The post on inflation I can't write for work

 I'm learning so much about finance from my job. However, since the financial advice I write is mainly for rich people who might need someone to manage their accounts for them, not poor people I want to radicalize into socialists, there's stuff I can't really address.

Inflation is really bad right now; it's the worst it's been since the 80s. Naturally this is bad in a lot of ways. It means that rent and food and transportation and healthcare are all more expensive than ever, but since wages lag inflation, you're probably still getting paid about the same. Meanwhile the money in your bank account is also worth less than it was. If you're really rich, you can get around this by investing your money at rates above inflation. But that's not normally something you can do if you don't have a pile of extra money lying around.

People have been asking what causes inflation, and mainly they seem to want to blame the president. Which is odd because we don't live in a country where presidents are permitted to set prices. Still, I have to admit that extra tax credits and stimulus have contributed to the price increases.

Here's how it works. Say a loaf of bread costs 50 cents to make and you can sell it for a dollar. If you sell it for more than a dollar, people aren't willing to pay that much for it, so you actually make less profit than if you keep the price at a dollar. Well and good.

Trouble is, people need to eat bread. So if all your competitors and you hike the price of bread at more or less the same time, people will still buy it even if it's $5 a loaf. Because they have to eat, and presumably you've hiked the price on all the other food you sell too.

Demand here is inflexible so prices can skyrocket--with one small check. This is that, if the price goes up enough, a certain number of poor people can't buy it no matter how much they want to. They go hungry rather than buy the bread. Now you're losing profits, so you grudgingly have to lower the price again. Low prices are generally good. Some very poor people still can't afford the bread though. You'll drop it to the point that most of your customers can afford the bread. Nobody's actually interested in making sure every single person can afford their product, just that they can sell enough volume to make a good profit.

Imagine, though, that the government realizes some people are going hungry, because they can't afford even a dollar a loaf. So it subsidizes food for the hungry, either by food stamps or straight-up cash.

Immediately demand goes up, and you (you're still a baker in this metaphor) sell a lot more. And you think, hey, with demand like this, maybe I can hike the price! So you hike it a little, and a little more, until demand drops off (some poor people cannot afford your bread). Then you've reached the sweet spot when you're making the most profit on bread you can.

It's safe to say, then, that providing for the poor causes inflation. It will always do that, because as long as suppliers are seeking only their own profit, the more money you provide to consumers, the higher demand will be, and the prices will go up.

This has happened with education. Easy-to-obtain student loans > most people can afford to at least try college > college prices go up. Now everyone's crushed by debt and all, but the profit margin is great. If we subsidize college more, prices will simply go up more. There is no reason for them to ever stop increasing prices until the point at which people stop buying the product. The price will always be set at a number some people can't afford.

And healthcare. Healthcare has very inflexible demand, because nobody likes dying. And so you can see the prices increase and increase; they don't stop increasing because sick people never stop buying healthcare. They will only stop increasing at the level when a significant number of people can't afford to buy it and die instead.

And rent, of course. And houses for sale. The costs go up and up and up, and we are all squeezed tighter and tighter, trying to pay for it. A certain number will not be able to do so, and we have homeless people. We have to have homeless people, to demonstrate we've reached the maximum price for the demand. A certain group of people do not even want there to be anywhere for homeless people to live, because if there is a painless option besides paying a thousand a month to a landlord and accepting a terrible job to pay for it, people will take that option. There has to be punishment for people who don't grind hard enough.

There is, of course, competition, and that helps. If someone wants to carve out a niche as the budget option, they can do so. (Much as I hate Walmart as a company, they make it possible for me to dress my children so I'm not going to say I'm not grateful.) But, in general, there's not enough competition. I heard from a guy on twitter the other day who lives in an area with only one grocery store. Bread there is $7 a loaf. Because when you're a monopoly you can do that. Here where I live, I've been able to reliably get bread for 60 cents, because we have quite a few different stores.

In this country, most things are provided by a very short list of companies. If they all agree-- either explicitly, or simply by watching each other's prices-- they can easily drive prices up and wages down. Take publishing. Since there are only five major publishers, there isn't a lot of competition for any book you want to sell, and advances get smaller while fringe benefits vanish. Likewise if the only department stores in your region are Target and Walmart, Target can set its price fairly high and all Walmart has to do is set theirs just a little bit lower to still be the budget option.

So, is it true that if we raise the minimum wage to keep up with inflation, it will cause more inflation? Probably, yeah. 

I still think we should do it, though. Because I would rather run a race trying to keep up with inflation than simply let a huge number of people fall further and further behind.

But I think we're eventually going to need some longer-term solution. Anti-trust enforcement is a big  one we haven't done enough in a long time. But I'm open to hearing more ideas. I know that division of wealth was once a lot more balanced in this country, and that there are countries where you can flip burgers for a living and still own a house. So it shouldn't be impossible.

But first, I think, we're going to have to want to. And there are a million and one reasons why people don't want that at all.

Should billionaires exist?

I participated in a written debate recently on the question "Resolved: Billionaires Should Not Exist." Unfortunately, the limit was 1000 words. I have a lot more than a thousand words to say about billionaires, and how much I don’t think they should exist. So here’s the uncut version for you guys.

To be clear, I don’t actually want anybody to try to get rid of billionaires right now. Even Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, both of whom said billionaires should not exist, didn’t propose tax plans that would come close to putting them back in the millionaire bracket. The influence billionaires have on our political life would make this almost impossible to achieve. And it isn’t really necessary, because much (not all) of the good you can do by eliminating billionaires could also be done by taxing them just a wee bit more. But if I could wave a wand and transfer the wealth of America’s 700 billionaires into the bank accounts of the 40 million Americans in poverty, I would do it.

I will start with a caveat: I do not intend to argue that in a future, poverty-free world, billionaires should not exist. I intend to argue that in the world of the present, in which poverty does exist and inequality is constantly increasing, billionaires should not exist.

My argument is that happiness would be increased if the wealth of billionaires were redistributed and they were taxed to prevent them from earning more than one billion dollars, while no serious disadvantages would result.

Utilitarian argument

I will pass over any question of deserving money, since that relies on a sense of justice not everyone can agree on, and consider only utilitarian goals. Would America be a happier place if the money of billionaires were redistributed to the lowest income tiers?

The folk saying that money can’t buy happiness is untrue. Scientists have calculated that money increases happiness, but only to a point. Up to $70,000 a year, every increase in income correlates to an increase in happiness. That’s unsurprising, because much suffering is caused by poverty or anxiety over falling into it. An individual who makes $70,000 can afford a house where he doesn’t have to listen to his neighbors screaming at one another; he can afford to travel to visit family; he can afford a healthy and varied diet and a meal out from time to time; he can afford entertainment and art and time with friends. An individual making the minimum wage of $15,000 a year or less, which includes over 13% of Americans, can afford none of these. Naturally he will be much less happy.

A billionaire, however, enjoys no utility from all that money. A person who possesses $900 million can already purchase anything a person might reasonably want: a mansion with grounds and a beautiful view convenient to a large city; a yacht, a private jet, employees to handle every need. A billionaire has passed, long ago, the point of diminishing returns, where more money can truly increase happiness. The same money will purchase a much greater utility when it is redistributed to the rest of the nation.

The 400 wealthiest Americans have, collectively, 3.6 trillion dollars. Distributed among the 34 million Americans in poverty, it would give each poor American $103,000. That’s enough for a modest house, owned debt-free, or a four-year degree at a public college. The gain in net happiness would be massive.

By distributing this money more carefully, through a long-term basic income or poverty-reducing programs, the increase in happiness could go on for years. As families pull themselves out of poverty, they will increase both production and spending, boosting the economy and reducing social ills like crime and homelessness.

So, once we acknowledge that redistributing money would increase happiness, we can start asking what other consequences such a move could have. Is there good billionaires do that we would miss? Or is there additional harm we could prevent by abolishing billionaires?

Argument from power

Once a person has satisfied all happiness-related desires, the only thing left their money can buy is power. When you have more money than most other people, you can influence society in a direction you choose. Some exercise that desire by giving to charities related to the world they want: whether, like Gates, to vaccination research, or, like Cordelia Scaife May, to causes like restricting immigration and population control because she wanted to preserve America’s open spaces.

Others exercise that desire politically, by donating to candidates, hiring lobbying firms, or bribing politicians directly. They can also fund media favoring their preferred worldview, as the Kochs or Michael Bloomberg do. Even in our court system, the rich always have a massive advantage over the poor, because they have better lawyers. Large companies can trample small ones in patent lawsuits, and rich people avoid jail time for crimes that would lock up a normal person for years.

In 2014, a Princeton study surveyed the effects of money on politics by measuring how often government policy follows the interests either of the economic elites or of the people at large. Their conclusion was that when the majority of economic elites disagree with the majority of average people, the elites were far more likely to get their way--45% of the time, rather than 18% for average people.

It would be nice to say that billionaires having money doesn’t affect the rest of us. But, since we’re all affected by politics, it absolutely does. This also casts a worrying light on our odds of ever changing the uncomfortable status quo.

