tnr

The loss of local bookstores troubles me. Whether it is Amazon or e-books, I fear for local bookstores, particularly used bookstores. A recent commentary by Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic (full article is behind a pay wall) offers a spirited defense of local businesses over online alternatives. A taste:

Browsing is not idleness; or rather, it is active idleness—an exploring capacity, a kind of questing non-instrumental behavior. Browsing is the opposite of “search.” Search is precise, browsing is imprecise. When you search, you find what you were looking for; when you browse, you find what you were not looking for. Search corrects your knowledge, browsing corrects your ignorance. Search narrows, browsing enlarges. It does so by means of accidents, of unexpected adjacencies and improbable associations. On Amazon, by contrast, there are no accidents. Its adjacencies are expected and its associations are probable, because it is programmed for precedents.

Support your local stores.

Once again, I am blown away by Leon Wieseltier on the back page of The New Republic. I hadn't read TNR in awhile because they charge so much for the subscription I had let it lapse - but they brought me back with a short term deal.

Good timing - Rick Perry seems to want to turn the US into some form of supposedly Christian Nation - not in the sense of taking care of our neighbors (one of many positive Christian values rarely embraced by those most loudly proclaiming their Christianity) but in the sense of parading faith and using it to beat on anyone who doesn't share it.

Wieseltier has a stunning repudiation of Rick Perry's public pronouncements but it is buried behind a pay wall. Pity. A couple of powerful snippets:

There is a man half-running for president in the United States who has adopted Joel’s plan. He is Rick Perry, the suave and shallow governor of Texas. He has issued “a call to prayer for a nation in crisis,” which he calls The Response. He proposes to fill a stadium in Houston—Reliant Stadium, it is charmingly called—with contrite Americans, and thereby change the course of our country.

...

"There is hope for America,” Perry preaches. “It lies in heaven, and we will find it on our knees.” He likes the sentence so much that he gives it twice. I dislike it hugely. This country was not built by people on their knees. It was built by people on their feet, with their hands as they were guided by their minds. They acted as if hope for America lay in themselves. There was nothing insolent about this. They were not godless people, except for some in our recent history; but their religion was compatible with, or even inclined them to, the modern concept of historical agency. The United States of America is a monument to that concept. It represents a revolution in human affairs not least because of its faith in the power of human action.

Leon Wieseltier, a writer that I frequently criticize, penned a prescient piece for The New Republic: "Eyeless in Cairo."

I have long argued that while not everyone in the world wants to vote in a republic or even necessarily be engaged in their own governance, I don't believe there is a person that believes power should be totally unaccountable to citizens. Similarly, I doubt there is a person who yearns to live in a society where there is no redress for injustice. This article covers similar ground - the prospects for democratization in Egypt and whether current US policy will reproduce Iran circa 1979.

This is an incredible passage:

Can one be for democracy in some states and against democracy in other states? As a matter of principle, of course not: democracy is universalism as a political order. It is premised on a certain conception of the individual and society, on an understanding of dignity and freedom that would be meaningless if it did not apply to all people. By bringing all people under a single philosophical description, it ignores, without regret, the social and economic and cultural distinctions among them. It equalizes. But policy, even when it is based in philosophy, is not philosophy; it cannot be indifferent to consequences. And the democratization of undemocratic societies is emphatically a policy of destabilization. In the anarchy of the attempt, all kinds of evils may be loosed. Unfree people dream of more than just freedom; they dream also of power, and vengeance, and exclusiveness, and heaven.

OK, I'm briefly blogging another article from The New Republic, "Franken Sense: The Very Serious Senator from Minnesota."

I opposed Al Franken's run for the Senate because I thought it a poor use of his talents. I was very wrong and I'm glad he won. This article confirmed much of what I have observed and I greatly hope he will be reelected despite what will be undoubtedly very motivated opposition.

Once again, Jonathan Chait asks and answers a good question: Who whould finance government: Paris Hilton or her maid?

Jonathan Chait's review of The Battle: How the Fight Between Free Enterprise and Big Government Will Shape America's Future in The New Republic, demolishes the absurd premise of the book -- that Obama is spearheading an attack on markets and entrepreneurship. Of course, it is this author, American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Books, and his allies like the Chamber of Commerce that have led the attack on the market in a successful attempt to maximize the power of the world's largest companies.

