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Law and Politics

#176: Not Paying for Health Care

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #176, on the subject of Not Paying for Health Care.

img0176Bill

I am not certain whom to blame for this; I don’t know whether it was a passing comment in conversation or a post in an online discussion or an article, but someone presented to me the suggestion that no one should ever be denied health care because he or she could not afford it.  I also have the feeling that the word “entitled” was used, as in “everyone is entitled to receive needed medical care”.

It is a noble idea, but problematic.

I don’t know what you do for a living.  Maybe you don’t.  Maybe you sit home and collect government checks–and I mean no disrespect for that, as I know people who receive social security because they are too old to maintain a regular job, or disability because they are too infirm sometimes to get out of bed, and I think it a wonderful thing that we provide money to support these people.  If we are supporting you because you are unable to support yourself, if you are a “burden on the taxpayers”–well, we the taxpayers have decided that it is worth a bit of our money to care for you.  But odds are good that most of you “have jobs”, do something that brings in the money some of which goes through the government to those who do not work.  We think that the elderly and the infirm are entitled to our support, and we use that word–entitled–athough usually as a noun, entitlements.

We also think such people are entitled to free and discounted medical care, which we also pay to provide.  Our idea of what people need, and therefore that to which they should be entitled, keeps growing.  People need, and are therefore at least in some places entitled to, cellular phones, Internet access, college education, transportation, and the list is growing.

I like the idea of entitlements; I’d like to be entitled.  People need clothes.  It would be nice if I could walk into a clothing outlet and help myself to jeans, shoes, shirts, socks and underwear, maybe a nice suit for special appearances.  I’m not permitted to wander naked, and wouldn’t particularly want to do so anyway, so that makes clothes a need.  No need to pay; I’m entitled.  If you work in garment retail, don’t look at me–I get my clothes free.

I also need to eat; what if I can’t cook?  Let me walk into a restaurant and order from the menu, have someone bring me food.  I am entitled.  If you’re the waitress, don’t expect a tip–I am entitled.

There isn’t a public bus within five miles of my home, and frankly almost everywhere I need to go, other than the hospital, is over there on the bus routes.  Transportation is a need around here, and one for which the government provides for the elderly poor.  Perhaps I should be entitled to a free ride whenever I want to go anywhere–call someone on my free phone and have them transport me to the store or the doctor or the movies, wherever I need to go, and then take me home again.  The driver should provide this, because I’m entitled.  Or perhaps I should just walk into a showroom and pick out my free car, and take it to the gas station for free gasoline.

You get the idea.  It would be nice if everything in the world were free, but then, who would pay for it?  Medical care is not free in the sense that it has no cost.  Even apart from whether drug companies are overcharging for medicines or whether hospitals, doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals are making too much money, medical care costs money.  The drugs are made from materials through chemical processes that are not always simple, and in facilities that are designed to prevent contamination as much as possible–costs, even without the people.  Patients are treated not only with medications, but with often very expensive diagnostic and treatment equipment (Computer Axial Tomography and Magnetic Resonant Imaging are very expensive, and are fairly standard in emergency room diagnostics).  Again, facilities can be expensive as well.  Much of the equipment is computerized.  The machine which automatically takes your blood pressure costs more than a typical laptop computer, but in the long run saves money over having a person come into your room every fifteen minutes to do the job; the machine that measures the medicine as it goes into your arm is another small computer.  Even the furniture is sophisticated–a hospital bed is capable of doing many things the typical patient is not aware that it does, and costs considerably more than most of the admittedly usually more comfortable beds patients have at home.

So maybe we’re overpaying the people–but what do we require of them?

If your doctor has been working for two decades, it is likely that his student loan debt still exceeds the amount you owed fresh out of college.  Further, medical professionals–not just doctors–are required to take continuing education classes, to keep up with current knowledge in the field.  Usually they have to pay for these classes.  They also have to be recertified regularly in a host of areas, depending on their particular fields, from starting IVs to running a “code” (“Advanced Cardiac Life Support”), requiring classes and tests to ensure they know current best practice.  Even so, medical knowledge is advancing so fast that it is said you are more likely to get the best care from a newly licensed graduate than from a seasoned professional with a decade or more of experience.  Your doctor spends a substantial amount of his “free time” on continuing education for which he pays.

Because we allow patients to sue doctors, doctors also pay for malpractice insurance.  It is likely that your obstetrician/gynecologist pays more for his malpractice insurance every year than the market value of his home.  There is no easy fix for this–but that’s probably another article.

The point is, everything we give away “free” to anyone costs someone something–you can take money out of the equation entirely, if you like, but it still comes to the three basics of economics, land, capital, and labor, and that has to come from somewhere.  We can give more of our money to the government and have the government provide more things “free”.  Indeed, we can give all our money to the government and have the government provide everything “free”.

There is a name for a system in which everything is free.  It’s called socialism.  In its purest form, everyone of us works as hard as we can at whatever we can do, and every one of us is free to help ourselves to as much of everything as we can reasonably use.  The pure form doesn’t work for the fairly obvious reason:  if you were told that you can have as much as you think you need in exchange for working as hard as you think you can, just how hard would you work and how much would you need?  Thus we have the practical form, in which someone is given the responsibility of overseeing how much you work and how much you take, in which you work as hard as your overseer thinks you can and take as much as your overseer thinks you need.  When that’s a private sector system we call it slavery; when it’s run by the government we call it communism.  Either way, if you want the government to provide everything free, you have to expect to pay for it somehow.

Of course, the people who say that medical care should be free don’t mean it should be free for everyone.  They mean it should be free for those who can’t afford it.  But then, who can afford medical care for calamitous conditions or events?  Who gets to decide what you can or cannot afford?  Does the fact that you own your house mean you can afford medical care up to the equity you have in your house, since of course you could sell the house and move your family to the street to cover the bill?  If you own a small business, does that disqualify you from free medical care, even if it’s running in the red?  Who gets free medical care?  Who is entitled to it?  Who has to scrape up the money for the bills or suffer for it?

Free medical care for everyone is a wonderful idea.  It is also an expensive one, one that will cost every one of us a fair amount of money and may change the quality of our medical care going forward.  If we want to go that direction, let’s at least consider ways to do so with the least amount of upheaval.

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Bible and Theology, Law and Politics

#159: To Compassion International

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #159, on the subject of To Compassion International.

Compassion International is shutting down all of its operations in India because the Indian government has been objecting to aid coming from outside India for relief efforts.  There is evidence that it is because Hindu nationalists are trying to shut down Christian ministries; India is now 15th on the Open Doors’ list of places where it is hardest to be Christian.

Someone has said that when God closes a door, He often opens a window.  I’m sure that the organization has long honed its methods, and has a clear idea of how to do what they do to make it work–but now it is not working in India, and they may have to rethink their approach there.  The words “creative financing” and “creative accounting” sometimes have an “iffy” sense to them, but I think in the present situation the organization needs to be creative in how they deliver their aid to those children.

I would like to make a suggestion that might get them thinking in a workable direction.

img0159Compassion

India certainly has a tourist industry.  We know that people travel to see the Taj Mahal and other sites within the country.  At present they are turning away aid connected to a Christian ministry–but it is doubtful whether they would ever be turning away tourist dollars.  I am thinking that if Compassion International set up facilities in India modeled on hotels or restaurants or other tourist services, then said they were part of the tourism industry but listed the rooms at exhorbitant prices, such a model might work.  Couriers could bring money into the country and “pay” the hotel, which could then use the money to “purchase” supplies at low rates from an international supplier (Compassion International).  Native workers for the organization would become employees of these facilities, and the children they wish to help could be listed in any of several ways so that they would receive the benefits–employees, dependents, stockholders, whatever method works under Indian law.

