Over at Hullabaloo this morning, Tom Sullivan wrote, Thank You for Not Voting Your Best Interests. He made a excellent and important point, but I think there is quite a bit more to it. His primary argument is that we liberals should stop saying that the working class “vote against their best interests.” He noted that this is an Ayn Randian, social Darwinian framing of voting. He asked, “Is that who we are? Is that the kind of country we want? Does that reflect our values?”

I have to admit to being guilty of occasionally using this language. And it has long bothered me that it goes against what I believe. I actually have a certain fondness for the fact that many Christians vote against their best economic interests in the name of what they think is their religious faith. That’s noble. And I often vote against my own best interests. But the statement doesn’t mean we are talking about the best interests of the working class — as in low skilled workers as opposed to its literal meaning of roughly 99% of the population that makes most of its money for work.

If we are talking about non-college educated whites, then he is most definitely right that “You’re voting against your best interests” is just a dog whistle for, “You’re a stupid hick.” But let’s remember: in general, it is not the poor who are voting for the Republicans. I discussed this in, It’s the Poor, Stupid. Poor voters in every state in the deep south voted for Kerry in 2004. The middle income voters are more inclined toward the Republicans and upper income voters go with the Republicans everywhere but California, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.

The issue is that the poorer voters tend not to vote at all — not that they vote against their interests. But I’ve always been careful not to blame them for this. There are a few things going on. The first is that our country goes out of its way to make voting hard. For example: why is it is necessary to register to vote? We all have social security numbers. Why isn’t that enough? Then, when you move, you must register again. And who moves a lot? The poor. But the problem is far deeper than that. Consider a working class family where both parents work — perhaps even multiple jobs. They are paid by the hour. They have children they must care for. People in that situation have to be very dedicated to vote. Compare that to a family where just the man works at a salaried job where his boss will be just fine that he comes in an hour late because, “The line to vote was terrible!” (Of course, the line to vote will not be terrible — that is reserved for where the poor vote.)

When it comes to what I care most about — economics — almost everyone who votes for the Republicans is voting against their best interests. The only people who are not are those people who get special benefits from the Republican Party. Otherwise, everyone does better under the Democrats — and that most definitely includes the owning class. And why do they vote against their own best interests? Well, Sullivan nails that:

This is why Wall Street turned against Obama in such a big way. He’s surrounded himself with Wall Street hacks. He’s done everything that Wall Street could hope for. But they hate him for one reason: he called them fat cats. Those people probably would have done worse under a McCain administration, but at least he would have played along and never countered their self-images as the brilliant and beneficent Masters of the Universe that they see themselves as.

So the question really is why so many people — rich people mostly — vote against the best interests of the country. There are lots of reasons for this. The one that seems primary to me is the Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman idea that making as much money as possible is doing what is in the best interests of your country. As a result, the rich have come to think that just by being rich they are being patriotic. And the rest of the nation has largely gone along with it, even though it really doesn’t have much of a historical legacy. In the past, the rich at least gave lip service to noblesse oblige; now they act like gods — deserving of both their privilege and worship.

We as liberals do need to be careful about the language we use. The “own interests” lament does sound like we are calling for selfishness. But I think it is deeper than this. A more accurate question would be, “We do they vote against our best interests?” But it is not a question for the lower classes. It is a question for the upper classes. And we shouldn’t be asking ourselves the question. We should be asking them, “Why do you vote against our shared interests?” I don’t think they have an answer for that.

Jonathan Chait is back, which is good news because I still look forward to reading him every day. And his first article of the new year is a good one, Harvard, Obamacare, and the Conservative Information Bubble. What it is about is the conservatives’ newest claim that Obamacare is failing. This time it refers to a Robert Pear article in The New York Times, Harvard Ideas on Health Care Hit Home, Hard. I believe the original title was, “Healthcare fixes backed by Harvard’s experts now roil its faculty.” Apparently, they decided that maybe that was too provocative a title.

The main “fix” that is roiling the Harvard faculty is the idea that healthcare consumers should have “skin in the game.” This means higher co-pays and deductibles. It is thought that if people have to pay $25 to see the doctor, they will only go to the doctor when they really need to. I’ve always found this a questionable contention because (1) most people avoid going to the doctor just because it is time consuming and painful; and (2) this is throwing a lot of pressure on the consumer to know when is the “right” time to go to the doctor. But maybe it works.

