Golly Toto, I Don't Think We're in New Hampshire Anymore

 "All politics is local."

--Tip O'Neill, former Speaker of the House

Before the internet, Mr. O'Neill's quip likely was more accurate, but one thing our connected information age has done is to nationalize politics. Just go on Twitter and see comments from Michigan, Texas, California, Oregon and you cannot distinguish them from people writing from New Hampshire.

Hampton Falls, NH

Which is not to say, we do not have local issues or that announcing you want to cut the corn ethanol in gasoline program will go unnoticed in Iowa, but if Donald Trump has taught us anything it's that the creepy crawlies are distributed from sea to shining sea, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf. 

There is some commonality which connects the junkyard owner in Wisconsin to the Hispanic who lives along the border in Texas to the guy down the street from Mad Dog in Hampton, who still flies his Trump flag, and who drove around for months with Trump flags flying from his Ford F 250.

Beautiful Downtown Hampton

Analyzing what connects these folks, across state lines, geography and even social class should be the first priority of political thinkers, but Mad Dog sees no signs the public intellectuals who might do this analysis have the tools or modes of thought to do it.

Jill Lepore might have a chance, but she is more historian than analyst. 

Certainly  Nate Silver is just guessing.

David Brooks might eventually figure it out, but Mad Dog is not holding his breath.

If Trump appealed to only the white male who barely got out of high school, worked a succession of uninspiring jobs--delivering auto parts, stocking shelves, changing oil at Jiffy Lube or tires at Town Fair Tire, or maybe, if he was a little more successful, working in a garage or in the trades, then one could go to work understanding the phenomenon. Losers in the meritocracy, who felt humiliated in school, who ran with the wrong crowd in high school and were never going to be seen by their peers as anything but ordinary at best and losers at worst. And along comes Trump.

But that doesn't explain the rich folks in Bonita Springs, Florida or up at Frye Island in Maine who love Trump.

And now we know it's not just some subterranean 40%. It's 50% or very nearly.

Obadiah Youngblood, Salt Marshes North Hampton

The only real comfort is history: Read Howard Zinn, or "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," or "A Bright and Shining Lie" or even "Gone with the Wind," and you will see that Trump part of America--resentful, feeling cheated, violent, every bit the same crowd who worked themselves into a frenzy over Adolf, right here in the USA. This hate, this intractability matches anything seen in Northern Ireland ("Say Nothing") or Palestine. 

Now, we are faced,  unexpectedly, with a Republican governor, Executive Committee, state House of Representatives and Senate, and we have no real explanation for this, in a state which sent a woman to the US House and another to the US Senate and a gay man to the House. 

What happened in New Hampshire?

Mad Dog has some idea, mainly what he wants to believe, that the powers that be in the New Hampshire Democratic party have failed to recruit the best candidates. But that's too simple. The best candidate or at least one of the very best for state House, Katherine Harake, a woman of poise, intellect and enormous promise did not make the House.

And the Pig Shall Lie Down with the Lamb

Then again, New Hampshire sent Maggie Hassan to the US Senate and to the governorship when it could have chosen Jackie Cilley.

And when it had the  choice between Terence O'Rourke, a sharp witted former federal prosecutor, a bronze star captain in the Airborne, and a man so mild mannered he tends to disappear into the woodwork, Chris Pappas, they chose Pappas. 

This may just be what makes politics an art, not a science. But it does not augur well for our future. 

The Origins of Trumpism: From The Best & the Brightest Through West Wing

 Twenty -seven years after David Halberstam published "The Best and the Brightest" Aaron Sorkin brought "The West Wing" to prime time TV.

If ever Santayana's  aphorism about learning from the past or being doomed to repeat it seems applicable, these two events would seem a case in point. 

Halberstam, writing almost a decade after John F. Kennedy's murder, was decried as a sort of second assassin, but that only reinforces the essential truth he described a decade after Camelot on the Potomac passed from the scene.

The assassins' bullets really did alter the direction of politics in this country, both in 1963 and 1968; they brought down the glamour and glitz which had invested the 60's service in government and not until Barack Obama was elected did large numbers of Americans again see the Presidency and the White House as glamorous. 

I am not speaking of history here; in my case, I'm speaking of memory. There is a difference between the history of a time written when every every last person who lived in those years has died, and histories written about the 50's, 60's and 70's, times people still alive remember.

