Libertarian Social Democrat

A.D. Freudenheim, The Editor

This recent political cartoon is a nutshell description of how and why I find myself drawn towards two conflicting approaches to government and governance these days. The Democratic and Republican parties are corrupt, cynical, and out of touch in equal measure, and it seems increasingly clear to me that this pathetic gridlock is unlikely to change for the better in the 2010 or even 2012 elections. The parties are too entrenched, the politicians too self-serving, and problems too vast. Here, then, are my two opposing perspectives on what must be done.

“Option A”: I call this approach the “Double-down on Obama, and embrace the hardcore, European-style Social Democrat approach of which the president’s critics are so afraid.” To anyone willing to listen, I am happy complain about the impact of current tax law on my household finances—not to mention the lack of affordable health insurance, the challenge of finding good public (i.e., free) schools in New York City, or the likelihood that Social Security will not be solvent should I ever need it. Nonetheless, I cannot help but wonder whether our society would be better off if we imposed the type of pervasive, all-encompassing “Nordic model” tax regime common in places like Denmark or Sweden. There, national income tax rates are upwards of 32% across the board, and there is a significant Value Added Tax on most purchases, a tax that typically rises for luxury goods. This hefty source of government revenue makes possible a generous network of social services, while also providing a slight leveling-out of wealth: the super-rich are slightly less so, while the poor can lead more stable lives with better government support where needed.

It isn't that I have a great need for more taxes, but the neither-here-nor-there nature of the current US tax plan is not working. The US Treasury, along with state government taxes, brings in enough revenue to sustain programs like Medicare and Social Security in the very near term—while much else has to be paid for with debt that will come due later. This tax revenue will diminish as Baby Boomers retire and government expenditures go up, making our future choices about programs and services even more complicated, and the population available to pay for them more diminished. As much as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are a drain on our resources, this situation—the demographic shift and its associated costs—existed before we went to war.

It is this absurd scenario that leads me to ponder the possibilities of giving the government 20% more money, in order to get better services out to a wider portion of the population while investing in and stabilizing some of the long-term programs that might otherwise run out of funding. Hell, witness Glenn Beck extolling the virtues of his local (taxpayer-subsidized) public library, and you can see all over again what could be accomplished with even more resources for these and other programs.

Not to mention that the more I have to listen to the self-serving, completely absurd Republican rationales for why national health care is effectively subsidizing the sick at the cost of the healthy, the more I think the “Nordic model”—heck, even the British model—is appealing. After all, this cross-subsidizing of resources and needs is one of the foundation stones of modern, Western civilization: taxpayers pay for police and fire services, even if most people never have their homes burgled or catch fire. Taxpayers pay for roads throughout their community, city, or state, even if the roads they drive on 90% of the time are the same 25 miles from home to school to work and back again. It takes a lunatic (like Glenn Beck) to think that eliminating (let’s say) the federal government, or even just federal income tax, would change this dynamic for the better. It would not diminish our needs, only the resources to address them.

And yet... there is my “Option B”: This one is summarized as “Learn from the Tea Baggers and the Libertarians—not to mention the founders of our nation, who revolted against an oppressive, self-serving regime.” Putting the terrorism-endorsing elements of the Tea Baggers, faux-Tea Baggers, and their GOP friends aside, it seems fairly clear that our governments actually are failing. From New York in the east to California in the west, the mixture of budget deficits, political gridlock, corruption, and pre-determined spending needs are making effective representative government harder and harder to find. (I know: Indiana is in great shape. Sorta.)

The thing is that the federal, state, and even New York City taxes I pay take a significant portion of my income—while the scope and quality of the services I receive in return continue to diminish, and the additional costs grow, too. At the same time, the sectors in which the federal government has been extremely focused for the last two years—such as banking and global finance—have become even more adept at taking advantage of a taxpayer-funded opportunity to soak the poor and middle-classes in favor of the already rich. Locally, one starts to wonder why Mayor Bloomberg’s city government can find the wherewithal to condemn private property in favor of billionaire developers when there are more basic needs left undone and while so many of the goals outlined in Bloomberg's PlaNYC remain unaccomplished. And meanwhile the optimistic, principled, values-driven “Yes, we can” president we elected seems to be either overwhelmed by actually having to govern or overwhelmed by the scope of the problems left him by the corrupt, sadistic, and politically twisted administration of Bush and Cheney. Heck, you know things are in bad shape when the ACLU is offering up a comparison between Obama and Bush!

