Conservative Ideology and Socialism Two Ways

Welcome friends!

I must apologize for the breakdown in my scheduling the last few weeks.  It’s been a little crazy around here and I’m not just talking about President Trump and the Republican Party.  So let’s make up for lost time and dive right in shall we?  What caught my eye this week was an amusing online comment about wealthy American “socialists” who live in gated communities and high rises not caring that immigrants and “black” people are taking jobs from hapless “white” people.  Always fun to read these sorts of posts if one can get past the fractured syntax and inventive spelling because it’s a little window into how other people see the world and by other people I mean in this instance people one might not otherwise engage in conversation in everyday life.  Ah yes the beauty of the internet.  Bringing people together, right?  Of course I’m not entirely sure if I was connecting with a semi-literate American redneck or a professional Russian troll still learning the English language but anyway they seem to get along quite well these days so doesn’t really matter much to me.  I am on the other hand always interested in how conservatives use and understand others (such as Russian trolls for example) to use the term “socialism.” It occurred to me although all conservatives are trained from early childhood to despise “socialists” with a passion verging on clinical paranoia they quite often display certain socialistic tendencies themselves.  Ironic.  Anyway, I thought I’d say a few words about that this week.

When American conservatives excoriate  domestic “socialists” what they have in mind is what you and I might call liberal / progressive democrats who support social programs designed to help struggling people.  I’m sure we all understand the haughty Ayn Randian elitist conservatives who despise that sort of thing on the principle if struggling people are destined to die they should get on with it and reduce the surplus population.  That type of conservative has been common both here and abroad for a very long time most likely from at least the time of the ancient pharaohs.  I talk about those conservatives often enough but they’re not really the focus of this post.  No, there’s another species of conservative in the USA that is more of the economically struggling salt of the earth “populist” variety.  It’s a running joke of course the latter group of conservatives finds common cause with the former group because the former group clearly views the latter group as little more than a mildly amusing species of vermin they need to play with in the name of political expediency until they manage to sufficiently shrink and neutralize democratic government to render such distasteful interactions unnecessary.  It may seem superficially curious these struggling working class conservatives would have such a rabid hatred of the people who have their best interests at heart.  Some of these conservatives are convinced liberal “socialists” are only concerned about struggling immigrants and racial minorities and funneling resources to them in particular.  Humorous of course because although there may be a few programs specifically tailored to immigrants and racial minorities most of the programs under consideration are means tested programs available to all.  Others are convinced the reason some people are struggling is that liberal “socialists” are trying to help them and if we just got rid of the programs designed to deal with these social problems the problems themselves would evaporate.  Also rather comical because historically of course the social problems predate the programs designed to address them and there is no reason at all to suppose something has changed in the interim that would prevent them reappearing if we no longer attempt to address them.  But that’s the story fed to them by the traditional conservative elite that has never seen the need to deal with social problems or I suppose more accurately has always refused even to acknowledge social problems as such and that’s the story they’re going with.

The funny thing about recent developments of course is conservatives of the struggling salt of the earth variety have re-discovered their own version of socialism in the guise of former presidential advisor Mr. Bannon’s pet project“economic nationalism.” Many conservatives seem to be struggling to recognize this agenda for what it is.  So let’s just set the record straight.

The non-socialist traditional conservative elitist response to white working class Americans losing their jobs is a big shrug of the shoulders.  So what?  What happens to you or your family is none of our concern.  We’re not your nannies.  If you lose out in the modern competitive economy that’s your problem not ours.  If insufficient jobs are available on the free market then it’s right and fitting you not have a job.  You should just go someplace and die.  Did an immigrant take your job?  So what?  You competed and the immigrant was either willing to work for less or had some other advantage.  Did some sort of minority take your job?  So what?  No one is entitled to a job.  The non-socialist approach is open borders, free movement of labor, free markets both domestically and internationally, and whatever happens happens.

What one may call the traditional liberal or at least neoliberal brand of “socialism” is to have the same sort of free market for labor and goods and services traditional conservatives embrace but to acknowledge and attempt to address the rather obvious distributional issues associated with that approach by coming up with programs to help people who may be losing out or temporarily struggling.  We’re talking about help for people having trouble finding a job.  Help with education.  Help with housing or food if necessary.  The most drastic option is probably spending tax dollars to generate jobs that would otherwise not be forthcoming on the market.  As many people have pointed out these fixes aren’t the same as dumping money down a hole in the ground as many traditional conservatives might suggest.  When we find a way to get money to struggling people they spend it, consumer demand increases, and the economy inevitably grows.  People are a lot happier as well and that has to count for something.

