Atlas Shrugged Review - Part III (of III)

[Read Part I and Part II]

Now that we've gotten the book out of the way, we can get to the pertinent political question: What are we to make of the current attempt to justify conservative economic policy with the writings and beliefs of Ayn Rand?

Notice that I said economic policy. You don't hear the Tea Party ranting and raving about Objectivist-style liberty when it comes to social issues like abortion or gay marriage. You certainly won't find them acknowledging Rand's hard-line atheism. These aspects of their heroine's philosophy simply don't comport with what they're trying to accomplish. So they ignore the implications and the imperatives that would come with being true believers...while claiming to be true believers.

Rand did not write fiction in the style of Camus and Sartre, whose great works were esoteric works of contemplative existentialism with provocatively ambiguous messages and implications. In a brief epigraph at the front of Atlas Shrugged, Rand says, "I trust that no one will tell me that men such as I write about don't exist. That this book has been written - and published - is my proof that they do." Based on this statement, we must first reconsider the existence of Hobbits, the Tin Man, and the virgin birth. Then we must take her at her word and read Atlas Shrugged not as allegory, but as a true depiction of the world as she saw it. In doing so, we are not permitted to dismiss as literary hyperbole the otherworldly perfection of her protagonists or the ghastly degeneracy of her villains. We must hold them up against the corresponding characters of our time and determine whether her prognostications are applicable to the current debate.

This is where Rand's contemporary enthusiasts fail miserably, through some combination of ignorance, misinterpretation, and/or disingenuous misapplication. Whereas I am happy to admit my admiration for the actions and motivations of characters like Hank and Dagny (while admittedly doubting the existence of more than a handful of real-world counterparts), Randians are clearly unable to concede that the antagonists and the motives attributed to them are pure partisan fictions. Indeed, they hold that all opponents [read: liberals] are exactly as Rand describes them. They accept Rand's epigraph at face value as justification for vilifying their ideological opponents. Liberals, they say, will destroy the world as we know it. Ayn Rand said so. "That this book has been written - and published," is all the proof that they need.

Setting aside Rand's vehement and delusional misconceptions about liberals, let's take a moment to consider her virtues. She reserves her most ardent praise for the individual who, by sheer force of his nature, will, intelligence, and determination, devotes his entire existence to the conception and creation of great things. Her heroes are unflinchingly principled when it comes to issues of compensation, refusing to take what they haven't earned as forcefully as they refuse to pay more than the value of what someone else has provided them. They are, truly, great men and women.

I struggle to see how these people bear any resemblance to the bankers, hedge-fund managers, failed-but-richly-compensated CEOs, and corporate con-artists who seem to be the largest beneficiaries of the modern conservative movement. I fail to see, for example, how the health insurance industry - which creates nothing - fits into Rand's worldview. (It seems clear that Rand would prescribe a system in which patients pay doctors directly for the services provided.) I cannot imagine Rand approving of the schemes that debilitated the housing market or the derivatives that decimated the financial sector. All of these seem to be perfect embodiments of Rand's "looters" and "moochers." Yet these are the people that today's conservatives are protecting through their single-minded focus on destroying their opponents. Much like Rand, they are so hysterically fixated on the perceived evils of liberalism that they are unable to think rationally or constructively about the real issues of the day. They have no positive vision to speak of, only a fervent hatred of what they perceive to be the antithesis of their non-philosophy.

Whether they realize it or not, today's conservatives are radical, Kantian Deontologists. That is to say, they judge the morality of an action solely on the motives of the person doing it, irrespective of the consequences. Unfortunately, this particular brand of conservatism bastardizes this legitimate, if problematic, philosophical perspective by also presuming to know the motives of anyone who might be called a liberal. It should come as no surprise that they regard those motives as universally bad ones. Whatever liberals are doing at the moment - even if it's something conservatives have done in the past - can only lead to apocalyptic consequences because when liberals do it, they are acting on bad maxims, whereas when conservatives do it, they are acting on good maxims.

To that extent, modern conservatives are clearly Rand's disciples - and this is why we can't just get along. Liberals have positive ideas about what the world should look like. Conservatives merely detest liberals. Sure, liberals often think that conservatives have a tendency to be motivated by greed, xenophobia, racism, chauvinism, and other forms of ignorance, but conservatives believe that liberals are evil - not misguided, not cut from a different cloth - but motivated by powerful, metaphysical forces of darkness that seek to sew destruction and misery.

