Lakoff and Wehling write: "Quoting conservative language, even to argue against it, just strengthens conservatism in the brain of people who are morally complex. It is vital that they hear the progressive values of the traditional American moral system, the truth that The Public is necessary for The Private, the truth that our freedom depends on a robust Public, and that the economy is for all of us."
Children trapped in poverty. (photo: Aromaa )
Economics and Morality
15 June 12
n his June 11, 2012 op-ed in the NY Times, Paul Krugman goes beyond economic analysis to bring up the morality and the conceptual framing that determines economic policy. He speaks of “the people the economy is supposed to serve” - “the unemployed,” and “workers”- and “the mentality that sees economic pain as somehow redeeming.”
Krugman is right to bring these matters up. Markets are not provided by nature. They are constructed - by laws, rules, and institutions. All of these have moral bases of one sort or another. Hence, all markets are moral, according to someone’s sense of morality. The only question is, Whose morality? In contemporary America, it is conservative versus progressive morality that governs forms of economic policy. The systems of morality behind economic policies need to be discussed.
Most Democrats, consciously or mostly unconsciously, use a moral view deriving from an idealized notion of nurturant parenting, a morality based on caring about their fellow citizens, and acting responsibly both for themselves and others with what President Obama has called “an ethic of excellence” - doing one’s best not just for oneself, but for one’s family, community, and country, and for the world. Government on this view has two moral missions: to protect and empower everyone equally.
The means is The Public, which provides infrastructure, public education, and regulations to maximize health, protection and justice, a sustainable environment, systems for information and transportation, and so forth. The Public is necessary for The Private, especially private enterprise, which relies on all of the above. The liberal market economy maximizes overall freedom by serving public needs: providing needed products at reasonable prices for reasonable profits, paying workers fairly and treating them well, and serving the communities to which they belong. In short, “the people the economy is supposed to serve” are ordinary citizens. This has been the basis of American democracy from the beginning.
"Quoting conservative language, even to argue against it, just strengthens conservatism in the brain of people who are morally complex. It is vital that they hear the progressive values of the traditional American moral system, the truth that The Public is necessary for The Private, the truth that our freedom depends on a robust Public, and that the economy is for all of us."
Conservatives hold a different moral perspective, based on an idealized notion of a strict father family. In this model, the father is The Decider, who is in charge, knows right from wrong, and teaches children morality by punishing them painfully when they do wrong, so that they can become disciplined enough to do right and thrive in the market.If they are not well-off, they are not sufficiently disciplined and so cannot be moral: they deserve their poverty. Applied to conservative politics, this yields a moral hierarchy with the wealthy, morally disciplined citizens deservedly on the top.
Democracy is seen as providing liberty, the freedom to seek one’s self interest with minimal responsibility for the interests or well-being of others. It is laissez-faire liberty. Responsibility is personal, not social. People should be able to be their own strict fathers, Deciders on their own - the ideal of conservative populists, who are voting their morality not their economic interests.Those who are needy are assumed to be weak and undisciplined and therefore morally lacking. The most moral people are the rich. The slogan, “Let the market decide,” sees the market itself as The Decider, the ultimate authority, where there should be no government power over it to regulate, tax, protect workers, and to impose fines in tort cases. Those with no money are undisciplined, not moral, and so should be punished. The poor can earn redemption only by suffering and thus, supposedly, getting an incentive to do better.
If you believe all of this, and if you see the world only from this perspective, then you cannot possibly perceive the deep economic truth that The Public is necessary for The Private, for a decent private life and private enterprise. The denial of this truth, and the desire to eliminate The Public altogether, can unfortunately come naturally and honestly via this moral perspective.
When Krugman speaks of those who have “the mentality that sees economic pain as somehow redeeming,” he is speaking of those who have ordinary conservative morality, the more than forty percent who voted for John McCain and who now support Mitt Romney - and Angela Merkel’s call for “austerity” in Germany. It is conservative moral thought that gives the word “austerity” a positive moral connotation.
Just as the authority of a strict father must always be maintained, so the highest value in this conservative moral system is the preservation, extension, and ultimate victory of the conservative moral system itself.Preaching about the deficit is only a means to an end - eliminating funding for The Public and bringing us closer to permanent conservative domination.From this perspective, the Paul Ryan budget makes sense - cut funding for The Public (the antithesis of conservative morality) and reward the rich (who are the best people from a conservative moral perspective).Economic truth is irrelevant here.
Historically, American democracy is premised on the moral principle that citizens care about each other and that a robust Public is the way to act on that care.Who is the market economy for? All of us. Equally. But with the sway of conservative morality, we are moving toward a 1 percent economy - for the bankers, the wealthy investors, and the super rich like the six members of the family that owns Walmart and has accumulated more wealth than the bottom 30 percent of Americans. Six people!
