Table of Contents

- Introduction: The Founders Declarations of INTER-dependence

- 1.     The Politics of Parts and Good Government

- 2.     Politics and Taxes Aren’t All About You

- 3.     Free Market Free Riders

- 4.     Good Rich versus Bad Rich

- 5.     What the Wealthy Use Welfare For

- 6.     Corporate Maker-Takers

- 7.     Competition’s Creed

- 8.     Corporations Just Can’t Help It

- 9.     Truths About Lying In Politics

- 10.  Government of Blind Leading the Blind

- Conclusion: Good Government and the Logic of INTER-dependence

Introduction: The Founders Declarations of INTER-dependence

Errors now dominate our politics. They weaken our hold on once self-evident truths and they blind us to the logic of the declarations of INTER-dependence built into the nation’s founding documents. The Constitution defines the duty to promote “the general Welfare” as being just as important as ensuring the common defense. The Declaration of Independence states the first justification for the American Revolution as the need to overcome barriers preventing the progress of “Laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public Good.” The Founders knew that the right role of government must include ensuring we all perform our inalienable duties to these now under-noticed undergirding and essential elements.

The good news is that the worst of these errors is easily exposed.  This pamphlet explains each error in short sections that can be read in only a few minutes, and are designed to be easily squeezed into small gaps in any busy schedule.

The bad news is that those confounding errors have been built deep into the language and ideas that politicians and voters actively use. Promoters of the unwholesome art of self-interested politics have preached these errors so relentlessly and for so long that they have become cherished beliefs and self-serving biases. But these mistaken beliefs are such poor political tools that they have built obstacles to “Laws the most wholesome and necessary” and so operate like those barriers the Founders fought. Any political ideas that fail to protect or promote “the public good” contain a distorted form of self-interest that is ultimately self-undermining. To damage what you depend on cannot continue to be deemed rational.

Whatever your current beliefs, you will serve your many interests (self, political, enlightened, long term and best) by reassessing your position on these errors. They have led us astray from the end of Abraham Lincoln’s famous formula for good government, that must be not only “of the people,” and “by the people,” but “for the people” as a whole. These short essays apply the logic of Lincoln and the Founders to correct errors in popular ideas about political self-interest and about the right role of markets. The pamphlet ends by showing what old wisdom and our best brain science can tell us about political truth and trust.

The Founders made clear the connection between liberty and the “public good.” They knew that liberty is in practice a government provided and protected program. We must reinstate the authority of their logic, and do our duty to remain loyal to the limits it sets on our individual political interests. Fortunately this requires relatively small adjustments to what many believe to be rational.

1.     The Politics of Parts and Good Government

Lincoln’s definition of the goal of good government doesn’t say “for your part of the people”—it says “for the people.” A nation must be more than the sum of the interests of its parts. And no politics of parts can work if the parts pursue only their narrow self-interests. All parts must recognize the role of a healthy whole. Tragically, our politicians too often make the error of benefiting powerful parts at the expense of the “public good.”

Medicare provides an excellent, enormously expensive example of a politics of parts error.  It has been widely reported that the pharmaceutical industry successfully lobbied to deny Medicare the power to negotiate prescription drug prices. Having this power enabled the Department of Veterans Affairs to reduce the prices it paid for drugs by up to 50%. Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize–winning economist, has called this “a gift of some $50 billion to…pharmaceutical companies.” That works out to about $600 per federal income tax payer. Reversing this legal private plunder of the public purse would yield two-thirds of the savings that President Obama and Representative Ryan seek in their respective Medicare reform plans. This would be a much healthier defense of the Founders’ “public good” than the present prioritization of the politics of powerful parts.

The ban on drug price negotiations is the result of an addiction to the seductive drug of narrow, self-interested thinking. So common is this type of error that it has its own name: the tragedy of the commons. But that is a misnomer. It’s really a tragedy of self-undermining, self-interested, shallow thinking. And we have learned the wrong lesson from it. The normal interpretation is that each rational user of a common public resource has incentives to take more than a sustainable share, which leads to overuse and tragedy for all. But if users were truly rational, they would choose to sustain the health of the common resource and logically limit the ways in which narrow self-interest can be allowed to be maximized.

In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville reported observing Americans who seemed to have a commonsense understanding of what was needed. Chapter 8 of Democracy in America is titled “How the Americans Combat Individualism by the Principle of Self-Interest Rightly Understood.” In it, Tocqueville says that “an enlightened regard for themselves constantly prompts [Americans] to assist one another and inclines them willingly to sacrifice a portion of their time and property to the welfare of the state.” The logic of enlightened self-interest and management of resources for the “public good” easily overcomes the barrier of the so called tragedy of the commons. Applied to the politics of parts, such broader thinking would prevent dereliction of the constitutional duty to protect and promote the “general welfare.” It is a tragedy of rationality that we have been using our collective reason so badly. And it’s a tragedy that our political elites cling to ideas of a narrow self-interest that can work against their own self-preservation.

