Month: October 2016

This is Part II, the second article in which my hope is to frame the election not as a contest of personalities, but rather with recourse to the differing political philosophies, progressive versus conservative, which underlie the platform and vision of the two parties and candidates.

Between these two personalities of the candidates, and the baggage that each brings, from the constant reminders of email controversies, allegations of sexual predation, the inflammatory rhetoric and insults, discussions of temperament and the like, so much attention has been directed at two individuals and the issues of their personae, that almost completely lost has been any awareness of the two governing principles being contrasted. Ultimately, while the personal peccadillos of the candidate are of key importance, no less so is their approach to governance.

In Part One of this article I argued that a progressive, “liberal”, center left approach to government, at the present time, was most likely to solve the overall threats to our society, and world.

In this, Part Two, I would like to drill down to the issues which seems (when any issues are discussed at all) to get the most attention. That is globalization, trade, immigration – basically our relationship to the outside world and how it effects our overall economy, our employment picture, and how the benefits of the last seven years of recovery have been distributed, or rather not distributed throughout our society.

I will try to research the benefits and detriments of so-called globalization, whether it is inherently harmful to our overall economy and also to the middle and working class, and whether the damage done, if any, can be corrected by different trade policies and barriers to illegal immigration. It is worth considering whether, regardless of the personalities involved, liberal policies would be more helpful in alleviating and addressing the distress caused by globalization, or whether conservative policies would be better. I will argue for the former.

I am aware that at this stage of the game, the election may come down primarily to personality, whether the number of people who view Hillary as a cheat and liar outnumbers those who think Donald is a megalomaniacal fascist and sexual predator. Perhaps that is the nature of elections in this day. Still I think some consideration of the political principles which ultimately inform the two camps is worthwhile, and I hope I can draw distinctions which a reader might find useful.

Globalization and the differential effects on different segments of the work force

It would be pointless to argue that “globalization” has been of universal benefit. It has been of mixed blessing and detriment. Even experts who have advocated for increased globalization argue, that globalization has failed to live up to its potential” to bring benefits to both the developing and developed world.

On one hand, economic analysis shows a beneficial effect of globalization on overall growth.

Some economists have a positive outlook regarding the net effects of globalization on economic growth, citing variables such as trade, flow of capital, GDP per capita and direct investment. However the largest effect has been in the transfer of wealth to well-educated and technically skilled segments of the economy. For those not at the top, however, the benefits have been considerably less. It has been noted that

“as labor-intensive industries move to developing nations, demand for labor in the United States decreases, thus reducing wages for non-college educated workers. At the same time, globalization increases demand in the United States for professionals, skilled labor and capital, thereby increasing incomes for college-educated workers and widening the gap between the rich and poor.”

The need to compete with workers in poor countries leads to decreased wages for non-college educated workers. Certain domestic industries, ranging from consumer electronics to textiles are “endangered due to comparative advantages of other countries” Further, growth in competition which inevitably follows growth in trade leads to domestic companies having to down-size to improve efficiency and increase profits. (Labourec

It is interesting that globalization has also lead to a worsening of the position of unskilled relative to skilled labor in developing markets.

Stiglitz, an economist known for his concern over growing inequality, argues that this is because special interests have constructed the rules to benefit themselves and that has lead to the detriments to those not so happily connected. He was referring primarily to the growing imbalance between rich and poor, industrialized north versus developing southern global economies, however the success of Donald Trump’s candidacy in bringing out real passion, real anger over this issue is clear evidence that such disparities exist in out developed country as well.

Donald Trump’s answer to the adverse affects of globalization on lower economic sector wages is to institute a form of trade protectionism. While this may have short-term benefits, in the long run it lowers general competitiveness and weakens overall world growth, as it was said to do in the great depression and lead up to the Second World War. At that time short term and temporary gains in local employment were ultimately followed by longer-term decrements in trade, productivity, and prolongation of depression. Isolation of American products from international competition has not been shown to increase, in the long run, the competitiveness of American industry, as was demonstrated by the growth of Japanese presence in the car industry at a time when American’s rested on an increasingly non-competitive standard.

