I largely agree with Steve Randy Waldman about the value of and need for “ideological work.”

For my part, I’m continually baffled by the degree to which thought-leaders and politicians on the center-left think it’s credible and/or political useful to present our agenda as wholly un-ideological and “pragmatic,” somehow emerging magically through empirical study. Quine’s Word & Object isn’t about politics at all but it’s full of valuable insights. All efforts to understand the world meld empirical and theoretical efforts, and all efforts to understand the world in a way that’s politically relevant are thus necessarily ideological.

Horace Dedieu shows that aps are rapidly overtaking songs as Apple’s most popular digital retail product:

The difference, of course, is that while I do buy both songs and aps from iTunes, I also buy songs from EMusic, from Amazon, etc. The iPod was launched as a device with a fairly general ability to play music files that competes with other music players, and then Apple also launched a music store that competes with other music stores. But Apple’s app store doesn’t work like that—it’s not just a convenient venue for buying iOS devices, the devices have been designed so as to make Apple the exclusive retailer of iOS-compatible apps.

It’s natural that players in the market will seek this kind of control over the digital retail distribution channel, since with zero marginal cost obtaining some form of monopoly power is critical. What’s interesting is that the logic of the situation is that this sort of monopoly power ought to be obtained by the network operators (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint) who control the genuinely scarce resource of broadband spectrum. Apple’s defeated that logic, thus far, by being smart slash lucky but in the long-run it seems to me that the rents will eventually flow to the operators.

Josh Foust discusses one of the most severe problems with our recent national security policies, one that’s difficult to discuss frankly in the current political climate:

The assumption of good intentions remains of the most critical failures of American imagination in both wars. I am at a loss for why this is the case—just about everyone who understands these things continues to beg the military to stop assuming Afghans know we have good intentions for the area, but it just hasn’t sunk in yet. Actions speak louder than words, etc. It’s not a hard concept to understand, but AMERICA GOOD is just not a given amongst locals. It’s years past time people stop assuming this is the case. If you no longer think people just intuitively get the inherent goodness of America, then it becomes easier to see why they’re pissed off at the destruction of their homes—not just “mud huts” but homes and a lifetime of memories and possessions (her continued inability to get that poor people care about their “mud huts” is worse than cringe-inducing). And, just as importantly, why it’s not necessarily a good thing when they cooperate with you afterward.

To me, I think this is a critical way in which widespread “pro-military” attitudes in American media and political culture act, in practice, to undermine practical military effectiveness. There’s a historical narrative about the United States being a force for good in the world whose military prowess is critical to the preservation of freedom that simply has nothing to do with the historical experience of large portions of the world. Nobody ever liberated Yemenis, or Pakistanis, or Venezuelans from Hitler or anything.

James Fallows asks us to exercise our imaginations and ponder the scale of China:

If Americans wanted to imagine what it would take to be “strong” in the way China currently is, [Thomas Barnett] said, all we’d have to do is think of moving the entire population of the Western Hemisphere into our existing borders. Every single Mexican. (Rather than enforcing the southern border, we’d require everyone to cross it, headed north.) Every Haitian, Cuban, and Jamaican. Everyone from Central America. All 190 million from Brazil. And so on. Even the Canadians. China, by the way, is just about the same size as the United States, though a larger share of its land area is desert, mountain, or otherwise nonarable.

If we did that, we’d be up to about a billion people — and then if we also took every single person from Nigeria, and for good measure everyone in hyper-crowded Japan too, we’d finally be up to China’s 1.3 billion size. At that point, like China, we’d have tremendous scale in everything. Rich people. Big businesses. A huge work force. Countless numbers of multi-million population cities. And we would also have a tremendous amount of poverty, plus pressure on resources of every kind, from water to food to living space. Just as China does now. Scale gives China some strengths. But it also creates tremendous challenges, as Americans would recognize if we thought about this prospect for even a minute. Seriously, reflect on this, and consider that it is China’s reality now.

