GOOD RIDDANCE, YOU LOUSY SOULQUARIAN; I'D RATHER YOU WERE A ROTARIAN, OR BETTER YET NOTED ECONOMIST HAL VARIAN
Slum Village has released
a new album, and, unsurprisingly,
it's dope.
I've just received word that
realultimatepower.net has posted an enormous update. Rest assured, you'd be foolish not to take a look; moreover, you'd risk opening a planetary rift, through which molten lava might seep through and kill Scrooge McDuck, various pretty girls, and a number of massive battle tanks.
Do you recall the movie
Juice, starring a young, wild-eyed Tupac Shakur as the young, wild-eyed "Bishop"? Bishop, a mercurial fellow, is a great lover of pistols; sadly, he is also a great lover of shooting and killing others, which is evil. I recommend the movie, as it features a wide array of flat-tops, including the classic flat-top fade.
I've come upon another item I wrote some time ago, which strikes me as uncharacteristically earnest (there's been some editing):
Many tax-cut advocates are indeed closet libertarians with a reflexive opposition to redistribution. Many are also sincerely committed to alleviating the conditions of the very poor and believe that a tax cut, by spurring economic growth, will do just that. Most of the supply-side rhetoric is nonsense. On the other hand, the notion that the federal government is capable of using spending to solve enduring social problems is also a bit daft. Like Susan Mayer and Christopher Jencks, I consider myself to be a hardheaded _____. Targeted interventions can do a great deal of good, but there are many things that money can’t buy. All Americans ought to have basic needs met and redistribution is an effective means to that end. But we live in a democracy and first-past-the-post democracies are oriented toward the median voter. The bulk of redistribution that occurs in the US is from the nonpoor to the nonpoor, often through the hidden welfare state of tax subsidies. While a compelling case can be made for spending on early childhood nutrition, things like agricultural price supports and subsidized tertiary education for the upper-middle-class, not to mention the bloated military establishment (I’m a hawk, mind you), are far more representative of how tax dollars are spent. If tax cuts for the rich are good for the economy, and the jury is still out, they needn’t be bad. Of course, _____ uses the long boom as evidence that it does not. Well, might the economy have grown faster without the tax increase? I doubt it, but it is a possibility. The recovery began under President Bush and was driven in large part by technological changes that were a long time coming; productivity gains that hadn’t materialized despite massive investments in high-technology suddenly appeared in the statistics, a phenomenon that might have been uniquely insensitive to tax treatment. To say that it is, “logically and necessarily true that if you believe that the Bush tax cut will help the economy, you must believe that the Clinton tax hike hurt the economy” doesn’t hold water. The point concerning the convexity of tax distortion applies here as well. On page __, _____ discusses a
National Review article (written by Ramesh Ponnuru, if I recall correctly) concerning the political economy case for tax cuts, namely that removing too many voters from the tax rolls can undermine democracy. As _____ acknowledges, this is a very serious argument that deserves our attention. Removing the median voter from the tax rolls could lead to punitive taxes on the rich eventually to fund subsidies for the middle-class. (The poor, who do not vote and are often looked upon with derision by the median voter, might not be helped very much at all.) But does this mean that Bush is lying when he says that he wants to reduce the burden on the lower-middle-class and the working poor? Nicholas Lemann, who wrote a fine New Yorker essay on this matter, might agree, but Mickey Kaus, formerly of
TNR, would not. In this regard, as in many others, Bush is not “living up” to the expectations of his conservative allies. The “class warfare” rhetoric is irresponsible and silly, but it is no worse, to say the very least, than frivolous charges of racism, many of which have been levied against Bush. _____ shouldn’t he held responsible for these charges, but it should be pointed out that reckless things are often said in the give-and-take of contemporary politics.
