Black and White

In politics it can be a little too tempting to frame arguments in a dichotomy that, by its very nature, has to be false.  It is never going to be as simple as to say liberals are dog people, conservatives are cat people, or vice versa.  The same is intrinsically true of more important differences concerning the value given to education or the military for example.  I hope that this simple truth is appreciated by the larger public, because we make our tasks more difficult to tackle when we frame every argument as an all or nothing struggle between two polar opposite sides.  That said, if I had to choose one group that seems less likely to accept the gradation, the grayness of the world, it would have to be those who live on the fringes, particularly those on the Right.

After listening to quite a few conservative commentators, I’ve learned that the world is a terrifying place where good and evil are constantly fighting and where there can never be any neutral ground between them.  Perhaps when I was a child this simplistic way of looking at the world would have resonated with me, but alas I have grown up.  The world is beautifully complex, with all sorts of centers struck between the poles.  People who live in this world are similarly complex, defined by the cognitive dissonance that allows us to live as the hypocrites we are without being immobilized by our own contradictions.  Hypocrisy, in this way, is not a negative thing, but as far as many conservative talking heads are concerned there is only the simple us or them narrative to cram yourself into.

This comes to a particular head when talking about the larger issues of freedom and equality in the world and in America.  To the extremist world view there can only ever be perfect liberty or perfect equality or perfect justice or perfect ideal x.  Either we choose to have a government that utterly lacks power and authority, to ensure that we remain totally free; or else we choose to impose a Soviet style authoritarian regime, wherein everything we do and think is monitored to maintain equality.  In short either we choose absolute free markets or we choose absolute tyranny.  They have to make this false choice, because between those two extremes there is clearly only one victor.

However, the world is not so simple and a pure and total libertarian system is not an ideal at all.  The lack of any governmental authority means the return of the ultimatum from the Melian Dialogue.  “The strong do as they can and the weak suffer what they must.”  The Koch Brothers, by virtue of their ability to make money are imbued with the power to do what they will and those who live in areas with too close a proximity to a leaking oil pipeline or a new fracking target will suffer what they must.  There is the illusion of freedom for everyone, but for many that is simply the freedom to be taken advantage of.  And I will readily admit that people do already suffer and are taken advantage of in the system we have, but we recognize these things as problems that society must address and at least try to fix problems where and when they arise.

If the choice is between that extreme or the horrendous gulags and endless queues of the USSR, then sure I will still take the libertarian wet dream, but this is a false choice.  Government is often treated as a necessary evil, and to an extent it certainly is, but only because it is the lesser evil of these radical extremes on either end.  Moderation, like in so many things, is the key to a prudent life.  Too much of anything will kill you, hence “too much.”  Too much water will kill you, whether in the form of a tsunami or water intoxication.  But that is not an argument against drinking water, which you may have noticed is rather necessary for the preservation of life.

Government does indeed go overboard, and when that happens it is up to us to recognize that reality and pull on the reigns to bring things back to an appropriate moderation.  Moderation is not an easy task, because it is an ever shifting target.  What works at one time in one place may not work for everyone everywhere.  It’s a balancing act like any other, where we try to get a little better with practice, but no system will ever be perfect.  We choose moderation in life because it is the most perfect, or least imperfect choice when compared to more horrendous alternatives.  But if you listen to commentators on the extreme Right Wing, there is only freedom and tyranny.

Granted, some of this can be chalked up to the hyperbole that is used in discussions to get people fired up and ready to fight for any particular ideology.  But when the specter of Stalin is used to start a discussion, you may have more than a problem with communicating your point of view.  Yet this is the framework that is used in nearly every discussion by Right Wing pundits.  If the President wants to raise taxes then that is equivalent to the government taking 100% of your money.  If the first lady wants to serve healthier lunches in public schools, she is force feeding the food of gulags on our nation’s youth.  If the Congress even votes on a bill to mandate mental background checks for deadly weapons, then that is tantamount to burning the second amendment and spitting on the ashes.

This is stirring rhetoric to be sure, to the point where you can really only gasp or laugh at it, but it ends conversations that need to be had by saying that any attempt to address problems is the work of tyranny.  To some people there can be no such thing as a good regulation, to which I have to respond that I am quite happy that cars are mandated to have seat belts, thank you very much.  Yes it might be the mildest form of irritation when the little alarm goes off because you didn’t buckle up fast enough, but that is the smallest price to pay for an improvement that both makes vehicles much safer and more valuable, but which would have been avoided if car makers had had their say.  There are good regulations, there are good taxes, there are good government services.  The key with any and all of these things is not to have complete regulation or none at all, but to look for what the right balance is to strike.

These are the conversations that are worth having, but listening to many talking heads it would seem that merely accepting that sometimes people make stupid decisions that affect other people is the first goose-step toward the next Reich.  Nearly every topic cannot be talked about rationally with people like this, because every proposed solution is immediately extended ad absurdum.  And the rational majority seems unwilling to respond in kind, which is probably the right call, but then this loud minority remains unchallenged.  In discussions about taxes, for example, whenever it is suggested that we raise the highest marginal tax rates by 1-3% the immediate question is, why not by 5% or 20% or 100%?  But when these same people propose cutting taxes to paradoxically raise revenue, based on the Laffer Curve, no one ever asks them why not eliminate taxes altogether?  No one does it because it is obviously insane to bring it to that extreme, yet we entertain the equivalent argument on the opposing side.

Fighting fire with fire is not an effective strategy, I’ll grant you, but at some point there needs to be a call for reason.  There needs to be a call for adult, rational discussion where we acknowledge that answers don’t always come easy and they rarely, if ever, come in a nice black and white picture.  Until we make these basic common sense rules for how national issues are even discussed, I find it highly unlikely that we can effectively solve them.  The world is full of different shades of gray, and that’s fine, we can work with that.  But if we force ourselves to entertain the notion that the extremist view of an all or nothing world is a healthy way to solve problems, then we force ourselves to live in a world without workable solutions.

And Spend

One of the most tired cliches in criticism of Democrats, liberals, progressives, etc is the three simple words “tax and spend.”  This is the great and terrible sin of the Left as put by essentially every conservative commentator.  But let’s just look at this for just one second, “tax and spend.”  That is the role of the government in a nut shell.  There are certain services we expect from government, which ultimately has no means of funding other than taxation, which is then put to use in the form of spending.  At its most basic, this is a criticism against the very idea of government and not about the Democratic Party.  While there are indeed members of the Republican Party who would like nothing more than to make government so small that “we can drown it in a bathtub,” that is not the main objective of Republicans more broadly, and certainly not sane Republicans.  The criticism is simply that Democrats tax too much and spend too much, right?  Well then how does governance play out when the GOP is in control?

When Republicans run for office, the largest plank in their platform is invariably the vow to cut taxes, usually followed with promises to cut spending as well.  Here’s the thing, they only go after the tax cuts.  And the average voter might be thinking, well that’s ok because at least then I get a tax break, but the problem isn’t that the government spends money, it’s that the government spends more money than it takes in.  The basic services of government do not come cheap, and whenever we choose to take lower taxes rather than pay for the services we all enjoy, someone has to pay.  In the short term, the government can borrow money, which we do.  Our borrowed money comes at a significant cost, however.  Each year we continue deficit spending means that on top of the interest we pay on the existing debt, we are taking on ever greater new debt to pay for the difference between what we spent and what we took in.

