Thomas Paine’s most visionary work was Agrarian Justice where he called for a Social Security kind of system for everyone over the age of fifty as well as a one-time payment to be made for everyone at the age of 21. It was to be funded with inheritance and property taxes. So it was actually a whole lot more liberal than Social Security, which is based upon a regressive tax and doesn’t provide any starting capital to young people. It was published in 1797, and if it were proposed today, it would be met with screams of “Socialism!”

It was written for the French Republic, although he took pains to note, “The plan contained in this work is not adapted for any particular country alone: the principle on which it is based is general.” In addition to being far ahead of our own time, the pamphlet is notable for its detail. Most of it goes into depth about how the program would be paid for. In roughly 6,000 words, Paine provides far more detail than was found in any of Paul Ryan’s budgets that were so loved by Washington journalists everywhere.

What is most interesting about the work, however, is the logic that he presents. I love it because it shows that he understood the problems with property rights. They provide a good to society, but with a cost: people can’t just start farming or hunting or foraging anywhere they want. He noted that native peoples in America had a standard of living that was greater than the standard of living of the poor in the “civilized” world. Just the same, they had a standard of living that was less than that of the rich. As a result, the rich should offset this deficit suffered by the poor through a small redistributive program.

It’s very simple. Yet even most liberals I talk to don’t understand it without an explanation. To Americans, the idea of property rights seems almost God given. But even on the most basic level, there is a cost to property rights: the cost of a government to enforce them. It is much more than just this, of course. The problem is that in modern America (and I assume most other places at most other times), most of the costs of property rights are hidden because they fall almost exclusively on the weakest people in society.

I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of just how generous Paine was being. He offered £15 to people at the age of 21 and £10 per year to everyone 50 and older. I managed to find the United Kingdom Nation Archives calculator for this purpose. But when I put in £15 in 1800, it told me that would be worth £483. This is roughly what £15 in 1960 would be worth today.

Looking at it another way, Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice is worth £10,000 per year. That’s in 1813 and he is unimaginably wealthy. But that income is supposedly only worth £340,000 today. That’s a lot of money to someone like me. But that is nothing compared to Mitt Romney (roughly $20 million per year at least), who is a small player — certainly nowhere near as rich as Mr Darcy. Similarly, in Jane Eyre (1847 — fifty years after Paine), the heroine is paid £30 per year as a governess. That’s less than £1,800 per year.

If we figure that the calculator is off by about a factor of fifty (and I think that is low), the lump sum payment at 21 would be roughly £25,000 ($40,000). And the old age pension would be roughly £16,000 ($26,000) per year. Note that Paine was offering a much more generous retirement than we do today in the US. But that shouldn’t surprise anyone; the United States has one of the most stingy retirement programs of any developed country.

It bugs me that politics in the United States have regressed. Of course the Republicans are totally unhinged. But the Democrats have spent the last two decades pushing ever to the right. If he were alive to day, I don’t think Thomas Paine would feel any more comfortable in the Democratic Party than I do. Certainly it is true that since Paine’s time, things have improved. But we seem to be headed in the wrong direction. In 1965, it was easy enough to think that things would only get better. But since then, the economic environment has gotten worse. And more than ever we need Thomas Paine. But we always have. We have still to catch up with his thinking from over 200 years ago.

There are big happenings in the Senate modeling community: the election is looking better and better for the Democrats. And I think this is excellent news for the country. But not in the way you probably think, coming from a Democrat.

Just two weeks ago, the Senate election model of The Upshot gave the Republicans a 67% chance of taking control of the upper chamber. But it has been coming down steadily since then. It currently gives the Republicans just a 52% chance of taking the Senate. Even the FiveThirtyEight model is down to a 59% chance. But what’s interesting is that it is now the outlier. No one else gives the Republicans that high a chance. Daily Kos gives the Democrats a 51% chance of keeping the Senate. And the Huffington Post model gives them a 57% chance of keeping the senate.

This isn’t to mention Sam Wang. He’s been bullish on the Democrats for a long time. He currently gives them a 70% chance of keeping the Senate on election day. (He gives an 80% chance if the election were held today.) But the most amazing change came from The Monkey Cage model. A couple of months ago, they gave the Republicans an 86% chance of taking over the Senate. That’s because the model at that time was entirely based upon fundamentals. But up into this last week, it still gave the Republicans a slight advantage. At least it did until today. Now they give the Democrats a 50% chance of keeping the Senate.

It is important to remember that none of this means that the Democrats will keep the Senate. But I think it means something far more important. The fundamentals are on the side of the Republicans. There are far more Democrats up for re-election than there are Republicans. The economy sucks. Obama has low approval ratings. Really: the Republicans ought to be looking at gaining ten seats. Instead, they are looking at six if everything goes their way.

