The Happy Warrior

Authoritarians support the authority. Let's revisit The Invisible Man, Rod Dreher, who sees right through every issue and finds nothing.

What holds us together, or could hold us together? One might have said once upon a time that Christianity did — that’s what Tocqueville saw — and later, one might have said civic religion (generic Christianity + “Americanism”). These were ideals we held in common, and they served as shared ideals toward which we strove, despite our imperfections and failings. 

Now, though? What is the common thread? What is the tie that binds us to our home? What is the law that rules our hearts? It is mere anarchy; the Baltimore rioters are only farther along the line of logic than the rest of the country is. They’re destroying their city because of lawlessness in their hearts, but the rest of us are destroying the basis for self-governance and order in our polis too. It’s all going, going … because in America, freedom is always the winning mantra.  

UPDATE: Reading the comments this morning, it appears that more than a few readers think I’m defending the Baltimore police, and police brutality. I’m not. Contempt for the law breeds contempt for the law. What I’m saying is that this contempt for the law is a lot more widespread in our society than among Baltimore cops and Baltimore rioters.

For a Christian, Dreher is a little too quick to judge, condemn, and commit sentence on his fellow man. The Black rioters are found guilty of a fundamental flaw of lawlessness, of disobedience to the authority which in their case is everyone because Black. That is wicked but they are not the only wicked ones rioting in the streets. Sexual freedom is victimizing Christian-Americans as well. The battle has been lost and now Dreher calls his flock to gather their sheep behind the citadel gates and wait for the enemy at the gate.

I believe that we cannot give up the fight, if only to delay the inevitable to give us time enough to prepare ourselves and our institutions for the long resistance. In oral arguments before the Supreme Court yesterday, the administration’s lawyer admitted that religious institutions may lose their tax-exempt status over same-sex marriage. We will all be Bob Jones University very soon.

There can be no greater martyrdom than the loss of tax-free status for racist policies.

It's funny how often money comes up in these little conversations. The worst thing that could happen to the church is not persecution but the loss of money. People might lose jobs; they would not have any money. And yet Rod Dreher is driving to his book signing in Dallas as we speak. He's not meeting underground worship groups to give them encouragement and hope for free. He's selling books. He's gorging on oysters with the Housewife from Hell, Mollie Hemingway. He attended the convention of the wacky, the Q conference. He's footloose and fancy free while the wife is home with the kiddies, and having a wonderful time. There he is, right in public, on mainstream media, the internet, in the publishing houses, and no doubt all over conservative media. He's not hiding. He's everywhere.

For a man who is suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, he sure does look like he's having a great time.

Opferfreund

In a boot-strapping individualist meritocracy, victimization is a bad word. Conservatives tell people to buck up, stop suffering and turn over their problems to God for relief.  When the victims ignore the facile and unhelpful advice the victim is shrugged off as unrewarding, recalcitrant and at fault for his own victimization. Which brings us to Rod Dreher, or rather a little story he wanted to share with his readers.

I had a friend once who suffered a series of significant losses, the victim of serious injustices, wrongs that could never be made right, debts that were impossible to repay. When we knew each other, I felt sorry for her at first, but in time, I came to see that she was a total slave to her past. She interpreted everything in the present in terms of the past, and without knowing what she was doing, determined that her future was bound to be miserable. Eventually I quit hanging around her because all she could talk about was herself as a victim. And she was indeed a victim! But she was a sad person who drove people away, because she had come to define herself by her suffering. For whatever reason, she refused to let that wound heal, and declined any help in healing. Thinking back on that tonight, it seems that to let go of her (entirely justified) sense of grievance would have been to lose herself. She is, or was when I knew her, the sort of person Dante would have met in Hell.

We might never know what advice Dreher gave the unlucky woman but it is safe to assume that his (present) God figured large in the conversation. The woman refused to forgive and forget about the abuse that made her the woman she became. She declined the offers (by Dreher, no doubt) of assistance in her healing. Perhaps there were offers of a prayer circle or an e-mail chain letter of prayer. Who knows? All we know is that she was at the end of her rope, in her own personal hell, and Rod regretfully deleted her and her tiresome self-pity from his life. It was the Christian thing to do.

It was also the Dreher thing to do, for Mr. Rod Dreher has spent his entire career wallowing in self-pity and cultivating victimhood by predicting a constant onslaught from the Social Justice Warriors of The Gay Agenda Brigade in the War Against Christianity And Community But We Repeat Ourselves.

Usually we are left to wonder what exactly creates a sense of victimhood so severe that one is driven to deny it exists while constantly, publicly, and for $19.33, cultivating it. Fortunately Dreher not only lets us know from whence it came, he can't shut up about it.

Dante's particular temptations were not my temptations, but I had done the same thing as he. I discovered that I had grounded my self-worth in the approval of my father, which I could not hope to earn. I had grown up in the household of a strong, loving father, a traditional Southern patriarch whom I hero-worshiped. He was gentle and kind, though also proud and willful.  

We were very different. He was an outdoorsman who loved team sports; I was bookish and unathletic. By his own admission, he had no idea how to relate to a son who was so unlike himself. Despite his open affection, I always knew that I, who share his name, was a disappointment to him. This hurt. A lot. 

One suspects the "open affection" was neither. It is very clear that his father did not approve of Rod and his girly ways. His father was proud and willfill; he had high standards and wanted Rod to be the kind of son and boy that he wanted.

When I entered my teenage years, we argued often, and I finally left for boarding school, in part to get out from under his roof. After I became a Catholic in my 20s, I transferred worship of my dad to worshiping the church -- this, without knowing what I was doing. I expected of the church's bishops, as I had expected of my father, something they were not capable of giving consistently: unconditional love, affirmation, and patriarchal care in which I could trust.  

Why? Because I wanted nothing more than to feel at home and cared for unambiguously by a father. I could never be truly at home in my father's house, because I could not shake the crippling sense of not measuring up to his standards. As a loyal son of the Catholic Church, I grounded myself in a substitute household, and felt strong filial respect and affection for the ecclesial patriarchs, especially Pope John Paul II. 

 Rod lays his words out with an artless honesty that is utterly blind to their implication. Rod could not win the unconditional love of his father so he turned to the next authoritarian structure to give him what he needed: organized religion.

