A blog in defense of western civilization by Roger Graf
Author: RogerG
I am a retired teacher and coach, Social Science Department chairman, community college instructor in Physical and Human Geography. I have attended 4 colleges with relevant degrees and certificates in History, Religious Studies/Philosophy, Education, and Planning and Community Development. I am also a 3rd generation native Californian, now refugee living in northwest Montana.
I am a retired California teacher (since 2015) after 29+ years in California high schools. The state has become a zoo, and now so will the classrooms. AB 493 would require teacher training in LGBTQ ideology. SB 419 will make suspensions for, among other things, unruly behavior almost non-existent. For teachers, it’s like being wheeled into the operating room and seeing the medical staff armed with sledge hammers. There won’t be much improvement in your condition but there will be a big mess to clean up.
493 takes teachers out of the classroom to be indoctrinated in all things sex-related. The propaganda line is as follows: Forget the Bible and millennias of understanding and accept the idea that a person can will themselves into another sex. Transgenderism is an important part of the coursework. Of course, we can’t do the same thing with race or ethnicity. Remember cultural appropriation? We can’t do the same thing in regards to height or long fingers. But teachers will learn that genitalia and chromosomes don’t matter.
I know; I know. The ideologues have a chest full of rhetoric and vocabulary to make others well-versed in the pseudo-science. Just remember, this isn’t the first time “experts” were enthralled by intellectual mumbo jumbo. Remember phrenology? Remember eugenics? If you do a deeper dive, you’ll find more bunk.
If that isn’t enough, 419 moves the schools further down the road to a suspension-free utopia … or maybe dystopia is more accurate. A school is commanded by the ideologues in Sacramento to jump through more hoops before a kid can be suspended for unruly behavior. It’s not as if schools already don’t do this. They do, and a lot. In some cases, too much. Nikolas Cruz of Parkland fame benefited from this bend-yourself-into-pretzels disciplinary regime. Last year, California’s Kern High School District teachers rebelled against the imposition of the “restorative justice” flim-flam.
So, the not-so-golden state will have boys-now-girls in the girls’ bathroom, locker room, track team, soccer team, …. Chaos in sex and gender will be supplemented by classrooms that more resemble prison riots. Teachers might begin to act like the Lloyd Bridges air traffic control character in “Airplane”: “Looks like I took the wrong week to quit ….”
“Steve” (Lloyd Bridges) sniffing glue in “Airplane”.
The whole situation will drive teachers to more than the bottle. It’ll drive many out of the state … if they remain sober enough to operate a U-haul.
I got a reply from “cushelp.com” at Walmart regarding my comment on the company’s new gun policies. The company’s online respondent indicated that the comment will go up the chain of command, and included a link of the newsletter/memo from President and CEO, John McMillon, to the employees (see the first edition of “A ‘Woke’ Walmart” for the link). This only further drew my ire. After reading McMillon’s missive to employees, I pounded a reply. Here is my rebuttal:
Thanks so much for your timely reply to my email which contained a link to a company circular from Doug McMillon, President and CEO, to associates about the new policy. Apparently somebody read my detailed response to your new policy on guns and ammunition. Again, thanks for taking the time to read it. However, rather than allay my concerns, they have been heightened.
McMIllon’s announcement to associates reads like a heated reaction to an issue-of-the-moment. Indeed, it goes further. It adopts wholesale the line of argument of partisan gun control activists such as the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, the Brady Campaign, etc., etc. All in all, Walmart is gradually aligning itself with the center/left. McMillon is confirming John O’Sullivan’s famous aphorism: “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.”
Let me count the ways. Surprisingly, I am not bothered so much by the company’s decision not to allow open carry in the stores. The problem lies with joining well-publicized nationwide gun-control crusades, emblematic in the demand that “the status quo is unacceptable”. It’s part of the usual rhetoric coming from the usual hive of gun-control groups and the Democratic Party. Parts of the memorandum could just as easily come out of Chuck Schumer’s office (D, NY).
I’d like to remind Walmart that the Second Amendment is part of the “status quo”. The Supreme Court defined the ownership of firearms to be an individual right, not a collective one. It’s presence in the Constitution is not for hunting or protection from MS-13. The Amendment is an avatar for citizen control of their government. A lesson in the English Civil War would work wonders in the corporate boardroom at Walmart.
So, what parts of the “status quo” is to be subjected to change? Well, it’s inanimate things like guns and ammo that are to be targeted (no pun intended) for punishment. The unstated premise is that the availability of these things constitutes a danger to the public. You tout the the company’s previous decision not to sell “military-style rifles”. The policy is nonsense as is the call to join a debate on resurrecting the Assault Weapon Ban. Calling for a debate are weasel words for establishing one (Ban). The debate on the Ban has been over for quite some time: the thing didn’t work, was allowed to lapse, and the Democrats refused to bring it back when they had the White House and majorities in both houses of Congress.
