RightField
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I agree, Krugman is a laughingstock on two continents.
Feeding the Blue Beast
- Thread starter RightField
- Start date
RightField
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Krugman had another posting today. He really is out in the cold.
RightField
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This thread appears to be appropriate for today's discussions.
LJ_Reloaded
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Questions the Republicans are TOO SCARED to answer:
How many Republicans in Congress plan on earning LESS Government salary money this year than their fellow Evil Communist Democrat counterparts?
How many Republicans in Congress plan on GIVING UP their free health care that they get for being Congresscritters?
Why do Republicans in Congress vote to KEEP their free health care but they oppose giving it to American citizens? Isn't this what Republicans call "do as I say do, not as I do"... aka "The Imperial Congress"?
Is $440 billion in Republican tax cuts larger, mathematically speaking, than $258 billion in Obama tax cuts?
Why do Republicans think it is okay for management to organize, but not workers? In what way is a union membership MORE coercive than accepting the power of management?
Why do Republicans claim that Union salaries are inflated but they don't believe CEO salaries are inflated even as CEOs get millions when their company collapses?
Why did Republicans, during their six years (2001-2007) of total dominance of Congress and the White House, never ONCE repeal the Community Reinvestment Act that they claim is responsible for the mess we're in now? Why did Republicans, during their six years (2001-2007) of total dominance of Congress and the White House, never ONCE stop the mortgage backed securities problem?
If the Democrats, ACORN and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) were responsible for the crash of 2007-2008, then why is it that CRA loans performed better than non-CRA loans? Why is it that the banks that collapsed were not governed by the CRA?
If the Republicans have such a huge problem with bailing out the banks and Chrysler, GM, etc., then why did they vote for all of this in 2008?
Republicans do not have answers to these questions. They fear me because I keep hammering them with these questions. These questions expose the TOTAL BULLSHIT that is the Republican philosophy.
How many Republicans in Congress plan on earning LESS Government salary money this year than their fellow Evil Communist Democrat counterparts?
How many Republicans in Congress plan on GIVING UP their free health care that they get for being Congresscritters?
Why do Republicans in Congress vote to KEEP their free health care but they oppose giving it to American citizens? Isn't this what Republicans call "do as I say do, not as I do"... aka "The Imperial Congress"?
Is $440 billion in Republican tax cuts larger, mathematically speaking, than $258 billion in Obama tax cuts?
Why do Republicans think it is okay for management to organize, but not workers? In what way is a union membership MORE coercive than accepting the power of management?
Why do Republicans claim that Union salaries are inflated but they don't believe CEO salaries are inflated even as CEOs get millions when their company collapses?
Why did Republicans, during their six years (2001-2007) of total dominance of Congress and the White House, never ONCE repeal the Community Reinvestment Act that they claim is responsible for the mess we're in now? Why did Republicans, during their six years (2001-2007) of total dominance of Congress and the White House, never ONCE stop the mortgage backed securities problem?
If the Democrats, ACORN and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) were responsible for the crash of 2007-2008, then why is it that CRA loans performed better than non-CRA loans? Why is it that the banks that collapsed were not governed by the CRA?
If the Republicans have such a huge problem with bailing out the banks and Chrysler, GM, etc., then why did they vote for all of this in 2008?
Republicans do not have answers to these questions. They fear me because I keep hammering them with these questions. These questions expose the TOTAL BULLSHIT that is the Republican philosophy.
RightField
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Nobody fears you. Most have you on ignore.
Last edited:
LJ_Reloaded
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That's because they can't even hope to keep up with me.
A sound and light show. Republicans could just opt to take less pay. Arnold Schwarzenegger did it. Why can't they?
It was all for show, nothing more. Case in point: when that failed the Republicans did not opt to give up their free health care plan.
Republicans oppose unions. They demonize unions. It's not a silly question.
Republicans blame Unions for the near-demise of GM even though 100% of GM's problems were that no one wanted their gas guzzling cars. Cars designed not by Unions but by management.
Avoiding the question. The question was, "Why do Republicans claim that Union salaries are inflated but they don't believe CEO salaries are inflated even as CEOs get millions when their company collapses?"
This is not about legislating private sector pay. This is about Republicans claiming that Union pay is overinflated while claiming CEO pay (which has ballooned from 30x worker pay to 500x worker pay) is not.
1) Show me where Bush tried to reign in the excesses of Fannie Mae.
2) Show me where the Republicans could not muster a majority of votes to force reforms.
3) The Republicans forced through Bankruptcy de-reform. They had the numbers in Congress. What made them unable to force through Fannie/Freddie reform laws?
Show me the law that forced loose lending standards on Lehman Brothers, AIG and all those other companies that went under. The much-demonized CRA certainly was not one of them.
Frisco_Slug_Esq
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Yes it is.
Did you take note of what Cuba is doing?
Going from Social Paradise to Capitalistic Hellhole.
It seems that as soon as you run out of a deep pocket...
HB1965
Litster
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You're article is very interesting but very idealistic. What sigh says is right. Both parties have proven that all they interested in is getting control and keeping it and not doing anything that forwards the interests of the American people. It's already reached a point where the American people no longer trust both parties. The Republicans have already shown that they aren't anymore fiscally responsible as the Democrats. They blame our problems on social welfare programs yet they would spend billions of dollars on the army, foreign aid so that we can gain a foothold into the economies of other parts of the world, and in providing incentives for big business. None of these things truly benefiting the American public in the long run in the way they think it will. The only thing that will stop all this is to elect people into congress that have no party affiliation and are ready to work on solving our problems and not combating each other.
Frisco_Slug_Esq
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Forgive me if I tell you that I still get the impression that when you go into the booth, and push comes to shove, the Democrats will still be the lesser of two evils for you...
Last edited:
HB1965
Litster
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Sorry. In my mind the Dems are just as bad as the Republicans. The only reason I pick on the Reps on the board more than the Dems is because you people put yourself out here much more.
I haven't voted for either party since the early 90s. My vote typically is a protest against what I see as the two big political parties in this country acting like babies fighting for the best toys.
Oh and AJ, you can deny all you want that you're a Rep. We all know that you are.
Frisco_Slug_Esq
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I'm a Libertarian.
I used to be a Democrat and you were one of the really irrational Bush haters...
We haven't forgotten.
__________________
Czech!
WODKA!
Владимир Владимирович Путин
(Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin)
I used to be a Democrat and you were one of the really irrational Bush haters...
We haven't forgotten.
__________________
Czech!
WODKA!
Владимир Владимирович Путин
(Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin)
HB1965
Litster
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We haven't forgotten? Be careful what you say because AGAIN you're allying yourself with the right wingers on this board.
You've only known me during the last 3 years and you also obviously have chosen to ignore my comments about both Clintons who I dislike way more than Bush at this point.
Aside from being a puppet for Chaney and Karl Rove
Bush did at least try on occasion to do the right thing. Obama is about the same. He's a puppet for other people's interest but has some good intentions.
Saint Peter
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And I am Batman!
I just play poker with the crooks on Friday night.
I just play poker with the crooks on Friday night.
RightField
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Feeding the blue beast is taking more and more cash these days.
Luk
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RightField
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Whatever.
LJ_Reloaded
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Ignore, my ass. I kicked his ass with this one and if anyone else asks these questions he'll run away then, too.
RightField
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Ignore, my ass. I kicked his ass with this one and if anyone else asks these questions he'll run away then, too.
1) The fact remains that democrats defeated the bill to reduce congressional pay that would have applied to all of them.
2) Ibid...the democrats took out the section of the healthcare bill that would have made them use the same plan/restristrictions as the rest of the country.
3) Republicans don't oppose unions. They are voting against expanding union card-check legislation which is a bad idea. Unions did have a major role in the destruction of GM in many ways not the least of which was requiring full pay for fuloughed (layed off) workers, but no Republican advocated for policies to control pay.
4) Republicans believe in freedom to succeed and freedom to fail...freedom is the recurring theme and the bottom line. It's people like you who want to control everything...particularly to "control it" to your benefit.
5) Bush did try to reign in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and now Barney Frank is admitting that they should have.
6) Liberals cried "racist" when Republicans tried to reign in bank lending abuses and backed off when they shouldn't have.
