Lewis Black, in a stand-up routine a couple of years ago, said that anyone still loyal to either major political party is crazier than he was after he dropped acid in the 70s and found himself in the woods, believing his fridge had turned into a mountain lion that he had tracked down and was now trying to gut in order to get a beer. LSD and I have never crossed paths, but I have to agree that anyone that is an active supporter of either party is crazy. They are both riddled with intellectual inconsistencies brought upon by the perceived need to pander to various groups in order to secure votes. What is even worse is that both sides are self-righteous.
My own personal philosophy is to look at what works. We have to find balances between helping ourselves, our fellow citizens, our fellow humans, and our descendants. A productive populace that works through various channels, including industry, media, governments, and civic organizations, to achieve progress in as many areas as possible, while keeping important values from being trampled, should be (in my opinion) the goal. No political party even tries to facilitate this.
What follows is a description of the parties as stereotypes. (In my next post, I'll discuss the major contenders for my vote, and how I will make my decision.)
Because I have traditionally aligned myself with the Democrats, I'll start tossing stones in that direction. Democrats do not seem to have an obvious cabal of three groups, but instead there is a herding of cats between environmentalists, pro-choicers, social progressives, recent immigrants, academics, blacks and Hispanics, unions, and whomever else walks through the door. Democrats do not seem to understand that money is not a fix-all. If there is a problem, the solution is invariably to throw more money at it. Education scores are down? Give the schools more money! Too many pregnant teens? Give both abortion clinics and adoption agencies more money! Etc. This approach has multiple problems, but the most severe are (a) The money has to come from somewhere, and (b) money not only does not solve all problems, but can make many worse.
(a) The money has to come from somewhere. So, when we stared the nation, a lot of the money to run the federal government was garnered from tariffs -- so we had people from other countries paying for our government. For several (mainly good) reasons, this won't work anymore. Now, most of the money comes from taxing U.S. citizens. This seems reasonable -- U.S. citizens receive the bulk of the benefit. However, every dollar that the government takes from its citizens needs to be justified; is it permissible for the government to spend money in this way, and is the return on investment worth it? There is a transaction cost to taxation (the IRS, lawyers and courts, HR staff, etc.), so the money taken through taxation must have an ROI greater than breaking even to be of value to society. If it doesn't, it is cheaper and more ethical to leave the money where it was earned. (As an aside, the term "earned" is much more problematic than many acknowledge, but that discussion is for another time.)
A substantial minority of the money comes from simply printing more of it. I will trust the economic know-how of my readers enough NOT to explain why printing money with no productivity backing it is not sustainable. (Feel free to research currency collapse, if you so desire.)
(b) Money sometimes makes problems worse. Okay, so even if the government can succeed via (a) in justifying the amount of money it takes/makes, that doesn't mean that more money solves the problem. Sometimes, money received without effort can give perverse incentives to continue the bad situation that resulted in getting the money. Single mothers get more money from welfare, so there is an incentive for women not to marry and to have children. Those children are statistically worse off (less likely to finish school, more likely to be teenage parents, more likely to be on drugs, more likely to be imprisoned, etc.) than children of women who do not receive increased welfare checks due to familial status. (I believe that the children of more well-to-do single parents are much less statistically impaired, which bolsters my claim.) So, following the policy of giving more money to help single mothers may actually hurt the children, however inadvertantly. More perniciously, this connection has long been understood, so at least some that uphold it must know the real-world effects of the policies, yet continue them.
Extending unemployment benefits can do the same thing -- many people will not try as hard to find a job while unemployment is rolling in. Indeed, they may have actually decided they are not seeking employment at all (maybe they want to be stay-at-home parents, or maybe they want to go to school, for instance), but they can make the weekly call to SAY they are seeking employment, and continue getting paid. This creates an incentive to lie (but everyone does it, right?), and it also skews the unemployment figures, probably reducing business and consumer confidence.
My point here isn't to say we should stop welfare or unemployment benefits. My point is that adding more money to a problem can actually make it worse. Often, making a program more efficient through policy changes has a much better return on investment. But Democrats rarely seem to take that option -- they always want to increase spending. With unprecedented debt and deficits, spending has to be reigned in.
But now let's turn to the Republicans. The GOP has consisted of 3 wings throughout my lifetime: social conservatives, big business, and small government. My major beef with Republicans is the idolization of personal greed. There was a time when greed was actually considered (believe it or not) to be not only sinful, but among the worst of sins. There are a handful of biblical verses saying homosexuality is bad; there are almost none saying that abortion is bad (really--see my previous blog about this, if you don't believe it); but there are legion (heh) saying that being rich is questionable, and even more saying that being charitable and loving is good. Indeed, the defining characteristic of Jesus
is supposed to be love, with charity being (very) arguably the highest virtue. How is it, then, that Christian conservatives find themselves in lock-step with big business?
The notion that the SOLE purpose of businesses is to make current money for the current shareholders, to the exclusion of all other priorities, is now accepted as almost self evident. I mean, for what other reason does a company exist, right? Well, perhaps for the same reason that people exist. People can try to get ahead, yet still treat their fellow citizens well, still give civically, still work toward a brighter future. But if you are on the wrong side of a shareholder derivative suit and make this argument, it is probably a losing one. How did we get here? Why can public companies not explicitly care about anything but money? Cannot a company have some duty to, for instance,
its employees, helping them to have better-than-average lives even if it will cost shareholders some? If you owned a small business, wouldn't you be likely to treat your employees well? But, somehow, big business does not have to do that. And let's forget about civic duties -- companies frequently feel the need to argue to their shareholders that the directors are really just worried about getting more
money, and any civic action is actually a thinly disguised bit of PR work.
I don't know how often I've heard Republicans say that taxation is stealing, and even sometimes that it is slavery. This sort of over-the-top, inflammatory rhetoric indicates, in my opinion, a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of governments and the history of the world. You don't have money without governments, and "property" only makes sense if there is some external entity to enforce and define property rights -- i.e., the government. Who owns something, and what that means, is a function of the civic agreements we have made to follow the rules set by courts and legislatures. Part of that compact is that governments get a cut. Policies may be bad, and taxes may be too high, but
taxation is not the same as a robber holding a gun to your head. (Yes, I understand that you will be arrested if you don't pay taxes, and that the police officer will be carrying a gun. He will be carrying the same gun if you are served for too many parking tickets, or if you burned down a tree in your neighbors yard, or anything else.) Anybody that compares paying taxes to slavery, including Representative Ron Paul, is hopelessly out of touch with what real slavery is; that statement is enough to call into question either the speaker's judgment or his argumentation strategies.
Even more problematic, though, is the way many Republicans are disdainful toward recipients of government aid. You hear welfare recipients described as lazy bums stealing from the productive Americans. Unemployed people are just loafers. Indeed, the recipients of virtually any government aid (unless it's the aid that particular Republican is getting) are lesser beings, worthy of derision. Though this is understandable rhetorically, how does it jive with charity? Shouldn't the first impulse be to help, in whatever way works best, and then, only after careful reflection, shouldn't a decision to give less be accompanied by caring, by charity, by love ... not by villification?
Not to leave others out, let's take a brief foray into the small groups: Libertarians, Tea Partiers, Occupy Wall-Streeters, etc.
Libertarians have many good ideas, but the problem often is they those good ideas come from an unbalanced understanding of our nation. It has never been solely about personal liberty -- as Franklin famously put it, either we hang together, or we will all surely hang separately. There is a balance between personal liberty, equality, and national progress -- "All [people] are created equal .... Among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." To focus solely on liberty is to miss part of the point -- or, to be fair, maybe it's to disagree with everyone from the founding on, which is not necessarily untenable ... just without historical pedigree.
Tea Partiers are a hodge-podge that started out naming themselves after a group that dressed up as Indians (Native Americans) to destroy other people's property in an act that many outsiders, including British sympathetic with the American cause, viewed with horror. I think that the modern group named itself well. It began with using guerrilla tactics to disrupt townhall meetings. It continues with obstinate refusal to compromise in any way. I applaud the group's grassroots political involvement; with almost everything else, I disagree.
Occupy Wall Streeters? I am extremely sypathetic to the fact that many Wall Street bankers have taken millions of dollars in bonuses while driving the world's economy over a cliff. I have friends that have had cars repossessed, houses foreclosed, declared bankruptcy, etc., and Wall Street bankers received tax-payer funded bonuses. Ridiculous. There, I agree with the Occupiers. Beyond that, most of their ideas are silly, like forgiving all student loan debt. Again, I appreciate grassroots political involvement; for the rest, silly doesn't work.
To look at this through a related lens, Democrats seem to care much more about equality than personal liberty, while Republicans seem to care much more about personal liberty than equality; the fringe groups tend to focus even more on one trait, at the expense of the other. As our founders and most succeeding generations have tried to make clear, however, BOTH equality AND liberty are values that should be nourished and respected.
So I think the political landscape is pretty bleak right now. We can choose from party A, who wants more government and spending, or party B, who wants more greed and spending. Almost nobody wants to focus on figuring out what works while trying to curtail spending. This is nothing new, but it seems to be very bad now, with S&P downgrading our credit rating and our entitlements and deficits out of control.
In my next blog, I'll discuss how this perspective will likely lead me to vote for my 4th favorite candidate this year.
My own personal philosophy is to look at what works. We have to find balances between helping ourselves, our fellow citizens, our fellow humans, and our descendants. A productive populace that works through various channels, including industry, media, governments, and civic organizations, to achieve progress in as many areas as possible, while keeping important values from being trampled, should be (in my opinion) the goal. No political party even tries to facilitate this.
What follows is a description of the parties as stereotypes. (In my next post, I'll discuss the major contenders for my vote, and how I will make my decision.)
Because I have traditionally aligned myself with the Democrats, I'll start tossing stones in that direction. Democrats do not seem to have an obvious cabal of three groups, but instead there is a herding of cats between environmentalists, pro-choicers, social progressives, recent immigrants, academics, blacks and Hispanics, unions, and whomever else walks through the door. Democrats do not seem to understand that money is not a fix-all. If there is a problem, the solution is invariably to throw more money at it. Education scores are down? Give the schools more money! Too many pregnant teens? Give both abortion clinics and adoption agencies more money! Etc. This approach has multiple problems, but the most severe are (a) The money has to come from somewhere, and (b) money not only does not solve all problems, but can make many worse.
(a) The money has to come from somewhere. So, when we stared the nation, a lot of the money to run the federal government was garnered from tariffs -- so we had people from other countries paying for our government. For several (mainly good) reasons, this won't work anymore. Now, most of the money comes from taxing U.S. citizens. This seems reasonable -- U.S. citizens receive the bulk of the benefit. However, every dollar that the government takes from its citizens needs to be justified; is it permissible for the government to spend money in this way, and is the return on investment worth it? There is a transaction cost to taxation (the IRS, lawyers and courts, HR staff, etc.), so the money taken through taxation must have an ROI greater than breaking even to be of value to society. If it doesn't, it is cheaper and more ethical to leave the money where it was earned. (As an aside, the term "earned" is much more problematic than many acknowledge, but that discussion is for another time.)
A substantial minority of the money comes from simply printing more of it. I will trust the economic know-how of my readers enough NOT to explain why printing money with no productivity backing it is not sustainable. (Feel free to research currency collapse, if you so desire.)
(b) Money sometimes makes problems worse. Okay, so even if the government can succeed via (a) in justifying the amount of money it takes/makes, that doesn't mean that more money solves the problem. Sometimes, money received without effort can give perverse incentives to continue the bad situation that resulted in getting the money. Single mothers get more money from welfare, so there is an incentive for women not to marry and to have children. Those children are statistically worse off (less likely to finish school, more likely to be teenage parents, more likely to be on drugs, more likely to be imprisoned, etc.) than children of women who do not receive increased welfare checks due to familial status. (I believe that the children of more well-to-do single parents are much less statistically impaired, which bolsters my claim.) So, following the policy of giving more money to help single mothers may actually hurt the children, however inadvertantly. More perniciously, this connection has long been understood, so at least some that uphold it must know the real-world effects of the policies, yet continue them.
Extending unemployment benefits can do the same thing -- many people will not try as hard to find a job while unemployment is rolling in. Indeed, they may have actually decided they are not seeking employment at all (maybe they want to be stay-at-home parents, or maybe they want to go to school, for instance), but they can make the weekly call to SAY they are seeking employment, and continue getting paid. This creates an incentive to lie (but everyone does it, right?), and it also skews the unemployment figures, probably reducing business and consumer confidence.
My point here isn't to say we should stop welfare or unemployment benefits. My point is that adding more money to a problem can actually make it worse. Often, making a program more efficient through policy changes has a much better return on investment. But Democrats rarely seem to take that option -- they always want to increase spending. With unprecedented debt and deficits, spending has to be reigned in.
But now let's turn to the Republicans. The GOP has consisted of 3 wings throughout my lifetime: social conservatives, big business, and small government. My major beef with Republicans is the idolization of personal greed. There was a time when greed was actually considered (believe it or not) to be not only sinful, but among the worst of sins. There are a handful of biblical verses saying homosexuality is bad; there are almost none saying that abortion is bad (really--see my previous blog about this, if you don't believe it); but there are legion (heh) saying that being rich is questionable, and even more saying that being charitable and loving is good. Indeed, the defining characteristic of Jesus
is supposed to be love, with charity being (very) arguably the highest virtue. How is it, then, that Christian conservatives find themselves in lock-step with big business?
The notion that the SOLE purpose of businesses is to make current money for the current shareholders, to the exclusion of all other priorities, is now accepted as almost self evident. I mean, for what other reason does a company exist, right? Well, perhaps for the same reason that people exist. People can try to get ahead, yet still treat their fellow citizens well, still give civically, still work toward a brighter future. But if you are on the wrong side of a shareholder derivative suit and make this argument, it is probably a losing one. How did we get here? Why can public companies not explicitly care about anything but money? Cannot a company have some duty to, for instance,
its employees, helping them to have better-than-average lives even if it will cost shareholders some? If you owned a small business, wouldn't you be likely to treat your employees well? But, somehow, big business does not have to do that. And let's forget about civic duties -- companies frequently feel the need to argue to their shareholders that the directors are really just worried about getting more
money, and any civic action is actually a thinly disguised bit of PR work.
