Peter Frase

As everyone knows by now, *Jacobin* [issue 9](http://jacobinmag.com/issue/modify-your-dissent/) is out (except for you print subscribers, sorry you lot). There's lots of great stuff there to dig into.

My lead editorial for this issue began its life as a blog post, and it was originally just going to be a quick response to the absurdly wrong-headed hit on Occupy that Tom Frank [wrote for the neo-*Baffler*](http://www.thebaffler.com/past/to_the_precinct_station).

It sprawled, obviously, into a larger chunk of wannabe-Perry Anderson intellectual history. But what I was originally reacting to was an essay whose false conclusions derived from one specific misbegotten premise: that Occupy was obviously and decisively a failure, and a defeat.

The encampments, from lower Manhattan to Oakland, are long gone. And hence, so is Occupy, from the vantage point of people who didn't really participate in or understand it. But the legacy of Occupy goes far beyond pitching tents in a few parks or public squares. The people who built those camps went on to build a successor politics that's ongoing, and both its successes and its failures are worth paying attention to. After hurricane Sandy, [Sarah Jaffe](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/11/power-to-the-people/) covered an iteration of this for *Jacobin*, when the afterglow of Occupy in New York City re-ignited as an impromptu relief organization that put mainstream relief agencies [to shame](http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2012/11/04/occupy_sandy_hurricane_relief_being_led_by_occupy_wall_street.html).

But Occupy's afterlife extends far beyond New York. Anyone who read my [contribution to Jacobin 3-4](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/11/an-imagined-community/) knows that I feel a special connection to the politics of Minnesota. So I was delighted that my annual Christmas return to Minneapolis coincided with an action from [Occupy Homes](http://www.occupyhomesmn.org/), which is what the Minnesotan fraction of Occupy has evolved into.

Occupy in Minnesota, as in many other places, begain with an occupation of public space. But in the upper Midwest, it was particularly pressing that activists find something else to expend their energy on that didn't involve camping outside through the long winter. As Occupy Homes activist Nick Espinosa explained to me, the focus on housing began when a foreclosure victim simply turned up at the camp and told her story. Since then, Occupy Homes has been involved in multiple foreclosure defenses, including one that resulted in (since-dismissed) [riot charges](http://www.fightbacknews.org/2012/6/30/occupy-homes-mn-protesters-charged-third-degree-riot-defending-cruz-home-foreclosure) against Espinosa and other activists.

The most recent action, pictured above, was as simple and media-friendly as it was politically powerful. We helped to move a homeless family of three into a [vacant, foreclosed house](http://www.occupyhomesmn.org/homeforholidays) in St. Paul, just in time for Christmas. The woman shown speaking above is the previous owner of the house, who is in the process of losing it to US Bank. She gave her blessing and support to the activists from Occupy Homes and Neighborhoods Organizing for Change (an ACORN successor organization) as they reclaimed the place for Carrie, Xavier, and young Caleb, shown on the left.

The activists are demanding that US Bank give the house to a community organization and take it as a tax write-off, so that it can be used to house people again instead of sitting empty. But even if the bank won't play ball, Espinosa told me that they should be able to keep the family from being evicted for at least a month, and quite possibly longer. And Occupy Homes has every intention of creating a publicity nightmare for the local authorities, if they decide to start evicting families on behalf of big banks. With luck, the action I took part in in St. Paul will be the first of many.

Getting a personal look at what Occupy activists are doing in Minnesota reinforced my conviction that the hopeful note on which I ended my editorial was the right one: "The old may still be dying, but the new is already being born. Our task is to help it grow."

The new issue of *Jacobin* will be out next week, just after Christmas, and it's full of great stuff. You should [subscribe](http://store.jacobinmag.com/) if you haven't already, or give someone else a [gift subscription](http://store.jacobinmag.com/) if you have. (You can place an order with the right shipping address, send an email to subscriptions@jacobinmag.com with your gift announcement, and we'll handle the rest.)

This issue's [cover](http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=567880103238695) is inspired by my lead editorial, which is both an appreciation and a critique of the *Baffler*, the small magazine that strongly influenced me and others associated with *Jacobin* back in its 1990's heyday, and which was recently relaunched under new leadership. I'm sure people will enjoy the salacious catfight element of sniping at another publication, but I hope they also respond to my larger purpose, which is to explain why the *Baffler* was so important and appropriate to the time of its initial run, and why I think *Jacobin* is reacting to a qualitatively different historical moment.

While you're waiting for the issue to appear, here are two things you should do. The first is to help defend University of Rhode Island professor and [Lawyers, Guns, & Money](http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/) blogger Erik Loomis. As explained in [this statement at Crooked Timber](http://crookedtimber.org/2012/12/19/statement-on-erik-loomis/), Loomis is the victim of an absurd rightist smear campaign, all because he used Twitter to metaphorically demand NRA head Wayne LaPierre's "head on a stick" in the aftermath of the Newtown school shooting. I've had my [strong disagreements](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/09/the-conservative-leftist-and-the-radical-longshoreman/) with Loomis, but this is a moment to pull together in solidarity. As an untenured professor, Loomis's job and career are at risk, and what's happening to him is a risk that all of us run when we air radical ideas in public. Read the statement for more, or just go right ahead and contact the following administrators at URI:

- Dean Winnie Brownell: winnie@mail.uri.edu
- Provost Donald DeHays: ddehayes@uri.edu
- President David Dooley: davedooley@mail.uri.edu

The second thing I would recommend for U.S. readers is to have a look at [this page](https://pol.moveon.org/fiscal-showdown-whip/index.html), which catalogs the positions of Senate Democrats on President Obama's plan to cut Social Security through a change in the way benefits are adjusted for inflation. Some have already come out against it, but many more haven't made their position clear, and a few are in favor. If your Senators are in the undecided or pro-cuts group, you can use the site to contact them and either express your disagreement, or try to pin them down on their position. Figuring out where all these politicians stand will be important in trying to beat back these cuts, just as it was in the fight over [Bush's attempt](http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/004279.php) to privatize Social Security.

***

With that out of the way, here are some other things I've published elsewhere lately that may be of interest.