The new / old “economic nationalism” implicitly acknowledges the drawbacks of the free market but instead of allowing it to function and trying to fix problems after they appear it attempts to manipulate the conditions surrounding the market to head off potential problems.  Examples of this approach would be laws to buy only products made in America (regardless of whether those products are the best or the cheapest) or to prevent companies relocating to other countries (despite the potential competitive advantages of doing so) or to prevent companies from automating or using labor saving technology (despite the potential cost savings).  Depending on the “society” this form of socialism is meant to address it might involve preventing people immigrating or I suppose even ensuring that members of some ethnic or racial groups get certain jobs, etc.  As any traditional conservative or neoliberal will tell you these types of market restrictions and manipulations come at a cost.  One may be unable to get the cheapest or most qualified worker.  One may lose out relative to foreign competitors.  The problems are in the same category as those associated with other more common market manipulations like minimum wage laws and union contracts.  However, this rigging of the market approach is one way to keep everyone or at least some people in the game.  Nothing is free in this world including trying to help struggling people.  And to the extent we’re getting money to struggling people we may at least still get the consumer demand effect.  My point in this post is not to adjudicate which type of socialism works best or makes the most sense.  It’s simply to point out they’re both forms of what is essentially socialism.  They’re both predicated on the proposition we should care what happens to other people in our “society” however we choose to define it.  We should care if our neighbor has a job.  We should care if people can afford housing.  Other people matter.

Now if one is truly opposed to socialism that’s fine with me.   Everyone is free to hold his or her own opinion on the matter.  I tend to think what happens to other people in our society is important.  Other people should have jobs and a way to make a living.  We need to keep thinking and working until we have a system that does that.  But that’s just me.  If one supports one type of socialism over another that’s also fine with me.  As I just explained I’m not entirely sure what would work best myself.  But you know what I really can’t abide?  Someone who rants on and on about the evils of socialism from one side of his or her mouth all the while promoting a form of socialism out the other side.  We’re not going to get anywhere at that rate.  Can we at least agree to try to talk sensibly about these issues?

The Wisdom of Age: Cher v Trump

Welcome friends!

I was watching a music award show on the TV the other night and was pleasantly surprised to see a tribute to the singer Cher who came out and did a few numbers.  Maybe her voice was a bit stronger when she was younger, it would be rather strange if that were not the case, but she sounded fine.  And the lady certainly knows her way around a stage.  Never one to be coy she mentioned during her short and gracious acceptance speech she had recently turned seventy-one and had been in the music business more than fifty years.  I find that sort of thing quite impressive.  How many flash in the pan musical acts have come and gone over the years?  But that wasn’t the most impressive thing to me.  No, the most impressive thing to me was that rather than tooting her own horn as one might expect any successful American to do she instead attributed her success mostly to a combination of luck and working with good people.  Such humility and I think honesty.  It made me reflect on the traditional association of age and wisdom one finds in many cultures.  Don’t get me wrong.  I certainly don’t think we’re all destined to become wise with age.  I doubt anyone has ever thought that in the history of the world.  A lot of older people become downright insufferable.  But sometimes one meets old timers who have lost interest in playing the game and puffing themselves up and so on and just want to let you know something they’ve found to be true during their lifetimes.  So valuable when one meets someone like that.  But then for some reason my thoughts wandered to that dishonest, greedy, grasping, boastful, old man American conservatives recently installed in the White House.   Must be about the same age right?  But gosh what a contrast.  Can one imagine Mr. Trump claiming that his vast fortune was due to anything other than his own perspicacity and hard work?  It occurred to me the difference wasn’t in the nature of a random interpersonal variation in temperament and personality.  President Trump talks and acts pretty much the way I would expect an enormously wealthy conservative old man to talk and act.  Cher talks and acts the way I would expect a female liberal of a certain age to talk and act.  So do one’s beliefs shape one’s character or is one drawn to certain beliefs because of one’s character?  I don’t know but I thought today I’d speculate a bit about the first possibility.

