Bernie Sanders: Problems with Soundbite Policies

Bernie Sanders is a self described democratic socialist who has become fairly popular among young liberals. He is technically independent, but he is running for the Democratic Party nomination. I disagree with most of his economic policies (as I will outline below), but I'm glad that he is at least open about his stances, and he often correctly identifies problems with the current system.

The Policies:
Going through his website, his own promotional material, we have the following headlines:

Real Family Values
Create Decent Paying Jobs
Income and Wealth Inequality
Getting Big Money Out of Politics
Climate Change and the Environment
A Living Wage

As headlines, these might be things I could support in sentiment, but not in practice.

Real Family Values
Bernie Sanders uses 'real family values' as things like mandatory paid vacation, sick leave, and other benefits.These are not the responsibility of the government to provide workers. This is something that workers should negotiate with the employers themselves. How can the government know how much vacation each worker needs or wants? Furthermore, with medical leave, he proposes that it be paid for by an 'insurance' program like Social Security. Government programs are not insurance, and it would not be optional, it would be mandatory.

Many of these policies focus only on the workers' side of the equation, with out recognition that the employers are people too, and have to look out for the interests of the consumer. Suppose a key employee gets sick for an extended period of time. Okay, they now have paid leave. The project that they were working on is sitting around waiting for them to get back. The project is on a tight deadline. What is the employer to do? If this is a key project, and required for the future profitability of the company, then a replacement needs to be hired to do the work of the person on leave. Now, when they get back, what happens? One of them is redundant, and should be fired (or reassigned in the wider economy, if that makes you feel better). The worker is not entitled to pay from an employer without the corresponding exchange.

All of the proposals under this heading are additional regulations on what people are allowed to negotiate with employers. In my ideal world, employees would be able to freely negotiate these terms without the need for a government program or system to require the terms of the employment contract.

Create Decent Paying Jobs
This is a typical view of both the political Left and the political Right. He advocates for a large spending program to build infrastructure and employ young Americans. He doesn't go into the details of what this would mean exactly, but it is a government intervention into the economy which will lead to more problems down the road.

He does correctly point out that the official unemployment rate is inaccurate, since the official numbers ignore the people who have given up looking for work, or those who want more hours. The solution is not, however, to spend other people's money to have people doing what no one cares enough about doing. At least part of his program will include job training, which is less than useless, since it will be paying people to teach other people how to do jobs no one else wants. If they did want them, they would be paying already.

It is conceivable that there are some people who would benefit from these job training programs. The problem is that it is essentially the broken window fallacy. The gains that we see are at the cost of actions we don't see. We can't see how the teachers and instructors would be spending their time if they weren't employed in this government program, and we don't see how the taxpayers who are paying for them would otherwise spend the money.

Income and Wealth Inequality
I've touched on this before, but it bears some repeating. Income inequality is not important. At all. The problem is that the poor are poor. If they are getting even poorer, that is an even bigger problem, but the richness of the wealthy is not at all a problem. There is some degree that this is a complaint about how the world is not fair, and how the rich and the poor should be closer together. In addition to the complaint being about how life is not fair, there are no reason to think that government intervention would improve the situation. In fact, I think that the government intervention has made the problem worse. It is government intervention and regulatory capture that leads to these problems in the first place, and if the banks had been allowed to fail and go through bankruptcy, maybe we would need his plan to break up the banks,

Getting Big Money Out of Politics

Here, I think is one of the worse misinterpretations of the First Amendment that is the problem on the Left, and one that I would hope Bernie Sanders understands better than he is letting on, since he is an independent.

First, I will give him due respect for advocating for a constitutional amendment rather than just overturning the ruling, though he is advocating for that too. But the problem with these ideas is that while money might not quite be speech, money must be spent to make speech effective.

He goes into a little more depth with his interview on Vox, where he gets into ideas that could get very dangerous for democracy, even more than he thinks ours is in danger from the oligarchy. His first idea after reversing the Citizens United decision is to at "at least make sure that candidates who are running will have as much money as their opponents." This might sound okay at first glance, but consider these questions:
Who determines a candidate?
What kind of paper work is required?
Can anyone become a candidate?
Is there a limit on the number of candidates in each race?
Will it be restricted to official political parties?
What if the candidate is religious? Will the state fund the campaign even if it is a religious one?
What about independents?
These are all questions need to be answered about publicly funding candidates. The power is shifted from the voters to the people who pick the candidates. This has already happened to a sad extent because of ballot access laws that impose additional requirements on candidates outside the two party system. Public funding of elections will only exacerbate this problem.

