Who is a true progressive?

My problem with Bernie Sanders and his Berniacs has always been--yes, even from back when he was battling it out with Hillary Clinton--that their positions on many issues are no different from tRump's own awful ideas.  Like bringing manufacturing back to America.  The complaints about offshoring.  Putting tighter limits on immigration.

Yet, Bernie and the Berniacs are considered to be "progressives," while these progressives criticize tRump and his trumpeters!

I worried about this even back in May 2015, when the campaign fever was barely above normal.  In this post, I quoted a bunch of experts, one of whom asked:

Wouldn’t a true progressive support equal opportunity for all people on the planet, rather than just for those of us lucky enough to have been born and raised in rich countries?

That's what I expect from a true progressive.  Yes, I consider myself to be a true progressive, in contrast to, for instance, Bernie Sanders, who has a long track record of anti-immigrant positions.

But, wouldn't a true progressive want to provide opportunities for all people on the planet, and not merely for the luck ones who were accidentally born here in the US?

tRump and his toadies have now used the cover of COVID-19 in order to suspend immigration.

“By pausing immigration, we will help put unemployed Americans first in line for jobs as America reopens. So important,” the president said. “It would be wrong and unjust for Americans laid off by the virus to be replaced with new immigrant labor flown in from abroad. We must first take care of the American worker.”

Chances are most Bernie supporters would agree with that, even though logic and evidence point to another direction: "numerous studies have concluded that immigration has an overall positive effect on the American work force and wages for workers".

Again, from that post in May 2015:

Unfortunately, most of the debate in rich countries today, on both the left and the right, centers on how to keep other people out. That may be practical, but it certainly is not morally defensible.

Morally indefensible.  Let them in poor countries eat cakes!

The following is a slightly edited post from May 10, 2015.
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The last few days I came across one too many commentaries about income and wealth inequality. Inequality within the US, and across the world.  Robert Samuelson's column is in the context of an anniversary.

In 1975, the Brookings Institution — perhaps Washington’s best known think tank — published an elegant essay by Arthur Okun, who had been one of the leading economists of the Johnson administration. The essay was called “Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff.” Its premise, as the title suggests, was that government faced a choice in fashioning its economic and social policies. A bias toward more equality might weaken economic growth by dulling the incentives to work, save and invest; on the other hand, leaving matters to the market could worsen inequality by widening income and wealth gaps. We could balance equality and efficiency. Once stated, the logic seems impeccable.

Inequality is now worse than it was forty years ago!

But, that is within the US.

If we, however, looked at the entire seven-billion-plus that we are on this planet, global inequality has reduced.  So much so that the managing editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives concludes his blog-post with:

the 21st century would be a time of rising equality across the global income distribution.

Data do show that globally inequality is decreasing even as within-country inequality is rising in many countries.  And that is Kenneth Rogoff's point of departure:

Wouldn’t a true progressive support equal opportunity for all people on the planet, rather than just for those of us lucky enough to have been born and raised in rich countries?

He explains:

If current concerns about inequality were cast entirely in political terms, this inward-looking focus would be understandable; after all, citizens of poor countries cannot vote in rich ones. But the rhetoric of the inequality debate in rich countries betrays a moral certitude that conveniently ignores the billions of people elsewhere who are far worse off.

Whenever I ask students in my classes whether we should worry about the increasing inequality in the US, or about the welfare of the economically disadvantaged billions outside the US, after they look at the data, not a student whimpers about the grossness of the inequality in America.  Rogoff reminds us about some of that data:

the middle class in rich countries remains an upper class from a global perspective. Only about 15% of the world’s population lives in developed economies. Yet advanced countries still account for more than 40% of global consumption and resource depletion.

People in America complain because the "ovarian lottery" seems to have lost its value:

global inequality has been reduced significantly over the past three decades, implying that capitalism has succeeded spectacularly. Capitalism has perhaps eroded rents that workers in advanced countries enjoy by virtue of where they were born. But it has done even more to help the world’s true middle-income workers in Asia and emerging markets.

Keep in mind that despite all that economic progress (I won't worry about the non-economic issues for now, because I do that in many other posts) in China and India and Vietnam and wherever, the average American is immensely richer than the average person in many countries around the world.

There is one more way in which all those people in other countries can be given a fair shot at improving their economic conditions:

Allowing freer flows of people across borders would equalize opportunities even faster than trade, but resistance is fierce.

