99. Self-Interest, Hypocrisy and the Commercial Takeover

Note: This post is the ninety-ninth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

I don't have enough time this week to do justice to the rest of 'The Republic' so instead I just wanted to mention this post by Paul Krugman.

Krugman starts by referencing a Mel Gibson movie from a few years back that was entitled, 'The Patriot' but featured a protagonist who was unwilling to fight for his country until his own family was attacked, and then embarked on a campaign for personal vengeance. Krugman links to an essay by Michael Lind that explains how this is hardly an example of what is normally referred to as patriotism.

Krugman sees a similar confusion when wealthy people who support measures that will benefit the poor or middle class are attacked as hypocrites (for example) for not being selfish.

Says Krugman,

"Which brings me to the subject of this post, the apparently equally misunderstood concept of hypocrisy. I’ve been getting some personal attacks on this front, but it’s a bigger issue than that. Here’s the personal version: suppose that you’re a professor/columnist who advocates higher taxes on high incomes and a stronger social safety net — but you yourself earn enough from various sources that you will pay some of those higher taxes and are unlikely to rely on that stronger safety net. A remarkable number of people look at that combination of personal and political positions and cry 'Hypocrisy!'

...

If you remember the 2004 election, which unfortunately I do, there were quite a few journalists who basically accused John Kerry of being 'inauthentic' because he was a rich man advocating policies that would help the poor and the middle class. Apparently you can only be authentic if your politics reflect pure personal self-interest

...

So to say what should be obvious but apparently isn't: supporting policies that are to your personal financial disadvantage isn't hypocrisy — it’s civic virtue!

...

Lind's essay about Mel Gibson ended with concerns that we may have lost the sense of what citizenship and its duties mean. Indeed. If people can't comprehend what it means to work for larger goals than their own interest, if they actually consider any deviation from self-service somehow a sign of phoniness, we, as a nation, are lost."

Another example, that Krugman doesn’t mention is the field of 'Public Choice Theory' which is premised on the notion that neither civic virtue nor patriotism exist.

Anyway, I just wanted to highlight this post from Krugman because what he is observing is what I have observed myself, and what provides some of my motivation for pursuing this series of posts. It seems as though commercial syndrome virtues are gradually driving out guardian virtues in our discourse, to such an extent that classic guardian precepts such as patriotism and civic virtue are now seen through a commercial lens as either hypocritical or incomprehensible for a growing percentage of the population. And on that note, it's time for a vacation, see you in a few weeks...

86. Casts of Mind, War and Peace Edition

Note: This post is the eighty-sixth in a series about government and commercial ethics. Click here for the full listing of the series. The first post in the series has more detail on the book 'Systems of Survival' by Jane Jacobs which inspired this series.

Paul Krugman had a post up recently about the U.S. Civil War and some of what he said struck me as relevant to his cast of mind, in the sense that some people have a 'guardian mindset' and some people have a 'commercial mindset.' Economists are typically the purest examples of the commercial mindset.

Here's a few quotes from his post,

"It’s the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War ...I’ve long had a special fascination, not with how the war began, but with its end. ...mainly, I think, it’s because of the symbolism of that final surrender: Lee the patrician, in his dress uniform, surrendering to the not at all patrician U.S. Grant, still muddy and disheveled from hard riding. It was, in a very real sense, the victory of modern America — of a democratic nation, in manners as well as politics — over an aristocratic ideal.

And the way modern America won was characteristic. Southerners were better warriors — man for man, they almost always outperformed Union armies, although the gap narrowed over time. But the North excelled at the arts of peace — that is, in industry and ability to get things done.

America’s other great moral war, World War II, was similar. ... the truth is that Americans were never as good at the art of war as the Germans. What we were good at was the art of production, of supply.

...

So anyway, I’m devoting a bit of time today to thinking about the muddy roads south of Richmond where, 146 years ago, the seal was put on creating the kind of nation I believe in."

It's a bit of an odd sentiment - the nation Paul Krugman believes in is one that is good enough at the Commercial life that it can 'buy its way to victory' in the Guardian world of warfare.

It's clear that Krugman understands the distinction between the Guardian approach of the patrician South vs. the Commercially minded North and that he prefers the Northern approach, but he doesn't spell out why - maybe because it was successful in the Civil War and World War II?, but you get the sense that his loyalty would remain the same even if the North had lost the Civil War and the U.S. had lost World War II.

