A Very Special Comment

I don't normally pull comments out of Megan McArdle's posts but I think talent should be recognized and promoted. Mr. Brandon Berg has some things to say about organ sales. Take it away, Berg:

Why shouldn't wealth be a factor? I'm getting pretty tired of leftists who, having failed to win public support for radical wealth redistribution, are now trying to render the entire concept of wealth meaningless through an endless list of things they think rich people shouldn't be able to buy. By and large, rich people* are rich because they've contributed a lot more to society than they've taken back. If they want to call in those favors in the form of kidneys to save or dramatically improve the quality of their lives, more power to them.

"Call in favors in the form of kidneys."

I still can't believe it.

"Call in favors in the form of kidneys."

These people think they deserve to be taken seriously, that they are capable of making decisions for other people despite their complete and utter lack of moral compass and humanity. And yet they see fellow human beings as something to be consumed by the elite, since the rich are worth more than the poor anyway.

But wait, there's more.

Insurance would cover the donor fee, so anyone with insurance could afford a kidney transplant. Yeah, some people don't have insurance, but they're not getting kidney transplants anyway because they can't afford the procedure, either.

That's a nice bit of wishful thinking. "In my world, insurance companies, who are eager to pay six figures an organ for very sick people's health care, will pay for the organ sale." What about the poor, since organ sales are ostensibly for their benefit? Well, they are shit out of luck. In Berg's "classical liberal" scenario the poor can sell their organs but they can't buy any if they get sick themselves. Not that he cares.

Berg has a brilliant blogging career ahead of him. If he doesn't have a wingnut sponsor already he should definitely shoot an email to all the major astroturf foundations offering his services. It's a philosophical crime to offer all this insight for free when he could be paid to advocate the harvesting of organs for the elite's benefit.

Concern Troll Is Concerned

Less Well-Bred Megan: Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah!

Oh, what the hell.

I was already pretty skeptical that this [Obama press conference] was going to do much good. Outside of elections and wars, it's hard to get people to watch a presidential address at the best of times. Late July is not the best of times. You don't want to counterprogram a wonkathon when people can flip to "So You Think You Can Dance" or wander outside to drink in the summer evening. Maybe it will move the poll numbers, but frankly, I'd be surprised.

So I think the left-wing pundits worrying about the performance are missing the point. The performance was, in fact, not all that good, especially by the high standards Obama set during the campaign. But I'll be shocked if the overnights beat Law and Order reruns. More than one journalist of my acquaintance skipped the thing. If a press conference falls in the summer doldrums, and nobody watches it, does it really matter?

She's been babbling endlessly in her manly battle against health care. It's all too repetitive and boring to discuss, and the details don't matter anyway because they are not presented in good faith. Let's leave McArdle to wander around the bars of DC, drinking cocktails with fellow journalists and the chaps from the office, their shrill laughter piercing the night. There may be a recession on but corporations are still willing to pay for good press, and money is how libertarians measure happiness.

Oh, Give Me A Break

Now Megan McArdle is just being stupid.

In a recession, the problem most people and organizations face is too little money. But clearly, that's not the case with the ACLU, which apparently has ample time and money to sue to prevent a charter school from unconstitutionally promoting Islam. In a way, this is very good to hear, because it makes it easy to direct my giving to organizations with more urgent needs. On the other hand, what the hell is wrong with the leadership at the ACLU? In theory, for all I know, it unconstitutionally promotes religion. In practice, what important freedoms are being violated? The establishment clause was supposed to prevent a minority from being oppressed by a majority, not to prevent a minority from oppressing itself. I admire a huge amount of the work that the ACLU does on issues like habeas corpus and wiretapping. Why, then, do they so often seem intent on turning the organization into the highbrow edition of Stuff White People Like?

Justice Hugo Black:

No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.

She can't read the wikipedia entry to double check?

Of course not.

And she admired the ACLU's work on wiretapping and habeas corpus so much she voted for Bush a second time.

This is our "elite."

We're doomed.

Dark Hearts and Bloody Money

It was bad enough that Megan McArdle was incapable of thinking through her recommendation for the sale of organs and seeing its potential harm to the poor and desperate. To make everything worse, now she compounds her thoughtlessness with smug, snide disrespect as well. Here is the entire post:

The National Kidney Foundation's argument against paying organ donors:

The National Kidney Foundation opposes compensation on the grounds that it would "cheapen the gift"--that it may be an "affront" to those who have already donated. ("The argument that paying organ donors is 'an affront' to unpaid donors is disgusting," Virginia Postrel, who donated a kidney to her acquaintance Sally Satel, wrote on her website. "Are unpaid donors giving organs to save lives or just to make themselves feel morally superior?")

