Marx & Engels? No, Marx & Einstein!

This is fascinating (and something of which I was, surprisingly, entirely unaware): Einstein was a socialist and articulated his views in the monthly socialist periodical, the Monthly Review, in 1949. Permit me to quote his critique of capitalism at length (although I am omitting a substantial amount that is material to his argument, so I encourage you to follow the link to read the entire thing):

The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the [crisis of our time]. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor -- not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules.

...

Private capital tends to become concentrated in few hands .... result[ing] [in] ... an oligarchy of private capital [ ] which cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society. This is true since the members of legislative bodies are selected by political parties, largely financed or otherwise influenced by private capitalists who, for all practical purposes, separate the electorate from the legislature. The consequence is that the representatives of the people do not in fact sufficiently protect the interests of the underprivileged sections of the population. Moreover, under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information (press, radio, education). It is thus extremely difficult, and indeed in most cases quite impossible, for the individual citizen to come to objective conclusions and to make intelligent use of his political rights.

...

There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment; an 'army of unemployed' almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. ... Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. ...

This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.

The solution Einstein proposes is the socialization of the means of production and a centrally planned economy ("which adjusts production to the needs of the community, [ ] distribut[ing] the work to be done among all those able to work and [ ] guarantee[ing] a livelihood to every man, woman, and child"). Einstein recognizes the dangers of concentrating so much power in the bureaucratic state ("[a] planned economy as such may be accompanied by the complete enslavement of the individual"), but -- at least in the essay I quoted here -- does not even hint at a solution to the "extremely difficult socio-political problems" that a centrally planned economy presents.

Still, how very fascinating that Einstein (recognized as one of the most brilliant thinkers of the last century) was such an ardent socialist. ("I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy ...") Indeed, in my view, Einstein articulates the Marxist critique of capitalism better (and using far fewer words) than Marx himself. I wonder whether Einstein ever further addressed the pragmatic difficulty in achieving a just socialistic state; that, after all, is the real challenge (and the reason that the proponents of capitalism have been so successful in defending an economic system that rests, fundamentally, upon nothing more than greed and large-scale exploitation).

Obamacare: Reading the SCOTUS Tea Leaves, ctd.

One of James Fallows' readers, echoing the point I made in my previous post prognosticating on the outcome of the Affordable Care Act litigation (my emphasis):

Roberts joined the [ ] majority today [in Arizona v. United States] to give a 5-3 ruling (Kagan recused). Only a 4-4 ruling was needed to uphold an earlier decision to overturn the law. He joined a politically polarized decision, possibly extracting a compromise to save debate on stop-and-check for another day in return. Perhaps this was the price for being picked to write a 6-3 majority opinion on Obamacare with a similar compromise to make the bill more conservative (e.g. the Roberts Obamacare opinion might establish a commerce-clause limit that stops somewhere between health-insurance and broccoli mandates).

That would be two consecutive decisions on politically polarized issues in which Roberts crosses sides to (1) provide a larger than needed majority and (2) moderate the result to be more conservative. I imagine that this would instantly reverse a lot of negative opinion about the Roberts court in the legal community, which would give him much more room to make really sweeping, conservative change in other areas that'll be up for debate soon -- ending voting rights enforcement, requiring all union members to opt in on dues, eliminating personal campaign contribution limits, ending affirmative action, upholding the latest abortion restrictions, a broader ruling against firearms restrictions, etc. If you take the view that nationalized healthcare is inevitable and will probably go into effect while Roberts is still Chief Justice, it makes more sense to build up support for other priorities.

NB: Scotusblog speculates, based on the assignment of today's opinions, that Chief Justice Roberts will author the ACA opinion, but I think that he would be writing the opinion no matter which side of the case he falls, so I am not sure we can deduce anything from that.

Enough Is Enough, Mitt!, ctd.

Michael Cohen on the "out-of-control" *LYING* of the Romney campaign: "Romney is charting new and untraveled waters in American politics. In the process, he is cynically eroding the fragile sense of trust that exists between voters and politicians."

The most disheartening part:

Pointing out that Romney is consistently not telling the truth thus risks simply falling into the category of the usual "he-said, she-said" of American politics. For cynical reporters, the behavior is inevitably seen to be the way the political game is now played. Rather than being viewed and ultimately exposed as examples of a pervasive pattern of falsehoods, Romney's statements embed themselves in the normalized political narrative – along with aggrieved Democrats complaining that Romney isn't telling the truth. Meanwhile, the lie sticks in the minds of voters.

It is well past time for journalist in the mainstream media, no matter how "cynical," to reverse this perverse dynamic. For those who would prefer to be fawning transcriptists rather than reporters of fact, law firms are always seeking additional secretaries.

