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March 27, 2010 03:04 PM UTC

Weekend Open Thread

  • 107 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“It is a man’s own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.”

–Gautama Buddha

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107 thoughts on “Weekend Open Thread”

  2. This should help the employment situation.  I’m really beginning to see what an omen that whole ‘spread it around’ thing was.  What a fool I was.

    March 26 (Bloomberg) — AT&T Inc. will book $1 billion in first-quarter costs related to the health-care law signed this week by President Barack Obama, the most of any U.S. company so far.

    A change in the tax treatment of Medicare subsidies triggered the non-cash expense, and the company will consider changes to the benefits it offers current and retired workers, Dallas-based AT&T said today in a regulatory filing.

    AT&T, the biggest U.S. phone company, joins Caterpillar Inc., AK Steel Holding Corp. and 3M Co. in recording non-cash expenses against earnings as a result of the law. Health-care costs may shave as much as $14 billion from U.S. corporate profits, according to an estimate by benefits consulting firm Towers Watson. AT&T employed about 281,000 people as of the end of January.

    1. the employment situation still lagged. Heads they win, tails we lose. Gotta love this economy.

      And it’s not even a cash hit, just an accounting gimmic.

      1. Obamacare: killing jobs, paychecks, benefits, old people, sick people, and babies in the womb

        http://www.coloradopols.com/sh…

        While maintaining your shiny delusions of Utopia, know this — costs will rise even more then had nothing been done and benefits for the working will shrink.

        Have fun for the next seven months.

        1. Let’s break out our weeping towels for the poor, poor businesses who only want to give more and more to the hard workers who made their profits for them if only the big bad gummint bureaucrats would let them. That your idea is it?

          The last 25-30 years has seen the decline of the American middle and working classes as the top 1% and .5% of society keeps gobbling up larger and larger shares of both our annual incomes and even greater shares of accumulated wealth.

          This has not been an accident, it has been by design, through our increasingly regressive tax policy as well as our inability to see government as a force for good in protecting citizens from those who would prey upon us.

          But I guess there are still a lot of people (and many on this site) who think these days of rampant greed and corruption are just okay. Let’s let those captains of industry, saints that they are, take us all down the tubes as they slice their shares off pre-tax and whether or not they run a profitable business.

          Oh, and BTW- those charges that are making headlines everywhere on CP blogs are non-cash charges. What does that mean? That they aren’t actually paying it out in cash. It is simply an accounting gimmic to allow them to avoid more taxes. I wish I could declare non-cash charges on my individual tax return, don’t you?

          1. Welcome.  

            You may respond to Libertad, we often do.

            But you should only expect .01% of his posts, his reasoning, his examples, his links (should he include one), etc. to make even remote sense. Every now and then, he squeezes out a real gem, but usually it seems to be a random pairing of words, strung together in some sort of mish mash, occasionally with a video (that supports the opposite point).  

            But we love him, sort of, like a crazy neighbor that you still watch out for.  

            1. I am quixotic like that I guess, tilting at windmills. Thanks for the heads up. Still a newb on this site and learning who’s who. Appreciate your feedback.

                    1. like a wind up toy. I’ll be amused for a while, but then you’ll bore me. Oops, too late.

                    3. that “I’ll be amused for a while, but then you’ll bore me. Oops, too late” is a pretty pristine example of that inartful and self-defeating attempt to “signfiy dominance” that I mentioned in the thread I linked to above, right? You need to have a chest to beat before beating it looks anything other than ridiculous.

                    5. Tell you what. Why don’t you give me a reason to post links to these two threads on current diaries, so that you can enjoy seeing me more publicly humiliated by your rapier wit, okay? It’s a shame to waste all of this…, whatever it is.

                    6. you’re doing yourself proud. Threaten. Bluster. Insult. Whatever it takes to make you feel all manly.

