Year: 2012

Secular humanist that I am, I couldn’t contain a squeaky chortle of glee when reading that the Creation Museum in a Kentucky suburb of Cincinnati is in financial distress. Attendance is down more than 30% from its opening year of 2007. It’s having trouble raising the $20 million it needs to build a giant Noah’s Ark theme park.

The Creation Museum uses interactive exhibits to brainwash children and uneducated adults to believe that the Earth was formed by a conscious deity about 6,000 years ago and that humans and dinosaurs once inhabited the same ecosystem at the same time.  The museum, wghose theme line is “Prepare to believe,” was built by a ministry called Answers in Genesis, founded, like the Murdoch right-wing media empire, in Australia.

The museum blames the bad economy for the slowdown in business. Of course the museum operates with one hand tied behind its back, since no public school classes are allowed to send field trips there because it would run counter to the Supreme Court decision that keeps religion outside the classroom. Imagine how well the Creation Museum would be doing if could get on the public school field trip gravy train.

I’m wondering if the problem isn’t that it has to face brutal competition. I’m not talking about from Disney and Universal Studios, which are dedicated to the religion of consumerism. I mean competition from the other museums that want us to believe in an unscientific and false view of the physical world. After all, there are now 16 museums in the United States dedicated to the false notion of creationism,  including:

• Creation Museum, KY
• 7 Wonders Museum, WA
• A Key Encounter Nature Theatre and Planetarium, FL
• Akron Fossils and Science Center, OH
• Creation Adventure Museum, FL
• Creation Discovery Museum, FL
• Creation Evidence Museum, TX
• The Discovery Center, TX
• Glendive Dinosaur and Fossil Museum, MT
• Grand River Museum, SD
• Lost World Museum, NY
• Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum, TX
• Wyatt Archaeological Museum, TN
• Camp Sunrise Museum, GA
• Creation and Earth History Museum, CA
• Museum of Earth History,  TX

You’d think there would be plenty of paying customers for everyone, what with a recent Gallup poll showing that 46% of all Americans believe that a god created humans in their current form, while another 32% think that whatever the process of evolution , it got a good nudge from a deity. That’s an enormous target market.

The creationist museum is a very much a phenomenon of the south. Of the 16 museums dedicated to creationism, 11 are in the south, with 3 in attraction-rich Florida and 4 deep in the heart of all things conservative, Texas.

Yet, despite the fact that Gallup found only 15% of the population endorsing the scientific view that humans evolved with the intervention of a deity, museums that advocate Darwinism, such as the American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (4 million visitors a year) and the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh (1.3 million visitors a year), draw more people. No creationist museum comes close to these numbers. It’s probably because those damn yankees stole all the best dinosaur specimens.

To believe that a god created us is harmless enough until it is used to defend pollution-causing activities or war. I also have no problem with building institutions full of pretty pictures and exhibits dedicated to religious contemplation and then charging people an entrance fee to see. Maybe it works a little better when the entry fees are voluntary donations, which has been the game for the Catholic Church for about 2,000 years.

What I find pernicious to the intellectual health of the collective body of the American people is to pass off this nature-centric religion as science, which is what all these museums attempt to do. In one way or another, they all use facts and what they call analysis to provide what they call scientific proof of the intervention of a god in the creation or development of human beings. To ask the “god” question is inherently unscientific (which is why calling the Higgs boson a “god particle” is so unfortunate). Science exists outside the world of gods, because it is based solely on observation and not a priori theories of existence. Science looks for consistent rules that exist through time and does not care who or what created the rules, just how they work.

Thus, it’s their pretentions to science that make these creation museums unethical.

These past few days, I’ve been thinking a lot about my brother’s death at the age of 49.  When he fell from a ladder and smashed his brains on the concrete below, he was worth about $100.  Yet he got the finest, most high-tech treatment available by first class specialists who respected and maintained his life until it was hopeless, then cut out his useable parts for the living.

And it was all free.

The best medical treatment in the world for free for an itinerent skilled laborer—and he got it at the Charity Hospital in New Orleans, which was founded in 1736 and at one time was the second largest hospital in the country. It never reopened after Hurricane Katrina, most assuredly for political reasons.