I remember my parents smiling and being a little dazzled by the new President's men. My father was less impressed with Kennedy, who he knew as a playboy Congressman and Senator without much apparent interest in weighty issues. Adali Stevenson impressed my father, not JFK. But you judge a President, they said, in large measure by whom he brings with him, who he surrounds himself with,  and Kennedy seemed to be bringing the entire Harvard faculty, plus men who had stellar careers at various foundations and think tanks. This was an impressive crew, far superior to Eisenhower's worn out old hacks. These men carried academic credentials galore.

McGeorge Bundy was a wunderkind, who had gone to Groton, then Yale (Skull and Bones) and then Harvard, where a professor in the department of government said a paper Bundy wrote as a new arrival was so astonishing, he thought not more than one or two tenured Harvard professors could have written anything of that quality. Bundy was first in his class at Groton and so brilliant he did not want to waste his time in the drudgery entailed in a PhD but was placed in a program called Junior Fellows, and got appointed to the faculty of government without having taken a course in government and he was made Dean of Harvard College with head spinning celerity.  Then he decamped to Washington, D.C. where he could sit on couches in the Oval Office and exude brilliance. 

All this brings to mind a scene in West Wing when Toby is discussing foreign aid, which the Republicans are assailing because they want the money spent on problems at home in the USA and Tobey, in the voice he uses when explaining something to really stupid, ignorant people who he thinks should stay out of governing and leave that to the  smart boys, says, "So you cut foreign aid for schools in Sudan and then 6,800 madrassas spring up to fill the gap; you cut aid for a farm program in Bolivia and the farmers plant 10,000 hectares of cocaine instead of soybeans and coffee and we've just blown our police and Coast Guard interdiction budgets for the next 10 years!"

This is just one moment among thousands in West Wing, where Toby or Sam or the President cite numbers, without reference to a study, which they use numbers as  sabers of expertise, to sound and look like they know so much more than their adversaries.

But, fact is, they do not know more than those hapless rubes in Iowa or New Hampshire who cannot understand the wisdom of spending money abroad to prevent problems from coming back home.  

What makes Toby think that if we spent money on schools in Sudan those 6,800 (such a specific number!) would not have sprung up anyway? Who spent the money to build those madrassas and would they not have spent money to compete with secular Western schools (sometimes taught by Christian missionaries) even if we had spent that money? We are talking about a lot of culture and context here. How far is Toby from becoming a Robert McNamara who thought he could calculate the number of tons of bombs he'd have to drop on Vietnam to win that war, as if culture and local belief and desire had nothing to do with it?

And what makes Toby think if we had just given money to farmers in South America those farmers would have grown soybeans or coffee rather than the much more profitable cocaine? Oh, the Americans are paying us $1000 so we will forget about the $100,000 we can make growing coca!

West Wing is all about quickness, telegraphic communication, not the teasing out of opposing points of view. Repartee, quick wittedness, sexiness is the currency of the power players in the White House, that and a sense of entitlement: We are the chosen ones. Our talents, to write great speeches which inspire, which can launch a thousand ships is rare. We constitute an exalted club: the Skull and Bones of American politics.

Sam Seaborne sends a new guy, Will Bailey, to Toby with the note, "He's one of us." And the context makes it clear that one of us means one of the few human beings on the planet who can write great speeches for the President and the world. Halberstam tells a story about Teddy Roosevelt sending a man to a Secretary of state with a note which said exactly that.  This is the old legend of the Sword and the Stone: Some people carry mystical powers which allow them to draw the sword from the stone and they are the people of destiny.

Toby and Will talk a lot about iambic pentameter. They talk about the craft of speech writing as if they are describing the parameters of some difficult neurosurgical procedure. They detect pentameter in the written opinion of a Supreme Court justice and Will does his homework as a speech writer for the President by requisitioning every speech the President has ever made so Will can get the rhythm of the President's speech. We are thus shown how very complicated, rare and extraordinary any human being writing for the President must be.

Of course, nowhere is it mentioned that Lincoln wrote his own best speeches and so did Obama. These are men who we listened to because their words were more than words or meter or iambic pentameter. These were the words from men who had been in the field of battle. We knew they knew something because they had been there.

This is the essential truth those knucklehead fans of Donald Trump have seized upon: All you Ivy Leaguers act like you've got some mystical right to rule. You try to prove it by quoting studies or statistics and sounding all academic and well educated but your knowledge is no more real, authentic or accurate than the stuff Donald Trump spews out at the podium at every rally. And he just makes it all up! We know that. But he doesn't have to prove it because we know he can't and we know you can't prove what you are saying either.

