I’m no fan of David Brooks. A couple of days ago, I wrote, David Brooks Puts Profits over Prophets. But I don’t see why liberals are so upset about his Drug War apologia. Don’t misunderstand: I see what they are saying. David Brooks used to smoke pot, but he thinks it should remain illegal without the slightest recognition that the drug’s legal status had no effect on his life. He was white and upper middle class (at least). If he had been black and poor, the drug’s legal status might have destroyed his entire life. He doesn’t understand that. I get it.

Of course, David Brooks also doesn’t seem to get that simply being born black and poor would also destroy your whole life. Not a lot of poor black kids get to go to Grace Church School. David Brooks seriously needs to go to a Tim Wise seminar. But that’s what David Brooks does: not understanding that we live in an incredibly unjust country with an economic system seemingly designed to reward the worst of what we are. He’s an apologist for the rich. And the fact that he is well paid to work at the “newspaper of record” is all the indictment of our society that you need. We have a very sick culture.

But David Brooks isn’t the only clueless person around. Our last three presidents have all committed drug felonies. Two of those three were Democrats. Our most recent president was paid millions of dollars to write about how he not only smoked pot, but also did cocaine from time to time. None of these men seem to care that the lives of young people today are being destroyed by those very same laws that they managed to avoid getting applied to them.

I can hear the apologists calling foul right now. Yes, I understand. There is a reason. There is always a reason. Clinton was a draft dodger so he couldn’t actually be liberal when it came to drug “crime.” Bush was a conservative so what do you expect? Obama is black so obviously he can’t be liberal, except in as much as he is dragged along by popular opinion. And I haven’t seen a whole bunch talk about those cocaine laws that Obama occasionally broke.

We have a major problem with drug laws in this country. But David Brooks is not part of that problem. Did anyone expect him to come out in favor of drug legalization? Even David Frum still thinks that cannabis is a dangerous drug! And who cares what David Brooks thinks? I know some people do but they’re all idiots anyway. Our drug law problems come from our politicians—especially our “liberal” politicians. So complain all you want about David Brooks’ hypocrisy on our drug laws, but just remember: he is way at the back of a line that’s head is guarded by President Obama.

I was watching an interview on Democracy Now! with Kevin Phillips from a couple of weeks after the last presidential election. Phillips is an interesting guy and he is always worth listening to. But he said something that really stood out to me. He noted that America was a nation in decline. This is a big issue to me that I almost never hear anyone talk about.

Where I see America’s decline most clearly is among the rich. These people demonstrate a “circle the wagons” mentality. That’s what all the tax policy is about. The rich seem to have gotten to the point where they don’t think they will get richer because the nation is getting richer. Instead, they just want to take a larger and larger slice of the economic pie. That’s how you get rich in a dying empire.

What’s really important here is that this belief in the decline of the nation is self-fulfilling. Over the last 40 years, we have given the rich a larger and larger share of the economy. This has effectively decimated the middle class. So while we are still a very wealthy nation we have become a kind of banana republic. Of course, instead of having banana plantations, we have a financial industry. That makes it worse! At least you can eat bananas. Most of the financial industry is useless even regarding its already dubious purpose of moving capital around.

The other important aspect of this is the income inequality. Increasingly, we have the very rich and we have the poor. In as much as we have a middle class, it is made up of the remnants of our once unionized work force. For a very large segment of the modern American work force, it might was well be the late 19th century. There is no 40 hour work week when you work 3 jobs. There’s no overtime. There’s no benefits, even at companies that offer them because you don’t work enough for that particular company.

And we are declining in the most horrible way possible. We are constantly told that we don’t have enough money to provide for the poor or have universal healthcare or a clean environment. But we do have enough money for corporate welfare. We do have enough money to lock up cannabis smokers. We do have enough money to cut the taxes of the rich. And note this because it is very important: spending money on the things that our rich overlords tell us we can’t afford would make our country and our economy stronger. And the things they say we can afford are the primary causes of our national and economic decline.

Arnold Schwarzenegger once said, “If you work hard and play by the rules, this country is truly open to you. You can achieve anything.” Pretty much the same thing has been said about every politician during my lifetime. But I haven’t seen any of them do anything about it. It is patently false. Obama hasn’t even tried to do anything for the labor movement. Why would he?! New Democrats don’t believe in that old economy stuff. They think if everyone would just teach themselves computer programming, everything would be fine.

But everything will not be fine. That’s because the rich have given up on America. They are just consolidating their gains. And their politicians have given up on America too. The only ones who haven’t given up on America are the poor. But no one listens to us. When the Occupy movement started, the media yawned. “Just a bunch of liberals.” But when the Tea Party movement started, the media celebrated. “A bunch of old people backed by the rich pushing for lower taxes on the rich!” That was something “new” and worth reporting!

