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Category: Philosophy
Quote of the Day
I think we’re long past the time when most print newspapers could’ve been saved by simply providing a better product, but I also think there was a window to save, if not the print versions, the institutions which published them. Obviously the WaPo can survive as long as Kaplan Test Prep [The Washington Post] makes enough to keep them afloat, but I do wish more journalists bemoaning the losses in their industry would recognize that at least to some degree ceasing to be relevant and authoritative publications is a part of the problem. Why should people read them when they have to spend a lot of time figuring out when they’re being bullsh%$#ed?
I’ve said it before, many times: One of the problems with newspapers is that their management does not believe that newspapers can survive, so their business plan is to suck the marrow out of these institutions, not to provide good product.
You saw this phenomenon with the American rail industry in the 1970s.
Monopolies Are Strangling Our Economy
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Graphic Courtesy of the WaPo
In Washington Monthly, Barry C. Lynn and Phillip Longman argue that the increase in jobless recovery and stagnation is an artifact of the increasingly monopolistic marketplace that we encounter:
If any single number captures the state of the American economy over the last decade, it is zero. That was the net gain in jobs between 1999 and 2009—nada, nil, zip. By painful contrast, from the 1940s through the 1990s, recessions came and went, but no decade ended without at least a 20 percent increase in the number of jobs.
…………
But while the mystery of what killed the great American jobs machine has yielded no shortage of debatable answers, one of the more compelling potential explanations has been conspicuously absent from the national conversation: monopolization. The word itself feels anachronistic, a relic from the age of the Rockefellers and Carnegies. But the fact that the term has faded from our daily discourse doesn’t mean the thing itself has vanished—in fact, the opposite is true. In nearly every sector of our economy, far fewer firms control far greater shares of their markets than they did a generation ago.
Indeed, in the years after officials in the Reagan administration radically altered how our government enforces our antimonopoly laws, the American economy underwent a truly revolutionary restructuring. Four great waves of mergers and acquisitions—in the mid-1980s, early ’90s, late ’90s, and between 2003 and 2007—transformed America’s industrial landscape at least as much as globalization. Over the same two decades, meanwhile, the spread of mega-retailers like Wal-Mart and Home Depot and agricultural behemoths like Smithfield and Tyson’s resulted in a more piecemeal approach to consolidation, through the destruction or displacement of countless independent family-owned businesses.
It is now widely accepted among scholars that small businesses are responsible for most of the net job creation in the United States. It is also widely agreed that small businesses tend to be more inventive, producing more patents per employee, for example, than do larger firms. Less well established is what role concentration plays in suppressing new business formation and the expansion of existing businesses, along with the jobs and innovation that go with such growth. Evidence is growing, however, that the radical, wide-ranging consolidation of recent years has reduced job creation at both big and small firms simultaneously. At one extreme, ever more dominant Goliaths increasingly lack any real incentive to create new jobs; after all, many can increase their earnings merely by using their power to charge customers more or pay suppliers less. At the other extreme, the people who run our small enterprises enjoy fewer opportunities than in the past to grow their businesses. The Goliaths of today are so big and so adept at protecting their turf that they leave few niches open to exploit.
One of the points that I have made when I discuss the role of the large monopoly Telcos and how this effects the availability and price of broadband is that when a company gets large enough, it’s more profitable to keep out competitors than it is to improve the quality and efficiency of its process.
If one understands the nature of any corporation, which is that they are short-sighted sociopaths by design, this makes perfect sense: You can spend billions on innovation, or millions on locking out and/or buying up competitors.
Even Sci-Fi author Jerry Pournelle, who describes himself as being somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun, says that for the free market to function, aggressive anti-trust activities are essential. (No link, it was from his “Chaos Manor” column in Byte about 20 years ago)
H/t Kevin Drum.
John Stewart is a F%$#ing Genius: Conservative Woodstock Edition
So, this thing seems to be the opposite of Woodstock, but at least it’s not Altamont…………
Oh my God it’s Altamont!!!!
