Pie Distribution

Buy-in is important.  Unless distracted or ignorant, people tend to get upset when they feel cheated.  Note that I use the word "feel" rather than "are".  This is because it doesn't matter whether people actually have been cheated or how we'd even determine the objective reality of it.  Action is based on perception, not reality.  Onward to pie.

Imagine two pies and two ways of slicing them.  To simplify things, let's assume that these pies are of equal quality and the only differences are the size (as measured by the number of blueberries used to make them) and slicing method (as measured by the size of the slice you get).  The first pie has 10 pounds of blueberries in it.  It is cut into ten slices and you get one.  In effect, you have 10% or 1 pound of blueberries.  The second pie has 15 pounds of blueberries it it.  It is cut into twenty slices and you get one.  In effect, you have 5% or .75 pounds of blueberries.

In Capitalism 101 we're told that the best result comes from everyone looking out for themselves (in 102 they cover externalities and information asymmetry, but no one takes that class).  What is the best result?  Well strangely enough, we're often told it in terms of "the economy" or "unemployment", broad, abstract concepts which can be thought of as generalized social benefit.  That's nice and all, but teacher told us to look out for ourselves.  So why are we concerned about that social benefit stuff?

If we follow the rules we're taught, to look out for ourselves, we'll take the first pie, because it gives us the bigger slices.  Why would we care about the overall pie if we're supposed to look out for ourselves?

These were, of course, stupid pies.  A more realistic pie would instead be one which accounts for how distribution affects size.  Excessively skewed distributions can cause problems.  If someone is promised too small a slice, then merely cutting it will reduce it to crumbs.  In this analogy the cutting is taxes and cost of living, since by my measure, merely continuing to live is not as good as getting pie.  We could cut taxes, and of course that would help, but the efficient method is to even out the slices, to ensure that no slice is so small as to not be worth cutting.

Promise me a bigger piece and I'll pick more blueberries.  This is good.  Though there is the potential for the promised piece size to rise faster than the blueberry picking, so that, for example, if 20% of people are promised half the pie, the remaining 80% might see themselves as getting cheated.  The perception has come back to us.

Whether you believe the system of the market is fair, the outcomes can quite easily feel unfair.  We could argue that they are not, but that's not going to fix perception.  It's not going to fix action.  By action I mean people getting aggressive: taking and revolting.  We could hire a few to imprison the rest, but as a rule, security is an enabler of wealth, not a creator, so now a certain part of the pie is being used to ensure that others don't ask for more pie.  That's hardly efficient.

Ultimately, the American-style market tends to be self-destructive.  The theoretical perfect market may emerge, but as success is rewarded, it unbalances the field and ceases to as perfectly reward success, with an increasing negative slide.  A few exceptions do not disprove a trend.  Moving away from the economics to the sociology, the mentality needed for a market, of looking out for oneself, is precisely the mentality which would lead a majority of people away from the market because regardless of what it does for the overall pie, it is not the way to maximize their own pie.

In other words, the majority of the world is not extraordinary so a system which places the majority of the rewards with the extraordinary will be unacceptable to the majority.  Thankfully for the wealthy, there are religion, race, and region to distract people from the cause of their misery.

"Most wars we've fought have been fought over ideology and philosophy"

This came from Idaho's Sen. Jim Risch.

Really?

Here's a list of conflicts in which the US was involved and my opinion on whether it was motivated by ideology or by material concerns such as resources or keeping up friendly governments.  These are not perfectly ambiguous, as I'll note during the Cold War.  Stating that a war was not motivated by ideology does not mean that it was the wrong thing to do, such as if we are protecting our own territorial sovereignty.  Similarly, just because a war was motivated by ideology does not mean it was the right thing to do.

Revolutionary War - Yes.  Representation, ore more accurately, lack thereof in Parliament was the real problem and what did we do?  We made a representative government.  Sorta.

Northwest Indian War - No.  Britain was supposed to give us the Northwest Territory but supported the local Indians with forts and whatnot.  We could argue that this was about the philosophy of treaties or some other spin, but essentially it's about territorial control, which if that's "ideology or philosophy" then every general is a philosopher.

