With you idea you would need an even bigger bureaucracy to set prices. Furthermore things go in and out of fashion, so something that is cheap now (say a work by an unknown artist) may become desirable later.

I have no objections to supporting the arts, which is why I think the fund I'm proposing could be used partly for such purposes.

Having adopted a policy of punishing Germany for WWI (and a bunch of prior wars that France lost), the winning powers were not interested in rebuilding Germany and transforming its warlike culture.

So after all the reasonable options had been eliminated it then sounds like war was necessary. A similar case can be made for how the west treated Japan (and China) during the first half of the 20th Century.

As for Iraq, the US was involved in picking sides in the Iran/Iraq conflict, as well as pandering to Saudi Arabia and other oil states and then is surprised when the meddling didn't go as expected.

War mongers have two characteristics.
1. Contempt for diplomacy and accommodation to the other sides interests.
2. A willingness to send other people off to do the fighting.

Shameful.

Let me give an example.

When I was growing up people typically went to the local butcher shop for meat. The butcher got sides of beef (or whatever) and then cut it up into the kinds of portions desired by the customers. When you wanted ground beef he would take the piece and grind it in front of you.

This was a skilled trade. The customer got what they wanted and lots of butchers were employed. Now we have huge factories where unskilled workers do repetitive jobs under terrible conditions and customers get what they meat packers choose to sell. In the latest variation, "case ready" meat, the portions are packaged in deep trays filled with CO2 and frozen at the plant. They are thawed at the supermarket and the thaw date is used as the "fresh" date.

Ground beef now gets subjected to recalls and instead of one bad cow, millions of pounds and hundreds of consumers can be affected.

The only one benefiting from this system are the meat packers, not the employees, not the customers and not even the farmers. When all the social costs are taken into account we aren't even sure that it is more "efficient".

Poor enforcement has also led to the situation where a firm is found to be in violation of some law or regulation and pays a fine, without admitting "guilt". Companies don't commit crimes, people do. The willingness to settle wrongdoing without individuals being punished needs to stop.

If no specific individual can be found guilty than the blame goes to the CEO. That's the principle established by Sarbanes-Oxley and it should apply to all activity not just fudging financial statements.

When a firm gets by with a fine the only ones who pay are the stockholders, and given the realities of modern corporate governance they are the ones with the least control over how "their" firm is run.

We need to abolish corporate personhood and perpetrator-less crimes.

First, they owe their souls to those who funded their campaigns (usually big business and military contractors).

Second, they get brainwashed by the military and intelligence services into thinking that vague threats are more serious than they are. This leads to early paranoia.

Third, they are put in a bubble where they have little contact with unfiltered information and are manipulated by the permanent government.

Just to cite a few obvious examples from the past week or so:
1. The conservatives and the Dems owned by the wealthy go ballistic of a minor change in the deductibility of charitable contributions for the top 1% of the population.
2. The same group cries the end of the US when Gates suggests jiggling a few military hardware program's priorities.

If even trivial changes like this get so much pushback what chance does a new president have to make real change, even if he wanted to?

If is meant to raise revenue, then it should be optimized for this purpose. So, logically the way to get the most from the income tax would be to make the progressivity steeper, eliminate the breaks on unearned income and restore the estate tax. If all the sources of income were treated the same for tax purposes then arguments about changes in behavior of key employees wouldn't hold up.

The reason that compensation has tilted towards bonuses and stock options is strictly an artifact of the tax laws. There are, for example, limits on how much a person's salary can be treated as a business expense. These other forms of compensation get around that. So fix the tax laws and the rest of the issue will resolve itself.

So stockholders, the "owners" of a firm, have no real way of controlling the firm's behavior. Saying that one can always sell one's shares if one doesn't approve, as libertarians often do, is not a real solution. Every major firm is run the same way. I should add that most non-profits are even worse since their boards are self selected without even the pretense of an election.

Even in the rare occasion when a stockholder proposal passes, boards have taken to ignoring them saying that they are only "advisory".

If stockholders actually had any say in the running of their companies there might be some regulation of the excesses. Changes in governance rules requires the intervention of government, but elected officials get their campaign funding from these very same firms. Catch 22.

Democracy is broken, not just in government, but in public institutions.

Does Unionization Matter?

I used the available data across time and across countries. The thing that one can see from examining the charts is that there is a high degree of correlation between the strength of organized labor and the degree of economic equality in a country. There is also a strong connection unionization and wages and earnings.

The anti-union faction in this country likes to predict the end of civilization, but we see things going just fine in other countries despite the strong power of organized labor.

When the data doesn't support your propaganda either ignore it or lie about it.

That is that liberals have a set of ethical principles based upon community. This can be seen in the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

The conservatives don't have goals, they have an interest in process. They are for smaller government (smaller than what?). They are for lower taxes (lower than what?). They are for less regulation (less than what?).

There is no end point to their programs, they can't express what they are aiming for.

This means that they are tacticians, not moral philosophers. They are all about "winning" against their enemies. Bush was the ultimate of this, his only interest was in politics and besting his opponents. That's why he surrounded himself with fellow tacticians like Rove, Delay and Gingrich.

It's why the GOP if floundering now, their standard process recommendations are out of tune with the current situation and they have no vision to offer in their place.

Many people are now getting drug coverage that weren't getting it before. Once the concept that Medicare should cover drugs has been made acceptable there is nothing to prevent it from being modified later.

There is sort of an expectation ratchet with social services. Once they are offered they become the norm and it is hard to eliminate them, that's why having Bush adopt this was so unusual.

Drug coverage will be fixed as part of an overall health care reform, we just don't know when.

2. The power of the fourth branch of government - the military. Notice that Obama has agreed to expand military spending, increase troop strength in Afghanistan and has kept much of the permanent government in the DoD in place.

So the GOP and the Dems only differ in one small area. The Dems are slightly more willing to fund social programs than are the Repubs. Even so it was Bush who pushed through the drug expansion of Medicare.

Notice that Dems aren't doing much differently when it comes to the financial bailout either. Geitner is a creature of the banking system and has now appointed many from the industry to be in his department. This is the same fox guarding the henhouse that we hand when Paulson was in charge.

Perhaps Dems are a bit more empathetic than the Repubs, or perhaps they are just more sensitive to the idea that if they don't throw a few bones to the working class in terms of expanded unemployment benefits and the like they risk seeing riots in the streets.

These are people who favor a hierarchical social structure headed by a strong leader. They are the followers. The model to examine is Irving Kristol.

When his god of the left failed he switched to a new one on the right. This is what's happening with the second generation now. Their idols have become tarnished and they are groping around looking for a new leader.

Stay tuned, you'll be surprised at where they end up. The one thing you can be sure of is that they will never be in a position where they do any thinking for themselves.

The second issue is how we allocate profits. We can have a health system which continues to allocate profits in a very unequal way, but which provides health care for all. Several of the proposals do this.

This is entirely acceptable as long as the decision is made democratically. Japan subsidies marginal rice farmers because they feel that it is a social good to keep these people in their traditional occupations. Everyone pays higher rice prices to cover this. An ethical decision, not one based upon economic "efficiency".

If we chose to keep a million people employed in the health care industry as middlemen as we now do then we can consider that as a parallel to the Japanese farmers.

The problem is that these social choices are not made democratically, but are the result of the buying of politicians through the cost of funding election campaigns. The other problem is that we don't achieve our goal of universal health care.

So we have the worst of both, an imbalanced profit allocation and insufficient services.

There is a slight difference between health care and entertainment. One is vital and the other isn't. There is no one forcing a buyer to shell out $16 for a CD of their favorite, and as we can see the public is pushing back against this model.

If it seems that vital services will always be subject to manipulation by the wealthy and powerful then we need to have a discussion as to whether these functions should be state-managed. Social Security was an attempt to remedy the lack of a viable retirement system. It only provided a partial solution because the business interests won't allow it to take on a bigger role.

It is, however, better than the private competition.

If people try to save for an uncertain future than they aren't spending now. The parties only differ on some relatively minor details, although given all the heat one would think there were real substantive issues. The "liberals" are more interested in providing increased social services, especially for those at the bottom. The "conservatives" are more interested in pumping money into the top. I think many really believe in trickle-down and that only the wealthy are smart enough to spend wisely.

Where they don't disagree is on the need for expanded militarism, expanded foreign adventurism, and the return to traditional capitalism. The fuss over increased regulation is just a side issue. Even corporations are leaning towards better enforcement of rules so that they have a more level playing field. It is hard for an honest firm to compete with a Ponzi scheme.

What they don't want to see is any discussion of the basis of capitalism, that it is a system based upon underpricing raw materials and that assumes they will continue to be available in, essentially unlimited, quantities.

The US consumes 40% of the resources with 4% of the population. This is not only unjust, but unsustainable. The developing world won't stand for it and the planet doesn't have enough resources to keep this up for much longer.

It is time to realize that "sustainable development", "smart growth" and other meaningless catch phrases are not a real social policy. The US public knows that we have been getting more than our share and wants to keep it that way, thus the widespread support of militarism. If we can't buy at favorable prices, we will force others to supply us. This was the philosophy behind the Iraq invasion and even though it has failed our leaders are not willing to concede that the model is obsolete.

I've not heard Obama say anything about sacrifice, but the US will need to scale back its consumption eventually. Either we plan how to do it or Mother Nature will do it for us.