Now that the conventions of both political parties are over, we’re in the campaign season, filled with all sort of high-sounding political rhetoric designed to appeal to partisan prejudices on both sides. And both candidates will have, if past campaigns are any indication, proposals that seem the heart of common sense… and that are, in fact, both meaningless, irrelevant to the problems at hand, or dangerous, if not all three.

Based on my past experience, I’m going to trot out some of the ones used in the past, along with some commentary. As many of the warnings for products posted here and there state, past history is no guarantee of future performance, but I’m certain some of these will come up somewhere.

I’m going to go over the budget line-by-line and get rid of the waste in government. As an economist, I did just that for various legislators for years. The problem is that the amount of true “waste” is rather small. The number of small programs with comparatively expensive benefits for relatively small constituencies, however, is enormous… but don’t tell small local communities that libraries and community centers that serve a few hundred people at best are a waste. Don’t tell a politician trying to get re-elected that a library or building memorializing a local hero is waste. A bridge serving a thousand people who have to wait for ferries in bad weather isn’t a waste to them, even if it costs the rest of us hundreds of millions. And, of course, someone always brings up the thousand dollar aircraft toilets or the hundred dollar special hammers for the military — and almost always those are required because someone didn’t order enough of them in the original procurement and, in order to keep the scores of aircraft flying past their original design life, the replacement equipment required is far more expensive because of the limited numbers and the one-time production costs.

I’m going to reduce taxes on the hard-working middle class and make the really rich people pay their fair share. This sounds really good, but something like 40 million Americans don’t pay any federal income taxes at all, and the lowest fifty percent of taxpayers pay less than five percent, while the top ten percent pay close to seventy percent. I’m certainly not rich, as anyone who knows the trends in the publishing industry could tell, and I’d certainly like my taxes cut, but how, exactly, is increasing the taxes on those who already pay most of them “fair” when the bulk of the services go to those who aren’t paying the taxes? As a society, we’ve already accepted the idea that those who have more need to help support those who are poor and struggling. It’s necessary so that the less fortunate can gain opportunities and do not live in the grinding poverty and misery that they would otherwise face — and which, unfortunately, some still do. But, please, let’s not dignify income redistribution through taxes as “fair.” Also, practically speaking, as I’ve noted before, there’s a limit on how much one can tax “the rich” and how effective government is in addressing the root causes of poverty.

I’m going to push for a modern and efficient military, and one that will support our men and women in uniform so that they are well-equipped to deal with the challenges that face us. Right. First, an effective military is never “efficient” or “cost-effective.” An effective military needs excesses of equipment and munitions, among other things, because once a war happens, it takes years to catch up to the needs of the military. The job of a military in a representative democracy is to use force to keep other people from doing bad things to others or to us or our interests. That means having lots of a equipment in lots of places, doing lots of training with highly expensive equipment, and then when the time comes, going out and doing the mission, and generally losing and/or breaking or destroying some, if not a great deal, of that most expensive equipment, along with incurring casualties. None of that is cheap, and the missions we seem to place on our military suggest that its role will never be terribly limited… so, if any politician pushes for “efficiency,” he or she is essentially limiting capabilities and increasing the likelihood of higher future casualties — which is what has happened in every conflict we’ve been in since WWII. In practice, that means either continued high and theoretically “wasteful” spending or an overstretched and overstressed military or a much lower foreign policy profile.

We’re going to push for environmentally safe energy independence. NO form of energy is environmentally benign. Every form of energy creates pollution, somewhere along the line, whether in the manufacture of the components, the extraction of resources, the power generation process itself, or the waste products produced. The only question is what form of energy creates the least adverse environmental effect in a given situation and location. Add to that the fact that capital and development costs of such an initiative would dwarf the costs of our adventurism in the Middle East. It’s a wonderful goal, but any politician who pushes it is either ignorant of the financial and technical realities or being deliberately deceptive.

I’m going to ensure that all American children can do anything they put their minds to. This one is sneaky. It’s one thing to posit a goal for every child to achieve to the best of his or her potential, but not all of us have the talents to do everything we can conceive of, and everyone has some limits on their potential and ability, but none on their dreams. All the work and dedication in the world would not allow me to become a professional opera singer — not when I can’t tell when I’m singing on key and not when I have no sense of rhythm. People cannot do all they would like, and they never have been able to do so. Saying that they can only breeds resentment… and we have far too much of that in society today.

