DISQUS

I've long suspected that David Brooks lives in some sort of an alternate reality anyway ... His recent column (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/01/opinion/01bro...) discusses how, surprise, human achievement in the realm of what we call "Genius" is actually a product of both inherent intellectual abilities combined with specific environmental circumstances. Did he come to this revelation just recently? Has he heard the expression "10% inspiration 90% perspiration", and its 200 variants? Do they really give people this dense Op-Ed's in the NYT? I'm also less inclined to take anything this man has to say seriously regarding conservatism since he labeled small-government types "nihilists".

I think vouchers is an excellent example of how libertarianism might work in the real world. It is a compromise of hard line principles (as you said, they are tax funded), but they foster freedom of choice, and encourage improvement of public resources through private (and public) competition. In fact, it is a great example, considering it is supported in almost every case by otherwise typically disenfranchised groups, and almost exclusively opposed by wealthy economic and political elites. In most cases I debate this issue, my "liberal" opponent is in fact reduced to the argument, "They don't know what's good for them." And I think that resonates and transcends the policy's political baggage. It's an issue that has sprung about relatively recently, unsullied by many hoary libertarian ideas which might incidentally have the stink of their past associations, like federalism and opposition to civil rights legislation, forever linked in the electorate's synapses.

Unfortunately every time I try to even breach the subject of economics with a Naomite (clever, huh), they dismiss the so-called "dismal science" as some type of nefarious voodoo concocted by purveyors of False Consciousness to woo them into bourgeois catatonia. Then again, anyone who is willing to surrender their intellect to Ms. Klein cover to cover has already betrayed a certain personal lack of sagacity that no amount of Econ 101 will remedy.

Sorry, you mention Klein, I get all worked up.

If you examine the specific policies Specter supports and doesn't and then consider the constituency he represents, his politics make sense, particularly his craven hostility to market and trade measures that are typically portrayed by men like Pat Buchanan and Barack Obama as robbing manufacturing jobs from blue collar Americans and shipping them overseas. However men like Andrew Sullivan will continue to lionize the Arlen Specters as pragmatic moderates, and those 200 Cato economists as extremist ideologue cranks.

Sorry, you just mentioned Miss Klein, sending me into my predictable apoplectic seizure of fury.

It just occurred to me that most young'uns only know Milton Friedman - who he is, what he's done, what he said - from The Shock Doctrine. Indeed, many older folks only know him from that book as well, cause you know, it was a NYT bestseller, and she was on Colbert. That's sad.

Folktivism?

I'd like to see you in public. As I've said many times before, it would be nice to see an articulate and genuinely intelligent defender of free markets, choice, and all that jazz on one of these shows like Real Time or Maddow instead of the easy targets they get to represent the opposition in order to seem like intellectual giants themselves. I mean, come on ... how hard can it be to outwit Pat Buchanan in a debate about the moral and logical virtues of SCHIP, even if you're on the "pro" side. You don't need to be a Rhodes Scholar, I'll tell you that much. Besides, they are essentially both economic isolationists. I'm telling you, that pair is less a real policy debate, and more like a political Statler and Waldorf.

I'm sorry, I've got to say something here. I see just as much locksteppery among the mainstream left equivalents of what you mention - MSNBC, Kos, Huff Po, etc. How can you watch Olbermann shrieking on and Jon Stewart kvetching about a cable finance network as though it's the Whore of Babylon, and not see that these are the doppelgangers of the right wing echo chamber?

And by the way, if Earth Hour was supposed to be so important and such a symbol of collective sacrifice for the common good, then why was it at night on a Saturday, when most people would be using little power at home anyway? Why not call for oh, say ... 10:00AM on a Wednesday? Probably because that would in fact be a sacrifice, and those who called for "Earth Hour" would be forced to reconcile their infantile pastoral fantasies with the actual implications of mass, diminished productivity. Even if one hour of lost work might not cripple the globe economically (or maybe it would, I don't know), it's telling that the green coalition shied from this at the get-go, realizing that the majority of human-kind would rather work and be prosperous than sit in idle contemplation of what their well-being is potentially destroying.