Now, you're going back on ignore until you come up with something intelligent.
Frisco_Slug_Esq
On Strike!
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Ignore him...
This real-life stuff, to him, is just role-play...
This real-life stuff, to him, is just role-play...
RightField
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This refers to the Liberal re-molding of the American society with heavy reliance on liberal taxation and "allocation" to benefit themselves in a quid pro quo approach that is not in line with the Republican vision of freedom. It's more like a return to the "guild" system of middle-ages Europe.
Coyote Den
The New American Corporate State
Warren Meyer, 08.26.10, 12:25 PM ET
Opponents of President Barack Obama and the Nancy Pelosi Congress will often accuse them of being "socialist." I find that this term is unhelpful, as many folks use direct government takeover of industrial enterprises as the litmus test for socialism, and thus will reject this hypothesis about the president. It is more useful to think of this administration as pursuing a European-style corporate state, a form of political economy that allows the state to exert strong control in the economy while maintaining a nominal façade of private ownership.
While the intellectual origins of the corporate state go back much further, the first serious attempt to implement such a system was in 1920s Italy by Benito Mussolini. Under that system, state-sponsored industry cartels programmed every aspect of economic life, from wages and working conditions to prices, production levels and product specifications. Nearly every commercial action required a government license, which would be denied to those who showed insufficient loyalty to the state and its goals.
In the United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was almost certainly an admirer of Mussolini's economic system, as he copied many of its salient features into the code authorities and commercial licensing requirements of the National Industrial Recovery Act (which eventually was struck down by the Supreme Court). Prices, wages, production quotas and, in effect, nearly every detail of business practices in an industry were to be set by small groups of government, labor and industry leaders. The president was given the power to unilaterally revoke the right to do business, without any further due process, of any enterprise in America if it refused to conform to this reincarnation of the Medieval guild system.
In their current form, European corporate states tend to be more informal than their predecessors, drawing on mutually supporting networks of labor, industry and government leaders without the explicit structure of Mussolini's cartels or Roosevelt's code authorities. These networks are driven by an implicit deal by each of the three groups to protect their mutual interests and to recognize specific obligations.
In this three-way arrangement, unionized workers in key industries get high wages, guaranteed employment, rich pension systems and government protection from competition from younger and foreign workers. In return, they promise labor peace (barring the occasional strike to demonstrate their power) and tremendous election-day muscle.
Favored businesses (and by these we are talking about the top 20 to 30 largest banks and corporations in a particular country) get protection from competition, both upstart domestic entrepreneurs as well as any foreign rivals. In return, they provide monetary and political support for politicians' pet projects--from recycling to windmills--with the understanding that politicians will give them legislative back doors to recover the costs of these programs from customers or taxpayers.
In return for granting this largess to selected corporations and unions, government officials get to remain in power. Typically this arrangement appeals to parties on both the left and the right, such that the nominal ruling party may change but the core group in power remain the same.
The losers in all of this are ... everyone else. In effect this corporate system is just another age-old, historically time-worn effort to cement the power of a small group of elites. Entrepreneurship and innovation are often impossible, as incumbent businesses can call on tremendous state powers to stifle competitive threats. The unemployment rates of the young and unskilled can be astronomical, even in rich nations like Germany and France, as older unionized workers have worked to calcify labor markets to their own advantage. In the end, consumers and taxpayers pay for the whole system in the form of reduced growth and economic output, higher prices, higher taxes and less mobility for those not already in power.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Does any of this sound familiar? Consider a few random observations from the past year:
--Powerful banks with executives who have served in multiple senior government jobs get bailed out. Others do not.
--Obama and Congress pass the health care bill by demagoguing against insurance and pharmaceutical companies, while simultaneously cutting sweetheart deals with these same companies. The pharmaceutical industry ends up as a major contributor to Harry Reid's re-election, and the insurance industry ends up with a law forcing every American to buy their product or go to jail.
--In return for publicly supporting the administration's green agenda, General Electric is rewarded with a series of proposed rules tilting regulations to favor key technologies it controls or has a strong position in.
--The administration throws out hundreds of years of contract law and takes a large portion of General Motors from secured creditors and hands it to the United Auto Workers union. Nearly simultaneously, Congress and the administration bring their full power to bear trying to damage the reputation of Toyota, GM's largest foreign competitor.
--While their only hope of financial recovery lies with their strong position in trucks and SUVs, GM proves its loyalty to the administration by backing misguided (and unreachable) fuel economy standards and going all-in on the money-losing Volt electric vehicle program.
--In nearly every city and state in the country, licensing boards proliferate. Though the justification is typically consumer protection, these boards tend to be dominated by current industry incumbents who use the boards to stifle competition. In Louisiana, for example, a group of monks is fighting back against state requirements that they must obtain a funeral home director's license to sell caskets, a license that must be obtained from a board where nine of the 10 sitting members are from the state's largest funeral homes.
Like Europe, the ultimate price for the growing corporate state will be paid by the American consumer (in the form of higher prices, reduced choice, and foregone innovation), and the American taxpayer, who is already facing an enormous bill from the direct subsidy of favored constituents. This corporate-government-labor coalition is ready to come together in the U.S. right now, and only the political energy of the rest of the American citizenry continues to resist it.
Coyote Den
The New American Corporate State
Warren Meyer, 08.26.10, 12:25 PM ET
Opponents of President Barack Obama and the Nancy Pelosi Congress will often accuse them of being "socialist." I find that this term is unhelpful, as many folks use direct government takeover of industrial enterprises as the litmus test for socialism, and thus will reject this hypothesis about the president. It is more useful to think of this administration as pursuing a European-style corporate state, a form of political economy that allows the state to exert strong control in the economy while maintaining a nominal façade of private ownership.
While the intellectual origins of the corporate state go back much further, the first serious attempt to implement such a system was in 1920s Italy by Benito Mussolini. Under that system, state-sponsored industry cartels programmed every aspect of economic life, from wages and working conditions to prices, production levels and product specifications. Nearly every commercial action required a government license, which would be denied to those who showed insufficient loyalty to the state and its goals.
In the United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was almost certainly an admirer of Mussolini's economic system, as he copied many of its salient features into the code authorities and commercial licensing requirements of the National Industrial Recovery Act (which eventually was struck down by the Supreme Court). Prices, wages, production quotas and, in effect, nearly every detail of business practices in an industry were to be set by small groups of government, labor and industry leaders. The president was given the power to unilaterally revoke the right to do business, without any further due process, of any enterprise in America if it refused to conform to this reincarnation of the Medieval guild system.
In their current form, European corporate states tend to be more informal than their predecessors, drawing on mutually supporting networks of labor, industry and government leaders without the explicit structure of Mussolini's cartels or Roosevelt's code authorities. These networks are driven by an implicit deal by each of the three groups to protect their mutual interests and to recognize specific obligations.
In this three-way arrangement, unionized workers in key industries get high wages, guaranteed employment, rich pension systems and government protection from competition from younger and foreign workers. In return, they promise labor peace (barring the occasional strike to demonstrate their power) and tremendous election-day muscle.
Favored businesses (and by these we are talking about the top 20 to 30 largest banks and corporations in a particular country) get protection from competition, both upstart domestic entrepreneurs as well as any foreign rivals. In return, they provide monetary and political support for politicians' pet projects--from recycling to windmills--with the understanding that politicians will give them legislative back doors to recover the costs of these programs from customers or taxpayers.
In return for granting this largess to selected corporations and unions, government officials get to remain in power. Typically this arrangement appeals to parties on both the left and the right, such that the nominal ruling party may change but the core group in power remain the same.
The losers in all of this are ... everyone else. In effect this corporate system is just another age-old, historically time-worn effort to cement the power of a small group of elites. Entrepreneurship and innovation are often impossible, as incumbent businesses can call on tremendous state powers to stifle competitive threats. The unemployment rates of the young and unskilled can be astronomical, even in rich nations like Germany and France, as older unionized workers have worked to calcify labor markets to their own advantage. In the end, consumers and taxpayers pay for the whole system in the form of reduced growth and economic output, higher prices, higher taxes and less mobility for those not already in power.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Does any of this sound familiar? Consider a few random observations from the past year:
--Powerful banks with executives who have served in multiple senior government jobs get bailed out. Others do not.