                    7. Who posted on a thread six days after the last post made, on which we had never interacted, responding to me with some gripe that had been festering in your itty-biddy little scrotum for a month because I had called you a “douche” in our one and only exchange, threatened to punch me in the nose, posted strings of invectives, and refused my repeated offer to just let bygones be bygones? And what threat have I made? You tell me that you’ve shown me up here; I was just offering to help you bask in your well-earned glory.

                    9. my replies in these two threads to jpsandsci have not been for his benefit, but rather to ensure that his petty attempts at disinformation and character assassination have not been allowed to stand unchallenged. jpsandsci himself is clearly beyond the reach of facts or reason, and so there is no point in engaging him.

        2. Creating jobs, increasing paychecks, increasing benefits, helping old people, healing sick people – and not harming babies in the womb.

          You really are a doofus, Libertad. Have fun for the next seventy years.

    2. But if you think that this non-cash “booking” change will effect the ability of these companies to do business, then you’re wrong. You’re also wrong that it will mean layoffs.

      How has the stock market performed since Obama took office? I’ll save you the research. The confidence in the market was below 7,000 when Obama took office and now its approaching 11,000. The Republican mantra of “free market” was a prescription for theft and abuse of enormous proportion.

      The actual threat to this turn around being marshalled by the Obama administration, was and still is housing (and commercial real estate values, as well). Housing has not found its  bottom yet. Estimates are that between 15% and 50% of housing values may yet be lost.

      Spare us your concern for the unemployed. It rings hollow. Perhaps you should work harder to protect the status quo. Here are the facts that sum up how wealth distribution between 1983 and 2004 became more concentrated, in good part due to the tax cuts for the wealthy and the defeat of labor unions: Of all the new financial wealth created by the American economy in that 21-year-period, fully 42% of it went to the top 1%. A whopping 94% went to the top 20%, which of course means that the bottom 80% received only 6% of all the new financial wealth generated in the United States during the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s (Wolff, 2007).

      Cry me some tears for the wealthy….and find a heart.

          1. The companies just mysteriously formed because of a primordial ooze-like mysterious convocation of willing labor just created it?

            I think we’re pretty close to a cat person – dog person stalemate here.

            I’m going to go play with the kids and tell them how much money they owe.  Have a great day.

            2. our inner Milton this morning? May I humbly suggest you read more Jack London. Try his short story entitled’ “How I Became a Socialist.” Give me a review.

              Have fun with your kids. That is what’s really important.

            3. back when Bush senior said it was and still is.  There isn’t a shred of evidence that the huge tax cuts for the elite led to the kind of investment that creates well paying jobs.  Not a shred.  

              On the other hand there is a ton of evidence that the policies touted by Republicans from Reagan through Bush have expanded exponentially the gap between the elite and the rest of the population, shrinking the middle class, expanding the ranks of the poor, making education and decent health care less available due to a combination of rising cost and stagnant means for the overwhelming majority. The policies that brought us here self evidently aren’t the cure.

              The fact that health care costs our economy so much more than it costs any other economy in the industrialized world due to our stubborn clinging to the silliest universal healthcare plan on the planet, universal care via the ER for which we all pay, has a far more negative effect than any of the factors conservatives use as an excuse to resist joining the rest of the civilized world in the 21st century with a universal plan that does much more for a half to a third the cost to our economy.  

              Since the ER is already our universal healthcare plan the question isn’t do we want to develop a universal health care system or not. The question is do we want to stick with a really lousy expensive one or go completely libertarian and deny ER access to the uninsured and their children unless they can pay up front.  Personally, I’m glad to see us taking steps toward the 21st century civilized world and away from the libertarian paradise of Somalia.  Suit yourself, though, LB.

            5. both cats and dogs.

              And I like both fiscal responsibility and a holistic economic analysis that incorporates an understanding of how important up-front investments are.

              And I like remembering what the ultimate goals of social organization are, rather than getting lost in the ideological abbreviations which were supposed to help serve those goals, rather than become superordinate to them.

              It’s a complex and subtle world: Anyone of us may be wrong about anything. That’s why two things are of critical importance: 1) Avoid violent answers to any problem if at all possible, and 2) Know that we live in a country comprised of many people with variations in values and priorities and goals, and that the country belongs neither to one faction nor the other.