Here's something to wrap your brain around, Will:

One of the crucial things that separate humans from other primates is the fact that we do not need to see our leader to maintain tribal cohesion. Baboons for instance, will become disoriented if they are in groups of more than twenty, because they lose the ability to distinguish the leader of the pack, and all hierarchy dissolves, thus lower primates tend to remain bound to smaller tribal units than man. Humans, on the other hand, have the ability to abstract hierarchies and tribal structures, and incorporate those abstractions in order to form more complex social groups and communities. This, however, is a double-edged (perhaps a many-edged) sword. In removing the immediate coercion of a leader in the traditional pack sense, one must have a code of law commonly shared by the group at best, at worst, proxies for a pack leader to enforce social conformity (shire reeves and the like). From this we also have the notions of nationalism and organized religion – symbols that organize social groups towards greater cooperation.

I think ultimately this comes down to how much further we will evolve. Many people who believe in evolution, ironically think man ceased to continue evolving somewhere around the Neolithic Period. I happen to disagree. Trends suggest that the more we continue to evolve in the sense of how we behave socially, the greater our autonomy will be in forming communities that cooperate without the need for any form of coercion, whether that be the Baboon Poobah of the Sahara Twenty or the Constitution itself (yeah, that’s right … I went there). Then again, that’s just me, and I’m a bit of an optimist.

Irony is, many people who self-identify as atheists believe in UFO's, 2012, and other theories with the same amount of evidence as the existence of God. Ellen Degeneres was a big booster of The Secret, and I would venture that she and her audience are largely secular. Regardless, take note that when rumors swirl about that Dennis Kucinich claimed to have an epiphany upon making extraterrestrial contact, most were mute, but when Huckabee talks about Jesus, the sky is falling on rationality in America.

What has always struck me as odd (maybe I'm being disingenuous), is how no one ever points out the places in Europe where same sex marriage is still illegal. You have often pointed out that a real comparison of America to Europe must take into account that Europe's diversity among its countries is akin to ours in terms of the different states. So to compare a socially conservative state in the US to the Netherlands, then use the Netherlands as synecdoche for the entirety of Europe is absolutely absurd. Many liberals forget that many countries in Europe are still virtual Roman Catholic strongholds, and public homosexuality itself is rewarded with violence in the very places some of these Americans threatened to move to in the case of a McCain presidency. I would argue that the diversity of acceptance of homosexuality is about the equivalent as that of Europe's as a whole.

The "Gee Whiz" naivete in “I’ve come to expect that even nobly conceived laws will be manipulated and distorted for private ends. But once in a while I hear a story that gives me the queasy feeling that I’m nowhere near cynical enough.” leaves me at a loss. I suppose it is simply a biological impossibility for folks at The Nation to concede, even after such an epiphany, that such private manipulations of nobly conceived public policies are categorical to the nature of politics. A subsequent epiphany that such private manipulations would be rendered obsolete if there were a significantly less powerful political mechanism to be captured would require a level of deference to reality that the Nation, and certainly its readers have never entertained.

I am certainly no fan of Barack Obama, nor am I particularly enamored of his policies. On the contrary, I agree with most of your sentiments. But doesn't GM, or any private company make the proverbial deal with the Devil when it accepts any government largess voluntarily. I mean, once General Motors has taken federal cash, it agrees to federal terms. I may have missed something in the details of the news regarding this story, but I'd be curious to know your take on that aspect of it.

