“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.” H.L. Mencken
Are the people pushing “Build Back Better” (BBB) proving Mencken right? As if we need any further examples, we’ve already got the person who nosed across the finish line first in the 2020 presidential derby sounding grossly incoherent on most matters, and especially on his bigger-than-WWII lollapalooza — the “BBB”. He’s not alone. Listen to Psaki at pressers, and Pelosi, Schumer, and the rest of the big wheels running the show in Congress.
Here’s the head-scratcher: How can you have “costs nothing” and “paid for” in conjoining sentences? They’ve said it regularly, and with a straight face. If it costs nothing, it’s free. Right? If it’s “paid for”, somebody, probably many somebodies, paid for it. Reality sets in. It will be taken out of one group’s hide to fatten the financial accounts of others, least of all the beneficiary down-and-outs.
The Congressional Budget Office just scored the latest edition of BBB. Surprise, it comes up short, way short. The DC capos (as in mafia “captain”) invented a number – $400 billion – from various BBB empowerments to the IRS. The CBO awakened the conjurers from their wet dream by downgrading the number to $120 billion. And this may be an overestimate since the law of unintended consequences will be unleashed as it was for LBJ’s Great Society of the 1960’s.
The poster child of the failures of the Great Society: the east side of Detroit as seen in a recent video.
Bear in mind that the whole shebang is designed to turn your life upside down and give you wasteful government services that you don’t want and won’t like. That’s not the end of it.
Just think, if it fuels inflation, interest rates rise and interest payments of the accumulated debt jump to new levels. Financing “paid for” will eat up the budget, and say goodbye to our blue water navy and a sane dollar. Of course, we could be a banana republic and repudiate the debt. It’s easy, don’t pay it, and we’re off to oblivion.
How do politicians lie? This way. Yep, our recent edition of the clowns is making Mencken’s point.
Our new god, The State, speaks: “Thou shalt drive an electric car.” When this god-imposter speaks, run!
Something normally left to individual choice, along with vacation destinations, is now the province of The State. Combine a neurotic over-reaction to unprovable threats (climate change hysterics) with a growing State impulse to engineer the person along the lines of the neurosis and the result will be a pure, unadulterated mess. The State is a hammer-for-everything when a shed full of tools is the actual necessity. Our lives will begin to look like the incessant and crude pummeling of a hammer. Translation: live less well.
And, God almighty, are they out to get the internal combustion engine. Gavin Newsom, governor of the looney bin formerly known as the State of California, and emboldened by his survival of the recall, signed the death warrant for the gasoline car in the state, the lethal injection to be performed by 2035. From DC, Biden’s Build Back Better – errrr Worse – has $13.5 billion for scarring the roads and interstates hither and yon with plug-ins for the things. To make sure that you use those plug-ins, the feds will bribe you with other people’s money – to the tune of $12,500 per purchase – to buy the contraption and junk your quite functional family sedan. That’s right, replace something that works for a will-‘o-the-wisp.
*Read about the EV and its heart and soul, the battery, here.
I equate the EV craze to gender reassignment surgery. Surgeons jettison the Hippocratic Oath by destroying perfectly healthy organs to align a person’s physique to their imagination. Ditto for Build Back so-called Better: mutilate the transportation grid to better fit the fancies of the half-witted representative from NY’s 14th congressional district.
And what are we going to get out of it, besides the will-‘o-the-wisp? A mess, a big mess. How much of a mess? Just think it through. Those holiday trips to grandma’s house will be measured in battery capacity. Don’t take too many long trips, commutes, or otherwise because the trip’s mandatory half-hour quick charges degrade the batteries. Don’t expect 100,000 miles out of the thing. And just think, you were forced to give up something that works very well for . . . God only knows what. Wait for this to percolate through the economy and into higher unemployment figures and higher grocery bills and poorer diets.
That’s a ticket for a return journey to the Middle Ages.
And what of those now-common California blackouts? After all, the greenie grid functions like the greenie car. The physics of the substitution of high-density energy with low-density doesn’t add up. The trillions spent on trying to make it work is an attempt to bend the laws of nature to the half-literate musings of The Squad. What will you do with an EV with no juice to its umbilical cord and plug? Commutes will be made more formidable, the suburbs will atrophy, and its back to cramped apartment life at the mercy of Lori Lightfoot’s or Bill de Blasio’s defund-the-police rantings. Is raising kids in decrepit schools and on streets filled with gangs, the homeless, needles, and feces supposed to be “Build Back Better”?
Homelessness in LA.
Remember, the trillions and trillions going into this bottomless pit is money not spent on other things. An adult, not the eco-fanatics in Congress, would recognize this as trade-offs. Our decaying military will make it possible for the Pacific to become a CCP lake. Try a supply chain under that regime. Reliance on more expensive and unstable energy and less functional vehicles means less productivity, and productivity is the name of the game for prosperity. More money going into greenie infatuations is less money for R&D for the next wave of world-impacting innovation. Add it up . . . and cringe.
Have we lost our minds? Our car fleet is more efficient and less polluting than nearly any outside the Anglosphere and Europe. We are now expected to dispense with the great strides in the use of fossil fuels and jump headlong into electricity-everything, just at the time when they plan to make the production of it more unstable and vulnerable. It’s crazy, absolutely crazy
A shopper walks past empty shelves where bread is normally displayed in a supermarket, Sunday, March 15, 2020, in Boston. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)
The April, 8, 1966 issue of Time magazine had as its cover story “Is God Dead?”. No, He isn’t dead but increasingly many have relegated Him to the attic with the rest of the old bric-a-brac. Nature hates a vacuum and so do we in our lives. When God is dethroned, the state will be enthroned. Well, alas, it came fully to pass, thanks to the pandemic.
If we should have learned anything from the 20th century, we should have grasped the obvious reality that the state is a very poor repository of our hopes and dreams. Central planning was a catastrophe both in material and immaterial ways. Most of us knew this; yet here we are: galloping inflation, a labor supply willingly eschewing labor, authoritarianism everywhere, and empty store shelves. We’re starting to look like those 1970’s photographs of the Soviet people queuing up to enter Soviet stores to find . . . nothing much.
Soviet citizens waiting outside a Soviet store in the 1970’s.1970’s Russian shopper looking at an empty meat cooler.
How did we get here? Look no further than the frantic reaction to the virus. Please excuse me for crowing a bit but back in March 2020, I bellowed that we ought not be doing this. The “this” is the extended lockdowns, the silly parsing of “essential” from “nonessential”, universal and mandatory masking, rampant social distancing, business and school closures, and an end to social and organized religious life. We are now paying the piper for this sin, and a host of others which accreted like barnacles to our ship’s hull.
