by publius
Like Yglesias and Atrios, I find the press’s “Everything That Happens Is Bad for Democrats” narrative extremely annoying. (See yesterday’s Post for the most recent example). The more interesting question though is why it keeps happening. Why do ostensibly liberal reporters keep returning to this narrative frame?
Although unintentionally, I think Andrew Sullivan’s interesting article on Obama provides a possible answer: liberal guilt. Examining how the generation-gap affects Clinton and Obama’s respective liberalism, he writes:
A generational divide also separates Clinton and Obama with respect to domestic politics. Clinton grew up saturated in the conflict that still defines American politics. As a liberal, she has spent years in a defensive crouch against triumphant post-Reagan conservatism. The mau-mauing that greeted her health-care plan and the endless nightmares of her husband’s scandals drove her deeper into her political bunker. . . . She has internalized what most Democrats of her generation have internalized: They suspect that the majority is not with them, and so some quotient of discretion, fear, or plain deception is required if they are to advance their objectives.
Frankly, I disagree that Obama is free from these demons. But still, Sullivan is on to something larger here. And that larger point is that liberals over the past two generations have been afraid to express their real views.
I’m not sure where it comes from. Maybe Nixon’s victories. Maybe Reagan’s. Maybe Bush’s. Maybe from 1994. Maybe from the Latina union-supporting, ERA activist who dumped Mickey Kaus in college. I’m not sure. But somewhere along the way, liberals got it in their heads (not always wrongly) that showing their true colors risked professional and political harm.
On the political front, we’ve seen manifestations of these fears in every election since 1988. The DLC; Clinton ’92; Clinton ’94-’96; Gore; Kerry; the BOLD 2002 prescription drug plan – all of the underlying strategies of these various movements were rooted in fears of looking too liberal on the big issues of our day.
On the professional front, liberal journalists and pundits internalized the view that the public disagreed with their fundamental beliefs. Accordingly, they feared the consequences of showing their true colors. Being too liberal — lacking moderation and understanding, even in the face of ridiculous positions – would prevent them from reaching the highest levels of DC Pundit-land.
Hell, I’m not exactly one to criticize on this front. Perhaps foolishly, I write anonymously strictly out of fear that my too-liberal statements could cause professional harm. More generally, academics have internalized the Horowitz Cultural Revolution more than they care to admit. As a result, they’ve become timid and scared in recent years.
The big problem though – the hypocrisy we have all shared in recent decades – is that the fears cause us to say things we don’t always mean. We moderate when our hearts aren’t in it — and we come off sounding phony. Or, we remain silent when we shouldn’t and come off looking cowardly.
It would be different if the GOP’s political success had made liberals fundamentally change their opinions on, say, social and environmental issues. But it hasn’t. It’s just changed how we talk about them. Either silently or privately to each other, we continue to be pretty dismissive of many (though certainly not all) conservative arguments without expressing just how patently stupid we think some of them are (e.g., evolution, pretty much every anti-gay anything).
But despite this internal confidence, the fear remains that expressing deeply-felt opinions will bring harm. It’s similar to hiding your emotions from someone you love for fear they will turn on you after learning what you really think. This is what liberals have feared – the stigma of being an unserious, fringe lefty. We’ve heard about “real America” since the 60s, and we’ve internalized it, deeply. We’ve internalized how our idealized Middle America will view our opinions – they never much care for them, thank you.
Turning back to the Post, it’s these types of fears that are driving the narrative Yglesias identifies — the great undead narrative that isn’t really alive, but never seems to die. I have no doubt that the Post reporter thinks global warming is a big deal. She probably even thinks doubters are either industry hacks or fools. But because global warming is one of those issues, the instinct is that expressing support will bring retribution. As a result, the fear gets projected out and frames the story. It’s risky, risky. It will make people think you’re a hippy. And not just this story, but every story. The rise of Pelosi triggers the fears that Crazy Leftness will send everyone running back to Nixon. And on it goes.
Unlike my usual work, these aren’t exactly empirically-rigid points. But assuming there is something to this (as I do), things do seem to be getting better on this front. To me, one of the lasting legacies of the liberal blogosphere will be that it revitalized liberals by making it ok to be unapologetically progressive again.
And since Ezra brought it up, this is precisely why I loved – and dearly miss – Billmon’s blog. Everyone with writing aspirations grows up wanting to be Hemingway or Fitzgerald. Well, not me. I wanted to be Billmon. I couldn’t of course – because no one can be. But he is the reason why I started. And what I loved (reading in those dark days of 2003) was how unabashedly and unapologetically angry he was. (In this respect, the rise of the blogosphere is related to the rise of Howard Dean). There wasn’t even the slightest attempt to be Broderish, to meet halfway on the Iraq war. There was no guilt. No triangulation. No trying to come to terms with “real” America. It was extremely refreshing, having just seen Daschle and every other major presidential candidate fall over themselves to support the war.
In a way, I hope we see him again. But then again, maybe not. It adds to the lore. Better to burn out than rust and all that…
Isn’t changing “how we talk about policies” actually very much like changing what the policies are?
Look, supposing you think that all the oil companies ought to be nationalised. Once upon a time, back in the late 1930s, there were serious politicians who wouldn’t have sniffed at that. There was a huge campaign in the 1940s, especially after FDR’s death, against ideas of that sort. People stopped talking about such policies. Eventually they forgot that such policies might even be an option. Now raising such policies would get you accused of being insane, even if you have the solidest arguments imaginable.
Controlling the discourse is half-way to controlling everything.
AMERICANS IN “BEING REPRESSED ABOUT SOMETHING” SCANDAL
This certainly accords with my own perception, that while the Republican party is a party with popular principles it’s leaders for the most part don’t really hold, the Democratic party is a party whose leaders really do have principles… that are unpopular enough they don’t dare acknowledge having them.
IOW, you’re on to something here. ’94, for instance, really was a case of Democrats going for what they really wanted, instead of playing it safe, and paying the price at the next election.
If your present generation of candidates are becoming unafraid, maybe the Republicans will be back in the majority sooner than I thought.
A good example of this would be immigration: The latest poll on drivers’ licenses for illegal immigrants has the public against it, 77-16; So, naturally, all the Democratic front runners have embraced them. Handing a GOP that’s been committing sepiku on the corruption and war front a roll of gauze and some tape.
That’s the sort of thing that happens when you forget for a moment that your core values are wildly unpopular.
Publius: First, I think this is refreshingly insightful. It’s something that I believe always defines the narrative but is rarely if ever discussed. But there is also an element of self-denial here I believe.
On the professional front, liberal journalists and pundits internalized the view that the public disagreed with their fundamental beliefs.
(mind reading cap on) I think many liberals want to believe that their views are truly representative of the public at large. Their beliefs are just so right, so good, how could it be otherwise? (cap off)
But the majority of the public does disagree with their (your) fundamental beliefs. For the last 30+ years, only around 18% of the population self-identify as liberal. Almost twice as many (33%) identify as conservative. The majority are still in the middle. During the same period the number of people who consider themselves Democrats (no matter how they actually vote) has been steadily declining. And that 18% number has remained very steady – regardless of war or the economy or the party in power for at least 3 decades. The public is just not on board.
When only 1 in 5 Americans self-identify as liberal there are only two possibilities IMO: either your beliefs truly are far from mainstream or the GOP has been remarkably successful in framing the argument (liberal is a bad word). The latter is not representative of the inept and dysfunctional GOP I’ve come to know.
A politician running on a liberal platform is (in most cases) unelectable. I think that naturally spills down to the pundits. Heck many Republicans believe HRC is a socialist, and that comes through in unguarded moments. But she certainly isn’t running as one – she wouldn’t have a chance. True liberals literally have to hide their true beliefs to get elected (with exceptions of course).
Note: Even conservatives believe that your beliefs are good, even desirable. We just don’t believe they are workable in the real world for the most part.
One objection: equating the religious right’s positions (e.g., evolution, pretty much every anti-gay anything) as conservative arguments. That’s like me claiming that atheism is a liberal argument.
that while the Republican party is a party with popular principles it’s leaders for the most part don’t really hold, the Democratic party is a party whose leaders really do have principles… that are unpopular enough they don’t dare acknowledge having them.
which party’s leaders have been pushing these wildly unpopular positions: staying in Iraq indefinitely, championing torture, increasing government surveillance of US citizens, lowering the taxes on the mega-rich and their silver spoons scions, limiting access to abortions and even to contraception, homophobic paranoia, xenophobic paranoia, eliminating Social Security ?
“Note: Even conservatives believe that your beliefs are good, even desirable. We just don’t believe they are workable in the real world for the most part.”
I think that’s somewhat of an exaggeration. “I suppose they mean well” hardly translates into something THAT positive.
Cleek, you slipped a few in there that you only WISH were unpopular.
But the majority of the public does disagree with their (your) fundamental beliefs.
…
For the last 30+ years, only around 18% of the population self-identify as liberal. Almost twice as many (33%) identify as conservative.
that says almost nothing about the actual policies. it only describes how people feel about the labels “liberal”, “moderate” and “conservative”.
Heck many Republicans believe HRC is a socialist,
sorry, but that says more about the ignorance of the average conservative than it does Hillary’s secret hidden policy desires.
you slipped a few in there that you only WISH were unpopular.
that’s true, i only wish the rancid shrieking *phobias were less popular. but until the demagogues of the right decide to stop stoking those fires, i guess we’ll all have to live with the effects.
OCSteve: One objection: equating the religious right’s positions (e.g., evolution, pretty much every anti-gay anything) as conservative arguments.
When conservatives stop being anti-gay, OCSteve, you’ll have a point. When conservatives in the US stop arguing that it’s wrong for children to be taught that evolution is a basic scientific principle, you’ll also have a point.
Hope that day comes soon. Until then, you would do better making clear to other conservatives that you, as a conservative, oppose these conservative policies and think they ought not to be conservative policies… than complaining to non-conservatives that they’re identifying common conservative policies that you personally don’t agree with as conservative policies.
the Democratic party is a party whose leaders really do have principles… that are unpopular enough they don’t dare acknowledge having them.
But the majority of the public does disagree with their (your) fundamental beliefs.
I think it depends on what the meaning of “liberal” is.
I do not self-identify as a liberal. I’m a lefty. The two things are not the same. Granted, if you’re a conservative, my being a lefty is probably a far, far more egregious sin, but if a pollster called me on the phone and said “do you self-identify as a liberal” my answer would be “no”.
Further, at a time when icons of “liberalism” include Barack Obama and Howard Dean, it seems to me that “liberal” has come to mean “someone running against a Republican”.
I’d be curious to know if either of you guys — Brett or OC — could give me a precis of the policy positions of either of those two guys off the top of your head. If I walked into a diner most places in the country and presented their positions over coffee in a reasonable tone of voice, without attributing them to a known “liberal”, more than a few heads would nod. Trust me.
So, I’m not sure the polling numbers mean a whole hell of a lot.
To my eye, conservatives have been taking this country straight to hell for the last forty years. They built a base by freaking people out, but you can only ride that horse for so long. They wore out “the coloreds are coming” as a rallying cry a while back, and “the hippies are coming” is getting long in the tooth as well. “The Muslims are coming” probably has a few good years left in it, though, so you all have that to fall back on.
Meanwhile, folks are losing their houses, health insurance, retirement money, and jobs. Their kids and neighbors are being sent overseas to get blown up, with no particular end in sight, and no particular good coming of it.
Their freaking spinach is killing them.
Good, stout, family values conservative politicians show up on a daily basis with their hands either in the till or in somebody else’s pants, and I’m not talking about simple consensual dalliances like BJs from interns. I’m talking freak show.
We now have a President who openly states that he is not beholden to the law, and who breaks laws both domestic and international with all the concern most folks devote to taking out the trash. You can try the “yeah, but he’s not really a conservative” line on for size if you like, but I can tell that that dog will not hunt.
Folks are fed up, and I’m not just talking about us coastal elites. If the Democrats remotely get their act together, conservatives will have their a**es handed to them. If they don’t get their act together, hopefully somebody else will step in and get it done.
If not, we’re screwed, cause our modern day conservatives, plain and simple, do not have the first idea of how to run a country. They know how to “send a message” like nobody since Goebbels, that’s for sure. But in terms of hands on, roll up your sleeves, keep the wheels on governance, they could not find a clue with both hands and a flashlight.
Thanks –
One objection: equating the religious right’s positions (e.g., evolution, pretty much every anti-gay anything) as conservative arguments. That’s like me claiming that atheism is a liberal argument.
When atheists across the country organize fax and email campaigns, and raise millions upon millions of dollars, supporting Democratic candidates to the exclusion of all others, you might have a point.
When Democratic politicians troop by the tens and hundreds, hat in hand, to the meccas of American atheism, to swear their allegiance to all that is atheistic, you might have a point. Except there are no meccas of American atheism.
Plus, there are plenty of conservative atheists.
Thanks –
From an (old) European perspective US “liberals” are not liberal for the most part and US “conservatives” are not conservative.
The Dems are at best center-right and the (current) GOP the second coming of the Harzburger Front.
Given that the rule of law is now a leftist fringe view (according to Beltway pundits)…
I say nuke it from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
Brett: I think that’s somewhat of an exaggeration. “I suppose they mean well” hardly translates into something THAT positive.
Fair enough – missing the word many in there – many of your beliefs are good, even desirable
Jes: Sure thing – you’ll just have to point me to where those things are considered part of a conservative platform vs. Republican or GOP.
Jes: Sure thing – you’ll just have to point me to where those things are considered part of a conservative platform vs. Republican or GOP.
Good luck separating the two, either in the public mind, or in actual practice, here and now, in the US.
If you sleep with dogs, you wake up with fleas.
Thanks –
Was that when he turned to goats?
Changing topics a bit back to the Obama vs. Clinton issue, the simplest explanation is that their life experiences were so different due to the ages they were when the same events took place. The turmoil of the late 60’s meant far more to a college student like Clinton than an elementary school student like Obama (even ignoring that much of the time he was overseas). Vietnam looks different when the males of your cohort were being drafted (like Clinton) than if it was winding down at the time you were old enough to follow the news (like Obama). The free love of the 70’s meant something different to a 20 something like Clinton than a pre-teen like Obama (for whose cohort the largest impact was increased divorces among parents).
Obama (if he gets elected) would be our first X’er President. Unlike the Boomers, the issues of the 60’s and 70’s were not the epic struggles of his early adulthood. Instead, Obama grew into early adulthood in the mid 80’s, the only time in recent history when being conservative was more cool than being liberal (think of Michael Fox’s character on Family Ties, or Andrew Dice Clay’s comedy or Morton Downey Jr.’s talk show). Numerous surveys have shown that the only age group which remains more Republican than Democratic is the one born in the first half of the 60’s. That, more than liberal guilt is what Sullivan is pointing to, and I agree with him that it makes a huge difference in the way he thinks.
OCSteve: Sure thing – you’ll just have to point me to where those things are considered part of a conservative platform vs. Republican or GOP.
Oh well – any excuse, eh? Much easier to put your head in the sand and pretend that the Republican party is not conservative than to try to change the Republican party. I get you.
or the GOP has been remarkably successful in framing the argument (liberal is a bad word). The latter is not representative of the inept and dysfunctional GOP I’ve come to know.
But they have, OCSteve. Sure the current clown show in Congress/Presidency is incredibly inept at, well, almost everything, being “on-message”, bleating about some supposed outrage (see the Moveon ad, the Frosts, etc.) and getting the media to repeat their nonsense is something they have done, and continue to do, quite well. Meanwhile, they have perfected the turn on a dime political positioning, see, e.g., the filibuster, “liberals say mean things!”, and don’t get called on it.
And Russel’s right, the crass use of “the muslim’s are coming” and “9/11! 9/11! 9/11!9/11! 9/11! 9/11!” has been incredibly effective for them. Hell, absent the Iraq war I’d guess they would still have a majority in both houses of congress, based on those two bleatings alone. Plus the constant preying upon American optimism* to deliver a massive (and it is truly massive) tax cut to the richest among us over the past 6 years, has been disgusting (sez one who has benefited rather nicely from those same cuts).
So, I don’t see a contradiction between the massive ineptness of the current GOP when it comes to governing (heck, I bet the higher ups actually think they’ve done a good job of governing, it’s just that their definition of a good job is different than most people’s) and their ability to mislead the public into voting for them (or voting against the democrats).
*”We’re all going to be rich someday!” Which reminds me of a friend of mine in college who would proclaim on Friday night as we exited our dorm to head out to various parties, “We’re all gonna get laid!” which, of course, meant that no one did.
The classic example pre-dates 1992. Go back to 1988.
Bush 41 almost never mouthed the word “liberal” when speaking about Dukakis. Instead he kept referring to the “L word.”
Just by doing so, with the knowledge that everybody knew he was speaking about liberal, he was equating in people’s minds that the word liberal was on a par with the “F word.”
Throughout that campaign I kept hoping that Dukakis would just come out and ssay something like:
“Yes, I am a liberal and proud of it. Almost everything positive in thsi country during the last century has happened because of others who were liberal, things such as Social Sevcurity, Civil Rights reform, Medicaire, etc. I am proud to be some one who represents caring for all people, for giving hope to our children, for taking care of our elderly, for making sure the common man or woman is not oppressed by an unfair economic system, etc.”
Instead, all I heard were the crickets chirping.
Yes, the word liberal has a bad taint, which is why the term progressive is used more often today. But if someone actually had the courgae to present what liberalism has done for this country just perhaps more people would see that in most ways they are actually liberals at heart.
The immigration polls are all over the map; they are in some ways much more anti-immigrant than our existing laws & in other ways much less so. They have also varied wildly over the last few years.
Anyway, the country doesn’t have to be majority liberal about everything for publius’s post to be right. The country just has to be much MORE liberal than Congress or the press act like it is, & that is certainly true.
the other thing about polls is that they tend to vary 20-35 points based on how you phrase the question. Public opinion is susceptible to change, & the Democrats & many allegedly liberal opinion writers don’t try to change it–it’s a wonder we’re not worse off than we are.
With the media, I think it’s the desire to 1) influence events; and 2) create drama. Since the media’s ability to promote stuff is limited, they use the tried-and-true method of shooting stuff down. So basically, everything that happens is bad for everyone.
I hate to bring up RedState again, but I was reading a thread about the impeachment resolution, and the rationale for the Republican tactic was described as “holding the Democratic leadership accountable for the lunacy of their base”. So Ron Paul is Republican fringe, and Kucinich is Democratic base. The narrative lives.
I don’t see liberal guilt as much as liberal pragmatism. As a couple people have said, the public at large isn’t very liberal. More importantly, though, the public at large is not very ideological. They’re for labor unions if they’re in one. They’re for saving social security if they’re getting older. They feel threatened by illegal immigration and gay marriage, but aren’t really able to articulate why. Their arguments for or against things are mostly rationalizations of what they already want to believe.
Hmmm – maybe substitute “cynicism” for “pragmatism”.
Excellent post. You’re _almost_ there, but you’re still hedging.
See? When we do these things we don’t “come off looking” phony and cowardly — we are phony and cowardly.
Bravely standing up for what you truly believe has consequences. Sometimes most of those consequences hurt. It’s still better than being the phony coward that most Democrats, including me, have voluntarily become.
Half the country favors impeaching Cheney, & the Democrats are supposed to be embarrassed to even debate it.
I think many liberals want to believe that their views are truly representative of the public at large.
Except, OC Steve, the public does tend to support liberal positions if they’re just posed to them in a neutral way without identifying them as liberal positions. For instance, the public supports social security.
But liberal has become a bad word, thanks to Reagan, the Christian Coalition, and all their accolytes.
Rust never sleeps.
“But somewhere along the way, liberals got it in their heads (not always wrongly) that showing their true colors risked professional and political harm.”
Maybe liberal politicians (the political harm side). But in the large majority of states with the large majority of population where a large majority of people work, that just isn’t remotely true, and hasn’t been at any time in the past 40 years. What profession is exposing yourself as a liberal risking professional harm? Lawyer? No. Doctor? No. Writer? No. Journalist? Please. Professor? Come-on. Banker? Nope. Actor? Surely no. Who exactly are you talking about. Certainly not enough people to generalize that statement to all liberals.
I suspect that one of the problems with liberals is that Americans have (or at least like to think they have) a strong streak of HATING to be told what to do, while many of the high profile programs of most liberals involve telling them what to do (eat, smoke, build, drink, spend their money on etc.)
They also hate paying the consequences of their actions, which is why many liberal policies are so popular.
Part of the problem with the US electorate is that (all the way down to the individual level) many people are almost schizo in their professed desires.
“It will make people think you’re a hippy.”
“Hippie.” It’s not a description of body shape.
“Except, OC Steve, the public does tend to support liberal positions if they’re just posed to them in a neutral way without identifying them as liberal positions. For instance, the public supports social security.”
This is true of almost any program, left or right, if couched in a ‘neutral’ enough way at a high enough level of generalization. Think “faith based programs”–wildly popular in the abstract, at most ‘eh’ in practice. Almost everybody would like all sorts of things for free too. But that doesn’t make it possible in a world of actual trade-offs.
“Rust never sleeps.
Posted by: Billmon”
Rust in peace, Billmon. You are greatly missed.
I suspect that one of the problems with liberals is that Americans have (or at least like to think they have) a strong streak of HATING to be told what to do,
when i think of the GOP, one of the first things that pops into my head is “moralizing authoritarians”. i’m pretty sure i’m not alone.
many of the high profile programs of most liberals involve telling them what to do (eat, smoke, build, drink, spend their money on etc.)
contrast that with the conservative impulses to tell everyone who to have sex with, what women can do with their bodies, what to teach children, how and when it’s permissible to criticize the government, what you can read, etc..
Sebastian: They also hate paying the consequences of their actions, which is why many liberal policies are so popular.
They also hate being permanently disadvantaged because their parents were poor, or because they’re not white, or straight, or male, or rich. That’s why so many liberal policies from the past and in the present are so popular.
Dying of brain cancer at 45 because you opted to be a self-employed carpenter in a country with the worst health care system in the developed world may be “paying the consequences of your actions” – but you’re right that most people hate the idea that they should base their whole career, everything they want to do with their lives, on whether or not that will mean they get health insurance so that, if they get cancer, they’re more likely to survive.