I have an essay in a rather unusual venue for me: the "Garage Sale Standard", a broadsheet that was commissioned to accompany a recent staging of artist Martha Rosler's ["Meta-Monumental Garage Sale"](http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1279) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. My essay, "The Garage Sale and Other Utopias", can be found in PDF form [here](http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/garagesale/garagesale1.pdf). I attempt to place the garage sale in the context of capitalism's fetish of the commodity, and individual attempts to escape from it:

> To alter the conditions that produce things like the Foxconn scandal would require a radical, worldwide transformation of the kind of society and economy we live in. Lacking the ability to bring about such a change, consumers disturbed by what is revealed when objects are defetishized understandably look for ways to avoid implication in processes of production that they find ugly and exploitative. Two of the most popular strategies are ethical consumption and buying secondhand. But while each of these points in certain hopeful and utopian directions, each also demonstrates the limits of seeking individual solutions to a collective dilemma.

I also have an essay in the most recent issue of the *New Inquiry*, ["Sowing Scarcity"](http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/sowing-scarcity/). It's a discussion of agriculture, in which I attempt to combine my longstanding preoccupation with intellectual property laws with a richer appreciation of ecological issues:

> This is late capitalism’s inverted world, where business and government treat nature as infinite but strictly ration culture. Thus does capitalism, billed in every economics textbook as the supreme mechanism for allocating scarce resources, degenerate into a machine that introduces scarcity where it need not exist and blithely squanders the things that are in short supply.

Finally, I had a blast appearing on Portland's KBOO radio to discuss the Basic Income and anti-work leftism [with Joe Clement and Kathryn Sackinger](http://kboo.fm/node/52414) and take questions from callers over the course of an hour. You can find the audio file at the link, along with some supplementary reading. If you want to hear an explanation and defense of Universal Basic Income as a Gorzian "non-reformist reform" in audio format, I think this is a pretty comprehensive one.

People know my beat by now, so everyone has been directing my attention to Paul Krugman's [recent musings](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-robots/) on the pace of automation in the economy. He moves away from his earlier preoccupation with worker skills, and toward the possibility of "'capital-biased technological change', which tends to shift the distribution of income away from workers to the owners of capital." He goes on to present data showing the secular decline in labor's share of income since the 1970's.

He then notes that his position "has echoes of old-fashioned Marxism", but reassures us that this uncomfortable realization "shouldn't be a reason to ignore facts". The implication of those facts, he says, are that neither the liberal nor conservative common sense has anything to say about our current predicament: "Better education won’t do much to reduce inequality if the big rewards simply go to those with the most assets. Creating an “opportunity society” . . . won’t do much if the most important asset you can have in life is, well, lots of assets inherited from your parents."

Meanwhile we have Kevin Drum [despairing](http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/12/our-bedpan-and-canasta-future) that the coming decades will be "mighty grim", as automation means that "the owners of capital will automate more and more, putting more and more people out of work". And we have the Financial Times publishing Izabella Kaminska [arguing that](http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2012/12/10/1303512/the-robot-economy-and-the-new-rentier-class/?) "we’ve now arrived at a point where technology begins to threaten return on capital, mostly by causing the sort of abundance that depresses prices to the point where many goods have no choice but to become free." This, of course, leads to attempts to impose artificial scarcity through new forms of property rights (with dire consequences for growth and prosperity), but I've written all about that [elsewhere](http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/phantom-tollbooths/).

What I mainly find interesting is what all this interest in technology and jobless growth says about the limits of contemporary liberalism. We can all hope that Gavin Mueller's [reverie](https://twitter.com/gavinsaywhat/status/277548284002828288) [of](https://twitter.com/gavinsaywhat/status/277549350383677440) [Paul](https://twitter.com/gavinsaywhat/status/277549399863881730) [Krugman](https://twitter.com/gavinsaywhat/status/277550263462666240) [dropping](https://twitter.com/gavinsaywhat/status/277551124733636608) [LSD](https://twitter.com/gavinsaywhat/status/277552595474726914) [and](https://twitter.com/gavinsaywhat/status/277554156699541504) [becoming](https://twitter.com/gavinsaywhat/status/277555109364387840) [a Marxist](https://twitter.com/gavinsaywhat/status/277556050801074176) will come to pass, but in the meantime his type seems to have no real answer. Nor do those of a more labor-liberal bent, like Dan Crawford [at Angry Bear](http://www.angrybearblog.com/2012/12/paul-krugman-changes-his-mind-on.html), who laments being called a neo-luddite and scornfully says: "As if widespread use of automated systems was automatically good for us overall". As if a world in which we hold back technical change in order to keep everyone locked into deadening jobs is a vision that will rally the masses to liberalism.

In its more sophisticated form, this kind of politics takes the form of Ed Miliband's "predistribution", which Richard Seymour [glosses](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/09/predistribution-an-attack-on-the-social-wage/) as a belief that "rather than taxing the rich to fund welfare, the government should focus on making work pay more." But if the structure of the modern economy is, as Krugman argues, one which depends on increasing numbers of robots and diminishing numbers of people, this project is bound to be either ineffectual or pointlessly destructive of our potential social wealth. The idea that there is something inherently superior, either politically or morally, about raising pre-tax and transfer incomes, rather than doing redistribution, is one that has never seemed to me to be especially well grounded. At times I suspect that it stems from an uncritical embrace of the historically specific white populist identity politics of the working class, and its accompanying fetish for the point of production, that I talk about [here](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/11/an-imagined-community/).

Not to say I have all the answers either, but here on the crazy Left we at least have [some ideas](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/04/the-politics-of-getting-a-life/). Ideas that don't presuppose the desirability of keeping the assembly line of employment going at all costs, pumping out something that we can call "middle class jobs". Ideas that get back to crazy notions like working time reduction and the decommodification of labor. These days, the unrealistic utopians are the nostalgics for the Fordist compromise, who see the factory worker with a high school diploma and a middle class income as the apex of human emancipation. But as Lenin [said](http://radicalcut.blogspot.com/2009/02/conversation-between-lenin-and-valeriu.html), "One can never be radical enough; that is, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself".

Given the [origins](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/introducing-saint-monday/) of my blog's name, I've avoided posting on Mondays. But I don't get paid for doing this, and so this was a misbegotten impulse for the reasons I explain below.