Let me first get pesky reality out of the way and just say that of course I believe what happens to one during one’s lifetime is due to all three factors I just mentioned: personal effort, luck, and outside forces... 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!

Distribution and Redistribution

Welcome friends!

I was taking a few moments the other day to register an opinion on a news website comment page and I ventured to mention what I consider an interesting distributional issue raised by recent technological developments including e-commerce and automation.  (Yes, I sometimes enjoy mixing it up a bit with the conservative trolls and comment botskies.  Hey, everyone needs a good laugh now and then.)  My general point was productive technology in the past may have generated a demand for a relatively large number of workers, which was great because a large number of workers with disposable cash means robust demand and hence economic growth.  In contrast, recent technological change has tended to concentrate wealth in particular sectors, such as IT and technology more generally, and more than that to specific people, the owners and CEOs of certain dominant companies in those sectors.  Basically technological development seems to be helping us devolve into a nation split between a rather small number of zillionaires and a very great number of impoverished fry cooks.  (The ever increasing domination of our political process by the wealthy elite probably plays a role as well but I’m determined to not discuss Mr. Trump this week in honor of his impending inauguration.)  So is that just fine because fate in the form of the almighty marketplace has ordained it?  Or should we do something to mix it up?  Should we think of some way to spread the output of our productive machine around a bit?  Make work for some people?  Pay some people more than a market wage?  Don’t get all angry now.  I never said I have the answers.  Just thinking out loud.  Anyway, as one might expect if one has ever ventured into such places I was immediately set upon by an army of conservative trolls incensed at my use of the word “distribution,” which I suspect they translated in their minds to the version more familiar to conservative ears “re-distribution,” which like “socialism” is something they’ve been trained since childhood to rage against.  One of the specific charges lobbed in my direction was that I apparently supported picking the pockets of hard-working billionaires to facilitate poor wastrels sitting on their assess doing nothing all day.  Another was that I had a nerve talking about other people’s money as though I had anything to do with it.  Being familiar with the dispassionate discussion of distributional and other economic issues from my days at the academy I was rather taken aback.  I’ve said for a long time on this blog I think one of our great weaknesses as a society is our inability to calmly and rationally discuss distributional issues and here was that exact problem not only rearing its ugly head but trying to take a big bite out of my backside.  So this time I thought I’d backtrack a bit and just go over some basics about distributional issues broadly conceived.

All economic systems function in part as distributional systems.  That is to say, they not only bring people together to co-operate on making things but they provide some mechanism by which those things are then distributed to people to use.  Even if we determined to not make a distributional system we’d still have one.  It’s called the guy with the gun economic system.  I think many places around the world actually use that system.  Fortunately given today’s political and economic rhetoric we don’t really have to decide whether to make one or not.  We’ve got one.  And it didn’t fall from the sky one day or rise up from the center of the earth.  We made it the old fashioned way through the crafting and enforcing of laws.  Remember Adam Smith and that lot?  They were writing the way they did because at that time they still had to convince some other people of the value of certain types of market arrangements.  The rudimentary market systems of Mr. Smith’s day were supplemented and hedged about by remnants of the old feudal system, which basically involved the king and other nobles and I suppose the church as well appropriating things at sword point more or less and then assigning it to their minions this way or that.  Some people liked it that way.  Not everyone was on board with the sort of market institutions we have today.  Someone had to make the case.  Anyway, it seems many people must have eventually found the case persuasive because market systems obviously became more and more dominant.  Of course, we subsequently learned market systems work best when regulated and supplemented in various ways by purposeful interventions of democratic government leading to the mixed system one finds in most places today but that’s neither here nor there for this post.  And yes guys with guns enforce our system but at least it’s something we’ve agreed upon the democratic way.

I’m pointing this out right now because I think many conservatives are prone to a certain distortion of perception in which supporting the status quo distributional system is thought to raise a fundamentally different set of issues from arguing for changes in the status quo distributional system even though the two sets of issues are entirely the same.  In other words, the conservatives incensed I would presume to pronounce upon distributional issues apparently did not recognize that they themselves are implicitly doing exactly the same thing, the only difference being I implied the possibility of supporting a distributional system other than the one we have now while they support the current one.  I suspect this is related to a common misperception of the conclusions of neoclassical economic theory I’ve alluded to a number of times over the years: the peculiar notion one is being neutral between two Pareto optimal market results if one uses their supposed equivalence to argue in effect one should stay at one or the other.  The true implication of an inability to compare such outcomes would of course be agnosticism with respect to staying at one or moving to the other.  Pretending it implies staying at one because one has no reason to move to the other seems quite similar to me to the notion we can avoid the issues associated with distributional systems by just sticking with the one we have and not discussing changing it.  In the language I’ve used in many other posts: resolving interpersonal conflicts of desires is going to happen one way or the other as long as humans live together in a society.  It doesn’t disappear if no one talks about it.

