On Musement

Spinoza's distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata (nature naturing and nature natured) refers to two aspects of God or Nature considered as the realm of both actuality and potentiality. Robert Corrington (1992) calls this view "ecstatic naturalism":

The most basic division affirmed by ecstatic naturalism is that between nature naturing (natura naturans) and nature natured (natura naturata). Nature naturing is here defined as the unlimited realm of potencies. The potencies are not yet possibilities because possibilities can only arise within and among actualities, that is, within the orders of the world (nature natured). Nature natured is the created orders of the world: that is, the manifest orders within which the human process finds itself....The difference between nature naturing and nature natured is the fundamental divide within nature itself. That is, this divide does not separate off nature from some alleged realm of the non- or super-natural but lives out of the heart of a self-transforming nature (209).

The border between these two realms of Nature is always in flux. As potencies become actualities through Nature's self-transfiguring evolutionary process, new orders of being create new potencies that in turn allow for still newer orders of being to emerge. The created world that is manifest to us is the living record of this evolutionary process of Nature's self-transformation and self-actualization.

Human intelligence participates in Nature's self-creative evolutionary process by means of a reasoning process originally described by Peirce as "interpretive musement." Musement is a species of abductive reasoning (reasoning that move from cases to general hypotheses that apply backwards to the case and others like it) in which the,

semiotic world of empirical knowledge becomes open to novel possibilities when musement works in its seemingly random fashion to let complex and different signs interact in ways that could not have been possible for the other more restricted forms of method. Interpretive musement opens up a free semiotic zone in which the self is actually brought into interaction with the depth structures of nature (212).

Musement mines novelty from the realm of potentiality and transmits it into the realm of actuality. Musement is the creative play of the spirit as it strives to make itself manifest. It is the source of the creative processes by which human imagination becomes reality.

Music, amusement, amusing, musical, museum, bemusement....In ancient Greek mythology the Muses are goddesses that inspire the creation of poetry, literature and art. They were regarded as the sources of knowledge that humans pass from one generation to the next. In modern usage, a muse (uncapitalized) is said the be the source of inspiration for artists and writers. Museums are shrines to the muses that inspired artists of the past to create form and meaning out of matter. Libraries are the shrines to the muses that inspired writers to create form and meaning out of ideas.

But there are other forms of human creativity, for instance, science and technology, in which the hidden potentialities of Nature can become manifest. Culture, considered in the largest sense, as all of the knowledge and information that can be passed from one human generation to the next, the sum of all memes, is itself an emergent order of Nature. Culture is natura naturata as it has been expressed through human action. But we also are continually creating culture; it is self-transfiguring like Nature itself. This is perhaps why we place such a high value on novelty in art and literature and science. We are always seeking the ecstatic experience of discovery.

I find these thoughts quite amusing.

Corrington, Robert S. (1992). "Ecstatic naturalism and the Transfiguration of the Good". In Randolph Crump Miller (Ed.) Empirical Theology: A Handbook. Birmingham, AL: Religious Education Press, pp. 203-221.

After the Rapture

The beginning of the end of the world did indeed occur yesterday May 21, 2011 just as Harold Camping had predicted. But not a single person was miraculously raised from earth into God's arms. This demonstrates once again that there are no righteous people and that the doctrine of salvation is a myth. Neither faith, nor good works, nor God's grace will save us from ourselves. We are the only ones who can do that. So what are we waiting for? You know we have limited time. None of us is getting out of this place alive. Let's get started.

Hannah Arendt's Intellectual Courage

The trial of Adolf Eichmann began fifty years ago this week, on 11 April 1961. There is a huge secondary literature on the trial, of which Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem is certainly the most famous contribution.[1] Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil first appeared in a five part series published in the New Yorker magazine in February and March 1963. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1963 by Viking Press which contained several technical corrections, some additional material concerning the German anti-Hitler conspiracy of July 20, 1944, and a Postscript dealing with the controversy that followed the original publication. I believe that this work should be a “core text”, particularly for courses and curricula dealing with the Holocaust and genocide studies. It’s value lies not only in the historical information it provides. Arendt’s book is important because of the controversy her analysis of Eichmann’s motivation provoked, and the intellectual courage she demonstrated in writing her book and responding to its critics.

SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Adolph Otto Eichmann (1906-1962) played an important role within the Third Reich in the implementation of the Final Solution for the “Jewish Problem”. As the head of the Central Office for Jewish Emigration he organized and managed the deportation and transport of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Germany and Austria to Eastern European ghettos where many became victims of the Einsatzgruppen. Following the Wansee Conference of 20 January 1942 (which Eichmann attended as recording secretary) he was given the job of Transportation Administrator of the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, a position in which he arranged shipments of Jews to concentration camps where they were murdered on an industrial scale. At the end of the war he was captured by the U.S. army but escaped under a false identity. He fled to Argentina in 1950 using a fraudulent International Red Cross passport and worked at various jobs under the name Ricardo Klement. He was living in Buenos Aires with his wife and their four sons in 1960 when he was captured by Mossad agents and taken to stand trial in an Israeli court on fifteen criminal charges including war crimes and crimes against humanity. He was found guilty and executed by hanging.

As Arendt attended much of his 1961 trial, read transcripts, and listened to the testimony unfold, she came to be focused on the question of the character of Eichmann’s conscience (or apparent lack thereof). How could a “good German” who was raised on the Ten Commandment (Thou shalt not murder) send thousands of innocent people to their deaths? If Eichmann was indeed “evil” in what did his evil consist?

Arendt’s answer to this question was shocking: she argued that Eichmann was an “ordinary man” whose head was swimming with empty clichés that he called “winged words”. He was a family man and a careerist who wished only to conform himself to the requirements of “respectable society” as it was understood in Nazi Germany at the time:

Eichmann, in contrast to other elements in the Nazi movement, had always been overawed by “good society,” and the politeness he often showed to German-speaking Jewish functionaries was to a large extent the result of his recognition that he was dealing with people who were socially his superiors....What he fervently believed in up to the end was success, the chief standard of “good society” as he knew it. Typical was his last word on the subject of Hitler;...Hitler, he said “may have been wrong all down the line, but one thing is beyond dispute: the man was able to work his way up from lance corporal in the German Army to Fuhrer of a people of almost eighty million....His success alone proved to me that I should subordinate myself to this man.” His conscience was indeed set at rest when he saw the zeal and eagerness with which “good society” everywhere reacted as he did. He did not need to “close his ears to the voice of conscience,” as the judgment has it, not because he had none, but because his conscience spoke with a “respectable voice,” with the voice of respectable society around him. (Peter Baehr Ed, The Portable Hannah Arendt. 355)

In Arendt’s portrayal, Adolph Eichmann was far from being a “moral monster” that many thought he must have been -- his brand of evil was boring and ordinary -- it was banal.

