You may remember last month when I wrote, Why Republicans Will Nominate Rand Paul in 2016. The basis of my argument was that Rand Paul’s current position on foreign affairs would never be palatable to the Republican base. Lucky for Paul that he doesn’t seem to have any commitment to his stated ideology, so he will simply become a generic (extreme) Republican by the time the primary really starts next year. But he will maintain the libertarian brand that so flatters the base. No one else can really touch that.

Today, Charlie Pierce brought my attention to the latest example of Paul’s “evolution” (or: “shameless pandering”) on his way to the Republican presidential nomination, For the Benefit of Mr Paul. Back in 2011, Rand Paul proposed a bill that would end foreign aid to all countries in the Middle East — including the untouchable country, Israel. Last month he claimed that he never proposed doing this. He also noted that Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

At that time, his comments were mostly about Israel. One can’t be neutral toward Israel and be a mainstream national politician in this country. If American has “exceptionalism,” then Israel has “super-duper exceptionalism.” One would think Paul would have realized this long ago. But if there is anything that Rand Paul’s career has shown, it is that he isn’t all that smart, and he surrounds himself with similarly capable sub-subgeniuses.

Last week, the Associated Press explained Paul’s new position, Perry, Paul Bash Obama for “No Strategy” on Syria.

Other than tipping his hat to the Constitutional mandate to seek Congressional authorization for starting yet another war in the Middle East, I don’t see this as anything different from America’s favorite comedy duo, McCain & Graham. And that is the point. Paul is well on the road to getting rid of the few libertarian ideals he has left, while maintaining the “libertarian” brand.

It isn’t hard to do. Libertarians believe in having a military (or at least a militia) that will defend against invading hordes. It just isn’t hard to move from that to defining any group we don’t like as an existential threat allowing for the permanent war we now have. And for that matter, it isn’t much further to making a “libertarian” argument for throwing Charles Schenck in jail for arguing against World War I.

Next be prepared for Rand Paul to do a little hedging on his support for cannabis legalization. “I’ve only ever been in favor of legalization if we absolutely positively can keep it out of the hands of children!” But we aren’t able to absolutely positively keep alcohol out of the hands of children. Isn’t that an absurd criterion for legalization? “I’ve am in favor of legalization if we absolutely positively can keep it out of the hands of children!”

On the issue of LGBT rights, he’s more likely to just not talk about them. But you can imagine something like, “I believe in same sex marriage, but I never said gay people should be able to teach our children!” So you aren’t in favor of LGBT equality? “Of course I am! But no one has a Constitutional right to a job!”

And on the issue of immigration, I think he will get on board with Marco Rubio’s brilliant political innovation. “I’ve only ever been in favor of naturalizing our illegal population after not one person is coming across the boarder illegally.” But isn’t that an absurd criterion that can never be met? “That’s why I’ve only ever been in favor of naturalizing our illegal population after not one person is coming across the boarder illegally.”

Although he’s never had far to travel, Rand Paul is well on his way to being the kind of LINO (Libertarian In Name Only) that Republicans can support. What’s funny about it is that I’m sure whoever runs for president on the Libertarian Party ticket will get far fewer votes in 2016 than they did in 2012. It’s amusing that Republicans fancy themselves libertarians but don’t really support libertarian policies. But it is a laugh riot that much of the official libertarian establishment is exactly the same. It shows just how ridiculous the entire conservative movement in this country has become.

The Young Turks produced a segment, Celebgate Hacking Excuses. I haven’t paid much attention to this. All I had heard was that this happened to Jennifer Lawrence. This caused me to search her name on Google because I had no idea who she was. I still don’t really know except that she is the star of The Hunger Games films, which I have never seen. But she’s a pretty young woman and I’m sure that there are scores of men for whom looking at pictures of her naked will be the high point of their lives.

Looking through the Wikipedia page on the 2014 Celebrity Pictures Hack, there are two women I actually know: Kirsten Dunst, who I know from her wonderful performance in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Jenny McCarthy, who I know because of her nutty belief that vaccinations cause autism. Regardless, I don’t really care.

But The Young Turks segment made me take notice. They went through five excuses that people made for why it is all okay. I should be clear, I don’t care because what these rich and famous women are going through is something that happens to literally millions of poor and unknown women who suffer far greater consequences. But I have no idea how anyone could argue that the stealing of people’s stuff is okay. Jennifer Lawrence is worth $40 million at the age of 24. Would anyone say it was okay to hack into her bank account and steal her money? I don’t think so. There is no difference between that and hacking her account and stealing her photos.

