Conservatives Proliferate in the USA

Welcome friends!

So many types of conservatives trying to do a number on the old USA these days it’s getting a little hard to keep track of who’s who.  Fortunately I ran across an article this week that discussed a little political typology prepared by the Pew Research Center based on some opinion surveys they conducted this past summer.  According to their interpretation of the results conservatives of one sort or another comprise 42 percent of the American electorate compared to 51 percent who lean more toward the liberal side of the aisle with an addition 8 percent classified as bystanders, which adds to 101 percent so I suppose must be a bit of rounding in there somewhere.  That bit isn’t exactly news.  I think we all figured out some time ago we weren’t really all on the same page.  No, the interesting bit for me was the way Pew divided conservatives into four separate groups based on distinctive and sometimes contradictory attitudes and beliefs.  If you’ve been reading my little blog at all you’ll know that trying to figure out the various types of conservatives and what they really think is something of a hobby of mine.  Indeed I’ve previously come up with three types of conservatism based on what appear to me to be different intellectual frameworks as opposed to shared attitudes or beliefs although I suppose they might equally represent simply different styles of talking: economic conservatism, political conservatism, and social conservatism.  This week I thought I’d take a quick look at the Pew classification scheme and compare it the scheme I’ve been using in my previous posts.  So let’s get to it... 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!

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?

Conservative Values Voters and President Trump

Welcome friends!

I was just sitting around marveling again at the fanatical loyalty of President Trump’s conservative base.  I think I mentioned in my previous post a recent poll found just over sixty percent of the man’s supporters said they couldn’t think of anything he might do that would make them stop supporting him.  That figure goes up past seventy percent for his female groupies.  Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion of course but it does raise the question of why.  What is it about the man that inspires such blind and uncritical devotion?  I thought I might take a few moments to speculate on that issue this time out... 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!

Dishonest Don and the Moral and Intellectual Rot of Modern Conservatism

Welcome friends!  

I was just sitting around contemplating the rather remarkable level of dishonesty issuing forth from the White House on a daily basis as well as the complete absence of concern let alone outrage on the part of our current president’s conservative base and it occurred to me that beyond merely damaging the USA in the more obvious ways, economically, militarily, politically, socially, legally, diplomatically and so on contemporary American conservatism seems intent on destroying the very soul of the USA: our moral integrity and respect for the truth.

What got me started thinking about this issue this week in particular was an article I read about our president apparently making up a story relating to a recent speech he gave at the National Scout Jamboree, the annual meeting of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), in which he rather predictably annoyed quite a few people by telling the boys Washington DC is a “sewer,” attacking Hilary Clinton, attacking the media, and basically engaging in the usual sort of lowbrow rabble rousing he has used to such great effect when speaking to his adoring army of angry redneck supporters.  The story he apparently made up about the event for the benefit of the tarted up conservative rag Wall Street Journal was that he had received a call from the “head of the Boy Scouts” who told him “it was the greatest speech that was ever made to them.”  ... 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!

American Heartland Disease

Welcome friends!

Did you catch the story about the good people of the US Midwestern state of Montana electing some conservative thug named Greg Gianforte to the US Congress?  He was in the news recently for physically attacking a reporter who had asked him a question about the Republican Party health care plan and then lying about it until he found it untenable in the face of testimony from witnesses.  (He was apparently relying on some Fox News reporters to back him up but they opted to tell the truth for once suggesting some elements of the organization may have some latent professionalism and commitment to ideals beyond making President Trump and the Republican Party look good.)  The citizens of Montana are of course free to elect any sort of idiot they like to the US Congress and frankly one doesn’t expect much from a state sparsely populated by the most isolated and provincial of rural folk.  Indeed I was about to let it pass without comment as just one of those things but it did get me thinking about something I found mildly interesting: the tendency of many Americans to romanticize these flyover regions of the country by referring to them as the “heartland” of the country.  The phrase of course is a little play on words involving the notion of a heartland as the geographical center of a nation and the notion of the heartland as the portion of a nation exemplifying its true character.  The problem in this instance is that while the first bit may well be true the latter bit is most emphatically not.  As the results of the recent election in Montana so strikingly illustrate the people of the so-called heartland of the USA today exemplify mostly the effects of a sort of rot or cancer of the American character.  These hicks of the heartland appear to have thrown over our cherished ideals of democracy and free speech in favor of the rather more authoritarian small town virtues of bullying and lying.  I’m afraid it’s time to call it like it really is.  The true intellectual and moral heart of the USA is located not in the geographically central farmlands of the Midwest but in the coastal regions and the large cities where most American and in particular most educated and gainfully employed Americans actually live.

One question that occurred to me is where did this fascination with rural small town life even come from? ... 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 American Dream

Welcome friends!

