James Fallows

My admiration for the Senate's minority leader, the Hon. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, is limited. But his latest move took even me by surprise.

In a tactic he thought would put the Obama Administration in an uncomfortable position, this week McConnell proposed a measure that would give the president, rather than the Congress, the responsibility for raising the federal debt ceiling.

Then, when Democrats surprised him by being willing to take up the measure, McConnell reacted in the way that comes most naturally to him: by threatening a filibuster. Attentive readers will recall that over the past six years, McConnell has been responsible for most of the filibusters in America's 225-year Constitutional history. The novelty this time is that he was filibustering his own proposal. Read the details here in the Washington Post.*

People of Kentucky: I really like your state, and I am a several-time-over Kentucky Colonel. But ... c'mon.
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* WaPo: Please, please, please! Is there no one on the politics-editing desk to point out what is wrong with the last part of this sentence from the story?

McConnell countered the measure should require a 60-vote majority, as most votes do in the Senate.

This morning I talked with Brian Lehrer of WNYC in New York, who had just returned from his first trip to China. As I told him, it's always thrilling for me when outsiders have an immersion in the China-of-this-moment and get a sense of how high its stakes are, how strong both the encouraging and the discouraging signals are, and how hard it is to know which trends and forces will prevail.

The discussion started with a look back at the debate Minxin Pei and Eric Li had about China's future -- bright or dim -- at last summer's Aspen Ideas Festival, and ended up with what I increasingly think of as the central contradiction and challenge for this next generation of the country's leaders. The contradiction is this:

• China's system must change, so that its now too-suspicious, too-controlling political institutions relax to meet the demands of an increasingly sophisticated economy run by increasingly urbane, educated people;
• China's system can't change, because of all the entrenched interests with something to lose.
  

Both statements are true now; both can't simultaneously remain true in the long run; but which will give way to the other no one can say for sure. Thus the stakes and the fascination in daily and weekly tracking of movements toward further opening or further closing. Today, unfortunately, three discouraging signs:

1) Liu Xia, whose husband Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize two years ago, told visiting AP journalists about the hardship she has suffered under house arrest since the time of his award. Here's one of the AP photos of Liu Xia:



The story is full of heartbreaking details about Liu Xia's detention in more or less unconcealed retribution for her husband's having "embarrassed" the government by receiving the Nobel prize. (He himself is serving an 11-year prison sentence.) For instance:

"We live in such an absurd place," she said. "It is so absurd. I felt I was a person emotionally prepared to respond to the consequences of Liu Xiaobo winning the prize. But after he won the prize, I really never imagined that after he won, I would not be able to leave my home. This is too absurd. I think Kafka could not have written anything more absurd and unbelievable than this."

2) China's latest Nobel prize winner, Mo Yan (right, official Nobel photo), who is in Sweden to receive the award for literature, used the occasion to say that censorship was "necessary" for a country at China's stage of development, and dodged attempts to get him to say anything in support of his imprisoned Nobelist countryman Liu Xiaobo.

As a writer, Mo Yan is obviously talented. As a public figure, he will forever be diminished by the stands he is taking, and avoiding, now.

3) Chen Guangcheng, whom I interviewed for the magazine this fall, is himself now beyond the reach of Chinese law. Not so his family members still in China, including a nephew who was recently sent to prison for three years. The obvious reason was retribution; the stated reason was that he had "assaulted" the police officers who broke into his house after Chen's escape.

Chen himself issued a video and statement this past weekend, also about the contradiction China faces. He addresses Xi Jinping and China's new leaders directly and states the choice they face in these stark terms:

"The whole nation is watching you. Whether you follow the mandate of heaven and the will of the people and carry out reform or you hijack the government and protect the privileged [i.e. those in power] foretells whether our motherland will go through a peaceful or a violent transition."

Boy, am I glad that the current issue of our magazine came out a week ago, rather than a week or two from now. Today we hear that:

• Apple is planning to open at least one Mac production line in America, and
• Foxconn will be expanding operations in the U.S.
  

In case you might possibly want a little context on developments like these, I give you Charles Fishman's "The Insourcing Boom," about the factors that a company like Apple -- or GE, which Fishman examines at length -- weighs in deciding whether to shift assembly back to a high-wage home-market company. And also my "Mr. China Comes to America," about some of the deliberations going on within Foxconn as it considers how to handle a younger, more sophisticated, more demanding, overall less compliant work force in China -- while also responding to ever-faster cycle times in product development, which make it more attractive to have designers, engineers, and production workers located close together and close to their markets.

Why do I mention this? Because the point of a magazine like ours is to give you advance warning of, and context for, items you're going to see playing themselves out in the news; and this turns out to be a particularly tidy example.

Also, the Bloomberg story quotes Louis Woo of Foxconn, who also plays a featured role in my story. Tim Culpan of Bloomberg quotes Woo thus:

"Supply chain is one of the big challenges for U.S. expansion," Woo said. "In addition, any manufacturing we take back to the U.S. needs to leverage high-value engineering talent there in comparison to the low-cost labor of China."

There is a lot about America's job-creation problems -- and potential -- in those two sentences. For a guide to what lies behind them, I gently re-direct your consideration to the December issue of our magazine.

I encourage you to read this obituary, from the UK Telegraph, of Maj-Gen Tony Deane-Drummond, who died yesterday at age 95. (National Portrait Gallery photo, via the Telegraph.)

Here is a minor sample that almost gets lost among the other things he did. In 1944, during Operation "Market Garden," Deane-Drummond was captured by the Germans. While in captivity with a lot of other Allied prisoners,

Deane-Drummond found a wall cupboard about four feet wide and 12 inches deep with a flush-fitting concealed door. He unscrewed the lock, turned it back to front, pasted over the outside keyhole and locked himself in. For the next 13 days and nights, he remained there.

The room beyond his door was used by the Germans as an interrogation centre. He had only a one-pound tin of lard, half a small loaf of bread and his water bottle to keep him going. A gap in a corner of the floor surrounded by pipes served as a makeshift urinal.

On the 14th night, the Germans left the room empty and held a party upstairs. Deane-Drummond slipped out of his cupboard, climbed out of a window, dropped into the shrubbery, dodged the guards outside and got away.

A Dutch family concealed him in a shed next to their house. When the Germans searched it, Deane-Drummond, hidden under a pile of sacks, remained undiscovered.

He was passed from one "safe house" to another. On one occasion Baroness Ella van Heemstra, the mother of Audrey Hepburn, arrived with a bottle of champagne.

Brits excel at this kind of obit, but they need the right material to work with. Maj-Gen Tony Deane-Drummond certainly provided it. Thanks to A.H.
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Also, surprisingly saddened to hear of the death of Dave Brubeck. David Graham has done a very nice appreciation. And -- it's a big day -- the famously tough and irascible Texas Congressman Jack Brooks, who was a much-feared figure in Washington when I first was learning about politics. As the NYT obit says:

An aide to [Lyndon] Johnson called Mr. Brooks "one of the few men L.B.J. was ever afraid of."... His defeat in the Republican Congressional landslide of 1994 reflected the long, steady rise of well-financed Republicans and anti-abortion organizers, as well as the defection of the Teamsters and some public employees unions.

