Wakefield:

Long time no see! You are missed around these parts as many of us enjoyed the exchange. Lets see if I can construct an answer for you.

I was always of the impression Ayn (Greenspin's wet dream) was very much in favor of letting the market run its course without government intervention. After all, whether it came to business or building a building who knew best? The businessman or the architect versus the gov. Believe me, the stories were great reads and I spent my youth delving deeply into them hoping some day I would be that architect. But like Marx, the ideals and stories failed to deliver what was portrayed in the story book lines. There was not a balance.

Perhaps, altruism is an unworthy goal of people and government. It is just to lofty a goal for one thing as you can't solve the nation's problems in entirety. On the other hand, expecting that people are the recipient of their own failings is not exactly reality. So maybe a pragmagtic balance is in order?

Lets start with those schools which you seem to believe are better if taught by religious zealots (not a bad word persay). Many of the public schools have had to make exceptions for every physical and mental disability and economic disparity in the US today. Money was alloted to public schools; but, the average of the amount since the sixties for regular education was ~1% with the rest going for the exceptions I noted. With "No Child Left a Dime," the gov mandated its existence upon the states and didn't fully fund it their presence. The same has happened with the ADA which goes back farther than Bush. They are not great schools and I can safely vouch for many state prisoners who came out of them without an ability to read, write, or do math at an 8th grade level. This is not necessarily their fault though and I think we get tied up in the amounts spent to educate the youth of today.

What if we just gave up? Instead of attempting to eductae them while young and give them a chance, we could then ouse them safely behind bars at ~$16,000 to ~$42,000 per year. The last report was there are 3 million prisoners housed by state and federal governments today. Of that statistic, the largest percentage of them are black, hispanic, or mentally ill. $46 billion expended on housing prisoners. Maybe giving up would not work and here is why.

Interesting stat from Bulhan and Fanon:

"For every 1% increase in unemployment in the United States, there was an increased mortality of 37,000 deaths per year (natural and violent) including ~2,000 more suicides and homicides than might otherwise occur." Or explained in simpler terms, for every 1% increase in Unemployment, we can expect to see increases in the mortality rate by 2%, homicides and imprisonments by 6%, and infant mortality by 5%. "Since WWII, the unemployment rate for blacks has been twice as high as that of whites." (Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression; H.A Bulhan; Mental Illness and the Economy, M.H Brenner).

If you do not have an education, you can barely work and make a living especially with the big push towards globalization today. If you are one of those who truly believe the Unemployment Ratio is 4.8%, I have a Participation Rate to sell you. So, allow me to tie this all together. Shitty or no education has a high probability of landing many young citizens in prison which results in their being housed at costs 3, 4, and maybe 10 times what this country spends on the average student going to a public school. So we have a choice here, if we do not educate them so they can be productive citizens, make a living, and pay taxes; we can house them in prison where they can get advanced degrees in criminality.

In case you do not believe this outcome, I would offer this up as additional support to the structural nature of poverty inspired violence in the US. Hertz in 2006 did a nice study on "Mobility in America." One glaring stat came out of that study, if you do not believe Fanon or Bulhan as quoted by Gilligan, "Violence, Reflections of a National Epidemic." Ok I lied, it is two stats. If born into the lowest quartile of income, white children have an ~1 of 2 chance of remaining there. If Black, the chance of remaining in the lowest quartile increases to an ~ 2 of 3 chances. Forgot one stat . . . the influencing factors are; Parental Income, Parental and Child Education, health and healthcare, neighborhood environment, and race.

Kind of a self fulfilling prophecy, don'tcha think? I would call that being pragmatic about today's environment. Given the results of no education, we can either spend on public education and seek to improve the school or we can let them rot in prison, as Rand and Kaus would expect and find acceptable. At what cost though? Educational costs are far cheaper.

Most of today's SC Justices were apointed by conservative presidents. Conner was appointed by Reagan. Maybe those presidents chose poorly? We are hardly a welfare state and I am sure most in poverty would love a way out if we let them escape.

First of all, the government certainly didn't "cause" the great depression, because it started under a laissez faire administration which had every opportunity to do, or not do, what needed to be done for almost four years. So please, don't embarrass yourself with the above tag line -- it isn't true and you know it.

Now, friend, try to think outside the box for a few moments. John Maynard Keynes claimed that the way to end the Depression was to pay men to dig holes and then to pay them to fill them in again. (He didn't mean this literally, of course. He was referring to "pump-priming" public works projects in general.) FDR tried some of this but it was politically impossible to do much of it. And, as anyone -- liberal or conservative -- will tell you, in the end it took WWII to end the Depression.

