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.

Caught in a Compromising Position

I read today about a recent Gallup poll that got some interesting results:

Americans also favor governance by those who "think it is more important to compromise to get things done" (63%) over those who "think it is more important to hold firm to their principles" (56%) -- although the overlap between the figures shows that some Americans view both types of leaders favorably.

Well, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if many Americans view both types of leaders favorably.  I've seen people flipflop on principle and compromise within a few minutes:

An old friend linked to a rant by a Methodist minister somewhere, and added his own layer of froth to it:

This is EXACTLY right. So much bull shit propaganda is speed out to the public as "facts". These are the real facts. The moderate - and trainable - on both sides need to come together to permanently oust these tea party legislative terrorists. It's time to take back our country with reason and compromise. These are NOT bad words and what WILL get our government working again.

"Moderate" is a "bad word," in my opinion, for reasons I've given before.  "Trainable" is even worse.  Just off the bat, who's going to do the training?  Our government wasn't founded to "train" us, or our elected representatives.  "Reason" is an okay word, but there's no reason in my friend's words.  "Compromise" is a bad word, since in practice what it has meant during the Obama administration is that the Republicans have been handed much of what they want, and are thereby emboldened to demand the rest of it later.  And it's hilarious of my friend (and he's far from alone among pious Democrats) to demand compromise, when both sides here are refusing to compromise.  That is not necessarily a bad thing, because there are times when one must not give in.  Obama and the Democrats have decided not to compromise any further on the Affordable Care Act.  Their supporters agree that they shouldn't.  So this time, right now, compromise is a bad word.

After a few snarling comments between us, my friend wrote exactly that: "There is no compromising on this issue," he wrote. Wait a minute, didn't you just demand compromise a few minutes ago?  Compromise isn't a bad word, and all that?  It's convenient, if not exactly gratifying, to have such a blatant textbook example of doublethink in action.

During the debt-ceiling battles and the government shutdown, many people in the media and outside it indulged in easy false equivalence, blaming both parties for refusing to compromise.  When deals were finally made, Democrats celebrated what later became known as the Sequester -- until it took effect.  Then they howled about the damage it was doing; including the guy behind it, our Collaborator in Chief himself.  So why shouldn't people hold both positions, demanding principle and compromise at the same time?  What matters in American political discourse is cheering for your team, chanting the right slogans, ignoring facts in favor of waving your colors.

Sometimes compromise is the right choice.  Sometimes it's not.  There's no rule that can decide which is right in advance.  Wanting there to be one is one strategy of what the philosopher Walter Kaufmann called "decidophobia," the fear of making fateful decisions.  Not too surprisingly, his call for autonomy and taking responsibility for one's decisions never caught on.

Hey, Big Spender: Still Fit to Eat With the Hogs

Here's a good example of the inadequacy of our political discourse.  The image above turned up on Facebook, though the Talking Points Memo article it references was published in May; I think it was spread around at the time.  A couple of people I know linked to it on Facebook today.  I was going to write a post about calls I've been seeing lately for more critical thinking, and I may finish it after I post this, but let this one serve as an overture to the bigger question.

It's good to refute Obama's Republican critics when they accuse Obama of being a big spender, but it's not enough.  In an alternate universe, say the Bizarro World, where facts would matter in election campaigns and political discussion, Obama's relative thrift would be embarrassing to the Democrats, as it should be.  After a catastrophe like the 2008 crash, the government needs to pump lots of money into the economy to increase demand.  Far from cutting government jobs as Obama has, the administration should add more.  Obama's stimulus bill was the right idea, but inadequate thanks in part to Obama's pre-emptive surrender to the Republicans on the Bush-era tax holiday for the rich.

Which gives me the chance I've been looking for to provide a source and a link to something I've mentioned before: Obama's admission that he had failed as a negotiator by offering the tax cuts himself, instead of making the Republicans demand them.

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. 

And if you recall, when we initially unveiled what the Recovery Act would look like — in fact, that a third of it was tax cuts — Mitch McConnell actually was, as he phrased it, pleasantly surprised that sort of traditional Republican idea had been included. But very quickly that pleasant surprise turned into attacks on the infrastructure or the aid to the states or what have you.

As Avedon Carol pointed out, one of the fundamental principles of bargaining is that you ask for more than you want, so the other party will have to make concessions to get you to lower your demand.  As I've pointed out before, even if Obama (an alumnus of the supposedly tough Chicago political scene as well as a couple of years in the Senate) had never learned this, he had plenty of advisors with more experience who could have pointed it out at the time.  There was no need for the far-future Obama of 2010 to invent a time machine so he could advise his much-younger 2009 self in the basics of political rough-and-tumble.  This same pattern has been played out repeatedly in Obama's term, as when he tried to show his reasonableness by appointing two fanatical deficit hawks to run his deficit-reduction commission, and when he put cuts in Social Security and Medicare benefits on the table during the absurdly mismanaged debt-ceiling debacle.  To say nothing of putting off that fight until the Democrats no longer controlled the House of Representatives -- was that "I can beat them mugs with one hand tied behind my back" bravado?  I wouldn't be surprised.

