Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

2024

Neoconomics

TAX WHAT YOU DON’T WANT, NOT WHAT YOU DO:

It’s Time the US Abolished the Income Tax: Bring on the consumption tax. (John H. Cochrane, February 12, 2024, CBR)

Here there is an awkward truth of taxation. Unexpected, “just this once and we’ll never do it again” wealth taxes are economically efficient. The problem of taxation is disincentives. If you announce a wealth tax in the future, people respond by not accumulating wealth. They go on round-the-world private jet tours instead of investing and building companies. But if you tax existing wealth, and nobody knew it was coming, there is no disincentive.

This is, however, one of the most misused propositions in economics. That “just this once and never again” promise isn’t credible: if the government did it once, why not again? And it feels horribly unfair, doesn’t it, grabbing wealth willy-nilly? Unpredictability is not something responsive, rule-of-law democracies can or should do.

In any case, as with corporate income, taxing investment income also makes no sense. You earn money, pay taxes on it, and invest it. If you choose to consume later rather than now, why pay additional tax on it? One of the main don’t-distort-the-economy propositions is that we should give people the full incentive to save by refraining from taxing investment income.

So why do we tax investment income? Again, because once you tax income, you have to start plugging holes. Many people can shift labor income to investment income. If you run a business, don’t take a salary but pay yourself a dividend. If you’re a consultant, incorporate yourself and call it all business income. In the 1980s, even cab drivers incorporated to get lower tax rates.

The income tax is the original sin. Taxing income made no sense on an economic basis. The government only did it because it was easy to measure and grab, at least before people started inventing a century’s worth of clever schemes to redefine “income.” It has led inescapably to more sins, such as the corporate tax and the tax on investment income. And now the repatriation tax on accumulated foreign earnings.

What’s the solution? Well, duh. Tax consumption, not income or wealth. Get the rich down at the Porsche dealer. Leave alone any money reinvested in a company that is employing people and producing products. Now we can do it. And we can then throw out the income tax, corporate tax, and estate tax.

Long War

THE WAGES OF IDEOLOGY:

What Is Left? Rebecca Solnit on the Perennial Divisions of the American Left: “It should be a modest request to ask that ‘left’ not mean supporters of authoritarian regimes.” (Rebecca Solnit, February 23, 2024, LitHub)


In late 1936 George Orwell, like so many young idealists from Europe and the USA, went off to fight fascism in Spain. By the spring of 1937 he realized he was in a war with not two but three sides. The USSR was holding back a full Spanish revolution while attacking the socialists and anarchists outside its control.

Facing prison and possible execution himself, not from the fascists, but the Soviet-allied forces, Orwell fled Spain. His immediate commander, Georges Kopp, was imprisoned, and the leader of his militia unit, Andres Nin, was tortured and assassinated by an agent of Stalin’s secret police. Orwell would spend the rest of his life trying to clarify that in his time the left meant both idealists committed to human rights, equality, and justice and supporters of a Stalinism that was the antithesis of all those things.

He wrote after he got back to England:

When I left Barcelona in June the jails were bulging… But the point to notice is that the people who are in prison now are not Fascists but revolutionaries; they are there not because their opinions are too much to the Right, but because they are too much to the Left. And the people responsible for putting them there are… the communists.

Some of the pro-Stalin left believed the sunny propaganda about the USSR and some of them knew better but went with the Stalinist notion that you have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, that the gulags and lies and mass executions were the price of the ticket to some form of utopia that would soon arrive after everything else had been quashed. There are similar rifts in the left of our time, which is both obvious and seldom addressed outright.

All ideologies are ultimately utopian and, therefore, anti-human. Unable to destroy human nature ideologues end by destroying the humans who disappoint them.

Just So Stories

WE JUST BICKER OVER THE DESIGNER:

PODCAST: Samuel Wilkinson — What Evolution and Human Nature Imply About the Meaning of Our Existence (Skeptic, 3/04/24)

With respect to our evolution, nature seems to have endowed us with competing dispositions, what Wilkinson calls the dual potential of human nature. We are pulled in different directions: selfishness and altruism, aggression and cooperation, lust and love.

By using principles from a variety of scientific disciplines, Yale Professor Samuel Wilkinson provides a framework for human evolution that reveals an overarching purpose to our existence.

Wilkinson claims that this purpose, at least one of them, is to choose between the good and evil impulses that nature has created within us. Our life is a test. This is a truth, as old as history it seems, that has been espoused by so many of the world’s religions. From a certain framework, Wilkinson believes that these aspects of human nature—including how evolution shaped us—are evidence for the existence of a God, not against it.