To understand your real interests you should ask: Does a proposed policy strengthen or weaken both my direct interests and my indirect interests? Does it protect the interests of everything that my success depends on, especially the interests of the nation as a whole?

Good government must rule according to the real meaning of the words “for the people,” and prioritize policies that sustain the robust health of the “public good.” Otherwise, it risks creating a machinery of powerful parts pitted against each other and working against the health of the whole. The Founders sought to prevent this, and understood, to paraphrase Tocqueville, that we must never lose sight of the close connection between the private fortune of each and the prosperity of all.

2.     Politics and Taxes Aren’t All About You

Politics is precisely not about you, at least not about you only. Your taxes are also not about you, at least not only you. Neither politics nor taxes are about your self-interest, unless that’s been correctly enlightened enough to include the interests of everything you depend on. Politics, and taxes, are by definition about the teams you are on. We can easily fall into an ultimately self-undermining error if we don’t acknowledge that one of those teams must be the nation as a whole.

Taxes are where the rubber meets the road when it comes to loyalty to our national team. Taxes are not a transactional payment for what you directly get back in easily identifiable individual benefits. Taxes are your part of the entire cost of keeping your country in good shape. Your part of what the Founders defined as a key constitutional duty, which is to promote “the general welfare.” However successful and strong you are, you still need Team America to be thriving, or your prosperity is based on frail foundations. Contributing to the costs of programs you don’t directly use, but which are needed to run the country, benefits you indirectly. You might call that redistribution, but it is also enlightened self-interest and the required rational response to the logic of our national INTER-dependence.  It’s time to put your money where your mouthed loyalty is, your rationally enlightened inclusive loyalty, that is.

Adam Smith, the much misrepresented master economist, usefully said “Every tax…is, to the person who pays it, a badge…of liberty. It denotes he is subject to government.” Like the Founders, Smith got it: No taxes means no government, no liberty, no public good, no practical platform on which to build a private pursuit of happiness. Taxes are not a punishment. They are the price of your liberty. What can look like a sacrifice is a sacred and immeasurable gain.

The crucial tax question facing the country this election is: What’s the right thing to do when the team you love, or at least can’t do without, is in trouble? Should the team members who are strongest step up and do what's needed and take one for the team? Or should they use their strength as leverage to force changes that will require that the weak do more, while the strong do less? Which of those is the right thing to do, the decent thing to do, the loyal thing to do? However you dress it up, that’s the moral shape of the tax issues we face.

Gregory Mankiw, a Mitt Romney adviser, said in a New York Times op-ed, “Don’t let anyone fool you into thinking that when the government taxes the rich, only the rich bear the burden.” But much more important is the opposite idea: Don’t let apologists for the shirking strong fool you—tax cuts for the wealthy are specifically an added burden others will have to bear. Every dollar less they pay is a dollar more the rest of Team America will have to provide somehow.

Though frequently framed to focus attention on your individual self-interest, politics and economics are really team sports and necessarily involve interactions with the interests of others.  Any ideas that spotlight the self-only aspects, but leave your INTER-dependencies in the dark, put you at risk of being led into logical errors. We must broaden the beam of our illuminating ideas, as the Founders did, to correctly enlighten our self-interests, by including the role of the public good.

3.     Free Market Free Riders

The “free” in free markets is frequently not the good kind of free. It’s an enormous error to accept that freer, less regulated markets are always better markets. Comparisons with regulations in sports and the legal arena can help us draw useful analogies. Whatever the free-market faithful preach, we must look at how they operate in the real world. All too often, free-marketeers seek a free ride, and try to free themselves from bearing the consequences and costs of their enterprises. Regulations are the only means of countering these unproductive, unethical freedoms.

Everyone appreciates the value of regulating freeness in sports. It's understood that the rules shouldn't favor the strongest teams or players, especially not at the expense of the sport as a whole. The same is true of markets. Regulations must protect the health of the whole, not favor the narrow interests of the strongest. Indeed, in sports we know that it can make sense for the rules to favor the weakest at the expense of the strongest.

The logic of liberty requires agreed-upon—and enforced—limits on free people. No society is possible without laws to limit individual freedoms where they conflict with each other or with civic order. This is no less true for markets. In fact, there are good reasons to make sure that free markets are never as free as free people. Markets can, and do, much more harm than individuals ever could. They coordinate the actions of billions, and we unbridle them at our collective peril.

There are three kinds of regulation resisters: the principled, the easier-for-me, and the exploiters.