All those pundits: Nate Silver, who told us Hillary Clinton had a lock on the election in 2016, until she lost and then he said: But I told you she had a one in 3 chance of losing.  You just didn't listen to me or understand that a 1 in 3 chance is a substantial chance; think of a baseball player who gets a hit 1 out of 3 times at bat--he's a successful player! It wasn't me who was wrong: It was you. You failed to understand probability theory!

And we know, well, Nate, if you had said, "anything's possible" everyone would have turned away and rushed off to listen to someone who claimed to have Delphic prophesy powers and ignored you; so you sold us on your clairvoyance. Then you blamed us for buying it. 

Yes, Donald Trump is a con man who says there's an invasion of brown skinned rapists threatening white suburban women, that COVID19 was made in a laboratory in Wuhan and spread by pedophile aliens from Area 51 under the direction of Obama and Hillary Clinton to wreck Trump's Presidency and COVID is actually gone now but the doctors are trying to say it's still killing people because they make more money that way. 

But, fact is, how do we know anything is true? The Best and the Brightest guys from Harvard quoted us numbers, cited studies in journals we couldn't see, Foreign Affairs, Scientific American, Nature. And they were as full of vaporous hot air as Trump.

We know we can't believe him. We don't take him literally. But we take seriously the proposition we cannot believe you. So we'll just believe whatever we want to believe.

We know he is all spoof. His schtick is all lampoon. He's saying, "Look a me, up here in my expensive suit and tie speaking at the podium. I'm a clown. I'm the court jester. But the court jester gets at a truth the serious courtiers cannot dare to say."

No child was killed at Sandy Hook. It was all just a TV set, like the moon landing. How do you know anyone was killed there? Were you at the school? At the morgue? 

I actually heard Alex Jones's lawyer say that on NPR. "Were you at the morgue?"

And that is the basic question: How do any of us know anything unless we were at the morgue ourselves?

The Electoral College: When Is a Savant Not a Savant?

Definition of savant

1: a person of learningespecially : one with detailed knowledge in some specialized field (as of science or literature)

Marilyn Savant has been writing a little column for years in Parade magazine and she answered a question, arguing for the Electoral College: 

"We are the United States of America, and our states--starting with the original 13 colonies--are separate entities.

It is understandably unacceptable to states with smaller populations to have their affairs decided by other states simply because more people live there. Suppose there were a United Countries of Earth. Would we like the idea of China (population 1, 439 billion) and India (1,380 billion) running the show? (The U.S. has 331 million people.) Or would we want a leveling factor?"

It is a daunting task to dispute a woman savant, one whose IQ is reportedly higher than anyone on the planet, or, at least is quite high, but let Mad Dog take a stab.

Ms. Savant begins at the beginning, which is probably a good idea. 

Where, after all, did the Electoral College come from?

This explanation is necessary because Americans have the odd, some would say revolutionary idea that we live in a free country which has a government of the people, by the people and for the people, which is to say, a democracy, where the government represents the will of the people.

Our form of democracy is not a direct democracy, where all the people vote daily on every issue, but rather, a Republic, and that is fragile enough, as Benjamin Franklin famously suggested when a woman outside the Constitutional Convention asked him, "What sort of government have you given us?" and he replied, "A Republic, madam, if you can keep it."

This was, of course, a departure from the rule of a king, where only one man's opinion mattered. Truth be told, King George III did not really rule quite as autocratically as all that--he had a Parliament, but even there you had a group of white men of property making the rules. What mattered was the vast estates, the land they owned and the wealth they controlled, when it came to being granted a voice in the affairs of government.

In the 18th century, when our Constitution was signed, the Southern delegates were aristocrats who owned vast estates, run with slave labor. And those states were huge: Virginia included what is now West Virginia and geographically was larger than Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont and Delaware combined. And it was expected the population of Virginia would grow bigger than that of those 4 states combined.

And the states were more like nation states at the time, separated by distance, by economy and not much united at all. New England considered seceding from the union over tariffs and many Virginians considered themselves unblushingly to be Virginians first and Americans second. 

But then we fought a Civil War for "The Union" and the United States of America "is" replaced The United States" "are."

