Month: September 2019

The British PM they call BoJo

Thinks Brexit is moving in slow mo.

The Commons stands tall.

Will the king take a fall?

Or will he enjoy the last ho ho?

According to the Daily Telegraph, BoJo has announced that he will defy Parliament and refuse to negotiate a delay in the October 31 Brexit date. Frankly, I’m not surprised; it is, of course, another attempt to force Labour into agreeing to an early election.

The events of the last few weeks have had a whiff of the Stuart monarchy about them. Proroguing Parliament? Isn’t that something Charles II used to do? Now, with this direct refusal to follow the law, Boris is heading into Charles I territory.

Will he suffer the same fate, in a purely political sense? I’m guessing not. Like Trump, Boris understands his base, and most of the rest of his party is terrified of them.

Conservative Libertarians oppose redistribution because it inevitably results in an increase in the power of the state, and a decrease in freedom. Are they right?

It depends on how you define “freedom.” Redistribution is, in fact, associated with additional legal restraints on individuals (particularly wealthy ones) within society; that is commonly known as “negative freedom.” However, due to the operation of the principle of marginal utility, which I discussed in a previous post, redistribution may actually increase the practical alternatives available to members of society as a whole; that is called “positive freedom.”

A negative freedom guy argues that a poor person and a rich person are equally free to buy a Lexus in a just society, because the government puts no legal barriers in front of either one of them. He would further maintain, in all likelihood, that redistribution is a slippery slope, and once you start it, you’re on the road to serfdom. Personally, I would say that experience shows we have enough judgment to stop before we reach serfdom, and the marginal utility/positive freedom position is the stronger of the two. That’s why I’m not a CL.

The old joke in the Soviet Union was to the effect that the workers pretended to work, and the bosses pretended to pay them. That’s the inevitable result of creating a system with minimal material incentives for excellence. It’s a problem that socialist societies never solved.

Of course, people work for reasons other than material rewards, and systems with too much inequality tend to be politically and economically unstable, so there are arguments in the other direction, as well. It’s a balancing act, and different countries handle it differently. The United States tolerates more inequality in exchange for more dynamism than, say, Denmark. It’s a spectrum, not a black and white issue, and where you stand on it probably dictates the way you vote.

One of the central themes of Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign was his response to “You didn’t build that.” Romney’s argument, when stripped down to its essence, was that the hard work and brilliance of American businessmen were responsible for their (and the nation’s) prosperity, and it was unjust to take their hard-earned rewards away from them.

Is it a violation of natural justice to tax the wealthy on their earnings and to give the money to the less fortunate? Of the arguments made against redistribution, this one is the least persuasive, because:

1. The wealthy did not create themselves, in a biological sense;
2. Nor did they educate themselves;
3. Nor did they create the physical, social, legal, and political climate in which their businesses were permitted to thrive. As I’ve noted many times, all that brilliance and hard work goes to naught if you live in South Sudan;
4. The wealthy rely more heavily on the legal system than poor people do to defend their assets and rights, so it is fair for them to pay more for it;
5. A large percentage of the assets owned by the wealthy were not created or earned by themselves; and
6. Someone has to pay for government, and you can’t get money from people who don’t have any.

Obama was right; individual initiative plays a part in the creation and growing of business, but it can’t and doesn’t happen outside of a nurturing environment for which all of us, not just the wealthy, are responsible. Redistribution to prop up and improve that environment is not, therefore, unjust.

At one point during the 2008 presidential debates, John McCain responded to an Obama comment by saying, essentially, “Aha! You support redistribution!” He acted like a guy who had just scored a touchdown and was spiking the football. It was self-evident, to him, that the American public hated any notion of redistribution.

Today, things are very different; a substantial degree of redistribution is supported by the mainstream of the Democratic Party. Here are the principal justifications for it; an analysis of the objections will follow during the rest of the week:

1. SIMPLE HUMAN COMPASSION: No elaboration is necessary.
2. IT’S NECESSARY FOR THE PROPER WORKINGS OF OUR POLITICAL SYSTEM: If inequality becomes too great, the system inevitably is “rigged” in favor of the wealthy. Sanders and Warren would say we’re already there today.
3. IT’S A MATTER OF MARGINAL UTILITY AND POSITIVE FREEDOM: A dollar in the hands of a plutocrat doesn’t really enable him to do anything he can’t already do, whereas an extra dollar in the hands of a poor person can make a very real difference in his life.
4. A HOLLOWED-OUT MIDDLE CLASS IS BAD NEWS FOR THE ECONOMY: A substantial measure of redistribution has the potential to revive the American middle class, and thereby increase consumption and economic growth over the long run.

Elizabeth Warren’s signature policy proposal, the wealth tax, is probably unconstitutional. Her innumerable plans are seriously flawed, and have little chance of becoming law. Her insistence on “fighting” about everything will simply exhaust and further divide the American people. She has no meaningful experience in foreign policy, and what few ideas she has on dealing with the rest of the world sound like left-wing Trumpism. So is there a case for electing her?

Yes. As everyone knows, she’s very bright. She’s capable of changing her mind if the facts require it. Given the difficulty of her upbringing, she’s tough, and her heart is in the right place. She knows as much as anyone could know about personnel and the workings of the administrative state. She would be able to handle Putin’s dog. Her personal morality is beyond reproach. Overall, she would make a decent president.

