Across the Great Divide

The Trouble With Libertarians.

I was going to post this as a response to Jeff Dege's comment on my earlier reaction to Craig Westover's "The problem with progressives," but it was starting to edge into full post territory, so it's here instead.

Jeff, whose contrary comments here I do appreciate because he's civil and often raises provocative questions, said:

"A “progressive” is someone who acts on the belief that life can be improved."

No. A progressive is someone who believes that people can be improved. That the only reason that we don't live in a utopian society is that we haven't yet remade man in the right way.

The progressives collectivist dreams of how society is organized have always faltered on the discord between how they believe people should interact and how they always have interacted.

And they always will.

To quote Lileks:

"The other day I was talking with a Democrat friend about the election. She'd remarked, with equal amounts of sarcasm and good-natured ribbing, that the GOP had two years to build utopia. I thought about that later while walking Jasper around the block, and thought, no; they're not about building utopia. Personally, I'm interested in keeping other people from building Utopia, because the more you believe you can create heaven on earth the more likely you are to set up guillotines in the public square to hasten the process."

See, that's the trouble with libertarians. They pretend to get the irony employed by us self-appointed elites and then turn around and accuse us of being humorless executioners behind our backs.

However, since we lost Mussolini as our glorious leader, the progressive record on public executions has been rather slim. (And you really can't count Hillary Clinton dropping the hammer on Vince Foster.) We really lack the experience to carry out that aspect of our plan for total world domination.

Jeff may be right, that as a progressive I believe life can be improved is by helping people improve. Otherwise, I'd be mostly limited to planting trees, pulling plastic bags out of ponds and eating three balanced meals a day.

Believing — and acting on the belief— that people can improve is still not the same thing as thinking I can perfect humanity or that government should enforce all manner of human relations. But Jeff and Lileks and Westover won't grant me any moderation or incremental progress.  Once I start believing that society is better off if it sets goals to reduce poverty or pollution, for example, it's only a matter of time before I'm driving the black van that hauls off Family Lileks to Twins Stadium for a little publicly funded entertainment.

I guess if you see the world in absolutes, it's hard not to believe people who talk about "progress" are really  trying to trick you into the oven if you dare want to bake your own cookies.

Though personal and political change is one premise of this blog, one only needs to read Jonah Goldberg and Craig Westover to see how deluded I am about humanity. And I am not just talking about their arguments.

Still, no one has even asked me to help put them in Guantanamo or Camp Wellstone Two. Some "collective!"

No, instead of worrying about everyone having the same leg kick in the May Day parade, the progressives I know are concerned about all kids getting educated, courts that work fairly and efficiently, good jobs, good government, and maybe once every four years, bringing the Republican National Convention to a complete, anarchic standstill.

Compared to doing that good work every day, I can't imagine wanting to live in a heaven on earth. Progressives like having something to look forward to.

Hide the children, honey, here come the Progressives!

Oh, my. It’s always a treat to have Craig Westover tell me what I think and stand for as a progressive.

No matter what provokes him or how widely he wanders to gather his wooly proof points, he always gets around to the same rant: Progressives aggressively impose their values on others, using the police power of the state to extort from the hard-working class the costs of providing extensive and unearned benefits to every slacker, transit rider, unwed mother and drug addict in creation.

His latest (“The problem with progressives”) might be called a straw man argument, provided one could see past all the mud. In it, he manages to herd Growth & Justice, Mussolini and stalwart Minnesota governors Harold Stassen, Elmer Anderson, Al Quie and Arne Carlson — some of the leaders being honored by the G&J-sponsored Sept. 3rd event, Celebrating Minnesota’s Progressive Republican Tradition — into a single, muddled group of apostates.

The notion that we are all progressives now — or, if not, we should be — is a dangerous challenge to constitutionally limited government.

