ah the south...

Daily Kos: Poll: Americans love France, San Francisco, Europe, and NYC:

All of them feature the same dynamic as San Francisco -- Republicans have solidly favorable ratings (as do every other demographic tested), but head down South, and it's a whole different world, dramatically out of step with the rest of America. What's this mean? It means that all that France and Europe demonizing, and all that talk of "San Francisco liberals" and "San Francisco values", and all that New York bashing (like Rush leaving Manhattan), plays to a very small core of people, and specifically to the conservative's Southern base.

This is clear evidence that the GOP has become a rump regional party. Because everyone else in America is just scratching their head at all that hatred directed at these places. They like San Francisco a lot. They love France. They think Europe is fantastic. And not even the New York Yankees can get people to hate on the Big Apple. And the more the Rushes and Becks bash those places, the more out of step with the Real America conservatives appear. They might as well be bashing puppies, apple pie, and moms.

The irony? Even Southerners have a net positive favorability for San Francisco (+6), New York City (+2), and Europe (+2). In other words, even in their regional stronghold, they're just speaking to a minority.

Posted via web from jimnichols's posterous

t r u t h o u t | Beyond Scarcity: Reinventing Wealth in a Progressive World

Beyond Scarcity: Reinventing Wealth in a Progressive World

We are bound to make the world in our own image. So, we had better be sure we have the right values in mind as we think about ourselves in this historic transition.

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich on Obamanomics

Marketplace: Introducing the era of Obamanomics

Robert Reich:

After more than a quarter century, the era of Reaganomics is over, replaced by Obamanomics.

The first principle of Reaganomics was that lower taxes on the wealthy made them work harder and invest more, and the benefits trickle down to everyone else. Rarely in economic history has a theory been more tested in the real world and proven so wrong. Nothing trickled down. After the Reagan tax cuts, the median wage slowed, adjusted for inflation. After George W. Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy, the median wage actually dropped.

Meanwhile, most of the income went to the top. In 1980, just before the Reagan revolution, the richest 1 percent took home 9 percent of total national income. But by 2007, the richest 1 percent was taking home 22 percent. Obamanomics, by contrast, will increase taxes on the top, and it will use these proceeds to raise the living standards of average Americans by giving them lower taxes, better schools, and more affordable health insurance.

Reaganomics' second principle was that deregulated markets function better. Well, energy markets were deregulated and we wound up with Enron. Carbon emissions weren't controlled, and now we face global warming. Financial markets were deregulated and we have a global meltdown. Obamanomics, by contrast, accepts important roles for government: Creating incentives for non-fossil based energy, setting an overall cap on carbon emissions, and ensuring the solvency and security of financial companies.

The third and least well-known principle of Reaganomics is that government can keep the economy moving full tilt by spending like crazy and not worrying too much about budget deficits. Reagan's big spending was on national defense. Some of us called it "military Keynesianism." Problem was, it didn't stop when the economy got to capacity, thereby threatening inflation. Obama's stimulus intends to avoid this by reducing deficits as the nation moves back toward full capacity.

Under Reaganomics, government is the problem. It can still be a problem. But Obanaomics at least recognizes there are even bigger problems out there that can't be solved without government.

Features: 'Philosophy’s great experiment' by David Edmonds | Prospect Magazine March 2009 issue 156

Features: 'Philosophy’s great experiment' by David Edmonds

Situations have a bigger influence on how we behave than we think they do. Perhaps, then, rather than worrying so much about character building in an Aristotelian vein we should be making people more aware of how easily apparently irrelevant factors can shape what we do. As Appiah asks: “Would you rather have people be helpful or not? It turns out that having little nice things happen to them is a much better way of making them helpful than spending a huge amount of energy on improving their characters.”

Is this all a storm in a common room? The repercussions of the experiments cannot be so easily dismissed. Think of the impact on political liberalism. At the heart of liberalism is the idea that an educated adult is and should be capable of choosing how he or she lives. But if, for example, situations affect us more than the reasons we give for our actions, and we use those reasons to rationalise them retrospectively, this assumption may need revision. This branch of x-phi might be nudging us towards Nietzsche’s view that what we take to be the inexorable conclusions of clear rational thought are nothing but reformulations of our innermost desires—disguised as the products of logic. We are not as in control of our thoughts as we thought. Nietzsche fully grasped how profoundly unsettling this notion was.

Libertarianism

Modern Liberalism and Libertarianism: An Economist's View
By Brad DeLong

Let me give you what I take to be an American card-carrying modern liberal economist’s take on classical liberalism--which I think is broadly an updated version of Adam Smith's take. It is, in short, that modern liberal economists are wanderers who have been expelled from the garden of classical liberalism by the angel of history and reality with his flaming sword...

It starts with an observation that we are all somewhat more interdependent than classical liberalism allows. It is not completely true that it is from the self-interest and not the benevolence of the butcher that we expect our meat. Self-interest, yes, but benevolence too: a truly self-interested butcher would not trade you his meat for your money but instead slaughter you and sell you as long pig. So this opens up a gap between the libertarian view and the world.

