"I don’t endorse the argument of the philosopher John Rawls that no one is entitled to a high income because..."

"... even characteristics that we think internal rather than external to a person, like IQ and leadership skills and athletic skills and energy and good health, are ultimately the product of luck. Therefore, Rawls argued, no one should be allowed to keep more of his earnings than necessary to 'incentivize' him to exert himself in a way that will maximize the social product."

So says Richard Posner. His objection is:

That treats people like the cells of an animal’s body, or the ants in an ant heap. Rather my point is that, to the extent reducing income inequality increases overall social welfare, there is a case for programs, financed by the well to do, that increase overall welfare by more than the cost of the programs. There is no reason to think that the cost would impose a crushing burden on the well to do, a result that would be objectionable quite apart from the costs in diminished incentives, and related costs such as tax avoidance and emigration.

Chew on that. I was distracted by "ant heap." Who says "ant heap" rather than "ant hill"?  I'm more the literary type than the economic. But speaking of departmentalization of each of us having our various skills and predilections, whether inborn or cultivated, my searching for the answer to my heap/hill question brought me quickly to this Robert Frost poem, "Departmental":

An ant on the tablecloth
Ran into a dormant moth
Of many times his size.
He showed not the least surprise.
His business wasn't with such.
He gave it scarcely a touch,
And was off on his duty run.
Yet if he encountered one
Of the hive's enquiry squad
Whose work is to find out God
And the nature of time and space,
He would put him onto the case.
Ants are a curious race;
One crossing with hurried tread
The body of one of their dead
Isn't given a moment's arrest-
Seems not even impressed.
But he no doubt reports to any
With whom he crosses antennae,
And they no doubt report
To the higher-up at court.
Then word goes forth in Formic:
"Death's come to Jerry McCormic,
Our selfless forager Jerry.
Will the special Janizary
Whose office it is to bury
The dead of the commissary
Go bring him home to his people.
Lay him in state on a sepal.
Wrap him for shroud in a petal.
Embalm him with ichor of nettle.
This is the word of your Queen."
And presently on the scene
Appears a solemn mortician;
And taking formal position,
With feelers calmly atwiddle,
Seizes the dead by the middle,
And heaving him high in air,
Carries him out of there.
No one stands round to stare.
It is nobody else's affair
It couldn't be called ungentle
But how thoroughly departmental

Put that in your Rawlsian/Posnerian analysis.

When Roe v. Wade came out, Justice Ginsburg believed the motivation behind it was fighting overpopulation.

Emily Bazelon gets clarification directly from the Justice about a remark she made in 2009 that seemed perhaps to favor abortion for population control. Justice Ginsburg reframed her point this way:

“I was surprised that the court went as far as it did in Roe v. Wade, and I did think that with the Medicaid reimbursement cases down the road that perhaps the court was thinking it did want more women to have access to reproductive choice. At the time, there was a concern about too many people inhabiting our planet. There was an organization called Zero Population Growth.... In the press, there were articles about the danger of crowding our planet. So there was at the time of Roe v. Wade considerable concern about overpopulation.”

That is, she intuited the Court's motivation, which she says she was wrong about — as she observed in the old remark and repeats now — because the Supreme Court later, in 1980, upheld the political decision to exclude Medicaid funding for abortion, in Harris v. McRae. Ginsburg's 2009 quote was:

[Roe v. Wade] surprised me. Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of. So that Roe was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion.

These remarks conflate the Supreme Court and Congress. It could have been that concern about overpopulation motivated the Court in Roe, as it pushed back the states' power to ban abortion and put abortion in a relatively positive light as something women had a right to do. That created the political space within which Congress might have opted to fund abortions for poor women. All that happened in Harris v. McRae was acceptance of the political reality that did ensue, the decision not to pay for abortions. The Supreme Court failed to predict the political fallout from Roe. The Court could still, at the time of Roe, have believed that it was enabling Congress to undertake population-control policy. When Harris v. McRae arose, the Court had new information and a new question to answer. It declined to extend Roe to mean that Congress was obligated to fund abortions as part of Medicaid.

Bazelon blithely concludes:

The history lesson is this: There was a feminist women’s rights argument for legal abortion in the 1970s, which the Supreme Court accepted in Roe v. Wade. And there was a separate and distinct argument about preventing population growth by being pro-abortion, made by groups like Zero Population Growth, which the court did not accept, not in Roe and not later.

The women's rights argument is presentable and defensible. Abortion for population control was and is too ugly — and too close to racism — for comfort. What is uncomfortable is suppressed. In that sense the denial is admirable. But Bazelon's instruction on the "history lesson" is too pat and too sanitized to be taken uncritically.

Paul Ryan tries to make the worrisome percentage 30, not 47.

