Tag Archives: free market

Libertarians: On what planet do they spend most of their time?*

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Not the one I live on:

Imagine receiving a paycheck not subject to income tax. The full amount is yours, and you are free to divide it between consumption and investment according to your subjective preferences.

Ah yes, the age-old dilemma. How much of my meager paycheck do I spend on groceries, bills, rent, etc., and how much do I spend short selling stocks?

(Also, seriously, what is the deal with libertarians and Republicans constantly forgetting that payroll taxes exist? The author is American, so you’d think he’d know how US taxes work.)

*Yes, that’s a Barney Frank quote. Also, h/t Jesse Taylor.

Livin’ Large

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The_Sims_-_Livin'_Large_CoverartIf I never hear the phrase “live within our means” in the context of the federal budget again, it will be too soon. The great myth that drives both the Village and the media narrative—a myth easy enough to buy into for a bunch of privileged goons who would still have a comfortable retirement to look forward to if Social Security evaporated entirely—is that Americans have been living large, that we’ve come to expect too much from our government.

Come to expect too much? What have we been getting? One of the worst qualities of life in the developed world, gun violence and incarceration rates that even Russia would consider ridiculous, crumbling infrastructure, expensive and inefficient profit-driven healthcare, ballooning costs for increasingly ineffective higher education… if this is living large by modern standards, the people of Northern Europe must be living on the set of Star Trek.

The truth is that America has been living large, but Americans have not, with the obvious few exceptions. We’re an empire with military force projected all over the globe, after all, and empires project their military force to gain tangible material and cultural benefits. Instead of tea and spices, of course, our main import is economic and military acquiescence, which may not sound tangible, but I assure you it has the power to make Dick Cheney rock hard. (We get the tea and spices, too, of course, but that’s a secondary perk at this point.)

Just to fill in the gaps a little, let me remind you that despite conservatives generally being big fans of hard currency, it was Nixon who finally detached the US Dollar from gold, and also add as a hint that one of Saddam Hussein’s last acts as a sovereign leader was to make some offhand comments about maybe starting to sell his oil in euros instead of dollars. America’s great imperial project, one apparently so subtle that modern gold-obsessed libertarians are too dense to notice it, has been to transform the US Dollar into the world economy’s new gold, because as the sovereign issuer of said US Dollar, that gives the US government some enormous advantages.

If these things seem rather high-level, that’s sort of the point: as Americans, we certainly benefit greatly from them—it would be grossly disingenuous to pretend that we do not—but they’re not for us. We might generally prefer the peace of mind of affordable healthcare that doesn’t constantly threaten to bankrupt us, or financial systems that don’t put us at the mercy of Mitt Romney’s colleagues, rather than the more profitable adventures in supplying terrorists and drug runners with guns so that we can later bomb them and any children who happen to be in their vicinity, but nobody cares what we prefer. At any rate, while we’re certainly in the top tier of quality of life in the world, we’re scraping against the very bottom of that tier. We know what a modern industrialized society is capable of providing for its citizens, and we’re not getting it.

So this persistent myth that we’re demanding too much of our government and living large off of it is irritating and infuriating. If the fat trimmed from America’s exorbitant lifestyle must come from our pantry rather than from our imperial playroom, we’re looking at a banana republic quality of life, because there’s not as much buffer between that and where we are now as Obama seems to imagine. My only question is this: why is it becoming conventional wisdom that we don’t have a right to expect anything better?

We can all be capitalists! and other fuckwitted ideas

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A couple weeks ago, Wonkette covered the wingnut antitruth, popular among the various faux-intellectual right-wing think tanks, that Thanksgiving is a celebration of the triumph of capitalism over socialism. As the story goes, the Pilgrims tried the whole socialism thing, nearly starved, then realized the folly of their ways and finally got their invisible hand out of their pants and got to work like good capitalists.