Now let me ask you: what is the difference between paying men to dig holes and then paying them to fill them in, and paying men to go get shot at, paying men to build ships, and paying men to build tanks and airplanes? Neither project adds much real WEALTH to society -- a tank is useful only as long as you're fighting a war, and nobody wants to fight wars forever. There are ancillary gains -- vastly better airplanes and nuclear energy, to name just two -- but these are things that a normally functioning capitalist society should produce in time anyhow.

The difference between WWII and FDR's "priming the pump" is precisely this -- the former was, after Pearl Harbor, politically acceptable; the latter was politically unacceptable even in the liberal atmosphere of the 1930s. Tha the government would raise taxes to unprecedented levels, would completely control the economy, and would borrow amounts of money unheard-of in our nation's history -- not even a President who won by the landslides FDR did could even dream of doing these things. He'd be told that this would ruin the economy -- you can't raise taxes in a DEPRESSION; you can't undertake massive borrowing without bankrupting the country; you can't stifle American initiative with a massive bureaucracy.

And yet, when these things HAD to be done to defeat Hitler and Tojo, all they did was to end the Depression, and launch a prosperity that lasted over a generation.

So you see, TTC, the problem was not that what FDR was doing wouldn't have worked -- we know it would have because when we HAD to try it on a large enough scale, it DID work. The problem was YOU, and the men like you of that time, who insisted that it wouldn't work, and as a result the Depression dragged on for a decade.

In an ordinary recession, demand eventually overwhelms timidity in the credit markets with the prospect of profit. Rand's insistence on letting the markets work things out makes a certain amount of sense in that context. But that's not what's happening now -- in fact, the production economy is relatively sound, though off from it's highs.

But the engine of an economy is capital, and what has been happening is that the capital markets are seizing up because of the incompetence of major financial centers in assessing and pricing risk. In the specifics here, the credit markets created "wealth" in the form of mortgages -- debt instruments -- that were in fact bogus to an unprecedented degree because normal standards of lending were thrown to the winds. It was a laissez faire administration -- doing exactly what Ayn Rand would have demanded as far as regulation was concerned -- that let this happen. Alan Greenspan, who was Rand's pupil in economics, led the way. What both Rand and Greenspan forgot is that SOME people saw a chance to make a lot of money by acting irresponsibly and then getting out while they were ahead. And when, by the miracle of modern computer tehcnology, they could write a mortgage to someone who couldn't possibly meet the payments BUT sell that mortgage to a union pension fund in Germany and elope with the profits, they did it. In fact, the banks and brokerages helped them do it.

Further compounding the problem was that the very financial institutions that should have seen that this "wealth" was bogus did not do so, and as a result were pulled down when the unraveling began. The problem is that if you let them all fail, there will be no credit markets of sufficient size to finance the recovery from the severe recession this would bring about. I don't like the idea of government bailing out multi-billion dollar corporations, either, but I like the idea of 25% REAL unemployment even less, and if a worst case scenario we're probably looking at something like that.

I never blamed Rand for her anti-Communism -- God knows she was entitled to it after having grown up there -- but for the fact that her writing very clearly drew a line that connected ordinary liberalism to Stalinism. When you claim that she denied that altruism led to Stalinism, I think you're dead wrong.

It was not altruism that led to Stalinism -- it was the use of the state by unscrupulous bureaucrats to enslave their fellow men. The same bureaucrats -- I mean, you are aware of this, aren't you? -- who now, as capitalists, continue to enslave their fellow men in Russia.

Rand, BTW, had no illusions that capitalists couldn't or wouldn't use the state for their own ends. Indeed, her most hated characters were nominally capitalists who did just this. It is why she insisted that capitalism could only work in a society in which every person strove to make his way through his best efforts. Unfortunately, the world simply doesn't work this way. Most people strive to make their way in life through their honest, best efforts, but enough people don't so that we need some way of calling them to account. There is no force that can do this other than God or government, and since God has gone out of that business for at least 3,000 years, we are left with government. It won't do a GOOD job, but it will do a better one than nobody at all.

Thank you for the fine post. It's interesting and well said. The rest of the thread is equally worthwile.

The notion that "private" and "public" ends are irreconcilably at odds with each other is a point of view that was not shared by the original "founders" of the form of governmet we claim to be heir to. While the world we've constructed since is certainly a long way from theirs, we are essentially the same human beings.

Our English word idiot derives from the Greek word idios, 'own private', idiotes, private person, layman, ignorant person. The Athenian citizen was saved from the modern American idiosyncratic delusion concerning what it means to be a citizen in a democracy through direct participation in the affairs of the city. He understood that as a citizen his life was not his alone, and as such not simply his own private affair.