My thoughts have turned to the wonderful care my brother received because of the announcement by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal that he was acting for the entire state and rejecting key portions of the Affordable Care Act. How far has Louisiana  fallen when it comes to taking care of its citizens!

Jindal has now been joined by his fellow right-wing ideologue Florida Governor Richard Scott, who is also rejecting those portions of the new health care law over which the states have control.

In the case of both of the provisions that Jindal and Scott have rejected, the governors are cutting off the noses of their constituencies to spite their own faces in a near paroxysm of ideological purity.

First, their refusal to construct state health insurance exchanges (HIX), which are state markets on which different insurance companies offer policies built on state-mandated standards to uninsured citizens of the state.  The Affordable Care Act gives every state the option to create an HIX, but the citizens of those states who decide not to create an one will be able to buy insurance on the federal version. In other words, by blocking Louisiana and Florida HIXs, Jindal and Scott are directly leading to an increase in federal government intervention on a state level because people who would have bought insurance through a state HIX will now go to the federal HIX.  I guess their opposition to social service programs to help the needy supersedes their dedication to states’ rights.

Ideological purity will lead to a net transfer of money from the pockets of Louisianans and Floridians because their governors are also rejecting an increase in the Medicare program.

I get it that both would like to replace Medicare with either a voucher system or, alternatively, end all government support of health care for the elderly.  But let’s look at the facts on the ground: Medicare as it exists right now is being expanded to serve millions of new people.  All of this expansion will be completely financed on the short term by the federal government and mostly financed by the feds in the long run. For every dollar that a state puts into the expansion in the future, it will receive many, many dollars from the feds both now and later. All of this money will go to making their citizens healthier.  Moreover, the citizens of every state will have to pay taxes to support the Medicare expansion, whether or not they receive the benefits.  Thus, by refusing to participate, a state is making its citizens pay for the health care of the citizens of other states.

In both refusals, the good governors are perversely working against their own cause. By not creating an HIX, they increase federal government control of the local health insurance market using federal not state standards. By turning down the Medicare expansion, they take money out of the pockets of their citizens and give it to the citizens of other states, a de facto tax increase with no benefit to those taxed—just the kind of thing about which Rick and Bobby like to pontificate.

Laughable on the level of ideas, but truly tragic when we think of the hundreds of thousands of people in these two states who will not get adequate health care because of these heartless ideologues.  It’s a sad day for both Louisiana and Florida.

I didn’t make a prediction in print on whether the Supreme Court would rule that the Affordable Care Act was constitutional or not, but I told several friends that I thought the vote would be 6-3 in favor of the law. I figured that Roberts always votes for the best interests of large corporations, and most large corporations like the new law because it takes a lot of the burden for paying the nation’s health insurance bill off their backs.  It thus made sense to me that Roberts would support the law’s constitutionality.

Roberts chose to justify his thumb up by reducing the many moving parts in the law to a net flow of money and then characterizing that flow as a “tax.” It was the same type of convoluted reasoning that the court has used in many bad rulings it has issued in recent years, such as Citizens United (which released a flood of corporate money into political waters), Bush V. Gore (which gave the 2000 election to the loser of the popular vote) and Knox v. Service Employees (which says that union members can opt out of providing financial support to political candidates).  In this case, Roberts twisted so that he could support the law without having to deal with states’ rights and other sacred rightwing principles.

President Obama gave the Republican Party some very good advice at the end of his lunch-time speech about the court’s decision when he said that it’s time to move on. Mitt Romney, John Boehner and Eric Cantor are all making inflammatory statements about repealing the law, but unless the fall election gives them both houses, repeal efforts will do nothing but keep the issue in the news and provide another distraction from solving real problems.

Although Romney has initially said that whoever wants to appeal this law should vote for him, I think he’ll lose if he focuses a good part of his campaign around repeal of the Affordable Care Act. A lot of Tea Partiers may hate the idea of government intervention in health care (except for Medicare, of course, which serves a large number of Tea Partiers), but these folk were going to vote for Romney anyhow.  They despise President Obama.