I am quite sure that most conservatives have not actually read Atlas Shrugged. It is also obvious that many others misunderstand and misapply what it says. No matter. Understanding the novel would not make their case any more substantive. They have latched onto Rand because somehow, somewhere, it was inserted into the conventional wisdom that Ayn Rand was a serious thinker - a philosopher queen - and that there must be some intellectual credibility behind a movement that claims her as its inspiration. That is why I chose to read Atlas Shrugged. I honestly hoped and sincerely expected that it would provide me with some deeper understanding of the logical basis of current conservative doctrine.

But Ayn Rand was not a serious thinker. Ayn Rand was a marvelous, if verbose, writer of fiction. Her logic is shoddy and her postulations go utterly unchallenged for want of plausibly-written adversaries. Setting up kerosene-soaked straw men, lighting them on fire, stomping on their ashes, and bottling the remains to be mixed into martinis is great fun, I'm sure, but it is not an impressive intellectual feat, to say the least. Adopting her writing as the theoretical basis of a political movement is a recipe for vacuous, counter-productive, and unresolvable conflict.

Atlas Shrugged Review - Part II

[Read Part I HERE.]

"I have never felt guilty of my ability. I have never felt guilty of my mind. I have never felt guilty of being a man. I accepted no unearned guilt, and thus was free to earn and to know my own value. Ever since I can remember, I had felt that I would kill the man who'd claim that I exist for the sake of his need - and I had known that this was the highest moral feeling."

This is the first significant statement of belief that we hear from John Galt ("Who is John Galt?) shortly after we meet him in the Atlantis-like utopia inhabited by industrialists who have abandoned the real world to live lives that accord with their principles (though it's difficult to imagine today's gazillionaires being content with the lives of modest simplicity these folks have accepted). It is a theme that appears throughout the novel, leading up to Galt's consecration of it as the fundamental tenet of Objectivism. It is repeated countless times, as if repetition will make truth of the accusation that liberalism is fundamentally motivated by the belief that the greatest of men exist only for the sake of the least. She successfully tears that notion to shreds over and over again throughout Atlas Shrugged, but to what end?

d'Anconia makes this case early on after intentionally driving a large project into the ground to make a point:

Francisco shook his head regretfully. "I don't know why you should call my behavior rotten. I thought you would recognize it as an honest effort to practice what the whole world is preaching. Doesn't everyone believe that it is evil to be selfish? I was totally selfless in regard to the San Sebastian project. Isn't it evil to pursue a personal interest? I had no personal interest in it whatever. Isn't it evil to work for profit? I did not work for profit - I took a loss. Doesn't everyone agree that the purpose and justification of an industrial enterprise are not production, but the livelihood of it's employees? The San Sebastian Mines were the most eminently successful venture in industrial history: they produced no copper, but they achieved, in a lifetime, the equivalent of what they got for one day's work, which they could not do. Isn't it generally agreed that an owner is a parasite and an exploiter, that it is the employees who do all the work and make the product possible? I did not exploit anyone. I did not burden the San Sebastian Mines with my useless presence; I left them in the hands of the men who count. I did not pass judgment on the value of that property. I turned it over to a mining specialist. He was not a very good specialist, but he needed the job very badly. Isn't it generally conceded that when you hire a man for a job, it is his need that counts, not his ability? Doesn't everyone believe that in order to get the goods, all you have to do is need them? I have carried out every moral precept of our age. I expected gratitude and a citation of honor. I do not understand why I am being damned."

Again, the sophomoric distortion of the other side's ideas make for great lampooning, but not for worthy opposition to any serious statement of philosophy. Francisco would be indisputably correct...in a universe inhabited by people who believe "that it is evil to work for profit," or that owners are, by definition, "parasites and exploiters." The problem is we don't live in that universe. Sure, we live in a universe in which some owners have been known to be parasites and exploiters, but that does not translate into a belief that it is evil to be an owner. It translates into a belief that owners should not be parasites and exploiters.

Rand pulls a similar stunt on two well-known phrases, both of which she nonchalantly presumes to conflate with liberalism. First, she introduces us to Ivy Starnes, one of the two remaining siblings who ran the Twentieth Centry Motor Company into ruins through their implementation of a communistic business structure. In helping her find the Starnes brothers, the local police chief tells Dagny "There's all sorts of human beings to see in the world, there's murderers and criminal maniacs - but, somehow, I think these Starnes persons are what decent people shouldn't have to see." Now that we have a totally unbiased view of the character we're about to meet, Ivy explains: "We put into practice that noble historical precept: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Their plan was "defeated by the greed, the selfishness and the base, animal nature of men." "Things became very ugly indeed and went fouler every year," Ivy says. "It has cost me my faith in human nature. In four years, a plan conceived, not by the cold calculations of the mind, but by the pure love of the heart, was brought to an end in the sordid mess of policemen, lawyers and bankruptcy proceedings."

