Rocky Headlands, Dull Sky
The Heritability of Political Opinions
An op-ed piece in today’s online New York Times reviews recent research that establishes the heritability of certain basic political attitudes, namely authoritarianism, conservatism and religiousness. The article can be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/09/opinion/thomas-edsall-how-much-do-our-genes-influence-our-political-beliefs.html
A table accompanying the article shows the relationship between these traits and the sharing of certain genes in identical and fraternal twins. Since identical twins share all of their DNA, while fraternal twins share only half, there should be a difference in the incidence of these traits if they are inherited. Of course, differential methylation of some genes is to be expected during development, which will change the apparent phenotype even when the genotypes are identical.
The table shows, for authoritarianism, a correlation of 0.51 between identical twins and only 0.1 between fraternal twins. For conservatism, the figures are 0.53 and 0.36. For religiousness, the correlations are 0.50 and 0.02. For traditionalism, the numbers are 0.44 and 0.18. These numbers show that there is a significant genetic component to authoritarianism, religiousness, and somewhat less so for traditionalism. For conservatism, there is less of a genetic correlation. The dramatic differences in authoritarianism and religiousness suggest that these traits are controlled by genes to a significant extent.
It is important to remember differential methylation of genes when interpreting these numbers. There is a possibility that a person’s degree of authoritarianism and religiousness are controlled by genes that are subject to differential methylation during childhood related to intense experiences. An example of this phenomenon is the permanent changes in gene expression observed when infants are subjected to severe deprivation.
The findings of these studies suggest that there are inherent genetic differences in the personalities of people who are more or less authoritarian or religious. Such differences may be difficult to overcome by changing one’s education or life experiences. Genes clearly do not explain all of the differences as the correlations are not that high even in identical twins; numbers like 0.8 or above would be expected in a “pure” genetic trait.
Thus, people who have had religious experiences or epiphanies resulting in intense religious practice and mindset may be genetically inclined to have such epiphanies. At the same time, people who have never had a religious epiphany may simply be genetically incapable of having one.
This suggests that it may be impossible to politically reconcile people who differ greatly in these traits. One group will prefer one type of politician, the other group a different type, and nothing can induce them to compromise. Even the act of compromise may be genetically influenced, to the point where some people are able to compromise and others are simply incapable.
These findings make it all the more important for us to have a pluralistic government with room for all types of people, and at the same time, we must have a decisive government which is able to make a fair compromise between the types, whether they can accept the compromise or not. The point is that a compromise must be imposed, whether are not the individuals involved are able to accept it. Some middle ground must be found which is fair to all concerned and which does not burden a powerless group to the benefit of a group with political power.
The point is that a group with political power does not have all the rights; the civil and human rights of the powerless and the minority cannot be infringed upon in a pluralistic government because there is no one right answer to any governmental question. This is the function of the Bill of Rights and most of the subsequent amendments to the Constitution.
The failure of the presidential administration to recognize this problem during World War One may have led to a serious distortion in American society since then. President Wilson had strong moral opinions and did not believe that dissent from these opinions was legitimate. He therefore created government institutions which enforced censorship and moral values, patriotism, and war against Germany, even to the extent of prohibition of alcohol. Wilson also created an internal security agency which was eventually consolidated into the FBI. Under the direction of Hoover for many years, this agency spied on every American without any let or hindrance. It created files on every known dissenter and group, files which contained as much myth and falsehood as truth. These files, particularly the sensitive ones on political leaders, were maintained in absolute secrecy and used by Hoover to consolidate and protect his power, that is, for political blackmail.
The legacy of the FBI can be seen in the NSA and now the Homeland Security apparatus, especially the no-fly list. This list was created and maintained in secret with no provision for change in case of error; the administration only acknowledged errors when forced by the courts. The legacy of Prohibition can be seen in the persistence of organized crime (which arose in response to the demand for illicit alcohol) and the prohibitions on the use of marijuana. Some have argued that the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which effectively outlawed marijuana, was a jobs program for government workers idled by the repeal of Prohibition. All of these situations can be seen as consequences of President Wilson’s moral rigidity and lack of tolerance for dissent or compromise, that is, his authoritarianism.
Unchecked authoritarianism cannot be tolerated in a pluralistic society, no matter how much it is seen to be needed by those in power in response to real or imagined threats.
The Supreme Court handed down an emergency order on Thursday evening that allowed Wheaton College to refuse to fill out a form stating that it had religious objections to providing contraceptive insurance coverage to its students and employees. This flies in the face of Justice Alito’s claim in the Hobby Lobby decision that the use of this form would be a viable and less burdensome alternative for Hobby Lobby to use in furthering its refusal to provide contraceptive insurance coverage to its employees.
