Five Terrible Ideas from Progressives and Conservatives

A recent article in Rolling Stone inspired a conservative writer to offer his own take on the piece. It's an nice demonstration of the fact that neither right nor left have a monopoly on bad economics. First, the liberal recipe.

Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For

Jesse A. Myerson,  Rolling Stone, January 3, 2014

Guaranteed Work for Everybody

Unemployment blows. The easiest and most direct solution is for the government to guarantee that everyone who wants to contribute productively to society is able to earn a decent living in the public sector.

Actually not a bad idea, except for that one qualifier, "everyone who wants to contribute." Because as we see in the next topic, not everybody wants to. And a lot of the stuff we need done is decidedly non-glamorous

Imagine a world where people could contribute the skills that inspire them – teaching, tutoring, urban farming, cleaning up the environment, painting murals – rather than telemarketing or whatever other stupid tasks bosses need done to supplement their millions.

Chances are, if you know enough to be useful teaching or tutoring, or paint a decent mural, you won't be part of this work force. Urban farming and cleaning up the environment won't be all that fulfilling and the "stupid tasks bosses need done," like sweeping floors and cleaning, will still need to be done in the public sector, too. How does "cleaning up the environment" differ from "picking up trash?"

Okay, so what do we do with people who just plain won't work? No money? What if they have kids? Because if just plain not working is an option, well, read the next point.

Social Security for All

Actual human workers are increasingly surplus to requirement – that's one major reason why we have such a big unemployment problem. A universal basic income would address this epidemic at the root and provide everyone, in the words of Duke professor Kathi Weeks, "time to cultivate new needs for pleasures, activities, senses, passions, affects, and socialities that exceed the options of working and saving, producing and accumulating."

Put another way: A universal basic income, combined with a job guarantee and other social programs, could make participation in the labor force truly voluntary, thereby enabling people to get a life.

This takes us to the fringiest areas of progressive economics, the idea that work should be purely voluntary. Nobody says it better than Washington City Paper's inimitable Franklin Schneider. God, how I love this guy. If he didn't exist, I'd have to invent him, except I would never insult leftists by accusing them of thinking like this. If I simply attributed his words to leftists, I'd be accused of creating a straw man. I couldn't begin to parody leftist thinking this brilliantly, except he's for real. Either that or he's the greatest genius troll ever. Anyway, here's "Doing More With Less: In defense of creative loafing" (Washington City Paper, March 7, 2008)

I’ve been on unemployment three times in the past six years. Each time was better than the last, and each time I stayed on until the last cent was exhausted. I didn’t even try to get a job; it was a paid vacation. This is somewhat unusual from what I can tell. There’s a deep vein of antipathy in this country toward collecting checks from the government, especially in precincts that tend to skew rightward. Politicians imply that it’s un-American for an individual to milk the government, all while jacking up corporate welfare for their campaign contributors.

This brand of puritanism has gained traction among the gullible masses, including those I count as friends. .....Most of them stayed on unemployment for only a few scant weeks before getting another shit job they immediately began bitching about. When I asked why, they muttered various reasons like “not wanting to be on welfare” or “wanting to work for a living.” One even fretted about “what her parents would think.” 

Given a choice between getting a check every week for doing nothing and getting a check every week for flushing 40 hours of the prime of their lives down the toilet, they chose the latter. I mean, what kind of self-hating, masochistic Protestant bullshit is that?

Not only do I feel no guilt whatsoever about sucking from the state’s teat, I feel that I’m absolutely entitled to it. First of all, the employer that fired me pays for half of my unemployment, and fuck them.

Second of all, it’s really my money in the first place. See, your employer never pays you what you’re worth—there’s a surplus, some of which goes toward overhead and various other business costs, and the rest of which is kept as profit. (This is what Marx was referring to when he talked about “exploitation of the workers.”) A tiny fraction of this surplus—which, again, has been skimmed off of my labor—is put into a government-mandated account to go toward unemployment checks for fired workers. So yeah, it’s my money. Give it back. And since most people’s lives are so devoid of meaning that they’d rather go directly into another shitty job than be forced to confront the sheer emptiness of their existence, most of that money never even gets distributed.

There's simply not enough room here to analyze this gem in depth. As Gunther Stent noted in "Paradoxes of Progress," when people have their needs satisfied, they find not working to be a very viable option.

Take Back The Land

The most mainstream way of flipping the script is a simple land-value tax. By targeting wealthy real estate owners and their free rides, we can fight inequality and poverty 

Fascinatingly, this is identical to the conservative recipe below, with one teensy-weensy difference. Myerson wants it in addition to existing taxes and Mathews below wants it to replace existing taxes. Myerson is apparently unaware that there are already property taxes, which often enough have the effect of driving people out of their homes when their property values rise because of nearby development.

Make Everything Owned by Everybody

There's a way easier way to collectivize wealth ownership than having to stage uprisings that seize the actual airplanes and warehouses and whatnot: Just buy up their stocks and bonds. When the government does that, it's called a sovereign wealth fund.

Well, gotta give Myerson props for not calling for violent revolution. Buy up all the stocks and bonds. So simple. With what? Tax dollars? Or just print money? Ignoring for the moment the inflationary problem, let's say we buy up $50 trillion of stocks and bonds. Now, "we the people" own $50 trillion in stocks and bonds. In other words, pieces of paper. And the people who sold them now have $50 trillion in cash to buy ... land? buildings? water rights? mineral rights?

The successful sovereign wealth funds have a source of income, like oil. Creating one out of thin air will be an interesting feat.

A Public Bank in Every State

The Bank of North Dakota doesn't make seedy, destined-to-default loans, slice them up inscrutably and sell them on a secondary market. It doesn't play around with incomprehensible derivatives and allow its executives to extract billions of dollars. It just makes loans and works with debtors to pay them off.

No, the public bank in a state with a total population less than a medium-sized city probably won't, at least not now. Care to bet the City Bank of Detroit or the State Bank of Nevada won't? And just wait till politicians sell enough taxpayers on the idea of borrowing from the bank as opposed to raising taxes.

So as counterpoint, we have this piece, written in rebuttal to Myerson's.

Five Conservative Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For

Dylan Mathews, Wonkblog January 7, 2013

End the long-term unemployment crisis

Kevin Hassett, an economist at the American Enterprise Institute who was one of Mitt Romney's lead advisors during his 2012 run, has proposed that the government directly hire the long-term unemployed. This could be implemented  by simply paying businesses to bring on more workers, and then phasing the subsidy out over time.

Mathews tweaks Myerson's idea a bit. Subsidize businesses to hire workers and then phase out the subsidy. Since when has a subsidy ever been phased out? And when the subsidy is phased out, how long before the workers are unemployed again? Hint: look at the cities that have given subsidies to businesses to locate there, only to have the business fold, be sold, or move a few years later.

Tear down the welfare bureaucracy

Food stamps must be spent on food, but what if the family receiving them needs help on rent more? Why should the government tell them how to spend their money, any more than it should tell the rest of us? Worst of all, the current, hugely bureaucratic system props up a class of unionized government workers who can't be fired and who pension costs are bankrupting our states and cities.

He can't resist the talking point that pension costs are bankrupting our states and cities. No they're not. Not paying debts on time is bankrupting our states and cities. If states and cities had funded their pensions all along, they wouldn't be in trouble. They deserve no more sympathy than a homeowner who can't make his mortgage payments because he blew the money in Las Vegas.

Wonderful idea, and right in line with observations by progressives that poverty is simply lack of money. Mathews observes that food stamps give people help with food, but what if the critical need is rent instead? Ahh, but this reform comes with a hook in it. Just look at the complaints from people who see food stamp recipients buying junk food. Or the anger at the revelation that some people figure out how to swap benefits for sex, drugs, or alcohol. (Basic Econ 101: anything of value can be traded for anything else of value. The workarounds to evade restrictions on how the money can be spent add inefficiencies, and guarantee the middlemen will get a hefty chunk, while the welfare recipients will get a lot less buying power, is all.)

I guarantee that if welfare recipients had to go to a warehouse and pick up sacks of rice and beans for food, within hours somebody would be buying them at 75% of their market value, and the money would be spent on other things. Then, when the hunger began to pinch, they'd re-sell the rice and beans at 110% of market value to those same people.