One Economy to Rule Them All

NO ONE MISSES OFFICES:

‘Office culture’ as we know it is dead. Workers have other ideas (Lillian Stone, 3/03/24, BBC)


The world of work looks and feels entirely different than just a few years ago – yet many companies are still intent on recreating the office cultures workers left behind as they abandoned their desks in 2020. While these companies are making some gestures to adapt – for instance, redesigning spaces to accommodate new preferences and hybrid-work habits – many are still set on bringing back what lured in workers before the pandemic.


Yet swaths of employees simply aren’t interested in going backward. Instead of trust-falls and cold brew on tap, employees are demanding flexible work, equitable pay and a focus on humanity in the workplace that transcends the perks they sought years earlier.
Workers’ shifting priorities are a natural consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic, says Georgina Fraser, head of human capital for global commercial real-estate firm CBRE. “The pandemic gave us autonomy in a way that we haven’t had previously,” she says. “It gave us the opportunity to choose how we structured our working days.”

Religion

…AND NOT EVEN THEN:

Aging Gracefully, Infinity, and the Oceanic Feeling (John Allen Paulos, Mar. 4th, 2024, 3Quarks)

These metaphors of infinity and aging undermine our exaggerated pretensions and mundane obsessions, and may even force us to view ourselves in something like the way we view the dilapidated statue of the boastful pharaoh Ozymandias.

Of course, I’m getting ahead of myself, perhaps like the woman writing her son a very long letter in the middle of which she congratulates him on taking a speed reading course and adds that because of the course he’s probably already finished reading her letter. Life, like the letter, isn’t over until it’s over.

Republican Liberty

ARBITRARY POWER, THAT IS:

Against power: As a republican, Sophie de Grouchy argued that sympathy, not domination, must be the glue that holds society together (Sandrine Bergèsis, Aeon)


The Letters on Sympathy, Grouchy’s only known, and signed, authored work, were published in 1798 as an appendix to her translations of the final edition of Smith’s book The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1792) and of his essay A Dissertation on the Origins of Languages (1792). These remained the standard translations of Smith’s key works for two centuries. Consequently, Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy remained in wide circulation too, and were able to influence the growth of political ideas. […]

But for fuller evidence of her more radical views, we need to turn to the newspaper she founded together with Condorcet, Paine and others: Le Républicain. Published in 1791, the journal included anonymous articles by Grouchy and her translations of some of Paine’s work. She became known as a ‘fierce’ republican, and, not surprisingly, as an anti-monarchist she was mocked and caricatured in royalist journals.

In one of these articles, Grouchy attacked monarchy as an economic extravagance, and at the same time showed that it served no purpose beyond a ceremonial one by proposing that the king and his entourage be replaced by automata. Given the cost of the real ‘moving sculptures’ and the difficulty of producing and maintaining them in good working order, the claim that automata would represent a significant cost-saving was a direct attack on royal extravagance. But more than an economic cost, it was the psychological cost of monarchy that Grouchy was most worried about. In the second article (which she may have redrafted from an earlier one by her friend Dumont), Grouchy took on a theme she developed in her Letters on Sympathy: the moral and psychological cost of domination, the kind of domination characteristic of monarchy.

Being dominated is the chief and most pervasive political harm for republicans, because, Grouchy argues, it removes our liberty. In this, republicans differ somewhat from liberals, who see liberty threatened by interference. To be dominated is not necessarily the same thing as being interfered with. Being dominated means being subject to an arbitrary power that has the potential to interfere at any point in time. Grouchy argues that a king who is unconstrained by the law always dominates. Even a benign king who does not wish to interfere with his subjects’ personal lives dominates. Louis XVI insisted that he cared above all about the happiness of his subjects, yet his power over them was unregulated by law, and therefore arbitrary and dominating in this sense. And, given that a king’s attitude may change over the course of his reign, and that he will, one day, be replaced by his heir, his benevolence cannot be relied on to prevent future harms from interference. So, the king’s character does not make a difference to whether we should accept rule by monarchs: they still dominate, no matter how well meaning.

India

MAGA!:

Inventing Hindu supremacy: Vinayak Savarkar ridiculed Gandhi, preaching that anti-Muslim violence was the only means to unite India into a nation (Mihir Dalalis, 2/27/24, Aeon)


To understand Narendra Modi’s India, it is instructive to grasp the ideas of the Hindu Right’s greatest ideologue, the world of British colonial India in which they emerged, and the historical feebleness of the present regime.

Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was a polymath who read law in London, enjoyed Shakespeare, admired the Bible, wrote important historical works, and became an accomplished poet and playwright. His lifelong obsession was politics.

Savarkar took up political activity in his teens and became a cherished anti-British revolutionary. While serving a long prison sentence for inciting violence against the British, he transformed into a Hindu supremacist bent on dominating Indian Muslims. His pamphlet Essentials of Hindutva (1923), written secretively in jail, remains the most influential work of Hindu nationalism. In this and subsequent works, he called for Hindus, hopelessly divided by caste, to come together as one homogeneous community and reclaim their ancient homeland from those he considered outsiders, primarily the Muslims. Savarkar advocated violence against Muslims as the principal means to bind antagonistic lower and upper castes, writing:

Nothing makes Self conscious of itself so much as a conflict with non-self. Nothing can weld peoples into a nation and nations into a state as the pressure of a common foe. Hatred separates as well as unites.


Savarkar has proven prescient if not prescriptive. Over the past four decades, the Hindu Right’s violence against Muslims has indeed helped Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to cement a degree of Hindu political unity long considered unattainable.

All Comedy is Conservative

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Liberalism’s last laugh: The fate of democracy could well depend on what makes us smile. (Lee Siegel, 2/21/24, New Statesman)


Surely Sunstein is aware of liberalism’s dour reputation? Liberalism’s current comedic tribunes, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel and the recently resurrected Jon Stewart, are far better at scolding and taunting than making actual jokes. In fact, Donald Trump’s most consequential contribution to popular culture is to offer a punchline, the mere utterance of which – “Trump” – requires no joke to precede it.

I wonder what the great liberal philosopher Judith Shklar would have made of comedy today. She wrote in 1982 that our “abiding cruelty is as evident in the horrors of civil war as it is in the pleasures of laughter” and observed that most people “enjoy a good laugh at the expense of victims”. In the current crop of late-night comedians’ jokeless taunting she might well have detected a strong echo of Trump’s own belittling laughter.

Shklar’s powerful notion of “putting cruelty first” is at the heart of cancel culture. Or as the American philosopher Richard Rorty parsed Shklar’s phrase: “Liberals are the people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do.” Rorty himself attempted to appropriate irony for humane purposes by formulating the concept of “liberal irony”, in which people are aware of the moral tension between shifting personal and historical circumstances and a universal commitment to humanity. It’s a uselessly beautiful idea. But it’s definitely not funny.

It is unlikely that Sunstein is thinking about Shklar or Rorty in his gesture of defiance in the face of anti-laughter forces. But he is pushing back against the effect that an obsession with social justice has had on comedy, which is precisely to judge comedy by its capacity to be cruel. He is thinking about the outrage directed at the comedian Dave Chappelle’s offensive remarks about trans people, and at countless similar barbs made by other comedians in the spirit, or the performance, of mordant humour. Laughter is the sound of freedom and joy, Sunstein wants to say. And liberals, true liberals, who are not in thrall to woke excesses, do not repress freedom and joy.

The utopianism of the Left/Right deprives them of access to humor.

Baseball

PAYING IT FORWARD:

THE BILL YANCEY EXPERIENCE (Dave Kaplan, February 28, 2024, Ball9)

At 76, Larry Hisle is one of baseball’s revered elders, a soft-spoken sage who has empowered at-risk children and troubled teens in the Milwaukee area over the last three decades.

Mentoring young people, helping them conquer personal hardship and self-doubt remains his inner passion. Actually, Hisle’s well-known strength in kindness recalls his own long-ago mentor.

“I can’t help but smile whenever I think of Bill Yancey,” said Hisle, who played 14 productive seasons with the Phillies, Twins and Brewers before retiring in 1982. “The man could not have been more encouraging, more motivating, more inspiring to me.”

Hisle, who grew up an orphan in southern Ohio, was once an insecure rookie with the Phillies, a team flaring with racial tensions. He lived alone and suffered acute anxiety and hepatitis.

Enter Bill Yancey, a genial veteran of the Negro Leagues in the 1920s and ‘30s, and later a pioneering Black major-league scout in the 1950s. He had just returned to his native Philadelphia in spring 1969 for his second stint as a Phillies area scout.

Yancey, who navigated racism and structural unfairness his entire life, saw in Hisle a fragile young man who’d been the target of a Ku Klux Klan rally in the minors. He saw a potential casualty to the racism that ultimately victimized Dick Allen, the franchise’s first Black star.

So he invited Hisle to live with him and his wife in their Moorestown, NJ house that season. Hisle savored Louise Yancey’s home cooking, and her husband’s unshakable lessons in resilience. Yancey’s guidance, he said, probably saved his career.

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