Category Archives: History

These People

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To wake up in the morning is to be confronted again by reality, brute or otherwise. Waking up today, I was struck once more by the fact that 147 Republicans (8 senators and 139 representatives) voted to ignore the 2020 election results in Arizona and/or Pennsylvania. They chose to side with the violent mob that had just invaded the Capitol instead of the election officials who submitted the results from those two key states.

How many of them would have voted to install the loser as president, given the chance?

Considering how they responded to a worldwide pandemic, we know many would have.

This is from Brian Leiter’s philosophy blog. He quotes some of an article from The Atlantic:

This is really stark evidence of the pathological dysfunction of this benighted country, in which one of the two major political parties is openly hostile to de minimis public health measures (recall that Americans died of Covid at a rate two to three times that [or more] of other normal countries):

[B]y far the single group of adults most likely to be unvaccinated is Republicans: 37 percent of Republicans are still unvaccinated or only partially vaccinated, compared with 9 percent of Democrats. Fourteen of the 15 states with the lowest vaccination rates voted for D___ T___ in 2020. (The other is Georgia.)

We know that unvaccinated Americans are more likely to be Republican, that Republicans in positions of power led the movement against COVID vaccination, and that hundreds of thousands of unvaccinated Americans have died preventable deaths from the disease. The Republican Party is unquestionably complicit in the premature deaths of many of its own supporters, a phenomenon that may be without precedent in the history of both American democracy and virology….

We know that as of April 2022, about 318,000 people had died from COVID because they were unvaccinated, according to research from Brown University. And the close association between Republican vaccine hesitancy and higher death rates has been documented. One study estimated that by the fall of 2021, vaccine uptake accounted for 10 percent of the total difference between Republican and Democratic deaths. But that estimate has changed—and even likely grown—over time….

Partisanship affected outcomes in the pandemic even before we had vaccines. A recent study found that from October 2020 to February 2021, the death rate in Republican-leaning counties was up to three times higher than that of Democratic-leaning counties, likely because of differences in masking and social distancing. Even when vaccines came around, these differences continued… Follow-up research published in Lancet Regional Health Americas in October looked at deaths from April 2021 to March 2022 and found a 26 percent higher death rate in areas where voters leaned Republican…

The subtitle of the Atlantic article sums it up:

Party leaders are unquestionably complicit in the premature deaths of their own supporters.

This May Be the Most Disgusting, Disheartening Thing You Read Today

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(Or maybe the second most, since you might read about the fascists and semi-fascists on Fox News and elsewhere attacking Ukraine’s president and being celebrated for doing so on Russian TV.)

For most of us, the company or organization we work for reports our income directly to the government. We’re responsible for accurately reporting deductions and so on and that’s almost always the end of the story. If you’re a certain former president, you can arrange your personal business in such a complex way — making your one company look like 400 or 500 of them — that the I.R.S. will throw up its hands and let you get away with financial murder.

His 2016 and 2017 tax returns show the result.

He claims he lost $32 million more than he earned in 2016. The alternative minimum tax for high income taxpayers still would have resulted in a tax bill of roughly $2 million, but he just so happened to have the same $2 million in tax credits. His total income tax for 2016: $750.

For 2017, his claimed losses were $13 million more than his income. The alternative minimum tax would have been $7 million, but he again had the same amount of credits. The result again: his total income tax was $750.

The New York Times has an explanation:

Before [what’s his name] became president and after, his exceedingly complex and voluminous tax returns came under regular scrutiny by the Internal Revenue Service. The number of agents assigned to the audit team: one.

After he left office, the I.R.S. said it was beefing up the audit team, to three. The tax agency itself acknowledged that it was still overwhelmed by the complexity of [his] finances and the resistance mounted by the former president and his sophisticated army of accountants and lawyers, which included a former I.R.S. chief counsel and raised questions early last year about why even three revenue agents should be assigned to audit him.

“With over 400 flow-thru returns reported on [his] Form 1040, it is not possible to obtain the resources available to examine all potential issues,” I.R.S. agents said … in an internal memo … released by the House Ways and Means Committee this week….

The committee reports released this week highlight how depleted the I.R.S. has become in the last decade, as Republicans starved it of funding. They also show how the agency has become increasingly unable to crack down on wealthy taxpayers who push the legal limits to lower their tax bills and have the means to fend off audits if they get caught.