The two stars on The Young Turks found one apologia for the thefts at least somewhat compelling, “Donald Sterling had his privacy violated when his ex released audio, how is the celebrity leak any different?” How about in every possible way? V Stiviano had recorded the conversation. It was hers. Not only that, Sterling knew that she was recording, although admittedly he didn’t think it would be used as it was. How does this have anything to do with stealing someone’s private property?

In the defense of The Young Turks, Ana Kasparian does eventually get around to making this argument. But it is clear that she and Cenk Uygur have been partly blinded by the erotic nature of the subject from seeing that this is just an issue of theft. This isn’t fundamentally about privacy. Someone stole stuff from other people. That is wrong. You really don’t have to say any more.

But let’s suppose that the Sterling tape had not been released by Striviano. Suppose it had been stolen from her and made public. That situation is still not the same as Celebgate. That’s because the Sterling revelations had social merit. Sterling was a bigot whose abuse of minority groups dates back decades. If it took his insult to Magic Johnson to bring light on this, so be it. Seeing Jennifer Lawrence naked hardly rises to the level of a social good.

And before anyone complains that this is all a matter of opinion, I have some advice: stop. Of course it is a matter of opinion. John Kiriakou should not be in jail; he performed a great service to our society by revealing CIA torture. On the other hand, if someone stole Plutonium and gave it to ISIS, that would not be performing a great service for anyone — including ISIS!

So if people want to argue that the availability of naked Jennifer Lawrence photos is a great social good, I’m willing to listen. But don’t pretend that Donald Sterling is a victim in the same way that that Jennifer Lawrence is. She was robbed. And in the 2014 Celebrity Pictures Hack, that’s really all that matters.

Afterword

I hate the “-gate” approach to naming scandals. That Mitchell and Webb Look says all that needs to be said:

I was very taken with a sentence in the introduction to Thomas Piketty’s famous book Le Capital au XXI Siècle, “Pendant longtemps, les débats intellectuels et politiques sur la répartition des richesses se sont nourris de beaucoup de préjugés, et de très peu de faits.” This means roughly, “For years, the intellectual and political debates about the distribution of wealth have been nourished by many prejudices, and very few facts.” It’s a good line, although it could doubtless be said about pretty much any political debate. But in most debates, there actually are facts. It is just the case that when the facts don’t support the position of the power elite, they are ignored. And that is largely what I expect to happen to Piketty’s book in the years ahead, but I will leave that for later. Now I want to talk about something more uplifting.

When Arthur Goldhammer translated that sentence of Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, it became, “Intellectual and political debate about the distribution of wealth has long been based on an abundance of prejudice and a paucity of fact.” That’s not just an important observation, it is a beautiful sentence. And that more than anything is what strikes me about the book: it is beautifully translated.

I know quite a bit about Piketty, but I had never heard of Arthur Goldhammer before. And there isn’t a lot of information about him online. That’s not surprising. Translators rarely become celebrities. And given that Samuel Beckett always translated himself from French into English and Goldhammer has never translated Gargantua and Pantagruel, there is no reason I would know him. But Goldhammer is a very well known translator. His translation of Democracy in America is highly regarded and now he has translated Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

According to the Wikipedia page on him, he got his PhD in math at MIT in 1973. And from 1977 onward, he’s worked as a translator of French nonfiction. That isn’t that strange: math, music, and linguistics all have much in common. They all have similar qualities of beauty. But I’m afraid that translators get the least credit of any creative workers. There are very few people who ever read more than one translation of anything. So there is a tendency to think of translation as a special kind of stenography. But just the one sentence above shows the lie to that.

In case you missed it, I finally got Capital in the Twenty-First Century. And it is a shockingly good read. I can attest to Piketty’s brilliance in telling a story. I can’t, however, say what he’s doing on the micro-level. But for my English language enjoyment and edification, Goldhammer has me covered. His translation is beautiful.

Afterword

Goldhammer blogs about French Politics. I’ve only scanned it but it looks quite interesting.

The United States is a democratic capitalist system. At least in theory. Today, Ezra Klein wrote, Three Sentences No One Should Forget About Unions. The sentences come from Richard Yeselson in an interview with Jonathan Cohn for New Republic, Happy Labor Day. Are Unions Dead? And they get at something I talk about a lot. In fact, I talked about it this morning in the birthday post for union organizer Walter Reuther: liberal policy is an important aspect of making capitalism work.

