According to Google, I find myself boring

...and who can argue with Google (my host after all).
Let me explain.  I have this blog (obviously).  Last year my son went to Lithuania for work and he kept a blog of his adventures.  Sometimes when I need a distraction (like I'm on a telephone conference that requires no attention) I'll start either at my blog or his and hit "Next Blog" which goes on some random blog hunt.  Now, I don't claim to know how Google plots a course from one blog to the next.  Maybe it's based on title.  Maybe it's based on keywords.  Who knows?  All I can say is that starting from my blog I wind up mostly at the blogs of argumentative fringe libertarians and starting at his I get to interesting artists (and breathless Malaysian college kids).

The bully always remembers it wrong

Today's headline:    Romney apologizes for hurtful high school pranks

It seems the presumptive republican nominee led a group of his friends in prep school to capture, restrain, and hold down a younger boy he thought was gay and cut his hair, that Romney thought was too long to be "right".  It is, I think, typical that a bully will recall brutal physical assault as a "prank".  A prank is putting the principal's VW on the basketball court.  A prank is stealing another school's mascot.  Abuse is not a prank, however amusing it might be to the bully.

What happens after Capitalism succeeds?

Last night the Republican candidates and many of their potential GOP voters in South Carolina made more or less the same point: the creation of jobs and the creation of welfare support (food stamps, subsidies, whatever) are not compatible.  Well, that's probably not true but it got me to thinking.

One of the advantages of Capitalism, at least as articulated by Adam Smith and Milton Friedman, is that market forces (as opposed to physical forces) create efficiencies in production and marketing.  That is, when Capitalism works well, things become more available, more cheaply available, more widely available.  So, fine.  What are we to do when everyone needs a job but jobs for everyone are not needed?  That is, in a Capitalist economy, as envisioned by, say, Mitt Romney, what if the economy (that "thing" that underlies the "market") produces enough and distributes enough and sells enough with only, lets say 80% employment.  That's the goal of Capitalism, after all, isn't it?  That the market should drive food production and clothing production and housing production and general goods production to such efficiencies that some of the people can make and deliver and sell all the stuff that all the people need.

So, what, then, does it mean to "create jobs"?  Wouldn't jobs for that 20% of "surplus" workers be, in the context of capitalist efficiency, the same as "welfare"?  There is, of course, no mechanism within a Capitalist framework for people without jobs to get access to any of the "stuff".  In a Capitalist framework, they are not "needed".  They should be made to go away.  It looks to me like we're there, now.  There's certainly plenty of stuff, probably more than enough to go around.  But of course it doesn't go around.  Why can't we just make it go around more?  What's so bad about distributing the stuff, of which there is plenty, to everyone?   The Capitalists will say that that will cause the 80% to stop working and then no one will have stuff.  But I don't think there's any evidence for that.  The alternative is to make the unemployed go away.  Where should they go?

They know not what they do

First of all, if I or anyone reads this even a few years from now, it is likely that the name, Occupy Wall Street will not ring any bells.  So let's just say that OWS is at this moment an on-going, spontaneous, global protest against the corporate and financial structure of the world, at  least the "developed" world.  The resounding theme is "we are the 99%" who are losing wealth, and losing hope, and losing time.  The message is familiar: the only reason we have societies is for our mutual benefit.  We didn't sign up to be mulch in the wealth-gardens of the 1%.

I seems to me that a big problem is that the 1% don't even know they're doing anything wrong.  Of course, they are, but they don't know it.  Our system (call it by name, Capitalism) is ideologically based on the notion that if profits are maximized, all will be well.  Well, it isn't and it won't.  For the most part, the banks aren't doing anything illegal when they buy and sell, debt, and insurance, and derivatives.  Anyone can sell anything whether it's real or not, as long as someone wants to buy it.  And corporations aren't doing anything illegal when they restructure instead of retool, when they move jobs to polluting, hazardous, plantations instead of taking smaller profits.  They're all just doing what the "market" demands.

In order for anything to change, these activities must become illegal.  We can't just do it with incentives; they're no substitute for obscene profits.   Yes, we must put restraints on "liberty" for the benefit of society.  After all, that's why we live in a society, for the benefit.  When the majority (much less 99%) of those who form a society no longer receive a benefit from it, when they'd be better off living in trees, they will bring it down, and the 1% along with it.

Socialized Medicine vs Socialized Public Safety

Those who oppose Socialized Medicine, or Universal Health Care, or let's just call it Common Sense are wont to appeal to basic Puritanism with the notion that people should be responsible for their own lives.  Freedom, they will say, means that individuals are allowed to take risks and are obliged to deal with the consequences of those risks.  Ron Paul, bless his tiny heart, has been steadfast in this regard and others on the Right, while not always quite so eloquent in their support of this Cotton Mather Health Plan are no less adamant in their ardor.

