If forcing Catholic hospitals to pay for "morally offensive" birth control is wrong, why is forcing me to pay for bombs and bullets, bombs and bullets that my religion holds are moral abominations, just fine and dandy?
- Badtux the Friendly Penguin
Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.
-- Badtux the Shorter Penguin
Funny how an entire long diatribe of mine can be summarized in one sentence, eh?
Let's say there's two substances, I'll call them RM and PM. The vendors of PM say that their stuff provides all the benefits of RM, but without the possibility of death. The vendors of RM say that their stuff isn't very dangerous, and provides some benefits that PM doesn't provide. Both provide scientific studies (paid for by the respective vendors) that "prove" their point.
Now, I'm not a scientist. How do I evaluate these claims and come to a reasonable conclusion? Oh wait, I know, I can *hire* some scientists! These hired scientists could look at the published studies and conduct their *own* studies, could perhaps look and find out exactly how many of the people who use RM die, vs. whether they're healthier in other ways than people who use PM. Because the scientists that I hire are not in the pay of either PM or RM, they are more likely to tell me the truth, instead of telling me what their employer wants them to say. But wait... I'm not rich. How can I afford to hire my own scientists?!
Wait, I know, I'll get together with a bunch of *other* people and we'll pool our money together to hire scientists! But... what if we find out that RM is killing children? We'd have to just publish our results for free, or else be complicit in the deaths of children. But if we have a moral duty to publish our results for free, what is the motivation to join our group to pay these scientists? I go to Joe Sixpack and ask him to toss in some money to help pay scientists, and Joe says he's kinda short, so he's just going to wait until we publish the results for free. I go to Droopy Dwarf and ask him to toss in some money to help pay scientists, he says he prefers using his money to buy gold and is going to just wait until we publish the results for free. Nobody wants to pay scientists because they all want someone *else* to pay for it, then they want to freeload! So at that point, I'm baffled -- clearly this scheme won't work if it's possible to freeload because everybody's going to want to freeload, but we can't say "we'll do the study but keep it secret" because if we find out that RM is killing children, then we'd be complicit in the deaths of children. If only there was some way to make everybody who benefits from the study pay for the study so that there's no freeloaders. That's the only way to make it happen. Now... what could we call such an organization? Oh wait.
Now, here's my question to the Libertarians: Given the freeloader problem that I mention above, where morally it cannot be justified to keep secret information that some substance is killing children, yet if we publish to everybody, nobody wants to pay... how do we fund this organization of independent scientists (let's call them the "Center for Disease Control" just to pick a name out of hat) without forcing everybody who benefits from their work -- which is *everybody* -- to pay for it? If taxation is slavery, are the deaths of children whose lives would be saved if we knew RM killed children just "collateral damage" in Libertopia? Because as much as I try, I can't figure out any way other than government to deal with the freeloader problem and get this study of whether RM is dangerous funded. I.e., every "libertarian" solution I come up with ends up with dead children (presuming RM is dangerous to children, which we'll presume for the purposes of this exercise). The only solution I can come up with that works for finding out that RM is dangerous to children is the liberal solution, where everybody is forced to pay taxes to get the study financed.
Next up: We join together and create a government and direct this government to collect taxes to pay for this study, and this government study then finds that RM is dangerous to children. What happens next? That's a subject for tomorrow's post...
-- Badtux the Basics Penguin
State and local public employees are unique in that they don't pay into Social Security, instead they pay into their state pension plan. The deal is simple: You put in your 30 years, you get to retire with a pension. This has three goals.
So the end game of attacking local and state pension funds is corruption. The more the grifter class can corrupt state and local governments, the more they can steal from us with scams and frauds that go unpunished. That's why state and local pension plans are square in their headlights right now... it's not about saving money, because eliminating these plans won't save money (because state and local governments will have to pay more for employees then -- just as the Federal government now has to pay more for employees than back in the 1970's, when many Federal workers made so little money that they qualified for food stamps). It's about enabling corruption. It's about allowing the grifters to ply their trade of scamming and defrauding people out of their money without having to worry about being indicted for their crimes.
And the grifter campaign seems to be working -- they've managed to convince large numbers of Americans that state and local pensions are "unsustainable". To quote JzB: WASF.
-- Badtux the Non-grifting Penguin
(*) Right-wing nutjobs are fond of saying that government workers are "overpaid" because the average government worker gets paid more than the average American. But the average government worker is college-educated and has years of experience in his or her job, and studies consistently show that at the state and local level, government workers generally make far less than they could make in private industry. Case in point: If I'd stayed in teaching, I would have 20 years experience now and be making $52,000 on the local teacher payscale. My current salary in private industry is, err, more than twice that. 'Nuff said.
Every time I go in to the DMV, the workers are professional, they're polite, they do their jobs competently, they get me fixed up and out of there without undue fuss and muss. The place is clearly understaffed for the job they do, but everybody I see is making do and getting the job done in a workmanlike manner.
