The New Republic

Nothing paradoxical about it. It is hypocritical, but not paradoxical; and Mencken commented on it 70 years ago. Not all who benefit, mind, but certain groups. Farmers, Corporate Welfare recipients, and old people.

- icarusr

August 19, 2010 at 11:31am

Icarusr, With regards to the farmers and rural states here in the Upper-Midwest, most did not have an "anti-government" traditions. The Republicans all most always looked for federal funds. In South Dakota, the saying goes "We elected Democrats to congress to bring the money home and elect Republicans to state offices to ensure it is spent wisely". What we have today is a Ron Paul time libertarian anti-government philosophy (wed to the religious right) that down dominates the Republican Party. Not all rural voters who support this anti-government movement understand just how radical it is. Not all known that it would have a dramatic effect on farm subsidies.

- SRC--Mpls

August 19, 2010 at 12:00pm

I'll defend the paradox against charges of hypocrisy just a bit. My grandfather was a banker who began his career in 1932. Soon thereafter, FDR declared the bank holiday and closed all the banks. Saved the banking system - probably saved American capitalism - but grandpa never forgave FDR or Democrats in general for it. Because of course his bank was solvent and had made prudent decisions, not like all the other irresponsible banks that deserved to go under. You might call this hypocritical, but I think it more accurate to observe that none of us are particularly good at seeing the systems in which we are enmeshed as systems. So even assuming grandpa's bank really was the solvent exception, the banking system was collapsing and would likely have taken his bank down with it. Saving the system, or solving systemic problems, necessarily entails actions that will seem to reward bad actors and punish, or at least fail to reward, good actors. And in my experience with farming, the same attitude is common: Most farmers are not hypocrites who convince themselves that subsidies aren't really subsidies but rather a fair return on the taxes they pay (though some, especially very large landowners, do exactly this). Rather, each individual farmer is making ends meet, barely, and staying ahead of creditors, barely, with enough profit to pay for next year's seed, barely, and so he thinks he doesn't need to take subsidies. But his neighbors all take whatever money the Ag Department throws at them, and he'll be at a disadvantage if he doesn't do likewise. You can't unilaterally disarm, or a single bad year can put you under and your neighbors who maybe weren't as prudent as you but who did take subsidies will be in a position to buy your land and expand their operations at your expense. When you're on the land, you don't see it from a systems perspective; you see it from an atomized perspective wherein imprudent behavior is rewarded and prudent behavior not rewarded.

- rhubarbs

August 19, 2010 at 12:09pm

Rhubs: I don't think your grandpa fits into the Mencken model. On Ag subsidies, though, I give you one word: Cotton. No cotton-pickin' state has the right to say one negative word about the guv'mint, and if they do, they are being hypocritical. As for your "You can't unilaterally disarm" argument, I think you are missing the locus of the hypocrisy. It is not that the average farmer takes subsidies, or that the average AARP voter uses Medicare, because others do it; that is rational behaviour. The hypocrisy arises where the nasty guv'mint proposes to extend health care to the working poor, and the AARP voter and the subsidies farmer pour into the streets, call Obama a socialistfascist and threaten armed rebellion against the unconstititutional expropriation of their wealth to spend on black and brown people.

- icarusr

August 19, 2010 at 1:43pm

"Relatedly, I think the biggest reason the stimulus is unpopular is that a lot of people simply don't think it worked, notwithstanding evidence to the contrary." What evidence to the contrary?? If you're the average Joe low info voter what you see is a high unemployment rate since BHO took office that isnt decreasing. That it isn't decreasing is really thev fault of BHO and the Senate Dems who cant get it into therir heads that they really can change this perception by acting boldly on job creation, even at this late date.

- drofnats1

August 19, 2010 at 2:00pm

The subject is welfare babies form Alaska and we get a disquisition on the Great Depression? This is too funny.

- liberal reformer

August 19, 2010 at 2:00pm

"In a nutshell, the idea is that having to acknowledge your dependence on someone else's money for your survival is demeaning--an admission of your own impotence--which makes you resentful toward the source of the largesse and reluctant to acknowledge that you actually need it" Finally, an explanation for the hostility liberal parasites exhibit towards conservatives/small business owners/investors/and successful private sector types in general. Add in a little envy and we have a winner.

