As I’ve mentioned before, The Progressive has a feature called, “No Comment.” In it, they put quotes that need no comment. For example, take almost anything from what Bundy has recent said and nothing really needs to be added. Media Matters flagged just such an example today, Fox Promises To Ignore Obama’s Press Conference Unless Someone Asks About Benghazi. In the following video, Fox News was covering the president’s news conference which he was doing with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Fox cut away, claiming that the next question was from a German reporter so they knew it wouldn’t be about, “Benghazi! Benghazi! Benghazi!”

Of course, I’m not a “no comment” kind of guy, so I will have a few things to say after the video:

This all follows from the announcement this morning that John Boehner will form a select committee on Benghazi. This, in turn, was a response to the “shocking” revelations that the White House was concerned about how the Benghazi attacks might hurt Obama’s re-election bid. This is right up there with the shocking revelation that politicians try to impress potential voters. As John Dickerson noted, there is every indication that at that time the White House actually believed the story they were pushing.

But David Weigel really gets to the heart of the matter, The Umpteenth Guide to the Impenetrable Benghazi Outrage. He goes through all the history and the supposed smoking gun email from speechwriter Ben Rhodes, and sums up:

So let’s boil that down further: according to the Republicans, the scandal is that the White House tried to distract attention from something that wasn’t happening. This is what is so aggravating about conservative media. It doesn’t matter what a Democratic administration does: the conservatives are going to scream scandal. If the administration really was sandal ridden, the right wingers would have moved on to something else—something meatier. I’m getting the same impression I got during the Clinton years (when I was a libertarian and not inclined to side with the Democrats), “If this is the best they can come up with, this must be a squeaky clean White House.”

In the end, this will come to nothing. But no one will admit it. And no one will ever tell the Republican base. So just like some conservatives still think Hillary Clinton killed Vince Foster, in twenty years some will think there was something to “Benghazi! Benghazi! Benghazi!” Even if they won’t be able to tell you what it was.[1]

The next time you wonder why it is that Republicans believe such crazy things, all you have to do is return to this one and a half minute video. People don’t switch over to Fox News because they are looking for coverage of Benghazi. They are already on Fox News because they flatter themselves that it really is “fair and balanced” (or at least “news”) and that they will get coverage that doesn’t upset their prejudices. But it is Fox News that decides that they are going to be outraged about Benghazi. Note that Weigel wasn’t saying that the Benghazi story was impenetrable; he was saying that the outrage was impenetrable. Indeed it is. But it is completely understandable.

[1] Actually, I think I have a plot for a film. Hillary Clinton actually used voodoo to force Vince Foster to kill himself. Now she has reanimated his body and sends it out to kill her enemies. She had long had an affair with Christopher Stevens, before he left her, announcing that he was gay and running off with Bill. So she sent Vince Foster to Benghazi to kill him. I see a series of films, collectively known as, “Vince Foster: Zombie Assassin.” It’s a winner!

Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote a great article yesterday at The Atlantic, This Town Needs a Better Class of Racist. In it, he looks at an issue that has long bugged me: how we ignore implicit racist that has huge social costs and freak out about explicit racism that while vile is largely impotent.

He noted, “Cliven Bundy looks, and sounds, much like what white people take racism to be… The problem with Cliven Bundy isn’t that he is a racist but that he is an oafish racist.” As I wrote last month, “Take away the [explicit] racism and the idea that slavery was just great and you are left with Paul Ryan’s hammock argument.” Yet when I say that Ryan’s policies are racist, I get ridiculed. Apparently, we aren’t supposed to talk about racism unless it is of the most obvious variety. As Coates wrote, Cliven Bundy “does not so much use the word ‘Negro’ — which would be bad enough — but ‘nigra,’ in the manner of villain from Mississippi Burning or A Time to Kill.”

Coates defines what we should be fighting as “elegant racism,” which is “invisible, supple, and enduring.” And the example of the hour comes to us from Donald Sterling because in public, he is one of its great practitioners. He refers to Bomani Jones who has been complaining about Sterling’s racism since at least 2006 when Sterling was sued by the Department of Justice on Monday for housing discrimination. Sterling was later fined $2.7 million for his behavior. In the following radio interview, Jones commented about the reason we freak out about these comments and not about his rental policies, “This is the only opportunity that a lot of people out here will have that they feel comfortable within their souls and within their psyches to stand against racism. Because it is so easy to do it on this right here and it’s so scandalous.”