For conservatives who recognize we’ve already created a distributional system and the same general sort of issues are raised by retaining it or changing it the next level of concern is the potential ethical issues associated with changing it and in particular how unfair it would be to change the rules in the middle of the game so to speak.  I certainly get that argument.  Imagine one based one’s life on the desire to become phenomenally rich and possibly made some awkward decisions and difficult tradeoffs along the way only to find later in life someone decided the distributional system was a little out of whack and slapped a great whopping tax on you at least ostensibly to spread things around a bit?  I imagine you’d be rather annoyed.  Seems like something we’d all like to avoid.  But the problem is we’re always in the middle of the game for someone.  And I really doubt the wisdom of painting ourselves into a corner by saying the inevitable implication is we can never revisit the issue again.  When we developed our current system we changed the rules in the middle of the game for the old nobility or someone anyway.  And I mean let’s face it, we change laws all the time.  Some or perhaps many of those changes have financial consequences for at least some people.  The only thing different about the scenario I just mentioned is maybe it has a relatively larger effect on one’s finances than some other changes.  It’s not really a difference in kind.  But I do think if ever we agreed upon any such changes we could try to find some way to do whatever it was gradually and with the least amount of sudden economic dislocation and ill will as possible.  Anyway, we’re nowhere near that point now so I suppose little reason to get into the detail of how one would actually ameliorate the shock of adjusting a distributional system.

Having set that aside let me just say a few words about this notion that changing the distributional system in some way, the dreaded (by conservatives) re-distribution, means taking money from hard working productive people and giving it to people who prefer to sit on their asses all day long doing nothing.  This I think sums up pretty well a common conservative take on why anyone would discuss these issues but it is all a bit of a straw man isn’t it?  Our current system is already set up to allow rich people to sit on their asses all day doing nothing and yet earn a heck of a lot more money than many hard working productive people.  Yes, I hate to get all awkward about it but once one gets a certain amount of money one can invest it, have the earnings taxed at a much lower rate than an equivalent amount of earnings generated the old fashioned way, and do quite well for oneself.  In some cases getting the money in the first case may involve some respectable level of effort but honestly I don’t know if it really adds up to the lifetime of work some less financially fortunate people put in.  I’m not arguing it’s illegitimate.  Not in this post anyway.  I’m just saying I think it’s pretty clear our current system is rewarding some things beyond “hard work” and “not sitting on one’s ass.”  Let’s have an example.  Say I write a successful blog and make a few million dollars.  (I’m partial to counterfactual thought exercises.  If you’re a realist and just can’t think that way just say I write a bit of code or whatever.)  I then proceed to sit on my ass doing nothing the rest of my life and live quite nicely on the returns from my investments.  As I just suggested I’m perfectly fine if you have an argument of why that makes sense but if it involves the notion that overall I worked harder than let’s say my elderly neighbor who’s been getting up at six in the morning the past fifty years to work in the old salt mines I’m bound to say I’m not sure you’re speaking in earnest.  And in my example at least I did something myself at some point in my life.  Conservatives in the US have long desired and are now in a position to do away with the estate tax (that would be the death tax in their own parlance) so increasingly the rich person sitting on his or her ass making more money by doing nothing than working people will be in that position because he or she had the good sense to be born to wealthy parents rather than anything he or she may have once added to the world.

