Gin and Tacos asks and answers:
Even among the unpopular solutions, why would they propose something like Medicare cuts – let’s be honest, even the GOP knows this is political suicide – before tax increases, defense spending cuts, and so on?
The answer is pretty obvious: because when the chips are down, they will stab you in the back at the drop of the hat. They don’t care about you, regardless of party. You are not important. They would rather try to ram Medicare reform down your throat than to bite the Pentagon and Wall Street hands that feed them or raise taxes on their own income bracket. The choice between cutting Social Security and lifting the payroll tax cap (without which Social Security would be solvent in perpetuity) is no choice at all. The default solution is always, always to throw you under the bus.
Here’s the thing though: in most cases, Very Serious People don’t benefit much from fucking over the poor and middle-class. Some of them get wingnut welfare gigs for serving as mouth-pieces for David Koch, but most don’t. Increasing the highest marginal rate by 4 percent isn’t going to put David Von Drehle in the poor house. Fiscal austerity is bad for the economy and that doesn’t help Fred Hiatt’s 401K anymore than it helps anyone else’s. What’s really in it for billionaire Pete Peterson to end Social Security? Why is he doing it? How much better can he eat? What could he buy that he can’t already afford? (The future, Mr. Gittes?)
Part of it might be that everything is relative, that it’s not enough for the rich to prosper, they must also be allowed to watch the middle-class starve. It might be that there’s a powerful Village omerta at work, that Richard Cohen would rather live with declining pageview and investments than rat out his cohorts. Or maybe they honestly believe that destroying the middle-class is the right thing to do — they don’t want to do it, they feel they owe it to us.
We already knew that David Brooks cares more about comity among elites than safety and health among the general population. But I didn’t know until this day that he thought that World War I — which killed a particularly high proportion of English elites — was a big bipartisan success. Maybe it too was the right thing to do.
I’ve said before that fiscal austerity is the new Iraq War, unsupported by facts and data, but unquestionably a worthy, morally serious undertaking that only a hippie could oppose. Maybe that’s wrong, maybe fiscal austerity is the new World War I.
Speaking the truth about austerity isn’t “class warfare”, it’s a battle against the kind of insanity that destroys civilization and benefits no one.
cleek
1000 internet points for the title
lacp
Obviously you are not a serious person.
Fe E
I’m not sure if everybody has seen this, but Balloon-Juice has one very famoous reader
eemom
LOVE that title! And if it’s not a song lyric it should be.
DonkeyKong
I remember when I was with Special Forces… seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember… I… I… I cried, I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out; I didn’t know what I wanted to do! And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it… I never want to forget. And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought, my God… the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we, because they could stand that these were not monsters, these were men… trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love… but they had the strength… the strength… to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral… and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling… without passion… without judgment… without judgment! Because it’s judgment that defeats us.
Excerpt from Col Walter Kurtz talk at the Aspen Institute
Bruce S
As a measure of how far the GOP has gone down the right-wing crank road, when Medicare was passed in ’65 more House Republicans voted for it than opposed it.
http://titanicsailsatdawn.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-congressional-republicans-voted-to.html
No Republican today would take the line Reagan, as GE propagandist, used about Medicare destroying an “America when men were free” – it’s all about deficits. But the fact is that the GOP has gone into socially nihilistic overdrive compared to my parent’s Republican party. 30 years of “Starve the Beast” cynicism has virtually destroyed any remnants of Burkean conservatism. We’re dealing with fringe radicals who have laid claim to one anchor-point of our political discourse. As the punditry’s Paul Ryan love-affair proved – tenuous as it may be after NY26 – right-wing extremism has poisoned our political discourse and pollutes “the center.” For all of my gratitude to the voters of NY26, I still think we’re fucked to even be fighting on this crackpot turf…
Zifnab
I think some people just have this philosophy that everything would be better if we did it *their way*. Privatize social security. Abolish Medicare. Double Gitmo. Why? Because it’s my idea and my ideas are pure gold! I’m a billionaire, I must know how to run the country better than you ACORN-supported left-wing idealistic hippies.
And part of it, I think, is that 4% might not like a lot to you or me. But 4% is $40k to guy making a million dollars a year. And everyone agrees that $40k is a lot of money. Even the millionaire recognizes that fact. I think people really don’t realize how rich they actually are. The number in the bank account is just a number. Wealth is just a high score. The idea that you’re sitting on more money than you could use in ten lifetimes just hasn’t sunk in. So when you look at your tax bill, and you see it stretching into the six figures, you just assume taxes *must* be too high.
Medicare, Social Security, domestic spending – these are just obstacles in the path to getting your money back.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
The simplest explanation for the Villagers behavior is that, despite appearances to the contrary created by all those bow-ties and cases filled with leather-bound books and tasteful pictures of mid-19th Cen. China Clipper ships adorning their walls, they really are that fucking ignorant and stupid. They really do believe the ideological bullshit they endlessly spout, crap that any reasonably well informed high school student would know is a total crock. This is what a demeritocracy in action looks like.
