Colorado Confluence

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Here’s the story: http://www.denverpost.com/breakingnews/ci_21118201/unknown-number-people-shot-at-aurora-movie-theater

The first priority now, of course, is taking care of all the people affected by this, showing support, being there for those who need it. Everyone able to offer that moral or material support should do so.

Our second priority is making sure that it never happens again, or happens with far less frequency. We shouldn’t fall into the habit of thinking of this as “an isolated incident,” and treat it the way we might treat a natural disaster, as if it just happens from time to time, and merits mourning but no changes in how we frame our shared existence. Rep. Rhonda Fields, who of course lost her own son to violence, was just on 9-News reminding us that we have to work to ensure that this DOESN’T happen, that we are not a society in the grip of random violence.

And the obvious way for us to stop being such a violent society is for us to stop being such a violent society, in thoughts, in beliefs, in ideology, in how some of us fetishize instruments of destruction, and in actions.

There will be those who insist that it is “wrong” to use this as a catalyst for discussing the underlying social problems involved, but if we don’t draw attention to them in the moments when their consequences explode upon us, then they are more easily minimized by those so inclined in times when their consequences are more remote from our thoughts.

Kyle Clark on 9-News just suggested that we all say or do something nice for someone today so that that ripples out and creates a more caring and mutually supportive society, and Kyle Dyer added that we should do so every day. They’re right; we make our culture and our society through our thoughts and actions. But we shouldn’t live dual lives, one defined by trying to be nice to those around us, and another defined by callousness and a lack of compassion in how we arrange our shared existence.

We need to work to become a different kind of society, a society that believes it’s important to reduce the levels of violence that we suffer, a society that is defined more by how much we care about and support one another than by how much we fear and loathe one another, a society that believes in BEING a society more than it believes in some moral imperative of mutual indifference. We all, as members of a society that participates in the creation of the culture in which we live, share some portion of responsibility for every event of this nature that occurs, either for what we’ve done to cultivate such a violent culture, or for what we’ve failed to do to cultivate something more rational and humane.

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There is much ado about President Obama’s recent statement “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that.” The overwrought right is abuzz with angry indignation. How dare he! they shout in unison, aghast that this evil communist could so thoroughly declare war on private enterprise. Let’s take a closer look.

First, it helps to have the entire quote before you:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

It’s a bit impolitic, a bit overstated. But how far off is it?

As I said in The War of American Interdependence, there are two cognitive frames in competition here, one which thinks that we are fundamentally, ontologically “individuals,” fundamentally mutually independent, and one which recognizes that we are fundamentally, ontologically members of a society, fundamentally interdependent. We think in languages we didn’t individually invent, using concepts and conceptual tools we didn’t individually invent. Every aspect of our lives implicates and depends on countless others, no matter how much of a rugged individualist one may be: Few frontiersmen built their own firearms, and, if some did, they did not mine the ores that provided the materials for it. And whatever they did, in almost all cases, they learned how to do it from others.

Most of us rely on one another to a far greater extent than that: Most of us don’t grow our own food, or, if we do, we don’t build the tractors and drill for the oil and do myriad other things involved in the enterprise. Most of us don’t make our own clothes, or build our own homes, or make our own tools, or produce our own electronic devises, or, if we do some, we certainly don’t do all. The market isn’t an expression of our mutual independence, but rather a social institutional form which helps deepen and facilitate our fundamental interdependence.

Our laws, as well, are an expression of our interdependence. We forge them in the light of what that interdependence demands of us. The developments of the modern era that led to market economies and popular sovereignty framed by written constitutions with carefully delineated rights and powers are part of the evolution of our interdependence. The concept of “liberty” itself is an expression of our interdependence, of the discovery of both increased vitality and increased humanity achievable by freeing up individual initiative and creativity to as great a degree as possible, while still recognizing and working within the framework of our fundamental interdependence.

Obama was talking about exactly that. It’s not some crazy idea, it’s not even really debatable: It’s a fundamental fact of our existence. We thrive through coordinated efforts and actions, through participation in a society with divisions of labor and mutual reliance on one another. The ideology currently in vogue which attempts to erase that fact from our awareness is pernicious and destructive; it attempts to redefine private wealth as attributable to nothing other than private actions, when that’s simply not true. Ben Franklin, unsurprisingly, got it right: Wealth is as much a function of the laws and markets and other social institutions that we forge together, and of the efforts of countless others channeled through those social institutions, as it is of individual effort, because without the former our own efforts have no framework within which to achieve their ends.

So, no, even in the more exceptional rather than more common instance in which a business is built up without any element of relative privilege (the differential material and social inheritances that we draw at birth) having advantaged the entrepreneur, they are not solely responsible for the creation and success of that business; the myriad other human efforts that it implicitly depended on are as well. And the market does not magically reward all of those efforts in ways which serve the ultimate goal of continuing to create the most robust, fair, and sustainable political economy human genius is capable of.

Those who are adamant that human genius cannot intrude on some imaginary pure and absolute individual “liberty,” that to do so is “social engineering” or “communism,” are rather remarkably ignoring how that individual liberty was legally constructed in the first place. Our own Constitution is an act of “social engineering,” and, in the way that too many now use the word, a “communist” plot. Indeed, the framers had to argue that we needed a government strong enough to facilitate effective collective action in our collective interests, “The Federalist Papers” frequently seeming to forecast the later invention of “game theory” and the recognition of what has since come to be called “collective action problems.” (See Collective Action (and Time Horizon) Problems).

The right claims to rever our Constitution and our Founding Fathers, and yet can’t seem to recognize that both acknowledged our interdependence. Art. I, Section 8, Clause i of the United States Constitution empowers Congress to tax and spend in the general welfare, meaning that “what’s mine” isn’t just mine; the public also has some claim on it. How much of a claim isn’t specified; that’s for us, as the popular sovereign, to determine and redetermine, in the light of growing knowledge and udnerstanding.

And as for the Founding Fathers, their views differed. Jefferson’s and Madison’s are frequently cited, but Ben Franklin’s are generally ignored, even though Franklin alone among them helped to draft and sign every single one of our founding documents and was the undisputed senior American stateman at the birth of this country. Franklin maintained that any private wealth beyond that need to sustain oneself and one’s family “is the property of the public, who by their laws have created it” (Walter Isaacson, “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life,” Page 424, quoting Franklin).

It’s not about denigrating individual effort and initiative, or failing to respect the vital role they play in our shared social existence. I can only speak for myself, but I’ll tell you clearly: I respect and admire individual effort and initiative, and recognize it as absolutely vital to our collective welfare. It’s not about failing to recognize the need to frame our shared social existence in ways that take that into account, and work to liberate rather than stifle such individual effort and initiative: I am adamant that it is imperative that we recognize the importance of that dimension of our shared existence in every public policy debate.

But it is not the ONLY dimension that we need to consider; it is not the ONLY value that we must respect and maximize. Our nation today has the highest gini coefficient (statistical measure of economic inequality) of any developed nation on Earth, and the statistical reality of one’s socioeconomic status at birth predominantly determining throughout life is inescapable (see http://www.americanprogress.org/kf/hertz_mobility_analysis.pdf). This is not only unjust, but also systemically dysfunctional: The two most catastrophic economic collapses of the last 100 years in America were immediately preceded, by a matter of months, by the two highest peaks in the concentration of wealth in America in the last 100 years, in 1929 and 2008, respectively.

Such gross inequality of opportunity and in the distribution of wealth hurts us all, and violates fundamental American values of fairness. It is one of the challenges facing us as nation, that we have to meet and address as a nation. It’s not wrong to remind those who succeed by some combination of individual effort and good fortune, facilitated, in either case, by our entire social production function, that they succeeded by virtue of their membership in this society, and that their success does not come without reciprocal responsibilities to the society that made it possible.

