I have a six-year-old son. His name is Jin-Gyu. He lives off me, yet he is quite capable of making a living. I pay for his lodging, food, education and health care. But millions of children of his age already have jobs. Daniel Defoe, in the 18th century, thought that children could earn a living from the age of four.

Incentives, however, are only half the story. The other is capability. Even if Jin-Gyu were to be offered a £20m reward or, alternatively, threateded with a bullet in his head, he would not be able to rise to the challenge of brain surgery had he quit school at the age of six. Likewise, industries in developing countries will not survive if they are exposed to international competition too early. They need time to improve their capabilities by mastering advanced technologies and building effective organizations. This is the essence of the infant industry argument…

—Ha-Joon Chang
Bad Samaritans

Good morning. I thought we would start with this nice video by French Rescue of Jacques Brel’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas.” As they note, the English translation is meant to be accurate and not poetic. For example, they translate the refrain “Don’t leave me.” They do, however, mention (on the YouTube page) that Dieter Kaiser wrote a more poetic translation with “Don’t forsake me now.” Personally, given the music, I think it works better to translate it, “Do not leave me now.”

I don’t think the lyrics really matter. The listener gets the meaning clearly. Brel’s performance is what really does it. He’s more an actor than a singer. That’s always been the problem when his songs are performed here by pop singers. All the depth and subtlety are ripped out of them. As in this song, I can’t really imagine an American male showing this level of vulnerability. Sure, there’s a lot of faux vulnerability—always with a wink to the audience. But then, Brel was a real man, not one of these pretend American men who are too worried that someone might think they are gay to ever be genuine.

Regardless, Brel is the real deal:

There seems to be a problem with Republicans and plagiarism. They have this tendency to just stick other people’s work in their speeches and bills without a thought. We saw a whole bunch of this with Rand Paul recently. And in the end, he didn’t even seem to understand what was wrong with what he had done. He made it out like other people were academic with their insistence of “footnotes.” He didn’t get the fact that saying something that was a direct quote without noting it is the definition of plagiarism.

Of course, some might bring up Joe Biden in 1988 when he plagiarizing part of a speech by British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock. Actually, there are mitigating circumstances in this. Primarily, he normally did directly quote Kinnock, but simply forgot that time. He claimed to be exhausted and I believe him. The fact is that love him or hate him, Joe Biden is the most authentic politician around. But the main point is that Biden was embarrassed about the incident and withdrew from the race.

Recently, we got another Republican plagiarizer: New York State Senator Greg Ball. Like me, Ball was deeply affected by the documentary Blackfish. So he put together a bill to make it illegal for aquatic parks to keep killer whales in captivity. The problem is that the bill lifts a paragraph wholesale from a blog post by high school student Donald Rapier.

This is unfortunate, because while Ball is a Republican, I agree with the bill he is trying to get passed. It is also unfortunate because he decided to rip off this high school student rather than me. Of course, the biggest problem is the plagiarism. And to his credit, Ball seems to understand that plagiarism is actually wrong and something to be embarrassed about. So he fired one of his staff members, who supposedly did the plagiarism.

But the whole thing shows how writing has been devalued. I would think that everyone who works in a state (Or federal!) level office would at least be a competent writer. But instead, it looks like Republicans are forced to hire people who scraped out of English Composition with a C-. Or if they aren’t forced, they think that ideology trumps competence. As much as I admire what Senator Ball is trying to do, I think he must ultimately be held responsible. It isn’t enough to say that your staff did it when you are the one hiring people who can’t write and don’t value those who do.

Last night, I watched The Incredibles. It is a feature length animated film about a family of super heroes. Think: Fantastic Four meets Roseanne. It was written and directed by Brad Bird, and like most of his work, it is a hell of a lot of fun. The first half of the film is a parody of the super hero genre. And as such it is brilliant. The second half of the film is straight super hero genre, but still works pretty well. I think it is a mistake to think of The Incredibles as anything other than a romp. But there is a thematic schizophrenia in the film that I can’t help but discuss.

In the first half of the film, the guiding idea is that people ought to be allowed to be who they are. What happens is that Mr Incredible (voiced by Craig T Nelson) hurts a man who he saves from suicide. The man sues him and this opens the floodgates for lawsuits against the “supers” who do have a tendency to cause a lot of damage in their crime fighting activities. The government passes a law granting them all immunity, but they have to stop being super heroes. So 15 years later, we find Mr Incredible working in an insurance company under a very annoying boss (voiced by Wallace Shawn) who is also offensively short.