Arendt’s description of Eichmann’s moral character, as well as her comments on the role of the Jewish Councils (the Judenrate) which had cooperated with the Nazi’s in sending their fellow Jews to their deaths, provoked a series of vicious attacks on her, mainly by American Jews. She was denounced by the Anti-Defamation League of the B.nai B’rith and labeled as “self-hating Jewess”:

For their part, critics claimed that the expression “banality of evil” seemed to exonerate Eichmann and blame the victims. Others accused her of bad taste, triviality, an insultingly harsh and ironical tone, a perverse unwillingness to understand the depth of the dilemmas facing the Jewish Councils, and of failing to show love for her own kind. A “lapse into uncomprehending arrogance” was how one scholar described the report eight years after Arendt’s death (in 1974?), and compared with some of the comments she had to endure during her lifetime this was putting it mildly. (Baehr, xxvi)

According to Peter Baehr, Arendt was “shocked and dismayed by the maelstrom her report had provoked.” Yet in the Postscript she wrote for the Viking edition she blandly observed:

Even before its publication, this book became both the center of a controversy and the object of an organized campaign. It is only natural that the campaign, conducted with all the well-known means of image-making and opinion-manipulation, got much more attention than the controversy, so that the latter was somehow swallowed up by and drowned in the artificial noise of the former. This became especially clear when a strange mixture of the two, in almost identical phraseology - as though the pieces written against the book (and more frequently against its author) came "out of a mimeographing machine" (Mary McCarthy) - was carried from America to England and then to Europe, where the book was not yet even available. And this was possible because the clamor centered on the "image" of a book which was never written, and touched upon subjects that often had not only not been mentioned by me but had never occurred to me before.

Arendt goes on to argue that the report does not attempt to address in any systematic manner the “larger questions” about the Holocaust, the German people, Jewish complicity, original sin, or other general matters, but was only about “the person of the defendant, a man of flesh and blood with an individual history, with an always unique set of qualities, peculiarities, behavior patterns, and circumstances.” She does admit that:

I also can well imagine that an authentic controversy might have arisen over the subtitle of the book; for when I speak of the banality of evil, I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial. Eichmann was not lago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III "to prove a villain." Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing.

But then she says,

That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man – that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. But it was a lesson, neither an explanation of the phenomenon nor a theory about it.

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What are we to make of this lesson today? Do we have any theory about it that can help us understand how men can behave so thoughtlessly? Recent research in moral psychology suggests a theory about the kind of “banal evil” that Eichmann represents. The work of moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt proposes that morality both “binds” and “blinds” us.[2] Haidt has described the pull of group cohesion on individual as a kind of force field, comparing it to the lines of a magnetic field. This force is what makes human social life possible -- it is the basis of group cohesion. Human beings, unlike other social animals, have the ability to build cohesive groups around beliefs and symbols, not just around kinship relations. We create group solidarity, and hence the basis for social cooperation among human individuals who are not related by kinship by anointing some object or belief as “sacred” or inviolable. The sacred object can be something like the Quaaba in Mecca, the image of the crucified Jesus, the flag, or the corporate logo. As individuals drawn into these force fields they are taught that success requires conformity to the belief system that characterizes the group. Deviation, disloyalty, or dissent is regarded as suspect and can lead to ostracism or worse. Those members of the group who dare to step across the line of what the group considered to be “acceptable thoughts” are quickly and violently rebuked for undermining group cohesion. Public disloyalty to the group’s ideology is a great sin -- blasphemers must be stoned, heretics burned at the stake, traitors much have their noses cut off, and dissident intellectuals must be shunned and discredited.

When mass societies are drawn into totalitarian ideologies such as fascism or communism, one has the potential to mobilize millions of humans to fight and die for their sacred symbols, or to kill millions of other humans in the name of their beliefs. What was shocking about Arendt’s insights into the origins of totalitarianism was that she realized that monstrous evil could come about simply through the normal functioning of the human moral sense. It was not an aberration that ordinary men like Eichmann could become mass murders; rather it was something to be expected because of the way the force field of social cohesion characteristically functions in human societies.

Arendt herself fell victim to this kind of attack because she asserted that the “really horrific discovery of totalitarian regimes has been that mass conformists ---”job holders and good family men” -- were much more pliant, dedicated, loyal, and abundant agents of extermination than the criminals, ‘fanatics, adventurers, sex maniacs, crackpots’ and social failures of the mob” (xliii). The greatest irony is that she herself was punished for disloyalty, for violating the taboos of the tribal group morality of Jewish intellectuals, for saying this.

Arendt is not the only intellectual whose ideas have been denounced because they deny some tenet of a tribal moral code. Haidt provides several examples of intellectuals who have met similar responses to their ideas.[3] Daniel Patrick Moynihan was vilified for having suggested that African-American culture might be one reason for the impoverishment of the black community. Lawrence Summer’s was hounded from the presidency of Harvard University after commenting in a speech that the reason there are no more women in science and mathematics might be due to a statistical observation that males are more likely than females to be on both the lower and the higher ends of the bell curves of intellectual achievement. Noam Chomsky, has met a similar fate after he signed a petition for the Holocaust denier Robert Fourissan. Chomsky denied that he was defending Holocaust denial; he saw himself as a defender of the principles of freedom of thought and opinion and argued that even ideas that he hates should be heard. Chomsky later wrote a short essay on the principle of freedom of speech that was included without his knowledge in a book by Faurisson. When he learned of this, Chomsky asked that it be removed. But he was nevertheless viciously attacked in a book by Werner Cohn, Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers (1995). In his usual matter of fact manner Chomsky has responded by saying, “It seems to me something of a scandal that it is even necessary to debate these issues two centuries after Voltaire defended the right of free expression for views he detested. It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers.”

In her book, Rude Democracy: Civility and Incivility in American Politics (Temple University Press, 2010) Susan Herbst argues that political discourse in America has become intensely partisan, uncivil, debased, and deceitful.[4] This is not a new phenomenon – American politics have always been nasty – but the cable news channels, the 24-hour news cycle, and the Internet have made the mass dissemination of toxic nonsense much easier. The Information Revolution has enabled a culture of mendacity to supplant reasoned and deliberative political discourse in the public arena. She notes that the early media theorists Robert Merton and Paul Lazarfeld predicted that radio and television would send us into a state of “narcotizing dysfunction” in which citizens would become cynically disengaged from strong political engagement But they could not imagine the extent to which we are now drowning in a sea “information” that is false, misleading, distorted, and deceptive.

So much of what passes for political discourse in the present media-saturated culture is really nothing more than the partisans of different tribal moral codes insisting on beliefs that members of their moral tribes believe in which members of other moral tribes deny. The discussion is not about truth; it is about loyalty to the tribal belief system. In order to be a member in good standing of the Republican party one must now believe that Obama is not an American citizen, that global warming is a hoax, and that the way to create jobs is to lower taxes for the rich and cut government spending. People invent elaborate rationalizations for continuing to be loyal to their tribal belief systems even though there abundant evidence that their beliefs are false. Like Eichmann they convince themselves that since all those important and successful people believe these things that they should too. Such is the power of the force fields that align people like mindless iron filings into conformity with the pattern of a group ideology.