Quasi-War - No.  France was being a dick, so we shot at each other a bit and they stopped attacking our ships.

First Barbary War - No.  We got into a fight with pirates who were capturing our merchants.

Tecumseh's War - No.  More fighting over the Northwest Territory.

War of 1812 - No.  Britain was attacking our merchants, enslaving sailors, and supporting Indian attacks.  We started a fight, we lost a lot, they eventually left again.  Oh, and Canada added another notch to its list of Failed Invasions of Canada.  Those Canadians are like sneaky Russians, in that they are hard to invade and cold, but speak something like English.

Second Barbary War - No.  We fought pirates again.

Seminole Wars - Multiple Nos.  We started fights with Spain and captured Florida, which given the democracy record of the state was clearly just a trap (have you heard Rick Scott is claiming US citizens are foreign and unable to vote?).

You know what?  Let's cut out some of the little stuff.  We chased more pirates, we got in fights with natives around the world.  It wasn't philosophical, but calling each little thing a war is a stretch anyway.  So let's lump it all together as a single No.  While we're at it, let's stop counting the fights with Native Indians and just stick those in with the other Nos.  In other words, unless we're shooting white people, it doesn't count (I'm trying to pretend that my arbitrary grouping of what were as deadly as 'real' wars is actually ironic racism rather than just racism).

Mexican-American War - Yes.  Texas declared independence and we backed it up.  Though the Texans might have all just been Americans who were encouraged to settle there to push out the natives and revolted because they were worried about losing their slaves, but let's call it an independence movement and add the second Yes of the day.

Then we got into fights with China, including one where we sided with the British who were trying to expand the opium and slave trade with China.  That's so damn awful that I'm counting it as an anti-Yes.

Civil War - Yes and Yes.  One side was protecting institutional racism and economic disparity (poor whites weren't so well off either) and the other side was protecting the union.  I don't agree with the philosophy, but I'll accept evil as the philosophical backing for secession and count the war as a double-Yes.

Spanish-American War - Yes.  Spain was horribly suppressing independence movements.  We kicked out Spain.  Then we started our own oppression, but that's not part of the war, so it's still a Yes.

World War I - No.  Beside a few revolutionaries in the Balkans, there wasn't much ideology going on here.  We wandered in to join the winning side (which was going to win without us, thanks to impending famine in Germany) after Germany sunk one too many ships (which they had to do because they needed to stop the flow of supplies to their enemies).

Russian Revolution - No.  We joined the invasion to try to put down those scary Bolsheviks, because they wanted to pull Russia out of the war, and as a general rule of thumb, the winning side is the one that has Russia to most of the dying.

World War II - Yes.  We were definitely on the not-Fascist side and went to great lengths to supply Britain and stopped trading with Japan.  However we didn't actually join the war until we were attacked.  I suspect we would have eventually, even if Japan hadn't done so.

When we get to the Cold War things become murky.  Was opposition to Communism an ideological matter or a territorial matter, since we believed that Communism was a Russian plot rather than a completely independent ideology.

Korean War - No.  We supported the genocidal government of South Korea (the roles were somewhat flipped back then) to keep the Soviet Union out (despite the invasion being supported by the Chinese).

Bay of Pigs - No.  This could have been an actual ideological Capitalism vs. Communism fight if we'd had the courage to actually fight it, rather than send Cuban exiles to die without the promised US support.

Vietnam War/Cambodian Civil War - Yes.  In Vietnam they voted for a Communist government.  We decided to go with the dictator instead.  Cambodia had its own Communists, so we had to fight there too, and it all added up to a big mess in which a lot of Americans died.

Dominican Republic - Yes.  Communism or dictator?  Dictator of course!  Screw all that democracy and self-determination nonsense.

Grenada - Yes.  Grenada wins independence from Britain and establishes a government (which was ambiguously democratic.  Popular leftists stage a coup and overthrow the government.  Military leftists kill those leftists.  US invades to re-establish a stable government (not the one with the leftists).

Panama - Yes.  Noriega stopped being useful to us and started just being a generic asshole who was crushing democracy and people in Panama, so we invaded and arrested him.