Argument from charity

We are sometimes told that billionaires do good because they can donate large quantities to charity. But billionaires give a lower percentage of their income to charity than others. Even the biggest givers in the nation, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, give less than 5% of their income annually. If we discount those two, the rest of the richest 20 Americans give about .3% of their combined income--less than the average American.

Even that charitable work isn’t necessarily helpful. Much charitable giving exists for a tax write-off rather than actually doing good. Money given to foundations can stay within the foundation forever. Donations can be used to strongarm nonprofits into whatever a billionaire wants, or to start organizations promoting a political interest. The Kochs, for instance, give to charity, but those charities are largely climate change denialist media.

If we are to spend funds wisely to help the needy in this country, we shouldn’t leave the distribution of it to billionaires. This money is better administered by smaller owners, nonprofits, and government.

Argument from investment

The next defense of billionaires is that they invest capital in the market. But that isn’t specific to billionaires. Wherever money is, it is active in the market. However, investment patterns are different at different income brackets.

The poor primarily spend their money on their needs. This fuels business at the level of demand: whatever businesses best satisfy the needs of people prosper when people have money to spend.

People of middle income invest money in mutual funds, government bonds, and banks. This fuels the market in general, making capital available for business and government.

Billionaires, however, have more money than they can easily spend. Some goes into the stock market, of course, in the same way as smaller fortunes. Some is spent on venture capitalism--investment in prospective businesses. And some goes to investing in real estate.

How much good is this capital doing, compared to the capital that is simply spent? Funding new businesses is good, but billionaires may not be the best placed to decide what ventures are worth investing in. For instance, the ridiculous juice subscription company, Juicero, was fully funded by the Silicon Valley wealthy, while diabetics are forced to hack insulin pumps because of a lack of innovation in the ones available. Assigning capital to causes is an important job, and having it done by a few super-rich eccentrics might not be the best way.

Money invested in real estate may be the worst for the common good. When a person of moderate means flips a house or buys an apartment building to manage, they usually do add some value. Real estate speculation, or buying large tracts on the promise the price will rise, can do harm. The mere fact that people use real estate for investment makes the price go up, causing housing to become less affordable and driving homelessness. Housing bubbles are an example of this.

Properties owned by large investors are 18% more likely to evict tenants than those owned by smaller landlords. This is because they can easily afford the loss of letting a unit stand empty. In some areas, many units remain empty because the market can’t fill them at that price. Large investors will buy up entire neighborhoods and drive up the price as high as they want, because they have no competition.

Another method of expanding wealth is to extract more resources. The urge for constant growth is a driver of environmental destruction: the pumping out of aquifers, burning of rainforests, fracking. Without the political advantages billionaires have, millionaires aren’t often able to exploit the environment on the same scale. But, since these are not necessary activities we need billionaires to do, we’d be better off with smaller investors.

In short: capital exists, and if there were no billionaires, there would still be capital. But that capital would be assigned by a larger number of people, and thus more accurately aligned to what the market needs rather than the quirks of a few people who need nothing.

Argument from innovation

Another argument for billionaires is that they fund great innovations. But in reality, most innovators do whatever they are known for before becoming billionaires. Once they are billionaires, they may appear to innovate, but more often, they use patent law and buyouts to suppress other innovations.

Bill Gates and Tim Allen weren't billionaires when they started Microsoft. Jeff Bezos started Amazon with $250,000. Elon Musk wasn't a billionaire when he started his first company either. It requires basic financial security to make an invention, but not billions of dollars. After becoming billionaires, these men mostly have not invented anything personally, but rather funded other people's research. This research could have been funded by government or jointly-owned associations.

In fact, in many cases, it already has been. GPS, digital assistants, touchscreens, and WiFi come from government research. Elon Musk's companies Solar City, Tesla, and SpaceX have received billions in government funds, and much of his money came from PayPal, which he didn’t invent at all.

We also have to consider how many innovators and inventors never get a chance to make their big breakthrough because of a lack of opportunity. No billionaires are entirely self-made; they generally come from comfortably well-off families and have college degrees. They have the leisure to work on their ideas and the ability to raise funds through impressing investors or getting loans.

One wonders how many Americans have been just as talented, but held back by circumstances. Maybe they were forced to drop out of high school to make a living, or they were too busy struggling as a single parent, or they had their credit destroyed by medical bills, and never had a chance to invent anything or start a business. It is wildly implausible that all the talent just happens to be found among the well-off. Perhaps we would have many more life-changing inventions if every creative person were financially secure and able to access education and necessary funds.

What would happen to the money?

So, imagine a system wherein it become impractical to become a billionaire. High wealth taxes force billionaires to divest their wealth. Where would that wealth go? Would it vanish? Would billionaires stop doing whatever it is that produces so much value?

Most likely, many of them would choose to donate large quantities to charity--better to at least control where your money goes. Many would divest stock, perhaps by offering employees joint ownership or finding family members to hold some of it. Some would continue as they are, passively earning wealth which goes directly to taxes. And more people would choose to stop at the eight-figure level of wealth rather than the nine-figure level--making business choices that produce a steady level of income rather than constant high growth.

Would it have been a bad thing if Amazon had chosen to stick to books instead of trying to devour the market share of every kind of product that can be shipped? Would it have been so awful if Microsoft hadn’t bought XBox, LinkedIn, Skype, and Mojang? Did the market ever benefit from Warren Buffet owning so many properties? Not at all. If billionaires stopped doing what they do, which is increasing their portfolios through the investment of capital, smaller investors would own those assets. We do not need to “motivate” people to innovate and invest with the golden carrot of becoming a billionaire, because there is nothing only billionaires do that has any value. Motivating people to run reasonably-sized businesses with reasonably-sized fortunes has exactly the same benefit.

None of this would end poverty overnight, but the tax revenue brought in could do a great deal of good. The wealth of billionaires could fund universal health care, subsidized college, rent assistance, better elementary schools, and so on. While billionaires’ efforts to divest money would reduce tax revenue, many billionaires simply can’t help continuing to earn money, and the public coffers would benefit.

The result of this would be a nation both economically and politically more equal than what we have today. The gains of the poor would result in widely increased happiness, and the only suffering caused would be the temporary disappointment of billionaires at not being so rich--though, to be clear, with 999 million dollars each, there would still be little they couldn’t afford. There is no reason we need billionaires.

Libertarianism, socialism, and whatever the heck this is

I'm not a libertarian any more. I was never that hardcore of one, in that I stuck with libertarian policies mainly because I found them practical. Further research has revealed that some of them aren't that practical, so I abandoned them. Libertarianism doesn't reliably care for the poor, protect the environment, or prevent massive corporations from taking advantage of ordinary people. That stuff is important enough to be a dealbreaker.

But of course, when you suggest that complete anarcho-capitalism isn't ideal, people demand to know whether you're a socialist. Trouble is, socialism seems to have shifting definitions. Is the gold standard for socialism the USSR, or Norway, or maybe Venezuela? If you propose a single change, like universal healthcare, you're told that's socialist. But that one policy certainly doesn't make a country equivalent to China or Cuba. There are a lot of stops on a scale from pure anarchy to pure communism - both of which, proponents will tell you, have never actually existed in real life, not on a large scale.

And one of those stops is the US. The US is not libertarian or purely capitalist. We have socialized education, socialized libraries, and a socialized retirement program. The government manages labor laws, breaks up monopolies, and injects cash into the economy to stave off recessions. Whether it's successful at any of those is always a matter for debate.

I read a book some years ago about North Korea. The North Korean defectors spotlighted in the book knew their communist system had flaws, but they were sure it was better than the alternative, which they imagined was something out of a Dickens novel. Child labor, grinding poverty with no aid available, no free schools, no affording a doctor if you're poor. What convinced them communism wasn't actually the best option was learning Western nations had modified their capitalist systems so they weren't like that anymore.

Which of course is exactly what happened. America isn't purely capitalist because we tried that and it was bad, so we established some safety nets and that was better. Capitalism isn't ruined just because there's an income tax or some food stamps.

So how much government intervention do you have to have before it's socialism? Frankly, I don't know and don't care; that's a question on the order of "is taxation theft," namely, arguing about definitions rather than realities. The real question is, how much management of the economy, in the form of graduated tax brackets and social programs, would it take to remove the advantages of having a free economy?

The advantages of a free economy include flexibility (there are lots of kinds of jobs and products, new products can arise all the time, prices are responsive to demand) and the ability to affect your own situation by working. Decentralizing decision-making means one person making a stupid decision won't cause an entire industry to go under. Income tax doesn't change these things significantly, not unless it's many times higher than what we have. Some socialist policies do threaten them. For instance, subsidizing anything risks increasing its price uncontrollably- since people aren't paying directly, they won't stop purchasing even if the price gets exorbitant (see: higher education, houses, healthcare*).

[*though with healthcare, since we need it to live, it's never going to be perfectly price-controlled by demand.]

