JayB

The odds of losing "values voters" to the likes of Frank, Pelosi, et al are miniscule enough that they should have no problem simultaneously marginalizing them and taking their money. It's not like the Democrats had to adopt "9/11 was an inside job!" into their platform to capture the overwhelming majority of the "Truther" vote.

This is a point worth considering, though it's hard to tell right now which wackos have done more damage to the GOP: the religious ones or the economic ones. Even if you (for the sake of argument)accept the premise that they're both equally wacko, the more pertinent question is which group will do more damage to the GOP in the next one or two election cycles - in which case, I think that the answer is clearly the former of the two. Of course, if you really believe the statement that you made above, the optimal strategy is clearly to donate to both. I'll get you started: https://www.cato.org/support/donate.html

If you were smart you'd be sending them donations.

Don't forget about Synfuel!

Some of the new routes were inspiring to read about, but I have to agree with the above.

Stating that much construction has to occur in the way of natural hazard doesn't constitute an argument for the public assuming the financial risks associated with such construction, much less for encouraging more such construction than would occur otherwise. Incentives that concentrate more people, poor or otherwise, in flood plains is dumb. Ditto for mechanisms that transfer the costs of home ownership onto people who can't afford their own home.

I'd say if you can't: -Afford the insurance premiums necessary to cover the risk to your private property. -Afford to lose whatever percentage of your property would be destroyed by the risks that you can't afford to insure, or that no private insurance company will insure. Then that place, wherever it may be, is too risky for you to purchase property until you can satisfy one of the conditions above.

Just imagining the number of people that are out there, nodding along, while fretting that their appointment with the homeopath conflicts with the anti-vaccine rally that they penciled in before someone sent them the e-mail about the anti-GMO working group that's holding a strategy session at the same time...

Using public money to underwrite the risks associated with private residences and commercial structures, aside from increasing the destruction of both lives and property in the event of a disaster, seems like an odd thing for a self-annointed progressive to support, given that you wind up with real-life consequences like people who are two poor to even consider visiting Martha's vinyard helping to pick up the insurance-tab for the multi-million dollar beachfront pads there.

I can't say that I am surprised. Then, we'd have a situation like occurred in California after the Northridge earthquake when the pay out was greater than the sum of all earthquake premiums ever collected, and insurance companies refused to issue further quake insurance. The state had to step in and create an insurance pool to provide coverage for homeowners. Ergo, we'd be right where we started. Also note that despite the state stepping in, premiums are still so high that only about 15% of homeowners carry quake insurance in California. Any public expenditure that promotes additional building in an area that's prone to flooding is dumb. If we're sending public funds to homeowners in flood-prone areas, it'd make much more sense incentivize their relocation to non-flood prone areas. I understand why people take the concerns about increased catastrophic flooding in river valleys and coastal areas seriously, but it's difficult to comprehend why someone who does so would think it's a good idea to support policies that promote the concentration of lives and property in those same areas. At the very least the government should phase out coverage for any new construction.

I'm all for phasing out Federal Flood Insurance.

Good discussion of the Gold Standard and modern monetary theory here: [video:youtube]_qO66Rmi1Mw

Like the Boazian "Blank Slate?" "Coming of Age in Samoa?" The lady from I.C.A.R. that dumped a pitcher of water on E.O. Wilson's head at a seminar in the 1970's? If we're going back to 18th century stuff, wasn't the LTV something that partially resulted from from Marx channeling bits of Locke et al? The original arguments aren't terribly convincing any more as empirical accounts of the origin of man/society, but had at least as much to recommend it as Filmer's "Patriarcha" and all of that business about the divine right of kings, etc that were the coin of the realm back in the day.

Quien es?

jayb no doubt was the kinda student teachers fucking hate when they turn in a 20 page paper instead of the assigned standard 5 paragraph guy i'm sure it's great stuff man, but i hope you're doing it for you own amusment, 'cuz i figure i'm officially crazy the day i start reading cc.com posts longer than say, 500 words if you can't dazzle'em w/ brilliance, baffle'em w/ bullshit! Someone's gotta strengthen your scrolling capabilities every once in a while or you'll miss out on half the pretty pictures in the TR's.