Yet you listen to the right-wing assholes and DMV workers are lazy, rude, spend most of their time standing around gossiping, and treat the customers like crap. But I'll tell ya a secret about why there's such a difference between my experience at the DMV and the experience of right-wing assholes at the DMV. It's real simple. The right-wing assholes are ASSHOLES. And if you treat a DMV employee like shit, like these right-wing assholes do, they'll treat *you* like shit too -- they'll lose your paperwork, require you to leave and go get stuff certified, or simply disappear into a backroom somewhere and leave you standing there while they take a long-overdue coffee break. That's why right-wing assholes are always complaining about the DMV... because DMV workers deal with hundreds of people every day, they're doing a thankless job that has to be done, and they just don't have the time of day for assholes. You go in there with an attitude, you get one back. It's that simple.
But right-wing assholes never get the point that the problem is *them*, not the DMV. You'd think that they'd get a clue, but such a sense of unwarranted entitlement seems to preclude such a clue...
One of the things that I like best about working in private industry now rather than government, aside from the pay (which is five times more than I ever made as a government employee) is that I don't have to deal with assholes. If an asshole starts demanding things of me, I tell him to go fuck himself and get his ass out of my business. A government employee doesn't have that luxury, the whole point of being a public employee is that you gotta serve all the public, unlike a private business where you can refuse service to anybody who's an asshole. But that don't make public employees robots, yo. You treat them like shit, well. What the fuck do you expect anyhow, that they'll just bend over for ya and say "thank you sir, give me more"?!
-- Badtux the Former Government Worker Penguin
World Nut Daily has joined the right-wing pogrom against public employees by railing about public employees' "outrageous" pension plans. At which point I say to the folks whining about these "outrageous" pension plans, "are you going to give up your Social Security?"
The deal is that public employees, with the exception of federal employees hired in the past 25 years, do not get Social Security. Their pension from their state or local government is all they get. And the reason the pension funds are underfunded is because they got looted -- the money in them got "invested" into worthless securities that scammers assured them were as good as cash (said scammers being called "credit rating agencies" -- S&P, Moody's, and Fitch being the Big Three and still in business, still pulling the same scam with no repercussions). So let me get this straight. The pension funds got looted because the politicians let scammers steal all the funds out of them, and the employees should pay for that?! That ain't right.
So what's the deal with the right wing attacking public employee pensions? Well, it's part of their ongoing anarchist project to destroy the effectiveness of government so that corporations can further loot the country by taking on the former functions of government (setting up hydraulic empires in major sections of the economy to assert control over the people). And they get a lot of the white trash "spite vote" to go along with this because the white trash lost their pensions when all the good-paying industrial jobs left the country, and rather than ask "Why don't we get pensions at our place of employment?" they instead attack anybody who has more than them because, well, just because they're mean spiteful people, I guess. If not, they'd be going after the politicians who've allowed our good-paying jobs to be outsourced overseas... but, y'know, attacking the people who really did you harm is no fun, especially if you're too stupid to understand what those people have done to you. Far easier to just attack anybody who has more than you, to try to bring everybody else down to your level...
-- Badtux the Unspiteful Penguin
"I'm from the government, and I'm here to help you!"
The punchline, to the glibertarians, is that government never helps anybody. Well, except for the people whose houses would have burned down if not for firemen. And their children's teacher. And the librarian who helps them find information. And look, we gotta keep government outta our Social Security and Medicare, right?
The notion that, in a democracy, government is us apparently never even occurs to the glibertarians... they have a profound distrust of the very notion, feeling that the majority of people are cretins and morons who don't appreciate their unique genius and thus will burn them as witches or steal all their money or something. The fact that it's never happened in the history of the United States of America doesn't phase them, they terrify themselves with all these imaginary things that could happen, in a universe where unicorns are real and the majority of people are thugs.
Of course, the majority of people are not thugs. The majority is sometimes thoughtless, often careless, usually oblivious, but thugs they are not, which is why in Glibertopia, where there is no government and everybody defends their rights with their own personal stocks of nuclear weapons, a small minority of thugs would rule via terrorizing the non-thug reality. I've seen it in action in areas where thug rule has replaced government rule -- the majority of people there are not criminals, are not thugs, but are so terrified they won't even point out the thugs to the police so that the thugs can be arrested and taken off the streets. That's Libertopia -- the Bloods and Crips end up running everything. And because the majority of people are not thugs, a democracy is not prone to the sorts of things that glibertarians fear about "tyranny of the majority" and nonsense like that... the majority simply isn't thuggish enough to do that sort of thing.
At which point someone says "but... but... HITLER!" But Hitler never was elected by a majority of Germans. He basically forced himself into office with dirty tricks and the help of his brownshirted storm troopers, and cancelled elections and pronounced himself dictator as soon as he was in place.
So next time a Libertarian makes that "I'm from the government..." joke, make sure you correct him: "Why are you so terrified of yourself? This is a democracy, and you are the government." And if he pooh-poohs that notion, ask him which, of our leaders, were not elected by a majority of Americans in fair and free elections. (Hint: The answer is that every one of them -- every single one of the sorry bastards -- was elected by We The People, and, sad to say, is probably representative of the average American, sigh!).
Government. It's ours -- and if it' s not, it's our own damned faults for re-electing the same stupid-ass bastards time and time again, yo.