Is there anything that can effectively counterbalance and thwart these tendencies towards enforcing mass intellectual conformity? Like many liberal college philosophy professors, I tend to believe that one can do so by teaching young people the arts of critical thinking and logical reasoning. Knowing about the rules of evidence, logical fallacies and rhetorical tricks, and taking part on reasoned debates about social, political, and ethical issues can allow young people to learn how to defend themselves against the daily tsunami of intellectual rubbish. But recent empirical research on learning outcomes among college graduates suggests most students show little if any improvement in their critical reasoning skills.[5]

Herbst argues that, “We cannot rely on standard, even if excellent, civics courses or Introduction to Political Science. We need to teach young people how to argue with vigor, intelligence, and panache.” This is what Arendt did in Eichmann in Jerusalem: she argued with vigor, intelligence, and panache that what happened in Nazi Germany can happen in any human society when the mass media are deployed in order to induce mass ideological conformity to a false tribal morality. That is why Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem ought to be required reading. But there is also the example of her own intellectual courage. Herbst writes that, “being a citizen of a democracy always demanded a sort of courage....the bravery it takes to express opinions and do so civilly.” The example of intellectual courage that Arendt provided in writing her report it is what today’s students should come to know and emulate. But they should also heed her warning about the potential for ordinary men to commit crimes against humanity by not thinking for themselves and simply going along with their tribal moral code. This timeless lesson is particularly timely right now.

Postscript (4/17/2011) I presented this short essay at the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Association for Core Text and Courses, New Haven CT on Friday 4/15/2011 as part of a panel on the concept of evil. The comments and discussion brought out more sharply the contrast between Eichmann's moral character and Arendt's --the one being an intellectual conformist and the other a non-conformist, indeed, an iconoclast who was willing to take the risk of criticizing the ideas of the members of her own "tribe." This morning I found this short essay by Ralph Seliger "Hannah Arendt: From Iconocast to Icon" that makes a similar point.

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[1] A new study of the trial by Deborah Lipstadt, The Eichmann Trial, has just been published. Some 400 hours of the entire trial are available in the English language on Youtube . For the trial transcripts, click here. There is also a film by Eyal Sivan, The Specialist. The two judgments, of the District Court of Jerusalemand the Supreme Court, are also available.

[2] Jonathan Haidt. “The Bright Future of Post-Partisan Social Psychology”. Delivered to the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, January 27, 2011. Available online: http://people.virginia.edu/~jdh6n/postpartisan.html. Visited 9 April 2011.

[3] Haidt himself commented that he went out on a limb in this talk, and declined to give any further examples from his own field of social psychology, saying it was “too risky” for him to do so. But he did go on to demonstrate that the ratio between social psychologists who describe themselves as politically liberal is 266 times greater than those who describe themselves as politically conservative, even though poll results consistently show that within the general population the ratio of liberals to conservatives is 1 to 2.

[4] Susan Herbst. “Rude Democracy in America: Can We Overcome it?” Phi Beta Kappa, Key Reporter, Spring 2011, pp. 8-9.

[5]Richard Arum, et. al., Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses. (University of Chicago, 2011) studied 2322 college students at 24 colleges and universities over four years. They found that, “large numbers didn't learn the critical thinking, complex reasoning and written communication skills that are widely assumed to be at the core of a college education”. After four years 36% showed no significant improvement in higher order thinking skills. They did find, however, that, “Students who majored in the traditional liberal arts — including the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences and mathematics — showed significantly greater gains over time than other students in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills.” See Sara Rimer, The Hechinger Report. “Study: Many college students not Learning to think critically,” January 17, 2011.

The Responsibility to Protect

At the conclusion of the UN Summit in September 2005, the Heads of State agreed to the following text concerning the responsibility to protect:

"The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic, humanitarian and other peaceful means, in accordance with Chapters VII and VIII of the Charter, to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII , on a case-by-case basis and in cooperation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities manifestly fail to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity."

UN Security Council resolution 1973, which authorized the imposition of a no-fly zone over Libya, and also the use of all necessary means to protect the civilian population, was passed unanimously (albeit with five abstentions) under the authority of Chapter VII of the UN Charter.

Chapter VII, Article 42 of the UN Charter says: "Should the Security Council consider that measures provided for in Article 41 would be inadequate or have proved to be inadequate, it may take such action by air, sea, or land forces as may be necessary to maintain or restore international peace and security. Such action may include demonstrations, blockade, and other operations by air, sea, or land forces of Members of the United Nations."

The UN Charter is a treaty and all members are bound by its provisions. The United States was founding member of the United Nations and the US Senate has ratified the UN Charter.

The US Constitution, Article Six says that: "treaties of the United States made according to it, [are] the supreme law of the land." This statement is found in the Supremacy Clause which created the Union by making the Constitution, Federal Statutes and Treaties, supreme over state laws. In other words, there is nothing more fundamental than this clause to the United States Constitution.

UN SC Res. 1973, which you can read here, authorizes Member States to take" all necessary measures to enforce compliance with the ban on flights".

So the involvement of the United States in this UN action undertaken for the purpose of human rights protection, is LEGAL under international law. The Korean War under President Harry Truman was also authorized in this way, as was the first Gulf War under President George H. W. Bush. The 2003 US invasion of Iraq under George W. Bush, was ILLEGAL under the terms of the UN Charter. It was also, therefore, ILLEGAL under the US Constitution, since the UN Charter binds all member states, and the US is a member state which has ratified the Charter, making it the "supreme law" of the land.

The War Powers Resolution of 1973 allows US presidents to commit US military forces to action without a formal declaration of war, but requires that he notify the Congress within 48 hours of committing US forces to action and requires that those forces shall not remain in action for more than 60 days without a congressional authorization of the use of force or a declaration of war. Incidentally, this resolution was vetoed by President Nixon, but his veto was overridden.

President Obama officially informed Congress that he had taken the actions that began on Friday March 19th, on Monday March 22nd. (see this ABC news report). So he was a little late, but he did comply with the requirements of the War Powers Act.

So the answer is, "yes" what President Obama did was legal under both international and US law. It was also the morally right thing to do. It will also, I believe, prove to be very much in the US's national interest to get on the right side of history in the making. It also, as a matter of fact, probably saved thousands of lives. Finally, it denied Gadhafi the opportunity to send the message to other tyrants that they can prevail through ruthless repression of popular dissent and protest.

So, for those of you who are concerned about this UN action, what is your problem? Would you rather have waited longer for him to act? Had he done so, on Monday we would be cleaning up after the bloodbath that Colonel Gadhafi had vowed he would create in Benghazi. Remember, he said last week, "There will be no mercy". This sounds to me like a statement of intent to commit war crimes or crimes against humanity. If he ever faces the ICC Tribunal, this statement can be used as evidence. Would you rather have prevented this humanitarian catastrophe or did what Clinton did in Rwanda and Bosnia, and sit idly by while tens of thousands were murdered?