Oh come on now. I actually enjoy perusing creationist literature from time to time in order to strengthen and refine my capacity to argue against it, so if you can point me to whatever you consider the most compelling defense of the LTV, central planning, etc I'll add them to the wish list on amazon and get around to them eventually. Seriously, make a list and post it. I'd like to read at least some of it. Not sure it'll help with the shit personality, but there's always Dale Carnegie for that. In the meantime, what this thread really needs is a cartoon. [video:youtube]sbRom1Rz8OA

I don't think that the critique of Smith and others as blinkered-idealist-technocrats holds once you actually acquaint yourself with the full range of their output. In the case of Smith, even someone who has read a "The Wealth of Nations," - much less the Cliff-Notes summary - but fails to bother with the ideas he put forward in "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" will come away with a very incomplete picture at best, and a kind of self-serving caricature at worst. Ditto for Hayek and most other standard bearers for the liberal tradition in economics. Aside from the technical economic aspects of Marxism that were subsequently demolished by the likes of Bohm-Bawerk et al (like the labor theory of value that you have recapitulated above) it seems like someone who partitions all of society into two abstract and highly idealized categories like "capital" and "labor" is ill equipped to criticize the conceptual framework that liberal economists have used in their technical work. The is all particularly baffling in light of the fact that during the interval of history that Marxists concern themselves with, farmers, fishermen, basket-weavers, blacksmiths, carpenters, cooper's, wheelwrights, doctors, barbers, pharmacists, lawyers, scriveners, painters, trappers, tobacconists, silversmiths, tailors...brewers, bakers, and candlestick-makers et...cetera...have vastly, vastly outnumbered the number of people employed in enterprises that require aggregated investment in structures and machinery. Unless you are willing to claim that most of humanity has provided for itself in Jeckyl and Hyde fashion - exploiting themselves by paying themselves less than the value of their output during the day, and rewarding themselves with the excess profits that they extracted from themselves in this fashion during the night - then it's hard to see how partitioning society into two "capital" and "labor" offers up a less idealized vision of society, or actually does much to help us understand "actually existing historical relations," much less an empirically correct or logically coherent methodology for understanding the dynamics that govern the full range of exchange transactions that have and do transpire in the real world. Who's operating in a conceptual dreamworld again? The problems with the idealized "Dialectical Materialist" framework are even more acute when we turn to the constraints that it imposes on expression, aspiration, imagination, and living. Is a system that allows people to evaluate all of the above in light or their own subjective notions of what's valuable and important to them really more confining or oppressive than a system that consciously and deliberately values people and assigns them roles based upon how well they'll serve the interests of the state? Is there room for someone that wants to make their living as a transgendered erotic dancer in the Worker's Paradise? How about a Priest? Can a Central Committee dream up a centrally administered system of roles and categories that's fluid and dynamic enough to accommodate the soul who's deepest fulfillment will come from working in both capacities at different points in the same life? Would they have any incentive to do so even if it was possible? Is someone who answers "yes" to either question the someone who should properly congratulate themselves for anchoring their stated preference for such a system in "actually existing" realities, historical or otherwise? Then there's the problem of efficient resource allocation, the coordination of supply and demand in the absence of market prices, and "the information problem" that crippled central planning in every regime that has attempted to organize itself along Marxist lines. Given the empirical track record here, and the near-century of technical demonstrations that it's impossible in practice, is a preference for that system really grounded in "actually existing historical relations?" Really? More than someone who's ignored the literature that demonstrates that a plane won't fly, knows it's crashed every time someone's managed to get it off the ground, and still wants to pack every one on earth aboard for one...more...try is grounding their beliefs in the "actually existing" principles and history of avionics? I've taken the time to understand all of the principal arguments against political and economic liberalism, but from your statements here I can only conclude that you've got much more than a superficial and limited acquaintance with the arguments for them That's really kind of a shame, in the same way that meeting someone who seems smart, but turns out to be a creationist recapitulating bad versions of Paley's arguments 150 years after the publication of "The Origin of Species" and all of the evidence that has accumulated in the meantime is a shame. If you change your mind, Bohm-Bawerk will always be out there, waiting for you: http://hussonet.free.fr/bohm.pdf

uh, isn't the gibbon quote more comprehensible? "The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful." Yeah - but the guy I quoted died in like 23 A.D. and it seemed like tossing a quote from 2000 years ago would be germane to the question of what had changed in the past 2000 years. Seems like the more interesting question is why religious faith that has little more in the way of logical, empirical, or moral content to recommend it over the long-dead beliefs that inspired folks to worship Poseidon and co. has persisted since then.