Conservatives seem to worry a great deal about others feeling morally superior. I can understand people worrying that they should donate organs as well, in death if not in life, but a lifetime of parents inducing guilt in their children for their supposed sinful natures has unhappy effects on people. People who have been raised to believe that they are morally superior by virtue of birth have other problems.

Having volunteered for Habitat Humanity several times in college, I am personally offended by the existence of Toll Brothers. Also, I've worked in a soup kitchen, so I'm suing Friendly's for defamation. As for hotels, as the former employee of an organization that provides homeless shelters, I can only say: have you no shame, sirs? At long last, have you no shame?

Such as snide, shameful disrespect and disregard for the humanity and vulnerability of the poor. Our elite and their enablers may sometimes have a crises of conscience, but in general their denial is too strong to overcome because they utterly depend on their perceived superiority for their self-esteem. Bob Altemeyer says of these people, whom he calls social dominators: [pdf]

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

What we have here is a woman who sees no reason why she should not be able to buy your kidney. Why shouldn't parts of other people be for sale? She might want it, might need it, and who are you to deny her what she wants? Someone desperate and desperately unimportant to the elite. A poor person who needs money for a child's operation, to keep a house, to gamble on his own business. A piece of goods in the marketplace, a cog in the machine, a chess piece to be moved and disposed of at will. That's what we are to the elite, and their pathetic, sniveling wanna-be enablers.

Stop, Thief!

I'll get to the more serious stuff later, but this Megan McArdle post is too good to ignore.

Well, my fourth bike was stolen this morning, out of our backyard, which has a seven foot stockade fence around it.

::giggle::

I laugh not because theft is funny, but because I know what has happened before, and I know what will happen next. McArdle helped the elites that own our government and financial system to steal the money she invested, money she planned to use to buy a house. She is currently doing anything within her power to ensure she will not have government health care. She will, when the time comes, do everything in her power to eradicate social security and Medicare. But getting her bike stolen--that's just the last straw!

The second thing I know is that her commenters will blame the victim. Since like calls to like, that attitude is what probably what attracted them to McArdle's blog in the first place. McArdle won't respond to criticisms of her work but she will respond to people who criticize her, when she does something foolish or without thinking it through. That hurts her pride in her intellect and is the only thing that pierces her thick layer of self-satisfaction.

Maybe I can put this in a way McArdle would understand. McArdle, during the theft of your investments bike you took money from the thieves to obfuscate and persuade everyone that their bikes were not being stolen. After everyone noticed their bikes were gone, you said that the thieves had to steal the bike or we'd all suffer when the thieves couldn't make money by stealing and selling bikes. Finally, you recommended that we give the thieves more money because they won't get the full purchase price when they sell the bikes. Except it was thousands of dollars, not a bike, that you lost, as well as your dreams for the future of your family.

Ross Douthat Is A Racist Moron Again

Ross Douthat tells us that affirmative action is now longer necessary because minorities can be successful and will soon be the majority anyway. He does not notice that if he keeps his mouth shut eventually he and his fellow whites will be eligible for what he constantly refers to as special treatment and unearned opportunities. Considering the intellectual depth Douthat is passing on to his offspring, they will need all the help they can get. He also does not notice that he is shilling for corporations who do not want to help the poor rise out of poverty.

Structual Problems

It is, no doubt, an extraordinary coincidence, but Megan McArdle seems to constantly find structural problems that cannot be solved. For example, we must eliminate social security because of its structural problems.

The supporters of the system are right that Social Security is not quite the catastrophe that conservatives claim--but they're wrong when they aver that the system doesn't have deep structural problems. It does, and those problems are going to become big political problems over the next decade.

And unions have a structural problem.

I know that my liberal friends and readers think of me as a union basher who just can't stand the thought of workers claiming a bigger share of the pie. I'm actually not particularly anti-union, and to the extent that I do have problems with unions, it is not because they seek higher wages and benefits for their members. Rather, it is because they introduce serious structural rigidities into the economy. Witness the problems that Delta is having merging with Northwest because they can't get the pilots--who are all in the same union--to agree on a seniority structure.

So does the media.

Of course, I would have to turn in my MSM Secret Decoder Ring if I did not follow up my criticism of Glenn Greenwald's take on "What's Wrong With the Media" with . . . my own take on "What's Wrong With the Media". Caveat Emptor.
Some of my current readers will no doubt be surprised to hear that I actually share Glenn Greenwald's frustration with the "Obama: Hot or Not?" coverage the often dominates campaign news cycles. I just disagree with his diagnosis of the underlying causes. Mr Greenwald locates the problem in a corrupt journalistic culture that wants to protect itself and the powerful by denying readers vital information. I think the problem is a side effect of powerful structural changes in the marketplace.

