Envy and Its Relatives

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”--Picasso

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On this day:
70
Titus and his Roman legions breach the middle wall of Jerusalem in the Siege of Jerusalem.
1967
Six-Day War begins: The Israeli air force launches simultaneous pre-emptive attacks on the air forces of Egypt and Syria.
1968
U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy is shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California, by Palestinian Sirhan Sirhan. Kennedy dies the next day.
1981
The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that five people in Los Angeles, California have a rare form of pneumonia seen only in patients with weakened immune systems, in what turns out to be the first recognized cases of AIDS.
1989
The Unknown Rebel halts the progress of a column of advancing tanks for over half an hour after the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
1995
The Bose-Einstein condensate is first created.

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The Trump administration signed a proclamation Wednesday suspending travel to the U.S. for citizens from 12 countries: Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. The proclamation also partially restricted entrance for nationals of seven other countries: Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.

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I need to change my Apple password. I sent a note and received a response that said they would send the necessary codes in several days.
Why does it seem these people are in vestments?

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Blockbuster CEO John Antioco decided not to buy Netflix for $50 million, partly because the “dot-com hysteria” was “completely overblown."

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Envy and Its Relatives

Thomas Aquinas defined Envy as "sadness on account of the goods possessed by others." Envy is sadness! It turns inward. How is it different from jealousy?

Envy's subject is removed from the envious; the envious man knows he has no claim upon the envied subject. He may covet another's property, but he knows it is not his. To attain it, he would have to steal it. 

Jealousy is a different matter. Unlike envy, jealousy presupposes the right to what the other has. Othello was jealous of his wife's imagined affections for another; he felt, justly, that those affections should be his.

So envy is the sadness over the attainments of another, and jealousy is the outrage over something misappropriated. The jealous man feels that something he might never have had has been lost to another.

In the redistribution world, wanting another's productivity--or the rewards of that productivity--is envy, as the envious man has no legitimate claim to it. Taking it away from its rightful owner is a reach for the envious, as the sadness of envy is passive. And to take someone's production requires force.

So, what to do? Envy politics transforms envy into jealousy by declaring that the production of another actually rightfully belongs to you. So, taking someone else's production is more like taking it back, and the force necessary is more justifiable.

Sometimes the producer is not enlightened enough to see this. And, of course, as with Desdemona, sometimes accidents happen.

Equality, Diversity and Family

The aspirations of the modern world--at least those propagandized--include "Equality." This is a tricky word because it means many different things and, as a battle cry, can attract quite diverse devotees to its flag. Is it the equality of opportunity? Of results? Are we content giving everyone the same chance for success in life--and, as an aside, how is that success measured? In some cases the equality desired seems to be a floor from which everyone may progress, in others a desired ceiling that will eliminate many from the anxiety of competition with their fellows.

One wonders about these ideals when looking at the outcome within families. Here individuals with very close genetic makeup and raised in the same environment emerge into adulthood in very different personalities and pathways. From the point of view of controlled circumstances, nothing could be better except for identical twins or triplets. In many ways this is a tribute to the inevitability of diversity, an engine of selection and change. On the other hand it is overwhelming evidence against the our ability to control outcomes. An adherent of equality could respond to this only by raising the strictures of upbringing, of narrowing the choices and experiences, in hopes of creating more uniformity, of taking individuality off the table. With uniformity, of course, there is less diversity. And, hence, less genetic creativity.

One wonders if this bland uniformity is at the core of the fascination our intelligentsia has with AI.

Class

We have become a tender culture. We can be so upset.

So I am embarrassed to say that I was recently really offended by a T-shirt. I guess "offended" is too passive. I was mad.

In 2011, “We are the 99 per cent” became a unifying slogan of the Occupy Wall Street movement. In 2013, the U.S. President Barack Obama described income inequality as the “defining challenge of our time”.

A year later, Pope Francis called for a “legitimate redistribution of economic benefits by the state,” while leftwing economist Thomas Piketty tried to supply the movement for greater income equality with intellectual ammunition in his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Recently The New York Times ran an article entitled Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!.

According to Jason Barker, an associate professor of philosophy at Kyung Hee University in South Korea and author of the novel Marx Returns, “educated liberal opinion is today more or less unanimous in its agreement that Marx’s basic thesis – that capitalism is driven by a deeply divisive class struggle in which the ruling-class minority appropriates the surplus labour of the working-class majority as profit – is correct”.

