Toxic medicine

Pick your poison. Image by way of wikipedia.

 If there was a scarier place for a soldier to be in the American Civil War than a battlefield, it might have been a hospital, of either the field or conventional variety.

Medical science had not yet caught on to the germ theory of disease. Overworked doctors rushed from patient to patient with unwashed hands and instruments. Amputation was the order of the day.

But if there was anything scarier than Civil War-era surgery, it might have been the medicine. It was a common practice to administer heroic doses of calomel to patients for a variety of ailments, including diarrhea and dysentery.

Among the ingredients of calomel were a mixture of mercury and chloride.

I managed to avoid a chemistry class in my education, such as it was, but I don’t think you need an advanced degree in that field to get a bad feeling about that.

One obvious result was mercury poisoning, but the specific symptoms could be horrific, including loss of teeth, rotting jaws and gangrene in the mouth and jaws.

Calomel caused misery and sometimes death to countless people, even ruining the health of “Little Women” author Louisa May Alcott during her stint as a nurse for wounded soldiers.

It boggles the mind that generations of doctors would rely on a chemical that caused so much damage and prescribe bad medicine for so long.

But the same kind of thing has happened over and over in the realm of policy and politics for the last half century.

And it might be about to happen again in West Virginia unless people speak up.

The bad medicine I’m referring to is the idea that cutting taxes for the wealthy will create jobs and economic growth. We’ve been told that over and over for years, but the evidence for that is about a scarce as that of the benefits of ingesting calomel.

Recently, researchers at the London School of Economics did the math. In a big way. They examined the impacts of tax cuts for the rich over a 50-year period in 18 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The countries included the United States, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Among the findings:

“We find that major reforms reducing taxes on the rich lead to higher income inequality as measured by the top 1% share of pre-tax national income. The effect remains stable in the medium term. In contrast, such reforms do not have any significant effect on economic growth and unemployment.”

And:

“Furthermore, we find no effect of tax reforms on real GDP per capita. When looking at the effect on unemployment rates, the estimates show a slightly different pattern. Here, tax cuts for the rich lead to slightly higher unemployment rates in the short term.”

And:

“Turning our attention to economic performance, we find no significant effects of major tax cuts for the rich. More specifically, the trajectories of real GDP per capita and the unemployment rate are unaffected by significant reductions in taxes on the rich in both the short and medium term..”

And:

“Cutting taxes on the rich increases top income shares, but has little effect on economic performance.”

If that’s not enough, other research in the field of public health from a variety of sources has found higher rates of inequality to be associated with many social problems, including increases in crime and violence, infant mortality, obesity, addiction, mental health problems and general unhappiness.

It’s very likely that there will be efforts in the coming legislative session to pursue this failed policy by changes to income and business property taxes that benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

I’m sure we’ll be told that taking the fiscal equivalent of calomel will be good for us. I hope the people of West Virginia send a loud and clear message of thanks but no thanks.

(This ran as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

Juvenile (in)justice

In case you missed it, here's my op-ed on the need for juvenile justice reform in today's Gazette.

MR. MOJO RISIN'. I have often been asked by out of state friends about WV Senator Joe Manchin. I usually say that some days are better than others (that's something the Spousal Unit frequently says of me). I'd  say that this was one of his good days. In a speech to Marine veterans, Manchin called for a cutback in US military adventures overseas.

INEQUALITY. What a drag.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The long view

A while back, I picked up a copy of Wait: the Art and Science of Delay by Frank Partnoy. The title attracted me since I've been known to procrastinate once or twice in my life. In fact, I may be doing it now. Anyhow, towards the end, he makes some interesting observations on how we measure economic success.

Typically, the focus is on GDP or gross domestic product. There are lots of problems with that. For one thing, GDP might go way up in the wake of a disaster or war as people spend more to deal with it, even if they become more miserable along the way or if it grows at the expense of long term prosperity.

Focusing on things like GDP is especially problematic if the focus is on the short term. Plenty of companies have gone belly up because their CEOs focused on immediate gains rather than long term stability, let alone sustainability.

He comes up with a good analogy:

Focusing narrowly on GDP is like driving a car and only looking at how fast you are going. Sustainability means you should also ask how much gas is left in the tank or whether you need to adjust your position on a winding road.

No wonder things crash.

 SPEAKING OF THE LONG VIEW. Here's a look at WV's new Future Fund law.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

About that lion

Ask this guy.

I've always loved philosophy, but there are certain schools of it that do nothing for me. Among these are logical positivism, analytical philosophy and schools that focus on things like grammar and language. Life's too short.

One person who has connections to those schools enjoys a huge international following: Ludwig Wittgenstein. I don't get the attraction.

A while back, someone loaned me a copy of what many people consider to be his masterpiece, Philosophical Investigations. I dutifully waded through it in hopes of changing my mind. It didn't happen, although there were a few good lines here and there.

I'm about to take issue with one of the most famous of those. In that book, Wittgenstein said, "If a lion could talk, we could not understand him." That might be true of things like sea cucumbers, but lions are mammals and we share a lot of similarities in the brain with them, especially in those regions of the brain that have to do with emotions.

I don't think that lions particularly need to talk, although one could argue that they already do non-verbally. But if they did, I think it would be pretty clear. I also have a feeling that most of what they would say would take the form of commands and declarative statements.

They probably wouldn't ask a lot of questions. Or need to.

CUTTING ALONE WON'T DO IT. People concerned about deficits would do well to think less about across the board cuts than about promoting economic growth, according to this analysis in the NY Times.

UPPER BIG BRANCH. Here's an interesting twist in the Massey mine disaster investigation.

