Am Politik

Thoughts on this laughable species of yours, and how it tries to organize its society.

• So Matt Damon apparently thinks applying any of the principles of free contract to education—like, say, applying some form of uncertainty to teachers' compensation, as an incentive to job achievement—is "intrinsically paternalistic".
  
  Pfft. Plainly Damon can't garden without a few emergency trips to the proctologist, let me count the ways.
  1. "Paternalism" is, pretty much always, an epithet applied to the left. It is a synonym for statist. (The equivalent for libertarians, if anyone wondered, is "absentee-maternalism"—complete with the crackhouse!)
  2. "Do well and you get better stuff; don't provide the function your services were retained for and you get nothing" is not paternalistic. It's, again, the same thing as economics. Are teachers not paid money? Should their jobs somehow be exempt from all the laws of economics? If we're presuming we have the power to do that, why not exempt their students from the laws of ballistics and make school shootings irrelevant, too?
  3. Wait, I figured it out: "do well and you get better stuff; don't provide the function your services were retained for and you get nothing" is sometimes used by parents, so maybe that's where he gets off calling it "paternalistic". Of course, it's bad parenting—treating children like the relationship is founded on contract—and tends to produce emotionally stunted, spoiled, co-dependent narcissists. Like Damon, come to think of it: maybe he's just generalizing from his own parents?
  But let us be charitable. Damon may have been trying to ape making a reasoned argument—he wants to be taken for a big boy!—but really he was just making a warding sign and drawing back in superstitious fear, for you have dared question a sacred caste of his religion.


• Which is not to say that the idea of "merit pay" for teachers has any merit, because it certainly does not. Teachers, like soldiers, aren't given merit pay, because their success or failure depends so heavily on what other people do (the exception, for soldiers, is groups like the Turkish bashibozuks, who were only paid in loot—thus their pay was contingent on winning).
  
  But you know what? You're still allowed to fire soldiers for gross incompetence, and that's all abolishing tenure would allow you to do to teachers. Personally, I (and I am basing this on ideas from my father and mother, both public school teachers—the former indeed the head of our local teachers' union) would have a teacher's firing-for-incompetence in the hands of the teachers after him. If the people who get your students after you find them lacking in basic skills, well, bye!


• Remember how Ann Coulter's new book is a risible collection of folklore masquerading as real historical analysis? Yeah, well, what's real funny is, she even gets the terminology wrong. The precise same argument, point by point, was made in an earlier book, against the author's opponents (coincidentally also French), and with just as much historical accuracy.
  
  But he was more specific, and where Coulter says "mob", her uncredited source says "Lumpenproletariat". I refer of course to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, by Karl Marx.


• That's interesting, actually: the movement defined by anti-Communism is, more and more, basing its arguments on Marxist oppression narratives. You see it in so many right-wingers' embrace of punk, in the various characterizations of the taxpayers as the "real" oppressed, and in every word Ayn Rand ever defiled a page with or hissed out between venom-weighted fangs.
  
  I'm not even necessarily saying they're always wrong (e.g. the tax policies in this country are not so much bad as wholly incoherent), but then, that's the thing about a Marxist oppression narrative, you can pretty much fit any facts into it.


• Speaking of bad economics, you know the idea of "job creation"? Yeah, well, I'm a science fiction writer, I know a hand-wave when I see it. You say "job creation" because you don't actually know what the labor-model in use in this country is, just like the writers in the new Battlestar Galactica say FTL: they're not even pretending they've thought about it.
  
  See, in a capitalist country, "job creation" is more accurately termed hiring. And you know who hires? The investor-class. Call 'em the rich if you like—that's a nice subjective term, just like poor—but the fact is, they're the ones who determine whether there are jobs. Tax policies probably (I'm just guessing here, really) ought to keep in mind that our economy is defined by its dependence on this comparatively small class of, admittedly, often-evil total idiots. Personally, I, too, would prefer the livelihood of everyone else were independent of the dumb apes, but since nobody—I don't care how socialist the other side calls them—has seriously proposed taking hiring out of the investor-class's hands, you can't afford to have them stop hiring. Again, tax accordingly.


• The fact that "dumb apes" and "often-evil total idiots" is also the description of the political class who determine hiring in a socialist system—you, the common man, are not in any sense not a dependent, in either system—reminded me of something Chesterton says, in Utopia of Usurers:

  This system might run side by side with a theory of equal wages, as absolute as that once laid down by Mr. Bernard Shaw. By the theory of the State, Mr. Herbert Samuel and Mr. Lloyd George might be humble citizens, drudging for their fourpence a day; and no better off than porters and coal-heavers. If there were presented to our mere senses what appeared to be the form of Mr. Herbert Samuel in an astrakhan coat and a motor-car, we should find the record of the expenditure (if we could find it at all) under the heading of "Speed Limit Extension Enquiry Commission." If it fell to our lot to behold (with the eye of flesh) what seemed to be Mr. Lloyd George lying in a hammock and smoking a costly cigar, we should know that the expenditure would be divided between the "Condition of Rope and Netting Investigation Department," and the "State of Cuban Tobacco Trade: Imperial Inspector's Report."

  Or as I myself like to put it, in Capitalism, the business class is also the governing class, while in Socialism, the governing class is also the business class. I trust you know the Transitive and Commutative Properties of Equality?