One must remember there is an implication here. Some may not want to be altruistic. Some might want to keep his farm or his car or his ship. And the NYT and the academics can glibly talk about Marx without getting into the specifics. But the specifics are that those who have, must surrender what the others want. Period. And there are only a few ways such a surrender, such a redistribution, can occur; it can occur with permission or without it. And without it means by force. And everybody seems to think this is just fine.

Well, maybe not everybody.

The Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker, for example, has examined income inequality at considerable length in his recent book, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. Pinker questioned many of the rationales for treating income inequality as the “defining challenge of our time” and concluded that “income inequality is not a fundamental component of well-being”.
And new and extensive studies have revealed that there is actually no causation between income inequality and unhappiness.

The market economy is not a zero-sum game, where someone’s gain must come at someone else’s expense. The growth of Western economies have certainly shown the diffusely creative and generative power of wealth.

“The rich get richer and the poor get poorer” is a synopsis of the socialist critique of the market system, implying the perceived inevitability of what Marx called the Law of Increasing Poverty. It is also a myth unsupported by empirical evidence.

 

But freedom and its attendant Capitalism has some problems. You are free to err; your investment or your farm may fail.

“Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin,” the American economist Alan H. Meltzer once put it. “It doesn’t work.”

So freedom, and capitalism, have risks.

Which brings me to my evil t-shirt. I was in Whole Foods and saw a guy in a t-shirt that said, "The Only Good War Is A Class War." He was no child; he was old enough to know better. Advocating class war, a tenet of Marxism, is similar to advocating Nazism or slavery on a t-shirt. Only it's worse; "class war" is overtly homicidal. It does not advocate conflict, it advocates murder and extermination. The property class in Marxism has not had better luck or better accents; the property class is a phase in evolution--like the wolf, an evil, predatory phase that needs to be destroyed. And extirpated. The group needs to be wiped out and its members torn out by their roots and burnt as a holocaust to history. Deracinated. The Marxist are not exaggerating. They did it wherever they could, including the children, infants and fetuses of the enemy class.

The idea is that a person, because of his job, or his education or his parents is your mortal enemy. Enemy. And should die. Die. Reloading over the struggling bodies of the dying Romanov teenagers was not an aberration, it was policy.

There is a risk in open-mindedness. Tolerance can become indifference. But no one should be indifferent to something like that.

Envy

Thomas Aquinas defined Envy as "sadness on account of the goods possessed by others." Envy is sadness! It turns inward. How is it different from jealousy?
Envy 's subject is removed from the envious; the envious man knows he has no claim upon the envied subject. He may covet another's property but he knows it is not his. To attain it he would have to steal it. Jealousy is a different matter. Unlike envy, jealousy presupposes the right to what the other has. Othello was jealous of his wife's imagined affections for another; he felt, justly, those affections should be his.
So envy is sadness of the attainments of another, jealousy is outrage over something misappropriated. The jealous man feels that something he might never have had has been lost to another.
In the redistribution world, wanting another's productivity--or the rewards of that productivity--is envy as the envious man has no legitimate claim to it. Taking it away from its rightful owner is a step away from envy as the sadness of envy is passive. And to take someone's production requires some kind of force.
So, what to do? A recent enhancement of envy politics is the transformation of envy into jealousy, the declaration of  the production of another as actually rightfully belonging to someone else. So taking it is less theft. And, of course, as with Desdemona, sometimes accidents happen.

You Have Two Cows....

Socialism: You have two cows. The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.

Communism: You have two cows. The government takes both and gives you some milk.

Fascism: You have two cows. The government takes both and shoots you.


Capitalism: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.

Magness on Piketty

Piketty's Capital argues that wealth inequality peaked during the turn of the 20th century. Catastrophic destruction of World Wars I and II, as well as the economic disruption of the Great Depression, took direct and heavy tolls on the world’s capital stock. In doing so, these events destroyed part of the wealth-accumulating mechanisms that Piketty pinpoints as the source of inequality in the earlier era. The result was a stabilizing period during which the wealth distribution for most of the developed world converged at a much lower level of inequality from roughly the 1950s through the 1970s. High taxes prevented the accumulation of wealth until tax reforms tied to Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Britain disassembled the mid-century progressive tax regimes. Inequality, Piketty contends, has been on the rise ever since.

