For the longest time, Donald Trump had one issue in which he led Joe Biden... "The Economy." And it drove me crazy! If there is one issue for which the evidence is overwhelmingly open-and-shut, it is the almost perfect record of better economic outcomes across the span of Democratic Administrations, versus Republican ones. And yet, no DP politician seems remotely capable of making such a case, in debate or even in position papers.
Finally, last week, polls showed Biden pulling ahead on economics, as well. But no thanks to self-gelded Democratic Party polemics!
And so, let's resume publishing chapters of Polemical Judo with Chapter Eleven, on that very topic. And yes, this is a long one! So again, I'll be splitting it in half. Because no one has the patience to read, anymore.
And yes, as always I have plenty to say about the week's events, as well. But this time I'll hold off, till the end.
No, you don’t get Adam Smith… and Other Rationalizations
“For as wealth is power, so all power will infallibly draw wealth to itself
by some means or other.”
– Edmund Burke (1780)
In August 2019 a coalition of executives representing some of America’s largest companies issued a statement that redefines “the purpose of a corporation.”[1] No longer should the primary goal be to advance the interests of shareholders, said the Business Roundtable. “Companies must also invest in employees, deliver value to customers and deal ethically with suppliers.” The statement was signed by nearly 200 chief executives, including the leaders of Apple, American Airlines, Accenture, AT&T, Bank of America, Boeing and BlackRock.
“While each of our individual companies serves its own corporate purpose, we share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders,” the statement said. “We commit to deliver value to all of them, for the future success of our companies, our communities and our country.”
Now of course we can all be excused some cynicism, knowing these executives owe their jobs to cartels of the biggest proxy voters. Moreover, many of them have manipulated rules of incorporation and taxation to keep trillions stashed outside of ‘our country.’ And a habit of craven kowtowing to very large, despotic foreign powers has tested every moral claim.
Still, the statement amounts to a long overdue correction of a malignant tumor-meme that infected corporate America since 1970, Milton Friedman’s cant that corporate officers owe duty only to immediate value for big shareholders.[2] Everything else, Friedman soothed, from long range planning to investment, to reputation, to the good of the commonwealth that supports our people and system, would work itself out via basic market forces. Unleashed from any residual sense of complexity or duty, members of an ever-narrowing CEO caste appointed each other to boards that then set ever-escalating executive compensation packages based on quarterly stock performance.
Under sway of the ones who would benefit most, Republican Congresses not only passed Supply Side tax cuts that supremely favored the upper crust, but removed controls that the Greatest Generation had put on maneuvers like stock buybacks, in which companies have lately spent many tens of billions in reserves and profits purchasing and inflating their own shares in order to… you guessed it… help officers make their “Friedman goals,” their magic bonus value thresholds.
Results have been uniformly disastrous, with corporate R&D and long term investment rates plummeting while executive pay, including stock and bonuses, went through the roof. So what are we to make of this?
THE BIG LIE: FISCAL RESPONSIBILITY
We’ll soon see clearly that Republican administrations are always – 100% of the time – far worse wastrels when it comes to debt and deficits, a point made with emphatically clear charts, later in this chapter.
Late News October 2019: “U.S. deficit hit $984 billion in 2019, soaring during the Trump era. Budget experts say it is unprecedented for America’s deficit to expand this much during relatively good economic times.” [3]
Further, when your RASR or ostrich Republican mewls about the inevitable demise of Social Security and our failure to act on that slow death spiral, you might mention how – back in 1993 when Democrats had Congress and sincere adult Republicans still existed – President Clinton fostered the Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform as part of the administration's effort to promote economic growth and control the budget deficit. The purpose of the commission, chaired by Senator J. Robert Kerrey (D-NE) and Senator John C. Danforth (R-MO), was to seek bipartisan agreement on long-term entitlement reform and structural changes to the tax system.[4]
The resulting bill almost passed.[5] It would have gradually cranked up retirement age and saved trillions, in exchange for instituting health care for children and the poor along with meaningful contributions by the rich. But the opportunity was trashed, first by Newt Gingrich and then by Dennis Hastert, who worked with Fox to end all traces of adulthood in the GOP. Danforth-style Republicans are now entirely extinct.
That entitlements reform package is still out there. Fiscal conservatives could make a win-win deal. But then – as happened with Welfare Reform – a major hot button issue to rant at their base might go away! And we can’t have that now, can we?
MUTANT TALENT? [6]
Why are executive compensation packages so vastly higher in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world? Even many of the smartest billionaires, like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have joined in warning that it’s gone way out of hand. But those denunciations are shrugged off by the right as sour grapes.
“These CEOs and such are worth every penny!” comes the rejoinder without much or any comparative proof. Alas, while countless pundits and critics have denounced these skyrocketing compensations as immoral, what we seldom hear is the objection put in AdamSmithian terms. Tell me if you’ve encountered this:
By the very notion of capitalism, when pay for a service goes way up, it should draw in talent from elsewhere, competing for the greater rewards. Many of society’s brainiest and best would drop other pursuits to go into management and finance, till the available talent pool (supply) reaches saturation with demand. Competition then brings pay levels back to equilibrium.
Yet they keep climbing into the stratosphere. Your assertion amounts to a repudiation of the market economics you claim to believe in!
It’s a different and in some ways better argument than the moral ones offered by Gates, Buffett and every decent person. Alas, Oligarchy’s shills have a counter:
“Market forces won’t bring down prices if the commodity is super scarce. These are mutant-level geniuses! No would-be competitors drawn in from other fields can possibly grasp or perform on those mountaintops.”
Ah, good one. But in this back-and-forth we get the last word:
So today’s hand-over-fist U.S. corporate execs are like mutant NBA basketball stars? Each worth whatever the team can possibly afford? But… um… aren’t those sports stars subjected to the most intense scrutiny, tracking and performance metrics of any humans on the planet? Their “mutant” status is verified analytically…
…which is the last thing that most CEOs today want. In fact, a great many writhe to avoid performance appraisal, issuing excuses and distractions that would embarrass any ball court prima donna.
