House of Eratosthenes

I’ve been enjoying the opening & unloading of whoopass on that ignorant slut Elizabeth Warren, and I’m glad to see it’s not over yet. George F. Will weighs in:

Warren is a pyromaniac in a field of straw men: She refutes propositions no one asserts. Everyone knows that all striving occurs in a social context, so all attainments are conditioned by their context. This does not, however, entail a collectivist political agenda.

Such an agenda’s premise is that individualism is a chimera, that any individual’s achievements should be considered entirely derivative from society, so the achievements need not be treated as belonging to the individual. Society is entitled to socialize — i.e., conscript — whatever portion it considers its share. It may, as an optional act of political grace, allow the individual the remainder of what is misleadingly called the individual’s possession.

The collectivist agenda is antithetical to America’s premise, which is: Government — including such public goods as roads, schools and police — is instituted to facilitate individual striving, a.k.a. the pursuit of happiness. The fact that collective choices facilitate this striving does not compel the conclusion that the collectivity (Warren’s “the rest of us”) is entitled to take as much as it pleases of the results of the striving.
:
Warren’s emphatic assertion of the unremarkable — that the individual depends on cooperative behaviors by others — misses this point: It is conservatism, not liberalism, that takes society seriously. Liberalism preaches confident social engineering by the regulatory state. Conservatism urges government humility in the face of society’s creative complexity.

Greg Sargent insists that Will has missed the point here.

What Warren actually said celebrated individual achievement, property and autonomy, while making the completely uncontroversial argument that those things are made possible by a functioning society enabled by a healthy social contract. Those things aren’t mutually exclusive in any way. The argument Warren is making is over how much each of us should sacrifice in order to keep that functioning society healthy. We’re running a deficit; someone has to pay to close it. Warren is simply asking the wealthy to sacrifice a bit more in that direction, because if they don’t, a disporprotionately [sic] heavy burden for fixing it will fall on the rest of us. This is a fair request, Warren says, because the society they’d be helping to keep afloat partly enabled their wealth in the first place — and will enable others to follow in their footsteps. Warren is making thise [sic] case to individuals who will decide whether to elect her to the Senate to advance this view. No tyrannical “collectivity” here.

Will doesn’t even attempt to engage her real argument — he doesn’t tell us why the wealthy shouldn’t be called upon to do a bit more to help close a deficit that conservatives insist is a threat to civilization as we know it.

Okay fine, let’s grant him that. Warren’s main point is still flapping around in the breeze because Will didn’t address it, so I will. This has been bugging me for awhile anyway:

The Elizabeth Warren syllogism I’ve picked up from what she said (for the uninitiated, it is here) — is:

1. Your business concern has been running a profit and the state has been running a deficit;
2. The activities of the state, funded by the rest of us, have been & are critical prerequisites to your business and the profits realized by it;
3. Therefore, since the state’s deficit represents a vital ingredient to your business that has essentially been unfunded, you need to pay more.

Pause here to note that Elizabeth Warren is a walking caricature of the ivy-league loudmouth with too much book smarts & not enough common sense. Of all the scathing criticism that has come her way on this thing, much of it has come from people possessing much greater experience than she can offer in “hard” businesses — businesses that just dangle a product or service out there, something that builds something useful that didn’t exist before, that people can actually use and would be willing to pay money to get. Warren’s background in positions that meet this criteria seems to be limited to writing wills, and oh boy, does it ever show.

A business, in order to realize a profit, relies on all kinds of things — and they’re all vital to the bottom line, or else it wouldn’t be relying on them. All the employees on the payroll, just for starters. The supplies in the supply room. The vendors who put them there. The wireless router and the carrier who supplies an Internet connection to it. The electricity, the physical space, the telephones, the company vehicles, the fuel inside them, the copier machine, the toner inside it, the dude who comes by to fix it, the guy that fixes the company car, the guy that fixes the router and the computers…

I’m not even getting warmed up here. Trust me, I could go at this all day long. There is, of course, a great big bushel of things that are made into these necessities, by design, by the state whose contributions Warren holds aloft. Artificially, the auditor’s efforts are made non-disposable and vital to the business’ “success” by a bunch of pain-in-the-ass rules — which, by the way, a lot of the time are put on the books just to put the business in its “place,” to get the message across to the business that a lot of voters & politicians are pissed off at it. The research eggheads who figure out how much dye & sodium goes into each can of product so the number can be put on a food label, the guys on the payroll whose job it is to work with the auditors and make sure the audit gets done, the second hard drive put in the mainframe to keep this data physically separate from that data, the technician who installed it, the shipper who shipped it.

All of these represent entities that provide products & services to the business so the business can succeed. And they are businesses of their own; each of them has the potential to make money, apply that money to their own expenses — and fall short. Guess what? That’s their problem. Each business has a mission, a way to make money, a big ol’ list of expenses that have to be met in completion of the mission…and some structure of executive responsibility for making sure it runs right. That includes the government.

But in the Warren/Sargent view of things, there is something unique and special about the government — and that is the executive responsibility part of it. For their syllogism to work, they must not see it. And it is the nature of government, at all levels, to remain blind to this as well: It’s never at fault for ending a fiscal period in the red, never, never, not ever. It’s always the fault of the taxpayer for not paying enough. The other providers in that big list I put together, a list I could have made much, much longer…they do not have this luxury. Their executives have actual responsibilities. If they fall short, it’s on them.