So we just have to be careful with it. The main thing I learned when I was studying the food system is that there are no simple solutions. Some horrible situations (like, for instance, e. coli in meat, or small farms going under) are caused by too little regulation, others by too much. Sometimes it's just the wrong regulation, either because lobbyists got through something to protect their interests, or because people didn't think through the consequences of their actions. So, whether we're adding regulations or taking them away, we have to be smart about it. That's a lot more important than whether something is "socialist" or not. We also have to consider who the policy will benefit: the ones in our society who need it most, or the ones who are doing fine and will continue to?

My current favorite candidate is Elizabeth Warren. She is concerned with helping those who need it most, and just as important, she's run the numbers and actually has a plan for everything. She's practical, and I like that.

Don't get me wrong, though, I'd vote for a hole in the ground before I'd vote for the incumbent.

Are all communists bad?

I've had an interesting conversation repeated a few times lately.  It's on the question of whether "socialist" is a designation, like "fascist," which is automatically negative, and which should lead us to condemn any person who self-identifies this way.  "Communist," of course, gets an even stronger reaction.

Internet communists can be a funny bunch; they enjoy throwing around Soviet symbology, I guess mainly to shock people.  And I haven't noticed much economic literacy among them, even compared to me -- and I'm no whiz at it myself.

But they don't strike me as evil people.  They don't actually want to eat the rich.  They want to redistribute property.  It can be a bit utopian; they imagine it will be easier than it is.  And I bristle when they say things like "we can't expect a solution from the system, we need a revolution!"  No.  I'm steadfastly anti-revolution.  People imagine it will be a shortcut to drastic change, but really revolutionary change takes time and there is no shortcut.  A revolution usually results in massive loss of life, but the actual change is always much smaller than you'd think.  The French revolution, for instance, was short-lived and ended in another monarchy.

Though my real beef with communism is that it doesn't work -- in no case has it ever actually succeeded, except when it becomes less purely communistic, as China has in recent years.  There are two reasons for this, and I can't say which is more important: first, there are massive coordination problems with distributing necessary goods to a nation, and cash is a really easy way to solve these.  It's imperfect, but "one guy in an office figures out what shoes everybody gets" is even worse.  The second reason is that no communist nation was actually democratic, no matter how much they claimed they were.  This is probably a function of them having been produced by revolution instead of actually the will of the people.  Totalitarianism is horrible and we all know it's horrible, so it should be utterly unsurprising that communist nations which were also totalitarian were horrible.  Fascism and communism seem very similar, not because fascism is really socialist (it's not) but because they're both totalitarian.

Now I'm always the first to say that ignorance is a very serious problem.  If dumb communist kids actually got the government they think they want, it would probably turn out badly, so I would oppose that.  Yet I still do have a different moral feeling toward an ignorant communist than I do toward a neofascist, because the communist is (perhaps very ineffectively) advocating for an end to poverty, while the neofascist is advocating for an end to Jews.  I can look at the (totally imaginary) end states that each hopes for, and can say that I admire the utopia of the communist (which would never happen) more than I do the utopia of the fascist (which, no matter what grounds it was based on, would almost certainly involve depriving some people of human rights even if it worked as planned).

The next objection to communism is that it discounts property rights.  The libertarian says taxation is theft; the communist says property is theft.  The reason for the totally different deontological statements is that nobody really knows what sort of property rights are natural, or how you get them.  Does everyone have an equal right to the goods of the earth?  Or do we earn a greater or lesser share depending on how hard we worked or what we got from our parents?  As I have become more and more of a consequentialist over the years, I've concluded that property rights only exist in the service of human life, liberty, and happiness.  So we should have what property rights help people to flourish, whatever those are.  If it means that some billionaires lose a lot of their property, I don't really care provided it actually serves the good of everyone.  Meanwhile if property distribution isn't completely equal, but that's the best way to make sure everyone has the necessities of life, I'm fine with that also.  The question between capitalism and socialism, for me, is not a moral one, it is a factual one, a practical question of what works best.

Now advocates of capitalism will point to their successes and communism's failures.  They will mention the people that capitalism has pulled out of poverty, and the famines that devastated the Soviet Union and North Korea -- human-created famines which amount to genocide.

But one may also point of the death toll of capitalism.  Isn't every person who starved to death in a non-communist nation a casualty of capitalism?  After all, the food, today at least, is available.  Capitalism boasts of the ability to distribute goods more efficiently that communism, but it too sometimes fails.  More specifically, I might mention horrible disasters that can be laid at capitalism's door:'
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
The Bangladesh garment factory fire
The Irish potato famine -- did you know that during the famine Ireland was exporting food?  The Irish just couldn't afford to buy it.
The Opium Wars in China -- honestly, the British East India Company could get its own whole list; China wasn't the only country it ravaged for money.
Belgium's rape of the Congo
Child slavery in chocolate plantations
And I could go on and on.  Water pumped out of aquifers to bottle for profit, while local villagers' wells all go dry.  Farmers evicted from their land so the government could hand it to a multinational corporation.  Terrible conditions in rubber plantations.  Terrible conditions in sweatshops.  Most countries are capitalist and in all of these, there is poverty, death from inadequate healthcare, death from unsafe workplaces, and so on.

But! You might add.  That's not real capitalism, that's crony capitalism.  To which I would say, exactly.  Pure economic systems exist only in the mind.  Advocates can always imagine it could be done more perfectly.  In reality, we should acknowledge the common failure modes exist because it is easy to fall into them.

So what would I advocate?  Some kind of balance, probably.  I have abandoned the idealism that once convinced me everything could regulate itself if only it were allowed to.  You want Oliver Twist?  Because that's how you get Oliver Twist.  Some regulation is going to be necessary, even while it's clear we haven't done enough to separate the regulatory bodies from the industries themselves.  We don't need a revolution on that, we need some tweaks.

When I hear someone say, seriously, that they would like to tweak things in a more socialist direction . . . I'm really fine with it.  There's a lot more socialist things could be before it got anywhere close to wiping out private industry.  Say, a guaranteed minimum income.  Or universal healthcare.  That stuff could be good, possibly, if done very carefully.  Certainly seems as likely to work out well as the opposite.  Now I doubt these people are going to get what they want, either, but they'll try and if they manage a few baby steps, I'd be cautiously hopeful.

And as for communists?  I think it's great that they have made the moral judgments that property rights exist to serve people and that equality is good.  I would agree with them on that; I think this is a moral and compassionate stance.  But I also think that they need to seriously study history and economics to try to find ways to change our current society more in the direction of their dream.  Waving red banners and sharing Soviet memes (which are very offensive to Holodomor survivors, by the way) aren't going to help them get there.

Ignorance and responsibility

You can well imagine, with my strong views on immigration and on attachment, that I've been pretty upset lately learning about the children separated from their parents at the border.  I'm glad the automatic separation policy has been revoked, but detention as a family is still pretty bad, and what is really needed is for their asylum claims to be heard promptly.

Anyway, let's take it as given that I have a strong opinion here.  And naturally I have felt very angry at those who defend the policy.  What has got to be wrong with a person's conscience that this doesn't bother them?

Well, I don't like to rush to judgment so I went looking for where my friends on that side have been getting their information.  Perhaps there's some justifiable explanation, you know?

So I read the DHS "myths" page that a friend-of-a-friend shared.  And I read this article on Breitbart, which paints child detention as a happy daycare that citizen children would be lucky to be sent to.  And it's true, both are masterpieces of propaganda which take careful research to break down.  If you read only those, and nothing else, it makes sense that you'd think people are being hysterical by fussing about this policy.  After all, our country isn't actually ripping children from their parents' arms!  It's rescuing children from human traffickers and keeping them in palatial residences, on the taxpayer dime.  Who could be against that?

Obviously this stuff can also be debunked.  You could read any of these posts:
WaPo: The facts about Trump's policy of separating families at the border
Slate: How the Trump administration defends its indefensible child separation policy
ACLU: The Bogus Reasons ICE Uses to Lock Up Asylum Seekers
Texas Monthly: What's Really Happening When Asylum-Seeking Families Are Separated
Slate: District Court Judge Denounces Forced Child Separation as “Brutal” and Clear Constitutional Violation
Aplus: DHS Called These "Myths" -- But Are They?
I understand why people don't feel as much trust in the ACLU or WaPo as they do in Breitbart.  Somehow they feel Breitbart is on their side and the others are "liberal." I disagree, but I understand.

But at some point I have to say, you're responsible for what you believe.  You're responsible for educating yourself.  Catholic teaching believes in vincible and invincible ignorance -- ignorance you can overcome versus ignorance that's not your fault.  If you aren't allowed access to the internet and all you hear is conservative talking points, I'll acknowledge that your ignorance isn't your fault.  But if you have an internet connection, you could find out.  It's just that people don't want to.

I admit, usually I'm a lot more tolerant of this kind of thing.  We do our best, there are so many blockages to people finding the truth about anything, when we know better, we do better.  But one of the big blockages to finding out the truth is this fallacy: that you're not responsible for what you believe.  That if you already believe a thing, you have zero responsibility to question that because, after all, you think it's true so why would you?