Heh
Deep Thought
This explains the world:
As a kid you see the world as being divided into grown ups and kids . . . and grown ups are all smart and they know everything and they run the world, and kids are just kids. Then you grow up and realize grown ups are just a bunch of f%$#ing idiots, they’re just tall.
— Unmutual, on the the by invitation only Stellar Parthenon BBS.
South Park on Ayn Rand
I really can’t speak to the qualities of Atlas Shrugged, though I did read Rand’s treatise The Virtue of Selfishness, and found it extremely unpleasant, both from the writing and the underlying philosophy.
As such, I find this bit from South Park (1:13) funny.
Signs of the Apocalypse
First, and most visibly, it’s the fact that the New Orleans Saints are now the world champions, having won the Super Bowl.
Secondly is that fact that David Stockman, one of the young Turks at the core of the “Reagan revolution,” he was Budget Director during Reagan’s first term, is arguing that the government should tax the financial sector to shrink its size:
While supply-side catechism insists that lower taxes are a growth tonic, the theory also argues that if you want less of something, tax it more. The economy desperately needs less of our bloated, unproductive and increasingly parasitic banking system. In this respect, the White House appears to have gone over to the supply side with its proposed tax on big banks, as it scores populist points against the banksters, too.
Not surprisingly, the bankers are already whining, even though the tax would amount to a financial pinprick — a levy of only 0.15 percent on the debts (other than deposits) of the big financial conglomerates. Their objections are evidence that the administration is on the right track.
Make no mistake. The banking system has become an agent of destruction for the gross domestic product and of impoverishment for the middle class. To be sure, it was lured into these unsavory missions by a truly insane monetary policy under which, most recently, the Federal Reserve purchased $1.5 trillion of longer-dated Treasury bonds and housing agency securities in less than a year. It was an unprecedented exercise in market-rigging with printing-press money, and it gave a sharp boost to the price of bonds and other securities held by banks, permitting them to book huge revenues from trading and bookkeeping gains.
Stockman is suggesting that people who he saw in the 1980s as the epitome of the heroes in Ayn Rand’s fiction should be taxed with the explicit aim of shrinking their size, because the business they do does not serve the public good.
This is a refutation of the “Objectivist” philosophy at the core of much of Mr. Stockman’s public life, which saw the glorification of greed as a force for good, and a legitimate basis for public policy decisions.
Why US Broadband Sucks
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The Phone Company*
Let’s look at Maine, where the terminally incompetent telco Farpoint is aggressively lobbying against Maine accepting a $24.5 million grant from the federal government to build out broadband networks:
Last month, NTIA gave Great Works internet in Maine $24.5 million toward a fiber optic network. The grant is a classic public/private partnership for a middle mile project that includes, among others the University of Maine.
Fairpoint, Maine’s primary rural LEC, has objected to this “undue competition with the private sector.” This would be funny, given how Fairpoint has become the poster child for the failure of the private sector to deliver on its big promises to rural communities. But Fairpoint’s talking points have ended up in legislation filed by Maine State Senator Lisa Marrache (D-Waterville) and Maine State Rep. Stacey Fitts (R-Pittsfield). Despite the fact that middle mile build out will help companies like Fairpoint (while also helping their competitors), we get the usual ideologically-driven nonsense about how the public sector ought to know its place and leave the driving to the all-knowing and super-efficient firms like Fairpoint — assuming Maine’s rural residents like the prospect of waiting for a bankrupt company [Yes, literally. Farpoint went Chapter 11] to satisfy its creditors and bring them broadband.
While this money would improve access and service for everyone, it would make it easier for companies to compete against Farpoint, the incumbent, so they are fighting this tooth and nail, because their service has been so unbelievably horrible that they know that they will hemorrhage customers if anything near free and fair.
That’s what this is all about.
There is more money in locking out competitors than there is in improving service, so US broad band, driven by private interests, is slower, more expensive, less reliable, and less accountable.
