On this day in 1776, Thomas Paine published (anonymously) Common Sense. As regular readers know, I greatly admire Paine. But not for Common Sense. Don’t get me wrong. Paine was an amazing rhetorician. But there was always a sense with him that he was at heart a rabble-rouser. The content of the pamphlet strikes me as overblown, given what the colonists were going through. And then it is taken to a whole other level in the 13 pamphlets of The American Crisis.

I admire Paine for his more sober writing: The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason. And it is interesting to look at his reputation in the United States with regard to this. In as much as he is considered a hero, it is because of Common Sense. But it contains passages like this that could have been written by a modern glib libertarian:

To be fair, Common Sense is more closely argued than that passage indicates. But still: is this how Americans see the government today? I don’t think so. Yet this is what Paine is loved for. Meanwhile, it was with The Rights of Man that made Americans start to turn a jaundiced eye toward him. And then they actively hated him after The Age of Reason. But these are great works of the Enlightenment. Paine understood the intellectual currents of the time. And typically, most Americans wanted to push back against them. Paine saw that the future laid in humanism, and America became focused on the Second Great Awakening.

Afterword

On this day in 1927, Metropolis was also released. It was hard not to write about it, because it still amazes me that it wasn’t that respected when it first came out. It blows my mind even today. No one has improved on cinema since then. But I’ve discussed it to some extent in the past, Fritz Lang.

Jonathan Chait wrote a great and thorough article earlier this week, Being Less Crazy Than Donald Trump Does Not Make Marco Rubio “Moderate.” In it, he went through all of Rubio’s positions to show that he is on the hard right of his party. Chait made a good point of the fact that Rubio goes around talking about his education reform idea. But he does it so he doesn’t have to talk about his extreme positions. In addition, his education program is tiny. It would be like Hitler going around campaigning on the idea of the Volkswagen. But our media would just report about the Volkswagen, just as they are reporting about Rubio’s “moderation.”

The truth is that the three Republican candidates for president — Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Rubio — are all extremists. They really don’t disagree about anything except how they ought to talk about their policies. In as much as they have policy differences, they all belong to Trump who looks liberal compared to the other two. So we have one candidate who the media currently has no problem calling an extremist, and he is the least extreme. Currently, of course, Ted Cruz is surging in the polls. And Brian Beutler thinks this is a good thing, Ted Cruz Is Exactly What the Political System Needs. It is subtitled, “Why Republicans and Democrats alike should welcome his nomination.” But for the second time in a week, I find myself very much in disagreement with him.

To start with, Beutler makes the argument that it would teach the Republicans a lesson. The media have been making this argument for decades. The conservative base always claims that they lose because they don’t run a “real” conservative. But this is not an actual argument. It is axiomatic. If a Republican loses the presidency, it is because they were not conservative enough. What every conservative “knows” is that the only reason any Republican ever loses any race is because they aren’t conservative enough. It’s like the old line, “I don’t know how Romney lost; everyone at the club voted for him!”

But the really dangerous assumption is that Ted Cruz would lose the general election. I don’t see that as a given at all. He could be Hitler pushing a new kind of car and he would win if the economy falls into recession next year. But there is another thing that will go on. As soon as it becomes clear who the Republican nominee will be, the elites will rally around him. They will talk about him as though he were just a garden variety Republican. (And they’ll be right, but not in the way they imply.) And so the mainstream media will not cover any of these three as though they are freaks. It will be the usual “Republicans are equal and opposite to Democrats.” If anything, we will see articles about how extreme Clinton is and how moderate Ted Cruz is.

The last thing that the American media ever want to do is admit that anything is wrong in the good ol’ USA. They act rather like a dysfunctional family at Christmas. “Don’t do anything to upset dad. Let’s just pretend that everything is okay.” But everything is not okay in America. We have a substantially better healthcare system today than we had seven years ago. Cost trends are down; access is up. It is the first step we’ve taken on the healthcare front to join the other advanced nations of the world. But every one of the GOP candidates wants to get rid of it on day one. They want to make life infinitely harder for the poor and middle class at the same time that they want to funnel huge amounts of money to the rich. This is a program that should appeal to at most 5% of the population. Yet it is a program that roughly 50% of the people will vote for.

There is something really wrong in America. And a big part of it is that upper class journalists keep insisting that nothing is wrong. It doesn’t matter if you vote for Ted Cruz or Hillary Clinton. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. But in fact, the decision really does represent the difference between millions of people dying. I know that sounds hyperbolic. But lack of healthcare kills people. Ever wider access to guns kills people. Lack of food kills people. Pretty much everything the modern Republican Party stands for kills people.