Phillip Magness has an article on Piketty that is severe. He finds that Piketty's data is taken from different sources at different times depending upon the result the data creates. This is a charge of more than inaccuracy, it implies dishonesty. A summary:
"Piketty’s empirical work suffers from several highly problematic characteristics. Empirical demonstrations of the century-long distributional U-shape for three different countries — his main piece of evidence for his inequality thesis — are rendered unreliable by issues including

1. suspect and biased adjustment techniques,
2. selective cherry-picking to create trends from ambiguous data sets, and
3. grossly insufficient annotation to cross-check and replicate his results where they diverge from their claimed sources.

Taken together, these issues reflect a severe confirmation bias at play throughout Piketty’s analysis.
Put another way, he seems to construct most of his data presentations around a specific historical narrative that he has already embraced as correct. This is an inversion of scientific inquiry, placing the cart of an ideological conclusion before the data horse and — in some cases — selectively ignoring or omitting data points that diverge from that conclusion.
In short, Piketty’s empirical demonstrations of his U-shaped historical pattern suffer from distortions, biases, methodological inconsistencies, and other questionable data decisions that render them unsuitable for drawing interpretive conclusions about his theory or making prescriptive policy recommendations." (Philip Magness)

We Have Met the 1% and It Is Us

The Republicans are really a pretty dumb political party. Somehow they have allowed the debate over the financial growth and stability of the nation to be distilled down by their opponents to the welfare of the nation's wealthiest citizens.

The point is not which individuals have the earnings of the people, it is whether the earnings of the people stay in the private sector or go to the government. Private economies do better across all income groups for a number of reasons--the main one being that the motives for the allocation of money in the private sector are not corrupted--so that the welfare of the entire community is better protected if the money stays private.

 

Identifying private money with the people who have the most of it is an easy and shabby deception historically associated with some very bad people.

Redistributing Health Care

The State of New York's decision to limit the number of patients' medical office visits is a clever take on redistribution: Medical care will now be available to people who do not need it, an under-served subset. It will free up medical offices to see more people who are healthy--and they are a lot less expensive to care for.

The only more effective plan would be to shoot the ill when they show up for their appointment.

Liberty, Equality, Production

"I had become aware that, in our time, the new social state that had produced and is still producing very great benefits was, however, giving birth to a number of quite dangerous tendencies. . . . My aim in writing (the) book was to point out these dreadful downward paths opening under the feet of our contemporaries, not to prove that they must be thrown back into an aristocratic state of society ... but to make these tendencies feared by painting them in vivid colors, and thus to secure the effort of mind and will which alone can combat them -- to teach democracy to know itself, and thereby to direct itself and contain itself."--Tocqueville, responding in an argument between liberty and equality in democracy.


One of the interesting aspects of the current presidency is the idea that this debate between liberty and equality is new, with new concepts and knowledge, when it actually is as old as the country. This debate is separate from the central government debate between the federalist and the anti-federalist, where the concern was the power needed by the state to function appropriately and what liberties would have to be surrendered.

The question of equality and liberty is more complex. The moral and ethical questions include what the individual can demand for himself and what his neighbor can withhold. So each individual in the equation has an equal claim for specialness.They are both different sides of the same coin. An additional  problem concerns whether the inhibition of liberty inhibits the community production, so the net effect of the government's expropriations necessarily decreases their largess. So that in an effort to improve the lot of one, all decline--even the intended beneficiary.

So not only is there a conflict within the intent; there is a conflict between the intent and the outcome.

Income Disparity and its Discontents

From Joseph Stiglitz's recent article inVanity Fair:

"It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality , America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow."

The notion of "income equality" is a new one. It is a slight variation of the old socialist outrage. But whether it is earned income or net worth, the idea that the government should have a hand in balancing things out is revolutionary for the United States. This is simply not a nation that historically would permit such an intrusion in peoples' lives. Moreover, there is the question of the value of such an intrusion. Are there studies that support the notion that disparities in income are particularly bad? Is it reasonable to compare the income disparities between those in Saudi Arabia and the U.S.? Are rich people really responsible for the failure of poor people to be rich?

