Good-in-theory

Operational Review

However, it was clear to me during my interviews of several protestors and witnesses said that they did not see protestors interlocking their arms and pushing back against the line of police officers as anything other than “passive resistance.” This is a misconception held by many. In most cases, the police have a very different definition of passive resistance. Any action other than a protestor passively sitting or standing and going limp is usually considered more than passive resistance.

Whose misconception?

But police officers are authorized by law to use force (violence, in the mind of the protestors) when faced with overcoming resistance while engaged in the performance of their duties.

Political physics: Force x Resistance = Violence

Officers shall use only that amount of force that is objectively reasonable, and will be judged by the standard of a reasonable officer in similar circumstances. Any interpretation of reasonableness must allow for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second decisions in circumstances that are tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.

Public reason policing.

There are some uses of force that are especially difficult to view. I am specifically referring to three instances where protestors are pulled by their hair as a control technique. Pulling the hair is an approved and very effective technique when justified by what the officer is facing. In all but one case, the pulling of the hair seemed reasonable. One protestor appeared to be clinging to some bushes. In the other case, an officer already handcuffing one protestor has to reach up and grab a protestor passed to his location by front-line officers. Trying to control two prisoners, while in a kneeling position is very difficult. The officer likely just grabbed what he could to move the second subject while not losing control of the first.

Reasonable hair pulling. Grab what you can to move the second subject [object?] while not losing control of the first.

Allowing an encampment to be erected anywhere in Sproul Plaza or any other location on campus would have had dire consequences. Almost without exception, every Occupy encampment across the country has associated crime, violence and unsanitary health conditions.

Health and safety.

The encampment would have been an attractive event for some members of the UC Berkeley student body. This is especially true of freshman and transfer students. Many parts of Occupy encampments are hidden from routine viewing, especially inside tents and makeshift structures. This would have exposed a very vulnerable part of the UC Berkeley community to undue and preventable risk.

Students assembling hidden from routine viewing - an undue and preventable risk.

This lack of open lines of communications had a negative impact on all aspects of the events that occurred.

Clear lines of communication are a necessary part of an orderly workplace. Failure to delegate information sharing responsibilities leads to inefficient management.

The use of OC may have been very effective if used at the main point of conflict at the first confrontation.

Should have pepper sprayed Berkeley first.

It might be useful to look at each of these options from the perspective of the protestor. What would be their preference?

What method of force would you prefer? OC spray, baton, rubber projectile, or taser?

Obviously, “none of the above” is the easy answer, but probably not realistic if one chooses to engage in demonstrations that can turn riotous.

What turns an encampment into a riot?

Superstars and Mediocrities

I argue that high incomes in professions such as entertainment, management, and entrepreneurship, may be explained by the nature of the talent revelation process, rather than by an underlying scarcity of talent.

(Source: insidehighered.com)

Link Round Up - Tax Inequality + Housing Values

Tax Rate history 1913-2012

Tax Rates - bottom and top brackets 1913-2012

Average Household After Tax Income 1979-2005

Effective Tax Rates By Quintile, 1979-2005

House Prices - 1970-2010

The Reproduction of Privilege

Quite a good read. If you want the Charles Murray style conservative response in brief - “didn’t you know, the poor are just genetically inferior to the rich!”

Econ Blog Wars - Chait vs de Rugy.

This still misses the point that Chait’s initial ‘mean’ reaction was driven by a rhetorical technique, and only indirectly by the question of progressivity in the US, but it does add some salient points.

The debate has become “is the US direct tax system progressive,” but the progressivity of the US direct tax system is simply one lever in the progressivity of the US as a whole - which, based on the other two levers pointed out (tax levels and transfer payments) is relatively quite regressive.

Chait’s intent was clearly to argue “talking about share of taxes paid without any reference to income inequality is a cheap, rhetorical trick widely used by the right.” (A technique also used earlier by Clive Crook, who leaps to de Rugy’s defense). He ended up ensnared in a debate about how progressive the federal direct tax system is, where he was wrong, rather than a debate about right-wing rhetoric and how progressive the US tax and transfer system is in toto, where he is right to say it is less progressive than Europe.

Here is Crook making de Rugy’s argument first in January.

If anything, rich Americans contribute a greater share of taxes than do their peers in other industrialized nations. The top 1 percent of U.S. taxpayers paid 40 percent of federal income taxes in 2007. The top 1 percent of British taxpayers paid 24 percent of the corresponding total.

Here is what Chait initially had a problem with in the Washington Examiner:

Contrary to common belief, the United States already has a more progressive tax system than do the most industrialized democracies worldwide. The nearby chart uses data from a recent report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development on the share of taxes (both personal income and payroll taxes combined) paid by the richest 10 percent of households in 24 industrialized countries. The bars represent the share of the total taxes collected that are paid by top earners in these 24 countries.

The richest 10 percent of U.S. households (those making $112,124 or more) contribute a greater share of taxes (45.1 percent of all income taxes) than their counterparts in any other industrialized nation.

Meanwhile, the average tax burden for the top 10 percent of households in OECD countries is 31.6 percent of the revenue collected, well below the percentage in America.

Chait’s first response is here.

De Rugy replies here.

Note that de Rugy does not cite her initial article, but rather the report her article was about. That’s a nice way to shift the issue from her own rhetoric to the matter of fact. But Chait was, in the first instance, perturbed by the rhetorical ploy.

Chati’s second response is here. Note how he goes wrong by committing a fallacy of his own. As Crook neatly put it, “rich Americans bear a bigger share of the tax burden because they earn a bigger share of the income and because the US income tax system is more progressive.”

De Rugy wrote a column centered around the claim that the United States has a more progressive tax system than any other advanced country, and as her sole piece of evidence cited the fact that rich people pay a higher share of the tax burden in the U.S. than in other countries. I wrote a response, noting that this reasoning is completely idiotic. Rich Americans pay a bigger share of the tax burden because they earn a bigger share of the income, not because the U.S. tax code is more progressive.

De Rugy replies here and here

Chait’s final response is here.

And de Rugy’s closing reply is here.

Now, to conclude, yes, it is true that a higher share of taxes paid alone doesn’t prove higher progressivity — and hence it is a very imperfect measure. But will Chait acknowledge the progressivity of the U.S. tax system?

Note the esquive here - ‘yes, the measure I used to gesture towards progressivity ‘is a very imperfect measure,’ but let’s ignore that and talk about something else. Let’s disregard that I use this tactic repeatedly.’

Nick Gillespie at Reason takes a turn at being polemical on the whole affair to compose a rant about liberal elitism here.

But the basic ‘fact of the matter’ here, as illustrated by the commentary of he who actually wrote the report, is quite simple.

The US has a highly progressive federal direct tax system
It has a not-progressive-at-all federal transfer payment system.
It collects fewer taxes across the board

There’s also something missing from the puzzle here - the effect of the state-level tax system in the US as compared to other countries, which is often shown to make the US tax system quite flat.

In any case, the message here is quite simple.

If you’re a right wing hack interested in lowering the tax burden of the rich, focus on progressivity (the slope of the tax burden) in order to argue that we already tax the rich more than enough.

If you’re concerned with inequality, raise all taxes (the y-intercept of the tax burden) and make the use of tax revenue more highly redistributive. Raising the y-intercept may force you to decrease the slope, but raising transfer payments will mitigate any effects upon the poor.

10th Feb 2012

It is my own flesh and blood… which constitutes the material, corporeal form of the spirit of money

An organised banking system is therefore their ideal. But this abolition of estrangement, this return of man to himself and therefore to other men is only an appearance; the self-estrangement, the dehumanisation, is all the more infamous and extreme because its element is no longer commodity, metal, paper, but man’s moral existence, man’s social existence, the inmost depths of his heart, and because under the appearance of man’s trust in man it is the height of distrust and complete estrangement. What constitutes the essence of credit? We leave entirely out of account here the content of credit, which is again money. We leave out of account, therefore, the content of this trust in accordance with which a man recognises another man by advancing him a certain quantity of value and – at best, namely, when he does not demand payment for the credit, i.e., he is not a usurer showing his trust in his fellow man not being a swindler, but a “good” man. By a “good” man, the one who bestows his trust understands, like Shylock, a man who is “able to pay.”

