Noah Smith is such a brilliant guy, I have no idea why he wrote, Guess What’s Destroying the Middle Class? He started with the silliest notion that there are three reasons why middle class wages are falling: robots, unions and China. I realize that there are a lot of people who talk about this, but don’t we all know that it is a little more nuanced than that? That it isn’t that simple? If you asked me, I would say that the primary reason for falling wages is something else entirely: the new normal coming into 2001 was that middle class wages were stagnant. The difference between stagnant and falling wages is just a matter of degrees. The capitalists in America have gotten even better at siphoning off profits.

There is nothing especially new about this; it’s been going on for forty years. And robots, unions, and China are all symptoms of the larger problem. And the larger problem is that the government has had it out and continues to have it out for the middle class. Let’s do a little Dean Baker 101. High paying jobs in America moving to low paying jobs in China should also reduce the cost of living for Americans. And indeed: televisions are cheaper. But what isn’t cheaper? Healthcare, legal support, college educations. And that’s because we haven’t subjected workers in those fields to the same globalization. And that is a choice that was made by the power elite for the power elite.

I agree with Smith that the robots story is weak. There is a larger problem, however. Our policies allow the owners of capital to capture more and more profits. Robots help in that regard. But technological improvements were arguably as fast during the 1950s as they are today. And we did not see more and more money going to the capital side of the economy at that time. I think that unions are clearly a bigger issue. But even they aren’t huge. I still think the bigger issue is the way that norms have changed. These now allow billionaires to think they deserve their money and don’t owe anything back to society. And this has ripple effects all through the nation, not the least of which being the low taxes on the extremely wealthy.

What really amazed me about the article was Smith’s fatalism with regard to the problem. He concluded that the problem was China — and I think that’s clearly a simplistic way of looking at income inequality — was so fundamental that the only thing that we can do is nothing. “The only solution to the problem of globalization may be to wait.” Chinese wages are increasing. So soon, all those factories will move to India. And then there won’t be any super-large countries for our patriotic companies to run to. In other words: don’t worry American middle class; your wages will rise in just another forty years!

(There’s something I don’t exactly understand with this reasoning. I thought that he was using China as a metonymy for the whole of globalization. But he seems to mean it literally. And apparently, only India can take over China. Somehow, a bunch of countries in Africa wouldn’t work. I don’t understand that, but I don’t suppose it really matters.)

A big problem with the people who claim that robots or education are the only things that are responsible for economic inequality is that these reasons are used as an excuse for doing nothing — or for arguing that there is nothing that can be done. But that is the conclusion that Smith draws from his China hypothesis. And this is strange, because like I said, he’s a brilliant guy. There is no reason for fatalism. The state of the American middle class is not the result of forces beyond our control; it is the result of our own policy choices.

Ted Cruz got a lot of razzing for his “Imagine” speech where he asked a lot of confused students at Liberty University to imagine a conservative world with things like a flat federal income tax. It was the “imagine” part of it that got the scorn, not the ideas — they are just standard Republican ideas. But I think it is really interesting that the Republican Party is so wedded to this idea that everyone ought to be pay the same federal income tax rate. This would make overall taxes in the United States regressive: the poor would be paying a higher percentage of their income in taxes than the rich. But that’s what Republicans like Cruz believe, and after they got their flat tax, they would start pushing for an explicitly regressive tax. After all, why should people pay the same percentage of their income in taxes?! One man can only walk on one road at a time; every man should have to pay the same amount. And so on.

It’s important to remember that as extreme as Ted Cruz’s ideas are, he is not an extremist in his party. The Republican Party is shockingly united when it comes to policy and ideology. And the mainstream press just goes along with this. So they treat the actual differences of opinion in the Democratic Party as equivalent to the tactical differences in the Republican Party. And it is in that way — and only that way — that Ted Cruz is an extremist. And this matters to his presidential aspirations in two ways. It will make it harder for him to get the Republican nomination; but if he wins the presidency, he will not face any special challenges.