There is a lot going on in this country that is wrong. Cheaper labor competition, short-term economic thinking, unproductive foreign wars, unmanaged entitlements, scandalous financial mismanagement, an aging population are all serious problems with serious negative impact on the country's economic health. The shift in the nation's emphasis from production, creativity and development to the collection of management fees has been a terrible shift as well. But income disparity? Is that a cause or an effect of problems? And can the government fix that fairly? The same government that felt it could fix the Iraqi nation?

A study from the University of Michigan's Panel Study of Income Dynamics reported the following numbers from the period 1984 to 2009:

The median net worth of the members of the house of Representatives rose 2.5 times--inflation adjusted!--from 280,000 dollars to 725,000 dollars. In the same period the average net worth of the average American family fell from 20,600 dollars to 20,500 dollars.

Now there is an income and net worth disparity worth some scrutiny.

Free Time! Occupy the Ballpark!

If our life on this planet is limited by time and our enjoyment in life a function of free time, what greater inequity in life is there than the unequal distribution of free time? A mystery to philosophers and a plaything of physicists, time, in some respects, is all we have.

There is no greater example of this inequity in life, this disparity of leisure time, than the unfair distribution of time by time zones and the callousness of the fat cats who control the World Series this year, particularly last night's game. A back-and-forth battle, individual and team heroics and three astonishing comebacks from the brink of disaster were all rolled up in an eleven inning contest that might go down as one of the best in the championship's history. And where was I? Asleep, preparing to go to work the next day.

Rather than stay up late in the night on the east coast I was forced by circumstance--my job, my responsibilities, the distortions of time zones, the fatigue from my work of the day--to miss this terrific game and be excluded from the excitement and enjoyment of it as well as the participation of of the game in history. I will have no memory of the great moments, no excitement to recall and no community of fellow participants to join. Nor will I experience the positive effects of the best of sports competition, a hallmark of American culture. Instead I will join that community of those who were forced by circumstance not to participate, those people --excluded through no fault of their own--who work, are fatigued from work, who at an early morning must rise to some occasion and especially those who are victimized by the eastern time zone when the games are in the central or west.

This morning I did not wake up on third base thinking I hit a triple, I woke up in the empty stands wondering what happened.

Workers of the world, unite!

The Borders of Sharing

The homogenization of wealth and resources, the Christian sharing of production, will always be with us. It has countless slogans, faces and accents and, with the exception of the communists, is usually a national phenomenon. The poorer of the nation plan for the wealth of the richer of the nation.

It should not be too difficult a sell. After all, why should someone have more than another--and, if the argument is that the rich worked harder or achieved more--why is that the deciding factor? Where does work sit on the sliding scale of value when compared to the life or comfort of another human being?

It's in its logical conclusion that sharing gets sticky. Most proponents see the struggle within their own culture; the redistribution is a more gentle one. In the West, everyone will have shelter, food--some perhaps a car. But in its international application, redistribution gets more difficult. Merging the incomes of New York and Mississippi is one thing, merging Mississippi with Uganda is quite something else. The struggles within the EU, really between the productive north and the unproductive south, are over this exact question. The German worker does not want to support the Greek retiree.

So does this egalitarianism have boundaries? And if it does, how are those boundaries drawn?

Snookie 3

If we agree that one purpose of taxation is to guide money into investment areas of national importance to "win the future" and if we agree that picking these areas of national importance requires a degree of expertise that is uncommon in the national community, then some people should not be taxed--or at least be taxed less--but should be allowed free rein their own money for the betterment of the nation and others should be taxed but their money should go to experts.

Now what about the other, rarely spoken, purpose of taxation: Income redistribution? What is its purpose and how does it play into our plans to "win the future?" If it is reasonable to tax on a sliding scale of productivity, is it reasonable to distribute taxes in the same way? Certainly we should be careful about the industries we subsidize to "win the future"; should we be similarly careful about the citizens and behaviors we subsidize as well?

So,redefining The Snookie Question:

Why it is assumed that "Investment" is a reasonable activity of the federal government?

If it is a reasonable activity of the federal government, is there any evidence the government does it well under the current structure? When Lyndon Johnson declared his "War on Heart Disease" it took cancer research years to recover as money was diverted from all research streams to cardiac disease. Bush ruled out any research into stem cell science with its inevitable ripple effects. Conversion of corn into ethanol as a substitute for petroleum has been a disaster environmentally, economically, agriculturally and intellectually.

