Slightly Different Thoughts About Expectations For Obama

Republicans only recognize “mandates” for themselves, and they will claim one if they win with 50% + 1 vote. I have a feeling that Obama could win in a landslide, the Democrats could get that filibuster-proof majority, and the Republicans would be crying foul over any Democrats thinking that they had a mandate.

Not that I’m cynical or anything …

Hey, McCain says he’s a socialist, so I say that when he wins nonetheless, he’s got a mandate for socialism!

(Too bad McCain is full of shit…)

Seriously, he’s a go-with-the-consensus guy. If liberals can work hard and manage (with help from the economy) to shift the Overton Window a bit to the left, I think Obama will respond. Just don’t expect him to lead the charge.

Conservatives/classical liberals have never accepted 2 wolves and a sheep voting on dinner as a mandate for the wolves.

No, they’re too busy deregulating wolf dietary restrictions, then blaming the Sheep Reinvestment Act for the death of livestock due to wolf attack.

Puchalsky is right at 2 above.

However, John, remember that old post of yours about arguing with people who aren’t really thinking coherently? It’s not your responsibility to create a coherent position for them so that you can argue against it.

Could some CTer write a script so that this is automatically placed as the first comment on any John Holbo post mentioning Jonah Goldberg? Would save everyone a lot of time….

I agree. Republicans and conservatives are evil and stupid. Adroitly stated! Eight years of superlative government stretch before us!

“’I believe in a relatively equal society’…That’s pretty much all you need to know to explain Obama’s position.”

I think this severely understates Obama’s–and American liberals’–distance from socialism. “I am against a radically unequal society” might work. But seriously, on what planet is disparity of wealth, opportunity, and power that exists in the U.S. anything approaching “relatively equal”?

As for the “redistributionism” language, we really need to demand people be precise about which kind. Socialists are equal redistributionists. Many republicans are redistributionists on behalf of the wealthy. American liberals are “distribute enough that the shafted won’t get angry and kill me–or worse, demand to share schools with my kid”-ists.

“Republicans only recognize “mandates” for themselves, and they will claim one if they win with 50% + 1 vote”

I think you’ll find they’ll claim one if they win with 50% – 1 vote as well.

“Just don’t expect him to lead the charge.”

Why should he give the current level of distrust and approval ratings of Congress he’d be a fool to mount that horse given that there is still considerable numbers in the other party.

A shift away from public schools and public policing of norms to independent schools and an even more cultural polarization in the workplace and society.

Why would you hope for that?

Why would you hope for that?

Because “you live your life and I’ll live mine” is more peaceable than “let’s you and me fight over who gets to run both our lives”, maybe?

Because “you live your life and I’ll live mine” is more peaceable than “let’s you and me fight over who gets to run both our lives”, maybe?

Sure, if this were some preindustrial idyll where you can live in your own little self-contained community and I can live in mine. But in the real world, the vast majority of people who self-identify as conservative are going to be sharing workplaces, schools, local governments, shopping malls, etc., with people who don’t. So a basic level of consensus and some shared rules — and an authority with legitimacy to enforce them — is pretty much non-negotiable.

But in the real world, the vast majority of people who self-identify as conservative are going to be sharing workplaces, schools, local governments, shopping malls, etc., with people who don’t. So a basic level of consensus and some shared rules—and an authority with legitimacy to enforce them—is pretty much non-negotiable.

Right. But a school system on the Dutch or Scandinavian pattern reduces the amount of consensus needed. A system of workplaces that allows more discrimination in smaller workplaces reduces the amount of consensus needed. And so on.

There will always be common principles needed. Having them be such that there is consensus on them is better. When there isn’t a consensus, it’s better, usually, to try to have everyone happy than to fight all the time over who rules.

This is all racism – Obama will take over and give all the money to the homies. Stop trying to use reason against it.

One wolf and a sheep that thinks it’s a wolf is about right. What do you think, tho, Mrs. T., of Sam @23? I’ve been trying to find a way to say he might have some fraction of a point without conceding to something horrible.

Does a rich person benefit more than a poor person from defense spending, the SEC, jails and the police?

Well, the rich person has their property protected by the army and the police. But on the other hand, the poor person gets to *live* in the jail (and eat there too). So it’s a tossup.

Talk about beating a dead horse…

Definition of a US conservative: a wolf who not only dresses in sheep’s clothing but yells ‘Wolf!’ at every passing sheep.

I look forward to a Democratic sweep just so we can ignore the National Review clowns for four years. Their obsession with the word “redistribution” is because it’s a kneejerk bad word to some voters — not because they are willing to discuss any idea behind it. The National Review writers evince no intellectual training, have no ability to discuss ideas.

