The Othering of "Economic Illiteracy"

Noah Smith has written a column at BloombergView, "Don't Believe What Jeff Sessions Said About Jobs," which scolds Attorney General Jeff Sessions for "terrible economics." That may be a bit like carping about Charles Manson's hairstyle or critiquing David Duke's academic integrity. But there is something far more dangerous going on with Smith's knee-jerk invocation of the lump-of-labor fallacy to rebuke Sessions and, presumably, those who might find Sessions's claims credible.

In effect, Smith is falsely equating Sessions's rationale for the expulsion of 800,000 young people who have grown up in the U.S. to Dean Baker's advocacy of work-sharing. Lest that appear to be hyperbole, here is how Smith described Sessions's terrible economics: "It's a classic application of a well-known fallacy called the Lump of Labor  -- the idea that there are a fixed number of jobs in the world, and those jobs get divvied up among people." And here is how Omar al-Ubaydli framed his counterpoint to Dean Baker's case for shorter workweeks: "Proponents of work-sharing believe an economy requires a fixed amount of work to be performed by a limited number of people."

But Smith's is only a relatively tame implementation of the fixed amount of false equivalency racket. Would you believe "collective bargaining = genocide"? Pierre Cahuc and ‎André Zylberberg traversed the obscene false equivalence distance from work-time reduction to genocide in The Natural Survival of Work: Job Creation and Job Destruction in a Growing Economy:

The idea that any country's economy, and a fortiori the world economy, contains a fixed number of jobs or hours of work that can be parceled out in different ways is false. When used to justify the policies that reduce the length of the individual work week, it may lead to unintended consequences. ... It can even be dangerous, as when it leads to the notion that getting rid of "superfluous" manpower (the Jews of Nazi Germany in the past, immigrants from many countries in the present) will give work back to indigenous residents.

Of course the above claim is not only false but absurd in the extreme. Work is "parceled out" all the time. A shift manager at Starbucks fills available hours with interchangeable baristas. The number of jobs or number of hours doesn't have to be "fixed" to allow them to be parceled out in different ways. Nevertheless, Cahuc and Zylberberg ride their vile hobby horse from the ominous-sounding "unintended consequences" of reducing the work week to the downright dangerous notion of getting rid of unwanted populations, which somehow begins to sound almost benign compared to those terrifyingly vague unintended consequences. The slippery slope only needed to be greased one short step to encompass the principle of collective bargaining. That step was taken by Thomas Cree in  "The Evils of Collective Bargaining in Trades' Unions" when he described the "economics upside down" that underpinned trade unionism and collective bargaining:

But now, there is a more serious evil than any of the foregoing. It is this, that the power of the union is exercised to enforce regulations which limit production and waste labour. Most workmen believe (and the belief is not confined to workmen) that increase of production per man is an evil. They think they are benefiting their class by doing each as little as possible, so as to make the work go over a greater number; and the desire to relieve the society of out-of-work allowance is a reason for enforcing that view. This is at the root of the demand for an eight hours' day, and for a say in the management in shops, and also a cause of the objections to piecework. In this view exceptional industry is no longer a virtue—it is a fault to be punished not only by disapproval of fellow-workmen but, in some cases, by penalties. In some trades, if a man earns more than a certain wage he is fined, and his employer is fined as well.

As did many of his fellow dogmatists, Cree felt it instructive to obscure the claim of a false belief in a fixed amount of work by embedding it in the "regulations which limited production" and the supposed impulse toward slacking and shirking. The rationale, however is that "most workmen believe... that increase of production per man is evil"... because they assume that there is only a fixed amount of work to be done and thus if one man does more of it than there will be less left for others. This argument was explicated in David Schloss's canonical explanation of "the Theory of the Lump of Labour":

In accordance with this theory it is held that there is a certain fixed amount of work to be done, and that it is best in the interests of the workmen that each shall take care not to do too much work, in order that thus the Lump of Labour may be spread out thin over the whole body of work-people.

Schloss's "Theory of the Lump of Labour" conformed to a template that already was more than a century old, having been expressed in similar terms in 1780 by the Lancashire magistrate, Dorning Rasbotham, in response to factory riots the previous year. Successive iterations of the complaint against the economic illiteracy of workers, handed down from Rasbotham to Schloss, adhered to what Albert O. Hirschman diagnosed as the "rhetoric of reaction." Workers enjoyed "the best of all possible worlds." Any effort on their part to "coerce" employers into paying higher wages or operating shorter hours would inevitably result in -- as Cahuc and Zylberberg put it -- "unintended consequences" that would make them worse off.

But, in what Noah Smith calls "one case where economists get it absolutely right" the consensus of economists -- outside of Econ 101 textbook orthodoxy -- is far less unanimous than he presumes. Among those economists who directly refuted the fallacy claim are Maurice Dobb, A.C. Pigou and Robert Hoxie. Economists who indirectly countered the fallacy claim in their analysis include Sydney J. Chapman, John Maynard Keynes, Joan Robinson, Luigi Pasinetti, John R. Commons, Dorothy W. Douglas, John Maurice Clark and Thorsten Veblen. Amazingly, objections and counter-arguments raised by these economists are never mentioned -- and obviously never addressed -- when the fallacy claim is trotted out. What kind of getting it "absolutely right" is that?

