Kim Davis, Religious Exemptions, and Fatassism

Welcome friends!

I was just chuckling over the latest news item on Kim Davis.  If you haven’t been reading the papers recently she’s that mildly frightening backwoods county clerk from Kentucky or Tennessee or some such place who has been in the news recently for refusing to carry out her official duties in terms of issuing marriage licenses to gay people.  Why was she doing that you ask?  Didn’t the Supreme Court just rule on that recently?  Why yes but like every conservative Ms. Davis is mostly concerned with what she herself wants to do.  In the vernacular, she don’t need no stinking laws.  Thus, like every other obnoxious power grabbing petty local bureaucrat who has ever lived she apparently felt entirely justified in doing whatever the hell she wanted to do.  In this case she looked into her blinkered heart and determined that at least in her little neck of the woods only straight people would be getting marriage licenses no matter what those power grabbing Supreme Court big shots in Washington might say about it.  To make a long story short they carted her off to the local slammer and her deputies ended up doing her job for her.  But I just read the other day she’s out again.  Maybe now she’ll do her job and then again maybe she won’t.  Don’t worry though.  Conservative Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas, offered to take her place in jail the next time she flouts the law.  I think they should take him up on the offer.  The best case scenario would be for Ms. Davis to get canned and Mr. Huckabee to serve a long jail term thus ensuring he cannot harm any innocent bystanders via electoral mishap... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

The Gay Marriage Threat to Marco Rubio’s Christianity

Welcome friends!

Speaking of clown acts did you happen to notice Republican presidential hopeful Marco Rubio’s recent frettings that gay marriage proponents may cast what he considers mainstream Christian teaching as hate speech?  I was about to chortle heartily and flip to another page as I normally do when I encounter conservatives wringing their hands over their universe of generally overblown if not entirely fabricated fears and concerns but I did find his statement intriguing in a weird sort of way.  I advocate gay marriage equality all the time (on the principle that gay people are people too) but at the same time I would hate for anyone to feel I’m attacking them personally because of their religious views.  So it’s not the sort of statement I feel I can really let go without comment.  Let’s think this through together.

First of all, let’s get one thing straight: I don’t believe any liberal in the country wants Christians who are morally opposed to homosexuality and / or homosexuals and who dislike gay marriage to either express a gay identity or to engage in gay marriage or even to say good morning to a gay person.  I wish all conservative to know that we liberals support you one hundred percent as far as that sort of thing goes... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Texas Ain’t So Bad Sometimes

Welcome friends!

Looks like I missed a week there.  Sorry, but life happens.  Anyway, I hate to keep harping on the same things over and over again but since freedom of speech and freedom of conscience are such important concepts for the liberal ethos and the American way of life I feel I really should say something about the relatively recent attempt by Muslim extremists (from a few weeks ago now) to undermine those values and the ensuing funny response in the US media.  I’m talking about that case in Texas where two domestic Islamic terrorists arrived at a cartoonist’s convention (obviously) with bloody murder on their minds only to be promptly bumped off at the front gate by a cop working as a security guard.  

Before I get into my usual quasi-philosophical musings let me just first express my admiration for the aforementioned cop... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Arizonda Yearns To Be Free

Welcome friends!

I’ve been a little preoccupied with economic conservatism the last couple of times out so I suppose it’s high time I took a swipe at the other head of the two headed beast before it takes a bite out of our collective backside.  Now did you read about the social conservative politicians in the US state of Arizona who passed a bill recently that would have allowed restaurant owners to refuse to serve customers they didn’t like based on the owners’ religious prejudices?  Yes, that would be gay people, in case you were wondering.  Well, actually I suppose they might eventually have extended the same consideration to their other religious prejudices as well so I don’t really know who else we might be talking about.  Jews or Muslims perhaps?  Or wait, I guess it wouldn’t make sense to require the motivating hatred to emanate from the Christian religion in particular so I suppose we might eventually have been talking about other people, such as Jews and Muslims, refusing to serve people they don’t like based on their own religious sentiments, such as certain Christians, not to mention each other.  Actually I guess it wouldn’t even necessarily have been just Christians, Jews, and Muslims ... oh never mind, I’m starting to get one of my headaches again.  Fortunately it’s a moot point because the governor of Arizona managed to rise to the occasion and veto the bill, much to the consternation of social conservatives like media personality / windbag Rush Limbaugh, who did his bit for irony by declaring his concern that the governor may have been bullied into vetoing the bill.  Because you know conservatives are always very concerned about bullying, right?  Oh yes, and the Arizona Catholic Conference managed to get in the papers by complaining about the outrageous affront to their religious liberties, which they apparently felt hinged crucially on their ability to refuse to do business with the less holy... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

The Austrian Connection

Welcome friends!

