Last night I began having a “twitter” conversation with someone calling himself Indjunjoe. Eventually, I referred him to a post I had written a year ago involving the “one pie to be shared by all” theory of economics. He left the following comment on that post, and my response is below.
Posted by Indjunjoe 1/11/2010:
“As I tried unsuccessfully to explain in 140 characters spurts (twitter), I find this story very comforting, like a feel good story you tell children so they grow without a sense of fear and deprivation. It’s great that we live in a country where only a minority of children have to confront that reality of fear and deprivation in their daily lives (25% live in poverty) and I have no argument about protecting those who can grow in a safe and supportive environment. But this is an adult forum, I assume, and I am interested in understanding reality and act responsibly with an informed mind. In that sense this story about pies vs. the bakery does not match a world of limited resources, and increasing inequality, so I have difficulty staying within the analogy while attempting to reflect reality.
For once pies are baked to feed not to hoard. There is no incentive in hoarding a thousand pies after you consumed enough to give you indigestion. They’ll go bad! Furthermore, and connecting with my research about inequality, what is really happening is that those who 30 years ago took home 1000 pies everyday, are now taking 5000, and yet their flower bill has gone up only twice, leaving the rest of the bill to those who used to take home one pie, and now have to make do with half.
Sorry to intrude in your happy talk of motherhood and apple pie, but if this is about life liberty and the pursuit of happiness (as the header suggests), as you drive down the yellow brick road on your perfectly safe SUV, try to mind those who are struggling along the way on bycicles or on foot; there are more and more of them thanks to the last 30 years of happy talk and tax cuts for the rich.
For a substantive discussion on economic realities you can find my position documented in indjunjoe.blogspot.com.”
Joe,
I hope you don’t mind if I call you Joe, instead of your user name; as a person with American Indian ancestors, I’d rather not.
“world of limited resources”
“increasing inequality”
“happy talk of motherhood and apple pie”
“drive down the yellow brick road on your perfectly safe SUV”
“those who are struggling along the way on bycicles or on foot”
“last 30 years of happy talk and tax cuts for the rich”
Boy, are those phrases familiar. I once thought that way too.
First off, the pie image is an analogy, and not intended to be taken literally; hence, your points regarding “hoarding” and “the pies will go bad” are not meaningful to this discussion. I didn’t originate the “pie” analogy in discussing economics. That concept has been used for many years by economists, business writers, finance people, and wives of presidential candidates.
I believe in “natural law” which basically states that all people have inalienable rights, given by Nature, or (in my case) God, and that no government bestows them upon me, nor has the right to take them away. They are mine. They are yours. They are absolute, nontransferable, nonnegotiable. Among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
The pursuit of happiness. We are not guaranteed happiness, not by government, not by God, not by Nature, not by any other person. We are guaranteed the right to pursue happiness, but we have to make our own.
The phrases you use are familiar to me. Eventually I learned the best lesson I’ve ever learned: to ask myself, what is my part in this? Directly or indirectly, I had a part in virtually every situation I found myself in. I learned, later in life than some, about personal accountability and taking responsibility.
The concept of “limited resources” is a myth, and I’m sorry you’ve bought into it. It is a narrow pessimistic view of the world and our country. It sounds like you believe there is a certain dollar figure that resides within the country, and that that money is finite. Never-changing. Never diminishing, never increasing.
I don’t believe that. I believe in wealth creation, rather than wealth sharing. (A bakery rather than one pie.) I believe that if I create a product that millions of people want to buy, and I sell it for a fair price, which means what the market will bear, and I become a millionaire, I have created wealth. I haven’t taken it from anyone. There is just that much more money in our economy, and it’s multiplied by the money earned by all the employees that I put to work making that gadget that everyone wants. Those employees put even more money out into the economy, because they can use their money to buy houses, cars, boats,–whatever they choose, as is their right.