But consider the math. When a Tea Party enthusiast decides to vote for Romney because Mitt supports health care repeal, that’s one vote. The section of the law that keeps children on their parents’ policies until age 26 gets 3 votes: mother, father and adult child.

And that’s the Republicans’ dilemma. There is something for everyone to like in the new law: benefit extensions and protections for the insured, affordable insurance for the uninsured, new funding mechanisms for businesses, fewer noninsured to muck up the finances of hospitals and a lot of potential new customers for insurance companies.

Once Romney and the Republicans start messing with any of these new benefits, someone will get angry.  And if they start giving ground on any of these benefits, the true believing Tea Partiers will object. Of course, they could go radical—what I have started calling “bat-Cantor crazy”—and call for the repeal of Medicare and its replacement by a voucher system. I don’t think a lot of seniors are going to like that idea one bit.

In short, now that the Supremes have upheld the constitutionality of the new law, the Republicans have no short-term winning strategy on health care. For that reason, I think that the health care issue will fade away, as Republicans hammer on Obama and the Democrats for the sluggish performance of the economy and the persistence of high unemployment.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the issue dropped off the political agenda by the end of the summer.

 

Whatever the Supreme Court  announces later this week related to the Affordable Care Act, another court in the land has made a landmark decision that will improve the health and well-being of everyone in the United States, if not the world.

A federal court has upheld a finding by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that man-made greenhouses gases pose a threat to public health that requires the EPA by law to impose limits on the emissions causing the danger. 

The unanimous decision rejected the arguments raised by the hacks hired by some (but not all) utilities, manufacturing companies and business associations. Those who brought the lawsuit against the EPA were trying to sell the old myth that the very idea that the Earth is warming is based on unreliable studies. Luckily, the judges could read and therefore understand with great clarity that the overwhelming preponderance of evidence supports the science of global warming.

As even The Wall Street Journal’s anti-EPA version of the news admits, there is little room in the decision for appeal, as the judges noted several times how strongly the law backed the EPA’s position. Despite the great odds of winning, though, Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli of Virginia said the state plans to appeal to the Supreme Court.

Virginia was one of 14 states that sued to block the EPA rules; the list of other states that joined in the lawsuit against the best interests of their citizens reads like a roll call of Tea Party hotspots: Alaska, Nebraska, North Dakota and Texas, for example.  

That 15 states, including California, Massachusetts, New Mexico, New York and Oregon, supported the EPA regulations underscores the deep divisions we have in the country right now. To a great extent, those divisions have occurred because one side insists on spewing out lies and questioning the validity of proven science.

In the case of global warming, there are two sets of lies: 1) that environmental regulations hurts the economy; 2) that the science of global warming is not yet proven.  The judges did not have to deal with the first set of lies. To the second, it answered with crushing clarity, exemplified by the most quoted part of the decision: “This is how science works. The EPA is not required to reprove the existence of the atom every time it approaches a scientific question.”   

We should celebrate this victory for everyone—since everyone has to breathe the air and many millions are suffering and will suffer from the severe economic dislocations that extreme weather and resource shortages are causing and will continue to cause.

But in this victory, let’s also look at the sober fact: The appeals court ruled that it was okay for the EPA to make its decisions based on scientific truth.  Opposed to this proposition were the politicians of 14 states and the lawyers of many companies and associations. Their efforts, backed by millions of dollars, slowed down implementation of anti-pollution regulations for some 5 years.

They also acted against the wishes of their constituencies, according to a 2012 study of the public’s attitudes on energy and the environment conducted by George Mason’s University’s Center for Climate Change Communications. In a study that received absolutely zero publicity, George Mason researchers found that:

• 72 % of Americans think that addressing global warming should be a very high priority.
• 92 % of Americans think that developing sources of clean energy should be a very high priority.
• 83 % of Americans think that protecting the environment either improves economic growth and provides new jobs (58%) or has no effect on economic growth or jobs (25%).

Thus even with the law, the truth and the public on its side, the EPA still had to slog through 5 years of legal proceedings just to demonstrate that, indeed, the government can make a decision based on facts.