It may be “paying the consequences of your actions” when a woman who has no health insurance and is in a job with no maternity benefits decides to have an abortion rather than a baby – the commonest principal reason for abortion in the US is that the woman can’t afford to have a baby – but it’s a payment I don’t think any woman ought to have to make.
Liberal policies are more popular because most people feel instinctively that there is a certain basic standard of care that civilised people owe to each other, whereas conservative values hold that if a man can’t afford to pay for cancer treatment; he should die; if an old person can’t manage to work, they shouldn’t have an income (the whole Social Security thing is founded squarely on the offense to conservative values of people who worked hard all their lives and now can’t work any more being able to retire with financial security); and the utter offense to conservative values of women being able to decide for themselves, regardless of their current level of income, marital status, or sexual orientation, when to (and if) have children.
Not to mention the awful liberal policy of ensuring that people don’t have to pay the consequence of “deciding” to be lesbian or gay, by removing the legal discriminations that conservatives support against LGBT people.
Insightful post. Do you think you’re blogging has changed since you’ve moved to Obi-Wi? Seems to me sometimes like you’re a little more cautious/careful.
Also, right on about Billmon.
Miss that guy’s writing. Would be particularly interesting to get his take on the sub-prime/Citi stuff.
russell: Good luck separating the two, either in the public mind, or in actual practice, here and now, in the US.
Jes: Oh well – any excuse, eh? Much easier to put your head in the sand and pretend that the Republican party is not conservative than to try to change the Republican party. I get you
I agree that separating the two in the public mind is a lost cause. But “pretend that the Republican party is not conservative” – there is no pretend there. The current Republican party has all but abandoned traditional conservative principles.
Does Democrat = liberal?
russell: I do not self-identify as a liberal. I’m a lefty.
Can you expand on that at all? I mean I couldn’t define the exact difference between a liberal and a lefty – which is further left? I would have said that liberal was further left than lefty, but you make it sound as if the opposite is true.
If I walked into a diner most places in the country and presented their positions over coffee in a reasonable tone of voice, without attributing them to a known “liberal”, more than a few heads would nod.
But isn’t that kind of the point of this post? I can’t tell you what Dean is up to these days but Obama does not strike me as trumpeting a truly progressive platform. It’s been pointed out to me that I’d likely agree with many of his positions. What I have read strikes me as not objectionable – nothing too far out there.
But it’s all “and a pony” – a chicken in every pot with no concrete details on where he is getting the chickens. That’s where things get divisive. Ask the diners if they are for or against a clean environment – nods all around. Explain to those same diners exactly what “drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions” means and note their reaction then. Much of the rest is noting problems without even claiming he has a plan to resolve them. Those diners will mostly agree that immigration is a problem – and then what?
Even if he is talking about progressive issues he is certainly not talking about what progressive solutions to those issues would be.
OCSteve: Actually, Obama (like most of the Democrats) is talking, in considerable detail, about what his solutions would look like. From this page you can find pretty detailed positions on most issues (health care, energy, etc.)
Do you think you’re blogging has changed since you’ve moved to Obi-Wi? Seems to me sometimes like you’re a little more cautious/careful.
Probably – everyone here’s like all respectful and stuff. 🙂
Please applaud and support brave and genuine Harry Taylor, who had the courage to take the microphone at one of Bush’s public appearances and say :
OCSteve: The current Republican party has all but abandoned traditional conservative principles.
In what way? It holds to the traditional conservative principles of do down the poor, oppress women, be publicly anti-gay, and make the rich richer. What traditional conservative principles am I overlooking?
Does Democrat = liberal?
You’ll have to ask someone who’s a Democrat. Or a liberal.
I am a radical left-wing loonie from the Socialist Republic of Europe, remember? 😉
In what way? It holds to the traditional conservative principles of do down the poor, oppress women, be publicly anti-gay, and make the rich richer. What traditional conservative principles am I overlooking?
Yes, this is a sarcastic question, and deserves a sarcastic answer. But those are the principles that the Republican Party in the US, the Conservative Party in the UK, and indeed other conservatives and other conservative political parties have embodied for my entire life, and, from my reading of historical conservative principles, for many decades since before I was born, both in the North America and in Europe. “Liberal values” – which is in my mind middle-of-the-road, since in my country there has been a strong left-wing party since my grandfather’s time – embody compromise between socialist values and conservative values. Fall too far in either direction, and government or corporations will have too much power for individual comfort. So I guess I could say I’m on the socialist side of being a liberal: I believe in universal education to capacity for all, decent health care for all, having a basic safety net so that a run of bad luck doesn’t put you and your children down forever, supporting women when they have children – all of which are good socialist values: but I also believe in the value of entrepreneurial enterprise and individual competition – which of course is best supported and encouraged by having that basic socialist safety net. That way people can be free to be self-employed carpenters without worrying about whether or not they’re going to develop brain cancer and die untreated at 45.
“Can you expand on that at all? I mean I couldn’t define the exact difference between a liberal and a lefty – which is further left? I would have said that liberal was further left than lefty, but you make it sound as if the opposite is true.”
Setting aside how many times we’ve gone around on this at ObWi, since it’s been quite a while since the last time, which was probably before OCSteve was around, it’s hard to know how to really address this without a kindergarten class in the history of the last two centuries of American political thought and development.
It’s extremely frustrating to have to start from the most pre-elementary level on up. Couldn’t you just read a couple of books on the history of politics in the 20th century?
“I would have said that liberal was further left than lefty, but you make it sound as if the opposite is true.”
This is just so profoundly ignorant, it’s almost impossible to know where to start: the Enlightenment, I guess, and early communitarians. But it would take us a while to get to the start of the 18th century, let alone to American and European late 19th century socialism and Marxism, and then the early 20th century splits, and the domestic American left-liberal wars of the early through mid-century.
Maybe you should start by seeing Reds. Then we can talk about the first three decades of the 20th century, with perhaps only brief looks further backwards.
“I would have said that liberal was further left than lefty, but you make it sound as if the opposite is true.”
Yes, I think it’s fair to say that Mao was “further left” than Adlai Stevenson. That Stalin was “further left” than FDR. That a member of the Socialist Worker’s Party is “further left” than a Democrat. And so on.
Brief previous comment here.
What do you even mean by “further left,” in your own mind, OCSteve, if you can’t tell a leftist from a liberal?
Liberalism. Socialism. Communism.
Generally and highly loosely speaking, if you believe in revolutionary Marxism, or some flavor of it, and want a revolution, you’re a leftist, and if you oppose it, and believe in continuing to improve liberal democracy via reforms, you’re a liberal.
This was all fought out from the late 19th century through the first half of the 20th century; the last battlelines were finalized in the post-war Fifties, when the last liberal organizations expelled the last communists, building on the mutual expulsions and splits of socialist organizations of the Twenties and Thirties. The result in the Sixties was the New Left, contemptous of the Old Left, and of liberals.
I could go into endless detail about the League for Industrial Democracy, and the development of SDS, and PL (Popular Labor), and backwards into Stalin’s disillusioning of much of the American left, and through the rise of Roosevelt and the triumph of liberalism over revolutionary Marxism in America, the earlier communists, and their roots in pre-Marxist communitarians, and back through the Levellers and all sorts of interesting English history, but there are countless books on the topic: I read hundreds, myself, back when I was 10-16, giving myself a basic political history education, and they’ll do a far better job of informing you than any little recapitulations by me here.
russell: I do not self-identify as a liberal. I’m a lefty.
Can you expand on that at all?
Sure, with the caveat that I’m talking about self-identification.
Liberalism has the flavor of improving humanity, maybe even the world. Part of the liberal project is making people better, nicer, happier, etc. Frankly, I don’t want government involved in deciding what “better”, “nicer”, or “happier” mean. So, I don’t consider myself a liberal.
Being a lefty just means being comfortable with an active role for government in matters of public interest. Implicit here is that I believe that there is such a thing as a public interest. It used to be called the “common wealth”. Nowadays we call it “pesky, burdensome intrusions in the market”.
I like a mixed economy. I’m fine with government regulation of industry, and frankly I wished the regulations we already have were actually enforced.
I’m fine with government owned or sponsored monopolies on things that are essential infrastructure, and which are naturally monopolistic. I don’t want or need “market based solutions” for who is going to supply my highways, water, electricity, natural gas, etc. National ownership of railways, airports, or even airlines would not upset me in the least. Whatever makes the right thing happen.
I for damned sure do not want “market based solutions” for national defense, intelligence, or public safety. They’re on their way.
I think that people who share a polity bear some responsibility for each other’s well being, simply because they share a polity, and I think it’s absolutely appropriate for government to be the vehicle by which that responsibility is carried out.
ObWi readers outside of the US are either puzzled or are quietly chuckling to themselves as they read this, because only here in the good old USA would I be considered a lefty. Nonetheless, by our lights that’s what I am.
Bill Clinton was a liberal, but was not especially a lefty.
There used to be lots of lefties, as I’ve defined the term here, in this country, but lately they’re scarce as hen’s teeth. I’m hard put to think of one.
Hope that helps.
More importantly, though, the public at large is not very ideological.
Game, set, and match.
Normal folks, “heartland Americans”, call ’em what you like, want government to keep the wheels on. Not like Mussolini “keeping the trains running on time”. Just want plain old effective governance.
People aren’t against, for instance, Social Security because it violates their sense of the proper role of government. To the degree they’re against it, they’re against it because they’ve been told it’s going to run out of money before they get their share.
It’s not the principle that bugs them, it’s the execution. Or, at least, the perception they’ve been given of the execution.
Folks want government to be effective, responsive, transparent, and accountable. They may not use exactly those words, but that’s what they’re after.
Conservatives spent a couple of decades promising that. Based on those promises, they were given the reins of power.
They failed to deliver, and failed in spades. Folks are beginning to notice that.
Thanks –
Hilzoy: Actually, Obama (like most of the Democrats) is talking, in considerable detail, about what his solutions would look like.
That’s the page I linked actually – I’ll give it another read but I saw little there in terms of concrete detail on proposed solutions. I saw a lot of words on what the problem was, but then mainly blurbs like “comprehensive solution”, “in Chicago”, “in the Senate”, “he has a plan”…
Jes: What traditional conservative principles am I overlooking?
Small government, fiscal responsibility, free trade, deregulation…
You’ll have to ask someone who’s a Democrat. Or a liberal.
Try this then. Liberals tend to align with the Democratic Party. Some members of the Democratic Party support the war in Iraq. Therefore liberals support the war in Iraq.
That seems to be your argument: Conservatives tend to align with the Republican Party. Some members of the Republican Party are anti-gay. Therefore conservatives are anti-gay.
I think that Osteve is right that the current Repubican party ( although composed of and supported by people who self-identify as conservative) has indeed abandoned what I guess you could call philosophiclly conservative principles. Thre’s a reason for that : no one, ouside of an ivory tower or wealthy suburb, really supports those pure philosohical conservative principles. No politician can get elected on them except from a few weathly districts where the constituency is protected by their nmoney from the consequences of the principles. It’s the Republicans, not the Democrats, who have to hide ther unpopular principles from the electorate. Over the last thrity yea4rs or so the Republicans who call themselves consevatives have hidden their principles and run for office so effectively by appealing to authoritarian personality types that the mask has become the party.
Take for example the principle of small goevernment, self-reliance, the opposite of mommy statism, the idea that government neees to stay out of the way. Who actually wants that principle to be applied to themselves?
Drug dealers might. Farmers, ranchers, sheep raisers, Boeing employees, people who don’t want their local taxes to go sky-high,people who want a road, or a safe work place, or health insurance for their kids, or protection for their property from the crappy things their neighbors might do or people who want public land to be managed for long term benefit of the public rather than shortterm special interests…..damn near everyone who cares about their own long term interests or the general public interest wants the government to use its power and its money to make policies, rules, inititatives that will mitigate their problems. And contra conservative belief that the govenmet can’t do anything right, for the most part the policies, rules and initiatives are reasonably effective when administred by professionals (as opposed to party hacks and cronies a la Bush ADmin>)
The appeal of Republicans who call themselves conservatives is to people who want the government to help them–and only them. Not anyone else. The priciple of governing best by governing least, becomes “I’ll pander to your selfishness and tell you the lies that you want to hear and and hide the discreecies and controdictions behind the promotion of hate and fear of everyone else”
So in a state like Idaho, the conservative principle of small government means that we the tax payers subsidize sheep ranchers in their use of public land–and those ranchers are “freed” from “excessive governmental interfertence” in their subsidized use of our resources. ANd the ranchers are told that they, parasites for generations, are the real true embodyments of American self-reliane and anyone who doesn’t support them is a latte-drinking liberal pinko etc etc etc.
A true conservative would either advocate the privatzing of public land, or demand that the users of public land behave responislby, or leave the sheep ranchers to the mercy of market forces. That’s not what the self identified conservative politicians of Idaho say to their self-identidfied conservative suporters, however.
The same pattern exists throughout the nation. The whole state of Alaska is the sheep-ranching parasite pattern writ large. ANother example: so-called small government conservatives who want to use the power of government to decide for women if they should take a pregnancy to term or not. Another example: my father in law was a Deomcrat back in the Depression. He woked for the WPA. Later he got a subsidized loan to start an apple orchard watered by irrigation form the socialist Bonneville power administration. Once he got financially comfortable he became a conservative and voted Republican because he was pissed at all those peole who couldn’t fend for themselves as he claimed had done all his life and, while expecting raods, schools etc, to mateialize in his vicinity, he was not willing to pay taxes.
Most Americans believe that the govenment is suppsed to do for them what they want done. Sometimes that means solving problems. Sometimes that means minding other people’s business. There has always been a a gray area of discussion about whether or not the governemt should intervene in a situation. However the conservitve pattern has not been to preseve freedom or independence or limit control or oppose the mommy state. That’s all eyewash. The practical realworld differece between people who call themsleves conservatives and other people is that the people who call themsleves conservatives only want the govenment to act on THEIR behalf or on THEIR beleifes. The rest of us are capable of supporting governemtn actions which are intended for the general good and are capable of opposing government actions to micormanage other people’s morals.
So, conserrvatism as a philosophy is a fantasy. It cannot exist in the real world because it lacks sufficient support.Its main fuction in the real world of politics is to mutate into a justification for selfishness.
Which has nothing to do with Publius’s post which is I think right on the money except that I don’t think the problem is liberal guilt. It’s liberal fear. And I’m sick of it. It’s way past time to get mad and fight back.
Gary: Sorry to put you out like that. Really, don’t feel you have to spend your time repeating what’s common knowledge here or leading the kindergarten class.
Russell: Hope that helps.
Yes it did. Thanks. Sounds quite reasonable actually – not even a hint of “revolutionary Marxism”.
The current Republican party has all but abandoned traditional conservative principles.
This is mystifying.
Conservatives in the US overwhelmingly support the Republican Party. Now suppose your statement is true. Then I guess conservatives vote Republican on a “lesser of two evils” basis. But why aren’t there enough of them to push the Republican Party back to “traditional conservative principles?” Maybe it’s because those principles really are not particularly popular.
You tell us that 33% of the public identifies as “conservative.” That means a large majority of Republicans so identify. Yet the Republicans have “all but abandoned traditonal conservative principles.”
There’s a disconnect here. The self-identification is not with what you consider conservatism, but with actual Republican policies which, I cannot resist pointing out, have a goodly component of “a chicken in every pot with no concrete details on where he is getting the chickens.”
OCSteve: Small government, fiscal responsibility, free trade, deregulation…
Makes the poor poorer, and the rich richer. Just sounds better.
“Small government” sounds much nicer that “Let people drown when a hurricane overwhelms the banks of a levee, if they don’t have the money to get away.”
“Fiscal responsibility” sounds much nicer than “Don’t tax the rich for social programs that will mostly benefit the poor”.
“Free trade” sounds much nicer than “Don’t let developing countries stop us from buying their raw goods at a price that benefits us, and selling them our processed goods at a price that benefits us” – “us” being the very rich, not you and me.
“Deregulation” sounds much nicer than “Let manufacturers run their factories to kill their workers and produce lethal goods, so long as they can profit by doing so”.
But it comes to the same thing.
OCSteve: Try this then. Liberals tend to align with the Democratic Party. Some members of the Democratic Party support the war in Iraq. Therefore liberals support the war in Iraq.
That seems to be your argument: Conservatives tend to align with the Republican Party. Some members of the Republican Party are anti-gay. Therefore conservatives are anti-gay.
In 2004 and 2006, the Republican Party campaigned on an anti-gay amendment to the Constitution. There was no significant conservative movement to oppose the Republican Party’s decision to campaign on making all LGBT people second-class citizens in the US. (If you’re trying to claim that there was, please link to a sampling of the major conservative voices who said explicitly that they thought the Republican Party should support the right to marry, not ban it Constitutionally.)
In 2004 and 2006, the Democratic Party campaigned on ending the war in Iraq. (Or so I recall from the campaigning stuff I read at the time.) While some Democrats support the war, and some seem to have just given up opposing the Republican support for the war, overwhelmingly, the Democrats and the liberals seem to have come to the common-sense conclusion that the war in Iraq is unwinnable and should end as soon as possible. You can doubtless link me to Democrats who argue that the US should go on fighting in Iraq forever, just like all the Republicans who think that, but I think for every Democrat voice that supports the Republican never-ending war in Iraq, I can find you a major Democratic voice that says the US should end it.
You want to continue this argument, or just give up now?
You want to continue this argument, or just give up now?
Given that I’m not going to change your mind on any of this and the post is not about conservative anything I’ll give up now.
Back on topic – here is what I think is the bottom line: The last Presidential candidate to run on an openly liberal platform was Mondale. He lost 49 states and barely carried his home state of MN. It was the biggest rout (Electoral College wise) in the history of the Democratic Party. Obviously there were other factors – Reagan was credited with the economic recovery, plenty of Democrats likely voted for Reagan based just on that. And Mondale did get 40% of the popular vote. But election-wise it was a blowout of historic proportions.
Next up, Dukakis. He was also pretty openly liberal. He carried 10 states – a big improvement.
Clinton then ran as a centrist and handily won two terms.
So I think you have to start by making the case that things have really changed that much in the past 23 years. As of 2004, a year into this war, I don’t believe they have. 18% is not going to win the day.
Kevin Drum’s done a number of posts on the difference between “identifying as liberal” and “supporting liberal policies” that would be worth reading. I’ll link’em later once I’m no longer dead on my feet.
I like how people use “statistical” analyses of presidential races to prove that X is impossible based on 1 correlation, 4-5 observations, and no controlling for any other factor.
Reading these comments make me think most of you didn’t experience the 60’s as a young adult.
That’s not a slam…indulge me as I express my old timer view on the labels we endure today.
My generation had parents who lived/personified the *American Dream* of a house, picket fence, Chevy wagon/sedan in the drive, homemade cookies and ironed shirts from stay at home Mom.
Vietnam escalated as we came of age. We were being drafted by the thousands and killed by the hundreds. We saw our parents as the status quo, the enablers of all things wrong in the world and at home. The usual teenage rebellion was far more intense as it was aimed in a deadly manner against virtually all things our parents stood for. The social restrictions put on our Mothers to not work, play nice with the neighbors, stand in silent support of their husbands…the same restrictions put on our Fathers in reverse, put your head down, support your family, never express emotion, certainly never express any creativity as it might threaten your *good* job sort of nonsense.
We didn’t want to go to some land we’d never heard of only to be killed for an existential cause that we could never grasp. We didn’t want to be trapped in the mire of social restrictions our parents were forced to endure and which made them, personally, so miserable. The nation happened to be enduring an overtly deceitful, negative political scenario personified by an assassinated hero most of us didn’t know much about before he was cut down enshrining him whether right or wrong through the closeted Nixon debacle. Interior social rebellions of women, civil rights, etc made for more upheaval.
So many of us rebelled…and we took it to an extreme never seen. We demanded no restrictions on anything we did. We balked at all of societal mores. Nothing was sacred and all was changing at breakneck speed…no time to absorb, no slow transformation. I didn’t live through it, but the depression was similar in transforming an entire generation’s psyche. In short, you had to live through it to truly understand it.
Of course as we grew up, I think many of us realized just how hurtful much of our behavior was to ourselves and everyone else…the troops we slammed, the institutions we trashed, and most particularly our parents who watched in complete disbelief and befuddlement.
At the same time the majority of us were pulling the *hippie* act, some of us were going hard right…the birth of the well oiled neo-con machine. Old principles made more visible by better educated marketers.
I’m sure many of those days hard right as they grew up came to believe their youthful beliefs were just as radical as we hippies were.
But some stuck with it and just did a better job of sustaining and growing their message through far better organization and marketing than the loose collection of what was the hippie movement.
Back in those days, the larger Republican party represented business…period. The Democratic party represented the big tent…wildly diverse in their roots and joined only by the tenet that the nation could never go back to the pre-New Deal days.
Today, there is still the underlying current of rivalry between those days youthful two factions. I believe many of us who sprung from the hippie movement truly resent the better plan of those that sprung from the hard right. I believe that many of us of both strips feel guilty about how we went about our philosophical evolution.
But I know two things. First, most of us now register as somewhere in the middle between the hard extremes and secondly, the old control battle, guilt, resentments within my generation will not go away so long as we live any more than the depression generation will ever change their psyche so long as they live.
Today, I truly believe most of the nation has one foot in each camp and most of their views lie very much in the middle. We are a reasonable people and when sitting face to face, one on one, we carry on debate very well…we discuss our differences and most times come to solutions that lie in between.
The rhetoric of the extremes is a road to accomplishing nothing and I believe, as a nation, we know there are serious problems that need solutions found only somewhere in the middle.
I believe most folks believe we need government, but want as little contact with government personally as possible. We want good roads, we want fire departments, police departments, reasonable restrictions on land use. We don’t want government taking all our money and we don’t want government telling us what to think. We want our underlying beliefs as expressed in the constitution upheld at home and across the world, not contorted to whichever extreme is using the document as a bludgeon against the other. We want some damn common sense in governance.
But our nation is so big, our politicians so isolated we seem to have reached another stalemate. There seem to only be visible extremes anymore…no middle ground thought at all.
Maybe we need another moratorium, another rebellion.
