Quantifying Social Science Units

The positional advantage enjoyed by classes of individuals–privilege–is an important factor in operation of social systems. I worry, because particularly on the left, it is considered a very important–often the most important–factor, but I don’t know exactly what it means, or, more to the point, how it works. Reified from an explanatory concept to a concrete concept, it is often little more than a rhetorical cudgel that can have a desultory effect on civic discourse, and thus become trivialized. It should go without saying that exactly because privilege in some sense or another “operates,” its trivialization is a real problem.

Richard Dawkins’ Selfish Gene was a revelation to me in high school, at least to the degree I could understand it. I re-read it every few years, and so when the 30th Anniversary Edition dropped* I was particularly excited, the added sections and footnotes serving something like hidden bonus tracks. When I got to the short section where Dawkins first suggests the existence of “memes,” the cultural (or social) equivalent of genes–indivisible units of learnable cultural information, I recalled for the first time really disagreeing with it when I first read the book. It was almost viscerally unpleasant. The short excursus on memetics is dissonant from the rest of the book, which while packed with thought experiments and analogies is actually pretty stolidly scientific and meticulous.

A week or so ago a Twerkuffle** broke out between various political writers and journalists on my Twitter timeline. The details of it aren’t important; the relevant portion is that the word “privilege,” as in “racial privilege,” was used a number of times, and I had a reaction similar to that I had when first encountering “memetics”. This got me thinking about what the two concepts–”meme” and “privilege”–have in common and why they strike a resonant tone with each other in my mind.

Social scientists, and the journalists/essayists (I’m just going to call these people “writers” from now on) who synthesize social science for public debate, have always had trouble with this kind of thing. From the Enlightenment until probably around Marx’ time, political philosophers and other intellectuals had a sort of tic where they would reify concepts to explain observable behavior or historical conditions–you know the tic I’m talking about; it was usually expressed by Capitalizing the first letter to make it seem Big and Important and deserving of a Proper Noun. This is actually a kind of logical fallacy, and it makes reading a lot of the early modern philosophers so grating. I don’t believe in an Over-Soul that can actually act on the natural world. It’s like when you meet someone who says they don’t believe in a god but they do believe in an “energy” that we’re all a part of. That’s nice, but it’s also either meaningless or just employing a synonym for god.

Dawkins raises and moves on from the idea of memes in just a handful of sentences, but the “work” on them has been plentiful, and the concept has certainly entered popular consciousness. What bothers me is when they are treated as actual, concrete entities that can be studied somewhat quantitatively, but they haven’t been properly defined. Remember that in The Selfish Gene Dawkins was advocating for the “gene-centered” view of evolution by natural selection. A debate then raging (and still on-going) in evolutionary biology was at what “level” natural selection operated: are “traits” selected? Individual organisms? Groups? Entire species? Dawkins and his fellow travelers were arguing that in fact natural selection is unconcerned with anything of a “higher” level than genes–he famously said that bodies are nothing more than machines meant to ferry genes around. Evolution is the process of differential survival of competing alleles in a genome.

Ways I Lecture My Dog

“You’re just a dog. I’m a person. Don’t ever forget the discrepancy in our capacity for autonomous decision making.”

“All you care about is dog things. The world is a very wide place. Broaden your horizons.”

“For example, look at how preoccupied you are with that piece of rope. Consider how much work has gone into producing the vast catalog of human literature.”

“By chewing the fastenings on this papasan, you’re just compromising the structural integrity of your own favorite place to sleep. You must begin to contemplate the self-defeating character of this activity and desist.”

“Decide, once and for all, whether you are a dog, or a baby, or a dog-baby or a baby-dog. Your waffling on this matter will only cause you consternation.”

“Possessions are fleeting.”

Letter From a Youngish Contrarian

Mr. Hitchens,

People are influenced every day in ways we can’t really countenance. Our minds take in data and format themselves to incorporate that information in a way we’re mostly blind to. Yet most people, particularly writers and artists, are fond of listing their influences. In my undoubtedly cynical view, lists of influences are more wishful thinking than faithful reporting. They aren’t necessarily our influences as much as the component parts of the image we have of ourselves. Be that as it may.

