I'm trying to understand why all my friends and coworkers are socialists.

Not socialists in practice, of course. After all, they don't personally redistribute their own wealth for sake of numerical financial equality. Sure, sometimes they'll give a buck to the homeless or buy a "fair trade" bag of coffee beans... but that's only after they've made sure to pay their rent, buy their groceries, and pre-order the next PS3 game. In their day-to-day lives, they understand that their employers pay them for their labor and they'd happily go work for more money or less responsibility if the opportunity came along; they understand that their barbers and shopkeepers charge them as much as they can and they'd happily go shop somewhere else if they could get a lower price for comparable goods and services. In actual practice, everybody I know lives and breathes capitalism, and wouldn't really know how it could possibly be otherwise.

But they're socialists in the abstract. My friends, in general, are highly intellectual (and most are even intelligent). Most of them work in an engineering- or technology-related discipline that involves arranging intricate components into elaborate complex mechanisms, a task that takes a combination of brains, creativity, and extensive training. In fact, this process applies equally to my friends in the arts, literature, and journalism professions - whether your "components" are transistors, STL functions, paint colors, notes on a clef, or words in the English language, the process of creation is the same. Maybe they believe an economy should be like a circuitboard or a painting - something that needs a Creator, or at least an Intelligent Designer. While most of them scoff at creationism, the thought of letting Darwinian selection guide a $40T economy makes them feel uncomfortable.

I wish I could understand why.

It can't be a matter of intelligence per se, because most of my friends are extremely smart and yet the principles of socialism are so blatantly, self-evidently stupid. I suppose it could be a mis-application of intelligence - the kind of cognitive error that makes a particle physicist think he can perform open-heart surgery because really a living organic system is nothing but a big collection of subatomic components. And he knows all about quarks, so a triple bypass should be no big deal - after all, he understands the structure of arteries and cardiac muscles on a much deeper level than the surgeon, right? It's not that he necessarily thinks a surgeon is dumber than him, it's just that he views everything through the lens of his own expertise.

Personally, though? I believe it's lust.

I think my friends - nay, the country - see Socialism as the trashy slut in third-period English that they feel disturbingly drawn to. They see her there every single day, sitting at her desk with her razor-burned legs crossed, her flabby thighs displayed prominently under her dark blue pleated plaid skirt. Her pimpled cheeks expand and contract as she sucks on a Blow-Pop with her pierced tongue and her excessively ChapStik'ed lips. Her stringy hair is done up in loose pigtails, probably still riddled with crusty droplets from her previous night's date. She wears T-shirts that say "Plays Well With Others" and her checkerboard denim purse has buttons on it saying "You know you want it". You hate yourself for having to admit it's true.

Everybody's had a piece of her - the Russians, the Chinese, the Cubans, the Koreans. She's "dating" some Eurotrash guys right now, and occasionally banging the English dude even though he really should know better. Most boys she's been with quickly end up feeling a burning sensation when they pee. A few of the particularly stupid ones fell in love with her, and they've never quite been the same since. The Russian guy had a really serious thing going with her once - by most accounts, he was her first - but that relationship got very, very ugly and now the two of them won't even talk to each other. The Russian guy's still a little messed up - for example, he's got some serious boundary issues - but he seems much more together now. He's always been a little messed up anyway. As for her, well, she's as big a whore as ever. Maybe she's just trying to punish her former Russkie lover by slathering her parasite-laden cooch-juice on every boy she can find, but she's only hurting herself... and her willing victims.

You know the old mindgame where someone tells you, "Don't think of a white bear"? You can't not think of a white bear, because you have to process the sentence to know what it is you're not supposed to do.

It's the same thing with Socialism. Every time you see her, you can't not think about taking her back out into the alley behind the school and slamming her up against the dumpster. You try to force yourself to not visualize her stuffing your cock down her throat until her eyes tear up and her sloppy mascara runs down her ruddy cheeks. You try, but you can't. You hate yourself for it, but the fact is you just want to plow that dirty, nasty little slut from every possible angle. To just do her already. Get her out of your system, get her out of your head.

And in the back of your mind, you think maybe she's not so bad after all. Maybe she's got a heart of gold. Maybe she's a really sweet, wonderful girl underneath that slimy exterior. Maybe all the stories about her are wrong - or maybe you're the man that will finally tame her. Sure, the Korean kid now sits alone in his room every night writing poems to her... but that's 'cuz he's the Korean kid. Maybe with you, if you're strong enough, things will come up roses, and you and she will create something beautiful together. Here she is, having been with every guy in the school (and a couple from the nearby community college), and who's the one she chooses to be with when all is said and done? You. Wouldn't that be something?