Or maybe we need to turn the reins of power over to anyone who isn’t still harboring latent resentments of the past. Maybe we need new, thoughtful different perspectives to, if not wash away, put away the mess that my generation has made of the world.
Don’t be ashamed to express yourself…but please don’t be afraid to listen to other perspectives and try to reach some sort of resolutions. If we only spout our own views and fail to listen to other reasonable perspectives, we will continue the polarization that has seemingly paralyzed us as a nation.
Forget the extremes on both sides. They will never be satisfied with the opposite extreme and that is what got us where we are today.
Take the bell curve of society and slice out the extreme 15% on either side of the middle. Answers are in that lump of the curve and most of the answers are reasonable.
Be there as a nation to supply a floor that no one will fall through, but be there as a nation to demand personal responsibility. Be there as a nation to support other less fortunate across the world but allow for the fact that other nations do not need to be shoved in our mold.
Be thoughtful, be responsible. So easy it’s hard.
which party’s leaders have been pushing these wildly unpopular positions: staying in Iraq indefinitely, championing torture, increasing government surveillance of US citizens, lowering the taxes on the mega-rich and their silver spoons scions, limiting access to abortions and even to contraception, homophobic paranoia, xenophobic paranoia, eliminating Social Security ?
I wish I could agree with you, but to me it seems pretty clear that, with the exception of the last, a whole lot of Americans are perfectly fine with the things you list, as long as nothing goes obviously wrong. Let’s be honest, here: Very few people give a damn about what goes on in Gitmo or whose calls the NSA is monitoring, because it’s assumed that it happens to those people. And while support for the Iraq adventure was never very deep, but if it had gone passably well, most folks would be hailing Bush as the next FDR.
And that is where a whole lotta lefties **do** have to hunker down and stay mum. Because the hard fact is that “the American people” are NOT uniquely wise or benevolent or far-sighted. They’re not uniquely deficient in any of those virtues, either — but nobody gets to DC by throwing cold water on the crowd.
Ask Jimmy Carter. To this day, even many liberals go along with the “Great Communicator” myth about Reagan, when in fact the ONLY thing he ever did was tell people what they wanted to hear.
The polls on torture & habeas show about 50 percent supportive & 50 percent opposed, though that’s an extremely rough estimate–it’s quite sensitive to how you phrase the questions, & varies from question to question & poll to poll. In Congress, though, there’s about 25-30 anti-torture votes & zero willingness to mount filibusters about this issue. I’d guess in the public maybe 20-25% is actively engaged in opposition to these policies; in Congress it’s more like 5-10%. Contrast the number of Democrats who routinely break ranks on torture, war, foreign policy, etc. with the number of Republicans willing to break ranks on say, S-CHIP. The GOP has sustained filibusters & vetos with very few defections on issues where the public is quite clearly actively opposed to their position. The Democrats haven’t managed the same with: (1) a Congressional majority (2) an evenly split public.
OCSteve (if you haven’t fled the scene):
What do you think US conservatives, in general, conserve? What are *you* trying to conserve?
It seems to me that a person is a conservative when they want to conserve something, to keep something the same. I, for instance, am an ecological conservative: I want to keep the species, habitats, ecosystems, & ice caps we’ve got.
But my ecological conservativism doesn’t count as political conservativism because politics is a game of power in human societies. So *all* political conservativism must by definition be about maintaining a status quo of power, whether that’s the power of the priesthood or the nobles or the aparatchiks or the large corporations. What else do you think it could be?
G Davis,
Interesting take, but one I (as an early X’er) have some quibbles with:
“But I know two things. First, most of us now register as somewhere in the middle between the hard extremes and secondly, the old control battle, guilt, resentments within my generation will not go away so long as we live any more than the depression generation will ever change their psyche so long as they live.”
I think these are two contradictory thoughts. The second seems correct to me — Boomers seem to want to refight their culture wars forever. The first does not; to the contrary, the most extreme people, on both sides of the spectrum, are Boomers.
“But our nation is so big, our politicians so isolated we seem to have reached another stalemate. There seem to only be visible extremes anymore…no middle ground thought at all.
Maybe we need another moratorium, another rebellion.
Or maybe we need to turn the reins of power over to anyone who isn’t still harboring latent resentments of the past. Maybe we need new, thoughtful different perspectives to, if not wash away, put away the mess that my generation has made of the world.”
What I think we need is someone to make a synthesis of the competing strands of Boomer thought, who can take the best part of what each side has been saying for the past 30-40 years, and wrap it together in a way which gets the whole of the Boomers to feel like the things they have fought for so long for have been incorporated into a new vision for the future.
“Forget the extremes on both sides. They will never be satisfied with the opposite extreme and that is what got us where we are today.
Take the bell curve of society and slice out the extreme 15% on either side of the middle. Answers are in that lump of the curve and most of the answers are reasonable.”
Not going to happen. The two 15% extremes will be hopping mad at the betrayal of their beliefs and decades of hard work. And since Boomers are both at the peak of their power currently and the biggest part of the most extreme elements, they will have the power to block pragmatic solutions unless there is a sufficient crisis to get everyone onto the same page of the playbook. I thought 9/11 could have been that, had Bush used his moment of national unity to take an inclusive course. Someone else will get the chance soon, and hopefully do a better job of it.
The polls on torture & habeas show about 50 percent supportive & 50 percent opposed,
Poll:
”
Asked whether they think waterboarding is a form of torture, more than two-thirds of respondents, or 69 percent, said yes; 29 percent said no.
Asked whether they think the U.S. government should be allowed to use the procedure to try to get information from suspected terrorists, 58 percent said no; 40 percent said yes.
”
OCSteve: Actually, Obama (like most of the Democrats) is talking, in considerable detail, about what his solutions would look like. From this page you can find pretty detailed positions on most issues (health care, energy, etc.)
I suggest that “detailed positions” might be a large part of the liberals’ problem. Look at Obama’s energy “solutions”: What I see is a studied attempt to win over important geographical splinter constituencies, or appear to be doing something. CAFE standards, for instance, are a band-aid, and a cheap ploy for a politician who’s decided that it’s safe to brawl with a weakened domestic auto industry.
If Obama really wanted “solutions”, he’d be talking about taxing carbon-based fuels, and he’d acknowledge that this will cause some short-term pain. And if he was really as inspirational as I keep hearing he is, he’d persuade folks that 1) our current energy “policies” include pissing away trillions in Mesopotamia, and 2) if we tighten our energy belts now, there might be real industrial opportunity ahead.
But I don’t see him, or any leading national Dem, doing that. It looks like similar criticism apply to ALL the health care “reforms” I’m seeing, which all discreetly tiptoe around the giant sucking tick known as the insurance industry.
OCSteve: Given that I’m not going to change your mind on any of this
You could, if you could find me the data I asked you to provide in order to change my mind – the major conservative voices opposing the conservative anti-gay legislation and the conservative anti-gay campaigning.
and the post is not about conservative anything I’ll give up now.
Fair enough.
That many individual conservatives are not homophobic, I accept right away – you’re not, Von’s not, etc.
I dunno, I think part of it is our press is fundamentally un-serious these days, due to profit pressures from the honchos at the paper.
“President Bush Found in Bed with Three Boy Scouts and a Dead Poodle: Bad News for Democrats!”
Republicans have spent at least the past 30 years attacking the word Liberal, which is why so many people use the word “progressive” now. Trying to associate liberals with mythical “Dirty F***ing hippies” who hate America and whatever crap they made up this time.
And the Democratic party, the closest thing there is to a national liberal party in the US, went along, or at least didn’t fight it. Partly, because there were a lot of “Dixiecrat” racists still from the Old South in the Democratic party, and partly probably from running scared from Reagan’s election, even though he only got 60% of the popular vote.
The entire propaganda efforts of Republican/conservative politicians has boiled down to “Government can’t work! Vote for us and we’ll prove it!” and then use their incompetent handling of stuff as evidence of how liberal government programs won’t work. See also: Katrina, Social Security, wildfires, health care.
Yeah, I’m just a little angry.
even many liberals go along with the “Great Communicator” myth about Reagan, when in fact the ONLY thing he ever did was tell people what they wanted to hear.
Reagan did two other things that were far more important in shaping the world we inhabit today:
– He convinced the Republican party establishment that they could violate the law, even to the point of grossly subverting the Constitution, as long as they brazenly refused to admit it. The lesson of Reaganism is that only PR matters; actions have no consequences if you have message discipline, even if the message is composed of lies.
– He convinced the Republican party establishment and the nation at large that complete fiscal irresponsibility has no consequences.
And we have been paying ever since Reagan the cost of these internalized falsehoods.
Kirk Anderson nailed the Reagan myth here.
Katherine: I like how people use “statistical” analyses of presidential races to prove that X is impossible based on 1 correlation, 4-5 observations, and no controlling for any other factor.
Assuming that was directed at me – I don’t do “statistical” analyses. Unless you want to consider my off the cuff remark of “Yeah – that worked out so well for you guys the last couple times you tried it I think you should give it another whirl” as some kind of deep analysis…
Doctor Science: What do you think US conservatives, in general, conserve? What are *you* trying to conserve?
We’re stuck with these labels that don’t accurately describe many of us. I’m not currently trying to preserve/conserve much of anything beyond my job, my marriage, and my sanity (any two of those three are probably questionable at any given time).
I’m certainly not interested in maintaining the current “status quo of power”.
If you are considering the traditional/formal definition of conservative the only thing that may really apply is the desire to reform society slowly and carefully. More accurately in my case I don’t like laws to “fix” something that lead to unintended consequences that lead to more laws to “fix” those problems, that lead to more unintended consequences…
And I am a fiscal conservative but not a social or religious conservative.
Jes: You could, if you could find me the data I asked you to provide in order to change my mind – the major conservative voices opposing the conservative anti-gay legislation and the conservative anti-gay campaigning.
Finding opposition is easy. Your original wording makes it tougher: “explicitly that they thought the Republican Party should support the right to marry, not ban it Constitutionally”.
There are major conservative voices in opposition to banning it – but that basis is more often than not opposition to amending the constitution for something that should be resolved by the states. That is ultimately the conservative viewpoint on a question like this.
Finding major conservative voices that explicitly support the right to marry is a bit tougher. Who’s “major”?
State Assembly Members? (lots of those, this is just one example)
Jerry Sanders? (Mayor of San Diego)
If your point is that no national-level Republicans explicitly support the right to marry I think you are correct. But where are the national Democrats who explicitly support the right to marry? Don’t forget that the DMA passed overwhelming in both the Senate and House and was signed into law by Clinton. I don’t see how the Democrats are much better on this issue.
Generally and highly loosely speaking, if you believe in revolutionary Marxism, or some flavor of it, and want a revolution, you’re a leftist, and if you oppose it, and believe in continuing to improve liberal democracy via reforms, you’re a liberal.
Two brief comments.
First, in the context of Gary’s very informed historical analysis of the terms, it is correct to say that “leftist” is basically equal to some form of Marxist.
Second, although I self-identify as a “lefty”, I’m not a leftist per Gary. I’m just well left of center by modern US political calculus.
A lot of the time, I think that just amounts to believing that interests other than, and in addition to, those of private capital and property deserve consideration in public policy. In this country, that’s more than enough to put you out there in deepest Leftghanistan.
But, you know, no revolutions for me.
If you want money for people with minds that hate, all I can tell is buddy, you have to wait.
And that is where a whole lotta lefties **do** have to hunker down and stay mum.
I disagree with this.
Things affect folks more than they think they do. Even esoteric things like torture or rendition of foreign nationals, civil rights of less-popular demographic groups, or abstruse topics in economic theory. They take their toll.
IMO it behooves lefties and/or liberals not to hunker down at all, but instead to make it blindingly clear how profoundly even the most ordinary folks’ lives are affected by the things their government does, or doesn’t do.
It’s not a matter of throwing cold water on anyone. It’s a matter of talking about what a deep, cold well of water we’re already in.
Thanks –
As far as why liberals are afraid to be themselves, I think Sebastian has it right. American politics is perfectly encapsulated by this:
Most Americans believe in liberal policies until it’s time to pay for them. That’s why the policies poll so well but Republicans keep getting elected. There’s a parallel with support for civil liberties, which is trumped by fear of crime/terrorism every time. It hasn’t always been this way, and I’m sure it won’t always be this way, but that’s the era we’re living in.
Liberals are afraid that all their opponents have to do to defeat them is hold up a picture of Osama bin Laden in one hand and do “the finger thing that means taxes” with the other.
They’re right.
“Most Americans believe in liberal policies until it’s time to pay for them.”
That’s because most Americans still hold, in a somewhat incollate way of course, a negative conception of rights. And THAT conception of liberty really doesn’t imply much of a price tag.
American’s love the nanny-state, however they like their nannies to have big balls under that dress.
American right-wingers are sick enough to give it to them.
OCSteve:
There are two ways of being a “fiscal conservative”. One would be the kind who doesn’t believe in levelling taxes, because money should stay where it is — which in practice conserves the status quo of financial power, in which the rich stay rich.
Another kind of conservative would be fiscally prudent over a longer term than the stock market or a large corporation finds reasonable. It would have been more prudent and conservative in this sense to spend money — to *raise taxes* — to prepare New Orleans to withstand a Category 5 hurricane.
If you’re going to describe yourself as a “fiscal conservative”, you still need to be clear what you’re trying to conserve. And if you want “the desire to reform society slowly and carefully” but say you’re not a “social conservative”, what are you talking about if not the desire to reform the distribution of power, of which money is a subset?
I personally am a believer in the Alice Tax, as proposed by Calvin Trillin’s late wife:
You’ll notice that “enoughness” is a conservative principle in the sense of: restrained, recognizing limits, not going too far. It’s only *not* conservative if what you’re trying to conserve is the concentration of power & wealth in the hands of the wealthy & powerful.
Like Alice, I’m OK with that.
Left Behind Roundup
As usual, I’m too far behind to ever catch up with all the posts I wished to blog on. It’s for exciting reasons, however: I’m giving a presentation summarizing my summer research before the Carleton community — defined in this case as my immediate c…
For an even broader historical perspective, recall that Marx’s sentence “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” is a profoundly Christian sentiment. Though the entire phrase doesn’t seem to be in the Bible, its constituent halves are, in different verses of Acts, and it is clearly how early Christians behaved towards each other.
Fast-forward a millennium and a half, and the heir to this tradition is the Catholic Church. But in the excesses of the Renaissance, the Church seemed very far away from its roots. Hence the Reformation, trying to bring back the days when anyone could find, in the community of the Church, a home and protection from a hostile world.
But by then the increasingly prosperous middle class of small tradesman and entrepreneurs would not be denied, and they gave success to the Protestant churches that told them what they wanted to hear: that success in business was a sign of success in God’s eyes, and conversely poverty and failure was a punishment from God. The poor had to be supported of course, of course, but not with too much because even God thought they deserved little.
I strongly recommend “Religion and the Rise of Capitalism”, by R.H. Tawny, for more on this process. Favorite quote: ‘… the poor, it is well known, are of two kinds, “the industrious poor,” who work for their betters, and “the idle poor,” who work for themselves.’
But this left out in the cold those who still wanted to return to the communism of the early Christian Church. They coalesced into the Communist movement, led by Marx and many others. If you were wondering how anyone could possibly be attracted to Communism, it’s the same yearning that attracted them earlier to the Christian Church and the Protestant Reformation.
But then in the 20th century came Lenin and Stalin, who did to Communism what Bush and cronies were later to do with Conservatism: make it a story to hoax the yokels while stealing their money, their land and their freedom. (Disclaimer: Lenin and Stalin were worse than Bush and Cheney. If Rudy gets in, all bets are off.)
For myself I try to avoid the left-right metaphor — it puts Hitler and Stalin at opposite ends of the spectrum, when they are really two peas in a pod. If we can throw the thugs off the spectrum, because their position on it is simply lip service and their real ideals are theft and domination — then maybe it will start to make sense.
I identify myself as a liberal because I believe that an engine runs best when all cylinders are firing. To fail to help someone escape from a life of suboptimal productivity because of poverty or disease or accident or sex or sexual orientation or race or it’s what they “deserve” — that damages the country as a whole, and everyone in it. You might claim that paying the cost of that escape is even worse. In a given case you may be right. But as a policy, the pendulum has swung so far the other way, we can go a long way back before that kind of concern starts to be important on an economy-wide scale. Fortunately, the clowns and idiots leading the conservative movement seem to be facilitating that. (Much like the clowns and idiots leading the liberal movement did, in the opposite direction, in the 70s.)
Be happy with your past 30 years of conservative domination. The previous 30 years had been very different. More important now are the next 30 years.
OC Steve: “But it’s all “and a pony” – a chicken in every pot with no concrete details on where he is getting the chickens.”
Ah…the curse of liberalism. Much better to be a republican and shout ‘untrammeled market freedom!’ ‘low taxes!’ and ‘Waste, fraud and abuse!’ thus absolving onself from any responsibility to justify, or even provide, policy detail. The myth is the reality.
How convenient.
Again from a European perspective:
Over here it is difficult to find people more conservative than on the Left (fringes excluded). A bit oversimplified the idea on the left is that the status quo is near the ideal or at least not far from the best that can be reasonably expected to be achievable. The conclusion from that is that the status quo (in essence, not necessarily in the details) should be maintained, which is in my book the basis of what conservative means.
The “Right” on the other hand finds the status quo pretty undesirable for reasons that can differ widely between groups. Therefore they want to change it radically. Relatively few want to return to the “old right” (the idealized 50ies or the second empire*). Those could be called reactionaries. Then there are the neonazis (most of which simply do not know what that actually implies and are mainly motivated by hatred of the enemy du jour). The main force are the “let’s imitate the US and become GOPish”.
In other words political positions that make one a conservative over here (in reality not just perception) would make one a progressive radical in the US. From that point of view liberal and conservative are not necessarily contradictory (because the status quo is [still] liberal).
The German liberal party (FDP=Free Democratic Party) is regularly torn by this. It always included the social liberals, the laissez-faire capitalists, a sinister undercurrent of nazism** and the “don’t rock the boat” fraction. For decades they have acted as moderators and voice of reason in German politics (through coalitions on the state and federal level) but with the old guard dying they have drifted constantly to the right and became “market radicals”. At that moment I stopped to vote for them and am now better represented by the “realo wing” of the Green Party.
*Wilhelminism is negligible though
**in Austria that part took over
Doctor Science: If you’re going to describe yourself as a “fiscal conservative”, you still need to be clear what you’re trying to conserve. And if you want “the desire to reform society slowly and carefully” but say you’re not a “social conservative”, what are you talking about if not the desire to reform the distribution of power, of which money is a subset?
…
It’s only *not* conservative if what you’re trying to conserve is the concentration of power & wealth in the hands of the wealthy & powerful.
Being neither wealthy nor powerful and knowing full well that I’ve topped out in terms of where I’m going in life – what might my motivation be in conserving “concentration of power & wealth in the hands of the wealthy & powerful”?
There seems to be this thought that conservatives, the vast majority of whom are not in the class of the wealthy and powerful, wish to protect that class as a goal in and of itself. Let me ask – for what possible reason? Early on in life someone might think to themselves “well someday I’m going to be in that class and I don’t want the government taking all my money when I get there”. But most of us reach a point where we realize we aren’t going to get there. What reason do we have for protecting that unreachable class at that point?
I think that this is attributing motivations of greed and selfishness where for the most part none exists. There are plenty on the right who make the same mistake. They believe that liberals are strictly after power; that they wish to make as many people as possible dependent on the government – with themselves in control of that government of course. They are equally wrong IMO. As with most things there is a grain of truth on both sides, but in general both sides are wrong to attribute this kind of intent to the other.
you still need to be clear what you’re trying to conserve
What I’m trying to conserve as a fiscal conservative is the entrepreneurial spirit that has made this country what it is economically. A rising tide… etc. With no evil intent at all, I just honestly believe that a million dollars in the hands of the right business-person or entrepreneur can do hundreds or thousands of times more good than that same million dollars in the hands of the government. The standard of living of those living below the poverty line in this country is the best in the world in terms of the “poor”, and that is not due to entitlement programs. Legislating social change just doesn’t work. Social change follows economic growth IMO and you can’t legislate economic growth (although that certainly doesn’t stop people from trying). That doesn’t mean I think that the system is perfect, far from it. Certainly we can do better, especially in terms of health coverage. It’s not perfect, just better than the alternatives IMO.
Ask Alice what happens to innovation in her world. What possible reason is there for people to work any harder or take any risks once they reach her government mandated “enoughness”? Is she going to have a government position of “Innovator”? A government paid (enough) employee whose job it is to innovate between 9 and 5 (not counting their hour lunch and hourly union mandated breaks)? Is the government going to play the role of VC using government designed rules of what constitutes “enough” risk?
And I’m not against taxes as a general principal. I’m against corruption and wasteful spending. In my experience the more money you give the government the less careful they are in spending it. I’d rather demand accountability than just keep giving them more money to waste. (And I’m not saying Republicans are better than Democrats here – not with this current administration.)
Your Katrina example is perfect here:
It would have been more prudent and conservative in this sense to spend money — to *raise taxes* — to prepare New Orleans to withstand a Category 5 hurricane.
The taxes were raised and spent to prepare NO. Most of it went to pork projects and corruption – and ultimately it was the inefficiency and/or incompetence of a taxpayer funded government agency that led to the levee breach after a Category 1-2 hurricane hit.
I don’t need to sell or justify conservatism. One third of the country plus a chunk of that middle 40% are already with me. This thread should have been about defending and promoting liberal principles but very little of that happened here. Instead it turned into me defending conservatism. Notice that I didn’t start it by claiming conservative principles were better – I was pointing out that the public is just not on board with liberal principles.
Back to publius’s post and to turn this around: I believe that liberals can not run openly on their core beliefs because those beliefs are just too far out of the mainstream. I’ve offered polling data to back that up. Can someone make the case that that data is wrong? It is three years out of date, but the numbers were remarkably stable going back 30 years. No one has offered any evidence or convincing arguments here that I’m wrong.
Steve,
“Let me ask – for what possible reason? Early on in life someone might think to themselves “well someday I’m going to be in that class and I don’t want the government taking all my money when I get there”. But most of us reach a point where we realize we aren’t going to get there. What reason do we have for protecting that unreachable class at that point?”
