Inspired by the linked post by Alex Tanzi at Bloomberg Quint, consider the graph at the top of this post.

Now provide a narrative explanation of what the graph illustrates. If you think it’s fair, please provide your definition of “fair”. I’m pretty sure it will hinge on ability to pay. In other words the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks.

It also bears noting that the top 50% of income earners pay 97% of the personal income tax. To be really fair (in this case meaning “even-handed”) it would probably be more illustrative to see a graph of total federal taxation (including payroll taxes). That looks more like this and strikes me as pretty unfair. I would love to see a breakdown like the graph at the top of the page of percent of total revenues paid by income group and relative to percent of income. My instinct tells me it would show that the top decile minus the top percent or two are getting screwed.

Extra credit question: what would it take to make the whole system fair? IMO the easiest way would be to eliminate FICA max. Sadly, that could be finessed.

Again over at OTB Steven Taylor has published the third installment of his series on institutional design. In it he lays out 10 aspects of a liberal democracy, presumably to lay the groundwork for future entries.

I would like to focus on just four of those elements:

2. Executive power is constrained.

3. Electoral outcomes are uncertain, with a presumption that some alteration of the party in power will take place over time.

7. Individuals have substantive democratic freedoms (speech, press, association, assembly, etc.)

9. Liberties are protected by an independent, nondiscriminatory judiciary, whose decisions are respected by other institutions within the state.

With respect to #3 it is all but certain that Chicago does not meet that standard. The last time a Republican was elected mayor of Chicago was more than 80 years ago. I am quite confident that a Democrat will be elected the next time around. Indeed, the outcomes of nearly all citywide general elections in Chicago are actually quite certain. The Democrats on the ballot will win. Many of the offices will actually be uncontested.

With respect to numbers 2 and 9 does the United States actually meet those standards? I’m not being snarky. It’s a legitimate question.

Consider, for example, the Affordable Care Act. Does the level of executive discretion it calls for constitute a constraining of executive power? If it does, under what circumstances would executive power be deemed constrained? If it does not we don’t satisfy the requirements of that element.

With respect to #9 you don’t need to search very hard to find the claim that we do not, in fact, have an “independent, nondiscriminatory judiciary” but that the Supreme Court merely follows the marching orders given by the political parties. If we do have such a judiciary, then the last several weeks have largely been contrived kabuki. If we do not, we don’t satisfy the requirements of that element, either.

With respect to #7 my question is a bit tougher. Does it actually mean anything? What are “substantive democratic freedoms”? Freedom of speech, press, etc. differ pretty dramatically from the United Kingdom to the United States to France to Germany. I think they’re all liberal democracies. Are some more liberal and democratic than others? Or do you have “substantive democratic freedoms” if you think you do? And isn’t that sophistry?

Note that in this post I’m not criticizing what Steven has written. I’m just riffing on it.

When I read about the Saudis’ reaction to U. S. government displeasure at Politico:

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Saudi Arabia warned Sunday it will respond to any “threats” against it as its stock market plunged following President Donald Trump’s warning of “severe punishment” over the disappearance of Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi.

Trump made a point of visiting the kingdom on his first overseas trip as president and has touted arms sales to Saudi Arabia. But both the White House and the kingdom are under mounting pressure as concern grows over the fate of the veteran journalist, who hasn’t been seen since he entered the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.

I couldn’t help but think of the cartoon above, sometimes captioned “That last grand gesture of defiance”. As the late Mayor Daley used to say, let’s look at the record. Saudi Arabia has a tenth of our population and its economy is less 8% of ours and most of that is the production of crude oil. We import about 5% of our oil from Saudi Arabia. We are their primary arms supplier. The Saudis punch above their weight because they’re the low-cost major supplier of oil and have the ability to affect oil prices. The Saudis are not popular in the Muslim world and, although there would be a response if we attacked them, the idea that the Muslims of the world would be outraged at any sanctions or non-military actions against Saudi Arabia on the part of the United States is nonsense.

I’ve mentioned this before but it bears mentioning again. Our relationship with Saudi Arabia goes back to the 1950s and it was part of what was referred to as the “Twin Pillars” strategy. We had close relationships with two Middle Eastern countries: Iran and Saudi Arabia, one Shi’ite and one Sunni. The idea was that between them we could maintain a shaky balance in the Middle East. That was long before we had become Israel’s primary patron or were importing the volumes of oil from the Saudis that we later did. Keep in mind that the Soviets had already cultivated cozy relationships with the two largest Arab countries: Egypt and Iraq.