None of that takes money away from “your” share. If anything, as this scenario plays out all over the country it lifts the economy up and benefits you as well. The less of each person’s money that the government takes, the more money there is to flow out into the economy. Government can not grow the economy, it is impossible because government has no money. They have only the money they take from us. Government spends money unwisely and wastefully. Individuals, small businesses, large businesses, and entrepreneurs create the economy; government stifles it.
The “increasing inequality” you speak of does exist. It has been growing, not for the past 30 years as you claim, but for the past 60 years, since the first attempts to socialize our country began. These efforts didn’t begin with the New Deal, but FDR’s New Deal began the “increasing inequality” and it has continued with every liberal law and policy passed that increases dependence of poor people upon government. This money should have been spent helping people become more independent and self-reliant, but instead, has only enabled generations of the poorest among us to remain in their poverty.
America is the only country where the only limits on a person’s ability to achieve success are those they place on themselves. (By success, I don’t mean money alone.) What I and millions of others are fighting for is that those self-imposed limits remain the only ones, and that government doesn’t become an enemy of the free market and the bounty it can produce for all of us.
As for “happy talk of motherhood and apple pie,” please. I’m sorry for you that my upward looking view of life bothers you so much. I remember feeling that way too.
A few days ago I watched (again) the movie “Alive.” A more desperate situation is unimagineable. I was struck by the fact that it was Ethan Hawke’s character, the optimist in the group, who saved them; the one who was glad when they called off the search because it meant that they could stop waiting around to be found and could begin to save themselves; the one who, after surviving a plane crash, stands and looks out at the Andes Mountains and says, “Look at this; it’s beautiful. God put this here for us to see, it’s so beautiful. And somewhere down there, is a green valley. And we’re going to find it.”
And they did.
That’s the difference in success and failure. That’s the difference in self-reliance and depending on government to save you.
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{ 11 comments }
Well, not sure how to address you. Pup would not work… Also, I have a short explanation of my twitter name on my profile. Injun Joe, the character from Tom Sawyer, was portrayed in a dehumanizing way, as a mean Indian, and neglected in a way that reflect the deep prejudice of the time. My point which may not be very successful is that I don’t believe in dehumanizing anyone, even our worst enemy, and I wanted to symbolically give voice to those who were never heard. I’m afraid that people of Native America ancestry may not understand that, so for now that is an explanation.
Now, I’m going to pick on a few important points you made, but not all, to keep this manageable.
Pie charts are useful to visualize a domain split into components with relative dimensional values. The bakery takes a flight of fancy away from that rationality. I understand that. Since you took a measure of creative license I tried to play along within those loose lines. Why would you think I was speaking literally? I brought in some aspects that I think were left out of your very distilled and airbrushed picture of reality.
Yes there is greed. Some think it’s good. Others think it’s a disease. I think it’s well portrayed in the 2008 Oscar winning “There will be blood”. Some people feel that they are entitled to everything and will fight anyone that attempts to gain something legitimately. There is no sense of legitimacy. Everything has to be theirs, unconditionally, or they get sick. These people leave a trail of destruction in their path. I feel that it is my mission to identify when abuse and exploitation is being committed and denounce those who commit such abuses. I think we all have that responsibility, and stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves. I’m not sure you feel such responsibility.
When you say, I used to think like that, I have to doubt. I am open to new points of view and try to learn from everyone that disagrees with me. But I’ve been doing this for a long time, in a very reflective and serious way, and I don’t see myself switching direction, even if I may swerve a little here and there. I must tell you that I did not grow up in this country but lived here the last 27 years. I have lived in Europe, in Africa, multiple countries. I have lived under fascism, apartheid, colonialism. I have lived through a radical revolution and seen the radicalism slowly melt away.
