People might assume that I’m happy to see Martin Shkreli hauled off to jail. But I’m not. He’s the hedge fund wunderkind who raised the price of Daraprim from $13.50 to $750. He got a lot of attention for this clearly greedy move, but it was actually a sign of hubris because it caused another company — seeing an opportunity — to enter the market and sell the drug for $1. So there never was much indication that he was anything but a con a man. The problem is that I just don’t see how he is that different from the fools that millions of people worship on Shark Tank.

There is something very wrong with our capitalist system. I’ve noticed this again and again throughout my life. It is not brilliance — much less the ability to improve the world — that is key to business success. For many, like Mitt Romney, making money is mostly about being in the right place at the right time. But for many more, it is about being ruthless. And the distinction between legal ruthlessness and illegal ruthlessness strikes me as almost semantic. It doesn’t surprise me in the least that someone like Shkreli isn’t clear about the distinction. It is almost certainly clear that Mitt Romney did far more harm in his legal business career than Shkreli did in his career even if all the charges against him stick.

I think this is what happens when you have a society based on the idea that nothing matters but profit. Yes, I know there are courses on business ethics. But it strikes me rather the way war crimes tribunals work — namely, you only face them if you lost the war. As it is, if Martin Shkreli really is worth $100 million, he may manage to get out this legal bind. Our system is, after all, set up so that it is really hard to convict anyone who can mount a good defense.

As it is, there is only a small amount of Shkreli’s career that has landed him in jail. And it has nothing to do with him jacking up the price of Daraprim — a move that certainly caused harm and could have cost lives. But that was a move that was widely praised (or at least apologized for) in the business press. What he’s in trouble for is not all the harm that he has done, but rather for the specific harm that he’s done to members of his own class. As Michael Hiltzik noted, that’s mostly what this is all about.

I’m getting tired of all this. When Martin Shkreli burst on the scene as a price gouger, I didn’t see much of the outrage. He was doing, after all, what we generally praise business people for doing. If he had quintupled the price of the drug up to $67.5, I doubt anyone would have noticed, even though that change would have been excessive. There just seems to be a certain hypocrisy in our society. We expect them to be anti-humanists. In fact, we praise them for being so. We hold them up as demigods. So I feel no schadenfreude toward Martin Shkreli — just sadness for a badly misguided civilization.

Whenever there is a poll question about something stupid, you can depend upon a fair number of Americans holding the ridiculous position. For example, there was a recent poll that found that 29% of Americans think Obama is a Muslim. I’m generally sympathetic to the argument that these people don’t really believe this. They are rather signalling in whatever way the questions allow that they really, really, really don’t like Obama. But I’m not certain. I don’t really know what is going on in these people’s minds. Indeed, a recent article made me question the basic brain functioning of my fellow Americans. But when I dug down into it, I found it was more complicated than is being reported.

Samuel Osborne reported in The Independent, US Town Rejects Solar Panels Amid Fears They “Suck Up All the Energy From the Sun.” The town in question is Woodland, North Carolina. Strata Solar Company wanted to build a solar farm north of the town. This required that the land be re-zoned from manufacturing to agricultural. The town council rejected the plan, despite the fact that the planning board was in favor of it. But it’s worse than that. The council had previous accepted plans for three other solar farms. But at the same meeting, the council voted for a moratorium on solar farms.

What could be the cause of this reversal? Well, the people have risen up. Some of the complaints at least seem reasonable. Mary Hobbs said that the existing solar farms have killed the local economy. I don’t really see that. Woodland isn’t exactly a tourist destination. It’s probably dying for the same economic reasons that lots of other small towns are dying. But it is true that the solar farm is not like a factory; it would create few jobs. At the same time, the Strata farm would probably have been very lucrative because its location was close to an electrical substation. This kind of local investment is not likely to revitalize the community.

Other concerns were less debatable. Jane Mann argued that the vegetation near solar panels is brown because of lack of sunlight. Her husband Bobby concurred, saying that the solar farms suck up all the energy from the sun. They are also concerned about cancer deaths, which the solar farms are supposedly responsible for. But mixed in with all the crazy, there is some sense. The Manns are still primarily concerned with what is going to happen to the town because of the solar farm. As Jane Mann said, “I don’t see the profit for the town.”

