True. You could argue that a CEO salary cap could cover the same functions as the income tax and estates taxes were created for, preventing the creation of aristocracy of wealth and political influence. The problem with creating a salary cap, as opposed to the income and estates taxes, is that how do you determine what should be the maximum pay and who should cap laws apply to. Is a person who makes a fortune for a lucrative cosmetic surgery practice less problematic than CEO and therefore entitled to a larger salary or should the salary gap apply universally?
Wouldn't this require that stock-ownership be much more individualized rather than through mutual funds or corporate ownership of stocks through holding companies. Wouldn't this also require that the CEO and other members of the Board can't own stock in their own corporation to avoid a conflict of interest?
I don't think that many liberals and progressives are against high CEO pay per se. Most liberals and progressives in this country want to temper and regulate capitalism rather than eliminate it and replace it with an alternative economic system. What gets to liberals and progressives about high CEO pay is that we feel that a lot of it is at the expense of the salaries and wages of more ordinary employees and that much of is it underserved in that CEOs seem to find ways of rewarding themselves with high pay and benefits even in the company they work for is doing very badly. The objection isn't so much the level of pay but whats being done for the pay and the perceived costs of the pay.
I don't think that most liberals and progressives would call for a cap on CEO pay. Thats much farther to the left than they want and also what could realistically be passed by Congress. If you listen to the complaints, its also not what bothers liberals. What bothers us is the ratio of pay between the CEO and the wages of an ordinary employee rather than how much the CEO is making.
I actually don't think that the Jewish right to self-determination derives from genetics. During the late 19th and first half of the 20th century, we were either persecuted out right or at best treated as citizens-strangers in most countries where we lived. We might have been a citizen of X country on paper but the reality was often different because we weren't Christian or Muslim or whatever. Jewish self-determination derives from this rather than genetics.
I actually have a soft-spot for Edward Said. Impeccable anti-Zionist as he was, he was enough a realist to admit that the Jews of Eastern Europe and the Middle East would have had a tough time of it but for Israel.
The problem with a lot of Arab/Islamic scholarship in the West, whether its produced by Muslims, Christians Arabs like Said, or sympathizers like Juan Cole is that many of them seem incapable of even remotely criticizing Arabs/Islam. Japanese scholars like Donald Richie or Edward Seidensticker love Japan and its culture but understand the negative parts of Japanese society and culture.
I've never really encountered a scholar of Arab/Islamic culture who was able to do this without being a Far Right racist who hates them anyway. There seems to be no balance. You have hagiographers or demonizers and nothing in-between. I suspect this has to do with imperialism in one way or another.
Iraq War II was a mistake. Saddam Hussein wasn't a threat to anybody but other Iraqis. It was bad for them but the violence unleashed by Saddam's collapse was worse. Even the best administrators in the world wouldn't be able to turn Iraq into a functioning democracy if anything because there wasn't a reliable group of potential politicians.
Tom Hollard made a convincing argument that Islam didn't exist per se till the Ummmayad caliphate, when the need to give better structure to the Arab Empire made it more important to differentiate between what Muslims believe and what Jews and Christians believe.
Shazbot, the American and Canadian governments didn't want to take the survivors because many Americans and Canadians saw the Jews as being too Red because they were Jewish. British Prime Minster Clement Atlee thought that the Jews should rebuild their lives in their home countries, who didn't want the Jews anyway and tended to greet returning survivors with pogroms. Stalin was actively planning to deport the entire Jewish population of the Soviet Union to labor camps in Siberia but luckily died before it could be implemented.
I think its also too much of a mistake to associate the creation of Israel too closely with the Holocaust. The movement for a Jewish state started in 1881-82, with the Bilu Settlers and the formation of the Hovevei Zion. By 1939, there were already 450,000 Jews in Eretz Israel. This rose to 600,000 by the end of WWII. The Holocaust gave new meaning to the movement but the push was already there.
The Khazar Kingdon wasn't in Turkey, it was in the area South of the Don River and north of what he now call Georgia the Country. Historians debate the extent that the Khazars became Jewish. Some thing it was only the elite who became Jews, others the entire masses.
