In A General Sense

If anyone thinks that Ann Romney "raised" her family all on her own, they must also think that there is nothing odd about having a car elevator.

Bikes and Scarcity

Do you think these Netherlanders are more or less happy because they had no access to cars?




or these Brits:



For much of the 1950s Europe was without cars and, from the looks of things happy enough.  The idea that a muchness of stuff is necessary for happiness.  The recent, and not so recent, carping on about poors with cell phones proving the greatness of America is the kind of brain-dead claptrap Buckley tried to bedazzle the Cambridge debating society to Baldwin's clear disdain.

It's not a question of crap and tat but of civil equality, which is nearly impossible to achieve when plutocrats write legislation.

This is What Kleptocracy Looks LIke

The story of Craig Dubow's disastrous reign over Gannet is pretty well know. Today, it seems, he was given a 32 million dollar severance package.

Much like hedge fund managers Dubow's social utility, which is almost always the argument for these kinds of outrageous payoffs, is near zero. He left the company he ran weaker than when he started; he seriously damaged or destroyed the careers of around 20k living human beings; he engaged in the duplicitous practice of increasing his own and his coterie of wrecker's salaries even as they failed miserably in their jobs.

If someone did this to, say, a house, it would be a case of theft and vandalism; however, because this happened in the "free market," it supposed to be perfectly legal. We're I the owner of any Gannet Stock, I sued everybody on the board and Dubow for theft and vandalism.

Relatedly, over to The New Yorker, there is an article detailing rich peoples comprehensive fraud to avoid paying their fair share. The story begins with a lout who makes several hundred million dollars per year and to avoid paying his taxes he games the system by living in New York City in fact while pretending to live elsewhere. The issues is a technical one when it should be a criminal one: fraud.

It's almost as if the rich are conscienceless swine.

Inequality

Because he is a silly yet horrid little man, Ross Douthat recently wrote, in the course of an incoherent defense of Charles Murray, that

[e]ven if liberals get the higher tax rates on the rich they so ardently desire, the money won’t be adequate to finance our existing entitlements, let alone a New Deal 2.0.

The fact is that he has no facts but rather an assertion. Leaving aside the long-term changes in wealth and wages that would result from a different tax regime and new method of wage allocation, right now the world looks like this:

20 % hold 85% of the wealth. Take that away andgive it to the state to fund an actually existing system in which talent, luck, and hard work move us forward instead of a world in which the sons and daughters of the 20%ers start out on third base, with slightly longer lead-offs based on how obscenely rich their parents were, and things would be much better than they are.

Instead the two political parties argue about how much more money the super rich ought to have and to what extent society ought to stop funding educational institutions and other means of creating a just society.

Reputation or Reality

The Reality is that a sociopathic robot Mitt  Romney is an over entitled twit who does in fact think that because he is rich he ought to run the world and who thinks that nobody else matters as much as other rich people. Almost all rich people think this way. Consider Sarkozy:

It’s incredible that Sarkozy, whose biggest battle in this election is to overcome his reputation as an arrogant, luxury-loving capitalist, would have sent a government jet to rescue Pierre.

Pierre is Sarkozy's son who was ill with food poisoning. What's incredible here is that Lauren Collins thinks taht Sarkozy's reputation is somehow or another inaccurate. like Bush the Lesser's reputation for being a tough guy.

The rich as a class do not care about the rest of us and worry only about manipulating the system, whatever it might be, to their own benefit.

Capitalism, the Right-Wing Critique, and Context

Right now the strong desire of "real" conservatives and the Tea Party Patriots to end sociopathic robot Mitt Romney's path to the White House is creating an entirely favorable moment for the critique of neoliberalism that Romney represents. It's not just Newt but now Alan West (R-Crazed Loon) is accusing the former Bain Capital economic hit man of destroying the economy in order to line his pockets. To be sure, West wants to associate neoliberalism with the center and center left; this position, however, falls to the ground what with Hyak's Road to Serfdom and the various virtues of selfishness the Right, conservatives, and neoliberalism misappropriated from Smith.