It's not clear to me that the semantic distinction between elevating prices by "artificial" vs "political" is terribly consequential, as workers who drive the cost of whatever it is that they're making above the price that consumers are willing to pay will ultimately meet the same end. The marketplace is littered with the remains of enterprises that domestic competitors ultimately put under. Candlemakers can only secure legislation that outlaws windows for so long before they lose either the political battle against the glass lobby or someone invents the lightbulb. But assuming for the moment that we accept your propositions, and that the workers in the public sector win the "political struggle over the conditions of employment and control over the work process" against the tax payers and manage to increase their compensation by a percentage of your choosing, while providing no more services to the public, how exactly does this benefit anyone other than the public sector employees? It's really quite hard to argue when I reject so many of your basic assumptions. It's no fun to start every post with "in the beginning...", or "first of all..." Nor am I much interested in playing along, accepting the premises of a system that is abhorrent merely for the sake of argument. I didn't letter in Debate and many of the arguments playing out here bear directly on too many lives, my own included, for parlor games. The point above about artificial vs. political is not semantic. There is no such thing as "artificial" unless the you accept that the system you're talking about is a universal constant. Such a system can only exist outside time and space in a computer model or on a cocktail napkin. In fact, the struggles over how things are made, by whom, for whom, who controls the process, etc. play out in real time in a historical process. Capitalism is not a metaphysical constant with artificialities, anomalies, distortions. It's a set of relationships held in place by political power and ideology, riven by structural contradictions and conflicts. Thank you for pointing out again and again and again (in nearly all your posts) the fundamental structural conflict that exists between labor and capital. Many on this board have pointed out a similar existential contradiction with regard to the "conflict of interest" that exists between "health care providers" and patients in a for-profit health care system. The same fundamental conflict of interest runs clear across the spectrum of capitalist relations: owners and management seek to extract the maximum profit from its enterprise at the least cost possible and seeks to minimize those costs by all means at it's disposal. In the case of cutting labor costs those means run the gamut from packing up for Chinese FTZs to "social dumping" to beating striking workers. It's been clear to the critics of capitalism since the beginning that it's enormously productive, that its means of generating efficiencies and economies of scale are unrivaled. The single minded pursuit of those things alone however are not necessarily compatible with human health and welfare or that of the ecological health of this planet. That people stubbornly refuse to commit social suicide in the name of greater efficiencies, cost cutting, economic growth, etc. is a mystery to you, Jay. Why? And why do you personally trumpet their miseries in the name of "creative destruction"? Part of it's probably your job, part of it is that you're comfortable enough that you can, but intellectually, I expect it's an undying commitment to human progress. As someone whose worldview extends from the same philosophical tradition as your own, I respect that. But at some point you guys started to fetishize the system, admiring its purity, its capacity for efficiency and left the human beings and their environs out of the equation. I'm not going to argue with you about the merits of milking the efficiencies of lowest cost per unit of production by minimizing the cost of inputs. As long as we're talking about people and not gears in a machine count me out of the parlor game. Well - there's too much in there for me to address in one go, so you'll have to settle for a (relatively) concise and incomplete answer. I was just as enchanted with the enlightenment as the next guy, particularly with Diderot, Voltaire, Condorcet, Turgot, etc - and was as puzzled as the next guy when the historical page-turner that I was reading my way through wound up with Robespierre writing the final chapter. My introduction to all of the above was via a degree program in the History of Science, and after marveling at the grandeur of Lavoisier's genius, it was more than a bit disconcerting to read of his beheading at the hands of whoever was manning the guillotine at the time. I think that the most instructive episode of all involves Condorcet simultaneously penning an optimistic tome on the perfectibility of man and society through reason while fleeing and/or hiding from the revolutionary mob that was hunting for his scalp. I think from there it was off to Edmund Burke, then Hume, then Smith, along with another round of Madison, Adams, etc. I suspect that you're well acquainted with their analysis and conclusions. I assume you can extrapolate what the influence of all of the above, when grafted atop world history from the French Revolution onwards has had on my conclusions about revolutionary social change and other related topics. It's hard to summarize the effect of Smith et al but for the purposes of our discussion here I'd say it gave me an appreciation of the importance of considering the interests of both the producer and the consumer in voluntary economic exchanges. That and the myriad other arguments that constitute the moral, technical, and empirical case for economic and political liberalism were just far more logically sound and convincing than the arguments for whatever alternates have been in vogue at any given time. If you're looking for the reasons why I can't support tariffs, subsidies, or any of the other permutations on protectionism and/or attempts to substitute a conception of value conceived, administered, and enforced by a bureaucracy for market prices, it's all out there all out there in the literature, but that's probably more material than you'd be willing or able to contend with (unless you happen to find yourself locked in the Cato Institute's reading room for several months). At the very least, you should get your hands on Bohm-Bawerk's "Karl Marx and the Close of His System (1896)." If you can still believe in the Labor Theory of Value after reading what I think is the best, and probably the last serious technical consideration of that theory by a top-shelf economist - then you can consider yourself a Gold-Star Marxist of the highest order. If you get around to it, it'd be interesting to hear what enabled you to hang on to the gunwhales of that particular shift after an analytical torpedoing of that magnitude.

