Month: August 2011 Page 1 of 2

The basics

On August 27, 2011

To paraphrase many of the greatest religious and moral leaders, there is only one law: imagine you are in someone else’s shoes, then treat them as you would wish to be treated.

Or, put another way, act towards everyone as if you loved them.

The vast majority of political and economic commentary on this blog is commentary derived from those postulates. Note that they are postulates, they are judgments about how you should live. I can make a very strong argument that the more a society acts like this, the more everyone is happy, including the rich and powerful, but that’s not why you should act that way, as powerful arguments can be made for selfish and destructive self-interest. You should act that way because it’s the right thing to do, and you know it is, deep in your gut.

The problem in this sort of thinking comes with people who insist on acting selfish in ways that harms too many other people. You can try the Martin Luther King, Jesus, Buddha or Gandhi approach with them: love them. Try and help them. And you should. But sometimes that fails, as with Gandhi’s attempts with Hitler.

Then comes the time when force must be met with force, and evil met with evil. And the question then is how not to become that which you fight, how to, in Christopher Dawson’s words, “not become indistinguishable from the evil (you) fight”.

It’s a hard question, and it’s one that many people have struggled with. King acknowledged that the instinct to strike back violently was natural and he even acknowledged that not striking back had a psychological cost. Acting with love was medicine for the sickness of the white racist soul, and it had a cost for those who practiced it. He also acknowledged that if non-violence didn’t work, violence was better than acceptance.

I will submit that the answer lies in red lines. In actions you WILL NOT take no matter what. No torture, for example. No rape. No deliberate degradation of other people. When I hear those who believe in the greater good who want to torture other people, think prison rape is just or who like the idea of making other people crawl and beg, I know they have stared into the abyss too long. They aren’t necessarily indistinguishable from the evil they fight, but they are walking that path.

At the same time, an insistence on complete moral purity is a road to evil of another kind, it is the road that leads to a man like Robespierre. And a strange part of the route to this evil is a refusal to accept petty human failings (like adultery, for example). A refusal to see that a person who has once done wrong, may still do much good. A refusal to believe that those who have done evil, can be redeemed.

I will submit that what must not be tolerated is people who allow themselves to take pleasure in the pain or degradation of other people. What was wrong with George Bush Jr. was that he was a sadist, a man who enjoyed other people’s pain. And worse, he was not sickened by his own sadism, but embraced it, and saw it as his right.

The men who voted to end segregation in the US included many racists. They were racists who despised their own racism. None of us are free of evil, none of us, but we are free to decided how we will act and we are free to embrace our evil or despise it. We can’t always choose our evils, many are set while we are still young, others come out of the darker strands of human nature, but we are free to choose how we will react to our evil.

In this we come back to the maxim “if you aren’t good, just act good”. Character and personality are built up in part by habit. Kindness, generosity, love, are habits as much as anything else. Your mind is great at justifying whatever you do. Do evil and it will justify it, do good and it will justify that, and over time you will become a better person inside your head, inside your soul. Fake it till you make it.

Which leads to the matter of morals (how you act towards those you know) and ethics (how you act to those you don’t know). A person’s morals are not their ethics. Every time I hear some American politicians going on about how much his family is the most important thing in his life, I think “oh, so you’ll put your family before your responsibilities to your job? Towards the millions of people who you have a duty to?” And many of them do. Their families get jobs with donors, and those donors get bills passed, and the next thing you know millions of people have been hurt, because they put their family first. Or they worry about having more money to take care of their family, or leave their children, and they make sure tax policy favors people in their tax bracket. Or….

I don’t want a good family person at the cost of public service, and neither should you. I want someone who works as many hours as it takes, does what is right for the country, not their family interests, who puts people they’ve never met first. I want someone who is ethical, not moral. If they’re having an affair with their secretary, like FDR did, I just don’t care, and neither should you, if they’re doing a good job for the country.

All of this isn’t consistent, and it isn’t all coherent, but it is, I think, true. Live, love, fail, do it some more.

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Again, the absolute inability to consider obvious solutions

By Ian Welsh

On August 26, 2011

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The NYTimes on solutions to the scarcity of important drugs which are generic and thus of little interest to big pharma:

Beyond limited responses, like using the F.D.A.’s discretionary powers to expedite temporary imports of drugs that are sold overseas but not here, there are very few ways to ease the crisis. For the longer term, bipartisan bills in Congress would require drug makers to give the F.D.A. six months’ warning of problems that might disrupt supplies. For that to work, the penalties for noncompliance would need to be stiff.