In all these situations I have seen people with power, and people without power. I have seen people who believe in their inalienable rights like you mentioned, but having to live under a tyranny that does not recognize them. They fight, sometimes give their lives, not for personal aggrandizement. They fight on the shoulders of a humanity they believed in and they knew that this humanity was real and alive, and had hope in them. I remember following the investigation on Steve Biko’s death when I was in South Africa. I remember how some whites tried to denigrate his character, and I heard the other side too. Mandela, at the time, was a banned terrorist and his name could not be pronounced or written about. So today I react to the terrorist label in a very different way than most people do.
This is my background and my political education.
In this country I was always autonomous and I grew to understand economics and integrate it in my world view. Within a few years of starting to work as an engineer I started to collect royalties from an invention I developed and decided to go back to graduate school. I never had to take a loan. I started my life here with some small savings and was always self sufficient, so I don’t know what you mean about learning personal accountability – assuming you were talking in economic terms. I was always responsible for myself but even in the middle of strangers and far from everything I knew I was part of a community. I don’t believe in the individualism except as an abstraction. I know how wealth is created, and I am perfectly capable to be creative and productive. I know for instance that bankers don’t create any wealth, and yet they feel entitled to earn in a year what other people would take multiple lifetimes to achieve. Most people in this country take a lot of things for granted and sometimes have a huge sense of entitlement. Whenever they succeed they pat themselves on the back and the higher they climb the less they realize how they are walking on top of a human pyramid. Eventually they realize it but they don’t bother to understand that it was not by themselves that they got there, because the higher you climb on the backs of others the easier it becomes. I don’t think that is the basis of Conservative thought but I know those people are individualists. It’s partly their nature but also reinforced by their environment. It is a broad generalization that a good intellect may be interested in money, and become a Wall Street banker, or be interested in knowledge and become an academic. Almost without exception the first will be an individualist the second a progressive (liberal, sometimes socialist).
So you believe that the problem of inequality should be blamed on liberals. I think that explanation is the product of your environment. It’s trendy to believe in supply side economics. I am not an economist but I don’t buy the concept and I think it is an interesting construct but insufficient to understand a more complex reality. Simplicity is so seductive and can be very elegant… I know I am a lot worse off after 8 years of Bush, who instituted crony capitalism in this country (expression coined by a conservative).
CEOs are ten times smarter today than they were just 20 years ago as their compensation indicates. Financial bankers the same, and they smugly keep to themselves the explanation that what everybody thought was the collapse of the global financial system was in fact just another opportunity to make money. Not that they produce any wealth! They simply play with the perceived value of assets so that by trading with advanced models they come out ahead of every poor schmuck who dares to wade into the shark infested waters of the “free market”.
I’m afraid I see things being much more complicated than your fashionable model makes it appear.
If simplicity is what you need to be comfortable with your world view I can appreciate that. For me it’s not enough. I think the truth is not so close at hand. I like to go deeper and further. I can’t say that it has been very rewarding in all aspects of my life, so I won’t try to sell you on that. I just have to go further and get to the truth when there is any chance that I am being offered any measure of deceit. There is plenty of filters required for that, deceit is truly an infinite resource. So instead of watching Fox “News” I wait for a humorous rendition of the more revealing episodes to be satirized by John Stewart. Between public radio/tv and some online sources there is enough variety of sources to figure out where the truth is being tweaked. And ultimately it is my life experience that warns me about who is likely to do that tweaking.
I hope I don’t come across as arrogant, because I don’t mean to be. I just found myself explaining why I can’t see things the way you do, and it’s a long explanation. I find that the way you deal with things that concern me, like growing inequality, with fashionable ideological formulas, may not instigate a continuous search for dissonance with what you could possibly observe with your eyes. The changes that have happened in the last couple decades and how they were orchestrated. The ideology that has moved people, and more specifically how myths and ignorance are used to manipulate a large part of the citizenry.
Most people simply have no time to go beyond a world view that answers their need to understand the world. Just like religion, it’s easier to believe what everyone around you reinforces with common beliefs. Ultimately it comes down to belief, which some people are willing to challenge when it collides with observation, but most would rather not question.