-- Badtux the Democratic Penguin
One of the irritating things about modern tax policy is how regressive it is -- rather than falling upon the rich, as property and income taxes do, modern taxes fall disproportionately upon the poor. The poor pay a larger percentage of their income as sales taxes than the rich do, for example, because the rich invest their money (tax-free in many cases) while the poor must spend (and be taxed on) every dime they earn just to survive.
Prop 21 continues this modern tradition. This establishes a $18 vehicle registration surcharge which will raise approximately $500M for the state's parks system, and in exchange Californians would be given free admission to the state's parks. The $18 surcharge for parks and recreation established by Prop 21 would be pocket change for me, but would be several hours of work (after taxes) for someone making minimum wage.
Still, with Prop 13 still fairly popular and not about to be repealed, what choice is there? Without more money, the California parks system, already in disrepair and crumbling for lack of money, is going to have to close altogether. Given that, I'm choosing the lesser of two evils and voting for Prop 21. Despite its clear issues -- such as not being inflation-adjusted so parks will be starved of money in the future -- it's still better than the alternative.
-- Badtux the Lesser-of-two-evils Penguin
The State of Virginia experienced a massive multi-day outage of almost all state computer systems due to contractor incompetence. Northrop-Grumman, the contractor, not only overcharged the State by approximately $2 billion for the IT infrastructure that failed, but did not even include system backups in the system design.
The reality is that the State of Virginia could have saved approximately $2 billion by simply hiring their own IT workers to design and implement the new network. Despite the ideological nonsense about how the free market can always do everything better than government, government employees are cheaper than contractors approximately 99.999999999% of the time -- they're willing to work for less than people with their experience and education would get in private business due to the better job security and benefits of government employment, and because they're eating their own dog food (i.e., their own paycheck is paid by the same IT system that they're designing), they have every incentive to get it right. It's the same reason why, when I was a government employee for a school district, my own curriculum materials that I designed myself for my own classroom were better than the materials developed by government contractors -- I had every incentive to get it right, because I was going to actually be using these materials. I wasn't doing it for a paycheck, I was doing it because I needed these materials and I needed them to be right.
So why didn't the State of Virginia simply hire the employees needed to implement and maintain the new network? Ideology. Simply ideology. Ideology says government is always more expensive than the free market -- despite the fact that in 99%+ of cases, contracting out a government-run function results in spending MORE money. Ideology, rather than pragmatic reality, drove this decision. That, and copious bribes from Northrop-Grumman to various Virginia politicians, of course. Oops, I forgot, they're not called "bribes", they're called "campaign contributions". My bad!
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
One of the things that has become clear recently, whether we're talking about regulation of Wall Street, regulation of deep sea oil drilling, regulation of coal mining, or whatever, is that federal regulators are now working for the companies they're regulating, not for We The People.
So why is that? Well, you can blame this on ole' Saint Ronnie Ray-gun again. In 1983, Reagan eliminated the Federal Retirement System for all new federal employees. New employees would pay into Social Security like everybody else, and then pay into a 401(k)-like plan, with the Federal Government providing some matching money.
There were two things that occurred because of this. The first is that the Federal Government had to start paying people more in order to come to work for the government. Much more. Federal employees today are paid salaries typical of private enterprise, whereas before Reagan did this, federal employees accepted less money up front in order to get more money on the back end when they retired with a federal pension.
The second thing is that the new system encourages corruption. Back in the days when you put in your 30 years and then retired with a federal pension for life, there was no percentage for corruption. If you accepted prostitutes and bribes from one of the companies you regulated, you would at the very least be fired, and then you'd be forfeiting your 30 year retirement benefits. But now if you're fired, you still have your Social Security benefits paid in, and you still have your 401(k) contents, and you can go to work for the company that gave you the bribe because you still know other people within the federal bureaucracy who might be bribable.
In short, eliminating the FRS a) made federal employees more expensive, and b) increased the incentive to accept bribes from the industries you regulate, or accept job offers from them in exchange for giving them what they want regulation-wise. Federal employees no longer have a reason to stay with the Federal government for the next 30 years, since there is no longer a pension waiting for them at the end of the line, so if someone offers a Federal employee a cushy job for the next few years if the Federal employee rules in favor of the company... well, there's no monetary reason to *not* do it. You're not giving up your federal pension, after all, because there *isn't* a federal pension...
So anyhow, that is why as the people covered under FRS have retired, and new employees have come in, that corruption in federal regulatory bodies has become rampant. Let that be a lesson to state and local governments planning on slashing their public employees retirement plans: That way leads to runaway corruption and higher personnel expenses overall. 'Nuff said.
-- Badtux the Pensionless Penguin
I am amused when I hear supposedly capitalists saying that "government is the problem, not the solution." Because if it were not for government, capitalism wouldn't exist at all.
Capitalism does not work sans government because power grows from the barrel of a gun, and without government, he who has the most wealth can buy the most guns and thus rules. The notion of everybody in a society getting together and pooling their wealth so that society as a whole is the party with the most guns and can thus regulate the wealthiest to keep them from running roughshod over everybody else is the only way for freedom to exist as anything other than a theoretical concept. Otherwise what you have is feudalism -- a few filthy rich warlords who control everything necessary for life at the point of their guns, and the rest of us, well, serfs.
