First: She’s liar.

Second: She’s horrendously unqualified.

Third: She has revealed the seedy hypocrisy of the Republican party.

But probably the most impressive thing about Sarah Palin is that she is, in fact, the entirety of John McCain’s economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy and foreign policy:

He said so himself when he claimed that, whenever Barack Obama is talking about John McCain’s economic policy, health care policy, tax policy, education policy, and foreign policy, he’s actually talking about Sarah Palin.

And did I mention that she’s using the same shady tactics of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush in her attempts to impede lawful investigations into her misconduct as governor of Alaska?

So if you want corrupt, unqualified liars, hypocrites, and smear-artists in the White House — Vote McCain-Palin 2008.

Yesterday I wrote about the role the agricultural revolution played in oppressing women. While exploring that subject, I ended up wandering off on a rather large tangent that I eventually deleted when it became large enough to sufficiently defocus the essay. But I think it’s a sufficiently interesting to discuss it here.

Jared Diamond has made the argument in several books and essays — most notably Guns, Germs, and Steel — that the move from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural societies was the “worst mistake” in history. To support this conclusion, he cites various evidence which indicates that the larger families of early agricultural societies actually resulted in poorer nutrition, hygiene, and even longevity compared to the hunter-gatherer societies they replced.

But Diamond’s thesis makes little sense: No one would willingly choose a less appealing lifestyle. Diamond argues that these societies were “forced” into this lifestyle due to their inability to control their birth rates. But this contradicts the known facts: For tens or hundreds of thousands of years, mankind was able to regulate their birth rates just fine while continuing to live in hunter-gatherer societies. And, in fact, modern hunter-gatherer societies manage to similarly regulate their birth rates.

I suspect the reality is that the agricultural lifestyle was preferred specifically because it allowed for larger families. This is a point of view which is probably difficult for a scholar from the latter half of the 20th century to understand, given that contemporary western society puts a very low premium on children compared to previous epochs of history.

Oh, we still like our children… we just tend to like them in moderation. The idea of a single woman bearing 20 children seems unspeakably alien and even slightly distasteful to most of us… but would seem incredibly desirable to most cultures of recorded history.

So those early farmers may have been hungry, dirty, and short-lived… but it wasn’t a mistake. They were gaining something that they valued even more.

Recently I’ve been reading The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. The book, as a whole, attempts to provide a universal overview of women — biologically, historically, culturally, and socially — from the dawn of time down through the mid-20th century (when it was written). It’s a stunningly ambitious project and, to its credit, succeeds far more often than it fails.

In the historical section of the book, Beauvoir analyzes how and why women came to be subjugated in almost every culture from the beginning of recorded history until the present day. If it was a matter of pure chance or a cultural artifact, she argues, we would not expect it to appear so reliably in cultures with little or no connection to each other. Nor would we expect to see the subjugation continue with such unmitigated persistence in all of these disparate cultural traditions while every other aspect of those cultures could be seen to shift dramatically.

Beauvoir makes a rather worthwhile argument that the key moment of change lies in the shift from hunter-gatherer societies (in which women are frequently seen as societal equals or even superiors) to agricultural societies. In short, no matter where agriculture arose, women were almost simultaneously subjugated. This indicates that the subjugation of women is neither a biological imperative nor some cultural oddity, but rather the result of something systemic to early agricultural societies.

Unfortunately, Beauvoir ends up muddying her argument rather thoroughly with heavy doses of mysticism, existentialism, and bald assertion. (These features may also be the result of a poor translation.) So, to try to straighten this out in my own mind, I wanted to put it down in a clearer form and then expand upon it.

THE PREMISE

Prior to the invention of agriculture (roughly 10,000 years ago), women were mythologically venerated. The degree to which this translated to daily life is somewhat unclear, but based on a variety of information (including the study of primitive tribes) it seems clear that men and women in hunter-gatherer societies were generally considered equals. There was a division of labor in these societies (usually with the men hunting and the women gathering) based on the physical differences between the genders, but not subjugation.

But with the invention of agriculture, things shifted. Mother goddesses were shoved out of power and replaced with male gods. And by the time written records begin to appear, women have almost universally been shoved into a second-place status.

Something had changed.

