Jonathan Bernstein addresses an interesting question with his usual keen insight, Why Reagan Is King of the Conservative Heap. It follows off an article by Jonathan Ladd, Why Are Conservatives Obsessed with Reagan? He Coincided with Ideological Party Takeover Like No Democratic President Did. Ladd’s argument is clear enough from that long headline. But Bernstein argues that it is both simpler and more complex.

In the simplest sense, the conservatives don’t have anyone else. Bush the Younger certainly doesn’t qualify and his father was a one term president who raised taxes. Then you have Nixon, who was not only chased out of office, but who had fairly liberal domestic policies. Even if it weren’t for Watergate, he would at best be the Republican LBJ. Ford hardly exists as a president. Other than that, there is Eisenhower who was no kind of ideologue. Then you have to go back to Herbert Hoover. So Reagan is pretty much the only candidate that the Republicans have who they can worship.

On the complex side of the equation, Bernstein mentions two other factors that have helped Reagan: he has had an industry dedicated to improving his reputation and his decade after office living with dementia made it so no one wanted to attack him. And on the Democratic side, there are lots of notable people—most especially Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Clinton. Republicans could, of course, go all the way back to Lincoln. But the reason they don’t is not so much that he died a century and a half ago. It is more that since the 1950s, the conservative movement has come under the grip of John C Calhoun. And even if they may think that slavery was bad, they are now deeply uncomfortable with the very idea of the Civil War. (That’s the nicest reading of where they stand.)

I tend to think that the reason Republicans worship Reagan is simpler still. When he left office, the economy was roaring along. Now this had absolutely nothing to do with his policies. But that’s the way it is. Liberals and conservatives alike now admire Clinton for the same reason. And I don’t see any more reason to give Clinton credit than I do Reagan. So the modern love of both presidents has more than anything to do with the American cult of success.

This is very interesting. Because I believe this, I’ve long thought that Obama was delusional. Carter’s time in office was actually rather good. He accomplished big things, including the Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty. Yet the economy was doing poorly at the end of his term. This had nothing to do with him. Paul Volcker had raised interest rates at the Federal Reserve in order to fight inflation. So the reason that Carter is held in low opinion is the exact same reason that Reagan is held in high opinion. Obama has accomplished remarkable things in his term. And he’d like to accomplish more. But regardless of what he accomplishes, people are not going to worship him. Unless, of course, the economy suddenly starts roaring.

I think we all have to accept that we do not have good reasons for revering the presidents we do. Clinton and Reagan were just president at the right time. Carter and Bush the Younger were presidents at the wrong time. This isn’t to say that Bush the Younger wasn’t a horrible president. But if instead of the financial crisis, the economy had kept growing through 2008, Bush would likely be the object of much adulation among conservatives. There’s nothing surprising or meaningful here.

I used to work with this young engineer. I remember him primarily because he was an annoying conservative who listened to Michael Savage every day. But he was an okay engineer, nothing special but competent. Since that time, he stopped working as an engineer and went into sales. Why? Because he could make a lot of money. In his case, that’s probably fine. But it does speak to a very big problem in our economy: people are given incentives to leave socially important but relatively low paying jobs like teaching and engineering. And they are incentivized to go into less socially useful fields like law or sales.

A good example of the problem comes to me via the great book, The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us. Imagine that we enacted a law that said that no one with an IQ over 70 could be a lawyer. The society would be no different. That’s because lawyers battle other lawyers. It is a zero sum game. On the other hand, if we made such a law concerning engineers, our society would be destroyed: our cars wouldn’t run, our computers would malfunction, our clocks would be right only two times a day.

So we really ought to construct a society in which great computer programers create great things that make our lives better. It is a major market malfunction that software engineers are taken away from productive work to create high frequency trading systems, which cannot by definition help society. Even if you think that high frequency trading helps the markets, the people in the markets don’t need to be our best and brightest. Again: if there was a 70 IQ point maximum for traders, nothing would change.

