Politblogo

Be grateful you aren't starving

For some reason, I decided today to punish myself by reading redstate.com.  RedState, for my Canadian readers, is a wannabe Daily Kos for the right-wing.  The people who run it are the sort of Republicans who give off a sort of normal, less freepish aroma, but do not be fooled: they are actually completely loopy neocons and the like with the thinnest veneer of erudition. 
The difference between them and the freepers is the recognition that you have to put on a suit to get the creamier fraction of wingnut welfare.

So anyway, token funny-name* dude Pejman Yousefzadeh approvingly quotes this stunning piece of Jonah Goldberg-ian sophistry from some nobody writer in the NYT.

 

All economists know that when American jobs are outsourced, Americans as a group are net winners. What we lose through lower wages is more than offset by what we gain through lower prices. In other words, the winners can more than afford to compensate the losers. Does that mean they ought to? Does it create a moral mandate for the taxpayer-subsidized retraining programs proposed by Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney?

Um, no. Even if you've just lost your job, there's something fundamentally churlish about blaming the very phenomenon that's elevated you above the subsistence level since the day you were born. If the world owes you compensation for enduring the downside of trade, what do you owe the world for enjoying the upside?

This is, in a nutshell, why capitalism---whatever its merits---exists in deep opposition to democracy. What is this guy really telling the victims of trade and, indeed, the rest of us?  What is the moral corollary of this logic, logic that the writer quite correctly identifies as emanating from capitalist ideology?

Be grateful that we allow you to survive.

I don't normally go after right-wing ideologues directly myself, happily preferring, as I do, what others call the circular firing squad; I have generally preferred to go after intellectually dishonest people who profess to be, in some way or another, on my side.  And I can't help but feel that this sort of logic also underlies those people as well, especially the well-meaning economists and the like. 

But when someone tells me, "Congrats!  We are not going to kick you onto the street today," I may indeed count my blessings for myself.  But I am not obliged to express any gratitude for it.   If I believe that I owe gratitude for survival to something, then I believe that it is my master.

*I can say this because in real life, I have a funny name like his.

The second day of Oilmas

Yesterday was Oilmas! $100 NYMEX, baby!

Public service announcement

Sadly, No! has a post on the congressional Democrats' complicity in torture, just in case you might have once thought, like Bradrocket, that the Dems were better on that issue.  The credibility of the report is disputed in comments, but there's an overall discussion on the crediblity of the Dems in general.

Why do I even bother voting for Democrats again? I mean, WTF. It would be nice, really really nice, to have at least one goddamn party in this doomed nation that stands fully against torture. Jesus H., you horrible assholes. Don’t you have any damn principles? Don’t you have any ethics? Have you ever, at any point in your miserable lives, taken a principled stand on any issue?

Again, I feel sick.  Favoring torture is now a bipartisan issue.  David Broder must be very pleased.

This Kos diary by Jerome à Paris contains a link to a fascinating Financial Times report.

Minimum wages are new in Germany, where pay is traditionally negotiated by business federations and trade unions. Yet they are hugely popular – a survey this week showed 78 per cent in favour. Yet Mr Westerwelle said the CDU’s decision to bow to popular pressure merely underscored the weakness of its leadership.

The horror!  Leaders bowing to popular pressure?  Next thing you know, they'll want democracy.

The FT editorial on this issue is a hoot too.

None of this will be new to most of you.  I don't know why I posted it---which is the general problem with blogging for me, it's so hard to post anything original, and there's nothing more banal than hatred for democracy.  But then you get those public service ads on TV from the Shriners about not cooking your kids, so I'm thinking of this post in that vein.

I CAN HAS BATHTUB?

The Grover, he is winning.

So, I love to get snippy with DKos.  But with things looking up for the Dems, it looks like the stifling conformism is relaxing a little bit. And, truth be told, some of the "diarists" at that site have been consistently informative for years.

One longstanding diarist, bonddad, has commented on finance for some time now.  And he writes that the next US president, probably a Democrat, is probably going to be hobbled economically.

Democrats have high hopes for the 2008 election.  And they should. Bush’s policies have done an incredible amount of damage to the Republicans.  It’s doubtful they will recover anytime soon. But should a Democrat win, the fiscal mess left by Bush has already predetermined the next president’s primary policy goal: to clean-up the mess Bush is leaving behind.

He then quotes some very scary debt figures.

Canadians will know to be very wary of debt scaremongering.  If there's one thing this country learned during the previous Liberal government(s), it's that it's surprisingly easy to dig oneself out of rather deep holes.  Canadian writers such as Linda McQuaig have built careers out of pointing out the artificial nature of debt and deficit numbers and their propaganda value in media-popular victim-blaming schemes, whereby the weakest are accused of soaking up and squandering our valuable resources and left to fend for themselves.