This calls for an experiment! Let’s see how Boeing and other manufacturing firms do, if they go back to promoting top officers from among the best engineers who actually build stuff?
On that note, I recommend a 1954 Hollywood movie – with William Holden and Barbara Stanwyck – called Executive Suite, which illustrates how we’re not the first to face these issues, with more and more boardrooms taken over by financial wizards instead of folks who came up delivering the goods and services the company is all about. Notably the Chinese – for all their faults – draw most of their ruling officials from a cadre of skilled managers who had been engineers. And that’s doing well by them.[7]
“All for ourselves and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind. As soon, therefore, as they could find a method of consuming the whole value of their rents themselves, they had no disposition to share them with any other persons.”
– Adam Smith
THAT VOODOO THAT YOU DO
You’ve seen this before and will several more times in this collection of essays. For decades we’ve been subjected to cult incantations like the Laffer Curve[8] and Supply Side “economics” that foretold a spectacular – nay miraculous – outcome: that huge tax cuts for the rich would prompt recipients to invest heavily in R&D, product development and new factories! (Thus increasing the “supply” side of the supply-and-demand curve, get it?) Moreover the ensuing boom in stimulated economic activity would result in increased revenue for the treasury, even at the lowered tax rates! And hence, supply side promised almost instantly reduced federal and state governmental deficits.
Prime the pump with a gusher of red ink… and soon you’ll be swimming in lovely black ink surpluses! It’s not surprising that this alluring theory was tried once. Is it shocking that we bought it again and again? And again, when it never once delivered? Among my top five demands for a wager, listed elsewhere in this book, is this one:
Can you name even one Supply Side prediction that ever came true? In science, or indeed most fact-centered professions, repeated failure to predict outcomes is deemed a likely sign of flakery, if not flat-out dishonesty. Hence the war on fact professions.
Evonomics.com – the smartest site online for economic/social analysis – aims not at opposing free markets, but saving them from the oligarchy disease that ruined flat-fair-creative competition in every past civilization. No online site discusses Adam Smith more often.[9] (My own Evonomics page is here.[10]) Take for example, Steve Roth’s essay “Capital’s Share of Income Is Way Higher than You Think,”[11] which dissects how almost half of the market income arriving at U.S. households is received just for being wealthy – owning stuff – and not either work or active investment.
Oh, there are exceptions! Many of the recent tech zillionaires – who spend their days happily working alongside engineers and creative types – recycled their extra cash into R&D, new ventures, new goods, services and productive capacity, even daring exploits in accessing the resources of space! That’s exactly what the mad right said would happen with Supply Side. (Moreover can you guess which way those long-ROI, risk-taking, tech-savvy caste of investors lean politically? With a few exceptions, like Peter Thiel, they are mostly Democrats,[12] or independents who agree that markets must be regulated to reduce the age-old enemy of enterprise –cheating.[13])
But as for the vast majority of Supply Side largesse recipients, they aren’t looking for risk or to sweat hard on some new venture. When they get a sudden burst of income, most of the rich plant it where Smith described aristocrats always pouring their excess wealth, into passive rent-seeking – or rentier – properties with safe or seemingly-guaranteed return. Of course this inflates asset values, not just stock equities but also real estate, even art. (Recent mass-purchases of rental properties by rich families have priced young first time home buyers out of the market.)
Beyond asset bubbles and expanding wealth disparities, perhaps the worst effect is plummeting money velocity, a measure of how often each dollar gets spent. Now there are times – e.g. during high inflation – when you want MV to go down! But generally speaking, a dollar paid to a bridge repair worker, say during an infrastructure campaign, will get spent immediately at the grocer, whose employees spend quickly for their own needs, and so on, hence high “velocity” for that dollar, which gets spent and taxed many times. But when rich folks get a lot richer – even good guys like Buffett – not very many of those dollars go to workers at the yacht factory. (The aspersion that Supply Side is “trickle down” aims in the right direction, but doesn’t do justice to this travesty.) Again, most of that extra income goes into passive rentier investments that send Money Velocity crashing.
Indeed, MV has crashed, even as deficits and debt go through the roof with every double-down we’ve seen on Supply Side voodoo. And yes, I will gladly make this a wager as described in Chapter 15.
Now let me be clear yet again. I want competitive-flat-fair-creative markets to work well. I know where the taxes come from that pay for liberal programs that uplift poor children, so they can then innovate and compete, in a virtuous cycle never before seen in human annals. But there are reasons why oligarchs, Laffer cultists and other fanatics had to change so many rules to get those gushers flowing into aristocratic maws. Because the Greatest Generation knew better. Massive stock buybacks etc. were banned! And if you wanted tax relief to help you to invest in long ROI product development, or factory equipment, you took generous deductions specifically targeted for those things! Moreover, when the state invested in your workers’ sanitation, health and children, plus the R&D and infrastructure that maintain a forward moving civilization, you saw that as ultimately beneficial to your shareholders… and everyone else.
So, again… name one reason we should trust a supply sider with more than a wet match?
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
–Winston Churchill
AGAIN, CRISES OF CAPITALISM
Let’s get back to the Business Roundtable’s revised notion of corporate duty, rejecting Milton Friedman’s at-best-myopic commandment to fixate solely on quarterly share price. Fine, thanks BR. It’s now recommended that companies also invest in employees, deliver value to customers and deal ethically with suppliers. I would certainly expand that customer service goal to thou shalt fulfill what the company exists for!
If it’s widgets, take pride in those widgets. And if you’ve branched from widgets into cloud based AI, doesn’t it make sense to prioritize doing that well? Sure, this desideratum overlaps with customer service. But sometimes your vision will stretch beyond what customers currently desire. It should.
