Old Gadfly: IM, what did you think about the second
presidential debate (October 16, 2012)?
IM: It was certainly more competitive than the
first one. But, I must say that it also
manifested some of the effects of engineering public sentiment that we talked
about in our last conversation.
Gadfly: How so?
IM: There were elements of the debate that
stemmed from and contributed to a relatively obscure concept called memes. Richard Dawkins introduced the concept of
memes in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. Memes are transmitted through a process of
imitation from person to person and essentially are the building blocks of
human culture. Memes can represent ideas,
concepts, beliefs, fashions, techniques, interpretations of phenomena, and
other forms of cognitions. A meme can be
false; yet, unchallenged false memes can still be rapidly propagated within a
culture. Richard Brodie wrote an entire
book to drive this point home in Virus of
the Mind: The New Science of the Meme.
Gadfly: Fascinating, IM. Tell me how memes were present in the debate.
IM: The first major indication was how President
Obama characterized Governor Romney’s economic plan. Obama asserted Romney’s plan would cost $5
trillion for proposed across the board 20% tax cuts, another $2 trillion for
additional military programs, and another trillion to continue Bush tax cuts
for the wealthiest Americans for a total of $8 trillion.
Gadfly: Maybe he’s correct.
IM: Gadfly, Obama claimed his own policies would
cut deficits in half and restore unemployment rates below 6% during his first
term. His policies failed to do this;
yet, Obama claims he needs another four years to give his same policies time to
work. This is the same man that thinks
he can lecture a man who actually has a successful economic and business track
record. But, Obama is clever. (BTW, I almost said smart; but a smart person
might make an adjustment when things aren’t working). Obama knows enough people will resonate with
the $8 trillion. The $8 trillion idea is
a meme that will get transmitted to others.
It took nanoseconds with the pundits at MSNBC News following the debate.
Gadfly: Your argument is plausible, and it sounds
like you have more evidence to discuss.
IM: Another example was town hall participant Susan
Katz’s question:
Governor Romney, I am an undecided voter, because I’m
disappointed with the lack of progress I’ve seen in the last four years. However, I do attribute much of America’s
economic and international problems to the failings and missteps of the Bush
administration. Since both you and
President Bush are Republicans, I fear a return to the policies of those years
should you win this election. What is
the biggest difference between you and George W. Bush, and how do you
differentiate yourself from George W. Bush?
Gadfly, what do you think is
the major meme in this question?
Gadfly: That today’s economic and international
problems were caused by Bush Administration policies.
IM: Yes, I agree with your characterization of
the meme. What you just described is
considered a meme because it has been propagated in the public narrative,
treated as an indisputable fact, and internalized in the American culture. Do you believe it is true?
Gadfly: There may be some elements of truth to the
meme.
IM: Name one.
Gadfly: One common argument is that Bush tax cuts led
to reduced tax revenues and corresponding annual deficits. But, we already examined this argument in a
previous conversation: tax cuts actually
corresponded with significant increases in tax revenue between 2004 and
2007. And, as Governor Romney tried to
explain, when he was allowed to speak, tax cuts can lead to job creation. Between 2004 and 2007 unemployment rates decreased
from 6.0% to 4.6%. But, then we saw a
decline in tax revenue and a rising unemployment rate in 2008. What do you believe accounts for these
developments?
IM: Gadfly, we talked about these developments in
a previous conversation (“Tax Cuts, Unemployment, and Public Debt,” August 26,
2012). Between 2004 and 2008, there were
no change in tax rates, but there was a major shift in political power from
Republican to Democrat in both houses of Congress and the burst of the housing
bubble in 2008 thanks to the subprime mortgages and Democrat legislation (i.e.,
the Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992). Remember, we also discussed the anti-business
ratings by the Chamber of Commerce for both Harry Reid in the Senate and Nancy
Pelosi in the House.
Gadfly: Is there any evidence to support the
Bushonomics meme?
