Tag: politics

Over at the Montclair SocioBlog (“the best blogI bet you don’t read”), Professor Jay Livingston commentson Charles Murray’s new book (no, I haven’t read it either) and Murray’s problem of “The Europe Syndrome.” A lot of Republican politicians have noticed this problem over the pond as well. As Murray says [I’ve added a few comments]:

There’s a lot to like about day-to-day life in the advanced welfare states of western Europe. [I’ll say!]

They are great places to visit. [You got that right!]

But the view of life that has taken root in those same countries is problematic. [Oh, when I lived there I didn’t realize they were all zombies, and many are kinda pale.]

It seems to go something like this: The purpose of life is to while away the time between birth and death as pleasantly as possible [Why while away time pleasantly when you could work two shit jobs for 70 hours/week?],

and the purpose of government is to make it as easy as possible to while away the time as pleasantly as possible – The Europe Syndrome. [Astute observation. Best we let the government do so only for the rich, as they have more financial means to rise above their own ennui. (Like how I just “happened” to throw in a French word there? Pretty swa-vay, no? Pretty effing European, if I do say so myself. Man, if I actually spoke French, I’d be dangerous.)]

Europe’s short workweeks and frequent vacations are one symptom of the syndrome. [Gosh, are there others? Has he even considered decent healthcare, education, and low-crime societies?]

The idea of work as a means of self-actualization has faded. [Such things happen if you have a dead-end job.]

The view of work as a necessary evil, interfering with the higher good of leisure, dominates. [Yup. Let me tell you, I’ve heard many actual real Europeans say, mind you this is in their well-spoken second (sometimes even third) language, so maybe I’m not getting it right, “I do not live to work; I work to live.]…

The decline of fertility to far below replacement is another symptom. [Greeks would be happy to know Murray considers them European, if they weren’t so busy “self-actualizing” without the burdens of workweeks and vacations at all!]

Children are seen as a burden that the state must help shoulder, and even then they’re a lot of trouble that distract from things that are more fun. [Oh. My. God. Wait till I tell my European nephews. Can they handle the truth? The oldest is only 11?]

The secularization of Europe is yet another symptom. Europeans have broadly come to believe that humans are a collection of activated chemicals that, after a period of time, deactivate. [A bit clinical, but yeah, that’s one way to put it.]

It that’s the case, saying that the purpose of life is to pass the time as pleasantly as possible is a reasonable position. Indeed, taking any other position is ultimately irrational.[Gosh. I never realized a shorter workweek and paid vacations were a threat to my “self-actualization” and even non-chemical eternal salvation.]

But Charles, what’s the answer!? Thankfully, Murray provide that in the very next paragraph:

The alternative to the European Syndrome is to say that your life can have transcendent meaning if it is spent doing important things – raising a family, supporting yourself, being a good friend and good neighbor, learning what you can do well and then doing it as well as you possibly can. [I thought the Europeans did that, since they have more time to do so?]

Providing the best framework for doing those things is what the American project is all about.

Yeah, if only all those paid vacations and leisure time weren’t getting in the way. Or, as the eminent Dr. Livingston puts it, I presume:

No wonder the Republicans constantly warn us against the temptations of “European-style socialism.” It’s not really necessary since most Americans don’t know about legally mandated vacation time or maternity and paternity leave, government support for all families with children, job protection, and other policies. Nevertheless, the conservative helmsmen stuff our ears with wax and lash themselves to the mast lest the siren song of European pleasure lead us off our American course.

I think the decline started with gay marriage. Or was it desegregation? Or maybe giving voting rights to women and non-property owners? Vive la différence!

Ta-Nehisi Coates has good thoughts on the New York Times piece by Binyamin Applebaum and Robert Gebeloff describing how people vote against the government programs they receive. This isn’t necessarily against their own interests. As Coates says:

What I strongly suspect is the sort of shame you see in Mr. Falk’s is neither crazy, nor ignorant, nor shocking, once you think about it. We all want to be cowboys. More, we sometimes want leaders who push toward that imagined self, as opposed to our statistical self.

As I have always said, this not a matter of voting “against your interest.” Your stated interest is in being a cowboy. The way to engage that person is not to condescend to them and assume they just have less information than you. It’s to try to get them to game out where cowboy logic leads.

From Rolling Stone:

The very rich on today’s Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government.

An ordinary person who has a problem that needs fixing puts a letter in the mail to his congressman and sends it to stand in a line in some DC mailroom with thousands of others, waiting for a response.

But citizens of the stateless archipelago where people [the very rich] live spend millions a year lobbying and donating to political campaigns so that they can jump the line.
…
Some of these people take that VIP-room idea a step further. J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon — the man the New York Times once called “Obama’s favorite banker” — … orchestrated a deal in which the Fed provided $29 billion in assistance to help his own bank, Chase, buy up the teetering investment firm Bear Stearns. You read that right: Jamie Dimon helped give himself a bailout. Who needs to worry about good government, when you are the government?