This would be a persuasive argument if it were not for the fact that Republican framing of issues (most notably with respect to the estate tax) is precisely aimed at convincing people they could become part of that class and therefore must not tax it.
I don’t think it is unreasonable for people to save and invest throughout their lives, and get to a point in their retirement that they have their house mortgage paid off, and a million in stocks and bonds, looking for a return between 6%-10% a year so that you can live off your investment income. Is that so far out?
OCSteve, would you characterize the vast majority of Americans as being conservatively liberal? That’s how I see it, and how I think of myself.
“What reason do we have for protecting that unreachable class at that point?”
For my part, my neighbor is a millionaire, runs a horse bording stable. You don’t think I’m going to take offense at the notion that I ought to conspire with somebody to rob my neighbor, in return for a share of the proceeds?
For an awful lot of people, while the wealthy are not a group they expect to join, neither are they distant strangers for whom we have no sympathy. They’re our neighbors, the owner of the small business we work for, a cousin’s husband… They’re human beings, with rights, and we know them too well to dehumanize them to the extent necessary to feel ok with looting them.
Ask Alice what happens to innovation in her world. What possible reason is there for people to work any harder or take any risks once they reach her government mandated “enoughness”? Is she going to have a government position of “Innovator”?
Hmmmm…. don’t you love nationmaster? Lets look for instance at the business spending in research and development. 13 European countries in the top 18 and two in the top three (US is 5th) – maybe a bit more socialism is not so bad for innovation after all.
If you look at enterpreneurship als number of new business started the US is ahead of the EU – but that list is topped by poor countries. Necessity driven enterpreneurship.
If you want to have booming new businesses that can potentially grow big, you need quite few favourable circumstances. Infrastructure matters, education matters (both government driven), innovation matters, culture matters, etc.
For an awful lot of people, while the wealthy are not a group they expect to join, neither are they distant strangers for whom we have no sympathy.
I doubt anyone here has no sympathy for the wealthy; if you really insist on that frame, the issue is doubtless that people have more sympathy for the destitute than the wealthy, which strikes me as a perfectly sensible arrangement.
[Unless, of course, the poor are a group of distant strangers for whom one has no sympathy…]
They’re human beings, with rights, and we know them too well to dehumanize them to the extent necessary to feel ok with looting them.
Oh please. “Looting”? More like “Ensuring that everyone contributes, commensurate to their abilities, to a fair and equitable society.”
Brett,
It is telling that your words to describe taxation are robbing and looting. What words do you use to describe someone who uses the products of taxation, such as roads, public schools, courts, etc.? Are they also robbers and looters?
“It is telling that your words to describe taxation are robbing and looting.”
I think it’s telling that YOU insist on using different words to denote the exact same activities, when they occur in the private and government sectors. What else are you going to call it when somebody uses the threat of violence to obtain something of value?
Look, government is nothing more than a highly evolved protection racket. And, while a parasite can evolve into a symbiote, government is never very far from it’s base origins. You’d think the monsterous death toll during the 20th century, of governments killing their own citizens, would adequately underscore this. To quote our first President,
“Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.”
You want my real beef with liberalism? You actually DO think that government is reason, is eloquence. You’ve got a terrifyingly benign view of an inherently violent and destructive institution.
You just don’t accept the reality that government is a necessary evil, and so you’re always all too ready to resort to it when it’s not remotely necessary.
THAT is what I hold against you, and it’s no small thing.
Brett,
“Look, government is nothing more than a highly evolved protection racket. And, while a parasite can evolve into a symbiote, government is never very far from it’s base origins.”
If you really believe this, I think you should move to your own island where you don’t need to worry about government taking away any of your stuff under threat of force. Otherwise, if you want to enjoy the benefits of society, paid for by taxes, and view paying those taxes as theft, then you, and not the government, are the parasite.
A perfect example of what I’m saying: Utter incomprehension of the concept of a “necessary” evil. What part of “necessary” don’t you grasp?
Government is, regrettably, necessary for the moment, until we find SOME way to dispense with it. But it is still an evil, and should only be resorted to when the only alternative is some greater evil.
Liberals, in my experience, simply can’t accept that government is an evil, that there’s anything wrong with, for instance, taxation. And so are only too glad to use it for purposes where the alternative isn’t remotely as bad as the tool.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t cases where we really have to resort to this blunt tool, and accept the horrible things that happen as a consequence. But they’re not nearly as common as people who don’t think taking money from somebody by threatening to lock them away in a tiny room is wrong seem to think.
Heck, you don’t even bother looking for a non-governmental solution before resorting to government. Government is your first resort, not your last.
Brett
-The surgeon drugged and knifed the patient in the operating theatre.
-The teacher blackmailed the student to remember vast tracts of information on pain of failure.
-The child trashed the room, strewing various objects she found all over the floor and covering the walls with illegible scribbles.
-The parent forced the child to swallow a noxious mixture that she clearly didn’t want.
They say that a chicken can be thought of as an egg’s way of making another egg, but at some point, you have to accept that government is not some actively malicious intelligence out to deprive you of something, if you accept the importance of efficiencies gained by scaling up systems.
Brett,
For someone who is claiming I am not comprehending what you are saying, that is a pretty good example of doing the same. Care to actually respond to my argument that taxes are not theft, as the taxpayer is getting the benefit of governmental services in return? That government is a social contract, where each party benefits?
To answer your comment, since I view democratically elected government as the sum total of the people governed, and since I don’t view my fellow citizens as evil, I don’t view their government as evil. Therefore, you are starting from a false reference point for me.
“Look, government is nothing more than a highly evolved protection racket.”
Some of us prefer the views of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and their peers.
Alexander Hamilton, January 1, 1788, Federalist #31:
Hamilton, December 28, 1787, Federalist #30:
I tend to be more impressed with their reasoning, then with yours, I’m afraid.
Regardless, yours as above is hardly an agreed view of our society, either historically or presently, however popular it is at LP party gatherings.
Brett – you say that like parasites are a bad thing.
I can’t speak for all liberals, obviously, but I don’t see government as reason and eloquence. I think “highly evolved protection racket” is apt — I simply believe that things actually can evolve pretty far from their base origins.
I can’t help but think that a cognitive linguist would have a field day with your comment. The conceptual metaphors you use for government are different from George Washington’s in an important way. Fire is both very useful and extremely dangerous — but it’s not evil (or good). It is “inherently violent and destructive”, but it’s also a beacon, and a place where people gather, and a protection against darkness and cold. Kumbaya.
“Care to actually respond to my argument that taxes are not theft, as the taxpayer is getting the benefit of governmental services in return? That government is a social contract, where each party benefits?”
1. “Progressive” taxation, rather than user fees, assures that some people are paying hugely more in taxes than the benefit of the governmental services they recieve.
2. Many government services, such as victimless crime laws, actually confer negative ‘benefit’; We’d be better off if the taxes funding them were burnt, rather than spent on them. Others confer the benefit on somebody other than the person paying. Still others the person might simply not want, or might want to buy elsewhere.
3. See Lysander Spooner’s essay “No Treason” for a detailed response to the suggestion that we are bound by some social “contract”. More like “an offer you can’t refuse”.
Brett,
“1. “Progressive” taxation, rather than user fees, assures that some people are paying hugely more in taxes than the benefit of the governmental services they recieve.”
In any group, some will always get greater and some fewer benefits than others. If you think you can persuade the majority of your fellow citizens to change the composition of taxes, or the amounts or types of services provided, that is what democracy is for. However, since Libertarians continually get less than 1% of the vote, one can only conclude that their ideas are simply not too popular when push comes to shove.
“2. Many government services, such as victimless crime laws, actually confer negative ‘benefit’; We’d be better off if the taxes funding them were burnt, rather than spent on them. Others confer the benefit on somebody other than the person paying. Still others the person might simply not want, or might want to buy elsewhere.”
Again, a matter for persuading your fellow citizens on specific cases. Not for shreiking that all taxation is theft.
“3. See Lysander Spooner’s essay “No Treason” for a detailed response to the suggestion that we are bound by some social “contract”. More like “an offer you can’t refuse”.”
Since his essay has been around for 140 years, if it were able to persuade the majority of people to change their view of government, we would have had a revolution. Instead, we have a Libertarian Party who can’t get 1% of the vote (and the only claimed revolution since then was Janice Rogers Brown’s bogeyman of the Socialist Revolution of 1937, which went in precisely the opposite direction).
Moreover, if you still feel like you are getting the short end of the contract, you aren’t bound to stay in this country. You won’t be arrested if you try to emigrate. Go to your own island, or your choice of countries with no intrusive government. Just don’t expect the same services which you feel are paid for through theft.
Hmm. No takers on my 10:24AM. Everyone still arguing how conservative (and now libertarian) principles are wrong rather than how liberal principles are not out of the mainstream… OK…
Dantheman: This would be a persuasive argument if it were not for the fact that Republican framing of issues (most notably with respect to the estate tax) is precisely aimed at convincing people they could become part of that class and therefore must not tax it.
I really think people give too much credit to Republican’s ability to frame these issues. They can try to convince me all day long that I’m going to make it into that upper 2% – but they haven’t seen my balance sheet. 😉 I understand that some people go through life certain that they are going to win the lottery and move to easy street (seriously – I know a guy who coasts through life now because he is absolutely certain he will win the lottery any day now) but I think most people have a realistic picture of their possibilities.
I think a more realistic take is that when you say today “it’s just a tax on the super rich and doesn’t impact most people” we think “yeah, but what about tomorrow”. Once upon a time the estate tax did only impact a few families. Now families are losing the farm they have owned for generations due to the appreciation of the land value. The AMT is probably the best example of this. When it was introduced in 69 it targeted only 155 households in total. Who could object to that (outside the 155)? Today some households with income just over $75,000 are being impacted. Does a married couple with kids making $75k sound like “the rich”? In other threads here they would qualify for SCHIP.
DaveC: would you characterize the vast majority of Americans as being conservatively liberal
The majority are clearly in the middle. Some mix of conservatively liberal and liberally conservative – in what percentages I have no idea.
Marbel: Lets look for instance at the business spending in research and development. 13 European countries in the top 18 and two in the top three (US is 5th) – maybe a bit more socialism is not so bad for innovation after all.
But spending on R&D doesn’t tell us anything about results. Up until the early 90’s the Soviet Union spent 2% of GDP on R&D. That would put them 4th on that list, right before they totally collapsed.
Hmm. No takers on my 10:24AM.
/me does a polite wave… but it is nearing bedtime on this side of the ocean.
“Now families are losing the farm they have owned for generations due to the appreciation of the land value.”
Cite?
It would likely be helpful, though, if you also mentioned approximately what number of families you consider to be sufficiently large as to be a significant problem, or objectionable level, or if you prefer, what approximate number would be small enough not be to a problem, in your eyes.
OCSteve, I’m not sure the AMT or estate taxes are great rhetorical cudgels to use against liberal, since the general liberal line I’ve seen on them is they should be reformed, and they should be indexed with inflation.
Also, the “Losing the family farm to estate tax!” canard is overused and far less common than its wielders would like to claim.
As for defending liberal principles, people have already quoted the polls that find broad popular support for most liberal programs, such as Social Security, health care, and not starting wars with coutries that didn’t attack us. Broader among the population than in Congress, even.
Which leads to the discussion of which mainstream we’re looking at. Mainstream in Congress? Yes, liberal principles are outside the mainstream there, because the vast majority of the Republicans in Congress are off in the depths of madness (or at least vote that way), and most of the Democrats are center-right corporatists.
Out of the mainstream in the media? When the Washington Post can run an article with the headline “Climate change bad news for Democrats” when the article says the exact opposite, that’s not a good baseline either.
The self-identification numbers I find slightly fishy, for the Republican demonization of the word “Liberal” for the past 40+ years, also mentioned above.
And unfortunately, now I have to run sine my girlfriend just got here, so I’ll finish this another time, probably tomorrow.
OCSteve,
“Once upon a time the estate tax did only impact a few families. Now families are losing the farm they have owned for generations due to the appreciation of the land value.”
Not a shred of truth to this. Republicans have tried to find such families for years, and never have.
“The AMT is probably the best example of this. When it was introduced in 69 it targeted only 155 households in total. Who could object to that (outside the 155)? Today some households with income just over $75,000 are being impacted.”
True. I was one of them, as I noted in my 2005 taxes (as the increased charity I gave after Katrina did not lead to an increased refund). And note which party has actually proposed doing something about this without the sweetener of extra tax cuts for the over $200,000 net income crew, and which is relying on the AMT not changing for its rosy budget projections.
But spending on R&D doesn’t tell us anything about results. I know, that’s why I used that only as a reply to your innovation fears 😉
The enterpreneurial part of the comment were adressed in the last paragraph. I think we are better in infrastructure (incl. ICT) and education, but I think the US culture is much more “go for it” than ours, and that has a substantial impact.
At the same time, things are going pretty well and I don’t mind having more time for leisure, sports and broadening the mind ;).
Nate,
“I have to run sine my girlfriend”
Would that be going out on a tangent? Since you’re away, you secant this joke until tomorrow.
Oh, and I don’t mind paying high income taxes but I do have a problem with some of our other taxes. In the Netherlands I am a centralist 😉
The estate tax has never, not once, taken a family farm away. It is common knowledge in the tax community that, as DTM says, various lobbying groups have looked for such people an never found one (and will admit it if you ask in private). The best way to fix it would be to exempt, say, $5 million per spouse, index that to inflation, set the rate to the highest individual marginal rate, and require heirs to take a zero basis in inherited property.
Politicians of all stripes deserve scorn for letting the AMT get out of control. Right now, getting rid of the AMT will cost something like $800 billion over the first ten years. Charlie Rangel’s recent tax bill would finance this by (i) imposing an extra 4% tax on modified AGI over $100K, and (ii) another 0.6 percent on modified AGI over $250K (each $ for single filers, double for married filing jointly) – and indexing those numbers for inflation.
The republican house’s leadership response to this AMT fix? It’s “the mother of all tax hikes”.
The best way to fix it would be to exempt, say, $5 million per spouse, index that to inflation, set the rate to the highest individual marginal rate, and require heirs to take a zero basis in inherited property.
I would be willing to support repealing the estate tax only if bequests are taxed as ordinary income to the recipient. Since, you know, they are income.
“The republican house’s leadership response to this AMT fix? It’s “the mother of all tax hikes”.”
Which only goes to show how short their memory is. IIRC, the correct answer (as a percentage of GDP) was in Reagan’s first term.
the idea that the people in the upper brackets in a progressive tax system aren’t the ones who receive the most benefits is mind boggling to me. Who do you think is more likely to get a cop when he needs one, Joe CEO or Joe Ghetto? Who is more likely to get a 20-year property tax abatement, Wal-Mart or me? Which people in our culture are more likely to do time in prison, regardless of the nature of the crime?
Yeah, the upper brackets just can’t get a break in America.
PS When you account for sales and payroll taxes, taxes are mostly flat anyway. Really.
I would be willing to support repealing the estate tax only if bequests are taxed as ordinary income to the recipient. Since, you know, they are income.
Yes, the estate tax is a substitute for an inheritance tax – it doesn’t really matter which one you tax economically, though upon who the administrative burden (and liability) fall differs, depending on the tax.
See Lysander Spooner’s essay “No Treason” for a detailed response to the suggestion that we are bound by some social “contract”. More like “an offer you can’t refuse”.
In graduate school, I was drawn to language endangerment and revitalization, and so spent time seeing how minority cultures are often on the short end of the stick for precisely this, and since we are talking about the US, Native Americans readily come to mind as groups of people getting offers they can’t refuse. But for someone who is, I believe, in a position of higher social status in relation to those groups, to scream about how unfair this is to him is more than a touch ironic.
I also seem to remember (though if I am wrong, please correct me) you making suggestions that we shouldn’t admit non-English speaking immigrants which seems like the precise opposite of the sentiment you give above.
“The best way to fix it would be to exempt, say, $5 million per spouse,”
Would there be a limit on the number of spouses I could claim, Ugh?
I think that this is attributing motivations of greed and selfishness where for the most part none exists.
IMO this is a very fair objection.
I’d like to try to take you up on your 10:24, in the form of making some replies to your post from the point of view of someone to your left.
I think your point about the role of private initiative / entrepreneurial effort / etc. is worthwhile. Government does not create wealth. It can, to some degree, encourage the conditions that make the creation of wealth more likely, but it does not create wealth.
And, without at all implying a selfish or materialistic POV, there are many, many good and important things that depend on wealth being created.
Whether a million bucks put in the hands of private initiative, or government, creates more good, however, depends entirely on what the good is you’re trying to create.
Private agents don’t want to deliver a letter to any address in the US within a couple of days for 42 cents. They don’t want to guarantee potable water to every home in the US. They don’t want to build and maintain decent roads to every location in the country. Not for a price that will make it available to everyone.
They don’t want to provide health care for every man, woman, and child in the country, probably for any price.
They don’t want to do these things because these are, basically, uneconomic things to do. They should not want to do them, and shouldn’t be asked or expected to do them.
But, all of these things need doing.
If they’re going to get done, then, folks need to do them for themselves. Some of these tasks are straightforward, and a handful of folks can just decide to do them.
Some of them are too large or complex for a handful of folks to just go do. For things like that, government is a fairly natural choice of agent.
In my view, which I think is pretty common among liberals and/or left-leaning people, government is the institution that people use to do the things that they want to do collectively. It should be precisely big enough to do what they want it to do, whether that’s tiny, middling, or enormous.
If it gets in the way, scale it back.
If it needs to do more, scale it up.
It’s easy to say that here in the US because, as of yet, we still have some levers to control the government. Other places, not so much.
But, the US, and more broadly western democracies, are what we’re talking about.
Government is, regrettably, necessary for the moment, until we find SOME way to dispense with it. But it is still an evil, and should only be resorted to when the only alternative is some greater evil.
Brett, you and I will never, ever agree on this. I think you’re wrong, and I think this point of view is irresponsible and destructive.
Human beings create governments, more or less as soon as they get in groups bigger than about 10. There will never, ever, ever be a condition where there are humans without government, and viewing that as a desirable state undermines the truly valuable role that government plays.
If you, Brett, actually want to live without government, you can. It is, in fact, possible, in this country, to carve out a lifestyle where government intrusion is so vanishingly small as to be negligible.
I know a handful of folks who live this way.
To do this, however, you need to be rigorously committed to doing more or less everything that needs doing for yourself. If you can’t sign up for that, you can’t avoid government.
You will also need to recognize that virtually the entire rest of the human population is going to go on creating and living under governments, with or without you.
Thanks –
Would there be a limit on the number of spouses I could claim, Ugh?
For you Gary? No.
I meant, per individual, of course.
And, without at all implying a selfish or materialistic POV, there are many, many good and important things that depend on wealth being created.
People sometimes forget that wealth is a mean, not and end.
Gary: Cite? It would likely be helpful, though, if you also mentioned approximately what number of families you consider to be sufficiently large as to be a significant problem, or objectionable level…
One.
Yes it’s an exaggerated talking point. The number of estates affected is very small. If not lost then some very large tax bills that must be paid off or you must commit to keeping it for 10 to reduce the rates. That’s all fine if you’re truly rich. A farm/business valued at $5-10M may not make you rich but if you want to keep it rather than liquidate, the $1.3M tax bill may be a serious problem. And yes, that happening to one single person dealing with their parent’s estate is too many.
Nate: I’m not sure the AMT or estate taxes are great rhetorical cudgels to use against liberal, since the general liberal line I’ve seen on them is they should be reformed, and they should be indexed with inflation.
I was using it as an example of a tax that was originally sold as impacting only the very rich, but then through changing times came to impact many more people. I’m saying some people won’t accept that argument anymore because we’ve seen it often does not stay that way over time.
As for defending liberal principles, people have already quoted the polls that find broad popular support for most liberal programs, such as Social Security, health care, and not starting wars with coutries that didn’t attack us. Broader among the population than in Congress, even.
True – but I’m talking more about the total program(s). As I noted with Obama he is talking about progressive issues but staying light on the solutions. I guess I should change it to “liberal solutions to problems” rather than liberal principles. I contend that a politician talking not only about what the problems are but how liberals would solve the problem would be unelectable. Ask anyone if they want a “clean environment” and I’m sure the response will be positive. Tell them that to accomplish that you plan to “drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions” and you may get a few frowns and head scratches. Explain to them in detail what that means and you lost their vote.
You know, all the comments about the estate tax above are especially trenchant — if it affects one farm, it’s one too many! — when you can find, on a daily basis, class warfare gems like, say, conversative darling Thomas Sowell (hey, did you know he’s black?) arguing that you shoudn’t feed homeless people because — wait for it!! — it encourages idleness.
Like, first of all, speaking of idleness, can someone remind me exactly what Paris Hilton does for a living?
And second, does Sowell imagine that, absent the scraps being handed out at the soup kitchen, homeless people are an afternoon away from a position on the board of General Electric?
OCSteve: It’s an exaggerated talking point
It’s a lie. Well, no, there are examples of the family home being lost because of the estate tax. But not ones conservative politicians would care to use.
I was using it as an example of a tax that was originally sold as impacting only the very rich, but then through changing times came to impact many more people.
No: it’s a tax that still usually only impacts the very rich, with one significant exception. It’s just that it suits the very rich to lie to you that the tax impacts more people who aren’t among the very rich and therefore the tax ought to be abolished
The main group of people who severely impacted by the estate tax (the very rich can afford to pay for the best tax advice) are same-sex couples – or rather, the unrecognized widow or widower left to deal with the estate taxes now payable on their partner’s half of their shared home, or all of it if the home was in their partner’s name. The solution to this – if conservatives were actually concerned about the estate tax meaning people lost their family home – is of course to repeal DOMA and pass legislation ensuring same-sex married couples can access all federal benefits of marriage.
Do you see that happening, OCSteve?
Do you see the campaigners to make sure their children inherit vast sums instead of vast sums minus the estate tax – a good, rousing, conservative campaign “Make the rich richer!” always sounds well! – picking out as examples, same-sex couples where one partner died and the lack of legal marriage and the impact of the estate tax as a direct result, meant the family farm was lost?