CHANGE #1: PROPERTY

Agriculture created a sense of ownership in the land. And I think, from that, a stronger sense of property in general developed. Property is a form of power and allows for the extension of the personal will. The desire for control seems pretty deeply ingrained into humanity, and property is one way of asserting control.

This expansion of the concept of property eventually led to other humans being controlled as property. Slavery is the most egregious form of this concept, but the concept is also expressed in the idea that a daughter belongs to her father and is given to her husband.

What determines the difference between master and slave? Power. And in a society ruled by physical strength, who gains the power and who becomes the object to be owned? Statistically speaking, it’s the male who has more physical strength than the female.

In this way, the expansion of the concept of personal property leads to the opportunity for the subjugation of women.

CHANGE #2: LEGACY AND IMMORTALITY

The expansion of property rights also created the ability to pass on a greater and more meaningful legacy to your children.

The nascent desire to achieve immortality through our children (so that some part of us might continue throughout eternity) is a pretty basic building block of human psychology. But being able to give our children property acts as a kind of force magnifier on our genetics: Now we’re not just passing on our flesh and blood, but also all that we have achieved in the course of our own lifetimes.

(The ultimate futility of this is demonstrated by Ozymandias, for example, but that doesn’t stop us from wanting it.)

But there’s a catch here: Without property, we’re perfectly happy to spread our genetic material far and wide and hope that some of it will endure. With property, however, there’s suddenly a desire to give it to the most worthy of our heirs. And, even more importantly, make sure it goes to one of our heirs and not somebody else’s heirs.

Unlike women, however, men have no surety of paternity. Which means that they have no inherent surety that they’re giving their property to their own kid or to the kid of some guy just down the street.

In order to gain that surety, the female mate must be controlled. And this creates the motivation for the subjugation of women.

CHANGE #3: FAMILY SIZE

There is plenty of evidence — both archaeological and anthropological — indicating that the movement from a hunter-gatherer society to an agricultural society resulted in larger families. This is either because the agricultural lifestyle required a larger workforce (which was obtained by having a larger family) or it was because the predictability of the agricultural lifestyle allowed for more children (which was desirable because of the legacy and sense of immortality they created).

However, for women having more children means spending more time in the non-productive state of biological reproduction (i.e., pregnant or recovering from pregnancy). Because women become less productive, they become more dependent on the production of men.

There are two edges to this sword: First, dependence allows for control. To put it in crude terms, if leaving your husband means you’ll starve to death, you effectively can’t leave your husband.

Second, because men are the breadwinners, they have a natural inclination to believe that the resulting wealth belongs to them alone. (Even if, in point of fact, their own productivity is heavily ennabled by their wife’s partnership and the children she is sacrificing her own productivity to bear and raise.) Since it is their wealth — not their wife’s wealth — the desire to make sure it goes to their own child (and not the progeny of cuckoldry) becomes even stronger.

(These impulses, it can be noted, explain the common laws prohibiting women — particularly married women — from owning property. It is a simple and expedient way to make sure that they can’t lay claim to any of the wealth which their husbands believe belongs rightfully to themselves and to their sons.)

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS

This is all simplified to its most basic components, of course. But that’s pretty much inherent in the exercise: We’re looking at the broad similarities created in society and economy by the agricultural revolution. Those broad similarities result in certain cultural patterns, of which the oppression of women is one.

And that’s why the oppression of women appears in tandem with the agricultural revolution, even when cultures are discovering agriculture independently.

On the flip-side, this does lead to the interesting observation that women’s liberation groups first began meeting with widespread success right around the time of the industrial revolution. In other words, the oppression of women appeared with agricultural economies and began disappearing as the agricultural economies gave way to industrial economies.

Is that mere coincidence?

From a philosophical standpoint, the women’s liberation movement is commonly understood to grow out of the Enlightenment-era focus on liberty. But were those philosophies only able to find fertile soil because the economies created by the industrial revolution de-emphasized inheritable property, reduced the need for large families, and made it possible women to obtain gainful employment?

This, ultimately, opens a much larger discussion of whether culture influnces economy; or if its the economy that influences culture. I suspect that, to one degree or another, both are true. I also suspect that it’s probably more insightful to look at how the necessities of an economy create certain social structures, and then look at the cultural impact those social structures have. (For example, the agricultural revolution may have subjugated women, but that subjugation manifested itself in very different ways across a wide swath of cultures and classes.)

