Culture – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

November 19, 2024November 20, 2024

Message to Biased “Experts”: If You Want to be Taken Seriously, Stop Being So Left Wing

May be an image of 1 person — Prof. Claire Finkelstein of Penn Law School

Case in point: Penn law professor Claire Finkelstein. In an opinion piece on The Hill news site, she lays out an excuse for left wing prosecutors to go after public figures who disagree with her and them (see #1). Ignoring all prior precedence and guidance, she’s four-square behind arming the justice system against her ideological opponents. Let’s face it, she’s another one of these tenured types in a silo of habitual left-wing partisans.

She opines that a Trump firing of Jack Smith is obstruction of justice. She writes,

“If the sole purpose of the removal of a federal employee is to immunize the president against investigations into his own wrongdoing, that is a misuse of presidential authority, and one that is unrelated to the protections that the presidency is meant to afford.”

Borrowing a Biden word, this is “malarky”. It’s tantamount to open season for the left to target the right. I don’t think that she means for the same logic to be applied against anyone on the left – hint: Joe Biden, the entire Biden clan, Hillary and her home brew server and blatant obstructions, Stacy Abrams and the original “stop-the-steal” campaign. What about the retinue of New York and Atlanta prosecutors? Partisan use of prosecutorial powers is a form of obstruction of justice, also called “abuse of power”.

Hillary Clinton using a personal server was a genius idea-IndiaTV News | World News – India TV — Hillary Clinton from around 2015

Finkelstein advocates a freebooting expedition into an elected official’s intentions, his motives, as they exercise their constitutional powers, something clearly deemed constitutionally off-limits by the Supreme Court in Trump v. US earlier this year. How else can she prove “wrongdoing” or “misuse of presidential authority”? Do intentions and motivations bedevil left-wingers? It’s odd that this kind of rationalization only seems to crop up when Trump, or anyone on the right for that matter, wins office.

Where were they on Clinton’s perjury, obstruction, and impeachment, or Obama’s autocratic use of his “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone”, or the sweetheart deals that paved Obama’s way from activist/provocateur to Senator to the White House? Not a peep. No investigations, thus no indictments, thus no trials, thus no “convictions”, all of it buried deep, deep. Her legal inquisitiveness begins and ends with Trump. For all practical purposes, the difference between the D’s and R’s in her analysis is who won the election. If the D’s win, move on. If it’s the R’s, all guns ablaze. Finkelstein is just another political hack with tenure, another reason to question the rectitude of the faculty lounge.

She can’t wrap her head around the fact that the policies of the Left aren’t popular, especially when they’re given the chance to roll out. Even that deep blue bastion, California, can only stomach so much of the consequences of its left-wing prejudices. They tossed out the criminal permissiveness of Prop 46 (in Prop 36). That mecca of the counterculture, San Francisco, previously jettisoned some of the school board and sent its social-justice-warrior DA packing (Chesa Boudin). This time, it’s mayor London Breed seeking new employment. Across the Bay in Oakland, its mayor, radical lefty Sheng Thao, and Alameda County DA Pamela Price were sent to the exits.

All About Smash And Grab Robberies - TAL Global — Screenshot of a smash-and-grab in San Francisco

Los Angeles finally had enough of DA George Gascon. Apparently, serial assault and battery, smash-and-grabs, stabbings, shootings, and overall mayhem on the streets aren’t popular, even among a left-wing electorate. Of course, the usual suspects in power gaslighted us behind deceptive stats, such as the FBI’s crime report which relies on reported crime. Who reports crime if nothing will be done about it? Think George Gascon. Rather, honestly, trust your lyin’ eyes and vote the rascals out. They did.

As a result, Donald Trump’s showing in 2024 improved everywhere. I’m reminded of the scene on the MSNBC set on election night when asked to show the precincts or counties where Harris bested Biden’s 2020 showing. It was a blank map and startled the hosts. It was no less true in California. Eight counties flipped to Trump this time around. But the state is the Marianas Trench deepest of blue so there’s ample electoral breathing room to keep alive the leftist vision of life.

Nearly everywhere else, it’s appalling. Freezing parents out of parenting is a losing strategy for adults still in touch with reality. Tinkering with sensitive, impressionable young minds with trans ideology and treatments behind the backs of parents are flat-out losers. Recommending, pushing the ingestion of chemicals to interfere with a child’s natural development, and eventual surgeries, which are irreversible, are proving that barbaric teenage genital mutilation is alive and well in a hypothetically civilized society. Is it still civilized? I kinda doubt it, so any campaign running on it shouldn’t expect election-night celebrations.

Thus, boys-turned-girls – er, trans-girls, “girls”, XY “girls”, whatever – invade chromosomal girls’ spaces and battle them in competitions. It’s a replay of the Christians versus the lions in the Coliseum. I’m confused – and understandably so – because boy/girl is now relegated to a state of mind and having no relationship to procreation. It’s social suicide. They’re crazy. Any parent ushering their child down this path is practicing child abuse. Don’t expect a ride to victory on the back of this buffoonery.

May be a doodle of 1 person and text

May be pop art of text

May be an illustration of welcome mat and text

It’s as if the Democrats are card sharks and knowingly dealt themselves a losing hand. The wild spending and its wild debt aren’t winners. Climate-change ideology (or actually theology) as a cover for bankrupting utility bills and the shaming for the purchase of practical and affordable family transportation doesn’t help. Inflation was met with a Salem-witch-trail pogrom against “price gouging”.

A housing crisis didn’t just magically pop into existence. It’s been building for decades thanks to the Democrats’ fealty to mammoth environmental regulation and empowered NIMBYs. California is home to the worst of it. Is Elon Musk’s embrace of Trump a consequence of the regulatory crazies in the one-party state who nixed an increase in Space X launches at Vandenberg? That’s the tip of the iceberg: try to build a Levittown in the state. It’s a nightmare. And you wonder why your young adult children are living in your basement.

Do I need to mention the Biden administration’s open invitation for the Third World to move to the United States en masse? What a goat rope.

The Democrats love what ails us. Barack Obama’s beloved Rev. Jeremiah Wright once crowed that “The chickens have come home to roost.” Well, the chickens are roosting as GOP victories. No amount of legal scheming by partisans in the ivory tower will give the Democrats what they dearly desire: power. Power is gained through elections and, right now, they’re not fit to be elected – except in bicoastal, metropolitan, and academic pits of despair.

Claire Finkelstein, Trump will fire Jack Smith if he’s still around, and you have no legal standing to stop it. Jack Smith was on the ballot only as a Trump campaign issue. Trump won and you and Jack Smith lost. Next time, try making your side more palatable instead of inventing new ways to obstruct the voters’ desire to be protected from you.

As a side note, how do you spend a billion dollars, end the race with a $20 million debt, and still lose? $1.02 billion wasn’t enough to sell this turkey.

Update: Harris collected over $2 billion, and her campaign contests any contention of leftover debt.

RogerG

Sources:

1. “Jack Smith must not drop the government’s charges against Donald Trump — here’s why”, Claire Finkelstein, The Hill, 11/12/2024, at https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/4986125-doj-trump-indictments-jack-smith/
2. “No, Firing Jack Smith Would Not Be an Obstruction of Justice”, Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review, 11/16/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/11/no-firing-jack-smith-would-not-be-an-obstruction-of-justice/

November 3, 2024November 12, 2024

Montana’s Californization

May be an image of 3 people and crowd — Sen. Jon Tester (D, Mt.)