Four months ago I thought I dispensed with the Values.com website, a hodgepodge of feel-good slogans and stories, funded by billionaire Phillip Anschutz through The Foundation for a Better Life.

At that time I wrote about the following about the 88 values touted on Values.com:

These values can apply to anything. A dictatorship or state ruled by one party would be just as likely to list all these values as a representative democracy would. Virtually all these values (with the exception of “true beauty”) would come in handy in training an elite force to torture and engage in illegal assassinations. Many of these values would make a perfect substitute for “Arbeit Macht Frei,” which means “work makes you free” in German and was hung as a sign over the entrance of several Nazi concentration camps. Those in favor of a woman’s reproductive rights are equally able to find solace in contemplating these values as those who wish to restrict these rights.

The amorphous quality of these values…make the campaign for “values”…mere shills for maintaining the status quo, which as people are discovering is a fixed game in favor of those who already have money and power, a game which 95% of the population is currently losing badly.

At that time, I assumed that the Values.com advertising campaign would soon end.

But months later, Anschutz persists.

Strolling along Manhattan’s Upper West Side the other day I saw a billboard on the side of a bus shelter that consisted of a color photo (or drawing) of Kermit the Frog.

Here is the text, all very large:

Eats Flies.

Dates a Pig

Hollywood Star

LIVE YOUR DREAMS (in a box)

Pass It On

…followed by the Values.com website address.

When you go to the website, you can not only find the billboard, but an inspiring story.   The story is not of how Kermit’s creator, Jim Henson, lived his dream. No, it’s about how the imaginary character, Kermit the Frog, has lived his dream, written in the inspirational style that has characterized American business fiction since the original Horatio Alger stories—not a hint of irony.

Here is the “values” lesson presented at theValues.com website about the Kermit story: “After all if a Frog can accomplish so much, we can do something, too.”

Where do we start?

Most obviously, anyone can accomplish anything in fiction. A frog doesn’t have to go to college, and if it does, it will surely graduate whatever its level of effort, prior experience or natural capabilities, unless it’s a secondary character. But it’s Kermit so he’ll pass and probably give the graduation speech, because it’s a fiction and he’s a hero. Just as everyone is a hero/heroine of his/her own dream.

But how does comparing what you’ve been doing to what an imaginary animal does to succeed going to help you? You could point to lots of people—Jackie Robinson, Lyndon Johnson, Joe Biden, Lucille Clifton, Beverly Sills, Steve Jobs and Howie Long all come to mind—as people about whom one could say, if they could do it, you can too. But an imaginary frog?

More subtle is the subtext behind the “values” message to “live your dream.” What does “live your dream” mean? Get what you want.

What kind of a value is “get what you want?” Seek the power, money, possessions, friends and whatever else defines your dream—whatever it is.

That sounds like the politics of selfishness, to me. I thought a “value” was supposed to link people to something beyond themselves, to their families, communities, nation, world, philosophies and political beliefs.

Most subtle, are the details that define “living the dream” in the Kermit billboard: He’s a Hollywood star, a celebrity. Not a scientist, not a president of a major university, not a business titan, not even an athlete: a celebrity. Once again, when given the opportunity to promote an ideal to which to aspire, an American thought influencer resorts to the celebrity.

In one billboard, then, Values.com uses a conflation or false analogy to propose selfish pursuit as a positive value and defines that pursuit in terms of a primary symbol of consumerism (the celebrity).  The overall impact of the Values.com website is to sell the current status quo, while the particulars of the advertising campaign built around “live your dream” provides key details of what the controllers of the website want our values and dreams to be.   

An article in today’s New York Times details a very disturbing trend: curators, scholars and other art experts are refusing to have an opinion on whether a work of art is genuine or not.

By genuine, what the article and all the art experts quoted mean to say is that the art was created by the person to whom it is attributed, always a famous artist.

The reason that the art experts are afraid to do what their job is—analyze art and determine its authenticity—is that they are afraid of being sued by either a purchaser or a seller who learns that her  Rodin is not really a Rodin. With paintings going for tens and sometimes hundreds of millions, a lot is at stake when someone says that a painting that was thought to be a Leonardo or a Matisse was really painted by someone else—a follower, a member of the school or even an out-and-out forgery. 