              The people who favor compromising extreme individualism with social responsibility won this time, and I hope we keep winning. But when we don’t, unless we’re committing crimes against humanity, I’ll understand that the extreme individualists belong to this democracy of ours as well, and will win some as well.

                2. I like dogs more than cats.

                  And I like reducing the gini coefficient (the statistical measure of inequality in the distribution of wealth) as much as I like increasing the GDP.

                  And I recognize that they (distributional justice and productive robustness) are not in perfect tension, but are also mutually reinforcing to a large extent.

                  An economy is not healthy if it is robust, but either unfair or unsustainable. It is not healthy if it is fair, but either non-robust or unsustainable. And it is not healthy if it is sustainable but either non-robust or unfair. A healthy economy is all three.

                    3. Next time I get a “geez” out of you, it’s going to be the other kind, if I have to cut and paste one of your own posts and claim credit for it in order to do so!

            6. …..said “Labor precedes capital.”

              Since he made a good living as a corporate lawyer prior to his political life, he certainly could have thought the opposite.

              But he didn’t.  

      2. These companies were double dipping government dollars.  The loophole was fixed so that they can only dip once!

        From this AP article:

        http://www.google.com/hostedne…

        Under the 2003 Medicare prescription drug program, companies that provide prescription drug benefits for retirees have been able to receive subsidies covering 28 percent of eligible costs. But they could deduct the entire amount they spent on these drug benefits – including the subsidies – from their taxable income.

        Why should they be able to accept a subsidy and at the same time write off that subsidy on their taxable income?

        There are probably hundreds of these loopholes that, mostly, large corporations take advantage of and mostly were given away between 2000 and 2008.

    3. I’m happy to pay it. Yes, health-care costs money (shocking!!!). In return I have employees who can concentrate on work rather than on fighting the health insurance companies. So I’m better off after the cost 🙂

    5. AT&T rose 9 cents to $26.24 at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares have fallen 6.4 percent this year.

      Up another six cents (or $354,000,000 in market capitalization) in after hours trading.  Clearly panic has set it in.  Clearly all is lost.  Dear God the horrors of socialism. Rep. Boehner was right about armageddon.  Obama promised us all along he’d never trade one time noncash expenses for health care for millions of people and no preexisting conditions.  We have been deceived my brothers, we have been deceived.

  4. That provision was put in by Bush administration cronies and their lobbyist friends to give big corporations (not small business) a tax break.  For people who don’t want to expand government, they sure have their hand out when it comes to not wanting to pay taxes.  

    1. ..Gundamentalists with their 9mm pacifiers are ‘bucks customers too!

      The satire is about right – not really stomping mad about insecure dickheads who think strapping a gun on their hip makes up for their irrational fears and insecurities.

      It’s enough of a tweak to make the point, and just about right.

  6. Michael Lewis is I think, the best writer on business out there – period. And with The Big Short he’s done a superb job laying our our recent fiscal insanity. (No surprise, what is presently proposed in Congress won’t do squat to stop activity like this from happening again.)

    One warning, make sure you have time to read when you get it – you won’t want to put it down.

    And ignore the poor reviews on Amazon – it’s a bunch of spolied children upset that there isn’t a Kindle version.

    1. This guys’ (the site) poor sense of humor is exceeded only by his incredible bad taste. It’s typical though. I guess, when you live in Happy Valley, you get somewhat inured to these nuts. We see this kind of stuff on pickup trucks.

      The cartoon is as despicable as you might expect. Love that 1st. Amendment. Morons have rights, too.  

        1. How could anyone not see that as racist? The imagery of a black man raping any white woman–let alone the statue of liberty–was enough to start many a lynch mob.

              2. that you have gone completely over to the dark/stupid side you, come up with a comment like this.  Don’t know whether it makes me feel better or worse about you, LB.

                1. Neither are racist ones.

                  It doesn’t mean you’re not a lunatic, it just means that I can look at something that’s out of line and identify it as being out of line.