*Californization: noun, becoming more like California in the mind and NOT necessarily in its geo-spatial characteristics, such as Bozeman morphing into “BozAngeles” merely because it grows to accommodate an influx of interstate refugees. Far worse and much more troubling is the manipulation of a state’s popular biases, even their prejudices, to adopt California policy preferences.

I am fearful that America is being bribed and forced to be more like California. California used to be held in high esteem, the “shining city on a hill”. That’s certainly no longer true. The state is synonymous with dysfunction, decay, decline, and colossal misgovernance. It’s hemorrhaging refugees to other states, most of them middle class and families. Its social and economic life is feudalizing. Its electorate over decades has consistently chosen to eviscerate its quality of life. The result is a basket case, a Third World state within the world’s premiere First World nation. The question is, are electorates in other states desirous to join the “golden state” in this internal Third World?

My newly adopted home state of Montana could be getting ready to make the slide. No, the influx of new people or urbanization aren’t the culprits. It’s big, big campaign money from radical plutocratic barons in progressive bastions (Silicon Valley for instance) who have an outsized role in selling California-style dysfunction to the rest of the country, the same people who’ve made their urban bubbles and bi-coastal expanses unlivable, unaffordable, and inhospitable.

They’ve perfected a deceptive style of political packaging to pour their money into: sell California’s one-party jungle primary with a well-funded Montana ballot initiative (CI-126); sell California hedonism by sanctioning through another Montana initiative the elimination of the inconvenient consequence of sex: the baby (CI-128). Just think, in it, one human being would be legally empowered to destroy another with few, if any, restraints.

May be an image of 1 person and text

The libertine deep pockets of California and New York prop up Jon Tester. As such, Democrat Senator Jon Tester has a campaign war chest 4 times his opponent. He’s a reliable vote for his party’s main policies and leadership, the same ones that seek to remake the country in California’s image.

They try to sell this dumpster fire of thought to the “rubes” by using the rustics’ vague social and political prejudices against them. Don’t like wealthy out-of-staters? Well, figure this: Tester uses his out-of-state millions to bash his opponent as an out-of-stater. Wrap your mind around that. And put a double-hex on his challenger by attaching “wealthy” to the pejorative. Class warfare works, even in red states.

Why are these progressive billionaires and zillionaires so interested in showering millions on Tester’s reelection? Answer: he thinks and votes more like them than us.

May be pop art of text — Tester: a two-faced Janus

The numbers are astounding in the effort to keep the guy in the Senate. According to Open Secrets, Tester vacuumed up $32.6 million in contributions in the first 3 months of 2024, about 70% of it are high-dollar (over $200) and a quarter, probably more, from super zips in California and New York (See #1 below). His Republican opponent, Tim Sheehy, garnered a mere $2.1 million. Clearly, a call went down the Dems’ deep-pocket pipeline to Big Entertainment, Big Finance, and Big Tech and up gushed the dough. The Democrats’ richly endowed blue-bubble political war machine have the wherewithal to have you vote for your own demise.

No wonder streaming anything results in a deluge of Tester spots. Ditto broadcast. Tester has more cash than he knows what to do with. The estimated $315 million to be spent on this Senate race makes it per capita the most expensive in history, $487 for each one of the state’s 648,000 registered voters (See #2 below).

With cash like that available to the initiative front, they can flood the screens, your text message platform, and airwaves with a tidal wave of appeals to popular prejudices which are crafted to have you vote for California dysfunction. The license for unlimited abortion (CI-128) is couched in anti-government verbiage by people who have the rustic look, waiting to manipulate our prejudices. Bear in mind that the reality is actually about one generation claiming the power to take the lives of those in the newest. Appalling. A country appearance and mannerisms disguise the push for California debauchery.

I suspect that the gambit sells. Our blue bubbles are mired in a deep quagmire of their own making. But in vast stretches of red states lies a population with their own dark strains of thought. Protectionism in tariffs and subsidies are popular. Interstate xenophobia lurks below the surface, ready to be exploited by the dump trucks of cash from blue-state bastions.

If the Big Lie succeeds, expect your children’s fortunes to worsen, and you won’t have a clue that you had a hand in it.

*P.S.: This piece was written before the November election.

RogerG

Sources:
1. “Tester outraises GOP rival in high-stakes Montana Senate race”, Jim Cloutier, 4/25/2024, at https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2024/04/tester-outraises-gop-rival-in-high-stakes-montana-senate-race
2. “Voters Drowning in Ads From ‘Obscene’ Amounts of Cash Flooding Montana U.S. Senate Race”, AP, USNWP, 10/29/2024, at https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2024-10-29/voters-drowning-in-ads-from-obscene-amounts-of-cash-flooding-montana-u-s-senate-race

October 30, 2024

The Incoherence of Victor Davis Hanson and His New Right

In Rob Reiner’s “This Is Spinal Tap”, the character of Nigel Tufnel (guitar and vocals in the faux group) divulges their secret in being “one of England’s loudest bands”. They stenciled their amp dial scales to end at 11 and not the usual 10 – not increase the actual power output, mind you. Thus, “We go to 11.” The difference between the regular Right and the most recent edition is that the newest vintage will “go to 11”, always on the lookout for new opportunities to be loco.

May be an image of 3 people and guitar

May be an image of text

May be an image of 2 people, crowd and text — Trump supporters swarm Washington, D.C., Nov. 2020

The New Right is content with the batty isolationism-lite, the battle against those mysterious and formless “neocons” and the “establishment”, and a zeal for protectionist tariffs. Their political darling is Donald Trump and prominent mouthpiece in the academy is Victor Davis Hanson. Hanson has twisted his intellect into knots to turn Trumpian incoherence into coherence. The old wisecrack “Give him enough rope and he will hang himself” could be rejiggered to apply to Hanson in “Let him talk long enough and reasonableness is overtaken by bunk”.

It was on full display in the October 26 podcast of the “The Victor Davis Hanson Show”. Hanson loves the term “reestablish deterrence”. I do too. In a dangerous world, bad actors need to understand that they’ll pay a heavy price for harming you: “If you want peace, prepare for war.” But it’s strange to the point of incredulity to apply it to only two of the three theaters of Cold War II: Israel and the Middle East, yes, of course; Taiwan/CCP/South China Sea, yes, of course; but Ukraine/Putin/Russia, no. What’s with that?

For Hanson, “reestablish deterrence” somehow stops when considering Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Hanson’s logic is a ball of confusion. He blathers about the “scared soil of Mother Russia” as quicksand for Ukraine and their supporters in order to justify a replay of 1967’s Vietnam War micromanagement when then-president LBJ chose bombing targets in North Vietnam and restricted efforts to destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail and clean out NVA and Viet Cong sanctuaries in Cambodia. According to Hanson, we should not be supplying offensive weapons nor should Ukraine in any way, no matter how modified, adopt the tactics of the invader. Is there at least a hint of inconsistency here? Hypocrisy?

Weapons are weapons, whether labeled “offensive” or “defensive”. Is it “offensive” to strike Russian airbases, supply depots, missile sites, command-and-control centers, or occupy areas near Ukraine’s borders that are essential to keep Russia’s murderous juggernaut rampaging in Ukraine well-supplied? That’s defensive, Victor!

For Hanson, “reestablish deterrence” only applies against Iran or the CCP. How does Putin deserve a free pass? It’s the strangest thing. Putin’s desire to resurrect the Soviet empire is somehow different in Hanson’s mind from the mullah’s ambition to bring back the caliphate over the bodies of millions of Israelis or Xi’s craving to rebuild the Middle Kingdom of earth. Putin is decimating Ukraine as Iran would like to see done to Israel. Instead, Hanson strays off into a gripping fear of stepping onto the “sacred soil of Russia”. No word about the “scared soil of Ukraine”.