And the reason conservatives don't flock to academia is not because a preference for other areas of work and life--it's because of structural problems.

Is academia serious about diversity?. . . asks Greg Mankiw. It's hard to come to the conclusion that the answer is "Yes". Faced with overwhelming evidence that there is a massive, massive underrepresentation of conservatives at the elite level, almost none of them even considers, in passing, that there might be some sort of structural problem. No, clearly the reason that conservatives don't make it into the academy is that . . . they're inferior.
It's not as if we're talking about a severe shortage of fly-fishers either. One would think that a committment to diversity would start with a committment to diversity of thought. But then, having thoughts that disagree with the thoughts that academics have probably means there's something wrong with you, doesn't it?
Don't get me wrong: I don't think there's any sort of conspiracy against conservatives in the academy. I think, rather, that a combination of more subtle factors erects a wall that it's harder for conservatives to climb over. Unless they are really, really brilliant, academics, like everyone else, need personal connections to help them up the academic ladder, from recommendations to mentors to advisors. Those personal connections are always much easier to make with people you agree with. Nor would I discount the possibility that, just as women's work can be subtly dismissed because we know women aren't as bright as men, academics who think that conservatives are stupid would factor that into their assessment of someone's intelligence--and then factor that assessment into their assessment of someone's work. And of course, one's ideas are to some extent socially constructed; simply by virtue of the arguments and information we hear, even if there is no social pressure to conform, being surrounded by a political culture will tend to drag our ideas in their direction.

Skipped over and didn't read it? I don't blame you. There's lots more, anyway. Here is just one mention of the structural problems that McArdle says created the current banking problems. Here is another attempt to blame the system, not the actors who cheated, maneuvered, lied and stole. It's an easy dodge that avoids assigning responsibility and holding others to account, thereby ensuring that our elite continue their superior lives without any interference from what McArdle would call the peanut gallery.

Tribes

At the deepest level, we make decisions based on our self-worth. If we feel good about ourselves we will make decisions that we hope will continue the trend. If we feel bad about ourselves we will try to alleviate those negative feelings in some way. This is a very general statement, but it has very specific effects.

If our parents were extremely negative, fear-inducing or abusive, we grow up with very negative feelings about ourselves. Nobody can live that way, and everybody attempts to feel better about himself or herself, in both negative and positive ways. One way of dealing with negative feelings is through identification with a group that brings out positive feelings. If you are a part of this group--which must be a superior group to compensate for your feelings of inferiority--you can assume its virtues for yourself.

When your football team wins, you feel proud. When a member of your religion distinguishes himself, you feel good about yourself. When your presidential candidate wins, you rejoice at this nation-wide stamp of approval of your political opinions. Our ideologies are tribal, our politics are tribal, our churches are tribal, and most of all, we belong to that first tribe of family, who taught us to borrow self-respect when we have none of our own.

To be part of a tribe is constant work, because tribes define themselves by shared practices and kinship and thus must define those who don't share kinship as The Other, the not-us, the threat to the homogeneity of shared thought. Thoughts (and therefore decisions) are not based on fact, reason and logic, they are based on how well the authoritarian adheres to tribal rules and practices.

Megan McArdle, defender of the indefensible, is rising through the ranks to the top of the right's intellectual ladder by defending Goldman Sachs, bankers, and income inequality. True, it's a short ladder that even Jonah Goldberg could heave himself up, but she's still accomplished a great deal in conservative circles. The bad thing about tribalism is that quality isn't a requirement for advancement and you end up dominated by hacks. When your back bench consists of the McArdle/Goldberg mutual admiration society, I'm guessing that the party of Standing Athwart History Yelling Stop isn't gong to be going anywhere for a while.

Alternate Universe Megan

Shorter Megan McArdle: No, I've never heard of spell check. Why do you ask? -or- No, I'm not obsessed with body image. Why do you ask? -or perhaps--The government will pry your Twinkie(TM) out of your cold, dead hands.

We'll get national health care when enough people have lost their jobs and finally realize how the rest of America lives.

Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness

Via Roy Edroso, I see Rod Dreher is indulging in his favorite apocalyptic fantasies again. Civilization will rot because men like to look at bare breasts. First, Rod relates a visit from an angel of the Lord in the disguise of a high school teacher warning him of mankind's nasty, dirty sinfulness.