There are real questions about whether, for example, NAFTA had a net benefit or gain. One recent Wharton school of business analysis concludes that, while there have been a net loss of some jobs, automotive jobs, for example, from the United States there are certainly gains for North America, and that had there not been a NAFTA, most of the jobs that have gone to Mexico would have gone to China. Interestingly enough, the author also concludes that the NAFTA facilitated improvement in the employment situation in Mexico has brought migration of Mexicans into the US to a virtual standstill. That is not what we would hear from Mr. Trump.

There is not one single “liberal / progressive” view on whether to increase globalization, and many well remember that in the primaries the more progressive wing of the Democratic party looked with great suspicion on a process which enriches the upper echelons to the detriment of the workers. However I believe a center left position would look, rather than to kill trade with protectionist policies, to help workers retrain and retool for growing industries. That is, at least, Secretary Clinton’s position.

The effect of immigration on American workers

The effect of immigration on American work force and wages is complicated. Some reports have suggested that rather than lowering economic opportunity for native born Americans, immigrants actually increase the opportunities for American jobs and incomes. This is because of a concept called “complimentarity”, which essentially says that if a low paid, less skilled worker can help a higher skilled person to get their job done (the person who builds what the architect designs), then both benefit. Providing services that the higher skilled work might otherwise have to take the time to do, house keeping, gardening, home care and the like, frees them to do more productive jobs.

“Not so fast” argues GW Bush speech writer, David Frum . He argues that the positive effect proposed for native American workers will obtain only if the presence of the lower skilled newly arrived worker can allow and facilitate the transfer of the native to a higher paying job. In his examples,

“The immigrant groundskeeper can’t speak English very well, so the lawn service hires a bilingual Mexican-American to supervise him. The rising numbers of immigrant nannies call forth specialized payroll firms that hire native-born workers to process checks and pay taxes.”

Frum goes on to argue that any positive effect of immigration might not really occur. It is not so easy for, essentially blue collar workers to move from less to more skilled jobs. “Up-skilling” as he calls it, requires time, effort, money, flexibility and it can “force older workers to begin again at a time in their lives when they felt settled to risk failure at a time in life when risk is not appreciated”.

Given these challenges, which are admittedly very real, it is not such a stretch to see why an apparently simple and straightforward solution such as Donald Trump suggests is appealing, and not so easy to demean or laugh off. The fact that these concerns are real, persistent and vocal on the part of Trump and his supporters, it is incumbent on a liberal, progressive and Democratic candidate to say how she would address the concerns.

How might a progressive approach the threats to worker well being from Globalization and Immigration?

The effect of Education. Globalization is surely not without its detrimental effects, however there are opportunities created for those with more competitive educations. Unfortunately for the US, the presence of a globalized increase in competition for lower skilled jobs, and an increase in the value of jobs that require improved education is occurring just at the time when the position of US education with respect to other countries has decreased. Due to increased international educational efforts, especially in emerging economies such as China and India, the US has fallen from 1st to 8th nation in the world in the percentage of students finishing high school.

Our competitiveness in advanced educational skills has fallen even more dramatically. In a compendium of recent studies we have fallen to 14th in reading skills, 17th in science, and a whopping 25th place in math! In other words, “the results from the world’s global education report cards show that American students are not well prepared to compete in today’s knowledge economy. A host of developed nations are surpassing us in education”.

The Effect of Health Care Costs on American competitiveness

It has been long known and well documented that the high cost of health care, relative to other developed countries, and the fact that it falls mostly on employers can have adverse effects on the global competitiveness of our industries. Put simply, if an American corporation has to factor the costs of health care for its workers into the price of a product, especially when that cost is high and growing, it forces the product to be more expensive and therefore less competitive.