Let us suppose that we list the children as employees of the hotel.  A courier arrives, checks in as a guest and stays overnight, paying the thousands of dollars that would otherwise have been spent on child care to the hotel perhaps by electronic transfer from the organization’s account to the hotel’s account, which might be in an international bank (depending on Indian law).  The hotel then spends most of that to buy food and supplies from its suppliers, and pays the children an official wage.  The children would be required to do the work of attending school (one of the benefits currently provided by Compassion International to its children), and school attendance would include free meals for the school day, and the employee benefits package would include fully-paid medical care.  “Uniforms”, that is, free clothing, would also be provided for school and work.  Some of the older children could be given tasks related to running the operation, such as working in the kitchen or cleaning the facilities, so that there is actual labor being performed by the employees.  Sponsors who currently are seen as donating money to provide benefits for individual children would be recouched, in legal terms, as providing for the salary and benefits of individual child employees.  In the United States they would continue donating to a non-profit charitable organization; that organization in turn would be, on the books, investing capital in a for profit corporation in a foreign country that is operating at a constant loss.  In doing this, the organization manages to deliver its care, much the same care as it is currently delivering, and the Indian government cannot prevent that care from being delivered without creating a lot of laws that are going to severely negatively impact its tourism trade.

Certainly the system would incur taxes and tariffs, but how serious can we be about wanting to help these poor people if we are unwilling to deal with such government regulations and costs?  There might be official industry standards to meet, but we deal with those problems in our own country–soup kitchens and homeless shelters are required to meet commercial facilities standards in order to deliver services to the homeless, and while it is an impediment to meeting those needs it is one that we overcome regularly.

I am not on the ground in India; I don’t know how severe or complex the problems actually are.  I think, though, that we are looking at some of the poorest people in the world, and I understand it is one of Compassion International’s largest national efforts, so I am hoping that if they give it some consideration they can find a way to continue delivering aid to these starving children within the strictures being imposed by the government and whatever other opponents they face.

I pray that they will find a way.

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Law and Politics

#158: Show Me Religious Freedom

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #158, on the subject of Show Me Religious Freedom.

It appears that Missouri has become a battleground for issues of church-state relations.  During the election we noted in web log post #126:  Equity and Religion that there was a ballot issue related to a cigarette tax to fund childhood education which included controversial language permitting such funds to go to programs sponsored by religious institutions or groups.  The measure was soundly defeated, incidently (59% to 40%), but whether that was due to opposition to the almost unnoticed clause about funding religious groups or to the near one thousand percent increase in the cigarette tax can’t be known.  The state is back in the news on the religion subject, as a lawsuit between the state and a church school is going to be heard by the United States Supreme Court this year.

The case is Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. v. Pauley, and SCOTUSblog nicely summarizes the issue as

Whether the exclusion of churches from an otherwise neutral and secular aid program violates the Free Exercise and Equal Protection Clauses when the state has no valid Establishment Clause concern.

But perhaps that will make more sense if we put some detail to it.

img0158Tires

Missouri runs a program that collects used tires and recycles them into playground surfacing material, providing schools and other facilities with a durable but softer play surface.  The program is funded by a surcharge on new tires–technically tax money dedicated to the purpose of handling scrap tires.  Trinity Lutheran Church runs a school which has a playground used by the students but also by neighborhood children.  They applied to the program to resurface that playground with the safer materials, but were refused on the grounds of a church-state issue.

Some would argue that the “separation of church and state” is on the state’s side in this, but that is not in the Constitution.  The Establishment Clause means only that the government cannot show favoritism between various religious and non-religious organizations; it can’t promote any specific religion, nor can it oppose any specific religion.  It will be argued as to whether providing playground surfacing materials to a church-run school might be promoting that church, but that is not all that is at stake.  Missouri is one of thirty-eight states which have what is known as a “Blaine Amendment”, after Maine Senator James G. Blaine who in 1875 proposed an amendment to the United States Constitution along these lines.  The Constitutional amendment proposal failed, but the majority of states adapted the concept to a variety of state constitutional amendments which were adopted and are still the law in those states.

The mindset of the nineteenth century was so very different from ours today that it is difficult to grasp.  If ever the United States was a “Christian nation” (I do not believe such an entity ever has or even can exist), it was so then.  Protestant denominations were separated from each other in friendly competition, and often worked together in evangelistic outreach; we had come through two “Great Awakenings” from which the vast majority of Americans, and particularly those who were neither Jewish nor recent immigrants (such as the Chinese in California), were Christians in Protestant churches.  However, those new immigrants–particularly the Irish and the Italians–were predominantly Roman Catholic, and Protestants still feared Catholicism, and not entirely unreasonably.  The fear arose because in countries dominated by Catholicism governments were perceived as following the dictates of the church–a fear which remained in this country until then Presidential candidate John Fitzgerald Kennedy made his September 1960 speech on the subject.  As a result, Blaine was the tip of an iceberg of an effort to prevent Catholicism from conquering America through the democratic process, perceived as in effect making the Pope our de facto emperor.  (We see similar efforts today reacting to the fear that Islamic immigrants will conquer by democratic process and impose Sharia Law on America.)

The word used was “sectarian”, and we might find that word inappropriate for its meaning.  After all, even at the dawn of the 1960s public school classes were opened with prayer and a reading from the Bible.  However, these were Protestant prayers, prayers that would have been embraced by every denomination from Episcopalian to Lutheran to Presbyterian to Baptist to Pentecostal.  They were thus viewed as non-sectarian, not preferring any one Christian denomination over any other.  Up until Pope John XXIII, Catholicism regarded all Protestants as condemned heretics (and it was more recently than that that the church has reached the position that there might be salvation outside the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches).  That was seen as the divisive position; the Protestant’s rejection of that was not seen as divisive, because Protestants were otherwise united and respected each other’s beliefs, at least in this country.

Blaine’s effort was attempting to prevent state money from going to Catholic education (“sectarian schools”).  Missouri’s version is considerably more strict.  It reads:

That no money shall ever be taken from the public treasury, directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect or denomination of religion, or in aid of any priest, preacher, minister or teacher thereof, as such; and that no preference shall be given to nor any discrimination made against any church, sect or creed of religion, or any form of religious faith or worship.

Arguably, read strictly this would prevent underpaid teachers in private religious schools from receiving food stamps or Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or prevent unemployed ordained ministers from getting welfare or social security.  No one has made that argument to this point; such programs were then not even imagined.

So this is what the First Amendment actually says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The sense is that the government will not interfere with the opinions of the people, or the expression thereof.  In a sense, the government has to be “opinion blind”–it can’t decline to give food stamps to a member of the Libertarian Party, or refuse to hire someone who previously worked for a Catholic charity, or decide whether someone can speak at a public meeting based on whether he was once Boy Scout or Mason or Gideon.

It would also seem to mean that the government cannot decide that an organization cannot receive public funds for a strictly secular purpose based on whether it is a religious organization.