But as the film progresses, it stops being about the oppression of those who are different. It becomes instead about the limitations placed on the great. At one point, Edna, the fashion designer who once made the fabulous costumes for the supers, laments, “I used to design for gods!” And indeed, as I’ve written about before, the modern action genre is nothing so much as demigod mythologizing. Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone don’t play humans, they play gods. And this has been a problem for our society where true heroism is devalued at the expense cinematic action that would kill any real man. At least the super heroes are demigods, unlike the Johns McClane and Rambo.

So, much of the second half of the film involves Mr Incredible grousing about the fact that greatness isn’t valued. For example, in an argument about their son Dash (!) whose super power is that he runs really fast, Mr Incredible says, “People keep coming up with new ways to celebrate mediocrity, but if someone is genuinely exceptional…” And then he proposes to his wife (the humorously sexist Elastigirl, voiced by Holly Hunter), “You want to do something for Dash? Well, let him actually compete! Let him go out for sports!” By the end of the film, he gets to do just that.

This brings up a fundamental problem, however. Dash may look like a little human boy, but he isn’t. He is a super or a demigod. Having other boys run a race against him is like having them run a race against a cheetah. (Note: I believe a human would beat a cheetah in a marathon.) After the race, father says to son, “I’m proud of you.” For what?! When Dash was born, he could run a hundred times faster than the fastest man on the planet. Is Mr Incredible proud that he just happened to be born with that ability?

That gets to the issue of free will. We are, all of us, the products of our genes and our environments. We are exactly whatever we were programmed to be. Now I understand that a society needs to pretend that this is not the case in order to provide an environment in which people will make the best of their lives. But we also shouldn’t lose perspective. The fact that I’m smart and knowledgeable is not something that I should give myself credit for. It is something that I should be grateful for. And so should Dash be grateful for his ability to run really fast.

The Incredibles gets confused about this. But it doesn’t matter. It is a fun and silly movie with a lot of laughs and action. And if you take it seriously, you are doing it wrong. Because it leaves a lot of unanswered plot questions. For example: when the super heroes retired, why did the super villains retire? But no one should care—not when we get to hear Wallace Shawn and Holly Hunter yell at Craig “No one helped me when I was on food stamps and welfare” Nelson. I suspect you will be having too much fun to notice any of these things. Regardless, you have no choice; you have no free will.

Yesterday, the White House announced that Obama would remove Chained-CPI from his next budget. Chained-CPI is the way of raising the cost of living more slowly so that Social Security benefits would be cut over the course of a worker’s retirement. Although it is not reported as much, it would also increase the taxes of lower and middle class people. So it is a good thing that the administration is officially giving up on it.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said, “There was a point in time when there was a little bit more optimism about the willingness of Republicans to budge on closing some tax loopholes, but over the course of the last year, they’ve refused to do that.” This was always the idea: Chained-CPI would entice the Republicans into a Grand Bargain of entitlement cuts and tax increases. Economically, this is a stupid idea. Cutting spending in a depressed economy is bad. Raising taxes in a depressed economy is bad. So other than the thoroughly repudiated idea of “expansionary austerity,” there was never a good economic reason for a Grand Bargain.

But I understand that politicians aren’t economists and often do things that make no sense in that regard. However, they ought to be smart from a political standpoint. Unfortunately, the Grand Bargain never made any political sense. A standard political compromise is where each side gives up something to get something else they want. But that doesn’t describe the Grand Bargain. It was making compromises to get something each side could deal with losing. Republican voters don’t want entitlement cuts and they really don’t want tax increases. Democratic voters don’t want tax increases and they really don’t want tax cuts.

Of course, there is a group that wants to raise taxes and cut entitlements: Washington centrists. These are the Very Serious People of legend. What makes them Serious? Being in favor of policies that no one likes! And if the policies are objectively bad for the economy, so much the better! What’s especially sad about this is that the Republican elite never really fell for this. But among the New Democrats who now control the Democratic Party, such Serious Thinking is all the vogue. This is the biggest problem with the party going forward.

Sadly, I don’t think this decision by the White House shows any growth either in terms of their political or economic thinking. Obama still pines for a Republican Party that will make deals the people hate. And he still thinks that the deficit is an important economic issue. (It is, of course, but in the opposite way he thinks.) Instead, I suspect his advisers are telling him that he’s already cut the deficit in half and it continues to go down. What’s more, it is getting hard to deny that all the cuts (especially the Sequester) are the cause of our weak recovery. But it is good that after four years of debt obsession, the White House is giving up. For now.

I’ve written a lot around here about the fact that we do have more or less a class war. But it isn’t like conservatives would have you believe. It isn’t that the poor are jealous of the rich. It is that the rich just hate the poor. As I show in It’s the Poor, Stupid, in general, the poor vote liberal and rich vote conservative. That’s just everyone voting their own self-interest. How can I say that the rich hate the poor?