In my view, two of the most effective repudiations of the fallacy claim came from Dobb and Hoxie, both of whom presented alternative explanations for why workers might appear to want to "restrict output." Dobb argued that what workers were after was not maximizing aggregate earnings but maximizing earnings relative to expenditure of time, effort and bodily "wear and tear." Hoxie argued that the tactics and strategies of trade unions were not based on some abstract idea of what was happening in the "economy as a whole" but on everyday experience in a local economy. Dobb referred to the "Work Fund" fallacy, which was another name for the lump of labor:

...trade unionists in the nineteenth century were severely castigated by economists for adhering, it was alleged, to a vicious 'Work Fund' fallacy, which held that there was a limited amount of work to go round and that workers could benefit themselves by restricting the amount of work they did. But the argument as it stands is incorrect. It is not aggregate earnings which are the measure of the benefit obtained by the worker, but his earnings in relation to the work he does — to his output of physical energy or his bodily wear and tear. Just as an employer is interested in his receipts compared with his outgoings, so the worker is presumably interested in what he gets compared with what he gives. A man who works longer hours or is put on piece-rates, and increases the intensity of his work as a result, may earn more money in the course of the week; but he is also suffering more fatigue, and probably requires to spend more on food and recreation and perhaps on doctor’s bills.

Hoxie re-branded the lump of labor as the "fixed group demand theory" and concluded that this theory, in practice, "is simply the application by the unions of the principle of monopoly, admittedly valid":

There is much scorn of unionists by economists and employers because of this lump of labor theory with its corollaries. This scorn is based on the classical supply and demand theory and its variants. Supply is demand. Increased efficiency in production means an increase of social dividend and increased shares, which in turn increase production and saving. Therefore, the workers cut off their own noses when they limit output or limit numbers. The classical position is undoubtedly valid when applied to society as a whole, if there is any such thing, and in the long run. But the trouble is that, so far as the workers are concerned, there is no society as a whole, and no long run, but immediate need and rival social groups.

Both Dobb and Hoxie called attention to the central conceit of the economists' scorn for unionist "theories" -- that somehow those who do not embrace the economic orthodoxy must have a view of economics that is "upside down" relative to the "true" theory. which is to say, same-but-different, with difference indicating deficiency. To put it bluntly, othering. 

What the hell is "othering"? In a nutshell it is the practice of constituting the self as sovereign Subject by constituting the other as subjugated. 

In the seminal text for the analysis of othering, "The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives," Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak presented "three random examples of othering." I'm not sure how "random" these examples were or even if they were random at all. Maybe she meant random as a kind of joke. At any rate, the first example had to do with s young Captain, Geoffrey Birch, riding through the countryside from Delhi to Calcutta "to acquaint the people who they are subject too." 

Spivak's second example was General Sir David Ochterlony, a gentleman, who saw in the locals "all the brutality and purfidy [sic] of the rudest times without the courage and all the depravity and treachery of the modern days without the knowledge or refinement." Her third example concerns some deletions in a letter drafted by the Court of Directors of the East India Company but expunged by the Board of Control. These deletions explicitly spelled out the rationale for withholding technology and knowledge from the natives. The final communique enacted the restrictions without disclosing the reasons.

So what does Spivak's narrative of power, disparagement and knowledge have to do with the lump of labor fallacy or, for that matter, with the expulsion of colonial subjects "dreamers"? My point is that Noah Smith's recourse to the bogus lump-of-labor fallacy claim has a much closer affinity to Attorney General Sessions's remarks blaming "illegal aliens" for denying jobs to Americans than do the latter remarks to Dean Baker's advocacy of shorter work weeks. 

Dorning Rasbotham, Sir David Ochterlony and Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions are reactionary birds of a colonialist feather, along with Thomas Cree,  Pierre Cahuc and ‎André Zylberberg. Sessions's economics is indeed terrible... as is the economics that opposes to it a fraudulent fallacy claim.

Sessions, Krugman, DACA and the Lump-of-Labor Fallacy

Now may be a good time to remind people that there can be bad arguments for good causes. There may even be good arguments for bad causes.

Sessions is wrong:

The effect of this unilateral executive amnesty, among other things, contributed to a surge of unaccompanied minors on the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences. It also denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens.

This is a lie. DACA has not "denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans." But it isn't a lie because it assumes the amount of work to be done is fixed. To make that claim trivializes both the mendacity of the Trump administration and the gullibility of people who believe the lies that demagogues tell them. The alleged "fixed amount of work" has nothing to do with it.

To the extent there is economic illiteracy, the economics profession is the main culprit. Economists have shamelessly touted policies that enrich the rich and impoverish the poor and pooh-poohed egalitarian proposals like work-time reduction. For all too many of them, it's their job. When those policies have exactly the effects they were designed to have, economists become puzzled about where all the inequality is coming from.

