I’m really happy to see how well the Labour Party did under Jeremy Corbyn. It is a great victory for left-wing populism. Of course, it is of some interest that even in victory, I see the mainstream liberal press taking pot-shots at him. “Wow, it’s great that Labour did so well; too bad they are led by a guy who supports Hamas and Hugo Chávez.”

But I just wanted to share with you what I jotted down in my notebook yesterday. My hometown has the worst public transit system I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve ridden them on four continents in dozens of cities. But one of the best things about my “smart” phone is the little memo app that allows me to talk and create notes when I’m stuck because the bus isn’t working.

It’s “speech to text” feature doesn’t work that well. But it’s pretty cool that I can send my notes via email so I don’t even have to transcribe.

Just Yesterday

Then Left-Wing Populism Won!

Regardless, Corbyn and Labour did far better than I could allow myself to hope for. The truth is that the Torries were expecting to improve their position — not get beaten badly. And I think the whole thing shows that when liberals are allowed to be liberals, they do better.

A big problem with the New Democrats or the Tony Blair Labour Party types is that they aren’t authentic. Sure, they can win elections. That’s because elections are more about fundamentals like economic trends. The truth is that when Bill Clinton ran as a new kind of Democrat, he was still seen as a Jeremy Corbyn socialist. It doesn’t matter that Bill Clinton really, truly was a new (bad) kind of Democrat. The people still saw him as a leftist.

And the people are right to think this. In a two party system, you expect that there is going to be one party on the left and one party on the right. When you have two parties on the right, the one that is slightly less conservative will be seen as, “Socialist! A socialist, I tell you!”

The People Need a Choice — And They Know It

And I still maintain that the Republicans’ move over the last four decades into a form of fascism is the result of the Democratic Party’s move to the right, starting in the early 1970s. Jimmy Carter was responsible for the success of Ronald Reagan. And Bill Clinton was responsible for the success of both George W Bush and Donald J Trump.

So the fact that the Labour Party won by being an unabashed leftist party is good news for the whole world. Everyone can see that there really is a constituency for left-wing populism. But our continued foe is the mainstream media. And that’s because they have never seen a conservative who was too conservative.

Liberal Journalists Think They Define Liberalism; They Don’t

But given that most journalists are liberal in the American sense of the term, they always define what they think as the right amount of liberalism. Thus, when a Jeremy Corbyn (or even an extremely moderate Bernie Sanders) comes along, they attack! The reporters define liberalism, not these politicians! So even if working people who make minimum wage like left-wing populism, the upper-middle class journalists can’t abide it.

But we’ll win. As long as we vote, we’ll win. It doesn’t matter that MSNBC thinks being pro-choice and pro-same-sex marriage is all it takes to be liberal. The people will support candidates who will support them — authentic left-wing populists.

[1] My phone, in its infinite “speech to text” wisdom heard “delegitimize” and converted it to “deal egitim eyes.” As far as I know, “egitim” is not even an English language word. But it hardly matters. I knew what I had said.

I had tea with my cousin on Friday. She knows that I’m a freelance writer and editor and asked about the harm that the repeal of Obamacare might cause me. It’s not so much a question of money. I have a major pre-existing condition, and depending upon exactly what the Republicans do, I might not be able to get insurance at all. So it is natural that someone who cares about me would be concerned about this.

I explained that if that happened, I would just join the Freelancers Union. What’s more, the original Republican plan would actually have helped me. Typical of Republican plans, since I don’t really need help from the government, the conservatives wanted to give me more help. Meanwhile, my desperately poor friend with three children might see his Medicaid taken away from his kids.

Don’t “Vote Your Interests

This all brings up the idea of “voting your interests.” Although I do bristle at people who vote against every interest they have except (for example) same-sex marriage, I do not think people should simply vote their interests. People should vote in such a way that they think will create the best society. So I really don’t have a problem with people voting only based on their anti-choice opinions if they actually think that abortion is equivalent to the Holocaust.

(Note however: I am quite certain that these people who are so upset about abortion are just being manipulated. Rich conservatives figured out a way that they could get poor people to vote for them by getting them to think of nothing but abortion. And these people have no moral standing when they vote against abortion choice but for policies that literally allow children to starve to death. So being against the Nazi death camps is admirable, but not if your position that the Jews should instead be left on a desert island where they will starve to death. And this really is equivalent to the thinking of the the people in the American anti-choice movement.)