When lots of money is on the line, people often sue when they don’t get their way, so it makes sense that they would sue someone who can cost them money because of a studied opinion.

For example, the Times article includes a photo of some of 74 plasters attributed to Edgar Degas. Too quote the caption: “fearing lawsuits, scholars are afraid to declare them genuine or not.”

It may make sense to those who initiate these lawsuits, but that doesn’t change the highly suspect ethical position of the art expert who bites his tongue about his professional opinion. The lack of integrity of the art expert who lets pass a forgery or a mislabeled painting is, as the Romans used to say, “res ipso loquitur or “a thing that proves itself.” It’s similar to a stock analyst who won’t pan a stock because his company is selling it or the public relations executive who lets a company lie in a news release because it’s a large client. It’s just plain wrong. And it’s a betrayal of the trust that society puts in experts and other intellectuals. (The first to use the term “betrayal of the intellectuals” was Julian Benda, who argued in 1927 that European intellectuals of the preceding hundred years often ceased to follow their professional dictates to reason dispassionately about political and military matters, instead becoming apologists for nationalism, warmongering and racism.) 

The most intriguing part of the story, though, is not what it says about yet another betrayal by intellectuals, but what it says about the power of branding.

Just think about it: here is a beautiful work of art that delights or stuns or evokes some emotional and intellectual reaction that is both pleasurable and edifying.  Suddenly you learn that it’s not a Picasso and so it’s worth less money.  Or an absolute monstrosity of a drawing, just as “fuggly” as you could imagine—but then you learn that John Chamberlain did it as a sketch for one of his metal sculptures and suddenly it gains in value. The value of the artwork increases or decreases dramatically by attaching a name to or detaching a name from the work, whose essence remains the same. It’s like bottling tap water, giving it a name that evokes health or purity and selling it as special water, wait…they’ve been doing that for years!

When the name of the artist and his or her general style becomes a brand, the value of which inflates the price that people and museums are willing to pay for the work, people are really buying the name more than they are buying the work itself. As with Coke, Bill Blass or even Paul Newman’s salad dressing, the power of the brand is an integral part of the product. The brand on a product usually stands for a set of values with which the company wants to associate its products, or it enables the company to extend to other markets or other product types easily, because people know the brand. In the case of the name of an artist, the product doesn’t change, just the price people are willing to pay for it.

The power of branding in art is ultimately bad for society, for this reason: rich folk trade this art between themselves or buy it and donate it to museums (often years later for a tax break on the current value which may be many times what was originally paid for the piece). All of this money is thereby kept out of the real economy. It doesn’t create jobs. It doesn’t help the economy grow. It’s just another proof that cutting taxes on the wealthy (as Bush II did twice and Romney wants to do again) doesn’t create more jobs than if the government had used the money to improve our roads, reduce the number of kids in public school classes or invest in advanced technologies.  We should end the tax deduction for giving art to museums or assess a very steep tax on all art purchases of more than $250,000. My solution would be to return to the taxation system of 1979, which will not only result in the wealthy having far less money to spend on frivolities such as signatures at the bottom of paintings, but also help to create a more equitable distribution of wealth.

OMG!, Yahoo!’s online celebrity magazine, has commemorated the fact that third-rate actor Mark Wahlberg finally earned his G.E.D. by giving us a list of 11 actors and models who never finished high school.

The photo-story consists of a list that unfolds over 11 web pages (to make it easier for the reader to see all the ads). Each web page tells a celebrity’s “I quit high school” story.

The tease to the story on Yahoo!’s home page is unethically misleading: “This list shows you don’t need a diploma to make millions in show business.”

The statement and the list itself play a deceptive fraud on readers, many of whom are impressionable teens and pre-teens to whom the celebrity mongers are selling a bill of goods about what constitutes success and value. While we can find celebrities and business titans, and even scientists who have not finished high school or college, they are rare and have become rarer over the last few decades.  Writing “You don’t need a diploma…” has the same ring of truth to it as “It will probably snow in January in Rochester,” while in fact the successful person without a high school diploma is a rarity.

