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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.

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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/

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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.

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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.

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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/.

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The Great Bamboozle 2024

Kamala Harris takes the stage at Democratic National Convention for acceptance speech – Firstpost

Donald Trump Addresses Republican National Convention | C-SPAN.org

It’s election season so the truth goes into hiding.  Want Proof?  Watch the latest edition of the Democratic National Convention.  Earlier, the GOP took their stab at forcing truth into exile at their confab, but they have the advantage of being out of power and not responsible for the donkey party’s forced death march of America to societal collapse.  It accords the GOP a target rich environment, thanks to Democrat buffoonery.  Yet, as it was said of the PLO’s Yassir Arafat, the elephant party will never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

Want proof?  Look at their mad dash to nominate their weakest candidate to head the ticket, but even he has a decent shot at the brass ring given the hash that the Dems have made of the country.  Making America look like California isn’t a good look.  So, what do the Dems do?  They distract our gaze to some shiny object – “bad Trump” – dress up misery as glory, and tar good sense as the return of Sauron. Case in point is the bombast directed at Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.

Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 aims to reduce, reshape government if conservative wins ...

The Dems’ ideological soul mates in newsrooms are quick to paste “right-wing” all over it in dark, sinister overtones (see #2 below).  But what is it?  It isn’t a resurrection of the Spanish Inquisition, the return of Jim Crow or Dickensian workhouses as they would have you believe.  A product of the Heritage Foundation, it’s what the group has been doing since their founding in 1973 as a counterpoint to the big-government consensus among elites from the New Deal to Nixon’s surrender to the progressive Leviathan-philosophy of government (wage/price controls, founding of the EPA, etc.).  As such, they produced policy proposals with intellectual heft for a burgeoning conservatism that arose around William F. Buckley that ultimately led to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.  Think of them as one of a constellation of think tanks (CATO at times, American Enterprise Institute) making up the loyal opposition to the center-left’s Brookings Institution or the more stridently left-wing Center for American Progress.

Project 2025 has the same philosophical roots as the ideas dating back to Reagan’s ascendancy: tax cuts; deregulation; a return of deterrence; a rollback of Soviet expansionism; missile defense; real education, entitlement, and labor reform; etc.  The same outlook is evident in Project 2025, but this time its suddenly and menacingly right-wing to the young babes in the newsrooms and on The View.  Has Heritage moved further right, or our chattering classes further left?  It’s the latter.

Project 2025 has much in common with the same outlook advanced by Heritage’s first president in 1973, Paul Weyrich.  Today’s Left, however, are neo-Marxists.  For them, FDR’s Keynesianism is passé.  They have revolution in their sights by sanctioning a seizure of power to eradicate the evils of heteronormativity, white and male privilege, the traditional family, global warming, the rich, capitalism, and opposition to gender ideology, alongside their compulsion to shower benefits and favoritism on an ever-growing list of the “oppressed” (“To be an antiracist, you have to be a racist”, a paraphrase of Ibram X. Kendi of CRT fame).

Roosevelt’s New Dealers would be shocked to learn of the prevalent worldview among reporters occupying cubicles at places like the New York Times.  The battles over pronouns and bathrooms and the smothering and now-habitual thought-smog of the Frankfurt School’s neo-Marxism – of the Marcuse/Foucault/Gramsci zeitgeist – would seem dismaying to the likes of Woodrow Wilson or New Dealers such as Harold Ickes, Cordell Hull, Adolph Berle, Jr., Harry Hopkins.  No wonder that the consistency of Heritage appears so frightening to young cadres who’ve unknowingly jettisoned their liberal forebearers and are fully immersed in a revolution for which they have little understanding.  They don’t realize how radical they’ve become.

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Go read Project 2025 (see #1 below).  It reads like much of the 1980 GOP platform, and that’s because it adheres to a set of universal and well-understood principles: keeping the federal government in the box of its critical and Constitutional responsibilities (protection and fostering comity among its citizens) and ensuring national safety and security abroad.

The Project’s first section is a call for elected officials to once again gain control of a sprawling and increasingly unaccountable bureaucracy.  The thousands of federal civil service employees in DC, just below the appointed level, can act as a disloyal opposition thwarting an electorate’s control of their own government.  Think of it, cozy relationships between reporters and civil servants result in leaks to obstruct policy initiatives.  Just recently, anonymous worker bees signed an open letter opposing aid to Israel in the aftermath of a rabid, barbarically gruesome killing of 1,200 innocent Jews at the hands of a duly elected terrorist group in Gaza.  The administrate state is partisan and all the efforts to insulate it from politics have only protected it from facing consequences for their partisan meddling.

The Wikipedia writer(s) castigate Project 2025 for pushing a “highly controversial” view of the unitary executive.  No, it is they who have a “highly controversial” view.  The mammoth Leviathan that is our modern administrative state is the unmentioned aspect of our Constitutional structure since the federal government took on powers absent from the Constitution (in Article I, Section 8, Cl. 1-18).  This humungous entity is a power unto itself. The Wikipedia article is shameful.

The unitary executive isn’t some novel invention.  It goes back to the founding (see #3 below).  The 19th century’s civil service reforms (Pendleton Act, etc.) were meant to remove the corrupting influence of patronage, the approach to governance represented by Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall in New York City.  Today, the threat comes not only from pay-to-play but from a partisan, activist base in the civil service, mostly in DC.  The reformers never envisioned public employees becoming a political constituency, a voting bloc with an ability to supplant the wishes of voters across the nation in an election.  If you want to “save our democracy”, how about making elections matter once more?

The rest of Heritage’s proposals range from rebuilding deterrence to ending the politicization of education, our health care, to a return to a free market/sound money economy.  Vintage Reagan.  Of course, the Left doesn’t like it.  They never have.  If implemented, Project 2025 would set the country up for a second Reaganite resurgence.  The Left could be out of power till future generations forget what they did to the country in the second decade of the 21st century.

The only problem is, Republicans also show signs of forgetfulness and the corresponding need to obfuscate and lie about it.  Trump is fond of saying, “I made China pay billions [in tariffs]”.  No, he didn’t.  His new taxes on imports were paid by American manufacturers and consumers.

Trump has a blinkered focus on the “trade deficit”.  He, and most Dems, believe that they can politically engineer more American manufacturing and bring the “trade deficit” into balance or positive.  For one, the “trade deficit” is only one computation in ascertaining the state of the economy.  If you think about it, if a positive trade balance was such a great thing, all nations should pursue it.  But if so, it’s an impossibility.  Some have to be negative, but that doesn’t necessitate economic despair.  That’s because the trade deficit is only one part of the account balance, which includes capital flows.  Deficits in one lead to surpluses in the other.  Trump and the Dems don’t think that deeply.

