Ep31 -- The Implication of A-holes

 As you may have surmised from recent episodes, I'm not a huge fan of Milton Friedman's. I mean, sure, he's got a Nobel prize in economics. So he must've been pretty good at it, but when it comes to transforming his economic philosophy into actual public policy, He was basically Paul Ryan before the advent of Creotine smoothies.  That is like Paul Ryan and so many other acolytes, he believed in the all-seeing all knowing wisdom of markets free from government interference.  But somehow he overlooked the fact that markets are made up of people. And he systematically downplayed, or never really cared about, what happens when good old human beings get a taste of power within those wonderful free markets and start to fiddle with things to make sure they don't ever lose that power.  For him, free meant free from government interference, but any interference that came from individuals riding high in those free markets, well, that was all fair game.  

Fast forward about 50 years and here we are.  And that brings me to the one quote of Friedman's that I completely agree with.  In 1975 the year before he won his Nobel prize, he said, "One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results."  To quote Captain Willard from Apocalypse Now, you're absolutely goddamn right, Milton.  So let's take a quick look at the results. Remember a couple of weeks ago, I talked about the Friedman quote, where he said a society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both. Well, some have argued as does economics professor Rob Larson in his recent book, Capitalism Versus Freedom, that we've been living in the Friedman era noted by economic policy from both parties that clearly put freedom before equality.  So, Professor Friedman, let's judge those policies based on their results.  

According to the Rand Corporation, if income distributions had held steady since 1975 the bottom 90% of Americans would have earned an additional $60 trillion, which instead went to the top 1%.  Friedman might think that's okay, but I'm guessing the bottom 90% view it a little bit differently.  Now that's obviously a massive number, but what does it actually mean? 

Well, if you currently earn the median income in the US, which is around $50,000 a year, your income should be double what it is today if income distributions remain the same since 1975. That means about an extra thousand dollars in income per week.  

And how does all that fit in with historical trends? 

Well, according to the Congressional Budget Office, income inequality between the wealthiest Americans and everybody else is the greatest it has been since the Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th century. And none of that just magically happened. There's no law of nature that says the income distribution has to go totally insane. It was the logical result of economic policies put in place by people like Milton Friedman, who either believed those policies would have the exact opposite effect that they said it would, or they explicitly wanted to have happened exactly what has happened.  

So this week. I want to talk a little bit about the mindset of many people at the top of our historically unequal society, and of those who promote the policies that put them there, and how their behavior and attitudes may actually say something positive about humanity as a whole. 

Stay tuned.  

I'm Craig Boreth, and this is The Great Ungaslighting, a podcast about how we all get conned into accepting a manmade culture that's out of sync with our human nature and how we can fight back and put the kind back into humankind.  

But first. a word about a sponsor.  This episode of The Great Ungaslighting is not brought to you by Uber. Ah yes, Uber. Remember when Uber used to have lots of cars available for rides at a decent price and paid its drivers fairly well? These days, not so much. Uber got us all hooked on cheap venture capital-subsidized rides and paid their drivers a decent wage. Then after they got too big to care, they jacked up their prices and started screwing over their drivers to the tune of around $1 billion each quarter in money that was transferred from drivers directly to Uber's investors.  I suppose we should have known we were being conned when they and other ride-sharing apps spent over $200 million to purchase a law in California to misclassify their employees as contractors. And now, Uber has once again turned to lawmaking. This time to help it avoid those pesky lawsuits charging that their drivers sexually assaulted passengers.  And they're doing it in a way that's particularly cynical and makes it clear that they are what Al Franken used to call lying liars in that the way they're lying shows that they know it's a lie and they believe their audience, which in this case, our voters in the state of Nevada, are too clueless to see through their bullshit.  

This time around Uber is bankrolling a ballot measure in Nevada that would prohibit lawyers from collecting more than 20% of their clients' jury awards or settlements. Currently, those fees can go as high as 40 or sometimes even 50%.  On the surface, this seems perfectly reasonable. Why should some ambulance-chasing shyster take almost half of their client's award? That seems ridiculous.  One of the comments on the New York Times website on the article about this asked why should a lawyer get a 40% profit margin when most businesses are lucky to get five or six.  This shows just how many ways one person can possibly misunderstand how trial lawyers' businesses actually work.  

First of all, whatever percent the lawyer receives is not a profit margin. It's the fee the law firm receives for the work they've done in bringing the case.  Of course, it's this kind of confusion that Uber is counting on for this ballot measure to pass.  But most importantly, and the thing that Uber definitely understands. Is that trial lawyers don't win every case, so they have to carefully decide which cases to take, maximizing their chances of collecting a percentage of the winning judgments.  What Uber is clearly trying to do with this ballot measure is to create a reality where trial lawyers think that it's not worth their time to bring cases against big well-funded corporations, like, well, Uber.  Look, trial lawyers have a pretty sleazy, and oftentimes reasonably well-earned,  reputation. But for Uber to leverage that sleazy reputation to purchase a state law in order to avoid responsibility for sexual assaults committed by its employees. Sorry. I mean, it's independent contractors now isn't that convenient distancing I'm sure they'll bring up in court. That's next-level sleaze.  

