CSotD: Futility
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Tom Tomorrow on the continued predominance of the "We had to destroy the village in order to save it" school of economic policy.
For those too young to remember, that phrase comes from a point in the Vietnam War when it was decided to move peasants from villages in vulnerable rural areas to brand new villages in areas that could be more readily defended.
Which makes sense in the abstract, but is idiotic when applied to actual people who don't give a damn who is sitting in the Presidential Palace in a city they will never see, and who just want to live where they have lived for thousands of years and go about their lives as they always have.
A spokesman explained to the press, "We had to destroy the village in order to save it," which pretty much summed up the policy of claiming we wanted to "win the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people" while pursuing actions that would make them hate our guts.
The true policy was summed up in a phrase that emerged from the Nixon White House: "When you've got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow."
A lot of us thought, after this arrogant attitude proved such a spectacular failure in Vietnam and after we ran Nixon's thugs out of power and at least some of them into jail cells, that our long national nightmare was over.
It is to laugh.
And the decent man chosen by other decent men to replace Nixon, were he still alive, would have been thrown out of his party a decade ago.
Heartless pragmatism is back in power, not simply despite our better moral teachings but also despite the fact that heartless pragmatism doesn't frigging work.
A few observations:
1. I'm currently reading Brooke Gladstone's book, "The Influencing Machine," which is in graphic form but is not a particularly quick read, since I think the cartoon format is to lighten the density of her exposition. I'm at the point now where she is explaining the futility of attempting to argue, persuade and cajole people with facts. Here's a sample:
I have not gotten to the point where she tells why this shouldn't just depress the hell out of me. However, I strongly recommend the book, at least if you feel you are still vulnerable to the persuasive power of intelligent discussion. It's smart stuff.
2. The Austerions keep saying that, if we tax rich people, they will stop creating jobs. Nobody has ever explained why this would happen, especially if we made it disadvantageous to ship jobs overseas.
The most asinine facet of this argument is its application to single-owner "small businesses" that show a net annual profit of more than $250,000. To begin with, it relies on people mistaking gross income for net profit. There aren't many single-owner, non-incorporated businesses that make over a quarter-million in annual profits.
However, there is a way to avoid showing $290,000 in net profits: Hire someone for a total cost (salary plus benefits plus payroll tax) of $40,000. That becomes a business expense and — voila! — you've avoided the higher bracket.
Higher taxes on the rich provide an incentive to create jobs.
Cutting taxes on the rich gives them an incentive to slash business expenses so they can take home more of the loot.
3. You can't maneuver an aircraft carrier with canoe paddles and the tactics of personal finance have no application to macroeconomic policy. None. Stop it.
4. But, hey, maybe Norquist is right. Maybe some serious tax-cutting will help the economy. If only we could find some place where they had been pursuing those populist, tea-party style tax restrictions for a couple of decades so we could see how it's going.
Like, say, the State of California.
5. See #1, above.
So anyway …
One of the best practitioners of the futile art of persuasion is Matt Bors, who received the Herblock Award and gave an amusing, insightful speech at the ceremony.
Aside from my affection for anyone who manages to go bald a decade before I did and bring it up at the biggest-so-far moment of his young life, the part of his speech that made me swoon was this:
Herblock stopped cartooning in 2001, two years before I began. Up until that point, I hadn't paid much attention to political cartoons and was more concerned with long form work… until I had something short to say.
Bingo. Maybe he went bald a decade earlier because he found his voice a decade earlier. Heck, I still haven't found anything short to say.
Here's his speech. At the Herblock Foundation site, you can watch the video or just read the transcript instead, and you can also see his winning portfolio.
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