Other proposals include a national stockpile of critically important drugs, incentives to encourage the manufacture of generic drugs, and broader powers and additional resources for the F.D.A. to head off looming shortages. Some, perhaps many, Congressional Republicans will inevitably oppose an expansion of the F.D.A.’s regulatory authority. This cannot and must not be a fight over ideology. For many Americans, it is a fight for their lives.

Why not either just have the government manufacture them, or force the firms to do it? There are more than a few ways to do so, including the war powers, act, I’m not even going to bother going into detail. This is an issue of will, not means.

We pretend our age is non-ideological, but it is so ideological it can’t even see its ideology. FDR or any president through Nixon, at least, and their Congresses, would have understood how to solve such a problem.

People are dying, but our leaders value the idea that the government shouldn’t do anything the private sector might do far more than they do the lives of their citizens.

RIP, Jack Layton, Federal New Democratic Party Leader

By Ian Welsh

On August 22, 2011

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If you haven’t heard, Jack died of cancer. I only saw him in person once, at a Toronto council meeting back when he was a city councilor, but he impressed me at the time as one of only three councilors who showed decent respect to the citizens giving testimony. I didn’t know then, and don’t know now, if it was savvy politics, genuine feeling, or both, but it felt like both.

Following politics closely, as I have, I have contempt for the majority of politicians, a contempt most of them have earned. Jack Layton is one of the few I respected. This is not because the NDP is the party in Canada whose ideology most closely approximates mine, I’ve had cordial contempt for most of the NDP’s federal leaders during my lifetime, it’s because Jack seemed to combine ability with a genuine calling to help people. He seemed to want to do the right thing, for the right reasons. That’s rare enough in everyday life, it’s beyond rare amongst experienced politicians.

Losing Layton is a big blow. It’s common to say things like “Canada is at a crossroads”, but this really is an era of crisis, and one where countries will be making choices which will determine how prosperous, free and equitable they are for generations. The current Conservative government is making choices which will cripple Canada economically, destroying much of what was built over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, making us into nothing more than a country which subsists on resources, a position which will leave us very subject to shocks, and as the Conservatives are implementing it, will make us more and more unequal.

The Liberals are not, unfortunately, a credible option. They, as with most “centrist” parties in the world today, simply want to go to hell on the slow road. Electing the NDP, then, is our only chance. They might not do the right things, but they are the only party which would even consider doing the right things. And Layton was a strong leader and one whom many Canadians genuinely liked. The nickname “Smiling Jack” started out derisive, but it became a term of affection.

I hope the NDP will elect another strong leader, and one with genuine beliefs he or she intends to put into action if elected Prime Minister. In the past the NDP has had a tendency to elect weak leaders who are aesthetically pleasing to the party’s constituents. Neither Canada nor the NDP can afford to make the leader a statement, the leader must be a leader, and must be able to lead the party effectively, both in the next election and as Prime Minister.

If there is an afterlife, I’m sure Jack’s still smiling. May he smile on all of us. I don’t normally offer condolences to public figure’s loved ones, but as Olivia Chow was one of the other three councilors in that Toronto council meeting all those years ago who impressed me, I offer her my best wishes.

Jack will be missed. But the best thing we can do in Jack’s memory is to continue his work, and make sure that the next government is NDP, and that once in government it does the right things.

RIP Jack. The torch has fallen from your hands, but you led us farther than any of us would have dreamed. It’s up to us now. You’d say it always was, and be right, but the world is genuinely better for you having lived. There is no higher praise, and few of your generation of politicians can say the same.

P.S. Layton may be the only Canadian politician in my lifetime who could say something like “Love is better than anger, hope is better than fear”, and have me believe he meant it. Because he actually lived his life that way and tried to help others live their lives that way. Honestly, he’s the first public figure who has died in my life where I’m actually sad.

The Next President of the US

By Ian Welsh

On August 15, 2011

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Not that my track record on Presidential predictions is all that good, but I’m laying odds it’s Rick Perry.

Unbelievable disrespect to a black man in Britain

By Ian Welsh

On August 15, 2011

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Watch. Seriously, watch it.