I think genetic studies revealed that 40% of all Ashkenazi Jews are descendants of four women who lived a thousand or so years ago. The same studies show that most Jews are basically cousins on a genetic level. An Eastern European Jew and a Yemeni Jew have more genetically in common with each other than their neighbors. The closest non-Jewish genetic cousins are the Levantine Arabs, Greeks, and Southern Italians.
There were various different proposals for where to build a Jewish state. This including setting up some farm colonies in Argentina by the JCA, the Jewish Colonization Association but most Jewish immigrants to Argentina settled in Buenos Aires. The British proposed giving the Zionist Movement part of Uganda for settlement in 1904 but this ended up being a fiasco because nobody wanted it.
Eretz Israel was always the primary focus of the Jewish National Movement because it was the most logical place. It had more emotional pull than any other alternative. It was also the most logical focus for Jewish nationalism since its place where nearly every Jew could relate to.
I differentiate intelligence and intellectualism. Intelligence is the ability to analyze the situation, think strategically, etc. Intellectualism is thinking abstractly about different subjects like justice, romance, and art. A lot of intelligent people aren't necessarily intellectuals.
This pretty much reflects my isssues with fan-fiction. A lot of fan-fiction writers aren't exactly the world's best thinkers when it comes to what is necessary for writing fiction. Even some really bad authors think a lot more about the implications of nano-machines or whatever than a lot of fan fiction writers. This means that fan-fiction authors tend towards using somebody else's ideas to fuel their fantasies. There is nothing wrong with that in a moral sense but I wish that people would put more effort into creating their own fiction rather than relying on work laid down by others.
I also tend to be something of a canonists when it comes to literature. A lot of fan-fiction involves fans correcting "mistakes" made by the author. Usually this comes down to fans being match-makers and changing the canonical romantic relationships. I'm not really fond of this, people do not have to like the choices an author makes but it takes a certain amount of unpalitible arrogance to correct an author's mistakes.*
*This is more true when a work as one authors and is more or less limited in scope. I make something of an exception for long-term collaborative projects, i.e. comic books. There its a bit more reasonable for fans to complain about author's messing up relationships becase the multiple-authorship means that nobody's vision is being violated.
And what would should the Jews have done? Stay in Europe and be slaughtered by the Far Right and Far Left? Go to the Americas when the United States, Canada, and other countries were putting up immigration quotas at the worst possible time? You aren't exactly providing us with viable alternatives. Or maybe you think that Jews alone of the persecuted groups should just take their beatings and be quiety about it.
Furthermore, if you think that the Jews of the Middle East would have been incorporated into the polities of the Middle East if Israel did not exist than you are a moron. Its not like the other minorities of the Middle East are being successfully incorporated into the various states. The Jews would have been just one more minority for the majority to persecute and the Juan Coles of the world would ignore it.
Also, if the reaction if the Arabs really only hated Zionism and not the Jews per se than why did they go off the deep end into the deepest conspiratoral forms of anti-Semitism? Article after article, book after book, lesson after lesson, and sermon afte sermon shows deep hatred of Jews in Muslim-majority countries. Do you think that they might be serious? Its not like they are exactly shy about it.
The fact that people like Digby continually ignore or find justifications for the vast amounts of Jew-hatred in the Muslims world from the end of WWII to the present among other things. I can go on a truly long rant about this but I think that a lot of people who are otherwise very good at identifying hatred and racism are horrible when it comes to Jew-hatred.
I'd be much more impressed with the people who feel tremendous empathy for the dispossessed if they were capable of feeling even a slight percentage of that empathy towards Jews when we need help. We always get lectured about how we should feel so much empathy because of our horrible history but when bad things happen to us and we need help than we get abandoned. Its worse when our persecutors are not white, than people actively find excuses for them.
I never thought that George W. Bush was dumb. Incurious and not prone to question himself or his beliefs, yes. Dumb, no. He knew what he wanted and thought strategically about how to achieve it. He often succeeded in getting what he wanted. That requires intelligence.