Most People Vote for the Good of All

I’m not unusual at all in not voting for my own, narrowly defined, interests. This is what liberals do. If there is one thing that I think defines a liberal it is having a strong sense of empathy. Certainly I want to have good, affordable health insurance. But I think of it in a broad sense. Right now, the government pays me $200 per month toward my health insurance. I’m more than able to pay the remaining $200 per month for my health insurance.

The Republican plan would have paid me something like $300 per month toward my insurance. This is because the plan gave everyone the same amount of money toward their health insurance. Really, the Republicans would like to give nothing at all. So their giving everyone the same amount was their way of trying to, as Brian Beutler put it it, “obscure the brutality of that underlying moral vision.”

But I don’t think that it’s fair that someone gets paid more money when they don’t need it — even when that person is me. And that’s the difference between conservatives and liberals. Politics isn’t a game. It isn’t just about winning. I’m interested in make a fair society. So I am fine with getting fewer benefits from the government and paying more in taxes when I’m one of society’s winners.

The Selfish Side of Caring

Of course, there is a selfish side of doing this. A fair society is also a more stable society. I’m hardly rich. But I have a good life and thus have much more to lose if society were to fall apart.So paying more in taxes and so on is a kind of insurance. Of course, that isn’t the way I think about it.

I want to live in a society that is fair. And I’m well well aware of the advantages that I have been given by this society. I might not have won the jackpot in life’s lottery, but I won one of the top prizes. Being born a straight, white, and male in this society might not be worth quite what it was for my father’s generation, but it’s still worth a lot. And my intelligence and temperament are both great gifts. So is being born in the United States — in California, no less.

But it seems the conservative mind sees things the opposite. Just as they think that I should get more money for my healthcare since I need it less, they think I should get more of everything else because I’ve been so lucky in life.

Why Republicans Are Evil

I’m not naive, though. I know that all their justifications are just lies. They claim that the rich should be given more money because they are “job creators,” but really they think the rich should be given more money because they simply believe in classes. The rich are better than the poor and therefore should be given more money. It really is as simple as that.

The problem with this is that there aren’t that many people who have a huge amount of money. So the Republican Party has had to figured out how to convince people to think that small issues are really important. So killing a 16-cell zygote is far more important than making sure that all grammar school children are properly fed. Stopping a tiny number of transvestite men in a country of 300 million people from using the women’s bathroom is far more important than billionaires paying less in taxes than their secretaries.

As liberals, our job should be to allow people to see their priorities clearly. And I’m afraid that we fail when it comes to this.

Voting for All the Wrong Reasons

I personally think that reproductive choice is a very important issue. It really is the difference between freedom and a limited kind of slavery. But we should understand that abortion is an important issue for some people. So we should make these people understand that if caring for the unborn child is very important, caring for born children is just as important. And that it is goes against everything they stand for to vote for a party that is against abortion choice but also wants to deprive children of food.

What’s more, caring about unborn children should mean more than just passing a law. Do we care enough for that unborn child to care for prenatal healthcare? For making sure that the mother is taken care of while she is pregnant? That she will have the freedom (real freedom, not the face libertarian “freedom”) to care for that child at least until it enters school.

The Republicans use liberal notions to get people to vote for their conservative agenda of taking money away from poor children and giving it to the rich. As liberals, we shouldn’t allow that. The truth is that if you talk to people who vote because of abortion or homosexuality, you’ll find their solution to the “problems” are fairly liberal. But the party they vote for has no solutions at all — much less liberal solutions.

The Republicans Will Only Bring Destruction

We need to ask these conservative voters what it is they expect from the party they vote for. The Republicans offer them passing a couple of laws. And that’s because the only thing they are interested in is giving money to the rich. The rest of it is just a con.

If women know they can raise their children in a stable environment, they will be more likely to do it. But the Republicans want to create the opposite. They want to make it illegal to have abortions so that we will have far more poor, malnourished children. They want to make unions illegal so that both parents will need to work in order to make ends meet.

I want a better society — not just for myself but for everyone. And I think most people are that way. So let’s not vote our interests. Let’s vote for our society’s interest. And that means a society in which one working person can support a family. It means a society where people are educated so they don’t have unwanted pregnancies.

The Better Society Is the Liberal Society

It sounds partisan to say it but the better society that conservatives claim they want is the society that liberal policy would produce. Otherwise, you end up with a society with a small number of super rich people, and then a bunch of poor people with malnourished children. Because regardless of what Republicans say, their policies lead to Oliver Twist. Liberal policy is the only kind that will lead to the society of mercy that Jesus preached.