This has never been a great concern to the baby boomer generation that has inflated the debt to incomprehensible levels, because there’s always been the previous generation to save the world and the coming generations to pay the debt.  And because younger generations are less likely to actually show up at the polls, there is only ever a marginal grievance that the debt grows as it does.  So while those tax cuts might have seemed so nice in the short term, someone is going to be feeling the pinch in the long term.  Which brings me to my criticism of the Republican Party, it is the “and spend” party.  By demonizing taxation in the way they do, it is nearly impossible to balance the books, unless you are prepared to slash spending, which they never are.

Republicans and Democrats both like to spend government money quite a bit, though they sometimes disagree on what exactly to spend it on.  Democrats are more likely to spend money on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, etc.  Republicans are more likely to spend money on the military, border security, less tangible defense like the CIA, etc.  And generally both like to spend on infrastructure, subsidies and pork barrel spending for their local constituencies.  The difference here is not whether these parties like to spend, it’s whether these parties are willing to pay for them, and clearly one is not.  The Republican Party continues to live in a dream where lowering taxes is the answer to everything, and the vague promise to cut spending will be enough to keep from accruing debt.  But let’s not forget that the first trillion dollar deficit came from President George W Bush.  He also managed to take the surplus budget he inherited from President Clinton and immediately turn it into growing deficits for the entirety of his tenure, ultimately culminating in the bailout of 2008.

Again, my problem here is not with spending per se.  The role of the government requires spending, but we need to pay for it, and Republicans have proven that they simply won’t or can’t.  I believe there is bipartisan agreement that the tax code needs to be simplified, but at the end of the day we need to start actually taking in more revenue and we can’t do that by continually cutting taxes, adding loopholes, and generally pretending there isn’t a problem.  If we don’t face these basic issues, then we won’t be able to pay for the things we expect a government to do.

President Lincoln has a somewhat well known saying about the role of government and it is “to do for the people what needs to be done, but which they cannot, by individual effort, do at all, or do so well, for themselves.”  This includes a great many things, such as defense, infrastructure, and education.  Let’s start with these really basic things that most everyone can agree upon, and look at what Republicans tend to do when it comes to spending for them.

Everyone knows that Republicans love to spend on military hardware, even when the brass actually advises against it.  Republicans love this so much and yet they have proven incapable of actually paying for it in times when military spending reaches its peak, i.e. wartime.  In the history of the United States, there are only two times when a president has decreased taxes during a war.  The first was Kennedy in 1964, at a time when there were American troops fighting in Vietnam.  However, you may notice by the date that this was quite a while before the Vietnam war became a large expenditure of both resources and American lives.  The only other president was George W Bush, who cut taxes repeatedly during what has become our nation’s longest war.  One could argue that it was this sparse revenue that allowed our troops to be sent into harms way ill-equipped, often lacking proper body armor and vehicle protection.  In short Republicans are willing to spend on defense, they just aren’t willing to pay for the defense of those actually bearing the load.

We saw the battle over infrastructure spending just this past summer, when the GOP was once again unprepared to pay for the maintenance of our bridges and highways.  What would normally have been one of the easiest votes for any politician was made impossible by extremists on the Right who were trying to outdo each other on who could be the most conservative.  Either they were living under the delusion that once these things are built they never need to be worked on again, or else they were under the delusion that gambling with the lives of Americans is a brilliant political tactic.  In either case I am left with the conclusion that these are not the sharpest tools in the shed, regardless of how big of tools they can be.

And then we get to education, which brings up a feigned controversy that always makes me chuckle.  The Right is always putting on the most contrived looks of shock and disgust when they find out that teachers and professors tend to vote democratic.  They make claims that this is evidence of some great conspiracy to indoctrinate the youth to vote for liberal candidates, when the simple reality is that teachers know who actually cares about education.  If Republicans were the ones fighting to not only fund our education system, but to make sure that the revenue stream is such that they aren’t going to continually have to worry about cuts down the road, then they might enjoy a little more support from teachers.  As it is, Republicans are always the first ones to sell our children short by defunding schools, and they’re always the last ones to accept increased taxes to make sure that we are actually paying for it.

So far in his tenure, President Obama has slashed the deficit and has done so largely without even addressing necessary tax increases, but the time has come to actually increase revenues so we can not only pay for what we need, but pay off the debt we don’t.  He follows in a long line of Democrats who will raise or lower taxes depending on what the situation needs, in stark contrast to Republicans who will only do the right thing once they’ve been dragged kicking and screaming to do so.  This is why I find it no great surprise that the “insult” hurled against Democrats is essentially a description of government, because if there is one thing this Republican Congress has proven it wants nothing to do with, it’s governing.

False Equivalency

Having conversations with people you disagree with can be pretty testing these days.  It can seem that people are no longer willing to give the benefit of the doubt that regardless of where we fall on the political spectrum, we all want the best for our country, our families, and ourselves.  Our disagreements come not from whether or not to destroy America, but how best to protect America.  In the larger context of society and media we are bombarded with stories about liberals versus conservatives, Democrats vs Republicans, the Left vs the Right, etc.  This is not what I experience in normal life, because when I talk with people I genuinely don’t go into it with the feeling that I’m going into an all or nothing grudge match.  When I argue and debate with others, I usually leave feeling that regardless of how much we may disagree that this too was an American who wants the best for their country.  However, there is an important gap that needs to be addressed in American politics.

If you take any philosophy and stretch it to its most extreme cases, you are bound to find craziness.  The belief that equality is of prime importance, when taken to its absolute limits, becomes a destructive ideology called communism.  The belief that liberty is of prime importance, when taken to its absolute limit, becomes a destructive ideology called anarchy.  The extremes of all ideologies are dangerous, and we should be ready to call them out where they are, but in America both sides of the extreme do not exist, at least not in the mainstream.  While there may be a handful of radicals calling for communism, remaining somewhere in this country, they are nowhere to be found in the Democratic Party or the American Left more generally.  The same is not true for the other extreme.

I don’t hear people on the Left calling for secession or civil war to settle once and for all if this is going to be a conservative or liberal nation, but I do hear these things coming from the Right.  To be clear, this is a minority of people on the Right, as the majority of Republicans whom I’ve met are not the bloodthirsty stereotype that sometimes ends up representing the American Right; however, the current of extremist ideology on the Right runs strong.  I, for one, believe it is worth taking the time to say that while there are certainly assholes on all sides of the political spectrum, only on the Right in America is that allowed to turn crazy.  More to the point, I think this is a problem for reasonable people on the Right, because the more tempered voice calling for limited government is overshadowed by the voice calling for the end of America’s government at least, if not the splintering of the union.

Believe you me, there are absolute jerks on the Left, who take a certain self satisfied notion that they know what is right all the time, and that anyone who disagrees with them is simply uneducated.  They exist, but they make up a tiny fraction of the American Left, and as my frankness should indicate, they are treated as something of a laughing stock.  On the other hand, the Right of American politics seems much more willing to not only condone their know-it-alls, but to put them in positions of prominence.  Figures like Rick Santorum are cheered when they attack legal immigrants along side illegal immigrants for taking American jobs, despite being the son of an Italian immigrant.  The now former Governor of Texas, Rick Perry, has casually mentioned that he could consider secession as a reaction to what he perceived as federal overreach, despite the fact that the last time Texas tried to do that it was pretty well settled what the country thinks about the legitimacy of secession.  This setting aside windbags like Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, and all the rest who constantly screech on about the many ways they would like to simply get rid of large portions of the American population: liberals, feminists, gays, atheists, etc.

All these extremists who claim that they will leave this country whenever a Democrat wins the presidency, and somehow never follow through, are embraced as patriots on the Right, for what reason I may never know.  Incidentally these same voices are always the loudest in calling for American troops to fight and die overseas, yet when it their numbers came up for the draft, they always had an excuse.  The more extremist voices on the Left are met with ridicule and embarrassment, but the ramblings of Right wing crazies are met with cheers.  Or how else could we explain the popularity of someone like Sarah Palin?