And we're back.  

Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis famously said in the early forties, "We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.  For anyone who has been sentient in the past eight years or so, I imagine that rings pretty true.  But a generation after Brandeis, Milton Friedman was saying things like free markets lead to greater equality. Which I'd suggest it doesn't match up too well with our lived experience of late.  

I've always wondered what people like Milton Friedman were actually thinking when they theorized about how their economic ideologies would play out in the real world.  I figure they could only have one of three possible mindsets. The first is that they were actually true believers in the rationality of markets that, sure, may result in monopolies, which can sometimes maybe be bad, but they thought for a fact that government interference to break up monopolies would be way worse.  And they believe things like it's impossible for a company to set prices at a loss in order to undercut all the competition, lock in customers and then raise their prices and not give a crap about customer service and laugh all the way to the bank as their stock price increases because they're able to using Cory Doctorow was brilliant turn of phrase "Convince retail investors that a pile of shit of sufficient size must have a pony under it somewhere."  

As far as I'm concerned, once we saw Amazon do exactly that starting about 30 years ago. We should have realized that Friedman and the neoliberals who've been setting economic policy in America since the late seventies, were at best naive and at worst, just opportunists trying desperately to create an intellectual excuse for unconscionable greed and inequality.  

Okay, second.  Since this was the height of the Cold War, maybe they genuinely believed that any government interference was simply a slippery slope to Stalinism. So obviously the best possible system would be the one in which there is zero government intervention.  I talked about this a little bit last week. It's sort of like saying if one dose of a drug is good. 50 doses of a drug must be great.  But all those guys had to do to find a counterfactual to their thinking was look at the previous three decades since World War II,  which saw FDRs New Deal implementing a lot of government interference, which created unprecedented increases in middle-class prosperity. So to ignore all that, you either have to be an idiot, or for some reason, you'd have to believe that middle-class prosperity isn't the kind of prosperity that really counts.  

The third possibility would suggest that they ascribed to what Heather McGee calls, drained pool politics. Remember, these Friedman quotes came from the mid-seventies, as the effects of the Civil Rights Act were really kicking in.  What McGee meant by drained pool politics was, as Black folks were finally allowed to take advantage of public resources, like public pools, many communities across the country decided that they would rather fill in those pools with concrete, destroying a beloved public resource, rather than share it with Black folks.  So maybe, and I'm just asking questions here, not accusing anybody, but maybe it was virulent racism that caused the shift away from public investment and toward comprehensive privatization.  

Now, I don't know which of those reasons led us down the path we've been on for almost 50 years. But as far as I can tell, it's some combination of those three.  Okay, but so what you may be asking? Well, here's so what: it gets me to what I hope will be the big takeaway for this week. And this may be a total rationalization on my part, but I'm going to go with it anyway.  I think that this need to create an intellectual excuse for greedy asshole-ish behavior is proof that humans are fundamentally good-hearted, generous, caring creatures.  

Okay, stick with me. If we weren't, there'd never be a need to justify extreme greed.  They would just do it and gloat about it.  I imagine deep down inside, deep down inside,  people like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk understand that it's absurd for them to have single-handed control over so much wealth.  I mean, there are over 800 billionaires in the United States right now. If you take one 10th of them. 80 of them. They hold as much wealth as the poorest 4 billion people on earth. That's 80 versus 4 billion.  I think that those guys have a tiny little seed of cognitive dissonance deep down in their subconscious about that. So they tell themselves stories to justify their extreme wealth. They're smarter. They work harder and they're doing important works with their money. And after a while living in that headspace, they take it to the next logical step, which is if I'm richer because I'm smarter and work harder and create things of greater value, then everyone less wealthy than me must be lesser on those metrics. And if the point of human existence is to reach the highest levels of excellence and achievement, then there's no logical argument for me giving up any of what I've got.  All that will do is reward people for being less smart, less hardworking, and less innovative.  Follow that to its logical conclusion and humans will devolve ourselves out of existence.  Now experience is showing us that the exact opposite is true. What in fact is getting us closer and closer to extinction is the power held by a very few people who can dictate public policy to suit their own interests often to the detriment of the rest of humanity.  And besides that, there's just a fundamental logical error that they're making.  They've defined excellence in human achievement very specifically, as exactly that and only that which has made me personally achieve what I've defined as excellence.  All you have to do is define excellence in a more humanistic, charitable, environmentally conscious, and collaborative way and suddenly, by those metrics, those guys don't look so hot.  And my hope is that what will happen once we realize how detrimental to human existence so many of these billionaire policy influencers have become,  and once we stop idolizing wealth that was accumulated for its own sake, we may begin to value those traits that are a bit more conducive to human survival.  And I think having a vice president who directly holds no stock or bonds and rents his home, but nevertheless appears to be a damn fine human being is a great place to start.  

Well, that's it for this week. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with anyone and everyone you think might like it. And until next time, be kind to yourself, cut each other, some slack, and always use your f*cking turn signal.