Certainly, any drawdown in US forces in Iraq will have a noticeable effect, for instance.  Reversing some of the tax cuts, another.  And so on.

But even this long in hock has had an effect, and the patient---the prospect of a decent social welfare schemes in the USA---is still partly drowned in Grover Norquist's bathtub.  Perhaps not quite the way that dear old horrid Grover intended it; he entertained, at least publicly, the fatuous thought that it might be brought about by spending cuts on the meagre redistribution schemes for the poor, or something like that.  But by the only way it could: coercive wealth transfer to the powerful.

As usual, the Onion delivers

In The Know: Are America's Rich Falling Behind The Super-Rich?

Via the comments at Sadly, No!

A buys luxury yacht, forbids B to sleep under bridge

In a previous post, I was confused by what was apparently an attempt at satire on another blog.  The blog owner came and attempted to clarify her point, but I became confused even further.  Fortunately, someone named Dave stepped in to clarify the position.

Confusing terminology because of a confusion of premises in the original question -- what is meant by opporutnity? There should be equal opportunity before the law, of course, because the government is supposed to be of and for all the people equally, otherwise it is indefensible. As far as other opporunities go, of course they are not equal. A is not obligated to share his opportunities and B is not obligated to expropriate them through the intermediary of the law -- this would destroy equality before the law, after which equality of opportunity becomes meaningless. This is the obvious target of Lisa's post -- all these groups demand in one way or another equality of some opportunity they are not ethically entitled to and simultaneously subvert the only equality of opportunity that is worth defending.

Fair enough.  This makes aspects of Lisa's confusing original post and subsequent remarks a little more clear.  It appears that she believes that some shrieking harpies are going around encoding special statuses and advantages for...a privileged few? 

So presumably before these vicious, envious meanies started their evil works, we had some modicum of greater "equality before the law", no?  So, this still leaves me with some areas of confusion:

1. What, according to Dave and Lisa, does it mean to be "equal before the law"?  I mean, the law could say (giving an extreme example for the sake of argument---I hope you aren't allergic to hypotheticals), "From 2pm to 3pm, everyone using the sidewalk in downtown is subject to pelting with diluted peanut butter."   "Everyone" here, refers literally to what it says, everyone, equally.  So we can say that everyone is still equal under the law, no?  Now, let's say that the peanut-butter-anaphylactic lobby succeeds in inserting the clause "except for people with peanut butter allergies"---are they institutionalizing "special status" as you and Lisa define it?  The answer will go a long way to clarifying what you mean.
2. Who wrote the law, anyway---before those silly Reds got their hands on it?  How were they able to write the law so that everyone is equal under it?  Did everyone have equal opportunity to write these laws? 
3. Lastly, and my biggest point of confusion, how does B's appropriation of A's greater opportunities destroy "equality before the law"?  After all, if B and A were reversed in the characters that gave them opportunities, the law would work the same way, no?

India complaining; VIjay Sappani gets it exactly backwards

Vijay Sappani gets it exactly backwards.  He thinks that the Lashkar-e-Taiba and similar groups come from Western indifference to anti-Indian violence by Pakistan.  I guess his affliction can be explained by the fact that he reads the Notional Pest.  Or something.

VijaySappani.com - Blog Archive - Pakistan:The Path to Terror in Canada: National Post has this front page story on ‘The path to terror in Canada”. It talks in detail the story of a Canadian who was trained there. India has been complaining of L-e-T and other pakistan army supported terrorist training camps for nearly two decades, but western governments did not bother until these terror camps started createing demons that are affecting their own borders and citizens.

Sadly, no.  It's not that "Western governments did not bother".   It's that Western governments---well, at the minimum, a Western government---chose to make use of Pakistan by encouraging certain destructive dynamics in the 70s and 80s as a weapon against a particular, now temporarily defunct, enemy.

But it's funny: Vijay's post is, coincidentally, the standard Official Line of the Indian government and its supporters.  It's always good to be suspicious of something when it transparently tries to align itself with the powerful.  India is claiming that it is an Innocent Victim of Islamofascism---just like you white people!  It's actually a quite typical and obsequious behaviour that us desi folk sadly exhibit.

Really, though, India does have a few relevant features in common with the West---a very tenuous claim to democracy, even of the representative kind, that is somehow expected to excuse its behaviour, a tendency to bully its neighbours, and exploitative economic system, etc, etc.  The best part is that India has often violently crushed liberation movements currently right inside itself, rather than tucked away in South America.

