One interesting thing about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is that libertarians are on both sides of it. There are what I would consider the stupid libertarians, who are in favor of the deal because they are for anything that seems like it will make the rich richer. These are the kinds of libertarians who are against unions and for the liberty-destroying “right to work” laws. If we exclude the people who are libertarians simply because it is a presentable form of neo-confederacy (and that is most of them), the majority of libertarians are of this kind: people who just think the rich are super-keen and need to be ever rewarded. This group includes Tyler Cowen — hero of subgeniuses everywhere!

But there is a small fraction of the libertarian movement that is actually in favor of individual liberty. This group will generally be against the TPP. They understand that this treaty is not much about trade. What it is primarily about is providing handouts to powerful economic interests. So I was pleased to see that, as I had previously noted, Timothy B Lee is one of the better kinds of libertarians. He’s still wrong about exactly what libertarianism would bring, but he is at least trying to create a better world for all, not just for those who are already doing well.

Over the weekend, Lee wrote, Why Killing Obama’s Trade Deal Could Be Good for Free Trade. Cowen had claimed that if the TPP gets shot down, future trade deals could be worse as a result. Why that would be isn’t clear. His followups seemed to be a lot of magic thinking: he believes it because he’s already decided that the TPP must be good. Lee, in refreshing contrast, was clear as could be: it’s the cronyism, stupid!

And conversely, if the failure of the TPP is seen to be due to all of the corporate giveaways in the deal, then future deals would be seen as DOA if they included them. As Lee put it, “When special interest groups started lobbying for another round of goodies, US trade negotiators would be able to say, ‘We’d love to help but we can’t risk having the deal rejected.'” The only question is whether future trade negotiators would see it that way.

But on that issue, Lee is also right: none of the major players arguing against this treaty are doing so out of a sense of protectionism. The number one thing that I hear people talking about is that it strengthens intellectual property rights, which will increase costs everywhere. The second thing I hear most often is the threat that the TPP could cause to democratic governance through the strengthening of investor-state dispute settlement — the unaccountable international legal system that could force countries to pay companies for laws that the court claims are hurting companies’ profits.

On the other hand, so what if future trade negotiators don’t take that lesson away from the defeat of the TPP? Surely after the defeat of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) for similar reasons, they would learn. And if not for that one, maybe the next. Whatever it takes. Although I have to say: I don’t see us getting more of these treaties if there aren’t major businesses able to get special treatment. The barriers to trade are already low. The TTP (and TTIP) didn’t come about because governments were itching for them. Now, the point of these deals seems to be very little besides the cronyism. I think they start with the cronyism and then come up with other things that will allow them to be sold.

This cartoon sums up a fact of our economic system. And it provides all the information you need to appraise the claim so loved by conservatives, “We don’t care about equality of outcomesopportunity.” What they mean is that they don’t care about either. It’s really quite simple: equality of opportunity — or even anything in the same ballpark — is a lie if equality itself is too far out of kilter. The conservatives who don’t care about inequality are just the modern day royalists. They want to enforce the current class makeup of society, but rather than use the idea of “blood” they use the far less reasonable idea of “meritocracy.”

The great cure-all for inequality is “education.” I’ve written about this a lot over the years. It is based on a correlation. Not surprisingly, people with college degrees make more money than people without college degrees. Of course, I’m highly skeptical of the mechanism here. For one thing, it is easier to get a college degree if you are stupid with rich parents than it is if you are smart with poor parents. So to some extent, a college degree is simply an indication of class. But the real reason that people push education is because it is a way of saying, “We can’t do anything right now!” And then they have another couple of decades to come up with a new reason why the rich should never be taxed.

So when Bernie Sanders (or Barack Obama) suggest that college be free, I’m not exactly inspired. That’s not to say that I don’t think it is a good idea. But it is not the panacea that many people think it is. As a result, I was very interested to read a recent article by Matt Bruenig, Wealth Inequality and Student Debt. In it, he provided a very useful thought experiment.

First, consider our current system for funding higher education. Two students — one rich and the other poor — go to a college that costs $100,000 for four years. The rich student gets no government assistance, but her parents pay the $100,000 and she ends up with no debt. The poor student gets $50,000 from the state, and nothing from her parents. She ends up with $50,000 in debt. Thus, the rich student is $50,000 ahead of the poor student.

Second, consider the Sanders system for funding higher education. Both students pay nothing for college. But the rich student’s family still gives her $100,000 — perhaps as a down-payment for her first house. So she ends up $100,000 ahead and the poor student ends up even. In the first case, the poor student ends up $50,000 worse off. In the second case, the poor student ends up $100,00 worse off. This means that the more progressive system actually increases inequality more than the current system.

