I have a modest proposal for the Israel-Palestine conflict: genocide. It’s time tested. After all, if the conflict were going on 500 years ago, the Israelis would have just gone in, slaughtered all the Palestinians who weren’t able to flee, and the conflict would be over. And would it really matter? Yes, there would be people who would be very upset. But there already are! Why should Israel care? They are the only country in the region with nuclear arms and they have the biggest military. Plus, anything the United Nations would try to do would be vetoed by the United States. So I say: go for it!

Now I know what you bleeding heart liberals will say, “Just because you got bumped out of art school by a better Jewish painter doesn’t mean you should commit a genocide against the Jewish people.” I see that point, but you have to draw a line somewhere. For example, some Palestinian idiots fire a couple of rockets into Israel wounding two people. So the Israelis respond in their usual proportional way. They didn’t go after the people that fired the rockets, of course. They just did their usual (And totally justified!) collective punishment, which killed at least 23.

This, of course, is following the kidnapping of three Israeli youths. It appears to have been a usual thing where thugs kidnap people and exchange them for money. But when it became a political issue, they thought it was best to just kill them. [Update: it now seems it was a Hamas splinter group that did it. -FM] This led to some sicko Israeli folks kidnapping a Palestinian youth and then burning him alive. So let’s see there. Step one: unpolitical act of murder by individuals. Step two: political act of torture murder by extremists. Step three: political act by extremist Palestinian faction. Step four: official Israeli attack on Palestinian population.

It’s not a good situation. And I know that many conservatives in the United States will say that the at least five Palestinian children who were killed in the recent attack should have been born to different parents or something. So given that it is perfectly acceptable to kill civilians if you think you have just cause (Defined as: whatever!) why don’t we just get systematic about this!

Of course, it will be sad to see all the Palestinians killed. But we’ll get over it. I mean who remembers the genocide of the Ottoman Empire? Who cares about the American genocide of the native peoples? All of them would be dead by now anyway. So in a hundred years, who will really care?

But let me be clear: it doesn’t have to be an Israeli genocide of the Palestinians. It could be the other way around. It is just that there are problems. One is militarily, the Palestinians really aren’t up to it. What’s more, if they did manage to do it, the United States wouldn’t be there to protect Palestine at the UN because we only believe in justifying absolutely everything that Israel ever does.

What’s really great about my idea is that the Palestinians are hardly clean in this matter. Sure, there’s about a thousand to one Israeli reaction to anything Palestinians do. But the Palestinians aren’t a bunch of Jains out sweeping the road in front of them to make sure they kill no living things. And it certainly doesn’t help that Hamas can’t decide if it’s a government or a revolutionary group. It was sad that they supported the murder of those three Israeli youths. So the point is that Israel has justification for attacking Palestine. And they don’t ever seem to be concerned about an appropriate level of force. So let’s get some of those nukes out. Let’s get this over with!

Afterword

Of course, the two countries could act as adults and not allow the extremists on both sides to destroy diplomatic efforts. But I’m sad to say that this idea is even more fanciful than my modest proposal.

Dean Baker has long advocated a response to economic recessions that one never really hears about: work reductions. Suppose that there is a recession and a company decides that it needs to layoff 20% of its workforce. Instead of doing this and putting the laid-off workers on unemployment, the company could cut everyone’s work hours by 20%, and the government would make up the extra 20% in compensation. This would lead to a faster recovery where the company would again be running at full steam.

This is a system that works really well in other countries, most notably Germany. But it would be especially great in the United States because workers here are notoriously bad about taking time off. But the main thing is that it is just good economic policy. It provides more stability. And the truth is that our country produces far too much stuff anyway. Over the last many decades, other advanced economies have used increased productivity in the form of more leisure time. In the United States, at least for the last 35 years, we have used increase productivity to make the rich even richer.

Let’s think about the issue of leisure for a moment. When most people think of leisure, they imagine drinking a cold beer on a Caribbean beach. But the truth is that for most people, leisure is actually something else. Most people really do go by the old saying, “A change is better than a rest.” People putter in their gardens, they knit sweaters, they play with their children (which helps in their proper development). Leisure is not a lack of work, it is just a lack of pay. And that is why as a country we should embrace leisure. It isn’t wasted time. The only way you can see that is if they only thing that matters to you is making money. And although that might be true of the power elite, it shouldn’t be a worldview that the rest of us accept.

Today, Dean Baker wrote a wide ranging article about the problems we face today because of our lack of economic demand, High Asset Prices, the Savings Glut, Secular Stagnation, and Unemployment. After discussing the standard economic approaches to the demand problem, he notes that we could have full employment if everyone just decided to work less. For a great many people, this sounds like a great idea. And the fact is that most Americans work so much not because they need to, but because they are afraid that if they don’t work unreasonable numbers of hours, they will lose their jobs.

Still, there are a lot of people like me who do very much live to work. I’ve seen this a lot in the high tech industry where programmers just want to work ridiculous numbers of hours. But there is no reason why they need to do all that work for some company that frankly abuses such work ethics. These programmers could go home at 5:00 each night and code cool new apps or code controllers for fly sized drones.