There is still much which divides regions of the country.  A look at the election day maps with that huge coherent mass of the states of the old Confederacy joined by the Mountain states of Montana, Wyoming and Idaho-- all in Republican Red --and the coasts usually solidly Blue with the Midwest in deep purple, confirms there remain division among the states. 

But the divisions are not simply state by state any more.

The fact is, Mad Dog has less in common with the resident of the North Country in New Hampshire than he has with a resident in a suburb living Maryland or New York. 

That popular description of  Pennsylvania--Pittsburgh and Philadelphia and Alabama in between--applies to many, if not most states now. What we have is a rural/urban divide, which is why talk of the Northeast and the Northwest seceding from the union is fanciful. They fly Rebel flags in rural New Hampshire now. New Hampshire!

So what makes us a country at all?

Mad Dog would submit, it's no longer shared values. If the last 4 years has taught us anything, it's that Americans no longer share an identifiable core of shared values. 

There is precious little the Proud Boys would cherish that Mad Dog embraces. Even the very idea of pluralism--the idea that more than one idea about a subject is acceptabe--is no longer a commonly held value. The idea that our society should be multiracial is no longer acceptable as even debatable by the Proud Boys.

That old bromide about "I disagree with what you say, but I will fight to the death your right to say it," is, for me, at least, no more.

The Proud Boys/Trumpists are now the American Taliban: They do not believe in my right to say anything; they reject the right of anyone other than white guys like themselves having any rights.

Should the country be run by whites rather than a multiracial government?

Should the country have a government which can tax its citizens?

Can the nation restrict the right of individuals to own and brandish firearms? 

Should the nation allow women to have abortions?

These are just a few of the questions which divide neighbor against neighbor, even in my New Hampshire town. 

It is true the answers  coalesce in the Southern part of our country but the answer of intolerance, unwillingness to believe in an obligation to a community has morphed into an impenetrable divide. 

So, on what basis do we have a country? And what sort of Republic makes sense here?

Mad Dog would submit America today is like a bad marriage which should continue. We may not love each other any more. We may not be able to even stand in the same room together, but we are so inextricably tied by economy, finance and ownership we cannot extricate ourselves.  

Obadiah Youngblood

While it is true a Blue Country consisting of the East Coast north of the Potomac and the West Coast could function happily enough and would thrive economically, likely prosper more richly than now, freed of the burden of supporting the dirt poor South, even with its Texas and Gulf oil wealth, the fact is that New America would be weaker without the Old Confederacy than with. And people like the idea of having an entire continent where you can travel freely, without internal passports, invest in business, own property in other parts of the country. Having the geography of a continent is liberating.

But, the fact is, when it comes to representation in a government and taxation, it's people, not sage brush, who pay taxes. And the idea rankles that those empty states like North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Idaho get 8 senators to represent less than 4 million people where California gets only 2 senators to represent 10 times that number, nearly 40 million.

Why should a US Senate, where Senators representing less than 40% of the nation thwart the will of senators representing more than 60% of the people?

The original swindle was who got counted as being represented, so those bewigged 18th century gentlemen got to count 2/3 of all the slaves in the state for representation, while the farmers of New Hampshire did not get to count 2/3 of their cattle, goats and chickens. 

Ms. Savant's argument is that we would not want to be governed by the will of other people who don't speak or language, share our values or have economic or land or property interests in common with us. 

It's that old question asked of the Swede who is appalled that Americans do not care enough for each other to provide for a common health care system which cares for every American.  But when you ask the Swede if he is happy to pay for the health care of the Spaniard, he recoils and says, "Of course not!"

Who we are willing to spend money on, who is in our national family defines what a nation is.  To say the citizen of North Dakota would not want the citizen of Maryland deciding about a common health care system is to deny the Union of our country.

And, Mad Dog would submit, if we are going to be a country, the country IS the people, not the rivers or the streams and the citizen of the United States in New Orleans cares just as much about the Mississippi River as the guy in Minnesota or Missouri who may dump his waste into it.

Republicans have won the popular vote only once in the last 20 years and yet have controlled the presidency for 12 of those 20 years. GOP 53 Senators represent 40% of the population. "A Republic, madam, if you can keep it." No we have not kept it.

The argument about China and India is a better argument for maintaining immigration control of our borders than it is about the Electoral College. If we are a country distinct from China and India, we had better develop some internal cohesion and recognize what makes our Union preferable to our dissolution. 