If it is reasonable to take money from investors for the purpose of substituting government investing, should the investment efforts of all citizens be equally supplanted?

If it is more productive and efficient for the culture to leave investments in the hands of some citizens and not others, can the same be said for those citizens receiving federal subsidy, that some seemingly qualified citizens should be bypassed in favor of others?

The Snookie Question 2

So what are the answers to The Snookie Question?

First, the "investments" the country makes to "win the future" should not be in the hands of Snookie, or a community organizer or someone morally opposed to the internal combustion engine. Investing to "win the future" should be managed by flint-eyed professionals and one of the responsibilities of the government should be to find them. This should be difficult because successful professional money managers are rarely more than random, a fact that must emphasize how difficult charting a course to "win the future" would be for Snookie or any other amateur.

Second, we must recognize that taxpayers, like life, are diversified. Some are astute and can be relied on more than others to "win the future." Taxing a productive investor might "lose the future". One would expect that Snookie might be less likely to invest her entertainment earnings well. Consequently taking money from Steve Jobs or Apple and giving it to a government appointee to invest to "win the future" would be less reasonable than taking Snookie's money. We may not be certain that the government appointee would invest better than Snookie but we can be certain that Steve Jobs would do better than either. Consequently, to "win the future," it may not be worthwhile to take Snookie's money but it certainly is a bad idea to take Steve Jobs'. If the purpose of taxation is to "win the future" it is madness to tax indiscriminately or on the foolish graduated scale of income earned, it is much more reasonable to tax on the basis of how productive taking and redistributing that money would be. Taking money from Snookie is much more reasonable than taking it from a true and proven producer.

Third, after our investments to "win the future", what individuals should get Snookie's money? The tendency of government policy is to subsidize people who have "lost the present". Are they the same people? Is there no distinction among them? Is a man born blind to be counted the same as an otherwise healthy unemployed addict? As time progresses and living standards decline, these questions will no longer be made by bureaucrats.

The Snookie Question

Taxation is one of those notions that has survived the divine right of kings that we don't challenge much. Yes, it contains the power to destroy. Yes, free men recognize that private property is a barrier against tyranny and taxes erode that barrier. Yes, it is unlikely that a government will distribute taxes in a community better than those who are taxed would. Yes there is an astonishing graft factor that would not be tolerated anywhere else. Yes, the manipulation of taxes by both the taxed and the recipients of taxes has grown from a household industry to a gigantic lobbying monolith. Yes, taxes--their avoidance and their capture--has become a giant distortion in the economy.

But bridges must be built, roads paved, mail delivered, armies paid...fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly. While it is true that almost all the functions of government can be performed by a private effort without tax money, we seem to bump along without any deep challenge to a system that everyone sees as wasteful, inefficient, corrupt, arbitrary and often downright criminal. As the cliche states, taxes, like death, is part of our nature. We have allowed them to persist like an appendix, unchallenged, or like a galero or an atef crown, a residual of an earlier time.

We need a fresh look at this question.

It is likely the distribution process of taxes will change; less and less of government work will be done "in house." That handoff of money, so coveted by the government middleman and the avaricious recipient, is likely to decrease as the "inflation tax" and the inefficiencies of government force the rulers to divest themselves of many "projects" and put them in private hands, just as local government has. What will remain will be those wealth transfers the government uses to buy civility and support and what the government calls "investments" to "win the future." As the living standard declines from inflation and the dollar devaluation, as people are damaged more and more by inflation's impact on buying power and bracket creep, people will want a better understanding of where their money is going and why. And the inevitable question will arise: The Snookie Question.

At the base of all taxation debates--graft, inefficiency, compliance costs--lurks The Snookie Question: The indiscriminate taking and the indiscriminate distribution of someone else's money. Some are taxed more, some receive more. The justification has matured from those days of kings and princes; now the money is confiscated not because it is the king's but because the payer owes his success to someone else--presumably society, in some inexpressible way--and the recipient--again not the king--is now a business the government wants to support or the poor or the unfortunate who must receive some payment as compensation for the payers success and his lack of success. The Snookie Question asks: "Are all tax payers the same and all tax recipients the same?" Clearly they are not. Bill Gates will certainly make better decisions on where to put money that will benefit the nation than will Snookie. So should they be taxed the same? There is no evidence the government is a good investor so, while Snookie and the government are expected not to do well with money and Bill Gates is, should we take Bill Gates' money and give it to the government--or, worse, to one of Snookie's desperate friends?