Note that this is true whether we are looking at the student alone, or the student’s family. And it is worse than even this makes out. Because a college degree for the rich student is going to be worth more than the college degree of the poor student. The rich student will simply have more opportunities based upon her connections. So the reward for that $100,000 investment is almost certainly far greater than the reward that the poor student gets from her $50,000 investment.

All of this highlights the fact that we need a highly progressive tax system. This, of course, is why the rich are so stuck on the idea of a flat tax. It is considered by them to be “fair.” But, of course, in the case above, it clearly isn’t. The tax system folds back on itself, because it doesn’t benefit the poor as much as it ought to. In the most basic sense, the rich student’s parents should be paying at least $50,000 more in taxes than the poor student’s parents pay. And when it comes to the upper middle class, that may well be the case. But when it comes to the truly wealthy, that isn’t the case at all. As I noted during the 2012 election, in Mitt Romney’s most recent tax year (2011), he had paid almost exactly the same tax rate that I did, even though I had made about $20,000 that year and he had made more than $13 million.

Clearly, there are more specific solutions to this problem. For example, we could just pay the tuition of poor students and not leave them in debt, even as we did nothing for rich students. But ultimately, the “free college” solution is the best. We just have to figure out how to tax everyone fairly. Until we do that, all is lost.

Last week, Jeffrey Toobin pushed back against the idea that if the Supreme Court find for the plaintiffs in King v Burwell, it is a problem for the Republicans, Obama’s Game of Chicken With the Supreme Court. In fact, he used Colin Powell’s old Pottery Barn rule to make the case. According to him, if Obamacare is broken, it will be the president’s problem because it is the president’s law. Toobin is a smart guy, but I don’t think he has a clue about political science.

Think about government shutdowns: why is it that the people always side with the president? Well, part of it is because the president is always a Democrat. Dig down a little deeper and you will see that the public’s reaction is almost axiomatic. Democrats are seen as being in favor of the government. Republicans are seen as hating the government. (I don’t think either of those perceptions are right, but they are what people think.) So when the government is shut down, it must be because the Republicans wanted it. If the proximate cause is the Democrats, it must be because the Republicans forced them into it.

The case here is even more on the Democrats’ side. The whole point of the Pottery Barn analogy was that if Bush went into Iraq and broke it, he bought it. In this case, it isn’t Obama who’s screwed things up. You’d have to use some pretty twisted logic to get there: people are getting subsidies because of Obamacare, and now they aren’t because of the continued Republican War on Obamacare, and so it is Obama’s fault for people not getting something that Obama gave them to start with. No. This is much simpler: Republicans hate Obamacare and this is their fault. This one isn’t hard. This is how it will play. Whether the Republicans will care or not is another matter.

Another aspect of this is how media shape perceptions. Clearly, the media cannot push a narrative that is totally at odds with what people are inclined to believe. But the media can certainly push a narrative that goes slightly against what the public is inclined to believe. And there isn’t even a question in this case. The media will push the narrative that the public already accepts. The only thing that will push against this is Fox News and hate radio. And the people who tune into those “news” sources will already believe the narrative that they are hearing. In terms of overall perception, we are talking about the people who listen to NBC Nightly News.

Clearly, everyone should hope that King v Burwell goes down in flames — with none of the justices siding with the plaintiffs. If that happened, maybe we could put an end to these frivolous anti-Obamacare lawsuits. If we get another 5-4 decision, I fear they will continue on. It’s like playing craps: the conservatives just keep rolling the dice hoping to get lucky. Regardless, this will be a problem for the Republicans and they will be forced to deal with it — even if they do it in a piecemeal way just until the next president’s term.

Happy Memorial Day. I used to really hate holidays — unless they were ones when people called me over to cook. To me, they were just days when the library wasn’t open and there wasn’t much news. But now, all days are pretty much the same for me. So it’s Memorial Day and that doesn’t really change anything. But Memorial Day has always been an exception in the sense that it is a serious holiday. As much as I may question the American war machine, I don’t question the sacrifice that people have made in the name of official government policy.

I’ve twice written about Memorial Day. The first time was, Remembering on Memorial Day. At that time, I said:

Last year, I wrote, Try to Be Better on Memorial Day. I think that it is worth quoting in total, because it sums up what I feel about this holiday — both good and bad:

It is the way of my people. We are not barbecuers. We do not like the Monday holidays. But if it is for a good cause, we bear it. The labor struggle is a good cause. The civil rights struggle is a good cause. And today is Memorial Day, and remembering the men and women we sent to their deaths, is a good cause. I like to think of Memorial Day as a day of remembrance of all who have died pointlessly. And before people jump on me, war is a pointless activity. It doesn’t matter that there are times when good people are forced to fight wars. World War II was a righteous war because of the Nazis and others, but certainly it would have been better if the Nazis had not risen and forced the world into war.