We may have wanted an Electoral College as a prenuptial agreement back in 1789, but the time has long since passed when we can pull apart and unless we are willing to go through the expense of a messy divorce, we had better give the people what they want. 

Lessons from Denmark: Borgen Blows West Wing Out of the Water

 For the first half of "Borgen" I watched not because the story lines grabbed me all that much, but the faces of the characters were interesting and the glimpses of life in Denmark were tantalizing. The story lines of family life were prosaic, but set in the Danish model of actually providing for families they were exotic enough to keep me in the game.

Figuring out the Danish parliamentary system, and accommodating to the accommodative style of Danish mores took a while. Watching "West Wing" on my morning treadmill and "Borgen" at night, the counterpoint became positively psychedelic. Ye Gads, these Danes know what they are doing.

Denmark is roughly the size of Maryland and has roughly the same population--around 5 million souls. But the Danes are far whiter than Maryland and have no predominantly Black city. They do have a problem dealing with immigrants, given their location. Trump talks about the "threat" from the Mexican border. Denmark is looking at the Middle East and Africa the way Sarah Palin looked out her window at Russia.

About halfway through the first season, this smooth ride along an asphalt road in a Volvo station wagon suddenly explodes into a moon shot on Apollo 13. The show which had been a sister to the tale of a Danish school teacher "Rita" suddenly opened a door to something more akin to "The Wire" meets Aaron Sorkin. 

Now in the third season, our heroine (and a fine piece of work she is) Birgitte (pronounced somewhere down below your vocal cords, BAWR-ga) founds a new party.  Her own Middle Party has not just drifted to the right, but has set full sail toward deporting immigrants for crimes like littering. On the left, there are wackos enough to make Toby Ziegler start searching for a flame thrower.

Birgitte opens an office, at no small personal financial risk and the space fills with enthusiasts of every persuasion, who see in  the advent of a new political party their own personal Nirvana. "We are not a mass movement," Birgitte's friend tells her "We are movement of masses."  She has her acolytes post on a bulletin board their most beloved policies and some are anti abortion, some pro choice; some want to see taxes raised; some want them lowered; some want immigrants to be welcomed and assimilated; some want them deported.

Brigid needs dues paying party members and she is desperate for money. But when a party founder finds a wealthy banker to donate 1.5 million kroner, solving the cash flow problem, she balks because it means money men will control the policies of the party. The banker tells her he wanted a 7% reduction in corporate taxes but the party man agreed to only 5% and that was okay. Politics is about compromise and negotiation he says, a very Danish sentiment. But not for Birgitte. She gives the money back and calls a meeting.

Birgette founded the new party, "The New Democrats" and she insists she will shape its ideals: She looks right at a woman in the crowd who is anti abortion and says, "We will not deny women abortions," and she looks to a man who has written a manifesto for the party which would nationalize most industries and says "We will not make war on capitalism, but only guide it and restrain its anti social excesses."  And so forth. 

And she  watches people walk out, as each sees his or her most important issue dismissed or diluted.  But Nyborg is willing to be rejected. She knows what Trump knew: Better a cohesive, dedicated army than an aimless mass of disparate dreamers.

Of course, I sat there watching, saying, this is what we face in America: The old Democratic party is a movement of masses, an unstable nucleus with protons and neutrons which cannot stay attached. We need a New Democrats party here, but if we get that, we will likely lose a lot of folks. We have staunchly pro Israel folk who are appalled by Muslim Congresswomen in head scarfs who rail about the Israeli lobby spending "Benjamins" to buy votes for Israel.  We have people who want to defund police, whatever that means, alongside folks who fear crime in the suburbs.

There is a wonderful scene in West Wing when Toby has to talk to street demonstrators who shout him down calling him a tool of big pharma and big oil and corporate kleptocracy and he notes these are kids on Spring break who will go back to the dorm rooms their parents have paid for at the end of the week and he loathes these phony privileged children who do not have to function in the real world. Brigitte is faced with all that. 

What is not in Borgen which is so prominent and pernicious in West Wing is elitism. Birgitte is denounced for elitism when she puts her daughter into a private psychiatric hospital having championed a law to reduce the deduction for private health insurance. An especially vile Rush Limbaugh type reads the lunch menu at the private hospital which includes items the average Dane cannot afford. That is elitism in Denmark. Brigitte's wonderful, savy "spin master" Katrine, makes her remove her expensive watch before going on TV.  Flashing swag is very un Danish.

