MMT and political economy

One criticism of Modern Monetary Theory* is that raising taxes to control inflation is politically difficult. I think this criticism is correct in a sense, but it's incorrect in a more important sense.

*I am not an academic scholar of MMT. Any mistakes in descriptions and analyses here are my own and should not be attributed to scholars in the discipline.

Politics is a legitimate topic of study by economists, and it's correct to say that raising taxes is difficult given current political institutions. It follows that more abstract, technocratic, and less openly partisan monetary policy is probably a less bad choice today to control inflation. Indeed, I don't think MMT is a particularly valuable economic theory given current political institutions. Of course, I think our current political institutions are terrible. And that's where MMT has real value in my opinion: even if you don't like socialism, MMT is, I think, a better theoretical framework for a much more progressive agenda, an agenda that will require substantial change — a revolution if you like — in our political institutions.

One important aspect of MMT is that it subverts the notion that our capitalist democratic republics are built on apolitical, ahistorical economic truths. They are not. To no small extent, economics is just describes how our political economy in a particular historical social context actually works. A different political economy would work differently.

Simply adopting MMT and changing nothing else would have at best no effect and at worst fuck things up royally. We can't fight fascism with economic theories. We have to rethink and re-implement our whole political economy at a fundamental level. That's not going to be an easy fight, and it won't be economists who do the bulk of the fighting. However, I think having a set of valid progressive economic theories has substantial value, and MMT shows a lot of promise of delivering that value.

Sanders' strategic blunder

I'm not sure if it was a mistake or just a failure of will, but Sanders started off with a strategic blunder.

I suspect Sanders thought, "I'll run for the nomination as a Democrat. I know I won't win, but I can get enough votes to make the Democratic party progressive. Therefore, I have to promise to support Clinton when I lose."

If Sanders had won 20% or 30% of the popular vote, his strategy would not have been a blunder, but sill would have been a mistake.

This strategy could not work. The Democrats cannot be "moved" away from neoliberalism, not from the inside. If Sanders had won 20-30% of the vote, he might have had a seat at the table, but he would have had very little actual influence. He might have bumped a token minimum wage increase up by $0.25, or shaved a half-point off of student loan interest, or provided a small increase in PPACA subsidies, but he would not have made the Democratic party progressive, just a little less neoliberal. Maybe that's all Sanders wanted, in which case I would fault him for a lack of vision and will. But I don't think so: Sanders has been outside the Democratic party too long for him to just want to be a mid-level Democratic operative.

If Sanders had really wanted to actually implement a progressive agenda, he would have had to take a risk. The only way to enact a progressive agenda would be to run as a Democrat, but at the same time build a third party to nominate him when Clinton wins the Democratic nomination. Then, during the general election, Sanders pushes hard for a progressive agenda; either Clinton moves hard to the left, or Sanders splits the Democratic vote and Trump wins.

There are four possible scenarios.

First, Sanders gets 5% of the vote in the Democratic party. He drops the third party and goes home. Progressivism is just too weak. Maybe next election, with someone younger.

Second, Sanders gets 20-30% of the Democratic vote. I suspect he thought that if he ran as a "good" Democrat, he might get 30%, but if he ran as a "spoiler", he would get only 5%. The problem is that, as noted above, getting 30% as a "good" Democrat is not much better than 5% as a spoiler. But if he gets 20-30% of the vote as a spoiler, he's in a position to mount a serious third-party bid and could actually force Clinton to the left. However, he could also pull a Nader and split the liberal vote and scary Trump! wins.

Third, Sanders actually wins the Democratic nomination. It almost happened. Then he runs as a progressive Democrat and wins, because scary Trump!

Fourth, Sanders gets what he actually got: more than 43% of the vote; he probably lost only because the fix was in. As a "good" Democrat, Sanders represents an existential threat to the party. Not only does he not get a seat at the Democratic table, after the election the party will quietly purge Sanders and his supporters, either literally or by forcing his supporters to pay obeisance to neoliberalism and abandon all that progressive nonsense. So I call his decision a blunder: not only will he not force the Democratic party to the left, he has actually given them the incentive to move to the right: force the progressive out of the party; they'll be too disorganized and weak to mount any kind of a challenge.

As a spoiler, however, he's really got a shot at not only forcing Clinton to the left, but actually winning the general election, because scary Trump! and nobody actually likes Clinton.