Oh damn it your right, I forgot about the income tax. Thats an important but not necessary one to keep since I don't think that an amendment really was necessary to give Congress the ability to tax income but for the Supreme Court being political and stupid. I think that most post-New Deal Supreme Courts, even very conservative ones, are going to find that Congress can tax income without an amendment.
Before the 16th Amendment pased, most of the Federal government was funded by excise taxes on alcohol. I'm assume that it will be similar if the income tax were to disappear. We might get tolls on interstates and taxes on internet porn.
I'm not a libertarian and I don't think that the "Protestant Work Ethic" is exactly foundational for libertarianism as I understand it. However, man of the less philosophically-inclined libertarians*, that is those who treat libertarianism as holy writ, do have a tendency to rant a bit about moochers when it comes to talking about social safety net programs. You see this more in the people who derive their libertarianism from fiction rather than intellectual trestises. From this you get an impression that one reason why libertarians think that the welfare state is bad is because it provides goods and services "unearned" to people who didn't work for them. These libertarians might recoil with some kind of horror at the post-scarcity future.
To use the obvious example, Ayn Rand and her fans often get into long rants about moochers and takers. It might be better to rephrase Jason's questions in terms of Objectivists rather than Libertarians becausee even though they are offically atheist, Objectivists do have a "Protestant Work Ethic".
*Another way of putting this might be people who are libertarian without thinking too much about it.
Do you have any evidence that the old system giving the states more of a say
beyond Southern Senators defending slavery or Jim Crow. The good senators always acted as super Representatives. The bad ones as representatives for the corporations. People wanted direct election for a reason.
I think the obvious reason why things had to stop there was that Neil Stephenson and a book to write and couldn't think about the full implicatiosn of nano-machines without hitting writer's block.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Wage Mastery”
True. You could argue that a CEO salary cap could cover the same functions as the income tax and estates taxes were created for, preventing the creation of aristocracy of wealth and political influence. The problem with creating a salary cap, as opposed to the income and estates taxes, is that how do you determine what should be the maximum pay and who should cap laws apply to. Is a person who makes a fortune for a lucrative cosmetic surgery practice less problematic than CEO and therefore entitled to a larger salary or should the salary gap apply universally?
"
Wouldn't this require that stock-ownership be much more individualized rather than through mutual funds or corporate ownership of stocks through holding companies. Wouldn't this also require that the CEO and other members of the Board can't own stock in their own corporation to avoid a conflict of interest?
"
I don't think that many liberals and progressives are against high CEO pay per se. Most liberals and progressives in this country want to temper and regulate capitalism rather than eliminate it and replace it with an alternative economic system. What gets to liberals and progressives about high CEO pay is that we feel that a lot of it is at the expense of the salaries and wages of more ordinary employees and that much of is it underserved in that CEOs seem to find ways of rewarding themselves with high pay and benefits even in the company they work for is doing very badly. The objection isn't so much the level of pay but whats being done for the pay and the perceived costs of the pay.
I don't think that most liberals and progressives would call for a cap on CEO pay. Thats much farther to the left than they want and also what could realistically be passed by Congress. If you listen to the complaints, its also not what bothers liberals. What bothers us is the ratio of pay between the CEO and the wages of an ordinary employee rather than how much the CEO is making.
On “Dignity, Empathy, and the Iraq War”
I actually don't think that the Jewish right to self-determination derives from genetics. During the late 19th and first half of the 20th century, we were either persecuted out right or at best treated as citizens-strangers in most countries where we lived. We might have been a citizen of X country on paper but the reality was often different because we weren't Christian or Muslim or whatever. Jewish self-determination derives from this rather than genetics.
"
I actually have a soft-spot for Edward Said. Impeccable anti-Zionist as he was, he was enough a realist to admit that the Jews of Eastern Europe and the Middle East would have had a tough time of it but for Israel.
"
The problem with a lot of Arab/Islamic scholarship in the West, whether its produced by Muslims, Christians Arabs like Said, or sympathizers like Juan Cole is that many of them seem incapable of even remotely criticizing Arabs/Islam. Japanese scholars like Donald Richie or Edward Seidensticker love Japan and its culture but understand the negative parts of Japanese society and culture.
I've never really encountered a scholar of Arab/Islamic culture who was able to do this without being a Far Right racist who hates them anyway. There seems to be no balance. You have hagiographers or demonizers and nothing in-between. I suspect this has to do with imperialism in one way or another.
"
Iraq War II was a mistake. Saddam Hussein wasn't a threat to anybody but other Iraqis. It was bad for them but the violence unleashed by Saddam's collapse was worse. Even the best administrators in the world wouldn't be able to turn Iraq into a functioning democracy if anything because there wasn't a reliable group of potential politicians.
"
Tom Hollard made a convincing argument that Islam didn't exist per se till the Ummmayad caliphate, when the need to give better structure to the Arab Empire made it more important to differentiate between what Muslims believe and what Jews and Christians believe.
On “Whoops!”
I think we should make sure that our secret service agents are graceful in their movements and not clumsy. It might be safer that way.
On “Dignity, Empathy, and the Iraq War”
Shazbot, the American and Canadian governments didn't want to take the survivors because many Americans and Canadians saw the Jews as being too Red because they were Jewish. British Prime Minster Clement Atlee thought that the Jews should rebuild their lives in their home countries, who didn't want the Jews anyway and tended to greet returning survivors with pogroms. Stalin was actively planning to deport the entire Jewish population of the Soviet Union to labor camps in Siberia but luckily died before it could be implemented.
I think its also too much of a mistake to associate the creation of Israel too closely with the Holocaust. The movement for a Jewish state started in 1881-82, with the Bilu Settlers and the formation of the Hovevei Zion. By 1939, there were already 450,000 Jews in Eretz Israel. This rose to 600,000 by the end of WWII. The Holocaust gave new meaning to the movement but the push was already there.
"
The Khazar Kingdon wasn't in Turkey, it was in the area South of the Don River and north of what he now call Georgia the Country. Historians debate the extent that the Khazars became Jewish. Some thing it was only the elite who became Jews, others the entire masses.
"
I think genetic studies revealed that 40% of all Ashkenazi Jews are descendants of four women who lived a thousand or so years ago. The same studies show that most Jews are basically cousins on a genetic level. An Eastern European Jew and a Yemeni Jew have more genetically in common with each other than their neighbors. The closest non-Jewish genetic cousins are the Levantine Arabs, Greeks, and Southern Italians.
"
There were various different proposals for where to build a Jewish state. This including setting up some farm colonies in Argentina by the JCA, the Jewish Colonization Association but most Jewish immigrants to Argentina settled in Buenos Aires. The British proposed giving the Zionist Movement part of Uganda for settlement in 1904 but this ended up being a fiasco because nobody wanted it.
Eretz Israel was always the primary focus of the Jewish National Movement because it was the most logical place. It had more emotional pull than any other alternative. It was also the most logical focus for Jewish nationalism since its place where nearly every Jew could relate to.
"
I differentiate intelligence and intellectualism. Intelligence is the ability to analyze the situation, think strategically, etc. Intellectualism is thinking abstractly about different subjects like justice, romance, and art. A lot of intelligent people aren't necessarily intellectuals.
On “A Thing I Do Not Understand about Libertarians”
This pretty much reflects my isssues with fan-fiction. A lot of fan-fiction writers aren't exactly the world's best thinkers when it comes to what is necessary for writing fiction. Even some really bad authors think a lot more about the implications of nano-machines or whatever than a lot of fan fiction writers. This means that fan-fiction authors tend towards using somebody else's ideas to fuel their fantasies. There is nothing wrong with that in a moral sense but I wish that people would put more effort into creating their own fiction rather than relying on work laid down by others.
I also tend to be something of a canonists when it comes to literature. A lot of fan-fiction involves fans correcting "mistakes" made by the author. Usually this comes down to fans being match-makers and changing the canonical romantic relationships. I'm not really fond of this, people do not have to like the choices an author makes but it takes a certain amount of unpalitible arrogance to correct an author's mistakes.*
*This is more true when a work as one authors and is more or less limited in scope. I make something of an exception for long-term collaborative projects, i.e. comic books. There its a bit more reasonable for fans to complain about author's messing up relationships becase the multiple-authorship means that nobody's vision is being violated.
