Insult

From now on I think we should all tar all neoliberals and their robotic sociopathic enablers with the brush of this Bobby Burns epithet:

thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense

The phrase is one of several dozen doozies sent by Burns to a critic.

Thatcher, Reagan, Bush I and II, Clinton and Major Never Existed, to Say Nothing of New Labor

From the NRO

They say everything old is new again, and that is certainly true of the British riots. The main areas of outbreak — Tottenham, Brixton, Toxteth in Liverpool — were scenes of similar riots and disorder in the 1980s and early ’90s. To that extent, they show how 14 years of Labour-party rule merely papered over the cracks in British society.

What baffles is this Thatcher and Reagan get all the credit for changing the debate from "welfare state" to "neoliberal state." And since then, we have suffered under one form or another of neoliberalism. It didn't work. There were clearly inflationary problems with the post-War Consensus prior to the horrors of "stagflation." However, the right  neoliberals insisted that under their watch the rising tide would life all boats while the left neoliberals insisted that welfare would aid those whose boats leaked.  Neither state of affairs have come to pass.

So what is to be done? At the  moment, here in the US it's Obama's neoliberalism, Romney's whateverism, or Bachman/Perry Christianism. It is, I think, too early to start drinking and too late to follow John Prine's advice:

A Quick Point

One reason that has become so difficult to raise taxes is that neoliberals posing as Progressives make this kind of arugment:

That’s not to say we need to “soak the professors” rather than “soak the rich.” Taxing the consumption of high-rollers and redistributing it to the less fortunate is a great idea. But a lot of the political dialogue I see online seems to consist of a slightly strange form of class resentment in which intellectuals, nonprofit workers, or public servants express bitterness about the high incomes of businesspeople whose lives they don’t actually envy.

Here the desire to tax the wealth is represented as class warfare. The obvious response:

Taxation isn’t a matter of rewards and punishments. It’s a matter of paying for the public obligations a govt takes on by collecting money from the members of society. The reasonable way to go about this is in the manner that least disturbs the ability of those individuals to go about their lives, at the very least to go about their lives in a way that leaves them capable fo contributing next year at tax time. We don’t tax the rich members of society at higher rates than the poor because we imagine that they are sinners in need of punishment. We tax the poor at lower rates because we don’t want the govt to take from them what they need to survive and thrive. We could tax people who earn $1,000,000 a year at 90%, and they and their families would do fine, would have food and shelter and clothing and health insurance, and even amusement, in abundance, and they would still be doing just as well next year and able to pay just as much in taxes. Take 90% from someone who earns $25,000, take almost any % from them, and you’re going to starve them. They won’t be able to pay taxes next year if they go quietly with this arrangement, because they will be dead of starvation or exposure, and there will be war if they don’t go quietly

Small wonder, then, that tax increases are off the table when we have to rely on some guy on the internet to make the argument alleged progressives refuse to make.

How to Spot a Neoliberal in Any Clothing

Obviously, there's the market fundamentalism; but also there's this:

She is smart. (That’s why she’s so rich.)

That's just not true. Mitt Romney is rich and he is an idiot. Donald Trump was/is rich and he is worse than an idiot. And so on. People are rich for lots of reasons few to none of which are smarts.

Form Versus Substance

Matthew Yglesias castigates Democratic and Progressive politicians for not riding roughshod over their opponents when they have the chance. As is his wont, Yglesias commends the manly men of the Republican party for their disdain for substantive democracy. As he often does, he commends them for refusing to engage in debate and compromise while extolling their use of procedure to get, or sort of get, what they want.  In this case, his thinks that the ACA, which is now a law, was badly handled because the currently dead-on-arrival Ryan plan passed with little or no debate, compromise, and etc.


David Weigel engages in the same sort of silliness when he derides Liberals for not engaging in the antics similar to the Tea Party Patriots on the grounds that their sober rejection of the Republicans anti-human agenda because there was

there was no reaction worthy of YouTube, nothing for cable news.(via)

Meanwhile in New Jersey, manly man and deeply-committed Republican governor Chris Christie threatens to go all Bismark on the New Jersey Supreme Court. Can the the Yglesias/Weigle wing, i.e., bright young things more enamored of the surface than the substance of things, of the commentariat's adulation be far behind? After all, like Paul Ryan, he's serous and taking on issues, the destruction of his state's constitutional order, in the service of solving as problem by attacking the least among us.

