The Problem With Pay Limits

I understand why Kenneth Feinberg is chopping the pay at companies that received TARP money. There are two reasons, on face, why this is a good idea. One is a simple moral one — if you’re on the dole, you shouldn’t be getting multi-million dollar paydays. The second is more long-term: a bonus structure which encourages people to make big profits at the end of every year will encourage risky activities which will then lead to the companies’ and the economy’s collapse. Also, there’s the problem of poor corporate governance, where high-up officers in companies stock boards with their friends who have no interest in thinking rationally about pay.

The problem, of course, is that there are a bunch of financial institutions, namely the investment banks bank holding companies who have paid back their TARP money, who are still receiving government support in terms of cheap Fed financing and rock-bottom interest rates who are not under Feinberg’s jurisdiction and are going back to giving out bonuses like it’s 2007 and “Irreplaceable” is burning up the charts all over again. More generally, there will eventually be a time when no banks will be in the position of having not paid back their TARP money and the legal claims Feinberg or his successor will be much murkier. There’s also the problem of highly paid traders and executives simply going to other firms who aren’t having their pay schedules set by the government.

But it would obviously beneficial to society if we had a financial sector that was smaller and where the executives and traders were much less wealthy. And it seems like the only way to do that well is to think more structurally. So that means a combination of regulations on size and riskiness on the front-end and higher taxes for the rich on the back-end. Obviously, it’s much harder to do something that will actually work than to take advantage of populist anger against the least-liked people in America, but this is really important stuff.

The Asperger’s Plea

Slate has an interesting piece on the slight trend of criminal defendants with Asperger’s being able to avoid guilty pleas or prison sentences because of their condition. The arguments range from the insulting and lame — like the case Robert Durst, the wealthy heir who chopped up his neighbor and got off the first degree murder charge because a “psychiatrist testified that his actions were the result of emotional deficits and impulsive behavior associated with Asperger’s” — to the more plausible, namely that it would be cruel and unusual punishment to put people on the Autistic spectrum into an American prison.

What’s slightly troubling about this trend is that it allows clever defense attorneys to take advantage of broad, crude stereotypes about people on the Autism spectrum (they’re unemotional! they love patterns! they don’t understand people!) and then use those to explain why clearly premeditated crimes shouldn’t be punished. What’s striking about those arguments is that many people who commit premeditated crimes that don’t have a clear self-interest explanation probably have all sorts of social issues and lack empathy and basic social skills (which is not to say that aspies necessarily have those problems). On the other hand, I find the cruel and unusual argument pretty compelling, though I think one could argue that the American prison system is cruel and unusual punishment for most people.

More Lil Wayne, Please

I’ve been writing the “Why You Should Care” column for North by Northwestern for about ten months or so. If I may say so, I think the column is pretty good. One problem: not enough Lil Wayne references in the ledes. So, in my latest, which is about how disastrous the return of super-high profitability in the trading sector is, I prominently feature Young Weezy. Exactly how we’ve gone a whole year writing about bailouts without mentioning “Got Money” is really beyond me.

Happy Birthday, John

Seems appropriate

A Procession

Le Duc Tho, Anwar Sadat, Yasser Arafat, Barack Obama. Dark-muslim-commie America haters all.

I really don’t know how to react to Obama winning the Nobel. It’s just too ridiculous. The only people I could have seen predicting this are the Glenn Beck crowd, who would throw that prognostication in there as a part of a ridiculous rant about Obama’s affinity for those socialistic Northern Europeans.

What Happens When We Talk About the Holocaust

When Obama made his speech in Cairo, he referenced the Holocaust as an impetus for the creation of Israel. This made some pro-Israel types upset. Judea Pearl published a Wall Street Journal op-ed where he said that Obama attributing Israel’s creation to the Holocaust made him similar to Ahmadinejad. Pearl wrote, ”Who else defines Israel’s legitimacy that way? Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does. Iran sees Israel as a foreign entity to the region, hastily created to sooth European guilt over the Holocaust. Israelis consider this distortion of history to be an assault on the core of their identity as a nation.” Marty Peretz, unsurprisingly, agreed and said that “Attributing the birth and development of Israel solely to the Holocaust is, then, simply wrong, egregiously wrong.”