Credit is conceivable in two relationships and under two different conditions. The two relationships are: first, a rich man gives credit to a poor man whom he considers industrious and decent. This kind of credit belongs to the romantic, sentimental part of political economy, to its aberrations, excesses, exceptions, not to the rule. But even assuming this exception and granting this romantic possibility, the life of the poor man and his talents and activity serve the rich man as aguarantee of the repayment of the money lent. That means, therefore, that all the social virtues of the poor man, the content of his vital activity, his existence itself, represent for the rich man the reimbursement of his capital with the customary interest. Hence the death of the poor man is the worst eventuality for the creditor. It is the death of his capital together with the interest. One ought to consider how vile it is to estimate the value of a man in money, as happens in the credit relationship. As a matter of course, the creditor possesses, besides moral guarantees, also the guarantee of legal compulsion and still other more or less real guarantees for his man.

If the man to whom credit is given is himself a man of means, credit becomes merely a medium facilitating exchange, that is to say, money itself is raised to a completely ideal form. Credit is the economic judgment on the morality of a man. In credit, the man himself, instead of metal or paper, has become the mediator of exchange, not however as a man, but as the mode of existence of capital and interest. The medium of exchange, therefore, has certainly returned out of its material form and been put back in man, but only because the man himself has been put outside himself and has himself assumed a material form.

Within the credit relationship, it is not the case that money
is transcended in man, but that man himself is turned into money, or money is incorporated in him. Human individuality, human morality itself, has become both an object of commerce and the material in which money exists. Instead of money, or paper, it is my own personal existence, my flesh and blood, my social virtue and importance, which constitutes the material, corporeal form of the spirit of money. Credit no longer resolves the value of money into money but into human flesh and the human heart. Such is the extent to which all progress and all inconsistencies within a false system are extreme retrogression and the extreme consequence of vileness.

Within the credit system, its nature, estranged from man, under the appearance of an extreme economic appreciation of man, operates in a double way:

1) The antithesis between capitalist and worker, between big and small capitalists, becomes still greater since credit is given only to him who already has, and is a new opportunity of accumulation for the rich man, or since the poor man finds that the arbitrary discretion of the rich man and the latter’s judgment over him confirm or deny his entire existence and that his existence is wholly dependent on this contingency.

2) Mutual dissimulation, hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness are carried to extreme lengths, so that on the man without credit is pronounced not only the simple judgment that he is poor, but in addition a pejorative moral judgment that he possesses no trust, no recognition, and therefore is a social pariah, a bad man, and in addition to his privation, the poor man undergoes this humiliation and the humiliating necessity of having to ask the rich man for credit.

3) Since, owing to this completely nominal existence of money, counterfeiting cannot be undertaken by man in any other material than his own person, he has to make himself into counterfeit coin, obtain credit by stealth, by lying, etc., and this credit relationship – both on the part of the man who trusts and of the man who needs trust – becomes an object of commerce, an object of mutual deception and misuse. Here it is also glaringly evident that distrust is the basis of economic trust; distrustful calculation whether credit ought to be given or not; spying into the secrets of the private life, etc., of the one seeking credit; the disclosure of temporary straits in order to overthrow a rival by a sudden shattering of his credit, etc. The whole system of bankruptcy, spurious enterprises, etc…. As regards government loans, the state occupies exactly the same place as the man does in the earlier example…. In the game with government securities it is seen how the state has become the plaything of businessmen, etc.

4) The credit system finally has its completion in the banking system. The creation of bankers, the political domination of the bank, the concentration of wealth in these hands, this economic Areopagus of the nation, is the worthy completion of the money system.

Owing to the fact that in the credit system the moral recognition of a man, as also trust in the state, etc., take the form of credit, the secret contained in the lie of moral recognition, the immoral vileness of this morality, as also the sanctimoniousness and egoism of that trust in the state, become evident and show themselves for what they really are.