It’s the funniest thing.  I was just writing last time about how American conservatives have gotten into the rather annoying habit of referring to their political and intellectual adversaries as Nazis and commies and hey presto I happened to read a rather funny article by the always entertaining E.J. Dionne that bears on just that subject.  The starting point for Mr. Dionne’s discussion was a statement ultraconservative politician Ron Paul (former Representative for the state of .... drum roll please .... Texas; in case you had to ask) made during the 2012 presidential campaign season: “We are all Austrians now.”  

WTH?!  Could this be why conservatives always seem to be living in some type of parallel universe?  Because they’re all Austrians?  OK, I suppose I’d better explain a bit before we continue.  First of all, the “we” in that sentence presumably refers to American conservatives or perhaps the particularly virulent subset of American conservatives that support so-called “libertarians” like Mr. Paul.  One thing’s for sure: I know it can’t refer to Americans in general because I’m an American and I’m not an Austrian.  Secondly, we’re obviously not talking about Austrians in the normal sense of the word, that is, in terms of national identity or allegiance.  Mr. Paul was not suggesting American conservatives have any special relationship with the country of Austria.  We’re talking about the co-called “Austrian school of economics” (or that’s what they call it here in the US anyway; I’d be willing to bet they don’t call it that in other places, such as Austria).  In case you’ve forgotten or managed to avoid ever having learned in the first place (in which case I salute you) the “Austrian school of economics” is named for two illustrious Austrian immigrants who were moderately influential academic economists back in the mid-20th century: Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.  Personally I think it’s a bit funny to insist on calling them and their followers the “Austrian school of economics” as both gentlemen emigrated from Austria as young men.  Mr. Hayek spent most of his working life first in England and then the US, while Mr. von Mises lived in the US from age forty or so.  But I guess if we called them and their followers the “English” or “American” school of economics things would get even more confusing so let’s just go ahead and keep referring to them as the “Austrian school” for want of a better term.  (If you don’t mind I’ll just keep the quotation marks throughout since we’re not all academic economists and I’d hate for anyone to get confused and think we were talking about Austrians in any more general sense, which wouldn’t be fair to our Austrian friends.  Economists living in Austria are basically on the same page as economists living in any other country.  They don’t follow a special school of economics.)

Now I suppose you’re wondering what’s so special about the “Austrian school of economics” compared to, say, the neoclassical school of economics I’m usually talking about?  Well, I think the most salient point for our purposes is that as a practical matter adherents of the mainstream neoclassical school of economics are just a heck of a lot more careful about how they handle value issues and hence what they are willing to say about broader social and political matters than are adherents of the “Austrian school,” who like many other conservatives have trouble seeing the limitations of economic theory and imagine their ostensible insight into that theory gives them a suitable basis for a complete system of social and political philosophy.

I suppose to avoid confusion somewhere down the road I should clarify that the “Austrian school” initially had mostly to do with what economists refer to as macroeconomic issues, that is, the analysis of large scale economic phenomenon such as unemployment, and thus was formerly most commonly contrasted with other schools of macroeconomic theorizing such as Keynesian economics.  So they made their name so to speak arguing that government  activity cannot really help the economy even in the case of demand side slumps.  Of course at some point during the Great Depression we tried it and it pretty much worked so the conventional opinion is they were apparently mistaken.  However, it takes a lot more than that to convince some people, especially when value issues gets mixed in with empirical issues.  And in this case the significance of the value issues eventually became all too obvious.  The “Austrians” really, really wanted government to fail because they had witnessed the rise of fascism in Germany, didn’t like what they saw, and became highly suspicious of or maybe we should just say paranoid about government in general.  Thus, for the “Austrians” the idea government might ever play any positive role in society was anathema.  They considered any discussion along those lines to be little more than a not very subtle means of allowing fascists in through the back door.  I mean, I understand where they were coming from and I’d probably have had the same reaction if I had been there myself.  Indeed, I’d probably have insisted on any number of  unlikely proposition such as, I don’t know, wearing brown shirts can make one’s brain go funny.  I guess sometimes people can overreact a little to these sorts of traumas, do you think?