Here's a quote from Strabo (Greek contemporary - at least chronologically - of Christ and the Romans) that has some bearing on the question: "For in dealing with a crowd of women, at least, or with any promiscuous mob, a philosopher cannot influence them by reason or exhort them to reverence, piety, and faith; nay, there is need of religious fear also, and this cannot be arouse without myths and marvels. For thunderbolt, aegis, trident, torches, snakes, thyrsulances - arms of the gods - are myths, and so is the entire ancient theology. But the founders of states gave sanction to these things as bugbears wherewith the scare the simple-minded. Now, since this is the nature of mythology, and since it has come to have its place in the social and civil scheme of life as well in the history of actual facts, the ancients clung to their system of education for children and applied it up to the age of maturity, and by means of poetry they believed that they could satisfactorily discipline every period of life. But now, after a long time, the writing of history and the present-day philosophy have come to the front. Philosophy, however, is for the few, whereas poetry is more useful to the people at large"

I'm not sure that we're talking about the same Hayek here. I've read a few hundred pages of his works, and have never encountered anything but impassioned, profound, and deep arguments for political and economic freedom. It'd certainly be strange if the same guy who spent several decades arguing on behalf of these causes from at least the early 1920's onwards, against the prevailing sentiments of his day, and who is best remembered for "The Road to Serfdom" was a closet authoritarian. What works of his have you actually read, and in what specific essays or passages in those works did he weigh in on the side of authoritarianism? My post made the difference between discourse and practice because libertarians/neo-liberals claim to be for 'freedom' whereas in fact they subjugate every domain of human activity to the logic of the market, which effectively results in a loss of freedom and power for those without sufficient economic power to intervene in the market. The end result of libertarian freedom is concentration of most wealth and power in the hands of economic elites. Hayek is well known for disliking representative democracy and he was openly against social justice; his model amounted to social darwinism: "Hayek visited Chile several times in the 1970s and 1980s during the reign of dictator Augusto Pinochet. Commenting on dictatorships to a Chilean interviewer, Hayek stated: "Personally I prefer a liberal dictator to democratic government lacking liberalism. My personal impression — and this is valid for South America - is that in Chile, for example, we will witness a transition from a dictatorial government to a liberal government."[34][35] Hayek's words and actions concerning Chile under the Pinochet regime have drawn criticism from historian of modern Latin America Greg Grandin, who claims that "Hayek glimpsed in Pinochet an avatar of true freedom, who would rule as a dictator only for a 'transitional period'", while also noting that "in a letter to the London Times he defended the junta, reporting that he had 'not been able to find a single person in much-maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende.' "of course," writes Grandin, "the thousands executed and tens of thousands tortured by Pinochet's regime weren't talking."[36] Hayek recommended reforms similar to Chile's under Pinochet for the Keynesian economy in the United Kingdom to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher said "the remarkable success of the Chilean economy [was] a striking example of economic reform from which we can learn many lessons, [but] in Britain with our democratic institutions and the need for a high degree of consent, some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable."[37] [note that the chilean economy cratered shortly thereafter causing Pinochet to intervene massively in the economy] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek Note that Hayek even held meetings of his Mt Pelerin Society (an association of neo-liberal thinkers, mostly economists) in Chile while Pinochet was in power. Oh good lord. Expressing a preference for Pinochet over Allende doesn't constitute a fondness for authoritarianism any more than a preference for Batista over Castro would have, Nicholas II over Lenin, etc - particularly when qualified by the correct observation that the policies that he instituted would ultimately undermine his rule in a way that Allende's, like Castro's, would not. Had he been asked, I'm fairly certain that he would have expressed a preference for the Reign of Louis XIV over of that of Robespierre for many of the same reasons. Expressing a preference for the lesser of two evils doesn't qualify as an endorsement of evil any more than saying that you'd rather have hepatitis than HIV would qualify as pro-hepatitis advocacy. He also correctly observed that in the long run the structure of the institutional protections for individual rights in a given country were far more important safegaurds of life and liberty than the terms that the regime in question used to describe itself. This should hardly be shocking to anyone who lived through the previous century and compared the fate of the people in constitutional monarchies to those unfortunate enough to find themselves in one of the various "People's Republics" that blighted the globe. The overall impression I get from reading your analysis of his works that you haven't read and specific arguments that you can't articulate, much less refute, makes me think of Wolfgang Pauli's famous assessment of a paper that we was asked to review. "That's not right...it's not even wrong."