What’s my point?  Pretty much the same as always I suppose.  I think we should be able to talk about distributional issues objectively and dispassionately and get past the knee jerk keep your hands off my stack Jack conservative mentality.  We’re going to be in for a bumpy ride if we can’t even manage that.  I’ve discussed how I feel about our current distributional system in the past and I’m not sure there’s much point of going over it again just now but the short version is I don’t think it’s all it’s sometimes cracked up to be.  Here are a few random thoughts on the subject.  There’s no mechanism in a market system to automatically ensure sufficient jobs let alone good jobs for the available population of prospective workers.  The distribution system I’d like to see would provide people willing and able to work and contribute to do well enough.  Yes, we need incentives to encourage people to go the extra mile or get into things they would otherwise not be inclined to get into but we probably don’t need to go overboard in that area.  Not sure we need to reward people being born to wealthy parents.  We should find a way to ensure the development of labor saving technology improves everyone’s lives and if that technology means some people lose their jobs we should do something about it and help them out in some way.  If we find our population is suddenly out of whack with the demand for labor we should do something until we get back to some sensible equilibrium.  I don’t think we just tell people they’re superfluous and maybe they’d like to go somewhere and drop dead.  The population is to me a separate issue we would then have to address in some way if that proves to be a problem.  In short, we shouldn’t just accept whatever happens on the market as though it were the result of some natural law we can neither assess nor alter.  Markets are meant to serve us; we’re not meant to serve markets.  But it’s fine with me if you have other notions.  Let’s talk about it.  Because you know not talking about problems has never yet made them go away.  They just fester in silence until funny things happen.  And I don’t meant ha ha funny.  Let’s not let the all too pervasive greed and egotism of the human race be our downfall.

Distributional Issues and Trumpism

Welcome friends!

I wish you all a healthy and happy Thanksgiving!  I know if you’re a liberal like me you may be struggling with the holidays this year given our particularly ominous political and economic situation; however, to quote my favorite fictional gay headmaster Professor Dumbledore, “Happiness can be found in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.”  With that sage advice in mind I determined to find among the huge risks and setbacks we now face with respect to the environment, our national security, the economy, the national debt, human rights, education, free speech, democracy, and so many other aspects of life something positive to say about the movement that brought us the clown president.  And you know after a few glasses of some perfectly acceptable wine I think I might have found something.  We may be nearing the time when people other than us liberals will be willing to talk openly and honestly about distributional issues.  Why do I think that?  Because by all accounts distributional issues may have played a large role in this last election.  Indeed, I was reading an article in the New York Times that mentioned twenty-six of the thirty lowest income states voted clown.  Talk about your trends.  Of course I’m sure income is probably correlated with some other potentially relevant characteristics like education but anyway there’s at least some prima facie evidence distributional matters may have played a role.  Some people may have finally figured out they’re missing out and may have finally decided to do something about it.  It’s unfortunate what they’ve decided to do about it is so opaque, unlikely to succeed, and bundled with so much conservative garbage but at least perhaps we can now acknowledge the distributional elephant in the room.

Yes, I find it more than a little ironic the American working class has apparently chosen finally to start looking after its interests by going with President-elect Clown and the other conservative one percenters given the traditional conservative line, the line that led many people to accept without question the desirability of free trade and the free movement of labor and so on in the first place, is that we needn’t worry about distributional issues because everything is handled adequately by the free market and any interference with that miraculous clockwork mechanism will doom us all to penury.  As I’ve always been careful to point out the free market is indeed good for many things in many circumstances.  However, as liberals and critics of neoclassical economic orthodoxy have argued for years free markets don’t necessarily always work as planned depending on the characteristics of the particular markets under consideration and equally or more significantly they don’t necessarily do a good job addressing distributional issues.  That is to say, they don’t necessarily deliver money and jobs to people we may think need money and jobs such as for example our compatriots in lower income states who ended up voting clown.  So I think we can all agree it’s good we’ve moved beyond the sort of simple minded conservatism we’ve been accustomed to these past several decades.  Seems other people may have decided distributional issues matter after all.  The free market is not the answer to everything that ails us.