That’s a good point. The site for the Strata solar farm is outside the town limits and so the town will get no tax benefit from it, “The only funding the town would get is approximately $7,000 per year for specialized training for the Woodland Fire Department in the event of an electrical malfunction at the solar plant.” Get that: the company is only going to pay to make sure that the publicly funded fire department is properly educated on how to serve the company’s interests. So regardless of how silly the concerns may be, there really is nothing to counterbalance it.

Now, I’m in favor of solar farms. This is exactly the kind of thing we should be doing. But we come back to the same problem as ever: inequality. The rich want to place their solar farms out where they don’t have to see them. They can just siphon off the profits to wherever they decide the view is nicest. And the people of Woodland get nothing very clear in exchange. It’s not surprising that they start talking about solar farms sucking.

I guess I should say something about the debate. Despite my best efforts, I did manage to listen to the whole thing. But as soon as I found out that it was focused on “national security,” I wanted to run away. This strikes me as journalistic malpractice on the part of CNN. Do we really need a forum to listen to all these candidates talk about how terrible non-Americans are and how we need to close down our borders? This is most of what we get from the candidates regardless. This is the easiest issue to demagogue and so they stick with it.

What’s more, when it comes to the situation in Syria and Iraq, they all push how “strong” and “hard” they will be. But when you get down to it, they aren’t proposing to do anything more than Obama. So they are going to continue to bomb but with more intent? Ben Carson implied that he wanted boots on the ground. Marco Rubio wants boots on the ground — Arab boots on the ground. John Kasich wants boots on the ground — some kind of Persian Gulf coalition. But I get it: the Republican Party is working itself up for war.

The reason I know this is because my father told me that he thought we needed to send ground troops into the conflict. Charles Krauthammer must think this. I know because my father also has no clue why we should send ground troops in. I questioned him about it. Does he think that ISIS is an existential threat? No. Does he think fighting ISIS over there is going to make terrorist attacks here less common? No. Does he realize that ISIS has been so successful because of our starting the Iraq War? Yes. So why do we need ground troops? At that point he folded, but this is fast becoming the new Republican orthodoxy.

But watching the debate, it was hard to escape the conclusion that Republicans think the greatest threat to the United States is Barack Obama. It’s also hard to understand why they all haven’t emigrated from the country. I mean, as Trump put it, “Our country doesn’t win anymore.” The United States does have a lot of problems, but listening to these bozos, you would think we were Zimbabwe. No one respects us; everyone gets over on us; we’re weak. And the only thing that will save us from this sorry state is a Republican president. That is, interestingly, also the one and only thing. Just elect one of them and America will be great again because it will be “strong” and “hard.”

The phrase “Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton” was repeated so often that I began to think it was a single person. And almost all of the attacks were facile. Take Ted Cruz’s opening, “The men and women on this stage, every one of us, is better prepared to keep this nation safe than is Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.” And why is this? Based upon the discussion, there seem to be two ways that every one of them is better:

1. They won’t be politically correct.
2. They will use the magic words “radical Islamic terrorism” more often.

That seems like snark, right? But it isn’t. It all comes down to their contention that there is something ineffable about fighting terrorism. It isn’t about intelligence and bombs and troops and so on. None of that matters if you don’t really want to fight the terrorists. And the one thing that Republican voters know, it is that Obama loves the terrorists just as much as he hates America. What they want is not any particular policy. They want more belligerent rhetoric. That will make them feel safer. And they are very much willing to give up essential liberty to purchase not temporary safety but the illusion of safety. It’s worse than Benjamin Franklin said.

Under normal circumstances, few people should care about the Paris climate deal. This kind of stuff is mostly just technocratic. There is a problem and they are just working out how to solve it. Indeed, 20 years ago, it would have been just that. But when one of the major political parties in the most powerful country on earth refuses to acknowledge that the problem is real, things are different. Then, getting anything done at all is a big deal. And that’s why this agreement is a big deal.

What’s different about this agreement is that it is not legally binding. But the question is: does that really matter? Brad Plumer wrote a really interesting article that provides a brief history of the failure of previous climate deals, Past Climate Treaties Failed. So the Paris Deal Will Try Something Radically Different. But the real takeaway here was this, “No treaty is truly binding.” That’s right. Countries mostly abide by their treaties because they want to be part of the civilized world. Even at that level, humans are still social. But more than that, there is the economic issue.

