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Yearly Archives: 2016

National Identity

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Angry crowds are boiling over. Revolution is at hand, something has to change. But change to what and where is it going? It doesn’t matter to many people. Smash what’s there and take control – we’ll figure the rest out later.

Many terms bubble out as we struggle to describe this moment. “Socialist” and “Fascist” have been easily pushed out to describe the followers of Sanders and Trump, some of whom move more fluidly through Sanders / Trump / Paul than our typical left to right, Democrat to Republican divide tells us is possible. What language do we have to even describe this?

That is, in the end, the problem. We have a rise of “Populism”, a largely apolitical beast whose character reflects is leadership – which can come from anywhere in the spectrum. At the radical heart of it all is “Revenge Populism” which lacks any vision of the future and little sense of past, living entirely in the hot here and now.

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Eyes on the Prize

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Much has already been made of the dust-up at the Nevada state Democratic convention. Was Bernie robbed by corruption? Was an unruly mob turned back? Opinions run hot through both social media and legacy media as the fight for the nomination heats up into a rather physical confrontation. But one point has rarely been made in all the noise:

What was actually at stake were two national delegates of the 4,765 total, or 0.04%.

For all the fuss you’d naturally assume that there was more to it than this, but there wasn’t. And the noise becomes much more than a juicy news story or a call to arms for a disgruntled group who believe they were robbed. It comes down to a question of strategy or how actual change is made, whether by a democratic process, a revolution, or some combination of the two.

By that standard what happened was completely shameful for a number of reasons.

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Gun Rights

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If you were to run down a list of hot-button issues which inflame the electorate on both sides, gun control would be near the top. The majority of the population favors stricter laws according to most polls, but those who are against new restrictions are much more vocal. Only 10% of the population favors weakening restrictions.

Given this, it may come as a surprise that in recent years laws regulating gun sales and ownership have become considerably less restrictive. This is due to a combination of reasons that start with a large Republican control of 30 state legislatures. Ultimately, however, the main driving force is a Supreme Court ruling which stated that the Second Amendment deals with individual, not militia rights.

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Break Big Banks?

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Too Big to Fail. It’s not just a description, it’s a political mantra – we have banks which have grown to the point where government cannot manage a potential collapse and the whole system goes down. Why not just bust them up?

There are actually a lot of good reasons why something much more subtle has to be done, as well as something more comprehensive. That doesn’t sell as well on the campaign trail, where the evil banks are a handy villain for all of our economic ills. Yet it’s vitally important because it’s entirely possible that in a rush to regulate we might do something which is not only dangerous but misses the real problem entirely.

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Reinventing the Labor Market

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If I were to tell you we’re at full employment, save one very nasty problem, you’d probably laugh. It sounds ridiculous on the face of it – aren’t people still struggling out there looking for work? Aren’t wages still stagnant?

The answer, not the punchline, lies in the problem – a terrible “skills gap”, or lack of the right skills for the jobs which are out there.

I’ve been slow to come around to the idea of a skills gap, figuring that it was far from our worst problem. There is a free market, after all, and workers who want a job will find a way to beef up their resumes to show that they have the skills which pay the bills. Eventually it should all even out. But what happens if the job market utterly fails?  That appears to be the situation.

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