But Michael Oren, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., writing in the New Republic decides to defends the accusations of war crimes in the Goldstone report by referencing the Holocuast:

… denying the Holocaust not only deprives Israel of its raison d’être, but, more nefariously still, it invalidates the Jews’ need to defend themselves

…

The Goldstone Report goes further than Ahmadinejad and the Holocaust deniers by stripping the Jews not only of the ability and the need but of the right to defend themselves. If a country can be pummeled by thousands of rockets and still not be justified in protecting its inhabitants, then at issue is not the methods by which that country survives but whether it can survive at all. But more insidiously, the report does not only hamstring Israel; it portrays the Jews as the deliberate murderers of innocents–as Nazis. And a Nazi state not only lacks the need and right to defend itself; it must rather be destroyed.

Now, obviously Pearl, Peretz and Oren are three different men, but one can think that they have similar opinions about Israel, Gladstone and Iran. Benjamin Netanyahu, also a man who I imagine sees things similarly to those three, spent a good long part of his address to the General Assembly discussing the Holocaust, strongly implying that the most hawkish, pro-Israel have no problem invoking the Holocaust when it comes to legitimizing the state or delegitimizing criticism of it.

There’s a problem here. For one, I kinda agree with Peretz, at least as I quoted him in his response to Obama’s speech. The Zionist idea is an old one, and Jewish claims to Palestine have a long history. And compared to how most other states have acquired their territory, Israeli claims aren’t especially specious or falsely constructed. Holocaust or no holocaust, a case for a Jewish state in Palestine could be made. And, Peretz is also right that if we view the state of Israel as purely a form of international reparations for the Holocaust, Palestinians and other Arabs are enabled to make the rather common sense argument that they shouldn’t have to be disadvantaged because of the actions and inactions of Europeans.

But why does the Holocaust come roaring back as the raison d’etre of the Jewish State when Israel is subjected to international observation criticism for its wartime actions? It’s a rather useful way to reflect criticism. If the IDF in Gaza is merely asserting the Jewish right to self defense, how can we criticize their actions? Even though every other state accused of war crimes makes this exact plea — that of self-defense — some defenders of Israel think that such normal criticisms are tantamount to a plea to reenact the greatest crime against civilians in human history.

It’s no wonder that hawkish pro-Israel types come back around to the Holocaust when they feel the most vulnerable. Although using the Holocaust as a justification for the Jewish state has analytical, historical and moral weaknesses, it is the one with the most polemical and emotional power. Many of those skeptical of Zionism will even admit that immediately following the Holocaust, the argument for the Jewish state was particularly compelling. But it’s worth considering what this mode of argument enables and makes room for.

If you view Jews as always put-upon by blood-thirsty, eliminationist anti-Semites – modern day incarnations of Amalek — and don’t trust the international community to show compassion or concern for the Jewish predicament, you won’t much care about UN reports which allege war crimes or US desires to stop settlement construction. Everything else becomes secondary to the  immediate task of defending the Jewish people. The moral and psychological consequences of this type of thinking are dire, however. They create a people forever petrified and unable to act as a normal state that thinks that peaceful relations with the international community under some sort of international law or consensus are possible. An obsession with the Holocaust, and the thought that the next one is always in the offing absent a strong willed group of Jews willing to be unpopular, will lead to something like…well, the modern state of Israel. This is a state where many have concluded that maintenance of the settlements will lead to either the end of Jewish democracy or the imposition of an Apartheid state and yet still blanches at US pressure to halt construction and is violently contemptuous of international criticism of its behavior.

Thomas Friedman, of all people, has a brilliant disquisition on this topic in From Beirut to Jerusalem. He describes how (this is from memory), before the mid 1980s, official visitors to Israel were more likely to be taken to a kibbutz than to Yad Vashem. A kibbutz — the symbol of optimistic Jewish collectivism and egalitarianism — was thought to be a more compelling and true symbol of the Jewish state than a memorial to the Jewish dead of Europe. Since then, things have only gotten closer to Yad Vashem and farther from the Kibbutz. I hope that changes.