In short, without this pooling of resources by the majority -- what we call government -- there is no such thing as freedom unless you happen to be the feudal warlord, and no such thing as capitalism since the feudal warlord simply seizes at gunpoint anything he wishes to seize. This isn't Communist theory. This is what has been actually observed in failed states such as Somalia in this reality, as vs. the fictional reality where Libertopians live where unicorns are real and cotton candy grows on trees. Chairman Mao may have had a different situation altogether in mind when he said "power grows from the barrel of a gun", and was in general an asshole, but even an asshole can occasionally stumble across Truth-with-a-capital-T.
- Badtux the Power Penguin
Juan Cole says that the Deepwater Horizon is not your fault because it's a case of regulatory capture, deep-pocket corporations buying legislation in their favor with campaign contributions. Thing is, as I've pointed out repeatedly, every one of those corrupt bastards in Congress or in your local legislature is there because the majority of Americans in their district or state voted for them. We don't live in a tyranny imposed by some evil dicator, we live in a democracy -- and keep voting for the most corrupt person, the person who accepts the most bribes err campaign contributions, despite the fact that it's destroying us as a nation.
Don't blame me, I voted for the hobbit in the California Democratic Presidential primary. He was the only one who refused to accept bribes err campaign contributions from corporate interests. Yet everybody else seems to have voted for the most corrupt candidates in the race, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Huh. Why is that?
I suppose it's because our campaigns have turned into mudfests where each side uses millions of dollars to smear the other side as un-American baby-molesters who probably bathe in the blood of 9 year old virgins every morning, but that only works because Americans let it work. If Americans simply ignored the mud-slinging, did their own research, and voted for the most honest candidate, we wouldn't have this regulatory capture problem. Yet they don't. They allow themselves to be swayed by the most laughable things, like the majority of Americans who voted for George W. Bush (or had no problem with him and thus stayed home) because "he's the kinda guy I'd like to go to a bar and lift a brew with." Nevermind that GWB didn't even drink. That's the mentality of the average American... they vote for an image, not for honesty, integrity, or substance. And there's nobody forcing Americans to do this. They do it because, well, just because they're Americans, fuck yeah, and nobody's gonna tell them they can't vote for Georgey Dry Drunk or Barry Hopey Changey just because Georgey is a draft-dodging moron and Barry is an empty speech-making suit, yo.
Compound this with the destruction Reagan did to our civil service, a destruction that the majority of Americans approved of because "federal employees shouldn't have better retirement options than the rest of us"... before Reagan destroyed the Federal Retirement System, federal employees were fairly honest because they intended to put in their 30 years and then take their FRS retirement, which would suffice to keep them in herring for the rest of their lives, and crooked companies couldn't influence them with bribery offers of cushy jobs if they ruled the company's way because, well, 30 years, dude, no job offer today outweighs the thought of putting in your 30 years and retiring and spending the rest of your life enjoying yourself. But when Reagan destroyed the FRS and instead put federal employees into Social Security and 401(k) plans, suddenly federal employees were bribable -- and they are.
Yet the majority of Americans still support cutting the pay of federal employees and still support cutting the retirement benefits of state and local employees, retirement benefits that are there to keep employees from being bribable. It seems Americans want something for nothing. They want honest bureaucrats, but they aren't willing to tax themselves for the pay and benefits that it takes to keep them honest. This was Reagan's great observation, that Americans want something for nothing and will vote for anybody who tells them they can have something for nothing, and as long as the majority of Americans are that way... yes, it *IS* your fault, America. You fucking morons.
-- Badtux the Moron-observin' Penguin
You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers, these are people of the land, the common clay of the new west. You know... morons. -- The Waco Kid, in Blazing Saddles
Because if we'd let the magic free market fairy (left) wave her (his?) magic wand and sprinkle free market magic fairy dust on the oil well, then BP would have run the platform more safely, so there!
What, you haven't heard about this? Well, you will, I'm sure. Because that's what believers in the free market fairy always do -- any failure of the free market isn't really caused by the fact that the free market, sans government intervention, rewards fraud and cutting corners on safety. Instead, they'll insist until their face is blue that it wasn't really the lack of government regulation that led to the fraud and to the cutting corners on safety, but, rather, too much regulation that led to the fraud and lack of safety! It's as if they live in some bizarro world planet where the sky is green, unicorns are pink, and cotton candy grows on trees... because the universe they describe certainly doesn't describe this world, where we have instance after instance where a lack of government regulation leads to unsafe meat, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities, oil well blowouts, etc. But then, reality has a liberal bias, so we can't bring reality into the discussion, right? Right?!
Folks, fairies aren't real. Well, except for the kind that march in gay pride parades, but they're not magical, and their magic wands do not sprinkle magic free market fairy dust when they wave their wands. They sprinkle something else entirely, something which George Alan Rekers is undoubtedly familiar with intimately, if ya get my drift...