--Obama and Congress pass the health care bill by demagoguing against insurance and pharmaceutical companies, while simultaneously cutting sweetheart deals with these same companies. The pharmaceutical industry ends up as a major contributor to Harry Reid's re-election, and the insurance industry ends up with a law forcing every American to buy their product or go to jail.
--In return for publicly supporting the administration's green agenda, General Electric is rewarded with a series of proposed rules tilting regulations to favor key technologies it controls or has a strong position in.
--The administration throws out hundreds of years of contract law and takes a large portion of General Motors from secured creditors and hands it to the United Auto Workers union. Nearly simultaneously, Congress and the administration bring their full power to bear trying to damage the reputation of Toyota, GM's largest foreign competitor.
--While their only hope of financial recovery lies with their strong position in trucks and SUVs, GM proves its loyalty to the administration by backing misguided (and unreachable) fuel economy standards and going all-in on the money-losing Volt electric vehicle program.
--In nearly every city and state in the country, licensing boards proliferate. Though the justification is typically consumer protection, these boards tend to be dominated by current industry incumbents who use the boards to stifle competition. In Louisiana, for example, a group of monks is fighting back against state requirements that they must obtain a funeral home director's license to sell caskets, a license that must be obtained from a board where nine of the 10 sitting members are from the state's largest funeral homes.
Like Europe, the ultimate price for the growing corporate state will be paid by the American consumer (in the form of higher prices, reduced choice, and foregone innovation), and the American taxpayer, who is already facing an enormous bill from the direct subsidy of favored constituents. This corporate-government-labor coalition is ready to come together in the U.S. right now, and only the political energy of the rest of the American citizenry continues to resist it.
RightField
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Jun 30, 2003
- Posts
- 9,360
This refers to the Liberal re-molding of the American society with heavy reliance on liberal taxation and "allocation" to benefit themselves in a quid pro quo approach that is not in line with the Republican vision of freedom. It's more like a return to the "guild" system of middle-ages Europe. This is "The Blue Beast"
Coyote Den
The New American Corporate State
Warren Meyer, 08.26.10, 12:25 PM ET
Opponents of President Barack Obama and the Nancy Pelosi Congress will often accuse them of being "socialist." I find that this term is unhelpful, as many folks use direct government takeover of industrial enterprises as the litmus test for socialism, and thus will reject this hypothesis about the president. It is more useful to think of this administration as pursuing a European-style corporate state, a form of political economy that allows the state to exert strong control in the economy while maintaining a nominal façade of private ownership.
While the intellectual origins of the corporate state go back much further, the first serious attempt to implement such a system was in 1920s Italy by Benito Mussolini. Under that system, state-sponsored industry cartels programmed every aspect of economic life, from wages and working conditions to prices, production levels and product specifications. Nearly every commercial action required a government license, which would be denied to those who showed insufficient loyalty to the state and its goals.
In the United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was almost certainly an admirer of Mussolini's economic system, as he copied many of its salient features into the code authorities and commercial licensing requirements of the National Industrial Recovery Act (which eventually was struck down by the Supreme Court). Prices, wages, production quotas and, in effect, nearly every detail of business practices in an industry were to be set by small groups of government, labor and industry leaders. The president was given the power to unilaterally revoke the right to do business, without any further due process, of any enterprise in America if it refused to conform to this reincarnation of the Medieval guild system.
In their current form, European corporate states tend to be more informal than their predecessors, drawing on mutually supporting networks of labor, industry and government leaders without the explicit structure of Mussolini's cartels or Roosevelt's code authorities. These networks are driven by an implicit deal by each of the three groups to protect their mutual interests and to recognize specific obligations.
In this three-way arrangement, unionized workers in key industries get high wages, guaranteed employment, rich pension systems and government protection from competition from younger and foreign workers. In return, they promise labor peace (barring the occasional strike to demonstrate their power) and tremendous election-day muscle.
Favored businesses (and by these we are talking about the top 20 to 30 largest banks and corporations in a particular country) get protection from competition, both upstart domestic entrepreneurs as well as any foreign rivals. In return, they provide monetary and political support for politicians' pet projects--from recycling to windmills--with the understanding that politicians will give them legislative back doors to recover the costs of these programs from customers or taxpayers.
In return for granting this largess to selected corporations and unions, government officials get to remain in power. Typically this arrangement appeals to parties on both the left and the right, such that the nominal ruling party may change but the core group in power remain the same.
The losers in all of this are ... everyone else. In effect this corporate system is just another age-old, historically time-worn effort to cement the power of a small group of elites. Entrepreneurship and innovation are often impossible, as incumbent businesses can call on tremendous state powers to stifle competitive threats. The unemployment rates of the young and unskilled can be astronomical, even in rich nations like Germany and France, as older unionized workers have worked to calcify labor markets to their own advantage. In the end, consumers and taxpayers pay for the whole system in the form of reduced growth and economic output, higher prices, higher taxes and less mobility for those not already in power.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Does any of this sound familiar? Consider a few random observations from the past year:
--Powerful banks with executives who have served in multiple senior government jobs get bailed out. Others do not.
--Obama and Congress pass the health care bill by demagoguing against insurance and pharmaceutical companies, while simultaneously cutting sweetheart deals with these same companies. The pharmaceutical industry ends up as a major contributor to Harry Reid's re-election, and the insurance industry ends up with a law forcing every American to buy their product or go to jail.
--In return for publicly supporting the administration's green agenda, General Electric is rewarded with a series of proposed rules tilting regulations to favor key technologies it controls or has a strong position in.
--The administration throws out hundreds of years of contract law and takes a large portion of General Motors from secured creditors and hands it to the United Auto Workers union. Nearly simultaneously, Congress and the administration bring their full power to bear trying to damage the reputation of Toyota, GM's largest foreign competitor.
--While their only hope of financial recovery lies with their strong position in trucks and SUVs, GM proves its loyalty to the administration by backing misguided (and unreachable) fuel economy standards and going all-in on the money-losing Volt electric vehicle program.
--In nearly every city and state in the country, licensing boards proliferate. Though the justification is typically consumer protection, these boards tend to be dominated by current industry incumbents who use the boards to stifle competition. In Louisiana, for example, a group of monks is fighting back against state requirements that they must obtain a funeral home director's license to sell caskets, a license that must be obtained from a board where nine of the 10 sitting members are from the state's largest funeral homes.
Like Europe, the ultimate price for the growing corporate state will be paid by the American consumer (in the form of higher prices, reduced choice, and foregone innovation), and the American taxpayer, who is already facing an enormous bill from the direct subsidy of favored constituents. This corporate-government-labor coalition is ready to come together in the U.S. right now, and only the political energy of the rest of the American citizenry continues to resist it.
Coyote Den
The New American Corporate State
Warren Meyer, 08.26.10, 12:25 PM ET
Opponents of President Barack Obama and the Nancy Pelosi Congress will often accuse them of being "socialist." I find that this term is unhelpful, as many folks use direct government takeover of industrial enterprises as the litmus test for socialism, and thus will reject this hypothesis about the president. It is more useful to think of this administration as pursuing a European-style corporate state, a form of political economy that allows the state to exert strong control in the economy while maintaining a nominal façade of private ownership.
While the intellectual origins of the corporate state go back much further, the first serious attempt to implement such a system was in 1920s Italy by Benito Mussolini. Under that system, state-sponsored industry cartels programmed every aspect of economic life, from wages and working conditions to prices, production levels and product specifications. Nearly every commercial action required a government license, which would be denied to those who showed insufficient loyalty to the state and its goals.
In the United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was almost certainly an admirer of Mussolini's economic system, as he copied many of its salient features into the code authorities and commercial licensing requirements of the National Industrial Recovery Act (which eventually was struck down by the Supreme Court). Prices, wages, production quotas and, in effect, nearly every detail of business practices in an industry were to be set by small groups of government, labor and industry leaders. The president was given the power to unilaterally revoke the right to do business, without any further due process, of any enterprise in America if it refused to conform to this reincarnation of the Medieval guild system.