Of course, it's also not really clear that it was the economic strength (per person) of the U.S. that was decisive in World War II. The Soviet Union was communist at the time, not exactly conducive to the kind of nation that Paul Krugman would believe in, and yet they seemed to do quite well in World War II as well.

Anyway, people can and do quibble endlessly about who accomplished what in past wars, but what is interesting to me is that Paul Krugman views democracy and strong commercial activity as going hand in hand in opposition to an aristocratic (hierarchical) society which is better equipped with warrior virtues, and that in his mind one (commercial society) is preferable and modern while the other (aristocratic society) is inferior and pre-modern.

In 'The Republic' Plato outlined how one type of government leads to another, with the aristocratic type giving way to a capitalist type which gave way to Democracy which finally gave way to tyranny, so that is consistent with Krugman's view that democracy and capitalism should be successors to the aristocratic type of society - although I doubt he'd agree that tyranny will be the new modern, leaving behind the old outdated democracy (or maybe he would, he's been paying as much attention to U.S. politics as anyone over the past decade).

Anyway, this is a bit of rambling post, the main thing I wanted to do was highlight how a commercial vs. guardian mindset lurks behind much of what is written on the topics of politics and what course society should take. Once your mind is tuned to look for the undercurrents of commercial syndrome or guardian syndrome casts of mind, you will see them everywhere (at least you will of you are like me, anyway).

More Krugman on Debt

Paul Krugman has posted one of his more in-depth explanations of his thoughts on debt and getting out of economic depressions.

For the most part, it is reminiscent of my final thoughts on the topic, expressed back here.

The main difference is that Krugman seems to think government borrowing can somehow trigger an eventual reduction in overall debt levels, paving the way for a more balanced economy and future growth. In my view, government borrowing only prolongs the debt party a little, but it will take either money printing or default on a significant scale to bring debt levels back down and right the economy.

More discussion of this topic over at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative

A License to Print Money 3

A little while back I expressed disappointment that Paul Krugman seemed to hold back from an obvious conclusion that printing money was the sensible course of action given the current economic predicament (weak overall demand, high private debt levels).

So it is good to see that he stuck his nose out a little further on this topic while I was away.

Says Krugman,

"In the end, I’d argue, what must happen is an effective default on a significant part of debt, one way or another. The default could be implicit, via a period of moderate inflation that reduces the real burden of debt; that’s how World War II cured the depression. Or, if not, we could see a gradual, painful process of individual defaults and bankruptcies, which ends up reducing overall debt."

It's also reassuring to see that, since I wrote this post summarizing my thoughts on the economic situation in mid-2009, the views of notable economists I respect (such as Paul Krugman) seem to be coming around much more to the view I articulated at that time - in particular that we either need to inflate or default in order to reset our debt to a much lower level. Or maybe they knew this all along and are just now becoming willing to spell it out clearly - either way, it seems like progress to me.

A License to Print Money 2

Let me preface this by saying that I'm a fan of Paul Krugman. I've read most of his books, read almost everything at the Paul Krugman archive, and read all of his columns and blog posts since he started working for the NY Times. This blog even has a 'Krugman was right, I was wrong' tag that I use on occasion.

Another strand to this post is that, over time, I've generally come to the conclusion that the simplest way out of the current economic mess for the U.S. would be to print money and distribute an equal share to each citizen until they get a little bit of inflation and a reduced debt load for debtors.

So imagine my disappointment when I read this recent post by Paul Krugman where he said,

"So why not forget about open-market operations, and just drop the stuff from helicopters? Well, remember that at this point cash and short-term bonds are equivalent. So a helicopter drop is just like a temporary lump-sum tax cut. And we would expect people to save much or most of such a tax cut — all of it, if you believe in full Ricardian equivalence."

Both Tyler Cowan and Brad Delong immediately noted that this didn't make any sense, as did a vast number of commenters on the original post.

How disconnected from reality do you have to be to think that if you give money to people who don't currently have any, they wouldn't either spend some of it or pay down their debts with it?

What vision of America must you have to imagine that the only people in America that exist are people who, given a $5,000 cheque from the government, would save all of it and not spend a dime.

It's especially frustrating because it seems as though there is almost a conspiracy of silence around pretending that America's economic woes couldn't be solved by printing a little money. And when one of the few prominent people you can expect to be both knowledgable and a straight-shooter takes on the issue, he uncharacteristically dodges the question with half-truths and deception.

The jedi mind powers of the creditor class are powerful indeed.

