Kausfiles Minus Kaus, pt. 1

A new series, wherein I remove whole sentences from context, and choose to engage Mickey as though he were referring to practical concerns instead of feverishly chasing union organizers down rabbit holes.

What will it mean to the economy if wages and other contract terms stop being set by the push and pull of negotiation and come to be set instead by arbitrators operating in accordance with some sort of de facto non-market custom?

That's a good point, Mickey! CEO pay has risen over 500% relative to worker pay in the last two decades, largely because those serving on corporate boards have a broadly self-serving interest in increasing management compensation, and shareholders are structurally cut out of the process.

Corporate governance reform is truly necessary.

Fixed

Asked:

Was there no domestic policy infighting under Bush, or did the press just not care enough about it to report?

Answered:

There was no domestic policy under Bush.

P.S.: For some reason I'm looking forward to the press coverage of mindlessly vicious bureaucratic infighting in the Obama administration.

P.S. The "reason" is that you hate the press and you hate Democrats.

You're welcome.

Neoliberals Call It "Dismantling The Welfare State"

Mickey's slow descent into second-hand Gawker (see here; also, he's suddenly started to reference Julia Allison for reasons unknown [does he know she once dated Harold Ford? -- ed. ... man, think of all the black female resentment blogging we missed!]) continues today with a link to their story about how "[m]en who are very sexually active in their twenties and thirties are more likely to develop prostate cancer, especially if they masturbate frequently."

Mickey, god love him, spins this Fark fodder into pure gold:

Do the stats reflect just correlation or causation? The viability of a peculiar kind of theraputic, sexually permissive liberalism -- most unfortunately symbolized by Bill Clinton's Surgeon General -- hangs in the balance.

First of all, hats (pants?) off to Mickey for working his rejection of excessive '60s liberalism into a post about sex ("I didn't leave the orgy, the orgy left me!"), thus confirming my suspicion that the roots of neoliberalism are less Daniel Patrick Moynihan and more Sigmund Freud.

Secondly, are we sure that men need the "peculiar kind of theraputic, sexually permissive liberalism" to convince them to masturbate? If so, does this explain Sarah Palin?

Third, it is never, ever too late to take a shot at Joceyln Elders, even fourteen years (!) later. Mickey saw his advantage and he took it. That's what heroes do.

Finally, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, MICKEY, NEVER MENTION MASTURBATION AGAIN ... HOW IN THE HELL AM I GOING TO WATCH BLOGGINGHEADS NOW? ... WHERE IS THE CHEMICAL SHOWER FOR MY MIND'S EYE? ...

/stumbles blindly away from keyboard

The Influence-Peddling Elephant In The Room

Here's another thing that kills me about Mickey's bailout blogging:

Detroit's major plan for continued viability, as best as anyone could discern one, was to shovel money at Congress to protect their only profitable line of business (selling heavy trucks and SUVs) by maintaining environmentally destructive and energy inefficient mileage/emissions standards, and hoping that the cost of fueling these vehicles never went up. This kind of action -- substituting government special-pleading for a competent business strategy -- is the kind of thing Public Choice Theory-lite neoliberals like Mickey live for.

Look at what it's got: (1) the "why liberals should be upset" hook (for most of Mickey's anti-union or -immigrant rants, this hook is "impact on low-income workers"; in this case, it would be "damage to the environment"), (2) a solid government-is-hopelessly-broken angle, and (3) some Democratic complicity in the problem (setting up the classic Kaus-ish "electing progressives leads to less progress" denouement).

Put them together and you've got the tried-and-true neoliberal slogan:

"If you really were a liberal, you'd hate liberalism and hate Democrats."

But Mickey needs more people buying into the false choice between productivity and unionization or else something like card check might actually pass the Senate. Also, Mickey basically considers unions the Death Star of contemporary liberalism's Empire (with the UAW manning the giant laser or something), and the enemy of your enemy is your friend, and so on.

But still. Watching Mickey pass up a perfectly good opportunity like this just so he doesn't have to temper his anti-union blogging is just so ... refreshing.

The Return

Hooray! Kausfiles is back!

After finding approximately seven distinct political philosophies carefully planted within Tuesday morning's 2400-word inaugural address, Mickey transformed into a catty gossip (well, more so) for the remainder of the week, offering us:

- Quincy Jones' drunk-on-TV shenanigans, which in the pantheon of inebriated television moments is well above David Gregory's sad little Imus episode and far, far below Suzy Kolber's encounter with Joe Namath; and

- A familiar grievance regarding the way parties stash celebrities far away from Mickey in a kind of a pre-emptive restraining order (does he know that he recycled that joke about V-VIP rooms from "Zoolander"?).

