Gavin Kennedy responds to "Adam Smith and Glibertarianism"

A recent post of mine Adam Smith and Glibertarianism: History Vanished into the Memory Hole was sparked by a comment thread at Angry Bear attached to the post Adam Smith in a wider context which in turn ultimately linked back to a post by Gavin Kennedy at his blog Adam Smith's Lost Legacy (ASLL). Mr. Kennedy left a comment HERE pointing back to a new post THERE and kindly offered to allow me to cut this Gordian Knot and start afresh from his take by reposting his piece in toto here.

I have yet to read through it in full and still less to formulate a response but I put it up in hopes that others will weigh in here. My response when it comes will be in comments. Mr. Kennedy:

[Please follow the link {above} as our debate is "parallel" rather than direct (I am not sure exactly what Bruce is debating with me, so I have offered an alternative perspective of history, which I think I share with Adam Smith.]

"Hi Bruce

I shall offer some comments on your article: “Adam Smith and Glibertarianism: history vanished into the memory hole”, first stating I am not sure to whom you address your remarks and,adding, I do not share your narrower view of history than Adam Smith’s, nor (on a lesser scale of philosophical symmetry) mine.

Applying class analysis to history, especially where it is informed by back-projecting 19-21st century consciousness, is limiting. If the mass of people in the distant past were deprived of the category, “democracy” as an idea, they were unaware of it. Athenian “democracy” disenfranchised women and slaves; in its modern context, glimmers of democracy appeared in Cromwell’s England (Levellers) and in late 18th century British colonies, and in Britain and France. Until then, the issue of “Liberty” was more important and, in my view, liberty still is more important than democracy – the former cannot be other than self-evident, the latter often is a sham (as recent and current examples show).

In Smith’s Lectures on Jurisprudence (1762-63) he gives a very clear account of the very ‘slow and gradual’ political evolution of liberty: Magna Carta, trial by jury, independent judiciary, rule of law, Habeas Corpus, through the absolute monarchies of the ‘allodial’ and ‘feudal’ disorders of Europe from the fall of Rome in the 5th century to the Constitutional Monarchies after the English civil war, 1740-60, and the ‘Glorious Revolution’, 1688.

A lack of democratic consciousness runs right back to and throughout pre-history and, incidentally, so does a lack of consciousness about property. The discovery of “property” was a revolutionary idea enabling a minority of the world’s tribes to move to rising population levels from the population-limiting mode of subsistence of the forest and rivers in which, well past the 18th century, the absence of private property among the majority of the world’s tribes in the vast land-mass of Africa, south Asia, Australia, the Pacific and the Americas, held their human populations in check. Tribal populations before property, and many of them afterwards, unaware of the phenomenon of property lived on in their subsistence modes. Both property and non-property societies were oblivious of each other’s existence until relatively recently.

Whilst their concepts of property were primitive and were confined to tribal properties, they were firmly resistant to other tribes intruding on “their” particular territories, but without their having clear concepts of property they could not evolve into early civic societies, based on laws, that were practiced over millennia. The group and individual violence common in many such primitive regimes of ‘tribal’ property is well documented in anthropological studies. Marxists idealise the ‘forest’ mode of subsistence as “primitive communism”, but it certainly had a bloody record among populations over hundreds of millennia, with women mainly suffering as victims and ‘war’ booty, and men suffering early and violent deaths (proportionally greater than well-known, so-called “murder capitals” in modern times).

Shepherding and agriculture (Smith’s 2nd and 3rd ages of man) gradually brought more sophisticated forms of property, first from tribal towards extended familial property forms and then towards individual families, and finally to inheritable personal properties. With such local property forms the need for resolving disputes emerged, many of them violent. Societies with individual property forms developed fairly high forms of civic society, at least for short periods, and while the annual distribution of “the necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of life” remained skewed, the long accumulations of stone-civilisations spread across Europe and the north Asian landmass, while not much changed elsewhere.
Into this world of cycles of civilisation and barbarism, with accumulating knowledge amidst “pusillanimous superstition”, and slow growth in total “GDP” (for want of a better term), though fairly constant per capita GDP (the surplus creamed off and directed to stone monuments, the detritus of such is scattered across the Euro-Asian landmass), Bruce introduces a conceptual apparatus to judge past epochs as if such concepts are applicable or remotely relevant to the past generations involved, or to modern generations, about what is called “history” (none of which we can change, experience, or even remedy now).

The distant past is, well, distant. The terrible crimes of oppression, genocide, sexual dominance, shaman-led atrocities, wholesale slavery, conquest, and ignorance, cannot find a remedy, a balm or an anti-septic comfort, nor can they be “revenged” (by whom on whom?). We are not just the descendants of noble savages, ignoble tyrants, and human saints. There are now six billion (and counting) where two millennia ago there were 100 million, and a couple of hundred millennia ago there may have been 50,000 or fewer.

Back-projecting modern indignation onto that past is an awesome vision. Who knows which “crimes” and degrees of “culpability” were shared by which individuals in the ancestors of each of us? Who knows who, among the past populations aided and abetted any of the “crimes” of their fellows, whether chasing and killing interlopers from other tribes on “sacred land”, or stole their women, or swung the lash or the sword at the defenceless “spoils of war” and unspeakable domination, right up the modern genocides of Nazism or Stalinism?

A Smithian perspective is somewhat less ambitious, and more to the point. It is to study the past to learn how the present came about; to neither condemn nor praise it, but to understand it, and to offer advice in areas where changes may be made to improve the lot of those unable to prosper humanely under the current regimes of the current plenty.

Property made some societies in the mainly Northern latitudes incomparably more opulent that the majority of the rest of the world’s population; attacking, perhaps destroying, the basis of that opulence is to act as if property never happened, or that it should have happened differently. That it didn’t happen differently is sufficient warning that what didn’t happen couldn’t happen. No examples of societies without property, "fairly" or “unfairly” distributed, managed to create the technologies and knowledge levels of those with property. Searching for evidence of seething masses of revolutionary inspired “soldiers” held down by perfidious state functionaries is as futile as it is fictional.

I think understanding such awesome facts is a proper prelude to understanding how and why we might move, slowly and gradually, towards societies more in line with the sentiments, oft expressed by Adam Smith, where those who sustain and co-operate in the progress towards opulence share in the resultant growth in “the annual output of the necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of life”.

[My 2008 book, Adam Smith: a moral philosopher and his political economy, (Palgrave Macmillan) gives a more detailed account than I managed to squeeze in here.]

Talking Point vs Reality: Health Care Reform's Effect on Medicare

cross posted at Angry Bear

The latest Republican talking point, promoted among others by Chuck Grassley this morning, is that proposed cuts to Medicare make its financial situation more precarious. Why cut $500 billion if Medicare is already in trouble? This is totally backwards and shows a total unawareness of how Medicare is financed. So lets review:

Medicare has four 'Parts' A (Hospital), B (Physicians), C (Medicare Advantage) and D (Drugs).

Part A is financed primarily by a tax on payroll supplemented by co-pays for extended stays. Tax receipts not needed for immediate payout are deposited in the HI (Hospital Insurance) Trust Fund which like its counterparts in Social Security functions as a reserve fund, serving to buffer out fluctuations in tax income.

Parts B & D are financed by a combination of premiums and direct transfers from the General Fund, while Part C being a combination of A, B, and D draws from all three sources and is run by insurance companies.

The Health Care bills under consideration leave current revenues into Medicare alone and so CAN'T worsen the overall financial health of the system. Instead they propose to change the payment mix going out and slash the extra premium going to Part C and so make the overall financial position BETTER. These changes actually move the date the HI Trust Fund is projected to go to depletion OUT IN TIME.

Now it is fair to argue that cuts in Medicare potentially deprive people on Medicare benefits they have come accustomed to, but the argument that they financially weaken Medicare is to get it 180 degrees reversed. Republicans have been bleating about an 'entitlements crisis' whose costs are out of control. Well the answer to that is to cut costs. The only difference is that Democrats propose to use the savings to extend coverage to the uninsured while Republicans were hoping to use them to preserve tax cuts.

So don't buy the "We are trying to save Medicare" argument from the Republicans, they don't like it, never have, and don't care in principle about cutting money going to gramma. Instead all of this, all of it is about wanting Obama and the Democrats to fail so that Republicans can make gains in the 2010 mid-terms. Pay no attention to the crocodile tears.

Game Changing Vote On Health Care

cross posted at Angry Bear

Key Senate committee passes health care plan

The Senate Finance Committee passed a long-awaited $829 billion health care bill Tuesday by a 14-9 vote. Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, was the lone committee member to cross party lines, breaking with other Republicans to vote for the measure. All the committee's Democrats supported the bill.

The MSM will lead with Snowe, but the real story to follow is that last sentence. Neither Conrad nor Lincoln left the fold. Meaning that at first glance there is no chance they would vote to keep the merged bill from at least coming to the floor for debate (which was a possibility if they had defected on the SFC bill itself) and I would think little chance they would back a filibuster on final passage.