His other idea on this vein is not as bad, but seems somewhat redundant. He thinks that a $100 tax credit for donating to any candidate as a way to 'democratize' the election funding process. It is better than the previous idea, since it doesn't spend taxpayer money on candidates, but my $100 contribution is already a vote. If I'm giving $100 to a candidate, I'm voting for them, and paying them $100 to help convince other people to give their vote to them. At that point, you could basically hold the elections as fundraisers, and each person has 100 votes to spend on the candidates of their choosing. It seems a little redundant.

Climate Change and the Environment
Here, he claims that we need to move away from fossil fuels, and use government funds to 'stimulate' the economy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This doesn't address part of the problem in that the traditional energy companies receive other government subsidies. The way to solve the problem is not to add additional stimulus, but to take away subsidies from the traditional system.

Living Wage
The debate about the minimum 'living wage' is an interesting one, but it again gets into a question of entitlement of the workers. Workers are not entitled to a living wage. Also, the living wage is different in different areas of the country. A national minimum wage doesn't make sense, since the living wage in New York City will be much higher than in Podunk, Anywhere. Personally, where I am now, I can live quite comfortably on $10 an hour full time. That is significantly lower than the living wage that he proposes.

Many people advocating for the living wage also claim that it is not possible to raise a family on the current minimum wage. That sucks for the kids, but why should the bad choices of those parents be our responsibility? It is a very simple solution: don't have kids. Having kids is a choice, and it is one with many long term consequences. If you can't afford children, make the choice not to have them. If you do have them, then make the sacrifice and work your ass off to take care of them, but don't complain to the people who haven't made your choices for you.

The living wage also runs counter to personal agency. People should be allowed to set their own price for their labor, even if it is below what anyone else thinks is tolerable. The living wage infringes on the rights of both the employer and employee to set the prices of their own services.

Equal Pay for Equal Work is Incompatible with Free Market Capitalism

The buzz phrase “Equal pay for equal work” is most commonly associated with the so called ‘gender wage gap,’ that women are getting paid less for the same work. While there may be a small gap due to discrimination, it is certainly not the 77% number that is often cited by mainstream reporting. But that is not the biggest problem with the issue of the phrase “equal pay for equal work.” The real problem with this phrase is that it is in fact regressive. If we truly embrace this philosophy, then it will be essentially impossible to progress, either technologically or socially.

Economic and technological progress hinges on the exact opposite idea: do the same work for less pay. Even better, many do better work for less pay. This is the nature of economic and technological competition. Technological progress strives to lower prices, producing the same goods at a lower price point. The winners are the ones who provide what consumers think is the best product for the lowest price. Cutting the price for the same product, or a superior product requires paying less for all the accumulated labor that produced the product. This is essentially less pay for equal work.  

Perhaps this is a misunderstanding of the phrase. What if we use another conception of the phrase? Let us examine equal pay for equal output, equal pay for equal effort, and equal pay for equal time worked.

• Equal pay for equal output: This is the most reasonable interpretation in my opinion, but even in this case ‘equal pay for equal work’ is wrong. In this interpretation, the price of products could never fall, since we can consider the product to be the output. If equal output must be paid the same rate across the market, then computers would in fact be more expensive that the first computers, since they do so much more.
• Equal pay for equal effort: We can consider this to be in some sense to be equal sweat equity for equal pay. This is also wrong, because just because someone works really hard doesn’t mean that their effort is valuable. If we have two people who dig ditches and move the dirt to a more useful location (landscaping or something), and one of them puts the dirt in the wrong location that is just as far away, I think we can see that they have both put in equal effort. One put the dirt in the right location, while the other did not. Clearly, the one who put the dirt in the wrong location should not be paid the same amount as the one who put it in the right location. If we required equal pay for equal effort, we would be forced to pay misdirected effort the same as good effort, which is clearly wrong.
• Equal pay for equal time: This is clearly ridiculous, as if we had to pay equally for equal time, hourly salaries would be the same for every profession ever, where clearly some are worth more than others. Someone who can build a twice as fast as someone else should clearly not be paid half as much for the same house (and faster too).

