Slavery is the Next Neat Idea (and other outrages)

Republican Department of Neat Ideas (via Mike Huckabee): slavery for non-violent offenders

Here's how deals are done on the money minded Right. You use the Party office to run a loansharking business and loot a charity to cover expenses. When there's trouble, declare bankruptcy. Pocket consulting fee. This actually happened in the GOP offices in Nevada.

"We didn't have a spending problem. We had a revenue problem,” said Scott Walker's campaign manager. This is how the failed Walker campaign brushes off their $1 million deficit. The point being this: if you spend people’s money on Scott Walker it’s well spent. If you spend taxpayer dollars on public needs it’s money wasted.

Another example of the Republican “Not My Responsibility” mindset: whenever possible let’s give the wealthy and corporations the option to avoid supporting public needs. NPR reports on a "neat" Oklahoma law that allows companies to leave workers high and dry.

For them, owning the company is what funds their workers’ comp. The only worker they want to compensate is the one at the top. Everything spent on other people is either waste or theft.

For the guys at the top “efficiency” becomes a question of “Who can we do without?” “Who can we get rid of?” The CEO himself is essential, of course, but everyone else is expendable.

When this kind of thinking migrates from the top of corporations into the top of government, what does it begin to remind you of? Which countries have systematically planned how to get rid of groups of people they didn’t want or didn’t like?

Don’t immediately say Germany in the Thirties. That’s easy. The same nasty thinking has been rampant in this country too. One loud voice in favor of selective extermination is now the favorite philosopher of the Republican Party: Ayn Rand.

When the thinking gets this toxic people want to step away from it. So you’d think.

But the migration of the GOP from levelheaded mainstream practical thinking to nutty extremist hate mongering insanity has been so gradual that a lot of people you thought are sane are still party to it. They’re the ones trying to explain away the ugly statements and proposals as isolated gaffes not representative of the broader party. David Brooks, the soft-voiced overly-polite columnist for the NYTimes is one of these, but even he is expressing disgust. Not so much with the hateful policies, though. It’s the dysfunction he finds embarrassing. Forgodssake, if you’re going to be a bigoted extremist party at least be an efficient and competent one! Think German engineering.

Here's an analysis of Brooks' fed up rant.

The problem is, David Brooks has been ushering the GOP down this road for decades. Explaining away the nuttiness, smoothing out the ugly policies, rationalizing the outright unAmericanness of the whole selfishness creed. He’s shocked, SHOCKED, to find the Republican Party––whose dysfunction and extremism he’s been doing PR for all this time––has become a dysfunctional and extremist party. Typically Republican. His response to any problem is threefold: Not my job. Not my responsibility. Not my fault.

David Brooks, the Explainer of the Working Class

Today’s Fun Facts. How deeply unfair has the American system become? Read on.

Libertarianism is an invention of a mischievous corporate cabal. It’s about their liberty not yours. Read and Learn Here.

David Brooks: “Bernie Sanders doesn’t get the working class…” Priceless omniscience from Brooks can be enjoyed here.

And David Brooks understands the working class completely. Like God. Underneath that smooth expensively suited Brooksian facade is a true working man, complete with sweat, weariness, worry about paying the mortgage, fears about some venture capitalist looting his pension, concern about his kids’ lives being poorer than his own. Yeah, Brooks is the working man personified. He knows that the triumph of the working man will only come when he realizes his interests are best served by following instructions. People who work for a living are meant to serve the people who own for a living.

Here ends the Gospel.

Why democracy isn’t working has something to do with the antidemocratic unAmerican concentration of wealth and power. Learn more here.

David Brooks Instructs the Poor On How To Be Better People

THE CHARACTER FACTORY (July 31, 2014) David Brooks


(With useful annotations and explanations of the author’s possible meaning)

Nearly every parent on earth operates on the assumption that character matters a lot to the life outcomes of their children. Nearly every government antipoverty program operates on the assumption that it doesn’t. [Do conservatives really want government to instruct all Americans on the content of their character, or only poor Americans? Are we to assume that poverty springs from failure of character? Do corporations of better character succeed and those of low character fail, or does it have more to do with luck, the way riches and poverty do? Is ruthlessness considered a positive character trait in a poor person? It's certainly essential in a corporation. When taxpayers rescue a company, say via bankruptcy, do they weigh the character of the CEO or the entire board of directors? Do they measure the character of every shareholder? No. We rescue corporations based upon collateral, the same as we rescue rich people. Often it is because that collateral is comprised of employees who didn't cause the company to fail, or the broader economy which might suffer, if the corporation is a bank and is large enough. Brooks hasn't begun well, has he?]