So just imagine we give all welfare recipients unrestricted cash equal to the value of their present benefits. Then someone finds, about a nanosecond later, that some have spent it on booze, drugs or sex, leaving their kids hungry. Cue the calls to abolish welfare entirely in 3, 2, 1 ....  And of course, the kids who aren't being fed properly will have to be assisted, eating up the savings from eliminating the welfare bureaucracy, which will end up being re-established to make sure money intended to aid the poor actually reaches its intended recipients.

"Why should the government tell them how to spend their money, any more than it should tell the rest of us?" Because we have a lot of Puritanical voters and politicians who insist on it.

Eliminate job-killing income, payroll, and corporate taxes

Mathews' plan is a single tax on land, an idea that has been floated around forever and not implemented for reasons that have been obvious forever.

The most obvious reason why we don't have a single tax of any kind is that people would put all their money into non-taxed sectors. Go ahead, tax my land. I'll live in a bungalow on a small lot and make all my money from capital gains, which are not taxed, and when I want elbow room, I'll winter in Aruba. Meanwhile, farmers, with lots of land, get taxed like crazy, and end up selling to developers. The developers in turn subdivide, build houses and pay no taxes at all on the sales. It works that way whatever is your single tax. Tax gold? Fine, I'll put it all in art. Tax stocks? I'll hold gold. 

Another problem is that there's a limit to how much tax you can collect on land. Unlike, say, corporate profits, which keep coming in, land doesn't produce additional value. So the total amount of taxes that can be collected will be so small as to starve the government (gee, I wonder if they thought of that) or force landowners to sell, most likely at depressed prices, leaving land in the hands of a very small number of large landholders (gee, I wonder if they thought of that, too).

The other principal objection here is, what assurance do we have that the money freed up by eliminating income, payroll and corporate taxes will actually go into creating jobs? For that matter, where exactly is the proof that income, payroll and corporate taxes really cost jobs at all, apart from the unsupported claims of people who want to ban these taxes? Give me the computer code. Show me a computer model that accurately tracks the U.S. economy and show that it predicts job gains if we repeal taxes. You want that rigor for evidence of global climate change. Fine, produce an equally rigorous forecast for the economy. Put up or shut up.

Have Social Security invest in the private sector, not the government

This is a wonderful idea. Let's establish a few ground rules:

• The value of Social Security accounts can never decrease.
• No company that receives investments from Social Security may declare bankruptcy, and the FTC can suspend trade in that company's stocks if investors begin to bail.
• No officers of any company that Social Security invests in may declare personal bankruptcy and they are personally liable for all losses.

Help small businesses grow

Mathews nearly repeats Myerson's argument for public banks, even going so far as to praise the same example. This actually makes me suspect it's the lone idea in these pieces that's viable.

Mathews, though, doesn't want the public banks to compete with private banks, but partner with them. So presumably that means not undercutting them on checking and ATM fees, just like banks bitterly resent the paltry competition from credit unions. And if public banks give out loans that private banks won't, isn't that competition?

So if public banks really take off and seriously cut into the business of Bank of America or CitiBank, look for pressure to mount on Congress to rein them in.

There's a Reason the Laws are Complex

Reality is complex. Simple solutions invariably create loopholes you can fly a 747 through.

Carnival Cruise Line and the Problem of Evil

No, fun though it might be, this isn't a cheap shot at Carnival, which had some very embarrassing moments in 2013. Nevertheless, millions of people have had millions of pleasurable moments and gained millions of pounds on Carnival cruises.

One of Carnival's mishaps spawned some of the most bizarre theological discussions ever. A small child drowned in a pool with dozens or people around, none of whom saw him until too late. The account mentioned onlookers praying for him, which in turn prompted a lot of snarky comments on the inefficacy of prayer, plus questions about why God would allow such a thing to happen. 

This wasn't a typhoon slamming into the Philippines, or a shoddy building catching fire or collapsing in some Third World slum. This was as close to a Garden of Eden existence as you can hope to find on this planet. Nobody was in want, nobody was hungry, nobody was cold, nobody lacked shelter, nobody lacked any material need, nobody was afraid, nobody was acting malevolently. Everyone was in a good mood, and probably even people who could be very nasty in everyday life were mellow and minding their own business. And yet a small child drowned in full view of all of them.

The obvious answer is complacency. Nobody expected a drowning, and nobody imagined that someone could drown in such a crowded setting without somebody spotting it in time. Very likely everyone assumed that any children in the pool were being watched by parents as required by posted signs, although this child was unsupervised. If it had been someone going for a 2 A.M. drunken dip, people would no doubt have expressed regret, but nobody would have been especially shocked. But this happened in broad daylight with a crowd surrounding the pool. Probably every onlooker would have tried to assist or at least alerted the crew had they seen it, but nobody was specifically watching for trouble, and so nobody spotted it until too late.  It doesn't help that drowning people don't fit the stereotype of the thrashing, struggling swimmer. Drowning people struggle quietly. They're too busy trying to push their heads above water to thrash, and too busy trying to gulp air to yell.

Once upon a time, people in America felt it was safe to leave doors unlocked, with the inevitable result that other people began taking advantage of easy access to peoples' belongings. During the Sexual Revolution, people enjoyed carefree sex, until herpes and AIDS spoiled the fun, because micro-organisms are very inventive. But criminals and disease are agents of evil, which in an ideal world would not exist. When people ask how a good God can permit evil to happen, what they often actually mean is "why didn't God make the world like Disneyland, or maybe a Carnival cruise?" And the answer is, look what actually did happen on a Carnival cruise.

So let's try to imagine a perfect world where nothing bad can ever happen. There is no disease and no crime, and no harmful animals or plants. But you can still get hurt. You can get hit by lightning and falling rocks, and you can fall off cliffs. What would happen? With no disease, people would probably get very casual about hygiene. What about leaving food out? Would it spoil? Waaah, why would a good God let my food spoil? Build your home on the edge of a cliff or too close to the water? Waaah, why would a good God let my house fall off the cliff? Waaah, why would a good God let my house be flooded? Would God let you float to the ground if you jumped off a cliff? Would God pop food into your mouth if you failed to feed yourself? In Exodus, God fed the Israelites with manna, but they still had to go out and collect it (and they got bored with it, eventually).

A good example of people living in a too-comfortable world (apart from one very big problem) is H. G. Wells' Time Machine. In this future world, humanity has evolved into two races, the surface dwelling, hedonistic Eloi and the subterranean, technological and cannibalistic Morlocks (the one very big problem I mentioned). The good film version (1960) displays starkly just how contemptible the Eloi have become. When a young woman is swept into a stream, the other Eloi make no effort to aid her (Saving Yvette Mimieux? A no-brainer.). When the Time Traveler asks where their fruit comes from, one answers dully "It grows." When he expresses a desire to learn about them, the Eloi asks "Why?" in a tone of voice as if to say "That's the dumbest thing I ever heard of." The Time Traveler is shown a library of books that crumble into dust when touched and berates the Eloi for wasting humanity's legacy.

But we don't need science fiction, because it's happening all around us. The better the world gets, the worse we get. America has the lowest crime rates in decades, yet we see people calling for ever more draconian punishments, and demanding the right to carry guns wherever they go. We periodically go into frenzies over imaginary crime waves. It seems the safer we get the more frightened we get. The more powerful our medicine gets, the more prone we are to complain about the cost and accuse doctors of withholding miraculous medicines. In fact, the more benefits of any kind we get, the more we see people accusing the very providers of exploiting them. Our Eloi have the civility and empathy of Morlocks, and our Morlocks are actually the civilized ones.

But it's an old story. Adam and Eve awoke in a world capable of supplying their every need. Everything was provided to them solely out of benevolence, or grace, as the theologians call it. And in short order they were convinced that God was scheming to withhold something from them that they had a right to (the first conspiracy theory?). "For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." (Genesis 3:5) Up to this point, Adam and Eve have contributed nothing to the world, and yet they think their rights are being infringed. Just like people who know nothing about science are convinced that science is lying to them about the age of the earth, or climate change, or the need for vaccination, and people who know nothing about economics are convinced that the rich or welfare recipients are robbing them blind. 