Of course not. Anti-gay policies take priority over anti-estate tax policies: but in any case, the campaign to repeal the estate tax isn’t one geared to helping ordinary people affected by it, but to make sure that the children of the very rich get to inherit the whole pile, not have to pay their share.
Phil: if it affects one farm, it’s one too many
Gee that sounds bad without context… I said “That’s all fine if you’re truly rich”.
The one is one too many is the person dealing with their parent’s estate that has to choose between:
A. Keep the biz/farm and commit to not selling it for ten years to lower the tax rate and assume a large tax bill.
B. Liquidate. That may mean putting people out of work etc.
Jes: Couldn’t figure out what you were talking about there for a minute as my comment you referenced was talking about the AMT – then I saw where you could read it as applying to the estate tax as well.
when you can find, on a daily basis, class warfare gems like, say, conversative darling Thomas Sowell (hey, did you know he’s black?) arguing that you shoudn’t feed homeless people because — wait for it!! — it encourages idleness.
“Veterans make up one in four homeless people in the United States, though they are only 11 percent of the general adult population, according to a report to be released Thursday.”
As I just read at James Joyners blog OTB :
The one is one too many is the person dealing with their parent’s estate that has to choose between:
A. Keep the biz/farm and commit to not selling it for ten years to lower the tax rate and assume a large tax bill.
B. Liquidate. That may mean putting people out of work etc.
Well, (i) the estate tax is out there, it’s not obscure, people who might be hit by it certainly have the means to plan to deal with it’s consequences; (ii) I don’t recall how debt is taken into account in the estate tax, but I believe it reduces the value of the estate, so why an estate worth (on a net basis) 5-10M couldn’t borrow the funds necessary to pay the tax in order not to liquidate is a bit odd.
But in any event, people face hard choices all the time so why, of all people, those subject to the estate tax should be exempt seems a bit mysterious to me.
And really, where does the idea of inherited wealth (and especially inherited super-wealth) fit into the conservative ideal of a meritocracy? (not aimed at you OCSteve).
One.
That’s a snappy reply, but I’m not sure you want to go down that path.
How many is too many people who die because they can’t afford health insurance?
How many is too many people who freeze to death because they can’t afford heat?
How many is too many people who have to choose between eating and buying meds they need?
And, sad though it may be to sell off the beloved family farm, the recently bereaved in your example split $3.7M. And, when you “liquidate” a business, meaning convert it’s value to cash, that generally means somebody buys it, so it’s highly likely that no jobs are lost.
I don’t see that taking this particular rhetorical strategy will be to your advantage.
Anyway, you very reasonably asked what the liberal position was. Here you go, to the degree that I can speak for it.
Liberals believe that people who share a political identity form a community, and that as such, they have responsibilities to each other. They shouldn’t let each other go hungry, go without shelter, or suffer from any of the other ills that are the common lot of humankind, if in fact it can be helped. And, usually, it can.
This, BTW, is the social compact that so many dread. Another name for it is “being a human being”.
So far, with few exceptions, conservatives will still be on board. If not, it’s time to buy some guns and a diesel generator, fill up a suitcase with ben franklins, and run the jolly roger up the mast, because it’s every man for himself and god against all. My only request is that, if folks want to take that path, they go somewhere else and live their pirate life, maybe someplace like the Sudan that already has no effective government, and leave those of us who are willing to try to work together to carry on in peace.
Assuming you’re not in the pirate camp, the place liberals and conservatives part ways is in their understanding of the role of government in folks carrying out their responsibilities toward one another. Liberals think it’s fine, conservatives don’t.
I, personally, think it’s fine. I think it’s fine because it means it gets done, it means I, personally, have a hell of a lot more input into how it gets done that would otherwise be likely, and it means that if the folks responsible for doing it aren’t getting it done I can, perhaps, do something to get their sorry behinds thrown out. When things that concern the public interest are left to the private arena, those things are generally less true, if true at all.
So, for the most pragmatic of reasons, I am firmly on the left.
Public actions in the public interest mean public control. And, even the useful but uneconomic things will actually happen.
Private actions, far less public control and accountability. And, it don’t happen unless somebody can make a buck off it.
I like useful things to actually get done, and I like having at least a tiny piece of the leash in my hand.
There’s also the whole moral dimension to it, but it’s probably best to just stick to the pragmatics for here and now.
Thanks –
“A farm/business valued at $5-10M may not make you rich but if you want to keep it rather than liquidate, the $1.3M tax bill may be a serious problem. And yes, that happening to one single person dealing with their parent’s estate is too many.”
This is a more important cause than saying one person going homeless is too many? Or saying one person going without medical coverage is too many?
On the scale of national priorities, why would making sure that not one family, out of some handfuls of well-off families having to pay tax on very large amounts of property, which they can afford to do, but will notice the bite, be high on the list of problems for the country to address?
Secondly, you asserted that:
I’m a little confused. Are you now saying that “[n]ow families are losing the farm they have owned for generations due to the appreciation of the land value” isn’t true?
If so, how would that be an example of how now significant numbers of people are losing their farms, thus demonstrating how taxes will inevitably grow to affect “most people”? Where are the “most people” — most farmers, let’s leave it at — now losing farms?
But how is the estate tax such an example? What does it mean to your claim when your example doesn’t support it?
And I have to ask, out of curiosity, why did you declare that “[n]ow families are losing the farm they have owned for generations due to the appreciation of the land value” if you believe that “Yes it’s an exaggerated talking point. The number of estates affected is very small”?
conversative darling Thomas Sowell (hey, did you know he’s black?) arguing that you shoudn’t feed homeless people because — wait for it!! — it encourages idleness.
Every once in a while, I read something of Sowell’s.
Every single time, I walk away thinking, when this guy was a kid, somebody stole his lunch money, or scuffed up his new sneakers, or broke his favorite toy — something like that — and he’s never gotten over it.
It’s kind of sad.
Thanks –
“If you, Brett, actually want to live without government, you can.”
In my experience there are only two things liberals don’t grasp about the concept of necessary evils.
1. That they ARE evil.
2. That they’re none the less necessary.
Thanks for yet again demonstrating the latter incomprehension of the concept. Tomorrow I can mention that sticking needles into people and injecting foreign substances isn’t something we really want to do unless it’s really necessary, and you can accuse me of wanting to contract polio.
Tune in next week when Brett feverishly reminds us that, though breathing is necessary, it is nonetheless EVIL…
Brett,
When you talk about comprehension of other people, it helps your believability enormously to not be failing to comprehend what the people you are talking to are saying. Russell and I have both set forth why we don’t think government is evil. And shreiking that we aren’t comprehending that it really-o truly-o is evil just isn’t a response to what we are saying.
Brett,
you might want to put down that broad brush you are using there, I think you are going to throw out your back…
In my experience there are only two things liberals don’t grasp about the concept of necessary evils.
Brett, I understand perfectly well what you’re saying. I understand perfectly well what necessary evils are, and that they exist. Grasping is not the issue.
I just don’t agree that government is one.
You could easily sell me on “necessary but annoying”, “not particularly efficient”, or even “pain in the ass”.
I just find “evil” to be an extraordinary stretch. Extraordinary. So much so, that it makes it hard for me to know where to begin to even try to find any kind of common ground.
To turn your analogy around, your statements here, to me, are akin to saying that hypodermic injections are “evil”. Nobody likes to get them, particularly, but they don’t hurt any worse than a bee sting, and for nowhere near as long, and they keep us from getting sick. They are not evil.
Sooner or later, many or even most folks end up seeing or, perhaps, even experiencing things that are, actually, evil. Sadly, there are no shortage of them.
Things that are merely annoying, inefficient, or even occasionally uncomfortable — those don’t quite rise to that level. Especially if they also have an upside.
Thanks –
There’s a distinction between “evil” and “an evil” that you’re missing here. But it’s time for me to blur the distinction between “sleepy” and “sleeping”, so I’ll let you tackle it yourself.
I’m glad other people brought in the estate tax, because that’s what I was going to use as an example for OCSteve. You can see actual numbers of farms affected by estate tax here — very, very, *very* few.
I live in an area where it farmers are definitely very stressed by high property values. But you know what has actually forced a farm near me to sell their land? *Medical insurance*.
They’ve been able to keep farming only because they are adjacent to a large corporation’s research facility, and the corporation would rather have one farm as a neighbor than a hundred houses. So the corporation bought the farm development rights, and the family can keep farming.
Brett, face it. You’ll never be able to convince people here that The Sheriff of Nottingham is NOT Robin Hood. There is some basic confusion here about whether private property confers freedom. I think it does. I would rather buy food at a grocery store rather than being distributed food at a food distribution center, On the other hand, I would rather be able to drive on roads without stopping every few miles to pay a toll. Here in Illinois, we have to pay tolls to the State for the right to drive on Federal Interstate Highways, but at least with RFID, we don’t have to stop as much anymore.
I am the type who wouldn’t like to work at a place where there is a lot of office politics. Other people want to live in a world where EVERYTHING is politics, from your private business, to policing your very thoughts, because they know what is best for you. Me, I think that I know what is best for me. I also believe that it is better to encourage people to take care of themselves, rather than surrendering that right to the government.
There is some basic confusion here about whether private property confers freedom.
Nope.
There is some basic difference of opinion about whether private property confers freedom. Difference of opinion is not the same as confusion.
Private property confers privilege. Not the same. Privilege is not, in fact, a bad thing in and of itself. More than a few folks have worked hard for, earned, and richly deserve, privilege. But freedom, it is not. Or at least, ought not be.
Where private property is required to confer freedom, the poor are slaves. Those places exist. I don’t want to live in one.
And, you know, with the exception of the folks who were insane or chemically impaired, anyone I’ve ever known who got their food from a “food distribution center” would have preferred to buy it at the grocery store. So, there’s nothing special about you. They went to the “food distribution center” because it meant they could eat.
Thanks –
I think that the idea of government and taxation as imposed evils not fundamentally justifiable in terms of basic human rights stems from a lack of awareness for one’s existing bonds within society. In theory, I suppose, there could be a society in nobody ever benefitted from an unearned benefit at the outset of their life, or suffered from an undeserved penalty. In that kind of a condition, where with every new life the roster of externalities started completely fresh, then there’d be some room to argue that “what’s mine is mine and that’s all there is”, and given a sufficiently rigorous enforcement mechanism to keep one’s heirs, associates, colleagues, bystanders, etc., from passing on consequences of your actions, it might work.
In practice, of course, nothing like that applies. We are all the recipients of a tremendously complicated web of good and bad externalities, many of which we will never in our lives know about or be able to identify. Nothing is ever purely ours – not unless we managed to come into this world altogether free of race, sex and gender, any deviation from the theoretically perfect genome for health, any impairing emotion or failure in reasoning, and so on, and then managed to preserve that blankness. But nobody goes through life behind Rawls’ veil of ignorance. (Some are thoroughly wrapped in stupidity, but that’s not the same thing.) We are all of us living among stolen goods, the fruits of good and bad luck, the results of corrupt justice and honest reckoning, the spoils of war, and a whole lot more, and we never escape that – there is no point in any human life when we are free of the consequences of other people’s lives that give us benefits and liabilities completely unrelated to anything we can know or choose.
Hence, government.
The state isn’t free of the matrix of legacies either, of course. But it is outside individual citizens’ knots, and therefore capable of acting free of some of the many complications facing individuals and groups interested in honest and fair dealings now – particularly when it comes to dealing with others who are interested in neither of those things. Further, it’s adjustable in light of new circumstance, and can therefore shift the matrix as a whole as we individually and collectively better understand what parts of our inheritance we wish to strengthen and which to put down.
There is, contrary to some of the more intemperate libertarian rhetoric, nothing mystical in this, no power suddenly vested in the group. It’s a simple fact that groups taken as wholes have properties not necessarily given to any individual member (no atom of gold is yellow in color or ductile), and by adding together many individual circumstances can damp out some of the inevitable irregularities that come from small data pools. If that’s mysticism, so’s statistics. (I keep hoping someday to find a sufficiently consistent anti-state argument that will lead to that conclusion, but so far they all chicken out short of that, or of denying the existence of externalities.)
Government is separate from individuals and their other associations only in the way that the climate overall and specific weather are separate from individual spots of ground. In both cases, there’s a larger system that encompasses both, and neither is innately evil…or particularly innately good, really. Weather’s what happens when physical forces of earth, sea, and sky interact with each other and the universe beyond; government’s what happens when individuals interact with each other and seek a level of consistency, efficiency, scope of action, and justice greater than they can achieve separately. Any argument capable of denying the fundamental validity of the state can also be deployed against weather, and probably against universal gravitation.
There’s a distinction between “evil” and “an evil” that you’re missing here.
One is an adjective and one is a noun.
If there’s more to it than that, you’re right, I’m missing it. Either that, or the distinction is rhetorical, in which case I basically choose to ignore it.
Thanks –
Difference of opinion is not the same as confusion.
No, I still think it is confusion. What Brett was trying to explain is that government is in fact coercive. There is a matter of degree. An extreme example is Zimbabwe, where there are very few private property rights, and the food situation there is not very good, unless you are of the correct political persuasion.
Private property rights mean that there are things that the government du jour cannot take everything away from you. Whether or not the government would give your stuff to other people who are more worthy does not come into consideration. I think that most people in the US agree that private property and free trade by and large maximize the wealth of the largest number of people. Certainly, a social safety net is desirable, but that doesn’t mean that all wealth should be redistributed. In the case of estate taxes, almost 50% of the wealth, after the exemptions.
Except in 2010, when there is no estate tax and all the evil Republicans will kill their grannies. I’m thinking that carbon monoxide poisoning would be the most humane, gentlest way, but am perplexed because this could lead to global warming.
Actually the exemptions (until 2011) are pretty good right now for the Federal Estate Tax, but Inheritance Taxes, which are different and added on by states are really, really bad. Wonder why there are so few family farms, and agriculture is more and more a large corporate business? Just look at the Estate Tax and something like Iowa’s inheritance tax. Part of our heritage in the Midwest has been irrevocably lost, and this talk about how only 5000 farm families per year are affected is like saying that most of the horses have escaped the barn; might as well leave the barn door open for a while longer until the rest of them clear out.
DaveC: What Brett was trying to explain is that government is in fact coercive.
And yet, you know, nothing actually prevents either you or Brett from moving to a small island somewhere and doing without government entirely. Of course, as I believe has already been pointed out to you, you would have to severely restrict the numbers allowed to move to this small island with you – since whenever humans gather together peacefully in any numbers, we begin to invent government.
It’s the bedrock of civilisation, DaveC, and I’ve never yet encountered a libertarian who wanted to do without the advantages of government: they only complain, at length, about having to pay for the benefits they get.
I’m quite comfortable saying that the state is coercive. I don’t think a coercion-free environment is possible, and that the state has a prospective legitimacy (if its leaders and employees and the public at large choose to work at it) that the sum of anarchistic interactions does not and probably cannot. A good government reduces the prevalence and intensity of coercion, and particularly reduces the extent to which individuals and groups intruding on others can enjoy their ill-gotten gains. A good government increases practical liberty – the opportunities available for average people of all sorts to pursue their desires and achieve satisfaction, health, safety, and prosperity. A society in which more people live in fear and experience reduced opportunity and well-being is one in which, in practical terms, there is more coercive force being flung around than one in which taxes are collected and services made available widely.
DaveC,
What isn’t ‘coercive’? My daughter wants ice cream and comes up to my wife and me and says ‘Pleeeeese’, that is ‘coercive’ to her (not to me, I’m always up for some ice cream) We’ve just had Brett treat us to the notion that getting vaccinations is the same as being sliced up by Jack the Ripper, so I’m not sure if I can get across the fact that there are differences involved.
Also, this coercion is the price we pay for certain things. And it is still possible, even if it is difficult, to live ‘off the grid’, if you really want. But I feel that a lot of people who carry on about their libertarian ideals and about how hard it is to do that, it suggests that they are less interested in being off the grid and more interested in letting everyone know how independent they conceive themselves being. (that’s a general observation, not a slam I should add)
since whenever humans gather together peacefully in any numbers, we begin to invent government.
Government exists also in the absence of peace, or fairness. The trick is to try to get the balance of the government right, and not to stray to far to the tyranny of the ruling class, the tyranny of the wealthy or the tyranny of the majority. That’s why the private sector, especially small businesses, families, and so forth have to be given greater consideration than large entities like government and big business. Property rights give a great deal of protection to the little guys, or at least the medium sized guys – hence, the “negative conception of rights” that Brett pointed out – things that cannot be taken away from you.
What Brett was trying to explain is that government is in fact coercive.
Aha. Thanks for clearing that up. Somehow, I failed to make the connection between “government may use force” and “evil”.
Here in the USA, the government can demand exactly the amount of your property that the law allows it to. The government can use exactly those levers granted it by law to do so. The laws are made by folks we elect.
The government can NOT, in fact, arbitrarily seize whatever of your property it chooses, at its whim. Not yet, anyway. Unless you’re suspected of violating a drug law. Which is one more reason I don’t vote for conservatives, but that’s another story, and perhaps a cheap shot in context.
Moving on.
You are absolutely, completely, 100% right to say that private property rights means the government “can’t take anything away from you”. That is one of many rights we recognize. That right does not confer the others, it is simply one among many. A wonderful one, in fact, one we should treasure. But, one among many, and not an extra-special one that magically confers the others.
I bet it is true that respecting private property contributes to the relatively widespread wealth we enjoy. It’s one factor among many. But, I have to say that I still fail to see the cause and effect relationship between wealth and freedom.
I was always taught that freedom was about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Depending on your tastes, you might need lots of money for your particular pursuit of happiness, but there are also lots of folks who can be pretty happy with quite modest means.
So, perhaps the confusion is not on my part.
I am, however, curious to know how you are going to get a social safety net with no wealth transfer.
I’m sorry farmers are having a tough time in Iowa. Here in MA, we still have lots of family farms, even though we labor under the same federal inheritance taxes you all do. Maybe there are some other factors in play. Market forces, perhaps.
Here are some things that might help you out:
Zoning laws
Policies that encourage the purchase of locally produced goods
Publicly funded land banks
Public/private partnerships to help keep farming families on the land
Those work here. You might give them a try.
Thanks –
That’s why the private sector, especially small businesses, families, and so forth have to be given greater consideration than large entities like government and big business.
We have found a point of agreement.
I’m gonna quite while I’m ahead.
Good night!
Tip to lj:
If you have created a family dynamic where you daughters have the same “equal voting rights” as you, then you are in for a world of hurt down the line.
Too late, that horse has left the barn…
It’s the bedrock of civilisation, DaveC, and I’ve never yet encountered a libertarian who wanted to do without the advantages of government
It seems that the main thing that libertarians want to prevent the government from taking are pieces of paper produced by the government, with the faces of former government leaders on them, of a value determined by the government that only maintain their value (or not, in the case of the current US version) as a result of good government policy as to how many are printed.
I feel reminded of that old ballad by some of the arguments brought up here (and by the “conservatives will kill their grannies in 2010”) 😉
Der Tantenmörder (the Aunt-Slayer)
No, I still think it is confusion. What Brett was trying to explain is that government is in fact coercive. There is a matter of degree. An extreme example is Zimbabwe, where there are very few private property rights, and the food situation there is not very good, unless you are of the correct political persuasion.
OF course in the absence of government the biggest bully will be coercive. An example could be Afghanistan.
It is nice to talk about how government robs you, but you do have a voice in the matter (funnily enough the word voor voice and vote is the same in Dutch). You know who are robbers imho? The young educated Dutch folks who grow up in the Netherlands, with medical insurance, computer acces, good schools and universities – and afterwards start complaining about the taxes and move to the US.
What Brett was trying to explain is that government is in fact coercive.
Whereas a situation in which 5% of the population controls nearly half of the country’s wealth is not at all coercive, nor does it have any negative consequences whatsoever.
I don’t know about “negative consequences”; Probably it does, compared to some possible worlds you could imagine. Coercive, though? I’ve noticed some people have an awfully broad definition of “coercion”, encompassing things like their daughter saying “Aw, please!”.
Bill Gates coerces you: “If you don’t do what I want, I won’t give you this money!”
The government coerces you: “If you don’t do what I want, I’ll send a goon squad to drag you off, and lock you away for the rest of your days in a little box. Oh, and if you put up a fight, they’ll kill you.”
Bill Gates doesn’t coerce, he persuades.
“An evil” vs “Evil”… “An evil” is something which, apart from any instrumental value it might have, is undesirable. Sticking needles in people, cutting them up, and so on. Generally speaking, if you can achieve the instrumental value an evil provides, without resorting to any evils, you should.
If you’d rather resort to evils when they’re avoidable, well, that’s where “evil”, the desire to do harm for it’s own sake, shows up.
Government is always “an evil”. The only thing it brings to the table that can’t be found in the private sector is the ability to get away with coercing people, and coercing people IS, all things being equal, undesirable. Alas, in the real world, government is very often just flat out “evil”, without the “an”.
But, sadly, government is also necessary. For the moment. Until we find something better.
We’re never going to find that something better, if we don’t bother looking, because we don’t find coercing people objectionable.
I’ve noticed some people have an awfully broad definition of “coercion”, encompassing things like their daughter saying “Aw, please!”.
One could note that you have an awfully broad definition of evil. I leave it as an exercise to the reader whether they would prefer to know when someone is trying to get them to do something that they might not, on reflection, agree with vs being able to make blanket moral statements on a wide range of activities that the majority of people find unobjectionable. I certainly agree that there is a tyranny of the majority operating in any society, but since you seem to be placed firmly within that majority, it is hypocritical for you to be arguing how put upon you are.
We’re never going to find that something better, if we don’t bother looking, because we don’t find coercing people objectionable.
You realize that this is diametrically opposed to any definition of conservatism that is operative in this world.
Russell: How many is too many people who die because they can’t afford health insurance?
How many is too many people who freeze to death because they can’t afford heat?
How many is too many people who have to choose between eating and buying meds they need?
One.
Gary: On the scale of national priorities, why would making sure that not one family, out of some handfuls of well-off families having to pay tax on very large amounts of property, which they can afford to do, but will notice the bite, be high on the list of problems for the country to address?