The most proximate cause of his defeat was his antagonizing of the gun lobby by voting for a crime bill that included a ban on 19 firearms as assault weapons. Mr. Brooks had fought vainly to remove the ban, but ultimately voted for the bill approved by the Judiciary Committee, which he led.

This past summer I mentioned the D.C. installment of the ongoing Uber-vs.-the-world battle. In the following months, as the Atlantic Wire reported, Uber (the on-demand, relatively expensive, smartphone-centric car service) has run afoul of taxicab regulators and existing taxi industries just about everywhere.

But yesterday, amazingly enough, a resolution to the hostilities appears to have been struck in one jurisdiction: Washington, D.C.! The exclamation point and related "amazingly" are because our beleaguered local D.C. government often lags rather than leads in this sort of agile adaptation to the new business and technology realities.

The CEO of Uber, who was previously on the warpath against the city and its regulators, announces the good news here, on the company's site. The main elements of the new law, as he reports them, are these:

• It explicitly defines a separate class of for-hire vehicles, sedans, that operate through digital dispatch and charge by time and distance.
• It creates a single operator license for taxis, sedans and limousines and requires the DC Taxi Commission to actually issue licenses after a long four-year hiatus.
• It sets new standards for price transparency that will benefit consumers.
• And, above all, it brings regulatory certainty to the vehicle-for-hire marketplace - making it very clear that Uber and its partners, the licensed/regulated sedan companies and drivers, can't be regulated out of existence.

He also credits D.C. Councilwoman Mary Cheh for leading the efforts to strike a deal.

So nyah nyah nyah, all you "real" cities with your fancy freedom-from-Congressional meddling, and your normal systems of self-government, and your other trappings of modern metropolitan life. We in D.C. may still groan under the thumb of an entirely unjust "taxation without representation" scheme, but at least we're solving the Uber question. Congrats to all.

My wife and I look forward to these next few days in Boston -- the place where she and I met, the place where I spent ages 1 to 2, the place where my sister now lives.

On Wednesday afternoon, Dec. 5, I'll be at MIT's Media Lab from 4:30 to 6 for a presentation called "An American in China." I think that would be me! Details here. Admission free.

On Thursday evening, my wife and I will be at Porter Square Books in Cambridge at 7:00pm. Details here.

This might be the moment to mention that the estimable Tyler Cowen, of George Mason University and the Marginal Revolution blog, has recently said that:

My favorite nonfiction book this year has been James Fallows's "China Airborne." On the surface it's about aviation in China, but it's also one of the best books on China ever, one of the best books on industrial organization in years, and an excellent treatment of economic growth. It's also readable and fun.

 The greatness of Tyler Cowen knows no limits. But you'd probably want to check it out for yourself. See you in Boston/Cambridge.

One month before the election, the Atlantic and our partners at UCSD put on the second 'Atlantic Meets the Pacific' conference in La Jolla. Video of many of the sessions has now gone up on the UCSD site. (Videos from both the 2012 and the 2011 conferences are here.)

This year I got to interview Stacey Snider, the CEO of DreamWorks, about many aspects of a studio-executive's job. But the discussion began with the then-impending release of her next big movie, Lincoln. I hadn't seen it at that point and knew only vaguely about its theme, and so I didn't ask her about its substance or implications. Instead, starting 3:00 into the clip below, I ask her to tell us what we should know about the movie that, a month hence, we'd be hearing all about. Then I asked her how a studio thinks about releasing a wholly "worthy" movie like this, in the era of The Fast and the Furious (which was another of her movies).



This is not a mainly-Lincoln discussion, but I thought it was revealing and interesting overall -- including when Snider explains that the most-misunderstood part of her job is that her principal duty is to read: scripts, novels, newspapers, histories, magazines. But its discussion of what the studio was thinking with Lincoln will be interesting for anyone who has seen the movie (as I finally have -- you should certainly do so if you haven't) and thought about its implications. For now I direct you to Ta-Nehisi Coates's ongoing exploration of these issues.

One policy point only: time and again in writing about American politics and the American presidency, I say that things are a huge mess now, but they've often been extremely messy through our history. This movie is a useful reminder on that point.

As a bonus, I also got to interview Gretchen Rubin, creator of "The Happiness Project." I was genuinely fascinated and engaged by everything she says. The three minutes that start at time 22:00 also touch on one of my Major Principles for Life.



Thanks to Stacey Snider, Gretchen Rubin, all the other guests and interviewers, and the UCSD and Atlantic Life teams who made this happen. (I went from these interviews on to China, for my "Mr. China" article in the current issue.) See you in La Jolla next fall.

Our Atlantic-world colleague Ron Fournier, of National Journal, has written a remarkable long article that I promise you will not regret taking the time to read. It is not what most readers would have expected from Fournier, who is best known for very hard-headed political coverage at NJ and before that for many years with AP. Instead it is a personal, unsparing, often beautiful account of family struggle featuring an improbable cast of main characters: Fournier and his wife Lori; their son Tyler, who has Asperger's syndrome; plus Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

For instance, Fournier offers this moment, after an extended father-and-son road trip across they country he has taken with Tyler as a bonding exercise. He asks Tyler what he got from the experience:

"All I got out of it was time with you," he says, laughing. "No offense." I tell Tyler there's got to be a better way to end our story than saying we spent time together. "This isn't Twilight," he says, referring to the film saga he wouldn't be caught dead watching. "This is you and me. Just write that we like to spend time together. That's a big deal for a kid like me."

It would be a big deal for me--if I believed him. The fact is, he'd rather be alone, and I can accept that now, because the aversion to social contact is part of who Tyler is. But he is telling me what he knows I want to hear, and that's progress for my empathy-challenged Aspie.

The views of Clinton and Bush -- as actual human beings, rather than public figures -- are precisely rendered and revealing. Fournier's vignettes don't change what we think of either man, but they extend it in interesting ways -- and to the credit of both, but especially for Bush. I'll stop describing and suggest that you set aside time to read it yourself.

If you're worn out worrying about Syria, Gaza, Iran, you name it, I give you: the announcement today by police on China's large southern island of Hainan that, starting on January 1, they will assert a right to stop and board any vessel they consider to have violated China's very expansive claim of territorial waters in the South China Sea.

Take a look at this rendering of the area over which China asserts territorial sovereignty. More details below, but the red line encloses what China considers its own sovereign area; the blue shows Vietnam's claims; the purple shows those of the Philippines; the yellow is Malaysia's; and the green is from Brunei.

Our new issue is out. (Say it with me: give the best gift of all, a combined print-and-online subscription!). Although I've worked for the magazine for a very long time, I make a point of not looking at in-process versions of the articles or the ever-shifting story lineup but instead reading each new issue as it arrives. That lets me react in real time as other readers would -- and to be freshly enthusiastic (most of the time) rather than jaded about what it contains.