What is wrong with a 1 percent economy? As Joseph Stiglitz has pointed out in The Price of Inequality, the 1 percent economy eliminates opportunity for over a hundred million Americans. From the Land of Opportunity, we are in danger of becoming the Land of Opportunism.
If there is hope in our present situation, it lies with people who are morally complex, who are progressive on some issues and conservative on others - often called “moderates,” “independents,” and “swing voters.” They have both moral systems in their brains: when one is turned on, the other is turned off.The one that is turned on more often gets strongest. Quoting conservative language, even to argue against it, just strengthens conservatism in the brain of people who are morally complex. It is vital that they hear the progressive values of the traditional American moral system, the truth that The Public is necessary for The Private, the truth that our freedom depends on a robust Public, and that the economy is for all of us.
We must talk about those truths - over and over, every day. To help, we have written The Little Blue Book. It can be ordered from barnesandnoble, amazon, and itunes, and after June 26 at your local bookstore.
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Were the government to reclaim its birth right of printing money there would be no public debt, no need to service the debt, therefore less taxes and the Greedy One Percent would gather a smaller part of the wealth created by the us all.
It is manageable, it was done three times already in this country: read about the colonial scrip, the continental scrip and the greenback.
For the past century, taxes and fees addressed the public costs of public services. The "bill" of government has actually been an investment. More recently, outsourcing public works to the 'private' sector has added 'profit' to the cost of government purchase of outside services. "Taxes" have been mis-characteriz ed as government evil rather than the cost of public services. Public service employment has been vilified. As 'private' sector jobs have lost benefits and been outsourced to low wage countries, American workers have been led to believe the "bill" for public employees is bloated. Bullshit! The bloat is at the top.
Disagree all you want, inform all you want, but attempting to silence others is against the freedom to speek guaranteed all people by the constitution.
It is nuts, I guess even Warren Buffett gets confused. From a July 7,2011 CNBC interview: "BUFFETT: I would say this. I would say this. The capital gains rate at 15 percent, the— if you buy a future, S&P future in Chicago and it goes up 10 seconds later, you resell it, it's 60 percent long-term capital gain and 40 percent short-term gain. Now, I'm not sure, you know, how anybody can come up with the logic of that."
That totally loses me and makes me fear the idiocy our tax codes contain.
Read this:
http://www.zimbio.com/US+Politics+and+Current+Events/articles/SyhePmZJ2ig/TPP+FTA+TPPA+Trans+Pacific+Partnership+Free
The MBA program I left preached this gospel. As one of my students once said to my class, "Employees are nothing but expendable human capital. We owe them nothing. We just learned that in our economics class."
I left after being ordered to abandon my provable, accurate, precise and motivational grading system and instead use a "forced curve" grading system--setting a fictional grading curve for students before I even met them. The lesson, of course--some people can always be thrown away.
Twice appalled, I decided to leave, no longer trusting or respecting the school's leadership. And thus give up a teaching career I dearly loved.
Many MBA schools are pumping young minds with this notion. And fueling the mess that seems to be devouring and destroying what we call America.
I still keep an eye on the most conservative PBS shows from Orange County, especially when their investments lost $1.5 billion dollars in derivatives, leading to the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history up to December 1994.
I marvel at how their investment advisers suggested county investments should (quietly)favor companies with the least humans possible, wanting returns of over $1,000 an hour per human where they had to use human labor. (Auto workers, at "only" $209 per hour return on investment weren't good enough for them.) They seem to have only furthered their unfair advantages and incredibly extended "temporary" tax breaks.
The only good news, buried in the pony dung, is that many of the smartest class among us is becoming less self-interested and actually going into other fields where their abilities do far more good for all of us.
I believe the forced curve propagates into future problems. Years ago we had a problem in our Space Systems Command and Control training program, with entering students being poorly prepared for the more advanced training. (I try to never give up on students but can only do so much without holding whole the class back.) We were spending several times the allotted tutoring time, even tutoring students from the preliminary courses from another training squadron, still with little success. We discovered the personnel center had switched to a curve based system where the raw scores were hidden, combined with relaxed standards for instructors. That meant less well prepared students receiving lower quality preliminary instruction before they got to our criterion based courses (do it to standards or washout). When we couldn't persuade the personnel center to be more selective, we started tutoring only the allotted hours and washing out 40% of the students, rather than try to do the ever more impossible. They quickly changed the selection process, but we lost some otherwise fine people, administrativel y discharged, rather than retrained into fields they could have done well in.
When we're over-exposed to *only* one of those opposing principles, though, do we ever *learn* the art of balancing the competing principles?
Before, they have many children per generation, productivity is low and overall health indicators are bad.
