JayB

And this has to do with millionare tax breaks how? "All this time we *believed* in Fidel....[sniff]" Must be lots of tears adding a bitter tinge to the organic fair-trade coffee in Che themed mugs this morning. Can't help but wonder if the evil homonym has had to add Fidel to the list of regressives scrawled in crayon on his basement drywall...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11291267

I share Hayek's opinions about the value of economic models, particluarly the one that stipulates that Y = C + I + G. Evidently most policymakers feel otherwise, and have for quite some time.

You could as easily give me $20 to yell "*!" as loud as I could on some street-corners in South Central LA to the same effect (i.e. I would offend almost everyone and probably offend a small minority to the point of taking action). I would not however blame Africans in general for my resulting plight. Get a clue. Hey - don't sell yourself short - I'd give you at least $40 for that - but I'm glad that you've conceded my point.

Should be easy to reverse, then. Just suspend the said laws and every industrial enterprise in the globe will be racing to set up operations in New York, Ohio, Michigan, etc! Someone tell the unions and their representatives in the state legislatures the good news! The days of $65/hour in total comp for turning a wrench on the assembly line are back!

Never was a union shop; paid workers well; shifted everything off to China too. Don't fret though JayB - the non-unionized lawyers and non-unionized accountants are coming next because despite economic blather, they don't do much unique either. Hopefully the McKinsey cartel of morons is next Yes. The clear implication here is that the company and all of its employees would be much better off if the company *had* been fully unionized.

indeed, though sadly the virtual form of political conversation makes it harder to seduce and hate-fuck your female opponents at the end of the evening when the booze is all drunk... i have great faith in yer intellect jay - yer clearly well-read and have no problem puttin a bunch of facts together into a well reason-agrument - i have no faith however in The Boss taking good care of me so long as i keep quiet I think that's a reasonable philosophy, but more so if it's applied to every boss in the picture. I just got back from a kayaking trip in Western upstate New York, and got another visual trip through past a parade of ghost-factories that permeate much of the rust-belt and New England these days. Did their union bosses and their political representatives represent them well when they drove their compensation above the value of their marginal productivity? Might have been a viable strategy at some point in the past, but I can't help but think that there was more than one set of bosses that failed those workers back there. Unionized workers that are part of a government monopoly are insulated from these forces to a certain extent, but given the nature of the math at play I can't help but wonder if there's not going to be a significant number of workers that wish their bosses had made flexibility and efficiency part of the playbook.

No, that was introduced by you, we are on another subject altogether. Warm regards sir! What caught my eye when I was scrolling through the thread was Off's claims about unions and the wealth necessary to generate and sustain a middle class. Since I'm one of the rare and unpopular folks that's of the opinion that they were more of a weakly correlated effect of far more complicated dynamics that gave rise to prosperity than a cause of it, I'm interested in how people who believe that story understand it. Sounds like we mostly agree on what their relationship to rising prosperity. I also think that the evolution of workplace safety is far more complicated than you suggest, but even taken at face value it's not clear that any role that they may have played in making industrial workplaces safer means that they're still necessary for that purpose or a cost effective means of achieving it. There's no doubt that the Union Army was responsible for ending slavery, but that wouldn't be a good argument for maintaining it indefinitely to protect society against a reversion to slavery. With regards to workplace safety back in the old days, I think it's worth remembering what percentage of the labor force was actually working in industrial and/or unionized settings, and what the actual incidence of deaths and injuries was in the era that we're remembering. There was far more danger everywhere - I'm not sure that working in a coal-mine in the late nineteenth century was significantly more likely to kill you than giving birth, heading out to sea to fish, etc - and even working in a small non-industrial shop as a blacksmith, etc wasn't without significant hazards. Life in general, and just earning a living was just way more hazardous for everyone back then, and there's an awful lot of factors outside of industrial unions that have made it far less so. I'm happy to give unions whatever credit they deserve here, but whatever it is I don't think it's sufficient for making everyone else pay to exempt them from the forces of competition and change that everyone else in society has to deal with, much less trying to eliminate competition and change under the mistaken idea that doing so is the recipe for increasing general prosperity.

