Living with Consequences: Principles v People

What I have never been able to understand about the reasoning of the American Republican party, is how it manages to separate principle from consequence with no apparent self-awareness whatsoever. It's tempting to label this as simple, blatant and willful hypocrisy or bad intentions, but that is too easy: we can't just dismiss a significant portion of the population as evil and leave it at that. For one thing, I personally know several Republicans who suffer this disconnect in their thinking, and I can tell you that they are not evil people. Quite the contrary: some are among the kindest people I know. Some are also quite bright, as are many Republicans (despite what left-wing talking heads would like you to believe), so we can't set their beliefs aside as the inevitable outcome of unintelligent people making policy.

So whence the disconnect? I think it stems from two things: 1) an inability to empathize with anyone outside your own sphere of direct experience and 2) an inability to connect principles on the one hand with the logical consequences of acting on those principles on the other. I won't touch that first point as I am neither psychologist nor father confessor. Lack of empathy is a personal problem people need to address through self-examination. But let's look at some examples of that second point.

1) Principle: A combination of small government/low taxes increases freedom and thus happiness. Practical consequence: poor services and infrastructure reduce the quality of life for all. This wouldn't be so bad if Republicans admitted the relationship between these two and asserted that the consequence was worth the principle. But they defiantly refuse to admit that there is a direct, indisputable link between starving a government of funds and that government being unable to provide services and infrastructure that everyone, Republicans included, takes for granted. You hear examples of this all the time, every time you hear a Republican friend complain about potholes or bad schools or poor funding for the police in one breath, while in the next breath bemoaning their high tax burden. There is no such thing as a free lunch: you either pay the price for civilization (i.e., taxes) or you live without the trappings of a civilized society, leading to generally low levels of life satisfaction. Ah, Republicans counter, but wait! It's not that we are saying that all taxes are bad, just that we could have all these nice things with current taxation if only the government didn't waste so much/wasn't so bloated. There's just one small problem with this argument: it has little basis in reality. I am not suggesting the government doesn't waste money. No government since the dawn of civilization could make such a boast. But if you actually take the time to look at the US federal budget and cut away every single thing you could conceivably consider as wasteful, then add in all the things we all want (but that some of us refuse to pay for), you come up with a total that is greater than the sum of taxation that Republicans are willing to pay. Don't take my word for it. Look at the federal budget. Cut away whatever you hate (foreign aid, assistance to the poor, whatever); leave the stuff you like (military spending, servicing the debt in order not to default, Social Security and Medicare, national parks, law enforcement, etc.) and add in what it would take to meet the needs not currently being met (the ones you complain about all the time, e.g. poor roads and bridges, unevenly and poorly funded schools, understaffed agencies that make you wait longer than you'd like, etc., etc.). I guarantee you that unless you are the most hard-core libertarian around, you still have a budget whose needs are not met by the size and revenues of our current government. Do the math. You will be amazed.

2) Principle: government debt is bad and must be stopped at all costs. Practical consequence: starving the economy, harming our creditworthiness and creating an unstable economic environment. First a major correction to the conventional wisdom that right-wing governments are more responsible with spending that left-wing governments: this simply isn't true, either here in the US or in Europe, as I showed in a 2012 post. The indisputable, easily verifiable fact is that most of the current US federal debt was run up under Republican administrations. But let's put aside blame and focus on consequences. The fact is that national debt is not (despite the folksy wisdom of some populists) anything like extravagant household credit card debt; it can be and often is an investment in growth, and, depending on interest rates and needs, can be a very smart thing to have. For example, if you have a bridge that is falling apart today and you can borrow $100,000 at 3% to fix it now versus waiting til it collapses in five years and spending $10,000,000 to rebuild it, is debt bad here? If unemployment is high now and that is draining resources from unemployment funds while also reducing the tax base, is it better to allow that to continue with no debt or invest in fixing both the drain on resources and the damaged tax base? Government debt is an investment tool. When used wisely, it is not inherently evil. Granted, we have often used it very unwisely, but for those cases, you might want to look more at Reagan in the 1980s and Bush II in the 2000s, when all we got were irresponsible,  deficit-ballooning tax cuts and huge spending programs that did nothing to boost the long-term health of the economy.