- mr_rationale

August 19, 2010 at 2:04pm

by the way - the reason people think the stimulus failed is that it did. It failed to stimulate sustainable private sector job growth. Sorry, but it is true.

- mr_rationale

August 19, 2010 at 2:06pm

Rationale, I like how you conflate "conservatives/small business owners/investors/and successful private sector" as if they are all one and the same -- every conservative is a small business owner, investor and successful private sector something or other (at least in his or her own mind)! Perhaps "liberal parasites" like us hate them because your paragons of self-reliance are heedless of how their own success was built pretty much wholesale on the opportunities provided to them by the well-ordered and dynamic society that previous generations of liberals helped build -- you know, the universal public education, well-funded research universities, reliable infrastructure, low mortgage rates and affordable middle-class housing, comprehensive fire and police protection, cheap and available food, etc. The kind of stuff that the average kid growing up in, say Ghana or Bangladesh or Belarus can't and doesn't expect. Which is brings up another point -- liberal parasites very much like people like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet or Sergey Brin who have more money that Croesus but understand what actually contributed to their success and spend their free time trying to improve society rather than simply agitating for lower tax brackets.

- wildboy

August 19, 2010 at 2:23pm

I agree, icarusr. I meant merely to suggest that the hypocrisy we see on this matter doesn't necessarily originate with a deliberately dastardly embrace of contradictory standards. I think that for a fair number of those whose expressed political priorities belie their willingness to accept government handouts, whether in the form of cash benefits today or in the form of state action to stabilize the banking sector in 1933, there is simply a blindness to the degree to which those benefits are of a kind with the government largess they claim to oppose. Not so much "do as I say, not as I do," but, "what I saw and what I do couldn't possibly be in conflict."

- rhubarbs

August 19, 2010 at 2:55pm

Rhubs: True. Hypocrisy can be deliberate or it can be unconscious (out of ignorance; I think the AARP dotties who were screaming, "Keep Government Out of Medicare" are really that ignorant, which does not make them less hypocritical, only mess malignant). The "Original Sin" of conservative hypocrisy on guv'mint - and Mr. Rat is Exhibit 1 in these pages - is, of course, that the very concept of property is a creature of organized society, that is, "government". These moronic Hobbesians have never read Hobbes, and go on in their merry way, accusing and cursing and insulting and wanting to "keep what is mine", forgetting that the "keeping" and the "mine" are both constructs enabled and enforced by government. You want to lift the heavy hand of the state? I'll tell you how to do it. It is not taxation, but the police, the prison system, the army, the courts and the laws that are the culprits. And there is no greater parasite than the oik who wants me to pay for the police to protect "his property."

- icarusr

August 19, 2010 at 5:18pm

LibRef: even the irrational and illiterate Rat is making more sense than you. Stop the flaming and concentrate on the subject matter. Or just put your head in a woodshredder.

- icarusr

August 19, 2010 at 5:20pm

mr_rationale fails to express with the same verbal level of venom that he spews forth towards liberal parasites against conservative parasites. Giving a free pass to conservative parasites that take corporate welfare: the multitude form of corporate, agricultural, industrial, energy subsidies and other means of Federal, State or local government "help" in order that their business remain competitive only shows hypocrisy and the consistent level of cognitive dissonance that runs rampant among conservative thinking these days. I guess picking winners and losers need only apply to conservative approved parasites who fight tooth and nail to lower their financial, moral and ethical obligations to the social order we call society.

- singlspeed

August 19, 2010 at 6:19pm

You wish rationale were making more sense than me, abusr. That will be the day. So if I accuse you of not reading books that you haven't read, you will take it lying down? Yeah, you would at about the point the point that rationale acquires brains. So I have to stick to the subject but some border-South nebbish can ramble on irrelevantly? The situation out here is amazing; there is the general clubbiness, group-think, if not group-sex, liberal epistemic closure, pathetically inadequate posts (which are fine and even slobbered over if they are by cronies), flaming from posters who denounce others for flaming. What does this remind me of.... wait!, this is reminiscent of this very thread about Alaska welfare babies. Who says that the right is the only thing wrong with this country?