Now back when I was studying economics in ... well, the year doesn’t matter ... we all considered the “Austrian school” to be very much a strange and rather archaic outlier in the field of economic thought.  It’s not that we considered them complete crackpots per se, more like people who were clearly motivated much more by their own ideological biases than by either rigorous logic or empirical results.  From my own possibly somewhat idiosyncratic perspective as a budding liberal I considered neoclassical economic theory insufficiently rigorous with respect to how it handled value issues, which I concluded pretty early on led to certain conceptual errors I’ve discussed a number of times now in previous posts.  (See My Own Favorite Posts at the bottom of the page or probably any of the posts tagged as having to do with economic theory in the labels section.)  But you know, I had the impression mainstream neoclassical economists were at least trying to think straight about value issues.  Well, I had that impression about some of them anyway.  Nevertheless, I’ve always sympathized with people who reject economic theorizing as too intellectually sloppy and polemical to warrant further study.  I think that’s a rather drastic reaction to what is now for better or worse a very influential way of making sense of the world, but never mind.  However, the way neoclassical economic theory handles value issues is a beacon of clarity and rigor compared to how the “Austrian school” handles those issues.  I’ve just never really understood people who reject standard economic theorizing to go in that direction.  It’s like out of the frying pan into the fire.  But I guess you have to be in the right frame of mind, and that frame of mind I think must involve value issues one perceives to be so important the dictates of rhetorical effectiveness overwhelm the rather more level headed dictates of logic and reason.  Note that I’m not talking right now about the actual values held by devotees of the “Austrian school.”  As I’ve said before I’m actually fine discussing any perspective on values issues one cares to take.  That’s not the problem at all.  I love to discuss ethical issues.  Let’s get it on!  But we’re not even at that point.  What I’m talking about right now is how certain people discuss value issues.  I’m saying my impression is that adherents of the “Austrian school” of economics do not appear to recognize the limitations of economic theory and the severely attenuated conceptualization of utility used in that theory and therefore are not really defending their values in an appropriate way.  I’m suggesting they use economic theory as little more than a rhetorical device to advance values they are not arguing for directly and honestly.

Let me give you an example of the type of thing I’m talking about.  In addition to his more serious work on macroeconomic issues I mentioned previously Mr. Hayek is also famous or perhaps even more famous for authoring a book with the rather frightening title The Road To Serfdom in which he argued the typical conservative line that any government activity beyond the sort of activity wealthy conservatives find personally useful, such as defending property rights, leads inevitably to the erosion of personal freedom and thus puts us all on the road to serfdom.  So, for example, if the government uses any form of economic stimulus to break a demand side slump and get people working again then one thing will follow another and we will all end up as slaves.  Of if the government provides some help to unemployed people or poor people then, again, we will all inevitably become slaves.  Or if the government changes the tax rates to make them a bit more progressive and spread the wealth around, well you know in that case we’ll all become slaves right away.

For me it’s just such a strange way of thinking about the world.  For one thing, it doesn’t seem to attach any significance at all to the issue of the relative legitimacy of different forms of government.  Basically any government activity Mr. Hayek doesn’t approve of ends up being branded a harbinger of slavery.  It doesn’t seem to matter what anyone else thinks about it at all.  I mean, shouldn’t it matter if we’re talking about the government of fascist Nazi Germany, the government of the Stalinist USSR, or the government of the USA?  It doesn’t matter if we have democracy or not?  All governments are essentially the same?  Then what did we fight all those wars for?  No, but seriously, I think for me this must be the single most serious and dangerous failing of modern conservative thought.  They just don’t seem to have any appreciation of the value of our democratic form of government.  It gives me the creeps.

For another thing I just can’t understand what they think or want to suggest is so different and special about government activity they like and accept, such as enforcing current distributional arrangements via contracts and property rights (and police and jails).  Why doesn’t that government activity also lead us down the road to serfdom?  I mean, there’s certainly a lot of it about, right?  Here in the US we have loads of prisons and lawyers and cops and all that.  I don’t see much minimization going on.  Should we do away with these oppressive governmental institutions and become anarchists?  OK, that’s what they call a rhetorical question.  The answer is pretty obvious.  I’m just saying when you think about those types of questions enough to hit upon the obvious answer, that we’re all better off if we accept some government activity to resolve these conflicts of desires so we don’t have to shoot it out on the street whenever we’re at cross purposes, then you’ll also understand the rationale for using democratic government to pursue broader social aims, such as creating a stable economy that distributes resources in an equitable, just, and appropriate way (with the details depending on one’s ethical leanings, which as I said before is something we can talk about and is intellectually speaking one step away from the point I’m trying to make here).  My point is simply that we’re not really talking about the pros and cons of serfdom here, are we?  We’re talking about the pros and cons of various types of government activity in light of various opinions about how we should resolve interpersonal conflicts on an ethical basis.  Looking at the issue as though it has to do with freedom versus serfdom demonstrates a distinctive form of confusion I think is rather similar to that of anarchists who perceive only the restrictive aspect of government power and can’t seem to recognize the corresponding liberating aspect.  Yes, a law against violent crime constrains one’s impulse to bash someone over the head with a rock and thus clearly limits one’s freedom if that’s what one had in mind to do.  However, it also makes one a bit less leery of walking down the road next to the old village rock pile, doesn’t it?  Such a law enhances one’s personal freedom in that respect.  The discussion about how to handle interpersonal conflicts of desire, such as whether one should be able to hit someone else on the head with a rock, should be about the ethical resolution of these sorts of interpersonal conflicts, not about the red herring of how important we all feel it is to be free.