There is a false equivalency in this country that says to be honest means that you shun the extremists on all sides equally, but with the balance of crazy so heavily slanted to the Right we need to acknowledge when the inmates are running the insane asylum.  The political spectrum is always going to look unbalanced to unbalanced people, so for those that lie so far to the Right it is unsurprising that they think the moderate position lies on the far Left.  President Obama is not a socialist, and his record has proven that he tends very well to the market system we have in place.  If you believe that he is, then I suggest first a dictionary and if that doesn’t work out you might want to ask your doctor for some meds.

If I start hearing people on the Left calling for an elimination of capitalism in favor of a communist redistribution of wealth, such that everyone has an equal bank account, then yeah I will be first in line to point out the extremism.  But that isn’t happening, and rational people know that it isn’t happening.  The “extreme” point of view on the Left that earns the disdain of the Right these days often would have been the mainstream of the Republican Party a mere 20 years ago.  The ACA was the brainchild of the Heritage Foundation, promoted by Bob Dole and first put in place by Mitt Romney.  It is by no means a Left wing idea, but it was better than nothing and Democrats assumed that if they gave Republicans what they wanted that there could be bipartisanship, but that didn’t happen.  The extreme fringe of the GOP has made dead sure that to even acknowledge that the free market healthcare system might have some problems is an offense worthy of ostracization.

In foreign relations, to even entertain the possibility of changing the status quo concerning Cuba is considered the height of communist sympathy, even though Richard Nixon did essentially the same thing with China in 1972.  In Nevada, the Republican governor is fighting with the Republican legislature because he wants to raise taxes, among the lowest in the nation, to pay for an improved education, among the worst in the nation.  There is no reason why members of a party should agree on everything, all the time, but the GOP’s insistence on litmus tests that go further and further to the Right is the result of the unrelenting demand of extremists on the Right to be treated as if they were the center.  And indeed, this self-centered view of the world is the very root of their ideology, as they ignore the pain of others, the real problems of the nation, and the solutions that have been proven to work.

We need to always give our respect to others who may disagree with us, because that is the heart of a civil society.  We need to treat political discussions on the national stage the same way we do when we talk with people face to face, which is to say that even when we disagree we learn to get on with our lives.  We need to be able to see the common ground that exists between Republicans and Democrats, but we also need to be conscious of which side is more heavily laden with extremists who are unwilling to debate and who remain intent first on silencing dissent.  There are always going to be wackos on all sides of the field, but we can’t afford to pretend that all sides have equal numbers of crazies like Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Steve King, Joe Arpaio, Michael Grimm, Gordon Klingenschmitt, Louie Gohmert, and much, much, so very much more.  John Boehner may be a jerk and an all around orange in the mud, but he’s not crazy.

Truth to Power

With nearly a week between the address and this blog post, it seems like I may just be the last commentator in the world to talk about my reaction to the State of the Union.  Nonetheless it needs to be, well, addressed.  Like most people in this country, and certainly all liberals, there is quite a bit of the speech that I absolutely adored and some resulting frustration at how good it was, or rather the timing of this great speech.  You see, President Obama laid out a brilliant vision for what progressives fight for and what America should look like if we simply cooperate long enough to get some common sense things done.  This forward thinking vision is the kind of thing the Democratic Party could really have run and won with in 2014, but that didn’t happen.  What we got was a bunch of cowardly Democrats begging not to be hit for doing all the good they have managed to do and the result was a miserable turnout and an appropriately miserable result.  But, in keeping with the timing of this post, it’s better late than never.

Mr Obama has gone so long worrying about how to get the Republicans to work with him on anything, it seemed for a moment that he’d become unable to see that they were extending a middle finger and not an olive branch to him for the past six years.  This speech brought an appropriate end to that, and yet it was done with an appropriate level of class for the highest office in the nation.  At no point did he overtly attack the GOP for voting of 50 times to dismantle Obamacare, nor for their petty attempts to stop the government from working, nor for their endless hearings about Benghazi that repeatedly vindicate the President, nor for the seemingly unending filibusters and threats to filibuster.  He did, however, deliver a brilliant punch to the Republicans who made their number one priority to make President Obama a one term president.  I’m sure he was as glad to get that off his chest as we were to hear it, but he didn’t dwell on the many criticisms that could and should be made about Congressional Republicans, regardless of how satisfying it would have undoubtedly been.

There was a good deal of time laying out the fine job he has done, in the face of their opposition.  He pointed out how much better the economy is doing under his policies, particularly considering the GOP created debacle he inherited. He reminded the nation of reality when it comes to foreign as well as fiscal policy.  Understandably, he did take a bit of a victory lap in touting off all the metrics possible that prove America has been more prosperous, freer, and safer now than it was when he took the oath of office in 2009.  But his small celebration was tempered by his admission that there was still much to do.  And this is the part that I appreciated most of all, because he not only highlighted the issues we face but gave clear and workable solutions to them.

In the 21st century, one of the greatest issues we face is the widening gap between the rich and the poor.  In an ideal world, this would make no problems at all for the people on the bottom end of the equation.  In an ideal world, the wealth of the richest Americans would spawn new industries and new occupations and new opportunities for everyone.  In an ideal world a rising tide lifts all boats, even if some get raised higher than others.  However, those in the population that have functioning brains may have noticed that we do not, in fact, inhabit an ideal world.  The widening gap between rich and poor is not a cause for celebration, even in the world of voodoo economics.  The fact that fewer and fewer people control a greater and greater share of the nation’s wealth inhibits growth and allows those with to game the system against those without.  The fact that the buying power of the majority of Americans is stagnant makes it all the more difficult to maintain current growth, let alone to boost the economy further.  Mr Obama clearly understands this and made the case for how we actually solve the problem.

The surest bet in fighting poverty is education from infancy through adulthood.  The proposals outlined by President Obama start in the early years of a child’s life by empowering families with the necessary resources to raise a child.  From maternity leave to tax cuts for children and pay equity, the President has shown his dedication to those who need the most assistance and who are the best investments, families of all shapes and sizes.  Our education system, in no small part thanks to federal investment and stronger standards like Common Core, is now preparing more students than ever for college education.  That education is incredibly expensive, so the proposal to provide the first two years of community college at no further cost to the students will bring the students even further along the way to preparedness for the competition of a global marketplace.

Obviously, these policies do not come without a cost of some kind.  Unlike Republicans who tend to simply cut taxes without a care in the world about the debt, Mr Obama is set to continue his slashing of deficits by addressing the revenue problems inherent in the existing tax code.  Loopholes are targeted and as compensation for the explosion in wealth the very richest in the country have enjoyed, the top capital gains rates will increase slightly.  What’s more, if Republicans actually feel like growing up and working together, they can feel free to highlight wasteful spending to be cut so that tax rates don’t have to go up any further.  Because there is a lot of real work to be done in Mr Obama’s last two years in office.

Or rather, the work that could be done.  As empowering as it was to hear the President outline his desire to bring broadband to all Americans, increase healthcare research, close Guantanamo Bay Prison, improve our nation’s infrastructure, build up our cyber security capabilities, and all the rest, the sad truth is that the recently elected Republican Congress won’t act on much of anything.  Every proposal that was brought up by the president should at least merit the kind of tempered discussion that will allow healthy debate and compromise that would create bills with most of these desired outcomes, if perhaps by alternative means.  Most of these proposals are things that the GOP has historically been behind, like ensuring that our bridges and roads don’t crumble or ending loopholes and exemptions in the tax code.  But we all know that the current state of our legislative branch is dedicated to proving that Congress is indeed the opposite of progress.