The Stakes in Libya

 

If Qadhafi succeeds in squashing this revolt though the use of massive force, it will send the wrong message to dictators and tyrants elsewhere. They will say: “In Egypt Mubarak did not use violence to hold on to power, and he is gone. In Libya, Qadhafi called in mercenaries and cracked down ruthlessly, and he survived.” What message will other dictators draw from this?

But it is better if the Libyan people succeed in liberating their country themselves, than if foreign governments, particularly those with economic interests in the country, were to send in their own troops to oust Qadhafi. But at what price in human life?

Federal Judge In D.C. Upholds Health Care Reform, Says Some Arguments 'Ignore Reality'

This article explains the opinion of U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler in upholding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act:

Federal Judge In D.C. Upholds Health Care Reform, Says Some Arguments 'Ignore Reality'

The gist of the argument she relies on is when a person chooses not to purchase health insurance this is an "affirmative action" which has real consequences for interstate commerce which the Federal Government has the constitutional power to regulate. The main real consequence is that it drives up the cost of private health insurance because it forces those individuals and families who do buy it to pay higher costs in order to cover the cost of the "free riders" who use health care services but do not pay for them.

Where else does this "free rider" issue crop up? Well it arises in relation to union collective bargaining agreements as well. In a collective bargaining agreement a union negotiates for favorable terms and conditions of employment on behalf of all of the employees in a bargaining unit. The benefits gained through these negotiations are enjoyed by all employees. But in some states, legislatures have passed so-called "right to work" laws that stipulate that workers who benefit from union agreements cannot be required to pay an agency fee to the union to compensate it for acting on their behalves.

This AFL-CIO page provides a short primer on the reasons why it opposes "right to work" laws. The key point is that allowing bargaining unit members to not pay for benefits they derive from union representation is in fact unfair to the workers who join the union and pay dues. The real consequence of "right to work" is to allow some people the "right to be free riders."

This is one of the ideas that motivates Libertarians and Tea Party Populists: they argue that individuals should enjoy the right to be free riders, that they should not have to pay for benefits that they enjoy that result from public policies and other collective agreements. The more thoughtful proponents of this view say they would rather not enjoy the benefits in the first place, or pay for them themselves, which is one way of avoiding free riding. But the muddled mass of conservatives what to have it both ways -- they want to enjoy to benefits of collective agreements while avoiding the costs of paying for them.

Welfare liberals, on the other hand, want to have publicly negotiated shared social benefits, such as public education and public health care, and insist that in order for these programs to be fair and cost effective, the burden of paying for them must be shared equitably among all of those who benefit.

So why are Republicans, Libertarians, and Tea Party Populists against the unions in Wisconsin and elsewhere? Why are they opposing the affordable health care law? Why are the trying to defund public education? Public broadcasting? And virtually every other public program except those associated with the military industrial complex?

It is because they claim the right to be free riders. This is really the great irony: libertarians often say paying taxes is tantamount to slavery. But, in reality, it is the liberty to free ride that forces other people to pay to support the ones who want to ride for free. Free riding is really a form of economic exploitation that disguises itself as personal liberty.

Wisconsin Is a Battleground Against the Billionaire Kochs' Plan to Break Labor's Back

Wisconsin Is a Battleground Against the Billionaire Kochs' Plan to Break Labor's Back | News & Politics | AlterNet

This article provide more direct evidence for the idea that the plutocracy is intent on destroying the last bastion of unionism in America -- public sector employees. Their strategy is to employ the politics of resentment to pit one segment of the middle class (read working class) against another, in this case, private sector employees most of who are not unionized against public sector employees where 1 in 3 are members of unions such as the AFT.

The propaganda talking point is to suggest that public sector employees who enjoy decent benefits they struggled to get over many decades of tough labor negotiations are somehow responsible for the fiscal problems many states are now facing. The real cause of the state deficits, of course, is the Great Recession, which public employees had no role in producing.

It was produced by greed, lax government regulation of the financial services industry, and the economic ideology known as "market fundamentalism". According to this winners-take-all mentality, there must be no part of the economy that is not subject to corporate rule. That is why the Republicans, who are an entirely owned and controlled subsidiary of Corporate America, are now attacking public sector unions, public broadcasting, public radio, and indeed any social formation that is not directly subservient to corporate control.

But truth has no bearing on this political strategy: it is driven by the idea that one can gain political support among private sector workers by making them resentful of the slightly better benefits that some public sector workers have. This is a classic "leveling-down" strategy of class warfare; the goal is to break public sector unions by convincing non-union workers that their plight is caused by there fellow workers, not by the corpocracy that runs America (and much of the rest of the world). If this campaign is successful it will mark the final triumph of the investing class over the working class and will ensure that income and wealth inequality will not be effectively challenged by the labor movement.

Here is how Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker expressed this divide and rule strategy:

“We can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and taxpayers who foot the bills are the have-nots,” Mr. Walker, a Republican, said in a speech. “The bottom line is that we are going to look at every legal means we have to try to put that balance more on the side of taxpayers.”

This is utter rubbish. Government workers -- civil servants -- are taxpayers too. They are also voters: the latter is what rankles Governor Walker because as voters they did not support him in the election. So this is also political payback: if one wants to ensure that Republicans control even more of the state governments than they presently do, bust the labor unions which (usually) support the Democrats.

However, as the demonstrations in Wisconsin are showing, these union workers are not going down without a fight. Now is the time for solidarity, not only with the demonstrators in the Mideast, but also those in the Midwest.

How the middle class became the underclass - Feb. 16, 2011

How the middle class became the underclass - Feb. 16, 2011

Heading towards class warfare? We have been engaged in class warfare, as this article demonstrates, for several decades. The plutocrats are winning. They have decreed that one can only refer to the struggle as "class warfare" when the middle class and the poor fight back.

Why Hopenhagen Turned into Nopenhagen

While it is not over until it is over, on this the penultimate day of the most important international conference on global climate change in this decade, it seems pretty clear that it is going to end in failure. There will be no binding treaty. It is not clear there will even be an agreed framework for such a treaty. There is no agreement or targets or benchmarks. Maybe there will be some progress on REDD and on a fund to help vulnerable nations adapt to some of the predicted effects of global warming. But overall, the COP15 Climate Conference in Copenhagen will go down in history as a failure.

Why did this happen? Did it really have to turn out this way? I am sure there will be lots of post-mortems written in the coming days and weeks. Here is my first volley.

The US never joined the 1997 Kyoto Treaty that COP15 was supposed to come up with a new treaty to extend or replace. At the time the U.S. Congress was controlled by the Republican Party (the GOP -- Guardians of Profit). The nominally Democratic President, Bill Clinton, knew full well that getting this treaty ratified in the US Senate had about the same chances as a snowball in hell. So even with Al Gore as his Vice-President, he caved to Republican opposition and adopted a negotiating position that said that the US would not commit to binding carbon emission reductions until the developing countries also accepted them.

