New Routes to the Indies

Some odd piece of technology is often the key to hazards, mystery and adventure in the great stories we remember long after our first encounter with them, from the Trojan Horse to Aladdin’s lamp.  In James Clavell’s classic 1975 novel, Shogun, the protagonist John Blackthorne, an English sailor, obtains a small pilot book that contains Portugal’s most closely guarded secret – the route around Africa to the Indies and to Japan.  Following it, Blackthorne winds up shipwrecked on the coast of Japan, where he takes part in some of the pivotal events of Japanese history; he spends his life there recognized as a  hero, who is remembered even today by a street named for him in Tokyo. For Shogun is actually a fictionalized account of real history, with real consequences.

One of the consequences was the eventual emergence of an expansionist Japanese empire 300 years later into a western world previously hidden from it, and a result of that was World War II.  Fortunately, time and distance had prepared the world for such encounters, and the results were eventually fortunate both for Japan and for the western world.  Not just Blackthorne’s fortunes, but his venture’s worked out well.  But such good luck is not always guaranteed.

The science world is dealing today with another such pilot book, in this case a journal article by a Dutch scientist funded by our own National Institutes of Health describing in detail the laboratory procedures for creating an air-borne form of an avian flu virus previously proven deadly but containable in its natural form.  A similar article has been published about a Wisconsin study, again funded by NIH. Supporters claim another victory in the eternal quest for knowledge, and proclaim it a milestone along the road to a universal vaccine; critics warn that this could lead to world-wide, man-made epidemics that could ravage all humanity.  Either way, this event, along with how we deal with climate change, could be pivotal in the history of the 21^st century, and perhaps of humanity.

It took 300 years for Japan to complete the transition from hidden treasure to expansionist empire. The Pandora’s Box of atomic energy has been contained for 75 years because theoretical knowledge must be combined with practical ability to build complex equipment in order for proliferation to occur.  In both instances, time has permitted the natural evolution of ways to deal with the consequences of the human urge to seek out and publish esoteric knowledge. The problem is that the procedures in the journal article can apparently be followed in any reasonably well-equipped laboratory. Success by two different sets of experimenters in just a few years is testimony to that.   In addition, the experiments themselves can lead to further highly dangerous viruses, beyond just avian flu, that could ravage all humanity, or toward universal vaccines.  We have, in effect, opened a route to a new world of the genetic engineering of pandemics which could be used either for cure or for our own extermination.

The problem also is that Pandora’s Box is impossible to close.  Portugal could not forever hide the route to Japan, the U.S. could not hide the secrets of atomic weaponry, and we shall not be able to censor the procedures for virus manipulation.  Just the knowledge that successful procedures exist will by itself generate imitators.  A rapid search for alternative approaches is underway.  Senate committees are looking at possible policies regarding funding of “dual use” research that can lead to both good and evil, but that has already been proven ineffective for control of chemical warfare and atomic weaponry.  I’m sure international conventions will be proposed and possibly adopted, but terrorists most likely to seek such technology will not be likely to pay attention to that.  Rapid development of a “pandemic preparedness” regimen has already been proposed, but many dark shadows are built into that concept; at the least another level of post-911 intrusive security could emerge, or even worse, the formulation of a mass quarantine and triage hysteria like that which accompanied the bubonic plague. Back then, entire villages were quarantined, with no entry or leaving allowed, and people simply left to die.  In our global village, such approaches will be useless, but nonetheless proposed.

One thing is clear.  The funding for research into anti-virus technology must be stepped up.  Promising advances have already occurred in the ongoing research interaction between genetic engineering and nanotechnology, and these should have their funding built up.  The gap between “pilot book” and consequences has drastically shortened, but so have our response times.  Once again the route has been opened to a new world, and, like it or not, we must enter.

Gay Marriage and the War on Religion

The news is abuzz this morning about President Obama’s announcement that he supports the idea of Gay Marriage.  I’d prefer to stay out of the brouhaha that will roil for several months over this, but at least some scattered attempts at adding clarity to the emotional muddle are needed, and there are times when taking stands really are important.  It’s really important to recognize that the public issue is so complex because it’s really four (or more) issues tangled together – a theological issue, a church/state separation issue, a socioeconomic issue and an emotional issue, each of which is itself complex.

