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Prodding Krugman

Paul Krugman has been on a mission lately.  He has been writing extensively about inequality in America.  As we all know it’s an ugly picture, and as we would all expect Krugman has dug out endless statistics to demonstrate just how ugly.

From my perspective inequality is the most salient economic fact that needs addressing: everything else becomes either secondary or derivative of it.  So I feel I need to embellish a little on what Krugman’s says when he says this in Part VI of his series:

“Yet soaring U.S. inequality since 1980 hasn’t inspired a major government effort to counter that trend. In fact, policy changes, notably Republican tax cuts for the wealthy, have accelerated the growing disparities. And as I’ll explain later, the current level of inequality in America is much higher than what would be expected in a truly democratic polity, one in which all citizens had an equal voice.”

Let’s unpack that a bit.

No, indeed, government policy has not addressed inequality.

Why?

Because government policy was the vehicle used to create our current levels of inequality.  That’s not just a nuanced difference between what Krugman says and what I see as the history.  The neoliberal takeover of American institutions, including the government and what has become known as “mainstream economics”, was not some quirk of history or some outcome of laws of  nature.  It was designed, implemented, and cemented in place as a deliberate seizure of power.  It has its roots in the dissatisfaction of the American business community with the institutions of the New Deal and the limit they placed on profit making.  It was given intellectual gravitas by the thinking of a variety of emigres from central Europe whose experience of the years between the two World Wars drove them to become severe critics of democracy.  Those people then found their way to certain American universities where they captured economics departments and were funded by wealthy donors whose interest was aligned with that of the business community.

Add in the geopolitics of the postwar era when America saw its role as a bastion of all things “liberty” against the dark or bleak alternative of the Soviet Union, and it is easy to understand why both American politics and the construction of economic theory followed the course they did.

The problem is, as I have argued before, is that the concept of “liberty” that became the foundation of policy during those postwar decades was essentially the original one that emerged way back during the early years of modernity.  It was based on the sanctity of private property and was thus intensely anti-statist and individually oriented.  It was the foundation for modern capitalism — in its industrial form rather than its prior mercantile form.  This is why the freedom to “truck and barter” remains at the core of the American myth.  

The development of America itself through the past two hundred years or so has always allowed this version of liberty to bubble to the surface.  There has always been sufficient space for expansion and growth to limit the emergence of other, more social, versions of liberty.  Even the great collapse of the Civil War could not engender a sufficient social reaction.  So whilst older nations whose roots were in the institutions of aristocracy, monarchy, and religious overlordship, had more certain targets for the creation of social liberty, there was never quite the same impulse for revolution in America , and never the same energy for attachment to a class-based democracy.  

And because all true democracy is built on the foundation of a conflict of class interests, this meant that American democratic institutions were never strong.  Thus the periodic outbursts of popular politics in American history, while they have all left an imprint, have never secured democracy against the countervailing force of industrial capitalism in the way seen in other nations.  The Jacksonian, Progressive, and New Deal eras have all, each its own way, engendered a reaction that allowed the business community and the wealthy to return themselves to their elite status and control of the state.

It is in this context that Krugman ought not be surprised about the lack of government concern over the inequality that has emerged since the last great reactionary period.  That inequality was intentional.  Further, when Krugman then goes on to say that our current levels of inequality are “much higher than what would be expected in a truly democratic polity” he is simply tacitly recognizing this reality.

America is not “a democratic polity”.  By design.

Why do I say this?

Because my metric of the existence of democracy is not institutional.  Institutions can persist and yet not fulfill their purpose.  They can be overrun.  They can decay.  They can even perform the exact opposite of their mission: suitably captured they can persuade the unwary that democracy still exists even when it has disappeared or been suppressed.

No.  My metric is such simpler: it is performative.  The existence of democracy can be seen precisely in the levels of inequality.  When they are high, democracy has faded from view.  When they are low democracy can be said to exist.

It is this difference that allows the current conversation to take on a surrealistic air.  Far too many current commentators are spending far too much time regretting the gutting of our institutions.  They are bemoaning the collapse of “norms” and all the other various devices that exist to secure democratic processes.  

They have, however taken their eye off the most important questions of all: why does democracy exist?  What is its purpose?  And, as I said above, that purpose is performative.  It is to mitigate the the immoral excesses of the greed we call industrial capitalism.  Democracy is the anti-capitalism necessary to allow the average person, someone lacking in great wealth, not to fall under the political control of those lucky enough to enjoy such wealth.  

So, while I applaud the effort and sentiment implicit in Krugman’s work, I wish he would extend it in order to incorporate the overt political intent that created our current circumstance.  Once we get that straight we can understand our malaise, its origins, and the remedies more clearly.

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Vapor Where? Vaporware!

Yes.  I know.  I can be flippant at times.  Economics is fun.  So why not?

One of my favorite sayings over the years — I have repeated myself endlessly — is that economists do not study the economy.  Not at all.  They study economics.  Or, more accurately, they study the assemblage of bits and pieces of method that aggregates into what they then call economics, or, more accurately what became “microeconomics”.  They revel in the arcane corners of their logic, and absolutely love their mathematics.  

One consequence of this is that economists have no subject matter to study.  They have methodology.  They have no subject.  Which frees them to wander about the intellectual landscape and butt in on other people’s fields of research.  Which has given economics a bad name, but which has provided employment for generations of economists.  

And it’s not just me.

Someone once said:

“Economists have no subject matter.  What has been developed is an approach divorced (or which can be divorced) from subject matter.”

That’s Ronald Coase.  Who am I to argue?

I am pondering this today because I recently started reading Jonathan Levy’s excellent new book: “The Real Economy: History and Theory”.  That’s where I found the Coase quote.

Levy is like many of us.  He asks a simple question and then gets … nothing.  The question, though, would appear to be profound: What is an economy?

Anyone asking this would naturally think the answer is best found in economics.  They would be disappointed.  There is no answer there.  Only vaporware.  That is to say the method that applies to …

Anything that can be quantified and scrunched through the machinery of economic logic.

Equally, this is why it is never wise to ask an economist what “the market” is.  They have no clue.  As Levy points out the most likely response will mimic the opening words of Greg mankind’s textbook where we find that there “is no mystery to what an economy is” because “an economy is just a group of people dealing with one another as they go about their lives.”

In which case, as Levy ponders: why call that group “an economy”, why not a “collective” or a “society” or a “polity” and so on.  

The history behind the steady removal of subject matter from economics is the topic of Levy’s book.  The high points are well known to you all:  what began as a study of the origins of wealth became steadily reduced into the study of people.  He cites Marshall as being a major contributor to this transition.  The opening words of Marshall’s Principles of Economics tell the tale:

“Political economy or economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life. .. it is on the one side a study of wealth; and on the other, and more important side, a part study of man.”

Marshall hedges somewhat when he says “a part study of man”.   It is as if he wants to pull his punches a little and not tread too firmly on neighboring intellectual territory.  The problem is that “the study of wealth” still posits a subject of enquiry.  The “part study of man”, however, suggests something else: the development of a toolkit.  It suggests the beginning of the journey economics took as it recentered itself on choice and behavior.  It started to become ever more a poor man’s psychology and left behind its origins as a study of wealth.

Lionel Robbins was, perhaps, the most astute observer of this trend, and it was he who gave us the iconic definition of economics as “the science that studies human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.”

Anyway, Levy says all this far more eloquently than I can.  What I would add, though, is the influence of both geopolitics — where economics was bent to serve an ideological purpose; and national, primarily American, power politics — where economics was bent even further to serve an ideological purpose.  In both these contexts it was mightily useful that economics complete its journey away from being the study of wealth towards being simply a body of logic.  

Because such a body of logic can easily be re-packaged as “laws of nature” and thus futile to oppose.  It sanitizes economics from appearing simply as a justification of capitalism or a justification of inequality.  It is concerned with neither.  It is the logic of choice.  Nothing more.  It has no moral stand to take because it has no content.

How convenient.

To emphasize this point, and to borrow yet again from Levy, I find it astonishing that John Hicks iconic text “Value and Capital” refers to wealth just four times.  Yet both words of its title “value” and “capital” scream out loud as deeply associated with it.  That a book with such a title can avoid the subject of wealth so completely tells us all we need to know about what became of economics.

It became all method.

Its subject matter was vaporized.