But, if Denmark has a caste system, it is nowhere near as pervasive or obvious as America's castes. We get a glimpse of it in "Rita" where a mayor wants her son to get accepted at a more competitive university, but there is none of the name dropping of Ivy League colleges, SAT scores, National Merit finalist awards that flash up every thirty seconds in West Wing.  The Danes do not wave that sort of "meritocracy" in your face the way Americans do, at least if these TV shows reflect the real world.

But tiny Denmark leads the world in wind turbines, wind power and green energy. Somehow, without the graduates of an Ivy League, they succeed where America fails.

And, oh, of course, their mastery of languages: Birgitte (the actress and the character) flips in and out of fluent Danish, French and English effortlessly. I can attest from brief forays into Denmark, most people there speak English, or at least their English is way better than my Danish. 

There is some chatter about David Simon, who did "The Wire" doing an American version of "Borgen." I cannot imagine Simon being able to comprehend the Danes and their delicate dance between wanting to succeed but not being seen as being more successful than their countrymen. 

Borgen is not to be missed. It holds wisdom for us, here in America, if we are only smart enough to comprehend it.

Things I Got to Tell Joe

 

Now, if I can just get Joe on the phone.

I know his handlers are preparing him for the debate.

I know they are telling him to keep his answers short and punchy.

I know they remember what happened in 2019 when he spoke at the Community Oven in Hampton, New Hampshire in the run up to the New Hampshire primary, where he got run out of town and came in at fifth place.

Poor Joe. He could not remember the question long enough to answer it. He could not remember the first part of his sentence by the second half of it.

But he won't have to, if he comes prepared.

First, he will know Trump will attack his son and try to rattle him with that.

Biden should be rehearsing his response:  "Everyone knows you want to rattle me with attacks on my kids, on my family.  Hell, everyone knows the reason I didn't jump in last time was because of what happened to my son.  But I'm not going to dignify that stuff with a response, beyond saying I'll put up my kids against your kids any day. And I never gave any of my kids an office in the White House, or made the public's business a profit center for my family."

Population of Coasts=Population of Center

2nd: On Trump's divisiveness

"Every despot in recent history has tried to divide and conquer. 

For you it's about calling migrants an "infestation."

It takes the form of throwing little kids into cages.

LA County Population= or > Each of these States

3rd: Very fine Nazis

"Even in this time of divided government, what people have called an 'angry moment' I thought all Americans could agree there is no such thing as "a very fine Nazi."

New Hampshire Pig

4th: On Science Denial

"You went from warning that vaccines cause autism to claiming a vaccine will save us by election day. You denied coronavirus is anything more worrisome than the common cold. You insisted it would "melt away like magic." You muzzled your best scientists and tried to substitute wishful thinking for real science. Where did that get us? It got us 200,000 deaths. 

Does that feel like winning to you?"

Those Who Served Civil War Hampton, NH

5th: On Medical Care

"You promised to replace Obamacare with something cheaper and better. All you've done is to defund it, undermined it but you never had an idea of your own about any alternative. You're great at throwing Molotov cocktails and burning the building down, but you're a miserable failure at building anything--except for bankrupt casinos" 

Those 5 things; count 'em on your fingers. Throw them out there, if you can.

UPDATE: 

#6:  "$750 A'INT MUCH PATRIOTISM"

Finding Your True Loathing in the Era of Trump

 All I ever needed to know about Milton Friedman was contained on a tape of an interview with Mr. Friedman I acquired somehow, in which Mr. Friedman declaimed we had no need for the Food and Drug Administration, that the free market could regulate drugs as scrupulously and ruthlessly as evolution eliminates unfit organisms and selects for the best competitors. 

No need for the FDA at all.

But what about drugs like thalidomide? 
This product, and a profitable one it was, was used in England until it was noted that thousands of children born to mothers taking thalidomide were born  with no arms or legs.  An sudden epidemic of limbless babies did not escape the notice of the British healthcare system, but too late.

But in the USA, the FDA refused to allow it to be sold,  exerting the heavy hand of regulatory government on the pharmaceutic industry, saving untold millions the nightmare that played out in England.

And how did Friedman reply to this example? Oh, but that's what the courts are for, Friedman replied blithely.
The companies which make such things get sued out of existence and others will be more careful when developing new drugs, seeing that example. It struck me that Friedman's solution would be scant solace to the parents raising those kids. 

