Millennials – Page 2 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

March 26, 2022March 26, 2022

A Religion for High Prices and Neo-Feudalism

An electrical contractor repairs a sign with gasoline fuel prices above six and seven dollars a gallon at the Shell gas station at Fairfax and Olympic Blvd, near a billboard of John Oliver, in Los Angeles, California, on March 8, 2022. (Photo by Patrick T. FALLON / AFP) (Photo by … — Changing prices at a Shell station in Southern California, March 22, 2022.

Economic inelasticity: a measure of an economic activity’s responsiveness to price changes. Inelastic supply is production made unresponsive to price fluctuations.

Market: the spontaneous arrangements that brings buyers and sellers together. Markets can be constrained by natural barriers (geography, availability of resources, etc.) and interventions (government).

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Some elements of the Right are deserving of condemnation for their forays into imbecilic isolationism. Their tariff nationalism and sophomoric hostility to our present and natural allies stagger the mind. That said, the biggest and most persistent threat to the welfare of the nation by far is the Democratic Party and its congregation of the Left.

Nuttery has little effect without powerful, organizational patrons. The donkey party has turned itself into the institutional home of the Left; the faculty lounge is the home seminary of the Left; and the seminary’s gospel is a fanciful, semi-religious, but material and messianic apocalyptism. Don’t mistake this for the traditional Second Coming. This endtime arises from glib Gaia-worship, a faith that angles to translate prophesies of doom into power. Its doctrine is in actuality an ideology and the attendant politics amounts to a missionary zeal for conversion, forcible or voluntary.

Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D, NY) introduces her Green New Deal, translating alarmism into policy, 2019.

But the appeal of this new faith is limited. Unlike Christianity that has a natural allure to all groups – the equality of all souls – this substitute creed is most attractive to the demographic product of its seminaries (college graduates), who are most prominently, but not solely, the degreed halfwits in the super zips (codes). Their half-wittedness is the fruit of the degraded and narrow education in the tenets of this debased secular faith. These people aren’t trained to question their assumptions. They are zealots that occupy the cultural commanding heights to influence and obtain office to force their form of salvation on the reluctant.

See the source image

Church/state separation be damned, they declare war on prosperity, independent consumer choices, entire industries, and the Constitution while they herd the population into cramped dwellings, ev’s, and mass transit. Freedom is the freedom to live only their way. I’m reminded of Orwell’s 1984:

“War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.”

And so the zealots march off and into elected office, the staffs of the elected, government employment, techie enterprises, the corporate boardroom, ad agencies, the press, law firms, Hollywood, and into the teacher corps of our schools – what G.K. Chesterton called the “chattering classes”.

The fruit of their endeavors, among other things, is a disfigured economic life, and more misery than what would occur without them running the show. Supply and demand get malformed, made inflexible to the unexpected twists and turns of existence. A pandemic hits and, voilà, we have empty store shelves, supply chain disruptions, inflation, a suppressed work ethic, fiscal insolvency, and the doldrums’ persistence into the foreseeable future.

That’s the thing, it doesn’t take much to maul the gears of an economy and hamper recovery. Demand remains pretty consistent (inelastic) for things like fossil fuels, rising with growth, and only declining when a recession hits, with its lost jobs and business closures. Not good. Supply is hamstrung (made inelastic) to respond to the demands of prosperity after the imposition of utopia. Not good.

And utopia is what it’s all about. Wherever the Dems hold sway in the halls of power – local, state, federal – they are running full speed toward their mirage of eco-nirvana. Democrat state-level fiefdoms are famous for it. The grid is target numero uno. California concocted its 100 Percent Clean Energy Act to command the state’s electricity to be carbon-free by 2045. Washington State’s Clean Energy Transformation Act commands its utilities to be carbon neutral in eight years. New York passed the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act that commands a net-zero economy by 2050. Hawaii jumps into the fray with its House Bill 623 that commands a 100% renewable energy grid by California’s year. They are declarations of war on fossil fuels, and the energy supply gets bulldozed.

Gov. Jerry Brown signs SB 100, mandating 100 percent renewable energy in California by 2045, on Sept. 10, 2018.

Notice the use of the word “command”, as in “command economy”? Karl Marx would be proud.

These lords of the state capital have jerry-rigged all manner of means to achieve the desired end. All of them, however, take the same tack of regulating traditional energy to death. Jerry Brown (as in jerry-rigged) and Gavin Newsom of the not-so-golden state are gung-ho. Brown, after signing the previously mentioned ukase, boasted, “California is committed to doing whatever is necessary to meet the existential threat of climate change.” There you have it: semi-theological apocalyptics combined with a newly inaugurated command economy.

Not to be outdone, Governors Cuomo and Hochul of New York read from the same prayer book. They, like the suzerains of the San Diego-to-San Francisco corridor (the rest of the state has little political pull), are enthusiasts for bans and regulatory dead weights. No fracking, no new permits, no new gas hookups for homes, and no pipelines. Thus, the residents of New York and anybody east of them get the privilege of paying six times more for natural gas than, say, the lucky folks of Texas or Louisiana. No pipelines are allowed across the empire state to possibly carry the fuel the 400 miles from the Marcellus Shale. Instead, it must be shipped from distant kleptocracies.

See the source image — Protest against the fossil fuel industry – pipelines, et al – in New York in 2012.

The same price penalty applies to everyone living in California. Like everything else in the state – housing, electricity, food, cars, you name it – gasoline runs at a buck-and-half clip above the national average ($5.85 vs. $4.33/gal.) for the commuters on Newsom’s roads, which happen to be among the worst in the nation. What a deal? The “bargain” combines a doom-premium (“existential threat of climate change”) in the form of high taxes and exorbitantly priced energy with crappy pavement. No wonder it’s hard to find a U-Haul to flee the state. Demand has outstripped supply.

If it’s obviously such a great deal for the country, with the utopians professing to be on the same team with the angels, why do they have to wallow in falsehoods? In Biden-speak, he said on March 14, “Make no mistake, the current spike in gas prices is largely the fault of Vladimir Putin — it has nothing to do with the American Rescue Plan.” Translation: It ain’t me! But it is . . . to a great degree. He’s doing his best to make energy supplies inelastic and prone to shocks, whether it be a virus run amok or Putin’s dream of a Greater Russia.

Biden blames Putin and his Ukraine war for the inflation rate and high gas prices. He won’t succeed. — Biden blames Putin and the Ukraine War for high gas prices, March 2022.