The president is not powerless in his current position, and his veto pen will certainly get the workout it has been avoiding in the earlier part of his tenure.  There will undoubtedly be some measures that get taken up, like the free trade deals and some form of tax reform.  Heck we might even see the end of the ridiculous effort to gut the ACA now that even the most conservative states are enjoying the benefits of an admittedly flawed healthcare system.  But at the end of the day, the only hope for families struggling, students drowning in debt, workers somehow getting by on minimum wage, and the rest of America that remains on the wrong side of the increasing gulf between the richest and the poorest is that in 2016 a Democrat takes up this mantle along with a progressive Congress to back him or her up.

In the mean time, though, this was not a fruitless exercise.  For now it serves as a reminder to the American people of why we like Democrats, and a vision of what kind of policies we would enjoy if not for the loyal opposition.  Because it is true that to confront your elected officials with the facts is indeed speaking truth to power, we need to remember that in a democracy the power lies with the people.  The President spoke to us and let us know what is really going on in the world and gave a suggestion of how he would fix the existing challenges in the world.  It is now for us to take those words for what they are and do with them what we must, and we must keep moving forward.

Right to be Served

Everyone has a reason for believing the things they believe.  Granted some reasons are better than others, and many times we all end up just continuing with whatever lessons we were brought up to believe.  That said, people who get into political discussions, generally, act as if the reasons they have the end all be all explanation for why their position is right, hence why they believe it.  Rarely do these explanations come from long self reflection, studies into effects of various policies, or research into different fields and thinkers.  No, the sad reality is that most people, myself included occasionally, end up hearing something that sounds just so right, which perfectly encapsulates why they believe what they already believed.  One of these little arguments that I keep hearing centers around why healthcare, university education, etc cannot be considered rights.  These things are services, provided by people who expect a wage for a living, and for these things to be treated as rights would require them to be provided for free to everyone and therefore require doctors, nurses, teachers, etc to work without a wage.

Admittedly, for the sake of brevity I cut out a couple of steps in the logic that get you from point a to point slavery, but still this is the rationale that is often given for why people dogmatically oppose national healthcare or higher education plans.  There are words that immediately come to mind when I hear these things and they often rhyme with bull spit.  Some rights do come in the form of services, and we all accept this, even those who pretend like this is an open and shut proof that we cannot have national healthcare in the US.  Every child in this country goes to school, even the poorest of society.  Incidentally, poverty indicators like the number of children at these schools who qualify for free meals has shown that the number of people needing this basic service as a right is increasing.  We all recognize that an education is the best bet a person has at succeeding, especially in a world where we now compete with the person next door and the person on the antipode of the person next door.  And even though we also have heard of those exceptional individuals who succeed in spite of a lack of formal education, unless you are in exceptional need of education, we recognize that not everyone can be the 0.0001%.

Public education is one of the greatest things we’ve ever done as a society, as it builds the basis of any true equality of opportunity.  Education is not the privilege of those who were born well, it is the right of any person in our society; and we are all wealthier for having treated it as such.  Teachers, though underpaid for the good they do, are not providing this service for free.  This is indeed still a free country, so we have never drafted teachers or forced people to take up that profession.  We use our taxes to compensate the people we want to execute this necessary right.  There is a very good argument for increasing that compensation to attract even better teachers and in greater numbers, but at the end of the day we already decide to put forward the proper funds necessary to attract people to this vocation of their own free will.  This isn’t the only example either.

One of the original rights spelled out in the Bill of Rights secures the right of all people to legal support.  The sixth amendment reads, “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.”  It’s that last bit that holds particular importance to this point, but really the whole lot is an argument for services as rights.

A judge, a jury, attorneys, bailiffs, etc have to be paid for their services.  We all accept the costs associated with courts because we recognize that the rule of law is the right of every human being and well worth the cost, regardless of your feelings about lawyers.  This is the basis of a just society; every person has access to the resources that ensure the rule of law wins out and that justice remains blind.  The reality that very often justice is not completely blind notwithstanding, we believe that everyone deserves a fair shot in their defense, and this necessarily entails the right to legal counsel.

Everyone, even the Boston Marathon bombers and the Aurora cinema assailant, has a right to a lawyer for their day in court.  Lawyers also do not do their work for free… usually.  And again there is a strong argument for increasing the wage of public defendants to ease the work load off those who do take up this vocation, but people freely choose to provide this service so that we can maintain this right as a society.  We accept the cost of these things as a society, because we all accept that it is better to make these kinds of necessary investments rather than suffer the costs of a lawless society.  Even when it makes us unhappy with the verdict, we recognize that this is the only way to fairly organize a society.  Heck, the people who attended the trials of the Boston Massacre were probably a little ticked off that they got away as well, but even they understood the necessity of a fair trial and legal representation for every person.

So why should it suddenly be any different when it comes to healthcare or higher education?  Why are so many people willing to slag off the people who could not otherwise afford what are increasingly necessary services?  The argument that we would have to start forcing doctors to work is utterly baseless as there is no country with a national healthcare system that has required this.  Pretty much every country in Europe has a greater density of physicians than the United States and more to the point these citizens can actually afford to visit them.  These nations are more than willing to pay the necessary price to maintain these national healthcare systems and they are rewarded for making the right choice by also paying a whole lot less than the United States for superior care.  All because they treat it as a right.

But now we get to an announcement President Obama made in the run up to this year’s State of the Union Address, wherein he stated that he would try to ensure that all Americans would be able to get two years of community college education if they worked for it.  This is to say that if you work hard in school to get the grades that qualify you for it, you would be able to continue onto higher education.  This would be a powerful move toward empowering the American people and thus the American economy.  Higher education has become the new standard for entering the work force, yet we still allow the majority of Americans to be priced out of it.  So much for equality of opportunity.

America’s university system, like its healthcare system, is so expensive that many of the people who most need the benefits granted are unable to afford it.  But the people who argue that it is simply a service maintain that we cannot afford such a revamped system, when in fact we cannot afford to continue with the broken system we have now.  We cannot afford to continue to treat rights as privileges and erroneously believe that simply because something is a service that it cannot be a right.  We need to make the investments now that empower people and create a society worthy of the American people.  Sadly, there is very little chance that anything will ever come of this.  The Republicans in the Senate and House will stand opposed to anything that bears the slightest connection with the President, let alone policy changes that actually make sense.  Instead we can expect the Right to continue to erode away these basic rights, at least until we can get them kicked out of office.

Pervasive Liberal Bias

I tend to listen to a lot of Right wing commentary, both for work and because I apparently have a masochistic side to my personality.  Once you get past the mind-numbing lunacy, the unearned sense of pride and accomplishment, and the nearly overwhelming density of wrongness in most claims you are left with some basic observations.  One of the observations that comes to the forefront of my mind is that there is a streak of conservatism that centers on the mistrust of basically everyone.  It might be worth taking a moment to shed a tear for those who live out these lonely lives incapable of trusting anyone, but it’s not strictly speaking the point of this post.  The lack of trust manifests itself in many ways, but a common way is in the belief of a conspiracy between liberals and professions that provide information.  Simply put, many conservatives believe that because many professors, journalists, and artists are liberal that there is a conspiracy from the Left to force feed their ideas on the rest of the world.  I would like to offer an alternative.

It is certainly true that an overwhelming majority of college professors tend to vote for the Democrats, even if they might not specifically identify as Democrats themselves.  The same is true to a lesser extent for journalists, and certainly artists have a tradition of being on the avant-garde, which is typically on the Left.  Here’s something that these professions generally share, a greater than average experience looking at reality, truth, facts, etc.  So my hypothesis for understanding this trend between information and liberalism would have to be that the people who generally know more than the average bear come to the conclusion that, on the whole, the Democratic platform is simply closer to reality than say the Republican platform.  I know this may seem jarring to those who get the bulk of their information from the conservative echo chamber, but it just so happens that studies tend to back up this claim.