This new issue contains a lot in the freshly enthusiastic category, but if you're looking for a guiltily easy way in, I will suggest James Parker's column on the alarming end-times genius that is Daniel Tosh. Parker's reaction to the tosh.o spectacle is very similar to mine, so naturally I think his column makes good sense. You should look for it on page 36 of the print issue. OK, I'll add a link down below. I'll point out some other stories as the month goes on.

I also have an article in this issue, describing a set of simultaneous complex changes (a) in China's economic, workplace, and social situation, (b) in America's economic, workplace, and social situation, and (c) in the manufacturing, design, and distribution technology that connects the U.S. and the international (especially Chinese). The surprising upshot is that after decades in which "new phase in the globalized economy" essentially meant "new problems for American workers," several of the trends are moving in favor of US-based manufacturing. Charles Fishman has an accompanying article on some of the larger international forces pushing in the same direction.

We've also put up a video, based on photos I've taken in Chinese factories starting six-plus years ago and as recently as last month, plus "real" photos by professional photographers. It gives you a brief look-and-feel introduction to the trends I'm talking about -- and the man, Liam Casey, whom I jokingly gave the title of "Mr. China" in a cover story five years ago and who is directly involved in many of these changes. He's just now opening an office in San Francisco as an aid to US-based manufacturing startups. ("Mr. China," by the way, is a longstanding, informal, usually half-jokey honorific, similar to People magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive" title. Jokes aside, right now Casey is as good a contender as any for the title.) 
 

 

I have been out of the Continental U.S. and Internet range for a while, so I'm behind the news. I will ease my way back with a few reading-tip links.

1) Thanks to everyone who sent me links about Kim Jong-un's new honor as the "Sexiest Man Alive," Of course the charm in the story is that the honor was bestowed by The Onion, and the hyper-earnest Chinese state media appeared to take it at face value. Judge for yourself: initial report on Beijing Cream, survey on The Atlantic Wire, followup today in NYT.

1A) Just because I can't resist, here is a meant-in-entire-seriousness feature from People's Daily this week, under the headline "Cool Models, Hot Airplanes Are Always Good Partners." It's the start of a slideshow.




This is part of a long "reportorial" tradition in the Chinese media that I'll say more about when I have more time. Hey, does my book on China's aerial ambitions seem more interesting to you now?

2) The best political news of the post-election era has been the array of signs suggesting that the Obama Administration and the enlarged Democratic majority are preparing the ground for a campaign against filibuster-abuse.

Not against the filibuster itself, which though most of U.S. history has been a safety valve meant for extreme circumstances, when a committed minority was willing to go all out to block the majority rule by which the Senate is set up by the Constitution to operate.

Rather this effort would be against filibuster abuse -- the application of this emergency measure to practically everything a legislative majority attempts to do. Under Mitch McConnell, the GOP minority has in the past six years dramatically ramped up threats of filibusters, with two results: unless you have 60 votes, it is difficult to confirm any nominee or move forward any legislation; and the process has become so routine that news stories now off-handedly say that Senate rules "require 60 votes for passage." The U.S. Constitution was crafted to balance majority and minority interests. This isn't the deal Madison et al had in mind.

You can riffle through the hundreds  of previous items on the theme here. But you should also check three recent elements:
•    A primer yesterday from Ezra Klein
•    Similarly from Greg Sargent
•    From Michael Tomasky
•    From Jeffrey Toobin
•    From a NYT editorial
•    A report on "curbing filibuster abuse" from the Brennan Center at NYU
•    From Brian Beutler at TPM

Here's why this matters: As Garrett Epps and Andrew Cohen, among others, have argued frequently on this site, shoring up the now-failing machinery of democracy deserves legitimate and urgent attention as a major objective for Obama's second term. The specifics include: taming filibuster abuse; limiting the also-abused Senatorial "privilege" of placing anonymous holds on nominations, which amounts to a kind of country club "black ball" system applied to staffing questions for the national government; working against Congressional gerrymandering; defending the right to vote as zealously in America as if we were observing elections in Haiti or Burma; and curbing enormous, anonymous, unaccountable PAC donations. Together these amount to a lot to take on. But it's time, and they matter.

3) While We're Talking About Holds, the sanest discussion of the whole Benghazi imbroglio I have seen, which includes a strong implied rebuttal to the threat by several GOP senators to "hold" Susan Rice's potential nomination as secretary of state, is from Ronald Neumann, a retired U.S. ambassador who is now president of the American Academy of American Diplomacy. Earlier this month he testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee about the right and wrong lessons to draw from the killings of four Americans. The whole thing is worth reading, but I especially noted this part:

My final point touches on the political responsibility of those in both the executive branch and the congress.  Personnel in the field must make difficult decisions about risk to accomplish their mission.  When things go wrong it is reasonable to review those decisions, as the Congress and the Accountability Review Board are now doing. 

However, if the post facto examination becomes too politicized you will reinforce at the political level in Washington a fear of taking risk that has already gone too far in my judgment.  Sound foreign policy judgments require knowledge that can only be gained by interaction on the ground.  If our diplomats now retreat even further into their bunkers, if they become even more hampered in their ability to actually understand the local scene, and if as a result they cannot distinguish successful policies from failing ones the fault will not be in some weak kneed "diplomatic culture" but in the failure of political authorities in Washington to assume their own responsibilities.

If this argument were applied to military operations, I am sure that John McCain would wholly support it. (You don't want commanders to become hyper-cautious through fear of being nit-picked later on.) If the Benghazi killings had occurred under a Republican administration, everything in McCain's recent record suggests that he would have been wholly understanding about the confusion inherent in the "fog of war." That is why McCain's showboating on this case, and the shadow it supposedly casts on Susan Rice, is yet another disappointing milestone in the sad trajectory of the later part of his public career. [Update: I see that Fred Kaplan has weighed in trenchantly on this case.]

As for Rice as Hillary Clinton's successor, on the merits I would prefer John Kerry in the job. If you have seen him discuss these issues in Senate-floor debate or elsewhere, it is obvious that he really knows them, and knows his counterparts around the world. Also, as with the choice of HIllary Clinton as Obama's first secretary of state, there would be a karmic plus to Kerry's selection. Like Hillary Clinton, he came close but not close enough in running for the presidency -- and, again like Hillary Clinton, he has worked loyally and skillfully on behalf of the Democrat who did make it all the way. (For now, let's set aside considerations of whether removing Kerry from the Senate might give Scott Brown a good chance of taking his seat for the Republicans, as he earlier did Edward Kennedy's.)

