One unmissable snip from Rebecca Solnit's op-ed that appeared in the Los Angeles Times this weekend, which spoke to state bankruptcy here in California but is just as relevant to the USA as a whole:
Speaking of poor children reminds me of Sitting Bull, as good an authority on our economy as anyone, even if he wasn't an economist and even though he died in 1890. After the Lakota were defeated, he joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West show for a season, but he never got ahead financially. He gave the bulk of his earnings to the street urchins who hung around the show. He was shocked that a nation powerful enough to conquer his people couldn't or wouldn't feed its own future. The white man was good at production, he concluded, but bad at distribution.(thanks, Clayton)
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Production of cool stuff is hard. Reistributing it is easy -- just take stuff from the ones that have it, and give it to somebody else. The problem is that distribution affects production.
I don't think Sitting Bull was really much of an authority on the economy after all, although I'd probably trust him more than the average L.A. Times editorial writer.
I wonder if Sitting Bull considered the (disquieting) possibility that the nation was strong enough to crush him in part because it treated many of its own as expendable....
The Lakota might have wound up with similar societal shortcomings given enough time to develop independently without interference.
I think that it's simply a corrupting influence of large scale trade and of industrialization. Once you decouple the concept of production from things you made yourself, or someone you know made, for local use, then you start to associate production with far-off people you don't know and inadvertently don't care much about. It goes downhill from there.
(please forgive my armchair philosophy)
In the US we do distribute food, medical care, and shelter to our prisoners, estimated at the cost $60 billion a year link. Considering that we, as one of the most capitalist countries, also has the highest number of people in prisons per 100000 people in the world, we are doing an amazing job at distribution link.
From an economic perspective, I suppose that distribution could be done more efficiently if these distributions were done before people got into prison because of the added economic damage caused by the crimes that need to be committed to receive this distribution as well as the loss of potential productivity of the prisoners now unable to become producers. Unfortunately we are more terrified of moral hazards than we are of the magnitude of productivity loss with the current policy. Admittedly it may be that we have not found a quantifiable means to understand an opportunity cost of transforming the politically underrepresented person to the real cost of the prison distribution recipient. Or maybe we aren't interested in how we could better use that $60 billion (or the next $60 billion). I don't know the answer to that question.
The problem is that distribution affects production.
This is true for some people -- frequently some of the loudest, reference the Fake News Network -- but not for everyone. Different motivations for different people.
Again the LA Times proves it isn't worth the paper on which it is written. She makes a big deal about distribution in CA, but then waxes longingly of all the money we could spend if we could only collect more taxes. CA wouldn't be in the problem it is in if it hadn't increased spending faster than the tax revenue increased in those good years. But I guess the CA legislature distributes all those taxes in a fantastic way. The only distribution problem she references is water, and that is the byproduct of ancient water rights legislation. It's almost unbelievable that that is the only example of poor distribution she could find in CA.
When I entered school after WWII we had a tough time. The baby-boom was close at hand. Retired school teachers came back to work. We had class sizes of 45 in second grade. By 4th I was in a split session class. In 5th we had a 4th/5th in the same classroom. Eventually a bond issue was passed and a new building was added.
All that said me had more than many schools have today. There was a cafeteria that provided a hot lunch, a woodworking shop class, a library, and a music teacher.
A few years ago I helped shoot a video at an elementary school. The performer asked, "Does anyone know what acapela means?" Not a hand went up during the two assemblies. By third grade we all knew what acapela meant.
Food for the body is one thing but food for the mind is another. It is hard to account for the present day lack of commitment to education
@Tekna2007
Some people are priviledged enough to be able to devote their full time to what they want to do. This includes folks that work in jobs they like as well as people who are independently well-off (and there's some overlap there.) But most of us have to work day jobs, and would not work those exact same jobs if we weren't paid. Even some people who work for low salaries in creative fields would have to do something else with most of their time if their rewarding creative jobs provided no income.
In the aggregate, distribution affects production. Contrary to what I said before, redistribution can be extremely tricky for the government, if the goal is not to mess up the productive side of the economy, not to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.
I wonder what Sitting Bull would have thought of the book of child beauty pageant photos?
@phisrow
hit the nail on the head there
This is Rebecca Solnit, who wrote the insufferable book "Hollow City" because her beloved San Francisco wasn't turning out exactly as she, personally, would have liked. Take her opinions with several truckloads of salt.
http://www.amazon.com/Hollow-City-Francisco-American-Urbanism/dp/1859843638/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1257205359&sr=8-13
Thanks! Now I can finally counter those critics who say that the state is tax crazy.
California has 0% oil extraction tax - unlike tax crazy Texas and Alaska.
>>When I entered school after WWII we had a tough time. The baby-boom was close at hand. Retired school teachers came back to work. We had class sizes of 45 in second grade. By 4th I was in a split session class. In 5th we had a 4th/5th in the same classroom. Eventually a bond issue was passed and a new building was added.
All that said me had more than many schools have today.
The Baby Boomers recognized the fallacy of investing in the future and made the appropriate corrections. In The SF Bay Area, huge numbers of schools were closed and consolidated. In East Palo Alto, some students travel 11 miles to their high school. Some schools (up until 2 years ago) required parents to camp outside over night to wait in line to enroll their kids. School buses were banned.
It makes sense... those who take the time and effort to vote should get the biggest spoils. If 1st graders are too lazy to vote, tough on them. Besides, retired baby boomers are the future - not children.
That $60 Billion does not go for services to the prisoners. The prisoners get NO MEDICAL CARE, but prison doctors that NEVER SEE A PRISON or PRISONER are paid $450,000 a year.