I remember in the late 80s, when I lived in Richmond, there was a considerable amount of hand wringing about how to repair the G Street Bridge over the Whitewater River. I asked my dad how it was that we were able to ever build these bridges if we were unable to even repair them now. I don’t recall what his answer was. At the time, I think I had Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series on my mind. In that series, the Galactic Empire was failing and the men of that time were unable to repair the great works of earlier times.

Today’s announcement of the death of Gene Cernan reminded me of that conversation with my Dad and, by extension, the diminished stature of the Galactic Empire (which was, itself, based on Asimov’s notion of the Roman Empire).

Cernan passed away at the age of 82. Forty-four years ago, at the age of thirty-eight, he was the last person to walk on the moon on December 13, 1972.

As he climbed the ladder to the lunar module and left the surface of the moon, he said:

[A]s I take man’s last step from the surface, back home for some time to come – but we believe not too long into the future – I’d like to just (say) what I believe history will record: that America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the Moon at Taurus–Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.

There is a good chance that I’m too focused on the moon as a measuring stick for our capabilities. After all, we (almost) harpooned a comet back in 2014. But it seems to be that the news is full of talk about what we can’t do, what we don’t want to do, what we can’t afford, and what we hate about each other. The fact is, we have not returned to the moon.

Some days, I think we need a Great Purpose to give our lives meaning. Without such a purpose, we take to building up the Other as Great Evils so that we can be heroic protagonists in our own minds. Nobody wants to be an insignificant part of an enormous, indifferent, and rudderless universe. So, we create narratives.

And, if we are not building mole hills into mountains, it feels like we’re drifting toward war just to give ourselves something important to worry about. It would be much better if we had something productive around which to unite and upon which to release our energies and focus our desire to be heroic parts of an epic story. I can think of much worse efforts than space exploration.

This is not, I’m afraid, much of a tribute to Captain Cernan. He was part of a great effort that did incredible things.  He said:

“What is the real meaning of seeing this picture? I’ve always said, I’ve said for a long time, I still believe it, it’s going to be — well it’s almost fifty now, but fifty or a hundred years in the history of mankind before we look back and really understand the meaning of Apollo. Really understand what humankind had done when we left, when we truly left this planet, we’re able to call another body in this universe our home. We did it way too early considering what we’re doing now in space. It’s almost as if JFK reached out into the twenty-first century where we are today, grabbed hold of a decade of time, slipped it neatly into the (nineteen) sixties and seventies (and) called it Apollo.”

Hopefully we can build upon his efforts sooner rather than later. I’d rather be of a generation that was part of a continued rise in knowledge, ability, and accomplishment than a generation that was part of a preventable failure in imagination and effort.

Rep. Ober (800-382-9841) has introduced HB 1013 which would eliminate taxes on food sold from vending machines. In the context of sales taxes, “food” has a particular meaning. A lot of what comes out of vending machines (e.g. soda and candy) is not considered “food” and will continue to be taxable. However, some of what comes out of vending machines (e.g. chips, cookies, and crackers) is “food.”

As I understand the current tax law, if you bought the chips from the grocery store, it would not be taxed, but if you bought the same chips from the vending machine, it would be taxed. I can only speculate, but my guess would be that advances in vending machine technology since this tax structure was developed have improved the ability of vendors to separate “food” from “non-food” for tax purposes. It’s probably fair to ask why candy should be taxed while cookies are not; but, I think it makes sense that whether the cookies are taxed probably shouldn’t hinge on whether they came from a vending machine or a grocery store.

The tax would be phased out from the current 7% down to 5% in 2017/18, 3% in 2018/19 and zero thereafter. The fiscal note indicates that this would reduce sales tax revenue by $5.8 million per year once the tax was eliminated.

