Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

It may seem a perverse subject for meditation on inauguration day for Donald J. Trump, but I'd like to take a Big Picture look at the woman who conspicuously isn't the center of today's ceremonies, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Think back on 2007, the early jockeying on the Democratic side, before any actual primaries or even caucuses had been held. HRC at that time was using the phrase "help make history." Support for her was helping to make history. She wasn't using the phrase "glass ceiling" much in that cycle, but the appeal suggested by the phrase was the same. This would have been a perfectly sensible appeal for her to make, if the chief intra-party opponent had turned out to be Christopher Dodd or Joseph Biden, just another WASPy white guy. It might have been somewhat less sensible if the intra-party opposition had coalesced around, say, Joseph Lieberman or Bernie Sanders. But we'll get back to that. A less hypothetical point is this: th...

According to a Reuters report posted on October 24, there's been a good deal of ambivalence in the oil patch during the recent Presidential campaign. Yes, more than a week has passed since then, but this gives me a distinctive take for what will be my last pre-election campaign-related posting in this blog, so I'll take it. One of the Trump campaign's themes -- admittedly a sort of second-tier theme, one assigned to VP candidate Pence -- was that the Obama administration is guilty of a "war on carbon," which the HRC administration will continue, so the coal, oil, and gas industries should all have boarded the TrumpTrain in self defense. The reasoning would have been more sound if Sanders had been the Democratic Party's nominee, but they did what they could with it. Anyway, the Reuters story, working from federal campaign finance filings, says that the oil industry's contributions have been about evenly split between the two campaigns. During an e...

She (my friend) then added her own comment: There were a lot of things wrong with the 50's, but one parent working with another one staying home (which they owned) was doable when the onus of taxes wasn't on citizens. The onus of taxes wasn't on the citizens because it was on the "corporations" you see. She seemed to be agreeing with the Sanders quote she attached that we ought to get back to that. But what does it mean to tax corporations exactly? Is it a free lunch for the "citizens"? Of course not. Depending on a variety of circumstances, a corporate tax gets money into the Treasury from one of three sources: the shareholders of the corporation in question; the consumers of the products and services it creates; the employees. If the labor market for the sort of labor a particular corporation needs will allow, the corporation (a legal form for the interactions of natural people) will pass the cost of the tax that way. If the labor market does...

A Facebook friend of mine has recently quoted Senator Bernie Sanders thus: She (my friend) then added her own comment: There were a lot of things wrong with the 50's, but one parent working with another one staying home (which they owned) was doable when the onus of taxes wasn't on citizens. There are so many different lines of thought that arise out of such claims., I almost replied thus: One line of thought this suggests, (your comment, not Bernie's) is the size of the labor pool then and now. Were women staying home (after the riveting services of Rosie were no longer required for reasons of war) because their men could make enough money to support them comfortably? That's what you seem to be suggesting, though you prefer to state the fact in a gender-free manner that would have seemed off in 1952. Anyway: consider the other direction of causality. Perhaps the fact that women were expected to stay home helped keep the supply of labor for certain sorts of...