Unfortunately the policies this new generation of conservatives apparently intend or profess to intend to use to address these distributional issues raise quite a few issues of their own.  For example, one solution they’ve been throwing around is trade restrictions.  Now in case economics and history are not your strong points I should point out that although trade restrictions are sometimes helpful for some firms and some workers in the short run from a distributional perspective they typically don’t work very well in the long run because other countries tend to enact their own trade restrictions in retaliation and the next thing you know we’re all making a whole lot less of whatever it was for a lot higher price than we were formerly.  It’s one way of addressing distributional issues relating to firms and workers in some industries otherwise at risk of losing out to international competition but it comes with some pretty significant risks as well.  I’d be a lot more satisfied to give it a try if we had all sat down and discussed it rationally and sensibly and decided it was the best way to address this issue but it’s hard to avoid the suspicion conservatives have hit on this approach not out of reasoned consideration but because they want to address distributional issues in a way that doesn’t make government influence in resolving the issues too obvious because in the eyes of traditional conservatives that would amount to socialism.  If government acts behinds the scenes (relatively speaking) to rig markets to give more acceptable results I suspect conservatives feel they can better maintain the pretense government is always bad and unnecessary and markets always good and efficient and so on.  Given the conservative elite’s flair for simple minded rhetoric and the conservative base’s flair for going along with whatever the economic elite feels inclined to feed them it will be incumbent upon us liberals to clarify what’s going on here.  We had a free market in the form of international free trade and some people basically tanked so we’re now rigging the market to make it turn out better for them in the short run.  It’s basically a form of redistribution because although some of us may be better off at least in the short run the rest of us will be paying the cost in terms of higher product prices.  Now if we can finally drop the need to accommodate traditional conservative market worshipping let’s think if there are other more sensible ways to get that same distributional result that don’t involve some of the costs and risks of trade restrictions.

The story relating to the free movement of labor is similar.  Again this is something that has long been lauded by traditional conservatives.  According to traditional conservative free market ideology if we bring the workers of the world into one vast free market for labor we’ll all be better off.  Worrying about the economic well-being of one’s fellow workers in one’s own particular country is a form of socialism.  It’s the same theory that underlies the traditional conservative antipathy to unions.  Unions are bad because they interfere with the free market for labor.  But it seems the new breed of conservative is willing to acknowledge a free market for labor in the international context can have unfortunate distributive effects on workers in formerly high income nations.  Hard to imagine such workers having much bargaining power if they’re competing with an army of unemployed poor people from other countries.  (Or if one is a conservative and has trouble perceiving the role of bargaining power in resolving distributional issues let’s just say it’s hard to image many workers landing good jobs at reasonable wages under those conditions.)  This is presumably where all this wall business fits in.  Again, I get the idea but I’m not sure demonizing and deporting undocumented immigrants and building a wall are really the best policies to address it.  And again I’m not sure this solution is the result of a rational discussion or just what happens when one tries to solve a problem without really talking about it directly.  You know what I mean.  We’re not talking about restricting the free movement of labor or the value of free markets in general.  We’re just talking about ejecting some bad hombres.  Anything else is just a side effect.  Wink wink.

The other approach I’ve been hearing about involves rebuilding some of our national infrastructure, which is actually something we badly need and that could also help out on the distributional front by putting some people to work doing something useful who might be unemployed or underemployed if we leave the market to its own devices.  This is a long standing liberal priority that brings to mind nothing so much as the successful policies of the New Deal in the 1930s that did so much to ameliorate the impact of the Great Depression.  But again even here I seem to detect some peculiarities.  Instead of doing something simple and sensible such as using tax revenues to pay people to rebuild infrastructure we’re apparently talking about some complicated program designed to change the incentives for other people to do it or something like that.  Again I wouldn’t be as concerned if I thought we had sat down and discussed it and decided this approach works best but I can’t help but wonder if the reason they’ve hit on this approach has more to do with ideological blinders and image than with economics.  How we can use government to fix a problem but maintain the fiction we don’t need government and market forces are doing it all?  Have government do something behind the scenes to change market incentives and then laud private business for responding to those incentives.  Is that honestly the best and cheapest way to get this done or are we basically footing the bill for conservatives to preserve their ideology?

Finally it’s unfortunate the new breed of conservative has managed to combine important elements of the liberal agenda like addressing some of the distributional issues associated with free markets and paying attention to public goods including rebuilding infrastructure with traditional conservative concerns like disregard for the environment; oppression of minorities be they racial, religious, or sexual; union busting; bellicose militarism; and the endorsement of policies designed to enhance the wealth and power of the economic elite (for example weakening the progressive income tax, reducing the social safety net, eliminating the estate tax, etc.)  Equally unfortunate is that the man they’ve chosen to implement these ideas is so unattractive and disreputable along so many dimensions and being one of the one-percenters who has prospered under our current arrangements has such strong incentives to not rock the boat or at least to be very careful how he rocks it.  Even if one accepts the possibility the clown administration may actually attempt to address some of these long-standing liberal concerns in its own twisted way it seems quite possible to me what it gives with one hand it may take back with the other.  Hard to see how it will all play out in the end.  Will the situation of struggling American workers actually improve or will the only people whose situation improves in the long run turn out to be President-elect Trump and certain other members of the ruling class?  Were workers played for chumps by rich people eager to gain political power to purse their conservative social agenda and further their own economic interests or do some member of the economic elite honestly have the best interests of struggling American workers in mind?  I suppose only time will tell.  But at least some issues are on the table now that formerly were not.  That must be a sort of progress don’t you think?  We can all be thankful for that.