Further, the “military-style” nomenclature is silliness on stilts. It’s all about a gun’s cosmetic qualities. These guns are no more dangerous than any semi-automatic gun. By the way, guns are by their nature “dangerous” … as are crossbows. If they weren’t, they’d be no good for hunting. The AR platform and its knock-offs are associated with the miscreants of mass shootings because they are broadly popular with the gun-buying consumer base in the general public. They are the most highly demanded product in a gun manufacturer’s inventory. Hopefully, you’re not suggesting that all these buyers are crazed lunatics. If semi-auto shotguns with more compact barrels were to be all the rage in the murderous-loser class, would a call for a ban on semi-auto shotguns be next? Strange legal principle: find out what’s popular with lunatics and prohibit it.
The ludicrous nature of the Ban can be seen in the bumbling attempts to codify the concept into law. Is it the pistol grip? Is it the semi-auto nature of the thing? Is it the magazine capacity of over 4 rounds? Is it because it looks like something in a John Wick movie? Going from state to state examining their bans is an exercise in chaos theory. Usually the laws are written by people with the least knowledge about firearms. Watching them at a press conference is a real hoot. The big problem with the ban stems from the quixotic desire to proscribe a product for its cosmetic qualities. That’s it!
Then Walmart stacks its current silliness with more silliness on the ammo front. No handgun and .223 ammo. What’s the logic behind that? Clearly, the company associates those cartridges with mayhem. Why else put them on the no-go list? What’s next, a ban on 12 gauge? Any cartridge’s survival on Walmart’s shelves hangs by the thread of a killer’s choices.
Astoundingly, McMillon applauds the likely decline in the company’s market share in ammo. Now that’s a first: a company defining success as a decline in market share. Sears and JCPenney should be popping champagne corks instead of wringing their hands. It seems like the national Walmart is taking its cues from California Walmart. California is a mess and hardly an example to be imitated. I fled the state as a third generation native Californian to Montana. The state is no place to raise kids. Are the Walmarts in Montana soon to be looking like the ones in that lefty loony bin?
As always in these kinds of circulars, there are some palatable suggestions. Shoring up FixNICS and competently-written red flag laws are things to consider. But the gun and ammo ideas are just warmed over goofiness in Democratic Party bullet points. None of the ideas have a scintilla of relevance to curbing these mass shootings. Ditto for the much-vaunted “universal background checks”. Try to enforce that idea when family heirlooms are passed down from parent to child. The dribble is trotted out each time for the sole purpose of hammering more traditional and conservative circles in our population.
I suspect a general leftward orientation in corporate boardrooms. Others have noticed it as well. Walmart has not been inoculated. I attribute the phenomena to an increasing isolation in corporate governance from the common people, particularly in flyover country. Socio-economically, the “suits” identify with each other and the urban values of their location. Much has been written about this. Now these collectivist values appear to be seeping into Walmart. O’Sullivan might be proven right once again.
For your information, I shifted my recent tire purchase from Walmart to Discount Tire. In fact, I used your cheaper price to get a price match from them. You are to be thanked for providing the price leverage. But to be honest, I would have agreed to a higher price to avoid doing business with a company who appears to be lurching left. I will be doing the same with our other consumer purchases. Don’t look for my car in your parking lot.
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Once again, the online receptionist indicated that my response will go up the chain of command. I suspect the reply is boilerplate.
After learning of Walmart’s new gun policy after the murderous rampage in an El Paso Walmart, I spirited off a reply on Walmart’s website comment link. Here is my initial comment to the company’s new policy:
I am commenting on your recent policy regarding guns and ammunition. I hope somebody reads it.
Right at the start: I am no gun enthusiast but am a strong believer in the Second Amendment and its pure and historical purpose. Also, I have come to notice the left-leaning tendencies in corporate boardrooms across the country. More and more, corporate policies are reflecting the left-wing zeitgeist of our urban and academic centers. I could provide more detail about this orientation if a history and philosophy lesson is required. Still, the trend is increasingly becoming apparent at Walmart.
Certain ideologically-laden code words keep recurring in many corporate policies, including Walmart’s. These are partisan leitmotifs that are littered throughout in more than just bland pronouncements on the company website, but also in company actions. Take for instance “corporate responsibility”. In the past, I have come to associate the phrase with Walmart’s attentiveness to community needs such as assistance to homeless shelters and schools. Well, it’s gone way beyond that. “Sustainability” has glommed onto the phrase. “Sustainability” has morphed into much more than roadside trash pickups. The word is corrupted with lefty crusades such as the massively politicized “climate change”, the wars on fossil fuels and plastics, and the never-ending campaigns to force “equality” in all its intersectional and “marginalized” guises, in the name of “equity” – whatever that means.