IM: In probably the best attempt to
justify the Bushonomics meme, the Center for American Progress published a white paper by Scott
Lilly, Understanding Bushonomics: How We Got into This Mess in the First Place, in August 2008. The paper singled out taxes, minimum wage,
trade, union, and immigration policies.
Let me critique the paper’s arguments:
·
One paragraph on tax policy presented an argument that the
wealthiest received a much greater tax cut than middle income families. The argument wants the reader to believe the
government is giving more to the wealthy than to the middle class. Taxes take money away from those who have
earned it. So, in reality tax cuts take
less from those who earned it. Many of
the “wealthy” took the tax reduction and invested it. The investment created jobs, which in turn
increased the tax base. This is why the
tax cuts generated more tax revenue for government budgets and lowered the
unemployment rate between 2004 and 2007.
And don’t forget, even with the Bush tax cuts, the top 5% still pay 60%
of the tax burden.
·
The paper provided three paragraphs to demonize President Bush on
the minimum wage. Lilly presumes a
minimum wage increases benefits for lower-skilled, lower-paid workers despite
evidence on the unintended consequences of a mandated minimum wage increase
(i.e., those it targets for the benefit are most vulnerable to losing their
jobs because employers will keep more experienced people with a smaller pay
increase while letting go the less experienced, lowest paid employees).[1] Lilly acknowledges that even though Bush did not
directly oppose adjustments to the minimum wage, a veto threat tied any
increase to business tax cuts. The
amazing dynamic here is that the progressive view believes government knows
better than the private sector regarding how to grow the economy. In doing so, the government issues rules and
regulations to control centers of production (sounds like the former Soviet Union ).
What progressives either do not understand, or dismiss as a fact that
does not fit their narrative frame, is that when certain wages became too high
in relation to globalized market forces, many jobs, such as manufacturing,
migrate to foreign economies that are a better fit. Ironically, the Obama Administration is now
trying to entice the manufacturing sector to bring jobs back to America
·
Lilly then claimed Bush trade policies led to a tripling (by a
factor of 3.1) of the bilateral trade deficit with China
·
Related to the trade policies, Lilly reported a loss of 21% or 3.7
million manufacturing jobs between 2000 and 2008—jobs that migrated to foreign
countries. This change reflects a
corresponding loss in union membership in the manufacturing sector, from
14.8% to 11.4%, or a loss of 30% of union members. These numbers reflect the unsustainable
expectations and cost of union membership in a globalized economy.
·
Lilly suggested Bush may have contributed to illegal immigration,
not from any specific policy, but from association with industrial sectors that
hired illegal immigrants, such as restaurants, construction, etc. The evidence Lilly presented comes from
political campaign contributions in the 2006 election cycle from
OpenSecrets.org. And, he is
correct. Yet, two years later, political
campaign contributions
from many of the same sectors shifted toward the Obama campaign. Thus, Lilly’s suggestion that Bush policies
exacerbated the illegal immigration issue simply has no logical foundation. What is more informative, however, is the
realization that these business sectors place greater faith in the Republican
Party to promote business. Businesses in
the private sector create jobs.
Recall our discussion about the burst of the
housing bubble in 2008 (“The Art of Economy Surfing,” September 7, 2012). The
point I am making, Gadfly, is that the Bush Administration has been
illogically, perhaps fraudulently, accused of causing the current economic
situation.
Gadfly:
So, the narrative advanced by a certain political faction has attempted
to propagate a political bogeyman meme that may not be true.
IM:
Bulls eye. The Bush
Administration meme became a prima facie straw man for future political
argument. This allowed then candidate
Obama to repeatedly equate McCain as a Bush clone. Bush policies were bad, and McCain is like
Bush; therefore, McCain is bad.
Gadfly:
So, the question posed to Romney was really a conundrum—how is Governor
Romney different from a false narrative?
Knowing how complex the explanation is for today’s economic situation, Romney
had no reasonable alternative in responding to the question other than the way
he did, which is unfortunate because the Bushonomics meme became further
entrenched in the public narrative.
IM: An
objective media source should never have let this happen. Twenty years ago, the first news source I digested
each day was the New York Times. At that time, the New York Times deserved the reputation as the bellwether news
source—it was nonpartisan and objective.
But, today, the New York Times
seems to have taken on the role of a state-controlled news source, similar to
the Pravda at the peak of the former
Soviet Union.
Gadfly:
I can see the role our media plays in propagating memes, whether true or
false. How do you tie memes to politics?
IM:
David Easton[3]
defined politics as the authoritative allocation of values. The political strategy for presidential candidates
is to demonstrate they have the best plan to advance values for the majority of
Americans. Values then are advanced
through policy and budgets.
Gadfly:
What are American values?
IM:
Good question. Values once
defined become memes that are dependent upon a medium for propagating them to
other people. So, the questions
important to understanding how this process works are; (a) who defines values;
and (b) how are people within a society informed of these values? Political elites determine values. Government technocrats, academia, Hollywood,
and the news media are sources and venues for propagating value-based memes.
Gadfly:
Let’s get more concrete in our discussion. Explain how the values of life and liberty
are propagated within our society.
IM: You
really know how to peel the onion, so to speak, Gadfly. Let me address liberty first. Conservatives believe in individual liberty,
yet with a sense of civic responsibility to one’s family, neighborhood, and
other forms of association.
Progressives, on the other hand, believe in collective liberty, that an
individual depends upon others for safety and security. This is why progressives insist upon unions
and why unions heavily (nearly 100%) endorse and fund Democrat candidates. As we mentioned before, collective liberty
was Hillary Rodham Clinton’s thesis in her book, It Takes a Village. Amity
Shlaes described progressive American fascination of the collective liberty
experiments by Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler in Chapter 2 of her book, The Forgotten Man. Further, if you ever want to read a savvy,
yet disturbing, display of language manipulation, read Professor George
Lakoff’s book, Whose Liberty? Lakoff believes no one pulls himself up by
the bootstraps and that individually earned wealth belongs to the
commonwealth. Finally, recall our
discussion about the Grand Inquisitor parable.
The Grand Inquisitor is today’s progressive equivalent; whereas,
conservatives are more consistent with the vision of Christ and the
Judeo-Christian philosophy.
Gadfly:
You describe a stark distinction between progressives and conservatives
regarding liberty. Now, how about life?
IM: Conservatives
are generally pro-life, which means they are opposed to abortion because it is
the taking of a life. Progressives, on
the other hand, say that a woman’s reproductive right, as a value, trumps the
right to life of the baby in her womb.
Gadfly:
IM, as a man, perhaps you don’t understand a woman’s dilemma when she
finds herself to be pregnant.
IM: You
raise an important point, Gadfly; and, this is an important reason not to judge
the moral intentions of a woman. Yet,
many decisions are made with incomplete information or as a result of the human
bondage we discussed previously, where emotion trumps reason. Nonetheless, this abortion debate is where we
have a moral obligation to judge the institutions and norms that shape our
society. Let me explain.
Context is important. First, with the exception of artificial
insemination, pregnancies are caused by sexual activity between a man and a
woman. This is an important point. Pregnancies are not like catching a cold or
the flu, where some errant sperm cell just happened to find its way to an egg
cell. According to Planned Parenthood’s analytical think tank, the Guttmacher
Institute, less than 1% of abortions are due to rape- or incest-related
pregnancies. That means 99% of abortions
stem from consensual sexual activity. By
the Institute’s own account, more than 1.2 million abortions took place in
America in 2006. This single-year number
of 1.2 million abortions is more than the cumulative number of American
casualties incurred in wars from the Revolutionary War to now.
Second, the meme, reproductive right,
technically means the right to reproduce, and reproduction happens through
sexual activity. If the meme,
reproductive right, includes the right to kill an unborn child, regardless of
the reason (e.g., unwanted, inconvenient, wrong gender, a male partner of
dubious genetic stock, etc.), then a more descriptive term for the value would
be the right of motherhood. This would
more appropriately describe a woman’s decision to be a mother to an unborn
child, or not.