The only truism in his corner is cause-and-delayed-effect. Societies don’t operate like toggle switches – instant-on/instant-off. It takes time for policy changes to translate into behavior and effects, both positive and negative. Time is necessary for people to get their act together in the form of land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship. Since California is his model, the complete effect of Biden’s pummeling of the energy sector will take years for the whole country to fully feel California’s chronically high energy rates, blackouts, shortages, stagflation, deteriorating roads, trains to nowhere, and bottomless spending on expensive-but-decrepit mass transit, and, lest we forget, the brewing campaign against homes with yards (single-family residential). No space privacy for you and your kids, peasants!

Likewise, it took a number of years for the widespread use of fracking beginning around 2011 and the repeal of the ban on the export of domestic crude in 2015 to turn into Trump’s bluster about energy independence and the US as net exporter. Sometimes, occupying the seat of power at the moment of good times is sufficient to enjoy the afterglow of public adulation.

But Trump and Congressional Republicans are actually deserving of praise because they greased the economic skids instead of throwing sand in the gears as Biden and the donkey party are currently doing. The thinking of Republicans is in the right place. For the R’s, pipelines (XL, Dakota Access) are a good deal. For the R’s, drilling on public lands is a great thing for supply and cheap prices. For the R’s, subsidy briberies for solar and wind and the purchase of Teslas are viewed correctly as an assault on freedom and the public purse, and move us closer to a grid that operates with all the reliability of a utility in Lagos, Nigeria, or California. Not good.

You can only get so much out of wind and solar. It’s called low energy density, an inherent characteristic of the two. As a result, low density must be compensated by the construction of vast plantations of panels and forests of huge propeller towers marring the earth’s surface. Lurking behind the scenes is natural-gas peaker plants to deal with the erratic production (the wind and sun are variable). The whole mammoth charade demands colossal sunk costs in redesigning the grid and the development of a storage system to make the massive contraption the complete energy source for your Netflix streaming addiction. Wouldn’t it be much easier with fewer lost opportunities (i.e., opportunity cost, the real meaning of the word “cost”) to clean up fossil fuels?

Certainly, Biden and the episcopate of the Church of Climate Change are aware of the monstrous costs and disruptions. It’s just that they don’t care. When you’re a believer, you’re a believer. And so, when American voters let Biden and company into command of the executive branch, they are going to get the full effect of the reunion of church and state, California style. It’s Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy all over again.

He didn’t disappoint the faithful from the get-go. Fresh from the chilly inauguration on the west front of the Capitol, Biden ordered an assault on domestic crude oil production by halting new leases, permits, and mining on federal lands, onshore, offshore, anywhere under federal control. Chad Padgett, former senior executive for BLM in Alaska, put it succinctly when he described an Interior Department memo, pursuant to Biden’s ukase, barring the issuance of “any onshore or offshore fossil fuel authorization, including but not limited to a lease, amendment to a lease, affirmative extension of a lease, contract, or other agreement, or permit to drill.” Half the 23 million acres of the Alaska National Petroleum Preserve was made off-limits. Authority over the process was centralized in the hands of Commissar Laura Daniel Davis, then-acting assistant secretary for Lands and Minerals at BLM, creating industrial death from bureaucratic atherosclerosis. Now, inelasticity applies to bureaucracy’s arteries as well as energy supplies.

Biden’s recent blame-Putin schtick to avoid responsibility for his stake in the mess rings hollow. Having spent his entire career in demagoguery and electoral pandering, the guy exhibits little understanding of enterprise of the free variety. People in the real world of business look over the horizon before they sink big bank on a venture. What they see into the near future, and maybe beyond, is Biden’s declaration in a 2020 debate:

“No more drilling on federal lands. No more drilling, including offshore. No ability for the oil industry to continue to drill, period. Ends.”

Can’t get much plainer than that. The delay normally accompanying a policy is reduced when demagogic hostility is combined with the accelerant of pandemic-inspired cuts in production at a time of quick recovery from the nightmare. Why invest in an industry that the donkey party and its administration declared to be the equivalent of kiddie porn?

That’s not all. We’ll enjoy the benefits of California’s sclerotic supplies alongside California’s high-priced everything. All of this will be wrapped in an increasingly feudal way of life. As in the old Soviet Union, a new aristocracy of the party and its nomenklatura will ride on top of a beleaguered class of commoners. Thank you, Democrats.

RogerG

December 28, 2021December 31, 2021

EVs: The Frivolity of Transportation by Fiat

Electric vehicle of the early 20th century.

EV: noun; abr.; electric vehicle.
Frivolity: noun; acting in a way that is silly or wasteful.
Fiat: noun; an arbitrary order. (arbitrary: based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system)

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Put the three words together: Turning all American car owners into EV proprietors in the span of 5-10 years by government fiat is an exercise in frivolity, and ruinous in the end.

Indeed, the whole campaign is arbitrary (fiat), totally lacking in sound reasoning. The end state of having all Americans junk their fully functional family sedans, minivans, and SUVs would turn upside down wholesale patterns of living just to satisfy a splinter group’s fantasy.

What prompted this observation? AAA’s “Via” magazine and its feature article, “Going the Distance: Tips and tricks from electric vehicle owners” (Nov./Dec. 2021). The splinter group in question is abundantly replicated in the article. The three profiled EV owners are full California urbanistas from the San Francisco Bay Area and Southern California (Santa Rosa, Santa Clara, Irvine area). All are degreed in environmental studies, the Humanities, or digital tech. All are cloistered urbanites who visit rental properties, coastal B-and-B’s, the arts-and-crafts circuit, and venture into the forests for the snap visit to mother nature. Trip distances are short or limited in routes.

In other words, they represent the left coast fringe – socially, economically, and politically. These are the type of people who reflect the lives and norms of those who pursue an existence in rather exclusive suburban ranch houses, gentrified flats, landscaped yards, and aren’t likely to get their hands dirty working wrenches and equipment. The supporting cast of workers for this insular urban lifestyle has a separate life that is a world apart. Yet, the white collars want to force their preferences on everyone, no matter our circumstances.

Young people walking on top of canal boat

As such, one of the things that Biden brought to the White House was California, meaning its progressive personnel and monoculture. And that means the state’s eco-looniness. The EV-love in the administration’s ukases, like much that gurgles out of the left coast’s sunshine state, lacks any sound rationale, either environmental or economic.

The environmental justification is the easiest to dispense with. The ol’ bugaboo of climate change – as bellowed by that great thinker of our times, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg – is infected with leaps of faith and logic. The reality is that the atmosphere is too voluminous, its content too varied, and influences too multitudinous to justify Greta’s tantrum (Sept. 2021), “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood!” That should give you a flavor of the hysteria to force you out of your fully functional and efficient Chevy Suburban.

