Alice Ollstein at Think Progress reported that just in time for Christmas, Newly Elected Governor Strips 140,000 of Voting Rights, Lowers the Minimum Wage. Yes, everyone’s favorite red state governor Matt Bevin decided to reverse the executive actions of the previous governor, Steve Beshear, that allowed non-violent ex-felons to vote and government workers to have something approaching a living wage. Merry Christmas!

Of course, Matt Bevin doesn’t want to disenfranchise all these men and women. He said that “it is an issue that must be addressed through the legislature and by the will of the people.” And you should believe it to the extent that you believe a pathological liar. Politicians never claim to be against any popular legislation that they overturn or otherwise sabotage. It is always something along the lines of, “I would love to support this legislation, there is just this one problem…” And if that one problem is eliminated, they always find another “one problem” that prevents them from supporting that legislation that they otherwise love.

Earlier this year I discussed the status of the states regarding this, Felons and Voting Rights. Kentucky — along with Florida, Iowa, and Virginia — are what I called the “completely vile” states where “you have to file an individual petition and get a pardon from the governor.” Think about that. Republicans, who go on and on about efficiency, think that the state should have to go over every one of those 140,000 before they get the right to vote. That’s over 3% of the population. And according to Think Progress, “As a result, one in five African Americans in the state are disenfranchised.” Know this: if the legislature did send him such a bill, he would find a reason to veto it.

Of course, none of this is an accident. Michelle Alexander talked about this, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Going away to jail for even ten years is not the big deal. It is that you are labeled for the rest of your life. Look at the way we talk about this issue: 140,000 felons. Not ex-felons. And this is part of the idea that a felon should never be allowed to vote again. As Think Progress noted, “Studies have found that ex-felons who have their voting rights restored feel more invested in their communities and are less likely to end up back in the criminal justice system.”

Matt Bevin didn’t just ruin the Christmas of ex-offenders, of course. He also reduced the minimum wage for state workers and contractors from $10.10 per hour to $7.25. Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas! He stated, “Wage rates ideally would be established by the demands of the labor market instead of being set by the government.” That’s your typical conservative claim that the market is perfect and if the government would just get out of the way, everyone would have jobs and own their own homes with picket fences and Barbara Billingsley waiting with a martini. They’ve never heard of monopsony.

But it wasn’t all bad news! Matt Bevin saw to it that someone got good news for Christmas. And that someone was Kentucky clerk Kim Davis. She’s wanted clerk names removed from marriage licenses because God don’t like them gays but she sure likes her job. So Bevin saw to it that Kim Davis and the other bigots like her can have a happy Christmas knowing that they are complicit in helping to establish equal rights.

This just in: Matt Bevin seen stealing Tiny Tim’s crutch so he can sell it and provide tax cuts for squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old rich people.

Public Policy Polling (PPP) has a history of polling ridiculous things. Usually I don’t think it means all that much. I’m of the opinion that if you asked Republicans if Obama was a child molester, a fair percentage of them would say yes. It isn’t that they really think that Obama is a child molester but that they want all the world to know that they really, really, really don’t like the first African American president. But the week before last, PPP asked an obscure, but I think ultimately telling, question, “Would you support or oppose bombing Agrabah?”

Now you probably don’t know it, but according to the Disney wikia page, “Agrabah, Arabia (أغربه) is the central location in the popular 1992 Disney film, Aladdin.” PPP didn’t tell this to the 532 Republicans they polled. And you can well image what the people answering the poll were thinking. “Agrabah” just sounds like a place where “those people” are. As I have heard too many times to feel good about humanity, “Those people were dancing after 9/11!” And this notion of “those people” includes pretty much everyone that isn’t European. “If they’re brown, they were happy to see the towers go down!”

So 30% of Republicans responded yes: they wanted to bomb Agrabah. Apparently, they wanted to make its celluloid glow in the dark. On the positive side, 13% thought that bombing was a bad idea. It’s a lot to expect that they recognized that Agrabah was a fantasy land from a distant Disney feature. I suspect they represent the libertarian, or at least non-interventionist, wing of the party. They said no to the question for the same reason most Democrats would: they aren’t keen on bombing other countries as a matter of course. And I suppose we should be glad that a whopping 57% of Republicans would like to wait and see if the Agrabahians are planning to use their magic carpets in an offensive way.