But to my knowledge no conservative candidate or pundit has suggested, much less advocated, that the Police and Fire departments of cities, counties, states, of jurisdictions large and small, far and wide should be disbanded and that individuals should be, well, responsible for their own property.

So that's it, really.  Private property is a public responsibility.  I'm responsible for helping to ensure, that is, to pay for, your house's integrity, your store's defense against the inevitable stampede of entropy, your community's bulwark against riff-raff like, well, me.  But private health is a private responsibility, at least as far as what has become the political center is concerned.  But why is that?  Why is property a collective good but health, even with it's obvious public ramifications (think epidemics), is strictly a personal choice?  Let's be clear.  If your house catches fire because you didn't plan on overloaded and frayed electrical wires failing to perform at more than their specified tolerance, I share in the remediation even if my own house is in no danger.  Socialized fire department.  But if you contract diphtheria because you happened to walk down the same street as someone else that's your own problem alone, even if you're going to bring it into the same bank where I'm making a deposit.  Private responsibility.

I could go on but I'm just repeating the obvious.  It is obvious isn't it?

The Consumer/Employee Coupling Problem

There is a famous exercise in applied mathematics known as the "rabbit lynx coupling" problem (not "coupling" in the sense of "mommy and daddy time", but in the sense of coupled differential equations describing the two populations).  The population of rabbits goes up when the population of lynxes goes down and vice versa.  In a stable ecosystem, the two populations will oscillate at the same frequency with opposite phase.  It's all great fun, unless of course you're the rabbit.

In modern capitalist economies, there is, it seems to me, a similar problem with coupled populations: Consumers and Workers.  In this case, however, they're really the same population or at least there's a great deal of overlap (you NEVER find a rabbit who IS a lynx!).  As I have said before, and is certainly well known anyway, money must flow if the economy is to be healthy.  One way money flows, in fact we're finding that it's the principal way,  is that people buy things.  In order to buy things they need to have money.  In order to have money they need to have jobs.  Furthermore, when they think there is a likelihood that they might lose their job, people buy only what they absolutely need.  This is important.  It turns out that this isn't enough.  For the economy to be healthy, people must buy stuff that they don't need.  That's crazy!

And this is where we are now.  The economy is struggling to get out of a recession and the way we're told this will happen is that people will buy things (that they don't need).  But in order to do that, they need jobs so they can have more money than just what they need to buy just what they need.  And what do we expect those jobs to be?  Why, making stuff and selling stuff and disposing of stuff that we don't need!
Look:  if people don't need stuff, a new car, a new dryer, a new sofa, our economy shouldn't collapse if they don't buy it anyway.  In fact, the economy would be more sustainable if it could survive with people only buying what they need, or at least mostly buying what they need.  It may be, and I have serious trepidation even raising this, that not everybody needs to be fully employed to make what everyone needs.  Ultimately, after all, it's really the farmers, and extractors (oil, minerals, ...) who make what we need.  Everyone else is really making stuff so those guys don't get all the money.  And, by the way, I'm not talking about old MacDonald here.  The farmers in question are Cargill and Monsanto and ArcherDanielsMidland.

Anyway, the problem is that our economy depends on the coupling between different aspects of the same population: workers and consumers.  There are no jobs if people don't buy steering wheel covers, or t-shirts, or paper clips.  Likewise, there is no stuff if people don't have jobs.  But most of it is stuff we don't need.  That is, it's the stuff we're not buying now because we're limiting our buying to what we need.  But because of "lack of consumer confidence", no new jobs are being created so consumers are even less confident.  But it's all made up.  We're not rabbits suffering from an abundance of lynxes.  Nor are we lynxes suffering from a scarcity of rabbits.  We are all both workers (money receivers) and consumers (money spenders).  And we shouldn't have to buy more than we need to ensure that we will be able to buy what we need in the first place.  We ought to find a way of living so that we produce enough for people to have what they need (and then some) and for people to acquire those things and not have to keep acquiring what they don't need.

So okay, you'll say that this is socialism and planned economy and that it doesn't work.  Fair enough.  But I think it's obvious that this, what we have now, doesn't work either.  So why is capitalism not working so much better than socialism not working?

Why I'm not a Democrat

The Democrats are like a big pile of cow shit between me and a big pile of pig shit, that being the Republicans.  They may smell better, but they still stink.  And they're full of shit.