Most Democratic antipoverty programs consist of transferring money, providing jobs or otherwise addressing the material deprivation of the poor. Most Republican antipoverty programs likewise consist of adjusting the economic incentives or regulatory barriers faced by the disadvantaged.

As Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution pointed out recently in National Affairs, both orthodox progressive and conservative approaches treat individuals as if they were abstractions — as if they were part of a species of “hollow man” whose destiny is shaped by economic structures alone, and not by character and behavior. [What Mr. Brooks calls “abstraction” is what policymakers might call lack of prejudice. An attempt to make the grant of benefits less about whether the bureaucrat likes the look of the applicant. Once an applicant for assistance is concrete and no longer abstract, other forms of judgment come in. What we call “discrimination”. Does this sound familiar? Does the applicant look like someone you’d ask to lunch? Did your son play lacrosse with him at Choate? Is he “the sort of person” you’d like to have move in next door? Once the terms become concrete the decision is less about the applicant and more about the person granting the benefits, the person deciding the terms.]

It’s easy to understand why policy makers would skirt the issue of character. Nobody wants to be seen blaming the victim — spreading the calumny that the poor are that way because they don’t love their children enough, or don’t have good values. Furthermore, most sensible people wonder if government can do anything to alter character anyway. [Insert a silent “But…" Here is where Brooks gets credit for saying he won’t say something before he spends the rest of the column saying it.]

The problem is that policies that ignore character and behavior have produced disappointing results. [Disappointing to whom? By whose standards? Disappointing to conservatives who despise welfare programs? Disappointing in the way conservatives enjoy being disappointed? The way they have a habit of being disappointed? And who are the rich to judge the character of the poor? Seems like a lot of the failures of character in recent years have been by rich folks. Do we give Social Security benefits based upon “character”? No. Medicare? No. Not even corporate welfare programs are based upon character, otherwise corporations who run themselves into the ground might be found wanting. Only programs for the poor require extra tests to see if the recipients are worthy. And the only instances when corporate welfare is said by conservatives to require extra worthiness tests is when the rescue is called for to save the jobs of the employees who were not to blame for the corporate failure.] Social research over the last decade or so has reinforced the point that would have been self-evident in any other era — that if you can’t help people become more resilient, conscientious or prudent, then all the cash transfers in the world will not produce permanent benefits. [Perhaps this research (whose research?) has shown this uniformly discouraging result because by 2004 the U.S. had already degraded a lot of the meaningful and effective instruments of our social welfare system, and beefed up the systems devised to make obtaining welfare a hard job in itself, by creating bars and tests and restrictions, by erecting barriers to discourage the poor from getting help. These systems also shifted critical dollars away from the actual welfare and into the pockets of the functionaries hired to make welfare more difficult to obtain. And it happened at a time when working class incomes were in swift decline and jobs were being shipped overseas where they could be done by children for 50¢ an hour with no benefits and no 40 hour work week. The poor in other countries have more “character” than our own poor, they'll say, which means the poor will work longer and harder for less than America's poor. That's not character. That's inferior status. And fear.]

Walter Mischel’s famous marshmallow experiment demonstrated that delayed gratification skills learned by age 4 produce important benefits into adulthood. [Or maybe the children who failed were simply more hungry than the ones who succeeded? Mightn't this delayed gratification training be better applied to the preschoolers who will one day be corporate executives? Wouldn't you say that the impulsive self-centeredness and impatient greed of the 1% does more harm than the undisguised hunger of preschoolers? If delayed gratification signifies superior character, wouldn't 450 years of delayed gratification mean that descendents of slaves have a lot to teach the rest of us?] Carol Dweck’s work has shown that people who have a growth mind-set — who believe their basic qualities can be developed through hard work — do better than people who believe their basic talents are fixed and innate. [True. But is this a greater deficiency among the poor? Is it a fair calculus to apply to persons of innately limited ability, who also tend to wind up poor? Conservatives hate the “everyone is special” philosophy taught during the '70s, but they seem to think everyone is equally able. True? Or not? Should we punish the unlucky? Should we add a “character test” for those who God, in His wisdom, decided to bless with limited abilities?Perhaps this test would be more usefully applied to the scions of the wealthy classes whose lives will float happily on a tax-free pillow of inherited wealth, whatever their innate abilities––if David Brooks can persuade our men and women in Congress to eliminate the inheritance tax.] Angela Duckworth has shown how important grit and perseverance are to lifetime outcomes. [You want to see grit and determination? Spend some time with the horribly underpaid working classes in this country. After a full week working at Walmart or McDonalds and whatever other second job they have, they still have to expend the effort to jump through the foodstamp hurdles and endure the opprobrium of cashiers and fellow shoppers when they use these benefits. Enduring the scorn of others is real endurance. Don't get me started on the long commutes some of the working poor endure every day to get to their jobs, or the thousands taken from each of them via legal systematic wage theft by their employers and creditors.] College students who report that they finish whatever they begin have higher grades than their peers, even ones with higher SATs. Spelling bee contestants who scored significantly higher on grit scores were 41 percent more likely to advance to later rounds than less resilient competitors. [Can I obtain my Grit Score from the Grit Bureau the same way I get my Credit Score? Of course not. It's a fiction. Grit is one of those words that should be reserved for individuals enduring the indignity of menial work, not for the cosseted classes Mr. Brooks is more familiar with.]

Summarizing the research in this area, Reeves estimates that measures of drive and self-control influence academic achievement roughly as much as cognitive skills. [Shall we include the negative effects that persistent systematic discouragement and sense of class inferiority learned from the indignities the poor and persons of color suffer every day? That has a more measurable effect on achievement. Let's not include that, though, because it may skew the reassuring conclusions Mr. Brooks prefers with his breakfast. And I'm sure his is a nutritious hot one, enjoyed with the New York Times, neither of which are as available in many poor working class households. I'll bet the poor hardly ever see a decent half grapefruit between one Christmas and the next, and seldom enjoy the better kinds of granola.] Recent research has also shown that there are very different levels of self-control up and down the income scale. Poorer children grow up with more stress and more disruption, and these disadvantages produce effects on the brain. [Ya think? Amazing how this factoid is relegated to the bottom of one of the middle paragraphs, where the author sorts the things he wants you to dismiss quickly while giving him credit for mentioning them. How fair and honorable of Mr. Brooks. One star for Gryffindor!] Researchers often use dull tests to see who can focus attention and stay on task. Children raised in the top income quintile were two-and-a-half times more likely to score well on these tests than students raised in the bottom quintile. [I'm afraid I scored badly on this paragraph. Can someone untangle the previous sentence?]

But these effects are reversible with the proper experiences. [Like what, par example... Experiences like pony camp? Computer camp? Computer camp followed by ownership of a computer, perhaps even a current model with decent software? We'd be better off sorting the prospects of Mac children vs. the losers who grow up with Windows.]

People who have studied character development through the ages have generally found hectoring lectures don’t help. [This is inserted to correct the idea that David Brooks is hectoring, which he would never do. A poor person would need to have a subscription to the Times to feel hectored. The brilliance of this rhetorical strategy is astonishing. What is the Latin expression for it?] The superficial “character education” programs implanted into some schools of late haven’t done much either. [Here I will not say anything using David Brooks and superficial in the same sentence.] Instead, sages over years have generally found at least four effective avenues to make it easier to climb. [Stairs? Stairs that actually go up? Stairs that don't have double-locked doors at the top? Stairs which don't have a No Persons Of Color sign painted above them? I'm speaking in metaphors here.] Government-supported programs can contribute in all realms. [Brooks is saying this is government's responsibility. Or is this a clever trick?]