When we all learned how so many priests used their roles as fathers to rape the children in their spiritual care, and that even the saintly pontiff had failed in his duty to protect the most vulnerable Catholics in his care, the revelations affected me with an intensity I did not fully understand, not even years after I left the Catholic Church, spiritually broken.

Reading Dante revealed something shocking to me. The collapse of my Catholic faith had been about fear, injustice, hypocrisy and the obliteration of trust. That I knew. But more than that, it had been about fatherhood and sonship. 

The abused adult will go from one authority to another and another, serially hopeful, disappointed, disillusioned, and then back to hopeful again.

I was not wrong to condemn the fathers of the Catholic Church for their wickedness in the scandal, but I had made a mistake that the devout Dante did not: I expected more from them than they could deliver, and came undone by the shock of their failures.

This realization did not cause me to return to Rome. As I said, I don't believe in Christ as a Catholic any longer; I am firmly Orthodox.  

But it did occasion understanding, and call forth mercy (this happened, too, with my father); the bishops, the priests and my own dad were not monuments to unerring authority, but rather my companions in shipwreck.  

And it taught me the importance of never mistaking icons through which the divine light shines imperfectly -- for example, the church, the clergy and the family -- for God.

 The one authority that can never disappoint, since nobody expects a birthday present or phone call from Him and never has to hear how disappointed He is in you for not finishing college/becoming an accountant/making the football team. Meanwhile on Earth, Rod is still searching for God's unconditional love. Sadly, he continues to look for love in all the wrong places.

It just occurred to me, re-reading that, that the deepest break between my father and me came over hunting. My father wanted to make me a hunter, but I couldn’t do it, because I was too tender-hearted towards animals. There’s an extremely painful moment that occurs while hunting — something I tell in How Dante.  And there is a healing dream I have, 30 years later, while reading Dante, involving my father and a hunt. I won’t reveal it here, but just now, re-reading the Cacciaguida material, I marvel at how it was old Cacciaguida, a Crusader knight, a father figure to Dante, and the Guide of the Hunt, who gave me the courage to tell the truth, no matter what. 

So, listen, if you live in north Texas, come out to see me and let me sign your book on Wednesday night at the Barnes & Noble near North Park, at 7pm. 

Rod has come up with (at least) two different ways to ease the pressure of his self-loathing for being disappointingly bookish and unmanly.  First and foremost, as is the way of his people, he turns sin into a redemption story that gives him moral authority. This gives him a sense of specialness, almost holiness, to compensate for all the insults, digs, yelling and temper tantrums that authoritarians indulge in when trying to force their children to obey. Self-esteem makes the child independent of authoritarian control; to think for yourself, speak for yourself, dream for yourself, create your own moral code, or disobey authority is wicked. The child must learn to obey for his own good.

Children need love and adults need to have been loved. Adults are usually reluctant to become angry at mistreatment from their parents because they still hope to gain unconditional love from their parents. Unfortunately the adult can never relive his or her childhood. He will never find peace until he realizes that you cannot forgive and forget, you can only let go.

Everyone needs a way to feel good about themselves. But everyone also needs release from fear and anger. It cannot be aimed at its proper target, the parents and parent substitutes. Authoritarians learn it is much safer to kick down than up; there is still too much to lose. So they cast about for a victim, someone that reminds them of all the things they hate about themselves. Manliness, let's say. You were forced to be manly every damn day of your life. It was for your own good. You still want your father's love, even if he is in the grave. So you will eradicate any unmanliness in the world in your father's name. You will face many difficulties, might even be forced to retreat from your enemies to lick your wounds and build up a sense of hope, but you will prevail in preventing gays from buying wedding cakes.

As we said elsewhere, Alice Miller said, "Fantasies always serve to conceal or minimize unbearable childhood reality for the sake of the child's survival; therefore, the so-called invented trauma is a less harmful version of the real, repressed one."  Rod's persecution fantasies will eliminate the real persecution from his father. Rod will not be the victim here; victims are supposed to receive God's healing Grace, not still be hurting from the abuse decades later, feeling it affect his relationship with his childhood family, his own family, and his sense of self.

Rod was a sad person who drove people away, because he had come to define himself by his suffering. For whatever reason, he refused to let that wound heal, and declined any help in healing. It seems that to let go of his (entirely justified) sense of grievance would have been to lose himself, with no family, no home and no faith. He was the sort of person Dante would have met in Hell.

Yet Rod considers himself a joyful man, a happy warrior for Christ. He is very happy because he is able to have his victimization and his Grace too. All he had to do was blame gays, women and liberals for his parents' sins. He gains everything he feels he is missing; appreciation for his intellect, respect for the depth of his religious feelings, attention, ego-gratification, and a type of love and approval from strangers or fellow authoritarians.

But fantasies are ephemeral. They are difficult to maintain and when some little boy points out the Emperor has no clothes the fantasies are exposed as lies. Our happy warriors are driven to fight hard for their own imaginary world and we absolutely must expose the lies or be forced to live in their dystopian fantasy. We must mock their fight, which we will greatly enjoy calling by the German word  Opferfreud, the joy at victimization. If it seems a shame to pick on a poor innocent little Christian boy and make him cry, well, God never said life was fair.

Money Money Money!

Digby says:

 Once again I'm stunned at how impressed everyone is with Scott Walker. Unless he some kind of diabolical genius who's 15 moves ahead, he just seems to step in it over and over again.  But the question is, if the media love him does it even matter?

The media is probably drooling at the thought of taking as much Koch money as they can. Second or third houses. Designer clothes. Ivy League tuition. Vacations in Tahiti. (I hear it's a magical place.)

The sky's the limit!

The Rich Turn Against Everyone Else

Shorter Megan McArdle: Watch me pretend that gross income inequality is not created by wealthy people who take action to keep and increase their wealth, but is merely a by-product of ambitious parents.

The Politics Of Style

There's nothing funnier than someone trying to out-snob the elite. Or sadder than someone slamming the lower classes for wanting nice things. Megan McArdle:

I’ve always had a sneaking fondness for Lilly Pulitzer’s clothes. Not to wear, mind you, because they are ugly as sin; I have never seen a woman wearing Lilly Pulitzer who would not have looked better in a ratty flannel bathrobe. But the ugliness is rather the point. Here you have an entire clothing line that exists to signal that the wearer is so young and comely, or so comfortable in her social status, that she does not need to bother finding attractive garb, and instead can clomp around in a brightly colored bag. There’s a sort of grandeur to the whole project.