TPM liveblogged the vote here: LIVEBLOG: Senate Finance Committee Votes On Health Care Reform Bill

I'll be following this story all day and night and will be able to respond to comments here (but not to those at AB). So consider this an open Health Care thread. I would throw one question out for discussion: Did AHIP overplay its hand by releasing the PWC Report? Because I certainly would not have predicted the Conservadems falling into line the way they did, something got them off the fence.

Adam Smith and Glibertarianism: History Vanished into the Memory Hole

Over at Angry Bear there has begun an ongoing discussion of Adam Smith led by the newest Bear, Gavin Kennedy of the blog Research Agenda. Today's post is Adam Smith in a Broader Context

In the course of the comments to the post I confronted a regular Glibertarian commenter who as always is arguing the standard Glibertarian line that Unfettered Capitalism Produces Optimal Outcomes because Adam Smith explained the Invisible Hand. My response got so lengthy, and ate into my time that I figured I would put it up here rather than going a weekend without a post. I think it stands pretty well on its own, but it is a response to a particular person and a particular argument whose details would require some to visit the linked post and thread. Anyway:
_________________________________________________________
In practice individual workers have always had explicit external bounds placed on their ability to maximize their own self-interest. For most of history and still today property owners, first mostly defined in terms of lands and moveables, later in such things as factories and intellectual property, have been able to count on State Power protecting those rights against the majority. often pejoratively described as the 'Mob'.

For example In Medieval and Early Modern centuries education was firmly in the hands of the Church, including higher education in the form of the great Universities. In turn the Church was firmly and legally in the hands of the property owners, who had the legal power to appoint parish priests, just as Kings had the right to appoint Bishops. Which meant in practice the vast majority of the Tithes extracted from the rural and urban working classes went not to the local parish, but instead to whatever member of the land owning class had been appointed to the benefice. In turn that person did not actually have to serve his parish, he could instead take the money derived from the tithe, use a small piece to hire someone to leave in his place 'vicus', hence the familiar English Vicar seen in literature, and go off to Court or University for advancement. In turn those Universities, funded as they were largely by past donations of various religious benefices naturally restricted entry to University to members of their own class which included medium to major landowners, certain merchants and much later manufacturers.

This self-closed system where only a minority had access to the means of advancement was firmly in place in England at the publication of Wealth of Nations, and while a little less closed in Scotland, was certainly understood by Smith. In reading Smith, or at least those parts of Smith that are commonly read today by economists in the classical tradition, there seems to be no understanding that all of these equilibrium mechanisms only applied to that subset of the population interior to the property owning system that had access to education and capital.

British society and economy was quite explicitly and open anti-Democratic right up to and beyond the revolutionary moment marked by the year 1848 with Chartists demanding universal suffrage in Britain and various European countries and capitals marked by open revolution. Remember that this was the year of the Communist Manifesto and the Second French Revolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848 And these Revolutions failed in their aims, the forces of Reaction were largely triumphant and Democracy would remain a dirty word for several decades to come. In Britain it wasn't until the Representation of the People Act of 1884 that you had anything resembling democracy.In light of that it is hard to see why people looking at these matters from a fundamentally Majoritarian position would take these late nineteenth century analyses as applying to the twenty-first century. This simple extension of ideas from Smith's very different economic and social society, where the general mindset that the majority was a potentially revolutionary mass to be suppressed where necessary by the use of State force, and where wage suppression and systematic denial of education to the masses were integral tools in those continual efforts, injects an 'up by your bootstraps' mentality that was utterly foreign to the time these ideas were formulated.

Smith's equilibria, to the extent they ever worked at all, were confined to those classes that were on the inside of the bubble of people represented in government and for whom the government in practice worked in return. Which is to say property owners and controllers of other forms of capital. The notion that this process delivered fair returns to the masses is absurd. Which in turn makes the whole Glibertarian effort to cherry pick Smith and Walras equally absurd, they are working from a discipline that grew out of explicitly anti-majoritarian principles and trying to apply that to a political and economic system ostensibly based on universal representation and equality of opportunity that would have been totally alien to the society in which the discipline of economics originally developed.

The futility of this is illustrated in Caplan's 'Myth of the Rational Voter' which seems aimed at the equivalent of repealing the Representation of the People Act and the Fourteenth Amendment on the grounds that the majority simply doesn't understand the primacy of property over democracy. Well maybe because most of us aren't starting from the position of privilege still given to those with ready access to capital and the means of economic advancement.

Score the War

cross-posted at Angry Bear

Davis Obey asks some hard questions that should have been asked long ago. My eye was caught by question one which prompts the title of my post. Why insist that Health Care be budget neutral and come in below some arbitrary target? Why did we even allow these wars to be funded with Supplementals and never received a ten year score? Why not Score the War?

Chief House Appropriator Urges Obama to Change Course On Afghanistan

“There are some fundamental questions that I would ask of those who are suggesting that we follow a long term counterinsurgency strategy:

1. As an Appropriator I must ask, what will that policy cost and how will we pay for it? We are now in the middle of a fundamental debate over reforming our healthcare system. The President has indicated that it must cost less than $900 billion over ten years and be fully paid for. The Congressional Budget Office has had four committees twisting themselves into knots in order to fit healthcare reform into that limit. CBO is earnestly measuring the cost of each competing healthcare plan. Shouldn’t it be asked to do the same thing with respect to Afghanistan? If we add 40,000 troops and recognize the need for a sustained 10 year or longer commitment, as the architects of this plan tell us we do, the military costs alone would be over $800 billion. And unlike the demands that are being made of the healthcare alternatives that they be deficit neutral, we’ve heard no such demand with respect to Afghanistan. I would ask how much will this entire effort cost, when you add in civilian costs and costs in Pakistan? And how would that impact the budget?

2. Do we really believe that there is an international consensus for such a long-term endeavor, or will we in fact, with the exception of some tokenism, be going it alone? Are we really prepared to “go it alone”?

3. What policy is in fact achievable? We should be asking not what policy is theoretically the most intellectually coherent, but which policy is actually achievable given the only tools we have in the region; the Afghani and Pakistani governments. Is there sufficient leadership, popular support, and political will, not in the United States but in Afghanistan, necessary for effective governance to take hold?

4. What makes us think that a much more aggressive and expansive role for U.S. troops will not harden elements of the Taliban and make them a more potent force, forcing them to stand up to the “occupier”?

5. Does it all add up? The so-called COIN, or counterinsurgency strategy, calls for a certain number of troops and police based on a country’s population. In Afghanistan that equates to 600,000 people in uniform. But the Afghani government has never maintained more than 200,000 before. Can they really sustain a three-fold increase?

6. Do we really have the tools to overcome language, culture, history and a 90% illiteracy rate to sufficiently transform such a country?

There are many things we could do to "provide for the common defense" and more that we could do to "promote the general welfare", and maybe this one is so vital that we have to do it come what may. But if the Generals tell us this is going to be a ten year war why not be adults and have an open discussion of what that means in dollars?

CBO Scores Tort Reform

CBO Letter to Senator Hatch

What Hatch proposed:

Several times over the past decade, CBO has estimated the effects of legislative tort reform proposals. Typical proposals have included:

 A cap of $250,000 on awards for noneconomic damages;
 A cap on awards for punitive damages of $500,000 or two times the award for economic damages, whichever is greater;
 Modification of the “collateral source” rule to allow evidence of income from such sources as health and life insurance, workers’ compensation, and automobile insurance to be introduced at trials or to require that such income be subtracted from awards decided by juries;
 A statute of limitations—one year for adults and three years for children—from the date of discovery of an injury; and
 Replacement of joint-and-several liability with a fair-share rule, under which a defendant in a lawsuit would be liable only for the percentage of the final award that was equal to his or her share of responsibility for the injury.

What doctors would save in premiums and as a share of overall medical expenditures

The Effect of Tort Reform on Premiums for Medical Liability Insurance
National implementation of a package of proposals similar to the preceding list would reduce total national premiums for medical liability insurance by about 10 percent, CBO now estimates. That figure reflects the fact that many states have already enacted at least some of the proposed reforms. For example, about one-third of the states have implemented caps on noneconomic damages, and about two-thirds have reformed their rules regarding joint-and-several liability.

CBO estimates that the direct costs that providers will incur in 2009 for medical malpractice liability—which consist of malpractice insurance premiums together with settlements, awards, and administrative costs not covered by insurance—will total approximately $35 billion, or about 2 percent of total health care expenditures. Therefore, lowering premiums for medical liability insurance by 10 percent would reduce total national health care expenditures by about 0.2 percent.

Not quite the panacea that the Right has been promising here. How much would that effect the Federal deficit?

In the case of the federal budget, enactment of such a package of proposals would reduce mandatory spending for Medicare, Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and the Federal Employees Health Benefits program by roughly $41 billion over the next 10 years (see Table 1).