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So, Trump sends the truth into exile, and that’s where people seem to like it.  But if you want to know why manufacturing isn’t the big economic draw that it once was, we elected people for over a century who taxed and regulated the people who make physical goods nearly to death.  The industries that subsequently ballooned were the ones that didn’t require them to run into the EPA, the Endangered Species Act(s), the plethora of land-use and environmental regulatory bodies at all levels that have sprouted across the fruited plain.  Tech/financial services/communications firms are less likely to run into NIMBYs and greenie activists with activist attorneys to block and delay at every step of the way.  Coding and an app can take place on a teenager’s laptop or a garage.  Taxes advantage human capital (example: coders, analysts) and punish physical (example: machinery, factories).  Manufacturers face adversarial unions who are protected by labor law.  The mandates – paid leave, childcare, benefits, exotic interpretations of equity rules and laws – have pounded the dynamism out manufacturing (see #4 below).

Not a word out of Trump about any of this.  He only wants to slap tariffs on foreigners.  Without correcting any of the above, he’s just jacking up prices and subsidizing economic sloth.  Lives don’t get better on the whole, opportunities for generations to come languish, and once again we get reintroduced to TINSTAFL: there is no such thing as a free lunch.

Right now, Americans love the lie, and our political mavens are happy to give it to us good and hard. Yep, it’s election season.  The Great Bamboozle is in full swing.

RogerG

Sources:

1. Project 2025: “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise 2025” as a pdf at https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

2. Wikipedia encapsulates the left’s reaction under their title “Project 2025”. No doubt, the article came from left-wing contributors. The rhetoric is jarringly of the left.

3. The notion of a unitary executive was explained by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 70. A summary of it can be found at the Bill of Rights Institute, “Federalist 70 Explained | Why Does the U.S. Have a Unitary Executive?”, at https://billofrightsinstitute.org/videos/federalist-70-explained-why-does-the-u-s-have-a-unitary-executive.

4. An explication of the disadvantages of manufacturing in America are presented in “What Washington Should Learn from Tech Companies”, Dominic Pino, National Review, August issue, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2024/08/what-washington-should-learn-from-tech-companies/.

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Democracy, Schmuckocracy

(Schmuck: a foolish or contemptable person; origin in the Yiddish schmok, i.e. penis)

Is it time to ditch 'NIMBYism'? - Phillips Group
NIMBYs, schmucks

The chant “Save our democracy”, it’s flung like so many shotgun pellets at anyone viewed as an opponent.  What about the people, the people doing the flinging?  The reality is that we have more “democracy” than ever before, and the dissatisfaction with our plight has never been greater.  How does that compute: more democracy equals more discontent?  Can the collective, also known as “the people”, act in the manner of schmucks, harming themselves?  Democracy, schmuckocracy?

The level of discontent is palpable in polls.  Here’s one: Gallup’s recent survey of public confidence in major institutions ranging from the governmental to the social and economic, public and private (see #1 and #2 below).  11 of the 16 measured entities experienced declines; not one turned in a sterling performance.  Much of the public’s lackluster assessment of our institutions can be attributed to their current conduct.  Biden’s infirmity, an engineered chaos at the border, the embarrassing bugout from Kabul, the highly destructive endeavor to shut down nearly all human activity during a viral episode, inflation, the unaffordability of shelter, the unaffordability of energy, crime, nothing seems to work, boys in girls’ locker rooms and bathrooms, etc., goes a long way to heaping scorn on government, on “our democracy”, on any of our institutions that had a hand in the degeneracy.

Military Clears Crew of Plane That Took Flight as Afghans Fell to Their Deaths - The New York Times
eople running alongside a U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane as it moved down a runway of the international airport, in Kabul, Afghanistan, in August, in 2021. (photo: Associated Press)
Olympics 2024: Boxer Angela Carini quits after 46 seconds against Imane Khelif amid eligibility row
An alleged transgender boxer consoles Italian boxer who quit after 46 seconds in Olympic female boxing match.

It doesn’t end there.  Many private ones – “big business”, big tech, the media – get slammed, and maybe deservedly so.

The Supreme Court takes a hit as well.  That might be due to another feature of a democracy: the people’s tendency to be acclimated to bunk.  Since 1973 when the Court imperiously invented a provision in the Constitution that established a national right to take unborn life, “the people” grew accustomed to it.  A 51-year odyssey ensued to do it.  So, by today, people crave their newly minted national license to end the life of people who haven’t exited the womb.  The Court’s Dobbs decision just struck the word “national” from the license, not the license itself.  But don’t expect “the people” to understand such subtlety.

Combine this with the habit of the public to be persuaded by jargon, such as “assault rifle”, and therefore unwittingly consign the Second Amendment to the mercy of demagogues, and we have another journey down Alice’s rabbit hole.  The Constitution stands in the way of the passion of the moment so “the people” turn on it and the Court in demanding a shortcut around the cumbersome task of properly amending it.  Understanding isn’t a feature of the mob, which sadly is another trait of democracy.

We’ve injected so much unrestrained democracy into our system that our founders’ original design seems strange to anyone born after the Great Depression.  Reading the Constitution must seem like a bizarre experience for a population raised on a steady diet of democracy this and democracy that.  An example would be the abuse heaped on the Electoral College.  Once a powerful faction loses the presidency by it, but wins the popular vote, they agitate to dismantle it and make the head of the executive branch conform to the wishes of the crowds on the two coasts and every urban center with a college campus.  It’s not enough that a form of direct democracy is the operative principle of the lower house of Congress in the Constitution.  The will of the mob must be made to dominate throughout.

Lest we forget, checking democracy and its mobs was an important goal of the founders.  Here’s a sampling of their views:

“Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death.” – James Madison

“It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government.  Experience has proved that no position is more false than this.  The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government.  Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.” – Alexander Hamilton

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.  There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” – John Adams

“It is one of the evils of democratical governments, that the people, not always seeing and frequently misled, must often feel before they can act.” – George Washington

There was never a more searing indictment of democracy than that of Ambrose Bierce when he wrote toward the end of the 19th century, “Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.”

“The people” aren’t cognizant of our already mammoth strides away from the founders’ restraints on the lustful will of “the people”.  Even for the House of Representatives, that bastion of the popular will in the original framing, a state’s representation became determined by single-district direct elections and not by the state legislatures by the late 19th to early 20th centuries.  That was only the beginning of the state legislatures’ attempt to neuter themselves in a mad dash away the founders’ wisdom.

The state legislatures were further taken out of the picture with the 17th Amendment: the direct election of senators.  They would no longer have any say in the selection of the state’s two senators.  Then came the initiative, referendum, and recall – “the people” make law, reject law, and reverse elections.  These ideas were championed by 19th century progressives who were more intent on removing the obstacles to their rise to power.  Smoke-filled back rooms were replaced by the big-government, neo-Marxist lunatics of the faculty lounge, the so-called “experts”, the constituency of our modern progressive gang, the people mostly responsible for our discontents when you think about it.

In the irony of all ironies, like the state legislatures, “the people” chose people who then took strides to remove “the people” from self-government, and thus enunciated the rise of the massive and unaccountable administrative state.  This new Leviathan can make law (regulations), execute their law, and adjudicate on their law without much input of an electorate.  Where’s the democracy?  It’s here: “the people” elect progressives, and continue to elect progressives particularly in the populous blue jurisdictions, who then heap more layers on the mountainous administrative state like the many bands piling upward in a mature stratovolcano.