He said he worked in a counselor's role there as well, and routinely dealt with students who were seriously messed up by their porn habits. For example, he said, he believed that many of the guys he worked with had no idea how to relate to women in a healthy way; the power of pornography, working consciously and subconsciously, caused the men to have badly distorted views of women, views that stunted and even paralyzed the men emotionally.

So do boarding schools. The men I've met who have the least realistic and appropriate views of women went to all-male schools.

My wife brought up the story of a handsome, popular Southern Baptist pastor in Dallas who, back in the 1980s, confessed to being the serial rapist who terrorized an apartment complex here. Porn helped make him who he was. After our conversation, I went into the Dallas Morning News online archives, and researched this guy, Greg Goben. He really was a Southern Baptist golden boy, from the time of his youth. Here's an excerpt from the 1988 news story reporting his guilty plea: [etc]

It sounds to me like this all-male group of football players is what corrupted poor Goben. Let's ban football--for oh so many reasons.

You probably heard about serial rapist and killer Ted Bundy's jailhouse confession to Dr. James Dobson (who is a psychologist -- many people don't know that) about the role pornography had in shaping the monster he became.

Bundy's childhood was deeply messed up. He found out his sister was really his mother in high school. He felt alienated and attracted to violent sex from an early age. Porn didn't create this monster, some person or persons did in his childhood. Dreher doesn't know this because for him, blind belief and prejudice is infinitely superior to fact.

We live in a pornified culture. So how do we raise sane, healthy children in this cesspool? What do you think? I haven't thought much about it at all, as a father. I never had any interest in porn, absent looking at a few dirty magazines as an adolescent. It creeps me out. When I was in college, neither I nor most of my close friends were religious, but none of us used porn -- or if any of them did, they kept their habits a secret, because they understood it to be shameful.

"None of them used porn"--what an interesting (and revealing) way to refer to looking at porn. I suspect Dreher is really thinking about masturbation. After all, he's worried about what porn will lead to, not about just looking at porn. Dreher's attitude towards sex is full of fear and distaste and masturbation has a special place in the goldly's hearts as directly forbidden by their god.

Now, there's no shame in it in our culture. This teacher's stories made me think that I need to figure out how to plant seeds in the souls of my children now, to grow within them a sane sense of personal purity and respect for the human body -- both their own and those of others -- that cause them to turn away from porn when it is presented to them, and to stay away from people who use it. Because in this vile Late-Roman culture in which we live, there's no way to avoid it. As long as personal computers and the Internet exist, the temptation will always be there.

"Personal purity." Pure, clean, white. Not sweaty, messy and in many shades, not bone and flesh and fluid. Yeah, that's not unrealistic at all. That's not going to mess with your head at all--being told that your human instincts and needs are foul and sinful and must be denied.

A Modest Proposal

Megan McArdle worries that she will have to put her wedding together herself because fancy weddings are now too expensive.

Megan Mcardle states people ought to be able to sell body parts.

The solution presents itself.

In For A Penny, In For A Pound

Now that Megan McArdle has defended Wall Street in general and Goldman Sachs in particular, she has moved on to defending corporations. Like one of the capitalist cuties on CNBC, she's always ready to protect the rich from the poor and defend corporate greed and wanton destruction. Evidently not having any nuclear meltdowns, refinery explosions or poisonous gas clouds to excuse away, McArdle settles for a plea to relieve corporations of their onerous taxes. We will have to take this line by line. I apologize.

The corporate income tax may be the stupidest tax we have.

If a student of mine wrote that I would send it back and tell them that "stupid" is too vague and too general, and he or she must rewrite the sentence.

At 35 percent, America’s levy on corporate income is one of the highest in the developed world.

True.

In 2007, about 2.5 million companies prepared lengthy returns at great expense, yet the tax generated only about 15 percent of total federal tax revenue.

Irrelevant to the question of how "stupid" the tax is. But, in retrospect, I now see that this sentence introduces the topic to the audience. And the topic is that it is expensive for corporations to have their taxes done. I would also send this paper back so the student could add information about why a corporate tax is a bad idea. I would write in the margins in red (I taught a while ago) "What is the effect of tax? How does it hurt corporations? Why was it put into place? Who does it help?"

The tax on corporate profits discourages capital formation, targets shareholders regardless of their wealth, and fuels frantic, and costly, business efforts to dodge it.

I guess this is the support for her topic sentence although it doesn't actually discuss anything specifically . Almost any expense could discourage capital formation or fuel efforts to dodge paying it. And taxes do have a bad habit of targeting everyone, to varying degrees. Freedom isn't free, you know.

Among experts who study its effects, support for the tax is at best sort of sheepish.