A useful exercise. And obviously we neither should, will, nor can do that. But I do think that what you might call the “national greatness” case for more immigration is underrated. All things considered, America is a pretty tremendous country and stands for good things in the world. Insofar as we tend to fall short in my view, it’s on dimensions of conduct where the PRC does not excel. We’re not talking about losing geopolitical influence to Norway. And, again, without being blind to the real problems with life in the US of A it’s clearly the case that there are worse places to live and lots of people who’d like to come here. So insofar as we can recruit people to our standard—especially people who already possess skills, English-language fluency, or family ties to the country—the case for “bending the curve” of population growth upwards.

Most people don’t realize this, but the United States continues to be a remarkably sparsely populated place. If the country as a whole had the same average population density as New Hampshire (!) it would contain about 522 million people and I don’t think anyone would consider New Hampshire to be an example of dystopian.

Freddie DeBoer writes, among other things:

Many of the young, upwardly-mobile bloggers out there take their cues from Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein. I don’t begrudge either of them their policy preferences, even while I disagree with them. But each represents, in his own, the corruption and capitulation that comes with prominence and success in this culture. I genuinely don’t know what the hell happened to Matt Yglesias. I long called him my favorite blogger. I’ve never mistaken him for someone who shares my politics. But he was, once, part of the resurgence of pride in leftism. He was one of the voices, in the midst of the Bush-era darkness, making it plain that he was unapologetic about being a creature of the left. In the last year or so, that stand has completely disappeared. He is now one of the most vocal of the neoliberal scolds, forever ready to define the “neoliberal consensus” as the truth of man and to ignore left-wing criticism. Indeed, I’m not sure that you could even understand that he has critics from his left, judging by what he chooses to discuss on his blog. This is a particularly cruel way to erase the left-wing from the discourse: to pretend that it doesn’t exist.

I don’t really know what it means to criticize a writer for holding that his own views are “the truth of man.” Obviously, I agree with my political opinions and disagree with those who disagree with me. If I didn’t agree I’d change my mind.

But one point that I agree with here, is that while I’ll cop to being a “neoliberal” I don’t acknowledge that I have critics to the “left” of me. On economic policy, here are the main things I’m trying to accomplish:

— More redistribution of money from the top to the bottom.
— A less paternalistic welfare state that puts more money directly in the hands of the recipients of social services.
— Macroeconomic stabilization policy that seriously aims for full employment.
— Curb the regulatory privileges of incumbent landowners.
— Roll back subsidies implicit in our current automobile/housing-oriented industrial policy.
— Break the licensing cartels that deny opportunity to the unskilled.
— Much greater equalization of opportunities in K-12 education.
— Reduction of the rents assembled by privileged intellectual property owners.
— Throughout the public sector, concerted reform aimed at ensuring public services are public services and not jobs programs.
— Taxation of polluters (and resource-extractors more generally) rather than current de facto subsidization of resource extraction.

Is this a “neoliberal” program? Well, this is one of these terms that was invented by its critics so I hesitate to embrace it though I recognize that the shoe fits to a considerable extent. I’d say it’s liberalism, a view recognizably derived from the thinking of JS Mill and Pigou and Keynes and Maury “Freedom Plus Groceries” Maverick and all the rest. I recognize that many people disagree with this agenda, and that many of those who disagree with it think of themselves as “to the left” of my view. But I simply deny that there are positions that are more genuinely egalitarian than my own. I really and sincerely believe that liberalism is the best way to advance the interests of the underprivileged and to make the world a better place. I offer “further left” people the (unreturned) courtesy of not questioning the sincerity of their belief that they have some better solutions, but I think they’re mistaken.

That’s hardly a comprehensive reply to everything DeBoer wrote, but I hope it’s an explanation of what the hell happened to me.

Ohio, like most American states, has spent years groaning under the yoke of affirmative action policies. But along comes new governor John Kasich with the state’s first all-white cabinet since 1962, solving the problem in one bold swoop. Now that real meritocracy has been restored to state government, though, things are finally turning around.