These objections might seem trivial, but they demonstrate the significant problems with the mantra ‘equal pay for equal work’ even if we can clearly define what equal work actually means.

Capitalism, by which I mean the free market, works by allowing the competition of people to accept lower pay for equal work; by giving people the freedom to provide services for cheaper than other people. 

Secession and the Consent of the Governed

Discussion of secession in the United States is usually tainted by the connection with the term to the Civil War and slavery. This can be quite frustrating, as questions of secession are fundamental to the legitimacy of a government, and the topic can get derailed into talk about the evils of slavery, and how to solve them without war.

I think of the question of secession as being linked with the idea of the consent of the governed. How are they connected? The consent of the governed is the idea that a legitimate government is only legitimate if it has the consent of the people over which the it is ruling. This is fairly well accepted, and is a phrase used in both the Declaration of Independence, and a similar idea is expressed in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government." Secession is what happens when a substantial subset of people withdraw their consent to be governed by a particular government, and separate from it.

For the governed people to meaningfully give consent, it must be possible for that consent to be withdrawn. If consent cannot be withdrawn, then a government that turns tyrannical is just as legitimate and consensual as a democratically elected government. So what should happen when a group ceases to consent to the current government? Under democratic ideals, they would vote in a new set of rulers to whom they consent. Now suppose that there is a significant geographic split, and the people in one region want to be ruled one way, and people in another region want to be ruled another way? Should the minority in that case be ruled by the majority from the other region? Or can the minority region autonomously withdraw consent to be ruled by the other region?

I think that the answer is fairly straightforward in the abstract. The people in the minority of the whole country should be allowed to split off from the nation, and choose their own form of government that has the consent of the people who live there, even though that was the minority of the people in the original nation as a whole. Furthermore, the independence of the minority region should not be dependent on the opinions of the majority region. If the minority region wishes independence, then any action by the majority region to stop the secession is seeking to deny the will of the people in that region. It could be viewed as a form of Imperialism.

So what happens if we continue this process? If there is another significant minority in the original minority (now majority) of this new country? Well, I think the same logic applies, and that region should be allowed to break off from the new country to form another country which has the consent of the governed.

Another side to think about consent of the governed is this: What should happen when an individual withdraws consent to be governed by the current regime? They could certainly be the majority of the people that occupy their property (assuming a land owner), so should they be able to withdraw consent unilaterally?  If not, then how large a group do you need to revoke the consent? A city? A town? A county? A state? At what level do we draw the line?

I personally think that an individual can withdraw their consent to be governed, and they should be free to do so. The only valid retaliation would not be for the withdrawal of consent, but for aggressive action on the part of the individual. A state, company, or coalition certainly has the right to use the powers of defense delegated to them by the consenting members of that state, company, or coalition.

The Marxist concept of 'Property'

Something that I hear Communists say is that they want you abolish private property. This is found in the Communist Manifesto, and I've seen a few Facebook communists claim this. I have no particular intellectual problem with this, until I hear the secondary claim: That they don't want to take away your home or your belongings. I typically hear it as the want to abolish private property for the things that you 'don't need.' A good example would be a second home, or something like that.

The problem with this is that it is inconsistent, and neglects the reason for 'ownership' of even a small amount of property. Suppose we limit each individual to what they need, as the Communist ideal would go: "To each according to his need." What is it an individual needs? Food, water, housing. In this day and age, we consider housing to include electricity, sanitation, and temperature control (heating and A/C). Okay, so if we consider that each person will control their own food, water, housing (own it). How do we get the builder to make that second house beyond his own? He won't own it, since private property doesn't exist, and he already controls his own home.

Suppose we have a small community, with one farmer, and one builder  (and we are supposing that the single farmer can feed everyone. I'll deal with the other case in a bit). The builder builds two houses, and one goes to the farmer. Is the builder then free forever to live off of the farmer? What if the builder is no good at farming, or is incapable of it? Is the farmer then forced to work to feed the builder for the rest of the builder's life? Suppose some disaster strikes, and the farmer is injured, and can only work enough to feed himself. Does he still have to provide food for the builder?