Damn, sounds a lot like out healthcare system.
Can We Please Give Texas Back to Mexico?
There is an author named Bill Martin, who wrote a political treatise called Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation
There is another author named Bill Martin, who wrote a children’s book called, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?
They are different authors, but it appears that the the right wing morons who control the State Board of Education did not realize this:
What do the authors of the children’s book Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? and a 2008 book called Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation have in common?
Both are named Bill Martin and, for now, neither is being added to Texas schoolbooks.
In its haste to sort out the state’s social studies curriculum standards this month, the State Board of Education tossed children’s author Martin, who died in 2004, from a proposal for the third-grade section. Board member Pat Hardy, R-Weatherford, who made the motion, cited books he had written for adults that contain “very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system.”
Trouble is, the Bill Martin Jr. who wrote the Brown Bear series never wrote anything political, unless you count a book that taught kids how to say the Pledge of Allegiance, his friends said. The book on Marxism was written by Bill Martin, a philosophy professor at DePaul University in Chicago.
You see the phrase, “Brown bear, brown bear, what do I see?” is just so similar to, “that would in effect overturn the imperialist system, and that would depend on creating, as Mao saw, self-reliant economies, not liable to exploitation.“
The stupid, it burns us!!!!!
H/t La Figa
Tax Sanity from Oregon
Having gone to high school in Portland, I am shocked that Oregonians have passed initiatives increasing taxes on the wealthy and large corporations, measures 66 and 67, by large margins.
This is surprising for Oregon?
I’m sure that a lot of you are saying, but it’s Oregon, it’s liberal, and you would be wrong.
In the 1920s, Oregon was the most Klan dominated state ever, and on taxes:
The double-barreled victory is the first voter-approved statewide income tax increase since the 1930s. Other states, facing similar budget woes, are watching the outcome closely because Oregon, after all, is a state that capped property taxes and locked a surplus tax rebate program into the constitution.
The last time voters approved a tax increase was 2002, when they agreed to bump up tobacco taxes to help pay for the Oregon Health Plan. Voters rejected income tax increases twice in recent years.
People in Oregon, which has a vociferous anti-tax streak in the electorate, have realized that if you want services, you have to pay for them.
More notably, it’s a broad based tax.
Cigarette taxes are seen as punishment for bad behavior, while the income taxes are seen as dues for being a part of society.
This is a big deal because it’s not a sin-tax, or a lottery, it’s a real broad based tax.
This Should Scare the Crap Out of You
Josh Marshall got a letter from an anonymous staffer, and while the whole letter is profoundly disturbing, the excerpt that Mr. Marshall put before the break is f%$#ing terrifying:
The worst is that I can’t help but feel like the main emotion people in the caucus are feeling is relief at this turn of events. Now they have a ready excuse for not getting anything done. While I always thought we had the better ideas but the weaker messaging, it feels like somewhere along the line Members internalized a belief that we actually have weaker ideas. They’re afraid to actually implement them and face the judgement of the voters. That’s the scariest dynamic and what makes me think this will all come crashing down around us in November.
This is a recipe for disaster for the Democratic party, and by extension, for the country, because people want politicians to stand for something, even if it’s wrong, and the Republicans waiting in the wings are far less moderate than Bush/Cheney/Rove.
Think about that: Republicans in power who would make us fondly remember the moderation of George W. Bush.
You may change your underwear now.
Josh Marshall is Right, and Was Right in 2004
In the aftermath of the Massachusetts debacle, a lot of people are wondering what the hell happened.
The talking heads inside the Beltway are sure that it’s because Obama is too Librul™, of course, but I think that Josh Marshall talked about the core problem in August of 2004.
He was talking about the Bush-Kerry campaign, and he characterized it as follows:
Let’s call it the Republicans’ Bitch-Slap theory of electoral politics.
It goes something like this.