The real mistake Beldar makes is to suppose that McCain wouldn’t clobber the rich, himself. If Republicans had enough brain-function to think back that far, they would remember that they HATED McCain. “Maverick” means “votes with Democrats.” If McCain pulls this election out of the crapper (a technical plumbing term,) he’s going to give the Democratic Congress everything they want.

Nowadays, these conservatives appear to have talked themselves into believing that McCain will uphold the core “principles,” as it were, of Reaganoidism. This remains highly unlikely. McCain has clung to Reagan’s Hadean shade in the (mistaken) belief it would easily get him elected — but he accents the gung-ho foreign policy aspects, NOT the economic philosophy. Reaganomics only ever got his uncomprehending lip-service. For example, McCain has been “consistently” both FOR and AGAINST Bush’s tax cuts. If we try to determine it from outer signs, we might conclude that McCain thinks rich people are fat, fatuous, undeserving, unheroic. He despises rich people. He married the beer heiress for the beer.

I love this quote: “He despises rich people. He married the beer heiress for the beer.”

The easy question

I mean, the one about the plural of “apocalypse”. It would be “apokalypseis” in Greek transliteration, but you should feel free to give it in English as “apocalypses”.

No, there’s nothing remotely odd about more than one apocalypse. The name refers to the revelation of events, not the events revealed in the bok of atha name, which the literal always seem to imagine to be world-ending, and thus presumably singular. There could well be plural revelations of even a singular end to the world.

In fact, you often see the name of that book of the Bible given as “Revelations”, even though I have only seen the Greek as the singular, Apokalypsis. Perhaps this mistranslation derives from some attempt to fit the cyclical narrative of events within the book, in which the world does indeed seem to end several times, to the narrative that the literalists seem so much more comfortable with, that of a world that ends once, and only once, and that for all, in a very big bang. It’s the revelations, you see, that really happen over and over again, but they are, properly uderstood, just so many prophecies of the one final event.

Unfortunately for this attempt to rescue the literal reading of the book, quite apart from the narrative within the book, which has the world ending repeatedly, there is the same problem, which this explanation can’t solve, created by the book’s relation to the extensive apocalyptic literature which had preceded it. The commentators would say that John decided to call his final battle “Armageddon” in order to tie in to this extant literature. But the very idea of such a tie-in would seem wrong-headed if you’re writing about the end of days, since it would seem to raise the uncomfortable point that the world didn’t end when Ezekiel and Daniel said it would either, so why would anyone believe a fresh author dumb enough to rely on these manifestly wrong earlier authors? You would seem to be engaged in self-refutation by calling your final battle the same name as the final battle in all your predecessors’ works, since this would seem to highlight the rather comprehensive lack of finality of these former final battles. And it’s not as if it’s just this one reference. The very warp and woof of the book is almost entirely composed of such references to and repetitions of the extant apocalyptic literature. The whole structure is booby-trapped by its identification with a body of texts that, along with the rest of the world, wouldn’t still exist if they had spoken the literal truth.

Which only goes to show that the book was written as a work of irony, to refute the millenarian literalists of John’s day. Jerusalem and Athens really were not far apart. Both use irony to explode the reigning intellectual or religious literalism of their time and place.

Lemuel @28,

I’m afraid I’m not clever enough to puzzle out what Sam means in that comment, so I really couldn’t say.

But seriously, what could practically be done to make the USA, or any other makor ‘developed’ country, less of a capitalist-corporatist-statist-boogeyman WITHOUT provoking dislocations and conflicts that almost anyone, if asked, would prefer not to see? Is the demonisation of the status quo not merely the rhetorical echo of a cry for revolution that was stupid, futile, and drastically unsuccessful, all through the twentieth century? Why does it seem to be assumed by some that the fundamentally unrealistic demands of total upheaval are morally superior to the work of making lives better? Or is that a silly question, since the same debates between revolutionaries and reformists have played out in the same pantomime of condemnation ever since the rise of mass left-wing politics in the 1870s?

Or are such questions merely trollish, and spoiling other people’s fun?

Two marginal points left or right is the core of this debate. In my opinion, that matters not a wit.

Speaking of wit, you’re a nitwit. Those “marginal points” can make the difference between large numbers of people having jobs or not, having adequate health care or not, even between war and peace (and even a “cold” imperial peace means many lives spared.) If that doesn’t matter to you then frankly you’re an asshole.

What Obama and McCain say about progressive income taxation, I am with Obama on this and will always favour him

To clarify, I do not mean the personal competence of Obama or McCain, but the competence of institutional frameworks under which both will have to function, which includes the governmental agencies they have to work with, party politics they will have to pander to, social realities and economic vagrancies that will have to be tolerated. The competency of the system has been woefully inadequate and has proven itself so many time over. We have been moving forward for the past few decades on the rule of “5 feet forward, 4 feet back” rather that “one foot forward”. That drains resources at an ever increasing rate.

