Blogging my thoughts:

The Op-Ed page in the New York Times today was pretty inspiring. Milos Forman, the film director of “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest” showed how those who claimed President Obama was a socialist didn’t know what they are talking about. He described socialism as he had experienced it and there is no comparison.

He argued that we had to keep in mind the melody of our country and how some harmony is required for us to make it. “But if just one section, or even one player, is out of tune, the music will disintegrate into cacophony.”[1]

I don’t want to blame one party for the gridlock in Washington, because the real reason for the chasm between different political ideologies is the chasm that has grown between the rich and the everyday people of our country. In the words of Chief Justice Brandeis, “We can have democracy or the great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both.” Our representatives in Washington are caught in the social forces, the money, that is, issuing from our social and economic inequality.

In their piece Eric Liu and Nick Hanauer compare the economy to a garden and argue that it is not a rational machine. Harmful economic activity needs to be weeded out and healthy economic activity needs to be supported. Taxes and government spending is like watering the garden, when it spent for education and health, and is better compared to the circulation system than money that just goes down the drain.

In my blogging I have compared taxation to pruning of trees and bushes in order to make them bear fruit for the common good rather than wild, destructive, and contradictory growth.

Liu and Hanauer argue that

“Under the efficient market hypothesis, taxes are an extraction of resources from the jobs machine, or more literally taking the money out of the economy. It is not just separate from economic activity, but hostile to it. This is why most Americans believe that lower taxes will automatically lead to more prosperity. Yet if there were a shred of truth to this, then given our historically low tax rates we would today be drowning in jobs and general prosperity.”[2]

The authors argue that jobs come from the organic feed-back loop between consumers and business, which requires a thriving middle class. The severe concentration of wealth kills middle class demand and jobs do not trickle down but emerge from the middle out. “To spend tax dollars on education and health is to circulate nutrients through the garden.”

They continue,

“True, not all spending is equally useful, and not every worthy idea for spending is affordable. But this perspective helps us understand why the most prosperous economies are those that tax and spend the most, while those that tax and spend the least are failures. More important, it clarifies why more austerity cannot revive an already weak private economy and why more spending can.“[3]

After the misguided Bush tax cuts (and the two wars) we lost 8 million jobs beginning our Great Recession. Money that could have renewed our infrastructure was in part lost in the Wall Street bubble with irrational derivatives and credit default swaps, where more weeds like Bernie Madoff and other Ponzi schemes were hiding among the wild growth in our financial sector, which made up 47% of our economy. The other part of the tax cuts, I believe, made our government have to buy bonds and increase the debt by loaning money from those who would have had to pay it in taxes. Thus our government has been taken hostage by those who should have paid taxes.

To pay taxes is a patriotic duty and serves to socialize our inherent selfishness. The tithe, which means giving the first ten percent of income to the church or charities, demonstrates one’s faith in God. Paying our taxes demonstrates our good faith as citizens of our commonwealth. It brings harmony into the garden of our economy. Liu and Hanauer argue well that their garden approach to the economy is pro-business and not at all anti-capitalist.

To me it seemed that politicians first promised tax-cuts in order to bribe voters into voting for them against their own interests. Now with Grover Norquist’s no tax pledge, which so many have signed, what seemed irrational has attained the level of insanity, unless one believes in anarchy. (Norquist merely wants to shrink government down enough to drown it in the bathtub.) Governor Pat Brown running against Ronald Reagan wondered, if he hated government so much, why he would want to be the president. It was like an anti-Catholic wanting to become the pope.[4]

The huge deficits that Reagan and George W. Bush left because of their tax cuts show that they were using both to dismantle big government. When Reagan talked of the corner drugstore he was avoiding mention of the huge pharmaceuticals. Privatization does not give more power to the common person and get the government off an individual’s back, but places us into the power of the corporations. As the state governments get into trouble and city governments here in California go bankrupt, more and more public facilities have to name themselves directly after corporations. A change of pitchers now requires one to hear about oil change or what not. You pay to see a movie and you have to watch commercials and the movie contains commercials in the feature. The market is colonizing our life world in places it has no right to be.

Why did FDR create big government? In order to bully the huge corporations into taking our national interests into consideration. Where is the allegiance of global transnational corporations, except for their own private wealth?

Public citizens standing up for public interests and the commonwealth have to take a stand against all this privatization. Private armies, private jails, private schools! If we could sell California’s state government to Google, it could take care of our deficit in a jiffy. Why not let Google become one of the fifty states? What’s in the name “California”? Why not privatize it? The CEO of Oracle just bought an island in Hawaii.

We have just been into downsizing, where hatchet men fired whole departments to replace them with temporary workers. There is an army of unemployed, making workers have to do the work of three or more laid off workers. Should you complain, there are ten other workers standing in line for your job. Then there is the out-sourcing of labor and the remark from a CEO in the down-sizing time: “We don’t owe you a living?” For the sake of mega profits, productive workers were laid off in droves. Are the people there for the sake of the corporations or the corporations there for the sake of the people? Pray tell.

See Habermas: The Life-World and the Two Systems.

peter krey