That has led to a $7 trillion “tax gap” of revenue over a decade that is owed but goes uncollected, in many cases from superrich taxpayers such as [him], who has boasted that he fights to pay as little tax as possible. [The I.R.S. is unable to] match the capacity of an industry dedicated to tax minimization and avoidance.

The agency’s … enforcement staff has fallen by over 30 percent since 2010, and audits of millionaires have declined by more than 70 percent. Its budget has declined by nearly 20 percent, when accounting for inflation, during the last decade.

Republicans have for years accused the I.R.S. of political bias and unfairly targeting conservatives. For that reason [no, the article should say “claiming that is the reason”], they have fought to cut the agency’s funding or, in some cases, called to abolish it altogether.

The spending package that Congress is voting on this week reduces the base funding levels for the I.R.S. by $275 million to $12.32 billion, which Republicans hailed as a victory. However, that does not account for the $80 billion in supplemental funding that the I.R.S. was granted through the Inflation Reduction Act this year to buttress its resources over the next decade and hire more than 80,000 agents and staff members. The Biden administration has broad discretion over how and when to deploy that money to modernize the agency and bolster its enforcement capacity.

The Treasury Department, which oversees the I.R.S., is planning to use some of those funds to hire more auditors who can tackle complicated tax returns.

Charles P. Rettig, who was appointed as I.R.S. commissioner by [the ex-president] and left the post last month, …  suggested in an email to The New York Times that the additional funding the agency is receiving will help it undertake such complex examinations.

“I.R.S. desperately needs additional specialized examiners and related support to conduct additional meaningful examinations of complex individual returns involving partnerships and tiered arrangements of partnerships and similar pass-through entities, foreign transactions, complex financial arrangements and similar,” Mr. Rettig said….

The Biden administration has emphasized its ambitions of modernizing the antiquated technology at the I.R.S. and improving its customer service. In an August memo laying out how the money would be deployed, Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said the agency would be focused on cracking down on rich tax dodgers and big companies that have long evaded paying what they owe to the federal government.

She also promised that middle-class households would not face more onerous scrutiny and that their audit rates would not rise. “These investments will not result in households earning $400,000 per year or less or small businesses seeing an increase in the chances that they are audited relative to historical levels,” Ms. Yellen wrote. “Instead, they will allow the I.R.S. to work to end the two-tiered tax system, where most Americans pay what they owe, but those at the top of the distribution often do not.”

The revelations about [the I.R.S. not properly auditing the ex-president’s returns] laid bare the difficulty that the I.R.S. has had in auditing the rich. The former president proved to be particularly uncooperative, as his team failed to provide facts needed to resolve certain issues and threatened to protest or appeal the process….

The report suggested that as the I.R.S. tried to work its way through [his] maze of tax returns, revenue agents [took] for granted that the assertions made by [his] accounting firm were true. Michael J. Graetz, the deputy assistant secretary for tax policy at the Treasury Department from 1990 to 1991, said the acquiescence of the I.R.S. to big accounting firms was striking…..

An agency memo that was recounted in the report described an audit team manager laying out the daunting nature of [the ex-president’s] returns.

“This return has about 400 flow-through returns reported on Schedule E and, since some of these are tiered, report a total of about 500 flow-through returns,” the auditor said. Underscoring the need for more resources, the memo went on to say that to “do a thorough review of these returns, we would need a team much larger than the current team.”

However, as you would expect:

The funds for the I.R.S. are expected to become one of the first big fights in Congress next year when Republicans take control of the House, as Representative Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican who is seeking to become speaker, signaled in September.

“On that very first day that we’re sworn in, you’ll see that it all changes,” Mr. McCarthy said. “Because on our very first bill, we’re going to repeal 87,000 I.R.S. agents. Our job is to work for you, not go after you.” In November, Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, [declared:] “I think we ought to fight an epic, knock-down, drag-out fight over stopping the Democrats from funding 87,000 new I.R.S. agents…”

Free Will and the Unmoved Mover

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Steven Nadler is an expert on the 17th century philosopher Baruch (or Benedict) Spinoza. He was interviewed for the Elucidations philosophy podcast in 2017. Here he talks about Spinoza and free will:

Spinoza had a very idiosyncratic conception of freedom: idiosyncratic because of the larger metaphysical picture in which he discusses the issue of freedom. Remember that for Spinoza, we are all modes, or in God or nature—and so human beings don’t have this kind of ontological autonomy that we ordinarily think that things have. We are no different from other parts of nature….We are governed by nature’s laws, and this is just as true for our states of mind. Our mental states, our emotions, our passions, our acts of volition, our imaginations—even our intellectual thoughts—are all bound together by the laws of nature, just as much as our bodies are.