Creeping Cynicism

Andrew Sprung yesterday:

Someone talk me down

I am so freaked out by the weakening global economy, the Republicans' ballyhooed Supreme Court-enabled 3-1 spending advantage, and the pending ACA decision by same Bushified court, I feel like Ingrid Bergman as the Germans march on Paris. Really, it feels as if the forces of reaction are gaining critical mass. They've sandbagged the economy, sabotaged the ACA, packed the court, and won the right to saturate elections with money.

Once again, I am reminded of Francis Fukuyama's demonstration that in other eras, state sovereigns have found means for a few centuries to check the ability of elites to entrench their advantages, only to have the elites eventually find ways to breach the defenses. The question is whether the current disproportionate accretion of wealth and power to the 1% will once again prove cyclical, as in the wake of the 1929 crash, or this time become permanent.

The billionaire barbarians are at the gates.

My response (on his blog):

I feel the same exact way, Andrew, so much so that I am seriously contemplating entirely disengaging from all things political.

I am an attorney, and if the Supreme Court invalidates the ACA, even if it cabins its judicial activism to the mandate, I am going to be devastated. As Akhil Amar stated in an interview with Ezra: "If they [invalidate 'Obamacare'] by 5-4, then yes, it's disheartening to me, because my life was a fraud. Here I was, in my silly little office, thinking law mattered, and it really didn't. What mattered was politics, money, party, and party loyalty."

I was flipping through the cable news earlier this afternoon, and Dylan Ratigan opined (in the context of campaign finance) that our system is like a drunk who is going to have to hit rock bottom by hitting/killing a child before things change. I'm afraid this is correct, and I am afraid that the accident won't occur until well into my twilight years.

The billionaire barbarians are not at the gates; they are in the throne room, preparing to defenestrate the king, while the rubes -- intoxicated by the most shameless of propaganda and empty promises -- cheer on from the courtyard below. It may be farcical, but that does not make it any less tragic.

I guess I can always blog about cooking, my sweet girls, and hot men.

Obamacare: Reading the SCOTUS Tea Leaves

The "convention wisdom" now apparently has it that the individual mandate, at the bare minimum, will be invalidated by the Supreme Court. Indeed, in a thinly sourced dispatch yesterday in Forbes, Obamacare opponent Akiv Roy reports that Justice Kennedy has already sided with the "conservatives" on this point, but that the justices are still (still!!) undecided on the issue of severability. (Jonathan Cohn has a nice overview of what the potential outcomes are here.)

I write merely to be on the record in predicting that the Affordable Care Act will effectively be upheld in its entirely, even if the Court to some extent buys into the activity/inactivity distinction of the challengers. (This could potentially lead, as Cohn notes, to a somewhat Pyrrhic victor for the challengers, one in which the mandate is invalidated but the penalty remains on the books.)

Why? Because Kevin Drum is entirely correct when he writes the following:

If the court does overturn the mandate, it's going to be hard to know how to react. It's been more than 75 years since the Supreme Court overturned a piece of legislation as big as ACA, and I can't think of any example of the court overturning landmark legislation this big based on a principle as flimsy and manufactured as activity vs. inactivity. When the court overturned the NRA in 1935, it was a shock — but it was also a unanimous decision and, despite FDR's pique, not really a surprising ruling given existing precedent. Overturning ACA would be a whole different kind of game changer. It would mean that the Supreme Court had officially entered an era where they were frankly willing to overturn liberal legislation just because they don't like it. Pile that on top of Bush v. Gore and Citizens United and you have a Supreme Court that's pretty explicitly chosen up sides in American electoral politics. This would be, in no uncertain terms, no longer business as usual.

The less ideological conservatives on the Supreme Court surely realize this, and I simply can not fathom that they are willing to jettison the Court's institutional legitimacy in order to score a short-term political goal for the Republican Party, on an issue far removed from the core concerns of movement conservatism. 

Perhaps this is naive. But judicial actors, although indisputably political actors, are not partisans in the same sense as legislators, and face far different institutional pressures and constraints. The Court is surely aware that its public approval ratings are at near-historic lows, and the Court is surely aware of what the elite (legal) consensus will be if the ACA is overturned, even in part. (See, e.g., Charles Fried's congressional testimony on the constitutionality of the ACA here, or his reaction to the oral argument here and here.) 

As a result, I continue to believe, contra the conventional wisdom, that the ACA will be upheld either 6-3 or 7-2. I desperately hope I am correct: beyond my concern as a lawyer-citizen, the human cost of a contrary result will be significant (e.g., here), something that is all too often overlooked in discussions of the case.