Repeatedly we’ve seen the statistics that show how people who regularly consume conservative media as a primary source, and likely only source, are not simply less informed but more misinformed.  This is to say that while a network like CNN is less than likely to be the ideal for informing people about the world we inhabit that it does actually leave people better informed than those having had no interaction with news media.  Fox News, by contrast, not only fails to impart reality but is quite successful at imparting lies to the point where the average person would be better informed having had no access to news media of any form.  So it should come as no great surprise when the people actually working for these organizations that leave people better informed, have opinions that differ from those who work in the conservative echo chamber.

Conservative parents tend to be a little scared of sending their children off to college, because it is true that many professors are of a more liberal mindset.  But the line between the fear of indoctrination and the fear of information becomes so faint in these discussions that it might as well not exist at all.  See college professors, on the whole, are not narcissistic propagandists who only want to create classes of ditto-bots.  In fact, my experience with college professors leads me to believe that what they want is to create students who can think critically and consider problems from different points of view, even those that might differ from their own personally held beliefs.  Shocking I know, but teachers are more concerning with getting students to think than to obey.  Professors tend to play the devil’s advocate to give the conservative point of view if the class is thinking only from a progressive point of view, to give the religious point of view if the class is thinking only from an atheist point of view, to give weight to differing points of view that cause people to consider whether their opinion is right or simply the one they first had.

And I think part of the problem people who fear these institutions face is the conflation of understanding that there are other points of view and the belief that all those points of view are equally valid.  For example, I can imagine the point of view of someone like Vladimir Putin, his desire for a strong nation and access to the resources that will allow his people to flourish. I can imagine that, but it is not an opinion that gets equal weight to the recognition that Russia is not the only country in the world, and if it’s “accessing” resources by invading other countries that it is being xenophobic in its nationalism, and that’s a problem.  This is a concept that news networks often struggle with.

In attempting to be an objective news source, networks tend to repeat the simple narrative of side A versus side B and that there must be a solution C that falls in between where the truth exists.  In most examples I would have to agree that truth lies in between the extremes, but if person A claims the earth is round and person B claims it is flat, then I’m sorry the only compromise that gets us to reality is if person B realizes they were wrong.  So news networks actually do themselves a disservice when they continue this format in circumstances where one side clearly has the better argument.  This fact was parodied by John Oliver in the context of the climate change discussion, where one side has facts, reality, and about 97% of scientists in agreement while the other side has a sheet of paper with legible writing on it.  And rather than simply accept that the people who actually know what they are talking about might be closer to the truth, the response on the Right tends to be an utter mistrust of intelligence.

Now, I’m willing to accept that intelligence is not a simple number line where those who test well get a high number score and those who don’t, don’t.  IQ tests, while easily understood, are not the perfect barometer for intelligence.  After all the associations that claim to be populated by people with high IQs, like Mensa, tend to be populated with people who elicit the response, “really, they’re smart?”  This in contrast to people that are generally perceived to be intelligent because of things they can prove in the real world, like Stephen Hawking who is not a member of Mensa but who clearly is actually quite bright, to put it lightly.  Furthermore there are indeed many different types of intelligence, ranging from competence in a given task, the ability to solve problems on the fly, the capacity to absorb and retain information, etc.  However, whereas a rational person would recognize intelligence and give due deference in the appropriate fields, the skepticism in conservatism seems to say that expertise is the thing that disqualifies you from having an objective opinion in a given field.

This is what creates the living, breathing straw man that is Rick Santorum.  “President Obama once said that he wants everybody in America to go to college.  What a snob.”  See there’s defending the rights of people making an honest wage without the benefit of higher education, and then there’s vilification of the people who want to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to get a college education.  Mr Santorum and many on the Right fall on the latter side, and to the peril of every American and human being more broadly.  Because while it may be true that simply having an education may not be enough, to tell people that the desire to ensure the best odds for success is snobbery puts down the society as a whole.

Society advances by the ideas of very smart people.  Sometimes those people are smart in spite of having no organized education at all, but a brilliant idea without the capacity to explain it, to expand on it, to flesh it out is brilliant idea squandered.  How many great inventions and works of art have never been brought about simply because the people with those ideas never learned the math behind their invention or the craft behind their masterpiece?  It just so happens that the people who wish to ensure every great idea is given the proper environment tend to vote Democratic, in no small part because they don’t hate intelligence.  New ideas can mean changing your initial assumptions, it can mean granting a greater range of possibilities than you first believed possible, but in every case it means bravely facing the facts and not hiding from them.  We are none of us perfect, so when you get corrected it is best to take it in stride and learn from it.  It just so happens that the people who have greater insight in the fields of biology, chemistry, physics, statistics, geometry, journalism, the arts, and every other field expanding our understanding of reality lean to the Left.  I get the feeling that reality itself might be closer to where they’re leaning.

Voting Responsibilities

With the new legislature now seated and going back to, well work would be a stretch, their daily activities that in some way resemble governing, we now get to enjoy the various choruses that always accompany the transfer of power.  There are the variations on a theme, “Don’t blame me, I voted for X.”  There is the slightly schadenfreude laden, “this is what you voted for.”  There are the arguments over who gets what blame and what praise for things that happened in the interim between the election and the beginning of the new session.  And more than ever there is the preparation for the next election cycle, which you may remember is a mere 665 days away.  However, today I want to talk about something that’s been on my mind, all the more since I watched “Selma.”  Incidentally it is a truly great film and certainly worth the exorbitant cost of movie tickets.

People on the Left have been looking at a very depressing silver lining in the aftermath of the elections.  That being, if you look at all the votes that were cast for all the serving senators, you will find that Democrats have won over 5 million more votes than Republicans, despite being in the minority.  This has to do with the fact that states all have an equal number of Senators despite the fact that states like California and New York have considerably more people in them.  If you look at the votes cast for Congressmen, you see a slightly less dramatic version of the same story.  Democrats in states like Texas are virtually silenced in Congress by gerrymandering so blatant it had to be the brainchild of Karl Rove.  I’ve talked before about the ridiculousness that in a state like Virginia a Democrat can win a statewide election but find that they are beaten out 2 to 1 in the legislature because gerrymandering ensures that the game is as rigged as humanly possible against them.

This also comes after years of efforts to suppress voter turnout generally, only when and where targeting liberal leaning communities is more difficult.  A task that became all the easier after the Supreme Court decided to gut the Voting Rights Act in June of last year.  And this is what I want to talk about, because it is no longer enough to seek voting rights.  In this country, the conservative wing of the political spectrum has dug down deep to ensure that the will of the people comes second to the will of the extremists.  While there may be hope in knowing that time will eventually make these points moot, as the voter base of the GOP dies off and the demographics swing unstoppably toward the party that welcomes current minorities, this is little solace for those of us who have to endure the full force of Republican control and all that it entails.

Voting rights were only ever enough because people understood how important they were, because people understood the measurable value of the ballot.  The Voting Rights Act came as a response to the active deferment of voters, but when so few people can be bothered to vote anymore, what difference does it make?  36.4% of eligible Americans could be bothered to get to the polls on November 5, 2014.  That 36.4% was able to determine the course of the government.  Actually it’s worse than that, because only just over half was needed.  So we do not have a democracy, we have a government of that 18.2% that came out on top.  Voting rights are insufficient to a nation that does not believe in the responsibility that comes with it.