Let us for the moment take the name out of this case.  Let us suppose that the plaintiff is the Columbia Community School.  It happens to be run by the Columbia Community Fellowship, but is incorporated separately as an educational institution.  Thus the application for materials from the program says that the applicant is “Columbia Community School”.  The question suddenly becomes whether the people who make the decision have the right to ask whether “Columbia Community School” is a religious organization–which under our hypothetical it is, but you would not know that from the name on the application.  Would it be a violation of the first amendment for the government to inquire whether the school is a religious organization?  Two points should by raised.  One is that it is established that the playground is used by children in the neighborhood who have no connection to the school; the other is that many public and private schools rent or even lend their facilities to groups for meetings some of which use these facilities for religious worship services–a use which the courts have agreed is legitimate, and indeed that it would be unconsitutional to forbid such use solely on the basis that publicly owned properties are being used by private individuals for religious purposes on the same terms that they are being used by other organizations for other purposes.  It thus seems that it would be illegal to ask the question, and the only reason the issue exists here is that we assume an organization with the words “Trinity”, “Lutheran”, and “Church” in the name is a religious organization.  While that seems a safe assumption, it is as prejudicial as assuming that someone with the given name “Ebony” or “Tyrone” must be black.

Let us also consider this aspect of the separation of the organization from the purpose.  Brigham Young University is clearly connected to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (The Mormons).  It also receives government grants for scientific research.  Should the fact that the school was founded by a religious organization for religious purposes disqualify it from receiving such monies?  If so, should the same rule apply to schools like Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and Notre Dame?  Patently it is legitimate use of government money to support academic research in secular fields, even if performed by religious persons at religious institutions.

It appears that the only sane conclusion here is that the government cannot discriminate against religious persons or institutions in the disbursement of aid for secular purposes.  We might argue that there is a fungible resources issue, that the money the church does not have to spend on playground resurfacing is money they can use for religious purposes, but ultimately the only use that this paving material has is to create safer play surfaces for children, and the only way the church can get that material is through the government program, so denying it would be making “a law respecting an establishment of religion”, clearly forbidden by the Bill of Rights.

The Blaine Amendment, at least in the form it has in Missouri, is unconstitutional.

We’ll see whether the Supreme Court agrees with that later this year.

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Bible and Theology, Books by the Author, Elections, Games, Law and Politics, Logic and Reasoning, Music, Temporal Anomalies/Time Travel, Time Travel Movies

#150: 2016 Retrospective

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #150, on the subject of 2016 Retrospective.

Periodically I try to look back over some period of time and review what I have published, and the end of the year is a good time to do this.  Thus before the new year begins I am offering you a reminder of articles you might have seen–or might have missed–over the past twelve months.  I am not going to recall them all.  For one thing, that would be far too many, and it in some cases will be easier to point to another location where certain categories of articles are indexed (which will appear more obvious as we progress).  For another, although we did this a year ago in web log post #34:  Happy Old Year, we also did it late in March in #70:  Writing Backwards and Forwards, when we had finished posting Verse Three, Chapter One:  The First Multiverser Novel.  So we will begin with the last third of March, and will reference some articles through indices and other sources.

I have divided articles into the categories which I thought most appropriate to them.  Many of these articles are reasonably in two or more categories–articles related to music often relate to writing, or Bible and theology; Bible and politics articles sometimes are nearly interchangeable.  I, of course, think it is all worth reading; I hope you think it at least worth considering reading.

I should also explain those odd six-digit numbers for anyone for whom they are not obvious, because they are at least non-standard.  They are YYMMDD, that is, year, month, and day of the date of publication of each article, each represented by two digits.  Thus the first one which appears, 160325, represents this year 2016, the third month March, and the twenty-fifth day.

img0150calendar

Let’s start with writings about writing.

There is quite a bit that should be in this category.  After all, that previous retrospective post appeared as we finished posting that first novel, and we have since posted the second, all one hundred sixty-two chapters of which are indexed in their own website section, Old Verses New.  If you’ve not read the novels, you have some catching up to do.  I also published one more behind-the-writings post on that first novel, #71:  Footnotes on Verse Three, Chapter One 160325, to cover notes unearthed in an old file on the hard drive.

Concurrent with the release of those second novel chapters there were again behind-the-writings posts, this time each covering nine consecutive chapters and hitting the web log every two weeks.  Although they are all linked from that table-of-contents page, since they are web log posts I am listing them here:  #74:  Another Novel 160421; #78:  Novel Fears 160506; #82:  Novel Developments 160519; #86:  Novel Conflicts 160602; #89:  Novel Confrontations 160623; #91:  Novel Mysteries 160707; #94:  Novel Meetings 160721; #100:  Novel Settling 160804; #104:  Novel Learning 160818; #110:  Character Redirects 160901;
#113:  Character Movements 160916;
#116:  Character Missions 160929;
#119:  Character Projects 161013;
#122:  Character Partings 161027; #128:  Character Gatherings 161110; #134:  Versers in Space 161124; #142:  Characters Unite 161208; and #148:  Characters Succeed 161222.

I have also added a Novel Support Section which at this point contains character sheets for several of the characters in the first novel and one in the second; also, if you have enjoyed reading the novels and have not seen #149:  Toward the Third Novel 161223, it is a must-read.

Also on the subject of writing, I discussed what was required for someone to be identified as an “author” in, appropriately, #72:  Being an Author 160410.  I addressed #118:  Dry Spells 161012 and how to deal with them, and gave some advice on #132:  Writing Horror 161116.  There was also one fun Multiverser story which had been at Dice Tales years ago which I revived here, #146:  Chris and the Teleporting Spaceships 161220

I struggled with where on this list to put #120:  Giving Offense 161014.  It deals with political issues of sexuality and involves a bit of theological perspective, but ultimately is about the concept of tolerance and how we handle disagreements.

It should be mentioned that not everything I write is here at M. J. Young Net; I write a bit about writing in my Goodreads book reviews.

Of course, I also wrote a fair amount of Bible and Theology material.

Part of it was apologetic, that is, discussing the reasons for belief and answers to the arguments against it.  In this category we have #73:  Authenticity of the New Testament Accounts 160413, #76:  Intelligent Simulation 160424 (specifically addressing an incongruity between denying the possibility of “Intelligent Design” while accepting that the universe might be the equivalent of a computer program), and #84:  Man-made Religion 160527 (addressing the charge that the fact all religions are different proves none are true).

Other pages are more Bible or theology questions, such as #88:  Sheep and Goats 160617, #90:  Footnotes on Guidance 160625, #121:  The Christian and the Law 161022, and #133:  Your Sunday Best 161117 (on why people dress up for church).

#114:  St. Teresa, Pedophile Priests, and Miracles 160917 is probably a bit of both, as it is a response to a criticism of Christian faith (specifically the Roman Catholic Church, but impacting all of us).

There was also a short miniseries of posts about the first chapter of Romans, the sin and punishment it presents, and how we as believers should respond.  It appeared in four parts:  #138:  The Sin of Romans I 161204, #139:  Immorality in Romans I 161205, #140:  Societal Implications of Romans I 161206, and #141:  The Solution to the Romans I Problem 161207.

Again, not everything I wrote is here.  The Faith and Gaming series and related materials including some from The Way, the Truth, and the Dice are being republished at the Christian Gamers Guild; to date, twenty-six such articles have appeared, but more are on the way including one written recently (a rules set for what I think might be a Christian game) which I debated posting here but decided to give to them as fresh content.  Meanwhile, the Chaplain’s Bible Study continues, having completed I & II Peter and now entering the last chapter of I John.

Again, some posts which are listed below as political are closely connected to principles of faith; after all, freedom of speech and freedom of religion are inextricably connected.  Also, quite a few of the music posts are also Bible or theology posts, since I have been involved in Christian music for decades.