But on the television media and in the mainstream press, about all you’ll hear is that Cruz is polling well in Texas and Clinton in New York. And otherwise, there is no real difference.

Timothy B Lee and Soo Oh are mostly right, We Just Got Some Really Great News About the Economy. I wouldn’t say “great news,” but the new jobs report is quite good news and the economic recovery keeps on keeping on. We added 292,000 jobs last month. And the estimates from the two previous months were revised up by a total of 50,000 jobs. So that means that the economy created 2.7 million jobs last year. That’s very good, but still less than 2014, when 3.1 million jobs were created.

It’s not all good news, however. The employment to population ratio (for prime age workers 25-54 years old) is stuck at 77.4%. To give you an idea of what this means, it was 80.0% in January 2008. It was 81.9% in April 2000. This is not a sign that people have gotten lazy. And given it only deals with people at least 25, it mostly filters out people going to school. And given it only deals with people under 55, it mostly filters out people who are retired. So our low rate (which has increased substantially from its nadir of 74.8% in December 2009), simply indicates that there are not enough jobs around.

Let’s do a rough calculation. The employment to population ratio for prime age workers is roughly 2.5% below where it was before the financial crisis. That represents about 3.5 million workers. And I continue to believe that full employment is not 5% (Much less 5.5% or 6%!) but rather 4%. So that represents another 1.5 million workers, for a total of 5 million workers. So if we continue to gain jobs at a rate of 292,000 per month, we will be back at full employment in a year and a half. Of course, no one expects the economy to continue to grow at this rate. It is more reasonable (but hardly assured) that we will see 200,000 jobs per month, which is over two years. For people who have been waiting for seven years, that’s still a long time.

This brings us to the Federal Reserve. This jobs report does not exonerate the recent rate hike. For one thing, the economy hasn’t had time to adjust to it. But the other thing is that the the economy doesn’t have to tank for the Fed to be hurting it. As I’ve just discussed, there are roughly five million people who would like jobs who can’t find one. Wage growth this last year was 2.5% — just above the core inflation rate for the year of 1.8%.

This brings up another question: when was the core inflation last substantially above the Fed’s 2% target? You have to go back 20 years to get even up to 3% for the year! The average core inflation over the last 15 years (1.95%) has been less than the Fed’s target, yet it is terrified that it might might go over the target. It is clear that despite its legal mandate, the Fed has no target; it has a ceiling. It will work to stop low inflation, but it only freaks out about inflation dipping above 2%.

I really hope that the economy will really start to take off now and that this jobs report is just the start. But I seriously doubt that. The most likely case is that it will continue to improve at the mediocre 200,000 jobs per month. At the same time, the Republicans will do everything they can to stall the economy. I mean, look at the following graph. This is what the Republicans have done to keep Americans out of work:

That’s a two million job gap right there. And given a 50% multiplier effect (which is probably low), if the Republicans had allowed the government to grow as it always did after past recessions, we would more or less be at full employment. If that were the case, the Fed could do almost anything it liked and I wouldn’t complain. But despite this jobs report, we are still in the middle of a very fragile recovery, and the Federal Reserve should be doing everything it can to help — and not just please bankers who want larger returns on their “investments.”

Shakezula over at Lawyers, Guns & Money, wrote, Predictable Predictions — ObamaCare Edition. It’s about two conservative predictions about Obamacare: that it would cause employers to cut hours so that they didn’t have to provide health insurance; and that the Medicaid expansion would lead to job cuts. As Shakezula noted, “Two predictably wrong predictions.” But I have to admit to being totally exhausted by the whole thing.

Of course the predictions were wrong. The people who made them never intended for them to prove to be right. This is how the Republican Party works. They have thrown every possible negative consequence at Obamacare hoping that something would stick. Note: stick, not be right. It is the tactical use of fear. And the Republicans are brilliant at it. They aren’t involved in rational debate. They are rather involved in a kind of anti-apologetics where they are just trying make the best sounding argument for what they believe on faith (or for other reasons regardless).

The Republicans were never afraid that Obamacare wouldn’t work. They talked about it failing all the time, of course. That was their major argument against it: that it was a big government program destined to fail. But if that were the case, they could have stood back and watched it fall. But they haven’t done that because their great fear all along has been that it would succeed.

And look what those losers in Congress finally managed to do. After almost six years and over 50 votes to repeal, the Republican controlled Congress managed to send a repeal bill to President Obama. Obama, of course, will veto it, and they know it. But this is what passes for success among the Republicans: a slightly less humiliating defeat. But I guess the real thing they are doing is sending a message: elect a Republican president this year and people like me can be totally screwed.

