He Didn't Mean What He Said

Matthew Yglesias on the unfairness of no choice in schools for poor people:

This is part of what drives me crazy about debates around charter schools and “choice” in the United States. Every prosperous family in the Washington, DC metro area is exercising public school choice when they decide where to live. And competition between suburban jurisdictions to attract affluent residents and raise property values is an important force in the competitive delivery of social services. It’s only poor people who just get stuck living where they can afford to live (i.e., someplace with low-quality services) and going to whatever school happens to be there. You need to either increase the number of high-quality schools or else increase the capacity of existing high-quality schools. Otherwise, well-heeled parents will use their financial clout to buy access to them, and poor parents will be stuck with the schools they can afford.

This seems relative clear cut: the rich by virtue of being rich have a choice of sending their kids to good schools. The poor don't. The implication is, which is why charter schools and choice appear, that those kinds of choices for poor families will improve educational outcomes.

Freddie deBoer wrote:

Matt Yglesias pulls out his new hobby horse: rich people have more choices than poor people, charter schools increase choices for poor people (even if they don’t work!), and for this reason we should, I take it, undertake all the union-smashing ideas beloved of the reform movement.

This is, again, pretty clear and accurate. Today, Yglesias wrote:

A lot of school reform haters seem mighty impressed by this Freddie de Boer takedown of an argument about charter schools that I never made. So here, again, is my argument. The term “charter schools” doesn’t appear in it in order to clarify the point that this is not an argument about charter schools.

What follows is a description, as opposed to argument about, of how money allows rich people to live wherever they wan't.  Leaving aside the sophomoric "school reform haters" as shorthand for people who accept that the available evidence shows that choice and charter don't work, notice how his defense of his original argument requires stripping the argument out of the original post by denying the implication of his use of charter schools and choice in the original.

Unless Yglesias threw those words in there at random and now denies they were there at all, the serve an implicit claim that charters and choice would/could offer to the poor what the rich already have. Otherwise there is no argument just a tediously obvious description of how, you know, having money allows its possessors to buy stuff.

Lame.

More Wasting of Time

Over to Crooked Timber the conversation about neoliberalism and Matthew Yglesias continues. Henry Farrell asked and continues to ask for Yglesias' "theory of politics" in response Yglesias harps on "policy" and makes sophomoric underpants gnome quips. This is the classic neoliberal dodge.  Pretend that you care deeply about policy and demand detailed arguments for and against and then ignore reality.

Take school choice, for example, the evidence is that the policy doesn't work. Yet Yglesias and the Wisconsin Republicans refuse to allow reality to get in the way of the expansion of this failed policy. Why? Because it's not about the ends; it's about the means: when the means meet the ideological test, they cannot fail they can only be failed.

Neoliberalism is a set of predetermined policies based on falsified believe in the efficacy of markets that seeks to dissolve disagreement with the disgraced and disproved "verities" of a failed and fairly ridiculous economic daydream.

UPDATE:
In the comments to the latest over to Crooked Timber, somebody claiming to be Yglesias writes:

Since a lot of people seem hung up on the word “workable” let me define it thusly: a “workable” policy agenda is one that, if implemented, would in fact achieve its ends.

School choice doesn't work and yet he insist on it; deregulation hasn't worked and yet he insist on it; destroying unions as a means of strengthening an industry hasn't worked and yet he think we need to get rid of teachers unions and so on. By his own words is he condemned. 

Waste of Time

It seems that this is the 20th anniversary of Tom Waits' Rain Dogs. It is one of the all time great albums. For reasons that are entirely unclear, to me in any event, someone decided to have a bunch of talentless bums important artists cover the songs.

In a related note, various and sundry people have been picking  on Matthew Yglesias for his neo-liberalism.  As is his wont, Yglesias responds by demanding concrete examples of his sins. Although, much like singing covers of Tom Waits, it's a waste of time, the problem with neoliberalism is that at its core it is dedicated to a market fundamentalism. Over to the Crooked Timber, last link, the idea is to divide neoliberalism into left and right with Yglesias being "left" and, one assumes, Thatcher and Reagan being "right." The difficulty here is that once you buy into the genius of the market and spend time mocking regulations and licensing  regimes, you, which is to say Ygelsias, provide a left-wing-I-really-care-about-the-poor-and-downtrodden gloss to a horrid  political/economic ideology, which hates people, and, what is even more important, because Yglesias and his fellow "left" neoliberals despise everyone to their left, which has the added advantage of providing a reasonable "left" neoliberal cover for the refusal of either the center or the right to listen to the actual real left.

One result of all this is that stolid centrists like, for  example, Obama tend to make the wrong policy decisions. 1848, I can't say this enough, ought to have taught the reasonable hippie punchers that the Conservatives and Reactionaries do not actually want and in fact won't give an inch.

The problem, in other words, isn't policies or end points it's the fact that Yglesias and co ally themselves with men and women who refuse to work toward the same ends via any policies. In short, "left" neoliberals are fooling themselves. And, just to be clear, if you think neoliberalism works, look out the window.

UPDATE:
Here's a thingymabob by Bradford Delong in which he tries to make "left" neoliberalism different from right neoliberalism and, quite frankly, I think  he fails. See also.

