Oxymoron of the Day

When is racism not racism? When it’s government-endorsed racism.

Then the racism is to be referred to as affirmative action, the oxymoron of the day.

A benevolent weed wacker for the government garden

A benevolent weed wacker for the government garden

By ERIC CLUE and NICK HACKER

Since the days of Jesse Jackson (the elder, not the younger), we have become political prisoners of the alliterations we use, even when they are mightily misleading. Consider how our political powers talk about the economy. Last month President Obama praised immigrants as an “economic engine.” Mitt Romney says that tax cuts will “forever fuel” a recovery. Others like Joe Biden, the Administration’s leading intellectual, fear a “super scary stop” in job growth unless the nation keeps doing what it’s been doing.

But our many alliterations ignore the need for a benevolent weed wacker in “the marketplace.” We too often tend to think of markets as extremely efficient, of humans as routinely rational, of incentives as commonly clear, and of outcomes as approximately appropriate. From this a series of market-based total truths follows: regulation and taxes are rotten and terrible because they impede the market’s implicit weed wacking works. Government stimulus is wimpy, wasteful, and wishful.

Together, these compose the great gospel of the market mavens. However, according to the alliterations and mega-metaphors we’ve developed—along with our proprietary algorithms—there is simply no evidence for it. We say trickle-down economics has fatally failed. What has worked? The President’s great leveling efforts (often derisively called trickle-up poverty) which have made everything free for so many Americans: college, disability payments, health care, housing, transportation, food stamps, cable television and high speed internet, and unlimited unemployment.

The 2008 crash and the Great Recession prove irrefutably how inefficient and irrational markets really are. And there is absolutely no evidence in the heart of any properly indoctrinated liberal economist that government interference could have possibly contributed to such happenings. None.

What we require now is a friendlier framework for thoughtfully thinking and tactfully talking about a new economy, grounded in modern understandings of how we want things to work. Economies (as social scientists and even liberal arts majors understand) aren’t super simple, largely linear and perfectly predictable, but complex, nonlinear and ecosystemic. An economy isn’t a machine; it’s a garden as shown by the mixed metaphors and subtle settled science of the documentary film Being There. The economy can be fruitful if well tended, but it will be overrun by obnoxious weeds if not.

So what is needed? A new framework, which we call Gardenbrain. With Gardenbrain, markets can become both efficient and effective if managed by government gardeners armed with benevolent weed wacking policies. Where Marketbrain—the idea that the marketplace actually works—posits that individual effort and initiative should be honored, Gardenbrain recognizes that we’re all better off when none of us are better off. Where Marketbrain treats inequality as the predictable result of unequally distributed talent and work ethic, Gardenbrain reveals that sophomoric subsidies and crony capitalism can instead help create a self-licking ice cream cone.

Gardenbrain challenges any non-liberal policy. And gardens are lovely and delicious while markets are ugly and malicious.

Consider regulation. Under the prevailing Marketbrain assumption, regulation is an invasive interruption of wealth creation in a largely self-correcting economic system. But the Gardenbrain metaphor, backed by our insightful ideology, allows us to instead assert an economy cannot self-correct any more than a garden can self-tend. And regulation — the creation of government standards to raise the government-determined quality of life — is God’s work.

Is it possible to garden clumsily and ineffectively? In a word, no (excluding mismanaged economies like East Germany and the former Soviet Union). Wise regulation is how humbly humanistic societies turn a dangerous jungle of “freedom” into a prosperous government garden. According to our algorithms, this explains why wherever one finds a highly-regulated economy one also finds a large and powerful government Leviathan. And where regulation is lessened, we find widespread freedom which can be a precursor to anarchy.

Or take taxes. Under the efficient-market hypothesis, taxes are an extraction of resources from the market. Taxes are not just separate from economic activity, but holistically hostile to it. Yet if this was an accurate reflection of our self-selected reality, then given our low and lax tax rates we should be wallowing in work. (Full disclosure: our algorithms have filtered outliers that don’t confirm our hypothesis, such as the current European economic situation.)

Gardenbrain, in contrast, says taxes are the foundational fertilizer which allows us to sustain the government garden. A well-designed tax system — in which the rich (those households making anything close to $200K/year) contribute and the poor (those much-needed special interest groups and voting blocs) benefit — ensures that wealth is properly “spread around” in order to foster fairness and satisfy standards. Reducing taxes on so-called “job creators” is fantastical folly. Jobs, we now know, are the consequence of a feedback loop between government, the people, and demand—as best managed by a government controlled economy—which truly creates jobs. Good growth doesn’t trickle down; it emerges organically from the government out.