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
The easiest thing to have done with health care would have been to simply issue a Medicare card to everybody with a Social Security card, then fund the whole thing with a payroll tax plus an equivalent tax on unearned income. We're spending the money on healthcare anyhow, it makes no sense to collect the money for healthcare in such an expensive and duplicative way as having health insurers duplicate the IRS's money collection mechanisms and Medicare's bill processing systems.
So why didn't Congress do it this way? Why did Congress create over 2,000 pages of kludges and workarounds to try to make the strange conglomeration of the Dutch, Swiss, and German systems that they came up with workable? Was it a conspiracy by insurers? Did the Trilateral Commission contact individual Congressmen and give them marching orders for how to create the New World Order? Did drug companies bend Congress into doing their bidding? Gosh, there's just so many conspiracy theories going around about why we have such an enormously complex health care bill that will only imperfectly cover most Americans, when the actual reason can be summed up in one word: Democracy.
Democracy is the notion that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard (H.L. Mencken), and this bill gives the common people what they want, in spades. Currently over 80% of Americans have health insurance either from private or public sources, the majority of those with health insurance have it via private sources, and over 90% of Americans who have private health insurance have it through their employer. Various non-partisan public health foundations, the most prominent being the Kaiser Family Foundation, set out in the aftermath of the blowup of the Clinton health plan to perform tracking polls to see what health care proposals are most popular. What they found was that the proposals that polled the best were proposals that combined a mandate on employers with subsidies for those who could not afford insurance and restrictions on insurers to keep them from kicking people out of the system. As in, roughly 70-80% support stable over more than a decade.
The single-payer alternative has never polled at even 60% even when polled as "Medicare For All", and generally rarely cracked 50% in the tracking polls. Since democracy is the notion that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard, our politicians then sat down to give us what we wanted, good and hard. And that, my friends, is that -- we got what we wanted, a system that largely keeps health insurance for working-age families in the hands of our employers, which thus required 2,000 pages of workarounds and kludges to sort of make it into a universal healthcare system if you squint hard enough. And which, of course, does include pieces of pork here and there on behalf of one special interest or another, but if you look carefully at the bill and at the fifteen years of tracking polls at the kff.org site, it's clear why it looks like what it looks like -- its core proposals are what polled best.
In short, there was no conspiracies involved here in the basic bones of what came out of Congress, it was very carefully crafted to include the policy proposals that polled best over the past fifteen years of tracking polls... along with a bunch of nasty kludges needed to make those proposals sort of workable (for example, the individual mandate, which is needed because otherwise the system goes into a death spiral). What happened to the simple notion of handing out a Medicare card at the same time a Social Security card is issued was something called "democracy", which is the worst of all possible forms of government save for all others that have been tried. So it goes.
- Badtux the Democracy Penguin
Now, you hear all these wingnuts nattering about how the Census is this vast conspiracy and they ain't gonna answer it and shit like that. And about how they're gonna defend their right to be an asshole cretin with those guns that they insist are gonna have to be taken out of their cold dead hands and yeah, they'll probably die, but then they'll be heros and shit.
Well you know what? It ain't gonna happen. You know why? Because the Census has other ways to get that info if you refuse to turn in your forms. First, a disclosure. I worked as a Census enumerator in the summer of 1995, when the Census was testing out the forms and procedures it'd use in the 2000 Census. Now, what was I trained to do when someone refused to fill in their form and wouldn't answer questions about who was living in the house? Well, first thing I did was go to the county courthouse and pull the property records for the house and see whether the person who paid property tax lived at the house, or was somewhere else. If somewhere else, I then contacted that person, likely the landlord, and asked who was living in the house on April 1 1995 along with who their kids and/or spouses were, and generally got all the info I needed. If the person who owned the house lived there, I still wasn't SOL. I was then trained to go to the neighbors and ask'em about Joe Schmuck, sayin' something along the lines of, "hey, we're trying to count everybody in the county so that we can get more of our money back from Washington, I've been having a hard time getting ahold of Joe Schmuck to find out who all was livin' there on April 1, do y'all know who was livin' there?" And I'd talk to'em about Joe Schmuck, get any info I could get about relatives or employers or whatever so that I could contact *them* for info if Joe still refused to talk to me. And then if, and only if, I couldn't get any info, *then* I turned Joe Schmuck in to my supervisor, who then could get info from the Social Security Administration and IRS and so forth on Joe Schmuck and Joe's family using some sorta court order shit they have set up for that kinda thing, but I only had to do that *once* in all the time I was taking Census. Otherwise, I always got my man, woman, and child.
Point bein', the government's gonna get all your info anyhow, and you ain't gonna get hauled outta your house by jackbooted thugs if you don't answer the damned thing. All you do if you don't fill out your Census form is annoy your neighbors and relatives and maybe your employer and make the Census Bureau spend more of your money digging that shit out of all the government records they already got. And it ain't as if the questions on the form are anything real intrusive anyhow, crap, as I pointed out yesterday, even the 1850 Census asked more questions than the 2010 Census. So you might as well just fill in the friggin' form and dump it in the mail, sheesh!
- Badtux the Practical Penguin
One of the interesting things that hard-core Glibertarians will say to you, when you mention the public order / public safety / national defense justification for having government, is "I don't need government to protect me, I have my guns!"