Yesterday I heard two interviews that helpfully recontextualize some common economic arguments about money and motivation, and provide another angle on the discussion of jobs in my [last post](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/11/hostess-and-the-limits-of-the-private-welfare-state/). The first is [with singer Chris Cornell](http://www.npr.org/2012/11/18/165213392/armed-with-age-and-experience-soundgarden-returns) of the recently re-formed Soundgarden, talking about what got him into music:

> I got a GED based on Catholic school seventh-grade education, really. I didn't make it that far. I have all those regrets now. ... I just kind of went into the blue-collar workforce at a really young age and discovered music, in terms of being a musician, around the same time. The good news is, I was probably 17 when I knew that's what I was going to do with the rest of my life, no matter what that meant. Even if that meant that I had to be a dishwasher or a janitor to support being in a band that I love and writing music that I love, I would be happy with that. So I feel fortunate. In spite of my lack of education, I didn't lack direction.

The second was with the writer Fran Lebowitz, on [Jesse Thorn's show "Bullseye"](http://www.maximumfun.org/bullseye/bullseye-jesse-thorn-fran-lebowitz-karriem-riggins-and-mark-frauenfelder). After Thorn asks her about the erratic appearance of her work, Lebowitz relates that she loved to write as a young woman, but developed crippling writers' block once she began to get paid to write. She posits that she is "so resistant to authority, that I am even resistant to my own authority." She later declares herself to hate work and be incorrigibly lazy, but the earlier comment hints at a more complex explanation. Transforming writing into an economic compulsion seems to have undermined intrinsic motivation, consistent with a long line of research in [behavioral economics](http://www.danpink.com/books/drive).

There's nothing particularly original or shocking about these interviews. We all know that people are motivated by much more than money. Just today, I saw two posts on this theme, from [Nancy Folbre on child-rearing](http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/19/of-parents-puppies-and-robots/) and [Matt Yglesias on people who take reductions in income in return for job satisfaction](http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/11/19/job_amenitiy_value_the_most_neglected_subject_in_economics.html). Yet according to the hegemonic common-sense form of economic reasoning, neither of these people should exist. If you want someone to do something, the common argument goes, you should give them a financial incentive. But Cornell isn't motivated by money, if we take him at his word (and even if he really wouldn't have kept at it without stardom, there are many others who do.) And Lebowitz is actively *de*-motivated to write by getting paid for it, illustrating the adage that the best way to ruin something you love is to
make it your job.

It's people like this that I'm thinking of when I say that with reductions in working time and something like a generous [Universal Basic Income](http://www.usbig.net/index.php), we would begin to [discover what work people will continue to do](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/02/do-they-owe-us-a-living/) whether or not they get paid for it. That's not to say that all work can be taken care of this way; it's hard to imagine an inverse of Chris Cornell who takes a day job as a rock singer to fund his passion for dishwashing. But we can at least start asking why we don't make an effort to restrict wage labor to areas where it actually incentivizes something.

This relates to a topic Mike Konczal brings up in his [new *American Prospect* article](http://prospect.org/article/great-societys-next-frontier), about the debate between proponents of the UBI (like me), and those like the sociologist Lane Kenworthy who prefer policies that are tied to participation in wage labor, like the Earned Income Tax Credit. Kenworthy worries about the disincentive to employment that a UBI would create, but I'm more interested in the way that it would open up space for people to do socially desirable but non-remunerated things (and also to reconsider how we distribute the burden of socially desirable but personally unpleasant work). We already have *too much* wage labor, from this perspective, so we shouldn't be so worried about getting more of it. So I agree, in a sense, with Trevor Burrus of the Cato Institute of all people, who [says we should champion](http://www.libertarianism.org/blog/bad-arguments-libertarianism-merit) "a system where productivity allows people to be artists,
record store clerks, or even bums." Of course, Burrus calls that system "the free market", where I would locate it in something rather different.

It's because of people like Cornell and Lebowitz, perhaps, that I don't worry as much as Keynes did, in ["Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren"](http://marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/keynes/1930/our-grandchildren.htm), about how people will find ways to use their expanded leisure time. He posed it as humanity's "permanent problem---how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure . . . to live wisely and agreeably and well". It's a theme recently brought up anew by Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky and his philosopher son Edward, who return to ancient philosophy's preoccupation with defining the good life in their fascinating (yet maddening) book [*Enough*](http://www.amazon.com/How-Much-Enough-Money-Good/dp/1590515072). But I ultimately have a lot of optimism about what people are capable of, and I believe a socialist future would, among other things, bring us more music and literature from the Chris Cornells and Fran Lebowitzes than does the system we live
in now.

Hostess Brands, maker of the Twinkie, [announced its liquidation](http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/hostess-brands-says-it-will-liquidate/) today. This provoked a wave of [now-more-than-everism](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/the-recoverydeficit-reduction-deal-the-two-parties-should-but-wont-strike/2011/05/19/AGxljgOH_blog.html), as both liberals and conservatives rushed to use the company's failure as a testament to their longstanding hobbyhorses.

To the Right, of course, the end of Hostess is just another great opportunity to bash unions. Although perhaps it's a sign of progress that even Fox News decided to soft-pedal this line, talking up the conciliatory position of the Teamsters while [blaming](http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/11/16/hostess-brands-to-liquidate-lay-off-18500-after-crippling-union-fight/) the recalcitrance of the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union for the closure. The idea that this is all about greedy unions is idiotic beyond belief, but sadly something we apparently still have to talk about. So if you don't believe me you can go read [Sarah Jaffe](http://adifferentclass.com/post/35839856607/we-deeply-regret-the-necessity-of-todays) or [Diana Reese](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2012/11/16/unions-did-not-kill-twinkies-but-theyll-take-the-fall/).

A line I'm seeing from liberals, meanwhile, is that this is another case of private equity vulture capitalism ruining the American dream. Hostess Brands was under the control of [a couple of hedge funds](http://www.cnbc.com/id/49853653), as is the style these days. And so one line of argument is that Hostess could have been a perfectly sustainable company with good paying jobs, if only those short-sighted PE guys hadn't showed up to loot it. A typical example of the genre is [this](http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/11/16/1162355/--Hostess-Brands-is-a-microcosm-of-what-s-wrong-with-America) from Laura Clawson at Daily Kos. Mark Price [puts it](https://twitter.com/price_laborecon/status/269485519417782272) more pithily on Twitter: "Private equity runs up debt, takes out fees and investment in capital goods declines leading to cost disadvantages."

There's no question that this is part of the story. The usual antics seem to be at work here, like levering up the company with debt and giving big pay raises to top management even as the business was going under. But Hostess had big problems even before the hedge fund guys showed up. Part of it was that on the marketing side, people just got less interested in eating Wonder Bread and Twinkies, and Hostess never managed to come up with any successful replacement products.