But 30%. That’s a lot of people who just want to bomb somewhere — anywhere. Well, almost anywhere. You see, if they had been asked if we should bomb Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, they wouldn’t have said yes. It is just that Agrabah sounds like one of those places where the people don’t like us. I’m sure the numbers would have been the same if the location was Bhopal — or even Mumbai. Because they are foreign sounding.

It’s a great concern that we have developed to the point where roughly a third of the Republican Party are so fearful that they are determined to bomb away their concerns. And I suspect that the other 57% are overcome with fear too. The last Republican debate did not instill confidence. Watching the whole thing, I was amazed that ISIS had become this big deal. It makes me feel alone, because I grew up with the Soviet threat. And although I think we were far too concerned about it, there is no doubt that the Soviet Union was a super power. The concern about ISIS is ridiculous.

For one thing, it is super focused. We don’t have to worry about white supremacists shooting up a church, because that’s just some wacko. We don’t have to worry about some guy shooting up a Planned Parenthood, because it is just some wacko. But a couple of would-be jihadists kill a bunch of people and there is nothing idiosyncratic about it! No, as “reasonable” Republican Marco Rubio says, it’s a “class of civilizations”!

This is what you get when all you have to offer the people is fear. When all your actual policies would be repugnant to conservatives if they were ever allowed to see them clearly. Nevertheless, Aladdin and Princess Jasmine are safe — for now. But there are many in the Republican Party who love the smell of celluloid in the morning.

In bed each night, I’ve been slowly reading through Terry Pratchett’s The Truth. It tells the story of the rise of the newspaper in Ankh-Morpork. As expected, it is very amusing with an abundance of lines like, “He was the younger son in any case, and family tradition sent youngest sons into some church or other, where they couldn’t do much harm on a physical level.” But there is an equal amount of wisdom. In particular, it touches on one of the great intellectual boondoggles of our time: creative destruction.

As the term is normally used, creative destruction is the almost biblical process of one business (or even industry) taking over for another less efficient business. The key is that we should all applaud this because the process makes us all better off in the long run. And it is largely true — assuming that the economy is working as it should. Of course, the economy is never working as it should — a discussion I will come back to shortly.

In The Truth, movable type comes to Ankh-Morpork. This development does not make the engravers of the city happy. They quickly see their incomes disappear. But movable type allows for William de Worde to start The Ankh-Morpork Times — a daily newspaper. Previously, he had created small numbers of newsletters on an infrequent basis for very rich people in other cities. It’s little more than a gossip sheet. But he quickly finds that there is no problem putting out a sheet of news every day. And he can sell it for very little, so it is widely distributed. The money begins pouring in.

It’s clear that William is not alone. The availability of movable type makes printing available to a lot of people who could never have afforded it previously. In the book (as far as I’ve read), the engravers decide to go into the movable type business. But there is a more obvious use for them, which William realizes on his second day of being a newspaper publisher: pictures. So he hires a vampire photographer, Otto Chriek, and the rest is economics. At that point, the economy has stabilized because now the engravers can be used for more sophisticated work — leaving the typesetting to the new technology.

This creative destruction should make the entire town of Ankh-Morpork richer. They are, after all, producing far more stuff with the same number of people. And this shouldn’t just happen there. It should happen anywhere that an innovation increases productivity. Sadly, we do not see this in our own economy. But we used to! As Josh Bivens and Lawrence Mishel showed, from 1948 to 1973, the median worker’s wage went up at the rate of productivity growth. From 1974 to 2014, the productivity has increased roughly at the same rate, but wages have stagnated.

Obviously, the gains from productivity from such creative destruction had to go somewhere. And we know where that somewhere is. There has been a huge increase in income inequality. The extra money was simply captured by those who were already at the top of the economy. This is what happens when workers have no leverage. When unions were strong in this nation, they saw to it that workers got a share of the gains. Of course, ultimately it isn’t about unions but about the government limiting the power of unions. This started in 1947 with the Taft–Hartley Act. It just took 25 years before the constant assault on unions really paid off for the power elite.

This is something that bugs me about people who claim that we have nothing — economically speaking — to fear from automation. Overall, I agree with the idea. But in the context of a government that is determined to funnel money from the bottom of the income base to the top, we really could see huge increases in productivity that result only in more money for the rich. But as The Truth shows, it shouldn’t be like this. And it doesn’t need to be like this. And if the power elite were smart (and they show very few signs of being so) they would allow more of the gains to be shared. When you hold down the vast majority of the population, bad things happen.