We got to central planning through the back door. The Bolsheviks, instead, simply banged down the front door. We nurtured ours over a century-plus, and when COVID hit, the “crisis too good to waste” brought out in full regalia the inner autocrat. Concentrating power over things large and small in the hands of a Bill DeBlasio, Gavin Newsom, or Joe Biden runs square into Hayek’s knowledge problem: no small group of people has the knowledge and expertise to manage something as varied and multitudinous as a nation’s economy. In the end, crap will happen. And it did.
Ships waiting for entry off the California coast.
Some blame the 95 cargo ships lining up outside the ports of Long Beach and San Pedro on the Longshoreman’s Union. Granted, their featherbedding and labor contracts can make life a living hell. Some mention the neglect of our nation’s ports. Some could rightly point the finger at the eco-craziness of California’s war on diesel trucks and trains – and anything fossil fuel that keeps us warm and gets us to work. I don’t know of many interstate truckers who relish driving in the state. All true, but all of it preceded the current mess and shelves were brimming at the time.
Biden and company have hit upon the canard of trying to convince us that a mess isn’t a mess, but is actually a sign of good times. It’s gaslighting as state PR. This headscratcher ignores his role in bribing workers to stay home. Drive around in that over-priced electric car of yours and you’ll see Help Wanted signs as ubiquitously as Biden/Harris 2020 yards signs in the DC metropolitan area. Employers will take anyone breathing, and maybe not.
Need more be said?
What of his – and the rest of the Democrat gubernatorial lineup – mandates and threats? It’s hard to run a business when suffocating the workforce behind masks and forcing unwanted vax jabs on the 30% who are reluctant. Who’d want to come back to work? Better to take the unemployment comp festooned with an extra $300 a week and enjoy the extended staycation.
Economic life is disrupted. And once down, overburdened with a dump truck load of taxes and regulations, it can’t get up. Like the weightlifter, we can add the weights to the bar when he’s already erect with it. But from a deadlift? The hysterical reaction to the virus knocked the economy down and they piled dumbbells on the corpse. The result is the long line of ships waiting offshore and ships’ anchors tearing holes in pipelines, which will be used to further the war on fossil fuels. Go figure.
Go ahead, don’t let God get in your way, continue to replace the old priesthood with the credentialed “expert” and their computer models, and welcome to the Soviet lifestyle.
Sometimes idiocy gets so entrenched that it’s mistaken for wisdom. For the rest of us, we should start to shake our elites’ false aura of authority and easily recognize some of their chic passions for what they are – nonsense. In this, I refer to our the corporate suits’ enthusiasm for woke ideology. How could adults embrace something so ludicrous? The farce would be apparent to a child.
I’m reminded of the old gag of a tractor-trailer hauling a tall earth mover but at a standstill at a bridge. Stumped as to how to get it under the bridge, a kid in a mini-van rolls by with the window down and yells, “Let some air out of the tires!” Staunching the drivel, before they mutilate our livelihoods and retirement systems, is as obvious as letting some air out of the tires.
It might take a kid to cut through the overwrought bunk to help return us to sanity. Right now, overwrought lefty foolishness is piloting the ship of our retirements. Pay attention those of you at the mercy of CalSTRS and CalPERS and the rest of the public employee pension gang. Lefty ideologues control your pension checks. One such lefty avatar is Kirsty Jenkinson, Investment Director, Sustainable Investment & Stewardship Strategies for the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS). Whew, what a mouthful, but a title that can be simply translated as “useful idiot in selling the rope that eco-totalitarians will use to hang us”.
Kirsty Jenkinson
Lenin was famous for his characterizations of supportive capitalists as “rope sellers” and “useful idiots”.
Taking a closer look at Kirsty shows the scope of the threat. This girl has an illustrious leftist pedigree, albeit one in carefully coiffed hair and suit (see below). She went from a four-year stint at Edinburgh University with a MA in “International History” to six years as an executive director at Goldman Sachs, innocuous enough till we find her as Director of “Governance & Sustainable Investment” at BMO Global Asset Management. What’s that obtuse title mean? Well, it’s a rephrasing of the leftist tag “ESG”, or Environment, Social, and Governance.
Whose Environment? Not ours, but the greenie utopia that people like Kirsty, schooled in all the lefty jargon, want to impose on us.
Whose Social? Not ours, but the “social” of the lefty faculty lounge and their legions of acolytes. Yep, that’s the stuff fed to your child through their curriculum and shows as Critical Race Theory and hides under the acronym EID – Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity. All of this lingo boils down to perpetual victimhood of the “other” which is defined by a laundry list of immutable characteristics and a host of mental dispositions (“My genitalia doesn’t define my sex.”). Of course, the “social” encompasses an explosion of so-called remedies in government commands, rewards, and punishments. It’s a complete omni-competent state, as in the one contemplated by Karl Marx.
Whose Governance? Yes, ours. Meaning, they want to control us in every possible way. This political disposition leads to the reflex to funnel campaign cash to eco-socialist parties, like today’s Democratic Party. It also seeks to rope the Fortune 500 into the revolution. That gets us back to Kirsty Jenkinson.
From BMO, she ends up at the World Resources Institute as Director of Markets & Enterprise Program. Media Bias/Fact Check rates them “left-center”. It’s an eco-group with the same eco-mantras.
The BMO and WRI stints uncovered her as a lefty political activist in the corporate suite. She continued her march through the boardrooms as the Managing Director & Sustainable Investment Strategist at Wespath Institutional Investments. Are you getting the picture? This lady is into funds that have millions of dollars of other people’s money at their disposal which can be turned into seats on corporate boards. The sheer weight of shares counts for a lot. All the better to foist ESG, EID, CRT, and the rest of the lefty litany on the nation from the classroom to the workplace. What doesn’t get through in the Green New Deal will be swept up by the Fortune 500.
Racial Equity indoctrination – CRT is foundational – in a North Carolina Episcopal Diocese in 2017.
That’s not the end of Kirsty’s sojourn. She’s now the Investment Director of Sustainable Investment & Stewardship Strategies at CalSTRS, the second largest pension fund with $275 billion in assets. Thus, this eco-activist has an outsized influence over the financial well-being of 949,000 teachers and staff. She can wield the fund’s $300 million stake in Exxon/Mobil like a Swiss halberd and force them to renounce any effort at producing affordable energy, their core business.