I particularly like the part that both caps your possible award and then subtracts from that any proceeds you might have gotten from insurance and workers comp. That is if by some chance you actually have catastrophic health insurance designed to meet your lifetime needs should something terrible happens you wouldn't have any recourse against malpractice at all.

Republicans need to stop dodging and ducking and get realistic about where the problems are. And it is not because meanie Democratic trial lawyers are driving doctors to perform defensive medicine. Americans deserve health coverage. We cannot continue to operate like we are a second world country where the wealthy get care and the working poor go without.

CBO Preliminary Score of Baucus's Chairman's Mark

by Bruce Webb (cross posted at Angry Bear)

CBO letter to Baucus

Estimated Budgetary Impact of the Amended Chairman’s Mark According to CBO and JCT’s assessment, enacting the Chairman’s mark, as amended, would result in a net reduction in federal budget deficits of $81 billion over the 2010–2019 period (see Table 1). The estimate includes a projected net cost of $518 billion over 10 years for the proposed expansions in insurance coverage. That net cost itself reflects a gross total of $829 billion in credits and subsidies provided through the exchanges, increased net outlays for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and tax credits for small employers; those costs are partly offset by $201 billion in revenues from the excise tax on high-premium insurance plans and $110 billion in net savings from other sources. The net cost of the coverage expansions would be more than offset by the combination of other spending changes that CBO estimates would save $404 billion over the 10 years and other provisions that JCT and CBO estimate would increase federal revenues by $196 billion over the same period.1 In subsequent years, the collective effect of those provisions would probably be continued reductions in federal budget deficits. Those estimates are all subject to substantial uncertainty.

For some reason the Table came out smaller than usual, in any event click to enlarge.

I haven't read through this and will make only two preliminary notes. One the bill leaves $81 billion in wiggle room to allow changes and still not break Obama's (rather foolish in my mind) demand that it be deficit neutral. Two is that on the cost side it is way under Obama's $900 billion leaving plenty of room for additions as long as corresponding funding is found for any thing proposed in excess of the $81 billion. Now if the Senate Finance Committee can just get this thing voted on and approved we could get this show on the road.

Max Baucus and Reconciliation

Well time to confess a screw-up. I had it stuck in my head that October 15th was the deadline for passing health care reform by reconciliation and so was reading Baucus's current attempts to drag out the bill as trying to run out the clock. Oops. Instead it looks like October 15th is the trigger that ALLOWS reconciliation and so that Reid is letting Baucus slowly tighten his own noose.

All of which makes me feel better about the prospects for ultimate passage even as it makes me feel kind of foolish. Luckily I didn't spread this misconception too far or God forbid post it at AB or here. Anyway here is Ezra correcting me six months in advance.

PASS HEALTH REFORM BY OCTOBER 15TH, OR ELSE.

First, a bit of background: Awhile ago, we talked about the three types of reconciliation possible on health care. The first type was a simple reconciliation process. The second type was a timed process where reconciliation would begin if the Congress didn't pass a bill by "X" date. And the third type was a threat to pass another budget at a later date that would include reconciliation.

The timed process always seemed the most likely. And Jon Cohn reports today that a deal has been struck: The budget will include reconciliation instructions pegged to October 15th. That's the date by which Congress has to pass bipartisan health care reform. If they fail, then the relevant committees have to write reconciliation legislation that faces a simple up-or-down vote in the Senate. No filibuster allowed. And with 59 Democrats, no Republicans needed.

It's hard to overstate the importance of this decision. This could be the day that health care reform went from being unlikely to inevitable. Without reconciliation, the incentives for the minority are very simple: Kill the bill. Do as Gingrich did in 1994 and hand the majority a failure. With reconciliation, killing the bill just means you're locked out of the final legislation. It's a death sentence for your involvement in the process. It is not, however, the end of the process itself.

I just mistook a trigger for a deadline. Oh well.

A Response to Robert Reich, or God Save Us From Our Friends

Robert Reich in a post at TPMCafe proposed a four point proposal to create jobs: Specifically, What Should Be Done For Jobs?. In it he falls into the typical trap certain technocratic liberals do, mostly those younger than Reich, they get too cute by half and neglect the political history. Here was my response to bullet point (2).

Secretary Reich, and I call you that because that made you ex officio a Trustee of Social Security, with all respect this is one of the stupidest suggestions I ever heard.

"(2) Propose a one-year payroll tax holiday on the first $20,000 of income. "

As you must be aware actual Social Security income from payroll tax and tax on benefits will barely cover outlays in OAS this year, while DI went cash flow negative in 2006. The two Trust Funds still show surpluses simply because of interest accrued on the Special Treasuries, but this interest has not come in the form of cash, but instead in the form of more Special Treasuries. Now these Special Treasuries are backed by Full Faith and Credit of the U.S. but can only be redeemed in cash by the Treasury doing borrowing in the public markets dollar for dollar.

What this means is that every 95%+ of every payroll tax dollar that comes in the door goes out immediately out in the form of benefits. Which means that every dollar not collected because of a tax holiday has to be replaced by a dollar of public borrowing and has the effect of flatlining the growth of the Trust Fund and so making a phony Social Security crisis into a real one.

Every time I hear of a 'temporary' payroll tax holiday I want to tear my hair out. The reason they are embraced by Blue Dogs and Republicans is because they make it easier to achieve their long term goal of rolling back the New Deal by 'proving' Social Security is a 'failure'.

Social Security is not a regressive tax, not when you consider the system as a whole. And Social Security was designed specifically NOT to be a welfare system lest it gets caught up in exactly the kind of proposals you are putting forth here.

Leave Social Security alone. It is worker insurance paid entirely by workers for workers. It demands nothing from capital and so owes nothing to capital. No one gets a free ride although there is a mild transfer from the middle class to the working class (because most people making $102,000 or less know they could easily have ended up closer to the bottom).

Under your proposal would workers still get credit for these dollars not withheld? Or would their future retirement simply be permanently reduced? These proposals always seem easy. Regressive carbon tax? Reduce payroll tax to compensate. Regressive flat tax? Reduce payroll tax to compensate. But each and every proposal has the effect, and often the intent, of defunding Social Security and transforming it from insurance to welfare.

Mr. Secretary do you have trouble sleeping at night? It is probably the ghost of Frances Perkins haunting you for even thinking about helping those who would kill her brainchild.

Either Social Security is in some sort of existential crisis or it is not. If it is the last thing you want to do is blow a big hole in its current income stream, and even if it isn't in crisis as a whole it is entering a period when it needs cash dollars. As noted above sometime soon income extracted in the form of payroll taxes and taxes on upper income benefits will no longer cover outlays. This will start as short term event in 2009 and 2010 but will return sometime after 2013 or so. This is not a problem it was exactly to counter the short term events that caused Congress to mandate that Social Security maintain a one year reserve right from the beginning. Right now those reserves are sitting right at 3 1/2 years, plenty to handle a cash shortfall that will be something less than 1% of outlays.

On the other hand even a short term payroll tax holiday blows a big hole in the Trust Fund. I don't know how much of SS tax income comes from the first $20,000 of income, but surely it is more than the $110 billion or so in interest on the existing Trust Fund, interest that will have to be paid by money borrowed on the public markets, there not being any free lunch here. Every $100 billion not collected in the present cuts $200 billion or more off the Trust Fund projected peak total. Good for Biggs' 'sustained solvency', not so good for the long term interests of workers.

Social Security is NOT welfare. Until you start exempting the first five, ten, or twenty thousand of income. For the love of FDR and Francis Perkins (the Labor Secretary who oversaw implementation of SS) resist the temptation to show how progressive you are by screwing around with FICA taxes. The wall between Social Security was carefully constructed for a particular purpose, it holds back those who would destroy Social Security in the name of 'fiscal responsibility' and 'intergenerational equity'.

Payroll tax holiday = defund Social Security. No matter how reasonable it sounds to offset some proposed regressive tax by a cut in payroll tax you always have to keep this equation in mind. You are not doing the poor any favors no matter how regressive you might think FICA is in theory. In practice it isn't. Just leave it alone.

Ground Rules at the Bruce Web: Don't be like Bob

Bob Boudelang is (we hope) a fictional character. But he represents a type that is unwelcome here. You don't get to just make shit up and by "make shit up" I mean repeating some talking point from Beck or Limbaugh. Just because you swallow the swill doesn't mean you can just present your beliefs about Clinton or Obama or whoever as being gospel truth. This came up because a long time commenter at Angry Bear asked if he was welcome here and I said "Sure, as long as you don't start spinning". Then he started bringing some urban folklore about Obama in. I don't want to hear it unless you can back it up with something better than Orly. Or Dori Monson. But back to Bob. Equal Time with Bob Boudelang copyright Democratic Underground

Ha! Ha! Ha! Dumborat Morans! You Are Doomded!, Mar 13, 2004
Well, now the election season has begun in dead ernest and at last our Great President has taken the boxing gloves off and started swinging.

