Thursday, March 25, 2010

The Tea Party - Like them or not, they're winning.

"The more that you fear us, the bigger we get." -Marilyn Manson

Running errands for work yesterday, I saw several news network broadcasts in the lobbies of various businesses, predominantly liberal-leaning news networks like NBC, and coverage of the Tea Party Movement consumed approximately 1/3 of segments in their entirity. Of course, that being said, the two main topics of discussion of the Tea Party were its alleged participation in the acts of vandalism against HR Democrats who'd voted in favor of the Health Care bill, and how its a fringe movement that appeals far more to "GOP-leaning" Americans than Democrats, and is hence poised to hurt the Republicans in the upcoming elections (by splitting their voter base).

I've already discussed in a couple of previous posts that highly biased mainstream media outlets are NOT conspiracy-serving propaganda-mills; but large quasi-entertainment corporations that pander to a lowest common denominator target market of consumers, saying whatever is necessary to keep their core viewers from changing the channel, lest they lose their advertising revenue. And this slandering of the Tea Party is absolutely no different; if anything, it is the above phenomenon compounded. Here are a few inconvenient facts the media broadcasts leave out regarding the Tea Party, followed by a brief discussion of why this matters:

1.) The Tea Party is NOT a Political Party. The talk of split votes is kind of null and void considering that at this point, with roughly 3 weeks left before Congressional Ballot petition deadlines, no Tea Party organization has announced either becoming a political party or even endorsing any candidates, much less nominating them.

2.) Every Tea Party organization website I have visited, just like this blog, takes a very strong stance that it does not tolerate violence or illegal activity, including the promotion of these on their forums. So, while no doubt there are always a few sociopaths willing to throw rocks at people's windows in the name of any philosophy, any attempt to "frighten" people by tying in any supporter of the philosophy with the violence is very far-fetched in terms of working.

3.) The polls that ask Tea Party supporters their political affiliation do not allow them any option that does not specify one of the 2 major parties. They have the option of agreeing or "leaning" Republican or Democrat, but not of marking "independent" or any third-party affiliation. Considering the rampant political ignorance in this country, even among self-proclaimed anti-governmentalists, and the undeserved pedestal of political party affiliations; it makes perfect sense that in this situation, detractors from the mainstream agenda pushed through by an almost unprecedented majority control of the government by one major party will choose the other major party if given an "either-or" decision.

Now then, here is why every one of these is exactly what The Tea Party needs.

First and foremost, the Tea Party doesn't have the resources of many older political organizations, so free television coverage that consumes 1/3 of every major network's time is about the best favor anyone can do them. Sure, they may prefer coverage that is a little more accurate than just references to idiots throwing rocks at windows and claiming to be affiliated, but even this drives traffic to their websites and makes people talk about them. Fox News, the accepted conservative news network of the US, is probably tied a little closer to the leadership of the GOP than these liberal networks to the Democrats; and in 2003, when G.W. Bush's popularity began to take a nosedive, they were a little smarter in minimizing coverage of the variety of detractor groups rather than slandering them, most notably Iraq War protestors. I have my hypotheses for this difference in approach, but suffice it to say, Fox News succeeded at least temporarily in creating the false impression in Bush's opponents that he was still popular while they were isolated and disillusioned that they would not be heard, although anyone with any basic knowledge of politics realized this was very much the other way around.

Secondly, in light of the effect described above, spreading the falsehoods of vote-splitting and GOP-leaning are absolutely the contrary of what the DNC might want their propaganda mills to do if, in fact, these were their propaganda mills. Dictators in the most unapologetic police states, who have their media on a leash, would have the anchors executed for this type of reporting. Public opinion polls, even those conducted by liberal networks like CNN, show clearly that both the Health Care bill and Obama and Congress Democrats are extremely unpopular and seemingly on a mission to see if they can beat G.W. Bush's record for most approval rating lost in the shortest period of time. (This is a hyperbolic comparison, I'm not quoting actual speed-of-loss statistics.) So, doesn't it seem a little contradictory to help this situation by screaming on TV about a "fringe movement that identifies largely with the opposing party"? If people, particularly swing voters who came over to the Democrats in recent years due to Bush's unpopularity, aren't happy with the Democrats - and they're not - then you've just given them a place to find those who agree with their sentiment! The linking of violence and vandalism may stop a few people, but there are others it will drive to find out for themselves who these "barbarians" are, and looking at any of their websites they will quickly discover these are in fact non-violent activist groups who agree with them. As for vote-splitting, this farce is likely to hurt Democrats more than help them. Many of these networks' core viewers are hardcore liberals who affiliate with far-left parties such as the Greens and various Socialist movements. These people detest the Republicans, so this baits their continued watching of NBC, but they are largely of the view that the Democrats don't go far enough (ie: the elimination of Obama's Public Option). Sure, they'd rather see Democrats than Republicans in power, but if NBC is able to create the impression that the Tea Party will take votes from Republicans and make elections safe for the Democrats, they are more likely to vote Green or Socialist to voice their discontent with Democrats. If you don't think this affect is very real, you need only think back to the 2000 presidential election. Many far-left liberals thought Al Gore was too moderate for their liking BUT safely guaranteed the White House, so Ralph Nader's 5% in Florida secured Bush's victory. All the fraud and unfairness allegations don't take away from this fact - if Gore had had just 2/5 of Nader's votes in Florida, there would have been no controversy that made any of these possible.

If anything, the only accomplishment of slandering of the Tea Party is to give supporters of the Democrats the false hope that, come November, their supermajorities in the Federal Congress and many state legislatures are, for lack of a better term, not doomed. This isn't to say every single one of these bodies will switch to Republican majorities, but the days when bills like Health Care could be passed without a single vote from the opposition party, and the only moderates to be convinced are fringe-movements within the Democrats, will be long-gone. Conservative media continued to disseminate the idea that their majorities in Congress were unbeatable and would only grow up until election day in 2006, and then again that John McCain had a significant chance of winning up to election day in 2008. The only viable explanation for this is the confirmation of my theory that mainstream media outlets' primary concern is to PROFIT from people's political views, not shape public policy by informing them. In a traditional sense, this is a goal fitting for theater, not journalism; but theater is exactly what these networks are.

To re-iterate, the Tea Party is a movement that tries to unite Americans sickened by a decade of unaccountable government, particularly federal. If they were really a fringe-group of the GOP, it would make sense for them to work within that framework and openly identify with the Republicans; a multitude of groups fed up with the Republicans under Bush were active in election years from 2004-2008, but most of the ones to gain national press were strongly and openly tied to the Democrats, seeing them as a solution. The whole point of the Tea Party's non-partisanship and their continued resistance of the temptation to organize as a third party or even as a single united movement, is that they seek to unite a broad base of people who are disgusted with the status quo of American politics, and the race-to-the-bottom inherent to this two-party plurality system in which the elected politician only has to convince the voters that his opponent is MORE of a sleaze and a thief than he is. The movement rejects a partisanship because it does not have a clear political agenda, and could not form a policy platform that any majority of its followers would support. Instead, their goal is to drive voters to get informed and find out what their elected officials really represent rather than limit themselves to a party label, which is EXACTLY what is long-overdue in the United States. The last major shuffling of political affiliations in this country occurred under LBJ in the late 1960s when he took up the cause of the Civil Rights movement and many Democrats switched over to the Republican Party - this occurred because until that point, the Civil Rights groups were a fringe movement that agreed with neither mainstream agenda. 40+ years of stoicism is a long time for both major parties to become pets of crooked special interests, because stoic polarization means movements not affiliated with either party are unlikely to have much say in politics, and the longer this goes on, the more unaccountable the government becomes. The Tea Party is not a new idea, it is just an indicator that we have reached the point at which government cronyism has pissed off enough Americans to seek real change that neither major party backs, a point we have reached several times before at which the political arena has seen large shifts. I'm not indicating there will be a new major party while one of the two current disintegrates, or that the major parties will split and form two new parties, although these ARE possibilities. I'm only saying this is an indicator that Americans have once again had enough and the Tea Party has enough support that one or both major parties will be forced to accomodate them in their agendas, or face catastrophic losses as the opposing party does so.

