The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) tweeted out this image with the text, “We stand in solidarity with the people of #Israel as rockets from #Hamas-controlled #Gaza rain down on them.” Okay, I understand. Of course, the ADL would stand in solidarity with the people of Israel if feather pillows were raining down on them. But there’s nothing wrong with always being on one side if that’s how you feel. Personally, I stand in solidarity with the people on both sides.

I want to answer that question, though. “What if terrorists targeted your city with rockets?” I think I can answer for America. We would overreact even more excessively than the Israelis have. We used the 9/11 attacks to fight a war with a country that had nothing to do with it, killing at least 100,000 people. I don’t think it is very helpful for Israel to ask America how it would react. We don’t have a good track record.

But I think it is very interesting that the ADL feels it needs to buy Twitter ads in this conflict. Because it is getting harder and harder for Americans to maintain their unwavering support for Israel. What we would do hardly matters. We’re a bunch of hypocrites. It doesn’t matter what we would do. We dropped two unnecessary atomic bombs on Japanese civilians. Asking us what we would do in a given situation is like asking Hannibal Lecter what he would do with a dinner guest.

It is completely wrong for Hamas to fire rockets into Israel. And I think Hamas really needs to figure out if its going to be a governing body or a terrorist group. But the fact remains that Hamas continues to be almost unbelievably impotent in their attacks. And Israel continues to be unbelievably lethal in their attacks—far more so against civilians than actual militants. And it makes me wonder if Hamas doesn’t fire its rockets just to make Israel respond in this way. If that’s the case, it’s an evil, but brilliant strategy. Because it is getting harder and harder to support the Israeli government’s reactions to these attacks.

I actually don’t take a side in this conflict. This goes right along with my 95/5 rule: 95% of the people just want to live their lives and 5% screw everything up. I stand with the 95. A bunch of them were killed in the last few days. And as usual, they were Palestinians, regardless of who started it and is ultimately to blame.

Jonathan Chait wrote a really good article earlier this week, Libertarian Accidentally Shows How Obamacare Is Succeeding. It has to do with Peter Suderman’s coverage of Obamacare over the past six months at Reason Magazine. Readers here may know of Suderman, because he’s also a film “critic” who I blasted last year about his truly ignorant take on why Hollywood films are so boring, Why Screenplays Suck. It’s funny that a libertarian would complain that films suck. According to their ideology, a film’s value is completely determined by how much money it makes. But whatever. Suderman, it seems, is just as much an idiot when it comes to Obamacare.

Chait looks at five articles that Suderman wrote about Obamacare. First, he said Obamacare wasn’t going to reduce the uninsured at all. A couple days later he said, well, maybe it would reduce the uninsured a little bit, but that was all. A month later, he was scoffing about the seven million Obamacare signups on the exchanges; he said it might be two and a half. A couple weeks after that, he had bumped his number up to three million newly covered—far less than the 13 million hoped for by the administration. So a New England Journal of Medicine report recently came out and found that 20 million Americans have gotten health insurance through Obamacare. Suderman’s response, “[I]t’s too early to say exactly how many so far—only that 20 million is almost certainly an overstatement.”

The point that Chait makes explicitly is that individually, each of Suderman’s articles claim that Obamacare is failing. But looked at in series, they show that it is a great success. I’ll go further: Suderman’s article series actually provides a more positive narrative for Obamacare than any of its biggest cheerleaders. This is a typical error committed by conservatives on Obamacare especially. They have been so certain that it would be a failure that they have made continued bold claims about it. I’m sure you could do what Chait did to anyone. If I could stomach it, I’d do it to that charlatan Avik Roy.

But there is something special here: Peter Suderman is not just a conservative—he is a libertarian. Libertarians are fine if they only talk in terms of theory. “The minimum wage is bad because two people should have a right to engage in any contract they find mutually acceptable.” It’s when they talk practically that they get into trouble, “The minimum wage is bad because it will cost jobs and drive prices up!” They should know this. When I was a fellow traveler[1], I understood this. But most libertarians just can’t resist. They insist on arguing that their “principled” stand will bring about a better world, even when there is usually no evidence for that.

Why is Peter Suderman against Obamacare? Because he’s against the government doing just about anything at all. And that’s fine! But he doesn’t make that argument. He makes the argument that the law is not working and will not work. But as a libertarian, he can’t really care whether the law is working or not. His complaint is theoretical. The free market is king and will solve all our problems! I just don’t understand the need to make these practical attacks.