Of course the “Twin Pillars” strategy collapsed when the Shah was driven from power. Why then have we maintained the supine posture with respect to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia that we have? I think it has to do with presidential politics and psychology. No amount of failure can cause a president to abandon a bad policy because no president wants to be criticized for it. It’s why we still have troops in Afghanistan, why we still rubberstamp so much of what the Germans want to do, and why we tolerate the demilitarization of our NATO allies.

I don’t think I’ve ever linked to the Research Digest of the British Psychological Society before. The link is to a list of the bad traits that psychological studies have found to be parts of human nature. Here’s the list:

• We view minorities and the vulnerable as less than human
• We already experience schadenfreude at the age of four
• We believe in Karma – assuming that the downtrodden of the world must deserve their fate
• We are blinkered and dogmatic
• We would rather electrocute ourselves than spend time in our own thoughts
• We are vain and overconfident
• We are moral hypocrites
• We are all potential trolls
• We favour ineffective leaders with psychopathic traits
• We are sexually attracted to people with dark personality traits

Read the whole thing for supporting evidence. Note that the “we” does not refer to Americans but people in general.

The only solace I can take from that is that psychological studies are routinely awful, unrepeatable, and just plain wrong. And that the follow-up to that post might be a list of our best qualities.

However, one conclusion we might draw from that list is that a worthwhile goal for our institutions would be to restrain our worst impulses.

Why is it that Americans think we have “moral standing” in the world? Not only do we not presently have moral standing we’ve never had moral standing. I write in reaction to this headline in the Washington Post: “Are We Willing to Sacrifice Our Moral Standing For This?” (referring to the disappearance and presumed murder of a Saudi journalist).

We have military and economic standing. We’re doing what we can to erode the latter and every non-decisive year we spend in Afghanistan damages the former.

Where did the idea of our moral standing come from? Why does it persist?

I’ve posted a number of times on what I think will happen should the Democrats take control of the House in November.

Here’s a question I want to throw out to the floor. What will happen if Democrats fail to gain a majority in the House?

I think that the anger and, well, mania we’ve seen since Trump’s election and then Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment will be nothing in comparison with what will happen. Democrats will blame everything except the DNC.

Over at OTB Steven Taylor has returned to his long-promised musings on political institutional design so I thought that, rather than cluttering up his comments section with it, I’d contribute a little color commentary.

The Founding Fathers, classicists that they were, were clearly familiar with Aristotle’s taxonomy of government (not to mention recent European political experience). In Aristotle’s Ethics he analyzes governmental forms in two axes: the number of people who make the decisions (one, a few, many) and whether the government pursues the public good which he refers to as “correct” (when it does) or “corrupt” (when it pursues personal interests). That results in this matrix:

He also envisioned these forms as progressing from one to another, from correct to corrupt, cyclically. “Polity” means a sort of constitutional arrangement.

The Founding Fathers clearly attempted to arrive at an arrangement in which the process of transformation from one form to another avoided one-man rule and avoided becoming corrupt. A government of limited powers in which decisions were made by a relatively small group who were selected by the greater body of the people was the form they arrived at. As practical politicians they also made compromises, the greatest and most damaging of which involved slavery and regional differences and the contrasting interests of small states and large ones.

Two questions arise from this. In this conceptual framework where are we now? How can we improve things?

IMO there is practically no question that we are alternating, even vibrating, between oligarchy and democracy (meaning in this case something more like mobocracy). This has come about through the abandoning the constraints of the our constitutional framework (required for a polity) and the pursuit of the personal goals and benefit of elected officials. Evidence for the former is the many federal programs which exceed anything actually in the Constitution and the significant extra-constitutional measures effected by Supreme Court decisions. The most obvious evidence of the latter is the accumulation of vast wealth by politicians during and after their terms of office.

I’m skeptical that anything meaningful can be done about either. We are a very large, incredibly diverse country. Consensus, required for republican government, is declining if anything. You cannot turn around without stumbling over an assertion in one form or another that the end justifies the means. That can only lead to oligarchy or mobocracy.

I’m particularly skeptical that electoral reform can heal what ails us. In the absence of more basic moral or ethical reform I don’t see how that will accomplish anything but I’m willing to learn.

I sometimes wonder whether Americans will ever recognize that every report from an international institution be it the UN, the World Bank, or any other reflects the prevailing wisdom among the European intelligentsia and that is only tangentially related to reality.

Our own elites with their well-earned feelings of inferiority respect those views far beyond their actual worth because they think the European intelligentsia are the cool kids.

Face it. The entire world is like high school.