………
Consider for a moment what the big game is here. This is a battle between two candidates to demonstrate toughness on national security. Toughness is a unitary quality, really — a personal, characterological quality rather than one rooted in policy or divisible in any real way. So both sides are trying to prove to undecided voters either that they’re tougher than the other guy or at least tough enough for the job.
………
One way — perhaps the best way — to demonstrate someone’s lack of toughness or strength is to attack them and show they are either unwilling or unable to defend themselves — thus the rough slang I used above. And that I think is a big part of what is happening here. Someone who can’t or won’t defend themselves certainly isn’t someone you can depend upon to defend you.
………
Hitting someone and not having them hit back hurts the morale of that person’s supporters, buoys the confidence of your own backers (particularly if many tend toward an authoritarian mindset) and tends to make the person who’s receiving the hits into an object of contempt (even if also possibly also one of sympathy) in the eyes of the uncommitted.
………
Only now, it isn’t the Republicans bitch slapping anyone. It’s the Democrats who bitch slap themselves.
Or as Zaid Jilani’s southern ConservaDem friend says:
And can I say this? F*ck the Democrats. They couldn’t get s%$# done with 60 seats, why the hell would I care if they have 59? F%$# them seriously we deserve to lose Congress this year. And don’t bitch and whine about it either how much has changed since we took over in 2006? Ain’t s%$# as far as I can tell. We capitulated to Bush, then capitulated to Republicans and now are just capitulating to ourselves.
F%$# it dude, I mean Republicans get whatever the f%$# they want with 50 seats and we can’t do f%$# all we deserve to lose
(“%$#” mine, “*” original)
Fundamentally, when we look at what is going on in DC, it looks like no one in the Senate or the White House is even trying to make substantive change. (Pelosi, at least, creates the appearance that she is trying to do something)
What’s more, among the DC Dems, there has been near constant bitch slapping of the Party Base, whether it’s the capitulation on the public option, the labor union insurance surtax, or the constant drum beat of how “the left” hates the Democratic Party because they want to primary DINOs (Democrat In Name Only) who have safe seats.
The central campaign platform of the Republican Party is that government can’t do anything. The Democratic Party seems to try very hard to prove them right.
Quote of the Day
Courtesy of Stephen Colbert, but Colbert the person, not the character that he plays on his show.
He was at a reunion of Second City comedians, and they had a panel on comedy and politics:
As for Glenn Beck, the panel discussed the challenge of maintaining a separation between reality and satire when so many TV pundits are simply, premeditatedly over-the-top.
“I said, ‘Let’s start doing some Glenn Beck stuff but in praise of Glenn Beck,'” said Colbert. “But every time we do one, he will have done something dumber. He raised the stupid bar and now it’s nearly inapproachable.”
(emphasis mine)
Have I Mentioned that I Love Alan Grayson*
Seriously if we had 200 guys like him in congress, we’d have 300 Dems in the Congress, and better policy:
H/t Crooks and Liars.
*In a 110% purely heterosexual kind of way, of course, as the General would say.
Signs of the Apocalypse
When “sensible centrist”, by which I mean that he some of his time trying to hew to the Washington, DC pundit consensus, Kevin Drum starts sounding like Leon Trotsky, something is amiss:
Like anyone, I’m pleased when I find someone to confirm my prejudices. And this is definitely one of them. Growth in a modern mixed economy is fundamentally based on consumer spending, and middle class consumers can increase their spending in only three ways: (1) real wage growth, (2) borrowing, or (3) drawing down savings. Only the first is sustainable. So if we want the American economy to grow consistently over long periods, we have to focus our economic machinery on median wage growth. We’ve done it before, we can do it again if we’re smart, and the result would be good for everyone: the rich would get richer, the middle class would get richer, and the poor would get less poor. The alternative is booms, busts, and continued social erosion. So let’s be smart, OK?
(emphasis mine)
He’s right, but the fact that he’s bucking the “Beltway Boyz” on this is telling.