UPDATE: In discussing this blog post on Facebook, I was reminded of a Dahlia Lithwick dispatch, written prior to oral argument on Florida v. HHS, that echoes and expands upon the point I am trying to make here:

If I am right [that the Justices are concerned about legitimacy], some justices may believe that this isn’t a fight worth having. Not now and not over this issue. ... Given th[e] line up of future cases [concerning congressional redistricting, enforcement of immigration laws, affirmative action, the VRA, gay marriage, and abortion], the five conservatives may want to keep their powder dry for now. I think they will. ... [F]or the court to strike [the ACA] down, the justices would have to pick a fight that wasn’t theirs in the first place [but was rather the Republican "Tea Party" base's fight]. ... The conservative legal elites don’t believe in the merits of this challenge, even if the public does. ... That brings me full circle to the court’s five conservatives. Is it possible that they are sufficiently ideological and political that the grim joy of sticking it to the president and the Congress will lead them to strike down the law? Of course. But .... [t]hey were raised on Reagan-era opposition to abortion and affirmative action, to the perceived indignities of the Voting Rights Act, and objections to the wall erected between church and state. ... They didn’t join the Reagan Administration to return to the glory days before the court expanded the reach of the Commerce Clause ....

That’s why the current fuss being made over the health care cases has offered the court a perfect cover story. They will hear six hours of argument next week. They will pretend it is a fair fight with equally compelling arguments on each side. They will even reach out and debate the merits of the Medicaid expansion, although not a single court saw fit to question it. And the justices will vote 6-3 or 7-2 to uphold the mandate, with the chief justice joining the majority so he can write a careful opinion that cabins the authority of the Congress to do anything more than regulate the health-insurance market. then ... And then—having been hailed as the John Marshall of the 21st century—he will proceed to oversee two years during which the remainder of the Warren Court revolution will be sent through the wood chipper.

Although I take it from Dahlia's subsequent dispatches (following oral argument) that she has changed her view on the likely outcome of the ACA litigation, I think her ex ante analysis was prescient and will likely prove correct.

Ideological Consistency and Partisan Politics

One of the bloggers at The Economist's DiA, E.G., has flagged a recent Gallup poll showing what is, to her, the unexpected convergence of Americans' ideological self-identification on economic and social issues:

ONE of the features of the American political landscape is that fiscal conservatives are, for the most part, socially conservative too. According to a recent Gallup poll, 31% of Americans identify themselves as both, making economic and social conservatives the biggest ideological bloc in the country. ... Incidentally, we see a similar connection between fiscal and social issues on the Democratic side: 15% of Americans, according to the Gallup poll cited above, identify as both economically and socially liberal. Another 15% are moderate on both counts. In total, as Gallup puts it, 61% of Americans are "ideologically consistent".

Here's the chart from Gallup (with the "convergent" or "consistent" categories highlighted):

E.G. is puzzled by this: "It's not as if gay marriage causes inflation. And while de-funding Planned Parenthood may result in smaller budgets in the short term, there's a strong case that limiting access to contraception and other family planning services will lead to greater government spending in the future."

So what's going on?

Single For Life

One of my very distant Facebook "friends"--a woman whom I very briefly met last summer, as we were both struggling to navigate our way back from Brooklyn using the service-impaired weekend subway system--just posted the following status update:

On June 2nd I married the man of my dreams. A week later he told me he didn't love me, he never loved me, that he's been lying to me, his kids, our friends and family and that he has issues with honesty. I suspected all along he lied about things but I wanted to believe otherwise. Saturday I was in shock, Sunday I was filled with a grief only matched by my mother's death. At four in the morning I woke up angry and went back to sleep. When I awoke again I was filled with grief all over again. As I sit here drinking coffee, trying to interest myself in the news, I remember my famous quote, "Inside every worse-case scenario there is a best-case scenario." Well it's not famous but perhaps it will be... Whatever happens in life is just life happening. If you are alive you still have a chance at happiness, love, success, and watching the sun rise and set. I am alive and if you are reading this so are you and for this I am beyond grateful. The greatest thing about losing love is knowing that great love still exists. This is my best-case scenario. Love is everywhere.

I showed it to my mother, whose cynical response was: "At least she found out early." (Background: my mother's husband of twenty-something years--the man who raised my sister and me--recently begin having illicit affairs with younger women, just as my mother was about to relocate with him to a desolate horse ranch in Oklahoma, resulting to their "surprise, last-minute" divorce, and my return to Alexandria, in March.)

Why am I writing about this? I am not entirely sure. Having gotten out of my own two-year relationship with a pathological liar just last May, I can hardly say I am surprised by these turns of event, although I can unfortunately relate. When you begin to suspect that your significant other has been lying to you about nearly everything from Day One (as seems to have been the case with my Facebook "friend"'s beau, and which was certainly the case with my ex), it is easier just to bury your head in the sand then to face reality ... to discount your suspicion as paranoia rather than realistically to consider the alternative. Because the alternative--that you've invited a metaphorical vampire into the house of your life--is terrifying.