I’m going to go to Washington and get things done… or some variation thereof. The Founding Fathers designed our government with checks and balances and procedural delays precisely because they feared that, without them, a popular government would act in far too hasty and dangerous fashion. Our entire federal government structure is designed in a fashion to make change difficult and slow, and any politician who thinks otherwise and that he or she can change that understands neither history nor people.

I’m certain that there are other supposedly common-sense proposals for political change that really aren’t that sensible under examination, but these should do for starters.

In the course of the presidential primary debates, both Barrack Obama and John Edwards made continued references to the growing inequality of income and power in the United States, and in his acceptance speech, Obama singled out the “wealthiest” five percent of Americans for heavier taxes. While I’ve also been concerned about what Edwards called “the two Americas,” the idea of addressing it by increasing taxes on the “wealthy” worries me greatly for a number of reasons.

First, as I noted in an earlier blog post, real “wealth” varies widely by geography and economic setting, and defining who is wealthy by an arbitrary number or percentage is every bit as erroneous as claiming that every member of one ethnic group is money-grubbing or that most young Black inner-city males are gang-members. Claiming that a New York City or San Francisco family [or families in any other number of high-cost cities] where both parents work full time and bring in a combined income of $200,000 are wealthy is absurd. That income can bring a very good life-style in much of America, but in New York and many other cities where tens of millions of Americans live, it’s definitely middle-class and nowhere close to “wealthy.”

Second, using taxation to address income inequality doesn’t work very well, because those who are truly wealthy have the assets and abilities to avoid increased taxation, while those who are merely affluent are the ones who find themselves bearing the burden of lost income. For example, someone who makes, say $5 million a year, and who would face increased taxes of 10%, can pay an accountant $100,000 a year to find away to avoid the taxes, and save $400,000. It makes no sense for family making $200,000 a year and facing $20,000 more in taxes to hire that accountant, nor do they have the financial assets to deploy in alternative strategies, yet for purposes of the politicians, both families are “wealthy.”

According to recently released IRS statistics, less than one half of one percent of Americans are “wealthy,” meaning that they have assets including houses, of more than two million dollars. When a middle-class house in many cities can easily cost over $500,000 for less than 1,500 square feet, having $2 million in assets may make you “affluent,” but it’s far from “wealthy.” Put another way, the “upper five percent” of Americans that Obama wishes to tax more heavily amounts to roughly fifteen million. According to the IRS, only ten percent of those are wealthy.

But the bigger problem with all of this is the assumption that taking money from those who are presumed to have it and putting that money into federal programs will do something to reverse the recent trends in income inequality.

Some claim that greater education will accomplish such a reversal, but during the last three quarters of a century educational opportunities and achievement for the less advantaged have improved, and yet the income gaps between the richest and the poorest have widened. Others suggest that great improvement in reducing barriers to women will help, but while not all of the barriers to women in high positions or in fields historically dominated by men have been removed, women have seen improvements in the opportunities and income available, and the income gap between rich and poor has still widened. The poorest Americans have far better housing than did the poorest Americans of a century ago and far better amenities in those dwellings. Even for the poorest of Americans, life is better than it was a half century ago.

So, with so many improvements, why has the income gap widened?

Have we become a more greedy society? That’s hard to measure, but I find it difficult to believe that people are inherently greedier today than in the time of the Robber Barons.

Is it because of a “winner-take-all” culture that praises and rewards disproportionately those at the top in whatever field? That this has occurred isn’t subject to debate. The pay received by the “average” business CEO is more than 300 times that of the “average” employee, a spread ten times what it was a half-century ago. In my own field of writing, look at the disparity between J.K. Rowling, with income of hundreds of millions, to any starting novelist with an average first-time advance of perhaps $5,000 to $10,000 for a year’s [if not many years] worth of work. Look at the difference between the pay of the average actor [circa $10,000] and the $20 million plus per film for the top names. Or the NFL minimum compensation versus the tens of millions for glamour quarterbacks. Now… the counter is that the superstars “earn” that money; they bring in the readers that buy the books, the fans who fill the seats and purchase the DVDs. But… the superstars always did. It’s just that with the growing purchasing power of Americans and the concentration of exposure through technology, the revenues that the superstars bring in are so much greater than in the past. In a very real sense, the combination of technology and greater disposable income means greater opportunity to make more money.