It’s probably obvious enough why this whole notion is fuckheaded, but you should read the article either way because it’s great. But what strikes me most about this whole revisionist history is that, as an anarcho-socialist linked to in the Wonkette piece points out, the glorious free market utopia the Pilgrims build in the wingnut tale isn’t actually capitalist.

Let’s look at the setup again: each family has its own farm and each family keeps the fruits of its labor. And that’s basically it. Now, if that sounds like capitalism to you because of all the mumble mumble bootstraps mumble mumble, ask yourself this question: who, in this scenario, are the capitalists?

Syndrome

“And when everyone’s a capitalist… no one will be.”

If you answered, “Everyone,” congratulations! That’s a really dumb answer! Such an arrangement cannot, by definition, be capitalistic. Just as you can’t be a predator without prey, and you can’t be a salesperson without a customer, you can’t be a capitalist without laborers. Capitalism is, by definition, a system wherein the means of production are owned by somebody other than the people who do the actual labor of production.

“But wait,” you might say. “Couldn’t that also describe feudalism?” Yes, yes it could. Congratulations, you’ve just spotted the man who’s been behind the curtain for the past 600 years. You know, the one who hides his uselessness by handing out worthless facades of fulfillment.

The notion that even ordinary Joes and Janes like you and me can be capitalists too is merely the latest con job used to keep the laborers from noticing that they’re being screwed. 401(k)s, the widespread availability of credit, and the push for universal home ownership are all Reaganomics-era innovations designed to give you the illusion of control over your financial life while, hilariously, actually serving as yet more vectors by which to transform you into a serf. You may also recognize these things as being major factors in the recent economic crisis.

Anyway, it’s that particular con that the narrative of Pilgrims as Noble Capitalists was designed to serve. The fact that it’s incoherent and ahistorical, not to mention the fact that you’ll never see Warren Buffet subsisting entirely on the produce of his own two hands, is irrelevant. The fact that these supposed champions of capitalism don’t even seem to understand what capitalism is is also irrelevant, because what they’re actually championing is class inequality and the suppression of labor rights. So yeah.

Give me your tired, your poor, so they can scrub toilets for $7 an hour

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Perhaps the key difference between Republicans and Democrats at the moment is that Republicans want to make America even shittier for people who aren’t rich white straight Christian males, while Democrats feel that we’re at about the right level of shittiness right here. The notion that America could perhaps be made not shitty for the majority of Americans is an idea that appears to have died sometime in the 70s. “A chicken in every pot” has transformed into “well, sorry you weren’t born rich, but we really do admire all the backbreaking work you do for less than a living wage!”

This is what passes for Democratic rhetoric in 2012:

The bad news is that as emotionally compelling as many of the speeches were tonight, the key themes almost all centered around equal access to opportunity. Over and over again, the theme was that success should be available to those who work hard. Michelle Obama celebrated her father who went to work every day despite physically devastating illness just to pay for her college education, and even took out loans to make it happen. She said that it mattered less how much you made, and more how hard you worked.
And all I could do at certain points was sigh and shake my head.

And this:

Last night at the Democratic convention, Michelle Obama defined “the very best of the American spirit” as “teachers in a near-bankrupt school district who vowed to keep teaching without pay.”

Why are we celebrating that teachers are willing to work without pay in a near-bankrupt school district, instead of questioning why a school district in a nation with a GDP of $15 trillion has been allowed to descend to the brink of bankruptcy? Why are we praising a state of affairs in which employees, with no alternatives left to them, will allow their employers to run roughshod over them? Why are megabanks deemed so essential to our country that hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money is handed to them when they nearly destroy themselves, but school districts are left floundering? And why isn’t Michelle Obama asking these questions instead of praising the teachers who are being asked to work without pay while Jamie Dimon takes home a $23 million paycheck as CEO of a bank that is posting record profits a mere five years after nearly destroying the economy?