Clearly there is a scale of people who can help the nation with their money and those who probably will not, those who should keep their money and those whose loss of money probably won't hurt the economy. And there is just as likely those whose receiving money will help the economy and those who will not.

Redistribution of income is not the point, it is the productive redistribution of income. Identifying the proper and productive formula sounds like a rare, reasonable task for government.

Taxing Snookie, Giving the Money to Rangel

An evaluation of the concept of forcible redistribution of wealth would consider at least some of these topics:

First, the nature of the enforcer. Clearly the leader who has no plan should be shunned. This would include those whose vision is little more than an optimistic hope, people whose motive is mainly the hate of those who are successful, the peculiar anarchists, anyone who includes murder as a legitimate tool to reach their goals. This exclusion leads to the assumption that the leader should have a public plan--not just a personal good will--that lays out the aims, direction and endpoint of the intervention.

Second, every thinker in the last three centuries has connected personal freedom and the sanctity of private property. Even Marx felt there was an intimate connection between property and freedom, he just thought the freedom was an unhealthy right of man as he thought freedom of religion was unhealthy. (He thought man should have freedom from both.) If the government is going to take property from owners, this question of freedom must be answered first.

Third, what about the Laffer Curve? It states that as confiscation of earnings rise, the amount the government takes rises to a plateau, then declines. This implies there is an intimate connection between the ability to keep one's earnings and how much work one is willing to do. If Laffer is correct, the expropriation of property from the public discourages work and causes a decline in government returns. This question must be answered as it assumes a decline in national wealth.

Fourth, should property be taken from everyone? Taxing the rich is a peculiar slogan as it implies a general equality. But there are vast differences. No one would suggest putting everyone weighing over 200 pounds on a diet because a six foot three inch man weighing 200 pounds may be lean while a five foot two woman quite in need of calorie reduction. Similarly one would look with suspicion on shifting money from a successful company like Apple to a bureaucratic relative of a senator because one could easily assume that Apple would put it to better use. One probably does not feel the same about a man with a criminal record who wins the lottery; it is unlikely that he would do as good a job with his money as Apple. So there is either an insincerity here--the government wants all the money regardless of the competence of its source--or some distinction must be made about who is taxed and what is to be achieved.

Fifth, there should be some requirements on the people who manage the money taken from the public. The Ponzi schemes the government has created and run over the last years probably should disqualify anyone with a governmental history. Who would you feel more confident in, Pelosi or Peter Lynch, Charlie Rangel or Warren Buffett? There should be some criteria, some qualifications.

Sixth, there have been many attempts to control incomes and guide economies by nations. Some in the Pacific Basin have worked. But many have not and have ended badly. Some criteria must be developed to analyze and judge the results during the project with the option of changing course if necessary.

There are countless problems with the state controlling the lives of its citizens. Property ownership has been a proven bulwark against tyranny. And government has been shown to be quite incompetent in many of the fields they have magnanimously entered. But these six points seem to be a worthwhile practical starting point on the question.

Targeting Redistribution

Bristol Palin earned more than a quarter million dollars in 2010 as an ambassador for/against/regarding unwed pregnancies. Here is a message for all Americans: Competence, effort and intelligence are nice but unnecessary complements to connections, publicity and personal failure but anyone, anyone, can succeed in this country. And this culture makes it possible for you to achieve not by overcoming your failures and stupidity but because of them.

Obama recently spoke on the possibility of the dreaded government shutdown and worried aloud that damage would be done because government investment in "innovation, infrastructure and education" would be curtailed and we would not be able to "win the future". As these people continue to repeat this mantra it would be reasonable, I suppose, to start giving them the benefit of the doubt and believe them. Let us assume these central government people really believe they can direct the money of hard working people and companies better than those people and companies can themselves. With the ungentle hand of government guiding our investments and innovations, we can "win the future".