I rarely make the commitment of support to any political organization, but this calls for an exception. Tea Partiers, I salute you.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Facts and Fiction of US Minority Relations

I remember a seminar in my 8th grade social studies class where the teacher asked the students to get into groups and come to a consensus on what the Declaration of Independence line "all men are created equal" really means. Questions he posed were "equal before whom?" "what exactly does 'equal' mean?" and most importantly "is it really true?". At the end of the assignment, there were about 1.5 times as many conflicting answers to each question as there were students in the class, and no one could come to any sort of consensus, which was the entire point of the activity.
However, while 20 or so 8th graders were fairly easily convinced that equality is a very loaded word and that it is impossible to achieve based on conflicting ideological definitions, it would seem that the adults of the modern United States are too busy pushing their own idea of equality on everyone else to take the 20 minutes they would need to understand the futility and hypocrisy of this. Let's try to accomplish the opposite.

Contents:
Ideologies of Equality
-Limitations of the Declaration of Independence
Current Laws and Factual Analysis
Interepretation: Causes, Implications, Avenues for Change

Ideology
Most Americans, with the exception of a very small minority of various extremists, claim to support equality as one of their fundamental political principles. However, when asked to define what it means to them, it is difficult to find even two people whose definitions don't conflict in some way. Older ideas of equality claim that it means equal protection by the government and equal rights to participate in it, whereas newer schools of thought often advocate that centuries of inequality dictate that the above can only be achieved if members of historically oppressed groups are given various special privileges, often in the form of having to contribute a lesser share to the collective resource pool and entitlement to greater benefits from it. From there comes a diaspora of conflicting opinions of how to DEFINE who is a member of these groups and who isn't, what contributions and benefits are acceptable as special privileges, and so forth. The menu of possible economic models ranging from full State-run socialism to complete free-market capitalism and everything in between usually involves a component adressing this issue, and contrary to popular belief, most models try to lay legitimate claim that their functionality will result in greater equality, even for the "minority" groups mentioned above, regardless of how they are defined. As always, I will not delve into ideas of whether its "moral" or "fair" to give material preference to someone because their counterpart was legally obstacled from it 100 years ago, because these words are arbitrary and irrelevant. Real measures of equality have to be grounded in numbers and statistics rather than people's various definitions of fairness, and hence we must examine how laws backed by equality ideologies really impact it and society as a whole.

The DoI
Before I move on, I would like to point out the silliness of modern equality concepts quoting the Declaration of Independence. If this is not interesting to you, please skip to the next section. I have discussed in several previous posts that much ideological backing for political agendas falls on scripture, or at least enlightenment documents looking for new definitions of scripture. It is important to remember that the Declaration of Independence, which most American ideologies seeking equality allude to at least in some form, was the epitome of such enlightenment documents. Here are some inconvenient facts:

- The DoI did not establish the American Colonies' independence from the British Monarchy anymore than Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation abolished slavery, or the Confederacy's secession from the Union established its own independence. Each of these documents was a patriotic primer intended to incite a half-decade of armed conflict, and in the two cases where the authoring sides prevailed, they then had the monopoly on force to sign certain provisions into law. Just as Lincoln didn't have the power to enforce his emancipation until he won the Civil War, the Founding Fathers could not enforce their independence until they drove out the British army. Whether or not anyone thought they had legitimate authority in these cases is absolutely irrelevant - authority is derived from force and popular compliance, not ideological legitimacy.

- The DoI holds 0 weight in any US Court. These institutions are legally bound by the Federal and State Constitutions, the earliest of which was written in 1788, 12 years after the DoI.

- The DoI's presents a very vague concept of "all men are created equal." When its same authors put together the first Federal and State constitutions, and the Articles of Confederation before them, they defined their own ideology to justify keeping slavery legally in place, only giving any real property rights to white adult males, and limiting political participation to the members of this last group that owned land.

Analyzing Current Laws

Many battles have been fought by various minorities and their advocates - ethnic and racial groups, women, sexual and gender minorities, a variety of disabled groups including the mentally ill, various occupational and economic class alliances, and so forth - to have the proprietary rights and participation in politics expanded to them that were reserved for white male landowners in the original United States, and it is difficult to say that the statutes have really accomplished this. Legally, traditional minority statuses cannot imply being barred from voting or running for office, for example; and while fraudulent transactions aimed to strip people of this right are difficult to dismiss as excesses, they are equally difficult to attach a discrimination label to. If a bureaucrat or political organization is bent on fraudulently preventing a politician from being elected, it makes sense to disenfranchise anyone that might vote for him, even if he has the predominant support of one minority or another. Cases where one minority is his sole support and no part of that minority opposes him are virtually non-existant. However, there are still fully legally mandated restrictions on the rights mentioned above based on status. For example, immigrants permanently living within the United States, legal or illegal, are barred from voting until they become citizens, and also on the disenfranchised list with them are various categories of the mentally disabled, citizens under the age of 18, and inmates in state and federal prisons. Arguments that any of these groups may have alterior motives or allegiances, or don't have a developed enough sense of morality, and hence cannot be trusted with the choice carry 0 scientific weight. Even if the allegations are true, using such arguments to determine voting eligibility is inherently discrimination, and they are WORD FOR WORD the arguments that were used to disenfranchise every other minority that is now allowed to vote (commoners, women, blacks, etc.), up to and including the British Aristocracy's traditional Medieval philosophy that only aristocrats qualify. These people's motives, their cultural backing, their age, their mental development, and so forth DO NOT exempt them from being affected by public policy - they are subject to criminal prosecution, they pay taxes and receive tax-funded services, and so on - so how any notion of equality can justify their non-representation is a bit of an enigma. Their status also makes a poor predictor of incapacity, as non-citizen permanent residents may still be loyal and have the US's interests in mind, people don't magically mature the day they turn 18, and so forth - these categories are blunt instruments at best.

Proprietary rights can even more easily be said to have lingering disciminative laws, the foremost example of these being the issue of homosexual couples. There are various different ideological concepts of marriage, but LEGALLY, it is a status that entitles everyone with it to a variety of important property rights - joint ownership, custody of children, immigration, exemption from inheritance taxes, and so forth. The compromise of "unions" does not guarantee these same rights, because unlike marriages which are licensed by one government authority and recognized by all others in the world unless they pass a specific exemption law, unions limit legal recognition to the extent of the issuing authority. This debate ultimately runs into a previously unaccounted for integration of religion and state, because religious authorities have the power to grant a legal status, and hence mandating them to grant it to homosexuals would force them to accept the legitimacy of their marriages. In the 21st century, in a country that lays such heavy claim to progress in equality, this is quite a sad excuse for an obstacle to what is denial of proprietary rights based on minority status regardless of how its approached. Laws to reconcile this have to be based on the goal of truly equal proprietary rights, but activists on both sides of the debate are densely obsessed with arbitrary concepts like changes to the definition of the word "marriage" and "religious recognition," perpetuating an unwinnable battle of conflicting ideologies that ultimately leaves a sizeable minority economically disenfranchised.

However, just as equality before the law is still far from achieved by it, it is important to notice that in a variety of domains, laws aiming or at least claiming to achieve it have reached fairly damaging levels of diminishing results. Anti-discrimination laws in various civil codes such as labor, tenancy and offering of services are perhaps the most evident example. Affirmative Action statutes for education and government employment are another. None of these laws make discrimination a crime punishable under the justice system, but they do make it grounds for civil lawsuits and for rulings such as punitive damages or mandated reversal of employment or tenancy decisions. The intention of these laws is a form of the above described special privilege for various historically oppressed minorities to allow them to achieve economic equality to the descendents of a privileged majority. Proponents claim that without them, discriminative organizations could keep ethnic minorities from moving into their neighborhoods or any minorities from joining vocational organizations such as unions, the minorities' higher propensity for poverty and lack of access to resources would reduce their chances of acquiring higher education and better-paid employment, and so forth. In my opinion, and the opinion of most Americans, these are noble ideological causes, but the problem is what they accomplish in functional practice.

