Moderation to fix what ails libertarianism

What's the matter with libertarians? You'd think that being able to appeal to people on the left, right, and center with principled support of a broad array of issues would make libertarians popular (and useful!). But they aren't, and it seems that a special kind of hatred and disgust is reserved for libertarians by the more activist partisans on the Left and Right. I think it comes down to ideology for the hated and the hater both.

Jerry Taylor at Niskanen Center digs in from a slightly different perspective. He diagnoses ideology as problematic, primarily because it encourages motivated cognition and prevents people working together to get stuff done. He calls for moderation. I don't like that word in this context, and I'm struggling to understand why. It's not that I'm against moderation per se. I just don't see it as much of a grounding philosophy as, say, balancing open mindedness with skepticism.

Adhering to a directional libertarianism can be a moderating influence on one's thinking and actions. If some policy moves in the direction of greater freedom, then it just might be OK to support it, even if it's not full-on anarcho-capitalism or whatever. As much as folks like to harp on the socialists who bleat real socalism has never been tried, well you get similar bleating about all sorts of Utopian if-onlys from libertarians, too. I'll take universally honest cops as a goal rather than no cops at all.

I guess there is no single word that combines pragmatism, justice, skepticism, and empiricism. Justice has to be in there, because without it, it sounds a lot like science, but that's not right. It's not a problem science can solve.

Taylor's piece is a compelling whole, which he finishes with a beautiful quote from Norberto Bobbio:

There were only a few of us who preserved a small bag in which, before throwing ourselves into the sea, we deposited for safekeeping the most salutary fruits of the European intellectual tradition, the value of inquiry, the ferment of doubt, a willingness to dialogue, a spirit of criticism, moderation of judgment, philological scruple, a sense of the complexity of things. Many, too many, deprived themselves of this baggage: they either abandoned it, considering it a useless weight; or they never possessed it, throwing themselves into the waters before having the time to acquire it. I do not reproach them; but I prefer the company of the others. Indeed, I suspect that this company is destined to grow, as the years bring wisdom and events shed new light on things.

Love that.

4th Estate drowns itself in its own BS

Warning: rant ahead!

Will mainstream news ever catch a clue? I have not heard more vapid, concerted, hyperventilating nonsense than much of what gets passed off as "news". It's transparently obvious to even the most casual observer. I suppose that they aren't trying to fool anyone (because they aren't) but rather virtue signal with an eternal torrent of bullshit. We all know Trump is a bullshitter. Classic definition. He may actually be telling the truth, but he doesn't give a shit. That is quite possibly an actual qualification for POTUS, but it should be highly disqualifying for the so-called 4th Estate.

It used to be I'd have to roll on over to Slate or Alternet to get some good and maddening eyerolling headlines, but now the Google News roll call of WaPo and NYT can generate all sorts of are you shitting me drivel about impending Constitutional crises, creeping Fascism, and the End Times of America.

It's… all… bullshit!

All of the whining about getting tagged with "Fake News" is pretty rich, especially when they sling knowing false, misleading, spin, aka news that is actually fake aka fake news. Any "journalist" talking regularly with, say, Michael Avenatti is probably better described as a click ho. Taking on a client who claimed that as a college student went to multiple high school gang rape parties? Really? Fuck yeah! Run it above the fold! How hell could that woman hold a clearance or be read into any program?

Oh, sure, there is a bunch of spin on the right, but it lacks the screaming hysterics and the astonishing lack of any sort of effort to even dress it up as serious. It tends to be of the connected-to-policy variety of "Socialism will turn us into Venezuela" and "Medicare is broke" and "The Democrats are coming for your guns", not "Trump conspires with Putin to turn America into Fascist Russian vassal state" or whatever jacknozzle delusion is coursing through the staff of Vox at the moment.

South and North Korea are talking and apparently removing mines from around the DMZ. Yes, it was covered and yes that's not fake news. It's good news! But does POTUS get any credit? If anything, his eccentric approach to NK, not to mention his interest in not just wanting to bomb the shit out of them gets no mention. But, blame mail bombs and mass murder get laid at his feet, which is total bullshit. Brexit? Blame Trump. Brazilian Trump? Blame Trump. Khashoggi? Blame Trump. Running out of toilet paper and forgetting to buy more when you were at the store? Blame fucking Donald Trump, because, obviously, it's all his fucking fault. People see through irrational bloviation.

I think the overuse of words like "authoritarian" and "fascist" would be whimsical if it weren't so goddamn irritating. With the exception of NK and cracking down on immigration, and his loopy tariff trade warfare, Trump's policies would be Mitt Romney's or Jeb Bush's or Marco Rubio's policies. Again, with the exception of NK and Iran, his foreign policy would probably be if anything less aggressive than HRC's would have been. Trump, in a fit nostalgic confusion perhaps, has been working as the Executive and not the extra-Congressional Legislator a la "pen and phone" BHO.