Moreover, the structure of the company's labor costs is not a completely bogus issue either. The main issue, as it often is in these cases, isn't wages but benefits, especially for retired workers. When Hostess went into bankruptcy earlier this year, *Pensions & Investments* [reported](http://www.businessinsurance.com/article/20120111/NEWS03/120119977) that seven of its eight largest unsecured creditors were union pension funds, and that the company faced $130 million per year of required contributions to these plans. And like all American companies that offer health insurance, they faced rising health care costs due to U.S.'s uniquely [irrational and inefficient](http://www.oecd.org/els/healthpoliciesanddata/49084355.pdf) system of privatized health care. It's absolutely true that these benefits were negotiated fair and square, and the workers have every right to them. But promising future benefits without worrying too much about how to pay for them is a problem for a lot of companies, and it was a way of pretending to continue the Fordist compromise of labor-peace-for-rising-wages long after it had become inoperative in reality. Continuing to fight on this terrain will always put labor on the defensive. It's worth noting that the Teamsters' own position [already included](http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07/26/hostess-twinkies-bankrupt/) significant concessions on pensions.

It may or may not have been possible to keep servicing all these obligations while keeping the company profitable, under more enlightened management. But keeping Hostess in business so they can give people good pay and benefits to make Twinkies seems like exactly the style of small-minded Keynesian hole-digging that I criticized in ["Against Jobs"](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/07/stop-digging-the-case-against-jobs/). These workers deserve universal health care, a good pension from Social Security, and dare I say it, even a [Universal Basic Income](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/09/the-basic-income-and-the-helicopter-drop/) to support them while they try to find other jobs. The fact that we depend on a privatized welfare state where all these things are tied to jobs is bad for workers and bad for the country. It feeds into the problem Ashwin Parameswaran discusses in [this post](http://www.macroresilience.com/2012/07/05/creative-destruction-and-the-class-struggle/), a quixotic search for "a stable system where labour and capital are both protected from the dangers of failure", one which "inevitably breeds a fragile and disadvantaged working class" that is fragmented into groups of protected insiders looking to protect their status, rather than act in solidarity as a class. I can't recommend that post enough if you, like a lot of people I interact with, have any affinity for the project of "somehow recreat[ing] the golden age of the 50s and the 60s i.e. stability for all."

Another reaction I've been seeing is "I don't feel bad about Hostess failing, but I feel bad for these workers". That's more than a passing ambivalence, it's a deep contradiction in our labor politics. I don't care much about Twinkies one way or the other, but there are plenty of other areas where Leftists definitely need to be comfortable with being job-killers: coal-mining, say, or debt collection. In support of that agenda, we need to be thinking not just about creating or protecting jobs, but about the kind of expansive welfare state that Bhaskar Sunkara and I talked about recently at [*In These Times*](http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/14035/for_the_welfare_of_all/). The [de-commodification of labor](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/06/de-commodification-in-everyday-life/) may be off the agenda right now, but we desperately need to bring it back.

"The Disposition Matrix" sounds like a dystopian science fiction novel. And indeed it is, but unfortunately it's being written by the American counter-terrorism bureaucracy, and rolled out as the blueprint for a future of state-sanctioned death squads.

The Washington Post [prints a riveting chapter](http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/plan-for-hunting-terrorists-signals-us-intends-to-keep-adding-names-to-kill-lists/2012/10/23/4789b2ae-18b3-11e2-a55c-39408fbe6a4b_story.html) of this story, a sequel to Obama's notorious "kill list". We discover the existence of a "next generation targeting list" (the aforementioned matrix), a spreadsheet of doom which will be used to keep track of all the undesirables now targeted for elimination by the CIA.

The story expertly combines bureaucratic tedium with horrific violence, and it is full of bizarre and terrifying lines. "The database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the 'disposition' of suspects beyond the reach of American drones." Drone assasination is now the *first* resort of the state.

***

"'We can’t possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us,' a senior administration official said. 'It’s a necessary part of what we do.'" Killing is ineffectual, which is why killing must remain our business forever. "Mitt Romney made it clear that he would continue the drone campaign. 'We can’t kill our way out of this,' he said, but added later that Obama was 'right to up the usage' of drone strikes and that he would do the same." We can't kill our way out of this, so we must keep killing. [You must go on. You can't go on. You'll go on](http://www.samuel-beckett.net/unnamable.html).

"'We had a disposition problem,' said a former U.S. counterterrorism official involved in developing the matrix." The problem was that there remained some people that the U.S. government was unable to kill.

Once, a man was captured off the coast of Yemen. "'Warsame was a classic case of "What are we going to do with him?" ' the former counterterrorism official said. In such cases, the matrix lays out plans." Perhaps we require ["camps . . . used for 'suspects' whose offenses could not be proved and who could not be sentenced by ordinary process of law."](http://www.peterfrase.com/2006/02/the-state-and-the-stateless/)

"The proposal, which would need White House approval, reflects the [CIA]'s transformation into a paramilitary force, and makes clear that it does not intend to dismantle its drone program and return to its pre-Sept. 11 focus on gathering intelligence." This will be very different from the [Tonton Macoutes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonton_Macoute). There will be no rustic straw hats and denim shirts this time.

"The matrix was developed by the NCTC, under former director Michael Leiter, to augment those organizations’ separate but overlapping kill lists, officials said." This is typical of the bloated, inefficient government bureaucracy. One day they'll think to outsource the machinery of death entirely.

"'The problem with the drone is it’s like your lawn mower,' said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and Obama counterterrorism adviser. 'You’ve got to mow the lawn all the time. The minute you stop mowing, the grass is going to grow back.'" You kill them and kill them, but they just keep growing back. After a time, "Targeted killing is now so routine that the Obama administration has spent much of the past year codifying and streamlining the processes that sustain it."

"The approach also applies to the development of criteria for 'signature strikes,' which allow the CIA and JSOC to hit targets based on patterns of activity . . . even when the identities of those who would be killed is unclear." Like Google's search algorithm, the characteristics that will make you deserving of government assasination are obscure.

"For an administration that is the first to embrace targeted killing on a wide scale, officials seem confident that they have devised an approach that is so bureaucratically, legally and morally sound that future administrations will follow suit." Barack Obama truly deserved his Nobel peace prize after all; he inaugurated the most moral campaign of wide scale killing in history.