Now, publishing two sub-Wonkette level posts in a five day span can be exhausting (don't I know it!), so what subject does Mickey choose to regale us with upon his return to the four or five things he can't stop writing about politics?

The auto bailout! Oh, awesome.

Gettelfinger argued Toyota's workers actually make $2-per-hour more than UAW workers, if you count bonuses ...

If Toyota can afford to pay its workers $2/hour more than UAW workers--perhaps because it doesn't have to build cars under the union's legalistic work rule system--that's great. It doesn't mean Gettelfinger's workers have a right to $28/hour if at that wage their employers can't stay in business without an ongoing multi-billion dollar subsidy. I'm sorry if this seems obvious. It's apparently not obvious enough.

Gettelfinger's point, which seems obvious, but is apparently not obvious enough [is that sneering? -- ed. No! Sneering is unbecoming ...], appears to be that if labor costs are the same across firms then perhaps labor costs are not the primary culprit for the auto industry's current failures, or at least aren't the cripplingly destructive force that folks like Mickey seem to think they are. Mickey -- with the grace you'd expect from a squinty, bald hippopotamus -- simply modifies his original theory ("Above-market wages are killing the auto companies!") to line up with what he's really been saying all along ("Any union-negotiated wage -- high, low, whatever -- will kill the auto companies!").

Now, maybe the problem really is legalistic work rules -- a Steven Rattner article older than Ezra Klein about auto plants on a different continent kinda sorta says it is! -- or perhaps it's, you know, a long legacy of terrible management.

(I mean, one would think that the inability to stay competitive despite selling a product everyone needs with a decades-long head start in the market would be an obvious sign of failure in company governance, but that's maybe too not obvious enough for Mickey.)

Pssst ... Hey Mickey!

There are some balls that didn't even have a VIP section ...

Jealous?

The "Ny" Mets Are Tom Friedman's Favorite Squadron

Where to start?

His image of one America stuck in multiple holes -- even after Matt Taibbi specifically mocked him for his belief in the unified theory of hole-sitting? His reference to "this crazy quilt of immigrants called Americans" (this grammatical nightmare called failures of singular/plural agreement; this awful collection of words called sentences; this terribly constructed pile of idiotic ideas called Tom Friedmans)?

I'll go with this:

That is why this voter is hoping Obama will swing for the fences. But he also has to remember to run the bases. George Bush swung for some fences, but he often failed at the most basic element of leadership — competent management and follow-through.

President Obama will have to decide just how many fences he can swing for at one time[.]

Has Tom Friedman watched even a single inning of baseball?

I hope, for all of our sakes, that Obama can make this decision quickly, as there's only one damn fence in a baseball game. There are multiple pitches and multiple at-bats, either of which would have made for a less-awful metaphor. You don't have, and can never have, multiple fences, each representing a distinct accomplishment.

And did Bush hit the goddamn ball or not? The decision to run the bases kind of depends on that, doesn't it? Is there really a Bush catastrophe that could be described as hitting a home run but forgetting to run the bases? It strikes me that Bush's problem was less that he forgot to run the bases, and more the fact that all his ideas about how to play baseball were horribly wrong and catastrophically destructive.

The more you stare at it, the more problems emerge. Friedman is trying to use running the bases as the equivalent of the day-to-day management that Bush had no interest in, but running the bases is a gigantic and obvious part of the game (for most). Cranky middle-aged sportswriters have long employed "hitting the cut-off man" or "taking the extra base" as examples of underappreciated fundamentals -- why use the most blindingly obvious part of the game to express attention to detail?

Also: Can't you only swing for only one fence at one time? Is he holding multiple bats? Was Bugs Bunny the pitcher?

Isn't the manager supposed to be guilty of poor management, instead of the batter?

Lemme take a crack at this:

I hope that Obama is trying to hit a home run every time he steps to the Congressional Plate, as going 2-for-4 with two singles and a walk (with the walk representing spending on roads and bridges instead of high speed rail) is unlikely to win the World Series of Competent Governance.

He should also coach his teammates to go from first to third on a ball hit to right field, as failure to do so will result in the defeat of card check legislation.

Where's my book deal?

Irresponsible Not To Speculate!

Did Mickey finally make it to Townhouse while he was in D.C.?

And was it like Jim Garrison visiting Dallas?

Fun Time Inauguration Interpretation!

Wherein I present:

Mickey's Next Updates To His Reaction To Obama's Inaugural Address!

- "Our workers are no less productive than when this crisis began." Pro-union! Boo!

- "the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job." Pro-"flexibility"! Anti-union! Yay!

- "new era of responsibility" Pro-welfare reform! Yay!

- "a nation cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous" Pro-redistribution! Pie slicing! Boo!

- "This is the price and the promise of citizenship." Anti-amnesty! Yay!

- "hard work and honesty" Anti-union!

- "courage and fair play" Pro-Wagner Act!

- "It has not been the path for the faint-hearted - for those who prefer leisure over work, or seek only the pleasures of riches and fame." Pro-welfare reform but distressingly paleo-liberal!

- "the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply." Anti-Mickey Kaus! Booooo!

- "What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them" Hmm ... it's not 1998 (or 1977?) anymore? What? Boo!

- "Parsing public statements to the point where they can support two diametrically opposite political positions so that one can later prove one's prescience regardless of the actual outcome of events does not constitute cogent analysis, and is a transparently hackneyed tactic" [not actually part of the speech -- ed. Mickey was too busy hanging with Maureen Dowd at what must have been the worst party in Washington to notice!] ... uh ...

Feel free to copy and paste, Mickey!

Anne Applebaum Is Like A Plane Crashing Into A River And Sinking

I linked earlier to that Anne Applebaum story, just to highlight the ridiculousness of her analogy, but there are a couple wonderful passages there.

[O]ne aspect of the new administration's various "bailout" plans worries me in particular: the assumption, which seems to lie behind them, that people make better decisions when they are handling public money than they do when they are handling their own money.

Even Mickey, master of the Straw Man, probably wouldn't go so far as to suggest that the Wall Street bailout is predicated on high-school-level anti-capitalist theories (Здравствуйте, Comrade Paulson!). Plus, wouldn't any decisions that don't lead to the near-total collapse of the financial services industry qualify as "better decisions"? Applebaum seems to be setting the bar pretty low here, even as she indicts no-one in particular of rejecting free market capitalism.

It's like she's accusing the fire department of failing to believe enough in people's ability to put out fires themselves. While standing in a burning building. In Dresden.

Anyway, the best part is that her evidence of this theory ... wait for it ... is Hurricane Katrina! In Applebaum's world, the problem with the government reaction to Katrina was that there was too much intervention:

Following the initial failure of the federal government during Hurricane Katrina, for example, government money poured into New Orleans in the weeks and months afterward. The result: large-scale fraud, massive dissatisfaction, and mobile homes so badly built that they could not be used.

Thus, Applebaum reframes the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina (death toll: 1,836) as a failure of government expenditure accountability, and is trying to use Bush's dramatic failure there to damn Keynesian economics. I would call that Kaus-esque, but Mickey would have found a way to work Davis-Bacon into it, too.

Yet many good things happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Volunteers of all kinds flocked to the city; local self-help organizations sprung up. This isn't to say there was no role for government, but that government worked best by supporting citizens' initiatives, not by replacing them.

Local Self-Help:


Citizen Initiatives:



My greatest fear is that in trying to fix the economy, the new administration will waste time and money in the mistaken belief that government-funded, centrally planned infrastructure projects will somehow use money more effectively than their private or locally inspired equivalents.

Coincidentally, that was Herbert Hoover's biggest fear, too. My biggest fear is zombies.

Also, note how the poor phrasing implies that "locally inspired" is somehow distinct from both "government-funded" and "private". Are we supposed to expand our public transportation network through a bake sale or something? Applebaum is such a sharp mind that given a choice between laissez faire capitalism and New Deal public investment -- in the middle of a financial meltdown, no less -- she opts for Localism Inspirationomics.

If you're wondering how in the hell she got here from the "Barack Obama as a courageous pilot" angle, it's because she abandoned her metaphor (like a sinking passenger jet!) less than halfway through her incredibly brief article and jumped aboard a half-baked libertarian missive (like a water taxi responding to a crisis!), only to try to salvage it at the very end (like the NTSB!).

[H]e will fail if he abandons the many lessons learned about the relationship between government and the governed over the past several decades—a relationship not unlike that between pilots, however heroic, and the passengers they are trying to save.

a) The decision to ditch the plane in the water should not have been "centrally planned"?
b) Even heroic pilots will fail if they don't follow the teachings of Milton Friedman?
c) If Rousseau had been alive during the era of jet travel, would his treatise have been called "The Social Boarding Pass"?

At least we can all agree that the evacuation of the plane was "locally inspired".