The funeral oration delivered to the people of Athens after the first year of the Peloponnesian War by the great general and statesman, Pericles, provides an interesting counterpoint to how many politicians and individual Americans view public service and public servants.

...Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. Our government does not copy our neighbors', but is an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while there exists equal justice to all and alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty an obstacle, but a man may benefit his country whatever the obscurity of his condition. There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private business we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbor if he does what he likes; we do not put on sour looks at him which, though harmless, are not pleasant. While we are thus unconstrained in our private business, a spirit of reverence pervades our public acts; we are prevented from doing wrong by respect for the authorities and for the laws, having a particular regard to those which are ordainded for the protection of the injured as well as those unwritten laws which bring upon the transgressor of them the repobation of the general sentiment.

Thucydides, Pericles Funeral Oration

While there is little question that the benefits and priviledges of Greek democracy were not universally shared by all of Greek society, there is still a sense of pride, and independence that is unmistakable.

"The creed of democracy, spiritual and political liberty for all, and each man willing servant to the state, was the conception which underlay the highest reach of Greek genius. It was fatally weakened by the race for money and power in the Periclean age; the Peloponnesian War destroyed it and Greece lost it forever. Nevertheless, the ideal of free individuals unified by a spontaneous commitment to the common good was left as a possession to the world never to be forgotton."

Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way

Part of your last quote refers to: "the ideal of free individuals unified by a spontaneous commitment to the common good." It is a comment on our country today that this concept is referred to by those in power, and those friendly to them, as "soft-headed liberalism" or some such putdown.

There is a line in the Talmud, which I learned not from Jews but from the leaders of the civil rights movement in the 1960s: "If I am not for myself, then who shall be for me? If I am for myself alone, then who am I? And if not now, when?" These men and women did battle with terrorism then with little more than that, and won. We could do a lot worse today.

agreed

The irony being of course this. Economics is a religion, Ayn Rand is the supreme deity. Alan Greenspan is Jesus. Faith is that it will all work, and who says Laffer hasn't had the last.

Hi Run75441:

I am extraordinarily busy, but still:

For sanity, and formatting, see my response to some of your insights here at this:

<link>

--Wake

The concept of free individuals acting in unison for the good of each other is the essence of democratic enlightened self interest. It is the long view that recognizes that in the end no one does it better alone or is stronger by themselves. This view is anything but soft headed altruism as you point out. It is survival on a very basic but more considered level.

You can be ruthless as you wanna be and then just give away a portion of the killing to "charity" (that's not what charity is) and their God of money has to bless all this unbridled greed for mammon.... guaranteed! ... it's all in their formula.

I guess God in heaven is far too stupid to see through these wizards of commerce; God must be up there for just one purpose; to prove how magnificent their awesome lives shine here on earth. It helps to attend a church pastored by some greedy pretender who centers his/her "ministry" on filthy lucre, effectively endorsing the whole boiling pot of scum.

Not sure what you mean--but damn if you might not have a job with any impedning Obama Liberation Theology administration as a speech writer.

What is MORE amazing at even MORE levels of utter hypocrisy is that the LEFT is constantly sermonizing its own contradictory statement that you "can't legislate morals" (which presumably they generally mean personal sexual morals, since that's what they yap about the most and complain about the most as being too pollyannish from the Right) and tell us we can't judge others' personal habits, the underclass's penchant for welfare witchery, or fatherless homes causing crime waves, or advocacy of government agency now taking the place of fathers and stability in the home, then they mock the idea of traditional marriage, and YET they then tell us that "robber barons" are ripping us all off in the midst of the second highest corporate tax rates in the West, profit is pure chemically evil, and "something must be done" (by governing bodies, no doubt) to cull back the "greed."

Granted greed is sinful, but then so too is the promiscuity and social disintigration caused by the welfare state whose crimes are far more horrific than crashing stock holders. I'd rather lose my nest egg to corporate raiders--as terrible as that is(though it'd be my fault for putting all the eggs in one basket anyhow...)--than getting capped in a parking lot over bucks and my wife's dinner ring by someone needing a quick crack fix.

We'll go stand over here....

I mean exactly what I wrote. Every big money enterprise preaches that you should give a portion away to charity; that it ensures that God will continue to bless your business. And every big money enterprise does exactly that. If you have as much money to give away as microsoft mogul Gates, you need a committee just to decide where to send all the money.

Since when did Jesus say anything about tithing big business profits to "charitable" foundations? Since when did "charity" come to mean the giving of money?

Have you read the New Testament? Why don't you understand what I mean? I trained for ministry in my church in 1985-86, have preached Jesus all over the nation, I'm serious about following the word of God... which strictly forbids preaching for filthy lucre and point blank tells us that "hirelings" who do so, don't care for the sheep.