I have to say one good thing about having a conservative like Donald Trump in the White House is that some of us are hearing a lot more from the conservative man and woman in the street now than previously.  I think in the recent past they must have been hanging out mostly in their own alternative fact universe of wacky radio shows, tacky and casual with the truth supermarket tabloids, and insane conspiracy theory websites.  I remember they were responsible for a great deal of ugliness, hatred, turmoil, and violence in my youth but recently not so much.  I thought maybe they had fallen into a great hole in the ground or gone somewhere. Kind of hard to engage with people when one can’t find them or anyway is unwilling to go where they reside.  I’ve always heard plenty from professional conservative pundits and spokespeople and so on but as I’ve explained many times in this blog those people talk such transparent rot one never knows what they really think about anything.  I always sort of wished I knew what the people who listen to such people thought they were hearing but honestly I just don’t know too many conservatives.  But they’re all coming out of the woodwork now aren’t they?  Ever time I glance at an online news comment stream there they are trying their best to explain their warped, incoherent, contradictory, horrifying worldview to the rest of us.  Fired up I suppose by having gotten their man in the White House and having taken control of both houses of Congress as well as the Supreme Court.  I suppose it is a bit disgusting in many ways but from a purely intellectual standpoint there are some interesting bits.  One interesting bit for me is that the recent debate on national health care policy has reminded me we have some pretty fundamental disagreements about what American is or should be all about. Let’s take a moment to consider the issue.

The American Dream.  We all hear about it from time to time.  But what the heck is it?  Well, I don’t know.  I think it’s different things to different people.  I’ve gradually come to understand that for many if not most conservatives it’s basically the dream of getting very rich... 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 Topsy-Turvy World of American Conservatism

Welcome friends!

I have to say conservatism here in the USA is pretty funny sometimes.  It’s so outrageously incoherent and idiotic one supposes no conservative could possibly expect anyone to take him or her literally or even seriously and yet one can never be entirely sure.  Why do they say the things they say?  Are they stupid?  Crazy?  Crafty like a fox?  After a lifetime of admittedly rather casual research I still don’t know.  What got me thinking about this issue yet again was some statements Dan Schneider, executive director of the American Conservative Union, delivered this year at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).  In a move reminiscent of Nazi Germany’s Night of the Long Knives albeit without the knives Mr. Schneider dramatically repudiated what has become known as the “alt-right” segment of the American conservative movement and ejected one of their main spokespeople who had apparently previously been attending CPAC events without incident for some time.  Don’t get me wrong.  Seems a sensible enough public relations move now these alt-right groups have become a more visible presence in our political and cultural life.  You may recall some of these people were in the news shortly after the recent presidential election celebrating Mr. Trump’s victory at a restaurant in our nation’s capital.  On that occasion the leader I mentioned earlier in the context of being ejected from this year’s CPAC had railed against Jews, quoted Nazi propaganda (in the original German mind you), explained his belief that America “belonged” to “white” people (or in his own crazy talk version the “children of the sun” apparently not fully comprehending the genetic mechanisms historically giving rise to different skin tones), and called out the following noteworthy slogans: Hail Trump!  Hail our people!  Hail victory!  His audience enthusiastically shouted these slogans back and several over excited attendees apparently gave the old Nazi stiff arm salute.  Got the picture?  To state the obvious I’m perfectly fine with mainstream American conservatives finally cutting these people loose.  Indeed, one can’t help but wonder what took them so damned long.  But then again a little later CPAC attendees enthusiastically endorsed as a true exemplar of bona fide conservatism the man the alt-right views as championing their extremist ideals: President Donald Trump.  For his part, President Trump informed the group, “you finally have a president,” and called his victory “a win for conservative values.”  But that’s just the sort of self serving hypocrisy one expects from American conservatives.  That’s not really what I wanted to address here.  No, the most notable element of the whole affair for me and the bit I’d really like to address in this post was Mr. Schneider’s fanciful denunciation of the alt-right segment of the American conservative movement as a “left-wing fascist group.”

I feel I just addressed the close association between American conservatism and fascism the other day but since conservatives insist upon bringing it up I suppose I might as well take another shot at it... 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!

American Conservatism and Nazism: The Economic Dimension

Welcome friends!

I suppose you may have noticed the flurry of articles comparing the political movement of our president-elect Donald Trump and his conservative Republican Party to that of Adolph Hitler and his Nazi Party so many years ago in early twentieth-century Germany?  I suspect it’s probably rather difficult to avoid noticing certain similarities.  Of course conservatives themselves have been preemptively calling their political opponents fascists and Nazis for some time now so I suspect some people must assume it’s all a bit of tit for tat but I really don’t think so.  I thought this time out I’d discuss yet another point of similarity this time involving economic ideas.

If you’re interested in history at all you may recall the little mustachioed monster of fame originally rose to power in Germany the conventional democratic way.  Yes, like vampires of film he only managed to wreak his havoc after having been duly invited in.  Of course in his case the havoc didn’t literally involve sucking blood but rather dismantling the democratic institutions of the nation and going on to murder millions of his countrymen and various other people besides.  By all accounts the initial impetus for his rise was a rather severe economic depression and the inevitable social divisions and in particular racial divisions the economic meltdown and social instability dredged up from the darkness of ages past.

In this context I think it’s important to realize one of the great and abiding mysteries for economic conservatives everywhere is why they don’t always do as well as they feel they ought to do under free markets.  It’s not much of a mystery or issue for liberals and leftists who believe markets don’t always perform that well anyway, which is to say markets can break down and exhibit instability, many types of markets have undesirable characteristics and results (monopolies, monopsonies, oligopolies, oligopsonies), certain common conditions render even gold-standard perfectly competitive markets problematic (externalities, information and other power asymmetries), and markets of any description do not necessarily do a very good job distributing goods and services to the people one might think should have them under any particular theory of social justice.  No, the problem for liberals and leftists is the relatively straightforward although obviously still quite daunting issue of how to fix the problems with markets to make things turn out better.

