meditationsfromthethirdrail

[meditationsfromthethirdrail]

Capitalism v Socialism

I woke up this morning feeling particularly discouraged and pessimistic, largely because I read some Facebook posts and comments just before I went to sleep last night which reminded me, as they usually do, of how incapable many people are of making rational judgments and/or holding and expressing values that I believe are critical to the survival of our society.  My last couple of posts have dealt primarily with the first cause of my distress - irrationality, as manifested by inattention to facts, sources of facts and the qualifications and biases of people who purport to present facts and rational conclusions.  I want to come back to that in a moment, specifically in the context of a discussion about competing economic theories, but first I want to briefly riff on the subject of values.

Some time has passed since my last post, in part because my last attempt to write a post on the subject of values was inadvertently deleted before I could post it.  That’s just as well because as I neared the end of my overly-long essay on values I realized I could boil it down to a few sentences.  The most critical values that I hold dear - those which bear heavily on my voting decisions - are empathy and pragmatism.  It should be apparent from my previous posts that those are my core values - they are deeply embedded in my reflections on every issue.  The primary reason why I sometimes feel so discouraged about American culture is that I observe large segments of our population that seemingly do not share those values and I have a difficult time accepting that.  Adding to my discouragement is an observation that many of the people who display lack of empathy and nonpragmatic approaches to solutions for social problems seem to be entirely convinced that they ARE empathetic and pragmatic.  And some people are just blatantly and unapologetically unempathetic and oblivious to the notion of pragmatism.

At the end of day, most of us are strongly influenced - in our voting decisions and most aspects of living - by others with whom we affiliate in groups, which are both formal and informal in nature.  Susceptibility to group influence varies considerably among individuals but it’s fundamental to human nature.  Consequently, if one consciously wants to influence someone else, it may be important to be perceived as being part of the other’s group.  Compromise, which is a form of pragmatism, hinges on the ability of persons with different perspectives to agree on a common group goal.  The point I want to make here is that perceptions, including unconscious ones, about group affiliation WILL have an effect on sociopolitical behavior of individuals, and that needs to be understood.  But if and when it is understood, then the ability to communicate successfully across our group boundaries will finally depend on whether persons striving to communicate can do it rationally and empathetically.

That was a long digression from my stated topic - Capitalism v Socialism, but I thought it was important to establish the foundation of my approach to discussing the topic (and most other topics I intend to cover in this blog).  If you cannot in fact empathize with others who are unlike yourself (e.g., different party affiliation, skin color, religion or what have you) and if you cannot in fact concede to fact-based pragmatic answers rather than ideological answers to difficult problems, then you and I hold such different values that there is little hope I can influence you or that you will do anything other than disappoint me with your opinions.  If you read the words “capitalism” and “socialism” and automatically think one is good and one is bad, and if you can’t see past your biases for and against one and the other, then my appeal to your reason and your emotions will fall short.

Okay, I’ll get directly into the topic now.  I spent most of my life in training for, and in practice of, capitalism.  My career as a CPA was directly in service to the capitalistic system that defines the American economic system in so many ways.  My primary role as an independent auditor was to provide some assurance to investors and financiers that the financial information provided to them by businesses seeking to obtain and maintain capital was sufficiently accurate to support decisions about whether to invest or provide other financing for those businesses.  Under a capitalistic system, trade and industry are controlled primarily by private owners, rather than by the state.  For capitalism to be effective (i.e., to create material wealth and well-being for owners and for the society as a whole), information bearing on our decisions about where to place capital needs to be reasonably reliable.  In America, information systems for operating our system of free enterprise have been fundamentally reliable most of the time, and that has enabled America to create a level of material wealth that is nearly unrivaled in global history.  If that sounds like an unqualified and glowing endorsement of capitalism, it is, but there are important qualifications and I’ll come back to those shortly.

Although my personal time and energies have been focused on support of our system of private ownership and free enterprise, the role of socialism in the global economy generally and in the American economy specifically has not been lost on me.  Let’s look at the positive side of socialism for a moment, in the same vein as we looked at the positive side of capitalism in the previous paragraph.  In contrast to capitalism, socialism advocates for an economy in which trade and industry are owned or heavily regulated by the state, rather than by private owners.  In America, and even more so in most other developed countries, there are many elements of our economy that are currently operated by the government (including state and local governments) - for example, the military, public education (almost 90% of PK-12 students are in public vs. private schools), social security and Medicare, and most of our transportation infrastructure.  In addition, the government regulates all businesses to some degree.  Although there are objectors to some of these government-run “businesses” and many of the regulations imposed on private businesses, there are good reasons why they exist.  The fundamental reason is that some economic functions and services are desirable, if not necessary, for the general welfare but do not create economic profits in a form that incentivizes private owners to allocate capital to them.  Private schools exist largely because some parents have sufficient wealth to send their children to such schools and their investment enables such schools to provide, at least in theory, “better” educations (a form of profit to the owners of the schools).  Most families cannot afford that level of investment and there is no direct financial profit for private sponsors; therefore if we value broad educational achievement as a precondition to the economic success of the country as a whole, a robust public school system is necessary.

Now let’s look at the negative side of both economic theories, starting with socialism.  Conservatives often have a field day when calling our attention the catastrophic failures of socialism in countries such as Venezuela, Cuba and the former Soviet Union, where private enterprise was all but entirely eliminated.  But most predominantly socialistic countries do not go to the same extremes in enforcing their economic ideologies.  Even in China, which is communistic (communism is an extreme form of socialism), capitalists have been given quite a lot of rein in recent decades, apparently because the state recognized the need for innovation and incentive to drive the economy forward, resulting in an exceptional long-term economic growth rate there, with plenty of room for more improvement.  China’s partial embrace of capitalism was a tacit admission that pure socialism does little to motivate individuals to work hard and especially to be creative because it takes away the rewards of doing so.  Ideological rewards - serving the community rather than one’s personal self-interest - are real, to an extent, and especially in a community-oriented culture such as China’s, but a state’s slipshod assignment of round pegs into square holes does not result in an efficient allocation of human capital, which is the foundation of socioeconomic capital.  Personal incentive is vital to allocating human capital to where it most naturally belongs and where it can be of greatest value to the society.  Achieving personal goals in addition to communal ones is also vital to individual happiness.