Bear in mind, that greenie stuff – “sustainable” – is expensive and unreliable, and that’s before we start the slide in our and our kids’ quality of life. And that’s before pensioners begin noticing the stories of CalSTRS’s difficulties in cutting the checks. At the end of the day, eco-fantasies don’t make for corporate health, and corporate ill-health becomes the basis for a bad portfolio, and a bad portfolio equals a bankrupt pension. Get it?
People like Kirsty Jenkinson, with her lefty fairy tales, have no business using my pension to advance their ideological crusade. The fiduciary rule requires the fund managers to work on behalf of the best financial interests of their clients. A totalitarian eco-utopia is not in the best interests of the beneficiaries. If individual beneficiaries want to send a little cash to the eco-blob, more power to them. But Kirsty should have another job, other than political activist. In fact, a proper functioning fiduciary rule would demand an end to titles such as Director of Sustainable Investment & Stewardship Strategies.
Either she finds another role or send her packing.
Intentional blackouts caused widespread damage and outrage throughout California over the past couple of years. (photo: JOSH EDELSON/AFP )
Part I in this series was about hysterics over the virus driving a people to mommy-state absolutism and the consequent slide to greater poverty, and a Medieval life. Part II concerns the climate-change delirium that promises to depress much of what’s left of our generally benevolent quality of life.
I’m reminded of Eastwood’s 2019 film, “Richard Jewell”. Shortly after the 1996 bombing in Atlanta’s Olympic Park, the FBI and a big-city newsroom moved from “lone bomber” to “hero syndrome” to Richard Jewell, the man who discovered the bomb and saved hundreds by evacuating the area before the explosion. Instead, he was turned into the lead suspect, which was broadcast to the world for months. Later, after months of FBI aspersions and negative press coverage, he was finally cleared and the actual culprit convicted.
Why mention this? Simple, organizations exhibit psychoses like individuals. Call it a social psychosis. An erroneous idea enters the organization’s social bloodstream, is reinforced by the mores of the group, and is hard to shake despite little evidence. It is so entrenched that caution and humanity get tossed to the wind. It is an alternative reality for them. The effect is magnified when allied organizations, such as a big-city newsroom and the FBI in the case of Jewel, feed each other’s prejudices.
Today, instead of some organizations’ blind embrace of the “hero syndrome” to guide their judgments, we’re experiencing another socially entrenched idea, climate change, that promises to deliver much greater and longer-term harm, and not in the ways intended by Earth First.
As before, allied organizations intensify a belief’s impact. These entities are less independent of each other as they reflect more homogeneous backgrounds such as college, intermarriage, and family status. Background examinations of the membership and employment lists of the Ford Foundation, Sierra Club, Department of Energy, US Forest Service, EPA, and much of the administrative state, etc., including the desk jockeys in national security, are an excursion from campus to campus and white collar to white collar. Increasingly, social homogeneity means a greater ideological homogeneity. The same mental bugs, such as the supposedly imminent threat of climate change, has resonance and force.
EPA employees joined the People’s Climate March rallies in Washington, D.C., Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, and Denver as part of the 370 events held April 29, 2017. The AFGE in the banner on the right stands for American Federation of Government Employees which is the largest federal employee union representing 700,000 federal and D.C. government workers nationwide and overseas.
We everywhere hear of climate change as a “fact”, hidden under verbal constructions like “scientific consensus”. Science isn’t about “consensus”. It’s about research, labs, and the constant testing and reformulation of hypotheses, not Gallup opinion surveys. A majority opinion is just another thing to be tested, not an end to the process so activists can rush off to write The Green New Deal.
What do these prophets of climactic doom have in store of us? Hmmm. It’s obvious they don’t like people or individuals organized in free societies. They’re utopians in the mold of Karl Marx with all the “alienation” nonsense (human alienation from nature) and the militant reflex to engineer a “better” person. Their 20th-century literary and ideological Trail of Tears goes from Rachel Carson’s fear of chemicals (’62, Silent Spring) to Paul Ehrlich’s fear of more people (’67, The Population Bomb) to Charles Reich’s greenie-Marxist totalitarianism (’70, The Greening of America) to Murray Bookchin’s open advocacy of eco-socialism (’86, The Modern Crisis) to Michael Mann’s graphic global temperature “hockey stick” (’98) to AOC’s declaration of the end of the world in 12 years. Rhetorically, they went from legitimate concern to doomsday in the span of 60 years, all in the campaign to impose their control over the most intimate details of our lives. Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot would be envious.
As in the devastations of Lenin, Mao, and Pol Pot, little good and great harm will come of it. Take a look at what sits before Congress today. In the mold of “the power to tax is the power to destroy”, the Democrats’ budget monstrosity of $3.5 trillion ($5 trillion by sober analysts), the reconciliation bill, is chock full of tax increases, all excused under “fair share” rhetoric. Hikes are to occur nearly everywhere in the tax code: capital gains, inheritance, the income tax’s top rate, business taxes, retirement savings, almost anything material and immaterial. If that isn’t enough, they’ve got a carbon tax bouncing around to hike the cost of your commute, keep the lights on, and prevent you from freezing this winter.
Democrats in Congress push their massive greenie social engineering scheme in a presser at the Capitol.
The tax haul is hawked by Democrats at $3.5 trillion so they can astoundingly claim “zero cost”, or as they euphemistically say, “paid for”. Odd, how so terribly odd. Taxes aren’t about “zero cost”; they’re about making somebody pay, and pay a lot, $3.5 trillion a lot.
Do you actually think that the Dems’ math calculations are an accurate depiction of reality? Under their greedy eye shades, they make some artificial sense, but that assumes people won’t try to avoid the whip hand of the IRS, who, by the way, will be given an additional $78 billion to hunt us down. In the real world, they won’t get that much, but the money spigot will still be cranked wide open from the Treasury Department to the Fed’s open market operations to a flood of dollars chasing fewer goods. Meaning . . . i-n-f-l-a-t-i-o-n, big time.
We don’t need Milton Friedman to remind us “inflation is the cruelest tax of all”. We’ll live it. So, add this monster extraction on top of all the other abuse. You’ll wake up one morning with a phone call from your accountant frantically advising you to change your portfolio, pronto, as your wife discovers at the grocery store that the price of everything in the basket doubled.
Scratch that long-planned family vacation to Disney World.
Why are we being forced to live this way? The answer lies deep in the synapses of the Democratic Party. For them, no social problem can be addressed without more government welfare spending. Also, their inner eco-totalitarian can only be satisfied with more crony capitalism and the power to coerce the population to live according AOC’s tweets, Congress’s airhead-in-chief.
