Notes from Texas

Just turned on the TV in my hotel room and caught 5 minutes of Glenn Beck mixing architecture criticism -- he's for real American architecture, like the Chrysler Building -- with a discourse about how imperfect but truthful and transparent politicians are better than those perfect, shiny politicians who only reflect their surroundings and want universal healthcare. Or something.

Anyway, that was interesting to behold, but then the commercial break came. First was an ad for Tax Masters, telling you that if you haven't filed tax returns in years you should hire them to stand between you and the IRS so that the feds treat you with respect and decency.

Then there was an ad for some mysterious quicky face-lift procedure that ended with the tag-line: "In these hard economic times, you should invest in yourself!"

Next up, G. Gordon Liddy hawking gold, the amazing commodity whose price goes up but doesn't come down! In these hard economic times, you need to keep inflating the price of GG's gold stash (which he admits he bought ten years ago)!

Holy shit.

More Politics of Resentment

Apparently visiting your grandmother in Hawaii is the latest sign of being out of touch and fancy-pants. Anyway, this expresses my thoughts exactly:

You see, “elitism” in this country isn’t defined by how much money you have, but whether you ever enjoy your life. For instance, you can make a lot of money and not be an elitist if your work is joyless and purposeless. This is why the Waltons are considered salt-of-the-Earth types, even though they’re the richest family in the world: because the only joy they get out of life is exploiting cheap labor both here and abroad to produce and sell cheap plastic crap. And since the Waltons are such miserable people, it’s hard for the average spite voter to feel much resentment toward them, since they’re basically richer versions of themselves.

We've got your statism right here...

Senator Kit Bond (R-MO):

"I'm not here to say that the government is always right, but when the government tells you to do something, I'm sure you would all agree that, I think you all recognize that is something you need to do."

Tell me again how conservatives are for small government, government small enough to drown in a bathtub, government that won't interfere in your god-given right to live your life as you god-damned please, etc.

Bio-Politics: An Object Lesson

A commenter over at Megan McArdle's (don't ask...):

"a certain floor of compensation for work"

That sentence summarize the problem with how work is conceived of in neo-classical and, for that matter, marxian economics.

Work is something that is not a good in and of itself, it is a negative that someone has to be "compensated" to do. Presumably because the person who is not working for wages have something better to do.

My fundamental objection to this view of work is that work is by no means a negative for an individual, but an intrinsic part of our "social being" in a society where most of us do not have activities like subsistence farming, etc. to keep us alive.

If you take the position that it is an intrinsic good to have people at work for a certain wage rather than to sit home and collect the identical sum doing nothing, then having as many as possible of the population at work is in fact, a collective good.

My argument is that to pay for idleness (Welfare, Unemployment "compensation", charitable handouts, etc.) fundamentally undermine the importance of work as a socializer, an activity that keeps people from doing things that are potentially harmful, deviant, or otherwise undesirable should they be not employed.

Look at most of continental Europe, where tight controls on hiring and firing, unionization, etc. have created an underclass of permanently unemployed, much like the underclass of mostly black ghetto dwellers in the US that is nearly permanently unemployable for different reasons.

To me, the danger of this underclass goes far beyond undermining the work ethic, incentives to work, etc. It goes to the heart of social stability in that persons who are idle at the margins of society and kept alive by handouts with no obligations are at high risk of doing things that upsets social order even more, like drug dealing, petty crimes, etc. because they are not occupied most of the time at a job.

So having said that, I am for a minimum wage, and at the same time, for the elimination of handouts without a reciprocal obligation to be at "work".

Count me in for eliminating programs like Social Security, disability payments, etc.

I lost track in there: We shouldn't compensate people for work because we shouldn't compensate people for idleness? If people would rather be idle than work, then doesn't compensation make perfect sense as a term? If people would rather work than be idle, then unemployment compensation makes perfect sense as a term and as a policy. Whatever.

Anyway: I just gave two closing lectures with the same punch-line. I said of both of my classes that my fondest wish is that they made my students a bit more useless. This wacko's idea of social engineering only makes my wish more fervent.

Work Harder, Minions! Your Overlords Are Proud!