In simple terms, when things are not going well for people they tend to scapegoat vulnerable others. This is not "economic illiteracy." It is scapegoating. Ironically, the economic illiteracy claim is itself a form of scapegoating. People stop listening to the experts because the experts have sold their credibility to the highest bidder. Instead of reflecting on why people don't trust them any more, the experts blame it on economic illiteracy.

UPDATE: Here Paul Krugman makes good arguments in defense of DACA and avoids the fixed-amount-of-work straw man distraction. The Very Bad Economics of Killing DACA. Much better.

Why Are We Not Keeping Track Of The Dead From Hurricane Harvey?

It is not surprising that as Hurricane Harvey has finally moved off the Atlantic coast and is over, and the flood waters recede in the various places that it caused damage, it is unsurprising that reporting has moved onto the inside pages of papers and even seems on the verge of disappearing.  But somehow a piece of information that I would think is important, and that I have seen reported more substantially in past disasters, is the number who died as a result of the hurricane.  If one googles "dead from Hurricane Harvey," one gets as the top hits reports from many days ago in which one learns that the number who died is in single digits.

As it is, by digging hard I have found that the number is much higher, but seems unclear, but is only barely being mentioned deep in stories on the event.  After digging hard, I found scattered reports within the last 12 hours.  The number dead are reported to be either 38, 40, 43, 45, 46, or 50.  Those searching through badly flooded buildings, now free from the water, are gradually discovering those who could not escape and drowned.  But somehow these numbers seem to be of little interest.  I remember previous disasters where a few died, and that number would be the big headline, and people would keep track.  But somehow, for reasons I do not understand, the number dead from this event somehow seems to be of little interest to the media, and perhaps even the public. Is this really true, and if so, why?

Somehow I doubt that it is because over 1,200 people have died this season in South Asia from floods as that piece of information has received even less media attention.

Barkley Rosser

Yet Another Republican President Stabs A South Korean President In The Back

[Able to get on here from my home laptop]

Donald Trump has long had a record of doing things one finds not just unbelievable, but seriously outrageous.  However, we may now have seen him do so in a situation involving a really dangerous foreign policy situation, the threat of a war on the Korean peninsula, a war that could involve nuclear weapons and could involve not just thousands, but possibly millions of people dying. The DMZ that separates North and South Korea is the most heavily armed place on the face of this planet, by a long shot, with most of those armaments piled up on the northern side.  It may be of a lower qualitative technological level than what faces it from the southern side, but it is simply enormous in quantity, and quite capable of inflicting massive damage on metropolitan Seoul, only 30 miles south of the DMZ, whose population in the greater metro area approaches 20 million people, a very large number of sitting ducks.

As it is, the DPRK, or North Korea, has been provocatively testing ever more capable missiles and bombs.  A missile that flew over Japan, more or less freaking them out, supposedly has the ability to hit even the east coast of the US.  Kim Jong-un made noises about firing missiles at Guam and Trump made a lot of loud noises.  That Kim backed down led Trump to brag that he knew how to handle Kim.  Meanwhile, new President Moon Jae-in of the ROK, South Korea, supported engaging in peace negotiations, even though Kim Jong-un has so far made no positive responses to that.  Then over the weekend Kim put the cherry on the top by testing a 100 kiloton device that has been advertised as a fusion H-bomb, a qualitative jump to a much more dangerous type of weapon.  Trump's response was to tweet that Moon was pursuing "appeasement" in contrast to his tough way of handling things, which he claims works, despite all this glaring evidence to the contrary.  Kim seems not deterred or suppressed in the least.

But the really outrageous move here is on top of this Trump has declared that he is planning to terminate the free trade agreement with South Korea, not even renogiate it, just cancel it.  Really?  The South Koreans do not support this and like the agreement.  Trump claims that the bilateral trade deficit of the US has increased, which was the immediate outcome of the agreement, but over the last year that has turned around with the deficit declining and has now returned to about what it was when the agreement was signed and continues to move in that direction.  But not to put too fine a point on it, Trump is lying about this as well as stabbing Moon in the back just as he denounces Moon for advocating what Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Angela Merkel, and pretty much every other leader in the world advocates, and even Trump has said he supports on certain days, ready to talk face to face to Kim under the right conditions. But if Moon says it, well, time to cancel that trade agreement, especially since it was another of those things that Obama did.  So, it must go.  The South Koreans are mystified and simply do not even know how to respond to this outrage.  What can they say?  They need the US alliance, even if the man in the White House is a lunatic, which is what they say he is.

I shall note that this is not the first time a Republican president has stabbed a peace-seeking South Korean president in the back. I have blogged on this previously, but back in March 2001, President Bush killed the peace efforts of then ROK President Kim Dae-Jung.  He came to dinner, thinking that the peace process under way from the previous administration and supported by Secretary of State, Colin Powell, would continue.  He was to have a dinner at the White House. But Cheney and Rumsfeld got to Bush and convinced him that a hard line against the DPRK would bring about regime change, a much better outcome, ha ha!  We can see how that turned out.  Kim Dae-Jung went home humiliated.