And note that we wouldn’t be the first powerful nation done in because people at the top firmly and with great sincerity believed stuff that makes for laughably bad fiction.
Stooleo
Its like spanking your children, you don’t want to do it, but it has to be done. See, cause we are all just children to these dicks and they know better.
headscratcher
No one understands better than the rich man that equity is a slippery slope: Share your surplus with one unfortunate, and before you know it he’s back at your gate, feeling better, stronger, and smarter, with his relatives and friends.
Violet
@Fe E:
Oh, holy crap! Mooseferatu was my Palin movie title suggestion. I get a headline from Krugman. Geek thrill!
arguingwithsignposts
DougJ, someone in an earlier thread linked to bobo’s latest bit of wankery. It might be worth a takedown.
Ruckus
We’ve pretty well established the problem. Conservatives.
The real question is not why they do what they do.
The real question is, how to turn it around?
A lot of liberals are working people(not necessarily right now of course). Time and money are not generally on our side. The retired generally don’t have a lot of money either.
How do we show those with money that it’s in their best long term interest to have a strong, healthy middle class? To help the poor be less so? Because winning one republican stronghold in NY is not enough.
DonkeyKong
Well, you see efgoldman … In this war, things get confused out there, power, ideals, the old morality, and practical military necessity. Out there with these natives it must be a temptation to be god.
Fe E
@Violet:
Very impressive win! :applause:
DonkeyKong
We being the natives…….
Hunter Gathers
It quite simple really.
Size of your bank account = the size of your man parts
The larger the bankroll, the bigger your man junk is.
When you are as super rich as our modern day elites are, schlong envy is the only thing that can possibly drive you to the excesses that our Galtian Overlords aspire to. It’s never enough. You can never have enough money. Your dick can never be big enough.
Poopyman
@efgoldman:
They’re cranking them out by the thousands in some crap factory in China, all made outta some crap recycled iron.
Even our revolution will be a mockery.
Violet
@Fe E:
Thanks! There were a ton of really great titles in that B-J post. I’m rather flattered that he picked my suggestion for his blog post headline.
cleek
the GOP obviously manufactured this crisis in order to exploit it for their usual ends. the Villagers then decided, thanks to the GOP’s prodding, that a deficit is a moral failing and that we can’t, in good conscience keep on living in this state of sin.
aisce
@efgoldman:
col. kurtz is marlon brando in apocalypse now. it was a movie.
dlw32
Could it be that they just don’t know how to stop? That having proselytized Tax Cuts for so long they can’t admit that there is a limit even to a good thing?
Then again, we’ve been following their prescription for 40+ years now and things are pretty much in the crapper. That leaves them saying either “it didn’t work” or “we haven’t gone far enough yet”.
Ash Can
@Violet: Excellent! “Mooseferatu” made me LOL.
Davis X. Machina
@Poopyman: True dat.
Ames/Tru Value shut its American pitchfork factory in West Virginia in 2002. Before then, Ames had made agricultural implements going back to the days of the Articles of Confederation.
As for tumbrels, I’m not sure you can even still get the parts.
trollhattan
@arguingwithsignposts:
I nominate this latest bout of bile-spilling from KrautHammer as worthy of mockery and dismemberment. What a vile, awful bag of (purportedly) human flesh.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-obama-did-to-israel/2011/05/26/AGJfYJCH_story.html
Fred
If you opposed privatizing medicare that is EXACLY like punching hippies and abusing grandma. Why are you libruuulss abusing grandma?!
/snark
Gretchen
The main reason I voted for Obama was that he opposed the Iraq war when all the other “serious” people thought it was necessary, including Hilary Clinton, while even I out here in the wilds of Kansas could see it was trumped up nonsense. So I’m waiting for Obama, that smart guy I voted for, to announce that this too is trumped up nonsense and we’re not going for it.
Ghanima Atreides
well….i think problem is the attachment to free market theory. Its all a ginormous lie.
Free market capitalism never delivered peace and prosperity in the history of the world. It just enabled the farming of the underclass. And for Americans and the anglosphere, the local underclass expanded to include third world countries.
And now a lot of people will pop up to say I’m an idiot and i don’t understand economics, but I think this is true– ON OBSERVATION –free market theory and market-based policies simply never better the human condition for any humans but the overclass.
And here is BJ frontpager EDK. The “Freed” Market will eat the rich.
Has that EVAH happened? CAN that ever happen?
I don’t believe it.
Its all bulshytt they tell us to keep the libertarian boot on our necks.
BTD
Nice one DougJ.
Montysano
@Violet:
I once had a View From Your Window at Sully’s place, which ended up in his VFYW book. I was thrilled; my friends were puzzled.
Poopyman
@Violet: Good job! Like I said.
Martin
I think someone made an astute observation the other day: these people are tired of pretending they care about the poor, about minorities, etc.
