Category Archives: Public Policy and Governance

Who Deserves?

I caught a bit of one of those interminable talking-head debates on television the other day, in which one pontificator was explaining that in America, we work for what we get, and it is thus unAmerican to begrudge wealth to those who have earned it.

I agree. When someone works hard, innovates and creates that better mousetrap, we all benefit. That person has earned what he or she has. I also agree that this emphasis on meritocracy–the belief (however unwarranted) that anyone can compete and succeed if they just work hard enough–is a quintessentially American belief.

What the talking head didn’t seem to understand was that he was in the wrong conversation.

The people criticizing the status quo today are clearly not angry with capitalism, nor hostile to those who have done well by actually producing something. They are angry–justifiably, in my view–with a government that seems to have two sets of rules, one for those rich enough to hire lobbyists and another for the rest of us. They are angry with a system that confers obscene rewards on people who produce nothing, people who simply play financial games and buy influence.

Genuine capitalism requires the rule of law and a level playing field, where the same rules apply to everyone. When some people–or corporations–are able to buy a pass, buy a separate set of rules for themselves, that is no longer capitalism. It’s cronyism, and it violates deeply embedded precepts of American culture.

I’ve always been puzzled by the double standard so many seem to live by: you’ll hear people talk disparagingly about “welfare bums” who “work the system” and don’t deserve our help. And I know there are people who fit that description–although research suggests they make up only 2% or so of welfare recipients. Until quite recently, however, I did not hear similar opinions offered about people with unearned wealth–those who inherited it, or especially those who broke the rules in order to get it. I heard few complaints about corporate lobbyists who “work the system” to get special benefits others don’t enjoy. If we truly believe that merit should be rewarded, and cheating punished, we aren’t doing a very good job of selecting the winners and losers.

What we are seeing right now is a shameful effort to defend unearned privilege, by claiming that the rich are all “job creators,” or that objections to the status quo are “class warfare.” It’s telling that those who genuinely earned their wealth–think Bill Gates or Warren Buffett–are among the most vocal critics.

If we are going to dispense welfare, who truly deserves extra help from the taxpayers? The single mom struggling to raise her children in an economy she did not produce–an economy hollowed out by wars of choice, tax breaks for the powerful and permissive regulations that enabled dishonesty all the way from Enron to the banksters–or the people who run corporations like Halliburton and banks like Citicorp and Bank of America? I’m prepared to concede that we couldn’t allow the financial system to melt down–the consequences would have been horrific for everyone–but now that we have stabilized it, we need to address the inequities of an economic system that demands far more from the working poor than it does from the well-connected rich.

We Americans need to rethink who we are, where our taxes should come from and where they ought to go, and who “deserves” what.

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The Klingons in Florida

Linda Greenhouse’s column in this morning’s New York Times discusses an absolutely appalling policy being applied in Florida. It is aimed at illegal immigration, but I hesitate to classify it as an immigration policy, because it is aimed squarely at young citizens whose parents lack documentation. The state refuses to authorize residential tuition rates for these young resident citizens who enroll at Florida’s public colleges.

It’s as if Worf, from Star Trek the Next Generation, is making policy in Florida. Klingons, as you may (or may not) recall, believe that “dishonor” passes from parent to child. Several episodes of the series drew their dramatic impact from the viewers’ sense of the terrible injustice of holding Worf responsible for crimes his father was alleged to have committed.

Klingons are fictional. Rick Scott, the criminal who is governor of Florida (I use the word deliberately; his company defrauded Medicare of billions) unfortunately is not.

As Greenhouse notes, the U.S. Constitution expressly forbids punishing children for the crimes of their parents.

““Corruption of blood” was a familiar feature of the common law in England. A person found guilty of treason and certain other crimes would be barred from passing his estate on to his children, who would thus inherit nothing but the corrupted blood line. The framers of the United States Constitution considered and forcefully rejected the concept. Article III, the judiciary article, contains this sentence: “The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture except during the life of the person attained.” As James Madison expressed the thought more directly at the time, the purpose was to prevent Congress “from extending the consequences of guilt beyond the person of its author.”

There are two questions here, both pertinent: Where was Florida’s Attorney General while officials were deciding to implement a policy so clearly at odds with what the Constitution requires? And perhaps more importantly, what happened to these policymakers’ human decency?

More GOP Insanity

Back in the Ice Age, when I was still Republican, the GOP used to be a party of grown-ups. It is painful to watch what has become of the Grand Old Party–and even more painful to see what it’s doing to the country.

