The Driving Dream of MORE

Too often we assume that Homo Economicus is truly just motivated by the money, or more ridiculously the financial interests of the shareholders of the companies they run.  The truth is Our Galtian Overlords are frequently just assholes because they are assholes, not because being assholes will actually make them any richer.

                                                --Atrios

                                    

That right there.  What Atrios said.  

Digby wrote something the other day quoting Joseph Stiglitz’s assertion that the ultimate fate of the 1% “is bound up with how the other 99% live.”  Digby then added that “a stable society with a thriving middle class is more necessary to [the 1%’s] survival than a quick buck to add to their already depraved level of wealth . . . .”

With which Steve M. quibbled:

Maybe [these statements] are true in the very, very long run, but I can’t live on a planet in which North Korea’s regime has endured for decades, thriving as its population starves, and believe that the overdogs in our society can’t keep bleeding us relatively slowly for as long as we’re willing to put up with it.  They don’t need for us to thrive – they’ll sell to a Chinese or Indian or Brazilian middle class if ours isn’t thriving.  Or they’ll sell to one another.  They don’t need for us to thrive any more than they’ve ever needed a thriving middle class in any of the third world countries where they’ve long put their factories.

But I think Steve M. gets it wrong here, because I think Steve misapprehends the issue.

Digby and Stiglitz might have been discussing the division between the 99% and the 1% that obtains here in the United States, but that division is being replicated around the world and so their argument applies on a global scale.

It is fine to blithely suggest that Our Galtian Overlords will sell to a Chinese or an Indian middle class if the US middle class isn’t flourishing, but neither the Chinese nor the Indian middle class are flourishing either.  Sure, you can point to the high growth rate of the middle class in either country, but that is only because when one’s starting point is essentially zero any uptick at all implies, mathematically speaking, a growth rate of infinity.  (I exaggerate, obviously, but I think you take my point.)

The reason we have a “global savings glut” (Bernanke, Krugman, Roubini), or - stated another way - a “dearth of economic investment opportunity” (Stiglitz), or - stated another way - an “overaccumulation of capital” (Marx) is because Our Galtian Overlords in pretty much every country are appropriating for themselves alone almost all the profit from their growing economies and not recycling that profit back into the system in the form of higher wages for everybody else.

By doing so, they are at once accumulating capital for themselves and destroying any market in which they might later deploy that capital.  It’s not that they are eating their seed corn so much as they are storing that seed corn away until it rots from disuse.

This is also why Steve M.’s point about the 1% never having needed a thriving middle class in “any of the third world countries where they’ve long put their factories” is misplaced.  The cruel genius behind the idea of employing third-world workers at slave wages to manufacture goods for export is that those goods, by definition, are intended to be sold elsewhere; by keeping their labor markets and their consumer markets absolutely separate, manufacturers could impoverish the former without shrinking the latter.  But the genius of this little stratagem evaporates once one attempts to replicate it on a global scale.  When the entire world’s labor supply is impoverished, the entire world’s consumer market is as well.

And as for the idea that the world’s 1% might simply sell to one another if they can no longer sell to the 99%?  Well, they certainly intend to try doing that; in fact, that seems to be the fundamental idea underlying CitiGroup’s infamous “plutonomy memo” from 2005.   But to again quote Kunkel: “this substitution was never likely, for as Keynes observed, ‘when our income increases our consumption increases also, but not by so much.’”  Simply stated, not even the greedy gobs of the Galtian Overlords can swallow an entire world’s production, over and over and over again.

Which leaves us, finally, with the suggestion that perhaps Our Galtian Overlords will learn to be content with living the way Kim Jung-il does in North Korea:  luxuriously, wanting for nothing, content to pile up riches while the rest of the world beggars itself for their comfort.  To which I respond . . . maybe.  Maybe they could learn to live this way, but I doubt it.

It is one thing to beggar a nation, it is quite another to beggar the world.  Kim Jung-il might not be vexed by the idle wealth he is amassing at the expense of North Korea but remember . . . at the end of the day it’s still only North Korea.  How much wealth can he possibly be amassing over there?  After Kim shoots a few new action-adventure Godzilla blockbuster movies and springs for another giant waterslide, how much can he really have left over with which to play the role of Scrooge McDuck?

 (h/t Anderson Cooper)

But The World is . . . The World. 

