In general, I don’t think that reproductive rights are that big a political issue. They seem to to represent a kind of binary choice for the middle of the political spectrum. As long as a candidate seems like she isn’t going to make abortion illegal outright — or even if she just doesn’t place too much emphasis on the issue — the voters are willing to give a pass. But at Thursday night’s debate when Scott Walker claimed that there should not even be an abortion exception for the life of the mother, he slipped over the line. And so did Rubio and Huckabee. And we know that Ted Cruz is right there with them. I don’t think any of these candidates have a real chance in a general election.

This is interesting, because a lot of pundits think that Marco Rubio would be a great general election candidate. He is “Latino” after all — not that you would know it from looking at him. But he certainly abolished all arguments that he is a moderate with his claim that there should be no rape or incest exceptions. To be clear: I find that position morally superior to the more usual, “We’ll let women have abortions if they didn’t enjoy the sex.” But for most people, no exceptions is toxic.

The problem in the presidential election seems to be the Planned Parenthood fake sting videos. I haven’t written much about this because it makes me so angry. But the whole thing is turning out to be something of a dud. For most people, it is just another case of conservatives going after Planned Parenthood. The only place it is really getting traction is with the hardcore anti-choicers. The videos didn’t change their minds. But they apparently think that if they keep showing the videos to each other and acting outraged, that it will have some effect.

The only effect it seems to be having is making the Republican presidential candidates pander to them in a big way. My biggest complaint while watching the first Republican presidential forum was the repeated use of the Planned Parenthood videos to pontificate about abortion policies they were all pushing long before. It’s annoying to listen to them totally mischaracterize the videos. But it is ultimately useless, except in putting them all on the record with their extreme opinions. So it would seem that it’s been a good thing for the Democrats.

In addition to all the screaming about abortion, all the candidates now want to defund Planned Parenthood. This is curious. Even the Republicans will admit that what Planned Parenthood is doing is not against the law. The arguments really have gone down to the point of complaining that the people working for the group talked about it too cavalierly and that it is “icky.” But these Republicans are not trying to make tissue donation illegal. Instead, they are going for defunding. It’s been widely reported that only 3% of what Planned Parenthood does is abortions. But more to the point: the federal government doesn’t fund any of those abortions. So why do the Republicans want to defund the rest?

None of this is very surprising. Jonathan Allen noted that the whole thing doesn’t look good, Republicans Took a Big Political Risk on Abortion in the Fox Debate. He wrote, “The fundamental problem for the GOP is that it is sprinting to the right on a major social issue that has tripped up its candidates over and over again.” But I’m not sure how they could avoid it. Being anti-choice is one of the most popular positions they have. Given that Scott Walker and Marco Rubio have come out as such pure anti-choicers, it is going to be hard for Jeb Bush to avoid it. And Ben Carson is on record as being just as extreme. In the end, the Republicans’ best chance may be to nominate Donald Trump.

One day, I was walking past a faculty member’s office in graduate school, and I saw the iconic New Yorker cartoon, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” It was not long after I had put up my first website, but the cartoon had nothing to do with that. It was a reference to newgroups and AOL. The cartoon works on many levels, but it communicated a widely held belief — then and now — that you can be anyone online. I thought it was hilarious. But there is a problem with the cartoon.

The truth of the matter is that “nobody knows you’re a dog” is only something that neophytes believe. Once you’ve been on the internet, you come to realize: everyone knows who the dogs are. I’ve seen it in my own life as a blogger. I used to make silly comments on other blogs. I was often pedantic. In a general sense, I did a lot of things that screamed, “I’m new to this!” That’s not to say I’m perfect now. I offend people when I don’t mean to. I make jokes that fall flat. But I don’t think anyone mistakes me for someone who doesn’t know more or less what he’s doing. And that’s just as true of the stuff that I’ve written on this blog.

But when a commenter comes here and starts yelling at me, I quickly know what breed of dog they are. They think they are anonymous. But the truth is obvious. Because of what I write about, I’ve often gotten people claiming to be successful at business. They say this because of course I’ve never run a business because I’m a liberal with profound doubts about capitalism. And they think that they can claim to be successful businessmen (It is always men!) because they’ve made a fetish of capitalism. But if that were the case, what are they wasting time on my site? They obviously don’t come here because they like the content. They are just trolling because they are bored.