As I mentioned, conservatives, who are by-and-large strong backers of capitalism, like to point to examples of extreme socialism as a basis for condemnation of socialism in general.  Liberals are more eager to embrace elements of socialism, and they can point to examples of capitalism run amok.  It might come as a surprise to conservatives that capitalism has ever “run amok,” but one needs to look no further than America for an example (although there are countless other examples because historically, capitalism has prevailed over socialism in practice all over the world - socialism takes a lot more organization to pull off).  It is almost impossible to summarize American history on this subject within the confines of a single blog post.  The evolution of capitalism in America is an exceedingly complex and multi-faceted subject covered by countless texts from historians, economists and others.  I’m going to give you an orbital flyby, but one source I can suggest for a somewhat condensed and readily available treatment is on a website named “newhistory.org” - it’s called “A Short History of American Capitalism.”

To make a very long story very short, America’s founding fathers were fundamentally capitalists who successfully rebelled against the interference of the British crown in their business interests.  The original Constitution and Bill of Rights, and the government institutions that emerged from those documents, were designed primarily to advance the interests of the founding capitalists, and to a lesser degree, to enable other white males to pursue their own interests without the same level of reference to noble heritage as had been the case in the old world.  They and their successors were the beneficiaries of an incredible and seemingly boundless array of resources in the new land.  They simply had to hobble or remove the native American inhabitants and beat back the vestiges of old world interests in order to exploit those resources, which they did.  Capitalism created the government and the government’s principal role was to support capitalists.

So you might legitimately ask, what’s the problem here?  American emerged as the all-time greatest economic powerhouse, so what’s the problem?  Yes America did succeed, and if one assumes that accumulation of a massive amount of national material wealth (without regard to how that wealth was distributed among the entire population and to the exploitation of millions of predominantly non-white humans), it’s a gigantic success story.  But it was a messy and uneven story.  Suffice it to say that the enormous natural wealth that was available for exploitation made success possible, but capitalism itself often sputtered.  The first problem was that there was, paradoxically, too much competition - markets were TOO free.  Remember, transportation of goods was slow and unwieldy in early America; therefore economies tended to be largely localized, and industrialization was just beginning.  Anyone with access to local resources could compete, but all that competition made it difficult for most capitalists to make a profit by cooperating to limit production and keep prices up.  Economic contractions were frequent and deep.

The earliest super-capitalists were folks like J.P. Morgan, whose control of the railroads enabled the extraction and manufacturing industries to become regional and eventually national in scale.  He and others who were able to develop and utilize emerging technologies were extremely successful, exerted enormous control over the government by buying influence, and started the trend toward monopolization, wherein a relative handful of extremely wealthy entrepreneurs claimed a gigantic share of the economic rewards.  The problem was that the millions of laborers necessary to operate those businesses had little to no power to claim any more share of the rewards than what the capitalists deigned to give them, which usually wasn’t much.  In addition, whereas too much competition (ostensibly the foundation of a free market system) was once the bane of capitalists (and continued to be the bane of farmers), now the collapse of competition due to monopoly power led to a winner-takes-all outcome in many industries and suppressed the aspirations of newly-minted capitalists.  At the same time, the established winners used their government influence to prevent the working class, on whose backs the capitalists’ fortunes were built, from collectively organizing for better working conditions and higher wages.  The long-running suppression of the working class was very violent - literally a war, with numerous deadly battles.  The vast majority of Americans had a low standard of living and little or no income security.  A small number of Americans lived like bandit kings (little wonder they were called “robber barons”) and the middle class was small.  If you believe that capitalism wasn’t running amok at that time, then I suggest you do not value empathy, because very little empathy was being shown to the veritable serfs who actually constructed and operated the vast machinery of the American economy.  It was hard to distinguish from feudalism.

These days there are millions of red hats emblazoned with the slogan “Make American Great Again.”  When was America “great” exactly?  If you read between the lines of the ultra-conservative narrative underlying the slogan, you’d probably be right to infer that America was “great” in the period from WWII to sometime in the 1960′s (unless you were brown-skinned or not heterosexual).  In that period America enjoyed a staggering share of global manufacturing output, technological innovation and military might, among other achievements, along with a relatively uniform and stable culture.  But more important to America’s standing as a beacon to the world than even its international dominance was that the American middle class was at its all-time height.  It’s a quaint thought that free markets can regulate themselves and provide the best overall outcome, but in reality it was the rise of socialism - first in the form of labor unions and a gradual, broader recognition that democratic privileges should be shared with ALL citizens, then through New Deal programs such as social security and extensive regulation of banks and financial markets, including anti-trust laws that broke up many monopolies - that actually enhanced the performance of capitalism by corralling its excesses and providing a much broader sharing of the rewards.  The rise of the middle class fueled the consumer economy that we still enjoy today, albeit with serious environmental side effects and diminishing economic benefits to the shrinking middle class and growing lower class.

In my career I worked very long hours, made many personal sacrifices and took on a lot of responsibility to advance capitalism, and for that I was quite well-rewarded, which is how the game is supposed to be played, or so I was always taught.  I would be entirely hypocritical to denounce capitalism.  However, I realize two important things that many capitalists, and the portion of the working class that buys into their rhetoric, don’t seem to fully grasp.  First, winners need to share.  Who likes to hear a talented pro athlete on a winning team claim the victory entirely as his own and horde all the spoils for himself?  An empathetic person doesn’t want to hear that, because an empathetic person wants the supporting cast to share the glory and to be on solid economic footing.  There are people working as many hours as I did and under conditions that are just as stressful, if not more so, who remain in or near poverty, even though they are often providing services we now recognize as “essential.”  The fact that those people aren’t earning a livable minimum wage while the share of wealth given to the top tier of earners is drifting back towards 19th century levels is a reason why America doesn’t feel as “great” as it once was to many people.  Second, as a pragmatic matter, when enough sharing doesn’t happen, the capitalist system doesn’t operate as effectively as it can and should.  An engine needs all of its parts to operate efficiently.  The 19th century economy sputtered much more frequently and severely than the economy has in my lifetime, but the Great Recession and the Covid Recession suggest that economic upheaval is again becoming a greater threat.  As I write this, the stock market is booming (which is great for the socioeconomic upper tier, including me), but a higher percentage of people are unemployed and economically stressed than at any time since I was born.  The profound discrepancy between what’s happening at the top and the bottom of the food chain is a giant red flag.

In future posts I hope to revisit in greater detail some of the specific ways in which capitalism and socialism are present in government policy - their merits and demerits.  For now I want to wrap up by noting that there is a widely accepted myth that America leads the world in terms of opportunity for upper mobility - that is, the likelihood that a person born to parents in a lower socioeconomic stratum will rise to a higher socioeconomic stratum as an adult.  I say “myth” because in fact America ranks somewhere around 25th compared to all countries regarding upper mobility.  The number one predictor of one’s ultimate socioeconomic position in America is the position of one’s parents.  That is not a healthy sign and it calls into question how effectively our economic system, including both the public and private elements of our system, are working.  Bear in mind that America is less socialistic than most, if not all, the other countries where opportunity for upward mobility is greater.  The bottom line (as we accountants often like to say) is that a good marriage of capitalism and socialism is a key to success.  Every developed country follows that pattern.  Americans will be foolish to let their pride in their heritage blind them to understanding how other countries have achieved greater success in some areas, sometimes due to socialistic policy, and to emulate the success stories without regard to ideological labels.

[meditationsfromthethirdrail]

The Source

I’d like to quickly recap what I’ve written so far in this blog, because each piece is part of a whole, and a stone on the path to a particular destination:  I started by discussing the idea that we are in a sociopolitically polarized era, gave an example of an issue with a wide divide (trust in government) and a suggestion about how to approach that issue to seek common ground.  My second entry was an exposition on how Americans have an unusually strong focus on rights and individual liberties, the weight of which sometimes buries the values we hold for empathy and taking responsibility for one another.  Again I suggested there is common ground, or more precisely, an achievable balance between seemingly opposing values.

Then I took a little sidestep because I thought it was important for you to understand something about who I am and the nature of my education and life  experience and whether it qualifies me to speak on these matters - i.e., whether I have credibility.  I want to continue on that tangent in this post before moving back to the main thread in the next one.  This time I don’t plan to say a lot more about myself specifically, but I wish to address a topic that ties directly to the question of ANYONE’s credibility - that is, the allegiance that any communicator has to the values of 1) assessing truth based on facts, and 2) honesty and integrity.  No one has substantial credibility, in my mind, if he or she doesn’t demonstrate and practice those values.  Regardless of your IQ, educational level, and success in business or politics or anything else, if I ascertain that you are trying to explain something to me or convince me of something but you are dishonest about it, or that you have been negligent about gathering and sorting supporting facts for your positions, then I don’t assume I will get useful insight from you.  Do you not feel the same about me, or anyone else? 

You may not feel the same.  Psychologists know that some people have genetic tendencies for personality traits associated with low fealty to facts - especially facts don’t serve their self-interests.  Some people also acquire those traits based on their specific life experiences, including cultural experiences.  Similarly, some people are genetically and experientially predisposed to laziness or other traits that motivate them to take shortcuts for getting to the truth and forming opinions about it, and some are just gullible and too easily trusting.  There are a number of other personality traits that bear on an individual’s attention to facts and ability to weigh facts.

Having a particular set of personality traits does not automatically mean that such persons necessarily admire those traits in themselves.  Most people have elements of their personality that they don’t like, often because they learn that certain traits cause negative reactions in others or are otherwise self-destructive.  For example, I may have a tendency to be sparked by anger when I hear something said that I strongly disagree with.  Many people have that trait, and many people don’t like having it because they understand the potential negative consequences of their explosions on their relationships.  But with self-awareness comes the possibility of change.

Most personality traits which are firmly established in childhood and which persist well into adulthood are exceedingly hard to shake.  If I’ve always been an introvert, for example, it’s unlikely I’ll suddenly, if ever, become an extrovert.  But I do have the potential for substantial change in many behaviors stemming from that element of my personality.  I can push myself to go out into the world more, or I can allow myself to be pulled there by a friend, and in the process of having more frequent social interaction, especially positive ones, I may gradually become more comfortable in social settings and more extroverted.  Similarly, if I’m not inclined to value honesty or to base conclusions on a comprehensive set of facts, and if I realize that about myself, I can act to adopt those values.  Equally importantly, if I can’t easily discern the lack of these values in other people, and therefore I too easily accept them as credible when they are not, I can also act to change that - i.e., learn to identify the absence of those values.

So how might I become self-aware, and perhaps then want to change?  I’d like to pause for a second and ask you to apply a little common sense for a moment.  Common sense is an oft-abused term but we usually know what it looks like when we see it.  Don’t walk in the rain if you don’t want your clothes to get wet - common sense.  Common sense dictates, I’d like to contend, that you should strongly discount the admonitions of someone who is dishonest or doesn’t have adequate depth of knowledge and adherence to facts, because believing him or her is more likely to lead you to form an incorrect opinion or make a poor decision about how to act on the information.  Few of us want that.  What self-respecting citizen wants to be a dupe?  Common sense dictates, therefore, that we need to value the influencers - especially those who wield the power to implement their will - who are honest and respectful of facts, and we need to disregard those who don’t have those qualities.

If you yourself are the one who disrespects facts and/or honesty, you are less likely to become self-aware and change.  You may actually like the fact that some other people are dupes because you can take advantage of them.  You may believe that routine lying serves your self-interest and perhaps you’ve developed considerable skill at it.  There is probably nothing I will or can say that’s going to change you.  Despite the futility of the endeavor, I’m going to take a quick crack at it.  The only chance I have of convincing you to change is if you can answer “yes” to this question:  “Do I want other people to tell me the truth and present me with the facts, enough so that I will reciprocate in order to earn their trust?”  If you can answer “yes,” there is hope that you can be an effective part in our vast social machine.  If you cannot, then you are going to be a clog in the wheel - perhaps a big clog if you wield substantial power.  You may achieve much of what you personally desire.  History is replete with successful bamboozlers, but in the eyes of good people, you are destined to be a villain.  In which case there’s no point in you reading this.

Let’s assume that you are one of the people who is fundamentally honest and you think facts are important for making wise conclusions, and that you wish to be influenced by others who also have those characteristics, for reasons I previously mentioned, or just because you like to “do the right thing.”  If that’s who you are, then your challenge is to weed out influencers and influences that are polluting you with bad information.  How to you identify them?  If you are prone to gullibility, how to do you recognize when you are in danger of being fooled?

I believe the practical answer starts with you deciding how you’re going to collect information, and how you’re going to evaluate the veracity of the information you collect.  Partly that involves taking a skeptical view.  When I am given a piece of information, even by a highly-trusted friend, I have a tendency to question whether it’s accurate, unless it’s something that seems patently obvious or infused with a large measure of common sense or logic.  I’m naturally skeptical.  I’m often even skeptical of myself when I say things - I question whether my memory of relevant facts is accurate.  My close friends know that I am very quick to pull out my phone and Google information when there is the slightest hint of disagreement or confusion about any topic.  That may be perceived as rude by some, and perhaps it is, so I’m not advocating that you adopt this quirk of mine.  But I do advocate for devoting a little more time to questioning your sources in general.  When I fact-check myself, I do it publicly so that if I’m wrong, I can freely admit it and move on with the truth.