No wonder we’re in a hell of a mess.  Pressure will build, and it’ll blow like a proverbial Vesuvius, but make sure that you’re not in the path of the political pyroclastic flow that follows.  In 2020, a cop-beating video clip went viral and progressives seized the opportunity to dismantle law enforcement, elect DAs who won’t prosecute, decriminalize criminality, riots erupted, people and property were torched, and many cities descend into the dysfunction and lawlessness where they lie today.  The only real export of LA and New York City are people as they flee the pyroclastic flow.

Seattle police at scene of riots in 2020 (photo: KOMO News, Seattle)
Antifa and anarchists co-opted an otherwise peaceful Justice for George Floyd demonstration in Seattle on Saturday, turning it into a riot. The next day, scores of employees and volunteers came together to help clean up the mess Antifa and the anarchists made. (Photo: Jason Rantz)
Seattle the day after the occupation by so-called anarchists and Antifa, 2020 (photo: KTTH 770, Seattle)

One word describes the hidden potential of the “our democracy” chant: California.  The taxes, the crime, the sordidness, the inner-city dysfunction, and the pervading sense of overall decay envelop the state and its “democracy”.  “The people” in the state chose it, and continue to choose it.  California’s “our democracy” is a Democratic one-party state.

Unfortunately, the state’s Democratic Party dominates the national Democratic Party.  The socialism of the state’s ruling Dems is the guiding philosophy of the national Dems.  The state’s Dems wreck the state’s economy and the national Dems work to imitate the wreckage everywhere else.  Quite a tag-team duo.

The state’s Dems lay waste to social life in making a mockery of nature’s male and female.  Boys rhetorically become girls and the next thing we see is that they’re in the girls’ locker rooms, bathrooms, and on their swim, track, volleyball teams, etc.  The state’s public schools are required to disseminate the gender confusion in the curriculum.  Taking his cues from California, Biden announces changes to Title IX of the Civil Rights Act to include the transgendered as a protected class thereby codifying rhetorical girls and boys into everywhere (see #3 below).

The not-so-golden state’s administrative state is imperial thanks to the ruling party’s zeal for upending an entire way of life in a senseless and manic effort to modulate the earth’s atmosphere.  That’s right, one state of 39 million people (and declining) is gung-ho about sacrificing its people’s standard of living on the altar of climate-change ideology, acting like they hold the thermostat to the global atmosphere.  They’d like to take the suicide attempt national, and Biden is accommodating.  In May of this year, the EPA issued new power plant regulations that’ll function as a death warrant to reliable, affordable electricity by mandating expensive efforts (carbon capture, etc.) to reduce emissions in fossil fuel plants (see #4-6 below).  It’s death by regulation, parroting California’s lunacy, and Europe’s.  However, Europe backed away, not so for the zealots in California and D.C.

The blackout was underway Friday as most of the state was issued Stage 3 emergency

Do “the people’s” government in America care?  Do “the people” even have enough of a pulse to care?  As for the first question, no, they don’t care a lick about your plight.  As for the second, no sé.  These activists in power are true-believers, with all the heart of a Bergen-Belsen commandant.  They are coming to get more than your sedan.  They sneer at your air conditioner, which is a lifesaver for anyone not living in Malibu (see #7 below).  This is totalitarianism pure and simple.  Like a rabid Marxist, their ultimate goal is to reengineer humanity, making the new man, woman, whatever.  You’ll be forced to live in the world that they have created for you.  And, like previous crusades for heaven on earth, it’ll be the opposite.

Watch as we relive the travel from hubris to nemesis in Greek tragedy.  The hubris hides ignorance and arrogance which leads to the disaster of nemesis.  Welcome to the base of the Democratic Party and the EPA.

We are living the nemesis that arose out of the hubristic arrogance and ignorance of a clan of firebrands, firebrands that we elected.  Don’t like Trump, voted for Biden, maybe vote for Harris in 2024?  Reality sets in: you avoid the ogre but get the greenie neo-Marxists and ruination.

Both sides decry the escalating cost of housing, the loss of the “American dream”.  The problem can’t be laid at the feet of high interest rates or inflation since it predated Biden’s spiking of the money supply in trillions of new spending.  No, speaking of supply, it’s a supply problem.  It’s been building for decades.  Look around you and you’ll hear hostility to housing construction: “The new people crowd my streets and schools”; “I’ve lost my small town”; “The new developments spoiled the scenery; they’re ugly”; “It’s destroying my property values”; “My property taxes have jumped to pay for their infrastructure and public services.”  Who’s there to speak for the young’s access to the “American dream”?  Nobody.  The only ones filling the hearing rooms and filing the lawsuits are NIMBYs galore and eco-revolutionaries.

This Northern California county tops national list for unaffordable housing

This method of governance was pioneered by California.  Growth control incubated in northern California (Petaluma, 1961).  In that instance, “the people” elected county and city officials to freeze in amber the “character” of the place.  What do you think happened to the housing supply?  Regulations and delays only added to the cost of whatever survives the local gauntlet.

In fact, the brutal gauntlet was extended.  “The people” of California gave to the world the California Coastal Commission (CCC) in approving Prop 20 in 1972, providing more avenues to block, impede, and knock out new housing, or make it so expensive that nobody in their right mind would want to pour a foundation in the “coastal zone”,  which is another one of those politically fungible concepts that prove useful to all eco-utopians and would-be social engineers statewide.

The CCC is one of many regulatory behemoths that “the people” of the state have created with their own hand in propositions or through their elected representatives to make it difficult to get the nod to nail two studs together.  Eco-obsessions reign supreme.  The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is the mother of all hoops to jump.  It empowers the California Department of Fish and Game, the various Air Quality Management Districts, anything conservation oriented, anything eco-utopian, who can only be pacified by project defeat, endless delays, and burdensome costs.  It’s a veritable goat rope.

In a microcosm of the state’s protracted assault on housing, a small 4-lot housing development in Los Osos, San Louis Obispo County, was approved as per the state and the CCC-ratified Local Coastal Program (LCP) of the county.  Later, the CCC discovered a sand dune on the property, declared it to be in an Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Area (ESHA), and repealed the permits (see #8 below).  The developers are fighting back in the California Supreme Court.  I’m pessimistic because the state’s courts reflect the longstanding and overweening one-party state.

Gauntlets bedevil the entire state.  It’s so prevalent, according to the California Association of Realtor’s (C.A.R.) Housing Affordability Index, only one in five home buyers can afford a median-priced house in the state (see #9 below).  According to Zillow, of those prospective home buyers, 70% are married and 44% have children (see #10 below).  Where do the underhoused with kids go instead of just another rental in a cramped apartment complex?  Good question.  Possibly, a U-Haul barreling east on Interstate 10 might be their best option.

But do the powerful really care?  Do they understand supply and demand or possess even a rudimentary grasp of trade-offs?  Eco-purity is expensive, very expensive.  So-called saving the coastal zone or preserving the habitat of the blunt-nosed leopard lizard, the gnat catcher, kangaroo rat, mountain lion, or whatever happens to dance across the screen of the hawkers of biodiversity, comes at the price of more than a house or rent.  The price tag shows as lost opportunities for the young and generations to come.  Their “American dream” will be stillborn.  But who shows up at the hearings or has an army of “public interest” law firms ready to file suit in court?  It’s the current homeowner who already has their slice of the dream and the eco-zealot who doesn’t care about the dream and would be quite happy with a repeal of the Industrial Revolution and upward mobility.  They’d be overjoyed with the return of the Middle Ages.