I'll give you $20 to post a video of yourself burning a Koran on youtube. If you believe everything that you claim to, it'd be easy money. He'll - I'd gladly pay you 100X that amount, but that'd probably cause a bit of discord in my home - but I'd definitely be in for 10x your bet, and I'm sure we could pass the virtual hat and generate enough dough to get you a few orders of magnitude more.

And then there's Germany, wealthy, prosperous, doing much better than the US.... and unionized Interpreters have unions in the US Accountants don't produce anything, they mostly just lie http://www.webcpa.com/news/Jailed-Russian-Oil-Execs-Point-Finger-at-PwC-55522-1.html As for your assertion about growth prior to unions - the desire to unionize was contemporaneous with the industrial production techniques that encouraged workers to unionize. You'd have to be either a) blind b) dumb c) a rigid ideologue to somehow think that workers didn't wish to unionize prior Hmmm. Wouldn't the claim you're making that unions are the cause of rising economic output, rather than an effect of it, be stronger without counterexamples like, say, Greece? Seems like it'd also require the trend economic performance of the said country to be stronger than the US for the entire period, and for the gap between the two to have successively widened as the percentage of the private workforce employed by unions in the US steadily decreased? As long as we're on this story - if unions were responsible for gains in efficiency, output, etc, etc, etc, for which we owe the wealth necessary to sustain the middle class - it would follow that savvy factory owners would be *mandating* that their workers unionize, since they'd instantly see increases in output without improving their production processes, equipment, marketing, etc, etc. They'd have an instant advantage over their un-unionized competition, no? Before too long, the competitive advantage would shift to a situation where every industry was 100% unionized, and those that failed to do so would have been driven out of business by their failure to do so. How does one who believes the "we owe our prosperity to unions" story reconcile the logical implications inherent in such a claim with the empirical record here in the US? Or in the relative prosperity of Germany vs Greece? I said whatever the fuck you want to rant on about feel free; if you were intellectually honest you'd look at German GDP growth 1945-2010 and marvel. Same for that matter for Greece, Italy or Japan It is a marvel. Couldn't agree more! It's a glorious development. There just isn't any credible evidence that unions are responsible for generating the wealth that made the said marvels possible. Just so you know, I'm not *totally* against confusing correlation and causation when it suits my purposes. I have serious doubts about whether or not there's really a causal mechanism behind the supposed health effects of moderate alcohol consumption, but as long as the literature supports it I'll gladly knock back my two beers a day and claim that it's a healthy thing to do.

I think that the real value here for me - other than alienating and garnering the hostility of folks on a message board rather than the bulk of our friends and acquaintances who hold religious and/or political views that are in synch with the overall vibe of the places we've lived - is in sharpening my capacity to defend my own convictions. I still believe that the liberal (in the classical sense) education I got, both in the classroom and through the informal mechanisms of of-topic debates and late-night bull sessions was vastly superior to what anyone who came into my college as a self-identified "progressive" could have possibly obtained. A virtual bull-session that doesn't leave your host so pissed off that there not only cutting through the steak but deep into the cutting board beneath it is a fantastic innovation.

And then there's Germany, wealthy, prosperous, doing much better than the US.... and unionized Interpreters have unions in the US Accountants don't produce anything, they mostly just lie http://www.webcpa.com/news/Jailed-Russian-Oil-Execs-Point-Finger-at-PwC-55522-1.html As for your assertion about growth prior to unions - the desire to unionize was contemporaneous with the industrial production techniques that encouraged workers to unionize. You'd have to be either a) blind b) dumb c) a rigid ideologue to somehow think that workers didn't wish to unionize prior Hmmm. Wouldn't the claim you're making that unions are the cause of rising economic output, rather than an effect of it, be stronger without counterexamples like, say, Greece? Seems like it'd also require the trend economic performance of the said country to be stronger than the US for the entire period, and for the gap between the two to have successively widened as the percentage of the private workforce employed by unions in the US steadily decreased? As long as we're on this story - if unions were responsible for gains in efficiency, output, etc, etc, etc, for which we owe the wealth necessary to sustain the middle class - it would follow that savvy factory owners would be *mandating* that their workers unionize, since they'd instantly see increases in output without improving their production processes, equipment, marketing, etc, etc. They'd have an instant advantage over their un-unionized competition, no? Before too long, the competitive advantage would shift to a situation where every industry was 100% unionized, and those that failed to do so would have been driven out of business by their failure to do so. How does one who believes the "we owe our prosperity to unions" story reconcile the logical implications inherent in such a claim with the empirical record here in the US? Or in the relative prosperity of Germany vs Greece?