Tell that to Jackie Kennedy. She wore a print designed by her good friend Lily Pulitzer and it was off to the races for Pulitzer's brightly colored Palm  Beach attire. And frankly my dear, Megan McArdle is not one to talk when it comes to dresses.

So I should not have been surprised that the company decided to partner with Target. After all, for the stated purpose, Lilly Pulitzer for Target is even better than the original: You care so little about what you wear that you bought the cheapest possible version rather than laying out $200 to look like you swiped the slipcovers from the lobby of a genteelly declining Florida motel.

The Target customers bought the dresses and products for the same reasons McArdle buys her favorite products-to be like the rich. Who knows, they might even think they are pretty.

What’s all wrong is the people who mobbed Target’s stores and crashed the website in a desperate attempt to get their hands on some cut-rate clothes. Lilly Pulitzer is, as Robin Givhan notes, the embodiment of the preppy fashion ethos. And if that ethos could be written in words rather than in the hearts of every man who gleefully pulls out his Nantucket reds and his ridiculous hats come Memorial Day, it would go like this: “I don’t care enough about anyone’s opinion to dress well.”

Of course, as with many elitist customs, it is not the truth of the proposition that matters, only the appearance of it. I was in high school during the Great Preppy Craze of the 1980s, and I can attest firsthand that the people who pulled it off most successfully put an enormous amount of thought and effort into looking as if they had just rolled out of bed that way. But here's one thing we do know: You cannot successfully claim not to care if you were up at dawn, queuing in front of a big box store or doing stretching exercises with your keyboarding fingers in order to get your hands on some clothes. Actually wearing Target’s Lilly Pulitzer line, therefore, signals the exact opposite of what it is supposed to.

The poors can buy cheaper Pulitzers in the attempt to look rich and fashionable but it'll never work, McArdle sneers. She was around real rich kids and their preppy clothes and knows that wanna-bes who ape the rich are to laugh. It's not like she buys the most trendy products she can afford.

The preppy craze was around in the 70s as well, by the way. The wealthier girls in my high school bought their bags and shoes at Papagallo and wore pastel Lacoste shirts and khaki skirts with their penny loafers. The Official Preppy Handbook, a satirical look at the old-money phenomenon, came out in 1980. (All of these kids were highly groomed; they did not look like they just rolled out of bed.)

There’s an economics lesson in here somewhere. Signaling is one of the most fascinating and elusive things that economists study, precisely because signals can be so fragile. Send too strong a signal and it can actually backfire, like a politician who tries hard to show voters that he shares their values and instead convinces them that he’s a flip-flopper and therefore can’t be trusted. Or a shopper who tries to signal devil-may-care insouciance by storming the racks at Target.

Losers. Where are sumptuary laws when you need them?

Pundits Wanted-Truth Optional

Megan McArdle is now even more special than ever.

Vice News this week will launch a personal-finance talk show on YouTube, “The Business of Life,” sponsored by Bank of America, which youth-skewing brand says will fill a gap in the media landscape for financial advice aimed at millennial audiences.

The bi-weekly series, premiering Wednesday, April 22, is hosted by Vice contributor and Daily Beast columnist Michael C. Moynihan. Each episode, to run about 20 minutes, will cover issues pertaining to younger consumers, such as dealing with student debt and how plan for starting a family. The show will feature a panel of writers, policy experts and scholars.

...

The premiere episode of “Business of Life” will cover the issue of millenialls entering and reshaping the U.S workforce. Moynihan will be joined by Planet Money’s Adam Davidson, journalist Meghan McArdle and Jamelle Bouie of Slate.

Lie, little pundit, lie! Fame and fortune will be yours!

The Worst of Times, The Best Of Times

Some say, "Why lie?"

Others say, "Why the hell not lie?"

You can keep telling lies over and over and over and you will never ever be punished.

You will be rewarded, as long as you tell the right lies.

Your editors don't care.

Your owners don't care.

Your readers don't care.

Your peers don't care.

Your opponents might care but so what? They don't pay you or praise you anyway.

So what is causing cost growth to slow down? I find this answer given by researchers to be pretty plausible: a combination of changes in private insurance and Medicaid programs as well as a general slowdown of technological innovation in the health-care sector. 

That last part means that a slowdown in health-care costs isn't necessarily great news -- it might mean fewer health-improving, life-extending innovations, which is great for the bean counters but not so great for us fragile humans who would like to live longer, healthier lives. Even for the bean counters, it also presents a risk: that technological innovation will start to speed up again.

...

But my biggest fear about Obamacare is that the government has a hard time making that sort of deal. It is easier to sit on drug approvals or restrict the use of expensive treatments than explain to folks why their taxes are going up. The more deeply we involve government in the health-care system, the greater the incentives government will have to squash innovation -- not exactly deliberately, but through price controls and onerous review processes that make it harder and harder to get new technologies to market. 

So maybe the bean counters shouldn’t be worried. But the rest of us probably should be.

After telling us for years that Obamacare will explode costs, and then maybe it looks like Obamacare won't explode costs but it really will some time long, long from now and far, far away, Megan McArdle now walks back juuuuust as much as necessary to tell us that maybe it won't explode costs but it won't solve all the problems of the world either. 

McArdle also walks back her claim that Obamacare will end all medical innovation and now we are told that maybe it will accidentally end innovation, not deliberately, mind you, but maybe accidentally.

But she still makes that claim.

I figured out once that McArdle might be making about $400 per post. She's written many, many, many posts trying to eradicate Obamacare. She's made a lot of money trying to ensure people die from lack of health care.

Death is her business.

Suffering is her currency.

And what does she do with her ill-gotten gains, to make a pun? She buys little bits of junk. Grossly expensive machines that nobody really wants. Cigarettes. Overpriced dinners. Booze. Clothes. Airline upgrades. First class all the way!

Praise. Ego-gratification.

This is how the world ends. Not with a bang or whimper, but drowning in an ocean of lies.

Meanwhile, I will be waiting, knitting tumbrels with my Madame Defarge (TM) needles.

All things come to she who waits.

Flashback Megan: Death Spiral Redux

While I am writing episode 1.01 of  That's Our Megan!, let's take a look back at a McArdle post from 2010.

Health Care by Easter?  