Let's do a little thought experiment, why don't we? First of all, let's identify when a gun is useful:
So why doesn't this happen more in real life, you say? Well, actually, it does -- every evening, around the country, there are thugs breaking into homes with the purpose of making the inhabitants of that home either dead or harmless. Except they're called "police officers", and they're arresting *other* thugs. We as a society hire a lot of the violent types and put them to work for us policing the rest of the violent types and protecting us from them. Second of all, the majority of the worst of the violent types, the most amoral killers, are either in prison or refrain from excessive violence because they don't wish to go to prison. In short, the deterrent effect of having police officers and prisons is what keeps most of us safe at night despite the fact that if anybody really wanted to take us out, we'd be dead.
So what would happen if we did not have our own thugs and prisons to take care of other thugs? Well, then thugs would rule the world. They'd go anywhere they wanted to go, kill anybody they wanted to kill, take anything they wanted to take, and if you objected, you would be dead because they're amoral killers who identify *everybody* as someone they want to kill and thus will never hesitate, while you waste precious moments trying to figure out that this guy wants to kill you rather than being the harmless meter reader he's dressed as. Why do we know this is what happens? Because it's what has happened everywhere that government has failed -- Somalia, Afghanistan, the tribal areas of Pakistan, all of them are thugocracies where the majority are cowed and victimized by a vicious and violent minority. You, as an individual, have about as much chance of stopping The Taliban as a mosquito has of stopping an elephant.
But, you say, let's form some voluntary organizations to hire our own thugs! Well, okay. Let's say that everybody in my neighborhood joins together to hire some security guards to protect us from those OTHER thugs out there. So far, so good. But what if someone in my neighborhood doesn't want to pay his part of paying for those security guards? He's free-loading off of the rest of us -- he's getting security for his home, but WE are paying for it!
So what is the Libertarian answer here? Apparently, to say "can't happen! Never happens! yada yada yada!" But my dad was manager of a townhouse complex for a while, and I'll tell you this, it *does* happen, and is prevalent. Mr. Grouch says, "I don't think we need security guards so I'm not going to pay." Or, "I don't use the pool, so I'm not going to pay" -- even though having a pool in the complex makes his house more valuable. And you can't exactly move his house to *outside* the secured perimeter, so he's getting free security AND free benefit to his property values from having a pool in the complex!
In short, we've run into the fundamental problem with libertarianism: the FREELOADER problem. The other people in the complex will get tired of paying for freeloaders, and more and more of them will refuse to pay, until eventually the few still paying for the security guards give up because they can't afford it anymore, nobody pays, and the thugs just march right in and turn everybody into their own personal slaves. Only something that we can call GOVERNMENT that says, "No freeloaders, if you refuse to pay we'll seize your home at a tax auction and sell it to someone who WILL pay" handles the freeloader problem.
And what is the Libertarian answer to the freeloader problem? Apparently, from what I've encountered, to stick their hands over their ears, their second pair of hands over their eyes, and shout at the top of their lungs "I see nothing! I hear nothing! It doesn't exist, lalalalala!" Apparently the Libertarian answer to the freeloader problem is to move to some alternate universe where unicorns are real and cotton candy grows on trees and human beings are perfect. It's the same universe as the hardcore Marxists, in other words, a universe where human beings are perfect and do not behave the way real life humans in this universe behave.
In the end, Libertarians and Marxists are fellow travelers -- utopians whose philosophies have failed everywhere they've ever been tried because they do not take into account the actual nature of humanity: hairless apes, monkeys with delusions of grandeur, with all the vices you'd expect from monkeys such as a propensity to fling poo, selfishness, an inability to cooperate except insofar as led by an alpha male, and a willingness to follow that alpha male regardless of what he leads them into. Monkeys. That's all human beings are. Marxists and Libertarians pretend that humans somehow can transcend a million years of evolution and become perfect. That, in the end, is why Marxist and Libertarian theories have failed wherever tried -- reality simply is, and can't just be wished away by pretending.
- Badtux the Realist Penguin
So let's talk about "conventional wisdom". What you find, looking at the data, is that "conventional wisdom" typically is nothing of the sort. It's passed-down superstitions and talking points with no basis in fact, no supporting data, no reality.
So let's look at Nathan's "conventional wisdom" from my post on unemployment below:
Instead of lasering in on unemployment as the lone bogeyman, I think we should look at the entire basket of problems.The problem is that employment is necessary in order for people to consume, and consumption is necessary in order to employ people. Hmm, circular relationship there, right? But in any event, if we're going to wean the economy off of government intervention, clearly focusing on employment is the way to do that, because only increasing employment can increase consumption enough to remove government from the role of "consumer of last resort".