What can we do about this? Matt Yglesias offered up an excellent idea, Tax Hikes Could Grow the Economy. It is based upon an economic paper “Taxation and the Allocation of Talent,” by Benjamin Lockwood, Charles Nathanson, and Glen Weyl. Without getting into details, the thesis is very simple. By taxing high incomes aggressively, we provide incentives for people to go into socially useful but relatively low paying jobs. The authors suggest that a top marginal tax rate of 70% to 90% would be optimal for a better distribution of talent.

Yglesias cautioned about reading too much into the results, however. First he noted that the finance industry does important work in the economy. Second, he observed that just because someone is a great hedge fund manager doesn’t mean he will be a great school teacher. I don’t buy either of these complaints. We are only talking about disincentivizing these highly paid positions. They would still pay a lot of money and attract a lot of talent. On the second point specifically, I think it proves the need for high taxes. Great hedge fund managers almost certainly would not be great school teachers or engineers. So we are paying them a great deal of money to do something of (at best) limited social value. And if financial speculation is all they are really good at, then they’ll go into that field regardless because no one will hire them for anything else.

I am constantly amazed that we have a political economy set up a certain way. There is absolutely nothing natural about it. We got it almost randomly. Yet the power elite have convinced themselves (and mostly everyone else too) that this is some God given system and if we changed it there would be catastrophe. But the truth is that we aren’t doing as well as many other countries that at least have somewhat different systems. Just look at taxes. Based upon the following graph via David Atkins at Hullabaloo, the OECD countries pay 42% (10 percentage points) more in taxes than the United States does:

Matt Yglesias wrote another great article today, No, Inequality Doesn’t Help the Economy Grow. It pushes back against this widely held belief that “there are tradeoffs between equality and efficiency.” As he notes, there are grains of truth to this and in the kind of perfect economies that fresh water economists like to model, this is true. But the real world is such that: (1) much wealth is inherited; (2) what people earn is not correlated with their effort; and (3) people are not paid according to their social value. Given this, there is little reason to believe that we need inequality for good economic growth.

Yglesias goes further to argue that inequality is bad for growth:

Unfortunately, we come back to the same reality: the United States really isn’t a democracy. The system we have is not only bad for the vast majority of our citizens, it is bad for the country as a whole. But it is great for the oligarchs. So we change nothing.

Before we get to the birthdays, I have to share something I wrote last year on this day. James Dobson is a very vile conservative Christian who founded Focus on the Family. To give you some idea of the man, he once said, “It is not necessary to beat the child into submission; a little bit of pain goes a long way for a young child. However, the spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely.” So last year, I wrote what I think is a wonderful bit of snark, “Since I mentioned Hitler’s birthday yesterday, I guess I have to mention that James Dobson is 77 day.”

The great comedian Elaine May is 82 today. She is a brilliant screenwriter, and not just of funny material. For example, she wrote the screenplay for Primary Colors, which is a really fine film. But comedy is her thing. She wrote one of the funniest screenplays ever, The Birdcage, which really is far better than the original (which is still excellent). And she wrote and directed Ishtar. It’s actually a very good, very funny movie. It seems it got a bad rap because of its budget. Big budgets are fine for action films but not for comedies. But most of all, it is an example of studio infighting. It seems that David Puttnam came in as head of production towards the end of the film, and as is standard, he wanted to kill it because it wasn’t his film. So he put out as much negative stuff on the film as he could. If you haven’t seen the film, you should.

But Elaine May is mostly known as one half of Nichols and May, her short-lived but hugely popular comedy act with Mike Nichols (who also directed The Birdcage and Primary Colors). Here is their classic “Mother and Son” skit:

Happy birthday Elaine May!

It occurred to me that I haven’t written anything to spoil Easter. The truth is that I don’t hate Easter so much. It’s on a Sunday, and things are always crummy on Sunday anyway. And it is mostly just a morning holiday, so it doesn’t get in the way of the little life there is normally on Sunday. And perhaps most of all, even though it is the hardest core of the hard core Christian holidays, mostly Christians just celebrate it amongst themselves without bothering the rest of us.