However, when I bring up this point in my classes, students suddenly become a tad defensive.  

Rogoff doesn't mince words:

Unfortunately, most of the debate in rich countries today, on both the left and the right, centers on how to keep other people out. That may be practical, but it certainly is not morally defensible.

And for a good measure, he reminds us about this too:

Europe’s long history of exploitative colonialism makes it hard to guess how Asian and African institutions would have evolved in a parallel universe where Europeans came only to trade, not to conquer.

Add to that America's slave trade.  And there are more to the list.

We lack definitive answers only when we frame the inequality problem a certain way.  It is just that we don't want to work towards those answers.  We choose to avoid them.  We are being cunningly political.

Birthright citizenship is a lottery of opportunity

The other day in class, I showed a short video about two textile industry workers in two different countries.  During the discussions that followed, one of the questions I asked the class was this: How many of you would trade places with those two workers?

Not a hand went up.  Naturally.

Imagine a different scenario in which students in those two countries are shown videos about the work and lives of two working class people here in the US.  And imagine those students being asked if they would like to trade places with American workers.  I bet that quite a few hands will go up.

But, of course, we have a system that prevents eager, willing, and capable people from coming here and being productive.  Immigration is a scare word in politics and culture.  Even in a country that was founded by illegal immigrants who wiped out the original inhabitants!

More than a year ago, Farhad Manjoo--another guy like me with a funny name and a naturalized American himself--wrote that "a brave Democrat should make the case for vastly expanding immigration."  Quick, name a leading Democratic presidential wannabe who has made the case for expanding immigration.  Couldn't name one, could you?

Manjoo wrote:

There’s a witheringly obvious moral, economic, strategic and cultural case for open borders, and we have a political opportunity to push it. As Democrats jockey for the presidency, there’s room for a brave politician to oppose President Trump’s racist immigration rhetoric not just by fighting his wall and calling for the abolishment of I.C.E. but also by making a proactive and affirmative case for the vast expansion of immigration.
It would be a change from the stale politics of the modern era, in which both parties agreed on the supposed wisdom of “border security” and assumed that immigrants were to be feared.

A contrast to Manjoo's prescripton is what today's leading Democratic contender said in an interview with Ezra Klein: He said that allowing more and free immigration "is a right-wing scheme meant to flood the US with cheap labor and depress wages for native-born workers."

The confident assumption that immigration is a zero-sum game that would depress wages is bizarre.  Not even for a nanosecond does the current President and the wannabes seem to consider the accident of geography--of where we are born.  As Manjoo wrote:

When you see the immigration system up close, you’re confronted with its bottomless unfairness. The system assumes that people born outside our borders are less deserving of basic rights than those inside.

"They" are "less" than us because they were born there, which, more often than not, are "shitholes" according to the man in the Oval Office.

Even if you set aside this moral dimension of the accident of geography, and how some may have won the "ovarian lottery," is it really the case that immigration is a zero-sum game?  Not. At. All.

It is usually only libertarians who make the case for immigration.  Like Bryan Caplan in his latest venture, which is a graphic non-fiction book.

Caplan presents immigrants not as threats—to low-skilled workers, to social services, to public culture—but as generators of wealth.

We--don't forget that I am an immigrant here--are not threats.

As a libertarian, Caplan generally seeks to avoid distinguishing between citizens of different countries. Instead, he condemns the “global apartheid” that borders perpetuate. Exclusion on the basis of one’s country of birth, he maintains, is no less reprehensible than discrimination on the grounds of gender, race, or religion. We are right to value equality of opportunity—but, if it’s valued at home, then it should also be valued on a global scale, where inequality is much starker.

Ask most progressive Democrats, and they will bleed in favor of "equality of opportunity."  But, they will be quick to slam the immigration doors and deny opportunity to "the wretched refuse of your teeming shore" because the "cheap labor"  will "depress wages for native-born workers."  It is an unholy alliance of the left and the right in order to screw most of the rest of the world that thirsts for opportunity!

When President Orange realizes that economic growth rate has not jumped up despite his trillion dollar give-aways to the rich, what he fails to acknowledge is that there is no labor to speed up the growth--something his chief-of-staff admitted in a closed door meeting.  Manjoo wrote:

Economically and strategically, open borders isn’t just a good plan — it’s the only chance we’ve got. America is an aging nation with a stagnant population. We have ample land to house lots more people, but we are increasingly short of workers.