"The number of targets on the lists isn’t fixed, officials said, but fluctuates based on adjustments to criteria. Officials defended the arrangement even while acknowledging an erosion in the caliber of operatives placed in the drones' cross hairs." Targeted killing used to be glamorous and sophisticated, but these days it's a bore. All the good targets are already dead.

"A senior aide to Panetta disputed this account, and said Panetta mentioned the shrinking target list during his trip to Islamabad but didn't raise the prospect that drone strikes would end. Two former U.S. officials said the White House told Panetta to avoid even hinting at commitments the United States was not prepared to keep." If we stop the killing, the terrorists will have won. If we say that we will stop the killing in the future, the terrorists will have won. If we hint that we might commit to stopping the killing in the future, the terrorists will have won.

***

It comes back, as it always does for me, to ["Four Futures"](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/). The fourth chapter of that essay is titled "Exterminism", and it suggests the following:

> Many of the rich . . . have resigned themselves to barricading themselves into their fortresses, to be protected by unmanned drones and private military contractors. Guard labor . . . reappears in an even more malevolent form, as a lucky few are employed as enforcers and protectors for the rich.

> But this too, is an unstable equilibrium, for the same basic reason that buying off the masses is. So long as the immiserated hordes exist, there is the danger that it may one day become impossible to hold them at bay. Once mass labor has been rendered superfluous, a final solution lurks: the genocidal war of the rich against the poor.

Until now, we have relied on the prison system to [warehouse the unemployed and unemployable](http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/07/job-crisis-black-unemployment-rates), but there just seem to be more and more of them. How long until someone like Pete Peterson demands, in the name of fiscal responsibility, that we begin liquidating these stocks of unproductive bodies?

Fortunately, the disposition matrix has nothing to do with such fears. The targets of the lists are not surplus labor, after all, we are merely terrorists.

A month or two ago, Bhaskar Sunkara came to me with the idea that we could, on a short deadline, turn our long-running discussions about the future of progressive politics in the United States into a "[Piven-Cloward plan](http://www.thenation.com/article/weight-poor-strategy-end-poverty) for the 21st century" for the cover of *In These Times* magazine. This was, of course, an insane proposal, combining the intellectual hubris of a mid-20th century French philosopher and the slapdash work ethic of an undergraduate pulling an all nighter. But I've learned by now not to doubt Bhaskar's [crazy schemes](http://www.jacobinmag.com), so naturally I signed on.

You can read the resulting product [here](http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/13998/the_welfare_state_of_america/#.UIVaggremjs.facebook), and Francis Fox Piven herself also weighs in with [an editorial](http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/14035/for_the_welfare_of_all) in the issue. I don't know whether we accomplished our grandiose aims, but I'm happy we at least made a case for something that's long been discussed on the left, and which doesn't get nearly enough attention: the need to shift responsibility for social policy from states and localities to the federal government.

In the essay, we make our case primarily on fiscal grounds, pointing out that the limited ability of sub-national governments to run deficits almost inevitably leads to a politics of austerity. But there's another aspect to this that we didn't really talk about, which is the regional structure of American politics. Reactionary approaches to the welfare state are particularly characteristic of the south, both its culture and its political economy. Federalizing social policy is therefore both an act of solidarity with the working class of that region, and a move toward completing the class project of the civil war.

As we note in the essay, Republicans---Romney and Ryan included---favor the inverse of our strategy, and advocate devolving social policy to the states. This has broadly negative consequences for the beneficiaries of such policies, but it has particularly bad implications for the residents of conservative states. Those states, as Jonathan Cohn explains [in *The New Republic*](http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/magazine/108185/blue-states-are-scandinavia-red-states-are-guatemala), are markedly stingier about social welfare spending. They also happen to be, by and large, the states with the most poor people. (This is, incidentally, what gives rise to "What's the Matter With Kansas"-style fallacies about poor people voting against their economic interests, due to the phenomenon of rich people living in poor states [being more strongly Republican](http://www.amazon.com/Red-State-Blue-Rich-Poor/dp/069113927X).)

This bifurcation of state-level social policy, which Cohn glosses as "Blue States are from Scandinavia, Red States are from Guatemala", also has a strongly regional pattern. Consider the following image, from the sidebar to Cohn's article:

The division between our local Scandinavias and Guatemalas tracks a very old north-south division in American politics, which is where the civil war comes in. Michael Lind recently [argued at Salon.com](http://www.salon.com/2012/10/10/slave_states_vs_free_states_2012/) that:

> The core of today’s Democratic Party consists of the states of New England and the Great Lakes/Mid-Atlantic region that were the heart of the Union effort during the Civil War. The core of today’s Republican Party consists of the states that seceded from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America.

Lind goes on to argue that:

> Notwithstanding slavery, segregation and today’s covert racism, the Southern system has always been based on economics, not race. Its rulers have always seen the comparative advantage of the South as arising from the South’s character as a low-wage, low-tax, low-regulation site in the U.S. and world economy. The Southern strategy of attracting foreign investment from New York, London and other centers of capital depends on having a local Southern workforce that is forced to work at low wages by the absence of bargaining power.

Centralizing welfare policy is therefore a way of avoiding a situation that pits the residents of the liberal states against an immiserated workforce in the south. This is an act of principled solidarity---a refusal to simply leave southern workers to deal with their conservative elites on their own---but also a pragmatic necessity. We may not yet be able to demand a global social democracy, but we can at least avoid an invidious race to the bottom with our fellow Americans.

Our essay concludes by envisioning the welfare state as a foundation for freedom:

> Freedom to give their children an education without rival. Freedom from poverty, hunger and homelessness. Freedom to grow into old age with pensions, Social Security, and affordable and accessible healthcare. Freedom to leave an exploitative work environment and find another job. Freedom to organize with fellow workers for redress.

The decommodification of labor that's entailed by egalitarian social policy is a partial emancipation from the [unfreedom of the workplace](http://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/01/let-it-bleed-libertarianism-and-the-workplace/). The stakes in this debate are therefore much higher than simply the existence of a "safety net" or a rudimentary social wage. It's about giving workers the confidence and the material security necessary to make bolder demands for social change.

You sometimes see Trotskyist sectarians [using the slogan](http://www.icl-fi.org/print/english/wv/980/civilwar.html) "Finish the Civil War! Black Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!" But before we get around to the revolution bit, just getting a robust national-level welfare state would in itself be a big step toward the completion of the emancipatory project.

