Why Does America Hate Free Market Capitalism?

Over at Balloon Juice, mistermix reports on how America’s internet service is being left in the dust by . . . wait for it . . . Lithuania.  Lithu – fuckin – ania.  Apparently, service (10/1 Mbps) that costs $40 - $60 here (depending on where you live) used to cost only $14.72 in Lithuania.  I say “used to cost” because Lithuania just doubled its speed with no increase in cost.  Which means that right now we in America are paying 3 or 4 times what Lithuanians pay and getting internet service at half the speed. 

(Click through and read mistermix’s entire post; weep at the fact that American internet service is half-speed compared to Lithuania’s worst service, and that if you were in Lithuania and willing to pay a little more you would have access to internet speeds that you can only dream about here in America.)

Look, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that the United States isn’t going to even make an effort to keep up with Korea or Japan – I mean, they’re supposed to be the high-tech havens of the world.  And I’ve even resigned myself to the fact that the United States isn’t going to even make an effort to keep up with Western Europe.  But when our tech infrastructure is being left in the dust by Lithu – fuckin – ania, a former Soviet bloc country . . . Jesus! we aren’t even trying anymore.

What really ticks me off about this is that there is absolutely no reason for us to lag so far behind the rest of the developed world.  But by our policy decisions we have chosen to do so – it didn’t just evolve this way in the United States, we picked this outcome because, basically, we don’t understand what “free market capitalism” means.

About Last Night's Republican Presidential Debate

Just a quick note, because this is something that has bugged me for some time, because there is just enough of the hint of truth in it to turn it into a Zombie Conservative Lie such that it never dies, and because I haven't seen anybody else mention it yet. In fact, I have yet to see anybody remark on this statement at all, even though it is easily the most radical thing to have been said last night.

During the debate, Gary Johnson announced that he was in favor of ending - completely - all corporate income taxes. He justified this by arguing that corporate income is money that is "taxed twice." We all own the corporations, he said, so when a corporation makes money that money is taxed, and then when it is distributed to "us" it is taxed again and that isn't right. (Let's just skip over the fact that most Americans do not, in fact, own corporations, or even any stock in a corporation other than what might be held by our mutual funds.)

Goddammit.

About Releasing Bin Laden's Death Photos

So President Obama has announced that no photos of Osama bin Laden’s body will be released.  As loathe as I usually am to speculate about the political calculations behind decisions like this, I wonder if perhaps in this instance Obama really is playing 11^th-Dimensional chess.

When I first learned that bin Laden’s body had been buried at sea, I thought this was a really, really bad mistake.  (You can see my initial take on the news of bin Laden’s death here.)  I predicted that the same impulses that drive the unhinged Birthers would give rise to a new conspiracy group – the Deathers, they are now called – who would claim that bin Laden really hadn’t been killed, that he had been captured and was being held or that Obama had cut a deal with him and that this was all a huge conspiracy to help get Obama re-elected.

And, indeed, despite the fact that (i) the election is still a year and a half away (which makes that conspiracy seem a little, um, poorly timed) and (ii) a conspiracy of this magnitude would be almost impossible to pull off, something of a “Deather Movement” does seem to be getting started.  For example, Andrew Breitbart’s site has posts suggesting darkly that something fishy seems to be going on without a body to view.  Fox Business News has some bloviator suggesting two days ago that without a body there will always be some “lingering questions” and “how will we know he’s dead.”

(As Jon Stewart said, mocking this douchebag:  “When are we going to stop pretending, as a country, that there is a level of empirical proof that will satisfy the conspiracy seekers amongst us?  These things are never about evidence.  We could have a videotape of the terror leader himself holding up Sunday’s New York Post and his birth certificate in his ‘I am bin Laden, Seriously’ t-shirt, saying on camera ‘I think this dude’s about the fuck me up big time,’ [and it] wouldn’t matter.”) 

Brian Kilmeade over at Fox and Friends wondered what the rush was to get the body buried at sea (saying that he agrees with Senator Graham “what’s the rush?” – so I guess Lindsay Graham is out there raising questions about this too, although I’ve not seen that myself).

Saving Endangered Species Isn't an Issue of Morality

"I don't recall a lot of people crying when we wiped out smallpox."

-Me
circa 1993


The second hour of the Diane Riehm show today was devoted to a discussion of the Endangered Species Act, how species get listed as "endangered," the effect of doing so and whether it is appropriate to take economic factors into account when deciding whether to place a species on the list or not. I only came into the program about half-way through, but I caught a caller who was upset that the Congressman (I didn't catch which Congressman) was arguing that we absolutely should take into account potential job losses and economic diminishment when making the "moral decision" over whether to attempt to save a species from extinction.