Greta Thunberg during her Zoomed UN speech on September 23, 2019.

What good is accomplished, though, by banishing the $40,000 investment in fuel, oil, metal, plastic, chips, and rubber in your garage, the euthanization of 2 million jobs in the fuel industry, and scotching the great advances in emissions and fuel efficiency down to the present? Nothing, absolutely nothing. Surely, Greta and her handlers in Big Environmentalism must realize that they have no street cred in Beijing and New Delhi – nearly 3 billion people combined and no desire to return to living in the dirt. Stack up their car fleets with ours. You would be replacing the cleaner things in our country with dirty cars, dirty power plants, and dirty air among these teeming hordes outside the developed world. Sorry, Greta, you’re nuts.

In the end, the amount of energy-trapping gases would scarcely budge, if not increase as capital seeking its highest rate of return rushes away from us to refuges of greater opportunity in places hungry to enjoy air conditioning. Dirty expands, clean shrinks. Punishing the clean is not a winning strategy.

So, why the headlong rush to the EV? Climate change doesn’t work for this lifestyle coup. Fact is, the campaign is a jumble of fantasies, fantasies about windmills, solar panels, and EVs. Greta’s fantasy sounds so simple. . . to the simple-minded.

The simple fact is that the EV is no practical substitute for the internal combustion engine. The infrastructure – repairmen, convenient and numerous charging stations, affordable parts and abundant retail outlets – will take multiple decades to arise. But the zealots are impatient: remember, 5-10 years to bankrupt you and the millions employed in keeping the existing fleet on the road. It’s reminiscent of the Stalin’s dekulakization campaign of the 1930’s. Eager to create forthwith Marx’s vision of the communal ideal, Stalin ordered (by fiat) the huge number of peasants in the Russian population – 82% of the total population – to give up their property and many of their belongings and herd them onto huge collective farms. The subsequent upheaval led to massive starvation and a huge expansion of concentration camps. An epidemic of death was inflicted on the bread basket of Russia. Similarly, lifestyle choices outsourced to the federal apparatchiks of Build Back Better will fare no better than Stalin’s Five-Year Plans.

Scenes from the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine of 1932-3.

Why should the infantile ramblings of Greta and The Squad have greater weight than my own? Their dream has incompatible elements. Hitched to universal EV ownership is windmills, solar panels, and any energy scheme conjured in a gentrified Brooklyn flat. Sadly, the lab rats who are Californians show us the results. Blackouts and the high cost of energy are the outcomes. So, just as we are bribed and whipped into EV’s, they are making the grid more expensive and unstable. Picture this: you rush out to get to work and find your Nissan Leaf with too little juice to make it to the office or get the kids to school. Blackouts just blacked out your car.

Okay, you and your kids can always Zoom . . . if the lights come back on. The pandemic lockdowns showed how that worked. More than the grid was destabilized.

As for that holiday visit to grandma’s house of 300 miles one way? Think about it, 250 miles is the likely limit before your wheels come to a dead stop. Of course, you know that ahead of time. If the grid hasn’t gone dark and you have the 6-8 hours to charge the thing before departure, you still have to restrict your route to the availability of chargers. Let’s just hope that you chose right and the plug-ins are operational. If not, expect a motel expense and an overnight layover.

If something mechanically should go awry, well, you’re stuck. The ubiquitous shade tree mechanic or guy who built a top fuel dragster won’t be of any help. The ready availability of parts and community knowledge is decades into the future. Hope that the diesel bus or train stops at the nearby hamlet.

If, by chance, you get the thing to the dealership, they might discover that the huge lithium battery pack is plated over and in need of replacement, a $20,000 part. The battery’s life was apparently cut short by all the 30-minute fast charging, a necessary activity due to much long-distance commuting or forgetting to plug the thing for the safer 6-8 hours of overnight charging. The 10-year lifespan was turned into 6. Normally, you’ll notice the deterioration in shorter operational distances as you begin to panic in the desperate search for a charge in the many and expanding derelict urban districts along the way. Maybe the thought of being held up at gunpoint disabuses you of that short excursion to Walmart.

Chances are, if you’re so into EV’s, you’re also apoplectic about open pit mines and polluted air and water, just the type of thing that inhabits third world kleptocracies, Putin’s Russia, and Xi’s China. That’s where we find the rare earth minerals for the batteries of your feel-good EV; however, rest assured that your EV won’t be responsible for inundating the Obama estate on Martha’s Vineyard. Everyone else in the mass of humanity will, thanks to your insatiable appetite for lithium batteries.

The utopian rush to the EV has consequences, many of them not pleasant. It’s what happens when adults turn over governance to childish and monomaniacal fanatics. Their tunnel vision becomes our tunnel vision, their leaps of logic become our leaps of logic. It’s a lesson that the editors of AAA’s “Via” magazine – Whitney Phaneuf, Katie Henry, Mandy Ferreira, and Rebecca Smith Hurd – should take to heart before they fob off on us their niche proclivities.

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Watch a Norwegian Tesla owner destroy his Model S because of the prohibitive $22,000 cost to replace the car’s battery pack.

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RogerG

September 27, 2021September 28, 2021

Left-Wing Glamour at War with Physics and Economics

Remember Biden behind the wheel of Ford’s F150 Lightning, a propaganda stunt to make EV’s appealing to rednecks (like me)? Anyone, though, with a smidgen of brain function will notice the silliness of the whole exercise. Ford’s newest addition to its truck lineup is a Rube Goldberg contraption whose purpose is a political one, not a practical one that can only emerge from the many confrontations with reality over time, like the iconic F150. It’s what happens when greenie fantasies declare war on physics and economics.

The saga begins with greenie dreams of heaven on earth and hatred for those not so enthralled with the dreamscape. When the dream captures the imagination of people similarly cocooned, people removed from the hoi polloi and rustics, but powerfully influential, it is shoved onto everyone else. So, if hair-on-fire congresswomen from gerrymandered, gentrified districts scream the climate-change apocalypse, out comes the snooty vilification and pressure on the corporate bigs to play along if they want to remain in the cool persons’ club.

Our excitable hair-on-fire congresswomen from NY’s 14th Congressional District.

Of course, the way is greased with other people’s money in tax credits and subsidies. To get on board the money train, the bigs conjure something that . . . works . . . but . . . . Thus, we get the Ford F150 Lightning with its 1,800 pound battery that takes 12.5 hours to recharge. The problem with EV’s has always been the battery. For the Lightning, a longer range and heavier battery is an option; the behemoth becomes a real behemoth. The problem is still the battery.