Working for Mother Jones is good for Mr. Drum.
Adventures in American MBA Wankertude
Steve Blank relates a story, one which is all to frequently repeated in American Boardrooms, where the new CFO comes into a startup company that is finally making a profit, and decides to end the provision of free soda to employees, which saves $10,000 a month, but chases away the experienced staff:
Sometimes financial decisions that are seemingly rational on their face can precipitate mass exodus of your best engineers.
……………
I had lived through this same conversation four times in my career, and each time it ended as an example of unintended consequences. No one on the board or the executive staff was trying to be stupid. But to save $10,000 or so, they unintentionally launched an exodus of their best engineers.
This company had grown from the founders, who hired an early team of superstars, many now managing their own teams. All these engineers were still heads-down, working their tails off, just as they had been doing since the first few months of the company. Too busy working, most were oblivious to the changes that success and growth had brought to the company.
The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free
One day the engineering team was clustered in the snack room looking at the soda machine. The sign said, “Soda now 50 cents.” The uproar began. Engineers started complaining about the price of the soda. Someone noticed that instead of the informal reimbursement system for dinners when they were working late, there was now a formal expense report system. Some had already been irritated when “professional” managers had been hired over their teams with reportedly more stock than the early engineers had. Lots of email was exchanged about “how things were changing for the worse.” A few engineers went to the see the CEO.But the damage had been done. The most talented and senior engineers looked up from their desks and noticed the company was no longer the one they loved. It had changed. And not in a way they were happy with.
The best engineers quietly put the word out that they were available, and in less than month the best and the brightest began to drift away.
Truth be told, I’ve never worked a company that gave out free sodas in the break room in the first place, and if I were to start a company, I would not choose this as a benefit for the employees, but it is American management that would create that would chase away its most valuable employees by counting pennies this way.
To the degree that the United States has achieved economic success since the end of the 2nd World War, it has been in spite of management, not because of it.
Deep Thought
H/t Pundit Kitchen
Rep. Capuano Tells Fellow Dems: ‘You’re Screwed’
Bummer of a birth mark, Democratic Party
Representative Michael Capuano (D-MD-8) just finished a losing primary against Martha Coakley, and he when asked to share his experience on the campaign trail, ye was blunt:
You’re screwed
Capuano took to the microphone, looked out at his colleagues and condensed what he’d learned into two words. “You’re screwed,” he told his friends in the House, according to one attendee. The room’s silence was broken only by soft, nervous laughter.
Capuano confirmed the gist of the message — “I’m not sure of the exact wording,” he told HuffPost, chuckling — and said that he doubted his wisdom was anything they didn’t already know.
“I think I was just confirming stuff they already knew,” he said. “I focused on two things: the war in Afghanistan and jobs.”
Everywhere Capuano went in his state, he said, he was bombarded with demands that the government do more to create jobs. He was also greeted by deep skepticism about Obama’s escalation of the eight-year-old war in Afghanistan.
Capuano said he told the caucus that opponents of the war need to be given a chance to vote against funding for it on the House floor.
“If we do anything [on the war], we need to have a separate vote on it. People who can vote for it, can vote for it. But those of us who want to vote against it, [should] be given that opportunity, too,” he said. “But I focused mostly on jobs. People are tired of the promises of jobs. They need them now.”
There are some very real issues here.
The first is that Barack Obama’s “Wall Street before Main Street” policies just aren’t selling.
The second is that Afghanistan is unpopular.
What makes it worse is that the stimulus package will be tied to the Afghan war funding:
Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, told reporters Tuesday that short-term extensions of unemployment and COBRA will be attached to the defense bill.
In effect, that requires members of Congress to back a war they oppose in order to get funding for jobs, a bargain many are loath to make, but one they’ve made over and over since Democrats rook control of Congress following the 2006 midterm elections — which were decided largely by voters fed up with the war in Iraq.
Steny Hoyer is optimistic, because, well, he’s a pro-war, pro-bank bailout squish, and he wants the rest of the caucus voting with him.