Dr.S: You can see actual numbers of farms affected by estate tax here — very, very, *very* few.
Nowhere did I say it’s a national priority or more important than homelessness or health insurance. I said don’t try to sell me on a tax using the argument that it will only impact the super rich because at some point in the future there will be unintended consequences. Fine – I chose a poor example – I should have stuck to the AMT. The wingnut brainwashing kicked in, what can I say.
I admitted that “losing the farm” is mostly a talking point. It is a very emotional issue, which is why it makes a good talking point.
I don’t know where you (Gary) get “which they can afford to do”. A typical family farm will be lucky to clear $75,000 in a decent year. The investment in equipment is enormous. Would you want to assume a million dollars in tax debt that the government will most generously allow you to pay off over 15 years?
And if the numbers are so small then why is this such a contentious issue? It can hardly matter to the government coffers right? Just a handful of people paying a reasonable tax… The government will piss away more than that processing the estates…
Phil: Whereas a situation in which 5% of the population controls nearly half of the country’s wealth is not at all coercive, nor does it have any negative consequences whatsoever.
Whereas a situation in which the top 1% of earners pay taxes in an amount equal to 95% of the rest of the country is not at all coercive, nor does it have any negative consequences whatsoever. (PDF)
And obviously isn’t progressive enough…
“An evil” is something which, apart from any instrumental value it might have, is undesirable.
Thanks for clarifying, that’s helpful. I also think your definition of “evil” — the desire to do harm for its own sake — is right on.
The issue here, IMO, is the authority or sanction by which the state may coerce private individuals.
If the state may coerce you to do whatever it wants you to do on any given day, I’m with you. It’s a rogue actor.
If the state’s ability to coerce you is limited by law — particularly when you have input into how those laws are made — then I’m not with you.
I’m not sure where your hope of a human society without government comes from, but I think it’s a vain one, and one with absolutely no precedent that I’m aware of in human history. Even anarchists have a governance of some kind, even if they claim not to.
That means the issue is whether government is accountable, transparent, and responsive. I.e., whether government will do what the folks who are governed want it to do.
The problem we face, here in the US, is less that government is out of control, and more that we have wide disagreement on what it is that we want government to do.
I don’t think we can blame “government” for that. It’s just an instrument. That particular problem lies with us.
And, you know, when it comes right down to it, “government” is just people doing stuff. It’s not a machine, it’s not an elementary particle or force, it’s not a law of nature. It’s a human institution. It will always be prey to the same flaws that we, ourselves, are, because we are what it is made of.
Thanks –
Of course the top 1% pay more, Steve. they have most of the money. Surely you understand this.
And let me tell you something about the top 1%, Steve. The company I work for is owned by Berkshire Hathaway. Last year Warren Buffet came and spoke at our annual sales meeting to about 150 of us. Know what his biggest complaint about our country was? That he and people like him aren’t taxed heavily enough.
Using Bill Gates as an example is pretty funny, Brett. Remind me again of which methods of persuasion MS used to achieve its market share.
Phil: Surely you understand this.
Sure – We have a very progressive tax. Just keeping with the “tax the rich” meme…
Let me ask though – how much is enough? Are you with Alice and Dr. S? The government should determine an “enoughness” figure and take every dime after that?
What percentage or dollar amount do you believe a person should be able to keep for themselves?
Buffet: There is nothing in the world that prevents him from paying extra to the government. People don’t though unless they have to. If he really believes that why doesn’t he just pay more? Or why doesn’t he shelter less of his income and just expose it to taxation? Why doesn’t he pony up an extra $100M and then challenge every other billionaire in the country to match him?
Why is it that in “Taxachusetts”, one of the bluest states, most people pass on the voluntary higher tax rate? Why do only .03% voluntarily pay more, with the wealthiest suburbs opting out almost completely? (Sorry for the blog only link, but the original article is no longer available at the Boston Herald.)
DaveC,
“On the other hand, I would rather be able to drive on roads without stopping every few miles to pay a toll. Here in Illinois, we have to pay tolls to the State for the right to drive on Federal Interstate Highways, but at least with RFID, we don’t have to stop as much anymore.”
In other words, you want to get the services of the government building and maintaining the road without paying for them. And you have the temerity to call the those of us who recognize that these things need to be paid for supporters of thieves.
Everyone still arguing how conservative (and now libertarian) principles are wrong rather than how liberal principles are not out of the mainstream… OK…
You want polls? Digby’s got ’em.
Basically, as far as peoples attitudes on several left-right questions, the conservative revolution peaked in 1994 and has been backsliding ever since. A little bit at first, growing to a torrent, as main streams should.
OCSteve, you talk about the mainstream as if it were written in stone. And you cherry-pick the time interval, the last thirty years, that will best support your case. The mainstream in 1937 was very different. And in 2017 it will be different again.
The literal main stream in the US is the Mississippi River: notorious for twisting and turning and cutting itself an entirely new channel if it wants.
I actually agree with your point in a limited way. At the moment, on a national scale, using say Gary’s definition of liberal and not the current wussified American version, then yes, a liberal cannot get elected. Yet. But explain Eliot Spitzer to me, if liberals can’t get elected.
It speaks well of you that you hold on to your conservative ideals in the face of the corruption and hypocrisy of conservative leaders. But the mainstream is not as principled, and will shift, as it has done before.
And in another generation or two, as the corruption and hypocrisy of liberal leaders comes to dominate the national dialog, it will shift back. Maybe you’ll live to see it.
Why is it that in “Taxachusetts”, one of the bluest states, most people pass on the voluntary higher tax rate? Why do only .03% voluntarily pay more, with the wealthiest suburbs opting out almost completely?
there is nothing that keeps anyone from paying more in federal, state, or local income taxes. People are free to forego deductions, overstate their income, make mathematical errors in favor of the gov’t, etc. The gov’t will be happy to take your extra cash.
Ugh, actually not.
Many many years ago, my wife and I received a refund from the government which was several thousand dollars (well, a couple) above what we thought we would get.
We informed the IRS via telephone and registered letter that they had made a mistake and sent the check back.
They resent the check with an explanation that we had made a mistake on our return.
In actuality, however, no such mistake had been made.
Granted you could overstate your income and forego deductions, which, in fact some people do to avoid being audited. But making calculations in error won’t matter.
john miller – I think it likely depends on where you make a mathematical error, but you’re right, they do at least some checking that would inure to the taxpayer’s benefit.
OCSteve: I admitted that “losing the farm” is mostly a talking point. It is a very emotional issue, which is why it makes a good talking point.
It’s a lie. It may be a very successful lie, but it’s still a lie.
There’s an outline here of how the estate tax really affects family farms and small businesses.
Note that the $2M threshold applies only if the people who own the family farm are a same-sex couple or an unmarried mixed-sex couple (or a single parent).
If you have concern about the value of family farms rising, the solution (which is certainly used in the UK by the government when calculating the estate tax baseline) is to have the base under which no estate tax is paid, be recalculated, year by year, to ensure that year by year, only the top 2% are affected by it. (Also, to epeal DOMA.)
This strategy is not appealling to conservatives whose policy goal is to protect the very rich at the expense of the poor (and of course, repealing DOMA contravenes the conservative policy of being anti-gay whenever possible). A better strategy from the point of view of conservatives is to refuse to recalculate the base figure, and hope that other problems cause a steep rise in taxable value leading to loss of estates that make good propaganda (ie, not owned by a same-sex couple, who ought to run the risk of losing the family farm, according to conservative principles).
There is also, as others have inquired, why cutting taxes for the very rich should be considered more important than ensuring that the very poor do not die of lack of healthcare or go hungry because they can’t afford to buy food.
The “losing the farm” talking point is a typical ploy of politicians who call themslelves conservatives and seek the votes of other self-proclaimed conservatives. It’s dishonest, emotionally charged and calculated to hide the real agenda–just like pro-life, pro-family, strong defense, strict constructionist judges and fiscal conservtism area all bogus, emotional and ony marginally connected to the actual policies promoted by conservative politicians, .
It is another of many examples of how conservatives not only misrepresent themsleves, but misrepresent the issues as well.
Because no one, not even self proclaimed conservatives, wants conservatives principles to be applied to themselves.
I really donn’t give a hoot about philosphy. I thinnk it is what people sdo that matters. So look at the legislative track record of conservatives over the last one hundred years:
opposed to child labor laws, all of the New Deal, the formation of the West Coast infrastructure necesary for fighting in the Pacific theater of WW2, the initial Civil Rights legislation, the initial environmental laws (Clean Air, Endangered Species, etc), the Wilderness Act, the Freedom of Inforamation Act.
Current conserrvatives either deny global climate change or oppose doing anything about it.
And what have thhey supporrted?
The Red Scare of the WW1 era, the Red Scare of the Fifties, fear of black welfare recipeints ( whle supporting Grover Norquist’s to promote budget policies designned to bankrupt the federal government)fear of gay people, fear of terrorists.
When this pattern becomes too obvious the people who call themsleves conserevatives decide that their actions annd policies and thhe politicianns thhey voted for aren’t conservativeas after all.
Conserrvatives have a philosophy (if you judge by behavior, not rhetoric), but it isn’t what they say it is. TThey believe that coersive governmental powerre should be used againnst indiviuals to limmit choice in the very private realms of xsex and thought. They beleive the coersive powere of government should not be used to curb the abusive behavior of powerful interests. So government can force women and girls to carry fertilized eggs to term, but it’s a violatioon of the principle of small goverment to pass anti-pollution laws.
And they dodge responisbility for thier track record by sayinng “Oh, that wasn’t us! Thatt was fake conservatives mascarading as us!”
The government coerces you: “If you don’t do what I want, I’ll send a goon squad to drag you off, and lock you away for the rest of your days in a little box. Oh, and if you put up a fight, they’ll kill you.”
Bill Gates doesn’t coerce, he persuades.
Bill Gates persuades within the commercial paradigm established by the government using that very same coercion you’re railing against. There’s absolutely no way around this. Unless you think that you can somehow saunter into a store and take a copy of Windows for free, untrammeled by “threats of violence”.
[And the irony of picking Microsoft, notorious for suing its competitors — excuse me, threatening them with violence by proxy — to establish its “persuasive” dominance, is just too much.]
Of course, it’s also telling that you’ve picked Microsoft, manufacturer of what is in many ways a luxury product, as your exemplar of non-coercive ways. What about, say, your landlord? Or your local grocery store? They may not be coercing you into a specific course of action, but they’re damn well coercive (see: theft above) and in the absence of government they could — and would, if history’s any guide — become just as coercive as government without the electoral benefits of same.
You could respond by arguing that this merely proves that government is necessary but doesn’t prove it’s not evil, which is why I mentioned breathing above. All human societies involve “coercion” in some form or another. All of them. You might as well rail against breathing as an “evil” obstacle to our true freedom and happiness. I mean, my god, can you imagine how much more liberty we’d have if we were free of breathing? But that’s a moot, and stupid, point to make because we don’t have that option. Breathing is an inextricable part of our existence. And so to is coercion, for the simple reason that we can’t always get what we want. Period. End of story. You can argue against this, you can beat your fists and shake your legs, but none of this will change a goddamn thing. All we can do is to arrange that the bulk of that coercion is effected by an accountable, transparent, and responsive actor (as russell said above): a government bound by laws, and the will of the people.
If for all this you still regard government as inherently evil because, my god, it might not let you do the things you like, well, I genuinely feel sorry for you. And if you still regard as evil the fact that government can, within the law, take some of that private property whose privacy that very same government creates… words cannot express the depths of my sympathy.
OCSteve, you talk a good game (other than pulling the ol’ Socratic rhetorical dirty trick of equating ‘conservative’ in a broadly-worded poll question with ‘conservative’ to mean ‘what OCSteve thinks it means”), but there is no way to do what you are talking about.
You don’t want taxes raised. OK, what would an OCSteve conservative cut? (we know the Republicans won’t cut anything, given they didn’t during their full-control interregnum).
Defense spending? Good luck with that one in today’s bedwetter-nation America?
Entitlements like SS and Medicare? Again, good luck with that (to use your ‘why don’t billionaires give the government money’ analogy, why don’t those 30% ‘conservatives’ give up their entitlements?)
Interest on the national debt? Please, the proposer would be hung.
Those three make up a huge chunk of all government spending, on the order of 70% last time I saw the figures. Most of the other is infrastructure building and admin functions that are what people generally think of as ‘government’. Can’t really cut that.
So, short of a massive effort to make people truly ‘personally responsible’ (i.e. get over the insane fear of terrorists and give up their entitlements), either taxes must be raised or keep deficit spending on credit.
The latter strikes me a no-no for a true conservative as I understand the word, so the responsible conservative position in the race of real life political pressure is to raise taxes.
Make it a flat tax if you wish, fine by me. But the deficit spending has got to be covered, otherwise we are all robbers (newsflash to Brent: There is no asphalt fairy).
And ‘a rising tide raises all boats’? What a bunch of hokum. Real wages haven’t risen with the tide, because that bit of Reagan idiocy only works when all share in the proceeds. If the 0.1%ers keep the difference, one quickly finds that some boats are a lot more equal than others.
The government coerces you: “If you don’t do what I want, I’ll send a goon squad to drag you off, and lock you away for the rest of your days in a little box. Oh, and if you put up a fight, they’ll kill you.”
I have never actually been afraid of this. It may be theoretically true, but I’ve never experienced it as a fear.
My personal experience of direct coercion by organizations is from medical insurance companies, who regularly and as a business policy threaten people with injury or even death. This is such a common experience in the US these days that I really wonder how people like Brett have missed it.
Ugh wrote:
I think that this is also, historically, a conservative value — that is, since human beings are social animals, the status quo is for them to keep living in groups and acting co-operatively. The difference between conservative and liberal comes in with regard to hierarchies and uneven distribution of resources (which are status quo, hence conservative values). The people who don’t believe in this first proposition are libertarians, IMHO — people who don’t believe humans are social animals.
This is where liberalism is distinguished from conservatism, IMHO. In an unjust world, any serious move toward justice disturbs the status quo and is thus unconservative.
It was perfectly possible for aristocrats to believe in a social compact where the lower orders did their part and the rulers did theirs. It recognized the reality of society and our mutual interdependence, while being deeply conservative.
Jesus Brett, the Senate just confirmed an AG who is ‘wrong on torture’ as Sen Shumer noted, just before confirming him. And your railing about the tyranny of the estate tax?
Dr. S – wasn’t me.
DaveC wrote:
Not at all. One definition of “freedom” is “the ability to act without caring about other people”, and private property definitely supports this kind of freedom.
But if private property confers freedom, then unequal distribution of property confers unequal distribution of freedom, and those with no property will be completely unfree.
So what’s more important to you? Moderate freedom for all, or no upper limit to the freedom of the very rich?
There is the sweet sweaty aroma of a pile on here, so I will pull back a bit and apologize if I’ve gotten a bit too sharp.
Ugh — yes, I see it was russell. Sorry, both — I’m easily confused because some sites I go to put the name under the comment, some above it.
Amos : And you cherry-pick the time interval, the last thirty years, that will best support your case.
I picked the period that was close to our time (easier to identify with and more pertinent than 1937) yet covered many years through war and peace and large economic swings (war and the economy being two of the most significant factors IMO). Anyway what are statistics for if not for cherry-picking? 😉 Seriously – based on the criteria I described I think it is a good sample.
Digby’s got ’em.
Again, the type of questions that most people would answer yes to. I modified my original question to include not just the liberal principle that most people would agree with but the liberal solution.
Gov’t should care for those who can’t care for themselves.
Sure – I don’t want people dying in the street. It smells up the joint and I have to step over them. (\heartless_conservative).
Gov’t should raise your taxes to care for those who can’t care for themselves.
Say what?!?
On those social and religious questions – I’m on board.
Let me make the challenge more explicit:
As a thought exercise, take each of Barak’s issues and then detail the liberal solution to the issue. On healthcare not “It’s time to bring together businesses, the medical community, and members of both parties around a comprehensive solution to this crisis…” Rather tell me how: What are you going to ask of business, what are you going to ask of the medical community, what are you going to ask of the taxpayer… Obama may as well because his Republican opponent certainly will. I submit that if you provide that detail to the voters then it amounts to an unelectable platform.
Ugh: there is nothing that keeps anyone from paying more in federal, state, or local income taxes.
Given a modified tax form (so there is no mix up or confusion) to provide for an explicit option to pay more, almost no one does. Shouldn’t one of the bluest states in the union lead the way if the answer is more taxes?
Mention of Buffet is what got me going on this though. The guy likely pays an amount more than the annual budget of my town to a team of tax lawyers to shelter his income then wants to claim the government should tax him more…
He doesn’t need to be taxed more. We just need to close loopholes and reduce his available shelters. He’d then certainly be paying a lot more…
LittlePig: pulling the ol’ Socratic rhetorical dirty trick of equating ‘conservative’ in a broadly-worded poll question with ‘conservative’ to mean ‘what OCSteve thinks it means
I’m not sure what that means. Should I tell you what someone else thinks it means? I can only tell you it means to me. And when Republicans masquerading as Conservatives stray too far from that meaning I no longer support them.
If you want to say that I’m not a very representative “Conservative” then I’d say you are right. Which means I guess you have all mostly been wasting your breath (typing?). Given my position on social issues I doubt the RNC will be pleading with me to run anytime soon. 😉
You don’t want taxes raised. OK, what would an OCSteve conservative cut?
Off the bat nothing. The day I’m put in charge of such things my focus would be on eliminating corruption, waste, and pork. That would free up billions right there. Take the current water works appropriation bill. It grew by 50% in the conference committee, after both the House and Senate had approved their version. Got to love that new transparency. $8B and that’s a drop in the bucket… As that’s my hot button I’d start there and see how far I got before thinking about cuts.
BTW I never said taxes should never be raised. I’m on record saying that I would be happy (well…) to pay the amount I pay now for my health insurance to the government for universal healthcare (some restrictions apply). I just want my tax dollars spent with a reasonable about of care. Don’t tell me you need more of my money when you (Congress) are practically flaunting the corruption and waste as it is.
Mention of Buffet is what got me going on this though. The guy likely pays an amount more than the annual budget of my town to a team of tax lawyers to shelter his income then wants to claim the government should tax him more…
He doesn’t need to be taxed more. We just need to close loopholes and reduce his available shelters. He’d then certainly be paying a lot more…
You mean shelters like the 15% rate on capital gains and dividend income?
Um, Buffet doesn’t shelter his income. He gives it away to charity to let it do the work that government doesn’t or won’t. He’s not exactly a profligate spends on himself.
Of the few honest to goodness multimillionaires I know or have known personally, not one ever complained about their personal income taxes or felt they were in any danger of being taxed into the poorhouse. Not one. One did used to complain about corporate taxes, but cut down on those by returning everything above a set goal into profit-sharing and bonuses.
News on the AMT: WASHINGTON (AP) — House Democrats on Friday pushed through an $80 billion bill to block the spread of a dreaded tax on middle-income people. The White House and Republicans, protesting tax increases in the bill affecting mainly investment fund managers, maintained that it would never become law.
Okay, for the issues, let’s see. As I’ve been doing this, I’ve noticed many of these issues tie together, and their solutions interact.
Health care? Well, in this case, I know my preferred solution is outside the mainstream of political dialogue, but here it is. Kill the insurance companies, which are giant sucking ticks on the literal and economic health of the country. Leave the rest in place, and have the government act as a single universal health insurance company for everyone. Ideally, we could fund it with income taxes equal to what everyone is currently paying in insurance premiums (or less, even!) and then allow people to go to any doctor or hospital.
Or maybe it would be better simply to nationalize the insurance companies, take over the whole infrastructure they have, and start integrating things and such.
Net cost to the average taxpayer? Zero. Guaranteed health care coverage for all, regardless of if you lose your job or whatever, etc. Probably efficiencies to be had by taking out the profit motive which leads to denying claims, and by removing duplicate paperwork for a dozen companies etc.
The main sticking points with this are 1) the insurance companies would never let it happen, and have lots of money. 2) People would say “but what about all the insurance jobs!” which is why the second suggestion, about having the government take over the current companies and then gradually merge them and weed them down might work better. Only ones who’d lose their jobs to start would be the highly paid executives, poor dears, they’ll never find a new job.
Like I said, it’s far outside the mainstream of political discourse, and it needs refining, but I think the idea’s salable to the public. No harder to sell than the “make insurance companies rich, keep a job you hate just for insurance, and let people who get sick get their claims denied” strategy of the Republicans, anyway.
Strengthen America overseas? It’s broad, but easy to tell where to start.
Elect a president besides George W. Bush. Throw Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, and anyone else who’s implicated in torture and lied about Iraq in jail. It sounds like I’m joking, but that would do a lot to restore our reputation, which used to be one of our greatest strengths.
Start getting out of Iraq. Fund our efforts to dismantle Russian (and our own) nukes to prevent them from falling into the hands of terrorists. Put more troops and rebuilders in Afghanistan, where they should have been in the first place. Sign on to treaties like the Law of the Sea and generally help encourage international laws and diplomacy. Generally live up to our end of the bargains of treaties, and live up to our ideals.
Fighting poverty? Create universal health care. Many bankruptcies are caused by health care costs. Crappy health care for the poor helps keep them poor. Many homeless have mental or physical disabilities. (See: Homeless veterans) Create something like the civilian corps of the Depression, to work on rebuilding and repairing our national infrastructure. Improving our poorest schools would help here too. Much of the specifics will depend on the area, and why there’s poverty there.
Energy and environment are pretty much tied together. First, I’d stop giving huge subsidies to dirty companies, especially oil and coal companies. Continue the funding for renewable energy, and set a countrywide goal for percentages. Commit the federal government to buying X% of its energy from renewable sources (and go up each year), to ensure there’s a steady demand for companies to build into. Implement a carbon cap and trade policy. Take the advice of actual scientists and engineers, not just industry shills. Repair and update our energy infrastructure. Mandate energy efficiency for federal buildings and departments.
Covenant with seniors? Work on fixing the federal budget, with an eye to the Treasury Bonds that will need to be paid to Social Security. Medicare would be rolled into national health care. Get rid of the pharmaceutical company welfare prescription drug bill, which would also be under the national health care plan.
