This graph comes to us from Paul Krugman, Competitiveness and Class Warfare. He uses it primarily to make the case that the idea of national competitiveness is nonsense. You can see that most starkly with France, which has a strong welfare state, and the United States, which has an extremely stingy one. (Don’t worry about the slight divergence at the very end; that is due to the catastrophic austerity policies in the EU.)

There is a long tradition of people freaking out about other countries becoming too competitive and the US falling behind. There is always some “star” country that people are afraid of. In the 1980s, it was Japan. Now it is China. And this supposed question for competitiveness is always used to make the lives of Americans worse. It is a reason why we have to destroy unions. It is the primary reason why must make public education boring and turn our children into top quality multiple choice test takers. And it is the reason why we must bow down to the “job creators.” Otherwise, China will take all our jobs and we will starve to death.

This isn’t to say that any nation can do anything it wants. There are a lot of things that can hurt the economy. But what it does mean is that the things that people in this country complain about don’t matter. The supposed big problem in France is that employees are really hard to fire. But we certainly don’t see that in terms of GDP growth. Similarly, with the Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality. Japan and France are relatively low at 63 and 69. But the United States is 85 — one of the highest in the world — even higher than Zimbabwe.

What this shows is that our economic system is the way it is because we’ve made it that way. There is nothing natural about it. And more to the point, these policies are not designed to grow our economy. Milton Friedman’s old idea is just wrong: it isn’t that the rich are pulling away but that the lives of the poor are being improved as well. In fact, there is more and more indication that all of this inequality is also bad for the rich.

To me, it is all very simple. I’ve been hammering on this for a while. If we don’t have an economic system that shares gains relatively fairly, then there is no point to continue on with it. What we have is a system that is already highly unequal. And then we add to that a system that just makes inequality worse over time. And then we add to that a system where the poor have little chance of becoming rich. And we end up with the modern equivalent of feudalism.

I know the conservative (and even more so, libertarian) response to this: we just haven’t gone far enough! The system is “free” enough to cause problems but not “free” enough to fix them all. But this is based on an idea that just doesn’t fly. There are almost no systems in any field of endeavor that just get worse and worse until you reach the solution and are then suddenly good. In general, if you follow a path and things are getting worse, it means you are going the wrong direction. See gradient descent.

But I think conservatives understand this. They are not pushing these policies because they think they are ultimately good. Instead, they think that the market (corrupt as it is) has picked the correct winners and so we should do everything we can to further help them. This is why libertarians are almost always against labor unions. It has nothing to do with freedom — much less the common good. It is just that they have decided that businesses are “good” and workers are “bad.”

The rest of us need to stop buying all this nonsense about how screwing over the poor and middle class is actually for our own good. It isn’t even for the overall economy’s own good.

Chris Dillow at Stumbling and Mumbling wrote a very interesting article that is worth digging into, Back to Pre-Capitalism? It follows after Paul Mason’s article, The End of Capitalism Has Begun. I’m all for an optimistic take on the future. But if history shows us anything, it is that the power elite are really good at warping society to their purposes. What’s more, the power elite are usually willing to sacrifice their own absolute status in the name of maintaining or increasing their relative status. Thus — contrary to Milton Friedman — they are more than willing to trade their own economic gain if the net result is that their economic status gets better relative to the rest of society.

I’ve long argued that we are moving in the direction of feudalism. The nature of unfettered capitalism is that the winners of the economic system will have more power to distort the political system. This is a positive feedback, which means that it is unstable: the more power the rich get, the faster they gain further power. The end result of this is not some kind of libertarian utopia but rather a kind of feudalism, where people aren’t necessarily slaves, but they also aren’t free. It’s kind of like the conservative’s idea of freedom of speech: you can say anything you want to, so long as you don’t.

Dillow offers three aspects in which he thinks that we are moving toward a pre-capitalist era. This starts with the fact that people are turning into generalists. Capitalism was all about specialization: factories with trained people making the one thing that they could make most efficiently. But now, few companies are willing to pay enough to get and hold onto trained workers. So we end up with a situation where workers have to hold down two or three jobs — maybe someone works at McDonald’s by day and drives for Uber at night. No special skills in those jobs. People doing it are like the serfs of old.

The second aspect is a turn against globalization and toward the local economy. At it’s worst, this is represented in hostility toward immigrants. “You can see all these as recrudescences of feudalism — a cleaving to community and belief that one’s fate should be tied to where one was born.” I’m not convinced that we are actually seeing this, however. I think the anti-immigrant movement is based upon the fact that Americans are seeing their standards of living going down. It is always easier to lend an open hand to others when you aren’t worried about your own survival.

Dillow’s third aspect is secular stagnation, which he blames on the replacement of the entrepreneur with the bureaucracy. I like this idea very much. For conservatives, bureaucracy is this thing that is associated with the government. But in my life, the bureaucracies that most interfere are those of private companies. The big companies are not like free-wheeling revolutionaries; they are staid bureaucrats. What creativity they have is exhausted on manipulating the political system and taking more money for the top management and owners, and away from the workers. The net result is slower overall growth, but excellent growth for those at the top: secular stagnation.

