I think I understand how Cory sees this portrait of Sanders as sympathetic, insofar as Stein characterizes Sanders as someone who is fervent, focused, honest, and damned with integrity. I wouldn’t conflate ‘sympathetic’ with ‘flattering’ however, as Stein does titrate his admiration for Sanders with not-so-subtle criticism:
Bernie Sanders is not a leader so much as a messenger.
[…]
He travels across the country constantly, giving long, passionate speeches in a way that makes talking seem like a blue-collar job
[…]
Even more than most candidates, Sanders is better at identifying problems than offering solutions
Overall though, I do get the sense that Stein likes the guy, particularly from this passage:
Huck Gutman, an English professor at the University of Vermont who served as Sanders’s chief of staff until 2012, and who’s been one of his closest friends for decades, says Sanders had two interests when he was mayor of Burlington: playing basketball and wealth inequality. He no longer plays basketball.
Then you seem to have a mismatch between what you can agree with and what you consider honest and decent. I don’t know if libertarianism is your poison, but if it is, don’t assume that it is the most rational or agreeable baseline.
“libertarianism” small-l, is my poison, in the following basic sense:
I think I believe, really, in two things politically:
First, the Hayekian view that human beings have a limit on their ability to understand or control systems and there’s very little reason to think that the government, as a collection of people, will make better decisions than individuals and,
Two, as Aaron Director put it, “laissez-faire is simply short hand for the belief that all government action should be viewed with the presumption of error.” (Not always a block – it’s a presumption that can be overcome, but it’s the default state.)
Those two don’t define my policy prescriptions in all cases, but that’s the lens through which I view the world.
That said, yes, I have an enormous mismatch between what I can agree with and who I consider to be honest and decent, well-meaning and yes, patriotic, people. I think that’s a good thing.
One thing I have never understood about that brand of libertarianism:
Why expect government to be wrong, but give corporations a free pass? Particularly given all the damage clearly done by “free market” capitalism?
Doesn’t small/weak government lead to a power vacuum that is inveitably filled by those with money and power, leading to tyranny again anyway? How is that possibly better than a stronger but preferably transparent and accountable/replaceable government?
Because after that nasty government stops holding you back by taking all your money, you’ll be able to become one of those people with money and power and freedom!
I think one of the disconnects is that – speaking for me alone – I don’t think the market is particularly free. And I don’t mean “we need to reduce regulation”, I mean the government is so powerful that the ROI on lobbying is better than the ROI on innovation, so it gets captured by entities that have the money to do so.
I think what one wants – certainly, in atl-land what I want – is a reasonably powerful government that enforces a very few laws very rigorously. It is the gamesmanship of law and regulation that is the most market-distorting stuff which I find most harmful. I think Bernie Sanders is mostly right that the corporations own the government – but I think the policy solution isn’t “get money out of politics”, but make the government a less attractive target for rent-seeking.
I had to think back about thirty years! It started when I was having a discussion with some friends which covered a range from scientific philosophy, through political philosophy. Thinking about it, I described my politics as being a sort of “objectivism”. So one friend mentioned Rand (who I’d not heard of) and roughly explained her style of objectivism. It was years before I read any Rand (LOL). But I did start reading up a bit about libertarianism, which was all of the social civil liberties kind. It wasn’t until the mid 90s or so when I got online and read more that I found that many people had more economic and financial meanings associated with the label.
Nowadays I would describe what I was thinking of then as more of a “techno-pagan scientific communism”. Although now I would describe it as a variety of anarcho-syndicalism. Lots of other collectivists fret about what can be construed as libertarian elements, but I think that people need to be free to organize for meaningful collectives to happen. Fair systems need to be voluntary, otherwise people get exploited once they are locked-in to anything.
I haven’t read any Emma Goldman (although I think I really should), but from what little I know, it seems safe to say that my definition of libertarian is much, much closer to hers than to Rand’s.
again, i’m not sure it was an endorsement over just straight reporting. you read the straight report as endorsement because you’re on Bernie’s side to begin with (me too, for the record)
see: [quote=“Mindysan33, post:11, topic:71940, full:true”]
I dunno… was it all that sympathetic. They kept insisting he “hates” the wealthy, when that’s not the case at all, I don’t think. He hates a rigged system.
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as Bloomberg is a business publication, would it not have an inherent slant against him, if anything?
being of the hip hop and punk rock generation (back when it MEANT something, dammit. get off my lawn etc…) the ethics i value are DIY, “keep it real,” “show and prove,” “it is what it is.” it’s all reputation based. here, i’m buffering what Oswalt said. politicians other than him are focused not on doing the work and being consistent, but on being electable and returning favors towards that goal.
i’ve been unfortunate enough to have answered some classified job ads that ended up being mills for high pressure sales and i’ve learned to spot it. successful panhandlers and used car salesmen employ these tactics. i can spot it in them the same as i spot it in HRC, Trump, and the other Rs. everything’s a soundbite. everything’s a righteous DO iT NOW call to arms, pushing emotional buttons, crowd control, and changing unpleasant subjects with a smile.
Bernie is real. i’m tired of being governed by panhandlers and used car salesmen.
I feel like the Rand and her disciplines stole that word. They are anything but objective.