References

A Jolt of Blue-Collar Hope.  David Leonhardt.  The New York Times.  November 22, 2016.  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/opinion/a-jolt-of-blue-collar-hope.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region.

Freemarketcare II

Welcome friends!

Did you catch the story in the newspapers about US-based Turing Pharmaceuticals increasing the price of a drug used by some AIDS and cancer patients by about four thousand percent virtually overnight from about $14 per pill to $750 per pill?  It’s been in all the papers.  Seems the drug in question, Daraprim, has been around for decades but Turing only acquired the rights recently, hence the rather abrupt price adjustment.  The CEO of Turing, thirty-two year old multimillionaire and former hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli, defended the company’s pricing policy saying he was just trying to make a profit, claiming the previous owners of the drug had been “giving it away,” and calling a reporter who questioned his judgment on the matter a moron.  Which of course from the perspective of people like Mr. Shkreli is exactly what someone would be if he or she didn’t raise the price of whatever he or she was hawking to whatever the market would bear.  That’s just basic economics.  Supply and demand.  Now in Mr. Shkreli’s defense I see he was in the news even more recently saying that having heard the public outcry he now intends to reduce the price to something a bit more affordable although in the story I read he declined to say what that might be.  One assumes it would not be the previous give away price.  I should also point out the company claims it provides the drug to about half the people who use it at no cost whatsoever and has plans to expand its charitable drug program.  So apparently if you’re in whatever class Turing Pharmaceuticals believes deserves charity then you have nothing to worry about.  I’m not sure who that might be.  Unemployed bankers?  Just joking.  I’m confident they run a perfectly reasonable means based system.

One might have expected this situation to foster an interesting debate between economic conservatives who believe whatever happens on the free market is ethical gold from liberals who conventionally take a more nuanced stance on such matters and are equally conventionally branded economic morons by conservatives... 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!

So Long Huy Pham

Welcome friends!

I suppose I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge at some point yet another senseless conservative-inspired American tragedy that took place a few weeks ago.  This time it was the unfortunate suicide of a young man (29 years old) named Huy Pham.  As you may recall Mr. Pham was the municipal maintenance worker from Costa Mesa CA who tossed himself off the roof of the local civic center shortly after being peremptorily laid off as part of a conservative Republican cost cutting scheme to eliminate city departments and transfer city services to private companies.

This is all particularly poignant to me because if newspaper reports are to be believed Mr. Pham was quite the exemplary employee and citizen.  He had apparently given no previous indication of being depressed or under undue stress.  Indeed, he had received his contractor’s license and was apparently planning on entering the building trade.  Unfortunately, construction in CA is a little down right now (you know, the whole housing bubble and financial crisis the conservative market worshippers conjured out of nothing).  So Mr. Pham apparently didn’t feel he had very good prospects at the moment.  What he did have was a large extended family he was helping to support on what I’m sure was a relatively modest income as a municipal maintenance worker.  However, neither his exemplary work ethic nor his family responsibilities made much of a difference to his wealthy conservative employers on the town council, who basically gave him the boot as a matter of course along with about half of the city’s other employees.

Of course, it’s one of the standing conceits of conservatism that the magic of the marketplace renders government services unnecessary and that even when they are inexplicably necessary one can always save a buck by outsourcing the work to private companies (because, you know, government employees are invariably lazy and incompetent).  I have to say I’ve never seen any evidence for this theory myself.  I’ve always just assumed it was another bit of stale old dogma expressing conservatives’ general contempt for government and working class people and their corollary adulation of private business and rich people (the kind of people who tend not to need most government services in the first place).  However, to be fair, I wouldn’t rule out one might see some modest cost savings, at least at first.  After all, all levels of government in this country are rather unique in their relatively open and accountable employment practices, and of course they have legal responsibilities to their customers, while private companies are relatively free to do whatever they can to screw their workers (and actually their customers as well whenever they get enough market power to get away with it, which seems to be quite often from what I can see).  So let’s give it a chance.  I’d be interested in knowing what kind of cost savings we’re talking about in this case.  You know, nothing wrong with trying some things.  If it doesn’t pan out then we can always go back to business as usual, although I suppose it might be a little trickier to resurrect Mr. Pham.  Oh and yes, I know what you’re thinking, but I haven’t seen any evidence anyone on the city council had financial relationships with the private companies that stand to make a buck.

