Pun Salad

The encyclicals paint a grim hypothetical picture in which our moral obligations are subordinated to, if not obliterated by, a dictum of wealth and power uber alles. Blessedly, that picture bears little resemblance to how modern market economies actually function. All around us, thousands of times a day, human beings act in ways that confound simple self-interest.

Sometimes that involves charitable giving and other explicit do-goodery: When you drop a few dollars into the Salvation Army's red kettle, you're altering, however slightly, the level of poverty produced in the market. But consider as well the young father who turns down a promotion because it would involve weekend travel and he wants to spend that time with his kids. Consider the employer who accepts a lower salary for herself in order to afford more generous health insurance for her staff. Consider both the activists who organized a boycott of Chick-fil-A upon learning the company's owner had spoken out against same-sex marriage and the Colorado baker who turns away business if it would require him to decorate a cake with a message that runs against his religious convictions. Consider everyone who's ever paid extra for fair-trade coffee.

In all these cases and countless others, individuals and groups make choices that reflect their values. But if unregulated capitalism is defined as a system in which men and women are profit-maximizing automata, then every time people depart from the Homo economicus script, they're behaving as a check on the system.

The impeachment pageant being played out in Washington is entirely predictable. But it does raise some important questions beyond the near certainty of how the impeachment itself will proceed, i.e. with an emotionally overcharged vote in the House, an anticlimax in the Senate, a declaration of “moral victory” by the Democrats, and the Republicans’ immediate preparations for impeaching the next Democratic president, whoever that should be.

Trump may be an agent of chaos, but he is not an agent of randomness. As some of the computer scientists among you will know, generating a string of truly random numbers is a real technical challenge. Patterns emerge in spite of the programmers’ best intentions. The same is true of quotidian human affairs. Consider the issue of media bias: It is to be expected that reporters and editors will make a certain number of errors in their coverage of a given issue, but when it comes to the gun-control debate, to take one obvious example, the errors pile up reliably on one side of the ideological divide, inflating the prevalence of certain weapons (e.g. Lydia Polgreen of the Huffington Post and a thousand other like-minded journalists conflating ordinary semiautomatic rifles and machine guns) or exaggerating the laxity of U.S. firearms laws. During his presidency, Donald Trump’s errors and abuses have not been random, either. They have in fact followed a fairly predictable pattern, or a couple of patterns: One of those is the pattern of obvious self-interest, as in his risible attempt to steer a G7 meeting to one of his ailing Florida resort properties; another is his habitual rolling over for the thuggish strongmen he takes as his model for authoritative leadership: deflecting from Vladimir Putin’s misadventures in the 2016 election and his invasion of Ukraine and subsequent annexation of Ukrainian territory, submitting to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and abandoning U.S. allies in Syria, etc.

We of the pro-market ideology like to talk about how markets are about cooperation, mutual agreement, and happiness all around. Why are the relationships between artist/performers and record labels so often fraught with difficulty?

The heart of the matter here is copyright. Let us be clear: copyright is not based on a normal contract. It is a state-granted right of monopoly privilege. It is usually presumed to belong to the artist. This is a myth. “Copyright was never primarily about paying artists for their work,” explains QuestionCopyright.org; “far from being designed to support creators, copyright was designed by and for distributors — that is, publishers, which today includes record companies.”

If I had to identify the most economically destructive part of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s agenda, I’d have a hard time picking between her confiscatory wealth tax and her so-called Medicare-for-All scheme.

The former would dampen wages and hinder growth by penalizing saving and investment, while the latter would hasten America’s path to Greece.

By contrast, it’s easy to identify the most ethically offensive part of her platform.

Just like President Obama, she’s a hypocrite who wants to deny poor families any escape from bad government schools, even though her family has benefited from private education.

Being from New England, it always makes me laugh when I get to go back home, because people know exactly what you’re talking about. It’s just such an odd place. Massachusetts has always made me laugh. I’m obviously a great deal older than you, but I remember when Dukakis was running for president, and he was trying to institute the mandatory seat belt law in the state, and people protested that, by selling and wearing t-shirts with fake seat belts on them so it looked like you were wearing one while you were driving.

It’s just the extent of that whole yankee mentality, of all that ‘live free or die’ kind of thing. It’s just a funny, quirky place. So many good comedians have come out of Massachusetts, whether it be Steven Wright or Lenny Clarke, and they just have that weird, funny New England sense of humor. Bill Burr is one of my favorites. It just makes me laugh whenever I get the chance to come back.