Whither the Moral Argument or: Why It Was Always Going To End Up This Way

At a certain point of the health care debate, when it looked like the Democrats were struggling to win broad public support, many liberal pundits tried to rehabilitate the “moral” argument for health care reform. The idea was that, while the Obama health care push was laudatory and that the bill was a great improvement over the status quo, the strategy Obama using was wrong. His wasn’t getting enough broad support because his focus on “bending the curve” — using health care reform to slow the growth in health care spending which, unchecked, would bankrupt the country — couldn’t get any traction. So, they argued, we should emphasize what a disaster our current system is for the uninsured and why it was an urgent moral failing.

Now, Max Baucus is always talking about bending the curve. He has emphasized over and over how important it is that any bill be, ultimately, deficit reducing. And now the CBO has scored the most recent Baucus bill and found that, it’s well, deficit negative. Maybe not entirely cost-curving, but surely good enough for Obama and Baucus. It also basically covers everyone. But, wait, Ezra Klein says, as he’s been saying for a while, that it’s also incredibly incremental. As he puts it, the bill “leaves 245 million non-elderly Americans who will pretty much be in the exact place they would’ve been otherwise.” Yet, Klein, like many others, is disappointed that a more ambitious and comprehensive bill isn’t in the offing and probably isn’t even possible.

But I think the fact that such a bill — which spends a lot of money to cover the uninsured but otherwise leaves most of the health care status quo intact — is probably going to be the bill, and will ultimately win support from the center-left and left is due tot he fact that leftie health care advocates, who tend to also be single payer supporters, have really been making an explicitly moral argument. It’s almost a weird coincidence that during the years where any universal health insurance was impossible (1995-2009), those who were most loudly insisting on universal health care were also wedded to one of the most radical methods of achieving such reform. In short, a world where what people really care about is universal coverage, something like the Baucus bill will end up being the means that universal coverage is achieved. It is, since it must go through the 60 vote senate, the Finance committee and get signed off by the interests which control health care policy, the way of achieving the most basic health care reform goal (covering the uninsured) that has the least resistance.

Columns

I’ve had two columns for the world’s greatest online publication — North by Northwestern – in the past week. One on net neutrality and one on financial services reform. Check them out.

The Dutch Option

Jon Cohn has an excellent article on the Netherlands that makes a rather obvious point that seems to elude some leftie activist: it’s possible to have a health care system that does everything any leftie wants — accessible quality care to everyone without a government run health care option. Now, this is a bit complicated because we already have a bunch of “public options” of varying degrees — Medicare, VA, federal employees and so on — but the basic point that a public option, especially any public option could have ever passed through the Senate, is not the be all end all of health care reform needs to be repeated over and over.

The big difference between the Netherlands and the US, even if we pass the Baucus bill, is how they treat insurance companies:

Still, there’s a catch. A big catch. Private insurance in the Netherlands works because it operates more or less like a public utility. The Dutch government regulates industry practices tightly–more tightly than the reforms now moving through Congress propose to do in the United States. The public insurance option was supposed to make up for that deficiency, at least in part, by setting a standard for service and affordability that the private industry would have to meet–and by offering a fail-safe option in case the private plans simply couldn’t keep up. If Congress ends up gutting the public plan, in part or in whole, then it needs to work even harder on making private insurance work. And it’s an open question whether that will happen.

I’m a bit more sanguine than many liberals on how much a possible bill could do on this front. Any bill that passes will have some basic, necessary regulations like community rating, some kind of mandate and guaranteed issue which will the foundation of any health care system that rests on treating private insurers as public utilities. I think that once we have some sort of system in place, there will be pressure to make the system better as more people are directly invested in it through higher taxes and the mandate. Of course, there’s a fear that all the mandate+subsidize system will do is lead to insurers competing not on quality, but on the skimpiness of benefits and through better marketing and advertising.

Another general point to consider when dreaming up health care systems is path dependence. Atul Gawande has made the point that just about every system we lefties admire wasn’t built up from scratch in a day. Instead, countries faced dilemmas of coverage and equity and built on what systems they had. There are both good political and pragmatic reasons to approach health care reform this way, which means that we should probably be focusing all of our efforts on making the insurance regulations and the exchanges as good as possible.

The Weird Simplicty and Complexity of Polanski

In some ways, the case of Roman Polanski is incredibly simple. If we were to imagine an otherwise unremarkable man who plied a 13 year old girl with alcohol and quaaludes and then raped her, we would have no sympathy for him and none of the excuses that are made for Polanski would be made for him. He is, simply, morally culpable for a horrible act and that should be held against him forever.