Rand has accomplished two things here. She has indiscriminately labeled all liberals as Marxists. With that out of the way, she claims to show that enterprises run by liberals according to liberal principles are doomed to failure - by merely recounting the failure of a fictional one. Worse yet, similarly fictional attempts to institute such principles all across the country have brought civilization to the precipice of complete meltdown. (Rand would undoubtedly be surprised to hear of the success of the worker-owned Wisconsin robotics firm and California bakery - to cite just two examples from Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story - that are run according to democratic and collectivist principles.)

And so, her beloved industrialists, so righteous that they could not go on in such a world, leave everything behind and set up a spartan commune in a hidden valley where they build their own humble abodes, barter for services, and basically start a new, ideal civilization from scratch. As hard as I try, it's difficult to imagine Jack Welch or the Koch brothers doing anything as high-minded as walking away from their vast fortune and the luxuries they affords them.

Rand also serves up "Money is the root of all evil," as uttered by the detestable Bertram Scudder (couldn't you tell by his name?), for d'Anconia to slash and burn for five long pages. In this case, not only does she deliberately pervert the spirit of the phrase, she inadvertently argues for its correctness (as properly understood) on both sides of the debate. "You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its life-blood - money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor." Both the producers and the looters are after the same thing - money. It is the pursuit of money that is regarded by the expression as the root of all evil, in which case the "moochers" and "looters" can just as easily be called "evil" for their determination to take it from the producers. Her attack of this aphorism has a self-defeating element which she ignores for the purposes of tying it around liberalism's neck.

If some of this is starting to sound redundant, you're getting an idea of what it's like to read this book. In Part III I will tie this all together in an attempt to show how current events are being shaped not only by Rand's shoddy attempt at philosophy, but by conservatives' misunderstanding of the Atlas Shrugged.

Read Part III HERE.

And now, for your entertainment, a little Francis Albert with Count Basie:

Atlas Shrugged Review - Part I

I quit.

My bookmark rests at page 893 (out of 1168) in my decade-old copy of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged - and there it will stay. I refuse to waste another moment of my life being subjected to this redundantly pedantic, delusionally angry phantasmagoria of imagined liberal wickedness and/or cataclysmic indolence. It's a shame, because the storytelling is pretty damned compelling when she is actually moving the plot forward rather than pontificating interminably on mundanely simplistic moral lessons. I would like to share my thoughts, in an effort to purge the anger this massive tome has aroused within me. Also, perhaps I can save you the trouble of putting yourself through an exercise in futile open-mindedness.

I consider myself an amateur philosophy enthusiast, so I had hoped that delving into Rand's masterwork might provide me with some understanding of the movement that has most recently taken her as its paragon. After all, I can strongly disagree with most of Kant's conclusions while respecting the process by which he reached those conclusions, the extensive justifications he provides for them, and the rationality with which he lays them out. I, for example, believe it would be highly moral to lie to the would-be murderer regarding the whereabouts of his intended victim, but I admire Kant's steadfast commitment to his own categorical imperative - and I am even open to the possibility that I am wrong and he is right. (See: On a Supposed Right to Lie from Altruistic Motives.)

After suffering through 893 pages of Atlas Shrugged, I have reached the conclusion that it is profoundly generous to call Rand a philosopher. A philosopher must put forth a set of heuristic, practicable principles that are justified by an articulated process of logical thought. Rand partially fulfills the first part of that obligation by saying that she conceives of "man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." Well, that all sounds well and good, but her evidence, in the form of a long-ass novel, is sorely insufficient. Philosophy abhors easy platitudes. It demands a more comprehensive and erudite approach to the great questions. It's easy to say "Never lie." It's another matter altogether to exhaustively justify that statement beyond the superficial instances in which it seems obviously correct. Kant did that. Rand does not apply such standards to her own dearly held principles.

What Rand does, in Atlas Shrugged, is actually a pretty fancy little trick. She sets up a sort of modified double straw man argument. (I say modified because only one is intended to be torn down, but the other is every bit as fictional.) Her heroes and heroines are delightful apotheoses of the species. Nary an objectionable thought or word is thought or uttered by Hank Rearden, Dagny Taggart, John Galt or Fransisco d'Anconia (once we understand his motives for seemingly offensive acts), nor by any of the small supporting cast of hagiographed industrialists. They are shining examples of rugged, deeply-principled individualists, bringing all of their extraordinary talents to bear in their chosen fields, generally for the betterment of mankind.