I have never seen conservatives and liberals so divided . . . in beliefs, not values.  On the one hand, there are people like the TNR crew, and Jonathan Bernstein, Andrew's guest-blogger, who seem to think that this it's the next best thing to a done deal.  Meanwhile, all the conservatives and libertarians I know think that it's pretty much hopeless, because Pelosi can't get it through an increasingly rebellious House.  To our jaded eyes it looks as if everyone who can is looking for an excuse not to vote for a bill that is unpopular with their constituents.  

The opinions on both sides seem so confident, and so incompatible, that one group of people is clearly borderline delusional.  I don't see how they can be right--even if passing health care makes the party better off (I'm doubtful), it does not improve the fortunes of members in conservative districts who do not get much mileage out of their affiliation with the Democratic Party (and will get even less mileage if they are seen as enabling unpopular legislation).

But of course, borderline delusional people don't think they're delusional, or else they wouldn't be delusional.  So there you are: either it's a done deal, or it's dead.  There's no longer much middle ground in between.

Two pieces of evidence: Pelosi seems to be losing yes votes.  On the other hand, it's not clear that Republicans understand that at this point, the only thing they can delay or destroy is the fixes, not the bill itself ... which is a problem, because the only weapon they have left is a credible threat to torpedo the fixes and let the bill stand exactly as the Senate passed it.

We report, you decide.

Yes, delusional people really have no idea how far from reality they live.

It's a good thing the ice caps are melting because Megan McArdle parked her double-wide at the North Pole.

A Really Smart Argument Against Hillary Clinton

Megan McArdle thinks that Hillary Clinton doesn't have a very good chance at becoming our next president. I know what you're thinking: Megan McArdle is always wrong, something as reliable as death and taxes. But McArdle thinks that failure teaches us how to be successful so it's worth taking a look at her arguments. Anyone who has been wrong that often is probably the smartest person in the world by now.

Why Hillary Clinton is bound to lose:

1.) She's old. Yes, most male presidential candidates are old too but people have different standards for women. True, those people are usually conservative and a conservative would never vote for Hitlery anyway but, umm, she's really really old and people will only vote for women who are not aged and unattractive. (But I repeat myself.) Which is why Sarah Palin won the vice presidency.

2.) Married women vote Republican. To prove this, McArdle links to a post by Kay Hymowitz that states more married women voted for Romney than Obama. Which is why Romney was our last president.

3.) Black voters won't necessarily vote for Clinton just because they voted for Obama. True, a big percentage of Black voters were women and McArdle has said that one of the biggest problems of the Black community is the fact that so many are single mothers and single Black women vote Democrat but--. Uh---. They won't.

4.) Voters don't lean Democrat. McArdle notes that Jonathan Chait says they do, and the link shows that Chait has the poll numbers to back him up but McArdle has a gut check and which do you believe--facts or McArdle's emotions? I thought so!

5.) A recession could scuttle Clinton's candidacy. A recession could scuttle anyone's candidacy but since the public is aware that the Republicans helped create one and the Democrats tried to bring us out of one, this factor might not be a lock.

6.) Clinton is a political neophyte. I'll have to let McArdle take this one in her own words.

6. She's not a particularly good candidate. She has never won a tough election. In fact, she's only won in deep blue New York, which is not exactly playing against the varsity. On the stump, she has nowhere near the appeal of her husband, or Barack Obama. She's a totally fine speaker, but she is not inspiring, and she does not come off as warm; her tone ranges from "well coached" to "annoyed." You might call her the Mitt Romney of the Democrats.

7.) She's damaged goods. McArdle feels that the Republican war against the Clintons will harm her chances of winning votes. Yes, the Republicans attacked Barack Obama with a violent fury and he won anyway but eh, where there's smoke there has to be electoral failure.

8.) People want change. Which is why Obama was elected twice and Bush was elected twice.

9.) Obama's poor approval ratings will not help Clinton.  However approval ratings rise with people's economic optimism which puts Democrats at an advantage.

McArdle says she could be wrong (practice makes perfect) so we will just have to wait and see. But for the life of her she just can't imagine why anyone would think that Clinton has the advantage going into the election.

The Rich Man's Profits Are Our First Priority

Megan McArdle's heart bleeds for the working man.

I've written before about the problems facing workers who are at the whims of their employers -- shifts that are scheduled a week or less in advance, on-call periods for which they're supposed to be available on short notice to work but might not get it. This is obviously bad for the workers: It plays havoc with their schedules, making it difficult to schedule child care and, of course, rendering it impossible to take on a second job. The New York attorney general agrees and is now questioning 13 major retailers, including Gap and Sears, about their practices.  

That sounds terrible. It must be eradicated at once.

The problem is that once you start to find legal remedies, you fall down a bit of a rabbit hole. How do you prevent retailers from basically making it impossible to have a life while working for them, while also allowing economically beneficial transactions to take place?

Indeed. How will you help the working man if it costs the rich owner any money? It simply can't be done because one must never interfere with profits.

After all, obstetricians and other medical practices have "on call" hours, and we don't really want to ban those. So do news organizations, which ensures they can cover breaking stories if they pop up over the weekend. I'm sure many other professions sensibly use on-call policies as a way to manage unpredictable workflow. So we don't want to ban on call entirely.

How is that obstetrician going to get a second job at Target if his employers can't put him on call? As for the news organization employees they can just do what McArdle does-never work on weekends.

Maybe we should restrict on-call hours to salaried workers. But I've been on call as an hourly worker, and I was happy with that arrangement.  

And if the Ivy League graduate with a wealthy father was happy to be on call, you should be too.

It was a chance to pick up some extra money, and if they didn't need me, I got my weekend. There are plenty of folks -- say, college students -- who have the time for sporadic work, and they would be unhappy if they couldn't get it. It sounds nice in theory to say "Well, employers should put those people on staff," but there are lots of jobs, from small construction projects to maid service, where that would push up the price of services to the point where the companies lost a lot of work, then the "on call" people wouldn't get to work at all.

If your employer could not enrich himself by exploiting your vulnerability you might not have a job at all.

Maybe we should restrict on call to a certain proportion of work hours. But again, there are people who want all the hours they can get, and others who can only work sporadically. We'd be denying those people a beneficial option.

Of exploitation.