Many times in this volume I recommend getting a better than clichéd notion of what Karl Marx and Marxism (seldom the same) were about. Remember when it seemed that both were consigned to history’s dust-bin? Well, old Karl’s tracts are flying off the shelves now, on university campuses and in worker ghettos around the globe. And the smarter billionaires are starting to notice. They’ll consider what kind of society could serve their enlightened self-interest over the long run. In my novels, Earth and Existence, I forecast that some members of a world aristocracy might even hold conferences about it, and perhaps we are seeing crude, preliminary signs.
“It’s not whether we should be capitalist or socialist. It’s how do we make sure that capitalism is working the way it has in the past,” said top investor Alan Schwartz at the recent Milken Conference,[14] warning of “class warfare.” He noted that salaries and wages as a percentage of the economic pie are at a postwar low of 40%, prompting a “throw out the rich” mentality that would require some form of income redistribution to head off.[15] The rise of inequality is discussed in great detail – and placed in historical context – in Thomas Piketty’s tome, The Economics of Inequality, as well as in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, where Piketty notes, “At the heart of every major political upheaval lies a fiscal revolution.”
Mega investor Ray Dalio warns that unless the American economic system is reformed “so that the pie is both divided and grown well” the country is in danger of “great conflict and some form of revolution that will hurt most everyone and will shrink the pie.” [16]
Later in this chapter we’ll see those charts I promised, revealing how Republicans are vastly worse regarding debts and deficits. But let’s start with the one below, which repudiates every claim of the Supply Side cult. It shows how U.S. wealth disparityunderwent steady decline under Rooseveltean social-economic arrangements, as the share owned by the bottom 90% rose steadily compared to the portion held by the top 0.1%, all of it accompanying rapid GDP growth and scientific/technical advancement. This ongoing augmentation of the middle class shattered every prediction made by Karl Marx, making his followers look dimwitted…
... that is, until the Reagan era’s reversal of post-WWII tax, regulatory and labor policies weakened unions while undermining investment in infrastructure and R&D, pouring wealth instead into the “job creators” – an “investor class” whose behavior began mirroring every anti-competitive, “rentier” syndrome described by Adam Smith, in Wealth of Nations.
Even more ominous, resurgent Marxists are now nodding and grinning, diagnosing the Greatest Generation’s experiment – in flat-fair-competitive-creative market enterprise bolstered by a vigorously progressive nation – as mere a historical blip, temporary aberration that no nation could sustain, as top oligarchs manipulate the system toward self-destruction, in patterns that exactly follow Old Karl’s forecasts, in Das Kapital.
Maintaining a civilization of empowered citizenship and fair-competition is a dilemma summed-up by famous historians Will and Arial Durant, in The Lessons of History:
"…the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation,
which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth
or by revolution distributing poverty.”
You’ll see that cogent quotation in several of this book’s chapter-essays. “Redistribution” is one of those words that can trigger apoplexy and get you called all sorts of names. But it’s exactly what the poorest two-thirds across the globe will demand, when they see that they can double their book wealth just by transferring title from say the 50 wealthiest families. It might happen quicker than you think, in a fit of fervent politics, without even needing guillotines. And would that be the end of the world for hundreds of millions of entrepreneurs and business owners, inventors and regular capitalists? Their chief concern won’t be to protect the uber-most lords who are striving daily to make Marx’s final scenario come to life. Their aim will be to prevent the revolution from radicalizing and crushing market enterprise, altogether.
Again, take a “redistribution” example that few ever discuss, but I mention in several places – when the American Founders (hardly viewed as the most radical of socialists) seized and parceled out up to a third of the land in the former colonies, an act of redistribution that makes FDR look like a minnow. And it was matched later by the taking of “property” from Southern slaveholders and redistributing that ownership to… well… to those freed people themselves. Oh there are precedents. And each time, market enterprise survived.
Each time, thereafter market enterprise thrived.
The lesson? Moderate resets don’t have to be the end of the world. But worlds can end if you greedily defer all moderate resets, tempting fate by tempting mobs.
=======================================================
== Back to this bizarre "future" era of October 2020 ==
Absolutely every point made here... and offered in Part Two of Chapter Eleven (next time) would be of use, if anyone of our 'generals' in this phase of civil war had the remotest sense of tactical logic. Alas.
As for recent events?
* Reminder from “the Postman”* that it’s time to mail those letters and packages now, and then stay out of the USPS stream till the second week of November! Tell any companies or orgs you know to do the same. leaving the USPS unburdened to convey all those ballots.
[1] “Milton Friedman Was Wrong: The famed economist’s “shareholder theory” provides corporations with too much room to violate consumers’ rights and trust.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/milton-friedman-shareholder-wrong/596545/
[2] Friedman’s cult of quarterly profit: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/milton-friedman-shareholder-wrong/596545/
[3] U.S. deficit hit $984 billion in 2019: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/25/us-deficit-hit-billion-marking-nearly-percent-increase-during-trump-era/
[4] In the 1970s capitalists were terrified by the fact the Union Pension funds seemed – if funded at projected rates - to be the main accumulating pools of capital. Indeed, by 2020 workers would ‘own the means of production’ that way, organically, without revolution. I believe much of the Reagan and after "revolution" was specifically targeted to end that dire ‘threat.’ They succeeded… and not one pundit today even remotely recalls those old worries, or sees or mentions how it was prevented, even though it was much discussed in the 1970s.
[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7999185
[6] Other economic topics: About liberals reclaiming Adam Smith: http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2013/11/liberals-you-must-reclaim-adam-smith.html About Smith and Friedrich Hayek http://evonomics.com/stop-using-adam-smith-and-hayek-to-support/
Recall from Chapter 9 how Americans Spent Themselves into Ruin... But Saved the Worldhttp://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2009/11/how-americans-spent-themselves-into.html Crucially, the world still needs America to keep buying, so that factories can hum and workers send their kids to school, so those kids can then demand labor and environmental laws and all that. And for that to happen, U.S. inventiveness – the golden egg-laying goose that paid for it all – must be preserved.