For the record, I assume conservative trolls are either high school boys who can’t attract a girlfriend or people on disability who spend most of their time in a state of outrage as a result of Fox News and hate radio. I also get college age boys who just can’t believe that I don’t see the deductive beauty of libertarianism. But the point is that I know who they are. I don’t just know they are dogs, I know the breed, I know the sex, and I very likely even know the kennel.

The reason I bring this up is because Scott Eric Kaufman posted a flame war he had with someone on a listserv, I Want to — but Can’t — Hate the Person Who Roped Me Into This Conversation. It all started with a neo-Confederate who was upset that someone wasn’t giving Robert E Lee respect. Kaufman wrote pretty much exactly what I would have, that Lee “fought treasonously in defense of slavery, end of story…” Thus began multiple exchanges between Kaufman and someone who he is too kind a person to expose. But it isn’t much of a conversation because the neo-Confederate mostly just spits bile and posts enormous emoticon images (really, check out the article).

But I was struck by the end, when the neo-Confederate wrote:

The neo-Confederate repeated this kind of thing. Yet he knows that Kaufman works for Salon and thus does, in fact, work for a living. But here’s the thing: I’m certain that the neo-Confederate did not have “big boy worky time.” But I’m not getting at the fact that he is clearly just trying to save face and get out of the flame war he started. That’s obvious enough. I’m getting at this: he doesn’t work at all. He talked about his 85 year old mother (who can kick Kaufman’s “little sissy ass.”), so I figure he is in his late 50s or early 60s. He’s never really had full-time employment. He is either now living off his mother’s Social Security or is on disability — very likely for mental problems.

I don’t mean to put the guy down. In fact, like Kaufman, I feel very sorry for him. And I could be wrong about who he is. But one thing I am 100% certain of: he isn’t the regular working Joe who he claims to be. He’s too crazy. The best you can say about him is that he was drunk. And that either means that he was going to work drunk, or he was lying about going to work. Regardless, this little dogie is not fooling anyone.

On this day in 1971, President Richard Nixon ended the convertibility of US currency to gold, thus ending the last vestiges of the gold standard. The major move against the gold standard took place during the Great Depression, of course. But this move has given the Federal Reserve more power to fight recessions, although I personally feel that the Fed uses its power in far too conservative a way to fight inflation. But that’s what is so bizarre about the gold standard crowd: they are always freaking out about coming inflation. But other than during the 1970s, inflation has been far lower off the gold standard than it ever was on.

The truth is that gold prices are not at all stable. A couple of years ago, I wrote, Gold Is Not a Good Investment — at Least for 500 Years. It includes a graph that shows the overall volatility of gold’s value, and also that it’s value has done nothing but go down over time. But there is also the story of Musa I of Mali. In the early 14th century, he took a trip to the Middle East. He spent so much gold, that he destroyed its value, throwing the region into a decades long recession. There is nothing stable about gold.

Still, we continue to hear the gold bug nonsense. Now part of it I understand. There are people making lots of money selling gold to these easy marks. But the people pushing the ideas seem to really believe it. (Even Rand Paul and Glenn Beck who seem to make a lot of money off it as well.) And gold bugs have been saying the same thing for decades: economic collapse and hyperinflation! What they don’t seem to understand is that the rich are in control. The rich don’t want to allow inflation or economic collapse.

But it is easier to place all of their outrage on the backs of shadowy bureaucrats who want to destroy capitalism as we know it. These people are just silly. And there are a lot of them out there. I run into them all the time. Alex Jones and pretty much anyone who is into conspiracy theories will eventually get around to thinking that we must have the gold standard. All they do is give the rich even more power. They are the most useful of fools.

Add Upworthy to the list of amazing websites that I’d never heard of. Today, I heard about them because there is a bit of a dust up about them, Upworthy’s Lefty Owners Scared Employees Out of Unionization. The company was founded by Eli Pariser, the former director of MoveOn. It is supposed to provide an outlet for “meaningful” content with a progressive edge to it. But like with most companies, when the employees wanted to organize, the owners freaked out. Labor unions might be fine for General Motors, but not for an internet company!

But don’t think too poorly of Upworthy. They aren’t ogres. The company does have a very good reason for resisting unionization: it is dying. Most of the traffic that Upworthy gets is via Facebook. And last December, Facebook changed the way it calculated its page rankings, and Upworthy saw its traffic cut in half. So the company is struggling. And management is afraid that if the workers unionize, it will scare off its already weak interest from venture capitalists.