First Gulf War - Yes.  Iraq invaded its neighbor.  Granted its neighbor happened to have a lot of oil that we wanted, but this was not a purely materialistic war.

NATO/UN actions in the Balkans - Yes.  There was not much to gain strategically by ending the civil war (though there was the effect of preventing a Jihad in the area; we weren't so focused on that yet); it was just the right thing to do, ending the massacres and fighting.

Haiti - Yes.  There was a coup against the elected President.  With the support of the UN, we stared really hard at the Hatian army, which backed down.  Peacekeepers ensured that the democratic government stayed in place.

Afghanistan - No.  We didn't worry much about oppressive theocracies as long as they weren't harboring people responsible for 9/11.

Second Gulf War - Yes.  Hussein was a horrible person, but he was a useful check on Iran and  knew what happened the last time he threatened US interests in the region.  However, a bunch of blind idiots and liars led us to war on the promise of WMDs that didn't exist, in order to start a domino effect of democracy that didn't happen.

Libya - Yes.  We clearly weren't just trying to end the civil war to get the oil flowing or we'd have  done more for the rebels, or backed the regime.

Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, etc. - No.  We're supporting a variety of dictators and shady characters through at-best legally ambiguous actions in the interest of security.

Tally

As I add it up, I'm getting 14 Yes and 15 No.  It would only take one to flip it to a majority yes.  I did lump together a lot of Noes.  However it doesn't make much sense to count wars as if each one is equal, particularly to make it a Yes or No absolute.  Every war, with the possible exception of the interventions in the Balkans, has some mix of philosophy and pragmatism.

However I do think we can say that to claim that most wars were over ideology or philosophy, as opposed to the usual national security interest or the support of the military-industrial complex, is a ridiculous overreach.  As much as we want to put a good face on our history, the US is not unambiguously good.  It's not even necessarily good from an international standpoint, bullying those who don't go along with its economic or strategic interests, just as all countries do.  There are no nice countries, only one which aren't as bad when compared to evil ones.  So sure, we're no North Korea, but we're not a nation of saints either and to pretend that we are is dangerous.  Once we assume sainthood, we stop striving to prove it.

Real Family Values

What is killing America's families?  Is it the gay menace?  Certainly children need male and female role models.  Two men just don't cut it.  Neither do two women.  Or one man and one woman.  These aren't families.

Two people are little more than a baby-making unit.  That's a nuclear family: two things that make babies and a collection of babies of various ages.  Hardly a real family.

That's what is killing America's families: the false ideology of the nuclear family.  With only two people, someone must lose.  The man works and the woman raises children and cleans the house and takes opiates to survive.  Or the man stays home and we call him a sissy.  Or both parents work and the kids are sent off to be raised by strangers.  What a great family.  Someone loses.  At the least.

Once upon a time less than two or three generations ago people lived with or near their parents, and grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and so on.  Children weren't raised by parents to then grow up and leave them behind and be parents and raise their own kids to grow up and leave them behind in an endless cycle of abandonment.  Instead, children were raised by family.

My own family believes in traditional concepts of family.  I was watched and raised by a grandmother, aunts, uncles, and had a cousin I treated as a brother.  Everyone helped everyone.  It made more sense that way.  Someone with two children can watch a third with no great extra burden, but to relieve one person of children entirely is a wonderful blessing.  This was how one tradition started which has run to this day, of my uncle taking my brothers and me to dinner on Christmas Eve so my mother doesn't have to deal with us.  At other times my brothers would be watched by my godmother (whose son would go to great lengths to frighten them, but maybe that is their own faults for watching Ghostbusters).

If you're going to artificially define families as a pair of baby factories, then I can almost understand the argument against gay marriage.  But that's a ridiculous starting point.  It's starting with a limitation which already is not to the benefit of the children or the parents and then rather than fixing the problem, tacking on another limitation as the weakest of bandaids.  Once you see that a family is more than just two people making sex cells and putting them together, that a family is a network of mutual support, then a couple gay people here and there aren't any problem at all.  So what if a couple people aren't baby factories?  There are plenty of those and they're perfectly capable of raising children, especially as part of a family rather than two people isolated from any social or family support.