I'm going to be interested in seeing how the Blue Wave crashes down on Congress. If it turns out to be the same old Red Tide we have today, that's just more nails in the coffin of journalistic credibility in the mainstream press, and they will have no one to blame but themselves.

MMT strawmen and other musings

I was fortunate to spend a good portion of my career in the company of a friend and colleague — let's call him Tab — with whom I could be in a near perpetual state of semi-disagreement. Now, I doubt there are very many relationships that can withstand this kind of friction, but there were extenuating circumstances which made it tenable for us to work together for many years.

First, we never doubted each other's intentions. We both have a tendency to argue for argument's sake in us, but when we were just fighting to fight, it was fairly apparent. Second, we were very broadly aligned on essential goals and values. We wanted to make software that was a value to our customers and a viable company. Third, we shared a commitment to objectivity, subject to limits of knowledge. That is, we could dig in to understand that some ideas are better than others. As you might guess, it's in this space the battle royales took place.

If there is such a thing as a spectrum of dude archetypes, we occupy two decidedly dudeish and distinct slots. Tab's a fairly authoritarian conservative engineer type and I'm a non-Utopian libertarian physical scientist type. And while these are distinct, they're largely compatible for constructive collaboration.

One of the things that hammered a little humility into me was repeatedly being on the wrong side of Tab's intuition. He has an uncanny knack to put his finger on the critical clue or aspect of a problem. This prescience was usually revealed in a statement like "I don't know what it is or why, but I don't like it!" And while Tab certainly has things he likes, operationally, he works mainly with dislikes and things that don't register as dislikes. There is something deeply conservative about not letting your likes get the better of you.

So, for as much as I like fighting it out with Tab, I am irritated when I argue with people who lean too much on what they like and reject what they dislike. That is, they argue from ideology rather than reason. I've seen this in looking at critiques of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and it drives me nuts.

First, let me say I am not a proponent of MMT or any particular economic school. I'm not an economist, just someone broadly interested in the panoply of economies in across the globe throughout history. This is in no way a defense of MMT or policies advocated by MMT. I simply want to clear up mischaracterizations (as best as I can tell) I've see widely promulgated in critiques.

Second, we need to distinguish MMT from policy recommendations derived from MMT by its proponents. I think that the policies generate the animus, and the critics thus try to figure out how to invalidate the theory by whatever means. That said, the domain over which larger aspects of a theory is valid (or at least instructive) will limit what policies can be implemented effectively based upon said theory. With that said, let's take a look at some of the misconceptions of MMT.

The scope of MMT is, as far as I can tell fairly limited. It pertains to relatively well-run modern market economies in countries with sovereign fiat currency systems. On top of that, I think you probably have to add a relatively low level of foreign debt. If those preconditions don't exist, you're probably not talking about MMT. Warren Mosler cooked up a MMT "Grexit" strategy that would suggest my assumption about foreign debt is misplaced. I doubt that Greece could adopt a "when and if" foreign debt repayment strategy without some furious blowback from Germany and other EU creditors. But that's an experiment we can't just go out and run. Arguing that MMT applies around a Greek level of development or higher is not a critique of MMT, but rather a hypothesis about its domain of applicability.

Anyway, even if I've missed the mark a bit with the foreign debt, MMT is not a universal theory of economics, so if it doesn't explain the Great Depression or the Roman sack of Carthage, that in itself does not invalidate it as a theory. Most critics that I've read, however, grant what they would consider to be foundational truisms about MMT, but then go on to attack policies derived by MMT proponents. These take the form of "yes, a country never need default on debt issued in its fiat currency, but hyperinflation!" The problem with this sort of critique is asserting an inevitability without regard to other fiscal and monetary policies and the functioning of the markets. Yes, Venezuela (sigh) has mastered the fine art of hyperinflation, but Japan has kept a lid on things. Australia can probably experiment with MMT in ways the DRC or Somalia cannot.

A key insight of MMT, IMO, that many critics reflexively reject is the mechanism by which MMT-applicable governments pay for things: government issues debt to print money. The role of taxes is not so much to "pay for things" but take money out of the economy. People think that payroll taxes "pay for" Social Security. Do they? How do you know where a dollar paid into the Treasury came from when it comes out again? You can't know. Payroll taxes are a mechanism to use money from workers when needing to remove it from the economy via taxation. They're a story to tell. And so it goes with any Federal tax you can imagine (state and local taxes are different because those governments don't issue their own currency, of course). Taxes are a tool for policy. Now, there are plenty of fights to be had about how to pull money out of the economy to keep things balanced, but those arguments need to be made transparently in light of how fiat currency governments actually pay for things. Gold standard and other constrained currencies (e.g., pegged to some other currency) cannot work in the same way, so again, the policies that work in one domain don't apply in others.

