I want to talk about productivity and inflation. This is partly just to nail down the issue for me. But also, I think I talk about this stuff in a way that assumes a knowledge that many people don’t have. Most people think of inflation as “printing money.” By this way of thinking, the economy is worth a certain amount and if there is more cash, then it is worth less. This isn’t true because money is a medium of exchange, not a reflection of the value of the economy — at least not directly.

Let’s consider an example. Imagine a world in which all workers and capitalists are paid according to their value. In this case, we assume we have no inflation. Now if one set of workers gets a raise, it will make the cost of whatever they are making go up. This is inflation. But if productivity went up at the same rate, this would not be inflationary. The workers would be paid, say, 3% more, but they would be producing 3% more stuff.

We don’t have such an economy. In our economy, largely because of governmental policy, capitalists get far more money than they deserve and workers less. Workers find themselves in a monopsony. If they can form unions or otherwise push back against this, it is possible that they will get more money by taking away some of the undeserved profits of the capitalists. In this case, workers can get a raise without causing inflation.

So we end up with inflation just in the case where workers get pay increases that, in an economic sense, they don’t deserve. (Obviously, this is not just about workers. If the price of oil goes up, it will cause inflation, for example.) The point I want to get across here is that inflation is not something we need to worry about in the modern American economy. For the last 40 years, workers have seen their wages stagnate even as productivity has continued to go up.

Given my simplistic story of inflation here, we should have seen deflation. But, of course, we haven’t. And that is because overall “wages” (wages and profits) have gone up at the rate of productivity. It is just that with tax laws and anti-union policies, the vast majority of the fruits of that productivity gain has gone to the capitalists. This has resulted in a huge increase in inequality.

And this brings us to the Federal Reserve. They are the ones who “print money.” And they are the ones who are hyper-concerned about inflation. Their biggest concern is that wages are going to start rising and this will cause inflation. That’s a valid concern. But it is only a concern because the capitalists will insist upon keeping their undeserved profits. There would be no inflation if increased worker wages came at the expense of overly generous business profits. But obviously, this is not something that the Fed has power over.

But at this point, the Fed should error on the side of creating jobs and not worry about inflation. Jobs help workers and inflation hurts the rich. But what the Fed means when it talks about raising interest rates to stop inflation is that it is going to put millions of people out of work and put even more pressure to keep wages low on those who have a job.

So we have an economy where workers are in a double bind. They aren’t making as much as their productivity would indicate. But when the economy gets good enough that their wages start rising, the Fed increases rates to stop it. This is why we can’t depend upon the Republicans’ big answer to save the poor: “Growth!” All the gains of growth go to the top. And that is something we have to fix in our regular political system.

This is a Bloomingdale’s ad from their holiday catalog. If you can’t read the text (I did alter the image to make it as legible as possible), it reads, “Spike your best friend’s eggnog when they’re not looking.” Not surprisingly, Twitter went crazy and Bloomingdale offered a garden variety apology, “We heard your feedback about our catalog copy, which was inappropriate and in poor taste. Bloomingdale’s sincerely apologizes.” Okay.

The one place in the world in which “copy” is thoroughly vetted, it is in advertising. If Bloomingdale’s really believes that the ad was inappropriate, they must have believed that when it was approved. I know what I have to go through just to get the preliminary text of infographics approved to start production. And that’s in a company that more or less consists of three people. Did this ad really just slip through? I tend to think that Bloomdale’s figured that they would get some publicity. It would titillate, but not offend enough to require anything more than a standard Twitter apology.

My question is: what is it an ad for? These are two very beautiful people. She looks carefree like she just performed brilliantly on America’s Got Talent. And he looks like a serial killer from a later David Cronenberg film. I don’t get a “date rape” vibe from this. I think he’s going to kill her and have sex with her corpse. What am I supposed to take away from this? That’s a serious question. If anyone can explain it to me, I’d really like to know. I really think that I’m missing something here. It isn’t unusual for me to be clueless in this way. But I don’t see a product being advertised.

It’s got to be that it isn’t an ad for anything. I’ve read a number of articles and no one mentions it being an ad. “Get her drunk then pop the question with a small karat, visibly occluded, rose-cut diamond.” I guess it is just an expression of holiday cheer. Who among us would not like to sleep with someone who’s marginal enough that we would have to be drugged? And that’s especially true given that eggnog generally has alcohol in it. What is Creepy Serial Killer Guy going to put in the eggnog? Ketamine? Maybe that’s it! Maybe the next page has a list of their offerings:

• Ketamine — just right for surgery or date rape!
• Nitrous oxide — it’s no laughing matter when you’re bedding a chick!
• Phencyclidine — she’ll be too delusional to resist!
• Valium — with retroactive amnesia, she’ll never know!
• Diacetylmorphine — when only the best will do!

I don’t mean to take this all lightly. I am very serious in wanting to know what Bloomingdale’s was thinking. It isn’t enough to say that they showed bad judgement. Unless we know what it is they were attempting to do, it is meaningless. And sadly, I think that all they were trying to do was to get us all talking about them.

I want to be very clear: I think it is wrong that police officers commonly lie on the stand regarding traffic citations that they’ve given out. I’ve seen it firsthand and I think it is an outrage. Yet I have never written an article about it. In fact, I don’t believe I’ve ever spoken to anyone about it. It’s not because I think it is just fine. Rather, it is because it isn’t that important. And this is what I think when Jonathan Chait writes, Can We Start Taking Political Correctness Seriously Now?