At the time, major developing economies such as China, India and Brazil, were refusing to do so because, they argued, most all of the CO2 in the atmosphere that was causing the problem was the result of historical emissions by the older industrialized countries. most notably the USA, which at the time accounted for roughly 25% of global emissions but had only 5% of the world's population. So there was an "After you Alfonse" type stalemate. The US would not agree to binding emission targets until the developing countries did, and they would not agree to reduce their emissions until the USA owned up to its responsibility.

But things began to change dramatically two years ago at the Bali climate conference when the US representative was heartily booed when she reiterated this tired old position that the Bush administration had stuck with. Moreover, China and other major developing industrial countries announced at Bali that they were now willing to commit themselves to carbon emission targets, removing one of the big obstacles to successfully negotiating a new treaty regime in Copenhagen this December.

So what happened? Well we got a new US President who says he is committed to the US doing its part to address the threat of global climate disruption. And now the US Congress is controlled by members of his own party in both the House and the Senate. Good opportunity right?

Wrong. The US moved the goal-posts. Now they are saying that they cannot commit to any binding agreement with robust emission reduction targets because they are not sure they can get any bill through the Senate unless Senators from coal-producing and oil-producing, and smoke stack industry states can be assured that China, and India and Brazil are not cheating on their claimed emission reductions and taking jobs away from American workers while continuing to pollute the atmosphere.

The developing nations have bristled at the suggestion that they cannot be trusted to keep their words, so we have another "After you Alfonse" type stalemate. This time the US will not say it can commit to binding emissions targets unless the developing nations first commit to a verification scheme of some sort. While the developing nations are saying, we already came halfway on our own, but what have you (the USA) done? Bupkiss.

The emissions targets suggested in the current House bill that form the basis of the current US negotiating position, are terribly weak. They are really only 4% below the internationally accepted 1990 baseline, and they are not even law yet and may never get to be law. The Europeans, the Japanese, and other developed countries, have stated that they will commit to 2020 reduction targets below the 1990 baseline of between 20-25%

Why is the US target so weak? Because, well, you see, we have this stupid procedural rule in the Senate that says that you need 60 senators to end debate on proposed legislation. If you cannot reach the 60 vote threshold you cannot end debate on the floor, and if you cannot end debate it you cannot vote on a bill and perhaps pass it.

That is why Sen. John Kerry went to Copenhagen this week to try to reassure COP15 delegates that the US Senate will pass a bill this spring with binding emissions targets, but only if the Chinese and other developing countries first agree to a verification scheme that they can use to convince recalcitrant and obstructionist Senators (read Republicans, a few conservadems, and of course our friend Joe Lieberman) from filibustering to block it in the Senate just as they have done with Health Care Insurance Reform this fall. So the Fate of the Earth comes down, again, to the dysfunctional US Senate and its stupid filibuster rule.

Or does it? According to the US Constitution, treaties must be ratified by two-thirds of the Senate, that is, by 66+1 Senators. In the United States, the term "treaty" has a different, more restricted legal sense than exists in international law. U.S. law distinguishes what it calls treaties from treaty executive agreements, congressional-executive agreements, and sole executive agreements. All four classes are equally treaties under international law; they are distinct only from the perspective of internal American law.

The distinctions are primarily concerning their method of ratification. Whereas treaties require advice and consent by two-thirds of the Senate, sole executive agreements may be executed by the President acting alone. Some treaties grant the President the authority to fill in the gaps with executive agreements, rather than additional treaties or protocols. Currently, most international agreements are executed by executive agreement rather than treaties at a rate of 10:1.

Despite the relative ease of executive agreements, the President still often chooses to pursue the formal treaty process over an executive agreement in order to gain congressional support on matters that require the Congress to pass implementing legislation or appropriate funds, and those agreements that impose long-term, complex legal obligations on the U.S.

So what are the chances that President Obama is going to use his power to make executive agreements to bind the US, even provisionally, to a binding treaty? Bupkiss. He needs political cover from the Congress. This is also the reason why he is not going to use the newly sanctioned power of the EPA to directly regulate greenhouse gasses as harmful pollutants. Doing so would bypass the Congress and expose him to merciless attacks from the GOP, threatening his prospects for re-election in 2012.

But in order to get Congressional cover (buy-in) he needs both the House and the Senate, and we already know what a cesspool of deceit and obstruction the Senate is these days. So, sadly, once again, the Fate of the Earth hangs on the existence of a stupid procedural rule of the Senate that prevents electoral majorities from passing legislation without the consent of 60 Senators before they can end debate.

To be fair, the failure of COP15 is not entirely due to US non-commitment. Our neighbor the the North, Oh Canada, with its current conservative government, has linked itself to the US position on reduction targets and binding agreements and is standing with the US in blocking a deal in Copenhagen. Canada is, in case you don't know, the #1 supplier of petroleum to the US market, far ahead of the Middle East. Canada also has the Athabasca oil sands (or tar sands) in Northern Alberta, which are really going to start paying off big time once we reach Peak Oil (perhaps we already have) and the price of petroleum starts to relentlessly rise as supply declines while demands increases.

Peak Oil is the real underlying driver of the "go slow" or "go not at all" approaches to an energy transition in this century. The oil producing states, and the major oil companies that hold long term leases, want to delay the transition to a carbon-neutral energy economy as long as they possibly can. It they don't they stand to lose something on the order of $100 trillion in revenues during the remainder of this century. Much of that money that would be left on the table if the world manages to accelerate the shift to carbon neutrality sooner rather than later by making green energy cheaper than dirty petroleum and other fossil fuels. The environmentalists, of course, are worried that if we prolong the end of the Oil Age we are risking cooking the planet and producing catastrophic changes in the climate that will take centuries to correct, if they can ever be corrected at all.

Hey, but what does catastrophic damage to the Earth, its people, and its living species, matter if the oil companies lose all those healthy profits in the process? The Bush administration made no bones about its non-energy policy being designed (in still secret meetings with oil company officials in Dick Cheney's office) to protect future oil company profits. At least Dubya was not a hypocrite.

But Obama campaigned on the slogans "Hope You Can Believe In" and "Yes We Can" Well those slogans are wearing pretty thin right now. If Obama is not willing to take any political risks to lead this country to a better place, then in three years people in his base will not be talking about "Hope" any more. They will be saying "Nope."

The Great Health Care Give-Away of 2009

In an earlier blog post I explained why health care insurance reform without a robust public option is a huge government give-away to the private health insurance industry. But that is just what is coming out of the US Senate this week. Harry Reid has reportedly dumped both the public option and the idea that people 55-64 years of age should be able to buy into Medicare, in order appease Joe Lieberman (the Senator from Aetna), Ben Nelson (another recipient of insurance industry largesse) and other conservadems.