3) Principles: government shouldn't tell the private sector how much to pay workers and government aid to the poor in unsustainable. Practical consequence: a poor minimum wage that has failed to keep up with inflation means that there is ever MORE pressure for the government to help the poor. You want to reduce Medicaid and welfare and food stamps? Much of this money goes not to the so-called 'idle poor' but to the working poor, including the lower ranks of our disgracefully-paid military servicemen and -women. So you can't have your cake and eat it, too: we either have to insist on a decent minimum wage and benefits to allow the working poor to support themselves, or you have to accept higher expenditures on aid to the poor. You can't have both a low minimum wage and a self-reliant lower economic class. It simply isn't realistic. Again, no free lunch.

4) Principle: sex education is immoral and it corrupts children. Practical consequence: higher teen pregnancy rates and more abortions, two things Republicans also decry. There are few areas where disregard for the practical consequence of principles does more harm than here. The bottom line is that abstinence-only 'education' simply doesn't work. Giving children the real facts about sex, birth control and sexually transmitted diseases, is far more effective at reducing teen pregnancy, the demand for abortions and STDs. This is not an opinion: there are mountains of data to prove this. Don't believe me? Try looking at a map of the distribution of teen pregnancies and STDs and comparing them to the red state v blue state electoral map and tell me you don't see a pattern.

I could go on, but the picture is clear: Republican principles are completely divorced from their practical outcomes. But what causes this disconnect? I think part of it is the nature of what drives the Republican mentality: unquestioning conformity to principles that are often seen as either divinely mandated or as part of an obligatory legacy of the Founding Fathers. I can't understand the logic of either of these. Even if I believed in a god, it would be one who cared about the actual outcomes for its children. And as for the Founding Fathers, the one thing people forget is that their real legacy is a framework in which we are free to create (and re-create) our own country for our own times. With all due respect to them, they were creatures of their age, and I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in the 18th century. They were a wise group, but they were, by our modern standards, also pretty misogynistic and racist. I do not judge them for that: we are all products of the age in which we live; but neither do I set such people as infallible demi-gods to whose values and ideas and structures I must cling. And they never expected us to: that's why the Constitution is a living, changeable document and one subject to the tradition of juris prudence, a tradition that allows us to adapt this document to changing values and circumstances. Such malleability is key if we are to maintain our Constitution in an ever-changing world. The Fathers couldn't have foreseen ICBMs and Uzis, the end of slavery and the liberation of women and minorities.

So how do we work with people who believe that they cannot be wrong because their principles come from on high? Well.....we don't. Sorry. Not that I don't want to, not that I don't wish we could, but by definition of who they are, it simply isn't possible to treat with the more radical wing, especially the Tea Party extremists, because their mentality leads them to classify reason and compromise as treason. You can't negotiate with someone who believes he is divinely instructed to do what, and only what, he thinks is necessary, facts and the practical consequences be damned. So all we can do is build as large a coalition as possible of liberals, centrists and the ever-fewer reasonable right-wingers and try to work around, over and under this group and wait for what always happens to reactionaries: their burial by the crushing judgement of history and the unstoppable (if slow) wave of change. The worse they can do is slow us down for a while. 

Rights without Responsibilities

It seems that every day we hear more and more about ‘rights’ and ‘freedoms’ from the right wing in this country. We’re subjected to a constant litany of complaints about the supposed infringement on these precious commodities. We hear about 2^nd Amendment rights, rights to low taxes, freedom from regulation, freedom from obligations to take responsibility for…wait a moment. What were those two words? Back up. ‘Obligations’? ‘Responsibility’? These two words seem to be outside the vocabulary of these complainers. How can one go on and on about one’s patriotism and love of country and rights and freedoms without every mentioning these two words? How can you love a country to which you feel you owe absolutely nothing but from which you enjoy all the fruits of its liberties?

You can’t just chant ‘USA! USA!’ and ‘Support the troops’ in one breath, and in the next breath begrudge the funds (aka taxes) needed to actually, literally support the troops. You certainly can’t use that old chestnut ‘Freedom isn’t free’ when you want your freedom to be literally free of charge.

