David Brin is the Man

Sci-Fi author David Brin has a not-so-well-known blog where he posts basically what are huge essays broken up into blog-post sized posts. He started with a three-month-long series on Modernism and it's enemies that was breathtaking and recently followed it up with a series on gerrymandering.

Yesterday's post though, mirrors a lot of the thoughts that have been going through my own mind recently about wealth and liberalism. Sometimes, I feel like Brin spends too much time trying to be a "centrist", but this post is a spectacular takedown of the economics of the Right...

We have been told all our lives that socialism is the chief enemy of markets. Hm, well, that was true for a little while, I guess. Indeed, Ronald Reagan was right to call the Soviet Union an "evil empire." But for how long? From 1917 to 1989?

Big deal!

For most of the rest of human history -- 99% of urban cultures -- the great enemy of accountability and market systems consisted of conspiratorial aristocratism. The deliberate collusion of those with power, money and influence to take over the organs of the state and use the state's power to enforce their family privileges. Their right to cheat and own other people. And then to ensure those privileges would be inherited. This happened so consistently, across all cultures, that it must be one of the core human traits that modern civilization is challenged to overcome.

Seriously, conservative friends, look over the paragraph above and try your best to evade it.

That's it. Right there. Look at the current Republican party. Look at the current Administration. They are the new arristocrats. Rich, white, male, wealthy. They have spent the last several decades making America safe for serfdom. The rich lower taxes on themselves and ensure that the cost of living increases for everyone else. They make more money while we pay more for education, housing, food, healthcare, and transportation. They squeeze the middle class and squash the poor. They make debt easy to aquire and hard to pay off. These guys are neo-Randian followers of a sort of revived version of Social Darwinism. Now the poor don't deserve help because they don't deserve it...They don't have the "determination" and they don't do the "hard work".

The new Social Darwinists have done a very effective job of propagandizing their vision so that the middle class will accept it. Welfare and Affirmative Action become "socialism". They demonize the Europeans and they push nationalism.

Back to Brin:

Go ahead. Ask some of today's "insatiable-style" aristos and propertarian mystics how they can support tax cuts for the rich in good times and in hard times...

...tax cuts for the rich during peace and during war. Tax cuts during huge deficits and tax cuts during surplus...

...tax cuts to "supply side" us into prosperity through investment in research and factories...

... and then -- when the aristocracy demonstrably does not invest their tax gifts in capital -- they switch to "demand side" justifications, calling for yet more tax cuts, so that the aristocracy can spend it all on employment-generating toys.

(Hint, the last thirty years have shown that direct tax cuts to the rich are just about the LEAST effective economic stimulation of any kind. Proportionate to any other social class, they do not spend. (Hence their support of consumption taxes.) And they do not invest in risky factories or startups. (Venture capital languished even as the Bush cuts sent torrents into wealthy pockets.) They most certainly do no research! In fact, they mostly use any fresh infusion of money simply to be richer.)

When you probe through all the contradicting justifications for this universal rationalization of tax cuts for the rich - especially refusing to pay when your country is at war - the surface reasons all unravel and you'll easily get to the reductio answer.

"It's not the government's money. It's my money."

Try it and see. These old-fashioned aristocrats (and their apologist ideologues) are generally pretty honest about it, after a good push, readily admitting that "supply side" and all the other flummeries were just window dressing. To them, "it's our money" is a deeply-felt and indignantly moral position. A platonic essence, grounded on a purely self-referential axiom. And, like all axioms, it is not subject to question or doubt.

Also (like so many fellow hypocrites on the left) they refuse to ever consider how wonderfully convenient it all is. That their principled, moral stand just happens to support their own, personal self interest.

What a coincidence.

Heh...I've spoken to people like that. Thank You, David Brin, for telling it like it is.