In their current form, European corporate states tend to be more informal than their predecessors, drawing on mutually supporting networks of labor, industry and government leaders without the explicit structure of Mussolini's cartels or Roosevelt's code authorities. These networks are driven by an implicit deal by each of the three groups to protect their mutual interests and to recognize specific obligations.
In this three-way arrangement, unionized workers in key industries get high wages, guaranteed employment, rich pension systems and government protection from competition from younger and foreign workers. In return, they promise labor peace (barring the occasional strike to demonstrate their power) and tremendous election-day muscle.
Favored businesses (and by these we are talking about the top 20 to 30 largest banks and corporations in a particular country) get protection from competition, both upstart domestic entrepreneurs as well as any foreign rivals. In return, they provide monetary and political support for politicians' pet projects--from recycling to windmills--with the understanding that politicians will give them legislative back doors to recover the costs of these programs from customers or taxpayers.
In return for granting this largess to selected corporations and unions, government officials get to remain in power. Typically this arrangement appeals to parties on both the left and the right, such that the nominal ruling party may change but the core group in power remain the same.
The losers in all of this are ... everyone else. In effect this corporate system is just another age-old, historically time-worn effort to cement the power of a small group of elites. Entrepreneurship and innovation are often impossible, as incumbent businesses can call on tremendous state powers to stifle competitive threats. The unemployment rates of the young and unskilled can be astronomical, even in rich nations like Germany and France, as older unionized workers have worked to calcify labor markets to their own advantage. In the end, consumers and taxpayers pay for the whole system in the form of reduced growth and economic output, higher prices, higher taxes and less mobility for those not already in power.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Does any of this sound familiar? Consider a few random observations from the past year:
--Powerful banks with executives who have served in multiple senior government jobs get bailed out. Others do not.
--Obama and Congress pass the health care bill by demagoguing against insurance and pharmaceutical companies, while simultaneously cutting sweetheart deals with these same companies. The pharmaceutical industry ends up as a major contributor to Harry Reid's re-election, and the insurance industry ends up with a law forcing every American to buy their product or go to jail.
--In return for publicly supporting the administration's green agenda, General Electric is rewarded with a series of proposed rules tilting regulations to favor key technologies it controls or has a strong position in.
--The administration throws out hundreds of years of contract law and takes a large portion of General Motors from secured creditors and hands it to the United Auto Workers union. Nearly simultaneously, Congress and the administration bring their full power to bear trying to damage the reputation of Toyota, GM's largest foreign competitor.
--While their only hope of financial recovery lies with their strong position in trucks and SUVs, GM proves its loyalty to the administration by backing misguided (and unreachable) fuel economy standards and going all-in on the money-losing Volt electric vehicle program.
--In nearly every city and state in the country, licensing boards proliferate. Though the justification is typically consumer protection, these boards tend to be dominated by current industry incumbents who use the boards to stifle competition. In Louisiana, for example, a group of monks is fighting back against state requirements that they must obtain a funeral home director's license to sell caskets, a license that must be obtained from a board where nine of the 10 sitting members are from the state's largest funeral homes.
Like Europe, the ultimate price for the growing corporate state will be paid by the American consumer (in the form of higher prices, reduced choice, and foregone innovation), and the American taxpayer, who is already facing an enormous bill from the direct subsidy of favored constituents. This corporate-government-labor coalition is ready to come together in the U.S. right now, and only the political energy of the rest of the American citizenry continues to resist it.
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RightField
Literotica Guru
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- Jun 30, 2003
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August 31, 2010
Shamelessness and the Stimulus
By Rich Lowry
Joe Biden was an inspired choice as spokesman for the "summer of recovery."
If the Obama administration wanted someone with little credibility to lose, who will say anything without a hint of shame or compunction, whose mouth habitually outruns the facts and common sense, it found its man.
The vice president is still hawking his recovery summer, even as GDP growth slows to a crawl, and he'll still tout the marvels of the stimulus even if we dip into negative territory again later this year. He makes the late, great pitchman Billy Mays look restrained and rhetorically scrupulous by comparison. Biden is joined at the hip to the most disastrous White House shibboleth since Pres. Gerald Ford's "Whip Inflation Now."
In a vaguely Soviet act of governmental exhortation, in 1974 Ford wanted local citizens' groups to "whip inflation now," or WIN. Ford offered a shiny "WIN" button to anyone enlisting "as an Inflation Fighter and Energy Saver for the duration." Six months later, only one local committee had been formed, and even Ford concluded the initiative was "too gimmicky." Inflation remained unwhipped.
What WIN buttons were to Ford, the gewgaws of the stimulus are to Biden. He relentlessly plugs the $5 billion for weatherization as "one of our signature programs," never mentioning, as the Associated Press puts it, that the program "has experienced spending delays, inefficiencies and mismanagement. In Biden's home state of Delaware, the entire program has been suspended since May, and last month federal auditors identified possible fraud."
The inefficiencies of the weatherization program are typical. According to the Washington Post, as of June 30, Detroit had spent less than 1 percent of $8.8 million for energy-efficiency initiatives, Phoenix had spent even less of its $15.2 million, and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., had spent $66,000 of $2 million.
In a favorite administration statistic, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the stimulus increased the number of people employed by 1.4 million to 3.3 million in the second quarter, a suspiciously wide range redolent of seat-of-the-pants guesswork. All the report proves is that if you adopt a model that assumes that the stimulus created jobs, it created a lot of them. The stimulus excels in this ethereal category of assumed job creation.
If the stimulus provided any initial boost to the economy, it was a sugar high, its effect neither healthy nor enduring. It's been a chilly summer ofrecovery. According to Macroeconomic Advisers, which estimates growth on a monthly basis, GDP growth declined 0.4 percent in June. Only 61,000 private-sector jobs were created in June and July. Biden must be banking on a hell of an August.
A ruinous shortsightedness is a hallmark of Obama economic policy. In July, sales of new homes dropped to their lowest level since the government started tracking them 40 years ago. The precipitous fall - down 32.4 percent from a year earlier - came with the expiration of the new homebuyer's credit. The credit temporarily boosted home sales, but - like the cash-for-clunkers program and the stimulus (in the best-case scenario) - at the price of stealing demand from the future. Unfortunately, the future always arrives eventually.
Obama-administration officials with a sense of shame want to keep their hucksterism within reasonable limits. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was reportedly irked that the New York Times gave his op-ed on encouraging economic signs the Biden-esque headline "Welcome to the Recovery." Geithner was right to point out that recoveries from financial crises are always long, hard slogs. That should have counseled restraint and realistic expectations from the beginning, rather than the administration's counterproductive hyperactivity and self-discrediting overpromising.
Once Barack Obama had settled on a nearly $1 trillion stimulus, though, it was inevitable he had to oversell it to get it through Congress, and once he unleashed that sort of spending, it was inevitable that Congress would create a sprawling mess. Amid the political and economic wreckage, there's only one thing to do: send out Biden.
Shamelessness and the Stimulus
By Rich Lowry
Joe Biden was an inspired choice as spokesman for the "summer of recovery."
If the Obama administration wanted someone with little credibility to lose, who will say anything without a hint of shame or compunction, whose mouth habitually outruns the facts and common sense, it found its man.
The vice president is still hawking his recovery summer, even as GDP growth slows to a crawl, and he'll still tout the marvels of the stimulus even if we dip into negative territory again later this year. He makes the late, great pitchman Billy Mays look restrained and rhetorically scrupulous by comparison. Biden is joined at the hip to the most disastrous White House shibboleth since Pres. Gerald Ford's "Whip Inflation Now."
In a vaguely Soviet act of governmental exhortation, in 1974 Ford wanted local citizens' groups to "whip inflation now," or WIN. Ford offered a shiny "WIN" button to anyone enlisting "as an Inflation Fighter and Energy Saver for the duration." Six months later, only one local committee had been formed, and even Ford concluded the initiative was "too gimmicky." Inflation remained unwhipped.
What WIN buttons were to Ford, the gewgaws of the stimulus are to Biden. He relentlessly plugs the $5 billion for weatherization as "one of our signature programs," never mentioning, as the Associated Press puts it, that the program "has experienced spending delays, inefficiencies and mismanagement. In Biden's home state of Delaware, the entire program has been suspended since May, and last month federal auditors identified possible fraud."
