Against the Stream

Socialism!

Matt Yglesias offers an appreciation of the Gotha Program:

Points one through seven seem a bit airy, rhetorical, and overblown but the final point, point eight, seems reasonably solid to me ... This program was, at the time, known as “socialism” and deemed by many to be unduly radical. Nowadays, of course, I take it that universal suffrage, free education, a ban on child labor, a progressive tax code, and a (two day!) weekend seem a lot like conventional wisdom. I’ll leave the implications for today’s political controversies as an exercise for the reader.

It's worth reflecting, from time to time, on how even our modestly ambitious brand of social democracy here in the United States was, once upon a time, considered to be out of the question. But the major programatic policies of the German Social Democratic Party in the 19th century are considered to be the status quo today. Nobody who supported these policies would be considered, by the sane, to be a socialist.

So when you hear people tossing around "socialism" as an epithet these days, just remember what socialism has brought us in the past, and consider what it might offer in the future.

As I said to a student yesterday, I get more Scandinavian by the day.

Tax Day, Tea Parties, and Stupidity

I did my taxes today, as did many Americans. I did not do them happily, but I was also not driven into paroxysms of irrational rage like so many of those who have decided to take part in the (hilariously named) "teabagging" parties around the country today. These groups view themselves as, somehow, chanelling the spirit of Paul Revere and the Boston Tea Party. The whole thing, not to put too fine a point on it, is pure, concentrated dumb.

First of all, let's remember that the heart of protest in the Boston Tea Party was "no taxation without representation." But the teabaggers are represented! In some cases, owing to the unrepresentative character of the U.S. Senate, they're overrepresented, given the size and population of their states. Far from being an undemocratic and non-consensual imposition on the U.S. people by a distant and disinterested foreign government, this is the legislation that their own elected legislators passed, and that their popularly elected president signed. This is is all the opposite of taxation without representation.

Second, although these protests are demonstrations of inchoate anger toward Barack Obama, it's worth noting that the current tax code, the one that people are out protesting today, has got nothing to do with Barack Obama, but is in fact the tax code as it was enacted under largely Republican congresses and signed over the past eight years by a Republican president. So to the degree that this is directed toward Obama and the Democrats, it misses it's desired mark.

Third, and more to the point, the Democratic Congress enacted, and Barack Obama has signed, the largest middle class tax cut in America history, of which most of the protesters today will be the beneficiaries. Far from protesting today, many of these people should be thanking the U.S. government.

Fourth, the complaints about deficits are inane. Under Bill Clinton, when the economy was booming, we actually had a chance to reduce and even elimiate the deficit. Under George Bush and a Republican Congress, the deficit exploded, along with thousands of bombs in an unjust and immoral war in Iraq, which contributed to the deficit. To the degree that Barack Obama and the Democrats are adding to that deficit, it is, and it is intended to be, a short term means of stimulating the economy in order to spark businesses to produce and thus employ workers, and banks to start lending again. In fact, for this purpose, the stimulous package was actually probably small, and so we ought to be spending more.

Finally, where were all of these people when Bush was running up those deficits? They were nowhere to be seen! So to complain now in a crisis, about deficits when they were silent for eight years when their own guy was in power, is a prima fascia demonstration of their hypocrisy.

So, happy teabagging hypocrites!

Economics vs. Morality

Matt Yglesias tackles some influential -- yet pernicious --  views in politics and economics:

Well I’d say one important set of ideas is the perverse notion that it’s wrong or inappropriate to subject people to moral criticism for making selfish decisions as long as the decisions don’t involve breaking the law. I’ve been writing a bit about this lately with respect to greedy financiers, but it’s a more general thing. If a person announced to his friends and family “I’m going to steal $17 billion from aspiring college students and give the money to banks” we would expect a degree of shock and ostracism to follow. Indeed, if a person said “I’m going to pick a student’s pocket at rob him of $17″ we would expect some shock and ostracism.

Such behavior is, socially speaking, considered not okay. But while it’s considered perfectly normal to expect one’s friends, peers, and colleagues to eschew stealing money from people, it’s considered hopeless naive to expect people to eschew the opportunity to go cash in by helping Sallie Mae hold on to money it doesn’t deserve. Along the same lines, I honestly don’t understand how the executives for the big fossil fuel firms sleep at night; but I know that part of the reason they sleep well at night is that in today’s America nobody really points out that their behavior is, on a personal level, more than a little shameful. People don’t discuss this issue by making explicit reference to Milton Friedman’s arguments about the social responsibility of business, but the shift in public discourse around these issues stems back to his work.

Another example is that, as Brad DeLong pointed out yesterday, economists’ protestations that they’re doing value-free social science actually embeds an implicit idea that “that shifts in distribution are of no account–which can be true only if the social welfare function gives everybody a weight inversely proportional to their marginal utility of wealth.” In other words, under guise of eschewing values, economics has adopted a philosophical value system which says that the well-being of rich people is more important than the well-being of poor people. Nobody ever says “social welfare function” when engaging in practical political debate, but the idea that not caring about distribution constitutes some kind of neutral middle ground is an important underlying premise of much practical political debate, and it’s viability stems from the fact that everyone remembers being taught that this is true in their Economics 101 courses.

As a third example, as a society we’ve become accustomed to the idea that when empirical evidence seems to contradict basic economic theory—as when the United States experienced rapid economic growth under conditions of widespread unionization and a high minimum wage—that we ought to accept the theory as true. This, again, is usually a claim you hear being made by economists, but its social prestige ultimately is a kind of idea in epistemology or the philosophy of science. And all this, of course, is to say nothing of the specific influence of particular empirical claims in economics which hold that high levels of taxation and government spending are everywhere and always economically destructive.

The obvious question then is: Given the influence of these pernicious ideas, are we stuck with them, or can we begin to see the world a different way?

Caroline Kennedy and the Vatican Embassy

Since when does the Vatican get to dictate U.S. foreign policy personnel?

Vatican sources told Il Giornale that their support for abortion disqualified Ms Kennedy and other Roman Catholics President Barack Obama had been seeking to appoint.
Mr Obama was reportedly seeking to reward John F Kennedy's daughter, who publicly gave her support to his election bid. She had been poised to replace Hillary Clinton as New York senator, but dropped out amid criticism that she lacked enough experience for the job.
 
The Italian paper said that the Vatican strongly disapproved of Mr Obama's support for abortion and stem cell research. The impasse over the ambassadorial appointment threatens to cloud his meeting with the Pope during a G8 summit in Itay in July.

Ms Kennedy, 53, has said that she supports abortion. Raymond Flynn, a former US ambassador to the Vatican, said earlier this week that Ms Kennedy would be a poor choice.

"It's imperative, it's essential that the person who represents us to the Holy See be a person who has pro-life values. I hope the President doesn't make that mistake," he told the Boston Herald. "She said she was pro-choice. I don't assume she's going to change that, which is problematic."

And here I thought what was important is that our Ambassador's support U.S. policies.

Obama is Anti-Religious

So says Newt Gingrich, and he should know:

Newt Gingrich said Tuesday the Obama administration is "intensely secular" and "anti-religious," the former House Speaker's second hard-hitting criticism of the new administration this week.

And what was Obama's sin? Apparently he has appointed a gay man to the administration's Advisory Council on Faith Based Initiatives:

In an interview with FOX News, Gingrich said he strongly disagreed with Obama's choice of Harry Knox — an outspoken activist for gay rights — to the White House advisory council on faith-based initiatives.

"I think their goal is to have a very secular America in which government dominates everything," he said. "Why wouldn't you put an anti-religious, left-wing zealot on a faith-based group? It's a perfect pattern for this administration."

Since 2005, Knox has served as the director of the Human Rights Campaign, a national organization that advocates on behalf of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals. He is also a former Methodist pastor.

So, to be clear on this, the evidence of Obama's "anti-religious" character is the fact that he puts a gay, Christian, Methodist minister on a panel, the purpose of which is to advise the administration on how to engage in faith-based initiatives.

The fact that the committee is religiously and ideologically diverse, and includes members who are opposed to gay rights, abortion, and lots of other things the administration favors, irrelevant. The one gay guy on the panel, that's all that matters.

This, I think, says more about Gingrich than it does about Obama.

Greed

Matt Yglesias makes a good point about how we've gotten to where we are:

These are people primarily motivated in life by greed. Not just by a desire to make some scratch, mind you. These aren’t immigrants who walked through the desert from Mexico in order to earn more money by washing dishes in a San Diego hotel. They’re not 24 year-olds looking for a hefty salary in order to pay off student loans. They’re multi-millionaires who want to earn millions more. It’s possible, of course, that Vikram Pandit really does find being a bank executive to be intrinsically interesting. But a good person, who’s primary passion was the life of a bank executive, would be donating the bulk of his massive compensation package to charity. But that’s not what Pandit’s doing. Rather he, like virtually all executives at major firms, is living a life that’s primarily oriented around an ethic of greed.

Now there’s a decent argument out there, familiar from Adam Smith and the whole tradition of economics, that a world full of greedy people isn’t necessarily quite the disaster that pre-modern ethical thinkers would have thought. This is all well and good. True even. But it’s a sign, I think, of a kind of sickness running through American society that we’ve lost the willingness to just say clearly that ceteris paribus greedy behavior is not virtuous behavior. In the spirit of decency, of course, we recognize that none of us are without sin. It would be crazy to try to condemn everyone who’s ever done anything greedy to the gallows. But the fact still remains that greedy behavior is not admirable behavior and that, as Krugman says, it’s very unlikely that the “best” young people were going into finance. And to say that they’re not necessarily good people need not entail that they’re criminals. Simply the fact that the best people are people who aren’t primarily driven by greed.

I would only quibble with the description of Adam Smith as supportive of an economy run by "greed." This is a point that is often made in discusssions about how capitalism "works," but it is based on a misreading of Smith. He believes that, in economic affairs, we are governed by "interest," but interest is not the same as "greed." Interest is a legitimate expression of our own sense of self-love, where as greed, as a vice, is inordinate self-love that leaves out concerns for fellow-feeling and justice. Smith's moral philosophy is a form of virtue theory, and as with all virtue theories, rests on a presumption that the virtues can be knocked out of whack and result in potentially destructive vice.

But this also helps point to what I view as the underlying moral problem facing the economy, namely the lack of a set of moral presuppositions to our economic activties. It's not that I would say people need to stop acting out of "interest," but that "interest" is not the only concern that enters into either the economy or society.

But, people being people, interest will far too often translate into greed, which is why it is necessary to have a just society in order to prevent greed from damaging the social fabric in those instances when people's sense of fellow-feeling isn't sufficient to prevent them from acting viciously.

Touching the Queen?

Apparently the snark machine is in a tizzy over Michele Obama "touching the person" of the Queen of England. As one who has a certain sympathy with the Puritan regicides of the British Protectorate, I've never understood why the Queen is given all this deference, but John Oliver clarified it all for me. It's not to protect the Queen from us commoners, it's to protect us from the Queen!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
The Poisonous Queen
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Geek or Nerd?

It's one of the perennial questions: Are you a geek, or a nerd?

Now, for my part, I've always considered the term "nerd" to be insulting and derogatory, while "geek" is a term of praise meant for those who are clearly smart and sophisticated enough to appreciate the pleasures of Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars comic books, and Dr. Who. When I refer to someone as a geek, I am engaging in high praise!

However, there is a school of thought that says that this is exactly backwards. To refer to someone as a "geek" is insulting, while a nerd is a super-intelligent computer coding and physics-problem solving machine.

Clearly there is some overlap between the "nerd" and "geek" categories, but it is apparently an ongoing conversation about whether one or both of them is a term of derision. Over at the SciFi website io9, this conversation has led to a rather heated set of discussions. Austin Grossman writes, in a plea to abolish the whole concept of "nerd," writes:

When I learned what a nerd was, it was through Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, along with Godel Escher Bach (aka the contents of a small town library) and (why be proud?) the movie Real Genius. Here's what it meant to me: intellectual play, lack of pretension, gaming, science fiction, being smart and not caring what other people thought. Nerds were people who questioned everything, who didn't accept anything until it was proven, who picked locks and repurposed lab equipment, who pursued their own passions for their own sake.

The category "nerd" overturned conventional ideas of cool, of attractiveness in both men and women, and of what it made sense to do on a Friday night. By valuing people who like cool stuff and don't care if gets them called a loser, it redefined what being a winner is. It gave me a way to value who I was and what I was doing.

which in turn led to an extended comment thread about the distinctions between nerds and geeks (not to mention "dorks," which are universally reviled by all parties).

In the end, the defining characteristics, and the praiseworthiness, of these terms will remain in some dispute. But, until the terminological wars are ended and peace restored to the realm of socially awkward smart people, I will remain proudly geek.