Your short book, Letters to a Young Contrarian, was seminal in my personal and intellectual development–or pursuant to the above, is an important element of the way I’d like to see myself–but it wasn’t the first thing I read by you. That’s because I, like you, consider my greatest influence to be George Orwell. Like millions of American students, I read 1984 as a high school freshman and Animal Farm as a sophomore. I actually didn’t like 1984 when I first read it, but mostly because I intensely disliked the foreword, by Erich Fromm, that we were compelled to read and “respond” to. Re-reading it, I can’t remember what it was I found objectionable about Fromm’s deeply political elaboration of the themes of the book. But I loved Animal Farm, which I had actually first read earlier but didn’t retain. After Animal Farm, I rented every Orwell book from the local library and imbibed every word with religious relish.

It was your book Why Orwell Matters (and yes, I’m certain somebody started writing a book called Why Hitchens Matters as soon as your diagnosis was announced) that set off the same interest in your body of work. The pattern of good-way-Orwellian skepticism and material analysis was there, though his humanity (you could never have written Keep the Aspidistra Flying) was displaced or subsumed by a strong lacing of angry Oxbridgean wit.

In your iconoclastic works on Mother Teresa, Kissinger, and Clinton, I found a brave and unforgiving morality, and unabashed pride in Enlightenment ideals and dialectic method. Much of your collection Essays on Love, Poverty, and War, perhaps even more than your Letters, provide a sterling example of contrarian journalism and writing; and even more than Why Orwell Matters, stand as a testament to his legacy.

But Letters to a Young Contrarian is so sturdily assembled, so steady in its reasoning, generous without a strand of unnecessary compromise. I could quote entire pages without need of ellipsis. It was your citation of Orwell’s masterful essay Through a Glass Rosily as a “favorite text” that girded you for moments of conflict that won me over completely. Through a Glass Rosily should be required reading for America’s chattering political class, that is more concerned with narrative than even the most insular novelist. Orwell’s 70-year-old-words are distressingly relevant:

Whenever A and B are in opposition to one another, anyone who attacks or criticises A is accused of aiding and abetting B. And it is often true, objectively and on short-term analysis, that he is making things easier for B. Therefore, say the supporters of A, shut up and don’t criticise: or at least criticise “constructively,” which in practice always means favorably. And from this it is only a short step to arguing that the suppression and distortion of known facts is the highest duty of a journalist.

For the first few years of my life as a political writer, I was the worst kind of partisan, feeling my way towards a voice and worldview. Taking my cue from the partisan media that had pervaded traditional journalism, I mistook an ability to cobble together helpful facts and “reinterpretations” as marks of a good thinker, ignoring the “unseen witness” in my mind that disapproved of so much of what “my side” was doing and saying. Your reprimand helped set me straight and set that witness free:

“The catalytic or Promethean moment only occurs when one individual is prepared to cease being the passive listener to such a voice [of conscience] and to become instead its spokesman.”

Say what you believe and report what you see, not what you’d like to be so, or what may help your side. No argument is more devastating than one where you don’t bother inventing anything, or reinterpreting anything, or rationalizing anything, but use bare fact and even assume your opponents’ stated intentions are true. In law this standard is used in summary judgment motions, and nothing is more dispiriting for your opponent that to hear, “Even if I accept everything you say is true, you are still wrong.” Summary judgment is one of those particularly strong-sounding Anglo-Saxon terms that Orwell would have liked, if he had any patience for the law.