Finally, in an economics riff that was too complex to be included in this political book, I explore how nearly all “leaders” fool themselves into thinking they can “allocate” a nation’s resources better than market forces. Those in the West who most loudly proclaim Faith in Blind Markets – or FIBM – are members of a narrow, incestuously conniving CEO caste who ‘pick winners and losers’ far more narrowly and with far less competitive knowledge than those communist or kingly allocators of old. http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2006/06/allocation-vs-markets-ancient-struggle.html
[7] Take the downfall of Boeing Inc., which began when the aircraft manufacturer’s executive offices moved far away from the design, safety and production centers in Seattle and Omaha, with top positions filled from the CEO-managerial caste, instead of engineers. My rascally-impudent suggestion that could save America in dozens of ways. Ban the undergraduate business major. Let folks come back for a masters after they’ve spent some years creating and delivering goods and services. There, I said it. See other crackpot suggestions in Appendix #2.
[8] In fact, there are levels at which the Laffer Curve is true! If you tax everything, business will halt and you’ll get nothing. So? The 1980s incantation was that the curve was always in the over-taxed, business suppression zone. No proof. None. And subsequent experiments – at the extreme in Kansas during 2015-2018 – showed diametrically opposite lessons.
[9] Except, of course, scholarly sites dedicated to the study of Adam Smith! https://evonomics.com
[10] “Best-of-Brin” essays about the world, economics, politics and philosophy at the Evonomics site. http://evonomics.com/author/davidbrin/
[11] From Evonomics: http://evonomics.com/capitals-share-of-income-is-way-higher-than-you-think/?utm_source=newsletter_campaign=organic
[12] My anecdotal assertion. But I’ll consider sincere offers of wagers. While Wall Streeters & oil-guys are “risk-taking” they remain short-ROI and hostile to science.
[13] "Ironically, Smith's epic work The Wealth of Nations, which was first published in 1776, presents a radical condemnation of business monopolies sustained and protected by the state, in service of a lordly owner-caste. Adam Smith's ideal was a market comprised of small buyers and sellers. He showed how the workings of such a market would tend toward a price that provides a fair return to land, labor, and capital, produce a satisfactory outcome for both buyers and sellers, and result in an optimal outcome for society in terms of the allocation of its resources. … He made clear, however, that this outcome can result only when no buyer or seller is sufficiently large to influence the market price–a point many who invoke his name prefer not to mention. Such a market implicitly assumes a significant degree of equality in the distribution of economic power–another widely neglected point." – from David C. Korten's book, When Corporations Rule the World.
[14] https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-milken-conference-ray-dalio-20190502-story.html
[15] “Throw out” is of course a euphemism for what folks risk, if they let disparities reach levels of 1789 France or 1917 Russia. And those thresholds are closer than most think.
[16] Ray Dalio. https://www.barrons.com/articles/billionaire-ray-dalio-income-inequality-education-u-s-at-risk-51554468777
53 comments:
" It is said: "The Secret Service is obligated to 'take a bullet for' the President. They are in no way obliged to take a bullet FROM the president."
Exactly so. Trump people seem intent on infecting the country--in this instance, in the most literal sense. Trumpkins at the super-spreader Barrett event are starting a bus tour to tell packed audiences of how they survived the Red Death. Trump met with Gold Star families the day after that event and is now claiming he got the virus from the Gold Star families! His 'doctor' has cleared him to go out and start campaigning tomorrow--more packed and unmasked gatherings. And to show that he's a perfect example of superior health, he's apparently going to guest-host the Rush Limbaugh show--all three hours.
On the bright side, Democrats, including Pelosi, are now talking openly about asking the Cabinet to invoke the 25th amendment.
I voted yesterday
1 vote for the Labour Party Candidate in my constituency
1 Party vote for "The Opportunity Party" - they are promoting a Wealth Tax and a Universal Basic Income
1 vote in favor of Cannabis legalization (referendum)
1 vote in favor of the "Right to Die" (referendum)
Voting is open until the 17th
We will see the results on the 18th!
Great post, as usual.
Why do you suppose the world hasn't been so struck by the force of your logic--which I'm neither denying nor belittling--that it hasn't jumped up, saying "I see the light," and reformed itself on the spot?
I put you in a class with Krugman, another brilliant analyst who hasn't changed the world.
You wrote, "Is it shocking that we bought ['supply-side economics'] again and again? And again, when it never once delivered?"
Unfortunately, it's not shocking. I doubt that "supply-side economics" policies were adopted because anyone believed them. They simply provided cover for politicians to vote the way the people who paid for their election wanted them to vote.
As I'm sure you know, politics is not primarily a game of logical argument. It's more one of performance, advocacy, and convincing (or, if you're DJT conning) people to believe in you.
I'm sure I would be slaughtered if I tried to be a politician. You are much more forceful, one of the prerequisites to being a successful politician. I'd love to see you try it.
Zepp Jamieson:
And to show that he's [Trump] a perfect example of superior health, he's apparently going to guest-host the Rush Limbaugh show--all three hours.
Hopefully, he gets plenty of spittle on the microphone.
(Wait--the so-called president of the United States has three spare hours in a day to host a radio talk show???)
Goldman Sachs agree...
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/stock-market-outlook-biden-blue-wave-boost-growth-goldman-sachs-2020-10-1029649255
This should be much bigger news than it is.
I haven't been paying much attention to football this year, but it is nice to see the Chicago Bears beat Tom Brady.
Dr Brin in the main post:
Fine, thanks [Business Roundtable]. It’s now recommended that companies also invest in employees, deliver value to customers and deal ethically with suppliers. I would certainly expand that customer service goal to thou shalt fulfill what the company exists for!
That was my Second Law of Corporatics.
(Although Alfred took me to task for presuming that a corporation has a raison d'etre--that it is less a tool than a person)
Zepp Jamieson:
Trump met with Gold Star families the day after that event and is now claiming he got the virus from the Gold Star families!
Like Louie Gomert claims he probably got COVID from the mask he had been forced to wear.
I haven't heard whether those Gold Star families actually have COVID, but if so, Occam's Razor would point to Trump giving it to them rather than the other way around.