For reasons that are beyond my understanding, the Court feels that it is too burdensome for an organization to have to fill out a form that simply states that it refuses to provide the mandated insurance and send the form to the insurance company. Somehow, signing such a form is a burdensome violation of one’s religious beliefs, too burdensome for Wheaton College. The College claims that, by signing the form and sending it to the insurance company, they are in some way tacitly agreeing to the provision of religiously objectionable birth control methods by the insurance company. They insist that they can only send the government a letter to that effect, not send the letter to the insurance company; signing the form and sending it to the insurance company is tantamount to providing the prohibited contraceptives themselves.
This objection goes beyond religious scruples and enters the domain of religious fantasy. They think that, somehow, by not sending the letter to the insurance company, they can register their objections in a more effective manner. Never mind that the affected women will still obtain contraceptives through the insurance companies, as a result of government action. Never mind that, no matter how hard they try, a private company cannot prevent its employees from engaging in sexual intercourse and simultaneously not taking the risk of having children.
The myopia of religious people knows no bounds.
Wheaton College is no isolated case: there are at least 122 cases pending in lower courts that voice the same objection to sending the form to the insurance companies.
The Slate writers state that “The most important precedent is United States v. Lee, which rejected an Amish employer’s claim for an exemption from paying Social Security taxes. In Lee, the court wrote that “[w]hen followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity. Granting an exemption from social security taxes to an employer operates to impose the employer’s religious faith on the employees.” It hard to imagine a precedent more directly foreclosing Hobby Lobby’s exemption to paying for contraceptive coverage under the Affordable Care Act.”
The majority in the Hobby Lobby case has treated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as an excuse to make a complete break from this precedent, in order to signal that it reverses the judgement in the case in which the Court sanctioned the firing of Native Americans who used peyote as part of their religious observances. Justice Alito stated in his opinion that: “This decision concerns only the contraceptive mandate and should not be understood to mean that all insurance mandates, that is for blood transfusions or vaccinations, necessarily fail if they conflict with an employer’s religious beliefs…” However, he appears to ignore all previous precedents as if they were annulled by the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. He states that RFRA is “a complete separation from First Amendment case law.”
Justice Sotomayor’s response to this outrageous coddling of Christian fundamentalists: “Let me be absolutely clear,” she wrote, “I do not doubt that Wheaton genuinely believes that signing the self-certification form is contrary to its religious beliefs. But thinking one’s religious beliefs are substantially burdened—no matter how sincere or genuine that belief may be—does not make it so.”
The Court’s decisions have lifted the burden on the employer’s exercise of religious scruples and placed the burden directly upon the employees. Never mind that the employer’s free exercise of religion impairs the employee’s free exercise of personal choices which are theoretically based on their own consciences, not the company’s.
Pictographs On a Rockfall
Rocky Buttes
Early in the Morning
The Religious Freedoms of Corporations
Here is an article from The American Prospect that argues against the religious freedoms of corporations:
http://prospect.org/article/secular-corporations-cannot-exercise-religion-my-friend
The problem with the recent Supreme Court decision in the case of Hobby Lobby is that a corporation is not a “person” and the law that the decision cites, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), specifically refers the the religious freedoms of “persons”. A group of people form a corporation in order to gain certain advantages in commerce– primarily the ability to isolate financial risks from the personal finances of the persons forming the corporation. Under the law, if a corporation goes bankrupt, the creditors cannot go after the personal assets of the founders of the corporation.
The litigants in the Hobby Lobby case, however, wish to retain their personal religious freedoms as related to the control of the corporation’s behavior. There is no precedent for this in law, as pointed out in the Prospect article. The Supreme Court majority, in their opinion, have created such a precedent de novo, in the case of “closely held” corporations. This majority has decided that a corporation, at least a closely held one, can be considered a person for the purposes of the RFRA.
To claim that the contraceptive clause places a “substantial burden” on the corporation’s free exercise of religion is disingenuous too. In fact, Hobby Lobby supplied health insurance up to 2012 that did cover the contraceptives (most of them.)
The rights of the third parties (the employees affected) were ignored in the Supreme Court decision. This is where the actual “substantial burden” lies. If Hobby Lobby is free to not provide contraceptive insurance, then the employees will have to look elsewhere and probably pay substantial sums to obtain the necessary contraceptives.