Sarah Kliff and Soo Oh at Vox put together a great chart, Here’s How Much Obamacare Has Cut the Uninsured Rate in Every State. The only state where the uninsured rate has gone up is in bright red Wyoming. This may be why Wyoming is currently discussing accepting the Medicaid expansion. But this isn’t just about the Medicaid expansion. Lots of states that didn’t expand Medicaid are seeing uninsured rates go down because of the exchanges. Texas has seen its uninsured rate go down by roughly a quarter. So I guess it’s really important to repeal Obamacare and stop these positive outcomes.

The conservative movement is based mostly on the idea of hatred. Conservatives see the world about winners and losers. They are like those people who whine about little league baseball where everyone gets a trophy. “What’s the point of playing a game if there isn’t a clear winner and loser?!” I’ve never understood this, but to the conservative brain it seems axiomatic. So if the poor don’t suffer, the game of life is not being played properly.

What makes humans most amazing as a species is not our big brains; other species have impressive brains. What we are great at is communication. And what has really allowed us to advance is the storage of information. This is why science operates at a breakneck speed. And as a result of this, we don’t have to worry so much about evolutionary pressures. We can control our birthrates. We can feed everyone. We can see to it that everyone has a reasonably contented life. Or we could do all these things if we could get the roughly one-third of the human race to stop believing that they can only be happy if others are miserable.

The Republican Party has taken it to a whole new extreme where they want to see the vast majority of people suffer so that the rich and power can feel just a little bit better about how awesome they are. The Republicans in Congress want to see to it that I don’t have healthcare; meanwhile, a bunch of terrorists think that the federal government is a tyranny because it won’t give rich people free land. The American conservative movement is such an amazing combination of evil and stupid that it’s hard to imagine outside of satire.

Ezra Klein wrote, Here’s What I Think Donald Trump’s Loss Will Look Like. You don’t need to read the article, here’s the entire argument, “Trump could just… not win. He could lose the Iowa caucuses. He could fall short in New Hampshire. A loss in any early state might lead to a loss in every state.” That could happen. But I think his argument is too dependent on Howard Dean as a model.

I remember the 2004 primary fairly well. I don’t recall Dean simply collapsing on the day of the Iowa caucus. His campaign seemed to be losing steam for months. His one big selling point was that he was against the Iraq War. But it also happened to have been the case that he wasn’t terribly liberal. And as good (Revolutionary!) as his online campaign was, the rest of his organization wasn’t that great. His whole campaign seemed to have lost steam by November. He was coasting. And then there was that bizarre trip to meet with Jimmy Carter. Through all that period, Dean seemed like the dog that caught the car. His campaign seemed rudderless.

Now you could say the same thing for Donald Trump. But I think Trump’s appeal to the Republicans is far more visceral than Dean’s appeal was to the Democrats. The Democrats liked that one issue, not Dean; Republicans like Trump. What’s more, there were real candidates running against Dean. Kerry might have seemed stilted, but he was a veteran. So was Gephardt. Trump is running against two first term Senators. Rubio actually has some experience, but he is not appealing to Trump voters. Cruz has basically no political experience and doesn’t seem any more electable against Clinton than Trump does. So I just don’t see Donald Trump petering out.

To me, the much more likely way that Trump loses is through the narrowing of the field. His negatives are still very high. After Bush and Carson get clobbered in Iowa, those votes will most likely go to Rubio and Cruz. I don’t see Christie doing anything much past New Hampshire. If Trump loses, it seems most likely that he will do so because there is a ceiling to his appeal. But that ceiling used to be much lower. The better he does, the higher the ceiling gets, because people aren’t against him because of his bigotry or policies or whatever; they are against him (in as much as they are) because they don’t think he can win.

I have no special insight into this. But I do think it is a mistake to make an analogy between Democratic voters in 2004 who were very angry about a recent event where they thought their party had let them down, and Republicans in 2016 who are very angry about everything and nothing, and always are. And I do think he has as good a chance of winning the Republican nomination as anyone else. But let’s not forget: he’s set the timbre of the campaign. If he isn’t the candidate, he’s still more or less the candidate. Again, I don’t think there is anything special about Trump. So who really cares? Donald Trump wins!

I am usually in agreement with Brian Beutler. But he was wrong yesterday, No, the Bundys Aren’t Terrorists. The crux of his argument is this, “The men took no hostages, and aren’t threatening to commit acts of violence against civilians.” That’s not actually true as a factual matter. This is not a sit-in where the men are chaining themselves to radiators. They are well armed and have been very clear that they will use violence against government officials if they try to dislodge them. These government officials are not military. There is no war going on. They are civilians.