Republicans ask not what they can do for their country but what their county can do for them. And there are very few Americans who want to live in this society. Americans want to live in a society where we all look out for each other. And that is a liberal society.

I’ve been thinking about the last article I wrote here, The Evolution of Comment Spam. That article was more or less about computers and about how the internet works. But I’m really more interested in spam on a much deeper level — the political level — the level of our economic system. Because it really is politics and economics that causes us to have spam. If there were no economic incentive to create spam, no one would.

After all, spam isn’t an art form. I’m sure the people in Palestine who get paid pennies an hour posting spam would rather be doing something else. I admitted in the article before that I didn’t understand the economics of spam. How is the spammer making money and who are they getting that money from. But I do know the economics this far: the spammer is making money doing nothing but damage.

Let’s Think About Our Economic System

And I think as a society we really need to think about this. This is a function of our living in a capitalism. I’m willing to admit that the incentive structure of capitalism does some good things. It makes people build beautiful guitars, for instance. But it also does this; it creates the incentive for people to make the world worse.

It’s funny to think about it. I don’t even know why I have to deal with spam. I don’t know why it increases the work that I have to do in order to bring my readers the work they want. But I do know that there is an incentive. What’s more, it’s a perfectly legal incentive. It’s every bit as ethical as my putting an Amazon Associate’s link when I talk about my favorite translation of Don Quixote. The fact that no one else seems to find this strange is what is so bizarre about it.

Pornography: One of Our Society’s Great Values

Here’s a little factoid you’ll find interesting. We think a lot about Hollywood. I have a whole website about it (from a strange angle, admittedly), Psychotronic Review. And every Monday, the news tells us how much money the newest Hollywood blockbusters made. Yet depending on who you ask, video porn makes anywhere from somewhat less than Hollywod to the same as it to more than it.

Don’t get me wrong: I have nothing against pornography. But I don’t find it edifying. And I think most Americans would be bothered that “adult” entertainment is roughly as profitable as the industry that brought us Schindler’s List. Yet that is the deal that we as a society have made. Listen to just about any libertarian around and they will tell you that the value of anything is determined solely by how much money people will pay for it. Thus, Hungry Bitches (“2 Girls 1 Cup”) is more valuable than almost every English language translation of Don Quixote.

Inefficient Economic System

The time has come for us to think about our society. We have an economic system that is incredibly inefficient because people are encouraged to make money by harming other people. Spam has been around for a long time. But it was only when people could really make money that spam took off. And as it is, at least as much money is spent promoting work than creating it. In the film business, the rule of thumb is that about as much money is spent on marketing as on creating the movie. That’s pretty amazing when you remember that movies often cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

But I know: everyone looks back at the Soviet Union and the conversation stops. That’s typically American. The truth is that under the Tsar, the Russian Empire was a combination of a very primitive agricultural economy and an industrial capitalism. Russia did far better under communism than it did under the Tsar. So bringing up the Soviet Union doesn’t prove anything.

We’re Stuck Thinking About How Things Have Been

What bothers me more, however, is the total lack of vision among people who are with me. There is capitalism and there is communism and then there is nothing. Call me naive, but I think humans are smart enough to come up with an economic system that is better than both communism and capitalism. I don’t have all the answers, but I have some of them. One is to decouple economics from politics. We’ve seen what’s happened in the United States where the rich gain political power, which they use to make themselves richer.

So I think we should have a top marginal tax rate of 100 percent. And I don’t just say that because I think that income inequality is bad. I think the rich have to be saved from themselves. If what a business owner really loves is running their business, it shouldn’t matter that they aren’t making any money. But I think it would encourage them to do things that would be edifying like read books, have relationships, think about new things. The system we have now is like a game where the winner is the person who dies with the most money. I take pity on everyone and so I think even the rich deserve something more than a life of Sudoku meaning.

Simple Ideas and Better Lives

Would stopping people from making more than one or ten million dollars a year really destroy our economy? Would making sure that everyone was well feed and had a place they could call home destroy our economy? I think not. I think we have simply lived in the limited minds of the super rich for so long that we are unable to think creatively. And being stuck in this mindset that ruin lies before us if we insist upon a fair distribution of resources means that we live in a world where I have to worry about people soiling my blog just so they can make a buck and and live the big Sudoku meaning dream.