But Coates took it deeper. The sin is not racism but making white people feel bad about racism. When Paul Ryan talks about lazy inner city youths, there is plausible deniability. We can say, “Sure, he means black inner city youths, but there are white inner city youths as well.” But when someone uses the n-word or says that blacks don’t have a good family life because they aren’t picking cotton as slaves, there is no denying the racism.

This is a pretty typical problem with conservatives: seeing the problems of the past but not the problems of the present. But Coates is right: this is largely a liberal problem. (Sadly, the conservatives are mostly not even this evolved on the issue of racism.) He argued that we see race as a thing, when it is actually not. Racism is a thing, and the idea of race is born from that. I think that is fundamentally correct. But more uncomfortably, he’s right that this is the way I think about such issues. I’m going to have to give it much more thought.

Coates ended the article with an observation that is so obvious that no one else seems to have thought of it:

I continue to find myself facing ethical questions I do not really feel comfortable dealing with. About a year ago, I created a YouTube video, These are not very bright guys – All the President’s Men. It is just a clip from that movie where Deep Throat tells Woodward that that he shouldn’t believe everything that the media said about the Nixon administration being brilliant, “The truth is, these are not very bright guys.” I put it up because I come back to it again and again in life. We are fooling ourselves if we think we have things under control. And that’s especially true in politics. I used it as an illustration of the potential dangers of the Republican Debt Ceiling hostage taking. That could have gone very wrong and it still could.

The video is only 15 seconds long and half of that is titles:

The video has never gotten many views, which is not surprising; I think I’m one of the few people on the planet for whom the line has any special meaning. And I had never received any comments on it. Until today.

I got a comment by a guy I’ll call WM. I’m not giving you his name because I don’t want him coming around here for reasons that will be obvious in a moment. And also, I think the nicest thing we can do for him is to leave him alone. In addition to what is most obviously offensive, the whole structure of the comment strikes me as being very much like what I’m familiar with of marginal schizophrenics. I don’t know, of course. But I feel very sorry for this guy.

What I don’t think most people understand about schizophrenia is how the person suffering from it has the experience of not being quite sure what reality is. This tends to make them very frightened. We see it as paranoia, of course. But from their perspective, this is rational. They can’t know that the conspiracy is not “out there” but rather “in here.” So I really do feel bad for anyone suffering from such a thing.

Here is a slightly formatted version of what he wrote:

Just to clarify a few things. Pakula directed All the President’s Men. Harrison Ford starred in Pakula’s last film, The Devil’s Own. LIE is Interstate 495 in New York. Pakula was killed in a gruesome car accident but I’ve never heard anything to suggest that it was anything else. I think he is implying some kind of conspiracy that must involve Ford, since he still walks the earth. Frank Stallone is the name of both a Suffolk County detective who was involved in the case and Sylvester Stallone’s musician brother. Is he suggesting a Hollywood connection there? I can’t say. Nor can I say if he actually worked at NASA, but given all the guy knows, he is clearly smart.

Of course, what most people will notice is that this comment is about as antisemitic as you can be in writing. But based upon other things the guy has said and done, he seems to be one of those people who think the world is controlled by reptiles mascaraing as humans. I guess they are who he thinks the “jews” really are, which is an inventive take on an old bit of hatred about Jews not being human.

My guess is that he was a smart and creative young man and the disease came upon him in his twenties, as it usually does (late teens, early twenties). And maybe he was working at NASA until he became unstable and they got rid of him. The society is particularly bad about helping the marginal cases. And think about it from his perspective: the world starts to come unglued, he loses his job, and largely becomes isolated. You’d want to find answers and I think he can be forgiven for coming up with reptilian jews who rule the world.

But my ethical problem is much simpler than trying to fix all the problems of the world or at least our nation. Should I allow the comment to stand? After all, I’m kind of a free speech absolutist. What he wrote was vile, but he does have a right to say it. Just the same, it doesn’t lead anywhere good. For one thing, it has nothing to do with what my video was about. And at best it would be ignored. But it might start a flame war. And it would certainly make anyone even marginally Jewish feel at least somewhat bad.