And that was very clearly and explicitly Ben Franklin’s view as well as mine (in fact, his was a stronger statement of it), so if you want to vilify me for daring to recognize that the public has some claim on private wealth, be sure to vilify him as well.

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In a new wave of the use of Colorado Confluence, I have begun posting pithy or thoughtful short articulations on the Facebook page, in colorful boxes with fancy fonts (please stop by and check them out: http://www.facebook.com/ColoradoConfluence). One such passage is:

“Extreme individualists don’t get that we are in reality interdependent. Empathy is a good thing, that enriches us all. And there is nothing about ‘the state’ that makes it a social institution that must never, by some bizarre and arbitrary moral imperative, be used as a vehicle for our empathy and interdependence.”

A commenter named “Richard” replied, “Interesting thought, but how does that allow anyone access to other’s funds JUST BECAUSE they have more?”

To which I responded:

Richard, we start from two distinct premises, operating within two distinct cognitive frames. The first step is to recognize these two distinct frames.

One frame (yours) is that we are primarily individuals, whose relative wealth and welfare is primarily a product of our own actions and merit, that the society we belong to is nothing more than a contractual relationship among otherwise absolutely mutually independent individuals, and that justice requires a clear public recognition that “what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is yours, period.”

Another frame (mine) is that we are simultaneously individuals and members of a society, that our individual existence is as much a function of our being members of a society as our society is a function of our being individuals, that we speak and think and feel within the framework of languages and cultures and conceptualizations that we did not individually invent, that our individuality is a marginal variation of a shared consciousness and shared existence, and that the welfare of each of us is the responsibility of all of us.

In my frame (as in Ben Franklin’s, I might add), all wealth belongs simultaneously to the individual and to the society, since both are implicated in its production. Certain, substantial, extensive protections of the individual claims on that wealth are both functional and fair, but so are certain, substantial, extensive protections of the societal claims on that wealth.

It is a balancing act, rather than absolutely one or the other. An unintended consequence of our founding ideology was a weakening of the implicit recognition that we are interdependent members of a society, something the founding fathers didn’t really have to worry about, because that interdependence was so universally historically unchallenged that they did not have any experience within which to identify any concern for its continuation. (The unlimited pursuit of absolute “liberty” is similar to our craving for sugar, salt, and fat: In the African savanna in which we evolved, we could never get enough of those essential food-stuffs, so we evolved to crave as much as we could get. Similarly, in the 18th century, it was hard to imagine getting enough “liberty,” so we cultivated an ideology that only craved ever more of it.)

So, your cognitive frame of “what’s mine is mine” is not necessarily the only rational or functional or moral cognitive frame, and it is, arguably, less rational and functional and moral than one which recognizes our interdependence, recognizes that members of a society generally are involved in the production of wealth and welfare in that society generally, and that the distributional injustices embedded in the system (through differential inheritances and birth into differing opportunity structures, for instance) are our shared responsibility to remedy. (End of response to Richard)

I titled this post “The War of American Interdependence” because we won the war of Independence, which turned out not to be just a war of independence from Great Britain, but also from one another. In fact, we have been fighting the war of independence from one another for the past two centuries, and those who have been on the side of increasing mutual independence have generally been in reality fighting for their own advantage in the context of inescapable interdependence.

Throughout our history, there have been those who have insisted that “liberty” means “my liberty to screw others.” No one shouted “Liberty!” louder than southern white slave owners, insisting that it would be an infringement on their liberty to free the slaves (see John C. Calhoun’s “Union and Liberty,” for instance). Then, when they lost that battle for American (pseudo)-mutual-independence, they re-emerged in the form of southern racists defending Jim Crow against the “tyranny” of the federal government.

It should come as no surprise, then, that they have re-emerged in our own age, reincarnated to protect those institutionalized inequalities of opportunity and privilege that exist today. Again, we have many shouting “Liberty!” as a rallying cry against increasing equality of opportunity in America, and decreasing a gross and indefensible concentration of wealth in far too few hands.

It doesn’t matter to them that the distribution of wealth in America is much more a function (as a matter of statistical fact) of what womb you are born into than how hard you work. It doesn’t matter to them that we are the most economically inequitable of all developed nations (and, largely as a result, perform worse by almost every measure of social wellbeing). It doesn’t even matter to them that this grossly inequitable distribution of wealth and opportunity is bad for the economy as a whole, record-breaking concentrations of wealth immediately preceding major economic collapses.

All that matters to them is that they have an ideology that blindly defends this status quo, and blindly rejects all reason and compassion militating against it.

So now I declare the War of American Interdependence, the war to become a society once again, to recognize that we are not just a collection of disaggregated individuals, but rather are intertwined in numerous ways, along numerous dimensions, and with numerous responsibilities to one another as a result.

Freedom is a wonderful thing, but it must be the real freedom to thrive rather than the false freedom of social incoherence. Freedom must be an expression of our social existence, rather than an obstacle to it. We must strive not just to be a “free” people, but also to be a humane people.

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On a comment thread of a map of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, one poster was adamant that it was completely inappropriate to refer to the Holocaust experienced by those peoples at European colonists’ hands as “genocide,” making very unconvincing legalistic and semantic arguments. After a bit of back and forth, he finally got very angry, and let loose with a rejection of the very notion that there was anything about that conquest that anyone should feel in anyway ashamed of. This was my response:

After all the meaningless noise, we get to the truth: It isn’t the word you object to after all, but rather the acknowledgement of the magnitude of the historical brutality and inhumanity that went into the formation of this nation! We can’t say “genocide,” not because its role as a legal term prohibits us in casual conversation from using the word in a way in which it is commonly used (oops), not because it is an insult to Jews (oops), but because, by god, how dare we insult your ancestors and nation by emphasizing the brutality of its formation!

And that’s the whole point, isn’t it? You oppose the use of the word not in SERVICE to “truth,” but in OPPOSITION to it; not because it’s too imprecise, but because it cuts too close to the bone.

We are determined to emphasize, and you are determined to de-emphasize, the very real brutality of the conquest of this enormous nation and the clearing away of the indigenous population, a brutality whose magnitude is not adequately captured by ANY word. You resent the use of the strongest word available, because it gets us one step closer to a sense of the true magnitude of the inhumanity involved, rather than, as you prefer, keeping us one step further away, in the ideologically convenient haze of historical semi-amnesia.

You don’t want to own the past because you DO want to own the present and future. The more we acknowledge the brutality of the past, the less free we are to continue it. That’s what this is all about: A battle of narratives, whether to be the jingoist chauvinists we have too long been and too many want us to remain, continuing to blithely trample on humanity while surrounded by the arrogant and self-serving halos of “American exceptionalism” and “manifest destiny,” or to be a people aspiring to true greatness of spirit and consciousness, recognizing without diminution the errors of the past in service to doing better in the present and the future.

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(This dialogue was in response to a post by DK about how “working economists” –i.e., corporate economists—denounced the bad job numbers.)

SH: One constant of world history: The wealthiest create and propagate ideologies that legitimate inequality as the natural and necessary order, and insist that addressing inequality can’t be done without hurting everyone. And yet, the continuing approach of the still elusive ideal of true equality of opportunity is precisely what has done more to generate ever more wealth, as well as extend it to ever more people. Those who counsel abandoning that enterprise now are identical to all those throughout history who have counseled abandoning it in their own time and place: Wrong.

Economics is not the study of how to rationalize inequality; it is the study of how wealth is created and distributed, and should serve the ongoing challenge to do so ever more robustly, ever more fairly, and ever more sustainably. You cite those who treat it as the former; I am one of those who treat it as the latter.