And you know, this isn't a "Gotcha!" kind of criticism: the US economy is still stagnant except for the rich (including President Obama, who will never have to stand in an unemployment line nor will his family ever miss a meal).  Real people are suffering because of the incompetence of the Obama administration, and his smug dismissals of his "professional left" critics are the more despicable because of that.  This should be remembered when Democratic loyalists talk about the stupidity of the voters, who don't understand how politics works and should just sit back and let the experts drive.  Far from playing a genius-level game of eleven-dimensional chess with his opponents, Obama can't even play normal two-dimensional chess.

Obama's supporters are worthy of their President.  Does Dinesh D'Souza accuse him of being a Kenyan anti-colonialist?  They retort that the President is following boldly in the steps of the "original anticolonialists," the Founding Fathers -- who in reality were exemplary colonialists.  D'Souza accuses Obama of rejecting American exceptionalism?  His defenders reply that he accepts it, with all the aggression and bloodshed that entails.  Do the Republicans claim that Obama is weak on foreign policy and defense?  His defenders brandish Bin Laden's head on a pike, and the corpses of dead "militants."  Do the Republicans accuse him of reckless spending?  Au contraire, the President is a miser, the biggest cheapskate to occupy the White House since Jimmy Carter turned down the air conditioning and ordered lights to be turned off.  Not that I blame them: there but for the lack of Barack's grace go I.

Ironically, the logical conclusion to draw from the graph above is that we need to elect a big-spending Republican president in Obama's place.  That's not a good idea either, since Republican spending is aimed at the neediest of the top 1% of the wealthy, which doesn't increase demand; the Bush years aren't far enough behind us that any adult should have forgotten that.  It wasn't out-of-control spending or soaring deficits that brought on the crash of 2008, it was unregulated financial speculation, which continues to the present.  Why should the wealthy worry?  If they get into trouble, the government will bail them out.  But the really rich aren't hurt by depressions, and despite their constant poor-mouthing, the rich are doing quite well under Obama.  Profits are up.  It's the rest of us who aren't fit to eat with the hogs at the corporate trough.

Mises Pieces

Paul Krugman's latest column has been getting some favorable attention, because he forecasts the failure of the Supercommittee, the Obama-Boehner chimera that was supposed to end our deficit woes. The Week cited it enthusiastically, and I quote this excerpt from their quotation:

Eventually, one side or the other of that divide will get the kind of popular mandate it needs to resolve our long-run budget issues. Until then, attempts to strike a Grand Bargain are fundamentally destructive. If the super committee fails, as expected, it will be time to celebrate.

Oh yeah, right, a popular mandate! The kind the Democrats got in 2008, and then let the Republicans dance on their heads very effectively for two and a half years, when the Republicans regained control of the House. Obama, you'll remember, preferred to put off dealing with the debt ceiling until after the Democrats no longer controlled Congress. Then he could pretend to his base that it was all the Republicans' fault, while the Republicans accused the Democrats of intransigence.

FAIR has shown that the same thing is happening now, quoting Krugman's column:

Well, maybe the idea was that the parties would compromise out of fear that there would be a political price for seeming intransigent. But this could only happen if the news media were willing to point out who is really refusing to compromise. And they aren’t. If and when the supercommittee fails, virtually all news reports will be he-said, she-said, quoting Democrats who blame Republicans and vice versa without ever explaining the truth.

... Oh, and let me give a special shout-out to "centrist" pundits who won't admit that President Obama has already given them what they want. The dialogue seems to go like this. Pundit: "Why won't the president come out for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes?" Mr. Obama: "I support a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes." Pundit: "Why won't the president come out for a mix of spending cuts and tax hikes?"

So far the public has given the Republicans most of the blame for the failure to negotiate, so there could be a "political price for seeming to be intransigent." But that will do no good, assuming the Republicans lose their majority in the House again, if Obama and the Democrats don't pick up the ball and run with it. Krugman assumes that they would, and who could blame him, if we didn't have such extensive recent experience of Democratic collaboration with the Right. If the Republicans keep their position in the House and take the Senate as well in 2012, though, it's safe to predict that they will take their mandate and go to town.

(The title of this post comes from a commenter at Roy Edroso's alicublog [under this post], referring to the Austrian school economist Ludwig Von Mises.)

The Art of Compromise

I'm just passing this along in case you haven't seen it already.