Spinoza does not think that there is such a thing as freedom of the will, … in any sense in which all things being the same, one could have chosen otherwise than as one did. So if you are looking for the kind of freedom that gives you independence from the causal determinism that governs most of nature, you’re not going to find that in Spinoza. What freedom does consist in, for him, is a kind of spontaneity, or self-governing autonomy. Not ‘spontaneity’ in the sense of uncaused events—there are no such things (for Spinoza) in nature—but, in a way, very much like a Kantian autonomy, where the things you do, the choices you make, the decisions you make, the goals you pursue follow not so much from how you are affected by other things—that’s passivity—but from your own knowledge of what’s really good, and what is in your own best interest….

Maybe the most precise way to put it is: it’s the difference between being acted on and being active. We’re always active to some degree, because we are always striving. That’s sort of our core essence, for Spinoza….

Things strive to maintain themselves. Other things strive to maintain themselves. Sometimes they come into conflict and these strivings push against each other. We as a part of nature are always being impinged upon by other things, and we’re always being passively affected by the objects in the world around us. But because we’re also striving ourselves, we’re in a way pushing back. And so, our lives are a struggle between being acted upon, and being active, or acting. The more free we are, the more active we are. The more we are determined by things outside of us, the more passive we are, the more we are in bondage to the world around us.

So, according to Spinoza, we are only free in the sense that we can do what we want to do, especially if we have good reasons for doing so. This is what philosophers call “compatibilism”, the idea that everything that happens — including human behavior — is caused by something else, yet we are truly free if nobody has a gun to our head and we decide for ourselves what to do.

I think what Spinoza and others call “free will” feels like free will but really isn’t. In order for an action to be free in the purest sense, there has to be a gap between what’s happened before (even the prior state of your mind) and the choice you finally make. You choose to do something – possibly after a great deal of deliberation – but nothing causes you to make that choice, other than your own free will. The result is that you truly could have chosen otherwise.

This is what Aristotle called the “unmoved mover” or “prime mover”. He thought of it as the primary or first cause of all motion in the universe. The unmoved mover moves other things, but is not itself moved by any prior action. To have free will in this pure sense, each of us has to be an unmoved mover.

Are we? It’s hard to believe that we are.

High Crimes, Not Misdemeanors

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The January 6th committee has concluded that the defeated former president committed four serious crimes: obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress, conspiracy to defraud the United States, making false statements to the federal government, and aiding or inciting an insurrection.

From Charles Pierce for Esquire:

That last word should toll like an undertaker’s bell through the rest of American history, the way it tolled for Aaron Burr and Jefferson Davis. It should toll the way it tolled for Benedict Arnold and John Wilkes Booth. It should toll deeply and profoundly, and it should echo forever.

A president of the United States has been more than credibly accused by a bipartisan select committee of the Congress of inciting an insurrection against the United States—which is to say, against you and me and every one of our fellow citizens. It should toll loudly enough to drown out any talk of polls and elections, and god knows it should drown out any attempt to minimize its significance or, worse, any attempt to equate what the former president did with anything that may or may not have been done by a Democratic politician. The committee’s criminal referrals are unprecedented in our history because the former president’s actions on January 6 were unprecedented in our history.

The Department of Justice should now act accordingly.

Understanding How We Got Here, or How a Defunct Economist Would Make Us Slaves

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As Christmas approaches, why not spend a few minutes reading about the little-known economist who did so much to burden America and other countries with a brand of economics and politics that would have warmed Scrooge’s cold, cold heart? Lynn Parramore of the Institute for New Economic Thinking wrote about him in 2018:

Ask people to name the key minds that have shaped America’s burst of radical right-wing attacks on working conditions, consumer rights and public services, and they will typically mention figures like free market-champion Milton Friedman, libertarian guru Ayn Rand, and laissez-faire economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.

James McGill Buchanan is a name you will rarely hear unless you’ve taken several classes in economics. And if [Buchanan] were alive today, it would suit him just fine that most well-informed journalists, liberal politicians, and even many economics students have little understanding of his work.

The reason? Duke historian Nancy MacLean contends that his philosophy is so stark that even young libertarian acolytes are only introduced to it after they have accepted the relatively sunny perspective of Ayn Rand. (Yes, you read that correctly). If Americans really knew what Buchanan thought and promoted, and how destructively his vision is manifesting under their noses, it would dawn on them how close the country is to a transformation most would not even want to imagine, much less accept.

