The US political landscape in 2016

Historical preamble

The people of the United States tend to decide that after eight years of one political party being in the White House, it is time for a change. Since George Washington took the office in 1789, it has happened only eight times that one party has headed the executive branch for more than eight consecutive years. Washington’s Federalist Party was in power for a total of twelve years, but after John Adams was defeated after one term by Thomas Jefferson, the Federalist Party never again occupied the presidency. Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans held the presidency for the next twenty-eight years, as Jefferson, Madison and Monroe served two terms each, followed by John Quincy Adams serving a single term. Since Adams left office in 1829, no political party has retained the presidency that long, and no Democratic-Republican was ever elected again. After that, the Democratic Party has occupied the White House more than eight years just twice. Andrew Jackson and his successor, Martin Van Buren, led the executive branch for a total of twelve years (1829–1841), and Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman held the office for a total of twenty years (1933–1953). The Republican Party has done somewhat better. They were in power for sixteen years from 1869 until 1885 with the presidencies of Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield and Chester A. Arthur, and for another sixteen years from 1897 until 1913 with the presidencies of William McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. The Republicans had two further twelve-year runs through the presidencies of Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover (1921–1933) and the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush (1981–1993). Since the 22nd Amendment was ratified in 1951, limiting a President’s tenure to a maximum of two terms, the election of Bush after Reagan is the only time a non-incumbent has been elected from the same party as his predecessor.

Applying the Pattern

If the 2016 election follows the pattern that has predominated since 1951, the Democratic Party will most likely lose to the Republican Party. If any one of the three candidates still actively vying for the nomination of the Republican Party as of March 18, 2016 manages to become the next President of the United States, the country’s change in direction will be noticeable. All three Republican candidates are promising to reduce or even eliminate most environmental regulations, measures that protect consumers from unscrupulous banking practices, and federal social programs aimed at providing aid to the poor and opportunity to marginalized. One candidate, Ted Cruz, has promised to eliminate the Internal Revenue Service altogether. These promises to “reduce the size of government,” if carried out, would fulfill the dreams of such anti-government billionaires as the descendants of Andrew Mellon, Fred Koch, John M. Olin and Lynde and Harry Bradley, who for decades have been generously funding lobbying campaigns against taxation, social security, welfare programs, and the regulation of the business sector, and pouring money into education programs that emphasize the values of a free-market economy. These lobbying and “educational” efforts have managed to convince numerous politicians, and the voters who vote for them, that taxation is a form of theft (or of punishment of the industrious and successful) and that welfare is immoral because it weakens those who avail themselves of it by making them dependent on handouts rather than industrious and self-reliant.

Although the incessantly repeated mantra of this year’s Republican candidates is reducing the size of government, there are some areas of life in which increased government is being called for. All of the candidates, for example, want to make the military significantly stronger and to deploy personnel and materiel to politically unstable parts of the world. The military is part of the government. Moreover, there is a shared will to expand the size and the powers of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and to “secure our borders,” and to enhance the ability of various other agencies to surveil and detain known or suspected “bad guys,” all in the name of making America safe. Some, but not all, of the current Republican candidates seem to be in favor of increased governmental regulations against same-sex marriage, although this effort is now being marketed as an effort to reduce government-imposed restrictions on the freedoms of religious people to manifest their biases against people whom they deem to be offensive in the eyes of God. There also seems to be a consensus that restricting the use of marijuana, even for medical purposes, is a desideratum; doing so everywhere in the nation, including states in which marijuana use is now legal by state law, would require increased power at the federal level. At the risk of oversimplification, the Republican theme appears to be less governmental control of non-human entities such as corporations and more governmental control of human citizens in almost all areas except their absolute and untrammeled right to bear arms.

Political plotting

Some time ago I wrote a post about an alternative to the outdated characterization of political views as left or right, and liberal or conservative. The so-called Political Compass plots political views along a horizontal and a vertical axis. The visitor to that site can take a quiz that then plots the visitor’s overall political philosophy on a Cartesian graph. The horizontal x-axis shows the degree to which one favors governmental regulation of the economy, with heavy regulation to the left and no regulation to the right. The vertical y-axis shows the degree to which one favors an authoritarian government, with heavy authoritarianism at the top and libertarianism at the bottom. On that way of plotting political views, a libertarian socialist (such as Noam Chomsky, Nelson Mandela or Dennis Kucinich) would fall in the southwest quadrant, while a more authoritarian laissez-faire free-market capitalist (such as all the Republican candidates and Hillary Clinton) would fall in the northeast quadrant. The Political Compass provides a graph of the 2016 Presidential candidates still in the race. On that graph, Hillary Clinton is almost as far to the right on the economic scale as the Republican candidates but significantly less authoritarian. (Not surprisingly, Donald Trump is near the top of the authoritarian scale; he is, however, somewhat to the left of Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio on economic matters.) It is noteworthy that only two US presidential candidates (Kucinich and Bernie Sanders) who have run as Republicans or Democrats in the 21st century fall outside the northeast quadrant.

There is another way of characterizing political views on a website called On the Issues. The visitor to that site can take a quiz of twenty questions, the responses to which will show the visitor’s overall philosophical views on a diamond-shaped grid. It will also show the degree to which the visitor agrees with each of the political candidates from the two major parties, including those who have dropped out of the race or suspended their campaigns, and of other parties such as the Green Party and the Peace and Freedom Party. When I took the quiz, for example, the website calculated that I am 98% in agreement with Jill Stein of the Green Party, 90% with Bernie Sanders, 78% with Elizabeth Warren, 75% with Hillary Clinton, 63% with President Obama, and 3% with Donald Trump, Rick Santorum and Ted Cruz.

Like the Political Compass website, the On the Issues website scores the visitor’s quiz answers in two categories, which they call the Personal or Social Score and the Economic Score. A high Personal Score indicates a strong belief in personal and social freedoms, which manifests as a belief in tolerance for different people and different lifestyles, while a low score indicates a belief that one’s standards of morality and safety should be enforced by government. (My score was 100%.) A high Economic Score, on the other hand, indicates a strong belief in markets free of regulations, tariffs and other factors that limit free enterprise. A high Economic Score indicates a belief in personal responsibility for financial matters and a conviction that free-market competition is better for society than a planned and regulated economy, while a low score indicates a belief that a good society is best achieved by government redistributing wealth and making decisions about which programs are good for society. (My score was 0%.)

By taking both scores into account on a graph, a political label is generated. At the limits, a score of 0% on both the personal and economic scale—minimum personal and economic freedom—indicates what the authors of the website puzzlingly called a Populist view. Both National Socialism and Fascism are sometimes characterized as populist movements, so it might be more accurate to call the zero-freedom stance Fascism. The website’s authors call high score of 100% on both scales—maximum personal and market freedom—a Libertarian view. 100% personal/social and 0% economic is called a Hard-core Liberal position, while 0% personal/social and 100% economic is called a Hard-core Conservative position.

Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, both of whom scored 100% personal/social and 0% economic are labelled Hard-core Liberals. Hillary Clinton, with a score of 80% personal/social 10% economic, is also labelled Hard-core Liberal, as is Barack Obama (80%, 20%). In fact, every Democratic politician at the actual or aspiring presidential level discussed on the website is called a Hard-core Liberal, the differences in their scores being relatively minor.

There is somewhat more variety among the thirteen Republican candidates. Among Republican presidential candidates who have suspended their campaigns, Chris Christie is labeled a Moderate Libertarian Conservative (50%, 70%), while Rand Paul (60%, 90%) is called a Libertarian Conservative; Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson (both 30%, 80%) are Libertarian-leaning Conservatives; and Marco Rubio (10%, 80%), Rick Santorum (10%, 90%), Bobby Jindal (20%, 90%), Jeb Bush, Lindsey Graham and Mike Huckabee (all at 20%, 80%) are all Hard-core Conservatives. Of the Republicans still actively contending for their party’s nomination as of March 18, John Kasich (40%, 90%) and Donald Trump (30%, 80%) are labeled Libertarian-leaning Conservatives, while Ted Cruz (20%, 100%) is the only remaining Hard-core Conservative.

That only two candidates from either party, Republicans Chris Christie and George Pataki, fall in the sector that the website labels Moderate is an indication of how polarized this year’s presidential campaign has been.

In a future post I will make an effort not only to describe but to defend the position that the On the Issues website designates Hard-core Liberalism.