According to Eli Pariser, the company did not say no to the workers. It just encouraged them to hold off because, “Doing this now at Upworthy could come at a cost to the company in terms of our ability to raise capital.” It’s not a totally unreasonable argument. Just the same, I know businesses. It is never a good time for anything — especially for unions. So I have a hard time taking this too seriously. I have to wonder why the company didn’t start off unionized. For a company pushing its liberalism as a brand, that might have been helpful. Regardless, I don’t see this story are a fight between good and evil. Upworthy is in a bad place, and it makes sense for workers to be understanding of that.

What I find much more concerning here is the way that an interesting company has to depend upon establishment companies for its fortune. There can be all the brilliant entrepreneurs in the world, but if the existing economic structure stifles them, what does it matter? And that’s clearly what’s going on with the venture capitalists. A liberal company isn’t allowed to be liberal, because the capitalists don’t think they will make as much money. And then, there is the whole issue of Facebook being so large that it can pick winners and losers. This is interesting because conservatives are forever talking about the grave threat of the government picking winners and losers. But we have an economy where major corporations pick winners and losers and they just don’t care.

The why I increasingly see things is that we need to get past the idea that our problems are do to individuals or companies or even industries. The problem is the system itself. And before we can even get to that, we need to see the problem. I don’t necessarily think that socialism is the solution, although clearly a social democratic system with a mixed economy is far better than what we have. But we live in a world in which people take capitalism as a matter of faith — as though no better system is possible. And the people who think this are as blind as those who thought feudalism was the best possible system.

The case of Upworthy is interesting, because it shows that even when people start companies with the best of intentions, they are constrained by the flaws in the wider economy. We need to start thinking about that, and working toward a better system for replacing it.

I am a strong supporter of Bernie Sanders. But it isn’t without some reservations. If I were an ideologue, I wouldn’t be a Democrat. I am very much in favor of strategic voting. So I have some concern as to whether Sanders acceptance of the “scary” socialist label wouldn’t be enough to destroy his chances in the general election. But in general, I don’t think so. I think “socialism” is a bad word primarily to people who would never vote for a Democrat. For most people, “socialism” means Sweden, not communist China. And Sanders’ policies are so popular, that I think the attacks wouldn’t stick.

But when I heard that Lawrence Lessig was thinking about running for president as a Democrat, I thought it was odd. I’m a big fan of his. Just the same, I have a problem with people who have no political experience running for president. It just isn’t what we as Democrats are. Above all, Democrats are competent. Governing is a question of skills. The Republicans may think that all a candidate needs is the right ideology, but the results of that can be seen in the House of Representatives right now. What does Lessig think he is adding to the debate? Is it really important enough to take time and attention away from candidates who are actually qualified to run for president?

The question defies a simple answer. Lessig is pushing the Citizens Equality Act of 2017. He says that he would serve as president only until it was passed into law. It has three parts to it: first, it would assure the equal freedom to vote (make elections a national holiday); second, it would assure equal representation in Congress (eliminate gerrymandering); and third, it would secure citizen funded elections. I don’t think any liberal would have a problem with this. And as Lessig indicates in the following video, it really isn’t partisan. Except that it is because conservatives know that in a fair fight, they lose, because their ideas are bad.

I guess Lessig is trying to push against the argument that I’ve made that he doesn’t have the experience to lead the country, by saying that he will resign after the law is passed. But that doesn’t really fly for a couple of reasons. First, it requires not only that he be elected, but that a Congress be elected that would agree with the Citizens Equality Act. That’s certainly not going to happen. What’s more, Lessig would be running as a Democrat. At least a third of the country is going to vote against him just because of that. On this level, his candidacy doesn’t make sense.

But as pretty much everyone is saying, the bigger problem is that Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin O’Malley are all in favor of the plan. So what’s going to happen? We’re going to have a debate where Lessig says, “Citizens Equality Act!” And the other candidates say, “Sure!” Lessig himself says that he knows other candidates care about the issue, but that they don’t have a plan for getting the policy passed. But neither does Lessig given that there is no way in hell he is ever going win the nomination, much less the general election.

As a Sanders supporter, I don’t understand why Lessig doesn’t just help Sanders’ campaign. In his work, he could highlight Sanders’ support for electoral reform. He could also push Sanders even further to the left on the issue. That seems like a much better use of his resources. But I’m open minded. If Lessig starts attracting thousands of people to his events, or starts getting a couple percent in polling preferences, I’ll give him a look. As for now, I’ll forget all about this ever having happened. But maybe I’ll read Republic, Lost again.