Lastly, the anti-government hand wringing of the “Austrian school” just doesn’t comport with my own feelings at all.  Sorry conservatives.  I realize the US government does all manner of things these day and consequently conservatives probably suppose I must feel myself to be little more than a serf, but I just don’t really feel much like a serf at all.  I feel I have quite a bit of freedom actually.  I think I probably have more personal freedom than nearly anyone else in the world.  And where I’ve given up some of my personal freedom because other people are involved I think it sort of makes sense.  That’s what happens when you live in human society.  Sometimes you can’t do whatever you want because you have to consider how your actions affect other people.  I don’t know, maybe we need to talk a bit about how we define the word “serf.”  I know I talked a little bit in an earlier post about what I was calling wage slavery, which I suppose might sound suspiciously like a form of serfdom, but in that case I was just talking about the typical conditions of life under a market economy.  (November 28, 2013)  I realize market systems only work if they’re backed up with government power to enforce the rules but I didn’t really mean to imply I felt the government was at fault for making me a wage slave by enforcing a market system.  In a democratic system like ours the government does more or less what we tell it to do via the voting booth.  That’s why I was talking about it in the first place.  I was wondering what, if anything, we can or should do about the phenomenon.

So have we made any headway into understanding the enduring mystery of the conservative mind?  Well, I’m not sure.  We have Mr. Paul’s assertion that American conservatives are now all “Austrians,” that is, adherents of the somewhat weird blend of economic, social, and political theorizing known as the “Austrian school of economics,” which paints democratic governments as trying to enslave their populations if they regulate the economy or pay any attention to distributional issues and so on.  And yes, I suppose that does help us understand why conservatives always seem to be charging their opponents with being Nazis and commies.  But for me the underlying mystery remains.  Why do they find that particular perspective so appealing and persuasive?  They didn’t escape from Nazi Germany themselves.  Do conservatives like multibillionaire Mr. Perkins, who I wrote about last time, really feel they are in danger of becoming serfs if our government tries to help out poor people?  Or are they just talking funny because they’re trying to manipulate other people into continuing to allocate them disproportionate economic power and they know most Americans (including especially liberals like me) place a great premium on personal freedom and don’t really like Nazis very much?  And if the latter is what’s going on, are they all in it together, winking at one another behind closed doors as conservatives are wont to do, or is it more a matter of moneyed bigwigs supporting and encouraging sincere ivory tower academics, provincial amateur philosophers, and late night radio talk show hosts and other media types?  How can we ever know for sure?  Who can we talk to straight?  Anyone?  Hmm, that’s a tough one.  Well, I suppose that’s what makes trying to understand conservatives such an entertaining if maddening project.  I guess all we can really do is just keep trying to talk as honestly as we can about our own values and beliefs and see what happens.

References

An economic school has led to gridlock in Washington.  Dione, E. J.  Washington Post.  February 9, 2014.  http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ej-dionne-jr-an-economic-school-has-led-to-gridlock-in-washington/2014/02/09/12de8df0-9020-11e3-b46a-5a3d0d2130da_story.html?hpid=z6.

Freedom In The News

Welcome friends!

I read a couple of stories in the newspapers recently that brought me back to some of the themes I raised in my recent posts about freedom.  (November 1 and 28, 2013.)  One was a story about some new technology that apparently functions as a sort of autopilot for cars at least over certain stretches of road and also about the impact that sort of technology might have on transportation workers.  (Hint: It’s not good news.)  The other story was about some sort of political initiative in Switzerland that involves a proposal to provide every citizen a guaranteed minimum income whether they are working or not.  Interesting stuff.  So let’s take one at a time, shall we?

As you may have detected from my less than detailed technical synopsis I’m not really that interested in the specific details of how the new automobile technology actually works.  I mean, sure it sounds sort of cool, but at the moment I don’t really care.  No, what I’m interested in right now is the impact on society of technological change in general; in this case, the fact that this new technology, like many previous technological innovations and no doubt many technological innovations yet to come, is likely to displace many of the workers required under the previous technology, which in the case of cars with autopilots I suppose would be truck drivers and so on.