Burn all the flags everywhere

Ever since the tragic shootings in Charleston, SC on June 17, 2015 of nine African Americans at a historically important black church, there has been an animated discussion of whether it is appropriate to fly what is commonly known as the Confederate flag. Although it was never the flag of the Confederate States of America, the flag known as the Confederate flag has long been popular among white people in the states that seceded from the United States in 1860 and 1861, namely, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia. Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina. To many African Americans, however, the flag is a painful reminder of centuries of slavery, followed by generations of racial segregation and systematic humiliation and marginalization at the hands of white people. In the wake of the racially motivated murders in Charleston, people all over the United States are arguing that the symbols of the Confederate States of America are divisive and racist and therefore no longer acceptable in a country trying to heal the deep wounds of a disgraceful past.

In following this debate, I have been struck by the fact that most of the claims made about the Confederate flag in the South could also be said of the star-spangled banner that waves over the state of New Mexico. The flag of the United States of America symbolizes the most recent in a series of conquests that this piece of land has experienced during the past five hundred years. The flag of the USA began to fly over New Mexico shortly after the the war of aggression that President James K. Polk initiated against Mexico in 1846. As a result of that war, in 1848 the United States of Mexico ceded Alta California (which included parts of the modern states of California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming) and Santa Fe de Nuevo México (which included most of the modern state of New Mexico, and western Texas, the Oklahoma panhandle, and parts of Kansas and Colorado) to the United States. In 1848, the flag of the United States of America replaced the flag of the United States of Mexico, which in turn had replaced the flag of Spain when Mexico gained its independence on September 28, 1821. To many of the native Americans whose ancestors had lived in what the Spanish had called Alta California and Nuevo México, none of these flags planted by the descendants of Europeans was especially welcome.

During the sixty-four years between the time that New Mexico became a territory of the United States of America until it became a state in 1912, there was constant discussion in Washington, D.C. over whether New Mexico was fit to be admitted as one of the United States. Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana argued strenuously that the Spanish-speaking and Indian population of New Mexico were incapable of self-rule and must be ruled without their consent by Anglo Americans. It was the responsibility of Anglo Americans, said Beveridge, to educate and civilize the peoples of New Mexico, which of course meant teaching them English. Senator Beveridge’s opinion was shared by a succession of American presidents. President Zachary Taylor favored statehood for New Mexico, but his premature death in 1850 brought an end to presidential enthusiam for that prospect. The next twelve presidents, preoccupied with other issues, were at the best indifferent to New Mexico. President McKinley (1897–1901) was concerned that New Mexico would not be ready for statehood until the various “savages” in the territory were outnumbered by English-speaking Americans. His successor, President Theodore Roosevelt (1901–1909), made no attempt to disguise his contempt for the Spanish, and he feared the Spanish influence in New Mexico had made the men of the territory far too effeminate to rule an independent state, while the Comanches and Apaches were considered untamed and recalcitrant obstacles to the advance of civilization. For a good many of the residents of the territory of New Mexico, the flag of the United States of America betokened a condescending paternalism that was used to justify the exploitation and colonization of the territory and its inhabitants, and statehood came as an indication that the territory had been fully conquered by English-speaking Euro-Americans. It is impossible to see the American flag flying in the state of New Mexico without being reminded of the racist and anti-Catholic attitudes behind the domination of the territory on the way to statehood.

Thinking about the matter even further, what is true of the Confederate flag in the South and the United States flag in the Southwest can probably be extended to every flag planted everywhere in the world (and on the surface of the moon). Flags are to human beings as urine is to canines. They claim territory and mark boundaries. They are by their customary usage symbols of domination, exclusion and exceptionalism. They indicate a willingness to fight to preserve the marked territory. While it can hardly be said that flags are themselves the cause of wars, they are certainly manifestations of all the underlying conditions of war. A flag says “Those who salute this piece of cloth belong here; those who do not should go elsewhere.” Flags—whether they be those of nations, states, counties, municipalities, corporations, educational institutions, religious institutions, rebel organizations, criminal syndicates or yacht clubs—are manifestations of the most animalistic and savage side of the human race. It is time to consider taking every flag ever designed off the flagpole and consigning it either to a bonfire or to a museum of horrors. And it is certainly time to evolve out of all the territorialism and competition for which flags stand.

Seventeen years after New Mexico became a state, President Herbert Hoover signed a Congressional resolution making “The Star-Spangled Banner” the national anthem of the United States of America. The song had been composed in 1814 after a crucial battle in the the Anglo-American War of 1812, the first war declared by the United States after it gained independence from Great Britain on September 3, 1783 . The anthem is a song about the nation’s flag and about American militarism. I first became uncomfortable singing it (and not only because it is a fiendishly difficult tune for anyone but a trained singer to carry) while I was an adolescent, and I have never been willing to sing it as an adult. The same is true of the pledge of allegiance to the flag. I simply will not say those words. It is my conviction that the age of nations must come to an end so that the human race can evolve beyond itself and leave itself behind—something it must do for its own survival.

Our War Against the Past

The idea of wilderness needs no defense, it only needs defenders.—Edward Abbey

In 1966 construction was completed on the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River. The beautiful Glen Canyon was flooded with waters that eventually formed Lake Powell, now the second largest artificial lake in the United States. The purpose of the dam was to generate hydroelectric power, a large percentage of which went to Las Vegas, Nevada to help keep that city’s bright lights illuminated all night and its fountains flowing around the clock. One of Edward Abbey’s best-known novels was a dark comedy called The Monkey Wrench Gang, which featured the antics of a team of environmentalists and anarchists determined to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam.

Throughout the time of the dam’s planning and construction, opposition was mounted by people concerned with the impact the dam would have on the delicate ecological system of the Colorado River, while advocates of the dam heralded the recreational revenue that the reservoir would provide, not to mention the electricity the facilty would generate. The argument was made that in its wilderness state, Glen Canyon was accessible only to a handful of outdoors enthusiasts capable of navigating the often-difficult Colorado River by boat or to a few hikers capable of the arduous walk into the remote area, whereas Lake Powell would be accessible to everyone via paved roads. To favor a handful of physically fit individuals who could visit the Glen Canyon wilderness over the thousands of vacationers who would visit Lake Powell, said the advocates of the dam, was elitism, perhaps even anti-democratic.

I remember the arguments well, for the effort to prevent the construction of the Glen Canyon dam was the first environmental campaign in which I participated, to the limited extent that I was in a position to act as a student in high school. My father, one of those hardy few who had gone through Glen Canyon by rowboat, was much more involved than I in the opposition campaign. The completion of the dam was felt as a bitter defeat within our family. (Little did I know then that many more would follow.)

Despite my taking sides against the construction of the dam, no doubt heavily influenced by my environmentalist father and all the literature of the Sierra Club that lay on coffee tables around our house, I did experience a conflict over the issue mentioned above. It did make sense to me that Lake Powell would bring pleasure to a large number of people, and I had just enough of a Hedonic Utilitarian streak in me that I was then not quite able to find a good response to the charge that wanting to preserve the wilderness for a few was a form of elitism. I knew that I personally strongly desired for the geological record of the canyon’s wilderness to remain intact, and I knew that I thought that leaving the flora and fauna of that region intact was more important than the opportunity for hundreds of vacationers to race around an artifical lake in speedboats. But why should preference be given to what I personally desired when so many other people clearly had different desires?

Five decades after the completion of the Glen Canyon dam, I find myself once again wrestling with the same issues and taking the same side in the seemingly endless war against the past being waged by denizens of the present. And although I have taken sides, I still experience an intellectual conflict lurking beneath my unambiguous emotional clarity. The war is being waged on many fronts. I will mention only one.

I was born and spent my youth in New Mexico, a land that has been populated for at least ten thousand years by various peoples. Europeans began coming relatively recently, around 1540, and they promptly claimed the land for Spain. As a New Mexican of European (mostly English) descent, I have always felt it important to learn as much as possible about all the peoples who have been in this land before my own ancestors came in the 1930s. No doubt this feeling was reinforced by the strong influence of an uncle who spent most of his adult life studying the archaeology of the ancestral Puebloan people of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Arizona. It has always been axiomatic to me that the Euro-Americans have a moral responsibility not to obliterate the traces of those who first settled this land and learned how to survive the challenges of an arid region that only begrudgingly tolerates human occupation. Like most things that are axiomatic to a person, that conviction of moral responsibility is not something I have questioned very deeply. My instinct is, whenever possible, to leave traces of the past intact, whether it is the relatively recent human past or the billions of years of geological past. Even my decades of Buddhist indoctrination in the principle that everything is impermanent have not made much of a dent in my instinct not to let the past slip entirely into oblivion.

Always encroaching on the past is the present and the future (or at least present fantasies about the future). People in the present desire petroleum, natural gas, uranium, copper and various other resources found in the lands that were once occupied by the ancestors of the Pueblos, then by Athabascans migrating from the north and Numic migrating from the Great Plains. Extracting these resources requires building roads, digging and drilling the earth and leaving large waste deposits and scars, all of which degrade or destroy the archaeological evidence of past settlements and, to a lesser extent, the geological record.