What’s more, Beutler claimed, “Nobody is being terrorized by the Oregon occupiers.” Uh, yes they are. I am being terrorized — and for a very concrete reason. I used to hang out with a bunch libertarianish people who were just itching for revolution. I know just what these guys are thinking. Either everything ends peacefully and they get a bunch of attention and free snacks. Or they become martyrs hoping to set off angry white gun freaks all over the nation to return the country to its true owners: people like them. They imagine statues of themselves put up like they are the Nathan Hales of the Second Revolutionary War. Trust me: I know these people.

It greatly concerns me that law enforcement has to worry that this will turn into another Waco siege and Ruby Ridge. This faction of the extreme right wing dates back to the white supremacist Posse Comitatus. These people have been spitting bile for decades. Where do you think Ted Nugent’s impotent threats against the president come from? These people represent a nationwide tinder box. And they are right to think that if the military comes in and starts killing white militia men, it could get very ugly very fast. And this does concern me — a lot. All of these weekend revolutionaries have their copies of The Anarchist Cookbook, and they are ready to thrust themselves into the imaginary world of Red Dawn.

Terrorism doesn’t have to include acts of violence. In fact, terrorism works mostly through the lack of violence — making people uncertain when it’s going to happen. If there is constant violence, it isn’t terrorism; it is war. One reason that Israel doesn’t crack down on illegal settlements is because of the as of yet non-violent terrorism of Israeli settlers. The fear is that if they are required to follow the law, they will start bombing. That’s terrorism.

Or think about it this way. Imagine your next door neighbor had a crack house and he told you that if you ever called the police, he and his friends were going to storm your house and kill your family. Okay, by Beutler’s definition, that would be terrorism because it was stated explicitly. But what if your next door neighbor just implied it. Isn’t this what the mob does? It isn’t, “I’m gonna burn down your house”; it’s, “It’d be a shame if your house burned down.” The Bundy bunch are very much using terrorist tactics; it’s implied in what they are doing.

What are we to call the Bundy Bunch if not terrorists? Aren’t the New Black Panthers called terrorists? Would anyone have had a problem calling civil rights protesters terrorists if they had occupied lunch counters with shot guns? I think that Beutler is doing what I too often do around here: grope for something contrary to say. The Bundy Bunch are terrorists. It may turn out that they are also a bunch of cowards who won’t live up to their rhetoric. But listen to these guys and what they and their predecessors have been saying for decades. They are either revolutionaries or terrorists. And given the amazing amount of freedom and democracy in this country, I don’t see much of a case for “revolutionaries.”

Paul Krugman wrote a really interesting article that I have a couple of things to add to, Academics and Politics. Now we all know the old complaint that college professors are liberal. And it is largely true. Should this concern us? Only if it should concern us that most people on Wall Street are conservative. People who gravitate toward knowledge as an end in itself will understandably lean left. It isn’t a conspiracy.

More and more, I believe that political orientation is really about culture. Being a conservative is really not about particular policies but about an outlook on life. This is something I’ve noticed from countless conversations with conservatives where we are very much in agreement about most things — especially economics. When I was in the academy, the conservatives I knew were like I was at the time: libertarian oriented — not wanting to have government interference. They were generally radically liberal on social issues.

But as liberal as the academy may have traditionally been, it has gotten much more so over the last 25 years. As you can see in the following graph taken from the Higher Education Research Institute, in 1990, roughly 40% of college faculty called themselves liberal and an equal number called themselves moderates. Roughly 20% called themselves conservatives. Today, 60% call themselves liberal, less then 30% call themselves moderates, and only 10% call themselves conservatives.

Krugman’s idea is the obvious one: the academy didn’t get more liberal, the conservatives got more conservative. He also mentioned the Republican Party’s general dismissal of global warming and evolution by natural selection. I would go further. The Republican Party is anti-intellectual. What’s more, they think the only purpose of education is to create a better workforce for IBM and GM. They don’t even think education is a matter of creating good citizens. Look at how common the desire is to eliminate the Department of Education. They want education to be controlled locally so that, among other things, students can be taught that African slaves were “immigrants.”

There is one bit of data presented by Krugman that is startling. If you look at the general population, 35% are Republicans or lean Republican, and 52% are similarly inclined toward the Democrats. For science professors, the numbers are 12% for Republicans and 81% for Democrats. But if you think about it for a moment, it isn’t surprising. Nor is it surprising that this trend started around the time that Bill Clinton became president. What does the Republican Party stand for? Any good ideas that it once had have been co-opted by the Democrats. We now have a moderate party and a proto-fascist party. It isn’t surprising that well informed people would skew heavily toward the Democrats.

