Getting to the Top Line

The dirty secrets bag of tax reform is finally being opened for just a little peek inside, and one of the major taboo subjects is slipping out.  The now discussable (though possibly not yet actionable) secret of just what is included or not included in that little line marked “Adjusted Gross Income” is being revealed in a variety of ways.  A lot of blather is going on about general tax rates and deductions, but those things mostly affect only what is entered on that “AGI” line.  The very rich do not need many tax deductions and general tax rates to them are almost a matter of indifference, because much of their income does not make it to that AGI line in the first place.  Millions of dollars of income, often the majority for the wealthy, disappears without ever making it there.  I first was sensitized to that about 50 years ago, when I learned the esoteric trivium that tax differed on turpentine producers depending on whether the tree from which pine resin was drawn was alive or dead.  There was an exclusion from taxable income for one or the other (I forget which) because it affected the personal income of Senator Russell Long of Louisiana, the author of that particular piece of legislation.  That of course was not even the toe nail of the camel in the tent.

Larry Summers, the former Treasury Secretary, Economic Adviser, Harvard President, etc., rats on his fellow wealthy elites by listing in a recent Washington Post column some of the more conspicuous secrets of hiding income available to the very wealthy.  For example, valuation practices in the tax code make investment partners able to end up with over $50 million in untaxed IRA’s, limited for the rest of us to a $5,000 annual contribution.  Only 1 billion in tax dollars is raised from the 1.2 trillion passed through inheritance and gift each year, a less than 1 percent rate.  “Like kind exchanges” (which are really sales of large  properties) by real estate investment operators are excluded from capital gains taxes,  this after the investors have already received depreciation allowances for appreciated property values unavailable to most home owners.  And wealthy investors and companies can shield most of their income by causing it to appear in low-tax jurisdictions like Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Ireland, etc.

Ray Madoff of the Boston College Law School points out that much of the income of the wealthy is not even required to be reported to the IRS, much less taxed. Aside from the inheritances and gifts cited by Summers, Madoff’s list includes payouts from trusts and distributions from life insurance.  It is the kind of exclusions from income listed by Summers and Madoff (and there are many, many more) that make the taxable income of the wealthy so much less than their true gross income that taxing what shows up on the tax form is often only a trivial exercise.

We live in such separate bubbles these days, aware only in minimal ways of the lives of those far up or down the socioeconomic scale from us.  Few of us know what it’s like to live on food stamps, even for a week, or the life that can be led when virtually all income is sheltered not only from taxation, but from any societal responsibility at all.  One of our societal shames is the sense many of the wealthy have that their wealth must remain hidden.  It can only come from a sense of shame, whether admitted or not, that they receive far more from society than they contribute. 

One thing that should unite us is visibility across the tax systems sufficient to know that loads are being borne fairly.  It is part of the glue that holds us together.  That we no longer have.  Summers and Madoff are right in their insistence that true tax reform will require a more open and visible income reporting system.  Any citizen receiving the benefits of our society should be responsible enough not to hide what he or she takes and contributes in relationship to that done by others.  We have lost something worthwhile since the days when Socrates, after receiving an unfair death sentence, refused the opportunity for exile instead, on the grounds that, having accepted the benefits of citizenship, he was obligated to accept its adverse actions as well.  Nothing like a death sentence, only reasonable disclosure and fair taxation is being asked of us today.  The time for dirty secrets should be gone.

George Will and the Christmas Spirit

It’s time again to wish George Will a handsome glass of syllabub and the Christmas Spirit.  Poor George, he needs them so very much!  One detects this, because as the Great Holiday approaches he becomes more and more incoherent in his rages against health reform, unions, the Welfare State, universal suffrage, and all other symbols of unrestricted peace and love.  Bah, humbug, have the poor no poorhouses to go to?  This year his incoherence particularly targets unions and unrestricted voting, hateful reminders of the latent capacity of the poor to upset, through sheer numbers, the blissful profit counting of the rich.  Perhaps he senses the unsettling approach of Marley.

He rails against unions for their “frenzy against freedom”, labeling them grandly as “the enemies of freedom”, and celebrates Michigan’s new “Right to Work” law.  In the interest of his cherished freedom of opinion, he cheers for the decline of the unions (is there some contradiction there, George?), and celebrates the loss of union membership (made possible though the layoffs initiated because of the recession brought on by the excesses of the wealthy.)  Others have already spotted his misuse, in his own frenzy, of Jefferson’s celebrated defense of the right to hold one’s own RELIGIOUS opinion and not support through taxes the RELIGIOUS views of others to argue for the right of non-union workers not to pay union dues. George’s frenzy did not prevent him from careful deletion of the word “religious” from the quote.  Subsequent reprints of that column have also carefully neglected to include the misused quote.  And of course, as a devoted studier of Supreme Court decisions, George should have noted, but did not, the distinction between the unrestricted freedom of opinion and carefully regulated freedom of action.  In right to work laws, the issue under debate is not opinion, but the “free loading” of non-union workers who receive the benefits gained through collective bargaining without paying for them, thereby creating their own little welfare state.  In that perspective, right to work laws are very close to the antithesis of the Jamestown Colony’s “If you don’t work, you don’t eat”.  I’m sure George’s fellow princes of capitalism would welcome the voluntary rejection of higher pay and benefits by such principled workers.

Again in his pre-Christmas frenzy, though, George failed to note the unions’ perhaps greatest attack against freedom. For as Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel-laureate economist, notes, it is unions that provide a major counter-force against corporate managers’ freedom to set their own excessive salary increases while simultaneously laying off thousands of workers.  Corporate boards of directors have long ago been made toothless in that regard.  I wonder how poor George overlooked that?

George’s own version of Christmas Spirit exhibits itself in his robust defense of the freedom of those who don’t care enough about overcoming the many barriers to voting to insist on exercising their right to vote.  He asks, compassionately I am sure, “should the indifferent be required to vote?”  He laments that long voting lines are created as the local jurisdictions in places like Alabama and Mississippi tidily try to clean up their voting registers while the untidy poor wait to vote, and fears that eventually voting will be a required exercise for all citizens. Oh, the Horror!  He notes that Hitler was elected with an average voter turnout of 86 percent.  Might it have been preferable for Germans not to be allowed to vote at all?  George regards “lackadaisical citizens choosing not to vote as a non-problem.”  Perhaps he should investigate the suspicious finding of sociologists that voting is itself a means of attaching citizens to the society, and serves to promote social stability.

Ah, the vicissitudes of George’s pre-Christmas doldrums.  All the sweetness and light in the air about us is getting to be too much!  Meanwhile though, we’ll wish him joy and peace, though he may lodge some objections to its too easy availability to all.  Merry Christmas, George!