Listening to my tape, I wondered: Who is this moral midget, this self assured moron?

For Mr. Friedman, the misery of those families is a small price to pay for the glorious liberty of a free enterprise system.
And here's the question I'd really love to ask the sage of Chicago:  You want to disband the Food and Drug Administration and all such government agencies which thwart the animal energies of the great capitalistic American economy?  So what do you do with Farmer Jones, who has a herd of cattle, 300 head infected with Mad Cow Disease? 
Mad Cow Dsease is a prion disease, transmissible to human beings where it causes Jacob-Creutzfield, a horrific degenerative disease which ravages human brains and leaves its victims twitching their beds, with a rapidly progressing dementia and quivering tongue. It does not reveal itself quickly; no, it takes its time, 20 years sometimes, until the first symptoms, but then it moves rapidly.

So the inspector from the Dept of Agriculture shows up on Farmer Jones's farm and tells him he has to kill every last cow in his herd, and thus the heavy hand of government has struck, intent on depriving Farmer Jones of his property, his wealth, a substantial chunk of his livelihood. Farmer Jones could sell those 300 head for substantial profit and the companies down stream could sell the hamburgers made from these cows to unsuspecting citizens, 30,000 hamburgers, 30,000 happy citizens, who 20 years later will wind up drooling in their beds while their families shrink in horror. 

And how does the great American judicial system compensate for all that?  Heaven forbid the Dept of Agriculture or the FDA interfere with all that! 

Oh, socialism! Public Health, the great socialistic anathema!

What say you great Professor Friedman? How does that scene get resolved by your free wheeling system of unbridled capitalism?

And having seen how malpractice claims played out in that theater of the absurd we call the  American courts, I knew for sure how totally ignorant Mr. Friedman was about the salubrious role courts might play as the regulators of truth and justice and behavior in America.
A special section in the New York Times of Sunday, September 13, 2020, a seven page extravaganza of self congratulation based on the seminal paper by Milton Friedman: "The Social Responsibility of Capitalism Is to Increase Profits," which was, we are reminded, lest it escape our notice, was published in the New York Times September 13, 1970, and, of course, this document "changed the course of capitalism," no small thing, that.

And to review this seismic event, "Nobel laureates and top thinkers" get to debate in this special, multi colored presentation what the genius, Nobel prize winning economist "got right--and wrong."

Of course, at the core of Mr. Friedman's teaching is that corporations and businesses need not worry about anything but making money, and all efforts to do more are rank socialism: "When I hear businessmen speak eloquently about the 'social responsibility of business in a free enterprise system,'...eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are--or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously--preaching pure and unadulterated socialism."

Socialism. Oh, the horror.

Each paragraph of this epoch changing paper (published, lest you forget, in the New York Times) is presented, with especially brilliant passages highlighted in yellow and annotated with comments from "top thinkers" in the margins in red ink, as if monks had labored centuries illuminating the manuscript.

Of course, none of this drivel is anything at all new: George Bernard Shaw gave us all this and better in "Major Barbara" as his hero, Undershaft, who has provided a whole city of happy and prosperous workers with lives enhanced by high salaries, wonderful schools for their children, playgrounds, parks, swimming pools, theaters, orchestras, ballet,  all of which benefit the workers who make bombs and armaments which wreck havoc, destruction and death on other cities around the world. Your first duty in life, Undershaft argues, is to not starve, to not be poor and to provide for yourself. And Shaw was writing nearly 65 years before Friedman and doing it better. 

Shaw, however, slyly undercut Undershaft's argument, by simply making him a munitions manufacturer. (As was the founder of the Nobel prizes.) None of us have to be told the limits of virtue, when we are talking about bombs and dynamite. After all, there are men who make their living understanding DNA, curing diseases, organizing hospital systems in places like Scandinavia. 

Which is to say, there are other options available beyond starvation or bomb making. 

Shaw, of course, was writing about Empire, the British Empire, where wealth brought home to the aristocracy was enjoyed at the expense of the colonials, and the underclasses. It really was "blood money" having been gathered at the cost of the blood of poor, mostly colored people both at home and abroad.
For Shaw, the message of those happy white Brits living in Undershaft's town is there is no such thing as clean money in a society where the wealth of the whole enterprise is grown in soil drenched in blood.