Ezra Klein wrote an interesting article that touched on both of these points, Imagine Ted Cruz as President. On the first point, I think he is mostly correct. The focus of the article is the idea that “imagination is not a plan.” Apparently, Cruz is really disliked in the professional Republican Party. In Congress, many are angry at him for forcing them into shutting down the government. Does that sound pathetic? It should! But what do you expect from a party that is largely built on inciting its base to believe things that aren’t true and promising to do things that can’t be done and would be disastrous if they were. And so when Ted Cruz acts as the conscience of party, you whine? Give me a break!

But luckly for the Republican Party (and to a lesser extent the nation as a whole), the base voters are ultimately a bunch of followers. If they are told that Ted Cruz can’t be president, they will go along with that. After all, if they don’t, there might be a girl president; or some darkie; or a socialist! Regardless, these are all issues for the Republican Party. The truth is that whether the nominee is Cruz or Bush or Rubio or Walker or Paul, it won’t be any different if they end up in the White House.

It is on this second point that I have a problem with Klein’s article. He titled the section, “Can Cruz get 60 votes in the Senate?” I just don’t see Cruz having any trouble getting what he wants if the Republicans control the Congress. Klein tends to suffer a bit from Washington Insider Disease in that he assumes that the Republicans will act the same way in power as the Democrats did before them. This isn’t the case. The Democrats got rid of the filibuster for executive and judicial nominations. When the Republicans control all of Washington, they will get rid of the filibuster all together. So the question is, “Will Cruz get 50 votes in the Senate?” And the answer is: yes!

The main thing that we must all remember is that regardless of who the Republicans nominate, he (Of course “he”!) will become president if the economy tanks in 2016. So don’t think for a second at Ted Cruz is too extreme to lose. Anyway, Cruz is good in front of people. Remember how reasonable he seemed on Seth Meyers’ show? And maybe Cruz isn’t the worst we could get. After all, it wasn’t Reagan who destroyed welfare; it was Clinton. Maybe in twenty years, I’ll be saying, “It wasn’t Bush who destroyed Social Security; it was Clinton.” I still think Clinton will be better than any Republican, but I wouldn’t put anything past her.

I just heard a tiny bit of Ali Gharib talking on Majority Report Monday morning. And he made a great point. He said that for years, conservatives have claimed that the Iranian regime can’t be dealt with. According to them, the government is totally ideological and will never make deals. The same thing was said about the Soviet Union, of course; as a result, I’ve never bought into that idea. It is just another way for people to dehumanize their enemies. But while there has never been any proof that the Iranian leaders were anything but rational actors, the recent negotiations with the P5+1 should eliminate doubt on the part of the most ossified critics.

But Gharib noted that conservatives have met new information about Iran with exactly the same arguments that they made before. So it would seem that there really are unmovable ideologues — and they are not the Iranians; they are our own conservatives. This is, interestingly, a point I often try to make to my atheist friends: religion is not the greatest motivator of extreme evil; power is. Now religion is very often pernicious in its own way, and it is a great tool for the power hungry. But it isn’t necessary at all. The neocon position on Iran is a great example.

Similarly, Monday morning, Jonathan Chait wrote, Netanyahu: Don’t Listen to That Incredibly Explicit Thing I Promised About a Palestinian State. He noted a similar dynamic going on with Benjamin Netanyahu, “He currently opposes [a Palestinian] state on the grounds that it would be run by Hamas, but he opposed a Palestinian state in the 1990s on the grounds that it would be run by Fatah.” That gets to the core of my problem with the Israeli government the last couple of decades: they always have an excuse for continuing to allow illegal settlements and block any kind of deal. Yet in America, Israel is always and forever the good and open-minded actor. (I often wonder what Americans would think if Israeli settlers just started annexing American land. I think there would be violence. But the situation in Palestine is never presented that way.)

What we have in this country is a narrative that we are addicted to. In it, Israel is always right and Iran is always wrong. It is part of a broader narrative that claims that whichever country our government likes can do no wrong and whichever country our government doesn’t like can do no right. See my article, American Double Standard Regarding Democracy, where I discuss the way that the truly horrible government of Saudi Arabia is treated as a great defender of freedom, and the struggling democracy of Venezuela is treated as an evil autocracy that represents an existential threat to the United States.