What I think we are seeing at long last is voters punishing the Republican Party for its insanity. I think the constant obstruction and doing the bidding of the rich has finally seeped into the thinking of more casual voters. This isn’t a profound realization. It’s more like people preferring Coke to Pepsi: they just have a vague feeling that the Republicans aren’t worth giving yet another chance to. And it is manifested in Democratic candidates doing just a couple of percentage points better than they normally would.

This could be very good news for the nation. I don’t mean that because the Democrats might well hold the Senate. That’s good but nothing exciting. If the Republicans fail to take the Senate after this very favorable election and then they get clobbered in 2016, the party finally will reevaluate its “race to the right” commitment. And that is absolutely a good thing for America. We need two sane parties. The current situation cannot stand. Of course, if the Republicans do not change, there is my old standby: they become a regional party and the Democratic Party breaks in half.

Regardless, that’s what we are looking at. Anyone who cares about the Republican Party should hope that they blow this opportunity. Because you know what will happen if they manage to just get 51 seats in the Senate. There will be people everywhere talking about how this shows that liberalism is dead and how everyone repudiates Obamacare. And if the Republicans only manage 50 seats, the more reasonable but still wrong narrative will be that the country has turned against Republicans. But that’s an exaggeration that could be very good for the nation.

Increasingly, American political discourse is the very worst kind of relativism. This is especially true on the right. Conservatives seem to think that reality is whatever they want it to be. Say it enough times and it is true. Just like in Nineteen Eighty-Four, what two plus two equals depends, “Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once.” So everyone was pleased when various media sources came out with “fact checkers.”

But very quickly, it was obvious that they were useless. The television networks followed up the 2004 presidential debates by noting three inaccuracies made by Bush and three made by Kerry. It was always equal, even if Bush had said that there were WMDs in Iraq and Kerry had said there were 50 million uninsured Americans when there were actually only 49. And so the act of false equivalence became high art.

Such ridiculousness has become passé. But now we have the official fact checkers who are with us every day. We have Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post and Fact Check but most of all, we have PolitiFact. To give you just a little taste of the stupidity that is PolitiFact, consider the statement from Eric Bolling who said that the US has “the highest corporate tax rate in the free world.” This is a common conservative talking point. It is intended to deceive and it does deceive. But it is technically true. PolitiFact gives it a “mostly true” rating, saying, “Officially, US rate is high, though firms usually pay less.” That’s right, but that doesn’t make the claim any less true. I hate when they do this, even when it is to someone as richly deserving as Bolling.

But flat out the best example of PolitiFact’s absolute incompetence came this last week, after Jeff Merkley said, “Social Security has never contributed one cent to the deficit. Not one cent.” Note that last sentence: people don’t usually add things like that if they are not 100% certain about what they are saying. And indeed, Merkley is completely right. Yet PolitiFact gave the statement a rating of “half true,” commenting, “Splitting the difference on Social Security.”

On Wednesday, Michael Hiltzik called foul on this one. It would seem that PolitiFact thinks that Social Security only gets revenue from payroll taxes. This is not true. It also gets revenue from income tax on Social Security benefits (from people who have enough extra money from other things to owe it) as well as from interest it gets on the Social Security trust fund. In fact, even though since 2010 Social Security has been paying out more than it has been collecting in payroll taxes, it is still bringing in more money in total than it is paying out. And it is projected to continue taking in more money than it is paying out until the year 2019, at which point it will have to start drawing down the trust fund.

After being so publicly called out, you would think that PolitiFact would note its error and at least change its rating to “mostly true.” But no. As Hiltzik pointed out today, A “Fact-Checking” Website Doubles Down on Its Social Security Errors. Instead of dealing with the criticisms, the writer of the original post, Dana Tims, sets up a straw man and whacks it down. Hiltzik explained:

But there is a fundamental pardox with fact checkers. They have to be seen as unbiased. And in order to be seen as unbiased, they have to always come down somewhere in the middle. It is like the old power paradox of John Boehner where he only has power as long as he doesn’t use it. We live in a nation that has one rather typical political party with all that is good and bad about that. And then we have the Republican Party that has largely moved fulltime to Cuckoo Town where reality is whatever anyone says it is. In this kind of political system, it is only one who let’s facts guide him regardless of how that is viewed who can truly be a fact checker. I don’t know what PolitiFact is. But it doesn’t help anyone figure out what the truth is. And in this case, all it does is confuse people about how Social Security actually works.