By the way, no one is happy with the job numbers. We were on the brink of a second Great Depression in 2008, with job loss rising at a rapidly accelerating rate, the trajectory of deepening economic collapse. Within two months of implementing ARRA, the tide was turned to a decelerating rise in unemployment, the trajectory of recovery. We averted a major and long-enduring economic collapse, and you’re citing 8% unemployment four years later as proof of…what? That you will do anything and say anything to further a blindly partisan agenda and reduce the influence of reason in public affairs?

DK: A “working economist” is one who has one or more corporate clients or perhaps is hired by an “industry” to project the short and long-term impact of the current economic conditions on that corporation or industry they represent (more micro economics). It helps those private companies and or industries to decide how to staff and deploy capital. They normally don’t have a political agenda, but a wise investor is going to pay attention to what they are saying. It is true that they are not making moral judgments. Somewhat like justice in that regard they are smart to be “blind”. They do help to form confidence or not. I know that “liberals” make fun of cliches like , “trickle down economics ” and “a rising tide floats all boats”, but it can’t be denied that it takes a “rising tide”, a better growth in the economy than we are now seeing, for those less prosperous to do better too. When many of the working economists (as opposed to those in the ivory towers) tell their business clients they should be cautious, you won’t be seeing growth anytime soon. It’s not politics, it’s just helping the client weather the storm. It’s their job and if done right, it floats more boats. Unlike government, businesses have to use capital wisely or they fail.

SH: It is true that short-term aggregate economic growth is one valuable dimension, which is why I always include it (“robustness”). But the dimensions of fairness and sustainability are also valuable dimensions. The form of economics to which you refer is not dedicated to any of those three dimensions, but rather a corporate or sectoral share of short-term aggregate growth. It’s akin to saying that a military strategist is more of an expert on international relations than those who study international relations in all of its myriad aspects; it may sound good to those who are inclined to think in a particular way, but it is the fallacy of saying that strategy for advantage has and is a broader view than synoptic, comprehensive analysis.

The proof of the fallacy of your argument is the combination of its antiquity, and the fact that in every other time and place in which a variant of it has been used, we now consider it to be an elitist artifact of a discredited earlier epoch. You confuse the need to have a healthy economy with the need to focus on championing the interests of the wealthiest, and while you may think that you can prevail with that position, you can only do so if reason applied to knowledge is effectively purged from consideration.

Since the onset of “trickle-down economics” (1980) in fact, the wealth of the wealthiest 1% has sky-rocketed, while the wealth of everyone else has slightly declined, graphically marking a noticeable departure from the previous decades of similar rates of growth between the two. (See the cover graph at http://www.facebook.com/​TheOther98.) Once again, reality has to be considered to be more compelling than self-serving speculation about how the world works that is empirically contradicted by reality.

Conversely, in those countries less infected with your elitist ideology, there is in fact a far greater extension of prosperity to a far larger segment of the society. Poverty rates are lower, along with a host of associated social problems, health outcomes are better, and the gini coefficient (the statistical measure of economic inequality) is lower (we have by far the highest of any developed country, and simultaneously the highest poverty rates and lowest social mobility rates of any developed country). Again, reality contradicts your elitist fantasy world, that serves the conscience and interests of the wealthiest, who want only to be left to continue to siphon an inordinate and economically dysfunctional proportion of national wealth into their relatively few hands, and to do so in a way that they feel able to rationalize to themselves and to everyone else.

No honest thinking person could possibly be fooled by this. Larger proportions of the rest of the developed world enjoy prosperity than Americans do, by not buying into your elitist rationalizations, which have been statistically proven to serve only the interests of the wealthiest Americans.

And, once again, I have to remind that the two greatest economic collapses of the last 100 years were both immediately preceded by the two highest extremes in the concentration of wealth in the last 100 years, which in turn were preceded by a decade or more of your favored economic philosophy. Once again, you prefer a self-serving fantasy to a very clear reality.

The tide was indeed rising, but you and your fellow neo-robber barons sealed out the rest of the ships in our national harbor from partaking in it, so that a few in an elite lock can benefit from it more extravagantly. And, as a result, since this particular tide DEPENDS on other ships rising, we all have sunk together…, except the elites, who will protect themselves until there is no wealth left to monopolize.

DK: The USA is A and China is A1 in terms of economic power and how these two nations go, so will the world. I’ve been to China and I must say in my opinion we do a much better job of equitably helping our citizens enjoy their lives. There are about as many poor people in our country, as a percentage of the population as there was in my youth, 50 years ago, in spite of all our efforts to help people out of poverty. I must say there are better safety nets for the low to middle income wage earners, but that doesn’t take into account the better products and foods available to everyone today. I think it is better to be poor here than in Brazil, China or India. Maybe it’s better in Spain or Italy, but not for long. I do believe that our economic system does a better job of creating economic growth. The proof is the USA remains the big dog in economics. What brought us to this point of great wealth as a nation is what will sustain us. I don’t think most Americans want to be anyone else, be it Sweden or Germany or whatever advanced economy you happen to think is better than us. I think we’ll go home with the girl we brought to the dance. We will at the same time try to tweak the system to help the unproductive will well, but we will not allow them to drag us all down. Any lifeguard knows this.

SH: Once again, you have responded by ignoring every single empirical point I made, and changing the subject in order to repeat your preferred talking points as if they’d never been challenged. I don’t know who buys it, but, whoever it is, they didn’t need to, because they’d have to have already been convinced to do so.

You also, when drawing comparisons, somehow managed to avoid actually discussing Germany, Sweden, The Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Luxemburg, France, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, The UK, Ireland, Canada, Austrailia, New Zealand…, you know, the group of countries to which I was actually referring. All you do is make a bland and meaningless assertion about how most Americans don’t want to be them, as if to say “it doesn’t matter how much better the quality of life is anywhere else; I will simultaneously make a false economic argument and insulate it by saying it doesn’t matter that it’s false, because Americans care more about ideological entrenchment than any improvement in the quality of life.” Interesting how you do that.

By the way, I’m an American too. And I care about the growth in human consciousness and the improvement of the human condition. There was a time when most Americans thought that slavery was just fine, and a minority felt that it was wrong. That minority was right to keep fighting to persuade their fellow Americans to adopt a more enlightened perspective. So, let’s not use what “most Americans” believe or feel or prefer as an argument about what is true or more useful or more moral. That’s why we have discussions like this one: To help us arrive at the best possible, best informed, and best reasoned answers.

Again, here is the reality of the correlation between marginal tax rates and aggregate economic growth (the exact opposite of what you insist it is): http://​www.washingtonpost.com/​blogs/ezra-klein/post/​tax-rates-and-economic-grow​th-in-one-graph/2011/05/​19/AGLaxJeH_blog.html.

You can’t erase the facts, David. You make economic assertions that 80% of economists dissgree with, and that are empirically contradicted, and, when that’s pointed out, just repeat those assertions again.

So, while you’re propagating your dogmatic rationalizations for extreme economic inequality, and why it’s good for everyone, let’s take stock of some of the facts and issues you’ve never addressed:

1) The fact depicted in the graph I linked to above, that shows that, until the onset of “trickle down economics,” incomes had been rising for all of us fairly steadily and equally. After the onset, incomes began to rise dramatically for the wealthiest, and to decline for everyone else.