Just a thought or two on the headline making process in light of the recent attention on “fake news.” A lot of fake news is pretty easily disregarded if you’re making an effort to be more or less objective. In my mind, headlines are a more pernicious subject. It’s my understanding that headlines mostly are not written by the journalists writing the article, and I think this gives rise to an editorial slant. The slant isn’t necessarily conservative or liberal, but if the headline writer is higher up in the hierarchy, there might be a tendency to write headlines that get more clicks or sell more papers.

I was close enough to a local story recently to see this play out, and I think it might be a more or less representative case. The journalist wrote a pretty straightforward account of a government action which was going to maintain the status quo. The headline made it sound like something controversial was happening. With the headline priming the reader for controversy, it really took some studying of the body of the article to determine that nothing very remarkable was taking place.

That feeds into a notion I’ve had that’s anecdotal and far from scientific on my part, but I’ve had the feeling with a number of articles over the years that the headlines skewed “conservative” while the bulk of the article skewed “liberal.” In any vent, the person skimming headlines gets a very different impression than the person reading closely.

Maybe it would be helpful to have a separate by-line when the headline is written by someone other than the author of the article. No solid thoughts here, just thinking out loud.

 

Lesley Stedman Weidenbener, writing for the Indianapolis Business Journal, has an article on the passing of long-time former state senator, Larry Borst.

Former state Sen. Larry Borst—one of the most influential budget leaders in modern state history—has died, a Senate leader said Tuesday. He was 89.

Borst served 36 years in the Senate representing southern Marion County and northern Johnson County. For more than three decades, he was chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, the panel through which the budget and all tax legislation had to pass.

Both an understated and commanding presence, Borst was nicknamed the “Silver Fox,” a nod to his thick gray hair and his crafty approach to legislation.

Borst served from 1968 to 2004 when he was defeated in a Republican primary. I most recently mentioned him in this blog a couple of weeks ago in the bicentennial series. He was one of a couple of a few key senators who dominated the Indiana Senate with Senator Garton.

During the 1980s and 90s, the Indiana Senate was dominated by President pro tem Bob Garton and his allies, Senators Larry Borst, Joe Harrison, and Morris Mills. . . .  Phil Gutman and Mark “Chip” Edwards had been convicted on bribery charges. Their  conviction arose out of a scheme whereby railroad lobbyists gave a few Senators monthly payments for three years in exchange for their support on favorable legislation.

In the wake of the scandal, the leadership position was open. Garton and Harrison, in particular, seemed to be running hard for the spot. Ultimately Garton won, and Senators Garton, Harrison, Borst, and Mills would control the Senate for something like a quarter century.

. . .

This power structure was one with which Governor Bayh had to contend. Senator Borst recalled Bayh’s term as governor as one that was popular with the public but was skeptical of the actual accomplishments. Bayh immediately implemented a Task Force to trim government waste and reduce its size but, according to Borst, “the savings claimed were dubious.” Similarly, Bayh forbid state employees from accepting “so much as a cup of coffee,” but, he said, that was never really enforced. He allowed the unionization of state employees but never entered into a meaningful contract with them. That said, Borst concluded, Bayh’s “don’t rock the boat” philosophy was good for the state at that time, and he had capable, honest staff members.

I’m sure there was plenty to disagree about with Sen. Borst’s policy ideas. A person can’t serve that long in that powerful a position without generating disagreement. But, I think it’s safe to say that his was a life of substantial public service.

The news tells me that, in a fit of strong arm politics, the North Carolina legislature is ramming through legislation to strip the governor of a lot of power before a Democrat takes office. The North Carolina legislation was described as:

a flurry of bills during a surprise special session this week to undermine Mr. Cooper by stripping him of his ability to make key appointments to state and local boards and mandating, for the first time, legislative approval of his cabinet.

There is, as it turns out, some bipartisan precedent for this in Indiana from back in 1883 and 1894.