You can’t bemoan attempts to place sane boundaries around your 2^nd Amendment rights when that right begins to cut into the more fundamental right of six-year-old children to live, to not have their bodies riddled with bullets from high-capacity, semi-automatic assault rifles. What about your obligations to them?  

You can’t talk about ‘freedom of choice’ in the context of our healthcare system when real choice and the highest-quality care are restricted to the wealthiest people. Yes, we have the most advanced healthcare available in the world, but the vast majority of us aren’t ‘free’ to choose that level of care. If having the most advanced care available were synonymous with having the best healthcare system, then our outcomes would be higher and we wouldn’t be ranked behind most other developed countries in life expectancy. Without the obligation to extend healthcare to all Americans, having the freedom for some select people to choose the best healthcare is meaningless.

Folks on the right wing in this country claim to be the patriots, the lovers of freedoms. But if you want freedom without responsibility, you’re not a patriot. You’re a freeloading leech sucking away resources without wanting to give anything back. That’s not my definition of patriotism. 

Why You Shouldn't Resent the Unemployed, Unemployable...or Even the Just Plain Lazy

I have never been on welfare. I have been fortunate to benefit from a great education, hard work and some plain ol' dumb luck. But I don't resent those who are on welfare. Indeed, one reason I find it so difficult to relate to the radical right wing in this country, is their whiny temper tantrums about the poor. They seem to believe these people are lazy and want to live in unemployment and poverty, that they prefer to live off the largesse of the public purse.

Let's put aside the fact that the 'largesse' of the public purse is hardly enough to afford the luxurious lifestyles Republicans want us to believe the poor lead. The myth of the Welfare Queen is exactly that: a myth. Let's also put aside the fact that an exceedingly small number of Americans spend very long periods on welfare. For most, welfare is exactly what it's intended to be: a short-term safety net to prevent people from starving or becoming homeless due to unemployment or family situations that preclude employment. A relatively very small number of people are on it for decades.

But these few people just make Republicans seethe with anger. And this rage makes people perceive that the costs for programs helping the poor (both here and abroad through foreign aid) are huge when in fact they are not. When pollsters ask people how much of our budget goes to helping the less fortunate, the figures they state are staggeringly wrong. For example, most Americans believe that more than 5% of our budget goes to foreign aid, when in fact it is less than 1%.

Let's also put aside my rather subjective take that this resentment and this anger are childish and selfish. It reminds me of the 5-year-old who throws a tantrum because his friend is using his toy, even when it's a toy he didn't care about and hadn't been using for ages. When conservatives get so worked up about welfare, I half expect to see them throwing themselves on the ground, kicking and screaming, shouting 'MINE, MINE, MINE!'

So putting all these issues aside, why should Republicans, Teabaggers and others NOT resent the poor and unemployed? One simple reason: we'd all be screwed without them. Let me say that again: without the poor, unemployed, and yes, even the lazy, this and every other capitalist country on the face of Earth would be quite royally and completely screwed. Why? Because having a certain portion of the population idle (by choice or otherwise) is like a safety valve through which the built-up steam of excessive demand for goods, services and labor can be vented. In the absence of this safety valve, you get runaway inflation and economic collapse. If there were a job for every person in this country and everyone who could work, did work, inflation would spiral out of control, primarily for two reasons: 1) Labor costs would soar. It's simple supply and demand: if everyone is working, there are far fewer applicants for new jobs and employers must thus pay a premium to entice people to change jobs. This has a snowball effect and soon wage inflation is out of control. This might sound good if you are a wage-earner, but it isn't because of reason number two. 2) When there are too many dollars chasing too few goods, prices skyrocket. With all those added wage-earners and all that added wage inflation, there would be too much money flooding the system in relation to how quickly that system could meet demand. Next thing you know, inflation hits double, then even triple digits.

So the next time you see one of those obnoxious bumper stickers that say, 'Work harder: Millions of people on Welfare are counting on you', tell the driver that he should be sending thank-you notes to those people for keeping his whole economic system and way of life feasible.