And that’s our country in decline: the only things that matter are the things that matter to the rich and that’s because the only people who are ever listened to are the rich. This is not democracy. This is not freedom. If it weren’t so tragic, it would be a joke.

Earlier today, Jonathan Chait wrote, Republican Reformers Stop Being Polite to Tea Party, Start Getting Real. Seeing that title, I jumped right in. I was prepared to savage any silly ideas that Chait had about Republican reformers and where they do or do not fit into the conservative movement. But that title was just about as inaccurate as it could be.

The article summarizes two articles in the most recent issue of National Affairs magazine. One by conservative hacks Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner. And another by AEI’s Michael Strain[1], who I will admit has shown himself in the past to not be a total idiot and nutjob. As Chait describes it, the “Prague Spring for the mainstream” conservative intelligentsia. And then he spends the rest of the article showing how it is nothing of the sort.

The problem is that being a conservative in any capacity is a really well-paying gig. No one is going to threaten his cushy job at AEI in the name of fixing the Republican Party. But even if one were so inclined, they would quickly figure something out that I’ve been talking about for years: the Democratic Party is the conservative party. So if these people really want to reform the Republican Party, they have to pretend that the Democratic Party is something that it is not. Chait puts it perfectly:

He then goes on to note that it isn’t that Republicans don’t have actual policies that they are vigorously pushing. It is just that they are the most vile policies imaginable that no conservative apologist could countenance. This is the Wonderland that conservative intellectuals live in. If you talk to them (And I do!) about their policies, they will tell you about how they are good for the poor. This is where Paul Ryan gets all the hammock garbage. The reason that people are poor is that the government is giving them too much! But when you step out of Wonderland, it gets hard. Poor kids go to school hungry. Poor kids get worse educations. Poor kids die at a much higher rate than rich kids. Well, the conservative intellectuals don’t want that, so they stay locked up inside Wonderland where all children are equal and have a good shot at the American Dream.

What’s most important to me in all of this is that these would be reformers aren’t just spewing out their Wonderland message of the perfect conservative policy. They are also reinforcing the beliefs of the reactionaries that Obama and the Democrats are secret communists trying to destroy the nation. And these “Republican reform” articles (it’s a genre) are always peppered with these distortions about the Democrats that reinforce what the Tea Party crowd already believes.

A more fundamental problem is that if there really were such a thing as a reasonable Republican, he would not stay one for long. Think of Michael Strain. If he really believes in what he claims to believe in, he fits much better in the Democratic Party than the Republican Party. But if he became a Democrat, he might lose his job at the AEI. I’ve wondered the same thing about Norman Ornstein, who is also at AEI. But I put him in the same category as David Cay Johnston and Bruce Bartlett: people who align with Republican ideals but don’t seem to vote with the party anymore. But Strain is much younger without the enormous reputations of these three men. So he has to be careful.[2]

But I have some advice for him and others like him: stop trying to be reformers. You’re only making things worse.

Afterword

Look at that picture of Strain above. He looks like a nice young man. He’s welcome in the big tent of the Democratic Party. I know that the two of us would be on opposite sides of the tent. But I’d welcome him. I doubt he’s much more conservative than Obama.

[1] Be careful. This is Michael R. Strain. It is not the Louisiana Republican Michael G. Strain.

[2] Generally, reform is for the older, so Strain is actually showing more bravery than most people in Washington.

This is a good segment from The Young Turks, about another MSNBC “scandal.” What happened was that Melissa Harris-Perry had some comedians on her show and they made a joke about the Romney family. Immediately, there is a freak out in the right wing media. The comedian then apologized and Harris-Perry apologized again and again and again. What’s interesting is that there is literally nothing to this. And the fact that Harris-Perry feels the need to beat herself up publicly, just shows how successful the right has been at working the refs.

Jimmy Dore is great in this segment because he totally calls it: this is false equivalence. Now, whenever anyone on MSNBC says anything that ruffles a single feather on the right, those on the left are equating it with the really vile stuff that is said on the right. This isn’t an MSNBC problem; this is a liberal problem. For all of their awful behavior, at least the right wing is loyal to itself. The left wing throws its own people under the bus for the smallest of causes.

Where I disagree with Dore is that Harris-Perry wasn’t over-apologizing because she isn’t smart. She was over-apologizing to protect her job. Given that both Alec Baldwin and Martin Bashir were fired over minor things, there is no reason to believe that MSNBC wouldn’t have turned on her as well. And notice, these two guys were fired, but when Phil Robertson says the vilest of things about happy blacks before they were allowed to vote, nothing happens to him.

I have gotten used to the mainstream media bending to the whims of conservative outrage. But this is totally out of hand when the supposed liberal cable channel (that I no longer watch because of the firing of Bashir) allows itself to be worked the same way. Have you noticed that very little has been said about Sarah Palin’s outrage about Bashir and then her great defense of Phil Robertson’s free speech rights? Come on liberals. Grow a fucking backbone. We’re fighting this war of ideas on the conservatives’ terms. So even when we win, we lose.