I have to disambiguate a bit here, because I know people are going to be shouting (if they actually pay attention to what I write) "But you say that belief is not a moral choice, that you automatically believe what the intellect presents to you as true!"  And yes, this is true.  But it is a moral choice to investigate in order to find the truth.  It is a choice to set the standard of proof on a level that true things are likely to pass and false things are likely to fail.  There is a right and a wrong way to go about finding the truth, and people all too often pick the wrong way.

Consider the way you react when a big story hits the news.  The natural pull is to do the following: first, you have a reaction based on whether the story confirms or challenges your worldview.  Your brain really doesn't like changing its mind, so it reacts defensively when the story challenges your viewpoint.  You immediately -- barely on a conscious level -- start trying to refute the claims in the story.  Is there a flaw somewhere, anywhere, you can latch onto?  You open another tab and go looking for another article that claims to debunk the first.  But this second article, you don't react defensively to at all.  If there are flaws or holes, you ignore them, because the story seems so obviously true you don't need them.

I know because I do this all the time.  I work really hard to try to stop it, because that's no way to find out the truth about anything, but it takes real effort to go looking for counterarguments for something I want to believe, or take seriously an argument I don't want to believe.  Some people don't make that effort.  Maybe they think it would be wrong to make that effort, because it betrays their "team."  I'm not sure.

All I know is, people not knowing the truth is one of the major forces for evil in the world.  People aren't evil enough to make all the evil we see on purpose.  Instead, they create that evil through ignorance, and no one confronts the evil because of further ignorance.  We always used to ask, "How did the Holocaust happen?  How did the Germans agree to gas the Jews?  How did no one else stop them?"  But we know the answer, I think.  The answer is that people chose to believe it wasn't that bad or wasn't happening at all.  The government had soothing answers, like that Jews were just being sent somewhere else, somewhere pleasant, where gentiles should be so lucky to go -- and on the taxpayer dime!  Rumors of the camps had reached America, and Americans said, "That's ridiculous.  That's overblown.  That can't be happening."  So they turned away boatloads of Jewish refugees, afraid that Communists might be sneaking in on those boats.  It was a terrible thing to do, but they did it based on the information they believed.

But why did they believe that information, rather than the truth?  I guess because they had a preference.  It's hard to find the truth when you strongly want one answer to be true.  And people don't wind up asking the crucial question, "What is true?"  Instead they ask, "Is there a way this can be false?"  When you approach a news story or any other source with the plan to debunk it, you aren't seeking truth.  You're defending yourself from truth.

So you know what?  I'm done excusing bad behavior on the grounds of ignorance.  If somebody, say, denies their child a blood transfusion on the grounds of religion, I'm through with saying, "Well, it's their belief."  Those are terrible beliefs, seriously, they don't ever worry about whether they are false?  You have a responsibility to check if your beliefs are true.  Even if you were raised with them.  Even if you have heard a lot of positive arguments and the only negative arguments were weak ones brought up in apologetics class.  The main responsibility still lies with the leaders of that religion, but everyone who is a part of it also has the responsibility to check it for themselves before they do morally questionable things.  If you make an error in reasoning, I will try to understand, but if you don't even try because you think your beliefs aren't your responsibility?  I'm going to judge the heck out of that.  Because I've heard that a lot of times and I'm getting tired of it.

I'm also done with people who comb through dozens of websites to find one rare tylenol side effect, but explain away side effects of "natural" teething tablets or adult aspirin because they like those treatments.  At some point you've got to notice you're trying to confirm your own biases.  I know because I've done it.  At least have the humility to recognize that you could be wrong, so don't pass yourself off an as expert all over the internet on every topic you read a couple of articles about.

I'm done with people who yell FAKE NEWS at anything they disagree with, and then pass around sketchy unsourced stuff without factchecking it.  You get a pass on the first time, because you didn't know, but after you've seen it debunked and the promised FEMA internment camps didn't show up, then you know you made an error and it's on you to tighten up your standards.

I'm done with people who look at rape victims cross-eyed because "they can't proooooove they were raped" -- except for Juanita Broaddrick and a few choice others, whose assailants you don't like.  Are you unaware that you accept eyewitness testimony for a million other things every day?  When do you start to notice the double standard?  Why is "can't be certain, but he probably did it" abandoned for "you can't prove it so it didn't happen" the second it's a rape case?

And I'm angry at those who defend the splitting up of families.  I'm not just angry at Trump, Sessions, and the rest who dreamed up this policy and know what they are doing.  I'm also angry at all the people who refuse to even entertain the idea that their heroes could be doing something wrong.

Seriously, people.  Make an effort to be objective.  Be skeptical of the things you want to believe as well as the things you don't want to believe.  Ask yourself, "What is the truth, and how can I find it?  What is a method that is likely to reveal the truth?  If I am wrong, how will I know?  What are the risks to being wrong?  How sure am I?"

Because at this point, I'm beginning to think that the root of evil is actually ignorance.  And a lot of that ignorance is willful.

Hobbesian parenting

Years ago I wrote a post about libertarian parenting.  I still believe in giving kids freedom to do what they want within reason, but experience showed that there's only so libertarian you can be as a parent.  I don't just mean "kids are a bit dumb and would forget to eat or sleep if we weren't there to make them," which is true as far as it goes.  A little gentle direction usually is about enough, so actual forceful interventions don't have to be an everyday occurrence.

However, I never could figure out how to deal with violence in a "libertarian" way.  Nobody should have the liberty to hurt anybody else.  I asked in my libertarian parenting group what you do when kids fight, and they mostly just said, "Fighting is against the non-aggression principle so I don't allow it."  Well, yeah, but what do you do to stop it?  Do you (as some libertarians argue) have the right to take any action you want so long as you weren't the one to initiate aggression?  On the other hand, since you weren't the one attacked, perhaps you have no right to intervene and your bullied toddler has to duke it out on their own.

I did try, for awhile, the "just let them work it out" approach.  I thought that perhaps they fought so fiercely because they were relying on me to swoop in and sort things out, and thus if I kept out of it they would eventually realize they should watch their behavior.  But it didn't help at all.  Things got worse and it seemed every day the kids woke up with a chip on their shoulder against the other one.  It was a textbook example of a cycle of violence, enacted daily by preschoolers.  Not good.

From watching my kids, I learned the flaws of radical libertarianism, or anarchy. (Anarchists often call themselves "libertarian," but real libertarians usually agree that the government has a role of defense and crime prevention, so I'm going to leave the libertarians alone from here on and speak specifically to anarchists, who made up 90% of my "libertarian parenting" group.)  Flaws like these:

1.  Not everyone follows the non-aggression principle.  This is obvious, right?  The reason no anarchist utopia has ever worked out is that people keep conquering anybody that tries.  Of course anarchy tries to deal with this by claiming that when bad guys attack, anarchists will voluntarily band together to defend themselves.  But ...

2.  Not everyone is equally strong.  So a sufficiently powerful enemy can wipe you out.  This is easily observed when my kids get in a fight.  Do I really want things to settle into a "peace" where the bigger or more aggressive kid beats up everyone else?  Because kids are kind of famous for getting into these social hierarchies when they're left alone.  (In some cases, they don't, and I'm not entirely sure why, but suffice it to say that whatever I was doing was insufficient.)

3.  Not everyone agrees on what aggression is.  Is humming while someone else is trying to play the piano aggression?  What about breathing on someone?  What about eating their food when you thought they were finished with it, but it turns out they're not?  What if you accidentally brush against them and they think you bumped them on purpose and clobber you, does that make them the aggressor and are you allowed to hit them back?  These questions come up ... kind of a lot around here.

4.  People (children especially) are not always rational, and sometimes they get carried away.  So rather than simply defending themselves, they try to avenge themselves.  Or they see a sibling coming and panic and hit first.  Adults do the same, cf. Afghanistan.

Anarchy provides principles which would work if everyone followed them, mostly, but it has no way to get people to follow them, to account for human nature, or to de-escalate violence once it's begun.  So it's not really very useful for this.  (Anarchist communes that take place under the auspices of some other government sound lovely, but of course they rely on the government defending their title to the land, arresting trespassers and other offenders, and generally providing a safe place to be an anarchist.)

Hobbes has the answer to all this, and I never knew it because my poli-sci class was mostly spittle-flecked rants that you could safely tune out because the professor wanted you to just find an old test and memorize the answers.  *still bitter*  And we spent, like, one day on Hobbes.

Hobbes gives three reasons why conflict begins: competition, defense, and reputation.  Let's take a few kid examples:

Competition, or gain: Michael sees a toy Marko has and wants it.  He's hoping he can get away with taking it, so he snatches it.

Defense: Marko sees Michael going for his toy, so he shoves him away from it.  Quizzed about it after, he'll say, "I wasn't TRYING to hurt him, I was just trying to make him stop taking my toy!"

Reputation: After having been shoved by Marko, Michael leaps to his feet.  He knows that if Marko hits him and gets away with it, he's going to do it more, so he punches Marko in revenge.  His revenge is disproportionate to the amount he was hurt, partly because he's angry and not in good control of himself, and partly because he rationally wants to let Marko know he's not to be messed with.

Once the fight has started, it's bound to continue to escalate.  Each becomes suspicious of the other and sees the worst in all the other's behavior.  If they tried nonviolence, it would surely help, but they're all afraid to because they might be taken advantage of.

There is one thing that can help: the Leviathan.  I mean me.  In a family, the parent takes the role of government.  I can prevent all three causes of violence.

Gain: Every time one child steals from another, I can make them give the toy back.  That way snatching ceases to be a useful behavior, and children do it less.

Defense: They know that if they are attacked, I will help them.  If I were faster it would help even more, but even at my delayed response rate, they are assured that yelling "Mama" will get me to come peel the attacker off them.  So about half the time at least, they choose that approach over the attack-back (or pre-emptive attack) method.

Reputation: If they revenge their own wrongs, they always overdo it.  But if I assure them that I will give some kind of consequence to the attacker, they are more willing to accept it.  I still think that the desire for vengeance is one of the dark sides of human nature, but it's there.  If I don't punish the offender, they will.  The goal is to reassure the child that you've done what it will take to convince their attacker not to do it again.  When I'm not going to punish the child -- like when Miriam was the attacker and I know she's just being tired and cranky so a timeout isn't really going to be helpful -- I still take her out of the room so the boys think she is getting punished.  And when the attacker is someone completely irrational -- like Jackie, or the dog -- I still give them a little lecture: "Gilbert, you must be more careful!  No stepping on people's feet!"  Somehow the kids consider this satisfactory.  But they do demand that something is done, and I'm beginning to see the sense in it -- they fear that if their attacker is allowed to get off scot-free, they'll do it again.

The Better Angels of Our Nature explained this stuff a lot, pointing out that honor culture flourishes in places where there is little or no government, whereas a strong government gets wronged people to press charges, file a lawsuit, or mutter "there oughta be a law."  When there is no higher authority for people to appeal to -- like in a corrupt state, or when kids are left unattended -- people feel they must create fairness for themselves through vengeance and preemptive attacks.

It's important that the Leviathan is separate from the parties it's arbiting among, and that it is stronger than any of them.  Obviously an arbitor that is obviously partial, or which can't enforce its judgments, is no different from none at all.  That's pretty easy in my case, though -- I am definitely a lot bigger than my kids, and I'm not a part of any of their fights.

The embarrassing part is that it took me so many years after first "studying" Hobbes to figure this out.  I had thought Hobbes was the bad guy.  Turns out all he was saying was, "Without some way to arbitrate disputes, life is going to be nasty, brutish, and short."  Or,  ya know, full of squabbles over toys wherein everyone winds up covered in teeth marks.

Calmer thoughts about the election

I am happy to report that my initial distress following the election didn't result in a downward depressive spiral, as I had feared. Instead, two friends came over Wednesday afternoon and cheered me up. John brought chocolate after work.  I woke up Thursday with a lot more optimism.  Sure, this election is bad news and bad things will probably happen as a result of it.  However, I can create enough distance for myself to live my life, and I don't need to feel guilty about doing this because it's not like my distress was helping anyone.

Facebook has been nastier than expected; I thought this would happen if Clinton won (because Trump supporters would be livid) but I did not think that I would see so much anger and mockery from Republicans if they won.  Clinton supporters, too, have been very upset and not all of them have been trying as hard to keep civil as I have.

So I've been turning from the immediate fears I have to reflecting on deeper trends.  What does it mean, that nationalist movements are gaining steam around the world?  How exactly would one even define these movements?

Fitting this into my usual frames of reference, I would say that Trump-ism is, first and foremost, zero-sum.  All his rhetoric and his policies support this: he feels America is losing and other countries are winning, and he wants other countries to lose so America can win.  A good deal, to him, follows not the ideal of Adam Smith and Milton Friedman, that everyone walks away feeling like a winner, but that you win and the other guy loses.  His trade policy is, "Other people are doing better than us out of our trade deals, so we should stop trading."  His foreign policy is, "Other countries are getting more out of alliances than we are, so we should stop honoring those alliances."  In short, America first.  The same attitude is common in nationalist movements in other countries, such as Brexit.

Now I have admitted in the past that some conflicts really do have zero-sum solutions.  Land ownership for agriculture is a big one, which is why I've grudgingly abandoned agrarianism.  But trade and world peace are, in my opinion, perfect places for non-zero-sum thinking -- and it's exactly that sort of thinking that has made the world as prosperous and peaceful (comparatively) as it currently is.

The second thing I would point to comes more from Trump's followers than himself -- it's placing the unit of mattering on a culture rather than an individual.  That is, they don't simply value the human rights and happiness of the people they live alongside, but also the preservation of their community in its current state.  If, for instance, they come from a dying factory town, they don't just want to be retrained for new jobs, or move to a different state where there are factory jobs available. They want to bring back their town the way it was, factory jobs and all.  And this is often the same sentiment that is interpreted as racism -- a desire to keep their culture intact, rather than changed by immigration.  I don't have a lot of sympathy for this, personally, because I am primarily an individualist.  But I don't think those who feel this way are necessarily just "racist" or "xenophobic."  Perhaps a better word would be "nostalgic"!  Because of course change happens, regardless of how hard you fight it, but it's happening particularly fast at the moment and I understand if it feels very unsettling.

The Better Angels of Our Nature discusses this divergence between individual rights versus cultural and communal values.  The author comes down very hard on the side of individual rights, pointing out that liberal democracies which consider themselves to be defending the rights of whichever individuals happen to live there (America, Canada, modern European nations) do a lot better than countries which see themselves as preserving a certain kind of culture (Nazi Germany, Islamic democracies, ethnocentric Balkan states).  But then, that sort of depends on your measure, doesn't it?  It's true that individual rights are preserved more in the individualist societies, but it's also undeniable that social change has tended to be rapid, including the decline of religion.

And the third major issue is a mistrust of global elites.  In our increasingly globalized world, it is very hard to draw the line between "there's a global conspiracy pulling all the strings behind the scenes in order to rip off the little guy!" and the actual truth, which is .... that in fact there are a lot of wealthy people, both in politics and business, who wield an undue influence, buddy up to each other, and don't care very much about you.  It's not so much a conspiracy as a situation in which the incentives don't always line up for decent behavior.

Thus, if you've read at all into the details of any political question -- as I have, on the topic of food and farming -- you reach the part of the story where elected representatives get together with the owners of massive corporations in a back room and work everything out between them.  And guaranteed, it's not what you or any ordinary person would have wanted.  I don't actually believe that all elites, or all multinational corporations, or all politicians, are as corrupt as all that.  Sometimes they deal with each other to actually make the world a better place; sometimes they aren't really working with each other at all because they're a diverse gang that wants different things.  But it's not unreasonable to be untrusting of these people.  The only unfortunate part is when people start to demonize anything that goes along with being "elite," such as expertise, and only trust people who are complete outsiders and thus totally clueless about the complexity of the system.

The really miraculous thing is that Trump managed to pass himself off as not a part of this untrustworthy crowd.  But once he had done so, and so many elites (for good reasons) expressed their dislike of him, that seemed like proof that he was a good guy -- on our team, not the elites' team, because if he were one of them, they would like him.  Which would work better if the global elite really were a massive conspiracy with a single set of goals rather than the messy tangle it really is.

The second question is, why now?  What has caused such a sudden backlash, when a short time ago it looked like the world was on one long march in a progressive direction?

1.  Economics.  I am not convinced by the narrative that Trump was elected by poor factory workers who lost their jobs -- because all the evidence is that Trump supporters were mostly middle-class.  However, I think there's a good argument for a broader kind of causality.  The whole developed world was doing very well in the early oughts, and suddenly we had our recession in the US, along with similar issues around the world.  That led a lot of people to feel that they're doing less well than they once were, or than they expected to be, and to blame global elites (some of whom absolutely were responsible).  And I think it also caused people to lose faith in the capitalist/democratic system that's been working so well up to now.  If it can't prevent recessions or austerity measures, what good is it?

2.  Islamic terrorism.  While xenophobia always finds something, real or imagined, to latch onto -- inventing global Jewish conspiracies or Catholic immigrant mafias -- in this case, the feared outsider group actually does contain some people who will literally kill you.  So it spurs a panicky backlash as a single terrorist attack reverberates around the world, leaving people thinking, "What if that happens here? We must block these scary outsiders from entering or it will happen here for sure."  Repeated attacks increase the fear, and also drive further reduction of faith in democratic pluralism.  Democracies get along really well with one another, we know this, but are they equipped to handle radical Islamic states and terrorist groups?

3.  Enlightenment values have been a victim of their own success.  Just as vaccination rates for a disease drop when people have never seen the disease -- imagining that polio could never come back or that diphtheria can't have been so bad, because no one has ever seen either -- faith in democracy drops as people lose familiarity with the alternatives.  Europe has been at peace so long we imagine it will always be at peace and can never be otherwise.  Human rights have been defended so long that many people have been telling me that we really don't need to worry about racism any longer, no matter what racist things some leaders say, because it's just dead and won't come back.  And I think that's a dangerous assumption.  There are reasons for the level of peace in the world right now -- stuff like free trade and alliances -- and if you axe those things, there is no reason to assume the standard level of peace and prosperity the developed world enjoys would continue.

4. Putin????   Okay, this one is more of a conspiracy theory than a reflection.  But I have been quite shocked lately to hear of how many  of these nationalist parties have been sponsored or supported by the Russians.  There have been cases of the Russians hacking into news networks before elections to display fake ISIS propaganda, or leaking juicy details about establishment candidates to help nationalist ones.  I can't be sure of this; my only source was in TIME magazine and they put all their best stuff behind a paywall.  (I read it in the doctor's office.)  But it's something worth thinking of.  If Putin himself is a nationalist, and he feels threatened by the united strength of Europe and the US, might he not wish to fracture that unity by encouraging go-it-alone attitudes in each country?

* * *

So that's what I think is going on.  I don't think it really matters that Trump is a playboy millionaire with a history of general skeeviness; I don't think that's why anyone voted for him.  Honestly, it may have helped, by getting Trump a lot of free coverage in a primary field where it was hard to get noticed.  Rather, his win is a triumph of anti-Enlightenment forces: zero-sum over cooperation; nationalism over globalism; culture over individual.

But that doesn't mean, of course, that we will now see a world or even a nation run by only these forces.  Half the country -- well, more than half -- never agreed with Trump in the first place, and many of those who did support him did so simply for partisan reasons, as our two-party system encourages.  It may be that he screws things up so bad in his first two years that he loses the Senate again, and the next two years accomplishes little or nothing.  Then again, it may be that his reluctance to uphold our alliances results in a nuclear Iran or Russia encroaching on the Baltic states.  I don't know, and this uncertainty is scary.

I do feel some confidence, however, that the Enlightenment values Trump's movement opposes are the exact reasons why the world is going as well as it is: why developed nations no longer fight one another; why individual rights are being championed so well.  Yes, the capitalist/democratic/progressive/globalist system has flaws -- its ability to be manipulated by the few people able to understand its complexity being one of those flaws.  Yet I think these flaws can be battled from within that system rather than trashing the whole thing.  That's the main reason I've opposed Trump all along -- though don't get me wrong, I detest him as an individual too.  He opposes everything which has been making the world a better place for the past sixty years: free trade, international alliances, pluralism.  (I could write a whole post on the ways immigration makes the world a better place -- maybe I should.)

Yet I am going to try not to read Trump's win as the definitive victory of the forces of darkness.  It's a setback, hopefully a temporary one.  Most of the world still wants to move forward, not backward, and there are ways to do it even if the most powerful man in the free world isn't on your side.

Recommended reading:
Don't Mourn, Organize - Thing of Things
White Riot - Vox [Note: facts very interesting. Tone very inflammatory.  If you are a typical conservative who absolutely cannot handle anyone thinking that anyone you like is racist, it will make you mad.]

Voting and moral theory

I've said before than in most cases, different moral theories have similar results.  In fact, most of us aren't very conscious about what moral theory we're using to make our decisions -- we just feel our moral choices to be obvious, and will draw from a variety of different arguments if we have to defend them.

The differences in people's moral reasoning are never so obvious as when they vote and when they talk about voting.  Different moral theories result in different frameworks for reasoning about how to vote, and ultimately in different votes. 

Let me describe what I mean by a few examples.

Deontologist voter: There are a few non-negotiables.  Whichever candidate passes a basic threshold of agreement on these gets his vote.  For instance, this was how I voted in 2004.  I didn't research the candidates at all.  I simply knew that one of them said he was pro-life, and the other did not, so I picked the one that did.

Virtue ethics voter: This person says that his vote has little effect on the course of the nation (because it's only one vote) but a huge effect on his own morality.  If he votes for someone who supports torture, for instance, it might make him more prone to excuse torture.  So he will generally vote for a perfectly pure candidate who has no chance at winning.  Mark Shea recommends this approach.  I did it in 2012, voting for Gary Johnson because I found both major candidates morally unacceptable.

Group loyalty voter: This person chooses a person who seems like "one of us" -- someone who signals that they care about the same moral issues and belong to the same tribe as the voter.  Candidates are well aware of this method of voting, so they will gather endorsements from churches, drop dogwhistles to their key constituencies, and signal group membership any way they can.  The reasoning is that it doesn't matter what the candidate's individual positions are, because anyone might be lying -- what they want is a person they can trust to make the right decisions once they get there.  To do that, the candidate should share, as closely as possible, the moral assumptions of the voter.

Nihilist voter: They feel discouraged because their vote doesn't count much, or because they are unimpressed by all available candidates, so they stay home.  I did this in 2008, in part because I had moved and not re-registered in time, but partly just because I felt disillusioned with politics in general and didn't see anyone I could get excited about voting for.

Consequentialist voter: This person does not care about whether the candidate is personally likeable, and doesn't need to agree with the candidate on any one issue.  Instead, they consider, of all the possible consequences of the election, which would be best.  Sometimes they call this the "lesser of two evils" approach, to emphasize that they're not voting for who they are because they actually like them.  But it is possible that consequentialism might lead one to vote for a worse candidate in order to discredit that party or punish the other party.  Or they might vote third party in order to send a message to the two parties that there is a rise in libertarianism or socialism or whatever and the parties should trend that way to win more votes next time.  This was certainly a part of my thinking in 2012 as well.  Consequentialism is the entirety of my rationale this time.

You've probably heard that Cruz is out and therefore it will probably be Trump vs. Clinton (unless Sanders has a massive surge).  So it's a much simpler consideration than it used to be.  I'd have seriously considered voting for Cruz, but I no longer have to weigh potential consequences of that now.

I can't know what all the consequences of either result will be.  But my assessment is that the world will be significantly worse under Trump, while Clinton is more likely to preserve the status quo or make things slightly worse.  Of the two possibilities, a Clinton win is better.

In past years I probably would have voted third party while harboring a secret hope that Trump would lose.  But at this point, being more strongly consequentialist than I used to be, I'll vote for the result I want, regardless of any personal animus or rational disapproval of the candidate.  Because my moral duty is to make things the best I can, rather than to preserve my own sense of moral purity by voting third party.

If your moral theory is different, you'll likely come up with different answers.  Whatever you do, I hope we're all still friends come this December.  This country probably can't be saved, not in the way I might hope, but good friendships can.  And when you realize that those who disagree with you on voting aren't evil, but simply making their moral choices according to a slightly different framework, it may be easier to respect them even when they vote differently from you.

The system isn't broken

The other day, I read a comment thread discussing the Republican nomination system.  It's admittedly very complicated, which led some of the commenters to feel that it was secret and being hidden from them.  In particular, they felt the mechanism of the "brokered convention" was unfair.  This is what happens if no candidate gets a majority of delegates.  At the convention, the delegates are "unbound" after the first ballot to vote for other candidates than the one they were originally bound to vote for.  That way, the convention can reach a true majority for a single candidate, as the delegates for less-popular candidates group around one with a better chance for winning.

What this means is that if Donald Trump gets 40% of the delegates, and Cruz and Kasich each get 30%, on subsequent ballots, Kasich's supporters can switch their vote to Cruz (or vice versa) so that the 60% of people who don't want Trump can get not Trump.

Unfortunately, the people in this thread felt that this was a failure of democracy.  It was proof that party insiders could ignore the will of the people (after all, more of them appear to want Trump than any other single candidate) and just pick whoever they want.  It just shows that they weren't paying attention back in 2012, when this very strategy was the hope of Ron Paul supporters to overthrow the establishment.  All they needed was to keep Romney from getting a majority, and then all the delegates would group around Ron Paul.

How could they do that?  Well, by making sure the actual people who went as delegates were Ron Paul supporters, even if bound to some other candidate.  How to be a delegate varies from state to state, but in all cases, these people are chosen by the local members of the party.  All you have to do, then, is register as a GOP member, get the support of other members, and get elected as a delegate.  And you have to be willing to travel to the GOP convention in the summer.  And, most of all, you have to have enough people backing you to get what you want.  That's the real reason Ron Paul failed.  It's not because the system stopped the people from getting what they wanted.  It's that more of the people wanted Romney than anybody else.

When I read this comment thread, I was filled with a sense of sympathy.  I remember feeling that way, feeling like the system was rigged against me, feeling that no matter how hard I tried or what I did, some mysterious group of elites would always do what they wanted anyway.  I felt that the people had no real power, that democracy was just for show.  Sometimes I even wondered if there was a vast conspiracy behind everything -- government in cahoots with economic and cultural elites to seize all the power and money in the country and make sure no ordinary people got any.

But there are things that don't jive with this viewpoint.  For one thing, the economic elites don't usually agree with the cultural elites -- that's why the left demonizes "the 1%" while the right demonizes The New York Times and Harvard.  And of course there are rich mogols on the left (Bill Gates, Warren Buffett) and conservatives do have influence on the media and education (Rush Limbaugh, prayer in schools).  If Gates gives a ton of money to the Democratic candidate and Koch gives a bundle to the Republican candidate, don't they wind up canceling out?

Of course, there are some things that do operate like I imagined.  Our food system and the Federal Reserve are two I can think of where certain special interests have a disproportionate level of influence.  In both cases, it's because most people don't know or care what's going on, while those most affected by them (Big Ag, Wall Street) know all about them and spend all the efforts on influencing them.  But in most cases, the government is too incompetent to control everything the way I thought, and most politicians aren't really as clever and evil as on House of Cards.

Then why don't we get what we want?  Well, sometimes we do get what we want.  When everyone in the country agrees on something, it's pretty uncontroversial and it just gets done without fuss.  But on most topics, either we disagree entirely on the end goal (some people want there to be gay marriage, and some don't) or we disagree on the means (we all want to end poverty, but some of us think we can do it with more welfare and some think what we need is lower taxes and less regulation).  In each of these cases, a maximum of one side can get what it wants.  More often, nobody gets what they want.  Some of us wanted socialized healthcare, some wanted free-market healthcare, so we got Obamacare, which we all agree is awful.  Some want to deport all illegal immigrants, others want to give them all amnesty, so we do neither and the problem of millions of undocumented workers, which we all agree is a problem, steadily gets worse.  This problem is compounded when a problem has multiple possible solutions instead of only two.  If there are five different ways to cure poverty, and each is only favored by 20% of people, of course we're not going to make a whole lot of progress.

Now, it's not as bad as all that.  I happen to be of the opinion that America in 2016 is a great place to live.  Sure, it's not perfect, and you all know I have a sentimental attachment to medieval Europe which makes me a little dissatisfied with the modern world.  But crime is falling, even the poor aren't usually starving, we've wiped out smallpox, and we have Wikipedia on our phones.  Unemployment is higher than I'd like, but not Depression-level bad, and it's slowly getting better.  Certainly there's a lot that should be done, but I don't believe that the sky is falling.

And insofar as there are problems, many of them could be solved with a little more effort.  I mean, our founding fathers pledged their lives, their liberty, and their sacred honor to change their political situation to one they preferred.  The average modern American thinks he's a hero if he shows up to vote and does nothing else.  I'm not denigrating voting, but voting isn't the only thing or the most effective thing you can do politically.  You could try to influence other people's votes -- that has a surprisingly large effect.  For instance, you could volunteer for a phone bank or to knock on doors for a candidate or ballot measure you support.  Money makes a difference, and it doesn't have to be given by Wall Street.  Sanders is doing quite well fundraising mainly from individuals.  Or you could try to influence your representatives by calling them when an important vote is coming up in the legislature.  I've done that several times, since I found out legislators really do listen to that sort of thing.  Of course that requires you to keep up on what's going on, instead of only paying attention to what the government is doing once every four years.

If you're interested in doing more, you could join a political party.  You then have the chance to push forward that party's goals within the country -- and to push forward your goals within the party.  You can find party members who agree with you on key issues and strategize to bring those issues forward.  You might even run for office.  While there are loads of people who'd like to be president, there are surprisingly few who are willing to do the thankless work of local and state politics, and there are plenty of people who'd like to vote for a trustworthy person if one would ever run.

While I think that working within a party is probably your most effective route to pursue change, if you don't like those, there are also political advocacy groups you could join.  Sure, Monsanto has a big lobby, but real food also has lobbying groups.  In order to compete with the corporate lobbies, these groups need money and volunteers.  If you haven't given them any money and you haven't volunteered, you can't expect them to get results for you.

These are just a few of the ways you can make a difference beyond just voting.  I list them because they are things most people don't do, which you can have a disproportionate level of influence if you do.  No one is stopping you from having a say in how the country is run -- except you.

Of course it's a heck of a lot easier to say "the system is broken," because then you're completely absolved from getting off your butt and doing something.  If the system is broken, you can whine about it in internet comboxes and fantasize about the government coming to get you or the coming apocalypse.  I know how that feels because I've been there.  The reality is more mundane: the machine works, but you're asleep at the wheel.  You go and vote, and then if you don't get what you want, you whine that the system is rigged against you and you never could have won.  But what if you could have won, if you'd done more?

There is no system for organizing human beings that runs smoothly with no effort from anyone.  Democracy is no exception.  Left to itself, it tends toward either oligarchy or demagogues.  But it doesn't have to be left to itself.  It can be influenced by the hard work of individuals like you.  Or, if you do nothing, it will be influenced by people looking for money or power who are willing to harm the rest of us to get it.  It's a free country -- the choice is up to you.

Public vs. private charity

Recently I joined a facebook group for my town.  I would like to know more local people, and it's a good way to keep up on what's going on around me -- free concerts, craft clubs, whatever.  It also gives me the beneficial experience that Chesterton describes of loving your neighbor precisely because he is nothing like you.

What gets me, though, is how much poverty there is.  Many of the postings are pleas for help -- someone's power is getting cut off, or they are getting evicted, or they don't have food, or whatever.  If this happened once in awhile, I'd be thankful for it, because I do want to pitch in and help my neighbors.  But it's so frequent that I couldn't possibly help them all, and I feel like scrolling by in a hurry so I don't have to see how much need there is around me.

Of course, the problem is that when a random person asks for help on Facebook, they could be anybody.  They might not really need the help.  Or they might be relying on my help to get them through a crisis without ever learning from it or turning their life around -- perpetually begging for money when what they need is a job.  And I know heroin is big in this town, what if they are just going to spend it on that?  You know.  The same reasons most of us walk by panhandlers, but without the awkwardness of avoiding eye contact.

I always thought that helping one's neighbors personally was always the best way.  When you help someone personally, you know their situation and what will most help better than a faceless bureaucracy can.  And yet I'm beginning to question whether that is really so.  A faceless bureaucracy can look at their pay stubs!

Another issue with private charity is that it is usually short term.  A person posts, "I need help with this month's rent," and people pitch in for that month's rent.  But next month, the rent needs to be paid again.  They are not getting consistent help.  And that gives them one of the worst effects of poverty -- constant anxiety, not knowing if you are going to be able to make it next month, or how.

Perhaps this is in some way one of the upsides to private charity.  People want to bail out others who are in a temporary tight spot, but they don't want to subsidize long-term poverty.  They think that if the poor are sufficiently uncomfortable and anxious, they'll eventually get a job.  I'm not sure this is true -- from what I can find out, people stay in poverty not because they are comfortable there, but because they lack avenues out of it.  Stable assistance can be helpful for getting out of poverty -- for instance, a person might rely on some form of aid while they get job training or finish a degree.  But one-time help, unless it's something big like a car, is not likely to help anyone out of long-term poverty.

It's something I've mentioned in the past regarding crisis pregnancy centers.  They are quick to offer poor expectant mothers a crib or some baby clothes.  But that mother is almost certainly not thinking "I could afford a baby if only I had a crib."  She realizes that if she's barely living on her job as it is, she can't afford daycare, but if she quits her job she's living on nothing.  Free daycare is much more than private charity can generally provide, and so is income assistance for a lost job.  In this country, maternity leave is not guaranteed or paid -- so the day that child is born, the mother starts losing money until she is able to get back to work.  This is a really, really big problem and almost certainly the cause of many abortions, but crisis pregnancy centers and private charity are not able to address it.

I'm not talking about the commonly cited problem of there just not being enough private charity.  The argument here is that if only we didn't have to pay taxes, we'd have more to spare for private charity and would give more.  That's surely true, and one would hope people would be willing to give as much if they had a choice, but my issue is more one of coordination.  I don't know the poor single mothers in my town, if I do know them, I don't know if I can trust them, and if I know and trust them, I'm still only one person and I'm not able to provide all they need.  And, of course, there are more poor people than rich people in my town -- much of the money in the state is in other parts of it, so that "relying on your neighbors" means that the more you need help, the less help there is near you.  Then there's the reliability issue.  If you're three months pregnant, you need to know there will be help six months from now.  Individuals are rather flaky and you can't take the chance of being left hanging.

Now, of course, many of these problems can be solved by charitable organizations -- neither individuals nor government.  Like government, a charity can investigate to find out if applicants are in real need, and it can provide more long-term help.  Unfortunately most of the ones I can find around me don't.  For instance, there's a soup kitchen that provides a free dinner on Wednesday nights.  What are people supposed to eat the other six nights?  There's a men's homeless shelter, but nothing for women.  It's just very spotty.  And again, it varies based on area -- our town has resources funded by the modest incomes of the people who live in it.  Considering that poverty is very high in large swathes of the country, it's not always enough to have assistance funded by your neighbors.

I think private charity will always have a place.  But a real safety net is going to have to be coordinated, capable of checking up on people, spread out across the country, and most of all, not riddled with holes.  The government is going to do a better job of this than private charity.  Even it isn't doing a stellar job, partly for political reasons and partly because bureaucracy is awful.  I think minimum income would waste less money while leaving fewer holes.

