grades, McArdle's stellar test-taking abilities have made her able to rise above bias.

Rather, the bias operates in what topics people choose to cover, how strenuously they interrogate facts, how skeptical they are of various claims about the future. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt says, when we see a fact or a claim that comports with our ideological beliefs, we ask: “Can I believe this?” When we see one that conflicts with it, we ask: “Must I believe this?”

McArdle routinely assumes anything she agrees with is right, and anything she doesn't agree with is wrong. We know this because she cherry-picks data and misinterprets information according to her bias. This makes her a very poor analyst, a dishonest journalist, and the type of person who will spend the rest of her life slowly sinking into the quicksand of the fever swamps, because that is where she belongs.

The process mostly operates subconsciously; it is entirely possible to believe that you are being strenuously fair while setting the bar higher for believing “conservative” stories and liking conservative politicians than for “liberal” ones. An unlikeable liberal politician will still be disliked; an irrefutable “conservative” fact will still be accepted. But in the mushy middle, the ground will tilt toward liberalism.

It's the System, man.

As long as there is liberal hegemony over the media -- and there is -- its coverage will read as liberal to someone with a different worldview. And that will create a demand for conservative media.

This is the lie (beloved of Jonah Goldberg) that extremist liberalism created the right wing fever swamps by forcing them to band together in self-defense and push back against the instigators.

The talent, the donors, the customers -- all will tend to be folks who are irritated with the status quo, which is to say, hardcore conservatives. How do you get and keep those folks? By being strongly ideological. You end up with a liberal mainstream media that is large and weakly politically biased, and a much smaller conservative media that is strongly political and focuses almost entirely on stories with a political angle, to keep its readership.

No mention of money, power and control, or the fact that the right's tactics worked for a long time, until they killed the golden goose by pushing the right too far.

At which point, it became hard for the people working in that media to get a job at a mainstream publication staffed by people who think they’re wrong about everything.

They are. Conservative failures have proven it. Right wing economics ruined Louisiana, Wisconsin, and Kansas and nearly brought down the entire economy. Right wing religion went too far and forced gays and women to fight back. (It's always projection.) Right wing entertainment failed to turn people conservative. Right wing  pundits were proven wrong about everything.

Big mainstream outlets hire a fair number of reporters from little left-wing political magazines; when I asked the conservative journalists I know for a similar list from right-wing outlets, the number of people we could come up with could be counted on the fingers of one hand. And we didn’t need all the fingers, either.

Evidently P. Suderman, boy Astro-turfer, can't get a mainstream job, denying McArdle access to even more money. How will she move to a multi-million dollar home on Dupont Circle next to Matthew "Let them eat concrete" Yglesias if she can't scrape up a million-dollar income?

This is not a slur on the folks on that side of the industry; a lot of them do great work, and many are my friends.

Please hire me, even though I say you are biased and should be hiring Pepe The Fever Swamp Frog instead of Paul Krugman.

But they justly lament that it will be hard for them to ever work anywhere else, given the employers on their resumes.

Then they shouldn't have taken those disreputable jobs, should they? Nobody forced McArdle to sell out to the Koches. She chose to work for them, support them, defend them, and lie for them. She could have lowered her expectations and taken whatever job her father could finagle for her, but she decided to become one of the Undead instead.

McArdle believes in gains from trade. She traded the Ivy League degree that her father bought for a high-salary job servicing billionaires. The mediocre sons and daughters of the rich took one look at William F. Buckley's mansion and yacht and in their greed forgot that he lived on a huge pile of inherited money, unlike them. They needed jobs and felt they deserved prestigious, lucrative ones. The only way they could achieve success was to take make-work jobs for shill factories. They joined conservative think tanks and wrote fake white papers and gave vapid lectures and bestowed each other with awards, aping real academics like a little girl and her dolls playing house. But they are shills, and everyone who doesn't live in the fever swamps knows it.

Conservative media, in other words, became an ideological ghetto. And ghettos often develop pathologies. What’s remarkable is not that so much of the right-wing media is so vitriolic and prone to conspiracy-mongering; what’s remarkable is that so many of those outlets remain committed to careful reporting and debunking things like the Obama birth certificate nonsense, rather than simply pandering to their readers.

Liar.

I’m not blaming liberals for the rise of the conservative-media ghetto.

Liar.

“Blame” implies that someone made a decision to make this happen. The thing is, no one made any such decision. There was no secret plan.

There was certainly no liberal media conspiracy, just an iterative process controlled by no one: Being human, liberals naturally prefer the work of folks who agree with them, so those are the folks they tend to hire and promote.  As they became increasingly dominant in the media, the trend became self-reinforcing. Fewer conservatives wanted to enter the castle in the first place, and few were allowed to. Now the castle residents are peering into the swamp and wondering what the heck is going on out there.

Oh, we know. The conservative elite unleashed their racists, sexists, and authoritarians, and the fever swamp denizens turned around and ate them.

But whoever is to blame for the problem,

How convenient. There are no villains, so hire the villains.

yelling at the residents of the swamp to behave themselves is probably not going to fix it.

Barring them from doing any more damage might help, though.

What would fix the problem is if the folks in the castle made a concerted effort to open the doors and persuade some of the swamp-dwellers to move inside.

Let in the racists. Let in the sexists. Let in the authoritarians,  the theocratic bigots, the conspiracy nuts, the gun nuts, the militia nuts, the Lock Her Up! nuts. It would be so biased to exclude them.

Not just to move inside, but to help run the place, pushing back on liberal pieties and dubious claims with the same fervor that liberals push back on conservative ones.

They don't just want to pretend to be real Big Thinkers. They want enough power to forced everyone else to service their billionaire masters as well.

The Party of Trump is knocking on the door and wants to be let in.

It’s not wholly implausible. The opinion operations of mainstream media outlets have long sought out and amplified conservative voices, in op-eds and via regular columnists like George Will at the Washington Post and Ross Douthat (preceded by Bill Kristol) at the New York Times. The news side of media outlets could follow suit. Unlike the “yell at them until they stop” strategy, this at least has a chance of working.

Destroy them while they're weak, when their base of power has left them. Hang garlic on your necks, ring the building with salt, draw hex marks over the windows.

But whatever you do, don't let them in the house.