Consider Romney's "I like to fire people." He insists that in "context" all he meant was "choice is good." Sure, but the idea of choice as "firing" is telling. It speaks directly to the neoliberal and conservative desire to economize all social relations; to degrade interpersonal relations by making each and everyone about masters and servants. 

Oddly enough, something like 99% of the population doesn't think this way. Most of us think of our relations, even those mediated by economic transactions, as being multilayered affairs in which the personal, the political, and the economic each in the own way and proper sphere condition, without determining, decisions about keeping or changing any other individual, organization, or institution off our On Notice Board or, even more important, from being dead to us.

The Romneys and his neoliberal cohorts see the world as one big round of economically rational decision-making in which the key determinate of economic rationality is the extent of their share of the haul.  Conservatives add to this toxic mix of anti-human policies and slow-motion suicide a conviction that the way things are currently organized, political, economically, socially, and culturally, is best of all possible worlds and that those currently maintaining the worlds as it is are the onliest ones who can do the job properly.

It is now time for the forces of positive change, as opposed to creative destruction and reactionary change, to insist on the something else.

Social Policy and Marketing Parking Spaces

As most of you know Matthew Ygleasias is neoliberal nitwit. For some reason, perhaps the utility of nitwits to forward neoliberal nonsense, lots of folks on the putative left like to link to him and engage with his nitwittery. Over here, for example Mike Konczal mention Yglesias and the guy who invented the idea of using market mechanism to create a dynamic pricing of parking spaces in the same passage. Over here, we find a discussion of the same set of issues, using the market to increase the costs of good and services by including "negative externalities." In the latter example, Peter Frase concludes with these perfectly sensible comments:

Willingness to pay, of course, is also a function of ability to pay, and a market mechanism implicitly attributes worth to a person’s desires in proportion to the money they have to spend.

Thoughtful neoclassical economists know this, but they usually choose to ignore it, presumably because the consequences of confronting it would be too politically uncomfortable. Their own theories tell them that, due to the decreasing marginal utility of money, an extra dollar is worth more to the poor than to the rich. It follows that asking an extra dollar for parking hurts the well-being of the poor far more than the rich, and systematically privileges those who don’t need to think twice about paying six dollars for a parking space. To which a good left neo-liberal would no doubt reply that the issues of rational pricing and wealth redistribution are logically distinct and should be thought separately. But politically, this means that redistribution is the lonely last instance that never comes.

All of which is enough to make a good progressive recoil from such a thing as “the market price for street parking”. But this position is not nearly audacious enough. Rather than a rejection of market relations, this is merely a rejection of a novel form of planning, in favor of the older, more obscure, more unfair and more inefficient methods of planning the use of public space. We could say instead that what’s needed is a direct assault on the inequalities of wealth and income that subvert the functioning of prices, and thereby impede the realization of the plan.

What I don't understand, to be frank, is why we have all these bright fellows seeking to resolve epiphenomenon when the real problem, as Frase points out, is economic inequality. Basing any set of social or political responses to the problems of humanity in society on market mechanism necessarily results in a society based on wealthy people's desires.

So how about everyone on the loft leave Yglesias to blather on in the well-funded obscurity of Slate except, perhaps, to point out that his solutions to life's problems are the "and a pony" of "left" policy discourse.

Being Right is No Excuse for Being a Horrid Little Man, But Still

 Over to TPM, Donald Trump correctly correct Chuck Todd on two important issues and they suggest that it is Trump who looks stupid.

Trump's essentially vulgarity and stupidity is beyond a doubt. But the points to take away from the first is that the NRO employes people who are actually dumber and more ideologically committed than Gingrich. And the second is that Chuck Todd is such an incompetent reporter that Trump, poster boy for ignorance, can school him on matters of fact.

Image the things of greater importance that Todd gets wrong or makes up. No wonder people vote against their interests; the press is incapable of reporting the time of day acurately. Why, one wonders, does TPM miss the point on this fundamentally key issue?

And There You Have It

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