Things People Say

In a book review in Sunday's NYT, noted Conservative political scientist Harvey Mansfield was doing a fine job of proving that if you want to think about the US's Constitution Madison is a better guide than noted Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt. He than argued that

[w]ith regard to welfare, Democrats are for it, Republicans against it; with regard to national security, the situation is reversed.

He cannot possible think that that sentence has any resemblance to reality. If he does, he needs to be kept away from sharp objects. Maybe he's trying to be funny, I don't see it. I stopped reading here because he's using a shop-worn trope so lazily that it undermines his attempt to engage in a serious intellectual endeavor.

The other day Jack Cassidy wrote about bike lanes in New York City, it set off a bunch of other folks who treated Cassidy as if he was interested in a debate. He isn't. In his first paragraph he writes that

[a]t the risk of incurring the wrath of the bicycle lobby, a constituency that pursues its agenda with about as much modesty and humor as the Jacobins pursued theirs[.]

 This isn't an attempt to engage with the other side of the discussion; it's an attempt to be an obnoxious fool. Think about all the folks who have been called humorless and dictatorial: feminists, ecological activists, lesbians, gay rights activists, Liberals, egg heads, suffragettes, civil rights activists, anti-war activists, Wobblies, etc, etc.  It's a trope rolled out by folks who realize that they are wrong but find the truth inconvenient or, in this case, causing them inconvenience so Cassidy, in this case, engages in an ad hominem
that frees everyone from listening to what he has to say and all the responses should have been: this kind of lazy nonsense isn't worth taking seriously.

In other discursive fields, the usual suspects made clear that they aren't actually interested in what what they say means.

On Friday, David Brooks wrote an op ed bit about how folks are overly confident and how bad that this. This is a man who makes his living talking about things he knows very little about and writing books that are equally filled with nonsense and gobbledygook. He ought to become the change he wants to see and resign to live a life of quiet contemplation in Tibet.

Last week, Michele Bachmann mangled American history and, when called on it, accused everyone in Massachusetts of hating freedom and blamed Obama's teleprompter for her ignorance. She ought to go with Brooks.

Finally,  according to yesterday's Wisconsin State Journal, Sarah Palin, who left her job after a half-term because she worried about lawsuits, said of the Wisconsin senators who skedaddled, that

[i]f your cause is worthy and just, and if it's -- it's worthwhile then should have  the ability to defend it. You shouldn't just retreat and duck and cover[.]

She has now made clear that she will not run for President and that she too is off to Tibet.

The think that ties all this together is that nearly none of the people involved particularly cares that they incoherent or implicated themselves as hopeless unreflective ninnies, it's that their unreflective ninnihood is what earns them a check or a place in the political firmament.

Which Witch is Which

The events in Egypt are giving Conservatives fits.  Jay Nordlinger over to the Corner writes

It seems that a democratic revolution is sweeping the Middle East — spurred, I am sure, by American and allied actions in Iraq. (Our chattering classes will never admit this.)

Nina Shea, on the other hand, frets because

Egyptian scholar Samuel Tadros [told her] that observers in Cairo are seeing Islamists out in full force among the protesters today for the first time since the demonstrations began. They poured out of the mosques after Friday prayers and are marching and shouting Islamist slogans.

On Fox News the confusion is so great that they cannot decide if they should hate Obama for supporting a dictator or for fostering the next Iran.

Me? I say wait and see.

Here In Wisconsin

Ron Johnson, who is a manufacturer, accountant, and lucky in his wife's family's business acumen, is running for US Senate in the great state of Wisconsin, home to the House on the Rock, was quizzed recently on his plan for the middle class.  He said, in part, nothing. When not saying nothing, he promoted the policies that failed for the past 30 or so years as the policies he, as an accountant and manufacturer, would put in place.  Ron Johnson follower of failed policies wants a chance to watch those policies fail yet again.

Newspapers

In the New York Times this am, David Brooks writes something that is either a fact free sociological discussion of Harvard's student body or a his attempt to use the Times' op-ed space to audition for role of the world's most pompous movie reviewer.

Meanwhile at the Washington Post, Dinesh D'Souza gets to reprise his assault on reality.

What is the point?

Horrific Historical Analogies

An alert non-commentator alertly alerted me to this exchange between Obama and some random crooks and malefactors of great wealth.  In response to increase regulation and potential changes in tax rates

Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman had the nerve to say this:

"It's a war," Schwarzman said on the struggle with the administration over increasing taxes on private-equity firms. "It's like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939."

When Hitler and his henchmen invaded Poland, they rounded up and began murdering Polish intellectuals, Jews, and others they deemed of being unworthy of life.  Obama proposes increasing tax rates by some small percentage or another. Clearly, the two situations are analogous, which is to say they aren't. 

Cliff May is Silly

He writes that

The New York Times sports section mainstreams polygamy[.]

Linking to this article, which, in fact, mainstreams equestrian sports, which is, in fact, worse.

UPDATE:
Just to be clear the mainstreaming consisted of mentioning without the condemnatory and condescending tone May seems to want, the article, which is fairly light-weight in its own right, that a women in a polygamous marriage where it is legal is a woman in a polygamous marriage.