Give me names and quotes, otherwise it's just something McArdle made up.

Yet as taxes go, it is relatively popular.

Proof? Numbers? Polls? Studies?

Thank god that paragraph's finally over.Can you take my word for it that the rest is as stupid as the first paragraph? It is just complaints that paying taxes cost money and people want to avoid paying taxes. In the last paragraph McArdle finally gets around to proposing solutions.

Democrats are looking at ways to lower the rate and “close loopholes” so that more corporate revenue, particularly profits earned abroad, gets hit by the tax. But Uncle Sam could collect at least as much revenue in a more progressive and less distorting manner by eliminating the thing entirely, and raising taxes on capital-gains and dividend income (which were previously kept low to ease the negative impact of “double taxation”—taxing corporate profits first as corporate income, and then again as shareholder income). That might not provide the moral thrill of demanding that corporations cough up their “fair share.” But with so many real advantages, it’s an idea that both left and right ought to be able to get behind.

The solution is to eliminate the tax on corporate profits and raise taxes on individual shareholders and individual stock and bond holders. Shift all the corporate taxes to the individual. Incredible, considering the circumstances.

Note also the assumption that the other side wants corporations to pay taxes out of moral righteousness. Business really can do no wrong in her eyes, no matter how much she equivocates. It's one of the strangest things I've ever seen, and I live in Texas.

You Have To Be Kidding Me

Shorter Megan McArdle: Barry Ritholtz is wrong and I am right. Goldman Sachs accidentally made billions of dollars out of stupidity. It's not their fault that the rest of the economy collapsed; it's the system's fault.


When, oh, when, will someone tell McArdle that the banks just aren't that into her, no matter how much she defends them? She's starting to sound like an abused spouse.

I think we can safely say that McArdle finally has jumped the shark. She was able to obfuscate while the con game was still running, but those day are gone. Only the scapegoating remains, and may I remind McArdle who has the money and power and who doesn't? Who would David G. Bradley get rid of under public pressure--his sponsors, or his embarrassing employee?

Just A Coincidence

In a bizarre coincidence, Megan McArdle is writing about how innovation in health care will suffer if we reform health care at the same time the Manhattan Institute is publishing a paper saying Obama will hurt health care innovation. So what is this Manhattan Institute?

Benjamin Zycher, Senior Fellow at Manhattan Institute's Center for Medical Progress,
opposes allowing the federal government to negotiate prices in the Medicare Part D prescription drug program, and argues that patients and their doctors should make their own decisions to choose drugs like Vioxx, rather than having the U.S. Food and Drug Administration decide on the basis of "bureaucratized ... scientific study."[9] The Manhattan Instititute issued a report by Frank Lichtenberg, a business professor at Columbia University, on the adverse effects of drug price negotiating in the Veterans Administration. Lichtenberg said that the VA National Formulary excludes many new drugs. Only 38% of drugs approved in the 1990s and 19% of the
drugs approved since 2000 are on the formulary. He also argues that the life expectancy of veterans "may have declined" as a result.[10]

Funding sources
The Manhattan Institute received $19,470,416 in grants from 1985-2005, from foundations such as the Koch Family Foundations, the John M. Olin Foundation, Inc., the Lynde and
Harry Bradley Foundation, the Scaife Foundations, and the Smith Richardson
Foundation. [11] The Manhattan Institute does not disclose its corporate funding, but the Capital Research Center listed its contributors as Bristol-Myers Squibb, Exxon Mobil, Chase Manhattan, Cigna, Sprint, Reliant Energy, Lincoln Financial Group Foundation, and Merill Lynch. [12]

Another funding source is the Searle Freedom Trust.

By the time he died on October 30, at the age of 81, [Daniel] Searle had become one of the largest donors to AEI in its history — and certainly the biggest in the organization’s last 20 years, during its period of preeminence.Searle died on a bird-shooting trip in Scotland. “He was an old-fashioned tough guy,” says Christopher DeMuth, the president of AEI. “He went out in just the style he had lived. Whatever he did, he did all the way.”His achievement as a donor to AEI would be enough to secure a meaningful legacy in philanthropy and public policy—but Searle’s bequest is far from complete. He leaves behind not only a record of generosity to AEI and like-minded groups, but also a foundation currently worth more than $100 million. Before long, the benefactor of Searle Freedom Trust will be spoken of in the same breath as the three great brand names of right-leaning philanthropy: Olin, Bradley, and Scaife. “His love of a free society will live on for many years to come,” says Gideon Searle, one of his sons and the new chairman of Searle Freedom Trust.
Dan Searle was born in Evanston, Ill., on May 6, 1926. He went to Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, and then Yale University and Harvard Business School, finally graduating in 1952. He spent his entire business career at G.D. Searle and Company, a pharmaceutical firm started by his family. He rose to become its president in 1966, CEO in 1970, and finally chairman of the board in 1977—a position he kept until 1985, when the company was sold. Its best-known products included Dramamine, Metamucil, NutraSweet, and Enovid, the first oral contraceptive. As chairman, Searle’s most important decision probably involved the hiring of a new CEO who had just left the Ford administration. Donald Rumsfeld strengthened the company and developed a reputation for leadership that made him an attractive choice for a future president who needed a defense secretary.

