We’ve seen this before, but today CNN has another poll (PDF) confirming that the Affordable Care Act’s conservative critics are a minority:

I’m not 100 percent sure if “not liberal enough” is the way I would describe the law. But you make the ACA better by making it more aggressive. That’s a public option, but it’s also more forceful implementation of the Independent Medicare Advisory Panel concept and a more aggressive phase-out of the tax subsidy for employer-provided health insurance.

I liked Chris Beam’s NY Mag article on libertarians, but I want to quibble with this:

Yet libertarianism is more internally consistent than the Democratic or Republican platforms. There’s no inherent reason that free-marketers and social conservatives should be allied under the Republican umbrella, except that it makes for a powerful coalition.

People, especially people who are libertarians, say this all the time. But we should consider the possibility that the market in political ideas works is that there’s a reason you typically find conservative and progressive political coalitions aligned in this particular way. And if you look at American history, you see that in 1964 when we had a libertarian presidential candidate the main constituency for his views turned out to be white supremacists in the deep south. Libertarian principles, as Rand Paul had occasion to remind us during the 2010 midterm campaign, prohibit the Civil Rights Act as an infringement on the liberty of racist business proprietors. Similarly, libertarians and social conservatives are united in opposition to an Employment Non-Discrimination Act for gays and lesbians and to measures like the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act that seek to curb discrimination against women.

And this is generally how politics goes in most countries. You have a dominant socio-cultural group allied with the bulk of the business community, and you have a more diffuse “left” coalition of reformers associated with labor unions and minority groups. There’s nothing “inconsistent” about organizing politics this way.

Mmm…tasty. Aiming for diverse recommendations here reflective of the places I’ve been in the past year:

— Sichuan Pavilion in Rockville, Maryland. Probably too far out of the way to be worth your trouble if you’re just visiting, but go here if you live in DC.

— Roast Fish Legend in Beijing. I’m having some trouble verifying on the Internet that this place exists, but I have a photo and you may have a friend who can help you decipher the Chinese characters. It’s delicious. Get the roast fish (obviously); the black bean sauce is particularly good.

— Kushi in DC. Very close to downtown, very close to the Convention Center, definitely come if you’re visiting the city. It’s a very unusual, very good Japanese dining experience. If you love sushi, you’ll of course want some sushi, which is excellent but similar to other excellent sushi; the real winner here is to explore the other options.

— Brunch at Casa Oaxaca, in Oaxaca. You can of course find a much better value for your money if you avoid doing anything this obvious, but the fact of the matter is that this was great brunch.

— No-name comedors in Oaxaca. Basically the reverse of the above. Point yourself away from the Zocalo and walk until you find yourself outside the city center and stop in for a bite or two at some places that have customers and smell good.

— The Lab Gastropub is mostly just convenient if you happen to be doing something at USC, but they served french fries with some kind of pumpkin dipping sauce that was fantastic and has proven hard to replicate.

— Xiabu in some shopping mall in Dalian, China. This is apparently a chain. They do hot pot. The people working there didn’t speak any English, but after a lot of furious gesturing Ezra Klein and I were able to persuade them to bring us 100 RMB worth of food, about 80% of which was delicious.

— Go to ethnic restaurants in Berlin and tell them “I’m not German”. Your (German) dining companions will be offended, but the results speak for themselves.

— If you’re ever in Ramallah, don’t miss the Palestinian-Italian fusion cuisine (think noodles or risotto with Middle Eastern flavors) at Orjuwan.

— Last but by no means least, El El Frijoles in Sargentville, Maine.

Enjoy.

Something that immediately presents itself when you’re a tourist, especially in a poorer country and especially when you’re a tourist in a common tourist destination like Oaxaca, is the prevalence of scams and ripoffs. You’re always on guard for scams, you’re also aware that a certain amount of getting scammed is inevitable, and since the overall price level is low and the scam-runners are likely poor you perhaps don’t care too much if you get ripped off some.

But this all strikes me as an underexplored element of economic interactions. The great genius of capitalism is facilitating mutually beneficial exchanges. I want a can of Diet Coke more than I want 8 pesos, so I hand 8 pesos over to a shopkeeper and he hands me a can of Diet Coke. Win-win. Then there’s fraud where you outright lie about what’s happening. That we understand, and it’s generally illegal.

But there’s this whole other world where, to a greater or a lesser extent, one party to the transaction is getting ripped off. We know this stuff happens. People buy lottery tickets, people put tokens into slot machines, and people pay fortune tellers. You can model all this behavior as self-interested and mutually beneficial by simply asserting that the people buying tickets are obtaining some large quantity of subjective utility from the lottery, but I think examining lottery marketing tends to cut against this interpretation. And this can move up from the realm of pure gambling. I saw a TV ad the other day marketing life insurance to AARP members. The idea of life insurance is that average payouts are less than average premiums (hence profit), but this bad investment may still be a good idea for your family because the economic impact of the loss of a breadwinner will be so devastating. But the whole logic of life insurance completely fails to apply to retired people.