So Music will be the next subject.

Since it is something people ask musicians, I decided to give some thought and put some words to #75:  Musical Influences 160423, the artists who have impacted my composing, arranging, and performances.

I also reached into my memories of being in radio, how it applies to being a musician and to being a writer, in #77:  Radio Activity 160427.

I wrote a miniseries about ministry and music, what it means to be a minister and how different kinds of ministries integrate music.  It began by saying not all Christian musicians are necessarily ministers in #95:  Music Ministry Disconnect 160724, and then continued with #97:  Ministry Calling 160728, #98:  What Is a Minister? 160730, #99:  Music Ministry of an Apostle 160803, #101:  Prophetic Music Ministry 160808, #102:  Music and the Evangelist Ministry 160812, #103:  Music Ministry of the Pastor 160814, #106:  The Teacher Music Ministry 160821, and
#107:  Miscellaneous Music Ministries 160824.  As something of an addendum, I posted #109:  Simple Songs 160827, a discussion of why so many currently popular songs seem to be musically very basic, and why given their purpose that is an essential feature.

In related areas, I offered #111:  A Partial History of the Audio Recording Industry 160903 explaining why recored companies are failing, #129:  Eulogy for the Record Album 161111 discussing why this is becoming a lost art form, and #147:  Traditional versus Contemporary Music 161221 on the perennial argument in churches about what kinds of songs are appropriate.

The lyrics to my song Free 161017 were added to the site, because it was referenced in one of the articles and I thought the readers should be able to find them if they wished.

There were quite a few articles about Law and Politics, although despite the fact that this was an “election year” (of course, there are elections every year, but this one was special), most of them were not really about that.  By March the Presidential race had devolved into such utter nonsense that there was little chance of making sense of it, so I stopped writing about it after talking about Ridiculous Republicans and Dizzying Democrats.

Some were, of course.  These included the self-explanatory titles #123:  The 2016 Election in New Jersey 161104, #124:  The 2016 New Jersey Public Questions 161105, #125:  My Presidential Fears 161106, and #127:  New Jersey 2016 Election Results 161109, and a few others including #126:  Equity and Religion 161107 about an argument in Missouri concerning whether it should be legal to give state money to child care and preschool services affiliated with religious groups, and #131:  The Fat Lady Sings 161114, #136:  Recounting Nonsense 161128, and #143:  A Geographical Look at the Election 161217, considering the aftermath of the election and the cries to change the outcome.

We had a number of pages connected to the new sexual revolution, including #79:  Normal Promiscuity 160507, #83:  Help!  I’m a Lesbian Trapped in a Man’s Body! 160521, and #115:  Disregarding Facts About Sexual Preference 160926.

Other topics loosely under discrimination include #87:  Spanish Ice Cream 160616 (about whether a well-known shop can refuse to take orders in languages other than English), #130:  Economics and Racism 161112 (about how and why unemployment stimulates racist attitudes), and #135:  What Racism Is 161127 (explaining why it is possible for blacks to have racist attitudes toward whites).  Several with connections to law and economics include #105:  Forced Philanthropy 160820 (taxing those with more to give to those with less), #108:  The Value of Ostentation 160826 (arguing that the purchase of expensive baubles by the rich is good for the poor), #137:  Conservative Penny-pinching 161023 (discussing spending cuts), and #145:  The New Internet Tax Law 161219 (about how Colorado has gotten around the problem of charging sales tax on Internet purchases).

A few other topics were hit, including one on freedom of speech and religion called #144:  Shutting Off the Jukebox 161218, one on scare tactics used to promote policy entitled #80:  Environmental Blackmail 160508, and one in which court decisions in recent immigration cases seem likely to impact the future of legalized marijuana, called #96:  Federal Non-enforcement 160727.

Of course Temporal Anomalies is a popular subject among the readers; the budget has been constraining of late, so we have not done the number of analyses we would like, but we did post a full analysis of Time Lapse 160402.  We also reported on #85:  Time Travel Coming on Television 160528, and tackled two related issues, #81:  The Grandfather Paradox Problem 160515 and #117:  The Prime Universe 160930.

We have a number of other posts that we’re categorizing as Logic/Miscellany, mostly because they otherwise defy categorization (or, perhaps, become categories with single items within them).  #92:  Electronic Tyranny 060708 is a response to someone’s suggestion that we need to break away from social media to get our lives back.  #93:  What Is a Friend? 060720 presents two concepts of the word, and my own preference on that.  #112:  Isn’t It Obvious? 160904 is really just a couple of real life problems with logical solutions.  I also did a product review of an old washing machine that was once new, Notes on a Maytag Centennial Washing Machine 160424.

Although it does not involve much writing, with tongue planted firmly in cheek I offer Gazebos in the Wild, a Pinterest board which posts photographs with taxonomies attempting to capture and identify these dangerous wild creatures in their natural habitats.  You would have to have heard the story of Eric and the Gazebo for that to be funny, I think.

Of course, I post on social media, but the interesting ones are on Patreon, and mostly because I include notes on projects still ahead and life issues impeding them.  As 2017 arrives, I expect to continue writing and posting–I already have two drafts, one on music and the other on breaking bad habits.  I invite your feedback.

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Law and Politics

#145: The New Internet Tax Law

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #145, on the subject of The New Internet Tax Law.

What the Supreme Court won’t hear can hurt you.

The Supreme Court declined to hear a case appealed from the 10th Circuit, Direct Marketing Association v. Brohl, which means that the decision of the appellate court stands.  That decision means that the state legislature in Colorado has found a loophole of sorts in a very important previous case, Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, 504 U.S. 298 (1992), which has been very important to Internet sales over the past one and a half decades, in a way that means you might have to pay your local state sales taxes on purchases you make over the Internet.

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Quill is effectively the reason you don’t pay sales tax on purchases you make over the Internet from retailers in other states.  It actually had nothing to do with the Internet–Quill Corp. was a mail order office supplies dealer in Delaware that shipped orders all over the country, and North Dakota sued to require them to collect sales tax on any products they sold to customers in that state.  The Supreme Court set up standards by which in order for a company to be required to collect sales tax for any given state, it had to have some kind of physical presence in that state–offices, warehouses, retail outlets, even possibly franchises.  Absent these, the state had no authority to impose obligations on a business located in another state.

What states did in the wake of Quill was in essence to add a line to their state tax forms instructing residents to declare how much they owed in unpaid sales tax due to purchases made out of state.  Oddly, very little was ever reported.

Colorado had a new idea.  They could not require out-of-state businesses whose only connection to the state was through electronic communications and independent shipping companies to collect taxes for them–but could they require such companies to report the amount of such tax that was owed?  If you in Colorado spent a thousand dollars to have Amazon ship you books, movies, or whatever you bought from them, you were legally required to let the state know, and to remit the unpaid twenty-nine dollars (2.9%) sales tax–but if you neglected to mention it, the State of Colorado would be unable to determine that without legal action such as a warrant to open your banking records.  Under the new law, though, Amazon would be required to let the State tax board know of your thousand dollars worth of purchases, so that when you failed to mention it the state could send you a bill with penalties for tax avoidance.

New York’s Data and Marketing Association, an industry group (formerly the Direct Marketing Association), sued the state in the name of the executive director of its Department of Revenue several years ago when the law was enacted, and got a stay while the matter was being litigated.  It has now run its course:  the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals has decided that the law is not an “undue burden” on out-of-state retailers, and the Supreme Court has decided not to hear the case, so that ruling stands within the Tenth Circuit and will probably be followed by other circuits.