Assault Weapons and the Second Amendment

I really didn’t want to write about this, but continued silence about last week’s violence in Connecticut could be interpreted as a kind of mute acceptance of the outrage and depravity of the world, and that mustn’t happen.  Some things are obvious.  Assault weapons in the hands of emotionally/mentally disturbed individuals are both a moral outrage and a growing danger to us and our children.  The right of “we the people” peacefully to assemble, whether in shopping malls or elementary schools or churches, and for whatever reason, is being jeopardized by “we, the people.”  A gun rights advocate in Virginia was quoted in the Washington Post this morning as saying about the assault rifle used in the shooting, “Who wouldn’t want a Ferrari?  Shooting it is a blast. It’s fast and accurate.”  Other gun rights advocates are forming long lines at gun stores to load up before they might be prevented from further purchases.  They forget that the mother of the Connecticut shooter was killed by a gun she herself had purchased.  Ralphie, in Christmas Story, was more responsible in his desire for a Red Ryder BB gun than that.

We are sacrificing our children for an absurd interpretation of an 18^th century document.  I dislike joining the blame game, but five old men on the Supreme Court bear as much responsibility for Connecticut as anyone.  The Second Amendment was written at a time, and in both a societal and military framework, vastly different from ours, and our understanding of both ourselves and our societal needs has expanded enormously, points the court majority steadfastly continues to ignore.  At that time, the largest places in America had populations of about 25,000, most people lived in a village or rural setting, and dangers were all around in the form of wild animals and Indian attacks.  The military threat was invasion, on foot and with muskets, by British or French infantry.   Implicit in the Second Amendment rationale is a vision of community we no longer possess.  Madison, the author, recognized the dangers inherent in unrestrained freedom; he even included in its language reference to the needs of “an orderly militia.”  He expressed, in his other writings, the knowledge that left unrestrained, the freedoms expressed in the Constitution could easily lead to corruption and excess.  But he believed that the peer pressure of the small communities in which Americans lived would provide the necessary corrective to such excess.  Even as late as the early 20^th century, that was still a valid belief.  Anyone who has read To Kill A Mockingbird, and sees in it, as I do, a community very like the one in which I grew up, has seen the enormous role for good or ill played by peer pressure in the America That Was.  But we now live in socially fragmented times where high migration, large population centers in which we are all strangers to each other, and moral ambiguity is the norm.  The societal discipline of peer pressure is no more.

The rationale given in the Second Amendment was a military one.  Militias armed with rifles provided by the militiamen themselves were important to protect against the still serious threat of a land invasion from England.  They would look rather silly these days guarding against atom bombs and missile attacks.  One strong virtue the military provides, though, is rules of engagement.  We have learned as our understanding of human psychology expands that the social judgment of young people is not fully formed until their mid-twenties.  And for some, it seems never to form.  Mechanisms for emotional discipline are important.  In hostile situations where emotions run high and weapons are at hand, tightly enforced rules of engagement are a necessary discipline, one obviously lacking in civilian settings where emotions can run equally high.  Easy availability of firearms without either the emotional discipline of peer pressure or of rules of engagement is a recipe for catastrophe, which we are experiencing more and more.

So, what can be done?  A preferred option would be repeal of the Second Amendment.  Its proper time is long past, and democracies around the world do very well without such a safeguard.  That is probably a political impossibility, in which case, the outlawing of civilian purchase, ownership or use of assault weapons should be the minimum acceptable reform.  Simply outlawing ownership, though important, will not by itself be enough.  That outlawing of assault weapons should include criminal liability for gun manufacturers who sell assault weapons to other than military purchasers.  The gun manufacturers are the other culprits, along with the five old men, for the criminally chaotic state into which our society is drifting, and it is they who fund the NRA and other lobbying groups who fight reform.  Reform is no longer a matter of idle discussion.  The tears of our children, and of bereaved parents, demand we find a better way.

Kansas and the EU

When I was a child, the height of the Dust Bowl had been only a decade earlier, and references to it were common. A standard joke was about a farmer praying for rain – not for himself, he had seen it once before, but for his children, who had never seen any. That’s what people did back then, crack jokes about things too difficult to think about otherwise.  So the recent Ken Burns special on PBS about the Dust Bowl days of the 1930’s brought back sobering memories.  Now comes news just this week about how the Midwestern drought has intensified to the point that 100 percent of Kansas, 96 percent of Nebraska, 91 percent of Oklahoma and large portions of other states from South Dakota to Texas are declared to be under “at least” severe drought conditions; 63 percent of the area where winter wheat is grown is considered to be in danger of losing the crop because of drought conditions.  We are speaking here about one of the major breadbaskets of the world, whose crops feed hungry people around the globe. Climate change is beginning to hint at its full potential.  The news is being lost on the back pages of newspapers, and shouldn’t be.

We shouldn’t, this time around, face the devastation of Dust Bowl days.  A lot of the horrors of those days – children unable to go outside in Oklahoma because of the days long dust storms, wide spread pneumonia from dust inhalation, clouds of dust spreading to the east coast, desperate “Okie” migrations to California – were the result of poor farming practices which we’ve learned much better about since.  Some people in the 1930’s wanted the Midwest declared the new American Sahara and forgotten about (remember New Orleans after Katrina?).  FDR refused to accept that, and major federal agricultural research and assistance programs salvaged the Midwest for us and for the entire world.  The farm aid and research programs of today stem from that time.   The Midwest has changed a lot since then, though, with mega-farms and millionaires replacing desperate dirt farmers.  That causes simmering resentment in urban areas against farm subsidy programs, which are increasingly viewed as costly leeching by undeserving giant agricultural corporations.  Which brings me to the EU.

Word is beginning to spread in Washington these days about a possible free trade negotiation starting up between the U.S. and the EU, to create what David Ignatius of the Washington Post calls TAFTA,  a Trans Atlantic Free Trade Area.  According to Ignatius, a major barrier is the U.S. concern about the agricultural support programs of the EU, which provide levels of subsidy and protection to French and other EU farmers undreamt of in this country.  I suspect that any concessions gained by the U.S. on that front would have to be matched by American concessions on agricultural subsidies.  Given the urban resentment in this country, tying reductions in U.S. farm aid to the prospect of enhanced exports to Europe would certainly be an attraction. 

I, an urbanite, resent the raids on the Treasury by the giant agricultural corporations as much as anyone. But I also remember the haunted look in the eyes of small farm relatives in those post-Dust Bowl days.  Climate change is introducing us once again to what could become dangerous times on the farm – times that could pose major threats to our national, and global, food supply.  Multi-million dollar checks to Billion dollar corporations don’t make sense.  We need to trim silly subsidies like the subsidy that pays annual checks to suburban home owners on the gulf coast because the land their house is built on was, many years before, subjected to rice crop damage from hurricanes.  But we need also to be prepared for hard agricultural times – times when the role of the federal government in agriculture looms large. Anyone driving on a back country road can look out and see how technology-intensive farming has become, and it will be more complex as climate issues grow.  For example, increased agricultural irrigation needs to be traded off against depletion of water sources from urbanization and climate change.  We are just as much in danger of losing some of our cities to dwindling water supplies as we are our farms.  Agricultural research, innovative ways to grow and conserve crops, etc., will be just as important as they were in the days of FDR. 

This is one of those areas where, as I’ve mentioned, international policy and domestic policy increasingly unite.  We have to think through carefully how we trade off our domestic agricultural interests against the prospect of enhanced manufacturing exports.  We need to stop thinking that climate change, foreign relations, infrastructure development, green technology, agriculture policy, economic stimulus, etc., are all neat categories which can be analyzed and acted on separately, just as we need to think less of Rust Belts versus Farm Belts.  China watchers like to refer to the 21^st century task of China as a “great rebalancing”, where all the old arrangements need to be rethought and brought into new relationships.  That is our task also.