First, habits. If you can change behavior you eventually change disposition. [Shall we also consider changing the negative behaviors of people other than those needing social welfare programs? For instance the people who pay them miserably and get rich thereby? Red lining and other forms of economic prejudice are not habits of the poor or people of color. They're the habits of the outside groups who decide the destinies of poor people without regard to their worthiness or character or hard work.] People who practice small acts of self-control find it easier to perform big acts in times of crisis. [Was it by several centuries of self control that African Americans found it easier to invent the only significant art forms America is known for? I'm sure that's too complicated for conservatives to answer. Did Mr. Brooks ever know someone whose self control enabled him to overcome the effects of several generations of poverty in his family? Such cases are not unknown, but they are outliers, they are not the rule. Why? Perhaps it would be more fair to blame the pervasive failure of poor and working class children to enter Princeton on some societal factors rather than on the individual's lack of “grit.” Perhaps it has something to do with the shrinking number of places available to “poor-people-with-grit” in places like Princeton, places which need to charge Westchester-and-Darien prices to stay, as they say, in the black. Let's face it, scholarship programs are more carefully directed at young people who are just a bit below the top quintile rather than those far below it. And perhaps there are many more “young ambitious poor persons with grit” who fail than there are “young ambitious rich persons with or without grit” who fail. Grit is less of a difference here than background and the learned experience that we call history. The rich child is likelier to land on his feet however things turn out.] Quality preschools, K.I.P.P. schools and parenting coaches have produced lasting effects by encouraging young parents and students to observe basic etiquette and practice small but regular acts of self-restraint. [Is this Brooks's subtly disguised hymn to charter and private education? 
“Private enterprise is the answer to everything.” From what I've read young black males learn to exhibit basic etiquette among whiter peers and adults earlier and better than young white males do. Self restraint is not something wealthy children tend to learn, but they don't spend their lives paying for that failure. The rest of us pay for their failures as well as our own.]

Second, opportunity. Maybe you can practice self-discipline through iron willpower. But most of us can only deny short-term pleasures because we see a realistic path between self-denial now and something better down the road. Young women who see affordable college prospects ahead are much less likely to become teen moms. [Gosh...did you read this in the same handbook I got from my health teacher in 1965? Quit insulting us and I'll quit insulting you. Did women deserve the vote and the right to property more because they waited centuries for it? I refer again to the centuries that African Americans waited for the right to basic civil rights in this country. We didn't withhold that to make them better people. In both cases we white males did it to make ourselves rich and powerful at their expense. The wrong class of people seems to be giving the character lectures here.]

Third, exemplars. Character is not developed individually. It is instilled by communities and transmitted by elders. [Translation: why the hell isn't every black father exactly like Bill Cosby? Meaning, I guess, wealthy, understandably irritable and articulate.] The centrist Democratic group Third Way suggests the government create a BoomerCorps. Every day 10,000 baby boomers turn 65, some of them could be recruited into an AmeriCorps-type program to help low-income families move up the mobility ladder. [Shall we get right on this when the person of color gets out of the White House? Because nuthin's gonna happen till he's gone. The Confederate Army now occupying Congress have made that plain. Still, not a bad idea. The people in our generation who will never be able to afford to retire will need something to do. And those who can will need something to do not to feel like lazy privileged jerks. Genuine lazy privileged jerks have no trouble dealing with idleness and wealth.]

Fourth, standards. People can only practice restraint after they have a certain definition of the sort of person they want to be. [Oh, I love this. Yardsticks. Standards. Always applied downward, never applied upward toward the persons pulling down enormous annual barely taxed pay packages despite dismal corporate performance. Here's a standard practice for you: If a CEO does a lousy job he pays the shareholders back out of his enormous package from the previous year. Here's another: If a Congress spends its entire two years in office doing nothing but withholding benefits from unemployed people and veterans, degrading our infrastructure, opposing everything and posturing, they don't get paid. Another: If they retire to a lucrative job as a lobbyist they surrender their retirement.] Research from Martin West of Harvard and others suggests that students at certain charter schools raise their own expectations for themselves, and judge themselves by more demanding criteria. [Or maybe it's just that those families who go to the effort to move their child to a different school are likelier to be more demanding. Here's another standard we might enact, but you won't like it: Expect all American companies to pay their employees a living wage, a wage sufficient to feed a family. This failure belongs to the employer not the employed, not the struggling worker or his and her children. This failure IS a failure of character that belongs to the very very rich in this country who have become rich by exploiting hardworking people. That is an old American tradition, exploiting workers, but it's not one we should be proud of. It may build character in the exploited but all the rewards accrue to the exploiter whose character is deficient if it exists at all. Wealth absolves a person from having his character or worthiness questioned. After a few generations he is automatically a better person than his economic inferiors––according to “conservative” beliefs. Even the wealth from generations of slave trading and slave-owning can confer superior character on the heirs.
Time launders the family as efficiently as it launders the wealth.]

Character development is an idiosyncratic, mysterious process. [Magical thinking is useful when the real variety gets sticky, so let’s finish with a vague compound aphorism:] But if families, communities and the government can envelop lives with attachments and institutions, then that might reduce the alienation and distrust that retards mobility and ruins dreams.  

David Brooks Explained

(David Brooks is the New York Times apologist for pure unregulated predatory capitalism, which is the Romney brand. Here's his most recent column, with explanatory footnotes.)

THE CAPITALISM DEBATE

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: July 16, 2012

Let’s say you are president in a time of a sustained economic slowdown. You initiated a series of big policies that you thought were going to turn the economy around, but they didn’t work — either because they were insufficient or ineffective (Or because your opposition and their clients and the trillions of bailout dollars hoarded by Wall Street were dedicated to making sure they didn't work). How do you run for re-election under these circumstances?

Do you spend the entire campaign saying that things would have been even worse if you hadn’t acted the way you did? No. That would be pathetic. (But it would be true. I guess the truth is pathetic if you don't like it.) You go on the attack. (Not an unreasonable thing to do since the Republican opposition has attacked and blocked and ridiculed and filibustered and evaded every proposal and every compromise you've tried in the past three and a half years.) Instead of defending your economic policies, you attack modern capitalism as it now exists. (Capitalism as it exists, as enabled by the extreme deregulation of the Bush years, is a gross distortion of the practical, regulated, moderate and egalitarian capitalism its inventor, Adam Smith, described in 1776.) You blame the system for the economy. (You blame the reckless greed and extreme inequality of wealth and power between Wall Street and Main Street, which is only fair. And honest.) You do this with double ferocity if your opponent (an affable, square jawed, handsome vulture capitalist and exporter of American jobs with unknown millions in secret bank accounts in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas and Bermuda) happens to be the embodiment of that system.

This is what the Obama campaign appears to have done in recent months. (Finally!) Instead of defending the policies of the last four years (which had started a decent recovery until the GOP retook the House and were able to shut it down again), the campaign has begun a series of attacks on the things people don’t like about modern capitalism. (Why argue with the American people? Give them some credit for intelligence.)

They don’t like the way unsuccessful firms go bust. (Or fairly prosperous firms are seen as vulnerable by takeover artists like Romney, who use the companies' own cash to buy them, then load them up with debt to pay themselves huge bonuses, then plunder their pension funds, slash their workers' pay and benefits, break their unions and ship their jobs overseas, using the proceeds to buy a few more homes and show ponies.) Obama hit that with ads about a steel plant closure a few months ago. They don’t like C.E.O. salaries. (Why should the boss of a company earn more in a day or an hour than an average worker earns in a year by actually making stuff?) President Obama hits that regularly. (Amen!) They don’t like financial shenanigans. (Let's quit mincing words. Call it crime, fraud, looting, corrupt practice, creative tax evasion.) Obama hits that. They don’t like outsourcing and offshoring. (Explain to me how firing people and moving their jobs overseas where you can hire a 12 year-old for a dollar a day is patriotic.) This week, Obama has been hitting that.

The president is now running an ad showing Mitt Romney tunelessly singing “America the Beautiful,” while the text on screen blasts him for shipping jobs to China, India and Mexico. (The text quotes newspaper reports that are actually factual. The singing is Romney's own. This is Politics 101.)

The accuracy of the ad has been questioned by the various fact-checking outfits. (Questioned before new information emerged that indicate Romney either lied to American voters or lied to the SEC about whether he was running Bain Capital during the period it was aggressively shipping jobs to China and India. Or maybe he was lying to Massachusetts election officials about whether he was living in his his Utah home or his Massachusetts home and running Bain. And how many homes does he own? Six?) That need not detain us. (Let's hurry past this because Romney's financial statements are dubious at best.) It’s safest to assume that all the ads you see this year (most of which will be paid for by the billions flowing into Republican PACs) will be at least somewhat inaccurate because the ad-makers now take dishonesty as a mark of their professional toughness. (A standard set by Nixon a generation ago and perfected by the Bush family.)