The first problem is that, with the exception of gender, minority statuses are extremely difficult to verify in any reasonable way, and discriminative motives behind any authority decisions are almost impossible to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. In the case of Affirmative Action, no state or federal statute specifies any verification criteria for who is and isn't considered a member of the beneficiary minority. Furthermore, many such statutes specifically FORBID such verification. Hence, just as in the 19th century openly discriminative laws gave people who were 1/8 white incentives to claim to be white, and other minorities such as homosexuals to hide their identity; modern laws give people who are 1/8 black or hispanic incentives to check this box on college and employment applications to give themselves an edge over others, or heterosexuals with some limited bisexual tendencies (or none at all!) to claim to be homosexual for the same reason, and then rant and rave "discrimination!" if anyone dares to question what they indicate. Similarly, in labor or tenancy situations, employers or landlords who are prejudiced against a minority are hardly restricted from acting on those prejudices in their decisions, as they are usually faced with a multitude of candidates and can pretty easily make the case that another candidate was a better fit without admitting to racism or discrimination. However, employers and landlords without such prejudices may run into difficulty discharging or evicting objectively problematic employees or tenants who happen to belong to a minority if they decide to take the incentive of using that status to challenge the decision based on discrimination.

Another problem is that, on an individual level, minority status often makes for a piss-poor predictor of actual economic disadvantage requiring help. For example, it is easy to point out statistically that black or hispanic children in CA are far more likely to attend underfunded government secondary schools with poor academic records than white children. However, this statistic is irrelevant for supporting Affirmative Action because nothing in the statute specifies the beneficiaries should come from such schools, and quotas for accepted minorities for higher education or government jobs easily allow the majority of such acceptances to meet the ethnic criteria but come from a more privileged financial background, and it makes sense that their background makes them match other acceptance criteria better than their poverty-stricken counterparts. The quotas, in turn, are often based on demographics and minority population percentages, which makes it difficult to set the quotas so high that the system is forced to benefit actual underprivileged minority individuals without running into a well-grounded accusation of discriminating in the opposite direction.

The inherent silliness of trying to verify people's ethnic backgrounds or their sexual orientations and determine whether these really make them underprivileged in an individual sense not withstanding, the statistics make it clear (and I'll be glad to link to some for those interested) that these laws have ridiculous costs in terms of inefficiency that far outweigh their benefits in terms of equality. It makes little sense to allude to ideologies of discrimination being "immoral," or private entrepreneurs having an inalienable right to discriminate against whomever they choose as it is their private business: both of these are normative discussions that cannot hope to fall back on science. The problem with these laws is that they accomplish very little in terms of actually curbing discrimination, but create a plethora of unaccounted-for costs that then fall on the economy and are bared by everyone in society. If a minority member from a privileged economic background uses that status to acquire the edge he needs to compete with an otherwise better qualified non-minority counterpart to be accepted to college or hired in a government job, he often then finds that the people who set those qualification criteria were reluctant to accept him because, based on academic or vocational preparation rather than minority status, he really ISN'T qualified. He then ends up either dropping out or quitting/losing the job, the costs of defaulted student loans, lost tuition revenue, re-starting the hiring and training process, and so forth, falling upon the taxpayers. I'm not making the insipid argument that minorities are inherently less qualified; on the contrary, the commonality of this occurrence as colleges and government institutions struggle to meet Affirmative Action quotas and are forced to accept/hire underqualified applicants is a HUGE indicator of the continued prevelance of inequality in terms of access to education and training, but Affirmative Action makes for an ineffective and costly solution. The costs are even more evident in the private sector. Private entrepreneurs who are reluctant to or unable to discharge an errant employee or customer because they fear the backlash of being accused of discrimination are forced to pass the costs of non-confrontation onto their consumers to stay in business, and in some cases this may actually exacerbate discrimination in the cases of reluctance to hire or offer services to minorities, as this is nearly impossible to prove as a motive upon initiation, but they may be costly to discharge should they prove errant, even if the entrepreneur holds no ideological bias.

This functional model does away with the fairy-tale idea that a political system has the capacity to eliminate discrimination against minorities, at least in any instant manner, and posits based on observational studies that the costs of excessive regulation to overall economic efficiency far outweigh its benefits to minority rights. As usual, the liberal argument of "if it changes one life, its worthwhile" belongs in a fantasy novel, not any political science paper, because quite simply, nothing effects only one life; and it is equally silly to believe that the grievous impact on overall economic effiency DOESN'T disproportinately affect the same underprivileged minorities these laws intend to help.


Analyzing Causes, Implications, and Methods of Impact

So, having simplified the realities of equality and minority relations issues to scientifically proven impacts rather than ideological rhetoric, let's examine the implications of what seems like an epidemic of blindness to the former and unhealthy obsession with the latter in the US, and possible contributors to it.

Allow me to demonstrate this ignorance epidemic with an example from current events. An incident has been in the news for the last few weeks surrounding a UCSD student publication, and past incidents involving this same organization, called the Koala. In their February issue, this publication printed a variety of very gratuitously racist material aimed at black students and black people in general, and also announced that, in association with a few other organizations, it would be hosting an event called the "Compton Cookout" to 'celebrate' Black History Month, which would have a "ghetto" dress code and other related themes. The Black Student Union responded with a protest which was covered by local news. The news report alluded to black students being the "smallest minority at UCSD with roughly 2% enrollment," and alleged that the Koala was a racist organization and called for hate crimes. The members of the protesting group in turn complained on camera that their student fees were being used to fund this organization. The incident's media coverage quickly snowballed into the national spotlight, with organizations like the NAACP condemning the publication as racist and despicable and calling for government action to sanction it, and resulting statements from various levels of CA State officials agreeing with the condemnations and promising corrective action.

The Koala's funding at UCSD was suspended pending the investigation, but it also exists on other campuses and has enough readership to allow it to operate by selling advertisement, so rather than hang their heads in shame and wither, the members reveled in the negative fame in Howard Stern fashion, and have continued to publish, hold events, and so forth. Moreover, the incident sparked flatout hysteria at a number of UC Campuses, not the least of these being a noose found in the UCSD library which was immediately reported on by the media to have had racist implications, although a minority student later admitted to having left it there, with motivations still unclear. The only alleged attempt at any kind of balance by the media was the interviewing by various outlets of some lawyers and constitutional scholars who affirmed that, stupid and offensive as such expression is, it is clearly protected under the First Amendment. Whether this really qualifies as balance or compounding bias is questionable, as the media did not make any comments on these affirmations but painted them against a background of ridiculous hysteria-baiting misinformation, so it can just as easily be interpreted as a suggestion that the First Amendment is obsolete or needs to have additional limitations.

Before we analyze the implications of this example, here are a few facts that the mainstream media conveniently omitted from their reports:

1. The Koala openly admits to a goal of entertainment by gratuitous offense. They use every possible racial, religious, sexual and miscellaneous slur and prejudice in print to such excess that an examination of any 5 or 6 issues makes it obvious that they are equal-opportunity offenders and if taken seriously, must hate every single living person on this planet, including themselves as just about every possible minority is represented within their own membership. Some of their content qualifies as important political satire - like Sacha Cohen's work, - but the majority of it is admittedly low-brow humor on par with a disturbing party joke intended to make everyone cringe.

2. The Koala has been around for over a decade, and just about every special organization at UCSD - Union of Jewish Students, MEChA, the Muslim Student Association, Campus Crusade for Christ, Queer People of Color, etc. - has taken a turn protesting, claiming public offense, and so forth in response to an issue or expression aimed at the constituency it claims to represent.

3. This is AT LEAST the 8th time they have had their funding suspended, their charter put in question, their actions investigated by campus authorities, etc. as a result of similar incidents. To date, they remain one of the oldest and most widely-read campus publications at UCSD (the only one to have verifiably operated on advertising revenue for months when unfunded by the campus), and no lynchings or other hate-violence have occured on any UC Campus in relation to any of their publications.

4. The Black Student Union's protest consisted of roughly 20 students - the organization's core membership and one or two non-black students who joined in. Simple math indicates that, minority or not, 20 students is NOT 2% of UCSD's student population, which totals between 30,000 and 40,000.