But when I see the cheap-shot, hypocritical, know-nothing tenor of the "arguments" against Susan Rice (by McCain, Lindsey Graham, and others), I shift from a so-so outlook on her nomination to enthusiastic support.  If her opponents manage to knock her off with these tactics, they'll have every incentive to keep using them. Obama didn't need to send signals that Rice was his first choice. But now that the fight has shaped up this way, he really needs to take it on, and win. He's still in his first term, but this is the first important test case of what he'll put up with in the second.
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Update: I wrote the preceding section without having heard anything about the new NRDC report of overall financial holdings by Rice and her husband worth between $23 million and $43 million, including an investment of hundreds of thousands of dollars in TransCanada, a company directly involved in the controversial Keystone pipeline.

At face value, the size of the assets is attention-getting rather than disqualifying. Not disqualifying, in that lots of previous secretaries of state have been rich, including the current one. But attention-getting in raising the question of exactly when a wife who has worked mainly in government and think-tanks, and a husband who has worked mainly as a TV news producer, built up these kinds of assets. I know a lot of people with more or less this career story, and I don't think many are in the same asset bracket.) The Keystone questions will require answers: why she was able to keep them in her current job, whether she would put them in a blind trust if she became secretary of state, and how they match with the Obama administration's reluctance so far to approve the pipeline.

To connect this with the larger point: If legitimate reasons emerge to oppose Susan Rice's confirmation for this job, fine -- let's hear them. But that would be different from what McCain, Graham, et al have offered so far.

For decades, every trend in manufacturing favored the developing world and worked against the United States. But new tools that greatly speed up development from idea to finished product encourage start-up companies to locate here, not in Asia. Could global trade winds finally be blowing toward America again?

I regret to say that every day I get a message or two like the one below. "Regret" because of the churn and hassle the people who write are going through; regret because I generally intend to do something with or about the accounts - write a post, figure out better answers -- but generally something else comes up.

So let me just put up the latest email-distress account more or less the way it just came in. For those joining us late, three points of background:

• For how and why I got an immersion in the world of hacking and passwords, see this report of the time a West African attacker took over my wife's Gmail account and zeroed out six years' worth of correspondence.
• For the importance of Gmail's "two-step authentication" system, which the reader refers to, see this and this - but mainly turn it on now. If you feel brave, you can wait until after you read the message below.
• For background on one question the reader asks, about whether he needs to change an entire suite of "reallllly long passwords," consider these truths of password-ology: The longer a password (and most systems now take very long ones), the harder it will be for an attacker to crack through a "brute force" attack. After all, each additional character in a password can increase the number of possible combinations nearly a hundred-fold, if you allow for upper and lower case letters, numbers, special symbols, etc. On the other hand, really long passwords can be easy for you to remember, if they're based on some mnemonic - an entire verse of a song, a list of streets in your hometown, anything.
  
  The reader says that he has applied these principles by making his passwords loooonnngg, based on a familiar-to-him phrases, and then adding minor variations according to a principle. To give a very simple example, an Apple password could be something like:

     TheRainInSpainFallsMainlyOnThe!Apple&Plain         then, for Amazon
     TheRainInSpainFallsMainlyOnThe!Amazon&Plain      and so on

This wouldn't be a good combo because anyone who guessed the first four or five words would have a key to the rest. Still you get the idea.

 He is wondering if his whole approach is now at risk.

All this is offered as a public service, in hopes that if you haven't applied proper password hygiene, you'll start doing it now. And, yes, I am aware that in the long run some solution other than passwords is needed - biometrics and all of that. But the long run is not yet at hand. Over to the reader:

I just had the misfortune of having my briefcase stolen, containing work laptop, original iPad, personal and work papers. The experience is almost bewildering - I feel like I should be more angry, but I am mostly sad and twisting in the wind.  Oh, and working my fingers to the bone changing websites.

I can say without hesitation that figuring out what passwords, verifications, and permissions to find, revoke, or delete is already the most troublesome part of this process thus far.  I already have 2-factor authentication on both my primary and secondary email addresses through Gmail.  I installed a 3rd party anti-theft app on my Apple and Android devices, although I will admit that their FAQ/forum is not being particularly helpful now that my iPad is, um, stolen.

Thoughts:

1) It's true, this is a major pain in the ass. Wouldn't wish on any except my worst enemies.

2) If I didn't have 2-factor and Google's ability to revoke access to subsidiary apps on a device-by-device basis, not to mention the ability to log those other devices out, I'd be really, really unhappy.  [JF note: Yes. Gmail's 2-step system can seem cumbersome in some aspects, but it offers very quick, convenient, and all-in-one-place ways of revoking or de-authorizing passwords for specific devices passwords after an episode like this.] I also feel much better about it all having several services (likely candidates like AppleID) tied to a second, 2-factor email address with text authentication rather than my primary email's app authenticator.  

3) I want a device that tracks all of the things that you've ever logged into - I am recreating it by looking at the iTunes App Store purchased section, and that's only helpful for the immediate big ones.

4) My AppleID Password is reaaaallly long (25+ characters).  I still have to change it right?  Second but related question for your experts out there:  IF you use a mnemonic to create a unique password for multiple services, and the mnemonic is, say, reaaaaallly long, but the unique elements are short and the rest repetitive, in other words, easier to crack, is that a safe approach?  We are assuming here that I am A) Not a famous person of interest worthy of the processor cycles, and B) not typing AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAb1, b2, b3 etc.

5) If someone from Prey [anti-theft app] is on your email list, will you ask them how I can enable push notifications after the fact, or whether I am doomed to waiting until this Black Monday thief takes my Apple stuff somewhere so I can get an IP, GPS triangulation, and so on to send to the police?

6) Do you have any advice beyond the stuff I've mentioned?  Should I set a Credit Report Alert on general principle?

7) On the exceedingly unlikely (but unfortunate!) chance that the thief is a reader here, would you please heavily redact this prior to publication [JF: done, also some details changed], although I would be happy to continue the conversation so future victims can benefit.

p.s. Any requests for Bus money because I am stranded in England should henceforth be disregarded, although please do call and let me know.

In a few days, the new issue of the magazine will be out (subscribe!), including my article on some economic and technical trends that are brightening prospects for new manufacturing jobs in .... America itself.

It also discusses my visit to Foxconn, in southern China, early last month. Foxconn is of course the biggest electronics manufacturer in the world. In the past few years it has become famous and infamous for its role as subcontractor for nearly all Apple products, as well as those sold under most other famous North American, European, or Japanese brand names. If you own any kind of electronic device, odds are that some or all of it passed through some Foxconn factory somewhere in China.

When the new issue comes out, TheAtlantic.com will carry a narrated photo gallery of scenes from Foxconn and elsewhere in the vicinity. As a warm-up for that, here is another set of snapshots from Foxconn's Longhua campus in Shenzhen, where some 220,000 people work and more than 50,000 live, as it appeared on a weekday about last month. For past photo visits to Foxconn, check the items collected here. There are all in the mode of quick snapshots rather than a systematic video assessment of the campus. Still, I think cumulatively they are interesting.

