The high stakes of culture Part 2

(Originally written back in January 2015, it's interesting to see where my thinking has changed. The writing remains rough, but clear enough.)

The general culture of the US is one input to the behavior of individuals, but local cultural norms are another, and probably stronger. I've written about middle-class culture, particularly the fear of losing all one's money and shifting to a day-by-day existence. I've also written about the clash between liberals' gun-less utopia and the gun owners sense of their rights and culture.

Other cultural quirks I've noticed: New York City has a sustained high rate of abortion--like many women there never seem to learn how to correctly use contraceptives. Middle-class girls are quite different--their rates of abortion have been dropping. Yeah-let's all learn about how to prevent unwanted pregnancies.

Inner city kids learn to disrespect authority: issue false denials, accuse people of racism, curse, lie. This is a generalization, as all observations of culture are. (TNC - Ta-nehisi Coates-- post on behavior/culture needed in poor area. Comments were very good but aren't available any more. One frequent commenter, Pete, a blue-collar white man from Baltimore, described a pro-education poor neighborhood.)

TNC makes the argument that the society has been exploiting blacks for the entire history--but I wonder whether he can count the past 40 years. (Yes, now in 2020 I agree with exploitation continued.) He doesn't say what society should do about this, but some commenters hint--schools as good as anywhere, possibly also true for housing, job opportunities etc. This is social engineering on a grand scale--just turn all neighborhoods into clones of middle-class neighborhoods. Not only prohibitively expensive, but also many groups haven't needed to so much external help to move into the middle class (like the immigrant groups). Some white groups have gotten mired in poverty too. Must they be engineered out poverty too? 

Here's how I feel about this: it's not a strong idea to spend so much money with little evidence investment will provide the outcome desired. This isn't the only instance I've felt this way (I feel the same way about treating cancer on my own dime.) I don't think changing schools and housing will help while the culture remains.

TNC almost follows the behavior of his youth, and calls headlines it the culture of poverty. He then gets angry when others use the term. How expectations are different and new rules learned. TNC on Cosby's cultural message. Racism creates pathology.

Big TNC article on reparations. To critique it, see what he doesn't focus on. Employment, the changes in the last 50 years, the generalization of who was hurt and who would have to have to acknowledge wrong-doing. Critique by another black columnist--this view isn't productive, so let's stick with what is more likely to be. Noah Millman thoughtful response. Conor's column with a block of good comments. Douthat writes about cultural and poverty. (Note--the talk is of a culture of poverty, but the bigger problem is all the local cultures of poverty. The particular problems grow locally with gradual diffusion, but I expect major local differences.)

Religious view. Rod Dreher lots of posts about loss of religion, loss of strictures, discipline, sense of duty. Fun post--worst cultural mistake. He's against nominalism and the emphasis on empiricism and observation. What's wrong with these (which have been so helpful in science)--denial or lack of evidence of the soul, God, etc. Science is a tough competitor.

Image: youtube.com

Ayn Rand is Nietzsche

Nietzsche is commonly credited with offering an alternative morality, where the supermen didn't have to follow the same rules as the sheep the rest of mankind. I haven't read much Nietzsche, so this may be a misrepresentation, but let's pretend it's accurate.

Ayn Rand thought that the bureaucrats and leeches were holding back the greatness of society. This is somewhat a tenet of libertarianism, that we all need to be free to soar as high as possible, free from the regulations that would tether us to mediocrity. Those tethers include anything beyond minimal taxes, gun restrictions, licensing for professions, FDA drug testing, regulations, and paperwork showing compliance with vast numbers of government rules, etc. They also include the social safety net. I'm going to focus on the safety net.

Some people need the social safety net. That's why we have it. Before governments got into that business, there were churches and charities that tried to handle the load but were often overwhelmed. I assume charities were overwhelmed. Perhaps they weren't and it was just a trick some liberal busybodies dreamed up in order to make jobs for themselves. But I bet charities were frequently overwhelmed.

So we've had and needed a social safety net. Yet Ayn Rand was against that net. I can understand if she thinks it's better never to use the safety net, but why should it not even exist? It exists because people have needed it in the past, some need it now, and other will need it in the future. But other people's needs are unimportant to the Ayn Rand archetype. The Ayn Rand hero will never be that needy person. The superman doesn't need the safety net, and the world should be for the supermen, not for the sheep. So, no safety nets for you sheep either.