Russ A: "As I'm sure you know, politics is not primarily a game of logical argument. It's more one of performance, advocacy, and convincing (or, if you're DJT conning) people to believe in you."
Actually, I think one of the main goals of the oligarchic putsch is to devalue the word "politics" which should be the grimy but positive sum process of itrative negotiation of shifting interests, heavily swayed by accumulating factual evidence. It used to at least somewhat resemble that, yes, even when Newt Gingrich negotiated (amid volcanoes of sputum) with Bill Clinton... for which he was toppled by Dennis Hastert who OPENLY declared an end to politics in America.
"I'm sure I would be slaughtered if I tried to be a politician. You are much more forceful, one of the prerequisites to being a successful politician. I'd love to see you try it."
In a nation where my words could be contextualized, sure. In this era? No way. Taken out of context, my past is filled with condemnable poison pills.
Russ Abbot:
I'm sure I would be slaughtered if I tried to be a politician. You are much more forceful, one of the prerequisites to being a successful politician. I'd love to see you try it.
Dr Brin is an ideas guy. What is needed is a charasmatic individual who believes in those ideas who can connect with voters and get them to care and believe as well. In this day and age, that would probably have to be a good internet "influencer".
Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity fill that sort of role on the right. The liberals who are any good at it (Thom Hartmann, Rachel Maddow, Stephanie Miller) unfortunately don't have a good way to connect with anyone who isn't specifically tuning in to them in the first place.
Stonekettle on Twitter goes one better than my comment about my cat being a better president than Trump:
I don't care if Joe Biden is secretly a steam powered automaton and inside his head is a little space alien working a bunch of levers and pedals.
He'd still be orders of magnitude better than Trump.
And that's no malarkey.
Re: Asimov, Krugman, Brin, et al
There is a huge difference between immediate power/influence and planting of seeds. The former is fleeting (eg inheritance brats), the latter is forever (eg knowledge).
"What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others." - Pericles
In other news, some Scots may not be emotionally ready for a Galactic Empire just yet:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/oct/09/remote-scottish-peninsula-could-be-host-to-spaceport-two-years-mhoine-peninsula-in-sutherland
Residents of remote Scottish peninsula face up to its future as spaceport
"Hopefully, he gets plenty of spittle on the microphone."
That's a given on that particular show. Trump was a remote guest today, arguing that Nancy Pelosi was aiming the 25th amendment at Joe Biden, not him. As for himself, he believes he is very young and in perfect health.
No. Really.
" What is needed is a charasmatic individual who believes in those ideas who can connect with voters and get them to care and believe as well."
There's AOC. Newsom, who also drives the right nuts. Basically, you need someone who can fight like a wolverine when needed.
"Taken out of context, my past is filled with condemnable poison pills."
Taken IN context, so is Trump's past. No comparison intended; I'm just pointing out what used to be fatal poison pills in the past aren't so now. Some of the people who question Kamela Harris' eligibility based on where her parents were born cheerfully supported Ted Cruz in 2016.
All you would have to do is throw away any personal integrity and self-awareness that might burden you so you can attract the sort of people who currently support Trump (or Cruz). Just be willing to believe seven impossible things before breakfast and to set the orphanage on fire, and you're set.
" What is needed is a charasmatic individual who believes in those ideas who can connect with voters and get them to care and believe as well."
I think, actually three types of politicians are needed:
-The "Charismatic", the person who can mobilize and bind voters;
-The "Party Soldier", the person who works behind the scenes to unify the party or connect with other political professionals;
-The "Expert", the person who actually knows the stuff the others are talking about the whole day.
I don't think AOC needs to read Polemical Judo. Her judo is working just fine, thank you.
I *do* think Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Bernie, and Biden need to read it, though. *Their* judo is weak sauce.
AOC lives in the heads of the entire GOP, full-time. Anytime she wants to get something done in the current environment she can come out for the opposite thing and the GOP will break their backs to make stuff happen to spite her.
Re: Scottish spaceport
"in Sutherland, a desolate stretch of peatland punctuated by mires and tiny lochs"
My ancestral homeland - ouch.
"Local Hero" (1983) pretty much nailed this story.
AOC got game sure... and I can improve it 60%.
Green New Deal EVOKED FDR but it should be made explicit by directly citing the Greatest Generations love of him and unions and hi taxes on the rich & anti-fascism.
Scidate: My da' hailed from Aberdeen, which is pretty much the same thing only with North Sea storms and oil money. Beautiful, but the weather sucks.
Doctor: There you go! Not just AOC: Biden has to promote the same values. He's starting to, at least.
Larry,
...took me to task for presuming...
The technical term is "juridical person". Basically a slave. Recognized as a person, but they may not exercise will independent of their owner.
A tool has no rights. A juridical person has some. A natural person has them all.
Look at the history of slavery and you'll find gradations in rights they possessed. Rights are claims by individuals recognized by other individuals, so it's really about the community deciding what they'll tolerate.
Where it is applicable with corporations is they they have sufficient recognized rights to 'own' things, thus taking those things is 'theft'. Even an owner must exercise a process to take what the corporation owns to make it official.
There is a huge difference between general partnerships, limited partnerships, LLC's, general C-corp's, closely held corps, and non-profits. All of them are 'juridical persons', but with different recognized rights. NONE of them have wills they may exercise independent of their owners even with the owners delegate decisions. ALL of them are capable of exercising the wills of their 'component parts' simply because that's who they do anything at all.
_______
The best argument I know for why a corporation should behave ethically is that we expect such behavior from the people who make up the corporation. Owners, managers, and staff. We might not punish amoral behaviors, but immoral ones count at any level.
A side note about space ports...
I suspect the days of them being placed in remote locations are numbered. As operations become less toxic and more frequent, we will need them close to population centers for the same reason we keep airports, seaports, and rail hubs near urban areas.
We will manage with the sonic booms and high decibel levels by placing them at some distance from suburbs, but that won't mean placing them in remote jungles and polar islands.