        1. I guess there’s something wrong with thinking that cartoons depicting lynch mob inducing stereotypes of black men raping white women, and the imagery of the President of the United States “raping” the personification of liberty is abhorrent.

  8. Since no one is willing to take my bet that Bennet will win in November, I guess that means everyone believes the primary race, at least, is over.  (David Zerota, Wade “Dick” Morris, Andrew Liebernoff, etc. all declined to bet.)

    Good.  I can now change my comment line from a reference to Bennet to an Arrested Development reference.  Here’s to all you analrapists out there.

     

    2. The compromising position of Steve notwithstanding, this is not a time for dawdling around the edges. As bold as Obama can be, I want him to be….for the progressive causes we elected him to champion.

      The Republicans have no interest in bipartisanship. They have no interest in the public weal. They are an obstruction.

      All great leaders, on the cusp of important historical decisions, deal with obstructions like all of us do when we find something in the way. We remove it.

      1. Maybe he chose the 15 that he thought were the most important as a warning and if the party of ‘hell, no’ still won’t let the process go forward, there will be more during the next holiday.  He gave them a year’s worth of rope.  Why aren’t the Dems screaming “Up of Down Vote”.  I have heard that a few times but they don’t push back as much as they should.  Appointments don’t require 60 votes, do they?

        The WMD treaty with Russia will probably be the next item.  The President needs that to be approved before he goes to Prague.

        Hopefully Harry will be able to get some rest the next week or so and the Senate can start trying to catch up with the House.

      2. I believe that removing the obstruction of politically represented ignorance is no mean feat. You never accomplish it most effectively and least expensively by declaring war on half the population. You only accomplish it by succeeding, to some extent, to simultaneously reassure a significant portion of the popular opposition that you are working with and for them, and to utilize some combination of negotiation with and outmaneuvering of the elected opposition in order to do so.

        The inconvenience of large numbers of people who disagree with us is not one which can be either wished or willed away.

          2. It comes down to the variable malleability of reality. It ranges from highly malleable to highly unmalleable, depending on how deep and extensive the molding being attempted in how short a time frame. I can alter the location of an object, if the object is small enough and the distance of dislocation short enough, with tremendous ease. But moving the Earth a greater distance from the sun would be considerably harder.

            When you pick a goal, you need to identify a means to achieve it via those aspects of reality that are malleable enough to create an in-road to success. One of the biggest mistakes people often make, for instance, when they talk about public policy, is to suggest something that a large number of decentralized actors have to spontaneously decide to do. For examples: “the solution to the crime problem is for parents to impose more responsibility on their kids,” or “the solution to war is for soldiers everywhere to refuse to fight.” The list is endless. The problem is that the suggestion not only fails to change the reality, it also fails to identify a pathway toward changing the reality.

            Many dramatic changes in our social reality can be effected, but only by investing heavily in an analytical understanding of the systems which comprise it, and seeking the “pressure points” in those systems where managable applications of focused human effort can have a rippling effect through the fabric of those social (and surrounding) systems.

            I still maintain that the distribution of beliefs and attitudes and understandings in this country is not wet clay in the hands of liberals deciding to make everything right. For better or worse (and it is some combination of the two), it’s not that easy in a democracy for any one faction to simply impose its will on another of equal size and conviction just because the first faction has more elected representatives in office. Look at the push back for the incredibly marginal health care reform we barely managed to squeek through, push back including threats of violence and actual acts of violence. And bear in mind that that push back is going to grow in determination as more legislation is pushed through.

            Does that mean we stop pushing? Of course not. But it does mean that it’s not simply a matter of “we’re in power and we can do anything we want.” We can’t, not because of any generous self-restraint on our part, but because of the actual limits of the malleability of the aspect of reality we are talking about: Our national culture.