And then there's everybody else. Rand imagines a universe that is populated almost exclusively by grotesque caricatures of the most reprehensible sorts of people she can imagine. These are the alleged enemies of Objectivism. Not one of them is recognizable as a real human being - not that Rand ever bothers to fill in the broad, deprecating strokes of disgust with which she draws them. The philosopher, writer, and musician are portrayed thusly:

"But which concepts are not ugly or mean, Professor?" asked an earnest matron whose husband owned an automobile factory.
"None," said Dr. Pritchett. "None withing the range of man's capacity."
A young man asked hesitantly, "But if we haven't any good concepts, how do we know that the ones we've got are ugly? I mean, by what standard?"
"There aren't any standards."
This silenced his audience.
"The philosophers of the past were superficial," Dr. Pritchett went on. "It remained for our century to redefine the purpose of philosophy. The purpose of philosophy is not to help men find the meaning of life, but to prove to them that there isn't any."
An attractive young woman, whose father owned a coal mine, asked indignantly, "Who can tell us that?"
"I am trying to," said Dr. Pritchett. For the last three years, he had been head of the Department of Philosophy at the Patrick Henry University.
...
"It is this insistence of man upon meaning that makes him so difficult," said Dr. Pritchett. "Once he realizes that he is of no importance whatever in the vast scheme of the universe, that no possible significance can be attached to his activities, that it does not matter whether he lives or dies, he will become much more...tractable."
He shrugged and reached for another canapé. A businessman said uneasily, "What I asked you about, Professor, was what you thought about the Equalization of Opportunity Bill."
"Oh, that?" said Dr. Pritchett. "But I believe I made it clear that I am in favor of it, because I am in favor of a free economy. A free economy cannot exist without competition. Therefore, men must be forced to compete. Therefore, we must control men in order to force them to be free."
"But, look...isn't that sort of a contradiction?"
"Not in the higher philosophical sense." You must learn to see beyond the static definitions of old-fashioned thinking. Nothing is static in the universe. Everything is fluid."
"But it stands to reason that if--"
"Reason, my dear fellow, is the most naive of all superstitions. That, at least, has been generally conceded in our age."
"But I don't quite understand how we can--"
"You suffer from the popular delusion of believing that things can be understood. You do not grasp the fact that the universe is a solid contradiction."
"A contradiction of what" asked the matron.
"Of itself."
"How...how's that?"
"My dear madam, the duty of thinkers is not to explain, but to demonstrate that nothing can be explained."
"Yes, of course...only..."
"The purpose of philosophy is not to seek knowledge, but to prove that knowledge is impossible to man."
"But when we prove it," asked the young woman, "what's going to be left?"
"Instinct, said Dr. Pritchett reverently."
At the other end of the room, a group was listening to Balph Eubank. He sat upright on the edge of an armchair, in order to counteract the appearance of his face and figure, which had a tendency to spread if relaxed."
"The literature of the past," said Balph Eubank, "was a shallow fraud. It whitewashed life in order to please the money tycoons whom it served. Morality, free will, achievement, happy endings, and man as some sort of heroic being -- all that stuff is laughable to us. Our age has given depth to literature for the first time, by exposing the real essence of life."
A very young girl in a white evening gown asked timidly, "What is the real essence of life, My Eubank?"
"Suffering," said Balph Eubank. "Defeat and suffering."
"But...why? People are happy...sometimes...aren't they?"
"That is a delusion of those whose emotions are superficial."
The girl blushed. A wealthy woman who had inherited an oil refinery, asked guiltily, "What should we do to raise people's literary taste, Mr. Eubank?"
"That is a great social problem," said Balph Eubank. He was described as the literary leader of the age, but had never written a book that sold more than three thousand copies. "Personally, I believe that an Equalization of Opportunity Bill applying to literature would be the solution."
"Oh, do you approve of that Bill for industry? I'm not sure I know what to think of it."
"Certainly, I approve of it. Our culture has sunk into a bog of materialism. Men have lost all spiritual values in their pursuit of material production and technological trickery. They're too comfortable. They will return to a nobler life if we teach them to bear privations. So we ought to place a limit upon their material greed."
"I hadn't thought of it that way," said the woman apologetically.
"But how are you going to work an Equalization of Opportunity Bill for literature, Ralph?" asked Mort Liddy. "That's a new one on me."
"My name is Balph," said Eubank angrily. "And it's a new one on you because it's my own idea."
"Okay, okay, I'm not quarreling, am I? I'm just asking." Mort Liddy smiled. He spent most of his time smiling nervously. He was a composer who wrote old-fashioned scores for motion pictures, and modern symphonies for sparse audiences.
"It would work very simply," said Balph Eubank. There should be a law limiting the sale of any book to ten thousand copies. This would throw the literary market open to new talent, fresh ideas and non-commercial writing. If people were forbidden to buy a million copies of the same piece of trash, they would be forced to buy better books."
"You've got something there," said Mort Liddy. "But wouldn't it be kinda tough on the writers' bank accounts?"
"So much the better. Only those whose motive is not money-making should be allowed to write."
"But, Mr. Eubank," asked the young girl in the white dress, "what if more than ten thousand people want to buy a certain book?"
"Ten thousand readers is enough for any book."
"That's not what I mean. I mean, what if they want it?"
"That is irrelevant."
"But if a book has a good story which--"
"Plot is a primitive vulgarity in literature," said Balph Eubank contemptuously.
Dr. Pritchett, on his way across the room to the bar, stopped to say, "Quite so. Just as logic is a primitive vulgarity in philosophy."
"Just as melody is a primitive vulgarity in music," said Mort Liddy.