To drive home the deception in the article, I want to take a look at this odious list of celebs without diplomas from three perspectives:

1. The list itself: Of the 11 celebs without diplomas, 4 come from families that are quite wealthy and well-connected, part of the 1%. Most people can’t ask mommy who is “in the biz” to call a business associate or pull a favor, so they might be well-served to get the diploma and the additional training that goes with it.
2. The celeb lists they don’t give: Wikipedia lists 86 television and film actors who went to Yale, 68 who went to Harvard and 118 who went to UCLA.  That’s only three colleges and it only includes film and television.  If I had to bet on either a college graduate or a high school dropout making it in Hollywood or on Broadway, I’d go with the kid with more training, and the numbers agree with me.
3. The list of non-celebs without high school diplomas: For every person who becomes a famous celebrity, there are thousands who try and fail.

The article never points out the hard cold facts of economic failure for virtually anyone with no education or certification. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the average wage of a high school dropout is less than $20,000 a year. A high school graduate makes on average more than $27,000 a year. Someone with an associate degree makes about $36,000 and someone with a 4-year degree makes almost $47,000 a year on average. Kids with dreams of fame who don’t quite make it can always fall back on their education—but only if they have one.

And many kids have dreams of fame. There are at least a thousand colleges offering degrees in performing arts that graduate students every year, many of whom want to work in show business. Every city has at least one modeling school and we all know how many college teams there are for every major sport.  Even for those with talent and drive, the chance of celebrity success is slight.

The ideological subtext behind the article is an extreme form of anti-intellectualism, the premise that one doesn’t really need an education to succeed.  The news media feeds us this nonsense with some frequency, but the OMG! article is especially obnoxious because it suggests that kids won’t suffer if they drop out of high school and pursue stardom.

I have rarely received as negative a reaction as when I lambasted Professor Thomas Sowell the other day for, among other things, his opposition to the minimum wage—any minimum wage. The number of negative comments rivaled what I received when I said that no comic book could be a mature work of art, as a novel or poem can.

In the case of the supporters of Marvel: The Avengers, who called me on my overly general statement about comic books, I admitted I went too far in a retraction a few days later.

But all I have to offer anyone who is opposed to a minimum wage is scorn and contempt.

Their arguments are self-serving and typically built on imaginary anecdotes, as imaginary as Reagan’s welfare queens driving Cadillacs or Santorum’s poor people emotionally crippled by the worst kind of addiction, food stamp dependency.

Let’s start with the imaginary business owner who can’t afford to hire someone to sweep the floors at $7.25 an hour, so he does it himself or the floors stay dirty. For years, whenever anyone proposed raising the minimum wage, critics have painted a grim future of thousands of business owners sweeping floors or living with filth. The floor-sweeping business owner has taken its place as one of the classic figures of right-wing economic mythology.  The first time I heard this metaphor used as the primary argument to oppose the minimum wage was when I was in college making a minimum wage of $1.25 an hour from a part-time job on a Sear’s shipping dock.

My question, then and ever since, is how valuable is the time of the owner if he can afford to sweep the floors him/herself instead of looking at the books, coaching employees, visiting clients or supervising the sales floor, developing growth plans, negotiating with suppliers, serving on boards where he can spread good will about the company in the community, or any of the other high level jobs entailed in running any successful business?   In many businesses such as mine, when a highly ranked employee works an hour, he or she can create dozens and sometimes hundreds of hours of work for other employees. What owner would be foolish enough to waste time sweeping floors instead of creating this additional work?  And aren’t there usually other employees who could sweep those floors, freeing the boss to perform tasks more central to making money?

As to the case of a potential business that depends on a lot of employees but can only make a profit if these employees are paid $4 or $5 an hour—maybe the owner has to take less profit or raise prices; in other words: change the business model.

The idea behind the imaginary owner-sweeper is silly. No well-run business hires additional employees if it hasn’t first figured out how to make money off of them, unless it’s a relative or a friend and the company is doing very well.

There are many factors that determine the current market for every position, including marketplace conditions, the presence of a union at the company or in the industry and the imputed value of the skill base and experience of the employee (which means that in this society, companies are willing to pay more for senior sales executives than for entry-level welders). All the minimum wage does is to put a floor on the minimum value of all jobs, as a protection of individual workers.