All of this can be traced back to “the people”, to “our democracy”, to the four wolves deciding the fate of the lamb.  The people chose societal collapse.  It didn’t magically appear out of the ether.  And it shows in the names on the ballot.  The parties gave them to us, or, more accurately, the party bases.  The political parties are more democratic than ever before, and their choices are miserable for anyone outside the “bases”.  For that is what democracy led to: the rise of the “base”.  Think of the “base” as a mob, an assemblage animated by jive.  For the Democrats, they’re enraptured by Marx and his ideological cousins in the Frankfurt School and faculty lounges everywhere.  All of this is unstated, mostly unknown to them since their beliefs never came with source footnotes.  They deny it while implementing it.  Anybody reaching the top of their slimy pole must sacrifice their good sense at the altar of the base’s groupthink.

portrait of critical theorists frankfurt school
Prominent Marxists – “critical theorists” (CRT, being woke) – of the Frankfurt School, who would be influential in the West. From top-left; Oskar Negt, Jurgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Claus Offe

The Republicans have discovered their own inner mob, or “base”.  It’s a cult around Donald J. Trump.  People were right to admire his policy successes but they were a product of Reaganism and not anything that might be construed as Trumpism.  Social conservatives and free marketeers populated his administration giving the country border control, tax cuts, deterrence, a burgeoning economy, and a Supreme Court that acts like a court and not a legislature – the very essence of Reaganism.

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The socialist Bernie Sanders in 2020
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AOC and powerful Dems announcing their Green New Deal
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MAGA from 2023 (?)

What would a second Trump term bring?  I suspect that it’ll be more like Trump and less like Reagan.  In economic policy, he’ll pursue his own form of central planning which is called industrial policy with a flurry of tariffs and taxpayer-funded benefits to his own favorites.  Right-to-work – freedom from coerced unionization – may take a back seat in a bid for the union vote.  Trade protectionism will be combined with a new isolationism, which is nothing more than America alone.  We might even see an abandonment of Ukraine.  Would any of this be popular among the general public?  It’s hard to say, but it sells with the “base”.

How did we get saddled with an inevitable neo-Marxist and Donald Trump when both are detested?  Trump in a good week never rises above the upper 40’s in his favorability.  The popularity of the Dems’ neo-Marxism is hard to gauge since it’s never exposed as such.  People probably wouldn’t embrace the public pronouncements of Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party platform if saw the line-by-line plagiarism from the writings of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School or the eugenics of Margaret Sanger.

As of today (8/3/2024), Trump’s favorability stands at 43.3% and is viewed unfavorably by a whopping 51.7% (according to FiveThirtyEight, see #10 below).  He’s a consistent stinker.  In the same poll aggregation, Kamala Harris’s standing isn’t much better with 42.4 favorable and 49.1% unfavorable.  She’s about the same in the pungency factor, even with a honeymoon of media praise, near worship, after her rise to donkey-party heir apparent.

The Dems’ neo-Marxism and its espousal by its candidates is joined by the GOP’s transformation into a personality cult.  For both parties, it’s the culmination of a century and a half of the democratization of their operations, and like the injection of direct democracy into more of our politics, dissatisfaction increases with the results.

Political extremists love the democracy rhetoric, aiming to recreate the Paris mob of the French Revolution.  Late 19th century progressives – many of whom were socialists (ex.: John Dewey) – pushed for the direct primary to replace party caucuses.  Primaries to choose delegates became routine starting in the 1970s for the Democrats and 1980s for the GOP.  It resulted in mass fealty to a person or to a groupthink among the base, thus the rise of the Dems’ Bernie Bros and the woke and the Republicans’ MAGA (see #11 below), with a corresponding rise in public disillusionment.

Democratization means rule by the base, not by the franchise.  Interparty rivalries get stamped out by a normally radical groupthink that captures the imagination of the party’s activist base.  For Dems, the groupthink is an enthusiasm for a campaign to ferret out white/heteronormative/male privilege, to expand the unacknowledged footprint of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School’s principal creed.  They’ll hide it because they have to.  The stench of the “socialist” label still pervades.

It’s so widespread that party big wheels – long-in-the-tooth politicos and big donors – had to step into the breech in 2020 to sidestep the frenzy for the Bernie Bros by resurrecting the doddering Biden, and later to swap the infirmed Biden for the younger-but-babbling Kamala Harris.  At least the Democrats have some adult guardrails which is a backhanded admission that too much democracy can get you into trouble.

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Guardrails don’t seem evident in the GOP.  Trump romped from primary to primary despite the fact that he’s the weakest candidate in a general election matchup.  Trump is popular with the base, unpopular to the those outside of it.  An infirm Biden managed to keep it close with Trump, and now the dullard Kamala Harris has drawn even with the man from Mar-a-Lago.  Ironically, with Trump in the picture, execrable socialism is still in play, thanks to mob rule in both parties and a broad apathy compounded by ignorance.

It must be hard to admit that schmucks exist in more places than among elites.  Look around you, maybe take a long hard look in the mirror.  Me too!  More direct democracy exposed the likelihood that schmucks have a broader presence than we’ve been willing to admit.  Party bases can be full of them.  The general public too.  “The people” can desire things that they ought not get.  The demands of half-witted utopians and adults who’ve already got theirs trample the prospects of the young and those yet to be born.  The adults of today confiscate the opportunities of those too young to vote and future generations.

It’s disgusting, and brought to you by . . . democracy.  Democracy, schmuckocracy.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “Historically Low Faith in U.S. Institutions Continues”, Lydia Saad, Gallup, 7/6/2024, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/508169/historically-low-faith-institutions-continues.aspx
2. “Confidence in U.S. Institutions Down; Average at New Low”, Jeffrey M. Jones, Gallup, 7/5/2024, at https://news.gallup.com/poll/394283/confidence-institutions-down-average-new-low.aspx
3. “Biden Administration: Title IX Protections Extend to Transgender Students”, Lauren Camera, US News and World Report, 6/16/2021, at https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2021-06-16/biden-administration-title-ix-protections-extend-to-transgender-students
4. “Greenhouse Gas Standards and Guidelines for Fossil Fuel-Fired Power Plants”, EPA, at https://www.epa.gov/stationary-sources-air-pollution/greenhouse-gas-standards-and-guidelines-fossil-fuel-fired-power
5. “4 Things to Know About US EPA’s New Power Plant Rules”, Dan Lashof, Lori Bird, and Jennifer Rennicks, World Resources Institute, 5/3/2024, at https://www.wri.org/insights/epa-power-plant-rules-explained
6. Much thanks to Gordon Hughes of the National Center for Energy Analytics in “The EPA’s Proposals for Power Plants Satisfy the Definition of Insanity”, National Review, 5/13/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/the-epas-proposals-for-power-plants-satisfy-the-definition-of-insanity/
7. “It’s time to rethink air conditioning”, Rebecca Leber, Vox, 8/26/2021, at https://www.vox.com/22638093/air-conditioning-worsens-climate-change-ac
8. “California Coastal Commission unlawfully blocks home construction”, Pacific Legal Foundation, describing their lawsuit against the CCC in Shear Development Co., LLC v. California Coastal Commission, at https://pacificlegal.org/case/shear-california-coastal-commission/
9. “2nd Quarter California housing affordability”, California Association of Realtors, 8/11/2023, at https://www.car.org/en/aboutus/mediacenter/newsreleases/2023-News-Releases/2qtr2023hai#:~:text=Fewer%20than%20one%20in%20five%20%2816%20percent%29%20home,according%20to%20C.A.R.%E2%80%99s%20Traditional%20Housing%20Affordability%20Index%20%28HAI%29.
10. FiveThirtyEight’s Aug. 3, 2024 poll aggregation at https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump/
11. “10.1 History of American Political Parties”, Open Library, at https://open.lib.umn.edu/americangovernment/chapter/10-1-history-of-american-political-parties/