The more I thought about it, the more I began to see the moral imperative to be about him and not the rest of society. For his own good, I canned it. (YouTube had already flagged it as spam.) If I can’t get the guy help, the least I can do is to not give him any exposure. I looked at his comment thread on YouTube and it was filled with very understandable reactions to him that certainly don’t help. So the less attention the better. But it’s sad.

Unlike most people, I believe in a kind of neo-classicism in education. I think that a liberal education is what binds us together. Increasingly, of course, it is what tears us apart. In particular, the current form of radical conservatism is based almost entirely on a large section of the country placing one piece of ancient literature above all others and have decided that far from being literature, it is The Truth™. And if it were, that would work. We could all know our Bibles inside, outside, and backwards and it would provide us with social cohesion. But it would be a shriveled shell of a culture.

But a truly liberal set of cultural touchstones are important to binding us together: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and so on. I would include the books of the great religions too, although there is already a great deal of Christian thought just in that list. I think it is important that I get a reference that you make of these people who have been so important in shaping our culture. Of course I’m not set on these people (except Homer and Cervantes). I’m well aware of the lack of diversity. We can argue (no doubt violently) about what should be our cultural touchstones. But there shouldn’t be a question that we need them.

Now conservative education reformers would say, “Exactly!” And they would put together lists of the hundred “great books” that every high school student must read. And they would design tests with questions like, “What is the name of the character who manipulates Othello into murdering his wife?” This is madness! When I talk about “arguing,” I’m not talking about doing it at teaching conferences and in Congress. The culture creates its own touchstones organically.

I’ve been reading a couple of books by Alfie Kohn, the great progressive education reform advocate and thinker. Right now, I’m reading What Does it Mean to Be Well Educated? And More Essays on Standards, Grading, and Other Follies. At the end of the title essay, he mentions the great John Dewey with regards to what I would think we should all agree is what education is ultimately about, “Dewey reminded us that the goal of education is more education. To be well educated, then, is to have the desire as well as the means to make sure that learning never ends.”

This dovetails nicely into what I think is the biggest problem with education today. Few ever get to the point of wanting to read Homer because they are too busy trying to make ends meet. Now liberals and conservatives alike proudly announce that the purpose of education should be to make getting a good job easier—which just so happens to provide the business community with cheap, government trained, workers. Kohn starts his second essay, “Turning Learning into a Business,” with a quote from educational thinker Jonathan Kozol:

But make no mistake: most people in the education “reform” movement are not embarrassed by this. In fact, this idea that the best thing you can do for a child is give him a good education that will provide him with a good job goes along with another conservative canard: the idea that income inequality is all about education. It isn’t all about education. And education reform should not be about trying to fix the much bigger problem of income inequality. And anyway: one reason our educational system is so screwed up is income inequality. In general, rich kids get great (And liberal!) educations. Poor kids get multiplication tables grounded into their brains.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say on this topic soon. As it is I find it deeply disturbing.

As Professor Farnsworth would say, “Good news, everyone!” Economists have looked at the data and it turns out that economic mobility has not gotten worse over the past several decades. Of course, as usual with such “good news” claims from Professor Farnsworth, it is actually bad news. You see, the reason that economic mobility hasn’t decreased is that it’s been terrible all along. Last month at The New Yorker, James Surowiecki explained it all in, The Mobility Myth.

What’s really bad is even if you look at countries like Sweden, there isn’t much mobility. The truth is that focusing on mobility is just a way to avoid looking at equity. And we are really good at that in this country. Both sides of the political spectrum fetishize opportunity as though it would be fine to allow some people to starve as long as they had an equal chance to be rich.

It goes further than this, however. People are only willing to talk about “equality of opportunity” in high tones. When it comes to practical measures, no one is interested in doing anything to improve the situation. This is where the partisan divide comes. Although Democrats don’t want to do anything to help equalize children’s chances in life, Republicans want to make it worse. In education, we have a terrible situation where school funding is dependent upon local taxes. So poor communities get worse schools than rich communities. But this situation that actively helps the children of the rich is not good enough for the conservatives. They want to subsidize the rich sending their children to private schools with vouchers. That is, by the way, what is behind the whole charter school movement.