The law has some specific limits.  It only applies to retailers with at least one hundred thousand dollars in gross sales to customers within the state, so it’s not going to impact your e-bay resale business unless you’re doing a lot better than most.  However, it is fairly certain that other states will be passing similar laws–it is estimated that Colorado will be able to collect over one hundred seventy million dollars a year in previously unpaid sales tax revenue, and numbers like that are undoubtedly going to appeal to legislators elsewhere.  It is less clear how important the definition of minimum gross sales within the state is to the decision, so it may be that some states will place the bar much lower with the result that small Internet retailers are going to have a hard time knowing where they are required to report what.  Meanwhile, language in the denial of certiorari (that means the written decision not to hear the case) from Justice Kennedy suggests that the Court might consider overturning Quill and allowing states to demand that retailers selling to state residents through such means collect and remit sales tax on all purchases.  Tennessee is already in the process of passing such a law, which might make it the test case in a few years.

Whatever else can be said, it is clear that the landscape of Internet marketing just changed significantly.  You can no longer avoid paying sales tax by ordering from out of state.

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Law and Politics

#137: Conservative Penny-pinching

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #137, on the subject of Conservative Penny-pinching.

Over a year ago, I addressed the the notion that people who are against abortion claim to be concerned for the lives of the unborn up to the moment they are born, but after that they no longer care.  Then just over two weeks ago I was at a gathering where someone made exactly that claim, and I realized something–something I hadn’t felt when it was merely arguments on a page:  the assertion that people who are against abortion are unwilling to do anything to help the born is not only untrue and irrelevant, it is insulting.

Why it is untrue and irrelevant is covered in that previous article, web log post #9:  Abolition.  Because of the way the meeting dissolved then I was unable to call his attention to that response; knowing, however, that I would see him again, I printed it and delivered it to him two weeks later.

img0137pennies

His response was civil, even friendly.  However, he kept saying that “they” were taking all the money away from helping people, from helping young girls who were just children having children.  I asked him who “they” were, and he said “conservatives”; I pointed out that the people mentioned in the article, working hard to provide assistance to exactly those people, were in the main “conservatives”, but his feeling was that it was not “those conservatives” but some other group of “right wing conservatives”.  Having worked with those people, I observed that some of them were certainly “right wing”.  Yet he insisted that there was this conservative effort to take money away from helping the people who needed it.  It was not at all clear just who was taking what money from whom, but he was certain it was being done, and being done by “conservatives”.

If we’re honest, we have to admit that there are a lot of people who don’t care about the poor, and indeed many of them are “conservatives”.  At the same time, many of them are “liberals”–I don’t see a lot of Hollywood millionaires giving ninety percent of their income to charities, or spending their evenings working in soup kitchens or at homeless shelters.  There are also a lot of people who do care, at both ends of the spectrum and through the middle.  Not every liberal politician who argues for aid to the poor does so because he cares; some do it because they want votes.  Wealthy liberals who call for more government spending on welfare programs are not really offering to give their own money to these, but suggesting that the government should give them more of yours.  Conservatives are wrong to think that all liberals pretend to care about the poor in order to use them to advance socialist and progressivist policies; yet it is equally wrong to think that this is not true of any.

However, in our conversation I couldn’t help feeling that, at least in part, he meant conservatives were taking money away from Planned Parenthood.  You don’t have to be too far to the right of left-wing progressivists to believe that the government should not be funding an organization that in turn promotes and funds the slaughter of children.  The argument has been made that Planned Parenthood spends none of its government-granted money on abortion services, but as we noted in post #2:  Planned Parenthood and Fungible Resources, no matter how they do their accounting it is evident that they could not spend as much on abortion as they do were their other programs not subsidized by federal money.  Certainly people who believe that killing unborn babies should be criminal are going to cut funding for any program that promotes the practice.  That does not mean that these people have no interest in helping pregnant teenagers and others struggling with unexpected pregnancies, any more than that those who want to bring an end to capital punishment and stop funding executions have no interest in stopping murders and other violent crimes.  You will say that it’s not the same thing, and in a way you’re right, and in a way you’re wrong.  If you tell me that grapefruit juice is not orange juice, you are certainly correct; if you tell me that because grapefruit juice is not orange juice it therefore is not citrus juice, you are mistaken.  It is quite possible to be very much in favor of a stated objective, whether it is helping pregnant women or reducing violent crime, and still object to a specific method of achieving that objective, whether it is killing unwanted children or terminating murderers.  It is quite possible to want to do something about a social problem without resorting to an extreme measure like killing people.  It is also possible to believe that such an extreme measure is appropriate and necessary for one type of problem but not for another.  The problems are not identical; only the solutions are similar.

Of course, some people argue that the unborn are not actually people.  To his credit, he did not suggest that; he rather suggested that they were unwanted human beings that should not be forced to come into a world that does not want them.  It strikes me that this is very like an ambulance crew saying they’re not going to take this injured homeless person to a hospital because he’s a worthless human being and he might as well just die anyway.  It is rather arrogant for any of us to put a value on someone else’s life, whether or not that person has yet smelled air.

Perhaps, though, he is not talking about abortion funding; perhaps he is talking about welfare.  In thinking about this issue I did a bit of research, and learned that the Federal debt is presently increasing by about one trillion dollars each year.  The population of the United States is a bit above three hundred twenty-five million, so that’s about three dollars for every person–every man, woman, or child, legal or illegal, in the entire country.  Of course, those who are in the country illegally aren’t going to pay that, and there is not much logic to expecting those who are receiving the benefits to pay part of that.  At some point we are going to have to stop spending as much or find a way to collect more.

So where could we cut it?

The total federal budget for 2017 is just above four trillion dollars–that’s four thousand billion (4.1472 trillion).  Sixty percent of that–about two trillion five hundred million–goes to what is loosely called “welfare”, that is, money that goes to taking care of people who can’t afford to take care of themselves, that “safety net” about which we are always talking (2.4971 trillion).  In fairness, the biggest piece of that–a bit less than one trillion–is social security (972.6 billion), which includes all those retirement checks and the federal disability program (and the salaries of the people who run it), giving a meager income to people who genuinely cannot or can no longer work.  More than a trillion goes to medical assistance, that is, Medicare (605.0 billion) and Medicaid (527.4 billion) including the Obamacare expansions, providing health services to people who cannot otherwise afford them.  Less than half a trillion goes to everything else we loosely consider “welfare”, social support services (392.1 billion).

It is argued that we should cut our outrageous military spending, but that outrageous military spending is less than a trillion dollars (0.8536 trillion), less than the medical care spending, less than Social Security.  We’ve been working on reducing military spending for a long time, and it is a much smaller portion of the budget than it was in the past–but in that time our “entitlements” and “welfare” programs have exploded to take the largest share of the budget.  Together, that’s over eighty percent of the budget; all other programs combined come to only seven hundred ninety-six and a half billion dollars, less than twenty percent, less than the military portion.  Saving money there is a bit like trying to make a package lighter by using less tape to seal it.