Now, imagine yourself the kind of person who actually likes, and needs, trucks. By the way, they aren’t the kind who reside in Greenwich Village flats, shop at Whole Foods, and whose personal transportation needs are satisfied by an electric golf cart masquerading as an EV car and Uber and Lyft. I’m talking about the type of people producing the grain that goes into our Boston University graduate’s plant-based Awesome Burger. An EV is as practical as a Gucci suit at a barn raising.

In such locales in the fruited plains, distance means distance, as in many, many miles. What happens when the twenty-something offspring took the sleek thing on a beer run the night before but forgot to plug it in? On your monthly trip to Costco the next day – 300 miles round trip – the contraption stops dead on the interstate. What do you do? The thing is heavy, takes 12.5 hours to charge, and nothing as simple as a five-gallon gas can offers a solution. If you are on the interstate, call for a heavy-lift, flat-bed tow truck. If you are stuck on a dirt road in a sea of rolling hills on the northern plains in the middle of winter, you die.

The northern Great Plains of the United States.

For our congresswoman from her gerrymandered, gentrified perch in the megalopolis, the answer is The Green New Deal. Capital meant for better devices and more energy will now go into upending the grid and bribing people with other people’s money to buy the contrivances, by force of law. We’ll end up with a mountain of the impractical and a lot less of the stuff that works. The state will simply step in to command the laws of economics and physics to disappear.

The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali, 1931.

Welcome to 21st century America. It’s a world that Salvador Dali made famous in his paintings. No, it’s not a real world, but it is to our hair-on-fire congresswoman from the Bronx/Queens. She actually believes in “her truth”, a “truth” at war with the laws of physics and economics. Biden also believes in her truth. This style of “reality” may be appealing as art in a Dali exhibit at the Met but is not so agreeable as policy to a South Dakota farmer stuck as the snow begins to fall with no cell reception.

A Russian teen found frozen to death in a car in 2020.

Left-wing glamour confronts the plain facts of existence and the results aren’t pretty.

RogerG

May 14, 2021May 19, 2021

They Caught ‘Em

The booking photos of, L to R, pf Rowan Dalbey, Kristen Aumoithe and Amber Lucas.

California gave to the nation mind-boggling aerospace, movies, the wonderful cornucopia of the Central Valley, and the high tech universe. Now, we must add half-literate loons to the list of exports. Weeks after the testimony of Barry Brodd, a former Santa Rosa police officer and current use-of-force expert, in support of Derek Chauvin’s defense, three women, maybe others, descended on a home in Santa Rosa thinking it was still occupied by Brodd. They vandalized the house in pig’s blood and left a pig’s head on the front porch. The only problem: the acts are felony vandalism and Brodd, like many of the retired California men and women in blue, no longer live in the state. The halfwits only ruined the sleep and property of quite innocent people.

The Santa Rosa home vandalized by the three “social justice warriors”.

The fact that Brodd no longer lives in the state says volumes. Not to say that he lives there but there is a reason for the existence of “blue Idaho”. In fact, huge colonies of Californian refugees are littered throughout the country, mostly west of the Mississippi. One reason for the exodus is the fact that the state is in the grip of people like Rowan Dalbey (20), Kristen Aumoithe (34), and Amber Lucas (34) – now charged felons. If you watch the video, you’ll get a brief backgrounder of at least one of the culprits, Lucas. She’s a “social justice warrior” and something of a wine connoisseur. The other two look like her sisters.

Take a look and you’ll get a glimpse into the mind of California’s ruling class.

RogerG

May 8, 2021May 8, 2021

College, College, College. What a Mistake.

A photo of Bowman Hall on the campus of the University of Kentucky.

For years, many people – me included – encouraged others to go to college. We pontificated that the only way to break glass ceilings, indeed, all socio-economic ceilings, was to get a degree. I think that we were right in limited circumstances, but then it became a mania. Other routes to betterment were maligned and a full-frontal assault was manufactured to shove young people into collegiate classrooms. Money, money, and more money, along with a full-throated indoctrination campaign from Sesame Street to pop entertainment to the high school guidance counselor were geared with singleness of purpose to get every warm body into a college desk. Looking back on it, the whole humongous effort was a colossal waste. And it shows.

Richard Vedder, Distinguished Professor of Economics Emeritus at Ohio University, writing in Forbes draws the curtains back to show the emperor to be naked. You can read his eye-opening piece here.

He begins his analysis with a National Bureau of Economic Research study of the recent rise in college graduation rates, a reversal of the previous long-lasting trend. A good thing, right? In one sense, yes, but in another, it’s a sign of the decline of academic excellence. The author eliminated improvements in such things as academic preparation in the lower grades and greater access to taxpayer subsidies as the causes. There’s good evidence of rot in the former and the latter has no connection to anything but tuition inflation. The authors end up with grade inflation for the spike in graduation rates.

Average grades have risen as measures of study time have fallen. Transcripts are littered with anything but coursework in science, math, or classical philosophy. But we have those great GPA’s.

Grade inflation. Look at those declining F’s-B’s, and the leap in A’s.

Many teachers are mightily trying to produce an educated citizenry. I’ve had the pleasure of working with a good number of them. Surely, a good portion of the blame applies to further down the social supply chain and outside of it (politics?).

The increase in college graduation rates is not a time for uncorking bottles of champagne. We’ll have to keep in mind that these numbers arise out of a very troubled educational environment.

RogerG

April 27, 2021April 27, 2021

Empty Pews and the Rule of Race-Agitators

House Democratic Party leaders: Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Jerry Nadler.

Today, we might be sensing the whiff of the kind of social decay that earlier laid open the ancient classical world to Christianity. A fatigued civilization, for whatever reason, can’t generate the resistance to something else filling the void. In the Greco-Roman world, the emptiness was filled with the beauty of Christianity. In our own time, it’s the onrush of the vile postmodernism and its depraved cousin, critical race theory, that is attempting to displace Christianity. The elites of all stations get caught up in the mania for this latest new thing, even if it is a moral and logical mess. We are entering a really dark place. Yet, hope lies in the fact that we’ve had trials before, and Christianity has proven to be remarkably resilient.

Sparse attendance at an United Methodist Church.

The current decline of Christianity in modern America is stunning. A Pew survey of American religiosity from 2019 shows the dire situation in just 10 years. In a nutshell, adherents of Catholicism and Protestantism are down (51% to 43%), and agnosticism, “nothing in particular”, and atheists are up . . . in just 10 years! Plowing the field deeper, the drops are most significant among those in the East, the college-educated, Democrats, and the young, with Millennials taking first place among the youthful disaffiliated. Nothing about his should be surprising if you’ve followed the culture.