This is truly outrageous! What we are getting from the Sausage Factory that is the Senate is a bill that will require millions of Americans to purchase expensive private health insurance, many of whom will be subsidized by taxpayers dollars in order to do so, with absolutely no mechanism to prevent these corporations from using the proceeds to pad their profit margins. This is disgraceful.

Progressives need to learn a lesson from this. The reason why this happened is nicely summed up in an article by John Neffinger "Why We Lost Health Care." The US Senate is a dysfunctional and undemocratic institution.

Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean has now called upon democrats to "Kill the Senate Bill" and start over with the House of Representatives. Without a public option or a Medicare buy-in provision it is not real reform at all. It is just a huge corporate welfare bill for the private insurance industry.

The people need to rise up and demand better of their government.

Pascal's Wager and Climate Change (Revised)

Current climate science suggests that the Earth's temperature has been steadily rising due to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions produced by our use of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and gas, and that the rate at which are pumping CO2 and other gases into the atmosphere exceeds the ability of the oceans and the plants to absorb them. If GHG emissions continue unabated then, scientists predict that the Earth's average temperature will continue to rise, and this may cause some potentially very serious climatic changes such as melting glaciers and icecaps, rise in sea levels, species displacement and extinction, spread of tropical diseases, refugee flows, droughts, floods, increasingly powerful cyclones, and so forth.

While there is a strong consensus among climate scientists that the theory of anthropocentric (human-induced) global warming is true with a high degree of certainty, a great many people still refuse to believe it. Some of these skeptics are suspicious of the explanation that humans burning fossil fuels is the cause of the warming trend and point out the existence of some studies that cast doubt on the consensus view (Alexander Cockburn claims the theory is a farce) . The recent release of "climate gate" emails from scientists at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit suggesting that they had tailored some data to fit this theory fueled climate change skeptics and deniers. Recent Polls show that the percentage of Americans who believe in anthropogenic global warming has declined. Some climate skeptics believe that the whole story is a hoax concocted by a vast left-wing conspiracy. Many of these climate skeptics are also vehemently opposed to the world's nations taking any serious steps to reduce GHG emissions in order to mitigate the threats predicted to arise due to global warming by reducing the use of fossil fuels and moving rapidly to a carbon-neutral energy economy.

But the question about whether or not we should now take serious steps to reduce GHG emissions is a classic case of decision-making under uncertainty. The question whether we should believe or disbelieve in current climate science is analogous to Pascal's Wager, named for the mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) whose Pensées contained the following intriguing paragraph:

“God is, or He is not.” But to which side shall we incline? Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separated us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up... Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. You have two things to lose, the true and the good; and two things to stake, your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose... But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is... If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is.

In this argument Pascal portrays the decision about whether to believe in God or not as a wager made under conditions of uncertainty. In modern decision theory the logic of his argument is represented by a decision matrix such as the following:

	God exists (G)	God does not exist (~G)
Believe God exists (B)	eternal heavenly bliss	-N (none)
Not Believe God exists (~B)	eternal damnation or (perhaps) purgatory	+N (none)

His argument suggests that if God exists, the reward for believing that God exists is very high, whereas the cost of not believing in God (if indeed He does exist) is very great --- eternal damnation. Therefore, it is a good bet to believe in God. If, on the other hand, it turns out that God does not exist, then the benefits as well as the costs are negligible (perhaps some Sunday mornings wasted going to Church), and perhaps, if God does not exist, we will never really know anyway whether our bet paid off.

Philosophers have found various reasons to object to this argument as providing a good basis for theism. But I leave these philosophical niceties aside, interested readers might want to consult the article on Pascal's Wager in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. My intention here is to suggest that there is a similar (and much better) argument to be made about the uncertainty of catastrophic climate change due to anthropogenic (human-induced) changes in the concentration of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the Earth' atmosphere.

There will be a big payoff if we believe in current climate science and take steps to reduce carbon emissions, and it turns out the theory was correct. And there will also be a big loss if we do not believe in current climate science, when it turns out that the theory was correct -- oops, we cooked the planet. Assuming that there is a greater than zero chance that current climate science is correct, then the rational wager would be to accept it and act so as to gain the best outcome and avoid the worst one, even if there remain some doubts about whether the current science is indeed correct. As a decision matrix this set of choices would be represented like this:

	Current Climate Science is correct (C)	Climate Science is not correct (~C)
We believe in climate science and act (B)	F1	F2
We do not believe in climate science and do not act (~B)	F3	F4

What are the relative values of F1...F4 in this payoff matrix? In order to make the answers more concrete suppose that you will be able to experience the planet Earth as it will exist 100 years from now. Perhaps you will still be alive because of miraculous new lifespan enhancing medical technologies. Or if you prefer a more supernatural possibility, suppose that you do die but will be reincarnated as one of your own great great grandchildren, or as another member of their generation.

Let's first examine the value of F3. If we do not believe in current climate science and act (~B) to mitigate its predicted catastrophic effects by rapidly transforming our energy economy so as to radically reduce GHG emissions, and it turns out that the current science is correct (C) in predicting catastrophic climate changes 100 years from now if we do not act, then you or your great great grandchildren will be very unhappy campers on Planet Earth. The payoff value of F3 (~B & C) is strongly negative. How would you feel about F3? Well probably a lot like an atheist who dies and meets St. Peter at the Pearly Gates --"Oops, I guess I was wrong, Gulp!"

What then is the value of F1? In this case, we decided to believe in current climate science and acted in order to mitigate its worst predicted effects, and it turned out that our current theories were indeed correct (B & C). The payoff for F1 is then very high indeed. F1 is analogous to the situation of the faithful religious believers who discover that the God they accepted does indeed exist, except that their reward is an earthly one, a planet whose climate is not greatly altered and disrupted by human activities.

So, just looking at these two values F1 and F3, we can say that F1 dominates F3, that is, that the expected utility of believing in climate change is far greater than the expected utility of not believing in it. Therefore, even with uncertainty about C, it is rational to bet that current climate science is correct and take steps now to significantly reduce our GHG emissions.

But we must also consider the costs and benefits of F2 and F4, the cases where current climate science is not correct. Suppose that in 100 years we learn that the climate science of the early 21st century was wrong in predicting catastrophic climatic changes due to anthropogenic GHG emissions (~C), but because people in the early 21st century believed in it (B) they spent a lot of money and effort on energy efficiency, electric cars, windmills, solar panels, and hydrogen fuels cells, and all that green stuff. How would you feel about that? I guess you would probably feel pretty okay about it; it would be kind of like learning that you had already been saved through God's grace, and it really didn't matter whether you went to church or not, even though you did. But your ancestors did make a big effort to "Go Green" for nothing, so let's say that F2 is marginally negative.

Now, finally, for F4 suppose that at the present we do nothing to prevent further increases in global temperature by altering our current fossil fuel energy economy (the so-called "business as usual" scenario), but that it turns out that current climate science is wrong, and nothing very bad happens. This is like finding one has a "Get into Heaven Free" card even though one lived a life of sin. One can imagine this would make one pretty happy. So let's say F4 is marginally positive.