Try to make sense of it. You can’t. Emotions must account for it. Angers, resentments could be swamping the brain. Col. Vidman is Ukrainian and testified against Trump. Hanson must have been grinding his teeth. (Honestly, me too!) Zelensky visits an American factory that’s viewed favorably for Biden and Harris. The Left hates Russia for magically electing Trump; therefore, the Right automatically loves the place. Putin, manly man, versus XY “girls” and XX “boys” regaled at the White House. The faculty lounge flies Ukrainian flags at their homes while blue-collars languish in joblessness and meth. Hanson is seething.

Hanson tries to use the national debt and an open border as an excuse not to have a foreign policy, at least one that makes some sense. He’s actually saying, until all our problems are solved, to hell with Ukraine and foreign affairs. We’ve done it before regarding the continent of Europe, circa the 1930s prior to the fall of France, Pearl Harbor, and the Holocaust. It’s a theater of the absurd, and Hanson is begging to play a key role in the sordid drama.

May be an illustration of text

RogerG

October 28, 2024

We’re Being Gaslighted

May be an image of blimp and twilight — Dodger Stadium and central LA in the background

No photo description available. — Piles of trash remain near 25th Street and Long Beach Avenue. (photo: Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Tuning into the broadcast of the World Series (game one and two in Los Angeles), viewers were regaled with “beautiful Los Angeles”, especially centering on the weather. Shortly after landing at LAX and a chauffeured drive, one telecaster gushingly described the terrace view from atop his Beverly Hills hotel as exquisite, as sublime. Yes, the weather is wonderful, and the scene must have been handsome for him, but only so long as he remained off the surface streets and in one of the super-zip bubbles, and doesn’t actually live and work there like the average Angelino. The beautiful weather and the human reality don’t compute.

For about 15 years prior to my retirement in 2015, we trekked back and forth through 3-4 states between our then home in Bakersfield and northwest Montana during the spring and summer breaks. While crossing back into California near Barstow or Bishop, and our descent toward Bakersfield down Highway 58, a slight depression washed over me. The condition recurred every time that I made, and still make, the trip.

The two experiences say more about California than the sunny skies and the beautiful, manicured grounds of Dodger Stadium. The first one is media hype and superficial. The second one is genuine from a native Californian of 60+ years.

California is alluring . . . if you stick to hovering above the surface and/or zip through the many stretches of disarray and stay on the freeways. The state is a combination of disorder and a colossal regulatory Leviathan and over taxation of its people. It’s visible on the ground, and spreading. The disorder is a consequence of popularly elected choices. Beating enterprise into the dirt, expanding the dole in innumerable ways, and centering law enforcement on the private economy and not on the miscreants that make life miserable have made a shambles of the state. The state is at war with prudence and decency.

Piles of trash remain at the corner of East 10th Street and Naomi Avenue in downtown Los Angeles in 2019. (photo: Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

The lunacy is a result of conscious political acts, if gauged by the number of bills passed by the state’s full-time, Democrat-controlled legislature. In no year since 1993 has the number fallen below 632, and more commonly around 800 to frequently over 1,000 (see #1 below). Such bills have included the criminalization of separate boys and girls toy isles; mandatory neo-Marxism in K-12; authorizing school personnel to hide gender confusion from parents; the establishment of the state as a sanctuary of teenage genital mutilation for anybody from anywhere; a whole series of acts that have destabilized the grid, jacked up energy prices to new heights, and force the population into feeble EV’s; etc. And all of this as the state’s 60-year-old infrastructure decays and its streets and public spaces become havens of crime and filth.

May be an image of 6 people and the Oval Office — Gov. Newsom signs bills

As I watch the World Series, we must realize that we’re being gaslighted by Big Media. California has wonderful weather (Mediterranean climates are like that) and natural beauty to rival anywhere, but the state’s electoral choices for decades have made it unlivable for anyone with their heads screwed on straight. Indecent public policy is popular alongside its fabulous weather, coast, and mountains.

Just driving up to a California gas pump is enough for me to sour on any of its advantages. I prefer to stay away.

RogerG

Sources:

1. “California Bills: Introduced Versus Enacted”, Chris Micheli, California Globe, 10/1/2024, at https://californiaglobe.com/articles/california-bills-introduced-versus-enacted-2/

October 12, 2024October 26, 2024

Is Kamala Harris a Marxist?

Kamala Harris is an ‘airhead’ | Sky News Australia

No, but not because she isn’t unwittingly trying to be. For her, Marxists are communists who are meanies, much like Cinderella’s stepmother. Deep down inside, she, in the manner of all who rose out of the California one-party tar pit, has an abiding affection for much that lies under the Marxist rug. For her and all her delirious fans, James Lileks, essayist and satirist, has produced a concise description for Kamala and her classmates in his hypothetical history class. Here it is:

“Communism was invented by a hairy, smelly dude who sat in the library all day writing an explanation for why he was broke and ignored. He came up with some ideas that appeal to people who think they can figure out a secret special formula that explains everything and also has the totally coincidental outcome of giving them stuff they didn’t work for or deserve, at the expense of successful people with lots of friends and hot wives and steady access to a bath so that people don’t faint when they walk into the room.

“This system is utterly at odds with human nature, history, economics, and common sense, and hence it is beloved of two kinds of people: college professors who can fasten on a fat Western college like a leech on a whale, and clever sociopaths who can use it to exert power over the masses. It killed millions in the 20th century, yet we are told true communism was never tried, which is like poisoning 200 million people with a dose of arsenic and insisting they would have been fine if they’d been fed twice as much. Any questions?”

I don’t think Kamala is listening. She’s too busy passing notes.

May be an image of ambulance and text

RogerG

October 10, 2024October 26, 2024

An ADD Society

Images Of Social Media Addiction

I maintain that we aren’t the same people who can preserve a civilization, let alone build one. We don’t realize that we resemble less the 19th-century’s mighty entrepreneurs, or the men who stormed the beaches of Iwo Jima, and more the residents of a floundering 5th or 6th century Rome. Here’s why, and why my posts will not cater to a troubling trend.

What happens when a mental disorder becomes a society-wide trait? In this case, it’s adult attention deficit disorder (ADD) which is characterized by lack of focus, impulsiveness, an inability to maintain sustained attention for an extended period. Sound familiar? It should. It’s definitely true of the kids, because their parents model the quirk. The foible surrounds all of us, and our kids, in our appetite for graphic, rapid-fire audio/visual entertainments and the spasmodic hiccups and burps of the smartphone world of social media, tweets, texts. It’s incapable of challenging us or expanding our horizons. It keeps us comfortable in our preformed prejudices. It manifests in our kids who are uninterested in reading much of anything of substance from cover to cover.

Look at the young entering college, even in our so-called elite institutions. The mental acuity and appetite to read cover to cover Crime and Punishment or Darkness at Noon, and understand them, is broadly diminishing. That desire for quiet interludes of sustained, concentrated reading is rapidly disappearing.

*I encourage all of you to read Ian Tuttle’s piece “Why Elite Students Can’t Read Books” in National Review at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/10/why-elite-students-cant-read-books/. It’s a real eye-opener.

Our predicament shows in the bifurcation of the digital world. On the one hand lies podcast long-form interviews and discussions, blogs, Substack; on the other we find Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and X. Many of my posts in Facebook are actually produced for my Substack newsletter “The Golden Mean” (https://rogerlgraf.substack.com/publish/home) and my blog, “Libertate Virtute” (https://www.libertatevirtute.com/). They are thrown onto Facebook only as an aside.