And so, I will vote for her if she is the nominee, even though she is far from my first choice.

“Corbyn better than no-deal Brexit, say investment banks,” in the Daily Telegraph. Need I say more?

Whether you support them or not, you have to admit that the Tories have been a genuinely conservative party; they support property rights, traditional values, adherence to longstanding constitutional norms, incremental change, and balanced budgets. Until now, of course.

The new version of the Conservative Party under BoJo is nothing of the sort. It believes in tax cuts, deficits, risk-taking, and trashing constitutional norms. It is a revolutionary organization determined to bring about fundamental change in the UK at all costs.

In other words, it sounds a lot like the GOP.

America is about freedom, first and foremost. Millions of people, the vast majority of them from Europe, came to this country to escape oppressive governments and to embrace new economic opportunities. Thanks to a system of limited government, they built the most prosperous and powerful nation on the planet. Anything that pokes a hole in this story is just a footnote.

America is exceptional, all right. It was born in slavery and the theft of property from Native Americans. The Founding Fathers were slave-owning hypocrites. The system was racist from the beginning and remains so today. American prosperity was built on slavery; American capitalism even today retains a whiff of the brutality of slavery. Anything that pokes a hole in this story is just a footnote.

America is an imperfectly realized ideal. Many of the Founding Fathers might have been racists and slaveholders, but the ideas and the system they created contained the germ of a better, fairer, more democratic tomorrow. The system has evolved over time, and will continue to improve with experience, a few hiccups along the way notwithstanding. America, for all its flaws, has been the final guarantor of peace and prosperity throughout the world. Today, it is more diamond than coal.

Pick one. Everyone else has.

BoJo, Rees-Mogg, and the rest of the ERG merry men behaved with complete impunity during the last year or so; they essentially operated as a party within the Conservative Party. Theresa May did nothing to stop them, largely because she thought, in the long run, she could sell her Brexit deal by proving that all of the alternatives were either worse or impossible. It didn’t work.

Today, the shoe is on the other foot, and Boris is threatening everyone who opposes him with excommunication. That will persuade anyone who has future ambitions. He only has a majority of one, however, and there are plenty of patriotic Tory grandees who will be willing to defy him. And so, the election is coming, as he undoubtedly knows.

Word is trickling out that the scope of Israel’s undeclared air war against Iran and its proxies is wider than we were first led to believe. Given my past criticism of the Israeli government, you might think I’m critical of that, but I’m not; my principal issue with Netanyahu is his desire to bamboozle America into doing his dirty work for him, and the increased level of conflict suggests that Israel does, in fact, have some skin in the game.

No, the real concern should be that we only hear about the war during election campaigns. Could it possibly be that Netanyahu is leaking this information because he wants to remind everyone how dangerous the neighborhood is, and how indispensable he is? He wouldn’t be cynical enough to do that, would he?

Of course he would.

Unlike my parents’ generation, mine never had much enthusiasm for unions. For right-wingers, the reasons were obvious, but even among many on the left, unions were just mouthpieces for reactionary white men with no interest in addressing the obvious social injustices of the day. If you wanted someone to beat up a Vietnam War protester, the first person you would call was probably a hard hat. The well-documented association with organized crime didn’t exactly help, either. And so, when the GOP came after the unions following the 1980 election, they couldn’t count on much public support.

Today, thinking on the left is very different; unions are given credit for raising wage levels and fighting inequality. There is something of a consensus among Democrats in favor of changing the laws to make unions more powerful. If they succeed, will things be different than they were in the 1960’s?

Yes. Today’s economy is very different, and the frontier for unions is not reactionary white men (some of whom are still union members, and now vote GOP), but groups such as home health workers who are largely comprised of women and minorities. Those organizations will inevitably have different interests than the unions I heard about as a child. And that’s perfectly OK.

THE BOOK OF AMERICA

1. And so, the Word of the Lord was observed by the Europeans, and the Lord was pleased, although He would have preferred that they stop needlessly slaughtering each other over minor points of doctrine.
2. In the rest of the world, it was a different story. The inhabitants kept their own customs, and disregarded the Lord’s will.
3. So, the Lord called upon the Europeans, and told them that they were His chosen people, and that they should impose the Word on the rest of the world, and exercise dominion over it.
4. They responded faithfully to the Lord’s call. They took possession of much of the rest of the world, appropriating its resources and either killing or enslaving the indigenous people along the way. And the Lord was content, because the Word now ruled almost everywhere, and his chosen people were flourishing.
5. He was particularly pleased with the new citizens of America, which was colonized by godly people determined to make the new country a shining city on a hill.
6. This they did, for many years. But then they lost confidence in their status as the chosen people. They started to believe that the ungodly had rights, too. They even thought it was OK to violate the Lord’s commandments on marriage and sodomy, and to banish true religion from the public sphere.
7. The righteous among the Americans wailed and called on the Lord for assistance.
8. He responded by sending them Donald Trump, who, with His (and Vladimir Putin’s) assistance, miraculously defeated the sorceress Hillary Clinton and fought tirelessly for the righteous against the sodomites, the liberals, and the people of color.
9. Trump even built a vast wall with the Lord’s help, and thereby stopped foreigners from swamping the culture of the righteous. America thus became a new ark in a rising sea of sin and irreligion.
10. The new ark survived when the Lord destroyed the rest of the world. The righteous and the Lord were thus vindicated, and America was made great again.