Progressives and Libertarians: An alliance long brewing

It’s taken a long time but this linkage is slowly emerging. It looks on the surface like a really weird one but it’s not. It’s a natural. The left-leaning Progressive wing of the Democratic Party is finding a comfy bed to cuddle with the right-tilting Libertarians of the GOP. A quick summary of some of the latest collaborations can be found here.

Highlights include (the number in parentheses is the number of Republicans who bolted their party’s long-standing refusal to ever cooperate with Democrats):

a. An agreement that would ban any company that uses offshore banking havens to avoid paying taxes from receiving Federal grants (34)

b. A bill barring the Feds from raiding medical marijuana dispensaries (49)

c. A bill funding background checks for gun purchases (76)

d. A bill to allow the use of Federal funds for abortions for Peace Corps women who became pregnant through rape (no vote yet — just came out of committee)

There are several other pieces of legislation brewing that may (or not) ever hit the floor of Congress or be passed and signed into law but these details aren’t the point. The point is that there’s something important going on here and it shouldn’t be seen as surprising. It’s a natural alliance that’s been shoved off stage by partisan bickering and blind hatred.

The key is appreciating that there are two elements to Libertarianism. One is economic. It argues for laissez faire economics, free-markets and depends on the classic Austrian School’s theoretical models. The other is a social Libertarianism. It values personal freedom and emphasizes the role of choice and free will.

These two intellectual threads share a common core. Outside agencies, public organizations and, in particular, governments should be limited in scope and influence and stay out of the lives of individuals and the businesses and organizations they create.

The first focus, the financial/economic theme is dead in the water. It doesn’t work. The Austrians like Hayek and Mises and their more recent adherents like Friedman and Greenspan lost the argument. There are lots of reasons why this is true — some of which can be found in an earlier blog.

But the other one, the social libertarian theme is right in the Progressive wheelhouse.[1] Honest, consistent Libertarians are pro-choice, pro-birth control, back immigration reforms, are pro-gay rights, back the legalization of marijuana, favor gambling, poker and sport betting, support decriminalizing sex acts and prostitution and disagree vigorously with government’s “war on drugs.” I, as an unabashed Progressive, am in agreement with all.

There are points in the Libertarian’s social code that I have trouble with, the most prominent being gun control. There are also elements of a kind of closeted racism that can be seen in Libertarians who feel uncomfortable with civil rights laws that make discrimination on the basis of race or gender illegal. But keep in mind that the committed Libertarian finds support, not in race, but in property rights principles. That is, if I own a restaurant I should have the right to exclude anyone I want just because I own the restaurant. Rand Paul has taken this stance in the past and it will come back to haunt him if he ends up contending for the Presidency. It is an extension of Libertarianism that is ugly and based on almost embarrassingly shallow understanding of basic principles of social psychology.

In the real political world many Republicans with supposedly Libertarian stripes don’t look very consistent. Even Rand Paul, probably the most consistent member of Congress, backs off when it comes to abortion and others find their Libertarianism getting wobbly when things like drugs, sex, legal sports betting, online poker are the topics — not necessarily because their beliefs are shaky but because their political base is shaky.

One deep problem the Republicans have here is that they pulled in all those Tea Baggers who think they’re Libertarians because they hate big government. But the Tea Party folks don’t understand the sophisticated political theory that underlies Libertarianism. Libertarians don’t “hate” big government in some blind devotional way. The issues turn on whether government compromises individual choice, whether regulatory agencies interfere with economic decision-making, whether collectivist ideals suppress individualism. And when the specific topics under the microscope are appropriate, Progressives and Libertarians should be in agreement and working together to reform matters.

So, nuts to the idiots in the wacky wing of the GOP. There’s a common ground here and it just might be possible to get some good things done.

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[1] Libertarians also tend to be isolationist in foreign affairs but that perspective is actually independent of the theory. One can be isolationist for any number of reasons.

F*cking for Fun: The Hobby Lobby Decision

This astonishing ruling triggered off thoughts expressed some months back about women, birth control and sex. So, today’s blog is an updating of them piggybacking on the Hobby Lobby ruling.