It is not unkind for me to cut my son’s allowance in order to pay the utility bill; he might think I should pay less to the utility company, but he would be upset if we said we couldn’t afford to run his video games or heat the water for his showers.  That national debt that’s going up another trillion dollars this year is very nearly twenty trillion already–sixty dollars for every person within our borders.  We keep saying that we’ll pay it off when things get better, but they’re getting worse and the amount is increasing like a bad debt owed to a loan shark.  Economists argue about whether it is bad for nations to go into debt, just as they argue about whether it’s bad for people to go into debt, but although we’ve at times managed to reduce the debt we have not paid it off entirely in a long time, longer than my lifetime, and the people who are lending us the money (what, did you think we borrowed it from God?) are beginning to think maybe we’re not so good a risk as they once thought.  Many economists assert that a high national debt depresses the economy, raises the prices of goods, and reduces the availability of jobs.  Somehow we have to reduce our spending.  It certainly is important for us to help the poor, but this ongoing forced philanthropy might not be helping so much as we want to think, and can’t continue at this level forever.

One way or another, there is going to be less money for those in need, because the way things have been going there has been less and less money for all Americans.  We laugh when in Fiddler on the Roof Nahum the Beggar complains to Lazar Wolfe about the smaller donation he gave this week, “So if you had a bad week, why should I suffer?”, but the truth is that when the rich have less money, everyone has less money, and when we make the pie smaller everyone’s piece gets smaller.  Not everyone can work; not everyone can contribute to the productivity of the nation–but if we don’t find a way to get more people working productively, there won’t be enough money for those who can’t.

Someone once challenged the original Mr. Rockefeller that his millions (which were then worth a lot more than they would be today) should be shared among everyone.  Rather than arguing the point, Rockefeller agreed, reached into his pocket, and handed the man a dime as his share.  If you stripped the top one percent of everything they owned and gave it everyone else, it would be a small amount divided so many ways, and there would be no comparable wealthiest people to rob the next year.  You cannot feed the poor by robbing the rich; you have to teach them to fish, that is, give them jobs, not money.  How to do that is much debated, but it seems that part of it has to be to reduce the amount the government is spending, and the obvious place to do that is where it is spending the most.

That hurts, but it may be necessary.

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Elections, Law and Politics

#127: New Jersey 2016 Election Results

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #127, on the subject of New Jersey 2016 Election Results.

We provided some advance explanation of the two Public Questions which were on the ballot, and did a quick rundown of the major candidates in the twelve congressional districts, and now we’re following up with the election results.  After all, with a lot of these events there is a great deal of coverage in anticipation of the moment, and then if you blink, you miss the outcome.  That shouldn’t be.

In the Presidential race, New Jersey consigned its fourteen electoral votes to the loser, Democrat Hillary Clinton, as Republican Donald Trump won comfortably.

Map of New Jersey's Electoral College vote, from Google, 3:00 Wednesday morning.
Map of New Jersey’s Electoral College vote, from Google, 3:00 Wednesday morning.

Public Question #1:  Constitutional Amendment to permit casino gambling in two counties other than Atlantic County, went down hard, about four to one against.  That means for the present casino gambling will be confined to Atlantic City, and the city will have to figure out how better to manage what it has.

Public Question #2:  Constitutional Amendment to dedicate additional revenues to state transportation system, ran very close, but sometime after midnight had clearly passed by a narrow margin, under fifty-five percent of the vote favoring it.  That means the state government will be forced to put the gasoline tax revenue into a dedicated account strictly for use by the Department of Transportation, which was the justification for the tax originally.

In the House of Representatives, all the incumbents were re-elected easily except in Congressional District 5, where Republican incumbent Scott Garrett was hurt by Libertarian Claudio Belusic in his race against Democrat Josh Gottheimer.  The Libertarian’s two-point-two percent of the vote was the best of any Libertarian candidate in the state (Libertarian Presidential candidate Gary Johnson took two percent of the vote in the state, the best showing of any third-party candidate), but even apart from that Gottheimer would have edged out a victory, with fifty-point-five percent of the vote in his favor.

This tips the balance of New Jersey’s Congressional delegation, which for the past several years has been evenly split with six Republicans and six Democrats; with Gottheimer replacing Garrett we will be sending seven Democrats and only five Republicans to Washington.  Nationally the Republicans still hold the House, with two hundred thirty-six seats, a few lost from their current majority.  In the Senate, Republicans also lost one seat (in Illinois), but still hold a bare majority at fifty-one.

Here are the incoming United States Congressmen from New Jersey by district:

  1. Donald Norcross, Democrat, Incumbent.
  2. Frank Lobiondo, Republican, Incumbent.
  3. Tom MacArthur, Republican, Incumbent.
  4. Chris Smith, Republican, Incumbent.
  5. Josh Gottheimer, Democrat, Newcomer.
  6. Frank Pallone, Democrat, Incumbent.
  7. Leonard Lance, Republican, Incumbent.
  8. Albio Sires, Democrat, Incumbent.
  9. Bill Pascrell, Democrat, Incumbent.
  10. Donald Payne, Jr., Democrat, Incumbent.
  11. Rodney Frelinghuysen, Republican, Incumbent.
  12. Bonnie Watson Coleman, Democrat, Incumbent.

That gives us the shape of our Federal Government for the next two years.

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Bible and Theology, Elections, Law and Politics

#126: Equity and Religion

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #126, on the subject of Equity and Religion.

I saw an article online, from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, entitled Amendment 3:  A Stealth Attack on Religious Freedom  The title intrigued me, since I had no notion of what was happening in Missouri, so I skimmed the piece–and was rather surprised at what I found.  It struck me that the author did not have a very good grasp on exactly what “religious liberty” is, so I decided to pursue the matter here.

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The purpose of “Amendment 3”, apparently Missouri’s version of what we in New Jersey now call a Public Question, is to create a cigarette tax and use the money to fund early childhood education.  The tobacco industry has not made a lot of noise about it, at least directly–they have learned that people who smoke are very unlikely to stop simply because the amount of money they burn increases.  It seems like a positive idea, that if people are going to kill themselves slowly at least they can help fund the education of our children.

At issue is text that says the disbursement of funds raised will not be limited or prohibited by the State of Missouri Constitution’s “Prohibition of public aid for religious purposes and institutions” clause.  That means that if whatever method of distributing the money to help with preschool education would otherwise mean that a Lutheran- or Baptist- or Muslim or Jewish-run facility would qualify for some of that money, that facility is not automatically disqualified simply because it is administered by a church, mosque, synagogue, or other religious organization.  Opponents of the measure say that this is an attempt to bring funding of religious organizations in through a side door, and so force people to pay for religious education with public money.

It is not at all clear that that is what this is, and in fact from the description it sounds rather as if it is an attempt, not to show religious preference, but in fact precisely not to show it.  It is saying that the fact that a group of people trying to provide early childhood education happen to be believers of a particular religious philosophy will not disqualify them from being funded by this program–exactly what freedom of religion means, that we will not discriminate against you on the basis of what you believe.  As long as the program is administered impartially, part of that impartiality has to be that a program is not disqualified based on religious connections.

That is important for multiple reasons.

Social programs and particularly education have always been spearheaded in the Anglo-Saxon world by Christians and Christian organizations.  Our Ivy League colleges and many other schools and universities were originally founded by Christians to educate doctors, lawyers, and ministers.  Christians were the first to attempt to help the poor in England through education of their children.  In America, many settlers would arrive in a new location and build a church and a school as the fundamental institutions of society.  Meanwhile, the Jews have long put a heavy emphasis on educating their children, going back more than centuries, possibly millennia–a Hebrew boy became a man by proving he could read from the Torah, at least as early as the first century.  Religious people have been proponents of education, and education for all, even when the approved thinking was that education was for the privileged and powerful, to maintain their power and privilege.