If you’re politically progressive — if you support civil rights; a clean environment; a fair economy; a well-run government; and the like — then Sarah Palin is dangerous. She has the right look, the right voice, and the right personal narrative to craft a political persona for herself which can resonate with a lot of people. Like Reagan before her, she can tool the power of perception to her advantage. And the power of perception can be very powerful in politics.

On top of that, she’s demonstrating a keen instinct for the jugular and the ability to articulate Republican talking points. Whether she’s writing the speeches or not is truly immaterial. She’s not Barack Obama or Bill Clinton, but she’s one of the best public speakers the Republicans have had in years.

I expect that Palin wil be a major mover-and-shaker in the Republican party for years to come. She will be a highly visible and highly effective spokesperson for the party. And she’ll probably be a very viable candidate for a Presidential run in 2012.

With all that being said, however, Palin has several key weaknesses:

(1) She suffers from a profound lack of experience. The Republicans are trying to spin that away by saying that she has more experience than Obama (she doesn’t) or by claiming that only executive experience counts for anything (a standard which means that John McCain is has no relevant experience). It’s very important that they don’t win this battle. Palin is inexperienced and she needs to remain defined that way through this election cycle.

(2) She has given two major speeches since being named as the VP nominee… and each of those speeches has been riddled with blatant lies. Those lies (and any lies she chooses to tell in the future) need to be repeatedly emphasized so that her credibility can be (quite rightfully) destroyed.

(3) She has several rather significant scandals hanging over her. Troopergate, her involvement with the secessionist Alaskan Independent Party, the book-bannings, and the politically-motivated “loyalty” firings cannot be allowed to fall to the back-burner.

(You’ll notice that none of the pregnancy nonsense or “mommy shouldn’t be allowed to go back to work” foolishness is mentioned above. That’s because those are, frankly, red herrings that provide nothing but a distraction from the more meaningful and substantive narrative.)

The next week is going to be fairly crucial. If Palin can be defined in terms of her failures, her lies, and her scandals then she’ll be effectively neutralized in this election cycle. (Although her ability to fire up the Republican base is not irrelevant, particularly if it frees McCain to finally skew back towards more moderate positions.)

But even if she’s neutralized in this election, she’s not going to go to away. She’s a young Republican politician who has been thrust into a party leadership role at a time when the existing leaders of the party are aging their way out of politics. There are only two ways she doesn’t assume a major role (including that possible 2012 run for President):

(1) One of her scandals breaks big. If Troopergate were to result in a criminal conviction or impeachment or if a video were to emerge of her explicitly endorsing the AIP’s secessionist platform, that would probably be sufficient to tarnish her political reputation in a way that would take years to recover from (if she ever could).

(2) The McCain-Palin ticket is blown out by the Obama-Biden ticket in the kind of humiliating display of political impotence that destroys careers. We’re talking about the kind of political whipping that McGovern received in ’72; Mondale and Ferrara received in ’84; or Dole and Kemp received in ’96.

However, I don’t consider either of those scenarios to be particularly likely.

In any case, I’ll be keeping a close eye on the polls over the next couple of weeks. I’m hopeful that the trends from earlier this week will persist and that the selection of Palin will be defined as the point where the McCain campaign finally shot itself irrevocably in the foot. But if she can somehow slip out from her inexperience, her mendacity, and her scandals, then Palin could become a very dangerous factor over the last 50 days of this campaign.

I’ve gotten tired of explaining why supply-side economics — i.e., voodoo economics — don’t actually work. So I’ve decided to write up a quick-and-dirty version that I can just link to as necessary. This is not meant to be a definitive statement on the subject. It’s not even an air-tight argument of the principles being espoused. It’s just me pointing at some pretty fundamental absurdities in voodoo economics and saying, “Hey! Look! Have you even thought about this? It doesn’t make any sense!”

(1) Money is a form of power. Power tends to accumulate more power. Thus, in a capitalist society, wealth tends to flow up, not down. The rich tend to become richer and the poor tend to become poorer. Supplying the wealthy with even more money doesn’t cause that money to flow down to the poor — it just accelerates this natural trend. Which is why, every time supply-side economics have been attempted, the divide between the rich and the poor has grown wider.