Now the thing that struck me as funny about this situation is that it seems to me we should all be rooting for new technology.  It seems so strange to me to think of someone saying, “Hey, I just found a way to reduce the labor required to do X (drive a car or whatever),” only to have someone else say, “Oh, hell!  That’s bad news, that is!”  I mean, it should be unequivocally better, right?  As a society we should be able to do more with less thus freeing up productive resources for other purposes.  Labor saving technology should allow us all some additional leisure time at any given level of needs and desires or alternatively allow us all to ratchet up our needs and desires to some new higher level in line with our new productive capacity.  But it doesn’t usually work out that way under our system, does it?  What usually happens is that a few people associated with the new technology, including the workers and investors to some degree, make some money and sometimes a great whopping boatload of money thus obtaining a greater degree of what we’ve been calling practical economic freedom, while the displaced workers lose their jobs and run around trying to find some new way to survive and typically suffering at least some loss of practical freedom at least in the short term and quite commonly in the long term as well.  In other words, in addition to generating additional economic freedom in some net or global sense these technological developments often also represent a reallocation of economic freedom away from the typically larger number of people associated with the old relatively labor intensive technology and to the much smaller number of people associated with the new labor saving technology.  So what’s the net impact?  Well, much like the situation involving the particular type of utility so beloved of economists, a lot of it depends on how one defines and measures “freedom.”  If you’re primarily interested in some measure of overall freedom without worrying about how particular people happen to be faring then I suppose the net impact on freedom might be favorable.  On the other the other hand, if you’re more interested in actual people and you plan on doing something like counting up how many people gain or lose freedom then it’s quite possible this type of technology might lead to a net decrease in freedom.

To me as a liberal this just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.  No one should fear or resent new technology.  We should be able to set up a distributional system in which everyone gains something from technological improvements and perhaps the people developing and working with the new technology gain somewhat more to provide incentives to do that sort of thing, but no one should be getting hit over the head in the process.  Our current system is just, I don’t know, not in proportion in some ways.  It allocates what I would call a surfeit of practical freedom to certain people for reasons I suspect go well beyond the need to provide incentives leading to an ever escalating gluttony of new needs and desires on the part of this group and it simultaneously restricts the modest amount of practical freedom allocated to other people to what I would consider in many cases completely unacceptable dimensions.  Of course, I suppose you realize this has been going on a long time now, right back to the start of the industrial revolution in the early years of the nineteenth century with the Luddites and their problems with the new fangled textile technology.  Anyway, this is one of the things I think is leading to the concentration of wealth and hence also freedom here in the US to an ever shrinking segment of the population.  And I don’t see any mechanism by which this sort of thing is going to go away on its own including by the way the much vaunted magic of the marketplace.  No, if history is any guide, the more probable situation is that without some sort of purposeful intervention it will get progressively worse until we get enough powerful egotistical self indulgent big shots and enough disgruntled powerless poor wage slaves that our democratic system begins to destabilize.  If that’s what happens then we’re really up the creek because in place of reasoned and carefully considered social and economic changes we’re likely to get hasty, uncontrolled, and probably ill-conceived changes.  Let’s just call it social mayhem.  It’s no way to do business.

So what’s the problem?  Why can’t we apply our ingenuity to resolve this little issue?  Well, the problem in my opinion is that we seem to be unable or unwilling to talk seriously about distributional issues.  Mention the word distribution here in the US and the next thing you know some fat conservative windbag will be calling you a socialist and trying to get a mob together to go set your house on fire.  (Well, maybe that last part was a bit of exaggeration, but you know what I mean: they get all crazy.)  It’s like we’re under the spell of academic economists who feel, rightly in my opinion, that they are not intellectually equipped to deal with distributional issues but who manage to twist that fact into the idea that no one else is intellectually equipped to deal with distributional issues either and that therefore we shouldn’t discuss them or think about them in any way.  It’s just ridiculous.  Look, at some point we’re going to have get serious and start talking about what’s happening to actual people and give up this simple minded idea that whatever happens in a free market system is by definition socially optimal.  Our system isn’t some sort of delicate and mysterious clockwork mechanism that fell from the heavens one day and that no one dare attempt to adjust or manipulate in any way.  Nor should we put our horse before the cart and base our distributional goals on whatever happens rather than trying to get what happens to reflect our distributional goals.  I mean, if you know a new technology is going to generate some unfortunate distributional changes and economic hardship for some people then just get in there and do something about it.  At least provide the displaced workers with some help to get into something else.  I know we do some of that right now but not nearly enough.  We give people a few months of unemployment benefits and then basically send them off with hearty slap on the back.  And if they’re not able to locate suitable employment they end up living under a bridge and everyone throws up their hands like its some sort of unfortunate mystery of nature.  For me it’s just not good enough.  Hey, it’s not difficult to figure out.  People need money to survive.  People need jobs or they need money sans job.  If that means you need to reallocate some money that would otherwise go to people with jobs then I guess that’s what we need to do.  I’m sorry to get all socialistic on you but if you don’t give a damn what happens to your fellow citizens then brother you don’t really have much of a society, do you?