As it turns out, in my analysis, my own view on the theological issue (and yours) is not particularly relevant to the public issue.  That is because, in my view, theology is a set of languages for speaking about the Sacred, each imbedded in a different culture with different words for expressing what may actually be very similar things.  We each in our own groups speak a kind of theological argot which frequently causes us to talk past each other. An example is the silliness surrounding the use of “Allah” versus “God”; both are the same concept expressed in different cultures.  Those misunderstandings are unlikely to change over any short time frame, and Baptists, Episcopalians and Buddhists will continue to charge each other with heresy for saying essentially the same things in different ways.  That is really the basic rationale for religious tolerance: an agreement to accept and live with the fact that we each have our own, individually formed way of understanding the world which others will never really understand.  In any event, it can, and should, make individual religious differences irrelevant for deciding public issues.

And that is a good thing.  For since the Peace of Westphalia, church/state separation has been imbedded in our western European culture.  That’s by way of saying it’s not just an American idea; that’s what the bloody Thirty Years War was fought over that ended at Westphalia, and the phrase “wall of separation between church and state” was actually first used by a Scottish theologian 50 years before the American Constitution. Europeans may actually be a little better at it these days than Americans. In France, for example, each wedding occurs once or twice – first as a required civil ceremony at the city hall, then, optionally, as a religious ceremony at a church; both are celebrated.  Either in France or America, when meeting someone, no one ever inquires which church approved the marriage or whether it was only civil. Marriage is a term that includes many sources of authority.

People have come from all over the world to America to protect their religious views by separating them from the turmoil that accompanies politics.  Protection of the Church from the State motivated our founding fathers more than protection of the State. The irony is that the separation our ancestors strove so hard for is being threatened by the very religious groups they formed.  My own church, the United Methodist, views a marriage as a sacred event, but not a sacrament.  Other churches consider it a sacrament.  Some churches perform Gay marriages; others prohibit them.  Agreement or disagreement with a church’s position can be expressed simply by moving from one church to another. Yet some devout church members seek to have the State set rules on what constitutes a permissible form of sacrament, a topic only the church can decide.  Will an eventual discussion be whether baptism by immersion, a physically dangerous act, should be legally prohibited?  Viewed in that light, the only legal issue about Gay marriage is whether marriage constitutes a contractual arrangement to which all citizens are entitled. The answer clearly is yes. It can be limited legally to an exclusive arrangement (hence the prohibition against polygamy), but not on the basis of gender differences under our Constitution.

The emotional issues any good Jungian will tell you are tied up with our internal struggles with our own nature, and our propensity to project onto some target group (the Other) the features of ourselves we cannot accept.  Because of that, the emotions are life-long for each of us and will never be settled by society for us. They will be resolved societally only over long periods. One hundred years ago, some states still prohibited marriage between whites and blacks; it is still an emotional issue to some, but no longer a legal or societal one. 

The socioeconomic argument against Gay marriage has been that marriage itself is a social arrangement to legitimate the nurture and rearing of children.  An anthropologist might argue that it as much originated to stabilize communities and safeguard the transfer of property. Both those arguments were outgrown long ago.  A headline in our local paper the other day hailed the first marriage of a seventy-year-old local woman; there goes the first argument.  And the newspapers are also replete with accounts of both the recreational marriages of celebrities (followed eagerly by some of the same people who deplore Gay marriages) and accounts of the increasing number of young people who raise children without commitment to marriage.  For that is what a marriage is supposed to represent, a commitment to long-term stable relationship, and the more such relationships form, the more stable the society.

In sum, our American society is facing what constitutes a significant transition for many.  The arguments against Gay marriage are all theological and emotional, and must be met and faced by individuals on an individual basis.  As a society, our commitment to church/state separation leaves no room for retreat; Gay marriage is a form of recognized commitment whose time has come.

Coalition Government

So now it all begins to come together.  Greece and France have rejected the German austerity regimen; can the rest of Europe be far behind?  The Arab world is struggling with its soul to decide where traditional Islamic values end, and political modernism begins.  Putin wins his election and discovers that winning does not mean the end of protests.  China shows cracks in its imperturbable front as ouster of dissident party leaders and escape of human rights protesters reveal new levels of internal struggle.  In the U.S., the Congress for the fourth year in a row continues to be unable even to agree on a Budget.  And multi-national corporations are taking all sides and none, to assure future profits. The situation in Europe has been called chaotic by some observers (as could also be called the situation in the Middle East.)  And that’s an interesting way to describe it.

