Paul Krugman explains here how to use a fictitious threat of space aliens to save the economy. The jist is: the economy was saved in 1941 by an external threat that united the country and allowed the huge deficit spending, that had previously been blocked by congressional republicans, to have near universal support. What they spent it on was actually negative social product--even less productive than Keynes example of paying people to dig a ditch and fill it up again--but they got greater than full employment by doing it. A threat from space aliens could clearly do the same thing today. By composing the threat appropriately, a clever fake could encourage needed infrastructure and social welfare spending.
Krugman says that this was in an old episode of the Twilight Zone (it turns out it's really from The Outer Limits), where a group of scientists faked an alien threat and tricked the world into world peace. This is an old story, rewritten by many science fiction writers. The first that I knew about was Arthur C Clarke's "Childhood's End", in which a benevolent alien race called the "Overlords" demonstrated that they could easily overpower any military on earth, illustrated the fraud of all religions and political and national partisans--generally with video--and convinced everybody to work together for the betterment of the world and succeeded in creating something fairly Utopian. In the end, Clarke goes off the rails with some ESP claptrap, but it gave me an idea, and for a high school creative writing class, I wrote a version of the same idea, where a group of scientists commandeered part of the TV network to convince the world that such an invasion had taken place and to pursue world peace (VietNam was still a very active war at the time). The "aliens" lived in zero G and could supposedly not tolerate earth's gravity or atmosphere, so they spoke over the TV in disembodied, godlike voices, destroyed military facilities, and commissioned "agents" (the conspiring scientists) to convey their wishes to the earthlings. It wasn't a very good story (I was only about 15). But I've never seen that episode of the Outer Limits, so I really did invent it. (update: I just watched "The Architects of Fear" on YouTube and like Clarke, they drifted off into ESP claptrap and also a morality tale about solving your problems without trickery. Sadly, troublemakers rarely have such morals)
The hard part would be getting real incriminating video like the "Overlords" did on the religions and partisans. I bet the NSA could help. Hacking the communications is clearly fairly easy, and once the "aliens" story has a little traction, unnecessary. Homemade UAVs and cruise and ballistic missiles could convince most of the world of the reality of the alien threat, and prior to 1980 or so probably everybody, but the US intelligence community of today could probably see through it. Again, NSA would be a good ally to have. A real, working death ray might do the trick.
One story along this line that I did read was "Occam's Scalpel", by Theodore Sturgeon. A brilliant but shallow businessman is convinced by a fake corpse and a story that invading aliens have been masquerading as human business leaders and intentionally polluting the atmosphere to terraform the earth in advance of their takeover--apparently the aliens need smog to live. The shallow businessman seems to have been convinced by the fraud and when the story ends, we're thinking that with his brilliance he might be able to reverse the pollution trend. There are, of course, lots of other stories about aliens solving our problems...perhaps the most famous is "The Day the Earth Stood Still"....klaatu barada nickto!
19 August 2011
15 August 2011
The Most Socialist Presidents
I've been getting robocalls and push polls from various right wingers lately. One of the standard talking points is that Obama is our most socialist president ever. To anyone with the slightest knowledge of history and an understanding of the meaning of the word, this is an absurd claim. Among the presidents since 1900, he's among the most pro-business. He has done nothing to earn the term socialist. The nearest is the new health care law--a requirement that everybody buy insurance from private companies, a few minor regulations of those companies with nothing that would prevent them from gouging, and a new exchange to give purchasers of that insurance a more convenient market. This is pretty much a republican program: socialism for insurance companies, private enterprise for people.
Lots of other presidents are more socialist:
#1: Abraham Lincoln: Our most socialist president ever, by far. After the civil war, his three biggest achievements were the Homestead Act, the Transcontinental Railroads and the Land Grant Colleges. All of these were major government incentives to stimulate growth by spending the resources he had available--giant tracts of land. Moreover, he was a supporter of workers--what we would come to call union rights. From his first state of the union speech:
#2: FDR: I think most people are aware of the New Deal, the National Relief Agency, the WPA, and Social Security in his achievements. In what will be news to most FDR haters, he didn't raise taxes to pay for his social programs. Hoover had done that earlier. FDR did eventually raise taxes, to pay for the war.
#3: Lyndon Johnson was a brilliant political strategist and infighter. He skillfully exploited a widely held sense of fairness, the worship of the martyred President Kennedy and the philosophy of government defined by FDR to push through the programs of the Great Society: expansion of Social Security, creation of Medicare, and the implementation of Civil Rights that FDR and Ike had started. He was cornered by Goldwater, very much against his will, into allowing the Viet Nam war to expand. His full throated support of civil rights transformed the South into a permanent stronghold for Republicans to this day, and their unthinking hatred of him has given the forces that would like to destroy his and FDR's legacy a far stronger hand than they would otherwise have.
#4: Theodore Roosevelt was simultaneously very pro business and very socialist. He understood the need for public institutions, creating the National Park system, and boosting anti-monopoly regulation.
#5: Dwight Eisenhower ranks fairly highly because of one thing: The national interstate highway system. He also did the first real civil rights enforcement and created NASA.
#6: Woodrow Wilson: not initially a supporter, he signed the constitutional amendment (pushed for by his predecessor Taft) that allowed a peace time income tax because he understood its necessity in the face of rising social needs and the realization that war was soon coming.