Grab up all of The World’s resources and you can’t just let that stuff sit around doing nothing.  You’ve got to find some use for it . . . exactly the same way campus police at UC-Davis or the cops in New York just needed to find a use for all that cool new military equipment that until recently had been just lying around.  “Money – excess capital – needs to be put to work; it needs to earn profit, or else it is just useless.”  As useless as an unopened can of military grade pepper spray.

Besides, at the end of the day anyone who has climbed to or spent their life in the coveted position of a Galtian Overlord, anyone as sociopathic as the Koch Brothers who – not content to possess a combined wealth of $50 Billion -- still feel the need to purchase governors, destroy workers’ rights, eliminate all business regulation, and disenfranchise voters merely to suck up even more money. . . anyone like that is never going to be content just to kick back and enjoy their unimaginable wealth.

Because the truth is that people so batshit, Koch brothers-level insane are just a little more imaginative than you or I could ever even think of being.  And what they tend to imagine is what it would be like to have more.  And not even more money, not necessarily.  Just . . . more.  More power, more control, more authority, more stuff, more, more, more and always, always, More Than Anybody Else.

More is what drives them.  Because, in the end, it really isn’t the money.  In the end it simply is that such people are – to borrow Atrios’s term – assholes.

* * *

So, yeah . . . Stiglitz gets it right when he says that the well-being of the 1% depends on them not destroying the very markets they need in order to keep realizing their ever-present dream of More.  

Nevertheless, the 1% persists in destroying those markets anyway because these people are perfect singularities of covetousness, reflexively grubbing up anything that crosses their greed field's event horizon.  It remains true that their very well-being depends to a large extent on the well-being of all the rest of us but, as Digby says, “they are too thick” to realize that simple fact.

Digby wins the round on points.

Conservative Sinecures Undermine Our Democracy

I found this excellent piece at the Wits and Vinegar blog arguing that we may be seeing something new with modern GOP state rule: the dismantling of our economic society by entirely unchecked greed. Wits and Vinegar suggests that - bad as things are now - we would be fooling ourselves if we allow ourselves to believe that at some point this dismantling will end out of at least a sense of self-preservation. It really is a very good post, and I urge you to click over and read it in its entirety.

There was one bit, though, that I did disagree with, and it was the suggestion that the Republican governors at the forefront of this dismantling don't realize that they are merely dupes and tools of their corporate paymasters:

[A]ll of these governors are similar, as are people like Paul Ryan -- they are under the assumption that they actually have a political future. It serves the interest of their major backers to have them harbor this delusion, but in reality they are in office only until the people have another chance to oust them for destroying the middle class. They are there to ram through ALEC authored legistlation, bust unions and leave the public education in this country so broken that it will take generations to repair. They care nothing for the long-term cost of such destructive action. Like George W. Bush before them, you have someone who is just egomaniacal enough to think they have what it takes to lead, and deluded enough to think that they are "in touch" and "on the right side of history." My ass. Sorry boys.

While I don't doubt Wits and Vinegar is spot on in her description of these men as egomanical and deluded, I would not go so far as to suggest they are unwitting dupes of their right-wing political backers. Having achieved the governorship in their respective states, they realize they don't have any political future after this -- they just don't care.

Liberals have spent the past decade or more bemoaning the fact that Conservatives have been playing long-ball and have stolen a march on us by creating, funding and supporting a web of right-wing think tanks whose only purpose is to think up and popularize policies and supporting rationales pushing right-wing interests. It seems to have escaped most of us that - in addition to providing a steady drumbeat of Conservative agitprop and policy prescriptions ready to be rolled out the moment Conservatives held power again -- these think tanks also helped to blunt the only power American voters have when their elected officials go to far: the power of the ballot box.

For example, nothing would please me more than to see Scott Walker recalled from office next year for having gone way too far in his entirely unnecessary "scorch the earth" war against Wisconsin's public employee unions. But the damage will have been done nevertheless, and Scott Walker will never have to want. His financial backers will get him a board job at one of these think tanks, a sinecure with a friendly university, and set him up with a lucrative position in some lobbying firm. Scott Walker is going to be just fine for the rest of his days.

Post-politics cushions for rabid right-wingers have become SOP now, further weakening our representative democracy. Why fear the will of the voters if -- once you are out of office -- you can really cash in? The fear that voters would kick them out of office was once the only way to ensure that elected officials didn't go too far in service of their paymasters, but Right-Wing Welfare has largely undermined that protection.

