Well, thank you for clarifying as to what you actually did during all of your classes at UCSB, and I quote: “zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz”

It shows, dear alum, it shows.

You contradict once again the author of this blog’s “essay ––-the very article with which you registered your strong accord––and his attempt to right his listing ship in claiming, falsely, that “most economists” agree with his Conservative falderal. Now you say that “economic activity is not captive to economic theory.”

How good of you to undermine your own ludicrous support of “supply side economics, to wit; Ronald Reagan signed in 1981 tax cuts that cut marginal tax rates from 70 percent to 50 percent on the “economic theory” that said cuts would actually bring about budget surpluses. The decade’s grotesque budget deficits disprove this foolishness quite handily (i.e, cutting taxes while raising military expenditures cannot result in a balanced budget).

You remind the discerning reader that this bit of economic “the-moon-is-made-of-green-cheese” nonsense remains sacrosanct to the Conservative/ GOP alliance, as you yourself recite it in your latest missive.

This is the very missive in which you hand your opponent the gun and bullets to shoot you in the foot, as shooting yourself in the foot is obviously your desire but above your current capabilities: “economic activity is not captive to [CONSERVATIVE] economic theory.”

Indeed, Monsieur le Ross, indeed.

You go on to mistake continuing “education” with Conservative indoctrination. They are not the same thing, sir.

That your partner went to Harvard is irrelevant to the exchange at hand. After all, he is not the one making absurd claims in support of insupportable shibboleths redolent of Conservative group “think.” You are.

By the way, Harvard is a very fine institution, and had Columbia University not accepted my application to attend, Harvard would have made a fine second choice to commence my studies.

That said, let us remind you that the current economic crises has utterly discredited your “expert” of choice, Alan Greenspan.

Greenspan…Greenspan, ah, yes, the very same nincompoop who expounded that “self-interest” would “regulate” Wall street institutions instead of the rule of law and its enforcement. Greenspan apparently never bothered to avail himself of the lessons of history (you do remember Santayana’s dictum, right?), the wisdom of political and social philosophers, not to mention untold millennia of human greed, self-delusion, stupidity, and avarice.

Just as likely that as a Conservative, you could not bring yourself to watch Greenspan’s deer-in-the-headlights performance before Congressman John Conyer’s questioning, you know: the event during which Greenspan gulped like the deer upon which the Mack truck’s headlights bear down on him, uttering in sheepish surrender to the oncoming oblivion that yes, indeed, his theory of “self-regulating” business didn’t quite pan out.

You might want to force yourself to witness the hapless Greenspan being made into so much historical roadkill before you resort to him and his ilk for “intellectual” and academic “support.” History, like that Mack truck, has sent Alan Bambi Greenspan’s shibbeloths to a better place (the curb). Your slavish reliance on that which reality has run over puts your arguments–––not to mention your dignity–––in same path of truth’s oncoming headlights.

And that which results provides an “education” that demands ever so much higher a price per course credit than ever would UCSB, let alone “Harvard.”

You decry the ad hominem, which evidently drew blood due to the accuracy of depiction, but you resort to it as first choice in your rather diminished arsenal in both your responses.

One would have hoped that your curriculum at UCSB would have included literature in general and the specifics of English language, for you seem to have forgotten the meaning of “hypocrisy.” Ah, yes, but then you hew to Conservatism, which by definition means that hypocrisy is the modus operandi of your internal reasoning and external debate. Does one really have the need of enumerating the innumerable examples of hypocrisy your chosen wing has engaged in over the past thirty years––not to mention the past eight years?

No, your petit examples will suffice as instructive. Consider your claim that my riposte trades in “self-serving assumptions” when in fact it is the author of this noisome blog who claimed so tendentiously (and falsely) that, and I quote, So too do your patently false claims that ripostes lacks “detail.” In fact, my rebuttals include citations of a noted scholars, of which yours and your fellow travelers do not. You falsely claim that I resort to “self-serving assumptions,” when in fact I eviscerated the “self-serving” falsehoods of this blog’s very author, to wit: said blogger claimed, and I quote, “most economists view the negative second-order effect of government spending as more harmful than any benefits derived from the spending itself.”

I pointed out that the leading economists, including a number of recent Nobel Laureates, have achieved a consensus that squarely refutes the egregiously “self-serving assumptions” of the author of the aforementioned opinion.

It is you, Mr. Ross, who have both refused and failed to rebut with anything approaching “detail” and disinterested analysis.

That you have worked in Oakland as “paymaster and estimator” for a printing company does not, in itself, make you a disinterested analyst capable of discerning historical, economic, and cultural forces shaping Oakland’s economic and political dynamics. Your fawning acceptance of Conservatism’s bankrupt assumptions in light of said ideologies–––and its practitioners’–––failings proves this point beyond any reasonable doubt.

Likewise that you have earned a degree in anthropology from University of California Santa Barbara invites the proverbial “pissing contest” to match Twain’s Calaveras county nonsense. So be it. You have your success at UCSB.

I took my degree from Columbia University, with honors, in a double specialization. But with respect to this exchange, only one of us, sir, has used the analytical tools his education has provided him.

It isn’t you.

Mr. Ross, it is incredible––but ever so telling–– that after the disaster of deregulation, for which we must give special “thanks” to the likes of Friedman, you hold on to said tribune of so-called “libertarians” and Reaganites alike as would a barnacle to the hull of the diving Titanic.

As for your reference to dead–both literally and in terms of their intellectual reputations—economists you depict as “respectable,” we will leave it to the more informed reader to contrast your Bush-league Ludwig Heinrich Von Mises and Friedmans against contemporary Laureates whose work reflects something so evidently beyond your ken and grasp: reality.

You neither addressed the academic evidence previously presented nor the truth of recent history. But then, how could you?

Instead, it is the same Conservative pseudo-intellectual blather, i.e., reference to dead and discredited scholars, on the one hand, and then on the other hand the clichéd attempts to denigrate the very academies in which they once worked as somehow not of the “real world.” Any more red herrings logical fallacies, Mr. Ross, and a waggish reader might come to the conclusion that you are a fisherman given to the landlubber’s hunt.

Suffice it to say, you did not respond with either conviction or light to address the truth of the matter, in the East Bay and elsewhere in America. And that is the simple fact that Conservatism is of a place not associated with what you call the real world, as the Goya-like disasters of the Bush regime amply demonstrated.

You might not recognize The Disasters of Conservatism, so to speak, but the American voters certainly do.

By the way, try taking a course in logic, and while your are it , take one on American history as well. Case in point, you bloviate on that “Government involves itself in ‘projects,’ not because it has a superior knack or aptitude for, say, running schools or building roads… but only because it has the power to tax.”

No, Mr. Ross, democratic government invests in the modern nation state because the majority of citizens vote its politicians to do so, and that is because the majority of citizens benefit from the modern welfare state, as you yourself do.

Now to he who imagines himself a “Boss”: your claim that , and I quote, ” The truth is that the argument about infrastructure required for a modern economy is rooted in the government spending of the 1950s.” is a malapropism that verges on an unintended reductio ad absurdum. So much for the Great Society; but you have just admited that Conservative’s ascendency over the past thirty years has lead to the direct decline of the Republic’s “modern” infrastructure.

Well, thank you.

On the other hand, the “hard giveaways” you whinge on about have no currency (oh,yes, one does mean to use that word), given the corporate welfare Conservatism has doled out to the military industries (of which California was a mighty recipient, indeed), and all for either exaggerated threats or the wrong profile of adversaries. We need not mention the bailout of Wall Street, as you are, Monsieur le “Boss,” evidently still waiting to tune in to Reagan’s GE flack pieces, circa the “1950s.”

That you like to sail with the “whatever-floats-thy-boat-but-the facts” good ship lollygag, as does Commodore Ross. For example, you doth protest as a prop thirteener of a cabin boy about government workers making ” fifty percent” more than their counterparts in the “private” sphere. But this says absolutely nothing of any relevance with respect to how a) the private sphere or government actually perform and b) how the private sphere actually depends upon government for everything from enforcing the power of contract to undergirding the scientific/academic institutions that actually create the technologies that drive post-modern capitalism.

How telling that you never question as to why the majority of the cadres of the private sphere make less than government, which as economists from the late Galbraith to Amartya Kumar Sen and Krugman have pointedly noted, has nothing to do with said cadres vows of poverty in their supposed religious service to the “market,” but rather Conservative politics have enabled the greatest shift in wealth from the middle-class who carry the “private sphere” on their backs to the upper tiers since the gilded age.

So “millionaire households” are “exiting” California—for what and where, Alabama? Mississippi? Alaska?–makes one struggle to choose between two well-deserved responses, to wit: a) GOOD RIDDANCE and b) Your arguments are beyond risible. They are mentally retarded.

Happy fishing, Red Herring boys…

First, I wonder how paying public employees 50 percent more than equivalent private-sector employees enhances economic growth. The truth is that the argument about infrastructure required for a modern economy is rooted in the government spending of the 1950s. True, we needed highways and airports. But today’s spending is largely not on capital improvements — it’s on transfer payments.

Second, it is simply a fact that millionaire households are exiting California for other locales. It is true that this phenomenon is hampered by geography and climate — people like living near coasts. But, to argue that taxes make no difference in where people locate seems pretty foolish.

One need only look at the progression of tax rates and spending priorities in California since 1960 to see the shift away from hard infrastructure toward welfare and giveaways to public employees. It’s unsustainable, and economic arguments rooted in past government successes only serve to make the coming crash worse.