But as we’ve seen with Cuba, over time, liberals can finally be made to see the light. But among conservatives, it is the same thing as it always was. Being consistently wrong is far better than ever changing your opinion to reflect a new reality. It seems that slowly liberals are waking up to the reality in the middle east. From a foreign policy standpoint, we should do what is in our interest. Making a deal with Iran is clearly in our interest. And increasingly, backup up Israel at all times is not. The conservatives — in as much as they are moving anywhere — are moving in the opposite direction. Fundamentally, I think that the racism that has always been so important to conservative domestic policy is now what is controlling its foreign policy. And so there will be no reevaluation of their position on Iran, because the conservatives are the true ideologues who — at least right now — cannot be reasoned with.

Ah, the good old days! That was when conservatives everywhere resorted speaking in only sentences that consisted of a noun, verb, and “Greece.” Every conservative policy under the sun had to be enacted or: “We’ll turn into Greece!” Well my friends, now United Kingdom Prime Minister David Cameron is back with a shocking bit of noun, verb, and “Greece” propaganda. While in Brussels to discuss matters related to the Ukraine, he took a moment to talk about domestic matters, because he’s afraid that the conservatives might not win the upcoming election. And so he lied in a very big way, claiming, “When I first came here as prime minister five years ago, Britain and Greece were virtually in the same boat, we had similar sized budget deficits. The reason we are in a different position is we took long-term difficult decisions and we had all of the hard work and effort of the British people. I am determined we do not go backwards.”

Translation: we screwed our people and claimed it was for their own good; those lazy Greeks didn’t do it and look at what a mess their country is today; and vote conservative because we are doing everything right! Except that isn’t at all the case. Luckily, Simon Wren-Lewis is around to strike back, Controlling the Past. But before I get to what he wrote, I want to talk about something he barely mentioned, because he’s a real economist writing for other real economists and so assumes everyone knows: currency.

The United Kingdom, like the United States, has its own currency. So it is much easier for it to bounce back after a crisis, because other currencies will simply rise relative to it. But for a country like Greece that shares the euro with most of its trading partners, there can be no currency devaluation. Thus there is far more disruption as wages have to go down. Basically, Greece is stuck with using Germany’s valuable currency. So this made it infinitely easier for the UK to weather the 2008 financial crisis. And it is the reason that Greece should never have been used as a scare tactic for the UK and the United States. What happened to Greece simply couldn’t happen to the UK and US.

But let’s get to the bulk of Wren-Lewis’ article. It focused on the claim that “Britain and Greece were virtually in the same boat.” Is that true? Not even close:

So in addition to not having its own currency, Greece enacted more than five times as much austerity as the United Kingdom did. But it is those noble pasty white Brits who did the hard work. This is very clearly meant to both stroke the ego of the British public and to make them feel that the very real pain they’ve been put through was for a reason (it wasn’t). The point of all this is to change the narrative of the past so that the current government looks good. And they want to push the idea that the same old conservative policies that they are always for are what we should thank for the better economic times. It’s ridiculous.

I don’t write as much as I should about education. The reason is that it greatly depresses me. The education “reform” movement is so pernicious and so powerful that it is hard not to think that all is lost. Here in the United States, this movement seems focused on destroying teacher unionization more than anything else. And as always when there is an attack on worker rights, the quality of jobs goes down. Even the most idealistic of those in the “reform” movement seem only interested focusing on test scores because that is something that is easy and quantifiable. It’s the old story of the drunk looking for her keys far away from where she lost them because “the light’s better here.”

Last week, Stephen Mucher, the director of Bard College’s “master of arts in teaching” program, wrote an important article, The Teaching Crisis That Unions and School Districts Won’t Address. It contains some amazing information in it. For example, “Since 2008, enrollment in teacher education programs in California is down 53%, and other bellwether states report a similar trend.” This trend is — Oh, what is the word?! — predictable. Let’s think about this for a moment.