Well, that’s Westover’s notion, which he proceeds to pummel into incoherence. Our event has a less sweeping point to make — that a progressive orientation toward governing is an admirable Minnesota political trait historically exemplified in both parties. It has played a significant role in making our state a model for how to achieve honest elections, effective government, a vigorous, community-engaged  private sector and relative economic prosperity.

Minnesota’s progressive tradition is something worth recognizing and celebrating at a time when the political spotlight is on us during the Republican National Convention — and when our standing as a national role model is coming into question.

In fact, progress is a core American value, and progressives represent the optimism and assertiveness of our founding fathers.

A “progressive” is someone who acts on the belief that life can be improved. Progress, whether enjoyed by individuals, businesses, communities or nations, is achieved through change that benefits increasing numbers of our fellows. For example, Harold Stassen’s reform of civil service that cleaned up serious corruption in state employment; Al Quie’s ongoing quest to assure the quality of our judiciary; Arne Carlson’s fiscal discipline coupled with visionary planning and wise investment.

Progressives don’t believe mankind is perfectible, the market is evil, the government is infallible or taxes are mother’s milk. We do believe the world for our children — and other people's children — can be made better than the one we ourselves enjoyed.

To Westover, though, we're totalitarians.

“Progressivism is politics as religion” that strives to aggressively impose values on society. "’Growth’ and ‘justice’ are both desirable,” he lectures, “and the progressive believes this makes them compatible irrespective of the laws of economics.”

Thinking about how to treat others — with justice — ought to engage our moral sense, but that does not mean government must dedicate itself to erasing all differences among people or businesses. Nor that business must tiptoe through every transaction lest it give offense or be accused of exploitation.

Private interests and governments both have the capacity to improve life. Yes, there are ideologues at the extremes who think the world would run better if one or the other were more fully in charge, but that does not represent the Growth & Justice position. Nor does it accurately reflect the mainstream Minnesota view of a balance between limited government and unlimited free markets.

Westover also conflates progressive politics with progressive taxation. A progressive tax strives to achieve proportionality in the overall tax system by taxing income at a higher rate as income increases. A progressive tax is based on a model of justice and fairness — that people who earn less should not pay a higher proportion of their income for public services than people who earn the most, as is the case today in Minnesota. 

There's plenty of room for discussion on this point, but Westover dismisses it as “moral argument, dividing the world into the self-sacrificing good and the selfishly individual.”

It is difficult to know, however, who is on which side in Westover World, considering Westover himself recently wrote: "Taxes as charity rob the giver of the virtue of the freely given gift and the responsibility of judging a recipient worthy of the gift."

No moral argument going on there, surely.

In Westover’s immutable universe, no one who favors progress — Republican, Democrat or Lutheran — can retain claim to their own core principles. We hope — hoping is still allowed, isn't it? — Celebrating Minnesota’s Progressive Republican Tradition will remind people of all parties that it wasn’t always so.

[Note: This was cross-posted from Growth & Justice blog, where I write as a communication fellow for Growth & Justice.]

Biking With Conservatives.

I'm glad Mitch Berg is biking to work. Truly. It's good for him, good for the earth and may even inspire others to give it a go.

It's also good for laughs.

I was sitting at a traffic light at the beginning of the longest, ugliest leg of the climb, in my sweatshirt and windbreaker pants.  A twenty-something pulls up next to me in full spandex biker regalia, with a “Obama” sticker on the side of his backpack.

Game on.

Now, the guy’s a real, genuine biker, with legs like tree trunks - kind of like mine were 20 years ago, when I was biking constantly.

As we jumped off from the light, I got behind him and followed him up the hill.  He started pouring it on; I kept on going, staying about four feet behind his back tire…

…and BOOM - we were up the hill!  Done!  Blammo!  Just like that!  Barely breathing hard!

I stayed in his slipstream for probably two miles, pacing him pretty nicely.  Now, for all I know he had mononucleosis and felt half-past-dead and that was the only reason I could keep it close; I am, after all, 45.