Yes. The reason for all of this fuss, from the President, Secretary of state, etc, etc, etc, etc, is that the followers of Islam are no more likely to engage in acts of violent retribution against non-believers who violate their religious taboos than members of any other religion.

Sounds like a vote for story number two.

I'm fairly certain without the rise of the middle class, made possible in part by unions, a large number of the college educated Americans who made those break throughs wouldn't have been able to afford college and many of those things wouldn't have happened here. Now shouldn't you be out in Central New York bitching that one forklift driver has the gall to accept $20/hr? Looks like a vote for story number one. Even if one accepts the logic behind that story for the sake of argument, then there are some interesting correlates. The first is that the historical record should show no increase in output, wealth, or real-incomes in the US for the entire historical period predating the rise of unions. The second is that in occupational categories where unionization has been either nonexistent or inconsequential, such as accounting, translating, architecture, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc there should be no record of real-wage gains. There are also quite a number of nations where virtually all industries have been 100% unionized - take any centrally planned economy of your choosing - and generalized prosperity never materialized for some reason or another. Hell - take most of South America - lots of heavily unionized industries organized into tidy cartels but strangely, no spontaneous emergence of a prosperous middle class thereafter.

So - is the claim here that: 1) Unions are actually responsible for creating all of the scientific, technological, financial, and other knowledge and innovations that made it possible to make commodities, food, etc ("wealth") more efficiently? 2) Unions were able to use a combination of lobbying and direct coercion to temporarily secure a greater share of the wealth created by other processes than their skills, diligence, etc would otherwise warrant? 3) Both? Story 1 is clearly false, and when stated clearly there's virtually no one who will try to defend it - because it's clearly false. No one with anything real at stake in the argument will try to defend the notion that we should attribute all of the additional wealth creation made possible by the advent of the integrated circuit, the laser, etc to the Teamsters. I don't suspect that you believe that the value of the work that your workers perform would instantly become more valuable, or that their output would increase as a simple consequence of them using some mode of coercion to force you to increase their pay or reduce their hours. There would be a re-allocation of the total income generated by your enterprise that would reduce your share and increase theirs, but that's it. Story 2 is more widely accepted, by people who both praise and condemn the unions for their successes in that regard. I'd like to learn more about how people who believe the "unions created the middle class" story understand the claims that they're making.

Yes - because there's been an evenly distributed tendency towards theocratic fanaticism across all countries that were either colonised in the 19th century or were client states during the cold war, no matter what religion had it's deepest roots in their society prior to either of the above occurring....

Hmmm, now where have I heard this sort of thing before? It's telling that you find quotations from the 19th century so appropriate here as the kind of essentializing meme on display is fundamental to the white man's burden narrative. The objects are virtually interchangeable (Islamists, Jews, Vietnamese, Negroes, Natives) as are the terms used to describe them (lazy, stingy, violent, etc.) Whether the "true nature" stems from blood or creed, the pathology always lurks just beneath the surface. So, not suprisingly, it's all about "the will and capability to forcibly suppress" the recalcitrant savage. Bravo Jay, once again you've shown the more you open your mouth the more disgustingly clear your worldview becomes. Good luck with your invasion/forcible deprogramming/Koran-burning campaign (the only prescription that could come from such a rotten foundation), lord knows humanity's track record proves we'll need it. Yes - every person, culture, or nation that's been on the receiving end of Jihad since the seventh century has been a victim of the same "essentializing meme." Yawn. Tell us more about your 1300 years of white European victimization! You're a fraud and a douchebag. Not much of that's been happening courtesy of Islam since the Treaty of Granada, but thanks. The folks who have been, and will continue to get the worst of it are all of the folks in the Muslim world who aren't able to defend themselves, particularly those who fall into categories that self-anointed progressives make a pretense of being the most concerned about. "Hey - being mutilated with acid for going to school *and* showing a bit of ankle underneath the burkha was terrible, but thankfully...no one was culturally insensitive enough to object to the practice without carefully examining their own latent biases and complicity in the modes of hegemonic neo-colonial moral discourse before doing so! What should western progressives *really* fixate on - how about the male-only membership rules at Augusta! I mean really, those who live in glass houses..."