The other argument against public charity has been quoted at me all my life: you don't get any credit for helping the poor with other people's money.  People say it like it's a conversation-ending sucker punch, but it doesn't mean anything to me.  I don't want credit.  I want poor people to be helped.  They will be helped just as much with my money or with someone else's.  And of course, some of that money is mine (we are now so wealthy we pay taxes!  hooray!) and considering that I have to pay it anyway, I'd rather see it go to the poor than elsewhere.  If a person really is opposed to all taxation, it is at least a principled position, but if you believe that the government has a right to tax at all, ruling out welfare is inconsistent.  Why should that money not  be spent on what is most needed?

(This is how you know that I am only a practical libertarian.  I'm not against government when it works well.  I just know that it rarely does, and that there are many things it tries to do that it can't succeed at.  I don't have a problem with taxation on principle because I don't think the right to property is absolute.)

Meanwhile I think there's always going to room for private charity.  There are very specific helpful things, from ESL classes to job training, that nonprofit organizations can provide efficiently.  And for occasional needs, person-to-person assistance is great.  You can donate to a GoFundMe to help someone start a business or purchase a vehicle to get to work.  Every little bit helps.

So long as you don't do what I am so often tempted to do -- feel compassion, want to help, then talk yourself out of doing anything because you're not sure it will help.  Better to give something sometimes to somebody than nothing, no matter how you work it out.  Surely it will make a difference to the person who receives it.

Liberty and safety nets

I've always been a bit in conflict about libertarianism.  On the surface, it's a great idea -- keep government to a minimum and people will be able to make the choices best for them without a lot of pressure.  And practically speaking, government tends to attract corruption and it wastes a lot of money.  And with so many competing interests, it often winds up not delivering a very good product in the end -- in its attempt to please everyone, it pleases no one very well.

But lately I've been running into a lot of criticism of libertarianism -- that it ignores the poor, for instance.  "Screw the poor," they say, is not a Catholic attitude -- we have a responsibility to the poor.

Now libertarians answer, quite justly, that they can care for the poor on their own time, it's not only government that can do that job.  However, it seems sometimes that the rhetoric goes further than I can agree with.  A libertarian might say that it is fundamentally unjust for their own money to be taken ("at gunpoint," as they like to put it) to help the poor, regardless of how much the poor need the money.

And that, actually, is not a Catholic view of property.  The right to life is absolute; the right to property is not.  Property is given to man to steward, but it comes with the responsibility to share with the less fortunate.  Here's St. Basil, a Father of the Church:

“But you say, ‘where is the injustice if I diligently look after my own property without interfering with other people’s?’ O impudent words! Your own property, you say. What? From what stores did you bring it into this world? When you came into the light, when you came forth from your mother’s womb, with what resources, with what reserves did you come endowed? No one may call his own what is common, of which, if a man takes more than he needs, is obtained by violence. . . Who is more unjust, more avaricious, more greedy than a man who takes the food of the multitude not for his own use but for his abundance and luxuries? The bread you hold back belongs to the needy, the clothes that you shut away belong to the naked, the money that you bury in the ground is the price of redeeming and freeing the wretched.” 

In fact, it has long been our teaching that you have no right to your excess when someone else lacks a sufficiency.  So if you are starving to death, you may morally "steal" food from someone who has more than enough, because it you have more right to it than he does.  This upsets a lot of people, raised on the idea that property is an absolute right, who think that taxation is theft.  I myself think that property isn't as simple as all that, as I wrote ages ago.  At any rate, from a Catholic moral perspective, taking from those who have more than they need to give to those who don't have what they need to survive isn't theft -- and for the government to do so on behalf of all of us is well-supported in Catholic social thought as well.

So much for the right of government to tax and to set up a safety net for the poor.  Is it practical?

First, consider the alternative, private charity taking care of everything.  Does it work?  I do not have time to waste on ideas that don't actually work.  And the libertarian answer that if only we didn't have to pay taxes, we'd have more to spare for the poor, is useless -- we do have to pay taxes and that's not likely to change.  After all, a lot of taxes don't go toward supporting the poor, but toward funding our government itself.  In short, I'm not asking what would happen in an ideal society, but what is likely to be possible in our political climate.  Is there a specific policy I can support now?  Because it is absolutely unacceptable to me to tell the poor they have to wait for help until the income tax is abolished .... i.e., forever.  Even worse is when conservatives get together to come up with things to cut from the budget, leave corporate welfare, military spending, and waste -- and cut food stamps.  That's where you're going to start?

There are many, many families right now in America who would not be able to live without the various aid programs we have now.  Unemployment is high even among those who are seeking it -- so it's no good to say "just get a job"; there aren't enough jobs.  And what about those who are not able to work, the disabled, for instance, or single mothers who are the only caregivers for their children?  There's a whole lot more need than there is available charity.  One in three children in America is born to a single mother, and half of these kids are in poverty.  How can private charity keep up with that level of need -- without letting people slip through the cracks?

Of course it's simple to say, "Those people's poverty is a result of their bad choices."  In some cases that is true.  But why should a single bad choice on the part of the parents leave the children in danger of starving?  Is that a Christian attitude?  To say nothing of how making single motherhood unaffordable does a lot more to encourage abortion than it ever has to stop people from having sex.  The thing about using poverty as the stick to "disincentivize" behavior we don't like, is that some people will not respond to the incentive and wind up being punished.  I refuse to accept that in a wealthy country like this one, any child should ever have to starve or be homeless.

So I have always bucked the libertarian trend -- if we can't come up with anything better, I say keep the safety nets where they are.  I think it's despicable for the Republicans to take a look at the Farm Bill and choose to cut food stamps -- a tiny portion of the spending on that bill, but the really crucial part.  Yes, food stamp spending is up lately -- because more Americans qualify for it.  And as for welfare, I found out a few months back that the stereotype I always hear -- the single mother too lazy to work, living off welfare checks -- is completely false.  You have to be working at least 30 hours a week or actively seeking work in order to qualify for welfare.  This doesn't make sense to me -- it seems quite the runaround to have women working 30 hours a week, spending half or more of it on daycare, and then getting a check to actually live on.  Why is it better for them to pay someone else to watch their kids so that they can bag groceries or flip burgers, when their kids would probably much prefer to have their mothers around?  Call me a socialist, but I think giving mothers the choice to care for their kids themselves is something our society could stand to invest in.  I would love to see statistics on this, but I am relatively certain that one of the things that makes the outcomes of the privileged kids so much better is that their parents have the ability to be involved.  Would letting mothers stay home without losing their welfare check help kids get out of poverty when they grow up?  I think it very well might.

To that end, I've been reading up lately on the negative income tax.  The basic principle is simple: if you make under a certain amount, instead of getting taxed, you get a check to help make up the difference.  It's scaled so that any hours worked will increase the total amount a person has to live on.  For instance, if you were getting a check for $10,000 a year, and get a job that pays $5,000, your check doesn't decrease to $5,000, but to, say, $7,500, so that now you have a total of $12,500 to live on.  But even if you don't work, you still get something -- a sort of bare minimum, depending on how many people are in your household, and what it might take for them to survive.  Ideally I think you'd want to have the thresholds set differently depending on where you lived and what the cost of living was.

What I like best about it is that it does not police or infantalize the poor.  When poor people are constantly required to justify their existence, prove they're searching for work, only get aid that can be used for specific things.  And yet, what poor people need the most is just money.  They know better than anyone what they need to spend it on -- medical bills, daycare, groceries, an old car so they can stop spending all their time and money on the bus.  Isn't the fear that "they'll just blow it on stupid stuff" a way of saying poor people are dumb, that they can't be trusted to look out for themselves?  Sure, you'll blow it on stupid stuff if you're stuck in a poverty trap and don't think you can ever get out, but if you have a reliable source of income, you have hope of improvement, and you will use the money you get to climb out of poverty.

I asked a friend today if he thought this system would keep people from working -- would they just sit on their duff and accept a bare-bones existence rather than getting a job?  And he pointed out that even not working for a paycheck can be an investment.  J.K. Rowling was on welfare when she wrote her books.  Would we really want her flipping burgers for fear of starvation, when a few years of leeway allowed her to write the books that let her escape poverty for good?  Being able to take a year or two off from the workforce (albeit with a very low standard of living -- we can't afford to make it luxurious, and we wouldn't really want to make it too comfy anyway) means that people can go to school, take care of kids, start a business, do some job training, and permanently get out of poverty instead of constantly having to choose short-term survival over long-term success.  Now some people might choose not to work.  But that's the case now; there are always people who will find a way to game the system.  Still, I do believe most of us don't like living off of charity of any kind; we have a strong instinct to support ourselves, to give back.

I'd be interested in learning more about this.  It's not, strictly speaking, a libertarian solution, but it was favored by Milton Friedman and F. E. Hayek, which (to me) means that some hardcore capitalist smarts back it up.  And it means less bureaucracy and government interference without neglecting the poor.  What do you think?