The decline can be traced to the failure of our institutions. Marriage has been redefined into a near oblivion with easy no-fault divorce, thereby leaving behind a tranche of emotionally-scarred children. The schools, in an effort to maintain religious neutrality by bleaching any hint of God from the curriculum, are training grounds for materialism (the material world is all that there is). The family provides no corrective since it has been incubated in the singular quest for material pleasure. The state reinforces the materialism by the transformation of its core mission into the nation’s nanny. All it can do is affect a person’s material condition, not their spirit or soul, if you will. In the end, the ever-expansive state crowds out the church and its essential social mission. It’s more and more a world without God.

The experience of the 20th century shows that the displacement of God tends to lead to the emplacement of man in His place. God goes down the memory hole and man gets deified. The deification occurs in the sanctification of the words of certain trendy persons. Their words are worshipped like Moses receiving the Commandments from the burning bush. They require no proof for their validity. They are simply announced and off to the barricades the zealots go.

The new gospel is postmodernism. It rejects a single, overarching truth, and makes all claims of truth to be dependencies of who and what is in power. Truth isn’t objective; it’s relative to those in a position to impose it. The problem: it justifies a skepticism of all claims and ends in a belief in nothing. A person under its sway will be forever in a state of second-guessing themselves. They end up where G.K. Chesterton found them:

“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

The “anything” could be modern “critical race theory”, “systemic racism”, or the neo-Marxism rampaging in the streets of Portland, anything put forward by anyone with a platform and power to push it. So, a philosophical movement meant to question power comes around to being a chief exponent of it: power in its most crass expression.

Enter Herbert Marcuse. Marcuse, an acolyte of the Frankfurt School (Institute of Social Research) in Germany, took the oppressor/oppressed dialectic of Marx and postmodernism’s chaining of truth to power to concoct the “critical theory” of today’s “critical race theory” (CRT). In Marcuse, the consciousness bit is hyped to present truth, and our awareness of the truth, to be a product of our power position in society. The powerful – the “privileged” in CRT – can be defined by race, gender, ethnicity, any one of a number of materially-based categories. Your consciousness – your values, intentions, beliefs, your head – is locked in place by your melanin count, et al. If you fall into the lighter side of the color spectrum, for example, you can say nothing to deny your “privilege” – code for power. You are as guilty as the darker pigments are founts of wisdom since they are deemed “oppressed”. Logic, reason, the scientific method, and any prior civilizational core tenet cannot be allowed to contravene the yapping of the race-hustlers on MSNBC, The View, the streets of Minneapolis, or the Democratic Party’s big cheeses. After all, their “truth” is covered by the claim that they give voice to the voiceless, a banality in common use in such circles.

If you haven’t noticed, their contradictory circular logic leads them back to a power grab to impose a “truth”. The whole thing is a hot mess, and a dangerous one at that.

What happens when the oppressors and oppressed switch roles: the oppressed become the oppressors? Of course, all of this is nonsense. Most single moms in a crime-ridden slum aren’t storming a Baltimore Target. The barking is coming from multi-millionaires and billionaires like Oprah or LeBron James, or a host of others of the oppressed-by-skin-color who have estates on Martha’s Vineyard and attended elite prep schools. The skin-color matrix breaks down as the new “privileged” take on the mantle of Lenin’s vanguard elite. In the end, we’ve got a new slate of “oppressors” as the consciousness bit is weaponized to crush opposition. The new “truth” that is not beholden to logic, law, the scientific method, math, or reason is set loose with no barrier to its realization. Are you sensing a whiff of totalitarianism?

Maxine Waters (D, Ca.) cavorts to Minneapolis to incite street extortion for her preferred verdict, and shouts “shut your mouth” to Rep. Jim Jordan (R, Oh.). Mazie Hirono (D, Ha.) goes before cameras to demand that men “Just shut up” if they attempt to prevent her from performing a career lynching of Brett Kavanaugh. Biden and Harris jump to cameras after the Chauvin verdict to announce a crusade against “systemic racism” without a shred of logic, reason, or evidence to justify the inquisition. Biden turns loose the powers of the federal authorities to indoctrinate the young in the contemptible “critical race theory” by reversing Trump’s order to stop the mental devastation in the federal government. Things are happening that should send chills down your spine, and all because some suburbanites had angst about Trump’s comportment.

Yep, elections have consequences, and many of them are hellish. The period between the present and the 2022 elections is a race, a race to see how much damage the New-Left-in-Democrat-clothes can inflict on the country before they are stopped in a vote of the people. The political charlatans currently running the show have a window of opportunity for them to unwittingly push the country into a major rupture. If they are successful in DC in ramming through their revolution, there’s too much of the rest of the country that won’t abide by it.

Ironically, states and cities under the sway of the New Left showed the way for red states who wish not to join their revolution. Leftists in power declared their jurisdictions to be sanctuary cities and states for illegal immigrants. As per blue states, red states are forming an expanding list of Second Amendment sanctuary states. Disunion, if it does happen, began with the Left’s flaunting of the clear Constitutional federal authority over immigration and may end with the two-thirds of the other states whose citizens don’t wish to be remain in a union with states who are striving to relegate them to second-class political status.

Gabrielle Clark, mother of the 12th-grader, who is suing her school and district for the imposition of critical race theory curriculum.

More pushback is germinating. Critical race theory’s totalitarian indoctrination is being challenged in court and before school boards. Examples are many. A father publicly pulled his daughter out of Brearley, an elite $54,000 per year New York private school for propaganda acts such as a school-sponsored student “Anti-racism pledge”. He says the school’s antiracism actions were “misguided, divisive, counterproductive and cancerous”. Gabrielle Clark, mother of a twelfth-grader in a Nevada charter school, filed suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada in December 2020. In her complaint, her son’s school “inserted consciousness raising and conditioning exercises under the banner of ‘Intersectionality’ and ‘Critical Race Theory.’” Further, “The lesson categorized certain racial and religious identities as inherently ‘oppressive,’ . . . and instructed pupils including [her son] who fell into these categories to accept the label ‘oppressor.’” This is Khmer Rouge stuff, and happening all over the country, and likely to intensify as the full resources of the federal government are brought to bear in service of the jihad.

How much more can the union endure? These are tumultuous times. May cooler heads prevail.

RogerG
*Thanks for the informational contributions and insights of Peter J. Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute, Bari Weiss, former New York Times editor, and Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay in their book, Cynical Theories.