I don't know how often I've heard Republicans say that taxation is stealing, and even sometimes that it is slavery. This sort of over-the-top, inflammatory rhetoric indicates, in my opinion, a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of governments and the history of the world. You don't have money without governments, and "property" only makes sense if there is some external entity to enforce and define property rights -- i.e., the government. Who owns something, and what that means, is a function of the civic agreements we have made to follow the rules set by courts and legislatures. Part of that compact is that governments get a cut. Policies may be bad, and taxes may be too high, but
taxation is not the same as a robber holding a gun to your head. (Yes, I understand that you will be arrested if you don't pay taxes, and that the police officer will be carrying a gun. He will be carrying the same gun if you are served for too many parking tickets, or if you burned down a tree in your neighbors yard, or anything else.) Anybody that compares paying taxes to slavery, including Representative Ron Paul, is hopelessly out of touch with what real slavery is; that statement is enough to call into question either the speaker's judgment or his argumentation strategies.
Even more problematic, though, is the way many Republicans are disdainful toward recipients of government aid. You hear welfare recipients described as lazy bums stealing from the productive Americans. Unemployed people are just loafers. Indeed, the recipients of virtually any government aid (unless it's the aid that particular Republican is getting) are lesser beings, worthy of derision. Though this is understandable rhetorically, how does it jive with charity? Shouldn't the first impulse be to help, in whatever way works best, and then, only after careful reflection, shouldn't a decision to give less be accompanied by caring, by charity, by love ... not by villification?
Not to leave others out, let's take a brief foray into the small groups: Libertarians, Tea Partiers, Occupy Wall-Streeters, etc.
Libertarians have many good ideas, but the problem often is they those good ideas come from an unbalanced understanding of our nation. It has never been solely about personal liberty -- as Franklin famously put it, either we hang together, or we will all surely hang separately. There is a balance between personal liberty, equality, and national progress -- "All [people] are created equal .... Among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." To focus solely on liberty is to miss part of the point -- or, to be fair, maybe it's to disagree with everyone from the founding on, which is not necessarily untenable ... just without historical pedigree.
Tea Partiers are a hodge-podge that started out naming themselves after a group that dressed up as Indians (Native Americans) to destroy other people's property in an act that many outsiders, including British sympathetic with the American cause, viewed with horror. I think that the modern group named itself well. It began with using guerrilla tactics to disrupt townhall meetings. It continues with obstinate refusal to compromise in any way. I applaud the group's grassroots political involvement; with almost everything else, I disagree.
Occupy Wall Streeters? I am extremely sypathetic to the fact that many Wall Street bankers have taken millions of dollars in bonuses while driving the world's economy over a cliff. I have friends that have had cars repossessed, houses foreclosed, declared bankruptcy, etc., and Wall Street bankers received tax-payer funded bonuses. Ridiculous. There, I agree with the Occupiers. Beyond that, most of their ideas are silly, like forgiving all student loan debt. Again, I appreciate grassroots political involvement; for the rest, silly doesn't work.
To look at this through a related lens, Democrats seem to care much more about equality than personal liberty, while Republicans seem to care much more about personal liberty than equality; the fringe groups tend to focus even more on one trait, at the expense of the other. As our founders and most succeeding generations have tried to make clear, however, BOTH equality AND liberty are values that should be nourished and respected.
So I think the political landscape is pretty bleak right now. We can choose from party A, who wants more government and spending, or party B, who wants more greed and spending. Almost nobody wants to focus on figuring out what works while trying to curtail spending. This is nothing new, but it seems to be very bad now, with S&P downgrading our credit rating and our entitlements and deficits out of control.
In my next blog, I'll discuss how this perspective will likely lead me to vote for my 4th favorite candidate this year.
Thanks for the analysis, Brandon. I agree with you by and large. That said, as long as I can remember I've thought the political landscape was bleak. My personal challenge has been to find a non-political solution to the political problem because I believe the political issues of our day are merely a symptom of a deeper malady. I'm fond of a quotation attributed to Albert Einstein which says, "The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." Since you know me and my convictions you can probably guess my angle.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed the musings, and I think honesty and even-handedness like this are key to moving forward together. I anticipate to your next installment.
@Justin - Thanks for reading and commenting. As to your angle, my first response would be "that has been tried before," to which you would most likely reply, "Yeah, but poorly."
ReplyDeleteI agree with the Albert Einstein quote, though I also like this one by Clinton: "There's nothing wrong with America that can't be fixed by what's right with America."
I am sure you are right about the perpetual bleakness of the political landscape. That is part of what brings good people to run, though, so I am still (very cautiously) optimistic.
Now, I'll post my next part in this series.