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Sunday, April 09, 2006

A liberal blog to read 

By TigerHawk at 4/09/2006 09:33:00 AM
I have occasionally linked to Ezra Klein, which is one of the very best "progressive" political blogs. Why? Because Klein and his co-bloggers examine the news on the merits, and generally not with regard to whether it is good or bad for the Bush administration. An example is this post, which declares straightforwardly that the decline in unemployment is "good news" because "nothing is better for the poor than a tight labor market." There are few of the conjured arguments you see on most progressive blogs that good news is really bad news, or if it is good news it would be even better news if Bush weren't so incompetent. I often do not agree on the substance with Ezra and his co-bloggers, but there is no doubt that they struggle to be intellectually honest.

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4 Comments:

By Anonymous Anonymous, at Sun Apr 09, 10:35:00 AM:

I'll second Pedro's "motion" to give Ezra a wide berth. Strikes me as looking for five cent cans in a municipal solid waste landfill.  

By Blogger TigerHawk, at Sun Apr 09, 11:08:00 AM:

Well, pedro, I hate to say it but if you look at the history of, say, the last 80 years, the Republican party has done just about everything possible to minimize the bargaining power of labor. It fought Roosevelt's National Labor Relations Board tooth and nail. It gutted key provisions with the Taft-Hartley Act. Ronald Reagan crushed the Air Traffic Controllers. Many Republicans opposed legislation against employment discrimination (with exceptions, such as Bush 41 and the Americans with Disabilities Act). Republicans continuously oppose increases in the minimum wage. One can go on and on.

Now, it happens that I take the Republican side on virtually all of these issues, but that is because I am against increasing the bargaining power of labor. Who are we kidding?  

By Blogger Dawnfire82, at Sun Apr 09, 05:31:00 PM:

Being anti-labor (pro-business?) is not the same as being pro-illegal immigration. There's been a significant amount of bitching among Republicans (esp in the border states) that the President's proposed solutions to Mexican immigration are not strict enough. Try to reconcile that with the 'illegal immigrants are a Republican's dream.' That's a generalization that relies on a stereotype of Republicans as backroom dealing capitalistic overlords who will sacrifice anything at the altar of the Dollar. Not exactly something to bring me back to said site...  

By Blogger Ezra, at Mon Apr 10, 01:13:00 AM:

Thanks Tigerhawk. Note too that I didn't write that particular post on immigrants, it was written, and signed, by one of my weekenders. In any case, it's sort of hard to argue with on the merits: election data shows a heavy inverse correlation between income and voting Democratic. Immigrants, who make the least, could be expected to vote Democratic the most -- they need the fully-funded entitlement programs.

Now, I don't think that enters into the Republican calculus on immigration (which is much too complex and fractured to be reduced that way), so I'm not giving it weight as motivation, but it remains partially correct. The more low wage workers with voting rights, the better Democrats do. Given X number of low wage workers, the fewer of them who can vote, the fewer votes Democrats get.  

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