As soon as this 5-4 vote was announced and Alito’s majority opinion was read the howling from the left began — and it continues and it should. It just might be the worst, illogical, nakedly biased SCOTUS ruling since Dred Scott. Frankly, I didn’t expect it and I don’t think anyone with two neurons left to rub together did. When the case was first accepted by the Court I thought it would be DOA. It seemed so ludicrous, so outside the realm of anything that anyone could tie to principles enshrined in federal law. Like so many others who follow the Washington wars, I was wrong. The reason is now obvious. We were looking in the wrong places. This ruling isn’t grounded on the Constitution or driven by the need to protect the rights of the owners of Hobby Lobby or whether corporations are people and protected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). That’s all window dressing. The decision is about fucking. Yes, fucking — specifically women fucking for fun.

So much of the blather that streams from the far right in this country has to do with weird vestiges of our puritanical past that it isn’t even amusing any more. As noted in that earlier blog, those who oppose abortion claim they are all about the sanctity of life or protecting the unborn child. Nonsense. If they loved life they wouldn’t support capital punishment in the face of overwhelming evidence that the innocent are executed with far greater frequency than the guilty. They wouldn’t back idiotic wars where thousands die. They would support pre- and postnatal health care, day-care centers, paid parental leaves, Head Start and other programs that benefit children. The deep reason for the conservatives’ opposition to a woman being able to make a decision about terminating an unplanned pregnancy is because in their minds she is guilty of a horrible sin: having had sex without the specific intent to become pregnant. And the punishment for this crime is to have to bear, raise and support an unwanted child. If these pseudo-moralists really wanted to reduce abortions they would support sex education and freely available birth control, the two programs that actually do work in limiting the number of unwanted pregnancies.

And this same twisted sense of morality is what lurks behind the well-dressed opinion that Justice Alito authored. It may have pseudo-legal language linking it (rather painfully) with the RFRA and echoing the equally-misguided Citizens United decision but it isn’t being driven by these statutory niceties. It’s because women who use birth control fuck for fun.

Harsh? Yes. But dig down a bit, below the surface. Look for consistency. Look for the common social schemas embraced by elderly Catholic men. Note the parallels with the anti-sexuality of Catholicism, the inbred sexism, the meme of male-supremacy, the view of women as chattel, property, the lingering women-in-their-place ethic. These sexist themes still ring dull-thudding bells despite claims to the contrary. Alito’s majority opinion reeks with painful apologies where empty claims are made about the severe limits of this ruling, of how it only applies in a sharply constrained way to a few corporations.

He read Ginsburg’s angry, passionate dissent. He knows at some level what the majority has wrought and he grasps, in a vaguely uncomfortable way, just how much his judicial belief system is interwoven with that of an outdated Catholicism — the one where women are seducers, duplicitous, dangerous. Where women should be modest in their dress and never provocative in their manners. Where a woman raped is a woman who asked for it, wasn’t careful, shouldn’t have been there or acted like that or should have known better. Men can’t help themselves so women must take care not to inflame them. A woman can’t be left to make decisions about her body, her sexuality or her partner. And no for-profit corporation should have to provide benefits that make it more likely that women will engage in recreational sex.

There’s been a lot of chatter about the right-wing’s “war on women.” Well, the Hobby Lobby decision is the latest salvo. It wasn’t about religious freedom or Obamacare or the Constitution or the RFRA. It was about women enjoying sex. The women on the court, Ginsburg, Sotomayor and Kagan, know this. They understand. They’ve been there. They can’t put it quite like this though. So I’m doing it for them.

Nick Hanauer and the Pitchforks

Nick Hanauer, an exceedingly wealthy Seattle entrepreneur, venture capitalist and self-described member of the top one-tenth of one percent club wrote an extraordinary article in Politico the other day.

The thrust of it is pretty straightforward and reflects the economic perspective that most progressives and leading economists like Nobelists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman have argued for — increase the minimum wage, tax the wealthy at a higher rate, tax inherited wealth, empower unions and reduce CEO salaries.