This is extremely long even after I tried to edit it, but I would like to add one more subject. Your views on people becoming dependent on government and being better off empowering themselves to fight their way out of poverty reminded me of something. I read a great book where Barabara Ehrenreich shares her experiences of one year in which she decided to live like a minimum wage earner, working multiple jobs as hotel made, dinner waitress, Wal-mart, etc. It’s called “Nickel and Dimed”. If you have read it I would like to know your impressions.
Joe,
Many call me Pup, that works fine.
You have certainly had a myriad of experiences in your life. It’s obvious that you’re educated, creative, and a productive citizen. Your “mission to identify when abuse and exploitation is being committed and denounce those who commit such abuses” is an admirable one, though I disagree with you that I don’t feel that “responsibility.” You are undertaking that on a grander scale than I, and I salute you for it. My mission, if you will, is more focused on other wrongs and abuses, the abuse of power, the wrongness in keeping millions of people in the depths of poverty because they are more useful to those seeking power, etc. I am passionately opposed to the snuffing out of motivation systematically carried out by progressive thinkers and politicians whose only true desire is power. Despite their lofty words about helping others–the poor, the downtrodden, minorities–they seek only to increase their own position and use those desperate groups of people merely as steps up to the top. And while your outlook and focus seems to be worldwide, mine is concentrated on America. Not out of any provincial “what happens elsewhere doesn’t affect me”–I know it does, but I choose to focus here, now, on the protection of our liberties.
I do know that corruption runs rampant in the corporate world; I have never and would never defend that. I see it as clearly as do you, I have simply chosen to fight different battles. I’m glad there are people like you to focus on the greed that leads to abuse; there are problems enough for all of us to pick our own battles.
You articulated doubt to my having thought a different way in the past. I won’t spend much time on that; what I say is true, and I have no idea what to say to convince you, nor do I have a vested interest in whether you are convinced or not. Suffice to say, in the past I often thought to myself and said to others, ‘no one needs that much money.’
I think we have both made clear that we have basic underlying differences in our thinking. I think the way I do primarily because of my relationship with God, and my realization that God’s gifts are to be used and shared, not secreted away, and that those gifts include a multitude of things. Writings by Milton Friedman and Frederick Hayek are among those gifts and have influenced my thinking, but primarily, the history of America’s founding.
I’m sure I haven’t addressed all the points you made. I thank you for the discussion; and wish you good luck fighting the abuse and exploitation. Those need to be fought, but I don’t think that because exploitation exists, we need to condemn the concept of liberty and capitalism, which go together hand-in-glove.
Thank you again for the comments. Please come back and comment any time.
Very interesting exchange indeed. I think I’ll side with you Pup. You and I think much alike.
Have a terrific day.
.-= Comedy Plus´s last blog ..A Very Nasty Virus =-.
I appreciate the sincerity of this exchange, and I didn’t mean to doubt you when you said that you had changed your thinking over time. I merely meant that you could not know that you used to place stock in the same beliefs I have, since you could not really understand where I base my belief system. I gave you some biographic background to let you know that I have experienced the world in a way that is not typically available to most Americans. No question that the foundation of this country is an event of the greatest significance in therms of human history. And you may agree that the Founders expected Americans to retain the power to defend democracy from its enemies. They warned us of the dangers of tyranny developping internally under the shadow of fabricated fear of external threats. That actually frames very clearly the Bush years in my view.
I’m not a watch dog for greedy capitalists, and in spite of what you think I believe in a free enterprise system with a level playing field. I do think that there is danger in the outrageous concentration of power that we have experienced in recent decades.
I don’t share your belief that Friedmand and Hayek were gifts from God. And that applies to Keynes and Galbraith, Stieglitz, Krugman etc. None of them settled for good a unifying theory of economic science. Claiming that God anointed a particular ideological faction is a hard sell outside a small circle of true believers.