Which brings me to that story about Switzerland.  Crafty people, the Swiss.  They know how to make a buck, that’s for sure.  But apparently they’ve got some other interesting stuff going on as well, such as a couple of nationwide referendums that have resulted in strict limits on executive bonuses and so-called golden handshakes.  What prompted this socialistic assault on the free market in generally conservative Switzerland, you ask?  Well, one likely reason reported in the BBC article I was reading is that some of the biggest Swiss banks, such as USB, continued to pay their top executives huge bonuses even while the banks they were supposedly managing reported huge losses.  Ein bisschen komisch, nict wahr?  (Hint: When you get to executive pay you’re in a world that is apparently largely divorced from normal market forces so what these people get paid has precious little to do with what they actually do on the job.  I wrote a little about that phenomenon before, see my post from July 5, 2012, for example.)  But that’s not even the most interesting thing they’ve been up to recently for our purposes.  No, the most interesting thing is they’re now planning to vote on something that seems to me to be even more remarkable: a guaranteed minimum income for all citizens whether they’re working or not.  Talk about taking the bull by the alpenhorns.  Granted the income they’re talking about is apparently barely enough to survive in pricey Switzerland (about $2,800 per month), but that still represents a big difference from someplace like the US where our official policy is that we don’t really care if you survive or not.  (But I suppose that’s part of the problem, isn’t it?  What exactly does someone need to survive?  You mean survive like a caveman?  Or do you mean survive given the norms of an advanced society?  Are you surviving if you can’t afford rent?  How about a car?  Internet?  TV?  Phone?  Who’s deciding that anyway?  Or are we going down a blind alley here?  Would it be more relevant to just think about this issue in relative terms like some percentage of the average or something like that?  So many questions; so little discussion.)  Even more to the point for me is the rationale for the new bill expressed by a key supporter, Enno Schmidt, who opined “a society in which people work only because they have to have money is ‘no better than slavery.’”  Which is pretty much what I was discussing the other day.  But can a market economy really function without at least some wage slavery? What will happen to the jobs that just aren’t the nicest jobs in the world?  Will they go undone?  Will wages for those jobs rise enough to encourage people to take them up for reasons other than that they have no real choice because the rent is due?  Will it make no difference at all as people ratchet up their perceived needs and desires by the amount of the minimum income so that internally they still feel forced by their economic situation to take those jobs?  And how about the overall economy anyway?  Will this blatant “distortion” of the “natural” distribution of resources (I thought I’d be funny and talk like a conservative economist just then) lead to all manner of unfortunate unintended consequences?  Or will making sure everyone has at least some money to spend give a little demand side boost to the economy and enable otherwise unproductive people the luxury of actually being able to train to do something useful and to relocate and to just in general become more productive members of society?  If that vote passes it will certainly be something interesting to watch in the years to come, won’t it?

Well, looks like that’s about it for this year.  See you in the new one with ... well ... I suppose with pretty much more of the same.  Never seems to end, does it?  Well, never mind.  We’ll get through it together.  As for now, please allow me once again to wish you all a happy holiday and a great and fantastic new year!

References

Swiss to vote on incomes for all — working or not.  Imogen Foulkes.  BBC.  December 17, 2013.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25415501.

Freedom II: The Internal Dimension

Welcome friends!

I think I’ll go ahead and talk a little bit this time about what I’m calling the internal dimension of freedom.  Now I’m sure there are all sorts of philosophical and psychological aspects to the subject but today I’d like to just talk about one rather mundane aspect: the issue of one’s material needs and desires and how they affect one’s internal perception of freedom.  I know what you’re thinking.  Oh, that again?  Well, yes.  I probably mentioned before that I spent more years than I care to remember studying the dismal science (that would be economics) so these sorts of issues always seem to be in the back of my mind somewhere.  Anyway, when it comes to one’s personal freedom I think this particular aspect is fairly significant and there are some interesting issues to think about, so why not?

So what am I thinking about when I say the internal dimension of freedom as it relates to one’s material needs and desires?  Well, it seems to me that one important component of freedom is whether one is or perhaps more accurately perceives oneself to be restricted to engaging in certain activities because of material considerations... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Freedom I: The External Dimension

Welcome friends!