You don't have to read very deeply or very wide in MMT literature to see that its serious proponents do not offer it as a panacea. MMT doesn't have anything to say about size of government relative to the economy, size of debts or surpluses, etc. MMT does not suggest governments can just print their way to full employment with no consequences regardless of other considerations, although policy suggestions for government-guaranteed full employment is what critics often latch on to as it's widely reviled by many conservatives and libertarians.

Would these critics hate it if such a policy actually worked? That is, the government could guarantee full employment without causing undue inflation and a sustainable economy? Around these edges you find motivated reasoning. Many would, of course, continue to hate it for their dogmatic devotion of their economic and political religions. It's very hard for people to change their minds, even in the light of evidence, absent a form of religious conversion.

Reflexive hatred of a idea, partially formed, foregoes possibility. What if the government guarantee of full employment didn't require additional government employees? What if it entailed tax cuts? There are, of course, bogus notions that can be dismissed out of hand. And, of course, good intentions and noble goals don't necessarily result in good policies and outcomes. But, well-intended people working openly, honestly, and seriously should be considered openly, honestly, and seriously. If people look to take down MMT, well, OK, but do so on the merits, not knocking down strawmen stood up in remote and irrelevant fields.

Against Fight for Fifteen

Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong. — H. L. Mencken

First, let us distinguish ends from means. The ends of improving the odds that people can sustain their families and themselves through stable, meaningful work should be a non-controversial goal of a people bound by citizenship. One step we take in this direction is abiding by an admittedly imperfect application of the rule of law. So, no argument about the ends. What's wrong with the means, with a $15 minimum wage? A bunch, IMO.

Although I'm not a professional economist, I have been in and around both sides of the wage equation for a bunch of years in the real world. I'm not talking theory, but what I've seen and experienced. Wages are not set by profits; they are enabled by profits. That is, firms can only afford to pay people if they are making money. If they are making more money than expenses, that's a good thing, because it means that they can keep on paying their employees. Despite ravings by certain lefty ideologues, the vast majority of employers dread the prospect of not being able to make payroll and being forced to let good employees go. The flip side of this, though, is that employers generally don't want to pay more than they have to for anything, and this includes employee compensation. This isn't evil, it's rational.

How wages get set is messy and opaque, but outside of perverse governmental, mercantile, and collectively-bargained contexts, it's generally market driven and it's influenced in great part to supply and demand. Outside of certain manufacturing contexts, it's often hard to estimate what someone's "productivity" is going to be or evaluate what it actually is once their employed. This is especially tricky in software development, the area I know best. The best developers can do things that lesser folks are simply incapable of doing. Moreover, they often do much more work of dramatically higher quality. Many high-end firms aggressively recruit these elite developers -- there is an almost unlimited appetite for such workers -- and thus wages, benefits, and working environments are very attractive. The mere mortal developers benefit from this as well because they don't have to compete with the elite developers in less glamorous software development jobs but still benefit from a relative scarcity of competitors. Offshoring and H1B visas are primarily about costs, but writ large the bang for buck is much less than you might imagine. They are less of a boon and more of a crutch that lets you limp along. Of course, there are some, but in my experience rare, stellar H1B folks and offshoring firms and personnel. Anyway, ascribing some "productivity score" to someone and the dollar value of that productivity is actually very hard to do for a wide variety of jobs. What's an office manager, janitor, receptionist, mail room runner worth to the firm in terms of increased productivity? Regardless, the firm will have to pay whatever they can agree someone to take to do the job, and this is set, in part, by supply and demand.

Would a firm ever "overpay" someone? That is, offer someone more than the amount they could pay them to do the same job? Sure, it happens. Most successful firms interested in long term viability want to have productive employees, and happy and grateful employees are better than sullen or resentful ones. At least, that's been my experience. And there are entire sectors where a variety of mechanisms deployed to maintain wages above what they would be if the wage was dominated by supply and demand. One of these mechanisms is a minimum wage.

There two things at issue: the minimum wage in general, and the Fight for Fifteen in particular. I cannot say that there might not be some situation where a minimum wage might make sense, but if there was I would think it would be sector-specific and local. I don't know if there is a Laffer Curve for the minimum wage, but it's easy to think that if the minimum wage for any sort of job at all was 100 bucks an hour, there would be a lot fewer employees out there. People push back on this line of reasoning saying that it's currently too low regardless and any grief caused to some by raising it would be outweighed by the benefits, and $15 is in the ballpark for a happy medium. I say this is too ham-fisted.

