Because You Are Lukewarm, I Will Spew You Out of My Mouth

The local newspaper in my small town manages to publish six days each week, which if I remember right was its frequency fifty-plus years ago, before I moved from the area.  That's not bad, given the difficulties newspapers everywhere are having.  Of course the pages are smaller than they used to be, as with most newspapers nowadays, but most of the content is locally produced and relevant.  I subscribe to the digital edition to support a local business, though I still seem to end up reading a print copy at the public library most of the time.

Last week I noticed a big column printed on a gray background, running from the top to the bottom of the editorial page.  It turned out to be a syndicated thing by Michael J. Hicks, a professor of economics at Ball State University, on the subject of the minimum wage, a timely enough topic.  I started reading.  It was strange.

The minimum wage has been much in the news these days, because of Joe Biden's abandoned promise to raise it to $15.  Professor Hicks began by declaring, "it seems wise to treat the issue a bit differently."

Instead of outlining the positive and negative effects of a particular increase of the minimum wage, I’ll offer the best arguments for and against any minimum wage. In so doing I’ll attempt an ideological Turing test, making the arguments so clearly that a reader cannot discern my personal position. By explaining the best arguments on both sides, I hope to achieve two goals. The first is to make clear the need for compromise. The second is to maximize angry comments from readers. Wish me luck.

And that was what he did: he rehearsed some basic arguments for and against having a minimum wage at all.  It reminded me of the late Alexander Cockburn's satirical piece "The Tedium Twins," which mocked PBS's McNeil-Lehrer Report for its dedication to finding two sides to every question, both of them as near a fantasized middle of the road as possible.  It's true that there are people who'd like to abolish the minimum wage, but they aren't likely to get anywhere, and abolition is not on the table right now anyway.  So why bother?  It's like going over the arguments for and against giving women the vote: quite irrelevant except for a few cranks, but it does fill up those column-inches, and Professor Hicks expressed his hope that he'd covered the arguments well.

If I have done so, and you, dear reader, are honest with yourself, you must admit that both the argument for and against hold a great deal of truth. I would go so far as to say that both arguments are essentially true.

The policy environment facing functioning democracies is almost always like the minimum wage debate. Both sides offer argument possessed of both supportive facts and truth. Yet, entirely reasonable, educated and well-meaning people still disagree. It is a hallmark of a liberal democracy that our policy debates are dominated by matters in which compromise is not just possible, but necessary. That is largely because we’ve solved most of those problems where compromise is not possible. 

Well ... no.  If I'm honest with myself, the arguments against the minimum wage were actually quite bad.

The best argument in opposition to a minimum wage is that government should not, and cannot, be in the wage- or price-setting business. Government has no role in a great many high-stakes personal decisions. Government cannot tell us what language to speak, what church to attend, who to marry or with whom to form a family.

No government may tell us adults how much alcohol we may consume, whether or not we can smoke tobacco, nor increasingly whether or not we may freely purchase cannabis or other drugs. Government cannot tell us whether or not we may own a gun or what type of house, automobile or boat we may own. Government isn’t permitted to do these things because free people won’t allow government to do these things.

However, free people will allow government to set and increase a minimum wage: a $15 minimum wage is favored by about two-thirds of likely voters, according to Pew, and other pollsters get similar results.  The comparisons Hicks lists -- what language to speak, which church to attend, who to marry, etc. -- are not similar in kind to a mandated minimum wage anyway.  I don't think it's accurate to claim that this argument is essentially true.  Hicks says it's the best one he knows of, and despite his affectation of impartiality, he can hardly take it seriously.  Instead he spent quite a number of column-inches saying effectively nothing.  I would call that irresponsible: as an educator, his role should be to address live issues rather than evade them.

As for "compromise," well...

As Congress commences a debate on increasing the minimum wage, we should view this as a crucial moment for our Republic. We have just passed through the most significant assault on our Constitution since the Civil War. Our ability to overcome that and prevent it in the future depends in part on how effectively we compromise over legislation. We should view the minimum wage as a good place to start.