1. we need to deleverage the economy and get back to saner levels of personal and savings,Indeed, and that is happening. That is the cause of the problems with the banks and deflation, deleveraging by definition decreases the money supply via increasing the effective reserve ratio of the banking system (see: fractional reserve banking). The problem with deflation is that past debts are unpayable with today's lower incomes caused by deflation, causing more defaults, more bank failures, more deflation, wash, rinse, repeat. In short, while deleveraging is necessary, the deflation caused by deleveraging is harmful and must be addressed via monetary expansionary efforts, which are ineffective when we are in liquidity trap territory because any printed money just goes under mattresses because it will be worth more later (as the currency in circulation further deflates). Thus the requirement for fiscal stimulus and deficit spending to draw that money out from under mattresses and put it to use, otherwise the freshly-printed money would just disappear under mattresses where it does nothing to foster employment and investment -- just as what happened in Japan during the 1990's, causing their 'lost decade'.
2. we need to own more of our debt as a nation.As long as the debt is owed in dollars that is irrelevant. If China was so stupid as to call in their debt, we'd simply print dollars (by issuing new debt that was purchased by the Federal Reserve with freshly printed dollars) and give them to the Chinese and say "okay, here you go!". If we wanted to be *really* mean, we'd deliver it as freshly printed bales of $100 bills, and let the Chinese figure out the logistics of how to get several freighters full of cash from the wharfs in Oakland to Beijing ;).
3. the trend toward higher spending has no end in sight. Is government spending the only hammer in your tool box?Utter nonsense. We are using government right now as consumer of last resort to provide consumption necessary for full employment. We need full employment in order to prevent the sort of human misery that results in social disorder, violence, and the breakdown of society -- people do *not* voluntarily starve to death. Once employment is on the rebound the amount of government consumption can -- and will -- be reduced because rising prices as economic activity causes a resumption of lending and thus decrease in effective reserve ratio and thus inflation will naturally shift resources away from fixed-price government contracts back into the free market (i.e., $1 of government money will no longer buy as much). We have equations on how this happens that have accurately described this behavior during past recessions. We don't need speculation, talking points, or "common wisdom" here, we have data.
4. everyone knows the phrase "no pain no gain",Talking point and "common wisdom" borrowed from the sports world that is actually contradicted by facts. What exercise physiologists have discovered is that if you are in actual pain while training for an athletic event (as vs. mild discomfort), you are overtraining. Athletes who train to the point of pain perform more poorly in athletic events than athletes who train to the point of mild discomfort. In short, "no pain no gain" has been utterly discredited and refuted by science -- if you have pain, what that means is that you're causing muscle breakdown, and muscle breakdown is *never* good if you're trying for optimal muscle performance.
As is true for physiology, so is true for economies. Unemployment beyond the amount needed in order to keep human resources mobile is *never* good. Mild discomfort (i.e., unemployment around 5-6%) can be good for an economy because it allows the economy to shift resources around to what's most in demand, but once you pass into actual pain, you are contributing to the sort of deflationary cycle that is not solvable via pure capitalism.
Blessing like belt tightening, going back to school, providing venues for humility and charity, focusing on what in important in life, *a smaller carbon foot print!*, slowing the pace of urban sprawl, and restructuring society for future sustainable growth.Some of these are undoubtedly good things. But people do not willingly starve to death. Real unemployment is now somewhere around 20%, and those people are starting to run out of resources as food pantries and soup kitchens become overwhelmed and run out of food and family and friends become overwhelmed and unable to provide further support to the unemployed. They will do whatever it takes -- WHATEVER it takes -- in order to avoid starving to death. We will need some sort of government intervention here because capitalism has no -- zero -- mechanisms for solving the problem other than "let them eat cake", and that works no better today than it did during the time of Marie Antoinette. The French Revolution was a disaster not only for the French aristocracy (who all lost their heads -- literally), but for the people of France, since it led to the rise of the despot Napoleon and the death of probably 25% of adult Frenchmen in Napoleon's endless wars of conquest. I think we need to avoid that example, thank you very much. If it means that I'm going to be taxed a few percent higher in order to provide food stamps to people currently not eligible for food stamps, well, so it goes. Better that than lose my head (literally).
Come on people, look at this thing holistically. I don't buy that the end of the word is nigh if we don't spend 2 more trillion. Let's start taking our lumps and quit whining.Who's whining? I'm talking about facts here. The fact is that without serious intervention in the economy, we are going into a deflationary spiral that will result in the collapse of capitalism much as happened multiple times during the 1800's and almost happened in 1932. If capitalism collapses unemployment is likely to peak at around 50% before things start getting better, and the only reason they'll get better is because America and Americans will be so impoverished by then that we'll be living like the Mexico City garbage dump inhabitants who survive by scavenging rotting banana peels and such from the piles of reeking garbage, i.e. they'll get better because it will be impossible to get worse.
We do not live in the agrarian nation of the 1850's, and we cannot survive severe depressions and the collapse of capitalism today by hunkering down on our farms and growing our own food. In the 1850's it didn't matter if capitalism failed for a while and reduced the economy to a barter economy for a few years. But we don't live in that world anymore. For better or for worse we hitched our horse to capitalism, and if capitalism fails today, the suffering -- and outright death toll -- would be horrific. What that means is that we have to do whatever it takes to keep capitalism from collapsing, and the first thing that has to be done is prevent a deflationary spiral, which means we have to figure out some way to get that $2T of disappeared dollars back into the economy -- and circulating, NOT under mattresses, where it's useful for nothing other than mattress stuffing. Since capitalism has no mechanism to do this, we are, by default, stuck with government doing it. If you have some other mechanism in mind, tell us.