But I don’t see us moving in this direction. And the reason is not that people wouldn’t like it. The reason is that the power elite love having a work force that is terrified of losing their jobs. So given the option of laying off 20% of a work force or cutting back hours by 20%, most owners would rather lay off the employees. For one thing, it is less disruptive to the company. But more important, it sends a message to the employees: stay in line, don’t ask for more money, work longer hours, and most of all, tenderly smooch my bottom.

I don’t have a problem with people disagreeing with me. There are times that I’m wrong. Here is a really embarrassing example: Chained-CPI Madness. If you look at that article, you will notice that right at the top I note the error that I made. The point is that I may have a political ax to grind (I do have a political ax to grind!) but it is based upon how I see the world. I would never intentionally manipulate data. I would never, for example, say that raising the minimum wage absolutely won’t cost jobs. But it is de rigueur for conservatives to claim that raising the minimum wage absolutely will cost jobs. The data are mixed, but they tend to side with me. If the data tended against me, I might still argue for raising the minimum wage; but I wouldn’t just quote the studies that agreed with me and pretend that the others didn’t exist.

This is my primary problem with the conservative movement. Look, I understand. If you pull a conservative and a liberal off the street, they will both spout a lot of nonsense. But when it comes to liberal intellectuals, a great deal of care is taken to get the facts right and to not deceive. That just isn’t true on the right. Except for Bruce Bartlett and Josh Barro (both of whom are far from perfect), I can’t name any major conservative thinkers who seem to care about getting the facts right. (And yes, I am especially thinking about Avik Roy.) Paul Krugman made note of this just today. Danny Vinik wrote an article where he pointed out that conservative wonks have abandoned Paul Ryan. But he noted that, “Ryan has long had passionate supporters among conservative intellectuals.” Krugman responded that it was always obvious that Ryan was a charlatan, noting, “And what does that say about the supposed wonks who passionately defended him?”

What it says is that the conservative intellectual class are themselves a bunch of ideologues who don’t care about having a real argument about policies. In other words: there is no major conservative intellectual movement; it is all apologetics. There is no greater example of this than John Hood’s recent The Wall Street Journal article, North Carolina Got it Right on Unemployment Benefits.[1] In the article, he argues that North Carolina was right to cut unemployment benefits because it really did encourage workers to go out and find jobs:

That’s a whole lot of numbers, even for a math geek like me. Luckily we have the national treasure who is Dean Baker to cut through all these lying statistics. First, North Carolina grew by more than the nation, but this has been true for the last four decades. The southern states are seeing more growth. Compared to the rest of that southern region, North Carolina actually grew less. So much for lie number one.

Second, total unemployment in the state dropped a lot in the state. Why? Because people who claimed to be looking for jobs before (because they had to in order to get unemployment benefits) simply stopped looking for work. Thus: the unemployment rate went down, but actual unemployment did not go down. As Baker put it, “While the size of the labor force in the rest of the [southeast] region grew by 1.0 percent over the last year, the labor market shrank by 0.2 percent in North Carolina.” Baker concluded:

There are two possibilities for what is going on with John Hood. One is that he knows he is lying and he just sees himself as a good foot soldier in the ideological fight. But I think it is more likely that he is just a true believer and so regardless of what happened in North Carolina, he was going to hunt around and look for any bit of data that backed up what he knew to be true.

This is my problem with the conservative movement. What Hood did is pretty much what every conservative “thinker” does. Facts are simply things to be used to justify what they already know to be true. Facts are never used alter policy, much less to create it. And this is why our country is on the verge of political crisis. We have two political parties. One is the usual kind of mediocre mixed blessing. The other is crazy. And we have a mainstream media that insists that the two parties are mirror images of each other. During the most recent debt ceiling negotiations, the idea that it would be no big deal got a lot of coverage in the mainstream press. When facts are just an ideological plaything for half the political leaders of a nation, catastrophe is a constant threat.

[1] John Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation. This is something I really hate. Conservatives take people like John Locke, who were very liberal (and even radical) in their own time, and grab onto them. Yes, the conservatives have finally caught up to the liberal thinking of three and a half centuries ago. You can imagine in the year 2525, conservatives will start the Martin Luther King Foundation. I hate that conservatives do this: co-opt great liberal thinkers of the past. Note that no conservatives want to name their foundations after Thomas Paine because after two and a quarter centuries, they are still far behind his thinking.

David Weigel is a smart commentator, but he really doesn’t get it when it comes to racism in the Republican Party. I wrote about this before, Dave Weigel’s Racist Apologetics. And I’ve written about it in a more general sense, Why My Father Watches Fox News. The fact that Republicans get behind people like Allen West and Herman Cain is because they are black men who ask nothing of the party. They are iconoclasts who are willing to pretend that racism is a thing of the past. A black conservative who was upfront about racism would be marginalized. Just look at Colin Powell, who probably couldn’t win a Republican primary in a single state of the union.