In the era where “savvy” is valued by a consolidated, insider-obsessed press corps (a disease you were not free of, frankly) and truth and opposition are considered at best gauche and at worst loony, the contrarian has fallen on hard times. Of course the contrarian is always going to be outside of the system; by hard times I mean that among the nation’s young intellectuals, writers, journalists, and activists, contrarianism’s traditional recruitment ground, opposition has been eye-rolled out of the way in favor of accommodation and loyalty and “organizational discipline.” The sight of so many devoted and brilliant young people so eager to show their ability to play nice with important people is sad, both in the sense of dolor and in the sense polite people employ it to mean pathetic.

As I feared, the election of an intellectual, youngish President who “gets it” has accelerated this problem. In my brief experience as an organizer, activist, writer, and bit of a radical myself, I have never met invective and self-delusion like that found among the President’s loyalist supporters. I made a feeble attempt to convince my fellow travelers that in fact now was the perfect time to be contrary on inauguration day in A Case for Contrarians. Re-reading it now, I find President-Elect Obama’s words about executive power particularly disheartening:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.

Having made this statement, how can anybody not looking “Through a Glass, Rosily” come to the conclusion that the President is either a weakling wholly under the influence of malign forces in defense and security, or a cynical hypocrite willing to appeal to our greatest ideals with no intention of following through? He’d surely reject that as a false choice, but if there is a third option he has not articulated it.

The time is ripe for your exhortations to be heeded. If ever your examples of iconlocast were needed, they are needed now. Your fearlessness in the face of a fight–your Kissinger lawsuit comes to mind–all young writers should strive to emulate–or at least, list as an influence.

Your heady Trotskyist days were before my time, and I was a child and teenager in your Marxist critic heyday, so unfortunately by the time I was old enough, and well-read enough, to begin consuming your contemporary work as an essayist, it was at just the wrong time. But not because of your support for the war in Iraq.

You and I share a source of shame. I like you, supported the invasion. But not because I believed for a minute anything the Bush administration was saying, either as to weapons of mass destruction or a connection to al-Qaeda. I like to think being the child of a victim of Iraqi Baathist secret police is a good enough justification, but it isn’t. I knew, from the years of listening to people from the country, that there was no chance Saddam Hussein was harboring al-Qaeda, or any Islamist terrorist network, voluntarily. This makes my support of the war worse than had I had no familiarity with the country. A lifetime of stories of the horrors of the Baathist regime were my sole rationale. Saddam was evil and had to go. I didn’t anticipate the craven incompetence and greediness with which the war would be conducted–but that is a failure of judgment, too.

I was barely 22 years old and wholly inconsequential when that war started. Frankly, I found it liberating, not shameful, to admit my mistake. It wasn’t something I couldn’t have avoided, it wasn’t youthful indiscretion–plenty of people situated similarly to me came out on the right side. I have no excuse but my own personal failure. So perhaps the best influence you had on me was your negative example.

I can excuse your anti-obituary of your once-friend Edward Said as gauche, and your support of the increasingly dictatorial Kurdish Regional Government as lazy myopia; I can even write off your asinine essay about women not being as funny as men as the embarrassing words of an aging, sad former playboy wandering into territory he doesn’t understand. After all, I don’t expect you anticipated a hagiography after your death. You did people you wrote about the courtesy of treating them as flawed human beings, not symbolic abstractions.

But your stubborn cleaving to the War on Terror generally and the Iraq War specifically is not really excusable. The lazy accusations of “Islamophobia” against you belie the real problem, an eager willingness to embrace the “War” on Terror as a vehicle for your legitimate loathing of superstition, backwardness, and authoritarianism of theocratic and quasi-theocratic states. I think you saw in the milquetoast left’s eagerness to defend fundamentalist Islam as a “reasonable” reaction to Western imperialist practice your Orwell-on-Sovietism moment. I think in your own mind you were finally given the opportunity to be as brave as Orwell, to beatify yourself.

But you’re no Orwell, and you chose the wrong moment. There is no heat-of-the-moment, forest-for-trees rationale that can ever justify why you wrote this:

When you meet a battlefield officer in Iraq as often as not, you are dealing with someone who cut his or her teeth in political-humanitarian rescue in Bosnia, Haiti, Kosovo or Afghanistan. Their operational skills are reconstruction, liaison with civilian forces, the cultivation of intelligence and the study of religion and ethnicity. Intelligence officers told me even then that they were getting more raw information than they could sift or process, and were being scrupulous in screening out tips that might involve grudges or revenge. This is, in every sense, a smart army.

