Monthly Archives: October 2014

The Work of Days (revisited)

This started as a footnote to the previous post but ‘grew’…

I would also suggest that this ‘stuff’ we call ‘matter’ may have an exteriority which, as the history of science demonstrates, resists our most concerted efforts to finally understand it, to know it in totality. Could it be that we can learn something about ‘knowing’ from this observation? ‘Knowing’ tends toward totalizing. In the Greek sense of telos, knowing aims and is directed in advance by the desire to understand. Under-standing is desire for arche, for origin. It seeks foundation, founded-ness, to arrive and yet, in view of the history of science or metaphysics, never arrives.

Never arriving is an exteriority to the desire for knowing. Never arriving is an essential teleological characteristic of knowing. Thus, the desire and the impossibility of the desire generate anxiety. Anxiety results in totality and historical metaphysics. Historical metaphysics’ telos aims at first philosophy. However, its history shows us much unapologetic failure. Totality is permeated by historical metaphysics just as historical metaphysics is permeated by totality. Thus knowing wants to ‘take account’ of exteriority, of error, and exteriority is violently appropriated by knowing. In both cases totality desires to take precedence, to understand, to rest. However, for desire to be desire it can never terminate; it can never complete itself in its object. Thus, desire is endless by necessity. The ancient Greeks called this struggle peras and apeiron, simplistically translated form and chaos (void).

Peiron in ‘a-peiron’ is the Ionic Greek for boundary or limit. The older form of this, peras, meant ‘beyond’ or ‘further’. Thus, a-peiron in Ionic Greek from Anaximander is the alpha privative, the privation of boundary and limit or without boundary or limit. Even in the much earlier archaic period of the Greeks, in Hesiod, we have Uranus (father sky) and Gaia (mother earth). Sky suspends, stands off, provides perspective. Sky is the son and husband of earth. Therefore, earth is generative. As the first of the gods, Earth is yet to be differentiated, it is undifferentiated.¹ Earth is the origin of sky. Thus, Earth is arche. In Hesiod, Earth, what we now call ‘matter’, was the first of the gods. Yet, Hesiod’s Muses tells us that first of all was khaos, chaos. Chaos means the ‘yawning gap’, a void. Thus, chaos differentiates and separates (the heaven and the earth). Earth is permeated through and through with chaos, undifferentiated but fertile and generative.

The Ionic Greeks further refined this notion to what post modernism might call the “play of difference” (differance [sic] in Derrida). The play of differentiation and a-differentiation, without difference, is not a confusion of differences or a tautological identity of sameness but an exterior to difference. According to Heidegger Phusis, through Latin, got translated as natura (or the modern word nature) and lost the original meaning of the word which is to grow, to emerge, to unfold. Phusis is generative. Heidegger calls this emerging-abiding sway. He maintains that phusis was the original Greek idea of being. Thus, differentiation, the earliest beginnings of science, of phusis (later physis, later physics) gives context to the already understood (pre-cognitive) notion of ‘is’. Yet, even earlier, we have chaos which is the necessary condition, “first of all”, and by absolute exteriority conditions and generates growth, differentiation and physics by chaos, a yawning gap. What was lost from the archaic period of Hesiod was the gap, the anarchy, which cannot be captured, totalized, brought into the light of knowledge or, as Plato may have written, “the good beyond being”.

In meta-physics we do not have the beyond as later Latin thinkers would have us believe. Aristotle does not use that title since it came much latter. His work currently titled and typically understood by the Latin word Metaphysics is really “τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικά” and may have been added by an editor. Aristotle claims the work was about “first philosophy”.² Heidegger thought it was Aristotle’s exploration into Being, ontology. It was not beyond or contrary to phusis but an inquiry into the ‘first’ of phusis. Perhaps we could think it as the great question of Hesiod, “what came first”. As such, the depth and richness of this question begins science; it begins physics, not transcends it. Earth generates sky but undifferentiating does not generate differentiation, it separates it. This separation or gap excludes a middle, an ever mediated in-between. This suggests that what always and ever grows seeks it telos, its completion, in bridging the gap, completing the difference, the error, in a unified totality. However, it can only ever, like Sisyphus push the rock uphill to have it roll down again. The Desire cannot be complete as it would no longer be Desire but the loss of Desire as sameness, totality and Error.

When the place of absolute exteriority is lost in totality and interruption of the other is taken as the same, as the already understood of ‘is’ (materialism, dualism, pluralism, stuff, thing, substance, atom, etc.), the otherness of the other, radical exteriority, can only be effaced. The effacement of the other in its most radical form is genocide. Ethics leaves the gap, the first as other and has always been at work in metaphysics, in the notion of God and gods. The problem is that so has the work of totality. Metaphysics errs by assuming the other as substance just as science can err. However, the virtue found in science is the deference to error, the possibility of falsifiability. To be sure, science can also be defiant and dogmatic as well but its health comes from its recognition of error. Metaphysics as religion has a tendency to forget its propensity for error. Its error then seems to be the error of dogmatism and denial, of another substance called God. The play of alterity in the history of science and metaphysics is what validates or what fails to validate particular differentiations.

The endless play of difference as Desire can never end in totality, the Truth. It can only bridge the yawning gap in violence, in totality and thus fail to achieve ethics. Desire as Eros can never find completion but it can find work. The work of physics-first philosophy as differentiation and the telos of differentiation as completion, fulfillment and wholeness desire finality. Ethics resists finality as totality. Only death as the possibility of the impossible can finalize Desire. Death as the radical alterity of the other overtakes us from without, from an exterior which can never be conquered. We can never have power over death. We can only be absolutely passive beyond all passivity in the face of death. Death is the answer to phusis not totality. Our telos is not in power or truth but in absolute exteriority. As such exteriority is the ethic of Desire. Since finality can never achieve totality, ‘archy’ (arche; origin) can never achieve an-archy. Arche can never find light, meaning, logic or value in anarchy. Anarchy can never ‘make sense’ to arche but it can always interrupt arche and provide the gap which keeps arche from totality, science from absolute knowledge, religion from false god-hood (idolatry). Anarchy is the openness of phusis which comes from without. It makes science and religion possible.