Chait's review does everything one would want a review to do, but I want to add that I don't think Brooks spends much time being disingenuous. I continue to believe that he and others like him are simply deluded. They do not understand the world as it is, and are fooled the tools they have created to spread their message -- talk radio, Fox news, the Wall Street Journal, etc. At one time, these were meant to spread right wing values such as free market principles and less government. But over time, they have come to work for one goal: winning. They have no principle and defend no values, which makes debating them impossible. As we have seen from the recent right wing pile-on around Obama's Asian trip, they will lie about anything.

I have gone back and forth on whether it makes sense to try the Bush Administration, Bush, Cheney, or others, for their crimes while in office. My thoughts center on how such an attempt would change the future despite the fact that I would love to see them pay for their many crimes... but revenge is not a particularly good reason to do this.

In a recent issue of The New Republic, Michael Walzer considers other political trials in a good article examining the merits of a Bush trial. Highly recommended for those who would argue for a trial.

My conclusion is ultimately that such a trial would create more problems than it would solve. However, I think a Truth Commission would be a good approach. If anyone truly believed we were a society governed by the "rule of law," then a trial would make sense. But we aren't - despite the popular talking points of both parties who only care about the "rule of law" when it disadvantages their opponents.

After I studied economics, I learned that most people who talk about the "free market" have no clue what they are talking about. Those who want government to operate exactly as would a business do not understand how the motivations of government are different from business, necessitating different approaches to solving the different problems that these entities are expected to resolve.

After visiting Africa and living briefly in the Middle East, I understood that there is no magical "free market." Markets result from infrastructure (provided by government or some other non profit-maximizing entity) and often anti-trust regulations.

This is background for an important article I highly recommend -- "Wealthcare" by Jonathan Chait in the September 23, 2009 The New Republic magazine... yeah, I meant to write about it last year.

Right wing radio hosts, Fox News, and a variety of other conservatives who grew up in Reagan's revolution have internalized a whole lot of talking points about "free markets" that they parrot at every opportunity - but they have no sense of the many well known problems of deregulation. The problems range from externalities like pollution to the natural monopolies of broadband and cable TV (that I spend so much time working on).

Chait, who is reviewing two books about Ayn Rand, tackles her legacy:

For conservatives, the causal connection between virtue and success is not merely ideological, it is also deeply personal. It forms the basis of their admiration of themselves. If you ask a rich person whether he ascribes his success to good fortune or his own merit, the answer will probably tell you whether that person inhabits the economic left or the economic right. Rand held up her own meteoric rise from penniless immigrant to wealthy author as a case study of the individualist ethos. "No one helped me," she wrote, "nor did I think at any time that it was anyone’s duty to help me."

But this was false. Rand spent her first months in this country subsisting on loans from relatives in Chicago, which she promised to repay lavishly when she struck it rich. (She reneged, never speaking to her Chicago family again.) She also enjoyed the great fortune of breaking into Hollywood at the moment it was exploding in size, and of bumping into DeMille. Many writers equal to her in their talents never got the chance to develop their abilities. That was not because they were bad or delinquent people.

If I were a right winger, I would likely attribute my success in sports photography to all the hard work I put in -- hundreds of hours of practice without being paid, being willing to go weeks without a day off, etc. But I recognize that in reality, many put in that hard work. I got picked up at the U as a shooter because I was incredibly lucky in timing. Without my hard work, the luck would have been worthless, but the luck was still required ... if I didn't run into certain people at a time they just happened to need a certain kind of shooter, I would not be the photographer I am today.

Getting my foot in the door was mostly luck. Keeping my foot in the door required skill and hard work, so I understand why conservatives harp on that. But to deny the luck factor missing a key part of the equation.