Commissar Ed Markey (D, Mass.) put it quite succinctly, “. . . the Green New Deal is in the DNA [of the reconciliation bill].” For instance, the greenies get their own version of the Young Pioneers (official USSR communist youth group), or Red Guards (of Maoist fame), called the Civilian Climate Corps, to conduct unspecified “green” actions. It could mean anything from door-to-door canvassing to pressure residents to turn down their thermostat to Portland-style “peaceful” protests.
And trillions of dollars in giveaways for electric bikes, solar panels (of course), advocacy of “environmental justice” (anything “justice” in their mouths means CRT), university grants to push the agenda, massive greenie “weatherization” campaigns, worker retraining away from the things people actually want (cars, trucks, air conditioning, single-family homes) etc., etc. Combined with the tax punishment, we’ll end up with a life of California-style energy prices, California-style capital flight, California-style welfare dependency, California-style shortages and inflation, California-style dirty commutes in gang-infested mass transit, and the rest of the social and economic miasma that is California. And our airhead-in-chief will call this Shangri-La.
Do you think that they’ll stop with the federal budget? Hogwash. Remember, they’re totalitarians, and, as such, they care just as much about what you think as what you do. The indoctrination will be pressed into the minds of the kids by curriculums and teachers. Nothing will escape the commissars’ gaze. Criticism of your diet will be part of the lesson plans: meat bad, veganism good. Just picture the teacher in her reading session with the kiddies seated around as she reads “Heather Has Two Vegan Mommies”.
The way is gradually being set for a Stalin-like war on the peasants, or actually the farmer, for producing the stuff that goes into my burger-and-a-Bud. Cattle flatulence, stockyards, farming the plains and woodlands, production of implements and fertilizer, and much more, disrupt the greenie utopia. So, expect the now-common shaming campaigns, penalties, and bountiful awards from the public treasury corrupted by gazillions of meaningless dollars. “Let them eat cake” is readjusted to “Let them eat tofu”.
Is this any way to live? Our economic and social lives are wrecked by COVID-hysterics, the public fisc of a drunken sailor that is an insult to drunken sailors, and militant social engineering based on the loony platitudes of The Squad — and the rare pleasure of a cheese burger and fries will be treated as deviant as pedophilia. My only solace lies in the fact that the Russian people managed to put up with it for 80 years and survived . . . albeit with a Putin helmsman-for-life, rampant alcoholism, a stagnant economy, and a disappearing birth rate.
Reading time for the kindergarteners might be better served by preparing the kids for a life of perpetual COVID shutdowns under an eco-Politburo. “Heather Lives with Her Mommies in a Dirt Floor Hut and Her Sisters Died in Infancy” might be a better choice for reading time. By the way, Heather cries a lot.
Ii comes down to a basic question: How many body blows can a nation endure before it is irreparably damaged? I don’t know, but these hits come from the worst possible source: our wildest imaginations put to practice absent much restraint.
Dégringolade: noun; a rapid decline or deterioration (as in strength, position, or condition), downfall.
Pres. Biden and Senators in front of the White House, August 12
The Democrats running the show in DC have passed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill – $550 billion billed as “additional spending” – and approved on a party-line vote (50-49) the Socialist Bernie Sanders’s $3.5 trillion “reconciliation” blue print. We are throwing money to the wind and will reap the whirlwind. We’ll get little for it but a national wasteland.
We could end up as the next Argentina. Argentina presents an abject lesson in the effects of drunken-sailor public finance. The Latin American country in 1970’s and 1980’s faced a debt crisis and began to wildly print money to address it. The result was an annual inflation rate that averaged 300% from 1975 to 1990. Middle-class purchasing power shrunk 30%. What is waiting in the wings as we embark on our own colossal spending binge, almost all of it from borrowing, bloating the national debt to such astronomical levels that the only way out is the one paved by Argentina? Could this be the beginning of the USA as simply another failed state?
Dire? Yes, because the numbers point in that direction. The national debt is scheduled to balloon from $17 trillion to $40 trillion over the next decade.* To put it in perspective, 1 trillion square miles would cover the surface of 5,000 earths; 40 of them would amount to 200,000 planet earths. There’s no solace in the fact that I won’t be around to experience the worst of it. My kids and grandkids will live to see their country become a basket case.
Much of this bloat will be swallowed up under “infrastructure”, which the most recent little and big sister editions aren’t. It’s a race-mongering, greenie utopian, nation-building exercise. It’s infrastructure to produce a faculty-lounge Soviet Union.
Leaving that aside, let’s take a closer look at the $550 billion mini-monster (remember, it’s $550 billion in $1.2 trillion) coming down the pike. Simple question: Is it even necessary? No. State and local governments currently spend $500 billion on real infrastructure. It’s not that there’s no infrastructure expenditures without this monstrosity. The drunken sailors in charge of the federal fisc are burying the cupcake of state spending under a gargantuan load of ice cream of federal cash. Don’t expect a cherry on top. Look forward to a belly ache and diabetes.
So, there’s no shortage of cash for “infrastructure”, if we understand that 500 billion hours ago would place us in the onset of the Early Eocene Period, which would leave another 56,762,626 more years before we started to walk upright. What happened to this interstellar load of dollars to justify an additional intergalactic heap? Well, it’s essentially wasted. Once again, the numbers are dispiriting.
Spending reform isn’t in the cards, just more cash. The problem isn’t that we don’t spend enough. It’s that we squander so much of it. Union featherbedding in the form of Davis-Bacon, and the little Davis-Bacons (state), bloat the cost of these projects by 22%. With federal Project Labor Agreements, labor costs are ballooned 30% when more workers are mandated than comparable projects in the European Union. It’s a sweet gig for the union hall, but in the end, we’ll still be plagued with crumbling bridges and interstates and a national debt that’ll relegate more of our children to pauper status.
Remember Obama’s measly $787 billion stimulus bill of 2009 which was supposed to produce those “shovel-ready jobs”? “Shovel-ready” ran into the buzz saw of entrenched environmentalism. Those lovable Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) in federal law, to be combined with Environmental Impact Reports (EIR) in states like California, empower environmental jihadists to delay and run up costs till they have squashed the thing and the proponents throw up their hands in disgust.
