mindlace

The interior ministry described the protesters as “Enemies of Afghanistan” and further opined “They are trying to show that the situation, that security is not good.”

I wonder whether the seven Enemies of Afghanistan that died in those protests were evidence for good security, ungood security, or even plusungood security?

This was an interesting election for me. This is the first time I have invested anything other than my own vote in the national electoral process; I spent a hundred some odd bucks on the Kerry campaign, and canvassed in New Hampshire. I also cared more, I guess, mostly on account of the Sup Ct.

One of the most important aspects of this election is that President Bush received an absolute majority vote. The second was that the Republicans increased their majority in both the House and the Senate. There is no way to spin this: The majority of American voters support Republicans.

Something I think was true for me, as well as possibly many other folk, is a selection bias in the messages that I chose to give weight to in the weeks leading up to the election. I tried, at first, to discount the reports that pollsters were making mistakes, but by the eve of the election I was all into the whole “not counting cell-phone users” motif – the theme that the youth vote would come out in a big way and make the difference this time. Maybe the youth vote did come out; it’s not clear to me that it all came out for Kerry.

I think this is an interesting issue, and one that will grow more interesting as time goes on. People moan about how bad media used to be, when there was only three channels, but the consequence was that there was a collective view on the issues that faced the nation. Today we all choose what media we want to see, and for the most part we choose media that reinforce our views.

From a historical perspective, the election result isn’t really that much of a shocker. The Democrats have had a hammerlock on power in this country since FDR, but most of the things that gave them that hold are now givens- nobody seriously proposes rolling back the ERA or the EPA or whatnot. It seems to me like Democrats haven’t gotten their heads around the kind of issues that could galvanize a new power center, one that didn’t antagonize their traditional foes. New thinking, in short, is missing.

The Republicans, on the other hand, are swimming in new ideas, cleverly branded with old-as-the-hills rhetoric. This Iraqi project is an audacious example. I don’t have much hope for its success, but I certainly wish Bush and his team well in their attempt to bring Democracy to the middle east; it’s hard to imagine a more Sisyphean task.

To quote Jeremy Rifkin, I do believe that “America is no longer a great country. Yes, it’s still the most powerful economy in the world, with a military presence unmatched in all of history.” I am saddened that America’s response to the killing of 3,000 civilians is to kill 30,000 civilians. I don’t believe that you can bring Democracy to people on the point of your bayonet. I hate that we are the Richest Country in the World, yet we treat our poorest and neediest people so abominably, we have such comparatively dreadful lifetime care for our citizens, and that we imprison more people per capita than anyone on Earth.

These are not my values. But it is important to recognize that the United States has never been a liberal country; from genocide to slavery to prohibition to the ruthless suppression of organized labour this land, and its colonizers, have never been kind.

On the other hand, I now live in the part of the United States with one the richest traditions of opposing these tendencies. Though the persecution of the Narragansett Indians in the 17th century was far from admirable, the ideals and strength of Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams, and their colleagues made Rhode Island a vanguard of freedom of conscience, freedom from slavery, and with a strong tradition of respect and charity towards your fellow man. They haven’t always been upheld, but they are extraordinary, given the times and circumstances they came about in.

So I’m glad that, even though I live in a country where the majority oppose my moral and intellectual stance – hell, to a large part oppose my intellectualism entirely – I finally live somewhere that blunts the full force of that opposition.

I think, now that this is all over, that it is time for me to let go of national politics, to acknowledge that neither I nor I with my like-minded souls will sway this country from its chosen course. I believe, wholeheartedly, in democracy; the people have spoken, and now I will be silent.

There’s an argument going around that the tax system is inequitable because the richest Americans pay a disproportional percentage of their income in taxes, while not receiving “more” government than poor folk. This isn’t the case, in a more balanced analysis.

They do receive more government services than an individual poor person: they get more protection from the police because they own more property. They get more from the Securities and Exchange Commission, the US Treasury, and the diverse set of agencies involved in protecting, regulating, and managing money, because they use more money and own more securities.

They receive more from the United States military because they own more foreign assets, more from local, state, and government judicial systems because they use courts more, the Interstate Highway System, because they and the goods they demand use it more, the Federal Aviation Administration because they fly more, the National Institutes of Health, because they get more health care, especially newfangled drugs, treatments, and surgeries.

Another factor in progressive taxation is the observation that we do not live in a perfect meritocracy.

While it is certainly true that the number of “High wealth” slots in this country is not fixed, neither is it true that a hypothetical optimal assortment of wealth according to greatest ability/highest demand would result in the current crop of “winners” being chosen.

In other words, rich people are rich in part because the way we structure our society and our markets mean that their place on the top is driven in part by externalities.

People don’t generally see it this way; we tend to falsely correlate ‘good’ events to our own agency and ‘bad’ events to exterior agency. When you are rich, especially if you didn’t inherit the wealth, it’s easy to be blind to the externalities (I’m a white male raised in an upper middle class home) and focus on the internalities (I’m smart, I work hard). The transitive analysis leads you to the sort of casual cruelty that the bum on the street is there because he doesn’t “want” things to be better, or doesn’t have enough of a “work ethic”.

So we disproportionately tax the rich because they *do* receive more government services, and to recapture externalities: what came from social context should go back to funding more social improvements to aid in the creation of the next generation of rich folk.

Of course, the real problem is that corporations pay less taxes than all but the poorest Americans. As pure social fictions given weight by the inertia of history, a corporation’s wealth is substantially less meritocratic than that of an individual, and their reliance on and benefit from social institutions is absolute; without Government there would be no Corporation.

As you are probably aware, the WTO has ruled that the US government must end an export subsidy mostly for Boeing and Microsoft. The bill that was supposed to achieve this has turned into a nightmare of pork featuring $170bn in tax cuts for corporations.

As you are no doubt also aware, corporations don’t pay much taxes in this country; you and I do. They’ve never paid their fair share, but these days they pay an astonishingly low percentage of taxes.

Please consider calling your senators and telling them that you don’t support tax cuts for corporations, that you don’t support this bill, and that you certainly don’t support any extension of the tax-cuts in this bill that are going to sunset.

It only lasted for a moment, but it was very funny:

Since CBS has refused to air the critical ad Child’s Pay during the superbowl, I suggest this substitute.