Check out the segment; it is really good:

Because of a bit of a mix-up, I happened to read David Brooks’ yearly discussion of the Sidney Awards, The Sidney Awards, Part 1. There is nothing quite like reading David Brooks or Thomas Friedman or oh so many other major newspaper columnists to make a writer feel good about himself. With Brooks, one gets a beautiful combination of lazy thinking, boring prose, and intellectual pretense. And all of this comes together perfectly when Brooks discusses work by people who can actually think and write reasonably well without undue pretense.

In this collection, he tries to figure out if there is more to humans than just a bunch of electrochemical processes going on in the brain. Brooks is clearly divided on the issue. The religious part of him wants to think that there is something other-worldly about humans—that soul that’s gonna go to heaven and party until forever never comes. But the political part of him wants to think that humans are just a special kind of resource that businesses use to bring products to market. Having read him for years, I know where he comes down on all this. Profits over Prophets. I’ve never met a big time conservative who wasn’t perfectly clear on that issue. Profits over Prophets.

Does Science Explain All?

He starts by discussing two opposing essays by Steven Pinker and Leon Wieseltier. Brooks refers to them as “two intellectual heavyweights.” Well, he got that half right. Pinker is an intellectual heavyweight. Wieseltier is best described as a prominent fight promoter. These two guys tackle the question of whether science can or rather more correctly could some day tell us everything about everything. I haven’t read the articles and I have no intention of doing so. It would be hard to find a more boring question to think about. But the way that Brooks writes about the articles is so shamelessly biased as to be comical:

That’s a knockout for Wieseltier, don’t you think? Of course, there are a couple of problems. One is that, in fact most believers take Scripture literally. A 2004 CBS poll found that 55% of Americans think that God created man literally as it says in the Bible. That’s not “few,” that’s “most.” This is the number one weapon in the arsenal of religious apologists. Well, no one really believes that nonsense! But of course, they do. And when they are all alone, they encourage each other to think that nonsense. But that’s a minor issue. Let’s get to the big problem.

Pinker is not talking about finding beauty in the chemistry of the paints used by an artist. He’s a cognitive scientist. When he says that science can explain everything, he’s talking about understanding the chemistry that goes on in the brain. Why does one painting cause the brain to release endorphins while another does not? I don’t know if Wieseltier is presenting this “chemistry of the paint” strawman to knock down, but Brooks sure is. And that’s where he leaves it.

If two intelligent people were going to discuss this kind of thing, they wouldn’t be talking about a human’s reaction to art. They would be talking about whether humans could ever understand why the universe exists. And by the way: it is possible that there is an answer to that question. I believe that certain findings of math indicate that some day we will be able to prove that such a question is beyond the power of a machine that is limited to the perfect intellectual potential of the universe. In other words, it might be possible to prove that nothing can ever fully explain itself. If Pinker wants to write a book about that, I’d be interested in reading it. I’m not sure Wieseltier is even capable of understanding the question. And I know that Brooks isn’t.

Do Elephants Have Souls That We Can’t Bother Defining?

Brooks next discusses Caitrin Nicol’s essay Do Elephants Have Souls? All I can tell from what he wrote is that Nicol thinks elephants do have souls, but isn’t really clear on what souls are. I don’t know what the big deal is. To me, the soul is the essence of a person. It is what I think I am that is distinct from the environment that I live in. But for religious folk like David Brooks, it is far more difficult. And his difficulty with the word takes him back to his unfair discussion of the Pinker-Wieseltier debate. But I don’t think it is just Brooks’ problem.

He quotes Nicol as writing “when we talk about it, we all mean more or less the same thing: what it means for someone to bare it, for music to have it, for eyes to be the window to it, for it to be uplifted or depraved.” Really?! That’s award-winning writing? Because I don’t think the eyes are the windows to the soul, I don’t think people bare their soul except in the sense that they always do, I don’t usually refer to music as having soul, unless I am referring to the music of the 1960s and 1970s that combined R&B with gospel music. I don’t think we all mean more or less the same thing. Most of the people I talk to think the soul is something that lives in the body and goes up to heaven when they die. I don’t think that at all. I’m sure that elephants have souls in the sense that I understand the term soul. But it doesn’t seem like Nicol and Brooks are clear enough on the term soul to say anything at all about elephants.

Did Aaron Swartz Die Because He Was Too Free?

