As you have heard if you follow these sorts of things, Jeremy Corbyn has been elected to lead the British Labour Party. It isn’t surprising, in that polls have indicated that this would happen for some time. But if you had asked anyone a year ago, they would have laughed at you. Corbyn didn’t even have enough support among Labour MPs to get on the ballot. He was only added at the last minute to provide a range of opinions in the election. This is because, just as in the US Democratic Party, the Labour Party leaders have moved very far to the right. So they were all surprised to find that the base of the Labour Party is the same as it has always been: liberal, even socialist.

But is this a good thing? The answer can be found in this headline from The Guardian, Osborne Says Electing Corbyn Will Set Labour Back a Generation. That would be George Osborne: First Secretary of State and UK Conservative Party power player. You always know that the left is doing the right thing when the conservatives start wringing their hands about the prospects of their opponents. He said that the Labour Party’s move to the right the last few decades has been good for them, and that if Labour had only elected Liz Kendall it would have caused the conservatives “the greatest problems.”

This is such nonsense. What Kendall offered was something we in the US know only too well from the Democrats. It’s the “not quite as bad” approach to campaigning. “We aren’t quite as bad as the conservatives — at least we care about the people!” At one time, I would have thought it sounded like a good political strategy, but it never works. People care about ideology, but they also care about passion. Most voters don’t know what to think — they are pulled in so many directions. So making a clear case for what you believe in can be useful.

Needless to say, George Osborne is not happy about Corbyn’s win. He is likely concerned — for his own party. They knew exactly how to fight against a Labour Party led by Liz Kendall. They really don’t know how to fight one led by Jeremy Corbyn. They haven’t had to do so in decades. That doesn’t mean that Corbyn is going to lead the Labour Party to victory in 2020. But it throws a wrench into the whole thing. The conservatives would have had almost nothing to lose if Liz Kendall led the Labour Party to victory. But if Corbyn does so, it will mean real change.

As a result, the Conservative Party may have to hold back some now. Maybe their continued policies of austerity — which work to enrich the rich and impoverish the poor — might not look so good when they are facing the possibility of a leftist revolution that will roll-back the current normal brought to the UK people by Margaret Thatcher. But Labour is going to have to be smart about this. And I fear that there are too many people in the Labour Party establishment who have a greater hatred of Corbyn than they do the Conservative Party. That is the real issue going forward: is the Labour Party going to find its roots? Is it going to be smart about this opportunity? Or is it going to crumble to pieces?

Last week, Jonathan Capehart tried to explain, How Ben Carson Cures White Fright in the Republican Party. It’s mostly an interview with Leah Wright Rigueur, author of the recent book, The Loneliness of the Black Republican. With all the discussion of Donald Trump leading the pack in the Republican presidential nomination, it is easy to overlook the fact that Ben Carson is the only person who is even close to him. It is Trump, then Carson, then statistical noise.

Rigueur mentions a number of reasons why Carson is doing so well. One rather obvious one that she doesn’t mention is that he’s been a Fox News celebrity for years. If Dr Oz decided to run for president, it wouldn’t be surprising that he would have an installed base of support. But that does rather beg the question. Carson is doing well because he did well on Fox News and he did well on Fox News because conservatives like him and conservatives like him because… Well, that is the question.

One of the minor reasons that Rigueur mentions is that Carson is an evangelical. Of course, he’s more than that: he’s a young earth creationist. So he not only appeals to the conservative Christians, but he also assuages their fear about him being a “scientist” — or close enough. And there is also the fact that Carson is kind of a self-made man. He found something he was good at and got rich doing it. And then, much more to the point, Carson is able to complain about the “wrong kind of blacks.” So he can say that Black Lives Matters is all wrong and no one can say that he is a racist.

But this is all nuance if you ask me. Ben Carson is doing well with the very same people who once made another political neophyte, Herman Cain, the front-runner in the 2012 Republican primary. And I think it is pretty clear that Carson and Cain are extremely different men. In fact, Cain is more akin to Donald Trump: loose, entertaining, substanceless. Carson is soft spoken. He seems serious — like he’s given the issues serious thought (even though he clearly has not). Indeed, if you look at the two men, you can see what a lie the whole concept of race is. Other than having darker skin than I do, there aren’t a lot of things that bind them together. They have totally different shaped heads, different noses, different eyes. But the key thing is that all Americans recognize them as the same race. And that’s most especially true of conservatives.

Like everyone else — very few conservatives think of themselves as racists. But they are painfully aware of just how white their party is. And yes, they take some comfort in convenient narratives about how the Democratic Party has tricked African Americans into supporting them. But they also know that for almost a century, African Americans were very loyal to the Republican Party. So something happened about 50 years ago, and we all know what it is: Richard Nixon and the southern strategy.

So there is a certain section of the conservative movement that is just dying to support a black candidate. So when one comes along who seems good enough, they love him! (It’s always him, right?) I know that I’ve seen this in my father. He wants to vote for black candidates because it makes him feel better about his belief that racism is mostly a thing of the past. Rich corporate CEOs and famous brain surgeons fit that bill. So I think there is always going to be a good 15% of the Republican Party who will support whatever black candidate shows up — as long as that candidate has the basic conservative qualification. And often not even that. There is one qualification that trumps all others: the belief that if these black kids would just pull up their pants and get a job, everything would be fine.

