Any analysis of wages earned in prior decades and wages earned today needs to take into account the fact that a lot of non-white-males have entered the workforce. Still, these are troubling numbers from John Cassidy of The New Yorker: Median earnings for full-time, year-round male workers: 2010—$47,715; 1972—$47,550. That not a typo. In thirty-eight […]
Read more at Forbes.
I’m glad Will Wilkinson lives in Iowa. We are all winning the future because of it. For instance, Will happened to be in a diner with presidential hopeful, Rick Perry, recently, and snapped some video of an exchange between Mr. Perry and an Iowa grad student. You should read the whole thing, because it’s a decent little snapshot of the Texas governor. This passage in particular, describing Perry’s reaction to the question, is quite wonderful:
I enjoyed witnessing this fleeting, close-up moment of flesh-pressing campaign politicking. Mr Perry’s skillful exit from the exchange, his calmly assertive demeanour (note the way his initially attentive eyes narrow into a challenging "kiss off" grin, the way he presses his index finger softly into Mr Hjelm’s chest) and the folksy leavening of his denigrating parting shot, all suggest to me a seriously skilled retail politician whose swagger remains mostly charming even when he’s being an impatient prick. Meanwhile, Mr Hjelm’s question and his follow-up blog post reveal an emerging line of attack on Mr Perry from the most fervently small-government precincts of the tea-party right: Mr Perry is a big-spending, lobbyist-loving, Al Gore-supporting ex-Democrat who is all pork and no tricorne.
I find myself largely in agreement with Freddie’s list of first principles, in spite of our various political and economic disagreements. This is interesting to me, because Freddie is very much an economic leftist, and I am very much a free-marketeer.
But we both believe in a robust social safety net; we both believe that civil liberties are the cornerstone of – not just democracy – but of a flourishing human society; we both believe that a broadly non-interventionist foreign policy is the best policy for America and the world; we both believe in some form of Keynesian countercyclical economic policy; we both believe in worker’s rights, though I find myself more and more of the opinion that workers need to organize and stand up for their own rights without the express backing of the state, which has historically only hampered and hobbled unions. We both believe in progressive taxation, though we may disagree on the particulars.
Freddie’s last point is not so much a first principle as it is a jab at the president:
I finally believe, on a purely tactical level, that rewarding bad behavior inevitably reinforces that behavior and ensures that it will continue. I don’t open the door when my dog whines to come in; I wouldn’t give a child throwing a tantrum the toy he is asking for. Capitulation to terrible behavior sends the unmistakable message that terrible behavior is rewarded and should be repeated.
This last one is hard. It could be applied to A) big banks who did not deserve to be bailed out or B) many state governments who badly mismanaged their money or C) the Republican Party who did not deserve to be elected back into office after the eight years of disaster under George W Bush or D) countless pundits who helped steer us into the dark waters we’re in today. The list goes on and on.
What’s interesting to me is that I largely agree with just about everything Freddie says in this post, though I know we have many disagreements as well. Which puts me to the left of Barack Obama. At the same time, I’m a big advocate of deregulation and a hands-off approach to the economy. Deregulate healthcare, let markets work, get government out of the economy. This, as I noted yesterday, can make me sound like a rightwinger in the current American context.
…was like typo heaven. The sort of post where typos go when they die.
Matt Zwolinski has a really good piece up in the Daily Caller on why he’s a bleeding-heart libertarian, and why progressives should be more libertarian themselves. He lists seven reasons, and concludes:
[P]olitical disagreement does not always, or even usually, imply an irreconcilable conflict of fundamental values. Progressives and libertarians should realize that they share many more values in common than they probably think, and that their different political prescriptions are less the product of an epic battle of good vs. evil and more a function of reasonable disagreement regarding how to prioritize and realize their common goals. Even if disagreement persists, bearing this point in mind should make that disagreement a more civil and productive one.
It’s too bad, in a sense, that Matt didn’t get this published in The Nation or some other progressive outlet. But it’s a good liberaltarian piece, and you should read the whole thing.