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California’s Threat to Nevada and the Constitution’s Commerce Clause

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Gov. Joe Lombardo, Nevada

The federal government is supreme in regulating interstate commerce (Article I, Section 8, Clause 3).  Fact, end of story!

But California is a law unto itself, free to screw up states that have the unhappy circumstance of sharing a border with it.  In a letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Tuesday 5/14, Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo stated the obvious: California policies are jacking up fuel prices for Nevadans as well as Californios (see #1 below).  You see, much of Nevada’s western fuel market is fed by refineries and pipelines from California, businesses under the thumb of that state’s multifarious politburos.

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Gov. Gavin Newsom, Ca., responds to letter from Gov. Lombardo

Newsom responded to Lombardo in the lingua franca of today’s hard-left Democratic Party by saying that Lombardo is a lackey of “Big Oil”.  As if parroting the editor of the Daily Worker (1924-1941, official newspaper of the Communist Party USA), Newsom said, “. . . [Lombardo] knows full well that oil refiners are driving up gas prices and making massive profits . . ..”  There’s not much room for the CPUSA in our national political corral since that space is increasingly monopolized by the DNC, especially their California affiliate.

Apparently, according to Newsom, refiners are only greedy bloodsuckers in California, and in a few other states acting as cheap knockoffs of the not-so-golden state.  The highest retail gas prices by state are all Democrat fiefdoms.  The prices (as of 5/16/2024) range from California’s average of $5.24/gal. to Mississippi’s $3.06.  No red state rises above Idaho’s $3.83 (see #2 below).  My Montana comes in at $3.48.

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Gas prices at Fairfax Ave. and Olympic Blvd., Los Angeles, 5/17/2024

Following the Marxist template, as usual, is the Democrat supermajority in the state legislature as exemplified in the Newsom-signed state Senate Bill X1-2.  The decree would establish a new commissariat to oversee these latest “malefactors of wealth” with power to investigate and recommend penalties to the state’s uber-commissariat, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).

That’ll do the trick.  Just persecute by prosecution the people with whom you rely for your fuel.  This won’t work, unless you believe in the efficacy and efficiency of a slave economy.  Whips and chains and overseers aren’t the best way to get the most out of people.  Unlike the mid-19th century’s era of chattel slavery in the old South, no Fugitive Salve Act exists to compel a people’s acceptance of involuntary servitude to Newsom and company.  Flight is always an option, as it has been for the past few decades for the state’s middle class, families, and many businesses.  What a time to be in the moving business, one of the few growth industries left in the state.

Never do these people look in the mirror.  The state gets sanction from the federal government to exceed the Clean Air Act.  More federalism?  Not! California gets to throw around its market weight in the form of mammoth regulations, mandates, and taxes on refiners that clearly disrupts the interstate commerce in fuel.  Just think, its EV mandate alone by 2035 will force the shipment of fuel onto electric big rigs – or electric trains that don’t exist – further ballooning costs and worsening efficiencies in an already California-tortured industry.

The fuel that flows down its pipelines doesn’t fare any better.  It does so under the lash of the state’s immense panoply of eco-commissariats.  For Nevadans, what comes out the other end is bloated in cost.  Just drive on Interstate 15 up and away from California and you’ll see prices drop the more California recedes in the rear-view mirror.  Test it out for yourself.

It would be a dereliction of duty on the part of Nevada’s governor to not look out for the interests of his state.  Nevada, like all states, has a keen interest in reviving Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce, and end the unwitting delegation of that power to fanatics in Sacramento, if for no other reason than the need to avoid the collateral damage from California’s suicide attempt.

Go get ‘em Gov. Lombardo.  And Congress, dump California’s exemption.  If necessary, federal marshals should seize control of all the state’s ports and repeal the state’s interference in interstate commerce by truck, railroad, plane, ship, and pipeline.  Keep California’s malign effects limited as much as possible to its residents, who regularly vote for the mess.  No state should be forced to live under the political toxicity of another.

Remember, the U.S. Constitution guarantees to each state a republican form of government, not a California government – Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution.

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RogerG

Sources:
1. “Lombardo to Newsom: Act now before gas prices get even higher”, KTNV staff (Las Vegas, Nv.), 5/14/2024, at https://www.ktnv.com/news/lombardo-to-newsom-act-now-before-gas-prices-get-even-higher
2. “Today’s Gas Prices By State”, Kelly Anne Smith and Korrena Bailie, Forbes, 5/16/2024, at https://www.forbes.com/advisor/personal-finance/gas-prices-by-state/#:~:text=California%20has%20the%20highest%20price%20of%20gas%2C%20with,average%20of%20%243.09%20per%20gallon%20of%20regular%20gas.

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From Eco-Consciousness to Eco-Totalitarianism

Family Farms Continue to Power U.S. Agriculture | USDA
Georgia small farm

Please watch the 20-minute video of the current predicament of small agricultural producers in Oregon.  You’ll see how green ideology leads to totalitarianism, or complete micromanagement of a people.  It’s a lesson in how the tapestry of individual liberty is crushed under mass controls.  It’s happening across the country.  And you wonder why Trump remains popular in many quarters.

Trump is the middle finger to this ideologically driven straitjacket.  Trumpism, loosely referred to as “populism”, isn’t a refined set of beliefs so much as it is a temperament, an attitude, a posture toward the smothering of personal, mundane choices.

It’s a consequence of the ruling eco-left’s attempt to herd people into an officially preferred lifestyle, one that is easily concentrated and thus managed in urban locations.  The war on the internal combustion engine, and on fossil fuels, is one means to that end. It’s a war on personal mobility.  If you can’t make the EV work for you or your family, or afford it, lying below the surface, unstated, remains their ultimate selection for you: unaccommodating, grimy, and unsafe government mass transit.

The 19th-century Bronx

The impracticality of electric vehicles – their only choice left for you – will force you back into the equivalent of tenements anyway, exactly where the charging infrastructure is most efficiently provided.  The concomitant range anxiety will do much to keep you condensed into apartment life for the rest of your family’s existence.  No swing set or doll house for your daughter, the government’s park in all its seedy glory being the only remaining option for her.  That, or the streets.