My focus on greed and power is not out of envy as many people like to portray in a dismissive way. It is because of the threat to democracy that follows the inequality being generated in the last 30 years. This is a repeat, to a certain extent, of the collapse of 1929. At the time the economic inequality measurements reached a peak. FDR’s policies brought that back to a sustainable level, in large part through fiscal policy. As that fiscal policy was undone the levels of inequality climbed and surpassed the same unstable levels in 2007. Personally I don’t think we have seen the precipice close enough to prompt us to take measures as bold as FDR took back then. We are still bitterly divided and I see a large portion of the population very open to the deceptive ideology that drove our economic policy since Reagan.
Today, the economic plutocracy has even a more tenuous allegiance to this nation than in the 30′s. They have transmutated into global corporations and will survive the destruction of this country without any remorseful thoughts, if they find that necessity to be in the path of their profit motive.
You seem to detect in every liberal politician a single minded preoccupation with power. There are surely examples to illustrate that, but to impute that characteristic to liberals is naïve in my view. I won’t go into my view of the likes of Tom Delay, Carl Rove, Dick Cheney, and others that have acted with great cynicism, on the margin of the law, to pursue political and economic power, in the process helping drive this country very close to irreversible disaster. I see them in collusion with global corporatists; much more so than any liberal. There may be room for collaboration between some conservatives and progressives where it concerns the loss of citizen power to the corporate interests that buy influence in Washington. I can only hope.
Clearly our different experiences have shaped our beliefs. I think it’s healthy to put them to the test. I try to express my concerns based on real economic data, or other fact based data. That is what I publish in my blog, which is intended more as a depository of my own research than for wide public consumption. But it is helpful in this age of Twitter as a reference for anybody who wants to have an insight on my point of view.
I thought this clarification was required to correct some important areas of the profile that I tried to get across on my last post.
I appreciate the spirit of this exchange and will continue to watch your postings, and more than likely disagree with some of them.
And may we all be blessed with sanity and clarity of vision.
…fabricated fear of external threats. … during the Bush years.
Please expound on this Joe. How do you know that so unequivocally that you can make that kind of bold statement?
.-= Kris, in New England´s last blog ..Epic Fail =-.
I don’t know anything unequivocally; that’s not what I insinuated. I do have a recollection of recent history that I interpret in a way that as far as I know is coherent with the facts. Clearly I am reminded of Madison’s warning: ” If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.”
Until proof in contrary I believe that at least some in the Bush administration used this warning not as was intended but as a plan of action. It’s an interpretation of history without the benefit of reading people’s minds but in line with the facts available to me.
Joe,
I was just re-visiting the “facts available to me” (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB80 about the lead-up to the Iraq war, and it seems clear to me that both the Bush administration and Blair’s in the UK acted on the intelligence they had received from others. One of the possible reasons given after the fact, when supposedly no such weapons or materials were found was that perhaps some of the Iraqi providers of intelligence gave misleading information hoping to influence US and UK policy; they were freedom advocates (the Iraqis) and wanted help in getting rid of Saddam. I’m not saying I believe that’s what happened, and I don’t have access to enough “facts” to know for sure what happened, but this sounds like a plausible scenario to me.
Unless you participated in intelligence gathering and/or interpreting that intelligence later for Congress and the President, I doubt that you know any more facts than anyone else. We all draw our own conclusions based on biases, previous experiences, and belief systems. Your interpretation of history is different from mine but we have the same facts available to us. I’m familiar with the Madison quote, it is used often, but my thinking is that we can’t use that quote as a basis for never fighting those who wish to do us harm.
Pup, maybe I was in the minority, but I was never convinced that there was reason to invade Iraq. I think your recollection has a lot to do with the environment you surrounded yourself with. There were huge street demonstrations that the media played down (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War) . At the last minute, while the weapons inspection chief declared his confidence that there were no WMD, Bush tried to push a resolution through the Security Council that would provide a legal cover under international law. We could not get the support of our allies (Germany and France). Tony Blair who played along ended up discredited after the publication of the Downing Street documents that uncovered the evidence fixing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downing_Street_memo). Ultimately, one after another, White House insiders came out with accounts confirming that Bush had a plan to invade Iraq since the day of his inauguration (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60minutes/main592330.shtml ). I saw through the theatrics because I was cynical about Bush from the beginning. Those who believed in him may have to confront a painful deception.