You see, these other service- and product-providers are paid according to contract and salary negotiation, not in equity in the business. You take a corporate accounting class, which Warren apparently didn’t do, and they make this distinction crystal-clear: holders of debt, and holders of equity. (Actually I think they defined this in Bookkeeping 101.) The business is indebted to them both but in entirely different ways, and this difference is what makes capitalism actually work. These providers of service or product get their twenty thousand dollars, or their five hundred, or their seventy-five cents — and that’s it. Occasionally, a business that relies on another business, might realize the necessity of offering more money because there’s a symbiotic relationship that’s about to go askew if the provider of some vital service is about to go under. That does happen within capitalism, believe it or not. But that business that receives the service — so long as it has met its obligations in the business community, it retains control. It’s gotta be that way. That’s part of a whole other “social contract” of which Elizabeth Warren, and those of like mind with her, have somehow managed to remain blissfully unaware.

Let me state it much more concisely: You do not get to tell a business “hey, I used a hand truck to haul that copier paper to your office two weeks ago and I can’t pay my cable bill — you need to pay more.” If it worked that way, a) it wouldn’t be capitalism and b) it wouldn’t work for long. So there’s your other social contract, Greg and Elizabeth: Everyone needs to take responsibility in order to participate. Anyone who doesn’t, is part of the problem and not part of the solution.

I’m sure Sargent would have something to say in response to that. I hope so. I hope this discussion drags on and on and on. It is helpful and educational…which indicates, to me, that if the conversation does manage to make its way to some statists who are more sympathetic to Warren’s side of things, they’re going to start saying things to dismiss it, like “Oh that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” or maybe fling around a few accusations of racism perhaps. That’s always a good fallback.

I hope this discussion drags on and on and on. It is helpful and educational…which indicates, to me, that if the conversation does manage to make its way to some statists who are more sympathetic to Warren’s side of things, they’re going to start saying things to dismiss it, like “Oh that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” or maybe fling around a few accusations of racism perhaps. That’s always a good fallback.

Yes, and yes, and yes!!! More, please!! Faster!!!

The greatest thing, to me, about this controversy is that people finally get to hear what leftists really think. I know I go on about this too much, but I’m around academics a lot, and trust me: Elizabeth Warren is the voice of moderation in the ivory tower. Keep talkin,’ Bessie — the ed bubble will pop even sooner, and maybe kids can go back to actually learning something in college.

Typical of leftist “logic” is this bit of Sargent’s response: Warren is simply asking the wealthy to sacrifice a bit more in that direction, because if they don’t, a disporprotionately [sic] heavy burden for fixing it will fall on the rest of us.

Yeah, but dude: it was “the rest of us” who caused the problem in the first place! And by “the rest of us” I of course mean guys like Greg Sargent, who continually vote for more and bigger “social spending” on cowboy poetry slams, the NEA, and all that other stuff that now falls under “shovel ready.” Want to give a liberal an aneurysm? Ask them to name a government program, other than defense, that can be cut as wasteful, inefficient, or simply too damn inessential to continue in the midst of this horrible, horrible budget crunch that is in no way related to decades of their shitty, Marx-lite policies.

Thus I refute thee. Raising taxes on “the rich” is the entire point of the exercise… which anyone with an IQ higher than Forrest Gump’s could see the minute Prof. Warren opened her yap. It’s always the entire point of the exercise, because professors are moron leftists to a man, and these days leftism consists of little but “raise taxes on the rich” (which is never them, oh no, even though a tenured prof makes just shy of $100K on average).

This is who they really are. This is what they really think. And this is what they’re teaching your kids, day in and day out, for upwards of 20 years.
- Severian | 10/07/2011 @ 06:53
What Warren actually said celebrated individual achievement

Yeah, those are approximately some of the words that came out of her mouth right before she basically said but it’s not your achievement, Little Red Hen, so give us a big chunk (presumably more than 35%) of your bread.

Experience tells me that if they increased it to 50%, then 60% … 70, 80, 90% (yes, it HAS happened here!) that it still wouldn’t be enough.

There was a song I used to like in my younger, more liberal days … 10 Years After’s “I’d Love to Change the World” … I’m pretty sure I know what they meant, and if they did, I’m pretty sure they didn’t get the irony:

“Tax the rich
Feed the poor
’til there are no
rich no more”

In a class-warfare context (which I’m fairly sure was the original spirit of the song), this is clearly more about punishing the rich than feeding the poor. But in real-world terms, one should ask the question …. And then what?

On that 90% tax bracket thing… that was something introduced by FDR, I think, in the first Progressive Revolution. Modern day progs who call for its return will point out that it was “only” 90% after the first 200K … which equates to about $2M in today’s dollars. But in the end, it’s arbitrary. Someone can always change what “too much” means, which means it could easily be re-defined to whatever it is you’re making.
- philmon | 10/07/2011 @ 11:26

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Yet More Arguing About Elizabeth Warren, and I Say GoodFriday, October 7th, 2011

Yet More Arguing About Elizabeth Warren, and I Say Good
Friday, October 7th, 2011