One part of the Southwestern United States in which this conflict is strongly felt is southeastern Utah. Elected Senators from the state have said that the the stark landscape of the region has no use other than to provide raw materials for manufacturing and the fuels needed to provide the energy for manufacturing. Preserving the history of the area—especially the history before Europeans settled the region—is not a high priority for those who wish to stimulate the industrial economy. Preserving wilderness is, in their view, a job-killing enterprise and a power grab on the part of bungling bureaucrats in Washington.

There are thousands of recorded archaeological sites in southeastern Utah, and it is estimated that those recorded sites represent about 10% of the sites that are still in the area waiting to be catalogued. Obviously not all of them can be preserved. In fact, archaeological resources are so strained that only a tiny fraction of the recorded sites will ever be studied. Archaeological study is limited not only by a lack of adequate funding and a paucity of qualified archaeologists, but also by the fact that the most probable descendants of the Basketmaker and early Pueblo people who lived in the Four Corners area from 2000 to 800 years ago do not necessarily want their ancestors studied by outsiders. Many tribes, for example, forbid DNA analysis of human remains, probably because such DNA studies as have been done have shown that the Pueblos probably came from Asia rather than being created in North America. Further DNA studies could (but probably would not) show that the ancient peoples in the Four Corners area are not really the ancestors of the modern Zuñi and Hopi and Keres people after all, and a finding like that that would conflict with the oral histories those people have carefully preserved for centuries. Moreover, some tribal elders say their ancestors abandoned their former settlement sites for a reason, and they want those abandoned sites to return to nature. Perhaps, some may say, the past is really none of our business. It should just be allowed to slip away while we pursue those things that really are our business.

Although I have had several decades to find ways of convincing people who do not share my views on the importance of preserving evidence of how those who came before us lived their lives (and how the earth was before much of anything was alive on it), I still have nothing to offer but what many would probably deem feeble sentimentality. But supposing some good reasons could be found not to lay waste to traces of the past, the question arises as to who should do the preserving. Since the time of Theodore Roosevelt, preserving wilderness and historical monuments has been the responsibility of federal and state governments. Those who follow Edward Abbey’s anarchist sentiments might find it alarming that governments involved themselves in such business. After all, Abbey wrote

Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others.

And

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.

Such sentiments as these could easily come from the mouths of today’s Tea Party Republicans and Libertarians.

The most obvious response to such anarchist convictions is the observation that if governments do not take measures to conserve wilderness and historical sites, it is unlikely that anyone will. As Ronald Reagan was fond of saying, government should do only those things that only government can (and is willing) to do. Protecting wilderness and historical sites is a perfect example of something that only government can do.

Private enterprise is unlikely to find any economic incentive to pursue archaeological or historical research or preservation of wilderness, and in the absence of economic incentive, private enterprise is unlikely to find any incentive at all. People with a strong ideological bias might sponsor research that finds evidence to support their particular dogmas—one thinks, for example of the wing of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History sponsored by David H. Koch, the message of which is that every time there has been climate change in the past, the human race has evolved to a higher level (leaving the viewer to conclude that climate change, and anything that brings it about, is therefore good).

Leaving the interpretation of the past only to those with vested commercial or ideological interests is not much of an improvement to leaving archaeological evidence of Buddhist Afghanistan in the sole custody of the Taliban or leaving the physical remains of Akkadian and Assyrian civilization in the care of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). If wilderness and artifacts of early human settlements are to be kept intact for the present and future generations to study and contemplate, no one is better suited to carry out that mission than the National Park Service, the National Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management. That said, what remains to be seen is whether we who live here now will have the collective will to give our government the power it needs to preserve the past for the future.

Are you listening, Mr Boehner?

Americans have entrusted Republicans with control of both the House and Senate. We are humbled by this opportunity to help struggling middle-class Americans who are clearly frustrated by an increasing lack of opportunity, the stagnation of wages, and a government that seems incapable of performing even basic tasks. — John Boehner and Mitch McConnell

Speaker of the House John Boehner and current Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell often state the importance of listening to the American people. When they emphasize the importance of listening, I am assuming they are stressing the importance of carefully considering all the many points of view expressed by Americans, and not only the opinions of those who make substantial contributions to the triumphant political party and those who can be counted on to vote for candidates who have been captured in the gravitational field of Messrs. Boehner and McConnell. Taking them at their word that they listen to American people, I am taking the liberty of writing this as an American person. I shall express my perspective on the state of our nation by offering a commentary to an opinion piece published in the November 5, 2014 Wall Street Journal by Mr. Boehner (R., Ohio) and Mr. McConnell (R., Kentucky).

Looking ahead to the next Congress, we will honor the voters’ trust by focusing, first, on jobs and the economy. Among other things, that means a renewed effort to debate and vote on the many bills that passed the Republican-led House in recent years with bipartisan support, but were never even brought to a vote by the Democratic Senate majority. It also means renewing our commitment to repeal ObamaCare, which is hurting the job market along with Americans’ health care.

First, it may be worth taking into consideration that many Americans find other issues every bit as pressing as the economy, especially given that when politicians talk about the economy, they are nearly always talking about that aspect of the economy that is measured in returns for investors in the stock market. A broader view of the economy also takes into account the level of wages for people who must sell their labor to make a living, the kinds of employment benefits available to workers, and the environmental sustainability of producing goods and services. It is disappointing, therefore, to see Messrs. Boehner and McConnell draw attention to their commitment to repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (which they choose to call ObamaCare). This is a matter on which the American people do not speak univocally. Many have been able to afford health insurance for the first time in their lives, thanks to that Act; those people may like to see the Act strengthened in various ways rather than repealed. Not everyone is in favor of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and those who are not contented with it are troubled by it for very different reasons. Some of us were hoping for a single-payer government-managed health insurance plan similar to what the citizens of Quebec enjoy; others would prefer to take their chances on remaining uninsured. Surely, when American opinion is so diversified, a more cautious promise to the American people would be to examine the PPACA carefully, rather than to repeal it altogether.

Secondly, it is worth mentioning that there were many factors involved in the undeniable dysfunction of the Senate. No small factor in the paralysis of the Congress was the tactic, repeatedly used by Republicans, of using filibuster to make debate impossible. The lack of a cooperative spirit in the Congress has by no means been one-sided. It takes at least two parties to participate in the condition commonly called gridlock. A common perception among American people of all political persuasions is that hardly anyone in the Congress is willing to put partisanship and ideological posturing aside. It is fundamentally dishonest for anyone in Congress to lay all the blame on those who sit on the opposite side of the aisle from themselves. It is the childish name-calling and sloganeering that many of the American people find distasteful about Congress. It is encouraging to hear a promise to remedy that infantile behavior, but the promise is unlikely to be fulfilled if all the newly empowered members of Congress can say are such things as “For years, the House did its job and produced a steady stream of bills that would remove barriers to job creation and lower energy costs for families. Many passed with bipartisan support—only to gather dust in a Democratic-controlled Senate that kept them from ever reaching the president’s desk.” The American people deserve better political analysis than that sort of one-sided finger-pointing.

We’ll also consider legislation to help protect and expand America’s emerging energy boom and to support innovative charter schools around the country.These bills include measures authorizing the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which will mean lower energy costs for families and more jobs for American workers…

Given that estimates for the number of permanent jobs that the Keystone XL pipeline will create vary between 35 and 50, it may be worth giving priority to developing solar and wind power. The pipeline is designed to transport crude from the oil sands of Canada, an operation that has had devastating consequences for the environment in Canada. Moreover, importing fossil fuels only encourages continuing their use at a time when climate scientists around the world are warning that irreversible damage is likely to ensue if alternatives to fossil fuels are not developed around the word immediately. The continued use of coal, natural gas and petroleum for energy production may have very short-term advantages, but their use is an example of ways in which the current generation is living at the expense of our children and grandchildren and further generations to come. The Republican caucus has repeatedly shown sensitivity to the moral bankruptcy involved in this generation’s prospering at the expense of generations to come; the call for a review of entitlement programs demonstrates Republican concern for generations to come. While a review of entitlements is indeed overdue and will no doubt require making difficult and unpopular decisions, it is to be hoped that concern for the future will not be limited to that issue but will also include environmental issues.

More good ideas aimed at helping the American middle class will follow. And as we work to persuade others of their merit, we won’t repeat the mistakes made when a different majority ran Congress in the first years of Barack Obama’s presidency, attempting to reshape large chunks of the nation’s economy with massive bills that few Americans have read and fewer understand.