And already people are talking about his great campaign commercial, which is unfair to those of us who wanted to have a discussion about September 11 without bringing up George W. sitting motionless at a school reading to children until he jumped up to run and hide. Which he did not want to panic those children, and anyway he was not running because he was afraid but only to be safe. And anyway, people have forgot about him lying about Air Force One being a target, which was not a lie but a miss statement, so do not bring that up again! Gee wiz!

You would think the victims and the firemen would be proud of Our Great President using such a divine moment in his ad instead of saying ugly things like "molesting the dead" or "grave robbing." But then some people are never satisfied and always want more. They should be satisfied with great leadership and not ask who knew what and when, or why someone was on vacation for a whole month, or why nothing was done about terrorism between the inaugeration and 9/11, or why Concertina Rice will not testify, or when subpeenas are going to be issued, or other trivial matters.

And yes, he did not use real firemen in the ad, but that was to create jobs. Now some actors have been paid to pretend to be firefighters who support Bush, just as if there were really ones. And Dennis Miller is also hiring people to sit in his audience and pretend to laugh at his hilarious conservative jokes. So who says there are no jobs under the Bush economic miracle, accept for the economists, and what do they know?

Speaking of hilarious, who did not get a chuckle when they heard John F. Karey had the nerve to call Republicans the most crooked lying group he has ever seen. Really! Imagine calling Our Great President a crook and a liar!

Yes, George W. has been arrested and convicted and yes, he made millions while his businesses went bankrupt and yes, he said there were weapons of mass distraction in Iraq and there do not seem to be any, but those are all blood under the sand, as far as I am concerned. And you cannot prove any sort of payoff from Halliburton so do not even try to look. Really. Do not even try.

I think John F. Karey owes an apology, not just to honest hard-working Republicans like me, but honest non-crooked people like Dick Cheney, who you cannot prove got the energy task force case fixed when he went duck hunting at the private lodge of an oil millionaire with Judge Scalia.

And he owes an apology to Ken Lay, who has not got indicted and that is as good as being honest. And he owes an apology to Tom Delay, who is sinnonimous with honesty and fair play, even if you cannot prove those rumors about his daughter, the lobbyists and the hot tub.

What shocking disrespect for the office of the president John F. Karey shows! Back when Dan Burton said Slick Willy was a scumbag and Trent Lott said Klintoon was a rapist and Jim Hansen said he should be assassinated and Jesse Helms said Clinton "better watch out," it was all said with respect.

Even Mrs. Brown Rosenfeld, who is such a LIEberal extremist that she supports public schools and wants health care for everyone, was outraged when she heard me explain what John F. Karey had said and how I wanted to respond, and she even donated a sheet so I could paint my sign. And she had her son get a tractor and drag my trailer up to the front of the lot so people driving by would see it.

So now everybody driving by the DaisyView trailer park can see my trailer with a big sign on it that says "George W. Bush: Crooked Liar! Who is Not Outraged!" The Democrats are doomded when Mrs. Brown Rosenfeld endorses messages like mine.

And from the number of people who honk their horns or give a big thumbs up as they drive by, it is clear Our Great President will continue to have smooth sailing like he has so far, if you do not count all the problems.

And who is not proud of the way the Republican party is moving like a oily machine? Just last week, they all switched their votes from yes to no at the drop of a hat when the Natural Rifle Association told them to. They were trying to protect freedom and liberty by keeping crime victims and frivolous parties like Chicago from suing the gun industry. But when it appeared a fanatic band of Moderates and Liberals were going to add background checks at gun shows and other wild-eyed schemes, they moved in unicycle, like wild geese in flight or precision machinery, and voted down their own bill.

Now fresh from that triumph, the Republicans are going to reclassify jobs at fast food restaurants as manufacturing jobs, which will not make more of them or make them pay better but will seem like good news and make everybody who does not know any better more upbeat. And the GOP has introduced a bill to keep people from suing fast food manufacturers like McDonnells. Now when Ronald McDonnell sends them an email telling them to vote the bill down, the entire country will be impressed again!

The Demoncrats can not match that and will not even try. And that is why I think some people are going to be mighty surprised on election day, and not just because there will be trouble at the polls in Florida (and you will not be able to prove Jeb had anything to do with it, no matter how it looks). Amen!

Don't sound like Bob. And don't be bitching about Free Speech, it is your side that is fighting the Fairness Doctrine tooth and nail even though nobody it actually proposing bringing it back.

TBogg: He shoots, he scores! Best Palin descriptor ever.

Still reading the Ancient City. Plus there are some key football games today including my California Golden Bears playing against USC with a lot riding on the outcome. Not only will the loser be locked out of the Rose Bowl hunt, if it is Cal we will be lucky to get into a second tier Bowl. (Update: my Bears stunk the place out. You can't win the Pac 10 without a top quality quarterback, and so far this guy is showing me nothing here. And crap what is up with Stanford? They were not remotely projected to be this good.)

So as filler I give you TBogg, who is in his own description a 'Somewhat accomplished blogger' now based in the FireDogLake empire. His latest snark is on Palin's new auto-biography 'Going Rogue, an American Life' and in doing so coined an instant classic term. With no further ado:

That's not writing, thats someone else typing

Let's not kid ourselves. Anyone with the bare minimum requirement of one honest bone in their body knows that Snowbilly Virginia Woolfkiller did not spend the past four months holed up in an igloo of her own furiously typing up her memoirs. Sarah provided Christian scrivener Lynn Vincent with tapes and some face time while she was visiting here in San Diego, between taking the kids (Musk, Camaro, Velour, and Baby Brushetta) to Legoland and the outlet malls, and, poof! magic!, a book was born.

But just like those facebook postings and the speech in Hong Kong, Sarah really wants us to believe that she did it all by her own bad moose-slaying self, and so Lynn Vincent gets relegated to the liner notes so as not to clutter up the view/Rich Lowry toss-off target:No "..with Lynn Vincent" or "...as told to Lynn Vincent".

Just like the Bible: God wrote it.

So: Sarah Pain, accomplished author.

I don't expect her fans to get the reference but I think Virginia Woolfkiller captures the essense of Sarah the Writer perfectly.

The Ancient City: by Fustel de Coulanges

The Ancient City (PDF)
Today I am going to start a re-read of Fustel de Coulanges The Ancient City, a classic study of pre-classical Greece and Rome written in 1864. In examining his Wiki entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numa_Denis_Fustel_de_Coulanges one sees the claim that "The work is now largely superceded" but does not explain in what way, perhaps commenters can fill in the gaps.

I found it a fascinating read the last time around, and will update this post as I work through it. From recollection Fustel de Coulanges sees the ancient city as a series of concentric circles each with a patriarchal head and its own god which continues down to the individual household with its Lares and Penates (of which more to come).

In doing some Googling I came across the following by M.I. Finley, himself a major historian of Ancient Greece. On my computer clicking the link triggered an immediate download and opening of the PDF. It is not a big file (708kb) but maybe not something you want to click on with a slow connection. The Ancient City: From Fustel de Coulanges to Max Weber and Beyond

From Finley we see where Fustel de Coulanges was perceived to go astray. In 20th century scholarship the city was more often seen as an economic unit and not so much as a social and familial one. Just off the bat I would say this is the product of too much abstraction, the model which explains the evolution of the medieval town to the modern city may not map well onto antiquity. So I am not ready to ditch the thesis of the Ancient City just yet.

And on finishing the Finley article I am going to give the edge to the Ancient City. The attempts by Weber and others to fit cities into an evolutionary model that culminates with capitalism is much too reductive as are attempts to draw too strict a line between urban and rural as separate economic interests. Instead we would do well to follow Fustel de Coulanges advice:

To understand the truth about the Greeks and Romans, it is wise to study them without thinking of ourselves, as if they were entirely foreign to us; with the same disinterestedness, and with the mind as free, as if we were studying ancient India or Arabia.

And here is the thesis statement:

A comparison of beliefs and laws shows that a primitive religion constituted the Greek and Roman family, established marriage and paternal authority, fixed the order of relationship, and consecrated the right of property, and the right of inheritance. This same religion, after having enlarged and extended the family, formed a still larger association, the city, and reigned in that as it had reigned in the family. From it came all the institutions, as well as all the private law, of the ancients. It was from this that the city received all its principles, its rules, its usages, and its magistracies. But, in the course of time, this ancient religion became modified or effaced, and
private law and political institutions were modified with it. Then came a series of revolutions, and social changes regularly followed the development of knowledge.

Making the city quite literally an extended family.

In Chapter 2 I find the first point of departure.

The dead were held to be sacred beings. To them the ancients
applied the most respectful epithets that could be thought of; they called them good, holy, happy. For them they had all the veneration that man can have for the divinity whom he loves or fears. In their thoughts the dead were gods.

In this chapter Fustel discusses funerary rituals that show that the ancients believed in an afterlife where soul and body lived on together, at least if the rites were strictly observed. Otherwise the soul wandered restlessly and perhaps haunting the living. But back in my days of studying Celtic Mythology it was clear that the Fairy People, those who lived in the mounds of ancient Ireland were treacherous and often malevolent. Yet in folklore these child stealers were called "The Good People". Why? Because as Professor O'Hehir explained "They might be listening". In Indo-European mythology and folklore the line between gods and devils was blurred to the point of non-existence, and the prudent approach was to adopt a posture of fear and awe. Here Fustel may have been drawn astray by the language, he might better of said "loves AND fears".