What matters is the ideology behind the ad: the assumption that Bain Capital, the private-equity (vulture capitalist) firm founded by Romney, should not have invested in (and subsequently looted) companies that (under Romney's/Bain's firm direction) hired workers abroad (after firing their American workers and looting their pension funds and taking away their health insurance); the assumption that hiring Mexican or Indian workers is unpatriotic (it's jolly patriotic if you're Mexican or Indian); the assumption that no worthy person would do what most global business leaders have been doing for the past half-century. (Let's just say it: If you could get away with being completely ruthless and greedy and violate trust and obligations right and left and ruin a lot of lives and make yourself rich in the process, wouldn't you do it? Some wouldn't. Very few people would have the gall to run for president on such a record.)

This ad — and the rhetoric the campaign is using around it — challenges the entire logic of capitalism as it has existed over several decades. (Actually, David. No. Go reread your Adam Smith. Reread your Theodore Roosevelt. Reread your Dwight Eisenhower. I'd recommend you reread Keynes, but you won't.) It’s part of a comprehensive attack on the (utter corruption and destruction of the) economic system Romney personifies. (He's the poster boy for the corporate “shenanigans” that collapsed our economy in the last few months of the Bush administration.)

This shift of focus has been audacious. (And long overdue. Obama has been too polite, too reserved, and too trusting in the age-old democratic rules and traditions in Washington, old traditions like cooperation and polity, which the Republicans have been spitting on for years. A word about audacity: Washington and Ben Franklin were audacious confronting the largest empire in the world. TR was audacious to confront the great powers and monopolies on Wall Street. Audaciousness isn't always a bad thing. Calling Obama audacious is audacious, in the negative sense.) Over the years of his presidency, Obama has not been a critic of globalization. (Globalization isn't necessarily bad. Free trade can also be Fair Trade, benefiting all sides of the trade. When globalization is an excuse to exploit disorganized and unprotected workers in impoverished countries or steal their raw materials or to dismantle workers' rights in your own country, using the infrastructure and institutions and perverting the laws created as part of a fair society to do so, that is bad globalization. That is the Romney model.) There’s no real evidence that, when he’s off the campaign trail, he has any problem with outsourcing and offshoring. (He isn't in the offshoring business. Obama hasn't exported a single job, but none of us can avoid buying tennis shoes made by teenagers in Malaysia or the Philippines.) He has lavishly praised people like Steve Jobs who were prominent practitioners. (He praised their inventiveness and the quality of their products designed here. Like most of us, he no doubt wishes they were made here.) He has hired people like Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric, whose company embodies the upsides of globalization. (If you want someone to advise and manage a complex economy you hire somebody who has experience advising and managing complex international companies. It would be foolish not to hire the most competent people. Sometimes even when they don't entirely agree with you, as FDR did when he created the SEC.) His economic advisers have generally touted the benefits of globalization even as they worked to help those who are hurt by its downsides. (The point of Democratic policy has always been to strengthen our economy while not gutting the source of its energy which is a skilled and well-paid workforce, citizens who can afford to buy the products they manufacture. FDR's rich friends called him a traitor to his class for siding with working people. I'd call that patriotism.)

But, politically, this aggressive tactic has worked. (Americans are lied to a lot by FoxNews and talk radio, but at the end of the day they are not stupid.) It has shifted the focus of the race from being about big government, which Obama represents, (a government big enough to serve a big country and stand up to huge transnational corporations...and by the way, Obama has increased spending less than any president since Truman––look it up) to being about (predatory or vulture) capitalism, which Romney represents.

Just as Republicans spent years promising voters that they could have tax cuts forever (and never pay for anything again), now the Democrats are promising voters that they can have all the benefits of capitalism without the downsides (as their parents and grandparents had in the bad old days of Truman and Eisenhower and JFK, before corporations were people in all respects but personal responsibilities), like plant closures, rich C.E.O.’s and outsourcing. (Funny how productivity gains don't count unless they are paid upward to the people in the executive suite. Workers are greedy if they demand benefits like healthcare but CEOs are shrewd if they demand free dry cleaning, free limos and courtside tickets for life) Just as Republicans used to force Democrats into the eat-your-spinach posture (you need to have high taxes if you want your programs) (Historically, Republicans only wanted the streets paved to their homes, their country clubs, their factory, and, as Leona Helmsley said, thought taxes were for little people), now Democrats are casting Republicans into the eat-your-spinach posture (you need to accept outsourcing and the pains of creative destruction if you want your prosperity). (Creative destruction is what the mob called burning the factory to collect on the insurance.)