Helping the American middle class is an excellent idea. During recent decades, wealth and opportunities have been diminishing for the middle class, and even more so for those at the bottom of the economic ladder, while the wealthiest have been prospering at unprecedented levels. The playing field of the American dream has been dramatically tilted in favor of the millionaires and billionaires, and everyone else is suffering. Changing that situation is urgently required. It is encouraging to know that the new Congress will make reform of the plutocratic system that has evolved in America since the Reagan years a priority.

Also encouraging is the promise—if it is kept—to design shorter bills that deal with only one issue and that Members of Congress can read and understand (for it is far more important for the lawmakers to be able to read and understand bills than it is for the general public). The practice of attaching irrelevant amendments and earmarks to bills as a tactic may be politically advantageous in the short term, but the long-term economic and political consequences can be catastrophic. The time for refraining from such practices and returning to more streamlined, straightforward and honest legislation is long overdue.

Messrs. Boehner and McConnell list several other priorities, some of which deserve careful consideration.

• The insanely complex tax code that is driving American jobs overseas;

Presidential candidates have been promising since at least the mid-1970s to simplify the tax code. Attempts to do so have been constantly thwarted, largely by successful lobbying campaigns aimed at preserving provisions that individuals and corporations with vested interests find to their advantage. One can only wish the newly elected Congress luck in reducing the insane complexity of the code. It may also be worth exploring what other factors are driving international corporations to base their operations overseas rather than in America. Laying all the blame on the current tax code smacks of oversimplification.

Simplifying the tax code may be one of those tasks best accomplished not by trying to please the American people but by laying aside ideology and working in a bipartisan way. What is needed is for the Congress to figure out what is necessary and what is possible, to draft legislation and then, with the help of the Executive branch of government, to explain the solution to the American people and explain why the solution reached is to everyone’s long-term advantage.

• Health costs that continue to rise under a hopelessly flawed law that Americans have never supported;

Health costs are bound to rise in a for-profit system. Opportunistic pharmaceutical companies, manufacturers of medical appliances, clinics and other healthcare providers have learned that people who are desperately in need of care are willing to pay handsomely to have their health restored. Rather than viewing healthcare as a potentially profitable business, it is time to view it as it is viewed in most other industrialized nations—a government-provided service that should be universally available to all legal residents of a country.

It is false to say without qualification that Americans have never supported the current law known as the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Many Americans did, and still do, support it. Many of those who did not support it were disappointed that it did not include a single-payer option. Public opinion on this matter has been truly divided, and that must be acknowledged if any progress is to be made. Simply claiming that Americans are united in their opposition to the current law is a misrepresentation of the facts and does not manifest the kind of bipartisanship and integrity that everyone hopes will characterize the newly elected Congress.

• A savage global terrorist threat that seeks to wage war on every American;

This is an issue that must be examined honestly and in some depth. It must be asked why some people are so displeased with America that they are prepared to visit violence on Americans and on people from countries that cooperate with America. Simply characterizing other people as savage is not a good beginning at finding a way to bring their anger to an end.

The United States of America is the largest military presence on the planet, and the leaders of the United States have not always used military power well. US military operations in foreign countries have not always been altruistic, and have not always been welcome. It is not at all surprising that the US is perceived as a colonial power and as a bully. Our collective response to threats has nearly always been to use force, and the constant use of force is a significant factor in alienating people in other countries. It is not that the United States has enemies so much as that the United States has policies that turn friends into enemies. Bringing an end to the global terrorist threat can only begin by honest and careful reflection on what kinds of policies have turned other people hostile and made them resort to measures that terrify us. No enemy can ever be pacified until we have collectively made an attempt to understood what we have done to make them hostile towards us.

• An education system that denies choice to parents and denies a good education to too many children;

This is so vague as to be nearly meaningless. While it always seems pleasant and benign to offer people choices, it must be asked what kinds of choices are being talked about here. Are we talking about giving people a choice to have their children taught in Spanish or Arabic instead of English? Are we talking about giving people a choice to have their children taught a particular religious mythology instead of the findings of science? Are we talking about giving parents the option to have their children taught the speculations of conspiracy theorists instead of the historical perspectives of mainstream society?

It may well be that it is not so much a lack of choice in curriculum that is depriving children of a good education, but other facts such as poverty and its attendant problems of malnutrition and homelessness. There are more children living below the poverty level in the United States than in any other industrialized country. For far too many children in this country, poverty stands as an insurmountable obstacle to getting any kind of education other than what they learn on the streets. For them, offering choices in curriculum and pedagogical style is meaningless, since all choices are equally out of reach to too many citizens and legal residents of the United States.

• Excessive regulations and frivolous lawsuits that are driving up costs for families and preventing the economy from growing;

This is another example of an oversimplification. Surely there is far more to rising costs than excessive regulations and lawsuits, and surely regulations and lawsuits have consequences other than simply driving up costs. Some costs go up because of a scarcity of resources; others go up because of greed and opportunism on the part of those who provide goods and services; others go up because of the lack of real competition in the marketplace. Most of the regulations that exist nowadays were designed to prevent abuses to consumers, abuses of workers, and abuses to the environment. While it is no doubt true that many regulations fail to offer the full protections they were originally designed to produce, the remedy to a poorly designed regulation is to replace it with a better-designed regulation, not simply to jettison regulation altogether.

As for lawsuits, it is really the Judicial branch of government that has the task of deciding which lawsuits are frivolous and which are legitimate. That sort of thing is not for Congress to decide. Just as it is not in anyone’s interest to have judges legislating from the bench, it is also not in anyone’s interest to have legislators passing judgment on matters of law. Lawsuits are, and should be, legal. Leave it to the courts to decide when a legal lawsuit has merit and when it does not. That is the Judicial branch’s job.

• A national debt that has Americans stealing from their children and grandchildren, robbing them of benefits that they will never see and leaving them with burdens that will be nearly impossible to repay.

Early Americans such as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine stated that government is for the living and not for the dead, by which they meant that no generation has a right to live in such a way that subsequent generations will not be able to live at approximately the same level of flourishing. Very few people today would argue against the claim that the decisions that the current generation of Americans are making will saddle the future generations with almost unbearable burdens. The impact of our collective lifestyle on the environment has already been mentioned. Current fiscal behavior is also in urgent need of addressing carefully and honestly.

By far the greatest amount of wasteful expenditure in the world today, and especially in the United States of America, is money put into the military. Finding a way to trim the swollen budgets of the military is the most urgent economic task before the nation today. Finding a way to bring the military budget down to a more modest and reasonable size would reduce the debt and make money available for education, healthcare, providing shelter for the homeless and taking care of the physically and mentally disabled. Spending money for those constructive endeavors instead of for the essentially destructive endeavor of preparing for military campaigns on foreign soil may well be the single best way to improve the American economy.

In closing, let me point out that the turnout in the 2014 election was only 36.4% of all eligible voters, which is the lowest voter turnout since 1942. Those who voted in 2014 have collectively expressed their preferences in local elections, but an aggressive attempt should be made to research what the priorities are of the 63.6% of eligible American voters who chose not to cast votes in the 2014 elections. It may be worth trying to learn why nearly two-thirds of voters chose not to make their voices heard. It is no doubt true that the American political system has become dysfunctional in many ways, and one of the manifestations of the malaise is the apparent indifference, and perhaps even despair, of the American people. Many of them seem to have given up hope. It is time to give all Americans, and not just those who write large checks to support their favorite political party, a truly good reason to hope. A first step in offering that reason to hope is for those in power to listen.

Aging gracefully

“At 15, I set my heart on learning. At 30 I knew where I stand. At 40, I had no more doubts, at 50, I knew the will of Heaven. At 60 my ears were attuned. At 70, I follow my heart’s desire without crossing the line.”—Confucius

Although I am increasingly reluctant to watch news programs on television—one can stand to see only so much bloodshed and tragedy—, I still have the habit of watching the evening news on PBS or one of the three networks I knew as a child: ABC, CBS or NBC. Watching the network news stations entails seeing a good deal of advertising. Watching which products are advertised with the evening news makes it clear that the networks have learned what kinds of people watch their news programs. Almost all of the products advertised are aimed at the so-called Baby Boomer generation, the folks who are most likely in the market for Viagra or Cialis, or products that ease the pain of post-menopausal sexual intercourse or arthritis or that relieve the symptoms of enlarged prostate or leaky bladders or indigestion, or products that minimize the effects of osteoporosis, or products that hide or eliminate or prevents wrinkles or double chins or bags under the eyes. The advertising one sees on the network news suggest two social trends that are separate from one another but collectively somewhat troubling. One of the issues is troubling to many older people, and the other is (or ought to be) troubling to everyone.