"Treacherous Pens and Tongues": The News Media Is Driving Me Crazy, by Jack S

The following is a story suggestion sent to Dan the siteowner of Angry Bear by commenter Jack S. Dan still has it under reveiw and he Jack and I agreed to put it up here to at least get the discussion going.
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Dan. You know how my personal take has been that the media, the news media in particular, is a primary agent in the obfuscation of all significant political and economic issues. "Treacherous pens and tongues," as the man once said. That man was describing the manner by which the populace is kept dumbed down on important issues and often led to a conclusion opposite to their own best interests. This morning the New York Times gives us yet more bold evidence of its own role in this process, and subtle they can be at the NY Times. Two articles on the front page of the print edition are striking, both for what is said and for what is left glaringly off the page. Maybe you can use this on AB.
First, (ed: from the NYT) Senators Reject Pair of Public Option Proposals

In print there is an accompanying photo of the panel (the on-line photo only shows a dejected(?) Sen. Schumer) with Sen Grassley front and center. The caption contains a part of the following quote, "But Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the committee, said a government insurance plan would have inherent advantages over private insurers. “Government is not a fair competitor,” Mr. Grassley said. “It’s a predator.” He predicted that “a government plan will ultimately force private insurers out of business,” reducing choices for consumers." The caption repeats the government as predator remark. There is no further comment on Grassley's comment. It is just out there, front page caption and all with no discussion of the self contradiction of the remark. The predatory nature of government, as Sen Grassley sees it, is given front and center prominence. What is the government if not Grassley and company? How are the rules of government decided if not in the Congress? Yet Grassley is permitted to make a baseless claim which distorts the debate, and the news media gives him the soap box to stand tall on.

Second, and here we have an interesting distinction between the on-line and print editions, there is the presentation of the story concerning the cash flow problems at the FDIC. In print the headline reads, "BANKS TO RESCUE DEPLETED F.D.I.C.: Plane to Protect Deposits as Failures Increase." On-line, same story and author different lead in, "Banks To Prepay Assessments
To Rescue F.D.I.C." Not quite the same emphasis, but still the same "rescue" scenario. The banks are rescuing the FDIC? Is that not ass backwards? Has not the FDIC rescued the depositors of the banking industry? Who is the rescuer in this story, and why is the NY Times highlighting and implying the good will of the banking industry that created this mess of failures to begin with?

As noted, "treacherous pens and tongues" intent on obfuscation and deception. Here is the whole quote,
"The people must therefore be instructed"
The obstacles to their enlightenment?
"The paid journalists who mislead the people every day by shameless distortions."
"What conclusion follows?"
"That we ought to proscribe these writers as the most dangerous enemies of the country and to circulate an obundance of good literature."
He means journals written in support of the revolution.
He goes on to summarize:
"When will the people be educated?"
"When they have enough bread to eat, when the rich and the government stop bribing treacherous pens and tongues to deceive them and instead identify their own interests with those of the people."

Jack S

Bayeux Tapestry

Well I got nothing today so I'll just throw something medieval up. My new banner comes from the first panel of the Bayeux Tapestry probably commissioned by Bishop Odo of Bayeux to commemorate his half-brother William the Conqueror's victory over Harold Godwinson at Hastings in 1066 and what we now know as the Norman Conquest.

The entire tapesty plus Latin translation and English commentary can be found here: Bayeux Tapestry. The Tapestry is not primarily a depiction of the Battle of Hastings, but instead lays out the case for William's legitimacy as king and equally of King Harold's illegitimacy as an oathbreaker of his pledge to support William as successor to Edward the Confessor.

However you judge the evidence it is clear that William claimed to be the rightful successor to Edward and took only what was due to him as such. In later centuries there was a theory that William take possession of all of England and then doled it out to his followers by right of conquest. Under this concept all land titles were ultimately feudal and all land held in one way or another of the King. This idea really doesn't hold up on inspection which can be seen quite clearly by sampling the Domesday Book of 1086. Domesday was a land survey designed to show all the property in England and its tenure and worth. It is introduced as follows:

Here is subscribed the inquisition of lands as the barons of the king have made inquiry into them; that is to say by the oath of the sheriff of the shire, and of all the barons and their Frenchmen, and the whole hundred, the priests, reeves, and six villains of each manor; then, what the manor is called, who held it in the time of king Edward, who holds now; how many hides, how many plows in demesne, how many belonging to the men, how many villains, how many cottars, how many serfs, how many free-men, how many socmen, how much woods, how much meadow, how many pastures, how many mills, how many fish-ponds, how much has been added or taken away, how much it was worth altogether at that time, and how much now, how much each free man or soeman had or has. All this threefold, that i8 to say in the time of king Edward, and when king William gave it, and as it is now; and whether more can be had than is had.

What is important is the continuity, the expectation is that the pattern of ownership is the same as it was prior to the Conquest "in the time of king Edward" and in many places it is clear there has been no disruption at all.

The idea that all land actually came into the hands of the king at one time is expressed even here "when king William gave it" but is not totally supported by close examination. Instead you have a process by which almost all land came into and out of William's hands over time. From William's perspective armed opposition to his invasion constituted treason and one of the penalties for treason was forfeiture of land. Meaning that after Hastings he came into possession of all of the Crown lands plus all of the possessions of Harold, the richest and most powerful Earl prior to his own accession, plus all of Harold's followers meaning a very large percentage of England. But those powerful men who stood aside at Hastings were left in possession until they too rose in revolt as many did in 1070.

What this meant is that every time there was a civil war or unrest, which happened periodically, top level tenures that had been free were legally subordinated to the Crown or to the King personally and so ultimately resulting in those top levels becoming almost totally feudalized. But none of this necessarily automatically transfered downward leaving a bewildering tangle of sub-tenures and common rights that didn't neatly fit into a feudalized scheme.

The result is an economic history where major landholders embarked on a centuries long attempt to preserve their property rights vs a vs the Crown while maintaining and extending those rights vis a vis the peasantry. Ultimately the major property holders won out and rights held from time immemorial by the free peasantry were wiped out and in many cases taking that free status away. The major events of medieval England including the issuance of the Magna Carta in 1215 and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 can not be seen in isolation from this struggle over property rights. Effectively the large land holders won over against the king in 1215 and against the peasantry in 1381 and then against the king again during the English Civil Wars of the 17th century. All revolved ultimately around the issue of property rights.

Which BTW ties back to some of my posts about Conservatism which equally can't be divorced from this property based struggle. Conservatives represent the winning side of all three events referenced here, they held their own all of the way down to the Reform Act of 1832 and in many respects right through 1920 and the introduction of universal suffrage in England.

Conservatives and the Ancient Constitution: Ver 1.0

Well I got started too late in the day to present a fleshed out version. So let this serve as an abstract.

Britain has never had a written constitution, instead it had what latter lawyers called the 'Ancient Constitution' which was both older than memory or even history reached and was in form perfect. Being perfect it was not changed or indeed changeable. Moreover it was not in origin considered to be the King's Law, it was instead before and to some degree above the King.

Now Britain did have royal formulations of law which were drawn up in what are now known as Law Codes, starting with that of King Aethelred of Kent of King Ine of Wessex which latter were incorporated in the latter Code of Alfred the Great. Alfred's Code is not designed to be foundational, instead he has gathered what he liked of other codes and gathered them together with some modifications. The best way to read Alfred's Code is as a collection of Administrative and Legal Regulations particularly as governing the King's rights to exercise jurisdiction. Which set off a struggle that would extend for centuries and indeed were not settled until the late 19th century, that is who was in control of the judgement in legal cases. Eventually it all ended in the hands of the King's Judges but this was a long process.

But none of this fundamentally was seen to change the Ancient Constitution, to the end English people held that they had rights against the King and particularly in the area of property and just as importantly in taxation. Certain taxes (or so we would call them) were due to the King as right, and others to the King as landlord, but at no time in English history was the principle that the King could just set taxes at will. And attempts by various English Kings to claim expanded rights were resisted and often enough by force.

The Magna Carta, often thought of as the basis for latter Anglo-American jurisprudence, is the product of just such a rejected claim. King John made demands that challenged the property rights of Lords and free-holders which led to a Civil War. Which John lost. The result was that the opposition laid forth their case, based on the Ancient Constitution (though at that period they didn't call it such), that John must renounce certain specific claims. In 1215 John was forced to submit. This was not a one time event, the Great Charter was reissued many times and serves as a cornerstone of the British Statute Book, but does not serve as the foundation for the constitutional system.