They know that it’s a social requirement that they do care – by the church, their neighbors etc. but in truth, they don’t care. They really don’t. So they put on this act, and staying in character is hard work and they tire of it. So if someone proposes a policy with some ideology attached that allows them to replace ‘do unto others’ with ‘fuck you, I got mine’ and be able to hold their head high, and put aside the act, they’re going to jump on it. They can’t help it – it’s who they really are.
I think that brick by brick, we’re just seeing that wall of fake caring torn down with the economy, deficit, jobs, whatever, serving as the excuse to do so. This libertarianism/tea party ideology is liberating a lot of conservatives.
bemused
How do you explain the Definitely Not Very Serious People who want to screw over the poor and middle class? The Definitely Nots may not have much of a pot to pee in themselves but they sure do mightily resent and begrudge anyone else getting any kind of helping hand. It’s like three year olds screaming because one other kid got one more M&M than they did.
Rebecca
I’m unclear why people are uneasy with the term “class warfare”. It’s short, simple, catchy, and gets the point across.
Rebecca
I’m unclear why people are uneasy with the term “class warfare”. It’s short, simple, catchy, and gets the point across.
Raenelle
Well, class warfare is the truth. And, BTW, our Galtian overlords aren’t simply driven by an imperative to make money. Their imperative is more radical–they must maximize profit. The tactics vary; the imperative (you’re either on the guest list or the menu) never changes.
Poopyman
I do notice that they’re still adding entries back there. I completely understand the compulsion to do so, also too.
kindness
Bobo may be on to something. It might be time to start killing the ‘elites’ here and now. Of course as soon as a new French Revolution begins here in the Good Ole US of A the Gaultians and Roves will immediatly start saying what normal Joes they all are and ‘Oh by the way did you see that elitist Democrat over there?’.
DonkeyKong
efgoldman!…..put Apocalypse Now on your netflix cue immediately!
Just Some Fuckhead
I think they’re just caught between a rock, the ultra right wing nationalist tea party and a hard place, the center right Democratic party.
When Democrats are already spearheading everything sane Republicans would be doing and your base is screaming “jump, jump!” as you peer over the cliff, what the hell are your options?
gex
@Ghanima Atreides: They don’t give a fig about free markets either. They don’t care about low barriers to entry or information asymmetry. They redefine “free” to mean the richest and the most powerful are free to do whatever the fuck they want.
Like most fundamentalists, there’s a profound misinterpretation leading to their beliefs.
Culture of Truth
When you hang with rich people all the time, rich people’s problems are what you see. So, yes in fact “Increasing the highest marginal rate by 4 percent” would be a disaster, for rich people whose lifestyles require every last penny, and more.
Kyle
The middle class are the doughboys, and the Very Serious People are firing the maxim guns. From the opposite trenches.
Tim Connor
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Correct. David Brooks is too stupid to understand that WWI took down the European aristocracy because the generation of young men who survived the war came back convinced that the ruling class was a lot of incompetent wankers, and they were determined to put a stop to their shenanigans.
One can only hope that current Americans are made of the right stuff to have a similar apotheosis. Right now, prospects are not heartening.
Tim Connor
@Raenelle: A gem. Thank you.
Ghanima Atreides
@Martin:
you are starting to get it. The Martin Postulate of the Unified Field of Libertarianism.
JC
Can we expect the news corps to call the Rethugs on their B.S. and on their hostage taking?
Medicare kills granny – so let’s abolish it and give tax cuts to millionaires.
The deficit is evil – so let’s give tax cuts to millionaires that increases the deficit.
If you don’t give us more tax cuts for millionaires and destroy Medicare – we’ll kill the credit rating of the United States.
What they are saying, is false, false, false.
What they are threatening, is a clear and strong financial negative impact for the United States.
and yet…all we get are horse race, who’s winning, stories.
It’s unbelievable.
Ghanima Atreides
@Raenelle:
Exactly. The “freed” market in action.
Poopyman
BTW, if you’ve abandoned the SQUEEE! post, JenJen claimed her pup.
Liberty60
@Ghanima Atreides:
A point about this alleged “free market”-
It is as mythical as any unicorn.
I can’t think of any society at any point in history, where there hasn’t been some sort of public agency, some public ownership of some sort of infrastructure.
Armies of almost any nation anywhere, roads, bridges and harbors anywhere, aquaducts of Rome, grazing commons in Medieval Europe, and the list goes on.
Aside from very brief interludes, like say Somalia currently, or Rome for a few years after one of the barbarian sacks, there never has been any such thing as a purely private economy.
This is why glibertarianism resembles nothing so much as its arch-enemy, Sockulism, because it is something artificial, a purely theoretical device whipped together from dreams and imagination. It doesn’t exist anywhere that we can observe and study it, it exists only as a grand facade of postulates constructed upon a foundation of hypotheticals, mortared together with faith.
ppcli
Though Mooseferatu did use this line in her acceptance speech to the Republican convention. Commenters on blogs like ours treated the fact that she was quoting a speech against Medicare as a “gotcha”. In fact, we should have seen it as foreshadowing.