It’s hard to know what to say, because what I’m thinking is unprintable. Yeah, what a surprise that the riots occurred. What a surprise. And cracking down will make it worse, not better. This isn’t even close to over, and it will never be over while men or women like that interviewer are in any position of influence or power. (h/t Feminist Philosophers.)

Update: a friend points out the social reasons behind the insistence that any explanation is an excuse and that anyone who “excuses” the rioters must be immediately asked if they condone the riots as if explaining is the same thing as condoning.

The insistence on not allowing an explanation reminds me of Obama refusing to “play the blame game” with reference to the Bush administration and the shutting down of discourse around the 9/11 attacks. Any attempt to actually understand why something happened threaten the official narrative, and might cast blame blame on those in power. That can’t be allowed, so no explanation is allowed, only condemnation. (Ian note: Remember all the nonsense about how the 9/11 hijackers were cowards? They were many bad things, they weren’t cowards.)

Socially how the next 20 odd years will play out

By Ian Welsh

On August 13, 2011

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Ok, let’s get down to brass tacks. The riots in Britain are an important event, and combined with the decision to double down on austerity they tell us a lot. This is my baseline, loose model for the next generation.

The decision has been made by Cameron and society in general that the way to respond to the riots is to crack down, hard. They are sentencing people to long sentences for minor crimes (a year for stealing a bottle of water) and they are extending the punishment to families, kicking people out of housing if a member of their family was arrested. They are discussing cutting people off from social networks, and in Calfornia today the powers that be cut off cell phone service during an entirely non-violent protest.

The decision has been made to double down on repression. To extend repression to families, a logical extension of our socieity’s obsession with family as above all else, and a very aristocratic thing to do, which reeks on the 17th century. In terms of social media, Wikileaks was the bleeding edge of this, when Paypal, VISA and Mastercard cut off Wikileaks, despite them having been convicted of no crimes, it was clear that access to the modern economy would be held hostage for those who didn’t play the way the oligarchs wanted them to play.

Repression of this sort always spirals. Cut-offs from the internet, from cell phone use, from specific sites, will continue to spread. Sometimes they will be temporary and blanket. Sometimes they will hit individuals. Sometimes they will hit specific sites in specific areas. Access to the modern credit economy will continue to be used as a weapon. There will also be continued removal of the right to travel, with no-fly lists moving to trains, and later to bus stations and eventually there will be a ramp up of stops of automobiles.

This sort of stuff is easy to get around, right now, by anyone relatively bright and even slightly technologically savvy. So there will be a renewed, and successful push towards what might be called the biometric surveillance state. You will carry ID, your biometric data will be centrally located as well as stored on ID, and this data will be used to control what privileges you have access to (you have no rights.)

Meanwhile, on the other side of the equation, throwing youngsters into prison for very minor crimes is a mistake. It will harden them, and connect them. This is especially true in British prisons, because British prisoners are a hardened bunch of criminals. But it is a mistake no matter where, because in America and Britain, having ever be thrown in jail means your life is over. Every decent job does a criminal record check, and if you have a criminal record, you will never ever have a good job again. At that point you might as well become a criminal, and why not a revolutionary?

Which leads to the crackdown on hackers. Throwing young, bright, technically savvy young adults in with the criminal element is, again, a mistake. The rise of the surveillance state means that tech savvy is going to become very important to anyone who doesn’t want to live by what might be called “Society’s new rules”. And the young hackers have a revolutionary mindset. The combination of men with nothing to lose, with men who have tech skills and believe society is corrupt and needs to be brought down, will be explosive. And since the biometric security state will be done on the cheap, by the sort of incompetents who run the current wars and the current security apparatus, there will be plenty of cracks in the system to exploit.

Likewise the increase in punitive sentences is a mistake, pure and simple, because it means people have less to lose. If a relatively minor crime gets you in for years, and destroys your life, many will make the calculation that they might as well fight, might as well use violent force, rather than be taken.

Meanwhile the ranks of the permanently unemployed will swell. At this point companies simply don’t want to hire anyone who has been unemployed for longer than about 3 months, and have a strong preference for the currently employed. If you don’t find a new job in 3 months, you are probably never going to have a good job again. The data is clear on this, what is also clear is that the developed world has made a hard turn for austerity, one which will do damage for years to come. A decade is modestly optimistic.

This will increase social disorder, of course, and our lords and masters and the remnants of the middle and working class who scream “they’re criminals, pure and simple”, will double down on repression, again and again.

