Prometheus: A 2001 Moment in 2012

I'm going to go whole hog here and say that Ridley Scott's Prometheus has given us the most divisive and possibly brilliant (but then again maybe not . . .) science fiction film in recent memory. The only movie that comes close, off the top of my head, is the brilliant District 9, but that one probably won't get mentioned in anyone's film classes ten years from now. I think Prometheus will.

A quick scan of the existing reviews of the film produces a surprise for me. Nearly all of them are firmly planted in the meh zone: lots of disappointment with character choices, admiration for the heft of the subject matter (hint: it's not xenomorphs), and awe at the technical mastery of the photography. On that subject, hopefully, Sir Ridley's gorgeous and wildly understated 3D will become a standard bearer for the technology. 3D at the movies is a good thing when the goal of the 3D is to generate the presence of the material and it doesn't go out of its way to throw an axe at you or swing you from rooftop to rooftop. 3D is better than 2D for the same reason that analog audio is better than digital: it's how we see. There will always be a place for 2D photography because of the compositional possibilities and the sheer amount of style you can wring out a world that looks 3D, but it isn't. Wes Anderson has made a career out of it in just the last 15 years. The great lesson from Sir Ridley and (No One Will Ever Call Me Sir) James Cameron is that 3D works best when it is shot that way from the get go. Conversions are evil and awful. Too bad Prometheus lost to Madagascar 3D at the box office. I think the lesson of that will not be lost on the studios, to our great misfortune as moviegoers.

The admiration that critics express for the ideas that Prometheus grapples with reminds me of Chris Rock's bit about Colin Powell from way back when. "He speaks so well, he speaks so well." They used to say. "That's what you say about retarded people, who can talk." When a movie critic writs: "Well at least he is dealing with some heavy ideas" that critic means, "I don't think he dealth with those ideas very well, but he's so famous, successful, and important that my publisher won't let me write that." The overwhelming voice I am hearing about Prometheus is disappointment, mostly because of the characters. And make no mistake, it's understandable. The scene at the dig site in Scotland where Noomi Rapace and whatever that guy's name is discover the glyphs that lead them to Weyland lasts all of 5 minutes and most of that is staring at aerial shots of the pretty Scottish mountains, not listening to either them explain what the scratchings on the cave wall mean. The movie jumps immediately to space without any explanation or elaboration of how this cave painting leads a mega-corporation to drop a trillion dollars on a space mission to an unknown and possibly non-existent planet with no guarantee of success. Why didn't Ridley just drop us in space to start with? Good question. This kind of shorthand (the less generous might call it laziness) is ever present. Characters jump moods with little or no explanation or process. The choices and moods aren't random, it's just that we aren't treated to the entire chain of events between those choices. Normally, a film will walk us through all the points in between the geologist being calm and surveying and stuff to flipping out over a room full of dead aliens. This film does not. But wouldn't you just start flipping out? I kind of liked it because I think it is of a piece with really big idea that lies at the center of the movie: "What the hell is happening and why?"

When you are dealing with the possibility that life on Earth was the result of biological warfare (or not), maybe understanding the behavior of the geologist and his redshirt biologist pal, who are going to do what redshirts do, isn't that necessary. They don't understand what's happening or why life exists, when they bother to think about it, so why should we understand them? I think that bafflement with fundamental existential questions is what the movie is all about. The main gist of the mission of Rapace's Ellen Shaw is to discover how and why humanity exists and the movie is a process of discovering that she isn't even asking the right questions and that she is not equipped to deal with the answers she is given to questions she didn't ask (also, she gets implanted with an alien, sort of). I left the movie certain that the openness and the open endedness of the film would engender anger among the wider population. Ridley Scott just gave us a movie that sort of settled an open question from a thirty year old movie by asking a much bigger set of questions without bothering to answer any of them. What the hell?! I left the movie knowing much less than when I entered it. I haven't seen the anger that I expected, more of a collective "Meh, it's got pretty pictures though." Still, I can't help but think that Prometheus is a movie that creates an itch that can't be scratched, that leaves you wondering about what it meant long after you have left the theater and the pretty pictures behind. That's why I think it might just be as good as 2001. It's a perfect demonstration of how to ask big questions and to not settle for cheap easy answers because it's entirely possible that there might not be any answers at all.