The article is chock-a-block with great lines and insights that might illuminate the minds of conservatives willing to listen; among them: inequality kills, trickle-down economics was and is a sham, the top one-percenters are not the job-creators, boosting the minimum wage does not bankrupt companies, union membership does not damage companies, unfettered capitalism cannot work and, importantly, if we don’t grasp these truths damn soon we’re going to find ourselves in a revolution and it will not be pretty. The article, interestingly, is titled “The Pitchforks are Coming … For Us Plutocrats.”

Hanauer also has grasped the deep message in Malcolm Gladwell’s remarkable book “Outliers” which can be compressed into one sentence: Most top performers are good but good ain’t enough… you also gotta get lucky.

Hanauer readily acknowledges that he got ridiculously lucky. Through a series of flukes he met Jeff Bezos and was one of the very first to buy into Amazon when it was just a glimmer in Bezos’ eye. No flukes, no Bezos, no gob-smacking bankroll. As Hanauer notes, if he and Bezos and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and ____  and ____ (you fill in the blanks) weren’t born where they were, when they were but, say, in Uganda or Somalia, they, with all their talents and drive, would be scraping out a living selling fruit out of a roadside stand.

But Hanauer’s statements should not be taken as socialist coddling or nanny-state pampering. He’s a capitalist and makes no bones about it. Capitalism works. But it must be regulated and its excesses restrained or it kills itself. I am fully behind him here — though there are nuanced elements that he doesn’t touch on in this piece where our opinions might diverge.

The article, and Hanauer’s other writings, talks and presentations are getting a good bit of attention. Some of it, predictably, is from the right like the Wall Street Journal who sees him as some kind of crazy (kind of like the way they feel about another renegade billionaire, Warren Buffett). Some of it is just shrill nonsense belched by morons who’ve bought into Laffable curves and other economic bullpoppy. Of course, much of the attention has come from the progressive, liberal lefties who are shipping Hanauer-url’s around the Internet with the kind of enthusiasm usually reserved for YouTubes of cute kittens.

But no one on either side of the political spectrum, so far as I’ve seen, has touched on the key political message in the Politico piece. It’s here:

“… the arguments we hear from most Democrats are the same old social-justice claims. The only reason to help workers is because we feel sorry for them. These fairness arguments feed right into every stereotype of Obama and the Democrats as bleeding hearts. Republicans say growth. Democrats say fairness—and lose every time.”

He’s spot on. You don’t raise the minimum wage because it’s the honorable thing to do. You raise it because it works. It increases the quality of life of the workers. They have more money. They spend it. The manufacturers who make the things they buy do better. They hire more people — who are paid a decent wage…. and so it continues. You don’t extend unemployment benefits because you’re a bleeding heart liberal. You do it because you know that every dollar received by an out-of-work laborer produces between $1.10 and $1.20 in the GDP. You pay your employees well because, as Henry Ford realized, when you do they can afford to buy Fords!

Oddly, this kind of thinking used to be what the Republican Party was all about, back when it was the Grand Old Party. But not now. Not anymore. Not since Reagan bought into those Laffable curves and was beguiled by “trickle down” economics.  

The Democrats and my fellow progressives need to listen here … closely. People do not want to be coddled. They do not want to be supported by the state or their family. They don’t want to be on welfare. They want jobs. They want to work, contribute to society, their families, their communities. They want to come home tired, dirty stinking from honest sweat or creaky from sitting at a desk or weary from tracking down clients or proud they spent eight hours behind a counter and never snapped at a rude customer. They want decent wages for this. They want the fucking American Dream that’s been stolen away. They want to be part of the middle class that’s been shredded, diminished, bled dry. They want a reasonable shot at the life that used to be on the horizon here but has been pushed away, into the vast wasteland that the right wingers are turning this country into.

Thanks for the message Nick. I just hope my friends here on the left can hear it — even if it comes from a capitalist.

Bad Beat Jackpots

I’ve been away for a while —playing poker in Vegas. I went down for my annual pilgrimage to the World Series of Poker (WSOP) and didn’t get around to posting anything. It was an relatively uneventful trip — that translates as “I broke even.” I played in two “bracelet” events (that’s what the folks at the WSOP call any of the major tournaments that award the winner a gold bracelet along with the cash), three smaller events at various casinos around town (Binions, the Golden Nugget and Aria) and, alas, crashed and burned in all. It’s tough to make the money in one of these. They only pay some 10% of the field and, unlike a decade or so ago, those fields are full of good players. There’s not much “dead money” anymore — as the amateurs and inexperienced players are referred to.

I played in five STSs. An STS is a “single-table satellite” where ten players play till one has all the chips. In most of these the final two will “chop” the prize, usually along lines that mirror stack sizes. I won two of the five outright — that is, no chop with another player. In both we got down to heads-up and, having the bigger stack each time I offered what I thought was a fair chop. Both times my opponents turned me down. Both times I busted them. Cash games were also good. So, “uneventful trip = broke even.”

Back home I got up this morning ready to go again — at the local Saturday Special, a 150 + 15 buy-in tournament. I called in to register and was told that “all tournaments have been cancelled for the foreseeable future.”

“Huh?” I grunted.

“The Bad Beat Jackpot is over 700 thousand,” he said.

“Huh?” I know I sounded disbelieving.

“Every table is full with cash game players. All tournaments have been cancelled till someone hits it.”

I HATE Bad Beat Jackpots for many reasons — and this is one of them.

Bad Beat Jackpots, for those who may not know, are a gimmick that many card rooms have instituted. They are a lottery-like pot of money that can be won if something wildly unlikely happens and a very strong hand gets beaten by an even stronger one. The BBJ that’s being run here has the qualifier hand of quad 8s beaten by a better hand. That is just not going to happen very often.

The money in the BBJ is contributed by the players. Every hand with more than some threshold (usually $20) has $1 raked from it for the jackpot. The more players, the more games, the more money goes into the BBJ which continues to build until a qualifying hand happens. It’s easiest to give some examples of how this might happen. Suppose you have 6♥, 7♥  and are up against a player holding J♥, Q♥ and the final board is 8♥, 9♥, 2♦, A♠, T♥.  Your straight-flush is beaten by your opponent’s straight-flush. You, holder of the “Bad Beat” hand, win half the jackpot; the other player who held the winning hand gets one quarter and all the other players at the table who were dealt into the hand split the remaining 25%. Another: you hold K, K and get it all in against an opponent holding A, A and the board ends up A, 8, A, K, K. Your quad Ks is beaten by quad As. Note that in all cases both players must use both hole cards and all qualifying hands must have a pot over some threshold, usually something like 20 bananas. This latter rule prevents everyone from just sitting there checking down hand after hand and never betting anything, just waiting for the magic cards to appear.

Sounds cool, yes? Well, the vast majority of recreational poker players think so and, as I discovered this morning, flock to the casinos when the jackpot creeps up to these life-changing levels. But they are not cool, not in my view of this game. Here’s why:

First, they bleed money from the table. Let’s assume that there are 25 hands an hour with pots large enough to be eligible for the jackpot take-out. My local room has 18 tables. This means that when running full tables some 450 rutabagas are being pulled out of our collective pockets every hour. Now not every table is going every moment of the day but it’s a reasonable estimate that every day something of the order of 8,000 coconuts is being dragged out of our pots and being shifted into the BBJ. That is a huge rake. Put it in more personal terms to see the impact. Suppose you’re a professional poker player and you put in the standard 2,000 hours a year in live play. You will average roughly two rakeable pots an hour and each will be 1 banana smaller than if you were playing in a room with no BBJ. The result is pretty painful: your annual income has been reduced by 4,000 coconuts. If you’re a successful 1 -3 or 2 -5 grinder this represents a significant percentage of your annual income.

Second, the BBJ is a “game” with negative expectation. The house takes out an administration fee, usually around 10% and many will also pull out a “starter” chunk of change that is used as the base for the next jackpot after one is hit. Poker is a game that can be played with positive expectation by a skilled player. Inserting this secondary game reduces this edge and you have no choice about whether you wish to participate — especially if there isn’t a room without one in the vicinity.

Third, the jackpots are taxed. The IRS treats them like lottery winnings (which is precisely what they are). The local BBJ may be closing in on three-quarters of a million zucchinis now but if I were to hit it or even be just a winner of a minor share, I wouldn’t take home anything near the full payout. It’s worth noting that if you play in a country with a sensible, progressive tax code like Canada or the UK these kinds of bounties are classified as “windfall” income and not subject to income tax. Sensible governments appreciate that these pots of money have already been taxed because not all the money taken out is returned to the player(s). They also generally have progressive tax codes which do not penalize the lower income groups, reserving the higher tax brackets for the wealthy. If you take a look around the typical poker room you can get a pretty good sense of which tax bracket the average player is in. [This wasn’t supposed to be a blog about politics but, well, …., I just can’t help myself. FWIW, my local card room is in Canada but, as a US citizen, I am still liable for taxes on any income generated anywhere in the world.]

Fourth, the probability of hitting a BBJ is vanishingly small. There’s a reason that the current one is so high. How unlikely is having quad 8s beaten? I, frankly, cannot recall ever being in a hand which would have qualified, ever, in my life and I’ve been playing poker off and on for half a century. We’re in “don’t-hold-your-breath” land and, in my mind, we’re also in “don’t-play-at-casinos-with-a-BBJ” land.

Fifth, just having a BBJ going brings a lottery-like mentality into poker. The BBJ has virtually nothing to do with poker. It’s a damn crap shoot that rides on faint hopes and gossamer airs. It’s a side bet with near impossible odds and horrible value. It detracts from the game.

Sixth (and last), one of these damn BBJ frenzies got my local card room to cancel their regularly scheduled tournaments and that has me feeling more than a little ticked off.

Heavy breathing in Cheneyville

In this strange political environment we’re in the sound of labored breathing beneath a black angular helmet was heard today as Dick Cheney and his rather scary spawn Liz took to the Internet and the WSJ to denounce President Obama and launch some weird new organization designed to do something to try to rescue Dick from the ravages of history and Liz from past blunders. The initial presentation was marked by a significant blunder when the Cheneys misspelled their own name and Dick looked weird wearing a cowboy hat and reading off a teleprompter. This guy spent his life in politics and corporate America and he shows up with somebody else’s heart beating in his chest in a freakin’ cowboy hat standing in front of a photo-shopped backdrop! “Weird” doesn’t get close.

The best line of the day came from Jay Carney on his way out as Presidential press secretary. When asked about Cheney’s statement that “Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many,” Carney mused, “which president was he talking about?”

But all these pathetic efforts on the part of the most thoroughly discredited Veep in memory (at least Dubya has the good grace to stick to painting and not continuously insert himself into domains about which he knows nothing) gave rise to a memory.

About four or so years ago I was at playing poker in Vegas. It was the WSOP and I was making my annual pilgrimage. I try to play the “Geezer” event — aka, the “Seniors” — and usually end up in one or two other events and play ridiculous numbers of hours in cash games. I had gotten knocked out of the day’s tournament and found myself in a $2-5 NLH game sitting beside a rather well-dressed woman. Well-dressed women are a rarity in poker, even more so at the WSOP — as for men…. well, don’t ask. So I was intrigued. We got to chatting and we did the standard, “like, where are you from?”

“Oh, I lived in New York City for some 35 years but now I’m in the Pacific Northwest. And you?”

“I’m from Wyoming,” she said…. and I perked up.

“Really?” I said.

“Oh, yes. Really,” she responded.

“Dick Cheney’s state,” I said.

“Oh, yes. Cheney’s state. I know him,” she said.

“Really?”

“Yup. We live in the same neighborhood. I’ve known him for years,” she responded.

“So,” I asked fearing the worst — after all, we’re talking about a well-dressed woman from whom money and position just drip who lives in the same upscale community as the Cheneys — “what’s he like?”

“Evil. Pure fucking evil,” she said and her face twisted up — “and I’m a Republican.”

So it goes…..