I love the irony of a right-wing philanthropist making his money off of birth control, then using that money to fund people who fight against birth control education.

The Searle foundation also funds the Federalist society, The Heritage Foundation, The Cato Institute, AEI, and the Reason Foundation, which provided an internship to McArdle's fiance.

Bristol-Myers Squibb. G. D. Searle and Company pharmaceutical firm. That's who is funding the think tanks that are fighting national health care. Astra Zeneca sponsors Atlantic get-togethers, and Bradley made his money selling information to the health care industry.

And his minions also hired a hack who fights the little people on behalf of multi-millionaires and their corporations. They don't even have to tell her to do it. McArdle leaps eagerly to support her masters; the world's tallest lap dog.

Blog Note

Megan McArdle has, unsurprisingly, gone a little too far with her latest post on Matt Taibbi, which is less an attack on his work and more an attack on his competence. Since The Atlantic has seldom or never bothered to rein in her incompetence, she does not recognize the proper boundaries of professionalism and good taste. I have delayed refuting it because I was devoutly hoping someone else would, and now I see Taibbi will answer McArdle when he has more time. (Phew!)

Barry Ritholtz also responds regarding McArdle's ridiculous statement that since there was no one villain, nobody was to blame.

ADDED: And of course the great Glenn Greenwald regarding Goldman Sachs, and McArdle in passing.

ADDED (2): MonkeyBusinessBlog analyzes McArdle's "takedown" as well. Part 1. Part 2.

A Public Prayer

While Ross Douthat is weeping over Teh Holy Fetus, the sickening fruits of the right's beloved war are available, via the trophy photos our soldiers took of their crimes. God bless our Facebook Generation, who thoughtfully chronicle their every move and mail their photographic evidence to their friends and family. The word "forever" never pops into their little minds, as they go from taking their shirts off for each other to ordering Iraqi women to do the same. I can hear the cheers of "Show us your tits!", just like at home, except for the automatic weapons. Well, maybe they have those at home too.

In wars people become brutalized and brutalize others. And not all of them die, of course. Some come home, our beloved heroes home at last, with all that expensive training and all these readily available American guns. They tortured and raped and murdered and now they're coming back home to your neighborhood, where everyone has forgotten about Iraq and there are no jobs and not enough social services.

Why did we invade Iraq, again? Why was the left called traitors for denouncing the American invasion of a foreign country? Why did we spend so much money, kill and displace so many people, destroy an ancient civilization that could have given us so much information about our common past? Let's ask the eminence grise of conservative intellectual thought, the best-selling author and enormously influential thinker, the frequent guest of Glenn Beck, Jonah Goldberg.

So how does all this, or the humble attempt at a history lesson of my last column, justify tearing down the Baghdad regime? Well, I've long been an admirer of, if not a full-fledged subscriber to, what I call the "Ledeen Doctrine." I'm not sure my friend Michael Ledeen will thank me for ascribing authorship to him and he may have only been semi-serious when he crafted it, but here is the bedrock tenet of the Ledeen Doctrine in more or less his own words: "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." That's at least how I remember Michael phrasing it at a speech at the American Enterprise Institute about a decade ago (Ledeen is one of the most entertaining public speakers I've ever heard, by the way).

All of you on the right who voted for Bush: You have no ideas. Your advice is useless. You were wrong, over and over and over. We are ashamed of you and of ourselves, but mostly you. Shut up and go away.

Thanks But No Thanks

Shorter Ross Douthat: Obey the Pope.

Somewhat Shorter Me: He's not my pope and I don't care what he says. When I am no longer a second class citizen in his eyes I'll read his work and think about it, just like I would for anyone else. Until then I cannot take seriously the agenda of anyone like Ross Douthat, who states that my uterus is on loan from his god and therefore he can tell me what to do with it.