Nearly every step on the approval path is plagued with public hearings. A great idea, right? It seems peachy till you notice who’s attending. Let me tell you it isn’t the young family breadwinners negotiating clogged freeway traffic trying to get to work or the grocery store. It’s the traveling troupe of eco-zealots who seek to make mincemeat of planning commissioners and building department officals. If that isn’t enough, the laws give the same lunatics the right to sue, which frequently shoves the project back to the EIR/EIS level and a restart of the whole rigmarole.
California set the tone at the state level with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) and the creation of new commissions and boards like the Coastal Commission. Others were empowered like the Air Resources Board and the sundry Air Quality Management Districts scattered throughout the state. Other states followed suit. California gave us Silicon Valley . . . and Ottoman regulatory efficiency. As a result, will we go the way of the Ottoman Empire, courtesy of the golden state?
Putting a number to the scene, EIS’s take 7-25 years to complete, depending on the availability of legal talent and motivation to mash up the works. Eco-zealots have both in ample supply. I’m reminded of Rachel Maddow standing before the Hoover Dam in 2011 wondering why we don’t seem to be able to accomplish big-scale feats anymore. Apparently, it never occurred to her that her eco-allies had something to do with it.
Rachel Maddow in front of the Hoover Dam, 2011
Disgorging a couple of humungous bills through Congress can only be considered a win in one sense. They were examples of a group of overpaid, insular politicos in DC getting more votes than the opposition in a couple of rooms in the capitol building. They won’t be wins for the American people, particularly the young and the ones yet to be born. Our children will be burdened with a legacy of dégringolade.
RogerG
*“Time to Move On from COVID Capitalism”, Kevin D. Williamson, National Review, April 5, 2021
While reading Ross Douthat’s (NYT film critic) review of Disney’s “Raya and the Last Dragon”, I was struck by how art may be imitating life, or vice versa. Honestly, I haven’t seen the movie, and won’t. But his depiction of the movie sheds light on what is happening on our streets and in power circles of the Democratic Party.
We are in a peculiar zeitgeist. The word “zeitgeist” became popular among poets (Goethe) and philosophers (Hegel) in the 1800’s to refer to the spirit of a time. How did we get to the zeitgeist of official neo-Marxist indoctrination of the kids (CRT, campaigns against systemic racism, etc.) and Green New Deal socialism? This is much more ambitious than simply punishing an individual political actor, party, or business. This political endeavor is a much, much grander thing: a revolution.
Ross Douthat
Douthat’s film review brings to light certain aspects at play in the newly constructed modern mind, especially amongst the people who dwell in our cultural commanding heights. He cites the fact that older Disney animated movies held to a particular set of plot devices that have disappeared from their newer offerings. Snow White, for instance, depicted an older fairy tale with a protagonist prince or princess, a romance, and a villain. The plot was simple and endearing.
What does Disney offer us today? The protagonist is still there, but the villain turns out to be an abstract threat, “some impersonal force, some moral or spiritual disturbance”. The romance is replaced by a sibling or platonic bond. These two characteristics speak volumes about today’s ethos.
The romance of man and woman is either reduced to pure physicality or, as in the case of “Raya”, gone. Why gone? Fear of the adjective “heteronormative”. Someone in the audience might be offended by the prevalence of the only sexual attraction tied to procreation. Let’s face it, LGBTQ is the chic victim group of our time. So, the man/woman attraction is replaced by something more neutral. In that way the prominence of heteronormativity is suppressed in order to raise the status of the other sexual arrangements.
Next, the absence of personalized evil – like a Simon Legree in Uncle Tom’s Cabin – in popular media. Evil is nebulous, in the form of “some impersonal force, some moral or spiritual disturbance”. A constant inundation of this plot device gets us into thinking of our alleged problems as the product of abstract forces. This might go a long way in explaining the resort to the abstract “system” in the scurrilous writings of the Anti-Racism crusaders Robin DeAngelo or Ibram X. Kendi. It’s the justification for the “systematic” reordering of the economy, and the omnipresent life associated with it, in the Green New Deal, and all of society in CRT. This is not reform, but revolution.
We probably got to the destination of our current Marxist moment with the assistance of popular entertainment. It’s easy to pour blood on a cop’s home, or maybe shoot him or her, or topple statues, or ransack a downtown business district if such actions are instrumental in bringing down the hypothetical, abstracted evil. It’s easier to push the nihilism through organs of the state if the population has been softened by a warped version of reality.
The cost of lumber in board feet has more than tripled.
In my previous post, I mentioned the lingering medical aftereffects of COVID. If it’s true that a disease leaves an imprint in your body, well, the hyper-response to the pandemic – the near strangulation of all human interaction – left a deep impact on our current prospects. We are experiencing it as a huge economic funk.
Inflation is set to rear its ugly head. There’s no better way to bloat prices than to pound production into submission. The supply and demand curves will do the rest.
Biden’s government threatening the crap out of the productive sector with the machete of regulations and taxes from its lefty utopianism plays a huge role. But so has the pandemic-authoritarianism of Biden’s side of the aisle. Blue state mayors and governors can’t shake the erotic euphoria that they receive from telling everyone within the reach of their edicts how to live.
Plus, they took imbecilic actions to scare the bejeebers out of their law-abiding residents by treating riots and wanton thuggery as First Amendment expression. Thus, people fled in droves to safer environs which resulted in real estate pandemonium in places that don’t have the wherewithal to increase housing supply, thanks to the garroting of the aforementioned supply chain. Locals can’t afford a $300,000 shack.
Lockdowns wreaked havoc in the demand for certain elements in the supply chain. Take for instance the lumber industry, the makers of paper pulp. There’s less need for mundane things like office paper when offices are closed and everyone is struggling with Zoom in their pajamas, and plants begin to close. Almost everything downstream to the shelves of Walmart was negatively effected.
That third leg of the factors of production – labor – was amputated in industries our potentates labeled “non-essential”. Don’t tell me that a Happy Meal wasn’t affected. Don’t tell me that much of the cornucopia of the entire marketplace wasn’t affected.
Then, our grand viziers drummed up the idea that it wasn’t enough to smother most everyone behind filthy masks and a home computer screen. The geniuses came up with the moronic idea of paying people with magic money to not have to put up with the boss up close and personal, or go through life without one. Suddenly, it pays to stay at home with your Hot Pockets . . . if the supermarket doesn’t run out of them.
The whole gambit smashes supply – i.e., production – creates pent-up demand ready to burst, as it hoses down the country in magic money – an additional $6 trillion of it if Biden has his way . What’s there to worry about?
Welcome to another casualty of government-sponsored COVID-panic.
Yahoo has an excellent piece on the stratospheric jump in lumber prices. It’s an interview with Bob Bauer of the Kentucky Forest Industries Association. Check it out here.