I suspect (again, I can't read his mind) Sanders thought he could get at most 20% of the vote, win a few delegates, and have real power inside the Democratic party; furthermore, he thought that if he got 30% of the vote and ran a third-party campaign, he would have thrown the election to Bush or Cruz or Rubio. (I'm sure he was as surprised as anyone else that Trump actually won the nomination.)

Progressives do not, I think, realize that politics is always and everywhere a chicken game. To win a chicken game, you must convince your opponent that you'll crash before you swerve. Sanders was not willing to risk a crash (Republican victory), so he literally promised on day one to swerve. Thus, his only chance at a progressive victory was to actually win the nomination, which would have been nearly impossible even if he had run a perfect campaign and progressive voters were a majority of Democrats.

By promising to be a good Democrat and not leading a third-party challenge to split the vote, he gave away progressivism on the first day of his campaign.

Negotiating with Clinton

Hillary Clinton is a neoliberal, and the neoliberals are the enemy of both socialists and progressive capitalists. Unfortunately, her chief opponent is Donald Trump, who is — in addition to personally being a dangerous buffoon — is not only a neoliberal but is at least leaning towards fascism, and fascists are the enemy of everyone but themselves.

I'm sure that Clinton and her campaign staff threw the most glorious party when Trump was nominated. She can do anything she wants because, well, what's the alternative? Trump? Please. And Clinton wants neoliberalism. She's built her career around delivering neoliberalism to the capitalist class. And why shouldn't she? Shilling for the capitalists pays well, and with a little artful misdirection, gets votes. Clinton is a politician, and that's the job: get elected and get paid. (Sanders, who nearly won the nomination, is definitely not going to get paid, and wouldn't have even if he had won the nomination and subsequent election.)

But Clinton is not herself a capitalist. She doesn't have a personal, direct interest in neoliberalism. She has money, but not money. She is, fundamentally, an employee. We'll never move the Koch brothers away from neoliberalism, but we can move Clinton. We just have to give her a good story to tell.

Clinton would like to go to Wall Street and say, "I delivered. You're getting pretty much everything you want: neoliberalism, globalization, trade deals, global intellectual property monopolies, a fragmented and powerless working class, and all the money. All I had to give up was some stupid shit that didn't pay anyway. Pay me. Boards of directors. Speaking fees. Book deals. You know the drill. I want to wipe my ass with $100 bills."

Ideally, we'd like Clinton to go to Wall Street and say, "Fuck you. You and all your money can't win an election, so you and your money are useless to me. I'm not one of you, but I am President of the United States, and none of you will ever be President. I had to throw you under the bus to get elected, and it was totally worth it. My advice is to get to Lichtenstein right now; the people are assembling torches and pitchforks even as we speak."

Ah... a lovely fantasy, but it's not gonna happen.

We could, however, if we worked hard, force Clinton to go to Wall Street and say, "Let me be blunt: you guys are seriously fucking your own shit up, and I cleaned up your mess. I had to give up a lot of what you want, but you want too much. You still have power, you're still the ruling class, but seriously: if I had tried to give you everything you want, you'd've ended up with Trump, and you're just as scared of him as I am. So you owe, and you're going to pay me — boards of directors, etc. — not because I gave you everything you wanted, but because I gave you everything you needed, your lives, and perhaps more importantly, your power. You need me, I need you, and if you don't pay me, you're going to end up with another Sanders or Trump, or worse."

Even with the current material and political situation, we can do better than simply passively accepting neoliberalism because scary Trump! The capitalist ruling class is worried, and the political class is worried.

Trump and Sanders did much better than expected. Trump broke the Republican party, and at best the Republicans will form the core of a fascist party that could get enough support to stage a coup, perhaps even a successful coup. The Democratic party only just barely staved off the Sanders threat, and they shouldn't be confident they can easily defeat the progressives in 2020 or 2024. To survive, the Democratic party absolutely must purge the Sanders progressives, and keep them from forming a viable second party.

If we simply say, "Clinton, because scary Trump!" Clinton will know she can get away with purging the progressives. She knows she can get away with the TPP, only a token increase in the minimum wage, abandoning free college tuition (maybe lower the interest rate on student loans a point), busting unions, promoting monopolies, because hey! neoliberalism is better than fascism, right?