In the Ayn Rand view, it's too bad that the sheep of Europe even pushed for these safety nets starting back in the 1800's. The sheep of America followed. That's a problem, having these sheep make decisions about what government is going to do. They make sheep-like decisions. The sheep become more sheep-like and dependent, and the supermen are weighed down. Government should be limited so the sheep can't decide what's to be done. [By the way, doesn't this sound suspiciously feudal? The nobility should make the decisions, and the peasants should shut up and be good mules.]

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I hope I've shown a strong similarity between the philosophy of Ayn Rand and Neitzsche. Perhaps I'm overreaching here, but I don't think so. I wondered for a long time why people are so adamantly against Social Security, a program that has such broad appeal. Why isn't it good enough for anti-SS folks that large numbers of people want the program? Isn't that democracy?

No, democracy isn't a good enough reason. First and foremost, the country should be as free as possible. That's what libertarians strive for. Nothing, not the wishes of the majority for a social safety net, should overrule the primary guiding principle of the country.

On one hand I can see the logic in this. On the other hand, in practice the people of this country (as in "we, the people") took the country in the direction it has gone. This country wasn't invaded and hijacked by Russians who changed our government by fiat. WE changed it. And there was a logic to the changes that we made.

So the libertarians aren't the only ones who have a logical, reasonable view of how our government should work. They have lots of competition, and they've been losing. We, the People, don't want the Ayn Rand or Nietzsche philosophy. The elections tell us that.

 Image: aplaceformom.com

The Cloward-Piven conspiracy/strategy is REAL!

You can't trust anything out of Glenn Beck's mouth, so I was surprised to find out that the Cloward-Piven strategy actually existed.

The Truth According to Glenn Beck

Cloward and Piven were sociologists who came up with a strategy in the 1960s to increase government spending on welfare to the point of destabilizing government. At that point, the government would change to socialist or communist. Cloward and Piven executed a lot of their strategy in New York City, but there have been setbacks, such as welfare reform. Nonetheless, their strategy is still underpinning Democratic policies, such as the stimulus, ACA, Dodd-Frank, and any Democratic voting laws.

Strangely, Beck doesn't evaluate how well or poorly the strategy is going. He gives no current numbers on how many people are dependent on government or how soon that burden will topple us. I guess a reality check isn't Beck's thing when he's on a roll. Instead, he announces "case closed."

The Truth According to Wikipedia

This is where I learned the shocking truth that Glenn Beck wasn't totally full of shit. Cloward and Piven did indeed want to create a fiscal crisis, which they write frequently about here (a transcription of their original article). They advocated signing up as many poor people as possible for welfare and other programs, and making sure that they receive the maximum legal benefits. The reason was primarily to put huge strains on the government, but also to get more money into the hands of the poor, to rally the support among the poor for political change, and to provide a stronger, more reliable electoral base for the Democratic Party.

Contra Glenn Beck, the stated goal wasn't total annihilation of the government, but instead direct payment from the federal government to every person. This wasn't a well thought-out goal. There was no math in their proposal--how much the payments would be to each person, how that would affect the economy, how the money would be raised.

Cloward and Piven admit some problems with their plan:

"A welfare crisis would, of course, produce dramatic local political crisis, disrupting and exposing rifts among urban groups... Group conflict, spelling political crisis for the local party apparatus, would thus become acute as welfare rolls mounted and the strains on local budgets became more severe. In New York City, where the Mayor is now facing desperate revenue shortages, welfare expenditures are already second only to those for public education.

...welfare costs are generally shared by local, state and federal governments, so that the crisis in the cities would intensify the struggle over revenue... If the past is any predictor of the future, cities will fail to procure relief from this crisis... for state legislatures have been notoriously unsympathetic to the revenue needs of the city (especially where public welfare and minority groups are concerned).

If this strategy for crisis would intensify group cleavages, a federal income solution would not further exacerbate them... legislative measures to provide direct income to the poor would permit national Democratic leaders to cultivate ghetto constituencies without unduly antagonizing other urban groups, as is the case when the battle lines are drawn over schools, housing or jobs. Furthermore, a federal income program would ... permanently relieve them of the financially and politically onerous burdens of public welfare*--a function which generates support from none and hostility from many, not least of all welfare recipients.

... it should also be noted that there would be gains even in defeat."