-- Badtux the Economics Penguin
This penguin took a nice little 4 hour hike today that turned into a 6 hour hike. The reason? It's *hot* here in Sodom By The Bay. As in, when I cranked my Jeep to come home, the thermometer said 102F (granted, that's because the Jeep was sittin' in the sun, but so was I!). And that was at 2800 feet elevation in the coast mountains!
So anyhow, heat slows me down quite a bit, since getting rid of heat is kinda hard for me. I end up taking my time, not blasting away, in order to keep from overheating. And of course drink water and Gatorade powder. 3 liters lasted the whole trip thankfully.
So anyhow, I'm tired. I'll leave you with this thought: Democracy is 10 wolves and 10,000 sheep voting on what's for dinner (since most of the American people are sheep, baaaa!). Learn to like eating grass.
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
In a democracy, government is *US*. You and me. Not some foreign imposition upon us from outside. Not some alien invasion sucking our life-blood out. Government is We The People, you and I gathered together to provide for ourselves whatever services the free market for some reason will not or cannot provide us, services such as roads, public safety, or whatever else We The People decide needs be done collectively as a people rather than individually.
This is not some new concept. To quote some dead commie leftist: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. And to quote another dead commie leftist: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. It is clear that these dead commie leftists believed that the purpose of government was to serve We The People -- all of us gathered together to tax ourselves and provide for ourselves what is necessary for defense of liberty and defense of life.
And of course, health care is one of those things. It wouldn't have occurred to the Founders to write health care into the Constitution because health care technology then was razors and leeches, neither of which is particularly expensive or requires a significant amount of society's resources to purchase. They did write post offices and highways into the Constitution, because they already had experience showing that private postal services and private highways did not serve the general welfare. But it is clear that if they had known that health care technology could advance to the point that 16% of the nation's GDP was going to health care, they would have had no problem with writing health care into the Constitution as one of the powers granted to government. Thomas Jefferson did not say that the Creator granted the right to life to only RICH people, after all. TJ said the Creator granted the right to life to ALL people. Not just those who can afford health insurance. Similarly, James Madison did not say that the purpose of government was to promote the general welfare -- the health and safety -- of only RICH people. He said that the purpose of our government was to promote the general welfare of We The People -- *all* of us.
So anyhow: That's democracy. And if we don't have democracy, we need to vote the bums out and vote new ones in -- ever single one of the bastards in Congress is there because somebody voted for them. That's the mechanism embedded in our Constitution for having revolutions, and it's happened twice in my very own lifetime, first when Ronnie Raygun came in with the Reagan Revolution that completely changed what the nation thought about the role and duties of government, and now, maybe, the Obama Revolution (but we'll have to see, neh?). We -- you and I -- have the ultimate power. We -- you and I -- have the power to show the bums to the door if they do not respect the wishes of We The People for universal healthcare for all Americans. The only question is, will we use this power? Or will we just continue being anesthetized sheeple bleating whatever our Party commissars tell is to bleat, regardless of whether it's in our best interests or not? Time will tell, hmm?
-- Badtux the Democracy Penguin
From the San Francisco Chronicle, we learn of the case of Lina Manglicmot, a nurse at the State of California's Correctional Training Facility whose base salary was $108,807 and who made $198,363 in overtime pay in 2007. I.e., she made over $300,000 in 2007. Now, where have you ever seen a nurse making $300 large for working in a training facility where she is presumably is teaching other nurses how to be nurses? Clearly this is a case of extravagant spending by the state.
Well, until you look at the actual data. The Correctional Training Facility is actually a prison located over an hour's drive from the nearest major metropolitan area, housing Level I (minimum security) through Level III (medium security) prisoners. The only "training" done there is training prisoners how to stamp license plates, pick up trash by the side of the road, and do laundry. And the Department of Corrections is under court order right now to provide a certain amount of nursing care to its prisons, and Lina Manglicmot is a named party in the lawsuit Bolling v. Curry et al. In other words, she is a nursing supervisor / registered nurse and under court order to work this many hours of overtime covering shifts where no other nurse can be found. And it's damnably hard to find nurses willing to work in a prison way out in the boondocks.
The root cause of all this is the fact that California sends so many people to prison for life for stupid reasons like stealing a candybar or a package of Hostess donuts, causing a doubling of the prison population without a doubling of the budget for prison medical care. Which wouldn't be a problem, except those pesky activist judges seem to be a bit crotchety about giving the death penalty (via denial of medical care) for stealing a candy bar. Something about the Bill of Rights, the Tenth Amendment, and how it bans "cruel and unusual punishments", which apparently they consider the death penalty for stealing a candybar to be. So this particular case is a case where the court ordered the spending, not something you can blame on the person working all that friggin' overtime (man, how does she have a *life* with all that overtime?! I bet she must be only a few years from her pension, otherwise she would have quit long before now). The curious case of the overpaid nurse turns out to have a very simple answer: The judge dunnit. So much for the "extravagant spending" canard...
-- Badtux the Nursing Penguin