Politics is generally, and very obviously in this election, a chicken game. The only way to win a chicken game is to throw the wheel out of the car and say, "Either you swerve, or we both crash." If Clinton believes that progressives will swerve, if they'll vote for her in 2016 and 2020, and vote for another neoliberal Democrat in 2024 because scary Hitler! and scary Stalin!, she won't budge. But she is a politician, and she won't lose on principle.* If she believes she has to deliver a progressive agenda or lose to Donald Fucking Trump (how humiliating would that be?), then she'll deliver.

*Trump will lose on principle, because then he or his more strong-willed successor gets to use the classic fascist "stabbed in the back" narrative. Trump and his supporters don't want to win an election, they want a real no-bullshit dictator. Actually winning the election would be a disaster.

I don't have much hope, though. There will always be a scary Trump! and progressives fall for that con every time. The one thing that progressives seem completely unable to do is fight for what they want when the going gets tough. Y'all will yak yak yak and vote for Sanders when it's easy, but he loses one little nomination, and y'all just give up and go home.

Krugman and health care

Paul Krugman considers health care reform "a disappointing, flawed bill — and that it’s also a progressive triumph."

Krugman is correct at least that we should pass the bill — it's better than nothing, and a smaller-than-expected gain is acceptable in a sense that a smaller-than-expected loss (e.g. the 2006 Iraq war funding debacle) never is. But other than that, it's hardly a progressive "triumph"; it shows merely that progressives are not losing as quickly as they might. It's the fourth quarter, we're down by 14, and we settled for a field goal. Yeah, I won't give up the 3 points, but this is not how to win the game.

The problem isn't that the Democrats tried and failed to get real health care reform, the problem isn't even that they blinked in a tough situation. The problem is that they did not fight. The Democrats didn't get the health care reform they won, they got the health care "reform" the Republican party let them have, "reform" that consolidates the power of the capitalist class to control health care and use it, like profit, rent and interest, to extract surplus value from the population.

Natural allies

"Not natural allies" does not mean "necessarily enemies". In the "lesser of two evils" sense, I would definitely choose left-wing capitalism over right-wing, just as I would choose liberal Christianity over fundamentalist. But I'm an atheist, not a liberal Christian, and there are elements of liberal Christianity inherently inimical to atheism. In just the same sense there are elements of left-wing capitalism — the capitalism — that are inherently inimical to communism.

In a global society dominated by right-wing capitalism, there are narrow, specific issues where the thinking and politics of communists agrees with left-wing capitalists: e.g. our opposition to sexism and racism and the erosion of bourgeois rights.

But there's a real difference too. While communist and left-wing capitalist intellectuals agree that sexism is bad, we differ sharply on what to do about it. The left-wing capitalist wants to make sure that access to the bourgeoisie is not arbitrarily restricted by sex. The communist wants to eliminate all exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, even exploitation that is not sexist.

When it comes to identifying, denouncing and raising awareness of a lot of issues, communists are on the same side as left-wing capitalist intellectuals. When it comes to the solution, however, there are sharp, irreconcilable differences between communists and left-wing capitalists. Left-wing intellectuals want to change the political superstructure only in such a way that it does not affect the basic economic foundations of our society. Communist intellectuals want to change the political superstructure radically enough that it can change the economic foundations of our society, or more precisely to eliminate the underlying contradictions of capitalism that are becoming a fetter on economic productivity.

To do so, we have to eliminate exploitation, not merely establish that the "right" to exploit others is free of arbitrary discrimination.

Communism and the left

Communism is not a "left-wing" political philosophy. Communism is on a whole different axis than the left-right split in contemporary politics.

The left-right split is about what kind of capitalism we want. The right wing wants an authoritarian, force-based, racist, national-imperialist capitalism; the left wing wants a more subtle, internationalist, "meritocratic" capitalism. Make no mistake: although they're both inside capitalism, the left-right split is very sharp and sometimes violent.

The focus of the left on identity politics and multiculturalism supports this thesis. The goal of quintessentially left-wing identity politics — for women, blacks, gays, immigrants, atheists, etc. — focuses on allowing individuals from these groups to enter the bourgeoisie. The goal of "multiculturalism" is to make the bourgeoisie an international class, to defend non-Western social and political ideas — such as the subjugation of women under Islam — that allow leaders of cultures outside the imperial nations to participate in the international bourgeoisie. The bourgeois left argument against colonialism is not that exploitation is bad, it's that foreign exploitation is bad.