First, it ignores the reality of low-skill and entry-level work. It may just not be worth the cost to firms to employ people at the higher rate. And this would affect the people most in need of jobs, perhaps rendering them permanently unemployable. It may also remove the opportunity for parents to teach their kids the value of work and develop a habit of responsibility and industry by eliminating sources of part time work.

A higher minimum wage can also put low margin businesses at risk. That is, if a business is only scraping by today, it may not be viable if it needs to substantially increase its payroll. Some say, rather savagely in my opinion, that such business shouldn't exist in the first place. This is wrong -- it's not the business that's the problem, it's the artificial hoops that have been erected through which it must jump.

A specific problem with the 15 dollars an hour of the Fight for Fifteen is that it's completely oblivious to how very different local economies are. If there is such a thing a "good" minimum wage, Palo Alto's will certainly be different from, say, St Louis'. This hypothetical good minimum wage would certainly need to vary from place to place, and you can bet your bottom dollar that whoever charged with setting it will get it wrong.

I don't doubt that many who support Fight for Fifteen have good intentions. But that's what the road to hell is paved with. The economy would survive a $15 minimum wage, but there would be winners and losers, and I think there would be a lot more losers and loss than some people think. I can's say with certainty exactly what would happen, but neither can anyone else, LOL. So, if fiddling with the minimum wage isn't the answer, what is?

Well, I don't think that minimum wages can be dismissed out of hand as a tool for making people's lives better, even though a single, global one can be dismissed with extreme confidence. That is, as I said, there maybe certain sector-specific instances where a local minimum wage might make sense. For instance, what about a program to clean up blighted areas that uses? Either the government could provide jobs directly or allow firms to bid on contracts that require employees be paid some minimum wage. Another option would be to allow employers to refund some fraction of payroll taxes to the employee. Given that option, what employer wouldn't refund their employee's payroll taxes? I can't think of any reason they would. Yes, it's a form of a tax cut, but it's a tax cut that goes directly to working people and has absolutely no negative effect on a firm or its viability. In fact, it makes it easier for firms to employ people on the margin, which I think everyone would agree is a good thing.

Being against Fight for Fifteen is not necessarily to be against working people. In fact, people who want everyone to have a shot at the American Dream should look at a universal $15 minimum wage with extreme skepticism.

Distinguishing framework from framer: postmodernism, Rashomon, and more

In the past, I've been pretty skeptical bordering on hostile to the different studies departments which have come to infest academia these days. That hostility dribbled over to some of the tools and concepts they use, and in hindsight, I see that was due to either intellectual laziness or blindness. Mea culpa.

In my defense, when I first looked into intersectionality, I thought it unremarkable. If I remember the story right, it went something like this: if you have a certain number of women and a certain number of black folks, you may still not have a certain number of black women and so something may be amiss. Our identities are formed at the intersection of many differing identities. Something like that and so far, so good. But when it devolves into oppression hierarchies and oppression Olympics, the utility diminishes beyond zero to become destructive. So, I was more skeptical of its use than its foundations from the get go. No so much with postmodernism.

Postmodernism is a much larger set of frameworks and concepts the details of which I won't get into here. There is a cavalcade of po-mo poltroons whose over-the-top idiocy, sloppy thinking, amorality, appalling behavior, misplaced relativism and innumerable other traits and activities had me dismiss postmodernism out of hand. I will confess that some groupthink made that easier, inspired in part, by an absolutely epic rant by Camille Paglia. Hostility to postmodernism is widespread and contagious. It can be cured however, with a generous dose of Nick Gillispe. Levi Russell aka Farmer Hayek helps in the recovery, too.

So I've moderated my opinion on postmodernism, intersectionality, etc as schools of thought but not so much on many of the pseudo-academics who use them. If, in the spirit of friendship offer some bacon to someone who I don't know keeps kosher, a third party watching the offer might see it as generous, I may be trying to keep it from going to waste, and the person looking at the bacon may see a grievous insult. This yields to a postmodern analysis where there are multiple valid truths which depend on perspective. It is, in part, why Rashomon is such a good movie, though I would bet that 99.9% (or more!) of all intersectional feminists absolutely hate it. Or would hate it if they every watched it.

Similarly, there is nothing essentially wrong from studying sociology, economics, history, physics, whatever, from a particular perspective. Where I things run off the rails, IMO, is when the perspective becomes the discipline. It's not there isn't something there, but that (via intersectionality!) it is necessarily unique. The degree to which there is overlap in perspectives between people of some given category can't be known, much less quantified. So, rather than a queer studies department, it would be better, IMO, to have queer folks bringing their individual perspectives to sociology, economics, history, physics, whatever. Lather rinse repeat all other group for which there's a studies department.