September 13, 2020September 13, 2020

We Are All Bobos Now

Pres. Nixon in an off-camera remark to ABC News anchor Howard K. Smith in 1971 said, “We are all Keynesians now”, or something like it. Nixon was describing his about-face on the gold standard and the imposition of wage and price controls. Nixon announced that once again the government interventionism of Keynes – the high priest of Democratic Party economics going back to FDR – was back in vogue in response to the onset of stagflation (stagnant economic growth and inflation). Smith was astounded by Nixon’s reversal and compared it to a Christian declaring, “all things considered, I think Mohammad was right.” It’s interesting to see how a thing becomes so pervasive that it seeps into individuals and groups historically resistant to it.

President Richard Nixon during an Interview with John Chancellor, Eric Sevareid, Howard K. Smith and Nancy Dickerson for the Television Special Program “A Conversation with the President” (1971).

Bobos in America

The same could be said of cultural shifts. For instance, a new set of values and mores percolates from the world of the beau monde (the beautiful people, the smart set, the jet set) to the acquisitive middle class. One of the recurring worries for Republicans is the gradual shift of the suburbs to the Democrats. What would account for it? Here’s a thought, reworking Nixon’s famous quip: We are all bobo’s now.

Bobo’s? The term jumped into the vernacular when David Brooks authored Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There in 2000. The portmanteau (two words collapsed into one) of “bourgeois” and “bohemian” signified the presence of a new and growing social class starting in the 1970’s. It was a blending of meritocratic capitalism (bourgeois) and the hedonism of the counter-culture (bohemian). The socially unconventional became married to the pursuit of wealth and status.

A witticism of Andrew Breitbart’s completes the theoretical outline. He was famous for saying “politics is downstream from culture”. So, as goes a person’s values and mores, so goes a person’s politics. As goes the values and mores of suburbanites, so goes their politics.

The counter-culture seeped into the jet set and then into the aspiring middle class and their ‘burbs. At the upper end of the social matrix, it’s found in all sorts of cosmopolitan settings: corporate boardrooms; the corporate boardrooms of the NFL/NBA/MLB/NHL/MLS (Big Sports), including their millionaire and billionaire players and coaches; anywhere the sartorial excellence of a Desmond Merrion suit is commonly on display; unsurprisingly our faculty lounges up and down the K-grad school pyramid; big media throughout its digestive tract; and anywhere open and closed office spaces are inhabited by people with a college degree. The residential destination for this comfortable counter-culture could be a penthouse, but frequently it’s outside the urban core where there’s room for manicured space – the ‘burbs and the vast stretches under the reign of large-lot zoning.

This is not a culture of the 1950’s stiff-necks of grey flannel suits in an IBM corporate suite. These bankers, moguls, buccaneers of high finance, partners in Big Law, and entrepreneurs of Big Tech vote Democratic and shower contributions on its favorite causes. The holy grail for them is environmentalism as it was for the Gaia-worshippers hanging out in Big Sur. This goes a long way in explaining the enthusiasm for climate-change nostrums in the form of the lifestyle totalitarianism under anything labeled “green” and “sustainable”. They can afford the costly mitigations or simply bear the expense to avoid them. An army of lawyers and accountants is a text message away, as is a plane ticket to that second home in Barbados.

The fact that the regular middle class isn’t in a position to bear the brunt of their new-found social and political enthusiasms prevents them from going all-in for the program. The prospect of high taxes, impaired professional opportunities, deteriorating futures for their children, and counter-culture values producing counter-culture politicians who don’t esteem public safety is like a wintertime dunk in the North Sea for our groggy suburbanites.

The predicament for the Republicans is that the ‘burbs are no longer reliable. It won’t take much for them to follow the inclinations of their values and disregard their direct interests. It’s an opening for the Democrats that is made possible by Trump’s coarse tweets.

Even so, I still don’t get it. Why flirt with ruination by a Soviet-style economy and cultural Marxism because Trump won’t discipline his tongue or tweets? It sounds like amputating your foot (our way of life) for a hang nail (Trump’s boorishness).

Case In Point: Bobos in the NFL

NFL executive Peter O’Reilly was given a tour of the Super Bowl volunteer headquarters Tuesday afternoon by Elle Kehoe, director of volunteers for the Super Bowl in 2017.

The predicament for Republicans presents a predicament for fans also, many of whom are in the suburbs. Today’s locker rooms resemble less the smelly and crude places of Jim Brown’s day and more a premier suite at the Waldorf Astoria.

The contracts of the crème de la crème talent rank them with the Saudi royal family, or at least the GDP of a Central American country. Even the payout for a journeyman player for the years that they are in the league is handsome enough to justify taking time off from the real world to cash in. Lebron James and Patrick Mahomes can afford to be trendy, and so they are in lifestyle and mind. Stephan Curry and his coach Steve Kerr have status and wealth to insulate themselves from the real consequences of their beliefs. They can afford to perpetuate insidious insinuations about America and its people and never really pay a price. Every woke event to go viral will provoke another half-witted turn before cameras and microphones as if they have something profound to say.

Watch this video of rich NFL players making politically-charged statements.

What’s the average fan to do as his stores are looted and burned and he is constantly shamed for being a racist while sitting with his family at his favorite restaurant? On the tube, the fan must weather the haranguing lectures of people who are athletically talented at doing one thing, dunces about any other serious topic, but now demand to be taken seriously as a modern-day Socrates.

I personally couldn’t take it anymore. I haven’t watched the NBA in the last few years, and now don’t plan to. The NFL, like the NBA, including MLB and the rest of corporate Big Sports, have turned themselves into advertising agencies for Marxist political movements. If they existed in 1917 Russia, they’d be barking Bolshevik slogans and wearing warm-ups with Lenin’s visage instead of George Floyd’s. Watching a game under these conditions is like viewing one of those massive Mayday spectacles in Pyongyang with chintzy revolutionary slogans and the huge cult-of-personality portable murals. The game is now clickbait for revolution.

Yes, part of the problem is the insulation from how the other half lives and works – more like 95% – that wealth and esteem accord. That’s not all. Another ingredient is the increasing bureaucratization of Big Sports, the thing that makes them “big”. Bureaucracies require armies of administrative white-collar managers. Knowledge, interest, and personal experience with the sport isn’t necessary. More important is experience in administrative fields made possible by a college education. At this point, we have corporate NFL as distinguished from the sweaty lives of athletes on the field. The worlds are galaxies apart, unless you are among the league’s player aristocracy.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell chat at an NFL event in Seattle in 2014.