It seems that Larissa MacFarquhar wrote a “brilliant” profile of Aaron Swartz. That may well be. But clearly, Brooks has an ax to grind when it comes to the question of the brilliant and depressed Swartz. Brooks callously observes, “He began writing big books or starting great projects, but he usually didn’t finish them.” Well, I guess that’s one way of saying that he was an idea guy. He was Frank in “Frank, Frank turned the crank; Joe, Joe made it go.” But you could just call him a loser who didn’t finish what he started. Less than a year after his tragic suicide, I guess the “loser” definition is the reasonable choice to explain Swartz. He uses the story to argue in favor of structure and not allowing those kids too much intellectual freedom. No mention is made of a government “justice” system gone wild, pushing an already fragile “soul” over the edge. But who needs those details when Brooks has an important story to tell about the evils of freedom and the uses really smart people put that freedom to.

Can Interviews Reveal the Ghost in the Machine?

Finally, we get to Don Peck’s essay about better ways to hire people to become corporate cogs, They’re Watching You at Work. The old ways of hiring are not working. I have no trouble believing that. “In one study at Xerox, previous work experience had no bearing on future productivity.” What’s more, people are hired more for how they get along socially with the existing staff than anything else. (This isn’t how Brooks puts it, because he doesn’t think that deeply.) Now I guess some companies are making people play video games so they can get the perfect employee with “a strict work ethic but a loose capacity for ‘mind wandering.'” Brooks tells us that it won’t matter if you went to Harvard or Yale. Of course, Brooks doesn’t like this idea at all. He thinks the analytics can’t work because there is something special in there that you just can’t test for. So these video games can’t find that special Brooksian “soul” but graduating from Harvard or Yale or (Brooks’ own school) the University of Chicago can.

I can tell you one thing. If these computer analytics do take hold in corporate America, they will only be used at the end of the interview process. Management will first make sure that you are the right kind of person. If you are black, they will make sure you are the right kind of black. You know the drill. And then they will do a background check on you to see if you’ve ever be arrested for possessing half a joint. And then they’ll run a credit check to make sure yours is at least in the high 700s if not a perfect 850. And then they’ll give you their little analytic test. But at that point, who really cares? They know you’re the “right” kind of person and you’ll fit in fine.

It’s possible that there really is a “ghost in the machine” of us humans. David Brooks really wants to believe that. At the same time, all of his political philosophy just wants to treat humans like they are cogs in the business machine. Like most conservatives, the idea that humans are special and deserve dignity and respect is just dogma you recite for the hour or so per week when you go to your holy institution. The rest of the time, the world is a social Darwinian nightmare where the weak get eaten by the strong because that’s what really matters. Humans are really important in the mythical afterlife. But in the real here-and-now, humans don’t matter a bit.

Profits over Prophets.

I’m trying, as much as possible, to make my political writing more understandable. It’s very easy to throw around words that don’t mean much to most people. One of those words is “austerity.” In a general sense, there is nothing special in the word. I live a life of great austerity because I don’t have much money. And in a political context, it means much the same thing. Unfortunately, it implies a lot that is just nonsense.

In America and especially in Europe, people who call for austerity are really calling for deficit reduction. But as we’ve seen, it is not just any deficit reduction. When France reduced its budget deficit by raising taxes instead of cutting spending, European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs, Olli Rehn was furious. Rehn and others claim that raising taxes is bad because it will slow economic growth while making poor people go hungry will not. You don’t have to know much about economics to know what nonsense this is. What’s really behind this is that Rehn wants budgets to be balanced on the backs of the poor because they aren’t his friends; he doesn’t want them balanced on the backs of the rich because they are his friends.

The idea is all the same, though: balanced budgets will lead to business confidence and the economy will improve. I’ve shown many times before that this just isn’t true. Let me repeat it here very briefly. When the economy is booming, government borrowing depresses the economy because private businesses have to spend more money to borrow so they can invest in and grow their businesses. But that isn’t the case right now! In fact, private businesses are sitting on trillions of dollars of cash and doing nothing with it. So all that a balanced government budget would do is take even more money out of the economy and make the economic downturn worse.

This morning, Paul Krugman put together a great graph that shows how this is working in Europe. There are five countries in Europe that have been struggling the most: Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Iceland. These countries are usually referred to as GIPSI (gypsy) or, by people who are jerks, PIIGS (pigs). For the last 5 years, these countries have been cutting their budgets like good little boys and girls, because the heads of the European Union have told them that this is the medicine that will fix their ailing economies. Well, how is that going? Not well:

On the y-axis, we see that the countries can now borrow money at a lower rate. This is because the European Central Bank (ECB) decided, after a long delay that they would be the lender of last resort; in other words, the ECB is guaranteeing that the countries won’t go bankrupt. But look at the x-axis. Despite all the austerity: the budget cuts and “belt tightening,” the governments of all these countries now owe more than they did before!

How can that be? After all, aren’t they spending less than they were before? Well, yes they are. The problem is that by spending less money, they put less money into their economies. This meant that more people lost their jobs—both government workers and private sector workers. Consider an example. There’s some government worker who was planning to buy a new car. But now that he’s lost his job, he can’t buy a new car. That means the guy who was going to sell him that car didn’t make his commission, so he isn’t going to buy that flat screen television he was looking forward to. And on and on. By cutting government spending, the economy gets even more depressed.