Which brings us to the other imaginary anecdote, another classic: the young kid struggling to get out of poverty who just needs a chance, but can’t get it because the minimum wage prevents anyone from hiring him. There is no doubt that there are any number of desperate people who would work for less than the current minimum wage, including lots of illegal aliens and teenagers. And when a recession hits, their numbers proliferate.

Yes, out of desperation, these people will work for anything. But that doesn’t make it right. The minimum wage is society’s way of saying that every person is entitled to a minimum amount of compensation (and dignity) when they exchange their work for money.

Which brings us to the underlying economic theory behind opponents of the minimum wage, including Professor Sowell, a premise so abstract that the right-wing has yet to create an imaginary person to embody its meaning: the minimum wage distorts the marketplace.

Damn right it does, and that’s a good thing. It’s supposed to distort the market place. Here are some other distortions of the marketplace:

• Using standard weights and measures
• Laws concerning the enforcement of contracts
• Regulations to ensure the safety of food products
• State certifications before people can practice medicine or law or teach children

In fact, every rule or custom of society distorts the absolute free market. Some distortions are good, such as the use of standard weights and measures. Some are obviously bad, such as prohibition of alcohol in the first part of the 20th century.

Those who oppose something just because it distorts the marketplace don’t really oppose marketplace distortions, just the ones that hurt their interests or the interests of those who pay their salaries. The minimum wage raises the wages not just of minimum-wage employees but of all others, and so distorts by redistributing wealth from business owners to their employees. When I look at economic realities—for example, the fact that most of the wealthy and near wealthy run, own or manage businesses and the fact that we have seen a widening split between what the wealthy make and own and what everyone else makes and owns—when I see these facts, I’m not so worried about the marketplace distortion that occurs because of the minimum wage. Even though I own a business, I would be delighted to see the marketplace distortion that would result if the minimum wage were raised to $10 or even $15.

That distortion, by the way, is called economic equity.

I was going to ignore the silly article by Tom Sightings titled “Dreams of the Ideal Retirement Home” in the latest U.S. News & World Report, but it hasn’t left the home and news pages of the major Internet news portals since it was first posted last Wednesday. With such media penetration, I feel as if I have to warn readers that the article is little more than propaganda against city life.

Sightings’ musings on retirement resemble all the real estate lists that appear in standard general news stalwarts like US. News, Forbes, Bloomberg News, the Associated Press and Reuters. The underlying ideological point of all these lists is to advocate for a non-urban life style, one dependent on cars and malls and in which the thought of going to a museum or serious play never crosses the mind, because we’re all so busy playing golf and camping out. (See OpEdge on April 11, 2012; September 23, 2011; and March 9, 2010, for example.)

Sightings doesn’t create a list. Instead his article does a little collective wishing out loud for his readers. His article flits from one retirement idyll to another, including:

• In the country
• In a small house with a small yard in a small town (Sightings’ own retirement dream)
• Beachfront, or at least near the sea
• Golf communities
• A home with access to parks
• University towns (he mentions Newark DE, Athens GA and Tempe AZ).

He completes his musings with a discussion of some non-geographic attributes—age of home, size of home, proximity to an interstate or airport.

Nothing about living in the exciting cities of Manhattan, downtown Chicago or Boston, Washington or Philadelphia, with their museums, live theatre, top musical performances of all types, experimental arts, major libraries and non-chain restaurants and retail establishments.

Nothing about living in the many quaint and bustling neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, Seattle, Atlanta, New Orleans (those that are left) or Milwaukee.

It’s not just city life that the author ignores.  He also ignores those parameters of the decision on “where to live when retired” in which urban life excels, such as:

• Extensive and dependable mass transit
• Major healthcare facilities
• Cultural activities
• Infrastructure of services and social opportunities for senior citizens

What Sightings does is assume the superiority of the suburbs and rural areas, both when working and in retirement.