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Updated to add, if you are interested in more elaboration on my opinion that printing money is the solution to the U.S.' economic problems, this post does a good job summarizing my views on the topic.

The Economics of Climate Change

If you're at all interested in the issue of climate change, you really should do yourself a favour and read the recent article by Paul Krugman in the New York Times.

You won't a better, more accurate, more readable description of the economics involved in why climate change is a problem, as well as why and how we should approach dealing with it. Highly recommended.

Easy Does It?

Here's a chart from the U.S. federal reserve that Paul Krugman mentioned the other day.



The Fed included the chart as evidence that monetary policy wasn't the cause of a U.S. housing bubble. Krugman was pointing out in response that you can't use a national average change in housing prices all that meaningfully for a country like the U.S. since, unlike other countries that had bigger national changes, the U.S. had a mix of high-growth bubbly areas and small-growth no-bubble areas.

As a Canadian, I noted that the growth in housing prices was higher in Canada than the U.S. over the period covered, and that the same logic regarding only part of the country having the big house price changes applied here as well.

But what worried me was something else.

The x axis on the chart is the Taylor Rule residual, or how interest rates, as set by the central bank, varied vs. what a rule-of-thumb known as the Taylor rule would suggest they should be. I'm not going to get into the technical elements of how the Taylor Rule works, the point is that the U.S. Fed used this metric in the chart as a rough measure of how 'easy' monetary policy was over the period. One concern with 'easy' policy is that by keeping interest rates below what they 'should' be, the Central bank might foster an unsustainable credit/asset price bubble that would be followed by a crash.

So starting from the left let's consider the countries that had the 'easiest' policy:

Greece: "Moody's cut Greece's debt to A2 from A1 on Tuesday over soaring deficits, becoming the third major rating agency to downgrade the highly-indebted country's rating this month."

Spain: "The weaker euro economies such as Spain and Greece have been terribly hit by the crisis, and experts blame the euro, at least in part, as European Monetary Union (EMU) members cannot use national monetary policy as a crisis-fighting tool."

Ireland: "How close is Ireland to crisis? Close enough that prominent people are raising the spectre of capital account flight already underway."

"The United States: Aughts were a lost decade for U.S. economy, workers"

So who's in fifth place, behind arguably the 4 countries hardest hit by the global financial crisis? Canada.

But don't worry, it's different here - I hope.

Stay Calm

From the entry for 'Calm' in John Ralston Saul's Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense,

"CALM - A state of emotion which is overrated except in religious retreats. It is used principally to control people who are dissatisfied with the way those in authority are doing their jobs. When individuals show annoyance, the person in power or with privileged information or expertise will make them feel they are not calm enough to deal with the situation rationally. A lack of calm suggests a lack of courage, intelligence or professionalism.

...

The Captain of the Titanic was no doubt pleased that his male passengers in first class remained calm as they waited to drown. Had they been less controlled, they might have found some small satisfaction in passing their time by throwing him overboard"

If you follow the financial news, you'll have heard that the largest investment bank in the U.S., Goldman Sachs, has reported a profit of $3.44 billion dollars for the quarter, and said it had set aside $6.65 billion for pay and bonuses in the quarter ($226,000 per employee, on average).

In a different era, just the 'mere' fact alone of a company paying its employees a quarter of million each for 3 months of work while the rest of the country faces the highest levels of unemployment and wage cuts in living memory might be enough to stir outrage.

These days however, it takes this profit coming on the heels of a series of government bailouts of Goldman Sachs, as well as a series of unseemly regulatory changes favouring Goldman Sachs, combined with the fact that seemingly all of the important political players who created the bailouts for Goldman Sachs and changed the regulatory rules to suit them are themselves former Goldman Sachs employees, finally combined further with the products that Goldman sells being a prime cause of the current economic crisis all put together with sky high profits and bonusses, to generate some outrage, some lack of calm from the passengers on the economic ship.

So on the Goldman front, we have a long article from Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone, which starts by referring to Goldman Sachs (known as 'Government Sachs due to the fact that everyone important in financial matters in the U.S. government used to work for them) as "is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

Then a youtube clip from a French network business TV show with Max Keiser repeatedly referring to Goldman Sachs as 'scum' who should be 'in the Hague'.



Even Paul Krugman gets shrill enough to say that,

"The American economy remains in dire straits, with one worker in six unemployed or underemployed. Yet Goldman Sachs just reported record quarterly profits — and it’s preparing to hand out huge bonuses, comparable to what it was paying before the crisis. What does this contrast tell us?