White Collar Robots

Paul Krugman has two posts up about our post-human future or - more precisely - discussing how now computers are displacing white collar workers. Chris Bertram makes the obvious point the real issue is distribution of benefits; however, in the comments someone shows up to defend the idea that in the future we will all be service workers, except for those of us whose service work has been roboticized, and -- when called on the dystopia -- gets all mad because some elite or another has dared to insult service workers. It's like there's a set of talking  points defending a world that no sensible person wants to live in.

Compromise

I mentioned earlier that the idea of a Progressive/Conservative alliance to destroy teachers' unions wasn't really a Progressive/Conservative alliance but rather a Neoliberal conviction that unions have to go.  Over to the NRO, Jay Nordlinger makes this clear. He writes

Teachers used to be something like a holy caste, practically the most honorable among us. I come from a family of teachers. Everyone thought of it as a noble calling. Teachers earned too little, but that was remedied, over time.

Notice the passive voice. It wasn't, so he would have you believe, the concerted union action that led to improved wages rather it "remedied" itself over time.

He continues:

Then everything went screwy. Teachers were not just well paid. (“Best part-time job in America,” Lee Iacocca once quipped, to the howls of many.) They were some of the most petulant, greediest, nastiest unionists around.

The nerve of workers using their collective agency to improve their wages and, one assumes,  to interfere in the political process in a way that benefits them.  They ought, it seems, to have waited for remedies. After a silly letter from someone in Madison Wisconsin who makes the mistake of assuming that the teachers' union here is a barrier to decent education, Nordlinger makes clear why no sensible Progressive, or really anyone, would ally with those seeking to destroy unions:

I remember something a friend told me — a friend who, 15 years ago, was fighting for school choice. When the teacher-union lawyers entered the courtroom, “I could practically smell the sulphur coming off them.”

 I always thought that the phrase demonizing your enemies was meant more or less metaphorically.

Guessing isn't Reasoning

J.M. Keynes once quipped that

[w]hen the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

Today, Paul Krugman argued that a committment to an ideology isn't like race in that former is mutable and latter isn't. In response, Megan McArdle blathered that

I presume that Paul Krugman holds the beliefs he does because they are his best guess at what is true, and that he could no more change his beliefs than he could change his native language.

McArdle, in short, thinks that people arrive at an unshakeable world view because they "guess" at how the world works and having once guessed they can never alter their guesses, which -- I suppose -- explains her own refusal to change her mind even as the world proves her guess to be wildly off base.

Sort of like John Derbyshire's admission that he can't  or, in any event, won't reason at all., this is really all you need to know of the Glibertarian mindset. See also.

Center Right Nation

Some of you may think that Reagan changed the way Americans think about the world and, consequently, you might think that insisting that Neoliberalism is the new orthodoxy and that soberly assessing the world from a Neoliberal point of view is simply accepting the world as it is. From Xpostfactoid we find a post from some guy with a chart based on data collected from some other guy that offers this view of public opinion:

This chart suggests that folks plumping for Neoliberal solutions are engaged in trying to sway the public's view of the world. You might suggest that public opinion and things as they are are two different things, by which you might mean the world works the way Neoliberals say it does. This is, as of course, difficult to maintain when much of the rest of the world operates outside the Neoliberal model.

When the Perfect Becomes the Enemy of the Good

When Voltaire wrote that I think he had this particular troika of doodlebugs in mind: Ross Douthat, Megan McArdle, and Matthew Yglesias. These three members of the pundocracy spend much of their time blathering about things of which they know nothing.  Recently, they all managed to pen posts that denigrate the idea of doing anything to meliorate the world as it presently is.

Douthat argues that

[a]fter all, what ultimately ails the world is its inherent imperfectibility — its fallen character, if you’re a Christian; its irreducible complexity and tendency toward entropy and dissolution, if you’re a strict materialist. This is true on all the great issues of the day. No matter how many lives may be saved or lost because of health care policy, no lives will be saved forever, and every gain will be an infinitely modest hedge against the wasting power of disease and death. No matter the wisdom of our politicians or the sagacity of their economic advisors, no policy course can guarantee universal wealth or permanent economic growth. And no matter the temperature of our discourse, the state of our gun laws, or the quality of our mental health care, nothing human beings do can prevent the occasional madman from shooting up a crowded parking lot.