The fun part of this sort of rhetoric is that you can advocate pretty much any kind of compromise you like if you get to decide where the extremes are.  Professor Hicks sets his extremes as abolition of the minimum wage and having one; compromise in that case would mean cutting the minimum wage, and I don't think a free people will allow that to happen.  The important point here is that those are not the options Congress will debate.  On Professor Hicks's assumptions, compromise would mean raising it to less than $15, or maybe cutting it, depending on where he imagines the Republican position to be.  That is not going to work either.  I'd like to suppose that as a professor of economics, he's aware that the current figure, $7.25, is a poverty wage that hasn't kept up with either inflation or increased worker productivity, which wage increases are supposed in principle to track. 

But to repeat, compromise depends on where you set the extremes, so let me suggest as one extreme that the minimum wage be abolished, and on the other, that the US impose really confiscatory taxes on the richest Americans, and use the new income to institute a guaranteed universal income for all Americans.  While I'm dreaming, let me add the abolition of all business-endowed chairs of economics at state universities.  We could compromise on, say, a $50 minimum wage.  Our future depends on how effectively we compromise on legislation, so let's get to it.

I Would Prefer Not To, Part 2

Vast Left kindly gave my earlier post a boost on Facebook, though he disagreed with my remarks about Obama's "competence".

IMHO, the competence argument presupposes things about Obama's objectives, or at a minimum tempts us to do so. I suppose one might reasonably imagine Obama sought some sort of braggable closure in the Grand Bargain negotiations, but even that is speculation. And, importantly, what objective did his incompetence cause him to fail at? It's only a failure if you sought a different outcome.

Two things here.  One is that VL evidently missed my reference to the negotiation, not of the deficit deal, but of Obama's 2009 stimulus package.  Maybe I should have put in a link, and I'll add one later, to Obama's own admission that he hadn't done such a good job on that one:

Now in retrospect, I could have told Barack Obama in December of 2009 that if you already have a third of the package as tax cuts, then the Republicans, who traditionally are more comfortable with tax cuts, may just pocket that and attack the other components of the program. And it might have been better for us not to include tax cuts in the original package, let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts, and then say, O.K., you know, we’ll compromise and give you your tax cuts, even though we had already proposed them.

Yesterday VastLeft tweeted "When the job is fucking over the most vulnerable people, the last topic that interests me is competence."  This is mildly alarming; it seems that VL can't grasp anything but the most direct ("Am too! Are not!") argument.  If what I wrote presupposed Obama's competence, it was only hypothetically, for the sake of argument. What I was getting at was not so complex: it was If X, then Y; if not-X, then not-Y: Even if Obama was trying to engineer an economic stimulus that would help the most vulnerable, he did a bad job of it.  He said so himself.  Just as Obama admitted that he did a poor job in his first debate with Mitt Romney.  Is it necessary to be a good debater to be a good President?  Not as far as I'm concerned; but it was still worth noting that he is not a good debater.  (And this is an easy, safe criticism to make, since almost all of his most devoted apologists agreed with it.)  It is, I think, important for a President to be a competent negotiator; it's a significant part of the job.

But it also follows from what I wrote in that post (that the principles you stand up for must be good ones) that it's not enough to be a competent negotiator, one must also be negotiating toward a good end.  If Obama was trying to push through a stimulus deal that would help the majority of Americans, he shouldn't have undermined it by offering tax cuts up front that would undercut its effectiveness.  (If not-X, then not-Y.)  This suggests that improving the economy for the 99% was not his goal, which seems likely, given his record.  This involved the real risk that an underperforming economy would hurt his chances of re-election, but Obama wouldn't have been the first president to run such a risk: Bill Clinton did just that by pushing through NAFTA in 1993, the Democrats lost control of Congress as a result, and Clinton might not have gone on to a second term; like Obama last week, Clinton won his second term by a relatively narrow margin.  Obama's re-election wasn't a foregone conclusion either, and the limping economy worried his partisans. On the other hand the economy was going well for the ultra-rich, with record high profits, but that crucial part of his base was strikingly ungrateful, despite the yeoman service he'd rendered them.  Fortunately for Obama, the Republicans fielded a stellar ticket of fools and bigots -- but even so, the popular vote was a close thing.  The gap between Romney and Obama in the Electoral College was much more dramatic, which is no doubt why those numbers have gotten so much display.  (Not that American Presidents ever need to worry for their well-being when they're turned out of office.)