But how is it that the government that is spending less actually owes more money now? Well, spending is only one side of the budget. If you cut your spending by 3% while reducing your revenue by 5%, you are going to owe more. All those spending cuts meant that people in the economy didn’t have as much money. As a result, they didn’t owe the government as much taxes. Thus, all the austerity—all the hardship placed on the working classes—actually made the problem worse.

What’s especially bad about this is that all of this was predictable and was predicted by a large number of economists. It isn’t hard economics. In fact, the economics used to justify such austerity programs was hard. Economists and politicians had to twist themselves into knots to justify how cutting spending in a depressed economy would help. They used an idea called “expansionary austerity” promoted by a guy named Alberto Alesina, who by all accounts is a very smart economist. Instead of the obvious idea that if people have money they will spend it, Alesina flipped this on its head. He claimed that if businesses see governments getting their budgets in order (But only through spending cuts, not tax increases!) then they will have “confidence” that will make up for the massive decrease in demand that budget cuts cause.

That’s fancy foot work. And I have to admit, as a non-economist but someone who is very good with math and all that, I’m impressed with the theory. It does take a smart guy to come up with a theory like that. But it fails the Ockham’s razor test. We already had a very simple model of how the economy works. And as is usually the case, the simple model was the one that was right, not the complex one with its loopy loops.

Yet here we are. Throughout Europe and the United States, conservatives are calling for more budget cuts. It doesn’t matter how much evidence piles up that this is exactly the wrong thing to do. But they aren’t pushing these policies because they work. They are pushing these policies because these are the policies that they always favor. And now they have an excuse for pushing the policies. The fact that the work of Alesina & Ardagna and Reinhart & Rogoff has been shown to be wrong doesn’t matter. They still use this work to justify their policies. They want to enrich the rich and impoverish the poor.

We declare our right on this earth to be rich, to be ever richer, to be respected as the rich, to be given the supreme rights of the rich in this unjust society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.

Afterword

It was easier to parody Malcolm X’s quote than Sartre’s. Actually, Sartre’s quote is closer to what I believe. Malcolm X’s quote is almost plaintive, “We demand to be respected.” In our society he was thought to be so radical and scary. But what was he asking for? Just the simplest of things: human dignity and respect. Our society seems to have gotten worse since that time. Now Sartre better speaks to our larger problems, while Malcolm X’s demand still largely goes denied:

I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.

By the way: those means do no include armed rebellion. Modern war is the most unjust thing imaginable. If a group of people want to go to war, that’s their business. But they always end up harming those who just want to live their lives. These are the other 99%—Jesus’ meek. War makes things worse. War exists to perpetuate itself. It is not a form of politics.

Images are from a great cartoon by Brian McFadden in the New York Times. Check it out!

Matt Taibbi has written an interesting article over at his post at Rolling Stone, On Christmas, Republicans Quietly Declare War on Themselves. As usual with Taibbi, it’s a fun read so I highly recommend that you take a gander. But I think he is basically wrong.

His thesis is that the Republican Party spent the Bush years treating the electorate as though they were a bunch of fools, so it should be no surprise that their party is now nominating a bunch of fools. In a comparison that perhaps only Taibbi could come up with, he says that the Bush years were the political equivalent of Married With Children, “an ongoing self-parody routine where couch-potato America tuned in week after week to cheer on the nitwit hero as he and his brood took on a world of self-serious snobs and their silly ‘civilized’ conventions (like, say, international law).” You know: political junk food that you know will make you fat and impotent, but oh don’t it taste good!

I agree with him on one point: John McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin—”one of the few potential candidates in the Republican Party rolls even dumber than George Bush”—was entirely Steve Schmidt running the Karl Rove playbook. And since I’m on the subject: liberals like Schmidt a lot more than they should. He came off looking pretty good in Game Change. But that’s like saying that Othello came off looking good in his play. Yeah, Iago is the true villain in that play, but Othello is still the one who strangled Desdemona. Schmidt is the one who thought so little of the American people and of the country generally that got Sarah Palin nominated to be vice-president of this country. Schmidt should be living in a cave somewhere if not in a grave after his quite rational decision to kill himself. That is, after all, what Othello did.

But here’s the thing. There is nothing new about conservative politicians saying wacky things. The Todd Akins and Richard Mourdocks have been around in the conservative movement forever. These are the people who President Eisenhower was discussing when he wrote:

Of course, Ike was wrong when he said their number was negligible. Then, as now, they represent 20% of the nation and 40% of the Grand Old Party. And they were out there in the 1950s talking about how God wanted black people to be poor. They were talking about how Jews controlled the world. They were talking about how water fluoridation was a communist plot. This was all done when Karl Rove was a little boy.

