The Dish

by Reihan

Two teachers reflect on Legos, power, and hierarchy:

In Legotown, the children had constructed a social system of power where a few people made the important decisions and the rest of the participants did the grunt work — much like the system in the trading game. We wanted children to critique the system at work in Legotown, not to critique the children at the top of the Legotown hierarchy. At the same time, we wanted them to see that the Legotown system was created by people, and, as such, could be challenged and reformulated. The children’s reaction to the winners of the trading game was a big warning flag for us: We clearly had some repair work to do around relationships.

But that, of course, is the trouble with radical egalitarianism. It is ultimately driven by intense hostility towards "the children at the top of the Legotown hierarchy" rather than a dispassionate critique of "the system at work in Legotown." Challenging and reformulating Legotown means changing which kids are at the top of the Legotown hierarchy. Instead of kids who are good at building things with Legos, it will instead be the kids who please the teachers with their dedication to radical egalitarianism. And so it goes.

[Patrick Appel]

More impressive than the amount of money Obama has raised is the sheer number of people who have donated to his campaign.

by Reihan

Gabriel Sherman’s take on the NYT‘s McCain story:

Beyond its revelations, however, what’s most remarkable about the article is that it appeared in the paper at all: The new information it reveals focuses on the private matters of the candidate, and relies entirely on the anecdotal evidence of McCain’s former staffers to justify the piece–both personal and anecdotal elements unusual in the Gray Lady. The story is filled with awkward journalistic moves–the piece contains a collection of decade-old stories about McCain and Iseman appearing at functions together and concerns voiced by McCain’s aides that the Senator shouldn’t be seen in public with Iseman–and departs from the Times’ usual authoritative voice.

Here’s my question: does this mean the Los Angeles Times is going to pull the trigger on yet another "scandal," this one involving the spouse of a leading presidential candidate? Ron Rosenbaum wrote one of the strangest blog posts of all time on exactly this subject in October, and it seems to have added salience now. 

by Reihan

I’ve been meaning to write a semi-serious post. My time at The Daily Dish will soon draw to a close. For now, I leave you with two overlong interpretations of modern indie classics, which you will find below.

Who doesn’t love Silver Jews? Crazy people, that’s who. But as it happens, some crazy people, yours truly included, also enjoy Silver Jews, particularly when I’m feeling blue. It’s cold outside, and the cold is having a deleterious impact on my life expectancy. I don’t know about you, but I’m very glad Silver Jews frontman David Berman is no longer smoking hard drugs. I can imagine my detractors saying, "I wish the same were true of you, Reihan. Please spare me your hellish warbling! Murder my cat, stab me in the belly. Just please, please, no more YouTube videos." And it’s true, you make a compelling point, detractors. However, it is also true that this video is something of a public service announcement, in which I celebrate the healing power of pears and, by extension, all fruit. Eat your greens, people. You heard it here, first.

This next video reflects my longstanding love for The Smiths, and also Keith Fleming’s excellent The Boy with the Thorn in His Side, a memoir of a disastrous bohemian adolescence. I also strongly recommend Morrissey & Marr: The Severed Alliance, perhaps the most serious-sounding title of a rock and roll biography I’ve ever encountered. This video is exactly as horrible as the others, possibly slightly more horrible, but it does include a very lengthy scat singing interlude. I think we’d all be better off if this video never surfaced again. Troublingly, it appears as though I am experiencing a stroke for about 35 percent of the time I’m singing. That would explain a lot about my mental state.

by Reihan

Will Wilkinson parries with Matt Yglesias over Iceland, and I think Wilkinson comes out ahead. First, Matt writes,

Iceland features somewhat lower levels of social spending than do the other Scandinavian countries, but it’s still a really high level especially when you consider that pretty much none of that tax revenue is going to the country’s non-existent military. I would love to see the US become more like Iceland — flexible labor market, high taxes, and generous public services sounds good to me. But I’m pretty sure Cato would freak out if I proposed a 50 percent increase in the tax share of the American economy.

To which Will responds,

Can’t they both be right? Iceland, much like Denmark, is more or less Hong Kong with a huge welfare state. High personal tax rates and redistributive policies certainly do affect incentives to work, save, etc. And certain state-provided services do tend to crowd out private alternatives. That said, it is possible to have high tax rates, lots of redistribution, and no other policies regulating the operation of the market. Neither Iceland nor Denmark leave their markets that unfettered, but it is simply undeniable that they are extremely wealthy, free-market capitalist countries. Indeed, the relative success of countries like Denmark and Iceland is outstanding evidence that the best way to ensure high levels of welfare spending (in tiny, ethnically homogeneous countries) is to let the capitalism rip.

And there lies the rub. Two thoughts. First, as Peter Lindert has argued, relying heavily on a VAT means that the people who are consuming public services are also paying for them. Our tax system is, suffice to say, not designed with this goal in mind. So Will’s Rawlsekian vision, with which I’m very sympathetic, is closely tied to broad-based consumption taxes.

Many of our most egregious labor-market interventions reflect the egalitarian aspirations of a deeply divided society. We don’t like the idea of handouts or special favors, so we choose radically less efficient and effective institutions that reflect our values yet fail to achieve our desired outcomes. Consider the Americans with Disabilities Act. It is designed to eliminate discrimination against disabled workers and, presumably, to increase the employment of disabled workers. In Japan, in contrast, the government subsidizes firms for hiring a certain number of disabled workers. The guiding premise isn’t that corporations are bad guys that discriminate, but rather that it can be expensive to accommodate workers with special needs, and the state should foot the bill for advancing the goal of social inclusion. Guess what? The Japanese approach has done a much, much better job of increasing employment among the disabled. Our approach has been a tremendous boon for trial lawyers.

We often use a strangely legalistic framework for achieving social ends. Racial preferences also come to mind. Consider the following, from a Newsweek profile of Michelle Obama.

At Harvard, she felt the same racial divide. Verna Williams and Michelle became friends in their first year of law school. She remembers many of their fellow black students worrying that white classmates viewed them as charity cases. But she suggests Michelle was not among them. "She recognized that she had been privileged by affirmative action and she was very comfortable with that," Williams recalls.

Michelle recalls things differently. A campaign spokeswoman says she had an edge getting into Princeton not because of affirmative action, but because her older brother was there as a scholar athlete. She was a "legacy," just like any other applicant with family ties to Princeton. Her aides say Michelle earned her way into Harvard on merit by distinguishing herself at Princeton.

How odd. This almost suggests that there is something to be ashamed of, which seems like exactly the wrong attitude. But of course people are sheepish about being the beneficiaries of a racial preference. And imagine how uncomfortable people would be if we said, "Okay, we live in a racist society, so black and Bengali children will be given a larger school voucher to account for that fact." This approach would make a lot of sense. It is the approach that undergirded the University of Michigan’s undergraduate affirmative action program, in which underrepresented groups were given a numerical bonus in determining admissions decisions. This had the virtue of simplicity and transparency. Sure enough, the Supreme Court struck that program down in favor of the Law School’s "holistic," opaque approach to preferences.

My sense is that many of the pathologies of our labor market derive from the effort to navigate this tricky terrain of respect. Iceland and Denmark and Japan don’t worry about this quite as much. Class consciousness, for example, takes a very different form, in which the less affluent feel entitled to certain benefits. They don’t really give a damn about what the bosses think.

But the thing is the United States will never be Iceland or Denmark or Japan, which is why our labor market interventions will have to take a very different form. Would-be reformers need to understand this.

by Reihan

Little-known fact: David Brooks began his career in journalism at Chicago’s City News Bureau, where he pounded the pavement on the crime beat. In today’s column, he unravels the rivalries and wounded egos that threaten to bring down the McCain campaign shoe-leather-style. And he also notes McCain’s Hart-like vulnerability.

At his press conference Thursday, McCain went all-in. He didn’t just say he didn’t remember a meeting about Iseman. He said there was no meeting. If it turns out that there is evidence of an affair and a meeting, then his presidential hopes will be over. If no evidence surfaces, his campaign will go on and it will be clear that there were members of his old inner circle consumed by viciousness and mendaciousness.

Remember when Gary Hart dared the press to find evidence of his, ahem, "Monkey Business"? Well, they did. The bluster and bravado that I like and admire in McCain, and that my lefty friends can’t stand, might indeed be the end of him.

Brooks’s column reminded me, oddly enough, of Sam Anderson’s brilliant investigative feature on The Splasher. It’s awesome.

by hilzoy

Reuters:

“Republican Rep. Richard Renzi of Arizona was indicted on 35 criminal counts, including conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering and official extortion stemming from land deals in his state, Justice Department officials said on Friday.”

The indictment, if true, is pretty damning. Paul Kiel at TPMMuckraker summarizes the charges:

“The charges boil down to this, basically. Renzi (who’s already said he won’t seek re-election) is charged with doing everything he can as a congressman to strong-arm others into buying land from his buddy James Sandlin — Sandlin then allegedly kicked back sizable chunks of cash back to Renzi in a series of complicated financial transactions (thus the money laundering charge). The main details of these charges were reported by the Arizona papers and The Wall Street Journal last year.

Update: Yikes. In a completely separate matter, the indictment charges Renzi with a conspiracy to “embezzle and misappropriate client premiums [from his insurance company] to fund his congressional campaign.””

According to the indictment, the extortion connected with the land swap was pretty blatant: at one point, Renzi told one of the companies he was trying to pressure into buying a property from his friend (Sandlin): “No Sandlin property, no bill.” I don’t think it gets more obvious than that. (I should note here that I love legal language: the indictment describes this as being, among other things, “a scheme or artifice to defraud the United States of its intangible right to the honest services of RENZI, free from deceit, bias, self-dealing, and concealment”.)

The misappropriation of insurance premiums also seems pretty appalling, according to the indictment: Renzi basically took over $400,000 in premiums without bothering to actually buy any insurance with them. (The money seems to have gone to his Congressional campaign.) When the people he had supposedly insured got cancellation notices, the indictment claims that he sent them fake insurance certificates from another company, a company that did not, in fact, issue insurance policies. (He says this was a clerical error.) The indictment also notes (p. 21, 61 e, f) that Renzi mailed two checks to people he had insured, one listed as “Donation Towards Claim Expenses” and the other as “Donation Towards Claim Settlement”. That suggests that he might have been paying out claims to the people he had insured.

All in all, it’s pretty astounding. If the allegations are true, I hope he has a nice long time to reflect on conscience, integrity, and the meaning of public service from his very own cell.

***

As Paul Kiel reminds us, the US Attorney who oversaw this investigation was Paul Charlton, one of the Attorneys fired in the, um, US Attorney firing scandal. From the WSJ:

“People briefed on the case said investigators in Arizona asked Washington for clearance — among other tools — for a wiretap of Mr. Renzi’s telephones, a highly unusual step against a sitting member of Congress, months before Election Day. The wiretap eventually was approved, and was in place by late October, these people said.

On Oct. 26, just days before the election, two political Web sites carried the first public word of the probe. In subsequent news accounts, an unidentified Washington law-enforcement official described the matter as “preliminary.” Few details emerged, but the leak disrupted prosecutors’ wiretap.

Meanwhile, Mr. Renzi, first elected to Congress in 2002, was fighting to hold on to his seat. In September, President Bush hosted a fund-raiser in Scottsdale on his behalf. About the same time Mr. Charlton was added to a list of prosecutors “we should now consider pushing out,” wrote Mr. Gonzales’s then-chief of staff, Kyle Sampson, in a Sept. 13, 2006, email to then-White House counsel Harriet Miers.”

What an unfortunate series of coincidences. Stranger still, when the investigation was made public, one of Renzi’s aides called Charlton to ask about it; Charlton reported that contact to the DoJ, as required, but oddly enough, the DoJ report of that contact was left out of the document dumps the DoJ made in response to various Congressional requests.

(Cross-posted at Obsidian Wings)

[Patrick Appel] In case you missed it, here was Clinton accusing Obama of plagiarism last night:

I don’t understand why the Clinton campaign has been using this line of attack. Maybe it polled well in focus groups or something, but it is one of the most absurd tactics I have ever witnessed. I hope last night’s fiasco put an end to it for good.

by Reihan

The late Tom Lantos memorably referred to former Gerhard Schroeder, the former German chancellor, as a "political prostitute" for his hilariously corrupt dealings with Russian gas giant Gazprom.

One wonders what Lantos would have to say about Bill Clinton. You may have missed last month’s excellent New York Times story concerning Clinton’s close ties to a Canadian tycoon named Frank Giustra. It seems that former President Clinton helped Mr Giustra secure an extremely lucrative mining deal with Kazakhstan’s government, and that Mr Giustra offered very graciously repaid the favor with a donation of $31 million to the former’s president’s charitable foundation and a pledge of $100 million more.

But of course the Clintons expect to be compensated for some of their good deeds.

As Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign has intensified, Mr. Clinton has begun severing financial ties with Ronald W. Burkle, the supermarket magnate, and Vinod Gupta, the chairman of InfoUSA, to avoid any conflicts of interest. Those two men have harnessed the former president’s clout to expand their businesses while making the Clintons rich through partnership and consulting arrangements.

Clearly the Clintons are a remarkable pair, capable of spinning dross into gold. But wouldn’t it be nice if they tried to find a more honest, less Abramoffian way to make a living, one that didn’t rope in the rest of us into acquiescing while they play the government the way some of us play the slots?

[Peter Suderman] The earmark crusades of the last few years have made fairly clear how politicians use earmarks to reward friendly businesses. What tends to get less attention, however, is that regulation, especially environmental regulation, is often used in a similar fashion.  Perhaps not surprisingly, it looks like Hillary Clinton may be as guilty as anyone, and Tim Carney’s got the goods.

(Bonus TAS angle: Reihan, always ahead of the curve, has noted the role this sort of regulatory gaming played in the War on Light Bulbs.)