It seems that of all the politically important, nay, existentially important topics people could get impassioned over, THIS gets everyone the most steamed. And yet, of the lot, it is the one that is of no immediate threat. Of course, assuming the verity of the claims, it is a threat to our grandchildren, their children, and so forth. But to make the burden our descendants would shoulder due to the supposed collective faults of our generation cause for mitigating action requires the most reckless form of abstract thinking. If our greater concern is not prosperity in general, but rather the prosperity of our own grandchildren, then we might as well have not done away with primogeniture, as that system seems to cut to the quick of looking after hypothetical beings rather expeditiously. Why tax estates if the well being of the subsequent generations is of such importance to us? Why suddenly does a political constituency that could normally care less about offspring (in fact recoils at stories like the infamous Octomom), wax almost ecclesiastic about our children, and children's children. I personally am not in line to become a parent, but it seems to me that this abstract argument is the only way to breach the natural inclination of a human being to really only view life within the prism of his own existence. I think that's healthy to a certain extent.

And for the record, our great great grandkids will be just fine. And if they're not ... who cares ... we'll all be dead anyway. I mean, honestly, how many of the AGW, blog reading, cosmopolitan crowd out there actually believes in an afterlife.

Forgive me for taking this a moment from empiricism to the philosophical, to explain why Will's argument will never gain purchase in a larger cultural sense. Look no further than Joseph Campbell. Look no further than the fact that there have been and always will be about 1,000 different versions of "WALL-E" in Hollywood, whereas "Atlas Shrugged" will remain in development hell forever. Yes, I know, Randroids, etc. and all that noise, but I'm trying to illustrate a point - which is that certain narratives are ingrained in our collective subconscious. The idea that prosperity and in a more convoluted sense, technology as an extension of knowledge (think Prometheus) is inherently destructive is ancient, mythic, and perhaps permanently part of our values system, genetically speaking.

It requires a great leap of self-control and in a broader sense, evolution, to accept ideas anathema to hundreds of years of evolutionary conditioning to tribal welfare. Unfortunately, that very human characteristic - that one of viewing wealth and technological progress as frightening and socially dangerous - makes ideas which promote prosperity over stagnation, and progress over the status quo, tragically unattractive to the majority of shaved apes. I regard it as what the late Bob Ross would have called a "Happy Accident" of evolution, that capitalism has had as much success as it has, in spite of our evolutionary tendencies, as a great adaptation our species has made, whether we like it or not to the cruel inconveniences of existence.

True ... and as someone intimately familiar with the entertainment industry, I can say that when a genuinely funny or insightful criticism of liberalism is proposed, higher-ups scoff and forbear.

I was at something soppingly hip as an evening of improv at the Upright Citizen's Brigade (great observation ground for the Stuff White People Like crowd) in Hollywood, and one of the headliners of the evening was a comedian portraying a rich Republican senator from Ohio, who took questions from the crowd. That's the tired shit that passes for cosmopolitan political satire.

The flaw in the "media criticism" of Colbert and Stewart is that it disproportionately falls short of criticizing MSNBC as the other side of the coin to Fox too often. True, Stewart made a token attempt to shine a lantern on MSNBC's appearance as doppelganger to FNC, but he nevertheless fails to point out the glaring similarities between, for instance, Rachel Maddow vs. Pat Buchanan and Hannity vs. Colmes. Yes, it seems the commonly held wisdom is that liberal bias exists, but that it is the lesser of two evils, indeed a necessary evil if there ever was one. And so while Fox is viewed as a true malice to society, poisoning the synapses of every man, woman, and child, simultaneously eroding the pillars of freedom, knowledge, and truth, MSNBC is portrayed as nothing more than a hapless crew of ne'er-do-well's with the best of intentions and the worst of methods. What's missing in the "satire" is that neither MSNBC nor Fox, or any other cable news network for that matter comes from a place of truth, knowledge, or any particular attachment to real freedom. As I've said before, Stewart is an avowed socialist, and while I wouldn't begrudge a good artist his politics on any other day (Hemingway, Picasso, London, etc.), it seems this one has let his attachment to utopian schemes color his art like a maudlin Thomas Kincaid painting.