What can we learn from this incident about the implications of minority and equality-related hysteria and ignorance? First, it is difficult to blame the State or UC officials for their condemning responses. They are politicians already burdened by a difficult economic situation which makes them very unpopular, and seeing as the protestors are vocal and the media spreads their message like the wind spreads Polio, it is a rational decision by them to try to preserve their PR by agreeing with it. Similarly, as discussed in an earlier post, it is somewhat difficult to blame the media for their biased reporting; seeing as media conglomerates are private corporations driven by profit and not some fairy-tale idea of "responsible journalism," and quite simply, accusations of racism and hysteria sell ads almost as well as racist jokes sell ads for the Koala. Finally, some limited blame can be placed on the whistle-blower organizations, but it is hard to paint them as the ultimate culprits. The members of the BSU and NAACP have every right to protest and be outraged; their only culpability is their ludicrous claim to represent an offended minority, as simple demographics on the number of minority students will indicate how few of them actually participate in such events and furthermore, make it very difficult to believe that the publication could retain such popularity if every minority these organizations claim to represent were really "outraged" and "offended". However, these organizations also have their own incentives for misrepresentation, because just like the government and the media, they are self-interested and driven not by their fairy-tale charters, but by the desire to remain in existence and in confidence in a society with a rapidly declining - although still strongly present - market for their services.

The culpability ultimately falls on the ignorance of the general public for its epidemic inability to separate facts from misinformation. This constitutes the belief in the government's neutrality and commitment to service and the trust of the mainstream media to report the news rather than manipulate them for profit, as adressed in previous posts, but of special relevance to this post is the equally ridiculous belief that organizations like the NAACP genuinely REPRESENT minorities. In truth, nothing perpetuates discrimination more than the obsolete advocacy of these organizations; and if you're gasping in response to that statement, ask yourself two questions:

1. What organization "represents" the interests of any conventional majority, such as white people or males?

2. What organization can clearly be agreed upon as the primary representative of any of the minorities I listed above still actively disenfranchised by LAWS rather than cultural prejudices supposedly outlawed, such as homosexuals, illegal immigrants, or minors?

The answer to question 2 is that there are a MYRIAD of such organizations, but they largely disagree with each other on effective advocacy and representation, and are too busy engaging in actual advocacy (lawsuits, organization, etc.) to come on TV and accuse everyone who disagrees with them of discrimination. This is the trademark of organizations engaged in real advocacy trying to genuinely represent minorities, they all have conflicting opinions and few people agree on who really represents the minorities. This was true for minorities such as blacks and women in the heyday of their own civil rights struggles decades ago as well.

The answer to the first question is far more relevant. There ARE organizations who claim to represent majorities in light of what they refer to as reverse-racist oppression, such as David Duke with his NAAWP and the lunatic fundamentalist who founded www.godhatesfags.com. But, with the exception of their very small number of supporters, the overwhelming majority of the American people see these "leaders" for what they really are - inbred half-wits stuck in an outdated mindset with no concept of modern science. Few of the people they claim to represent would agree they represent them, and more importantly, few people they promote discrimination against would agree that they in fact represent the views of any majority. The problem with our society's mindset is that the people we readily accept as conventional minority leaders, particularly black leaders, are in fact that minority's equivalents of David Duke; and its not that they call themselves representatives, its that the general public *accepts* them as such even if the minorities don't necessarily hold that view. Are President Obama, Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Thurgood Marshall, 4-Star General and former Commander of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of State Colin Powell, former Sec. of State Condi Rice, media personality Larry Elder, conservative politician Alan Keyes, comedian Bill Cosby, religious leader Dr. Jeremiah Wright, and a variety of other extremely successful, wealthy, and well-known black people who don't make a living peddling racist hysteria like its going out of style not BLACK? Isn't it just a tad racist, then, to ignore these people's success and rational approach to politics and limit our scope of representation to a bunch of drug-addicted, scandalous, inarticulate, violence-advocating sociopaths like Kanye West, 50 Cent, "Reverend" Jesse Jackson, and Islamic Fundamentalist with a flavor of Black Militance Louis Farakhan? Why do we call it discrimination when the idiots who idolize these "leaders'" philosophy of drug-dealing and violence justified by racial inequality end up in prison? Its not racism when equally socially ept skinhead ciminals end up in prison following the suggestions of David Duke. Its not equality when black people who follow the examples of Clarence Thomas or Dr. Jeremiah end up successful entrepreneurs or professionals, even if they don't land fame or a spot on Supreme Court, and even if they agree - as I do - that discrimination is still rampant and destructive in the US, but don't see the petty crime advocated by 50 Cent as a solution. The only reason David Duke or Louis Farakhan aren't locked up is that they are celebrities and have the resources to legally shield them from the repercussions of their sociopathic behavior; people who hold to the same line of thinking but can't afford $1,000/day lawyers aren't so lucky.

As stated before, statistically speaking, far fewer black people think of these people as their leaders than non-blacks who associate them with that title, just like most Muslims are NOT supporters of Osama Bin Laden, most women don't side with nutball feminist activists, and so forth, but mainstream opinion makes an epidemic fallacy of assuming the opposite, and this has abysmal effects. For one, it contributes to the tyranny of the inefficient laws described above, often adding an incentive for associated bureaucracies to jump on board with the hysteria-baiting to ensure their job security. More importantly, however, it can tie the government's hands in serving the interests of the population as a whole AND actually exacerbate hate violence, such as when Islamic Fundamentalist groups claim to represent all Muslims and spark the government pandering to their interests resulting in confused commoners engaging in violence against peaceful Muslim Americans, who mostly leave their home countries to escape these very same sociopaths that claim to represent them. It is no secret that during the Cold War, the largest contributions to the western effort to stem and contain the spread of Communism were made by escaped dissidents from places like Cuba, North Korea, and the USSR - if they agreed with the sociopaths in charge in those places, they would never have left.


Conclusion

I in no way endorse the notion that the United States has done away with cultural epithets of prejudice and discrimination or fixed the inequality decades of it have created, simple statistical analysis on the economic status of minorities proves how stupid that argument is. I am merely pointing out that the various economic policies aimed at fixing these problems have failed colossally; they have the potential to actually create discrimination and violence, but more importantly they perpetuate nominal equality at the cost of extreme inefficiency - inefficiency that of course lays most heavily on the same minorities it tries to help due to their unfair access to resources. (I will possibly discuss alternate solutions in a later post, please don't make the assumption that I subscribe to the notion that repealing these policies without any other changes would fix the problem, but this post is about values and attitudes rather than economics.) The driving force behind the perpetuation of said policies is the idiotic assumption that the organizations who scream bloody murder every time these policies are challenged actually represent some disaffected minority. This confusion threatens free expression - a legal threat is far-fetched as there is no precedent for finding expression illegal solely by virtue of offensiveness - but the general mentality of being afraid to offend because organizations like the NAACP will make you look like a racist in the eyes of the masses contributes to the abysmal institution of political correctness, which limits both government and private organizations in their attempts to find real solutions to inequality. These organizations have every right to exist and to be vocal, but the mass belief that they represent minorities makes their rhetoric a vehicle for steering public policy to benefit their core membership and in some cases associated bureaucracies, which constitutes a tiny special interest. Although some of these organizations are self-interested to a criminal extent, as we have seen in certain examples, such behavior is present in most societies with freedom of expression and trying to put legal limits on it would have far greater costs than the ones associated with it. The government and the media are hard to find culpable, as they are reasonably self-interested and have no choice if they want to stay in business but to react to the confused market of public opinion. If you want to disenfranchise special interests like the NAACP, the answer is to peel yourself away from mainstream media outlets and find reliable information regarding the society that surrounds you, then contact your local, state and federal representatives and tell them that if they don't get their priorities straight and start serving YOU and not some band of criminals that convinces people of their own sainthood, then you will fire them and elect someone that can. This won't put the organizations out of business, just as the KKK still exists 145 years after the end of the Civil War, but it will make them a laughing stock rather than any sort of moral authority, putting them in their rightful place in society.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Collective Responsibility: The Forgotten Oxymoron

Up to this point, my rants have been largely focused on general theory or very specific issues, even those blatantly critical of certain trends or policies have abstained from making general claims about any political or economic system. Today, for the first time, Neurotoxin becomes abrasive, and I will give a harsh, discrediting critique of one particular socioeconomic school of thought that has virtually no redemption in scientific terms. The target of the day: State Involvement in the Economy, and its extreme form - Socialism.

First of all, it is important to remember, as I mentioned in the "Understanding the Modern US" post, that only the most extreme State involvement in the economy scientifically qualifies to be defined as Socialism (you can look at the definition in that rant for more information). However, the fact that government policies regulating the economy don't qualify for that definition in no way redeems them as efficient or beneficial, I simply point that out to remind people of the need for more concrete criticism than just dismissing it as "bad" by attaching that label, which to many Americans is a dirty word that they don't understand.