Building Better Machines

A recent article in Scientific American, entitled “The Wisdom of Psychopaths”, comments how similar many of our society’s leaders – politicians, movie stars, major entrepreneurs – are to what is known as “classic psychopaths.”  They are ruthless, uncaring of consequences to others, superficially charming, overwhelmed by their own self worth, driven to satisfy only their own desires and needs.  And we are busy building more of them all the time.  Sometimes we do it by the way we raise our children, sometimes by the entertainment we prefer, sometimes by how we vote on Election Day, sometimes by the values we elevate through our ideologies.  For example, Michael Sandel, in What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, reports that Larry Summers, then President of Harvard, spoke in Harvard Chapel about how Economics enables us to “economize on altruism.”  But sometimes, we just leave it to our engineers.

Case 1: many of us are not aware that when gas prices skyrocket or the charges for our heating in winter become outrageous, they are not the product of some malevolent decision by an evil plotter out to do us harm, but simply the calculation of a computer program, possibly thousands of miles away. Knowing only formulas that define relationships between a change in price of gas or electricity and the resulting change in demand, and uncaring about the possibilities of leaving people stranded or freezing, the program sets prices or selects energy sources to maximize profit for the corporation involved.  The program is effectively autonomous in its decisions, and not at all altruistic.

Case 2: General Electric and other major companies are proudly announcing their achievements in industrial robotics, which is maturing as a way to provide “on-demand” production of consumer goods to exact customer specifications.  The results are great: soon you’ll be spelling out exactly what your dream toaster will be, and it will be arriving on your doorstep the next day.  Of course other consequences will occur.  Millions may be out of work as they are replaced by robots, but hey, that’s capitalism, and for every winner there are multiple losers.  The robots won’t care.

Case 3: the current controversy over the use of “killer drones” for attacking specific terrorists is tempered by the knowledge that a human operator is “in the loop”, actually issuing the decision to strike.  But that’s not really efficient, so engineers are busily working on ways to enable the drone to perform autonomously, thereby opening up a whole new category of homicide: “oops, computer error.”

Case 4: the visionaries of the internet are looking forward to 2045, the year they estimate that all-wise intelligent machines will take over the nasty job of making all the decisions that run the world. The near-term project in that pursuit is to develop computers capable of designing new computers smarter and faster than they are; then the new computer will design its successor, etc., etc.  You may have seen one step in that direction recently on Jeopardy when a computer developed by IBM trounced the greatest human Jeopardy champions.  But will the machines making the decisions for us have really human values and emotional intelligence?

Another article in that same Scientific American noted that a three pound human brain contains the complex circuitry and computational capacity equivalent to the entire internet, so I’m not holding my breath for that 2045 dawn of a new age.  We’ll still outnumber the machines about 10 billion to one.  But that visionary goal illuminates a challenge we face in the near and far future: how to control the burgeoning technology we are so rapidly creating to assure its “built-in” values are truly human, not just the residues of defunct 19^th century philosophies, and that we ourselves stay human, too.   For example, Economic Determinism and Laissez-faire Capitalism, with their emphasis on “economizing altruism” are an example of thinking based on early understandings of Darwinian evolution and the human genome that are now being outgrown; we don’t want them embedded into our machines, and need also to get them out of our heads.  More generally, we have not yet faced up to the task of building ethical machines or an ethical technology-dominant society.

Isaac Asimov solved the problem neatly with his conception of the three laws of robotics; that was great for fiction, but real-life solutions are going to be a lot harder to arrive at.  It was interesting, though, that his first law was equivalent to an age-old truth – the first line of the Hippocratic Oath, “First, strive to do no harm.”  A step forward some engineers might love the challenge of might be to view such ethical principles as “constraints” built into a linear programming algorithm seeking profit maximization.  Who knows? It might actually achieve something.  That would still not solve the altruism issue; that’s Asimov’s second law.  But it’s a step in the right direction. And many such steps are required before we can unleash autonomous machines on our society.

Of course, the fundamental problem we face is not simply building better machines.  It’s building better people.  We really need to outgrow the stage of human society where an objective observer can point out that our leaders are generally psychopaths.  And that will be the hardest job of all.

China and America in the 21st Century

I first became aware of the imminent (then) demise of the Soviet Union back in the early 1980’s from an article in The Wilson Quarterly.  The article noted the rapid emergence of a new educated middle class in Russia, and commented that, “You can threaten a peasant with a gun; it’s much harder to frighten a nuclear engineer.”  Putting that together with the lessons of social history and of my own experience analyzing the changes in supervisory styles occasioned in the U.S. with the emergence of employees more knowledgeable about current technology than their managers, it was easy to see that some major upheavals were on their way in the USSR.  When Reagan made his famous challenge, to “tear down that wall”, the real foundations of that wall had mostly already been eaten away.  I feel somewhat the same now about China. 

China is riding a major housing bubble, and lives off dominance in exports, both enabled by a rapidly growing middle class.  It is a gift to them, but a dangerous one that breeds social revolution.  Increasing inequality as the power brokers of the Communist Party become far richer than those around them nettles the newly affluent middle class.  A highly testing dominated traditional educational system robs the new entrepreneurs of what they perceive as necessary training of their children for global competition.  Trash and polluted air accompanying China’s “industrial revolution”, not important twenty years ago, are now becoming a major public offense.  Revolutions are often thought of the end result of extreme poverty, but far more common is the “revolution of rising expectations”, which can take a variety of forms.  It was prosperous American merchants and land owners who set off the American Revolution, not desperate peasants.  China’s is currently taking the form of growing public resentment against the perceived “corruption” of Communist Party leaders.  A recent analysis by Washington Post reporter Jia Lynn Yang compared this growing resentment of the Chinese middle class to the Tea Party and Occupy movements in the U.S., but more stratified cultures, such as China’s, often see “rising expectations” revolutions take more violent forms, such as that of the American or French Revolutions.

Americans tended to view the 20^th century as the century for struggle for super power status between the U.S. and Russia.  That was really first predicted by De Tocqueville back in the 1840’s, based on his recognition of the characteristics the two countries had in common.  He was not blinded by the then feudalism of Russia versus the raucous democracy of America to all the nations had in common. 

Now Americans view China as a somewhat mysterious rising power from the East on a collision course with the U.S. for dominance as a global super power.  China-U.S. relations are perceived as perhaps the largest international policy issue of the 21^st century, aside from global climate change.  But what is notable also about China’s issues, starting with a polyglot culture spanning a continent, is that they are very much the same as America’s. The rising levels of inequality in both China and in the U.S. are among the greatest, measured on standard international indices, in the world.  Both countries’ educational systems are characterized by areas of brilliant achievement combined with wide-spread trouble spots.  Environment and the need for clean technology are sore spots in both nations.  How to deal with issues of migrant labor occupies both countries.  Constructing an infrastructure capable of supporting a 21^st century economy is an overwhelming need in both.  And other nations rich in people and unexploited resources are nipping at the heels of both, from India and Brazil to South Africa.

Looking longer term, the international super power of the 21^st century will likely be the nation which best addresses its domestic issues.  Both China and America are shaky on doing that in many ways.  China’s problems are its own, and mostly must be dealt with just by China, as they best learn how.  But it is well for us here in America to remember that in a global world “foreign policy” and “domestic policy” are no longer separable.  What we do in dealing with our own infrastructure and education and inequality will determine our standing throughout the world, and our failures will resound worldwide.

Bad-Faith Statistics

I’m just back from a pleasant week away, and was planning on saying something about the EU debt crisis, but it’s still ripening on the vine – or in this case, more a fuse than a vine.  In my assessment, that fuse will sputter on until 2014, when all the moral, political and fiscal bills will come due, so I’ll have probably lots more to say before then.  Meanwhile, some of the statistics being tossed about by columnists like Robert Samuelson on the Washington “Fiscal Cliff” topic are so egregiously bad-faith that I have to tut-tut about them immediately.  By bad-faith, I mean statistics that are deliberately misused by someone who should know better to present a picture opposite to what they actually portray.  And Samuelson, an economist, should know better.  He’s not by himself, by any means, and not all the misrepresenters are conservatives.  But his blatancy stands out.

First, he portrays himself as presenting an even-handed analysis of the role of Social Security.  Maintaining that benefits should be cut, he presents the arguments against doing so as “shortsighted”.  He notes that a principal argument is that most of the elderly are poor, presenting statistics that, to the contrary in his view, 25.9 percent have family income over $75,000, 19.4 percent have income from $50,000 to $74,999, and 18.8 percent have income from $35,000 to$49,999.  He “forgets” to note that adds up to 64.1 percent, meaning 35.9 percent have family incomes below $35,000 and 54.7 percent of the elderly have family income below $50,000.  The median family income in the U.S. is about $52,000 and the family poverty level is about $20,000.  So over half the elderly live with incomes below the national median income, and the majority of those are more than halfway down to the poverty level. That of course argues directly the opposite of Samuelson’s view.  The elderly are not in general affluent.  It should be noted, by the way, that until Social Security began paying benefits 60 years ago, over half the elderly lived below the poverty line, so there has been substantial improvement.  And that benefits the whole nation, something Samuelson seems also to “forget.”

Samuelson then argues that Social Security benefits are not truly “earned” because payroll taxes are used to pay benefits to others, not the worker who paid the taxes.  But Social Security is a form of casualty insurance, which, like all insurance, uses current premium payments to pay benefits to those who have had losses, in this case the loss of income from retirement. Samuelson’s argument is like saying that insurance benefits, after years of paying premiums, are not really “earned” and should be cuttable at will by insurance companies.  I doubt he would regard his own insurance that way.

The Social Security issues arise in the first place because we, as a society, have not come to terms with how we should treat the elderly.  Are they only discards from the labor pool, no longer productive but still, regrettably a “cost of doing business”, or are they honorable fellow members who have done their duty over many years in many ways and deserve a full place at the table?  In the latter view, the economic statistics would show the elderly as having essentially the same median income and poverty rate as the population in general.  The fundamental sticking point is that we continue to deal with the problems and issues of the elderly as only employment related, when they are beyond the time of inclusion in individual employers’ labor pools.  Social Security and Medicare are regarded by employers essentially as unfortunate externalities, which because benefits come after the employment period, only weigh employers down without benefitting them.  But the elderly contribute, and have long contributed, to society in many ways, not just through employment.

We need, as other nations already have, to look at decoupling Medicare and Social Security from individual employment – to regard retirement and health provision as obligations of the whole society.  Though it has immense dangers of its own, perhaps we should consider funding Social Security and Medicare from the General Fund via an income tax or VAT.

We have to deal with the Fiscal Cliff without sacrificing the elderly poor among us.  We all shall be elderly (more and more so according to the demographers), and some shall always be in need. But we are more than just a “cost of doing business.”  Shakespeare put in Cardinal Wolsey’s mouth the lament, “If I had served my God as I have served my king, he would not, in my old age, have left me naked to mine enemies.” We as a society are better than that, but we threaten to behave just as callously whenever the subject of taxes is raised. By coming to terms with the real social value of our elderly, perhaps we could reach societal statistics we can cite without shame.

Football and Religion

Back in high school, I was a member of an excellent A cappella chorus, whose director was nationally known and whose repertoire ranged from Broadway show tunes to Russian liturgical music to an ancient Greek hymn to Apollo.  All our music was well received, but a special crowd favorite was when we sang a unison chant of The Lord’s Prayer at assembly each week.  Lacking any social sensitivity at the time – I was a true nerd – it never occurred to me that several of my Jewish friends might have been bothered by listening.  It was just another one of our numbers as far as I was concerned, and no one ever said anything.  I suspect both my Jewish and Christian friends regarded it much the way I did, as just music, but I do not know for sure, because like it or not, they never would have spoken.

We nowadays have several Orthodox Jewish friends whom we regularly see.  One of them, a woman in her mid-eighties, feels pain to this day from having to sit in homeroom in her Baltimore public school each morning while the class around her recited The Lord’s Prayer.  To her it was an offense repeatedly rubbed in, from which she still bears a grudge.  She was not required to recite it herself, only to listen as others did, but to her it was a symbol of religious oppression.

A controversial court case this year arose when cheerleaders in the small Texas town of Kountz, who regularly waved banners at games with messages such as “Scalp the Indians” (itself about as socially insensitive as I was back in high school), decided to replace the banners with encouraging religious messages.  When the superintendent banned the practice, the cheerleaders (or, as I suspect, their parents) sued, insisting that they, the cheerleaders, waved the signs voluntarily and without direction from the school, and the school had no right to stop them.  With support from the Governor and a temporary injunction from a Texas court, the practice continues.  The temporary injunction was based on the court’s view that students do not shed their Constitutional rights when they enter a school house.  Whether that view would hold on appeal is problematic.

I’ve mentioned before about the distinction between adult Liberty to pursue one’s own life goals without government hindrance, but responsibly mindful of the rights of others sharing the society, versus the teenage desire for Freedom from all restraint without regard to the effect on others.  It’s part of growing up.  The Constitution and the Declaration of Independence both promote Liberty, not Freedom.  This case is awkward in regard to that distinction.

The unrestricted freedom of our own thoughts and religious beliefs is among our most precious rights, as is the right to express such beliefs.  Freedom to practice religion is written into the Constitution.  About that there is no controversy.  It is when we enter a room, or stadium, with others, that questions arise.  There we are dealing with issues of expression rather than belief.  We’ve all been to parties or dinners where our spouses have reminded us beforehand to be careful about what we say about religion or politics, because some of those who will be there will be offended.  We treat the space as a kind of neutral ground, and express our opinions responsibly.  We do that because the others there are our friends, and we care about not offending them.  It is one step further to treat strangers, or all classmates, as our friends, but it is a step worth taking.  Christian doctrine, which the cheerleaders are striving to practice, tells that the Apostle Paul wrote, “If because I eat meat it causes my brother to do wrong, then I will not eat meat…”  Does the anger and frustration of those feeling religiously oppressed qualify as the “doing wrong” that must be prevented under that doctrine?  Aside from that, simple civility would say much the same about voluntary sign waving when alternatives are available.  Signs of encouragement that are not overtly religious should be easy to come up with.  There’s the prohibition in Constitutional law against “shouting fire in a crowded theatre.”  And there’s the nexus implied by the cheerleaders being perceived by the crowd as agents of the school, whether they themselves feel that way or not.  Where does that all fit into the Kountz picture?  The courts, and those serious about their religious belief, may have their hands full on this one.

However the courts may finally hold on this one, the cheerleaders would do well to consider the silent voices in the crowd; even in the small Texas town of Kountz there may be those who are oppressed for a lifetime by having always and everywhere to listen to or view beliefs contrary to their own, knowing that any objection on their part would bring with it social ostracism.  Football fields are neutral places for recreation, not pulpits, where even the strangers seated next to us should be our friends.

Knowing the Territory

I love Meredith Wilson’s great musical, The Music Man, and one of my favorite spots in it comes right at the start, when the chorus sings that great argument song, “You can talk all you want. But it's different than it was. No it ain't, no it ain't. But you gotta know the territory. Shh shh shh shh.”  That pretty much describes the Republican Party these post-election days.  Conservatives are wandering hurt, bewildered, after losing a great battle and perhaps a war, and they’re wondering how it happened.

The explanation is easy if you remember your history, and conservatives should. It’s appropriate to recount it now, since yesterday was the anniversary of the speech by the first great Republican leader, Abraham Lincoln, that commemorated the Battle of Gettysburg, (and besides, I love to tie together oddly-matched metaphors.)   Michael Shaara’s great historical novel about Gettysburg, The Killer Angels, makes the reason very clear.  Befuddled about the battleground and the location of the Union army by the antics of their cavalry leader, JEB Stuart (the Tea Party?), who was off having fun circling the Yankees and whooping a lot, the Confederate army arrived only after the Union army had already seized the high ground. They had to spend three days in futile charges uphill at entrenched Union positions.  In a sense, the battle itself, great and fierce as it was, was only an aftermath; for the Confederates, it had been lost before it began.  Without the eyes of Stuart’s cavalry, Lee and his generals hadn’t known the territory well enough to position themselves effectively.  General Longstreet pretty much had the problem figured out, but Lee’s pride prevented him from listening.

Of course, the bigger problem for Republicans is that they can’t agree on what constitutes high ground.  A major wing of the party, the social conservatives, keeps insisting the high ground is faithful adherence to principles like anti-abortion, opposition to gay marriage, opposition to illegal (?) immigration, etc.  The moderate conservatives, scouting the territory now and for the future, argue that those are the high grounds of the past and no longer appeal to the contemporary electorate.  Meanwhile fiscal conservatives argue for the austerity of their depression era upbringing while moderates reason that some give and take on taxes and regulation is needed to satisfy modern voters.  The conservatives are still, to paraphrase Keynes’ memorable phrase, mentally the slaves of long-dead moralists and economists, while the moderates have not yet worked out their logic for dealing with change. Their real argument is over whether social virtues are eternal and immutable or subject to changing with the times.  “If it was good enough for grandpa…” But of course, that is an argument settled many times and in many ways in countless other societies; the real social virtues are those of recognizing and honoring both the intrinsic value and the autonomy of other people.  They last and do not change, but specific positions on narrow issues are soon left behind on the ash heaps of history.  The purpose of taking a political position at any time should be to address a pressing need of people of that time, and those needs change with time.

The conservatives have forgotten that in human history, change is inevitable. Any success at what you’re doing now will beget some change in the future.  The issue is not how to stop disagreeable change.  It is how best to manage its pace and direction.  It is “how not to throw the baby out with the bath water.”  Traditionally, the conservative solution to the problem was to favor careful, incremental change, but change nevertheless, while liberals favored more rapid progress.  But the pace of societal change has itself quickened.  The reasonable incrementalism of our grandparents is like no change at all today, while our grandparents’ rapid change is today’s incrementalism.  Republicans need to quicken their pace as a party to keep up with society, or they will be left behind.  That would be a shame, for adequate change management to address changing social needs does require both the rapid and the incremental points of view, sometimes one way, sometimes the other.  Supreme Court Justice Souter in an address at Harvard noted that both the much castigated “Separate But Equal” decision of 1904 and the apparently opposite “Brown v. Board of Education” decision in 1954 were appropriate recognitions of the maximum change absorbable by the pace of social change for their times.  In his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail”, Martin Luther King, Jr. recognized that the pastors of Birmingham were honorably seeking incremental improvements, but argued that the time and circumstances demanded immediate and drastic change.  Different times, differing resolutions.  Knowing the territory is what counts.

Madison's Vision

In troubled times it’s somewhat useful to look back at what our founding fathers intended to happen in the first place.  That’s why I dearly love the Federalist Papers, both for their historical value and for their insight into our contemporary affairs.  James Madison is the founder I appreciate most, for his prescient understanding of just the sort of things we’re going through today.  The major author of our Constitution (Jefferson was not even there at the time and Washington couldn’t be concerned with details), Madison reasoned out carefully each feature, persuaded others to his view and equally carefully explained, along with Hamilton and Jay, the reasoning that led them to the form it took.  Nowhere is he more a contemporary of ours than in Federalist #10, where he lays out his vision for the management of contending factions.

Madison first notes that human differences inevitably lead to contending factions, and that pure democracy is ineffective in controlling the strife likely to result.  He observes that the rock on which democracy has foundered more than any other is inequality of incomes.  That is the issue most likely to generate contentious factions.  The only way to avoid factions totally is through loss of liberty.  The legislature of a republic works best to manage it, for the decision makers must represent differing points of view but be small enough in number to work together toward resolution. And, here is a key point, a geographically large and diverse republic fares best, for it is best equipped to subdue the greatest danger, the tyranny of a majority unwilling to compromise.  The larger the republic, the better equipped it should be for wise decision making through the meeting of contentious minds.  Though Madison didn’t explicitly say it, that implies that a continental republic with great ethnic diversity is perhaps the best equipped of all.  Diversity is the healing force which maintains the health of the republic.

The election we have just concluded was notable for the emergence of a new political landscape in which, for the first time, no one voting bloc dominated.  The Young, the Elderly, Women, Latinos, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Southerners and Midwesterners, Investors and Debtors, Gays and Old White Men all had their say, and the winners were a coalition of several oddly matched groups.  Or rather, the winners were all Americans, for the results reflect Madison’s vision of what the Constitution and the Republic are here for in the first place.  The newspapers report that some conservatives are distraught, mourning the death of the America they feel is their home.  But other Americans were celebrating the birth of the America they had been waiting all their lives for.

The real message of the election is not a premature death, but the attainment to adulthood of the American Republic, in a form very like that intended by Madison in the beginning.  It is now one in which compromise between factions is no longer an option.  It is a necessity.  As Madison cautioned, the first great issue to be resolved is our growing inequality of incomes.  Lack of resolution of that issue by itself will destroy whatever hope we have for success in dealing with the other great issues of our times.  Yes, the Deficit is important, and to me Climate Change is perhaps the greatest and most urgent issue of our times.  But the health of the Republic is what enables solution of other issues, and that health depends on a common acceptance of the Rule of Law, which in a republic depends on general acceptance of fairness in government. Acceptance of resolutions between contending factions depends on that.  Excessive differences in outcomes for those who play by the rules is the surest way to destroy that sense of fairness.  As a finally adult republic, it is time for us, in the upcoming Congressional session, to put away the childish political behaviors of our past to reach out for the mature cooperation that will ensure our future together.  Any group, liberal or conservative, that stakes its agenda on an unwillingness to compromise will soon be a relic of the past.

Problem Solving Government

Well!  The silly season is over and the nation can return to serious business.  Gone are false issues like “Is the government too big?” (size is determined by what the task is, and what are appropriate tasks for government is never seriously discussed during an election) and “That’s too European”, debates that obscure rather than illuminate, endless analyses by talking heads about meaningless nuances in polls, etc.  The problem of course is that election news is dominated by statisticians and politicians and media people striving for a line, any line, that will create the adrenaline rush we’ve all grown so addicted to.  The Washington Post actually got down to a serious article on alternatives for dealing with climate change (a subject on which politicians have been strangely quiet for months), on Election Day. 

Now we can work on the problems.  Of course, the first one is that many of our elected politicians don’t really understand the problems.  I cringe when some congressman exclaims, “but evolution is only a theory”, then goes home to take medicine tested for safety and effectiveness under rules that come out of evolutionary principle.  There’s always some of that around.  But part of the problem is because of something that organizational sociologists call “trained incompetency.”  That’s when one’s learned occupational values and methods make you blind to problem definitions and solutions that are not usable within the skill set of your occupational training. It’s a little like, but not the same as, the economist’s “If your only tool is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail”, only in this case, your occupation makes you blind to all the other tools lying around, and to the fact that the solution might involve growing a garden.  Lacking understanding of the actual problems, like climate change and crumbling infrastructure and the looming impacts of robotic manufacturing and people starving while the equivalent of a whole state’s corn production is turned into soft drinks, the politicians occupy themselves with what they understand - the mechanics of legislating, filibustering without actually filibustering, passing budgets in one house they know will go nowhere in the other house, etc..  England’s famed Prime Minister, Lloyd-George, once was asked by a young member whether knowledge of Latin was required to serve well in the Parliament.  Lloyd-George’s reply was, “No.  It is necessary to have forgotten Latin.”  And sometimes it’s necessary to have forgotten the nuances of Robert’s Rules of Order.  The trained ineptitude of legislators is measured as much by the legislation not even introduced as by that that passes or fails, and much has not been introduced.  The inability to address the problems extends also to the Supreme Court, as witnessed by the recent Citizens United and Lily Ledbetter decisions.  Justice Holmes would have cringed at the current Court’s inability to deal with real world consequences.

A legislature filled mainly with lawyers is apt not to treat all that seriously a lack of high-speed internet access among the poor, or the danger of drought (and what to do about it) in the Midwest, or rail alternatives for decreasing fuel consumption, etc., etc..  I say mainly: I realize that some members come from backgrounds other than law, but the proceedings seem dominated by those with legal backgrounds,  I have no grudge against lawyers; one of my sons is a highly successful lawyer and I’m very proud of him.  The law is a valuable and an honorable profession.  And a legislature filled mainly with engineers would be as blind to a different set of problems.  But, in the language of business, specialists should be on tap, not on top. That should also be the case in the legislature, and the law is a specialty there also, not its purpose.  Of the four faces on Mt. Rushmore, only one, Lincoln, is the face of a practicing lawyer.  Jefferson studied the law but spent his life doing other things.  Neither were any of them, by the way, outstanding businessmen.  Yet some of our finer Presidents, Wilson and LBJ come to mind, began with careers in education.  Half the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were ministers.  It is no coincidence that other nations which have far more diverse and technically knowledgeable legislators than the U.S. are making substantial progress on urgent issues we seem unable to address.  The third world will eventually make far better use of solar energy than we are likely to. 

America’s problem with a mainly-lawyer legislature is strangely and almost uniquely American.  De Tocqueville commented on our pervading reverence for the occupation; perhaps we substitute rule by lawyers for rule of law and think that will work for planning our infrastructure needs.  FDR, after his experiences with the phenomenon, exasperatedly commented that “The Constitution was not written for lawyers.”  That the focus of the legislature should be on solving problems rather than debating legislation seems to be a blind spot we have always had.  In part at least, it comes from our national ideology that the impact of government on that part of the “real world” we label as private sector should be minimal.  But of course, having an impact for the better on all of us is part of the purpose of government.  “The government which governs least governs best” should be understood in the context of the least action which effectively solves the problem.

Now, at the start of another four-year cycle seems the time we should begin thinking of how best to enable problem solving in  the legislatures.  Fareed Zakarias has proposed establishing expert Commissions, like the Military Base Closing Commissions, whose recommendations must be accepted or rejected by Congress without amendment, on topics ranging from climate change to transportation.  Devising reasonable term limits would be a start on structural change.  Most legislators these days seem to divide their time between filibustering and fund raising.  Some ways and means are needed to short circuit that so that legislators actually have time to read the legislation they argue about and to be educated on the issues.  Changing the term of members of the House to three, rather than two, years might be another structural start.  We generally decry one-issue candidates, but but a few one issue ones such as an engineer with a burning passion to improve the transportation systems or communications systems of this nation could be valuable.  Perhaps professional societies might nominate members for consideration by voters.  Teachers Unions do that now for school board elections.   The qualifications of judicial nominees are reviewed in a non-binding way by the American Bar Association.  Why should not the American Academy of Science review proposed members of the science committees of congress?  Perhaps we should even consider constitutional changes that add something besides just having lived to a certain age to the qualifications for congress, though what those those qualifications might be would require wisdom that is perhaps beyond us.  Fewer members of the House with higher qualifications might be a help.  But the real need is for the American people at the congressional district level to recognize that in this complex society of ours, adequate congressional service requires more than average understanding of the issues; that will be a long time coming.  But other countries have managed to do it; we can too.

A Common Humanity

It’s always interesting when four authors, coming from separate disciplines and writing with unrelated perspectives on differing topics, converge in their conclusions on the same larger issue. It gives one the urge to stand upon his soap box and philosophize about wise men and elephants. You remember: several blind wise men each touch a different part of an elephant and arrive at entirely contrary conclusions about its nature.  Joseph Stiglitz, economist, writes in The Price of Inequality about how we are evolving to a Plutocracy through the constant heaping up of small inequalities until they become one great inequality. The villain is unregulated focus on market efficiency. Thereby, he writes, we endanger the socioeconomic future of our entire society.  Michael Sandel, ethicist, writes in The Moral Limits of Markets about how we are “commodifying” everything so that anything can be traded on one or another kind of market, and thus are corroding our morality and losing sight of the fact that markets are simply a tool for our prosperity and not the determinant of our existence.  We have lost sight of the fact that some "goods" are intrinsically not economic ones.  Charles Murray, sociologist, writes in Coming Apart: the State of White America, 1960 – 2010 that we are fragmenting as a society into socioeconomic bubbles, between which lifestyles vary so drastically that understanding and communication are impossible.  Our perks and luxury goods divide us in a way no guarded fences could.  And J.D. Trout, cognitive scientist, writes in The Empathy Gap of how, in American society, our culture causes decent people to ignore indecent degrees of inequality and suffering.  He advocates the development of psychologically sensitive social policies that correct for the deficiencies of human nature.