Conservatives are in a different mental place altogether.  They accept the free market as a panacea for all the material and distributional issues a society may face so if problems remain despite the presence of an apparently free market that’s really a rather remarkable state of affairs.  The primary way conservatives have historically attempted to explain this great mystery is that yes, market systems are inherently flawless and fantastic and so on, but someone is “rigging” the market behind the scenes as it were to make it not work out right.  Sabotage or I suppose as conservatives might say sabatoogie.  For Hitler and the Nazis the shadowy culprit was international Jewry.  One can imagine this wasn’t the most difficult sell in the world at that time and place given the rather obvious otherness of Jewish people in the context of self-adoring European nationalists and racists, the troubled history of Jewish people in Europe since the Middle Ages, and more prosaically the fact some Jewish people had managed to do pretty well for themselves under the prevailing market system.  Make no mistake about it.  Although the Nazis fashioned themselves “socialists” and talked a lot about collectives in certain cultural and military contexts when it came to economic matters they were pretty much conventional economic conservatives.  They didn’t challenge the economic elite of the nation and in return the economic elite of the nation didn’t challenge them.  They were all about keeping labor in line and leftist labor agitators out.  Their goal was an unholy merging of big business, (undemocratic) government, and the military machine.  Hitler won the support of most of the upper classes in the Germany of the day because he basically represented a potential money making opportunity for them.  Obviously it didn’t end too well.  Can’t do much with smoking rubble and a big pile of corpses.  But by the time they figured out which way the wind was blowing there wasn’t a whole lot they could do about it.

Here in the USA we have a roughly similar sort of dynamic going on right now.  Conservatives have been talking up the magic of the marketplace as they have been these past two centuries or so but as was the case in Germany in the early twentieth century some workers just aren’t doing all that well financially.  Liberals are trying to explain why that might be the case in terms of technological change and the rise of more effective international competition and more generally just trying to get people to think realistically about the distributional issues associated with market systems but of course conservatives aren’t having it.  They’re too busy looking for the scoundrels who have been rigging the markets to make them not function as they should.  They know it can’t be the economic elite or captains of industry because under conservative philosophy those are the people responsible for all good things in the world and the most deserving of our respect.  It must be someone else.  You can tell they have something like this on their minds because they’re always talking about taking the country back from someone.  But who?  And how did they get hold of the country in the first place?

I suppose a few American conservatives accept the traditional antisemitic line endorsed by the Nazis but not very many.  We just don’t have the history for that sort of thing to really take root.  We didn’t have medieval pogroms or Christian crusades.  We have lots of immigrants from all over the place and always have had.  We like to talk about religious freedom.  Some nativist groups have gotten on that wagon over the years including the neo-Nazis and KKK but it’s a bit of a hard sell for the man in the street.  No, in an American context the much more tempting and satisfying scapegoats are the so-called “black” people, the descendants of the slaves the old-timers kidnapped and brought over to work in their fields and who did a lot to build the country into what it is today.  That despicable but surprisingly long-lasting labor and social arrangement generated a type of social cancer that has proven quite difficult to eradicate or sometimes simply to contain: racism.  According to this theme markets are not working properly because our darker hued compatriots and possibly their illegal immigrant allies (and misguided liberals of course) have captured the government and are using it to wreck markets and funnel resources to the undeserving.  As I’ve noted before the story doesn’t entirely make sense to me according to the available facts because poor “black” people have been doing just as badly as poor “white” people and I think even a little worse and most illegal immigrants are struggling economically as well.  But I suppose the theory is that even though they’re trying to wreck markets and funnel resources to themselves they must not be very good at it because all they’ve managed to do in practice is wreck markets.  So in the eyes of conservatives the solution to our problems is to take the political system back from the people who have captured it, “black” people and their foreign allies, and put it back under the control of people who understand how the market is meant to work and will presumably not mess with it: rich old “white” people.  They would like to find a permanent solution and are forever thinking of ways to limit and shrink democratic government and correspondingly expand the power of the autocratic economic elite but they can only do so much at one time.

Of course, one must admit our conservatives are not nearly as bad as their historical counterparts.  No one has suggested carting anyone off to death camps in the countryside.  Not yet anyway.  I would find that reassuring were it not for the fact we’re not really comparing apples to apples.  Germany in the era of the Nazis went from the social turmoil of a lost war through an epic economic depression to the upheaval of total war.  One supposes these conditions must have had some influence on the complete moral meltdown we all remember today.  Here in the USA we’re having it relatively easy right now.  We have some economic problems that are particularly acute in some areas of the country but overall we’re not doing so badly.  We have some ongoing military conflicts but not really anything beyond what is more or less normal for us these days.  We’re basically on a pretty even keel right now and yet the person the American public chose as their president was Donald Trump. One can’t help but wonder if Germany in the 1930s had been doing as well as we are today would Hitler and his party of dimwitted goons have gotten anywhere near the reins of government.  Or would they have spent their lives railing against the system in some Bavarian beer hall?  Or flip it around.  Let’s say Trump’s economic incompetence and anti-regulatory zeal unleashes a major 1930s style depression.  People in the so-called “heartland” are out of work.  They’re going hungry.  They’re fearful for the future.  What will their philosophy suggest was the cause of the calamity and what do you suppose they will see as the solution?  Or let’s say a major war breaks out.  I mean a big one.  Nuclear.  Biological.  It’s us against them and our backs are against the wall.  But who is us anyway?  Does it include the people conservatives formerly suspected of attempting to steal the country from them?  Will we need to come up with a final solution to the enemy within?