Ever think the Garden of Eden story is so unfair? I mean, why do we get kicked out of Eden because Adam and Eve screwed up? Well, the good news is, we do get born into the Garden of Eden. And the bad news is, before we can talk, we fall for the snake's pitch and exile ourselves. Think about it. You have no worries, no responsibilities, and everything you need is provided for you. And before you can even crawl, you flunk the first test. The world does not provide you with instant gratification. No matter how diligent your Mom is, she'll be doing something selfish like putting out a grease fire when you want to be fed now, or she'll fail to divine what's making you cry, or, cruelest perfidy of all, maybe she and Dad will be collaborating on another sibling. 

A little later on, when you develop some motor control, the snake slithers back and springs a second test on you. You want a toy. There's one across the room, and another one much closer in the hands of another toddler. What to do? The easy thing, of course, grab the toy away from the other child. And when we develop language skills, we do exactly what Adam and Eve did in the Genesis story. When confronted with wrongdoing, we lie, excuse ourselves, and accuse others. Game, set, match. Exit through the gate past the angel with the flaming sword, please. We don't have a lovely parting gift for you. 

And there's one final thing we do: we blame reality for our problems. My parents are to blame for sending me to my room. My Teacher is to blame because I failed. That stupid cop went and gave me a ticket. The System is to blame for sending me to prison. Care to bet Adam and Eve spent a lot of time complaining that God was such a tyrant? I mean, what's one lousy piece of fruit anyway?

There is, of course, a solution. It would require that human nature itself change so that we all exercise good judgement. We don't build houses in dangerous places. We accept that storms are a necessary force for flushing wastes and replenishing shorelines and wetlands, and we build suitably. We accept that earthquakes and volcanoes are part of the price for having the mountains that make the world beautiful and we exercise prudence. In short, there is no Original Sin.

It's pretty clear that the kind of world many of the "Why would a good God ...?" people envision would end up with God intervening constantly to save people from the consequences of their laziness and carelessness. And since I've seen comments from people who more or less explicitly assert that "compassion" means not allowing consequences of any kind, that's no exaggeration. God would effectively become a concierge and a janitor. The Garden of Eden on a cruise ship is sustained by lots of people, roughly one for every three passengers, working all the time, and enjoying a much less than Eden existence themselves. 

Why didn't God make the world like a Carnival cruise?" Because, look what actually did happen on a Carnival cruise.

The Problem With Pacifism

The Illusion of Pacifism

The problem with pacifism is not that it's mistaken or impractical (although it is), nor that it's an illusion indulged in by people whose own safety is protected by non-pacifists (although it is), nor that non-violence has probably caused more loss of life and suffering than it has prevented (although it has) nor even that the record of pacifists in supporting brutal, corrupt and repressive regimes is at least as bad as that of the CIA (although it is). The problem with pacifism is simply that it does not exist.

What is Non-Violence?

• Obviously, committing violence yourself is not non-violence!
• Hiring or encouraging others to commit violence for you also obviously cannot be termed non-violence. This includes relying on the legal system, which ultimately rests on the use of force as a last resort.
• Goading your opposition beyond endurance to the point where they respond violently is non-violence only in the most hypocritical, specious sense.
• So is obstructing the activities of others so much that they must resort to force to end the obstruction. The sit-ins of the 1960's were not non-violent in any meaningful sense.
• Putting people in the position where they either have to yield to your demands or resort to violence to stop you is emphatically not non-violence. 
• Nor is provoking a violent response in the hope of getting an over-reaction that will discredit the opposition and gain sympathy for your side.

The last four items on the list are calculated, manipulative, and deceptive practices. Neither Gandhi, nor Martin Luther King, nor the anti-war protestors of the 1960's were non-violent. They were skilled orchestrators of violence by others. The fact that their opponents were usually stupid enough to oblige them doesn't make the tactics any less manipulative or deceptive; in fact, often the response to an initially restrained opposition was an escalation of confrontation in order to cross the threshold into violence.

• Can you really claim to be non-violent if you engage in activities that you can reliably predict will end in violence?
• Can you really claim to be non-violent if you threaten someone else's position to the point where they feel they must resort to violence to protect their interests? Civil disobedience is a form of violence.
• There is no such thing as non-violent crime. 

Certainly nobody who uses drugs can claim to be non-violent. Yes, I know all about the theory that our war on drugs is really responsible for the violence, and that if we simply legalized drugs the problem would go bye-bye. But in the world as it is, drugs are banned and traffickers are violent, and if you do business with them you are supporting their violence. Could there be anything more absurd than a vegetarian who won't eat meat because she opposes harming animals, while at the same time using drugs and pretending that she's not contributing to violence?

Forms of Pseudo-pacifism

The only truly non-violent tactic, in the sense that it neither commits nor provokes violence, is complete non-resistance and submission to the demands of the power elite. Even something as benign as education or public health, if it threatened someone else to the point of violent action, would be forbidden. Women would have to submit meekly to rape rather than struggle to resist. And no "pacifist" I have ever heard of advocates that. Generally, what passes for "non-violence" or "pacifism" is one of the following:

• Relying on the law. This is not non-violence because if all other measures fail, the legal system will use force to achieve its ends. That's why we speak of enforcing the law.
• Maintaining a facade of pacifism while provoking the opposition to violence, or creating an intolerable obstruction that can only be removed by force, or threatening their position to the point where they feel they have to resort to violence to protect their interests. This position, as already noted, is hypocritical, manipulative, and deceptive.
• Selective pacifism: condemning U.S. military action but not violent actions against the U.S. If you take the position that someone has a cause for waging just war against the U.S., fine. Just don't pretend it's pacifism. There's no difference between a cop clubbing an anti-war protestor in 1965 and clubbing an anti-abortion protestor in 2000. Argue that one was not justified and the other is, if you will, but don't pretend that one instance is violence and the other isn't. Even weirder are the pacifists who condemn the international community for not intervening in places like Rwanda. And do what? Hold anger management sessions for the Hutu mobs? No, intervention would surely have meant military violence.
• Compensatory pacifism: you oppressed us for a while, now we get to oppress you. A perfect example is the statement by Mari Matsuda when the University of Hawaii was trying to formulate a policy against hate speech: "Hateful verbal attacks upon dominant group members by victims is permissible." While Idi Amin was slaughtering thousands in Uganda in the early 1970's, some activists in America argued that it was "racist" to condemn him, because Africans had been oppressed by colonialism and now we had no right to criticize.

I don't have any problem with the use of violence in self-defense, or for taking down an oppressive regime, or for subduing criminals or protecting the weak. And the fact that somebody is so insecure that they resort to violence when confronted by mere demonstrations is often (not always) a pretty good idea who ranks where on the moral scale. But then again, I never pretended to be a pacifist. What I have a problem with is advocating, instigating, or indirectly causing violence while pretending to be non-violent.

What Would Jesus Do?

"The search for the historical Jesus" is generally a search for ways to make Jesus say the things we think he ought to have said if he'd possessed our wisdom. The historical reality is that Jesus lived in a society under military occupation by a foreign empire, and one swarming with insurgent groups at that. If Jesus had ever meant to condemn imperialism or endorse "liberation theology" or "wars of national liberation," he had one of the most perfect settings in all history to do so. Not only did he not do so, but Roman soldiers are just about the only group in the New Testament who are given complimentary treatment. When a group of soldiers came to John the Baptist asking what they needed to do to be saved, he told them not to abuse their power. He didn't even remotely suggest they should quit the army.

It gets worse. Jesus was put to death on trumped up charges. What a perfect opportunity to condemn capital punishment. Yet, while he and two criminals were dying, one of the criminals chided the other one, saying that they were only getting what they deserved. What a perfect place to say that nobody deserves to die at the hands of the state, that the criminals are really victims of unequal wealth, lack of empowerment, and poor self esteem. Jesus, apparently failing completely to understand what was at stake, said nothing. And his followers, while they condemned the execution of Jesus and some of his followers, always did so on the sophistic grounds that they were innocent and morally in the right. Not once did they challenge the right of the state to take the life of genuine criminals.

Attempts to equate Christianity and pacifism simply don't stand scrutiny. Christianity does not teach that life is sacred. Jesus and his followers ate animal products. Christianity doesn't even teach that human life is sacred. Christ told his followers not to fear those who merely destroyed the body, and said that he who loved his life would lose it.

Thou Shalt not Murder

But what about "Thou shalt not kill?" Notice that it's "Thou shalt not kill," but David slew Goliath? Why two different words?

Because the original meaning of kill was more nearly that of murder, whereas slay meant homicide in general. Although there's some overlap in usage in the Bible, generally actions like killing in battle are translated with slay. The distinction was clear in the 1600's when the King James Bible was published. It's only when we became intellectually sloppy that we blurred the distinction between the two words.