Violet
@Montysano:
Oooh! Very cool! Can you now say you’re a published photographer?
@Poopyman:
I didn’t have time to read the follow up thread, so thanks for the compliment. It’s funny the thread is still getting additions. Not that I don’t get why…
I really can’t wait for Palin’s film to be released so people can have fun with the clips.
Poopyman
@JC:
Yeah, that’ll happen just as soon as the news outlets stop being owned and controlled by the Rethugs.
(Realizing I’m answering a rhetorical Q)
Judge Crater
It’s all ideological, Doug. A significant segment of the population (mostly Republicans) has swallowed the Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, free market cool-aid. They want to destroy the legacy of the New Deal (Medicare/Social Security) and return to a laissez-faire, social darwinistic society.
To them, almost any collectivist, big government program or solution is anathema. It alters the holy free market calculus that distributes wealth and success in accordance with immutable, and, they would argue, moral principles.
This is the essence of Reagan and Limbaugh and Paul Ryan: government social programs give people things they don’t deserve, things the free market has denied them. People are getting something for nothing. And the right-wing finds this intolerable.
Ghanima Atreides
@gex: no, they ARE the embodiment of the free market.
And like I pointed out, I no longer believe that the “freed” market is CAPABLE of delivering social justice even as a trickle down or side-effect.
Americans have a teleological belief that “freed” markets can deliver improvements to the human condition for all citizens.
This is untrue on observation.
Mandramas
@Liberty60: Theoretical construct doesn’t need to be reachable, only approachable.
Chris
@Martin:
That was me. But I think you summarized the whole thing better.
Mandramas
@Ghanima Atreides: Apparently, economical ideologies needs insane teleologicals beliefs in order to survive.
Violet
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
They also think that they and their families will end up on the side of the rich. They can’t really fathom that something might go wrong and things won’t work out they way they imagine in their heads. That they might need a safety net? Unpossible!
So if any of these policies might not be so good for those who “need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps” well, that’s not truly their problem.
Ghanima Atreides
@Liberty60: yes, but evolutionary economists dispute the teleology of free market theory– that the theoretical free market could deliver improvements to the human condition. I think, on observation, approximations of the free market only improve conditions for the overclass.
And since it is not actually possible for a free market to exist, therefore libertarianism is more like a religion, complete with liturgy, a guild, and a belief in the supernatural.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Rebecca:
The French and Russian Revolutions gave “class warfare” a bad name. All those dead bodies you know, and in the end for what, just so Napoleon and Stalin could climb to the top of the heap of corpses? Who wants that? Besides which, in the last 400 years of Anglo-American political history we tend to prefer civil wars over revolutions anyway.
Sly
Every generation has a Jouett Shouse, and the Pete Peterson Foundation is just a modern incarnation of the American Liberty League. Pretense at nonpartisan reform, yet carrying water for a specific set of wealthy interests.
And its not difficult to see how such things come about. Peterson got his start when a bunch of muckety-mucks (including J.D. Rockefeller) hired him to run a commission to study and make recommendations to Congress on rules governing philanthropic spending (before that he was director of a number of corporations in Chicago). From there he served in several positions in the Nixon Administration (including a brief stint as Commerce Secretary) before becoming CEO of Lehman Brothers for about a decade. Then he founded his own private equity firm, Blackstone Group, with Steve Schwarzman, the notorious cheapskate who who compared the repeal of the carried interest deduction to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.
When the guy wasn’t performing tasks where the sole criterion of success is how accountable you are to wealthy interests, he was one of them. Its likely the only world he knows.
Chris
@Liberty60:
And the more it’s clear that it’s not real and can’t work, the more angry the base gets. “It has to work, God damn it, don’t tell me we were wrong! We’ve invested far too much into believing this!”
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
even if was your father, grandfather, great grandfather, or you are an old-money-mongrel,you have some myth, or collection of myths about how fortunes are, and were made. you believe that you have to be willing to scrape by, to live like a dog, while building your enterprise.
most of the people who make up the elites, didn’t do it, but they believe that is how it is done.
in order to innovate, and create new wealth, you must be totally desperate. thus they believe a society that is desperate will finally provide galtian like inventions. the wealthy truly believe this shit. and they are sold the glory of this bullshit, by the people who are making fortunes, reaffirming this belief while helping themselves to their own fortunes.
or you can take a more misantropic view, that these folks know better than anyone, that the government, is the enabler of all great fortunes. like harshly hazed pledges become the most agressive hazers, the rich always want to be the last person to have wealth. because the power and status that comes with wealth, only exists if there are only a few who have it.
Ghanima Atreides
@Mandramas: homosapiens sapiens is highly permeable to demagoguery. That was the greatest fear of the founders.
Free Market Theory is just another scam for the rich to farm the poor.
EMPIRICALLY it. does. not. work.