Of course, today he is out with his own counter argument, Did I Accidentally Prove that Obamacare Is a Success? It’s actually a shockingly bad bit of writing. Chait’s main point is that on each occasion, Suderman put the worst possible spin on what was going on. Suderman’s main complaint is that Chait didn’t quote other articles of his. But if you look at those articles, they are either pure reporting, or again, Suderman putting the worst possible spin on the data. For example, he complained that Chait didn’t include “an April 17 post noting the administration’s report that 8 million had signed up for coverage.” But in that “report,” Suderman makes the same conservative comments: not everyone is paying and we don’t know about the demographics. It might as well have been Charles Krauthammer or George Will writing.

At no time did Chait claim that Suderman was making outlandish attacks on the Obamacare news. He was just pointing out that Suderman was always painting the worst picture possible and over time that picture has gotten better and better. In a sense, it is a compliment to Suderman; it shows that he is not resistant to facts. He has an ideological ax to grind, but he isn’t such an ideologue that he refuses to look at reality. (As a counter example, look at the gold standard crowd who claim that inflation is actually really high but there is a conspiracy to prevent us from knowing about it.)

I, of course, have a much worse view of Suderman. I still have a certain fondness for libertarians. They are not paleoconservatives. But I have a problem with Suderman because I know that it doesn’t matter what happens, he will always hate Obamacare for theoretical reasons. So let’s suppose that in three years, Obamacare is a fantastic success—that there is no way to deny this. Suderman will do what libertarians always do when they can’t make a practical case: he will complain about it based on theory: the government should not take money away from one group of people to give healthcare to another group of people. And that annoys me, because it means that all the practical arguments were disingenuous. The biggest thing I still respect about what I consider real libertarians is that they are honest. Almost none of the people who call themselves libertarians are.[2]

Say it with me: “I will only make theoretical libertarian arguments because practical libertarian arguments are usually a joke.” Repeat as often as necessary.

[1] People may wonder why I continue to use the term “fellow traveler” to indicate my former libertarianism. This is because libertarianism today is very much like communism 80 years ago: it is a utopian philosophy that can never be refuted because no society can ever be completely pure. So proponents will always claim, “Well, if we just did one more thing” everything would be roses or whatever. This doesn’t mean that I don’t have a certain respect for the old communists or the new libertarians. But they are far more similar than they know.

[2] But look at that face! He looks so fresh and idealistic. It’s hard to think ill of him.

I saw this sign from a protest against the kids who have fled the violence in Central America. It is literally true: the Bill of Rights applies to citizens. But of course, that’s not what the sign means. It means that the Bill of Rights only applies to citizens. This is a common and totally fallacious belief.

In truth, the entire Constitution has only 22 references to “citizen” in it and they are all about who can be elected to office, who can vote, and how citizens of one state interact with citizens of another state. As for the Bill of Rights, there is no mention whatsoever of citizens in the original ten. As for the amendments, except for one, every mention has to do with voting. The one exception is the 11th Amendment that has to do with citizens of one state or country suing citizens in another state. It really has nothing to do with citizens and was about the jurisdictional reach of the Supreme Court.

If you study the thinking that powered the founding of the United States, you will see that these men did not see rights as a special case for the United States. True: that was all they had control of. And they, like all men, had their many hangups. John Adams, for example, might have thought himself above a cobbler, be he thought a lawyer of property in England deserved the same rights as he did.

This is why the First Amendment reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” There’s nothing in that amendment that says that a tourist must be of the “right” religion or must shut up. That’s to say nothing of a national.

I have heard this kind of thinking that the Constitution is only for citizens from conservatives for years, however. This is not only sad and disappointing, it is dangerous. Conservatives are actually more fond of the Declaration of Independence than they are the Constitution. Yet that document is even more explicit. The key sentence is, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” [My emphasis -FM] There is a strong current in the conservative movement that wants to move backwards from 1776. They want to limit rights, as though foreign people being granted rights somehow diminishes their own.

I realize that it would be too wordy to create a sign that read, “The Bill of Rights applies to CITIZENS but except for voting it also applies to EVERYONE.” But I assume the person who created that sign didn’t know this, didn’t know the history of this country, and didn’t care in a very real way, that we are a revolutionary people. And that means we are not looking out for only ourselves, but for everyone. We don’t want to form just a more perfect union, but a more perfect world. The Constitution, in its most important parts applies to all people. That is something that all fifth graders should know.

I have a modest proposal for the Israel-Palestine conflict: genocide. It’s time tested. After all, if the conflict were going on 500 years ago, the Israelis would have just gone in, slaughtered all the Palestinians who weren’t able to flee, and the conflict would be over. And would it really matter? Yes, there would be people who would be very upset. But there already are! Why should Israel care? They are the only country in the region with nuclear arms and they have the biggest military. Plus, anything the United Nations would try to do would be vetoed by the United States. So I say: go for it!