Carly Fiorina has surged in the polls for the Republican presidential nomination. This is the result of her performance in the “kids’ table” debate last Thursday, but I doubt it indicates that people were watching. Rather, Megyn Kelly was gushing about it during the regular debate and I’m sure that Fox News has generally been pushing it. She’s a good candidate for the Republicans: rich but a failure at business, no political experience, and the same policy ideas as every other Republican. You gotta love that!

Last weekend, she was on CNN, where we learned that, Carly Fiorina Opposes Paid Maternity Leave Mandate. That’s a shocking headline in its banality. Of course she’s against a government mandate for maternity leave; she’s against any government mandate. She’s against raising the minimum wage, and I suspect if she were honest, she would admit that the very idea of the minimum wage offends her. She’s a corporate thug who believes that if only we give business all the power, everything will be fine.

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig responded to all this nonsense, Carly Fiorina Is Dead Wrong About Paid Parental Leave. On CNN, Fiorina highlighted Netflix as a reason why the government shouldn’t do anything. She said, “I don’t think it’s the role of government to dictate to the private sector how to manage their businesses, especially when it’s pretty clear that the private sector, like Netflix, like the example that you just gave, is doing the right thing because they know it helps them attract the right talent.”

Recently, there was indeed big news about how Netflix was giving all its employees unlimited leave during the first year of a new child. But this doesn’t tell the whole story. As Emily Peck reported last week, Not All Netflix Workers Will Get “Unlimited” Parental Leave. The employees in Netflix’s DVD division are not covered. These are more the regular employees. The leave program only applies to the streaming division — the high tech side of the business.

Bruenig argued that the Netflix program shows exactly the opposite of what Fiorina claims. It’s just another way that the private economy slices and dices employees into the deserving and the undeserving. And the net result of it is not “equality of opportunity.” Instead, it is a way to give the children of the upper classes a distinct advantage over the children of the poorer classes. If anything, Netflix is showing how the business community is making a social problem worse.

Of course, Fiorina’s claim is stupid on a lot of other levels. Assuming Netflix is on the leading edge of trend (and there is no reason to think that), why has it taken all these years to start to deal with a problem that has been going on for decades? I am so sick of hearing this from conservatives. I got into it with a libertarian recently who claimed that we didn’t need child labor laws because the market was going to get around to the problem. Even if you do accept these kinds of highly questionable claims, they are cold comfort for people harmed while we wait for the market to work its magic.

But the main thing is that the market will not work its magic. Fiorina is an ideologue. She simply believes that the government should never tell business what to do. And she latches onto any factoid that gives her beliefs some kind of political cover. We’ve watched over the last five decades as the minimum wage has been allowed to decrease greatly in real terms. Did the business community “do the right thing”? No. More people work for minimum wage than ever. And Netflix hasn’t even solved the issue of parental leave for its own employees — much less for the entire nation.

Over the weekend, Dean Baker wrote, An Innovative Way to Address Teacher Shortages: Higher Pay. It’s a very short and snarky post, in reference to an article in The New York Times, Teacher Shortages Spur a Nationwide Hiring Scramble (Credentials Optional). As Baker noted, it’s an interesting article. But it fails to mention the obvious market oriented approach to bringing more workers into an industry: raising wages. I wonder why that is?

There are a couple of parts to this. The first is that as a nation — especially in the political class — we are schizophrenic about teachers. On the one hand, we think that teachers are lazy and don’t care in the least about children or teaching. “Damned teachers’ unions!” On the other hand, we think that teachers only care about teaching the kids and so we don’t have to pay them well. It makes absolutely no sense. The best you can say about this is that maybe they don’t actually think that teachers only care about the kids, but just that teachers should only care about the kids. And that’s even worse.

Of course, all the teacher haters out there wouldn’t go to their jobs in grocery stores and banks and restaurants — not to mention newspapers and magazines and television stations — without being paid. They know how monetary considerations affect their personal and work lives. But applying it to teaching somehow seems wrong. I think their ideas about teaching come from watching Little House on the Prairie, where teachers were young women waiting to get married.