The last one is a war on tradition. Established notions of public morality, institutions like marriage and family, and values such as self-reliance, personal responsibility, and economic freedom are assaulted in the pursuit of making the “new man/woman”. Call it social engineering; something reminiscent of more sordid episodes of the 20th century.
I am sad to see that Walmart has succumbed to the zeitgeist. Now, it’s guns. The new policy about open carry and ammunition may have something to do with liability issues. Nonetheless, the corporate course on these matters is still troubling. A mob is afoot emanating from our megalopolises, the worst in academia, and the media that is tied to the two. It takes courage to stand athwart the mob. Yours appears to be waning.
I’m reminded of Simon Schama’s chronicle of the French Revolution, “Citizens”. The mob of Paris and its fire-breathing demagogues were the bane of civil governance for the country for centuries. Threats, intimidation, violence, and blackmail were all-too-common. The lid blew off in 1789 and France plunged into darkness and dictatorship for decades afterwards. At the time, some people made their peace with the Revolution. Have you made yours?
Don’t mistake fashionable trends of thought for wisdom. The Second Amendment is a symbol of citizen control of our polity. As such, I’m exercising my sovereignty in severing any personal commercial association with Walmart.
Currently, I’m in a spat with Walmart. No, my complaint isn’t about Walmart as an unabashed exploiter of the working poor, the complaint common among illiterate social justice warriors. Au contraire, I’m referring to Walmart’s gradual alignment with the cultural left. Surprise, surprise.
What drew back the curtain was the company’s new policy on guns and ammunition. An emotive reaction to a horrible incident like the one at the El Paso Walmart is understandable, but don’t mistake “understandable” with “reasonable”. For many reasons, much in Walmart’s new stance on guns is absurd. More about this later.
Walmart’s approach is encapsulated in this memo to employees shortly after the El Paso shooting. It can be found here: https://corporate.walmart.com/…/mcmillon-to-associates-our-….
John McMillon, President and CEO, of Walmart.
A Wikipedia search of the memo’s author, John McMillon, President and CEO, uncovered more. Guns and religion are two of the most salient issues in the culture war. And McMillon weighed into both. In 2015, McMillon proclaimed that a “religious freedom” bill before Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson “threatens to undermine the spirit of inclusion present throughout the state of Arkansas and does not reflect the values we proudly uphold”. Cut through the gobbledygook and we see that Walmart has joined the LGBTQ crusade to punish religious dissenters for disagreeing with them. McMillon sounds like Pelosi. Religious freedom laws have become a necessity as government agencies and commissions under the sway of the powerful LGBTQ lobby have targeted private individuals for taking the Bible seriously. Talk to Jack Philips, or take a look at the Houston mayor’s attempt to subpoena pastors’ sermons, or governments’ efforts to force religious organizations to facilitate abortion.
Jack Philips of Masterpiece Cakeshop and the target of legal action by Colorado’s Human Rights Commission. Their actions against Philips were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.
But now we have the big cheese at Walmart declaring “inclusion” trumps (no pun intended) “religious freedom”.
A scan of the company’s website will find it littered with the eco-lobby’s hobby-horses. I suspect that the “suits” in charge at Walmart chafe at those viral pics of unsightly-dressed shoppers. They want to upscale the company’s image by showing that they too are like the swank Malibu types with fashionable views to go along with a fashionable look.
A page from the “Global Responsibility” link on walmart.com.
McMillon’s personal history, though, presents a conundrum. He’s a born-again Christian. He’s also a lifer Walmart employee. On the religious angle, he’s confused in trying to mesh his haute couture views with Jesus of Nazareth. As an employee, he’s been in management for at least 20 years, and much of that in corporate management. Somewhere along the line he has absorbed many of the values of a university’s Sociology faculty. It’s a familiar development in the backgrounds of many corporate execs.
Wealthy people in today’s world seem to be attracted to wokeness like a moth to light.
9/11 is the moment to commemorate the victims and those who answered the call and made sacrifices to combat the threat. It is also a reminder of the decline of ardor not long after.
George W. Bush had approvals of 99% and then the bottom fell out. The peaceniks returned with a vengeance – “Bush lied, people died.” The Democratic Party resumed its bash-America stance. The next number of presidential elections cycles produced commanders-in-chief who would spend their tenures repudiating W.
