Anarchoblogs

this seems basically right to me; the basic commitment is to redistribution. however, i might also remark that redistribution the other way round sort of lurks at the heart of the actual republican agenda. i know this will cause you to sob uncontrollably, but i won't be blogging tonight's debate. my prediction is that each man will so thoroughly and devastatingly refute the other that no rational person will be left with any alternative but anarchy.

like i say, it's not that i'm just endorsing peterffy's ad. but there is one thing wotrth thinking about (again); whether to measure, say, welfare or justice in comparative or absolute terms, or perhaps some other aproach. 'under socialism, the rich became poorer, but the poor also became poorer.' almost anyone, i think, would not regard this as a good trade-off (whether that is an accurate depiction of socialism here or there is another matter). so if we frame the thing in terms of income percentiles, a la 1%/99% and define the problem as inequality, a situation in which we reduce the wealth of the highest group to 1/10 of what it was, while reducing the resources of the poor by half is an improvement, though people begin to starve. you might think about whether you would choose an unbelievably unequal distribution of goods where everyone has (at a minimum) enough, or a much more equal distribution where some people don't if you are even tempted by the latter i think self-reflection is called for: is the driving force justice or mere envy?

since supposedly democratic policies benefit 'white working-class voters,' and such voters often go republican, one concludes that they are voting against their own interests, which is supposedly irrational. so, they must be manipulated by right-wing monsters. now here are some assumptions packed into this: one's self-interest is exhausted by maximum cash. and people do, or ought to, vote in their own self-interest as they understand it. (never mind the incredibly impoverished conception of rationality.)

i am a white man. if i voted my own self-interest, i might well vote for the most extreme racist and sexist available. hard to blame me for that if you're attacking people as irrational for failing to vote their self-interest. even now, i actually do benefit from the structural racism and sexism of our culture; obviously, i should devote my vote to preserving these come what may. folks like me didn't find jim crow at all inconvenient; i don't even know what people were complaining about; we might try that shit again. say feminists are right and the republican war on women represents men's obsession with controlling women's bodies. well hard to argue that we don't benefit, among other things economically, from such control. it would be irrational for me not to support all such measures.

evidently, the key reasoning strategy of nobel-prize winners is amazingly direct: from any premises whatever, your pet conclusion follows. no matter what the data, it always shows that government should be larger and more active. krugman, i have to say, is merely obsessed: he just desperately wants to be subordinated: he thinks about nothing else day or night: nothing else actually matters.

so as i understand the argument, it's that if you agree that consumption drives the economy, and if you agree that certain governmental activities increase consumption, then you are rationally obliged to agree that such activities should go forward in a slump like this one. er. look: the inference is wildly fallacious. here's a parallel argument: consumption drives economic activity. requiring every american citizen to spend 50% of their savings on amazon this weeekend would increase consumption. so you're rationally obliged etc.

possibly any measures you take will have other effects than sheer stimlation. well assessing those effects - oh, you know, doubling the deficit - might be sort of important i assessing what you want to do.