But this brings up a larger issue that I think about a lot. But its one that the whole education “reform” movement seems totally oblivious to. Regardless of what they will say, the single biggest issue for these “reformers” is to get rid of teachers’ worker protections. They want to make teachers at will employees so that they can be fired without cause. This is supposedly what it is going to take to have a first rate education system. Somehow, making teacher jobs more like server jobs at Denny’s is critical.

I’ll admit that doing that will certainly be a way of getting rid of bad teachers fast. But in my entire work life, I haven’t found that the bad workers are the people who get fired. In fact, it is more often the good workers. This is because people usually get fired for personal reasons — because they aren’t liked by those doing the hiring and firing. Also: people who disrupt tend to get fired. You know: the kind of people who are often the very best teachers.

But apart from that, the great push in the education “reform” movement is to make teaching a less appealing profession. I know that the supposed reformers will say this isn’t true. They will claim that good teachers will thrive in this environment. But that isn’t the way people looking at going into teaching will see it. Few will go into the profession thinking they will be the very best. Most will go into the profession thinking that can do a good job and have a decent career. But not in the brave new world of the education “reform” movement. They will instead see a job where they are forced to make students perform well on standardized tests and probably have a half dozen different jobs in their career.

So the current state of education “reform” is just as schizophrenic as our general outlook on teachers: “Teacher jobs are just too cushy and we can’t find anyone to fill them!” But as I’ve written before, the goal is not to improve education. It is to decimate public education. After that’s done, all that sweet money now going to the “reform” movement will dry up, because the billionaires giving it will have accomplished their goals.

I have an idea: how about we start thinking seriously about education and not just doing what the billionaires want?

David Cay Johnston has been writing a lot of great stuff over at Al Jazeera America. This last week he wrote, Flat Wages Show the US Doesn’t Have a Labor Market. That’s quite a thing for a conservative to say. But that’s one of the things that is so great about Johnston: he doesn’t follow the herd. He is, fundamentally, conservative. But he isn’t partisan. The person I most associate him with is Dean Baker. The fact is that even though they come at problems from different points of view, they both are interested in the common good. And they see that our system does not facilitate that.

In this article, Johnston focuses on the Supreme Court’s definition of a market. He wrote, “The high court has held that a market requires a buyer (employer) and seller (worker) acting without coercion and a reasonable command of the facts reaching an agreement on price (pay).” This is really critical. We have a tendency to be really loose when it comes to this kind of stuff. But not any system where goods and services are transferred is a market. No one would say that a mafia protection scheme is a market, even though a service (not getting beaten up or killed) is exchanged for money. Coercion really is key.

So let’s look at labor. Is it a market in this sense? Not at all. It is totally coercive. I’ve talked about this a lot. People don’t have a choice but to have a job. We are all born into the Monopoly game with all the properties already sold. So we can’t just farm a fallow field or hunt. Nor can we just cut down some trees and build a house. These are all options that civilization has taken away. But in the conservative mind (and even more, the libertarian mind), civilization owes nothing to the individual. Rights have been taken away and not replaced, but they think it is “natural.”

But we can see that there is no labor market just by the outcome. Macroeconomics is nothing but feedbacks. So wealth should be something that is constantly circling around the economy. But it largely isn’t. Other than the late 1990s, when has the the US economy reached full employment? You’d have to go back more than a generation. Full employment is the exception, not the rule. And this means that workers have basically no leverage in the economy: there are always more people than jobs. And the end result is that money piles up with people who already have large piles.

Johnston puts forth two ideas[1] on how we could go about creating a labor market in this country. The first is to raise the minimum wage. I’m for that. But it is also the case that it is a remedy that doesn’t fix the underlying problem. Clearly it should be done, however. Second, is that we should encourage the creation of labor unions. This is the core of the issue. And from my perspective, we should mandate labor unions. When I was a libertarian, I used to argue this. You couldn’t have management able to organize as a unit and not have labor do the same thing. Almost no libertarians believe this, because they don’t actually believe in “free markets and free minds”; they just hate workers. (Note how popular libertarianism is among upper middle class white college graduates.)

But the Republicans are not willing to touch this stuff. And to be honest, the Democrats are fairly squishy on it as well. But these are things that we should all agree on. In particular, the minimum wage is something that even majorities of Republicans believe in. Really, it all comes down to accountability. Johnston wrote, “Congress will act only when voters make the reelection of representatives depend on raising wages.” That’s true. The problem is that too many of the people affected are too busy working second and third jobs to show up at the polls.

[1] He talked about a third one, but it is fairly technical: labor inspectors. It’s important though.