It is a mistake, I think, to count left-wing bourgeois intellectuals as natural allies in the struggle for communism; calling communism a "left-wing" political philosophy makes this mistake seductive.

Obama and torture

Barack Obama will, of course, "fail" by socialist and communist criteria. He promises jobs — capitalist jobs — not democratic, public control of production. He promises a stronger, more competent imperial presence — he wants to win the wars Bush has started — not to dismantle the imperialist system. Obama is overtly, explicitly and enthusiastically a supporter of the capitalist-imperialist system. Quelle suprise.

Barack Obama will, however, fail by liberal and progressive Democratic standards. Or, more precisely, Obama will succeed by liberal and progressive Democratic standards only because those standards have sunk so low.

It's been a clear tactic of the Republican party for the last 40 years that they're not afraid to lose elections. They know an electoral loss is just a setback, not a defeat. They are defeated only when they have to give ideological ground, and they're willing to sacrifice elections to maintain their ideological ground. The Democratic party, in contrast, constantly cedes ideological ground to win elections.

One critical ideological goal of the Bush administration was to establish absolute executive authority. The Bush administration tortured people not just because they're sadistic bastards — and they tap into the sadistic tendencies in the population — but also to establish that they could torture people and get away with it.

I'm of course pleased that the Obama administration will not torture people. But it's not enough to forswear torture just because Obama himself happens to be a (relatively) nice guy. We must forswear torture because it is illegal and has real consequences and punishments. As we have seen in the last eight years, we cannot always count on having a nice person as president. To borrow a metaphor from Christianity, we should not just uphold the law, we should fear it. (At least today; we'd like to get to where people uphold the law out of rational apprehension of its benefit, but that will take quite a long time. In the meantime, we're stuck with the system of enforcement.) We must not only condemn rape and murder, we must punish rapists and murderers or our condemnation is just empty rhetoric.

Susan Brownmiller makes this point sharply in Men, Women and Rape. When the book was written, rape was prosecuted and punished only primarily when the rape infringed on the property rights of the husband and/or father. This pattern of prosecution undermined the moral condemnation of rape as a crime of violence against a woman as a person and made the moral condemnation empty rhetoric.

It is not enough that Obama's administration will not torture people. If Obama allows those who did in fact torture people to escape without punishment he is just as guilty of suborning torture as the men of the early 20th century (and to some extent many of today's men) were guilty of suborning rape by not prosecuting and punishing rapists as criminals against a woman's person.

It's important to understand that all factions of the bourgeoisie want absolute executive power; the controversy is only over how that power should be exercised and — to some extent — how openly or covertly to establish and maintain that power. Obama would not have received the financial and ideological support of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois press had he not clearly promised to maintain the executive power appropriated by the Bush administration and also promised to exercise that power more effectively and more palatably.

Update: Matt Bors expresses the same idea more succinctly.

Progressives and conservatives

The progressive movement in the United States is moribund. To the extent that there is mass action by people who call themselves progressives — MoveOn.org, Daily Kos, etc. — there is little actual pressure for progress; the only pressure that exists is against only the worst excesses of neoconservatism. Where is the pressure to end the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan?

Why are progressives celebrating the election of a president who calls for only a reduction of the occupation of Iraq — and even that reduction over a ridiculously long time frame? Why celebrate the election of a president who explicitly calls for intensifying the occupation of Afghanistan, and who makes bellicose, threatening statements towards Iran? Why celebrate the election of a president who responds to the economic crisis by appointing the people who caused the crisis to try to fix it? Why celebrate the election of a president who responds to the undermining of what little democracy we actually have by the Republican party by "reaching across the aisle" and promising cooperation with those who can just be labeled as actual traitors?

Are progressives just stupid? Well, yes, but that's not, I think, the cause of the problem. Conservatives are not just stupid, they're really fucking stupid, and batshit crazy as well, but despite these handicaps they've achieved remarkable success: They've run against peace and prosperity and actually won major victories. They've influenced the narrative so deeply that even now so-called progressives are happy with just a little bit less war and poverty, and decry anyone calling for more as naive and unrealistic.

Conservatives have done well because a substantial fraction of the ruling class has been throwing vast amounts of money to promote conservatism. Think tanks, pundits, columnists, school boards and local politicians, national politicians. The core strategy has been simple: promote a consistent ideology, and win where they can, but never compromise the core ideology to recover from a loss. Absent catastrophic conditions, this is an effective strategy for implementing an ideology; indeed this is the only effective strategy.