Surveillance cameras. The very first stop on my tour was the surveillance room, where the cameras were trained on different parts of the enormous main-cafeteria structure. In the last photo you'll see some cameras trained on the "suicide nets," place outside windows, balconies, and other openings after a rash of jumping-suicides in 2010.







Two scenes from the food-prep hall. First, a few of the multitude of stir-fry pots used to prepare the day's meals. Then, the biodiesel factory, where (I was told) the left-over cooking oil is made into diesel fuel for use in the factory's boilers. Across China, the handling of left-over cooking oil is a major challenge and occasional scandal -- for instance, when it's collected from gutters or sewers and re-sold. Foxconn made a point of the proper handling of its oil refuse.





Now, four scenes from the pharmacy and health center. First, the main drug-dispensing area; then, two shots from the acupuncture and 'traditional-medicine" zone; then a dental-hygiene chart. There were people waiting and getting treatment in the clinic, but I didn't think I should take pictures of them.









Hoops. A view out a dormitory window to one of the sports fields.



More to come.

When you feel like taking a break from shopping -- or if you're working in some retail establishment yourself -- here's something to consider on the income-inequality issue.

Just before Thanksgiving, following the observations of a Boston bartender, I published messages from several readers on the importance of raising the minimum wage. In real terms, the minimum wage has gone steadily down; these readers argued that keeping it even with inflation, or better yet moving it substantially ahead, would help lower-income Americans while not hurting the economy as a whole.

Now some responses.

1) Lessons from the Antipodes. A reader writes:

A friend of mine just returned from Australia and she said that it was the most expensive place to visit as a tourist that she has ever seen.  I'm thinking at least a part of that is related to the minimum wage.  Nevertheless, if the goal is to have more people pay income taxes and to stop having Mitt and his pals bellyache about the 47%, raising the minimum wage would go a long way towards that.

As I've written here a number of times, it really is true that Australia has very high retail prices, a very high minimum wage, and a very noticeable "mate"-like middle-class feel to its society. The pay scale is not the only reason for Australian egalitarianism, but it's a factor.

2) The words of Ron Unz. A very large number of readers pointed me to an essay in the American Conservative, by Ron Unz. It supports increasing the minimum wage, and here is a sample of its reasoning:

So how might we possibly raise the wages of American workers who fill [the] huge roster of underpaid and lesser-skilled positions, holding jobs which are almost entirely concentrated in the private service sector?

Perhaps the most effective means of raising their wages is simply to raise their wages.

Consider the impact of a large increase in the federal minimum wage, perhaps to $10 or more likely $12 per hour....

A minimum wage in this range is hardly absurd or extreme. In 2012 dollars, the American minimum wage was over $10 in 1968 during our peak of postwar prosperity and full employment. The average minimum wage in Canadian provinces is currently well over $10 per hour, the national figure for France is more than $12, and Australia has the remarkable combination of a minimum wage of nearly $16.50 together with 5 percent unemployment.

For those who don't know, Unz is no one's idea of a leftie or union activist. Worth reading.

3) The main contrary view. From a small-business owner in Massachusetts:

I own an ice cream business - 3 stores in the Boston area.

There are businesses like mine that have traditionally offered young people their first jobs. We take them while they are still in high school. We coach them about the importance of showing up on time. We teach them about working with other people. We show them how to work with the public. In my business, we raise their wages as they gain skills and take on responsibility.

I think the current minimum wage rate in Massachusetts is very reasonable (well, actually a bit high) for students taking on their first job.

In a business like mine (or MacDonald's) wages and associated taxes consume 25% to 35% of our income.  Businesses of this sort are very sensitive to changes in the minimum wage, and these businesses provide a worthwhile way for young people to enter the labor force.

Talk about the minimum wage generally seem to be oversimplified and never seem to address the issue of people entering the labor force.

4) On the other hand. From another small-business owner, this one in Maryland:

When I wear my small business / local economy advocacy hat, the increase in minimum wage issue is core to me.  I testified @ the MD House of Delegates and State Senate finance committees for a minimum wage increase bill they were considering in the 2011 legislative session (it failed).  The interesting points were that those testifying against increasing the minimum wage were making exactly the same points as me - to different conclusions.  What your correspondents in today's post missed is the hard-to-quantify benefits to a business for paying a higher minimum wage than the legal minimums:

•    Dramatic decrease in employee turnover, which results in:
•    Increased employee productivity / competency
•    Decreased training costs & other associated costs to replace employees
•    A beneficial company culture which is easier to maintain and reinforce
•    Increased 'buy-in' or sense of ownership by the employees - they will stay that extra half hour when it's really needed - without being asked' because they already understand the urgency of the situation

([One company] starts permanent employees at $10 / hour for 'minimum wage' types of jobs.  We also pay an annual bonus based on company financial performance which in recent years has run to 25-30% which bumps those employees to nearly $13 / hour.  And we pay 75% of health insurance costs for all employees after 3 months, have a 401k that we contribute 3% / year to as well. 

I can honestly say I'm not becoming wealthy under this model, but then I have been able to leave the business in the hands of my capable employees for a year so I can earn more in Italy, and my business partner is away for two months in China / Australia / NZ at the same time.  In the past five years we have not lost an employee because they've gone and found a better job.)

5) The minimum wage is not really the issue. Another reader:

I think you might be off target. What I'm seeing now is the shift to eliminate full time workers, go to part time workers, plus make the part time workers life miserable by not allowing them set hours to enable them to work 2 or more part time jobs. I've seen stories about some companies that use weather and other information to schedule workers at the last possible second, if they can't make it they get their hours cut. Add these factors to the pressure ObamaCare make on employers, and full time jobs are going to disappear.

I have two suggestions to replace your minimum wage increase:

- Provide rights to part time workers. Are employers using 2 part time workers to replace a full time worker, getting around health care and other benefit costs? We need to study this problem, make sure we don't make the problem worse. Also, I think we need to look at rules that allow part time workers to work more than one job.

- My crazy idea, since I am a free market conservative, is to totally eliminate all benefits for everyone of working age that is capable of working, replacing all with a government as the last resort employer. Drug test workers. If they don't work, they don't eat. Liberals won't like that, but they will like the fact that unemployment goes away, and the big benefit is that there will be competition for workers. I'd think that paying the federal minimum wage, with health care, is adequate. I know its crazy, but I would like to see it studied.

6) Right, it's not about the minimum wage. Another reader:

The hourly wage is too small, but a bigger problem is the non-existent 40-hour work-week.  It corrupts the concept of a "minimum wage."    
 
Wage workers more and more cannot count on 40 hours per week, or even 30 hours per week, because the wage-payers have figured out how to avoid the mandates, such as health care insurance, pregnancy benefits, overtime, vacation time, etc, - they only give 29 hours per week, thereby avoiding the necessity of providing benefits.  