In 1883, the Democrats swept into control of the General Assembly following a poorly received effort at Prohibition by the Republicans. The Democrats promptly stripped sitting Republican Governor Albert Porter of a number of his appointment powers. When Democratic Governor Matthews was elected, the General Assembly promptly restored the appointment powers. But the Democrats failed poorly themselves in the 1894 election. The Republican General Assembly promptly passed legislation stripping Governor Matthews of the appointment powers.

Gov. Matthews vetoed the legislation and did so minutes before the General Assembly was set to adjourn — in an effort to delay the Republicans’ ability to override the veto. However, the House Republicans blocked the governor’s messenger from reaching the House Speaker. This resulted in fist fights between Republican and Democratic lawmakers that lasted about a half hour. (A good round up of the newspaper coverage of the incident is here.) The governor’s private secretary, Myron King, was apparently in pretty rough shape after the beating.

“Revolvers were flourished and blows struck with such articles of furniture as the combatants could lay hands on conveniently.”

The Democrats apparently finally got King with his veto message to the Speaker’s desk, but moments after the Speaker declared the session adjourned sine die. The members of the legislature involved in the assault of King apparently left the city quickly thereafter to avoid arrest.

I expect anyone who bothers to read this blog probably already knows this, but Constitutionally, there is a distinction between government speech and private speech. When the government speaks, among other things, it is governed by the Establishment Clause (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” — this has been interpreted to extend to government generally and not just Congress.) Private citizens are not bound by the Establishment Clause.

In Knightstown, there is a large evergreen in the town square. The town decorates it with lights and such during Christmas. One of the decorations is a large cross on top of the tree. That is apparently the only religious symbol. The ACLU filed suit and the town declined to fight the suit, taking the cross down.

This has provoked outrage in the usual fashion. One of the common arguments is that not allowing the government to put up a cross is, itself, a violation of the Free Exercise clause (“Congress shall make no law respecting . . . the free exercise [of religion].”) I’m not sure if this is people being deliberately obtuse or if they simply don’t understand the distinction: private citizens have the right to exercise religion freely; government is restricted from making laws with respect to the establishment of religion. Private individuals are not restricted from establishing religion; government does not have a right to exercise religion.

If the tree and the cross had been on private ground, no lawsuit would have been filed by the ACLU (and, if it had, they would have lost). The critical distinction here is that the cross was government speech. I went to the comment section of a news article (I know, I know) and the commenters studiously ignored the distinction between government and private speech. Rather than comment there, I thought I’d just scream into the void from the friendly confines of my own blog.

This is the 75th Anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Imperial Japanese Navy made its attack on Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941. The surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Oahu, Hawaii, was aimed at the Pacific Fleet of the United States Navy and its defending Army Air Corps and Marine air forces. The attack damaged or destroyed twelve U.S. warships, destroyed 188 aircraft, and killed 2,403 American servicemen and 68 civilians. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto planned the raid as the start of the Pacific Campaign of World War II, and it was commanded by Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who lost 64 servicemen. However, the Pacific Fleet’s three aircraft carriers were not in port and so were undamaged, as were oil tank farms and machine shops. Using these resources the United States was able to rebound within six months to a year. The U.S. public saw the attack as a treacherous act and rallied strongly against the Japanese Empire, resulting in its later defeat.

Back in 2006, Kung Fu Monkey spoke to the bravery with which the Allies responded (and contrasted it to the fearful rhetoric associated with the War on Terror in 2006):

FDR: Oh, I’m sorry, was wiping out our entire Pacific fleet supposed to intimidate us? We have nothing to fear but fear itself, and right now we’re coming to kick your ass with brand new destroyers riveted by waitresses. How’s that going to feel?

CHURCHILL: Yeah, you keep bombing us. We’ll be in the pub, flipping you off. I’m slapping Rolls-Royce engines into untested flying coffins to knock you out of the skies, and then I’m sending angry Welshmen to burn your country from the Rhine to the Polish border.