2) The fact that economic growth is positively correlated to higher marginal tax rates rather than lower marginal tax rates

3) the fact that we are currently still at one of two historical extremes in the concentration of wealth, both of which immediately preceded the two most catastrophic economic collapses of the last hundred years;

4) the fact that that condition, in both instances, followed a decade or more of the small (domestic policy) government and deregulatory policies that you favor;

5) the fact that, historically, the policies favored by the wealthiest members of a society have always had a bias which has advantaged the wealthiest members of the society at least sometimes at the expense of the less well-off;

6) the fact that you seem to want to rely exclusively, as your policy compass, on the policies currently favored by the wealthiest members of our society, and by the journals that exist to express and serve their interests;

7) the fact that every single prosperous, modern, developed nation has had a large governmental infrastructure in place since before the last great wave of expansion in the production of prosperity (and so how can you possibly call that antithetical to the production of prosperity, when it is universally associated with it, in what the chronology suggests is a somewhat causal relationship?); AND

8) the fact that actual economic theory helps explain why that historical reality is the historical reality, and how to approach public policy analysis with that dimension of the challenge in mind.

DK: Steve, I try to boil ideas into simple concepts. It’s bites most people can understand. In the US those who are not poor live as well if not better than those people in other developed countries. They are happy. Those below the poverty line are not as happy and I can only guess how they compare to poor in other countries. For example, the poor here live better than most people in Africa, yes? The liberal consist of 23% of our voters and they share your concern for social justice. I’m more concerned about the overall health of our economy and putting as few burdens on those who create wealth as is “fair”. That’s the focus of the debate. What’s fair? The US is still the world’s most successful economy (total production), so it’s silly to say our system hasn’t worked. Can it be improved and do some have too much wealth? OK, but I really don’t care what Steve Job’s net worth was. We do have more than our share of mega-billionaires that throw the averages off. But so what. They can only spend so much and in my experience (in trust banking), in the end they spend much of their time figuring out how to give that wealth away. I know that doesn’t work for “liberals” because you know best who and how the less fortunate should be helped. You’ve heard of the Lilly Foundation, Ford and on and on. It’s big government v private capital and private capital always wins when it comes to efficient use of capital. It’s simple, they have to pay attention to what they are doing and if they don’t they go out of business. We have a core difference. You think government is needed for social justice and the cost in the inefficient and slow growth is worth it. I think government is the necessary evil and the more decisions left to the individual the better it is for those who are productive and who create things and services. You really don’t care what I think (or my “experts”). By the way, I don’t invest in Europe, they are sinking fast, if you may have noticed. I mention Germany because they have been fiscally responsible. I like Canada too. They were sinking, but the conservatives took over and turned it around (and yes I know they have socialized medicine).

We have more mega-billionaires because we have had the economic freedoms here for those who are the most innovative to succeed big and change the world. I’ll mention Steve Jobs once again (because he was a political liberal) but the reason why we have so much wealth at the top is because of the great success of capitalists like him. Lot’s of that wealth is tied up in their companies. I’m sure many of the 99% malcontents picture these highly successful people sitting on a pile of money in a vault. Success in business is a good thing for our country and is how good jobs are created. Why making those successful companies these hustlers are never giving social justice a thought. They are focused in beating their competition and building a better mouse trap. Like Jobs, once successful, they often do think more about helping others. That’s really nothing new (Ford Foundation). The less government the better if the focus is on creating growth.

SH: David, by “boiling ideas into simple concepts,” you mean “weeding out inconvenient information, avoiding logical argumentation, and displacing empirical analysis with arbitrary and often demonstrably false speculation.” You “can only guess how (the poor) in other countries” compare to the poor in America? Guess what, David? You don’t have to guess, because we have a little something called “research,” which informs us. Here’s what it informs us of: There are far less of them, they have access to far more public goods, and their self-reported happiness is far higher than ours. In fact, the self-reported happiness in most Western European nations is higher than that of people in the United States in general.

Though the main issue currently under discussion is inequitable distribution of wealth and opportunity, and therefore how well off the affluent in America are in comparison to the affluent in other countries begs the question, it’s nevertheless quite debatable whether “those who are not poor live as well or better than those people in other developed countries.” Violent crime is far, far higher here, and a host of other social problems that we fail to address diminish the quality of everyone’s life. More importantly, those who aren’t exceedingly wealthy, who have children with special needs, who have serious health issues to deal with in their families, who face any of a host of potential challenges in life, on average and in general fare far, far worse than those similarly situated in other developed countries, as a result of our (well, your) pathological ideology of “I’ve got mine, so screw the rest of you.”

The valid comparison, of course, is between the United States and other developed countries, because those are the alternatives with similar economies and, in fact, slightly lower per capita GDP, indicating that we certainly have the resources to accomplish anything they have accomplished. The comparison to Africa is an irrelevant distraction, which, of course, is one of the principal techniques on which you rely.

Again, the empirical evidence demonstrates the convenient error in your premise that “social justice” and a healthy overall economy are at odds with one another. Among the many facts that you have failed to address are those that suggest just the opposite. There is a positive rather than negative correlation between high marginal tax rates and high GDP. The two greatest economic collapses of the last 100 years immediately followed the two highest peaks in the concentration of wealth in the last 100 years. You present a false dichotomy that serves to justify a simultaneously unjust AND systemically dysfunctional condition. But, facts aren’t relevant, right David? Only the constant repetition of your elitists rationalizations, overwhelmingly contradicted by the actual facts, can pass for “truth” in your mind.

You say “the less government the better if the focus is on creating growth,” but, again, the real world resoundingly debunks that assertion. Every single modern prosperous nation on Earth has, and has had for most of a century, an enormous governmental administrative infrastructure, which has proven necessary to managing such economies. There is not one single exception. And this was already the case prior to the last historically unprecedented expansion in the production of prosperity. On the other hand, there are many horribly failed countries with virtually no government at all, Somalia being the archetypal example. You’re assertion is simply the opposite of what observable reality supports.

If total wealth production were the only measure of a system working, then one that put 100% percent of the wealth into one person’s hands and left everyone else to starve, as long as the quantity of wealth it put into that person’s hands were more than the quantity of wealth produced in other countries, by your definition, that would be a country that no one could say was failing to “work.” Well, it works for one person, but not for the other hundreds of millions. Clearly, distributional issues are legitimate.

And not just because economies “work” when they work for the benefit of the people within them, not simply when they produce a lot of wealth that only a few enjoy. Also because such inequality leads to economic collapses, such as the one recently catalyzed in part by exactly such gross inequity in the distribution of wealth. A few traders were making fortunes in underregulated derivatives markets (divorcing short-term risk from short-term profit), while many were going underwater on their home mortgages. Again: Peaks in concentration of wealth = catastrophic economic collapses; higher marginal taxes = most robust economic performance. Those are empirical facts, which you love to disregard and replace with factually contradicted fabrications.

I could go on, of course, and demonstrate line by line how you simply ignore the empirical data, replace it with ideological speculation that is actually contradicted by demonstrable facts, and how you do so in service to a concentration of wealth into ever fewer hands, to the detriment both of the vast majority of Americans at all times, and to the functioning of the economic system as a whole in the long run.

It’s remarkable how consistently you make your arguments without ever citing a single empirical fact. All of your “arguments” are based on the assumption of your conclusion, mere repetitions of accepted and unexamined dogma, as if simply by saying it often enough and loudly enough, and doggedly enough ignoring all evidence to the contrary, your fictional world becomes a reality. It just doesn’t work that way. And most obnoxiously of all, it’s not even a fiction based on a love of humanity, a wish that we could achieve some ideal that serves the needs of those least fortunate, but rather a fiction designed to perpetuate human suffering and injustice and insulate enclaves of great wealth from the sea of humanity around it.

It’s also remarkable how thoroughly you rely on straw man arguments. Of course the success of business is a good thing. I am a believer in carefully considering what facilitates the success of business as we continue to refine our economic policies. It is a vital consideration, but neither one that stands alone, divorced from myriad related considerations, nor one that is incompatible with addressing those myriad related considerations. We need to attend to all relevant dimensions of a well-functioning economy as we forge our public policies: Robustness, fairness, and sustainability. (Neither is anyone here opposing enormous wealth in and of itself. It doesn’t bother me that there are extremely wealthy people; it bothers me that our system is grossly imbalanced in favor or facilitating that, and not balanced enough in favor of ensuring that others are living moderately secure and comfortable lives.)