For example, [one big retail company -- JF is cutting the name, because I haven't checked this out myself]  hires hourly workers to staff their stores, they use software that calculates an algorithm including sales patterns in relation to daily weather, time of the year, time of the day, as well as how many hours each worker has already worked, to then calculate exactly how many workers should be called in to work and for what hours and who still has less than 30 hours.  The workers have no control over their schedules, never know when they will be called, and will suffer penalties, if they do not comply.  A worker may get a call to work a few hours one day, then no call for a few days, then work a few more odd hours on another day. 

This is represented as a "feature" (instead of a fault) - part-time workers can fit in work around their busy schedules!  But the reality is that more and more jobs are not full-time, they cannot find 40 hours of work per week, nor can they qualify for any benefits.  Instead of giving 40-hour work-weeks, the companies hire more temps.  The same sort of shenanigans have been taking place in the white-collar world, where more and more people are hired as "consultants" on low-ball, fixed-price contracts, with no benefits.

7) More from overseas. A reader in Europe says:

I must correct your reader who thinks the minimum wage in canton of Geneva is $17 an hour. Switzerland has no lawful minimum wage. But for a full time employee in the most menial job (cashier, cleaner, etc) is 3500 Franks or $3700 a month.

Living costs are insane here!

Median (not average) wage in Geneva is about $8500.

8) And there is plenty of variation in America itself.

One problem with a nationwide minimum wage of any kind is that costs of living are very different in different parts of the country.  A minimum wage that makes a 40 hour a week job pay a living wage in Montgomery County, MD will probably price people at the bottom out of the labor market in Jefferson City, MO, where the costs of living are probably half as much.  I don't see any way to set a nationwide minimum wage that makes sense everywhere.  I suspect this is something handled better at a state level, though even there, rural Maryland has lower costs of living than the DC suburbs.

And:

Yes, indexing minimum wage is the right thing to do.  Already done in several states, including my state,  Oregon.  Minimum wage is going up $0.15 in Oregon on 1-Jan-2013 to adjust for the cost of living.

9) Finally, the non-obvious politics of this all.

Regarding your recommendation on raising the minimum wage, consider two "facts" (I do not have current data on this at hand, although I am fairly confident this is still true): (1) Most people working for the minimum wage are not "poor" (defined as something like living in a household with income less than twice the federal poverty guidelines); and (2) most "poor" people do not work for minimum wage.  

Fact (1) is because many minimum wage workers are dependent children in non-poor households (as I and almost all my upper middle class friends were in high school) or spouses in non-poor households (as my wife was recently - working for a non-profit).  Fact (2) is because the problem many poor people have is lack of work (no job or too few hours), not too low a wage.  Raising the minimum wage to $10/hour does not help someone who makes $10/hour, but only has 20 hours of work a week.  Thus (to the degree there facts are correct) raising the minimum wage is a blunt instrument to address working poverty. 

Policies like a more generous Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) are more targeted.  Of course, EITC payments come from the government, and require taxes, while increased wages come from employers and do not require tax increases. Thus, raising the minimum wage may be a more politically feasible strategy than increases to the EITC.

Enough for now. Thanks to all.

Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July are America's best holidays. Anyone inside the U.S. naturally associates the Fourth of July with eating hotdogs and watching fireworks, and associates Thanksgiving with eating turkey and pie, hanging around with friends and family, and watching football. Plus all the appropriate civic thoughts for each day.

When Americans are outside the U.S., both of these holidays turn into occasions for comrade-seeking and bonding and celebrating with other Yanks. Gathering with countrymen on these days is part of the mark of being American: no one else remembers that they are actual holidays, no one else has the ancestral imprint of watching the Bears vs. the Lions while mashing potatoes or wondering if the turkey is done.

And thus it was that in Casablanca this afternoon, for Thanksgiving Day, my wife and I went to Rick's Cafe -- in search of an American friend and proper holiday ambiance. The friend was Kathy Kriger, whom we had gotten to know long ago in Japan when she was in the foreign service there. For the past 14 years she has lived in Morocco, where eight years ago she opened Rick's. It's a Bogey-era Art Deco house re-done, with loving detail, to create the look and atmosphere of Rick's Café Américain from the movie Casablanca. A waiter is wearing a fez; the bartender shakes a silver cocktail-mixer behind a bar that could have come from the movie; there's a piano right on the main floor. We didn't have turkey -- today's Thanksgiving meal featured couscous --  but in all other ways it was a welcome plunge, on a classically American holiday, into a familiar part of our national culture.

The next time you're in Casablanca (another phrase I never imagined myself writing), it is very much worth checking out Rick's. Especially if you're there next Monday, when Kriger and company will celebrate the 70th anniversary of Casablanca's debut. More about Kriger and her cafe from American Way and The View From Fez, which is also the source of the nighttime photo above. Her recent book about her adventure is here.

I'll resist the temptation to hoke things up with a "Here's looking at you..."-style sign-off and simply extend wishes on America's Thanksgiving Day to all.

Now, to find a satellite feed of Redskins-vs.-Cowboys.

This item begins with two policy announcements, then switches back to "what the bartender saw."

Policy announcement #1: Thanks to the scores of people who continue to send in views every day about the Atlas Shrugged Guy, and his different-but-related California counterpart. There is so much of this that I will let it sit for a little while before doing another harvest.

To those who complain that there has been way too much on this theme: I am taking a time-out -- and the subject must be interesting to someone, because people keep writing. To those who complain that my selection of comments has given critics disproportionate airtime, the truth is that the incoming ratio is about 20-to-1 critical. 

Policy announcement #2: A little dispute has spilled over to the site of Discover magazine, arising from my claim to Neanderthal heritage. The dispute doesn't directly concern my own lineage but rather the varying competencies of archaeologists, geneticists, etc., to address the issue. You'll see what I mean if you take a look there.

You'll also see why I think this is a good time for me to re-state some operating principles. One concerns quotes from reader mail. For the record, if you send me a note via this site, I will assume I can quote it unless you say otherwise from the start. I will, though, attribute it only to "a reader" or "a doctor from California" etc unless you specify that you would like me to use your real name.
 
The other concerns the extent of "vetting" readers' remarks. When I am writing a book or a magazine article, I feel an obligation to fact-check claims that people make in quotes I am using. Usually I am quoting people to explain an issue or illustrate a story, and usually there is no point in quoting something that I believe is misinformed or wrong.

It's different when I am quoting messages from readers. This is more like an extended letter-to-the-editor section, or a heavily supervised comments forum. I choose comments because I think they're interesting, or to illustrate the range of response I'm getting. On some topics I know enough to referee a dispute, and I will rarely put up a comment I think is completely nuts. But on other topics I sometimes put up a range of views I can't specifically vet one by one. The best I can do is follow the argument as it evolves. You'll see why I restate this point if you look at the Discovery item.

OK, now on to substance. A few days ago I quoted a bartender who had worked at fund-raisers for both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney during the campaign. He argued that, despite obvious differences between a Republican and a Democratic donor crowd, people at both events were notably isolated from workaday reality, for reasons of class. Now three responses.