Let’s not let our arrogance get the better of us here.  We’re not immune to the forces that blighted Germany in the not so distant past.  History can repeat itself and will unless we fight tooth and nail to make sure it doesn’t.  All pepped up and ready to argue with all your might against the ignorant and destructive forces Mr. Trump has ridden to political power and clearly plans to nourish and encourage the next four years?  Ready to stand up for our American way of life and our shared values of democracy, reason, kindness, and humanity?  Good.  Let’s meet the new year head on and fight the noble fight together.

Will Absolute Power Corrupt Trump And The Other One Percenters Absolutely?

Welcome friends!

I know I usually do a special holiday post this time of year but I’m hardly in the mood with darkness, ignorance, and ugliness on the ascendency everywhere in the world including my beloved homeland the USA.  My heart is just too heavy this year to do anything light and amusing.  Well, no more light and amusing than when I try to get all weighty and serious anyway.  Instead, I thought I’d take yet another whack at something that’s been on my mind a lot lately: the rather remarkable divergence in how many liberals and conservatives perceive the motley collection of inexperienced (in terms of national policy) billionaires and millionaires president-elect Trump has assembled to head up his administration.  To put things in a nutshell for those who haven’t been reading the papers recently (which I would understand well enough) Trump’s team raises all manner of red flags for many liberals but seems to be viewed as a welcome breath of fresh air by most conservatives.  I suppose it mirrors the reactions of the two camps to the roughly similar issue of the potential conflicts of interest of the One-Percent President himself.  Liberals are very concerned.  Conservatives can’t fathom why.  It got me thinking I should delve into the origin of this obviously quite fundamental difference in perspectives yet again.  Hey, anything worth saying once is worth saying twice or however many times I’ve said it now.  How many times did president-elect Trump lie about President Obama being unable to produce his birth certificate?  At least I’m sincerely trying to be truthful and helpful.

Being a lifelong liberal myself and probably typical of the breed in certain respects I suppose I can speak to that side of the issue so let’s just do a little overview of how things look from the first floor of my modest ivory house if one wants to think of it that way.  After that I’ll move on to the more challenging portion of the exercise and try to imagine how conservatives must see things.  Then I’ll wrap up with a few issue that make it very difficult or I suppose if I’m being honest pretty much impossible for me to fully understand the conservative perspective in the hope that some conservative might read it one day and explain it in print, in which case I can do the whole exercise again but presumably with a much improved take on the conservative perspective... 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!

Domestic Terrorism Takes Root in Oregon

Welcome friends!

Looks like the race for the presidency is really heating up, right?  Who could have predicted the head of the FBI would try to play king maker and jump in at the last minute with a breathless albeit vague declaration that a few weeks back his agency found some emails that seem to have some connection with Hilary Clinton?  Will it turn out to be “bigger than Watergate” as Trumpo triumphantly proclaimed?  Or will it be nothing at all?  Hey, your guess is as good as mine.  The funny thing is it doesn’t matter; we’ll only know after the election.  The real news here is not the emails but the news or pseudo-news about the emails.  Anyway, now that FBI has entered the fray it seems we have a real horse race on our hands.  Will we get a corrupt lying incompetent buffoon or a Nasty Bitch?  Sorry, I meant Nasty Woman just then.  Speaking in the vernacular.  They both have pros and cons.  The buffoon might be entertaining but potentially horribly destructive and embarrassing.  The Nasty Woman might know what she’s doing but she’s so uppity and cold.  I can feel myself shriveling up as I write.  Tough call.  I remember watching the Three Stooges as a child so I do appreciate buffoonery.  I can picture the scene.  President Trumpo the Clown shows up at a fancy schmancy diplomatic event at the White House with a bunch of foreign eggheads and politically correct milquetoasts.  Some elegant older lady, let’s say a 2 or 3, asks him if they will serve canapés.  Trumpo declares confidently, “Why soitanly!” and slips into the kitchen to heat up a can of peas.  He emerges with a bowl of warm peas only to slip on a banana peel and fall into a dignified foreign duchess small hands grasping at her crotch.  Outraged she picks up a cream pie from the sideboard and throws it at him but he ducks and it hits a smirking Mike Pence who proclaims loudly, “That never happened!”  I’m telling you every day will be hilarious!  We’ll never know what manner of lunacy might happen next.  Will the government default on its debt?  Will we have another Great Depression?  Will we lose our jobs, our savings, our houses?  Will we have health insurance?  Will we have nuclear war?  Will we dissolve Congress and do away with democracy?  Will we have race war?  Will we have a war of religion?  Will we construct a Great Wall around the continental USA?  Seriously, I think we might die laughing during the next few years.  Hey, there are worse ways to go.  And what if it’s the Nasty Bitch?  Well, I guess we’ll survive well enough so that’s the good side but just imagine the damage to the egos of all those dimwitted older rural white men out there.  Oh won’t someone think of the childish?  The emails, the emails!  Well, let’s wait a week and see how it all plays out before getting too worked up shall we?  With a little luck everything might still turn out OK.  No, what I wanted to talk about this week was not the impending election but something that strikes me as every bit as ominous in its own way: the recent acquittal of a band of armed domestic terrorists by a sympathetic or perhaps just craven jury right here in the good old USA.  Did you ever wonder how those swarthy foreign countries end up with roving bands of armed lunatics they seem entirely incapable of doing anything about?  Well, wonder no more.  It’s basically the same reason we apparently intend to allow bands of armed lunatics to operate freely here in the USA.  The people demand it.  So nice when mysteries like that are solved isn’t it?

Yes, the story I’m discussing this week involves that armed “militia” that took over a federal building in rural Oregon a while back... 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!

Conservatives Attempt to Undermine American Democracy

Welcome friends!

I suspect I might have only a few weeks left to discuss one of the most illuminating political movements in recent years: the attempt by elements within the conservative Republican Party to install lying egoist billionaire playboy Donald Trump as president of the USA.  Looks like it’s not going to pan out of course and I never really thought it would but that’s not the interesting bit.  The interesting bit is they’ve gotten nearly half the country to go along with their little scheme.  It’s really quite remarkable and something that as a younger man I would have confidently predicted could never happen.  In my youth conservatives were always banging on about their values as though they and only they had them.  Makes me laugh now.  I guess we didn’t realize the values they were talking about were things like pussy grabbing, telling outrageous lies, insulting people, and making a quick buck.  Well, making a quick buck maybe.  I suppose we all suspected that was one of the primary values they had in mind.  But I guess we didn’t know it was the be-all and end-all.  Apparently the conservative position is if one makes a buck one can do and say whatever one likes.  Yes, the rich are very special people.  One doesn’t want them to shrug and let the whole world slip from off their shoulders.  That would be like some kind of Greek tragedy.  By the way, I suppose I should clarify that when I mention conservatives in this post I’m talking about the mainstream conservatives of today.  Trumpkins.  People who live mostly in the sparsely populated central regions of the nation.  I know there are still a certain number of more reputable and high minded people who rather confusedly also want to call themselves conservatives and have been doing whatever they can to shut Mr. Trump down.  Those are the people I consider the honorable opposition.  We may disagree on many or I suppose just about all values and facts but at least we agree on a few things such as talking and acting like reasonable adults, speaking honestly and plainly, trying sincerely to straighten things out.  I miss the days when such people were in charge of the conservative movement in this country.  It was a lot more fun to engage the “enemy” on the field of ideas like gentlepeople than to engage them on the streets of Crazy Town as we do today.  Didn’t think much of it at the time but I guess everything is relative.

Speaking of things that are now apparently acceptable but never were formerly how about Trumpo the Clown’s contention that the election has been rigged?  Well, I guess that only applies if he loses.  He’s said if he wins the election he considers that evidence it was above board but if he loses that shows it must have been rigged.  Funny sort of proposition isn’t it?  Something not quite scientific going on there... 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 Government Made Me Do It

Welcome friends!

I read an interesting article the other day about what I think must be one of the central mysteries of our time.  Why are undereducated underemployed economically struggling older rural while people so attracted to spoiled self-obsessed fabulously wealthy jet setting big city liar and all around shyster Donald Trump?  Talk about your strange bedfellows.  I know a lot has been made of Trump’s efforts to tap into every low sentiment one can find in small town America: racism, nationalism, nativism, religious intolerance, misogyny, hatred of sexual minorities, and so on.  I get that part.  He has clearly tapped into a previously unused political resource.  But it’s not like he’s some kind of political genius.  We all knew such deploring sentiments were out there.  It’s just that no one else was sufficiently disreputable to go there.  But is there something else this segment of conservatives finds appealing about the man?  Something a bit more positive perhaps?  Something people who don’t live in Oklahoma or Texas or other such places might hope to understand?  Well, much to my surprise I’m starting to think there may be.

The article I was reading discussed an apparently common attitude among such people that the US government is the source of all that ails them.  Yes indeed.  They don’t attribute their financial difficulties on anything you and I might think about: technology, industrial organization, trade, demand, unemployment, commodity bubbles, and so on... 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 Conservative Embrace of Nonsense

Welcome friends!

I was just reading another article that brought to mind the curious love affair some conservatives seem to be having with utter nonsense.  It’s getting rather comical.   Indeed, I suspect Mr. Trump’s main credential as a conservative must be that he peddles unadulterated poppycock.  I think conservatives have confined themselves to talking nonsense for so long they’ve developed a positive taste for it or if they still don’t like it at some level at least can no longer detect it.  Hey, it happens.  Like eating salt.  What tastes salty?  Whatever is slightly saltier than the last thing one ate.  If the last thing was a potato chip you’re in trouble.  Same thing with nonsense.  How idiotic does Trump have to sound before conservatives notice and begin to have reservations?  Apparently pretty damned idiotic indeed.  What is all this pre-Trump nonsense I’m talking about?  Well, I discussed last time the curious notion that having a so-called free market will solve all our economic woes and in particular ensure a fair and equitable distribution of resources.  Don’t know where they got that from but they’ve been saying that for decades.  They may have been saying that since Victorian times.  Nothing that happens in the world and no developments in the field of economics seem capable of changing that conviction.  The article that got me going this week addressed a slightly different but just as long lived conservative talking point: the importance of cutting taxes and shrinking government.  The article simply pointed out there is no real empirical evidence for this idea.  Indeed, countries with faster growing economies tend to have somewhat higher taxes and larger governments.  Of course as the article pointed out this might be because people in countries that are doing well simply have higher expectations with respect to their governments dealing with social issues.  Countries are not necessarily growing faster because they have high taxes and large governments.  The point is simply the data show in the real world higher economic growth rates tend to go along with higher taxes and larger governments for one reason or another.  Given this state of affairs one wonders why conservatives are so adamant about this particular policy prescription.  Indeed, after listening to them talk about this idea for decades I rather suspect it’s the only policy idea they really have.  At least they seem to trot it out no matter what is actually happening in the world.  Did Wall Street generate a stock market crash that threatened the economy?  We need to lower taxes and shrink government.  Is most of the wealth going to a small group of people at the top?  We need to lower taxes and shrink government.  Do we have a bunch of unemployed poor people with guns shooting one another and random other people as well?  We need to lower taxes and shrink government.  Kind of like the old snake oil one could find at the local agricultural fair.  Good for whatever ails you.

But of course the great underlying question is why are conservatives drawn to this sort of thing?  Why don’t they seem to care about facts? ... 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 Great Conservative Non-Debate on Distributional Issues: Free Markets At Home And Abroad

Welcome friends!

A couple of posts ago I was talking about Brexit and I mentioned I noticed something a bit odd about how conservatism reared its ugly head in that context so I thought I’d take another look at that this week.  If you read my blog at all you’ll know I’m always interested in sorting the odd bits.  I don’t really have the time or inclination to do any intellectual heavy lifting in my little blog.  I mentioned I have a day job, right?  But I consider clearing up this sort of confusion whenever I can my humble contribution to the common good; my way of helping those who want to think seriously about real issues.  And believe me in our culture those people need all the help they can get.  The prevailing mode of discourse here in the USA and I suppose other western democracies tends toward a combination of one-sided advocacy derived I suppose from our adversarial judicial system and idiotic infomercial-style political marketing designed to manipulate people into doing things.  To state the obvious this mode of discourse is not at all addressed to clearing up confusion.  Indeed, if the various proponents of this mode of discourse feel confusion might help them get what they want then confusion is what they will peddle.  Seems quite often the case from what I can tell.  Well, OK, I suppose addressing the confusing bits helps me as well.  I’m not just doing it for other people.  My brain just feels better when it’s not tied up in knots.  Always sets me a little on edge when someone says something that doesn’t really make sense and everyone else carries on as though nothing happened.  That’s usually when people start talking past one another, which is something that always annoys the hell out of me.  I mean really what’s the point?  There’s already too much meaningless noise in the world.  Let’s not add to it.  If you suddenly find you no longer understand what the other fellow is talking about don’t get angry and start insulting people like some conservative hothead, just back it on up until you figure out what happened.  Probably just a bit of confusion involving some ambiguous language or something like that.  But people are so impatient these days.  I know our time in this world is limited but isn’t it better to clear up one little issue at a time so those who come after us have something solid to build upon than to tell the tale of all humanity only to find out we got a little mixed up on page one and someone else has to do the whole thing over again?  Show a little humility for goodness sake.  Case in point.  Conservatives and distributional issues.  What’s their position?  Clear as mud.  Doesn’t stop them foaming at the mouth about it, does it?  Let’s see if we can shed a little light on the subject.

First let me just say the conservatives I’m talking about this week are economic conservatives so if happen to just say just conservatives later on keep that in mind.  I’ll think a bit about social conservatives and distributional issues another day but you know I think social conservatives are generally more concerned with other issues like forcing other people to follow their religious precepts and getting one over on minorities and bashing gay people and fretting about immigrants for cultural as opposed to economic reasons and so on.  As far as distributional issues go they’re probably fine with whatever they think we have now or had before depending I suppose on how well they’re doing.  No, when it comes to distributional issues economic conservatives are the more interesting case to me because they typically profess to have some substantive views on the subject although usually it turns out they don't or at least none they’re willing to share.

Now when one thinks about economic conservatives and distributional issues the preeminent intellectual construct that comes to mind must be the so-called “free market.”  I say so-called because I suppose what most conservatives have in mind when they talk about the free market is the model of a perfectly competitive market from the neoclassical economic theory they most likely vaguely remember from their freshmen year in college.  My impression is people who think more seriously about such things, such as most but by no means all economists, consider the term “the free market” hopelessly vague, anachronistic, and politicized.  Real markets can have all sorts of characteristics that cause them to diverge more or less dramatically from the theoretical model of a perfectly competitive market so the question of what really happens when one doesn’t regulate real markets, which I suppose must be one common interpretation of the word “free” in the phrase “the free market,” is very much an open question.  Nor is it the case that left to their own devices most real world markets will tend over time toward the perfectly competitive end of the spectrum.  Nor are such markets “free” in the sense they allow everyone to do whatever he or she wants.  One still needs property rights and contracts and cops and prisons and so on.  I suppose one could say one is free to do whatever one is allowed to do under that system but then again I suppose one can say that about any distributional system.  Indeed, I suppose it must be the case some people at the bottom of the wealth spectrum would experience more practical economic freedom under a different sort of distributional system.  Other people too maybe.  (If you like to think about such things you may want to glance at my musings on some of the more ambiguous elements of the concept of freedom in my posts Freedom I and II from November 1 and 28, 2013, respectively.)  Let me put in this way.  In my rather too many years of graduate study in economics I don’t really recall hearing anyone use the phrase “the free market.”  I’ll go ahead and use it here to keep the authentic flavor of conservative discourse.  Just keep in mind that what I’m actually referring to and what I think economic conservatives are actually referring is the theoretical model of a perfectly competitive market from neoclassical economic theory.  We can just assume for purposes of this discussion that model is a close enough approximation to enough real world markets we can just discuss that model and “the free market” interchangeably.  (Just to be clear, I don’t actually think that’s the case at all but I’m not sure it matters for what I’m trying to say this week so let’s play a little game of the imagination and say we can to keep things moving.)