It’s not that there are no legitimate concerns raised by the right: We do need to change our public spending paradigm, to stop a constantly growing national debt. Very few economists think that is at all defensible to try to do that during an economic downturn; that actually increases rather than decreases the debt in the long run, by slowing the economic engine that produces the wealth that generates the revenues. More generally, we should rely on legitimate economic analyses, which define a far narrower band of what’s reasonable than these blindly ideological assertions of yours. We should acknowledge and be informed by the empirical data, rather than do contortions to wish it away in service to both social injustice and economic dysfunction. And we should recognize that we are charged, as human beings, not to be slaves to the system that has evolved to serve us, but rather to channel those forces to the purpose of human liberty, human well-being, human consciousness, and human benefit.

It boils down to this, David: In any time and place, there are those who work hard to defend a status quo that is serving their interests and that they don’t want to see changed; there are those who want to change the status quo in ill-considered and irresponsible ways, and there are those who want us to use our minds and hearts and imaginations to continue to work with this ongoing evolutionary social institutional and technological landscape in which we find ourselves, to continue to refine it, to make it function better for the benefit of humanity. It’s clear at a glance that those who cling to the status quo that benefits them have never been right, have never been admired by future generations for their courage or wisdom, and have never been the ones to make the most vital and productive contributions to human history.

You cite Steve Jobs, whose genius was that he looked at the world and saw possibilities that did not yet exist, and worked to bring those possibilities to fruition. He was an innovator, a visionary, someone who introduced new ideas and new forms into our social institutional and technological landscape, to the benefit of us all. We all need to be more like that, in all of our spheres of endeavor. It’s not just about business innovation, or technological innovation; it’s also about social institutional innovation. The Constitution of The United States is a great example; it was a huge and dramatically beneficial social institutional innovation. And that project, that challenge, has not ceased. It continues; we remain called upon to rise to it.

There are many wonderful aspects of our political economy. I’ve studied it for decades, and consider it a wonder to behold. But like everything else in our world, both human and natural, it is a moment in history, an instant of a dynamical story in which we are both the participants and the authors (of the human component, at least). You are engaging in the ancient folly of defending the status quo as inviolable, a folly that has been proven counterproductive in every time and place throughout the entire story of human history. It’s time, instead, to join all reasonable people of goodwill, all people dedicated to the ongoing human enterprise, and ask with us, “how do we do better?”

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(This is the continuation of the dialogue reproduced in A Response to a Conservative on Patriotism, Militarism)

DK: Anyway, I appreciate you efforts in trying to communicate with me. I was happy to learn you served. I didn’t see the justification for the war in Vietnam, but whereas my dad served in WWII & grandfather in WWI I couldn’t dodge service. My solution was to serve 6 years in the Army National Guard, most of that as an officer. Becoming an officer reinforced my belief that making excuses can be harmful. If you want something, go for it. I was working full-time during that time and in a four year JD program nights at Suffolk Law. I came from a blue collar background but found a way to put together a fairly successful career. I now run a small investment advisory service to keep busy in retirement, helping people as well as I can. I help with children’s services by raising funds through my service club. When I grew up this was considered a duty. I now fiind that there are those today who think it should all be the “job” of government. In fact I hear that whatever I do is done just to make myself feel better. I guess that is true. Given my upbringing helping others is a core principal. Of course we do that too with paying our taxes that also provide help to those in need, but passing the buck isn’t enough. I answer to myself, which is part of being a responsible person. I don’t need or want to to judge you. Obviously you are driven to help others by working very hard providing the justification for the government making more decisions for us and how we should lead our lives. I can’t figure out why you believe you can make better judgements than I can for myself. Your subjective opinions are made to look like axioms. In support of your beliefs you accumulate experts, like Krugman. You do know that some smart people have different opinions, but they are just selfish. I can provide you with contrary “evidence”, but because I don’t find it in “liberally approved ” resources you will dismiss it out of hand. I really do think you are a good person with just a different set of values (bias). We need to know ourselves. The smartest people do and are always questioning their assumptions (bias).

SH: It is not sufficient to respond to informed arguments by saying, “well, that’s just your bias,” and then burying the precise analysis that was employed under a lot of misdirectional rhetoric about others trying to tell you what to do when you know better than they do what is best for you to do. Because, let’s face it, we all know that there are numerous circumstances in which we reject that premise out of hand: You don’t get to murder people because you know what’s best and no one has any right to tell you what you should do. The issue isn’t whether we are interdependent or not, whether we, as a society, have some rights over you as an individual, to protect and advance the rights of all other equally valuable individuals; it’s a question of how and where and by what reasoning and values to realize the ideal balance between your individual liberty and our social coherence. I believe in doing it through the careful and systematic use of the full breadth and depth of our consciousness, in service to humanity, all values considered. You believe in relying on a convenient set of ideological platitudes that carefully remove a plethora of relevant information and analysis from consideration, and then declaring that all opinions are equal.

Of course, no one is without bias, and no one has any final claim on absolute truth or absolute expertise. The competition of ideas is vital to the process and outcomes I am talking about. This is a part of that competition, involving competing arguments and competing narratives. You do your best to advance your preferred narrative, using all of your skill, trying to appeal to the emotions of your audience in a way which you think will resonate with them. I, too, do my best to advance my preferred narrative, using all of my skill, trying to appeal to the emotions of my audience in a way which I think will resonate with them. But, on top of that, I make it clear, through the consistent application of disciplined reason to carefully acquired evidence, that I am doing so in service to the reason, not in service to blind ideology. My narrative IS the use of disciplined reason and disciplined imagination, applied to carefully acquired information, in service to humanity. Yours is the repetition of right-wing ideological platitudes. In the world as it is, tragically, blind ideology frequently prevails over informed reason. In the world as we should strive to make it, that should never happen.

You have the habit, which I’ve commented on several times already, of not actually responding to the facts and arguments presented, but rather simply reiterating your talking points, your preferred emotional appeals, pretending that the analyses that have challenged them simply don’t exist. That certainly can work, and has worked in many times and places. But it SHOULDN’T work. It is the undermining rather than mobilizing of reason in service to humanity. And, in the long run, it does not prevail. Our goal should be to bend that arc of the moral universe more sharply toward justice, and expedite the exploration of all other alternatives before arriving at that which is recommended by reason.

I’m all for community involvement and volunteerism, and do a fair amount myself. But we had a history of reliance on that informal and unenforced “duty” to take care of the needs of the poor and unfortunate, and we know that it does not do so to any adequate degree: It produces a Dickensonian world (and Dickens, in fact, was responding to an ideology virtually identical to your own, which had come to displace a more compassionate and responsible one that had preceded it). There’s an inherent free-rider problem; a diminishing few step up and bear the whole burden, while an increasing many say “well, I can’t solve these problems on my own, so why should I bear the burden of trying? My contribution can never meet the need out there, and my individual failure to contribute won’t change things much either.” That’s why we can, should, and must use an agent of our collective will to commit us all to responsibilities we believe we should collectively assume; because that’s what works.

“Passing the buck” isn’t saying “not only should we all do as much as possible for others, of our own accord, but we should also work together, through our social institutions, to do as much as possible for others and for us all as a society.” Passing the buck is saying “it’s up to each person to decide whether they want to help others or not; the poor, the destitute, the sick, the unfortunate, are not society’s shared problem, but rather only the problem of those who decide of their own accord to take on the burden that we do not insist that we all share, and so ensure that it is not adequately met.” Passing the buck is saying “we can’t meet those needs that can only be met as a society, because to do so would require us to act as a society, and that is anathema to our values.”