The main thing that Dillow is getting at is that our economy is becoming more hierarchical. And that goes against the idea of capitalism and very much toward the idea of feudalism. As soon as I’m done writing this article, I’m going to write one about the lack of a labor market in the modern American economy. (It won’t necessarily be published after this one, but I’ll try.) And I would say that this is all inevitable. If there is no governmental check on a capitalist economy, it naturally works itself to feudalism. But it might be just as accurate to say that if democracy is not allowed to hold in check any economic system, it will naturally become something very much like a feudalism.

On 1 March of this year, Charly Keunang was killed by police officers in Los Angeles. He was unarmed and black — as if that cliche even has to be mentioned. But there is an issue that stands apart from the fact of unjustified police violence. As Janine Jackson reported recently, To LA Times, Meth in Skid Row Victim’s Blood More Important Than Gun in His Flesh. This refers to a headline in The Los Angeles Times, “Skid Row Shooting: Autopsy Shows Man Shot Six Times, Had Meth in System.” Because, you know, that explains everything. Just so you don’t think the headline distorts the article, this is the lede, “A homeless man killed by Los Angeles police officers earlier this year on downtown’s skid row was shot six times and had methamphetamine in his system at the time of his death, according to an autopsy report.”

There were other ways to report on the autopsy. Jeff Sharlet wrote, An LA Cop Pressed His Gun Into the Chest of an Unarmed Man And Shot Him Through the Heart. He was pretty clear:

But The Los Angeles Times’ reporting is entirely typical. The truth is that journalists have close relationships with law enforcement. They are great sources of tips for reporters. How else do you think that the newspapers find out that this or that celebrity was caught in a porn theater? So it isn’t at all surprising that it works the other way too: the police know they can depend upon reporters to create stories that spin the news in their direction.

For two decades now, I’ve been writing with some exasperation that our society thinks that drug use is worse than murder. There are many facets to that. For example, there is the way that drug felons on parole are required to do drug testing but paroled murders are in general not. Inside the criminal justice system, there really is the feeling that murder is just an unfortunate thing that happens to a large extent because of bad social environments. That’s true! But the same people who are understanding about this want to treat drug users in a particularly punitive way.

I’m constantly amazed how the specter of drugs can be used to totally invalidate wrongdoing. After George Zimmerman murdered Trayvon Martin, much was made of the fact that Martin had cannabis in his system. Many liberals were surprised at the time, “What does that have to do with anything?” But that is exactly the point. The idea is to paint the victim as one of “those” people who cannot be trusted.

In the case of Charly Keunang, the emphasis is more, “Who knows what he could do while on drugs!” But the same thing can be said without the drugs, “Who knows what he could do!” The actual evidence that drugs make people violent is only strong for alcohol. A big part of that is our society’s dysfunctional attitudes towards drugs. There’s no point in testing if heroin, meth, or cannabis makes people violent. They must be because they aren’t sanctioned by the government!

Meanwhile, Charly Keunang is dead. And The Los Angeles Times is there to run with old, biased stereotypes of drugs and drug users — all in the name of protecting a group of men who, under the cover of protecting the community, murdered an unarmed man.

I still hear conservatives talk about the Surge during the Iraq War. It continues to seem bizarre to me for a few reasons. First, the Surge didn’t work. It just corresponded to the Awakening when moderate Sunnis started fighting against the jihadist elements in Iraq. Things didn’t improve because we sent in an extra 30,000 troops. I thought this had been well established. Second, the Surge didn’t win the war; it just took it from a total catastrophe to a smaller catastrophe. But third and most important, who cares what happened in 2007?! That was almost a decade ago. Why are conservatives continuing to talk about it?

The solution was found in an excellent article by Peter Beinart, The Surge Fallacy. Right about the time of the Surge, conservatives were turning against the neoconservative project in a big way. But all those same people are now back on board. And the reason is the supposed success of the Surge. I suppose it does go along with another favorite conservative myth: the “We weren’t allowed to win in Vietnam!” narrative. By that myth, if only the military had been allowed to drop more bombs — Or nuclear bombs! — then we would have “won” the war. I think of it as the “parking lot” approach to war and it shows that people who push these ideas have no clue what war really is.

But what Beinart calls “the legend of the surge” is even more pernicious:

Of course, Bush had not “won” the war. Although the violence was greatly reduced, the Surge itself hadn’t succeeded at it’s main goal: political reconciliation. The point of it was to create a stable political system where the “Sunni and Shia Arabs and its Kurds all felt represented by the government.” This never occurred. It’s not hard to see why. The Shia had been oppressed for a long time. Now they had power and they were going to use it:

That’s long before 2011 when Obama supposedly screwed everything up by withdrawing troops. But this isn’t to say that Obama is blameless. It is just that the things Obama did to harm the situation (mostly supporting the corrupt, power hungry Nouri al-Maliki) are things that the Republicans agree with. The point is that there was a bad situation under Bush. It got no better under Obama. The problems in Iraq are the result of that, not the withdrawal.