            I’ve often repeated, and I continue to maintain, that by far the most important political arena is the human mind, affected by formal and informal instruments of education, propaganda, and socialization. “Will and Grace” did more for gay rights (along with all of the proliferating soap opera gay couples, and concommitent cultural shifts) than any law that anyone could have passed, because the change in attitude eases in the change in law, while a change in law grunts mightily against resistent attitudes. It’s a dialectic, to be sure, and laws help to keep the forces of change in motion. But the cascade of changes in attitudes and understandings is the real goal, and the real triumph.

            Without working toward that end, you’re not working very effectively toward molding that hard, dry lump of clay you see before you.

  12. Strengthening communities helps people to teach and learn from each other throughout the course of their lives, and to take better care of each other in a variety of ways, thus preventing a multitude of human-induced problems that otherwise would have occurred.

    In the modern context of decreased insularity, it creates environments for improved public discourse and broadened perspectives by throwing dissimilar people together who would not have otherwise chosen to associate with one another.

    It provides mechanisms for reducing child abuse and neglect, and domestic violence, by increasing mutual awareness and support.

    It creates social capital by forging a local networks of mutual assistance.

    It stimulates and humanizes local economies by creating closer bonds between local residents and local businesses.

    It improves employer-employee relations through that humanization, by making businesses and the social relations within them more transparent to their local customers.

    It decreases our carbon footprint by increasing the amount of business we do close to home.

    It reduces crime by increasing mutual vigilance.

    It increases the amount of mentoring and adult guidance that children receive, and reduces their range of unsupervised action, by creating relationships between all adults in the community with all children in the community.

    It strengthens the nation by increasing our identification with one another, our sense of being a people, our commonality.

    It improves the quality of life along multiple dimensions, including the emotional and psychological, the social, and the aesthetic.

    1. I’d like to return to the economic discussion, and the issue of inequality. Clearly, there will always be rank differences, however, can we not limit the range of inequality in income distribution-a minimum income and a maximum income? Economically, without aggregate growth, poverty reduction requires redistribution. Complete equality is unfair; unlimited inequality is unfair. Seek fair limits to the range of inequality. The civil service, the military, and the university manage with a range of inequality of a factor of 15 or 20. Corporate America has a range of 500 or more. Many industrial nations are below 25. Could we not limit the range to, say, 100, and see how it works? People who have reached the limit could either work for nothing at the margin if they enjoy their work, or devote their extra time to hobbies or public service. The demand left unmet by those at the top will be filled by those who are below the maximum.

      A sense of community necessary for democracy is hard to maintain across the vast income differences current in the US. Rich and poor separated by a factor of 500 become almost different species. The main justification for such differences has been that they stimulate growth, which will one day make everyone rich. This may have had superficial plausibility in an empty world, but in our full world it is a fairy tale. (Herman Dalys thoughts…not all mine)

      1. that decreasing economic inequality is a vital goal, superior in importance to the goal of increasing aggregate wealth. However, despite this superiority in importance, it must be addressed not in isolation, but rather in conjunction with a comprehensive economic analysis.

        I am less inclined to set arbitrary targets for reduction of income inequality, and more inclined to put into place dynamical mechanisms for it that are conducive to a robust and sustainable economy. One such mechanism is to vastly expand infrastructural investment through the public sector, a perpetual stimulus package, through which we as a people employ virtually everyone who needs employment, doing things with high economic multiplier effects. Part of such an investment would be investment in the continuing public education required to develop the human capital necessary to realize the material capital improvements.

        This strategy simultaneously redistributes wealth downward through a continuing public education and works program, and improves the context for entrepreneurial and private investment production of wealth.

        I have never maintained, in any form, that income disparity is conducive to wealth, or is a desirable social framework. As with many things, from an economic efficiency point of view, there is an optimal level of econommic inequality, either below which or above which economic efficiency is reduced. We are clearly far above that optimal level (we have far greater economic inequality than that which is optimal even from a strict economic efficiency and robustness standard).

        Nor would I maintain that economic efficiency/robustness should be the measure of the success of an economy. As I posted above, a healthy economy has to be robust, sustainable, and fair (by “fair,” I am referring to the relative equality of the distribution of wealth, through equality of opportunity to partake of the wealth that is produced). If anyone of these dimensions are ignored or undervalued, the economy will not be one most conducive to aggregate long-term human welfare.