U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN):

I am so proud to be from the state of Minnesota. We’re the workingest state in the country, and the reason why we are, we have more people that are working longer hours, we have people that are working two jobs.

This is so many different ways of fucked up, it's hard to know where to begin...

Who's Our Buffy?

This is pretty good. My favorite:

Fred Thompson = The Judge
His backers got all excited and made a big effort to assemble him. When they finally put him together, he turned out to be a lethargic mess and didn't accomplish very much.

Be Afraid. Be Very, Very Afraid.

Following the LGM links to some of the best blog posts evah!, I discovered this very nice summary of David Frum's conservatism (and not his alone):

What ‘offends’ conservatives about the welfare state is that it is economically inefficient: it destroys value by systematically encouraging masses of people to behave in reckless, value-destroying ways, which ultimately hurts those masses themselves. The cost of maintaining the safety net eventually frays even the satefy net, and then you’ve got nothing. Of course, this is putting the thesis rather crudely and ignoring numerous variants. But never mind that. It turns out economic inefficiency isn’t what ‘offends’ conservatives after all, at least not Frum.

“The great, overwhelming fact of a capitalist economy is risk. Everyone is at constant risk of the loss of his job, or of the destruction of his business by a competitor, or of the crash of his investment portfolio. Risk makes people circumspect. It disciplines them and teaches them self-control. Without a safety net, people won’t try to vault across the big top. Social security, student loans, and other government programs make it far less catastrophic than it used to be for middle-class people to dissolve their families. Without welfare and food stamps, poor people would cling harder to working-class respectability than they do not.”

The thing that makes capitalism good, apparently, is not that it generates wealth more efficiently than other known economic engines. No, the thing that makes capitalism good is that, by forcing people to live precarious lives, it causes them to live in fear of losing everything and therefore to adopt – as fearful people will – a cowed and subservient posture: in a word, they behave ‘conservatively’. Of course, crouching to protect themselves and their loved ones from the eternal lash of risk precisely won’t preserve these workers from risk. But the point isn’t to induce a society-wide conformist crouch by way of making the workers safe and happy. The point is to induce a society-wide conformist crouch. Period. A solid foundaton is hereby laid for a desirable social order.

Let’s call this position (what would be an evocative name?) ‘dark satanic millian liberalism’: the ethico-political theory that says laissez faire capitalism is good if and only if under capitalism the masses are forced to work in environments that break their will to want to ‘jump across the big top’, i.e. behave in a self-assertive, celebratorily individualist manner.

This dovetails very nicely with the Randian only-an-ubermensch-can-succeed-in-business silliness. The two conspire in that they apply to completely different people: the poor get the fearful conformity, the rich get the fearless individualism.

Trying My Hand at That Witty Sadly, No-esque Blogging

John Derbyshire over at National Review Online decides to put conservative thinking in its best light:

Startling Discoveries [John Derbyshire]

More from America's Newspaper of Record this morning. Headline: Stress Mess in U.S.

We're stressed out, we can't sleep, we're drinking too much—and it's getting worse.

Well, as a chronic somniac (i.e. opposite of an insomniac), I can sleep anywhere, anytime: ball games, movies, NR editorial conferences... no problem there. Drinking's a slight worry, though, I'll admit.

When did the NY Post become America's newspaper of record?

Forty-eight percent of Americans say they're more stressed now than they were five years ago, and the same percent report regularly lying awake at night because of stress, according to a new study by the American Psychological Association.

Oh, these "studies." That forty-eight percent could just be telling us that you feel more stress as you get older. Give us some good quantitative data. Did you measure stress? Did you measure it five years ago? With controls so the test groups are sufficiently similar? It's amazing what shoddy "research" these soft-science people get away with. Gimme numbers, gimme data. "Oh yeah, I definitely feel more stressed out than I did five years ago..." Uh-huh. Who can remember five years ago in that much detail? I'm pretty sure I was married to the same lady five years ago, and living in the same house. Beyond that it's all fog.

Derbyshire is now a real man a science? He seems to have made an elementary mistake: he took the NY Post story about the study to be the study itself. A simple error really.