Encouraging a group to do what we want them to do and they want to do anyway is good politics.

Besides, if the objectors are saying that it is a violation of the principle of freedom of religion to fund any organization that promotes a religious position, they’re going to have to stop funding public education as well.  St. Louis is a particularly interesting case, as it is the home of the headquarters of the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church–not the most conservative Lutheran group, but conservative enough that they honestly believe in a six-day creation.  You might disagree; I don’t know that I agree.  However, whenever the State of Missouri uses its collected tax money to teach the scientific views about the Big Bang Theory and the Theory of Evolution, it is spending money to promote a religious idea–the idea that the Missouri Synod Lutheran belief in six-day creation is wrong.  Our objectors say that they do not want their tax money spent to fund organizations that will promote religious notions with which they disagree; now they know how their Lutheran neighbors feel.

The only way to treat religious people and their organizations fairly is to make the question of religious belief irrelevant to the question of funding social efforts.  Otherwise, it would be the same as saying that the government will not fund a day care run by a black man, or a preschool run by a woman.  Not discriminating on the basis of religion means that religious views are not a factor in the decision.  That’s what the amendment is saying.

How those programs are going to work has not yet been determined.  The simple way, though, is for the government to provide scholarships or tuition reimbursement for needy families trying to send their children to whatever preschools are available.  Some have argued that this kind of “voucher” system unconstitutionally funds religious schools because the parents can give the money to those schools and the government winds up paying the church, as it were.  However, to do otherwise unconstitutionally discriminates against religious groups, requiring that parents send their children only to schools which reject religious views entirely–itself a religious view–or forego the government assistance they cannot afford to be without.

It would be akin to refusing to provide food stamps to any family that says grace before meals.

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Law and Politics

#108: The Value of Ostentation

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #108, on the subject of The Value of Ostentation.

As sometimes happens, one of my political web log entries got me involved (I hesitate to say “embroiled”) in a discussion.  This time the post was mark Joseph “young” web log entry #105:  Forced Philanthropy, and the argument was carried on Facebook.  In that discussion, someone said

I would just rather live in a world in which people don’t starve while others walk around with $5000 purses and $25,000 watches.

My gut reaction was to agree with that–but then something in my brain started nagging at me.  Why?  That is, what does the one have to do with the other?

The half million dollar Audemars Piguet Diamond Fury ladies' wristwatch
The half million dollar Audemars Piguet Diamond Fury ladies’ wristwatch

I got to thinking about that expensive purse and that expensive watch.  The very definition of “expensive” means that our ostentatiously wealthy person parted with a large amount of cash to obtain it.  I expect that somewhere there are designers who themselves are becoming ostentatiously wealthy from the sales of their products, but ultimately someone–undoubtedly several someones–is getting a paycheck.  I don’t know that it matters whether that money is funding a few very healthy paychecks of skilled craftsman or a lot of factory wage checks for employees–it is moving the money from the bank accounts of very rich people to the wallets and pocketbooks of ordinary working-class families.  It is creating jobs.  That expensive bauble is proof that that wealthy person parted with a large sum of cash.

So it seems that in some sense the purchase of those expensive purses and watches is money going to feed someone other than the very wealthy owners of said baubles.  It is in that sense communicating exactly the opposite of what the critic perceives–not money wasted that could have fed people, but money spent to provide paychecks so people can eat.

Sure, some of it goes into nonsense like all those diamonds that stud the watch, but ultimately we’re still talking about money moving away from the wealthy bauble purchaser toward the working classes.

The objection seems rather to be that the wealthy person is showing off how much money he has by spending it on severely overpriced merchandise.  Why should anyone spend that much money on a handbag?  Indeed, our wealthy person could have walked into Walmart and purchased a perfectly functional handbag for under twenty dollars.  My wife does so frequently.  It seems that the only reason to spend more than that is to have something that will say, “Look at how much money I wasted on a handbag, because I am so incredibly rich that I can.”

Of course, the makers of those expensive products will argue that the price is justified by the quality.  The purchasers, likewise, will say that the products they bought are genuinely better in real ways than the ones everyone else buys cheaply.  After all, “cheap” generally means both that something doesn’t cost much and that it isn’t worth more.  What we have a hard time imagining is that the expensive handbags and watches and other baubles are really worth what the wealthy pay.

That may be something we cannot genuinely or fairly assess.

I have never played a Stradivarius; I have heard a few of them played, but only reproduced over computer sound systems.  They’re said to be priceless, and those few people who have the opportunity to play them believe them to be worth every penny paid for them.  How can I know?  I’ve played a few violins of varying quality, and would say that some are worth more than others, but I cannot really imagine one being so much better that it would be worth as much as that.  I have played a couple of Fender Stratocaster guitars.  They’re good guitars, but I’ve always had the feeling that they were way overpriced–you can get a decent electric guitar for a tenth of what some Strats cost.  Yet there are professional musicians who won’t play anything else, or at least who insist on having one in their collection for use when they want it.

I agree that some instruments play better than others.  When I was in high school, tenor saxophone was one of my instruments.  I often wondered whether I could play alto, and one day I saw an alto sax lying around and tried it, and was impressed with how nicely it played so I looked at the stamp–and discovered that it was the band director’s instrument.  I once picked up a Rickenbacker bass, and it was also very nice.  I’m not sure what these instruments cost, and I’m not sure I could justify spending that much on one.

On the other hand, when I was in The Last Psalm I purchased recording tape for every concert.  RadioShack® then had three grades, and I bought the cheapest for the first few years–and told the sound engineer that as soon as I could hear the difference, I would upgrade to the better grade.  I did so for the final years of the band’s run, because my hearing was better.  I wonder today whether the costs of producing high-quality recordings are worth it, because most people listen to low-quality mp3 copies on low-fidelity equipment.

The point is, an assessment of the quality of a product and the value of that quality is an essentially subjective question.  I can’t imagine a watch being worth as much as that, but some people see it as a quality issue.  If someone puts that kind of effort into producing a product that is in some way better than the norm, and can persuade wealthy people to pay that much for it, that is probably overall better for the economy than having the wealthy people buy the ordinary quality products at the ordinary price.

And the rich person who spends five thousand dollars on a designer handbag instead of twenty dollars on a practical Walmart model has parted with an extra four thousand nine hundred eighty dollars that has gone into paychecks that feed ordinary people somewhere.

So what is it that bothers us about these ostentatious baubles?  Perhaps more precisely, what is it that we want instead?

Some of us want there to be no wealthy people in the world.  Of course, as one of the people in the referenced conversation reminded, half of everyone is below average.  He was speaking of intelligence, but it’s true of wealth as well, and so is the converse:  half of everyone has more than average.  I might feel it unfair that Donald Trump owns his own hotels or Hillary Clinton can jet to Europe on a moment’s notice without checking her bank balance, but I might as easily object that my neighbor could afford to install automated lawn sprinklers or an enclosed garage.  Some people will have more, some will have less.  It is the nature of such differences that they form a bell curve, and it is the nature of natural bell curves that the extremes are extreme–fewer and fewer people having more and more (or less and less).

We can, of course, try to alter that unnaturally–perhaps create a tax that takes 100% of all income or assets over a certain amount.  That is problematic on so many levels.  A fixed amount means that the inflation which drives down the value of a dollar correspondingly drives up the amount of money that is needed for the same standard of living, and so more and more people will hit the ceiling.  It is also detrimental to the economy:  if after this point I am not making any money, why should I work?  That also applies to questions like why should I invest–I won’t hire the people to build the new hotel if once it is finished I make no additional income from it.  No, putting a ceiling on income is not a good plan for the economy; the fact that people can become incredibly wealthy is one of the incentives that drive economic progress.  It is also one of the incentives that drive technological progress:  people invent new devices in the hope that it will make them rich.  It also drives people into popular culture, giving us movies and music and other art forms, as well as star athletes.  You can’t both have the incentive that people work hard to make a lot of money and the limit that no one can be ostentateously wealthy.  That part does not work.

Perhaps we feel like there shouldn’t be anything we, ourselves, cannot afford if we want it.  That is, if I admire your car, I should be able to afford to buy a similar car–maybe not today, but within a few years if I work at it.  Everyone should be able to afford a basic standard of living much higher than everyone can afford–a car, a house, a college education for his children.  What about a boat?  What about an indoor swimming pool, a private indoor gym, a personal jet?  What defines this minimum standard of living?  The reality is, and has always been, that some people will have more than others, and those who have less will be envious of those who have more.  It does not really matter, as we just noticed, how much more or less; the envy exists because it is never exactly equal.

Perhaps that aspect of things we cannot afford goes the other direction:  handbags and wristwatches should not cost that much, no matter how good they are.  How much, though, should they cost, and how do we decide this?  If I can sell the rights to a song I wrote for thirty dollars, is there a reason why I can’t sell the rights to a song I wrote for thirty thousand dollars?  J. K. Rowling sold the rights for the first printing of the first Harry Potter book for a paltry sum; by the time she finished selling the movie rights for the seventh book, she was (literally) richer than the Queen.  Can it be said that the books were not worth that much money?  Obviously the movie producers thought they were, and presumably made much more on income from the movies than they paid her for the rights.  Would we be screaming that she got shorted if they paid her a lot less?  And why, then, should it be different for a handbag or a wristwatch?  Pricing is not arbitrary:  it is based on what people are willing to pay.

So why are wealthy people willing to pay so much for baubles which perform functions suitably managed by considerably less expensive items?  Perhaps that is our objection:  they do it to get attention, to display their wealth, in essence to be ostentatious.  Is that what bothers us?  What is interesting about that is that it only bothers people who care about it.  I would not know the difference between a five dollar pocketbook and a five thousand dollar handbag.  I might be able to tell if I examined it closely that one was better made than the other, but at a glance it means nothing to me.  It only means something to two groups of people:  those who can afford such expensive objects, and those who wish they could and so read about them and drool over them.  The cost of these baubles only matters to people who want to show off and to people who are impressed by them.  The rest of us don’t really care how much it cost.  If I knew how much the handbag cost, my impression would be that had I that much money, I would spend it on something I would enjoy a lot more.

But then, I don’t have that much money, and I don’t really know what I would want to own if I had it.  Would I buy a Stratocaster?  A Stradivarius?  And that raises the question of what we want these wealthy people to do with their money instead.  Should they hide it in storehouses like King Midas?  Should they spend it on armaments or their own personal armies and fortresses?  Should they buy companies, and so make more money?  However they spend their money, it is going to be ostentatious in the eyes of someone.

We would rather have them give it all away to people who have less.  Even when that doesn’t mean “including me”, it is still asking them to spend their money for our benefit:  if they give their money to aid the poor, we don’t have to part with so much of ours and don’t have to feel bad about not being able to do more for the poor without suffering more ourselves.  We don’t have “enough” money for ourselves.  However, a long time ago I learned about the concept of rising aspirations:  the more money you have, the more things you perceive as necessities.  Does anyone really need two televisions?  Two cars?  Two warm coats?  We complain about ministers who own their own personal jets, but these are people who have to travel to the places they have been asked to speak and arrive comfortable and refreshed, so they see these as needs.  No one has “too much” money; everyone can think of what he would do with a little more.

And if we get wealthy people to spend money on ostentation, we get that money into the hands of poorer people as surely as if we were to tax it or coerce them to contribute it to charity.  We get them to part with that money voluntarily, not under compulsion; and we do so in a way that creates jobs instead of making more people dependent on our generosity or pseudo-philanthropy.

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Elections, Law and Politics

#105: Forced Philanthropy

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This is mark Joseph “young” blog entry #105, on the subject of Forced Philanthropy.

Somewhere in the archives of Charles Schulz’ wonderful Peanuts comic strip is the one (shown below) in which Linus says, “When I get big, I want to be a great philanthropist!”  Charlie Brown observes, “You have to have a lot of money to be a great philanthropist…”.  After a moment of consideration, Linus clarifies, “I want to be a great philanthropist with someone else’s money!”

We laugh.  It is funny because it is absurd.  There is nothing particularly charitable about giving away money that belongs to someone else, regardless of who benefits.  It is completely absurd.

img105Linus

Yet when politicians say it, for some reason no one laughs.

That’s probably because politicians have demonstrated that they are quite able to do exactly that:  They have the power to take money away from some people and use it to help others.  We have given them that power, and there is a degree to which we are pleased with the outcome, as programs like food stamps and medicaid have reduced poverty in this country to the point that very few Americans are really truly poor.  That is, the kind of poverty we see in Third World countries including India and parts of Africa just does not exist here; we have relatively isolated cases of people “falling through the cracks”, not cities packed with homeless people mobbing the streets and refugee camps bursting at the seams.  We could do more, and we are doing more, but what we have done has been accomplished in significant part because politicians have decided to be philanthropists with our money, and we have approved that.

Yet when Hillary Clinton starts talking about how she would use Donald Trump’s money claimed by the Estate Tax he wants to eliminate, it bothers us.  As Mitch Album (Detroit Free Press) says,

The whole image of the government rubbing its hands as you take your dying breath should creep you out.

We have seen it in Blackadder, as the wealthy nobleman is dying and the King and the Archbishop are drooling over who should get his estates.  Hurry up and die, Donald:  Hillary is already counting the share of your money she is going to give to the less fortunate.

Let’s be clear on this.  It’s one thing for us to agree, however reluctantly, that all of us who are scraping by will sacrifice a little money we could really use for something else, and let the government use it to help those who are not scraping by.  It is entirely different for all of us who have enough to be comfortable to decide to gang up on the few who have more than we do, take their money, and give it to the less fortunate.  The former is almost altruistic, and with bit of stretching can be made to appear as if it is our generosity helping the poor.  The latter is simply criminal–and however much we want to admire Robin Hood, we would have little sympathy for a modern criminal waylaying everyone driving expensive cars and giving the money to farmers who feel their tax burden is too high.

However, somehow politicians have persuaded us that it is a noble idea to rob from the rich and give to the poor, that in doing so they are being charitable.  Like Linus Van Pelt, though, they prove to be philanthropists with someone else’s money.  It is not admirable to take money from the rich and give it to the poor when it is not your money.

I don’t know what Donald Trump has done that counts as charity.  I’m told that Hillary Clinton and her husband own and operate a major charitable fund, and accept contributions from many very wealthy donors.  I gather, too, that they have both personally profited substantially from operating that fund.  She seems to have demonstrated a talent for taking money from other people and making it appear she is a philanthropist.  I suspect she has made more money on her philanthropic activities than she has contributed from her own independent income.

However that is, though, it does appear that she is ready to take money from anyone who has it.  I can only be grateful that I don’t have enough to catch anyone’s attention.

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