Cloward and Piven were enamored with crisis as a vehicle for political change. They observed that the Great Depression and the black protests and riots were very effective in spurring legislation. However, they were quite wrong about the how the welfare burden crisis would play out. The federal government never came close to giving direct payments to every person. The closest was a short-lived proposal in 1972 by presidential candidate George McGovern, who was defeated in a landslide. Instead, welfare more and more became a target for derision as failed social engineering. Welfare reformers from the conservative side haven't been wonderfully successful in changing welfare dependency either.

Cloward and Piven moved on, and were leaders in the push for the Motor-Voter law. If not for Glenn Beck, we probably wouldn't know about this earlier plan of theirs.

The Truth According to the Daily Kos

An author at the Daily Kos points out that had Obama wanted to follow the Cloward-Piven strategy, he would have tried to torpedo TARP, causing even more disruption in employment. That would have provided an even bigger crisis, which would have allowed for nationalization of a bunch of industries, even larger increases in aid programs like food stamps and unemployment payments. The author also doubts that there was a Cloward-Piven strategy, but instead it was only one article.

Truth Filter

From my experience, I'm inclined to think that Cloward and Piven did have a plan, but that plan wasn't fully implemented and didn't work as mapped out. There were crises from welfare demands, but the solution didn't take the form of direct checks to the poor. I doubt that Cloward and Piven's vision was particularly influential. It's not was though welfare or community organizing didn't exist until Cloward and Piven created them. Welfare most likely would have developed just as it did, regardless of these two.

That's a big problem. These two saw welfare as a way to alleviate poverty and build a political base, but they didn't see welfare as a subsistence trap. They didn't discuss the perils of living off of guaranteed low-level income such as losing the drive to improve and losing the skills and habits of working. That consideration didn't seem to enter their consciousness at all.

Richard Cloward died in 2001, but Piven has continued their work. She still supports direct payment from the federal government to all citizens and residents. The payments should be substantial enough for people to live in dignity. This means that employers will have to pay even more since their competition is a substantial handout.

Piven doesn't see any difficulty with this idea. She doesn't question how tasks will get done if everyone could be paid for not working, or the effect of a surge in wages on living costs. She also states that the US is a fabulously rich country, rich enough to afford wars all over the globe. Piven clearly lives in a self-made fantasy world. She is incredibly clueless when it comes to economics. Sad that she's been a professor for decades now, so she's been teaching these economically ignorant ideas to a couple generations already.

I suppose the good news is that I don't hear many other people repeating those ideas. The vast majority of people want jobs, not payouts for just hanging around. Cloward and Piven never got the welfare system they wanted, the direct federal payment system they wanted, or the more socially equal society they wanted. Most people wised up and realized that world vision was an impossibility. That's good progress there.

Protest in Boston, 1966

Image: thenation.com

P.S. Direct connection between Barack Obama and Cloward-Piven: none except in Glenn Beck's mind.

The silver lining of the continued stalemate

...in three words: NO SOCIAL ENGINEERING.

No Democratic social engineering. No Republican social engineering. No big tax cuts blowing holes in the budget. No expensive new programs blowing holes in the budget.

What we'll have is minimal change in government. Gone is the ability to engage in any large-scale expensive wars. There won't be any half trillion dollar jobs program/stimulus. We'll have an incremental austerity because there aren't the votes for raising spending. We won't have huge spending cuts because there aren't the votes for that either.

We can probably remain in this state for quite a while. After all, what are the pressing national or international issues that require a major change? Our budget deficit is the biggest one I can think of. If the international financial systems go into another meltdown, that will be another, but it's not happening now. Neither is it clear that any regulation the US could pass would prevent it.

If this is an end to meddling government, I'm for it. If it's simply a vacation from meddling government, I'll take that too. However, I don't forget that huge government programs of yesteryear are cushioning the problems of today. We have programs that aid the elderly and sick, that protect our borders and international trade, that educate the next generation. I'm fine with stopping the fixing for a while, letting things settle, and see what, if any, pressing issues arise in a few years. Maybe there won't be big issues, maybe there will. Perhaps the best thing is to wait and see.

Tell me the truth--wouldn't you love a break from changes for a while too?

 Let's all give it a rest.

Image: wallpapersonweb.com

Contraception decision: War on religion?

Is the decision of the Obama administration on contraceptive insurance coverage a "war on religion?"