Now I know what you bleeding heart liberals will say, “Just because you got bumped out of art school by a better Jewish painter doesn’t mean you should commit a genocide against the Jewish people.” I see that point, but you have to draw a line somewhere. For example, some Palestinian idiots fire a couple of rockets into Israel wounding two people. So the Israelis respond in their usual proportional way. They didn’t go after the people that fired the rockets, of course. They just did their usual (And totally justified!) collective punishment, which killed at least 23.

This, of course, is following the kidnapping of three Israeli youths. It appears to have been a usual thing where thugs kidnap people and exchange them for money. But when it became a political issue, they thought it was best to just kill them. [Update: it now seems it was a Hamas splinter group that did it. -FM] This led to some sicko Israeli folks kidnapping a Palestinian youth and then burning him alive. So let’s see there. Step one: unpolitical act of murder by individuals. Step two: political act of torture murder by extremists. Step three: political act by extremist Palestinian faction. Step four: official Israeli attack on Palestinian population.

It’s not a good situation. And I know that many conservatives in the United States will say that the at least five Palestinian children who were killed in the recent attack should have been born to different parents or something. So given that it is perfectly acceptable to kill civilians if you think you have just cause (Defined as: whatever!) why don’t we just get systematic about this!

Of course, it will be sad to see all the Palestinians killed. But we’ll get over it. I mean who remembers the genocide of the Ottoman Empire? Who cares about the American genocide of the native peoples? All of them would be dead by now anyway. So in a hundred years, who will really care?

But let me be clear: it doesn’t have to be an Israeli genocide of the Palestinians. It could be the other way around. It is just that there are problems. One is militarily, the Palestinians really aren’t up to it. What’s more, if they did manage to do it, the United States wouldn’t be there to protect Palestine at the UN because we only believe in justifying absolutely everything that Israel ever does.

What’s really great about my idea is that the Palestinians are hardly clean in this matter. Sure, there’s about a thousand to one Israeli reaction to anything Palestinians do. But the Palestinians aren’t a bunch of Jains out sweeping the road in front of them to make sure they kill no living things. And it certainly doesn’t help that Hamas can’t decide if it’s a government or a revolutionary group. It was sad that they supported the murder of those three Israeli youths. So the point is that Israel has justification for attacking Palestine. And they don’t ever seem to be concerned about an appropriate level of force. So let’s get some of those nukes out. Let’s get this over with!

Afterword

Of course, the two countries could act as adults and not allow the extremists on both sides to destroy diplomatic efforts. But I’m sad to say that this idea is even more fanciful than my modest proposal.

Dean Baker has long advocated a response to economic recessions that one never really hears about: work reductions. Suppose that there is a recession and a company decides that it needs to layoff 20% of its workforce. Instead of doing this and putting the laid-off workers on unemployment, the company could cut everyone’s work hours by 20%, and the government would make up the extra 20% in compensation. This would lead to a faster recovery where the company would again be running at full steam.

This is a system that works really well in other countries, most notably Germany. But it would be especially great in the United States because workers here are notoriously bad about taking time off. But the main thing is that it is just good economic policy. It provides more stability. And the truth is that our country produces far too much stuff anyway. Over the last many decades, other advanced economies have used increased productivity in the form of more leisure time. In the United States, at least for the last 35 years, we have used increase productivity to make the rich even richer.

Let’s think about the issue of leisure for a moment. When most people think of leisure, they imagine drinking a cold beer on a Caribbean beach. But the truth is that for most people, leisure is actually something else. Most people really do go by the old saying, “A change is better than a rest.” People putter in their gardens, they knit sweaters, they play with their children (which helps in their proper development). Leisure is not a lack of work, it is just a lack of pay. And that is why as a country we should embrace leisure. It isn’t wasted time. The only way you can see that is if they only thing that matters to you is making money. And although that might be true of the power elite, it shouldn’t be a worldview that the rest of us accept.

Today, Dean Baker wrote a wide ranging article about the problems we face today because of our lack of economic demand, High Asset Prices, the Savings Glut, Secular Stagnation, and Unemployment. After discussing the standard economic approaches to the demand problem, he notes that we could have full employment if everyone just decided to work less. For a great many people, this sounds like a great idea. And the fact is that most Americans work so much not because they need to, but because they are afraid that if they don’t work unreasonable numbers of hours, they will lose their jobs.