Ultimately, the problem is not the law. It's that employers can get away with forcing workers to commit large chunks of their waking hours just for the chance of picking up a few shifts. And the answer, as I explored recently, is that "the market for low-skilled labor is terrible." People are consenting to these miserable practices because they don't have any better opportunities.

Here's one solution that might thread the needle: Require employers to pay for the privilege of using workers contingently. I'm not saying that they should have to pay minimum wage, but require them to pay something -- say, $1 an hour -- for putting people on call. If the option is still economically valuable, they'll use it. If it's not, then the deadweight losses from banning on call are probably pretty minimal anyway.

Why outlaw exploitive labor practices when you can toss a few dollars at the employee and continue to exploit him?

This is not a perfect free-market solution, as my critics will be quick to point out.

Critics? We laugh at critics!

But it is probably better than forbidding the practice entirely, which is where New York seems to be pointing. Better still, of course, would be to work on the opportunity side, so that people aren't forced into contingent labor in the first place.

Gosh it would be so much better if everything were better, but since it isn't we will just have to let the exploitation continue. It's for the workers' own good.

More seriously--I know people call criticism of McArdle shooting a big fat fish in a wee little barrel but this was incredibly lazy, even by the standards of the world's laziest econoblogger.

And The Beat Goes On

Shorter Megan McArdle: The straw man argument I am having in my head to distract everyone from the egregious errors in my Social Security post is a distraction from the real issue.

Seven Reasons We Hate Free-Range Parenting

In the interests of FREEDOM!!!!11!!!, Megan McArdle has some ideas on how you should raise your children. So do I.

Seven Reasons We Hate Free-Range Parenting:

1. Children are not chickens.

2.  McArdle says stranger abductions are very rare. That is true. This is what she does not say:

There were an estimated 58,200 child victims of nonfamily
abduction [in 1999], defined more broadly to include
all nonfamily perpetrators (friends and acquaintances
as well as strangers) and crimes involving lesser
amounts of forced movement or detention in addition
to the more serious crimes entailed in stereotypical
kidnappings.
Teenagers were by far the most frequent victims
of both stereotypical kidnappings and nonfamily
abductions.
Nearly half of all child victims of stereotypical kidnappings
and nonfamily abductions were sexually
assaulted by the perpetrator.

3. McArdle thinks children should be trained to rush gunmen so we don't have to pass gun laws.

4. McArdle thinks it would be an onerous burden to watch your children when they go to the playground.

5. McArdle thinks parents worry too much about feeling guilty if their daughter is raped while walking around town without an adult.

6. McArdle thinks "there can be too much safety."

7. McArdle wasn't raped as a child so your child certainly will never be raped.

At the age of 9, I walked to school with a group of other 9-year-olds. Or by myself. Across the very busy streets of the Upper West Side, at a time when New York City really was very dangerous. Past housing projects. Around construction sites. My sister rode the subway to school at that age. My best friend got on the crosstown bus by herself in the first grade. Attrition rate among my classmates and myself: 0.

Bonus #8. Pity the poor pedophile.

A couple of years back, I learned that an adult I had grown up around was a pedophile.  He had never, to anyone's knowledge, done anything about it.  Certainly he was never anything but decent to me, and I babysat his kids when I was a pretty young kid myself.  Rather, a technician mucking around on his work computer had discovered a stash of child porn.  He went to jail for a while.  His life was destroyed.

This changed a lot of the way that I think about pedophiles.  I used to use the kind of hyperbole one often hears--that people who look at child porn "should be shot" and so forth.  I don't say those things any more. 

Obviously, I am not going to defend the use of child porn at all; it's despicable, and jail is the appropriate sentence, because the man who purchases child pornography is encouraging its manufacture.  But it made me think of them for the first time with sympathy.  They didn't choose to be like this--God, who would?  Sex is one of the most powerful drives we have, and as Dan Savage's columns testify every week, we have little control whether it focuses on something relatively normal, or something . . . um . . . extremely statistically unlikely.    

...

That doesn't lessen the horror of child porn, and I think we're right to punish the possession thereof quite heavily.  (And don't get me started on the manufacture: shut the dungeon door and throw away the key).  But the people themselves deserve some shred of our empathy.

If you knew people who were sexually assaulted as a child or were sexually assaulted yourself as a child you are not quite so cavalier about safety. Unfortunately the people who were lucky enough to not be assaulted are trying to convince parents that nobody has anything to worry about.

It's up to you to decide whether or not you want to take that risk. It is you and your child who will have to live with the consequences. Not Megan McArdle.

ADDED: Mark Kleiman weighs in on Twitter: "Victimization losses are small compared to crime-avoidance costs." Perhaps he can tell the parents of the next victimization loss that at least they saved money.

The Patron Of My Patron Is Not My Patron

Pete Peterson says that we must cut Social Security and Medicare because debt is out of control.

Peterson helped fund the New America Foundation.

The New America Foundation helped fund Megan McArdle.

Megan McArdle says we must cut Social Security and Medicare.

Megan McArdle wrote a fawning article on Pete Peterson.

Megan McArdle does not provide a disclaimer saying that she has received money that partially came from Pete Peterson when she writes about Social Security.

Let's take a look at that tribute article from 2014.

Twelve and a half trillion dollars. That’s how much our federal government owes to others as the U.S. rings in 2014. Add to that our hidden debt: the additional trillions not yet on the books but promised to millions of people to pay for their retirement and health care in the future. How is our nation going to pay these mushrooming bills?

That’s the question that Pete Peterson would like to see answered, and as soon as possible. The 87-year-old billionaire created the Peter G. Peterson Foundation with an aim very different from the usual charitable aspiration: to advocate for the budget balancing he believes the nation so desperately needs. To nudge the U.S. in more fiscally cautious directions (even at the price of tax increases that many of his natural allies t hink would create their own economic problems), his foundation has poured tens of millions of dollars into everything from video games on responsible finance to annual budget conclaves on the dangers of a large national debt.

Education and ire

The Peterson Foundation’s first task is education. It expends a lot of money and effort making people aware that there is a serious problem in our federal treasury. If you hear someone talking about entitlements or debt today, chances are they have had their thinking informed by a Peterson report or event. The foundation’s annual Fiscal Summit is rapidly becoming a Who’s Who of serious thinkers on this topic—and the ones who aren’t on the podium are often in the audience, furiously taking notes.