This strategy requires money. A lot of money. A lot more money than can be raised from the hoi polloi. Those conservative clergy — Rick Warren, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell — who depend on the support of ordinary people are small potatoes, bit players in the drama. They are powerful not just because they have a few million bucks fleeced from their sheeple, but rather because they are allied with a much more powerful general conservative movement funded by billions of dollars.

The liberal billionaires — those in a position to throw a significant amount of money at the progressive movement — are in a bind. On the one hand, I'm sure they can clearly see that the conservative movement is leading the world to a catastrophe — a catastrophe that is looming even now. On the other hand, how do they respond? To act progressively risks progressing right through towards socialism and a radical redistribution of wealth... their wealth. So they act only defensively... but no one has ever won a defensive war.

When I started this blog in 2007, I was disgusted with the progressive movement for their incompetence and cowardice. I'm now less disgusted (but no more inclined to cooperate). The progressive movement is ineffective simply because they don't have the massive funding the conservatives have. There's no selection process within the movement: money just doesn't flow to successful progressives.

Progressivism, socialism, communism... all of these movements require catastrophe. This is not to say that catastrophe must or should be engineered; even if such a thing were morally permissible (which it's not), progressives by definition lack the resources and economic ability to actively bring about a true catastrophe. But we see time and again that ruling-class based societies bring about their own catastrophes: depressions, wars, famines, plagues. Until the catastrophe strikes, progressives will always be marginalized; when catastrophe strikes, all the money and political power in the world cannot force back the reality that demands progress.

Elitism

In my extensive travels I recall one curious country where economic and political opportunity and status was strictly allocated by height. Tall people received advanced education and managerial jobs, and the seven footers usually became CEOs. The President of the country was, of course, pushing 8', the tallest man in the country. Short people became janitors and sewage workers.

I remarked to one of the citizens that this arrangement appeared... well... somewhat counterintuitive. He angrily retorted, "What would you have us do? Cut all the tall people off at the knees?"

Of course not.

When I condemn elitism, I am not condemning the fact that people have different abilities and skills. I understand that some people are more industrious than others. I realize that these many of these differences in skill and character have real economic consequences. Being against elitism is not to endorse the idea of making everyone the same. I am against elitism in the sense of being against socially constructed differences in political power and economic wealth.

The primary arguments in favor of elitism are wrong.

The primary argument is that the (innately) "superior" create more value and therefore deserve membership in the (socially constructed) "elite". But as we see time and again, a truly free market does not strongly correlate individual reward to the creation of excess value: excess value becomes more-or-less equally diffused throughout the entire society.

It's also impossible both to unambiguously determine who is actually adding value. Who is responsible for creating the excess value of the plow? The person who makes the plow, or the person who uses the plow to actually grow food?

Value itself, subjective and variable, is itself impossible to determine unambiguously. What is the value of a pound of food? If you're starving, the value of a pound of food is infinite; if you already have more than enough to eat, it's negligible.

In the most extreme case, there is perhaps a hundred-fold difference in individual skill and character that have direct, physical economic consequences; it is implausible to believe there is more than a thousand-fold difference. The difference in actual wealth, however, is many orders of magnitude higher. The idea that people with great wealth innately "deserve" that wealth — by virtue of creating it directly — is clearly ludicrous.

The second argument is that by creating a meritocracy, a set of social constructions that amplify the rewards due to innate skill and character, those with superior skill and character will have an incentive to use their abilities at least to some degree for the mutual benefit of everyone. This is not a terrible argument, but the limits of meritocracy are easy to determine. Economic wealth is a form of indirect political power, and political power — direct or indirect — is a privileged position to shape our social constructions. People who become wealthy and powerful for whatever reason have an obvious incentive to reward being, not becoming, wealthy and powerful. The tendency of every elite in every society to "shut the door behind them" is universal and without exception.

Furthermore, just because people have economically useful skills and abilities does not mean they are wise and intelligent in other matters. All socially constructed elites tend to correlate their power with peripheral non-economic characteristics: race, religion, and, of course, familial relationships. Argument: George W. Bush. Case closed.

The only argument for elitism is the ecological argument: Where you have prey, you will have predators; "there's a sucker born every minute, and two to take him". But this is most definitely not a moral or ethical argument.

So, no, when I argue against elitism, I am not arguing that individual differences should be erased. I argue, rather, that we should not amplify (even at best) these individual differences to economic and political privilege.