Obama is spitting all over the Wisconsin teachers who were willing to stand up against this plutocratic arrangement—teachers who received no assistance from the national Dems even as Republican money poured in to support Governor Walker’s campaign of suppression—when she ignores them and instead praises the teachers who keep their heads down in the face of such injustice.

This is the party workers and disadvantaged people used to look to to protect their interests, and now the best they can muster for workers is, “We know you’re working longer hours for worse benefits, if you’re lucky enough to have a job at all. Keep it up!”

The real message coming from the Democrats this year is: get used to this. It’s not going to get better. And if they have their way, it certainly isn’t.

Right-wing Mythology #1 and #2

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Contrary to the implication of the title of the game (to which I would like to see a sequel, hint hint Ensemble Studios… oh wait, Ensemble Studios doesn’t exist anymore), the age of mythology isn’t in the distant past. Mythology just takes a different form these days. Republican mythology is a particular brand of mythology in which socialists are a genuine threat rather than a largely ignored smattering of academics, and Newt Gingrich is a towering intellectual giant rather than a complete dumbass.

So I’m starting a new series called Right-Wing Mythology, in which I debunk a particular tenet of right-wing belief in the US. (Speaking of serieseses, I’ll probably do more Emphases on Twit here and there, but I don’t pay nearly as much attention to Twitter as I did back when I was unemployed, so, y’know.) Now, the focus here will be very specific: I won’t challenge every single untrue thing some wingnut commentator says. And I won’t address patently obvious things like “Obama is a Muslim,” because a) duh, he’s not, and b) even if he were it would influence my opinion of Obama to a slightly lesser degree than his preferred brand of soap.

No, the focus will be on “facts” that pretty much every conservative takes for granted, things that seem like common sense to them, if only because they’ve been living in the Fox News bubble for too long. Things like “the government is inefficient at everything ever” (to be addressed in a future entry) or “the Chinese are about to plunge their hands into our chests a la Temple of Doom and pull out all the money we owe them” (already addressed that, try to keep up). Other future topics will include Social Security, taxation, and maybe Ayn Rand or something, who knows.

Today, to start off, I’ll address two myths. The second one’s on the house. As is the first one.

Right-Wing Myth #1: Obama has massively expanded the federal government

How do you measure the size of the federal government? For simplicity’s sake let’s go with the two most obvious: federal budget and number of federal employees.

Conservatives do love to talk about Obama’s alleged fiscal irresponsibility. And indeed, the federal budget increased by about $452 billion between 2008 and 2011. That proves it! Well, not really.

Suppose a year ago it cost you $20 to fill up the gas tank of your car. Now it costs you $35 to fill up the gas tank of that same car. Is that because you expanded your gas tank? Of course not. It’s because the cost of gas increased.

Similarly, one of the biggest drivers of the budget increase since 2007—before Obama took office, one should note—has been the increasing cost of existing government programs, most significantly welfare and other need-based programs. And the reason those costs are rising is because more people need welfare. You may recall that we’re in a recession. How you feel about whether or not they deserve that welfare is irrelevant; despite Gingrich’s bloviations, Obama didn’t initiate or even grow those programs. They simply serve more people now, because more people live in poverty. Let’s look at the breakdown:

But whoa thar! you might say. Why is the “Other” category so enormous in 2009? Well, because of the stimulus, of course. But not so fast—it’s not Obama’s stimulus, it’s Bush’s. It’s the TARP program initiated under President Bush in 2008. It gets factored into the 2009 budget because the 2008 budget was passed back in 2007. You know how it is. In fact, the entire 2009 budget was passed back in 2008, when Bush was President, and as you can see, the budget did not suddenly balloon as soon as Obama signed his first budget for 2010. That’s all that really needs to be said about that.

But what about federal employees? Well, let’s look at dat chart too.