Dimon, incidentally, is another one of those bankers who’s complaining now about the unfair criticism. “Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it,” he recently said, at an investor’s conference.

Nobody hates them for being successful. And not that this needs repeating, but nobody even minds that they are rich.

What makes people furious is that they have stopped being citizens.

Most of us 99-percenters couldn’t even let our dogs leave a dump on the sidewalk without feeling ashamed before our neighbors. It’s called having a conscience: even though there are plenty of things most of us could get away with doing, we just don’t do them, because, well, we live here. Most of us wouldn’t take a million dollars to swindle the local school system, or put our next door neighbors out on the street with a robosigned foreclosure, or steal the life’s savings of some old pensioner down the block by selling him a bunch of worthless securities.

As someone from a middle-class public-school background who has rubbed shoulders with the 0.1% (that’s what happen when you go to Princeton and Harvard), what bothered me about the uber-rich I met in Princeton (you don’t meet so many uber-rich in grad school) wasn’t that they were rich… It was their absolute sense of entitlement! They never counted their blessing. They didn’t need to. They knew the game was rigged and that were going to win it.

Now I benefited from the same game, and by most of the world’s standards I’m uber-rich (something mostly due to where and to whom I was born, for which I’m very thankful), so I can’t complain too much.

No, what bothered me about these people–our current masters of finance and industry–is that they somehow believed that they had earned their privileged position. And I’m talking about 18-year-old prep-school kids who at that point had never worked a day in their lives!

They had convinced themselves that somehow, because their parents were rich and they went to Princeton, that theyhad won a meritocratic game. They thought they were better–not just richer, mind you, but better–than working people, especially the janitors and cooks and service workers (students and professional alike) who took care of them (and had made the best of their life’s situation). I saw it all the time. The rich really are different than you and me: they have no clue.

[thanks to Alan for the link]

Speaking of rich people buying the services of the state, it seems the Justice Department is now doing the dirty work of pharmaceutical companies by cracking down on Google which got paid to run ads for Canadian drug companies. That’s not free speech. That’s illegal because Congress says it is.

So the Justice Department is going to enforce a law (which, granted, is part of their job description–but the Justice Department has a lot of discretion as to which laws they want to enforce) passed on behalf of rich companies.

Remember, our Congress prohibited the government from negotiating drug prices on behalf of Medicare beneficiaries. If that’s not a giveaway to rich pharmaceutical companies, I don’t know what is! And it weren’t legal, it would be called bribery. Wes Metheny, a senior vice president for public affairs at PhRMA, the main lobby for the pharmaceutical industry, said:

The industry still opposes allowing the government to negotiate drug prices and letting people import drugs from abroad. He said there is “no guarantee” that either would lower costs.

It’s so shameless.

Turns out Medicaid gets the cheapest deals on drugs the prices are, get this, government regulated. Maybe we should increase regulation. Or maybe we should let the unencumbered free market lower prices.

I mean, anything would be better than a crazy cycle where:

1) Corporations give money to politicians to pass laws to ensure price fixing so we all pay more for each and every prescription drug sold in America.

2) Any monopoly-breaking anti-trust effort is attacked by taxpayer funded law enforcement agencies–the long arm of the Department of Justice, no less! The government cracked down on Google because Google has the audacity to run ads for Canadian drug companies. Seems the law trumps free speech when corporate profits are at stake. I guess Google isn’t paying them enough. Besides these ads are chump change to Google. But keeping drug prices artificially high is big buck to Big Pharma.

3) The pharmaceutical corporations, in turn, funnel their government enforced profit (but just some of it) back to politicians. After all, corporate donations are constitutionally protected free speech.

But how could that ever happen here? It would be so blatantly corrupt and unfair for all of us to be forced to give our money so the rich can make more. This is America.

Hey Republicans… you know why “treason” matters more than other insults? Because the Constitution mentions treason seven times, you want every idiot to be able to carry a gun, and treason is usually punishable by execution. But what do I know? I’m just another “lib”.

I wonder what Karl Rove would say? Oh… I guess Karl is getting soft. Uh, no, he’s not. When Karl Rove is considered left wing, it’s a sign of the coming apocalypse. God help us!

Speaking of God, I’d fully support Texas secession. And I hope they take Arizona with them. And then pray. I’m sure that’s what your intolerant old-testament hate-filled Jesus would do. Right after pissing on all those illegal immigrants not raping your daughters.

[I know those last two lines don’t make sense. That’s my point. But when I’m in doubt, I just think: WWYIOTHFJD.]

If you have $35,800 to casually drop on dinner, you have too much money. Rich Democrats should be taxed more, too.

More productive uses of $35,800? How about paying the tuition of seven students for a year of study at my public university.

Obama’s dinner also cost me$12, because I had to hop off a bus and take a cab because traffic wasn’t moving on 57th Street. On the plus side, I had a most enjoyable ride with what might be the last smart-talking NYC-born cabdriver in the city! Deep down, I’m pretty sure he was Ernest Borgnine.