But setting aside these nickel-and-dime issues what I find more interesting about this story is how all these economic conservative bully boys go about their business.  I’ve mentioned in many of my previous posts the rather obvious propensity of social conservatives to become bullies (seems hardly a week goes by where I couldn’t write something on that topic) but I don’t think I’ve discussed the very similar propensity of economic conservatives to do the same.  What am I talking about?  Well, I gather from the newspaper articles some people in Costa Mesa are more than a little upset about how the city council went about its business.  Basically, it seems they were in quite the rush to tell Mr. Pham and his many colleagues to get the hell out, apparently delivering all two hundred or so layoff notices on a single day.  Now I’m not sure if anyone actually said, “don’t let the door hit you on the way out,” but I do know one of Mr. Pham’s co-workers said in the papers he felt the city council and their “quick-acting decisions” led directly to Mr. Pham’s suicide.  And I also know some Costa Mesa city workers accused the conservative city council of not even attempting to work with their employees to bring down costs, which all sounds pretty familiar and entirely plausible to me.

To add a small note of levity to the tragic story someone apparently photographed the conservative mayor of Costa Mesa, local businessman Gary Monahan, celebrating St. Patrick’s Day at the Irish bar he owns less than two hours after Mr. Pham’s tragic demise (and looking quite the jolly old elf with his kilt and glass of beer, I must say).  Mr. Berardino, the general manager of the Orange County Employees Association, was a little incredulous.  He says he asked Mr. Monahan why he was celebrating when one of his employees had just killed himself apparently out of despondency from having been summarily fired.  Turning on that old conservative charm Mr. Monahan explained he had a business to run.  Well, he did.  He later accused the union of trying to embarrass him, which is after all much the bigger issue here.  Of course, to be fair, Mr. Monahan denied having any sort of conversation at all with Mr. Berardino or knowing anything about Mr. Pham’s death at the time.  But, you know what?  I think I believe Mr. Berardino’s account.  It certainly corresponds with my experience of the conservative mentality in this country.  So some working class schlub lost his job and killed himself?  So what?  I have a business to run!

Nor is this an isolated case by any means.  The conservatives’ hugely successful agenda over these past several years of transforming American society into a sort of top heavy winner-take-all banana republic; their contemptuous mass layoffs of middle class government workers; their determination to bust unions; their assault on government job and educational programs; their reckless enthusiasm for deregulation in any and every context; and their self-serving support of the financial elite of the country have left many young people in quite the precarious financial position indeed.  The financial elite seem determined we deem this entirely intolerable situation the “new normal.”  Right.  Sorry folks, but a normal society looks after their young.  (I know, I know ... all together now ... we have a business to run!)  So to me Mr. Pham actually represents a great many young people in our society today who maybe aren’t driven entirely over the edge as was Mr. Pham but who are certainly somewhere near it and liable to follow him over at any time.

Oh, and I would like to just add one more thing, which is I think Mr. Pham is the type of person I would like to have known personally.  I don’t know, maybe I’m just tired of all the obsequious hagiographies of the rich and famous, the only people who really matter to conservatives, but I actually think I have a little more interest in and respect for a responsible and struggling young man who was doing his best under trying circumstances, who ended up being abruptly fired from his job in difficult economic times through absolutely no fault of his own, and who ultimately killed himself to protest the unjust system under which he lived.  You know, I think I’d be interested in a TV program on that.  But the only thing on is a ten part mini-series on famous rich people.  Oh well.  I suppose realistically that’s probably the last we’ll hear of Mr. Pham.  Hey, who knows, maybe there’s an afterlife of some sort after all.  Maybe one day I’ll meet Mr. Pham.  Maybe we’ll raise a glass or two and share our thoughts on what really ails the nation.  But for now, let me just say so long, Huy Pham.  You were a good man.