But here’s something that a person of Krugman’s stature can’t say: it’s also about intelligence. Republicans love to publish books about what idiots liberals are. They’re compensating. They know that the more education and knowledge a person has, the more liberal they become. This causes conservatives to say things like a comment I recently got, “You’re what my father always called an educated idiot.” That was the extent of his argument. I was wrong just because and all my book learning didn’t mean a thing to him because he thought with his gut.

I think there are actual issues that liberals and conservatives can debate. But in this country, there really aren’t. The conservative movement has gone off the rails. So it’s hard for people who think for a living to miss this fact. Republican economic policy is wrong. Sure, you can find intelligent analysis from Greg Mankiw, but what Republicans want to do is the same thing they’ve done for four decades now and it never works as advertised. Republicans are simply wrong about global warming. Republicans are wrong about foreign policy. These aren’t opinions; these are factual claims. And on foreign policy, even they know they are wrong, because they talk tough, but when pressed, they admit that they would do nothing different from what the Democrats would do.

If we had the Republican Party of the early 1970s, I can see intelligent people differing over policy. But today, there are only three reasons to be a Republican. First, you might be stupid and ignorant. Second, you might be a hateful bigot. Third, you might be rich. That’s it. It isn’t surprising that PhD physicists skew heavily toward the Democratic Party.

Afterword

I haven’t read the study, so I can’t say. Another factor could be that colleges are using so many more adjuncts, who get paid next to nothing. Poor people skew liberal as well. I suspect if you polled college administrators, you would find that they are far more conservative.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that Ben Carson was justifying the recent political execution of Nimr al-Nimr and 46 others in Saudi Arabia. According to him, this is all about our nuclear deal with Iran, which in his twisted brain makes it more likely that Saudi Arabia will get a nuclear weapon. This is what we expect from the tribalistic Republican Party. Saudi Arabia is an official ally, so of course whatever they do is great. Iran is an official enemy, so whatever they do is horrible. Carly Fiorina justified dismissing Iranian outrage because, “This is a regime that tortures citizens routinely, that thinks nothing of executions, that still holds four Americans in jail.” Yeah, those four Americans in jail really does make the Saudi Arabian executions just fine.

As Lee Fang and Zaid Jilani documented in The Intercept, After Executing Regime Critic, Saudi Arabia Fires Up American PR Machine. The only thing more predictable than the US government supporting anything done by official allies is that the “free” US press will push the official government line. Imagine how this story would have been covered if the countries had been reversed. There would not only be blanket outrage, there would be calls for war. Instead, we get Ben Carson saying that Saudi Arabia had to execute all these people because of our nuclear deal with Iran.

The main issue at hand is Nimr al-Nimr. He was a political activist in Saudi Arabia. He was a Shia Sheikh in a Sunni autocracy. He was put to death for “foreign meddling” and for “disobeying” the Saudi government. His actual crime was supporting mass political protests against the Saudi regime back in 2011. The court didn’t have to put him to death, but I’m sure that there was extreme political pressure on it to do so. Everywhere you go you hear people like Fahad Nazer say things like, “The primary message appears to be aimed at Saudi Arabia’s own militants, regardless of their sect…” Nazer used to be a political analyst for Washington Saudi Embassy — a fact not mentioned when he was quoted.

Of course the whole thing just shows what a farce the whole idea of terrorism is. Fang and Jilani quoted Sarah Lea Whitson of Human Rights Watch, “Saudi Arabia’s terrorism law includes as acts of terrorism merely criticizing the government, merely criticizing the monarchy.” That’s really what the definition of terrorism is: doing anything that the government doesn’t like. I still stand by the honest definition of terrorism as acts designed to terrorize a population, but this definition used in Saudi Arabia is generally the one used by American media.

The US government has not condemned what Saudi Arabia has done, but only “expressed… concerns. At the same time, everywhere in the US it is ISIS all the time. We must close down the internet because of ISIS. We can’t allow refugees in the country because of ISIS. Screw the Constitution, we’re afraid of ISIS! Yet it has largely been Saudi money that built up ISIS. And Iran has been fighting ISIS since the beginning. But Saudi Arabia is our “friend.” And Iran is our enemy — as far as I can tell because we are still angry about the embassy attack in 1979.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia continues to be a backward country. But they’ve got oil, so we just love them. If they got nuclear weapons, we wouldn’t blink an eye; our only concern would be that it would cause Iran to get nuclear weapons. Pretty much Saudi Arabia can do anything it wants because we’ve defined it as a Good Guy™. It is a horrible country. It commonly commits crimes against humanity. Still, we give them billions of dollars in aid and justify their crimes like the execution of Nimr al-Nimr.