I think maybe I need to see it again . . .

The Parable of the Bricklayer

 Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.

Once there was a man with a garden. He looked out on his garden and loved it. The sun rose and the sun set on this garden and the man could not help but love it. One day, while considering his garden, he realized that something disturbed him: he could see land that was not his garden, which could not compare with the wondrous beauty he had created in his own. The man thought to himself "I am a man of wealth and taste. I know another who will understand this problem and help to solve it." So the next day, he spoke to an architect. "I love my garden," he said. "I love to consider its beauty. But I wish to shut out that which is not my garden for it is not beautiful. Can you help me?"

The architect had eyes to see and agreed that the garden was indeed very beautiful. He was wise and understood what had to be done. He agreed to the task and went away for some days. When he returned, he had a drawing of the man's garden. The man was not pleased. “I already know what my garden looks like!” he said. The architect was patient and instructed the man to look again. The man looked and he saw that it was only his garden and done so cleverly that instead of a wall, he saw the completion of his garden. The man saw the architect's wisdom and took pride in hiring him. "Let it be so," he told the architect.

The architect was troubled for he knew that no one had ever done anything like the wall he had drawn. He was downcast at the thought that it could not be done so he sought the counsel of others, never disclosing his doubts to the man of wealth. His wise friends solved told of a fabulous bricklayer, the finest they had ever seen. He could make this wall happen. If he is so wonderful, wondered the architect, why isn't he a mason? That is not for us to say, his friends said. See him. He can help you. So the architect went to see the bricklayer.

The bricklayer was a man in love with beauty. He did not want to build just any walls. He built what he must to keep his family fed, but his heart was not in love with walls, but with great walls, challenging walls. His family did not suffer, but he would not become a mason. When the architect arrived and showed him the beautiful drawing of the beautiful garden, the bricklayer knew at once that this would be the greatest thing he had ever done and that it could not be done the way this man had drawn it. But he held his tongue, so great was his desire to build this wall. He loved the idea of this wall, so the bricklayer kept quiet. He had not worked in some time and he wanted this wall from this strange man. So he agreed that he would build the perfect wall for the man of wealth and taste's exquisite garden.

Work began, much to the delight of the man of wealth. He stared at the picture the architect had drawn him and considered the work in his garden. Things were going well, even the bricklayer agreed. He could see the problems that would soon come, that the stone and the brick would not look or be as the architect had drawn them. But work was going well, so he kept quiet. Eventually, it was too much, the work had gone too far and the bricklayer could not keep silent any longer. He chose his words carefully. "This part of the wall cannot be like this," he said to the architect. "Why not?" asked the architect. The bricklayer could talk of stone and how it wanted to be and strength and how to make the wall great, but he could not find the words for the architect. He remained silent. "Think about it." said the architect.

The bricklayer did not like it. He did not sleep. He thought about it. The next day, he said. "It cannot be done." "But--" "--something very much like it can be done." And he spoke in the architect's language, haltingly and not as well, for he could not draw in words or on paper as the architect had done. But even the architect could see what the bricklayer meant. "Agreed," he said "Let it be so." And the worked continued this way for some time. Problems arose and the bricklayer and the architect would cajole and argue and wheedle and plead and dance and work would continue.

But the bricklayer was troubled for he had never said what he wanted to say, never spoke of the entrance to the wall, the arch of the wall, for this part truly was impossible. The bricklayer thought if he could consider it for as long as possible, he could make it work. He thought “Perhaps if I do my best and it fails, they will see that it cannot be done. We understand each other now.” For the bricklayer had spent a great deal of time with the man of wealth and they seemed like friends. The man had even sent gifts to his family.

So the time came to complete the wall and the beautiful arch that would make it whole and it went exactly as the bricklayer had expected. They built it as best they could, but it would not hold. The architect and the man of wealth were furious. "I thought you were the best!" said the architect. "It cannot be done," replied the bricklayer. "I thought you loved beauty!" raged the architect. “It cannot be done," said the bricklayer in shame and agony. He was unhappy to find that the architect and the man of wealth were not hist friends and they would not listen as he hoped they would. "It will be done." they insisted. "It cannot be done." "You cannot do it," they said. "If you wish to hire someone else to finish this, you can. It cannot be done," said the bricklayer. "If I hire someone else, then I will take your pay and give it all to whoever finishes my wall," said the man of wealth. There was silence. The bricklayer said "I will see it done." He trudged home.