Protesters march in San Francisco Thursday, March 20, 2003. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
Even Republicans joined in the mudfest. Trump would spend the 2016 campaign bashing the Bushes and continue the pounding in the years after the inaugural. He teeters on the edge of the isolationism rabbit hole.
Not surprisingly, Trump goes through national security people like a pothead does reefers. Remember McMaster, Bolton, Mattis? It’s hard meshing “America first” with obvious national interests that stretch beyond the two oceans. I’ve got to give Trump credit, though, for persistence in forcing that square peg into a round hole. But it’s hard on the worker bees.
Part of the problem in stoking the enthusiasm to keep up the fight against terrorism is disoriented expectations. All conflicts are compared to WWII. It’s the gold standard for wars for the historically illiterate. All American wars, including the Revolution, were divisive affairs, with the lone exception of WWII.
Female delegates to the 1915 Women’s Peace Conference in The Hague, aboard the MS Noordam. April 1915.
WWII is an island in history’s landscape. The evil was easy to identify, had uniformed people to kill, and a capital to conquer. What’s the capital of terrorism? Terrorists don’t fight “fair”, like the 1950’s communist Malay National Liberation Front, the Viet Cong in Vietnam, the Pathet Lao in Laos, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, the Castro-inspired killers in Latin America, …. The enemy looks like Malay peasant farmers and Afghan peasant farmers.
Guerrilla forces from North Vietnam’s Vietcong movement cross a river in 1966 during the Vietnam War.
The violence burns for a long time. For our enemies, the strategy is simple: keep it burning and America will eventually quit. Vietnam invited that conclusion. These are likely to be the only kinds of wars that the world’s lone superpower will get. The Iraqi insurgency followed and Afghan Taliban are following the script to a T.
And lo and behold, we get presidents whose endgame is withdrawal. Translation: the enemy wins.
This challenge doesn’t have to end that way. We have to be as relentless as our foes, if we can rediscover fortitude. All the while, never forgetting 9/11.
Below is a video from Mearns Academy, in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, which went viral in June of 2019, of a teacher who removed a student for stating that there are only two genders.
In my mind, the remarkable thing about the incident was the teacher’s frequent reference to “policy”, as in the school’s and government’s policy of recognizing more than two genders settles the issue enough to squash dissent. It’s an approach that seems to be seeping into most areas of public life. In other words, be silent if you disagree with the powers-that-be on an issue that is inherently open to dispute.
Yes, open to dispute. Elementary logic makes it easy to challenge this most modern of contentions. Yet, the enthusiasts for 40 or so genders try to swamp opposing voices with, in essence, a politicized résumé. The tactic is to prepare a list of gullible Ph.D.’s – ones with prejudicial sympathies for the claims – make sure that they occupy powerful positions in the relevant professional associations who have an instinct for political adventurism, and have a fervent activist base – size doesn’t matter, approximation to political power does. In that way, logic and facts get overwhelmed by the loud volume of an intense few. Education is bedeviled by the technique, as I can attest from personal experience.
For an alternative view of transgenderism, go here.
What it comes down to is a person’s self-assertion that he or she (or whatever) is the opposite of his or her (or whatever) chromosomes. Rhetoric, verbal distinctions, and analytical procedures to identify “legitimate” claims are invented to bolster the new “science”. If the purpose of the process is to winnow out the dubious from the genuine, the filter has holes the size of railroad tunnels. If this is science, it is of the sham variety.
We’ve been down this road before with eugenics and racial purity. And we might have to add overwrought “climate change” to the list. So-called “science” is just as vulnerable to fanciful popular trends as hemlines and music.
At the end of the day, what have we done? As is usual in these kinds of things, it’s the young who pay the price for our impulsiveness. They are injected with pharmaceuticals at a young age in preparation for surgery later. The drugs will stunt their development and the surgery is irreversible. But by then, it’s too late. A change of heart just became meaningless. With transgenderism, you might as well repeal the Hippocratic oath.
The problems don’t stop there. Girls’ track, swimming, soccer, etc., or girl’s anything, will have been made nonsensical. The inherent advantage of the transgendered girl over those whose mental state aligns with their chromosomes means that past-boys will dominate present-girls. I wonder about the survival of the longstanding feminist push for sports equity when the boys-now-girls are harvesting the majority of girls’ sports scholarships and dominating the record books. We don’t have to much worry about the process working the other way.
This is what happens when government wades into a controversy in favor of the side obviously lacking in merit but nonetheless having proximity to power. Government diktat overwhelms debate and discourse, and helps to produce viral videos of public employees shaming dissenters even though the dissenters have the stronger case. Is this any way to run a citizen republic?