Most of the discussion of this now goes on about how the North Koreans cheated on nuclear agreements by enriching uranium.  However, those commentators somehow fail to note that the agreements were only about plutonium, not uranium. But "history" has the North Koreans violating agreements, with everybody forgetting how Bush undercut the agreements (and the US never fulfilled parts of it in terms of supplying DPRK with various items).  Trump's back stab is worse, but this is not the first time.

Oh, Moon has responded to Trump's outrageous tweet.  He has pointed out that Korea suffered a "fratricidal war," which he does not want to see again.  He intends to "pursue denuclearization" on the peninsula "by peaceful means" in agreement "with our allies."  Sounds reasonable to me, but at the moment reason does not seem to be in charge of what is going on here.  Let us hope for Moon's view to prevail, somehow or other.

Barkley Rosser

 

Let Trump Continue To Fail To Appoint People

There has been much moaning and wailing and gnashing of teeth by many commentators and politicians over the failure of President Donald Trump to appoint people to fill numerous now vacant positions within the executive branch of government, with the State Department often being put forward as one of many agencies with many empty chairs in official positions.  However, the other night I heard Lawrence O'Donnell make an interesting point: those empty chairs are being filled in the meantime by long-in-place civil servants who actually know what they are doing and are not Trump-loving hacks and fools.  In departments where he has made appointments, such as the EPA, his appointees have wreaked havoc and done mostly awful things. 

So, let us hope that he gets bogged down in tweeting and blocking possible candidates for these positions because they are insufficiently kowtowing to him.  That way we might have at least some parts of some government agencies run by non-crazy knowledgeable individuals. We can only hope.

Barkley Rosser

No To Unprovoked Violence By Anybody

And, sorry, but no, simply saying things one does not agree with does not justify in engaging in unprovoked violence.  This is directed at the recent events in Berkeley where it appears that masked and self-identified "anarchists," (not "antifa members" as Hannity called them), engaged in violence that was not in self-defense. I am not all that happy about people shutting others down from simply speaking publicly, but I am completely opposed to doing this by means of unprovoked violence (self defense as happened in Charlottesville is a different matter).  This applies to what happened at Middlebury College as well. 

There is a very fine line here, but progressives must not fall into the pit of saying that unprovoked violence is acceptable because "those people are bad."  Sorry, not acceptable.  Peaceful counterprotesting as we saw in Boston is the way to go.  Period.

Barkley Rosser

Is David Ignatius Falling For Saudi Propaganda?

Washington Post columnist and occasional novelist and diplomat, David Ignatius, is one of the best informed and wisest of commentators on Middle East affairs.  Thus it is with concern that in yesterday's Washington Post in a column titled, "A new chance for Middle East peace?" he seems to have fallen for third rate propaganda largely being pushed by the Saudi government, although also backed by the UAE ambassador (closely allied to Saudi Arabia in their anti-Iran and anti-Qatar escapades), as well as "the White House."  I can appreciate that in recent years hopes for any kind of Israeli-Palestinian peace deal have simply been absent, so maybe he is indulging in some sort of optimistic thinking with the idea that pushing any sort of plan is better than having none.  But I fear that not only is he being a pollyanna here, but joining a herd of suckers for drivel coming out of the Saudi PR machine, which wishes to puff up new Saudi Crown Prince, Muhammed bin Salman (MBS) as a wonderfully progressive and open-minded reformer.  Yuck.

Indeed, what is probably the most dramatic point here is that indeed MBS has apparently been going around saying that "resolution of the Palestinian problem and peace with Israel are 'crucial for the future of the Middle East.'"  This is indeed louder than what has been heard from Saudi leaders previously, although the late King Abdullah did put forward a peace plan that involved the Israelis moving back to the 1967 borders, a plan that went nowhere.  So, peace noises out of the Saudis are not exactly completely unprecedented.

The more detailed part of the column where Ignatius shows his usual ability to ferret out information not previously reported by others is that the specific plan being pushed involves using a UAE-based Gazan Palestinian named Mohammed Dahlan to get Hamas to moderate its demands on Israel in response for a bunch of economic aid, including a power plant to be built across the border from Gaza in Egypt.  No evidence that the current Hamas leaders in Gaza will go along with this is provided and, and it is admitted that Dalhan has long been at odds with Mahmoud Abbas, the PLO leader who is in charge of the West Bank.

I grant that Ignatius recognizes that MBS has his flaws, "has made brash moves that have caused him trouble, including the war in Yemen."  But this is all supposedly offset by his "youthful and dynamic leadership" as touted to Ignatius by MBS's younger brother, Prince Khalid bin Salman, now Saudi ambassador to the US, with the UAE ambassador also weighing in.  Ignatius recognizes that underlying this push from the Saudi-UAE-Egyptian axis and possibly Israelis is a common enmity shared with the Trump administration toward Iran. Ignatius does not discuss the increasingly failed effort by these to isolate Qatar, which has just reopened diplomatic relations with Iran, or the dangerous apparent moves by the Trump administration to undo the Iran nuclear deal.