It is not socialism to enact policies intended to create equal opportunities for everyone (funding public education, rural electrification and broadbandification). In many ways, these policies improve the efficiency of markets. But talk radio wants us to believe the U.S. is the land of opportunity and left wing policies want to punish the successful. The truth is that decades of conservative reforms have greatly damaged our dreams of poverty-to-riches opportunity in the US:

In reality, as a study earlier this year by the Brookings Institution and Pew Charitable Trusts reported, the United States ranks near the bottom of advanced countries in its economic mobility. The study found that family background exerts a stronger influence on a person’s income than even his education level. And its most striking finding revealed that you are more likely to make your way into the highest-earning one-fifth of the population if you were born into the top fifth and did not attain a college degree than if you were born into the bottom fifth and did. In other words, if you regard a college degree as a rough proxy for intelligence or hard work, then you are economically better off to be born rich, dumb, and lazy than poor, smart, and industrious.

We know this intuitively - perhaps the best example is talk show hosts or pundits who are consistently wrong with most of their predictions and yet remain very influential. Those who pushed the Iraq War lies the hardest continue to get more TV and radio time than the doubters who have been proven right regarding the Iraqi threat.

Is income really a measure of productivity? Of course not. Consider your own profession. Do your colleagues who demonstrate the greatest skill unfailingly earn the most money, and those with the most meager skill the least money? I certainly cannot say that of my profession. Nor do I know anybody who would say that of his own line of work. Most of us perceive a world with its share of overpaid incompetents and underpaid talents. Which is to say, we rightly reject the notion of the market as the perfect gauge of social value.

But it is important to understand why some on the right remain outraged at how much the rich are taxed. They are not incorrect, but the reason they continue paying so much in taxes is that the U.S. has become so incredibly stratified on the basis of income that even as tax rates drop, the rich pay more because their incomes have increased so incredibly much:

The reality of the contemporary United States is that, even as income inequality has exploded, the average tax rate paid by the top 1 percent has fallen by about one-third over the last twenty-five years. Again: it has fallen. The rich have gotten unimaginably richer, and at the same time their tax burden has dropped significantly. And yet conservatives routinely describe this state of affairs as intolerably oppressive to the rich. Since the share of the national income accruing to the rich has grown faster than their average tax rate has shrunk, they have paid an ever-rising share of the federal tax burden. This is the fact that so vexes the right.

The entire article is well worth reading.

The economics of insurance are poorly understood by most people -- especially politicians the media folks. Although, some politicians almost certainly understand it well, but play on the misunderstandings of others for political gain. Jonathan Chait has an insightful piece in a recent TNR article that looks at the differences between how Republicans have approached health care and how Democrats have.

Though I come down squarely on the philosophical approach of the Dems -- one of fairness and equal opportunity -- I like that Chait explains pretty fairly how Republicans approach it -- they prefer not to take from the winners to compensate the "losers."

Health insurance, if you think about it, is a redistribution scheme. It transfers money from the winners (people who don’t need much medical care) to the losers (people who do). It differs from other redistribution schemes because, unlike programs that redistribute from rich to poor, the winners and losers can’t be sure in advance which category they’ll be in. That’s why people enter into it voluntarily--today I might be healthy, tomorrow I may contract some horrible disease.

If you want to have a better idea of why Republicans are freaking out at an almost entirely private sector solution to a problem that would be better solved by greater public sector involvement (says me), read this article.

As a person who researches a lot of the crap I talk about (it may sounds like BS, but sometimes it isn't!), I am often flummoxed by those who take the position that the truth lies half way between the extremes:

I think that often where I am is just in the middle. The middle is often the commonsensical place to be. The notion that one side is right and one side is wrong is generally, as one finds in life, not the case.

Fortunately, Jonathan Chait offered a terrific response to this inane comment, starting with:

Roberts has a great point. The sensible position usually does lie halfway between two extremes. Just look at history. In the 1960s, the country was split between extremists who wanted to deny civil rights to African Americans, and extremists who insisted on completely equal rights everywhere. The dispute caused so much strife and anger because no sensible moderates could be found to stake out the middle ground between these equally radical positions--say, desegregating some institutions but not others, or letting black people vote in every other election.

The article makes good points, explaining why compromising for the sake of compromising is doomed to failure. Some situations require a 100% solution, not a 50% solution. Beyond that, we can often have sides where one side represents their position honestly and the flip side is totally full of shit - as often happens. What happens when a situation has more than 2 sides?

The idea that the truth is "in the middle" may work when it comes to subjective memories recalling some events when people are exaggerating but has little application elsewhere, and those that cling to it to avoid actually thinking about how to solve a problem are lazy.