Pete Buttigieg, Sec. of TransportationNew York Times Magazine reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones talks to Hampton University about her piece The 1619 Project Wednesday November 6, 2019 at Scripps School of Journalism. (Rob Ostermaier/Daily Press)
President Biden in his first speech to Congress on April 28, 2021: “Independent experts estimate the American Jobs Plan will add millions of jobs and trillions of dollars to economic growth in the years to come.”
“Experts”, it’s become a cliché, a buzzword, famous for its new-found vapidity and banality. All apply because its meaning has been soiled by media-hungry activists, politicians exploiting the moment to foist their fanatical vision on the country, and far too many technocrats and technocrat wannabes stepping outside their lane with disastrous results. The word has been stripped of its force in the language. It’s developed a darker connotation to those who happen to fall on the wrong side of the fashionable zealotry of the age.
Part of the problem lies with our misplaced faith in a technocracy, the tendency of seeing nearly all issues as if they were matters to be addressed by technical expertise. Values such as liberty, decency, self-reliance, civil society, faith, personal achievement, cultural preservation, etc., are reduced to a secondary role. Questions are reduced to mere calculation, the calculus of the technical expert.
Funny thing, though, most everyone with an animating cause or set of zealous ideological commitments desires the security from challenge that the moniker “expert” confers. Partisan, ideological crusaders seek protection from opposition under a pseudo-expertise invented for the purpose. It’s how they make their positions unassailable. The drive for paper credentials (college degrees, certification) – that staple of the expert class – is extended to cover good old-fashioned extremist provocateurs. Thus, the expert umbrella is stretched into a canopy sheltering everyone from the lab coats to the fanatical huckster.
No doubt, the pandemic has diminished the value of the word “expert”. Doctors Fauci and Birx in the previous administration, and the ubiquitous Fauci and Walensky in this one, have made “expert” a matter of scorn for many. The reputations of many “experts” are sullied when they conveniently forget their place. Policy – meaning the directions and actions of government’s decision-makers – must consider more than the physical “science” of an issue. “Science” is a necessary but not sufficient factor in developing a course of action. Certainly, it’s more at the top of the list in some matters than others. But the last time that I checked, Fauci, Birx, and Walensky aren’t Constitutional scholars, social psychologists, economists, and cultural anthropologists who understand the high priority of liberty in our society. “Science” in their hands becomes cold, hard government aggression. As one sensible pundit put it – I paraphrase – we should consult their expertise, not submit to it.
Dr.’s Fauci and Birx Dr. Rochelle Walensky, CDC Director
Speaking of submit, right now, the “science” of the “expert” is a form of Islam, in the purest definition of the Arabic word. Its literal translation is “submission”. For a Muslim, it’s submission to Allah. For our power-hungry collectivists, it’s submission to their version of “science” under the cloak of their coterie of “experts”, as if no other voices matter, so long as it produces submission to the orders of the powerful. It conjures images of conversion by the sword sweeping the Middle East to the plains of France and gates of Vienna of centuries past. Only in this case, the hardy activists in the seats of power, with their politicized “experts” in tow, are scything any opposition to their authoritarian edicts. It’s shocking to watch the overturning of the Founding by this bastardized form of “science”.
The bastardization sullies its reputation, but the interference of politics isn’t the only cause for the decline in the status of “expert”. The inherent value of the college degree – the base requirement for “expert” – has an inverse relationship to its ease of acquisition. The college degree in the ever-growing panoply of fields, in its current state of depressed value, still strives to share in the glow of a PhD in nuclear physics. In fact, PhD’s are offered in nearly everything, but without the rigor. Much of the coursework is balderdash, sophistry, or disguised ideology. Yes, ideology, as in a systematized but shallow viewpoint masquerading as a form of higher thought.
Enter “Doctor” Jill Biden, an archetype of the genre. She’s an obsessive/compulsive hoarder of degrees with two masters in reading and English and a “Doctorate” in educational leadership. Does all that time and expense in a college classroom designate competence? Maybe, maybe not, many times not. As a 30-year veteran as an instructor in public high schools and a community college, in many leadership posts, I’ve seen this breed of cat many times. With their advanced sheepskin in Education, many with the Jill accolade (Education PhD, empty awards and certificates) on their résumé, they prance before the faculty in training sessions with their alleged silver bullet for reform but can’t handle penetrating questions into their scheme. It quickly becomes obvious that their “competence” is actually a faith in a set of highly tendentious assumptions for which they are ill-prepared to defend when confronted by skeptics. They stammer, unless they stand before a staff equally in the dark. It’s an embarrassing charade.
Jill Biden, “PhD”
Don’t trust the presenter to realize the embarrassment and then expect that to be a corrective. Some are so immersed in their loose theory that they are oblivious. Some go so far as to mistake a dubious ideology for scholarship. Indeed, some manage to parlay the cognitive blur into a sweet faculty gig, like Nikole Hannah Jones, author of the discredited “The 1619 Project”, now a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. It’s easy to becloud the boundary between political dogmas and scholarship when you don’t know any better. I suspect that she doesn’t know any better.
Either she doesn’t know any better or she does but has forsaken truth-seeking for political activism. The reality is that she’s more of an advocate of a political dogma than a real scholar. Scholarship, like science, is a coherent search for truth. That’s not for her. She has built a career on the false analysis of starting with a conclusory dogmatic belief (“systemic racism”), then engages in an extrapolation from that unproven assumption (the need for “equity”), and then moves onto unfounded speculation to serve her preordained political vision (racial reparations). It’s perfect for protracted political agitation. And it’s an insult to scholarship.
Her affront to logic is astounding. As a point of comparison, the form of truth-seeking and sound logic in the field of science is the scientific method. It begins, absolutely begins, with a testable hypothesis. The proposed answer to a problem (hypothesis) must be stated in a testable manner. A person can’t start with “systemic” as a governing adjective. It’s too ill-defined to be subjected to verification. Jones’s method of thinking has more in common with the Buddhist Sutras than rigorous scientific analysis. She, like others of her ilk, simply claim a “truth” and then run with the ball.
She is part of a tribe of abusers to serious scholarship. Like them, she tries to present an ersatz proof in the form of “statistical disparities”, which are unequal socio-economic measures by demographic group. Blacks suffer a higher rate of maternal deaths for instance. Okay, now what? She jumps to her favored conclusion of “systemic racism”. But that’s not proof of a “system” disfavoring Blacks. She hasn’t even dealt with the question of whether the possible causes are external or internal to the group. That would require a legitimate process of elimination which she doesn’t even attempt, or can’t perform.