To begin with the social trend that is troubling to many people over the age of 60 or so, there is a perception that young adults do not know what is going on in the world. Some years ago I taught a course in reasoning and critical thinking, one of the required core courses for all undergraduates at my university, and one election year I decided to focus on the quality of argumentation found in political campaigning and in the official platforms of the various political parties (Republicans, Democrats, Green and Libertarian). In one of the first classes of the semester, I asked the class how many of them read the New York Times. None. Los Angeles Times? Wall Street Journal? Christian Science Monitor? USA Today? The local newspaper? None. Well, I thought, perhaps newspapers are not as popular as periodical news magazines, so I asked how many students in the class read Time Magazine. None. Newsweek? The Economist? Foreign Affairs? Mother Jones? The National Review? The New Republic? None. Well, I thought, perhaps students prefer watching television—although I had seen a Pew Research Center report that young adults were far less interested in television than their parents and grandparents were. So I asked how many students watched news on ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC or C-SPAN. None. Finally, not having named a single news source that any of my students would admit to using, I asked where they went to get information about what is going on in the world. Students began calling out their favorite sources of news, almost all of them sites on the Internet. Of the sources they named, I had heard of only two: Jon Stewart’s Daily Show and The Colbert Report (both of which I had watched for a few minutes before flipping the channel to something that seemed a little more promising).

As the semester progressed, it was apparent to me that most of the students had a pretty good idea of what was going on in the world, combined with a fairly poor idea of where anything in the world is located and an even worse idea of what happened in the world before last Tuesday. With a few exceptions, their general knowledge of history and geography seemed to range from mediocre to abysmal, but they did seem to be acquiring fairly good information about current affairs. It’s just that their sources were mostly unfamiliar to me, just as my sources were unfamiliar to them. While somewhat discouraged by the general lack of knowledge about history and geography, I could at least feel encouraged that they were not consuming the deeply biased reportage that one finds on Fox News and MSNBC, although they were consuming the strange blend of reportage and entertainment that one gets on the Comedy Central programs. All things considered, I think I came away from the experience somewhat less alarmed by the younger generation than many people my age—I was born in 1945. On the other hand, I did not manage to convince many of my age peers that there is no reason to be alarmed by how uninformed today’s college freshmen are. (I learned it did not help at all to remind people of how ignorant and uninformed we all were when we were eighteen and nineteen, way back in the early 1960s. I can still recall, albeit with acute embarrassment, that when I, at the age of 18, picked up Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, I thought the story was unfolding in Africa. Perhaps I thought that because the novel is about, among other people, Sikhs, and the only Sikh I had ever met came from Uganda. It is now almost beyond belief to me that I ever could have been so abysmally ignorant of geography that I thought Pakistan might be in Africa, but I am guessing I was not alone in my generation in my general level of geographical ignorance. It is easy to forget at the age of 60 that one knew considerably less at the age of 20.)

While I am not particularly worried about the quality of information that the younger generation in particular is consuming, I continue to be alarmed at the very poor quality of information readily available to Americans of all ages. It is increasingly difficult for anyone of any age to sort information from spin, fact from prejudice, news from entertainment, and programming content from commercial advertising. American culture, not to mention the many cultures influenced by Americanism, has long been venal and consumerist. It is difficult to assess whether it is becoming more so than it was in the nineteenth century, but it certainly is not becoming less so. There has been considerable advancement in technology, but very little if any advancement in sophistication, culture or civilization. Collectively we remain imbeciles with ever smarter toys.

The second social trend that I’d like to comment upon, the one that is (or ought to be) troubling to everyone is the increasing refusal of Americans to age gracefully. Physical conditions that have always been associated with aging—lower libido and decreased fertility, slower metabolism, a general decline in the efficiency of all body parts, including all the internal and external organs—are increasingly being seen as diseases. They are given names such as Low Testosterone, Erectile Dysfunction, benign prostatic hyperplasia, and the names are abbreviated to easily pronounced phrases such as Low T, ED and BPH, and for every one of these conditions there is a raft of pharmaceutical products (most of which, as noted above, are advertised on the evening news), all of which have side effects that are arguably more serious than the “diseases" they are designed to cure, side effects that are written in print so tiny that no one over the age of 40 can read them, or spoken of so rapidly and in such soft tones that no one with any degree of hearing loss can understand them. American has produced a generation of elders that have replaced wisdom, perspective, experience and sagacity with a neurotic phobia of gray hair, white whiskers, baldness, wrinkled skin, sagging chins, baggy eyes, flaccid penises and dry vaginas.

People get old (except for those who die young). That is what happens when they stay alive for several decades. And as they get old, their bodies change. Instead of accepting and even celebrating those changes as an intrinsic part of life, American culture has chosen to revile those changes and turn them into opportunities to sell yet more unnecessary products. And then we complain that the younger generation does not respect us. Why should the young respect the elderly, when the elderly do not gracefully accept the natural occurrences of old age? As Confucius said, “If you would be respected by others, you must first respect yourself.”

We saw above what Confucius said about the course of his life. That was how old men in China saw things twenty-five centuries ago. The modern American septuagenarian says, “At 15, I was prescribed Ritalin. At 30 I was given Prozac. At 40 I began using Grecian Formula. At 50 I began Botox treatments. At 60 I required Enbril. At 70 I followed my heart’s desire with a little help from Viagra.”

Life in the southwest quadrant

There's abundant evidence for the need of it. The old one-dimensional categories of 'right' and 'left', established for the seating arrangement of the French National Assembly of 1789, are overly simplistic for today's complex political landscape. For example, who are the 'conservatives' in today's Russia? Are they the unreconstructed Stalinists, or the reformers who have adopted the right-wing views of conservatives like Margaret Thatcher? (The Political Compass)

The designers of The Political Compass website make the case that rather than a linear political spectrum along which views, and the people who hold them, can be identified as left-wing or right-wing, what is needed is a more sophisticated tool that allows for distinguishing between managed-economy leftists such as Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (better known by his assumed name Joseph Stalin) and leftists such as Nelson Mandela and Mohandas K. Gandhi. What distinguishes these two styles of leftist, argue the authors of the website, is their differing attitudes of authoritarianism. While the Marxists who ruled the Soviet Union, China and North Korea were highly authoritarian and ran states in which individual citizens had little personal freedom, Gandhi and Mandela were communitarians of a different kind altogether who were strongly in favor of personal freedoms held in societies filled with ideological and demographic diversity. For the authoritarian leftists it is important not only to control industry, agriculture and the markets but also to control the access that citizens have to information and to impose a uniformity on thinking and opinion. For the more libertarian leftists, it is important to regulate corporations in order to protect citizens from the excesses of corporate greed but to protect the freedoms of individuals from governmental excess.

The authors of The Political Compass have devised a test, which enables visitors to the website to determine their own location on the political and social map. The horizontal axis of the map indicates one’s attitudes about how much governments should be involved in the economy and in markets; the left favors more involvement, the right less. The vertical access indicates one’s attitudes about how much governments should be involved in the personal lives of individuals. The higher one is placed on the vertical axis, the more one feels comfortable with governmental efforts to control the behavior of citizens, the more authoritarian one is; the lower on the axis one is, the more libertarian one is.

The Political Compass situates various political figures from world history on the map. Stalin and Castro occupy the northwestern quadrant, occupied by those who favor strong governmental regulation of both the economy and the behavior of individuals. The northeastern quadrant is populated by every Democratic and Republican presidential candidate since 1980, for all have been relatively laissez faire about the economy but relatively willing to manage ordinary human behavior. The differences between the politicians that Americans consider conservative and those they deem liberal are minuscule; American politicians collectively occupy a remarkably small amount of territory on the map as a whole. About this more will be said below. The southeastern quadrant is home to Ayn Rand and her followers, people convinced that government has no business regulating corporations and markets and also no business regulating such personal matters as marriage, sexuality, the use of drugs, access to abortion and other issues. The southwestern quadrant is occupied by those who favor some degree of regulation of the economy but relatively light regulation of personal behavior; this is where one finds names such as Gandhi, Mandela, and the Dalai Lama, along with such American politicians as Dennis Kucinich of the Democratic Party, and Jill Stein of the Green Party.

Looking at where nearly all the influential American politicians are clustered together, with hardly any room between the dots representing Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and very little room between them and Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill, makes it clear that in American politics most ideological differences are more imagined that real. The media do their best to make it appear as though there is an unbridged gulf between liberals and conservatives, but in fact they are all pretty much on the same page. That page is paid for by corporate special interest groups who spend billions convincing both consumers and politicians that the ideal society is one in which markets are unencumbered by regulations and people all have the same tastes and the same cravings for barely distinguishable products, most of them unnecessary.