However, that being said, it is impossible to look at state involvement in the economy in its modern form without examining the history of Socialism, where modern policies find most of their roots. The ideological story begins in Medieval Europe. In the centuries immediately following the fall of the Roman Empire, even in places where it never reached like modern Russia or Norway, the political order in Europe largely resembled that of the Barbaric Tribes contemporary to the Roman Empire itself. Immediate authority in most of Europe was held by local territorial figures, who had mostly come to power through accumulation of wealth and control of force, and then hoisted upon themselves various aristocratic titles like "Duke," "Baron," "Count" and so forth to legitimize their authority. Terms like "King," "Dauphin," or "Czar" did not come into use until hundreds of years later in the majority of Europe. Overbearing authority then, very roughly resembling a federal or supernational government today, was held by networks of religious leaders, just as it had been in the Barbaric Tribes. This is why territorial rulers had their authority legitimized in religious terms - often through ceremony as well as revisions to the Christian Faith taught to their constituents aimed to make them believe these leaders were God's favored, although Christian scripture clearly says the opposite. This is also why the majority of wars in this time period were not state vs state or territory vs territory, but large conglomerate vs large conglomerate, as they were fought predominantly over larger territorial power schisms within the Church, the split of Eastern Orthodoxy from Roman Catholicism and the birth of Protestantism with its 30 Years War being the most prominent examples. Territorial leaders accepted the Church as an overbearing authority, common sense would dictate, because it commanded these large conglomerates of force and could bring the power of several dozen other territorial rulers down onto the head of one who tried to declare his independence. The Church's own claim to legitimacy, besides faith-based supernatural beliefs, was that it brings about a synchronized doctrine of collective responsibility. While the presentation of this responsibility - a need to enforce fundamental Christian laws to avoid various Hell on Earth scenarios - is laughable even to most Christians today, it is nevertheless rooted in an ideology aimed at solving a variety of very real contemporary social issues (discussed in the Premise posts), and was corrupted into an autocracy of superstition that lost sight of these goals through centuries of political implementation. It will soon become evident why this discussion is so relevant to modern day Statism.

The formation of the infant modern states was largely a trend of territorial rulers acquiring enough hegemonic authority to usurp and undermine the overbearing power of the Church. Phillip II of Spain, while proclaimed by historians as "Mr. Catholic", took over the city of Rome and held the Pope prisoner for a number of years, allowing him to operate his Church with, essentially, the blade of Phillip's sword held to his throat. Henry VIII, in what is oversimplified by modern history as a conflict over seeking a divorce, militarily expelled the Catholic representatives from England and coined the Anglican Church, which was almost exactly the same but named the King, not the Pope or his Cardinal, as its final Earthly authority. Ivan IV of Russia, its first hegemonic monarch, spent most of his life in territorial wars against members of his OWN FAMILY that were territorial rulers who did not agree to a united monarchic state, and in the process executed the majority of the elite of the Russian Orthodox Church - paradoxically declaring them heretics for opposing him while teaching that Earthly force-based authority is to be succumbed to. Those who remained were largely his proponents and the Church took a secondary role to the Czar in Russia once his claim to the throne was unchallenged.

This ousting of Church autocracy is often credited as a large factor in ushering in the Renaissance, but whether or not it actually caused it, the Renaissance did not bode well for the monarchs for reasons most people today are not aware of. Namely, reading scriptures on their own and having the liberty to interpret them for themselves rather than listening to a "spiritual advisor" who commanded tremendous amounts of force, scholars and elites began to see that these writings said absolutely nothing about the legitimacy of monarchic authority, and could pretty easily be interpreted as calling these people tyrants and despots for hoarding wealth while forcing the common people to live in poverty under the duress of force. Every late-Renaissance political philosophy that is alluded to by underlying theories of modern government, from the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes and JJ Rousseau to the early Socialist writings and Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto, largely draws upon ideological Christian values for support. The states later formed based upon the writings of these philosophers largely divorced themselves from theocracy, but it is important to remember that the philosophers themselves lay their moral roots in Christianity. What they found in the scriptures - originals rather than Church-authored revisions - were the same ideals alluded to earlier meant to preserve human rights and dignity and deal with destructive social issues. The 18th and 19th century revolutions were, in an ideological sense, nothing more than an enema of force-wielding authorities (Church and Feudal Aristocracy) who had lost sight of the ideologies that supposedly legitimized them - it was a return to ideological roots rather than a change in them.

The relevance of this for modern state policy is gargantuan. Namely, every political philosophy in question, or at the very least every state formed on their basis, continued to commit the fallacy of giving the state the unchallenged authority of ensuring these social issues were addressed, giving very strong credibility to the folk wisdom that humanity really does learn nothing from history. Personally, I don't agree that any modern government has at any point adequately lived up to this responsibility. The pre-Civil War United States was fairly adamant on the limitation of federal authority and the separation of Church and State - the erosion of the former being the real cause of the Civil War conflict, NOT slavery. But, this country was still not the libertarian utopia many modern anti-governmentalists believe it was 145 years later. It was riddled with lawfully-protected ethnocentrism and downright racism, and while in modern times it is easy to dismiss these as prejudiced excuses for the economic hegemony of the ruling elite, the exclusion of ethnic minorities (immigrants, slaves, Native Americans, etc) from the political process was largely accepted then under the same rhetoric used to justify the state's excessive role in the economy today. Namely, these people were said to be insignificantly educated, savage, and unfamiliar with modern customs of civility and hence would eradicate the freedom and prosperity enjoyed by everyone if enfranchised in politics. Moreover, their disenfranchisement was sold to the masses by psuedo-scientific sources as doing them a FAVOR in many cases; the people with the power to make policy had to take the minorities' moral incapacity into consideration, and protect themselves and everyone else in society from the irresponsible decisions they would make if given the power to do so!

It is no surprise, then, that modern western socialism, as a policy rather than ideology, had its birthplace right here in the United States. Following the abolition of slavery and the industrial revolution - which gave birth to another minority very inconvenient for the ruling elite - the workers - a large school of thought then considered scientific infused in the masses a sort of hysteria about the corruption of society's moral fabric due to the participation of these minorities. Namely, formerly-enslaved blacks, immigrants which were now heavily allowed to naturalize and become citizens, industrial workers, and certain Native American groups, were now all formally allowed to participate in policy making. Despite Jim Crow laws and corporate-controlled election-fraud, their political influence was nevertheless heavily felt. The school of thought mentioned above, with its roots in the "Know-Nothing" movement of 3 decades prior, and Psychiatrist Henry Goddard and education guru Horace Mann at its forefront in the 1880-90s, advocated that the state was now bearing the economic and social weight of these groups' participation, and to protect everyone, it had the responsibility to ensure they were in line with modern customs. In policy, this approach was the justification of a number of "charming" state-ordained practices:

- The application of extremely culturally biased IQ Tests (designed in homogeneous France for the purpose of educational placement of children and blatantly co-opted for this) to incoming immigrants, as well as blacks in the South and Native Americans in the West to determine their "mental capacity" to vote or even be admitted to the country in the case of immigrants.
- The coining of the term "Moron" by Dr. Goddard to describe what could now loosely be translated into a classification of individuals bordering on mental retardation, determined by the same tests. These individuals were then LEGALLY MANDATED into psychiatric detention camps with the admitted objective of preventing them from reproducing (sometimes also sterilized), as Goddard largely believed that intelligence was genetic.
(These tests largely tested math, English in its New England form, and social IQ in terms of New England customs. Of course, no immigrant or minority who had never been formally educated and grew up in a different culture could do well on them, and modern IQ tests account for the grand majority of these biases.)
- The formation of the first government-run primary and secondary schools, which mandated attendance, and again had the openly admitted objective of instilling in youth who could not afford private education the moral and cultural knowledge necessary for the capacity to participate in politics. This education system is also credited with the coining the civillian "salute," in which it was mandatory for children to hold their hands to their hearts while reciting the pledge of allegiance.

Here's the kicker: Predominantly, the proponents of this movement and those who supported it openly referred to themselves as, you guessed it: SOCIALISTS.

Fast forward 50 years.

