Before I get to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, though, I'd like to spend a little bit of time talking to you about soap. I shall attempt to avoid excessive references to Tyler Durden, but we'll see how well I manage that goal by the end of this rambling post. Let's talk about soap.
I like soap. It is a fascinating substance. Do you know what makes it so chemically interesting? It has to do with the fact that water and oil don't mix. They can't bond with each other because one is polar and the other isn't. A soap can bond with both polar and non-polar substances. Like water and oil. How cool is that? Here's why that matters. You are filthy, you damned, dirty ape! Keep your paws off me. See? Not a Fight Club reference. Anyway, your body secrets oils. Water will not bond with those oils because water is polar, and oil is non-polar. A simple rinse won't get you clean. Soap, however, will bond to the oils you secrete, and the water you use to rinse off the soap, which has bonded to the oils, and then you are clean! Soap is awesome! I am very much pro-soap. If there were a pro-soap political party, I'd vote for them.
So, next non-Fight Club reference. Seinfeld. Remember that episode in which someone with really bad B.O. sat in Jerry's car, and the B.O. attached itself, permanently, to his car? Can that happen in real life?
I had an experience like that recently, and yes, this will connect to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Patience. Patience, like soap, is virtuous. People are, I suppose, polarized in the extent to which they display it. See what I did there? Anyway, I teach one of my classes this semester in a small room. I walked into the room recently, and nearly fell over from the stench. I don't know precisely how Jerry's car smelled, but I'm pretty sure this was it. I walked right out, and arranged another room for the day because there was no way I was spending an hour lecturing in that room. "Lecturing" requires speaking. Speaking requires passing air through my vocal cords, which requires first inhaling in order to have the air to exhale in the first place, and that just wasn't gonna happen in that room. I have standards, and very delicate nasal passages. Translation-- I'm a pathetic wimp. Dainty, little me.
The students took their turns smelling the offending room, and while they weren't as horrified as I was (they were, after all, college students who live in worse conditions), they verified the existence of offending particles in the atmosphere. I contend that it was lingering B.O. from a previous occupant.
This is why I am so strongly pro-soap. Behold the connections as they begin to form in this rambling post.
As a political scientist, I proposed the following law: mandatory use of soap, enforceable with criminal penalties.
The students responded by indicating that while they, too, were generally pro-soap, they found my proposal problematic. From a practical perspective, how would it be enforced? Could it even be enforced? However pro-soap you are, it should be immediately obvious that such a law would be silly and unenforceable. It's the kind of thing that you suggest because you like the basic, underlying motivation, but a few seconds-if-that of thought would reveal that it is conceptually flawed at the core, and could never work.
You shouldn't have to think too hard to realize that it's a fun idea to toss around in the classroom, but too stupid to be taken seriously. And if you can't see that, you have no business engaged in the serious business of policy-making.
Oh, right. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I was getting to her. I have no comments here on the concept of single-payer healthcare, which is an ideologically debatable proposition, your position on which will depend on your perception of the proper role of government. I have no comments here on the notion of a much more "progressive" rate of taxation. There are not-stupid people who advocate top marginal tax rates near 70% based on the premise that such a rate maximizes revenue, etc. Yes, Arthur Laffer was kind of right. Raise taxes beyond that, and revenues go down because you disincentivize economic activity. The question is the maximizing point, and I don't know what that is, but a 70% top marginal rate is a claim that can be made. I have no comments here on the morality of high tax rates. There are a lot of statements and positions that I simply will not address here because they are rooted in basic, normative debates. That's not quite my schtick.
I do have some comments on something I have raised before-- the concept of a federal jobs guarantee. Quick. You have 10 seconds. Spend those 10 seconds thinking about all of the ways that prevent you from ever implementing this idea. Go.
….
So, what'd you come up with? Maybe not 21 trillion problems (zing!), but I bet a few... People whose skills don't match job availability? Distance to openings? Lack of transportation to get to those jobs? I'm guessing those came to your mind in a matter of seconds, if you are reading a professor's blog, because they are pretty obvious. So, here's the thing about policy. It's haaaaard. I'm one of those weirdos in political science who does the math on theoretical models because, to me, that's easier, but policy is hard. Goal: design a system in which those who are employable have jobs, to a greater degree than they have now. Good goal. How do we do that? Sorry, but I got nothin', beyond the traditional arguments. Guaranteeing it at the federal level with no plan whatsoever on implementation, though? That's as dumb as Trump promising to repeal Obamacare and replace it with "something terrific." Trump's plan was to "cover everybody," with no plan as to how. Sound familiar? It should. It's about as coherent as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Just asserting a federal jobs guarantee, with no plan for dealing with people who don't have skills appropriate for federal needs, don't live near federal employers, don't have transportation to get anywhere near federal employers...
That's where you start sounding like me, walking into my classroom the other day, proposing mandatory use of soap.
The differences are: 1) I was joking, and 2) the audience knew it and treated it as such.
Several years ago, I wrote a fun, little paper: Going Off The Rails On A Crazy Train: The Causes And Consequences Of Congressional Infamy. It was about the loonies in Congress, or rather, who got perceived as being a loony tune, based on the frequency of legislators' names being searched in Google along with some epithets. At the time, there was an interesting party asymmetry. Republicans scored higher (lower?) than Democrats. I speculated in several contexts that this was the result, not of an actual asymmetry in sanity, but the fact that while my champion, former Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) was all over cable tv all the time, for whatever reason, Democrats (Pelosi?) managed to keep their embarrassments, like Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX) from hogging the camera. Jackson-Lee has since gotten into a bunch of trouble, but the thing is, only Congress watchers like me knew who she was. I've known how crazy she is for years because I follow Congress professionally. For whatever reason, for a long time, it looked like Democrats hid their idiots, and Republicans lionized theirs. That may be changing.
Don't give Ocasio-Cortez endearing nicknames. Deal with the fact that her policy understanding shows the depth of knowledge of my joke about mandatory soap use.
It is unfortunate that Google changed its algorithm so that I can't keep doing that study. I really would have been curious about the party asymmetry in the era of people like Ocasio-Cortez.