But our legal system is not one that fairly, accurately and satisfactorily judges moral culpability and then apportions punishments. Instead, in the case of Polanski, there is a good argument to be made that re-trying or imprisoning him now would be an offense to due process procedures and rights, which we tend to think supersede questions of guilt. One can appeal to this legal and procedural complexity — namely that Polanski was about to be screwed by a judge and prosecutor colluding with each other — without making any excuses for behavior or obscuring the rather clear fact that he raped a 13 year old girl. I think that some feminists, like Scott Lemiuex and WAM, in their noble effort to focus on Polanski’s unambiguous criminality in the face of morally odious defenses of him, have too hastily dismissed these procedural concerns as simply yet another defense for the indefensible.

Now, I hate to use myself as a counter-example, but I think it’s indeed possible to think that Polanski is indeed a rapist and that imprisoning him or retrying him (remember, he had originally arranged to be sentenced to time-served) would be problematic. The way our legal system works is to separate moral and procedural concerns, I think we are complex enough to do the same.

This Is What Democracy Looks Like

The Cynical, Ironic Ideologue

There are two Irving Kristols. One is the wide-ranging, detached and influential New York Intellectual of the 40s, 50s and most of the 60s. This was the man who was at the center of an intellectual culture whose scope and influence is only rivaled by Bloomsbury and 1930s Vienna. Although his colleagues produced more substantial work of lasting import (Daniel Bell, Seymour Lipset, Nathan Glazer), Kristol was hardly some intellectual dilettante.

But then in the 1970s and onward, he turned into one of the most dangerous creatures that can exist in the public sphere: the ironic, cynical ideologue. Matt Yglesias and Andrew Sullivan both point out that Kristol openly and blatantly disregarded expertise in economics when selecting supply-side pieces to be published in the Public Interest and maintained a thoroughgoing agnosticism despite publicly insisting that religion was necessary for the maintenance of the values that hold society together. Kristol himself, the philosopher king of the Republican Party, could maintain a basically faithless, cosmopolitan life among intellectual elites of all political stripes, but the masses could not. It’s not so much that he made arguments for the superiority of white-middle class values and religion in bad faith, it’s that his entire intellectual style — whatever is good for the Republican Party is true — doesn’t admit any difference between good and bad faith.  When you see his son, William, be so cynical and cavalier about the truth or any objective standards for candidates besides the ability to provide a short-term boost to a flagging Republican presidential campaign (Palin, Sarah) you are seeing the inevitable result of his father’s style.

Of course, Kristol’s heirs could use some cynicism — the conservative movement’s obscene faith in the magical ability of supple side tax cuts is nothing if not sincere — but it should be recognized that much of the synthesis that defines the conservative movement was conceived in a way that regarded intellectual honesty and skepticism as a crutch.

PS – Even if you don’t think that “ideas” or intellectuals are the driving forces of political coalition building or success, it’s still worth pointing out that the conservative movement reveres Kristol.

Need More Zeitlin?

I haven’t been posting nearly enough. It’s two parts moving in, two parts seeing people I haven’t seen in three months and one part playing Madden ‘10 on the 37 inch flatscreen that came in this morning. I am, however, still twittering like a fiend. So if you need that daily dose of wry, informed and impetuous commentary on current events, check out the feed.

This Doesn’t Make Sense

As much as I despise the Notre Dame Fighting Irish,  I understand why NBC signed a deal with them and I understand why their game against an unranked, middle of the road Big 10 team is getting national coverage on ABC. A lot of people like the Irish, and a lot of people like Michigan. But the mere fact that much of America is besotted with a team that hasn’t a won a major bowl since 1990 and has gotten their asses handed to them whenever they do slip into BCS bowl doesn’t mean that America’s sports media should pretend that Notre Dame is any sort of threat to do something special this year. They are ranked 18, and with BYU and Boise State both looking to go undefeated while beating some real talent, Notre Dame will probably get squeezed out of an at-large BCS bid.