Yesterday, Paul Waldman wrote a very interesting article at The American Prospect, Why Can’t You Miserable Commoners Be Happier With Your Lot? In it, he quotes a study by Page, Bartels, and Seawright, Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans (pdf). Unlike pretty much all polls that at most look at people in the broad category of making “over $100,000 per year,” this study looks at the truly rich. And it finds that the rich are downright mean (my word, not theirs).

The best example is how people responded the statement, “The government in Washington ought to see to it that everyone who wants to work can find a job.” The general public was in favor of this with 68%. But the rich? Only 19% of them were in favor of this. We’re not talking about giving a handout here. We are talking about government policy to allow people to earn a living.

The only justification I can think of for this is that the rich believe that if the government helps in this way, it will raise wages. The poor won’t be as dependent upon the rich and thus the rich will lose money and power. That’s a vile attitude, but it is also stupid. The economics are not that simple. It’s funny that the rich believe that “a rising tide lifts all boats” when it comes to enriching the rich. But when it comes to enriching the poor (where it’s more true), they don’t believe it.

Another interesting aspect of the report is spending priorities. These range from -100 (meaning they really want to cut them) to +100 (meaning they really want to fund them). The general public gave education funding +50. The rich still support it, but not as strongly: +31. Never believe a conservative who tells you they support equality of opportunity. Similarly, they are against Social Security with a score of -33 compared to a general public score of +46.

This is sad but not surprising, because it’s human nature. And given this, there are obvious policy implications. In the United States, we have a democracy only in a theoretical sense. Our elected officials listen almost exclusively to the rich. It’s even worse than that. There is a widely held belief that the rich are disinterested truth-tellers while the poor are self-interested. This is, of course, self-serving. It provides our leaders with the justification for ignoring the thoughts and needs of the vast majority of the country.

There is at least one thing we can all do: vote. Even the problems with the Democratic Party’s move to the right over the last four decades can be reversed if the poor start voting as much as the rich. Voting is the one aspect of democracy that we still have control over.

Afterword

I do wonder, though. If the poor really did start voting and the country started being a real democracy, would the rich find a way to stop this? I’m not just talking voter ID laws. Look at Michigan with their anti-democratic state-imposed city “managers.” In general, you can count on the elites not believing in democracy and we see them more and more willing to admit it publicly.

A couple of months ago, Milt Shook wrote a good blog post, Of Course Obama’s Progressive! Give Him More Democrats, See What Happens. I have many problems with Obama, but he is basically right. Any politician has to be seen in the context of the political environment that he is part of. There is an unfortunate tendency among liberals to look back fondly on Reagan and Nixon. And indeed, on domestic issues, Nixon was pretty good. What I think people forget is that these men existed in a political environment. Nixon could not act like Ted Cruz does now. What’s more, if Nixon were alive and in politics today, he would be as extreme as any of them. Ditto (even more so) for Reagan.

However, Obama is the result of a 50 year assault on the political Overton Window. Republicans do not need to win elections; they have already pushed the political battle ground so far to the right that what now passes as liberal, is at best what passed as center or even center right a few decades ago.

Recently, I asked some of my readers to take the Political Compass test. The results were highly skewed, because my writing doesn’t exactly appeal to conservatives. You can see them all as black dots in the lower left hand corner of the graph:

My results were -7.75 on the left-right scale and -7.23 on the authoritarian-libertarian scale: (-7.75,-7.23). The average of all of us was (-7.10,-7.56) with 90% confidence limits of (2.73,0.95). As you can see in the graph, the website owners have tried to assess the scores of famous people. Some of these are about right. In particular, I think Francois Hollande is correct: very slightly liberal, very slightly libertarian. The Dalai Lama, however, is way off—he ought to be down with all the Frankly Curious black dots.

I was quite interested in where they put the last presidential race. Obama got a score of (+7,+6). Romney got a score of (+8.5,+7.5). Overall, I think these scores are a little extreme. I don’t actually think that Romney is that bad, although that isn’t far off from where he campaigned. I also think I’d give Obama something more along the lines of (+3,+2).

I like Obama and in general, he is leading the country better than any president during my lifetime. But he is constrained by the neoliberal ideology of the New Democratic movement that he is very much a part of. The Republican Party may have been taken over by the Tea Party base. But the Democratic Party has been taken over by the New Democrats. They aren’t all bad, but they believe in a lot of economic policy that is just wrong. Still, I support them because they continue to believe in facts and they are at base practical.

The bottom line is that we need to destroy the Republican Party. Then we can fight about liberalism. I believe that the modern Democratic Party would make an excellent set of parties. One liberal (the New Deal/Great Society part that I am proud to include myself in) and one conservative (the New Democrats with their “free” trade agreements and ending welfare as we know it).

And here at the People Republic of Frankly Curious, well, you all know what you are!