Ethics as Desire is the embodied of work. The work of days achieves value and meaning in ethics. Ethics in this sense stands back from purity or the proper, the achievement of totality. It recognizes limit and boundary. It grows from error and does not die in dogmatism. Totality is the premature termination of Desire, the facade, the semblance. In the play of Desire, what the Greeks termed Eros, we encounter the gap, the absolutely excluded in-between, which is neither mortal or divine. The work of Ethics gives value, meaning and place to the stranger, the wanderer, the homeless, the errant with dignity which can only be reserved for the gods.

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¹See Reading Hesiod’s Theogony (with Notes and Questions)

“But I want to ask again, do we need to make this assumption of such a “pre-existing undifferentiated field”? I do think it is called for by Hesiod’s words.” Page 13, Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays, Drew A. Hyland, ‎John Panteleimon Manoussakis – 2006, See this

²τὰ μετὰ [in the midst of, among, after] τὰ φυσικά [physics] If the editor, Andronicus of Rhodes [50 BC], placed this title on Aristotle’s work, it may simply have meant that he physically placed the material after Aristotle’s books, the Physics. See this and this.

In Metaphysics A.1, “Aristotle says that “all men suppose what is called wisdom (sophia) to deal with the first causes (aitia) and the principles (archai) of things”” (981b28), and it is these causes and principles that he proposes to study in this work. Aristotle’s Metaphysics, First published Sun Oct 8, 2000; substantive revision Mon Jun 11, 2012

Philosophy, Evolution, Chris Hayes and Punk Rock

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Last night on the MSNBC program “All In with Chris Hayes” he had an interesting discussion with Gregg Graffin, punk rocker of Bad Religion and PhD in Zoology.¹ He thinks of himself as a naturalist. He has written books concerning evolution, God and atheism. Last night he was discussing what he termed “dualism” and “materialism”. The initial story on MSNBC was about some comments the Pope had made reconciling evolution and the big bang to Christianity. Gregg thought that folks that did this were dualists. He made the claim that scientists were materialists. While I am sympathetic with his views on evolution and science, I found the discussion in terms of dualism and materialism to be very anachronistic. These terms have been discussed in philosophy for hundreds of years. These terms have been retrofitted as far back as Plato and Aristotle. While they may oversimplify and fail to capture the Greek differences in Plato and Aristotle, they probably started coming into their own in Neo-Platonism in Rome, Constantinople and Christian Scholasticism. These modern philosophical notions really came into play with Rene Descartes in terms of Cartesian Dualism. They were in vogue in the days of Charles Darwin and most recently for Karl Marx and historical materialism. However, with regard to contemporary philosophy, the use of these terms reflect a kind of naiveté of where philosophy has subsequently traversed. Of course, in the history of philosophy they are still discussed just as medieval literature, Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton’s “aethereal medium” for the transmission of light, along with the struggle of the Royal Society with alchemy are still discussed in academia.

Framing contemporary arguments with these historical motifs is tantamount to trying to talk to a physicist in terms of atoms. Of course, the atom has a historical paradigm and certainly is useful for teaching students new to physics but physics has traversed quite a ways from the Greek notion of Democritus’ atom. Likewise casting the net of dualism and materialism over science and theism forces the discussion into anachronistic dispersions. The fact is, just as science has paradigm shifts as Thomas Kuhn discussed in the sixties in “The Structures of Scientific Revolutions” so does philosophy. As Kuhn points out, the semantic certainties of science are not some kind of self-evident, a priori, ‘truth’ content but have roots in history, politics, economics as well as accuracy, consistency, scope, simplicity, and ‘fruitfulness’. Contemporary philosophy has long since left the binary oppositions of dualism and materialism. These concepts may have historical significances and utilitarian virtues but they also fail to convey richness, value and truth just as Nietzsche’s aphoristically declared “God is Dead” and ether was finally dismissed in Einstein.

The error in dualism or materialism is in the metaphysic of ‘substance’. In the notion of substance a whole history of what philosophy calls ‘ontology’, being-logos or the study of being, is already understood and assumed. The assumption cannot help but think² of what ‘is’ is, is-ness, in terms of ‘thing’ or what Heidegger termed ‘thing-ness’. So ontologically synonymous terms such as ‘reality’, matter, mind, spirit and even ‘is’ equivocally and already (pre-cognitively) understand what ‘is’ in easy terms of stuff, thing and substance. All that is required after that is to categorize this stuff in terms of one (materialism or idealism), two (dualism) or more (pluralism). In the modern occident, materialism and dualism are most prominent. In 20th century phenomenology, what this capacity for en-framing shows is not what it pretends, the actual stuff of ‘is’, but a certain capacity of who we are as ‘historical’. We cannot help but think in these historical motifs because our language, our thinking, is already formed by a certain history of ontology. In the 20th century, philosophy has reawakened the thought of being, what was thought in the Pre-Socratics as phusis, from where we get our modern word physics. Just as sub-particle physics now thinks the atom in terms of quanta, current philosophy has tried to stratify content and ‘meaning’ in historical terms. What this does is open up a kind of externality to the already understood notion we have of being, existence, substance, matter, etc. and asks if the notion we have of the early Greeks is really the sealed, hermetic space, classical philology imagines or if there is an excess that has been overlooked in what those early Greeks were asking.