Gustav Klimt 

And as for dumping of chemicals into all the Love Canals--the free enterprise system will eventually see to the end of such companies. Not soon enough for the victims, but these victims will be fortunate enough to be living in a free enterprise system, where the liberties of corporations are protected against unadulterated socialistic government regulation. 

Regulation, you see is "socialism." The heavy hand of government intruding into the free market, restraining the stallions of innovation and dynamism.

Never mind, there is no such thing as a free market in these United States of America--just ask the farmers who sell corn to be incorporated into alcohol or folks who work at un unionized shops.

 

Nincompoop

But in Friedman's case, we have the Ayn Rand of economics sporting his Nobel Prize and the New York Times elevating this nincompoop into some sort of savant. 

If the choice is between the knuckle dragging, babbling dementia of our current President and the self assured savants University of Chicago, I suppose we have to choose the officious over the delirious.

You Would Fight for Strangers?

Trump spoke honestly when he said he thought men who went off to fight in the Vietnam war were suckers. It was a stupid war and you'd have to be stupid to fight in a stupid war like that, he said.

When Sonny Corleone tells Michael those who rushed to enlist after Pearl Harbor were fools and suckers, he is stating the tribal creed of the Italian family mob: You fight for your family, not for some idea of country.  Michael tells him he sounds like his father, who, of course, is the Godfather. Sonny agrees, and he's proud of it.

Only your family matters: Patriotism is for suckers

And that is the creed of Donald Trump, who is the Don of his family.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-I4VIR5yGg

I felt the same way at the time of Vietnam--not that we had no country worth fighting for but that we were not fighting for our country in Vietnam.  There was the good war against Hitler. But there was a stupid war in Vietnam and I thought you had to be stupid to fight in that war.
But I would never say or think people who did go to Vietnam were stupid. They were fighting for their country, as far as I could see.
Even Rhett Butler ultimately goes off to fight for the doomed Confederacy, in the end. 
My own brother, who got a rocket fired at his swift boat, and trudged through the jungle, still believes he went to war to serve his country, and if he thinks that way, he did. He had a little Rhett Butler in him then.

There was a movie called, "Born on the Fourth of July" which depicted how badly ordinary American boys were deceived about Vietnam, and there have been book length analyses, like Max Hasting's masterful "Vietnam" and Neil Sheehan's "A Bright and Shining Lie." All of these depict the folly of those wars and the folly of fighting in them.

But once you are committed and over there, once you come under fire, all the glory stuff disappears, and you are just fighting to stay alive and to keep your brothers-in-arms alive. That much I can understand without ever having been in the military, because I've been in other less dire situations where the team mattered, and it didn't matter if anyone else saw what you were doing; you fought for each other.

So what Donald Trump was saying was, for once, honest and we can believe he meant that.

A lot of my generation agrees with him on that one level: you can be fooled into thinking you are doing something great.

But you can also be foolish: Pat Tillman dropped out of a million dollar NFL career and went off to fight in the Middle East miasma and got shot dead. And he was shot by his own men in a friendly fire incident. Such is the absurdity of ill conceived wars for no good reason.

Tillman: Shot by his own troops

But what Trump gets wrong is there are other wars, where you might not be wrong: the men and women who rushed off to fight after 9/11 may have been fools, but at least this nation was under attack. The foolishness of waging war on someone who had nothing to do with that attack can be argued. As John Kerry said, attacking Iraq after 9/11 made as much sense as  attacking Mexico after Pearl Harbor. 

Abu Gharib: Fighting for your country

And then there is that other good war: The Civil War.

America, to my mind is not exceptional in any of the ways pundits claim. 

But it is exceptional in one way: It is the only country which has ever fought to free an underclass, to free slaves and the people who had no skin in the game  went to fight to free slaves on principle.
It's true many if not most Union soldiers may have marched off for more mundane reasons--adventure, glory, boredom--but at some level and eventually, the war became about slavery and the armies, if they did not understand that at the outset came to know it and yet they persisted.
Those Union soldiers fought for the idea of America, for the great experiment in government of the people, by the people and for the people. That was real heroism and patriotism.
And by Trump's thinking, those Union soldiers were the ultimate in fools and suckers because they did not have to fight, and they could have made money buying and exporting and manufacturing King Cotton leaving the slaves to produce it.

This latest tempest will be kept in its teapot, but it will be interesting to see if any minds or hearts are changed.

True Believer

I would bet not.