We are seeing a disaster unwind in slow motion, and the only person who might make it better, Barack Obama, is spending too much time kissing the asses corporate interests that created the NAFTA driven political firestorm in 1994.
An Insight into the Mind of Ayn Rand
Mystery/thriller writer Michael Prescott has looked through the journals of Ayn Rand, and he finds her musing on one William Edward Hickman, who said, “What is good for me is right,” which seems to pretty classical Randian Objectivism.
She is enthused about this person, and his philosophy, describing it as, “The best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I have heard.”
While Mr. Hickman is fairly obscure these days, unless you are a lawyer, in which case it is one of the earliest attempts at an insanity defense, he was well known during his day, basically 1927 and 1928, because he kidnapped a 12 year old girl, ransomed her, and dismembered her.
And Ayn Rand calls what he did a, “Real man’s philosophy.”
If there were any doubt as to her being evil, it is ended. If there were any doubt as to her sanity, those doubts are reinforced.
I will leave you with the last two ‘graphs, but please read the rest, but be warned, the specifics of the murder are grisly:
By the appraisal of any normal mind, there can be little doubt that William Edward Hickman was a vicious psychopath of the worst order. That Ayn Rand saw something heroic, brilliant, and romantic in this despicable creature is perhaps the single worst indictment of her that I have come across. It is enough to make me question not only her judgment, but her sanity.
At this point in my life, I did not think it was possible to significantly lower my estimate of Ayn Rand, or to regard her as even more of a psychological and moral mess than I had already taken her to be.
I stand corrected.
Did Prosperity Gospel Housing Crash?
Hanna Rosin has a fascinating article about the increasingly popular Prosperity Gospel, which teaches that virtue is rewarded with wealth in this world, may have been at the core of the housing bubble and associated crash:
America’s mainstream religious denominations used to teach the faithful that they would be rewarded in the afterlife. But over the past generation, a different strain of Christian faith has proliferated—one that promises to make believers rich in the here and now. Known as the prosperity gospel, and claiming tens of millions of adherents, it fosters risk-taking and intense material optimism. It pumped air into the housing bubble. And one year into the worst downturn since the Depression, it’s still going strong.
It’s something that I’ve never thought about, but I do tend to see the correlation between someone assuming that their own personal virtue will somehow trump the house price to income ratio, and engaging in reckless behavior, and as Rosin further notes:
Demographically, the growth of the prosperity gospel tracks fairly closely to the pattern of foreclosure hot spots. Both spread in two particular kinds of communities—the exurban middle class and the urban poor. Many newer prosperity churches popped up around fringe suburban developments built in the 1990s and 2000s, says Walton. These are precisely the kinds of neighborhoods that have been decimated by foreclosures, according to Eric Halperin, of the Center for Responsible Lending.
Certainly, they fit hand in glove with the housing boom and bust, as does the explicitly atheist philosophies of Ayn Rand and Objectivism, which would tend to imply at least a supporting role.
Of course, this attitude has its genesis at the beginning of European colonization of this country.
The Pilgrims, as good Calvinists, believed that predestination implied financial success, and this idea has carried forward 4 centuries since.
As a Jew, I see the focus on rewards in heaven in most mainstream Christian denominations to be a bit unseemly, Judaism downplays the afterlife, focusing on the mission of Tikkun Olam (Mending the world), but prosperity gospel has always seemed to me to be, a perversion of faith as well as being insincere: After all, what is there to religion if you get something for nothing.
I would note that Rev. Rick Warren, with whom I agree on very little is of largely the same opinion, saying that, “This idea that God wants everybody to be wealthy? There is a word for that: baloney. It’s creating a false idol. You don’t measure your self-worth by your net worth. I can show you millions of faithful followers of Christ who live in poverty. Why isn’t everyone in the church a millionaire?”
All in all, it’s an interesting read, and gives a view of a theology that I find profoundly disturbing.