That is a dangerous blind spot, MacLean argues in a meticulously researched book, Democracy in Chains…

Buchanan … started out as a conventional public finance economist. But he grew frustrated by the way in which economic theorists ignored the political process. He began working on a description of power that started out as a critique of how institutions functioned in the relatively liberal 1950s and ‘60s… Buchanan, MacLean notes, was incensed at what he saw as a move toward socialism and deeply suspicious of any form of state action that channels resources to the public. Why should the increasingly powerful federal government be able to force the wealthy to pay for goods and programs that served ordinary citizens and the poor?

In thinking about how people make political decisions and choices, Buchanan concluded that you could only understand them as individuals seeking personal advantage. In an interview cited by MacLean, the economist observed that in the 1950s Americans commonly assumed that elected officials wanted to act in the public interest. Buchanan vehemently disagreed…

His view of human nature was distinctly dismal. Adam Smith saw human beings as self-interested and hungry for personal power and material comfort, but he also acknowledged social instincts like compassion and fairness. Buchanan, in contrast, insisted that people were primarily driven by venal self-interest. Crediting people with altruism or a desire to serve others was “romantic” fantasy: politicians and government workers were out for themselves, and so, for that matter, were teachers, doctors, and civil rights activists. They wanted to control others and wrest away their resources: “Each person seeks mastery over a world of slaves,” he wrote in his 1975 book, The Limits of Liberty.

Does that sound like your kindergarten teacher? It did to Buchanan.

The people who needed protection were property owners, and their rights could only be secured though constitutional limits to prevent the majority of voters from encroaching on them… MacLean observes that Buchanan saw society as a cutthroat realm of makers (entrepreneurs) constantly under siege by takers (everybody else) His own language was often more stark, warning the alleged “prey” of “parasites” and “predators” out to fleece them.

In 1965 the economist launched a center dedicated to his theories… MacLean describes how he trained thinkers to push back against the Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate America’s public schools… She notes that he took care to use economic and political precepts, rather than overtly racial arguments, to make his case, which nonetheless gave cover to racists who knew that spelling out their prejudices would alienate the country….

[Buchanan] focused on how democracy constrains property owners and aimed for ways to restrict the latitude of voters. [MacClean] argues that unlike even the most property-friendly founders Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, Buchanan wanted a private governing elite of corporate power that was wholly released from public accountability.

Suppressing voting, changing legislative processes so that a normal majority could no longer prevail, sowing public distrust of government institutions— all these were tactics toward the goal….

In nurturing a new intelligentsia to commit to his values, Buchanan stated that he needed a “gravy train,” and with backers like Charles Koch and conservative foundations like the Scaife Family Charitable Trusts, others hopped aboard. Money, Buchanan knew, can be a persuasive tool in academia. His circle of influence began to widen….

MacLean describes how the economist developed a grand project to train operatives to staff institutions funded by like-minded tycoons, most significantly Charles Koch, who became interested in his work in the ‘70s… Koch, whose mission was to save capitalists like himself from democracy, found the ultimate theoretical tool in [Buchanan’s] work. [MacClean] writes that Koch preferred Buchanan to [conservative economist] Milton Friedman and his “[University of]Chicago boys” because, she says, quoting a libertarian insider, they wanted “to make government work more efficiently when the true libertarian should be tearing it out at the root.”

With Koch’s money and enthusiasm, Buchanan’s academic school evolved into something much bigger. By the 1990s, Koch realized that Buchanan’s ideas — transmitted through stealth and deliberate deception, as MacLean amply documents — could help take government down through incremental assaults that the media would hardly notice. The tycoon knew that the project was extremely radical, even a “revolution” in governance, but he talked like a conservative to make his plans sound more palatable.

MacLean details how partnered with Koch, Buchanan’s [center] at George Mason University was able to connect libertarian economists with right-wing political actors and supporters [at] corporations like Shell Oil, Exxon, Ford, IBM, Chase Manhattan Bank, and General Motors. Together they could push economic ideas to the public through media, promote new curricula for economics education, and court politicians in nearby Washington, D.C.