This is, of course, a big mistake. It may turn into a relatively stable solution set in some countries, but they won’t be places you want to live unless you have the morals of totalitarian, and in others it will lead to revolutions, while in others it will lead to outright failed states. We can hope that a few will turn aside from this path. So far in Europe only one country has, Iceland.

As with most of my predictions, folks will scoff at this one, think I’m hysterical, and doom-monger, and so on. But this is just social mechanics played out over time. This is the glide path, it can be stopped, but it is unlikely to be.

Hard and Complicated Aren’t Synonyms

By Ian Welsh

On August 12, 2011

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The chart above is my second favourite chart. It’s a chart of per capita health expenditures over the last forty odd years and what I want you to look at is Canada and the US. You’ll see that at one point Canada actually spent more per capita than the US, then over less than a decade our costs dived to about 2/3rds of yours and then started paralleling your costs again.

What happened in that time period is that we went to single payor universal health care. Since then our metrics have been as good, or better than the US, with the exception of waiting times for optional surgery.

Now this isn’t actually a post about healthcare, it’s about language.

Specifically I’m sick of the idea that “the US doesn’t have any simple problems.”

Actually, many of the US’s problems are simple, and health care is just one of them.

The problem is the use of simple as a synonym for easy; and hard as a synonym for complicated.

See, stopping smoking isn’t complicated. All you have to do is… not smoke. But it’s hard as dickens, which is why so many people fail to do it.

Now a lot of US problems are like this and health care is one of them. The US spends about 16% of its GDP on healthcare, clocking in at 2 trillion. Changing to a single payor universal system will slash about a third of that. Savings: about 650 billion dollars. Everyone knows this who isn’t paid not to know it – every other country in the world that has universal health care pays about a 1/3 or less than the US and when Canada switched, its costs dropped by a third.

This isn’t complicated. But it is hard. It’s hard for the same reason that quitting smoking is hard, or that losing weight is hard – that 650 billion dollars extra is something the US is addicted to. That money pays for jobs and profits at insurers, drug companies and to hospitals and to some doctors.

That’s a lot of money, and the people who are currently making a living, or a huge profit from it, don’t want to lose it. So they’ll fight tooth and nail to not end the gravy train. The 20% to 30% administrative margins in health insurance companies as opposed to the 2% to 3% margins in Medicare are money that someone is getting. The price is that 50% of bankruptcies are caused by medical costs; that 43 million Americans are unemployed and that American companies like Ford and GM have huge medical costs that companies like Toyota don’t have.

So it’s not complicated to fix US healthcare – just go to comprehensive healthcare, probably modeled after France or Germany (who do as well or better on practically every metric), and voila – no more uninsured, much fewer bankruptcies, improved competitiveness and 650 billion dollars in profit and administrative costs that could actually be used for productive enterprise. Hard, because a lot of people make a lot of money from the status quo. But not complicated.

The US has a lot of problems like this. The debt and the deficit can be fixed by simply increasing tax rates and closing loopholes. Raise marginal rates on the rich, who can definitely afford it, end preferences for unearned income (which is taxed at half or less the rate of your paycheck) and make it so that corporations and people are taxed at the highest applicable tax rate on all their income so they can’t try and hide some of it overseas and get a lower rate, and you’d be back on track.

Or – to put it even more simply, don’t spend more than you bring in. It’s simple, and the Bush administration, after the Clinton administration had put the budget back on track, simply decided to max out the credit cards to give the rich tax breaks.

Social Security – simply get rid of the cap on contributions at 100,000 and it’ll be in the black. Heck, even without doing that it’ll be decades before it can’t pay. This one isn’t even simple, it’s just “there is no problem”.

Prison Incarceration – the US has more people per capita in jail than any other nation, edging out Russia back at the turn of the century. This is largely a result of draconian anti-drug laws, yet drug consumption hasn’t gone down, indeed, quite the contrary. When you do something for 30+ years and it doesn’t work, the answer isn’t to do it harder, the answer is to stop doing it. Get rid of mandatory sentencing requirements, 3 strikes laws and stop putting people away for possession of any but the worst drugs. Legalize marijuana. Legalize most opiates. Legalize mild forms of coca so people can get their kick without crack or cocaine. The prison population will drop, drug use won’t go up significantly, and the steady assault on your civil liberties will slow down (the war on terror was just the war on drugs on crack, really.)