And even once the vampire has been vanquished, and you have started to pick up the remnants of your life (emotionally, physically, financially), can you ever truly trust again? Not merely others--the loss of belief in the goodness or even redeemability of humanity is bad enough--but yourself, for permitting a con artist into your life in the first place. (Indeed, the enduring lesson of my last few close relationships, both romantic and platonic, is that I am a weak, naive individual and phenomenally poor judge of character.)

So, as much as I wish I could offer some words of comfort to my Facebook "friend," to tell her that she should persevere, that love will ultimately conquer all, etc., I can not honestly do so. Great love, like great wealth, may exist, but not for most of us. The desire to be in an intimate romantic relationship is just as often destructive as it is fulfilling. To accept the fact that you are fundamentally alone--and to learn how to be alone yet not feel lonely--is to take charge of your own happiness. And the earlier these lessons are learned, the better.

Enough Is Enough, Mitt!

I started writing (but then discarded) a post yesterday about my ever-increasing feeling that Romney's presidential campaign is far sleazier than any I had ever previously witnessed. (The only thing comparable I could recall was the Swift Boating of John Kerry, but (a) that was a isolated tactic in the course of the 2004 presidential campaign, and (b) that tactic carried out by surrogates rather than the Bush campaign itself.)

P.M. Carpenter (via Andrew) is apparently on the same page:

There no longer exists any doubt that Mitt Romney intends to win the White House by conducting the most dishonest, unscrupulous and reprehensible campaign ever devised, in mere whimsy. The unethical stench of this man is not only breathtaking, it's meteoric. I have never seen anything like it, never heard anything like it, never imagined anything like it.

All you American political history books, move over; there's a new king of demagoguery in town, and future history will never see his malevolent depths of dishonor again.

Andrew's take (my emphasis):

Romney, I'm increasingly inclined to believe, is a businessman all the way down. His ethics are about getting, as he put it, 50.1 percent of the vote in any state. He does not believe there are any ethical or principled reasons not to try and get to that 50.1 percent however he can. A businessman can compartmentalize core moral and political questions into marketing. The goal is 50.1 percent saturation. ... [¶] If a line will work against Obama, he will use it, regardless of its truth. Because there is no truth in Romney's world. There is only advertizing [sic]. [¶] There is something increasingly chilling about this shape-shifter, isnt there? He views himself as a product to be marketed to different audiences at different times. And the actual content of that product is completely malleable. ... To predict Romney, in other words, you simply have to merely examine the market he's selling to. [¶] As I noted once before, he doesn't just believe that corporations are people; he is a walking corporation masquerading as a person.

What happens when Romney wins this election (which I believe is going to happen, by the way)? How do Democratic politicians in Congress respond? What will Romney's campaign have done to the legitimacy of the presidency? To the legitimacy of government itself? To the already deep partisan divide in the country?  It was one thing for the Supreme Court to have handed the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush; Bush himself really had nothing to do with that, the Bush campaign that year was fairly "clean," and the election truly was phenomenally close. It will be something entirely different if Romney wins this year, after having campaigned on lie after blatant lie, with straight-out propaganda funded by dark money blanketing the airwaves, and little to no push back from the mainstream media (and amplification by the partisan press).

Like Jamelle Bouie, if it sounds like I am frustrated, it is because I am. In writing about the efficacy of the GOP's audacious strategy of obstruction to the Obama Administration, he observed: "To many of our pundits and reporters, this is business as usual. In reality, it’s absolutely insane." The same is even more true of the "unethical stench" of the Romney campaign. It's enough to sour one entirely on the prospects of democratic self-governance.

Opening Volley

If you are here, welcome, glad to have you, etc. You likely know me quite well already, so let's dispense with introductions, shall we?  (Although, in case you are a stranger, you can learn a bit more about me from my Google+ profile, a link to which is provided in the sidebar.)

I am not sure what I want to accomplish with this blog. I suppose my primary intent is to avoid further subjecting my Facebook friends to my musings, which is to say: to protect myself from the silent contempt of those who do not appreciate my frequent posts. (Whether or not I actually post things here remains to be seen.) To some extent, I'd also like to make this space a bit more personal, which is to say: to [more] freely express the things that I always ultimately regret posting on Facebook. Finally, I would like to virtually workshop some of my writing here (although, again, this may or may not actually occur).

A brief word regarding this blog's title: "virtus dormitiva" is an expression I recently came across in a blog post by the Cato Institute's Julian Sanchez (who, incidentally, is quite a brilliant thinker and writer -- too bad he's been lost to libertarianism, an affliction which seems to affect a disproportionate number of heterosexual males of above-average intellect). I found the expression -- coined by Moliere in The Imaginary Invalid, and used to describe a particularly florid tautology -- amusing at the time, and, for some reason, it came to mind when contemplating a title for this blog. Interpret that as you will.

Okay. Enough with the preliminaries. Let's dive right in.