The “media,” which is a very broad group of organizations and individuals, may be more distrusted now than it has ever been.  Many studies suggest that it is, and for good reasons.  When I was young, by far the dominant sources of “hard news” were local newspapers and radio stations, and the three major TV networks.  You had to subscribe to certain magazines or read certain books to find radical or even unconventional views.  For the most part the newspapers and broadcasters operated with high journalistic standards and were relatively apolitical, compared to what many of them are now.  And they were widely trusted.  Newscasters such as Walter Cronkite and Tom Brokaw were generally thought to be telling us the truth, even if we didn’t necessarily like the truth.  Of course the reality was that the dominant truth presented was a product of the mainstream culture (white male-dominated), so it didn’t give a full picture of America and Americans.  But even folks in disadvantaged positions were more likely to dislike media because it obscured their specific values and experiences than because it was perceived as dishonest.

“Media” is so much more than that now - it goes without much explanation.  We are bombarded with information not just from the old-line sources but with an endless flood of digits streaming from our phones and tablets and computers and a cornucopia of apps, including all those collectively described as “social media.”  Most contemporary media don’t make the slightest pretense of objectivity. Even those that do are heavily infiltrated with influencers with an infinite number of agendas.   In many respects the “mainstream” media is much harder to identify now.  You can see the vestiges of it on, for example, the nightly news on ABC, NBC and CBS.  But as our culture has diversified and splintered, concurrently with the expanse of media technologies, even the large media organizations have devoted ever-increasing amounts of their content to commentary rather than to straight “news.”  “News” is:  this is what happened. “Commentary” is:  this is how to interpret what happened.  And “news” has always been, and still is, distorted by the process of selecting which facts to report.

On one hand it’s wonderful that we have so much media to select from.  So many more, disparate voices can be heard.  Information that would have been buried in the past is much more easily exposed when there are ever-multiplying outlets.  It’s much easier to find facts (which is why I use Google and other search mechanisms a lot) but in the course of looking for facts we have to wade through a lot of interpretation and opinion.  Facts and interpretation are easily melded and easily confused.  The old-line media with high journalistic standards tried to boil down the most relevant and honest information for us in the old days.  They failed in many respects but it was mostly an honest effort.  Now the burden is on each individual to sort through a mountain of information for what’s relevant and what’s true.  Very difficult!

Many people I know - most people with the exception of those who tend to ignore everything in media that’s not explicitly for entertainment - have gravitated toward sources of information that confirm what they want to believe.  This is the phenomenon of “confirmation bias.”  Conservatives tend to watch Fox.  Liberals are more likely to opt for CNN or MSNBC.  Watchers of these and biased media enjoy being soothed by commentators and news people with a biased selection of facts.  It’s natural to want affirmation of the views we already hold.  It is disconcerting, on the other hand, to be confronted with facts or opinions that call our views into question.

I submit to you that finding comfort in your news sources is the opposite of what you should be doing.  If you want the ability to form the best possible opinions, you must embrace objectivity and even opposition in order to get the full picture.  Recently I’ve seen political advertising in which videos have been presented entirely out of context and photos have been photoshopped to eliminate details that didn’t fit the narrative.  Those are dirty tricks, plain and simple.  But the same thing happens in seemingly legitimate presentations all the time.  In a typical news story about, say, a conflict between a policeman and a citizen, one outlet may highlight a video made by a bystander that shows the policeman fire on a citizen at point-blank, and make little comment about the policeman’s motivation.  Another outlet may focus on the policeman’s bodycam showing the citizen charging at him, and ignore the bystander’s video.  Both outlets may provide little or no information about the circumstances leading up to the conflict.  Which news report you see may strongly influence how you feel about the police or how you feel about citizens who have conflicts with police.  I’m not suggesting that all news sources will go to either extreme.  Indeed, my point is that if you want a complete and balanced view of the situation, you need to see a report from a source that has done as much as possible to present both sides of the conflict, and the context of the conflict, objectively and comprehensively.

Most of the news and much of the commentary I consume comes from media that has been identified as relatively unbiased and factual.  For example, I like ABC’s World News Tonight for quick flybys of the latest stories.  For a deeper dive into those stories and a wide variety of topics, I like NPR.  I am well aware that some of you are choking about right now, because you’ve previously concluded that outlets such as ABC and NPR are part of the liberal, leftist, “lamestream” media.  Well, you are mostly mistaken.  The facts are the facts and these outlets and some others hold themselves to high standards for truth.  Some facts can be interpreted as favorable to liberals, and if a mainstream outlet provides those facts, that does not automatically establish a liberal bias and definitely does not establish dishonesty.  It simply means they want you to know the facts.  

My other sources for news are internet news feeds from MSN, Apple, Yahoo and others.  These news feeds contain links to numerous media sources from the mainstream to the left and the right.  Recipients of these feeds usually have an opportunity to select both the topics and the specific sources included in their individual feeds.  So I could, for example, weed out the New York Times or the New York Post from my feeds.  If I want to get a left-leaning bias in my feed, for example, I can choose to eliminate content from the New York Post.  If I want to get a right-leaning bias, I can reject content from the Times.  But I do neither because I want to see a cross-section.  The result is that I often encounter content (from both sides) that instantly invites my ire because it conflicts with my preconceived notions.  By doing so, I am forced to confront perspectives and contrarian facts that may challenge my preconceived notions.  If I’m not willing to do that, however uncomfortable it may make me, then I cannot legitimately claim to be a truth-seeker.

I start every morning with a couple of cups of coffee, and while I’m drinking them, I usually peruse the news feeds on my mobile phone.  I estimate that, simply by reading the headlines for articles and videos about political and politicized topics, I can identify those emanating from certain sources (or a certain group of sources) most of the time.  Looking at today’s headlines, for example, I see this: “Robin Williams’ ‘rambling’ Joe Biden bit resurfaces 11 years later.”  The headline suggests that the accompanying article will put Joe Biden in a bad light based on commentary from an honored and admired person, and not surprisingly, it comes from the very conservative New York Post.  Here’s another:  “Oprah Winfrey Demands Justice for Breonna Taylor With 26 Kentucky Billboards.”  The headline implies that seeking justice for Breonna Taylor is strongly supported by an honored and admired person, and not surprisingly, it comes from the very liberal Huffington Post.  There is a definite pattern in the entire array of articles that make it fairly easy to distinguish Fox News content from MSNBC content, for example.  The pattern involves both the subjects that they choose to report on and the slant they give to stories reported on by both.  It’s much harder to identify a bias in headlines from sources such as ABC or Associated Press, for example.