Let’s think about the “Good War” for a moment. As many as 25 million soldiers died during it. Of those, 5 million died while in POW camps. As many as 55 million civilians died, roughly half of them from disease and famine. What a waste. I can’t help but think of us as two colonies of ants, because the individuals on either side are pretty much indistinguishable. The treatment of Jews and other “undesirables” by the Nazis was inhuman, but other than being more concentrated it was no different than what we did to the native peoples of America. The Japanese treatment of the Chinese was terrible, but did it really justify our systematic destruction of the Japanese civilian population? Did it justify dropping two atomic bombs on them?

Again and again, I come back to 95/5 principle: 95% of the population just wants to live their lives and have their Memorial Day barbecues (or in the case of my people, write maudlin essays about the tragedy of war); and 5% of the people want something else — I don’t even know what it is anymore. It’s mostly power, I suppose. But once these things are set in motion, there seems no way to stop it. Everyone has pitchforks and torches, and in the end no one is quite sure why.

Unlike Memorial Day that I rather like, I really dislike Veteran’s Day. The whole thing reminds me of the bumper sticker, “If You Like Your Freedom Thank a Vet.” Sadly, the military is necessary. But the last even remotely existential threat we faced was 75 years ago. And sure, we should thank those vets. But just as much, we should thank the vets of the Soviet Union — over 11 million of whom died to protect our freedom.

But if people want to see Memorial Day as a nationalist holiday, I’m against that. The last thing we need is to expand the holiday — to make it about even more dead soldiers. The sacrifice that these men and women gave is not “cool.” It is not something to be celebrated. It is something to be honored, because as a species, we are extremely flawed. Above all, it should be a day that we, as a species, ask forgiveness from those we’ve murdered in what were almost always fights over natural resources. Very much like this:

On this Memorial Day, let’s try to be better than the chimpanzees.

So there you go. Let’s honor and remember our military dead. And let’s try to do better from now on. It is not a matter of better technology. It is a matter of better morality. Happy Memorial Day.

Over at Vox on Friday, Timothy B Lee wrote a surprisingly thin article based on a single source, These House Republicans Are Bucking Their Party Leaders — and Obama — on Trade. Mostly, it is just, “This is what my Cato friend, Bill Watson, thinks is going on in the House.” Watson is just your typical Cato ideologue who thinks that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is going to be like fairy dust on partner countries. That’s because he, like most proponents, claims, without proof, that the TPP is about “free trade.” Well, at least in Lee’s article, we don’t have to listen to such nonsense. But I do wonder if the Republican vote totals that he presents are any more grounded in reality than his arguments for the TPP.

He claims that there are between 15 and 50 Republicans in the House who will vote against fast track authority. If it is 50, bye-bye TPP! If it is only 15, then the president gets his “legacy” bill and we get another “trade” agreement that will cost American jobs and put more money into the pockets of the already rich. Given that this is is the raison d’être for the American government, the people will probably not even notice. The modern American is used to slipping further and further behind. She might have a heart attack if our long slide down were interrupted.

But what I found really interesting in the article was Lee’s comparison of the Democrats’ reasons for being against the deal and the Republicans’ reasons. The Democrats oppose the treaty on the basis of practical concerns. For example, one of my biggest complaints is that greater enforcement of intellectual property rights in other countries will crowd out actual goods that Americans make. For example: Hollywood is just going to take this money and run; it isn’t going to produce more and better films. So money that was once available to Vietnamese consumers to buy our stuff will instead go straight to the power elite in Hollywood. This is one of the mechanisms in the TPP that will redistribute income upward.

The Republicans, not surprisingly, don’t need no stinking practical concerns. Instead, they are concerned about the “Constitution” and “executive power.” But most of all, they are focused on the fact that they hate the current President of the United States. In addition, of course, Republicans are concerned about things that aren’t real. Lee mentioned, “And when Republican do complain about the contents of the TPP, they sometimes focus on topics that almost certainly won’t be part of the trade deal.” That includes the fear that the TPP will allow more brown people in the country.

This is, sadly, the great divide in American politics. And it is amusing that a libertarian like Lee would highlight it, even if he doesn’t frame it as systemic. “Liberalism” in America is just the practical business of governing. It is largely devoid of ideology. “Conservatism” in America is just the business of attaining ideological purity. But the ideology of the conservative movement is vague at best — having something to do with American exceptionalism: small government when it comes to the least dangerous aspects of public policy and large government when it comes to the most dangerous aspects of public policy. This is why most liberals can at least have a decent political discussion with libertarians. They may be lost in the ideological vapor, but at least their ideology is relatively coherent.

See also: TPP Could Create 4,000+ Minimum Wage Jobs.

Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo wrote an insightful article last week, Chris Christie and the Distorting Lens of New York Media Dominance. It answers the question, “Why is so much made of these northeastern Republicans when they never have any hope in a national primary?” There is a lot to his answer. Basically: so much of the media establishment — including conservative flagships — is located in the northeast. He also noted that this is where most of the moneyed Republican base is. But, “It’s just not where the voters come from.”