Even in the hard sciences, scientists disagree. But across the spectrum of sciences and other academic departments, there are foundational agreements. What the original Sokal affair and Sokal Squared has shown that there are some departments of academia where there is no foundation at all. There is a difference between seeing something as legitimate and at the same time wrong and having no common basis for legitimacy.

Bail's broken -- here's how we fix it

Bail has been on my mind of late, prompted by news California has decided to "reform" its criminal justice system by eliminating its cash bail system. Reform is in quotes because I think that it's going to have unintended consequences, none of which are good. Cf. this piece in Politico for the backstory. Long story short: in the absence of bail authorities would likely choose to incarcerate folks that would have otherwise been released. This could have a disastrous effect on those incarcerated and their families (e.g., lost jobs, inability to attend school, etc.) and would be a miscarriage of justice for the innocent.

The bail system as it stands today is a good idea that is poorly implemented. It's a good idea in that it gets the accused back to their life while they await trial, it provides incentive for them to show up at the trial, and it provides an insurance mechanism to make sure they do if they don't come willingly. It's poorly implemented in that it requires many people to pay a bail bondsman to post a bail bond, even if they are innocent. The eighth amendment to the Constitution reads:

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

If a person can't afford the fraction of the bail set to pay a bondsman, it's possible that the bail was excessive in the first place, but that will almost certainly never be the view of any court.

Over at TAC, Lars Trautman proposes "private freedom funds" as a solution. The idea here is that jails contract with the with a bonding organization and profit comes from a share of the savings accrued by not locking people up. While accurately recognizing problems with the current system and potential savings with reform, the proposed solution sounds like a recipe for all kinds of abuse and corruption.

Here's a solution that keeps the system largely intact that preserves a presumption of innocence, aligns incentives for better criminal justice, and is not punitive for the innocent: for people who cannot afford to put up the bail themselves, have the arresting organization or other aspect of the government put up the money for the bond. However, to guard against gaming the system where the government is on the hook for some fixed expense, bail bondsmen would compete for posting the bond at a reverse auction where the winner makes the lowest bid. If the defendant is found guilty, he is assessed a fine equal to amount posted for the bond. If the defendant is innocent, the arresting organization has to eat that cost.

While this is an expense that government doesn't currently have today, it's conceivable and even likely that it would cost cities, counties, and states as a whole less money. Why? The cost of the bond they have to pay out would likely be less than the cost of pretrial detention for the people who otherwise couldn't make bail. Assuming that they're mostly making people who are guilty make bail, the cost will eventually be borne by the accused -- they're just fronting the money. However, it provides incentives for law enforcement to be prudential in arrest decisions by assigning a monetary cost to getting things wrong. Moreover, it provides a measure of accountability that could easily be understood by the public. Naturally, there are all sorts of way set up a system that doesn't involve direct involvement of the arresting organization in the payment of the bonds, but whatever aspect of the government that does the paying will have an accounting.

From a bail bondsman's perspective, not much changes, except now they have to compete with each other at (reverse) auction rather than competing for customers. While this may squeeze the percentage they can expect from a typical bond, they should realize a savings from not having to advertise and see increased business due to those people who otherwise would not have made bail. Bail bondsmen may or may not like the scheme, but for them it's better than wholesale elimination of their profession.

For the guilty, not much changes either. They are still out the amount they would have been, though this will have been deferred until after sentencing. There is, of course, a big change for those who are guilty but wouldn't have otherwise made bail -- they see the imposition of a financial liability they wouldn't have been given had they waited for trial in jail. In this and any case, however, provisions to pay this and any other set of fees and penalties over time can and should be made. In some cases, the governments may need to provide a fund to pay for the hopelessly indigent. Regardless, the bail bondsmen's fees are almost assuredly less than what pretrial detention costs would have been, so the system should be a net saving for government.

For the innocent, much changes for the better. People who otherwise wouldn't have made bail don't stew in pretrial detention and the people who would have gone to bail bondsmen have saved hundreds or even thousands of dollars in their encounter with the criminal justice system. And it better protects the rights of citizens recognized by the eighth amendment.

Latest governmental WTF: Presidential alert

Captain Kirk performs a Public Service Announcement on behalf of the United Federation of Planets.

So, at 1818 Zulu yesterday, a FEMA-sponsored "Presidential alert" showed up on my phone. Presidential alert? WTF? Doesn't Trump already have a Twitter account?