Now, there is little doubt that young Rove looked at all this nonsense and thought, “A large segment of the American public is made up of complete idiots!” He didn’t create it. He just used it. The problem is that using it gets harder and harder. Not even half of the Republican Party is made up of these “nuts” (Karl Rove’s term). So the rest of the Republicans and pretty much all of the Democrats have to be deceived into thinking that Republican candidates aren’t part of the Crazy 40. But that’s really hard in a world that is so interconnected. Within second of Richard Mourdock saying that pregnancies resulting from rape are “something that God intended to happen” people know about it on Mount Everest.

So now, the Republicans and the national Chamber of Commerce are hooking up to spend $50 million this year to stop “fools” from running for office. This will not work. For one thing, since 40% of Republicans (the Crazy 40) are these very fools, that means that roughly 40% of the people who run for the Republican nomination will also be fools. Most of it just comes down to abortion absolutism. If you don’t think that rape gives a woman the right to abort a pregnancy, you are going to run into rhetoric about how God intended it and how you ought to turn lemons into lemonade.

This is why the smart Republicans are doing the only thing that just might work: voter suppression. If only the Crazy 40 vote, it doesn’t matter what fools the Republicans nominate. And just like the non-crazy 60% of the GOP, the Crazy 40 will also do the bidding of the super rich. And that’s all that matters.

I think that it is important to understand what conservatives mean when they say certain things that make absolutely no sense. The big example of this is, “The government can’t create jobs.” This sounds like nonsense on the face of it. For one thing, it is usually said by some politician and you can’t help but respond, “The government created your job!” But that’s not what conservatives mean when they say that the government can’t create jobs. But don’t misunderstand: they are still wrong. It is just that there is a certain amount of sense in what they are saying.

When Senator Idiot says that the government can’t create jobs, he means that the money that is used for his job comes from taxing people. If that money didn’t go to the government, the tax payers would spend the money and thus create one or more jobs in the private sector. Thus, the government creates a job only by removing a private sector job. This is not a totally stupid idea. There is something to it and under certain circumstances it is even true.

The problem is that, like most conservative economic thinking, it is simplistic. Consider our current economic system where we are very far from full employment. Money is just sitting around not being used. Companies are sitting on piles of cash rather than investing and hiring because demand is so low. In this situation, we could fire Senator Idiot and put the money we pay him back into the private sector by reducing taxes.

In a booming economy, the result would be another job in the private sector for Senator Idiot or someone like him. But in a weak economy like the one we now have, the result would be even more money in the private sector, where it would just sit around doing nothing. So currently, and really, for about the last 13 years, government spending really does create jobs. When government spending does not create jobs is almost never. But there are times. Remember at the end of the Clinton presidency? Remember how Clinton was reducing spending? That was the correct thing to do, because the private economy was buzzing. Personally, I think that if a Republican had been president, he would have continued to spend. But that’s a story for another time.

Even at full employment, when the private sector is booming and businesses are desperate to borrow money to invest and hire, it is fine for the government to take some of that money and hire. There is nothing necessarily better about a private sector job than a public sector job. It is just in this case, you can’t say that the government is creating a job, because the money being used to create that job would be used by the private sector to create a job. But that is very rarely the case.

Now most conservatives don’t even know this much. They are just repeating a talking point. So when you talk to them, you will probably need to educate them as to why conservatives claim that the government doesn’t create jobs. And that’s actually helpful because it gives you some common ground on which to start your discussion, “Yes, the government doesn’t create jobs when the economy is at full employment.” From there, you can talk about all the money that is just sitting around doing nothing in a depressed economy. You can talk about how business owners don’t hire when they don’t have many customers. And before you know it, that conservative will be talking like a Keynesian.

Aaron Carroll has another one of his Healthcare Triage videos out. I have to say, it’s a mixed blessing. In general, I agree with everything Carroll has to say about just about everything. So the information that he presents is really good. But does he have to try so hard to act and sound like his producer John Green? Green is a good example of how you can be really successful at something that people think of as creative, while not being the least bit creative. It’s been about a year since I’ve watched any of Green’s highly polished videos because (1) they are all the same and (2) he generally manages to waste ten minutes of my time without informing me of anything at all. Compare him to CGP Grey, and there is no contest. Of course, Grey doesn’t put out videos every week like his livelihood depended on it. (Oops!)

Carroll’s newest video is “The Sky Isn’t Falling.” That’s great, because that’s what I try to explain to people in my life. If you’ve heard some outrageous story, chances are it isn’t true. And if it is true, it is most likely not indicative of a trend. And if it is indicative of a trend, it’s a new Republican plan to stop people from voting. Carroll is a doctor, so he’s talking about doctor stuff. And it is really interesting. It turns out that our kids drink less than kids in other comparable countries. And they smoke less. They have less sex. Pregnancy rates are down. Stealing is down. Assault is down. It isn’t all good, but it mostly is. The main thing is that our kids are fatter than kids in other countries, but even there, the trend is good: our kids are getting less fat.