Now, that construction was a little naive, and the builder could farm, and the farmer could build. But in that case, why is one entitled to the labor of the other? If the builder builds a second home, why is the farmer entitled to it for no labor? The builder spent his labor to build it, surely he should be compensated for his work somehow. Otherwise, it would be slavery. Similarly, if the builder can't farm, how is he entitled to the work of the farmer? They can certainly trade between the two of them, but that presupposes that there is ownership of the goods being traded. The extra house being traded for food requires that the extra house is owned, as is the food.

Let us also look at the case where the farmer cannot feed both himself and the builder with his labor. If he doesn't enlist the builder's help, one of them will starve. Is the builder the one who gets the food? Well, not if you own the labor and materials that you need. In that case, the farmer gets to keep the food, because he needs it, and only the excess is given away. This puts the builder in a predicament. Why should he build a house for a farmer who will not feed him? In reality, the builder should build his house and then take up farming, but leaving that aside, why should he build that second house for the farmer? He gets no benefit, and starves to death, at which point the farmer can take his stuff (unless the farmer died of exposure).

The problem with abolishing private property is that there is no incentive to reach beyond subsistence. There is no reason to build that second home, since you won't use it. There is no reason to farm the extra food. Any extra labor beyond subsistence has its benefits denied to the individual, and becomes a form of slavery.

Institutional vs Cultural Privilege

When getting into discussions about things like affirmative action, feminism and general identity politics, I find that the topic of privilege comes up a lot. White men are privileged, which is why they are at the top of society or in power in various positions. They have privileges to which they are blind, and to combat this, programs like affirmative action are necessary. Suppose we take this as a given, that white men are privileged over everyone else. There are, however, no laws which explicitly privilege white men over other groups (at least as far as I know). There are no legal disputes which hinge on the color of the skin as a matter of law. The privilege that white men enjoy is not an institutional privilege. It is not codified in the rules at the legal institutions, or in any major institutions generally. Instead, privilege must be social or cultural, not institutional.

First, let me be clear: whites most definitely did benefit in the past from institutional privileges, and it would be stupid to think otherwise. Slavery and Jim Crowe laws are clear examples of this. Whites were given advantages in laws and rights. Today, there are no such laws that make this distinction between whites and blacks. Whites are no longer institutionally privileged. The privileges that white men have are therefore cultural and social. Cultural and social privilege is very hard to correct, and I'm not sure that anyone really knows a good way to go about it.

Cultural privilege is something that cannot be corrected institutionally, because it will create backlash. Affirmative action tries to combat the socio-cultural privilege of being white and male with an institutional privilege and preference for other demographic groups. This, instead of making the problem better, creates additional cultural privilege for the white men. Why? Because the white men who made it managed to do it without help from the system. Everyone else? They got help. They couldn't hack it on their own merits. This new white male privilege now exists because they are viewed as having achieved, as making it through an institution that is biased against them.

You see some of this happen in the tech industry nowadays, with articles saying that white men are privileged for being taken seriously for their achievements. The problem is that the proposed solution just makes that problem worse. Creating institutional privileges for the 'underprivileged' just give the culturally privileged additional privileges.

Affirmative Action

Talking about affirmative action in this country is an easy way to have an angry debate. Just come out against it, and a whole bunch of (usually) liberals will jump down your throat and call you a racist. The problem is that the current system of affirmative action, and certainly all the simple, easy ways of doing it, are racist.

The first problem with affirmative action is that it is usually trying to fix the problem far too late. College admissions should be based entirely on merit and what the student can bring to the campus. It is certainly possible that the traditional measures of merit are fundamentally flawed, and should be reworked. This, however, is a problem with the measures of merit being inaccurate, not necessarily discriminatory. Rather than 'fix' the problem right before college, it would make a lot more sense to fix the problems with the education system before college. This way, the students who 'need' affirmative action now will be able to get in on their own merits. 

It is also certainly possible that the admissions departments are biased, but there are other ways to get around this, rather than have a selection directly based on race. One would be to have all evaluations of the candidate take place without the name or any other identity markers (gender, for example). This can't solve discrimination at interviews, but it might help isolate the type of discrimination, and show how much is due to race and gender, and how much is due to merit. 