My suggestion is that the Modern American Conservative movement draws from this now eight century struggle to contain the King and the Government into their proper role and that insists that certain rights existed prior to any Kings, or at least any earthly Kings. To that extent the line between the Ancient Constitution and Natural Law begins to blur thus explaining why Conservatives seem to have the selective acceptance of the American Constitution, to the degree that it violates previous rights and laws it is only partially binding.

I don't know that I am totally persuaded by my own argument here, and I will try to continue developing it. For what it is worth consider this version 1.0

You like me! You really like me! Plus some stuff on the Magna Carta.

Well maybe it is too early for me to have my Sally Field Moment. But some people are actually coming by. including DDay of Digby who picked up my post on Sec 116 with Keeping Them Honest. Plus one of my favorite commenters of all time came by and had a nice word.

So I guess I will have to keep stuff coming. My next post is tentatively set to explore the foundations of conservatism and particularly how that relates to property rights, whereas liberalism more typically starts from human rights. If this is even remotely right it casts the Constitution as a compromise.

I know this will not come as some blinding insight but it does go somewhat towards explaining why conservatives tend to approach the Constitution cafeteria style. For example they advocate taking a very narrow reading of the 'general welfare' clause, which appears both in the Preamble and Article I Sec 8 (Powers of Congress), yet find that Article 2 Sec 2 (President as Commander in Chief) trumps the clear language of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments, while denying that there are any possible restrictions on the Second Amendment and of course denying any knowledge of the Sixteenth Amendment (Income Tax).

Conservatives consciously or not are appealing to an older legal tradition stemming from the Magna Carta, which though not actually incorporated in the Constitution as we have it, is still considered binding. Or something. I'll be thinking about this through the day and will have a more filled out version hopefully tomorrow.

I do get notified of comments by e-mail, any suggestions or links about this topic would be welcome. As would any guest submissions.

UPDATE: On my way out the door. It turns out that I will have to start before the Magna Carta with the Ancient Constitution. Plus some discussions of the Laws of Ine and of Alfred the Great, that is periods from 5 to 7 centuries prior to King John's issuance of the Great Charter in 1215. Conservatism is OLD, in fact it is quite literally pre-historic, existing prior to the introduction of writing into Northern Europe.

Social Security Runs Amok

From the Wall Street Journal Online. Social Security Owes 'Fugitives' Millions (This link will probably expire within the week, but I have included the full article below)

By ELLEN E. SCHULTZ

A federal judge approved a civil-court settlement requiring the Social Security Administration to repay $500 million to 80,000 recipients whose benefits it suspended after deeming them fugitives.

The supposed fugitives include a disabled widow with a previously suspended driver's license, a quadriplegic man in a nursing home and a Nevada grandmother mistaken for a rapist.

They were among at least 200,000 elderly and disabled people who lost their benefits in recent years under what the agency called the "Fugitive Felon" program. Launched in 1996 and extended to Social Security disability and old-age benefits in 2005, the program aimed to save taxpayers money by barring the payment of Social Security benefits to people "fleeing to avoid prosecution."

But some federal courts in recent years have concluded that most people the agency identified as fleeing felons were neither fleeing nor felons. The problem: Social Security employees relied on an operations manual stating that anyone with a warrant outstanding is a fugitive felon, whether the person is actually fleeing or attempting to avoid being captured.

The Social Security Administration, which neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing as part of the settlement, declined to comment.

The National Senior Citizens Law Center, an advocacy group for the elderly and disabled, sued the Social Security Administration in an Oakland, Calif., federal court last year on behalf of people denied benefits, and asserted that most warrants -- some decades old -- were for minor offenses and most people were unaware they existed.

Roberta Dobbs, a 75-year-old widow in Durant, Okla., who uses a wheelchair and is tethered to an oxygen tank, was deemed a fugitive in 2006 because of an outstanding 2001 warrant issued in California following a traffic accident while Mrs. Dobbs was moving from her home. Her benefits were cut off for three years, forcing her to rely on friends, family and charity.

Some "fugitives" were victims of mistaken identity. To identify felons, the agency cross-checked its database with databases of old warrants obtained from various law-enforcement agencies. If a match was found -- of a person's first and last name, and either Social Security number or date of birth -- the person was deemed to be a fugitive and his benefits suspended. The program didn't compare middle initials or gender.

Willie Mae Giacanni, 79, a retiree near Reno, Nev., was informed by the Social Security Administration in 2006 that her $350 a month benefit would be suspended because of a warrant outstanding in New York, a state she has never visited.

She said she "called different precincts," trying to find out what she was wanted for. A detective told her the warrant was for Willie Frank Thomas, who was wanted for kidnapping and rape in 1972. Although Mrs. Giacanni's first husband's surname was Thomas, and the suspect shared her birth date, he had a different Social Security number, middle name, gender and race, according to the New York City Police Department's fugitive-enforcement division.

The detective sent Mrs. Giacanni a letter to give to the Social Security office, stating that the warrant wasn't for her, but the agency wouldn't accept it. Mrs. Giacanni sought help from a legal-aid attorney, who got the matter resolved. The agency declined to comment.

Even if people succeeded in clearing their warrants, the SSA had maintained they shouldn't have been paid benefits while the warrant was outstanding, and pursued them for the "overpayment." Mrs. Dobbs ultimately got her warrant vacated with the help of a legal-aid lawyer in 2008, but the Social Security Administration said it wouldn't resume her benefits until she repaid $11,802 for benefits she received in 2005.

As part of the settlement, the agency agreed to drop its claims for "overpayments."

After the NSCLC sued the agency, the SSA agreed in April to a proposed settlement to suspend benefits only for people who are charged with escape or flight to avoid prosecution. Under the pact, SSA stopped suspending benefits and agreed to repay benefits suspended between January 2007 and April 2009.

Most repayments will begin to go out late this year. Mrs. Dobbs received $37,970.

People whose benefits were cut off before 2007 could reapply for benefits, but would receive retroactive payments only to April 2009. An estimated 120,000 people fall into this category, said Gerald McIntyre, a lawyer for the NSCLC.

The settlement is good news for Catherine and James McMahon, a retired nurse and teacher in their 60s, who unsuccessfully applied for Social Security disability benefits for their son, James Jr., who was struck by a truck and paralyzed in 2006.

The couple was told their son, who resides in a nursing home, was ineligible for benefits because of a 1991 warrant. "It had something to do with a late night college party," said Mrs. McMahon. Her son, now 35, thought the matter was resolved after several court dates.

Now her son will receive about $735 a month in benefits, retroactive to early 2007. The money will help provide for his two young children, whom the McMahons are raising.

I have heard from reliable sources that the Social Security Administration has been seeded with Bushies fundamentally opposed to its basic mission and not just in the political positions. These people really want you to believe that "Government is the problem".

(BTW I am told that 'amok, amuck' is the only Malay word adopted into standard English vocabulary)

The least known, most important section in HR3200

Over at Angry Bear I have a whole series of posts relating to HR3200, the American Affordable Health Care Act or AAHCA otherwise known as the Tri-Committee Bill. The following is a comment I posted to a MyDD diary today in response to complaints that the health care bills under consideration don't have meaningful cost controls. While this is true enough for the Baucus Bill currently being marked up, it really is not true for HR3200. The response here is posted unchanged.
________________________________________

The House Tri-Committee Bill has some excellent price control measures and you can bet a lot of the jostling around the Senate Finance Bill is the insurance companies jostling a way to keep the employer and individual mandates while ditching Secs 111-116. And especially 116.

Sec 111 Prohibiting Pre-Existing Condition Exclusions
Sec 112 Guaranteed Issue and Renewal
The can't turn anyone not covered by employer insurance from a individual plan, nor refuse to renew it. No matter what your pre-existing condition or what illness you develop. And no rescissions based on forgetting that case of acne when you were 14.

Sec 113 Insurance Rating Rules
2nd most important provision. No individual or business can be charged more than any other one in your area. Small businesses don't have to negotiate prices or worry about hiring someone who may become sick or pregnant. Under HR3200 all those are total non-issues. Besides area the ONLY criteria on which premiums vary is age, and that restricted to a 2:1 ratio, and family composition (insurance companies can charge families more than an individual but only within limits).

This is HUGE. If you are a 'smaller' or 'smallest' employer you just enroll through the Exchange at the same price per individual and family employee as any other Exchange participant. You can not be discriminated against even if you hired an employee on thrice weekly dialysis, or just coming off cancer treatment.

Sec 114 NONDISCRIMINATION IN BENEFITS; PARITY IN MENTAL HEALTH AND SUBSTANCE ABUSE DISORDER BENEFITS.
Sec 115 ENSURING ADEQUACY OF PROVIDER NETWORKS.

But here is the biggee, the single provision that guts the insurance companies current predatory model, the one you can bet they are most eager to kill. It is deliberately written to be innocuous but does more to control costs and insurance pool gaming than any other.

Sec 116 ENSURING VALUE AND LOWER PREMIUMS.
(a) IN GENERAL.--A qualified health benefits plan shall meet a medical loss ratio as defined by the Commissioner. For any plan year in which the qualified health benefits plan does not meet such medical loss ratio, QHBP offering entity shall provide in a manner specified by the Commissioner for rebates to enrollees of payment sufficient to meet such loss ratio.