I am not looking for justifications to give more power to the government to make decisions about how we should live our lives, but rather am striving to give more power to us as a society to act through a democratically elected and constitutionally framed agency of our will to accomplish goals and meet challenges that we collectively face and cannot be accomplished or met merely as a group of disaggregated individuals. We are a society, and have to act as a society, which means using the social institutions of being a society to exercise a collective will, bear collective burdens, and meet shared responsibilities. That is one part of what it is to be human.

Using government to do what really has never been adequately done without it isn’t “passing the buck,” but rather just the opposite: Stopping the buck in the one way and one place where we can effectively stop it, in the agency of our collective will and collective action, because it is a “buck” that requires and merits no less resolve than that.

It’s not about making better judgments for you than you make for yourself; it’s about acting cooperatively to accomplish ends that can only be accomplished cooperatively. Here is an explanation of how that works: http://​coloradoconfluence.com/​?p=1459. This isn’t a “subjective opinion,” it’s a mathematical reality. We ARE interdependent, and if we fail to act in ways which explicitly recognize and respond to that fact, as effectively as possible, balancing the simultaneously complementary and competing values of individual liberty and social coherence, then we fail both to achieve the full realization of both our individual liberty AND our social coherence, and fail to achieve the full realization of our humanity.

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(This appeared on a Facebook thread following a post about real patriots being willing to pay taxes to support valuable social services.)

DK: It’s Interesting that a significant majority of folks who have served in the armed forces favor Romney. They do know how to make sacrifices. My bias favors those leaders who have actual experience in managing a business. Nice to have a Harvard law degree, but having a Harvard MBA too is a good base to build on. Romney proved himself as a businessman and created a fortune. But “liberals” today tend to demonize those who are successful (the evil 1%). That kind of thinking will obviously do lots to promote business creation and the needed risk taking and hard work. Romney’s success rate in turning around failing companies was about 80%. We’ll be hearing lots about the 20%. All politicians pander to their base, as you well know. The 50% of us who actually pay federal income taxes are patriots and are happy to pay those taxes. I know I’m happy to do so and frankly I’m simply amused by those who pay nothing and then have the gall to say that I don’t pay my fair share. It’s so weird.There are crazy elements on both the right and left. Some would say that liberal spendthrifts are going to bankrupt our country. Government spending is not all that different than personal finance. You have to set priorities. That is being responsible, not crazy. Most people in this country are hard working, caring people. Let’s try to get along!

SH: Actually, managing a business and managing a government involve very different skill sets, because: 1) the former allows for a far more authoritarian approach while the latter requires more ability as a mediator and facilitator, and 2) the former is driven by a single goal (maximizing the profit margin) while the latter serves a complex matrix of goals in service to maximizing the well-being of a populace.

I don’t “demonize” the 1%. I’d be happy to be among them; there are a lot of things I’d like to do with such money (esp. financing the social movement of my dreams, that I’ve outlined on my blog). I critique the system that produces such an excessive and growing concentration of wealth, and do so for two reasons: 1) It isn’t within a context of widespread prosperity, and so indicates a systemic failure to distribute the wealth produced with some modicum of equitability (and given that we have the most inequitable distribution of wealth of any developed nation on Earth, and the highest poverty rates accompanied by a plethora of associated ills, it clearly is not a necessary and unresolvable condition in a modern, successful, capitalist economy). And 2) It actually harms the economy as a whole, DIMINISHES AGGREGATE WEALTH, and WEAKENS THE ECONOMIC ENGINE.

The fact that all other developed nations have far less economic inequality than we do definitively debunks the notion that addressing socioeconomic inequality undermines economic prosperity. AS AN EMPIRICAL FACT (something people need to pay more attention to), those countries that DO pay attention to the issue of the distribution of wealth have LESS poverty, more generalized prosperity, and lower rates of all of the associated ills (e.g, violent crime, homelessness, malnutrition, etc.). As I outlined in my straight-forward “A Framework for Public Discourse” that I wrote in response to you, David, and that you never replied to, there is no a priori economic reason why we have to assume that any social problem is off-limits for us to contemplate and look for ways to solve, always doing so with attention to all relevant factors and implications. Economics is not the science of excusing inaction because it is presumed that doing so will decrease the production of aggregate wealth, as you use it, but rather is the science of figuring out how to balance a variety of interrelated and sometimes competing concerns to maximize human welfare, as people more concerned with humanity and less concerned with rationalizing inequality use it.

(Did you see the wonderful quote by John Kenneth Galbraith, by the way? “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy: That is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” That sums up my above point beautifully.)

And it is clear, both historically and in economic theory, that excessive concentration of wealth diminishes the robustness of an economy in its entirety. This is because it creates a sub-optimal balance of capital investment and consumer spending, and is well illustrated historically by the fact that the two most catastrophic economic collapses in America of the last 100 years were immediately preceded by the two greatest concentrations in wealth in America in the last 100 years, in 1929 and 2008 respectively, which in turn were preceded by a decade or more of small government, pro-business, deregulatory policies. Your entire edifice, David, is counterfactual and contradicted by well-established economic theory.

As for military personnel favoring Romney, those who pursue military careers have long tended toward conservatism (though far less universally than some suppose), and the fact that they do so today is neither new nor interesting. Those individuals, in fact, are part of the inspiration for the above post, since they tend to be among those who insist that patriotism requires that it take their preferred form. This was a response to that notion. As a former U.S. Army infantryman myself, I have no compunction about criticizing our militaristic emphasis in America (nor should anyone, whether they’ve served or not). We haven’t yet struck the right balance between “supporting our soldiers” and “criticizing how we use them and how we culturally contextualize the use of them.” Vietnam was an object lesson in the horrible error of vilifying those who are also victims of our overzealous militarism, the soldiers themselves. But it has become excessively taboo to say “I oppose the glorification of warfare, and the glorification of inflicting enormous damage on enormous numbers of other human beings, in the name of patriotism, with the flag waving and stirring songs echoing in our hardened hearts.”

Something that absolutely appalls me is that, when we discuss the pros and cons of any particular military action, the issue of how it will affect the innocent civilians on the other end is almost off the radar. When we debated the costs and benefits of the Iraq war, what you heard least (barely at all, really) was “we are killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians every year, and maiming and leaving homeless tens of thousands more.” That failure, that omission, is not patriotic, and I am tired of it passing for patriotism. It is a sign of a hegemon that has become so self-absorbed and self-serving in the utilization of its rather awesome power that it has earned the enmity that much of the world feels for it, and should take to heart the lesson that should teach.

That’s the whole point: Should “patriotism” be defined by our willingness and ability to inflict massive suffering on others, or on our willingness and ability to create more well-being among the members of our own society (at the very least)? I say the latter. Conservatives, apparently, insist on the former.

Don’t use the word “gall” with me when we talk about “fairness.” In terms of the distribution of wealth and opportunity, we are the least fair of all developed nations. Repeat that to yourself a few hundred times, because you’re having a great deal of trouble grasping it: Every other developed country on Earth does a better job than we do of extending the fruits of prosperity to a larger portion of their citizenry. That matters. That’s relevant. And that’s because they, unlike you, understand that we are societies, not just random collections of mutually indifferent human beings. Your wealth (as Ben Franklin himself emphasized) belongs to the public as much as it belongs to you, because it is produced through a partnership in which your efforts and skills are facilitated by a social institutional framework in which we all are invested and to which we all belong.