They tend to sorrespond to what Elizabeth Badinter called "male" societies: spread the genome and survive the fittest.
After, families tend to have one or two children on average and to nurture them much more - what the same philosopher called "female" societies.
It sounds to me that Democrats advocate a female society: nurture; while the republicans root for a spread and conquer, vae victis approach.
Take a look around you.
And try to read the language of Economics of whatever species of sociopolitical power they are propping up. Per'aps I'm a simpleton from another era but it all seems to be deliberately obtuse and thereby defensible only by those in accord with a given theorem.
I'd rather deal linguistically with Basque or Welsh. At least they mean something connected to people and their lives.
"Morality" in such an abstract world is an inconvenient quantity that can be conveniently disregarded .
http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/2012/06/nightmare-gathers-force.html
June 14, 2012
The Nightmare Gathers Force
In writing about the ongoing crisis facing Greece (and Europe generally), commentators often advance the notion that what is occurring in Greece in particular provides a preview of what will happen in the United States if we continue on our current path. Conservative and neoliberal writers (but I repeat myself) proclaim that this necessitates governments becoming far more brutal in their dedication to "austerity": that is, the ruling class must be extravagantly ruthless, without surcease, in depriving those who are without power, wealth and privilege of every means of sustaining their lives. One of the assumptions of our "betters" is that truly deserving, "good" people will nonetheless manage to survive, and perhaps thrive, even in the midst of resources and possibilities for action that diminish daily. We are told that this is one of America's greatest virtues: anyone who is hardworking and dedicated, who genuinely "makes the effort," can succeed -- because, of course, the ruling class's success has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that they have long been favored by privilege and power, often from birth.
[...]
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article31568.htm
Myth of Perpetual Growth is killing America
Commentary: Everything you know about economics is wrong
By Paul B. Farrell
June 13, 2012 " - SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Yes, everything you know about economics is wrong. Dead wrong. Everything. The conclusions of economists are based on a fiction that distorts everything else. As a result economics is as real as one of the summer blockbusters like “Battleship,” “The Avenger” or “Prometheus.”
The difference is that the economic profession is a genuine threat, not entertainment. Economics dogma is on track to destroy the world with a misleading ideology.
Why? Because all economics is based on the absurd Myth of Perpetual Growth. Yes, all theories and business plans based on growth are mythological.
Economists are master illusionists who rely on a set of fictions, fantasies and forecasts that emanate from a core magical mantra of Perpetual Growth that goes untested year after year.
And yet it’s used to manipulate the public into a set of policies and decisions that are leading the American and the world economy down a path of unsustainable globalization and GDP growth assumptions that will self-destruct the planet.
Denial? We’re all addicted to the Myth of Perpetual Growth
[...]
Lets call them what they are SOCIOPATHS!
I was staggered last night to hear a Republician saying the poor never went hungry and poverty was their fault because there was plenty who had lifted themselves out of poverty through hard work and saving money. The Australian reporter was gob smacked and incredulis and asked him "Have you ever visited the poor and had he had to miss eating due to lack of money?" The reply was No I never go down there as there are to many thieves and junkies- they always find money for drugs!- any way why would I miss a meal my folks provided for me when I was young...Before sailing into a tirade against HIS TAXS going into programmes..Aus tralian reporter (Red faced) What would you say to these children? "Get a job work hard and save." "WHAT YOUR SAYING LEAVE SCHOOL? are you saying child labors acceptable? "We if you say you can eat yar then it OK someone has to pay. END of as reporter stood up in discused and walked away saying well it not exceptable any where in my book!
BUT..!
Where are the LEADERS who will boldly say it without compromise and deliver a Forward Vision Americans will follow en masse down a new Road that is well laid out for them to see in their hearts and minds..?
AND...
Where are the portals through which such 'Free' Speech can be delivered unto the masses when almost all pipelines for speech are now owned, and exploited by a very few Global Corporate Conglomerates with their 'own' interests in mind..?
AND...
Where is a Political Party united enough, large enough and 'spineful' enough to support such Leadership and such a 'Vision' to help pave the way forward and out from under the current Corporatacracy that now runs and chokes America on behalf of a very select few and back to the universal AMERICAN DREAM begun by our ForeFathers and all those who shed blood fighting for our rights, defending it and our rights and saving the world from Fascism along the way..?
The Country operates under a Government by Lobby and the two dysfunctional Parties holding almost all elected offices across the land. And so, the airways and printways are still filled with competing, expensive 'one or the other'.., 'paper or plastic' Political CHEAP TALK while 99% of Us are still stuck on the same 30 year long, disastrous Corporate Conservative Road to even more Less and Less Government for the sake of fewer and fewer Wealthy People.
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