Homeland security. Install actual security at ports. Get rid of most of the invasive and pointless TSA searches and crap at airports. Stop tarnishing our bad name with torture and unjust occupations. Stop overwhelming our intelligence agencies with terabytes of information about Americans from internet and phone searches. Re-hire all the Arabic speaking gay translators that the military’s fired. Basically reorient the whole thing toward actual threats instead of trying to make American citizens scared.
Immigration. Enforce the laws on hiring illegal immigrants, to reduce the demand for them. Talk to smart people about how to help Mexico’s economy stop sucking, to cut down on the supply. Allow a path to legal residency for millions and their families who live here. Raise legal immigration limits, unlimited for Iraqi refugees who want to come here.
Enforcing the right to vote. Enforce the laws on the books. Require a paper trail for all voting. Investigate Diebold. Do a real investigation of the 2000 election, maybe 2004. Give felons who’ve served their time (and maybe another year or two out of jail?) the right to vote again. Stop voter purges.
Cleaning up corruption. Man. That’s a hard one. David Brin suggests an independent US Investigator General, and that’s probably not a bad idea. Stop treating corporations as “people” under the law, especially for campaign contributions. Make more things public on the Internet, with a good interface and search. Possibly public financing for elections.
Strengthening families and communities. Universal health care would help here. Apply all non-discrimination stuff to everyone. Encourage city planning to be based around people, not cars. Make contraceptives freely available. A lot of these though, would have to be local too, based on the history and character of the community.
Reconciling faith and politics. That, I can’t help much on. Treating all faiths equally under the law infuriates some people. And as long as a large branch of Christianity is being used as basically a political machine for the Republican Party, this is a really hard one. Fred over at slacktivist might be a better place to look.
So, I don’t know if that’s detailed enough for you, OCSteve, but it’s a lot of things to cover. And only some that I’m actually informed enough to get into much detail on. Hope that’s sort of what you’re looking for, though.
Nate: That’s exactly what I was hoping for.
Actually it was more than I hoped for, seeing as none of it (beyond one mention of “nationalize”) really scared me. In fact I agree with several of those just as you wrote them and at least some parts of most of them. And there is not one I would reject outright. If it was an all or none package I would not vote for it, but there is a ton of stuff there to form common ground.
So if that is representative of liberal principles/solutions it’s not so scary. I’ll retract my statement that the platform would be unelectable.
Thanks for taking the time to compose that.
Whereas a situation in which the top 1% of earners pay taxes in an amount equal to 95% of the rest of the country is not at all coercive, nor does it have any negative consequences whatsoever
I’d like to revisit this for a minute.
The issue here is fairness — is any section of the population being asked to bear an unfair proportion of the overall tax burden. The paper you cite fails to give a realistic picture because it only counts income tax, which is the most progressive tax levied by the federal government.
Here are some numbers from the CBO for 2003 and 2004. They track income and tax numbers for various quintiles within the population, as well as more detailed numbers for the uppermost cohorts.
Among other things shown here are total dollar income of each group as a percentage of total national income, and total tax burden of each group as a percentage of total national tax burden. In other words, what percentage of the total pie each group has, and what percentage of the total tax hit each group has.
The income numbers include not just personal income, but investment income and other non-salary forms of compensation. The tax numbers include not just income tax, but SS and excise taxes, as well as corporate taxes distributed according to the distribution of corporate income.
So, for the federal level at least, it’s pretty much an all-in picture.
If you don’t mind playing along, I’d like to lay out the proportional tax burden for each group, the proportional income for each group, and one additional value to show the difference. By “difference” I mean the relative tax burden minus the relative income share. The point of including the difference is to get an idea of who is paying more and who is paying less, and how much more or less.
Ready? Here we go. The numbers are tax burden %, pre-tax income %, and difference.
Lowest quint — 0.9% 4.1% -3.2
Second quint — 4.5% 8.9% -4.4
Third quint — 9.7% 13.9% -4.2
Fourth quint — 17.6% 20.4% -2.8
Highest quint — 67.1% 53.5% +13.6
So, yes, the most highly paid folks pay quite a bit more of the tax burden relative to their percentage of total income. They pay 13.6% more in taxes than they get in income. The real pikers are the second quint folks, who pay 4.2% less, for a total differential spread of 17.8%.
Not inconsequential, but not quite the 1% / 95% ratio your paper shows.
And, it’s most likely a bit lower because state and local taxes are generally not progressive.
The really interesting group, however, are your top 1%. Their numbers are 25.3% and 16.3%, for a difference of 9.0. They’re taking a smaller hit, in proportion to their income, than the rest of their top quintile fellows. Same for the top 5%.
The folks who are really getting it in the neck are the folks who are just into the top quintile — folks with a total pre-tax compensation somewhere between $191K and $297K. The really, really rich folks actually do kind of OK.
Not for nothing, but I think you will do well to take Tax Foundation stats with a grain of salt. They’re not actually false, they just don’t tell the truth.
Thanks –
p.s.
I like me some Nate.
Thanks –
Ditto.
Well done Nate,
And OCSteve, I haven’t gotten around to commenting here, aminly because I was really ticked off at Brett and didn’t want to say something I would regret later.
However, interestingly enough, as you mentioned, liberal principles are pretty much accepted by the country. The question is putting the principles into practice, and there is no one specific way to do so.
Personally, I agree with much of what Nate said, but not all. Not principle wise, but practice wise.
The issue here is that the “liberal” label is still equated with “tax and spend”, which isn’t necessarily correct. And if nothing else, that is still more responsible than spend but don’t provide revenue. That isn’t a “conservative” principle either, not really, but that is what it would be fair to say based upon current Republican/conservative practice.
OCSteve: Actually it was more than I hoped for, seeing as none of it (beyond one mention of “nationalize”) really scared me. In fact I agree with several of those just as you wrote them and at least some parts of most of them. And there is not one I would reject outright. If it was an all or none package I would not vote for it, but there is a ton of stuff there to form common ground.
Glad it was the kind of thing you were looking for. I can’t guarantee how representative it is of any other liberal’s views but my own. Though since my political coming of age was through the late 90s and 2000s, and heavily influenced by blogs (including this one), so much of it’s probably fairly similar to the “netroots platform”, to the extent there is one.
I did say my part about health care would be definitely non-mainstream. 🙂 Honestly, I think many of the problems in health insurance/health care come from insurance companies’ profit motive. Because that makes them try to charge as much as possible, and pay as little as possible. Which leads to things like companies rescinding contracts, like Kevin Drum talks about here And it has ripple effects, from freelancers, people stuck in crappy jobs because they can’t wait the three months for the new insurance, and so on as I mentioned above.
So my preferred solution is to get the profit motive out of health insurance. Or at least profit motive of the type we have now where companies have to have record profits each year otherwise their stock tanks. “Nationalize” is a boogeyman word, I know, but having the government just take things over as they are now and then work them into something better was one option for the change, to keep from just throwing everybody working at insurance companies out, and keep from having to do new plans for everyone, etc etc. There may be other ways to do it. But it’s not terribly likely to happen, given the clout the insurance companies have.
There’s a bunch of other stuff I support you might find more radical, much of it to do with limiting the power of corporations (partly covered by the “not count corporations as persons” thing), restoring some sanity to copyrights, a higher inheritance tax (with a$5-10 mil exemption, tied to inflation) to protect against aristocracy, and environmental stuff (we really have to completely redo how we do a lot of things), but some I’m fairly sure won’t happen, or at least not through regular politics the way they are right now. And some I think are good ideas, but I’m not strident about implementing exactly that way. Also, we have many giant disasters to deal with, thanks to Bush.
And I could probably reach some kind of compromise on many of them, were I dealing with you, or my girlfriend, or some of the other reasonable conservatives I know. Not with the current Republicans though, because they deal in bad faith. And not to mention they and the groups and companies funding them (and partially the Democrats) would find them anathema.
I didn’t mention how to start getting out of Iraq, because I honestly don’t know. I’ve become convinced Iraq is so bad all we have are bad choices left, and in that case, I’d rather pick a broad goal such as (Get out of Iraq. Fairly Quickly) and then consult people who know what they’re doing, and develop some kind of flexible plan. What that’d be, I don’t know.
Thanks for taking the time to compose that.
You’re welcome.
russel, Anarch, and john miller:
Thanks.
And I’d be happy to have people disagree with hypothetical me, because in general I’m not concerned with the practice for everything, but the results. So if it works, great!
“So, yes, the most highly paid folks pay quite a bit more of the tax burden relative to their percentage of total income. They pay 13.6% more in taxes than they get in income. The real pikers are the second quint folks, who pay 4.2% less, for a total differential spread of 17.8%.”
Of course, this whole analysis tacitly assumes that fairness consists of paying taxes in proportion to one’s income.
You can’t really determine whether our tax system is “fair” without some independent definition of fairness. For my part, I think that it’s fair that people pay for what they get, and get what they pay for. Of course, by that standard even the flat tax is wildly unfair.
Brett – I’ll admit I haven’t read all the comments, so if you’ve answered this I apologize fo asking again, but what is your fair tax system? User fees only?
Honestly, I’m curious.
What kind of user fees would the stock market have? Or police, or the military? Or the Federal Trade Commission? Department of weights and measures?
Yeah, basically, the ideal ‘tax’ is a user fee, where you’re allowed to turn down the service, or obtain it from somebody else if they’re offering. IOW, it’s the free market that’s fair.
“What kind of user fees would the stock market have? Or police, or the military? Or the Federal Trade Commission? Department of weights and measures?”
Last time I checked, the stock market wasn’t a government service, and it’s paid for by charging brokers. The department of weights and measures could obviously charge for it’s services: It provides certified references for… weights and measures, of course.
I’ll admit that the police, and to a much greater extent, the military, are difficult to finance through user fees. Though we might try a check off system, it would certainly reveal which services people actually thought were worth paying for.
I’d suggest a head tax for those programs whose benefits can’t be directly related to specific people, and quantified.
And if you protest that the poor couldn’t afford such a head tax, I’ll only respond that fairness is distinct from mercy. And that we should only levy excess charges on the wealthier to the extent that the inability of the poorer to pay their fair share makes it necessary, rather than to the maximal extent that’s politically feasible.
Brett – thanks.
russell: I’d like to revisit this for a minute.
Ohhh Kayyyy.
Not for nothing, but I think you will do well to take Tax Foundation stats with a grain of salt. They’re not actually false, they just don’t tell the truth.
I’ll consider that. Anyone can manipulate the data however they like…
Your normal sign-off is “Thanks”, but let me thank you. You responded and gave some very thoughtful replies to my questions on this thread. I appreciate that. I learned a lot and it was worth your time IMO.
john miller: The issue here is that the “liberal” label is still equated with “tax and spend”, which isn’t necessarily correct.
I’ve been fishing for a direct response for a couple of days. Tell me what liberals will do! Nate gave me exactly what I was looking for (if not what I expected). I realize I just wasn’t asking the question the right way. “Tax and spend” was what I was expecting, so Nate surprised me.
Nate: Though since my political coming of age was through the late 90s and 2000s, and heavily influenced by blogs (including this one)
Damned whippersnappers… Did I ever tell you about walking to school, up hill, both ways, in the snow…
I didn’t mention how to start getting out of Iraq, because I honestly don’t know.
I change my mind twice a day based on what I read last.
Thanks again for the response.
Not for nothing, but I think you will do well to take Tax Foundation stats with a grain of salt.
Not addressed to me but I would also note that Citizens for Tax Justice stats/reports should also be salt licked.
I’m not sure that anybody answered the question about what about liberals makes them good, but lots of comments about why conservatives are bad. And since older people tend to have more of the wealth, because of tax-deferred things like 401K’s, older people must be really, REALLY, bad, unless they never took responsibility for their futures and are currently homeless, which I suppose would make them good, or at least gooder than people who saved their money and are clasified as rich.
So the question is, if I have been very careful and saved and saved all my life to hit that sweet spot where I can retire on my savings, does that put me into the evil and selfish 2% category, or does that put me into some category where I am not a burden on my children.
And if I get killed in a wreck with a Point Beer Truck, (my wife would be driving, naturally; I’m a very careful driver), should my rotten kids get the money, or should half of that be taken away?
I personally would want the moollah to go to my kids, even though they are disrespectful liberals and would probably blow it all on tricked out Volvos.
OCSteve, would you like to take up DaveC’s claim that conservative=rich and rich=conservative?
Brett, a flat-rate head tax, aka a “poll tax”, is a tax designed to bear more heavily on the taxpayer the poorer the taxpayer is.
Of course, this whole analysis tacitly assumes that fairness consists of paying taxes in proportion to one’s income.
Not only is that fairer, it’s also more efficient. Of course, it has the unconservative effect of making taxes bear with equal weight on rich and poor alike, and goes directly against the conservative principle that the poor exist to be exploited and made poorer for the benefit of the rich.
OCSteve, you were saying earlier that in your view “conservative” doesn’t mean “make the poor poorer and the rich richer”. How do you feel about Brett and DaveC, your fellow conservatives, making clear that in their view that’s exactly what “conservative” does mean?
I personally would want the moollah to go to my kids, even though they are disrespectful liberals and would probably blow it all on tricked out Volvos.
Every multimillionaire I’ve known has also been extremely insistent that his or her children would have to work and earn their own wealth rather than living off the success of their parents. Every single one.
Last time I checked, the stock market wasn’t a government service, and it’s paid for by charging brokers.
We already have ample historical evidence of what a stock market operating in the absence of securities regulators looks like. Perhaps you’d like to revisit those days. Perhaps you also are crazy.
“Not only is that fairer, it’s also more efficient.”
What could be more efficient than charging everyone the same exact sum? It certainly reduces the amount of data you have to collect on people, and the calculations they have to perform.
Anyway, “bear more heavily”? I donno… If you dump a 400lb hunk of pig iron on me and the world’s strongest man, it’s certainly true that only one of us is still going to be lying there the next day, but it’s indisputably true that the two loads weigh the same. It’s just that we’re not equally good at lifting. So I’d have to say in a literal sense, that a head tax bears EXACTLY as heavily on one person as the next.
But what I’m really arguing here is that people who get the same services, in all fairness, owe the same amount. If we chose not to charge one of them that full amount, and instead force the other to bear an extra portion of the burden, it isn’t “fairness” that’s in play, it’s mercy. Which is a departure from fairness. Sorry, all the virtues don’t necessarily direct you to do the same thing in any given instance…
And we shouldn’t pretend that we’re charging them the amount they properly owe. It should instead be regarded as a support program akin to food stamps. You could tax everybody what they really owe, and then provide the poor with “tax stamps” with which to pay the portion they can’t afford.
********
Look, one of the great insights of economics, and the reason wage and price controls cause a disaster every time they’re tried, is that prices are a feedback mechanism. They signal to people how much the things they’re contemplating really cost, so that they can make an at least semi-rational decision about whether they’re really worth it.
By divorcing taxation, the price of government services, from the services actually provided to individuals, we disable that feedback mechanism. Services there might be a great demand for get under-produced, services which most people wouldn’t regard as worth it if they had to pay the piper get over-produced.
I suspect this is actually the real objection to funding government programs by honestly calculated user fees: That most people wouldn’t chose to buy nearly as much government as you want them to buy, if they had good feedback on how much that amount of government actually cost. We tremendously over-purchase government due to the fact that the average voter doesn’t see most of the cost of the government they’re buying when they walk into the voting booth.
Needless to say, that’s not an objection I particularly respect.
One of the problems I have with the “pay their own way” rhetoric is it’s dishonest. It acts like the freeloading poor are living it up on everybody else’s dime, especially the rich.
But the rich get the most out of government services. They get stock markets and assured weights and inspectors and regulators which let people have faith enough in the market to know that what they’re going to buy is what they’re going to get. They get the benefit of open financial markets and institutions. They get insurance for their banks so people will feel confident the bank’s not going to go under or have a run on it, so people will use them. They get the benefit of legal systems to ensure their corporate contracts will be honored, and redress if it’s not.
Yes, everybody gets these benefits. But the rich get most of these benefits, because they allow them to make their money in the first place.
But the other problem with the user fees idea comes from another basic insight of economics. Externalities, and public goods. How much is it worth to you to have a society where you can walk down the sidewalk. Should sidewalk owners charge user fees? Sidewalks broken up into different widths, differently maintained, and at different prices, how would those work to walk on? How about clean air and water? How much are air and water worth to you? How do you charge somebody for clean air, or clean water? And since air’s a gas, how do you control who gets it? Do the people who pay user fees carry around cans of clean air, while people who pay less get a filter, and people who pay even less get a surgical mask, and some people just have to breathe toxic soup? What kind of user fee should people have to pay for New York City’s trees? They provide $122 million in benefit to the city, after all. But what if acid rain from a coal power plant two states away kills New York’s trees? How much should the birds who live in Central Park pay?
How much is it worth to live in a society where you can change your job without losing your health insurance? How much is it worth to live in a society where hard working independent businessmen don’t end up dying of brain cancer because they couldn’t get insurance? What kind of benefits would it supply to live in the kind of society where people felt secure in their health, rather than terrified of getting sick? What would it do to property values if mentally ill veterans didn’t have to live on street corners, and could get treatment they need? What would it do to our economy if people could start their own business could do so without worrying about losing their business, house, and family the first time they got sick?
There are a lot of things prices don’t work for, because they’re things that are valuable, but hard to monetize. And other things provide such spread out benefits to society it’s hard to point at one thing, or one person, and say they should pay for it. Good luck trying to calculate the way diffuse benefits split up between every member of society, especially when who gets what benefit from it could change easily.
Markets is notoriously bad at pricing public goods and externalities, for all of those reasons. So for the provision of public goods, “the market” is a poor choice. And markets aren’t some abstract perfect ideal, anyway. They’re systems created and maintained by people, and the rules people make for them. So don’t cite the insights of economics about prices, and ignore the insights of economics about other subjects as well.
“Externalities, and public goods. How much is it worth to you to have a society where you can walk down the sidewalk.”
Which is why I proposed that, for services where the benefit can’t be properly quantified for a given individual, a head tax was appropriate. Unless you’re going to go all tautological on me, there’s no reason to suppose that a millionaire values their life 100,000 more than a homeless person.
I’d say that liberalism actually takes market rhetoric more seriously than conservatives. We believe that positive externalities exist very widely, and can be created in places where they don’t now exist with some effort; we also believe that consistency of foundational expectations is good, that security in planning is good, and so on. For that matter, we take the division of labor seriously, and seek to consolidate the load for a lot of basic worries rather than inefficiently dumping it on everyone in the public at large. All of this is merely saying that a lot of what makes commerce works well also makes other parts of life work well – that is, that the claims are true, not just convenient dodges for self-interest.
More on this later.
No, but a millionaire gets quite a bit more benefit and use from most of those hard-to-quantify services than a poor person does, in general. Especially the net service of making sure people’s lives don’t suck enough to re-enact the French Revolution.
But surely, since you were talking about great insights of economics, you would know about marginal utility, Brett. If you have two dollars, and pay one dollar to walk on a sidewalk, that’s half of your money. If you have a hundred dollars and pay one dollar to walk on the same sidewalk, that’s 1% of your money. And if you have $100,000 and pay one dollar, that’s .001% of your money.
When you have more money, each individual extra dollar of cost or earnings nets you less effect than the last. And each dollar you spend hurts you less, because you still have plenty more available. That’s the entire point of progressive taxation, it’s not a matter of screwing the rich, it’s a matter of maximizing utility.
So that head tax, along with the user fees, is a much greater proportion of their money than it is for a millionaire. And that’s not really “fair”. It may be fairer in an absolute dollar sense, but it’s not nearly as fair in the percentage of money paid, or the effective cost, because of the difference in how useful each marginal dollar is.
Alternative conceptions of ‘fairness’, Nate. That’s what I’m pointing out, “fairness” is an inherently contested concept, and it’s not that liberals want to be fair to people, and conservatives don’t. It’s that they understand “fairness” differently.
What could be more efficient than charging everyone the same exact sum?
It’s much, much more difficult to collect $90 from someone who has only $100 to live on till next payday, than it is to collect $90 from someone to whom that kind of sum is chump change.
The Conservatives in the UK discovered this fairly obvious fact by trying to do it: Margaret Thatcher got the boot because the inefficiency and expense of the poll tax had become inextricably tied to her.
Maybe that’s what you’ve been trying to say, Brett, but mostly it’s been coming off as “anything other than paying the exact same dollar amounts is unfair,” at least to me.
“It’s much, much more difficult to collect $90 from someone who has only $100 to live on till next payday, than it is to collect $90 from someone to whom that kind of sum is chump change.”
Well, yes, and I proposed a solution to that. I’m not suggesting that we charge a bum on the street the federal budget divided by the population of the country. I’m suggesting that we regard the fact that we don’t as charity, not “fairness”.
“Maybe that’s what you’ve been trying to say, Brett, but mostly it’s been coming off as “anything other than paying the exact same dollar amounts is unfair,” at least to me.”
And I’m as entitled to use my conception of fairness, which ain’t exactly oddball, just as much as you are your’s; Expect that when I say fair, I do not mean the communist slogan, “From each according to his ability…”
I’m suggesting that we regard the fact that we don’t as charity, not “fairness”.
It’s “charity” to expect the very rich to pay proportionate to their income, and it’s “fair” to give the very rich a free ride?
You’re right: conservatives do interpret some words differently.
And I’m as entitled to use my conception of fairness, which ain’t exactly oddball
No, no – it’s a very standard conservative idea: the rich should get richer, the poor should get poorer. This is “fair” according to conservative ideas of “fairness”.
Jes: OCSteve, would you like to take up DaveC’s claim that conservative=rich and rich=conservative?
Not sure what you’re asking Jes. If conservative=rich then I missed the boat somewhere. Heck if conservative=rich then there wouldn’t be a single Democrat in America…
If Dave’s point is that conservatives tend to plan and save for their future more than others I’m not sure I agree with him. (In my gut I do but I’m not aware of any stats that prove that.) Some of us (like me) have absolutely no faith that the social security system we’ve paid into all of our working life will be there for us. And of course the I in FICA stands for insurance – it was never meant to fully fund retirement.
Being of the first generation to go to work when company paid pensions had mostly become a thing of the past, I’ve known since my first paycheck that I was on my own in terms of retirement. (First paycheck: Who the hell is FICA and why have they taken that big chunk of my money?!?)