"Stress continues to escalate, and it's affecting every area of people's lives," said Russ Newman, a psychologist and executive director of the APA.

Get a real job, pal.

???????????? Someone who writes professionally for the National Review is telling people to get real jobs? Derbyshire rolled out of bed, still hung-over from cocktails the night before, turns on his computer, has a brain fart over a NY Post article, and calls it a real day's work.

So what is it we're worrying about while we stare at the ceiling all night? Primarily two things: money and work, the main woes for nearly 75 percent of Americans.

In related news, dog bites man, sun rises in the east, courts strike down restrictions on illegal immigration, etc., etc.

That's way up from 59 percent of us stressed out over those two things a year ago.

Economies wax, economies wane, whatcha gonna do?

First he wanted comparative numbers, then he gets comparative numbers, then he poo-poos the comparison. Is he admitting that the economy was significantly better two years ago? Can we hold him to that?

We're also worrying about making the rent. More than half of people polled say paying the landlord or making the monthly mortgage causes great stress.

So maybe you shouldn't have bought that 8,000 square foot McMansion with a $1,200 a month heating bill on a 95 percent mortgage when you got promoted to Assistant to the Deputy Assistant's Assistant? Bad life planning.

If you're worried about paying the landlord, you obviously didn't buy a McMansion--or even a crappy shotgun shack. Does he really think 95% of Americans live in 8000 sq. ft. homes? That 95% of Americans work in management positions? That 95% of Americans are guilty of "bad life planning"?

The APA study was conducted online and involved interviews with 1,848 Americans nationwide.

An on-line study? So the subject group here is people on-line, with the time & inclination to participate in your study? Oh, that's well normed.

According to the report, all that stress and worry is taking a big toll on our lives, leading us to fight with family members, drink, smoke and give up on working out.

All things unknown in the U.S.A. five years ago. For heaven's sake: I've given up on working out at least 20 times, the first circa 1965.

If 20% of people experience x at time t, and 80% experience x at time t+1, that's called an INCREASE. To claim there has been an INCREASE in x is NOT to claim that x suddenly popped int existence.

"The high stress levels that many Americans report experiencing can have long-term health consequences, ranging from fatigue to obesity and heart disease," Newman said.

Goverment must act! Someone call Hillary!

If society makes us sick, maybe society should be altered in some way, y'know. But in Derbyshire's world, it's always peachy.

The study found that as a result of stress, 54 percent of people have fought with loved ones, and 8 percent say stress has led to separation or divorce.

...Which up to now have arisen from stress-free circumstances.

More than three-quarters of respondents say stress is making them sick, from headaches (44 percent) to upset stomach (34 percent) and grinding their teeth (17 percent). And then there's the not-so-healthy ways people try to handle all that stress, from eating junk food to tipping the bottle. Forty-three percent claim they eat—or overeat—unhealthy food to deal with stress, while a third say they lose their appetite and start skipping meals.

Plainly we need a federal Department of Stress Reduction. Or perhaps we could put Prozac in the water supply?

I'd settle for overthrowing capitalism, myself.

Drinkers and smokers report downing more booze and lighting up more often when feeling the effects of stress.

If these researchers aren't short-listed for a Nobel Prize, I'll want to know the reason why.

"Some people feel overwhelmed and out of control," said Beverly Thorn, a University of Alabama psychologist who was one of the researchers involved in the study. Thorn explains that people turn to bad habits when under stress—and that often makes them feel even worse. "It's a vicious cycle," she said.

Maybe they have the wrong bad habits.

If Derbyshire isn't short listed for the Pulitzer, we'll know why, too. Still, I have to agree with him that we need better bad habits--I would propose hacking the NRO site, or egging Derb's car, or the like. I imagine it would do wonders as stress relief.

But it's not all bad news.

So what's it doing in my newspaper?

More than half of Americans listen to music, read, or exercise as a way to alleviate stress. Others spend time with family and friends. More than a third say they pray when stressed out.

Hmm. I think I'll stick with the bad habits.

Advise to the Derb: stick to the drunk curmudgeon routine. It's much more charming than the social commentary.