And as vaporware it insinuates itself everywhere whilst being nowhere near in particular. 

What’s the point of that?

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The Strain is too much

Picking up where I left off …

And, just for fun …

We need more billionaires!

No.  Really.

That’s the message delivered by Michael Strain in this morning’s Financial Times.  

After all, where would be without them?

Strain is, as we all know, associated with the American Enterprise Institute, and is thus a wholly owned subsidiary of the billionaire class. He is expected to do the bidding of the people who write large checks to purchase the intellectual cover that the AEI produces.  In his role as a loyal protector of his benefactor’s interests he has to produce articles, papers, and other influential output that justify their continued dominance of our society.  

When last I wrote I was trying to explain how the business class has always had an outsized political influence in American politics.  In this effort I was using Arthur Schlesinger’s study of the Jacksonian era as an example of one of the few periods when that grip on society slipped slightly. 

My starting point, to repeat myself, was the assertion that democracy exists in its modern incarnation as a mitigating force acting to reduce the anti-social effects of unfettered capitalism.  That’s why any credible reading of modern history tracks the slow but steady expansion of the franchise throughout the 1800s and into the last 1900s.  All the trappings of modern democracy — all its various mechanical instantiations — have been put in place within that timeframe, and all had to be torn away from the reluctant grip of a pre-existing elite whose political dominance rested on relative wealth.  This was not a process of open minded or generous discovery of the efficacy of democracy by that elite.  It was a defensive and much regretted move designed to fend off social unrest, uprising, and the possibility of the loss of that wealth.  

So democracy is best thought of a struggle to reduce the predations of capitalism and the advantages that it bestows on the elite who thrive within the liberties it is based upon.  

The problem with such struggle is that it has to be ongoing because capitalism itself is an ongoing activity.  Precisely because the goal of democracy is to increase the share of wealth flowing into the hands of the lower classes — whose work is an essential ingredient in the creation of the wealth in the first place — it is resented by the capital owning class.  Whenever wealth is shared more evenly the loss is felt acutely by the wealthy.  So they start to agitate in order to re-establish their prior status.  

Thus, there is a cyclicality in the process of struggle.  Gains by each side are followed by losses.  It is only when the lower classes are in the ascendancy that we can truly say that democracy exists.  When the wealthy are in the ascendancy the institutions and norms of democracy might remain in place, but their effect is hollowed out and corrupted.  There are elections but they have no substantial meaning for the majority of voters.  Life goes on as before.  The wealthy accumulate greater shares, until the imbalance becomes intolerable and the threat of uprising and social unrest triggers another bout of concessions and a temporary reappearance of democracy.

It is following in this train of thought that I look at the neoliberal era less in terms of its economic theorizing — which was always twisted by the geopolitics of the Cold War — but as the seizure of power by the business class.  To indulge in endless critiques of Cold War economics and its overt ideological underpinnings is fun but uninteresting as an exercise in trying to explain contemporary politics.  

This is particularly true when we consider the extreme lengths that economists have gone to in order to build their theories in order to justify certain social arrangements — most of which seem to benefit the business class.  And none of which entertain power as an explanatory component of theory.  

Yes, that’s a generalization.  But, equally, it is relevant.

Back to Strain and his benefactors:

The seizure of power by the business class in the 1980s and culminating in its complete control by the end of the 1990s, rested on the careful creation of ideologically coherent views of society.  These views had to provide an attractive but anodyne explanation to voters as to why American style capitalism was preferable not simply to Soviet Union style authoritarianism, but, more importantly, to European style social democracy.  It was this latter social arrangement that was the greater threat because it maintained a role for private business, but within limits.  The route to abundant profit was occluded by the acceptance of the necessity of a strong role for the state as the true representative and defender of the people.  

Remember:  this was in the latter years of the New Deal experiment with democracy.  It was an era of high tax rates and compromise by business — something that grated on the wealthy whose reduced status became the motivation for reaction.  The billionaires were unhappy.

That we have so many nowadays is testimony to the extent of their triumph in recapturing power and their destruction of democracy.

So why is Strain complaining?

It’s that recent election in New York City.

The winner, Zohran Mamdani, has made one or two comments about the abundance of billionaires.  We could, he suggest, do with a few fewer.  He has even had the temerity to argue in favor of an extra 2% tax on incomes over $1 million.  Worse, he wants to raise New York’s corporate tax rate to parity with surrounding states.  This is hardly Marxist or zealous redistribution.  Personally I regard it is fairly timid given the extraordinary inequality that exists in the city — it has the highest Gini score of all cities in the nation.  

Mild though this is, it requires violent rebuttal by folk like Strain, whose livelihood depends on doing the bidding of the billionaire class.   

My disappointment with Strain, though, stems from his argument.  It’s old.  It’s tired, and it is tone deaf.  It is the same old Cold War economics that we’ve seen before.  I was hoping for originality.  What I got was a retread of a Nordhaus working paper from 2004 (NBER Working Paper 10433 to be precise).

Note the date.  2004 was before the Great Recession revealed Cold War economics as a hollow exercise in logic rather than as an explanation of real world economic activity.  It was the heyday of what we all called the “New Economy”.  It was before we fully understood the corporate dominance of the internet and the way in which information could be distorted by social media.  It was before we used the word “platform” much, and it was certainly before we realized that platforms were simply a way of consolidating control over advertising dollars.  

No.  2004 was still a year when the glow of technological novelty was strong and the rents that flow from innovation in technologies where network scales matter had not yet strangled competition.  Nordhaus set out to examine what appeared to be the very high stock prices of technology companies and the relationship between rapid productivity growth and corporate profits.  Were, he asked along the way, speculators attributing the correct rate of capture of profit from innovation to the firms involved?  Or was there, by inference, a bubble in stock prices because of an error in that rate of attribution? 

We do not need to examine the details Nordhaus presented.  Our interest is in Strain’s use of his conclusion.

Which is, notably, that businesses and there “innovators”  are pretty awful at retaining a large portion of the profits from innovation.  The depreciation per year of the firm’s capacity to protect that profit is due to all sorts of things: competition, poor intellectual propter protection, and the arrival of yet newer innovations all play a part.  Nordhaus estimated that surplus profits from innovation depreciate by about 20% per year.  After a few more assumptions and estimates he arrives at the conclusion that over the entire postwar period (1948-2001) business only managed to retain 2.2% of the profit generated from innovation.  The rest flowed into society as “social surplus” — i.e. better products, lower prices, etc.  

It is this 2.2% figure that Strain then applies to his billionaires in order to demonstrate his point:  we need more of them because they are generating a ton of surplus and they are awful at keeping it for themselves.   He uses Jeff Bezos as his example — confirming the tone deaf nature of the business class in view of the absurd spectacle of Bezos’ wedding last week.  Strain says that because Bezos has accumulated personal wealth of  about $240 billion, and applying that factor of 2.2%, we can argue Bezos has created around $11 trillion for society as a whole.  

Wow.  We need more billionaires.  

Do some simple math: just handful of billionaires can account for the entirety of economic activity.  The mere multi-millionaires have no impact.  And the ordinary folk?  They enter only as a rounding figure.  If at all.

This is, of course, if we accept Bezos as an innovator.  And if we accept that Nordhaus’s analysis still holds two decades further into the “New Economy”.  And if we accept that Bezos hasn’t been able to build suitable moats around his wealth to prevent the sort of depreciation critical to Nordhaus’s conclusion.  Is, in other words, Bezos that hapless?  Is he that lacking in skill?  Or, to generalize, are all our billionaires that incompetent in protecting their wealth that they allow it all to flow downhill to the lesser folk?  Do need better and more clever billionaires?

With Bezos suitably established as a pillar of society, and with the AEI’s duty duly done, Strain then goes on the make the usual assortment of comments we expect from people paid to do the bidding of the business class.  Take this as an example:

“One of the central moral promises of democratic capitalism is that people receive their just rewards.  In our system, economic inequality is tolerable if not reflects differences in effort, risk taking, skill, and choices.  The evidence strongly suggests that this promise is being kept — remuneration is primarily determined by productivity.” 

I know.

I choked on my coffee too.

As a pablum citation of Cold War nonsense it is a classic.  As a statement about reality it is fantasy.

The implication, given the difference between Bezos’s wealth and that of, for the sake of argument that of most Amazon employees, is that he must work prodigious hours each week.  They do.  So he, in order to work harder and thus “earn” that extra wealth he must be in the office 24/7 … no 48/14 … no … you do the math.  And his skill at loading those packages is just stunning.  His fulfillment rate is legendary.  Quite why Amazon needs to employ anyone else is baffling.  Given the wealth difference, and using Strain’s standard explanation of it, Bezos alone would be sufficient to generate Amazon’s profits.  

It all falls apart in the light of day.

But as a parable based on Cold War logic it is wonderful.

And notice the conflation of capitalism with democracy as in “democratic capitalism”.  Given that democracy exists precisely to reduce the effects of capitalism linking the two into one conjoined system is simply a trick to create an illusion useful only to the business class and its billionaires.  At no point must the everyday voter realize the threat to democracy that capitalism represents.  Or, even more importantly, vice versa.  That would empower the lesser folk and give them a clarity of purpose the billionaires want to avoid.

Strain goes on:

“It is outrageous to single billionaires out for punitive policies.  They should not be treated as pariahs who need to be knocked down a peg or two nor seen as revenue-generating machines for the rest of society.  Rather, they deserve to be treated as we all should — as full citizens, with rights and duties, who both benefit from and contribute to society.”

This nasty attitude that people like Mandani have is why, presumably, billionaires need so many special benefits in the tax code.  Like the tax on capital income being lower than the tax on work.  It is why, probably, they manage to pay a lower average tax rate than their employees.  And it is obviously why they so desperately need the tax cut currently being discussed in Congress.  It’s a sort of welfare program for the rich so that they can be compensated for appearing so exploitive.  It has nothing to do with their control of politics.  Nothing.

After all, they are just simple citizens like the rest of us.

With no extra privileges.

And a very large crew of hangers-on like Strain eager to explain how important they are and why free markets return to each of us only what we each deserve.  I think they call it marginal productivity.  Or Cold War logic.  Or, to paraphrase Martin Luther King: socialism for the rich and free markets for the poor.  

In which case: who is more properly called a socialist?

Bezos who gets all sorts of subsidies, tax breaks, special treatments, and legal wheezes, or Mamdani, who does not?

I wait for Strain to explain.  

And I wait … 

And wait …

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Tooze Goes There

Ctrl.  Alt.  Democracy.

What is democracy for?

There is a huge cloud of dust at the moment as both centrist and leftish commentators decry the constant battering Trump and his minions are delivering to what we call American democracy.  This stream of criticism focuses relentlessly on the undermining of institutions and norms of behavior that have hitherto, it is said, provided and undergirded that democracy.

Few of these commentators, though, reflect on why we have democracy in the first place.

Is this because it is thought to be self-evident?  Is it because we have forgotten?  Is it because it is a bit too discomforting?

Fortunately, Adam Tooze goes there:

“At the level of a city of New York, some of the classic tension between capitalism and democracy can still be felt. There was once a time when redistributive mechanisms could be built in America. The American income tax system is still progressive. There are basic structures of welfare. America has a public education system. But at the national level, since the 1980s, the traffic has been largely one way. The idea that democracy might enable the majority of Americans to proactively distribute significantly greater resources away from the rich towards public services and those most in need, has come to seem increasingly quaint. At this moment, Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, a huge tax giveaway for the upper class, is moving through Congress. It will be profoundly regressive in its impact.”

The classic tension between capitalism and democracy.

There.  He said it.

Democracy exists in opposition to capitalism.  Not in support.  It is a force for redistribution.  It is a force meant to rebalance the way in which the excesses inherent in capitalism seem always to accumulate wealth and incomes into ever fewer hands.  The reason we tax the rich is not to raise revenues, but to disable their ability to corrupt elections with their cash.

Tooze also notes the disturbing trend since 1980: we have steadily surrendered democracy to the extent that actions that redistribute or level things out appear “quaint”.

Given the difficulty created by this “quaintness”, the egregious levels of inequality forced on us by the rich since 1980, and the apparent ease with which the American political system can contemplate and legislate into being laws that concentrate wealth further whilst impoverishing the poor even more, it is quite proper to consider whether America is, indeed, a democracy.

Sure, it has the shells of the institutions.  It has remains of the norms.  It has a history — albeit checkered — of outbreaks of democracy.  Its political landscape has the archeology of democracy, but its present is far from democratic.

The plutocrats rule.  The sickening indulgence and tone deaf nature of the Bezos wedding extravaganza in Italy is evidence of their ascendancy.  So was the enormous effort Elon Musk made to purchase the last presidential election. So is the petulant reaction of Mark Zuckerberg whenever anyone dares to suggest Facebook is anything but a force for good in the world.  

Tooze is commenting on the hysterical reaction amongst the elite engendered by the victory in last week’s New York City Democratic primary by a left-of-center populist running on an agenda focused on the lack of affordable lifestyles for the majority of the city’s citizens.  The plutocrats of Wall Street — those whose existence is the cause of the lack of affordability for everyone else — are up in arms.  

Of course they are.  They have enormous privileges to protect.  The cheats and dodges they have purchased and squirreled into the tax code in order to give themselves advantages that the lesser folk do not have need to be protected against the possibility of a bout of democracy.  The corruption they have indulged in as they finance favorite politicians and Supreme Court justices now needs to pay off.  The lobbyists they have mustered to ensure that elections don’t weaken their grip on power need to be activated.  And the media they own needs to intensify the propagation of “centrist” messages that clearly identify last week’s victor as an unstable radical rather than as a democratic vanguard.

Battle must be joined if the plutocrats are to continue to enjoy the fruits of their corruption and destruction of American democracy.

Business — big business in particular — has always been an enemy of democracy.  Sean Wilenz credits Arthur Schlesinger with making this clear.  Big business. and the wealthy people who align with it. have always held the high ground in American politics.  The sources of their wealth might have changed: at the inception of America it was land, but industrialization quickly created a new breed of power brokers whose wealth was based on capital, but their domination of society is ongoing.  Schlesinger, in his history of the struggles of democracy in the Jacksonian era of politics, identifies class as a delineation.  The effort to carve democracy out of the original neo-aristocratic political system created in 1787, was, he argued, a class struggle.  Here’s his opening paragraph in the conclusion to his book on Jacksonian politics:

“The tradition of Jefferson and Jackson might recede, but it could never disappear.  It was bound to endure in America as long as liberal capitalistic society endured, for it was the creation of the internal necessities of such a society.  American democracy has come to accept the struggle among competing groups for control of the state as a positive virtue — indeed, as the only foundation for liberty.  The business community has been ordinarily the most powerful of these groups, and liberalism in America has been ordinarily the movement on the part of the other sections of society to restrain the  power of the business community.  This was the tradition of Jefferson and Jackson, and it has been the basic meaning of American liberalism.”

This was written in 1945, when the New Deal temporarily suggested that America was on a trajectory towards a permanent democratic state of being.

That, as we know, was upended by the counter attack launched by the wealthy under the guise of neoliberal philosophy and Cold War economics, both of which were purchased by the rich and big business to provide intellectual heft to what, otherwise, might have appeared as a highly regressive movement.

The goal of the counter attack was to present such regression as progress.  It was to center attention on the individual and any from the collective.  It was an appeal to the mythic nature of the American self-image as rebels against authority and as rugged self-providers amidst a sea of hostile forces.  The context of the Cold War was perfect cover: anything that smacked of collective action could be denigrated as Marxist, with the Soviet Union providing the foil for comparison.  The systemic anti-social and anti-democratic bias of the neoliberal intellectuals and economists who wrote the scripts, textbooks,  and newspaper articles during the counter attack is well known.  We know who they were, and which university departments they populated.  Their acquisition by the rich had only one purpose: the destruction of democracy.

The denigration of the state was the destruction of the social.

The destruction of the social was the establishment of the individual.

The establishment of the individual was the undoing of democracy.

For without the social, the concept of citizenship is vacant.  A citizen is a member of something.  That something is society.  So the absence of society implies the absence of citizenship.  And the absence of citizenship undermines the claims to rights of groups associated with it.  Politics is thus sanitized of collective activity and is re-based on the more limited rights of individuals.  

The undoing of democracy set business free to accumulate monopolies, build moats around sources of profit, to undo the efficacy of market based competition, and to restore itself to its former status and privilege.  

The undoing of the New Deal was the undoing of democracy and the restoration of plutocracy.  This was the purpose of neoliberalism.  This was the purpose of what Jacob Hacker calls “the Great Risk Shift”.   Unfettered from the constraints imposed by the state on behalf of the people, business could busy itself with the steady offloading of risk onto the unprotected individuals it targeted and exploited either as customers or employees.  

In short, business was back in business.  And the plutocrats were back in the saddle. 

So when someone pops up into politics and seems to be a threat to plutocracy, they must, at all costs, be stopped.

Otherwise America might have one of those bursts of democracy is has had in the past.

And, as we all know, that’s not good for business.

Ctrl.  Alt.  Democracy?

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When is an act of war not?

It is surely mystifying, isn’t it?

America just dropped bombs on Iran, and one of the questions being most discussed is whether that constitutes an act of war.  

What else could it possibly be?

Only in a nation beset by a confusion of lawyers could the question arise.  Bombing someone else’s country is an act of war.  Whether it fits neatly within one of the clauses of a piece of paper written a long time ago and which has been repeatedly ignored throughout the years is not relevant.

Except in America.

Where the media seems to have accepted the party line that Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium is of sufficient threat to world peace that it is an existential and imminent threat.  So bombing Iran has slowly become a totally acceptable thing to do.  That appears to be the uniform point of view of our serious people.  And hence the media.

Which allows for a change of subject.  It shifts the focus.  Instead of discussing the dropping of bombs, we are discussing legal technicalities.  We are not debating whether dropping bombs is good or bad.  We are debating whether it fits within the tradition of American legal, constitutional, and political practice.  Conveniently for everyone involved we skipped past go.   There was no need to discuss the moral efficacy of actually dropping bombs.  That is a given.  This is Iran after all.  No, the real issue is the legal fine point of whether the President overstepped his authority by not getting Congressional permission first.  The lack of such permission makes dropping bombs illegal and — roll the drums — potentially not an act of war.  Technically speaking.  

The legal fees start piling up.  The politicians cluster in front of television cameras.  Long arcane articles appear in the press.  Think tanks announce special events.  Academics dust off arguments for and against.  References to various pieces of legislation dominate the news.   No one is seriously interested in the morality of dropping bombs on someone else.  As I said, this is Iran after all.  Not at all.  This is clearly a legal question: when is an act of war not an act of war?

So, in true American style, the act of dropping bombs is seen more an issue of constitutional law and political contest than, well, being warlike.

Various American government officials have been very careful to tread this legal line.  They have been unanimous in pointing out to us all that “America is not at war with Iran … it is at war with Iran’s nuclear program”.  This distinction must give great comfort to everyone involved.   It’s unequivocal.  Dropping bombs on Iran is only act of war if Congress says so.  And since Congress didn’t say so, these particular bombs are not warlike.  Not as far as Iran is concerned.  They just happen to have been dropped on Iran.  Though not in a warlike fashion.  Not at all.  

Presumably they came in peace.

Sure.

Having said all this, I must admit it fits neatly within the overall rubric of the American attitude towards the Middle East.  Iran is unquestionably a major irritant.  It has a detestable leadership.  What ought to be a large prosperous nation is held back by an ancient anti-modern religious ideology designed to prevent development and freedom.  Iranians have been ill-served by their political leaders for decades.  And like all regimes built upon ancient religious views it has a restrictive and throttling hold on its own people.  The leadership is deathly afraid of allowing modernity to creep in because it would undermine its authority.  So, like all such theocracies, it surrenders its purported moral basis in order to maintain itself in power.  

Theocracies ought to be inimical to American politics generally.  They are anti-modern.  They are anti-freedom.  Any nation run by, or on behalf of, a religious sect is foreign to American principles.  But America has always had its own strain of religious extremism.  So that particular value — of religious tolerance and freedom — is one that gets set aside once in a while.  

Which has muddied the American approach to the Middle East for decades.  

So, the bombs come in peace.  They are not an act of war.

Not yet anyway.

Meanwhile the lawyers do what lawyers do: obscure things, so that what looks obvious is anything but.

Nah!  Dropping bombs is obviously not an act of war!  Phew.  That makes me feel much better.

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