Ben Carson is the Valium for Republican racial anxiety.

Jared Bernstein wrote a very good article over at The Atlantic, America’s Poorest Are Getting Virtually No Assistance. It’s not a new story to me — or many of my readers — but it is one that we as society have not reckoned with. In 1996, Bill Clinton ended “welfare as we know it.” Most people are still confused about this. When I talk to people of all political stripes — but especially conservatives — they mostly think that people get on welfare out of high school and die on it. At the very least, they think single mothers without jobs get it. That just isn’t true.

With “welfare reform” came this idea that people should work if they want to get off welfare and climb the economic ladder. That’s actually true. But as Bernstein noted, there was a major problem: “the new welfare law assumed the jobs would be there.” No one really thought about that side of the equation. They seemed to be trapped in the Say’s Law fallacy: supply creates its own demand. So by this way of thinking, if these people went out looking for jobs, the jobs would suddenly appear. It sounds ridiculous when it is put so bluntly, but that is exactly what they were assuming.

But they — Bill Clinton most of all — lucked out. Welfare reform came along at exactly the same time as a huge economic boom — and stock market bubble. So there really were jobs available. Massive numbers of people who had been stuck on welfare suddenly found themselves with jobs. Hooray! Welfare reform worked! But of course it didn’t. Without welfare reform, it is certain that a comparable number of people who had been on welfare would have gotten jobs. As Bernstein noted of the poorest of the poor, “They want decent, steady jobs, and not just because they recognize work as an economic necessity but because of the dignity they believe it will bring to their lives as people and as parents.” Trust me on this: “dignity” is the key word there.

But now we are stuck with this narrative: we forced people on welfare to get jobs and it worked! Tough love rules the day! I don’t think that liberals are quite so sanguine about this anymore. But conservatives are convinced because it is what they want to believe anyway. And this is what gives us people like Paul Ryan saying that the safety net is a “hammock that lulls able-bodied people into complacency and dependence.” Poor people don’t have it great in America — regardless of whether or not they are on welfare. The very notion is silly.

I have an even more fundamental problem with this kind of thinking. I don’t understand why it is that we think mothers should have to work outside the home. Certainly it wasn’t traditionally like that. And every time some rich woman decides to stay home and raise the kids, we as a nation stand and applaud her noble act. But poor women need the “dignity of work,” because raising children isn’t a dignified occupation — when you are poor. So I think we as a society need to give this some thought. And we also need to think about the effect an insecure, nomadic lifestyle has on the life prospects of children.

As a society, we should be ashamed of how we treat the poor. They need a helping hand — and very often a hand out. I don’t know when they ever need a kick in the pants.

David Cay Johnston wrote a really interesting and disturbing article at Al Jazeera last week, New York’s Electricity Market Is a Scam. Rather than have an old fashioned public utility, New York has an electricity market that just so happens to have been set up by Enron. The promises are always the same: a market will make prices cheaper. And the results are always the same: they aren’t. In fact, “Adjusted for inflation, electricity in New York costs almost 17% more than a decade ago.”

Let’s get something straight: businesses are not designed to keep prices low; they are designed to keep prices high. This confusing is what is behind one of my favorite brainless arguments against raising worker salaries, “If you raise wages, the companies will just raise their prices!” No they won’t! If the companies could have charged more before, they would have. Businesses charge as much as they possibly can. The only thing that stops them from gouging is that there are other companies that compete with them. And in a properly regulated market, this is exactly what happens. But businesses do everything they can to avoid competition.

Actual collusion is illegal, of course. In an oligopoly, businesses don’t generally need to collude. They can avoid competition because it is to everyone’s benefit and they know how much it costs their “competitors” to bring their products and services to market. As a result, the regulators of the New York electricity market keep data secret to stop collusion. Or supposedly they do. It seems more like they are trying to keep the data away from the people and their representatives so that the power companies can continue their scam. Because it really is remarkable. New York energy prices have gone up despite the fact that energy supply is always greater than demand. And by a lot, “Its surplus is huge, as much as 63 percent in May, and never less than 4.6 percent, New England Power Coordinating Council reliability reports show.”

What’s more this supposed private data isn’t private. New York Assemblyman James Brennan thought he smelled a rat, so he hired utility economist Robert McCullough to look into it. And McCullough found that by using the disparate data that is released, it is a simple matter to derive all the data. And if he can do it, the companies that are supposedly competing can do it. And they most certainly are, because energy prices in New York should be down not up, by the laws of microeconomics.

Johnston is no liberal. His conclusion is:

I know that my libertarian enemies will claim that this just shows that the government should be out of the market altogether. There are two words such people should keep in mind: Silk Road. But this is all just conservative nonsense: the idea markets exist naturally without government. They don’t, and indeed, can’t. And this is not a theoretical issue. The question is how we are going to distribute energy to consumers. We can start with a little transparency.