Those who resist on principle believe everyone should be as free as possible. But nobody would want drivers to be free to choose which side of the road to drive on. Some limits, like rules of the road, enhance effective freedoms and improve safety and efficiency.  And freedom, like every other ideal principle when it comes into contact with reality, has to be balanced against other goals.

The easier-for-me resisters just want to avoid the inconveniences of regulation. But they are often blind to their own fallibility. Regulations can protect them from their own mistakes, as well as protect the system and all others who need it.

Exploiters actively seek to take advantage of lax rules and want weak enforcement. If they think they can pad profits by not processing their waste or having their accountants cook the books, they’ll do it. Regulations help manage these exploiters, just as laws help us manage would-be criminals. Their whole point is to protect us, as much as possible, from those who are tempted to act badly.

A particularly perilous example of resistance to regulations is put into a concerning context by a posting on the Forbes website "Financial Execs Confess: Sure, We Lie and Cheat.” It cites a survey of 500 senior executives, 24% of whom said success requires that "rules may have to be broken” and reported that “39% found it likely that their competitors had engaged in illegal or unethical activity.”  To ask such an industry how it would like to be regulated is like consulting foxes on the design of rules for guarding hen houses. Even if many on Wall Street aren’t exploiting resisters, the easier-on-me position taken by their colleagues enables others who are.

By all means, we should roll back regulations that don't meet social goals, but by no means at the cost of making conditions easier for the unscrupulous and the fallible.

As with political freedoms, the price of market freedoms must be eternal vigilance. Markets are like fires. If not carefully managed within safe limits, they’ll consume everything in their path. But carefully controlled and put to good use, they’re invaluable.

4.     Good Rich versus Bad Rich

The rich are as replaceable as you or I. Many of them like to think they are not, and they’d especially like others to think they are not, but they are mostly as economically expendable as anyone else. The rich often like to tell us how strong they are. We should believe them. It means they neither need nor deserve special treatment.

I want to be clear, I am not against the rich: It would be great if as many people as possible were rich, especially if at the same time as few as possible were poor. But if I may simplify for the sake of a useful argument, there are at least two kinds of rich: the good rich and the bad rich; the in-it-together rich and the in-it-only-for-themselves rich; those who take an enlightened view of their interests, and those who seek only their own narrow, short-term advantage. The good rich try not to do anything to harm their communities or the country. The bad rich have no such qualms. The good rich see their role as succeeding by creating value and contributing to the public good. The bad rich succeed by exploiting others, ignoring the costs they impose on others, and seeking to contribute as little as possible to the common good. The more of the good rich we have, the better we all do. The more of the bad rich we have, the greater is our social insecurity, and weaker is our ability to protect the “public good.”

One good way of categorizing any particular rich person is their position on taxes— everyone’s legally and ethically required contribution to the total cost of running the country. Anyone who avoids, or evades, or cheats on their taxes reduces the resources available for promotion of the “general welfare,” which the Founders defined as a constitutional duty, on a par with ensuring the common defense. A particularly disloyal form of this tax treachery is when the bad rich lobby for and secure legal loopholes that let them treat their taxes differently, loopholes through which their loyalty leaks. Mitt Romney pays a tax rate of less than 15% in large part because of the “carried interest” loophole that allows him to classify his pension income as capital gains. You can’t classify your pension income as capital gains, but he and his private-equity peers can.

The Wall Street Journal quoted an expert who explained how some private-equity titans might react if required to pay taxes at ordinary rates: They might “decide the deal simply isn't worth it for them,” that “if we’re only allowed to keep $6.5 million of every $10 million fee—rather than the $8.5 million we now get—we'll just retreat to the golf course or find some other business, and millions of Americans will lose their jobs because we won't be there to turn around their companies.”

That’s the threat private-equity titans wield to extort special treatment. But if that’s the best argument they have, we needn’t worry. These rich are replaceable. We should have greater faith in the entrepreneurial energy and spirit of Americans than they do. And we should be happy if the current lazier rich decide to work less, because they will have to pay tax at the same rate you and I do on our so-called ordinary income. Other hungrier, harder-working, smarter, more efficient soon-to-be-good-rich folks will step up to do those deals even if they are only making $6.5 million. They are precisely the kind of rich we need more of. Their success strengthens the nation, while success that depends on special tax treatment weakens us all.

Romney would like to lower the top income-tax rate, arguing that this would spur economic growth. But that’s just his dogma talking; he’s putting his free-market faith above what the evidence of experience and data demonstrate. Economic growth was higher during the Clinton and Reagan administrations, when top tax rates were higher, and there was less growth under George W. Bush, who cut top tax rates.  The simplistic idea that top tax rates are a drag on the economy is simply an error. Or perhaps Romney thinks business titans today are just not as capable or as strong or as skilled or as hard working as those who built the booming economies of the past, when taxes were higher.

Let me end by repeating, we need more good rich, and as many as we can get. Rich folk like Warren Buffet who sees no reason why he should pay a lower total tax rate than his secretary. It’s time we used the rules to encourage the bad rich to get themselves replaced by the better-for-us-all good rich.

5.     What the Wealthy Use Welfare For

Many of the wealthy use welfare. To ignore their use of entitlements and government subsidies to support their standard of living is an error. Economies are densely interdependent networks in which effects can’t easily be isolated to immediate interactions. And whether the wealthy like to see it or not, we're all in this safety net together.

The Economist website provides a useful example of this error, in a post called “Taxing the Rich,” by Will Wilkinson, an usually astute analyst and admirably clear thinker, who wrote: "Anyway, it's not the infrastructure of American capitalism that's busting the budget... Fiscal strain is largely a matter of buying health care for old people."

But Wilkinson is wrong. Government-provided health care is an integral part of the “infrastructure of American capitalism.” As are many other welfare programs, especially for businesses that employ low wage earners. Many corporations depend on the safety net, just as their employees do.

The “infrastructure of American capitalism” requires workers. Workers get old, and their health care and other needs must be met. They cannot be treated like inhuman resources to be consumed, and the residue conveniently and cheaply disposed of. Some capitalists would argue that those old, used-up workers should have saved enough to provide for their retirements. Some of these personal responsibility–preaching capitalists are the same ones who have “renegotiated” or gutted pension agreements (a favorite tactic for private-equity firms like Bain Capital). The New York Times on May 9, 2012, reported that more older Americans are working longer because, among other reasons, "many corporations have stopped providing health care to retirees... forcing them to work till Medicare is available." Those businesses have increased their profits by pushing employees into the publicly funded safety net. Private enterprise will always have incentives for this kind of cost shifting. And we must be vigilant against those who willfully ignore its impact.

Further, some of those personal responsibility–preaching capitalists pay their employees so little, they aren’t able to afford to eat, much less save for their retirement. Of the over 45 million Americans who are on food stamps, 40% live in a household that has at least one wage earner. In some low-profit industries, employers might have little choice, but in other more profitable businesses, employers simply prefer to profit by paying below-survival wages, knowing that the safety net will support their employees.

This is how the taxpayer-funded safety net nets increased profits for companies like Walmart, which is owned by the richest family in America. For example, in Ohio, 28% of Walmart’s 50,000 employees use Medicaid. Taxpayers subsidize—in effect send welfare payments to—the richest family in America. Surely this is an unjustified dependence on an entitlement program.

It’s not just corporations that have a codependent relationship with welfare. Anyone who employs a low-wage worker, such as a nanny, is likely in the same boat, kept afloat by the safety net. Medicaid costs employers only 1.45% of salary and if it weren’t available nannies would likely have to be paid more to be able to buy private health insurance. That’s how the government subsidizes private childcare, and it’s just one example of how many Americans benefit indirectly from welfare received by others.

Wilkinson’s remark reveals a not-in-it-together mindset at work in the hearts and minds of some American capitalists and their theorists. They willfully ignore INTER-dependencies that ripple widely through our economic networks. If anything, President Obama’s comments explaining to business owners that they “didn’t built that” didn’t go far enough: Some of these capitalists “couldn’t run that” without the support of the safety net, which is now an integral part of what the Founders called “the public good.”

6.     Corporate Maker-Takers

If corporations are people, too many of the current crop are whiny, tiny-minded, titan “maker-takers.” Make no mistake, I'm not against corporations: Many are decent, well run, respectable, responsible, constructive contributors, providing products and services we depend on every day. But as you’ll see, it’s a $160 billion error not to call out and hold to account those that behave badly by seeking to exploit the public purse—as well as politicians who fail the Founders’ defined duty to protect the taxpayer dollars that are “the public good.”

The logic of Milton Friedman's famous phrase “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” which has been so effectively deployed against public programs, can be turned around and applied to titan “takers.” There’s no such thing as a free infrastructure either. Every dollar a private business makes depends on publicly funded institutions and infrastructure, which has to be paid for somehow.

Some corporate titans are happy to be maker-takers on a free-lunch infrastructure. A recent analysis found that 30 of the largest, most profitable corporations in the country often pay no federal taxes at all. They increase their profits by avoiding contributing to the infrastructure their businesses depend on. They can find ways to avoid it. But many of the rest of us can’t. Every dollar they don’t pay is another dollar others have to provide. Or that has to be borrowed. Scheming to get out of paying taxes is an act of tiny-minded free riding by corporate titans. General Electric is a prominent member of the moochers club, despite the fact that its CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, is the leader of President Obama’s economic advisory team on job creation. Clearly it’s not just Mitt Romney who’s a corporate coddler.

But it gets worse: Some of the largest corporations in the country receive payments from the taxes others pay. ExxonMobil, despite being one of the most profitable companies in the history of capitalism, is one of these titan “takers.” When efforts are made to get such companies off welfare, their lobbyists complain and reel off their rationalizations. While the majority “of the people” struggle economically, these corporations—whiny, tiny-minded titan maker-takers—continue to pick the public pocket.  The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service reported that in 2011 these corporate entitlement programs cost the public good $160 billion in total “tax expenditures.”

These corporate welfare “takers” use the same justification Governor Romney employs in justifying the low percentage of his income he pays in personal taxes. They say they pay what's legally required. What that really means is that they have lobbied to create lax tax laws that grant them special treatment, and allow them to contribute less to, or take money from, their country, and from every taxpayer in America. This may be technically legal, but it's far from ethical. And it’s far from sustainable. It fails the logic of the golden rule, and of Kant's first test of any viable ethical system. Both boil down to the question, What would happen if everybody did the same? If everybody found a way to create a legal fig leaf that allowed them to evade most or all of their taxes or rationalized why they should receive payments from the public purse? It takes no special smarts to figure out that this weakens the country. And it fails the Founders’ defined constitutional duty to “promote the general welfare.”

Let me repeat, many corporations do their best to be productive, and essentially good, but even they must see the errors of their nastier non–burden-sharing brethren. We’ve long paid too much attention to the fruits of success. It's time we focused on the roots and on paying for everything that keeps the soil that nourishes those roots in good shape. As the old saying goes, there’s a time to sow and a time to reap. It’s time we told every titan, no sow, no reap.

7.     Competition’s Creed

Competition frequently creates foolish costs and undesirable outcomes. Though the free-market faithful have long preached that competition creates efficiency, as if it were a law of nature, nature itself teaches a different lesson. The seductively simple story of the virtues of competition contains some general theoretical truth, but execution is how theory dies, and we can’t let blind faith prevent us from seeing the deviling details of how it operates in practice. Unregulated competition in nature regularly delivers disaster. And ignoring nature’s lessons for our economy would have us be as dumb as trees.

Richard Dawkins, a noted explainer of nature, tell us, “Tree trunks are standing monuments to futile competition.” In his book The Greatest Show on Earth, he makes the necessary distinction between a “designed economy” and an “evolutionary economy,” using the fable of the “Forest of Friendship.”  “In a…mature forest,” he writes, “the canopy can be thought of as an aerial meadow...raised on stilts…gathering solar energy...but a substantial portion of the energy is ‘wasted’ by being fed straight into the stilts, which do nothing more useful than loft the ‘meadow’ high in the air, where it picks up the same harvest…as it would—at far lower cost—if it were laid flat on the ground.”

No tree can afford to not compete in the height competition. However, if somehow the trees could arrange a pact of friendship to limit their heights, each tree, and the forest as a whole, could save energy. This is obviously not possible for trees, but if it were, Dawkins concludes, the “Forest of Friendship [would be] more efficient as a forest.”

Systems of self-interested agents, responding only to local incentives, can easily evolve energy-wasting, unfruitful competitions. Dawkins doesn’t make the obvious connection between free- market theory and freely evolved systems, but you should. Once a way of competing is established, it’s very difficult for individuals not to play along. If we let our economies imitate trees, and the majority of nature, in practicing unguided free competition, the results will often be suboptimal, for each and for all. Worse, we will miss the main benefit of being human, which is to use reason to coordinate better outcomes.

Enormous ill-suited “monuments to futile competition” exist at the heart of our health-care system.  A 2008 study found that pharmaceutical companies spend 24% of their revenue on marketing and promotion (versus 13% on research and development). Drug prescription decisions should be based on objective medical criteria, and data on performance and side effects is publicly available. So why on earth would it make sense for pharmaceutical companies to spend so much on the armies of sales reps that visit doctors with such relentless regularity? The local logic at work is that, no individual company can risk not playing the game. However, a neutral body with the power to enforce adherence to agreed-upon limits could change these dynamics, collecting the information that companies seek to provide to doctors and making it available online. This would cost a trivial fraction of the monumental $62 billion wasted by the current free market approach (based on latest size of pharmaceutical revenue at $260 billion). It would also prevent nonmedical distortions in prescription decisions.

The way wasteful competition gets entrenched is a worrying example of an entire class of errors in which what passes for rational decisions can create undesirable outcomes. These include the tragedy of the commons, Prisoner’s Dilemma-type games, and Nash equilibria. Applying a narrowly self-maximizing logic yields suboptimal results for everybody. But tackled as coordinated action problems, with monitoring and enforcement— they’re easily solved to greater benefits to each and all. Precisely the lack of this complex cross-agent coordination prevents “the market” from increasing efficiencies in our unintelligently evolved U.S. health-care system. Competition’s benefits are created by constraints. Creative responses to designed and guided limits can work better than “natural constraints” in avoiding negative-sum games.

Free competition does not magically lead to the best outcome in nature. Nor does it in economics. The magic of markets isn’t like the magic of science; it’s more akin to stage magic, where the effect is achieved by misdirection. A selective spotlight story focuses our attention, on the one hand, on the benefits of unbridled competition, but draws attention away from the other, invisible hand, as its busy externalizing costs or in other ways causing harm. This oversimplifying and oversold story has outlived its fitness. Our choice is either to be as dumb as trees, or to guide competition for better outcomes.

Some are waking up to nature’s lessons for economics, for example, Robert Frank author of The Darwin Economy. But much work remains to be done to overcome old myths. Too many parables that have been proven wrong are still peddled by politicians. For example, Mitt Romney’s voucher plan for Medicare is built on this error—an unfounded faith in unguided competition’s creed.

8.     Corporations Just Can’t Help It

A giant suckering sound can be heard in the land. It’s more dangerous than the giant sucking sound Ross Perot heard in 1992. It’s the sound of us being suckered into collaborating in an economy that’s not run “for the people,” and that sucks for most “of the people.”  Sadly, we’re seeing the sound spirit of enterprise being replaced by the unsound spirit of exploitation.

Politicians and pundits eagerly examine economic data to determine if we’re heading for recovery, or recession or depression. But America no longer has an economy that is well described by a single set of aggregate statistics, and a key question is recession or recovery for whom? A substantial majority of the American people, the slumpen masses, have been, in effect, in recession, or at least stagnation, for decades, even as the aggregate statistics have shown growth. Ours is now a tale of two economies. The wages of 80% of workers have not increased in real terms in 20 years. In the same period, worker productivity has essentially doubled.

This new profit un-sharing economy has been the work of psychopaths. Though most of us have never met a psychopath, the majority of us work for them. I don't mean that most bosses or CEOs are psychopaths but that, as William Deresiewicz pointed out in a New York Times op-ed, if corporations are people, it’s a legitimate question to ask what kind of people they are. The “answer,” Deresiewicz wrote, “was precisely, psychopaths: indifferent to others, incapable of guilt, exclusively devoted to their own interests.”  For the sake of convenience, let’s call such organizations psycho-corps.

Unbridled psycho-corps work in global-scale system that drives many decent people into the business of banal badness. Hannah Arendt coined the expression “the banality of evil” to describe how millions of ordinary, not intentionally evil Germans did the bidding of their Nazi bosses, mostly motivated by the need to feed their families and to secure their pensions. Similar pressures are at work in under-regulated capitalism (though psycho-corps, unlike the Nazis, now make fewer pension promises). With the ever present excuse of responsibility to shareholders and a duty to maximize profits, corporations get decent people to do the work of psychopaths: for example, by paying bonuses to someone in your management chain to figure out how not to share profits with you, or to figure out how to avoid bearing the costs of pollution; or by figuring out how to get a free ride by avoiding corporate taxes; or to lobby for subsidies that deplete the public purse for private profit.

American capitalism used to be run more inclusively. Now, most if not all of the benefits of productivity gains go to the “job creators” and not the job doers. We’re told that this is just the way global capitalism works now. But modern Germany again can provide a useful example, and in this case a happier one. Somehow, the universal laws of globalization work differently there. Somehow, their economy has been managed to avoid creating similar inequalities, they don’t have the same slumpen masses, or the same gargantuan gap growing between workers and the roaring away rampant uber-rich elite (the German ratio of CEO to worker pay is 11 to 1, compared to over 200 to 1 in the U.S.). Seems the laws of economic globalization are not like the laws of gravity, which are the same in Germany.

The final triumph of the psycho-corps is to turn government into business by other means: to get political leaders, who used to govern jurisdictions “for the people,” whose job it was to regulate and define market limits, to instead compete against other jurisdictions to create an ever more “business-friendly” environment. One that’s usually less friendly to every other part of society, especially the “public good” the Founders’ fought to enable and protect. “Business-friendly” often isn’t even friendly to the infrastructure businesses themselves need.

The adage that “it’s the economy, stupid” has to be modified. It’s not just the economy, it’s what you use the economy for. And we are stupid if we don’t corral the economy and its powerful players into serving the public good. They aren’t likely to volunteer from the goodness of their hearts. Especially as those hearts, good or bad, are enmeshed in a machinery that pressgangs them into psychopathic exploitation. Unrelenting pressure to maximize profits can push many markets into a winner-is-the-sinner race to the bottom. And most of us are collaborators in this global no-one’s-to-blame game.

9.     Truths About Lying In Politics

It’s illegal to advertise products with lies. We know it's simply wrong for businesses to profit from deceptively influencing your choices. If that weren't discouraged, they'd increasingly seek success by ever cleverer lying. And a commerce that encourages such untruths isn't efficient or productive or even workable in the long term. Yet somehow, the influences exercised on your choice of government are exempted from this logic, and left outside the limits of legal restraints. Isn’t it time political ads were held to at least the same standard as soap ads?

The relationship between politics and truth has gotten so bad, it needs counseling to prevent a divorce due to irreconcilable differences.  In two Reuters opinion pieces, “Looking for Truth in All the Wrong Places” and “Why We Vote for Liars,” Jack Shafer makes the case that politics and truth are rarely a good match, referencing books on the history of political lying, and comparing product markets to “political markets” to make useful analogies.

Shafer’s position is that it’s naive to expect politicians or their ads not to routinely lie. Despite the fact-checking circus and commentator kerfuffles, politicians “rarely are forced to pay a political price when they butcher the truth.” So "of course [politicians] continue to lie even when called out," concluding that this isn't a problem because voters expect it and because it works. The fact that fact-bending works is a scientifically proven fact. Scientists call one aspect of this phenomenon source attribution error. Some of the contents of political ads on TV are easily remembered as if they were news. Increasing exploitation of this brain bug is a major reason we have a democracy drowning in deep disinformation.

Shafer writes that voters “crave rhetoric that moves their un–fact-checked hearts,” which illustrates another confounding cognitive characteristic scientists call confirmation bias. We rarely listen neutrally for facts or evidence; rather, we listen for what confirms our heartfelt prior beliefs. That this is measurably true means we must actively seek to balance our own biases if we are to make better political decisions.

But here, Shafer makes an election-endangering error. Rhetoric needn’t be craven or deceptive. After all, rhetoric is simply the art of persuasive speech, which doesn’t necessarily entail falsehood. That’s precisely the legal line drawn in product ads, which are commercial rhetoric. Be as persuasive as you can, but don’t mislead. Truth-in-advertising laws require ads to be “truthful and not deceptive,” to “have evidence to back up claims,” and “to not be unfair.”

Shafer goes on say that the “product” voters buy in “political markets” includes, as a desired feature, the ability to tell “durable, convincing lies” that signal “a candidate possesses the political skills to run the Executive Branch…[because] much of governance is about deception, bluff, and double-dealing.” He says “To lie about an issue is to be a politician…. To lie about a legal matter is to be a lawyer.”

This comparison of the lies of politicians and the lies of lawyers can be extended to help us see other errors in Shafer’s position. Lawyers can’t lie to win cases for their clients with impunity. They are subject to a code of professional ethics, with punishments, for example disbarment for failing to act in the best interests of their clients.

In addition, lawyerly lying or fact fudging for clients’ cases is constrained by an elaborate balancing machinery of justice. An independent judge acts as referee. Rules of evidence must be adhered to. Witness testimony that doesn’t tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” is subject to criminal penalty. Shafer’s own profession of journalism itself used to function as a more effective judge, as well as an expert counterwitness against each side. But journalists now confuse the need to be balanced with treating both sides of political issues equally. Judges must be balanced, but must also make decisive rulings that guide the jury. They must rule flawed evidence as inadmissible.

The press has become a more reluctant referee recently, relinquishing the role of making emphatic judgments. But if democracy is to work effectively, it needs equivalent restraints, or voters will have no beacons to help them navigate through the foul, factless fog of warring politicos.

10.  Government of Blind Leading the Blind

To believe you and your preferred leaders have no biases is to be for electing a government of the blind leading the blind. Our best brain science tells us that all humans, including—and sometimes especially—leaders, are fallible and biased and susceptible to blind spots, because of how our brains work. In judging erring leaders, we should be more forgiving of those who have shown that they have a more honest relationship with their mistakes, and who have proven that they use bias-balancing mechanisms in their policymaking.

Science has relearned what many wisdom traditions have long taught—that certain kinds of certainty certainly increase the risk of making serious errors. Overconfidence in your own correctness, a particular kind of pride, hubris, or vainglory, as the saying goes, goeth before a fall. We must be ever vigilant against signs of such bias in our leaders and the organizations they work in. Ask yourself: Does the way they make decisions increase or decrease their susceptibility to their own biases? Do they allow experience to educate and alter their assumptions? Or do they cling to doctrines despite data demonstrating that they don’t work? These questions make clear a key asymmetry between the two main political parties.

In this sense, the Republican Party has shown itself to be too true to its beliefs by allowing dogma to trump data. They continue to preach their free-market faith in the effects of lower taxes and lighter regulations, in the face of the fact that such policies didn’t deliver the promised economic benefits the last time they were tried. Those policies did, however, deliver an increased share of the national economy to the richest, while weakening the rest of “the people.” John Maynard Keynes once said, "When my information changes, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?" Applying Keynes’s question to the Republicans leaves only two possibilities: They are betting on their blind faith, or they want to extend the “not for the people” effects their policies achieved before.

Unlike the GOP, the Democratic Party has demonstrated that it can counterbalance its biases. Democrats regularly seek solutions across the aisle and add them into their policies, so much so that Ezra Klein, writing in the New York Review of Books, described Obama’s 2012 platform as consisting of “Romney’s health care… Gingrich’s environmental policies… and a mixture of the Bush and Clinton tax rates.” Klein also says that the GOP has tried to tarnish these as “the greatest threat to capitalism since Karl Marx sat down for a beer with Friedrich Engels.” This is a particularly untrustworthy and treacherous twist. Rather than be seen as willing to work constructively with Democrats, the GOP seems to prefer to shoot itself, and the country, in the foot, for the sake of gaining a “political” advantage in the game of getting elected. They put seeming different from Democrats, by repudiating ideas they created and once championed, ahead of advancing policies they previously told us were good for the country.

It’s an especially foolish error to fail to hold politicians and their parties responsible not only for specific lies and the problematic outcomes of particular policies, but also for the general processes they have demonstrated they use. These days, if you’re inclined to support GOP policies, voting for Democrats will get you many of the better, less blind-spotted GOP ideas.

It remains a trustworthy truth that to err is human, but to forgive, if done unselectively, is a political error. To paraphrase Groucho Marx on biases, who are you going to believe, me or your lying biases?

Conclusion: Good Government and the Logic of INTER-dependence

America’s founders fought for freedom from tyranny and bad government. They aimed to advance those arcs of history that tend toward juster governments. As the Founders made clear in the Constitution, good governments have a duty to promote the general welfare. Their nation now threatens itself, by not resisting a tyrantless tyranny of errors in the ideas that dominate its political. But a free democratic people can only be subdued by elective errors. And such errors are possible only if the people wrongly understand their real interests. Properly understood, these interests must build on, to use the words of the Declaration of Independence, “Laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.”

Tyrannies share with all forms of bad government the essential error that they rule for the benefit of the rulers. These essays expose errors that have loosened our grip on how “of the people,” and “by the people,” must meet the just end of all good government, which is ruling “for the people” as a whole. Are leaders governing “for the people” when they enact laws enabling private interests to profit by plundering the public purse (we saw examples of this by the pharmaceutical  industry, ExxonMobil, and General Electric), or seek tax changes that would have the strong and successful do less for the public good while asking that the less strong do more? Too often, seeing those sorts of errors leads to greater support for the idea that less government is better. But whether big or small, a government that isn’t strong enough to prevent an unbridled machinery of markets from mercilessly maximizing private gain at the expense of the public good cannot meet the test of the logic of Lincoln and the Founders.

Some feel they need to get the government off their backs, but the truth is little else has your back, especially in times of trouble. The Founders knew nothing else is designed to, or has incentives to, invest in and protect “the public good” or to promote “the general welfare”. Both of which are the common ground in which we all grow our fortunes.

Resistance to injustice and oppression may be an essential element of human nature, with its origins deep in prehistory. The anthropologist Chris Boehm, writing about the largest survey of known hunter-gatherer cultures, has proposed that “counter-dominant coalitions” are essentially universal and therefore could be a common human trait. Cultures that successfully harness the division of labor must also develop sustainable rules for fair division of the resulting proceeds. Otherwise, those who feel unjustly treated can form unions of the dominated to constrain those who would oppress them (e.g. by abusing their power and overexploiting common resources). This is precisely the force that fired the foundry of our freedoms. The power “of the people” properly organized against domination that damages the general welfare cannot be resisted. William Berkley, who governed the colony of Virginia in the mid-1600s, understood this when he wrote, “Oh how miserable is that man who must govern a people [of which] six parts of seven are poor, in debt, discontented, and armed!”

Those who would now run the country not “for the people” but for the benefit of their own narrowly conceived interests should heed Berkley’s warning and remind themselves that the nation’s independence is built on a logic of national INTER-dependence.  The Founders made this clear in their declarations of the importance of “Laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” Good government is all about interdependences. It’s the process of prioritizing and referring those interdependencies for the benefit of the whole.

In this, as in every, election we must stir once more those mystic chords that connect us to our constitutional duties to the “public good” and the “general welfare.” And remain loyal to the logic and limits the Founders laid down in the nations defining document. Or we risk cracking the noble heart of this great nation’s foundation.