A letter from Lincoln...

Confidential. Hon. J. T. Hale Springfield, Ill. Jan'y. 11th 1861.
   My dear Sir---Yours of the 6th is received. I answer it only because I fear you would misconstrue my silence. What is our present condition? We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten... In this they are either attempting to play upon us, or they are in dead earnest. Either way, if we surrender, it is the end of us, and of the government. They will repeat the experiment upon us ad libitum. A year will not pass, till we shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will stay in the Union. They now have the Constitution, under which we have lived over seventy years, and acts of Congress of their own framing, with no prospect of their being changed; and they can never have a more shallow pretext for breaking up the government, or extorting a compromise, than now. There is, in my judgment, but one compromise which would really settle the slavery question, and that would be a prohibition against acquiring any more territory. Yours very truly, A. LINCOLN.

'Beautiful Losers'

Here's a quote I ran across from Leonard Cohen.  It has to be one of the finest, more poetic uses of the English language that I've heard in a very long time. After that fake filibuster from Cruz, last night, I thought we should take a minute to recharge our souls.  --Matthew      >What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is the caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love.
--Leonard Cohen

"Yes We Built It!"

The newest addition to the anti-gov't, libertarian movement is a group named "Yes We Built It!" They operate under the guise of advocating for small business, luring business owners in with the same rhetoric found at your local Tea Party Chapter meeting: Big gov't is bad, taxes are bad, all business regulations are bad, etc. Part of their mission statement complains of the heavy burden the corporate taxes impose on small businesses. Of course, small business aren't in the same tax bracket as corporations and don't pay these "corporate" taxes, which makes you wonder if these small business owners (who signed up) are really THAT unaware of how taxes work, or are they lying? If it's the latter, are they someone to do business with? At any rate, a cursory reading of their mission statement should tell you that what isn't propaganda is just plain false, and what they're advocating for is not in any way aimed at improving small business. It's part of the same old false "grassroots" movement to destroy business regulations/taxes and create a laissez-faire economic model.

Free Market Fallacies

One of the most insidiously deceptive ideas is that the "free market" is natural and inevitable, existing outside and beyond government -- so whatever inequality or insecurity it generates is beyond our control. By this view, if some people aren't paid enough to live on, the market has determined they aren't worth enough. If others rake in billions, they must be worth it. If millions of Americans remain unemployed or their paychecks are shrinking or they work two or three part-time jobs with no idea what they'll earn next month or next week, that's too bad; it's just the outcome of the market. According to this logic, government shouldn't intrude on the free market -- through minimum wages, high taxes on top earners, public spending to get people back to work, regulations on business, or anything else -- because the "free market" knows best and government always messes things up.

In reality, the "free market" is a bunch of rules about (1) what can be owned and traded (the genome? slaves? nuclear materials? babies? votes?); (2) on what terms (equal access to the internet? the right to organize unions? corporate monopolies? the length of patent protection? ); (3) under what conditions (poisonous drugs? unsafe foods? deceptive Ponzi schemes? uninsured derivatives?) (4) what's private and what's public (police? roads? clean air and clean water? healthcare? good schools? parks and playgrounds?); and (5) how to pay for what (taxes, user fees, individual pricing?).

In other words, markets don't exist in a state of nature; they're human creations. Governments don't intrude on free markets; governments organize and maintain markets. Markets aren't "free" of rules; the rules define them. The rules can be designed to maximize efficiency (given the current distribution of resources), or growth (depending on what we're willing to sacrifice to obtain that growth), or fairness (depending on our ideas about a decent society). They can even be designed to entrench and enhance the wealth of a few at the top, and keep almost everyone else comparatively poor and economically insecure.

If our democracy was working as it should, elected representatives, agency heads, and courts would be making the rules roughly according to what most of us want the rules to be. Instead, the rules are being made mainly by those with the power and resources to buy the politicians, regulatory heads, and even the courts (and the lawyers who appear before them). Not incidentally, these are the same people who want you and most others to believe in the fiction of an immutable "free market."

Which is all to say: If we want to reduce the savage inequalities and insecurities that are now undermining our economy and democracy, we have the right to do so. But we must exert the power that is supposed to be ours

Tea Party! America thanks you!

This is my very first post on my very first blog. For better or worse, I am now a "blogger". How does it feel, you ask? Alright, I guess. I'm just now on sentence #5 so I don't have much to compare it to. This is little more than a cursory run-thru in order to get used to the intricacies of the blog.