It's very difficult for union employees to make more than non-Union employees with the same skill-set unless they've managed to secure regulations that insulate themselves from competition, They forced regulations thanks to their collective power to fight off unfair competition from employers that practice social dumping. It is remarkable that you are here arguing against cost of living increases yet we have yet to read you arguing to cut fat at the top. Social dumping (not paying living wages, healthcare, pensions, taxes that go for education, infrastrusture, social services, research and development, etc ...) doesn't result in cheaper prices for the consumer but is an effective transfer of wealth to the top which has resulted in people not being able to make ends meet despite the generalization of 2 wage earner households let's start by rolling back the tax cuts for the wealthy, banning doing business with tax heavens and taxing transfer pricing. That should get us a long way toward where we need to be. How does any of the above - which we've discussed at length before - constitute an argument for inefficiencies that result in the government providing citizens with fewer services per tax-dollar collected?

It's not clear to me that the semantic distinction between elevating prices by "artificial" vs "political" is terribly consequential, as workers who drive the cost of whatever it is that they're making above the price that consumers are willing to pay will ultimately meet the same end. The marketplace is littered with the remains of enterprises that domestic competitors ultimately put under. Candlemakers can only secure legislation that outlaws windows for so long before they lose either the political battle against the glass lobby or someone invents the lightbulb. But assuming for the moment that we accept your propositions, and that the workers in the public sector win the "political struggle over the conditions of employment and control over the work process" against the tax payers and manage to increase their compensation by a percentage of your choosing, while providing no more services to the public, how exactly does this benefit anyone other than the public sector employees?

SAYS THE NEOLIBERAL ECONOMIST!!!! Whew! Ha-Ha! That is a knee-slapper! Thanks for the funny, Jay. You are a riot. Irony quota filled for the day. Ha. Man, that was good. While the two have quite a bit in common, Hayek does not equal Friedman, and there are some subtle differences in their outlook and methodological assumptions that derive from Hayek's arguments concerning "scientism" that I find convincing. The fact that they disagree with one another on certain methodological points no more strengthen's the case for central planning than disagreements between Dawkins and Gould should embolden creationists. While that may be a good book on the abuses of science, in practice Hayek was even more blatant than Friedman in his support of the dictatorships that neo-liberal fundamentalism rode on, i.e. not only did he couch his unscientific approach to the economy as dogma (I assume the object of Prole’s laughter) but he condoned authoritarian rule to impose it on people. Friedman, at least, verbally denied condoning dictatorships even if in practice he didn’t mind the opportunity they represented to market his snake oil. I'm not sure that we're talking about the same Hayek here. I've read a few hundred pages of his works, and have never encountered anything but impassioned, profound, and deep arguments for political and economic freedom. It'd certainly be strange if the same guy who spent several decades arguing on behalf of these causes from at least the early 1920's onwards, against the prevailing sentiments of his day, and who is best remembered for "The Road to Serfdom" was a closet authoritarian. What works of his have you actually read, and in what specific essays or passages in those works did he weigh in on the side of authoritarianism?

Non-union employees make less than unionized employees? Tell us something we don’t already know. It seems to argue the case for unions pretty well unless you are arguing that people shouldn’t get cost of living increases (especially since the CPI basket is fixed to minimize inflation). Budget deficits due to less sales tax revenues and capped property taxes? That’s what happens with regressive taxes. Aren’t you one of those who wanted to drown government in a bathtub? So, where is the news? It's very difficult for union employees to make more than non-Union employees with the same skill-set unless they've managed to secure regulations that insulate themselves from competition, and thereby enable their employers to transfer their excess labor costs to consumers in the form of higher prices. Since the consumers in this case are taxpayers, it's not clear to me why you think that forcing them to pay artificially inflated prices for services that they have to obtain from the government is a good thing for society. Particularly when in practices that means that a given level of taxes results in fewer public services - ranging from providing beds in local shelters to fixing potholes - delivered per dollar spent. This is true no matter what the level of taxation. Strange thing to argue for.