Once ‘is’ has been incased in terms such as ‘matter’ a whole history comes along with that which even the history of science has abundantly demonstrated cannot be what it appears as. Simplistically, the ‘scientific method’ makes claims to a certain kind of anarchy (without origin) of the direction of thought. It claims to be guided by whatever ‘truth’ may come along to upset current convention. Sure enough, the history of science is replete with such examples or what Kuhn terms ‘paradigm shifts’. However, as he also shows, that movement is not simply a movement of ‘truth’ guided by mere materiality but also brings with it histories of content not merely reducible to ‘matter’ but essentially dependent on politics, economy, culture, etc. Likewise, a certain kind of anarchy also betrays the common notions of philosophy and I would dare say theology as well (but that is another topic). What betrays us is a certain kind of myopia or what Socrates characterized as shadows cast on a cave wall. Rather than deny or affirm the individual tenants of our sight, in contemporary philosophy, we should turn the question towards what is it about us that conditions us for such wanderlust? What shows itself in the unimpeachable certainties of our determinations? How is it we can encapsulate entire histories with widely varied, forgotten and even undiscovered possibilities in such as simple word as “is”? What can this capacity tell us about language, about truth, about matter? On the apex of dark energy and dark matter where physics itself has put its truths in essential question how can we not be thrown back on the anarchy of thought, a radical exteriority which must always remain a ‘yet’? What is more, in physics as in philosophy the whole question of temporality has once again been brought to the fore.

Heidegger calls the notion of sequential, linear ‘now’ moments the vulgar notion of time. For Heidegger it is an abstraction. It may have pragmatic and utilitarian advantages but as we know in Einstein such a notion was essentially made relative to the speed of light and thus the notion of time was entangled in the permeability and contingency of matter and energy. Time, in physics, is no longer understood in Newtonian absolute categories but as having stretch and even termination. Likewise, Heidegger recognizes a stretch in the way we experience temporality where, for example, anxiety or boredom may slow down time and exhilaration or joy may make time fly by. Of course, our history has once again given us convenient categories for explaining this in terms of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ but as we have seen, the historical capacities we have may cover over as much as we think they reveal. For example, now we think time in physics as relative and with a stretch which we put in categories of matter. When we think time in terms of the human experience of time we put that in categories of subjectivity. However, for both the dynamic is very similar and we supplement that dynamic with convenient historical categories of matter and subjectivity.

This detour into current philosophy was to make apparent underlying metaphysics of such easily tossed about notions as dualism and materialism where ‘is’ has already been explained and understood in terms of substance, matter, ‘thing-ness’. It was also to show a kind of philosophical contemporaneousness where the alternative to endlessly debating the merits of dualism and materialism gets enveloped in a certain way in which we ‘are’ or what Heidegger called ‘da-sein’ (the ‘there’ of being). Finally, the allusions to radical exteriority discussed in Emmanuel Levinas and highlighted here in the radical contingency of science, of ‘truth’, even of ontology would bring us full circle to an anarchic origin of a possible notion of God and the absolutely suspended and founding place of metaphysics. The negation of knowledge or ‘truth’ stops short of the alterity of excess, of otherness, as it agnostically decries the possibility of alterity whereas in Levinas the anarchical beginning, the origin of all our meanings is in the face of an unbridgeable, untraceable disruption of the other. This he terms anarchic³, without origin, which also finds a voice in the earliest Greek writings of Hesiod:

Tell me all of this, you Muses who have your homes on Olympus, from the beginning, tell who first of them (the gods) came-to-be.

First of all Chaos came-to-be; but then afterwards…⁴

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¹Talking God and evolution with a punk legend

²An assumption which we ‘cannot help but think’ could otherwise be known as ‘truth’.

³See The Work of Days (revisited)

⁴Hesiod, Theogony. See my yet to be completed philosophy series starting here, Prelude to the Philosophy Series.

The Big, Bad Boogie Man: Regulation

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It is not uncommon to hear the right complaining about the “government controlling their lives”. Most are not talking about radio transmitters being planted in the their brains (yet ) but their proof invariably hinges on regulation. If you listen to them, regulation is controlling them from morning ’till night. We rarely hear what regulations are making them so miserable. If you cannot understand their dilemma in the simple recognition which comes with the word ‘regulation’ then you are not one of them. The assumption they have seems to be that regulation comes from the big, bad, bureaucratic, government man from above. This boogie man has the same position as Satan in Christianity. He is responsible for all ills in human society. He has nothing better to do than torture all the hapless creatures on earth. There actually is a medical condition for these folks caused by an overactive amygdale.¹

The truth is that regulation does not fall from heaven or ascend from hell. Regulation bubbles up from the electorate and corporations.

A plane crashes. People fly on planes. People want some assurance that their plane will not crash so we get the FAA.

Pollution starts giving people cancer in a highly industrial region. People do not want cancer. People do not trust the corporations telling them not to worry because it is not the corporation’s fault. People want assurance that someone else more objective is looking out for them so we get the EPA.

The banking industry starts making risky loans. The bank fails. People do not want to show up at the bank only to see that the doors are locked, the lights are off and there is no one to call to get their deposited money back. This is why we have banking regulation.

De-regulated financial markets start bundling up packages of people’s home mortgages into bonds. The whiz kids doing this figure out that they can get more money for these packages if their bond rating is higher. They come up with some fancy math no one understands to show that the risk for losing money on these packages is small, even though there are seemly larger and larger numbers of risky loans making up these packages. They also figure out that wining and dining these private rating agencies goes a long way towards getting them better bond ratings. Before long these seemingly fantastic, low risk, high yield packages are running out of mortgages needed to create them. The whiz kids get another idea, “let’s create a market that will make getting mortgages easier than getting candy out of a vending machines…folks can get mortgages to get money to do whatever they want to do…who can turn down free money?” When the market blows up and causes a deep recession people want someone to keep it from happening again, to do something about it, so we get financial regulation, again. The whiz kids get bonuses for their hard work crashing the economy and their last great idea is to blame the government for causing the recession in the first place.

Kids get a new toy. The put the toy in their mouth. They get lead poisoning. People do not want their kids to get lead poisoning so they demand a Consumer Product Safety Commission.