This is a pons asinorum (bridge of asses) - an initial first step that has to be made before any productive discussion can begin. People who trot out "thou shalt not kill" as a basis for pacifism are revealing only their illiteracy.

The Cycle of Violence

Before we go any further, take your mouse and put the cursor on the bold lettering above.
Now, notice what you did. In order to move the mouse, you had to exert force, and very precise and gentle force at that. You didn't rip the mouse cord out of the computer, or crush the mouse in your grip, or push so hard on it that you mashed the trackball flat. The notion that force inexorably spirals out of control is precisely that trivially easy to refute.

Now it's probably true that resorting to unnecessary violence may very well lead to retaliation. So restraint in dealing with confrontations is usually a good idea. But all the talk about "ending the cycle of violence" fails to address the key question what do we do about people who have already turned to violence as their tactic of choice? As a problem-solving tool, "violence first" has a couple of things going for it:

• It's simple
• It gets results, especially after word gets around that you don't hesitate to use violence
• It's gratifying. You get to vent pent-up rage, feel dominance over others, maybe even a sexual turn-on

Most pacifists react to this issue by simply pretending that it doesn't exist, that people either never deliberately choose violence, that violence always stems from earlier violence, poverty, or injustice, or that if people do deliberately choose violence, it's in rare cases that are not really of great importance. But history abounds with examples of people who have deliberately chosen violence. The ease with which people from non-violent backgrounds have been induced to commit atrocities in wartime shows how easy it can be for the violent to recruit assistants, and for the gratification factor to take hold. Thus, a single individual who opts for violence because he enjoys domination may succeed in recruiting many others less bold than he is. How do we respond to people who have opted for violence? Appeasement merely reinforces the conviction that violence gets results. Moreover, it provides gratification by reinforcing the feeling of dominance. When confronting people who have already opted for violence, non-violence has a very good chance of perpetuating the cycle of violence. Retaliatory force, on the other hand, makes the results of violence a lot less simple, a lot less effective in getting results, and a lot less gratifying.

Furthermore, violence is only the far end of the spectrum of force. Every screaming brat who throws a temper tantrum in public is testimony to the fact that children do not need to be taught the use of force. And regardless how loving, benevolent and diligent a parent is in meeting and supplying the child's needs, every child sooner or later runs into the fact that other people, much less the physical universe, will not. Sooner or later every human being has to face the fact that some desires will not be gratified.

Throwing the First Punch

Pacifists are vociferous in denouncing "aggression." I can think of a number of cases where "aggression" either shortened a war or ended genocide. None involve the United States, by the way.

• In 1971, civil war broke out in Pakistan, which was then made up of two ethnically and geographically separate areas. A million people died and ten million fled into India. Faced with an overwhelming refugee crisis, India invaded East Pakistan, which became independent as Bangladesh.
• Madman Idi Amin brutalized Uganda for eight years, killing perhaps 300,000 people, before Tanzanian troops and Ugandan rebels invaded and expelled him in 1979. It should have happened much sooner.
• The Khmer Rouge regime of Cambodia killed at least a million people before being driven from power by a Vietnamese invasion in 1979. Most of the American pacifists who opposed the Vietnam War so loudly remained strangely silent while the Khmer Rouge atrocities were being committed (Joan Baez being the one honorable exception). But the U.S. government, still smarting from its loss in Vietnam, shamefully condemned the Vietnamese.
• While Idi Amin was grabbing headlines in Africa, Jean-Bedel Bokassa held power in the Central African Republic, which he renamed the Central African Empire. He killed perhaps 100,000 people. In 1979, France engineered a coup that overthrew Bokassa. Very slick and oh so French. They took advantage of Bokassa traveling abroad to fly in a new president and a few battalions of Foreign Legionnaires, and that was that. Napoleon, if you're looking down, you should be proud.

Not only is it morally permissible to commit aggression, sometimes it's morally obligatory.

So What's Your Plan?

When the Persian Gulf War broke out, critics of the war complained that we had not given diplomacy enough time to do the job. Years later, after a decade of economic sanctions had reduced Iraq to utter misery, many of the same people were complaining that sanctions should be ended because they have failed and because they are causing great suffering.

So what, exactly, was diplomacy supposed to accomplish in 1991? The only actions we can take against a country from outside are to blockade it. If blockade has not been effective after ten years, and if a blockade is considered morally objectionable if it causes human suffering, then exactly what measures were we supposed to take against Iraq?

I suggest that pacifists have a moral and intellectual obligation to answer the following questions:

• What specific measures will lead to a peaceful solution?
• What evidence do you have that these measures will work?
• What criteria will we use to decide if the pacifist approach has failed?

For example, saying "The United States should have relied more on diplomacy to capture Osama bin Laden" doesn't cut it. What specific diplomatic approaches should we have tried? What evidence is there that they would have worked? How long should we persist before concluding that they don't work? Are there other criteria (credible evidence of bin Laden acquiring nuclear weapons, for example) that would justify immediate action?

Why Did I Even Get Out of Bed?

Sometimes you find something written by a more illustrious writer that says it first and so perfectly, anything else is almost superfluous. Here is an excerpt from George Orwell's Notes on Nationalism (May 1945). Note: Orwell uses the term "nationalism" as a synonym for any fervently held ideology, whether attached to a nation or not. This is simply a brilliant piece of work, not just on pacifism but all forms of extreme belief.

The majority of pacifists either belong to obscure religious sects or are simply humanitarians who object to the taking of life and prefer not to follow their thoughts beyond that point. But there is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defense of western countries. The Russians, unlike the British, are not blamed for defending themselves by warlike means, and indeed all pacifist propaganda of this type avoids mention of Russia or China. It is not claimed, again, that the Indians should abjure violence in their struggle against the British. ...

All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty....

If one harbours anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible. Here are just a few examples. I list below five types of nationalist, and against each I append a fact which it is impossible for that type of nationalist to accept, even in his secret thoughts...

PACIFIST. Those who "abjure" violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf. ......

Too Dumb to Run a Lemonade Stand

According to National Review Online, The Corner, April 29, 2010, this e-mail is made the rounds on Wall Street in the early days of the Great Recession.

We are Wall Street. It's our job to make money. Whether it's a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn't matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn't hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone's 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I've never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.

Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.

Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you're only going to hurt yourselves. What's going to happen when we can't find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We're going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We're used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don't take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don't demand a union. We don't retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we'll eat that.

For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We're going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I'll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.

So now that we're going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we're going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren't going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We're going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.

The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it's really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.

We aren't dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply…will he? and will they?

Guess what, dude, you are not going to take anybody's job, because you don't have any useful skills. You push paper, and one particular kind of paper at that. I sided my house, designed and built a bay window, and converted a bathroom into a laundry room, doing all the plumbing and wiring myself. Can you even drive a nail without hurting yourself? Can you use a circular saw and come away with ten fingers? Can you change oil or spark plugs or a muffler? Can you use a soldering iron? Can you even write your own Excel spreadsheets? I can even code HTML, a frequent necessity because of the inept way Blogger writes it.

What kinds of stuff do you trade? Biotech? Great, tell me what a retrovirus is, and what a porphyrin is. You're international? Wunderbar. How many foreign languages do you speak? Aerospace? Tell me how they get a geosynchronous satellite into orbit. Information technology? What's the difference between RAM and ROM? A virus and a worm? What are VGA, EGA and RGB? Oil? Draw me a sketch of a saturated hydrocarbon. Draw a cross-section of a salt dome. What are migrated and unmigrated seismic sections? Defense? Pleased to meet you. What branch did you serve in? What's the difference between an Army first lieutenant and one in the Navy?

Here's a plan: you don't get to enroll in an MBA program - anywhere - until you have a professional degree or equivalent certification (say, master machinist) in a real profession, and five years' on the job experience. And to the business people who did it this way, it hardly needs explaining. (As of this writing, BP is taking hard hits over the Deepwater Horizon disaster, but at least the CEO, Tony Hayward, started off as a geologist and worked his way up through exploration and production. He's not one of those airheads who studied "management" in a vacuum, as if managing a drug company was the same as managing an automobile plant.)