Lastly, consider spending. The word spending means literally “to use up or extinguish value,” and most Americans believe that’s exactly what government does with their tax dollars. But government spending is not a simple single-step transaction that destroys dollars as an engine burns evil and dangerous fossil fuels; instead it’s an investment that circulates the government’s money. To invest tax dollars on education, green energy, the children, clean air and water, undocumented workers, free healthcare, and the likes is to carefully circulate natural nutrients through the grand garden of government.

Humans, we existentialists say, emerged from the primordial ooze and know there is no enduring truth. Perhaps that is why we have long had a poor understanding of the relative truth needed to grow government gardens. We need to elect the right gardeners (our benevolent weed wacking and redistributional elites), have them secure the soil (through, for example, the whenever-required application of eminent domain), and then depend on their goodness and wisdom (to properly cast the seeds of investment). Of course, they’ll also fertilize, water and wack the weeds for us. Lastly, our good government gardeners must also input algorithm changes, add useful alliterations, allegories, and metaphors, and when needed, re-define language in order to create the ideological story the people should hear. When the marketplace of ideas is finally eliminated by our elites, the fine and fruitful government garden will grow greatly.

Eric Clue and Nick Hacker are the authors of “The Government Gardens of Goodness: A Story We Made Up on Citizenship, the Economy, and the Role of Government.”

(Note: if you must, read the original here.)

Wanted: analysts who can analyze

The irrepressible Ezra Klein—I mean that in a derogatory way; think of an irrepressible Charles Barkley at an all-you-can-eat seafood spread—has a piece at Bloomberg (which op-ed wise, tends to be a reflection of its nanny state founder). The thesis? That raising taxes can be a political winner for Barry Oh!

…polls consistently show that increasing taxes on the wealthy is hugely popular. In the same Gallup poll, 62 percent of respondents said “upper-income people” were paying too little in taxes. In a CNN/ORC International poll, also conducted in April, 68 percent of Americans agreed that “the present tax system benefits the rich and is unfair to the ordinary working man or woman” and 72 percent said they support changing the tax code “so that people who make more than one million dollars a year will pay at least 30 percent of their income in taxes.”

What Klein ignores is the fundamental issue that should be driving discussions on tax rates: government spending. How big an issue is spending versus taxes? Charles Barkley big. Consider the nonsensical Buffett Rule of a few months ago:

[Obama’s] Buffett [tax] Rule would cover just 0.7% of all of Obama’s debt and .1% of Obama’s spending.

Instead the Klein focus is on protecting Obama, attempting to offer political advice to the Administration, and improve Obama’s re-election prospects while the nation continues towards a fiscal cliff based largely on one factor: the government spends way too much.

Penn State and the lessons of power

In human hands, power tends to corrupt. Left alone and over time, the consequences of the corrupting situation(s) will certainly fail to improve.

As such, there is no better argument for political term limits and institutional transparency than the example from sports we see with Penn State football, the Jerry Sandusky sex crimes, and Joe Paterno.

From MSNBC regarding the just-released Freeh report:

The report says the main cause of the university’s failure was a desire to avoid bad publicity.

When power is threatened—in this case, in the form of potential bad publicity—either the reality of the situation is dismissed or a scapegoat must be found. Beneficial reform is waved-off until the weight of the crisis demands it.

Other institutional-level problems from the Freeh report:

• A striking lack of empathy for child abuse victims.
• Lack of oversight by the board of trustees.
• “A president who discouraged discussion and dissent.”
• Ignorance of child abuse issues and laws.
• A football program that had opted out of university programs and training on reporting requirements.
• “A culture of reverence for the football program that is ingrained at all levels of the campus community.”

No empathy, no oversight, no leadership, ignorance, lack of transparency, inappropriate hero worship/cult of personality. Not good. In fact, it reminds me of our current political situation—that is, the Obama Administration—in many ways. How ‘bout this?

• A striking lack of empathy for tax payers, the young, and savers.
• Lack of oversight within the Justice Department.
• “A president who discouraged discussion and dissent.”
• Ignorance of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, Executive authority, and effective economic principles.
• A Justice Department that hid behind Executive Privilege and ignored Congressional reporting requirements.
• “A culture of reverence for the President that is ingrained at all levels of the Democrat party and across the main-stream media.”

The concern with legacy, with what others think, is more powerful than we realize. Many, Joe Pa and Penn State included, are likely more concerned with their legacy—that is, winning and/or looking like they’re doing the right thing—than they are with doing the right thing and competing with honor.

Penn State as an institution probably would have missed the decades-long signals if the football staff had established a Jerry Sandusky School of Massage and Locker Room Therapy.