The link at the end of this post will take you to a website that shows a chart which I find very useful for evaluating and filtering the biases and factual reliability of various media sources.  Like me, Adfontesmedia is committed to combatting political and cultural polarization in America.  I strongly encourage you to consider the objectivity and reliability of your sources for any information that bears on your political decisions.  If you read or hear something from a source that is not in the top middle section of the chart, you should consider either rejecting the information or counterbalancing it with other information about the same topics from a source on the opposing wing of the chart.  In addition, if you hear or read something that sounds too good to be true - i.e, it perfectly illustrates something you already believe - you should fact-check it on a site such as Snopes.com or Factcheck.org.

Remember those old movies like Wizard of Oz, Little Big Man or one of many about the frontier west or the Great Depression in which a guy who travels in a covered wagon attempts to sell magic potions to a bunch of open-mouthed townsfolk?  If you’ve watched one of those, haven’t you said to yourself, I would never be the one to buy the snake oil?  Well, I hope you aren’t, but the reality is that there are tens of millions of Americans who routinely buy the snake oil.  I beg you, don’t be one of them.

https://adfontesmedia.com

[meditationsfromthethirdrail]

Credentials and Credibility

I’ve written about polarization and about empathy, rights and responsibilities in the last couple of blog posts.  I have a long list of interrelated topics to cover before the November elections and I plan to keep plowing through them.  But I’m well aware that my voice is a candle in the wind, to borrow the phrase used by T.H. White in the title of his tale about King Arthur’s dream of a more egalitarian and peaceful society.  The number of readers of my blog thus far may barely run into double digits and that may never change.  We are all drowning in information (and misinformation) unless we are either so socioeconomically disadvantaged as to be denied access or are actively disengaged from media.  People in either category aren’t reading this.

With all the competition for the attention of readers and listeners, if someone wants to be heard above the din, he or she either has to have a forceful personality and a good platform, or actually have something important to say.  I may not have either of those.  Readers will judge for themselves.  But it occurred to me that I ought to at least provide a little background about myself, which may or may not compel you to hear me.  So here it is.

My story is not one of hard knocks and resentment - it’s a success story.  There are a lot of ways to define success but I feel like I’ve grabbed a nice assortment of brass rings during my almost-seven decades on the planet.  I’ve had a long and happy marriage to an incredible woman; I’ve traveled extensively (six continents and all fifty states) and lived for substantial periods in many states; I have three degrees from a major college; I attained a modestly high position in a large, global professional services firm and was financially well rewarded for my efforts; and I have many hobbies and interests that make it easy for me to stay fully occupied in retirement.  Most importantly, I’m happy and at peace with myself and others.  One could argue that these successes may have caused me to be out of touch with those who’ve enjoyed fewer of them, but I don’t think that’s entirely true, and I’ll try to suggest why.

My parents were the son and daughter of a sharecropper and a truck farmer/itinerant salesman, respectively, in rural Mississippi.  They grew up during the Great Depression. They were married and gave life to my older brother when they were still in their teens.  My dad dropped out of high school to sign up for the Army and served in the European theater in WWII.  After the war he got a G.E.D. and served as a tractor mechanic for a while.  Around the time I was born he was hired by a prominent agricultural implement manufacturing company, which led to him being transferred from Mississippi to Maryland to Ohio to Idaho to Oregon and to Iowa in order to earn promotions, and with family in tow.  Later he also transferred to Texas, Missouri and Georgia, after I was left behind to attend college in Iowa.  In those days it was possible to rise pretty high in the ranks of a business like my dad’s, without a glittery collegiate resume, if you worked hard and were willing to uproot yourself and your family whenever it was called for.  So my dad eventually did rise fairly high in the ranks, and in the meantime my mom scrambled her way to a B.A., then taught high school English for a short time.

All’s well that ends well, as Shakespeare once said.  My parents came a long way from the dusty fields where they picked cotton for 50 cents a day.  My own road to success was much easier than theirs.  During most of my childhood our family was financially situated about in the dead center of what was then considered middle class.  My parents were not rich, although they accumulated modest wealth later in life, and they were always frugal, so I grew up with very few toys and a mostly empty closet.  My parents were not the type to devote much time attending to my personal pursuits, other than to quietly demand that I get good grades in school.  So I wouldn’t say I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, but I understand that’s a relative thing.  I certainly wasn't lavished with material things as a child, but I never went hungry or worried about having a roof over my head.

Aside from a base level of financial and emotional support and protection, the best thing my parents gave me was a solid education in a robust public school system.  This was a pre Betty Devos era.  Fortunately I had just enough innate ambition (or willingness to succumb to my parents’ expectations) and intelligence to perform in the upper tier, academically.  I could have done better but I often didn’t “apply myself,” as they say.  In retrospect I realize I had ADHD but few people understood or cared about that back then.

My college record was spotty at first, but ultimately pretty good.  I had almost no grasp of what I wanted to do with my life.   As a result, I had an abnormally extended adolescence, to roughly age 27.  Maybe I was a trendsetter; I see a lot more of that happening with young people today.  In any case I considered, at various times and among other things, becoming a Baptist minister (I was licensed and briefly attended seminary), an English professor (I have an M.A. in English and instructed freshman writing courses for three years), a novelist and poet (insufficient talent and discipline derailed that plan), and a hotel manager (nah).   A happy accident of my wandering and indecision was that I acquired a lot of knowledge that later paid off in surprising ways I’ll come back to later.  I was financially very poor the entire time, which gave me considerable perspective on what it means to be concerned about affording basics such as food and transportation.

I vividly remember the catalysts for my decision to enter the social mainstream. One was the fallout from a poker game I got into with some friends.  One of my “friends” was a notoriously unethical character who, one late evening when I was especially unlucky and perhaps too full of beer, lured me into some bad bets that resulted in a $700 debt to him.  At that time, when I was working several crummy part-time jobs to afford food and my $50 share of the rent on a slum-quality house we shared with two other guys, $700 dollars seemed like a million dollars.  I didn't realize and no one told me that on the very next evening the same group of friends gathered for another poker game as I was licking my wounds and trying to form a plan.  I was not present to witness the scene in which the guy whom I was newly indebted to suffered an equally humiliating loss - a loss that was forgiven by the victor on the condition that the loser would also forgive my loss.  My friends assumed that Bart (not his real name, or is it?) would inform me that I was off the hook.  He did not.