The fact that the Court limited its decision specifically to contraceptive insurance is not helpful in this case. The limitation brings to mind memories of previous decisions in which similar limitations were announced, specifically the decision in the case of Bush v. Gore in 2000. The announcement of a limitation to precedent is an acknowledgment that the arguments in the case are specious and not sustainable.
The Hobby Lobby decision is a bad one because it shifts the “substantial burden” on the exercise of religious freedoms from a corporation to the employees of the corporation, that is from a non-person to a person. Once again, it relieves the powerful of obligations and burdens the weak with additional demands on their limited resources. The Court once again ignores the fact that the powerful have a surfeit of resources and the weak have, by definition, limited resources.
Surely the function of government is to protect the weak and enforce the obligations of the powerful, not to further burden the weak and relieve the powerful.
Cat Closeup
Krugman Exposes Kansas Hypocrisy
In his most recent column, the New York Time’s resident economist, Paul Krugman, tells us about the wrongheaded decision of the Kansas legislature to raise taxes on the poor and cut taxes on the rich. Specifically, Kansas cut income taxes for the rich about two years ago, while simultaneously increasing sales taxes (the burden of sales taxes falls mainly on the poor.) The result: a nearly one half billion dollar current accounts deficit for the state of Kansas, accompanied by reduced social services for the needy.
Other states are trying this same absurd strategy, egged on by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), and a strange man from the past, Arthur Laffer. It was this same Arthur Laffer who convinced Ronald Reagan, when he was a candidate for President, that slashing taxes on the rich would yield increased government revenues. Nothing of the sort happened, and the resulting deficit forced Mr. Reagan to raise taxes again (slightly.) His successor, George HW Bush, was forced to raise taxes again (slightly.)
It was not until Bill Clinton raised taxes again, more substantially, that we were put on the road to a balanced budget. None too soon, for an impressive economic boom followed. This boom was completely unanticipated by Mr. Laffer and was contrary to his dogma that taxes should always be lowered to help the economy. Despite the evidence showing him to be dead wrong, Mr. Laffer has continued to spread his dogma to any conservative who would listen.
The claim that taxes on the rich are a drag on the economy has been thoroughly discredited by all the evidence, yet this claim persists everywhere conservatives hold sway. There is no more obvious example of the universal truth that one’s ideology can distort one’s view of the facts. This distortion has increasingly affected politics because organizations like ALEC, paid for by rich conservatives, make contributions to politicians who become beholden to them.
The fact is that the government, as the feared engine of redistribution of wealth, can be a tremendous boost to the economy by supporting consumers. The economy, which we think of as consisting of producers, is completely depend on consumers for its health. The government can create or support consumers by giving money to poor people, who then go from being inert lumps to buyers of goods and services. Without this stimulus, the producers are dependent on consumers who already have enough money and have already bought most of the goods they need: a less attractive market to the producers.
The result of this lack of stimulus can be seen in the economy today: corporations are sitting on over two trillion dollars in cash because there is no market of consumers to support expansion and hiring. The economy is in the doldrums despite its apparent recovery from the Great Recession because no new markets of consumers are developing. No new market is appearing because the unemployment rate (particularly those who have withdrawn from the jobs market altogether) has remained high and median income has not increased. Even those who are employed cannot spend because the minimum wage has not gone up significantly in many years.
Productivity has greatly increased since 1979 but compensation has not. Thus, more goods and services are being produced per unit of work, but there is no more money being paid out to allow workers to purchase those goods and services. The result is economic stagnation or even depression.
The money that is being made from that increase in productivity is not flowing to workers, but instead to the most highly paid people, the top 0.1%; these people have more money than they need, and thus don’t spend the money they get. Their money flows into savings and investment; without an enlarging market made by workers spending money, there is nothing to enlarge the economy as a whole.
These facts are in conflict with the conservative ideology that people should compete “on a level playing field” to gain their compensation, and that those who are not productive don’t deserve to have compensation. This ideology extends to the basic needs of living, and if you are not productive, you don’t deserve to live. Apart from their complete lack of compassion for others, following this ideology leads to economic stagnation rather than revitalization. The fact is that there is no “level playing field”: some people start out with overwhelming advantages due to their positions of power, and without help, other people, even very productive ones, are never able to catch up. Following the ideology of Ayn Rand and ignoring the needs of others, however unproductive, is a self-defeating strategy. This has been shown by many examples over the last hundred years.
The truth is that compassion and other-oriented strategies rebound upon the practitioner with increased benefits for the self as well as society. There is no need to impoverish oneself in order to help others; a reasonable level of compassion, if practiced by everyone, will raise all boats.
Krugman’s column can be found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/opinion/paul-krugman-charlatans-cranks-and-kansas.html