Sorry, it seems like straw men because I'm not exclusively referring to Stewart, but rather the dogpile that has accumulated on CNBC and Cramer in general. Andrew Sullivan has basically stated that these guys are responsible for what he's been calling the "depression" up until recently. I guess my judgment of Stewart making a point about this is clouded by the fact that I really place Stewart in the same category as every other huckster/pundit on cable or AM radio. I don't take him seriously, and even when one tries to distill a point from his comedy, glaring ignorance of crucial facts is evident. And while that certainly doesn't make your point about Cramer any less relevant, the whole spectacle seems more like two deceptive idiots arguing morals, and Stewart happens to be the home team. This is a man (Stewart) who kisses Evo Morales's ass when he's on the show, yet suddenly has an attack of virtue with a TV host who's Wall Street's Crazy Eddie.

This really strikes me as analogous to criticizing the mainstream marketing of games of chance, because degenerate gamblers bet their family savings and more often than not, lose everything. As someone who has spent quite a lot of time around Atlantic City, I am intimately acquainted with the depths of human depravity that is the result of another form of mainstream asset gambling. The fact that people aren't aware of the inherent risk in what CNBC's "advisers" urge them to do is besides the point, so is the fact that a network has grown out of this practice. There's also a network that would have us believe, if we were to take them at their word, that "History" includes solely the events of WWII, UFO sightings, and possible encounters with real live monsters.

Sure this might be bad. It's always bad when people engage in stupid, reckless behavior as regards their finances. It's also bad when people take advantage of that tendency to profit. But when a guy bets his kid's college fund on a prize fight, and it turns out the fight was fixed and he bet on the guy that took the dive, why is it we always blame the fixers first?

Valid point regarding CNBC and Wall Street. One thing has gotten me quite irritated though, and that is the assumption that advice is somehow tantamount to coercion - ipso facto CNBC's giving of bad financial advice amounts to the mass fleecing of Americans. I must have missed the civics lesson where we were taught that risky behavior is offset by the mitigating presence of professional daredevils who assure us to "come on in, the water's fine" and that the burden of risk is shifted to those that massage our less noble instincts. Moreover, it disgusts me that a huckster of a different kind is now vaunted as some kind of latter day Murrow (host of "living rooms of the stars") for scolding a guy whose crimes any rational human rightly conflates with those of Billy Mays.

We can all admit that this network, whose purpose it is to give investment advice and financial news, was wrong, and gave lousy advice. We can admit that many of the people who appear on the network are predatory douchebags. So are the owners of OTB franchises by the same logic. But to suggest that CNBC, in giving bad, predatory financial advice, is solely responsible for the bubble we've found ourselves in, and the subsequent losses many Americans have endured is hysterical and ridiculous. I personally, just as a matter of common sense, have never trusted the notion of rapid trading, and those who engage in it do so at their own risk. In laying the bulk of the blame on a Cable TV station for God's sake, that doesn't even command a competitive market share, we completely disavow individuals of their own responsibility for an inherently risky financial endeavor. We will always have the irresponsible, the gullible, the gamblers, the eager to make a fast buck. And we will always have the purveyors of snake oil, and the Jim Cramers.

I must say first that there are some simplifications that Loury makes in his statement, and I'm not entirely sure from whence, ideologically he comes, but much of what he says has some truth to it. While certain problems might simply be beyond our understanding as social engineers (even in the wide world of free markets), I do agree that the public school system is a huge part of the problem. In addition I think that the aspect Loury touches on, but I'm not sure he's specifically referring to in his lament over urban ghettification, is the fact that most urban centers, particularly on the east and west coasts (incidentally, the hubs of our media excrescences), have draconian restrictions on development and regulations such as rent control that create a de facto partitioning of the classes. San Francisco serves as an excellent example of a city whose policies of maintaining landmarks, prohibiting new development, etc. has led to an oft avoided fact of one of the most dangerous ghettos in the country with a crime rate that has exceeded that of the "pre-renaissance" days for the very reason that the middle class that once thrived there can no longer afford to live there. So called "Middle America" has a much more pro-growth attitude when it comes to land use, even when it comes to urban centers.