First, it tells us that Goldman is very good at what it does. Unfortunately, what it does is bad for America.

Second, it shows that Wall Street’s bad habits — above all, the system of compensation that helped cause the financial crisis — have not gone away."

The Krugman comments were the final straw that sent The Economist to the fainting couch. In a column entitled, 'Goldman Madness Spreads' they admonish us as follows,

"Paul Krugman writes today that:

...what [Goldman Sachs] does is bad for America.

What it does is bad for America. Not "some of what it does is bad for America". Not "the legal, profit-seeking behaviour of large investment banks may have some negative externalities that should be addressed by government regulators, in the following ways".

This is no way to have a policy discussion."

Let me repeat part of the quote from John Ralston Saul that I started with, "the person in power or with privileged information or expertise will make them feel they are not calm enough to deal with the situation rationally."

Which, at length, brings to this post by Mike at Rortybomb which triggerred my post. Says Mike,

"Is there room for outrage? I always find this frustrating in economic technocratic talk, where outrage/disgust/shaming is dampened by having to focus in terms of 'bad incentives.' There’s a schizophrenia in the way we talk about this, that capitalism on one hand is a benevolent invisible hand guiding us all together, and also amoral tiger who of course was going to rip your throat out if you don’t lock its cage properly.

Getting a little hyperbolic, it’s like someone has broken into our house and is looting everything in sight. How do we 'set up his incentives' so that he leaves without the treasury in tow? Setting up the terms for discourse in economic rationality speak is only going to allow us to answer the question of 'why didn’t we lock the door?' Good question, of course. But we have problems right now that rightfully deserve shock and anger."

In case it's not obvious, I agree. I often find myself resigned when thinking about the dominance of our politics and economics by a wealth-serving ideology that hides under a cover of technocratic 'rationality', but the appropriate, and more effective response is often anger, not resignation.

Meanwhile...

True, there's an election going on here in Canada, but really, that happens every year or two so it's no big deal. Less frequent (in the developed world, at any rate) is the sort of financial industry carnage this weekend brings in the U.S. What a mess!

Perhaps relevant, from a Paul Krugman column from last December:

"Mr. Greenspan wasn’t the only top official who put ideology above public protection. Consider the press conference held on June 3, 2003 — just about the time subprime lending was starting to go wild — to announce a new initiative aimed at reducing the regulatory burden on banks. Representatives of four of the five government agencies responsible for financial supervision used tree shears to attack a stack of paper representing bank regulations. The fifth representative, James Gilleran of the Office of Thrift Supervision, wielded a chainsaw."

Partisan Hack

I see that the NY Times had the same take on Greenspan's social security remarks as I did, both in an editorial and in Paul Krugman's column.

The biggest difference between what I wrote and what Krugman wrote is that he was a lot less polite,

"By repeatedly shilling for whatever the Bush administration wants, [Greenspan] has betrayed the trust placed in Fed chairmen, and deserves to be treated as just another partisan hack."

Ouch.

The Hazards of Tobogganing and Social Security 'Reform'

I've never written for a newspaper so I don't really know, but I'm thinking one of the biggest advantages of blogging vs. the world of print is being able to write your own headlines. Of course, there may be a reason those two jobs are often separated.

Anyway, a friend mentioned the other day that there was an article in the (Vancouver) North Shore News on the dangers of tobogganing (prompted by a local boy who got a concussion) and that the article was recommending laws to make helmets mandatory while sliding. There is no word yet on whether this was just a big left-wing plot to get Andrew Coyne so upset that he stops writing altogether.¹

Meanwhile, I'm starting to think that this whole plan to mess up the U.S. economy, I mean reform Social Security, may be just a ploy to get Paul Krugman so upset that he pulls a Coyne² - or at the very least stops writing about all the other Bush disasters in the making. If you want a great example of Krugman demolishing the plan for Social Security 'reform', see this link (courtesy of another friend) to an interview with him in Rolling Stone.

¹ Andrew Coyne had an excellent Blog which came 4th in voting for best Conservative blog despite the fact that he hasn't posted to it for months - mysteriously disappearing from his blog right after a series of impassioned pleas to stop the madness of mandatory cycling helmet laws.

² OK technically Coyne only stopped blogging, he kept writing his column, and since Krugman doesn't have a Blog, just a column, it's not a perfect analogy, but nobody likes a nitpicker.