A pregnant woman looks out the window at the Robert Taylor Homes projects in Chicago. 2001.
If our “system” is a knee on the neck of Black America and a fixed competition to advance whites as Jones claims, why aren’t whites doing better? Going back to those maternal-mortality rates, whites don’t lead the pack with the smallest maternal death rate. They are tied with Asians, and Hispanics are at the head of the pack with the smallest number. When Jones bellows that she wants “white people to give up whiteness”, does she now mean that “brown people give up their brownness”?
The bankruptcy of “statistical disparities” doesn’t stop there. Average life spans by race don’t cooperate with the Jones’s hallowed belief in “systemic” white supremacy. Whites have been on a slide in longevity for a couple of decades since the onset of the opioid epidemic’s “deaths of despair”. Whites, as in maternal-mortality rates, aren’t on top in life expectancy. The peak is occupied by Asians (89), followed by Hispanics (83), and whites (79) and blacks (73) finish behind. Should “Asians give up their Asianness”?
She gets away with it because she, like her prototype, Jill Biden, has buried the incompetence in a layer of sheepskin and paper in the form of awards from organizations that are equally as corrupted by the fashionable political manias of our time. Corruption begets corruption.
It extends to the academy that hired her, UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. A freebooting activist like Jones, masquerading as a scholar, will face many journalism students who avoided the rigor of an academic core, maybe like her. The School removed the requirements for Econ 101 (basic econ principles and concepts), History 128 (US History, 1865 to present), and Poli Sci 100/101 (US government/state and local government). Forget about any expectation of any learning in Western Philosophy and Civilization, and Logic. They are primed for her nonsense.
The core can be dodged by adhering to a curriculum more attuned to political activism in courses such as “Defining Blackness” (African Studies 50), “Environmentalism and American Society” (Anthro 51), “Collective Leadership Models for Community Change” (Comm 53), “Supernatural Encounters” (Rel 246), and “Emotion and Social Life” (Soc 51). See where Biden’s extra four years of taxpayer-funded education in his “American Families Plan” leads? It heads straight to academic charlatans like Jones, transcripts littered with radical infatuations of the moment, and an untrained and empty head ready to fill slots in the newsroom at The New York Times.
And just think that the Jones brigades of critical race theory (CRT) are spreading into your kids’ primary and secondary schools. Yeah, the schools down the street. “Equity” is CRT’s cover for the use of statistical disparities to force a levelling. That means in today’s doublespeak that your kids, if they are white or white enough, are going to go through Maoist struggle sessions to force them to admit their role of oppressor. Take for instance , the Inclusion and Equity officer for the mostly white Hamilton Southeastern School District, northeast of Indianapolis.
Rosalie Nataki Pettigrew
She promises an eternal crusade for “equity”. She boasts, “You’re on a journey but you never arrive, you get closer [to equity], but you never really get there. It’s continued work, it doesn’t stop, because I think the moment that we stop is the moment that old systems can come back.” The poor kids are being set up to get an unending dose of this lefty indoctrination, or until parents get wise and yank their kids out of this ideological hothouse.
If you’re looking for the clean-cut, button-downed alternative in your “expert”, not the kind in college faculty posts that give birth to the Marxist hoods manning the BLM or Antifa barricades in our big cities, you’ll turn to the bland representatives of McKinsey & Company, a multi-national consultancy operation. Here you’ll find the morally, but appropriately certificated, empty suit. McKinsey puts a premium on the prestigious paper, prestigious degree, from the prestigious university. Pedigree matters more than moral depth. They’ll even take those Humanities majors. From there, McKinsey alumni frequently gravitate to government or to the heavily bureaucratized Fortune 500.
A younger Pete Buttigieg as a McKinsey whiz kid.
No better example can be found of the McKinsey Associate in government than our first gay Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg. The callousness of the tone-deaf empty suit can be seen in this exchange between Sen. Ted Cruz and Buttigieg on Biden’s order to cancel the Keystone pipeline:
Cruz: “So for those workers, the answer is somebody else will get a job?”
Buttigieg: “The answer is we are very eager to see those workers continue to be employed in good-paying union jobs, even if they might be different ones.”
“Different ones”? Once you kill 11,000 jobs, Buttigieg and the rest of the gang over at Biden central can’t guarantee the avoidance of economic despair for the 11,000 now having to resort to unemployment benefits. He can’t wrap his head around the human cost of playing the demi-god with the lives of others.
The mindset around Biden, including Buttigieg’s, is a military one. The workforce is a mass of cogs in a machine who are treated like grunts in the Army, ready to be shunted around as needed. For the Buttigieg types, highly specialized welders are a number to be moved from one column to another in their Excel spreadsheets. Indeed, it’s as simple as Excel to our Harvard and Oxford-trained alumnus of McKinsey and Company. Flesh and blood, personal aspirations, and family welfare be damned for this disconnected careerist. It’s shallow thinking at its harshest and worst.
John Maynard Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace to explain the troubling outcomes of the Carthaginian peace at Versailles in 1919. Keynes followed the academic script by clinically focusing on the economic consequences, but at least he was aware of serious fallout from the decisions made at Versailles. Buttigieg is also probably aware, but seems not to care. For him, he thinks that he can add another field to his Excel federal spending spreadsheet for a retraining program for defunct workers in defunct-by-edict jobs. He hits the enter key and it’s off to the gym as if “problem solved”.
McKinsey-style aloofness, almost callousness, isn’t due to the lack of goals. If anything, this suit is all about goals in his means-ends analysis. However – and I paraphrase James Carville – it’s the goals, stupid. In this manner, he’s like our newest faculty member at UNC-Chapel Hill. Both take a tendentious claim – Jones’s “systemic racism”, apocalyptic climate change for Buttigieg – and run to its mitigation no matter the destroyed livelihoods and ruinous ramifications from their suicidal jihad against the whole of the American way of life. For Jones, it’s “burn baby burn”. For Buttigieg, it’s a cold calculus toward dubious ends. Both will burn down the house.
America is in the grip of a death cult, one that originated on the campus and spread to big philanthropy, the Fortune 500, big sports, and the big-moneyed class in trendy places. The cult is partly populated by a compromised and myopic claque of experts, too many of them caught up in a fanaticism-of-the-moment and cruising way out of their lane. Others in the sect have the accoutrements of “expert” (a degree) but, in reality, are revolutionary firebrands. It’s as if we have created for ourselves a pseudo-technocracy gone mad, or, more specifically, gone woke.