In the past, Harvard has provided 100% coverage of faculty. (I’m sure that Harvard is like most colleges in using a lot of adjunct faculty who are paid almost nothing and given no benefits — but that’s another issue.) Now the college is paying only 90% and the faculty are not pleased. Conservatives have pounced. Chait quoted Red State, “One imagines how all these pampered academics would feel if they were forced to use a silver (70% covered) Obamacare plan.” I love that: “pampered academics”; these intellectual elites who fly coach to conferences are so pampered but the financial elites in their private jets and the gated mansions are not pampered. Regardless, it is clearly a reduction in compensation, even if a fairly minor one.

But as Chait noted, conservatives have no cause to feel good about this development. This idea of having “skin in the game” is their own conservative idea. In fact, about the only healthcare reform idea that conservatives have that is not totally ridiculous is their health savings accounts. This is the idea that people put tax-free money in a savings account that they use for medical expenses. This goes along with some catastrophic insurance policy — with maybe a $10,000 (Or more!) deductible. Since the money in the savings account is yours if you don’t use it, you have a real incentive to chew Advil all year long and not have the doctor look at that pain in your lower right abdomen. Incentives!

That’s all that is going on at Harvard. The only thing that conservatives should complain about is that the school is paying too much of the faculty’s healthcare costs. Of course, this is just the conservative way. Anything that people don’t like in Obamacare proves that it is hopeless and must be repealed. And this is even true when what people don’t like is their conservative policy idea, “You hate having to pay 30% of your healthcare costs, but you are going to love it when you have to pay 70%!”

It is important to remember where conservatives are in terms of knowledge about Obamacare. The only information that they get is negative. This is why they truly believe that the law is on the verge of collapse. It is very much like conservatives in the 2012 election where they were just sure that they were going to win. Contrast that with liberals during the 2014 election who might have grasped on to any hopeful bit of evidence, but who were completely prepared for the slaughter that came last November.

There are lots of things to not like about Obamacare. Steven Brill is out with a new book that highlights many of the problems, America’s Bitter Pill. But those problems are the conservative aspects of the law. And it is embarrassing for conservatives to throw rocks at the law while showing a complete lack of knowledge about their own “plans.”

Optional musical accompaniment, Isn’t It Romantic:

Isn’t it pathetic?
Journalistic hacks
Just following the herd!

That’s what I thought when I saw this at The New York Times last night, Two New York Police Officers Are Shot in the Bronx. It came in my email and that’s why I think it is pathetic. Obviously, this is a real news story. But The Times on average sends me maybe two notices per day. So this is Big News™ because, “Cops’ lives matter!” Of course, no one ever questioned that the lives of police officers mattered.

This is all a response to the murders of Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos. After that, apparently, the senseless shooting of kids by police officers don’t matter. As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote yesterday, “If the public appetite for police reform can be soured by the mad acts of a man living on the edge of society, then the appetite was probably never really there to begin with.” The recent rallying around the police is business as usual — we’ve been seeing it for years and it is in no sense any different from the tired demands for conformity found in, “Support the troops!”

But this recent bit of voluntary government propaganda is really a bit too much. The two officers — Aliro Pellerano and Andrew Dossi — were not killed. That’s good news, even though they were seriously injured. Like I said: this is a perfectly acceptable news story, but not one that the paper of record should be sending out to its email subscribers. The headline implies that this was another ambush attack as had happened to Liu and Ramos. But it wasn’t. The officers simply got into an altercation when approaching two men who were suspected of a robbery. Also: the suspects are Latinos.

What is particularly troubling about this is that it is pushing a false narrative. Police officers are not under assault. Police work has done nothing but become safer over the last twenty years. The facts are clear. Back in 2011, after a rash of shootings of police officers caused a similar outbreak of deceptive reporting, Radley Balko wrote, The “War on Cops” That Isn’t. And late last year, he followed it up with, Once Again: Police Work Is NOT Getting More Dangerous. Just in terms of raw numbers, there were fewer police officers killed in 2013 than there had been since World War II. And that is with a population that is 2.25 times the size.

I don’t think the problem is primarily that the public is deceived about this. The problem is that police officers are deceived about this. It causes them to use excessive force because they live on a knife’s edge — constantly thinking that they are in danger. Another factoid from Balko’s work is that it is more dangerous to simply live in one of the 50 highest crime cities than it is to be a police officer. Yet no one ever says, “When a waitress in Oakland drops off her kids at school in the morning, she doesn’t know if she’ll ever see them again!” But this kind of nonsense is constantly thrown out about the police.