One of the problems that those in favor of affirmative action tend to ignore is an effect later on, that changes the perceptions regarding the group benefiting from the discrimination. If people know that an institution practices affirmative action, then the people in the group receiving the benefits will be perceived by some as marginal. The phrase of 'You only got in because of ...' is something that friends of mine have heard, and part of the problem is that institutions publicize that they practice admitting traditionally lower qualified applicants based on race or gender. This sheds doubt on every member of the group that is benefiting from the affirmative action, as any of them could be below the requirements of what it would take a candidate who did not benefit from affirmative action. This hurts both those in the group who benefited from affirmative action who could have gotten in, and those who would have gotten if they were not displaced. 

When affirmative action is done wrong, it can also have an even worse problem, by perpetuating the stereotypes that the program was supposed to oppose. If no candidates from the traditionally dominant group are admitted, and the traditional measures of merit are accurate, then what will tend to happen will be that the group that benefited from affirmative action will tend to be at the bottom of the class, rather than dispersed more evenly throughout the class. This will mean that the experiences of the students will generally be that the traditionally dominant group is better at academics than the group that benefited from affirmative action, leading to a perpetuation of racist or sexist stereotypes. 

As I said before, this requires that the traditional measures of merit are accurate, and it is certainly possible that they are not. But I think it is highly unlikely that the measures of merit are completely wrong, or have no value, otherwise schools that didn't use them would be just as good as those that didn't, and I don't know of any school with an admissions policy that doesn't use at least some of the traditional measures of merit (GPA, SAT, ACT etc.). What makes more sense than adding something like race to the admissions would be to attempt to reform the traditional measures of merit so that they can more accurately measure the attributes that they intend.

Villains of Korra

I recently marathoned the last two seasons of the Legend of Korra. While I understand that it is a kids show on Nickelodeon, I still think that some of the ideas could have been explored better. There is not enough time given to develop the ideas of the villains, or examine what makes the villains wrong, either in their methods or ideology. If you want to watch the series, this contains some spoilers, so I would recommend not reading.

I personally didn't think that much of the first two seasons. The second was so disappointing that I stopped watching, until I heard that the last two seasons were much better. Well, I think one of the reasons that I found the second season so lackluster was that the villain in it had no reasonable justification, or at least as one that I picked up.

The political side of this is that in the first, third, and fourth seasons showcase different political ideals. The first season tries to explore the idea of equality. The equality movement ends up going too far, but the political questions that they raise are not really answered satisfactorily. They end up discrediting the movement by revealing that the leader of the equalists is actually a bender, and therefore a hypocrite. This is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons, the first of which, for me, is that it doesn't remove the objections that were raised by other characters.

The equalists do bring up valid points about being ruled by benders, and how benders have power over them, but they cross the line by taking away peoples bending by force. It should certainly be acceptable to resist benders who try to impose their will on non-benders. This aspect is something that I don't think is explored quite enough, since they end up spending time on rushed romance and pro-bending. One thing that was not mentioned that the benders were getting less relevant in terms of actually using bending in day to day activities. Technology was gradually replacing benders in that respect. The modern civilization also limits what benders can legally do, since it is easy for them to destroy property, which is expensive and has to be fixed.

If people are unequal because of birth, whether it is elemental bending, wealth, good genetics, or any other factors, it doesn't give other people the right to take that away, whatever that is. It is not okay for one group to impose their will through violence or threats of violence, regardless of which side of the have and have-nots they are on. If we take away the abilities that make people extraordinary, all that we are left with is a poorer world.

Skipping ahead to the third season, we have anarchists who are trying to free people from oppressive governments. I find that I can agree with them on some things, but definitely not the way that they go about it. I think that part of the problem is that when they espouse the downfall of governments, they don't make a distinction between government and law or cultural practice. This is a common mistake, but they anarchy that they propose is what is usually thought of as the Hobbesian state of nature.

The fourth season is in some sense the flip side of the anarchist argument, though it is not really portrayed that way. The villain in this season showcases what I would consider some of the dangers of Nationalism. There is some value in a united country as opposed to a fractured one, but for it not to be oppressive, it requires the consent of the governed. Unification through force is not only oppressive, but is also causes war, which is one of the worst things that people can do. Nationalists place the nation as more important than the individuals in the nation. The national interest is used as the excuse, but it is just what the leaders view as the most important.

I would have liked it more if Legend of Korra had expanded a little more on the philosophy of the villains, since for three of the seasons, the villains had philosophy that can't be dismissed out of hand, and even for a kids show, we should try to show that ideas could still be good, even if the way that the villains went about it was definitely wrong.