"The Catholic Church objects to being told to pay for something that it morally objects to. Why should the government make Catholic schools, hospitals and charities pay for abortion inducing drugs, sterilization and contraception? ... There is no reason it has to involve the Catholic Church other than pure spite." -- Washington Post commenter

I don't think it's "pure spite" or "war." Lots of people seem to want to ramp up the rhetoric, a problem not confined to one side of the dispute.

There are many non-spiteful reasons for wanting insurance plans to cover contraceptives. Here are a few: People like to control when they have children without foregoing their sex lives. To many, it doesn't make sense to carve out a special exception for birth control when many other medications/procedures are covered. Some women (a few) need hormones to control diseases like ovary cysts. None of these are spiteful or war-like reasons to cover contraceptives.

The decision about covering contraceptives pits two worthwhile goals against each other: 

• The usefulness of contraceptives is similar to the usefulness of hypertension medicines, and perhaps should be treated in the same manner by insurers. 
• Religious employers don't want to be forced to pay for medications that they have a long-standing doctrinal objections to. 

This is a difficult matter of deciding which of the conflicting interests is more important. It is not spite or war.

That the government and employers are involved is an artifact of our ridiculous health care insurance system where the employer pays. If we could transition to private/individual-funded choices, then we could pick our own insurance based on our own consciences. That would be much better. Amen.

 Praying . . . that the contraceptives keep working. 

Update 3/14/12. The Obama administration isn't trying to end religion or shut down the Catholic Church. But it sure feels like some alliances of conservatives are trying to completely shut down Planned Parenthood. If the Catholic Church was trying to do this directly, people would be up in arms.

Healthcare and the tentacles of government

One problem with Obamacare is that it greatly increases the role of the federal government in healthcare. But it's not that government's role is currently small. With Medicare, Medicaid, veteran's healthcare, and federal employees, the government's role hasn't been small since the early 1960's.

Private Sector Sprawl

This mirrors the growth of health insurance coverage in the private sector. If anything, the private sector has been in the forefront of increasing healthcare expenditures, and the federal programs only bring those spending patterns to the poorer parts of society. Private health insurance instituted coverage for prescription drugs long before Medicare Part D, so it's no wonder seniors wanted it too.

So the federal government is hardly the major instigator of insurance coverage for contraception. However, it is a significant step when government mandates that insurance companies have to provide them with no copay. I understand the reasoning: contraceptives are preventative care, and ACA mandates that insurance companies cover preventative care 100%. They are certainly cost-effective compared to maternity costs.

However, I question whether the country is going in the right direction to mandate that ALL insurance cover ALL care deemed preventative. We might make better decisions and save money if we had skin in the game. On the other hand, we might save some money in the short run by making bad decisions, like delaying treatment or skipping an uncomfortable screening test that also cost us money (insult on top of injury).

How Many Mandates?

So I'm uncertain. Should we go the libertarian route and leave the responsibility to the individual, or do we go statist and trust a government board to dictate what standard care and standard coverage should be? I actually think that the doctors in government agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control have done a good job, so I don't object on principle to the statist route.

Maybe it is best for medical experts to evaluate practices, their costs, and their efficacy and report which are best. I don't particularly care if the medical experts work for the government or for large healthcare groups like Kaiser or Mayo Clinic, or for large insurers. If they use good methods and find good savings in money and lives, I want to know and benefit. However, when it comes to legally mandating certain coverage, maybe it's better to go slow--don't require too much all at once. Choose to mandate the most effective preventative care, not the kitchen sink of preventative care. And also allow other experiments, like Whole Foods health account/catastrophic care insurance combination.

I hope ACA doesn't become a monster, with too many mandates and therefore hideously expensive. It doesn't have to be that way. Still, ACA was an important step to partially solve a huge problem in the US for those without employer-provided healthcare insurance. Just like Romneycare was a big step for Massachusetts, and it's now benefiting many, including people in my own family.

More Choice

In a time when our healthcare insurance market seems like feast or famine (employer-provided insurance or nothing affordable), ACA mandated something else. It opened a door. Now let's open some doors for other sorts of healthcare coverage too.

Preventative care: Catching the #1 cancer in women

Extras:
Switzerland model, Singapore model with mandatory accounts.
CA mandates, CT mandates. Read them to see how much is mandated (a lot), and think about how you'd be glad it was mandated if you were in those shoes.
Read the sequel follow-up post.