"Seventy percent of Americans want the American dream. They believe in the American idea. Only 30 percent want the welfare state... Before too long, we could become a society where the net majority of Americans are takers, not makers."

"The most leftie opening ceremony I have ever seen - more than Beijing, the capital of a communist state! Welfare tribute next?"

A member of Parliament tweets.

"Porn, stripping get Octomom Nadya Suleman off welfare."

"There's really nothing I won't do to support them or care for them.... Every good mom or dad can identify with that, providing for their safety, their well-being."

"The Progressivity of Taxes and Transfers."

From Harvard econprof Greg Mankiw:

Because transfer payments are, in effect, the opposite of taxes, it makes sense to look not just at taxes paid, but at taxes paid minus transfers received. For 2009, the most recent year available, here are taxes less transfers as a percentage of market income (income that households earned from their work and savings):

Bottom quintile: -301 percent
Second quintile: -42 percent
Middle quintile: -5 percent
Fourth quintile: 10 percent
Highest quintile: 22 percent

Top one percent: 28 percent

The negative 301 percent means that a typical family in the bottom quintile receives about $3 in transfer payments for every dollar earned.

The most surprising fact to me was that the effective tax rate is negative for the middle quintile. According to the CBO data, this number was +14 percent in 1979 (when the data begin) and remained positive through 2007. It was negative 0.5 percent in 2008, and negative 5 percent in 2009. That is, the middle class, having long been a net contributor to the funding of government, is now a net recipient of government largess.

And by "now" he means 2009. It's now 2012. What is it now?

ADDED: Had to correct "lawprof" to "econprof." I know he's an econprof. I'm like Obama the other day saying that the people fainting in the crowd could be helped by "paralegals." Once you get law in your head, it seeps in everywhere, often inappropriately!

"Do you think that the man in line behind you and the lady behind him want to buy you your cigarettes?"

The 65-year-old cashier who scolded the 20-year-old with the EBT card and refused to let him buy cigarettes.

The next day, the 20-year-old’s “foster mother” showed up at the Big Apple to complain about how her “son” had been mistreated. Jackie Whiton talked back again.

“I told her, ‘Use the money you get from the state to buy his cigarettes.’ She said, ‘Absolutely not.’ ”...

“He was very capable of working,” Jackie said, “so I told him to get a J-O-B.”

Whitton was fired.

Should Whiton have been fired?
	Yes, for talking to a customer like that, but her policy opinion is correct.
	No, she's a heroine, and all cashiers should do the same.
	Eh. It's complex. But don't fire her. Give her another chance, and fix the policy.
	Yes, and in fact customers should be allowed to buy what they want.
pollcode.com free polls

By the way, were you familiar with the term "EBT card"? Do you know what the letters stand for? (I didn't.)

"In this video, what is astounding is that Rebecca, the Planned Parenthood counselor, starts arranging with the actor about how to get a late-term abortion."

"To wait until her pregnancy is so developed that — and using Medicaid for this, using the state to pay for the ultrasound to determine the gender, and then to do a late term abortion if it was a little girl."

ADDED: Planned Parenthood responds:

"Within three days of this patient interaction, the staff member’s employment was ended and all staff members at this affiliate were immediately scheduled for retraining in managing unusual patient encounters...."

This spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood Federation of America [said] that the organization condemns seeking abortions on the basis of gender, but its policy is to provide “high quality, confidential, nonjudgmental care to all who come into” its health centers. That means that no Planned Parenthood clinic will deny a woman an abortion based on her reasons for wanting one, except in those states that explicitly prohibit sex-selective abortions (Arizona, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and Illinois).

Then why did they fire the staff member? I'm guessing the problem was that she colluded with the "patient" about how to extract money from Medicaid and services from the OB doctor in her effort to find out whether she was pregnant with a girl.

"Julia" was the Democratic Party's "attempt to make singlehood cool and fresh and new..."

"... in an attempt to court [the single woman] demographic."

Yeah, I know: an "attempt... in an attempt" — it's sloppy writing. In the WaPo (by Jessica Gavora, but I'm linking anyway.

[Julia] is the Democrats’ answer to Romney’s family Christmas card. A nation of women on their own, after all, doesn’t relate very well to fecund portraits of smiling white moms and dads with kids and golden retrievers underfoot. With her spare, faceless affect, Julia is meant to evoke a more modern, independent sensibility — with the exception of her life of endless government dependency, that is.

Faceless! That word came up on the blog yesterday, as we talked about Obama's bullying of the schoolgirl "Coretta." He described the other children — the ones whose chanting caused him to turn on the girl – as "faceless." (They were silhouetted by the sun.)