Movement politics

I believe our society is heading for catastrophic failure, and the existing Democratic party is not going to save us, barring a science-fiction brain swap between Clinton or Obama and an actual progressive. It behooves me, then, to talk about ways of fixing our society.

There are several plausible scenarios for catastrophic failure. In the best possible case there won't be any kind of rebellion, coup, or general suspension of the Constitution; we will experience a severe economic depression and the short- and medium-term domination of our government by the Republican party, but our fundamental systems will remain at least nominally in place. If this scenario occurs, there are substantive and effective steps we can take to make our society a better place.

The right has used the movement/party model to take over our government. This model is very effective, and many fundamental features can be replicated by the left.

The movement/party model consists of a disciplined, unified, extra-political organization, the conservative movement, to construct and propagate a political philosophy. The members of this movement then use their discipline and unity to control the specifically political Republican party. Since the movement supplies a consistent philosophy, a voter base and, most importantly money, the actual politicians further the movement's agenda in official government.

There is every reason to believe the left can replicate the movement/party model with similar success. Create a liberal-progressive movement, take over the Democratic party and further a liberal-progressive agenda in government.

Moreover, the left can replicate the model excluding many of the features of the right's implementation that many on the left find odious: authoritarianism, dogmatism, and almost complete disconnection from reality and factual truth. Some of the right's features are very powerful tools for unifying a movement and ensuring discipline. The religious have honed authoritarianism and dogmatism to near perfection over at least two or three millennia. There are, however, tools that authoritarianism and dogmatism render almost useless, and which can be employed to good advantage by the left: truth and transparency.

To be effective, a movement has to be disciplined and unified. The members of a movement have to deliver a consistent and stable philosophical message, they have to vote as a bloc, and they have to concentrate money. These requirements force some degree of top-down approach to decision-making. An internally consistent and stable philosophical basis; majoritarian, consensus or near-consensus decision-making; and a rigorously bottom-up electoral structure can, however, prevent the top-down decision making from devolving into elitism, authoritarianism and dogmatism.

A bottom-up electoral process* in one in which those groups at the "direct" or lowest level elect one of their members to represent the group at the next highest level; the group of people thus elected then elect one of their own to represent them at the further level, until a small enough group has been concentrated to make decisions for the movement as a whole.

*I'm sure there's a name for this organizational method. I thought it was syndicalism, but that refers to a specific kind of labor politics.

I intentionally use the word "philosophy" in place of "ideology". Ideology has come to be too strongly associated with authoritarianism and dogmatism. However we label it though, any movement must have a set of core principles that are internally consistent and stable over time. Stability doesn't mean incapable of change; it means only resistance to capricious change, change only when there's a very good reason to change. Since a liberal-progressive movement can't rely on any kind of philosophical or religious authority, those principles will have to be fairly broad, and adherence need not be absolute; it should be necessary only that a lot of people can endorse most of the core principles directly, and find none of them abhorrent.

(I should also note in passing that "pragmatism" is not a core philosophical value. It just means "effective for some stated purpose"; without a specific stated purpose, it's vacuous. It should be noted that the Cheney Bush administration has been very pragmatically effective at enriching the top 0.01% of the country.)

With a disciplined, unified movement committed to using politics to implement its agenda, and by trading authoritarianism and dogmatism for universalism, truth and transparency, I believe those of us with liberal and progressive views can have a profound impact on the political social and cultural life of the country.

The rich are different

The $300,000 Watch That Doesn’t Tell Time:

"With no display for the hours, minutes or seconds, the Day&Night offers a new way of measuring time, splitting the universe of time into two fundamentally opposing sections: day versus night." ...

The company’s chief executive, Yvan Arpa, cited statistical studies to explain how the watch better reflects the time-philosophy of today’s wealthy.

Progressivism and socialism

Working for and advocating the establishment of rough equality* is the essential property of progressivism. I call this notion "progressivism" because we are making progress away from the elitist authoritarianism that was the essential character of past political systems — most notably the maximally elitist absolute power of the individual monarch — in favor of more politically egalitarian democracy.

*Dismissing (out-of-hand, for the moment) the Harrison Bergeron almost-straw-man notion that equality entails erasing individual differences.