Really, where is the outrage about the “war on Easter”? No one seems to care that we secularists don’t understand the “reason for the season.” I don’t suppose it is much of a mystery why we don’t get this. Easter is basically a zombie story. Jesus is crucified on Friday where he suffered a whole six hours for all the sins of humanity. Then he was entombed. Then his body rose from the dead and a few people saw him, but not all recognized him.

You know, that’s an interesting thing. The story from Luke is that a couple of Jesus’ followers meet up with a man. They chat, they eat, he vanishes. Then they think, “Hey, I’ll bet that was Jesus!” This is typical of the reaction of believers to failed prophecies. After the prophecy fails, they justify how it actually did happen, it’s just that it happened differently that they had thought it would. So a guy comes around and they don’t know him. But after he’s left they convince themselves that he was Jesus. Not that I’m suggesting that the story is true.

Anyway, the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ after three days in the desert sounds like something out of a horror movie. When he appears to the women, he tells them not to be afraid. You can understand why: his rotting flesh hanging from his bones. In addition to everything else, the smell must have been incredible.

But apart from the religion of the day and all the cute bunny rabbits and eggs, the nature of today being a holiday did, in fact, really screw me up! I was coming back from San Francisco on the bus. Had it been late, I would have ridden the bus all the way to the Golden Gate Transit base. That would then give me about a two mile walk home—nothing too bad. But since it was early, I got off downtown, figuring I would take the city bus straight to my place. I really had to go to the bathroom anyway, but as I got off the bus, I noticed that the place was strangely vacant. When I went to the bathroom, I found it locked. Then I realized it was Easter and none of the city buses were running. So I went over to the mall. It was closed! Anyway, I managed to finally get a ride home. But it made me resent Easter in a whole new way.

Now, had Jesus pulled up in a car and given me a lift home, I’d have to rethink my entire theology.

Wow, David Brooks wrote a really smart column. No, I’m just kidding! If ever there were one man who demonstrated the lie of “meritocracy,” it is David Brooks. On Friday, he wrote, When the Circus Descends. And I should be clear: by Brooks’ standards, it is not bad because it is not utterly and completely evil. Instead, it’s boring. He is lamenting that some people are complaining about the Common Core Standards, even though they’ve been approved in 45 states.

But in as much as he has something to complain about, it is still really vile in the way that we have come to expect from him. Because according to him, he knows the truth: Common Core is a great thing. Anyone just looking at the facts (Anyone like David Brooks!) would just see that it’s great. After all, the business community is clamoring for it. And if the business community isn’t selfless, then who is? But the only group he actually quotes for how great Common Core is, is the Thomas B Fordham Institute. And who are they? Just a conservative think take with an ideological ax to grind. See: its the best practical approach to education reform because an ideological group is in favor of it!

I don’t especially have an opinion about Common Core. I don’t mind educational standards. But I expect this will all mean in practice more cookie-cutter teaching, with lots of incentives based upon a lot of tests. My philosophy of education is liberal: train people to love learning and they will educate themselves. Too much, our educational system trains people to know very limited facts and skills, with the added disadvantage of coming to hate education. But there is nothing wrong with having goals. (Although note: it is hard to look at some of the new testing and think it is anything but a joke.)

Brooks would also have us believe that there are crazies on both sides that just can’t get past their ideology. Again: that places him in the mythical center that is beyond ideology. But the two sides in this fight are hardly equivalent. On the right, you really do have loons. Although it is rarely stated, the real fear is that if the government can dictate that kids learn basic math, it can also dictate that they learn evolution. There is no doubt that the concern is about the idea that there might be some objective reality that conflicts with their religious beliefs. They can cloak it all they like in concern for local control, it’s all about religion.

On the left are actually very few people. If it weren’t for those on the right who are making a whole lot of noise, there would be no debate. These are the states not adopting the standards: Texas, Virginia, Alaska, Nebraska and Indiana. They are all red states, except for Virginia, which is a purple state. It isn’t the teachers’ unions who have stopped Common Core from making it into law. But even as much as it is an issue on the left, the people are against it because of its effect on education. It isn’t that they don’t think there should be no standards outside the Bible. They just disagree about what should be expected of the children.