This seems to be a foreign concept to Weigel who wrote today, What Conservatives Mean When They Talk About “Race-Baiting” in Mississippi. He’s right in a certain way: Mississippi conservatives don’t hate all blacks, just the ones who make the slightest demands on their fantasy world where racism was abolished 9 April 1865. I really do mean to go back that far, because it is clear that the conservative movement now thinks the civil rights laws of the 1960s were a form of tyranny. That is, after all, what was behind John Roberts’ decision to gut the Voting Rights Act: to pretend that racism is that thing that used to occur in the United States.

If Mississippi conservatives were really concerned about fairness and not just stopping blacks from voting, they would have changed their voting system. Instead of requiring voter identification, they would have required partisan primaries. Instead, they did the opposite. And their most conservative voters then freaked out when the blacks who they had intended to stop from voting at all went ahead and voted for a Republican that they didn’t like. I’m sorry, but this is racism pure and simple.

This is how Weigel sums up the complaints of the Mississippi Republicans, “The ‘racist’ party is the one that wins black votes by promising largesse, and the colorblind party aims to win them by talking free markets and social values.” This in itself is a racist view of the situation. What, after all, was Medicare Part D, but a giveaway to a Republican coalition? What was the attempt to privatize Social Security, but a giveaway to a Republican coalition? What was the recent farm bill, but a giveaway to a Republican coalition and an attack on a Democratic coalition? The whole idea that it is just blacks who are won over by a party’s pandering is racist. And add to that, the idea that rich people vote for the Republican Party because of their embrace of “free markets (!) and social values,” and you have a frighteningly racist statement.

I don’t know how long Weigel can go on making excuses for the clearly racist attitudes on the party of conservatives. And what’s more, I don’t know why he does it. There is no indication that Weigel harbors any more racist attitudes than we all do. And he is certainly smart enough to know what he’s doing. Does he think that he needs to be the one to always be out in front making the best case for the Republican Party’s racist language and policies? Or does he have a real blind spot where he can’t see that even his best case apologia for conservative racism is itself racist.

Let me make it easy for Weigel. The Mississippi conservatives are complaining because they know there are not that many black makers, so it must have been all those black takers who won the election for Thad Cochran. That’s the blunt way of putting, “The ‘racist’ party is the one that wins black votes by promising largesse, and the colorblind party aims to win them by talking free markets and social values.” I really want to know if Weigel would still claim that the conservatives making that argument aren’t really racists.

You probably know the idea of “creative destruction.” Basically, it means that smart people come into a poorly performing company. They get rid of the dead wood—they fire people. Then the company’s prices go down so that consumers have money they can spend on other things, increasing demand elsewhere. Then the fired people and even more can be better employed doing something else. The idea is that it may be disruptive, but in the long run, everyone is better off.

I have always had a problem with this idea. The reason is that prices do not reflect costs. Let’s suppose that I manufacture chairs and they cost me $5 each to make. I’m not going to sell them for $10 because that’s a reasonable markup. If I can get people to pay $100 for them, I’ll sell them for that price. On the other hand, if people will only pay $2 for the chairs, I will sell my existing inventory at that price and discontinue the line. So the only way that costs matters to me is if I’m not making enough. Otherwise, if people want to pay a million bucks for my $5 chair, that’s just fine.

Those of you who know a little economics will say, “Yeah, but you aren’t the only person who makes chairs!” And this is right. In the perfect markets of Chicago School models, other producers will come in and beat down my price. We will go back and forth until we get a price that is some reflection of the cost of bring the product to market. But such truly free markets are almost nonexistent. Let’s look at the way things normally work.

There are a bunch of little drug stores and they employ a whole bunch of people. A Walmart comes into town and puts them all out of business for both good (Walmart really has perfected the supply chain) and bad (Walmart illegally suppresses unions and can provide lost leaders) reasons. So there is lots of disruption but consumers really do get better prices. But the extra savings in the community is not equal to the loss wages. So creative destruction creates profits for the already rich and destroys the incomes of the community.

I was thinking about this after reading a great interview at Truthout between Jason Hickel and Alnoor Ladha, Are Economic Growth and Social Justice Incompatible? I recommend reading the whole thing, because it discusses the way the economy actually works and not the myths that we are constantly told. Take this frightening bit of information from Hickel:

That’s right boys and girls. In the mind of my father’s generation, “capitalism” was the same as “democracy” and “freedom.” But the oligarchs want to create a new kind of system. Feudalism became capitalism, but it seems very much like we are headed to what I call neo-feudalism.

What’s most upsetting about all this is that it has always been a farce. There have never been “free” markets. The system has always been geared to maintain the status quo. On the whole, the rich are not rich because they are smarter or more knowledgeable or harder working. They are rich because they are rich. They are rich because their parents were rich or simply because they were lucky. Being brilliant brings many rewards, but great wealth is not usually one of them. Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds truly revolutionized computing, but it was the subgeniuses Bill Gates and Steve Jobs who became billionaires.

So unless we stand up and do something about it, we will end up not only serfs, but serfs who are beholden to mediocrities. Kind of like we are now, but worse.

Image taken from The Amendment Gazette, Feudalism Then and Now.