See also, Steve Horwitz on libertarianism and power – a topic that’s gotten quite a lot of play in the comments at the main blog yesterday and today.
Commenter b-psycho writes:
Libertarians, vulgar or not, tend to talk a lot about property rights. What the vulgar ones, who unfortunately dominate mainstream discussion, fail to connect the dots on is that being consistent on property means that rent-seeking is equivalent to robbery — and that keeping that consistency demands seizing back the gains from it. Ironically for what "libertarianism" has come to mean publicly, you start poking around that whole property thing and you end up at a rather Left-wing conclusion.
So corporate rent seeking — hell, I would argue corporate status itself even — is theft, and all property claims arising from it are void. Conservatives don’t even think about this, as it would knock over the apple cart, and they worship apple carts. Thus far, the response on the part of liberals is to qualify and regulate corporatism, while taxing some of the proceeds to ameliorate conditions of the poor.
Well…here’s my idea:
Organize the working class, outside of the state, along the kind of lines previously introduced by the Wobblies (look it up if you have to). Don’t accept and qualify the corporatism, dismantle it and seize back the stolen property. "Class Warfare"? Yes, please.
The mainstream Left sees the problem, but insists on using as a solution the co-conspirators in the status quo. The most this leads to is bribing people to not revolt.
Or, in other words, pity-charity liberalism.
I think the alternative to the Class Warfare suggestion – the whole dismantling of the status quo – is to build alternative institutions outside of the status quo, and then wait patiently for those alternative institutions to work their quiet subterfuge.
Technology and open-source manufacturing and software and any number of other alternatives to the corporate status quo are beginning to pop up. I imagine we’ll gain more ground by adopting these over time, piecemeal, rather than any sort of massive organized class warfare.
I fully endorse this post from John Cole. This insanity has to stop, but it won’t. Not any time soon at least.
Via Conor, Gary Johnson answers the CNN GOP primary debate via Youtube:
It was wrong to exclude Johnson, however slim his chances might be. He’s a former governor with a successful track record and unique opinions on war and prohibition. The dinosaurs of network news are once again showing their age.
Matt is right about Pawlenty’s failure to distinguish himself from the pack. Also, Romney is taller and better looking than Pawlenty. You can’t underestimate how important this is to the electorate’s collective subconscious.
Taller candidates usually win. The only reason McCain beat out Romney the first time around is that…well honestly, I have no idea. Elections can be unpredictable affairs.
The only real threat to Romney at this point is Rick Perry. Alex is right to be concerned.
An idiosyncratic intellectual project of mine is trying to rescue classical liberalism’s good name from the clutches of contemporary libertarianism. A big issue here is that classical liberals were very concerned with binding resource constraints. In their day, that meant primarily arable land. John Locke, for example, famously noted that individual appropriation of land as property was legitimate “at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.”
The particular problem of arable land isn’t a big deal in a modern rich democracy. But the basic issue that individualistic solutions don’t work when you have binding resource constraints is applicable to a lot of modern day issues. The atmosphere has a finite ability to absorb carbon dioxide emissions before we hit some kind of devastating climate tipping point. It’s striking that seven of the world’s ten highest revenue firmsare in the oil business. And a huge share of the recent action in the high-tech space is intimately bound up with the finite quantity of radio spectrum. Tim Lee, who identifies as a libertarian but who I see eye to eye with a huge range of issues, has a thoughtful post about the application of these Lockean issues to the AT&T/T-Mobile merger.
Meanwhile, for the countervailing forces ledger note that the Communications Workers of America are strong proponents of the merger because AT&T is unionized and they think this will help them organize T-Mobile’s workers.
This is something of an idiosyncratic intellectual project of mine as well, though I haven’t settled on whether I’m trying to rescue classical liberalism from contemporary libertarianism or rescue liberalism from the clutches of technocratic progressivism. Maybe both.
It’s also quite possible that I’m just in it for the money.