Do you want an example of pure demagoguery? Well, here it is! Watch Elizabeth Warren appeal to the prejudices and emotions of her crowd.
Her speech is filled with all the lingo in the quiver of any power-hungry firebrand. When democracy becomes a substitute for morality, as it is for Warren, Bernie, and the Squad (AOC and company), such people are free to go out and advocate theft if they can garner a large enough throng. And in this Democratic Party, the rhetoric does. This, the wealth tax, is thievery through the tax code, pure and simple. Her rationale is utterly fantastic and also very frightening. It is frightening not just for its lunacy but for the moral corruption of the masses who buy into it.
Elizabeth Warren addresses a large crowd for an August campaign rally in California. Frederic J. Brown/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
The wealth tax ploy is too easy to take apart, as economists even in the Democratic Party stable (Larry Summers, et al) have done. Fact: you’ll get a small fraction of what you expect. It’s too easy to legally dodge. And if that doesn’t work, simply flee and have your assets electronically transferred to Zurich. Wealth is remarkably portable. Of course, you can attempt to stop the flight with more draconian measures, but then you’re mimicking Maduro, or Lenin, or Stalin, or Mao, or Castro …. Elizabeth, do you really want to go there? Some in the base are certainly hot for it.
Venezuela’s illegal traders have proliferated as grocery stores are fast becoming empty. Credit: Eneas De Troya / Flicker
I’m reminded of other crusades to stick it to the rich, real or imagined. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane to 1929. The story actually begins in 1906. The farsighted Russian Prime Minister, Pyotr Solypin, starting in 1906, uplifted the peasants by giving them land and thus they became property owners. Some were successful and became richer than others. By October of 1917, a revolution for forced “equality” – that’s what communism and Bolshevism are all about – seized power and would spend the next decade trying to eliminate the so-called “kulaks”, or rich peasants. Many were not so much rich as they simply owned their own land. Stalin had enough of peasant resistance. Party activists and armed cadres descended on the countryside to rile the many less-well-off. They seized land, food, crops, livestock, equipment, and herded peasants into state farms and the gulag. That’s the beginning of the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33.
A dispossessed kulak and his family in front of their home in Udachne village in Donets’ka oblast’, 1930s. (Image credit: Central State Archives of Photo, Audio, and Video Documents of Ukraine named after G. S. Pshenychnyi)A family with starving children during Stalin’s de-kulakization campaign. Wikimedia Commons.
What’s interesting about the episode is the requisition squads left no stone unturned. Peasants resisted by hiding all they had, all to no avail. Everything was taken, even the seed grain for next year’s crop. What does this mean? Famine and 50 years of shortages. Warren will have to follow in the footsteps of the lefty activists of 1930’s Russia to realize her anticipated $2.75 trillion windfall. It’ll be a replay of 1930’s Russia. Capital will be hidden or flee with the same devastating effects on our country. Warren has company of the sort nobody should relish.
As in the October Revolution, Warren and company are offering “equality” through a series of massive wealth transfers. The “equality” will come in the form of freebies offered up to the alleged dispossessed. It’s a promise with a sordid past. Beware America, she plans to revisit the horror on us and our progeny.
“Approaching the fowl with stalking-horse”, an 1875 illustration. (en.wikipedia.org)
Stalking horse: noun; a false pretext concealing someone’s real intentions. (Oxford Dictionary)
In the context of the verbal brawl that occurs in today’s America, the eagerness for gun control and large-scale immigration is a stalking horse for deeper and mostly urban cultural trends. The popularity of gun control takes place in the urban womb of government services. Think of it as mass infantilization. Nearly unrestrained immigration is fashionable in districts whose knowledge of immigrants is limited to the domestic help of the cheap nanny, housekeeper, and landscaper. Do you really think that they ever venture into the blighted neighborhoods that the hired help retreats into after work? Ignorance of guns and the actual lives of immigrants plagues our cultural “betters” in our cities and their academic playgrounds, and ironically informs (“informs”, maybe a bad choice of words) their political enthusiasms.
In May of 2019, Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker (D, NJ) called for national gun registration.In August, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris expressed the willingness to send cops to people’s homes to confiscate banned firearms. (Washington Examiner)
What brought this personal reflection to mind was Michael Lind’s piece in American Affairs, “Classless Utopia versus Class Compromise” (Summer 2018, Vol. II, Number 2).