UPDATE: Courtesy of my North Van friend, here is the link to the toboggan story in the North Shore news. As my friends says, whatever happened to bailing out before you hit something? (or went over an embankment with rocks below) - were we wimps in our generation?

Shouldn't We All be Paid for Our Work?

OK, enough about the Blog, back to Politics.

If Paul Krugman is the American columnist you should read if you only read one, then Maclean's columnist Paul Wells (and his Inkless Wells blog) is probably the Canadian equivalent. But is that going to stop me from nitpicking at a throwaway comment he made in a recent column? Of course not, if anything, the best need to be held to a higher standard.

The recent column in question included the following line,

I have enough musician friends that I'd really rather see musicians get paid for their work.

First off, there's a word for what happens when people set policy according to who their friends are, and I believe it is 'cronyism'. But I'm guessing that Wells' didn't really mean it the way it came out, so we'll give him the benefit of the doubt.

More interesting, and the reason I made this post, is the 'Musicians should get paid for their work' argument, which I've heard a number of times. The problem, to me, is that the word 'Work' has two (relevant) meanings.

From my girlfriend's concise (yet massive) Oxford dictionary:

1. activity involving mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a result.
2. such activity as a means of earning income

So taken on definition 2, the statement is basically that musicians should earn an income from the activity they take as a means of earning income, the logical fallacy of 'begging the question'.¹

Even if the people who say this have definition 1 in mind, their argument derives force from the fact that the reader has definition 2 in their mind. After all, shouldn't we all be paid for our work?

Given that the question we are trying to answer is, should musicians be paid for the music they create?, it would seem to be more (at least equally) intellectually honest to say that you think musicians should be paid for their hobby, but it doesn't have quite the same ring to it, does it.

¹ Via the Nizkor Project,

Begging the Question is a fallacy in which the premises include the claim that the conclusion is true or (directly or indirectly) assume that the conclusion is true. This sort of "reasoning" typically has the following form.

1. Premises in which the truth of the conclusion is claimed or the truth of the conclusion is assumed (either directly or indirectly).
2. Claim C (the conclusion) is true.

In this case, the Premise is that what musicians are doing is work (in the sense of work being something you do and get paid for) and the conclusion which follows is that they should be paid for their work which they are doing to get paid for.

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Irony: The Blogger spellchecker suggests Nigger as an alternative to Nizkor.
Go Figure: The Blogger spell-check dictionary recognizes Nigger but not Blog???

World's Biggest Margin Account

A few posts back, I tried to (satirically) make the point that in the current 'idea-assessing' environment in the U.S., the government could propose just about anything, no matter how idiotic, and the reaction would depend more on the 'spin' than it would on how idiotic the idea was.

Turns out, I needn't have bothered, since the Bush administration decided to demonstrate it for me. Last week they announced (admitted?) that they were planning to fund Bush's plan to partially privatize their Social Security accounts¹ by borrowing roughly $1 trillion (maybe $2, but who's counting).

My first reaction was, "So they want to borrow a trillion dollars, give it to the population to invest as they see fit, hope that people earn a return above the interest paid on the borrowed money and then reduce people's benefits accordingly once they retire? i.e. They want to set up the world's largest margin account?²

But people seemed to actually be taking it seriously as a proposal, so I was starting to doubt my initial reaction. Luckily, I happened upon Paul Krugman's article in the NY Times which reassured me that it was Bush, not I who was going crazy.

If you're interested in this issue, I highly recommend reading his article. In fact, if you want to read one American columnist (and you also care about my opinion) than I'd recommend Krugman - alas he is taking a break right now to work on a textbook, but he'll be back in a few months (I'll let you know).


¹ For those not following this too closely, the U.S. Social Security Program is similar to the CPP in Canada whereby tax revenues from people currently working are used to provide payments to the retired. Bush wants to change the U.S. system so that each person's taxes fund their own retirement. It's not a bad idea, but, since retirees are depending on the current taxpayers for their benefits, if the taxpayers start keeping that money for their own retirement - it leaves a bit if a gaping hole, so you need to inject a lot of cash into the system to make the transition.

² A margin account is when you borrow from your stock broker to invest more money. If you invest $5,000 but borrow $4,000 of it, then if the value of your investment goes up to $6,000 then you have made a 100% profit (because you invested $1,000 of your own money and now it's worth $2,000). Of course if the value of your investment goes down from $5,000 to $4,000 you've lost all your money (since you owe $4,000 and that's all your investment is worth). The net effect of buying on margin is to increase the risk , without any net improvement in your odds (plus you have to pay interest). So it only really makes sense if you're pretty confident about what you're investing in (or you're just a gambler at heart).