The bricklayer knew that his plan had failed. What they asked was impossible and that he could no longer ask their permission to change it or make it seem like it was their idea. He stayed up late into the night and finally came upon a solution, a devious solution. It could be done and it would look like they wanted it to, but it would be unlike anything he had ever built. He forbad them the use of the garden during his time so that he could finish it. And when it was done and everything held up and it was beautiful, the friendly looks returned. The man of wealth handed the bricklayer his payment and it was more than the bricklayer had ever known. It would feed his family, it would raise his children. It was his proudest moment. And then the man of wealth paid the architect ten times what he had paid the bricklayer. The bricklayer swallowed his tongue. And then the man of wealth heaped praise and honor on the man who had done the impossible: the architect. Then they left the bricklayer with his pay and joined a party the man of wealth called in the architect's honor.

The bricklayer went home and considered the meaning of these events, of what he had done and what had been done to him, since he had done the impossible thing. What the architect done? He had put pen to paper! I laid the bricks, I made it happen, thought the bricklayer. His eyes were darkened and his days were bleak and bitter, though his family did not suffer, indeed his family was happy. He returned to his old walls because he was a practical man and a man of habit. But these walls filled him with revulsion. He had known beauty and he had known greatness and these walls could never make him happy. He knew that he would not be happy again. The bricklayer spent his days avoiding the thought of the architect and the beautiful garden. On the most painful days, when he could not forget, he dreamed of what foul imprecations he would hurl on the man who had stolen his shining moment, who had received all of the honor and glory for the greatest work any bricklayer had ever done. He wondered why he should not be an architect. But in his heart, the bricklayer knew this was folly and he would return to laying his brick.

And one day, the architect returned. "Great news!" He said, "This will be the greatest wall you've ever built." The bricklayer was silent. "What's wrong?" asked the architect "This is an even greater wall than your last. Look at this beautiful drawing!" And the bricklayer did. And he was silent. "Tell me, will you do it?" cried the architect. "You are the only one who can build this wall. Will you do it?" The bricklayer thought about all that he wanted to say, all the terrible, impossible things he wanted to scream at the architect thief. He was shaking with the rage he felt at this man and his pen and paper. And when he opened his mouth to speak, the bricklayer, said only "Yes."

Making a Sensible Bourbon Purchase

Trying to make a sensible purchase of bourbon, I did what I always do: I checked out the brands on Wikipedia. It should not shock anyone that most of the bourbon brands are owned by large companies. What did I end up buying? Well, you'll have to be patient. Here's a breakdown of all those big companies:

Diageo (rev. approx $20.12 billion) - You know this company, even if you don't recognize the name. They own Guinness, Bushmills, and Johnnie Walker (and many many others). Bourbon brands: Bulleit

Beam, Inc (rev unknown) - This company is the result of a reorganization by parent company Fortune Brands that finally separated all of the spirits from brands like Moen, Fypon, and Masterlock, which, uh, aren't spirits. The reorganization happened in October, which is why the revenue numbers aren't there. The combined group reported revenue of $6.7 billion in 2010, to give you a sense of the scale. Bourbon brands: Booker's, Baker's, Basil Hayden's, Knob Creek, Maker's Mark (purchased from a now defunct Anglo-French conglomerate called Allied-Domecq), Old Crow, Old Grand-Dad, and, wait for it, Jim Beam

Brown-Forman (rev $3.23 billion) - This a pretty big company, but it's also local, so that makes up for it a bit. The company and the families are also huge supporters of the arts and many other causes in Louisville and farther afield, so they have that going for them as well. Bourbon brands: Jack Daniel's, Woodford Reserve, Early Times, Old Forester

Heaven Hill (private): A private company means it doesn't have to report much to anyone other than its owners, but it is but it is the 7th largest alcohol supplier in the country and the 2nd largest bourbon supplier, so it's save to say, it's not small. Bourbon brands: Evan Williams, Elijah Craig, Heaven Hill, Old Fitzgerald

Kentucky Bourbon Distiller's (private): These guys are also private and they don't exactly distill their own stuff, despite the name (they are refurbing a distillery though, so they will soon. Bourbon brands: Rowan's Creek, Willet, Johnny Drum, Noah's Mill, Pure Kentucky XO, Kentucky Vintage.