I think Walker and the rest (like the odious Rick Scott who isn't even waiting to leave before cashing in) know this, I think it is at least an implicit part of the deal the Koch Brothers, et al. made with them: destroy the unions, destroy the social safety net, destroy the regulations that vex us, and we will make sure that you are set for life.

I think they know exactly what they are doing, and what they can look forward to. They embrace it.

Ayn Rand Was Very Silly, But Conservatives Are Just Evil

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life:
The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish
fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable
heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood,
unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

--John Rogers
Kung Fu Monkey


Johann Hari has a new column up over at the UK's The Independent that simply is a must-read. He excoriates today's Republican party for its crass insistence on promoting only the interests of the country's uberwealthy at the direct expense of the less fortunate 99% of Americans. For example, of the Ryan Budget plan he points out that "it halves taxes on the richest 1% and ends all taxes on corporate income, dividends and inheritance. It pays for it by slashing spending on food stamps, health care for the poor and elderly, and basic services. . . . Ryan says 'the reason I got involved in public service' was because he read the writings of Ayn Rand, who described the poor as 'parasites' who must 'perish', and are best summarized by the title of one of her books: The Virtue of Selfishness."

However, the vast majority of Hari's column devotes itself to Donald Trump and what it says about the modern Republican party that he is now the party's frontrunner in Presidential nominee polls. Describing Trump as "the Republican Id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality," Hari offers up a few choice quotes from the Donald about how America should deal with the rest of the world. On Libya: "I would go in and I would take the oil . . . I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff." On Iraq: "We stay there and we take the oil. . . In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation's yours."

* * *

In the liberal blogosphere, which I frequent, there has been for a number of years now a good deal of focus on the new, ersatz Republican followers of Ayn Rand's writings. Alan Greenspan himself, the maestro of our current financial debacle, was one of Rand's most devoted followers -- he actually sat at her feet as a college student and was editor of one of her Objectivist publications. As a result, to this day he so objects to any government regulation of any business or financial activity that he once told Brooksley Born that he was not even in favor of prosecuting financial firms that committed fraud because that would only interfere in the market's ability to punish such firms itself. (He, Larry Summers and Bob Rubin were also instrumental in crushing Born's attempt to impose derivative regulations while she was with the CFTC; of course, given that unregulated derivatives trading is a large part - if not the largest part - of how the financial industry got into the mess it did, that decision seems in retrospect very, very stupid).

In Congress, of course, we have Rep. Paul Ryan and his plan to wage war against almost everyone in America for the benefit of his small number of rich paymasters, and we have newly elected Senator Rand Paul who makes no bones about the fact that he is an Ayn Rand devotee (although it is not true that he was named after Rand; my understanding is that his name is short for 'Randal').

And this constant reference to Ayn Rand's writings by our new Republican Overlords -- who, despite controlling only one chamber of Congress, somehow manage to decide what issues must be taken up by the government (abortion and the deficit, but not jobs or the economy) and how those issues must be framed -- and by bloviating Conservative pundits and TeeVee talking heads, has had an affect on the people who listen to such folk.

For example, about two years ago, shortly after Obama had been sworn into office and the first glimpses of Tea Party Madness were beginning to emerge among the nation's more conservative elderly, I was checking out a few books at my local library. A sizable percentage of the immediate population where I live consists of retirees. Whilst checking out my books I got into a brief conversation with the librarian, who told me that she had just started reading Atlas Shrugged as part of a local book club. She told me she thought it was important that as many people as possible read Ayn Rand's opus because the book is "so relevant, given what's happening in the world today."

Now, a couple of things about this statement struck me immediately. First, I could think of nothing that was "happening in the world" right then that would make Rand's so-called philosophy more relevant than before -- that is, unless you count the fact we now have a black man sitting in the White House. Second, the library doesn't sponsor book clubs; this apparently was something she had gotten into with some unspecified number of friends, and they all had suddenly decided they needed to read Ayn Rand. Third, I couldn't just let this statement go unchallenged, because the last thing we need is people interested in reading Ayn Rand for the lessons they think they can learn from her.

So I explained to the librarian, as gently as I could, that I had read Atlas Shrugged and nearly all of Rand's writings years and years ago, back when I was in High School, and that - like a lot of people who stumble across Rand - I had enjoyed them immensely. However, after I grew up some and gained a greater appreciation of how people work in the real world, I came to see Rand's writings as fairly juvenile. I told her (as nicely as I could) that I thought they were not writings anyone should ever make the mistake of taking seriously.