The inefficiencies of the weatherization program are typical. According to the Washington Post, as of June 30, Detroit had spent less than 1 percent of $8.8 million for energy-efficiency initiatives, Phoenix had spent even less of its $15.2 million, and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., had spent $66,000 of $2 million.
In a favorite administration statistic, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the stimulus increased the number of people employed by 1.4 million to 3.3 million in the second quarter, a suspiciously wide range redolent of seat-of-the-pants guesswork. All the report proves is that if you adopt a model that assumes that the stimulus created jobs, it created a lot of them. The stimulus excels in this ethereal category of assumed job creation.
If the stimulus provided any initial boost to the economy, it was a sugar high, its effect neither healthy nor enduring. It's been a chilly summer ofrecovery. According to Macroeconomic Advisers, which estimates growth on a monthly basis, GDP growth declined 0.4 percent in June. Only 61,000 private-sector jobs were created in June and July. Biden must be banking on a hell of an August.
A ruinous shortsightedness is a hallmark of Obama economic policy. In July, sales of new homes dropped to their lowest level since the government started tracking them 40 years ago. The precipitous fall - down 32.4 percent from a year earlier - came with the expiration of the new homebuyer's credit. The credit temporarily boosted home sales, but - like the cash-for-clunkers program and the stimulus (in the best-case scenario) - at the price of stealing demand from the future. Unfortunately, the future always arrives eventually.
Obama-administration officials with a sense of shame want to keep their hucksterism within reasonable limits. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was reportedly irked that the New York Times gave his op-ed on encouraging economic signs the Biden-esque headline "Welcome to the Recovery." Geithner was right to point out that recoveries from financial crises are always long, hard slogs. That should have counseled restraint and realistic expectations from the beginning, rather than the administration's counterproductive hyperactivity and self-discrediting overpromising.
Once Barack Obama had settled on a nearly $1 trillion stimulus, though, it was inevitable he had to oversell it to get it through Congress, and once he unleashed that sort of spending, it was inevitable that Congress would create a sprawling mess. Amid the political and economic wreckage, there's only one thing to do: send out Biden.
RightField
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- Jun 30, 2003
- Posts
- 9,360
March 7, 2011
Paul Krugman Gets It Half Right
Walter Russell Mead
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day; Paul Krugman was almost this lucky in his recent New York Times column: Degrees and Dollars. It’s an important column and should be required reading even for people who stopped reading him a long time ago. Krugman’s take on what’s wrong with the American economy and what to do about it shows a powerful intellect grappling honestly with some of the biggest problems we face.
And Krugman’s column also illustrates the point I made in The Crisis of the American Intellectual: that many of the smartest and best educated people in this country are so blinkered and blinded by the assumptions and values of the blue social model that they simply cannot think outside the box.
Paul Krugman, professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton (Wikimedia)
First, here’s what Krugman gets right: the hopes of our intellectuals that shoveling ever more money into our faltering higher educational system will raise American living standards are delusional. Citing the recent New York Times article on the devastating consequences of automation for the future employment of American lawyers, Krugman points out that many high-pay white collar occupations are vulnerable to automation.
He also gets something else: that many professional jobs are vulnerable to outsourcing. Citing research from fellow Princeton profs, Krugman tells us (again, correctly in my view) that in the next stage globalization is going to be slicing into job opportunities and wages at the high end of the labor market.
Krugman’s column is part of a much broader trend: the intellectual and economic underpinnings of the blue social model are in a process of accelerating and serial collapse. I posted last week that the truly deadly threats to the public sector unions, the threats that doom them to long term decline, aren’t coming from people like Wisconsin governor Scott Walker; they are coming from blue state governors in places like New York and Vermont who recognize that their states simply cannot afford to give public unions anything like what they want. The New York Times editorial board, one of the bluest groups in the United States, published an editorial the day before Krugman’s piece appeared that argued for deep changes in the way state workers are rewarded and managed. Sez the Times:
At a time when public school students are being forced into ever more crowded classrooms, and poor families will lose state medical benefits, New York State is paying 10 times more for state employees’ pensions than it did just a decade ago.
And why is this? Well, continues the Gray Lady, there are several reasons, including this:
[M]ost state employees pay only 3 percent of their salaries to their pensions, half the level of most state employees elsewhere. Their health insurance payments are about half those in the private sector.
And where does this leave us?
In all, the salaries and benefits of state employees add up to $18.5 billion, or a fifth of New York’s operating budget. Unless those costs are reined in, New York will find itself unable to provide even essential services.
The problem goes beyond wages and pensions. It also involves work rules — like seniority and tenure. An editorial that appeared on the same day as the Krugman piece argued for revising New York state law to make it easier to fire bad teachers — and to make layoffs performance-based rather than firing young teachers while protecting time-serving hacks through the seniority system.
The Times, it hastens to assure us, is not (God forbid) anti-union. It merely believes that the state must set wages, pensions and work rules based on the financial facts of life rather than on union wish lists. And the state must elect politicians who will stand up to union demands and, presumably, crush union strikes aimed at resisting the wage and pension cuts, layoffs and work rule changes that the Times believes are a matter of life and death for New York State. If workers want to go on paying dues to organizations that cannot bargain effectively over anything important, the Times is fine with that. (If that is what the most reliably liberal major news source in the country thinks, it isn’t hard to see where the debate on public unions is heading.)
Krugman and the Times editorial board are both examples of something important in American life today: left-liberal intellectuals are increasingly able to understand that individual supports of the blue social model are crumbling. But they are still so captivated by the blue model, so profoundly convinced that the Progressive movement’s solutions to America’s social ills in 1910 are still valid today, that they cannot yet look beyond the blue model to imagine a different and brighter future for the United States.
Here, for example, is the solution Krugman proposes to the problems that automation and outsourcing have caused for both blue and white collar workers in the US:
So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.
This is blindness so brilliant it would dazzle a bat. If, as Krugman posits, demand for US workers will be falling in both manufacturing and the professions, how exactly will labor unions get higher wages for their members? Factories will be closing in Krugman’s world and law firms will be turning more and more work over to computers or shipping it overseas. Perhaps stronger unions could make it harder for companies to do this for a while, but ultimately facts speak. Stronger unions making tougher wage demands will not exactly persuade American (and foreign) investors to create new jobs in this country — or to slow down their efforts to reduce their US workforce by outsourcing and automation. When human workers receive rising wages, become harder to fire, and are governed by ever more convoluted and expensive work rules, replacing them with computers becomes more attractive, not less.
Unions tend to flourish when demand for workers is rising (as in China today); they do not and cannot protect the situation of workers as a whole against a background of falling long-term demand for their work.
The problem isn’t that this or that piece of the blue social model is breaking down and needs to be fixed so that the rest of the model can go on working well. It’s not that the university system is broken and that if we fix that the model still works. Ditto the public sector unions or the situation of the labor movement as a whole. Mandating an expensive new set of health care entitlements at a time of looming insolvency won’t help either.
The problem with the blue social model today is systemic. It’s not a problem with one piece or another. The pieces are all falling down and breaking apart at once. It is what happened to the “One Hoss Shay” in Oliver Wendell Holmes’ poem about, they used to teach us back in Pundit High, the breakdown of Calvinist religion in New England.
Old One Horse Shay (Wikimedia)
The shay in Holmes’ poem had been built in 1755 by a clever parson determined to make sure that every part was equally well-made and that the whole system worked harmoniously. For 100 years the wonderful shay rolled on smoothly, with none of its parts ever needing repair or replacement. But nothing lasts forever and 100 years to the day after it was assembled, there was a sudden jerk and the driver fell ingloriously to the ground.
What do you think the parson found,
When he got up and stared around?
The poor old chaise in a heap or mound,
As if it had been to the mill and ground!
You see, of course, if you ‘re not a dunce,
How it went to pieces all at once,
All at once, and nothing first,
Just as bubbles do when they burst.
Logic is logic. That’s all I say.
“End of the wonderful one-hoss-shay.”