But even though I’ve been careful with money and saved all I could all my life, I still have little hope of a traditional retirement. I’m pretty sure I’ll have to work to my dying day. Unless someone can clue me in to this conservative=rich thing.
How do you feel about Brett and DaveC, your fellow conservatives, making clear that in their view that’s exactly what “conservative” does mean?
How do I feel about you putting those words into their mouths? 😉
OCSteve: Not sure what you’re asking Jes. If conservative=rich then I missed the boat somewhere.
In DaveC’s comment on “November 09, 2007 at 10:47 PM” he uses “rich” and “conservative” interchangably.
How do I feel about you putting those words into their mouths? 😉
How do you feel about DaveC’s assertion that rich=conservative and conservative=rich? How do you feel about Brett’s repeated argument that the only fair tax system is one designed to make the rich richer and the poor poorer? You were the one arguing that these were not conservative ideas, yet I don’t see you arguing with Brett when Brett presents them as conservative ideas.
Brett, if you really think progressive taxation, or even a flat tax, is Communism, then I don’t think any of this discussion is going to be productive at all. Which is what it sure sounds like you’re saying.
OCSteve: Some of us (like me) have absolutely no faith that the social security system we’ve paid into all of our working life will be there for us.
Well, unless you get a long run of liberal administrations, it probably won’t be. But if you want conservative government, you want a country in which ordinary people will be on their own and desperately scrabbling to fund their own retirement. Social Security is a liberal institution – an immensely successful and popular one, which means it’s naturally been opposed by conservative government in the US. But there’s no reason it shouldn’t be there for you when you retire – unless you have a long run of conservative administrations determined to destroy it before people like you can benefit from it.
“How do you feel about Brett’s repeated argument that the only fair tax system is one designed to make the rich richer and the poor poorer?”
I attribute this to the liberal tendency to assume that one’s foes agree with you about the consequences of the policies you advocate, and stubbornly oppose them only because they don’t want the good that would obviously come from them.
In fact, I have NEVER argued that a tax system has to be designed to make the rich richer, and the poor poorer, to be fair. A fair tax system *might*, or might not, have that consequence, depending on a lot of other things, but that consequence sure as hell isn’t what I think would make it fair.
You always end up with this sort of attribution of evil motives, when somebody who believes in a procedural conception of fairness argues with somebody who believes fairness is dependent on end states.
Jes: How do you feel about DaveC’s assertion that rich=conservative and conservative=rich? How do you feel about Brett’s repeated argument that the only fair tax system is one designed to make the rich richer and the poor poorer?
The only place I see those words are by you. I understand that’s what you believe they mean, but that is not what they are saying.
But if you want conservative government, you want a country in which ordinary people will be on their own and desperately scrabbling to fund their own retirement.
As an ordinary person, if I had invested that 12% since my very first paycheck and gotten an average rate of return of 7-8% I could retire comfortably at age 55. As it is, that lifetime of paying 12% won’t do a thing for me. They‘ll have to raise the qualifying age to 70 to keep it solvent and I seriously doubt I’ll live that long.
To the claim that price regulations lead inevitably to disaster (Brett at 9:12 am), I’ll simply say “Enron”. I assume that Brett actually meant general and detailed fixes on the prices of all goods as practiced to a degree in many totalitarian societies (mainly on the left but occasionally on the right too). Otherwise I would have to assume that he is not as a principle against using the power to withhold essentials as a tool of exploitation (like some South American water privatization schemes that actually led to a popular revolution).
I understand that’s what you believe they mean, but that is not what they are saying.
That’s odd, OCSteve: not only is making the poor poorer to the benefit of the rich exactly what a flat-rate poll tax inevitably leads to – Brett acknowledges this, he just thinks that’s fair.
As an ordinary person, if I had invested that 12% since my very first paycheck and gotten an average rate of return of 7-8%
Well, you could have done that anyway – why didn’t you? (Serious question, by the way: I’d like an answer. Why didn’t you take 12% of your first paycheque and invest it to get a 7-8% return, and keep doing that?)
As it is, that lifetime of paying 12% won’t do a thing for me.
Well, not if you keep right on having conservative administrations who are determined to end Social Security before you can benefit from it. But, as a self-identified conservative, you haven’t really got any moral high ground to complain about that.
For my part, I think that it’s fair that people pay for what they get, and get what they pay for.
That isn’t a tax. It’s fee for service.
You don’t appear to be suggesting we actually *do* this, but only appear to be making a point about the meaning of the word “fair”.
So I’ll just say, that’s an interesting thought, but perhaps not really a workable one in context.
it’s not that liberals want to be fair to people, and conservatives don’t. It’s that they understand “fairness” differently.
In a million years, I couldn’t possibly agree with this more.
Sometimes I wish conservatives could actually live a world governed by their concept of fairness, even if just for a few months. IMVHO, it would cure them of their interesting theories in a damned hurry. At least, I sure hope it would.
Just my opinion.
Citizens for Tax Justice stats/reports should also be salt licked.
No argument here.
They‘ll have to raise the qualifying age to 70 to keep it solvent and I seriously doubt I’ll live that long.
Eat a salad and some fruit every day, take it easy on the booze, don’t smoke, and take a 30-40 minute walk in the morning.
Just another of russell’s helpful suggestions for everyone else’s life.
And if I get killed in a wreck with a Point Beer Truck, (my wife would be driving, naturally; I’m a very careful driver), should my rotten kids get the money, or should half of that be taken away?
Dave, I think you wanna lay off of that brown acid.
Thanks –
Russell: Eat a salad and some fruit every day, take it easy on the booze, don’t smoke, and take a 30-40 minute walk in the morning.
I eat a lot of salad and fruit. And I walk on average 20 miles per week. I do take it easy on the booze, but the smoking will kill me. I’m not famous enough to get a new lung or two.
Jes: Well, you could have done that anyway – why didn’t you? (Serious question, by the way: I’d like an answer. Why didn’t you take 12% of your first paycheque and invest it to get a 7-8% return, and keep doing that?)
Little things like rent and food, and the 30% something withholding. Later on college (two degrees for me, three for my wife, paid every cent out of pocket except for VA help for me), a mortgage, refinancing the mortgage, paying off the tons of debt without ever considering bankruptcy or government help of any kind…
As soon as the 401(k) came along I was in and maxed it out. It hurt, a lot sometimes.
But looking back now – if I had had a government sponsored private retirement account from the beginning I would be planning my retirement about now.
But, as a self-identified conservative, you haven’t really got any moral high ground to complain about that.
Sure I do. Always. SSN is broken. Any fixes will require upping the eligibility age, cutting benefits, raising taxes, or all of the above. We should have moved to private accounts many many years ago.
“You don’t appear to be suggesting we actually *do* this, but only appear to be making a point about the meaning of the word “fair”.
So I’ll just say, that’s an interesting thought, but perhaps not really a workable one in context.”
I think it’s workable from a standpoint of economics, but politically, there’s just no way to get there from here, so, yes, I was just making a point about the meaning of “fairness”.
Maybe this is the place for a little rant. What does it mean to me to be conservative? Self-reliance and independence.
I grew up dirt poor. Meat (hamburger) was a luxury. My role model is my mother who raised four kids (one with Downs Syndrome) working as a waitress.
Even as the victim of a public education I worked my butt off. I took the advanced placement courses and the Reagents courses. I didn’t play with my friends. I studied. I knew at a very young age that being poor really sucked and it wasn’t for me.
My wife came from a similar background and we started living together very young. We worked together and saved all we could. I didn’t join the Army out of any altruistic impulse – it was pure desperation, my only shot at college. My wife followed me around the country and around the world and made a home for us no matter how hard it was. Let me tell you that the life of an Army wife sucks. She always got a job and worked and took college classes as we could afford them. She did KP and home health care and other horrors I hate to even think of now. We went to night school and drove (separately) 50-60 miles per night each way for classes. Then we came home and did homework until we collapsed at 2AM. Every weekend was either seminars or homework or papers.
Since then things are much better but we still each work 60+ hours per week. We’re middle-middle class. We’re OK to miss a few paychecks if that happens, but we have little hope of retirement in the traditional sense.
But we’ll make it. You know why? Because I can never remember in all those years not seeing a help wanted sign somewhere. There is always a job. You can always pay your way.
My sister has Downs Syndrome. Back then the doctors pressured my mother to institutionalize her. She didn’t. Instead my mother normalized her. Kept her at home, put her into the school system as long as she could. Put her in special ed. Made her deal with life…
My sister, with Downs Syndrome, now owns her own home. Actually it’s a duplex and she rents out the other half. She holds down a full time job. My mom pays for staff to keep an eye on things, but my sister owns it. No, her Downs is not mild; no one not in the family would ever understand a word she says.
My family has used government services. Cheese is good. I want a safety net; it has helped my family before. I will pay for it.
But people need to “bounce” off that net. Not settle in for the long haul. My sister is where she is through hard work. With her and my mom and my wife as role models what do you think my opinion is?
First, women rule. They are the stronger sex by far. Any of you men who do not believe that are fooling yourself.
Next – if you can’t at least try as hard as these three women then something is wrong.
A fair tax system *might*, or might not, have that consequence, depending on a lot of other things, but that consequence sure as hell isn’t what I think would make it fair.
I couldn’t disagree more. I think that, in a representative democracy, a tax system which as a consequence makes rich people richer and makes poor people poorer, and does so by design, is by definition unfair. Maybe in a kleptocracy or plutocracy it would be considered “fair,” but not in anything that claims to be in any degree democratic.
@OCSteve: I know a jazillion people with stories just like yours who are equally as independent and self-reliant — and, by the by, never ever ever took a penny in government assistance, ever — and probably more than half are Democrats. Just for the record.
for OCSteve via Metafilter: always a job
Phil: I know a jazillion people with stories just like yours who are equally as independent and self-reliant…
I’m sure. It’s nothing special. Most people just deal with whatever life hands them. That is normal I like to think.
Phil: Although given that she is my sis, I think it is way cool she not only owns her own home but also rents half of it. I’m very proud of that so I’ll brag a little…
“think that, in a representative democracy, a tax system which as a consequence makes rich people richer and makes poor people poorer, and does so by design, is by definition unfair.”
Just to be clear, are you talking about a hypothetically evil tax system, or something sort of like the one we have now or the ones that OCSteve has been talking about. Because OCSteve hasn’t suggested such a system, and the system we have now isn’t anything like that either.
If you mean that after taxes rich people may be richer in year 2 than they are in year 1 and poor people may or may not be poorer in year 2 than they are in year 1, that isn’t the same thing at all. Lots of people may be richer or poorer in any given year, and for the most part that won’t have lots to do with the tax system–and it shouldn’t.
OCSteve: Little things like rent and food, and the 30% something withholding. Later on college (two degrees for me, three for my wife, paid every cent out of pocket except for VA help for me), a mortgage, refinancing the mortgage, paying off the tons of debt
And do you suppose this would have been any different without Social Security? Still a serious question. Do you suppose that you would have taken the 12% away from rent and food and education and mortgage and so forth, and begun investing it in the stock market at an average rate of 7-8% return?
But looking back now – if I had had a government sponsored private retirement account from the beginning I would be planning my retirement about now.
Oh, right. So you think the government would have helped you get an average 7-8% return on your investments in the stock market. What happened to those supposed conservative ideals of “small government” and “self-reliance”?
Sure I do. Always. SSN is broken.
Well, I guess you’re in the state of mind where Bush and other conservative politicians want you to be. Social Security is in good shape: Bush lies to you and claims it’s broken already – so that you won’t make too much fuss when it’s taken away from you.
Sebastian: Just to be clear, are you talking about a hypothetically evil tax system, or something sort of like the one we have now or the ones that OCSteve has been talking about. Because OCSteve hasn’t suggested such a system, and the system we have now isn’t anything like that either.
I think the flat-rate poll tax, where the US federal budget is divided by the population of the US and everyone pays their equal share, was Brett’s idea of a “fair” system, actually. He argued that any other system was charity.
Just an idea (no chance of realization):
A hiatus (let’s say 10 years) is set between the bequest of inheritance and the actual receiving of the dough (exception: means of production that are kept and not sold within the hiatus time). The heir will receive 1$ of the inheritance for every $ (s)he earns him/herself without or only a minimal tax. After the hiatus period those parts of the inheritance not yet claimed through the process will be taxed at a very high margin*.
Unfortunately that system would not prevent cronyism/nepotism/favouritism but it would be a great incentive for a lot of drones to actually earn their place in life**.
*The same rate would apply for non-marginal sums the bequeather hands out before death to avoid the above process.
**Wouldn’t it be nice to see Dubya in that position?
“He argued that any other system was charity.”
But did not, you might have noticed, argue against charity. What I object to is the notion that charity is fairness. No, it’s charity.
Remember that old saying, “Justice is what we deserve, mercy is what we hope for.”? That’s the kind of point I’m trying to make.
What I want, (And know I will never get, because politicians sure as heck don’t want it.) is a tax system where it’s blatantly obvious to voters, where they feel, how much the things they’re voting for COST. I want a tax system where you vote in a pro-war President, and your taxes go up by your share of the cost of that war. You’d probably like that. You probably wouldn’t like the fact that you elect a Congressman who’s in favor of some social program, and your taxes go up by the cost of THAT.
A tax system where almost all of the budget is carried on the backs of a small minority of the voting public lacks crucial feedback. Most of the people are voting for things they’ll never have to pay for. And so they vote for things which they wouldn’t think worth it if THEY had to pay for them.
Granted, if you want a heck of a lot more government than the average person would want to pay for, you probably consider that a feature, not a bug.
What I want, (And know I will never get, because politicians sure as heck don’t want it.) is a tax system where it’s blatantly obvious to voters, where they feel, how much the things they’re voting for COST.
I’d like to think that all our rather sharp differences stem from this observation. I don’t think we can really know the costs, especially when we get to the aggregate knowledge of the population, but you seem to think we can. I look at my life and think about what different decisions ‘cost’ and realize that there was no way to know those costs. And because I think that there is no way to know the costs, we should maximize our opportunities. We don’t really know which child is going to grow up and invent a new fuel source or the cure for cancer, so we ‘cast our bread on the waters’. Attributing this to a desire to keep duping the public is wrong and wrongheaded.
Of course, I think I can hear you say ‘hey, it’s not our bread, it’s my bread and I get to decide what I do with it’. The argument to self interest is that you actually pay more because you lose efficiencies of scale. The argument to aggressively attack your position is to question precisely what you own and how you do so and suggest that the value of what you own is based on the social networks involved. The argument from social conformity is that we are not willing to set up the system to keep you out of what you don’t want, and the inefficiencies introduced by dealing with folks like you serve to reduce the value for all us socially upstanding folks so tough luck. I find the last one the least satisfying, but it does underlie the general notion of coercion/state’s monopoly on power
Anyway, I hope that I have laid out the arguments without making any sly suggestions about your ‘real’ agenda, and I leave it to others to continue.
OCSteve: I wasn’t intending to belittle your or your sister’s acccomplishments. I was just pointing out that “independence and self-reliance” certainly don’t track to conservativism on a 1-to-1 basis, or at all, really; and they certainly have nothing whatsoever to do with Republicanism. At least not in my lifetime.
And of the people I know who have had to use government assistance, I don’t know of any who said, “Well, I’m set now! I can settle in for the long haul!” My wife is on unemployment at the moment for the first time in our 18 years together, and she’s finding it humiliating, degrading and a complete pain in the ass. My 83-year-old grandmother, who is a widow now for three years and who gets her SS and whatever of my grandfather’s benefits she inherited, works five days a week at Wal-Mart.
Sebastian, I thought it was pretty clear I was discussing a hypothetical system in which wealth, by design, flowed upward on a constant basis.
I think it’s workable from a standpoint of economics
In the sense that the sums all add up in the ledger, yes, the economics all work out nicely.
The problem is more than the “politics”, in the sense of “nobody will vote for it”. The reason noone will vote for it is that it’s unfair to the point of being morally wrong.
In short, it sucks.
Government is not a fee for service arrangement. Government is a set of institutions people create to organize their common civil life.
It is not just, or even primarily, a vendor of goods and services. It is something to which people actually owe obligations, for the privilege of sharing a civil community with other people.
Pragmatically, if everyone pays the same dollar for the same service rendered, rich folks get all the benefit they like, and poor folks get none. Making that not so, or at least less so, is not a matter of charity. It’s a matter of fulfilling mutual obligation, because you’re all citizens of the same polity.
I’m sure you disagree, which is part of why you consider yourself a conservative, and a very large part of why I do not, and never, ever will.
I can get on board with OC’s desire for less-advantaged folks to get up off their *sses and make their lives better, rather than think someone else is ever gonna do it for them.
But I think the vision of the ideal world you’re painting in this thread to be unbelievably bleak. It would, in fact, suck like hell to live in it.
A tax system where almost all of the budget is carried on the backs of a small minority of the voting public lacks crucial feedback.
That might be so, but that ain’t, remotely, what we have.
Thanks –
So, in this view there is no fair way to finance national defense, police forces or a criminal justice system, without which a “free market” is impossible.
For me, what characterizes Brett’s pie-in-the-sky libertarianism most is the utter absence of history. Did the author of “government is EVIL” ever study the question of where government came from? What purpose was being served by the people who were there at the beginning? And if “government” is “evil” then what is the source of this evil?
Is it not obviously the evil of human nature? And how is the existence or non-existence of government going to effect the existence or non-existence of evil?
Us liberals get accused often enough of starry-eyed idealism. But we’re pikers in comparison to the libertarians who love nothing better than dreaming up perfect worlds from the comfort of their own bathtubs.
russell,
Thanks for the damn good advice.
(singingbone!)
I’m not famous enough to get a new lung or two.
OCSteve: I’m from the Netherlands: I think you should have as much chance at new lungs as our queen did, provided you both worked as hard at limiting the damage. Famous is not the means I’d like to measure the worth of someones life with.
I think it is great that your sister has these means. I also suspect that your sister couldn’t have done it without help (your mums, your siblings’, yours) and I wonder wether she’d have made it if she had a hearth condition (frequent in Down’s kids) and wether she has a nice medical insurance. But maybe all my concerns/questions/assumptions are wrong – I don’t know enough about your situation.
I *do* recognize your idea about people that should get off their *ss and help themselves. My father was an alcoholic (I’ve been in homes because my parents couldn’t afford housing & food). My mother divorced him when I was 8 and had to take care of my sis, my bro and me – having had only elementary school herself. My sis became a heroin addict but came clean after a few years- but she still feels that society should pay her for being a more or less productive member of the communicty, if only because she tries to raise her son well. My bro still is an addict with regular convictions for dealing (no violent crimes for which we are gratefull).
I’ve always been the one who studied, who worked and who paid taxes – quite often telling them that when they complained about ‘the government nog paying enough’ they ment that *I* wasn’t paying enough. My family thought my highschool diploma was such an asset that they declared me crazy for wanting to study further instead of keepint the current job.
So yeah, I’m better off than my siblings and I worked pretty hard to get there. I feel entitled to having a nicer house, better holidays, more financial leisure room. At the same time: I am glad my nethew has good medical care and is entitled to good schooling, since none of this is *his* business and he should have the same opportunities other kids have. If I would’t have had government sponsored scholarships I doubt that I could have made it to where I currently am.
My brother, who has been a heroine addict for more than 20 years (together with the group of friends he has been in since he was three years old), still has an appartment to live in, has a side job as a sportschool janitor, gets the same medication as I do for our mutual thyroid disease and still visits us on birthdays and holidays – my sons love their uncle who brings them weird litte gadgets and is so strong that he can wrestle all three of them to the ground. Their lives *and* ours (because he has always been my little brother and I love him) *and* my brothers *and* societies (because he can lead a relatively normal life with small scale dealing as his worst crime) are better off because the government provides him with the basics. He has no diploma’s, no work experience and is a convict; there aren’t that many rosy outcomes for him and I prefeer this to him laying in the gutter to die or robbing people to sponsor his habit.
Phil: I was just pointing out that “independence and self-reliance” certainly don’t track to conservativism on a 1-to-1 basis, or at all, really; and they certainly have nothing whatsoever to do with Republicanism. At least not in my lifetime.
No argument there. I didn’t mean to imply that. I just meant that to me conservatism means self-reliance and independence.
Marbel: Yes my sister has had a lot of support. She could not actually go out and get a “real” job and a mortgage. But she works a full week and gets a paycheck and pays her bills. And she knows she has to pay her bills before she can spend money on anything “fun”. She does have a lot of health problems and I doubt she will be with us for many more years. My mother also has her covered with great insurance and she gets great care at one of the best hospitals in the country.
My father was an alcoholic (I’ve been in homes because my parents couldn’t afford housing & food). My mother divorced him when I was 8 and had to take care of my sis, my bro and me
That mirrors my life very closely. Alcoholic father, my mother left him when I was about 10 to raise 4 kids on her own. As the oldest I pretty much raised my siblings. Very sad about your brother.
As I noted I do believe in a safety net. My family has used it. I’m willing to pay for it. I just ask that people use it responsibly and pick themselves up and deal with life.
Yes my sister has had a lot of support. She could not actually go out and get a “real” job and a mortgage. But she works a full week and gets a paycheck and pays her bills. And she knows she has to pay her bills before she can spend money on anything “fun”
I didn’t mean anything but respect, I hope you felt that. My brother-in-law is mentally handicapped and autistic and has not been brought up for a more independent life, which I have always seen as a shame (he is comparable with a 14 yo kid – pretty capable, speaks 4 languages, sings beautifully, but cannot put experiences in perspective, panics at lots of things and doesn’t exactly know who to trust and who not). And as I said, being an old mother made me seriously contemplate handicaps and my attitude towards them.
I think we are not that far apart. I’m inclined to feel that people who do not *want* to work after 65 (maybe 70) should be compelled too and I’m inclined to feel that kids should all have equal treatment/opportunities where possible. And I feel that the safety net should be broader that just “able bodied” and should provide people with means to participate in society as well as they can. So that is probabely the area where we’d differ about degrees and limits.
should NOT be compelled too ;). And on rereading the ‘who to trust’ should probabely be a ‘whom’.