Chaos is an ancient Greek word (how appropriate!) that can mean either totally without order, or a chasm or abyss, or a cloud of potential creativity.    It’s what we used to describe at the office as an insurmountable opportunity.  Greece and the Middle East seem to illustrate the first definition, the whole Euro zone the second (is it about to leap into dissolution?), and possibly the whole scene the third.  For what is lacking to turn the world on its ear in a burst of creativity is an innovative way to govern though coalition, though not the kind of party coalitions common to traditional politics.

Traditional coalitions are arrangements between political parties in a country to share a majority power in the national legislature by voting cooperatively with each other.  In Greece, for example, the recent election has not gotten any party even close to a majority and they are seeking, unsuccessfully so far, to find a coalition capable of forming a majority government. But even if a coalition is formed, that won’t begin to solve the issues with Germany and the bankers.  That will require concerted action with France and the rest of Europe, which will have their own coalition issues, and in turn lead to the need for concerted action in negotiations with bankers, the IMF and Wall Street.

Some new kinds of coalitions are needed, and that will require recognition of who the actual opposition parties are.  That is not as obvious as it looks.  Germany, for example, is the usual villain named in accounts of the problems of unalloyed European austerity in recent years.  But Germany, along with China, has been one of the most prosperous countries in the world because of its exports. The rest of Europe is a major part of its export market, and unstinted austerity in southern Europe generates substantial risks for German manufacturers and the whole German economy. And so also does inability of southern European customers to pay their bills.  As I’ve noted in a previous post, the IMF has projected a growth in German GDP of only 40 percent of the growth rate of American GDP over the next 5 years.  A healthy growth regimen in Greece and France would likely boost the German economy.  The problem for Germany, as for the rest of Europe, is that German politics is controlled by its bankers, who are focused on foreclosure of southern Europe to the exclusion of all else. But of course, who would be the subsequent buyer?  And not only German bankers are in the mix.  For Goldman Sachs and other large multi-national banks played leading though shadowy roles in generating Europe’s current crises. In fact, then, the real opponents in this case are corporate bankers versus governments responsible to support the needs of all their citizens.

What is needed are coalitions, both governmental and non-governmental, that serve common interests across national boundaries.  The two major assets of multi-national corporations are their portability and immortality.  Their portability enables them to cross or minimize national boundaries with ease and to escape regulatory control by any one nation. Their immortality enables them to accumulate the vast resources that can overpower even the resistance of large sovereign states.  One Sweden-based multi-national corporation, Stora Kopparberg, was chartered in 1288, making it older than many of the over 40 countries where it operates today.  They also are expert at association, cartels, joint ventures and other forms of corporate coalition. Governments in Europe on the other hand, are still more French or Greek or British or German than they are European.  National boundaries form the limit of their visions of problems shared across Europe.  To deal with corporate portability and resources that are damaging to all nations, governments must unite in international regulatory regimens, parties must seek partners across national boundaries (a European Progressive Party?) and social action groups act in concert (an Occupy Europe?).  Creative chaos is an opportunity that should be built upon.

Power, Illustrated

I’ve mentioned the ongoing struggle for dominance between corporations and governments (the preferred term is “sovereign states”) several times lately.  You might find the topic somewhat abstract and so what?, like talking about a struggle between giants somewhere in the Greater Magellanic Clouds  - interesting, but light years away.  So here are a few examples of what’s happening now, up close and personal.

Item: an old friend has a son of whom he is proud; the son, an aeronautical engineer working for a major airplane manufacturer whose planes we all fly on, has recently been appointed to a staff whose duty it is, working for the manufacturer, to review and certify the safety of airplane designs, on behalf of the FAA, (bold added intentionally.)  That is, the staff reviews their company’s design, and in the name of the FAA certifies that is acceptable as meeting all safety standards.  The rationale is that the FAA lacks the expertise and resources to conduct the required review.  As I interpret it, the FAA and the company have switched roles, with the FAA now serving as the public relations agent for the company, assuring the public (that’s you) that the product is ok.  Think about it the next time you fly.

Item: the Washington Post notes in an about federal workers column that the Agriculture Department is planning to privatize the inspection of poultry nationwide to save its resources in the face of budget cuts. So one private corporation will be inspecting and certifying another private corporation on behalf of the federal government to assure you that your chicken dinner is not only yummy but safe.  Meanwhile, new standards for food safety have been delayed for several years since their first announcement.  Supposedly it’s to clear up the wording of regulations; insiders say large food producers are privately protesting and stalling.  Doesn’t that make your chicken taste better and better?

Item:  a Federal Reserve Governor warns that the banking reform initiatives passed in 2010 as the Dodd-Frank Bill are fizzling due to private strong resistance from Wall Street banks, especially JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs.  The resistance has grown stronger since 4 of the 19 large banks failed to pass the “stress tests” mandated for them by the legislation.  Resistance is also strong against the “Volcker Rule”, which prohibits banks from using more than 10 percent of customer deposits to “do business with” other banks on their own behalf.  As you recall, that rule is aimed at preventing banks from engaging in risky speculation with their customers money by, among other things, engaging in derivatives trading and “off-the-books” short-term transactions.

Item: I’ve noted before the way gas prices go up and up, even when supply is up and demand is down.  Defenders like Robert Samuelson say its justifiable because it’s a world market and, since everyone needs oil, the oil is ”price-inelastic.”  That’s obfuscatory language for monopolistic or oligopolistic pricing, i.e., charging regardless of the users’ ability or willingness to pay.  Do you recall how prices vary at stations on this side versus the other side of town?  Then why do prices in America, which has growing supplies, have to be up because demand is high in China?  Hmm.  Could it be because Exxon-Mobil is no longer an American corporation?

The struggle for dominance between corporations and sovereign states is not taking place in a galaxy far, far away.  The battlefields are at your grocery store, your airport, you gas station, your bank, and a thousand other places where you live.  When Supreme Courts award another victory to corporations, or corporate lobbyists stem another attempt at government regulation, it’s you that loses.  Think about it.

You Can't Go Home Again

Blaine Young, Chair of our County Commissioners is pushing for elimination of all county funding for non-profits.  He says it’s to save the county from raising taxes, though estimates are that the total county funding for non profits amounts to .1 cent per dollar of the county budget.   So if you have a property tax of $5,000, then annually funding non-profits could cost you a whole $5.  I think he’s chasing a dream, his dream, of life in the county 100 years ago.  His real problem seems to be that he’s after the wrong opponents, and his dream becomes the nightmare of others.

The non-profits he would cut funding for include operations like Heartly House, the Mental Health Association, the Cold Weather Shelter, etc. – all those places that the people derailed from normal living by the stresses and dislocations of our current county way of life go to for help with coping and recovery.  “Have they no poor houses to go to?” snarled Ebenezer Scrooge, and Young’s solution is suspiciously similar.  He seems to think religious congregations and big hearted people around the county will pick up the slack.  But, as an example, for my own congregation to double its giving for such purposes, and that would not be enough, would require an increase in giving of about $50 per member, not the $5 provided through property taxes.  That’s because “many hands make light work”, as the load is shared by the whole county population.

And the problem is a county-wide problem, not just for the poor and for the big-hearted only, but for all the people and for the county government.  The county Young appears to dream of is the sleepy, mainly rural and lightly populated county of 100 years ago.  People knew each other, life didn’t change that fast, and neighbor helped neighbor.  At least that’s the way the dream goes.  But you really can’t go home to that dream again.  The modern county is a high-tech, commuter-oriented place where life changes fast, for better or worse, and the attendant stresses and strains can ruin lives.  Neighbors often don’t know even who lives next door.  Government, like it or not, plays a big role throughout.  State and local government offer tax subsidies and grants to business to stimulate growth, rezone, build new roads, etc., actively working to create the growth and change that alters the lives of their citizens.  They no longer are allowed to disclaim responsibility for the consequences of their actions.

The responsibility of government, and that includes the county, to act has been recognized for many years now, as has also been recognized the impossibility of governments to act flexibly and efficiently enough through direct action to get done all that is needed. The solution to the dilemma has been “third-party government”, the funding by government of private organizations to get done things that government is too unwieldy to accomplish.  Government can’t build advanced fighter planes; that’s why they subsidize defense contractors to do so.  And government can’t directly provide all necessary services to those displaced and traumatized by the changes government has encouraged; that’s why they why they fund non-profits to do so.  That’s what the non-profits are doing that Young seeks to defund. It’s time for Blaine Young to wake up from his dream, and get back to the work of managing effectively all of the county’s responsibilities, not just those of 100 years ago.

Bobby Burns Economics

The English translation goes, “If some little god the gift would give us to see ourselves as others see us, it would from many a blunder free us, and foolish notion.”  That caution from Bobby Burns would be a wise thing to remember this political season as we surround ourselves with ranting advocates waving charts.  We argue about deficits, entitlement reforms, Buffet rules, etc., focusing largely on where we are relative to where the economy was 4 years ago or where we want it to be in another 4 years.  And all the time, great controlled experiments of the kind social scientists dream about are occurring, answers are being produced, and we are blind to them.

Take for example, the issue of the desirability or failure of “the bail-out”, much decried by conservative economists, who strongly prefer deficit reduction and an austerity regimen as the economic cure.  It so happens, that when the global financial crisis hit Europe at the same time as America back in 2008, European bankers, particularly the Germans, prescribed just that. Both the EU and America suffered immediate sharp economic declines.  In Europe the prescribed austerity produced in addition great social trauma, including a “humanitarian crisis” and rioting first in Greece, and now creeping across southern Europe and political crises beginning to spread even to stalwart democracies like France, the Netherlands and the UK.  The economic crisis in Europe meanwhile continues unabated, Spain and the UK have officially entered a double-dip recession, and the Euro zone is expected to shrink another .3 percent this year.

In America, as a result of the lamented “bail-out”, AKA old-fashioned Keynesian economics in thin disguise, the current GDP growth is between 2 and 3 percent, still weak but definitely on the mend, and a number Europe would love to have.  Longer term, the IMF has just projected that German GDP growth to 2017 will be only 40 percent of the American growth rate.  Germany, you will recall, is the leading exponent of severe austerity.  It has become clear to all in Europe, except perhaps Germany, that austerity alone was part of the problem, not the solution.  It’s interesting that the American politicians who most decry the “Europeanization” effect of liberal proposals are the ones  most inclined to follow failed European solutions.

Other experiments are occurring further afield. China, with an expected population over age 60 of 200 million by 2014, is carefully extending its pension plans investments to include up to 40 percent in the equities market.  And China has reduced its average cost to the consumer of medicine by 40 percent by standardizing drug prices.  They are also exploring regulation of hospital administrative practices as a cost-cutting device.  The results are far from in, but worth watching.

The point is, of course, that in this rapidly globalizing world, we need no longer rely only on a longitudinal analysis of American experience to understand our problems and their potential solutions.  It’s time to lift our eyes to the world around and to see both it and ourselves “as others see us.”  We could avoid some costly blunders.

Bubbles, Tiny Bubbles

Travelling between worlds is frequently a wrenching experience, even when done at the dinner table.  I recently found myself making the jump, first while dining with friends who definitely qualify as members in good standing of the east coast establishment, then later with friends who are active in the international scientific community.  My establishment friends are not only very good people, but totally “with it”, able to converse knowledgeably and facilely on just about any topic.  To some extent, they make their living with words.  At a lull in the conversation, I had brought up the subject of the ideas in David Rothkopf’s new book, Power, Inc., regarding the struggle for dominance between multi-national corporations and nation-states.   I thought that since my friends worked daily with both corporations and government, they might find Rothkopf’s conclusions at least interesting. It was like dropping a rock into the abyss. It was not just that they had not read the book; that by itself would never have stopped them from conversing about it.  My friends were obviously flummoxed by the very existence of such ideas and at a rare loss for words, so we quickly passed on to other subjects.  Then, a day later, I brought up the same ideas (you can tell I liked the book) to my scientist friends, who immediately picked up on them, affirming them from their own experience and offering several instances of their significance.  I myself was a little aghast at the chasm it revealed between two superficially overlapping communities.

It brought to mind another book I’m currently reading, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 – 2010, by Charles Murray.   It’s one of those books that is less controversial than its author.  Murray is a conservative sociologist best known as author of The Bell Curve, a book some years ago reporting educational differences between Whites and Blacks that received a lot of criticism for its negative conclusions about the educational attainment of Blacks.  In his new book, Murray reports a study of emerging differences between upper middle class and the working middle class in America, confining himself to a study of white groups only to avoid further racial controversy.  In it, he analyses commonalities and differences between two communities living side by side in a Philadelphia suburb, and their changes over time.  He finds that groups that once, while differing in income and education, essentially shared the same life style, eating the same foods prepared only slightly differently, shopping at the same stores, with children attending the same schools, etc., now are living lives differing in such broad ways that they are increasingly unable to understand and relate to each other’s problems.  Murray describes each group as living in a bubble, out of contact with the other and not even aware of that fact. His conclusions reinforce the observation made in The American Scholar a year or two ago, that the average graduate of an elite college is unable to hold a meaningful conversation with his plumber.

I suppose my problem with the book is that, because he’s doing a longitudinal study of two side-by-side communities, and not for example, including differences between a southern university town, a Midwestern small town and a west coast hi-tech community, Murray’s bubbles are too large and few.  In my view, we are increasingly a nation of smaller and smaller bubbles, and a San Francisco poet or Chicago commodities broker or Duke University teacher might as well, to an affluent farmer in east Texas or to each other, be in Asia. I have cited before the empathy gap in America, and the problems it leads us into.  It will be especially troubling this year, as we go into a general election and begin tearing each other’s values apart.  We always will need to be sensitive to the different bubbles we live in and the different way the world appears from them.  And we must remember that sometimes there’s a whole different world just across the dinner table.

Pursuing Happiness

Most  of us who have parented have noticed  smart little kids going through a stage, sometimes extended, where they love to sort and count things – balls, cars, princesses, dinosaurs, whatever.  The objects are definite, the numbers are understandable and exact, the exercise is lulling, and there’s pleasure in all of that.  Most kids grow past that stage toward involvement in all sorts of other things; the rest become economists.  They have found their bliss in life early on, and will cling to it forever.

Left undisturbed, economists will usually go about quietly, muttering under their breath strange incantations, like “negative elasticity”, “Laffer Curve”, “externalities”, etc., and happily predicting doom just around the corner.  That, after all, is how the field came to be described as “the dismal science.”  They worship odd things that no one else can see, like “perfect competition” and “the rational man”, but we all have our idiosyncrasies, and economists are useful in providing a plausible explanation for things that happened last week, though they never can seem to figure them out in advance.  But the field has been under attack lately, and some are beginning to react strangely.  Perhaps, it’s another tremor in the paradigm.

Take for example, the column the other day by Robert Samuelson in the Washington Post. It was an all-out attack on happiness!  He was obviously upset and outraged about a report just issued, the “World Happiness Report”, which argued that GDP doesn’t measure everything important in life and that economic growth doesn’t always make people happier.  He attributes it to a shadowy, sinister European conspiracy he calls “the happiness movement.” Oh, the Horror!  He’s particularly concerned about a recent study result that economists call “the Easterlin Paradox”, that the rich and middle class are happier than the poor, but after that, getting richer doesn’t cause their own sense of happiness to increase. (It should be noted, by the way, that decades ago, behavioral scientists studying motivation theory learned to distinguish between “satisfiers” and “dissatisfiers”, and then found that lack of money is a dissatisfier, but money is not a satisfier, and by itself is not a motivator. Could it be that motivation counts toward happiness?  They found that what really counted toward “morale”, a kind of group happiness, were gestalt and cohesion – a shared group identity and a sense of active belonging.)

All that is preface of course to his real target, which is the immeasurability of happiness and the lack of a common definition.  He believes that, since no measurable standard of universal happiness exists, governments should not promote it, but stick to things he’s good at measuring like GDP. He notes that the Happiness Report lists Freedom as an essential component of happiness, but that freedom permits self-destructive acts which reduce happiness. Thus, to him, happiness is a utopian vision not worth pursuing, and creates goals doomed to failure.   He’s right that happiness is not an entitlement, and will probably never be achievable for all, but grumpily wrong otherwise.

It starts with his bland premise, that “All rich societies already try to balance economic growth with social justice, security and environmental progress.”  Yet a fellow columnist, Harold Meyerson, reports that since the 1970s all additional income from increases in productivity in America, the richest of nations, have gone to the top ten percent.  Had the minimum wage, now $7.25, increased in line with productivity, it would be $21.72.  The security of families is under constant attack though efforts to chip away Medicare and Social Security.  Environmental progress is challenged every day by oil companies and other entrenched interests, who seek to worsen, not better, the environment through self-serving policies.  And he of course is wrong in his 18^th century attitude that any goal which cannot be measured is not worth seeking.  It was those “utopian visions” that brought his ancestors to America in the first place, that conquered a continent and that serve as the engine that drives America today.  People do not live to pursue a higher GDP; they live, in part, to prosper in a virtuous society. The Founding Fathers, far better than Samuelson, understood that the virtue of a society includes the promotion of individual hopes and dreams, not all achievable or measurable. His bliss lies in counting and measuring; he should not deny others their own.

Tilting the Bargaining Table

I still remember the day my seamstress mother’s pay was raised to 50 cents per hour.  In the early 1950s that was an increase in our household income of about two-thirds, a major cause for celebration.  A few years later a minimum wage law would raise her pay again to 75 cents per hour, but that, while well worth celebrating, had not quite the impact of that original raise.  It had come after a hard-fought battle between the sweat shop owners of the clothing factory in our small East Texas city and the clothing workers union, during which my mother had spent many hours on the picket line.  She always credited the union as making her hard life at least minimally endurable.
Mama’s battle it turns out was occurring at the peak of the union movement in this country.  In 1954, union membership topped out at 35 percent of the work force; it would never again achieve that level, though union membership in absolute numbers would reach 21.8 million workers in 1979.  Union membership nationally has declined to 11.8 percent of the workforce in 2010, but even that is heavily bolstered by the 37 percent unionization of the government workforce (that includes state and local, teacher unions, etc., as well as federal); private sector unions are down to 6.9 percent of their workforce.  It is no coincidence that at the same time, as reported by JPMorgan Chase, U.S. labor compensation is at a 50-year low relative both to company sales and GDP.  It turns out that in 2010, 100 percent of all income growth went to the wealthiest 10 percent of U.S. households.  As Harold Meyerson notes in the Washington Post, unions at 6.9 percent of the private sector workforce have lost the power to bargain effectively for higher pay.
That’s what is especially bemusing about Mitt Romney’s vow that on a first day in the White House he would issue executive orders “to tilt the bargaining table away from the unions.”  A Texan is always ready with a colorful phrase, but one is overburdened in this case; should it be “kicking a man when he’s down”, or “sucking the creek dry” or simply “trying to get blood out of a turnip?” Whatever the metaphor or simile used, it can’t convey either the antiquity of Romney’s labor-management views or the depth of vulture capitalism to which they sink.  They have the ring of sweat shop management from 60 years ago.  If he aspires to be President of all the people, he has a lot of catching up to do.

The Broccoli Test

Well, my Easter break, including a couple of pleasant days at the beach - much too pleasant for early April, but that’s a topic for another day - is over, and it’s time to resume pondering the strange ways of the political world.  There have been so many oddities these last few days that choosing among them is tough.  One of the oddest, that I’ve shied away from because the field was so crowded, was the strange Q&A session of the Supreme Court about the Affordable Care Act.  The high point (?) of the session was the series of questions raised by Justice Scalia about the Individual  Mandate, including “does the government’s position mean that the power to regulate interstate commerce includes the ability  to mandate eating broccoli?”  Clearly he is still dealing with childhood issues.  Actually it is a serious question in its way, involving the issue of establishing a clear legal limit to the power of government to intervene in markets.

The question deserved a clearer answer than it got, but that was left, interestingly enough, not to lawyers, but to Donna Dubinski, former CEO of Palm Computing, in a Sunday column in the Washington Post.  It certainly gives weight to the famous observation by FDR that the Constitution was not written for lawyers.  Ms. Dubinski gave a both legal and economic answer that merits wider circulation.  Her criteria for government mandate under the Interstate Commerce Clause were that 1) the product or service involved must be something everyone must have at some point in their life, and 2) the market for that product or service does not function.  In other words, it must involve a failed market for a required product or service.  That’s about as clear as it gets in Constitutional circles.

Ms. Dubinski goes on to point out that the broccoli fails both tests while the ACA clearly meets both, in that health service is required by everyone at some point, is too expensive for the individual without insurance if left until sickness occurs, and is too expensive for society if the individual “free loads” by refusing insurance while healthy.  She points out that additional evidence of a failed market is that at least 25% of individuals not covered by employment based insurance are uninsured because they are denied coverage even while reasonably healthy, not for failure to seek it. Perhaps, unlike Scalia, she does not see the feasibility of leaving someone dying of leprosy in the streets.  In any event, the “failed market” argument seems powerfully persuasive.  Let us hope Scalia gets over his distaste for broccoli enough to consider the arguments carefully and dispassionately.