But Carroll is such a white bread kind of guy, he won’t make the important connection that I will. We here in America spend about twice what comparable countries do on healthcare and don’t even provide healthcare for roughly 20% of our citizens. Conservatives like to blame this on the unhealthy lifestyles of Americans: we’re fat; we smoke; we’re violent. But the data that Aaron Carroll presents indicates that this is not the case. So what exactly are the conservatives going to blame our poor healthcare system that nonetheless costs us a fortune?

I’m not being naive here. That was just a rhetorical device. They will blame it on whatever is handy. Remember when the deregulated collateralized debt obligation (CDOs) caused a financial crisis? Or when deregulated Savings & Loans caused a financial crisis? Or basically when any kind of deregulated thing caused catastrophe? Remember what the conservatives always said was the real problem? It was the fact that there was still some regulation. In a truly, completely, “more mythical than A Midsummer Night’s Dream” world, there would be no problem.

So if we aren’t being over-charged for bad and incomplete healthcare, it must be the government’s fault. It must be that Medicare exists. Or Medicaid. Or food stamps! Whatever. It doesn’t matter. The main thing is that it can’t be that we have a totally screwed up pseudo-free market healthcare system that doesn’t work. Remember how the conservative mind approaches problems. First, it eliminates all possible solutions that contradict ideology. Currently, that eliminates pretty much all solutions. Then, from the couple of possible solutions left over, it picks one. It doesn’t matter how the solution is picked, because they are all useless. The conservative hope is that the problem fixes itself, so that their useless “solution” is eventually forgotten.

It is important to remember, however, that things are in generally not so bad. And this is despite the conservatives doing everything they can to make the world the worst place possible.

Happy new year!

I’m not big on predictions, especially political predictions. But back in July, I did offer up, The Next Three Election Cycles. That was not so much a prediction as it was an explanation of what I thought it would take for the Republican Party to make substantial changes in order to start winning national elections again. The predictions in the article, however, still look pretty good.

I said that the Republicans will likely pick up a few seats in both the House and the Senate. What’s more, I said there was a 50% chance that the Republicans will retake control of the Senate. The reason for this is that 2008 was such a great year for Democrats. They have to protect a large number of seats compared to the Republicans. The fact that the Democrats still have a 50% chance of holding onto the Senate in an off-year election should give you some idea of just how badly the Republican Party is doing.

And it is important for the Democrats to maintain control of the Senate. There are lots of federal executive and judicial nominations that Obama will need to make the last two years of his presidency. So it would be really good if the Senate stays in the hands of the Democratic Party. But it wouldn’t be catastrophic if it didn’t happen. And the reason it wouldn’t be catastrophic is that if the Republicans gain control of the Senate, it will be for two years, and two years only.

This morning, Ed Kilgore helpfully reminds us that the political landscape will be infinitely better for Democratic Senators in 2016. Instead of trying to hold onto the gains they made in 2008, it will be the Republicans who are trying to hang on to the enormous gains they made in 2010—you remember: Obama’s “shellacking.” Kilgore provides the numbers:

Remember, if the Republicans take control of the Senate after next year’s elections, they will only take control by the smallest of margins. In fact, people are talking about there being a 50-50 split in the Senate, requiring Joe Biden to spend most of his last two years as vice-president hanging out at the Senate. So just with those numbers, the Senate will go back to the Democrats in 2016. (I predicted this as well in my article.)

But it is even worse for the Republicans. The 2016 election will be “on year”: a presidential election. So the entire electorate will be more liberal. So there will be a Democratic Senate after the 2016 election. That isn’t a debatable point. What’s more interesting at that point is what will happen to the House. Every day that goes by, the great Republican gerrymandering coup of 2010 gets less powerful. So by 2016, the Democrats could take back the House. And that has to cause thoughtful Republicans a great deal of worry. After all, they will be but four years away from another gerrymandering opportunity, but this time it will be during a presidential election. The Democrats might gerrymander the Republicans right out of existence.

Regardless of all the predictions you are going to hear over the next couple of days, remember this: the 2014 elections are not going to be a big deal for either party. About the only good news that the Republicans might get is that they control the Senate. And that will last exactly two years. The Republicans are a dying party. And having a slim majority in the Senate may be the last thing they have to celebrate for a very long time.

Brad DeLong brilliantly pointed out that, “Underpinning the value of the dollar is… the fact that you can use them to pay your taxes to the US government…” Ah! Now I think I understand why the libertarians hate “fiat money”! It’s because libertarians are generally idiots. No, really.