You're not dinosaurs, all right. Dinosaurs knew how to survive in the wild. You're more like the dodo: flightless, sluggish, and perfectly adapted to its isolated and safe little island - until the people, cats, dogs, pigs and rats came ashore. Free rides on your backs? No, you got free rides on our backs. Your lavish income was precisely analogous to a church usher grabbing a pocket full of donations as payment for passing the collection plate, or maybe a refinery worker siphoning off a tanker full of gas to sell on the side simply because he has access to the valves. Just being in the money stream doesn't entitle you to any of it.

You're "more vicious" than dinosaurs? Oooh, can I feel your muscles, you big strong man, you? Maybe in your new found free time you can read Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff," where he contrasts the hollow business conceit of "dog eat dog" with the 25 per cent career fatality rate among military jet pilots. That's not combat. That's just flying. Fighter pilots take risks. Soldiers, cops, and firemen take risks. In a typical year about 1200 construction workers, 500 truckers, 300 farm workers and 150 police die on the job. How often does someone on Wall Street die on the job?

$85K with no upside is harsh? Do you have any idea how insulated from reality you are? Surf the want ads and see how many jobs there are at $85K a year. Especially entry level and no experience, which will be you if you try to make a radical career shift. Sure, when the market was performing well, everyone was happy. You got big bonuses, Joe Shlabotnik on the assembly line got a small raise and a hike in his IRA. Then the market tanks. Joe Shlabotnik loses his job, his house, his retirement and you, in return, are willing to settle for what - a slightly smaller bonus this year? Instead, you are shocked to get no bonus and a salary cap. You're taking a hit only remotely comparable to his; after all, you still have a job, a home, and savings, and let's not forget a health plan, and it's all so - (racking sobs) - unfair. After all that blather about the risks of the marketplace, you actually experience the real results of risk, and you're shocked. You experience the tiniest, softest touch of karma and you claim a martyr's crown. 

"Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping?" Absolutely. You are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping. First of all, you don't have any practical skills. I hope you're not one of the people I have actually met who think you can teach third graders the way you teach adults. Second, you're not going to leave Wall Street because you like being where the action is. You'll still get a thrill out of steering millions of dollars around even if your skim is a lot less. You will still enjoy the view from your top floor office window. You will still enjoy having flunkies cower before you and having affairs with the secretaries. And this is why John Galt will never, in a million years, move to Galt's Gulch. You'll trade all that to landscape in Altoona or teach school in North Platte? And be at the bottom of the totem pole? With only your actual skills and attractiveness to rely on? In the words of the inimitable Nelson Muntz: "HAH-ha!"

And don't forger Mrs. Vicious. Do you recall the story of the businessman in London a couple of years back who asked his trophy wife at a party whether she'd still love him without his money? She said "####, no!" and everyone had a good laugh. Turns out she wasn't kidding. The economy went south and so did she. Maybe your marriage is true love. But before you go John Galt, better make sure your Significant Other can (will) make the transition from society in New York to Rotary luncheons in Boise.

And there's another reason. John Galt has a hundred people waiting to take over his job, and so do you. And every one of them can do it just as well as you can. You want to talk about unions? You're as tightly unionized as anybody. You restrict access to your career every bit as much as any other union, and you are no more in short supply than they would be if the artificial barriers were removed. Nobody can walk in off the street and challenge you for your job any more than you will be able to walk in off the street and challenge someone else for their job. Where you are now, it's who you know as much as what you know. Out here, it's what you know. And you don't know jack.

Cold Case: Lessons from a Long-Ago Murder

A Fairy Tale?

Once upon a time there was an Olympic athlete with a gold medal, who had gone on to become an eminent professional and respected family man. Unfortunately, he had a secret life. He had a mistress, and one night he killed her. The police soon arrested him, and he was put on trial for murder. His Olympic medal, professional degrees, and community stature counted for nothing. He was found guilty and put to death.

Whoa, many people would say, I'm glad you began that story with "Once upon a time," because it's a fairy tale. Someone of that stature could find a phalanx of lawyers to defeat the charges or bargain them down to something lesser. Even if he were by some wild chance found guilty and sentenced to death, the appeals would drag on interminably. The press and his supporters would wage a relentless battle to raise doubt about his guilt. Eventually some judge would be persuaded, or the governor would cave in to popular sentiment, and he would have the sentence commuted. In a few years, when the hubbub had died down, he would go free. Because prominent people just aren't put to death.

Reality

Except the incident really happened, exactly as described, in 1929. The Olympian was James Howard Snook, who won a gold medal for pistol marksmanship in the 1920 Games in Antwerp, Belgium. Admittedly the Olympics in 1920 didn't command the celebrity they do now, and pistol marksmanship is not on the same plane as the high jump or decathlon. Nevertheless, Snook was an acclaimed Olympian. By 1929, he had a wife and child, and was head of the Department of Veterinary Medicine at Ohio State University. He had also been carrying on an affair with a young medical student, Theora Hix, for three years. On June 13, 1929, during an argument, Snook bludgeoned her and cut her throat. Her body was found the next day. Snook was soon identified as the prime suspect, put on trial in July and found guilty on August 14. After exhausting his appeals all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, he was executed in the electric chair on February 28, 1930. (Snook is the only Olympic medalist ever executed for a crime.)

Despite Snook's intelligence, education and professional experience, this was a singularly inept crime, worthy of inclusion in any "dumbest criminals" compilation. Snook killed his lover and left her body in a place he was known to visit (a firing range where he practiced his marksmanship). He managed to get Hix' blood on his clothes and in his car, and he kept the murder weapons. And although he had medical training, plus access to a laboratory and a wide array of chemicals, he was unable to clean the weapons, a knife and ball peen hammer, well enough to eliminate all traces of blood, even by the standards of 1929 forensics.

The trial was sensational, complete with drugs and kinky sex (by 1929 standards). Snook supplied the drugs, to which he had ready access, and which were much less regulated than they are now, and Hix supplied the kinky. (One can just picture Snook's poor wife hearing the details in court and wishing she could get the electric chair right then and there.) During the trial, Snook claimed that Hix had threatened to harm his family. Prosecutors argued premeditation, pointing to the unlikely opportune availability of a ball peen hammer in Snook's car. The jury, judge, and apellate courts agreed.

I first learned of this case in 1994, after the arrest of O. J. Simpson, when it appeared in a background story on other sports figures who had been charged with crimes. (I regretted not saving the article at the time, although when I finally decided to write this piece, I located the details on line in seconds. Such is the growth of electronic technology.) As the O. J. drama unfolded (complete with jugglers and dancing bears in the streets, as one Doonesbury strip put it) my mind kept returning to that long ago murder. How was it that in 1930, in a time many would consider a judicial Dark Age, an Olympic gold medal and a prominent professional position were unable to save a murderer from the electric chair? On the other hand, in 1994, after decades of legislation and court decisions aimed at reducing inequality in the judicial system, wealth, prominence, and the money to hire a team of lawyers were instrumental in getting a murderer acquitted.

Two conclusions immediately leap out in comparing the Snook and O. J. cases:

1. All the procedural complexities added to the legal system since 1930 have made the system less fair and equal, not more. The inequality is not so much due to unfairness directed at less wealthy defendants, as it is the creation of innumerable loopholes that wealthy defendants can exploit.
2. The increased injustice came about not in spite of the court reforms of recent decades, but precisely because of them. The most nearly infallible recipe for injustice is complexity. The more complex the appeals process becomes, the more costly it becomes to exploit judicial safeguards. Wealthy defendants can afford the lawyers. Public defenders and attorneys working pro bono for less affluent clients are more heavily burdened. And of course, if you are too affluent to qualify for public assistance and too poor to hire attorneys out of petty cash, you will escape punishment only in the sense of not going to prison. Financially you will be as bad off as anyone behind bars.

Most commentators on this case point out that the case would be handled differently now, as indeed it would. Snook was interrogated for nineteen hours straight, without a lawyer, and was slapped a couple of times by the interrogating detective. And the appeals process was very abbreviated by today’s standards. On the other hand, what substantive issues would a lengthier appeals process have addressed? Snook was clearly not of diminished capacity and his guilt was beyond doubt. The only issue of substance was whether the killing was premeditated. Snook claimed that Hix had become increasingly jealous of his family obligations and had threatened him and his family. Nevertheless, by his own account, Snook was not in imminent danger at the time he struck Hix, and the fact that he had a weapon close at hand tipped the balance against him.