The topics can’t and shouldn’t be addressed in short spasms. The issues demand something more than a digital burp. If you have an adult appetite for long-form treatments of serious matters, then grab a cup of coffee and . . . read.

Join the revolution against society-wide ADD. Tolle, leges (Latin): “Take up and read”.

May be an image of eclipse and text

RogerG

October 9, 2024October 26, 2024

A Blue-Collar Command Economy, or The Blue-Collar Suck-Up

Trump Hard Hat — Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump (photo: Mark Lyons/Getty Images)

Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones in “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”, first verse:

“I saw her today at the reception
A glass of wine in her hand
I knew she would meet her connection
At her feet was a foot-loose man
No, you can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometime, you’ll find
You get what you need”

Needs and wants, there’s a difference. Mick Jagger knew it. Needs are fundamental; wants are desires, the things that we would like. In normal times, the two are mangled beyond recognition, doubly so in election season.

Both parties – one a neo-Marxist enterprise, the other a personality cult – are in a mad dash to pander to the so-called middle and working classes, non-college educated. By so doing, the two parties in this time of voting advocate a command economy for the benefit of this general mass of people who work by the clock, do contract labor, and own small businesses. Here’s a splash of cold water: command economies don’t work, no matter their alleged beneficiary. Why? They’re commanded by the government, it’s employees and politicians. Any goodies granted one group come at the expense of the others, not just the rich, and will include many in the middling ranks of the socioeconomic pyramid. It’s the philosophy of beggar-thy-neighbor. That’s all that governments can do. Any bennies for blue collars – or the middle class – will come at the expense of the gradual negation of their own jobs and the futures of their children as future growth is diminished by “fair share” demagoguery against the rich. We’ll pay in more ways than one, not just at the checkout counter. The economic math is inexorable.

Though, to be real, today, the college-educated aren’t any more cognitively advantaged than the non-college educated. Many BAs, maybe most, are just proofs of indoctrination in claptrap. Indoctrination is not education.

The claptrap may help explain the broad acceptance of economic nonsense. A belief is deeply embedded that our specie of unionization is good, that you can wall off the country from foreign competition, hike taxes on the rich, and ignore the rest of the world, and everything will be hunky-dory. That isn’t a realistic game plan. It’s merciless, incremental national suicide.

Anyway, such is the political fashion of the time. Warning: fashionable politics and economic good sense don’t mix, like drinking and driving.

Profoundly galling is the demagogic blue-collar suck-up from both parties in the form of a love affair with “coerced” unionization, for that’s what we’re talking about, coerced. Of course, “coerced” is a yucky word, so they want to leave it at simple “unionization”. But honesty demands that we realize that the NEA, AFL-CIO, SEIU, the Teamsters, the entire litany of labor monopolists, actually demand “compulsory” (coerced) membership for everyone in the workplace. These folks aren’t into “voluntary”.

Their political word play doesn’t clarify squat. More of the word play clouds the picture even more. Coerced unionization comes in something referred to as “collective bargaining”. The question is, for them and everybody else, how to make a “collective” out of an inchoate mass of workers of divergent individual interests and beliefs? Answer: set up a system of legal protocols to force everyone into the thing, that’s how. A monopoly of labor under one set of masters, that’s how. Use the power of the state to impose one man, one vote, one time, since it’s harder than hell to decertify the labor monopoly once it’s established. After the initial certification vote to create the thing, you might be able to opt out, but you’re still going to have to pay for the thing (in California, “agency fees”). And don’t underestimate the organization’s creative bookkeeping to vacuum as much as possible out of every employee’s paycheck into the union treasury.

And guess what the dues-fueled slush fund goes for? Politics and more politics. These unions realize that their very existence is dependent on the power of the state to create and enforce the protocols that create them. Their existence and power are dependent on the state. Limited government, on the other hand, by definition, leaves little opportunity to hobnob with politicians to make law to squash dissenters at the workplace. That’s the reason for the unions’ hearty distaste for our constitutional republic. By definition, a constitution limits government power to what’s written. Big Labor demands what’s not written and therefore legally impermissible, and progressivism obliges. Progressives (in today’s parlance, neo-Marxists), as the unions’ chief political benefactors, simply interpret The Constitution out of the way by calling it a “living constitution”. How convenient.

In the end, these politically privileged labor monopolies cannibalize their own industries and morph into pillars of radical cultural revolution, ready to join their lefty comrades at the parapets. Industries flee their self-destructive grip; opportunities decay for upward mobility; many of its members discover their daughters sharing bathrooms and locker rooms with XY “girls”; and their schools, streets, parks, and downtowns are dangerous pits of despair. So much for “look for the union label”. This ain’t your grandpa’s UAW.

In fact, the UAW eyes richer fields to plow in organizing tomorrow’s cultural revolutionaries in the growing cadres of college teaching assistants. Imagine it, your son or daughter might be taught or their papers graded by a Hamas-loving activist who can’t be removed due to the protective political and legal force field provided by the UAW. It’s happening in California. The UAW has jumped on board the organizing gravy train of public employment, the very thing that has rendered California irredeemably ungovernable. California’s one-party state has turned itself into a clone of the Islamic Republic of Iran or the CCP with the guardians of the revolution, like the mullahs or the Party politburo, being the cabal of labor mandarins who were empowered by the very same state government that they now dominate. For the worker bees, they mostly approve of this arrangement so long as the pipeline of bennies keeps flowing, a glaring example of stage one thinking.

“Most thinking stops at stage one.” — Thomas Sowell in Applied Economics

17 Best images about Thomas Sowell on Pinterest | Sociology, Economics and Liberalism — Thomas Sowell

Stage-one thinking? Sowell defines stage one as a myopic concern with only the immediate consequence of a proposal or action. Then a sharper mind, in response, forces the person to address, “Then what?” After a series of then-whats, the person quickly realizes that their great idea is buffoonery. But don’t expect much stage two or three among most of those without a BA, and many of those walking around with one. According to a Pew survey from 2019, those with less than a college degree are four-and-a-half times more likely to view our participation in the global economy as a bad thing (see #1 and #2 below). Blue collar support for a wide range of foreign engagements has been waning for years. But then what, after the tariffs and abandonment of Ukraine?

You see, a stage-one buzzword of the Left has entered the lexicon of the Right: industrial policy, which basically translates into raising the economic drawbridge in international trade. It parallels Lenin’s infamous “central planning”. In central planning, the government manages, or directs, the economy to mold the “better society”. Whose better society? Of course, it’s the one in the mind of those perpetual obsessives who’ve spent their adult lives in fevered hatred of the existing patterns of life. The mental pathology infects the Left, and now the virus has come to the Right.

Quote of the Day: Hayek on Knowledge | Learn Liberty

The scheme runs four-square into Hayek’s “knowledge problem”. Their end state of bliss – America First – demands great power in the form of more government interventions to direct the lives of millions of economic actors acting both as buyers and sellers, consumers and producers, taxpayers and beneficiaries, in the whole range of possible economic activities available to each one of these participants. Such knowledge and wisdom are beyond human capacity, let alone the people manning the controls of the massive administrative state, the Fed, congressional committee staff, local planning commissions and boards of supervisors, a state’s Dept. of Fish and Game, Coastal Commissions, or the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the people who’ll enforce Trump’s tariffs. It’s a fool’s errand, but one, today, the Right seems anxious to pursue. Read J.D. Vance’s or Donald Trump’s speeches.