As I’ve noted in the past, basing currency of gold doesn’t make any sense. Gold Has Little Intrinsic Value. In that article, I discussed how gold doesn’t stop inflation. And in another article, Gold Is Not a Good Investment—At Least for 500 Years, its value doesn’t keep up with the economy. So why base your currency on gold?

Why “Fiat Money” Really Is Valuable

The one thing that the good old American greenback is good for no matter what is that you can pay your taxes with it. The truth is, that’s a great thing. We all have to pay taxes and as long as the government is fairly large, people are going to need a lot of that supposedly useless paper to pay their taxes. So the baker down the street will at very least sell you some bread for the fiat currency because he is going to need some of it to pay his taxes.

And that my friends is why libertarians don’t like it. They think taxing is theft. Interestingly, they don’t think driving on public roads that were paid for by taxes is trespassing, but then libertarians have never been known for their deep thinking skills. So because taxes are not valid, libertarians think “fiat money” is of no value. The rest of us know that we have to pay our taxes, so regardless of everything else, cash really is worth something.

Live in the Real World

Now what is that “everything else”? That’s the fact that we all agree that cash is worth something. I can go to Walmart today and buy a candy bar for 69¢, just like I could yesterday or last month. We all agree that today, cash is worth about what cash was worth yesterday. But that’s largely due to the government. The government is roughly a third of our economy. This is just like when labor unions were big. It didn’t matter then that only about 30% of the workforce were in unions, the fact that the percentage was so high helped keep wages and working conditions of people not in unions high and good. So given that one-third of the economy accepts the greenback, means that 100% of the economy accepts the greenback.

So the libertarians continue to live in their mythic land where everyone is fairies and elves and there is no government. But in the real world, “fiat money” works really great. And inflation under it has been lower and more stable than it ever was under their beloved “gold standard.” Personally, I’d love to live in the mythic libertarian land and be an elf with a fairy wife. Unfortunately, I have to pay my bills. And they are all due in real “fiat money” greenbacks.

The Queen of England pardoned Alan Turing for his crime of being gay. That’s over 60 years after the state chemically castrated him for the crime and just 59 years after he killed himself as a result at the age of 41. Better late than never, you say? I don’t think so. I think that late is exactly the same as never. If you show up one minute late to stop an innocent man from being killed, you might as well have never shown up. Better later than never, is a phrase you can apply to lesser things. Sorry we wrongly locked you up for a couple of years. Here’s a hundred thousand dollars to try to make make up for it. That’s better later than never. Sorry we castrated and killed you. That’s not better later than never. That’s exactly the same as never.

In the video over at Crooks & Liars, sculptor Glyn Hughes rightly asks, “What about all the other gay men who were prosecuted? Don’t you think it rather says that if you’re useful to the state, the law doesn’t apply to you? We’ll let you off.” Indeed. How about one big apology? “We’re sorry that we allowed hatred and ignorance and bigotry to rule our laws in England for hundreds of years and so ruined the lives of countless gay and lesbian people?” That might actually mean something for the present. It might actually cause a few people to think, “What minorities are we oppressing right now that we will later have to apologize for?” I’m sure, some later queen will make an announcement that locking up all those drug addicts was wrong. Of course, it won’t matter then. They’ll be off to throwing people in prison for different stupid reasons.

As a society, we are always fond of being accepting of useful weirdos. I wrote about this recently, Unstable Weirdos and Business Success. A business consultant was trying to figure out how companies could keep the good (usable) parts of us weirdos and get rid of the bad (nonusable) parts of us. The fact is that you can’t. If there is a brilliant man who seems perfectly at home in his work environment, it is pure luck. Most of us don’t have that luck and so society misses out on all of the nice things we could add because it’s uncomfortable to have us awkward people around.

Of course, there are places for people like me: academia. But even it has its limits. And look at the way that conservatives think about academia: it’s that place where “dangerous” ideas come from. And even liberals want to turn it into nothing but a training ground for the brave new world of employment opportunities. In other words: the conservatives want the colleges to produce the same old cogs and the liberals want the colleges to produce new and improved cogs. But they are all cogs. And unfortunately for me, I am not a cog. And unfortunately for the society, many, many more brilliant people than I am are not cogs.

Of course, Turing wasn’t a difficult guy to work with. He just had this one small problem: he wasn’t sexually attracted to the “right” sex. It just shows how small minded people are about social deviance. Some day they may throw people in jail for not liking football. Unimaginable, you think? There was a time when some people drank and other people smoked cannabis. Yet almost a million people are arrested for cannabis every year in the Land of the Free. (Irony alert!) And the vast majority of those arrests were for simple possession. So if in a hundred years, I get a posthumous pardon after I died in jail for the crime of thinking that football is the most boring game ever invented, don’t be surprised. Well, be a little surprised. I think pretty highly of myself. But I’m no Alan Turing!