Let's start with Hitler's Germany. First of all, the term "Nazi" was coined in 1941 by the Western enemies of Hitler (France, UK, US); it is very rare to hear this term in reference to Hitler in Eastern Europe to this day, and in Germany itself it was virtually unheard of until after the defeat of Hitler in 1945. It is no secret that Hitler and his followers referred to themselves as National Socialists, and this is more or less how the rest of the world referred to them until 1941. This is important because, until Hitler's unexpected backstabbing of the Soviet Union in June of 1941, these regimes were allied and lumped together by both supporters and detractors in the category of "Socialists." As the Soviet Union joined the ranks of the Allied Powers, however, it became very inconvenient for Western governments, whose constituencies saw the USSR in the same light as Hitler's Germany and for good reason, to refer to these countries by the same label. Hence, the term "Nazi" was quickly co-opted to emphasize the nationalistic eugenic human-rights abuses that characterized Hitler's socialism, while Stalin's socialism which slaughtered millions of its own citizenry with little heed to their ethnicity was suddenly less abusive of human rights. (Remember how "General" Musharaf who usurped power in Pakistan suddenly became "President" Musharaf after the 9/11 attacks and the need for his compliance against the Taliban?) Interestingly, the USSR and many of its modern successor states refer to Hitler's Germany as "Fascist Germany," a term coined by Stalin to represent Hitler as the enemy because Fascism was seen as an extreme totalitarian form of the imperialism that socialism ideologically sought to eradicate. Finally, Hitler's allies through the end of the war - Japan, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria - continued to refer to him as a Socialist until their own defeat.

The importance of Socialism being the underlying rhetoric in Hitler's Germany is colossal, even if in practice the economic system did not fully qualify for the label, at least not to the extent of the USSR's. Today, it is a popular fallacy to paint Hitler as the epitome of extreme right wing, but without defending the extreme right wing (they are more comparable to the Spanish Inquisition for those seeking diminutive comparisons), Hitler was the POLAR opposite - an extreme LEFT winger. The justifications for every one of his own charming practices openly and admittedly drew upon the ideals and policies coined by US Socialists 50 years prior, they just took them to a greater extreme. Hitler's death camps which housed Jews, Blacks, Gypsies, Homosexuals, the Disabled and Mentally Ill, and later political detractors like Catholics and Communists, were a direct derivative of Goddard's detention camps for "Morons" with the exact same justification - these people were not only unfit but dangerous to the rest of society if allowed to participate or even mingle with it, much less to reproduce seeing as these were genetic qualities that set them apart from the Greater Race. Early National Socialist rhetoric targeted people afflicted with birth defects and mental illness for costing the economy large amounts of state-collected resources without being able to produce their fair share. It is a known fact that Hitler idolized Henry Goddard, despite the fact that the latter admitted in the 1910s that his theory of hereditary intelligence was deeply flawed from a scientific standpoint. Furthermore, anecdotal evidence points to Hitler's "salute" being an adaptation of the mandatory gesture in the first American public schools, and that his choice of the Swastika (two intertwined S's) and the importance of the letter 'S' as a symbol in general were a tribute to the word "Socialism". I am not making the argument that Hitler's Germany wasn't EXTREME, but I am making the claim that collectivized responsibility, even in less overtly oppressive forms, has an inherent necessity for the denial of equal access in order to function; the only differences are the severity and the specific groups it chooses to oppress.

The essence of collectivized responsibility in every form, whether Hitler's eugenics-based Socialism, the class-baiting "re-education" socialism of Stalin, Mao, or Kim Il Sung, or the various social welfare policies of Western European and North American democracies today, is that every individual in a society is responsible for its progress as a whole, and hence bears the collective costs of the irresponsible behavior of any one member. This isn't a normative theory - this is the practice which laws in all 3 examples above FORCE on their constituents. Hitler justified the extermination of the disabled because it was already accepted as a given that it is the state's financial responsibility to support them. In the USSR, it was illegal and punishable by imprisonment to not have a state-recognized job (meaning freelancing of any kind or unemployment by choice) under the justification that the system could not exclude the citizen from the fruits of everyone else's labor in the form of state services, and he was hence committing a crime by voluntarily not contributing. Western democracies don't enact the same extremes, but ridiculous laws such as being required to wear a seatbelt in a car or a helmet while riding a motorcycle or bicycle, blanket drug prohibition, and proposals such as Obama's mandate on US citizens to buy health care insurance, at the end of the day draw on the same rhetoric when faced with the unbeatable "Fuck you, its MY life" argument. It is accepted as normal for the state to pick up the tab when someone needs an "essential" service that they haven't arranged for, even if by choice, and hence the state gets to mandate precautions to reduce the costs of these irresponsibles to the masses.

I won't get into normative or moral arguments that are so popular in criticizing this model, because frankly, as I've stated over and over again, normative morality is arbitrary and science is not concerned with it. My criticism of it has far more irrefutable backing in the sphere of countless examples of rampant economic and civil inefficiency associated with it. For starters, even without committing the all too common slippery slope fallacy that equates the policies above to herding undesirables into detention camps, this model nevertheless gives the government a very dangerous economic decision power under the extremely flawed presumption of its neutrality. In the fervently debated topic of health care, for example, both conservative and liberal politicians almost unanimously agree that its runaway costs are the results of excessive regulation - although somehow their solutions then propose more regulations to counter this. Health care professionals - doctors, nurses, laboratories, residential facilities, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, etc. - are placed on a mythical pedestal of need for regulation to ensure safety of service. They are required to jump through a maze of hoops to obtain and keep their practicing licenses, and these are given only to those who follow a scientific model of health care accepted as correct by.... who? Ah, yes, government bureaucracies like the FDA and the AMA heavily controlled by large business interests who practice this very same model, ranging from procedures to pharmaceuticals. Their scientific school of thought is credible and useful, I am not advocating that all traditional western medicine is quackery; but to make it a CRIME to practice medicine from any other, equally credible and scientific school of thought, is nothing short of policy intended to ensure profits by eliminating the competition, thinly masqueraded as protecting the health of the masses. And practicing unrecognized medicine is just about a crime - it can result in the loss of licensure, steep fines, and the obsession with government ordainment opens the door to frivolous malpractice lawsuits against anyone who gives treatment or advice slightly deviating from the norm (malpractice lawsuits are commonly known as the #1 cause of runaway health care costs in the US). Of course, alternative practitioners can spend obscene amounts of money on lawyers to put together advisory disclaimers that protect them from becoming the victim of the policies described above, but this drives up their own costs of operation AND gives health insurance providers - an unrepentant government-ordained cartel that is legally prevented from disbanding and has strong government-infused disincentives from broadening their scope of coverage - an excuse not to COVER alternative treatments. If this CLUSTERFUCK, pardon my language, and the runaway costs of health care that it results in are in any way definable as the "failure of the free market," then I'm not sure what economic glossary the politicians are reading, but its not one any economist or political scientist has ever laid eyes on. Health care is a prominent example in modern times, but countless other examples exist of the government taking on a responsibility for delivering a type of service and then driving it into the ground in terms of efficiency as a result of the compound effect of special-interest-originated policies over time.