Don't get me wrong - this is a marvelously written and hilarious little literary burlesque. I just don't think it says much for Rand's so-called philosophy if these are the best devil's advocates she can produce to test the strength of her ideas. If there's not a soul on earth that would sympathize with these waxwork characters, what purpose do they serve in advancing or supporting Objectivism?

Wesley Mouch, the lobbyist-turned-almighty bureaucrat who exacerbates humanity's downfall through the enactment of the sort of absurd policies that Rand imagines liberals would enact, such as the Equalization of Opportunity Bill, comes in for similar treatment:

Wesley Mouch had a long, square face and a flat-topped skull, made more so by a brush haircut. His lower lip was a petulant bulb and the pale, brownish pupils of his eyes looked like the yolks of eggs smeared under the not fully translucent whites. His facial muscles moved abruptly, and the movement vanished, having conveyed no expression. No one had ever seen him smile.
Wesley Mouch came from a family that had known neither poverty nor wealth nor distinction for many generations; it had clung, however, to a tradition of its own: that of being college-bred and, therefore, of despising men who were in business. The family's diplomas had always hung on the wall in the manner of a reproach to the world, because the diplomas had not automatically produced the material equivalents of their attested spiritual value.

These, believe it or not, are brief examples of Rand's cartoonish vilification of non-Objectivists. There is one particularly ridiculous, 18-page scene in which a cabal of powerful "looters," led by Wesley Mouch, conspire to enact Directive Number 10-289, which essentially ceases all private enterprise and innovation, seizes all intellectual property, freezes all wages and prices, and otherwise turns all power over to the Unification Board, which is comprised of these same men. 18 pages! In a delirious ten-page screed against Marxism, a former employee of the Twentieth Century Motor Corporation describes the company's descent into madness and dissolution when the owners attempt to turn the company into a collectivist enterprise.

The loathing with which she writes about these men - the constant repetition of their evocatively slimy names, the sarcasm, the disgust even at the physical features she has endowed them with - undermines her objective. These empty suits say nothing positive about Objectivism. They demonstrate only that Rand is as petulant as Wesley Mouch's lower lip.

Perhaps most deplorable is the two-page description of a train catastrophe (brought on, of course, by the forces of anti-Objectivism) in which Rand parades the train's non-Objectivist occupants to their deaths with no small amount of smug satisfaction:

It is said that catastrophes are a matter of pure chance, and there were those who would have said that the passengers of the Comet were not guilty or responsible for the thing that happened to them.
The man in Bedroom A, Car No. 1, was a profess of of sociology who taught that individual ability is of no consequence, that individual effort is futile, that an individual conscience is a useless luxury, that there is no individual mind or character or achievement, that everything is achieved collectively, and that it's masses that count, not men.
...
The woman in Roomette 10, Car No. 3, was an elderly schoolteacher who had spent her life turning class after class of helpless children into miserable cowards, by teaching them that the will of the majority is the only standard of good and evil, that a majority may do anything it pleases, that they must not assert their own personalities, but must do as others were doing.
...
The man in Seat 5, Car No. 7, was a worker who believed that he had "a right" to a job, whether his employer wanted him or not.
...
The woman in Bedroom D, Car No. 10, was a mother who had put her two children to sleep in the berth above her, carefully tucking them in, protecting them from drafts and jolts; a mother whose husband held a government job enforcing directives, which she defended by saying, "I don't care, it's only the rich that they hurt. After all, I must think of my children."
...
These passengers were awake; there was not a man aboard the train who did not share one or more of their ideas.