The article is about the large scale social, economic, and political trends mostly affecting native blue collar workers. In it, Lind makes the point that nearly unfettered immigration has led to the evisceration of native low-skilled and blue collar workers, no matter their ethnic or racial backgrounds. He writes, “… globalization, operating mainly through corporate-orchestrated labor arbitrage—in the form of offshoring jobs to foreign workers or importing immigrants to compete with native workers—weakened the bargaining power of immobile native workers in the developed democracies.” Do you think that the loss of bargaining power for the native lower-skilled worker crossed the minds of upper-middle-to-upper-class urbanites? For them, it’s simply a matter of compassion and nannies.
Victorina Morales, undocumented worker at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J.
Also, I must admit that it could be something more sinister. For everyone else outside their pampered social circles, though, massive immigration had a devastating effect.
Think of it this way: open borders is a stalking horse for gutting the power and influence of the hoi polloi, knowingly or unknowingly. Regarding the stalking horse of gun control, it’s a matter of everyone being forced to adopt an urban lifestyle with its norms, expectations, and requisite politically correct views, no matter its unfitness for folks outside the suburban/urban bubbles.
Progressive/left protesters crowd and shout into Rep. Chris Stewart’s (R, Utah) townhall in Salt Lake City, March 31, 2017. George Frey/Getty Images
Our times seem to be especially fraught with some of the worst invective, character assassination, and outbursts of anger bordering on rage. Disruptive chants and slogans have replaced reasoned discourse. I’ve complained about this often. Astonishingly, it has taken place at a time when we are spending trillions on education. As it turns out, mass education hasn’t produced mass wisdom. The situation raises serious questions about our educational system. Are we educating citizens or producing close-minded activists?
Watch this episode of young climate-change activists making demands at a recent (August 22) DNC meeting in San Francisco. The Sunrise Movement is most certainly the Sundown Movement, the sundown of reasoned discourse.
Very little intelligent dialogue takes place, nor is there any evidence of its presence in the short cognitive histories of these young people. They jump from rash conclusion to street activism with nothing prior or between.
The same is true in much of our political landscape. Brusque knee-jerk reactions take the place of thoughtful discussion and civil discourse. I doubt if the groundwork in the form of sufficient knowledge has been made in order to make it possible. So, it’s back to chants, slogans, disruptions, and hectoring. I cringe just thinking about what will happen if Pres. Trump gets the chance to fill another Supreme Court vacancy.
In the case of the above video, the instigator is the previously-mentioned Sunrise Movement. When I look into the faces of these young people, I slump into depression thinking of what our media and schools have done to their minds. All is not lost though. There are still a few golden and older voices in the wilderness, even if they’re no longer with us. Two of those voices belong to the late Milton and Rose Friedman. Their legacy continues in the Free to Choose Network. Airing this month on Amazon Prime Video are “The Real Adam Smith: Ideas That Changed the World” and “Sweden: Lessons for America?”. I viewed both recently.
The first should be a must-see for Pres. Trump and some of the hosts on Fox News. Are you listening Tucker? The second one should be required viewing for – wait, it’s a list – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, her political soul mates, the activist base of the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders, much of the rest of Democratic Party’s wannabee presidents, and those protesters pushing their way into the DNC’s meeting in San Francisco.
Pres. Trump reacts to trade issues in the same way as a developer dealing with his project’s immediate circumstances and the relevant people before him. Tariffs for him are like the rent charged in Trump Tower. It adds to his bottom line. The “trade deficit” is treated as a debt or loss in his books. It isn’t quite that simple. Tariffs are taxes paid by consumers in one way or another. Call it a value-added tax on imports, and operates in like manner. As for the “trade deficit”, it is just one component in the balance of payments. A shortfall in it will lead to surpluses in the other two components: the financial and capital accounts. The importer gets dollars and we get their goods. The dollars end up in financial instruments (bonds, government debt for example) and foreign direct investment.
For Trump, the dollars flow in the pockets of foreign fat cats as they live in, get this, a non-dollar society. How does that work? It doesn’t. The fat cat must translate his dollars into his country’s currency to buy that swank penthouse in Shanghai or keep the Benjamins to spend them on a Montecito mansion. He’ll need renminbis in the PRC or hand over the dollars to the old-moneyed seller in posh Montecito. Another option is parking the money in our government debt. Whichever way, dollars eventually come back here.
Dollars or renminbi (yuan).
Could trade deficits have downsides? Yes, they could. Some regions could fall into depression as they lose out in the international competition. The social effects of economic decline aren’t pretty. Shuttered factories and businesses, distressed neighborhoods, family breakdown, substance abuse, people locked into a cycle of life with few prospects, and welfare dependency are symptoms of the malaise.
Abandoned and dilapidated factory complex in Detroit, Mi.Injecting opioids.