I ended up with Rowan's Creek, for a couple of reasons. I was looking for something that was truly small batch (Maker's can call themselves small batch, but when every liquor store has a wall of Maker's, it's hard to take that seriously) and relatively obscure. I have high hopes for this bourbon, but the more I think about it, the more likely I am to buy Brown-Forman in the future.






Now, you may be wondering, why the hell would anyone spend this much time investigating something like bourbon?! I'll tell you, I am fascinated by global capitalism. I'm a huge fan of globalisation and what it has allowed us to achieve as consumers, including the ability to not choose something from a major global conglomerate. But I think people are also frequently ignorant of just how pervasive such sprawling global powerhouses are and the pivotal role they play in making trips to the grocery store more interesting and a lot easier on the wallet. You can rail against the 1% or just plain feel queasy about what your money does when it leaves the aforementioned wallet, but the most important duty of consumers is to make informed purchasing decisions, especially if you have a political point of view. There is no more powerful act as a political animal than where you decide to put your money, every day. You can hate Food, Inc all you want, but if you don't understand how Food, Inc works (including some of the ways they are using organic to capitalize on the fact that you hate them), you will never effectively fight what you hate. For me, that means really understanding where my bourbon comes from, along with a lot of other things, of course. But it's a habit that's got to start somewhere.

What the Totalitarianism are you Talking about?

“[A] tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

C.S. Lewis

With all due respect to Mr. Lewis, I believe that he is quite wrong about this since the Communist regimes of the late 20^th century demonstrated that they could provide all the power of these omnipotent moral busybodies without any of their sincerity. I would argue that all totalitarian regimes exercise power in ways that are extremely similar to his hypothetical omnipotent moral busybodies and they only approval they seek is the continued exercise of power. Still, if we look at the strategies these oppressive rulers engage in to subjugate their citizens, I think Lewis has made an intriguing point There is no more effective totalitarian state than the one where the dictates of the security apparatus has been internalized by its citizens. In short, all totalitarian regimes find a way to turn the consciences of their citizens against themselves, while studiously avoiding having a conscience of their own.

You might be wondering, why the hell is Erin thinking about totalitarian regimes and how they oppress their people? I blame it on this little shelf above me. A guy can only spend so much time surfing the Internet. There on the shelf was Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, one of those books that you are supposed to read (can we call it one those Books? Or at least, one of those Novels?) and truthfully, one that I had been meaning to read for a long time. And when I finished it, I saw that Lewis quote and it produced an internal dialogue that was long and complicated enough to warrant the time and effort needed to turn it into a blog post (and a good long one at that).

Since Kundera's novel was the proximate cause for this line of thought, let's start with the Communist police state (for the record, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Kundera, Vaclav Havel, and Tom Stoppard have all written eloquently on this subject and I'm drawing from all of them). The Communist police state in action strongly resembles the more busybodies that Lewis talked about. The primary tactic applied to the population as whole is to create a culture of the surveilled, which is to say that the security apparatus is dedicated to creating institutions that give the average person the impression that they are constantly being watched. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault discusses how Jeremy Bentham's concept of the Panopticon works in society. In the Panopticon (first envisioned as an ideal form of prison design by Bentham), the prisoners can all be seen by a security area at the center, but the center is opaque, so they never know when they are being observed. Since most people act in their own best interest, simple game theory calculations show that the most reasonable choice is to act as though they were always being watched (a perversion of Pascal's wager perhaps). Foucault feared the way that Western society had manifested this idea, but the Communist states took this idea and made it quite literal in applying it to their societies as a whole.

In the smaller states, like East Germany and Czechoslovakia every high profile dissident and everyone suspected of possibly being a dissident was convinced that they were being bugged and surveilled and informed on (history has shown that they were mostly right). Just in case anyone thought they could escape from the surveillance net, the regimes made examples of certain people, often they weren't particularly vocal or particularly dissident, in order to silence everyone else. This obviously has an (intentional) effect on the “normal” citizen as well (two birds, one large expensive stone). Kundera's Tereza talks about this feeling in very personal terms, comparing her experiences in Prague to her girlhood under the baleful eye of a once beautiful mother who survived the loss of her beauty by becoming old and grotesque openly and without shame and by stripping her daughter of her own right to feel shame. Tereza internalized this as an intense need for privacy and was thus constantly terrorized living in the post Prague Spring era. Kundera says that, for Tereza at least, a concentration camp is the total absence of privacy, in which case the ultimate goal of the security apparatus is to turn all of society into a concentration camp.