- liberal reformer

August 19, 2010 at 7:06pm

Nice to see you again, single. I recall you were out here a good deal back in 2008. I was just going to make the point that you did, i.e., that rationale never denounces those on the right who are riding the statist gravy train. Plus, he just about always tries to divert from the topic that Jonathan introduces. I suppose when you have less than a thimbleful of knowledge and you are taking on a brilliant analyst, that is the only hope that you have.

- liberal reformer

August 19, 2010 at 7:11pm

I have seen this phenomenom in the most strange places. I know a person who works on a stimulus funded infrastructure project who call Obama a "socialist" and see himself as John Galt. It really is a strange disconnect in our politics. Chait's column about the "Oldification of the GOP" is another example. We had a demographic that a few years ago was demanding subsidies for perscription drugs and now is demanding that nobody else gets it because that would be "big government." I do think it is correct that Rat. fails to even acknowledge the subsidies many of the uber-rich get from the government. It is almost comical. What is even more comical is that these rugged individualists asked for billions in TARP.

- MikeB.

August 19, 2010 at 8:56pm

There are a few other big things though: 1) The Republicans just have a good lie, and the press does a horrible job of calling them on it: Tax cuts are magic fairy dust. We'd get even more than we get from the government if only we have 50% or 100% tax cuts, then look out! Economics has long, long established that there's so much the pure free market will not provide, underprovide, or poorly provide due to market problems like externalities, asymmetric information, etc. But how many people are well educated in economics. 2) The stuff that they get is good government spending (Keep your big government hands off my Medicare!), and not that expensive. They just want to end the 80% of government spending that's going to lazy welfare recipients, and they don't understand that it's actually just 0.7% of total government spending, and is very hard to get for an able-bodied lazy person for long. 3) They have the luxury of saying government is bad because of all of the benefits they already get. You can join the Tea Party and say how government should be slashed when you're getting Social Security checks a lot larger than what you paid in, and free luxury single-payer health insurance that you'd never be able to come close to affording in the pure free market. Take those things away and then they'd protest for a more expansive government to protect them, to get those things.

- RHSerlin

August 20, 2010 at 12:33am

"Relatedly, I think the biggest reason the stimulus is unpopular is that a lot of people simply don't think it worked, notwithstanding evidence to the contrary." Indeed, let's see the evidence. The original assertion that the stimulus would work was based a lot on Romer's belief that a dollar spent by government resulted in a certain economic benefit, and that benefit was higher than a dollar NOT collected in taxes. Of course, pre-2007 she believed the opposite. And for a while we were confronted by the logic that the stimulus created 3M jobs, but unemployment wasn't moving--it was somehow stuck. And now all we have is "It would have been a lot, lot worse". The data here is exceptionally sketchy. "Sketchy" and "trillion dollars" shouldn't be in the same sentence often. Those that benefited from the stimulus are those that supported Obama during the election. Period. Bankers and unions.

- seattleeng

August 20, 2010 at 11:40am

libref: you really made me laugh with the comment the Chait is a brilliant analyst --- full belly guffaws. Earth to libref -- Chait is partisan, liberal blogger who's job it is to cheerlead for the mostly moonbats subscribers of TNR. He has no educational or professional experience that qualifies him to speak as a real economic analyst. Great at snarkly political commentary thougth -- no qual needed I worked as an analyst at McKinsey years ago -- Chait couldn't get interviewed for my administrative assistant. But keep it up libref -- this blog is my comic relief during the day, and spending the 3 minutes to refute a Chait argument is my guilty pleasure. I actually time myself.