You call it “gall” to consider equality of opportunity a legitimate issue of concern, and then insist that we should all “try to get along”? You talk about “liberal spendthrifts bankrupting our country” when 80% of American economists favor Democratic over Republican economic policies, and the free-market advocate Economist magazine called your economic arguments “economically illiterate and disgracefully cynical”? Give me a break, David! From the point of view of the discipline of economics, on the basis of the empirical evidence, it is this excessive concentration of wealth which is bankrupting the country, not “liberal spending” (especially since our national debt has grown more under Republican than Democratic administrations, due to that same conservative eagerness to kill other people at great cost to ourselves and our economy)! As an EMPIRICAL FACT, the two most catastrophic economic collapses of the past 100 years were immediately preceded by the two greatest concentrations of wealth in the last 100 years, both of which followed a decade or more of small-government, deregulatory conservative policies. This isn’t JUST about what’s fair and humane, it’s ALSO about what’s necessary to the health of the economy as a whole!

I DO believe in fiscal responsibility, but fiscal responsibility is not best achieved by pursuing draconian cuts in a slew of extremely marginal (in a budgetary sense) social welfare policies and programs. There are really only two social welfare programs that are substantial budget items: Social Security and Medicare. And, yes, I’m in favor of reducing their budgets, in two ways: Raising the retirement age, and means testing both of them. Problem solved (especially if we stop spending far larger amounts of money beating the world into submission).

You want to keep doing contortions to find ever-more satisfying moral justifications for rank selfishness, you go for it my friend. And I won’t hesitate to shame you for it in return, because it IS a shameful attitude, and one that I will not legitimate with any degree of acceptance, even if, after a series of insulting and disingenuous statements, dedicated to perpetuating the suffering of my fellow citizens in service to continuing to tank our economy, you close by saying “let’s all get along.”

(If you really want to get along, actually listen to opposing arguments, consider their merits, look at the evidence, and realize that you, as well as those you are talking with, are going to have to compromise, particularly when the evidence is resoundingly against you. Merely attributing mainstream liberal positions to “extremists,” which you graciously indicate are complemented by far-right extremist positions that you don’t hold, followed by “let’s all get along,” isn’t enough.)

(A continuation of this exchange can be found in A Response to a Conservative on Personal and Collective Responsibility, Reason, Bias, Discourse & Humanity.)

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1) There are a set of problems and challenges and opportunities and potentials that we face as a society.

2) In terms of our economic system, they can be summed up in terms of robustness, fairness, and sustainability.

3) In broader terms, they can be summed up as the desire to create as much and as many opportunities to prosper and thrive as possible, that those opportunities be as widely available as possible with as few unfair advantages and disadvantages as possible, and that those opportunities be available in the future as well as the present (we want to be fair to future generations).

4) Reality imposes certain somewhat but imperfectly understood limits on our ability to confront these problems, challenges, opportunities, and potentials.

5) Starting with assumptions about what can’t be done, or what must be done, or why it is impossible or violates some arbitrary moral imperative to address any of those problems, challenges, opportunities and potentials imposes an artificial constraint rather than a naturally arising constraint, a presumed incapacity rather than an encountered incapacity.

6) There is no moral rationalization for why, all other things being equal, human impoverishment and the various burdens that come with it should be considered preferable to its absence.

7) There is no moral rationalization for why, all other things being equal, social injustices (i.e., systematic inequalities of opportunity to thrive) should be considered preferable to their absence.

8) Economics is the systematic study of how various factors affect these various dimensions of the production of “utility” (a broader concept than wealth, but similar in meaning) including robustness (more aggregate utility), fairness (more equitable distribution of the opportunity to produce and partake of utility), and sustainability (a system for the production of utility which can endure indefinitely).

9) Politics is the process by which public policies are arrived at affecting, among other things, our system for the production and distribution of utility.

10) There is nothing inherent to our economic or political systems that precludes contemplating how to confront and address any of the problems, challenges, opportunities, or potentials that are identified above.

11) The study of economics does not lead to any clear and indisputable conclusion that it is impossible to confront and address any of the problems, challenges, opportunities or potentials listed above.

12) When specific questions concerning the best policy for addressing the problems, challenges, opportunities or potentials listed above arise, there should be no a priori assumptions about what that best policy is or what alternatives can and can’t be considered and examined.

13) When such questions arise, all participants in the public discourse regarding them should draw on the relevant disciplines to the greatest extent possible, and should examine the empirical evidence to determine what the best policy would be.

14) Opposing parties in debates that arise as a result should focus on the same goals (as outlined above), considering only the balance of priorities among them and the means for attaining them (or of demonstrating through a cost-benefit analysis that attaining one or more of them is prohibitively costly).

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(The following is a quote posted on Facebook and the exchange that followed it)

“We’re coming to a tipping point… there’s going to be a huge conversation; is government an instrument of good or is it every man for himself? Is there something bigger we want to reach for or is self-interest our basic resting pulse?” -Aaron Sorkin

DK: Each person in our great country gets to reach for something bigger or not.

SH: We are far too individualistic a society. First, our individual welfare depends heavily on how well developed are our institutions for cooperation and coordination of our efforts. Second, our liberty is a function of our unity and social cohesion, not of our disunity and social incoherence, because government isn’t the only potential agent for depriving one of one’s liberty (or life, or property, or happiness), and it’s absence ensures that other, more diffuse predators will plague everyone incessantly. Third, we are primarily expressions of a historically produced collective consciousness, thinking in languages and with concepts, operating through social institutions and utilizing technologies that we did not individually invent, but rather collectively developed over the course of generations. Our “individuality” is a unique confluence and marginal variation of both genetic and cognitive shared material. We are part of something bigger than us, and as big as it, for it flows through us and we flow through it. Government is not arbitrary; it is one valuable social institutional modality, evolved over millennia, to be refined and utilized in ever more useful and liberating ways.

DK: I grew up in a small MA community that still made decisions during annual town hall meetings. There was a strong sense of community and neighbors took care of neighbors. My grandfather was the town’s tax collector (thirty-five years) and he provided that service evenings and weekends from his home (his day job was being a shop foreman). It was very efficient as were many of the other town services, like fire and police (volunteers). Today in that same town many of these same services are full-time and the town has buildings to house them. Is there better service? Nope. But that’s small town America. My point is the closer the government is to the people the better. Our founders knew this and tried to set up a system that limited federal authority. It does allow more individualism, versus collective authority and remote control. In my opinion collectivism just doesn’t work very well (Russia). I don’t want you or anyone else bossing me around. I’ll take care of myself and do more than my fair share to help others who are in need. Only independence leads to self-actualization. As a former trust officer I saw this with trust babies. Money isn’t everything.

SH: If you’re saying that the disintegration of our communities has been horribly bad for America, and that we would be better off working toward recreating such communities again, I not only agree with you, but it is a topic I write on often, and in very specific ways. When I talk about my ideal social movement (which I do at length, in dozens of essays on my blog, Colorado Confluence), reconstructing a specific, modern form of local community is one of the three components I emphasize.

If your suggestion is that the growth in the federal governmental role in our lives is incompatible with this, or the cause of this, then I couldn’t disagree more. The primary causes of the disintegration of local community have been: 1) increased geographic mobility (and the economic incentives for it), 2) increased options for associating with people remotely (thus decreasing the need to associate with neighbors who are dissimilar to oneself), and 3) the same rise in hyper-individualism that is responsible for our diminished willingness to consider government a tool of collective action and collective welfare.

A sense of community may well have been at its height at precisely the same time that we were most willing to utilize and rely on Government as a tool for taking care of one another: During the Great Depression and the New Deal. This is because the two are more inherently compatible and mutually reinforcing than inherently incompatible and mutually inhibiting.

I agree: The closer government is to the people the better. But that’s not a geographic thing, but rather an emotional, attitudinal, and behavioral thing. First, let me point out why it’s wrong as a geographic assertion, and how our history has been, in one sense, the ongoing discovery of why it’s wrong as a geographic assertion.