The Process of Denial

We on the left often ask how conservatives could possible manage to lie to themselves so often, so easily, and so completely. They utterly ignore facts and logic to assert, over and over, that they are right and everyone else is wrong. It's baffling and maddening, and despite all the theories that help explain the phenomenon, it's still hard to recognize and counteract. However I ran across a few instance in the writings of our favorite example of conservative dysfunction, Megan McArdle.

Here's one example, coincidentally from an earlier post attacking Matt Taibbi, whom she insultingly calls one of the peanut gallery:

This brings me to a pet peeve that has been increasingly irritating me as the crisis wears on: people with little or no understanding of markets confidently opining on the causes of the crisis.

Here we can see the mechanics of the denial of reality at work. She assumes her knowledge of the financial system is better than that of anyone who is not a member of her elite group. From McArdle's latest Taibbi attack:

He seems to deliberately eschew understanding his subjects, because only corrupt, pointy-headed financial journalists who have been co-opted by the system do that. And Matt Taibbi is here to save you from those pointy headed elites.

The authoritarian McArdle, unsurprisingly, believes what the elites tell her. Because of her elite education she considers herself one of the elites, even though she was only worked in the financial system for a relatively brief time. But her heart most certainly is allied with them, and during the bank bailout she supported her heroes unstintingly. Another interesting thing here is that by most standards Taibbi (the son of a television reporter) is elite, infinitely more so than McArdle. But McArdle has drawn a line that lets in her friends and keeps everyone else out, the better to have enemies to attack. Emotionally still in high school, McArdle resents that Taibbi is considered cool and her own deep, edumacated elite thoughts turned out to be wrong. Back to McArdle's earlier Taibbi attack.

What is most infuriating is that the people who know the least are the most confident about their appraisals. Anyone with any sort of expertise in the field knows that no one understands this crisis very well.

Economists all over the ideological spectrum are rethinking the lessons we thought we had learned from the Great Depression and the Japanese experience. As it unfolds, we will no doubt be seriously rethinking our model of the relationship between the financial markets and the real economy.

Here is another of her excuses, another method she uses to convince herself that she is right and everyone else is wrong. It's the famous Whocouldaknown? excuse, as if actors don't exist in a situation. Things just happen, for structural reasons, and we better sit us down for a long, long spell and think about those structures. Ignore the newly ultra-rich and newly poor, they have nothing to do with it. It's an impersonal, theoretical level, not a level that makes you acknowledge that you are actually talking about real people.

The problem is, ignorant people who have somehow gotten hold of one or two precious facts, and brandish those facts like a mighty Sword of Truth, are superficially convincing. They are convincing because they misunderstand the situation in, well, the way that ignorant people misunderstand it. The stories they concoct are therefore very convincing to the ignorant, except those who have an ideological predisposition to doubt their story. Those ignorant people are busy listening to some other huckster peddling financial snake oil.

This passage also shows the ever-present comedy in McArdle's work. She has no idea how often she describes herself while talking about others. She projects her own actions on others constantly and I can't help but laugh at her cluelessness. It's one of the few amusing things about this whole disaster and in bad times we have to get our fun where we can find it. McArdle has very poor reading comprehension (how on earth did she manage to get an English degree?) and frequently leads her readers astray, who then proceed to merrily follow her down the path of misunderstanding and error.


Here is another example: McArdle picks at a WHO study that shows America might just not have the best healthcare in the world. She can't accept the study for personal reasons, which she disguises as professional reasons. Her libertarian beliefs against national health care are merely part of her longing to be special, to feel good about herself. Unfortunately she wants to do this by excluding others, to feel like she is one of a special elite. She was obviously developed this need in childhood and now is sentenced to seek constant reassurance for the rest of her life, or until she wakes up and realizes that she doesn't have to prove herself to anyone but herself.

Back to the WHO study--first, she says the study's old. Then she states the liberal solution won't work like magic (as if anyone thought it would) and indicators are cherry-picked. Next she pulls one of her favorite tricks, trying to blame the study for not concentrating on some other factor McArdle claims is more importnat the actual, damaging, study, thereby hopelessly confusing the reader with straw men.

These machinations lead her to the other source of funny in McArdle's output: her ability to tie herself into rhetorical knots while attempting to defend the indefensible. It's where the true McArdle essence shines.

But one would hope that the WHO rankings would reflect, to a first approximation, where you'd rather get sick. Does anyone really think that they'd rather be the average consumer of health care in Colombia, than in Columbus, Ohio?

But what about the worst off, you might say? What about them? The WHO table isn't even a good ranking of where I'd prefer to be poor. I'd far rather be an uninsured day laborer in San Francisco, than in the Dominican Republic. For that matter, I'd rather be uninsured anywhere in the United States than an average citizen in Costa Rica.