The people who don’t like you driving a Toyota are the same people who see no reason for NATO, an independent Ukraine, protecting Taiwan and its Taiwan Semiconductor, or preventing the oil-rich Middle East from becoming the playground of the mullahs. For stage-one thinkers, anything beyond our borders places an out-of-sight second to the extortionate goodies made possible by a cozy relationship with accommodating politicians. Don’t expect stage-one thinkers to have a grasp of the world war stage-setting in the 1938 Munich Agreement. Aggression was rewarded and soon we were embroiled in a total war of 80 million deaths, civilian and military.

Iwo Jima Photo Taken 70 Years Ago Today - David Hume Kennerly — Scene from the Battle for Iwo Jima, Feb.-March 1945

We could have stayed out as the first edition of America First in 1940 demanded. It took a brazen surprise attack to shock stage-one thinkers into realizing that events an ocean away can lead to Americans dying in large numbers.

“Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” — G. Michael Hopf in his novel Those Who Remain

Though, are we the same kind of people who could tolerate the bloody storming of the beaches of Iwo Jima and D-Day’s Omaha, or show persistence in the horrid conditions of Okinawa, the Hürtgen Forest, or the Battle of the Bulge? One has to wonder. Our elections are a barometer of the public psyche. Look at the pitches, now from both sides. Our elections are looting expeditions. Republicans promise not to touch our bankrupting entitlements while delivering on all manner of goodies to the middle class and blue collars. Ditto for the donkey party, only by a factor of ten. It’s all billed as fair-share justice when in reality it’s just targeting the successful to bankroll their pet social engineering schemes. Being spoon fed from the public treasury isn’t a promising approach in preserving a hardy people.

The Democrats used to be the party of government command and control. Not any longer. The Republicans offer a similar farce.

Think about it. What’ll happen in this command economy of the Right is a replay of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (Simpson-Mazzoli) signed by Reagan. We got the amnesty but little of the other component: enforcement. Trump will get his tariffs – something the Democrats are already giddy about – but won’t get much regulatory relief, the very thing that makes us uncompetitive with the rest of the world. The blue-collar suck-up in the form of compulsory unionization also awaits. We might get some reprieve from the greenie totalitarianism, but NIMBYism remains a populist obsession. Republicans have no stomach to fight hikes in the minimum wage, nor the other humungous host of mandates that raise the cost of doing business in the U.S. The tariff wall goes up and we will wallow in our own petri dish of fiscal and regulatory incontinence.

Prices will rise, and we may not even notice it. Higher prices only become apparent if there is a point of comparison. Where’s the comparison after walling off the competition? However, we will see an economy frozen in amber, limping along, with accountability and the essential force of creative destruction limited to those smaller firms without an intimate relationship with powerful politicos. The big government of the command economy necessitates big business. Big government and big business are Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum.

The Toxic Relationship Between Big Government and Big Business - Cecil County Conservative ...

Welcome to the cesspool of the blue-collar command economy and an electoral choice between detestables. That’s our choice this time around in the presidential sweepstakes: a California totalitarian with a velvet glove or a self-absorbed panderer. Oh, the panderer is “tough”, but only tough on foreigners and not to some within his own ranks who unwittingly demand undeserved and extortionate privileges. Which one of the offerings do you dislike the most?

For me, I’ll put on the hazmat suit and vote for the bombastic panderer. Somehow, a cultural revolution of porn to grade schoolers, teenage genital mutilation, XY “girls” everywhere in women’s spaces, eat the rich, carte blanche abortion inclusive of pedicide (killing of children), and greenie totalitarianism seems to be more Orwellian than the tariff buffoonery and blue-collar suck-up. There, I made my choice.

May be an image of text

RogerG

Sources:

1. “6. Views of foreign policy”, Pew Research Center, 12/19/2019, at https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/12/17/6-views-of-foreign-policy/
2. “Majority of Americans take a dim view of increased trade with other countries”, Pew Research Center, 7/29/2024, at https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/29/majority-of-americans-take-a-dim-view-of-increased-trade-with-other-countries/

September 27, 2024October 26, 2024

The United States of California

Bye-bye California: More and more golden state residents are deciding to move away for good. (photo by ©SFGate)

Get ready. Buckle up. The dysfunction of California is about to become the dysfunction of the United States. Take a look at a red/blue county or precinct election map of California and you will see what lies in store for our country (see maps below). East of California’s Coast Range, and beyond the coastal plain from San Diego to the Bay Area, extends a vast Republican hinterland that is essentially inconsequential to the governance of the state. The same thing awaits the huge stretch of the country between the two coasts and outside the deep blue urban bubbles that dot the landscape like islands in a vast red ocean (see maps below). Furthermore, as urbanization proceeds apace even in solidly red states, they too will increasingly resemble the quality of governance in Chicago, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and California. Today, urbanization is poison to good governance.

May be an image of map and text — 2020 election nationally by precinct

Who’s responsible for this sorry state of affairs? First, the people, whether in town or country. They vote for “wrong track”. Many believe in the impossible, such as bountiful entitlements (unreformed Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid), papering over in trillion-dollar spending bills every grand greenie scheme, a strong national defense . . . and, amazingly, low taxes and fiscal sanity. The tooth fairy anyone?

Second, the Democrats’ base. They are the boosters of America’s institutional socialist party, the equivalent of Europe’s Social Democrats. Well, let’s just call them the Social Democrats. And third, the Republicans’ base. They are in the grip of a psychotic personality disorder, one that emotes in bouts of vengeance, and will blindly follow the person who best captures their sense of resentment and defiance. The result is a competitive socialism and a broad and chronic sense of post-election disappointment.

The “people”, both in their party’s primaries and in the general electorate, choose failure. Let’s not be puerile in blaming somebody else: “elites”, “establishment”, academia, the media, or some other nebulous cabal of the beautiful and hyper-wealthy-and-powerful. We did it; we chose it; we continue to choose it. Period.

In more sensible times, the Democrats’ socialism should write them off as an electoral joke. Instead, they’re competitive. It’s much more than the wind in their sails from their much larger stable of lefty zillionaire donors and left-wing academic/media commissars who occupy the commanding heights of the culture. Sometimes, your greatest strength arises from your opponent’s weakness. And lately, to the great joy of the donkey party, the GOP base has decided to go bonkers.

The evidence of the Republican voters’ mental incapacity lies in a Democrat Senate (51-49) and their poor showing in the last four national elections in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022. 2016 was a squeaker (No, DJT, you didn’t win by a “lot”.) with a Republican Senate narrowed to a two-seat majority. The 2018 midterms saw our Social Democrats capture the House. 2020 was a Trump loss and a Social Democrat Senate. Then, we had the 2022 midterms. Inflation gripped the country; the national debt exploded; many of our urban spaces are violent open sewers; a totalitarian COVID shutdown destroyed our economy and public schools; our educational system is a mess; housing and energy are out of reach; appeasement foreign policy has made a comeback; the Kabul humiliation; boys are taking over girls’ sports; and a new Axis is turning the international scene into something that resembles our urban spaces. 2022 was supposed to be a red wave but became a desultory mist with a paper-thin Republican House majority that is both ungovernable and too busy neutering itself.

It’s a personality type that seems to attract Republican voters today like moths to a light; that and the endorsement of their new avatar, Donald Trump. The precursor to MAGA was the Tea Party bursting on the scene in 2009. Within Republican ranks, a feistiness was brewing which gave us 2010 Senate candidacies of, for example, Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware (the so-called “witch”) who went down in flames. Republican voters had more electable choices at the time – including a former Delaware governor – but favored the fiery type so long as they showed sufficient belligerence. The general election results of that year and following, however, were dismal.