#7: Richard Nixon: Our most fervently anti-communist president also instituted wage and price controls, took us off the gold standard, created the EPA, OSHA and several other agencies. He famously repeated Milton Friedman's line "we're all Keynesians now", a statement that was interpreted (wrongly) as supporting socialism. And he went to China. The price controls proved a disaster economically, as did his war policy, but otherwise, most of this stuff worked.
#8: Thomas Jefferson ignored the advice of his economic advisers and bought "Louisiana" from the French, at what was then a terribly high cost. He quickly created expansionist programs to explore and settle it. One of these many socialist contributions was "The National Road", the first government funded highway. It still exists: it's called US Highway 40 and goes from Frederick, MD to St Louis, although Jefferson only planned to reach the Ohio River. Today, the route is largely shared with I-70.
James Polk, Grover Cleveland, William Howard Taft, and Harry Truman all did things which today would be described as socialist. Reagan, GHW Bush and many others things that would cause them to be ranked in the same general range of socialism Obama. Did you know that Reagan raised taxes and increased government spending? And also: "...where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost." Ronald Reagan, Labor Day 1980 (while running for president)
I'd rank Obama at about #15 or so on the socialist spectrum. He did push for a slightly more socialist health care program than we got, but he caved to give us a program similar to the ones Dole and others were pushing for in 1993. He undermined the already too-weak ARRA stimulus bill by filling it with tax cuts, as well as caving on tax cuts for the rich as he promised in the fall of 2010. He gave up pushing stimulus and began pushing austerity before the 2010 election.
There definitely are more conservative presidents than Obama: GW Bush, Herbert Hoover, Warren Harding. Note that history (including some pretty conservative historians) also rank these as having been among our worst presidents.
Lots of other presidents are more socialist:
#1: Abraham Lincoln: Our most socialist president ever, by far. After the civil war, his three biggest achievements were the Homestead Act, the Transcontinental Railroads and the Land Grant Colleges. All of these were major government incentives to stimulate growth by spending the resources he had available--giant tracts of land. Moreover, he was a supporter of workers--what we would come to call union rights. From his first state of the union speech:
In context, he makes it clear that he's including both free workers and slaves in what he calls "Labor". Lincoln also pushed through the very first nationwide income tax, mainly to pay for the war.
#2: FDR: I think most people are aware of the New Deal, the National Relief Agency, the WPA, and Social Security in his achievements. In what will be news to most FDR haters, he didn't raise taxes to pay for his social programs. Hoover had done that earlier. FDR did eventually raise taxes, to pay for the war.
#3: Lyndon Johnson was a brilliant political strategist and infighter. He skillfully exploited a widely held sense of fairness, the worship of the martyred President Kennedy and the philosophy of government defined by FDR to push through the programs of the Great Society: expansion of Social Security, creation of Medicare, and the implementation of Civil Rights that FDR and Ike had started. He was cornered by Goldwater, very much against his will, into allowing the Viet Nam war to expand. His full throated support of civil rights transformed the South into a permanent stronghold for Republicans to this day, and their unthinking hatred of him has given the forces that would like to destroy his and FDR's legacy a far stronger hand than they would otherwise have.
#4: Theodore Roosevelt was simultaneously very pro business and very socialist. He understood the need for public institutions, creating the National Park system, and boosting anti-monopoly regulation.
#5: Dwight Eisenhower ranks fairly highly because of one thing: The national interstate highway system. He also did the first real civil rights enforcement and created NASA.
#6: Woodrow Wilson: not initially a supporter, he signed the constitutional amendment (pushed for by his predecessor Taft) that allowed a peace time income tax because he understood its necessity in the face of rising social needs and the realization that war was soon coming.
#7: Richard Nixon: Our most fervently anti-communist president also instituted wage and price controls, took us off the gold standard, created the EPA, OSHA and several other agencies. He famously repeated Milton Friedman's line "we're all Keynesians now", a statement that was interpreted (wrongly) as supporting socialism. And he went to China. The price controls proved a disaster economically, as did his war policy, but otherwise, most of this stuff worked.
#8: Thomas Jefferson ignored the advice of his economic advisers and bought "Louisiana" from the French, at what was then a terribly high cost. He quickly created expansionist programs to explore and settle it. One of these many socialist contributions was "The National Road", the first government funded highway. It still exists: it's called US Highway 40 and goes from Frederick, MD to St Louis, although Jefferson only planned to reach the Ohio River. Today, the route is largely shared with I-70.
James Polk, Grover Cleveland, William Howard Taft, and Harry Truman all did things which today would be described as socialist. Reagan, GHW Bush and many others things that would cause them to be ranked in the same general range of socialism Obama. Did you know that Reagan raised taxes and increased government spending? And also: "...where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost." Ronald Reagan, Labor Day 1980 (while running for president)
I'd rank Obama at about #15 or so on the socialist spectrum. He did push for a slightly more socialist health care program than we got, but he caved to give us a program similar to the ones Dole and others were pushing for in 1993. He undermined the already too-weak ARRA stimulus bill by filling it with tax cuts, as well as caving on tax cuts for the rich as he promised in the fall of 2010. He gave up pushing stimulus and began pushing austerity before the 2010 election.
There definitely are more conservative presidents than Obama: GW Bush, Herbert Hoover, Warren Harding. Note that history (including some pretty conservative historians) also rank these as having been among our worst presidents.
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