U.S. NOW: BE AFRAID!! Oh God, the Brown Bad people could strike any moment! They could strike … NOW!! AHHHH. Okay, how about .. NOW!! AAGAGAHAHAHHAG! Quick, do whatever we tell you, and believe whatever we tell you, or YOU WILL BE KILLED BY BROWN PEOPLE!! PUT DOWN THAT SIPPY CUP!!

My title is taken from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. I had a poster with an image of a smoking flag over Pearl Harbor and the words, “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.” It was a very powerful image for me and, since then, I’ve associated Lincoln’s words at Gettysburg with the attack on Pearl Harbor.

We were fighting against Imperial Japan, a place where militaristic nationalists had taken control of the government and stoked notions of Japanese exceptionalism. The America fought for by the Americans 75 years ago stood for a country (in principal if not always in fact) governed by the consent of the governed where all men are created equal. The home of the brave.

We should always be mindful that, as Edward R. Murrow pointed out, “we are not descended from fearful men.” When our own militaristic nationalists come peddling fear and exceptionalism, we should strike them down just as we struck down Imperial Japan so that the dead of Pearl Harbor shall not have died in vain.

A friend of mine directed me to an article about Elon Musk and his comments about a universal income. The question has to do with technology and innovation that eliminates the need for humans to do the jobs. Musk suggested that a universal basic income or something like it might be the answer. “There’s a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income, or something like that, due to automation,” said Musk. “I’m not sure what else one would do. That’s what I think would happen.”

Earlier this year, Brian Howey asked Mitch Daniels about the shift from manufacturing to a knowledge based economy. He said:

“Every time human ingenuity has created one of these transformations, people have worried,” Daniels said. “They see what is being lost. It won’t take a third of us to grow food. What’s everybody going to do? Every time up to now, the new economy produced more opportunities than the old one did.”

But the change gripping the United States today is worrisome to Daniels.

“It’s not yet clear to me that it will create sufficient categories of new high-paying jobs,” Daniels said. “Whether there will be enough of them to support a growing population and a middle class like we’ve known, that’s what is bothering me.”

There are, as I see it, two related but wrongfully conflated issues: 1) designing an economy that continues to be productive; and 2) the notion that moral worth and economic success are more closely correlated than they really are. The first demands a lot of respect. The second is an anachronism we should try to get past.

I think we bear some cultural scars from the Cold War wherein we are overly fearful of communism and socialism. That said, the systems implemented in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe are not ones we want to live in. You don’t want a system where an oligarchy lives large, snuffs out economic innovation, and leaves people with no incentive to work and create. If you appropriate 100% of the value a person creates, why would he or she bother? On the other hand, I’m willing to bet that most individuals would do the same work for $500 million as they would do for $1 billion. At a certain level, the incentive structures provide diminishing returns. Historically in this country, taxes — even very high taxes on upper incomes — have not shut down the economy. In any case, I think there is some evidence that you have maneuverability for gathering golden eggs without killing the goose that lays them.

On the functionality argument, there seems to be room for negotiation. But the moral argument is so often a show stopper. (See, e.g. taxation = theft!) Beyond that battle cry of some libertarians, there is the more pervasive Puritan work ethic sensibility in the American electorate. If you are poor, it’s because of a moral failing. If you are rich, it’s because you worked harder or smarter. But the economy isn’t a morality play. It rewards leverage more than merit. Even so, back in the olden days, there was survival value for the community in making sure everyone was busting their ass. If you had people sitting around, the village might starve. Now, the resource situation is a little different. I posted some thoughts in response to that Mitch Daniels conversation linked above:

As I view it, we’ll be economically productive enough to create what we need to support everyone as well or better than we ever had. The problem is that our current means of allocating the benefits of that productivity doesn’t distribute those benefits in a manner that will support everyone as well or better than we have in recent memory. Traditionally, there has been some justification in telling someone that, if they weren’t producing and acquiring what they needed to support themselves, it was because they were lazy, and we ought not reward laziness. More and more, it seems to me, there are people who are perfectly willing to work; but the economy has shifted in ways that requires labor less and less. If labor isn’t something the economy needs very much, how do we go about allocating our resources in a way that doesn’t rely on labor as a proxy for merit?