Roger Goodell, the current commissioner, a three-sport high school star but hobbled with injuries before he could matriculate to college, has a similar route up the greasy pole as any one of the 69 Goldman Sachs partners. Here it is: BA in economics from Washington & Jefferson College (Penn.) > intern in the New York City office of NFL commissioner Rozell in ’82 > New York Jets office intern in ’83 > assistant in the NFL’s Public Relations Dept. in ’84 > assistant to AFC president Lamar Hunt in ’87 > variety of administrative roles under commissioner Tagliabue to 2001 > NFL’s Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer in 2001 > NFL commissioner in 2006. Goodell never strapped on shoulder pads for one minute in college or the big show. He’s a creature of a corporate swamp.

Dawn Aponte (r) and the Miami Dolphins Dennis Hickey.

Take a look at Dawn Aponte, the Chief Football Administrative Officer, NFL Football Operations: grew up on Statin Island, NY > accounting BA from University of Delaware in ’93 > New York Jets accountant, ’93-’94 > MA in finance and management from Wagner College and law degree from New York Law School by 2001 > New York Jets personnel assistant in 2001 > Jets manager of football administration in 2003 > NFL’s management council as vp of labor finance in 2006 > Cleveland Browns vp of football administration in 2009 > Miami Dolphins senior vice president of football operations in 2010 > Dolphins executive vice president of football administration in 2012 > business development executive at RSE Ventures, a sports and entertainment tech firm in 2016 > NFL’s chief administrator of football operations in 2017. Her world is east coast cosmopolitan/east coast college/white collar salary/up the greasy pole.

And so it goes for much of the NFL’s Operations squad. There are a few others with backgrounds in officiating or as players, but the majority go from college to the ladder up the corporate suite. By values and mores, the suits from lackeys to big salary have more in common, socially and culturally, with the faculty lounge, Manhattan, and Westchester County than the guy in the $120 jersey watching the game on his Costco-purchased tv and who admires Buffalo Wild Wings for its many big screen tv’s and “fine cuisine”.

No wonder we get the lefty platitudes thrown in our faces. The strategy comes from people who wouldn’t dare be caught in the company of tailgaters.

Bobos are now in charge of managing our sports enthusiasms, all other entertainments, media, 401k’s, and opinions. Singular instances of purported police misbehavior somewhere mean racism everywhere, as interpreted by a socially and politically homogeneous class who is far removed from their fan base. The green theology of the bobos means a head-of-the-line advantage to push every catastrophe into the climate change vortex. Current events are tinged by the mores, values, and related views of bobos at the commanding heights.

No wonder the ‘burbs flirt with the Democrats. The inundation of a uniform and one-sided perspective takes its toll. The bobos rule and set the tone for those on the lower rungs of the middle-class ladder. An increasingly irreligious, secular, and bohemian suburb is fertile ground for Democrat outreach.

At least, or until, the soccer moms and their significant others get what they asked for and will be forced to be wary of it. In other words, as with a drug addict, they will be shocked out of their political dalliances when their fortunes are scarred by their political choices. As a coach, I know that failure can be therapeutic.

I am not cheer-leading for failure but I see its silver lining. Too bad it’ll come at the expense of foreclosures and stunted opportunities for generations to come.

RogerG

July 3, 2020July 3, 2020

Opinionated Ignoramuses

As you watch the video below please keep in mind that these protesters may reflect another lost generation, or, more accurately, a lost portion of another generation. We are breeding highly confidant, overly opinionated know-nothings. They are coming out of our comfortable homes and families and out of our resplendent public and private schools. Why? Below is my attempt to wrestle with an answer.

Fads infect nearly everything. Trendy grand theories takeover many fields. Academia and its professional appendage – teaching – are especially prone to it. I remember a conversation with a principal many years ago over the voguish pedagogy of HOTS, or “higher order thinking skills”. He believed that the idea held great promise. I was more skeptical. He saw it as a way to constrain the leftward bias in the schools. I viewed it as ongoing cover for more bias, just another rendering of the usual indoctrination with a new twist.

The notion of honing good “thinking” skills in the young, on first blush, has some appeal. But strip away the glossy veneer and you’ll find the same cognitive emptiness and ideological spin. For one, educators never established a good factual and conceptual basis for the students’ logic. A biased rendition of human experience and complete ignorance of history’s contrasting frames of reference makes the entire enterprise nonsensical.

The K-16 academic core – Science, Language Arts, Math, History – remain primers for the making of good little Progressives (maybe less so with Math, but the “experts” are making inroads). Reason or revelation; objective or relative truth; spontaneous human organization or central planning; the positive notion of human nature or a negative one; nature or nurture; humankind as animal or “in God’s image”; collectivism or ordered liberty; and the “scientific” or organic forms of human social development are some of the dichotomies that’ll be absent from their understanding. Chances are, the kids won’t be acquainted with them because the staff never was. The rot is preordained from college on down.

I maintained that the kids already “think” and have been doing it since they first mouthed “I want” to mom. If you doubt it, establish a dress code and watch them devise ways to subvert it. Kids are quite ingenious at playing hooky and avoiding homework. Ask any parent. It’s not that kids don’t “think”. We just don’t give them much to properly think about. And we aren’t about to accomplish that end when we smear “thinking skills” over a deep layer of half-witted indoctrination.

Add a dollop of narcissism in the form of a frenzy of self-esteem instruction and you’ll have all the makings for an opinionated ignoramus. They have opinions but are manifestly ignorant of much of everything outside the dogmas of the Left. They speak in empty rhetoric, so dialogue never happens. It deteriorates into a flinging of accusatory epithets. Insults that they mistake for deep thought are their stock-and-trade.

We brought this on ourselves. If the home is responsible, it’s child abuse. If the schools are liable, it’s child abuse. Either way, this is no way to rear a child. People don’t get this bad by accident.

RogerG

August 25, 2019August 27, 2019

Our Times

Progressive/left protesters crowd and shout into Rep. Chris Stewart’s (R, Utah) townhall in Salt Lake City, March 31, 2017. George Frey/Getty Images

Our times seem to be especially fraught with some of the worst invective, character assassination, and outbursts of anger bordering on rage. Disruptive chants and slogans have replaced reasoned discourse. I’ve complained about this often. Astonishingly, it has taken place at a time when we are spending trillions on education. As it turns out, mass education hasn’t produced mass wisdom. The situation raises serious questions about our educational system. Are we educating citizens or producing close-minded activists?

Watch this episode of young climate-change activists making demands at a recent (August 22) DNC meeting in San Francisco. The Sunrise Movement is most certainly the Sundown Movement, the sundown of reasoned discourse.

Very little intelligent dialogue takes place, nor is there any evidence of its presence in the short cognitive histories of these young people. They jump from rash conclusion to street activism with nothing prior or between.