People get Ebola. People do not want to get Ebola. People demand that the CDC do something about it. They even demand that the government regulate the people coming from those Ebola countries by isolating them for weeks.

Regulation also comes from large and powerful companies that want to reduce competition, drive others out of their market, keep prices and margins high and also, at times, to keep substandard or dangerous products out of the market. The companies have deep pockets. They fund political campaigns. When their candidates get in office they expect payback. They get the regulations they want . This is called cronyism or corporatism.² Some economic whiz kids come along and tell us that the government is the one that made cronyism possible. If the government were not around to interfere with the workings of the ‘free’ market there would be no corporatism. Well, that is ostensibly true since corporatism is defined as,

a system of running a state using the power of organizations such as businesses and labor unions that act, or claim to act, for large numbers of people³

It does not take a whiz kid to know, no government – no corporatism. However, a couple problems arise after this: 1) It is not possible to have a government which in no way interacts with the market 2) If the market did not have a government it would have to create one. Of course, the whiz kids, with dubious motives, assure us that the closer we come to an ineffective, non-infringing government on the market, the more the market will take cares of us…sort of like evolution where, you know, the strong survive. What they are really telling us is that the new government, the laissez-faire (fancy French name for let the market decide) government will do a much better job at taking care of us. Trust the market to keep planes from crashing, pollution from killing us, bankers from stealing our hard earned money, financial whiz kids from wizzing all over us, kids from eating lead, people from getting Ebola or any of the nasty viruses and bacteria. Oh, and we all know corporations would have no capability to manipulate the market like in the Gilded Age, monopolies, etc. because the market would decide not to let them do that – right?

Well, now that we have established the fact the government is the big, bad, boogie man otherwise known as Satan and the ‘free’ market is the saint of evolution, I guess we can go vote for…you know who!

_________________

¹See The Conservative and Liberal Brain

²See Formalism: When a Lie Becomes Truth (really)

³Encarta Dictionary: English (North America)

Plutocracy and Democracy: A Credit Suisse Report (Update 10/22/14)

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According to a report just release entitled, “Credit Suisse : The wealth gap is starting to worry the arch-capitalists“¹, the wealth to income gap is the largest it has been since 1929. If 1929 rings a bell it is because it was the start of the Great Depression. Credit Suisse is by no means a left leaning group. They provide advisory services for private banking, wealth management and investment banking (ticker CSGN).

Every time we have had a spike in this benchmark we have had a severe depression or recession. The folks at Credit Suisse are arch-capitalists. In the report they state:

Curiously, the Marxist view that the unequal distribution of capitalism’s rewards creates a potentially catastrophic drag on the economy has lately become conventional wisdom among such deeply capitalist institutions as the IMF and ratings agency Standard & Poor’s.

They go on to state that the reason for this is that rich people do not buy enough. Also, credit has tightened a lot for average folks in the last decade. They further state:

The problem of depressed demand is unlikely to be resolved at all by the workings of the market, which left to its own logic will continue to concentrate most wealth in the hands of a tiny few.

The movement towards flat income and incredible gains by the wealthy is called plutocracy. Plutocracy leaves the legitimate realm of a capitalist meritocracy and not only brings us closer to another economic depression but, as history has abundantly demonstrated, will eventually make a violent revolution more likely. As I stated in my recent post “Modernity and the Contradiction of Values Dilemma“, the lack of viable checks and balances in laissez-faire capitalism, intelligent regulation, is a contradiction of the values of modernity. Elitism has always been the direct outcome of plutocracy as the Gilded Age readily shows. It seems that there are trends in post-modernity that are again tugging at the reins of elitism. Anyone that advocates the principles that lead us back to plutocracy and elitism also must silence the bodies of modernity which advocated democracy, the common folk, and was embodied in the U.S. Constitution.

In this election season, each voter should ask themselves which political party would bring us closer to de-regulation, lower taxes for the wealthy and large corporations, and cutting and eliminating social programs that put money into the hands of the poor which get spent much more readily that in the hands of the wealthy. The Republicans have been slashing government funding and housing programs (NGOs) which benefit the poor and middle class. Now, they even have the nerve to bash the Democrats for the lack of affordable housing and blame the government for ignorantly turning Ebola away in the emergency rooms of their De facto health care plan².

Please ask yourself which party is more likely to support checks and balances in the market, find ways to get cash into the hands of those that will spend it, solve long term health care issues or at least make an attempt. It is also commonly known even among the most conservative economists that our economy has always done better under Democratic administrations than Republican administrations³. Also, when you think of political attempts at solutions versus road blocks and naysayers what political parties come to mind?

Look at where Austrian styled economics got us with radical financial de-regulation. Credit default swaps fueled the fires of a private mortgage wildfire. NGO’s loan failures were very small compared to private mortgage company failures. The bi-partisan FCIC report on the Housing Crisis of 2008 concludes:

The Commission also probed the performance of the loans purchased or guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie. While they generated substantial losses, delinquency rates for GSE loans were substantially lower than loans securitized by other financial firms. For example, data compiled by the Commission for a subset of borrowers with similar credit scores—scores below 660—show that by the end of 2008, GSE mortgages were far less likely to be seriously delinquent than were non-GSE securitized mortgages: 6.2% versus 28.3%.⁴

President Bush admitted the ‘mistake’ which put ‘boots on the ground” in Iraq and cost taxpayers trillions of dollars in foreign wars. Yet, the current political narrative has lost the perspective of the cost of those wars, in lives and capital, relative to the much lower cost of foreign involvements during the Obama administration.