Still, that long, ugly hill practically vanished.

So my conclusion; without testosterone, humankind would still be sitting in caves gnawing on grass seeds.

For two miles he drafts off another biker hauling a backpack and then credits his own manly effort. I think I feel a metaphor coming on, but it's already been composed.

Narcissism and the Commons.

Last week, Shankar Vedantam wrote a Washington Post column titled, "Clinton, Obama and the Narcissist's Tale." It appeared yesterday under a different Star Tribune headline, "Democrats face a classic 'tragedy of the commons.'" One emphasizes the self-absorption required of politicians; the other highlights its effects.

I'm more interested the commons metaphor and how it relates beyond the current presidential race because I think it helps define the great dividing line of our time. Parties and candidates have clustered at the poles of the real divisions among us — whether to value the big picture over the short run and place collective interest on at least a par with self-interest.

Vedantam invokes the tragedy of the commons to explain the dangerous trap of this "fault line" between individual and collective interest:

Individuals embroiled in similar dilemmas find them impossible to solve on their own, because they are confronted by a Hobson's Choice: Act selfishly and cause collective disaster, or act altruistically and aid someone else who is acting selfishly. Either way, selfishness wins.

"The way the system is set up, the more-selfish person has a higher probability of winning," social psychologist W. Keith Campbell said of the Democratic primary. "You end up with the more narcissistic, belligerent candidate."

He cites an experiment by Campbell in which volunteers were tasked as timber companies to manage a forest in perpetuity.

[Since] the volunteers did not know whether their kindness would be reciprocated by others or exploited by competitors, people raced to cut as much timber as they could and quickly razed the forests to the ground. Groups with volunteers more willing to think about the collective good preserved their forests longer. But selfish people within these groups had a field day exploiting the altruists — and the forests perished anyway.

Much of the conflict in the public domain mirrors this dynamic. Free market vs. government regulation. Energy development vs. conservation. The individual or family vs. the collective. The castle vs. the commons.

Government and other social institutions, especially religion, have developed to regulate or redirect behavior from the destructive effects of selfishness. But Reaganism has led an all-out assault on the notion of "the commons," associating it with failed socialist states instead of with managing, in Jedediah Purdy's* phrase,  "the things that we cannot avoid having in common and whose maintenance or neglect implicates us all." That is, the legal system, the economy, public health and the natural world to name a few.

The attack on the commons has been prosecuted against and through those very institutions charged with keeping it — school boards, churches, local governments and federal agencies — abetted by think tanks, pundits and pollsters who retail to the public simpleminded formulations of complex problems and then pretend to discover them as the will of the people.

Public opinion, Purdy says, "has become shorthand for uninformed attitudes dignified by statistical aggregation." And the "Public,"  he says, is increasingly defined in Libertarian terms to be whatever government provides to people who are too lazy or weak to get a share of the "Private."

Although unregulated behavior can be modeled and the consequences predicted, before they will act, cultures of heightened self-interest demand proof, which practically means collapse of fisheries or financial systems. In Garrett Hardin's term, "intrinsic responsibility" can be clearly grasped when an act is straightforward and the consequences are immediate. But those who most loudly espouse personal responsibility and accountability for actions rarely see their own complicity in causing harm when the effects are indirect — through consumption, financial manipulation, disinvestment or discrimination.

We cannot and should not legislate away self-interest, but neither can we blithely continue to grow population, consume energy and amass wealth as if we were the planet's sole occupants — or, alternatively, as if we all have our own personal savior waiting in the wings.

Until we learn to see the systems we live within, we contribute to their ruin. And even then...

_______

* I could've sworn I'd written before about Jedediah Purdy's book, For Common Things, but apparently not. (Naturally, libertarians didn't like it; nor did  Caleb Crain. But here's another view that there are worse sins than being privileged, earnest and young.)

Lost: One Soul. Answers to Leftie.