Maybe all this would be wonderful, but frankly it looks like a bunch of wishful thinking amounting to poor propaganda given today's reporting. In the first section of today's WaPo is a story about the trip just concluded by Jared Kushner to that neck of the woods, with Ignatius's story clearly representing some PR for it based on what Kushner thinks he is doing, with Kushner and MBS big pals by all reports.  This is their big plan.  But in a story misleadingly titled "Kushner's Mideast talks called 'productive'" it turns out that mostly things look like they are not going anywhere. 

A meeting with Mahmoud Abbas had a bottom line that Abbas is not going to do any serious talking unless the Trump administration accepts the two-state solution, and the story made it clear that Kushner did not do that, and the administration more generally has not done that.  It also  notes that the Netanyahu government is becoming distracted by an increasing corruption scandal, so may be unwilling or unable to do anything at all out of the ordinary.  Maybe there will be mumbling in Gaza, but the idea that we are on the verge of some great breakthrough in Palestinian-Israeli relations looks to be a joke, despite Ignatius playing pumpboy for the trouble-making Saudi crown prince's propaganda who seems so able to get lots of people in Washington to spout his nonsensical and dangerous drivel at the drop of a hat (or a sword).

This is disappointing.  David Ignatius should know better.

Barkley Rosser

Michael Boskin’s Revisionist Economic History

The latest from Michael Boskin belongs on the National Review:

So far, Trump has failed to deliver any major legislative policy achievements. Nonetheless, he has helped the economy by rolling back President Barack Obama’s damaging regulatory and administrative diktats in areas such as energy, education, finance, and labor law.

He offers no evidence for this spin – just a lot of babble regarding Trump tweets or whatever. But what caught my attention as well as that of Brad DeLong with this intellectual garbage:

Bill Clinton’s administration began with a lack of discipline, a failed attempt at health-care reform, and a loss for the Democrats in the 1994 midterm elections. But Clinton turned things around, appointing new aides, moving toward the political center, winning reelection in 1996, and working with a Republican-controlled Congress to balance the budget and reform welfare.

Brad does a nice job of debunking this nonsense but let me just add that the Republican controlled Congress was not what balanced the budget. What balanced the budget was the 1993 tax increase they voted against, the economic boom they claimed would not happen, and the peace dividend that the GOP hawks abhorred. Boskin next sings the praises of St. Reagan:

Similarly, Ronald Reagan endured large Republican losses in the 1982 midterm election. At that time, the US was in a deep recession, owing to the Federal Reserve’s tough disinflation policy, which Reagan had supported. But the economy made a strong recovery, helped by Reagan’s tax cuts and increased military spending.

At least Boskin did not try to pin the 1982 recession on Jimmy Carter but how can he endorse Reagan’s fiscal irresponsibility while trying to tag Clinton as allegedly having a lack of fiscal discipline. After all, the Reagan fiscal stimulus dramatically increased real interest rates which not only hurt private investment but also led to a massive appreciation of the dollar leading to a sharp fall in net exports. Maybe this fluff does not belong on the pages of the National Review as it may have been too dishonest even for those Republican hacks.

What Would Jesus Do?

First they coddled the white supremacists with false equivalency, and I didn't resign from the Trump Evangelical Council because those protesting the white supremacists didn't have a permit...

Trump and What Army?

Donald Trump is no stranger to outrageous public poses and statements, but his refusal to condemn white supremacists post-Charlottesville has apparently struck a nerve.  Has he crossed some sort of new line?  Here are some dark, speculative thoughts about the events of the past few days.

I believe Trump’s impeachment is an option that political and financial elites are holding in reserve.  They appreciate the vehicle that has brought the hard right to power, but they are ready to remove it if it no longer serves their purposes.  It’s not clear whether there is evidence sufficient to impeach him today, but there almost certainly will be in the coming months, especially as his finances are exposed.  I am not claiming that impeachment is a certainty, only that less hormonally imbalanced elites want it to be available should they need it.

The problem is that something like a third of the country supports Trump, most of them passionately.  His base will regard an impeachment as a final, decisive battle for American freedom, the fulfillment of all their most paranoid suspicions about the evil forces arrayed against them.  And quite a few of them are armed.

The nightmare scenario is an impeachment process setting off mass violence in the streets—a civil war.  Trump can be forgiven climate denialism, nuclear sabre-rattling and various other sins, but he can’t be allowed to encourage the formation of loyal paramilitary band of supporters, a praetorian guard of street thugs.  Hence the uproar over Charlottesville by plutocrats and Republicans who have swallowed equally contemptible posturings in the past.