National Donors Keep Tea Party Losers Angle, O'Donnell on Political Stage | Fox News — Sharon Angle (l), Christine O’Donnell

Nonetheless, a truculent streak survived to remain a big part of the GOP base’s psychological profile. It’s attractive to them but not much to anyone else. But 2016 seemed to confirm their “wisdom” in the surprising Trump victory. They probably thought that the rest of the country was now onboard with their war against “the establishment”. And then along came 2018, 2020, and 2022, and repeated letdowns for the party. 2024 may yet prove to be a replay of 2022, or worse, and proof of the old definition of insanity falsely attributed to Einstein: “Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting ….”

In 2022, we saw Trump endorsements in key competitive races go down in flames: Kari Lake (Az.), Herschel Walker (Ga.), Dr. Oz (Pa.), to name a few. Trump’s pugilistic refusal to accept defeat in 2020 paved the way for Georgia to be represented by two socialists in the Senate. Think of that: Republican governor Brian Kemp – the one who wouldn’t kowtow to Trump’s 2020 election rantings – sailed easily to victory as Walker succumbed to the Social Democrat Raphael Warnock. Even in Georgia, cantankerousness and an “outsider” status aren’t appealing attributes once we leave the tight confines of a party primary. It’s a lesson that today’s GOP base stubbornly refuses to learn.

May be pop art of text

The GOP base enthusiastically walks into the Social Democrats’ field of fire as the socialists throw money behind the most MAGA-like candidate in the Republican primary. The Social Democrats know something that Republican voters willfully ignore: pugilism in a candidate may whip up primary voters but is an advantage for the opposition in the general election. Funny thing, the Republican base wants Trumpiness and the Social Democrats are happy to accommodate them.

It is for this reason that socialism is competitive. Social Democrats get away with hiding their neo-Marxist roots – don’t expect their ideological soul mates who dominate our media to spill the beans – while Republicans continue to ignore reality. The Social Democrats know how to muzzle their cranks in election season. The GOP gives theirs a bullhorn.

May be an illustration of text

So, expect more boosterism for a culture of death (abortion unrestrained, euthanasia), drug legalization, fiscal stupidity, increasing dependency on public assistance, a dilapidation of national defense, the weight of the Leviathan behind teenage genital mutilation and XY “girls” in women’s spaces, a furtherance of the official pogrom against white males, and the world around you turning to crap. Much of it can be laid at the feet of Republican primary voters for refusing to present viable alternatives.

When candidates like a stroke victim (John Fetterman) and a mentally addled senior citizen (Joe Biden) consistently best MAGA darlings (Dr. Oz, Trump, Lake, etc.), it’s proof that something has gone awry, not with the “system” or the “establishment”, but with the base. In other words, Republican voters are making it easy for the USA to become USC – no, not that USC, the United States of California. California is the template for the entire country, with its dysfunction, greenie totalitarian utopianism, fiscal insanity, flood of refugees fleeing the dysfunction, its feudal society of a shrinking middle class and burgeoning poor amidst the super-rich behind their manor walls.

And watch after this election for the “wrong track” number to hit the stratosphere. The Social Democrats’ base is brainless for its belief in the impossible, such as a prosperous socialism. The Social Democrats in their base are firmly committed to oxymorons. For their part, the Republicans are impervious to simple campaign arithmetic.

Welcome to the United States of California. Yuck!

A man walks along a section of Union Pacific train tracks in downtown Los Angeles. (photo: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

RogerG

September 24, 2024October 26, 2024

The Race Hustle

May be an image of 3 people and text — BLM co-founders from left: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. Pictured at the Glamour of the Year Awards at NeueHouse Hollywood, 11/14/2016. (photo: Jordan Strauss, AP)

Preface:

I wrote most of the following before the release of Matt Walsh’s film “Am I Racist?”. He stole my thunder.

After viewing the film, there are two takeaways. First, jargon-laced pseudo-scholarship predominates in many academic fields, especially in education and the other “soft sciences”. They are laced with the 21st-century’s equivalent of phrenology or astrology. Much that is produced is riddled with the silliness of circular reasoning. How so? They use what they’ve never proven to justify major actions to defeat what they’ve never proven. It’s absolutely embarrassing to watch the drivel take hold.

The peddlers are chasing ghosts of their own fevered imaginations. The absurdities look compelling to the unwary as the proponents beam so confidently and arrogantly in their nincompoopery and glibness.

And this leads to the second observation: it sells to a more than insignificant chunk of the population. Random people sign petitions to rename the George Washington Memorial after Geoge Floyd. They are easily goaded into saying “f*#& you” to a semi-sentient allegedly racist old white man in a wheelchair. Some people, maybe many, are easily shamed into believing the unbelievable, and paying hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars to debase themselves in what can only be described as Maoist shaming sessions. At least Mao’s Red Guards seized, beat, and tortured their victims into the humiliation. They had to be brutalized into demeaning themselves. Not so with these deep-pocketed sheep. Is this what late-stage civilizational decay looks like?

So much for the “wisdom” of the American people. It’s enough to cause the sane to seek refuge in a hermitage.

********************

Well, here it comes. I’m a “racist” to today’s activist-entrepreneurs who’ve turned racial oppression into a lucrative career. If I am, so is Booker T. Washington when he wrote in 1911,

“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”

And to think that he wrote it in 1911. He was way ahead of his time. He was branded an “accommodationist” for lacking sufficient militance in that era. Derisive labels are commonplace for this crowd of the race obsessed. That way, these race hustlers don’t have to explain themselves or their political jihads, just spew epithets and force skeptics to cower.

And the hustle certainly pays well. The hustle popularly known as Black Lives Matter (BLM) hit the mother lode on the back of the killing of George Floyd, raking in $90 million in 2020. BLM people, who before were just getting by, became celebrities with real estate portfolios, six-figure consultancies, and five-figure speaking gigs. Self-described Marxist and co-founder Patrisse Cullors fell into the lap of luxury in the purchase of a $1.4 million, 2,370 sq/ft Malibu area home. No more Banquet frozen dinners for this aspiring member of the Fortune 500.

No one really knows what happened to about half of that $90 million windfall from 2020. What we do know is that friends and associates in this hustling conglomerate – now called the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation – are watching as their fortunes blossom. Oppression pays, and not necessarily for the oppressor, but especially for the self-anointed spokespeople of the oppressed. It once again proves that mammalian waste attracts flies.

These champions of the oppressed need to keep the pot boiling. They covet oppression, real or imagined, like John D. Rockefeller coveted crude oil. Into this swamp of race-covetousness dives Hasim Coates. Who’s he? Coates carved a Denver satrap out of this vast oppression-mongering empire. A small fish in an ever-expanding pond, Coates joins Ibram X. Kendi, Kimberle Crenshaw, Robin D’Angelo, et al, in the CRT brigades as they swim about for fun and profit. He’s a fixture on the Denver political scene pushing causes and fellow-travelling candidates, and himself, into the control of Denver schools and wherever he can sell the gambit.

May be an image of 2 people, beard and people smiling — Kristen Fry, left, and Hashim Coates, right (Photo courtesy of Kristen Fry, (Screenshot via Hashim Coates for County Commissioner/YouTube)

Sometimes, people who’ve made a career in noisy hyperventilation necessitate the regular use of epithets, slanders, and smears, but inflate the balloon too much and it pops in their face. Coates’s ears must be ringing after one Denver school principal and mom stuck a pin into his hustle. Coates is a fan of redistributionist justice at the school level (and male prostitutes as it turns out) which translates into the same approach as the “reimagining law enforcement” of wannabe future president and Democratic standard bearer, Kamala Harris. “Reimagining” is making a shambles of the schools like it did our streets.