That it happened didn't creep me out so much as it apparently has some folks. I think the creep out factor is related to its being called a "Presidential alert". The President is Donald Trump, and thus anything Presidential is connected to President Trump, and therefore subject to any number of evil and twisted ends in his subversion of laws and norms as he transforms America into a fascist dictatorship. Or whatever. Actually, if Trump knew anything about the test, I think it's likely that he learned about it from Fox news. I don't know, but I wouldn't think that something like this needs Presidential attention once the decision was made to implement the new capability. If he had been in the loop, I think he would have used it to thrash the news cycle, insisting that there be a personal message from him on that the inaugural broadcast. Say what you want about the guy, but he does know how to grab the spotlight and this was an massive opportunity for spotlight grabbing: most of the phones in the US. Opportunity missed bigly. But, I digress… back to the name Presidential alert.

Consider Article 2 Section 1 Clause 1 (A2S1C1) of the Constituion:

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.

The text alert capability is a part of FEMA's more general alert infrastructure -- the one which occasionally produces those god awful screechings on the radio from time to time. Why can't they make up some some nice little service oriented jingle and play that? Or something in praise of fuzzy kitties and you need to go get one or two or half dozen from the local shelter sung by Madeleine Peyroux or, better yet, voiced dramatically to music by William Shatner? But, I digress… FEMA is in the Executive branch and via A2S1C1we may conclude that in some perhaps unusefully vague sense it's not strictly inaccurate to label it Presidential, but they might call it something better. And "President Trump's greatest alert ever issued!" is not something better.

As for the alert itself, the notion of FEMA being able to ask carriers to spam their subscribers with an important message is not in itself troubling. However, it's hard to imagine something that every person with a phone in the US would need to know immediately. Incoming Russian nuclear missiles? Maybe. But a gal canning salmon in Navnek, Alaska probably doesn't need to know that Naranja, Florida is about to get clobbered by a hurricane or overrun by unstoppable mutant pythons from the Everglades who have suddenly developed a taste for people.

So, as for the fact there is a Federal alert system that incorporates cell phone service providers to give the government a push capability to deliver messages to a bunch of phones in the US, that doesn't worry me so much. They could change the name of the alerts, or not. Any emergency so important that everyone in the US needs to know right now is probably going to be coming from the President

Fanatanstic Fables: The Discontented Malefactor -- Slouching toward an Orwellian unlanguage

The Discontented Malefactor

A Judge having sentenced a Malefactor to the penitentiary was proceeding to point out to him the disadvantages of crime and the profit of reformation.

"Your Honour," said the Malefactor, interrupting, "would you be kind enough to alter my punishment to ten years in the penitentiary and nothing else?"

"Why," said the Judge, surprised, "I have given you only three years!"

"Yes, I know," assented the Malefactor--"three years' imprisonment and the preaching. If you please, I should like to commute the preaching."

--

I don't know why I do it, but I cannot look away from the slow-motion trainwreck that is the so-called mainstream media. Where there was once news there is now a continuous shrill torrent of preaching and opinion. Articles in The New Republic and National Review might as well have been written by people from different planets. Seeing friends and colleagues flying apart into their ideological camps has been both amusing and distressing. The amusement I confess is that base reaction that physical comedians tap into when they slip on a banana peel or have a hammer drop on their head. The distress is contemplation of a future where we have lost our collective minds.

I've seen otherwise friendly people literally not able to communicate stalemated by their entrenched certainty in their position and the evil wrongness and deception they believe of the others. I've seen people make decisions based in part on how Trump relates to the situation in the most bizarre and incoherent ways. For instance, someone decided not to go back to Taco Bell ever again because Trump had tweeted a picture of himself eating a Taco Bell taco salad. You're not going to do business with someone who sells Trump a taco salad? Does Trump even buy his own food? And what is the person taking orders at the Taco Bell supposed to do? It's nuts. Yo quiero common sense.

Further distress comes from being (pre)judged and labeled, assigned to one side or the other based on some inclination, or worse, mere observation. Think it's profoundly weird to the point of incredulity that a PhD research psychologist doesn't know how a polygraph works? Well, I must be a sexist and a rape-apologist and a right-wing fascist Trump loving deplorable. Look on a claim of never (ever!) having drank to the point of forgetfulness from someone who apparently started getting together with his buddies for "skis" in his teens with some skepticism? Well, I must be some lefty libtard postmodernist Marxist hater of Western civilization. Clearly.

In hindsight, I wonder what the signal-to-noise ratio is in reportage where the authors feel compelled to assign labels to the people in their stories. It seems these labels are not there to inform, but rather to shape the battlespace. To implant prejudice in the reader. Sadly, hyperbole and misuse have rendered these labels increasingly useless. Just what constitutes a fascist these days? Anyone who didn't vote for Hillary Clinton? A socialist? Anyone who is in favor of any form of a welfare state no matter how small or efficiently administered. While accurate of some people's thinking, it's bunkum. And increasingly dangerous.