Had you put down your own rose-colored glasses, you could have seen the situation there for what it was. Only contrition could have redeemed you, and while you bent slightly that way in admitting the war was not prosecuted perfectly, you refused to break, and now you’re gone and will never have that opportunity. Evaluation of legacies are best left to generations down the line. What we know now is that the good you could have done as the indefatigable and stilleto voice for contrarianism in a time of creeping authoritarian denial of truth you sacrificed not to some ideology or even sycophancy to power, but something maybe worse: to your fanciful image of yourself and your posterity.

To be more like your influence. I won’t insult irony by spelling it out and just let it stand there.

Thanks for writing,
Ramsin

Conflicts with Schools Privatization, Apparent or Otherwise

A little friction met the Emanuel administration’s to-date smoothly-rolling program of partially privatizing the school system this week. First, a report in the Tribune indicated that charter schools, which are privately run schools operated on tax money, do not perform any better than public schools on average and in many cases are considerably worse. Particularly troubling for privatization advocates–who are found in both political parties and in a wide swath of the political spectrum–was the suggestion that it is in fact poverty that drags down those charters performing worse. This fact is often brought up by privatization opponents and downplayed by its champions as mere excuse making. From the Tribune report:

More than two dozen schools in some of the city’s most prominent and largest charter networks, including the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO), Chicago International Charter Schools, University of Chicago and LEARN, scored well short of district averages on key standardized tests.

In two of the city’s oldest charter networks, Perspectives and Aspira, only one school — Perspectives’ IIT Math & Science Academy — surpassed CPS’ average on the Illinois Standards Achievement Test, taken by elementary schoolers, or the Prairie State Achievement Examination, used in high schools.

Next, Emanuel’s choice to spearhead his school-turnaround effort brought the word “cronyism” into coverage of his administration, always a quick way to convince Chicagoans the new boss is the same as the old boss. This week the Emanuel administration announced a turbocharged CompStat program for the public schools and the expansion of the privately run Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL) program, handing them six more schools to turn around. AUSL has a mixed to poor record with school turnarounds, and is connected to the Mayor through a number of campaign and policy staffers and his choice to head the Board of Education, David Vitale, raising questions of the propriety of the choice. Interestingly given the mantra of privatization advocates that public school supporters use poverty as an excuse, AUSL head Martin Koldyke defended their record by blaming kids for being slow to catch on.

Emanuel was reportedly testy when asked if there was a conflict of interest in his choice of AUSL given his political connections to them. Asked directly if there was a conflict of interest, the Mayor answered a wholly different question:

It is not a conflict to give kids a good education. It’s the responsibility I have as mayor.

Whether there was a conflict or not, this controversy, if it is that, lays bare one of the problems inherent to privatization of public trusts, namely, the ease with which, at worst, actual conflicts arise, and at best, the appearance of conflicts arise. Mayor Emanuel’s political connections to AUSL leadership are undeniable; whether they motivated in whole or in part his decision to hand them more business isn’t as germane as the ease with which he is able to hand them business, the lack of meaningful checks to that ability, and the absence of transparency in the decision. It is worth nothing that another major charter operator, United Neighborhoods Organization-Charter School Network (UNO-CSN), is headed by a co-chair of Emanuel’s Mayoral election campaign, Juan Rangel. From the outside looking in, the lesson is obvious: if you want to build a successful school operator, at the very least it helps to have strong political connections.

Now that the privatization train has started rolling, it will be more and more difficult to stop, and the Mayor’s ideological dedication to the principles underlying certainly grease those tracks. It is unfortunate that the years-old warnings that charters were unproven went unheeded. We now are looking at a class of powerful and connected rent-seekers with intense financial and professional incentives to preserve the system. If it bears out that charter schools offer not meaningful advantage over public schools, we have solved no problems while likely creating a whole new class of them.

The New Chicago Way: The Wholly Surveilled City

A friend sent me a note asking if the recent Automated Speed Enforcement system (ASES) approved by the General Assembly at the behest of Chicago’s Mayor and Police Superintendent would make Lake Shore Drive fully subject to electronic monitoring, since almost the entire lakefront is a public park, and the bill was pitched as enforcing speed limits near parks and schools, “for the children.” The good news is the answer is no, because Lake Shore Drive is exempted from the enacting legislation, known informally as SB956. The bad news is that Lake Shore Drive may be the only unmonitored bit of the city.

The ASES would not apply to Lake Shore Drive, but it would apply to almost the entire city. Some interesting things about the bill:

First, the way it defines an “automated speed enforcement system.” That is as, “a photographic device, radar device, laser device, or other electrical or mechanical device or devices installed or utilized in a safety zone and designed to record the speed of a vehicle and obtain a clear photograph or other recorded image of the vehicle and the vehicle’s registration plate.”

Which brings us pretty seamlessly to “secondly.” Secondly, the bill defines a safety zone as any “area” that is within 1/8th of a mile (or a city block) from the property line of any public or private school or school-owned facility except central administrative buildings, and any park district owned property, except, again, for central administrative buildings. As you can imagine (see schools map below) that makes up a huge amount of the city–because the cut off isn’t just a block. The bill also provides, “However, if any portion of a roadway is within either one-eighth mile radius, the safety zone also shall include the roadway extended to the furthest portion of the next furthest intersection.” In other words, if a road falls within the a block of the property line of a school district or park district property, then the “safety zone” is extended to the next intersection, and through it.

Take a look at this map:

View this document on Scribd

These are just the elementary schools.

Your Dissatisfaction Is Your Fault

There is a segment of the liberal establishment and activist community that is still going through some kind of post-partum depression. For nearly a year, there was this halycyon period, where popular and left-wing revulsion at the right coalesced disparate groups around then-Senator Obama, despite centrist behavior, corporate fundraising, and DC-establishment campaign apparatus. Finally, the liberal establishment was cool, for lack of a better word. The traditional left kaiboshed all the third-party talk and Kucinich-celebrating and everybody came together around a particularly skillful political salesman.

They want it back so badly you guys. So badly. Remember the good old days? Where activists and intellectuals put aside their skepticism and principles and threw their cash and energy at the establishment, and we all watched will.i.am videos and cried and stuff? It must be that the extent to which the left is dissatisfied with the President (and Democrats generally) is calibrated precisely to the degree that those activist and thinkers are intellectually dishonest, naive, or, my favorite, “emo.”

But this rationalization that dissatisfaction is due to anything besides the facts that President Obama is killing U.S. citizens without due process, uninterested in prosecuting corporate criminals while exporting record numbers of immigrants, bringing Wall Street functionaries into his cabinet, and privatizing public schools is getting confusing.

If my tone seems dismissive, I don’t intend it that way. The impulses are rational. It’s also something of a forest/trees problem. When you spend all day around people who are there in the Committee meetings and halls of power tearing their hair out dealing with obstreperous opponents, casual denunciations of the President and Democrats in general can seem ill-informed or naifish. But take a breath and look at the big picture: either Democrats don’t actually want to pursue fundamental reform of our economy and society, or they do but are so wildly inept at it they can’t communicate it to a public that they insist “really” wants the same thing. In either case, they aren’t worthy of the support (and money) of activists.

The latest bit of this comes from a New Yorker article by Jonathan Chait. Chait is an apologist for the President, though he would consider himself merely a realist in the face of unhinged or intellectually dishonest critics. Chait argues that lefty dissatisfaction with the President comes from…well, I’m not wholly sure exactly what he means. Here’s his thesis statement:

Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president. They can be happy with the idea of a Democratic president—indeed, dancing-in-the-streets delirious—but not with the real thing. The various theories of disconsolate liberals all suffer from a failure to compare Obama with any plausible baseline. Instead they compare Obama with an imaginary president—either an imaginary Obama or a fantasy version of a past president.

Do We Need Property Rights Over Our Jobs?

In my various doings, toss-abouts, and private follies, I’ve known many socialists or quasi-socialists. I don’t know how common that is, to know a lot of socialists; nor do I know if I actually do know “a lot,” since there are probably many people who know lots more. Seems like a lot to me. I guess any would seem like a lot.

Anyway, my point is to say that I always profoundly disagreed with them on a lot of things, but the big one—and the reason I could never be a socialist, or even a proper Marxist—is that I’m big on property. I think reasonably strong property rights are not just important, but fundamental to a working democracy and liberty generally. I think it’s so plainly obvious that it’s not even worth arguing about. Property rights are a funny thing though; libertarians—hard libertarian, not the vague Ron Paul-ish ones—take the extreme view that property rights precede all civil society. In other words, they are inviolably ours, to the degree that the state can have no powers that conflict with that right.

This isn’t a very common view; the Constitution itself gives the government the power of eminent domain in its 5th Amendment “takings clause.” The takings clause allows the government to take any property for a “public use” so long as it is done via due process and pays a “just compensation.” So our starting point, as a society, is that the right to and dominion over your property is not 100% absolute. The debate then settles in on what is an appropriate framework, or the optimal limits, for our property rights.

Consider two examples:

In the first, you are you. You work for a firm as, say, a designer of some kind. You lead a team, but don’t have any management authority. You’re there for five years. You get incremental raises every six months. You’re five years in, and you make $65,000 a year now, and pay about $18,000 in taxes. Now, a management position just under the executives, say, two levels above you, opens up. You interview and you get the job. Now you make $174,000 a year, and pay $55,000 in taxes, or a 5% greater rate. Is that fair?

Obamacare and the Privatized Social Safety Net

For all my discontent with “left neoliberalism” and its pervasive influence, it’s nice when you get some concrete specifics, as applied.

In my piece on the constitutionality of the individual mandate, I argued that the Affordable Care Act created a distressing precedent, whereby the government addresses inequality-causing market failures through broad requirements of consumers to protect profits as a precondition to regulations and requirements of capital. The administration’s thinking in creating the individual mandate was undergirded by left neoliberal preference for “market solutions,” as much as by an over-cautious political calculation whereby industry had to be placated before social ills could be addressed.

And lo and behold, unbeknownst to me, the Hon. Brett Kavanaugh, a D.C. Circuit Judge appointed by George W. Bush, was saying the same thing, although from the opposite perspective. In his dissent to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision upholding the Act’s Constitutionality, Kavanaugh characterizes the individual mandate as an example of legislative ingenuity in a new era of “privatized social services”:

The elected Branches designed this law to help provide all Americans with access to affordable health insurance and quality health care, vital policy objectives. This legislation was enacted, moreover, after a high-profile and vigorous national debate. Courts must afford great respect to that legislative effort and should be wary of upending it.

This case also counsels restraint because we may be on the leading edge of a shift in how the Federal Government goes about furnishing a social safety net for those who are old, poor, sick, or disabled and need help. The theory of the individual mandate in this law is that private entities will do better than government in providing certain social insurance and that mandates will work better than traditional regulatory taxes in prompting people to set aside money now to help pay for the assistance they might need later. Privatized social services combined with mandatory-purchase requirements of the kind employed in the individual mandate provision of the Affordable Care Act might become a blueprint used by the Federal Government over the next generation to partially privatize the social safety net and government assistance programs and move, at least to some degree, away from the tax-and-government-benefit model that is common now.

Courts naturally should be very careful before interfering with the elected Branches’ determination to update how the National Government provides such assistance. Cf. Heart of Atlanta Motel, Inc. v. United States, 379 U.S. 241 (1964); NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U.S. 1 (1937). The significant implications of a Commerce Clause decision in this case – in either side’s favor – lead to this point: If we need not decide the Commerce Clause issue now, we should not decide the Commerce Clause issue now. I therefore would not strain to sidestep the Anti-Injunction Act.

(emphasis added)

In other words, Kavanaugh seems to be saying, the individual mandate may appear unconstitutional in the same way that the Civil Rights Act (Heart of Atlanta Motel) and the National Labor Relations Act (Jones & Laughlin Steel) did because it is novel, as they were. But novelty, or new-ness, isn’t proof of unconstitutionality; it may just augur a new era of legislative instruments. Kavanaugh, rightly I think, sees the Affordable Care Act as the first step in that new era: an era where the government, rather than redistributing wealth or restructuring economic relationships to address social ill, fuels capital’s ability to act on the assumption that the “spontaneous order” of consumer choice and entrepreneurial acumen will cure social ills.

You may believe this to be true, that it’ll work. But if you do, you have to contend with the fact that the empirical evidence for it is thin; for all the Great Society’s many failures, the replacement of tight regulatory regimes with preference for public-private partnerships and market mechanisms has seen an explosion in income inequality, economic insecurity, household debt, and the concentration of political power.

Mayor Emanuel’s First Budget Passes Unanimously

The City Council voted today to pass Mayor Emanuel’s budget unanimously, 50-0. Chicago News Coop reporters Hunter Clauss and Dan Mihalopoulos described Aldermen’s comments as “near worshipful” though not without acknowledging the necessary pain that will come with cuts to front-line workers, library and mental services, and elsewhere.

The budget affects deep cuts, particularly around staffing, to close the $600+ million budget deficit the city faced. The budget came in at $6.3 billion. Aldermen lauded the Mayor for being inclusive in the planning process. While under Mayor Daley unanimous budget votes were often used as evidence that the Council was a mere “rubber stamp” for the Mayor’s prerogative, a unanimity does not necessarily entail that. Aldermen seemed to feel like they got their words in during the preparation process, which is arguably much more important than voting against the final budget. Tracking how the budget has changed from its initial form to today would be more instructive; unfortunately that process is not particularly transparent, or at least self-evident.

AFSCME Council 31, which represents thousands of city workers, released a statement upon passage of the budget bemoaning the deep cuts to basic and needed social services:

A Primer on the Individual Mandate and Its Unfortunate Constitutionality

The Supreme Court has granted certiorari to an appeal from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals decision holding the individual mandate, Section 1501 of the Affordable Care Act, to be unconstitutional. The case, United States Department of Health and Human Services v. Florida, looks at a number of issues arising from the bill, most of which are not of general interest, such as whether the federal Anti-Injunction Act prohibits challenges to the Affordable Care Act (probably not).

The big constitutional question at issue is whether Congress’ Commerce Clause powers allow it to compel people, “as a condition of residency in the United States” to purchase monthly health insurance coverage. It’s a big important question, because it is an unprecedented exercise of power by Congress, not in scope, but in form: where Congress has tried to achieve similar things in the past, it has typically either regulated producers or used its taxing powers, which is nearly infinite.

So here’s a bit of a primer to help you argue with the blowhard Randite at your office who thinks the individual mandate is slavery, as well as with your Democratic partisan former college roommate who thinks it’s the greatest thing since the New Deal.

What the Commerce Clause Has To Do With It

Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution lays out Congress’ enumerated powers. Clause 3 specifies that Congress shall have power to “regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes.” This is the “Commerce Clause,” and it is made up of two broad areas: the more obvious facial power, to regulate commerce between parties in different states, and the “dormant” power to prohibit states from passing their own laws that would, in effect, regulate such commerce. In other words, regulating commerce between states is the sole province of the U.S. Congress, and the U.S. Congress, unlike state legislatures, has only those powers granted by the Constitution, whereas states have a “general police power” [PDF] that Congress does not.