Asking workers to forego healthcare in their contracts is well known to be a non-starter, but any system in which some of the burden is shifted from employers, and some of the costs increases of health care are mitigated would tend to increase our competitiveness.

Analysts of the effect of the Affordable Care Act have concluded that, while it is too early to know for sure, (and there are clearly some fixes needed), there is a real possibility that the provision of near universal care, care whose cost is rising more slowly, and care which can be separated from the burden to the employer may make our industries more competitive. Certainly a liberal progressive agenda would seek to improve on the promise of more universal and less expensive health care, something which the conservative surely would not.

So what could a more progressive, or center left administration do to address the damage to the American worker which globalization and immigration have created, and why would these responses come more likely from a democratic administration? Here are some possible answers.

1) Investment in American infrastructure would create jobs and opportunities for workers which are much harder to “out-source” to other countries. I have previously argued (see Part I of this article) that such a massive investment in infrastructure would require public private partnerships, debt assumption which only the full faith and credit of the government in partnership with industry could accomplish, and some element of public planning. All of these are more likely with a progressive administration.

2) Public investment in education, both at the primary level, but more to the current point at the retraining level would help make American workers more competitive compared to workers in emerging economies where educational advancement is occurring more rapidly.

3) Public efforts both improve the economics of health care delivery could relieve a tremendous burden from American export industries. Thousands of dollars are added to American cars, for example, decreasing their international competitiveness. Although the “public option” is currently too progressive by far to take hold, certainly public efforts to reign in spending are needed for us to remain competitive, and a return to an unregulated fee for service, such as might occur with the repeal of the Affordable Care Act runs the risk of putting the competitiveness of our products even further back.

In conclusion, I have tried to analyze how a liberal, or progressive agenda might approach one of the most glaring issues of the day, compared with how a conservative might do the same thing. I have tried to do so without a single reference to either candidate’s personality, temperament or trustworthiness. Certainly those issues are not without their importance, but I believe we, as an electorate, would be better served by far to try to debate the issues from the standpoint of principle over personality.

My conclusion continues to be that while there is not easy fix, a liberal, progressive, center left agenda continues to be the one with the most chance of addressing both the longer global issues (see Part I) and the more current issue of globalization, trade and immigration.

The present election cycle has focused almost exclusively on the personalities, temperament, idiosyncrasies and supposed inadequacies of the two individuals running for the presidency. Lost, in large measure, has been a serious discussion of the most important issues, and lost completely is a discussion of the underlying principles which would inform a discussion of the two parties and the two approaches to government.

I believe that we are losing, in this personal slugfest, an opportunity to engage in the investigation of those underlying principles. Were we to bring the basic concepts, reasoning behind, arguments for and against, and implications of the progressive platform versus the conservative one, we could at least, as a nation, take steps forward more guided by an underlying conceptual structure, than the present teetering between issues and personalities of the day.

I hope to make a plausible argument here that a central, liberal, “progressive or left” leaning conceptualization for the role of government and its efforts is better for this nation right now than the conservative “right” leaning approach. I think that argument can be made even were we to have two equally capable and equally untarnished candidates. I will leave untouched for this article whether that happens to be the case or not.

I will make this argument with the points which follow.

Questioning the Basis for the Moral argument for conservatism.

I assert that the romantically imagined ‘rugged individualist’ argument for a moral basis for conservatism is a flawed argument. The argument, stated quite articulately and compellingly by Ayn Rand and F.A. Hayek, holds that when an individual alone, by dint of their own personal capacities, talents, efforts, courage, willingness to take risks, to work tirelessly, suffer mightily and bear any hardship to create something in the world, they should be able to reap, unencumbered and unfettered, the benefits which result from the fruition or success of their labors.

This argument is further extended by the assertion that the way in which the less gifted and accomplished majority surrounding that productive individual can share in the benefits produced by that individual is only through the coercive power of the state, either implicit or explicit, to compel the individual to give away from what is rightfully theirs to those who did not share in its production. This has been called a “Road to Serfdom”.

The argument finally extends to state that it is human nature to work for one’s own wellbeing, and that of one’s family, but once a productive individual finds the fruits of his or her labor being ‘redistributed’ more an more widely one’s motivation to work will crumble, and everyone will sit around waiting for others to do the work (after all, why should they do anything) and the productivity of the society will collapse.
This is, as I can see it, the clear principles which underlie the right, the conservatives, in their conception of national policy and finance. All of the concern about ‘redistribution’, tax structure, the size of government and regulations obtain from this underlying structure of thought, that the individual creates and produces, and the government has no right to interfere.

The argument is flawed for two basic reasons.

First, although there are exceptions, the vast majority of those who ‘produce’ do not achieve what they achieve in a vacuum. Most people who “make it” do so within the context of considerably enhanced opportunity compared to less fortunately endowed. They are born into more successful families, endowed often with more intellectually favorable genes, but more to the point with more achievement oriented influence, they are held on the lap and read to from infancy, shown to recognize and reproduce letters almost from the time their little eyes can discriminate shapes. They get pre-school, nursery school, and, even when not enrolled in a better or private schools, they are usually lead to know from Day 1 that school is special, important to be taken seriously and exceled at. They are generally well supervised, often well tutored, usually well travelled and culturally enriched. Those meant to be successful go to summer camps, get riding lessons, learn a musical instrument and are expected to compete and succeed in literary, artistic and musical endeavors. They are, in a word, groomed. Not everyone who succeeds, but the vast majority. To assert that the world is like a race in which we all are given an equal start and is therefore somehow fair is simply not true. If a race were run where some started halfway to the finish line on bicycles and the others started behind carrying bags of cement, we would not call it fair. This is an exaggerated image, of course, but not completely off the mark. The underlying “fairness” argument for the conservative approach to government is, rugged individuals aside, not really fair.

Second, to the extent that the productive individual’s talent and effort are translated into a deliverable and reward-able product or service, still the vast infrastructure which was needed to allow its production and distribution do not belong to the individual, but are the produce of a vast history and society. The roads along which the products travel to market were made by hundreds who came before, on land which was settled by thousands in decades and centuries passed, defended by the blood, sweat, and tears of millions who died preserving the right to build into the future. The hedge fund hero or the dot com maven owe most, of course, to their own efforts, but a significant contribution to their success was made as well by the unknown communist comrade who fell at Stalingrad, or the son of an immigrant dying in the sands of Iwo Jima. “You didn’t build it someone else made it happen” was a line that earned President Obama a firestorm of criticism, but the speech articulated this argument quite to the point.

The rugged individualist, Man on his Own, is not really on his own. It is a romantic notion, I admit, and few adolescents can escape the thrill of Atlas Shrugged, but a fair and, I believe mature understanding of the way the world works will call into question the claim of the conservative rugged individualist that no one else has a share in their success. The claim is not accurate.

Notice I am not claiming, here, a moral superiority to the progressive view that we are “all in this together”. Most religious teachings argue a mandate to share with the poor. But I will not make this argument here. I only assert that the moral argument for conservatism is at best questionable, and if the moral arguments for the right and the left are, at least, equal, then we should look to what is most effective a way to run a society.

The “straw man” of socialism.

For the record, not even the so called socialists call for a system in which individuals are not rewarded for their individual efforts. While it is always popular to attack progressive agenda by calling it socialist and Stalinist, implying that the productive will work and the others will lounge, that is simply no one’s position. The progressive agenda admits the right of individual achievement and private property, but calls for broader distribution of opportunity and a more comprehensive safety net. It also calls for some segments of the economy which are traditionally private and profit motivated to transition to being viewed as societal and universal. As we progress now into the main points of the argument, it is at least dispensing with the view that the left is socialist and will lead to sloth. It is not, and will not.

Four Pillars of Arguments for a more liberal leaning worldview.

1. The enormous and growing disparity of wealth, income, power and opportunity

, but within the nation and internationally are inherently destabilizing and are the largest cause of increasing conflict and war. Although some argue that inequality has mixed benefits and threats, most view the level of increased inequality in the world as a threat. Certainly the majority of conflicts have some major discrepancy in opportunity as part of what might appear an otherwise sectarian struggle. Although no single point of view has a monopoly of concern over this growing threat, I believe it is clear enough not to need specific citation to know that liberals and progressives view wealth inequality as threat to the nation and world stability, while conservatives tend to favor policies which only promote that inequality.

2.
Those challenges which must be met to bring our nation and the world further into the next century will demand investment and coordination

of resources which can only be done with a national, somewhat centralized public private and planned approach. The needed investment in urban infrastructure and the creation of world class city regions, investment in the complete overhaul, modernization and maintenance of local, regional national and international transportation infrastructure for both people and goods, the massive development of information infrastructure, health infrastructure and so on will require, most likely, tens if not hundreds of trillions of dollars world wide over the next decades. It will require intelligent planning and coordination on a scale unimaginable for a single private enterprise.

Private entities could not have put a man on the moon, nor could they have won the Second World War. There is a time for a coordinated, public and national response. I would assert that time is now. A progressive and liberal government could see that. A conservative outlook will not. Partially that is because:

3.
The next step in our national evolution will require a very long-term vision,

one that sees our development in the context of technological and social changes extending into the next several decades. It is highly likely that the national “balance sheets” would have to be ‘in the red’ for several decades before this generation’s investment pays off for our children and grandchildren. Corporations report to their constituencies on a quarter-to-quarter basis. A government informed primarily by a corporate mentality simply is less likely and less able to respond to the longer view.

4.

The majority of issues of the conflict in the world

can be easily framed in a black and white, us versus them, good guys versus bad guys, we win means you lose motif. And, sometimes, that is true. But more often, to really get a longer term, difficult problem solved requires extensive cooperation, negotiation for mutual benefit, give and take, willingness to hear another’s view points, and a willingness to come out of an argument having achieved some but not all of what one wanted. Efforts by recent conservative administrations to impose unilateral and non-consensual solutions by unilateral force, for example in Iraq, have been, I think most observers would agree, been less than successful. The effort to achieve a fair, sustainable, if not total solution in Iran used a different, consensus building approach.

The rhetoric of the guys with the white hats sallying forth to confront evil is very appealing, but rarely, not never, but rarely works. At least not without broad consensus building and compromise. A liberal and progressive agenda tends to look for compromise, consensus, and diplomacy, using military intervention sparingly and as a tool of diplomacy. That is sometimes, but, I would assert, less often the approach of a conservative government.

I could go on to list specific issues, climate change, our relationship with our super-power rivals, our approach to regional conflicts, tax policy and the like, and view review them in the context of these pillars of difference. I will not do so at this point, only to reiterate that from the standpoint of what can clearly be argued as our greatest threats and challenges, a left of center government, sustained over a several election cycle will be much more effective in address those threats and challenges than any but the most moderate center right.

The specific threats to the American electorate in terms of globalization and automation are real. In the next part of this article I will attempt to address those within a more liberal leaning framework, which is, I believe, much more likely to succeed than one steeped in conservatism, nationalism and xenophobia.

Notice I have not considered the persona characteristics of the two candidates for office in this article. I have attempted to argue for voting liberal rather than conservative in any situation in which the two candidates are of equal capacity, leadership qualities, character and temperament. I suppose, if there were a situation in which the candidate of the Republican or conservative faction were clearly superior, I would consider for one election voting for that candidate.

I do not believe that to be the case in this election, so will continue to vote for the candidate I believe best represents the more liberal leaning, center left approach to governing. I hope I have demonstrated it to be more effective, and at least as well morally grounded.