Frankensteinbeck (The ex-Uloborus)
@Ghanima Atreides:
The problem with your observation is that you really are only observing the US. The Free Market is a powerful and very useful driver of universal wealth. Countries with completely controlled markets like the old ‘communist’ countries languished in immense poverty. Competition and private entrepreneurship have been demonstrated time and again to be excellent for everyone.
The problem is that this is not binary. A COMPLETELY free market is also a friggin’ nightmare. You gotta split the difference. Nobody but the most insane right wingers (IE, the current GOP) want a completely free market.
MikeBoyScout
WOW!
Doug Harlan J nails it FTW.
thanks Doug.
Maude
@Violet:
Congrats and an oatmeal cookie for you.
Ghanima Atreides
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal:
But this is not strictly true. You can accumulate that fortune simply by farming the underclass and abdicating your humanity. Like my greatgreatgreat grandfather and the 12 year old girls running the machines in his paper factories.
Free market capitalism is the survival of the greediest.
Violet
@Maude:
Thanks! I love oatmeal cookies. A woman I used to work with made them with a small amount of lemon zest in them. They were superb.
PeakVT
What’s really in it for billionaire Pete Peterson to end Social Security? Why is he doing it? How much better can he eat? What could he buy that he can’t already afford?
Power, status, and control. Beyond a certain point, which is probably below $10 million in total assets, the marginal utility of money goes to zero. But one can still use it for pleasure. For some people, that simply means hookers and blow. For most, it’s a little more complex. If Peterson succeeds, he’ll 1) increase his power relative to most people, 2) probably increase his status among his peers, or at least receive affirmation from them, and 3) have successfully re-ordered the world to his liking. That those things can be considered important doesn’t occur to most people who, to greater and lesser degrees, still have to be concerned with putting food on the table on a regular basis. But I really do think its the explanation for the actions of the conservative-leaning ultra-rich.
Litlebritdifrnt
In other news RWNJ Virginia Foxx got a bill passed in North Carolina that not only prohibits tax payer dollars from being used for abortions but also prohibits them from being used to even train anyone how to perform abortions.
http://foxx.house.gov/index.cfm?sectionid=55§iontree=54,55&itemid=1634
So if they can’t ban it altogether they will just make sure that there are no doctors trained to do it.
These people make me fucking sick. How many jobs is that going to create?
Napoleon
@Sly:
The first law firm I worked at I worked for the guy who was his General Counsel at the Commerce Dept.
burnspbesq
@Zifnab:
Or maybe everything we were taught in intermediate micro about the diminishing marginal utility of wealth was wrong.
Mandramas
@Frankensteinbeck (The ex-Uloborus): I agree, but that’s hard to proof. Communist countries in XX century where into the immense pressure of Cold War, and since they and a lot lesser initial installed industrial capacity, their governments had to transfer a lot of their productive strength into military strength, only to be able to be in pair with Western World. This means, a lot less confort for the citizen: this is one of the main reason of the fall of the communist regime.
burnspbesq
@Maude:
I hope you brought enough for everybody.
Ghanima Atreides
@Frankensteinbeck (The ex-Uloborus):
Again, this is empirically untrue. Free Market approximations only benefit the overclass.
Americans are a global overclass if you consider it.
Being “better” than a controlled market is immaterial. I am saying FMT CANNOT deliver deliver on its teleological promise of improving the human condition. It only improves the human condition of the overclass, at the expense of the underclass.
You are repeating mythologies.
Jewish Steel
Didn’t Obama win every demographic except white men? And don’t the sort of men who persist in voting Republican see their ideal selves as stern daddies who make tough decisions for the family?
Even if these proposals do no good for the economy, they do no lasting harm to the moneyed class. The kind of rhetorical climate austerity or war creates is motivational for the Republican base. Dimwitted white dudes.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@Ghanima Atreides:
when rich people talk about how they got so rich, part of the glory is that so and so was willing to eat mayonnaise sandwiches three meals a day for 10 years, or some such. they love talking about how once upon a time their people were hard core survivors, as if its transferable.
JGabriel
TPM Tweet of the Day:
How come Thomas Friedman never gets any cab drivers like this?
.
Martin
@Chris: Yes, I believe it was you. (Can’t seem to figure out what thread it was in.) It coincided with a comment from an acquaintance of mine the day before or so, who commented that he wished he could be a Republican. My (tactless) retort was “Why the fuck would you ‘wish’ for that? Either you agree with them or you don’t.” And his reply surprised me: “It would just be easier if everyone could solve their own problems.” Well, DUH! It’d be easier if I could shit gold, too. I got the distinct sense that he just wished he could stop caring about people that needed the social safety net. He couldn’t in good conscience actually do that, but he pretty desperately wanted that escape.
burnspbesq
@PeakVT:
Actually, it doesn’t. But there is a point beyond which additional wealth functions primarily as a way of keeping score.