Now that Obama is in the catbird seat, we'll see him negotiating a Grand Bargain to keep us from going over the Fiscal Cliff.  There's been talk of how good Obama's position is now, compared to 2009 or the debt ceiling battle of 2011.  But by now his goal is pretty clear, a destructive one, so it doesn't matter whether he's a competent negotiator or not.  Whether Boehner or Obama emerges the victor in the Grand Bargaining, most Americans (and most of the world) will lose.  But don't worry: Neither Obama nor his lovely wife nor his beautiful little girls will ever miss a meal, and isn't that what really matters?  What Obama fan wouldn't be happy to go hungry to keep them comfortable?

It's also odd that VL is still hammering away at a point that isn't central to the post he praised so generously; but now I've devoted too much attention to it myself, so on to other matters.  The elections are finally over, and America's best minds can turn their attention to really important subjects: football and basketball.

I Would Prefer Not To

The former (she's still working, I've retired) co-worker who posted this commented, "so true, if our elected officials did this a lot more would get done!"  I see variations on that theme a lot, on Facebook, in the letters to the editors of newspapers, in the comments sections of online newspapers, and in the magnanimous victory speech of His High Mightiness, our newly-elected President of the United States and Protector of Their Liberties .  And it makes no sense at all.

I don't dispute that Republicans in Congress and elsewhere have done their best to obstruct President Obama's agenda for the past four year for mainly partisan reasons.  One reason I consider this obvious is that they refused him courtesies they've freely granted to Republican Presidents, like raising the debt ceiling.  Like Democrats who suddenly embraced policies under Obama that they denounced under Bush, they were clearly motivated solely by party hatred.

It should be remembered, however, that bipartisan cooperation brought us the Vietnam War, Don't Ask Don't Tell, the Hyde Amendment, the North American Free Trade Agreement, welfare "reform," the Defense of Marriage Act, the repeal of Glass-Steagall and other dismantling of important protective regulations, the invasion of Afghanistan, torture and indefinite detention, the invasion of Iraq, the attack on Libya, drone warfare, No Child Left Behind, the current murderous sanctions against Iraq, and the Bowles-Simpson Commission, and many other wonders.  It looks poised to bring us a further assault on Social Security and Medicare, and more austerity generally (except for the top 1%) in the name of deficit reduction.  I doubt that my co-worker, or the many other people I've seen calling for "working together", would think that all of those were positive developments.  (That's assuming that they know what most of them are, which I also doubt.)

A dozen years ago, the now-late Alexander Cockburn wrote after the defeat of Al Gore:

First a word about gridlock. We like it. No bold initiatives, like privatizing Social Security or shoving through vouchers. No ultra-right-wingers making it onto the Supreme Court. Ah, you protest, but what about the bold plans that a Democratic-controlled Congress and Gore would have pushed through? Relax. There were no such plans. These days gridlock is the best we can hope for.

Alas, this time around there's a good chance that Barack Obama, Harry Reid and John Boehner will sit down and reason together over the deficit, with disastrous results.  Maybe not -- Boehner has hinted that he's still not on board with higher taxes for the rich -- but I expect Obama will be ready to waive that demand if it gets him cuts in Social Security and Medicare.  We'll see.

There are times when refusal to cooperate is a good thing.  I supported the Democratic state legislators in Wisconsin and Indiana who fled their states to try to block destructive Republican initiatives.  Would I support Republicans who did the same thing?  Yes, if (but only if) they were really opposing bad legislation.  It's not enough, as I've said before, to stand by your principles: your principles have to be good ones.  And who decides what are good principles?  I do.  You do.  We all do.  But we don't necessarily agree.