The other purely scientific problem with collectivized responsibility is its inherent empowerment of the irresponsible. I'm not praising Hitler and Stalin, but their social totalitarianism was aimed at curbing non-contribution and free-loading, even if the ends of a socialist society do not justify such means. In western social welfare states, the problem of free-loading is a gaping, ever-expanding void with no solution in sight, and anyone who dares to suggest it is a problem is quickly labeled a racist, an oppressor, and so forth. Well, the Michael Moores of the world can call me whatever they want, but from a purely efficiency-oriented perspective, with no mention of ethnicity, religion, national origin, social class, gender, sexual orientation, etc., social welfare has the inherent quality of destroying the incentives of those who benefit from it from contributing their fair share. This isn't limited to the archetypal 23-y-o welfare mother with 3 children who gets a far larger check than she would if she were to find a job, especially factoring in the costs of daycare, although said people ARE an example. What about working-class families who DON'T receive welfare, but in which the adults hold jobs that do not provide group health coverage, and they are FORCED to rely on state-funded health care systems at least for their children? Anyone who has ever been a recipient of state-funded health care services knows how nightmarish they are, but the alternative for these people is lack of health care for their children altogether and they are reasonable in not wanting THAT. What about college students from lower middle class families who can only afford higher education by attending a tax-funded university and even THAT with government loans? When 75% of their education costs are not paid by them or their families, where is the incentive for them NOT to choose a major like Philosophy or Critical Gender Studies with which they are extremely unlikely to make a fraction of the money post-graduation that their education cost? What about large businesses that gladly support laws like minimum wage hikes or others that drive up their operation costs, knowing that in return they will receive government funds to expand their operation that essentially allow them to pass said costs onto the taxpayer? Free-loading, as in all these examples, in the western social welfare state is not only tolerated, it is the only viable method of competition for the majority of actors in the economy, and it makes sense that they domesticate political actors to represent them in government and ensure they have a way to benefit from it, as the alternative is to end up the sucker that pays the price but gets no reward. The deeply flawed defense for this system is that we are "dependent" on it and that without it, children will be without food and health care, no one will be able to afford an education, workers will be underpaid and businesses will not be able to extend their services, and so forth. This defense ignores the fundamental problem with this system, which is not that its "unfair," but its inherent INEFFICIENCY. Every one of those examples, when multiplied by the millions of cases in the US and Western Europe, EXPONENTIATES the costs of whatever service the government is providing. The curbing of welfare and health care programs for the needy would strip private providers who these services pay of a very significant chunk of their income, forcing them to lower their prices and explore more efficient methods of operation with the money they save from taxes paid to support these same programs to attract those same customers; as discussed in my public education rant, educational institutions would have to significantly reduce their costs if the government no longer picked up the tab, and the market shortage of educated people would result in a response of more efficient forms of funding, such as private corporations paying for someone's education in exchange for say, a 5-10 year commitment of working for them (this would also exponentially reduce the number of students with economically useless majors, for which I remind you your taxes currently pay); large corporations stripped of government welfare would have to eat up the costs of competing with their small-business rivals, and would have no incentive to support labor laws that put said rivals out of business, as discussed in a previous rant. The welfare state does not only tolerate inefficiency, it rampantly promotes and rewards it at a cost to anyone attempting to be efficient, creating an ever-expanding dependency on itself in the fashion of an illicit drug that most people see no alternative to. I am not advocating for the complete and instant eradication of each of these policies as these would have abysmal immediate consequences, but efficiency-based policy would dictate their gradual, harm-minimized rollback that allows the time for free-market alternatives to adequately provide the same services, NOT propose the continued expansion of the welfare state when it already consumes a gargantuan portion of our resources with diminishing returns.

There is always some involuntary brunt of responsibility for members who choose to be irresponsible that every member of society carries, and this brunt does have a tendency to disproportionately affect the poorer or the politically disenfranchised. However, trusting the state to set standards of responsibility and then attempt to protect everyone from everyone else's (or their own) irresponsible choices makes, for lack of a more scientific term, a piss-poor solution to this problem. History and the modern system are both littered with examples of special interests quickly co-opting the supposedly neutral government to set the standards in a way that benefit them economically and disenfranchise everyone else, and seeing as the government is very difficult to effectively compete against, the only viable means of opposition is for competing special interests to infiltrate this system with their own agents and fight over who the standards will benefit. This results in, at best, a race down a bottomless pit of ineffiency; and at worst, millions of people herded into concentration camps under the excuse of having a nature contrary to progress. The public sector's tendency toward this is irreconcilable regardless of what accountability measures well-intentioned proponents of Statism may suggest - history does not offer a SINGLE example of economically efficient government. For the most part, people somewhat versed in politics and economics recognize this condition, but make the flawed argument that the free-market alternative would be worse and has already proven to fail. As I've illustrated over and over and over again in this post, however, it is very difficult to blame any of these economic failures on the free market considering none of the failures cited that the welfare state aims to fix occurred in anything even RESEMBLING a free market system to begin with. The ONLY alternative, as the title of my blog advocates, is to FIRE YOUR GOVERNMENT when it comes to being charged with minimizing collective risk and maximizing collective efficiency, because not ONE example exists of it being given this duty and accomplishing anything short of the EXACT OPPOSITE.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Understanding the Modern US

Looking at the Premise posts, it is fairly easy to understand that the underlying theory of society and economics presented there is that the grand majority of people in this society are motivated by what they consider their rational self-interest. For some of them, this may be as simple as their own economic survival and perhaps preservation of their own basic liberties. For others, it may be more complex if they believe in the righteousness of their ideologies and seek to "help" or "save" others from some perceived threat or persecution. For the majority of Americans, the truth lies somewhere in between, either some form of compromise between ideology and self-advocacy, or more often a synthesis of the two. In any case, however, the pursuit of ideological righteousness can still be simplified to rational self-interest. A religious person trying to convert others to her faith, an economic liberal working to bring what he perceives as social or economic justice to minorities, even extremists who look to exterminate or disenfranchise some group of people because they see them as counter-progressive or dangerous - without delving into morality or the logic behind these motivations, the majority of them can be said to engage in these activities because it makes them feel happy and accomplished, even if they claim not to pursue any immediate earthly gain. Earthly gain is not limited to economic success or even tangible things that are thought to make people happy. The belief that they are accomplishing what is comparable with their religious, political, or social ideologies can be a very powerful motivator, and can be easily lumped in with self-interest, even if those who don't share their beliefs find it irrational. So, with this in mind, what contributes to the continuous proneness of the United States toward inefficient methods of accomplishing the optimal society described in Premise 3? It is easy to blame the ideologies and that their teachings are often obsolete, over-generalized, or simply contrary to efficiency. But people aren't born ideological, and even most ideologies don't come pre-packaged with promoting closed-mindedness and seeing anyone with a divergent opinion as the enemy. What contributes to this hostility between different schools of thought, and what are its effects?

UNDERSTANDING ECONOMICS
Most economic discussions in this country - whether between individuals, on some form of media, or between politicians - never get past the tier of uninformed accusations. Economics is a complex and intricate science, and it is understandable that most people who haven't studied it to some extent are not very well-versed in it. However, this does not stop them from being affected by it in their daily lives - taxes, changes in prices on consumer goods, reductions in government services they may depend on, laws regarding wages, business regulations, etc. Seeing as economic well-being ranks pretty highly in most people's books when it comes to rational self-interest, the effects of the economy that are contrary to this tend to upset and anger people. Once this occurs, it is very easy to fall into a web of misinterpretations and oversimplified concepts that are common ignorance, and people then tend to see anyone positively affected by economic trends by which they themselves are penalized not only as their adversary, but as belonging to some mythical enemy camp, often one presumed to be a massive conspiracy to rob the camp they see themselves as belonging to. Examples of this include conservatives vs liberals, capitalists/free market advocates vs socialists, workers/unions vs corporations, and so forth. The majority of people who use such terms, however, have no concept of what they even MEAN. Let's try to address some common economic myths:

Capitalism/Free Market Economics: This term refers broadly to economic systems that operate on a model of minimally restrained competition. "Restrained" refers to government regulations that affect the economy - tax codes, labor laws, prohibitions or restrictions on any sort of product, etc. The unrestrained movement of "capital" does not only refer to money, but literally anything with economic value, including resources and even anyone able to produce labor. The United States has NEVER operated under this kind of economic system. Some scholars refer to the pre-Civil War era as resembling a Free Market, but an economic system in which the law specifically strips large groups of people of equal property rights, including the proprietary right to THEIR own labor as in the case of slavery, cannot POSSIBLY qualify as a system of competition unrestrained by laws. Myths about "capitalism" claim that it promotes everything from slavery to modern corporate welfare laws ranging from tax loopholes to bailouts to laws that eliminate effective competition for the clear benefit of a large corporation. Politicians in favor of these laws often refer to them as "free market" or "capitalistic," so it is no surprise that people who see themselves victimized by these policies call capitalism oppressive and see anyone who sees free markets or capitalism as beneficial as their enemy. Often, they see various regulations supposedly meant to "level the playing field" for the working class as the only alternative to what victimizes them, and see anyone who does NOT see these as beneficial as a "capitalist" who seeks to "oppress" them.