Since F1 and F2 together still yield a strongly positive payoff, while F3 and F4 still yield a strongly negative one, it is still rational to bet that current climate science is correct and act on that belief.

Critics of this argument may want to quibble with my estimate of the cost of F2. Climate skeptics are likely to argue that the cost of mitigating global warming is going to be greater than marginally negative. We will have to make some real sacrifices in order to reduce our GHG emissions to safe levels by mid-century. Let's assume this is correct. Even so, it is worth it because the expected loss if we do nothing is too great. As the authors of a recent report on the economics of climate change argue, it is also possible to think of the choice we face as analogous to the decision to buy fire insurance:

The reason people buy fire insurance is not because they are certain that their house will burn down; rather it is because they cannot be sufficiently certain that it will not burn down. Likewise, the projections of dangerous climate risk if the world exceeds 350 ppm CO2 in the long run are not certainties; they are, on the contrary, necessarily uncertain. If the worst happens our grandchildren will inherit a degraded Earth that will not support anything like the life that we have enjoyed. On the other hand, if we prepare for the worst, but it does not happen, we will have invested more than, in perfect hindsight, was necessary in clean energy, conservation, and carbon-free technologies. How would we feel about discovering we had done too much about climate change, compared to discovering that we had done too little? (DeCario, S.J., Norgaard, R .B, Norman, C. S., and Sheeran, K.A. "The Economics of 350: The Benefits and Costs of Climate Stabilization." Economics for Equity and Environment. www.e3network.org. October 2009, p. 6.)

So how much is catastrophic climate change insurance going to cost? According to this study, which is based on a comparable analysis of several economic projections done both by business-sponsored groups, and nongovernmental and academic groups, it is estimated that climate insurance would cost between 1% and 3% of global GDP in order to reach the lowest carbon target currently being discussed, 350 ppm. As the authors of this report reckon:

Suppose the cost of climate protection turns out to be 2.5% of global GDP, toward the high end of the global scenarios just discussed. In an economy that is growing at 2.5% per year, a rate that is common for developed countries, spending 2.5% of GDP on climate protection each year would be equivalent to skipping one year's growth, and then resuming. Average incomes would take 29 years to double from today's level, compared to 28 in the absence of climate costs. In an economy experiencing 10 percent annual growth, as China has in many recent years, imposing a cost of 2.5% per year is equivalent to skipping 3 months of growth; if 10% growth is sustained, average incomes would reach twice the current level in 86 months, compared to 83 months in the absence of climate costs.

In fact, these authors argue that at the early stages of a climate mitigation program we might actually save money because we are reaping the benefits of greater energy efficiencies. But the bottom line conclusion derived from this study is that, "There are no reasonable studies that say that a 350 ppm stabilization target will destroy the economy; there are no studies that claim that it is desirable to wait before taking action on climate protection" If this is correct, then buying climate insurance is a good investment because we can easily afford it and with a relatively modest cost we can avert a disaster in the making.

On the other hand, if we disbelieve in current climate science and do nothing now to reduce our carbon emissions, then either we discover that we spent 1%-3% of global GDP converting to a carbon-neutral energy earlier than we had to, or we find that we overheated the Earth and our house burned down.

So you climate change skeptics and deniers out there, which risk would you rather take? Would you rather that we now take steps to prevent catastrophic climate change when we can easily afford climate insurance, or do you want to go on business as usual without spending anything on insurance and risk the catastrophic climate changes that current science is predicting? You must choose now. Choose wisely.

My Apology

I have never killed anyone.
I have never stolen anything.
I have never been arrested.
I have never cheated on my wife.
I pay my taxes.
I don't covet other people's possessions.
I don't spread lies.
I don't use racial epithets.
I am productively employed.
I exercise regularly.
I eat fruits and vegetables.
I keep myself well-informed.
I never hit my children.
I donate to charities.
I recycle paper, cans and plastic.

I am sorry.
Being good is boring.

Please forgive me.

Joe Wilson's outburst

Rep. Joe Wilson's (R -SC) shouting "You lie!" during President Obama's nationally televised speech to a joint session of Congress last week proved that Van Jones was right when he said the Republicans are assholes.

A health insurance mandate without the public option is a real loser

In his speech last night President Obama for the first time made it clear that he will be insisting on a mandate for individuals and most companies to buy health insurance.

This is a huge boon for the private insurance companies who stand to gain millions of new members. However, if as proposed they will not be allowed to "cherry pick" subscribers or deny benefits for pre-existing conditions, then their bottom-lines will also take a hit.

The natural thing for them to do would be to pass on these additional costs to their members in the form of higher premiums, larger deductibles, fewer benefits or all three.

If there is no strong national nonprofit public health insurance plan they are competing with, this is just what they will do. The result will be a government mandated windfall for the private insurance companies, and higher (not lower) premiums for the insured.

With a public plan, however, they will be forced to offset the increased costs of "stable and secure" health insurance with real efficiencies and even, perhaps, by forgoing some profits and disappointing their Wall Street analysts.

This is why having a public health insurance option is so essential to the overall effectiveness of health insurance reform.

Wishing to secure insurance industry profits, some Repbulicans are now proposing that there be a waiting period before the public plan is introduced, and suggesting a trigger under which it would only be introduced after this period if the anticipated cost savings in health insurance do not materialize.

The idea of delaying implementation of a public option so the insurance companies can enjoy several more years of windfall profits is crap that ought to be firmly rejected. Those who favor this idea are counting on being able to demonstrate that the reforms enacted this year did not reduce costs (as they won't without a public option) and then arguing for their repeal hoping that this will give them an issue to regain control of the Congress several years down the line. In the meanwhile their allies in the private insurance business will be reaping the benefits. This is why stock in the major private insurers rose after Obama's speech.

Addendum (9/11/09) An interesting commentary by R J Eskow published this morning makes a similar argument while also explaining why health insurance company stocks went up the day after the President's speech.

Addendum (9/12/09) Jed Lewison has also noticed that a mandate without a robust public option is a gift to the private health insurance industry.

Addendum (9/13/09) David Sirota provides examples of other "triggers" that are legislative bullcrap.

What Ever Happened to Moral Hazard?

The term "moral hazard" has a long history, but it was brought into prominence by economist Kenneth Arrow to describe situations in which governments step in to rescue private financial institutions from the consequences of their own risky or imprudent behavior. The term itself has an interesting etymology; hazard was originally a dice game, like craps, in which bettors would often wager (and lose) their fortunes, which, come to think of it, is really not that different than banks making disastrous bets on subprime mortgages, credit default swaps, toxic assets and the other forms of financial chicanery that caused the financial meltdown in September 2008 and let to a global recession that is still not over.