EconWatcher
@Ghanima Atreides:
This book, filled with interesting statistics and analysis, makes an articulate (and to me, pretty persausive case) for how free markets and global trade have reduced poverty.
http://www.amazon.com/Defense-Global-Capitalism-Johan-Norberg/dp/1930865473
But its author, Johan Norberg, is a tragic case. A youngish Swedish libertarian, he wrote the above book, which is fact-based and worthy of consideration, when he was completely unknown in the US. But then Cato imported him to this country, and he essentially got onto the wingnut welfare circuit.
He then wrote a book about the financial crisis, which I thought would have a fresh take (based on the strength of his first book). But it was an unbelievable embarassment. He actually put ACORN and the CRA at the center of the story. It was like a parody of right-wing propaganda.
Another promising young mind lost to wingnuttery.
Bruce S
“Though Mooseferatu did use this line in her acceptance speech to the Republican convention. Commenters on blogs like ours treated the fact that she was quoting a speech against Medicare as a “gotcha”. In fact, we should have seen it as foreshadowing.”
Great catch – but surely she wouldn’t have tagged it directly to Medicare, which was what Reagan was doing. The GOP is even crazier now than when Reagan was a corporate spokesmodel, but they had to expend several presidencies creating “deficits as far as the eye can see” – deliberately – to give this horsehit they’re pushing a veneer of credibility. “Destroy the village in order to save it…”
Liberty60
@Frankensteinbeck (The ex-Uloborus):
Speaking of mythologies, another one that needs destruction is the notion that the public and private spheres are mutually antagonistic.
That is, that business interest and government regulation and investment conflict with each other.
This is utter nonsense- business prosperity DEPENDS on government regulation and public investment. FedEx, Wal-Mart, and the entire export/ import-based business sector wouldn’t exist without publicly constructed harbors, airports, highways and the like.
Real estate investment wouldn’t be profitable without the assurance provided by building and safety codes, restaurants couldnt function without health codes, and so on.
Again, its the religious fundamentalism of the glibertarians who refuse to accept the premise of a mixed economy, where private and public sectors cooperate and complement each other.
burnspbesq
@Ghanima Atreides:
Wait, what? Are you saying that the average poor person is worse off in 2011 than in 1811, or 1611, or 1411? That seems to be not supported by the evidence.
Or are you saying that there has been no upward mobility in the last two centuries? Sorry, I’ve seen the conditions under which my Irish ancestors lived, and I am unambiguously better off than they were.
Sly
@Liberty60:
It’s deeper than that: the market is actually a construct of the state itself, or at the very least the state’s monopoly on the use of violence. Without that monopoly, whether in the form of city guards patrolling a literal trade market or the SEC looking for securities fraud, there can’t even exist the pretense of just enforcement of contracts. Everything becomes conditional on the buyer being able to kill the seller if the seller rips him off.
dave
God, this is a fucking good post.
...now I try to be amused
@Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal:
Look up Monty Python’s “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch on YouTube for a good parody of rich men talking how hard they had it.
aisce
after thinking it over, i believe it comes down to racial supremacy, dougj.
the wealthy westerners fear a changing world order. as the “global elite” becomes truly global (and therefore browner or yellower or what have you), the almost millennium old system of white supremacy is existentially threatened.
and oppressors can’t help but imagine the oppressed are vengeful. the sad thing is that they’re not. it is a rare slave that seeks to enslave others in turn, they know that pain too well to do unto others. but the rich do not get this.
so they instead try to steal everything that isn’t locked down. they betray their own countrymen, the less well off, kicking them further down the ladder of opportunity. try to corrupt them, make them vicious like pit bulls. and then unleash these hardened and resentful masses on the burgeoning third world powers, while the rich consolidate their position atop the world forever.
Liberty60
OK, OK, not to spam the thread- but here is what I was thinking of when I hear nitwits bray “Government doesn’t make anything! It only steals our hard earned tax dollars!”
“What have the Romans ever done for us?”
and for a modern update of the theme-
“What have unions ever done for us?”
ETA @ sly-
So, what has gummint ever done for us?
Aside from the roads, harbors, bridges, sewer system, storm drainage system, of course the storm drainage system! Oh and air traffic control, food inspection, hospitals, disease control. And yeah, public enforcement of contracts, and a court system to adjudicate, yeah, thats pretty good.
Oh and public research and development in airplance, rockets, satellites, intertubes, yeah, couldnt do without that.
But still, GOVERNMENT DOESNT DO ANYTHING!
Chris
@Martin:
Well, sounds like he was rationally self-interested enough to realize that he couldn’t do it even if he wanted to, which is a step above most conservatives right now.
@EconWatcher:
You become part of a system that’s guaranteed to take care of you for the rest of your life. I can see why it attracts so many. (Although the ever-worsening rigidity of the rightie noise machine also guarantees a steady stream of people getting spit out, like Bruce Bartlett).
@Sly:
This. Free market – Government = CosaNostrastan, all day every day.
Sly
@burnspbesq:
Yes, living conditions are not static. But they aren’t static for both poor and rich. Poverty is a relational status precisely because of general upward mobility: the luxuries of one decade become the necessities of the next.
So what has generally happened for the past century or so is that the poor have been chasing a largely arbitrarily defined poverty line. A line that has remained constant (adjusted for inflation, the poverty line today is identical to the one implemented in the 1960s), and one that was designed as such on purpose. Because as soon as the non-poor suspect that actually addressing poverty will cost them something (and, usually, it will), anti-poverty programs would lose their political legitimacy.
...now I try to be amused
@Sly:
Yep. In a way, illegal markets are the freest markets. In another way, they’re the least free.
FlipYrWhig
@Litlebritdifrnt:
“Morgue attendant” is a job. :P
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
@…now I try to be amused:
or i can check on facebook for some folks i used to go to school with. amazing to see people evolve from summer camp bedwetter to club for growth donor…or maybe not so much.
bemused
@Martin:
It would be easier to be a Republican. You just gotta believe and you don’t have to worry your beautiful mind about anything. If the pinko liberals would just get out of the way, the Ryan plan will work beautifully, tax cuts to job creators and wealthy will trickle down, churches and good hearted folks will take care of everybody in need and the freeloaders will learn to straighten up and fly right. Easy, peasy.
Sly
@Chris:
You don’t give the mafia nearly as much credit as they deserve:
That’s what the organized crime syndicates are, when you get down to it. They enforce contracts that would otherwise be unenforceable by the state. A market without the state would actually be worse than the mafia.
Rihilism
Excellent post, Doug. Hilarious title too…
@Violet: Congrats, Violet. Me so jealous…
Shoemaker-Levy 9
I assume you’ve seen the Godfather movies?
Rihilism
@Violet: Oops, forgot to mention I thought Mooseferatu was hysterical…
Kathy in St. Louis
I do have one theory…really, I may be going crazy with this one, but…..Could Boehner have done this because the freshmen Teapartiers have been so awful for him to deal with that he let them see what how their totally nutty ideas would go over with the general public? This way,now that they have seen how totally pissed the general public is, they will shut up and get in line.
It is really the only possible scenario that I can think of for a suicide vote like this one.
Rebecca
@Sly:
Can you please elaborate? I don’t understand from the word “pretence” on, especially the last sentence, or at least who “buyer” and “seller” refer to.
Mandramas
@burnspbesq: I think that Ghanima says is that the inequity grows in near-free market condition. It is not that people on 1611 were better that today, it says that the breach between kings and serfs is not larger that today breach between CEOs and mexican unlawful immigrants.
Also, America had a large age of non totally free market age (mixed economy aka welfare state aka keynesianism), so the inequity theoretically should have dropped in this period, and it is the last point of reference valid.
scottinnj
The messaging for the Republican party is:
If you are rich – taxes are theft, you are paying more than your fair share already.
If you are middle class or lower – all that welfare/medicare etc isn’t being spent on Real Americans © (i.e. it is being spend on teh blacks and teh browns). So its a way for you to stiff it to the (not white) Man!
My evidence is just anectodotal but the most insensitively people I know are the most conservative.
Scamp Dog
@Rebecca: The unstated premise of the claim is “We won the class war, you lost, shut up and accept your defeat”.
Sly
@Rebecca:
Even in a well-regulated regulated market, corruption will exist on the part of regulators in the equitable enforcement of contracts (the agreements between buyers and sellers). In other words, the problem of the enforcers of contracts favoring one side over the other beyond what the law mandates can never be completely eliminated, just limited or mitigated. To use an example from another field, the possible damage inflicted on a community by a cop on the take is limited by by the presence of Internal Affairs, but not eliminated because perfect enforcement is impossible.
These are the kinds of inefficiencies that reasonable people live with. We know that corruption will never be eliminated, but we maintain the pretense that it can in order to make many of those inclined toward corruption fearful of getting caught and, in response, better regulate their own behavior. This is why the state has a monopoly on violence; not only to inflict punishment on those who break the rules, but to make people think twice about breaking the rules in the first place. Because if you break the rules, an organized band of people with guns will come after you, and they will have the sole authority by consent of the governed to detain or harm you if you resist them.
An unpoliced (or anarchistic) market doesn’t have either of these features. Nothing exists to prevent fraud except the ability of the victim to kill the perpetrator, which not only fails to prevent fraud, but actually incentivizes fraud. In other words, why would any of a landlord’s tenants pay rent if the landlord can’t call up the police and have them enforce the rental agreement by evicting you? He can’t. All he can do is shoot all of you, which doesn’t exactly solve the problem of not being paid.
Baron Jrod of Keeblershire
@burnspbesq:
Today, about half of the world’s population live in poverty that’s just as crushing as your Irish ancestors endured. Quite a few of these people are far, far, FAR worse off than their ancestors were in 1411.
There’s a whole world outside of Europe and the Anglosphere, and most of them are worse off thanks to unchecked capitalism. It’s lovely that you are doing better, but don’t pretend everyone shares your prosperity.
DanielX
“this notion that some people will never be able to enjoy Heaven unless they can also hear the screams of the tormented beneath them in Hell is something we understand quite well in Chicago. Here we call it “The Cubs/Sox cross-town rivalry” “….h/t Driftglass
What’s not to understand? Some folks regard suffering as a virtue, as long as they’re not the ones doing it. I mean, I’ve heard it, though it was sorta semi-coded…..Don’t you know the American working/middle class – in point of fact, anyone with a net worth of less than seven figures – has had it way too easy for way too long? It’s time for some fucking austerity around here! Now bring me my pheasant under glass, subhuman!
Robert Waldmann
Hippy is such a vulgar word. I believe that “only a hippie could oppose” should be “only a ‘fool or a Frenchman’ could oppose” I might grant you “only a Fonda, ‘a fool or a Frenchman.”
While we may disagree with the VSPs we must not plagiarize them. I am quoting Richard Cohen.
UncertaintyVicePrincipal
I agree with the sentiments entirely, but that post has to have more mixed metaphors and cliches in once place than I’ve seen in a long time.
They may be committing suicide, but they’d rather ram that down your throat when the chips are down by stabbing you in the back at the drop of a hat than bite the hands that feed them, because their default solution is to throw you under the bus.
It’s like an entire Itchy and Scratchy cartoon in a paragraph or two.
Chris T.
@Zifnab: $1M/year is chump change to a guy like Peterson. Think more along the lines of $100M/yr. Of course that just means that the 4% is more like $4M/yr, rather than $40k.
Also: it’s very easy to spend $1M/yr. Private jets, yachts, ten or twenty houses around the world, etc.: these things add up.
Ghanima Atreides
@burnspbesq: no, like Mandramas says, the inequality gap is the same between my great great great grandfather and his child chattel slaves as the gap between a feudal lord and his serfs as the gap between the owner of wallmart and the greeter old people or the gap between the california land-holder grower and the illegal immigrant picker.
The standard of living may rise, but the rough gap between the underclass and the overclass stays the same.
And yes, my upbringing and ancestry horrifies me when I think about it.
Its the same the same as freddies education thread. Why do we have private schools?
They are hotels for dogs.
Why do we think free market capitalism improves the human condition? Is there any evidence it ever has?
Can the “freed” market eat the rich even in theory?
I think its all myth, or conventional wisdom, or accepted knowledge, or religious belief.
And its bulshytt.
Ghanima Atreides
@EconWatcher: i dont deny that, because a regulated market performs better than a command economy. But I deny the teleological premise that free market capitalism improves the human conditition.
It can only improve the human condition of the overclass.
Here is a thought experiment.
Could a “freed” market ever actually eat the rich?
Tell me if you can figure it out please.
Ghanima Atreides
@aisce: the anglosphere (white anglosaxon christians) has simply been the global overclass. A fraction of the worlds population was able to command a disproportionate share of the worlds resources.
It was a very successful CSS for the last few centuries.
Ghanima Atreides
@DougJ
true, but lets expand this to the whole American economy.
If the free market is a fantasy, and free market capitalism does NOT decrease the inequality gap….
why do so many people believe in it?
Bill Murray
@EconWatcher: well you said he was a libertarian so he was already lost to common sense.
and here are some pretty compelling books by Ha-Joon Chang, who as far as I know doesn’t put ACORN and the CRA in the front of the Big Shitpile, showing that free trade isn’t all its cracked up to be
http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/B001P3OMQY/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1306528604&sr=8-2
http://www.amazon.com/Kicking-Away-Ladder-Development-Perspective/dp/1843310279/ref=pd_sim_b_2
trollhattan
In which Ryan clears up, uh, nothing.
http://www.tnr.com/blog/89129/paul-ryan-non-answers
DZ
@Chris T:
I have one rich friend. He just bought a new Gulfstream 5. $42 million. Interestingly, he and his wife are left-wing Democrats
Just Some Fuckhead
I have one poor friend. He is a douchebag and he’s never riding on my plane.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
i just sold some fuckhead a 25 million dollar plane for 42 million dollars.
profits like these, who needs friends.
Southern Beale
No, no. You have it all wrong. What’s most important is not fucking over the poor or the elderly, but that THEIR IDEOLOGY IS RIGHT. Even when all evidence points to the contrary, they must stubbornly and steadfastly hold to their free market, de-regulation, government-is-the-problem-not-the-solution principles.
That’s what it is. They don’t care who gets fucked over in the process. The important thing is that they stood by their ideology, no matter how wrong it is! It’s George W. Bush in Iraq all over again.
PurpleGirl
@efgoldman: I knew that name and story sounded familiar.
Col. Walter Kurtz is a character from Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
PurpleGirl
@efgoldman: The script for Apocalypse Now was written by Coppola and John Milius, based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Apocalypse Now takes place during the Vietnam war. Heart of Darkness was placed in the Congo Free State of 19th Century.
Joe Buck
Their plan is not only to gut Medicare, but to make Democrats complicit in the gutting, and then blame them for it. If they succeed, it’s all over.