Stupid, callous and wrong. It's the inevitable consequence of stupid, callous and wrong values, and stupid, callous and wrong decisions based on those values. It's why we laugh at McArdle, and why we fight McArdle.

Sunday Sermon

I'll have more on this later, but I want to take a moment and savor the fact that Megan McArdle is supporting Goldman Sachs, (as she has supported the bankers) over people like herself. McArdle is one of the money-grubbing libertarians whose only concern is always her own personal satisfaction. It's the philosophy of selfishness, the religion of self-love, the I've-got-mine-Jack-screw-you attitude devoid of honor or compassion.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. (John Donne)


Donne wrote that we all are part of the Body of Christ, and therefore we are each part of the same whole. Even though I don't believe in gods, I still feel a part of mankind because I choose to feel, to let their suffering or concerns pierce the daily comfort of the little island of Me. We are all connected, and what we do affects others we'll never meet. Our actions send out ripples of repercussions, for good or ill.

The time to take a stand is long past, when these crushing wheels were set into motion, and now we all have to suffer the consequences. But we certainly don't have to tolerate or encourage the poor damned fools among us who are still cheering on their destruction, in the hopes that when the pinata of our economy is broken, they will be able to grab as much candy as their hands and pockets will hold.

Our Imaginary Friends

It seems I'm becoming superfluous, because now Megan McArdle is providing both sides of her debates, liberal and conservative. That saves me some time, but unfortunately with the responsibility also comes the power, and instead of hearing real liberal argument we hear McArdle's Imaginary Liberal Opponent arguments. Her ILO seems to be a child of average intelligence who learned everything she knows about the government from picture books. Let's call our liberal Shirley, after the little mop-topped movie star. It helps if you add a cute little lisp or inability to pronounce her r's.

Liberal Named Shirley: Gee willikers, Megan, it sounds like you think the rich are special people who need help!

McArdle: I'm afraid I gave the impression yesterday that I thought the fate of Manhattanites makes $200K+ was infinitely more tragic than the fate of single mothers making $20K. Not so. The point wasn't that beleaguered Manhattanites are particularly worthy of our sympathy--though there really is a disconnect between the lifestyle being taxed in Manhattan and Omaha at similar levels of income. Rather, it's that almost no one, including people who are quite affluent, seems to have realized that they're on the hook for the spending they support.

Shirley: (Giggles) Gosh, I never thought that if people had to pay taxes, I'd have to pay taxes too!

McArdle: Look at our current deficit. There's a reason that most countries do not attempt to fund large welfare states with a very progressive income tax, the way we do*. The income of the wealthy is fungible, mobile, and volatile. These are not strengths from the vantage of the tax system.

Paying for a huge new entitlement which will, at best, grow steadily during downturns, should not be done with a tax that will plummet the way progressive income tax revenues seem to during a depression. See: California, State of.

Shirley: I don't understand. Does that mean that taxing rich people is bad?

McArdle: But at any rate, I was in no way trying to argue that it's unfair to raise taxes on wealthy people. Only that a) doing so seems to raise shockingly little revenue and b) fairly wealthy people seem to be getting a nasty surprise from this, and I expect that the surprises will get nastier as the administration is forced to dip into lower income quintiles who were told to expect a tax cut.

Shirley: Oooh! Oooh! You are a mean, nasty lady who makes me just squirm with anger! Rich people can too afford more taxes--after all, the top 10% of rich people have 71% of the nation's wealth!

McArdle: * (Yes, yes, I know the liberals are squirming in their seats, waiting until they can tell me that it is a MORAL OUTRAGE that I called our system progressive. "Progressive" is a slippery term with many meanings, but in this case, I merely mean that our tax system collects a vastly disproportionate share of its income from the wealthier members of society. The individual income tax, which is the largest single source of revenue, collects 75% of its money from the top 10% of taxpayers. FICA is regressive in incidence, but still collects most of its income from the higher quintiles, for the unsurprising reason that higher quintiles have more income subject to the tax. Calculating corporate income tax incidence is functionally impossible, but one hopes it falls more heavily on the rich than the poor--if it doesn't, we ought to get rid of it.

Shirley (sobbing with frustration): I really want to say something but I'm afraid of such a mean lady!

McArdle: "You are missing the point!!!" you want to say, but for this purpose I am not. I am not making a normative argument about the justice of American tax distribution. I am making a positive argument about the dependence of American tax revenue on the income of the upper quintiles.)

Poor Shirley, who makes such bad arguments and has such an immature attitude. I'm surprised that McArdle can bear to live in a world filled with such imaginary people.