Not every "labeler" necessarily thinks much about the labels used because they aren't meant to be accurate or descriptive but rather to signal which side the labler is on. The consequence of this mechanism of virtue signaling is to further erode any precision of meaning for the words. This leaves us slouching toward an Orwellian unlanguage of dystopia. Dead will be ideas leaving only beliefs and dogma.

Fantastic Fables: Father and Son -- Meditations on a soil of remorse

Father and Son

"My boy," said an aged Father to his fiery and disobedient Son, "a hot temper is the soil of remorse. Promise me that when next you are angry you will count one hundred before you move or speak."

No sooner had the Son promised than he received a stinging blow from the paternal walking-stick, and by the time he had counted to seventy-five had the unhappiness to see the old man jump into a waiting cab and whirl away.

--

Ambrose Bierce's mastery of words still astonishes. A hot temper is the soil of remorse. Beautiful. I think that our soil of remorse is a Congress that steadfastly shirks its duty with respect to foreign wars and passes reckless budgets that spends money on wasteful and unproductive goods and services. The depth of their understanding is unknown since they tend to indicate their preferences with the uniform structure of "we need to spend more on X" where X is their preferred program, department, or sector. They indicate their disfavor of program, department, or sector by saying "we should cut spending in Y." A Congressman might his extreme disfavor with something by suggesting it be eliminated entirely. However, the only thing that ever gets cut or eliminated is taxes, and that for only a time. The amount Congress increased the defense spending by in FY 2017 and FY 2018 is $108 billion. That increase is larger than any defense budget in the world, with the exception of China.

One result of prolonged Congressional dysfunction is that we have corporate America out there issuing low interest rate bonds to gorge on cheap dollars. Whereas a stock valuation is an ephemeral construct of the market, payroll, rent, and debt service are things with concrete values that needs to get met at specific times. If too many firms bump into too many of these walls with too few dollars, there could be hell to pay.

In the last recession, the gangsters who caused all the trouble whacked the back of the taxpayer's head with their financial walking-sticks and hopped into the getaway cab while the taxpayer was counting on the government to do the right thing. Which, of course, they didn't.

Apple is not a tech company

Apple is not a tech company. It is a trillion-dollar luxury product (and services) company. This is not meant as an insult, merely an observation and I am not ready to short AAPL any time soon. They cast off metric booty-loads of money -- so much they don't even know what to do with it. Which is why I don't consider them a tech company. My perspective is informed by having help start a software development company and run it until it had become largely a software maintenance company, from tech to products and services.

Yes, Apple traffics in "tech" writ large, but what I'd call a tech company traffics in innovation. Apple was, for a while, a tech optimization company along with its brand. The insight with the iPhone was to mash up the (derivative) iPod with the ubiquitous mobile phone and slap an Apple logo on it. Since then, they've done doodly squat. Except, of course, make loads and loads of cash and addict millions of people to their phones, services, and brand.

What does it mean if they can't think of something to do with that cash? Yes, they pay a dividend and buy back stock, but that's not innovation. That's turning the crank for investors, which is right and proper in its own way. But, if that's all that's left, then, clearly, they've run out of ideas. And if they're out of ideas, they're not a tech company, by my definition.

As I said, I'm not ready to short AAPL, but there are a few things to keep an eye on. First is the competition. Offerings from Google and Samsung are very strong, and the feature-function gap has narrowed to de facto parity. Second, entry level phones are one tenth the price of iPhones and provide access to the same apps and services that connect users to social media, the Internet, and, oh yeah, make calls. Third, phone quality is sufficiently high across the board that people can be reluctant to upgrade. A new release is no longer a compelling event.

Of course, Apple has a lot going for it and it's hard to see it going away. They have a massive installed based who are deeply intertwined with a labyrinth of Apple services that would make it difficult to switch to a cheaper, and perhaps technically superior offering. Moreover, they control access of companies and developers to their installed. They are sitting on a quarter trillion in cash and that's after a buying back a bunch of stock.

No, Apple is not a tech company anymore, and that's fine. But you know who is a tech company? Amazon. And that they are is amazing and a little scary.

What's a sovereign nation?

Greece wants their drachma back.

What is a sovereign nation? That's not a question I have traditionally spent a lot of time pondering, assuming, naively, that all nations are sovereign by definition. But it's more complicated than that. Originally, the States of the United States were supposed to be sovereign -- or at least much more sovereign than they are today, but that went out the window long ago (thanks Commerce Clause abusing Congress!). And I think that there is a similar process underway in Europe. My proposition is this: if your currency is denominated in Euros and your country's name is not Germany, then you are not a sovereign nation or won't be for long. So, rather than look at what a sovereign nation is, I'll look at what a sovereign nation isn't. Consider Greece. They have been relegated to vassal state status with their monetary policy being dictated by the IMF and the holders of Greek bonds including Germany, France, and others.