Afterword

If you want to know about Social Security, you really should read Social Security: The Phony Crisis by Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot. It is now 13 years old and just as valid today as ever. I wrote a discussion of the book a couple of years ago, if you are interested.

Should kids look up to Martin Luther King Jr as a role model? You might think they should, but that’s just because you are another liberal Frankly Curious reader with no more sense than God gave a donkey — and not one of the smart one, but one who went to school on the little bus. You see, it turns out that King was not a perfect man. You may have heard about extramarital affairs. In addition to this, King was much shorter than Malcolm X. How can you look up to a man who is so short. (Disclosure: Martin Luther King Jr was exactly my height.)

All of that might have been overlooked. But did you know that MLK was a plagiarizer?! Thirty-six years after he got his PhD in systematic theology, a Boston University committee found that, “There is no question but that Dr King plagiarized in the dissertation by appropriating material from sources not explicitly credited in notes, or mistakenly credited, or credited generally and at some distance in the text from a close paraphrase or verbatim quotation.” Can you imagine?! The man didn’t properly footnote his dissertation!

It is important at this point to note that it is because students tend to take these kinds of shortcuts that there are dissertation committees. In my experience, dissertations are not given sufficient scrutiny. But there is a good reason for this. Most people are far more interested in whether the new work is important and correct. Most of any given dissertation is just a retelling of what work has gone before. And in this case, the same committee that found that King had plagiarized also found that his dissertation made an important contribution to scholarship, which is the only thing that matters.

There is little doubt that King’s dissertation has been picked over more than almost anyone’s in history. The reason for this is doubtless good and bad. There are those who want to diminish him, because let’s face it: there are a lot of people who still don’t think African Americans should vote. But on the other hand, there are many who just want to know who the great man was.

And now we know: Martin Luther King Jr was a man, like so many others. But he was also a man who did great things. And his worst doesn’t even rise to the level of my worst. And it is in the noise compared to men like Ronald Reagan. So yes: children should admire Martin Luther King Jr. We all should. We should admire him for the great things he did. And the fact that he was a little lose with his dissertation citations and his marriage vows doesn’t mean a thing.

Libby Nelson wrote a great article over at Vox this week, Ranking High Schools Tells You Which Schools Are Rich or Selective. It isn’t about the Education Reform movement. But it does show the lie to it. The article is based on The Daily Beast ranking of the 700 best high schools in the United States. And surprise: the best schools are the ones that are rich or only let in the best students.

But don’t forget: the issue is teacher tenure and nothing upsetting to the power elite like school funding! We have an educational system that, like most of our society, is set up to help those least in need of help and to let those most in need of help languish as we tell them, “Anyone can make it in America; if you haven’t made it, it is your own damned fault!” It is pathetic and I can’t think about it without thinking what an idiot Jonathan Chait is.

Of the top ten schools on the list, only one has a student body where over half the students (63%) get free or reduced-cost lunches. It is the School of Science/Engineering in Dallas. And it is selective. The best students from throughout the Dallas area go there. So it isn’t surprising that 100% graduate or that 98% are college bound or that 100% take Advanced Placement courses. These are largely students that would do this in any environment.

What we are seeing is that the policies of those in the Education Reform movement have already succeeded at mostly separating the best students out of the normal public school system. This allows them to scream all the louder about how the public school system is not performing for our children. The whole thing is based upon the fact that poor children don’t do as well as rich children for the normal environmental reasons as well as unequal funding of schools. And the Education Reformers have managed to make the situation even worse for the average poor child.

If we lived in a rational country, we would look at The Daily Beast rankings and decide that we had to do something about inequality in our educational system. Instead, we just seem to shrug, “What are you gonna do?!” I suspect that among conservatives, the unstated belief is that the rich are just better than the poor and that’s why their kids do better. It’s all just status quo apologetics.

At her blog, Diane Ravitch recently wrote, Researcher: Success Charter Chain Built on Hyperbole. It notes that the Success Academy charter schools have just lied about who they serve and how well they perform. For example, they claim that they serve the same number of special needs students. But, in fact, while less than 1% of their students have special needs, over 10% of the public schools in the area have special needs students. They do this same kind of misrepresentation in many other ways. I think we would all agree that, just as The Daily Beast rankings show, if you only pick the best students for your school, you will do better.

It is annoying to have to discuss these things. Whenever I do get into an argument with people in the Education Reform movement, they always say the same thing: we can’t do anything about school funding, but we can do something about teacher “tenure”! So it’s the same old American idea: it is better to do something, regardless of how bad it may be, than to do nothing at all. And in the case of Education Reform, the people who determine what can be done are billionaire “philanthropists” like Billie and Mindy.

In 50 years, when The Daily Beast ranks the top high schools in America, it will find the same thing: the best schools are filled with rich and specially-selected students. And the only thing that will have changed is that teachers’ unions will be long gone, teachers will be paid a lot less, and the poorest students will be served even worse than they now are. But not to worry! Rory John Gates III (Billie’s great-grandson) will get a great education!

Steve Biko was a political activist who worked against the apartheid regime in South Africa. In the late 1960s, he helped to form South African Students’ Organization and was its first president. By 1972, his political activities were so successful that he was thrown out of college. And the following year he was “banned” by the South African government. That meant he was forbidden from speaking to more than one person at a time. And he was confined to his township. And he could not write for or speak to the media.

Let us take a step back from this. In the United States at this time and for another decade and a half, conservatives in the United States spoke of apartheid South Africa as though it were the shining light of democracy in Africa. According to these conservatives, the rulers of South Africa were the modern incarnations of the Founding Fathers. But we all know what was really going on. The rules were white, so it didn’t matter what they did. And the oppressed were black, so it didn’t matter what was done to them.

Despite these restrictions, Biko continued to organize. The Soweto Uprising was highly successful, and was put down by the regime with its characteristic restraint by setting dogs on the school children and then shooting them. At least a couple hundred where killed and over a thousand wounded. After this, the regime decided that they really needed to go after Steve Biko, even though he was not directly involved.

On 18 August 1977, Biko was arrested at a check point under a law that ought to sound familiar to Americans who have been paying any attention to events in America over the last several decades, Terrorism Act No 83 of 1967. He was tortured for 22 hours. This resulted in Biko slipping into a coma. Then he was chained to a window grill for a day. Just short of four weeks later, he was transported 700 miles to a prison that had hospital facilities. He died the next day — 12 September 1977 — 37 years ago today. Wikipedia provides the following tragic but entirely typical conclusion, “The police claimed his death was the result of an extended hunger strike, but an autopsy revealed multiple bruises and abrasions and that he ultimately succumbed to a brain hemorrhage from the massive injuries to the head…” You know: the police never do anything wrong. And they can never be held accountable regardless, “After a 15-day inquest in 1978, a magistrate judge found there was not enough evidence to charge the officers with murder because there were no eyewitnesses.”

The one good thing about Biko’s death was that it really did publicize just how awful the apartheid system was. Over 10,000 people came to Biko’s funeral. So he was a martyr to the cause that he had worked his whole adult life for. So I can see the beauty in his life and ultimate sacrifice. But it mostly just fills me with rage.

Here is Peter Gabriel’s song “Biko”:

It seems like the time for these signs, right? During World War II, the British government used these “Keep Calm and Carry On” motivational posters to keep morale up as cities were being bombed. But that’s not like us. We don’t go in for that whole “stiff upper lip” thing. Panic and horror are more our way.

Think about the Rambo films. That’s your modern America right there. It isn’t about thinking through things and making the best of a bad situation. It is about taking a bad situation and making it much worse. We believe above all in freaking out, as long as we get a nice happy ending where the mentally broken homicidal hero kills everyone and is safe to do the same thing in the sequel.

So have at it, my fellow Americans! Let’s panic and freak out! I only request one thing: don’t pretend that we are strong. We aren’t. We are like frightened children. And we aren’t rational. We’ve allowed some bad news in the world (And there is always that!) to be used against us to push television ratings up and increase the power of disingenuous politicians. But there is nothing new is that. That’s what we always do!

This is why we are always for the newest war. We chant, “We’re number one! We’re number one!” And then, after a few years, we calm down. The sky wasn’t really falling. There weren’t terrorists under our beds. Heart disease and cancer are still by far the most common ways we die. And we look back and say what we always say, “That was a mistake.”

So let’s sing it all together:

Because that’s the important thing. In fact, that’s the American thing. Overreact to everything. Behave badly. Look back on it with shame. But don’t learn anything, because that might change the cycle. And if Americans didn’t constantly freak out about everything, how would we know we were Americans?

Jonathan Bernstein is frustrated, Ted Cruz’s Empty “Sister Souljah” Moment. He can’t figure out why people would call this a “Sister Souljah” moment. I share his frustration, but it is easy enough to explain: smarter conservatives are so desperate to find signs of the slightest amount of reasonableness in the Republican Party that they act stupidly. And shockingly, the conservative doing this today is the generally very smart and insightful David Weigel.

What Ted Cruz did was very simple. He blasted some Middle East Christians for not being big enough supporters of Israel. Not surprisingly, the people he spoke to did not like what he said. They booed him. But since when it angering an audience a “Sister Souljah” moment? If that were the case, Chris Christie would have a long line of such moments. But no one thinks he does. Instead, they think he is just a bully.

The point of a “Sister Souljah” moment is to increase your “moderate” credibility by attacking part of your own constituency. Democrats are great at this. The New Democrats don’t seem to believe in anything so much as they do attacking their own base. Criticizing the labor movement is hugely popular. Such moments are extremely rare coming from Republicans. But Bernstein notes a good one: Rand Paul attacking voter ID laws. And how do we know it was a “Sister Souljah” moment? Because he almost immediately backpedaled. What he said really was an offense to his base and an effort to appeal to the middle. The same can be said of Chris Christie’s attack on anti-Muslim bigots.

But what exactly did Ted Cruz risk? Unwavering support for Israel is absolute Republican orthodoxy. Going before unfriendly audiences to tell them that you are just as extreme as ever is not a “Sister Souljah” moment. It shows a little bit of guts. But no one has ever questioned that Ted Cruz is a true believer who is willing to tell anyone that he is right and they are wrong. Weigel is pushing the definition of the term so far that Ted Cruz’s Green Eggs and Ham filibuster could be so named. After all, he was telling all of America things they didn’t want to hear.

But what’s going on with Weigel? It’s got to be that he just got excited. But this kind of thing really calls into question his objectivity. And this is something he clearly prizes. As a libertarian, he takes a kind of centrist position so he can laugh at both sides. But this article is off the rails. It is titled, Watch Ted Cruz Turn a Political Problem Into a Pro-Israel Sister Souljah Moment. And it ends, “Sister Souljah achievement: Unlocked.” That sounds more like cheerleading rather than reporting or even analysis. And this is always the problem with people who have major ideological axes to grind pretending that they don’t.

It’s 9/11, there is another drumbeat for war with Iraq, and the neoconservatives are everywhere telling us we must make the same mistakes they helped us make a decade earlier. This raises the question, why does anyone care what they have to say? Jonathan Chait wrote a very good article about the neoconservative reaction to the threat from ISIS, Dick Cheney and the Neocons Would Like to Celebrate This 9/11 by Freaking Out Over Iraq Again. Before Chait has a chance to write a corresponding article about people like me on the other side of the question, I thought I would run through his insights and see if there is anything there worth thinking about.

His intensions were not to explain why the neoconservatives act as they do, but only to describe the basis of their arguments. There are four aspects. First, there is the focus on being “serious” in response to the threat. Second, there is an apocalyptic assessment of the threat. Third, there is the blurring or complete erasure of the distinctions between various parties. And fourth, there is the dismissal of the possibility that anything bad might happen because of overreaction; the only threat comes from not reacting enough.

What’s especially interesting about this is the focus of on “seriousness.” The truth is that their ideas are deeply unserious. The overall vision is this: we should go to war with everyone we don’t like in the region because ISIS is an existential threat to us and the only thing that might hurt us is if we don’t act right now with overwhelming force. Last night, Ted Cruz went on Fox News and said that there is a threat that ISIS is coming through the Mexico border, even though when pressed he admitted that there were no credible indications that this was happening.

What this all reminds me of is Malcolm Nance’s observation of the neocons at the State Department under Bush after 9/11 and their desire for “Tom Clancy Combat Concepts”:

The key word in that description is “childlike.” It’s like a game to these people. This is why the major neoconservatives are chicken hawks. They have to be. They can’t understand anything about real war. And they don’t understand what Karl von Clausewitz laid out 200 years ago, although the idea is far older than that, “War is not merely a political act but a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same by other means.”

What’s amazing is how the media take all this posturing as serious enough for coverage. What the neocons offer in terms of policy is far less serious than what the Quakers offers on the other side: war is always wrong. Yet no major news outlet thinks that the Quaker take on geopolitics needs to be considered. In fact, even people of my persuasion who think that war should be the last option are not considered serious enough for much coverage. Instead, the “liberal” response to any problem is just to drop bombs on people, which is still, you know, war.

I know what the media would say about this. People like Cheney and Cruz running around doing their Chicken Little routine has to be covered. They are obviously passionate about the threat they see, even if it is not a substantial threat. But these same media apologists don’t seem to think that the far larger group of people who are worried about global warming need to be given a huge amount of coverage.

I doubt that anyone seriously thinks that the neoconservatives have any credibility at this point. But the media have a vested interest in pushing for war. It’s good for ratings. Getting everyone worried about global warming would only result in policy and, you know, people working to fix the problem. But Cheney and company running around frightening the nation would result in super cool war footage that would likely go on for years.