The overall effect of the Communist methods of subjugation (perfected over time beginning as early as 1917 under Lenin as Solzhenitsyn points out, lest anyone be tempted to blame this solely on Stalin's influence) is the same as that of a state of moral busybodies. We will get to the Nazis in a moment, but a key distinction between the Communists and the Nazis is only how they turned their citizen's consciences against themselves; both regimes made it a point of policy to do so. The Nazis had a generally a stable sense of what it was correct to believe, while Communists (both good and bad) never had any idea of what it was acceptable to believe. Maybe the Nazis would have gone this way as well, but Communism was riven from its very beginnings by disagreements and factions and a steady series of purges. Being a good Communist in 1933 was not the same as being a good Communist in 1938. This may confuse those who believe that Communists were acting rationally as a result of their ideology. Marx certainly didn't write anything new between 1933 and 1938. But Solzhenitsyn points out that these great waves of purges had a particularly chilling effect on society because the terror of the police state is most effective when no one has any idea why they were arrested. Solzhenitsyn points out that the KGB was adept at simply inventing reasons for you to be arrested and then convincing you during the interrogation that you are in fact guilty, turning their own consciences against them, usually by assuring them that if they go along with what the authorities want, they or their families will be spared. The key to understanding the success of all totalitarian regimes is understanding the extent to which the state makes a bargain with their citizens to trade their silence for their safety. The Communist regime was brutally effective at creating an atmosphere of fear and stifling a sense of community because they had no compunction about lying to, arresting, and generally bullying everyone, from the lowest citizen to the highest officials. The offered trade for safety was always false, but most people are helplessly innocent in the face of state power and they just refuse to believe that a government official would lie to them so blatantly. Note that the Communist regime is not acting in accordance with any particular ideology when it acts this way. Communism has its own set of rhetoric and rhetorical strategies and so a Communist regime will resort to Communist discourse to justify its actions, but underneath the rhetoric, we find an iron fist and an iron will to power. Words did not mean anything and they could be played with at will in the pursuit of silencing dissent, destroying a citizenry's sense of privacy (and therefore community), and generally creating an atmosphere of fear that made it possible to rule effectively.

As I mentioned earlier, the Nazis chose a slightly different tack. Instead of creating a blanket of fear through uncertainty, they enabled their regime and its goals by highlighting certainty in the calculations of personal safety. Much has been made of the silence of ordinary citizens concerning the Holocaust in Germany, both by Germans themselves in their intense introspective debates about the meaning of the Holocaust (or Shoah or Auschwitz or whatever you want to call it) and by outside observers (hence, Hitler's Willing Executioners). “But I didn't know!” is the classic cry of those who seek to justify themselves and this cry has been completely worked over in the course of the intense and long lasting debate about German history, showing how little power that phrase had in clearing anyone of guilt. It also doesn't give the Nazis enough credit for their adept manipulation of the conscience's of the average person. The Nazis co-opted their citizenry from the outset by offering a clear cut boundary. Pastor Niemoeller's classic quote lays it out: “First they came for the Jews, but I did not speak up, because I was not a Jew . . .” This was the bargain between the Nazis and the majority of its citizens: if you were not a Jew, then you have nothing to fear from us. If you don't help Jews or have anything to do with them, we will leave you alone and for this you will be grateful. You didn't have to agree with the Nazis beating Jews up, and you didn't have to do it yourself. All you had to do was not to look at it. From that point on, the Nazis own you, even if you don't take part in the beatings or the killings or the expropriation of property (though they did take your children and tried to make sure they took part – that's a much more effective compromise of someone's conscience after all). The Nazis have you on their side because the act of turning your back was immoral and people knew it. After all, no government that goes around beating people for one reason has any compunction about changing that reason to include you. But if the price for not getting beaten at the moment was not condemning the beating of this other guy, that is a price that most people will pay. But it creates a complicated calculus of guilt, which is undoubtedly intentional. If you didn't beat a Jew, and you didn't kill one, and you never saw the smoke from a crematorium, what reason did you have to be considered guilty was the public cry of many, but deep down, they knew that reason and the regime knew it too. The regime had purchased what it wanted from them, had used your own conscience against them by preying on this natural insecurity. Niemoeller finishes the thought of course (then they came for me and there was no one left to say anything). In other words, the Nazis also created an atmosphere of fear, removed any sense of privacy and community, and used the conscience of their citizens against themselves.