I Agree With Robert E Lee

I agree with the senior Robert E Lee as well as his descendant, Robert E. Lee V, and also the great grandsons of Thomas L. ("Stonewall") Jackson, William Jackson Christian and Warren Edmund Christian, that Confederate monuments should be removed from public locations to either museums or other locations, much as was done in the former Soviet Union.

In 1866, the senior Robert E. Lee wrote a letter to my collateral relative, Thomas Lafayette Rosser, last commander of the Laurel Brigade, who refused to surrender at Appomattox, and who is now buried in the Riverview cemetery in Charlottesville, VA.  In that letter Lee said the following:

"As regards the erection of such monuments as is contemplated, my conviction is that however grateful it would be to the feelings of the South, the attempt...would have the effect of continuing, if not adding to, the difficulties under which Southern people labour."  

J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. 

Slavery, "Heritage" and Southern Fried "Free Speech"

Who knew that neo-Nazi, KKK white supremacists and Trump supporters were liars, cry-babies AND hypocrites?

The reasons for secession by the states of the Confederacy were not complex or ambiguous. They are not a mystery. They were proudly proclaimed by the Confederate states. The cornerstone of the Confederacy was slavery and the conviction of the racial superiority of the White man and the social, moral and political inferiority of Africans. This was stated unambiguously in the cornerstone speech by Confederacy Vice President Alexander Stephens:

The ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were that the enslavement of the African race was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. Our new government is founded on exactly opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and moral condition. This our Government is the first in the history of the world based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. It is upon this our social fabric is firmly planted, and I cannot permit myself to doubt the ultimate success of the full recognition of this principle throughout the civilized and enlightened world.... This stone which was rejected by the first builders 'is become the chief stone of the corner' in our new edifice.

The idea that slavery wasn't the reason for the secession was an afterthought that was solidified into unquestionable dogma a half century after the end of the Civil War. Yes, we have documents in the career of Mildred Lewis Rutherford and the successful campaign to rewrite the history of the Civil War, as taught in the South. "Reject a book that says the South fought to hold her slaves."

This should also put to rest any notion that "defenders of Southern heritage" are champions of "free speech." The are liars, cry-babies, hypocrites and TOTALITARIANS bent on imposing their self-serving distortions of history on everyone else.

Miss Mildred L. Rutherford

At their 1919 reunion the United Confederate Veterans "resolved to inaugurate a movement to disseminate the truths of Confederate history." To carry out this aim, they comissioned Miss Rutherford, Historian for the United Daughters of the Confederacy to prepare "A Measuring Rod to Test Text Books and Reference Books in Schools, Colleges and Libraries" to be used by textbook committees of boards of education, private schools and libraries to ensure "absolute fairness" "truth in history" and "full justice to the South."

These crackers were not just whistling Dixie. If you know anything about the textbook industry, whatever Texas wants, y'all get. "The Lost Cause triumphed in the curriculum," quipped historian James McPherson, "if not on the battlefield." Here are some excerpts from the pamphlet's front matter:

A MEASURING ROD FOR TEXT-BOOKS 

" 'A Measuring Rod For Text-Books,' prepared by Miss Mildred L. Rutherford, by which every text-book on history and literature in Southern schools should be tested by those desiring the truth, was submitted to the Committee. This outline was read and carefully considered. 

"The Committee charged, as it is, with the dissemination of the truths of Confederate history, earnestly and fully and officially, approve all that is herein so truthfully written as to that eventful period. 

"The Committee respectfully urges all authorities charged with the selection of text-books for colleges, schools and all scholastic institutions to measure all books offered for adoption by this "Measuring Rod" and adopt none which do not accord full justice to the South. And all library authorities in the Southern States are requested to mark all books in their collections which do not come up to the same measure, on the title page thereof, "Unjust to the South." 

"This Committee further asks all scholastic and library authorities, in all parts of the country, in justice and fairness to their fellow citizens of the South, to yield to the above request. 

"C. IRVINE WALKER, Chairman."

INDEX (see also "TRUTHS OF HISTORY") 

I. The Constitution of the United States, 1787, Was a Compact between Sovereign States and Was not Perpetual nor National 6 

II. Secession Was not Rebellion 7 

III. The North Was Responsible for the War between the States 8 

IV. The War between the States Was not Fought to Hold the Slaves 9 

V. The Slaves Were Not Ill-Treated in the South and the North Was largely Responsible for their Presence in the South 10 

VI. Coercion Was not Constitutional 11 

VII. The Federal Government Was Responsible for the Andersonville Horrors 12 

VIII. The Republican Party that Elected Abraham Lincoln Was not Friendly to the South 13 

IX. The South Desired Peace and Made every Effort to Obtain it 14, 15, 16 

X. The Policy of the Northern Army Was to Destroy Property—the Southern Army to Protect it 18-21 

XI. The South Has never Had its Rightful Place in Literature 22-23

WARNING!  

Do not reject a text-book because it does not contain all that the South claims—a text-book cannot be a complete encyclopedia. 