Beinart ended by noting that the Republicans are right back to the hubris that brought us the Iraq War in the first place. But even though most of the Republican candidates for president are talking about sending ground troops into Iraq, that is unlikely to happen. But there is a broader problem:

That’s even more frightening. But the Republican Party has always seemed like jocks in the locker room before a big game: pumping themselves up as though they can win by will alone. The Iraq War shows that wisdom comes very slowly. And then, with the slightest hint of success, it is jettisoned for their easy bellicosity.

It has been interesting to watch the debate against the Iran nuclear deal. That’s because it is entirely faith based. No one has anything of substance against it. They constantly say that the alternative to this deal is a “better deal.” Generally, they never say what that better deal would consist of. But when they do, we find out that their “better deal” is one where Iran capitulates not just about everything regarding its nuclear problem but other things as well — like officially declaring support for Zionism. And the truly annoying thing is that even if such a deal came, the same people would reject it because they would say Iran can’t be trusted.

So what we have here is the same old argument that conservatives have always made: they just don’t want a deal of any kind. These were the same people who didn’t want to talk to the Soviet Union and communist China. And they are the people who still don’t want to talk to Cuba. And in none of these cases will they admit to what they really want: war. To them, war should always be like World War II with the total capitulation of the Germans, Italians, and Japanese. I think it comes from some sense that the “good guys” must always vanquish the “bad guys.” I don’t think we need to dig too deep to see the television western roots of such arrested development.

Brian Beutler wrote an excellent response to this last week, Republicans Who Oppose the Iran Deal Are Making Promises They Can’t Keep. He noted that the implication of the “better deal” argument is that they are all for diplomacy, it is just that all the negotiators of the P5+1 are incompetent and gave everything away. If only they had done the negotiations, then Congress would now be voting on the “better deal.”

This is a curious claim coming from people who were against even negotiating with Iran in the first place. What’s more:

Beutler went on to compare the “better deal” line to the Republicans’ constant claims that they will replace Obamacare with a better law. Of course, that better law never shows up. That’s because all this complaining that we can get better laws and better deals is just a stalling tactic. It’s very much like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s approach to a two state solution with Palestine. For years, he’s been claiming that he’s holding out for a better deal. But it’s clear what he’s actually doing: destroying the possibility of any two state solution. Because again: total capitulation is the only kind of “deal” that he thinks is good enough.

The question is how long we as a nation are going to put up with these fantasies from conservatives? I’m the first to admit that Obamacare is suboptimal. I would indeed like to replace it with something better: single payer healthcare. The Republicans want to replace it with something worse: what we had before with some long wished for conservative ideas that have nothing to do with making healthcare better or more available. In the case of the Iran nuclear deal, it’s even worse. If Congress manages to kill this deal, all the other countries will back away from us and side with Iran. And they will be right to do so.

Bruce Bartlett wrote an interesting article last week, Will Donald Trump Crack-up the Republican/Tea Party Alliance? He speculated that Trump could cause a rupture between the two parts of the Republican Party: the social conservatives and the business interests. But as usual, the article is filled with Barlett’s cognitive dissonance. There are just some things he really wants to believe like the idea that the Tea Party ever had much support for economic conservatism. It was always overwhelmingly about about social issues. If it cared about mortgage relief, it was only because “those people” were getting it. The libertarian rhetoric to come out of the Tea Party was only the result of what Bartlett admits was astroturfing.

The other thing that he seems to miss is that Donald Trump does not represent a conflict within the party. In fact, he bridges the two sides of the party. He’s a big business guy who will provide just the kind of policies the business community wants, and he provides plenty of red meat to the social conservatives, without offering much in terms of substance on policy. That is pretty much the definition of the traditional Republican Party. So how is it that he represents such a threat?

As far as I can tell, the reason that the “establishment” side of the Republican Party doesn’t like Donald Trump is because they don’t think he will win in a general election. Their outrage concerning his comments about Mexican immigrants is purely political: they think it is bad among swing voters. But when it comes to his policy positions, we hear nothing from the party establishment. Are they against his immigration policy on its own terms (not on how it looks outside the party)? Are they against his ideas on taxes or social programs? The only policy I know of that they seem to have any problem with is his opposition to privatizing or “block granting” Social Security.

The whole thing brings me back to a quote I read from a liberal blogger a long time ago. He had once been a Republican. He said (more or less), “The hardest thing about being a Republican was never being able to say what you actually believe.” Yeah, it’s not pleasant holding views that are repugnant to the vast majority of people. And this is what the Republican “establishment” doesn’t like about Trump: he is explicit about many of the traditional dog whistles. Does anyone really think that Bush’s Willie Horton ad was about furlough programs? Clearly, Trump is too smart to go after African Americans, but he is doing the same thing about more acceptable targets of hate.

So I don’t see Trump causing any harm to the Republican Party. If any harm is done, it will be by the Republican “establishment” and its desire to destroy Trump, even though he is in no way an outlier in the party. The truth is that I don’t see what the big deal is about Trump. If he weren’t running for president, the remaining candidates would still have been all over Planned Parenthood and voodoo economics. The problem isn’t Trump but the party itself. Sure Trump demagogues the Tea Party. But so do the other candidates.