So, as I was saying, most of the relatively serious economic conservatives I’ve met believe all distributional issues will be adequately addressed as long as we have a free market including of course that important and rather distinctive portion of the market governing labor.  My impression has long been these people believe under the conditions discussed in the neoclassical model of perfect competition everyone will get what he or she deserves.  Those who should be rich will be rich, those who should be poor will be poor, and those old hobos who should starve to death in the woods will starve to death in the woods.  If we have a free market then all will be right with the world as far as distributional issues go anyway.  My understanding is most conservatives believe any further discussion of distributional issues would place one firmly in the despised (by them) “socialist” camp with the moochers and takers who are trying to upset the natural order of things and get something other than what they really deserve.

However, although I’ve found pretty much all economic conservatives profess to base their ethical thinking about distributional matters on neoclassical economic theory I’m not sure they’re all on the same page about how that is actually meant to work.  One must keep in mind academic economists have long given up pretending they have a coherent ethical theory about distributional issues and how such issues relate to the model of perfectly competitive markets.  Indeed, the branch of economic theory dealing with such matters, so-called welfare economics, has eschewed such overt ethical arguments since at least the middle of the last century.  However, I think it’s fair to suppose many economic conservatives never got the memo.   As I’ve pointed out in a number of other posts modern welfare economics takes an entirely different approach to supporting policies designed to produce and maintain “the free market” that purports to imply nothing about the ethics of distributional systems including those associated with a free market for labor.  Of course some confused people (including some confused economists) believe they can use neoclassical economic theory to establish the ethical superiority of “the free market” based solely on what they call “efficiency” in the context of the model of a perfectly competitive market (not to be confused with the “efficiency” you and I use in everyday speech) and setting aside distributional issues entirely, which they suggest we can handle as a second step some old way or other later on.  Doesn’t really work of course, as I’ve also pointed out in many previous points.  If distributional issues matter, which of course they do, they render it impossible to say anything definitive about the desirability of any given free market / perfectly competitive market outcome using modern welfare economics because any given free market outcome will necessarily come bundled with a distribution.  Free market outcomes with no associated distributions are theoretical constructs that exist and can only exist on paper.  It’s true neoclassical economic theory demonstrates if one has no unresolved distributional issues then a perfectly competitive market looks pretty good but that’s not the same thing at all.  And of course fixing a distribution once one is in place without “interfering” with “the free market” for either products or labor is basically a logically impossible task.  The result of this confusion is that some economic conservatives support the distributional system associated with “the free market” in exactly the same way as their nineteenth century predecessors.  The only difference is that because they profess to have not taken up the ethical issues associated with the distribution of economic power they can’t be bothered to explain their reasoning to anyone, which has the convenient attribute for conservatives that no one is in a position to refute them or even engage them in conversation on the topic.  It’s an intellectual sleight of hand I’ve discussed in many other posts so I won’t go into it again here.  My point is it’s not serious stuff for serious people.  Just a little mind game some conservatives have long been satisfied to play amongst themselves.

In the domestic context most conservatives have long believed if one is not getting what one thinks one should be getting the problem cannot involve the free market itself since that always leads to socially optimal outcomes but from someone interfering with the free market.  Indeed, I read an article just the other day that discussed a recent poll that estimated seventy-one percent of US citizens feel the economy is “rigged.”  The language is noteworthy because instead of attributing their economic woes to the essential dynamics of our free-ish market system and thinking of serious solutions the idea the economy is rigged leads them to suppose the solution lies with a purer form of the free market that will eliminate the rigging.  I get the idea.  If only we could get the free market free enough then everyone would finally get what they truly deserve.  But why do people think that?  I don’t know.  It’s certainly not in modern economic theory as I just explained.  I know.  I’ve looked.  Surely it can’t be from a study of history.  When we actually had a purer form of the free market back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries we had all manner of labor unrest and lots of people who certainly didn’t feel they were getting what they should be getting.  So I don’t know.  And how exactly do these people think the economy is being “rigged” anyway.  I mean rich people rule market systems.  That’s the nature of the beast.  They can start businesses, they can take chances, they can invest in stocks, they can relocate and retrain and switch field and whatever the hell they want to do, they can buy what they want, they can live where they want, they can contribute to politicians to get their way, and they can buy and manipulate the media or a good portion of it anyway.  Is that what people mean when they say the economy is rigged?  Because a purer form of the free market would not prevent any of those things happening.  Nor does the free market have any internal mechanism to address things like producing enough jobs to go around or generating fair wages or keeping a lid on unjustified inequality or anything like that.  It might do that under some conditions.  Might not under others.  Indeed, increasing concentration of wealth in a select few and the corresponding impoverishment of the majority is perfectly consistent with a free market under certain conditions relating to the initial distribution, technology of production, and labor and product market characteristics.  So why this unshakable conviction on the part of conservatives that the tantalizing but apparently never fully attainable free market will solve all economic issues?  If you ask me it’s because we don’t talk seriously about such matters and people cling to what they think they know even when what they think they know has no real basis in either fact or theory.