There are 2 other appearances of the word "faceless" in "Dreams From My Father." But this is going to require a separate post. Just talk about "Julia" here. In the next post, I'm going to tell you about "Joyce."

The number of women not in the labor force hits an all-time high as 324,000 women leave in the last 2 months.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The labor force includes people who are unemployed but actively looking for work.

This year (in both January and April), only 57.6 percent of the women in the civilian noninstitutional population were in the labor force. That is the lowest rate of labor force participation by American women since April 1993, according to historical data maintained by BLS.

The rate of female participation in the civilian workforce peaked twelve years ago--in April 2000--when hit 60.3 percent...

For both males and females combined, the rate of participation in the labor force dropped to 63.6 percent in April—the lowest rate since December 1981.

Recently, however, women have been leaving the labor force in larger numbers than men.

It would be interesting to know why this has happened. Is it a cultural trend, with families restructuring to single-earner form? Are more women going the "Julia" route, finding succor in the arms of the government? Or is this mostly the government's recategorization of the unemployed, done to keep us from seeing the real unemployment percentage?

Alexandra Pelosi "is declining to understand the critique."

Says Ta-Nehisi Coates, attacking the filmmaker for a documentary that shows poor white people in Mississippi and poor black people NYC displaying divergent attitudes toward the government. The white people want the government out of their lives, and the black people accept government intrusion that comes in the form of welfare benefits. Coates assails Pelosi for thinking that by offending "both sides," she can get away with demeaning poor people:

That a person who would use journalism to render whole geographies as cartoons, would journey to friendlier environs and pull the same vapid trick should be expected....

Since when did shitting on poor and working people become worthy of self-congratulation? When did punching down become avant-garde?

That's how Coates frames it. Now watch the video:



ADDED: I love when Bill Maher says (at 8:48):

You and I are not racists. I just gave my imaginary child's college fund to Barack Obama, and your mother is Nancy Pelosi. So of all the people in the world — we are not out to fuck black people.

That's a very crude analysis of racism! They stroke themselves with this belief that because they support the Democratic Party, they are certified non-racists. Where's the self-criticism? Isn't it at least possible that their party's policies represent a low opinion of black people, that they are paternalistic, that they take advantage of a seemingly locked in voting bloc?

"Dublin dole office bans those in pyjamas."

"There is a psychological aspect and pyjamas are associated with sleeping at night and comfort in the home...  You have to get into the mindset of what you are doing that day. So if you are wanting to get a job, go dressed prepared to get a job."

Oh, come on. People dress to express themselves. These "pyjama"-wearers are telling the government something important about the way they feel about the "dole." Don't squelch the communication. Don't stanch the flow of information between citizen and government.

Adult baby throws a tantrum when he hears of a threat to his SSI payments.

"You wanna test how damn serious I am about leaving this world, screw with my check that pays for this apartment and food. Try it. See how serious I am. I don’t care... I have no problem killing myself. Take away the last thing keeping me here, and see what happens. Next time you see me on the news, it will be me in a body bag."

"Individuals who don’t purchase insurance they can afford have made a choice to take a free ride on the health care system."

That's a sentence I've already quoted in the previous post, but focusing on it in isolation, I see it's a stunning example of something I've been observing more and more: Today's liberals sound like yesterday's right-wingers.

Read that sentence closely: "Individuals who don’t purchase insurance they can afford have made a choice to take a free ride on the health care system." Doesn't Larry Tribe sound like your old man carping about welfare queens? There's no pity for people who are struggling to cover their basic expenses: Ah, don't be a bleeding heart — Larry/The Old Man scoffs — these people are choosing to sponge off the rest of us.

Tribe had to block out the possibility that people without health insurance aren't really making a choice. After paying for the things they think they need, they just don't have enough money left to cover a major expense that doesn't bring them a present good, only insurance against something that could go wrong.

Yeah, but that's why we need to force them to take responsibility, make them put insurance into their household budget along with the extra cupcakes and cars they're always blowing their money on — Larry/The Old Man snaps back at you.

Maybe now, you're thinking The Old Man was right! I'm not saying he wasn't. I'm just saying the liberals of today sound like The Old Man who used to enrage us with his heartlessness and his cynical observations about the lives of the people we thought of as vulnerable and unfortunate. That doesn't mean today's liberals are wrong. And I'll leave it to you to tease out the corresponding observation about the conservatives of today. Are they saying things that we Boomers, in our hippie days, used to scream back at The Old Man?

It's easy retaining your status as the oldest man in Tokyo...

... when you're already dead.

[W]hen officials went to congratulate Sogen Kato on his 111th birthday....  discovered a mummified body, believed to be Kato, lying in his bed, wearing underwear and pyjamas, covered with a blanket.

Mr Kato's relatives told police that he had "confined himself in his room more than 30 years ago and became a living Buddha"...