All of this annoys me because the issue is equality and not meaningless notions like equality of opportunity. Surowiecki notes that from the 1940s through the beginning of the 1970s, it didn’t much matter that people were stuck in the middle class. The entire class saw its incomes double during that time. That was because workers actually got part of our productivity gains. But that all came to an abrupt end in the late 1970s with the rise of the New Democratic movement (regardless of the fact that it wasn’t call that then) and the embrace by Republicans of supply side “trickle down” economics.

When the government decided that the way to make the economy grow was to give more and more money to the rich, we saw two things. First, we saw only modest growth—nothing like what we saw before that period. Second, we saw that all of that growth went to the people at the top. There was no trickling down. And this was hardly surprising. As conservatives are fond of saying, “Incentives matter!” Lowing the taxes on the rich only gave them greater incentives to give themselves more money.

The United States does not have much economic mobility. The United States has never had that much economic mobility in an absolute sense. Michael Harrington was exactly correct when he wrote in The Other America: Poverty in the United States:

Of course, I’m not willing to even yield the point about inequality not decreasing in this country. The study cited by James Surowiecki looks at mobility in the context of quintiles. We know that the story of inequality in this country is not the story of the top 20%; it is the story of the top 1% or the top 0.1%. I suspect that if we looked at that, we would see much mobility decreasing, because the truly rich are in so much better a position to pass on wealth than the simply upper class.

But the main thing is that it doesn’t matter. Talking about “opportunity” is just a way of not talking about inequality. Mitt Romney and his ilk would have us believe that the liberal concern about inequality is just a way to enact a dictatorship of the worker. That’s just rhetoric, because I don’t even know of any socialists who believe in that. All we are talking about is a more just distribution of resources.[1] This is a debate we should have—and one that liberals would win. That is why the conservatives want to stop us from even discussing it. We shouldn’t allow that.

See also: Conservatives Define “Equality of Opportunity” Out of Existence

[1] Simply because our economy greatly rewards some kinds of endeavors doesn’t mean there is anything natural about it. Patents, for example, are orders of magnitude more profitable today than they were 200 years ago. This is because of things like manufacturing technology. But that doesn’t mean inventors should be richer today than they were then. What’s more, it is an argument for reducing rather than increasing intellectual property protections. But with economic power goes political power. Thus, we’ve only seen increases in intellectual property protections. Certainly Disney has made enough from Mickey Mouse.

Timothy B Lee is young journalist over at Vox. He mostly writes about intellectual property where his work is quite good. I noted this in an article last year, Vague Patent Trolling. But being a libertarian, when he gets outside of that issue, he tends to go very, very wrong, Libertarian Fail on Birth Control. And I’m afraid that is the case with his article today, Venezuela’s Silly Gimmicks Can’t Fix Its Disastrous Inflation Problem.

I’ve been very impressed with Vox thus far—especially the work by Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias. But this article by Lee is incredibly weak. It is the nationalistic equivalent to hippy punching. American journalists love to complain about Venezuela. That in itself would be okay, but I always get the idea that these journalists thinking that they making a bold stand for Truth rather than just following the herd and pandering to nationalistic prejudice.

This is sad to see from someone as smart as Lee. I’m sure that if he had been writing about Bolivia, a country without so much ideological baggage, Lee would have provided some facts. Instead, he makes two points. First, he presents the central bank not releasing an annualized inflation number as an attempted conspiracy, even though he admits all you have to do is compound the numbers to get the annualized rate. Second, he pushes the old CATO Institute idea that the inflation rate is really much higher because of black market currency. Dean Baker countered this idea almost two months ago:

But one can’t deny that Venezuela has an inflation problem. And there are a lot of parts to it. If you want to know about it, you had better go over to Reuters, where Eyanir Chinea explains the situation rather well, Venezuela March Inflation Speeds Up Amid Street Protests. Lee’s article reads like the product of a slightly more reasonable The Wall Street Journal editorial page.