Partisanity = Part-insanity

I followed a link from View From Seymour, to George Lakoff's writing on the topic of framing discussions to highlight the values you want to highlight.

Despite the protestations of being non-partisan, the page read (to me) as follows:

1. Conservatives are using framing to get their message out and it is proving to be an effective weapon in the battle for American hearts and minds

2. Liberals need to adopt use of this weapon as well.

3. Here's an example of how to do it.

Leaving aside the (interesting in its own right) theory of framing discussions, I was struck most by yet another example of the incredibly partisan nature of discourse in the U.S.

It seems that when writing about something with potential bearing on U.S. politics, no study or source can be quoted without either: a) defending the non-partisan nature of the study/source, b) admitting that the study/source is a partisan for your side but arguing that what they say is still at least somewhat valid or, best of all, c) noting that the study/source is actually from the opposing team.

The underlying assumption (by Democrats) is that Republican supporters will twist the facts (and make things up), to the extent that what they say is not even worth listening to (unless it supports a Democrat point) and the same is true in reverse.

At some point, I wonder if the concept of objective truth gets lost. Consider a random voter, Mr. X, who is faced with a referendum on a flat tax proposal. Mr. X could try to figure out whether a flat tax will be good for him and the country or not, but if everything he has available to read is just pro-tax or anti-tax spin and is probably just lies, what's the point? If all Republicans are going to support it whether they think it's a good idea or not and all Democrats are likewise going to oppose it, then he will be unable to get any sense of a general consensus of opinion on the topic. In the end, Mr. X will just vote for whoever best framed the issue in terms of his values, or better yet, just vote for whoever seems the most trustworthy (i.e. vote for the person with the most symmetrical face).

Even on something as clear and straightforward as global warming, the 'teach the controversy' approach can create an appearance of two sides with equally valid but different points of view, both of which are just trying to 'spin' the issue to their benefit. And then the reaction is to say, 'who knows who is really telling the truth?' Living inside this us-against-them, all-spin, U.S. prism, even otherwise intelligent people like Andrew Sullivan can get drawn into just offering their readers two opposing opinions on global warming and saying that they should decide, as if this is representative of the current state of thought on this issue (among those who know what they are talking about).

The media in the U.S. reinforces this trend. It avoids taking positions on anything the least bit potentially controversial and when opinions are needed it goes to a talking head format in which an equal number of partisan representatives do their best to frame/spin the issue in their favour.

The end result is that on any issue, regardless of the weight of the actual evidence, the testimony of those involved, the informed judgment of serious, knoweldgeable analysts, the rational arguments or the impact of similar policies enacted elsewhere, either side in the U.S. (Republican/Democrat) can take any position they like and it will be treated as a valid option to be weighted with equal consideration with whatever position the other party takes.

Supporters of both parties will look to their own partisan media outlets to reinforce their viewpoint and tell them why the other guys are wrong. The 'non-partisan' media will treat both options equally and will allow roughly equal time for both sides to make their case (and if they don't they will be accused of bias).

Obviously there are limits to this kind of thing. A party which supported a draft for example would have a hard time framing it well enough not to take a hit. More generally, the more close to home a policy hits, the more people will see through the spin to figure out how a policy affects them and vote accordingly. But to the extent that this paradigm does hold, a party in the U.S. can both propose and do pretty much whatever it wants - the only thing that will matter in the end is which party frames it's message better, and of course who seems more trustworthy (symmetrical).

OK, this was a long rambling post (silly me thinking that blogging would teach me to be more concise), but even if you didn't like it, I feel like writing it has brought me closer to understanding how Bush could be re-elected, so I still think it was worthwhile.

In a later post, I'll look at Canada and talk about why we are in a somewhat better position than the U.S. on this issue.

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Update Jan 24, 2005: Some time after I wrote this post, I noticed that Paul Krugman has said the same thing much more concisely:

"The media are desperately afraid of being accused of bias. And that's partly because there's a whole machine out there, an organized attempt to accuse them of bias whenever they say anything that the Right doesn't like. So rather than really try to report things objectively, they settle for being even-handed, which is not the same thing. One of my lines in a column -- in which a number of people thought I was insulting them personally -- was that if Bush said the Earth was flat, the mainstream media would have stories with the headline: 'Shape of Earth--Views Differ.' Then they'd quote some Democrats saying that it was round."