But, of course, even the left will not make a case for the huddled masses yearning to break free.  If only it did!

There doesn’t have to be a tradeoff between immigration and welfare programs or workers’ rights. On the contrary, they are two sides of the same coin.
The United States needs more immigrants to maintain current levels of economic growth and welfare provision, but it also needs more economic redistribution and workers’ rights to make sure that the aggregate benefits of immigration are shared fairly within society as a whole.

In the current political climate, even to suggest that a presidential wannabe is in favor of immigration will mark the death of that wannabe's candidacy. Some day, we will see the light.  The sooner the better.

Source

Hotel California is bankrupt

More to add about California failing:

What went so wrong? The answer lies in a change in the nature of progressive politics in California. During the second half of the twentieth century, the state shifted from an older progressivism, which emphasized infrastructure investment and business growth, to a newer version, which views the private sector much the way the Huns viewed a city—as something to be sacked and plundered.

Joel Kotkin does not mince words here, does he!
And the state of the state now?

Between 2004 and 2007, 500,000 more Americans left California than arrived; in 2008, the net outflow reached 135,000, much of it to the very “dust bowl” states, like Oklahoma and Texas, from which many Californians trace their origins. California now has a lower percentage of people who moved there within the last year than any state except Michigan. Even immigration from abroad seems to be waning: a recent University of Southern California study shows the percentage of Californians who are foreign-born declining for the first time in half a century. For the first time in its history as a state, as political analyst Michael Barone has noted, California is not on track to gain a new congressional district after the 2010 census.

I am more in agreement than otherwise with Kotkin pointing the fingers at public employees and their unions gone amok; environmentalists gone amok; and would add one more to it: Republicans gone amok.  It seems like social conservatism is the one and only litmus test for Republicans running for office, which has eliminated any possibility of moderate and intelligent Republicans ever winning one, even if such a candidate could gain the plurality of all voters.  (Recent example: Meg Whitman, the Republican nominee for California's governor race has already stated her opposition to the Prop 8 verdict!)  Well, I could repeat the same lines for Oregon too.

What California needs is a healthy dose of Libertarian-Democrat politics.  This would combine the best of the Earl Warren and Pat Brown policies with the Reagan approach to a focus on budget (in California--not when he was in the White House).  Or, let us see, California needs its own Tory-LibDem government.

Speaking of LibDem here in America, yesterday I came across this site devoted to Libertarian Democrat perspectives.

The "Senategate" in the Land of Corruption, er, Lincoln

More to add on the coming confusion and disunity among Democrats .... Spiked's Sean Collins has this to throw in:

Only about four weeks after the election, and the liberal-left was now feeling a new range of emotions, from confusion to disillusion to who knows what, trying to work out how it could be that their hero could have selected such centrist and even right-wing figures to the leading advisory roles in his administration – with not a ‘progressive’ in sight. To make it even more galling, these picks were being widely referred to as ‘the best and brightest’ (what, were they implying that progressives are neither?).

Ahem, maybe a tad below the belt on progressives not being in the club of "the best and the brightest" .... but, good point. And then later he writes:

Sceptical liberals could at least console themselves that Obama would bring needed ‘change’ from the evil Bush administration – but wait, now they couldn’t even say that! The liberal-left not only has to deal with all the Clinton re-treads; they also have to face the fact that there will be holdovers from the Bush regime in critical roles. Robert Gates, the executor of the Iraq war, will stay on as defence secretary. And the top economic position of treasury secretary goes to Timothy Geithner, who was once registered as a Republican and now calls himself independent, and who has already been working closely with the Bush administration secretary, Henry Paulson, on the bailout package. Obama even reached back to the Reagan years and chose 81-year-old Paul Volcker to be an economic adviser (when Obama said he wanted experience, I guess that included finding someone who actually lived during the Great Depression).

Should something bizarre come out of the Illinois governor scandal--shall we call it "senategate?"--that taints even a third-stringer in the Obama camp, well, it will be quite a three-ring-circus! Bill Clinton had his real estate deals investigated ad nauseam--remember Whitewater? We now have the shadow of Tony Rezko ..... politics in any country is one hell of a spectator sport--if only it didn't have serious implications!