Altruism, capitalism, charity and drinking before noon.

A Dutch historian born the year before the Berlin Wall fell went viral.

Says Rutger Bregman, the hero of Davos: "No, wealth isn’t created at the top. It is merely devoured there."

Bregman wasn't couching his critique in terms of altruism, but rather offering a prescription to treat capitalism's absurdly dystopian excesses.

“This is about saving capitalism,” he said. “Most innovation has come about through government spending. During the golden age period [after the second world war], there were way higher taxes on wealth, property, inheritance and top incomes. That’s what we need today if we are going to tame this beast called capitalism.”

It reminded me of Ayn Rand, who spent a lifetime arguing against altruism.

There are some ... who believe as Rand did: that those who rely on social systems are---to use her ugly term---“parasites,” and those who amass large amounts of private wealth are heroic supermen.

Her zealous disciples responded in kind.

Rand disciple Alan Greenspan, for example, initiated the era of “Reaganomics” in the early 1980s by engineering “an increase in the most regressive tax on the poor and middle class,” writes Gary Weiss, “the Social Security payroll tax—combined with a cut in benefits.” For Greenspan, “this was no contradiction. Social Security was a system of altruism at its worst. Its beneficiaries were looters. Raising their taxes and cutting their benefits was no loss to society.”

Then Rand got old, became ill and opted to accept "parasitic" Social Security and Medicare benefits.

Rand taught “there is no such thing as the public interest,” that programs like Social Security and Medicare steal from “creators” and illegitimately redistribute their wealth. This was a "sublimely enticing argument for wealthy businessmen who had no interest whatever in the public interest.... Yet the taxpayers of America paid Rand's and Frank O'Connor's medical expenses." Randians have offered many convoluted explanations for what her critics see as sheer hypocrisy. We may or may not find them persuasive.

The preceding is intended as introduction to an interesting critique of "Effective Altruism," in a Jacobin article by Mathew Snow titled Against Charity.

A growing social movement ... brands itself Effective Altruism. Effective Altruists calculate where expendable income is best spent and encourage the relatively affluent to channel their capital accordingly. Among their most highly favored causes are the Against Malaria Foundation (which distributes insecticide-treated bed nets), the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative (which works to establish school-based deworming programs), and GiveDirectly (which gives unconditional cash transfers to people in extreme poverty).

Over 17,000 people have pledged to give at least 1 percent of their income annually to such endorsed causes, and over 1,000 have pledged to give at least 10 percent. It is particularly popular among millennials, leading some to laud it as “the new social movement of our generation.”

In short, "Rather than creating an individualized 'culture of giving,' we should be challenging capitalism’s institutionalized taking."

The irony of Effective Altruism is that it implores individuals to use their money to procure necessities for those who desperately need them, but says nothing about the system that determines how those necessities are produced and distributed in the first place.

If we look at the institutions that make and allocate the resources others so desperately need, we must ask whether it is wrong to withhold those resources from others for the sake of payment and profit. Doing so not only seems morally reprehensible, it is morally reprehensible for precisely the same reason Effective Altruists argue it is wrong not to donate money to charities: it’s immoral to value some small sum of money (or what it might buy) over a human life or minimum standard of living.

In this way, Effective Altruism’s argument trades off an obvious moral truth without any mention of its direct tension with capitalist accumulation: as men and women with money and moral consciences, we can’t put a price on life, but as men and women participating in a system governed by the logic of capital, we must.

The absurd result is that Effective Altruism implores individuals to pay whatever price the market demands for basic necessities on moral grounds that cut against subjecting those necessities to capitalist market logic at all.

And the conclusion:

Rather than asking how individual consumers can guarantee the basic sustenance of millions of people, we should be questioning an economic system that only halts misery and starvation if it is profitable. Rather than solely creating an individualized “culture of giving,” we should be challenging capitalism’s institutionalized taking.

Just trying to inspire discussion over beers, y'all.

The value of experience, or how the "Sherman Minton Renewal brings fears of congestion, economic pressure on poor neighborhoods."

Kudos to writer Michael L. Jones and Insider Louisville for digging deeper.

Sherman Minton Renewal brings fears of congestion, economic pressure on poor neighborhoods

Social justice advocate Cathy Hinko said she believes the Sherman Minton Renewal, slated to begin in 2021, will have a negative impact on low-income residents in Louisville and Southern Indiana.

The Sherman Minton Renewal could take up to three years to complete and will cost more than $90 million. The Indiana Department of Transportation and Kentucky Transportation Cabinet hosted two public feedback sessions this week, one on Tuesday in New Albany and another on Thursday at the Chestnut Street Family YMCA where Hinko raised her concerns.

“The neighborhoods in west Louisville are extremely segregated, as a result, deprived of easy access to retail and to grocery stores. Frequently, they pop over to New Albany for that access. So, what’s going to happen when the Sherman Minton is closed is those neighborhoods are going to be even more isolated from shops, food and entertainment,” said Cathy Hinko, executive director of the Metropolitan Housing Coalition, citing expected lane closures and shutdowns of the Interstate 64 bridge associated with the renewal project.

Part of the reason such extensive repairs are needed, Hinko said, is because Kentucky and Indiana transportation officials underestimated the impact that the $2.3 billion Ohio River Bridges Project would have on the 56-year old Sherman Minton and the 89-year old George Rogers Clark Memorial bridges, which remain the only two non-tolled bridges in the area ...

... David Coyte, president of the Coalition for the Advancement of Regional Transportation, said he thinks the dollars being invested in bridge construction and repairs would be better spent on a light rail system that crossed the river.

Balance and insight from a veteran journalist.

For more:

Possible Sherman Minton closure concerns residents, by Brooke McAfee (Tom May Anthology)

NEW ALBANY — New Albany resident Maura Murphy said she is concerned about how the planned construction on the Sherman Minton Bridge will affect her daily commute to work in Louisville.

This one's dedicated to Deaf Gahan and his merry band of local Democratic Party sycophants: "America Can't Fix Poverty Until It Stops Hating Poor People."

Pay no attention to what Jeff Gahan and Adam Dickey's local Democrats say.

Rather, take note of what they don't/won't say ... and moreover, what they're doing (public housing hostile takeover) and not doing (adhering to their presumed political party's own platform).

It's world class hypocrisy, right here in Anchor City. They can pray in the Church of Pretend Disney all day long, but the stench remains. 

America Can't Fix Poverty Until It Stops Hating Poor People, by John A. Powell and Arthur Brooks (CityLab)

A bipartisan plea to stop “othering” those living on the economic margins.

“Hell is other people,” famously wrote the French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre at the close of his 1943 play No Exit. While for Sartre this was a philosophically sophisticated point, in America today it has become simply the way we increasingly treat people at the margins of our society. We see whole groups of people as unlike ourselves—as the undesirable “other.”

Many different kinds of people have been harmfully “othered” throughout our country’s history, and the plights of these groups have received well-deserved attention and focus. But there is one group that we systematically other today—with hugely damaging consequences—while hardly even realizing that we are doing it. Those people are Americans living in poverty.

Research consistently finds that Americans exhibit a disturbing level of antipathy towards those on the economic margins. In a 2001 word-association study, researchers from Kansas State and Rice Universities asked subjects to rate how well a variety of words described different social groups. Compared to their ratings of middle-class people, and given no information except economic status, the average subject described poor people as 39 percent more “unpleasant,” 95 percent more “unmotivated,” and twice as “dirty.”

In another 2002 study, researchers from Princeton, UCLA, and Lawrence University asked students and adults to gauge society’s views toward several often-stereotyped groups. Other out-groups were demeaned as either incompetent but personally warm, or unfriendly but competent; only the poor were consistently classified as both unfriendly and incompetent. Americans, it seems, have a uniquely low opinion of poor people: We offer them neither our empathy nor our respect.

This antipathy is not the result of comfortable Americans having to endure constant exposure to the poor. On the contrary, a sharp uptick in socioeconomic stratification and segregation has been widely documented across the right and left, from Charles Murray to Robert Putnam. For growing percentages of middle- and upper-class Americans, interactions with poor and working-class people are very rare. Well-to-do Americans have almost no meaningful cultural contact with anyone from economically marginalized communities—from struggling inner cities to decaying suburbs to depressed rural counties.

One might surmise this separation is the result of the widespread negative attitudes about people in poverty. But there is good reason to believe the causality also runs in the other direction. Psychologists have long studied a phenomenon called the “Ben Franklin effect,” named for the Founding Father’s observation that our appraisals of other people can actually follow our behavior towards them, rather than just the other way around. Specifically, Franklin noted, we tend to like people more after we have granted them a favor ...

More socialism to brighten a dreary Monday: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show.'

Riffing on Eugene V. Debs, Pope Francis and Slavoj Zizek brought me to this spot-on indictment of the capitalist mess we've dug (Simon's words). The following excerpt is no more than a tease; you really must read the whole article.

David Simon: 'There are now two Americas. My country is a horror show' (The Observer/The Guardian)

The creator of The Wire, David Simon, delivered an impromptu speech about the divide between rich and poor in America at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney, and how capitalism has lost sight of its social compact. This is an edited extract

... And so in my country you're seeing a horror show. You're seeing a retrenchment in terms of family income, you're seeing the abandonment of basic services, such as public education, functional public education. You're seeing the underclass hunted through an alleged war on dangerous drugs that is in fact merely a war on the poor and has turned us into the most incarcerative state in the history of mankind, in terms of the sheer numbers of people we've put in American prisons and the percentage of Americans we put into prisons. No other country on the face of the Earth jails people at the number and rate that we are.

We have become something other than what we claim for the American dream and all because of our inability to basically share, to even contemplate a socialist impulse ...