Faced with this catastrophe, the Progressive mind can only echo Samuel Gompers’ cry for “More!” But the cry is doomed to be fruitless. The only thing that will help is more subsidies: aid to universities and to students to allow the unsustainable education bubbles to continue to rise; aid to states and local governments to pay spiraling wage and pension bills; aid to home buyers to stave off price collapses; and most crucially, massive aid to both health care providers and consumers.
Wrong. We need to reduce the ‘friction’ in American society: the costs of our legal, health, educational and other government services. Some of this will come through the use of exactly those abilities of the computer that Paul Krugman dreads: their ability to replace human beings for much routine office work. Making government (and private sector) bureaucratic payrolls massively smaller is what the general interest requires.
In the medium term this process, aided by ever-improving software and the continuing rapid increase in computing power, can go much, much farther than many people imagine. Robot judges assessing claims filed by robot plaintiff and defense attorneys? It may be coming into view. This post (thanks, Instapundit, for the link, and for much, much else besides!) explores some of the possibilities.
In other cases, the changes have to do with smarter practices rather than automation. And this is not about a knee-jerk preference for right wing solutions over left wing ones: finding cheaper (and more humane, less destructive) ways than prison to deal with non-violent criminal offenders is one example.
Or look at education. Moving from “time-served” processes of certification (four year BA degrees, three years in law or divinity school) to certification based on achievement can make education dramatically cheaper. It is sheer madness that most students spend 12 years in school, and another four in college. Why exactly should all kids the same age be in the same grade? One size does not fit all; why shouldn’t high school kids go free when they can pass the equivalent of a GED? And for that matter, shouldn’t school districts encourage and reward teachers and schools that are able to graduate students faster? Among other things, this would allow some of the resources not spent on babysitting high-achieving kids to go to kids who really need the help. How “right wing” is that?
The same goes for college. Oxford and Cambridge graduate their students in three years — yet few people think British college grads are less accomplished than their American peers. What is sacred about the four year BA? Wouldn’t a shift to an exam based system (students who make qualifying scores on the appropriate exams would be certified as graduates) allow more people to advance farther at less cost? And there’s an element of social justice here: the kid from a no-name school who scores high on the exam will have an edge on the Ivy League kid who partied through college and just scraped by.
I don’t claim to have all the answers to how America’s professions should be restructured. Those answers will be discovered bit by bit as millions of people work to do things faster, cheaper, smarter. But the aggressive use of computers and innovation to increase the productivity and reduce the costs of “frictional” activities like government, the legal system, the financial system, health care and education will allow Americans to pay less in taxes and fees for services that they truly need even as the quality of government services improves. That is what productivity is all about.
For many people this sounds like a systemic assault on the few good jobs left in the United States. But this process of creative destruction is not a Scrooge-like endeavor to squeeze the honest workers for the benefit of fat cats. It is clearing the field for new enterprises and new professions. If education, government and other important services become cheaper and better in quality, and as inflation in other sectors like health care is better controlled, it will be easier and cheaper than ever to start new businesses.
What will the brave new American economy look like? Nobody knows. But maybe you will have (or be) a kind of geek-on-call who, for a fixed rate, handles anything that goes wrong with all your electronic and media equipment, who handles those three hour tech support calls for you, and who also figures out what cable, direct TV, online or other service providers work best for you. Maybe you will use or run services that shuttle kids around the suburbs to their various classes and sport events. Maybe all of us, instead of a handful of upper middle class and upper class people, will have access to serious personalized guidance and educational counseling for our kids. Maybe you will have a personal nutritionist who is also your shopper. Health care will be more individually tailored, and instead of seeing a doctor every time you are sick, you may spend time with a person who helps you navigate the health system and who makes house calls (with a “smart box” that give better diagnoses with more up to date knowledge than 90% of human doctors) and sets up a treatment carefully calibrated to work best for you.
You will be able to pay for these services because computers make them cheap to deliver, and also because many of the bills you dread now will go down. As higher education becomes more skill-based (and the liberal arts portion is increasingly delivered in smarter ways), it is likely to become much, much cheaper — the modern college lecture is using a teaching technique invented in Greco-Roman times when students listened as teachers read scrolls, and not much has changed since. So you won’t have to save up for a generation to send your kids to college — and they won’t have to spend a generation paying off the loans to cover the rest. Your taxes will be lower in proportion to your income — both because as governments become more efficiently managed they can balance their budgets and because with balanced budgets they will retire the old debt. Should you need legal assistance, in most routine cases it will become much easier and cheaper to get — just as tax software programs now give many consumers the kind of help it once took trained accountants to deliver.
This is the essence of progress: as we move forward less of our society’s time and energy goes into just staying alive; more of it goes into living better. The key to that now is to move as quickly as possible to reshape these critical professions with the full power of information technology.
Nobody has a blueprint for the post-industrial world, and the pessimists and doomsayers will always be with us. The porters’ union probably once fought the wheel and predicted mass unemployment and falling living standards if those crazy things ever caught on. How would honest porters earn a living if everybody used those new-fangled wheelbarrows? And if the porters are out of work, what about all the shopkeepers and tavern owners who depend on the porters as customers? Alas, oh woe and alackaday!
Ban the wheel!
We have our naysayers and prophets of doom in the US, and many of our intellectuals are so caught up in and so well paid by the blue social model that they literally cannot conceive that the radical changes shaking their world should be embraced rather than resisted. But one of the great secrets of America’s historical success is that the voices of nostalgia are weaker here than in other places.
Krugman and many of his colleagues at the Times are, I think, blinded by how good things once were. This is understandable; I felt that way for many years myself and it was only slowly and painfully that I gave up on the blue social model that once looked so good. But the country and the times we live in demand more than angry and ultimately despairing nostalgia from our thinkers and opinion leaders. Let us hope that it comes.
Paul Krugman Gets It Half Right
Walter Russell Mead
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day; Paul Krugman was almost this lucky in his recent New York Times column: Degrees and Dollars. It’s an important column and should be required reading even for people who stopped reading him a long time ago. Krugman’s take on what’s wrong with the American economy and what to do about it shows a powerful intellect grappling honestly with some of the biggest problems we face.
And Krugman’s column also illustrates the point I made in The Crisis of the American Intellectual: that many of the smartest and best educated people in this country are so blinkered and blinded by the assumptions and values of the blue social model that they simply cannot think outside the box.
Paul Krugman, professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton (Wikimedia)
First, here’s what Krugman gets right: the hopes of our intellectuals that shoveling ever more money into our faltering higher educational system will raise American living standards are delusional. Citing the recent New York Times article on the devastating consequences of automation for the future employment of American lawyers, Krugman points out that many high-pay white collar occupations are vulnerable to automation.
He also gets something else: that many professional jobs are vulnerable to outsourcing. Citing research from fellow Princeton profs, Krugman tells us (again, correctly in my view) that in the next stage globalization is going to be slicing into job opportunities and wages at the high end of the labor market.
Krugman’s column is part of a much broader trend: the intellectual and economic underpinnings of the blue social model are in a process of accelerating and serial collapse. I posted last week that the truly deadly threats to the public sector unions, the threats that doom them to long term decline, aren’t coming from people like Wisconsin governor Scott Walker; they are coming from blue state governors in places like New York and Vermont who recognize that their states simply cannot afford to give public unions anything like what they want. The New York Times editorial board, one of the bluest groups in the United States, published an editorial the day before Krugman’s piece appeared that argued for deep changes in the way state workers are rewarded and managed. Sez the Times:
At a time when public school students are being forced into ever more crowded classrooms, and poor families will lose state medical benefits, New York State is paying 10 times more for state employees’ pensions than it did just a decade ago.
And why is this? Well, continues the Gray Lady, there are several reasons, including this:
[M]ost state employees pay only 3 percent of their salaries to their pensions, half the level of most state employees elsewhere. Their health insurance payments are about half those in the private sector.
And where does this leave us?
In all, the salaries and benefits of state employees add up to $18.5 billion, or a fifth of New York’s operating budget. Unless those costs are reined in, New York will find itself unable to provide even essential services.