If the police had merely been intent on closing the books quickly, they had a much easier target to go after. Hix had another lover while she was having her affair with Snook, and he was the first suspect picked up. He was able to convince the police that he and Hix had ended their relationship a year earlier and that he was engaged to someone else. So the police passed up the chance to wrap up the case easily, released a suspect of low socioeconomic class, presumably someone without the means to mount a vigorous defense, and arrested the respected professional Snook instead. The commonplace wisdom that socioeconomic status determines a defendant’s fate is turned completely on its head in this case.

From Hix’ murder to Snook’s execution was 260 days. Three years later, Giuseppe Zangara would shoot Mayor Anton Cermak of Chicago in a botched attempt to assassinate Franklin D. Roosevelt. Zangara defiantly boasted of the shooting in court and was sentenced to 80 years in prison. However, when Cermak later died, Zangara was charged with murder. Again he defiantly pled guilty. Only 33 days elapsed between the shooting and Zangara’s execution and only 14 days since the murder conviction. Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated President William McKinley in 1901, was executed 53 days after the shooting. In 1921, psychologist Lloyd Vernon Briggs examined the case and concluded that Czolgosz had been mentally ill and possibly not legally responsible. Charles J. Guiteau, assassin of President James Garfield in 1881, was executed just 363 days after the shooting. This trial was one of the first high profile trials where the insanity defense was invoked. Garfield did not die for eleven weeks after the shooting, a victim of medical malpractice as much as the bullet, and Guiteau was convicted on January 25, 1882, 156 days before being executed.

There is a good chance that all three political assassins would have been found insane if tried today. Guiteau in particular was delusional about his popularity after the assassination, and believed the public regarded him as a hero. Certainly all would have had appeals filed on their behalf. But even counting the issue of insanity, all of the three assassination cases were straightforward enough to be resolved in a single round of appeals, lasting at most a year. Certainly none were complex enough to require millions of dollars to decide.

In contrast, it took 12 years to decide the case of Charles Rodman Campbell. In 1974, Campbell raped a woman and served six years for the crime. In 1982, while on work release, he killed the woman, her daughter, and a neighbor in retaliation for testifying against him. He was finally executed in 1994, only after the State of Washington had appealed to the Supreme Court in an effort to get a final decision on the constitutionality of the case. It took twelve years to resolve a case where there was never the slightest doubt of the defendant's guilt.

How did we get from the simplicity of 1929 to the complexity of today? The 1931-1937 Scottsboro case was a contributing factor. Nine black youths were accused of rape on flimsy grounds and sentenced to death after cursory assembly-line trials with only the most meager representation. Two separate hearings by the Supreme Court laid down important due process safeguards, yet it seems likely that justice would have been far better served if the Court had simply overturned the verdicts on the grounds of insufficient, flimsy, and contradictory evidence, not to mention blatant judicial prejudice. Yet the Federal courts played procedural patty-cake with Alabama's courts, effectively declaring themselves impotent against Jim Crow sham trials.

Another significant episode was Caryl Chessman's unsuccessful twelve year (1948-1960) battle to avoid execution for rape and kidnapping in California. This case became a rallying point for opponents of capital punishment, who were further swayed by Chessman's articulate writings. It laid down the precedent later observed in the cases of Eldridge Cleaver, Edgar Smith and Jack Henry Abbott that articulate writing somehow atones for heinous crimes. It also created a precedent for defense attorneys filing interminable piecemeal appeals in an effort to wear down the opposition or slip an overturned verdict through the cracks.

Due process is result, not procedure. A trial that results in punishment of an innocent person is not a fair trial, despite Justice Scalia's scandalous (and impeachable) recent opinion that innocence is not a Constitutional bar to imprisonment. However, a trial that results in the release of a guilty person is likewise not a fair trial. If the Scottsboro Trials were a miscarriage of justice, so were the acquittal of O.J. Simpson and the overturn of the convictions of the Chicago Seven.

Courts are understandably reluctant to second guess lower courts' readings of the facts. There are myriad important things in court that never make it into the transcript, such as the fact that a defendant has an arrogant smirk or a prosecution witness stammers and sweats when cross examined. And yet innocent defendants remain jailed while courts bat procedural matters around instead of declaring that a prosecutor's case is simply worthless on its face, or declaring that an appeal is pointless because the appellant is patently guilty. The waste of resources is huge. It typically costs millions of dollars to deal with a capital case, even if the defendant is palpably guilty. These are resources of money and docket time that could be spent on reviewing the cases of genuinely innocent victims of miscarriages of justice.

It seems to me that we need at least three Constitutional amendments:

• No person shall be punished for a crime except on conclusive evidence of guilt.
• Appeals (criminal and civil) may only be based on a reasonable showing of factual error in the original verdict.
• No procedural issue shall ever take precedence over issues of fact.

What about all the procedural safeguards created by the courts? There is still plenty of room for those; indeed, these changes will strengthen them. A prosecutor who faces having his conviction dismissed rather than merely being overturned will be a lot more careful about observing procedural safeguards that really count. If his case is dismissed with prejudice because he withheld exculpatory evidence, that will hurt a lot more than the slap on the wrist of having a verdict returned for retrial. Even better would simply be tossing the prosecutor in jail for contempt of court for wasting judicial resources. If Southern courts had routinely had guilty verdicts against black defendants thrown out as worthless because they were unsupported by the facts, or because the judge was blatantly prejudiced, we might not have had to wait so long for civil rights progress.

The Six Most Economically and Mathematically Illiterate Comments on Social Security

"There's Nothing in the Social Security Fund but IOU's"

Guess what? Unless you have a petroleum tank or grain silo in your back yard, all your wealth is IOU's. Your bank account is bytes in a computer and scribbles on paper. Your stocks and bonds are pieces of paper. Just ask anyone who owned Enron. You have gold or platinum? Good for you. Do you actually have physical ownership? If not, all you have is a promise to deliver your gold. Even if you have gold, it has value only because you can probably count on someone to take it in exchange for what you want. But nobody is going to take gold for the last seat on a lifeboat or the last can of beans in town.

"There are Only Two Workers for Every Recipient"

As of August, 2013, there were 62.7 million Social Security recipients. They received an average monthly benefit of about $1200 per month ($14,000 per year), according to the Monthly Statistical Snapshot of the Social Security Administration. According to the Department of Labor, the employed work force totaled 144 million people, and according to the Census Bureau, the median personal income was about $50,000 a year.

So we have 2.3 workers for every Social Security recipient, but they're earning 3.5 times as much. So each Social Security recipient is equivalent to about one third of a worker, and there are 2.2 times as many workers as recipients. The actual income ratio is 2.2 x 3.5 = 7.6 to one. That is, wages total 7.6 times the amount being paid out in Social Security benefits.

"My Grampaw has Gotten 400% of what he paid in!"

So fulminated one angry millennial on line.

Ever hear of double-digit inflation? We had it for several years in the 1970's. The consumer price index now is about six times what it was in 1970. Meaning a dollar paid in to Social Security in 1970 would have to be repaid by $6 now. So yes, Grampaw probably did get 400% back in face value dollars. In actual purchasing power, he probably broke even.

"I'll Never See a Penny of Social Security"

That's entirely up to you.

Just be aware that "entitlement reform" is code for "I'm going to take everything you paid in to Social Security and use it to reduce my taxes.

So go right ahead and vote for politicians who want to rob Social Security. Your call.

"It's A Ponzi Scheme"

A Ponzi scheme promises investors unreasonable growth, which is achieved in the short run by luring new investors in to cover shortfalls.

If you borrow money from people, promising to pay it back when you get a job, and you do, that's not a Ponzi scheme, even though you're promising to pay in the future with money you don't yet have.

If you promise people to double their money in six months, and just take it and run, that's not a Ponzi Scheme. Stealing, yes, but not a Ponzi Scheme.

If you promise people to double their money in six months, and make a risky investment that could possibly have done it but fails, that's bad judgement. It may get you a whopping civil suit or even prison time, but it's not really a Ponzi scheme.

In a real Ponzi Scheme, you'd promise people to double their money in six months. (More than likely, you'd pose as a shareholder yourself to rake in the payoff). You pay them back a bit each month, using their own money to do it. They are impressed and encourage others. Now you have real money to play with. So you pay off the original suck investors, who are very happy. They tell their friends, and may re-invest their own money, and all goes smoothly, until the growth stops. You continue to make payouts until the money runs out, and then you run.