On the importance of the minimum wage:

The bartender raises an excellent point.  If Democrats/liberals really wanted to help the poor, a good place to start would be raising the minimum wage.  The exact amount is different depending on where one gets their information, but based on what I've read, if we took the minimum wage in 1968 and indexed it to inflation, these workers would make roughly $10.50/hour - not a bountiful haul by anyone's standards, but a lot better than the present situation.

Presuming a household has two full time earners making minimum wage, this equates to roughly $46,000/year ($10.50 X 2 X 2080hours/year).  Again, nobody's living large on this, but at least it's close to the median US household income.

Moreover, most people making minimum wage are not working the kind of jobs which can be shipped overseas either: Wal-Mart employees, convenience store employees, low-level health workers, etc.   Yes, raising the minimum wage would cause prices to increase a bit, but the world isn't going to end if I have to pay a bit more for services which are more a luxury than necessity. 

Fears of inflation are overblown as well.  Australia has a minimum wage of roughly $15.50/hour and it's roughly $17.00/hour in the Canton of Geneva in Switzerland.  Neither of these countries is being rocked by inflation.  Yes, services cost more, but again most of these services are luxuries not necessities.  If I have to pay a bit more to go out to eat, see a movie or purchase consumer goods, I'll be just fine.  I'd rather see people be able to live in dignified conditions, put food on the table, clothe their children and pay for heating, than be able to get LOW LOW prices from Wal-Mart on cheaply made breakable crap.   If I have to pay a bit more for a haircut or eat out less, I'll live.
It also has the benefit of broadening the tax base.

Of course I am presenting an overly simplified picture of a complex economic argument - and plenty of fodder for those who think the opposite - but I've traveled/lived in enough countries which much higher minimum wage laws and they're getting on just fine.

One last point: When I hear small business owners scream bloody murder about how any increase in the minimum wage will impose a tremendous burden, I always want to scream that, in real terms, their labor costs have been steadily decreasing for the past 44 years - to the tune of more than 30%!

And furthermore:

I enjoyed reading the POV of someone who busts their ass for a living. I worked as a union stagehand for 20 years before I got hurt and couldn't continue, and it was always a struggle to make sure I made the minimum every year so I could get the health care coverage. Most stagehands jump from short term job to short term job ("The Bounce"), so getting to your minimum number for coverage is often hard, and scary, especially when work is slow.

This is one of the big reasons I support Medicare for all. There are many other reasons (cost containment, basic fairness, better for businesses and unions to not have to worry about it, etc), but the maze of hoops that working people have to go through to get the coverage now, and the huge out of pocket expenses associated with it for many people, make the current system, and even the Obamacare improvements to the system, an unnecessary waste of our time and resources.

The minimum wage point the reader made is especially important. I worked for minimum when putting myself through college many years ago. My daughter currently works for just a little over minimum. It's a joke. In fact, there's a little game I always tell insensitive rich people, or Glibertarians who would like to eliminate the minimum wage, to play:

http://playspent.org

That always shuts them up.

Of all the ideas that Willard Romney's had in his life, I found one that I actually liked. Back when he was a slightly reasonable moderate, he proposed tying the minimum wage to inflation. This is a fine idea that we should do as soon as possible. Businesses would like it because the raises would be predictable and timely. Workers would like it because their raises wouldn't depend on getting the Democrats back in charge of the House.... I can't think of a better way to reward work, and help people get out of the so-called "culture of dependence" than actually paying them what they're worth, and giving them regular cost of living raises to boot.

Finally, on whether the bartender was making a "plague on both their houses" false-equivalence-style argument:

I don't think the bartender's comment was an "false equivalence" at all. Rather, it is a telling observation about how too many democrats think like the right these days. He calls the "you'll be sick yourself someday" argument for buying healthcare a "nice argument to make if you get an employer-subsidized plan, not so persuasive if you don't and rely on seasonal and/or hourly wages." Indeed, the retort is a variation on the "personal responsibility"/"stuff for nothing" theme that omits what's happened to middle-and working-class incomes over the past forty years, to say nothing of the the fiscal cliffs families have been pushed over in the past five years.
 
I don't have the luxury of relaxing in my Ph.D./Lit-Prof bubble because I teach at a fourth-tier, open-admissions university that caters to first-generation, working class students, most of them older and with families; nor do I remember the last time I had a raise - except in my medical deductibles. I do have a subsidized plan, thank god, and it got me into M.D. Anderson when I needed it. But I know there are other kinds of insurance that I should be carrying but don't simply because I cannot afford to do so.
 
The argument at which your correspondent bridles is not a policy argument, it's a moral argument that scolds while willing away the very real differences among us, and the right has had a very good run of exploiting the resentment that such willed blindness engenders.

Also for the record, I'm not just quoting these readers because I think their views are "interesting." I think they're right.

In time you get used to anything. I still do an occasional double-take at reminders that Vietnam is a de-facto military partner of the United States, given the 50,000-plus Americans who died in warfare there. (Yes, the same is true of former enemies like Germany and Japan, but they became "partners" under duress, by being conquered.) Then I remember that most of today's Americans had not been born when U.S. troops were pulled out of Saigon in 1975, and I realize that fewer and fewer people would share my sense of surprise.

This is a long way of saying: I retain a sense of true astonishment at news that a U.S. president is visiting Burma*. The only development that could be more deeply startling would be the rapid opening of North Korea. The opening of Cuba will be less surprising, because it is completely inevitable. The transformation of the Arab world is also different, in that it came in response to widespread protests.

For atmosphere, a bus in downtown Rangoon five years ago:




Even five years ago, Burma seemed less profoundly miserable and in its own reality than North Korea, but almost as hermetic in its politics. Communication of all sorts in and out of the country was difficult; the regime operated with that dangerous combination, military oppression and superstition. The main surprise about Aung San Suu Kyi is that, although held captive, she survived physically. 

Starting two-plus years ago, Burma's previously hard-shelled-seeming regime began opening up. Not long before that, it had remained so intractable that it stiff-armed international offers of help to rescue victims of a cyclone that killed tens of thousands of its people. There are all sorts of hypotheses about the reasons for the change -- I discussed a book examining some of those ideas last year. And all sorts of problems and injustices and remain. But imagine the sense of surprise you would feel at the friendly visit of an American president to a North Korea that had decided to open itself up and join a liberalizing world. When good news occurs, it's worth noticing.

Two more scenes from Rangoon, ca. 2007. My wife and I have been in and through Burma several times, starting during the riots and the mass-suppression aftermath in 1988. First, school books for sale:

If you're late joining us -- hey, maybe it's best to keep moving right along! Over the past two weeks readers have weighed in, pro and (mostly) con, about a small businessman somewhere in the Middle South who said before the election that if Obama were reelected, the businessman would express his disgust by "shrugging." He would close his business, lay off his workers, and get ahead of the inevitable collapse of the over-burdened economy. You can see some early installments here and the latest one here.