Still, there are a lot of people like me who do very much live to work. I’ve seen this a lot in the high tech industry where programmers just want to work ridiculous numbers of hours. But there is no reason why they need to do all that work for some company that frankly abuses such work ethics. These programmers could go home at 5:00 each night and code cool new apps or code controllers for fly sized drones.

But I don’t see us moving in this direction. And the reason is not that people wouldn’t like it. The reason is that the power elite love having a work force that is terrified of losing their jobs. So given the option of laying off 20% of a work force or cutting back hours by 20%, most owners would rather lay off the employees. For one thing, it is less disruptive to the company. But more important, it sends a message to the employees: stay in line, don’t ask for more money, work longer hours, and most of all, tenderly smooch my bottom.

I don’t have a problem with people disagreeing with me. There are times that I’m wrong. Here is a really embarrassing example: Chained-CPI Madness. If you look at that article, you will notice that right at the top I note the error that I made. The point is that I may have a political ax to grind (I do have a political ax to grind!) but it is based upon how I see the world. I would never intentionally manipulate data. I would never, for example, say that raising the minimum wage absolutely won’t cost jobs. But it is de rigueur for conservatives to claim that raising the minimum wage absolutely will cost jobs. The data are mixed, but they tend to side with me. If the data tended against me, I might still argue for raising the minimum wage; but I wouldn’t just quote the studies that agreed with me and pretend that the others didn’t exist.

This is my primary problem with the conservative movement. Look, I understand. If you pull a conservative and a liberal off the street, they will both spout a lot of nonsense. But when it comes to liberal intellectuals, a great deal of care is taken to get the facts right and to not deceive. That just isn’t true on the right. Except for Bruce Bartlett and Josh Barro (both of whom are far from perfect), I can’t name any major conservative thinkers who seem to care about getting the facts right. (And yes, I am especially thinking about Avik Roy.) Paul Krugman made note of this just today. Danny Vinik wrote an article where he pointed out that conservative wonks have abandoned Paul Ryan. But he noted that, “Ryan has long had passionate supporters among conservative intellectuals.” Krugman responded that it was always obvious that Ryan was a charlatan, noting, “And what does that say about the supposed wonks who passionately defended him?”

What it says is that the conservative intellectual class are themselves a bunch of ideologues who don’t care about having a real argument about policies. In other words: there is no major conservative intellectual movement; it is all apologetics. There is no greater example of this than John Hood’s recent The Wall Street Journal article, North Carolina Got it Right on Unemployment Benefits.[1] In the article, he argues that North Carolina was right to cut unemployment benefits because it really did encourage workers to go out and find jobs:

That’s a whole lot of numbers, even for a math geek like me. Luckily we have the national treasure who is Dean Baker to cut through all these lying statistics. First, North Carolina grew by more than the nation, but this has been true for the last four decades. The southern states are seeing more growth. Compared to the rest of that southern region, North Carolina actually grew less. So much for lie number one.

Second, total unemployment in the state dropped a lot in the state. Why? Because people who claimed to be looking for jobs before (because they had to in order to get unemployment benefits) simply stopped looking for work. Thus: the unemployment rate went down, but actual unemployment did not go down. As Baker put it, “While the size of the labor force in the rest of the [southeast] region grew by 1.0 percent over the last year, the labor market shrank by 0.2 percent in North Carolina.” Baker concluded:

There are two possibilities for what is going on with John Hood. One is that he knows he is lying and he just sees himself as a good foot soldier in the ideological fight. But I think it is more likely that he is just a true believer and so regardless of what happened in North Carolina, he was going to hunt around and look for any bit of data that backed up what he knew to be true.

This is my problem with the conservative movement. What Hood did is pretty much what every conservative “thinker” does. Facts are simply things to be used to justify what they already know to be true. Facts are never used alter policy, much less to create it. And this is why our country is on the verge of political crisis. We have two political parties. One is the usual kind of mediocre mixed blessing. The other is crazy. And we have a mainstream media that insists that the two parties are mirror images of each other. During the most recent debt ceiling negotiations, the idea that it would be no big deal got a lot of coverage in the mainstream press. When facts are just an ideological plaything for half the political leaders of a nation, catastrophe is a constant threat.

[1] John Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation. This is something I really hate. Conservatives take people like John Locke, who were very liberal (and even radical) in their own time, and grab onto them. Yes, the conservatives have finally caught up to the liberal thinking of three and a half centuries ago. You can imagine in the year 2525, conservatives will start the Martin Luther King Foundation. I hate that conservatives do this: co-opt great liberal thinkers of the past. Note that no conservatives want to name their foundations after Thomas Paine because after two and a quarter centuries, they are still far behind his thinking.