One could go on like this for quite a while, including in foreign policy (stop supporting authoritarian regimes because you’re scared of regimes with popular support) and economics (restructure the economy so that making things makes more money than playing securities games) and education (don’t tie school money to property taxes). The solutions in many cases are clear and they aren’t complicated. But they are hard because many people benefit from the way things are done now. But one shouldn’t confuse hard and complicated and one shouldn’t think that just because someone is mainlining pork today they have a right to mainline pork forever.

(One also shouldn’t confuse logistically complicated with conceptually complicated. We live in a society which is very very good at logistics. Walmart, FedEx, UPS, the US military and many other organizations are logistical wizzes.)

When I look at America what I see isn’t a nation with problems it can’t solve, instead what I see is a nation with problems it won’t solve and what I see is a lot of people to whom the status quo is really good (including most Congresscritters) who try and sell Americans that there’s nothing they can do.

Politics is about fixing problems. Anyone who tells you that simple problems are complicated and can’t be solved, but only managed, needs to be kicked out of office. Because the one thing I’ll tell you is this – problems you don’t actually try to fix, don’t get fixed. Losing weight is hard, but if you never try, you’ll never succeed.

Cutting health insurance companies and drug companies off the gravy train will be hard. But if you don’t do it, you’ll never have good universal healthcare.

Your choice really. America has everything it needs, still, to choose life and a renewal of the American dream. But I wonder if it will, or can. Every great nation has its period in the sun come to an end, and in almost every case, it’s internal rot that brings them down. America has renewed itself in the past, does it have the guts and the integrity left to renew itself one more time?

(This is a re-post of a post originally published May 14, 2007. Some minor changes have been made.)

The monopoly of violence and simple solutions to supposedly insoluble problems

By Ian Welsh

On August 11, 2011

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One of the interesting things happening in Britain is the formation of ad-hoc groups for neighbourhood defense. People have noticed that the police can’t defend them, and have decided to defend themselves.

This it is not a good thing for the State, which is why the police are strongly against it. This is potentially the beginning of the breakdown of the monopoly of state violence, and the beginning of the creation of militias. Normally, of course, I’d be aghast at the creation of militias. They lead to nasty sectarian strife, etc… and if they take off, that’s exactly what will happen.

But what they also are is a crack in the social contract between state and citizens, an acknowledgement that the State can’t defend its own ordinary people. And as you walk down this path, citizens start questioning their support for the State, period — whether in taxes, or in obedience to the State’s law.

Normally, again, this is a bad thing. Heck it’s a bad thing here, but just as with the riots it is a natural reaction to the current situation. When the State doesn’t do its job properly, whether that’s running the economy for everyone’s benefit, not just a few; or whether that’s maintaining the basic monopoly of violence (which includes basic social welfare so that the designated losers of the system don’t resort to uncontrollable violence), people start opting out.

States which don’t perform their basic functions become failed states. There are a lot of ways to get there, but one of them is to allow the highest inequality in the developed world to exist in your capital (sound familiar?). Those people lash out, you can’t repress them effectively anymore, others step up to do what should be your job.

Those who say there is no solution are, as usual, full of it. There is a solution, and it is obvious. Britain had plenty of money for the Iraq War, had and has plenty of money for Banker salaries and a housing bubble. A chunk of that money could have easily made sure this didn’t happen, but the choice was made to have rich bankers and bomb Muslims: those were Britain’s priorities.

But if you wanted to fix it, first you clamp down hard (you now have no choice, because you didn’t care about these people), then you offer them a future. You basically give everyone who wants a job, a job, put ex (or current) sergeants and corporals in charge, move any non-married men and women out of the city, and put them to work fixing and building things. There are always roads and buildings to be repaired, ditches to be dug, farmers who need help and so on. You hire out of work tradesmen, and they teach them skills. You pay them decently, you feed them, you house them, you give them skills. After 4 or 5 years, you start putting them back into the private work force, and you subsidize their first job.

This isn’t rocket science, it is dead obvious. Yes, it is expensive, but it is less expensive than the Iraq War or bankers bonuses. And it is a hundred times more humane, and will prevent further occurrences while improving race relations, your economy, your tax base and you workforce.

When people say there are no simple solutions they are, in the current context, almost always full of shit. What they mean is that there are no simple solutions which are socially acceptable either to the governing class or to society as a whole.