And so on. This is Ayn Rand's view of humanity. This is the lens through which she viewed her fellow inhabitants of the planet.

To be continued...

[Read Part II HERE]

Shutdown Shenanigans

I'm not sure that there's much left to be said about the impending possible government shutdown, but I feel that I must at least attempt to sort through a few issues that have been bouncing around in my head.

First of all, just to put things in perspective, take a look at this interactive graphic of Obama's 2011 budget proposal. Move your little magnifying glass over to the "Transportation" section and toggle between the two boxes in the upper right hand corner of that section ("Airports and airways" and "Mass Transit"). The difference between the size of those two boxes - which is basically imperceptible when viewed as pieces of the [square] pie - is roughly what Republicans appear to be fighting for at the moment. (FYI - This graphic is a year old. I'm just using it to visually demonstrate the numbers being discussed.)

Now, you might say "If the difference is so minute, aren't the Democrats being just as petty?" No, they're not. Here's why. If you've ever bought or sold a house, you'll understand that the fiscal impact of small variations in purchase price impact the two parties in vastly different ways. When we purchased our home last August, for example, the seller had the price listed at an extremely reasonable $168,000. We considered making a first offer of $163,000. Why not? The market was in the toilet. Why not get the very best deal possible? At 5% over thirty years, that mortgage payment would have come in at $875. But then we crunched the numbers and realized that the payment on $168,000 was only $902. Now...it's not that $27/month is nothing, but $5000 out of the seller's pocket is a much more painful hit to take. We did the research and saw that they bought the house for $180,000. They were already taking a loss. We didn't feel that $27/month made it worthwhile to compound that loss. Maybe that makes us foolish, but then again...we can sleep at night.

Similarly, the $5 billion gap between Democrats and Republicans at the moment would have a seriously painful impact on some of the parties involved while having a negligible impact on the overall budget - especially when Democrats have already moved from $0 to $34 billion (a figure roughly represented by the "National Institutes of Health box in the upper right hand corner of that graphic). Again it's not that $5 billion is nothing, but in the broad scheme of things, it's comparable to our $27/month.

But these numbers - these ridiculously irrelevant, relatively paltry sums - are the least offensive part of this debate. I happen to be taking a course in biomedical ethics at the moment, so I have recently been immersed in Kant's categorical imperative, which, if you're unfamiliar, is really just a corollary of the Golden Rule. Whereas the Golden Rule says "Treat people the way you'd like to be treated," the first formulation of the Categorical Imperative says "Act only on the maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." Another way of saying that might be "Live up to the rules that you wish to impose upon others." The GOP has proven itself incapable of meeting that standard. When they are in control, running up the debt on their wars and tax breaks for the rich is deemed acceptable. When they are out of power, any amount of debt is an unsustainable, existential threat - even when the bulk of that debt can be attributed to their policies.

Incidentally, these free-market crusaders ought to know as well as anyone that debt is a completely legitimate, important part of capital structure. Corporations of all sizes use debt on short and long-term bases, in good times and in bad. It is a crucial part of start-up costs, expansion, and weathering bad economic circumstances. They do, in fact, know this. That's why they feel comfortable incurring debt when it meets their particular ideological standards. If they truly felt that debt was the threat they say it is, they would not have - could not have - allowed our overseas adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the very least, they would be demanding our immediate withdrawal. After all, as John Boehner never tires of saying, "We're broke!"

Should we be tackling the skyrocketing debt? Absolutely. There is broad consensus that we need some shared sacrifice and smart long-term planning. But let's be intellectually honest about why we need those things. It is not because debt is inherently evil. We need shared sacrifice and smart long-term planning because we are in a period of serious economic distress. (I won't even make the easy arguments about how we got into such a period.) Such times call for serious solutions. Defunding NPR and Planned Parenthood are not serious solutions. Continually moving the line in the sand and demanding additional cuts is not a serious strategy. These are pathetic political attacks that attempt to take advantage of the circumstances while having no meaningful effect on the broader issues.

And now, a dose of soul for your day, from Jimmy Cliff - featuring some of my favorite backup vocals of all time (the actual recording off Cliff's Anthology is obviously better):