Austrians take government austerity to an extreme. The difference between the U.S. recovery and European economic stagnation are commonly known to be the intervention of the Federal Reserve here and the tightening of fiscal policy by the German central bank. The Austrians would eliminate the Federal Reserve. They think the Federal Reserve “prints money”. The fact is the Fed sells government bonds through the Treasury department just as a private corporation sells bonds to raise money. “Printing money” would mean we would simply make the currency with no intention of paying it back. This type of narrative hides the basic function of a Treasury bond to manipulate the naive.

In keeping with their ‘selective’ austerity ideal, Republicans in Congress continually target government programs they oppose. They were not in favor of cutting the Medicare Advantage program they started which was a boondoggle for private insurance companies but cost the taxpayer 12% more for the same programs under traditional Medicare⁵ They would not cut the bloated defense budget without having too under budget sequestration in 2013. They refused to let the prescription drug plan, started under Bush 43, negotiate cost with insurance companies for bulk purchases as any private company would do. This has and will continue to cost the taxpayer billions of dollars. Due to this, the prescription drug program will cost as much as ObamaCare did over 10 years. No Republican has ever tried to repeal the prescription drug plan or change the law to save the taxpayer billions while providing the same services.

Republicans only favor cutting government programs they deem as wasteful such as education, environmental, food stamps which helps farmers as much as it helps the hungry. Republican cutting has hit many government department budgets including the CDC, embassy security, blocking infrastructure bills, cutting taxes on the wealthy while making sure that the poor masses would find it much harder to vote. In spite of their pet programs, under President Obama, the deficit has come down dramatically.

⁶

The spike at the beginning of the Obama administration had nothing to do with ObamaCare which had not even hit the budget in those years. The spike was a result of the great recession started by the Bush administration which controlled both Houses of the Congress for six years and had a conservative majority in the Supreme Court. It reflects decades of congressional mandated spending under both parties and had absolutely nothing to do with anything the Obama Administration did. You would never know that by listening to popular rhetoric. The economic recovery since then and reduced deficit spending should have been a high credit to the Obama administration but the narrative has been turned upside down by big money political marketing in large part thanks to the Citizens United decision.⁷

Did we gain oil independence in the Bush administration? The International Energy Agency (EIA) predicts we will by 2015.⁸ If you listen to Republican rhetoric funded by the oil industry you would think that the EPA and President Obama has cripple energy oil production. The opposite is actually true.

Forbes recently published an article entitled “Obama Outperforms Reagan On Jobs, Growth And Investing”.⁹ The data shows that while Reagan was considered the best economic president in recent history he lags Obama in “all commonly watched categories”:

Economically, President Obama’s administration has outperformed President Reagan’s in all commonly watched categories. Simultaneously the current administration has reduced the deficit, which skyrocketed under Reagan. Additionally, Obama has reduced federal employment, which grew under Reagan (especially when including military personnel,) and truly delivered a “smaller government.” Additionally, the current administration has kept inflation low, even during extreme international upheaval, failure of foreign economies (Greece) and a dramatic slowdown in the European economy.

While job participation, what the Republicans call “real unemployment”, has remained relatively flat since 1994, there was a rise in job participation during the baby boom years under Reagan and a decrease under Obama as baby boomers retire. This chart shows the difference between reported unemployment and all unemployment, including those no longer looking (called U6, it has been tracked since 1900). It has “remained pretty constant since 1994”.

Here is a comparison of unemployment under President Obama and Reagan:

It shows unemployment did not peak as high as it did for Reagan and recovered faster under Obama. Is this the message most folks are hearing? The current perceptions of President Obama are produced by those who could care less about the real facts.

When Republicans defend the wealth factor they often tell us that wealthy people create jobs. While only a small percentage of wealthy people actually finance start ups directly, their defenders suggest that stock investments indirectly finance companies that do create jobs. So who gains when jobs are created:

¹⁰

While rich folks may create some jobs they pale in job creation when it comes to a healthy middle class. It is really simple: the rich may create a job but the economy’s job creation engine is from the consumer who spends and thus creates multiple jobs. The rich will thrive whether the economy is good or not as the graph above shows. The referenced “Business Insider” article from the graph above goes on to state:

Now, again, entrepreneurs are an important part of the company-creation process. And so are investors, who risk capital in the hope of earning returns. But, ultimately, whether a new company continues growing and creates self-sustaining jobs is a function of the company’s customers’ ability and willingness to pay for the company’s products, not the entrepreneur or the investor capital. Suggesting that “rich entrepreneurs and investors” create the jobs, therefore, Hanauer observes, is like suggesting that squirrels create evolution.

Even more so, the great Reagan litmus test of “are you better off now than you were” at the end of the Republican’s great recession of 2008 has been completely ignored. Do we really want to go back there? Are the Republicans the ones that are going rally behind the middle class and their incomes? In spite of the doomsday sayers about Obama, where is the hard evidence that his administration will end worse than the previous Republican administration did? Are folks so gullible that they cannot remember recent history over the continual, highly financed squeals of rhetorical propaganda? I sincerely hope not. In any case, all I can say is that If the Republicans get back into office in 2014, we will all get what we deserve.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” George Santayana

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¹Here is a video about this shown on CNBC today.

² Ebola, Texas and ObamaCare

³See The Great Lie: The Great Depression and Recessions of the United States

⁴See THE FINANCIAL CRISIS INQUIRY REPORT, page xxvi

⁵See Extra Payments to Medicare Advantage Plans Totaled $5.2 Billion Over Fee-For-Service Costs in 2005, Also The Ryan Plan: Part 1

⁶See CBO An Update to the Budget and Economic Outlook: 2014 to 2024, page 8.

⁷See Formalism: When a Lie Becomes Truth (really)

⁸See IEA Predicts the U.S. Will Be the World’s Largest Oil Producer by 2015

⁹See Obama Outperforms Reagan On Jobs, Growth And Investing

¹⁰See Sorry, Folks, Rich People Actually Don’t ‘Create The Jobs’ in Business Insider.