The problem goes beyond wages and pensions. It also involves work rules — like seniority and tenure. An editorial that appeared on the same day as the Krugman piece argued for revising New York state law to make it easier to fire bad teachers — and to make layoffs performance-based rather than firing young teachers while protecting time-serving hacks through the seniority system.
The Times, it hastens to assure us, is not (God forbid) anti-union. It merely believes that the state must set wages, pensions and work rules based on the financial facts of life rather than on union wish lists. And the state must elect politicians who will stand up to union demands and, presumably, crush union strikes aimed at resisting the wage and pension cuts, layoffs and work rule changes that the Times believes are a matter of life and death for New York State. If workers want to go on paying dues to organizations that cannot bargain effectively over anything important, the Times is fine with that. (If that is what the most reliably liberal major news source in the country thinks, it isn’t hard to see where the debate on public unions is heading.)
Krugman and the Times editorial board are both examples of something important in American life today: left-liberal intellectuals are increasingly able to understand that individual supports of the blue social model are crumbling. But they are still so captivated by the blue model, so profoundly convinced that the Progressive movement’s solutions to America’s social ills in 1910 are still valid today, that they cannot yet look beyond the blue model to imagine a different and brighter future for the United States.
Here, for example, is the solution Krugman proposes to the problems that automation and outsourcing have caused for both blue and white collar workers in the US:
So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.
This is blindness so brilliant it would dazzle a bat. If, as Krugman posits, demand for US workers will be falling in both manufacturing and the professions, how exactly will labor unions get higher wages for their members? Factories will be closing in Krugman’s world and law firms will be turning more and more work over to computers or shipping it overseas. Perhaps stronger unions could make it harder for companies to do this for a while, but ultimately facts speak. Stronger unions making tougher wage demands will not exactly persuade American (and foreign) investors to create new jobs in this country — or to slow down their efforts to reduce their US workforce by outsourcing and automation. When human workers receive rising wages, become harder to fire, and are governed by ever more convoluted and expensive work rules, replacing them with computers becomes more attractive, not less.
Unions tend to flourish when demand for workers is rising (as in China today); they do not and cannot protect the situation of workers as a whole against a background of falling long-term demand for their work.
The problem isn’t that this or that piece of the blue social model is breaking down and needs to be fixed so that the rest of the model can go on working well. It’s not that the university system is broken and that if we fix that the model still works. Ditto the public sector unions or the situation of the labor movement as a whole. Mandating an expensive new set of health care entitlements at a time of looming insolvency won’t help either.
The problem with the blue social model today is systemic. It’s not a problem with one piece or another. The pieces are all falling down and breaking apart at once. It is what happened to the “One Hoss Shay” in Oliver Wendell Holmes’ poem about, they used to teach us back in Pundit High, the breakdown of Calvinist religion in New England.
Old One Horse Shay (Wikimedia)
The shay in Holmes’ poem had been built in 1755 by a clever parson determined to make sure that every part was equally well-made and that the whole system worked harmoniously. For 100 years the wonderful shay rolled on smoothly, with none of its parts ever needing repair or replacement. But nothing lasts forever and 100 years to the day after it was assembled, there was a sudden jerk and the driver fell ingloriously to the ground.
What do you think the parson found,
When he got up and stared around?
The poor old chaise in a heap or mound,
As if it had been to the mill and ground!
You see, of course, if you ‘re not a dunce,
How it went to pieces all at once,
All at once, and nothing first,
Just as bubbles do when they burst.
Logic is logic. That’s all I say.
“End of the wonderful one-hoss-shay.”
Faced with this catastrophe, the Progressive mind can only echo Samuel Gompers’ cry for “More!” But the cry is doomed to be fruitless. The only thing that will help is more subsidies: aid to universities and to students to allow the unsustainable education bubbles to continue to rise; aid to states and local governments to pay spiraling wage and pension bills; aid to home buyers to stave off price collapses; and most crucially, massive aid to both health care providers and consumers.
Wrong. We need to reduce the ‘friction’ in American society: the costs of our legal, health, educational and other government services. Some of this will come through the use of exactly those abilities of the computer that Paul Krugman dreads: their ability to replace human beings for much routine office work. Making government (and private sector) bureaucratic payrolls massively smaller is what the general interest requires.
In the medium term this process, aided by ever-improving software and the continuing rapid increase in computing power, can go much, much farther than many people imagine. Robot judges assessing claims filed by robot plaintiff and defense attorneys? It may be coming into view. This post (thanks, Instapundit, for the link, and for much, much else besides!) explores some of the possibilities.
In other cases, the changes have to do with smarter practices rather than automation. And this is not about a knee-jerk preference for right wing solutions over left wing ones: finding cheaper (and more humane, less destructive) ways than prison to deal with non-violent criminal offenders is one example.
Or look at education. Moving from “time-served” processes of certification (four year BA degrees, three years in law or divinity school) to certification based on achievement can make education dramatically cheaper. It is sheer madness that most students spend 12 years in school, and another four in college. Why exactly should all kids the same age be in the same grade? One size does not fit all; why shouldn’t high school kids go free when they can pass the equivalent of a GED? And for that matter, shouldn’t school districts encourage and reward teachers and schools that are able to graduate students faster? Among other things, this would allow some of the resources not spent on babysitting high-achieving kids to go to kids who really need the help. How “right wing” is that?
The same goes for college. Oxford and Cambridge graduate their students in three years — yet few people think British college grads are less accomplished than their American peers. What is sacred about the four year BA? Wouldn’t a shift to an exam based system (students who make qualifying scores on the appropriate exams would be certified as graduates) allow more people to advance farther at less cost? And there’s an element of social justice here: the kid from a no-name school who scores high on the exam will have an edge on the Ivy League kid who partied through college and just scraped by.
I don’t claim to have all the answers to how America’s professions should be restructured. Those answers will be discovered bit by bit as millions of people work to do things faster, cheaper, smarter. But the aggressive use of computers and innovation to increase the productivity and reduce the costs of “frictional” activities like government, the legal system, the financial system, health care and education will allow Americans to pay less in taxes and fees for services that they truly need even as the quality of government services improves. That is what productivity is all about.
For many people this sounds like a systemic assault on the few good jobs left in the United States. But this process of creative destruction is not a Scrooge-like endeavor to squeeze the honest workers for the benefit of fat cats. It is clearing the field for new enterprises and new professions. If education, government and other important services become cheaper and better in quality, and as inflation in other sectors like health care is better controlled, it will be easier and cheaper than ever to start new businesses.
What will the brave new American economy look like? Nobody knows. But maybe you will have (or be) a kind of geek-on-call who, for a fixed rate, handles anything that goes wrong with all your electronic and media equipment, who handles those three hour tech support calls for you, and who also figures out what cable, direct TV, online or other service providers work best for you. Maybe you will use or run services that shuttle kids around the suburbs to their various classes and sport events. Maybe all of us, instead of a handful of upper middle class and upper class people, will have access to serious personalized guidance and educational counseling for our kids. Maybe you will have a personal nutritionist who is also your shopper. Health care will be more individually tailored, and instead of seeing a doctor every time you are sick, you may spend time with a person who helps you navigate the health system and who makes house calls (with a “smart box” that give better diagnoses with more up to date knowledge than 90% of human doctors) and sets up a treatment carefully calibrated to work best for you.
You will be able to pay for these services because computers make them cheap to deliver, and also because many of the bills you dread now will go down. As higher education becomes more skill-based (and the liberal arts portion is increasingly delivered in smarter ways), it is likely to become much, much cheaper — the modern college lecture is using a teaching technique invented in Greco-Roman times when students listened as teachers read scrolls, and not much has changed since. So you won’t have to save up for a generation to send your kids to college — and they won’t have to spend a generation paying off the loans to cover the rest. Your taxes will be lower in proportion to your income — both because as governments become more efficiently managed they can balance their budgets and because with balanced budgets they will retire the old debt. Should you need legal assistance, in most routine cases it will become much easier and cheaper to get — just as tax software programs now give many consumers the kind of help it once took trained accountants to deliver.
This is the essence of progress: as we move forward less of our society’s time and energy goes into just staying alive; more of it goes into living better. The key to that now is to move as quickly as possible to reshape these critical professions with the full power of information technology.