The call very forcibly reminded me of a similar conversation I had with a few friends years and years ago, back when I was still in school. We were having lunch and one of my friends asserted that humans have absolutely no moral right to cause the extinction of any species, and that if a species goes extinct either through our actions or our inactions then we are morally culpable.

I took issue with this statement, despite the fact that I consider myself an environmentalist and am generally in favor of not seeing any species driven off the planet. What made my friend's opinion risible to me was not the result she sought to achieve by her argument, but the way she got there:

"I don't think I can agree with that," I told her, "of course we have the moral right to eliminate some other species, given the appropriate circumstances."

"Like what?" she asked.

"Well, like if that species is a threat to us, especially if that species is an existential threat to us. In fact, you can disregard morality completely to get to this point. Nature itself is all about species competing for resources, and if there are not sufficient resources for two species to cohabitate then the better adapted species survives and other dies off. If you are concerned about 'preserving the environment' then I think you have to recognize that extinction is just as much a part of the ever-evolving 'environment' as is every living species at any given time."

"Oh, that is just bullshit. Look, we're the dominant species on the planet right now and we can basically do whatever we want without threat that some spotted owl or something is going to wipe us out. You're just making an argument to justify letting us do what we want to anyway . . . pillage and loot the world around us and turn it into a cinder."

"No, I'm not, I'm just pointing out that 'saving species' isn't necessarily an issue to be resolved through a moral lens. I don't recall a lot of people crying when we wiped out smallpox." (Years later I would see a similar point being made in a funnier way by P.J. O'Rourke, but I'm telling you I came up with the joke first.)

The Real Reason Obama Waited Until Last Week to Release his Long-Form Birth Certificate

For all the last part of last week we were treated to political pundits and professional entrail-readers speculating about why Obama 'waited' until last week to release his long-form birth certificate. There was much rumination about whether it was because Trump was surging in the Republican polls, or whether it was designed to cut the legs off of Jerome Corsi's imminent book Where's the Birth Certificate? What kind of 11th-Dimension political chess was Obama playing by timing the release when he did?

Well, have you seen Obama's speech at this weekend's White House Correspondents Dinner? It was hilarious, particularly the first two videos that accompanied it. The first, before he began speaking, was a music video featuring a (really quite horrible) rock song titled "I am a Real American" and featuring (several times) a throbbing picture of the long-form birth certificate center screen.

The second came after Obama announced he was going to prove he had been born in Hawaii by showing everybody his "birth video." Suddenly the room was pierced by a loud cry and African-sounding music, and the screen started showing the beginning of Disney's The Lion King, with the baby lion being anointed by the baboon and all the other African animals bowing in obeisance toward him.

When that clip finished Obama asked, "Where's the Fox table? Look, I want to make sure you guys know that that was a joke. That was not really my birth video, it was a children's cartoon. If you don't believe me, Disney has the long-form."

So I don't think Obama waited until last week to release the long-form birth certificate for any 11th-Dimension political reason. I think he timed it just so his performance at the WHCD would be really, really funny. This wasn't about politics, this was about comedy. And given how pissy Donald Trump got about it, it worked out really, really well.

First Thoughts on Bin Laden's Death

UPDATED BELOW


I just logged in a few minutes ago to look something up on Wikipedia, and was shocked to see the news that U.S. forces shot and killed Osama bin Laden earlier today. So, of course, I went to a few news sites and watched President Obama's speech.

Of course, it is way too soon to know much about what happened and hopefully more details will be coming shortly. But like everyone else who pays attention to and writes about news events, I figured I'd jot down -- in no particular order -- my initial impressions and thoughts after watching Obama's speech.

(1) Isn't it nice to have a competent administration again? Isn't it nice to feel that the United States government actually can accomplish something? Since we let bin Laden get away at Tora Bora, and then decided to devote most of our military might to invading and occupying Iraq, I have had a real sense that the United States government just didn't seem capable of focusing on a goal and achieving that goal; still, you would think capturing or killing the mastermind of the largest terrorist attack on U.S. soil would be an important enough goal that we could get past our national ADD for at least a little while. The fact the government was able to finally accomplish this goal now, following hard on the heels of the federal government's speedy and effective response to the tornados that just ravaged Alabama and a lot of the Southeast (in stark contrast to the government's ineffectiveness after Katrina), just makes me feel warm inside, like proof that if we just make sure to give the levers of power to intelligent, competent people then that power actually can be used competently and intelligently.

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.