One thing I’ve focused on in my writing is that the police have become a bunch of pussies. They aren’t willing to subject themselves to even the slightest danger. For example, there is the 2003 case of a woman who was fatally shot by police offers because of her threatening gestures with a vegetable peeler. But I seem to be about the only person willing to call the police pussies. And this is because the police have convinced themselves and the nation that their jobs are so dangerous it makes sense for them to constantly be on guard so that occasionally overreaching is understandable.

It isn’t. Because police officers do not have terribly dangerous jobs. I mean, they aren’t cabbies — who are four times as likely to die on the job!

Update (6 January 2015 6:10 pm)

Unbelievable: Cop Wounded in Shootout Not Happy About de Blasio’s Visit.

While doing research about the decreasing dangers of police work, I came upon some good work by libertarians. Unfortunately, this also brought too much of the typical brain dead libertarian economic analysis. In particular, at The Freeman, I found an article by Corey Iacono, 5 Economic Myths That Just Won’t Die. It was apparently the cover story of the December issue. It’s an excellent example of conservative affirmative action. If only I could spout this kind of nonsense, I too could be published in a seemingly popular magazine.

A big part of the problem is that the myths are no such thing. No one, for example, goes around saying, “Capitalism isn’t economically superior to socialism.” There literally is no such thing as a pure capitalism or a pure socialism. The libertarians are the only ones who claim that there can exist some kind of perfect capitalism. And even they fall to pieces when you bring up tort law or almost any other practical matter. But even if we grant Mr Iacono his myth, he doesn’t counter it. He only argues that liberalizing socialist countries increases economic growth. That is not the same as showing that capitalism is economically superior to socialism. There is a balance and going too far either way makes things worse.

Typical of the article is its argument against, “Countries like Sweden and Denmark prove that high taxes don’t harm economic growth.” He avoids the subject altogether. He does mention one paper regarding the Danish economy that is not based upon data but on a non-standard economic model. Otherwise, his argument is that in a general sense lower taxation leads to higher economic growth. Again, no one really argues with this. The argument has been that taxes of the rich do not hurt the economy — in a recession at least — because they don’t spend most of their money and so it is just added to the piles of cash rushing around the economy hopelessly looking for places where it can be used. But such economic complexity is anathema in libertarian thought.

The article isn’t without some actual claims that are made, “The government ended child labor. In a free market, child labor would still exist.” But I hardly think it is a myth. He quoted an article by the Economic History Association that stated that child labor ended primarily due to improved incomes of working people from 1880 to 1940. The problem here is that incomes improved due to the rise of labor unions and various government activities. Given that the United States has been seeing little to no increase in real wages for the working classes over the last four decades, we ought to see a rise in child labor if it weren’t for laws. The same argument that Iacono made has been made for a century and a half for how the Civil War was unnecessary because the free market was just about to destroy slavery. In this case, Iacono is apparently fine with generations of children working in coal mines because the bright light of the libertarian utopia is only a few generations away!

His next myth was, “Free trade doesn’t lead to better economic outcomes in the real world.” Free trade is mostly a scam to keep rich countries rich and poor countries poor. There is no way that a banana republic becomes anything else if it can’t protect its infant industries from destruction by powerful foreign corporations. Let me outsource the rebuttal to Ha-Joon Chang’s excellent Bad Samaritans:

But by far the worst of the “myths” was, “The idea that economic growth helps the poor is trickle-down economics — it doesn’t actually help them.” No one says that economic growth doesn’t help the poor. No one. But he doesn’t address this anyway. He actually goes on to argue in favor of trickle-down economics. He wants growth, which he claims that we get “through methods such as limiting the size of government and lowering barriers to international trade.” The size of the government is generally irrelevant, but it is unquestionably actively harmful in the middle of the worst economic period since the Great Depression. There is no “crowding out.” Corporations are already sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars because they don’t see any point in investing. And what possible barriers to international trade is he talking about? As I’ve discussed, our big new “free” trade agreements are more about making countries less democratic and making it easier for owners to collect their rents.

All of this is just the same old libertarian hokum. This isn’t economics; it is theology. It is worship of the free market and the idea that any interference with it will make it angry and turn against us. Economics started as a part of moral philosophy. But amongst libertarians, it has lost all its moral context. It is no longer about the best way to facilitate the sharing of resources. It is about feeding an ideology that can never fail and only be failed. Unfortunately, Corey Iacono isn’t even a priest in the cult of the free market; he’s just one of the true believers sitting in the pews.

Afterword

Iacono wrote a followup article, 5 More Economic Myths That Just Won’t Die. It is an improvement in that it actually contains a widely believed claim that is, in fact, false, “Immigrants take American jobs and reduce American wages.” But three of the remain four myths are all the same: government can’t create jobs. It’s pathetic. But it has 464 shares, because there are scads of people out there who just can’t get enough hokum when it tells them what they want to hear.