Nobody has a blueprint for the post-industrial world, and the pessimists and doomsayers will always be with us. The porters’ union probably once fought the wheel and predicted mass unemployment and falling living standards if those crazy things ever caught on. How would honest porters earn a living if everybody used those new-fangled wheelbarrows? And if the porters are out of work, what about all the shopkeepers and tavern owners who depend on the porters as customers? Alas, oh woe and alackaday!
Ban the wheel!
We have our naysayers and prophets of doom in the US, and many of our intellectuals are so caught up in and so well paid by the blue social model that they literally cannot conceive that the radical changes shaking their world should be embraced rather than resisted. But one of the great secrets of America’s historical success is that the voices of nostalgia are weaker here than in other places.
Krugman and many of his colleagues at the Times are, I think, blinded by how good things once were. This is understandable; I felt that way for many years myself and it was only slowly and painfully that I gave up on the blue social model that once looked so good. But the country and the times we live in demand more than angry and ultimately despairing nostalgia from our thinkers and opinion leaders. Let us hope that it comes.
RightField
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Planet Washington
By Jonah Goldberg
By earth-logic, if you got a raise of 10 percent last year, but this year you're only getting a raise of 8 percent, you're still getting a raise. On Planet Washington, that qualifies as an indefensible slashing.
So when the GOP cut $4 billion from the budget last week, the Democrats acted as if it was an involuntary amputation.
Now the GOP wants to cut $61 billion of discretionary nondefense spending from the total budget of $3.7 trillion, and Democrats are responding as if this will spell the end of Western civilization.
But given their terror of forcing a government shutdown, Democrats were forced to counteroffer with a cut of $10.5 billion, or 0.28 percent of the federal budget.
Imagine you have a budget of $10,000 (about 40 percent of it borrowed on a credit card), then "slash" 28 bucks. That's what it's like to be a frugal Democrat.
"Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace repeatedly pressed Sen. Dick Durbin: Is $10.5 billion in cuts "really the best the Democrats can do?" The No. 2 Senate Democrat responded, eventually: "We've pushed this to the limit." Any cuts beyond that would simply crater our economy and gut "investments" to make us competitive with China. Apparently, Durbin thinks trimming the staff at the Oregon National Laboratory will result in us all becoming busboys at a Beijing restaurant.
Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's solution to the deficit is -- wait for it -- spend a whole bunch more. In October, Pelosi said that every dollar spent on unemployment benefits and food stamps puts another $1.79 into economy. "It is the biggest bang for the buck when you do food stamps and unemployment insurance."
Her latest version of teenage-mutant ninja Keynesianism is to "invest" even more on education. "Nothing brings more to the treasury than investing in education," Pelosi said.
Never mind that Washington has "invested" roughly $2 trillion in education since 1965. Forget the fact that spending at all levels of government has gone from $55,000 per a single student's complete K-12 education in 1970 to $155,000 in 2009, according to Cato Institute scholar Andrew Coulson, while "overall achievement has stagnated or declined, depending on the subject."
Would another trillion spent on education really have a greater return than, say, allowing US companies to drill for the billions of gallons of oil and the trillions of cubic feet of natural gas under our soil?
Why am I talking about Durbin and Pelosi? Well, Obama is in a fetal crouch under the Oval Office desk, muttering something about the need for courage and bipartisanship while quietly proposing $6.5 billion in cuts, which the Congressional Budget Office said is really only $4.7 billion. (That's about $700 million more than the US spends in borrowed money every day.)
Oh, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid seems determined to keep talking until the men in the white coats escort him off the Senate floor. He was last heard saying the GOP has gone crazy because it had cut funding for a Nevada cowboy-poetry festival. No, really.
In 2007, the budget was 19.6 percent of the GDP. In 2009, it went up to 25 percent of GDP. That's where the Democrats would like to see it stay.
What happened? The financial crisis, of course. But as many of us suggested at the time, one of the Democrats' real motives behind the stimulus was to inflate the "baseline" budget so that huge increases would never be reversed, thanks to the DC logic that a cut in growth is a cut.
Now, Democrats greet any attempt to restore government to its pre-crisis size -- when we were still living way above our means -- as if America would be plunged into the Stone Age.
Look at it this way. Those heartless Republican bastards would cut 2011 nondefense discretionary spending from 3.6 percent to 3.2 percent of GDP. Under Bill Clinton, such spending averaged 3.1 percent of GDP.
We owe $14 trillion we don't have. Our total liabilities -- i.e., Social Security and other entitlements -- dwarf that. So we can't just cut discretionary spending alone. But if it's this hard to ask cowboy poets to pony up, how are we going to deal with what everyone agrees is the much harder stuff?
By Jonah Goldberg
By earth-logic, if you got a raise of 10 percent last year, but this year you're only getting a raise of 8 percent, you're still getting a raise. On Planet Washington, that qualifies as an indefensible slashing.
So when the GOP cut $4 billion from the budget last week, the Democrats acted as if it was an involuntary amputation.
Now the GOP wants to cut $61 billion of discretionary nondefense spending from the total budget of $3.7 trillion, and Democrats are responding as if this will spell the end of Western civilization.
But given their terror of forcing a government shutdown, Democrats were forced to counteroffer with a cut of $10.5 billion, or 0.28 percent of the federal budget.
Imagine you have a budget of $10,000 (about 40 percent of it borrowed on a credit card), then "slash" 28 bucks. That's what it's like to be a frugal Democrat.
"Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace repeatedly pressed Sen. Dick Durbin: Is $10.5 billion in cuts "really the best the Democrats can do?" The No. 2 Senate Democrat responded, eventually: "We've pushed this to the limit." Any cuts beyond that would simply crater our economy and gut "investments" to make us competitive with China. Apparently, Durbin thinks trimming the staff at the Oregon National Laboratory will result in us all becoming busboys at a Beijing restaurant.
Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's solution to the deficit is -- wait for it -- spend a whole bunch more. In October, Pelosi said that every dollar spent on unemployment benefits and food stamps puts another $1.79 into economy. "It is the biggest bang for the buck when you do food stamps and unemployment insurance."
Her latest version of teenage-mutant ninja Keynesianism is to "invest" even more on education. "Nothing brings more to the treasury than investing in education," Pelosi said.
Never mind that Washington has "invested" roughly $2 trillion in education since 1965. Forget the fact that spending at all levels of government has gone from $55,000 per a single student's complete K-12 education in 1970 to $155,000 in 2009, according to Cato Institute scholar Andrew Coulson, while "overall achievement has stagnated or declined, depending on the subject."
Would another trillion spent on education really have a greater return than, say, allowing US companies to drill for the billions of gallons of oil and the trillions of cubic feet of natural gas under our soil?
Why am I talking about Durbin and Pelosi? Well, Obama is in a fetal crouch under the Oval Office desk, muttering something about the need for courage and bipartisanship while quietly proposing $6.5 billion in cuts, which the Congressional Budget Office said is really only $4.7 billion. (That's about $700 million more than the US spends in borrowed money every day.)
Oh, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid seems determined to keep talking until the men in the white coats escort him off the Senate floor. He was last heard saying the GOP has gone crazy because it had cut funding for a Nevada cowboy-poetry festival. No, really.
In 2007, the budget was 19.6 percent of the GDP. In 2009, it went up to 25 percent of GDP. That's where the Democrats would like to see it stay.
What happened? The financial crisis, of course. But as many of us suggested at the time, one of the Democrats' real motives behind the stimulus was to inflate the "baseline" budget so that huge increases would never be reversed, thanks to the DC logic that a cut in growth is a cut.
Now, Democrats greet any attempt to restore government to its pre-crisis size -- when we were still living way above our means -- as if America would be plunged into the Stone Age.
Look at it this way. Those heartless Republican bastards would cut 2011 nondefense discretionary spending from 3.6 percent to 3.2 percent of GDP. Under Bill Clinton, such spending averaged 3.1 percent of GDP.
We owe $14 trillion we don't have. Our total liabilities -- i.e., Social Security and other entitlements -- dwarf that. So we can't just cut discretionary spending alone. But if it's this hard to ask cowboy poets to pony up, how are we going to deal with what everyone agrees is the much harder stuff?