That said, and modulus this basic human--well, call it "sympathy" as Adam Smith did--modern liberal economists were very happy for a long time with classical liberalism. Yes, there were externalities, and increasing returns over a range, and market power--but the presumption was that market failures were tolerable and in a sense optimal because of the magnitudes of government failures that would attend any attempt to compensate for them. The near-consensus of economists was at least crypto-classical liberalism, along the lines of Colbert's exchange with Legendre in the reign of Louis XIV:

"What do you need to help you?" asked Colbert. "Leave us alone" answered Legendre. ("Que faut-il faire pour vous aider?" asked Colbert. "Nous laisser faire" answered Legendre).

Then starting in the late nineteenth century liberal economists were mugged by reality:

--on issues of income distribution--the Gilded Age--and how laissez-faire did not appear to be producing the reasonable distribution of the fruits of the social division of labor that economists had all expected...

--on issues of macroeconomic stability--the Great Depression was a big shock--and the argument that the Great Depression arose because markets were not free enough never acquired legs or force outside the theological...

--on issues of the persistence of "unfree" labor--Adam Smith expected the imminent collapse of slavery, but ending slavery took a war, and the market economy in America did not appear to be doing very much at all to undermine Jim Crow...
last and most recently, the fear of the increasing importance of "market failure"--the coming of the "information economy"--caused economists to worry that we were moving from a Smithian to a Schumpeterian world, and even if the presumption of laissez faire works for a Smithian world it is not at all clear that it works for a Schumpeterian world...

The upshot is what Keynes said eighty-four years ago:

It is not true that individuals possess a prescriptive ‘natural liberty’ in their economic activities. There is no ‘compact’ conferring perpetual rights on those who Have or on those who Acquire. The world is not so governed from above that private and social interest always coincide. It is not so managed here below that in practice they coincide. It is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest. Nor is it true that self-interest generally is enlightened; more often individuals acting separately to promote their own ends are too ignorant or too weak to attain even these. Experience does not show that individuals, when they make up a social unit, are always less clear-sighted than when they act separately. We cannot therefore settle on abstract grounds, but must handle on its merits in detail what Burke termed “one of the finest problems in legislation, namely, to determine what the State ought to take upon itself to direct by the public wisdom, and what it ought to leave, with as little interference as possible, to individual exertion”...

One way to understand Keynes's General Theory is that Say's Law is false in theory but that we can build the running code for limited, strategic interventions that will make Say's Law roughly true in practice. The modern Ametican liberal economist's view of libertarianism is much the same: libertarianism is false in theory, but it is very much worth figuring out a set of limited, strategic interventions that will make the libertarian promises roughly true in practice.

The Robert Rubin welfare plan...

More Money for Robert Rubin

It looks like President-elect Obama is picking up President Clinton's promise to end welfare as we know it. Back in those pre-welfare reform days, welfare checks went to poor families. Welfare as we know it now seems to involve giving taxpayer dollars to Citigroup and other banks.

The media seem to have largely overlooked the Citigroup tax credit in their discussion of the latest items in President Obama's stimulus proposal. According to the Washington Post, the proposal will allow companies to write off current losses against taxes paid over the last 4-5 years, not just 2 years, as in current law.

There are relatively few companies that could benefit from this tax break since most companies will not have losses so large that they would need more than two years of tax payments to balance them against. But, really big losers, like Robert Rubin's Citigroup, and other badly failing financial institutions, are losing much more money in 2008 and 2009 than they earned in 2006 and 2007.

Did the political connections of Robert Rubin and others in the financial industry have anything to do with the decision of Obama's economic team to be so generous to them? I don't have an answer to that question, but the media should be asking it.

Rocker on Liberalism and Democracy...

"Liberalism and Democracy were pre-eminently political concepts, and since most of the original adherents of both did scarcely consider the economic conditions of society, the further development of these conditions could not be practically reconciled with the original principles of Democracy, and still less with those of Liberalism. Democracy with its motto of equality of all citizens before the law, and Liberalism with its right of man over his own person, both were wrecked on the realities of capitalist economy. As long as millions of human beings in every country have to sell their labour to a small minority of owners, and sink into the most wretched misery if they can find no buyers, the so-called equality before the law remains merely a pious fraud, since the laws are made by those who find themselves in possession of the social wealth. But in the same way there can be no talk of a right over one's own person, for that right ends when one is compelled to submit to the economic dictation of another if one does not want to starve" --Rudolf Rocker "The Ideology of Daily Life"

Who really cares?

Ezra Klein on conservatives and charitable giving... DO LIBERALS HATE CHARITY?

Every so often, his findings are trumpeted as proof that conservatives are more genuinely compassionate than liberals. And that's exactly what Nick Kristof did over the weekend.

But the difference can be explained in one word, and it's not "compassion." It's "religion." A recent survey from Google similarly found that self-identified conservatives gave more to charity than did self-identified liberals. But they also found that "if donations to all religious organizations are excluded, liberals give slightly more to charity than conservatives do." Indeed, religious congregations are far and away the largest recipients of charitable gifts: In 2006, they made up 32.8 percent of all giving. But is that charity, at least charity as Kristof and Brooks are defining it? For instance: Utah is among the most Republican states in the nation, largely because of its heavily conservative Mormon population. Mormons tithe 10 percent a week to their church. But is that charitable giving? Or is it a membership fee? How much of it goes to anti-poverty programming? How much to church administration?

Saying that conservatives give more to charity is another way of saying that conservatives are more religious.