Coates, a common fixture at Denver Schools’ board meetings, claimed a white woman, parent Kristen Fry, grabbed him and used a racial slur to threaten him. He filed charges with the Denver PD; police criminally cited Fry; Coates won a restraining order against her; and the local DA accommodated by filing charges against Fry. The problem is that there is no evidence of anyone using the “n” word or touching Coates. Surveillance tape shows no touching and witnesses close to the encounter vouch to no use of the slur.

Coates is no stranger to the race hustle in Denver. Now, Fry is suing Coates, one of his associates, and four members of the Denver Public Schools Board for defamation, reminding all of us that the race hustle is still a hustle and therefore open to legal action by its victims. Not surprisingly, many hustlers end up penniless or behind bars. Right now, though, there’s still quite a bit of money left in the game to attract half-witted academics and scammers with the right melanin count, choice of bed partners, genitalia, and pronoun diversity.

Epilogue: Please go see “Am I Racist?”. Matt Walsh does a great job in exposing the baloney.

P.S.: Facebook wouldn’t initially approve this post because it “goes against our Community Standards”. What exactly does? A New York Post article on Patrisse Cullors’s real estate buying binge as one of my sources, that’s what. I removed the source but you can access the piece by searching “Patrisse Cullors real estate buying binge”.

May be a graphic of 1 person and text

RogerG

Sources:

1. “After Raising $90 Million in 2020, Black Lives Matter Has $42 Million in Assets”, Nicholas Kulish, New York Times, 5/17/2022, at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/business/blm-black-lives-matter-finances.html
2. “Who’s In Charge of Black Lives Matter’s Millions of Dollars?”, Robby Soave, Reason, 2/1/2022, at https://reason.com/2022/02/01/black-lives-matter-funding-millions-patrisse-cullors/
3. New York Post article on Patrisse Cullors’s real estate buying binge censored by Facebook.
4. “Radical Activists Nearly Ruined a Denver Mom with Racism Charge. Then the Evidence Came Out”; Ryan Mills, National Review Online, 9/3/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/radical-activists-nearly-ruined-a-denver-mom-with-racism-charge-then-the-evidence-came-out/

September 20, 2024October 26, 2024

Republican Marxism

J.D. Vance projected to win GOP Senate primary in Ohio

While listening to a recent episode of the “Victor Davis Hanson Show” podcast, I heard Hanson make reference to the Republican Party becoming a “conservative working man’s party” under Trump. Memories came to mind of Karl Marx’s International Working Men’s Association (see #1 below). Hanson, a renowned conservative, was adopting the jargon of the historical international Left, the same kind of rigid and simplistic homogenous-class thinking that is the hallmark of Marxian socialism – indeed, all of modern socialism and its more recent iteration as neo-Marxism.

He isn’t the only one. Some prominent MAGA-adjacent Republicans are sounding like Eugene Debs, the last Socialist Party candidate for president to garner 6% of the popular vote (in 1912). An enthusiasm for class warfare is one of the key pillars of so-called National Conservatism since the rise of Donald Trump. And the dictum of class warfare brings in tow a cry for big government. How else to prosecute the class war except with the long and powerful arm of the state? People like Sen. Josh Hawley (R, Missouri), like a shark on alert for the blood of votes in his home state, and reneging on his pledge to support right-to-work laws, announced his opposition to the laws that would actually free the worker from compulsory union membership and payment of dues (see #2 and #3 below). That’s what is meant by right-to-work, and now Hawley opposes it.

Somehow, Hawley’s mental gymnastics has turned the freedom of a worker to choose whether to join a union or not into an unjust imposition. Missouri legislative Democrats, with the support of a small group of Republicans, placed a measure on the Missouri ballot which passed in 2018 to repeal the state’s right-to-work law. As usual, a good portion of union dues were showered on political advocacy to kill the legislation, and as usual the union cash to the tune of $600,000 was lavished on a political consultancy to run the campaign, which doesn’t include all the soft contributions that unions are famous. After which, we have Hawley joining the picket lines at a recent UAW strike against American automakers and announcing, “… I certainly wouldn’t support any federal legislation to impose right to work on anybody.”

President Joe Biden AND Sen. Josh Hawley join striking UAW picket lines? — Sen. Josh Hawley (R, Missouri) on picket line in support of striking members of the UAW in Wentzville, Missouri, 9/25/2023.

Impose? Again, right-to-work is the exact opposite of “impose”. Hawley’s stand against right-to-work is empowering unions to impose themselves on reluctant workers. The rhetoric and Josh Hawley’s brain are incoherent.

Hawley isn’t the only big government firebrand in the GOP tent. Hawley joins Donald Trump’s VP pick, J.D. Vance, in rooting around in the same mental garbage bin conjuring ways to jack up wages through government intervention. Hawley has concocted a “blue collar bonus” to reward, and only reward this class-based constituency using the tax credit gambit to hike minimum wages to $16.50 (see #5 below). Vance to his credit, and true to his Ohio State and Yale academic pedigree, has declared a broader, more philosophical war on “doctrinaire free market economics” to accomplish the same ends. The guy wants to use the power of the state to imitate the Soviet Gosplan, the state economic planning agency. How? Throw up tariffs walls to shield American firms from competition: “You’re going to see a much more aggressive approach to protecting domestic manufacturers ….” (see #7 below). The Soviets did the same thing. He can’t mean all American manufacturing – it’s too big. He’s got in mind those of his region; think Michigan to Ohio.

May be an image of text

Vance isn’t done with state interventionism to advantage one group of workers and their select industries. He doesn’t care a lick for the young. Social Security is a trainwreck; it was designed that way from the get-go. The scheme has young workers supporting the elderly. No, in speaking truth to my elderly peers, you aren’t getting your contributions back in your benefit check. A good portion of it comes out of the paychecks of overstretched young workers and their families who can barely afford the mortgage. The ploy was great when 160 workers supported one retiree (1940). It’s not so great when the ratio has been whittled down to under 3 to 1 due to a birth dearth and advances in health care stretching more people into their sunset years (see #8 below). Vance apparently wasn’t a math whiz at OSU and Yale.

Here he is at his most calloused:

“One way of understanding the Social Security problem is, old people can’t work, young people can, babies can’t. So people at a certain age support the babies and the old people.” (see #7 below)

If he isn’t busy working to abandon Ukraine to Putin, he’s dead set on throwing struggling young families into the maw of the AARP.

Opinion/Cartoon: Social Security Funding

Hanson, Hawley, and Vance are all bollixed up in their heads. They blame nebulous foreigners, billionaire left-wing techies, Wall Street, and the mysterious force of globalization. It’s the same message peddled by Lenin and his Bolsheviks in the heady days of 1917 in Petrograd. These befuddled firebrands of so-called national conservatism target “elites” as the Bolsheviks did the “bourgeoisie”.

19th century Marxists coined the word “capitalism” to give focus to their rantings and produce a perpetual hate figure: the “capitalist”. Today’s national conservates proffer “neoliberalism” and the “neoliberal”. This neoliberalism is actually the beginning of economics as a field of study. It didn’t originate in J.P. Morgan’s den or the faculty lounge of the University of Chicago. It came into being during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment when people applied reason, empiricism, and science to an understanding of how people organize themselves in making a living. Best and worse practices came to light and economic liberalism was born. Out of it came thinkers such as Jean Baptiste Say and Adam Smith. The “neo” part came about when others (Milton Freidman, F.A. Hayek, Arthur Laffer, George Stigler, et al) resuscitated these earlier insights during a dark period of government interventionism and inflation, insipid economic growth, high unemployment, and the overall social breakdown of the 1970s (see #9 below).