American society is—perhaps always has been—essentially delusional. No delusion is more persistent than the conviction that Americans love freedom and have more of it than the citizens of any other country on earth and are eager to bring their beloved liberty to every region of the world. For at least a century and a half those who have controlled the wealth of the nation have tirelessly worked to convince the rest of us that there cannot be governmental regulation of agricultural and industrial production and distribution without governmental interference in the lives of people. Abridging the freedom of a corporation to pollute the environment and pay substandard wages and minimal benefits to workers is carefully presented as leading inevitably to limiting the rights of families to worship as they choose, live where they want to live, and own the weapons they need to keep criminals out of their homes. The attitude being fostered was summed up by Ronald Reagan in his often-quoted pithy mantra, “Government is not a solution to our problem, government is the problem” and in his more verbose (for him) claim that “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government—lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.”

When it comes to limiting personal freedoms, poverty is far more effective at achieving that condition than governmental regulations. According to Jacob S. Hacker, a professor of political science at Yale University, “Most Americans (58.5%) will spend at least one year below the poverty line at some point between ages 25 and 75.” At any given time, 16% of Americans live in poverty, which is operationally defined as a condition of not being able to afford to buy goods and services commonly taken for granted by mainstream society. (Mainstream society arguably takes far too much for granted, but that is a subject for another essay). Poverty is a complex phenomenon that cannot possibly be reduced to a single cause, but there is little doubt that a significant factor in the rise in American poverty is the dramatic maldistribution of wealth in a society that has, since President Reagan’s administration, whittled away at laws and regulations designed to curb the insatiable greed and the feeble social conscience of most international corporations and the people who run them and invest in them. And yet many of the very people whose lives are pinched back by poverty are the most avid supporters of spurious claim that all governmental regulation of anything results in diminished freedom for everyone.

My score on the political compass test was -9.38 on economic matters; that is 93.8% as far to the economic left as the compass measures. On the vertical axis my score was -7.44; that is 74.4% as far to the libertarian side as the compass measures. That makes me an anti-authoritarian communist, pretty deep into the southwestern quadrant. So what would life be like if we south-westerners were to get the upper hand in this country? That may be the subject matter of future blog posts, but a quick sketch would look something like this:

• Wages earned in exchange for labor would be taxed lightly if at all, and income gained through investments would be taxed rather heavily. Inheritance taxes would be higher than they now are, perhaps as high as 100%.
• Education at all levels would be provided at no cost to the individual, and students would receive stipends to enable them to meet living expenses.
• Health care would be provided to everyone at no cost to the patient, through revenues raised in taxes. Pharmaceutical companies and other health-product providers would not be allowed to realize more than a modest profit on their products. (Both these measures have been successful in keeping health costs low in the province of Québec and the Dominion of Canada).
• Neither the federal government nor any of the states or municipalities would be empowered to pass laws concerning marriage that limit the gender or number of spouses that any one person can have. Any group of people living together for one year and deeming itself to be a marriage would receive all the rights now extended to a legally married couple. Divorce would be granted automatically to any married partners who ceased to live together and who wished their separation to be construed as a termination of their commitment to be married to one another. Marriage and divorce would both be purely de facto rather than de jure matters.
• The criminal justice system would be oriented entirely toward reforming miscreants rather than punishing them. Sentences, therefore, would be dramatically reduced for all crimes.
• Recreational drug use would be decriminalized, as would prostitution. Governmental agencies would be established to provide help to tobacco, drug and alcohol addicts who desired help in overcoming their addictions and to provide quality-controlled substances to those who chose to remain addicted.
• All organized religious institutions would lose all tax exemptions and would be taxed at the same rate as all other commercial enterprises.

The utopian southwest-quadrant nation would be open to anyone who wished to live here, and those who did not wish to live here would be free to leave at any time. The institution of citizenship would for all practical purposes cease to exist. Many of the most expensive governmental agencies, such as the military, the FBI, the CIA, the TSA and the NSA would be significantly curtailed, as would such agencies as ICE. (A nation with open borders has no need of costly and wasteful immigration and customs enforcement). The elimination, or at least significant reduction, of all such agencies would reduce the amount of money the government needs to spend and thus make the tax burden on everyone less onerous.

I take the unofficial motto of my village—“Just South West of Normal”—quite seriously, although I have serious misgivings about the concept of “normal”.

The greatest obstacle to capitalism

Amazon.com is testing delivering packages using drones, CEO Jeff Bezos said on the CBS TV news show 60 Minutes Sunday.

The idea would be to deliver packages as quickly as possible using the small, unmanned aircraft, through a service the company is calling Prime Air, the CEO said. USA Today

Ever since the eighteenth century, capitalists have been charging full steam ahead to reduce the expenses of production by reducing the need for costly human labor. Human workers must be paid, and they are prone to organizing to demand higher wages, fewer working hours and employer contributions to retirement plans and health insurance. Replacing human workers with uncomplaining machines has always been seen as a good strategy for maximizing profits, and when total mechanization has not be feasible, the next best strategy has been to seek the least demanding human labor—newly arrived immigrants from poorer countries, workers who have entered the country without proper documentation and workers so desperate for a day's wages that they are willing to be paid a substandard wage “under the table.”

Ever since the early decades of the 19th century in America, capitalists, who have always had a far greater influence on lawmakers than citizens with limited financial resources, have fought against laws and regulations that provide for safer working conditions, better wages and limited working hours. Such statutes are traditionally characterized as socialist measures that somehow abridge the rights and freedoms of Americans and are therefore anti-American. Such rhetoric has been a standard part of capitalist culture since well before the American civil war and the abolition of slavery.

In today's culture, those who oppose such institutions as social security, medicare, the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act, minimum wage laws and laws requiring the payment of overtime never miss an opportunity to describe such measures as “job-killing”; the implication is that anything that adds to the expenses of providing goods and services will reduce the profits of a commercial entity, which will displease shareholders and ultimately result in the loss of employment opportunities for those who do not have enough capital to be shareholders and who must therefore sell their labor on the open market.

Strangely, when the CEO of Amazon proposes to deliver packages by robotic drones, the proposed scheme is not decried in the media as job-killing, just as it is not described as job-killing (or-people-killing) when 95% of the products a retailer sells are manufactured in unhealthy and dangerous working conditions overseas by workers who are paid scarcely enough to sustain life. Do not expect consistency in the rhetoric of capitalists, for they, like Walt Whitman, are large and contain multitudes.

If capitalists thought things through, they would quickly realize that human labor is not the only obstacle to maximum profits. Corporate executives demand compensations that severely drain a corporation's resources. For example, the CEO of Amazon is currently Jeff Bezos, whose net worth is estimated between $28,000,000,000 and $33,000,000,000. If his annual recompense could be eliminated, Amazon's profits could soar, and that measure would kill only one job.

Another enormous drain on a company's coffers is the body of shareholders, who expect dividends and ever higher values for the stocks they invest in. Eliminating all those expensive capitalist investors could lead to major savings and would not eliminate any jobs whatsoever, since investors typically do not do a lick of work for the corporations in which they invest.

Finally, a great deal of money could be saved by eliminating human consumers of goods and services, for those human consumers are prone to demanding satisfaction and are liable to demand their money back for unsatisfactory products and service, and, in extreme circumstances may even sue a company for real or imagined damages.

Clearly, the human being is the greatest obstacle to capitalism. Eliminating human beings as workers is only the first step in a perfect capitalist economy. The next step is to replace corporate executives and boards of directors and all those pesky shareholders with computer programs, and to replace consumers with purchasing robots. Money could simply be transferred electronically from one bank account to another without any human intervention. Moreover, if human beings were eliminated altogether at both ends of the business transaction, there would be no need for any goods or services. It is only human beings who demand such things. If a corporation did not have to make products or provide service, it could realize a 100% profit. Nothing is more profitable than charging a price and giving absolutely nothing in return.

Meanwhile, in the perfect capitalist economy all the human beings could live like traditional Buddhist monks, covering their nakedness by sewing together rags salvaged from rubbish heaps and burial grounds, eating fruit that had fallen from trees and animals that had died from falling off cliffs, owning nothing whatsoever and traveling everywhere on bare feet. If the Buddha was right, that lifestyle would make everyone maximally happy, once they stopped imagining they needed more. The world of capital could keep on transferring funds from one account to another indefinitely with no interference from human beings, and human beings could live simple and contented lives on the earth without the burden of worrying about economy, and they would leave few scars on the environment.

There, I have solved nearly all the world's problems in this squib, and it has cost no one a single penny. I'm glad to have been of service.