For the record, no scorn. No jubilations either. And, as a matter of fact, I am doing well. Thank you.

Republicans will howl that an Obama victory will be a mandate for socialism until Election Day, after which (hopefully, barring epic complacency) they will howl that an Obama victory is no mandate for socialism.

Crooked Timberites will howl that an Obama victory will not be a mandate for socialism until Election Day, after which (hopefully, barring epic complacency) they will howl that an Obama victory is a mandate for socialism.

It wouldn’t be hard to require stringent identity checks for intercity buses and trains, if our government chose to do that.

Or freeways.

[somebody] “Of course Obama favors redistribution. He isn’t a flat-taxer”

It’s interesting that when Joe the Plumber brought up the flat tax as one possible logical conclusion of Obama’s tax philosophy, Obama wasn’t dismissive at all, but took it up gently and half-cogently, even threw some numbers around like he knew what he was talking about (and maybe he did — i’d like to see the analysis that he was quoting so fragmentarily.) The flat tax has been promoted by at least one Democratic presidential hopeful: Jerry Brown.

[flubber, here and below] I’m sure even a flat tax could be argued as being redistibutionist.

Anything that taxes higher wealth or income more than lower wealth or income is easily redistributionist, so yeah, taxing income at a single rate qualifies: 10% of a million dollars is a lot more than 10% of $100K which is a lot more than 10% of $10K. Obama admitted to Joe the Plumber that the flat tax would be redistributionist in principle, but then argued that it isn’t quite enough, or not quite fair enough, or inefficient — or maybe all of those (half-cogently, as I said) and was therefore not ideal in practice.

A perfect pay-for-use system might not be – tho impossible to calculate and implement, shurly.

Impossible now, perhaps, but maybe it won’t always be. I can envision how, with continuous real-time location-based services, comprehensive public exposure of the supply chain public for government services, and ubiquitous wireless internet to intermediate between the two, a person could be driving down the highway and check a readout on their mobile phone that tells them just how much government they’ve consumed (in cost terms) over the last minute, with a breakdown of the costs available by clicking on a link. It’s not a stretch from that vision to one where you have “consumers of government” being billed on that basis as well — in real time. A rich person driving down that highway might decide that, in order to get to a very important meeting, it would be better to consume the highway component of government more rapidly, and would be billed that much more when he moves into the fast lane, after a largely automated bidding process concluded over a period of seconds or less. Indeed, this is very much in line with the various congestion pricing proposals.

This kind of thing (modulo privacy chilling effects — don’t get me started, but also solvable in principle) is what computers and networking are good for. Any society that can pull it off with adequate respect for civil liberties and an arguably fairer taxation regime might even reasonably claim that this is what computers and networking were made for.

Does a rich person benefit more than a poor person from defense spending, the SEC, jails and the police?

I believe none other that Teddy Roosevelt argued thus. It’s not hard to work out. A burglar hitting a rich person’s home makes off with a lot more than when hitting homes of the middle class, or the poor. So the rich are getting a better deal from any policing that makes their homes less of a target for burglars, at least to the extent that they spend on expensive stuff that could be ripped off. The sales tax on luxuries might be calibrated against this plain reality. Unlike congestion pricing on roads, however, this one lend itself less easily to marketizations, and more to the classic free-rider problem: if I’m rich and my house is smack between the houses of two rich families (or even two middle-class families), why should I pay what they’ve bid for police services? Why wouldn’t I just pay nothing? Perhaps more transparency would help in this case — I’d get peer pressure from my neighbors, who could see I was slacking on community property-protection taxes, and if I still did nothing, eventually the criminals would notice I was slacking. The cops could just respond to my alarm and sit around, pointedly doing nothing as the burglars loaded up the truck with my vintage record collection and my wife’s diamond earrings. But in general, I think it doesn’t make sense to try to have pay-as-you-go (with progressive taxation through price discrimination or higher taxes from higher bids) all across the board. At least, I can’t see it all the way through.

In any case, it’s interesting to think about what might happen if we had pay-as-you-go taxation in an environment where individual transaction transparency is very high and transaction costs are negligible. It’s even more interesting to think about price discrimination for typical government services being significantly democratized. After all, price transparency and price discrimination are mutually antagonistic, so wherever the rich would otherwise tend to pay what everyone else pays but with greater relative benefit (i.e., free-riding), you’d want the discriminatory price/tax schedules agreed upon with some democratic legitimacy. One might even imagine a multi-millionaire (not to speak of a billionaire), about to embark on a stroll through the picturesque poverty (relatively speaking) of some vibrant BoHo city district, then checking his cellphone to see what the local strolling charges are, wincing, but then deciding, “Ah, what the hell — yes, continuing on foot here is better than backtracking to leave my cell in my car, in a parking lot three blocks away now –“