Third,
the reproductive rights argument is a form of eugenics; whereby, a woman
exercises a legal prerogative to manipulate nature’s law. Both reasons are
consistent with Margaret Sanger’s vision for population control from a eugenics
perspective. Eugenics was an attempt to
reduce the number of lesser desirable human beings in favor of those from a
more favorable genetic stock. This
ideology was penetrating the United States by the same progressives who admired
Stalin’s and Hitler’s experiments with collective liberty. This is why Sanger started the Planned
Parenthood program, which to this day has facilities positioned in
neighborhoods characterized by poor minority populations.[4] Sanger’s worldview justified intellectuals,
such as herself, with a moral obligation to rid the world of lesser desired
human beings. Her biographical history
is readily available in libraries and the Internet. Her legacy lives on with an even larger and
more pervasive Planned Parenthood organization.
Fourth,
while today’s Planned Parenthood leaders tone down Sanger’s rhetoric, the
original mission remains the same. The
insult to those who understand the genesis and mission of Planned Parenthood is
that by paying their federal income tax, they have been co-opted in the
eugenics model when the federal government subsidizes this enterprise with
millions of dollars annually. This
federal funding is an example of egalitarianism, a concept we discussed in a
previous conversation.
Fifth, Planned Parenthood is a
501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
Perhaps it should seek the additional millions of dollars from private
sector donors who believe in the ideology of eugenics. Today’s Planned Parenthood champions would
deny the above logic. They tell us they
are in the practice of protecting a woman’s reproductive health (and,
incidentally, Planned Parenthood is an industry with jobs and income). Yet, they avoid discussing the one choice
that puts health at risk (whether a venereal disease or unwanted
pregnancy): voluntary sexual
activity. And of course, there is a
related issue regarding employers (even religious ones) to provide
contraceptives and abortifacients to their employees, implying a statist
encouragement of sexual activity. Does
this sound like Huxley’s vision in A
Brave New World (i.e., feelies, the orgy porgy, and the
centrifugal bumblepuppy)? Book of Proverbs is about 5000 years old,
dating back to King Solomon and the Sumerian civilization (circa 3000 B.C).[5] Frankly, the Planned Parenthood legacy (and
its support for sexual freedom without consequence) seems to be profoundly
reflected in Proverbs 26:11, “As the dog returns to his vomit, so the fool
repeats his folly.” With this context in mind, let me share two reflections.
First, the sad part of the abortion
experience in America (or anywhere in the world for that matter) is that many of
these women find themselves in a situation that they were not prepared to be,
whether through ignorance, loneliness, or whatever reason that compelled them
to engage in sexual activity. They then
find too much encouragement from those they trust to guide them through an
abortion. While many of those they trust
encourage abortion out of compassion for the pregnant woman, they fail to
understand that the aborted child is not aborted from her memory. Years later, many of these women are struck
by the cold and ruthless act of abortion and will carry that scar forever.
Second, John
Stuart Mill spoke of a profound metaphor when he said “When a people are used
as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the
service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people.”[6]
The reproductive rights debate is a metaphorical
war between values: in this case,
pro-life and reproductive rights. Norma
L. McCorvey was used as a human instrument by a lawyer, Sarah Weddington, in
the case that resulted in the Supreme Court ruling, called Roe Versus Wade of
1973.[7] McCorvey was the “Roe” in Roe versus
Wade. While she was under a lot of
pressure to have one at the time, McCorvey never had an abortion, and today is
a staunch opponent of Roe versus Wade, and abortion in general. Yet, as we see in emotional political
discourse, reproductive rights, as a meme, has shaped a cultural view for many
in our society.
Gadfly: IM, why is there not such a discussion in the
public narrative?
IM:
The current discussion is dominated by a progressive viewpoint. As I already mentioned, at one time earlier
in my life, the first news source I read each morning was the New York Times. In those days, the Times newspaper was the bellwether news source. Other news outlets keyed off the Times.