Ebola, Texas and ObamaCare

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Governor Perry and many of the extreme right-wing Republicans in Texas including Ted Cruz are extremely proud of their efforts to repeal affordable health care in Texas. They have proven by their actions that they favor the old ’emergency room’ health care system.

Texas Governor Rick Perry has joined the ranks of other GOP governors eager to assert the sovereignty of their states by nullifying the ObamaCare law. Perry announced on Monday that the Lone Star State will not be expanding the Medicaid program or creating the necessary healthcare exchange to implement the president’s signature legislation. As noted by Reuters, “The announcement makes Texas the most populous state that has rejected the provisions.”¹

One thing that history has abundantly demonstrated to us about the ’emergency room’ plan is that low income folks and folks without health insurance are routinely turned away from hospitals as Mr. Duncan was recently or wait for hours in the waiting rooms while sharing any opportunist germs with each other. This is not the fault of the hospitals. It is the fault of reckless and opportunist politicians which are content to manipulate the public using highly funded and deep pockets, thanks to the Citizens United decision², into believing that they will not be directly affected by opposing ObamaCare. However, in the case of recent Ebola infections in Texas, it should be clear that the more folks of low income or no health insurance are ignored by the ’emergency room’ status quo, the more hospitals are forced to be lax with their admissions due to lack of adequate resources. See this chart below to see how Texas fares with the rest of the country. Note that these statistics even factor in the other conservative states which also refused the federal aid for Medicaid as “U.S. Uninsured”. The tragic difference is much more apparent in Texas when those conservative states are factored out from this data.

	Texas Uninsured	U.S. Uninsured

Uninsured total population	24%	15%

Uninsured children	16%	9%

All adults uninsured, 19-64 years of age	32%	21%

Uninsured women 19-64	30%	19%

Uninsured men 19-64	33%	23%

Nonelderly uninsured- at least one full-time worker	24%	15%

Nonelderly uninsured by gender	Male – 52% Female – 48%	Male – 53% Female – 47%

Nonelderly uninsured by race/ethnicity	White – 24% Black – 10% Hispanic – 62% Other – 4%	White – 45% Black – 15% Hispanic – 32% Other – 8%

Uninsured rates for the nonelderly by age	Children 18 and under – 16% Adults 19-64 – 32%	Children 18 and under – 9% Adults 19-64 – 21%

Distribution of the nonelderly with employer coverage by age	Children 18 and under – 18% Adults 19-64 – 81%	Children 18 and under – 15% Adults 19-64 – 85%

Source: Kaiser State Health Facts, 2012

– See more at: http://www.texmed.org/Template.aspx?id=5519#sthash.HL3MzX1Q.dpuf

What is lost in the right’s rhetoric is the vested interest that we all have in making sure that the U.S. has adequate health care. When the poor and uninsured are no longer the ‘they that can be conveniently ignored’ but the ‘they’ that can spread Ebola to the wealthy and insured, the political landscape changes. If hospitals are underfunded and under staffed thanks to the law signed by Ronal Reagan requiring hospitals to take care of the indigent³ they will not be able to adequately screen for conditions like Ebola. This is no longer a ‘bleeding heart liberal’ problem but a problem that threatens even the most red states. I have always maintained that you can be a very selfish, ‘me only’ voter and still have valid reasons, your own interest, for providing a “safety net” as Reagan called it for the less fortunate. It is unfortunate the even Democrats are running away from these principles in their local elections after the brutal beating from the right on ObamaCare. If we as Americans do not learn from the Ebola incident, we fully deserve everything that will come from our convenient ignorance.

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¹See Texas Refuses to Implement ObamaCare

²See Money is Free Speech?

³See Simpson-Bowles Revisited

Also, see this column by Duncan’s nephew:

Exclusive: Ebola didn’t have to kill Thomas Eric Duncan, nephew says

Modernity and the Contradiction of Values Dilemma (Updated 10/6/14)

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Everyone has values. Values always have a temporal setting. Temporality, as Heidegger would remind us, has a stretch¹. The root of crime is incongruent² values. Incongruent values result in self-destruction and other-destruction. The work of life and the highest goal of thinking is congruency. Temporality certainly brings with it contemporaneous themes but also, universal themes. By universal themes I specifically mean the body. Not just the human body but body in the broader sense of organized (organically, physically, etc.), essentially interdependent and fundamental boundary conditions. In this sense, congruency means harmony. As such, human kind has completion, wholeness, telos³ in the Greek sense as fundamentally constitutive. Therefore, harmony is our ‘from which’ and also ‘to which’ of existence. As long as we exist, we are founded as origin (archê)⁴ and telos. However, equally co-constitutive with body is entropy. Entropy is cacophony. Entropy is the tear of temporality. It is radical alterity, exterior to body. Entropy is anarchy, without origin, anachronous⁵. For Anaximander:

Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.

We also have in Hesiod, writing of the origin, “First of all chaos came to be…”⁶

Therefore, values as congruency is temporized as the middle voice, as not mortal or divine as Eros, as harmony and cacophony, as interiority and exteriority, as being and radical other, impenetrable transcendence. Upon this plight, thought as existence: work.

Work is the movement of peras and aperion⁷, form and void (chaos as yawning gap). Body is the motion of work. As such, value is the promise of harmony and the yawning gap of cacophony. Neither can be without the other. Yet, if meaning is to be found in existence, if body is to be inherent, coherent, intact value is not optional. Death is the destruction of body, at least with regard to organism, to human body. However, body is overlapping bodies. As human body we live in historical, setting body. Human body also lives in matter, physics body. Human body belongs to political, community, labor bodies etc.. Body necessarily connotes “in”. By “in” we mean indeterminate, interwoven bodies. This aspect we call intermediate. Both harmony and cacophony are mediated, essentially and irrevocably. What this means is that there is never simply a binary totality except in utility and intermediacy. Some may call binary totalities ‘illusion’ in grander schemes but if that is the case, it is a necessary illusion in the semantic of utility. Grammar as the interplay of syntactic and semantic, sign and symbol, is body also which reflects harmony and cacophony, congruence and “in”-congruence. In grammatology, we also find the middle, the intermediate, the play of the same and other, body and bodies.