The important element in a Ponzi scheme is not hoping to pay off debt with future income, which is every debt ever incurred. And it's not even promising future growth. That's called "investment." It's the promise of unending growth, and even that's not a Ponzi scheme as long as you can deliver, and alert investors that the ride is about to end. No, a Ponzi scheme promises unending growth and then uses trickery to prevent investors from seeing the crash until too late. If Bernie Madoff had just said, "Sorry, folks, but the fund isn't doing well, and returns will be down" he'd have stayed out of trouble.

Social Security is not a Ponzi Scheme. At the beginning, it could pay out more than recipients paid in, because the pool of contributors was increasing. That ended 60 years ago. Right now there's a bottleneck because Boomers are retiring, but that can be fixed by controlling the growth of benefits and by raising the cap on contributions. If we make those reforms we can ride out the Boomer wave. There's no reason Social Security can't function indefinitely.

But is it fair to hit the rich with the costs of Social Security? Well, one reason they're rich is that their corporations stopped providing defined benefit plans, and they don't pay workers enough to save enough on their own. So, yeah, it's fair.

One final point. President Roosevelt wanted the Social Security fund to be prepaid, but conservatives opposed allowing the Government to accumulate such a large surplus.

"We have $100 Skazillion in Unfunded Obligations"

You are earning the median income of $50,000 a year and you have a mortgage of $250,000. Panic! You have $250,000 in unfunded obligations! That's five times your annual income!

Except, of course, you can reasonably count on earning a salary to meet future payments. And you will probably be able to sell the house, and maybe your salary and the value of the house will go up. 

According to "Cox and Archer: Why $16 Trillion Only Hints at the True U.S. Debt" (Wall Street Journal, November 28, 2012), the total value of unfunded liabilities in the U.S. is about $87 trillion, 5.5 times GDP. But if we don't flinch at our mortgage holder above owing five times his annual income, what's to panic about here?

So say we have 150 million workers. That $87 trillion in obligations comes to $580,000 each. But nobody is going to get a $580,000 lump sum. That will be paid out in Social Security and Medicare benefits. Those unfunded liabilities include pensions and social security payments to be paid out over maybe 25 years. Over 25 years, that $580,000 comes to $23,200 a year.

The present U.S. GDP is about $16 trillion, so the total GDP over 25 years will be 400 trillion dollars. Government obligations of $87 trillion total 21 per cent of total GDP over 25 years. But wait! yells the TV pitchman, there's more! Cox and Archer claim the obligation is growing at $8 trillion a year. Let's tack that on, a total of $120 trillion, to give a grand total of $207 trillion. That's half the total GDP over 25 years, not 5.5 times.

Well, hey, why don't we just extrapolate out till the earth gets too hot for life, 1.5 billion years from now? Our total unfunded liabilities over that span are 8 trillion times 1.5 billion = 12 sextillion dollars. That's 750 million times our GDP! We're doo-o-o-oomed. On the other hand, the people at the end are screwed anyhow (I was going to say "hosed," but they'd probably welcome that) so we can just stick them with the tab.

The Cosmic Filter

Where Is Everybody?

A long-standing paradox in astronomy is sometimes called the Fermi Paradox after the famous physicist Enrico Fermi, who is the first person known to have posed it. If extraterrestrial civilizations exist, where are they? Anything that grows exponentially quickly gets very large, very fast. Something that doubles ten times is a thousand times as large. Actually 1024 times. The fortunate accident that a thousand is a round number in decimal, which humans use, and very close in binary, which computers use, is why we speak in terms of mega-, giga- and terabytes. (Nothing comes in kilobytes any more except tweets.)

So twenty doublings gets you to a million, thirty gets you to a billion, and nine more gets you to half a trillion. There are about 400 billion stars in our galaxy. So it would only take 39 doublings of a star-faring civilization to colonize every star in our galaxy. If it takes ten thousand years for a colony to take root and develop its own interstellar capability, that would be 390,000 years. That's an eye-blink in cosmic terms. So why isn't there massive evidence for interstellar societies? Or if they existed in the past and went extinct, why don't we see evidence of them? Why isn't there a global layer of extraterrestrial residue in the Ordovician or Jurassic?

Maybe we're first, or all alone (the same thing). That seems hard to believe given the rapidly mounting evidence that all (or nearly all) stars have planets. It also seems like special pleading. Scientists really don't like assuming we occupy a privileged place - it's proven false so many times in the past. Others object that we shouldn't try to read human psychology into aliens. Maybe they don't expand exponentially, or have a drive to explore. That's special pleading in reverse. It amounts to assuming we're uniquely aggressive or inquisitive, or so unusual that other races that develop science won't think anything like us.

Maybe there's some obstacle. Maybe civilizations don't stay viable for very long, or there's a technical obstacle too great to overcome. Or maybe they're out there, but keeping a low profile. Maybe they avoid pre-interstellar races, or maybe we're of no interest to them. We can barely read humans, much less try to head-shrink extraterrestrials.

Is it possible that there could be extraterrestrials that have the desire and means to colonize other stars, yet are free of the potentially fatal flaws we see in ourselves? There's one supremely important consideration. We don't see evidence of a widespread galactic civilization. That's serious evidence that such a combination of traits may not exist.

Oh, wait, "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Well, yes it is. If a hypothesis predicts large and easily observable effects, and we don't see the effects, that's evidence the hypothesis is wrong. I can't argue that, because there are no arrowheads in my flower bed, that Indians never walked across my (to them) future lawn. The probability of finding an arrowhead anywhere is low. But if you say that Indians a few thousand years ago had technology comparable to ours, that hypothesis predicts we should find ubiquitous advanced artifacts. We don't. Therefore the hypothesis is wrong.

But since we're the only intelligent species we know, it makes sense to start here. To begin with, we're really not all that inquisitive. The fact that we remained hunters and gatherers for a quarter of a million years doesn't inspire optimism. During recorded history, how many societies engaged in active, serious exploration? Renaissance Europeans, the Ming Chinese (but only for a short time), Polynesians, the Vikings. Maybe the Mongols and the Arabs, or at least individual adventurers. And that's it. The Romans, a society whose survival depended critically on knowledge of the world outside their borders, had almost no interest in geography. They never explored Ireland, or the Baltic. Black Africans never discovered Madagascar. The languages of Madagascar are Malayo-Polynesian, a fact that has been called "the single most surprising fact of human geography." Even today, with the world of knowledge at their fingertips, most people use the Internet for social messaging, games, and other less savory interests.

Space Travel

It's so much fun to watch science fiction from the early 1950's. The space program consisted of a wise old fatherly senior scientist, a young virile junior scientist, the senior scientist's beautiful daughter (can you see where this is going?) and a gangly kid from Texas or Brooklyn to provide assistance or comic relief or pathos (or all three). They worked in a basement lab at a university, or a back hangar at an Air Force base, and that's it. The sum total of the U.S. space program. Nobody pictured it would take the resources of a superpower to get into space, or that the impetus would be superpower rivalry. But we did, to the background beat of people complaining about "spending all that money on problems here on earth." But we persisted thanks to the virtues of being a republic, where decisions are (ideally) made by people smarter than the voters who elect them. And now that the technology has matured, minor powers like North Korea, and private companies, can orbit satellites. Barring catastrophe, that technology is here to stay. But resources were never an issue. Propellant is cheap. It was learning how to do it that was the problem. The vast majority of the cost of a satellite is skilled labor.


The next step is going to the moon. There are two important questions here. First, would civilizations on a world lacking natural satellites ever travel deep into space? Or would that first step be such a huge one that they decided it was impractical, impossible, or not worth it? More fundamentally, can civilization itself exist on a world lacking a large natural moon? Our moon stabilizes the earth's axial tilt within moderate limits because its gravitational effects overwhelm everything else. Mars, with only two tiny satellites, is much more affected by Jupiter, Earth, and Venus, and undergoes much larger changes in its axial tilt. It may be that the lack of large natural satellites is the real cosmic filter, that planets without large satellites undergo such huge environmental oscillations that life doesn't advance beyond primitive levels.

And once we got the the Moon, the geopolitical justification was gone. The people who wanted to "spend all that money on problems here on earth" got their way. Anyone else remember the Seventies? How we took all that Apollo money and eliminated poverty? Tore down the slums? Crime dropped to near zero? Me neither. Anybody care to tell me what we did get for it?