Neil Pierce’s current column is yet another example.  As he reports,

“There’s no sane way to say that America’s criminal justice system is “OK.” It costs over $100 billion a year; it imprisons hundreds of thousands for minor drug possession or sale; overall it’s incarcerating 2.3 million men and woman — the most of any nation on earth.

But that didn’t stop 43 Senate Republicans from recently wielding the weapon of a filibuster to torpedo a proposal by Sen. James Webb (D-Va.) for a bipartisan national commission to undertake a stem-to-stern examination of how we apprehend, try and punish in America.”

The entire column is worth reading, but the essence is that the GOP claims a STUDY of the criminal justice system would be an infringement of “states rights.”

Mull that over for a minute. We have now gotten to the place where simply informing ourselves about what is happening in our country cannot be tolerated. Information has become the enemy.

I suppose I shouldn’t be so stunned; these are the people who deny the existence of global climate change, who insist that evolution is just a “theory” (betraying their ignorance of the meaning of scientific theory), and that people are poor not because they can’t get jobs but because they’re lazy. They’re the people who sneer at educated “elitists.”

So now the party that talks endlessly about the need to cut costs has killed a perfectly reasonable, modestly priced study aimed at determining why we are overspending by billions for a system that is both inefficient and inequitable–a study to help us spend less to make Americans safer.

Welcome to the age of the new and improved “know nothings.”

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So One Hologram Says to the Other….

My son Stephen is home for the Thanksgiving weekend, and last night the three of us watched one of the shows in Nova’s “Fabric of the Cosmos” series. This one explored the nature of space–which is not “nothingness” as we might imagine.

These Nova productions do a great job of simplifying complex science, drawing analogies to things we understand. That said, by the time the show concluded, my head hurt.

I had no idea that black holes–in addition to squashing everything that has the misfortune to get swept up within their immense density–keep copies of what they crush on their “outside.” (Whatever the outside of a black hole is.) Nor had I encountered the theory that our world might consist of holographic images of those images.

Does your head hurt yet?

I may not have learned much about physics from this particular explanation, but it did illustrate, once again, the immense gulf between what I know and what science has discovered. And that makes me wonder–again–about the processes we use to make policy in this country.

If I were a lawmaker, and I was being asked to vote upon a measure to fund a particular scientific inquiry, how would I evaluate the merits of the project? What if I was being asked to ban a certain line of experimentation? And even if I had access to excellent advice, how would I justify my vote–whatever it was–to those who elected me?

When Texas was a potential site for the Hadron Collider, there was a frenzy of fear that it would create a black hole that would swallow the Earth. It was subsequently built in Switzerland, began operations recently, and thus far, at least, we’re still here. Or at least our holographic images…

I really don’t want to turn policymaking over to the technocrats and nerds, but I also don’t think Joe and Jane Sixpack and I are equipped to make a lot of the decisions that we collectively need to make.

As the world gets more and more complicated, we need to think carefully about the level of knowledge we need to make good policy, and how we might keep decision-making both democratic and informed.

Unfortunately, this hologram has no idea how to do that.

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Too Complicated for Democracy?

A breakfast discussion this morning about the Indiana Legislature and “Right to Work” reinforced a concern I’ve harbored.

For years, when I heard discussions about “Right to Work,” it seemed obvious to me that everyone should have the right to work without being forced to join a union. That, after all, was the way the issue was framed, and I was totally unaware that the reality was more complicated. Once I understood the issue more fully, I changed my policy preference.

The problem is, more and more issues are like Right to Work. No matter how simple the framing, the policies themselves require more in-depth knowledge in order to genuinely understand what is at stake. Formulations that compare decisions about the national budget to those you make for your own household, “Dirty Harry” approaches to criminal justice, “we just need to deport illegal immigrants” simplifications and numerous other “everyone knows” “it’s just common sense” approaches to government decision-making are simple, deceptively appealing, and usually (but not always) wrong.

The question is: how well can democracy work when even the most diligent voter (and how many of those are there?) is unlikely to be informed about the complexities of the policies being proposed by candidates?  How can we citizens make good decisions in an increasingly complex world?

I don’t have the answer to that question. But in a complicated world, a measure of humility would seem to be in order. At the very least, voters should cultivate a healthy suspicion of candidates displaying too much certitude–candidates who tell us the problems are simple. And we should run like hell from the ones who profess to have all the answers.