In the debate between [Alex Gourevitch](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/10/two-hurricanes-2/) on one side, and [Chris Bertram](http://crookedtimber.org/2012/10/10/alex-gourevitch-on-environmentalism-some-pushback/) and *Jacobin* contributing editor [Max Ajl](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/10/climate-change-and-the-politics-of-responsibility/) on the other, I'd put myself more on Bertram and Ajl's side. Gourevitch's essay was a bit too long on caricatures of environmentalism, and too short on critiques of the particular way in which development operates in capitalism.

I do think, though, that Ajl's opening is a bit misleading as to the substance of his argument. He ridicules Gourevitch's call for "control and manipulation of nature" as "pure ideology", and insists that "ecological problems are not resolvable through endless technofixes". But the further control and manipulation of nature by means of technology is then precisely what he goes on to advocate. What separates the two positions is that while Gourevitch tends toward an uncritical conflation of "development" and "capitalist development", Ajl outlines an explicitly ecological (though not necessarily anti-capitalist) path of development, involving things like high-speed rail networks and alternative energy systems.

Ajl's other important point is to separate the defense of advanced technological society from the praise of large scale, centralized industrialization. As Bertram notes in his post, there is a sort of stagist theory of history implicit in Gourevitch's argument, in which poor countries must pass through the same kind of industrial development that characterized the imperial metropoles in the twentieth century. In fact, it is possible for poor regions to skip over some parts of the earlier history of industrialization entirely. Hence we see countries skipping the buildout of land line telephones in favor of cellular, and the same may happen with [distributed solar power generation](http://gigaom.com/cleantech/why-power-generation-will-mirror-cell-phones-in-developing-nations/).

Thus, while the specific criticisms Gourevitch makes (on Palestinian bicycle generators and the California energy crisis) are mostly on target, he is too quick to dismiss "federated, small-scale self-sufficient production communities" entirely. As Ajl notes, a red-green vision may reject retreating into some pre-industrial past, but it is also about something more than just generalizing current rich country ways of life to the whole world.

I'm jumping into all this because it connects to my [last post](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/10/the-3-d-printed-future-and-its-enemies/) on 3-D printers and related small-scale fabrication technologies.* One of the appealing things about these technologies is that, as Juliet Schor notes in [this post](http://www.julietschor.org/2010/08/new-work-centers-and-htsp/), they have the potential to make high-productivity but small scale production much more viable. This implies that an increasingly productive economy need not be identical with an increasingly centralized and hierarchical one. Which is not to say that big and complex infrastructural systems can be done away with entirely, only that they can be a less important part of our material culture. It may turn out that the industrial age was actually the apex of economic "bigness", and that the post-industrial future will be both more decentralized and richer, a manifestation of what Ursula Leguin [calls](http://www.sfsite.com/03a/ul123.htm) a "genuinely mature society" that employs advanced technology but has transcended the capitalist imperative to constantly grow and expand.

This would be very fortunate, and not only for reasons of ecological sustainability. Ashwin Parameswaran, in his many posts at [Macroeconomic Resilience](http://www.macroresilience.com/), has discussed the way in which contemporary capitalism is the endpoint of the high-modernist "control revolution". In [his view](http://www.macroresilience.com/2012/02/21/the-control-revolution-and-its-discontents-the-uncanny-valley/), post-Fordism is merely a completion of the Fordist project of "systematising each element of the industrial process", and "introducing order and legibility into a fundamentally opaque environment via a process that reduces human involvement and discretion by replacing intuitive judgments with rules and algorithms." The attempt to stabilize the incredibly complex systems of a modern macro-economy then leads, he says, to a situation in which the rules and feedback loops are so complex that they render "the system fundamentally illegible to the human operator". According to this analysis, our current version of "too big to fail" crony capitalism actually has much in common with the Soviet project, which ultimately failed "due to its too successful adherence and implementation of the high-modernist ideal."

In recent times, decentralization of the economy has been rhetorically associated with the libertarian right (even if, as Parameswaran argues, their project was actually a continuation of the control revolution). There is no reason, however, for the Left to respond by fetishizing bigness, which would be no better an answer than the the fetish for smallness that afflicts some of the environmentalists Gourevitch criticizes.

* *As an aside, I should clarify that some of what I discussed in that post was speculative, and not meant to describe the current state of these technologies. In particular, I'm well aware that it's not possible to manufacture anthrax (or, to be scientifically precise, the Bacillus anthracis bacterium) in one's home. But there's no reason to believe such things won't eventually be possible.*

Lately, it seems like everyone is [talking about 3-D printers](http://www.wired.com/design/2012/09/how-makerbots-replicator2-will-launch-era-of-desktop-manufacturing/all/). Until recently, these devices have been seen either as novelties or as expensive pieces of equipment suited only for industrial use. Now, however, they are quickly becoming affordable to individuals, and capable of producing a wider range of practical items. Just as the computer became a vector for pervasive file-sharing as soon as cheap PCs and internet connections were widespread, we may soon find ourselves living in a world where cheap 3-D printers allow the dissemination of designs for physical objects through the Internet.

The line between science fiction and reality is moving rapidly. Scroll through [these links](http://boingboing.net/tag/3d-printing) at BoingBoing and you'll see 3-D printers churning out everything from guitars to dolls to keys to a prosthetic beak for a bald eagle.

Ensconced in the home, the 3-D printer is a [step toward](http://store.makerbot.com/replicator-404.html) the [replicator](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicator_(Star_Trek)): a machine that can instantly produce any object with no input of human labor. Technologies like this are central to the vision of a post-scarcity society that I outlined in ["Four Futures"](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/). It's a future that could be glorious or terrible, depending on the outcome of the coming political struggles over the adoption of these new technologies. As the title of a [report](http://www.publicknowledge.org/it-will-be-awesome-if-they-dont-screw-it-up) from Public Knowledge puts it, "It will be awesome if they don't screw it up."

Battles over 3-D printing will be fought on two fronts, and two mechanisms of power are likely to be mobilized by the rentier elites who are threatened by these technologies: intellectual property law and the war on terror.

***

I wrote earlier this year (at [Jacobin](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/01/the-google-vanguard/), the [New Inquiry](http://thenewinquiry.com/essays/phantom-tollbooths/), and [Al Jazeera](http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/03/20123121415465844.html)), about the fight over laws like the Stop Online Piracy Act, which would have given the state broad and ambiguous powers to monitor and persecute alleged copyright infringers. The intellectual property lobby is currently in retreat on this front, but the general problem of intellectual property stifling progress has not abated. Aaron Swartz, who was the victim of one of the [more ludicrous](http://jacobinmag.com/2011/07/artificial-scarcity-watch-jstor-edition/) recent piracy busts, is still facing [multiple felony counts](http://crookedtimber.org/2012/09/19/new-charges-against-aaron-swartz/). Apple and Google, meanwhile, now spend [more money on patent purchases and lawsuits](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/08/technology/patent-wars-among-tech-giants-can-stifle-competition.html) than they do on research and development. And the next front in the war over IP is likely to [center on 3-D printing](http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/26/the-next-battle-for-internet-freedom-could-be-over-3d-printing/).

Like the computer, the 3-D printer is a tool that can rapidly dis-intermediate a production process. Computers allowed people to turn a downloaded digital file into music or movies playing in their home, without the intermediary steps of manufacturing CDs or DVDs and distributing them to record stores. Likewise, a 3-D printer could allow you to turn a digital blueprint (such as a CAD file) into an object, without the intermediate step of manufacturing the object in a factory and shipping it to a store or warehouse. While 3-D printers aren't going to suddenly make all of large-scale industrial capitalism obsolete, they will surely have some very disruptive effects.

The people who were affected by the previous stage of the file-sharing explosion were cultural producers (like musicians) who create new works, and the middlemen (like record companies) who made money selling physical copies of those works. These two groups have interests that are aligned at first, but are ultimately quite different. Creators find their traditional sources of income undermined, and thus face the choice of allying with the middlemen to shore up the existing regime, or else attempting to forge alternative ways of paying the people who create culture and information. But while the creators remain necessary, a lot of the middlemen are being made functionally obsolete. Their only hope is to maintain artificial monopolies through the draconian enforcement of intellectual property, and to win public support by presenting themselves as the defenders of deserving artists and creators.

This same dynamic will arise with 3D printing. Now, however, it is industrial designers who will be cast into the role of the artists and writers, while certain industrial manufacturers will be threatened with death by dis-intermediation. Designers will still be needed to create the patterns that are then fed into 3D printers, while the factories will be superfluous. Imagine a world in which you could download the blueprints for an iPhone 5, and print one out at home. Suddenly, Foxconn and the Apple Store are out of the picture---the only indispensable part of the Apple infrastructure is industrial designers like [Jonny Ive](http://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/online/jonathan-ive-on-apple/jonathan-ives-biography), who are responsible for the putting together the sleek and attractive design of the device. The Public Knowledge report cited above predicts that "as 3D printing makes it possible to recreate physical objects, manufacturers and designers of such objects will increasingly demand 'copyright' protection for their functional objects."

In the last issue of *Jacobin*, Colin McSwiggen [admonished designers](http://jacobinmag.com/2012/08/designing-culture/) to pay attention to the fact that they "make alienated labor possible". The idea of "design" as separate from production is tied to the rise of large scale capitalist manufacturing, when skilled craftspeople were replaced with factory workers repetitively churning out copies from an original pattern. But the order McSwiggen critiques is one which will be undermined by the dissemination of micro-fabrication technology.

3-D printing isn't going to restore the old craft order, in which design and production are united in a single individual or workshop. What it will do instead is make some designers more like musicians, struggling to figure out how to react to consumers who are trading, remixing, and printing their creations all over the place. At the same time, it will blur the line between creation, production, and consumption, as amateurs delve into creating and repurposing design. Like musicians, professional designers will have to decide whether to [scold their customers](http://www.spinner.com/2012/06/19/cracker-david-lowery-npr-illegal-downloading/) and join industrial interests in fighting for strong copyright protections on designs, or whether to look for [new ways of getting paid](http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/the-artistic-freedom-voucher-internet-age-alternative-to-copyrights/) and new ways of connecting with their fans.

***

The dark side of being able to print any physical object is that other people can print any physical object. It's all well and good when people are just making clothes or auto parts, but recently there have been stories about more unsettling possibilities, like 3-D printed guns. The first of these was ultimately [over-hyped](http://www.zdnet.com/no-you-cant-download-a-gun-from-the-internet-7000002108/), but did show that the day was at least approaching when home-printed firearms would be a reality. Then, there came a story about a 3-D printer company [revoking its lease and demanding its device back](http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/10/3d-gun-blocked/) after it got wind of a collective that intended to make and test a 3-D printed weapon.

This story is significant because it indicates a line of attack that will be used to restrict access to 3-D printing technologies in general. I have no particular love for the gun-enthusiast crowd. Those leftists who think access to guns is somehow useful to revolutionaries are living in the past and underestimate the physical power of the modern state, and having your own gun is more likely to lead to you getting shot with it than anything else. But guns, and other dangerous objects, will surely be used as the pretext for a much wider crackdown on the free circulation of designs and 3-D printing technology.

When the copyright cartels were still only trying to control the circulation of immaterial goods like music and software, they faced the problem that it was hard to convince people that file sharing was really hurting anyone. Notwithstanding a few lame attempts to [link piracy to terrorism](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080328/122324685.shtml), the best they could do was point to the potential loss of income for some artists, and the possibility that there would be less creative work at some point in the future. These same arguments will no doubt be rolled out again, but they will be much more powerful when linked to fearmongering about DIY-printed machine guns and anthrax.

This is where the [intensification of the surveillance state](http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1680390), throughout the Bush and Obama administrations and under the rubric of the "war on terror", becomes important. The post-9/11 security state has gradually rendered itself permanent and disconnected itself from its original justification. We will be told that our purchases and downloads must all be monitored in order to prevent evildoers from printing arsenals in their living rooms, and it will just so happen that this same authoritarian apparatus will be used to enforce copyright claims as well. Meanwhile, the military will of course proceed to use the new technologies to [facilitate their pointless wars](http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/10/printers/). Readers who are interested in a preview of this dystopia of outlaw fabricators trying to outrun the police are referred to Charles Stross's novel, [*Rule 34*](http://www.amazon.com/Rule-34-Charles-Stross/dp/B004Y3I6XW/charlieswebsi-20).

There really *are* dangers in the strange new world of 3-D printing. I'm as uneasy as anyone would be about unbalanced loners printing anthrax in their bedrooms. But we have seen all too well that the repressive state apparatus that promises to keep us safe from terror mostly manages to [roll up a bunch of inept patsies](http://www.propublica.org/article/fact-check-how-the-nypd-overstated-its-counterterrorism-record) while remaining unable or unwilling to stop a [deranged massacre](http://www.salon.com/2012/10/01/aurora_survivor_stars_in_gun_control_ad/) from going down now and then.