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Freedom

I love walking in the mountains, because it reminds me what an illusion freedom is. Walking along a mountain path, I feel free, but when I reflect on how much choice I actually have to go this way or that, my choices are severely restricted. The contour of the land will allow only a few limited options, and the vegetation on the land restricts those options even further. My age and physical condition furnish more restrictions. When all that is taken into account, I find I have the freedom to continue going forward where progress is possible or to turn around and go back pretty much the way I came. There is no real alternative to following the path I am on, a path that has been worn into the landscape by countless human beings traipsing over the land for the past four thousand years or so, those human beings having followed the paths worn by animals, who followed the route of water, which went where it went because of the declivity and the placement or rocks strewn along the escarpment some forty thousand years ago by a volcano. The feeling of freedom is undeniably joyful, but it is almost entirely a figment of my imagination. And realizing that, I can't help wondering whether it is a vain imagining, one that could be discarded without much effect. And I can't help wondering to what extent the illusion of freedom while walking in the mountains is an example of freedom being largely an illusion in most other areas of life.

People go where animals have gone, and animals go where water has gone, and water goes where it can go. This metaphor has been used for years by moral philosophers. Every action makes a path, like water running down a hill, and once the path is made or deepened, it increases the likelihood that future actions will follow a similar course. The deeper an arroyo becomes, the less likely it is that water will flow anywhere else but in that arroyo, and the more deeply entrenched a habit becomes, the less likely it is that the owner of the habit will act otherwise. If one becomes a saint (or an arhant in Buddhism), the good habits are said to be so deeply entrenched than acting sinfully (or in Buddhism unhealthily) becomes impossible. It is also said that people can become so deeply habituated to unhealthy actions that they can no longer even aspire to act wholesomely. The very idea of freedom in such cases becomes meaningless, or at least inapplicable.

Even in the vast area between the extremes of the perfect saint or the complete sinner, freedom may well be either an illusion or an excuse. None of us wants to think of our actions being motivated by factors largely out of our control, so we prefer to think of ourselves as free. When others act in ways we find annoying, the itch to retaliate arises, but we feel it would be unjust to retaliate against someone whose actions were motivated by factors beyond his control, so we invent his freedom to justify our treating him in ways we would not want to be treated. The invention of freedom makes it possible to regard others as criminals, as evil-doers who have chosen to act in ways that land them in prison or, in extreme cases, in the hands of an executioner. Rather than thinking of those whom we label as criminals as people who have fallen victim to circumstances beyond their control, the tendency is to see ourselves as the victims of deliberately bad people who have chosen to torment us with their behavior. Seeing others as beings who have a very limited range of choices and who are pushed into conduct by forces they poorly understand and over which they have no control would frustrate our longing to seek revenge on those whose conduct is annoying. And so we imagine their freedom and then insist the imagined is real.

Selling people the illusion of freedom is highly profitable. Manufacturers of products spend vast sums of money convincing the public that their lives would be better if they owned a product or partook of a service, and then they say “We are simply providing people what they want to have.” Manufacturers of environmentally destructive automobiles say they are merely providing people with the kinds of automobiles they want to have. Makers of health-destroying processed foods claim they are providing people with the what they like to eat and drink. Providers of tobacco and other addictive drugs say they sell the products that people want to buy. All these providers of bads (which they misleadingly call goods) claim that to interfere with the process of selling people products and services that worsens them would be limiting people's freedom. The idea of freedom has become an absolute. Limiting freedom (of anyone except those whose behavior we label as criminal) must be seen as an evil. The economy depends on seeing freedom as an absolute and the abridgment of freedom as an evil.

How free is any of us? How much do we really want to be free? How many of us would like to be free of the prisons we build for ourselves by owning property and dwellings and modes of transportation? How many of us would like to free ourselves from the slavery that takes the form of selling our labor to people who use it to provide unnecessary products and services to others? Who would like to be free of the social obligations they create by accepting help from others? How many people are living exactly the life they have always dreamed of living? One person in ten? One in a hundred? One in a million? And of those who are living the life they have dreamed of living, how many would still want to live it if they knew the consequences their way of living has on others? How much knowledge of reality could they endure before their fantasies of freedom became unsustainable?

People who speak of freedom frighten me. People who imagine that the countries in which they live offer the most freedoms alarm me as much as any delusional person alarms me. Delusional people are unpredictable. Unpredictable people act in ways that I find annoying. But logic gives me no choice but to accept their unpredictable behavior. They are not free to think of themselves as anything but free, and I am not free to condemn them for being deluded.

Perhaps there are a few trivial and meaningless ways in which people are free. I don't know for sure. I suspect, however, that hardly anyone has more than one percent of the freedom she would like to think she has.

Feel free to disregard everything I have said. I had no choice but to say it.

Rethinking America

Listening to the debates among the candidates contending for the nomination as the Republican presidential candidate in 2012, I have been struck by how many references there have been to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. There seems to be a feeling, among some candidates at least, that these documents are unambiguous and that one can simply read them and understand immediately what the law is without any further interpretation. One gets the feeling that some candidates feel that much of the history of the Supreme Court has involved replacing the constitution with new laws rather than arriving at legitimate interpretations of the guidelines provided in the document. One candidate, Newton Leroy Gingrich, has even suggested he would, as president, feel free to ignore court decisions he disagreed with and perhaps even impeach judges whose decisions he found objectionable.

All this talk of the constitution has made me wonder whether the problem of current American politics has been properly identified. It could well be that the source of the deep divisions that have paralyzed America's legislators is the Constitution itself, since that document was the product of legislators who were incapable of seeing eye to eye on how the nation could be governed. Although it would admittedly be a big task, it might be time to put the Constitution of September 17, 1787 into the nearest shredder and start all over again trying to provide a more workable set of guidelines in order “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” If a new American constitution is written, I would recommend making a few minor changes in the structure of the country. A few of the suggestions I would make are the following:

• Abolish the states. The very idea of trying to unite states was wrong-headed in 1787, when the only states were Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, all of which are clustered together on or near the Atlantic coast. Now that the nation that grew out of those twelve states whose representatives signed the constitution in 1787 has fifty states that cover many times as much territory and have over one hundred times as many people as in 1787, the prospect of uniting them all is incalculably more difficult than it was as the nation was just getting started. The task of running the country as a country is hampered at every step by the existence of states with artificial boundaries, many of them so large that there is very little common ground within those boundaries. If one looks at a state such as Colorado, just to give one example, it is obvious all four of its borders were drawn on a map with a straight-edge rather than following natural geographical features. The eastern third of the state is prairie, the middle third is mountainous terrain, and the western third is a mostly arid terrain of mesas, canyons and hills. All three of these regions have different ecosystems, different economies and different demographics. What is now called the State of Colorado is an absurd monstrosity, an outrage to both reason and emotion. And Colorado is but an example of a kind of absurdity that is multiplied across the expanse of land between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans.
  
  Once the monstrous fiction of a state is removed, dozens of now-untractable problems will immediately disappear. Gone will be the conflict that now exists between federal laws and state laws. In the absence of state laws, there could be (as in Canada) a single set of federal criminal and civic laws. People who favor reducing the size of government should welcome the total elimination of fifty state legislative bodies, and people who favor the reduction of the tax burden should welcome the complete elimination of all state taxes. Much of the waste and redundancy that cripples the United States of America would be eliminated immediately by the elimination of states. (Of course, if there were no states to unite, the name of the country would no longer make sense, but it should not be difficult to find a new name for the more streamlined and much-improved country. It could be called Atlanto-Pacifica.)
• Abolish the Senate.The Senate exists only because the founding parents could not agree on whether each state would be represented in the federal government by a number of representatives proportionate to its population or each state would have equal weight just by virtue of being a state. (This whole issue was made even more complicated by the fact that some states that had a large number of human beings living in them, most of whom were slaves, wanted slaves to count as represented population, even though they could not vote to choose their representatives.) If there were no longer any states, there would be no need for equal representation among them, and hence no need for a Senate. Again, people who feel that government has grown much too large should be overjoyed at the prospects of eliminating one of the two bodies that make up the current Congress.
• Abolish the office of President. The office of President of the United States (POTUS) is surely the second most ridiculous political idea in the history of governance, the first prize going to the office of Vice President of the United States. No country needs a president elected separately by the people, let alone a president elected by an electoral college. A country does need some kind of leadership (unless it is a country run on Quaker principles), but a prime minister will suffice. If the House of Representatives were structured more like a House of Parliament, then the leader of the party with the most elected representatives would automatically be the Prime Minister. A Prime Minister appoints a cabinet of elected members of parliament, who may be, but are not required to be, of the same political party as the Prime Minister. The cabinet is both an executive branch and a legislative branch.
• Abolish an electoral cycle with fixed periodicity. Rather than having elections every fourth year, elections should be called as they are in all countries that have a parliamentary system. It should be the law that a government in power must dissolve parliament after five years of rule, but there would be provisions for the ruling party to call elections more frequently than that, and there should be mechanisms in place for the opposition parties to have motions of non-confidence that would force an election if governance is going badly. In order to reduce the amount of time and money wasted on political campaigns. elections should be held no more than thirty days after parliament is dissolved. In an age of rapid communications, thirty days is ample time for a political party to inform the voters of its platform and for the voters to evaluate the platforms they are asked to consider.
• Reconstitute the Supreme Court. If judges continue to be appointed by the party in power, they should be appointed for a limited amount of time, say, a non-extendable term of eight years. If judges are elected by the people, as perhaps they should be, then they should have to stand for election every time there is a parliamentary election.