Do not reject a text book because it omits to mention your father, your grandfather, your personal friend, socially or politically— it would take volumes to contain all of the South 's great men and their deeds. 

Do not reject a text-book because it may disagree with your estimate of the South 's great men, and the leaders of the South 's Army and Navy—the world can never agree with any one person's estimate in all things. 

But—reject a book that speaks of the Constitution other than a Compact between Sovereign States. 

Reject a text-book that does not give the principles for which the South fought in 1861, and does not clearly outline the interferences with the rights guaranteed to the South by the Constitution, and which caused secession. 

Reject a book that calls the Confederate soldier a traitor or rebel, and the war a rebellion. 

Reject a book that says the South fought to hold her slaves. 

Reject a book that speaks of the slaveholder of the South as cruel and unjust to his slaves. 

Reject a text-book that glorifies Abraham Lincoln and villifies Jefferson Davis, unless a truthful cause can be found for such glorification and villification before 1865. 

Reject a text-book that omits to tell of the South 's heroes and their deeds when the North's heroes and their deeds are made prominent. 

Refuse to adopt any text-book, or endorse any set of books, upon the promise of changes being made to omit the objectionable features. 

A list of books, condemned or commended by the Veterans, Sons of Veterans, and U. D. C, is being prepared by Miss Rutherford as a guide for Text-Book Committees and Librarians. This list of course contains only the names of those books which have been submitted for examination. Others will be added and published monthly in "The Confederate Veteran" Nashville, Tennessee. 

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Deep Structures of the Cultural Marxism Myth

Jeet Heer has posted a timely and excellent essay at New Republic titled "Trump's Racism and the Cultural Marxism Myth." In his essay, Heer recounts much of the background to the Higgins memo that I have documented here, here and here. Heer credits William S. Lind as the major popularizer of the myth, as have I in my blog posts. What I'm posting here extends the analysis and reveals significant background about personnel and timelines to the story.

In my most recent post, I started to probe further back into the myth's history with an examination of Eliseo Vivas's over-the-top invective against Herbert Marcuse since the late 1960s. Vivas was deeply offended by Marcuse's writing and expressed his displeasure in several articles and a book, Conta Marcuse. He was also a frequent contributor to the journals, Modern Age and Intercollegiate Review both of which are associated with the conservative organization, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute or ISI. From a snippet of a speech by ISI president T. Kenneth Cribb in Ellen Messer-Davidow's 1993 article, "Manufacturing the Attack on Liberalized Higher Education" I had the hunch that the ISI might offer a clue to the metamorphosis from Vivas's anti-Marcuse screeds to the full-blown cultural Marxism myth that appeared in Lind's pamphlet, Pat Buchanan's book, Higgins's memo and Anders Breivik's manifesto.

Cribb is a pivotal character in this saga. He was national director of the ISI from 1972 to 1977, then, after earning a law degree went to work for Edwin Meese during the Reagan campaign in 1980 and ended up Counselor to the Attorney General and subsequently Assistant for Domestic Affairs to President Reagan. After the end of the Reagan administration, Cribb returned to the ISI to serve as president of that organization from 1989 to 2011.

Krawattennazis Rich Higgins and T. Kenneth Cribb

In 1989, Cribb gave an address to the Heritage Foundation on "Conservatism and the American Academy: Prospects for the 1990s" in which he outlined his vision for a "sustained counteroffensive" on what he characterized as "the last Leftist redoubt, the college campus." Cribb painted a picture of relentless persecution and harassment of conservatives in American universities taken mostly from Peter Collier and David Horowitz's Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts about the Sixties. He boasted of the ISI's readiness for that counteroffensive:

In addition to saving a remnant that renews the font of conservative ideas, we are now strong enough to establish a contemporary presence for conservatism on campus, and contest the Left on its own turf. We plan to do this by greatly expanding the ISI field effort, its network of campus-based programming.

Cribb was unequivocal in his view that academia was "the one redoubt left to it [the left] by the successful conservative counterattack of the 1970s and 1980s." His promised counteroffensive was thus presented as a mop-up operation for the establishment of a "free" society, which is to say a traditionalist society freed of the nuisances of relativism and other non-conservative heresies.

Eight years into that mop-up operation, Cribb contributed a chapter to William Lind's Political Correctness: a Short History of an Ideology, the locus classicus of the cultural Marxism myth. Cribb's chapter was titled "Political Correctness in Higher Education." It presented anecdotes from conservative college newspapers affiliated with the ISI meant to illustrate the "alarming rate" at which "the freedom to articulate and discuss ideas" was being eroded by incidents of intolerance and corruption of the curriculum to downplay the significance of Western Civilization.

"While it would be easy to dismiss such demonstrations of intolerance as student pranks," he admitted, "these incidents are the surface manifestations of a more pervasive and insidious trend..." The headline outrage was the burning of "hundreds (sometimes thousands) of copies of conservative student newspapers."  He concluded his chapter with a brief account of the ISI's efforts to stem the tide of the alarming erosion of freedom. Along with other sections of the Lind book, whole passages from Cribb's chapter were 'cribbed' by Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik for his manifesto.