Ah yes, freedom.  I don’t know why but it’s been on mind a lot recently.  Such a complicated and elusive issue or that’s the way it seems to me anyway.  Just the type of thing I like to think about for my little blog posts.  You’ve got to think about something so you might as well think about something a little funny and messed up, right?  Simple issues are just so damned boring.  (Fortunately in my experience almost nothing is as simple as some people would have it be, but still …)  Anyway, a couple of random thoughts about freedom crossed my mind the other day so I thought I’d spend a few moments to jot them down.

My first thought is that the concept of freedom has both an external and internal dimension and both dimensions have their share of interesting features.  I considered just talking about both dimensions in this post but maybe that’s too much so let me just say a few words about the external dimension of freedom this time and next time I’ll take up the internal dimension (depending on what manner of lunacy hits the news in the interim, but in a future post anyway).

So what do I mean by the external dimension of freedom?  Well, I’m thinking of the sort of freedom that appears to emanate from one’s environment as opposed to emanating from one’s own head or heart.  Now this external dimension of freedom seems to me to also have two dimensions: what one might call a legal dimension and another I suppose one might call a material dimension.  That in turn leads me to my first observation about the external dimension of freedom.  For some reason or other I think people in the US and possibly other Western countries as well tend to think of external freedom primarily in terms of the legal dimension rather than the material dimension and even then only in a peculiarly restricted sense of the legal dimension.  And that’s just a recipe for confusion all around.

What the heck am I babbling about?  Well, let me just set up a little example to get the discussion going on a more concrete basis.  Let’s say some guy has fallen on hard times and is living under a bridge but sees a castle on a hill and says to himself, “I think I’ll go live in that castle.”  Lo and behold, he finds it impossible.  He actually makes it to the castle one day and forces the door but the police arrive and promptly cart him off to jail.  Consider the following question: Was this guy ever free to live in the castle?

You see where I’m going with this, right?  Hello!  Ambiguous language alert!  The answer clearly depends on what we mean by freedom in this context and that’s just not all that obvious to me.  One way to think about this issue would be to check if there were any government laws or edicts that expressly prohibited the guy from moving into the castle.  You know, something like, “It is hereby decreed no one living under the bridge shall henceforth live in the castle.”  If there were a law like that on the books I think we’d all be on the same page in saying, no, apparently this guy was not free to live in the castle.  That’s what I’m calling the legal dimension of the external dimension of freedom.  Is whatever it is allowed under the law?  (By the way, I hope having two levels of dimensions isn’t too confusing for anyone.  I’m just too lazy to get out the thesaurus right now.)

What about the case where there is no such law or edict?  Well, now I think we’re starting to get into a more ambiguous and hence interesting situation.  One perspective might be to say, yes, the guy was free to live in the castle, he just didn’t have enough money to buy it and thus obtain the legal right to live there.  I suppose one might say he was free to live in the castle conditional on the fact that he came up with the money to buy it.  Hmm, so now in place of or in addition to our questions about freedom we have questions about conditional freedom.  I’m not sure we’ve made all that much progress because one thing we would probably want to check is whether there were any laws or edicts that prohibited the guy from coming up with the money to buy the castle.  Anyway, it would seem a little strange to me to say the guy was free to live in the castle conditional on his coming up with the money to buy the castle in the context of a law that prohibited him from obtaining the necessary funds.  In that situation I think the answer would again be pretty clear: the guy was apparently not free to live in the castle.  In that case we would still be dealing primarily with the legal dimension of freedom even though we would be starting to see the intrusion of a more material sense of freedom in terms of money and economic power serving as the intermediary between what this guy wants and what he can actually get.

What about the case where there is no such law or edict?  Well, market systems entail certain legal rules or if you want to use academic language institutions governing how one can legally obtain money, and they typically also come with requirements that one pay at least something in taxes, and those rules and requirements might theoretically have prevented the guy in question from accumulating enough dough to buy the castle.  You know, maybe if he could have just robbed a bank or skipped out on his taxes for a year or three he would have been in the place like a shot but since he was sticking to the rules then no.  So did the presence of these legal rules limit the guy’s freedom to live in the castle?  The situation is getting a little more interesting (to me anyway) because now we’re operating at the nexus of legal and material freedom and the language is starting to get a little weird.