However, and this is the interesting bit to me and the part I really wanted to talk about this week, Brexit in the UK and the remarkable popularity of the comic stylings of Trumpo the Clown here in the USA have demonstrated the existence of a rather large group of nominally economic conservatives who profess to relate their thinking on distributional issues to free market ideology in a domestic context but rather confusingly not in an international context.  These conservatives are more than happy to call anyone who talks about distributional issues relating to market systems in a domestic context socialists or communists but they themselves oppose the free market in the form of free trade deals and the free movement of labor or jobs in an international context based on what would appear to be distributional concerns.  It doesn’t really make sense to do both of these things at the same time, which I suppose must be what annoys the hell out of the first group of economic conservatives who take their market worshipping seriously or at least want to use that as their story.  Indeed, I don’t really know what to make of this new group myself.  They don’t seem to fit cleanly into any of my previously delineated categories.  Not even sure what to call them.  Given their apparent domination of the conservative Republican Party here in the US should we think of them as the real economic conservatives and consider the group who talks up the free market as a panacea for all that ails us a bunch of out-of-touch or perhaps intellectually dishonest windbags?  Or are the logically consistent market worshippers the real economic conservatives and the group that supports free markets in a domestic context but opposes them in an international context a bunch of populist wooly headed know nothing pseudo-conservatives?  I don’t know but they all sound like conservatives of one sort or another to me.  I think what’s going on with this new group of conservatives is they’re paying attention to their self interest and are convinced people talking about distributional concerns relating to the free market in a domestic context implies domestic poor people picking their pockets and taking their jobs while conversely people not talking about distributional concerns relating to the free market in an international context means foreign poor people picking their pockets and taking their jobs.  One infers these people are not expressing their distributional views honestly, similar to what I suspect other conservatives are doing but even more obviously and egregiously.  I get that they feel they deserve better paying jobs and more money but why exactly?

Basically the distributional effects of implementing free market ideology in the international context has split the conservative intellectual elite if one wants to think of them in those terms of business tycoons, rich people, old school Republican Party elites, certain academics and amateur social philosophers from their more plebeian supporters who apparently never really gave a second thought to what the first group was actually saying but were convinced they would come out ahead if they went along with whatever it was.  The conservative elite has continued on with their same old story but it has apparently finally dawned on their rank and file supporters that at least as far as importing cheap labor and moving manufacturing overseas they’re getting screwed.  I suppose it’s mostly a positive development.  A little more thinking and it might dawn on these people the free market solves everything story isn’t as strong as they’ve been led to believe even in a domestic context and for the same reason: distributional issues matter.  We’ll all be liberals at that point and we can move on to actually solving some things.  Of course in the short term we have to put up with the awkward growing pains of this portion of the conservative base in the form of characters like Trumpo the Clown belching out an incoherent mishmash of contradictory ideas no reasonable person can decipher.  But how much damage can the guy really do in four years?  Oh.  A lot?   Well never mind; life goes on.  Two steps forward and one step back.  That’s the way of the world.

We liberals also have our share of disagreements but we don’t really have this particular problem because in general we’re just willing to talk about distributional issues a lot more openly and honestly than are most economic conservatives.  We know distributional issues matter.  I say it all the time.  We know simply having a market system doesn’t necessarily address all distributional issues.  I say it all the time   We know talking about things like freedom and liberty is a red herring if we’re really talking about distributional issues and resolving interpersonal conflicts of needs and desires.  I say it all the time.  We’re not surprised at all some conservatives have thoughts on distributional issues that aren’t captured in free market ideology.  How could it be otherwise when the whole argument ostensibly relating the two is nothing but an intellectual sham?  We should sit down and discuss distributional issues some time.  No, it’s not class warfare.  Ignorance never solves anything.  It might hold something at bay for a little while but that’s not the same thing at all.  If only the conservative elite would give up their program of obfuscation and misdirection and start talking seriously about such matters we might actually get somewhere.  You’d think they’d start doing that now to close ranks if for no other reason but maybe their shared hatred of liberals and humanists will be enough to keep them together for now.  Who knows?  Only time will tell.  Here’s a happy thought.  If the conservative Republican Party loses yet another presidential election here in the USA maybe future conservatives will be more willing to discuss distributional matters openly and honestly.  Wouldn’t that be a breath of fresh air?  Say it with me now!  I’m with her!  I mean, I sure as hell can’t be with him, can I?  Let’s not be ridiculous.

References

71% of Americans believe economy is ‘rigged.’  Heather Long.  CNN. June 28, 2016.  http://money.cnn.com/2016/06/28/news/economy/americans-believe-economy-is-rigged/index.html?iid=EL.