No matter how noble the intentions or potentially good the outcomes of any new government initiative, skepticism and cynicism are easy to come by. Just look, for instance, at the convoluted health care bills that have passed both chambers of Congress: it’s easy to say that not every plan for reform is a good one—based on the impact of these two proposals in terms of taxes, costs, and access to medical care. Perhaps more government involvement in health care is not the benefit for which many of us were hoping, relative to a desire for lowered insurance premiums. Yet simple initiatives like the one proposed by Representative Alan Grayson, to allow people to buy into Medicare directly, probably have little hope of success.

Power corrupts, and government offices seem to fuel this even more than the power that comes from wealth and prestige. Given that, it seems like the the best way to tackle our present problems is not through greater and more vigorous government engagement. Instead, we need vigorous government disengagement—a winnowing and pulling back, especially at the Federal level—combined with a steep reduction in our Federal tax burden.

Ultimately, this should be combined with a series of national “conversations” about some of the key issues we face as a nation and state by state. From guns to, well, health care, we don’t know what we want. Our politicians, and the parties that support them, are too scared to help—too scared to move away from the ease of lobbyist-driven corruption, lest they make an unpopular move and wind up out of office and out of power. The platform of domestic policy goals I outlined in August 2007 remains as relevant now as it was then. The question is: who is going to help us get there—or when and how will we help ourselves?

LinkedIn & Other Failures

A.D. Freudenheim, The Editor

Let me be bold: we are hiring. How’s that for an opening declaration amidst a sometimes gloomy, recession-bound America?

Yet we plan only to hire the best, most qualified people. This statement, ordinarily unnecessary, is apparently demanded by the present circumstances, particularly the weak comprehension of the job application process amongst those currently seeking employment. Here is a brief catalog of some recent failures by applicants:

• A consistent mis-attribution of my gender. “Dear Ms. Freudenheim” is not offensive, merely wrong. Among applicants who bothered to use such a formal salutation, 95% missed this one. Oops. To be clear: the issue is not my taking offense, but rather that it indicates you have not spent much time with the firm’s website or my bio.

• In our casual day and age, many people skipped a formal salutation altogether, going with a simple “Dear Hiring Manager.” Well, fine … but not really.

• Many applicants noted talents with social networking systems like Facebook and Twitter: it was rather faddishly mentioned in many cover letters, in addition to being listed as a “skill” on resumes. This is like saying you know how to use a fax machine. Time to point out the obvious: these systems are tools, means to conveying a message but not capable of developing the message itself. From a communications perspective, if there is a skill here, it will be in knowing what to say and when. (Back in 2003, I noted some other fake “skills” people listed.)

• If you want to address your “core skills”—whatever they are—it is better if you emphasize those that are most relevant to a particular job. Recent applicants have highlighted skills as a LAN administrator, an ad buyer, an “M&A” specialist, and a certified mortician (yes, really). Of those four, only one is even close to relevant.

• Words like “proven” or phrases “demonstrated success” are instant red flags. We want people who know what it means to be successful, but the applicants who toss these words around usually aren’t. One applicant—with not a single full-time job experience to her credit—noted that she is “comfortable in a leadership role.” Listen up: if you're just a few years out of college, have accomplished a few internships and your first full-time job, then writing of a “proven track record” (or some such nonsense) is a signal ... and not a good one.

In all of this, however, I want to vent some particular frustration at LinkedIn.com. If you’re not familiar with it, LinkedIn describes itself as “an interconnected network of experienced professionals from around the world, representing 170 industries and 200 countries. You can find, be introduced to, and collaborate with qualified professionals that you need to work with to accomplish your goals.” For more information about the site and its goals, you can also read this recent feature piece from The Wall Street Journal.

In an effort to broaden the pool of candidates from which we typically draw, we posted our job listing to LinkedIn, along with our other, regular sources. The job listing at LinkedIn makes clear that we are looking for people whose background and skills combines both communications (public relations) and the arts. This is not a whimsical combination drawn up for the amusement of job seekers—it is essential to our business, which is communications in the arts.