Why this hate of the city? It’s a confluence of two trends, one deeply seated in American history and one a phenomenon originating the post-World War II era. The long-term trend is American distrust of “the other”—the immigrant, the foreigner, those of different color. Cities thrive on diversity, which by its nature forges all “others” into a mosaic of “all of us, each different” (that I personally find beautiful).

The other trend—in operation only since about 1945—is the synched messages of car companies, real estate developers and retail chains about the blandishments of suburban living: buy this new house, depend on cars and shop only in recognizable places that look like what you see everywhere else.

No one can say if Sightings buys into the ideology and doesn’t know that his piece is little more than propaganda against cities. But he does know that he’s fooling the readers about something: The article begins with his pulling weeds and dreaming of retirement, and ends with a collective sigh for all of us (including himself) who will have to get through another weekend of taking care of the yard. But the biography that follows the article mentions that he is already retired. He deceives us by saying in the article that he is dreaming of attaining a condition that he is already in.  The deception is purely rhetorical (as the bio admits the truth), but unnecessary. Sightings could have written the same article without the personalization.

In his most recent column, which I saw in today’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Thomas Sowell patronizes the working class by imagining a group of educated people who look down on manual and semi-skilled labor. He characterizes Utopian intellectuals who “lament that many people work ‘just for money’” and want every job to be self-fulfilling, which Sowell says the Utopians say excludes janitors and fast food cashiers.  Sowell ends his article, titled “Meaningful Work,” by lambasting those who tell young people that certain jobs are “menial.”

Sowell, who has been touting rightwing causes as a senior fellow at the ultra-conservative Hoover Institute at Stanford for decades, pretends to be a friend of young people and the working class, protecting them from the hectoring of the elitist college police. 

Let’s forget about the fact that Sowell doesn’t name one of these elitists, although he alludes to an unnamed “internationally renowned scholar who recently said that what low-income people needed was ‘meaningful work.’” Nor does he cite any studies, e.g., of attitudes of educators, the wealthy or some other groups towards manual and semi-skilled labor.  It’s painfully clear that Sowell has created a straw man—I guess I should say, straw group—so that he can assert his pride in the working class.

When it comes time to actually do something for young people, minorities or the working class, whatever the proposal is, Sowell is ready to shoot it down. Money is the ultimate sign of respect in our society, so let’s take a look at how Sowell stands on issues that put more money into the pockets of manual and semi-skilled workers.

Sowell is against any kind of minimum wage, because he says it distorts the marketplace. Like a doting uncle, Sowell worries about the young people who lose job opportunities because employers can’t afford to hire people to do certain jobs. It’s a bunch of malarkey. Employers make money on every employee, either directly or because doing the work frees a more valuable employee to make money directly.  Employers only hire workers they need, and when they need a worker, they hire one. The minimum wage makes sure that everyone gets paid fairly, no matter what the job or the age of the worker.

Sowell also despises unions, which catapulted millions of manual and semi-skilled laborers into the middle class for decades. It’s not a coincidence that as soon as union membership started to shrink, so did the real buying power of the average worker. Unions not only ensure high wages for union members (even college educated ones such as teachers and nurses), but they also put pressure to raise the salaries for all jobs at a company or in an industry, both management and nonunionized workers. Again, like a good uncle, Dr. Sowell says he only has the best interest of workers in mind when he says that “unions are for unions.” Sowell shows only mock concern for employees, who he assumes can buy each other a better deal with the employer than each could if teamed with all her/his fellow employees. After all, it works for Alex Rodriguez and Kevin Durant. And I’m sure it worked for Sowell in his last contract negotiation, too.

In his article, Sowell says that people who lack skills can “take jobs for which they are currently qualified and then move up the ladder as they acquire more experience.” What ladder is he talking about? He’s a social scientist who is supposed to keep up with the literature.  Hasn’t he heard that a recent study demonstrated that it’s significantly harder in the United States to move up the economic ladder than in any other westernized country, and it’s hardest to rise from the lowest rungs?

If Sowell were truly interested in young people, the uneducated or minorities, he would work to instill an attitude of respect towards all jobs and all kinds of labor. Now in America, that means supporting policies that increase the wages paid to the people who perform manual and semi-skilled labor.