Curiously, there was no mention in Cribb's 1989 address to the Heritage Foundation of Herbert Marcuse, the Frankfurt School or cultural Marxism nor was there in the book by Collier and Horowitz book that Cribb had cited. "Politically correct" gets four hits though. Yet Horowitz  and Collier were active participants in 1960s New Left extremism. Similarly, ISI poster boy Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education from 1991 contains one brief and not particularly scathing mention of Marcuse and one reference political correctness but no mention of the Frankfurt School or cultural Marxism.

The political correctness. cultural Marxism stew didn't get all its ingredients until the 1992 article, "New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and Political Correctness," whose author, Michael J. Minnicino, subsequently disowned his work as "hopelessly deformed by self-censorship and the desire to in some way support Mr. LaRouche's crack-brained world-view." That fine piece of Western Civilization scholarship was then taken over and reworked by Lind in 1997.

At last we have a doctrine, a vanguard organization, and a timeline. But most importantly, courtesy of the Larouche cult, we now have a suitably unitary devil-function. The "basic Nazi trick," as Kenneth Burke labeled "the 'curative' unification by a fictitious devil-function, gradually made convincing by the sloganizing repetitiousness of standard advertising technique." Helpfully, in a 1988 address to the Heritage Foundation,William F. Campbell explained why conservatives need such a devil-function:

But as first and second generation conservatives have always known, and had to live with as an unpleasant skeleton in the family closet, there is sharp tension, if not contradiction, between the traditionalist and the libertarian wings of the conservative movement. They have been held together primarily because of their common enemies, modern egalitarianism and totalitarian collectivism, which they both abhor. 

In 1988, when Campbell made those remarks, the Soviet Union still existed and could serve the primary role of common enemy, symbolizing the alien totalitarian destiny of domestic egalitarianism. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a new enemy had to be conjured. The Higgins memo is testament to the contortions that must be endured to conjure that devil.

Why Is The Fed Raising Interest Rates As Fast As It Is?

I have a theory that at least some people at the Fed are supporting interest rate increases not because they are worried about incipient inflation that must be nipped in the bud in advance under a regime of inflation targeting, but because they are looking over the horizon and worrying about a possible recession in the not-too-distant future, and they want to be able to have interest rates high enough that they can then engage in lowering them as a stimulative policy tool under the circumstances.  If they are too low, then extraordinary measures will need to be used, and some of those measures may not be available in the future.

This theory is based on nothing solid at all, nothing.  I think that those who may be thinking this (and my likely candidate(s) would be people at the very top) are constrained in speaking openly due both to the current institutional arrangement of consensus decisionmaking within an established inflation targeting system with a 2% inflation target, not to mention pressure not to talk about possible future dangers.  The current line is that the economy is doing well, and certainly it is on the standard measures of unemployment and inflation, even if the former could be better and wages could be rising more rapidly.  Indeed, it is this good performance that is supposedly underlying the moves to raise interest rates and possibly "normalize" the balance sheet (which I doubt there will be too much action on).  But my theory is that for some of them it is a matter of trying to "normalize" on interest rates as well while the possibility of normalizing is possible, while the economy is doing fairly well and one can raise them without obviously slowing things down noticeably, so that indeed there will be the ability to lower them again in the future when necessary.

He did not put this theory forward, but it was reading the recent column by Larry Summers that appeared in the Washington Post on Monday was been linked to by Mark Thoma today (unable to make that link, sorry) and also can be gotten to at larrysummers.com/2017/08/14/why-the-federal-reserves-job-will-get-harder.  He is focused on the upcoming ending of the term of his rival as Chair of the Fed, Janet Yellen, and is worried about who Trump will pick and what will happen.  While stating that he would have "preferred a slower pace of interest rate adjustment," he bottom lines that "Overall it has done well in recent years" (even though he did not get picked to be Chair).

While he thinks the economy is currently doing pretty well, looking forward he worries tha it is "brittle" with numerous dangers, and opines that there is a two thirds chance of a recession during the next Fed Chair's term.  He then notes how the still low interest rates will make it hard to use the interest rate tool to stimulate the economy, making it difficult for the Fed to do much.  He does not make the leap I did to the possibility that this fact may be on the minds of at least some people at the Fed, although they really cannot openly say it.

I agree with his concerns about what is coming due to the political situation, with "major risk now of presidential interference" in the Fed, and he makes disparaging remarks about the president quite reasonably so.  He also notes that the "temper of the times has turned against technical expertise in favor of populist passion." There is reason to be concerned about what he will do. 

But in the meantime some people at the Fed may be doing their best to make it possible for the Fed to do something in the future when the need will surely arise.

Barkley Rosser

Additional Remarks

Commander Bone Spurs was afraid that some of his supporters would be too thick to grasp the grudging, involuntary nature of his teleprompter recital. Just to make his bad faith perfectly clear, IMPOTUS tweeted additional remarks about his "additional remarks":