The issue could not be simpler: you need to feed the lion. If you don’t feed the lion, he will get hungry and eat you. In a democratic capitalism, there are two forces that push against each other: the power of the rich to manipulate the political system to funnel money from the poor to the rich, and the power of the poor to enact laws that take money away from the rich and redistribute it. Labor unions are incredibly important in this. But in modern America, the first force has had far more power over the last four decades than the second force.

Richard Yeselson’s three sentences explain the issue:

This goes right along with the last article I wrote, The Rich as Spoiled Brats With Infinite Power. The point I was making was that the rich act in a very shortsighted way because they believe that the government will always bail them out. And the poor exhibit all the signs of learned helplessness.

But let’s look at a graph from Ezra Klein (edited by me for aesthetic reasons). It shows the unionization rates of the various countries in the OECD:

You will note that the United States is pretty far down the list and that includes public employees. But unionization rates are not the only thing that matters. France is not on the chart and it has a lower level of unionization. I assume this is because French labor law is such that workers generally don’t feel they need a labor union. The government protects their interests. In the United States, the government is exactly the opposite: it does everything it can to limit what protections unions provide.

Another graph in Klein’s article shows how well correlated the incomes of the top 10% are with the decline in unionization. He cautions us to not read too much into this. That’s correct. In fact, I suspect the relationship is more the opposite. The more power the top 10% has managed to get, the more they have used it to crush unions and everything else that might limit their ever increasing wealth. I’m sure that a graph of the income of the top 10% and their political power would be at least as stark.

There is a complimentary graph that shows public support for labor unions over the last three decades. What it shows is that union support has been shockingly consistent even while actual unionization has gone steadily down. So the dying union movement isn’t caused by people losing interest. It is just that destroying labor unions is a government policy.

In the United States, we clearly have a capitalist system. When it comes to whether we have a democratic system, it is at least not clear. What the people want doesn’t seem to much matter.

Update (1 September 2014 8:43 pm)

According to Richard Yeselson, “France actually has smaller percentage of union members than the US, but union contracts cover almost the entire workforce.”

Happy labor day, comrades! Do you know why labor day is today and not on May Day — International Workers’ Day? Well, it’s because of the commies and anarchists. President Grover Cleveland was afraid of associating the international worker movements with the American movements. Of course, Cleveland wasn’t all that keen on the labor movement. But he made Labor Day a national holiday! Why? Because he was trying to make nice after totally screwing up in the government’s response to the Pullman Strike.

This is an interesting but totally typical story. The Pullman Company made railroad cars. Following the Panic of 1893, Pullman lowered worker wages. There is nothing especially wrong with this. It can be much better than laying workers off. Of course, Pullman did lay off workers. It probably only lowered wages because it had an excuse. But all that was probably okay.

The problem was that the workers lived in a company town. They paid the company for rent and food and more. But when the company lowered wages, it did not lower the cost it was charging workers for their necessities. The workers were, not surprisingly, unhappy about this situation. But George Pullman refused to lower his company town prices and refused to even arbitrate the matter.

Notice the situation here: Pullman thought that his workers should suffer because of the bad economic conditions. But he didn’t think he should suffer at all. During the first years following our financial crisis and the bursting of the housing bubble, there was endless repetition that what the country needed was “shared sacrifice.” But if you dug down even a little into these pleas, you saw that it was all sacrifice by the lower classes — none by the upper. For example: we heard constantly that we had to cut Social Security, but we couldn’t even mention raising the payroll tax cap. (That would be class warfare!) The bankers were bailed out without much fuss but homeowners were just left to their foreclosures. And there were large cuts to social programs but only a tiny increase in the very top marginal tax rate and only because it was going up anyway.

More desperate than we are today, many of the workers joined Eugene Debs’ American Railway Union (ARU). And they went on strike. It got ugly. Union members eventually stopped railroad service in a number of places. Then Grover Cleveland used the interruption of mail delivery to justify sending in federal troops. This did eventually end the strike — at a loss of 30 striker lives and almost twice as many wounded. This is generally the way it goes.

The government does not like organized labor. It is too much of a threat to the status quo. When organized, workers have enormous power. That was why, in 1947, we got the Taft–Hartley Act, which outlawed “jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns.” And after that, Reagan savaged unions and basically made the remaining union rights void through lack of enforcement.

In 1894, of course, the government was scared. Grover Cleveland and the rest of the government wanted to make nice with organized labor. They probably had Louis XVI of France in mind and were trying to hedge their bets. So only six days after the strike ended, Cleveland signed the legislation making Labor Day a federal holiday.

As for old George Pullman, well, a national commission was appointed to look into the causes of the strike. It found Pullman culpable and said his company town was “un-American.” In 1898, the company was forced to sell off the land, which became part of Chicago. It didn’t matter to George Pullman, however; he died the year before.

After the strike, Debs was arrested and charged with conspiracy to obstruct the mail. You know: it wasn’t enough to have your strike crushed; Debs was a little man and so the government needed to crush him too. But Debs was represented by one of the great heroes of that period: Clarence Darrow. Darrow argued that Debs didn’t conspire to do anything and that it was the railroad that conspired against the workers. This is something that doesn’t seem to be understood by my libertarian enemies who almost to a man hate unions: if workers aren’t able to organize, it isn’t fair; the company management is very organized.

The prosecutors saw they were going to lose the case, so they dropped the conspiracy charge. Debs was later convicted on the lesser charge of violating a Supreme Court injunction and was given six months in jail. Although he entered jail what we might call a liberal, he left a socialist. While in prison he read a whole bunch of Marx and that changed his outlook. He was also influenced by visits from Victor L Berger. Along with him and others, Debs founded the Social Democratic Party of America. He went on to run for president as a socialist five times — the last time in 1920, he did from prison. He was serving a ten year sentence for violating Obama’s favorite law, the Espionage Act of 1917. He violated it by giving a speech that “obstructed recruiting” for World War I.

In 1921, The Bridgemen’s Magazine wrote:

So enjoy your Labor Day. But don’t forget the suffering and loss that it represents. And don’t stand for people like Eric Cantor showing such great disrespect to it. We know conservatives hate the labor movement. We know that many so called liberals are at best apathetic towards the labor movement. But the least we can demand is that they all show a modicum of respect one day of the year. Now go enjoy your barbecue or whatever.

I’ve been reading a lot of David Harvey recently. He writes from a Marxist perspective and although I don’t consider myself a Marxist, there is much to be said about looking at modern American economics from this perspective. Last night, I was listening to a lecture he gave, The Contradictions of Capital. And one thing really stood out to me. He asked why people have always chosen gold and silver as a basis for their currencies. Why not an oxidizable metal like iron?

There are two primary uses of money. First, it is a mechanism of transferring wealth. Sure, you could give your doctor a chicken as payment, but it makes more sense to use money. Money is convenient: it doesn’t require us to be forever swapping things of value in order to end up with the things that we want at any given time.

The second use of money is more problematic: a mechanism for the storage of wealth. This is the area where I am most in opposition with libertarians. They see the ability to store wealth as being critical to the economy because people will only work if they know they can hang onto that wealth for the rest of their lives (and their children’s lives (and their children’s lives (…))). But at the same time, the storage of wealth is a primary cause of our continuing Greater Depression. Businesses are sitting on piles of money. In a good economy, they would invest it and hire people to make more money. But in the current economy, they don’t even have substantial inflation to disincentivize their money hording.

So what would happen if money was oxidizable? Imagine if any money held onto by an individual or business was taxed at, say, 10% each year. That would provide a very big incentive to spend the money. This would create much more demand in the economy. And clearly, companies couldn’t get away with just paying their CEO more, because his wealth too would be taxed at the same rate. It would tend to decrease inequality given how we’ve become so much of an aristocracy. This is the basic idea behind Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century.

There are obvious problems with this system, but that isn’t to say that they can’t be overcome. In fact, many of them have obvious solutions. The most important is that people should be allowed to save some money. Clearly, some kinds of retirement accounts would have to be exempt and there would have to be some amount that people could save without being so taxed. That’s simple enough. I’m not clear about how such a system would deal with commodities. Would people be taxed on gold bars they hoard in the cellar? Again: that’s not too hard. I think it would be taxed — the same way the state of California taxes business inventory. (For the record, I hate that tax; it is very hard on micro-sized companies.)

The biggest problem is that the rich would just move their wealth outside the country. I believe that this is why Piketty is calling for an international wealth tax. We are seeing this with the various tax avoidance schemes such as corporate inversion. More and more, the only way that we can make the rich pay anything close to their fair share in taxes requires international efforts. Given how successful such efforts have been on the issue of global warming, I’m not hopeful. (Note the Catch-22 here.)

But the idea is intriguing. It is worth giving serious consideration. And maybe some day after things reach a point where the only options facing the rich are reform and revolution, they will choose the former. Does this mean I don’t believe in democracy? Not at all! I am a big believer in democracy. I just don’t think that much of it exists in the modern world.