Yet a paltry 5% of applicants managed to mention both sets of qualifications in their cover letters; an even smaller 2% have resumes that actually reflect this combination of work experiences. Why are the other 98% wasting their time and mine? A friend suggested that I should be happy: this self-winnowing pool of candidates makes it easier to focus on the relevant folks. That’s true—but it would be nice to have a broader pool of relevant folks on whom to lavish some attention and possibly to hire!

For any job listings site, including LinkedIn’s own, the software is only as good as the humans who develop it. So here’s an idea: let employers put in a list of keywords—kept hidden from job-seekers—without some combination of which applications will not be forwarded. This process could be weighted, so that two words in a cover note might count as one word listed in someone’s resume, reflecting a ranking of interest versus experience. This would screen out the people who use the ease of push-button application processes to dump resumes on employers who will never hire them (like the paralegals or accountants who have no skills or interests that match our needs), and prioritize the “account executive’ who mentions the arts over the one who does not. Applicants might learn something too: if not every application is even accepted for review, they might have to start paying closer attention to the jobs in which they are interested.

Sadly, most of what I have written here is not new: see previous postings from 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, and 2002. It isn’t as if I have made a secret of the failures of past applicants, in order to aid future ones. To little effect, it seems.

On the Reality of God

A.D. Freudenheim, The Editor

Initially, I found John Avant's book If God Were Real to be … terrible. A brief catalog of complaints: The language is sometimes repetitive and unsophisticated, and initially the ideas seemed similarly simplistic and unevolved. The introduction to the book—a story about the capacity for love and desire for a father figure in a much-abused little girl—seemed to be there solely to condition the reader, to manipulate emotions in order to preclude rational judgment. The inclusion of a long statement from the author's (adult) daughter, about her experiences as a committed Christian in the New York theater scene, felt naïve.

Then there's the devotion to god—or, more accurately for Reverend Avant, Jesus—that continued to present problems for me. I’m not a Christian, or even a Jew for Jesus; while I respect many of the principles Jesus espoused, I have never been able to get over the intellectual hurdle of the whole “son-of-god-in-man is god who died for our sins” construct. (Yes, yes, I know: it’s about faith.) To be fair, it must also be noted that I am clearly not Avant’s intended audience. This is a book written for Christians, so Avant's repetitive refrain that “we should all love Jesus” is, I can only assume, more appealing to a Christian audience.

***

However, my view of Avant and his book began to change, and rapidly, as I got further in. After the first chapter, Avant writes as a strong, passionate individual with a very definite, out-of-the-mainstream perspective on “organized” religion. He frames very clearly his objections to the contemporary "church" of Christianity: not the religion itself, but the ways in which it is interpreted and applied by the institutions that wave the banner most loudly. (This short poem, by a friend, gets the sentiment just right.) This is where the book is most successful, in aggressively engaging with the way that religious institutions often become more focused on themselves than on the values they espouse. While I will never share his passion for Jesus, I came to respect his faith and his logic.

Avant calls for a new “Jesus Movement,” his preferred term in place of Christianity. He writes: “Can we see a new Jesus Movement in America? Probably not in traditional, institutionalized Christianity as I have described it. It’s too absorbed in guarding its turf and protecting its turf lords. Institutions tend to protect themselves at all costs, and I see no sign that the institution of Christianity will move toward Jesus.” (Page 54)

This is the meat of Avant's argument. He carefully builds this out, exploring a range of issues, from how modern American Christianity deals with drugs addicts (there’s a chapter titled “If God Were Real … the Church Would Be Full of Addicts”), to the risk-averse nature of churches and communities and a sense of expectation of using religion as a means of achieving prosperity (there’s another chapter, titled “If God Were Real … You Would Be Really, Really Rich”). (For more on the concept of the prosperity gospel, see these two articles from the December 2009 issue of The Atlantic.) His section on the absurdity of Christian attacks on J.K. Rowling and the Harry Potter series is sharp and insightful.

All this reminded me of my own feelings about much of contemporary (American) Judaism, where the importance of institutions—and institutionalized beliefs and perspectives—sometimes feels like it has overtaken the importance of the values at the heart of Judaism. Everything from the “Yom Kippur appeal” fundraising tactic to the American Jewish fetishization of Israel is driven as much by a commitment to the status quo as anything else. Rare is the organization (religious or otherwise, to be sure) that boldly embraces downsizing in the face of diminished resources or audiences. Instead, external problems are blamed, and used as foils to generate support. (Surely it isn’t simply that some young Jews find modern Judaism less-than-compelling, perhaps because of the relentless focus on the trifecta of the Holocaust, Israel, and intermarriage to which we have been treated for the last five decades.)