To radically shift modes…

I recently reflected on discussions I have had with Austrian Economists⁸. The Austrians are fundamentally devoted to radical laissez-faire capitalism. They reflect some of the current libertarian and right wing views in the United States. They believe that when ‘free market’ capitalism fails, systemically, it is because of government intervention. The only way to emphatically prove their point would be to eradicate government which would be an impossibility or, short of that, make it “small enough to drown in a bathtub” as some of them have stated. In this case, we have the body of enterprise, of a certain kind of market economy, which has been given an elevated status, a reified status of the proper over and against the body politic. Their belief is that laissez-faire body maintains itself more efficiently in the microeconomics of capital dynamics than the macroeconomics of large government regulation. One downside I have pointed out to them is that non-governmental body⁹ can have small companies and extremely large multinational corporations. Systemically, this means that extremely large multinational corporations can suffer from the same woes as large governments which regulate. They can also be bureaucratic and inefficient. They can also monopolize and regulate the market in every sense of the word¹⁰. Likewise, governments can be small like Switzerland or Austria with relatively large tax bases but distribute social services as efficiently as small companies would in the laissez-faire capitalism. Even very large governments like the United States can systemically be organized as large multinational corporations, as conglomerates or independent business units which give them the same type of systemic advantage as smaller companies. The National Park System, the Governmental Accountability Office (GAO) and many other departments in the U.S. government provide ample proof of this.¹¹ In effect what we have are intermediates at work in the body politic and the body market. The binaries break down except in the minds of dogmatically committed enthusiasts.

The Austrians believe that voting in the body politic is not at all like ‘free market’ competition. This, in spite of the fact that corporate boards are voted in, in large corporations. Perhaps, again the argument could be made that the small number of participates in corporate governance makes the process more efficient than general voting in, say a large government like the U.S., and therefore less likely to accrue professional politicians but anyone that has worked in a large corporation will readily tell you about politics in those corporations. It has occurred to me that, while the Austrians will not say it, they really do not believe in democracy. They believe that the reins of power in economics operate most efficiently when they are held by the few or by fewer folks than when many folks are involved. They hurry past the issues of body politic in body corporation and also wise corporate governance such as in conglomerates. They have setup binaries which define their most basic value system. While these binaries may be illusory and lead to far too reductionist conclusions, the real question is, could Austrian Economics serve as a protectionist strategy for the few? If we dismiss democracy as a viable means for governance aren’t we really left with the mercantilism that folks like Thomas Jefferson were so vehemently opposed to? Can democracy work? Can we have large governments with efficient social services just as large corporations can have efficient conglomerates? Sure we can also have inefficiencies in large government, large corporations and even small governments and small businesses. Perhaps less or more likely depending on the independent and dependent variable we setup in our statistical measurements.

To be fair, power does not necessarily reduce to elitism. It is commonly thought that money is power and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Well, Christians do not think the power of God corrupts and according to them, God is absolute. After all, Plato thought that the philosopher king would be the best answer to politics. Personally, I prefer everyone evolve to the level of philosopher king. In any case, there certainly has been examples in history of wise leaders, wise corporate leaders, etc.. However, without knowing any actual statistical studies on this, I would think that there is greater effects with corruption in greater concentrations of power¹². I am not sure there is statistically any greater percentage of corruption with greater power. Many small businesses cheat on their taxes. Many folks lie with ease. The macro effects of these vices could only be corrosive on a large scale by way of accumulation. Examples of this would be countries where corruption is widespread and laws are commonly broken by average citizens. Those that control concentrated pockets of power and are corrupt can have great, catastrophic, macro effects as history is replete with examples. If my suspicions are correct, it follows that if corporations are people too (but not government curiously enough)¹³ and since they typically have more power, these concentrations of power would lend themselves to greater statistical negative effects from corruption. Of course, this can apply to governments as well.

The problem with the laissez-faire capitalists is that on one hand, when it comes to the ‘free’ market, they appear to completely ignore the effects of corrosive power on systemic capitalism and on the other hand seem to suggest that the government is the embodiment of absolute power and absolute corruption. This dichotomy is not mitigated in their analysis by intermediate factors such as when power is systemically used wisely as many Americans ‘say’ is embodied in the U.S. Constitution or when market players corrupt the competitive advantage (i.e., monopolistic tendencies). In the U.S. Constitution there are checks and balances against elitists consolidating power and corruption. The whole system is based on a representative democracy. If you believe that the U.S. government is a complete failure, it follows that you believe the checks and balances in the U.S. Constitution are negated by the corrosive effects of power. The laissez-faire capitalists oppose any corrective market intervention such as regulation. They offer no checks and balances to monopolistic tendencies by private corporations except the “competition of the market”. They believe that the only checks and balances needed in capitalism are completely inherent to the market itself. They typically ignore the same kind of regulatory effect that large, monopolistic multinational corporations have on the market. To eliminate competition, they believe that price fixing and collusion, supply side manipulation, buying or driving the competition out of business is a legitimate enterprise in big business. They would have vigorously defended the “robber barons” such as John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew W. Mellon, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt. The would have opposed the crony capitalism practiced by these folks as an example of government deformation of the natural business cycle. However, they appear to blame government for these deformations not the “robber barons”. They would never blame the capitalistic system which allowed these folks to acquire vast money and power and enabled them to buy off the government. How could they afford the government payoff before they obtained a high degree of wealth to even start down the path of cronyism? Could it be that they were corrupted by the capitalistic system before the government was ever implicated? This one-sidedness is exactly what shows the Austrian’s hypocrisy and blind dogmatism.

