J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 1166

Making Sense of Friedrich A. von Hayek: Live from La Farine CCXXXV: August 7, 2014: Virtual Office Hours/The Honest Broker for the Week of August 9, 2014

Over at Equitable Growth: One way to conceptualize it all is to think of it as the shape of a river:

The first current is the Adam Smith current, which makes the classical liberal bid: Smith claims that the system of natural liberty; with government restricted to the rule of law, infrastructure, defense, and education; is the best of all social arrangements.

This first current is then joined by the Karl Polanyi current: Polanyi says that, empirically, at least in the Industrial Age, the system of natural liberty fails to produce a good-enough society. The system of natural liberty turns land, labor, and finance into commodities. The market then moves them about the board in its typically disruptive fashion: "all that is solid melts into air", or perhaps "established and inherited social orders are steamed away". But land, finance, and labor--these three are not real commodities. They are, rather, "fictitious commodities", for nobody wants their ability to earn a living, or to live where they grew up, or to start a business to be subject to the disruptive wheel of market fortuna. READ MOAR:

The social disruption produced by allowing the prices of these "fictitious commodities" to be set by market forces is too great to be sustained. Politics will not allow it. And so a good society needs to regulate: A good society needs to regulate the market for land so that people are not thrown off of what they have good reason to regard as theirs even if they lack the proper pieces of paper. A good society needs to regulate the market for finance in order to maintain full employment and price stability. A good society needs to regulate the market for labor to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to work at a living wage.

Thus we must move forward from classical liberalism to social democracy.

That is Karl Polanyi's argument. And it is convincing. Classical liberalism supports and justifies economies that produce a great deal of unnecessary human misery: that seems very, very clear indeed by the time of the Great Depression. As John Maynard Keynes wrote in his 1926 essay, "The End of Laissez Faire", nineteenth and early twentieth-century history teach one big lesson:

It is not true that individuals possess a prescriptive 'natural liberty' in their economic activities. There is no 'compact' conferring perpetual rights on those who Have or on those who Acquire. The world is not so governed from above that private and social interest always coincide. It is not so managed here below that in practice they coincide. It is not a correct deduction from the principles of economics that enlightened self-interest always operates in the public interest. Nor is it true that self-interest generally is enlightened; more often individuals acting separately to promote their own ends are too ignorant or too weak to attain even these. Experience does not show that individuals, when they make up a social unit, are always less clear-sighted than when they act separately. We cannot therefore settle on abstract grounds, but must handle on its merits in detail... distinguish afresh the Agenda of government from the Non-Agenda; and... devise forms of government within a democracy which shall be capable of accomplishing the Agenda...

Why then was classical liberalism so strong at the end of the nineteenth century? Keynes's view:

The early nineteenth century... harmonised the conservative individualism of Locke, Hume, Johnson, and Burke with the socialism and democratic egalitarianism of Rousseau, Paley, Bentham, and Godwin.... Nevertheless, that age would have been hard put to it to achieve this harmony of opposites if it had not been for the economists.... To the philosophical doctrine that the government has no right to interfere, and the divine that it has no need to interfere, there is added a scientific proof that its interference is inexpedient.... The corruption and incompetence of eighteenth-century government... material progress between 1750 and 1850 came from individual initiative, and owed almost nothing to the directive influence of organised society... the innovations of Darwin.... The economists were teaching that wealth, commerce, and machinery were the children of free competition--that free competition built London. But the Darwinians could go one better than that--free competition had built man.... Socialist interferences became, in the light of this grander synthesis, not merely inexpedient, but impious....

These reasons and this atmosphere are the explanations... why we feel such a strong bias in favour of laissez-faire.... We have not read these authors.... Nevertheless we should not... think as we do, if Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Paley, Adam Smith, Bentham, and Miss Martineau had not thought and written.... I have said that it was the economists who furnished the scientific doctrine by which the practical man could solve the contradiction between egoism and socialism.... I hasten to qualify.... It is what the popularisers and the vulgarisers said.... The popularity of the doctrine must be laid at the door of the political philosophers of the day, whom it happened to suit, rather than of the political economists...

Classical liberalism--laissez-faire--was a mighty intellectual current. But empirical reality was mightier still, especially in the form of the Great Depression. And so the main channel became social democracy. And so, I think, it remains today.

But as the river entered its delta, it did spread out. There are three other channels in the delta besides Polanyi-style social democracy: call them Leninism, Keynesianism, and Hayekism:

Lenin says the social democracy or democratic socialism is unstable. The bourgeoisie is hegemonic. It will turn the mechanisms of the democratic state to its own purposes. What is needed is aggressive communism to exterminate the bourgeoisie as a class. Only after the aristos and the bourgeoisie and the hep-men and the kulaks and the careerist bureaucrats have been eliminated can a properly-good society be built.

Keynes says that we really need much less social democracy (or democratic socialism) than the main Polanyi current believes. Simply stabilize aggregate demand at a high level via clever central bank financial engineering, and people will not mind that the market treats the "fictitious commodities" like commodities. Moreover, the taste-making and the thrift-promoting virtues of the bourgeoisie sitting at the top of a fairly-steep socioeconomic pyramid are a feature, not a bug, for a good society.

Hayek says that the problem with classical liberalism was that it was not pure enough. The government needed to restrict itself to establishing the rule of law and to using antitrust to break up monopolies. It was the overreach of the government beyond those limits, via central banking and social democracy, that caused all the trouble. A democratic government needs to limit itself to rule of law and antitrust--and perhaps soup kitchens and shelters. And what if democracy turns out not to produce a government that limits itself to those activities? Then, Hayek says, so much the worse for democracy. A Pinochet is then called for to, in a Lykourgan moment, minimalize the state. After social democracy has been leveled and the rubble cleared away, then--perhaps--a limited range of issues can be discussed and debated by a--limited--restored democracy, with some kind of group of right-wing army officers descended from latifundistas Council of Guardians in the background to ensure that property remains sacred and protected, and the government small enough to fit in a bathtub.

And as you study the thought of Hayek, recognized that there are three very different and distinct subcurrents reinforcing, opposing, and confusing each other:

The Good Economist Hayek is the thinker who has mind-blowing insights into just why the competitive market system is such a marvelous societal device for coordinating our by now 7.2 billion-wide global division of labor. Few other economists imagined that Lenin's centrally-planned economy behind the Iron Curtain was doomed to settle at a level of productivity 1/5 that of the capitalist industrial market economies outside. Hayek did so imagine. And Hayek had dazzling insights as to why. Explaining the thought of this Hayek requires not sociology or history of thought but rather appreciation, admiration, and respect for pure genius.

The Bad Economist Hayek is the thinker who was certain that Keynes had to be wrong, and that the mass unemployment of the Great Depression had to have in some mysterious way been the fault of some excessively-profligate government entity (or perhaps of those people excessively clever with money--fractional-reserve bankers, and those who claim not the natural increase of flocks but rather the interest on barren gold). Why Hayek could not see with everybody else--including Milton Friedman--that the Great Depression proved that Say's Law was false in theory, and that aggregate demand needed to be properly and delicately managed in order to make Say's Law true in practice is largely a mystery. Nearly everyone else did: the Lionel Robbinses and the Arthur Burnses quickly marked their beliefs to market after the Great Depression and figured out how to translate what they thought into acceptable post-World War II Keynesian language. Hayek never did.

My hypothesis is that the explanation is theology: For Hayek, the market could never fail. For Hayek, the market could only be failed. And the only way it could be failed was if its apostles were not pure enough.

The structure of the argument is familiar: We first see it in the syllogism:

YHWH had promised victory to his people Israel if they were faithful.
We tried to be faithful.
Here we are captive in Babylon.
Clearly we were not faithful enough to YHWH.
We need to strive much harder to be more faithful to YHWH in the future.

But that the argument is familiar to us all does not make it right.

And, indeed, right now as I am opening my mail I find, from the President of the Cato Institute:

"Pure capitalism". Impure capitalism, you see, doesn't work. The blurb from Charles Koch--which did not scan--is: "Required reading.... Shows how our economic crisis was a failure, not of the free market, but of government."

Enough said?

The Political Economist Hayek is the founder of the Mont Pelerin Society, who sets as his post-World War II lifetime task the rollback of social democracy. That is the Hayek who, we think, urges Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s to pull a Pinochet in Britain on the Labour Party and the United Mine Workers. She answers him thus:

The progression from Allende's Socialism to the free enterprise capitalist economy of the 1980s is a striking example of economic reform from which we can learn many lessons. However, I am sure you will agree that, in Britain with our democratic institutions and the need for a high degree of consent, some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable. Our reform must be in line with our traditions and our Constitution. At times the process may seem painfully slow. But I am certain we shall achieve our reforms in our own way and in our own time...

The original letter from Hayek appears to be missing from the places it should be. I suspect it was a real doozy.

With respect to this Hayek, I believe that three important questions naturally suggest themselves: Why the urgency of the task? Why the certainty of the aim? WTF with democracy and Pinochet?

Why the urgency of the task? The post-World War II world outside of the Iron Curtain sees remarkable prosperity: rapid growth, the egalitarian distribution, an increase in the human freedoms along nearly every dimension. The post-World War II social democracies are neither bureaucracies that stifle enterprise and produce economic stagnation nor murderous Jacobins. To the east across the Iron Curtain remains the great grave threat of Stalin. Why not declare a domestic political truce in the west and focus on the Cold War?

The answer, I think, is that how you really believe that social democracy was The Road to Serfdom--that German social democracy had led to Weimar which led to Hitler by sapping the love of liberty and independence of the people, and that the same process was already well into train in the Anglo-Saxon democracies. Why Hayek thought this as decade after decade went by with no great upward leaps in the degree of central planning after Attlee's prime Minister ship is not at all clear. What is clear is that he greeted the stagflation of the 1970s as evidence that he had been completely right all along.

Perhaps it was Hayek's social conservatism allowed him to be confident that he was right even during the days of prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s. Uppity Negroes, uppity women, uppity hippies--all, to him, signs of deep moral and spiritual decay that by the logic of The Road to Serfdom had to bring economic and then political catastrophe in their train. But this is speculation.

Why the certainty of the aim? this, I think, is clear. Hayek was not a believer in technocracy. For Hayek, the government would always be the tool of the ruling class. The ruling class might, briefly, be the envious poor who would destroy the economy by confiscating entrepreneurial wealth and then sharing it out. The ruling class might be the monopolists. The ruling class might be the "New Class" of anti-entrepreneurial do-gooder social-worker types. In any case, the results of giving the government more power would be bad. Much better to limit the government to establishing the rule of law and breaking up private monopolies via antitrust. (And Hayek's students would quickly ditch that last part.)

But in addition there is a fourth possible ruling class: one modeled after the Habsburg aristocracy that ruled the land in which Hayek was born.

WTF with democracy and Pinochet? it is very clear that Hayek was very comfortable saying that he would much rather have an authoritarian classical-liberal government then a democratic government that followed "illiberal" economic policies. But where are these authoritarians respect the rule of law supposed to come from? Why should governments that do not respect the lives of their people--that throw people out of helicopters into the South Pacific--or the liberty of their people--that "disappear" critics who cross the line and are too strident--respect the property of their people? Both theoretical and empirical considerations would tend to teach the lesson respect for the rule of law is a seamless garment: governments committed to respecting free speech and free elections would seem to be much more likely to commit themselves to respecting property than those that did not. Yet Hayek does not see it in the way I would regard as natural. Why not?

The natural place to look is, I think, to recognize that Hayek was not born on the shores of the North Atlantic. The North Atlantic's dictators--Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, Vidkun Quisling, Philippe Petain, Antonio Salazar--are none of them prizes. But Hayek was formed in Austria. From his perspective the property and enterprise respecting Imperial Habsburg government of Franz Josef eager to make no waves, to hold what it has, and to keep the lid off the pressure cooker appears not unattractive. This is especially so when you contrasted would be really existing authoritarian alternatives: anti-Semitic populist demagogue mayors of Vienna; nationalist Serbian or Croatian politicians interested in maintaining popular legitimacy by waging class war or ethnic war; separatists who seek independence and then one man, one vote, one time. An "authoritarian" after the manner of Franz Josef looks quite attractive in this context--and if you convince yourself but they are as dedicated to small government neoliberalism as you are, and that the Lykourgan moment of the form will be followed by soft rule and popular assent, so much the better. And if the popular assent is not forthcoming? Then Hayek can blame the socialists, and say it is their fault for not understanding how good a deal they are offered.

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Noted for Your Lunchtime Procrastination for August 7, 2014

Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog

Big Thinking About ObamaCare: Wednesday Focus for August 6, 2014 | Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Lunchtime Must-Read: David Weigel: Rick Perlstein's Critics: The Plagiarism Dead-Enders | Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Lunchtime Must-Read: Mark Schmitt: Righting the GOP: Rick Perlstein's "The Invisible Bridge" | Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Lunchtime Must-Read: Richard Mayhew: Brad Delong Smackdown Watch | Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Nick Bunker: Technology might not reduce employment, but it does affect the labor market | Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Janet Currie: Health, wealth and foreclosure | TheHill
Armin Rick: The prison boom and black-white economic inequality | Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Nick Bunker: What the new S&P report means for research on economic inequality and growth | Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Nick Bunker: Efficiency, inequality, and the costs of redistribution | Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Nick Bunker: How much is money worth at different income levels? | Washington Center for Equitable Growth

Plus:

Things to Read at Lunchtime on August 7, 2014 | Washington Center for Equitable Growth

Must- and Shall-Reads:

Mark Schmitt: Righting the GOP: Rick Perlstein's The Invisible Bridge: "Perlstein’s subject is always political movements and political culture.... [Perlstein] rests too much agency in Reagan, the individual, when the whole point of the Perlstein project is to trace the lines of the conservative counterrevolution, undistracted by the charms and psychodrama of its front men. The book works best when it does exactly that, just as the 1976 Reagan campaign... the movement--in the form of its issues and its direct-mail operations--was more successful than the man.... There is a great book within The Invisible Bridge, but it would be about 500 pages... about the structure and strength of the conservative movement, the continuities between Nixon’s politics and Reagan’s, the failure of liberals and Democrats (and organized labor, whose disintegration during the decade goes mostly unmentioned) to speak to the economic and cultural panic of the decade..."

David Weigel: Rick Perlstein's Critics: The Plagiarism Dead-Enders Alexandra Alter... [said] Sam Tanenhaus... 'Lamenting the lack of primary sources'... 'wrote that Mr. Perlstein had "adopted the methodology of the web aggregator"'. It was a serious accusation, but now that Tanenhaus's review is up, there's very little to it. Tanenhaus['s calling]... the mid-1970s... the moment when right-wingers became 'inverse Marxists' and 'revanchists'. How is this different than Perlstein's argument? Perlstein just lacks Tanenhaus's pompous fatalism.... The 'web aggregator' line looks even worse.... Reading [Tanenhaus], you might assume that Perlstein abandoned the archives to write this book. But Perlstein's online notes refer to findings from Michael Deaver's papers... Reagan's papers... Nixon's papers... half a dozen other primary source archives. Perlstein does use more online sources than his 2001 book. Has anything happened since 2001? Have more sources been placed online? Why, yes, they have.... Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner's replacement level gossip columnist, reports... 'the Atlantic magazine said Perlstein has shown in his latest political history that he is less a researcher-historian than a simple "web aggregator" who collects publicly available information and stitches it into a book'..."

Richard Mayhew: Brad Delong Smackdown Watch "Brad Delong... is getting one thing significantly wrong.... Recently, I wrote about AIDS medications and Gresham’s Law applying to health insurance... the first salvo of the 'brainpower health insurance companies devoted to gaming the system' as it is the most obvious target to create policies that are amazingly ugly to people with chronic, expensive conditions.... We’re seeing this with AIDS/HIV patients for two reasons. The first is that this is a population with known high costs that insurers really want to avoid. Secondly, there is a significant network of very effective advocates who are able to identify this as a business strategy of some insurers and scream about it. I would be shocked if other very high cost but very small population diseases are not being 'top-tiered/specialty tier for generics' as a risk avoidance strategies, but I have not heard about them. The policy solution is simple, engage in a regulatory arms race to force insurance companies to compete on providing health coverage and health improvement instead of cherry picking good risk and off-loading bad risk to competitors and/or government programs. This will work in most Blue states and some Red states..."

Perry Link: Evan Osnos: He Exposed Corrupt China Before He Left: "Osnos begins by noticing a bifurcation in popular Western views of China—roughly, a good China of rising material standards and a bad China of repressive government—and he wants to reconcile the two.... When we reach the book’s powerful end it is obvious that he does [understand].... Osnos is able, much to his credit, to take the further step of estimating what [the Chinese] would think if they lived with a free press. His expatriate friends criticize him for paying too much attention to dissidents who are 'famous in New York or Paris [but] unknown to ordinary Chinese citizens'.... The intensity with which they censor a writer like Liu Xiaobo is eloquent evidence of their own judgment that Liu’s ideas would have strong appeal if they were allowed out.... By the end of his book Osnos has moved a considerable distance from China as an amusing place to China as a distressed place. He invites the question of how long the Chinese people are going to put up with their situation.... Osnos relates how a woman with connections near the top of the Party approached his wife, Sarabeth, asking that the Osnos couple relay to Michael Forsythe, then a Bloomberg News reporter who had revealed that the family of China’s president Xi Jinping was worth hundreds of millions of dollars, this message: Forsythe and his family 'can’t stay in China…. Something will happen. It will look like an accident.... He’ll just be found dead'.... I was struck that Osnos is publishing Age of Ambition as he leaves China to go write for The New Yorker from Washington, D.C. Would he have written the same way if he had wanted to stay longer?..."

Barry Ritholtz: Naming the Biggest Losers in America "When we look at the weak sectors... it should be obvious that our national economic wounds are mostly self-inflicted.... During a recession and recovery, spending should rise and the Fed should make credit less expensive. Except in this cycle. Before you start telling me about beliefs and ideology and the deficit, all one needs to do is compare federal spending during the 2001 recession cycle, with a Republican controlling the White House.... The importance of reducing deficits and having a smaller government only applies when the GOP doesn't control the White House.... Block grants to the states could have helped... as they have in past recessions. But they weren’t, for partisan political reasons. The nation is worse off for it. Business equipment investment and other forms of capital expenditures have been jump started with an accelerated depreciation tax allowances in past recessions. For some reason, this was allowed to lapse in 2013. This wasn't very smart.... The biggest drag of all has been the persistent weakness in residential real estate.... As we noted in 'The Best Housing Program You've Never Heard of', there were some attempts to ameliorate this, but they amounted to too little too late.... There is plenty of blame to spread around, but not in equal measures to both parties.... Congress is a national embarrassment. That sentence is one we all have believed at one time or another to be true. But the sentence I never imagined I would ever write is this: Thank goodness for the Federal Reserve."

Robert Farley: The Strategic Problems in Ukraine "Putin does not want to invade Ukraine; if he actively sought this end, he would already have ordered military action.... He wants... to minimize US and European sanctions, and to maximize the size of the buffer zones.... Putin has to contend with... pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine and Russian nationalists in Russia.... Energy sanctions are a two way street.... The military balance, however, strongly favors Russia.... My guess is that we’ll see a short, conventional war of maneuver between Russia and Ukraine, that the Russians will win, but will restrain its activities to Donetsk, Luhansk, and environs. It’s going to be very difficult for the Ukrainian military to restrain itself short of complete victory over the separatists, and the drive for victory will probably spur Russian intervention.  With luck, however, the war will be quick, only moderately destructive, and the political aftermath will be manageable."

And:

Nicholas Bagley: Yes, Halbig should be taken en banc
Adam Posen: The inequality debate avoids asking who is harmed
Caroline Freund and Sarah Oliver: The Missing Women in the Inequality Discussion

And Over Here:

Liveblogging World War II: August 7, 1944: Mortain (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)
Over at Equitable Growth: Big Thinking About ObamaCare: Wednesday Focus for August 6, 2014 (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)
Hoisted from the Archives from Ten Years Ago: The Cincinnati: An Alternate History Book I Would Pay Good Money to Read... (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)
Liveblogging the American Revolution: August 6, 1776: John Adams to Abigail Adams (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)

Should Be Aware of:

Scott Lemieux: The conservative legal case against ObamaCare keeps getting nuttier "In the latest legal battle over ObamaCare, sensible observers are having what can only be described as a crazy-pills moment.... In last month's ruling in Halbig v. Burwell.... The Obama administration has asked for an en banc hearing — that is, a hearing before the D.C. Circuit as a whole. The panel's extremely weak opinion has no chance of surviving an en banc hearing if it is granted. And since the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the argument accepted by Halbig, there would be no lower-court split for the Supreme Court to resolve, making it much less likely that the nation's highest court would take the case.... According to White and Adler, this case does not meet the standard of 'exceptional importance' required by Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure for an en banc rehearing. To restate these arguments is to refute them. The panel's holding would throw the American health insurance market into chaos.... The argument is also a monument to bad faith. If the entire D.C. Circuit vacates the Halbig ruling, it is certain that Adler and his colleagues will immediately rediscover the importance of the case, and ask the Supreme Court to review it..."

Takatoshi Ito: We Are All QE-sians Now: "The four major banks (BOJ, FRB, BOE and ECB) have adopted unconventional monetary policy, or broadly-defined quantitative easing (QE), in the last several years. The broadly-defined QE can be classified into comprehensive easing (CE) and pure-QE. The former is aimed at purchasing assets of dysfunctional markets and the latter is aimed at expanding monetary base to stimulate demands. The objective of this paper is three-fold. First, various QE adopted by four central banks are classified into CE and pure-QE. Second, the Bank of Japan (BOJ) is a harbinger for most QE measures in its earlier QE period of 2001-2006. Third, effects of BOJ’s QE measures are empirically investigated with focus on the three possible transmission channels with monthly data since January 1999. The long-term interest rate tends to be lower and the yield curve tends to be flattened when the monetary base expands faster than nominal GDP. The yen vis-à-vis the US dollar tends to depreciate when the Japanese monetary base expands faster than the US monetary base. An impact of monetary base expansion on the inflation expectation is not confirmed. Findings are consistent with a view that QE is effective, by lowering the long-term interest rate and the currency depreciation."

Liveblogging World War II: August 7, 1944: Mortain

From Rick Atkinson, The Guns at Last Light:

Such a place was Mortain, a village of 1,300, twenty miles east of Avranches.... The last German occupier in Mortain had been gunned down on August 3 by a French policeman armed with a nineteenth-century rifle and one bullet. Hours later, the 1st Infantry Division arrived, only to move along on August 6, supplanted on that warm, luminous Sunday by the 30th Division.... Two of the division’s nine infantry battalions had been dispatched elsewhere; the rest now burrowed in across a seven-mile front.

Of keen interest was stony, steep Montjoie, looming over Mortain to the east and so named because from here joyful pilgrims first caught sight of Mont-St.-Michel, twenty-seven miles distant. To GIs the mile-long escarpment was simply Hill 314, after its height in meters; seven hundred men from the 2nd Battalion of the 120th Infantry chuffed to the crest before scratching at the skimpy fieldworks left by the 1st Division....

Montgomery’s assessment that “the enemy situation is far from good” was unarguable, and that very vulnerability made the Germans desperate. From his East Prussian headquarters a thousand miles to the east, Hitler detected “a unique opportunity, which will never return … to drive into an extremely exposed enemy area.” At his direction, a counterattack spearheaded by four panzer divisions was to blast through Mortain to Avranches, cleaving Patton’s Third Army from Hodges’s First Army and, if not cudgeling the invaders back to their ships, at least reimposing the static war of early summer. “Tell Kluge,” Hitler added in a message sent through high command, “that he should keep his eyes riveted to the front and on the enemy without ever looking backward.”

Field Marshal Kluge replied that “such an attack if not immediately successful” would risk envelopment and annihilation. Even if the spearhead reached Avranches, the force would be too weak to hold its gains against Allied air, artillery, and armor. Eight German divisions had already been obliterated during July fighting in and below the Cotentin, plus others written off in Brittany and the isolated Channel Islands. Six replacement divisions had recently arrived on the Norman front from southern France and the Pas de Calais, permitting a reorganization of sorts: Panzer Group West was rechristened Fifth Panzer Army, with a dozen divisions in four corps, and Seventh Army counted sixteen divisions. Yet this host was fragile and dispirited. Hitler waved away all caviling. The attack would go forward, as ordered, “recklessly to the sea, regardless of the risk."

Swirling fog lifted and descended with stage-curtain melodrama in the balmy small hours of August 7. Shortly after one A.M., American pickets reported a spatter of rifle fire, followed by the distinctive growl of panzers on the hunt. Then the attack slammed against the 30th Division front in scalding, scarlet gusts: 26,000 Germans in the first echelon, with 120 tanks....

Almost nothing went right in the German attack. A stricken Allied fighter-bomber smashed into the lead tank of the 1st SS Panzer Division, blocking the column for hours. Only three of six enemy spearheads surged forward on time. The right wing, anchored by the 116th Panzer Division, hardly budged; the commander would be sacked for “uninspired and negative” leadership. Of three hundred Luftwaffe fighters promised for the battle, not one reached the front. The German weight fell heaviest on St.-Barthélemy, a crossroads two miles north of Mortain. Aiming at muzzle flashes, U.S. tank destroyer crews here demolished a Panther with a 3-inch slug at fifty yards, then another at thirty yards; both slewed across the road, burning with white fury. GIs at one roadblock let the panzers roll through, then butchered the grenadiers trailing behind. The 1st Battalion of the 117th Infantry suffered 350 casualties and retired to a hillside a thousand yards west of St.-Barthélemy, but the German offensive had been delayed six hours, with forty panzers soon crippled.

Meanwhile, at the Abbaye Blanche, a twelfth-century stone heap just north of Mortain, a platoon of sixty-six men with bazookas and artillery repelled an SS regiment. GIs stood fast against tanks, flamethrowers, and grenades. More than sixty enemy vehicles would be knocked out hub-to-hub-to-hub. Dawn, that pitiless revealer of exigencies, unmasked the German predicament. Four armored divisions—from north to south, the 116th Panzer, the 2nd Panzer, and the 1st and 2nd SS Panzer—stood exposed and blinking in the brilliant sunshine once the fog burned off. “First really large concentration of enemy tanks seen since D-Day,” an RAF patrol reported. Typhoon fighter-bombers soon scalded the German ranks with two thousand 60-pound rockets and 20mm cannon rounds the size of tent pegs. Joined by cab ranks of Thunderbolts and Hurricanes, the planes attacked until dusk in a shark-feed frenzy. “Hundreds of German troops began spilling out into the road to spring for the open fields and hedgerows,” a Typhoon pilot reported. Only a few dozen tanks and trucks were actually demolished from the air, and more than a few sorties mistakenly hit American revetments. But scores of other vehicles were abandoned under the onslaught or were wrecked by field artillery: a dozen battalions—144 tubes—raked the two roads leading west from St.-Barthélemy.

A panzer corps headquarters described the attacks as “well-nigh unendurable,” and Seventh Army on August 7 conceded that “the actual attack has been at a standstill since 1300 hours.” The only exception to the “exceptionally poor start,” as Seventh Army described the offensive, was a narrow advance of four miles by the 2nd Panzer Division in the north, and the successful seizure of Mortain by the 2nd SS Panzer Division. Das Reich had struck at three A.M. on Monday in three columns, overrunning a roadblock to the south, capturing antitank guns to the north, and infiltrating through the 120th Infantry with help from two traitorous French guides....

A radioed query from the 30th Division headquarters six miles to the west—“What does your situation look like down there?”—drew a spare reply: “Looks like hell.” It also looked like hell from Hill 314, but at least the view was majestic. Lieutenant Weiss, with his field glasses and Signal Corps radio, had called in his first fire mission at six A.M., shooting only by sound and by map coordinates after sentries reported four hundred enemy troops scrabbling up the east slope. From a stone outcropping on the hill’s southern lip, among scrub pines and the animal fragrance of summer pastures, Weiss soon saw columns of German soldiers threading the plain below, including bicycle troops with rifles slung across their shoulders. Again he murmured incantations into the radio handset. Moments later, rushing shells fell in splashes of fire and the singing fragments that gunners called Big Iron. German mortar and 88mm shells answered, pummeling Montjoie’s rocky shoulders. Late in the afternoon Weiss radioed, “Enemy N, S, E, W.”...

Artillery curtains directed from Hill 314 paralyzed Das Reich, kept the 17th SS Panzer Grenadier Division from scaling the hill, and prevented a collapse of the 30th Division’s southern flank. White phosphorus forced enemy troops into the open, where they frantically brushed the burning flakes from skin and uniform; high-explosive shells then cut them to scraps. By nightfall, the German offensive had stalled completely; five divisions had been unable to punch through a single American division with fewer than six thousand infantrymen. “If only the Germans will go on attacking at Mortain for a few more days,” Montgomery cabled Brooke that evening, “it seems that they might not be able to get away”...

Lunchtime Must-Read: Richard Mayhew: Brad Delong Smackdown Watch

Richard Mayhew: Brad Delong Smackdown Watch "Brad Delong... is getting one thing significantly wrong.... Recently, I wrote about AIDS medications and Gresham’s Law applying to health insurance... the first salvo of the 'brainpower health insurance companies devoted to gaming the system' as it is the most obvious target to create policies that are amazingly ugly to people with chronic, expensive conditions.... We’re seeing this with AIDS/HIV patients for two reasons. The first is that this is a population with known high costs that insurers really want to avoid. Secondly, there is a significant network of very effective advocates who are able to identify this as a business strategy of some insurers and scream about it. I would be shocked if other very high cost but very small population diseases are not being 'top-tiered/specialty tier for generics' as a risk avoidance strategies, but I have not heard about them. The policy solution is simple, engage in a regulatory arms race to force insurance companies to compete on providing health coverage and health improvement instead of cherry picking good risk and off-loading bad risk to competitors and/or government programs. This will work in most Blue states and some Red states..."

Lunchtime Must-Read: David Weigel: Rick Perlstein's Critics: The Plagiarism Dead-Enders

David Weigel: Rick Perlstein's Critics: The Plagiarism Dead-Enders Alexandra Alter... [said] Sam Tanenhaus... 'Lamenting the lack of primary sources'... 'wrote that Mr. Perlstein had "adopted the methodology of the web aggregator"'. It was a serious accusation, but now that Tanenhaus's review is up, there's very little to it. Tanenhaus['s calling]... the mid-1970s... the moment when right-wingers became 'inverse Marxists' and 'revanchists'. How is this different than Perlstein's argument? Perlstein just lacks Tanenhaus's pompous fatalism.... The 'web aggregator' line looks even worse.... Reading [Tanenhaus], you might assume that Perlstein abandoned the archives to write this book. But Perlstein's online notes refer to findings from Michael Deaver's papers... Reagan's papers... Nixon's papers... half a dozen other primary source archives. Perlstein does use more online sources than his 2001 book. Has anything happened since 2001? Have more sources been placed online? Why, yes, they have.... Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner's replacement level gossip columnist, reports... 'the Atlantic magazine said Perlstein has shown in his latest political history that he is less a researcher-historian than a simple "web aggregator" who collects publicly available information and stitches it into a book'..."

The Atlantic Monthly and the New York Times have, I think, some explaining to do...

Over at Equitable Growth: Big Thinking About ObamaCare: Wednesday Focus for August 6, 2014

Over at Equitable Growth: Coffee yesterday with Peter Gosselin. Back in the day, when he worked for the Los Angeles Times he was one of the very very very best reporters covering American healthcare and related subjects. Then he was Tim Geithner's speechwriter. Now he is doing something at and, I think, underutilized --at least I find myself learning a lot less from him these days then I used to learn.

And at coffee he put me on the spot. He asked me what big thoughts I had about the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

So I stammered something relatively incoherent...

Now, however, I have had a chance to regroup. I have had an opportunity to bring some things that were barely or unconscious into the full light of reason. So I would like to try to do a better job...

Ten points: READ MOAR

This is an ugly sausage. It had to be passed with only Democratic votes. I did see this before. In the run-up to the 1993 Reconciliation bill, Bob Dole pledged that Clinton would get no Senate votes from Republicans. It was not, you understand, because Dole thought the policies were bad policies. It was because he wanted no Republican fingerprints on the bill, so if the economy tanked Republicans could use it as an issue. Not personal, or policy, just political. It seemed to me at the time that this was a rather silly thing for Dole to do. The Clinton economic policies were likely to work--they were, by and large, good policies. Republicans were much more likely to be eager to share credit for the boom than eager to run against Clinton on the economy. Forcing passage via Democratic votes degraded the quality of the bill from our perspective, but degraded it much more from Dole's perspective.

So it has proved with the ACA. The ACA was the best bill that could have been passed given that McConnell had persuaded Brown, Collins, Snowe, and Voinovich to oppose it rather than to bargain their votes to improve it. The ACA was much better than nothing. And the ACA is something that moderate Republicans are already profoundly unhappy they let themselves be bullied into lining up in opposition to. Everyone who gains coverage via the Medicaid expansion or via the Exchanges or who sleeps easier because they know they will still be able to afford health insurance if they lose their job knows that the Republicans wanted to keep them from getting that benefit--the Republican Noise Machine has made sure of that.

The Republican-Heritage Foundation piece of the bill--the exchanges--appear, to me at least, to be functioning much better than expected. I thought, given the amount of brainpower health insurance companies devoted to gaming the system, that they would have been able to blast large holes through community raining by crafting policies that only an idiot with chronic conditions would sign up for. That has not happened. Yet. But I am now considerably more optimistic about the possibility of providing effective social insurance via a health insurance marketplace dominated by for-profit insurance companies than I once was.

Where the Medicaid expansion has been allowed to take effect, it has taken effect. People are going to the doctor more, people are finding doctors to go to, and the only minus is one that we already knew: that Medicaid is not a terribly good way to spend our money in treating people with chronic conditions.

I still cannot believe that anybody smart and energetic enough to become president could have focused as little on and had as little idea how to manage the implementation of his career signature initiative as Barack Obama.

Matching Barack Obama on not understanding the situation is John Roberts: if you are going to rewrite the Medicaid expansion part of the law from the bench, you first brief yourself on what the Medicaid expansion is. You thus know that even though the reduction in Disproportionate Share payments is in another title of the bill that it is part of the Medicaid expansion. You thus know that the income floor for citizen subsidy eligibility at 138% of the poverty level is part of the Medicaid expansion. John Roberts did not do his homework when he legislated from the bench. And so he turned what was already an ugly sausage into a true dog's breakfast.

The end of rapid health-care inflation has been astonishing. It is hard to see how it can possibly be a thing unconnected with the ACA. But it is not clear what the important connections between the passage of the ACA and the slowing-down of health-care cost inflation have been.

The willingness of state-level Republican politicians to hurt their own people--those eligible for the Medicaid expansion, those who would benefit from a little insurance counseling to figure out how to take advantage of subsidies, those hospitals who need the Medicaid expansion to balance their finances, those doctors who would ultimately receive the subsidy dollars--is, as John Gruber says, "awesome in its evilness". The federal government has raised the money, and all the state has to do in order to get it spent is to say "yes". Especially in contrast with the extraordinary efforts state-level politicians routinely go through in order to attract other spending into their state, whether a BMW plant or a Social Security processing center, this demonstrates an extraordinary contempt for a large tranche of their own citizens. And when I reflect that a good third of that tranche reliably pull the lever for the Republican Party year after year...

The current disaster scenario involves Republican mega-sweeps in the 2016 election. But even in that case the ACA does not die. It gets implemented in Blue States and in half or so of Red States--and the other half of Red States fall even further behind the rest of the country than they are already. Think of TANF in the 1990s: a small plus for the poor of Blue States that had good ideas for what to do with what had been their AFDC money, and a large minus for the poor, especially the deeply-poor, of Red States that did not have good ideas.

With the ACA we have placed a lot of bets. The important thing for policy now is to let them ride and see how they come out. The thing to avoid is revisiting the issue until we have a sense of what in the ACA is working and what is not.

Come the 2020s the Cadillac Tax will start to bite, and we will have to decide whether we are happy with the shift from an employer-sponsored to individual-purchase-via-exchange insurance market regime that the Cadillac Tax will impel. We will have a much better idea then of what we should do than we can have now.

1153 words

Hoisted from the Archives from Ten Years Ago: The Cincinnati: An Alternate History Book I Would Pay Good Money to Read...

Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal: Alternate History: The Cincinnati: The Constitutional Convention essentially reproduced the late-eighteenth century division of power in the British government at the time: instead of King, Lords, and Commons we had President, Senate, and House of Representatives.

There were some tweaks: Individual Presidents were weakened by making them stand for four-year terms, while the Presidency was strengthened by giving it a mighty plebiscitary base. Congress was weakened by depriving it of the power to pass Bills of Attainder and Ex Post Facto laws. The Presidency was weakened by depriving it of the ability to bribe members of Congress by offering them posts of trust and profit. And the government as a whole was weakened in its authoritarian powers by the Bill of Rights.

But for the most part it was the late eighteenth-century British Constitution, dry-cleaned, brushed, and patched.

What if things had gone differently? What if the Founders had taken as their model not late eighteenth-century Britain, but that other great example of good government: the Antonine dynasty of the Roman Empire, in which each Emperor "adopted" the leading military politician of the next generation as his successor?

My brother sketches out what might then have happened:

OK. Each Imperator--chosen by the Cincinnati--serves for no more than two 10-year terms, with the mandate of the Cincinnati being to choose the most impressive available military politician as his successor.

Then we get:

1790-1800: Washington

1800-1810: Hamilton

1810-1820: "Light Horse" Harry Lee

1820-1830: Andrew Jackson

1830-1840: Andrew Jackson

1840-1850: James K. Polk (a stretch)

1850-1860: Zachary Taylor

1860-1870: Robert E. Lee (struggles to find a good general as successor)

1870-1880: U.S. Grant

1880-1890: Phil Sheridan

1890-1900: Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain

1900-1910: Teddy Roosevelt

1910-1920: Teddy Roosevelt

1920-1930: John Pershing

1930-1940: Douglas MacArthur (uh-oh)

1940-1950: George Marshall

1950-1960: Dwight Eisenhower

1960-1970: Maxwell Taylor

1970-1980: Matthew Ridgeway

1980-1990: Alexander Haig (uh-oh)

1990-2000: Colin Powell

2000-2010: Colin Powell

Well, I've seen worse lists of rulers, but I'm not sure we make it through the Great Depression with MacArthur.

Perhaps the Republic falls in 1935 to an insurrection led by Huey Long in the role of the Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus. Perhaps not. Certainly a very different United States. An inferior one? Again, perhaps.

Liveblogging the American Revolution: August 6, 1776: John Adams to Abigail Adams

Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 6 August 1776

Yours of 29 July came by this days Post, and made me very happy. Nabby, Charles, and Tommy, will have the smallpox, well, I don't doubt. Tell John he is a very lucky young Gentleman, to have it so much better, than his Mamma, his sister, and Brothers.

Mr. [Samuel Adams] will set out for Boston, on Monday, the 12. of August. I shall write by him. But I will not neglect Writing a few Lines by the Post. --

I have written a Resignation of my Place here, to the General Court, sometime ago, but it seems, they were adjourned, and therefore will not be able to consider the Matter, untill the 28 of this Month, when they will send some other Person here in my Stead. --

How I am to get home I dont know. When I see how Mr. A. goes, I will write you more particularly upon the subject. Whether to hire a Horse here, or to have a Man and two Horses come for me, I am not determined, must leave all undetermined at present. I want the Exercise of a journey so much, that I must return soon. The General Court will appoint some one to relieve me, I hope, the first Thing they do, after they come together. I shall take it for granted, that they will sett off, accordingly. My Health is so infirm that I can stay no longer.

We are in daily Expectation of some decisive Stroke at N. York. Dunmore has fled from Cheasapeak, and Clinton from Charlestown, and both have joined How, at Staten Island.

Noted for Your Morning Procrastination for August 6, 2014

Over at Equitable Growth--The Equitablog

Nick Bunker: Efficiency, inequality, and the costs of redistribution | Washington Center for Equitable Growth

Follow-Up Musings on the Philosophy of Probability: Tuesday Focus for August 5, 2014 | Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Why Is Employment Today So Much Lower than We Expected Seven Years Ago?: (Late) Monday Focus for August 5, 2014 | Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Evening Must-Read: James Pethokoukis: The ECB Continues to Ruin Europe | Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Afternoon Must-Read: Paul Krugman: Phosphate Memories | Washington Center for Equitable Growth
Lunchtime Must-Read: Brian Buetler: Watch Rand Paul Run for His Life Before Steve King Insults an Immigrant in Iowa | Washington Center for Equitable Growth

Plus:

Things to Read on the Morning of August 6, 2014 | Washington Center for Equitable Growth

Must- and Shall-Reads:

Brian Buetler: Watch Rand Paul Run for His Life Before Steve King Insults an Immigrant in Iowa: "It’s a cruel coincidence for GOP presidential aspirants that the Republican Party’s most uncensored, most influential, anti-immigrant member (Representative Steve King) hails from a state (Iowa) where, for arbitrary reasons, presidential primary candidates face their first real electoral test... Republicans like Senator Rand Paul have to break bread in public... with someone they must be prepared to flee mid-meal, while still chewing. That's what happened Monday at a Paul fundraiser in Okoboji, Iowa.... Sticking up for the DREAMer in the video would plausibly doom Paul’s primary campaign. Standing with King would pose an equal but opposite threat in the general, as would playing dumb. So, he did what he had to do. And it was a wise move.... To many Republicans, feigning surprise at an immigrant’s command of English and calling her a lawbreaker is unremarkable. As is the suggestion that children should refuse to travel with their parents absent proper authorization, or that they should self-deport once they grow up.... But most people don’t find these kinds of things particularly commendable."

Paul Krugman: Phosphate Memories "Does anyone remember this, from Erick Erickson of Red State? 'Washington State has turned its residents into a group of drug runners--crossing state lines to buy dish washer detergent with phosphate. At what point do the people tell the politicians to go to hell? At what point do they get off the couch, march down to their state legislator’s house, pull him outside, and beat him to a bloody pulp for being an idiot? At some point soon, it will happen.' Yes, because there’s no possible reason meddling politicians should interfere with Americans’ God-given right to use phosphates however they like. Oh, wait. 'It took a serendipitous slug of toxins and the loss of drinking water for a half-million residents to bring home what scientists and government officials in this part of the country have been saying for years: Lake Erie is in trouble, and getting worse by the year.'... As far as I can tell, there isn’t a well-organized phosphate denial campaign, insisting that runoff has nothing to do with algae blooms. But I’m sure one will arise as policy action grows nearer."

James Pethokoukis: The ECB continues to ruin Europe: "The GOP might have a soft spot for the European Central Bank. Republicans, including Paul Ryan and Kevin Brady, have in the past advocated changing the Fed’s dual jobs-inflation mandate to a sole focus on inflation. Unlike the Fed, the ECB has just a mandate to maintain price stability. Also unlike the Fed, the ECB hasn’t engaged in massive bond-buys to boost demand. It hasn’t, however, worked out so well for the euro zone where the jobless rate is 11.6%.... The difference between the US and EZ recoveries is startling. While the former is weak, the latter is comatose. A key explanation, I and other market monetarists have argued, is the more active Fed..."

Jonathan Chait: GOP Climate Policy Gets Less Intelligent: "12 states filed suit to block the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) has an op-ed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal endorsing the lawsuit and laying out an unofficial political manifesto.... Kelly’s op-ed neither denies nor accepts the validity of climate science. Rather, it offers up a pastiche of political and economic reasons to oppose regulatory action, or any action at all, to mitigate climate change. As such, it represents something close to the cutting edge of Republican Party thinking on the issue.... Three substantive public-policy arguments, or approximations of public policy arguments, emerge: 1. Energy prices will go through the roof.... [But] nope. The study mentioned — authored by the conservative American Action Forum--doesn’t really say that Obama’s new regulations on coal plants will increase electricity prices by 10 percent. It arrives at this figure by adding the projected costs of all of Obama’s energy regulations, past and present.... 2. Businesses will suffer and have to lay off workers.... The following five words are the best tip-off that you’re about to encounter an invalid citation: 'According to the Heritage Foundation...' And sure enough, when you click over to the Heritage study, it concedes... [they] measured a different plan than the actual one and are pretending it’s basically the same thing.... 3. Unilateral reductions are pointless.... This is a common but bizarre allocation of blame. The United States has emitted far more carbon into the atmosphere than India or China--indeed, more than India and China combined. The United States continues to emit several times more carbon per person than either China or India.... Reading Kelly’s op-ed, one searches in vain for any minimal attempt to grapple with the costs of allowing the unlimited free dumping of carbon into the atmosphere. The degeneration of the GOP’s climate policy is almost total..."

Ezra Klein: Revenge of the conservative nerds Cooke's essay... is an interesting window into the state of contemporary conservatism. The old conservative critique of nerds... technocrats and intellectuals... was that their approach to knowledge was fundamentally flawed. 'I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University', William F. Buckley... said.... Cooke's essay... reflects an emergent trend.... Its argument is... that the left is full of faux-nerds who lack scientific training but nevertheless wear glasses--and... should be mistrusted... the problem is... liberal poseurs.... A version of this transition can be seen in the Republican Party's lurch from George W. Bush to Paul Ryan.... Ryan... became the Republican Party's vice presidential nominee on the strength of his unusually detailed budgets.... 'In an era that seemingly rewards shallow oratorical excellence over substance (see Obama, Barack Hussein), his political brilliance is the capacity to educate on a vision, run on a record of accomplishment, and--yes--stand on his feet and talk persuasively about both', enthused conservative economist Doug Holtz-Eakin..."

Paul Krugman: Inflation, Unemployment, Ignorance "Jared Bernstein notes that we don’t seem to have a very good story about inflation and unemployment these days.... Ever since the 1970s we’ve been teaching a story in which an economy with excessive unemployment is one in which inflation should keep falling.... I’ve argued that the data are more consistent with a paleo-Keynesian Phillips curve in which unemployment determines the level, not the rate of change, of inflation--which could make sense given anchored expectations and downward wage rigidity. But that’s an educated guess at best, and somewhat post hoc. The thing is, however, that this is not a new problem.... The lesson for now, surely, is that we should not begin tightening based on hypothetical measures of slack.... We should wait until there’s really clear evidence of overheating.... The risks of moving too soon versus too late are not symmetric."

Nick Bunker: How much is money worth at different income levels?: "Nathaniel Hendren... creat[es]... a new metric... the 'inequality deflator'.... Hendren argues that economic surplus is worth more to those at the bottom of the income distribution.... According to Hendren... giving $1 of surplus to a person at the 20th income percentile would increase average surplus per person for everyone by about $1.10. Compare that to the deflator of an income at the 90th percentile, which would result in everyone accruing only about $0.80..."

And:

Ruthanna Emrys and Anne M. Pillsworth: H. P. Lovecraft Reread: The Thing on the Doorstep
Robert Brenner: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe
Jay Rosen: "Here I want to explain something about how I work, so that Facebook can refuse to send it to my subscribers..."
Mike the Mad Biologist: "Someone needs to tell Republicans that you’re not actually supposed to govern according to the rhetoric used to gull the rubes. I wonder what their campaign contributors think about all of this…"
eliasisquith: Twitter: "Douthat compares immigration reform to torture b/c his faith gives him a moral compass I lack http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/opinion/sunday/ross-douthat-obamas-impeachment-game.html
Brett N. Steenbarger: A Simple Strategy for Shaking Confirmation Bias
Lee Phillips: The never-ending conundrums of classical physics
Adam Serwer: How Bush officials got away with torture
Adam Posen: Japan’s Recovery: Going Right, Just Not Going Well
James Politi: Q&A: Lew on tax inversion
Brad DeLong: This Is Highly, Highly Unprofessional from Jack Lew (and Barack Obama)...
Velella velella turn Tofino, B.C., shore into sea of blue - British Columbia
Andrew Sullivan: The Last And First Temptation Of Israel

And Over Here:

Watch Steve King and Rand Paul!: Erika Andiola and Cesar Vargas Win the Internet Today: Live from The Roasterie CCXXXIV: August 6, 2014 (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)
Liveblogging World War I: August 5, 2014: The German Attack on Liege in Belgium/Britain Decides to Send the Expeditionary Force (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)
This Is Highly, Highly Unprofessional from Jack Lew (and Barack Obama)... (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)
Over at Equitable Growth: Why Is Employment Today So Much Lower than We Expected Seven Years Ago?: (Late) Monday Focus for August 5, 2014 (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)
Tuesday Virtual Office Hours: Follow-Up Questions on the Philosophy of Probability: Live from Cafe Milano CCXXXIII: August 5, 2014 (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)
Tuesday Book Recommending: Graydon Saunders: The March North (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)
Kansas and Colorado Governors Offer Test: Live from The Roasterie CCXXXII: August 4, 2014 (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)

Should Be Aware of:

Greg Sargent: GOP moves from ‘self deport’ to ‘throw them all out’ "The border crisis has pushed the true GOP position on immigration out into the open, confirming Republicans have become the party of maximum deportations. Even the Wall Street Journal editorial board has now echoed this idea, castigating 'Deportation Republicans'. To understand the possible long term implications of this, note that two Republicans who have explicitly used this debate to raise their profiles--Ted Cruz and Rick Perry--also may well run for president next year.... Perry claimed the big story here is that Obama has failed to secure the border, repeating wildly inflated claims about illegal immigrants being responsible for thousands of homicides, and... 'have substantial terrorist ties'.... Ted Cruz’s role in pressuring House Republicans to vote to deport all the DREAMers has already been documented.... The House GOP’s lurch to the right on immigration [may be] only a prelude for worse to come in the coming GOP presidential primary.... Obama’s coming action on deportations will introduce another element of #Obummer Lawlessness into the mix, ratcheting up the explosiveness factor among GOP primary voters. It’s not hard to envision the GOP primary candidates... pledging to deport millions.... None of this will matter much in 2014, because Latinos are not a big factor in the key Senate and House contests..."

David Weigel: Republicans back away from the call to impeach President Obama: The GOP understands that message only helps Democrats: "Who Said Impeachment? The conservatives who wanted to impeach Obama are acting like it was never their idea. It seems as if someone has gotten to Rep. Ted Yoho.... [John] Fleming was on board with the omerta, which developed over the weekend.... If impeachment is a scam, it was started on the right, early in the Obama presidency. Some of its early adherents believed in it; some thought they were merely responding to the passions of constituents; some, obviously, wanted to raise money. At the start of this summer, the conservative book-publishing industry churned out two new tomes about why Republicans needed to start an impeachment conversation... on July... came Sarah Palin..."

Duncan Black: Eschaton: Beat Sweeteners Or Deep Pathology: "I guess we're due for our parade of fluff pieces [from organizations like the National Journal] on Republicans grifters 'hopefuls' [like Rick Perry] who are going to spend the next couple of years auditioning for a Fox News gig running for president. To the beltway press, there's just something about Republicans. They're so attractive, so charming, so thrilling."

Tim F.: Batting Next: Darrell Issa: "Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) and his House Intelligence Committee just wrapped up two years of Benghazi!!!. They turned up no red meat for the base. No ground beef. No flavored broth. Not even a bouillon cube. Among the Intelligence Committee’s findings.... Intelligence agencies were 'warned about an increased threat environment, but did not have specific tactical warning...'. 'A mixed group of individuals... participated in the attack.' 'There was no "stand-down order" given to American personnel... no illegal activity or illegal arms transfers... no American was left behind.' The administration’s... talking points reflected the conflicting intelligence assessments...'. For chrissake GOP. Your boy Romney committed an awful faux pas that night.... You just don’t step on dead American diplomats like that and you especially do not do it before anyone knows what exactly happened.... At the heart of BENGHAZI!!!1one! you will find a deep shame about what Romney did... an embarrassing farce.... Everyone saw the pie on Mitt’s face when Barack Obama cordially asked him to keep digging, even people who will never admit it out loud. Shame can be a powerful emotion.... Even Darrell Issa will one day work through.... I expect eventually they will wheel him out of the Rayburn building in a straitjacket ranting at statues about freemansons and lizard people."

Watch Steve King and Rand Paul!: Erika Andiola and Cesar Vargas Win the Internet Today: Live from The Roasterie CCXXXIV: August 6, 2014

Kaili Joy Grey of Wonkette summarizes: Watch Steve King Get Schooled By Hero DREAMers, While Rand Paul Runs Away Scared: "Meet your new hero, America... Erika Andiola....

...Watch the video--which you MUST do, RIGHT now, go on, we’ll wait for you--you’ll see why. Here’s the 'Oh, I never watch the videos' summary....

At a fundraiser for Rep. Steve King, hosted by Sen. Rand Paul... Erika... introduced herself. 'I’m actually a DREAMer myself', she says. 'I’m originally from Mexico, but I’ve been raised here.' She tells him she graduated from Arizona State University, and that’s... you’ll see Sen. Rand Paul quietly pick up his drink and leave like sticking around to talk about immigration with an actual immigrant... is not on his schedule....

I know you want to get rid of DACA. I want to give you the opportunity, if you really want to get rid of it, just rip mine. You can go ahead and do that.

And that’s when she hands him what presumably is the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals documentation that King and his fellow Republicans are so eager to run through the shredder because 'rape paths' and 'death trains' and drug mules dressed up as children, doing 9/11 to America.... And in return, he grabs her hand... and tells her, 'You’re very good at English, you know what I’m saying'.

'I was raised in the United States', she reminds him.

You should watch the whole thing. You really should. The part where he asks her if she’s a drug-smuggler. The part where he asks her, AGAIN, if she understands English. Duh, Steve, she’s speaking to you in English, isn’t she? Do you understand? The part where he insists the 'liberal left' takes all of his hatred out of context, that when he talks about the evil brown not-Americans, he is ONLY talking about the evil drug-smuggling ones. Not the ones like Erika, the ones who’ve grown up here and graduated from college and yes, STEVE, they speak English.

That’s when Erika’s companion, Cesar Vargas, explains that he has also grown up in this country, he’s graduated from law school, and he wants to serve his country. The America one, the one he’s known since he was five years old, and why does that make Steve so angry, huh? Then King babbles on about Obama and the Constitution and blah blah blah typical Steve King Republican blah.

Just watch it. And then watch this bonus follow-up, where King talks to reporters and explains that he’s the victim because these law-breaking kids of law-breaking parents just came to make a scene, but at least he didn’t run away from their questions like SOME people, ahem.