The nation as a whole wants better teachers for our children. Everyone at least gives lip service to the idea that great teachers have a huge effect on our children. And the solution that we’ve come up with is: test the children more, over-structure classroom time, and vilify teachers. Oh, and don’t forget: get rid of their unions, decrease worker protections, and lower their salaries. That’s clearly not the way to get better teachers working in our schools. In fact, it is a recipe for destroying good teachers that are already working.

So what is it like to be a teacher?

It is hard to see the whole of the education “reform” movement as having any philosophy other than, “The beatings will continue until morale improves.” Now Mucher isn’t specifically talking about the “reform” movement. But the focus on testing and the vilification of teacher unions is all coming from the “reform” movement. And the “reform” movement goes where the money pushes it. And the money comes from the same people who moved our manufacturing jobs overseas. They want to do for education what they’ve done for the rest of the economy: turn teachers into low paid cogs, who can be plugged into any educational machine.

Mucher is clear as to what needs to be done. In addition to “competitive salaries, benefits and better working conditions” teachers need their jobs to be fulfilling:

No surprisingly, Diane Ravitch had a few choice words to say about all this. She noted something that is telling, “I doubt that most critics would know how to teach a classroom of 30 children of any age, but they feel emboldened to complain about those who do it every day.” I think that is part of the problem with the way that Americans look at teaching: they think it is something that anyone could do — very much the way that they think about politics. I’m not sure where they get this idea, except that Americans just have a tendency to devalue the work done by anyone. To me, the kind of teachers that the “reform” movement is crying out for practice the easiest kind of teaching.

What we end up with is a system that claims it wants Alfie Kohn acolytes in the classroom to stimulate and broaden the minds of children, but it wants to check in every two months to make sure that all the children have learned how to spell certain words and know the dictated parts of the multiplication table. That doesn’t work. But as I’ve said before, education “reform” has little or nothing to do with improving education, What Is the Goal of Education Reform? Since the real problems in our educational system are not being dealt with, it isn’t too surprising that the “reform” movement is only managing to make things worse.

I don’t stay up much on the whole gamergate thing, for reasons that will become clear enough in a moment. But I found Todd VanDerWerff’s article over at Vox interesting, Gamergaters Don’t Think It’s About Ethics in Journalism. They Think It’s About Colonialism. For those of you who are blessed with having never heard about it, gamergate is basically a great big whine on the part of the traditional gaming community who think that the girls and the darkies are going to pollute the insular fun of their Call of Duty games. I think the best way to think of gamergate is to imagine three ten-year-old boys inside a tree fort with a sign on the outside that reads, “No girls allowed.”

This article is in reference to an article by Gita Jackson at Boing Boing, We Are Not Colonists. According to her, the traditional gamers feel as though they are settlers of a world with their distinct culture. And now, they feel all these “foreign” elements are coming in and taking over. This is, of course, a ridiculous notion. No one is trying to stop people from getting their vile kicks from Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto.

I think the “colonization” paradigm is a useful one. But it describes the situation from the inside. Jackson asked the question, “Are there ‘natives’ to non-physical spaces?” Of course there aren’t. What makes one a native is to be born and raised in a place. These gamers are just as much immigrants as anyone else. But most of all, no one is taking anything from these guys:

But I also think it is simpler than this. The complaints of the gamers are exactly the complains of any group with power that sees that power threatened. It is really just about privilege. I don’t think the irony is missed on anyone that these aggrieved games are generally straight white mans of the middle class and up. The whole of gamergate can be seen as a microcosm of the American power elite’s clinging to power — or a replay of the aggrieved white male of the 1970s, trying to deal with the increasing public power of women.

From what I can tell, the ultimate fear of these basement dwellers is that people are starting to look down on them. And I think they are right. I think the portrayal of women in almost every game I’ve ever seen will gradually be seen sort of like Playboy magazine. But having the world think that you aren’t creepy, immature, or both is not something anyone has a right to expect. But expecting things you have no right to is the very definition of privilege.