Add to that a culture where “worth” is measured more and more by money, by compensation, where business professors make twice what music and science professors do, all because they claim they can earn more in business. They doubtless can, but the comparative earning power in another field doesn’t necessarily translate into teaching effectiveness. Nor do high salaries or compensation in one company mean that everyone in every other company is worth that. And when some of the highest paid corporate CEOs in the financial industry have racked up the largest all-time losses for their corporations, it’s pretty clear that high compensation doesn’t always translate into excellence… but it does translate into a significant income gap between those at the top and those in the middle and on the bottom.

Given these factors and a number more, I have real difficulty in seeing how greater taxation of the upper middle class and the affluent to fund government policies and programs is likely to have much impact on the income gap. It might reduce the deficit, but given the habit of politicians always spending more than they have, I have even greater doubts about that as well.

But… it’s a great political issue, and I’m sure we’ll hear a whole lot more about it over the next eight weeks.

Because I’m a glutton for punishment, as some readers know, I do read the reader reviews of my books, and occasionally, those of other writers. The one thing that strikes me consistently is that there is certainly a percentage of reader reviews where I’m left asking, “Did these people even read the same book?”

The answer is: They read the same assemblage of words, but not the same book.

How does this happen? Why does it happen so often when readers see exactly the same words on the page?

In the simplest terms, words on the page evoke not only their meanings, but the emotional connotations that accompany those meanings. But even meanings vary from reader to reader, and that’s scarcely surprising when you consider that most words have more than one dictionary definition. Then add to that the emotional responses that we all have to words and situations, and we’re bound to have different reactions.

As a writer, what bothers me about all this, I have to admit, is not the difference in the range of reaction to a book but the violence of the reaction by those who dislike a book. In more than 35 years as a professional writer, I’ve seldom ever seen a “positive” reaction to my books or those of any other author of the sort that says, “This is the world’s greatest book” But I have seen more than a few books, and many were not mine, with assessments like, “the most tedious book ever” or “the worst book I’ve ever read” or “totally unreadable.”

What I found most intriguing about these sorts of comments was that they usually occurred amid other comments that praised the depth of the book and the skill of the writer. In fact, they were more likely to occur with a book that other readers praised.

This would tend to support my long-time contention that any review [either by readers or critics] reveals at least as much about the reviewer as about the book being reviewed.

And, unhappily, that leaves us writers with yet another question: Did anyone read the books we wrote, or did they just read their interpretation of what we wrote?

The mortgage securitization debacle and the housing market meltdown illustrate a fundamental aspect of modern technological civilization: the loss of direct personal accountability that accompanies increasingly complex social, technical, and industrially-based cultures.

In a low-tech culture, if I purchase a hammer from the local smith, I know who forged it. If something goes wrong with the tool, there are essentially only two people who are accountable. Either the smith forged an inferior tool, or I used an adequate tool improperly. In such a setting, most of the time, it’s a fairly straight-forward process to determine responsibility and accountability. The same is true when cattle are grown and slaughtered in the same local village.

But… once these and almost all others processes become “industrialized,” who’s responsible when things go wrong… and how can any individual hold anyone accountable? The answer is that, without some sort of societal rules and regulations, with penalties, the individual can’t. The incredible abuses of the food processing industry in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century have been studied and documented in detail, and those abuses led to a range of government regulations and agencies… and many experts still feel that the oversight of the industry leaves much to be desired. The same problem led to environmental abuses and cities where the rivers literally caught fire… and even recently to children’s toys coated in lead paint.

Like it or not, human nature being what it is, all too many people who would not dare to shortchange their families or their neighbors face-to-face seem to have no compunctions about doing so in an industrial or technological society where they’re only a part of the process and where they are never personally held directly accountable.