Neoliberalism: Political Success, Economic Failure - The American Prospect — The national conservatives’ heartily disliked “neoliberals” of 20th-century America and Europe, from left: F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ronald Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher.

You’d never know that history in the way Vance, Trump and company depict the plight of American manufacturing and blue collars. They’re victims of “doctrinaire free market capitalism” and its cousin “globalization”. And, in their pronouncements, a cabal of bi-coastal financiers and techie zillionaires are hoarding the rewards. Everybody else is reduced to peonage in their mind. Anyway, that’s the story per Vance, Hawley, Trump, and company.

What they get wrong is that American manufacturing was plagued by . . . us! Yes, we did it to ourselves. We distorted our economy by punishing with imperial unionization, regulation, and taxation the kinds of industries that are likely to more conspicuously impact the land, water, air, flora, and fauna. They happen to be the primary industries (ag, lumber, mining), the skilled trades, the muscular occupations, manufacturing, nearly anything that demands brick-and-mortar construction and the need for permits, approvals, reports, consultancies, and a team of lawyers on retainer. It’s a gauntlet that other industries are less likely to face to the same degree.

Global climate strikes, environmental protests in July 2022 — Climate activists, 2022

Versus

5 Keys To Building Strong Environmental Portraits | Construction & Industrial Media: Photography ... — The skilled trades

We developed a love affair with “clean” industries. In the 1980s, communities more receptive to growth would preface their support with the call for “clean” businesses. Of course, they have a “clean” environment in mind, social and natural. By the 1980s, a cumbersome Leviathan was erected by the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA), Clean Water Act and its amendments, Clean Air Acts, Endangered Species Acts and the breeding of state-level knockoffs like the California’s Environmental Quality Act, activist court decisions to broaden the reach of regulatory agencies, etc. Add to the anti-manufacturing legions the empowerment of local gangs of activists exploiting this flood of regulation. It’s a wonder that we have any manufacturing left.

That’s how you clean the air in the LA basin: you regulate manufacturing out of existence. Permissionless industries began to fill the economic space left empty by the war against “dirty” manufacturing. Coding can take place by a teenager with a laptop and the pc was developed by a couple of twenty-somethings in a garage, all accomplished without interference from the local building inspector, state fish and game overseers, air quality district commissars, enforcers from the Army Corps of Engineers, demands for environmental impact reports, etc., etc. What began without permission of a government employee soon occupied pride of place – tech, communications, financial industries – in our economy. We did this, voted for it, and some of us turn around and complain about the results (see #10 below).

What’s the answer among national conservatives (natcons) to the distorted nature of our economy? They lead assaults on the rich and free markets. The reality on the ground, however, is that “neoliberalism” hasn’t been ascendant since, let’s say, the 1920s, maybe before. It’s been talked about, papers filed in scholarly journals, but our government hasn’t been enslaved by it since, maybe, dinosaurs weren’t oil, certainly since the New Deal. Have you taken a look at the Federal Registry of regulations? Here’s a clue: it hasn’t gotten smaller. Natcons have fits over “globalization”, as if we don’t have tariffs. Here’s another suggestion: examine the 4,392 pages of U.S. tariffs in our Harmonized Tariff Schedule. Natcons are feverishly breeding straw men, not unlike their left-wing cousins.

Reducing Red Tape in the public service 2 legislation – Parliament of Australia

Fact: free markets aren’t free in America. Talk to anybody trying to build a housing project, frack, irrigate, open a new steel plant in a blue state, manage an auto plant with the UAW breathing down your neck. Manufacturing didn’t disappear; they were just discouraged, and the survivors fled the worst blue-state snake pits for those right-to-work states that Hawley now castigates. Listening to the mouthing of natcons sounds like the prescription of low-dose poison to kill intestinal parasites only in overdose amounts.

They are under the delusion that they can calibrate free markets without killing markets. If prior government interventions are any indication, they are fools. It’s regulation that must be carefully calibrated, not markets, much like Bill Clinton on abortion: safe, legal, and RARE.

If natcons occupy key positions in a new Trump administration, watch as they burden our economy with rising costs for consumers and producers which will translate, as it always does, in less opportunity, especially for those striving for upward mobility. We’ll get the tariffs, but not any appreciable reduction in regulation or its multifarious mandates. The Trump economy of his first term was a Larry Kudlow economy, one of cheap energy, tax cuts, and Congressional Review Act rescissions of some Obama regulations. A new Trump economy promises to be a Vance/Hawley one. Two very different beasts.

It’s sad to see Marxism take hold in both parties. Some Republicans are attempting the trick of freeing “Republican Marxism” from the oxymoron category (a contradiction in terms). Their Marxism won’t succeed any better than the Maduro Marxists running Venezuela.

May be an image of text

RogerG

Sources:

1. Most mass encyclopedias such as Wikipedia or Britannica have an article on “Karl Marx: Role in the First International of Karl Marx” and “Second International” to describe the history of international socialism.
2. More on Sen. Josh Hawley and his newfound faith in unionization can be found at “Republicans For Coerced Unionization Likely To Remain A Small Caucus”, Patrick Gleason, Forbes, 12/23/2023, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickgleason/2023/12/13/republicans-for-coerced-unionization-likely-to-remain-a-small-caucus/
3. An additional source of this new “conservatism” can be found at “Josh Hawley’s Pro-Union Folly”, Dominic Pino, National Review, 10/11/2023, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/10/josh-hawleys-pro-union-folly/
4. Sen. Josh Hawley’s advocacy of raising the “blue collar” minimum wage can be found at “Josh Hawley Proposes Tax Credit to Raise Minimum Wage, Says Large Businesses Could Support Hike”, Newsweek, 2/25/2021, at https://www.newsweek.com/josh-hawley-proposes-tax-credit-raise-minimum-wage-also-signals-support-democrats-15-bill-1571660
5. Sen. Josh Hawley’s endorsement of raising the minimum wage can be found at “’The world has changed’: The scrambled new politics of the minimum wage”, Alex Seitz-Wald, NBC News, 3/8/2021, at https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/world-has-changed-scrambled-new-politics-minimum-wage-n1259647
6. More on Sen. J.D. Vance’s embrace of big government can be found in “GOP VP Nominee J.D. Vance Is an Enemy of Free Markets”, Ilya Somin, Reason, 7/15/2024, at https://reason.com/volokh/2024/07/15/gop-vp-nominee-j-d-vance-is-an-enemy-of-free-markets/
7. “The Trump-Vance Ticket is a Repudiation of Free-Market Conservatism”, Victoria Guida, Politico, 7/16/2024, at https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/07/16/the-trump-vance-ticket-is-a-repudiation-of-free-market-conservatism-00168578
8. “Social Security History: Ratio of Covered Workers to Beneficiaries” at https://www.ssa.gov/history/ratios.html
9. An excellent synopsis of neoliberalism in “Conjuring Up the Neoliberal Bogeyman”, Samuel Gregg, National Review, 3/13/2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/conjuring-up-the-neoliberal-bogeyman/
10. “The Future of Innovation in the United States: Permissionless or Regulated?”, Mohamed Moutii, Econlib, at https://www.econlib.org/the-future-of-innovation-in-the-united-states-permissionless-or-regulated/
11. An excellent summary of the national conservative and neoliberal divide can be found in “Too Much Deregulation? We Wish.”, Dominic Pino, The Washington Free Beacon, 9/15/2024, at https://freebeacon.com/culture/too-much-deregulation-we-wish/.