The fallacy of their analysis is that when it comes to large, multinational corporations, competition is systemically and artificially diminished by great wealth and great power regardless of laissez-faire-government interaction. In view of this, “competition of the market” becomes a kind of mantra which cannot be intrinsically corrupted from within the system, the ‘free’ market can only be corrupted from without, by governmental regulation. This kind of binary reduction makes fair competition a variable which, for them, cannot be diminished or increased except from within proper and legitimate laissez-faire capitalism. In other words, there are no unfair competitive advantages which are systemic to laissez-faire capitalism as long as government regulation is excluded. In their opinion, the Gilded Age was not an effect of laissez-faire capitalism but crony capitalism. The Great Depression was a result of government intervention in the stock market not a stock market free-for-all where the ‘all’ was the few. For them, true laissez-faire capitalism would have prevented these historical atrocities.

Competition cannot decidedly be corrupted from within but chiefly from without, the government. This myopia of the notion of competition has and will allow corrupted, concentrations of power to go unchecked. The Austrians fancifully and unrealistically believe that the ideal of laissez-faire ‘competition’ cannot be systemically, over the long term, compromised from within. This kind of blind dogmatism is what I refer to as elitism. It is a contradiction of values which cannot be brought to the light of day. This value cannot be made coherent by Kant’s categorical imperative. What kind of person would defend no limitations to absolute power, to pure economic Darwinism, to absolving absolute power of any blame as long as it triumphed competitively without government coercion. What kind of human value system could be harmonized with a ‘legitimate’ totalitarianism as long as it is acquired by ‘competitive’ laissez-faire capitalism.

Of course, the Austrians would claim that ‘real’ competition would prevent such an outcome. They would protest that monopolies were the result of corrosive government intervention into the market not any ability of the marketers to systematically and intrinsically manipulate the market and eventually the government, to obtain their empire. If the government did not exist or barely existed in pure market terms, the “robber barons” would have failed from market competition. For the Austrians, it would be impossible for laissez-faire capitalism to effectively become the government, to acquire that kind of power. It would be impossible for the government to be a byproduct of laissez-faire capitalism. For them, the original beast is the government. In the case of the United States, the government can only corrupt laissez-faire capitalism. It can never enhance the market. Representative democracy can only interfere and thwart ‘free’ enterprise. Freedom is not a result of government, it is a result of market dynamic. This reduction allows no intermediation, no checks and balances, no voting, no democracy. Democracy only sets the stage for government corruption and therefore, market deformation. In Austrian Economics’ terms, checks and balances are solely from within, intrinsic, the “in” without considerations for legitimate external contingencies. The market admits no exterior, no other, no proper and valid interruption outside its hermetically sealed body. In vernacular, this reduction allows the rich to get richer and the poor get poorer as long as the fittest survive without cronyism. Laissez-faire capitalism can only be corrupted by government, it can never be systemically, over time, corrupted from within due to pure market competition.

If this is the case, do we all to easily give up on democracy? Do we favor heroic elitism, triumph of the fittest, over common populism? I ask the reader, are these binaries beginning to show themselves in their artificiality? This is where critical thinking must and should come in. If, as Kant would have us think, our maxim of elitism were to be the universal law of ‘bodies’ human, would we be ok with laissez-faire capitalism as the Austrians envision it? Didn’t we and Thomas Jefferson crawl out of that kind of dark economic age? Are we all too willing to go back there? Why would it be different this time around? Here is where congruency, given the many different bodies, weighs most heavily. The work which thought places on us, which values require of us, is not to hide or apologize for our secretive values which cannot reach the light of day but to harmonize what we believe internally with what we think should be the maxim of society, of body politic, of value as coherent and congruent with body.

The artificial reduction of values into disparate, cacophonous binaries may simplify and stupefy the work of congruence, of allowing, defending and justifying dogmatic ‘differences’ without explicitly endorsing contradictions but letting them remain implicitly (albeit, convenient for some). The work of thinking is in proportion and magnitude as Aristotle would instruct us. Every time we vote each of us has that work laid upon us not from without but from who we are. That is what democracy is about. We are called to the work of democracy, harmonizing constitutive bodies from which we exist and allowing interruption from the other for which we have no already understood dogma or reduction. If we fail this, the elitists will be all to happy to do the work for us.

_________________

¹See A Brief Introduction to Being and Time

²not corresponding in structure or content

³See Philosophy Series 7 – Eros

⁴See Philosophy Series 6 – The Origin

⁵See Thoughts on Heidegger and Levinas, also Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – Emmanuel Levinas

⁶See Philosophy Series 4 – Hesiod

⁷See Aristotle and Modernity: The Eternal and Science

⁸See An Email to Paul Krugman, Steve Horwitz and’Free Market’Fundamentalism, Theoria and Austrian Economics [from what I can see], Fundamentalism in Market Economy: The Austrian School, Fundamentalism in Market Economy: The Austrian School and Regulation

⁹I use this grammatical rendition purposely to refer back to the previous discussion.

¹⁰See The Free Market Ideal

¹¹See Free Market Either/Or Government?

¹²There are those that believe power, whether used wisely of corruptly, is absolutely reductive of existence as one reading of Nietzsche might suggest. This analysis sets up and reifies another binary dichotomy as for example power and powerlessness and refuses the absolute interruption of the other. I think of this as yet another example of an enlarged amygdale. See The Conservative and Liberal Brain

¹³See Formalism: When a Lie Becomes Truth (really)

Musings

Thoughts on Philosophy, Politics, Physics, Religion, Music and Economics

Monthly Archives: October 2014

The Work of Days (revisited)

Philosophy, Evolution, Chris Hayes and Punk Rock

The Big, Bad Boogie Man: Regulation

Plutocracy and Democracy: A Credit Suisse Report (Update 10/22/14)

Ebola, Texas and ObamaCare

Modernity and the Contradiction of Values Dilemma (Updated 10/6/14)