Myth Taken Politics

Adroit But Sinister Politics: A Big Myth Redirected

Should Dean allow the Democrats to go further to the left? Is the Bush administration going to far to the right?

Political strategy has nothing to do with left and right. Talking heads pontificate about moderates and the right and left wings, but all they are doing is wasting our time. In fact, the sooner you forget about left and right when talking about political strategy the sooner you will be able to understand it. Political strategy is about us versus them. PERIOD.

The Democrats are failing because they prefer to defer to the right on defining issues in us versus them. Democrats must adopt a populist attitude and define every issue as us versus them. (Repeating this until it sinks in). Republicans have gotten away with using unnatural divisions, able to somehow allow the powerful and wealthy, a very small subset of the U.S. population, with various divisions of the population, especially the rural (again small numbers but over-sized electoral power) and white Christian males (solid minority). Although this seems obvious, Democrats are notorious for blowing it. For examples, see below:

Indiana's Municipal Munificence

Shocking! Indiana legislative defeats telecom corporation supported bill that would have kept municipalities from bringing broadband to citizens. While Philadelphia still struggles against telecoms to bring wireless broadband to its citizens, Indiana has succeeded in killing the anti-broadband bill. SBC and other telecoms put out a major effort to keep cities and counties from competing in providing  highspeed Internet access-although, my guess is that some municipalities would not be interested in creating broadband networks if telecoms actually provided the same services at similar costs. So while small town America is often left behind by behemoth telecoms, it is up to democracy to provide some means for people to bring themselves up. Kudos to Indiana. (see my other post from today on the Philadelphia story)

Philadelphia Broadband Banned?

Today, Frank Rizzo, Philadelphia Councilman, had an opinion piece on CNET arguing against Philadelphia government creating its own wireless hotspot that would cover the whole city. Rizzo's arguments are based on myths about government influence in technology. Rizzo claims that the effort to bring broad-based broadband is best left to the private sector. Actually, Philadelphia would be making a major step forward by providing its citizens a great service and head-start over other cities. Although there are some risks involved in any endeavor, private or public, Rizzo only mentions public failures, but he does not mention the many good ideas that private companies have failed at (including using wireless for city wide networks). Rizzo also misses the huge public successes including the Internet without which their might not be such a thing as broadband (or the World Wide Web and graphical web browser), or the Rural Electrification Act and TVA, and the list goes on. The chance that the neighborhoods will have a higher use of broadband sooner or better than under the Philadelphia plan is probably not true (note: availability is not the same as use).

Below are some quick pointers:
 

Who Pays for Healthcare?

A recent comment on this site asked about employer contribution to Social Security. And today on NPR's Morning Edition there was a story about Montana legislators proposing a tax on large retailers who pay less than a set amount to their employees. Recently in California, there has been some controversy over Walmart giving instructions to employees on how to receive public assistance. Locally there has been a fight in Montgomery County, MD for ensuring "living" wages.

At the bottom of all of these stories is the question of who should pay for expenses, employees, employers, government or charity. Before answering that question, it should be understood that for most employees, it is their employer that is paying for 100% of expenses (with only certain exceptions). An employee who is "forced" to pay for health care instead of receiving an employee benefit is still receiving the money in the form of salary to pay for health care from their employer (whether or not the employee ever ends up paying themselves). There are often artificial distinctions that are made for reasons of tax purposes or enforcement or social reasons, but in almost all cases an employee requires 100% of all of their expenses to live from their employer in the form of payroll taxes, salary and benefits. Any expenses that are not covered by employers means that everyone else in society must contribute to their expenses, usually through tax funded government programs. Or, when society does not step in, the employee just suffers: lack of food, education, proper shelter, necessary health care and clothing.

Once it is understood that employee contributions are actually always paid for by employers, making the distinction is a way to obscure the fundamental issues. When Walmart and other companies make money by paying insufficient wages and benefits, it means that their employees suffer either the hardship or indignity of getting help from government or charity or they suffer through deprivation and preventable illnesses. We as a society should confront this calamity or suffer as it directly and indirectly hurts us all.

Non Sequitur Politics

I have noticed that many times advocates of a position use non sequiturs to make a point. For example, a recent USTA political tv ad claims that the reason the United States is 13th in use of broadband is due to outdated telecom laws that don't have the provisions that USTA is pushing. Well, I would guess that the twelve countries that are ahead of us must have the type of laws on telecom that USTA would like. But you won't find any insight into what the other countries are doing to be more successful at the USTA.

Political non sequiturs do not mean that the goal is wrong, just that the argument is illogical. I see this often in technology policy, perhaps because it is a difficult area to tie policy to technological success or may be because technology is hard to explain. Anyone who wants to better understand technology policy arguments should be very careful to watch for non sequiturs along side of the usual myths (biggest is that government is antagonistic to innovation in the private sector-more on that later).