Under the current model insurance companies make money in two ways. One by insuring people who likely won't need are and two by denying care to those who do need it. Their stated goal is to reduce their Medical Loss Ratio to as low a number as they can. Under Sec 116 this doesn't work, the more successful you are at denying care or insuring people who don't need it the bigger the rebate check has to be.

The key is getting the target MLR set at the right level, which is where the PO comes in, its MLR effectively establishes the level against which the private plans have to compete and so keeps the insurance company from gaming the Commissioner in an attempt to get a lower MLR (equals higher profits and dollars for exec compensation). But if pushed to the wall you could control insurance companies premium increases simply through strict application of the provisions of Sec 116.

Sec 116 = Premium and Profit Control. It is even more key to the long-term success of health care reform than the PO itself. As is Sec 113. For example in the Baucus Bill the age ratio is 5:1 plus a tobacco provision that could mean a 55 year old smoker could be paying up to 7.5X more than a young non-smoker.

(And yes people shouldn't smoke. But people our age remember when cigarettes came with no warnings, were advertised everywhere, and the tobacco companies were spending millions that there was no proven link between cigarettes and anything. Think of the Climate Change Deniers of today. Penalizing some middle age guy because he fell afoul of a campaign of lies 40 years ago is a little harsh.)

HR3200 is a good bill that does not sell us out to insurance companies. Taken as a whole it would prevent almost all gaming and gouging. Yet people seem to have written it off as if Dingell and Waxman and Rangel and Brown had each spent the last four plus decades figuring out how to screw over progressivism.

Mercian Gold: Penda? or Offa?

Nope that is not a misspelling of 'Merican' and those are real names of Kings of Mercia, the main rivals to the West Saxon Kings which gave us Alfred the Great. The following is just a stunning find, really the biggest since the discovery of the Sutton Hoo Ship Burial, and in sheer quantity of gold vastly outshines even that.

Largest ever hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold found in Staffordshire

A harvest of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver so beautiful it brought tears to the eyes of one expert, has poured out of a Staffordshire field - the largest hoard of gold from the period ever found.

The weapons and helmet decorations, coins and Christian crosses amount to more than 1500 pieces, with hundreds still embedded in blocks of soil. It adds up to 5kg of gold – three times the amount found in the famous Sutton Hoo ship burial in 1939 – and 2.5kg of silver, and may be the swag from a spectacularly successful raiding party of warlike Mercians, some time around AD700.

A gallery can be seen here: Anglo-Saxon treasure hoard found in Staffordshire
Another from TPM here: Terry the Conqueror

Black and white map Mercian Supremacy, c.800 AD
Larger scale map of Southern England and Wales Southern England in the Ninth Century If you look along the border of Mercia to the west you will see the line of Offa's Dike, a massive earthwork defensive wall.

We don't know a lot about Mercia, What we do know is pretty well covered by a good article in Wiki. Mercia

Also from Wiki this from the Sutton Hoo ship burial showing a somewhat older but similar piece of Anglo-Saxon artwork. Imagine taking a used metal detector to a field and finding something like this. Then six hundred more, then turning it over to the experts who found hundreds more beyond that. This is beyond daydreams. Click to enlarge.

Movement Conservatism: the Good vs the Many

You can't understand the incoherence of the modern American conservative movement without understanding the contradiction at its core. Burkean Conservatism has as its goal the preservation of the interests of the Good as against the demands of the Many. In eighteenth century Britain this fell right in line with the existing political, economic, and social structures, everyone understood who was High, Middle, and Low and the gradations within those categories. In politics the interest of the High was protected by the House of Lords and the interests of the Middle at least somewhat protected by the House of Commons (because not all the Middle was represented and the High had much influence). But the Low had no representation at all and in the ethos of the time that was a good thing.

In eighteenth century Britain democracy was equated to revolution and specifically the the French Revolution with its radical levelling principles that led to regicide and the breaking of the power of the Established Church. The French Revolution was not just a political, social, and economic convulsion, it seemed in its totality to be a breakdown in cosmic order, a World Turned Upside Down.

The American Revolution started 13 years before the French and so while many of the Founders were sympathetic with the ideas that would drive the later Revolution they were able to implement them in a very different situation, the King not residing right in the midst of them but instead being on the other side of the ocean. Still the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights and the relatively wide franchise were from the perspective of the newly emerging Burkean Conservatism thoroughly radical rejection of the natural order. For Conservatives pure democracy was a threat.

Which puts us where we are. Modern American Conservatism has inherited its foundations from Burkean Conservatism but is constrained by the American political system from proposing them openly. In America you can't openly assert that society is by nature hierarchical and moreover pyramid shaped and that that societal order is best maintained by the control of the 'Good' people in the middle to upper levels of the hierarchy who are by that same nature not only allowed but encouraged to maximize their own 'Deserving' interests against those of the 'Undeserving' 'Many'. That the end result is by definition anti-Democratic is a feature and not a bug.

But in the United States the path to public power comes through obtaining electoral majorities, meaning that the natural representatives of the 'Good' still have to draw the votes of enough of the 'Many' to be first past the post. Which in practice means convincing enough of the 'Many' that they are really among the 'Good' even as they lack the natural economic and social status to actually take their place among the latter. Which has led modern Movement Conservatism to exploit every fissure among the Many, including race, national origin, and religion. For Conservatism 'Good' meant free, white, male and being either wealthy or living in small towns and rural areas and mostly still does. Which makes it an uneasy fit with a country that is increasingly diverse and largely urbanized.

How do you sell Conservative concepts of hierarchy and natural inequality in a system built on the credo that holds that "All Men are Created Equal" is a central tenet of society? Well with great difficulty.

Celtic and Scandinavian Mythology Blog Source

I'll be filling this one out over time. For now I will just start with two works:

Gods of the Ancient Norsemen by George Dumezil. Dumizil is best known for his theory that both Indo-European society and it's mythology were fundamentally Tri-partite in a way that aligned class and function and that this could be seen in various forms in all derivative traditions including as here the Scandinavians. In Dumezil's original formulation this was also hierarchical with the Priest/Magician/Judge at the top, the Warrior a step below, and the Farmer below that. My view is that this gives too much weight to the Indian Caste system and that at least in the European context the functions were organized on the same level but drawing their practitioners from different classes with the King representing all three functions: i.e. Judge-Warrior-Fertility God somewhat equally. My reading on this topic is out of date, suggestions for more current works welcome.

On the Celtic side I am going to put up T.F. O'Rahilly's Early Irish History and Mythology which is a series of essays on the history, linguistics and myth of Early Ireland, which here should be understood as Ireland before the Vikings (itself the title of a book I will link to soon) or basically Ireland prior to 800 AD.

I am going to set out and re-read both of these over the next few days but would be interested in hearing from anyone who had read either or indeed any book covering the same materials.

Bruce's Blog-Sources

This page is and will be a work in progress. It lists all of my Blog-Sources to date.

Celtic and Scandinavian Mythology

What's a Blog-source?

Blog-source is a term coined by me yesterday which like most semi-clever terms had actually been coined by others before. But apparently not that often so I'll just take credit here.

My version of a Blog-source is a combination of a weblog and a suggested reading list about topics of interest to me. The idea is that each Blog-source will evolve over time as I find, or commenters suggest, additions to it and hopefully each will spawn some sort of conversation. As I add new Blog-sources I will index them on a main Bruce's Blog-Sources page.

I'll just have to see how this goes, because I have a history of getting bored and lazy and dropping projects. But who knows? Maybe its different this time.

iPhone Posting

Well a little test. Seems to work fine, tomorrow I unleash 'webb's blog- sources'

Back and better than ever

Because this wasn't much of a blog to start with.

But I am going to try to put up a post per day, some substantive and some not.

My key issues as a front page poster at Angry Bear have been Social Security and more recently Health Care Reform. But my interests are broader than that and include (or included, because on many topics I am no longer current) such things as European and especially Celtic Mythology, Medieval British and Irish History. More recently I have been trying to point out connections between the development of modern democracy and the development of classical economics, or more precisely the disconnect, the latter only working fully in a relatively anti-democratic society of the type that marked Industrial Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.

I have also realized that I don't do any reading anymore, so hopefully I will get that jump-started and talk about it here.

More about me tomorrow. Plus I might test out some blogging from my iPhone. Well see where this takes us/me.

What is the Bruce Web? Is it dead?

Not really.

The Bruce Web started as a personal blog, a place to play with ideas that I would later launch in the form of comments at Economist View or dKos or other places that had some things I did not. Like readers. But it got noticed here and there and ultimately got me an invite to put up some Social Security stuff at Angry Bear, which grew into a long and continuing series. The series is indexed here (see right side-bar) but hosted over there.

I still put up some pieces here, generally drafts for Angry Bear, or ones that get too long or too pedantic, but most of the action is over there and not here.