The word "moral" also did not necessarily have to do with ethical evaluation and accountability as it does today. According to Martha C. White, "moral hazard was an assessment of risk based on the situation. For instance, a log cabin was more susceptible to fire damage than a stone cottage. Over the years, though, “moral hazard” also came to mean a situation in which the insured became cavalier about due diligence on their end—leaving a cooking fire unattended in that log cabin, for instance—banking on restitution in the event of a disaster" [Martha C. White (2008) . What is a Moral Hazard? From Slate - The Big Money].

The basic idea of moral hazard as we use the term today is that people and institutions will be encouraged to take greater risks than they should or otherwise would if they believe that someone else will take responsibility for rescuing them if things turn out really badly. For instance, the government, an insurance company, or bleeding heart liberal do-gooders will step in to save people from the worst consequences of their own irresponsible behavior. If the government has a track record of stepping in to rescue banks that are "too big to fail" from the consequences of their own greed and poor judgment, this creates a moral hazard that encourages future risky behavior on the parts of bankers.

This outcome is particularly likely, many people believe, if those who were rescued in the past are not forced to accept any of the costs of their own bad behavior and, moreover, are rescued without agreeing to accept any new regulations that would prevent them from making similarly poor choices in the future. This sort of governmental response to a financial crisis rewards irresponsible behavior by privatizing the profits while socializing the costs. It is a perverse incentive that encourages irresponsibility.

This is just what the US government did last fall in response to Wall Street's bad bets and the collapse of credit markets. Many people, including myself, accepted the argument at the time that, although a massive government bailout could indeed create moral hazards, this risk was insignificant compared to the very real and immediate risk of a panic that would trigger an economic depression. In doing so I had assumed that eventually we would start addressing the risk of moral hazard and do something to re-regulate the financial industry in order to prevent the banks and insurance companies that were rescued from engaging in the very kinds of risky investments that got them, and all the rest of us, into this mess. Whatever happened to that?

What happened is that financial re-regulation got put on Obama's back burner and no one is talking about it any more. Now people are talking about a "government take-over" of health care insurance. The language of "take overs" is important, because the idea resonates with something a lot of people object to about the way the government has handled the financial crisis, the recession, the failures of GM and Chrysler, and yes, even the "Cash for Clunkers" program that is due to expire tomorrow.

In each of these cases it appears that government intervention undermines the value of personal responsibility. Steeped in the Protestant Ethic of self-reliance and independence, there are many American's whose sense of morality is offended when they think that the government, or indeed anyone else, is planning to "take over" matters that should properly be one's own business. Adults are supposed to take care of themselves and it is an affront to one's dignity to have the government involvement in what should be a matter of personal responsibility. The term "take over" also connotes loss of control, so the term delivers a double-whammy to people who fear that the government is trying to run their lives.

Obama and his advisors would do well to recognize this and to start re-framing the national debate over health insurance reform to highlight the need for greater personal responsibility in matters of health. They should hammer on this theme whenever they talk about the way health insurance works in this country. What we really have is "sick care" rather than health care. People with health insurance are not necessarily encouraged to stay healthy by, for instance, joining a gym, stopping smoking, losing weight, getting regular physicals, engaging in wellness programs, eating healthier foods, and so forth. Rather, they are paying for the assurance that that when they get sick or are injured someone will help them pay their medical bills.

The so-called "public option" (a terrible name) needs to be described as a low-cost form of health insurance that will create incentives for people to get primary medical care, engage in personal behaviors that encourage wellness and disease prevention, pay doctors and hospitals for keeping people healthy rather than treating them when they get sick, and employing the best evidence-based treatments available in a coordinated and efficient manner. It should be called something like "WellCare" or "Amerihealth" to give it the right vibes. Above all the pitch should emphasize that it is not a substitute for individuals taking personal responsibility for their own health. Rather it will operate so as to make it easier for folks to do so by creating positive incentives that will lead to better health outcomes and lower costs for everyone.

The outstanding success of the "Cash for Clunkers" program demonstrates that even proud and independent-minded Americans are not averse to accepting government help in doing what they should be doing for themselves anyway. "Sure," they will say, "I probably made a mistake when I bought that Ford Expedition ten years ago, never expecting that the price of gasoline would go over $4.00 a gallon." "But, I am damn happy to accept a government check for $4500 to trade it in for a Toyota Corolla. If the banks can get billions why can't I get a few thousand?" The moral hazard here, that people will continue to make stupid consumer decisions expecting that the government will bail them out, is not so serious, and most of us will just shrug our shoulders and accept the risk.

But what about the people who never bought an SUV in the first place, or who never smoked, who exercise regularly, eat fresh healthy food, invested their money prudently and cautiously, and generally accepted personal responsibility for taking good care of themselves? What are we getting? We are getting screwed. We did the right thing, after all, and accepted our personal responsibility and also some share of our social responsibilities. We could at least get a little credit, you know.

There is, in fact, no contradiction between accepting personal responsibility for caring for oneself, and also accepting a share of social responsibility for caring for others. Generally speaking, living a life of personal responsibility is an achievement for which individuals can be justly proud. Living such a life is also, generally speaking, a precondition for accepting one's social responsibilities, particularly those that involve caring for others. Accepting the burdens of parenthood and raising children is the primary way in which most adults express their social responsibility, their willingness to make sacrifices for the good of others. This is fine and good, and responsible parents should get a lot of credit.

Some individuals extend their social responsibility beyond the confines of their own family, and accept some responsibility for fixing some of the "big problems of society". Such people manifest a higher virtue by voluntarily "taking responsibility" for helping to "repair the world", but those who stop at personal responsibility and familial responsibility are not to be faulted on that account. These folks understand that by taking care of themselves and their loved ones, they are doing a good service to society by not having to ask anyone else for help in what should properly be their own responsibility.

These folks don't get enough credit; we should let them know that by caring well for themselves and their families they are fulfilling their primary social responsibilities. But, they might also need to be reminded that their are lots of folks who are not so fortunate, who for one reason or another, mostly not because of their own choices and actions, are unable to fully take care of themselves and for minor children who depend on them, and could use some help getting to a position of self-reliance. Framed in this way, most people will respond with compassion rather than with scorn or indifference. Particularly if one invokes the principle of reciprocity (popularly known as the Golden Rule) and proposes that they themselves should be entitled to similar help if ever they falter and cannot fully take care of themselves. We humans are wired for reciprocal altruism; we just have to figure out how to activate these responses when mutual aid is mediated by large governmental institutions.

If people take personal responsibility for themselves, and accept a fair share of their social responsibilities, they should be lauded and indeed rewarded for doing so. The problem, once again, is one of perverse incentives. We are embracing policies that discourage people from taking personal responsibility when we should be doing the opposite. The idea that our major institutions should be incentivizing and rewarding both personal and social responsibility is a winner both politically and morally.

So why don't more politicians get it?

Addendum 9/12/09: This New York Times story explains what happened to the idea of moral hazard in the financial industry. It morphed into I.B.G.