***

Now, like the rest of us, Avant is not free from certain contradictions. He criticizes organized Christianity’s focus on political hatred as a distraction from Jesus’s call to love everyone … and then makes some rather strong statements against homosexuality and gay marriage. Oh, well.

But, as someone famous once said, let (s)he who is without sin cast the first stone. Overall, Avant has written a strong book, one worth reading for contemporary Christians or others interested in the role and ongoing development of the largest religious denomination in the United States. Avant even includes a section on atheism towards the end of the book—a book littered with quotes from atheist or questioning friends and commentators—that again represents the value of an open mind, and is evidence if needed that a believing individual can co-exist with a non-believing one, without necessarily feeling threatened. The subtitle is “A Journey into a Faith That Matters” and it’s Avant's ongoing journey. I wish him well.

FCC idiotic disclosure notice: I received a free copy of this book from the publisher, via LibraryThing, as part of its Early Reviewers program.

Inculcate, Not Indoctrinate

A.D. Freudenheim, The Editor

Here's one possible definition of parenting: a process of imparting knowledge and values, from parent to child, culminating in a point of departure from which the child will make decisions for his/herself—hopefully informed by what the parents have taught, but with a folding in of the child’s own experiences. I think my parents approached parenting this way. And although I certainly couldn’t have articulated it as clearly before becoming a parent myself, it is generally the process I try to follow, too.

A few weeks ago, sitting in children's services at synagogue with my daughter, all of this flew at me in a completely different way. I was watching my child learn (and mimic) the behaviors of others, learn the songs and memorize the prayers, and—yearningly—try to grasp the concept of being Jewish. She sat in front of me in a navy blue dress and her “synagogue shoes,” legs crossed on the floor, following along with the flow of the service, and eagerly awaiting the chance to go up front at the end of the "grown-up" services to join other kids in singing Adon Olam.

It made me acutely aware of the fine line that exists between inculcating and indoctrinating, and how easy it must be to cross that line.

***

I come by my Jewishness honestly, and where Jewish education was concerned, my parents (particularly my father) followed the same model as with most other things. As a result, my level of observance has evolved and changed over the years, from a foundation established long ago. Adulthood, marriage, children—all play a part in this ongoing process, and I think this is all to the good. Indeed, I cannot imagine having a genuinely static set of beliefs or observances (in religion or much else) because that would inhibit true intellect from playing the appropriate role in my life. I believe firmly in the importance of doubt, and doubt often leads to change.

I want similar things for my children as my parents surely want(ed) for me. I want them to find their place in the world, to contribute meaningfully, to be “good citizens,” and to see happiness as something to be pursued (not as a right to instant gratification). I also want them to know and love Judaism, as I do. I want them to learn from it, to find meaning in its traditions and guidance from its values and teachings, and to engage with it as a framework for helping their growth into intelligent and insightful people.

***

Which brings me back to that scene in services with my daughter, and the distinction between teaching and indoctrinating. With inculcating comes an acceptance that the outcome cannot be controlled—but to my mind, this makes it more likely that the outcomes will be better and more evenly and effectively distributed. I am fairly sure my parents do not approve of every decision I have ever made, but hopefully even those decisions they did not understand were acceptable because they were mine.

Indoctrination, on the other hand, may achieve the near-term desired result—obedience to a particular cause or way of life—but it will make any divergence of views a schism rather than a mere difference of opinion. Nor is this an issue limited to religion, formally defined: almost any set of opinions or values can acquire the characteristics of religious doctrine, and the heavy handedness that “doctrine” implies.

No question, I am aiming to teach, and not just in religious matters; watching my daughter, I hope I am pursuing all this properly. She’s still young; there are many questions to come, far more than she is capable of asking now, at 2.5 years of age. But it is easy to see—and terrifyingly easy to understand—how some communities and societies have functioned over the years, replacing inculcation with indoctrination, and not to anyone’s betterment, individually or collectively. That’s not why I take her to services. I want her to learn, to question, to think, to embrace and to reject. To love, to live righteously but not self-righteously, and to let others live, too. That’s what I’m aiming to teach, and hopefully that’s the path we are on.