I guess you could say so, but Obama isn’t presiding over a government any larger than the one Reagan and H.W. Bush did. Incidentally, the vast majority of the increase in employees went to two departments: Health and Human Services (thus implying that the hirings there are the result of the same increase in welfare needs brought on by the recession and not by any deliberate action on Obama’s part), and Homeland Security. Say, that reminds me, who was the last president to add an entire executive department to the federal government? (Hint: it wasn’t Obama.)

Right-Wing Myth #2: The US government oppressively over-regulates business and stifles competitiveness on the global market

This is an easy one. The conservative trope, as you probably know, is that business regulation in the US is just redonkulous, and it’s totally punishing our valiant Galts, and that’s totally why they can’t hire more people, and also it makes America less competitive and it’s probably also why we, unlike Iran, have gays in our country.

Let me introduce you to something called the Ease of Doing Business Index, measured by the World Bank. This index ranks the countries of the world (except the ones where you can’t really do business, so North Korea’s out) in order of how “business-friendly” their regulations are. The US is fourth. Fourth most business-friendly. In the world. Only Singapore, Hong Kong, and New Zealand outrank us.

Those countries that are supposedly welcoming business with open arms, thereby just forcing US corporations to fire a bunch of Americans and hire a bunch of outsourced workers? Well, China is 91st in the world. India is 132nd.

Yeah, the US is ridiculously lax on business. Businesses get away with a lot, in case you haven’t noticed, such as bringing the economy to the brink of collapse and then facing absolutely no consequences for it.

The free market is a cake, which in turn is a lie

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It’s funny how, as far as Republicans are concerned, you shouldn’t go asking the government for help, unless you’re a billion-dollar corporation. The reason the free market is great, according to Republicans, is that you have to provide quality, competitive goods and services, thus allowing the cream to rise to the top… unless you’re a billion-dollar corporation.

Last year, a new company called Lightsquared promised an innovative business model that would dramatically lower cell phone costs and improve the quality of service, threatening the incumbent phone operators like AT&T and Verizon.  Lightsquared used a new technology involving satellites and spectrum, and was a textbook example of how markets can benefit the public through competition.  The phone industry swung into motion, not by offering better products and services, but by going to Washington to ensure that its new competitor could be killed by its political friends.  And sure enough, through three Congressmen that AT&T and Verizon had funded (Fred Upton (R-MI), Greg Walden (R-OR), and Cliff Stearns (R-FL)), Congress began demanding an investigation into this new company.  Pretty soon, the Federal Communications Commission got into the game, revoking a critical waiver that had allowed it to proceed with its business plan.

And so Americans continue to have a small number of expensive, poor quality cell phone providers.

It’s almost like all this “free market” talk goes out the window when the plutocrats’ billionaire buddies need a helping hand from the government.

An example of the free market solving things

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It’s a basic tenet of free-market conservatism that the profit motive will naturally provide society with the most efficient balance of all its demands. If society really needed it, it would naturally be profitable, and if it’s unprofitable, that means it’s unnecessary.

And yet:

Cancer medicines desperately needed by sick children and adults are in short supply, undermining the ability of U.S. doctors to administer treatments, top oncologists warned this week.

Many drugs are scarce because there is no incentive for drugmakers to manufacture low-cost generics, which have slim profit margins for pharmaceutical companies.

Well, the free market has certainly solved the awful problem of corporations not making sufficient profits. Sadly for those of us who aren’t a corporation (or a CEO or major shareholder in a corporation), it hasn’t quite solved the problem of people dying of “the most common and treatable cancers.” But at this point I suspect that many free-market advocates have forgotten that those are the kinds of problems that the free market was originally touted as being able to solve.

In fairness, it’s not impossible to have a sane sort of free market where “slim profit margins” doesn’t translate to “don’t bother.” After all, for a pharmaceutical company that makes lots of different drugs, producing a few that are only barely profitable hardly seems like an unbearable burden. But America’s 21st century free market, where the primary goal of business isn’t to actually produce a product or advance public interests, but simply to chase ever-higher profit margins at the behest of shareholders, is not it.