      2. Yes to the former, kind of to the latter. I do believe that we should provide everyone with a minimum income in exchange for community service (its demoralizing and enervating otherwise), and that we should have extremely progressive taxes, taxing up to 70% of astronomical wealth (and of large inheritances).

        The discussion of the fairness of such a tax revolves around whether one conceives of us as a mere collection of individuals, or as a society. To the right, it is absolutely obscene, because that wealth belongs to that individual, and the state has no right to steal it. This conceptualization, however, is pure fantasy. Property rights are a human invention, not a natural occurance. They are a legal arrangement among people vis-a-vis the material and immaterial resources available to them and produced by them collectively. The wealth that any one individual accumulates is accumulated via these legal arrangements, and with the support of a material and human social infrastructure which facilitates its production and accumulation. There is nothing immoral about refining those arrangements in order to increase our collective efficiency and our overall fairness of distribution.

        1. “They are a legal arrangement among people vis-a-vis the material and immaterial resources available to them and produced by them collectively. The wealth that any one individual accumulates is accumulated via these legal arrangements,”

          That legal arrangement has been constructed over the millenia to prevent the strong from simply taking what they want…say, as in Somalia, or in some failed African nations, still. Whether you take someones’ quality of living by kicking down their door, inflicting violence upon them, and looting their possessions or by creating that “legal arrangement” by enacting laws that allow the uber-wealthy and institutionalized wealth to take over the government and the common wealth, the net result is the same.

          For working people, the poor, the middle class, and anyone else who is not a part of the top 5%, the real enemy has been and continues to be, the Chamber of Commerce…at all levels. In particular, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. If you could poll the U.S.Chamber Board of Directors, how many of them would be Keynesians?    

          1. is a wonderful invention for the facilitation of market exchange and individual initiative and innovation, but it also was established and has always served as a way of legitimating past theft. In fact, institutionalized distributions of wealth in general (not just private property rights) have always served exactly that purpose. There’s a line in my novel in which a military conqueror opposed by the aristocracy says to his gathered troops, “..or they will haul us away in chains, labeled ‘criminals’ for doing for ourselves what their great grandfathers did for them.”

            Clearly, private property and inheritance rights comprise a system for transmitting intergenerationally the inequitable distribution of wealth and power, historically instituted and preserved by those exercising the most institutional power in order to preserve the deeper historical inequalities established by conquest and outright theft.

            With democratization, liberalization, and the ideology of egalitarianism, we have made some marginal in-roads against this aspect of property rights, but as mere reforms of a system established through historical theft they have only scratched the surface.

            One reaction to this historical reality, of course, was Communism and the revolutions in its name, which only recognized the injustice of history and lacked sufficient respect for the genius of history. Our system of property rights, regardless of its underlying moral dubiousness, is too robust to discard. But conservatives, by recasting functional necessity as a moral imperative, have succeeded not only in retaining a robust system, but also in obstructing the continuing historical progress toward repairing its inherent unfairness.

            1. The security of private property is one of the key foundations of the economic growth of the human race. That and the rule of law is what has given people the security to invest in the future. If my company, my house, my car can have them redistributed away from me at any time, then why would I ever invest anything in their improvement, or even their maintenance.

              The trick is not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, but to generate more geese for more people. That’s why I push so hard for quality K-12 education – it’s the best chance others have to also gain economic security. And given the chance they will do so, because what they earn they can safely keep.

              1. and I pay taxes on it with the belief that, as a capable and successful business owner, I did not make myself successful alone, but with the aid and comfort of my community. Subsequently, I have a sense of endebtedness to share the “common wealth”.

                But, I also have ancestors who believed that the only property you had was that which you could carry along with you, and even that was a gift from the community of which you were a part.

                The issue isn’t whether or not private property is wrong. As Steve points out, it is the fact. The question is one of parity. We insist on it as a fundamental need in professional football, but not in our personal lives…huh?