I am not sure what he means by "strict" in his characterization of materialist, but I am, more or less, a materialist and what he said there is poppycock. It is, obviously and trivially, true that no matter what problems will remain; this doesn't mean we have to stop. From a Christian perspective there is no greater call to action than this

34 Then shall the King say to them on his right hand, Come, you blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: 35 For I was an hungered, and you gave me meat: I was thirsty, and you gave me drink: I was a stranger, and you took me in: 36 Naked, and you clothed me: I was sick, and you visited me: I was in prison, and you came to me. 37 Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we you an hungered, and fed you? or thirsty, and gave you drink? 38 When saw we you a stranger, and took you in? or naked, and clothed you? 39 Or when saw we you sick, or in prison, and came to you? 40 And the King shall answer and say to them, Truly I say to you, Inasmuch as you have done it to one of the least of these my brothers, you have done it to me.

It is also that case that, according to Christ, the world will be made perfect

31 When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit on the throne of his glory: 32 And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divides his sheep from the goats: 33 And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

There is the whole tradition of Christian melioration of things of the this world, like Just War theory, Peace of God, Truce of God, and the whole notion of meliorating the City of Man while the Douthatss of the world await the Son of Man to return and send the rest of us goats to the fiery pits. He is, in other words, full of it. Sure the world as it is is a tough place to love and harder place to fix; but so what?  I thought Catholics rejected a theology of despair.

McArdle reads, or claims to, the recent Atul Gawande, that I mentioned here, and concludes

But not the only reason. Even the programs that genuinely work have a lot of things going for them that a broader program won't.  They have a crack team of highly educated experts who are extremely excited about the program, and understand the ideas behind it backwards and forwards.  They work in a controlled environment, and usually have a decent amount of administrative support for their efforts.  They are time limited, which matters--people are willing to endure lots of things for a limited, known duration that they wouldn't do permanently. They are often offering bonuses for participation.

Then they get implemented in the real world, with ordinary people who don't particularly want to change the way they've always done things, don't really care about the noble ideas behind your program, and don't see any end to it.  And the effects disappear

See, it cannot work because "ordinary" people wont do the work necessary to make change a reality. Of course, the one of the points was that ordinary people with the necessary skills could and did make the various experiments work.  It is also odd, isn't it, the degree of contempt she displays toward ordinary folks.  The article made clear that there was template for success: more intervention led to lower health care costs for the most expensive patients and their health improved.  Her claim is that "ordinary" people hired to engage in similar acts, wont because, you know, "ordinary" folks are lazy asses. This from a woman who cannot add.

Matthew Yglesias, riffing off of something Jon Chait burbled, thinks that although

[w]hen Bill Clinton pronounced that “the era of big government is over” in 1995, he was clearly wrong. And since that time we’ve gotten SCHIP, Medicare started covering prescription drugs, and now we have the Affordable Care Act. So the era of big government wasn’t over in 1995 and it’s not over in 2010, but what is over is the era of big government liberalism. That’s not to say there will be no new changes to health care policy or to education policy or any of the rest of it. But there aren’t any major new fundamental commitments to be undertaken and there isn’t any more money to undertake it with. 

Because

Future public policy has to be about ways to maximize sustainable economic growth, and ways to maximize the efficiency with which services are delivered. 

Remember that neither Chait nor Yglesias has anytime for anyone on their left and Yglesias really and sincerely believes that, despite all reality to the contrary, neo-Liberalism is the most bestest way to make the world a better place for all; primarily, the last quoted sentence suggests, because the supply of robots is unlimited. Color me shocked, a neo-Liberal looks around at a world with high unemployment, increase income and wealth disparity, increasingly deregulated economies falling into cycles of boom and bust much like the bad old days pre-Keynesian interventionism, and so on and concludes that our most pressing problem is the continued depression of workers wages and the continued process of deskilling.  If you don't believe me on the last point go and read one of his posts on education reform. Or, better yet, go read about neo-Liberalism and welfare or the way in which Yglesias, whether he knows it or not, is acting and speaking in the interests of the wealthy and powerful.

If we listen to anyone of these up-and-coming embarrassments to the all-American values of hard work, getting things done, and the gradual creation of an ever more perfect, even if it always sucks, world, we would give up. Why, one wonders, would such a "diverse" group of "thinkers" decide to try and convince everyone to stop working?