What got me thinking about all of this is learning a little bit about Modern Monetary Theory or MMT. There is a lot to MMT and I won't go into it all here, but a key element is that a sovereign state issuing its own fiat currency can never be insolvent. Most macroeconomics are predicated on the government being able to nudge things like inflation, employment, and investment by increasing or decreasing the money supply. When a country's currency is pegged to foreign currencies or is not even under the country's control as with Greece and the euro, the country's monetary policy options are severely constrained. The way the EU is organized is much more problematic than the States since the individual countries are kinda-sorta sovereign in that they have armies and considerable independence over their finances, but those using Euros are much more constrained in their monetary policies than those that do not. It is interesting that the Brexiting UK and other problem children Hungary and Poland don't use the euro. If I were a Swede I'd say you can pry my Kronor from my cold, dead hand. Lather, rinse, repeat the other still fairly sovereign countries. I bet Greece would love to have their debt in drachmas rather than euros. There's not much they can do about the debt today, but there is one plan for how they can get their drachmas back.

The EU much different from the US is that the EU nations are much more different one from the other than the States are in the US. The EU nations have distinct languages, customs, values, traditions, etc., whereas much of the diversity of the US is mixed together and spread out to varying degrees and, for the most part, knit together through the common usage of English. My suspicion is that the only countries in the EU with a real tradition of a Roman-style sense of naturalization are the UK and France and maybe the Netherlands. That is, the French are more likely to see a naturalized French citizen as French (as long as she acts French) than say a Hungarian is to see a naturalized Hungarian citizen has Hungarian.

The most important euro-using country wrestling with its lack of sovereignty is Italy. Unlike the UK, much of the Italian government debt is denominated in Euros, thus leaving the EU much more problematic than the already problematic Brexit. Moreover, an Italian exit of the EU would cause seismic disruptions to the EU and the euro with the loss of the EU's third largest economy that Italy represents. Default by Greece would have been painful for investors, default by Italy might cause a global financial crisis.

Countries and banks are getting too big when the failure of one can bring down the global economy. Banks we can do something about. Countries not so much, but a United States of Europe needs to be built with a lot more care than is being used to run it today. The UK voted for sovereignty. I wonder if they will be the only country to do so.

Trump has catalyzed a watershed moment in our nation's history, and one, if we're not vigilant and careful, may never recover. The "Russia" narrative is an out-of-the-park home run for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Complex (MICC), both political parties outside the MICC, and the MSM. And no, this is not some grand conspiracy, but an unlikely and unholy alignment of interests which are no longer aligned with the greater good of the American people, or any other people of the world as "people" are commonly understood. What the Russia narrative has done is given us the Mueller investigation. Whatever you think of Trump personally, it's a very bad precedent to authorize a special counsel to investigate wtfever [pdf]:

(b) The Special Counsel is authorized to conduct the investigation confirmed by then-FBI Director James B. Corney in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence on March 20, 2017, including:

(i) any links and/or coordination bet ween the Russian government and
individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump; and
(ii) any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation; and
(iii) any other matters within the scope of 28 C.F.R. § 600.4(a).

(c) If the Special Counsel believes it is necessary and appropriate, the Special Counsel is authorized to prosecute federal crimes arising from the investigation of these matters.

Some say that this is no different than Whitewater, but it's not even in the same universe. Whitewater was started when a specific individual (David Hale) was the source of specific criminal allegations (claimed Clinton had pressured him into making an illegal $300k loan to Susan McDougal). The specific criminal allegation that launched a thousand ships against Trump and perhaps all future presidents: Russia! Whitewater, in hindsight, was really bad. This takes that mistake up to 11. The opposition at time of inauguration has a shiny new tool, burnished by precedent. Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey will be supplanted by the Quest for the Blue Dress in our cultural narratives.

MICC benefits because a super-majority of the sheeple they herd and fleece are now united in fear and loathing of Russia and are baying for action. And if the sheeple trust the MICC to deal with the Russian (bug)bear, well, they extend that trust to believe the MICC will do what's in their best interest. And our war in Yemen is good for jobs. Yeah, that's the ticket.

And Russian fear and loathing sells. It whips up passions and generates the clicks and the retweets and sustains the monologues. Is there any MSM outlet that is at all skeptical of the Russian narrative. Sure, they have different spins this way and that (no collusion with Trump, but totally tried to whack Skirpal, or collusion, hacked the election, and totally tried to whack Skirpal), but there is some way that Russia is at the bottom of something nefarious that's totally transforming America for the worse. And they're right. Whether the Russians are doing something effective actively, I don't know, but the Cult of the Anti-Russia is creating a bunch of dogmatic zealots whose reasoning is impaired where fact and fiction are indistinguishable.