What most annoys me is why Lee is even covering the issue. After all, it isn’t big news that Venezuela’s high inflation rate is roughly what it was last month. And other than pushing a highly questionable CATO Institute study, he isn’t adding anything to the debate. He says that the way the central bank is reporting its inflation rate won’t help the situation. But is the central bank doing anything that will help? Or hurt? We don’t know because Timothy B Lee isn’t interested in the subject. On the other hand, if Venezuela’s inflation rate had come way down I doubt that he would have covered it at all.

This is not data journalism. This is ideological opportunity-strafing. And if it is going to be in Vox, it ought to at least have a little intellectual heft. One CATO Institute graph and one monthly inflation rate from Venezuela’s central bank is not enough.

That image is from All In. It shows yet another way that the government provides huge amounts of welfare to the rich. The normal price of private land grazing rights for one cow for one month is $16.80. The government basically gives it away for $1.35. That’s a subsidy of $15.45 per cow per month. Bundy reportedly had 908 head of cattle on federal land. So even if he paid his fees, he would have been getting a subsidy of $14,028.60 per month, or $168,343.20 per year.

This doesn’t come as a surprise to me. On 15 April, I wrote, Be a Patriot, Pay Your Taxes! It was a general article, but I included Cliven Bundy in the discussion. I said, “I’m sure that I can find more things in the federal budget that I don’t like than Bundy can. One of the things I don’t like is how the BLM allows ranchers to graze their cattle at below market prices. Of course, in Bundy’s case, even that is too much. So it just steals it.”

The truth is that I have no problem with the government subsidizing ranchers in this way. There are good reasons for a country to prop up the farm industry. A country always wants to be able to feed its own people by itself if it ever comes to that. But the problem comes in when people assume that farmers and ranchers are rugged individualists who get by just based upon the sweat of their brows. And that just ain’t the case.

The average SNAP (food stamp) benefit in Nevada is $123.57 per month or $1,482.84 per year. That’s over a hundred children who could have been fed for the year. And that’s the subsidy that wasn’t good enough for Bundy! He thought the federal government giving him almost $170,000 was an outrage. He wanted over $180,00 so he threatened federal officials with hundreds of guns. What a patriot!

But I run into this kind of thinking all the time. Someone will mention some outrage like Jason Greenslate, the Fox News surfer. And they ask me, “Don’t you think this is terrible?!” Well, yes, to some extent I do. But why is anyone focused on such a small issue? Banks get billions of dollars and you are concerned that a surfer is getting a hundred bucks a month in free food? That is outrageous.

When poor people throughout the nation got their SNAP benefits cut, gun toting militia men didn’t show up to defend them. Instead, they showed up when a millionaire cattle rancher didn’t want to pay pennies on the dollar for his grazing rights. And this is because hate radio and Fox News are not interested in the really big welfare takers. They want to keep everyone focused on the little guy. Remember: the Tea Party started not when big banks got bailed out but when the government was talking about helping out struggling home owners. It’s like a magic trick: look at the poor person getting a little help so you don’t noticed boats loaded with cash being sent to the rich. Or, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”

Some revolutionaries these people are! Like we need militia groups to protect the oligarchs. What a pathetic group of people.

And the la-hand of the Freeeeee!
And the hoooome, of thhhhhe, braaaave!

Update (24 April 2014 10:00 pm)

Now that I think about it, this is how the conservative base is made to vote against there best interests. They get focused on something like the surfer dude and vote on that, even though it doesn’t matter at all what the surfer dude does. This allows them to vote for people who funnel billions to the already wealthy. A lot of people don’t seem to believe it, but when I talk to conservatives alone, they are surprisingly sensible and there is much common ground. But as a group, I find them surprisingly gullible. It is so frustrating to talk to a conservative in depth about a particular thing and find that I totally agree with them. Then, after a month of Fox News propaganda, I will talk to them and they will have flipped their position. But that isn’t too bad; changing one’s mind isn’t a problem. But in general, they have no memory of having had any other opinion. It is like Fox News washes their brains of the ability to even think about the issue.