Also numbered are the days when pieces of the rocket don't land right back at the spaceport to be re-fueled and re-flown. The port likely will need a cleared zone for partially managed mishaps during launch & return flights, but it won't have to be huge once toxic propellents are phased out.
_________________
I used to work a little on projects that promoted spaceports in unlikely places, but I currently am glad I was unsuccessful. They were all too remote. Ports belong where commerce flows in and out of a region. Doesn't matter if they involve the sea, air, rail, or space. They belong where business wealth gets concentrated.
Taken out of context, my past is filled with condemnable poison pills.
Heh. That wouldn't stop you if you wanted to run in a local race. Mayor? County/City Commissioner? Dog Catcher?
... not that I think you should run. It WOULD be a learning experience for all involved, but it's probably a job for one of your dittos. 8)
No, Dr. Brin should run. You know what they say. Don't talk the talk until you've walked the walk. ;) Once he runs for office (whether he wins or loses) he can then determine if his suggestions and political judo are actually effective or not. if it is, he'll be a shoe-in. If not? He knows to moderate and alter his suggestions.
Acacia
Most slaveries of past societies had many caste levels, including upper ones where the slave had merely to pay an annual or monthly rent and was otherwise free... all the way down to hellish stuff. But most were allowed to save up cash to someday buy freedom.
Confederate slavery sometime showed some nuance, but entirely at the master's whim. psychologically, it was likely because southern Americans knew that admitting any humanity to them... even an octaroon descended almost entirely from white masters and fully literate... would lead to a vast surge of Frederick Douglasses.
Alfred, would serving as dog catcher do as much good as I am doing now? Where's the line?
Dr Brin:
Confederate slavery sometime showed some nuance, but entirely at the master's whim.
This is just an anecdote, but I do remember hearing a particularly egregious case in which a female slave was accorded no quarter for defending herself against a master's actual attempt at killing her. The "reasoning" was that slaves as property had no implicit rights, not even the right of self-defense. In the story as I heard it, even the people in the judicial system were sympathetic to her situation, but the general attitude was a kind of resigned, "But what are you gonna do?"
Alfred Differ:
Where it is applicable with corporations is they they have sufficient recognized rights to 'own' things, thus taking those things is 'theft'. Even an owner must exercise a process to take what the corporation owns to make it official.
I wasn't discussing taxation of corporations. My reference to the "Second Law of Corporatics" was that a corporation should be required to do what it is chartered to do, because that's why it exists in the first place. In response to the notion that a corporation's only purpose is to maximize profit, Michael Moore used to ask rhetorically, "Why doesn't General Motors just sell crack?" Possibly, the company could make more profit by selling drugs than by manufacturing and selling automobiles, but there's no good reason why We The People should charter them to do so and grant them special privileges in the process.
We've had this argument before, and you seem to treat the corporation as if it springs to life spontaneously. In my admittedly-limited understanding, a corporation is chartered by a state and granted immunities and other wheel-greasing privileges and incentives in the process in order to more efficiently produce some societal good. I'm not sympathetic to the view that the corporation may then ignore the production of the good it was created for, but keep the privileges.
All of them are 'juridical persons', but with different recognized rights. NONE of them have wills they may exercise independent of their owners even with the owners delegate decisions.
What burns me is that a corporation like Hobby Lobby gets to claim to have religious convictions protected by the First Amendment. I mean, we've gone through decades of being told that corporations can't be expected to be good citizens caring for the environment or the well-being of its employees because a corporation is an amoral profit-making machine. But they can have moral values concerning contraception? Give me a break.
The best argument I know for why a corporation should behave ethically is that we expect such behavior from the people who make up the corporation.
You're really stretching the definition of "expect" there. There's a sense in which I "expect" Mitch McConnell to behave ethically, but I don't really "expect" him to do so. Meaning, I'm not surprised when he doesn't.
I'll refer you here to my response to Mike Pence's "We (Republicans) trust the American people to make the best decisions on dealing with a pandemic." The American people have demonstrated that they won't make the correct decisions in a pandemic. Likewise, corporations have demonstrated that they won't behave ethically as long as unethical behavior is a winning strategy without negative consequences for them.
Okay, so here's what I am worried about now.
Fact: Donald Trump has said "The ballots need to go away," "Proud Boys, stand down and stand ready" and "Bad things happen in Philadelphia."
Fact: Absentee voting is WAY WAY up, and heavily Democratic. No question about this.
Fact: Absentee ballots are not to be counted (anywhere, as far as I know) until election day.
Fact: in my city, Trumpers have already started to harass people dropping off completed ballots at the election board office.
We already assume that Trumper terrorists will harass voters at the polls on election day. HOWEVER:
It makes tactical sense for fascist elements to invade the election board offices in large Dem-leaning cities in swing states, such as Philadelphia, Atlanta, Austin, Miami, etc., and do what I will call Brooks Brothers Putsch 2: Electoral Boogaloo. Before the absentee ballots can be counted, the fascists may burn all the absentee ballots they can find.
Then Trump declares the counts invalid in those cities, declares martial law in those cities, claims the states in question (minus X number of ballots turned to ash which may have been the Biden/Harris winning margin) and squeaks out another electoral college scam.
We need to plan for this possibility. Recommend, at the very least, LOTS of Dem supporters in place to make human chains and defend the election offices.
TCB:
Donald Trump has said "The ballots need to go away,"
When my daughter was little, she had a friend who would leave off parts of compound words. For instance, while sitting on the toilet, she's cry, "I can't reach the toilet!" In context, it was obvious that she meant the toilet paper. Likewise, she would ask if we had "salad" to put on her salad, because she was really asking about salad dressing.
Trump's rants about "the ballots" when he specifically means the absentee ballots always reminds me of that three-year-old kid. Either that or he's revealing something about his dictatorial tendencies when he claims that we can only have a fair election if we get rid of the ballots.
Oops, Trump said "Proud Boys stand back and stand by" not "stand down and stand ready" but the meaning is functionally the same. They got the message (and the T-shirts) anyway.