This is a theme I’ve touched on from time to time (it seems to have been very much on my mind in 2012):

Fred Clark: Unemployed in the Affluent Society (10/25/11):

Galbraith discusses the Puritan origins of a moral imperative to work. Goods were vitally necessary; the loss of available labor to produce those goods was extremely detrimental to society; and, therefore, the penalty – deprivation of all or most of an individual’s income – was appropriate. The penalty was so justified that there was no moral obligation to help someone who wasn’t helping themselves by working.

Now, in a world awash with goods, the loss of an individual’s productive capacity is incidental but the penalty remains almost equally severe – even where the failure to work isn’t through sloth but through lack of obvious opportunities. And, yet, the quest continues for a moral justification to allow the affluent to settle into a comfortable disregard for those not sharing in society’s affluence.

Technology and the Future of Work (4/18/12):

This has me noodling about the nature of wealth, the nature of money, and the nature of work. I think there is an underlying premise that we can’t sustain a middle class society if we all just go around giving each other haircuts or whatever? The government can’t just give away money. Sounds reasonable, but why not? Because we have to eat and have shelter; we need someone to make the stuff. Who is going to do the hard work to farm and make stuff when they can just get free money from the government? People will stop working, you’ll have more demand than supply, money will be worthless.

But, I wonder. Automation suggests to me that these goods are easier to make. What happens if government is essentially printing money to pay for these non-tradable goods (healthcare and education, for example) and the money supply enters the economy that way instead of through the Federal Reserve?

Posner, Clark, Efficiency, and Economic Hematoma (4/23/12):

The problem is that we may not be diverting workers from more to less productive work. The workers themselves may not be engaged in any work at all. If we made a subsidy contingent on increased employment, we may well be requiring that the manufacturing be performed in a less efficient way. But, we’d be doing this to give the individual worker a basis for staking a claim to some of the value created by the production. This is less efficient, but it may be necessary so long as: a) we know of no more productive work that the individual worker can do; and b) we require work as a basis for making a claim for income.

. . .

You get an economy that’s working very efficiently. But, because the world’s necessities can be created by a relatively small percentage of the population, the vast income generated pools in relatively few places; sort of a hematoma of the economic circulatory system. To remain healthy, the body politic needs good circulation, else part of it becomes gangrenous and poisons everything else. If possible, we need to find more productive work for our citizens. Otherwise, we need to figure out some other way for allocating some part of the economic flow to idle citizens.

Liberty, Laws, and Property (8/30/12):

The libertarians I have read don’t seem to bother much with this sort of calculus when it comes to property rights. They take it as an article of faith that property rights always outweigh the corresponding restrictions on liberty. This is so, I think, because of the tendency to regard property rights as “natural rights” — something that comes not from the rational acts of humans but from the ether or something. I’ve never heard a convincing explanation of “natural rights” — mainly just hand waving references to a Creator whose mind is apparently known to those who divine the natural rights. Fact is, in the absence of law, there are no rights; just unenforceable opinions about how things ought to be.

But, I think in the coming years as the nature of work evolves, we’ll have to be more aware of the calculus underpinning our assessment of property rights and the corresponding burdens imposed thereby.

I’ll keep thinking about this. I think it plays into all kinds of major concerns: jobs, debt, taxes, the shrinking middle class, etc.

Ruminations on Labor (9/3/12):

The problem I see, this Labor Day, is that compared to recent centuries, wealth is fairly abundant, but the amount of labor necessary to create that wealth is very much diminished. And, yet, because of the history of how wealth was traditionally created, we generally tie the legitimacy of one’s claim to property to some sort of labor that goes into creating that wealth. Then, we allow (even encourage) the laborer to contract away much of that claim to an employer – someone with specialized access to tools needed to create wealth (large machines, in many cases) or maybe specialized access to the demand or markets for certain types of labor.