"
I prefer to see myself more as an archipelago.
On “Dignity, Empathy, and the Iraq War”
And what would should the Jews have done? Stay in Europe and be slaughtered by the Far Right and Far Left? Go to the Americas when the United States, Canada, and other countries were putting up immigration quotas at the worst possible time? You aren't exactly providing us with viable alternatives. Or maybe you think that Jews alone of the persecuted groups should just take their beatings and be quiety about it.
Furthermore, if you think that the Jews of the Middle East would have been incorporated into the polities of the Middle East if Israel did not exist than you are a moron. Its not like the other minorities of the Middle East are being successfully incorporated into the various states. The Jews would have been just one more minority for the majority to persecute and the Juan Coles of the world would ignore it.
Also, if the reaction if the Arabs really only hated Zionism and not the Jews per se than why did they go off the deep end into the deepest conspiratoral forms of anti-Semitism? Article after article, book after book, lesson after lesson, and sermon afte sermon shows deep hatred of Jews in Muslim-majority countries. Do you think that they might be serious? Its not like they are exactly shy about it.
"
The fact that people like Digby continually ignore or find justifications for the vast amounts of Jew-hatred in the Muslims world from the end of WWII to the present among other things. I can go on a truly long rant about this but I think that a lot of people who are otherwise very good at identifying hatred and racism are horrible when it comes to Jew-hatred.
"
I'd be much more impressed with the people who feel tremendous empathy for the dispossessed if they were capable of feeling even a slight percentage of that empathy towards Jews when we need help. We always get lectured about how we should feel so much empathy because of our horrible history but when bad things happen to us and we need help than we get abandoned. Its worse when our persecutors are not white, than people actively find excuses for them.
"
I never thought that George W. Bush was dumb. Incurious and not prone to question himself or his beliefs, yes. Dumb, no. He knew what he wanted and thought strategically about how to achieve it. He often succeeded in getting what he wanted. That requires intelligence.
On “A Thing I Do Not Understand about Libertarians”
Why do you want to make life hard for urinologists?
On “Thursday Night Bar Fight #5: Brother, Can You Spare an Amendment?”
Oh damn it your right, I forgot about the income tax. Thats an important but not necessary one to keep since I don't think that an amendment really was necessary to give Congress the ability to tax income but for the Supreme Court being political and stupid. I think that most post-New Deal Supreme Courts, even very conservative ones, are going to find that Congress can tax income without an amendment.
Before the 16th Amendment pased, most of the Federal government was funded by excise taxes on alcohol. I'm assume that it will be similar if the income tax were to disappear. We might get tolls on interstates and taxes on internet porn.
On “A Thing I Do Not Understand about Libertarians”
I'm not a libertarian and I don't think that the "Protestant Work Ethic" is exactly foundational for libertarianism as I understand it. However, man of the less philosophically-inclined libertarians*, that is those who treat libertarianism as holy writ, do have a tendency to rant a bit about moochers when it comes to talking about social safety net programs. You see this more in the people who derive their libertarianism from fiction rather than intellectual trestises. From this you get an impression that one reason why libertarians think that the welfare state is bad is because it provides goods and services "unearned" to people who didn't work for them. These libertarians might recoil with some kind of horror at the post-scarcity future.
To use the obvious example, Ayn Rand and her fans often get into long rants about moochers and takers. It might be better to rephrase Jason's questions in terms of Objectivists rather than Libertarians becausee even though they are offically atheist, Objectivists do have a "Protestant Work Ethic".
*Another way of putting this might be people who are libertarian without thinking too much about it.
On “Thursday Night Bar Fight #5: Brother, Can You Spare an Amendment?”
Do you have any evidence that the old system giving the states more of a say
beyond Southern Senators defending slavery or Jim Crow. The good senators always acted as super Representatives. The bad ones as representatives for the corporations. People wanted direct election for a reason.
On “A Thing I Do Not Understand about Libertarians”
I think the obvious reason why things had to stop there was that Neil Stephenson and a book to write and couldn't think about the full implicatiosn of nano-machines without hitting writer's block.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.