Liberty is something that Americans understand as both a right and a responsibility, particularly in light of the attacks in France.  We understand that our freedoms come at a cost, and are only as strong as we make them.  For instance we could claim to have freedom of expression but exercise such self censorship as to make the whole matter aside the point.  We could say that this is a country where you are free to speak your mind, just so long as you never say anything offensive, but that would fall short of the responsibility that comes with the right to free speech.  The same is true with voting rights; we technically have the right to vote, but without the responsibility to actually go out and do it, what was all the work that went into getting the vote for?

To the Millennials, my generation, what the heck happened?  Just barely 20% of the eligible voters age 18-29 actually voted, what the actual hell happened that 79% of us couldn’t make it to the polls?  Do you want to know why this generation and the next generation always gets slagged off in public discussions, and why we are thought about last if at all?  It’s because no politician in their right mind actually expects to lose any votes by selling us down the river.  There are no political stakes in creating massive debt for the coming generations or for backing down on the social issues that matter to younger voters.

The turnout from the black community is considerably better, at around 40%.  So any black person in America wondering why there isn’t any more black representation in areas that are majority black should really ask that question to the 60% of people who didn’t show up.  In Ferguson, a community that should know all too well the cost of not having their voices heard, the voter turnout as a whole was just about the same.  And I understand the iniquity of voter ID laws and the other stumbling blocks put in the way to keep as many people from voting as possible, but that only makes it that much more important for those who hold the proper IDs to get out there and vote.  One hour out of one day every couple years is a very low price to ensure that the elected officials won’t start writing up asinine laws that keep you from voting in future.

Women, especially in the South, should appreciate the necessity of voting to ensure that a handful of entitled, old, white men aren’t dictating what drugs can appear on your health plan, which women’s health clinics are allowed to exist, whether women deserve equal pay for equal work, when women are allowed to be compensated for maternity leave, etc.  Yet turnout for women, like turnout in general, hovers around the mid 40s in off year elections.  The cost of this is felt in the erosion of every right that was fought for between the 19th century and now.  These battles will never be over so long as apathy allows the reactionaries to hold sway over politics every time a president isn’t on the ballot.

We owe it to the passed generations who made it possible for us to vote to go out and make sure our voice is actually heard.  We owe it to the coming generations to ensure that those who do vote aren’t doing so at the expense of the people who will be cleaning up the mess.  Hell, we owe it to ourselves to make sure that when the new legislature takes its seat, it is a true representation of we the people.  And not just to make a point about democracy, not to echo the whims of founders, not to be able to make claims about being the land of the free; we need to do this so we can look ourselves in the mirror.  We need to hold ourselves responsible for our elections and our elected officials and act like adults for once.

Do you want to know what demographic is the most likely to go out and vote?  It’s a married doctor over the age of 65.  That says to me that the people most invested in other people understand the importance of voting.  That says to me that the smartest people understand the importance of voting.  That says to me that the people with the most experience, the people who have dealt with the realities of living in a pluralistic democracy understand the importance of voting.  These are important demographics, to be sure, but they aren’t the whole story of America.  Less than half of Americans have a college degree and less than 13% of Americans are 65 or older.  The whole of America cannot be served so long as the arbitrary sectors who actually vote are the only ones being tended to.

Democracy is not a government for the lazy or the complacent.  Democracy is a government for people who want to be heard, it’s a government for people who are ready to work.  But democracy is not merely a right of the people in a vacuum, it comes with certain basic responsibilities.  Unless and until we learn how to uphold the responsibilities that come with voting, we will be stuck being pissed off in January at the garbage that was allowed to be elected into office.

False Targets

Now and again, certain memes pop up in political discussion.  They get condensed and spread and shared and rehashed until they become rather meaningless movements, however well intentioned.  For example you might consider the Kony 2012 movement or more recently the #JesuisCharlie as movements that get people focused on a short term cause to varying results and timeframes.  Sometimes these movements can do tangible good, like the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, which has been credited for raising millions of dollars toward ALS research.  This not to mention the effects of simply raising awareness, however briefly, as well as the good for spinoff organizations, e.g. the Rice Bucket Challenge.  But there is another side to these social memes, a side that hopes to go further than simply pointing out problems but pointing out the people at the root of it.

This shouldn’t be a destructive thing on its own, after all if there is a culprit responsible for a crime it might be useful to know who that is if you want to set things straight.  Unfortunately, not every problem has as easily a targeted figurehead as say Kony 2012, and particularly with broader issues of economics, taxes, government spending, etc it can be easy to lay the blame on just about anyone.  The repeated meme that keeps popping up on my radar are lists of problems in this country all ending with something like “yet, we donate billions to other countries before helping our own.”  Yes, as it turns out, it is all the endless charity we give to foreign nations that is the cause of all our problems.  Every grain of wheat we give to starving children in Africa comes out of the mouths of starving children back home, every dose of medicine given to countries struggling with pandemics comes at the cost of people seeking medical treatment back home.  So I’m here to call bull, because this is just another example of using easy and false targets to distract people from the real issues.

First of all we have to recognize that America is not the nobly sacrificial country that these posts lead people to believe.  In fiscal year 2013, America spent approximately $3.45 trillion.  We took in about $2.77 trillion in revenue, meaning that the deficit was about $680 billion.  These are astonishingly large numbers, to the point where they become rather meaningless.  The uninitiated person might be terrified that the deficit was so many billions of dollars, adding to the debt of $16.7 trillion.  And indeed these are overwhelming numbers that need to be confronted, but with a deficit to GDP ratio at 4.1%, there is no immediate crisis, which is incidentally why you don’t hear about the debt anymore.  With all these billions and trillions, everyone wants an easy answer of who or what is to blame.  The easiest answer in politics is to blame people who don’t vote, namely foreigners.

How can we be so generous with our money, knowing that we are in such deep debt?  America comes first, so if we are going to tighten the belt let’s start with foreign aid because we can’t help anyone else until we get our own affairs settled.  Well how much would that save us?  The best numbers I can get my hands on say that the US spent about $23 billion on foreign aid in fiscal year 2013, or to put that in the context of the budget 0.67%.  So I was actually mistaken when I said to a friend of mine the other day that we spend 1% on foreign aid, because it’s actually 2/3 of 1%.  To put that in perspective, Sweden, a country with an economy that is about 32 times smaller than the US, is slated to spend about €30 billion in the next year.  That equates to about $35.6 billion.  A country that much smaller than the US is not only spending more per capita than the US, but they are actually planning to continue spending more in brute dollars than the US as they tighten their own belts.  But just because other people are doing something, doesn’t necessarily mean that it is the right thing to do, right?

Readers might remember how I said that by giving to the poor, rich people do not in fact get nothing in return, much as that double negative confuses the issue.  The same goes for nations, because we get a heck of a lot more back from our foreign aid programs.  Setting aside the whole issue of loan repayment, which is an important issue to be sure, we don’t just get warm fuzzy feelings for ensuring that victims of famines, tsunamis, pandemics, warfare, etc have some kind of support.  Every child, every family, every human being we empower and enfranchise through foreign aid is better able to contribute to their local communities and to the interconnected global economy.  Every dollar we spend on building schools, wells, roads, and all the rest comes back to us in the form of resources, ideas, inventions, and sheer human capital.

We would be starkly worse off for keeping our foreign aid budget as low as it is, let alone reducing it further.  But we do indeed have issues of our own, and the trouble of finding the money to address these issues remains as untouched as ever.  So what is actually to blame?  The two biggest sources of spending in our budget come in the forms of entitlements.  The combined Medicare/Medicaid as well as Social Security.  The problem with the first one is found in the overwhelming cost of our larger healthcare system.  No other country in the world spends as much for healthcare as we do, and all this for the right to not have coverage.  Adopting any national healthcare system would cut a huge chunk out of those costs right away, and lead us to being able to not only fight the debt, but increase funding for all sorts of assistance programs.  Social Security is a crucial program that also needs fixing.  We need to adjust the system to account for the increased longevity of our citizens as well as to stop using it as a bank to be robbed to fund other programs.  Not least of all, we need to work on returning the steady funding it needs, while empowering the return of pensions in the private sector.

Beyond these two large slices of the budget, there is another slightly smaller slice that needs to be addressed.  In fiscal year 2013, America spend over $640 billion on our defense.  that’s more than 27 times what we spent on foreign aid in case you were still interested.  That is also about the same spent by the next 9 largest militaries on earth combined, of whom three are NATO members and another four are considered close allies like Japan and South Korea.  Now let’s set aside the ridiculous pet projects that cost us further hundreds of billions of dollars, like the F-35 project, and look at the real question at hand.  Is all of this spending worth it?  Anyone who has looked at what our military spending does and has done would have to conclude that it does not.

There is, in fact, too much of a good thing.  I’m sorry to have to remind us all of the lesson we learned when we gorged ourselves on Halloween candy as kids, but it is true.  We spend too much on the military, and it’s not just that we spend too much but we actually are less safe as a result.  The surpluses created by the military-industrial complex, end up in the hands of people we later have to fight, e.g. Al Qaeda, Taliban, ISIS.  Our arms and armor end up on both sides of every conflict we fought for the last two decades at least, not to mention the conflicts that afflict our allies and otherwise neutral nations.  Anti-aircraft systems, armored vehicles, artillery, and of course small arms bearing the tag “Made in the USA” do not only end up in the hand of troops from the USA and that means we have to spend more money and lives.

We continue to fund, maintain, and support outdated weapons systems even when the military begs us not to.  Or have we forgotten about the M1 Abrams that were purchased in that same fiscal year 2013, even after objections by the Army?  See, there is something we can’t afford, and it’s something that pervades most of our budget.  We can’t afford to ignore reality and just go with what tests well with audiences.  We love to fund the military, so we do it beyond all reason.  The resulting inefficiencies and redundancies actually leave us less safe, yet we will continue to foot the bill because that’s what people want to vote for.  We love to hate on pet projects and pork barrel spending, just so long as its not the stuff that got people elected in the first place, so nothing gets cut regardless of reality.  And we love to hate on those poor and needy people from other places, because we don’t have to look in their eyes as we do it.  They are the perfect false target for politics, because we are able to make mothers, daughters, fathers, and sons look like monsters eating all our money.  And all this little facade costs us is our morals… and our money.

Nothing in Return

In the grand scheme of things, you wouldn’t think that an off the cuff remark about taxes and entitlements would matter all that much.  You might not think that until you hear two terms: Romney and 47%.  Now setting aside the schadenfreude that some of us enjoyed when Mr Romney garnered just about 47% of votes in the 2012 election, this is an interesting subject to consider.  Not simply the question of just how much that sound bite actually affected the election, but where that comment came from, because it is still with us today.  For example, among the newly inaugurated representatives that went to work this week is a Mr Cresent Hardy. Mr Hardy claims that not only is the “47%” true, but that it’s bigger now.  And as you may have guessed by the fact that he was sworn in, that comment didn’t cost him.  Clearly there is a portion of America that is at least comfortable with the idea that there is a large and growing group of ‘takers’ in this country who need to be stopped.  Here’s why that is bull.

First of all we have to start by nailing down what the grievance is here.  Certainly people don’t complain about all entitlements or even all assistance.  Well, setting aside the people who are constantly attacking social security, medicare, and the right of people to give money or food to homeless people; the majority of people have no problem with the principle of giving to the needy.  Mostly, people do have a problem with giving without getting anything back.  Even the staunchest conservatives, generally, like charity because they get the sense of having done something good or following a command from their religion.  The attack on the “47%” was done out of the belief that by creating a social safety net that we were empowering people to remain poor and engendering the belief that the poor should loathe the rich who make these entitlements solvent.   The logic behind this has always seemed a little wonky to me,  nonetheless this is the usual complaint against the ‘takers.’

The ‘takers’ don’t give anything back, or at least the ‘makers’ don’t get anything back.  If this were true, I could see a solid argument to be made that a social safety net does indeed lead to longterm problems, even if our silly consciences might lead us to believe it is the moral thing to do or something ridiculous like that.  Well fear not, ye scoffers at morality, there is an economic light at the end of the altruistic tunnel.

Evolution, which is to say the biological descent with modification made famous through the observations of Charles Darwin, is indeed a reality.  Social Darwinism, on the other hand, is not.  And it’s a pity that the people who now make up the majority in the legislature tend to have these two concepts flipped in their minds.  As it turns out, helping people who find themselves shafted by circumstances, does not make the people who do the helping weaker.  Quite the contrary, because like altruism itself, these actions persist in humans because they are actually beneficial to us as individuals and as a species.  How can this possibly be?

Well, let’s begin with recognizing that there is no perfect split between ‘makers’ and ‘takers,’ even if conservatives and marxists seem to believe it does.  Though in the case of Marxists the terms are generally the capitalists and the proletariate.  At any given time we are all of us merchants and customers, and at all times we are creating wealth through consumption.  The trouble we get into is that sometimes wealth becomes static, and this can happen for very different reasons.  For the poorest of society, wealth can become static due to unemployment, sickness, debt, etc.  For the richest of society, wealth can become static due to fear of the markets, anticipation for growth at a later time, etc.  More than anything one of the greatest limiting factors to the use of wealth by the wealthy is that at any given time a single person can only ever purchase so many burgers, cars, stocks, t-shirts or whatever else a person might want to consume.  And it just so happens that there is a rather easy way to solve both of these wealth limiters.

At any given time there are both people seeking employment as well as people seeking employees.  Many of those positions might require a certain background, skill set, education, etc.  So, the mere fact that there are both jobs and prospective employees is not always sufficient to get people employed.  Furthermore, the size of this country and planet means that even when the perfect prospective employee is available for their ideal job, they might not know about it or be able to get there in the first place.  For all these reasons, a certain amount of capital might be needed to get prospective employees the skills they need to enter the job market, the tools to find the right job, and the means to get themselves to that job.  We would all be richer for combining a person with a job, so why not simply provide the capital upfront, with the understanding that it will be paid back through services and consumption and tax revenue?

That is one of the important reasons why we have these “entitlement” programs, to ensure that our economy runs as efficiently as possible.  Far from getting nothing, the ‘makers’ of society get the most out of this deal because there is a new customer capable of buying their product and ready to ease the tax burden off them by contributing as well.  By cutting off the social safety net, we would see a glut of people incapable of escaping poverty.  This isn’t just theory either, America’s conservative mistrust of the social safety net has ensured that the meritocracy that should embody capitalism dies.  Countries like Denmark, Canada, and Germany have much better economic mobility, in part, because they give the necessary benefits to the people in need.  That’s how much smaller economies are able to punch above their weight; well, that and education.

By whatever metric you prefer, the social safety net has made far more wealth than it has taken.  So I don’t understand why it is the people who are working to ensure that wealth keeps growing are attacked as stoking the flames of class warfare, when the people who really do believe there is a fundamental difference between ‘makers’ and ‘takers’ get a pass.  And this is all setting aside the moral imperative to ensure that our children don’t go to bed cold and hungry.  Heck, even a state as conservative as Utah has committed to strengthening the social safety net by simply giving homes to the homeless.  So what is the real issue here?

See, I don’t think that conservatives are bad people just because they’re conservative.  I do believe that there are a lot of bad people who happen to call themselves conservatives, though.  There is no coherent line of reasoning that comes down against helping the poor; there is no religion that says charity is a bad thing.  There are, however, people who see a very clear line between themselves and the rest of society who use whatever religion, ideology, or writing to pretend like there is anything more than greed to their position.  These people very often, but not always, are the real people who are taking while giving society nothing in return.

If you make your money in America, but hide it in an offshore account to ensure that you never pay into the system that made your wealth possible, then you are a taker.  If you rig the system through lawyers and lobbyists to cut exceptions in the rules to ensure that you get subsidies while food stamps get cut, you are a taker.  If you fund campaigns to elect politicians who fight to get rid of the social safety net, you are a taker.  If you look at your holy texts to find justification to ignore the needy, you are a taker.  And it is a sad reality that the occasional pittance that is thrown back at specific groups is enough to get their names on buildings, as if the “Koch Center for Leadership and Ethics” makes up for the degradation of ethics in our political, legal, and education systems.

So while the entitled few will continue to bemoan the fact that success does not come without certain responsibilities, and work to squeeze every last penny out of a society that has already made us all richer than any past civilization, the rest of us will keep defending that last great hope of the American dream.  The hope that regardless of your circumstances that you can dust yourself up, take your neighbor’s hand today, and work to make things better so that you might also reach down to help the next person up.  We do these things because we are better than the alternative and because constructive cooperation builds up economies and makes us all richer than fighting for the last scraps of a skeleton economy.

Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité

The recent terrorist attack against the newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, is a tragic reminder that our rights, our freedoms are not as universally beloved as we might think.  I believe I speak with every right thinking person in the world right now in standing alongside the victims, their families, and the people of France as they undergo mourning for the loss of truly masterful satirists and anticipation for the perpetrators to be brought to justice.  France holds a particular place in my heart for many reasons, not least of all because I briefly studied at Université Rennes 2.  France has long been the country of satire, being the nation to gift the world with the wit of Voltaire, so it seems all the more tragic that hundreds of years later this nation should be targeted for simply speaking truth to power.  Because regardless of where you put yourself on the political spectrum, regardless of whether you agree with everything Charlie published, regardless of your religious sensibilities, we must stand resolute in defense of these most crucial rights and principles in democracies: liberty, equality, and brotherhood.

These rights come with responsibilities, a fact that is often overlooked in “patriotic” discussions.  The price we pay for being free societies is that we will never be completely safe, the price we pay for liberty is offense, the price we pay for is equality is the lack of privilege, the price we pay for brotherhood is accepting even those who we disagree with as our family and neighbor.  Make no mistake, these rights are worth the price and more.  These principles are indeed worth defending and have been worth fighting for from the time of the first republics.  France particularly knows the cost of the freedom of expression having endured countless tyrants, monarchies, revolutions, coups, and any other force that has tried to silence opposition.  Each step of the way, though, the cause of liberty has emerged from the blood and has brought France alongside her.

Personally, I try not to go out of my way to offend people as it seems less likely to bear fruit than to bring someone along gently.  I believe that simply because you have the right to say and do as you please, doesn’t mean you necessarily should do it.  Nonetheless, the right to offend is intrinsic to the freedom of expression, as people have the ability to be offended by even the most innocuous things.  Extremists of every stripe need to be reminded that the world does not revolve around them, that there are indeed other people in this world who may hold differing views.  In this time particularly, we need to show a strong face to islamists who wish to impose their interpretations of islam on others, while at the same time welcoming every muslim who lives a life of peace and tolerance.  And quite frankly, this is what Charlie has done.

Depictions of the prophet Mohammed are forbidden in the Koran, but these edicts apply only to the believers.  As nonbelievers, the writers and artists of Charlie are under no compulsion to follow Muslim law or Jewish law or Christian law.  If you find the materials offensive, fine, but that really is the end of it.  No one is forced to look at these pictures, no one is forced to read Charlie. And honestly, if you want these things to stop then the absolute worst strategy out there has to be to make a vocal condemnation of it, feel free to look up the Streisand effect at this point.  Ultimately, the right to offend is the greatest friend of devoutly religious people, because no one knows how to offend large numbers of people quite like extremists empowered by religion: WBC, ISIS, KKK, etc.

Equality too carries with it steep costs that we all realize are certainly worth it.  The constant conversation in America concerns religious groups feigning oppression because they are treated as equals to atheists, muslims, buddhists, satanists, and everyone else.  If one group is allowed to make a display on public property, then all are.  If one church wishes to we gay couples, then the other churches can’t rewrite the law to forbid them doing so.  In France, this is a slightly different issue, because for the most part the religious have come to terms with this reality.  Religion is a fiercely private thing in France, and you just don’t see outward displays of faith in public.  However the ever growing population of devout muslims has made things a bit more difficult, because some of the basic tenets of that faith require basic displays on their person.

The banning of veils is a reminder that different countries put the balance of liberty and equality at different places.  In France there was an understandable fear that people could use facial coverings to get past security.  They then took that fear and used it with a little xenophobia to get people behind the whole concept and thus equality means that no one is allowed to have the privilege of wearing a face covering in public.  There was also a fear that these laws would continue to enact equality by banning the kippah, or yarmulke, but that has not since passed.  The price we pay for equality is indeed privilege, but I fear that the rather heavy handed approach of such policies actually undermines equality by saying that certain religions and their expressions are less than equal.  It reminds me of homophobes who claim that gays already have the right to marry… people of the opposite sex.  It’s not that there is no logic behind these lines of thinking, just that it takes a certain kind of jerk to actually think it works in the real world.

I think right now, though, we really need to remember the last of these three principles, brotherhood.  Setting aside the less than gender neutrality of the term, we do need to come together now.  The condemnations of these attacks have come from Muslims, Christians, atheists, and nearly everyone of any background.  It is at these moments of tragedy that we are called to come together, to undo the division that was desired by attackers.  French history is replete with examples of various religions coming together as well as moments of division.  From the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre to the accusation of Emile Zola, France has certainly had its moments of religious intolerance.  It is that history of intolerance that informs the attack in the first place, as these extremists try to silence the diversity inherent in a pluralist democracy.  So it becomes the duty of all of us to respond with compassion, with love, with devotion, and with brotherhood.

We must assert all of our rights, but always remember who and what the problems really are.  These despicable characters are worthy of pity, but they too are our brothers.  We cannot give in to the hatred we feel now and return violence for violence.  It is good that France has now written into its constitution that the death penalty is a thing of the past, because the death of these criminals will do nothing to bring back what was lost.  The only way that can be done is if we learn to embrace liberty, to defend true equality, and to always be prepared to carry out brotherhood.  Because, as much as we might tell ourselves these are static concepts, they are not.  Liberty, equality, and brotherhood are actions to be taken by individuals and governments alike.

But I don’t think what we need at this moment is to create a great movement to inspire new satirists, they will come on their own.  We don’t need new laws to punish wrongdoers any more than we already do, nor set up new defenses to keep people out, because we need ideas to move all over the world.  We don’t need to keep to our own cliques and families, because brotherhood is for all humanity.  If anything we need to remember the words of Camus, “Ne marche pas devant moi, je ne suivrai peut-être pas. Ne marche pas derrière moi, je ne te guiderai peut-être pas. Marche juste à côté de moi et sois mon ami.”  Or for those with rusty French, “Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead.  Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow.  Just walk alongside me and be my friend.”

Nous sommes tous Charlie, nous sommes tous les êtres humains, nous sommes tous les frères et les sœurs.