When you think about this, taking money from Steve Jobs and his company and giving it to a professional street organizer probably doesn't make much economic sense. But the idea may not be without some merit. I have an idea where this notion can be used to prove itself and the nation will experience a significant advance: Get rid of Bristol Palin, Snookie Whatever, Paris Hilton and most of the other headliners on Huffington Entertainment; remove them from public view and eliminate their ability to make money. I absolutely guarantee that the $250,000 Bristol made last year could be better spent elsewhere. Double for Snookie. The Kardashian family made over $25 million dollars last year; that could probably cure cancer. Let's not target "The Rich", let's target "The Profoundly Stupid Rich." Cartoons for adults would be another fertile field. Ditto anyone who makes money on combat in cages or any "extreme sports". Lawyers who advertise on TV in the early afternoon would be next. Then authors of diet books.

Everything has limits and redistribution probably does too. But this would be a nice and productive place to start as we work towards the middle.

The Democrats' Nixon Moment

Missionaries, Christian Colleges, the Peking Union Medical College and America's war against Japan that benefited China so much were all American efforts that promised reasonable relations between the U.S. and China until Mao won the war with Chiang Kai-shek, Chiang fled to Taiwan and Mao created the Peoples' Republic of China. Mao began to harass everything not Chinese--especially Americans, the Korean War broke out eventually pitting Chinese troops against Americans (where Mao's son was killed) and any hope for a relationship was lost. The Americans signing a defense treaty with Taiwan in 1954 made things worse.

Nixon became president with anti-communist credentials from Helen Douglas to Hiss to the Kennedy Taiwan debates. But close on the heels of the inane "ping-pong diplomacy" Kissinger went to China secretly in 1971 and arranged to provide China with American intelligence on Russia. Nixon followed in 1972. The China door was open.

A democrat could not have done that; only someone with a history of being part of the process can reverse it. That time has come for entitlements and the republicans can not do it. The democrats must. This will be ugly but these programs are democrat programs and must be curtailed in some thoughtful, sensitive but meaningful way.

On the assumption that the Congress can not be as foolish as they appear, this will be more than an intelligence or parliamentary test; it will be a test of integrity.

spreading the wealth

The notion of my giving my money to someone else is indeed neighborly and kind should I do it. But to have a third person give my money to someone else is neither. It certainly is no reflection on me. And, of course, it is taken forcibly from me, most likely by the same people who thought they would benefit from the idea in the first place. If the government becomes a benevolent power in our lives, it will be the first time ever. Ask Iraq. Ask New Orleans. Ask the pensioner with the ever changing social security goalposts. Even the church has a spotty record. And the government is a notoriously inefficient and dishonest middleman. This enthusiasm is just beyond me.
The only good thing about this election is it will be soon over.

the series and life's lottery

Watched the game last night 'til the 6th. I was astounded to hear the umpires' union had negotiated a deal that forbids umpires from working consecutive series. Regardless of how good an umpire is, he cannot be brought back for the series next year.

These men are clearly Obama voters. Spreading the wealth. Not a surprise the umpiring has been the story of the series for the first time ever. There is a terrible, irrational quality in the thinking of these people; they believe in "life's lottery". It implies that all life is random; places, people and events can be exchanged. Likely this comes from reading a course syllabus on introductory science. Had they read a bit further they would start talking about Heisenberg.

Certainly there are biases in life. There is a wonderful line about George Bush "who was born on third base and thought he hit a triple." But distinctions among people are harder to assess than that. Pujols has certain qualities of vision, coordination and power that differentiate him from me; that differentiate him from the leadoff hitter and the pitcher, too. I would never be able to compete with Jorden or Bettis or Crosby, regardless of my work ethic. Nor could I displace Steven Hawkings, or even hold his attention for a minute.

While I recognize these biases I do not recognize them as unfair. I would love to be a great athlete with lots of money and adoring fans but I do not feel that the fact that I am not is unfair. Nor do I think wealth is unfair. Wealth is one of the truly fair distinctions, differences, in life; somebody earned it. Crosby, Jordan, Sandy Koufax-none of those guys earned their distinctions although they certainly worked harder than any politician to develop them. (Remember, Larry Bird wasn't his high school team's best player, Jean Auel was not her writing group's best writer nor was Turow). Giving a lousy umpire his chance is unfair, unfair to the better umpire who is being passed over, unfair to the hitter and the pitcher who have to accommodate to his erratic calls, unfair to the third baseman who must tolerate his injustices, unfair to the fan who must put the game in the context of his errors and unfair to the game which makes demands on everyone else.

There is no error for the umpire.