The way politics is right now, it seems pointless to even discuss it. There are lots of parts of this, but the main thing on my mind is the Medicaid expansion. The current status with roughly half of the states not expanding Medicaid is just cruel. The best you can say about the politicians who are blocking expansion is that they are placing theoretical concerns about government accountability ahead of practical concerns about poor people dying because of lack of healthcare. But a more clear-eyed view of it would be that they are purposefully hurting the working poor for the sake of political gain. It is shameful.

Ed Kilgore wrote two articles today that looked at some numbers related to this. The first was, Medicaid Expansion and the “Socialized Medicine” Underground. Most of the article is about what appears to be an obsession with him: the fact that Obamacare approval numbers appear much worse than they are because of people who say they don’t like Obamacare because they want a single-payer system. Republicans like to note the polls that say that far more people dislike Obamacare than like it. But if you include the “I want single payer” crowd in the “supports Obamacare” group, the program is actually quite popular.

But what I took for the article (actually just a two paragraph post) were the numbers of people who supported the Medicaid expansion. He quotes a Public Policy Polling survey of Texans who think the state should expand Medicaid by an overwhelming plurality: 49-35. A Georgia College poll found that Georgians were for it by a huge majority: 60-30. So even in these bright red states, the Medicaid expansion is popular. The people are not demanding the stonewalling that the Republican Party is giving them. Again: shameful.

The second article was, Medicaid Expansion: Deal Too Good To Refuse Getting Better. It is based upon a new Congressional Budget Office report that finds that the earlier extremely generous federal government funding of the states will be even more generous. He quoted Edwin Park at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities as saying, “CBO now estimates that the federal government will, on average, pick up more than 95 percent of the total cost of the Medicaid expansion and other health reform-related costs in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) over the next ten years (2015-2024).” That means that states would pay just 1.6% more than they now pay for Medicaid and CHIP to insure far more people. Shame, shame, shame:

I really wonder what these people tell themselves. I’m sure there is a whole lot of cognitive dissonance going on. But I wonder what they will think in ten years when more practical people finally give in and expand Medicaid. Probably nothing. It will be like global warming. If we’re lucky, we’ll get an, “Oops!” But more likely, they will never think about it. The press will be too polite to say anything. And they will never come face-to-face with anyone who was harmed by their shameful behavior. And remember: these are mostly people who consider themselves Christians. What would Christ do? Heal the sick. What would Christians do? Grumble about all the free healthcare Those People were getting.

Shame. Shame. Shame.

Over at The New York Times today, David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy wrote an excellent article, The American Middle Class Is No Longer the World’s Richest. The only thing that really surprised me in it was that the median income in Canada is now greater than it is in the United States. It’s pretty hard to explain that in any way but that we simply have a political system that is controlled by the rich who have managed to make economic policy that pushes money from the poor to the rich.

It’s actually shocking when you consider that by and large the upper class (top 20%) minus the rich (top 1%) get screwed compared to how the rich alone are treated. But they actually have political power and I’m surprised that they haven’t revolted against the system. These, after all, are the people who pay income tax rates around 30%. The rich don’t; they pay half that much because most of their income in unearned. The upper class also pay a high percentage of their incomes in payroll taxes. The rich pay a tax rate that approaches zero the more they make. I understand that the rest of us are even more screwed, but we’ve long known our government isn’t interested in us. But revolutions are usually fought between the upper class and the rich. Why is our upper class so complacent?

Of course, the problem is more than just tax policy. The truth is that even forgetting about the government, American workers don’t do as well as they do in Canada and many other advanced economies. (Although that’s getting less and less true.) And the reason for that is very simple: unions have been effectively destroyed in this country. This started in a big way in 1947 with the Taft–Hartley Act. And then Reagan signaled open season on them in 1981. (This was no surprise; what was surprising was that many unions endorsed Reagan.) The only reason that capital ever shared any of the benefits with labor was that it was forced to. Unions don’t have the power they once had so workers haven’t seen any part in productivity gains over the last 35 years.