Hmmm, now where have I heard this sort of thing before? It's telling that you find quotations from the 19th century so appropriate here as the kind of essentializing meme on display is fundamental to the white man's burden narrative. The objects are virtually interchangeable (Islamists, Jews, Vietnamese, Negroes, Natives) as are the terms used to describe them (lazy, stingy, violent, etc.) Whether the "true nature" stems from blood or creed, the pathology always lurks just beneath the surface. So, not suprisingly, it's all about "the will and capability to forcibly suppress" the recalcitrant savage. Bravo Jay, once again you've shown the more you open your mouth the more disgustingly clear your worldview becomes. Good luck with your invasion/forcible deprogramming/Koran-burning campaign (the only prescription that could come from such a rotten foundation), lord knows humanity's track record proves we'll need it. Yes - every person, culture, or nation that's been on the receiving end of Jihad since the seventh century has been a victim of the same "esentializing meme." Yawn.

1. The 1.05 billion or so Muslim moderates haven't had much luck using their nuanced understanding of the infinite number of platonic gradations between sufism and salfism to check their most ideologically committed, violent co-religionists. What, in your estimation, are the odds that a squishy renunciation, abnegation, or condemnation of Western values and the heritage of the enlightenment will inspire them to ease up on the jihad against the infidels? In mine - the number is indistinguishable from zero, and is only likely to supplant their hatred of the west with contempt. I'd rather deal with the former than the latter. 2. What historical evidence do you have to support your claim that violent conquest in the service of religious domination is a novel feature of 20th century Islam that had it's sole genesis in colonial domination? The history of Islam from ~AD 650 onwards has been one of violent conquest. Conquer, then kill, convert, or subjugate. These acts have inspired and justified by the central tenets of the faith from the get-go. In your account of history, was Charles Martel confronted by folks who traveled to France with no violent intentions as part of a "peaceful inner struggle?" So now your problem is with the "most ideologically committed, violent co-religionists". Certainly a step in the right direction though you backslide almost immediately with the "conquer, kill, subjugate" rhetoric. You seem confused. Which is it? Still unanswered is the question why some strains of militant political Islam are so particularly potent now. In spite of your insistence that violent conquest is central to Islam, it certainly wasn't causing any discernable rumpus on the world stage for hundreds of years. You know, while the colonial powers were actually doing exactly what you claim to find so abhorrent. Why are people finding fundamentalisms of all kinds (ethnicity, nationalism, religious) so attractive right now and seemingly leaving liberalism and "western" values in droves? Can your Mr. Mackey of a theory answer that or not? It ceased to cause a rumpus on the world stage only when a thousand year long process of incremental defeats and relative technological and economic decline - from the Battle of Tours to the Treaty of Luasanne - left it ever more incapable of doing so. "Islam has been liberal when weak, and violent when strong. Let us not give it credit for what it was merely unable to suppress." Ernest Renan, 1883. My guess is that ever since the West has no longer had the will nor the capability to forcibly repress Islamists, they've simply returned to form - and the norms that have persisted in their faith since its founding - when and where the opportunity presented itself.

And that of christianity has somehow been significantly different? Really? In what way? It wasn't associated with military conquest from the moment of its inception, nor did it have the backing of a significant geopolitical player until three centuries after its founding (Constantine), for starters. ""Stretching from Morocco to China, the Umayyad caliphate based its expansion and success on the doctrine of jihad—armed struggle to claim the whole earth for God's rule, a struggle that had brought much material success for a century but suddenly ground to a halt followed by the collapse of the ruling Umayyad dynasty in 750 AD." Khalid Yahya Blankinship "The End of the Jihad State: The Reign of Hisham ibn `Abd al-Malik and the Collapse of the Umayyads" State University of New York Press, 1994.