After the Moon, the next step is to Mars or Venus. Both would require a ship that can protect its passengers for many months, a lander that can get passengers to the surface and back, and a surface habitat that would provide protection for months while the party explores and waits for the planets to reach the right configuration for the return trip. We can do that for Mars, at least in theory. Venus is too hostile to venture to the surface now. But going to Mars will be a huge venture. We can do the logistics, provided we have the will as a society, and it will take years. We simply don't have the will as a society. The money needed to go to Mars will be an irresistible target for people who want to divert it to other purposes, or simply pocket it. More likely, incremental improvements in space technology will close much of the gap, just as private entrepreneurs are talking about returning to the Moon. The old conspiracy talk about all the blueprints for Apollo being gone is bunk. The blueprints don't exist on paper, but they do on microfilm. There are Saturn V rockets at Cape Canaveral and Huntsville. And we wouldn't recreate Apollo technology to go to the moon today any more than we'd run the Indy 500 in a Stutz Bearcat. Not when a cell phone has more computing power than Mission Control in 1969. (That said, do go to Cape Canaveral and take in the Apollo 8 launch re-enactment. Pay for the full price experience. It is money well spent.)

Much of the lure of venturing beyond the Moon is due to Mars being at least slightly earth-like. It has an atmosphere and evidence of a watery past. And there's that legacy of canals and imaginary Martians, H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs. If there were nothing between us and Jupiter, or Mars were an airless planet like Mercury, or a lethal place like Venus, would we go? So maybe civilizations need the right planets nearby to have a motivation for long distance space travel.

So imagine we can eventually travel at will between the planets. Now for the stars. Now if we postulate things like artificial gravity or faster than light travel, all bets are off. On the other hand, if you can travel faster than light, the Fermi Paradox becomes even more acute, because it becomes so much easier to colonize the galaxy. So let's go to Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light years away. We need something that can keep a large crew alive - and sane - for many years. It will have to have room, the ability to grow food, its own space program (to land and come back), and the ability to fabricate everything it needs. I can't see anything smaller than an aircraft carrier, and that's being absurdly conservative. So let's say it weighs 100,000 metric tons (100 million kg) and gets to 1% of the speed of light. That's small enough that we don't have to worry about relativity. Energy = 1/2mv² = 1/2 x 100 million kg x (3,000,000 m/sec)² = 4.5 x 10²⁰ joules. That's U.S. energy use for 50 years. That's not counting the internal energy needs to keep the ship lit and heated, keep plants growing, and so on. Then you have to spend an equal amount of energy braking once you get there. Unless you want to doom the crew to fly on forever. At 1% of the speed of light, the trip will last 430 years, or the time since Queen Elizabeth. The First. Can people keep a sense of mission and purpose for that long? Maybe they'll decide they prefer the ship instead. Or maybe they'll regress to pre-scientific levels and believe the ship is all there is. Although that theme has been used in a number of novels (and the ill-fated 1973 TV series, "The Starlost"), it seems far more likely that outcome would eventually - most likely very quickly - lead to a catastrophic breakdown of life support. If you up the speed to 10% of the speed of light, the round trip will take 86 years, maybe enough for someone who leaves as a child to come back. But multiply the energy needs by a hundred - velocity squared, remember? And then double it again, because now you have to accelerate back to Earth, and slow down once you get here.

There may be a relatively small historic window for us on Earth to travel into deep space. We saw one window open and close with the Apollo Program. There may or may not be another one. But why go to the Moon? Apart from scientific needs like building an observatory on the far side free from Earth's radio emissions, most of the things we can picture doing can be done better on earth. Mining? Well, almost all mineral deposits on Earth required water for their formation. The geology isn't the same. Mining metal rich asteroids may be more practical, and a lot of that can be done robotically. Then you do have the problem of getting thousands of tons of metal back to earth. Think of Chelyabinsk, multiplied by thousands. Drop it in the oceans? Tsunamis. Not to mention huge amounts of vaporized metal in the atmosphere during re-entry. Maybe we could fabricate the metal in space into aerodynamic landing bodies. On the other hand, using the metal in space to build spacecraft and space stations would be eminently practical. Why go to Mars? There may be some usable minerals in those deposits from Mars' early oceans. But there's the energy cost of getting it off Mars and getting it back to earth.

Libertarian colonies? Any libertarians who join lunar or Martian or asteroidal colonies will soon find themselves yearning for those regulation-free days back on Earth. Life in a colony where you can't survive five minutes unprotected outdoors will be regimented beyond belief. You don't waste anything. You don't pollute in the slightest. You will have to get permission for anything out of the ordinary. And you will work. I'm not even going to address Venus, where your habitat has to protect against 400 C temperatures and 90 atmospheres of pressure. We don't even have sub-sea habitats that can handle those pressures.

The only imaginable reasons to go to the moon or Mars for the foreseeable future are scientific, intellectual, and adventure. Any economic payback will be very far down the road. And human history doesn't offer a lot of hope that societies will engage in purely intellectual exploration for very long. To have regular travel to the moon or Mars will require travel simple and cheap enough for individuals and small groups to do it on their own. It's far from clear the economies of scale will ever permit that. Even taking a balloon to 25 miles and parachuting out required some pretty massive financial support.

If we can find habitable planets the equation may change, but seeking habitats for population growth is not an option. In fifty years we have launched about 500 individuals into space, or several thousand if you count people with multiple trips. Human population growth is about a quarter million per day. That means you send Birmingham to Alpha Centauri today, Fresno tomorrow, Tacoma the next day... just to stay even.

And incremental growth won't cut it. We didn't send ships ever farther into the Atlantic. Columbus went across in one shot. We didn't go a quarter of the way to the Moon, or halfway. (Actually, our first few probes did, but only because we didn't give them enough velocity) Once the technology exists for a long voyage, the only sensible approach is to do it all at once. But we won't go to the stars until we have the capability: propulsion, life support, all of it.

Collapse

We've dodged a bullet in terms of nuclear apocalypse, at least for now. That's not to say we won't have a future superpower ruled by suicidal lunatics. Picture Brazil, say (just to pick a current non-nuclear major power) ruled by a North Korea style government and possessing a nuclear arsenal. Or ruled by an apocalyptic religious cult. But at least we aren't currently preoccupied with nuclear annihilation. What seems more likely to cause our collapse is environmental: exhaustion of resources, mass extinction, resurgence of epidemics, collapse of agriculture, and so on.

It's not inevitable that an alien race would suffer collapse. But it is all but inevitable that a race that has a blind faith in unceasing growth will collapse. If they have our brand of technological optimism, they won't take action until absolutely necessary, confident that new technology will present a solution to their problems. And they'll always be right. Until that one time they're wrong, and they make that one fatal miscalculation. After all, you can run a hundred red lights in a row without harm. It's that one time that causes the problem.

There's an argument called the Doomsday Argument that holds that the end of the human species is probably near. Any given person has an equal likelihood of being born at any point in human history, and the average position would be halfway through. Since about 100 billion people have already lived, we should expect roughly 100 billion more to come after us. Since global births now number about 134 million a year, it takes about 7-1/2 years for a billion people to be born, or about 750 years for the next 100 billion people to be born. There are tons of things wrong with this argument, chief among them the fact that we are where we are, and if we're at the 10% or 90% points, no amount of probability will change that. It's like arguing that most cars run fine, so the probability is that yours does too, and that clanking sound is just your imagination.

It might well be that the real Cosmic Filter is cultural. Once a civilization accomplishes what it can easily do in space and acquires most of the easily available knowledge, any further improvement might require such a huge additional investment that the effort seems unwarranted. 

An additional collapse scenario is that sufficiently advanced civilizations may have their needs taken care of by machines so well that they lose the ability or desire to do things for themselves. Think of the progression of starship captains portrayed in Wall-E, each progressively tubbier and less motivated than the last. Imagine a civilization with holodeck technology but no interstellar travel. If they can visit any imaginable world without leaving home, why leave home? Our own concern with the environment and preserving history is laudable, but it bears an ominous resemblance to the renewed affection a child feels for an old toy just before giving it up forever. If you can see a tiger or a panda in virtual reality, why do we need the real thing? If you can go to Mars in virtual reality, why go for real? In short, they become Eloi. And watch the 1960 version of The Time Machine (the good one) to see just how contemptible the Eloi were.