The larger issue they all nibble at the edges of is, “what does it mean to share a common humanity?”  That’s the elephant in the room.  For the answer we give to that question shapes our social policies, the forms and purposes of our governments, and how we treat each other in a crowd at the shopping mall.  Science fiction authors have been dabbling with the question for the last 100 years, since H.G. Wells posited a “War of the Worlds” that caused us first to think, what if others really different from us are out there: what would the differences be? They soon concluded, in sagas like Asimov’s Foundation Series, that the fundamental nature of being human has nothing to do with color or shape, and is not even defined by whether one is born or manufactured.  The ultimate hero of the Asimov series is a robot.  Nor is it defined by one’s place on the socioeconomic scale.

That issue was already being worked on, well before the science fiction writers got hold of it.  In the 19^th century, the response of de Tocqueville to Marx’s Das Kapital was, “I detest those great theories, which by relegating human history to the progress of one great idea, remove Man from the history of Mankind.”  In the 18^th century, the great religious reformer John Wesley wrote, “One great reason why the rich in general have so little sympathy for the poor is because they so seldom visit them. Hence it is that . . . one part of the world does not know what the other suffers.”  Both Wesley and de Tocqueville, along with Marx, were reflecting the recognition of a common humanity that rose above social systems and our individual places in them. That idea had begun its emergence ever since the Age of Exploration had brought us into contact with peoples and cultures so unlike us that at first we doubted that we shared the same family tree. 

Now in our own confused times, we are learning new lessons.  Apart from our day-to-day dealings with potential horrors and catastrophes like global climate change and a Middle East-wide civil war (for that is what it is), in this still-new 21^st century we must face and conquer two great human challenges.  We must learn to recognize that our true humanity is not only a set of inborn traits, it is a learned characteristic, shaped by our culture as much as by our genes: that is the insight we gained from the ruminations of 20^th century science fiction, and from 20^th century science.  We are what we teach ourselves and each other to be.  Second, we must learn how to reshape our politics and social institutions, including our economics, to enable the practice of a common humanity.  We can no longer ignore others who are different, and seek to shape society to fit only our own needs.  Simply the presence of global epidemics will prevent that.  Resolutions will include day-to-day matters like appropriate business regulation and global issues like the massive human migrations that will be a characteristic of our century.  They will also involve resolving questions about whether stratified human societies, separated between great wealth and abject poverty will be a wave of the future or a relic of the past.  We humans have come as far as we can as isolated individuals, buffered by weapons and prosperity from the sufferings of others.  Our future will be either a shared one, or a return to the Dark Ages of the past.  The French have an old saying, that the primary task of each generation is to save civilization from the barbarians of the next generation.  We need to get to work.

Mega-Storms and Movies

In a rather silly Harrison Ford movie that came out a few years ago, The Day After Tomorrow, the story begins with a huge hurricane forming over Scotland, then turning overnight into an icy freeze that transforms New York City into the arctic.  Ford, ever the scientist adventurer, has to rescue his daughter from a wolf pack, escaped from the zoo, before trekking off with a good part of the U.S. population, including the President, to Mexico, where they are welcomed as refugees.  As noted, the movie is quite silly, but not as silly as it might seem.  It merited a scientific analysis a few months later in Scientific American, which deals very seriously with science,  that found it contains the kernels of  some very serious science.  That science is known as tipping point theory, which describes a very controversial but possible outcome of global climate change.

The thing that made the story line of the movie just plausible enough for a movie plot, but also incredibly silly, was an overnight change in global climate which instantaneously converted NYC to the arctic.  Global climate just cannot change that quickly.  But, according to Scientific American, core drilling in the arctic ice cap reveals that temperatures have dropped by about 20 degrees, indicating the advent of an ice age, at least 4 times in our geologic history, suddenly, in a period of 20 to 40 years.  Scientists theorize a specific set of circumstances leading to such a “tipping point.”  The key is the performance of the Gulf Stream.  The Gulf Stream is a major part of the “ocean conveyer belt” which operates by convection to transfer heat between the tropics and the arctic.  Many people do not realize that Paris and London actually lie north of Quebec, Canada.  The reason there is no London or Paris Ice Festival is that the Gulf Stream keeps them, along with the rest of Western Europe and the northeastern U.S., warm enough to grow roses where in theory roses should not be.  The Gulf Stream is a heat pump which cools the tropics to warm Europe, then transfers back the cooled water to the tropics via the Polar Current. It relies on the salinity of cold water to keep it going. And that’s where the problem and the controversy arise.  Tipping point theory notes that global warming causes arctic ice masses, particularly the Greenland ice cap, to melt, diluting the salinity of the ocean at a key point with freshly melted glacier water.  That can cause the ocean conveyer to grind to a halt, putting all the burden of heat transfer onto atmospheric events like hurricanes, and leading to a period of sharp division between warming tropic areas and increasingly icy polar areas.  That period can last several hundred years, as seen in ice core samples from the arctic.  It can turn areas like New England or Western Europe into places more like Mongolia, while converting areas like the U.S. mid-Atlantic regions into atmospheric battle grounds between heat and cold that result in extreme weather events.  If it happens too fast, it can generate an ice age before a new level of stability is reached. 

Slowing of the Gulf Stream was first reported about 2004; then, in 2010 contradictory reports came out, claiming the slowing was a myth.  More recently, in 2012, the U.S. Geologic Survey published data indicating that not only was slowing of the Gulf Stream occurring, the pace of the slowing is actually speeding up.  As usual with the subject of climate change, the controversy rages on while no actions are taken.

Which brings me to hurricane Sandy, building up outside my window as I write.  Sandy is being described as a “mega-storm” involving a hurricane merging with a cold front from the west and wrapped around with an arctic front from the north.  It’s declared to be so large that it will cover the eastern U.S from Ohio to the Atlantic and from North Carolina to Michigan.  Meteorologists are describing it as a “once in 500 years event.”  I hope they are right.

The Limits of Markets

One of the dirty little secrets of purely competitive market economics is that as soon as any seller gets a competitive edge, they seek to destroy competition.  John D. Rockefeller was particularly good at that; the annoyance of everyone else at his skills is what brought on the breakup of the Standard Oil Company, the first great American monopoly.  Economists call that kind of behavior “rent seeking”, and it includes, as well obtaining a sustainable monopoly, predatory pricing, arranging favorable regulation, tax breaks, subsidies, friendly pricing (ask defense contractors about that), patent protection, and resource allocations (like federal land leases and mining rights) at heavily discounted prices.  These are some of the ways government shapes “purely competitive” markets in a laissez-faire economy.  And let us not forget manipulation of imperfect information, a favored technique for confusing buyers about what they’re really getting.  That also includes attempts at manipulating our world view so that our preferred choices are to buy the products they want to sell.