There is a laugh-out-loud funny article by Colin Dueck and Roger Zakheim at The Wall Street Journal this morning, Toward a Reform-Conservative Foreign Policy. These “reform conservatives on national-security issues” want to change the state of our foreign policy. And they want to do it by — Wait for it! — doing exactly what conservatives have always wanted to do. I have major problems with the reform conservatives generally — all they are willing to do is nibble around the edges because they cannot be seen as taking a big bite out of conservative ideology. But at least they do nibble. Dueck and Zakheim don’t even do that.

The argument in the article consists of two points. First, it complains about Obama’s foreign policy. This isn’t serious at all. It just recycles the same tired claims of the conservatives that Obama looks week (generally because he doesn’t act like an authoritarian, but really just because he isn’t a Republican). The second part of the argument is a vague disclaimer that they aren’t like Bush in 2003. And this leads up to their great “reform” conclusion: we need to spend more money on the military.

It is curious that conservatives constantly call for government to be more efficient — except when it comes to the military. Education can be infinitely more efficient. One teacher can manage a thousand students! But the military couldn’t possibly do more with less! One less bomber would destroy our military or at least send the message to the evildoers that it is time to strike! It’s sad but tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the priorities of conservatives. No wonder they hold authoritarians like Putin in such high regard.

Ed Kilgore summed up what they are pushing, The Long-Awaited Reformicon Foreign Policy Initiative: Throw Money at the Pentagon:

But it is more than that. The military cuts that we have seen came from the Sequester. The Republicans allowed cuts to military spending and Democrats allowed cuts to social spending. What these guys are really saying is that now that the deal is made, they want to keep the half of it that they like and jettison the half they don’t like. They even mention in the article how important cutting the budget is, “It is indeed imperative to reduce the national debt, but defense spending has already taken more than its share of cuts since Obama took office…” So the idea of just getting rid of the Sequester is off the table. As usual with conservatives, they want everything and are not willing to give anything in return.

They also mention Rand Paul as the leader of the faction of the party that wants to reduce the military. This is critical to their argument. By not being Rand Paul on the left and Bush in 2003 on the right, they are in the “reasonable” center. But it isn’t true. Rand Paul has shown himself to be very slippery when it comes to the military. By the time he gets the presidential nomination, he will be as much a hawk as any of them. And they provide an apologia for Bush in 2003, by noting the special circumstances. But there is nothing that they are proposing that is any different from Bush in 2003, except that they wouldn’t go to war with Saddam Hussein because he’s dead.

But maybe I’m wrong about these guys. In a way, they are right smack in the middle of the reform conservative movement. No one in that movement wants to change anything. They just want to rebrand the Republican Party. And that’s what their article is: a bunch of gobbledygook designed to look like they are dealing with the constant failures of their ideology, without actually doing it. Welcome to the party boys, the money is fine!

Hannah Groch-Begley put together some interesting statistics from Media Matters, The Media in 2014 by the Numbers. None of it is shocking, but it is all disturbing.

She started the article with what is perhaps the most surprising statistic: none of the top editors at the ten biggest newspapers are women. That statistic wouldn’t be surprising if we were talking about almost any other industry. But women are extremely well represented in writing. I have always taken this to indicate that women are naturally better writers. That’s certainly been my experience. I had to work very hard to write as well as most of my female friends who didn’t ever work on it. Regardless, if you look at technical writers, there are more women than men. On the other hand, in Hollywood, where I assume the money is better and the prestige is more, there are more men. Regardless, I would think the new business would do better. But of course not! Silly me to be the least bit optimistic.

There is a pair of statistics that I’ve seen before that I’m not sure is as meaningful as it seems:

The truth of the matter is that the Ebola freak out seems to have just corresponded to the interests of the Republican Party. And I doubt it mattered anyway. I don’t think that Democratic voters stayed home because they felt that the administration was doing a bad job with it. What I think is a bigger issue is that if a Republican had been in the White House, Ebola would have received perhaps a quarter of the coverage. Fox News would have covered it in a completely reasonable way and the other news stations would have followed suit. In fact, there would have been a huge backlash against anyone who didn’t. They would have rightly been criticized for fomenting fear. But when a Democrat is in the White House, nothing is off the table. We should be very concerned that the mainstream media allow the Overton Window to be set by conservative media.