Hugh Hewitt, normally one of the sane people in the media storm in the age of Trump, has joined the ranks of militant busybodies that were unleashed by the current sickness hysteria. A couple of days ago he was agreeing with a caller (a medical doctor, so someone with medical street cred) on the need to continue the mitigations: social distancing, masks, business closures, etc. The day after, he was ranting from his WaPo op-ed about running into groups of joggers and bicyclists on paths who were not practicing his meddlesome measures. He crafted his complaint as one of selfishness and foolishness of the non-compliant. I was incensed … not at the bicyclists but at him.
He would say, and has said, that the numbers and science are on his side. What drivel. Yes, policy making during a pandemic demands the use of statistics and science. But these are some of the ingredients in the recipe for making good policy, not the only ones. Think about it: science has produced many ways to safely abort a baby, but is abortion even acceptable? On such matters, science and numbers can only take you so far in the determination of what ought to be done.
The limitations on science and numbers go beyond the moral issues. They extend to all decision making, and especially to ones that have great impact on the country. It should begin with a presumption on the boundaries for action. In other words, what is acceptable? In combating terrorism in Baghdad, is it appropriate to nuke the city? (Oh, by the way, don’t think that it didn’t come up in many a ribald beerhall conversation around the time of The Surge.) For me, the thought was beyond the pale. The same consideration should be at work in response to a communicable disease. Options like the mass execution of the infected are too horrible to contemplate … and so should the euthanization of the social and economic life of a continental country of 330 million people. Going back to Dirty Harry: “Man must know his limits.”
Who would have thought it was possible? LA freeway without traffic jams during the current California lockdown.
And that’s what we have done with the American lockdown. We’ve decided to nuke Baghdad, so to speak.
There are so many holes in Hewitt’s logic – and others like him – that if it was a ship, it’d sink. Forcing a population of 330 million to take on the appearance of bank robbers is foolishness in the extreme. An argument in support of the nonsense relies on the highly contagious nature of the virus. Wait a minute. All viruses, as well as bacteria, are contagious and dangerous to certain classes of persons. Yes, Hugh, no surprise, the things are small enough to swim in aerosols (suspended fine droplets of moisture). Always have.
But there’s a fallback position for the would-be authoritarians. Wait for it: they proclaim that this one is particularly deadly. Well, to be honest, it’s lethal only to vulnerable groups, but these people are vulnerable to any malevolent bug, and there are many, many of those without the coronavirus in the mix. Hewitt’s stance is actually a demand that many of us will come to know only a third of a person’s face from here on out. Apparently, for him, it’s the new normal.
I guess that the discovery of masks on a couple of dimwits who just held up the local Wells Fargo can no longer satisfy the new post-pandemic standard for “probable cause” when so many of us have a few in the glove box, thanks to Hewitt, others like him, and that band of “experts” straying way outside their lane.
Good, upstanding citizen in a bank or larcenist? Answer: larcenist at a bank in Odessa, Tx., January 2020.Good, upstanding citizen in a bank or larcenist? Answer: larcenist in a bank in Lower Gwynedd, Penn., September 2019.
Furthermore, why bother putting anyone in a police lineup with half the face gone? Criminal investigations will be farcical in Hewitt’s brave new world. The only parallel that comes to mind is the demand by some Muslims for their women to be photographed in the burqa for government-issued ID’s. A crowded DMV under the current protocols would logically require a photo of everyone in a full burka or at a minimum in Jesse James mode. Of course, what good are the pics with two-thirds of the face veiled?
Voter ID laws are similarly made useless since the picture is undecipherable. The electorate instantly becomes whoever happens to be breathing – or not breathing in the case of Chicago – on US soil at the time of the election, a fervently sought end state of the Pelosi Democratic Party. It’s an interesting way to repeal protections of the ballot from fraud.
Exceptions? Come on, what Gretchen Whitmer, Andrew Cuomo, Nancy Pelosi, Gavin Newsom, and every other power-hungry politico in high office isn’t salivating at the opportunity to embrace full burka getups and the N95 bank-robber look in state-issued id’s and driver’s licenses if need be? But how will cops identify a pulled-over driver with everyone disguised in their mask? It certainly will be easier for under-aged teens to buy beer as they approach the counter with the same mask that appears on their older brother’s driver’s license. Clerks will have to learn the science of forensic facial recognition absent two-thirds of the face … or, more likely, the booze age limits will become passé.
See, the scheme is so unworkable in the long term. It’s a short-term response that some meatheads want to make the “new normal”. Amazing!
There is no limiting principle in the logic of the shutdowns, every-man-is-an-island mode of social interaction, ending gatherings and the First Amendment’s right of association, the mask-wearing nonsense, and government squashing the livelihoods of millions as businesses are forcibly shuttered. You simply can’t take a meat axe to the social and economic parts of life and still have anything resembling a life.
Some have proposed that the epidemic should be treated as a war, like Trump and ironically his “progressive” foes who are constantly on the lookout for the next “moral equivalent of war”. What they’re after, more accurately, is total war. Total war is the complete involvement of the community from kids collecting scrap metal in the neighborhood, to bond drives, the militarization of the work force, to all kinds of conservation and rationing schemes. But here’s the kicker: all war plans presume the existence of an economy. No economy, no war material, and no war. They want total war without the “total”.
The advocates of William James’s “moral equivalent of war” in response to the virus have killed off much of the economy. And given their rationale, they would inflict the prescription on us anytime the same, mutated, or cousin of the bug makes an encore. Can you imagine our economy and social life sitting on pins and needles every flu season? Stress on the people goes through the roof, uncertainty for all investment is the “new normal”, business and commerce becomes unsteady as they constantly look over their shoulders at the latest moves by some commissar, and workers and everybody else can’t plan ahead. Get used to that word “depression”. That will be our new normal.
We can’t do this, this shutting down of life. We can’t continue with social distancing, universal sheltering-in-place, the masks, and an end to work life – or its constriction. And what’s with this planned obsolescence of the neighborhood school, with its lifetime memories of friendships, teachers, band, cheerleaders, games? We can’t do this, and never should have done it. Instead, we need to do something more sensible: limit restrictions to the infected and vulnerable, pump private and public moneys into therapies and cures, and leave the rest of us to conduct our lives in accordance with our conscience and our God.
We should be admonished to proclaim “never again”. “Never again” applies to genocides, and it could also refer to the horror wreaked on our social, religious, and work lives. Never again. Please, never again.