But it’s interesting. After Brooks complains about the teachers’ unions being against the Common Core Standards, he writes, “A large survey in Kentucky revealed that 77 percent of teachers are enthusiastic about the challenge of implementing the standards in their classrooms.” But that’s typical of conservative thinking. No one wants to appear to be against teachers, because all of us remember that at least some teachers were really important in our lives. So he pretends that teachers’ unions are something other than groups of teachers.

I know that David Brooks thinks that unlike other pundits, he just looks at the facts. You can see this if you ever watch him on The News Hour. But as I’m fond of noting: modern conservatism is an ideology in a way that modern liberalism just isn’t. A good example of this is Dean Baker. He’s a liberal. Yet no one—at least, no conservative one—is as dedicated to using the free market for the benefit of society. David Brooks is just a conservative ideologue who talks nice. And occasionally, he pays tribute to “centrism” by comparing school teachers to Glenn Beck and Elisabeth Hasselbeck.

Everyone around here knows where I stand on politics. I am a liberal on social as well as economic issues. But I don’t think much about the social issues. Without a decent amount of economic equality, how ever we go about accomplishing that, the social issues are of limited importance. Regardless, as long as we live in an oligarchy, we don’t have the ability to affect social policy anyway. As the Princeton study pointed out: poor people occasionally get the policies they want because they just happen to agree with the policies that rich people want. It’s coincidence, not power.

It was in this context that I heard last week that Michael Bloomberg was planning to spend $50 million to start a group to counter the NRA. This was not exactly news, because Bloomberg started a political campaign after Sandy Hook. And I noted at that time that he was going after some good economic liberals. I’m not keen on the NRA. But I would much rather a representative be beholden to them than to be beholden to Wall Street—as most politicians are. So I figured it made sense for Bloomberg to spend that kind of money on this cause. He is, after all, a one-issue guy. He can offer some crumbs to liberal mindedness, as long as no one gets in the way of his money.

It seems there are very few issues that I disagree much with Thomas Frank, but today I felt like he read my mind when he wrote about Bloomberg’s new venture, “I’m a strong supporter of gun control, so hooray, I guess.” It’s part of a larger argument, Straight into the Fox News Buzzsaw: Why Elite, Billionaire Liberalism Always Backfires. After taking a scalpel to Bloomberg, he gets to his main point: we can’t depend upon rich liberals because their interests are not our own.

Think about Milton Hershey, who was one of the most beneficent plutocrats ever. There was nothing that he wouldn’t do for his workers. But when they wanted to start a union, he fought them with everything he had. It was all fine as long as he was the great patriarch who showered his employees with living wages. But when the workers demanded independence, that was just too much. And Hershey was far greater than plutocrats then, and light-years ahead of plutocrats now.[1] Frank sums up the plutocratic as only he can:

Unusually, Frank’s article actually ends on an upbeat note. And I agree with him that as individuals we really do have power if we work together. I have long thought that the key to saving our country is unionization. But at this point, the only way that’s going to happen is if we all get out there and vote, because for the last 60 years our rights to organize as workers have been steadily destroyed.

Unfortunately, I am not upbeat nor am I very hopeful. And the reason I’m not is the current state of the Democratic Party. It has become primarily a socially liberal party. In terms of economic policy, the Democrats are now far more conservative than any Republican could have ever hoped for in the late 1960s. And voters seem to have largely accepted this. I don’t think it is a knowledgeable acceptance. I think most people—young people especially—have come to believe that having no real choice on economic policy is not only the way things are, but the way they should be.

What hope I have is found in the recent Democratic Party embrace of raising the minimum wage. But we have to look at this clear-eyed. Getting a (still too low) minimum wage pegged to the inflation rate will only happen with a Democrat in the White House and Democratic control of both branches of Congress. And even then, it wouldn’t surprise me that a Democratic president would veto a minimum wage increase—if that Democrat was someone like Andrew Cuomo, who claims to be for it but always finds a way not to support it in practice. What’s more, I’m sure there are at least three people on the Supreme Court that would love to find the minimum wage unconstitutional.

But whatever hope I have is dependent upon all of us. We can’t depend upon rich benefactors. We have to do it ourselves. We have to vote. We have to organize. And above all else, we have to stop believing this nonsense that the laudable improvements in gay rights make up for ever increasing poverty and an ever shrinking middle class. We mustn’t mistake our own issues that just happen to overlap with those of the plutocrats as any indication that they are on our side. They aren’t. We are alone in this struggle.

[1] I’m not an expert, but I’ve read quite a lot about that period. In general, the plutocrats of the Gilded Age were concerned about wealth inequality. It was mostly only because they didn’t want to look like jerks to other plutocrats. But largely because of Ayn Rand, today we have this philosophy that just being rich is doing good works. That is what’s behind the “job creator” myth and it is why the myth is so damaging to society. Anyway, this is why I think today’s plutocrats are worse than they were a hundred years ago.

Friday in the fashion section, The New York Times published, Including the Young and the Rich. The nature of the article is clear from its first sentence, “On a crisp morning in late March, an elite group of 100 young philanthropists and heirs to billionaire family fortunes filed into a cozy auditorium at the White House.” But the United States doesn’t have social classes, right?

The article gets worse. It goes on to talk about, “Patrick Gage, a 19-year-old heir to the multibillion-dollar Carlson hotel and hospitality fortune.” He presented a talk about human trafficking. Here is an actual quote from the young billionaire-to-be, “The person two seats away from me was a Marriott. And when I told her about trafficking, right away she was like, ‘Uh, yeah, I want to do that.'” Of course she wanted to do that; all the hip young billionaires are doing it!

But what most struck me in the article was who wrote it: Jamie Johnson, heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune. We all know Mr. Johnson because of his dreadful little documentary The One Percent, which I discussed in Rich Kid Guilt. His whole career is based upon the fact that that he is rich. He has become a representative of the rich who think maybe they should be taxed a bit more.

The problem is that there is no recognition in any of Johnson’s work that his privilege is manifested in far more ways than his money. He is an intellectual and creative mediocrity. There is no way that anyone would invite him to appear on MSNBC or write for The New York Times if it weren’t for his inherited wealth and position. He isn’t around to report on the super rich; he is around to represent them.

The article contained the following disclosure:

So much for the pretense of exposing the super rich, which we saw in his movie. I suspect that after the rich saw his film, they figured he was safe. This is not a guy who is going to rock the boat. And so when all the future billionaires got together, they didn’t want any reports around. But Jamie Johnson was just fine. The New York Times should be ashamed.

Adolf Hitler was born on this day in 1889. I have a hard time thinking that Hitler was a remarkable man. Obviously, he had a profound effect on history. But violent, hateful sociopaths are not that unusual. I tend to think he was just the right vile human being at the right time. When I look around the political landscape, I see a lot of people who, given the right environment could have as evil an effect as Hitler did. It’s probably unfair, but when I see Ted Cruz, I see the same kind of charm that Hitler had mixed with his vile will to power and the associated demagoguery. And Cruz isn’t the only person I see in this light. I see this in a lot of politicians. I even see it in liberals, although it is much more a contagion among conservatives. But am I saying that Ted Cruz and his ilk want to start a genocide? No. I’m saying that what made Hitler is deeper than his racist and genocidal policies. The thing that links Cruz to Hitler is their shared wish to use fear and anger of a weak minority for political gain.

Since I’m already depressed, just like last year, I note that in 1893, the great film comedian Harold Lloyd was born. Unlike Hitler, Lloyd actually was unique. And he wasn’t just amazing; he was a very funny guy:

Happy birthday Harold Lloyd!

I saw a really great collection of photos a couple of weeks ago, The 60 Most Powerful Photos Ever Taken That Perfectly Capture the Human Experience. And since I don’t have time right now to write a proper article, I wanted to offer up what I thought was the most impressive.

It is from the Korean War. During the height of combat, Sergeant Frank Praytor found an abandoned two-week old kitten. I assume its mother had been killed or otherwise displaced. This picture shows him feeding the kitten who doesn’t look like its had its eyes open for long.

This does capture the contradiction of us humans. Our differences of opinion lead us to go to war with each other. But still, we are moved to save a helpless kitten. Of course, more and more I think our leaders get us to do the terrible things we often do. Basically, humans are decent. And we are often at are best under the worst of circumstances, as we see with Sergeant Praytor in this photograph.

Go check out all of the images. They are all quite good and many of them are truly amazing. I also really liked the photos of the Korean brothers, the Klan toddler, the Iranian skater girls, and the heart transplant photos. Enjoy!

Well my friends, the next two days will have scant postings here. I am off to do some field tests with my business partner Mikhail on our totally cool high tech device that hopefully some day soon I will be able to talk about. It is arguably the best work that I’ve ever done. We are quickly getting to the point being able to release prototypes and maybe even getting some money. This project is also the reason that I don’t post quite as much as I used to. But you still get at least four articles per day!

There probably won’t be anything more today. Sunday will have a birthday post, but I’m not sure of what else. Maybe a lot else, but I’m not promising anything!

Most of what is wrong with the American criminal justice system is summed up in the following headline from the ABA Journal, Rare “Perry Mason” Moment in Court Wins Dismissal for Defendant, Desk Duty for 5 Police Officers. The basic story is sadly typical. The police pulled over Joseph Sperling, a 23-year-old in the Chicago area. They claimed to pulled him over for not using his turn signal. Then, when the officer approached the car, while Sperling was getting his driver’s license, he just happened to smell the cannabis and discovered it.

But the story has a happy ending. The defense attorney, Steven Goldman, sent a subpoena to the Glenview police department for the squad car video. And what do you know? It turned out that every one of the five officers involved in the arrest told the exact same lies. The judge was not pleased about this, calling it “outrageous conduct.” And according to the article, “Cook County Circuit Judge Catherine Haberkorn granted a defense motion to suppress the search, which eliminated a basis for his arrest and resulted in a swift dismissal by prosecutors of the felony drug case against the 23-year-old.”

I am really glad that Sperling lucked out in this case. But what’s sad is that he indeed “lucked out.” This kind of police behavior is not just common; it is standard operating procedure. But look what happens to these cops who conspired against an American citizen, “The officers were later put on desk duty…” There will be an investigation. Most likely, it will find that any collusion was inadvertent. But even if the investigation finds that they did intentionally collude, nothing bad will happen to them because everyone in the police force knows that this is how they do their jobs. It’s just that normally, there isn’t video tape that exposes them. (And even when there is, defense attorneys don’t have the time to check it out.)

Police officers throughout the nation destroy the lives of people all the time. People get arrested on drug possession charges, become labeled felons, and have difficulty finding gainful employment for the rest of their lives. So I have no problem with throwing the book at cops that are caught doing this kind of thing. It shouldn’t just be a matter removal, much less the “indignity” of having to work inside the office. At minimum, they should be prevented from ever working in law enforcement again.

The system we have insists upon treating cases like this as though they are the exception instead of the rule that they clearly are. And so every time an officer testifies in court, it is just assumed that he would never lie. If I were on a jury (and I never will be, precisely because I think this), I would take officer’s word as less reliable than others. I’ve seen this in traffic court. Officers always claim to remember the most banal stuff, which they don’t. It is all in their notes, but of course, they could write anything in their notes. And we see that in this much more serious case.

People always argue for the death penalty as a deterrent to crime. It doesn’t actually work because people don’t usually make calculated, reasonable decisions about murder. But police officers do make calculated, reasonable decisions about bending the rules and making their jobs easier. Deterrents really will work on them. We should throw the book at these officers.