Chris Hedges quotes the president of Chicago Theological Seminary —  "Once you sell your soul, it is hard to get it back." — in his essay, The Left Has Lost Its Way. He argues that the left has lost its sway by failing to hold fast to core issues. Let politicians compromise, he says.

Political and social change, as the radical Christian right and the array of corporate-funded neocon think tanks have demonstrated, are created by the building of movements. This is a lesson American progressives have forgotten. The object of a movement is not to achieve political power at any price. It is to create pressure and mobilize citizens around core issues of justice. It is to force politicians and parties to respond to our demands. It is about rewarding, through support and votes, those who champion progressive ideals and punishing those who refuse. And the current Democratic Party, as any worker in a former manufacturing town in Pennsylvania can tell you, has betrayed us.

[...]

The failure of the left is the failure of well-meaning people who kept compromising and compromising in the name of effectiveness and a few scraps of influence until they had neither. The condemnations progressives utter—about the abuse of working men and women, the rapacious cannibalization of the country by an unchecked arms industry, our disastrous foreign wars, and the collapse of basic services from education to welfare—are not backed by action. The left has been transformed into anguished apologists for corporate greed. They have become hypocrites.

There's more. Hedges says, rightly, "The rise of a corporate state, and by that I mean a state that no longer works on behalf of its citizens but the corporations, is as much a part of the Democratic agenda as the Republican agenda." The working class has a right to be bitter with liberal elites.

The struggle now for progressives is to find their nerve, he says.

Looking back across the grim 8-year legacy of the Naderite Rebellion and the Kerry Collapse, it's tempting to go for the electoral win, no matter what "our" candidate represents. The consequences of more Bushism are terrible to contemplate. But it wasn't just the GOP that brought us the prospect of broader economic collapse, perpetual war and a widening class divide, was it?

Why Won't Godless Liberals Help the Poor?

Thursday's Why Do Conservative Christians Kill Their Kids? could've been an early April 1st post, but it was actually a bad reaction to an overdose of "liberals are [bad/unethical/unpatriotic/hypocrites/can't count to numerous] and here is my carefully selected fact to prove it."

This impulse welled up after spending far more time on John McCain's mouth than any non-member of the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry should, and then reading George Will's "Liberals speak of generosity; conservatives actually have it."

"The surprise is that liberals are markedly less charitable than conservatives," he intones, sounding not very surprised at all, while the headline writer follows right along.

Will picked this week to write about a book published 16 months ago that forwards a premise that liberals give financial lip service to their social values. You've probably heard this already, in a far less affected manner than Will manages:

While conservatives tend to regard giving as a personal rather than governmental responsibility, some liberals consider private charity a retrograde phenomenon — a poor palliative for an inadequate welfare state, and a distraction from achieving adequacy by force, by increasing taxes.

In other words, we substitute other people's taxes for our personal charity.

You'd think in honor of tax time Will would at least congratulate us Blue Staters for taking smaller deductions, thereby paying more to the government. Isn't that living your values?

Okay, seriously. My annoyance with Will's piece starts with how he slants the evidence even further to the right than what's in Arthur C. Brooks's Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism. Will says:

Although liberal families' incomes average 6 percent higher than those of conservative families, conservative-headed households give, on average, 30 percent more to charity than the average liberal-headed household ($1,600 per year vs. $1,227).

Will notes the importance of religion as an underpinning of conservative values, but he neglects to mention that religious giving accounts for most of this disparity.

Brooks found religious donors gave about 3.5 times the amount secular donors did — on average $2,210 versus $642 — and most of that giving went to religious causes. That tracks with a recent report from the Minnesota Council on Foundations, which says individual religious giving in the state dwarfs all other categories at about 60% of charitable dollars.

But according to a review in Philanthropy, when Brooks measured only giving to non-religious causes, the difference between religious and secular givers fell to $88. He also found that religious conservatives gave slightly more than religious liberals, while secular liberals were more generous than their conservative counterparts.

I could further question the size and source of any giving gap, but what really got me was the divisive set up. Like asking "why do conservatives kill their kids?" Will's formulation of the research is presented in a way that incites argument rather than invites exploration by the "accused."

Instead, what if we approached Brooks's book in a spirit of discovery? What sorts of questions might we ask? And what might we learn about ourselves that would actually be useful?

For example:

• Am I more generous than other Americans? If not, is that something I want to change?
• Why do I give? To solve social ills or make myself feel good?
• Do my giving patterns show ideological or class biases? Does that matter?
• Is it better to give to the poor than to the arts or environment? How do I make those choices?
• Do my political opinions make it hard for me to see the actual social value in religious giving and faith-based initiatives? Do others discount the value of public investment for similar reasons?
• If we can agree on desired outcomes from fulfilling social needs, will it be easier for the community to agree on a variety of funding methods?

When readers are introduced to issues in a way that accentuates existing political notions — such as government wastes my money or wealth and morality are incompatible — it's very difficult to reach any kind of understanding, either of the other side's beliefs or the deeper complexities of the problem.

This article about fundamentalism expresses in another way the constructive potential of the tension between liberal and conservative thought.

Fundamentalism's conservative impulse wants stability in societies. Liberal impulses serve to give us not stability but civility: humanity. They do this by expanding the definitions of our inherited territorial categories. The essential job of liberals in human societies is to enlarge our understanding of who belongs in our in-group. This is the plot of virtually all liberal advances.

[...]

When liberal visions work, it's because they have kept one foot solidly in our deep territorial impulses with the other foot free to push the margin, to expand the definition of those who belong in “our” territory.

When liberal visions fail, it is often because they fail to achieve just this kind of balance between our conservative impulses and our liberal needs.         

The problem, of course, is that this notion of balance fits better with liberalism. The fundamentalists are less likely to budge.

Where Dirty Political Campaigns Joined Mass Media.

Maybe I'm slow on the uptake, but I just recently came across the story about Upton Sinclair's 1934 run for California governor and the dirty tricks by the pre-liberal media his potential victory inspired.

Sinclair, the muckraking novelist whose Oil! became the basis for There Will Be Blood, was a socialist running as the Democratic nominee against a Republican party hack. With a program called EPIC (End Poverty in California), Sinclair drew more voters in the primary than Republican Frank Merriam, despite the fact that California was a heavily GOP state.

This disturbed the establishment, which in those days was headed by movie moguls who then, as now, had greater loyalty to money-making than to liberal ideology.

The execs prefigured the threats made by pro sports team owners by threatening to move their studios to Miami if Sinclair were elected, and the Los Angeles Times  denounced the "maggot-like horde of Reds" who supported Sinclair. But their most effective measures were mobilizing their marketing and story-telling resources in a disinformation campaign.

To smear Sinclair, experts made innovative use of film, radio, direct mail, opinion polls, phony leaflets and false advertising. The political effort that produced the strongest impact was the manipulation of the movies. For the first time, Hollywood put all its professional and financial resources into action against a Democratic candidate. Led by Louis B. Mayer, a rabid Republican who headed M-G-M, studio executives raised enormous sums of money, intimidated their employees and produced propaganda films.

[...]

The pro-Sinclair forces were pitted against Mr. Mayer's protege, Irving Thalberg, who produced a propaganda film showing bums arriving in California to take away everybody's jobs and cause trouble. Fake leaflets were printed stating that the Communists endorsed Sinclair and branding him a dynamiter of churches and all Christian institutions. Radio scripts warned against the dangers of Sinclairism, saying it would mean higher taxes. A radio melodrama intimated that "Governor" Sinclair would confiscate everybody's swimming pools.