Most of all, for all Pakistan's faults, India is incredibly intransigent on the issues that make up the heart of the critical India-Pakistan dispute.  And it and its supporters have the gall to make accusations.

A how-to manual for the Republicanization of Canada

Laurent at Polyscopique is a rare, rare creature.  A Québec conservative who is both "socially" conservative (as evidenced by his natalist obsessions---by definition, never more than an expression of alarm that the wombies aren't under control) and economically conservative as well.  In other words, he wants discourses that have pervaded the USA and to a lesser extent the ROC also to pervade in Québec.  This places him into an even smaller minority in Québec than proportionately in Canada as a whole.

He also writes some of the most readable articles on Canadian politics from a conservative persective.  Most recently he has written a review of a conservative takeover manual by Adam Daifallah (whom I blogrolled a long time ago but haven't read since).  The review and what it implies about the book are interesting.  Essentially it proposes a way to adapt the successes of the American conservative movement to Canada.

Libertarian tidbits

I've occasionally tussled with libertarian capitalists on and off this blog.  But I'm not totally appalled by them, not as a whole.  Some of them are incomprehensible, but some of them really do have their hearts in the right place.  Such as, for instance, Arthur Silber, who wrote impassioned critiques of the USA as it is today.  Unfortunately Silber has been having financial and personal trouble that in some ways makes one wonder why he is a libertarian after all, but it' s not my place to tell him that, I guess.  But he has dropped out of the blogging race---a second time.  Poor guy.  His writing deserved to make it big, in my opinion, despite his economic views and his recovering Randroid status.  But, myself, I found it hard to keep my attention on his site for various reasons, one of which is the lack of comments on his blog---he didn't even allow trackbacks.   The biggest blogs, such as Atrios and Kos, have at least one of those.  You really have to build up a community, and what was missing from Silber's effort is one of those.  I hope he's OK, though.

On another note, libertarians often bring up some guy named Hayek a lot.  Apparently, he wrote a foundational book for them, The Road to Serfdom.  Apparently some people claim he's not a "dogmatic ideologue."  Brad DeLong derides this view:

Brad Delong's Semi-Daily Journal - Friedrich Hayek as ideologue:

Private property rights were much narrower than Hayek would have wished, and government ownership of the commanding heights of the economy was much greater than he (or I) would have wished. But destruction of the rule of law? Nonsense.

This is important. For if right-wing ideologues claim that Clement Attlee has destroyed the rule of law through nationalizations, unemployment insurance, public health programs, and zoning, then right-wing ideologues can take one step further to justify the crimes of a Franco or a Pinochet.

Political economy and reality

I'm often peevish about economists, but I have to admit that I'm more ambivalent than entirely negative about them.  Some of them have their hearts in the right place.  One of them who has his heart and his head mostly in the right place is Max Sawicky.   

One of the things that infuriates me most about even the most well-intentioned academic economists is their bizarre, almost disingenuous political naiveté.  Let's just assume their theories are correct in the first place.  The problem is that there is often a distance between theory and policy that makes promoting some policies almost irresponsible, no matter how much it looks good on paper.  One such is free trade: almost every well-intentioned economist agrees that there are losers from free trade and that they should be compensated.

But in North America, at least, the very political forces that promote trade (really, investment) liberalisation are also those that work actively to suppress loser compensation.  And they have short-term incentives to do so.  Consequently, promoting open borders is probably a harmful thing to do.

Which it's why it's refreshing to read about MaxSpeak's and Tyler Cowen's debate over US tax issues linked from here.  In this discussion, Max says what should be an obvious truth every economist with an opinion about policy should know:

Let's review a couple of rules for evaluating the recommendations of President Bush's Advisory Panel on Tax Reform. Key is that any tax change must be compared to some alternative. In isolation, tax changes can look more appealing than they deserve. But we never have the luxury of starting with a clean slate.

To make a legitimate comparison of tax systems, the details of each need to be based on raising the same amount of revenue. Otherwise it's not a reasonable comparison. Secondly, there is little point in comparing an ideal system with a real-world one. The ideal will never become reality. Some bowdlerized version of it might. It's the latter that must be considered. That said, ideal systems can be discussed to get basic principles into view.

...

I want to briefly reinforce something I said in the face of some disagreement from Tyler. There is a place for discussion of ideal tax systems, especially in academia. In the policy world, however, one must consider the consequences of proposals in the legislative arena.
Something beautiful at birth can turn ugly very fast in committee. So we need to keep an eye on both the ideal and the practical.

Emphasis mine.  I would go farther though, and did above.  It's really frustrating to watch economists passionately defend trade liberalisation in the hope that the magical unicorn of compensation will arrive.  It's far more likely that trade will deliberalise than the losers in North America get compensated.