Virginia Postrel wrote a much more articulate explanation of this dichotomy, and lays out perhaps one of the best supporting arguments for the Red State Blue State divide I've heard so far. Well worth a read. Here's a quote:

"Dallas and Los Angeles represent two distinct models for successful American cities, which both reflect and reinforce different cultural and political attitudes. One model fosters a family-oriented, middle-class lifestyle—the proverbial home-centered “balanced life.” The other rewards highly productive, work-driven people with a yen for stimulating public activities, for arts venues, world-class universities, luxury shopping, restaurants that aren’t kid-friendly. One makes room for a wide range of incomes, offering most working people a comfortable life. The other, over time, becomes an enclave for the rich. Since day-to-day experience shapes people’s sense of what is typical and normal, these differences in turn lead to contrasting perceptions of economic and social reality. It’s easy to believe the middle class is vanishing when you live in Los Angeles, much harder in Dallas. These differences also reinforce different norms and values—different ideas of what it means to live a good life. Real estate may be as important as religion in explaining the infamous gap between red and blue states.

The Dallas model, prominent in the South and Southwest, sees a growing population as a sign of urban health. Cities liberally permit housing construction to accommodate new residents. The Los Angeles model, common on the West Coast and in the Northeast Corridor, discourages growth by limiting new housing. Instead of inviting newcomers, this approach rewards longtime residents with big capital gains and the political clout to block projects they don’t like. "

Whole thing well worth a read ... only two pages.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200711/housing

It's gotten to the point, quite frustratingly, that the reason the "We're all Keynesians (or if you ask Newsweek, Socialists) now" refrain is so tacitly accepted by the bien pensant, and almost everyone else, is almost entirely the result of rhetorical dishonesty and intellectual laziness. Of course, it was political posturing and outright deception to preach a free market philosophy from the bully pulpit for the last eight years, but it takes a special brand of media douchebag cum moron to take the GOP on their word over the last two terms. One can assume that the large majority of pundits and reporters on the right and left might not be able to draw you a demand curve if you asked, but they certainly all have Google and know how to use it, or at the very least know how to get to the library and inquire about this so-called "free market ideology". It either displays true willful ignorance of the very subjects these people cover, or conscious deception when Christ Matthews says that we got to where we were because of the laissez-faire policies of the Republicans. And the fact that many, including the self-professed intellectuals of this country, get their news from these people, is precisely why ... We're all Keynesians now.

On a slightly related note, when are we going to get to hear that Naomi Klein prebuttal!!!

What part of "rent-seeking" didn't you understand?

btw ... this gets to the meat of what I think is the fatal flaw in "Green" technology subsidies/legislation. We have no idea where the next technological innovation in energy will lead us. And when it does come, it may, to Laurie David's chagrin, not be a so-called clean energy. Who knows, we may discover a way to produce synthetic crude - inexhaustible carbon fuels. Use the existing infrastructure with a few tweaks, but supply with a new energy source. The only problem - it doesn't align with the rhetoric of cleanliness, the "addiction to oil" metaphor which brings to mind nothing more elegant than a bruised and foul-smelling waif turning tricks for the next fix sticks in the mind every time one fills up at the nearest 76.

I don't know if you are referring to the constantly evolving field of quantum physics, which at certain points has caused a few of Eintein's theories to fade into academic obsolescence, or the Nazis who rejected his science outright simply because he was a Jew. But in terms of Evolution by Natural Selection - this is a field that has do do with so many different disciplines from anthropology to archeology to cellular biology to genetics. There are certain aspects of Evolution which are theoretical, albeit highly credible in comparison to Young Earth Theory, and others which are in fact, VERIFIABLE IN A LABORATORY, such as those dealing with cells, bacteria, and the like. Generally if someone rejects an entire field, which consists of both theory and proven fact, it seems he is ignoring the complexities of the situation for other reasons. Likewise, if one equivocates deniers of a field who conflate testable hypotheses and theoretical anthropology and those who question the untestable assertions of an inherently unprovable hypothesis, I would say he is guilty of the same generalization that Evolution deniers are when they ignore the difference between "Darwinism" and "Evolutionary Biology".

In short ... it's apples and oranges.