For the first time in my life, I devised a budget in order to determine how I could repay Bart the debt that didn’t actually exist, because that’s the kind of guy I am.  I believed, and I still do, that a person is morally and ethically responsible for meeting whatever commitments he or she enters into.  So  I scrambled for more hours working as a church janitor, a tutor and a library assistant; I ate Kraft macaroni and cheese almost every day (30 cents a box, if I recall); I stayed in my room as if I had contracted the then-undreamt-of coronavirus; and I turned over every penny that didn’t go for rent and minimal food to Bart in three monthly installments until I was finally clear.  I was six feet tall but my weight fell to about 140 pounds.  On the day I forked over the last $200, Bart skipped town, just as the news finally arrived that I wasn’t supposed to have owed that debt.

That sordid chapter concluded with me taking a job, out of sheer desperation, in a factory where I was paid a below-minimum wage to operate a machine which applied mailing labels to printed advertisements.  It was mind-numbing.  There were perhaps another 100 workers in that factory doing the same thing I was doing.  The output of each worker was measured daily by the factory management.  By the end of the first week I was the most productive mailing label attacher in the factory.  To keep myself from going insane, I approached my task as if it were a game and challenged myself each shift to beat my previous day’s output, which I always did.  During my brief lunch breaks I used to surreptitiously glance around at the other workers and I understood exactly what Thoreau meant when he opined that the mass of men live lives of quiet desperation.  I don’t know if he was right about “the mass of men,” but he certainly could have been describing that crew at the factory.

In my second week at the factory I met another newly-hired college guy whose wife and he were trying to save enough money to move to Los Angeles so he could take a shot at professional acting - this was his second job.  Chatting with him during lunch breaks, i was inspired by his desire to fulfill a dream and the difficult steps he was taking to do it.  I listened to him, I looked around at the hollow-eyed, middle-aged folks who had worked for years operating labeling machines, and I squirmed as I considered what a sap I was for racking up a poker debt and falling victim to a con man.  i abruptly abandoned the factory but I felt so discombobulated that I enlisted my good buddy John to drive out to Idaho with me so I could visit my brother and try to get my shit together.  By the end of that brief sojourn out west, the best job offer I could manage was from Roto-Rooter . . . to work in the field, as it were.  Wake up call!

If you’ve read this far you must be wondering how any of this supports the notion that I’m qualified to write about sociopolitical matters.  It doesn’t, except to demonstrate that I have at least a small measure of “street cred.”  But the best is yet to come.  When I returned to Iowa I found a better job in a hotel.   Initially I was a night auditor, which is a position that involves being a desk clerk part of the time and an accountant the rest of the time.  Only a small step forward, financially, but it gave me a taste for something I had never previously thought about doing for even one minute.  Accounting, I quickly learned, was something I had a natural aptitude for, and in some quirky way I found it interesting.  Once again I viewed my duties as a sort of game, but this was a game that lit up my brain much more brightly than did operating a machine to perform an exceptionally repetitive task.  

My whole life is a series of lucky breaks at critical junctures.  In this instance the break was that I met a co-worker - a guy who shared the hotel night auditor position with me - who had previously worked for a large CPA firm.  He had taken the part-time hotel job because he was trying to become a full-time stock trader and that’s what he was doing during the day.  From him I learned what it is that CPAs in a big firm actually do.  Let me assure you I’m not going to get into that subject, in case you were already feeling the dread.  (Thank God for actuaries - the only people who make accountants seem slightly interesting.)  Suffice it to say that I figured out how I could minimize the additional schooling I would need to become qualified to be a CPA and I decided to take a stab at it.

I kept the hotel job but started carrying a heavy load of college classes - accounting, math, economics, law, etc.  It so happened that I met my future wife, who was just finishing her Interior Design degree at the same college, about the same time I took the first tentative steps down my new career path.  That was even more fortuitous - I give her lots of credit for helping me stay the course.  The two years in which I went to college in the day, worked at the hotel at night, and struggled to get our new romance off the ground, was “character-building,” to say the least.  I can barely remember anything about that period, it was such a blur.  To give you an idea of how much of a blur it was, the major highlight I remember was driving with my new spouse to Des Moines to dine at Spaghetti Works.  $5 for beer-and-cheese spaghetti, all-you-can-eat salad bar and a glass of swill.  Heaven!

When the two hellish years finally ended and I received my B.S. in Accounting, I had already lined up a job in Des Moines as an auditor with one of the Big 8 (at that time) accounting firms.  Not long afterward, I passed the CPA exam and my wife landed a spot with a local design firm, and we were on our way.

Ok, at last I’m where I possibly should have started. In the ensuring three decades I continued to work as a CPA, becoming a partner along the way (meaning that I became one of the owners), and developing a specialization working with clients in the financial services industry - investment management companies and banking and finance companies, primarily.  This is the good part, folks.  My career soon took me from Iowa to New York City, where my background in English earned me the privilege of being a key designer and the principal author of new practice guidance for our international firm, which was just merging with another large international firm.  That put me in the spotlight for a time and gave me a leg up for promotion.  After the merger we relocated to Los Angeles, where I worked with some of the most prominent investment management companies in the world, and numerous banks, mortgage banks and other financial institutions.  Finally we moved to southeast Pennsylvania and I split time engaged with clients there and in California, and with our national financial services practice in New York.

Late, late nights on Wall Street helping to prepare financial offerings with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line.  Late, late nights at client offices in L.A., San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, New York and Philadelphia, managing teams of young accountants to deal with complex accounting problems under tremendous pressure.  Board meetings, fee negotiations, staff meltdowns, discoveries of fraud and malfeasance, financial crises in which I was an inside observer.  A 60-hour work week felt almost like a vacation compared to many weeks with even longer hours.  It was enough to give me PTSD.  I don’t want to overstate it - it wasn’t like actual life or death combat PTSD - but I still have nightmares ten years and more after the fact.

That’s a very quick summary of the 30+ years in which I obtained hard-won knowledge about global finance and economics - a period in which I also had a lot of experiences with politics, charitable organizations and other components of society I didn’t have time to get into today.  I still spend a lot of time staying informed about subjects ranging from psychology and mythology to current events and hard science.  There’s a ton I still don’t know.  But as my all-time favorite singer Joni Mitchell famously said, I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now.

[meditationsfromthethirdrail]

Rights and Responsibilities

In my last post I tried to summarize the sociopolitical polarization of America and suggest a bridge.  As a primary example of a polarizing issue and how we might arrive at common ground about it, I focused on the size and breadth of government, took a brief look at it from both sides of the political divide, and suggested there are ways we can teach ourselves to communicate more effectively and start closing our divide.

Of course we all possess, somewhere deep in our hearts and minds if not also superficially, barriers to our abilities to understand the perspectives of those on “the other side” and find common ground.  Some people are genetically predisposed to have psychological traits centered on self-protection and self-interest.  Others have a genetic predisposition toward empathy and concern for others.  Our cultural and familial environments exert an even more powerful and pervasive force on the relative persistence of these traits in our society as a whole.  In order to climb the barriers caused by persistent focus on self-interest, there first must be self-awareness - i.e., a realization that a focus on self-interest and self-protection is a barrier to empathy.  And secondly, we must value empathy and have a genuine desire to see other perspectives.

Empathy is very much a value as well as a skill.  A person who possesses and practices empathy places great value on the well-being of others.  A person who doesn’t is less concerned about the well-being of others, unless it serves his or her own self-interest.  Personally, I try to find common ground on which to stand with those whom I don’t entirely agree because I believe other people have as much inherent worth as I do, and I want to find accord with them if it’s possible to achieve that.  Furthermore, I believe their well-being will usually add to, not subtract from, my own well-being.

I promote empathy as a base value in part because I believe it provides the social glue necessary for a nation to thrive.  America was founded primarily by men whose relative wealth and power were the result of the pursuit of self-interest, which in the mid-1770′s was being unduly stifled by the British.  in order to inspire enough of the masses to support their revolution, the founders developed libertarian philosophies and principles that we still honor today.  Indeed, many of those principles - inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, for example - have been extended far more broadly to contemporary Americans than they were to revolutionary era Americans.  Male landowners wielded substantially all voting and governmental authority during the first several decades after the creation of the United States, and only gradually did others obtain their shares in such authority. 

The general drift toward greater liberty for more citizens is a good thing overall, and the promise of freedom and opportunity that has lured so many immigrants to America is being fulfilled to a greater and greater degree (think of recent progress on LGBTQ rights, for example), with occasional setbacks, including some setbacks we are currently enduring.  However, our almost-universal allegiance to these principles has fostered a culture in which the embrace of self-interest has tightened at the expense of empathy and attention to social responsibility.  A reason that Chinese are more comfortable with communism, it seems to me, is that for millennium their culture has placed high value on social responsibility.  it’s embedded deep in their mythology.  In such a culture, especially one with an authoritarian government, the downside is that many personal freedoms are shackled.  

I contend that desires for personal liberty and for a cooperative society are not mutually exclusive.  Indeed, achieving a proper balance between rights and responsibilities is a cornerstone of the highest-achieving societies.  At an individual level, the relative degree to which we focus on our personal rights versus our responsibilities to others is a measure of our most fundamental values.  It feels to me that the U.S. is in a period in which our dominant values are married a little too closely to our desires for personal liberty and self-interest.  That’s not exclusive to conservatives nor liberals - both camps tend to prize personal liberties, although the specific liberties they prize often vary.  Because they vary, subcultures clash and their constituents  simmer in aggression toward one another.  Such aggression is boiling over more frequently in the cauldron of pandemic anxiety and racial discord.  If we recognize this as a problem, which most of us do, then we have to figure out how to move the balance back toward greater empathy and social responsibility.

Cultural shifts are difficult, but people can be, and are, led by those who figure out how to communicate effectively with large numbers.  Often those are authoritarians and persons who exploit fear and mistrust.  But they can also be charismatic people who preach empathy and know how to sell it.  Those are the leaders we should be looking for now.  And voting for.

[meditationsfromthethirdrail]

Polarization

There is a widespread perception that the U.S. has become as polarized, politically, as it has ever been.  A careful consideration of America history suggests that’s not actually true, but I understand the sentiment and I often feel it myself.  Being retired provides me with an inordinate amount of time to ponder this problem and to try to make sense of it.  It’s become something of an obsession.

I like to mix it up a bit in social media - primarily Facebook - with persons opining on various social ills and political agendas and especially those blindly sharing fact-challenged propaganda, both from the left and right.  I’ve stayed away from Twitter, which by design strictly prohibits posts from being long enough to contain meaningful reasoning.  I like to save Instagram for pretty photos of flowers and birds and vacations.  But Facebook seems a reasonable forum with enough content flexibility to present ideas with some depth to them.  Social problems are inherently complex and nuanced, as evidenced by the fact that most of those problems have persisted, in one form or another, throughout human history.  Individually and collectively we often find ourselves in situations where there is no perfect, right answer or solution - certainly not one that can be summarized in a tweet.

Our response to dealing with COVID-19 is a good example.  There are enormous difficulties, economic and otherwise, with isolating ourselves from one another, and another set of bad outcomes resulting from not doing that.  The tendency, it seems, judging by most of the dialogue we see in social media (and most other media) posts and comments, is for people to take ideological positions, cherry-pick supporting facts (or worse, supporting falsehoods), and promote extreme positions.  By “extreme” I mean positions that ignore the truths that are quite often inherent in opposing positions.  Again using the debate over proper responses to the COVID-19 pandemic as an example, most people who originate or share political posts on Facebook seem either to be solidly of the opinion that isolation, shut-downs, masks, etc. are good policy, or they’re of the view that all those measures are counterproductive or even unAmerican.

Most people instinctively understand that neither of those views is exclusively correct, but people who are in the middle tend not to weigh in as often, perhaps because their confusion about the solution makes them feel that they don’t have anything meaningful to say.  I think those voices should be heard much more often than they are.  I feel like I have one of those voices, and that’s why I feel a responsibility to try to make myself heard.

Following is my approach to analyzing sociopolitical issues - that is, issues that can be addressed, at least in part, through government action or some other form of collective action by citizens working towards a common goal.  First, I try to understand whether and how the issue can or should be addressed by the government.  That question is itself a polarizing one.  Conservative ideology contains mistrust of government, especially Federal government, whereas liberal ideology contains high expectations that the government should intervene to address most social ills.  Neither of those views is inherently correct.  One of the the biggest challenges politicians face, when they’re focused on “doing the right thing” and not just getting elected, is deciding what the best role of government ought to be in tackling specific issues.  It should be obvious that the government is not the right institution to deal with some issues (the establishment of religion, for example) but it is the right institution to deal with some other issues (the defense of the nation against an outside military force, for example).

When I attempt to discern the proper role of the government, I avoid starting with the ideological answer.  Instead I try to look at it pragmatically.  Why is (or is not) the government equipped to deal with the particular issue in question?  Can government be effective?  Can government be efficient?  How will government fund its involvement?  What other institutions can or should be involved?  What’s the ultimate cost to society, economically and otherwise, to having the government more or less involved?  The calculus involved to answer these questions is exceedingly complex; nevertheless that’s what politicians ought to spend their time debating, and their debate should always begin with a careful gathering and consideration of relevant facts, dismissing ideology in favor of rationality and consultation with experts to the fullest extent possible.  

One time when I still had an active professional career, I was in Utah to give a presentation to the board of directors of a financial institution.  One of the directors was a former U.S. senator from the state, and I happened to be seated next to him when the board convened for lunch.  When he learned I resided in Pennsylvania, he asked me what I thought about the reelection chances for a well-known senator from my state who had recently switched his party affiliation.  That led to a discussion about certain economic policies, during which the senator delivered the low-tax mantra familiar to anyone who has ever listened to a Republican politician for more than a few minutes.  My response to him was that I had never understood why the White House, Congress and the Senate didn’t decide about the appropriate level of income taxes by first deciding a) how much does it cost the government to do the things that everyone agrees it needs to do, and b) what else is the government better equipped to do than is any other institution or group of individuals or companies, and how much does that cost?  The answers to those questions, I opined, would inform the government about how much revenue it needs to raise.  Cart before horse, as it were.  I thought the senator would have a ready answer but he seemed not to have ever thought about it that way.  Probably, I surmised, because he was more of an ideologue than a pragmatist.  Reducing taxes is Republican dogma if anything is.

Let’s return to the issue of the proper size and scope of government, which is a major bone of contention between conservatives and liberals.  I can think of numerous Republican friends whose belief that big government is wasteful, inefficient and disrespectful of individual liberty is perhaps the main driving force (among the forces that involve reason and not just culture, tradition and emotion) behind their party affiliation.  A strong preference for low taxes is a closely correlated issue.  I think it’s safe to say that almost everyone distrusts the government about some things if not many things.  Liberals also believe that big government is a problem, just in different ways - for example, too much spending on the military.  That’s a whole other issue in its own right and I don’t want to veer into a tangent here, but the point is that everyone wants limited government, and our Constitution is clearly designed to handcuff government overreach.  Where should the lines be drawn, to the extent they aren’t clearly spelled out in the Constitution, as potentially amended?

First I want to say to my liberal friends, it is true that the government is often wasteful and inefficient, and not just in the area of military spending.  Who hasn’t complained about long lines or call waiting times at government agencies?  Who hasn’t been affected by some kind of government error or bureaucratic hassle?  Who hasn’t heard tales of certain government employees and contractors being underworked and (seemingly) overpaid?  When my father died and my mother required constant care because she was disabled by Alzheimer’s disease, I spent many, many hours dealing with the Veterans Administration to obtain certain benefits for her, so I know first-hand what a nightmare that can be.  Because we experience these things, it’s easy for us to conclude that government is bad, or at best a necessary evil.  

But I ask my conservative friends who are particularly inclined to seize on the flaws of government as a reason to dislike government generally, are the alternatives to government necessarily better?  Many conservatives and libertarians contend that government ought to be run like a business.  Indeed, I used to be a big proponent of that theory.  Certainly if government were run like a business, it would be more likely to cut dead weight and strive for cost-effective delivery of services, because that’s how it would survive, fiscally.  At some point in mid-life, I heard someone whom I respected say flatly that the role of government is not that of a business.  I thought about that and realized my friend was correct.

A business operates not just to provide goods and services to its customers, but foremost to earn money for its owners and managers.  That’s the basis of capitalist ideology (more about that in a later blog).  The government operates (or should operate) in the interests of its citizens - all of them, or as many as possible.  There is no profit motive.  If social security, for example, were run as a business, the inevitable result would be that a relatively small group of people would take a sizeable chunk of our FICA taxes for themselves, and everyone else would either receive lower payments or they would pay higher taxes for the same benefits.  That’s basically what insurance companies that sell annuities do - they take their cut first.  I’m not being critical of insurance companies - annuities have a proper role in the personal finances of many people.  But annuities are not affordable for many.  The fact that our health care system is operated for profit to a much greater degree than are the health care systems of substantially all other developed nations is a primary reason why U.S. per capita health care costs are so much higher than those of substantially all other developed nations - about double the average, in fact.  Again, health care is another polarizing issue, and properly the subject of a separate discussion.

Briefly, another example:  let’s say a private enterprise, such as a mining company, turns an area of land into a toxic waste dump affecting water and air quality in the area.  One necessary role of government, I would argue, is to prevent that from happening, but it  does happen, primarily because of corruption, even if the corruption isn’t always obvious.  There is usually no profit motive for anyone to clean up the toxic land and quite often the offending enterprise has conveniently gone out of business.  So either the government steps in to repair the damage or we live with the negative consequences.

My point here is that although government has certain flaws, it’s the only prominent, powerful institution that’s designed to provide for the welfare of the people as a whole rather than just those who will profit from running it.  Corruption (again, a separate subject for another discussion) is the rot inside government that facilitates the generation of profit for a few at the expense of everyone else, and that’s why it’s extremely important that corruption be rooted out at every possible turn.  In a democracy, the act of voting for candidates who demonstrate disdain rather than tolerance for corruption is a critical function of voters.   Beyond that, as I said before, we should task our politicians to debate the circumstances and conditions under which government is the best source to provide services to citizens that private enterprise will not or can not.  Based on the consensus our elected officials reach, we should be prepared to pay taxes to fund what has been deemed necessary or healthy for the citizenry as a whole.

I believe in having as small and unobtrusive of a government as we can, so I guess that makes me a conservative.  I also believe in having a government that provides necessary and appropriate services for the benefit of all citizens, to the extent possible, which I suppose makes me a liberal.  The fact is that these labels just muddy the water and cause us to gravitate to extremes.  We need to focus on uncovering the best ways to get things done for the benefit of all the people while providing ample incentive and reward to those who make the greatest sacrifices and contributions to getting them done.  Those goals are not mutually exclusive - not at all.  Indeed, balancing those goals, and the roles of government, private enterprise and charitable organizations in achieving those goals, is the ultimate challenge for those who make the laws of the land.