Ultimately, the crimes inflicted on the Iraqi people in the name of liberating them have inflated the legitimate Anti-Americanism of huge numbers that immeasurably increase our risk and insecurity. A risk which until 9/11 that administration had ignored.
It appears to me that by watching the horrible results of our destructive power on TV we don’t get the real sense of the human tragedy, and that makes us so trigger happy. I believe most people are that insensitive because they feel secure that they are safely protected from being victimized in the same way; who would even consider invading this country other than someone maddened to the point of suicide? We haven’t had an invasion of our territory in the modern era (comparable to a single day of bombing during the invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan). But even if we seem to get away untouched there is an ultimate price paid by those who do the dirty work. Since the start of the war each year more veterans commit suicide than all the lives lost on 9/11 (http://www.wpxi.com/health/22206480/detail.html ). Compared to today’s bellicose attitude of many Americans Thomas Jefferson sounds like a pacifist when he says: “War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses”. It rings true to me.
…interpret in a way that as far as I know is coherent with the facts.
Joe – there is the flaw in your entire argument. You can’t interpret facts – they are just that, facts.
Interpreting them allows them to be bent to suit a particular narrative or agenda. We’ve all done it.
.-= Kris, in New England´s last blog ..Drained =-.
Thanks Kris for your contribution, appreciate it.
Joe, you probably were in the minority in your doubting from the start of the need to go into Iraq. You and Barack Obama. That’s beside the point. Now, you’ve used a book written by a man with questionable credibility as support for your distrust of Pres. Bush, and refer us to a link to an article at CBS news, which no longer has ANY credibility with me. When a news outlet refuses to report on information about a favored candidate that might be negative for him, that outlet loses its standing as a true source for information.
You’ve referred twice to my positions as a product of “the environment I surrounded myself with.” I have NO idea what you mean by this, but it sounds as if you have decided that I exist in one certain type of environment, which only believes certain “rules.” If that is indeed what you mean, you lose a little credibility with me as that is a closed-minded way of thinking. I mean, I don’t know if you mean regional, geographic, socioeconomic–just have no idea. As I said above, it’s a closed-minded narrow way to assess people.
This is such an old tired argument. You are free to think what you want, and, thankfully in this country, also free to express it. I do not agree in any way with your opinions about Operation Iraqi Freedom. This post of yours sounds much like someone who gets his news only from certain sites and organizations. I read, listen to, and watch them all. I know what you’ve been told, I’ve heard it too. The difference is that I’ve had the courage and open-mindedness to watch and listen to other sources, namely FOX, CNSnews.com, and several others.
I know that you and many many others who share your ideology believe totally that those of us who recognize that sometimes you have to fight–go to war–don’t care about the human cost. Again, exposing your own closed-mindedness.
That’s all I have on this; I’ve had this exact short-lived “debate” with others who have said almost word for word what you wrote above. It’s pointless to debate or argue. I have no reason to believe what Paul O’Neill says. And, I don’t.
You’re welcome to comment here anytime, but I must warn you, I grow weary of debating the same points about President Bush. He is not president anymore, while I admire, respect, and will protect him with my words, I am not looking for someone like him to be my next president. I want a true conservative.
Pup, we are very far apart indeed. I don’t think I’ve had the opportunity to have a civil argument with someone that holds such opposite views. I’d have a very easy time finding people who agree with me, but I think there is more to be learned by talking across ideological barriers if you can find a place where freedom of expression is truly tolerated. I guess this is a compliment. However, so far, I have learned more about the process of maintaining a conversation than how to actually bridge the difference of our views. Maybe that’s good enough for now.