But because of the relentless hype any halfway decent Fighting Irish team gets, they are going to be part of the conversation. And it’s all a huge scam. Because the Irish isn’t in a major conference, they aren’t required to play any good teams — with the exception of their annual game against USC, where they routinely get demolished — but they play all their games on national TV and can beat up on the weak opposition with everyone watching. Because of college football’s partial reliance on polls for deciding who gets to play in bowls And since the entire college football community knows that getting Notre Dame into a BCS game means more hype and ratings, they get every break when it comes to getting that elusive at-large bid. I almost hope they only lose two games this year and get into a BCS bowl and get crushed by a far superior, less media-beloved team. Kinda like in 2001, when an absurdly talented Oregon State team crushed Notre Dame in the Fiesta Bowl.

In other college football news, I’m not a betting man, but if I were, I would take USC to cover the spread. Terrelle Pryor is a very talented quarterback. He’s not Vince Young. USC’s defense is amazingly good. USC doesn’t lose to highly ranked out-of-conference opponents, they lose to mediocre Pac 10  teams.

UPDATE: So, obviously, USC didn’t cover the spread against Ohio State. In fact, they looked pretty shaky. That USC isn’t in a full-on rebuilding year — having lost their key skilled position players and the core of their defense — is a testament to how amazingly deep they are. The game also revealed something that everyone who’s watched a decent amoung of Big 10 football knows — Tyrelle Pryor is an amazing athlete, a fantastic scrambler and a fearsome runner with a cannon hanging off his shoulder. But when he’s forced to pass and win games, he leaves a lot to be desired. He’ll have to get much better before the Vince Young comparisons make any sense

Eight Years Ago

Finally, after electing a president who wasn’t defined by an irresponsibly belligerent response to the murder of 3,000 Americans, I think we can gain some perspective on how the events that day revealed much of America and its political leadership to be fundamentally weak, immature and irresponsible.

Many countries have seen tragedies. Many countries have been attacked by outsiders. And they have nearly all responded by drawing in on themselves and becoming more hostile to the outside world. But America is different. Our understandable anger and paranoia turned into something horrible, not only for those Americans who have seen their constitutional values destroyed and their friends and relatives sent off to die in a pointless war, but for all the Iraqis and Afghans who have died needlessly or have found themselves locked up in a Kafka-esque island fortress for being aligned with the wrong warlord in the Hindu Kush. One would hope that America’s size, strength and influence would breed a certain sense of responsibility and humility, an awareness of how our actions affect the entire world, for good as well as evil. Instead, we had a political class intent on war and the nullification of our the principles that are the supposed bedrock of our nation.

Instead of tempering our anger and fear and distrust, they played on it. The media and the public, instead of being wary of demagogues who use times of fear to advance nefarious ends, were enthralled with the idea of projecting power and strength, with little care for the consequences we’d bring upon ourselves or inflict on to others. We were hurt and humiliated, but not chastened.

In stark contrast to the collective failure of our leaders, the culture has largely recovered. Though the memory of 9/11 was manipulated by those who have nothing but contempt for our cosmopolitan, urban centers that are the driving force of our culture and our economy, the victims were largely New Yorkers. They were blue staters, living in a city whose greatness is a product of its diversity and dynamic cultural energy, values that a revanchist, hostile right can’t stand. And New York, the site of the attacks, recovered. There were those who talked about how humor and irony would be impossible after 9/11. How New Yorkers would give up their decadence, get settled down and have kids. But it never happened. New York retained its essential cosmopolitan identity. Comedy and irony, two great American values which seem to be infused into the lifeblood of our cultural capital, are still with us. New York is still New York, though scarred. It’s noteworthy how the culture of American — that ineffable product of 300 million people interacting and desiring and producing — survived the trauma of that day, while our politics, which is marked by unconscionable amount of cynicism, bad faith and utter uncaring for those hurt by the power wielded by America, could not. It suggests that while we can come under the thrall of bad people, we are still, in some sense, good.

Health Care For the Poor, Health Security For the Middle Class

Dana Goldstein points out that, as far as explicit subsidies for the purchase of health insurance goes, just about any conceivable health plan is tilted towards helping the poor more than the middle classes. In a straight dollars sense, this is true: “At 300 percent of poverty — $66,150 for a family of four — Baucus requires a family to spend 13 percent of its income on health care before government subsidies kick in. That’s a burdensome $8,600.”

But that seems to be ignoring the real problem for the middle class regarding health insurance. I’m not so sure it’s cost, or , if it is cost, that’s not what people are complaining about or are worried about. The cost of normal health insurance, notwithstanding large, unexpected expenses, is pretty well hidden from a lot of people, especially if they get coverage from their employer. The problem is, instead, for the self-employed or people who might lose their job and have to buy health insurance .It’s a security problem, not a coverage problem. All the consumer protections — guaranteed issue, community rating, no preexisting conditions, caps on out of pocket expenses — are a huge boon to everyone who isn’t super rich and purchases health insurance.

In some sense, you want most people to pay for a good portion of their normal health expenses on their own. What you don’t want is people being too poor to afford health care, people going bankrupt paying for health care, or people not being able to purchase reasonably priced insurance because of preexisting conditions. And just about any Democratic plan, from the Baucus compromise to the tri-committee bill, gets us closer to those protections being a reality.

See Nick Beaudrot as well.

Are We Switzerland?

Matt Miller has a good op-ed in the Post arguing that progressives shouldn’t die on the public option hill, and that a bill that includes exchanges, subsidies, a mandate, guaranteed issue and community rating would be a vast improvement over the status quo. Or, as Ezra Klein puts it, such a bill would be “the most important progressive policy passed since Lyndon Johnson.”

Miller’s case against single payer, or against any giant change to the health insurance system, is similar to the point Atul Gawande made in his January New Yorker piece on various industrialized countries journeys to universal health care. We’re stuck with a system where private insurers are going to be providing health care (or paying for it) for the vast majority of Americans. So, we should build on that system and try to turn insurance companies into something approaching highly regulated utilities? I understand both the practical and ideal arguments for this. For one, massive, wrenching changes to the health care system can have tons of unintended consequences. Also, a single payer system (as opposed to a socialized one) will probably have trouble avoiding costs and won’t be able to progress to a kind of mandate+capitation system that we’re approaching in Massachusetts.

But for the practical objections, would a switch to a single payer system really be all that wrenching? After all, we already have Medicare. If the Democratic proposal were just Medicare for all, that would be an almost textbook example of building on what we already have. Hell, we could build on the Veteran’s Administration health system, which is a Britain style socialized system.

The Baucus Bill

So, after coming out in outline form in June, Baucus has released a plan that seems exactly the same. As Ezra Klein puts it, “If no Republicans sign on to this bill, it will be hard to view the past few months as anything but wasted time in which the president’s poll numbers got hammered and health-care reform became more difficult.”

Basically, the bill is what I predicted the final health care bill that makes it to the president’s desk will be: “Subsidies to 300 percent of poverty. Medicaid to 133 percent of poverty. Insurance market regulations. Prevention. Wellness. Exchanges.” And, to pay for it, an excise tax on “gold-plated” insurance plans, which is just a complicated way of “capping the employer tax exclusion on plans that cost more than $21,000.”

I think when this health care bill gets to the President’s desk, the big question is why it took so long for a basic outline that had been around for months to turn into reality. When the health care debate started in honest, it became clear that the left wing position, as represented by the Progressive caucus and the Democratic, non-Blue Dog House caucus was the Baucus plan with more subsidies and a public option. Because of the way Senate moderates operate, who necessarily control the final form of a bill that has to pass a 60 vote Senate, the final bill would have to extract a pound of progressive flesh. Because Senate moderates are most likely to both be concerned about the spending and deficit implications of progressive social spending and are the most in hoc with the insurance companies, those pounds of flesh take the form of the public option and of more generous subsidies for the poor and middle class to buy health insurance. And so, you have the Standard Democratic Health Plan with Medicaid subsidies going to 133% of poverty instead of 150% and insurance subsidies going to 300% of poverty instead of 400%.

I understand why progressive activist types, who are basically primed to accuse any Democratic administration of selling out to a phony Washington policy consensus, are upset by such a bill. But considering how difficult (i.e. impossible) it has been for any President, even under the best of circumstances, to pass universal health care, endless gripping about something like the Baucus bill going into the law will be seen, ten or twenty years down the road, as being petty and short-sighted.

Van Jones

As surely you’ve heard, Amanda Carpenter of the Washington Times dug up Van Jones — Obama’s Green Jobs frontman and hero the climate change activism community — signing a petition put out by “911Truth.org” that called for an “immediate public attention to unanswered questions that suggest that people within the current administration may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war.” And the right, which has been gunning for Jones for a while, is going nuts, as is expected.