This is one weak spot in the film. Free trade has a ying and yang quality. It works best among countries with free economies, more or less. The role of similar social expectations and norms among nations can’t be counted out. I suspect that the PRC sees trade as another weapon in the long twilight struggle for national and ideological dominance. If their people get richer in the process, that’s icing on the cake. The country is certainly one for us to be very leery.
Nonetheless, the first film – “The Real Adam Smith” – lays out a useful primer for the value of free trade, one that Trump and his courtiers should understand. It might restrain them in their enthusiasm for punishing our literal and natural allies with tariffs. But we can hold two ideas at the same time (per Hillary’s iteration, and true). President-for-life Xi may be Trump’s friend, but he isn’t ours.
The second film – “Sweden: Lessons for America?” – is a necessary corrective to a popular urban myth for self-styled urban sophisticates. They pride themselves in being smarter, more intelligent, and better informed than the rubes. For them, the right side of the political spectrum is populated with Morlocks.
The Morlocks in the 1960 movie, “The Time Machine”.
The prejudice was on full display when Paul McCartney accepted the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in 2010 and bellowed this insult at ex-President George W. Bush while President Obama and wife were in attendance: “After the last eight years, it’s great to have a president who knows what a library is.”
McCartney and Pres. Obama at the award ceremony, June 2010.
Ironically, the rank condescension of an accomplished pop music star is rooted in a profound ignorance that is common in places like bein pensant circles in Georgetown. For the beautiful people, all the smart people are on the left side of the spectrum. In reality, they’ve adopted John C. Calhoun’s outlook, but the target isn’t African-Americans. It’s anyone who might wear a tool belt, pay a mortgage, attend a Bible-believing church, and just might register Republican. Johan Norberg, the documentary’s host, unwittingly presents proof of the presence in chic quarters of the “Ignorant” stamp on the forehead with a frequency equivalent to tattoos in the crowd of heavy metal concertgoers. Norberg does it by shattering their fantasies about Swedish socialism.
Bernie Sanders has frequently tried to distinguish himself from the brutal socialism in the Soviet Union and Mao’s China. He does it by attaching his socialist vision to Scandinavian “social democracy”, not Pol Pot. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , a younger Bernie Sanders with different genitalia, imitates him. Both invoke the experience of “democratic socialism” in Scandinavia.
CNN quotes Bernie Sanders as follows: “I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway and learn what they have accomplished for their working people.” The Danes recoil from the “socialist” label. Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen responded in a speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, “I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”
Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, October 30, 2017.
Bernie and AOC continue to maintain that these countries are working examples of a successful socialism. They try to do so, in spite of the Scandinavian leaders’ rejection of the “socialism” label, by emphasizing “democracy”. It’s rhetorical sleight of hand. The fact of the matter is that the scheme is all about government control. It matters little if the control is exercised through a small claque of ideological oligarchs or a mob of 50% plus one. Private property becomes meaningless if it is at the mercy of any assemblage of 50%-plus-one. “Democracy” is the cover for all sorts of sins.
To say it is “democratic”, also, doesn’t mean the administrative state goes away. Rules to avoid chaos and give direction will have to be promulgated by a commissariat approaching the size of the Soviet Gosplan. The likes of Bernie and AOC have all kinds of social and eco “justice” to pursue. AOC helped author one incoherent version of the Green New Deal and Bernie later came up with his own monstrosity. Whichever of the two routes you take, you’ll end up in the same place: central planning!
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey (right) speak during a press conference to announce Green New Deal legislation on Feb. 7. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Plus, the two carnival barkers act as if nothing has happened since the heyday of Scandinavian socialism in the 1970’s. It’s here that the Swede, Johan Norberg, and “Sweden: Lessons for America?” clears away much of the verbal smog. To make it simple for Bernie and Alexandria, Sweden had a free market economy, lost it, then gained it back. How did they do it? They reined in their “social democracy”. Business taxes were lowered; pensions became contribution-based rather than benefit-based; universal school vouchers were implemented to the point of private high schools becoming half of all high schools; unions became cooperative rather than combative; the vaunted universal health care system is remarkably decentralized with vouchers and a growing number of private healthcare providers; and on and on and on. In many ways they are freer than us.
Bernie wishes that we could be more like Sweden. Oh really, Bernie? I don’t think so. There is one area that should especially draw the ire of Bernie and much of the Dem Party. Sweden makes everyone pay taxes. If you will receive government benefits, you will pay. They don’t have a tax structure that attempts to shoulder the burden of government on the pocketbooks of the wealthy and the businesses who are the engine of jobs. They tried that in the 1970’s and saw their economy slump and businesses flee. Don’t doubt for a moment that Bernie and AOC won’t try to inflict the horrible history on us.