If you’re thinking yes, those legal rules limited the guy’s freedom to live in the castle, and like most people you put a positive value on freedom, then you’re well on your way to developing that particular malady of the imagination known as anarchism in which one sees government and laws and property rights and so on as impediments to freedom rather than as expressions of or even requirements for freedom.  But surely that’s a funny way to look at the situation.  What would happen if we eliminated those rules?  Let’s say by hook or by crook the guy managed to rake in enough cash to buy the castle and move in.  Let’s say the following week a more heavily armed and better financed group of miscreants kicked in the front door and promptly threw the guy out the window.  Why not?  Certainly sounds to me like the guy wouldn’t have been free to live in the castle under those conditions.  He’s lying on the pavement at this point.  It seems to me we’re now talking strictly about the material dimension of freedom.  Laws have nothing to do with it but just try it sometime and see what happens.  By the way, you know the situation I’m describing here corresponds to how they actually managed things for centuries in the bad old days, right?  I’m not just making things up over here.  Heck, they’re probably still doing things this way is certain places around the globe right now.

On the other hand, if you’re thinking no, those legal rules did not limit the guy’s freedom to live in the castle and were, instead, what rendered it even theoretically possible for him to do so by creating the legal framework that would allow him to accumulate funds without getting ripped off and robbed by other people and that would also enforce his property rights if ever he got enough cash to buy the place.  So under this perspective the legal rules surrounding the market system supported the guy’s freedom to live in the castle.  However, the fact of the matter remains that under these rules the guy might still have been unable to accumulate the required amount of money, right?  If he wasn’t born to money, didn’t have a head for business and finance, wasn’t drawn to fields that were particularly lucrative, had the misfortune of living during a recession, depression, war, and so on, well then the guy would most likely have been out of luck.  So even with these rules and institutions the guy wouldn’t necessarily have been free to live in the castle in a material sense.

Of course, in order to accommodate the guy’s desire to live in the castle we could always have changed things around not only in terms of the legal framework surrounding how he could accumulate money and the policies affecting his overall economic situation but directly in terms of the distribution of castles.  For example, we could theoretically have said something like, look, a lot of people want to live in the castle and we think it’s important they all have that experience so we’re passing a law that everyone can live in the castle for a week.  (Yes, the guy was either living on a very small island or there were an awful lot of castles about, but that’s not important here.)  That would seem to me to render the guy free to live in the castle, at least for a few days.  But that would represent a rather limited sort of freedom, would it not?  He would still have to move out by the end of the week and in a sense such a rule would also limit his freedom to live in the castle for longer than a week.

By this point you may be thinking yes, yes, I get it: lots of issues about freedom.  What’s the point?  Fair question.  It’s interesting to me because it seems to me many people get a little funny when they think about issues of the general type of people wanting to live in castles, that is, distributional issues.  In particular, many people seem to me to want to discuss these issues in the language of personal freedom but to me that just seems so confusing for the reasons I’ve just discussed.  You know, what kind of freedom?  Whose freedom?  It just seems so much clearer to me to talk about these distributional issues in terms of, well, the morality of distributing resources along certain dimensions.  Look, we’ve got a castle on a hill.  Who’s going to live there?  Why?  It’s all about how we specify the winners and losers under a given economic system for distributing scarce resources.  And I’m not saying it’s a simple issue by any means.  I certainly don’t know the answer, although I have some ideas we could discuss someday.  Maybe it involves future considerations such as incentives or the question of who can best care for the castle.  Maybe it involves who would get the most out of living in the castle.  Maybe it involves who has the strongest right to live in the castle.  But one thing seems clear to me: the only way to make the issue appear to hinge on freedom is to pretend other people don’t exist so the issue becomes merely what one wants to do and one’s freedom to do it.  But we all know other people actually do exist, right?  So we’re not going to get anywhere if all we can agree upon is that freedom is good.

If you’ve read my previous posts then you’ll recognize all I’m really doing here is going over yet again the liberal ethos I’m always talking about but this time from a slightly different angle.  Recall that under the liberal ethos there is a realm in which one’s actions do not have a significant effect on other people and in that realm it does, indeed, make sense to portray the basic issue as one of supporting or not supporting personal freedom as a sort of general abstract value.  But then there’s the other realm in which one’s actions do have a significant effect on other people.  That is the realm that includes economic issues like the distribution of scarce resources.  In that realm we’re talking about resolving interpersonal conflicts of needs and desires and in that realm it just doesn’t make sense to me to portray the issue as hinging on one’s attitude toward personal freedom.  Too many people are involved.  If you’re talking about personal freedom in this context all you’re probably doing is talking in circles by meandering willy nilly through various potential conceptions and dimensions of freedom and confusing the hell out of everyone including quite possibly yourself.  You’ve got to go beyond the value of freedom and into the messy details of these sorts of interpersonal conflicts.  I know, that’s a heck of a lot more work than just saying you support freedom, isn’t it?  But that’s the nature of the beast.  What else can we do?  Start babbling simplistic nonsense like some conservative libertarian or anarchist?  Life is complicated.  Let’s at least have some fun talking about it.