… MacLean recounts that Buchanan … focused on such affronts to capitalists as environmentalism and public health and welfare, expressing eagerness to dismantle Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare as well as kill public education because it tended to foster community values. Feminism had to go too…

Buchanan’s ideas began to have huge impact, especially in America and in Britain….The economist was deeply involved in efforts to cut taxes on the wealthy in 1970s and 1980s and he advised proponents of Reagan Revolution in their quest to unleash markets and posit government as the “problem” rather than the “solution.” The Koch-funded Virginia school coached scholars, lawyers, politicians, and business people to apply stark right-wing perspectives on everything from deficits to taxes to school privatization. In Britain, Buchanan’s work helped to inspire the public sector reforms of Margaret Thatcher and her political progeny.

To put the success into perspective, MacLean points to the fact that [law professor] Henry Manne, whom Buchanan was instrumental in hiring, created legal programs for law professors and federal judges which could boast that by 1990 two of every five sitting federal judges had participated. “40 percent of the U.S. federal judiciary,” writes MacLean, “had been treated to a Koch-backed curriculum.”

MacLean illustrates that in South America, Buchanan was able to first truly set his ideas in motion by helping a bare-knuckles dictatorship ensure the permanence of much of the radical transformation it inflicted on [Chile], a country that had been a beacon of social progress. The historian emphasizes that Buchanan’s role in the disastrous Pinochet government …has been underestimated partly because unlike Milton Friedman, who advertised his activities, Buchanan had the shrewdness to keep his involvement quiet.

The dictator’s human rights abuses and pillage of the country’s resources did not seem to bother Buchanan, MacLean argues, so long as the wealthy got their way. “Despotism may be the only organizational alternative to the political structure that we observe,” the economist had written in The Limits of Liberty….

[MacClean] observes that many liberals have missed the point of strategies like privatization. Efforts to “reform” public education and Social Security are not just about a preference for the private sector over the public sector, she argues. You can wrap your head around those, even if you don’t agree. Instead, MacLean contends, the goal of these strategies is to radically alter power relations, weakening pro-public forces and enhancing the lobbying power and commitment of the corporations that take over public services and resources, thus advancing the plans to dismantle democracy and make way for a return to oligarchy. The majority will be held captive so that the wealthy can finally be free to do as they please, no matter how destructive.

MacLean argues that despite the rhetoric…, shrinking big government is not really the point. The oligarchs require a government with tremendous new powers so that they can bypass the will of the people. This, as MacLean points out, requires greatly expanding police powers “to control the resultant popular anger”…

Could these right-wing capitalists allow private companies to fill prisons with helpless citizens—or, more profitable still, rights-less undocumented immigrants? They could, and have. Might they engineer a retirement crisis by moving Americans to inadequate 401(k)s? Done. Take away the rights of consumers and workers to bring grievances to court by making them sign forced arbitration agreements? Check. Gut public education to the point where ordinary people have such bleak prospects that they have no energy to fight back? Getting it done.

Would they even refuse children clean water? Actually, yes. MacLean notes that in Flint, Michigan, Americans got a taste of what the emerging oligarchy will look like… There, the Koch-funded Mackinac Center pushed for legislation that would allow the governor to take control of communities facing emergency and put unelected managers in charge. In Flint, one such manager switched the city’s water supply to a polluted river…Tens of thousands of children were exposed to lead…

Economist Tyler Cowen has provided an economic justification for this kind of brutality, stating that where it is difficult to get clean water, private companies should take over and make people pay for it. “This includes giving them the right to cut off people who don’t—or can’t—pay their bills”…

Research like MacLean’s provides hope that toxic ideas like Buchanan’s may finally begin to face public scrutiny. Yet at this very moment, the Kochs’ State Policy Network and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group that connects corporate agents to conservative lawmakers to produce legislation, are involved in projects that the … media hardly notices, like pumping money into state judicial races. Their aim is to stack the legal deck against Americans in ways that MacLean argues may have even bigger effects than Citizens United, the 2010 Supreme Court ruling which unleashed unlimited corporate spending on American politics. The goal is to create a judiciary that will interpret the Constitution in favor of corporations and the wealthy in ways that Buchanan would have heartily approved.

“The United States is now at one of those historic forks in the road whose outcome will prove as fateful as those of the 1860s, the 1930s, and the 1960s,” writes MacLean. “To value liberty for the wealthy minority above all else and enshrine it in the nation’s governing rules, as [Buchanan] called for and the Koch network is achieving, play by play, is to consent to an oligarchy in all but the outer husk of representative form.”

Unquote.

For the record, quoting John Maynard Keynes:

The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

Especially if billionaires are spreading the scribbler’s ideas.