The Romney campaign doesn’t seem to know how to respond. (There is no plausible response. Maybe they know this.) For centuries, business leaders have been inept when writers, intellectuals and politicians attacked capitalism (which is why the billionaire class have spent billions buying writers, economists, academics, inviting creative people to their beach homes, creating “think tanks” and buying ad talent and mass-purchasing their dreadfully bad political books onto the bestseller list. It's called bribery.), and, so far, the Romney campaign is continuing that streak. (But how many billionaires can Romney loyalists fit into one 60,000 square foot Hamptons “cottage” for a fundraiser?)

One thing is for sure. As Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute (see "billionaire funded right wing think tank", above) has said again and again (to appreciative monied audiences who pay for his airfare), it’s not enough to say that capitalism will make you money. You can’t fight what is essentially a moral critique with economics. (Since when has money made you immune to moral considerations? I think Jesus had a few things to say about the morality of the rich. Adam Smith naively assumed the rich would submit to honest, fair regulation.)

Romney is going to have to define a vision of modern capitalism. (As a Bush Jr. advisor once said “We create our own reality.” In the new Republican universe reality can be bought, usually without inconveniencing rich friends with a tax bill.) He’s going to have to separate his vision from the scandals and excesses we’ve seen over the last few years. (Let's walk that back a couple of years and stipulate that the scandals were the most scandalous during the regime of your man George W. Bush. The Obama years have been about uncovering them and re-installing the regulations against scandalous behavior. Over fierce Republican objections.) He needs to define the kind of capitalist he is and why the country needs his virtues. (Assuming you don't mean the “virtues” of firing people and paying those wages to yourself and your fellow investors for your skill at firing people. Firing isn't the best word here. “Firing” assumes cause. Most of the people Romney fired were laid off for the “crime” of earning a living, for making things at a wage American companies used to pay when America's economy got its strength from workers who could afford to be consumers.)

Let’s face it, he’s not a heroic entrepreneur (except in his autobiography, his stump speeches, his reports to shareholders and his statements to the SEC). He’s an efficiency expert. (A CEO tends to define “efficiency” by how little he can pay his workers to work longer and harder and faster.) It has been the business of his life to take companies that were mediocre and sclerotic (or paid a fair wage for good work) and try to make them efficient (make them pay less for more work, by hiring Asian children if need be; slashing benefits) and dynamic (a word possibly adopted by McKinsey to project a robust image onto a company without it actually meaning anything). It has been his job to be the corporate version of a personal trainer: take people who are puffy and self-indulgent and whip them into shape. (Here's where David begins to sound like he's writing a brochure for the Hitler Youth. I don't think that is his intention.)

That’s his selling point: rigor (forcing other people to be rail-thin and rigorous translates into his fat monthly paycheck) and productivity (again, other people's hard work and productivity can be paid directly to him for demanding it. This, if you can avoid throwing up, is called a “business model”.) If he can build a capitalist vision around that, he’ll thrive. (HE will thrive. Other people, not so much.) If not, he’s a punching bag. (Commence punching.)

Oh, heck...Bill Maher said it better than I can:

“America's rich aren't giving you money, they're taking your money. Between the years 1980 and 2005 80% of all new income generated in this country went to the richest 1%. Let me put that in terms that even you fatass teabaggers, I'm sorry, can understand.

“Say 100 Americans get together and order a 100 slice pizza. The pizza arrives and the first guy takes 80 slices. And if someone suggests, why don't you just take 79 slices, that's socialism! I know, I know. I know, I know, it's just a TV show. But it does reinforce the stupid idea people have that rich people would love us and share with us if only they got to walk a mile in our cheap plastic shoes.

“But they're the reason the shoe factory moved to China. We have this fantasy that our interests and the interests of the super rich are the same. Like somehow the rich will eventually get so full that they'll explode. And the candy will rain down on the rest of us.

“Like there's some kind of pinata of benevolence. But here's the thing about a pinata. It doesn't open on its own. You have to beat it with a stick.”

Eat that, David Brooks. Maybe they should hand his column to Bill Maher.