So what do they do? They flirt.

They flirt with Socialism. They flirt with the idea of socialized health care and federal housing management. They implement progressive taxation schemes and federal grant programs. They know in the back of their minds that no good will come of it, that the wanting is more compelling than the having. And they believe that, once they've gotten a taste of her, they'll be okay afterwards - at worst they won't catch anything they can't fix with penicillin. And maybe, just maybe, it can blossom into a romance. It's a gamble, one that they feel themselves destined to take, not because it's necessarily a good idea, but because it's an idea at all, and it's stuck in their heads and they'll never be rid of it until they finally just do it.

And so they pursue Socialism as though they are pursuing their destiny. They rally with irrational (and frankly creepy) fervor behind politicians like Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama, who promise to set them up with her... as though that's a good thing. And they flirt with her every chance they get.

They flirt with disaster.

The buzz of the day revolves around the collapse of the mortgage industry and the debate over the use of the public purse to alleviate the financial pain of some of the industry's major players (or more precisely, to distribute that pain over the entire tax base).

The details of the bailout plan are still in discussion in Congress, but it's pretty clear that the federal government plans to perform some kind of acquisition or offer some kind of loan program, using the contents of the US Treasury (real or imaginary) to perform a risk-based investment whose expected value is below zero. If it was actually a potentially good investment, the federal government wouldn't need to take action. Private investors would jump at the chance to take it upon themselves to do so. For example, Warren Buffet's $5B investment in Goldman Sachs shows that, at least as far as Buffet believes, Goldman Sachs is still a viable company.

In short, government doesn't make money. Government only gets involved if there's no money to be made, where businesses and investors have decided the field is barren. Fools rush in where angel investors fear to tread.

Now, I've said many times on this blog that I'm not going to pretend to be able to correlate macroeconomic policy decisions with microeconomic ramifications. What I seek to point out here is merely to echo the popular belief in the relationship between the national debt, the value of the dollar, and the impact of the value of the dollar on individual pocketbooks.

I think there's a general consensus, right or wrong, that the bigger the national debt gets, the less purchasing power the dollar holds. In actual historical analysis, there does tend to be a correlation, but, to my knowledge, raw historical economic data itself doesn't really establish a cause-and-effect relationship. That is, does the dollar get weaker because the debt grows, or does the federal government need to borrow more money because goods and services require more dollars to pay for? To what extent do these forces feed one another, and to what extent are they fed mutually by some common underlying factor?

It's exactly these kinds of issues that make me realize that economic policy debates are largely sophomoric and undignified affairs, conducted by people who purport to sound authoritative without actually knowing what the hell they're talking about. They're unsuitable for serious adults intent on solving problems and getting things done. Yes, there are self-styled economic policy professionals out there, such as Ben Bernanke or Thomas Friedman, and people do listen to them... But if you ask me, these guys know about as much about the science of economics as Asclepius knew about medicine, Aristotle about physics, or Paracelsus about chemistry.

It's also why I believe that, when it comes to government involvement in most things - especially the economy - the cure is worse than the disease. It's like having an Egyptian anatomist for a physician. It's not that he doesn't know anything. He knows some stuff, but the stuff he knows is warped and skewed. The more subtle and serious the problem, the less reliable his treatment. You might trust him to remove a splinter or even set a broken bone. But would you trust him to surgically excise a tumor? Me, I think I'd take my chances with the cancer.

And that brings us to where we are now, facing a major hike in the national debt and a federal alleviation plan whose goals are of dubious desirability and whose likelihood of achieving those goals is improbable at best. Makes me wish I'd held on to my gold last year.

On the upside, though, a weaker dollar has advantages for the country in general and for me personally.

As other currencies strengthen relative to the dollar, American labor becomes a steadily more profitable investment. The reason American companies use Mexican or Chinese labor is because it's cheaper than American labor. As the dollar drops relative to the peso or yuan, American companies will find it steadily more expensive to hire Chinese or Mexicans, and relatively cheaper to hire Americans. This means jobs that are currently overseas will return to the US.

It also means that foreign companies will begin to find it profitable to build factories here, which means that we'll grow accustomed to seeing American workers going to work in British or German or Chinese-owned factories in Minnesota and Pennsylvania. Some might find this an unappealing prospect, but I don't really see what's so bad about it. It's part of living in an integrated, globalized world - after all, we're supposed to celebrate multiculturalism and diversity, right? Besides, a paycheck's a paycheck, regardless of whether it comes from an American boss or a Chinese one.