But change is a-coming. Angry Bear's current owner is thinking of going to something closer to that of Firedoglake or TPM where there is one main blog but also a number of sub-blog from which material can be pulled to the mothership or just left alone. For example at FDL is found TBogg who as a self-desribed 'somewhat popular blogger' was a daily stop for me. Well now I stop via FDL.

So if this works you can expect to see the Bruce Web as a sub-blog to Angry Bear, which will also allow me to take this blog in some new directions that don't quite fit the dimensions imposed by Angry Bear. So maybe more history, including non-economic history, maybe some more philosophy (I need to dust off those books anyway). But for now The Bruce Web is likely to be kind of a lonely outpost.

Draft comment Open Left

That is me, I would like to throw in a little something I put up at Angry Bear the other day.

The topic was the empirical data of the effect of tax rates on economic growth. Fellow Bear cactus, who has a book on this coming out soon, has showed conclusively that even adjusting for lag effects that economic growth has been higher under Democratic presidencies with higher tax policies than under Republican presidencies with lower tax policies. Which shows that the Supply Side claim that higher taxes discourage work and investment does not have an empiric basis.

Which of course caused a commenter to rather smugly point to the Wiki article on 'Correlation does not imply causation'. Well true enough, but the relation is not symmetrical. Hume pointed out a few hundred years ago that no amount of positive observations of B following A logically proved that A causes B. It may in fact result in a psychological certainty that the Sun will really will rise in the East tomorrow which makes it perfectly rational to act as it it were a certainty. Which doesn't make it one from a strictly logical position.

Now Popper came at this from a different direction. If someone is making the positive claim that A causes B then even a single negative observation casts doubt on the relation. This he called 'Falsification' and used as the demarcation between Science and Pseudo-Science.

Supply Side economics and the broader Classical Liberal Economics from which it brings has relied on claims of logical certainty, they predicted certain specfic effects that didn't happen. Which causes them to adjust the THEORY to account for the differing outcome and leave the practice whether this be deregulation or tax cuts alone.. The Left generally is not immune from this impulse, certainly Vulgar Marxism has had no difficulty swallowing outcomes that are contradictory to predictions and so staying the course.

FDR struck a new course and so established a new kind of Liberalism that was not as theory bound as the Classical Liberalism that spawned both Chicago style liberal economics and Marxism, the New Deal did not insist that was either a magical Invisible Hand that would fix everything, or that we should institute rigid and very visible Five Year Plans whose failures would be explained away by 'Wreckers' who could then be sent to the gulags.

So I think it is fair to describe New Deal Liberalism as Enlightenment Liberalism, its practitioners have confidence in its methods which are empirical and outcome based without welding themselves to some big-C Certainty.

Now it is always psychologically more comfortable to cling to Certainty and never more so than in a time of serious economic and social flux, it is not easy being the anti-proverbial atheist in a fox hole. But Popperian style Empricism forces us to accept that we live in a probabalistic world, excorciating the Leader for not being true to the Faith or the Faithful for not being true to the Leader is ultimately counterproductive.

Mankiw, height taxes, and wilful blindness to history

Comment on "Redistribution, height taxes and utilitarianism" at Economists View

Mankiw is committing the common mistake of classical economists, they simply ignore actual economic history and the differing motivations behind the progressive agenda.

Some parts of that agenda are driven by utilitarianism. For example I would put universal single payer in that category. As a democratic people we have decided some goods should be delivered by public means. This includes such things as schools, most roads, fire protection, libraries. More controversially in the 60's we added such things as basic nutrition, income and medical coverage for the poor. None of this was inevitable, in colonial days all of those services were delivered in large part or in whole via the private sector either on a profit, subscription or charity basis. The extension of this to universal health care may to some be driven by morality, to others by ideology, but in a democratic society the real driver is utilitarian considerations.

Progressive taxation has much more mixed roots. Certainly it is partially utilitarian in impulse, once we have decided that things like libraries are public goods we have to acknowledge that not all people who utilize them can afford to pay a pro rata share, or else we could have just left them on the existing subscription system. The inevitable result is that there will end up being some downwards subsidy. The solution devised was to fund most of these from taxes on property and sales, with some exemptions built it. But in any event these taxes are proportionate and keyed to free actions, that is no one is forced to build a mansion and furnish it luxuriously and so incurring huge property and sales taxes.

Which gets us to the progressive income tax which is by designed not strictly proportional. And the motivation for this is only partially utilitarian, it is also a concession to the historical reality that distribution of the gains from productivity are not delivered by some magical and precise division of those gains by the exact contribution of capital and labor inputs, that is a textbook fantasy promulgated by the servants of the winners in this particular game, e.g. the Manchester School.

I have just begun re-reading E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class and its lesson is clear. You can explain much of the political and economic history of England as a constant battle to protect property rights from democracy, and this too even for those among the leadership of the popular side of the English Civil War. On the one side you have the Leveller Colonel Rainborough:

"For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore truly, sir, I think It's clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government .... I should doubt he was an Englishman or no, that should doubt of these things."

This is a demand for universal manhood suffrage. To which Cromwell's son-in-law General Ireton replied

"o person hat a right to an interest or share in the disposing of the affairs of the kingdom... that hath not a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom"

And by what reason does he privilege property holders so?

"All the main thing that I speak for, is because I would have an eye to property, I hope we do not come to contend for victory-but let every man consider with himself that he do not go that way to take away all property. For here is the case of the most fundamental part of the constitution of the kingdon, which if you take away, you take away all that"

Ireton here is drawing a straight line from democracy to socialism and even communism (in the pre-Marx sense), property however acquired is to be protected by the state from the demands of the workers.

The resultant distribution of gains from productivity was the direct result of one sector of society, those who controlled capital, having complete control of the political institutions. This was to some degree less true in the United States, the near absence of a landed aristocracy and the free availability of land to the West leveled the political power some, but still prior to the Progressive movement of the late 19th century political power was largely reserved for large property owners who in turn made sure that no issues around equity or actual analysis of the relative contributions of capital and labor ever entered into the question of distribution of gains of productivity. Instead we have and perhaps still continue to have descendants of the Manchester School acting as apologists for their masters and insisting that any attempts to redress the power imbalance simply a violation of Economic Law carried down on an Invisible Third Tablet from Mt. Sinai.

Progressive taxation is then driven by a democratic understanding that the reason it took Great Britain until 1918 and the U.S. in most respects to the One Man, One Vote rulings of the early sixties is because property owners continued to maintain a thumb on the scale of economic outcomes. The graduated income tax simply being an acknowledgement of historical reality.

So Mankiw's argument rests on fallacious grounds and weasel language. The very use of 'redistribution' builds in the assumption that the initial distribution was strictly proportionate to actual economic inputs. Anyone who ever believed that should have had their eyes opened by AIG bonuses, those bankers, like English aristocrats in the Edwardian Age, had become comfortable with their lavish lifestyles and had no attention of giving them up even after being revealed to be mostly economic parasites. That is Mankiw is serving in the role of Jeeves, the hyper-intelligent and clever servant to his master the hapless Bertie Wooster, here represented by the wealthy and ultra-wealthy of the U.S.

Mankiw wants to blur the line between redistribution and restitution, the wealthy of this country in large part got that way because the political and economic structures have always been rigged in their favor. The progressive and graduated income tax is a method for demanding restitution for their unfair grab of the original gains. To pretend that this is all the same as taxing people on the basis of their height or their I.Q. or whatever is historical nonsense.

2009 Trigger: OASDI Combined

Tables and Figures from the 2009 Report

Angry Bear Social Security Blogging: Northwest Plan edition

The Gathering Storm

Time for Clarity: Income vs Cost & the Six Approaches for 'Fixing' Social Security

The Northwest Plan: a Real Fix for Social Security

Mechanics of the Northwest Plan for a Real Social Security Fix

2009 Social Security Report

Assets of the OAS Trust Fund? or Just Phony IOUs?

Infinite Hooey: PV and Past Participants in Social Security

Sky is not Falling on Social Security

DI Trigger: Fixing What is Broken in Social Security

When Strawmen Collide: Biggs v Lind

NW Plan for a Real Social Security Fix: Ver 2.0

NW Plan: Combined OAS and DI Triggers

Hacktacular!: Robert Samuelson on Social Security

Social Security in Ecolanguage

Probability and Social Security

Northwest Plan for Social Security: Policy Proposal? or Benchmark?

How I Eliminated $15.4 TRILLION in Unfunded Debt: for $1.50 a Week

How the Northwest Plan Eliminates Unfunded Liabilities: Forever

Infinite Hooey: PV and Past Participants

2009 Social Security Report

The 2009 Report of the Trustees of Social Security is due out today 'late afternoon' DC time. Assuming the Trustees use the same file name conventions as they have in the past the following links should come live right as the Report is released to the web. If for some reason they are different you should be able to access the PDF and HTML versions or order the paper version at Reports from the Board of Trustees

Entry page
Table of Contents
List of Tables
List of Figures

CBO Briefing to Social Security Advisory Board