I’m all too aware of the conservative response to this. We have already heard people claiming that this will just allow Russia (which has set insignificant goals) to get ahead of us. But I think this is a total misunderstanding of the way that economics works. Listening to the Republican debates, I’ve been really annoyed hearing about how doing something about climate change will hurt our economy. This is taken as a given. But it is actually rather the opposite that ought to be given. We aren’t going to grow our economy in the long-term by making it ever more dependent on the new energy technology of a century and a half ago.

What we are getting from the Republicans — and what we always get from them — is not an argument for economic growth. It is an argument for the status quo. They care about securing the profits of those who are already rich. Look at who is the biggest funder of the Republican Party: the Koch brothers. Their wealth comes from oil. They don’t see clean energy as a way to help our shared economy; they see it as a threat to their short term profits. And the Republicans rush to defend their interests, using the specious argument that they are looking out for all of us.

So Russia looks like it is going to do what Russia has traditionally done: look backwards. As it is, the Russian economy is highly dependent upon selling oil. So this makes some sense. But it is shortsighted. I think that’s especially true because we have been going through a period of revolution regarding green energy. I fully expect countries like Costa Rica (which put forward an ambitious program) to look back in ten or twenty years and see that they have not only been able to do a lot more, but that their economy is much better as a result.

We really have two choices here. We can look backward and continue to harm the earth. This will lead to more economic stagnation. Or we can look forward and mitigate the damage we are doing. This will lead to a more vibrant economy. That’s it. This really is what it’s all about. The only upside for continuing on as we have been is that it allows installed interests to continue to make money. The economies that are going to be strong in the future are the ones that embrace green energy today. And I think that alone will cause this climate deal to be a success.

Over at Mark Thoma’s indispensable Economist’s View is a sub-blog by Tim Duy, Fed Watch. Generally, it is too technical for me. But the other day, I was really struck by an article, Makes You Wonder What The Fed Is Thinking. Of course, I always wonder what the Fed is thinking. But when someone like Duy says that, it makes me take note.

He started by noting that one of the reasons that the Federal Reserve is set to raise interest rates is because it believes that the inflation rate will “approach” its 2% target in 2016. Now before we get to Duy’s point, think about that for a moment. According to the Fed, it is supposed to target 2%. Now it’s looking like the Fed is saying that really the 2% target is a ceiling. They are not willing to let it get above that point. If that’s the case, I wish the Fed could tell us so that we could fire them all and restructure the organization. As it is, the Fed doesn’t seem to be much concerned with employment, which is the other thing that it is supposed to do.

But as Josh Zumbrun noted in The Wall Street Journal, while the Fed may think that inflation will “approach” 2% next year, “The trouble is they have made the same prediction for the past four years.” It seems that in Fedlandia, we are always and forever on the verge of inflation. The Fed isn’t any better than the Ron Pauls of the world who tell us we must buy gold because hyperinflation is coming. The Fed types scoff that such idiocy. But they don’t seem to be able to learn from their own failed predictions.

What Duy highlighted is the asymmetric nature of the Fed interest rate increases. If the economy starts to heat up, causing inflation — the Fed can just raise interest rates as high and for as long as necessary. But if economy goes into recession, the Fed can only lower interest rates to zero. So if they raise interest rates too soon, there is little the Fed can do to fight the resulting recession. There are other asymmetries in all of this. And they all point in the same direction. So why raise rates now?

Duy mentioned the “financial stability” argument. According to this argument, low interest rates will “encourage excessive risk-taking.” Really?! Because I remember the Fed watching the tech bubble and the housing bubble inflate over years without doing anything about it. I think this argument is just more apologetics. The situation is this: the Fed wants to raise interest rates; but there is no real reason to raise interest rates; so the Fed goes looking for reasons to justify things it wants to do regardless.

I’m sorry to be constantly harping on the Federal Reserve. But it really is ridiculously important. The truth is that with the current philosophy of the Fed, the working class will never get ahead. As soon as the economy is starting to do well enough that workers can share in productivity growth, the Fed puts on the brakes. This is not good. In general, the Fed has not been a major tool of the power elite. But it looks more and more like that. And imagine what it would be doing if it had been filled with people by Donald Trump or Ted Cruz? It’s too frightening to contemplate.