I say it's time we brought back traditional marriage and real family values.  No more of this nonsense of blocking marriages to people who have the same genitals.  I say we block marriages to people who live too far away from their families.

I think this is how the Fed does it, right?

The paper I was writing on the yuan and the effects of its value is complete, for a given definition of complete.  It was fun to write and research, but might have been more fun with a little more time (though for a student there is no such thing as more time, just more procrastination).

A US State as a Representative Body

Once upon a time the United States was just a bunch of colonies that, thanks to a combination of geography and France, broke away from England.  They were small in population, only about 2.4 million in all.  That's smaller than many states these days.  Smaller than cities.  New York City has about 8.4 million people.  Already that makes a single city larger than the entire original colonies.  On top of that, there are people in New York who don't live in the city, for a total of almost 19.5 million.
This puts the average American revolutionary at about 185 thousand people per representative unit.  Obviously a bit removed from your small town.  But let's compare to the modern New York state with 19.5 million, or 19,500 thousand people per representative unit.  The representative nature of the state is a bit diluted.  Wyoming, not a very populous state, is still at almost 570 thousand per representative unit.

Think about this next time someone speaks about states' rights.  Is giving power to the states actually giving it to The People, or is it merely shifting it to a different political arena?  Should states get to decide human rights?  Imagine if tomorrow you woke up and you were a second-class citizen.  If the federal government did it you can bet you'd find a lot of people to join you and a couple centuries of court decisions as ammunition.  Well, maybe only one, or a few decades, start with Brown v. Board and work your way up from there.  States have a long, proud history of oppression.  And that's exactly the problem, the myth that states are somehow a representative unit, when a single state is less representative than a pure federal system would have been in 1776 (which obviously isn't when the Constitution was ratified).

The solution isn't breaking apart the level of representation further.  It never was.  Instead, look at actual policy.  Ask if it improves your life or makes it worse.  Ask what precedent it sets and how that can be managed.  A great rule from Washington is better than a terrible rule from the city council.  One of those places has the funding to get the information needed to make good policy.

Government as a Household

It's a popular analogy, government and household.  If a household has a drop in income it spends less.  By analogy, if government has a drop in tax revenues, it should spend less.  Makes perfect sense.  Unless you actually look at the analogy beyond the simplistic first impression.

First, let's stick with the "government is like a household analogy."  If a family loses income they don't instantly cut spending.  They can't, not unless they want to starve, freeze, and get kicked out of their homes.  Over time they can cut back, but that takes time.  Meanwhile, they look for more income.  They look for new work, second jobs, extended hours, and might argue for a raise (though if unemployment is high this isn't likely).  When they balance their budgets they don't only look at spending; they also look at revenues.

An even greater absurdity is the notion that households must balance their budgets.  Over the long-term, yes.  But over spans of weeks, months, even years, they may run debts.  They take out mortgages, which are a massive source of debt which persists for potentially decades.  They get car loans, another source of debt.  They get college loans for even more.  Households can pile on huge amounts of debt.  The last one may even be necessary, as job prospects and income are far greater with a post-secondary degree, so that not taking on debt is the truly irresponsible action.

People have credit scores and incomes and these are used to determine home much to loan them and at what rate.  Excluding the recent lying-fueled financial bubble, markets are pretty good at loaning money.  If they predict an average loss, they don't loan.

They act the same with governments.  Except in a few cases such as Greece, where the public debt was covered up by a joint public-private partnering on a corrupt government and Goldman Sachs (who has engineered it to make money off the default, still showing that the banks look for profit, rather than civic duty), investors are loaning to governments because they think they will be paid back.  They think that the spending that is being done is either stimulative enough to outgrow interest rates or is at least preventing a loss of value, making the loans as safe place to put money even if not particularly profitable.  If they didn't think so, they'd not loan the money.  If you disagree with that, then you're attacking the very notion that actors in markets seek profits or suggesting that they are all incredibly stupid.

If spending were truly "out of control" relative to expected tax incomes, then the market would stop loaning money.  The government isn't forcing banks and individuals to loan it money.  They are doing it willingly.  If the government fails to pay them back, that's part of the risk of investing.