I keep returning to what Milton Friedman always claimed: the rich were getting far richer but the poor were also getting richer. I often fantasize about having him before me and asking him today, “The poor are actually doing worse. So what do you think of your laissez faire now?” Of course, it’s a hollow fantasy. I know exactly what he would say. Like all libertarians, he would retreat into theory and tell me it was still best to have our winner-take-all society because: freedom! He would also prevaricate and claim that the poor losing ground is just the product of us not yet having the libertarian utopia. It is at this point in my fantasy that I beat the poor man to death with my bare hands.

The two issues—unionization and taxes—go hand in hand. The more money the rich have, the more they can lobby the government to destroy unions and lower the raxes of the rich. This feeds back to give the rich even more power and great incentive to use it to destroy unions and lower the taxes of the rich. And it is all done in the name of making America richer. But now with Canada getting ahead of us (and other countries sure to follow), what will be the rationalization? Because I’m sure there will be a rationalization. A change in the facts is not going to stop the power elite from pushing policies that make then more powerful and more elite.

Afterword

Cenk Uygur provided a great overview of the NYT article on The Young Turks:

Update (23 April 2014 5:44 pm)

Dean Baker once again proves that as bad as anyone says it is, he can always show that it is worse, The American Middle Class Is Doing Much Worse Than the NYT Says:

I was just watching Stefan Molyneux answer Jon Stewart’s list of questions for libertarians. I’m not going to put a link in because the truth is that the answers that I heard were so pathetic that I don’t think it is a good idea to spread them around. But there is one issue that I want to discuss. Stewart asked if things like the social safety net don’t enhance freedom. Molyneux’s response was (and this is close to if not exactly a quote): sure it does but then allowing rape enhances the freedom of the rapist. There are so many things wrong with this that it would take a book, so let me address just three varied issues.

First, this is a false analogy. To start with, it is offensive to suggest that rape is equivalent to a sales tax. I’m sure that Molyneux would counter that he isn’t saying they are equivalent, but that hardly matters. His argument throughout what I watched was that the problem is simply coercion. So taxing is coercive and rape is coercive. No one who is not stuck in a theoretical frame of mind would make such sweeping comparisons.

The second issue is that there is a fundamental contradiction between the libertarian non-aggression principle and the belief that people should be protected from coercion. According to libertarians, there should be laws to stop one person from raping another. So how are these laws enforced? There are two potential answers. Either it can all be done with donations or the government can coerce people into paying taxes for these “proper” government functions. The former case is just a might-makes-right system with a patina of justice painted on. The latter yields the liberal point: we all do have some duties to one another. There is no reason that we should accept libertarian dogma that the only valid purpose of government is to enforce non-aggression.

To pretend that non-aggression is the only shared good in society is just nonsense. As the years go on, I’ve begun to see that while libertarianism appeals to smart, theoretically minded people, it is also the most lazy of political philosophies. It depends upon defining most social interactions out of existence. And then, caught in its own theoretical framework, it is never forced to confront its own practical ramifications. And that’s why when libertarians make practical claims, they are always dependent upon cherry picked data and conservative political apologetics.

And for the third issue, I need to dig a bit deeper into what else our libertarian friend said. He noted that the social safety net allows people to make bad choices. Unlike raping, poverty is not a choice. In general, poor people don’t make the decision to avoid getting an education because they can depend upon the government. The idea that they do is just an old conservative canard that is not based upon any actual data. Conservatives just know these kinds of things, and the facts don’t matter at all.

The main reason for having laws against rape is to stop people from raping in the first place, not to punish them after the fact. There is no equivalent argument against poverty, which is very rarely a choice. In almost all cases it is a complex phenomenon that is almost completely determined by social factors. Allowing poor people to starve will not provide a substantial incentive to reduce poverty—most especially in the world where all the property has already been divided up.

I have heard things about Molyneux in the past, but I’d never seen him before. I can see why libertarians like him. He’s got that zestfully clean look and manner. And he’s got the libertarian dogma down. But I can also see why he makes liberals apoplectic. He’s breezy with his thinking, and breezy is not a good way to think about serious subjects. Having been a keen observer of libertarians for three decades now, I see what Molyneux is all about. He sticks mostly to theory but peppers it with practical claims. I have little doubt when it comes down to it, he will jettison all of the practical claims when they are shown to be wrong. And he’ll be left with his non-aggression principle. Taxation is rape! There is no serious political discussion to be had here.