At my day job, I’ve been working on a number of articles that were left by writers in various states of unacceptability. Some of them only required what I would loosely call editing. I turned one into a new article. And there were a few that were just hopeless. One was an article I’ve seen so many times before, I don’t understand why the writer thought it was worth revisiting: what rich people do differently from poor people. The implication of these kinds of articles is always the same: if you act like rich people, you’ll become rich yourself!

It’s nonsense. But there’s a reason why it has become something of a genre: the rich and their apologists really want to argue that there is some good reason for people to be wealthy. We supposedly live in a meritocracy, after all. So it just can’t be allowed for people to think that wealth is largely a matter of dumb luck. But of course, it is. Even if you grant the idea of meritocracy, why is it that one person is born smart and another dumb? And you can say the same thing about every other human attribute that a price can be put on.

The article I was dealing with was based on the book, The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy. What it said was that we have the wrong idea about millionaires. The typical millionaire was just your unassuming neighbor who saved money and invested it in the stock market. There was just one major problem with the book: it was wrong. It’s true that there were such millionaires. But as Nassim Nicholas Taleb documented completely in Fooled by Randomness, that was due to the fact that the book came out in 1996 — the end of the longest bull market in US history. In other words, the timing was perfect to find such millionaires. What’s more, there was survivor bias.

So I went looking for a couple of articles that would push back against this narrative. I was still hoping that I might be able to save the article. I disagree with a lot of the stuff I work on; I would still publish this article if I could make it good and more or less true. But what I found made me abandon all hope. The first was an article by Matt Bruenig, In Reality, the Wealthy Inherit Ungodly Sums of Money. A lot of people try to make the argument that the rich don’t inherit that much of their wealth. And so they will show that the poor inherit almost all of their wealth whereas the rich only inherit about 15% of theirs. It’s pretty obvious what’s happening: the poor live hand to mouth and have almost no wealth. Looking at the problem that way is disingenuous.

But Bruenig makes a wider point that I’ve been making for years: what the rich give their children in terms of cash really doesn’t matter. That isn’t the major inheritance that they get. Bruenig noted, “They also pass along social and cultural capital that help their kids capture the scarce supply of highly-paid jobs. Indeed, even rich kids who do not receive a college degree are 2.5 times more likely to wind up as high-income adults than poor kids who do receive a college degree.”

Probably an even bigger myth that is pushed about the rich is that they work harder than the poor. Sean McElwee addressed this issue, Do The Rich Really Work More Than the Poor? To the extent that it is true, it is because the the poor can’t find work. There are a lot of details about that in the article. But I think the more important point on this is that the rich have more fulfilling jobs. As McElwee put it, “The rich are working slightly more hours, but the real story is the dramatic increase in the hours by the poor and middle-class that are not corresponding with higher wages. And these hours are not of the same quality; they are more satisfying and less stressful.”

But you could just watch Chris Rock discuss how a “career” is different from a “job”:

What’s interesting is that the writer of this article I was working on is, based upon his other work, really liberal. But he really bought into this nonsense. And I don’t think he’s alone. This is one of those hidden systems of control. We continue on with our broken neo-feudal system, because most people think the rich really do deserve their wealth. But there really is no evidence of that.

NPR put together a very useful table, Where Presidential Candidates Stand On Climate Change. What I find most interesting about it is that there aren’t that many Republican candidates who reject global warming outright. There are only four who absolutely reject it: Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, and Donald Trump. The table claims that Ted Cruz’s position on global warming is “complicated.” But that’s not really true. At least as a presidential candidate, he’s full-tilt global warming denial.

But if you drill down further, you see that actually no one in the Republican field believes in global warming. It really comes down to the Three Stages of Global Warming Denial. It’s pretty hard to say that there is no global warming and not come off as a complete idiot. Just look at the list above. Two more candidates believe global warming is real but not caused by humans: Rand Paul and Marco Rubio. I actually think this is an even worse position to hold. It says that global warming is happening but we have no idea why. It doesn’t make much sense. But this is stage two.