But the family had received 9.5 million yen ($109,000: £70,000) in widower's pension payments via Mr Kato's bank account since his wife died six years ago, and some of the money had recently been withdrawn....

"His family must have known he has been dead all these years and acted as if nothing happened. It's so eerie," said Yutaka Muroi, a Tokyo metropolitan welfare official.

What uncaring skepticism toward religion!

"Unmarried women, 70% of unmarried women, voted for Obama..."

"... and this is because when you kick your husband out, you've got to have big brother government to be your provider."

Said Phyllis Schlafly, who meant to say that: "Yes, I said that. It's true, too. All welfare goes to unmarried moms."

"We want a society where your birth certificate is your passport, and everything is free."

That's a quote from Abbie Hoffman, from a 1971 article in The New York Times called "Ripping Off, The New Lifestyle." I ran across it this morning as I was preparing to teach United States Department of Agriculture v. Moreno (1973), a case about a 1971 amendment to the food stamp program that kept unrelated persons from qualifying as a household. The Supreme Court saw it as "a bare congressional desire to harm a politically unpopular group" — that is, hippies — which is not a legitimate governmental interest.

If you want to get a feeling for why Congress freaked out about hippies, go read that article. It's hilarious and disturbing. There's the commune called The Orphanage that has a sign on the wall reading: "The Best Things in Life Are Free — If You Steal Them From the Bourgeoisie." They collected unemployment, welfare, and food stamps (which they sold). The preferred method of getting food was shoplifting.

Ripping off — stealing to the uninitiated — is rapidly become as much a part of the counterculture as drugs and rock music.... [H]undreds of young people live solely off goods they are able to liberate from private enterprise and funds they manage to extract from the Government. Thousands more supplement conventional income with frequent forays, as often for the sheer joy of bilking hated institutions as for the plunder itself.

... College graduates who once might have dreamed of, say, a law partnership, now fantasize knocking over a Brink's truck....

Behind the new morality of theft without guilt is a radical ideology — some would call it a rationalization — which sees America as a society based on the rip off, its most respected citizens businessmen who have most successfully held up the most people... "The dictionary of law is written by the bosses of order," writes [Abbie] Hoffman. "Our moral dictionary says no heisting from each other. To steal from a brother or sister is evil. To not steal from the institutions that are the pillars of the Pig Empire is equally immoral."...

Youths line up at unemployment insurance offices, happily explaining they can't find work because potential employers object to long hair, and at supermarket checkout counters where the signs say, "We Accept Food Stamps."

"Programs intended to help deserving poor folks are perverted to subsidize hippie communes," charges California Gov. Ronald Reagan. "Poverty-stricken mothers stand in line at the market to buy meager amounts of beans and dried milk, and watch shaggy dropouts use food stamps to pay for steaks and butter." ...

Here, the NYT notes the amendment to the food stamp law that was held unconstitutional in Moreno.

Is ripping off piecemeal revolution, an unorganized conspiracy of hit-and-run assaults on capitalism, or is it simply criminality without the extenuating circumstances of forced poverty?

The NYT had to ask! They consulted a sociology professor, Irving Louis Horowitz, who gave them this incredible quote:

"There's no longer any distinction between political dissent and deviant behavior.... The two are becoming one, and obviously the merger is going to lead to strategies that are traditionally considered criminal."

"But when blacks riot in the ghettos, is it a crime or a political act?... When young radicals steal from corporations that are involved in price-fixing, tax evasion and false advertising, is it a crime or a political statement? Ripping off is essentially a moral outcry. The ambiguity is where morality ends and petty thievery begins."

Ah! Sociology professors. What would we do without them?

Meanwhile, Gov. Ronald Reagan went on to become President of the United States in 1981. And that was the same year the fantasy of "knocking over a Brink's truck" came true. A friend of a friend of the Brink's robber-murderers is now President of the United States, and people who don't like him like to ascribe radical ideas to him, but in fact he's a little younger than the Baby Boomers like me who, en masse, warmed to the ideology of Abbie Hoffman, et al., back in 1971. The radicalism of today is tame stuff compared to what was freely spouted and admired back then.

Mickey Kaus thought he was being paranoid, worrying that Obama's Democrats would unravel welfare reform.

"On bloggingheads my colleague Bob Wright routinely ridiculed me as paranoid for worrying that if Democrats got back in power they would unravel welfare reform. Even I thought I was paranoid. If only for political purposes, I figured, Dems would have to wait a few months or years before sabotaging Bill Clinton's major domestic achievement. It took them two weeks."

(Would it kill Mickey to give us a nice Bloggingheads snippet of Bob's savage mockery?)

AND: Not precisely apt, but funny: