The Republican establishment, it is everywhere reported, is upset at the prospect (which seems to be fading a bit) of a Gingrich nomination. Of course, he'd be a disaster; Obama would virtually be guaranteed a landslide if they were stupid enough to nominate Newt. but it's nice to see them squirm.
The Republican Party, for almost all of my adult life, has been the party of racism, of cynical manipulation of the basest fears and prejudices of the least-educated portions of our population, even as it has also curried favor with the wealthiest and most privileged. The Republican strategy of division has sold a lot of books --both in its promulgation and in analysis of it-- and done a huge amount of damage to our polity.
But they have only themselves to blame for Gingrich. What did they expect, when they stood silently by, or even actively encouraged, ceaseless ad hominem attacks on President Obama, from thinly-veiled racist comments and arguments to Senator DeMint's "You lie!" called out during the State of the Union address.
When the Republican Senate Minority Leader, at the start of Obama's term, announced in all sincerity that his primary legislative objective would be to see that Obama would be a one-term president, he was in effect saying, to hell with the duties of governing; we will be about naked political advantage, gained no matter the cost. And when the Republican establishment stands silently by when Obama is attacked as a racist, as one who hates his country and wants to subvert it?
Well, then, they deserve Gingrich and worse (of which they have seen, and continue to see, plenty in their own primaries). They are despicable people, and they get what they sought. Unfortunately, their comeuppance threatens to be the punishment of all of us.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Monday, January 16, 2012
So Much Nonsense, So Little Inquiry
Listening to Republican Debate XVII: When a dabbler in policy-think such as I am can spot the inaccuracy, the inconsistency, the enormous and questionable assumption in the statements of a candidate, you wonder why there is never a follow-up question that points it out.
Examples, from flipping on the tv for 3 minutes tonight:
Gingrich: Every American will be an investor when he goes to work (I missed the question, but he was obviously talking about privatizing Social Security), and will have an estate to leave his children, which he doesn't get now. Q: What causes this Everyman investor to make intelligent investment decisions? And what happens when, the year he retires or the year after, the market loses half its value, which has happened twice in the past 25 years?
Santorum: We'll cut the corporate income tax in half. It'll become like a Net Profits Tax (what does he think it is now?). But we'll only do it for manufacturers who keep their jobs in the U.S. They are the jobs that are leaving. Q: Has he never heard of call centers in India, or service bureaus in China or Taiwan?
What a waste of time; these guys are pathetic. Romney included. Huntsman, the only sensible guy in the field, dropped out today. I heard someone on the radio explain it this way: He's not charismatic, he's not exciting.
How about his policies?
Examples, from flipping on the tv for 3 minutes tonight:
Gingrich: Every American will be an investor when he goes to work (I missed the question, but he was obviously talking about privatizing Social Security), and will have an estate to leave his children, which he doesn't get now. Q: What causes this Everyman investor to make intelligent investment decisions? And what happens when, the year he retires or the year after, the market loses half its value, which has happened twice in the past 25 years?
Santorum: We'll cut the corporate income tax in half. It'll become like a Net Profits Tax (what does he think it is now?). But we'll only do it for manufacturers who keep their jobs in the U.S. They are the jobs that are leaving. Q: Has he never heard of call centers in India, or service bureaus in China or Taiwan?
What a waste of time; these guys are pathetic. Romney included. Huntsman, the only sensible guy in the field, dropped out today. I heard someone on the radio explain it this way: He's not charismatic, he's not exciting.
How about his policies?
Friday, October 14, 2011
Tales of Hoffman. Estates.
The states should be abolished.
Well, OK, maybe not abolished per se. But they are detrimental to the proper functioning of the economy, as they currently exist.
What raises this issue, not for the first time, in my mind is the worry, in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, about what may happen if the suburb's biggest employer, Sears, should pick up and leave.
Why should Sears do this? Because Hoffman Estates, and Illinois, dares to apply to Sears the tax rates that apply to everyone else. In Illinois, I mean. Other states will bid for the privilege of having Sears move its headquarters to their locales; and the primary thing they have to offer is tax breaks.
That's why Sears went from downtown Chicago to the boondocks in the first place, of course: the town of Hoffman Estates gave Sears zillions of dollars worth of tax breaks in return for Sears's relocating to their village, back in 1989. The deal expires next year, and so Sears is now seeking another tax exemption, from another state. Of course, it would also be willing to consider a suitable extension of its current tax exemption, in return for staying where it is.
States want companies like Sears; they employ large numbers of people (about 6,000, in the case of Sears), and this brings prosperity in the form of all the money that is spent locally by those thousands of employees.
Trouble is, those thousands of employees have multiple thousands of kids, who need schools. And the thousands of families need parks, and streets, fire departments, and infrastructure of diverse and complex nature. The employer, in the normal circumstance, pays property taxes on its facilities to help build those schools and hire those firemen.
When localities or counties trade long-term tax "holidays" to specific companies in return for the gift of a headquarters facility, or a big plant, to be located within their boundaries, they essentially render themselves hostage to the company.
So now, Hoffman Estates has a gun to its head: if Sears leaves, people will leave. Housing prices will fall; a big facility will become idle; schools will empty; and so forth. Sure, they need the tax receipts, but the village also needs the company's presence. And suddenly, the company has suitors from all over the country.
So states and municipalities enter into a bidding war for the prize of the company's presence on their soil. The states engage in a race where the winner impoverishes himself.
More on this later. But it seems obvious that, when you have dozens of different administrative districts (our states) racing to the bottom in this way, everyone is worse off.
Oh yeah: except for the big corporation.
Well, OK, maybe not abolished per se. But they are detrimental to the proper functioning of the economy, as they currently exist.
What raises this issue, not for the first time, in my mind is the worry, in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, about what may happen if the suburb's biggest employer, Sears, should pick up and leave.
Why should Sears do this? Because Hoffman Estates, and Illinois, dares to apply to Sears the tax rates that apply to everyone else. In Illinois, I mean. Other states will bid for the privilege of having Sears move its headquarters to their locales; and the primary thing they have to offer is tax breaks.
That's why Sears went from downtown Chicago to the boondocks in the first place, of course: the town of Hoffman Estates gave Sears zillions of dollars worth of tax breaks in return for Sears's relocating to their village, back in 1989. The deal expires next year, and so Sears is now seeking another tax exemption, from another state. Of course, it would also be willing to consider a suitable extension of its current tax exemption, in return for staying where it is.
States want companies like Sears; they employ large numbers of people (about 6,000, in the case of Sears), and this brings prosperity in the form of all the money that is spent locally by those thousands of employees.
Trouble is, those thousands of employees have multiple thousands of kids, who need schools. And the thousands of families need parks, and streets, fire departments, and infrastructure of diverse and complex nature. The employer, in the normal circumstance, pays property taxes on its facilities to help build those schools and hire those firemen.
When localities or counties trade long-term tax "holidays" to specific companies in return for the gift of a headquarters facility, or a big plant, to be located within their boundaries, they essentially render themselves hostage to the company.
So now, Hoffman Estates has a gun to its head: if Sears leaves, people will leave. Housing prices will fall; a big facility will become idle; schools will empty; and so forth. Sure, they need the tax receipts, but the village also needs the company's presence. And suddenly, the company has suitors from all over the country.
So states and municipalities enter into a bidding war for the prize of the company's presence on their soil. The states engage in a race where the winner impoverishes himself.
More on this later. But it seems obvious that, when you have dozens of different administrative districts (our states) racing to the bottom in this way, everyone is worse off.
Oh yeah: except for the big corporation.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Afghanistan
This is old news, what with the current obsession with constitutional amendments mandating balanced budgets --a stupid idea if there ever was one; is it superfluous to mention it's a Republican brainchild?-- and sundry other posturing by our political class, which has come to resemble nothing so much as the characters in a play by ... oh, maybe Oscar Wilde. Or a skit by Ernie Kovacs, like the immortal (and faintly racist) "Nairobi Trio." But precisely because the situation in Afghanistan is, however temporarily, off the front page, I thought it would be a good time to review the bidding, as it were. And so I've chosen two articles that address different aspects of that war and that country.
The first, from the July 9, 2009 issue of the London Review of Books, is an historical review of Afghanistan's position in international conflicts. Rory Stewart focuses on the "Great Game" of the 19th century between the Russian and British Empires and Afghanistan's role. Here is that piece. Next is David Bromwich's article, "The Fastidious President," in the November 18, 2010 issue of that same publication.
The first, from the July 9, 2009 issue of the London Review of Books, is an historical review of Afghanistan's position in international conflicts. Rory Stewart focuses on the "Great Game" of the 19th century between the Russian and British Empires and Afghanistan's role. Here is that piece. Next is David Bromwich's article, "The Fastidious President," in the November 18, 2010 issue of that same publication.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Tax Rates for 2014
Many of the problems vexing our country could be addressed fairly, expeditiously, and effectively by returning to the individual tax rate structure we had in 1954, the first term of President Eisenhower.
Here are the MFJ brackets for that year (there are actually many more brackets, approximately 25 in all; the missing ones are interspersed between these break points):
It’s time to try something old.
Here are the MFJ brackets for that year (there are actually many more brackets, approximately 25 in all; the missing ones are interspersed between these break points):
$0 - $4,000 20% $6,000 - $8,000 22% $16,000 - $18,000 34% $38,000 - $44,000 56% $70,000 - $80,000 69% $100,000 - $150,000 75% $400,000 - 91% |
Too steep? OK, let’s index these rates for inflation since 1954. Roughly speaking, the consumer price index (1982 = 100) was 25 in 1954, and is about 200 today, so prices have increased eight-fold in the past 55 years. So let’s leave the rates the same, and multiply the brackets by 8. For simplicity, let’s say the rate shown begins to apply when income reaches the amount indicated:
Income Marginal Rate
$32,000 20%
$64,000 22%
$144,000 34%
$352,000 56%
$640,000 69%
$1,200,000 75%
$3,200,000 91%
Let’s compare these rates with those actually in place in 2010:
Income Range 2010 Indexed 1954
Marginal Rate Marginal Rate
$0 - $16,750 10% 0%
$16,750 - $32,000 15% 0%
$32,000 - $64,000 15% 20%
$64,000 - $68,000 15% 22%
$68,000 - $137,300 25% 22%
$137,300 - $144,000 28% 22%
$144,000 - $209,250 28% 34%
$209,250 - $352,000 33% 34%
$352,000 - $373,650 33% 56%
$373,650 - $640,000 35% 56%
$640,000 - $1,200,000 35% 69%
$1,200,000 - $3,200,000 35% 75%
$3,200,000 - 35% 91%
Notice that people in the lowest brackets would see their tax rates vanish. From a public policy standpoint this is probably undesirable; so let’s insert a 5% and a 10% bracket at these low levels of income. Let’s also provide a personal exemption of, say, $10,000 for the first two people listed on a return –husband and wife, husband and husband, whatever—and reduce it to $5,000 for all dependents after that. That way, a family of 4 with an income of $32,000 would pay a 10% tax on the last $2,000. Nominal, sure; but it forces them to pay attention. And we should all be taxpayers, even if nominally so.
And let’s not be accused of being punitive on the middle class: keep the rates where they are now, up to an income of $144,000; and split the difference for the next bracket. Say, a 30% rate for incomes between $144,000 and $209,250.
It’s only when you get above $350,000 that taxes really start taking off. This is the area where, over the past 50 years, the brackets have simply disappeared. That is, those at the top are currently being taxed at rates far, far below what they would be had the 1954 rates been left in place and only adjusted for inflation. In other words, someone who earns $1 million today pays only 35% on his next dollar of income; had the tax rate schedule been maintained at historical levels he would be paying more than double that –75%.
Even in 1980, there was a 70% bracket, applicable to dividends, interest, and other unearned income; capital gains were taxed at 35%, and earnings at 50%. Note that these are the top rates in each case. Few people actually paid them; but the rates were there for the very wealthy.
No wonder the rich get richer, now more than at any time since the Gilded Age. And if you consider individual cases, why does it make sense that a physician, who earns a handsome but not egregious $300,000 per year, should pay the same rate on his next dollar of earnings as the CEO of a Fortune 100 company who makes $10 million?
Our tax structure has lost what is probably the most important feature of a voluntary system, namely equity. It is simply unfair, as it stands today. That lack of basic fairness has been obfuscated as we have had hammered into us all the notion that “taxes” are too high, by those at the top who have reaped substantially all the benefits of the tax restructuring of the past generation, and suffered essentially none of the ill effects of the tightening of the safety net and the rape of the economy by the economic elite (with the active collusion of the Congress).
Let’s get concrete. Say I’m a surgeon with a prospering practice, and my taxable income is $750,000 per year after all exemptions and deductions. What do I pay today, and what would I pay under this proposed alternative?
The 2011 tax rates compute a tax for our surgeon (assuming a joint return) of $232,808. Under the proposed scheme above, he would pay $331,900, an increase of $100,000. This is a big increase; on the other hand, it leaves him with “only” $418,100 after tax. This is about $1,145 per day. Most Americans don’t spend anything like that even when on vacation and paying for hotels, airplane tickets, and so forth.
Yes, I know that there are other taxes, like property taxes and payroll taxes and so forth. We all have expenses. But there are a lot of unmet needs in this society; and we did not achieve the prosperity of the 20th century –prosperity that has declined significantly for a large minority, if not an actual majority, of Americans since 1980—by failing to meet our needs as a society. Quite the contrary, it was only after we introduced steeply progressive income taxation, and social welfare programs, that our middle class grew and our society began to realize its potential. We have given up middling prosperity for the great majority in exchange for lives of unimaginable wealth and privilege for a thin slice of our population. In the process, we’ve distorted our economy and our polity, our overall standard of living has declined, we’ve come close to ruining our social contract, and we’ve steadily lost ground when comparing ourselves to other countries on almost any metric you choose: healthcare cost and outcomes, life expectancy, income inequality, educational achievement –even literacy--, social and economic mobility, and so on.
It’s time to try something old.
Sunday, May 1, 2011
Campaign Contributions and Regulation
Paul Krugman blogs about financial regulation in the context of political calculation and political contributions, and concludes:
"Of course, when the Times complains about how the administration’s explanation
validates the antiregulatory ethos that led to the crisis and still threatens
to block reform
you could say that this is the whole story of the Obama administration. Name your issue — fiscal policy, Social Security, financial regulation, foreign policy, Guantanamo — and the administration has effectively caved in to the other side’s framing."
This is a troublesome reminder of how regularly I have been disappointed by this centrist president who, while being tarred (I use the word advisedly!) with the "socialist" brush, has time and again compromised by moving from the center --having hardly bothered to argue forcefully his own position-- to the midpoint between the center and the hardest of hard right positions. It is a testament to the racism and xenophobia of the Republican base that the GOP continues to excoriate this moderate. Do they think for a minute that Hilary Clinton or Joe Biden, had they been elected, would have been half as conciliatory, half as willing to abandon their own views in favor of political compromise, as Obama? Ironic that the Right won't take "yes" for an answer.
"Of course, when the Times complains about how the administration’s explanation
validates the antiregulatory ethos that led to the crisis and still threatens
to block reform
you could say that this is the whole story of the Obama administration. Name your issue — fiscal policy, Social Security, financial regulation, foreign policy, Guantanamo — and the administration has effectively caved in to the other side’s framing."
This is a troublesome reminder of how regularly I have been disappointed by this centrist president who, while being tarred (I use the word advisedly!) with the "socialist" brush, has time and again compromised by moving from the center --having hardly bothered to argue forcefully his own position-- to the midpoint between the center and the hardest of hard right positions. It is a testament to the racism and xenophobia of the Republican base that the GOP continues to excoriate this moderate. Do they think for a minute that Hilary Clinton or Joe Biden, had they been elected, would have been half as conciliatory, half as willing to abandon their own views in favor of political compromise, as Obama? Ironic that the Right won't take "yes" for an answer.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Defining Deviancy Down
From The New Criterion comes a piece that, for me, resonates even as I'm not sure what I think.
The burden of this short article is that we've sort of allowed standards to slip, in our universities, to the point that pretty much anything goes, not just in terms of behavior, which is lamentable enough, but also in what we consider worthy of study. We're not talking, here, about courses in comic books or tv sitcoms. No, this is about sex; and, more generally, about ennobling the marginal --not just accepting odd behavior and standards, but endorsing them enthusiastically as mainstream.
As I tried to pull out a quote or two from the article I kept failing: there are too many good quotes, and they reinforce one another in context in a way that taking a single one out of context could not do justice.
So you'll have to click on the link and read it. What interests me is (1) my instinctive agreement with the overall point --that deviancy, as Senator Moynihan wrote so long ago, can be (artificially) "cured" if we just redefine it. Moynihan's larger argument, pursued over several years of fierce controversy, is that some things are destructive of individual and social weal even if they are the habits of people whose legitimacy, as human beings, we want to go out of our way to acknowledge.
The context of that was the effort, in the '60s, to take positive note of, to affirm, the worthiness of ... well, the downtrodden: black people, poor people, those on the fringes of society. It had recently been discovered that people in these categories, although they might be different than "ordinary" middle-class, middle-brow, middling Americans, were no less entitled to all the protections of the polity, all the benefits that accrue to all citizens. Not just to the right, so belatedly, to vote and to eat at Woolworth's (never mind); but to consideration. A black woman deserves, a priori, to be called "M'am" if you would, in a similar situation, call a white woman so. That this was a revolutionary idea as recently as my young adulthood may sound strange now; but there it is.
So we learned to accept things that previously had been denigrated (which term shares a common origin with "Negro" and less polite slang equivalents, it's worth noting in passing): nappy hair (or processed hair), sure. We stopped using crude slang terms for certain automobiles. A fag became just a cigarette; and so on. We tried to look beyond the surface, to appreciate the person beneath.
And a funny thing happened: we started adopting the mores of those classes we wanted to "elevate." I know this sounds impossibly class-conscious and ethnocentric, but in fact we believed that the things the upper reaches of the society, speaking in social and socio-economic terms, valued and tried to uphold were more valuable than the habits of mind and habits of behavior of the lower classes. My father used to say, irritatingly, "Poor people have poor ways." But I still find it hard to argue with this, even when I can disagree with William Buckley (if I remember correctly) who responded to a serious sociological study entitled "The Culture of Poverty" with the cute comment that what was really in evidence was a poverty of culture.
So we got to a place where vulgar language was a mark of street-wise authenticity, so that we now find beautiful and seemingly intelligent young women (I know, I'm objectifying them!) talking like sailors. Now, a cunt isn't just an honorable if starkly explicit old English term for an anatomical feature; it's used to describe a person in her entirely.
So have we progressed?
In a recent conversation, a friend argued with me that the country began to disintegrate (my word, not his) when we started emphasizing the things that made us different from one another rather than the things that made us alike. But I think that, fifty years ago, the only reason we could talk so seamlessly about our similarities was that those who were different were so marginalized that they were invisible. And now we may be paying the price, in that we've allowed the pendulum to swing far to the other direction. There's no question that women, and homosexuals, and racial minorities, are better off now than they were in my childhood. And, for me, there's also no question that the progress from which they have benefited would not have happened had they continued to allow themselves to be ignored. And so, realizing that we had been ignoring (not to mention badly mistreating) them, we went out of our way to enfold them in what we saw as "our" consensus. Hell, I wore a dashiki in 1973, too.
The article that gave rise to this train of thought is concerned with college and university courses that elevate sexual ...oddities to the level of political statements or cultural affirmations that are worthy of analysis and deep thought. There are numerous examples, most of them pretty amusing. It is hard to see (1) why anyone ought to care about someone else's private vice (if that is what it is) or private behavior generally, and (2) why students ought to study much more than the Trivium and the Quadrivium. Everything else is more or less on-the-job training, anyway. We go to the zoo to regard oddities, after all; and zoos are more and more widely criticized because they inflict harm of one sort or another on what are, after all, creatures capable of feeling pain. So should we be any less respectful of ourselves? One can argue that prostitution, for example, ought not be a crime; but is it certain that, in consequence of such a liberalization, prostitutes ought to come before classes of undergraduates to explain their fee schedules? Undergraduates are, after all, even in our overly-enervated society, barely beyond childhood. Should they be allowed to play innocently before being given advanced courses on what are, for most people, less-than-obvious sexual exercises?
So where do I come down on this? I think we have to be cautious about enforcing the values of a previous generation just because they seemed, on the surface, to work for that generation and because the world was less noisier, arguably in consequence. I think we have to allow latitude for a wide variety of experiences and expressions. And I think that, over time, the worthy experiences and expressions will survive, and the others will not. But we should not jump to adopt every new thing: that is the shallowest faddishness. cultural styles, like ideas, have to prove themselves. We have, happily, a wide range of sub-cultures in this perhaps overly-permissive society; let them experiment and percolate up their best, and we can try it on after they've vetted it to some extent. Should professors bring the latest gadget into the classroom just because it's reputed to offer a different kind of orgasm (of whatever intellectual or physical kind)? Is that what a classroom is for?
No.
The burden of this short article is that we've sort of allowed standards to slip, in our universities, to the point that pretty much anything goes, not just in terms of behavior, which is lamentable enough, but also in what we consider worthy of study. We're not talking, here, about courses in comic books or tv sitcoms. No, this is about sex; and, more generally, about ennobling the marginal --not just accepting odd behavior and standards, but endorsing them enthusiastically as mainstream.
As I tried to pull out a quote or two from the article I kept failing: there are too many good quotes, and they reinforce one another in context in a way that taking a single one out of context could not do justice.
So you'll have to click on the link and read it. What interests me is (1) my instinctive agreement with the overall point --that deviancy, as Senator Moynihan wrote so long ago, can be (artificially) "cured" if we just redefine it. Moynihan's larger argument, pursued over several years of fierce controversy, is that some things are destructive of individual and social weal even if they are the habits of people whose legitimacy, as human beings, we want to go out of our way to acknowledge.
The context of that was the effort, in the '60s, to take positive note of, to affirm, the worthiness of ... well, the downtrodden: black people, poor people, those on the fringes of society. It had recently been discovered that people in these categories, although they might be different than "ordinary" middle-class, middle-brow, middling Americans, were no less entitled to all the protections of the polity, all the benefits that accrue to all citizens. Not just to the right, so belatedly, to vote and to eat at Woolworth's (never mind); but to consideration. A black woman deserves, a priori, to be called "M'am" if you would, in a similar situation, call a white woman so. That this was a revolutionary idea as recently as my young adulthood may sound strange now; but there it is.
So we learned to accept things that previously had been denigrated (which term shares a common origin with "Negro" and less polite slang equivalents, it's worth noting in passing): nappy hair (or processed hair), sure. We stopped using crude slang terms for certain automobiles. A fag became just a cigarette; and so on. We tried to look beyond the surface, to appreciate the person beneath.
And a funny thing happened: we started adopting the mores of those classes we wanted to "elevate." I know this sounds impossibly class-conscious and ethnocentric, but in fact we believed that the things the upper reaches of the society, speaking in social and socio-economic terms, valued and tried to uphold were more valuable than the habits of mind and habits of behavior of the lower classes. My father used to say, irritatingly, "Poor people have poor ways." But I still find it hard to argue with this, even when I can disagree with William Buckley (if I remember correctly) who responded to a serious sociological study entitled "The Culture of Poverty" with the cute comment that what was really in evidence was a poverty of culture.
So we got to a place where vulgar language was a mark of street-wise authenticity, so that we now find beautiful and seemingly intelligent young women (I know, I'm objectifying them!) talking like sailors. Now, a cunt isn't just an honorable if starkly explicit old English term for an anatomical feature; it's used to describe a person in her entirely.
So have we progressed?
In a recent conversation, a friend argued with me that the country began to disintegrate (my word, not his) when we started emphasizing the things that made us different from one another rather than the things that made us alike. But I think that, fifty years ago, the only reason we could talk so seamlessly about our similarities was that those who were different were so marginalized that they were invisible. And now we may be paying the price, in that we've allowed the pendulum to swing far to the other direction. There's no question that women, and homosexuals, and racial minorities, are better off now than they were in my childhood. And, for me, there's also no question that the progress from which they have benefited would not have happened had they continued to allow themselves to be ignored. And so, realizing that we had been ignoring (not to mention badly mistreating) them, we went out of our way to enfold them in what we saw as "our" consensus. Hell, I wore a dashiki in 1973, too.
The article that gave rise to this train of thought is concerned with college and university courses that elevate sexual ...oddities to the level of political statements or cultural affirmations that are worthy of analysis and deep thought. There are numerous examples, most of them pretty amusing. It is hard to see (1) why anyone ought to care about someone else's private vice (if that is what it is) or private behavior generally, and (2) why students ought to study much more than the Trivium and the Quadrivium. Everything else is more or less on-the-job training, anyway. We go to the zoo to regard oddities, after all; and zoos are more and more widely criticized because they inflict harm of one sort or another on what are, after all, creatures capable of feeling pain. So should we be any less respectful of ourselves? One can argue that prostitution, for example, ought not be a crime; but is it certain that, in consequence of such a liberalization, prostitutes ought to come before classes of undergraduates to explain their fee schedules? Undergraduates are, after all, even in our overly-enervated society, barely beyond childhood. Should they be allowed to play innocently before being given advanced courses on what are, for most people, less-than-obvious sexual exercises?
So where do I come down on this? I think we have to be cautious about enforcing the values of a previous generation just because they seemed, on the surface, to work for that generation and because the world was less noisier, arguably in consequence. I think we have to allow latitude for a wide variety of experiences and expressions. And I think that, over time, the worthy experiences and expressions will survive, and the others will not. But we should not jump to adopt every new thing: that is the shallowest faddishness. cultural styles, like ideas, have to prove themselves. We have, happily, a wide range of sub-cultures in this perhaps overly-permissive society; let them experiment and percolate up their best, and we can try it on after they've vetted it to some extent. Should professors bring the latest gadget into the classroom just because it's reputed to offer a different kind of orgasm (of whatever intellectual or physical kind)? Is that what a classroom is for?
No.
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