I like to use this Forbes article to show that Trump simply didn’t screw up the economic recovery:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2019/07/05/trump-is-falling-almost-1-million-jobs-short-vs-obama/amp/
Umm. Is anyone going to tell him about the connection between Regeneron and fetal tissue?
Things get scary complicated when you shun science (and reading, and learning, and thinking).
dwibdwib:
I like to use this Forbes article to show that Trump simply didn’t screw up the economic recovery:
I don't get it.
Did you say what you meant to say?
scidata:
Is anyone going to tell him about the connection between Regeneron and fetal tissue?
It won't bother him.
It will, however, be amusing to watch the evangelical hypo-Christians pivot 1984-like into being in favor of fetal stem cell research. And that's what we're reduced to now--taking faint pleasure in knowing with 100% accuracy that the party who supposedly detests flip-floppers is going to flip-flop, and exactly how they will do so.
On packing the supreme court--Hal Sparks mentioned to day what Kamala Harris's (or Biden's) correct response to that question should be--"That's up to Congress." Read the Constitution, because it really is.
There's even a non-partisan justification for doing so, which Hal also mentioned. We used to have nine federal districts and nine supreme court justices--one assigned to each. Now we have thirteen districts. There should be thirteen justices. Four to be appointed by the next Democratic president and confirmed by the Democratic Senate immediately upon inauguration. They want to play smash-mouth hardball? Bring it on!
But it's not up to Biden or Harris to change the composition of the court, so the idea that she's hiding what she intends to do to the court is nonsense.
There was a post on Tumblr I read recently which was about anti-abortionists getting abortions. These women would go in for an abortion, abort their fetus, and be hostile toward the abortion clinic while doing so. They were unabashedly hostile and yet still used the service. And why? Because they honestly don't care about if abortions are right or wrong, they want their abortions but other people shouldn't have them.
So all these "no fetal stem cell research" people will hate on it. They will advocate against it. They will call people who use it butchers and baby-killers. And they will use this product while calling the people administering it murderers to their faces. They do not have a sense of shame and say fuck you to being called hypocrites even as they are exactly that.
In short? They don't care. All of this is political theater so they can be hostile and nasty and when they win they will move on to something else. They could repeal the 14th Amendment, enslave every single black person, put them to hard labor until the black people work themselves to death, and will call them "lazy" and "weak" and other slurs.
They are users. Pure and simple? They are users.
And when in their ideal world Roe vs. Wade is repealed and abortion declared a crime punishable by death, they will quietly have abortions and have doctors that are paid high dollars for their services while other women are put to death when they miscarry and it's called an abortion and they won't care one bit about what they have done.
Acacia
Acacia
Acacia H:
So all these "no fetal stem cell research" people will hate on it. They will advocate against it. They will call people who use it butchers and baby-killers. And they will use this product while calling the people administering it murderers to their faces.
Ah, but will they call Donald Trump a butcher and a baby-killer?
No, because Donald Trump is THEIR man and he could strangle an infant in the streets before everyone, on national television, and they would state it was the right thing to do and they'd cheer him on. If Donald Trump was Patient 0 for a Zombie Apocalypse they'd all be lining up to be bitten and turned into zombies. The Republican Party is now the Cult of Donald.
Acacia
Meanwhile in Australia, a former prime minister has started a petition for a top-level investigation of Rupert Murdoch's media empire, 'a cancer, an arrogant cancer, on our democracy'.
" No, Dr. Brin should run. "
I'll just note, apropos of nothing in particular, that there was a write-in campaign in '68 for Kilgore Trout.
"Ah, but will they call Donald Trump a butcher and a baby-killer?"
'Course not. Fetal tissue got nothin' to do with killin' babies! What are you,some kinda lib monster?
Acacia H:
No, because Donald Trump is THEIR man and he could strangle an infant in the streets before everyone, on national television, and they would state it was the right thing to do and they'd cheer him on
You state the obvious as if it's a bad thing for us. I for one take great pleasure in watching these people show their blatant hypocrisy in public for all to see. The next time one of them shoves a picture of a pepperoni pizza that's supposed to be an aborted fetus (thank Norman Goldman for that image) in my face, I'll go, "How do you know that's not one of Donald Trump's aborted fetuses? You know, the ones you approve of?", and then laugh in their face.
David,
...would serving as dog catcher do as much good as I am doing now? Where's the line?
Heh. Not a chance. If I thought so, I'd run for dog catcher in my city to make the point.
There is a line somewhere, though, and it has to be decided by you. If you feel 'almost famous' at times and know that your current approach isn't producing the effect you want, shaking things up IS the way out. Sometimes one shakes things in a particular direction and improvement happens. Sometimes not leaving one with thermal agitation as a fallback technique.
Mayor? Maybe. Clint Eastwood took that route. Not sure why, though.
County Commissioner? Maybe. Probably a smaller time commitment.
None of these, though, unless you think thermal agitation is the only option that makes sense at this point.
Also, NONE of them if you take an income hit. That would be senseless for the guy who described proxy activism.
Finally, I think your fiction speaks loudest. Except for the transparency book, I think the novels describe your intent far better. For example, when I read that section in Existence where Tor makes use of her expertise network while chasing a 'problem', I understood what you were doing here... with us. It was clear why you thought the cost to your time might be worth it. 8)
Larry,
I'm not overly focused on taxation of corporate property this time around. I'm actually avoiding tax topics right now because I screwed up my documentation involving a house sale / follow up purchase in a way that prevented me from playing the 'game' most people play to avoid paying taxes on gains. Ouch. I owe an awful lot of money now, but that's no one's fault but my own.
What I'm pointing out is that the concept of a 'charter' is a fiction. Technically, a State DOES charter a corporation, but that charter docs are written by founders. What the State really does is recognize the creation of a corporation. Much like we do with marriages, the so-called permit is really just a recognition of intent by founders of a new partnership. That's not a weak analogy either. A Marriage actually IS a general partnership in many ways.
