John Hodgman, “That Is All“
I know better now than ever that wealth deranges.
It disconnects you from the world. It inflates your self-regard. It allows you to believe that four people congratulating you at your country club makes you a goddamn hero of America.
And it leads you to say things like former banker John A. Allison said in the article linked: “Instead of an attack on the 1 percent, let’s call it an attack on the very productive.”
Because of course, you non-millionaires are not productive, and not worthy.
I know this from experience: when wealth takes hold, the brain creates a new reality in order to explain your new fortune over the poor fortunes of others.
It is not enough to say, as some of these men do, “I am wealthy, and I got some lucky advantages, but I also worked really hard and found some opportunities, and I am proud of it.”
You must instead say: “my extreme wealth proves that I deserve to be wealthy, because I am better.”
This logical fallacy is the core of Social Darwinism, but you’d think after a while that Homo Robber Baronensis would have bred some thicker skin.
But it’s like no one around these rich and powerful men have ever called them a name or even disagreed with them!
Oh! That’s right: no one has. At least, not for a long time.
Noah Smith: “The liberty of local bullies“
Libertarianism – at least, its modern American manifestation – is not really about increasing liberty or freedom as an average person would define those terms. An ideal libertarian society would leave the vast majority of people feeling profoundly constrained in many ways. This is because the freedom of the individual can be curtailed not only by the government, but by a large variety of intermediate powers like work bosses, neighborhood associations, self-organized ethnic movements, organized religions, tough violent men, or social conventions. In a society such as ours, where the government maintains a nominal monopoly on the use of physical violence, there is plenty of room for people to be oppressed by such intermediate powers, whom I call “local bullies.”
The modern American libertarian ideology does not deal with the issue of local bullies. In the world envisioned by Nozick, Hayek, Rand, and other foundational thinkers of the movement, there are only two levels to society – the government (the “big bully”) and the individual. If your freedom is not being taken away by the biggest bully that exists, your freedom is not being taken away at all.
Robert Reich: “The Great Republican Crackup: How Angry, White, Southern Men Took Over the GOP and Made Our Government Into a War Zone“
This isn’t to say all Tea Partiers are white, Southern or rural Republicans – only that these characteristics define the epicenter of Tea Party Land.
And the views separating these Republicans from Republicans elsewhere mirror the split between self-described Tea Partiers and other Republicans.
In a poll of Republicans conducted for CNN last September, nearly six in ten who identified themselves with the Tea Party say global warming isn’t a proven fact; most other Republicans say it is.
Six in ten Tea Partiers say evolution is wrong; other Republicans are split on the issue. Tea Party Republicans are twice as likely as other Republicans to say abortion should be illegal in all circumstances, and half as likely to support gay marriage.
Tea Partiers are more vehement advocates of states’ rights than other Republicans. Six in ten Tea Partiers want to abolish the Department of Education; only one in five other Republicans do. And Tea Party Republicans worry more about the federal deficit than jobs, while other Republicans say reducing unemployment is more important than reducing the deficit.
In other words, the radical right wing of today’s GOP isn’t that much different from the social conservatives who began asserting themselves in the Party during the 1990s, and, before them, the “Willie Horton” conservatives of the 1980s, and, before them, Richard Nixon’s “silent majority.”
Through most of these years, though, the GOP managed to contain these white, mainly rural and mostly Southern, radicals. After all, many of them were still Democrats.
Ezra Klein: “On debt, the conventional wisdom vs. the markets“
In Washington, 2011 was all about dangers posed by America’s deficits. Republicans said deficit reduction was priority number one. Democrats mostly went along. But in the markets, the story was precisely the opposite. As Daniel Kruger reports in Bloomberg, demand for American debt was stronger in 2011 than in any year since 1995. It’s cheaper for the U.S. to finance its debt today than it was when we last had surpluses. For all that Washington is sure we’re borrowing too much, the signal from the markets is that we’re borrowing too little, that they wish we would borrow more. …
That’s a sad commentary on the state of the global economy. But it’s an incredible opportunity for us. It means that any investment with any positive rate of return is an investment worth making. Infrastructure clearly fits that bill. Not only is the likely return high, but if we don’t do it now, we’ll need to do it later, when our borrowing costs will be higher.
But the conventional wisdom — the wisdom that says the only responsible thing to do is cut — stands in our way. If we were going by the numbers, the path forward would be clear: Borrow now, when we can get money for free, when we have millions of unemployed Americans to put back to work, and when the economy is in desperate need of more demand.
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