- mr_rationale

August 20, 2010 at 1:40pm

On some of the other feedback: Yes the Gov does provide economic value -- the 25% or so of Gov that produces an 'gov good or service' Gov good/service is recognized Econ 101 concept. I have digressed on this before. My comments focused on the other 75% that doesn't provide value. And given that liberals as a segment are the least likely voting bloc to participate in the 25% of Gov value add (defense, protection, etc). My focus on liberals justified. On whether or not a convservative qualifies as a parasite -- does the reveneue you receive directly from Gov. (as direct transfer or tax credit) exceed the taxes you pay? Harder to qualify if in private sector, but possible I suppose.

- mr_rationale

August 20, 2010 at 1:51pm

So, Mr Rationale, by your lights the only value the government provides is in the area of defense and law enforcement... Never mind that this formulation of yours is boilerplate Libertarian rubbish; for the moment lets take it at face value and try to imagine what it would be like to live in an America whose government did nothing but guard our national borders and put miscreants behind bars. First off, Medicare would have to go, which means that about 20% of the health care spending in the USA would cease right off the bat and while Grandma wouldn't be hauled before a death panel, she'd have to sell her house to pay for her coronary bypass, and she can kiss that elective hip replacement goodbye. Suck it up, Grandma! Take some more Tylenol! And what else would happen when Medicare disappeared? Well, we'd stop training new doctors. That's right, the GOVERNMENT covers the bulk of the (surprisingly small) salary of every intern, resident and subspecialty fellow in the USA. (That mean, nasty, incompetent government... How could it do such a thing?) I suppose we should say goodbye to the NIH too. No more biomedical research... We'll also have to scrap the EPA and any pretense of environmental regulation. (Wow, the fog sure is getting thick these days, and it sure does make you cough...hack! hack!) Public universities will, I suppose, also be a thing of the past. The national parks will be sold off to ranchers and mining companies. The federal land that makes up the bulk of the American west will, I suppose, be sold at a one-time auction that I'm sure will get the maximum value for its former owners--the American people. Native American tribes, well, they can shoot a moose, get off the res or, frankly, just sit there and rot, but no one is going to help them with their sewage systems or medical care. Those functions are too low value. And what about public primary and secondary education? Too expensive, too inefficient. What about infrastructure? Who'll maintain the Hoover dam? Some private company will take up the slack, won't it? Seriously, Rat, yours and Rand Paul's libertarianism is a philosophy for bright pre-adolescents. Anyone older than fifteen who espouses such views suffers from a crippling immaturity and lack of imagination. You see the world as a far simpler place than it is. Anyone who thinks the small government you'd like to see is a good thing should go spend some time in Namibia. The per-capita GDP there is quite reasonable for sub-Saharan Africa--about $8000 US a head. The private sector is thriving. (Mostly white) people live in gorgeous hilltop villas and drive Mercs and Range Rovers and exercise at a Virgin health club. But the public sector is a totally ineffective mess--small government in fact if not by intention--and life for the majority is indeed nasty, brutish and short. You, Mr Rationale, would turn the USA into Namibia. I hope and pray that you and those of your ilk will never succeed. Enough time wasted. Clean lines down at Torquay point. I'm off for a surf.

- AaronW

August 20, 2010 at 4:59pm

Mr_Rationale: "He has no educational or professional experience that qualifies him to speak as a real economic analyst." I don't need to be a "real economic analyst" to know that the vast majority of them think the stimulus did just about what most people think a stimulus of that size would do. I just have to read Mark Zandi at Moody's, for example, or a news report about him. There are many others. "this blog is my comic relief during the day, and spending the 3 minutes to refute a Chait argument is my guilty pleasure. I actually time myself." This reply took me less than a minute, I believe.

- dsimon

August 20, 2010 at 5:33pm

Once again, rat never speaks to the main point. I score him for never criticizing (or even knowing about this phenomenon?) rightists hitching their cars to the statist gravy train and characteristically, he has not one word to say about this. And his lame response is always to laugh at J. Chait or those of us defending Chait. What a gigantic mind rat has. A person (i.e., rat) who wrote quite recently that Republicans are serious about cutting the deficit because some of them support a Constitutional amendment concerning deficits should never ever make fun of anyone writing about policy.

- liberal reformer

August 20, 2010 at 10:03pm