Now I'm starting to get a lot of messages like this one, complaining that, while the Atlas Shrugged Guy was sending updates, he wasn't defending any of his views:

Your return to Mr. AS was disappointing largely because he is not responding to the level of discourse that his original rants generated. This is something I have noticed about the loyal opposition in its present incarnation. No matter how much you try to engage them on issues of substance, inevitably, no matter how much you listen to them and offer factual rejoinders, you can count on them trying to change the subject, moving into incoherence, engaging in non-sequiturs, speaking in tongues, going all "talk to the hand", etc.

Ultimately, this is all about tribalism.

So, it's time for a couple of "reasoned" defenses. First, someone speaking up for the Guy himself:

Your latest installment of Atlas Shrugged Guy detractors was overwhelmingly a slew of those crying hypocrisy on the part of our Randian in question. After reading through five or six of them espousing essentially the same argument - that this man is profiting from the very institution he denigrates - I thought it high time for me to finally get involved in your Atlas saga. Here goes:

Government as a Premise
On it's face, lamenting the hypocrisy of Atlas Shrugged Guy (ASG) appears to be a rather solid argument: the man is excoriating the very same government he is profiting from. I would argue, though, that this method of reasoning exposes our general complacency toward the growth of government and centralization of power. In short, as government expands to fulfill a new role - education, healthcare, etc. - too many people automatically consider government intervention to be a premise (never a conditional) of operations in that sector. Take education for example. Education existed well before a department of education did, yet as spending on education continues to increase we have seen a pitiful rise in performance that rivals statistical insignificance. Alas, government has implicated itself in this sector, and to have it withdraw must certainly cause chaos. Government is rarely the problem; rather, it just needs to be utilized in a better or more efficient manner.

A Personal Example
My point is that our government continues to expand, and with it comes the increasingly encompassing argument of hypocrisy. Take myself: my career path is in medicine. By the time I get a medical license, Obamacare will have been fully implemented. I personally am against the legislation, and I can very well see myself complaining later on in life how government and its policies are hurting my practice. The army of hypocrisy sniffers, however, will rebut: "How can you complain about Obamacare? It has given millions of people health insurance so that they can afford to visit your office and be your patients. The only reason your practice is so successful is because you're profiting off an enormous pool of insured made possible by Obamacare. That is the height of hypocrisy!" When government is everywhere, people are apt to give it credit for whatever they please.

Addressing the Atlas Shrugged Guy's Predicament
Finally, let's address ASG's specific predicament. It appears that he is enjoying the beneficence of the military-industrial complex (an awful institution I could lambaste at length). Is he wrong to do so? I'd venture to say no. Don't blame the player, blame the game. Government has adjusted the terrain of the playing field so that a government defense contractor position is a very lucrative job. Would anybody blame someone for pursuing the best paying job he found in his field? Let's say for the sake of argument that the military-industrial complex ceased to exist. What would ASG do? Well, he would have to take his skills elsewhere and find a more productive use of them. He could either strike success again in some other sector or completely lose out from the complex's abolition. What irks me about the hypocrisy crowd is that they implicitly presume the latter. The argument is that ASG should just shut up and be thankful because his worth is predicated solely on the government largess allotted to him. Without it, he is nothing.

I apologize for the rather lengthy post, but this has been a sorely underrepresented philosophic take on your series, and I've tried to anticipate whatever criticisms I could think of in advance.

Now, a different but complementary reasoned-defense from the "California guy" I quoted earlier. This is someone I know personally, and who I know is telling the truth when he says that he has had a successful job-creating, company-building, high-tech career, on a large scale. He was the one who objected to California's recent passage of Prop 30, on grounds that the majority was authorizing benefits for which the heaviest tax-payment burden would fall on a rich minority. In response to a wave of rebuttals, he writes once more:

These comments create bipolar feelings--I am delighted and disapproving, admiring and disdainful, and chastened and emboldened. Several ideas permeate what has been said, I'll comment on those then suggest an underlying problem.
 
First, I am chastened at misattributing the closing quote. [JF: He refers to his passing along a quote falsely attributed, boiled-frog-style, to Alexis de Tocqueville.] I had not read it in years (unaware of its recent resurgence) and my search for its origin and precise content led me astray with an incorrect provenance.  That said, it states perfectly my concern for our shared future. Odd that many replied about the attribution when the rise of legalized robbery in America is the urgent point rather than the as yet unidentified historical writer who foresaw it.
 
Next, it is nice to have so many mathematically inclined readers, yet it is sad that so many are correspondingly weak at English-language comprehension. The increases were labeled as increases in the marginal tax rate. Check my math and the definition of marginal tax rate, for example at the web page I supplied a link to. It is correct. Also, there is a difference between paying 30% more and paying 30% and that confused a few. However, when I wrote, "...pay 30% more..." I erred by rounding. Even on a billion dollar income, the total tax increase by this Proposition would be just 29.1% and not the 30% I rounded to. Mea culpa.
 
Minutiae aside, I have solidarity with many writers. The California initiative process is dangerous. Agreed. Every election we dodge falsely labelled, mean-spirited Propositions. Proposition 13 still casts a shadow across the state like that of Mordor. Agreed. Yet, I pay $4,000 per month in property taxes on my home. Is this low? Hardly, but property tax issues did erode the state's finances. Agreed. The tax law also entices people stay in their homes forever so neighborhoods become childless, urban core schools become redundant, and new ones are needed at urban edges. This urban planning problem resulted from Proposition 13.
 
Alas, not all is agreement. Reading skill seems low among indignant writers. No, I did not stop helping California's needy. I pay 1% of everything I earn to them, at tax gunpoint, while the 99% pay nothing under Proposition 63. What I did stop was giving above this to the majority who voted to take that 1%. As stated, I give what I can to those outside of California. They are just as needy so the Apostle Matthew need not worry.  Another disagreement is about sales tax. That is going up too, by 0.25% from an average of 8%, an increase of 3.125% (no rounding) and applies to all trade, which seems fair so did not earn my complaint. However, drawing a parallel between "we'll all be paying 3.125% more sales tax next year for shoes and toothpaste" and "a tiny minority will be paying 10% to nearly 30% more of their yearly income retroactively" is a false equivalence about a predatory behavior that the Proposition defines and 53.9% voted for.
 
Finally, I promised something new. Only one response (thank you) suggested that there might possibly be something even slightly wrong with a majority constructing a large tax aimed exclusively at a small group. Most said something like "this is payback" while a few wrote "the rich don't need their money." If you really feel this way--that something in the path to the present justifies a majority taking outright from some minority--then you have lost the empathy for your fellow man, the pride of self-reliance, and the respect for people in other walks of life. These define civil society and make the American system noble. Please reflect carefully. Our nation cannot survive a majority of takers and the willingness to exploit others always starts with seeing them as less worthy than you; less deserving of their lives, property, earnings, respect, or any other fruit of their labor. If voters had aggressively taxed left-handed people, short people, single parents, war veterans, or some other small group would you feel as righteous? What does your answer say about who you see as worthy like you and who is less so?

More in the queue.