And as for me personally, I believe a weakening dollar will actually make me a bit richer.

I believe that software development is already a fairly globally priced asset. That is, it's very, very easy for a software development firm to hire anybody from anywhere in the world, thanks to the lack of physical constraints on the development and manufacturing process of the end product. It's much easier for a British company to hire Indonesians to make software than to make cars. As such, the salary I draw is driven more by competition in the global talent pool than by the value of the regional currency. If I was paid in yuan, I'd be earning approximately the same total dollar amount as I earn now, converted to yuan. That goes likewise for pounds, pesos, rubbles, or rupees. There might be a variation by as much as a factor of two in either direction, but the variation in cost of living in the currencies' respective locales can vary by a factor of ten or more.

My debts, however, are at a fixed dollar amount. The amount I owe on my mortgage is not going to rise just because the value of the dollar falls.

This means that a weakening dollar increases the numerical value of my salary but leaves my mortgage unchanged. If the dollar were to halve in value next year, it would dent my salary, but my company would give me a raise in order to keep me around - this raise would not be a factor of 2x, but it would have to be pretty hefty, since it's very easy for me to simply find a British or Irish firm to contract my services out to from remote. My mortgage, however, would effectively drop in half, and there's nothing the bank can do about it.

So, if you're in debt (as most of us are), and you work in a globalizable industry (as most of us do), a weakening dollar can be your friend.

For all his talk of Change, Obama's stated policy positions offer very little difference to the stances of his opponent - or, for that matter, those of the current administration.

I've already noted before that Obama's Iraq plan is identical to Bush's and McCain's. To recap, Obama vows to bring the troops home in a 16- to 20-month phased withdrawal, contingent on the Iraqi's ability to functionally replace them. He will then leave a forward base in Iraq indefinitely for regional force projection. This is substantively indistinguishable from the plans of his opponents.

Now Obama has conceded Bush's and McCain's positions on the economy as well.

Democrat Barack Obama says he would delay rescinding President Bush's tax cuts on wealthy Americans if he becomes the next president and the economy is in a recession, suggesting such an increase would further hurt the economy.

This is such a great revelation. On the face of it, he is evidently admitting that he understands that Bush's tax policy helps drive economic growth. Now, I know better than to make authoritative assertions of economic policy, but Obama of course doesn't. So it doesn't matter whether or not I believe the Bush tax cuts are a good idea (I do) - what matters is whether or not Obama thinks so.

And like a teenager who rails against her parents demanding more autonomy and then asking for an extra $10/wk for her allowance, Obama has been deriding the Bush tax policy for the entirety of his campaign only to now assert that he will keep it in place to help the country's economic performance.

More generally, this invalidates the most basic premise of the Obama campaign. Now that he's in consensus with McCain on the two biggest issues in this election - Iraq and the economy - can someone please explain to me exactly what it is about Obama that makes him the candidate of Change?

See, now, this is interesting! This is the kind of stuff I'm talking about!

Prompted by Ari, I investigated some of the tax policies laid forth so far by Obama and McCain. I recognize that these are tentative policy statements and that the guy who wins might do something completely different once he actually gets into office. Nonetheless, these projections are interesting in the meantime because they tell us at least what the candidates think the voters want to hear.

As it turns out, taken at face value, Obama's tax policy doesn't actually increase my tax load by much relative to what it is by now. What's even more interesting is that it appears to be roughly on par with what McCain would tax me. Now, there are additional factors, such as how much Social Security they take from me and how they'll tax things like my house and my investments. But in the end, it ends up being pretty darn close to a wash.

Both plans end up being pretty vanilla party-line policies when it comes to income tax: McCain extends the Bush tax cuts and throws in a new way to compute health insurance costs, whereas Obama promises to screw punish increase taxes on successful productive high-income earners. There's two catches, though. One is that McCain's health care thing is kinda fucked up, and ends up actually slightly hurting people in my income bracket. The other is that Obama's progressive tax scheme is very progressive; it reduces taxes a little bit on people earning low to medium incomes, then it hits individuals earning over $200K (and couples earning over $250K), and it taxes all holy hell out of them. These people end up shouldering over half of the nation's total tax burden.