This isn’t at all surprising, and frankly, I’m surprised that it took this long for some of Jones’s radical past to come back to haunt him. As Alex Pareene explains, after Jones graduated from Yale Law School, was a “a “full-on Marxist” in early ’90s California. He joined a revolutionary Marxist group and protested police brutality.” Basically, during the 1990s and early 00s, he was part of the “Ella Baker Center For Human Rights,” which was an Oakland based left-wing group that mostly concerned itself with criticizing the police, incarceration and other pet issues of the Bay Area far-left activist community. He ran in the same circles as decidedly not-mainstream types such as, for example, Medea Benjamin, founder of Code Pink. Basically, he was the exact type of urban, far-left community organizer that conservatives really despise. And  for a relatively mainstream public figure, he has a recent past that’s far outside the accepted American consensus.

But, right around the same time he signed the Truther petition, he began his transformation into the Van Jones of today: the foremost activist for the “Green Economy,” which is mildly utopian vision where labor, upper-middle class environmental activists and urban minorities all unite around a shared vision where a government encouraged conversion to a clean energy economy provides full employment for union workers in rust belt states and for alienated urban youth. He’s also an incredibly savvy organizer, and most importantly, a great self-promoter. Jones, in his environmentalist guise, has been feted by all sorts of extremely mainstream folk (most noticeably Thomas Friedman) and is basically a saint for those who global-warming activism.

So, it makes sense that the right would go after him. He’s both beloved by the Left and is pretty vulnerable because of his past associations. As for whether he should stay on in his White House role as a “relatively low-level bureaucrat trying to steer stimulus funding toward green-job programs,” I wouldn’t be particularly upset if the White House threw him under the bus. No matter what, he’ll still be an exalted figure among climate-change and environmental activists and will be able to put his incredible charisma, energy and vision to good use without a White House position.

PS – And now, not surprisingly, he’s resigned.

Rawls and the Real World

In a review of Amartya Sen’s latest book, the Economist offhandedly makes a common criticism of Rawls:

In the courtliest of tones, Mr Sen charges John Rawls, an American philosopher who died in 2002, with sending political thinkers up a tortuous blind alley. The Rawlsian project of trying to describe ideally just institutions is a distracting and ultimately fruitless way to think about social injustice, Mr Sen complains. Such a spirited attack against possibly the most influential English-speaking political philosopher of the past 100 years will alone excite attention…

Rawls held that social justice depended on having just institutions, whereas Mr Sen thinks that good social outcomes are what matter. Strictly both could be right. The practical brunt of Mr Sen’s criticism, however, is that just institutions do not ensure social justice. You can, in addition, recognise social injustices without knowing how a perfectly fair society would arrange or justify itself. Rawlsianism, though laudable in spirit, is too theoretical, and has distracted political philosophers from corrigible ills in the actual world.

Sen’s criticism is hardly an original one. Much of the backlash against Rawls, led by Raymond Guess and others, has been around exactly this point. In blunt terms, he’s too abstract, too concerned with institutions to provide a real political program for those concerned with justice. But this criticism always seemed a bit too pat.

Yes, it’s true, in A Theory of Justice, Rawls does not provide his opinion on hot-button issues or give an historical account of how real, existing liberal societies came to be. But it’s a little unfair to make a criticism of Rawlsianism based just on the works of Rawls himself. Other thinkers, deeply inspired by Rawls, are very concerned with “corrigible ills in the actual world.” Susan Moller Okin, for instance, is someone who took basic Rawlsian ideas about fairness and justice and then turned into a practical political theory of liberal feminism, with all the concern for the real world ills facing women and policy suggestions you would want from a political philosopher. Thomas Pogge is another example of someone working in a broadly Rawlsian framework to address the very issues (global justice, broadly) that Sen is so concerned about. Now, both Pogge and Okin are also critics of Rawls, but they don’t throw out the entire Rawlsian manifold when they turn to discuss their own pet issues. It’s by this process is, of course, that most philosophical or theoretical schools develop It’s a weird category error to say that a certain school of thought isn’t broad or encompassing enough, and then only look at one of its thinkers.