The Nazis co-opted their citizens by guaranteeing their safety and so silencing their consciences. The Communists arrested random samples of people periodically so that everyone assumed they were being spied on and could be arrested for doing something that was counterrevolutionary and since no one knew exactly what that meant, everyone's conscience became a weapon in the hands of state security. Both methods of totalitarian rule divided the people, kept them apart from themselves and never gave them the safety. You could argue that the difference in methodologies was a result in the difference in their ideologies and the end goals of the regimes, but that ignores a great big variable, which is that Communist countries perfected their tactics over the course of seventy years and the Nazi regime only lasted twelve, which is to say, the Nazis might have ended up in the same place, given enough time in power. My point is that despite these slight differences, the same effects were aimed for and achieved. Obviously the surface rhetorical and discursive strategies diverged, but in the end both regimes, and I think all totalitarian regimes, do the same things to their citizens and for the same reason, regardless of the surface rhetoric and ideological appearances. The purpose of a totalitarian regime is to exercise power in a particular way and it is always necessary to oppress their citizens to do so. Their justifications for this oppression differ (within limits) but all act to instill fear in their citizens, remove a sense of privacy at a societal level, and offer a fake bargain between safety and acquiescence which compromises the conscience of their citizens. In other words, Lewis was wrong to think that a completely oppressive society required moral busybodies who were convinced they were acting for their citizen's own good. He was right however, in sensing that a state that used the people's own good as it's justification could reach the highest heights of oppressive tyranny. There were good Communists who were true believers, and they had their uses, but true believers lack the flexibility of those who wish to remain in power, which is why the Communists had to purge them on regular basis, silencing those who would remind them of Marx's purpose, as if that were the point! Communist China is doing a wonderful job of living out this contradiction: Communism is as much a method of maintaining power as it is an ideology. Since the 1980s China has not let Marx or Mao get in the way of accruing economic strength.

C.S. Lewis is hardly alone in making the mistake of believing in the sincerity of the rhetoric of oppressive regimes rather than recognizing them as a means to an end, but nevertheless, I think it is a mistake. All totalitarian regimes fundamentally act to the same ends: terrorizing and silencing their populace by finding a way to use the conscience of the populace against itself. While true believers exist and though they help to provide the ideological and rhetorical cloak that enables totalitarian regimes, totalitarianism is fundamentally devoid of ideology. The surface rhetoric changes from regime to regime because the realities of power differ from place to place, but you will always find with such regimes that ideology is a cloak applied to the iron fist of power. Some (clueless) leaders may even believe some of the stuff they are spouting, though I have my doubts about that. Is Qaddafi really so insane that he sincerely believes the claptrap he spouts? I don't think so. Whatever the cloak, the underlying imperative of a totalitarian regime is to get and retain a certain type of power. Ideology provides a discursive reservoir for the rhetoric intended for public consumption. It's also a handy weapon against any of their citizens who make the mistake of actually believing any of it.

What are they thinking?!

The New York Times reports that Wisconsin Republicans have found a way to get their way even without a quorum. I have no doubt this will continue to be controversial.

Even if I agreed with the Wisconsin Republicans (which I don't) this seems counterproductive. You vacate any moral high ground in an argument about who better represents the will of the people by acting as if those Senators (and the people they represent) weren't there. Not a smart move.

Nate Silver (the excellent election forecaster and ) has pointed out that this move will probably not help Republicans in a state he calls a swing state in more than one way. Did anyone attempt to use this as leverage? Does anyone think strategically out there?

Political Philosophy in a Paragraph or Less.