I've only been able to find descriptions of the fake newsreels Thalberg created and ran in California theaters. Cast from the lower ranks of the studios' actors, one featured an "inquiring reporter" asking "people on the street" for whom they intend to vote and why. Bums, morons and anarchists with Bolshevik accents declared themselves for Sinclair. The well-spoken middle class voters were all for Merriam.

Another clip was based on a sarcastic retort by Sinclair to a question about the poor flocking to California to take advantage of his EPIC plan: "If I'm elected governor, I expect one half the unemployed in the United States will hop aboard the first freights for California." The newsreel obligingly showed the deadbeats and dirty Trotskyites massing on the California border, waiting to descend upon the election of Governor Sinclair.

There's much more history of the Sinclair campaign and the opposition's tactics here and in a 1992 book by Greg Mitchell.

But then, I guess you could just watch the news.
 

Urban Conservatism: Of City Mice and Country Mice.

An 18-year-old finds an underlined and dog-eared copy of Atlas Shrugged in a pile of junk left in a long-abandoned logging complex on a remote and uninhabited island. For the next ten years, Ayn Rand's  anti-collectivist thinking influences the young Alaskan who eventually becomes the president of the progressive Minnesota think tank, Growth & Justice.

Dane Smith draws on those roots in his contribution to a collection of short essays by the Center of the American Experiment, What Does it Mean to Be an Urban Conservative?:

Urban America is progressive and communitarian, while rural (and to a lesser extent suburban and exurban) America is conservative and individualistic. Where you are has a lot to do with who you are, and this has been a fact of mankind going back to ancient Greece and Aesop’s story about the country mouse and the city mouse.

Conservative economist and St. Cloud blogger King Banaian's essay translates mousehood into voting behavior:

In a rural election, your vote is more likely to flip the outcome, giving you greater incentive to learn whether candidate X or Y would increase your happiness. In a city, you can be “a good person” without having to worry whether your vote will harm your happiness.

Minnesota Chamber of Commerce official Bill Blazar makes a telling contrast  in his parable of St. Paul and Minneapolis mice:

St. Paul, I believe, does not plow residential alleys. Instead, it calls on property owners to remove the snow in a timely fashion. By contrast, Minneapolis plows the alleys. I’d argue that the former does more to build community than the latter. Property owners not only have to accept their responsibility, but also come up with a means of meeting it.

Former Sen. Dave Durenberger draws on David Brooks' distinction between "creedal," all-power-to-the-individual conservatives and "temperamental" conservatives who see the individual as a part of a social organism:

Temperamental urban conservatives like me thrive on diversity and social cohesion.  It’s all around us—in our neighborhoods, our restaurants, our small businesses, our churches, and our transportation and public safety systems. We are all very close to each other and interdependent.  As temperamental urban conservatives, we gladly pay a lot for the amenities of the city—the sights, sounds, smells, and, yes, the conveniences it brings to our lives.   

Long-time DFL activist Arvonne Fraser says the public benefits when conservative thinkers keep liberals on their intellectual toes and recalls some of her favorite Republicans:

Successful urban conservatives look ahead as well as back. To be successful politically, urban conservatives must recognize, for example, that municipal garbage systems are necessary and costly. And true conservatives are fiscally responsible. They become tax experts, not tax avoiders.

Devin C. Foley, director of development for Center of the American Experiment, recalls stirring examples of public-private partnership in Minnesota history:

The Twin City Rapid Transit Company operated the trolley car system in Minneapolis and St.  Paul until 1954 after winning an initial 50-year contract with the city of Minneapolis in 1875. By 1954, there were 400 miles of track and 700 street cars. Almost anywhere in Minneapolis, a trolley stop was no more than 400 yards away. 

There's a good reason Foley's trolley tale ends in 1954. That's when the sterling streetcar system was finally stripped of its assets by a crooked speculative investor and shut down.

You can read these and other ruminations here [download .pdf].

Welcome to the Party.