The argument has been made that a “rising tide raises all ships”, but the reason this disproportionate distribution of wealth is a problem leads us to…

(2) The modus operandi of capitalism is consumer spending. In a capitalist system you have multiple products available, and those products which have the greatest value to the consumer succeed (because they buy them) and those which have less value fail (because they don’t). In a very real sense, capitalism is a democracy in which you vote with your dollars for the products you like best. And although in practice a capitalist system can become flawed in many ways, capitalism has widely proven itself to be the best system for encouraging quality, efficiency, and innovation.

You need an unequal distribution of wealth for this system to work, but when that inequality becomes sufficiently disproportionate the reduced spending power enjoyed by the majority of your consumers results in a less efficient system. Not only are the quality of decisions which emerge from such a system degraded, but the system’s ability to encourage increased value and quality becomes quashed.

This all leads us to the fundamenal problem with supply-side economics…

(3) If you want to stimulate a capitalist economy, you should be giving tax breaks to the poor, not the rich.

The reason for this is the difference between spending and investing. Republicans argue that giving tax cuts to the rich allow them to invest in business. By investing in business, the argument goes, the economy grows and the workers end up benefitting in the long run.

But while investing is an important part of capitalism, it’s the secondary mechanism of the capitalist system. The primary mechanism of a capitalist system is spending.

If you give money to someone and have them invest it, that money may or may not eventually result in economic activity and capitalist success. (Whether it does or not will depend entirely on how the money is invested. If it’s invested in a better, cheaper product that people want, it will stimulate the economy. If it isn’t, then it won’t.)

But if you give the money to someone and have them spend it, that money immediately results in economic activity and capitalist success. This result is guaranteed.

In other words: If you give the money to an investor, you are injecting that money into the economy in an inefficient manner — that money may or may not end up growing a business producing products that consumers want.

If you give that money to a consumer, on the other hand, you are injecting that money almost directly into the economy — that money will automatically end up growing a business producing products that consumers want (because the consumer will spend it on the products that they want).

(4) The name “trickle down economics” is actually truth in advertising. Money in a capitalist system flows reliably from the consumer to the successful business/investor/capitalist. Movement in the opposite direction, however, is not reliable.

Which actually brings us full circle: In capitalism, wealth tends to flow up and trickle down. If you want to stimulate an economy, you want to make the money flow and, thus, encourage better ideas and more valuable products.

And that means tax cuts for the poor and the middle-class, not the rich.

THE OTHER FALLACY

Of course, this conclusion simply opens the door to the larger question of when such tax cuts are appropriate. The other fallacy of voodoo economics is the claim that lowering taxes will always result in sufficient economic growth to raise overall tax revenues. This is self-evidently not true for several reasons:

(1) If you reduce the tax rate to 0%, it doesn’t matter how much economic growth you enjoy as a result: You still won’t end up with increased tax revenues (since you’re not collecting any).

(2) Even if you replace “no taxes” with “infinitesimal taxes”, the conclusion is still palpably absurd. If you have an average tax rate of 30% and you lower that to an average tax rate of 1%, you’re claiming that the economy will grow to 30 times its current size entirely as a result of the tax cuts. (That means you can’t count inflation or the normal economic growth that would have occurred even if you hadn’t cut taxes.)

The underlying fallacy here is the belief that the social institutions and infrastructure created by our government have no positive role on economic growth. Common sense alone should tell you that a certain degree of social infrastructure (e.g. law and order), physical infrastructure (e.g. roads), and educational infrastructure (e.g. univeral education) is beneficial to the economy (even if one ignores all the other societal benefits). And even the most cursory analysis of history shows this to be true: Anarchy is not conducive to economic growth.

On the other hand, it is equally trivial to demonstrate that the opposite extreme is equally absurd: The benefits brought by government cannot possibly outweigh the problems caused by an average tax rate of 100%.

The inevitable conclusion is that there is a sweet spot in which both the benefits of low taxes and the benefits of the societal infrastructure provided by our government are maximized.

Or to look at it another way: The problem with both extremist libertarians and communists is that they equally fail to appreciate the sweet spot between anarchic liberty and absolute central control.