Tenement Housing: 10+ Photos Show the Tragic Lives of New York City’s Immigrants in the 1800s ...
Tenement, New York City, undated

The desire for control doesn’t stop there.  The increasing grip on urban folk is extended to those who are scattered in places where the grip of the central planners is more tenuous, in the outback.  Small agriculture is targeted like the individual family in their individual car in their individual bungalow.  Climate-change hysteria is the ramrod for empowering the state.  Other hypothetical eco-disasters – groundwater use and pollution for instance – are similarly used to police the guy or gal with a few sheep, horses, cattle, chickens, or surplus vegetables.  The way is left open for greater concentration for the already highly concentrated operators, those big enough to stand toe-to-toe with big government.

USA_AG_BEEF_15_xs.jpg | Peter Menzel
Harris Ranch, Ca., feedlot for 100,000 head of cattle

Anyway, it’s an easy sell to ideologically domesticated urbanites once they accept the premise that cattle flatulence is a mortal threat to Gaia, or the choices of those rural “deplorables” must be made to fit the mold of their urban cousins.  Urbanites outvote the “deplorables”, so it is a popularly elected totalitarianism.  Somehow, the chant of “save our democracy” rings rather hollow.

Again, please watch the video of eco-consciousness turning into eco-totalitarianism.

RogerG

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The Real Minimum Wage Is Zero

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Thomas Sowell

The esteemed economist Thomas Sowell quipped, “Unfortunately, the real minimum wage is always zero.”  California is sadly learning this hard lesson as we speak.

Many California workers went from “Hurray!” to pink slips after California voters sent zealots into seats of power across the state to enact zany laws, like AB 1228.  Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill last year that raised the minimum wage to $20 per hour for fast-food workers (with an exception for a donor), his legislative super-majorities guaranteeing the outcome.  The lid was off for minimum wage hikes in the state’s other industries and in the many specific locales in the state enthralled by collectivist dreams.  Now, the reality: everyone didn’t get the leap in pay.  Many of those so-called “oppressed” found their hours cut or sent home without any hours, having lost their jobs.

All of this is a reminder of another Sowell witticism: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.”  You can only get things after giving up other things. The politicos issued the decree, “Thou shalt pay no one less than $20 per hour”, that led to those still facing a bottom line to cope by reducing the payroll.  So, the numbskulls in power unwittingly created a “nominal” minimum wage, and a “real” one: nominal = $20; real = $0!

Lee E. Ohanian with the Independent Institute chronicles the number of workers who were zeroed out in the ungolden state (see #1 below).  9,500 lost employment in the state’s fast-food industry from fall to January of this year.  Pizza Hut and Roundtable said goodbye to 1,300 delivery personnel.  El Pollo Loco and Jack in the Box are shifting to robots.  Thus, total employment in the state’s private sector during the same interval dropped .2%.  Is this “Bidenomics”, or maybe “Newsomnomics”?

Prices are jumping with the minimum wage boost: Wendy’s 8%, Chipotle 7.5%, Starbucks 7%, and others like McDonalds will be announcing hikes soon.  Fast food is a good with high elasticity (clientele is sensitive to price changes).  So, they can only raise prices to the point when the loss of business begins to eat into the business model.  Scott Roderick, a McDonald’s franchisee, said, “I can’t charge $20 for Happy Meals.”  If he doesn’t, and economically can’t, he may have to close shop.  How many then will join the ranks of the “real” minimum wage?

An economist at the Employment Policies Institute, Rebekah Paxton, lays out more carnage as the fever for $20 spreads to the other surviving remnants of the state’s shrinking private sector (see #2 below).  The neo-Marxist SEIU is chomping at the bit to ruin other businesses in the state.  West Hollywood is a microcosm of the elected lunacy gripping the state.  Making their SEIU donors happy, the city proclaimed a $17.64 minimum wage for hotel workers.  The union used this leverage to make it apply everywhere in the city.  Currently, the “nominal” minimum wage stands at $19.08.

Predictably, many formerly joyous workers in the city are discovering that their services are no longer needed.  Staff cuts of 30-40% are routine. 85 businesses in the city were shuttered last year.  The 30-40% are back to $0.

Since Biden and the poohbahs of the donkey party are keen to hitch the nation to the California train, expect more of us across the nation to suffer, even those of us who fled the People’s Republic.  Nationalizing lunacy is their chief aim.  When will they learn that you can’t suspend the laws of nature, and the laws of economics that rise from them?

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RogerG

Sources:

1. “California Loses Nearly 10,000 Fast-Food Jobs After $20 Minimum Wage Signed Last Fall”, Lee E. Ohanian, The Independent Institute, 4/26/2024, at https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=14919&utm_source=FFF+Daily&utm_campaign=252dd0222c-FFF+Daily+2024-05-04&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1139d80dff-252dd0222c-318121705
2. “California’s Predictably Disastrous Minimum-Wage Hikes”, Rebekah Paxton, National Review, 5/7/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/05/californias-predictably-disastrous-minimum-wage-hikes/

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A Green Totalitarianism Is Descending Upon Us

Online surveillance bill opens door for Big Brother | CBC News

They are coming for more than your family sedan.  They are going to upend, disrupt the entire system that brings everything to your home, grocery store, et al.  You’re going to be hit big time in your pocketbook and in every facet of your life.  Get prepared for it is coming, if not stopped.

Is Biden determined to turn me into a Trump voter?  Trump, no doubt, is the ugly face of my party, but Biden and his donkey party are trying to construct a totalitarian state on a preposterous green agenda.  Animating the whole venture, as is true with all totalitarian crusades, is a belief system on how best to organize and control people.  To gain popular traction, it’s best for all such crusades to contain a strong apocalyptic element, one powerful enough to justify stampeding the people into acceptance of its dictates and regimentation.  It’s happening before our eyes, right now!  Say goodbye to the republic and hello to the Soviet.

The EPA is the chief engine of the transformation from citizen republic to rule by all-powerful commissars.  Under the guise of “climate change”, we are being ordered to scrap our already immense sunk costs in affordable and reliable transportation for the mirage of something that doesn’t exist, and if it does, it’s a catastrophe as a replacement.  Prepare for a calamity, one that’ll conspicuously fall more seriously upon our children and generations to come.  Your kids will be the real victims.

March is turning into a deadly month for the health of our constitutional republic.  The EPA earlier in the month announced its intention to follow the template of California, one of a few states famous for turning many of its residents into refugees.  Like the authoritarian clown car in Sacramento, tighter emissions for “light duty” vehicles (cars, trucks, many SUV’s) will be imposed from 2027 through 2032, eventually sealing the death warrant for the production of nearly anything with an internal combustion engine (see #1 below).  Say goodbye to more than the citizen republic.  Say goodbye to that thing in your garage that allows you to get the kids to school, or you to work, or pay a visit to grandma for Thanksgiving, for its life will be wrung out of it by regulating and taxing it to death in escalating licensing fees and costs for upkeep, parts, and fuel.  Manufacturers will be forced to eliminate their production.  The comrades in power plan to leave you with no way out but into their approved and glorified golf cart.  This is nothing but totalitarianism “for your own good”.  And, of course, they know better about what’s good for you.  Right?

EPA Says More Diverse Advisory Committees Will Mean More Equitable Decisions - Union of ...

On the heels of that monstrosity, the commissars proclaimed a similar rule for the fleet of big vehicles that bring everything from produce to your grocery store to all things from an Amazon distribution center, everything that fills a shelf (see #3 below).  It’ll be much worse for those people who choose to live outside the controllable and tight confines of an urban area.  Think about it, all that stuff that was affordably made available at your fingertips will be crammed onto battery-powered big rigs (fuel cells create their own immense problems, see #2 below) of limited capacity, range, and tremendous recharging difficulties.

The mammoth costs of so-called “innovating” our way out of these imposed problems will only short-circuit the necessary wealth to satisfy other necessities of life.  These blinkered potentates have no understanding of the gargantuan trade-offs that they are inflicting on us.  Either that or they don’t care.

My bet is that they don’t care.  Why?  They possess a religious fervor for an ideology that justifies, in their mind, taking over more and more of your life.  For them, they are busy saving the planet, even if it means destroying your standard of living.  You see, their religio-ideology is founded upon a robust, promethean definition of “social cost” and “externalities”.  Like a canon law in the church, their “church”, the two doctrines give overriding weight to real or imagined costs for all of society for everything that you do.  Where’s the limits? Practically, there aren’t any.  Thus, the creeds become the supreme, open-ended excuses for the EPA, or any commissariat for that matter, to do anything that they want.

In the past, it was national socialist race justice to prevent defilement of the “race”, or the dictatorship of the proletariat to cram equality of condition on all of humanity to prevent exploitation.  Today, it’s saving the climate, leaving aside the lack of any credible, peer reviewed evidence that anything that they’re doing will positively affect a global atmosphere under which billions of people are acting independently and beyond the reach of the EPA.  Pardon me for concluding that this is nothing but pure stupidity.

In the end, the Biden claque and his Democratic Party are seemingly intent on destroying our way of life and replacing our citizen republic with rule by totalitarian zealots.  It’s Petrograd 1917, Berlin 1933, or Beijing 1949.  Keeping this crowd in power would have us see the end of much that we cherish.  So, if the choice is between the abominable Trump or this gang of totalitarian fanatics, one can be forgiven for preferring boorishness to Big Brother.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. In Orwellian language, the EPA announcement: “Biden-Harris Administration finalizes strongest-ever pollution standards for cars that position U.S. companies and workers to lead the clean vehicle future, protect public health, address the climate crisis, save drivers money”, March 20, 2024, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-strongest-ever-pollution-standards-cars-position
2. A survey of the literature on the shortcomings of fuel cells:
* “Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Vehicles: Everything You Need to Know”, Car and Driver, 9/26/2022, at https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a41103863/hydrogen-cars-fcev/
* “A review of PEM hydrogen fuel cell contamination: Impacts, mechanisms, and mitigation”, ScienceDirect, 3/20/2007, at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378775306025304
* “Fuel Cells”, University of Illinois, at https://publish.illinois.edu/fuel-cells/benefits-and-disadvantages/
* “How Fuel Cells Work”, How Stuff Works, at https://auto.howstuffworks.com/fuel-efficiency/alternative-fuels/fuel-cell.htm

3. The same Orwellian language for heavy-duty vehicles: “Biden-Harris Administration Finalizes Strongest Ever Greenhouse Gas Standards for Heavy-Duty Vehicles to Protect Public Health and Address the Climate Crisis While Keeping the American Economy Moving”, EPA, 3/29/2024, at https://www.epa.gov/newsreleases/biden-harris-administration-finalizes-strongest-ever-greenhouse-gas-standards-heavy

4. National Review articles that provide excellent overviews of the issues:
* “Biden’s Vehicle-Emissions Gaslighting”, Luther Ray Abel, 3/20/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bidens-vehicle-emissions-gaslighting/
* “Electric Vehicles: The EPA’s Fast Track to Fiasco”, Andrew Stuttaford, 3/25/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/electric-vehicles-the-epas-fast-track-to-fiasco/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=capital-matters&utm_term=second
* “Biden Admin Imposes Strict Pollution Standards for Buses and Heavy-Duty Vehicles”, Caroline Downey, 3/29/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/news/biden-admin-imposes-strict-pollution-standards-for-buses-and-heavy-duty-vehicles/

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What Does a Lack of Interest in Government Debt Say About Us? Nothing Good.

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Demonstrators march down Pennsylvania Avenue during a protest against police brutality and racism on June 6, 2020 in Washington, DC. This one end of the voter spectrum. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
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Trump supporters, the other end of the voter spectrum

Debt. Debt. Debt.  Government at all levels is awash in it.  Mountains of bonds and treasuries, unfunded mandates, and government spending galore is bankrupting the country.  The numbers are in the trillions for Washington, D.C., and beyond millions and into the billions in some state and local hives.  California stands out, and is leading the way to massive, harebrained fiscal imbecility, and a dismal future for anyone too young or unborn to vote.

And to think that nobody really cares.  The public doesn’t, just try and do something about it.  What animates the Trump crowd is rhetorical red meat, sticking it to the libs, and other acts of political theater.  No talk of debt, addressing it, or facing the runaway train of our entitlements.

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Donald Trump waves to the crowd at one of his rallies in Florida, 2024.

Nothing in Trump’s past or in his recent four years at the Resolute desk is promising.  The guy is a real estate magnate who fumbled around in debt and bankruptcy most of his adult life.  As president, he just wanted to spend and spend and spend, even chastising Senate Republicans for balking at another spewing of checks across the fruited plain to grease his reelection campaign.  The only problem with his personality kink is the absence of the discipline of a bottom line in a federal government that can issue more debt and dollars at will. No state has a Federal Reserve Board.  Trump is a child in a candy store, and so are his followers.  Enough of this inane talk of having a businessman in the White House, especially this businessman.

The other choice on the political landscape is a band of neo-Marxist central planners who never met a tax, new bottomless social engineering gambit, and outright giveaway that they didn’t like.  The central planning is bad enough, but the vacuuming of more taxpayer dollars from potentially productive endeavors in the private sector into the hands of politicians and their special pleading lackeys is a recipe to repeat 1920s Weimar Germany, or maybe 1920 Bolshevik Russia.

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President Biden delivers remarks regarding student loan debt forgiveness in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in 2022. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post via Getty Images / Getty Images)

Where are the adults?  Do we really want adults in decision-making posts?  Apparently not.  Adults aren’t popular.  Never have we been more in need of someone who will speak truth to power, and that power means the American public who keep electing these clowns.  We, the American voter, are the real “establishment”.  As before, watch demagoguery short-circuit any come-to-Jesus talk.

The numbers are staggering.  The national debt of $34.5 trillion is not far from the country’s total productive output, increasing $1 trillion every 100 days (see #1 and #3 below).  Meaning, we are close to the land of no return.  Compound the nightmare with rising interest rates adding fatter interest payments to the astronomical total and the magnitude of our fiscal immaturity resembles the black hole at the center of the galaxy.  Democrats and Trump only know how to spend, with the Democrats performing a lethal injection of tax hikes into our bloodstream as we drown in the sea of debt.