In the mortgage mess, I doubt seriously that many, if any, mortgage lenders would have recommended that their institutions should keep the vast majority of the sub-prime loans that were bundled together and then sold to investors, especially not if their paychecks depended on the performance of those loans. Instead, all too many of the low-level originators were pressed, either directly or indirectly, to make as many loans as possible, because the originators had no sense of accountability, only the pressure to obtain high yields and fees.

For any society to continue to prosper, there has to be a high degree of accountability, and that accountability can either come from a societal tradition of honesty and responsibility, or from regulatory structures that force some accountability, or from a combination of both. In the end, however, regulation alone will fail, because unchecked human ingenuity and duplicity will force more and more regulations, to the point that the entire society becomes bound so tightly in bureaucracy that change and innovation become virtually impossible. On the other hand, with minimal or no regulation, and no cultural insistence on honesty and responsibility, human vices will destroy the trust and cooperation necessary to maintain a viable high-tech society.

So… any time you start complaining about those endless government regulations that seem to invade everything…you might consider why and how they developed.

I have been known to stand and lecture from soapboxes. I have even been known to pile soapbox upon soapbox and reinforce those soapboxes with yet other soapboxes… and I’m certainly going to reinforce that impression with what follows.

Point number one: There are no new plots. Heinlein said this almost forty years ago, and all too many readers, and even some writers, don’t understand this. There are twists on basic plots; there is window-dressing of all sorts; but the basic plots are still limited. They are: (1) the love story [all kinds of love stories]; (2) the man/woman/AI/alien who learned something; (3) the little shot who becomes a big shot [and the reverse is the classical tragedy]; and (4) the mindless adventure story [otherwise known as the video/board game or James Bond plot, although some would claim it isn’t a plot at all]. The first three plots can be combined; the fourth plot cannot be combined with anything except box office or other receipts.

Point number two: Books without plots have a strong tendency not to sell.

Point number three: The majority of readers prefer books with recognizable plots and characters that appeal to their individual tastes. Because individuals do differ in tastes, there are a number of genres, subgenres, and the like in fiction, and different authors often have differing reader bases.

Point number four: The vast majority of readers want to be entertained, and that entertainment is usually based on plot, characters, events, and structure that meet their needs. Some readers prefer their entertainment to be thought-provoking, but usually it’s only thought-provoking if they happen to agree with the author.

Point number five: Entertaining readers is not a crime; it’s not even a sin. Not entertaining them is occupational suicide, because successful writers must appeal to a certain minimum number of readers, or publishers will no longer publish and distribute their books.

There are scores of good and competent authors who are no longer published because their books did not sell. There are even authors who, editors claim, are exceptional and who do not sell commercially. But, exceptional or not, to survive, an author needs an audience.

Behind all these points is a simple overriding one. Taken in terms of a world-wide perspective [or a galactic one], there are not that many different approaches in basic structure in the books written in any given language, nor in plot. The differences lie in the skill of the writer in presenting the story… and in the receptivity of the readers.

So… when a reader or reviewer claims an author used a hackneyed plot, that’s a cop-out. All plots are hackneyed. What they’re trying to say is that they didn’t like the way the writer presented the plot, or perhaps more accurately, that the writer wasn’t successful in creating the illusion of newness or difference, at least for them… or that they really don’t know why they didn’t like the book, and opted for a convenient excuse for a reason.

There is also a certain faction among readers and reviewers that decries the “endless series” and/or “doorstopper” fantasies, yet I certainly don’t see that criticism in the cases of endless sitcoms, endless TV series, or forever dragged-out miniseries… or in other genre fiction. The only real differences are that there’s a lot more money [and special effects] in the television series… and that generally the science or the fantasy in the endless books is better. As for the criticism that “endlessness” shouldn’t apply to F&SF books… why not?

Along this line, there’s essentially no difference between an author who writes an “endless” series and one who writes the same characters, structure, and plot time after time with different character and place names and different settings. In fact, sometimes the “series” author might be the more honest one, because he or she isn’t trying to give an illusion of difference that doesn’t exist.

And… finally… readers and reviewers who complain that books whose plots and characters they have just dissected in detail are “unreadable” are either lying or don’t understand the meaning of “unreadable,” which, in turn, suggests strongly that their comments should not just be taken with a grain of salt, but that they and their comments should be interred in the salt mine.

And now… it’s time to put away the soapboxes… for at least a while.