By now, I think these arguments are commonplace. I'll add that I'm profoundly discouraged by the domestic political scene at present. Evil or no, I sense that the hegemony of the center-left has taken a turn for the not-great. What do I mean by the hegemony of the center-left? Leaving aside the partisan affiliations of the president and the congressional majorities, it is fairly clear to me that the center-left holds the initiative, intellectually and strategically, on the crucial policy questions: access to medical care and the future composition of the education industry. As
John Judis and Ruy Texeira convincingly argue in their new book
The Emerging Democratic Majority, we have every reason to believe that the tenuous Republican majorities of the present are fleeting, soon to be replaced by a more assertive Democratic legislative majority, bolstered by broad cultural-demographic shifts in US society, e.g., the changing ethnic composition of the population, the changing class composition of the population, and changing social mores, etc. And so a post-Reagan, and post-Clinton, neo-neoliberalism (not the neoliberalism of Charles Peters,
TNR, and the Atari Democrats, exactly) will almost inevitably come to the fore. The question is, what kind of neo-neoliberalism? The original neoliberalism was, despite a number of nagging, persistent flaws (most, in my estimation, involving "the social issues"), pretty damn airtight: basically, it wedded a commitment to the poor with an appreciation of both the free market and American power. Judging by the priorities of the neo-neoliberalism -- specifically, a zealous commitment to a "patient's bill of rights" (which would stymie efforts to cover the uninsured), generous government-funded prescription drug coverage and comprehensive regulation of the pharmaceutical industry (which would stymie pharmaceutical innovation), and a zealous opposition to, for example, school vouchers (which would, over the long run, dramatically improve educational outcomes) -- I worry that it weds the worst of right and left. From the right (not my kind of right, but my kind of right may well exist only in my own brain, and possibly that of the now-vanquished Bret Schundler), it gets a narrow concern with the interests of the nonpoor. Of course, the concern is more with the salaried lower middle class than with, say, small-scale entrepreneurs, but that makes for precious little difference: the poor are deprioritized, which is perhaps inevitable. From the left, there is a slavish devotion to identity politics shibboleths and a still-strong distrust of American power.
This stance is hardly limited to a single political party; instead, it's more or less a sign of the times, although I do think there's reason for optimism on the identity politics front. I may be wearing rose-colored glasses, but I get the distinct (cliched) impression that there's been a sea-change in US attitudes toward race and color, particularly among the kids just slightly younger than yours truly. This impression is based primarily on my perceptions of youth culture as derived from television, popular music, and movies. I am, as frequent readers will no doubt know, an avid consumer of youth culture, but this isn't to suggest that my observations are accurate, as I'll be the first to admit that I'm not always the keenest observer. No, that's not true. I am, in fact, the keenest observer, in large part because I am "keen."
My own allegiances are to what Michael Tomasky derisively, and misleadingly, refers to as "velvet conservatism," which is to say an older center-left tradition that is more or less homeless at present. Not exactly what Tomasky calls "velvet conservatism," but close:
But if the concurrence of these events has any larger meaning, it's that they give rise to a new and possibly influential strain in American political discourse. If one were to take Hertog, Steinhardt, Peretz, and Lipsky's politics and put them in a centrifuge, the substance that would emerge would be as follows: It would be explicitly neither Democratic nor Republican. It would be right of center, especially on foreign policy (and most especially on Israel). It would be right of center, too, on a good number of domestic questions. But because it would pay some obeisance to the New Deal and even (sometimes) to the Great Society, which neoconservatism refuted thoroughly, and because it would purport to care deeply about poor people of color -- Hertog is messianic on the topic of vouchers and calls urban education "the civil rights issue of this generation" -- it would stand quite apart from, say, the obstreperous conservatism of a Tom DeLay. Indeed, it would claim its roots in a historic pragmatic liberalism that today's wandering liberals, this gang of four would argue, have cashiered out of slavish devotion to quota queens and teachers' unions ...
So: Not the nastiness of Tom DeLay, but for God's sakes not the woolly-headedness of Ted Kennedy or Hillary Clinton. This tendancy would be conservative but elusive; conservative but gently so; conservative but sometimes surprising. Call it a "velvet conservatism."
Yeah, I'd tweak that considerably. While I'm droning on, I may as well be more specific. A very wise man, also a former employer, characterized the broad political stance of
America's greatest weekly newsmagazine roughly as follows: (1) for using government to alleviate inequality, poverty, and other symptoms of social injustice; (2) against divisive identity politics, instead standing for an inclusive American identity, a healthy pluralism coupled with a respect and appreciation for our common cultural and political heritage; (3) and, perhaps most importantly, for the use of American power to advance the cause of liberal and democratic values around the globe. I believe in all of these things, though my program for (1) might be slightly different than the program the gentleman in question had in mind. Another thing that's important to me is a cosmopolitan sensibility, and I don't mean a disdain for hillbillies and NASCAR, which I certainly don't share with loathsome Manhattan parochials and other scumbags. What I do mean is a firm belief that questions of social justice are presumptively global rather than local, which, counter-intuitively, is why I believe in a strong, assertive US foreign policy and, perhaps less counter-intuitively, a policy of unilateral free trade and generous overseas development assistance tied to constructive, conducive domestic policy environments in the recipient states. (I'm aware of the P.T. Bauer critique, and I certainly hope that any revamped ODA policy would take it into account.)
But yeah, this is all pretty idle: purposive strategic action rules the roost, often to no particular end aside from self-aggrandizement. That's most assuredly evil.