Today, the Times reporting and
editorials reflect a political lens through which it observes and reports the
news. Just this week, in an effort to
rally behind the progressive presidential candidate, the paper published an
editorial, “If Roe v. Wade Goes.” Citing
progressive think tanks, the editorial was a blatant attempt to frighten women
into thinking Romney and Ryan would advance policy to make abortion illegal, making
abortion dangerous for those seeking one.
Romney and Ryan believe abortion rights are something to be decided by
the people within their respective states.
But, progressives have a different view because they believe in a large
central government with a statist perspective and moral superiority in “the
authoritative allocation of values.” In
the process, those who dominate the public narrative propagate the memes that
shape American culture.
Gadfly: IM, let me reinforce what you just described
with thoughts from Walter Cronkite.
Cronkite said the following in the Preface to a 1983 edition of George
Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984:
Seldom
has a book provided a greater wealth of symbols for its age and for the
generations to follow, and seldom have literary symbols been invested with such
power. How is that? Because they were so useful, and because the
features of the world he drew, outlandish as they were, also were familiar. . .
. We’ve met Big Brother in Stalin and Hitler and Khomeini. We hear Newspeak in every use of language to
manipulate, deceive, to cover harsh realities with the soft snow of euphemism
[George Lakoff demonstrates this in Moral
Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives
Think when he metaphorically classifies liberals as nurturant parents and conservatives
as strict fathers]. And every time a political
leader expects or demands that we believe the absurd, we experience that mental
process Orwell called doublethink. . . . If not prophecy, what was 1984?
It was, as many have noticed, a warning:
a warning about the future of human freedom in a world where political
organization and technology can manufacture power in dimensions that would have
stunned the imaginations of earlier ages.[8]
The challenge, IM, is to
sufficiently educate members of our society with the intellectual capacity and
sense of discernment to (a) identify those memes that arm politicians for
abusive power or inspire politicians for character-based leadership; and (b)
make informed decisions at the ballot box.
The future of our individual freedom is at stake.
[1] See Daniel Aaronson and Eric French, “Product
Market Evidence on the Employment Effects of the Minimum Wage,” Journal of Labor Economics, 25(1)
(January 2007), pp. 167-200. Using the
restaurant industry as the sample population, Aaronson and French concluded
that “a 10% increase in the minimum wage lowers low-skill employment by 2% - 4%
and total restaurant employment by 1% - 3%.
See also, Sara Lemos, “A Survey of the Effects of the Minimum Wage on
Prices,” Journal of Economic Surveys,
22(1) (February 2008), pp. 187-212.
[2] See Mark Landler, “Obama Calls for Tax Breaks
to Return Jobs from Abroad,” The New York
Times, January 11, 2012. Retrieved
on June 10, 2012 from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/12/business/obama-seeks-tax-breaks-to-return-jobs-from-abroad.html;
see also Christopher Power, “Do Tax Breaks Help Manufacturers?” Bloomberg Business Week Asia, February 24, 2012, retrieved on June 10
from http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-02-24/do-tax-breaks-help-manufacturers;
see also Susan Helper, Timothy Krueger, and Howard Wial, (February 2012), Why Does Manufacturing Matter? Which Manufacturing Matters? A Policy Framework, Metropolitan Policy
Program at Brookings, (Washington ,
DC
[3]
David Easton, The Political System: An Inquiry into the State of Political
Science (New York: Knopf, 1953), p.
139.
[4] See excellent well-cited background research
at http://www.citizenreviewonline.org/special_issues/population/
the_negro_project.htm; http://www.examiner.com/conservative-in-virginia-beach/planned-parenthood-is-the-black-community-s-worst-enemy;
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/aug/25/planned-parenthood-targets-blacks/;
and http://bloodmoneyfilm.com/blog/planned-parenthood-eugenics
[5] Lawrence
[6] John Stuart Mill, “The Contest in America
[7] Sarah Weddington, A Question of Choice, (New York, NY: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1992).
[8] George
Orwell, 1984 (New York: Signet Classic,
1983), pp. 1-2