As everyone should know, this is the standard problem for the Republican Party. It is committed to the interests of Wall Street. But that doesn’t win elections. The Republican base voter is mostly interested in social issues. The truth is that Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani are extremely conservative. “But they are usually not terribly focused on the evangelicalism-tinged social issues that drive Republican party identification in its heartlands.” So these guys might be loved by Wall Street, but they are like the Southern Strategy without the south: they aren’t going to win elections, even if northern Republican voters rather like them.

I agree with all of this. But I think there is another aspect to it. It has to do with the Professional Centrists. These are the people, who represent the foundation of the commentariat, who are always and forever looking for a “third way.” By definition, the Republicans are too conservative and the Democrats are too liberal. And we know it is definitional, because these people so often call on the two parties to compromise on what turns out to already be Democratic policy. But even if it weren’t for this, how can someone look at both the Democratic and Republican Parties and how much more conservative they’ve become over the last 50 years and think, “Sure, the Republicans are too conservative, but the Democrats are too liberal!”?

For these kinds of pundits, the Republicans from blue states will always have a special glow. It’s simply because those Republicans can’t afford to look like rattle snake handlers. But since the pundits don’t care about actual policy, they can focus on the way that people like Christie and Giuliani seem like regular people (in the sense of “like people who upper class pundits know”). What’s more, they seem less conservative than the likes of Ted Cruz — even though they aren’t. So it allows these Professional Centrists to claim that these Republicans are centrists. It’s axiomatic: given that Democrats are too liberal and Republicans are too conservative, any Republican who they decide is less conservative than the Republican Party generally must be a centrist or moderate. QED.

Charles Murray is out with another book, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission. I haven’t read it because no one is paying me to. There are too many great books that I will never have time to read. I’m not going to waste my time reading yet another of his screeds. Let’s be clear what he’s all about. Most people know him from, The Bell Curve. As a result, most people think of him as a racist. Indeed, I’m pretty sure I have called him that myself. But it isn’t quite appropriate. Murray doesn’t care about race. Like all of his books, The Bell Curve was making a social argument for conservative policy. In that particular case, he was arguing for an end to affirmative action.

This new book is more practical. He argues for a kind of civil disobedience. He wants some billionaires to pony up some money for a legal defense fund that will allow companies everywhere to break the law. This act of widespread law breaking will thus paralyze the system and the long promised libertarian utopia will at least be at hand! Some people seem genuinely concerned about it. Sam Seder and Digby spoke about it at some length on The Majority Report on Tuesday. But I don’t think there is much to worry about here.

Matt Bruenig tackled the issue last week with his usual finely tuned analysis, Charles Murray’s Abracadabra State. He noted that Murray’s legal defense fund would constitute insurance. And in most areas, the courts have already made insurance against law breaking illegal. Now it is possible that the court system would allow conservatives to get away with such a scheme. But that would be because the courts wanted the same thing that the conservatives wanted. That, of course, does not seem likely. Even conservatives judges bristle when conservative activists try to mess with their power.

To me, Murray’s idea is just a systematic approach to what conservatives have long been doing. We have seen two major challenges against Obamacare. But the truth is that conservatives have filed hundreds if not thousands of similarly frivolous lawsuits. And they were all taken care of very quickly. And it goes back much further than that. Conservatives love to rail against “activist judges,” but for the last 30 years, it has been the conservatives on the bench who have been activists. There are very few people in the federal courts who would be seen as liberal outside our own skewed definition of the term.

I think that Brian Beutler is exactly right, Charles Murray and the Right’s Plan to Subvert Democracy. But even that gives the conservative movement too much credit. Despite their constant claims to the popularity of their cause, conservatives gave up on democracy over two centuries ago. This is one of the great burdens of being a conservative. If you are serious, you have to admit that the people are not on your side. And that means abandoning the idea of democracy. And that means you want something like a philosopher-king. Of course, that’s not going to happen. Instead, it would just be a king — some better than others. But most conservatives are fine with that — just as long as they are part of the aristocracy, and they are allowed to keep stealing from the poor.

Murray’s subtitle is telling, “Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission.” It’s interesting how conservatives see liberty as being whatever it is that they want. It’s never thought out. I would like the liberty to live anywhere that I want and to hunt and gather. But Murray would say: no, no, no! That’s because the kind of liberty I’m talking about interferes with the kind of authority (property rights) that he believes in. Murray doesn’t believe in liberty, though; he believes in a system of government that is more attentive to the interests of his class. Of course, he’s living in a dream land. There is no government that could be more attentive to the interest of his class than the one we have in the United States — at least one that wouldn’t cause a revolution.

See also: David Frum Summarizes Charles Murray