Under this definition, one cannot be a progressive while being sexist, i.e. holding that women are inferior just by virtue of their gender. In the same sense, one cannot be a progressive while being racist, or a homophobe, or a nationalist**, or holding any other bullshit establishment of inequality. But while eliminating these bullshit distinctions is necessary, it is not sufficient to implement progressivism.

**In the sense of holding that some people are inferior just by virtue of their nationality.

We are still left with the more refractory notion of economic class. Class is not transparently bullshit in the same sense that racism is transparently bullshit. When class was explicitly determined by virtue of heredity, as during feudalism, it was transparently bullshit; The West, however, especially the United States, has to a substantial extent transformed class into a sort of meritocracy. Class by merit is a definite improvement over class by birth (or race, or gender, or sexual orientation, or nationality, etc.) but it's not enough. Class itself, however it is established, is inherently unequal.

First of all, the notion of "meritocracy" is ambiguous and subject to equivocation. There are two definitions of meritocracy. The first is the unobjectionable notion that we should reward people according to their individual merit. The more problematic notion is that we should concentrate power ten-million-fold and give that concentrated power to the "best" among us. To equivocate these two notions entails holding that Bill Gates is ten million times better than an African subsistence farmer. Another way of looking at it is that the United States' 300+ billionaires are worth more than 90-95% of the people of China put together.

Such a notion is patently absurd. (There are those who would argue this sort of meritocracy directly and explicitly, notably Ayn Rand, gleefully contemplating the fall of civilization when a few thousand rich bastards exempt themselves from human society). The notion that one human being could be ten times better than another is barely credible; just a hundred times better is obviously ridiculous. Ten dumpy out-of-shape middle aged white guys like me could beat the NBA MVP in a game of basketball. I'm a damn good computer programmer, but you could take a hundred random people off the street, give them the same sort of training that I had, and they would certainly out-produce me, probably by an order of magnitude. And these examples arein a areas of narrow specialization, where "better" and "worse" can be objectively measured.

Why does Bill Gates have tens of billions of dollars? There's no possible way he could actually personally consume that much wealth, even with the help of his immediate family. There's only one reason to have that much money: To control what gets made and who gets to use it. In short, to gain power. And this sort of economic power is of the same essential character as political power: Whether or not a person gets enough to eat, and has a right to dignity at work is just as important as his liberty, dignity and well-being at home.

Even the most cursory study of history (real history, not fourth-grade civics propaganda) shows that concentrating power is a Bad Idea in general. Power, by its nature, perpetuates itself, and once you give real, concentrated power to an individual, it is he (and it's usually been men) who decides who gets the power when he decides. Once the people create a King and become his subjects, the only way they themselves can decide who becomes the next King is violent, destructive, wasteful rebellion. Even if we luck out and make a saint our King, that's fine for today, but what about tomorrow?

We have learned that it's best not to concentrate political power too narrowly, and when we do concentrate political power at all, we must create elaborate democratic institutions to make those who exercise that concentrated power responsible to an informed, realistic electorate.

We don't know that democracy is the correct solution to the concentration of political power, but we do know that every society that has concentrated political power without democracy has eventually oppressed the population to the extent that they had no choice but to starve to death, rise up in rebellion, or degenerate into anarchy and Mafia rule. Yes, Stalin turned the most backward country on the Eurasian continent into a global superpower in a generation, but two generations later the Communist party ran Russia into the ground, perpetuating the cycle of totalitarianism and chaos. While the jury is not yet in on China, I expect the same thing to happen; the cycle of totalitarianism and chaos is readily apparent in Chinese history.

It is ridiculous that any person could be ten million times better than any other person — great economic wealth is not earned by inherent individual merit — therefore such wealth must be socially constructed: it is granted by the people at large. Since great wealth cannot be deserved by individual merit, we must evaluate schemes that grant great wealth to individuals not on the scheme's "intrinsic" merit, but on its consequences. And the consequences of concentrating power have invariably been bad for everyone, even those who actually held the concentrated power (just ask Czar Nicolas or Marie Antoinette).

Thus we can conclude that the only progressive position on economics is to distribute wealth many orders of magnitude more equally than it is presently distributed. Furthermore, where wealth is concentrated, it must be under the power of democratic political institutions. In short, progressivism entails socialism.

Nothing changes, nothing stays the same. The only choices are progressivism (more equality), regressivism (less equality) or passivity. The "true" conservative, someone who wants things to stay exactly the same is deluded or dishonest. You are either progressive, regressive, or an instrument of progressives or regressives.