 The analogy with a household eventually breaks down.  Households are a few people and in the US, people have safety nets.  There are charities and welfare and food stamps.  If the breadwinners can no longer afford living expenses, they can cut spending and their children won't die.  I'm not saying the safety net is perfect in terms of being too strong or weak, but it's there and it means that a family isn't a job loss away from starvation and being beset by bandits.

The magnitudes are different, as well as the responsibilities.  If government stops spending, it ripples out, fast and wide, to hit every single family in America.  Social Security stops and suddenly seniors are without income.  But Social Security isn't the fiscal problem anyway: it won't be insolvent for decades and in the meantime, it's actually a net lender to the government: it holds Treasury bills.  We could cut welfare and food stamps, which are about 13% of the budget, thereby driving millions of citizens further into poverty and possibly starvation.  Private charities aren't going to pick up that slack.  There are not enough jobs for them to all "get a job", not in a recession.  So in effect, advocates of cutting the safety net are suggesting that potentially millions of Americans end up homeless and starving, which would eventually fix unemployment by attrition.  Health care could be cut which would at least have the effect of killing them faster than starvation and exposure.

Infrastructure is about 3%, which on one hand covers bridges to nowhere.  On the other hand, it also covers infrastructure, the roads, bridges, trains, ports, and air system which make it possible to do business here.  Look up the barriers to economic development in poor nations and somewhere between lack of education and perpetual war you'll find lack of paved roads.  Speaking of education, cutting funding there is a great way to ensure that future generations are even less employable, prolonging recessions and stagnation across generations.  Science and medical research are a mere 2% of federal spending and are another necessity for long-term growth.  Cutting any of these are equivalent to selling your arms: it might give some budget relief, but it make future growth and employment even harder.

Households can cut spending without major problems.   Governments cannot.  For all the talk of waste and excessive spending, most of what is spent is spent making this a country worth doing business in, worth living in, and safe enough to work and live in.

Beyond all that, taxes interact in a backward way with the economy.  In a recession, revenues fall.  This is where much of the current "Obama deficit" has come from.  Meeting the legal obligations to citizens, the safety net, tends to get more expensive as more people are unemployed.  None of these are due to bad policies or the particular actions of any adminstrations: neither the Obama or Bush administrations caused the recessions, though the tax cuts by both have increased the budget deficit.  Merely having an economic recovery, with no changes in tax rates or spending, will improve the budget situation.

In summary:
- Governments have obligations to their citizens and their actions have dramatic ripple effects.
- Households, and governments, are under no obligations to run balanced budgets at all times.
- Spending can be stimulative and stabilizing.
- Markets are ultimately responsible for debts as they are the ones who allow them.

The Republic is a Failed Idea

Among other things, such as mass terror and murder, the French Revolution popularized the concept of the Republic.  It sounds really nice, doesn't it?  I don't mean that in a sarcastic way.  Imagine a government that, rather than being a monarch or oligopoly, is instead created by the people of the country.  If we had a say in government then it would probably be less likely to kill us and might even make the world better for us.  As a person of a country, I must say that on the surface, in theory, this Republic concept sounds pretty neat.

In practice it's a complete failure.  Just look at the world.  The People's Republic of China is a classic model of a corrupt, brutal government, rotting with corruption and cronyism, and definitely not looking out for the people of China.  Not far away at all is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea where we regularly see the product of Republicism: belligerence, mass starvation and murder, technological stagnation, and isolation from the world.

If you read the news you've probably heard of another hostile country, the Islamic Republic, which seeks to develop its own nuclear weapons.  In Africa there is the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a humanitarian disaster spawned by wars and revolutions by a seemingly-endless succession of cruel leaders.

If we look back at history, then there is another big one, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  Stretching across Asia into Europe, this was the greatest enemy to human liberty that the world had ever seen.  It threatened Europe and all of Asia.  It triggered an arms race and wars around the world to spread its ideology.  Thankfully, in 1991 this giant experiment in Republicism collapsed, proving forever the failure of the idea of the Republic.