A couple of statistics that really struck me had to do with experts. First, only 3% of economic segments in the first half of 2014 featured an economist. Now, when you consider the state of the economics profession, maybe that isn’t so bad. I suspect that a good deal of that 3% was made up with Arthur Laffer. Just the same, it shows the media really aren’t interested in expertise — they figure economics is simple and everyone has valid opinions on it. They just want some politician on the two arbitrary “sides” of the issue and that’s that.

The other statistic is of much greater concern: on education segments during 2014, only 9% included educators. As with the economist, the media seem to think that teaching is simple. Why talk to teachers about education? After all, everybody knows that teachers just care about working as little as possible and taking home those big ol’ pay checks! Am I right?! But unlike economists who are to a large extent incompetent apologists for the power elite, teachers actually do know something about education. But the power elite would prefer to leave them out of the conversation. And the mainstream media are more than willing to oblige.

There are are lot more factoids in the article. The ones that I mentioned are just the ones that stood out to me. But there is much of interest. I suspect that next year, Media Matters will be able to write the same article with a minimum of editing.

It is Sunday, and so Thomas Frank has an article that is well worth reading, Chain Restaurants Are Killing Us: Billionaire Bankers, Minimum-Wage Toilers and the Nasty Truth About Fast-Food Nation. He focused on workers and the corporate elite because none of the franchise owners would talk to him. But he asked, “I wonder how many chain-store bosses can truthfully say they make an ‘honest living.'” I think I have a little insight into that.

Do franchise owners work hard? In my experience, yes. But they don’t work harder than their employees. They will, of course, sometimes get behind the counter or in the kitchen and kick a little ass — like they are the best workers around. But this kind of work represents the exception: maybe a couple of hours a week at most. Their primary function is as “manager.” I put the scare quotes on there because the truth of the matter is that the corporations don’t allow much in terms of management. The franchises are meant to be idiot proof — and that is as true for the worker at the register as it is for the owner managing the place. And this is generally only at the start of the franchise. The whole idea is for the owner to leave the whole thing to others who are less well paid.

The main thing is that the franchise owners get paid far more for whatever it is that they do. Of course, the idea in a capitalism is that people ought to be paid just for owning something. I’m not against this idea in theory. In practice, in the United States, it’s a travesty. It is why we hear this lie about the entrepreneur — the woman who “took a chance.” But that’s not what I consider an entrepreneur. This definition of entrepreneur just highlights the fact that business success is mostly a matter of luck. Borrow a bunch of money, start a business, go bankrupt. Repeat that process until you don’t go bankrupt. I’m all for bankruptcy laws — and I think it should be a lot easier for individuals to go bankrupt — but there is no denying that it is a form of socialism. In fact, for the right class of people, business is all about socialism: using the common resources to help you make it big.

So what we really see in the comparison of franchise owners versus franchise workers is which ones have the opportunities to buy a franchise. Is it the case that a minimum wage worker would ever make enough money that she too could take the risk and buy a McDonald’s franchise with $750,000 in non-borrowed cash? Where is the equality of opportunity there? So of course this isn’t about the brave entrepreneur who is willing to take risks. Everyone takes risks every day. I love this quote from Melissa Harris-Perry:

I come back to this idea again and again that conservatives (and many “liberals”) are deluded in thinking that if outcomes are dictated by the “free” market, they are “natural” — and therefore correct. The truth is that there aren’t any markets that are free. Markets themselves are communal constructs. The idea that I’ve been grappling with the last couple of year is how it makes any kind of sense that the nature of a society should dictate the rewards. For example, before movies, actors had to work every day — often multiple performances per day. The most successful ones became rich. But they were nowhere near as rich as the most successful actors today who might only work a month out of the year. The difference has nothing to do with the actor; it is entirely due to the technology that the actors had no part in creating. The same thing can be said about every other industry. Just look at the effects container ships have had on the narrowing of manufacturing industries.

The bottom line to all of this is that capitalism is not a just way to allocate resources. And even if it were, those with the most resources would use them to tilt the playing field in their favor. Instead of the government molding capitalism to work better, it has been molded to work worse. There are programs to mitigate the worst poverty, because the power elite know that starving children with bare feet begging in the streets causes a backlash that they can’t control. But other than this, the government mostly works to take money from the poor and give it to the rich. And the richer one is, the bigger the handouts.

Afterword

If you click over to the Melissa Harris-Perry video, you will hear Monica Mehta claim that 5% of the people pay 40% of the taxes. I’m pretty sure that would be 40% of the federal income taxes — a common conservative deception. But regardless, the number means nothing, given that the 5% makes a whole lot more than 5% of the income. People like Mehta disgust me.

See also: I Was a Middle Class Food Stamp Kid