Terrorism, like drugs before it, is only a pretext for ratcheting up a repressive apparatus that will be used for other purposes. Today, we are familiar with the statistics [showing that](http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/10/02/what_id_like_to_ask_obama_and_romney) terrorism has killed 32 Americans per year since 9/11, while gun violence has killed 30,000. Soon enough we will be able to add 3-D printers to the list of phantom menaces that are trotted out to justify wiretaps, raids, and indefinite detentions.

***

William Gibson famously said that the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed. In the future, expect the copyright cartels and the national security state to team up to bring you a new announcement: the future is here, but you're not allowed to have it.

*Update, 2 October 2012: Corrected a mistake in the data on the charitable contributions tax deduction. An earlier version referred to the wrong table from the Tax Policy Center.*

The American plutocracy's habit of portraying itself as an oppressed minority has become a source of ongoing amusement, and Chrystia Freeland has the latest chapter of this comedy [in the *New Yorker*](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/08/121008fa_fact_freeland?currentPage=all). She presents a series of quotations and anecdotes that will be barf-inducing to anyone who hasn't had their head pickled in Ayn Rand aphorisms. I particularly enjoyed the guy who compared Barack Obama's treatment of the rich to the oppression of black Americans, and the guy who compared Wall Street supporters of the President to battered wives.

But the most illuminating and distinctive part of the essay is the way it highlights this curious argument about the "self-taxation" of the rich:

> __Many billionaires have come to view charity as privatized taxation, paid at a level they determine, and to organizations they choose. "All things being equal, you’d rather have control of the money than the government," Cooperman said.__ “Even if you’re giving it away, you’d rather give it away the way you want to give it away rather than the way the government gives it away." Cooperman and his wife focus their giving on Jewish issues, education, and their local community in New Jersey, and he is also setting up a foundation that will allow his children and grandchildren to support their own chosen causes after he dies.

> Foster Friess, a retired mutual-fund investor from Wyoming who was the backer of the main Super pac supporting the Republican primary candidate Rick Santorum, expounded on this view in a video interview in February. __"People don’t realize how wealthy people self-tax," he said. "If you have a certain cause, an art museum or a symphony, and you want to support it, it would be nice if you had the choice."__

It would, indeed, be nice if you had the choice. Obviously charitable donation is only equivalent to tax-funded government spending if you are indifferent to democratic accountability. So it's not surprising to hear this kind of rhetoric out of the ultra-rich, who tend to be committed to an [ideology of meritocracy](http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=613) that is fundamentally hostile to democracy. The less cautious apologists, like [Bryan Caplan](http://www.cato-unbound.org/2006/11/06/bryan-caplan/the-myth-of-the-rational-voter/), will straightforwardly propose "relying less on democracy and more on private choice and free markets." Left unsaid is that "choice" in the private market consists mostly of the [choices of the people with the most money](http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/04/hoisted-from-the-archives-a-non-socratic-dialogue-on-social-welfare-functions.html).

This is why a class compromise over the welfare state is so elusive. It doesn't matter whether the rich agree that they benefited from their society in the "you didn't build that" sense, nor does it matter whether higher taxes on the rich and more spending on social programs and jobs will ultimately promote more economic growth. This is about *power*. Even those who piously declare their desire to "give back" to society insist on doing so only on their own terms.

Traditionally, the socialist movement has emphasized the need to subject the investment decisions of capitalists to democratic accountability, but it's just as important to talk about democratic control over social welfare spending. The choice we face is not really whether there will be a social safety net, the struggle is over whether we will have a democratic welfare state or a kind of private welfare state run according to the whims of rich philanthropists. The latter, even in the improbable event that it could replace public spending in terms of overall dollars, would be both undesirable as a matter of democratic principle, and a lot less likely to consist of the kind of universal, unconditional income support that is most [consistent with individual freedom](http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/03/against-means-testing/).

A more specific policy point about this issue of "self-taxing" is that it highlights what an obscenity the tax deduction for charitable donations is. The Joint Committee On Taxation [reports](https://www.jct.gov/publications.html?func=startdown&id=4386) that this deduction (including both individual and corporate donations) cost the federal government $41.3 billion in 2012, and the cost is projected to rise to $54.7 billion by 2015. Data from the Tax Policy Center [shows](http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/numbers/displayatab.cfm?DocID=3135&topic2ID=60&topic3ID=95&DocTypeID=2) that over 95 percent of this benefit goes to the to 40 percent of the income distribution, and over a third of it goes to the top 1 percent. This data also shows that repealing the deduction would be equivalent to a 0.5 percent tax rate increase on the top 20 percent, and a 1 percent rate hike on the ultra-rich top 0.1 percent.

It's bad enough that this deduction encourages the transfer of social welfare functions from the state to the unaccountable non-profit sector. But a lot of "charitable" spending is of questionable social value anyway. Leon Cooperman, described in Friedland's article as the "pope" of the whiny billionaire movement, recently gave $25 million to the Columbia Business School, which means that the government is subsidizing his efforts to help the reproduction of the capitalist managerial class. The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, one of the largest charitable foundations in the country, is a [major promoter](http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/investigations/corporateaccountability/1580/selling_schools_out/) of the neoliberal "education reform" movement that played a major role in the battle between Rahm Emanuel and the Chicago Teachers Union. And large chunks of charitable donations (including Mitt Romney's) go to churches, which are more important as conservative ideological and political actors than they
are as sources of aid.

Leon Cooperman is both a signatory to the Warren Buffett/Bill Gates "Giving Pledge", which commits him to giving the majority of his assets to philanthropic causes, and a passionate supporter of Mitt Romney. There is no contradiction there. Cooperman and Romney are both committed to the same principle: there's nothing wrong with helping the needy, as long as only rich people have the right to decide when, whether, and how it gets done.

You can look at people like Gates and Cooperman as the alternative to the decaying, narrowly rapacious capitalist class I described in [this post](http://www.peterfrase.com/2011/08/the-decay-of-the-capitalist-class/). They aren't altruists or class traitors, they're just demonstrating their enlightened self interest as a ruling class, and a recognition that they need to dedicate some resources to collective projects that help perpetuate the society they dominate. But they're still the class enemy, and they'll remind you of that as soon as their power is seriously threatened.