Really, the amazing part of the story is the abject ignorance of the story. Bernie, AOC, and the like, stop history in the 1970’s. Democratic socialism’s failures are deleted from the record so they can ignore Scandinavia’s movement toward free markets. Our democratic socialist icons take the system of its heyday, pretend the failures and reforms didn’t happen, and attribute the successes of its reforms to the socialism of the earlier misbegotten period. This is circularity with a huge bite out of its circumference. It’s nonsense.
In Scandinavia, particularly Sweden, Adam Smith has made a comeback … out of necessity. Socialism failed. In America, especially among the Democratic Party base and millennials, Marx is making a comeback. Go figure. AOC tries to distance herself from Marx to be more politically palatable. So does Bernie. Yet, do they really understand Marx? I kinda doubt it. Marx is socialism with an eschatology. Strip the violent eschatology and you still have socialism. Our lefty politicos want socialism to be elected into power. But does the means of implementation matter? Socialism is socialism and it doesn’t work. Isn’t the emphasis on 50%-plus-one just another attempt at putting lipstick on a pig?
A return to a sound understanding of human nature and the modes of social organization that are attuned to it would be huge step forward in removing needless chatter and destructive venting. I doubt, though, that it will ever get a hearing in today’s toxic climate. Too many people just don’t know a damn thing. Many of them are on the left, but that won”t stop them from being oh so confident. There is nothing more dangerous than an over-confident ignoramus.
Today, Bernie Sanders unveiled his plan for the Green New Deal, a $16.3 trillion monster. You can read about it here in the New York Times. The number – 16.3 trillion – is so huge that we lose sight of its magnitude. To break it down, if the dollars were miles, it would be a little less than three-quarters of the distance to Alpha Centauri, an entirely separate planetary system “far far away”. The size of the number means that the bill can’t be paid by anyone. The projected payback will extend beyond generations “far far away”. It’s essentially an invitation to join the Stone Age for anyone and everyone in generations from now to those “far far away”.
That dingbat congresswoman from the Bronx would like to stampede us into the Stone Age with hysterical cries that we have only 10 years before the Götterdämmerung if we do nothing. For her, better the Stone Age than extinction. Apparently, Bernie also favors the choice of the Stone Age. For me, the difference is marginal. The Stone Age was best captured in Thomas Hobbes’s famous dictum: life is “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short”.
Making flints in the Stone Age.
But is the U.S. in the catbird seat to stave off disaster anyway? Remember, our government’s decisions to economically harm us only harms … us! China and the rest of the developing world have a keen interest in indoor plumbing and air conditioning. They’ll burn down their jungles and the fossil fuels in a long list of Saudi Arabias to get out from living in the dirt. So, unless Bernie appoints himself to be the Maoist General Secretary of the World and embarks on a Genghis Khan-style conquest of the planet to enforce the resultant poverty, he’ll just end up destroying us. The rest of the world will continue to pollute, albeit at a faster clip.
BEIJING, CHINA – DECEMBER 20: Citizens walk in smog on December 20, 2016 in Jinan, Shandong Province of China. Air quality index (AQI) readings exceeded 400 and some schools have suspended classes in Jinan. (Photo by VCG/VCG via Getty Images)Burning coal in China to generate electricity.
A few numbers might help Bernie, his fellow ideological asylum inmates, and the Squad in understanding the extent of the craziness. The U.S. is about a quarter of the world’s economy. China comes in second at 15%. The numbers are nearly reversed in global CO2 emissions: China at 30%, the U.S. at 15%. So – I’ll go slow for the woke crowd – we produce 25% of the world’s product at only 15% of emissions, and China knocks out 15% of the world’s product at 30% of emissions. What’s that mean? I’ll go slow once again for all those with degrees but show no sign of better judgment: It means that China is dirtier, much dirtier at a rate twice ours. The lesson, therefore, is to smash the cleaner nation’s economy only to clear the way for the dirty one. Bernie must have skipped Math class in high school.
The hope is that China will be inspired by our example to voluntarily follow suit. What example? It’s the example of how to level a first world country into the third world. I suspect that they’d like to avoid the experience as if it was a leper colony.
California prides itself in being a ground breaker. They have adopted the greenie snake oil through a variety of measures over the past couple of decades. As of 2017/18, though, the state accounts for only 1.1% of global CO2 discharges. Even if they knock it down to zero – probably by running the rest of the economy out of the state – their slot will be more than replaced by India as it ramps up.
What’s the upshot of all the greenie caterwauling? Say goodbye to the future for your kids, their kids, and their kids’ kids. Maybe they might feel better if they know that they were making a sacrifice for the good of … no one. Not!