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel-winning economist, points these out as the ways the early 19^th century idealistic farm-to-market, democratic “purely competitive” laissez-faire economy of rational economists’ fantasies has evolved into the plutocratic economy of today.  In his book, The Price of Inequality, he portrays little inequalities heaped on each other until they grew into the enormous burden of inequality we bear today.  He notes that the “Chicago School” of economics still regards these inequalities as good things, promoting market efficiencies.  But those who bear the brunt of them do not.  Stiglitz’s view amounts to  a system with five main components: you the consumer, the producers/sellers, government, social forces (which shape government) and markets.  The established sellers seek to use government to their own advantage to create the great inequalities in the market that produce plutocracy.

The other dirty little secret, though, always forgotten by the plutocrats and usually forgotten by the economists, is that the system is elastic; unbalance the markets too far in the direction of inequality, and social forces snap back.   That’s what caused the downfall of Standard Oil.  That’s how revolutions, financial panics, depressions, etc., are generated.  That’s what we’re seeing today in southern Europe, in the Occupy movements, and in the growing American unrest over the tax structure.  For “social forces” is another name for the consolidated expression of human nature, and human acceptance of unfair and manipulative behaviors has its limits.   Economists are always seeking a magic bullet to cure the unevenness of “the business cycle”; perhaps they should spend less time on econometric models and more time on acceptable human relationships.

Another author, Michael Sandel, in What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, has done just that.  He notes that the 2008 financial collapse can be viewed as a societal moral repudiation of the behavior of financiers and the financial markets.  Then Sandel lists the innumerable ways in which our contemporary economy has turned items of intrinsic value into commodities to be bought and sold for financial enrichment. Items like renting space on your forehead for advertizing, losing weight, the cell phone number of your doctor, prison cell upgrades, the right to immigrate ($500,000 gets preferred treatment), and a multitude of other things are given a price and “commodified.”  Sandel’s concern is less with Stiglitz’s worry about inequality than about the corrosive spread of a “market mentality” across our whole moral view of the world.  He sees markets as a useful tool for obtaining the things to make life better, but a tool which must be limited to its proper uses, and not allowed to take over our whole world.  At bottom, Sandel’s views rest on Emmanuel Kant’s moral principle that we should always treat other people as ends in themselves, and not simply as means to some ulterior, such as monetary, end.  That is a principle to which our humanity strongly responds; when, for example, some years ago, a little child fell down a well in Texas, it was a national cause to get her out.  The cost of doing so was not an issue.  When everything has been commodified, we have lost our humanity as well. 

I have mentioned before that laissez-faire capitalism lacks a built-in brake to keep it from collapsing of its own excesses.  The 2008 crisis was an example of that.  But perhaps at least a partial brake has always been there, lying unused.  No ethics guides the actions of our financial markets and large corporations, only doing what is legal.  Ethics is not taught as a subject in public schools, and in most colleges is limited to the philosophy department.  Ethics was always the only fully home-schooled subject; and homes differ a lot.  Our form of capitalism has become, in consequence, a bare knuckles brawl where no rules apply except survival and profit.  Professional groups in contrast, such as doctors, teachers and lawyers, have always had professional societies with ethical standards and the ethical training associated with them.  They are far from perfect, and there are many malpracticioners in each group, but they beat our experience with financiers and CEO’s by a long shot.   It is time to reintroduce our society to the need for and to the standards of ethical behavior in all areas, including finance and business.  Perhaps, when we learn how to treat each other better, our business cycles will improve as well.

The Prime Directive

One of the most difficult foreign policy issues of our times is what to do about the plight of women oppressed by ultra-traditional cultures in countries we are  allied with.  Amnesty International reports today that a young Afghan woman was beheaded by her own mother-in-law for refusing to serve as a prostitute.  The mother-in-law and other relatives freely admit it.  Last week a Pakistani girl was shot for publicly expressing her desire to get an education. These and other equally repugnant cases are known to be common, not exceptions, in areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan.  It is both a difficult moral issue and an extremely complex question about appropriate relations between unlike cultures.  Star Trek years ago invented the “Prime Directive”, the mandate never to interfere with the workings of an alien culture, no matter how repugnant, as a governing principle.  The Prime Directive places highest value on toleration.  It is also a statement that all morals are relative to the culture in which they are embedded, a much less intuitively obvious assertion.  Something in us says ”yes” to the Prime Directive, recognizing our lack of right to change without consent what another culture has worked out over centuries only because it seems wrong to us.  Yet something in us also recognizes our common humanity across cultural boundaries, and is rightly unwilling to tolerate arguable depravity.

It was easy for early Spanish Conquistadors in the new world; they abolished human sacrifice without hesitation simply on the grounds that any practice so variant from their own moral standards must not be allowed to continue.  The fact that they themselves were beating slaves to death appalled only a few. Toleration was not a part of their worldview; failure to recognize the common humanity of people of other cultures was.  Many at that time believed new world peoples had no souls.  For us, it is somewhat easy in the face of oppression to reason that the best we can do is to quickly withdraw financial aid to the oppressors and depart.  But what if doing so is in conflict with our national strategic interests?

Our traditional guiding principle – our “prime directive” - is that decided in the Treaty of Westphalia, back in 1648, that each nation has ultimate authority, based on its own religious and moral values, to determine its laws and internal behavior – “To him who is sovereign, his own religion.”  That was fine in a common European culture where beheadings for not being a prostitute were unthinkable for all.  Our world is both much wider and smaller today, and no Westphalian principles govern the many nations with which we must interact.  Yet we also know also that imposition of Sharia legal principles in the U.S., despite their being the norm among many other nations, would be alien to us; shutting an eye to perceived moral excesses elsewhere becomes the preferred norm everywhere.

We need to keep two things in mind.  First, no nation, neither we nor Afghanistan, is a monolith. Just as we share room for many widely divergent values, some of them violently expressed (a shot at an Obama campaign office?), so do other nations. Strategic interests are worked out between governments, but moral interests must be worked out between people. I’m sure many Afghanis and Pakistanis are as repelled as we are at the atrocities taking place in their homelands. Second, if we support our own legal and moral principles, we have an obligation to make it known.  Silent withdrawal is itself a form of consent.  I’ve mentioned the legal principle we have that no one can be required to serve as conduit for the free expression of another.  That principle can be broadened to the international scene.  We need to strengthen our use of public diplomacy, through the voices of diplomats, use of Voice of America, etc., to make it clear how unhappy we are with such atrocity and unwilling to support its continuance, financially or otherwise.  We need to emphasize that we believe the principle recently recognized by the U.N. of “Responsibility to Protect” extends to a nation’s protection of its people against such atrocities through passage and enforcement of laws.  But to withdraw from the scene only supports the agendas of those wishing us to be gone anyway.  There are well-intentioned people in each country begging for our support, and we need to provide it.  There are basic human rights that are beyond any particular culture, and need expression.  We owe it to ourselves and to the world to be an active voice in conveying them everywhere.