I try not to fret about sounding like a libertarian sometimes. Thinking that people ought to be free to make their own choices is not the same what I see libertarians do, which is usually trying to insist on absolute freedom while sneaking in every restriction on freedom that they want as natural or obvious. I mean, I agree with them that there should be some kind of sanction for murder, but I actually notice that a sanction against murder is a restriction on freedom while they pretend it isn’t (and then go on to pretend that a state that enforces contracts with force isn’t a restriction on freedom either, all the while saying that the only part of the state we shouldn’t dismantle is very part that exercises coercive force - the police/army).
The best criticism I have ever heard of Bernie Sanders is this, paraphrased: “The money has to come from somewhere!”
As in, he wants to take all that money from Wall Street and give it back to the people who need it the most.
But that money got there and has to come from somewhere.
Money isn’t just stacked over there in a vault on Wall Street; just go get it in a big wheelbarrow and take it somewhere else. That money was systematically funneled there with every click of a “buy now” button, every pay-per-view, every subscription, ever grocery, every prescription, every doctor visit, every piece of electronics purchased, every car financed, every house mortgaged. Every penny earned in a 401k had some portion of it funneled to accounts associated with Wall Street. Nearly every penny that moves anywhere brushes up against Wall Street.
So, to change Wall Street and how the rules work for collecting that money there, by the very nature of that reform ALSO MUST INCLUDE changes to the way that money is spent in the first place. As in, how consumerism plays out in the USA and in the world. It’s not just taking money from Wall Street. It’s a complete shift in the way consumerism currently functions.
All the money comes from somewhere. Yes, the 1% control the majority share. But it happened by activity of all 100% of people. (Except @popobawa4u)
I am in favor of these changes. And I know Bernie is fully aware of these subtleties, as are the few people with actual thoughtfulness on the right.
We can, and hopefully will elect Bernie. It would be the mark of only the beginning of a pitched battle that will take a long time to resolve.
I agree with you on what seem to be your foundational principles.
Unfortunately once you start making a list of all the major market failures that can’t be solved privately due to coordination, free rider, transaction cost, bounded rationality, and asymmetric information issues (I may be missing others), i.e. problems only a free central coercive governing body can address, you end up with either at least as much total government as we have now (though better organized) or a society that is a pretty horrible place to live for nearly everyone.
Edit to add: unless you follow @Popobawu4u’s advice and only interact with a small local group of people you personally know, in which case good luck to you.
I’d say one of the biggest problems we have is thinking that money has to come from somewhere. It doesn’t. It’s all just numbers in computers. Billions and trillions appear and disappear on Wall Street and they literally come from nowhere. “Quantitative easing” has been inventing money from thin air for years now and giving all straight to the ultra-wealthy. It hasn’t caused inflation because the Wall Street economy doesn’t connect with the real world economy of food and clothes. I have three suggestions for fixing in, in order of severity:
Very high taxes on the wealthy, and maybe a tax on wealth itself. Accept that the rich will keep skimming off the top and just skim right back.
Cut the string and let the Wall Street balloon economy float away, entrenching a class of ultra-rich leeches to save us from their machinations. Just say, "alright, if you are rich now you can keep trying to increase your high score of money and we’ll give you all the things you want, but you aren’t allowed to mess with the rest of us anymore - no saying who gets to work or what gets built or who gets to live where.
Impose the logical consequence of Citizens United, arrest all owners of Corporations for slavery, and start subsistence farming until we can figure out how we can have nice things again.
I think (1) would actually solve the problem (for a few decades and then it would start to creep back - the price of freedom being vigilance and so forth).
But you missed one word that would actually have helped your point:
Activity.
We share this delusion. We actively participate in it. So, it all does come from somewhere: it comes from our shared delusion. To change one part of it must needs change all of it. If not in this lifetime, then in future generations, when the earth can no longer support our delusion.
You are DEAD ON with shifting to wealth tax, instead of income tax. We could waive tax for people whose net wealth was under $500K in the USA, and charge those over that between half of one percent, and several percent, and totally replace most other taxes incl. income tax, overnight.
Emma Goldman was an anarchists and got kicked out of the country for her beliefs. She was a great and brave woman, unlike Rand who just seemed small and greedy to me.
Well, when I talk about wealth tax I’m basically just referencing Picketty. There are lots of ways to do taxes and I have no idea what the real world effects of them would actually be. But for everyone who thinks that income taxes somehow don’t work, I point to the post-WWII expansion in the US where income taxes on the top tax bracket ranged from high 70s to low 90s. It worked out pretty well. The main point is to stop feeding the cultural notion that the rich deserve to be fantastically rich and that taxation is theft, and start feeding the notion that we are all in this together and that the wealth the rich command is a representation of the input of all of us.
If the Walton family was making even 5% on their fortune (and that’s a gross underestimate just for the sake of example), that would be enough to hire about 680,000 of the poorest Americans to build pyramids in their honor, stage choreographed dance routines, or form a massive line taking turns shining their shoes all day. To me, saying that one person’s command is worth the labour of so many others is basically an undemocratic notion. They essentially have a number of subjects on the same order of Magnitude of Henry the VIII.