And that's the trouble with JFK's bromide above.  Who could possibly disagree that we should work together for the common good, rising above cheap partisanship for the good of the country and the world?  Has anyone ever disagreed?  Certainly not many.  Most people are sure that their position, their answer, is the right one.  So where do you go from there?  Most people have no idea.  I think that reasoned, informed debate is one tool.  I have learned a lot by watching intelligent, informed, rational opponents articulate their disagreement.  The outcome may not establish the right position or the right answer, but it often establishes that at least one is wrong, and that is a good thing to know.

But a lot of people hate debate.  Like Lady Augusta Bracknell, they dislike arguments, which are always vulgar and often convincing.  Or as too many people have said, "Arguing on the Internet is like competing in the Special Olympics -- even if you win your [sic] still retarded!  LOL LMFAO! ROFL!!!!"  (This canard seems to imply that these people would approve of debate elsewhere than the Internet, but I don't think so; at least, when I've asked them where debate and argument should happen, they don't have an answer.)

And if I have learned one thing from the past election season, it's that an election campaign isn't the right place for a debate either.  Not even the official Presidential and Vice-Presidential debates.  On their own account, Democrats no less than Republicans have no idea what to do when someone disagrees with them about the issues or the positions of the candidates, so they fall back on abuse.

But I've written about that enough in the past several weeks.  The main point is that negotiation isn't about debate, though it may include some along the way.  Nor does it promise "the right answer," perhaps especially in politics.  This is a point that party loyalists will make when their own side is criticized, though they will abandon it when they're criticizing the other party.  And I don't believe it would make any difference at all if party labels were set aside, because in politics other factors are at least as influential as party: money, seniority, the coming elections.  And more than two sides are usually involved.

If two parties sit down to negotiate in good faith, the result will not necessarily be good.  It's like voting: there is no reason to believe that voters will make the "right" choice, but the point is that they have a say (at least in theory) and therefore some accountability, if only to themselves.  In the real world it's likely that both sides are negotiating in bad faith.   It might be quite bad, but principles aren't involved.  I have to keep reminding myself that this applies to negotiations in government.  Remember Barack Obama's failure in bargaining for his stimulus package, where he unilaterally offered tax cuts to the Republicans before they'd even asked for them.  That's a lack of basic competence, which should be borne in mind by those who think of Obama as their mighty shield against the Republicans.  Obama can't even play ordinary chess very well.  In service of his corporate donors and cronies, he knows how to strongarm his fellow Democrats and to a slight degree the Republicans, but that's not chess-playing, that's main force.  Which is also a factor in negotiations.

But still, one thing we should have learned from the past four years is that Obama isn't as smart as he thinks he is.  (Do I think I'm smarter?  I really have no idea.  What I think is that years of hanging around with America's elites has made Obama less smart than he used to be.  In his place I might have made the same mistakes.  But the point is that he made them.  I've noticed that some former high US officials have admitted that they did the wrong thing while in office.  Either they said so explicitly, or did so tacitly by adopting different positions after they were out of office.  And they can't be accused of not knowing what real politics is like (a popular attack on non-politicians when we dare to speak up).  The key question then is how to make those different positions feasible or workable for politicians while they're still in office.  There's much talk of what is "politically possible" and "politically impossible."  The pressures on politicians to get rid of social programs, to cut taxes on the rich while maintaining social programs for them, to wage wars of aggression and terror, are obvious enough.  So what kind of pressure will make them do the opposite?

You can't blame him for doing that, a politician's apologists protest: Look at the pressure he was under.  To me it has long been obvious that the remedy is to put pressure on him (or her) to do something else.  If nothing else, it would remove the excuse.  One could say to the politician in question: you'll be voted out of office whatever you do, so you might as well do what you yourself agree is the right thing.  It might not be the right thing; he might just be telling me what he thinks I want to hear.  But that's not important here: the important thing is to take away the excuse.  Probably he has more excuses up his sleeve, but enough pressure should force him to acknowledge that they are excuses.   And then, to quote the psychoanalyst at the end of Portnoy's Complaint, we may perhaps begin.