But if you look at people who are willing to do something about global warming, that leaves only two. First there is Lindsey Graham, who has not put forward any plan, which shows just how important he thinks it is. And then there is Bobby Jindal. He has put forward a plan, but it is primarily to make things far worse:

But note that neither of these guys is a top tier candidate. In fact, Jindal isn’t even running anymore. If you look at the top tier, there are only three candidates who have ever called for anything at all to be done about global warming: Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, and John Kasich. I don’t think any of them have been willing to say that during the course of the campaign. It’s sad. If one of them actually came out with a plan, it would be a typical Republican plan like Jindal’s that would make the situation worse.

It’s also interesting to note that every one of the Republicans is in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline. I’ll admit that in the grand scheme of things, that isn’t a terribly important issue. But if you think global warming is a problem, you can’t be for the pipeline.

Meanwhile, all three of the Democratic candidates have actual plans to combat global warming. We don’t even have to discuss whether or not they believe in it. Of course, I suppose the Republicans could argue that they do have a big tent. The Democrats all believe the same thing (also known as the truth). The Republicans are all over the place in their denial. But it is important to remember that. What we are seeing with the Republicans is what we saw at the end of Terminator 2 where the T-1000 is trying various forms to survive. The Republicans are trying to find a winning strategy for avoiding doing anything about global warming.

On Friday, Abby Goodnough wrote a very informative article at The New York Times, Poll Finds Kentuckians Split With Governor Matt Bevin on Expanded Medicaid. You may remember that just over a month ago, Bevin was elected governor of Kentucky by almost 9 percentage points. Of all the Republicans who ran, he was the most clear: the Medicaid expansion had to go. Here is a quote from last February before the election, “Absolutely. No question about it. I would reverse that immediately.” That seems clear enough.

Of course, as the election went on, it became muddled. According to Sam Youngman at Lexington Herald-Leader just a month before the election, “At last week’s Centre College debate, it was far from clear whether Bevin knew the difference between Medicaid, the health insurance program for low-income and disabled residents, and Medicare, the health insurance program for people 65 and older.” To me, this is really telling. We liberals talk a lot about how Republican voters are ill informed. People who consume conservative media tend to believe things that just aren’t true. But the truth is that Republican politicians (especially over the last couple of decades) are that way too. They’re just mad as hell and they’re not going to take it anymore. “It” in that sentence is nothing very concrete except their vague feeling that something ain’t right.

More important, however, Bevin’s position depended upon the circumstances. By July, he said it was “an absolute lie” that he ever said he would reverse the Medicaid expansion on the first day. In August, he was pushing for a complete reversal in a fundraising letter. For readers of this site, it is probably obvious that Bevin’s July statement is disingenuous. So he wouldn’t reverse the program on the first day? That just leaves every other day of the remainder of his term. And true to his word, as I write this on the fifth day of his term, he has not done anything official to the program.

The poll found that over 70% of Kentuckians who have an opinion on the Medicaid expansion want it kept the same. I’m sure that on many other issues the vast majority of Kentuckians are similarly at odds with the governor they just elected by a huge margin. I have to admit, this still annoys me. There really isn’t a bait-and-switch going on here. The people of Kentucky knew who they were voting for. Or to put it more accurately: the people of Kentucky knew who they were “not voting” for.

The same poll found that while 54% of Republicans wanted to keep the Medicaid expansion, only 43% who voted for Bevin (and I assume that pretty much means those who voted at all) want to keep it. I suspect that Bevin’s best political move would be to cut the Medicaid expansion. It really doesn’t matter what the people of Kentucky think; it matters what the voters of Kentucky think. Given that Kentucky holds its gubernatorial elections in off-off-years, he can depend upon a very conservative electorate. He’s for more likely to lose the primary because he did what the people want than he is to lose the general because he did not.

What it looks like he’s going to do is change the program so that the poor have “skin in the game.” He’ll probably also cut it back so that fewer people get it. These are both bad ideas. They reflect the usual conservative hatred of everyone who you don’t know. (Remember Rob Portman deciding that gay rights were a matter of liberty as soon as he found out that his son was gay? That sums up conservatives completely.) But Kentuckians should count themselves lucky. Like most politicians, Bevin was very clear who he is and how he would govern.

People love to quote Benjamin Franklin, “A republic — if you can keep it.” They usually quote it as if keeping the Republic would require some kind of herculean effort. Who would have thought we would lose our republic just because people couldn’t bother voting?