I thought of this all recently in terms of continuing discussions of the mysterious sky-high profitability of the financial sector.

We often have this conceit that ripoffs are an economically marginal phenomenon that applies to, sure, tourists and gambling addicts and maybe naive poor people going to see tarot card readers. But if you look at the price premium people are willing to pay for “organic”-labeled products and the dubious science behind the theory that these products are superior to conventional varieties, I think it’s clear that yuppies aren’t immune to getting ripped off, either. And I think we should be open to the possibility that this is happening in finance. How much do the sundry pension fund beneficiaries, 401(k) holders, endowed nonprofit managers, etc. of the world really know about the investment game? Are they really that much more savvy and sophisticated than their working class lottery ticket buying peers? Or does their self-image as savvy sophisticates make them that much more prone to being ripped off? After all, Bernie Madoff was able to swindle a bunch of very sophisticated investors out of a great deal of money. He did it through actual, prosecutable, criminal fraud. But not every scam and ripoff is a fraud, and not everything that’s legal is a mutually beneficial transaction.

Brian Beutler reports:

In the nearly two months since the November midterms, the conventional wisdom has centered on the idea that President Obama’s agenda will be largely protected from an influx of Republicans by the Senate’s arcane rules and his own veto pen. With 47 members in the 112th Congress, the GOP will lack a majority, let alone a supermajority, to pass the legislation they’d need to pass to undo Obama’s accomplishments and blunt his progress — as if he’d sign those bills anyway.

But Republicans are all too aware of this conundrum, and have been looking for ways around it. What they found is an obscure authority provided by a 1996 law called the Congressional Review Act. It provides Congress with an expedited process by which to evaluate executive branch regulations, and then give the President a chance to agree or disagree.

It’ll be interesting to see how this works out. Obviously this passed in 1996 with the hope of severely hampering Bill Clinton, but it’s obscure precisely because in 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2000 this dog didn’t really bark. Then again, a lot of what’s happened in politics over the past 10 years is that people have found new ways to “push the envelop” of existing political norms.

I think this from Kevin Drum nicely encapsulates the past 40-50 years of US political development:

My post earlier today about the decline of organized labor and the rise of rights-based activism within the post-60s liberal community provokes an obvious question: was this a good thing?

Obviously it was good for African-Americans and women and gays and others who benefited from it. But it wasn’t so good for the economic fortunes of the working and middle classes. And that was almost certainly the tradeoff we made. In the 70s and beyond, probably 80% of the money and emotional energy that sustained the Democratic Party came from environmental and rights activists. But within the Republican Party, money and energy were about evenly divided between social conservatives and the business community. What happened after that was unsurprising: on social issues, where 80% of the liberal party was fighting 50% of the conservative party, liberals made a lot of progress. On economic issues, where 20% of the liberal party was fighting 50% of the conservative party, liberals steadily lost ground. And when Democrats decided to become more “business friendly” in the late 80s, we lost even more ground. That’s how things played out, and under the circumstances that’s pretty much exactly how you’d expect them to play out.

To me, this just seems like an overwhelmingly good tradeoff. After all, “African Americans and women and gays” and “the working and middle classes” aren’t separate groups of people. Half the population is women. Add in gays and lesbians and racial minorities, and the move toward social tolerance has been a series of giant leaps forward for the majority of the American people. What’s more, if you look at those working- and middle-class Americans whose families lived in Asia or Latin America in 1970 you’ll see that the level of economic progress facilitated by the tolerance agenda is enormous.

One thing I’ll say to Drum, though, is that I think the tradeoff happens along more dimensions than simply the unions vs other groups one.

Consider divorce. When a couple gets divorced, the woman normally ends up with a lower household income than she had pre-divorced. So making it easier for women to leave unhappy marriages led, in practice, to declining household incomes for American women. But I think it entails a very narrow view of human well-being to say that women were made “worse off” by changes that have allowed them to be less tolerant of abusive husbands, philanderers, etc. Social justice and human equality do not live on bread alone and I think it’s both natural and healthy that as average material living standards increase progressive focus starts to turn more toward the “post-material” issues.

Relatedly, I’m not even sure how much of a real choice there even was. There were racially regressive elements of the American labor movement, but on the whole organized labor’s embrace of civil rights was important to making it happen. Total homegeneity is a favorable situation for economic solidarity, but if it doesn’t exist (as it never has in America) then social intolerance becomes a tool of divide and conquer strategies by capital and the optimal strategy for labor is to promote tolerance and inclusion.

Lydia DePillis crunches the American Community Survey data to produce a chart “of the median home price citywide, vs. the highest and lowest median home prices by neighborhood cluster, over the last 15 years.”

The interesting thing, as she notes, is that the median moves steadily upwards and is at its peak level even though both the top end and the bottom end are below-peak. It’s easy enough to understand how that can happen, but it’s a reminder that average trends can mask what’s happening beneath the surface.