PREJUDICE. Scientific research suggests it may be more ingrained than we like to think, but there are ways of countering it.

WANT TO BE HAPPIER? Try focusing. Wandering minds apparently gather negative thoughts.

MORE ON THOSE NEANDERTHALS. Maybe the human edge over our Neanderthal cousins had something to do with our slow growth to maturity.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

THE TURN OF A PHRASE

Icon of the Archangel Michael.

This week on Goat Rope, El Cabrero is responding to a challenge from a reader to write about the five things I admire most about Jesus. The hardest part was figuring out where to start.

If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

The fourth thing I'm going to write about is Jesus' way with words. Official Goat Rope verdict: he had one. Big time. Whole libraries have been written on the sayings of Jesus and more could and will be written. I'm going to focus today on his awesome one liners.

My personal favorites include some of his comic visual images, like when he nailed hypocrites who made a show of religion while neglecting simple justice and compassion:

You blind guides, who strain out a gnat and swallow a camel!

And speaking of camels, let's not forget this one:

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God

.

How about these for cutting through the #$&%:

No one who puts his hand on the plow and looks back is fit for the Kingdom of God.

What goes into your mouth will not defile you, but what comes out of your mouth, that will defile you.

Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

To save your life is to lose it; to lose your life is to save it.

Follow me and let the dead bury their dead.

The first shall be last and the last shall be first.

Exalt yourself and you will be humbled; humble yourself and you will be exalted.

I could go on and on but I'm sure the Gentle Reader knows where to find more.

WHERE YOUR TREASURE IS. In light of the new Census report on poverty, health coverage, and incomes, the American Friends Service Committee calls for new priorities:

Congress should redirect the $720 million a day the U.S. is spending on the Iraq war to programs that reduce poverty at home, urged the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), responding to Census Bureau data released today.

“For $720 million, we could provide over 400,000 children with health care, or over a million children with free school lunches,” notes Joyce Miller, the American Friends Service Committee assistant general secretary for justice and human rights. “America’s shameful poverty rate should lead everyone to ask ourselves how we want to spend our tax dollars — on war or on education, health care, job training, affordable housing, and the like.”

CONSIDER THE LILIES. Did you ever want your own Spiderman suit? As in a real one? A group of Italian scientists say nanotechnology could make it happen.

MORE ON THE CAMEL/NEEDLE'S EYE THING. CEOs of major U.S. companies made more in a day than the average worker in a year.

MORE ON THE WHERE YOUR TREASURE IS THING. Here's an interesting essay by David Korten on rethinking the meaning of wealth in terms of life.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

LOVE AND DEATH

Caption: This man is now portraying the impetuous and occasionally violent Dmitri Karamazov. The character of Snegiryov is played by the toy monkey.

El Cabrero is still on something of a Russian literature jag. There's no telling at this point how long it will last, although I do promise to try to keep it shorter than The Brothers Karamazov.

I haven't seen a lot of Woody Allen films, but did get a kick out of his spoof of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in Love and Death, both of which are, after all, their major themes.

For Dostoevsky, the two were intertwined. He was haunted by death long before it finally caught up with him. When he was still a teenager, his father died suddenly amid rumors that he had been killed by his serfs.

As a young man, he fell in with a group of radicals and was arrested and sentenced to death. As William Hubben puts it in Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Kafka (how's that for a lineup?), after several months in prison, he was one of a group of 21 prisoners scheduled to be executed at 7:00 a.m. on the morning of Dec. 22, 1849:

They were led out into the prison yard to stand on the scaffold, and the officer in charge read to each the fatal words of the verdict, "Sentenced to be shot!" The prisoners' clothes had been taken off, and for twenty minutes they waited in the ice-cold temperature for the final moment to come. Dostoevsky embraced two of his friends in a last farewell. He wrote later of this "last" moment, "I kept staring at a church with a gilt dome reflecting the sunbeams and I suddenly felt as if these beams came from the region where I myself was going to be in a few minutes."

Suddenly an officer came galloping across the square, signalling with a handkerchief to announce that Tsar Nicholas I, "in his infinite mercy," had commuted the death sentence to prison terms in Siberia...

That ought to do it, huh?

Unbeknownst to the prisoners at the time, the "rescue" was staged, a pure example of the theater of power. Siberia probably wasn't' much of a picnic either.

It's probably no wonder that he delved the dark side like few other writers, pondering the problem of evil, guilt, and suffering. But he is also the writer of redemption, compassion, and love in the face of death.

Here's Father Zossima's advice on his deathbed in the Brothers K:

Brothers, have no fear of men’s sin. Love a man even in his sin, for that is the semblance of Divine Love and is the highest love on earth. Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.

Alas, it's easier said than done. Good, though.

DEMOCRACY AND/OR GROWTH. Jonathan Chait in the June 4 New Republic discusses a column by an American Enterprise Institute economist who

points out that, over the last decade and a half, free-market dictatorships had faster economic growth than free-market democracies. The obvious explanation would be that dictatorships tend to be poorer countries (e.g., China) that can grow more quickly by catching up with modern technology. But Hassett offers up a different interpretation: Unlike democracies, dictatorships "are not hamstrung by the preferences of voters for, say, a pervasive welfare state." In other words, while Western democracies are held back by voters--with their pesky demands that citizens get health care and old people not be left to starve in the streets--autocracies march nobly toward a free-market paradise.

This reminds me of a passage in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment where a character says that

compassion is forbidden nowadays by science itself, and that that's what is done now in England, where there is political economy.

Back to the future indeed...

GOATS TO THE RESCUE. Finally, the title of this Times article tells it all: "In Tennessee, goats eat the vine that ate the South." The ones around here would probably refuse to eat the kudzu out of spite...

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