                The opportunity for the accumulation of unlimited wealth by any member of society is a threat to that society unless that society is prepared to exist as a monarchy…or corporate oligarchy,if you will.

                The rich are getting much richer…the poor are getting much poorer. We know where this leads, don’t we?

                1. I think the trick is to:

                  1. Provide true equality of opportunity (which requires adequate child nutrition & healthcare, quality education through college, etc).

                  2. Try to level the playing field. Those at the top have tremendous advantages.

                  3. Tax progressively (and intelligently).

              2. you didn’t read, or at least didn’t understand, what I wrote. In the very first line I wrote that private property “is a wonderful invention for the facilitation of market exchange and individual initiative and innovation,” and then later in the post wrote that those who have sought to abolish private property rights “lacked sufficient respect for the genius of history.” I called it a social institutional innovation that is “too robust to discard.”

                In other words, nothing I said contradicts anything you said following “Are you kidding me?” Similarly, nothing you said addressed anything I said.

                It’s a complex world, David. Just because something is efficient doesn’t mean it’s fair. And just because it’s unfair doesn’t mean it should be abolished. As I made very explicitly clear in my post, it would be utter follow to abolish private property rights in pursuit of increased fairness, given the fundamental importance of its efficiency in the production of wealth.

                And, news flash: Everybody pushes for improvement in K12 education, not withstanding the popular but cheap formulation “those who critique my proposed strategy for accomplishing X are less committed to X than I am.”

              3. your invaluable contribution to the discussion on how to improve K12 education. After all, your suggestion, “put someone in charge,” is brilliant in its simplicity, and destined to revolutionize social thought for generations to come.

              2. it would be a good one to achieve. The problem isn’t that it’s a bad ideal to strive for, but rather that it’s not a trivial challenge to align individual and collective interests sufficiently to accomplish it.

                We should indeed, ideally, desire a society in which each contributes all that they are capable of contributing, and enjoys equitably of what we collectively produce by doing so. But we are animals that do not automatically act in our collective interests. That fact, that we act in self or local interests but have much to gain from cooperation, is the lathe of history, and has produced the bulk of our social institutional landscape, including those robust wonders called “markets.”

                1. since my merely having explicitly stated it appears to be insufficient, I am not now, nor ever have suggested or ever will suggest either the abolishment of private property, or the imposition of a command economy. I have always emphasized the robustness of markets, and rely most heavily on microeconomic analyses (which assume precisely those facts which undermine the viability of communism) in all of my social analyses.

                  The problem with command economies is that they ignore the ways in which individual incentives are salient both in governance and in economic activity. Centralizing economic decision-making power is not egalitarian, because the decision-makers act in their own interests rather than in the interests of those they represent. And is not robust, because those engaged in the production of wealth, not being compensated for initiative and hard work, lack the incentives to take initiative and work hard.

                  David’s clever joke about “having lots of needs” is exactly right: Who determines what one’s needs are, and what stops each from insisting that they are quite extensive? The problem with the Marxist formulation is that it ignores all of these disalignments between individual and collective interests. And that’s why it is worthless except as the statement of an unattainable ideal.

                  2. I love this site.  So funny.

                    Congress Passes New Law of Thermodynamics



                    In a bid to free the nation from foreign oil and bring its carbon footprint to naught, Congressional Democrats passed a new law of thermodynamics, which states, “From each according to ability; to each according to need.” This should lead to real energy independence once supply of energy becomes independent of its demand.

                    In practical terms, the new legislation establishes a new energy regime called “greenergy,” according to which supply will match demand based on need and not on any particular technology’s ability. Under this scheme, alternating current (AC) will be replaced with alternative current. The new AC will work by adjusting the needy consumer rather than the supply. Said one Senator, “For alternative energy we need an alternative consumer. That much is clear.”

                    1. See my above post on “the variable malleability of reality” (to which David replied “Geez,” which is NewPolSpeak for “you have your head up your ass”).

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