My friend the conservative accountant sent this "Father-Daughter Talk" to his two favorite liberals:

A young woman was about to finish her first year of college. Like so many others her age,  she considered herself to be a very liberal Democrat and was very much in favor of the "redistribution of wealth." She was deeply ashamed that her  father was a rather staunch Republican, a feeling she openly expressed. Based on the lectures that she had participated in, and the occasional chat with a professor, she felt that her father had for years harbored an evil, selfish desire to "keep" what he thought should be his.

One day she was  challenging her father on his opposition to higher taxes on the rich and the addition of more government "welfare" programs.  The self-professed objectivity proclaimed by her professors had to be the truth and she indicated so to her father. He responded by asking  how she was doing in school.

Taken aback, she answered rather  haughtily that she had a 4.0 GPA, and let him know that it was tough to maintain, insisting that she was taking a very difficult course load and was  constantly studying, which left her no time to go out and party like other people she knew. She didn't even have time for a boyfriend or sex, and didn't really have many college friends because she spent all her time  studying.

Her father listened and then asked, "How is your friend Audrey doing?" She replied, "Audrey is barely getting by. All she takes are easy classes, she never studies, and she barely has a 2.0 GPA. She is so popular on campus; college for her is a blast. She's always invited to parties, has sex with a lot of men, and lots of times she doesn't even show up for classes because she's too hung  over."

Her wise father asked his daughter, "Why don't you go to the Dean's office and ask him to deduct a 1.0 off your GPA and give it to your friend who only has a 2.0? That way you will both have a 3.0 GPA, certainly that would be a "fair and equal distribution of GPA."

The daughter, visibly shocked by her father's suggestion, angrily fired back, "That wouldn't be fair!  I have worked really hard for my grades! I've invested a lot of time, and a lot of hard work! Audrey has done next to nothing toward her degree. She screwed off while I worked my tail off!"

The father slowly smiled, winked and said, "Welcome to the Republican  Party."

Let me point out a couple things about this tale.

1. The kid who worked hard and did all the right things was liberal, but the clear implication of the story is that Democrats should be associated with enabling and rewarding irresponsible behavior .
2. The parable equates reducing one's grade with paying taxes. The daughter only loses when she gives her 25 percent. However, tax revenues benefit society, including the taxpayer. 
3. Another implication: granting a free GPA point is the equivalent of welfare. In this case, the dad is too generous. Welfare constitutes about 1 percent of the federal budget and 2 percent of state budgets. Half of the president's current discretionary spending [Download tables.pdf] budget — 0.5 of a GPA point — goes to defense.
4. GPA is a poor analog for money earned in a free economy. GPA is a fixed commodity based on an arbitrary scale, parceled out somewhat subjectively by a few professors. No one can earn more than a 4.0. As we've seen, income in America keeps growing for those smart kids at the top, no matter what the government does.
5. Once taken away, a lost GPA point can never be restored. Paying taxes doesn't mean you can't increase your income. And the more you make, the smaller percentage you give away.
6. Who besides college freshmen advocate for "fair and equal distribution" of anything? In my book, fairness is about proportionality in the tax code, not equality of income.

If the daughter is that easily swayed by her dad's arguments, she deserves to have her GPA lowered.

Business Says What We've Been Saying.

Because I try to keep a bit of a curtain between this blog and my sometime work for Growth & Justice (which I'm sure they appreciate when I write about religion), I don't hype every post at the Growth & Justice blog. But today, Dane Smith writes about a recent Minnesota Chamber of Commerce luncheon at which business leaders were sounding some pretty progressive themes:

[Chamber senior vice-president Bill] Blazar cited the obligatory and predictable concerns in a survey of businesses to "hold the line on taxes'' (Minnesota now ranks 23rd among the states in total taxes as a percent of income) and the perennial desire to hold down worker's comp and unemployment comp costs. But the four business leaders who followed him said hardly a word about their tax burden or regulatory concerns.

In fact, they talked mostly about the need for state investment in education, training and transportation infrastructure.