I am not one of those people or couples. My income is too high to get an Obama tax reduction but too low to get an Obama tax increase. To me, the difference seems to end up being within a few hundred dollars, maybe one or two grand tops. Now, don't get me wrong: Given a choice between paying two grand and not paying two grand, I'd rather, you know, not. But it's not quite enough to make me start going around serial-killing welfare recipients to reduce the economic burden, either.

In fact, such a small margin basically takes the candidates' income tax stances out of play from the point of view of my own personal benefit. What it leaves is a philosophical evaluation rather than a pragmatic one. I strongly dislike the Obama income tax plan because I oppose the idea of forcing any human being to pay, work, or live for another human being, and I utterly refuse to support a candidate whose policies would use the power of government to empower the many to subjugate the few. But I gotta admit, right now it doesn't affect me personally. And maybe in four or eight years it will, but for the time being there's no difference to me.

There is, of course, more to this story.

Where the McCain tax plan really wins is in its treatment of corporate taxes, tariffs, and investment incentives. In other words, while both McCain and Obama want to take the same amount out of my paycheck, McCain wants to take substantially less from my employer as a whole. This would leave more money for my employer to either hire me some help, or just increase my salary. Either way, my life gets a little easier. It also reduces the cost of goods by reducing business overhead, thus increasing my buying power.

So, looking at just income tax alone, my life pretty much doesn't change regardless of whether it's McCain or Obama in the White House. They'll both take essentially the same chunk out of my paycheck. However, when you consider corporate tax policy as well, it becomes clear that, while the chunk they take out stays the same, my paycheck is likely to be bigger under McCain, and I'll be able to buy more with each dollar of it.

Point: McCain.

Reason Online succinctly puts what I heard coming out of Obama's mouth last night.

Government cannot solve all our problems. Just the ones involving energy, education, work, the weather, cities, the countryside, sick children, sick mothers, joblessness, hopelessness, and frightening foreigners who do not live in Iraq. Now if you'll all look under your seats, every one of you is going home with a new car!

(I'm disabling comments and trackbacks on this entry because this snippet of brilliance is Reason's, not mine. Please post comments and trackbacks on Reason's site.)

Well then, by all means, correct the facts and flesh out the arguments. I'm all ears.

This argument is an attempt to take down all my other arguments by claiming that my premise is incorrect, that I should give my vote to whoever will make the country better rather than who's best for my own personal situation.

First of all, the idea that I should bow to any higher power is something I find ridiculous, and your belief that I am somehow morally inferior to you for refusing to do so is something I find deeply offensive. I love my country because it affords me the opportunity to live my best possible life. The god or gods I choose to worship are private, my business, not yours, and I'm not interested in your input on the matter. I will not kneel at your altar, regardless of whether it's for a sentient supernatural being, or for a secular construct such as Country or Society or The Greater Good.

Kindly keep your religious or quasi-religious beliefs to yourself and out of my government. And while you're at it, kindly keep your laws off of my body and out of my pocketbook.

But for humor's sake, let me grant you the premise. We should all vote to make the country as a whole better, right?

Well, the country, as a whole, is comprised of individuals. By making the lives of the individual citizens of this country better, you and I together can make this country better by induction.

Now, as it so happens, I in fact am one such individual. So by voting towards my own self-interest, I am in fact improving the country.

And, even more so, by voting towards my interests, you can help individuals other than yourself: namely, me! And that means you can improve the country too! So it looks like you just convinced yourself to vote for McCain! Neat!

Isn't collectivist political philosophy wonderful?

Yeah, that's a really convincing argument there.

This argument addresses an Obama Presidency from a strictly symbolic perspective with corresponding self-fulfilling prophecies, rather than a pragmatic perspective revolving around policy issues. It works on multiple levels, from the personal (my coworkers would be less grumpy and irritable) to the international (Europeans would hate America less with Obama at the helm).

The idea is that, ultimately, people around me want Obama to be President, and, whether their reasoning makes sense or not, I will benefit from my neighbors being less whiny, cranky, and obnoxious.

Now, this argument is interesting because it's totally circular. It is factually true that, if you threaten to irritate me with your whining unless I help you elect your man (or donate to your charity, or attend your cocktail party, or Perform Arbitrary Action X), then I will experience less of your whining by complying with your demands.

This is a form of emotional blackmail, and your paltry attempts at it pale in comparison to what I've learned to endure from my Jewish mother.

It is not actually a form of persuasion. Basically you're saying that I should vote for Obama not because he's the better candidate, but because his supporters are volatile, melodramatic crybabies. I do not find this convincing.