The foundation’s educational outreach extends not just to experts but to the general public, particularly college students—who after all will be stuck with the check. It has sponsored the production of an array of multimedia, from the 2008 documentary film I.O.U.S.A., which premiered at the Sundance Festival, to an array of perky if grim digital leaflets.
...

 As philanthropic efforts go, attacking the nation’s budget deficit may seem curiously unrewarding. Donors to colleges and art museums get prominent buildings named for them. Donors to African poverty get their pictures in glossy magazines along with Bono. Donors promoting debt reduction get fan mail from accountants and small businessmen.

Deepening national thinking about deficits, though, is important. Indeed, it is one of the most important national issues of our age. A budget crisis, after all, has the power to override every other
policy priority.

Yet it’s also a thankless cause. In today’s fiscal environment—with the economy drifting, tax revenues lackluster, and all those entitlement promises coming due—budget sanity means taking things away from people. Spending will have to be cut, taxes may have to be raised. Confronting austerity tends to spark a lot of ire.

And much ire has been poured onto the courtly figure of Pete Peterson. Liberal economist Dean Baker has called him one of “the granny bashers, intent on privatizing Social Security.” Peterson can be a lightning rod, particularly for left-wing groups that revile the idea of reforming entitlements.

So why is Peterson doing this? What makes him want to dedicate his golden years, and a considerable chunk of his personal fortune, to being the somber voice of warning instead of the sunny voice of assurance?

...

In his ramble through advertising, academe, manufacturing, politics, then finance, Peterson showed an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time. “I’m a great believer in dumb luck,” he told me, but both in person and in his biography, the picture that emerges is of someone who is always open to opportunity, and willing to pursue it with inexorable resolve whenever he stumbled across it. Just as his father took the worst job on the railroad and turned it into a small business capable of supporting a family and multiple employees, Pete Peterson turned accidents into successes.

It probably helped that he was a bit of an outsider, someone with a different perspective on things (starting with the times his mother made him go to school in a frilly Greek blouse, which will make any boy a fighter). There are many points in Peterson’s long career that contributed to his current crusade against deficits: his father’s thrift, his long career in finance, his various episodes of public service. But the first time the world got to see Pete Peterson in action as an outsider who quietly steps in and finds a way to help a broken system heal itself was when John D. Rockefeller III called.

...

A cool head in a crisis

Peterson had the funds to put that belief into practice once his Blackstone investment firm went public. And by then, he’d developed a cause that didn’t already have its own telethon: restoring America to sane budgeting. A solid Midwestern Republican, Peterson was shocked by the accumulating budget deficits of our current generation—from a slight surplus in 1960, to a deficit of 2.1 percent of GDP in 1971, 2.7 percent in 1980, 5.0 percent in 1986, 10.1 percent in 2009, and 7.0 percent in 2012. This offended his deep-rooted drive for “economia!,” and since 2008 he has committed $1 billion to his deficit-fighting foundation.

For Peterson, ringing a fire bell on this topic feels like his philanthropic calling. “I would find it difficult to spend all of my time and energy on kind of reacting to standard requests,” he recently told the Bridgespan Group in a video interview. “It just wouldn’t be exciting and challenging…. I need challenges.”

Even with $1 billion and an army of advocates on the job, though, can the man with a passion make the necessary impression in Washington, where challenges often turn out to be mystifyingly complicated, and common sense isn’t all that common? Can he overcome today’s special interests and reservoirs of political inertia?

Peterson has navigated himself, and his companies, through some tight spots before. That’s why Lehman made him CEO just a few weeks after joining the firm, when losses in its government-bond department caused an internal crisis. Perhaps someone with a passion for budget balancing is just what Washington needs.

One of the most interesting things about the Peterson Foundation’s efforts is that it hasn’t pushed a specific agenda on the public, or funded ideological forces to do so at arm’s length. Its politically broad investments have encouraged scholars of all perspectives to take ownership of the problem. It has made brainstorming and raising of awareness its work.
Yet if no one takes action, all of this will eventually be for naught. Peterson would rather that the U.S. fix the situation now. Budget problems are easiest to control when tackled early, for the same reason that retirement experts urge people not to wait until they’re 50 to start funding their 401(k)s. But Washington’s short-term thinking has, if anything, gotten worse in recent years. Observers used to lament that policymaking was dominated by the two-year House of Representatives election cycle; now lawmakers lurch from crisis to crisis with political cycles measured in months or weeks.

At some point, Washington is going to have to make some adjustments. Either voters will get anxious enough about our debt to force politicians to act in time, or insolvency is going to make all the terrible choices for the nation. Plans made when things are falling apart can be clumsy ones, and all the mathematical momentum is against you at that point.

The U.S. will be better equipped to make good policy if it has already made the hard calculations and had the necessary discussions about economic realities and tradeoffs long before the time of financial reckoning. Those are the undertakings that the Peterson Foundation is trying to encourage right now, well before an economic emergency unfolds.
The Greeks have recently illustrated many of the bad things that can happen when national spending exceeds resources over an extended period. Greece offers a vivid example of a fate that no one wants. Luckily, Greece has also provided America with a man willing to use his money to help our country find a more responsible way to proceed.

Megan McArdle is a columnist for Bloomberg. Her book The Up Side of Down will be published in February.

One of better bits has McArdle's patented unprofessional habit of using what she must think are subtle word choices to slime the left and portray the right as wide-eyed innocents just tryin' to help a feller along.

[...]Peterson was determined to save foundations as an independent part of American civil society. He is credited with fending off more extreme proposals from the likes of Senator Al Gore, the future vice president’s father. It’s clear that this episode also shaped the way Peterson would approach his own giving when he later became wealthy enough to create his own foundation. Asked how the experience shaped his thinking on philanthropy, he paused for a moment, then smiled shyly. “I thought it was important for foundations to be innovative and do things in areas where no one else is going.”

Why not cover subjects as a journalist when those same subjects are funneling money to people who funnel money to you? It worked with the Koches; McArdle repeatedly defends them and simply denies she is connected to them. When someone points out that journalists are not supposed to do this without giving disclaimers she just lies and says she is giving full disclosures. If you try to pin her down she goes on the attack.

susanoftexas 1 day ago
Full disclosure: my husband once had a fellowship with the Charles G. Koch foundation.

At Reason magazine, where he still works as associate editor.

From Sourcewatch:

The Reason Foundation is a self-described "libertarian" [1] think tank. The Reason Foundation's projects include NewEnvironmentalism.org and Privatization.org, as well as Reason Magazine[2] It is part of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation network.
The Reason Foundation is funded, in part, by what are known as the "Koch Family Foundations,"[3] and David Koch serves as a Reason trustee. [4]

[From the list of Reason funders]
Between 1985 and 2009, the Reason Foundation received funding from the following sources, in the following amounts: [13]
Koch Family Foundations:
Charles G. Koch Foundation $57,000Claude R. Lambe Foundation $857,000David H. Koch Foundation $1,522,212


[Why does anyone care what the Koches do?]

Koch Industries is also a major polluter. During the 1990s, its faulty pipelines were responsible for more than 300 oil spills in five states, prompting a landmark penalty of $35 million from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In Minnesota, it was fined an additional $8 million for discharging oil into streams. During the months leading up to the 2000 presidential elections, the company faced even more liability, in the form of a 97-count federal indictment charging it with concealing illegal releases of 91 metric tons of benzene, a known carcinogen, from its refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas. Koch Industries was ranked number 10 on the list of Toxic 100 Air Polluters by the Political Economy Research Institute in March, 2010. [1][2]
In a study released in the spring of 2010, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the United States’ top ten air polluters. [15]
Republican TiesIf convicted, the company faced fines of up to $352 million, plus possible jail time for company executives. After George W. Bush became president, however, the U.S. Justice Department dropped 88 of the charges. Two days before the trial, John Ashcroft settled for a plea bargain, in which Koch pled guilty to falsifying documents. All major charges were dropped, and Koch and Ashcroft settled the lawsuit for a fraction of that amount.
Koch had contributed $800,000 to the Bush election campaign and other Republican candidates.
Alex Beehler, assistant deputy under secretary of defense for Environment, Safety and Occupational Health, previously served at Koch as director of environmental and regulatory affairs and concurrently served at the Charles G. Koch Foundation as vice president for environmental projects. [16] Beehler was later nominated and re-nominated by the Bush White House, to become the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Inspector General. [17]

Ms. McArdle also donated her time to the Koch's IHS [Institute For Humane Studies] 50th Anniversary Dinner; Charles Koch is its chairman.

There is no shame in being closely aligned with billionaires, as Ms. McArdle has noted. Everyone has to be paid by someone. Journalists should all be as open as possible when it comes to their actions, as Ms. McArdle has noted repeatedly in reference to Mr. Gleick.
35 people liked this.


McMegan 1 day agoin reply to susanoftexas
I am curious to know what you think that this little section has to do with my decision to donate my time to the Institute for Humane Studies, or how that constitutes my being "paid by someone".
19 people liked this.


susanoftexas 1 day agoin reply to McMegan
You want to know what your donation of your time to the Koch brothers has to do with your ties to the Koch brothers? Do you also want to know what your husband's continuing employment at Reason has to do with his ties to Reason?
13 people liked this.


McMegan 1 day agoin reply to susanoftexas
I didn't donate my time to "the Kochs"; I donated it to the Institute for Humane Studies, an organization whose goals I support. Is anyone who donates time or money to an organization to which George Soros donates also "tied to Soros"? Does that donation somehow constitute getting "paid by" George Soros?
36 people liked this

susanoftexas 1 day agoin reply to McMegan
So you deny that you are affiliated in any way with the Koch brothers.
7 people liked this.


McMegan1 day agoin reply to susanoftexas
I have met Charles Koch twice, for about a minute each time. I don't think I have never met David Koch. I receive no personal income from the Kochs, nor, to my knowledge, from any institution with which they are affiliated. I believe that David Koch is still a donor to the Reason Foundation, but I do not know that to be the case, and what I write is certainly not affected by that--except to the extent that the tedious disclosures mean that I spend somewhat less time making fun of the hilarious conspiracy-mongering than I otherwise would. The Kochs had nothing to do with my support of IHS, which predates my learning of their existence.

I'm curious, Susan: who's paying you to troll my blog? Could it be . . . SOROS??? Surely you wouldn't waste all this time to so little effect unless someone was paying you, would you?
43 people liked this. Like Reply


susanoftexas1 day agoin reply to McMegan
Like you, I donate my time.
11 people liked this.

Of course her ties where far more extensive than she let on. McArdle easily rationalizes that since she supports billionaires' goals anyway, taking their money doesn't compromise her work.

I can only imagine the amount of smug satisfaction it gave McArdle to tell me I was wasting my time by pointing out her lies. She knows that nobody cares if she lies, and if they do so what? She is backed by billions of dollars. Those who tell the truth are on their own.

Getting It Wrong Again

So far Megan McArdle has ignored the prominent Los Angeles Times article correcting her deceptive comments about Social Security, choosing instead to respond to Dean Baker's comments at his blog at the Center for Economic and Policy Research without addressing Baker by name.

"Of course we would all like those who disagree with us in major debates to simply disregard their arguments and accept what we are saying as true," their blogger writes. "But most of us just don't possess the power to force our opponents to concede the truth of our position, even when if we use ad hominems to belittle their arguments":

McArdle is a Mean Girl and habitually uses insults to intimidate her targets. One must go with one's strengths however and when knowledge, reason and honesty are one's weaknesses, venom and propagandist repetition are all that is left.

Baker pointed out that the government is going to pay out Social Security just as the government is going to pay out on other bonds. McArdle quoted Baker saying:

McArdle tells us that bonds purchased with prior years' surpluses don't matter, the government still has to cough up the money in the current year. The same logic applies to the bonds held by rich people like Peter Peterson. The government has to cough up the money to pay him the interest this year on whatever bonds he holds.

If McArdle wants to declare it "supremely irrelevant" that the payments for Social Security come from bonds held by the trust fund, then with equal validity we can declare it supremely irrelevant that Peterson paid for the bonds he owns. After all, this would just get us into tired old arguments about moral obligations to bondholders.

Of course McArdle is trying to convince people that Social Security will go under. Randians do not like Social Security because it is theft from the young to the old in their twisted philosophy. She has said in the past:

 It was nice that a combination of rising life expectancy and broader pension coverage allowed a large segment of American workers to take what amounted to a multi-decade vacation.  (Though this was never quite as widespread as people now "remember").  But this was never going to be sustainable. 

And:

As for [increasing Social Security benefits] with taxes, Social Security is expected to stabilize at around 6% of GDP.  What sort of boost are we talking about?  Enough to make up for the fact that our national savings rate has fallen from about 10% of income in 1980 to 2.5% now?  That would be a huge increase, not a small one. It would have quite noticeable effects on the economy, and on the living standards of the younger, poorer workers that we are asking to transfer money to older, wealthier ones.  One of those noticeable impacts would be a further decline in labor force participation by those in their early sixties.  Another might well be a further decline in the private savings rate.  

Of course, we could give everyone smaller increases.  And I imagine they could find uses for the money.  But the same could be said for millions of non-elderly people who are stretched thin.  I'm not sure I see a strong case here for taking even more money from young people and transferring it to people who decided not to save enough.

It probably doesn't hurt that the New America Foundation, funded in part by Pete Peterson, who is trying to eliminate Social Security, gave McArdle a $25,000 fellowship. (The page at the New America Fellowship that listed McArdle as one of its recipients has been scrubbed.) For 25 grand a lot of people would be very much against anything you care to mention. But that money was gravy, not graft. McArdle already believed that nobody should help anyone ever if it cost her money or if she thought it would cost her money.

McArdle's response to Baker is nonsensical, of course. She pretends that the government cannot print money and that we would have to cut the budget to pay for any benefits increases because her arguments would disappear in a puff of smoke if she did not. She also pretends we could never raise taxes for the same reason. These deceptions would not fool a small child or his dog but they give her audience what the audience wants to hear and they keep those fat paychecks a-coming, so McArdle gets to work spreading deception and delusion.

So if we're looking at fiscal policy -- and I'm afraid we'll have to, however much you pound the table about the sacred moral obligations embedded in special-purpose government bonds -- the correct answer to any discussion of the trust fund is "who cares?" Whatever the legal and accounting conventions, from the perspective of the government and the taxpayer, Social Security is no longer self-financing; its benefit payments exceed the revenue it collects from its dedicated taxes. If we want to continue to pay those benefits, we are going to have to find another source for that money: cutting spending elsewhere, raising taxes, or borrowing money in the financial markets (which will itself eventually have to be repaid by either cutting spending or raising taxes). Large and growing sums will be needed. Where shall we get them? Or shall we cut benefits to future retirees? 

Recourses to the sacred moral foundations of the Social Security trust fund are generally an attempt to dodge those questions by people who don't want to consider benefit cuts and aren't brave enough to ask the middle class for hundreds of billions in extra tax revenue, and presumably think that if we just let things go on until the benefit cuts are imminent, we'll have to raise taxes instead of trimming benefits. 

For years, this tactic worked; nothing was done. But now Social Security's dedicated revenue is no longer enough to pay its costs. The taxpayer is going to have to find some extra money or agree to cut spending somewhere (such as benefits for future retirees), or, more probably, both. The Day of Judgment is at hand, and we will not delay it by so much as a minute by squabbling about the ritual status of the Social Security Administration.

McArdle accuses Baker of pounding the table instead of addressing the issue which is of course ridiculous, but she also very carefully accuses him of lying. From Twitter:

     David Rosnick ‏@ViscidKonrad 15h15 hours ago

1. @asymmetricinfo we have a legal obligation to pay Peterson, and a legal obligation to find money or cut benefits if trust fund runs out.

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2.     Megan McArdle ‏@asymmetricinfo 15h15 hours ago

   @ViscidKonrad Actually, just a legal obligation to cut benefits. There’s no “find money” provision in the law, just a massive benefit cut.

     
3.     David Rosnick ‏@ViscidKonrad 15h15 hours ago

   @asymmetricinfo we cannot legally find money for Social Security? Really? Yeah, it might require Congress to act, but...

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4.     Megan McArdle ‏@asymmetricinfo 15h15 hours ago

   @ViscidKonrad I said we don’t have a *legal obligation* to do so.

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5.     David Rosnick ‏@ViscidKonrad 15h15 hours ago

   @asymmetricinfo ... And if it does not, then cuts. But still no legal barrier to finding money for Social Security

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6.     Megan McArdle ‏@asymmetricinfo 15h15 hours ago

   @ViscidKonrad I didn’t say there was. The barrier is political, which is that no one want lower benefits or higher taxes.

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7.     Megan McArdle ‏@asymmetricinfo 15h15 hours ago

   @ViscidKonrad Also wishful thinkers who write articles falsely implying that this is not an issue we really face.

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McArdle leaves herself enough legal wiggle room to do the Shimmy but her meaning is clear.

Baker responded to her response, basically repeating that the government will make good on its responsibilities.

Of course Congress could change the law, as McArdle says, and not pay these benefits. I have not heard many members of Congress suggest that they want to default on the bonds held by the trust fund, but they have the constitutional power to do so. Of course Congress also has the constitutional power to raise the tax rate that Peter Peterson pays on the interest from his government bonds by 40 percentage points. It is unlikely it would impose this sort of tax increase, but it is not constitutionally prevented from doing so.

But McArdle wants us to focus on the fact that the government needs money to pay the interest and principle on the bonds held by the Social Security trust fund. This is true, just like it needs money to pay the interest and principle on the bonds held by Peter Peterson. There is no logical reason why the former should be any more a problem for Social Security than the latter is a problem for Peter Peterson.

The bizarre aspect of this discussion is that it comes at a time when the economy is still operating well below its potential level of output, even using the very conservative estimates of the Congressional Budget Office. This means that the government effectively faces no real budget constraint. If it spent more money (either borrowed or printed) it would lead to more output and employment, not a drain of resources from other sectors of the economy. That situation may change in the future (i.e. we may be at or near potential GDP), but those predicting a quick bounce back from the recession have been proven wrong for a long time.

Anyhow, if McArdle wants to claim that we need to have the money from some source other than current Social Security taxes to repay the interest and principle on the bonds held by the trust fund, this is of course true. The hard part is understanding why anyone should care.

McArdle will continue to pretend that she makes her own reality and everyone else must live in it. Why not? Her lavish and slavish support for billionaires is making her rich, proving that money does indeed trickle down as long as you are willing to lie and deceive to get it.

UPDATE: See also RJ Eskow's excellent summation of the event. He mentions McArdle's use of the opening line of Pride and Prejudice, something I found amusing considering the circumstances.