These are a few of the structural changes that could be made to enable a more efficient and streamlined and much less costly form of government to emerge in the country now called the United States of America. If the Constitution of 1787 is retired and replaced with an improved document, many of the amendments to the current constitution, including the Bill of Rights, would also be retired. Many of the ideas now rather poorly and ambiguously expressed in the Bill of Rights that came to be attached to the original constitution of 1787 could be expressed more clearly. The ambiguous amendment calling for the separation of church and state, for example, could be replaced by a provision declaring that there be absolutely no reference to any sectarian religious dogmas within the Parliament or Supreme Court or in federally funded educational facilities or health care providers, but guaranteeing that no individual ever be limited in his or her choice of religious views and practices, so long as those practices do not violate the criminal laws of the nation.

There are other reforms that I personally would recommend, but some of them are controversial, and I do not wish to enter into controversial issues here. They can wait for another communication. Suffice it to say for now that it seems perfectly obvious that the Constitution that has been in place since 1787 is no longer a fit instrument for effective government. It was never particularly good, but as times have evolved its few good points have ceased to be as good as they once were. It's time to bring an end to the United States and to replace it with a constitutional democracy more like those in most European countries and in such countries as India, Korea and Japan—or our next-door neighbor, Canada.

Gaps

A sign that always caught my eye in the Toronto subway system was a warning that said “Mind the gap.” I think it may have been a warning to people that there was a space between the train platform and the floor of the subway car. But to me that gap was never much of a menace. I was more concerned about other gaps.

Everyone seems to be talking these days about the increasing gap between the rich and the poor. In November 2010, The Consumerist reported that between 1995 and 2005, the average CEO pay went up 298% while the average worker's pay went up 4.3%. Notes published by Prof. G. William Domhoff, entitled "Who Rules America: Wealth, Income and Power" claim that in 2007, 42.7% of America's financial wealth was controlled by the wealthiest 1% of the American population, 50.3% by the next 19%, and only 7.0% of the nation's financial wealth was controlled by the remaining 80% of the American population. This distribution of wealth has held steadily since the time of President Reagan. An article on economic inequality claims that the Forbes list of billionaires shows that the three wealthiest people in the world (Bill Gates and Warren Buffett of the United States and Carlos Slim Helú of Mexico) together have more wealth than the combined wealth of the 48 poorest nations in the world. The economic gap has deservedly attracted quite a lot of attention. But that is not the gap that I wish to talk about in this squib.

There is another gap that has become increasingly evident to me during the past several months, largely thanks to the debates among aspiring candidates for the Republican nomination for president of the United States. This gap is more difficult to characterize and therefore to quantify than the inequality between the financially richest and the poorest people. For lack of a better term, let me call this yawning inequality the civilization gap. By civilization I mean a whole range of human virtues beginning with a basic knowledge of science and the humanities (history, geography, economics, literature, the arts and so on). I also take civilization to include skills in critical thinking and what people commonly call wisdom—the ability to discern realty from fancy and to make good practical decisions grounded in fact and arrived at by weighing evidence carefully. And of course I take civilization to include compassion, generosity of spirit and empathy. In short, civilization includes the four traditional cardinal virtues of wisdom, justice, self-restraint and courage and at least the theological virtue of love. The opposite of virtue, of course, is vice, and a commonly referenced list of vices in Western literature is the list of the seven deadly vices of pride, anger, greed, gluttony, envy, lust and sloth. My observation, then, has been that so far the Republican candidates have displayed a remarkable deficiency of civilized virtue, and what I suspect is that the candidates display that deficiency largely because they are supported by a substantial sector of the American public that is also lacking in wisdom, a sense of justice, self-restraint, courage and compassion but is driven instead by pride, anger and greed.

The Republican debates have had a number of chilling moments. Chris Matthews recalled several in the October 21 episode of Hardball. There was the cheer that came up from the crowd when it was announced that while Governor Rick Perry of Texas has governed, there have been 234 executions of prisoners, more than any other governor in modern times. Governor Perry also earned hoots of approval when he stated that there is no compelling evidence that global warming is taking place as a consequence of gas house gases being introduced into the atmosphere as a result of human use of fossil fuels. There were the shouts of “Yes!” when Senator Ron Paul was asked whether he would let someone who could not afford private health insurance die rather than be given treatment at the taxpayers' expense. Then Ron Paul was jeered when he said, rightly, that Muslim terrorists had attacked the United States because the United States had established military bases around the world and interfered in the politics of other countries, and not because terrorists hate American freedom. There was a cheer from the audience when Herman Cain said that anyone who is unemployed has no one to blame but himself. All those outbursts of cheering and jeering from the audience exhibited a lack of civilization that can be found in every region of the country. While the Republican debates are what have helped me be more aware of the civilization gap, I do not at all think the gap is an especially Republican phenomenon.

There are two dimensions of the civilization gap that I would like to reflect on here. The first dimension is what might be called an education gap, and the second is what I'll call the decency gap. As an educator, I am confronted on a daily basis with evidence of how poorly informed most Americans are about international events, geography, history, mathematics and basic science. One obvious educational gap is between those who have a post-secondary education and those who have stopped their formal education at or before graduation from high school. The cost of college education has become prohibitively high for most people, with the result that many low-income people in the United States have no opportunity at all for higher education, and many others graduate with debts that will follow them around for most of their lives. There is, however, a less obvious education gap. Even among people with advanced degrees, there is a gap between those who have a good grasp of both the humanities and the sciences. Specialization in most fields has resulted in an increase in people who are highly trained in a narrow field but poorly informed in others. It is not unusual to find teachers and scholars in the humanities who know next to nothing about science, and scientists who have a poor command of topics in the humanities. In a complex world in which many decisions are made democratically, it is alarming when most people are called upon to cast their votes on issues about which they have little or no basis on which to make an informed decision. The alarm registers even higher when one considers how vulnerable most people, thanks to their ignorance, are to being manipulated through misinformation. In a democracy of dunces, most of the power ends up in the hands of liars.

What I have called the decency gap is a manifestation of a pandemic lack of sensitivity that goes mostly unobserved because people have become so, well, insensitive. (Insensitivity by its very nature is one of those maladies, like ignorance, a main symptom of which is that those who have the disease are unaware of having it.) A few recent examples may help clarify what kind of thing I am thinking about here. 

On the PBS News Hour of October 21, 2011, footage was shown of the last few moments in the life of Colonel Mu'ammar Muhammad Abu Minyar al-Qaḏḏāfī. The images, taken by a cell-phone camera, showed the terrified colonel being beaten, humiliated, cursed and pushed by an angry mob. As part of the same news story, the colonel's bloody corpse was shown lying on a mattress on the floor, surrounded by Libyans taking photographs of it with the mobile telephones. Apparently, producers of the News Hour found it sufficient to warn viewers that the images they were about to see were graphic and violent. What is astonishing is that such images have become entirely unremarkable. 

Television viewers were well prepared for al-Qaḏḏāfī's demise as a result of having seen similar photos of the hanging of Saddam Hussein and the assassination of Usama bin-Ladin. Indeed, people all over the world are routinely subjected on a daily basis to pictures of dead and often decaying bodies of war casualties, traffic accidents, political assassinations, homicides, and victims of earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricane, tornadoes and floods. 

What is gained by showing such images? In what way do they aid the understanding of the world in which we live? What purpose do they serve, aside from satisfying the morbid curiosities of viewers? What is the effect of satisfying people's morbid curiosities on a daily, even hourly, basis? Do the producers of visual news and entertainment productions consider such questions? Do they give a second thought to the cultural climate they are helping to promote? I am not sure whether it would be more disheartening to learn that television producers give these matters no thought at all or to to learn that they have thought about it and find their policies warranted. Denying that regularly subjecting viewers, even at the safe distances provided by a television, to the effects of violence has the effect of creating a more coarse and insensitive cultural milieu seems as reprehensibly ignorant as denying that burning fossil fuels creates the conditions of accelerating degradation of the air, the land and the waters of our planet. In both cases, it is a matter of a cultivated ignorance that is willfully maintained in the interest of making money at all costs.

These are dangerous and unpredictable times. Part of what makes them so dangerous is that there are too few people minding the gaps.