At the founding of this county, many (not all) of the Founding Fathers were concerned about the potential tyranny of a more remote government, and took for granted that the more local government was more a thing of the people. In many ways, this was a very nationalistic notion, because they thought of their state as their nation (that’s how we came to change the meaning of the word “state” as we have), and they considered governments that weren’t their own true ”national” government to be imperialistic and foreign.

But our history has been one of successive increases of federal power either to increase the federal protection of individual liberty from more local government (e.g., the abolition of slavery and the 14th amendment, which catalyzed a gradual application of the Bill of Rights to state and local government as well as to federal government; the Civil Rights court federal court holdings, federal legislation, and federal enforcement), or to increase the federal role in facilitating individual liberty by increasing opportunities to thrive economically (e.g., the New Deal, the Great Society).

But a larger role for federal government does not have to be an emotionally or socially remote thing. I feel a personal connection to my two U.S. senators (one more than the other) and several of my state’s congressmen (as well as many in the state legislature and state government). In a different way (i.e., without the benefit of actual, personal interaction), I feel a personal connection to President Obama. And all of us who feel that we are in a shared national community feel that we are also in a shared local community. We tend to be more involved locally as well as nationally. I, for instance, made an effort once to reinvigorate my community, to get my neighbors more involved in our local schools and local businesses, to become more of a community. (Ironically, it is in the strongly Republican/Conservative/Libertarian enclaves such as where I live where local communities are weakest, and in the strongly Democratic neighborhoods where local communities are strongest, suggesting again that the correlation you identified is the inverse of reality.)

“Collectivism,” like “socialism” is an inherently overbroad term, and even more so in the way that it is used by modern conservatives. It is used to simultaneously refer to a set of failed totalitarian states, and to the entire corpus of modern developed predominantly capitalist but politically economic hybrid states that are the most successful economies in the history of the world. Every single modern developed nation, without exception, has the enormous administrative infrastructure that invokes those terms from conservatives, and every single one, without exception, had such an infrastructure in place PRIOR TO participating in the historically unprecedented post-WWII expansion in the production of prosperity (pre-empting an insistence that it is an unhealthy and self-defeating by-product of such wealth). In reality, the political economic form that you insist doesn’t work is the only one that ever has, on the modern scale, and the one you insist is the best imaginable has never actually existed and can never actually work.

(Sure, before the New Deal we had a much smaller federal government, but we were already using it in multiple ways to address social problems, including child labor and anti-trust laws. It only resembled the conservative ideal when we lived in a historical period that did not support any other form, due to the state of the economy and of communications and travel.)

Our founders set up a system that had the potential to articulate with and evolve according to the realities of lived history. The Constitution is brilliantly short and highly general, except in the exact design of the governmental institutions, which remain as they were outlined, with some Constitutional modifications since (such as the elimination of slavery and of their infamous designation as 3/5 of a human being, and the direct election of U.S. senators). Our nation is not some stagnant edifice following nothing more than a blueprint which perfectly predicted and mandated every placement of every brick, but rather an organic articulation of our founding principles and documents with our lived history, creating something that is responsive to both simultaneously.

No, this isn’t the America envisioned by Jefferson and Madison. It is a bit more like the one envisioned by Hamilton and Adams, and, in some ways, not nearly as “collectivist” as the one envisioned by Franklin, who considered all private wealth beyond that necessary to sustain oneself and one’s family to belong “to the public, by whose laws it was created.” But, more importantly, it is the one that the articulation of foundational principles with lived history has created. None of us can read the minds of historical figures, or impute to them with confidence what they would think today, but for everyone who says that Jefferson would be revolted by modern America, I say that it may well be that he would be delighted by it, for the ideals he helped to codify gained fuller and deeper expression, through the unexpected mechanism of a stronger rather than weaker federal government, than he was able to imagine possible. (And it was Jefferson; after all, who insisted that our social institutions have to grow and change with the times, for to fail to do so is to force the man to wear the coat which fit him as a boy.)

Community, like a well-functioning and substantial federal government, is, to some extent, all about us as a community, as a people, limiting one another’s actions and pooling resources for mutual benefit. You may not want a government bossing you around, but I don’t want corporations poisoning my air and water because they can increase the profit margin by not “wasting” money on avoiding doing so. You may not want a government bossing you around, but I want a functioning market economy rather than the undermined and unstable one that occurs in the absence of sufficient governmental regulations to ensure that centralized market actors don’t game markets to their enormous profit and to the public’s enormous, often catastrophic, detriment.

Are there challenges to be met while doing so? Does the resolution of problems create new problems to be resolved? Absolutely. Does that mean that we should rely on the never-adequate system of private charity to confront deeply embedded and horribly unjust poverty and destitution, rather than confront it as a people, through our agency of collective action, our government? Absolutely not.

Buy my e-book A Conspiracy of Wizards

There’s a post going mildly viral on Facebook, just one of many on both sides of the ideological divide. The post is a picture of a message on yellow paper held between two fingers, that says “Don’t claim to love the U.S.A. while trying to make it a socialist nation.” it’s a relatively mild one, to be sure, far less offensive than many I’ve seen. But it is usually accompanied by comments that make it more offensive, hateful and ignorant statements that one might expect to accompany such mindless drivel as this.

Every now and then (okay, fairly frequently), I decide to respond to such things, to challenge these pernicious and destructive narratives. This is how I responded to this one, on several of its threads:

First, what you are referring to as “socialism” is the hybrid, predominantly market-based capitalistic political economic form common to all modern developed nations, without exception, and in place in all modern developed nations PRIOR TO their participation in the historically unprecedented post-WWII expansion in the production of prosperity.

Second, it is to the right of the political economic ideology advocated by Benjamin Franklin who said “all property superfluous to (that necessary to support oneself and one’s family) is the property of the public, who by their laws have created it.” I guess that Benjamin Franklin, who was the only one of the founding fathers to participate in the drafting and signing of every single one of our founding documents, and who was the universally revered senior statesman of our new nation at the moment of its birth, had no right to claim to love America, then?

Third, “loving America” requires committing ourselves to the same level of discourse, the same openness to ideas, the same willingness to celebrate and apply reason to the challenge of self-governance, as that which characterized our founding fathers in 1787, when they gathered for the Constitutional Convention, and forged difficult compromises and sought pragmatic solutions to problems.

Fourth, this kind of nonsense, of misusing the word “socialism,” of rejecting political economic reasoning within a political economic system that is UNIVERSALLY characteristic of every successful political economy in the world today, and of vilifying those who want us to remain a modern and prosperous nation rather than be thrown into the downward spiral of ignorance and bigotry that you are so passionately striving to impose on us, is simply repugnant.

It is no expression of love for America to vilify your fellow Americans, to constrict our thought and reduce our commitment to the welfare of our people and the good of the world. It is no expression of love for America to strive to continue to impose policies on it that have put it near or at the bottom of all developed nations by most measures of human welfare, with by far the highest violent crime rates, with by far the highest percentage of our population incarcerated (of ANY nation on Earth, bar none!), with higher infant mortality rates, higher poverty rates, a poorer performing educational system….

It’s no expression of love for America to hate its people, to lack compassion or concern for the destitute, to refuse to incorporate economic theory and research into economic policy, to refuse to learn and understand the lessons of history, to remain ignorant and irrational and belligerent and bigoted and to insist that that is what must define us as a nation and a people.

That is not love for America. That is hatred for humanity. And it is not who and what we are. It is not who and what the vast majority of Americans, reasonable people of goodwill, people who care about one another, people who care about being wise and compassionate and working together to do the best we can in a complex and subtle world, are going to let you turn us into.