Once again the Economist sums it all up for me fairly well. This post from their Free Exchange blogger is a great look at free trade and its costs and benefits. My favorite line: "Society doesn't owe anyone a factory job, and it doesn't owe factory workers a cheque if an improvement in trade rules leaves them jobless. It owes them precisely what it owes all of its members: a level of protection against the unpredictable sufficient to afford them the opportunity to get back on their feet."

I don't think I can put it any better than that. If I could, I would run to the nearest political campaign and get a real job.

Politics Found Me

It all started with a blog post from the Economist. I try to avoid long political debates on Facebook. It's not why I use the site since the 'Book is so diligent about telling everyone I know exactly what I'm doing. Eventually, the constant posts on politics will drown out the rest of the personal stuff that people come for. I don't want to do that to all the apolitical folk who friended me because we did Summer Theatre together.

I do love politics, though. This is a blog; it was inevitable that politics would find it's way here. Posting a news item about a topic like the Wisconsin union situation was bound to draw a response and draw one it did. An old friend took issue with it almost immediately. I'll just reproduce his post (adding some of his own edits) and my response here to save some time:

• Peter: What this article pretty much ignores is the fact that government jobs = fat pensions that you don't get in the private sector. That's one of the primary perks of getting a government job.
  
  The author dismisses said pensions by arguing that they'll be underfunded, but in doing so destroys the rest of his argument. Clearly then, the government is out of money and cuts have to come somewhere, but he provides no solutions.
  
• Erin: Hey, Peter! It's been quite a long time, hasn't it? Funny, I remember arguing quite a lot about politics as a rabblerouser in high school. It's almost like fifteen years hasn't gone by.
  
  Anyway, the author's argument here doesn't really deal with strategies for fixing the deficit (though the Economist in general is consistently on the side of pension reform, though not union busting). It's about the new idea that public sector workers are a lot better off than private sector workers. I would argue that even with the pension benefits, it's impossible to believe that public workers (meaning teachers, lawyers, administrators, accountants, firemen, policemen, etc) are paid wildly out of line with the work that they do. I also think he is right to point out that given the current economic climate, it is quite likely that even that one supposedly gold-plated benefit will vanish before most of the workers get their shot at it. Ultimately, I don't think there is any reason for the blogger to try to provide a particular solution to the deficit problem, since that isn't his purpose (though the Economist's editors consistently stand behind the need for meaningful deficit reduction through pension and health care reform, as well as other sensible tax reform to increase tax revenue and diversify the tax base away from an over-reliance on the income tax).
  
  The only point that I wish the author had made was that public sector benefits haven't fallen to the same levels as private sector benefits because governments are just plain slower at reacting to economic changes and because it responds to political as well as economic pressure (unlike, say GE or IBM). Even the Wisconsin union acknowledges the need for pension and health funding reform, though, a point that doesn't get enough emphasis, I think.
  
• Peter: It has been a while since we set up the ol' chess board and discussed life, politics and whatever else we deemed important. That said, I don't disagree with you, I guess I just don't get the point of the article. While it may be true that the pensions end up not fully-funded, isn't the fact that public employees have such fat pensions and sweet health-care plans that make it difficult to hire/retain/give raises to current employees? Moreover, though a direct comparison is difficult, I think that many public sector employees do make more than their private sector counterparts.
  
  At the end of the day, I'm all for paying a good wage to teachers, but I'd kill the unions too as they've long been against any kind of merit-based pay and make it darn near impossible to fire teachers.

I hope Peter has dropped by so that we can continue this discussion (sorry about the roundabout way to do that, Peter!), though I will gladly debate these points if anyone is interested.

I disagree that public sector pensions are outrageously high or that their health care plans are significantly better than many private plans (my parents will certainly debate that point and my father has worked for the federal government for his entire career). I would love to take issue with the comparison and there is a wealth of empirical data out there, but I'm just not going to out and find it (though if someone wants to hire me to spend the time to do that, they are welcome to send that interest along). It's just overall strange to me that in the past couple of years it has become an article of faith that the private sector workers are getting screwed and people look longingly at public sector compensation and benefits, something that would have been laughable even five years ago.

I definitely agree that teacher's unions have not been amenable to some obvious solutions to the clear problem of teacher quality (though it could be because of the confrontational way that these ideas have been presented by people who would happily do away with the union - not a recipe for dialogue).

As I said, I'm all about the discussion. Chime in if the spirit moves you!