Socialism: This term refers to an economic system that is entirely or almost entirely state-run, not by virtue of regulations and limitations, but by virtue of the state owning the majority of the means of economic production - farms, industry, stores, service providers, etc. This was the system practiced in the USSR through the majority of its existence, the government claimed to be "building" a Communist society but openly admitted that they ran a socialist regime that was supposed to eventually evolve into Communist through a Marxist model. The idea of this system was to eliminate competition and place all essential economic decisions under the umbrella of the government, which was presumed as neutral and NOT self-interested and would hence distribute fairly and without judgment. The realities of this system where it has been attempted, such as the USSR, have proven that it fails drastically at what it attempts to do, because bureaucrats ARE self-interested and giving them the power of distribution simply creates a parallel black market system that is far more unfair and brutal than any legal competition, while productivity plummets because the official currency is not worth anything in the black market and no one is concerned with getting work done as it does not directly benefit them - leading to shortages which reinforce the power of the black market. However, regardless of failed attempts elsewhere, the United States has NEVER practiced anything resembling this system EITHER. Those who claim to be socialists are simply ignorant unless they support the overhauling of the economy to be completely government-run as presented above. Even the Western European States, often dismissed as socialists by opponents of socialism and hailed as an example of socialist success by its advocates honestly do not even come CLOSE to meeting this definition, they have high taxes and a variety of services dubbed as "essential" under government control, but the majority of their means of production remain in private hands.

Communism: This term refers to an ANARCHIC system with no government AND no private property, in which all property and means of production are agreed upon as communal and all members participate economically according to their abilities and consume according to their needs. It is very important to note that Communism's main premise is voluntary participation, and that it sees enforcement of non-competition and lack of private property as contrary to its principles. This system is PURELY theoretical and has NEVER been practiced in known history on a national scale, although a few very small communities inside larger States, such as the Israeli "Kibbutzes," can be said to be examples of it. However, it is important that membership in such communities is voluntary and people who no longer find them to their liking are free to leave without penalty at the hands of the larger state within which they operate.

So, where does that leave the modern economy of the US? I don't see the necessity of coming up with an economic term to define the system in place, as long as it is clear that it does not fall under the definition of any of the three above. The US economy IS heavily based on competition, but rather than free market competition, it is a competition in which the government is a very important player, and the regulations through which it shapes the economy are tools of various interest groups and conglomerates to compete with each other. In an oversimplified view, Republican politicians are seen as the competition tools of the very rich - corporations, large business owners, sometimes government contractors that serve the military, and so forth - and their policies benefit this sector of the economy through tax exemptions for the rich, government spending that turns them a profit such as military projects, bailouts when these corporations are on the verge of collapse or infusions of tax money to help them expand, and so forth (reminder: THAT'S NOT CAPITALISM). Democratic politicians are seen as the competition tools of the working class - industrial workers, farmers, service workers, and so forth - and their policies support labor unions in their advocacy for worker benefits, "essential" services such as shelter, food, and health care for people who otherwise could not afford them at taxpayers' expense, and so forth (reminder: THAT'S NOT SOCIALISM). The small band of politicians that can be considered closer to free market or libertarian in their approaches are occasionally seen as the competition tools of the middle class - small business owners, freelance professionals and contractors, and so forth - and their policies try to eliminate the regulations set by the two groups above as both tend to disenfranchise them economically, either by virtue of higher taxes and labor laws that their large-business competition has a far easier time handling, or tax-breaks and subsidies for large businesses that, again, make them impossible to compete with. Lifting the oversimplification and looking at reality, however, the system is far more intricate and does not follow these general predictions very well. Large businesses compete with each other, and hence many have their own puppet politicians whose policies are aimed to favor one large business over the other. Labor unions are private organizations formed by workers to allow collective bargaining with employers, and short of protecting their right to exist do NOT need government support to do their work. In many corporate industries, they are largely a thing of the past as they have long since bargained the oppressive corporations out of existance, and the competition that has risen up to replace them usually makes a deal with their employees to offer a standard of quality benefits and safety in exchange for pledging NOT to unionize. The unions that still exist are for the most part government employee unions (where there is no competition to render them obsolete) or in certain latent industries, such as automobile corporations, that are riddled with inefficiency. Powerful, rich, and self-interested, many modern labor unions have their own puppet politicians on either side of the aisle, and the policies meant to benefit them largely sum up to giving them an edge over their own non-union competitors (like bailouts for corporations who would otherwise be driven out of business by union costs and replaced by more efficient non-union alternatives) or preserving their jobs such as opposition to policies that cut government services (education, prisons, etc.). Many policies often mistakenly seen as benefitting the working class, such as minimum wage hikes, are well-proven by history to have little effect on the lives of minimum wage earners, but they do tend to give large businesses a competition edge over small businesses as their volume of operation allows them to swallow up the costs easier. Hence, large corporation politicians often support such policies, although this is seen as counter-intuitive. To not leave the middle class off the hook or without blame, free market politicians tend to garner support by proposing drastic changes that immediately positively affect their constituency, and may in theory be more efficient, but in practice need to be implemented slowly and thoughtfully to avoid unaccounted for immediate affects, as with deregulation or privatization of certain rationed services that results in skyrocketing prices because the infrastructure is not in place for the higher consumption of competitive pricing rather than rationing. An efficiency-based approach to American economics, then, is not to "see the benefits and shortfalls of each ideology," but to divorce oneself from them altogether and examine how each economic policy will truely effect society. Dismissing them as a conspiracy or oppression by one overgeneralized group or class or another, or even as a specific move by some special interest, is very narrow-minded; and what's worse, inefficient policies of every kind THRIVE on this kind of ignorance because politicians and special interests don't need to convince their consituencies that the policies are actually beneficial, it suffices to convince them that they are lifting some sort of oppression or inequality at the hands of an invisible enemy oligarchy, or more moral than an opposing special interests' policy suggestion - as if there are no other choices and everyone is somehow represented by one of these two.

THE ROLE OF THE MEDIA
It is very important to explain the role of information distribution in the above model. Most people who commit the fallacy described above of overgeneralizing economic classes and division lump most facets of mainstream media in with one such class or the other, often accusing the conglomerates that disagree with them as being cronies of some oppressive oligarchy, while seeing the ones who agree with them as fair and balanced and reporting "real news". Unfortunately, this laughably oversimplified model forgets that large media conglomerates, regardless of political affiliation, are private corporations and, at the end of the day, driven by PROFIT. Their profit is generated by selling advertisement, and the prices at which they can sell it, in turn, are dictated by the volume of patrons they can attract that would then see these advertisements. Ideally, reporting that is blatantly biased or misleading should alienate patrons, driving down advertising revenue, which would make it contrary to effective competition. However, practice shows that reporting of the news in a less biased, more scientific sense tends to bore and confuse the average uneducated patron; large amounts of attention are attracted by playing upon people's fears and prejudices with emotional displays of agreement and fanaticism (a la Glen Beck or Michael Moore). Hence, is it really any surprise that large media outlets tend to lean so heavily toward one mainstream point of view or another? Once again, this attracts the most attention, which drives up advertising revenue on which their profits are based. One suggestion to counter this trend, often blamed for the emotional political polarization of the country, is to hand over the reporting of the news into government hands which would make it less dependent on profit. However, as we have seen in our discussion of practices of socialism above, the bureaucracy IS self-interested, even if not directly profit-driven, and the plaguing trend of government-run media in historical examples is to become an instrument of inducing conformity to the policies of whoever is in charge, even in countries where subversive speech is NOT illegal and there is competing private media that is very subversive. The point is simply that, while the media may claim to have responsible journalism at the heart of their principles, at the end of the day it is driven by its own self-interest like every other actor in the economic system described above, and whether this interest is profit or government-approved conformity will not make them any less self-interested and unbiased or responsible. A balanced picture can honestly only be acquired through one's own eyes, and if this is impossible, then the seeker of unbiased news should limit himself to the facts and actual tangible observations presented by the news, or seek out smaller news outlets that present more facts and observations and less opinions and interpretations. This can be difficult, and getting all the facts about any situation, including those conveniently omitted by one side or the other may require looking at a variety of sources before reaching one's own interpretation. This process is time-consuming and often leads to ambivalence and the realization that the person does NOT have the information or expertise to make a decision regarding where they stand on an issue. People are driven to insecurity when brought face to face with their own ignorance, and don't have the time to construct an informed opinion but nevertheless continue to be victimized by various economic policies. Hence, they choose the "easy" solution of watching the likes of Shawn Hannity or Oprah Winfrey scream and gesticulate wildly as they pretend to "understand their pain," not realizing that this is analogous to popping a daily dose of Alka-Seltzer to deal with ever-worsening digestive tract problems, but not putting in the time and effort to eat anything other than junk food.