There is a lot of published nonsense out there about the purpose of corporations. Utter bullshit really. Look at how humans actually come together and you'll understand them better.
*** A company is a gathering of humans who voluntarily abandon some of their personal sovereignty in exchange for amplifying their combined affect when engaging in certain behaviors.
This works for all types ranging form partnership (like marriage) through limited liability corporations to non-profit organizations. The differences between them is in what we expect of the company in terms of its rights and the freedom of its staff to act as natural persons while representing the juridical person.
Some are designed for profit. Some are designed for child rearing. Some are designed for education. Some are designed as investment vehicles supporting some other company. Some are recursive and some are very flat.
What burns me is that a corporation like Hobby Lobby gets to claim to have religious convictions protected by the First Amendment.
Yah. I hear you. The point I'll make here is that you don't recognize that right for the juridical person while the people who abandoned some personal sovereignty to create Hobby Lobby did NOT abandon their claims under the First Amendment. Thus… a clash that we have to collectively decide.
You're really stretching the definition of "expect" there.
Heh. Not really. We expect them to behave and get upset when they don't. Fortunately, we can't punish them unless they behave in an immoral fashion that we can prove is a crime before a jury of peers. You have every right to judge even when you can't convict. That's why Justice is a virtue. If you didn't have expectations, it wouldn't be a virtue by definition.
…corporations have demonstrated that they won't behave ethically as long as unethical behavior is a winning strategy without negative consequences for them.
Some do. Some don't. Secure those negative consequences if you can. That's what Justice is all about. Be careful about going too far, though. Judge Dredd was not a hero.
Zepp Jamieson:
Fetal tissue got nothin' to do with killin' babies!
That's what I'm afraid the reaction would be to Dr Brin's assertion that the Confeds can't avoid the fact that humans have caused an increase in ocean acidification. He seems to think it's a slam dunk which would have them running from their climate-denying position, but I expect most of them have no idea what ocean acidification is, let alone why they should care about it one way or another. And why are we moving the goalposts away from climate change?
Alfred Differ:
Mayor? Maybe. Clint Eastwood took that route. Not sure why, though.
County Commissioner? Maybe. Probably a smaller time commitment.
I forget the particular term that Norman Goldman used to talk about all the time--the local party officials who actually decide who gets on the party's ballots for the voters to choose from. That's an underappreciated position with a lot of power to make a difference.
Alfred Differ:
What I'm pointing out is that the concept of a 'charter' is a fiction. Technically, a State DOES charter a corporation, but that charter docs are written by founders. What the State really does is recognize the creation of a corporation. Much like we do with marriages, the so-called permit is really just a recognition of intent by founders of a new partnership.
I understand that with respect to the partners themselves. But what about concepts like limited liability? Isn't that a perk granted to the corporation by the state, and something that only the state has the ability to grant?
That's not a weak analogy either. A Marriage actually IS a general partnership in many ways.
I actually do understand that. Before same-sex marriage was legalized, I used to argue that the gay couple should incorporate themselves and then merge.
A comic book story I read in college (Fantastic Four Annual #18 if anyone cares) brought home the idea that the couple themselves are the ones who decide that they are married, and the ceremony and licensing are only official means of recognizing that reality. My younger brother was so impressed with the fictional wedding speech in that comic that he declared he'd want it read at his own wedding. Four years later at his real-life wedding, I did just that.
Then again, there are privileges and responsibilities granted by the state (and the church for that matter) as conditions of marriage, and those are not privileges the couple is legally able to grant to themselves independently. The ability to visit a loved one in the hospital, for example. Or the right not to testify against the partner in a court of law. So in that sense, the state really does charter the marriage in a way that is important to the individuals. That's why the fight over same-sex marriage is important, and it was not sufficient to just say, "You consider yourself married, so who cares about the piece of paper?"
And that's what I was talking about referring to the state chartering a corporation. In one sense, that might just be an official recognition of the "birth" of the corporate "person". But in another sense, that person is granted special privileges that the person on the street doesn't have. And I assume that there's some reason why the state does that--that the state sees some value in return.
onward
onward
I admit that am generally annoyed anyways, by the glib
ranting about the Rentier Caste's catechism... Supply
Side (Voodoo) Economics (SSVE). But here is a quote:
'When they get a sudden burst of income, most of the rich
plant it where Smith described aristocrats always pouring
their excess wealth, into passive rent-seeking – or
rentier – properties with safe or seemingly-guaranteed return.'
So must we say 'passive rent-seeking', here, given that the locution is not from Adam Smith, and is technical jargon for a concept that is not in Adam Smith under any name, and which you appear, actually, not to understand? An example of rent seeking is when a company lobbies the government for grants, subsidies, or tariff protection. Rent seeking is a byproduct of political legislation and government funding.
I do also have bigger fish to fry -- I think it would be basically starting badly, to even suppose that the point of the market is to generate wealth. I might put it this way, that generating wealth is a complete side effect of the market as far as the benefits to society are concerned. I get that you want to embrace a dynamic capitalism, you're lionizing trust-busters as heroes of competition and such, it's all about dynamism, hard work and innovation and such, and fine, without getting into all of that then, I would just quibble that not even 'rentier' is a term that is found in Adam Smith at all.
Danny, posting a comment deep under a blog posting that has been left behind is fruitless. I seldom go hunting down here, after typing 'onward.' You are best off posting under the CURRENT blog post where conversation is going on.
As for your Adam Smith pedantry, I agree we could argue that Smith's use of rent-seeking is not identical to mine. But you quibble, sir. Blatantly, Smith denounced the tendency of the rich NOT toi invest in risky ventures requiring capital for new production, leaving that to the petit bourgeoisie, while aristos use government influence to enhance the value of their passive assets. Um.. That is essentially what I said!
onward
onward
As to my Adam Smith pedanty, that sounds like a bad thing, and yet I can think of worse fates. But I am grateful for any reply at all, especially as I might have been a bit brusquely imperious in my approach. I commend you on keeping an open mind -- one of the most difficult things to practice.
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