I didn’t even need to read it to know what it is about: some Missouri protesters blocking an ESPN photographer from gaining entrance to their encampment. I heard about it over the weekend. And I thought, “That’s a mistake!” We are liberals and we believe in openness and fairness and freedom of speech. Just the same: it’s college. And besides, people do stupid things all the time. Is this a trend? Not as far as I can tell. Incidents like this go back as far as there have been colleges and they never became normalized — even in the “scary” 1960s.

But Jonathan Chait has been complaining about this stuff for years. And if there is one thing that everyone knows about Jonathan Chait, it is that he will never give up a fight. I know of two different fights he’s had with Ta-Nehisi Coates. In both cases, Chait was completely wrong and out gunned. Yet those fights only ended when Coates got bored. Chait would always have a response because in Chait’s mind, he is never wrong. Or something. It could just be that he’s lazy. Once you write an article about political correctness, the next dozen just write themselves. They are all the same, you just have to change the specific example and tweak the reasons why this time young liberals have turned authoritarian.

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber wrote a very useful article, Beware the Commissars of Political Correctness! He documents Chait’s alarmist writings as far back as 2006 when he warned about Netroots and the possibility of “members starting off as relatively sensible liberals, or left-liberals before veering into the abyss.” The abyss, of course, being “more liberal than Jonathan Chait is comfortable with.” He really reminds me of Bill O’Reilly, who is just fine with people of all political stripes — as long as they aren’t outside his clearly defined political window. (Admittedly, Chait’s window is far more reasonable than O’Reilly’s.)

The truth is that every liberal I’ve read regarding the Missouri protesters have been harshly critical. But here’s Chait’s takeaway:

So you see the problem. It isn’t enough to condemn the act. We must all join Jonathan Chait’s bandwagon. We must admit not just that the protesters are wrong, but that they are part of some great threat to liberalism itself. Our criticism of this act is proof that there is a major problem. Have things gotten worse in Missouri since this incident? Not that I can tell. So it is more of Jonathan Chait’s Chicken Little act. Missouri is the leading edge of leftist totalitarianism, just as Netroots was nine years ago.

Jonathan Chait has a large readership. And he writes a lot of good commentary. But he blows out of all proportion what everyone agrees is a minor problem. It is very much as if I went around ignoring police brutality because my personal cause — the one that really gets me excited — was the injustices going on in traffic court.

See also: Jonathan Chait Should Stop Writing About Education Reform.

The reactions to the attacks in Paris are very aggravating. I’m not talking about the sadness, the outrage, or even the fear. It is always sad when people die. And it is always outrageous when people are murdered. And I at least understand fear, even if this act shouldn’t elicit that response. The number of people who died yesterday in Paris from these attacks are about double the number of people in America killed with guns on any given day. The specifics don’t matter so much to me. It is all unnecessary death. It makes me sad that humans are this way. But it’s the shock that aggravates me.

I hear a lot of people who are just amazed that people would do this. “They must be crazy!” Maybe so. But I feel fairly certain that the way the terrorists see things, they are acting rationally. This wasn’t just some madman who ran into a shopping mall and started shooting people. This was a well planned operation. There were six coordinated attacks. It was a military style mission and I have little doubt that those who took part considered themselves soldiers in a noble fight.

I know that we here in the US see a drone strike on a wedding party that kills 12 as an unfortunate mistake. I’m among them. I don’t think that anyone in the US military wants to kill innocent people who are celebrating one of our most important cultural signifiers. But that’s pretty easy for me to think. The perspective is certainly very different of the people in Yemen or Afghanistan or any number of other place where the skies are patrolled by our drones.

Roughly 2,500 years ago, Aeschylus wrote in his play Agamemnon, “They raped our queen, so we raped their city, and we were right!” This is the cycle of violence. When two groups go to war, they normally disagree about what the first offense was. Doubtless Priam would not have agreed that the first offense was the “rape” of Helen. So I have a hard time with people who are just shocked at the attacks in Paris. We are engaged in a “war on terror.” Do they think that the terrorists are just going hole up in a compound watching pornography like Osama bin Laden?

I was disappointed, but not at all surprised, to see a CNN headline, US Officials Say No Known Threat to Homeland in Wake of Paris Attacks. The fact that Americans have to be constantly reassured that we are safe is pathetic. We spend roughly half of all the money the world spends on military. We are remarkably safe from all threats except maybe obesity. Yet we still quake in our boots whenever a highly publicized terrorist attack occurs.

According to the Global Terrorism Database, on 13 November 2014, there were 41 terrorist attacks. At least 81 people were killed and at least 62 were injured. But these occurred in places like Iraq, Philippines, Ukraine. And the biggest attack (in terms of death) was “only” 20. CNN didn’t need to assure Americans that they were safe on the same day last year. But if we are going to be afraid, we should be afraid every day, because this stuff happens every day. But it hardly happens at all here.

We are part of this pattern of violence. The worst American delusion is that we just mind our own business and bad things happen to us. We are never just minding our own business. The United States is the most meddlesome country on the planet. And we are far from perfect; just check out Thursday’s Anniversary Post. But I don’t expect us to be; and I don’t think anyone else does either. The real problem is that we do not use our enormous power to limit violence. We are not doing what is needed to reduce things like the horrific mass murders in Paris yesterday. We have allowed the Israel-Palestine conflict to fester for decades. We eagerly destabilized one of the most important countries in the Middle East. And whether our global “war on terror” is creating terrorists faster than it is killing them is a matter of debate.

So be sad about yesterday’s deaths. Be outraged that terrorists decided to murder ordinary people just trying to live their lives. Be afraid that they are coming for us next. But don’t be surprised. “They raped our queen, so we raped their city, and we were right!”