1. The 1.05 billion or so Muslim moderates haven't had much luck using their nuanced understanding of the infinite number of platonic gradations between sufism and salfism to check their most ideologically committed, violent co-religionists. What, in your estimation, are the odds that a squishy renunciation, abnegation, or condemnation of Western values and the heritage of the enlightenment will inspire them to ease up on the jihad against the infidels? In mine - the number is indistinguishable from zero, and is only likely to supplant their hatred of the west with contempt. I'd rather deal with the former than the latter. 2. What historical evidence do you have to support your claim that violent conquest in the service of religious domination is a novel feature of 20th century Islam that had it's sole genesis in colonial domination? The history of Islam from ~AD 650 onwards has been one of violent conquest. Conquer, then kill, convert, or subjugate. These acts have inspired and justified by the central tenets of the faith from the get-go. In your account of history, was Charles Martel confronted by folks who traveled to France with no violent intentions as part of a "peaceful inner struggle?"

It's amusing to me that you'd post this as a refutation, rather than a confirmation, of what critics of Islam have been arguing for years. Imagine reading the article and changing "Islam" to "Buddhism," and "Muslims," to "Buddhists." Imagine an article who's major unstated premise - its "given" - was that the natural reflex of Buddhists responding to *flooding* would be to enhance their allegiance to a moral and political order that sanctioned the most obscene medieval barbarisms as divine manifestations of god's will, and that would ultimately to prompt even more of the most devout amongst them to lash out at the rest of mankind in spectacular fits of homicidal violence.

Not Alan Ginsberg: "I got to know the poet Allen Ginsberg towards the end of his life. Not very well, just a nodding acquaintance, but after he died I attended a memorial in his honor at the City University Graduate School. At that service, his personal assistant related a story about Ginsberg’s reaction to the death sentence pronounced on the novelist Salman Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. Rushdie’s “crime,” you’ll recall, was writing a provocative, perhaps even blasphemous novel inspired by the life of Muhammad called The Satanic Verses. Though I might be screwing up a few details, the gist of the story was as follows: Soon after news of the fatwa broke, Ginsberg and his assistant climbed into the back seat of a taxi in Manhattan. After a glance at the cab driver’s name, Ginsberg politely inquired if he was a Muslim. When the cabbie replied that he was, Ginsberg asked him what he thought about the death sentence on Rushdie. The cabbie answered that he thought that Rushdie’s book was disrespectful of Islam, and that the Ayatollah had every right to do what he had done. At this point, according to his assistant, Ginsberg, one of the gentlest men ever to walk the planet, flew into a rage, screaming at the cabbie as he continued to drive, “Then I shit on your religion! Do you hear me? I shit on Islam! I shit on Muhammad! Do you hear? I shit on Muhammad!” Ginsberg demanded that the cabbie pull over. The cabbie complied, and, without paying the fare, Ginsberg and his assistant climbed out. He was still screaming at the cabbie as the car drove off." http://reason.com/archives/2010/05/14/the-poet-versus-the-prophet What *are* you arguing, BTW?

It's a Sam Harris quote-a-thon: "The New York Times has declared that the proposed mosque will be nothing less than “a monument to tolerance.” It goes without saying that tolerance is a value to which we should all be deeply committed. Nor can we ignore the fact that many who oppose the construction of this mosque embody all that is terrifyingly askew in conservative America—“birthers,” those sincerely awaiting the Rapture, opportunistic Republican politicians, and utter lunatics who yearn to see Sarah Palin become the next president of the United States (note that Palin herself probably falls into several of these categories). These people are wrong about almost everything under the sun. The problem, however, is that they are not quite wrong about Islam. In his speech supporting the mosque, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said: “We would betray our values—and play into our enemies' hands—if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else.” This statement has the virtue of being almost true. But it is also true that honest, freedom-loving Muslims should be the first to view their fellow Muslims somewhat differently. At this point in human history, Islam simply is different from other faiths. The challenge we all face, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, is to find the most benign and practical ways of mitigating these differences and of changing this religion for the better."