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If there’s one thing both sides agree on, besides the profligate spending, it is, “Don’t touch Social Security and Medicare!”  As entitlements, both are on spending autopilot.  The spending flies on, but the funding source is deteriorating; the revenue fuel tank of the contraption is shrinking in real time.  The program is set up as pay-as-you-go, so the elderly need to stop saying that they are only getting their contributions back.  Balderdash.  Current retirees are receiving the contributions of current workers.  That’s the truth behind the lies.  When the amount of inflow stagnates or declines due to demography or deteriorating prospects for the young contributors, and the outflow prances forever upward, the fiscal tipsiness is guaranteed to add more huge infusions of red ink.

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How much of an infusion?  Don’t let the banality of these colossal numbers (trillions) habituate you into accepting them as tolerable.  They aren’t.  Euphemistically referred to as “unfunded obligations” among official bean counters, Social Security is scheduled to pour $19.8 trillion into the master “unfunded obligation” of the national debt through 2095.  Medicare promises another $68.1 trillion.  If we take the trend line into the great beyond, in perpetuity, as far as it can be calculated, Social Security raises the ignominy to $59.8 trillion and Medicare $163.2 trillion (see #2 below).  If this was a drunk, the victim would have long ago expired from alcohol poisoning.

California is paving the way to this sordid future, but in their muddled thinking, in their clichéd mind, it’s a compliment – all the talk about “California is the future”.  Well, they got this one right.  California is likely to be the country’s future.  They went right from a state that could conceive and build the California Water Project to inmates running the asylum.  It’s a playground of the insane.  There’s your future.

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California governor Gavin Newsom speaks at a press conference in Beijing, China, October 25, 2023. (Tingshu Wang/Reuters)

The state’s popularly elected governor and legislature discovered, like kids coming downstairs to the Christmas tree, an eye-popping $100 billion pot of gold, or “surplus”, in the summer of 2022.  Chief inmate, Governor Gavin Newsom, gushed, “No other state in American history has ever experienced a surplus as large as this.”  And then he and his fellow adolescents went around showering the largesse in a splurge of incontinence.  23 million of its residents received checks worth as much as $1,050 at a price tag of $9.5 billion.  It then would seem only natural for a self-proclaimed sanctuary state for immigration law violators to bankroll $5 billion for the health care of the same immigration law violators (see #4 below).  Foreign nationals in our country in violation of our laws now get bennies.  Got that?

In their unthinking habit of seeing bigger budgets as success in any social venture – not kids reading better or the number of homeless declining – the Sacramento clown car shoveled $20 billion into the pockets of the professionalized homeless “advocates” in their opulent NGOs, with no positive impact on public defecation, open-air drug dealing and use, crime, or the number of filthy encampments littering city streets.  The state’s potentates could go a long way in curing the problem just by being a little more energetic, as they demonstrated recently in sprucing up grimy San Fransisco for the ruling thug of Red China, Xi.  Instead, you’re likely to see an increase in real estate investments by those professionals in their NGOs.  They don’t have an interest in curing the problem for that would only make them get a real job (see #4 below).

The state’s deficit stands at $78 billion, and rising.  Add the state’s massive overspending to local wantonness and the total debt picture throughout the state approaches $1.6 trillion (see #4 below).  I’m not sure if a cliff or wall is the most appropriate metaphor, but the car is more than driven by the mandarins in city hall or Sacramento.  These nincompoops are popularly elected.  The people of the state have their foot on the pedal.  The people want fiscal insanity.

So, let’s stop blaming some abstract others for this dire situation.  The people voted for it, and continue to do so. I’m reminded of Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror”.

Michael Jackson Man In The Mirror Wallpapers - Wallpaper Cave

As one stanza puts it:

“I’m starting with the man in the mirror
I’m asking him to change his ways
And no message could’ve been any clearer
If they wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change”

Leave it to the King of Pop to issue a come-to-Jesus moment.  It’s astounding to think that a deeply flawed man, who died of a deadly cocktail of drugs, made more sense than the people do in their elections.  Stew on that for a while.

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RogerG

Sources:

1. US Debt Clock at https://www.usdebtclock.org/. You can watch it climb in real time.
2. “The Real Federal Deficit: Social Security And Medicare”, John C. Goodman, Forbes, 2/25/2024, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/johngoodman/2023/02/25/the-real-federal-deficit-social-security-and-medicare/?sh=25189f695679
3. “The U.S. national debt is rising by $1 trillion about every 100 days”, Michelle Fox, CNBC, 3/1/2024, at https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/01/the-us-national-debt-is-rising-by-1-trillion-about-every-100-days.html
4. “California’s Deficit: Bring Your Alibis”, Will Swaim, National Review, 3/18/2024, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/californias-deficit-bring-your-alibis/

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They’re Still Leaving as of Friday, 12/29/23

Local Moving Labor | U-Haul

In “Poltergeist II”, the little girl stares into the snow of the TV screen and announces, “They’re baaaaack!”.  Who’s back?  The ghosts, of course.  For those chronicling the decline of California, the iconic declaration must be reworked.  A person staring at their daily news feed comes away with stories of people leaving the state saying, “They’re leeeeeeeeeeaving!”  This time, it’s Time magazine in “Americans Are Fleeing Los Angeles More Than Anywhere Else for First Time” (see below).

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The little girl from “Poltergeist II”

And I quote from the story: “Los Angeles was not at the top of the list [of places to move to], instead becoming the area residents were most likely to move away from.”  According to a Redfin report, “That marks the first time on record [LA] has been the number one place homebuyers are leaving, and the first time in over two years the Bay Area has dropped out of the number one spot.”

A dubious distinction for the not-so-Golden State.  LA occupies the top spot, but the rest of the list is a who’s who of American urban dystopia, all of them Democratic Party satraps. San Francisco, New York City, Washington, D.C., Seattle, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit and Denver are kryptonite to businesses and the middle class.  People are voting with their feet as they have for millennia.  Hell on earth is not a magnet.

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A common strip of homelessness in Los Angeles
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Litter from the chronic mobs of thieves along rail lines in Los Angeles

Welcome to urban America, and for the globe-trotting foreign traveler, reconsider that visit to the City by the Bay or Disneyland. Unless you’re a member of a major bowl game broadcast crew like the ESPN team reporting from the floor of the Rose Bowl, who’ll speed from the airport to hotel to the Rose Bowl in a limousine, you’ll risk face-to-face encounters with urban dysfunction.

For Californians, get out. For visitors, stay away.

business exodus people leaving california

RogerG

Source:
* “Americans Are Fleeing Los Angeles More Than Anywhere Else for First Time”, Suzanne Blake, Time, 12/29/23, at https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/americans-are-fleeing-los-angeles-more-than-anywhere-else-for-first-time/ar-AA1md8sC?ocid=msedgntp&pc=LCTS&cvid=483db5997a504d34a10fb00840ed94db&ei=52