But, now, with the demand for labor at very low levels, the individual has very little leverage when negotiating away their claim to property (e.g. the employment contract). This leverage is further reduced by the fact that the person has certain basic needs – food, shelter, health care, etc; and, by and large, can’t simply walk away from the table in most cases. (If demand for labor is high, then you can simply go on to the next employer; if not, you have to take what you can get.)

Meanwhile, employers (those with specialized access to tools or markets) can accumulate great wealth because they can bundle together the shares of access to property traded away by the laborers (value created by labor but not retained by the laborer) and pocket that value for themselves. They’re able to do this because they are operating in an environment featuring a cocoon of infrastructure and property laws; among other things. Absent this environment, their deals with laborers (and with makers of the specialized tools and with the markets they have specialized access to) would be worth precisely nothing. Without this cocoon, you get Somalia.

If you’ve read this far, I suppose you get the idea.

An acquaintance of mine raised a complaint that’s fairly familiar and, so, seemed worth a blog post. He is questioning why some folks call him a racist for being opposed to illegal immigration. He says he’s fine with legal immigration but opposes illegal immigration. What is so wrong or racist about being in favor of enforcing the law?

My response was:

The notion of racism comes from how intensely one reacts to illegal immigration versus other kinds of law breaking. If you support Trump despite his violation of laws against discriminatory housing but then get very unhappy about immigrants who haven’t obtained the proper paperwork, it makes people think that sanctity of the law isn’t the only thing motivating your outrage.

Would you vote for a candidate who promises to permanently revoke driving privileges for anyone who has exceeded the posted speed limit? Probably not. Which raises the question about why you feel so much more passionately about violating immigration laws.

I have mixed feelings about throwing around the label “racist.” It’s sometimes warranted but it’s also a conversation stopper. On the other hand, as I’ve pointed out many times in the past, I’m an upper-middle class white guy, so my taking a more philosophical approach to the question of racism is a privilege I have that others probably don’t.

In any case, on the subject of immigration, illegality, and whether racism might motivate one’s reaction to illegal immigration, I think it comes down to evaluating that reaction as compared to other forms of law-breaking. Do you view immigrating without the proper paperwork as more like a crime that’s malum prohibitum (wrong because it’s prohibited) like speeding or more like a crime that’s malum in se (wrong in itself) like robbery? If Congress legalized the immigration in question, would you be cool with the newly legal immigrants or would you be mad at Congress? The responses to those questions and your reasons for them probably go a long way toward answering whether race is a motivating factor in your views on the subject.

I’ve been writing this blog long enough that I can now rely on that “ten years ago today” crutch and be a little bit lazy. As it turns out, my post from Thanksgiving 2006 is pretty applicable to Thanksgiving 2016:

I know Thanksgiving is, at its root, a religious holiday, and I am not the most religious sort. Nonetheless, I think it’s probably my favorite holiday (Halloween is a close second, but on a more fun, superficial level.) Regardless of my doubts as to whom my gratitude should be directed, I recognize that I have a great deal about which to be thankful. It’s good to have holiday reminding me, and everyone else, of that fact.

For starters, I have a wife I love, two healthy kids, a job, enough to eat, and a roof over my head. That’s a pretty good start. I live in a country of such bounty I have the leisure time to do something as frivolous as write in this blog while drinking an African coffee and while my daughter sits next to me, eating grapes in November. Never mind access to technology plentiful and cheap enough to make the blog work. And I live in a country where I can express my doubts about religion and speak my mind about politics without any significant fear of reprisal.

Obviously I have my criticisms of my governments’ policies, objections to the direction this country has been heading, and fears about just how much my children will have to be thankful for when they are my age, but for today, it’s worth remembering that I have much of my own for which to be thankful.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody.