I have long thought that Watergate backfired on liberals. Pretty much any Republican malfeasance harms liberalism because it harms the idea that government can be a force for good. I’ve become really frustrated with what I see as casual cynicism: the idea that everyone is out for their own gain and no one is any damned good. This is implicit in the “both side do it” argumentation so loved by the mainstream media.

Yesterday, Matt Yglesias pointed out an excellent example from Ron Fournier where he complained that Obamacare was “a one-sided law.” So if Republicans explicitly boycott a law because it will provide political benefit to the president, both sides are equally at fault. Similarly, Dean Baker pointed out, “Robert Samuelson does the old ‘pox on both your houses’ routine, complaining about Republicans who want tax cuts for rich people and Democrats who defend Social Security and Medicare.” All of this pushes the idea that government is corrupt and there are no good politicians. And what that means is that the Republicans win, because that is the idea that they are pushing.

There is no doubt that this has been a major issue since Nixon. But there is another issue that was brought up in a Thomas Frank interview with Rick Perlstein, How ’70s and ’80s Cynicism Poisoned Democrats and America. In it, Perlstein brought up a major change in the kind of Democrats who got elected in 1974. It was kind of the start of the New Democrats. I’ve discussed this in the past to the extent that I refer to Jimmy Carter as the proto-New Democrat. He was, after all, the guy that really started the deregulation frenzy, rolled back Nixon’s policy of detente with the Soviet Union, and pushed forward debt fixation. But I always thought that he was something of a singularity. Not so:

And that means that liberal — Populist! — economic policy was largely dropped. Hart and company didn’t argue against the conservative economic policies of the Republicans. In fact, they largely agreed with them. Later in the interview, Perlstein noted, “And a lot of these post-New Deal Democrats, by the way, come out of the New Left and the New Left had this very problematic relationship with the labor movement, who were seen as sort of the Cold War consensus.” This has long been a problem with our new upper and upper middle class political establishment. They have no real experience with the working class. And this is why Republicans — even while being horrible for workers on a practical level — have managed to paint Democrats as a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show.

The big problem with this is not just that Democrats elect nothing but conservative presidents like Carter, Clinton, and Obama. The problem is apparent in the fact that the Republicans claim these conservatives are leftist extremists. And that allows people like Ron Fournier and Robert Samuelson to define a new liberalism that is far to the right of Nixon. By abandoning liberal economic policy, the Democrats have not only directly harmed the American middle class, they have also made any real discussion of change impossible. Now even the most traditional of economic policies are met with cries of, “Socialism!”

This is why I see the primary problem in American politics as being centered around the Democratic Party. If we want a more reasonable conservative movement and Republican Party, the solution is for the Democratic Party to move to the left on economic policy. But the sort of people in the media who are always looking for compromise and occasionally fretting about the extremism of the Republican Party always call for exactly what caused our current problems. Fournier thinks that there is some magic trick whereby if Democrats just move the right amount to the right in the right way, the Republicans will move the left and we will all sing “Kumbaya”! But just the opposite has happened and will continue to happen. When the Democrats move one step toward the Republicans, the Republicans move two steps away. And it is only studied ignorance that allows pundits to not see this.

Consistency is a laudable goal, but not something to get too hung up on. I very much agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…” Just the same, some level of consistency is important. At very least, the attempt keeps us intellectually honest, because one can only finesse an argument so far before it crumbles. In the field of politics, we see inconsistency in the form of hypocrisy — and hypocrisy of the most premeditated nature.

My favorite example of this is Obamacare. As Scott Lemieux noted early this year, Obamacare is not the same as the Heritage Foundation plan. But the one main thing the two plans share is the most hated thing in Obamacare: the individual mandate. And as late as John McCain’s 2008 campaign for president, Republicans were fine with the individual mandate. But the moment it was in the Democrats’ plan, it because, “Socialism! Socialism, I tell you!” This is not a foolish inconsistency; this is a profound and disingenuous inconsistency — the stuff of villainy.

So I was interested but not at all surprised to read Jonathan Chait this morning, Why Is This Bush Official Flip-Flopping on Obamacare? Simple answer: because he’s a Republican. The person in question is the president of the American Health Policy Institute, Tevi Troy. In 2007 — you know, when a Republican was in the White House — he wanted to tax the so called Cadillac healthcare plans — those worth over $15,000 per years. But yesterday over at The Wall Street Journal, he wrote, Another ObamaCare Deception. The whole article is about how the Obamacare tax on employer provided health insurance above $27,500 would be — Wait for it! — a tax!

So when Republicans are in the White House, a tax on plans worth more than $15,000 is just good sense. But when Democrats are in the White House, a tax on plans worth more than $27,500 is going to impoverish the American worker. Clearly, this is just more Obamacare punching. If it’s in Obamacare, Republicans hate it, regardless of what they thought before. Notice that the Cadillac tax has always been greatly loved by Republicans because it is another way to harm union workers. Only people in strong unions (and managers, who will just vote themselves raises to offset it anyway) get these kinds of plans. It show the lengths to which Republicans will go to attack the new healthcare law.

As I said, this is not a surprise. If you burrow down deeply into conservative ideology, what you will find is… nothing. That explains the obsession with purity — it is all they have. This is the reason that there has been no replacement plan. Their’s is an ideology of annihilation. They hate Obamacare not because of what it does but simply because it does anything. We saw much the same thing with the Republican response to Hurricane Katrina. President Bush seemed to treat it the way the cargo cultists did when trying to get the airplanes to come back. He seemed to think that all that was necessary was for him to drop by and look at the damage (From a plane!) and he was done. He had cast his spell!

When Republicans are in power, they are incompetent. When they are not in power, they are against everything. They are, in a word, nihilists. The problem is that they won’t admit it. And that is why they can’t help but contradict themselves from administration to administration.

This morning, Jon Swaine reported Ferguson: Video Shows Darren Wilson Arresting Man for Recording Him. Wilson, of course, is the Ferguson police office who shot and killed Michael Brown. You know: the man who is soon to be officially not indicted because police officers are never held accountable? Based upon conflicts between the video and what Wilson actually said in his report, many are questioning if Wilson can be trusted in what he says about the Michael Brown shooting. I have a slightly different take on it, but first, let’s go over what is going on with this video.

Just over a year ago, Officer Wilson came to the home of Mike Arman to deal with a citation regarding “derelict vehicles” on the property. Arman wanted to record the encounter. Wilson apparently thought that the video recording was verboten, because we live in a police state. He told Arman to stop photographing him, “If you wanna take a picture of me one more time, I’m gonna lock your ass up.” And then Wilson arrested him for “failing to comply” with Wilson’s orders. Subsequently, the charge was dropped.

I think that the incident shows what we already know about police in general and Darren Wilson in particular. They all think that everyone should bow down before them. They are jerks. The law doesn’t matter. If they don’t want you recording an incident, they will arrest you. The worst that will happen is that the charges will be dropped. And that means that the innocent civilian who was simply exercising his constitutional rights was punished for it. Meanwhile, nothing happens to the officer, except that he learns that he can do anything he wants — often including killing people — and there are no consequences.

What has been clear from the very beginning is that Darren Wilson has an attitude toward those who he polices. Conflicts are not going to be de-escalated; he is going to make situations worse. It seems that he was trained that way in his first job with the police department in Jennings, Missouri. According to the Washington Post, “What he found in Jennings, however, was a mainly white department mired in controversy and notorious for its fraught relationship with residents, especially the African American majority.” It doesn’t seem that anything has changed.

My experiences with the police — both personally and what I’ve observed — is that they always treat people with barely disguised hostility. A lot of it is that they’ve all convinced themselves that their jobs are really dangerous. They don’t, but that’s what they’ve convinced themselves. This is why they act like pussies, using clubs, tasers, and guns at the slightest provocation. But in addition to that, they are insular groups who spend far too much time together and far too little time in the great big world. So they understandably develop an “us versus them” mentality.

What is not understandable is why the departments don’t do more outreach and training. Instead, we have to wait for things like the Michael Brown shooting, even though it was clear last year that Wilson was a tinderbox waiting to explode. Consider the encounter with Mike Arman. Wilson was just there on a citation — the equivalent of a parking ticket. But he apparently didn’t feel that Arman was giving him enough respect. So he arrested him. That isn’t the behavior of a professional government official. That’s the behavior of a thug. We didn’t need the death of Michael Brown to know that.

For years I’ve been grappling with a question. How is it that technology and infrastructure affect the amount of money a business owner makes. According to most people on the right, a person’s or company’s value is exactly (or very nearly so) based on the amount of money they make. But think about a man who makes hammers. If he lives in 1750, it doesn’t matter how cheaply and quickly he can make hammers, there will be distinct limits on the number that he can sell because of distributional limitations. But this same man living today would have almost no limitations and so could make vastly more money. What’s more, because he was selling so many more hammers, there are various scaling effects that would also bring his costs down and his profits up.

This example highlights the fact that the man is not necessarily making what he is worth. The modern hammer maker is paid more not because of anything he is doing but simply because of the existing technology and infrastructure that he was gifted. The greater profits are therefore not due to individual achievement, and therefore should not go to the individual — at very least, not entirely. This strikes me as a devastating argument and so I’ve wondered why I don’t hear economists making it. But I figured it had to be floating around.

I think the reason the argument isn’t more widely discussed is because it is easier to simply assume an economy without Sam Walton and then compare it to the economy with Sam Walton. The difference is what Sam Walton is worth. It is much more complicated to consider what actual value he adds. To me, it is as simple as considering one of the most basic economic ideas: the opportunity cost. The question is not how much Walmart adds to the economy, but how much Walmart adds to the economy compare to other options.

Consider the world of classical music. What if the best violinist in the world had never been born. He makes millions of dollars. Would all those CDs not be sold? Would all those concerts not occur? No. Instead, the second-best violinist would have a better career. And the world would be negligibly worse off, because the difference in ability between and the best and the second-best is razor thin. If you want it quantified, consider the 100 meter run: if Usain Bolt had never been born, the world record would be 9.69 instead of 9.58 and Yohan Blake would be doing those Puma commercials.

I have found someone who is talking about this kind of stuff. Recently, Dietz Vollrath wrote, Scale, Profits, and Inequality. His primary interest is in regard to taxation and its effects on innovation. As you know, I think most arguments about innovation are just cons. The idea that people innovate in order to make billions of dollars defies human psychology. Everyone wants to make money, but billions of dollars is out of the range of normal thinking. And regardless, no one considers how much their marginal tax rate will go up before creating something new. “I was going to invent a cold fusion reactor, but then they raised the top tax bracket to 39.6% and I said, ‘No, no, no!'” What rubbish.

Vollrath noted that the quantity of a product sold “depends on the aggregate size of the economy.” He continued:

I would go further, of course. I think that the “genius factor” is greatly over-prized. It too is constrained by social factors. For example, Linus Torvalds’ genius was entirely dependent on the genius of Richard Stallman and the creative environment he established. I’ve always found Stallman to be a rare singularity in the history of innovation because he is so idiosyncratic. There is no question but that Torvalds is brilliant, but eventually some programmer was going to do what he did; I’m not as certain about that when it comes to Stallman. Regardless, people like Jobbs and Walton were not singularities.

This issue is more difficult to argue. What isn’t difficult to argue is that when Sam Walton was computerizing his distribution system he was not thinking, “This is worth doing because long after I’m dead my family will have more money than they could ever spend!” But even if he had been thinking this, all he was doing was harnessing a collective resource that our current system allows to be taken entirely as individual profit. Vollrath noted:

The reason we don’t see more of this kind of thinking is that macroeconomics is largely apologetics. (See Economic Apologetics and The Myth of the NAIRU and Its Purpose.) Ideas that push against the interests of the powerful are ignored or held to ridiculously high standards of proof. Ideas that flatter and enrich the powerful are true until proved otherwise. But I’m glad that there are economists out in the world that are talking about issues like scale effects. I will continue to look for more.