Healthy Guns

A.D. Freudenheim, The Editor

In September, a Federal court in New Mexico ruled that the police search of a man carrying an unconcealed (holstered) gun into a movie theater was illegal, a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights under the Constitution. The police search was apparently predicated on a call by the owner of the theater, after seeing the man enter; the police searched and then released him, though they made him leave his gun in his car.

I heard about this case through a posting on Reason’s blog (here), which also quoted a news item in the Wisconsin Gun Rights Examiner (here) that said: “The court also found that merely being armed does not automatically make a person armed and dangerous, which would be necessary to justify a limited protective search (Terry stop) that justify officers disarming an individual.”

A few weeks after I saw that item, there was a big story in the New York Times (here) about a young boy—a first-grader—who was suing to overturn his suspension from school for having brought his Boy Scout-approved camping utensil (combination fork, spoon, and knife) to school. The boy violated a school district rule that prohibits dangerous weapons, for which the knife portion of the tool apparently qualifies.

In the latter case, the school administrator in the case had been steadfast in saying he is only applying the rules, equally and without discrimination. In the former case, the man in New Mexico was free to carry his gun because there is no state law prohibiting the carrying of an unconcealed firearm nor, it seems, did this particular theater have its own sign prohibiting guns.

Then there are the people who brought guns to various events with President Barack Obama over the summer, from handguns to assault weapons. Also armed but presumed not dangerous, despite the fact that their very appearance at Obama’s rallies was anger-induced. Of course, what might be anger-inducing here is the heavy irony of the Obama administration permitting gun-toting protesters … following eight years of a Bush administration that sought to squash and make invisible all protesting. Never mind the inconceivability of the Bush-era Secret Service ever having allowed gun-toting citizens within a mile of a rally for the president or his vice president!

And here is where it once again all converges for me: as a nation and a society we have completely failed to sort through and address what you might call “first principles” on the issue of whether anyone can be legally “armed,” and if so, with what weapons and for what purpose.

Yes, we have the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1789, and which proposes to give citizens the rights to “bear arms.” Even accepting the traditional, NRA-style interpretation of that Amendment, we must acknowledge that it dates to 1789. And we must therefore remind ourselves of the many other elements of the Constitution that have changed or been reinterpreted in the two centuries since, to adapt to new situations and understandings, as the world has changed. The idea that the Second Amendment is sacrosanct, untouchable, and not open to (re)interpretation is absurd.

While people are (in some states) allowed to bring their guns wherever they go, without significant oversight, weapons training, or lessons in good citizenship … other states, and often the same ones, have absurdist rules religiously obeyed that would suspend a kid from school for an “offense” that is itself so offensive as to be lacking in logic. He’s a 6 year old: why not have the teacher take the pen knife away for a day and give it back to him when he goes home? Heck, it is probably a lot easier to disarm a 6 year old than it is an adult with a strong psycho-emotional attachment to his hip-holstered Glock.

All of these things just remind me of the grander failure of our political and legal structures in the face of broad societal changes. At every level, our politicians—our new, Messianic president included—are too much in the thrall of people whose bought-and-paid-for views take precedence over a more fundamental understanding of the value of their citizenship, or the needs and rights of the rest of us, as individuals and members of different communities.

Back in March, I wrote about another tragic gun violence situation as representative of the degree to which our society’s approach to this and related problems is out of whack. The premise, and the problem, remains the same: our police and other law enforcement officers can only address the symptoms of such illnesses. They do not have the right to address the underlying causes. That responsibility belongs to us, the citizenry.

What we need is, in effect, another Constitutional convention. We need an opportunity to evaluate and address some of the broad thematic changes in our society over the last few centuries, and then develop a new set of principles—carefully evolved from our current Constitution—that help shape the direction of this country for another 220 years. From guns to nationwide healthcare to “net neutrality,” our communities and our country look radically different than they did several centuries ago. Attempting to “fix” many of our problems without first agreeing to the principles that should guide us will, instead, only lead us further astray. Don’t believe me? Just ask yourself whether you think a “public option” in health insurance is a good idea or not, then check with your neighbor, and then read the news.

We are boxed in, trapped, for a cage match we didn’t anticipate or ask for—and a good portion of the population will be coming to this fight armed and, quite possibly, dangerous. Be sure to bring your combination camping utensil.