The same is true in much of our political landscape. Brusque knee-jerk reactions take the place of thoughtful discussion and civil discourse. I doubt if the groundwork in the form of sufficient knowledge has been made in order to make it possible. So, it’s back to chants, slogans, disruptions, and hectoring. I cringe just thinking about what will happen if Pres. Trump gets the chance to fill another Supreme Court vacancy.

In the case of the above video, the instigator is the previously-mentioned Sunrise Movement. When I look into the faces of these young people, I slump into depression thinking of what our media and schools have done to their minds. All is not lost though. There are still a few golden and older voices in the wilderness, even if they’re no longer with us. Two of those voices belong to the late Milton and Rose Friedman. Their legacy continues in the Free to Choose Network. Airing this month on Amazon Prime Video are “The Real Adam Smith: Ideas That Changed the World” and “Sweden: Lessons for America?”. I viewed both recently.

The first should be a must-see for Pres. Trump and some of the hosts on Fox News. Are you listening Tucker? The second one should be required viewing for – wait, it’s a list – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, her political soul mates, the activist base of the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders, much of the rest of Democratic Party’s wannabee presidents, and those protesters pushing their way into the DNC’s meeting in San Francisco.

Pres. Trump reacts to trade issues in the same way as a developer dealing with his project’s immediate circumstances and the relevant people before him. Tariffs for him are like the rent charged in Trump Tower. It adds to his bottom line. The “trade deficit” is treated as a debt or loss in his books. It isn’t quite that simple. Tariffs are taxes paid by consumers in one way or another. Call it a value-added tax on imports, and operates in like manner. As for the “trade deficit”, it is just one component in the balance of payments. A shortfall in it will lead to surpluses in the other two components: the financial and capital accounts. The importer gets dollars and we get their goods. The dollars end up in financial instruments (bonds, government debt for example) and foreign direct investment.

For Trump, the dollars flow in the pockets of foreign fat cats as they live in, get this, a non-dollar society. How does that work? It doesn’t. The fat cat must translate his dollars into his country’s currency to buy that swank penthouse in Shanghai or keep the Benjamins to spend them on a Montecito mansion. He’ll need renminbis in the PRC or hand over the dollars to the old-moneyed seller in posh Montecito. Another option is parking the money in our government debt. Whichever way, dollars eventually come back here.

Could trade deficits have downsides? Yes, they could. Some regions could fall into depression as they lose out in the international competition. The social effects of economic decline aren’t pretty. Shuttered factories and businesses, distressed neighborhoods, family breakdown, substance abuse, people locked into a cycle of life with few prospects, and welfare dependency are symptoms of the malaise.

Abandoned and dilapidated factory complex in Detroit, Mi.

This is one weak spot in the film. Free trade has a ying and yang quality. It works best among countries with free economies, more or less. The role of similar social expectations and norms among nations can’t be counted out. I suspect that the PRC sees trade as another weapon in the long twilight struggle for national and ideological dominance. If their people get richer in the process, that’s icing on the cake. The country is certainly one for us to be very leery.

Nonetheless, the first film – “The Real Adam Smith” – lays out a useful primer for the value of free trade, one that Trump and his courtiers should understand. It might restrain them in their enthusiasm for punishing our literal and natural allies with tariffs. But we can hold two ideas at the same time (per Hillary’s iteration, and true). President-for-life Xi may be Trump’s friend, but he isn’t ours.

The second film – “Sweden: Lessons for America?” – is a necessary corrective to a popular urban myth for self-styled urban sophisticates. They pride themselves in being smarter, more intelligent, and better informed than the rubes. For them, the right side of the political spectrum is populated with Morlocks.

The Morlocks in the 1960 movie, “The Time Machine”.

The prejudice was on full display when Paul McCartney accepted the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in 2010 and bellowed this insult at ex-President George W. Bush while President Obama and wife were in attendance: “After the last eight years, it’s great to have a president who knows what a library is.”

McCartney and Pres. Obama at the award ceremony, June 2010.

Ironically, the rank condescension of an accomplished pop music star is rooted in a profound ignorance that is common in places like bein pensant circles in Georgetown. For the beautiful people, all the smart people are on the left side of the spectrum. In reality, they’ve adopted John C. Calhoun’s outlook, but the target isn’t African-Americans. It’s anyone who might wear a tool belt, pay a mortgage, attend a Bible-believing church, and just might register Republican. Johan Norberg, the documentary’s host, unwittingly presents proof of the presence in chic quarters of the “Ignorant” stamp on the forehead with a frequency equivalent to tattoos in the crowd of heavy metal concertgoers. Norberg does it by shattering their fantasies about Swedish socialism.

Bernie Sanders has frequently tried to distinguish himself from the brutal socialism in the Soviet Union and Mao’s China. He does it by attaching his socialist vision to Scandinavian “social democracy”, not Pol Pot. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , a younger Bernie Sanders with different genitalia, imitates him. Both invoke the experience of “democratic socialism” in Scandinavia.

CNN quotes Bernie Sanders as follows: “I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway and learn what they have accomplished for their working people.” The Danes recoil from the “socialist” label. Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen responded in a speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, “I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”

Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, October 30, 2017.

Bernie and AOC continue to maintain that these countries are working examples of a successful socialism. They try to do so, in spite of the Scandinavian leaders’ rejection of the “socialism” label, by emphasizing “democracy”. It’s rhetorical sleight of hand. The fact of the matter is that the scheme is all about government control. It matters little if the control is exercised through a small claque of ideological oligarchs or a mob of 50% plus one. Private property becomes meaningless if it is at the mercy of any assemblage of 50%-plus-one. “Democracy” is the cover for all sorts of sins.

To say it is “democratic”, also, doesn’t mean the administrative state goes away. Rules to avoid chaos and give direction will have to be promulgated by a commissariat approaching the size of the Soviet Gosplan. The likes of Bernie and AOC have all kinds of social and eco “justice” to pursue. AOC helped author one incoherent version of the Green New Deal and Bernie later came up with his own monstrosity. Whichever of the two routes you take, you’ll end up in the same place: central planning!

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey (right) speak during a press conference to announce Green New Deal legislation on Feb. 7. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Plus, the two carnival barkers act as if nothing has happened since the heyday of Scandinavian socialism in the 1970’s. It’s here that the Swede, Johan Norberg, and “Sweden: Lessons for America?” clears away much of the verbal smog. To make it simple for Bernie and Alexandria, Sweden had a free market economy, lost it, then gained it back. How did they do it? They reined in their “social democracy”. Business taxes were lowered; pensions became contribution-based rather than benefit-based; universal school vouchers were implemented to the point of private high schools becoming half of all high schools; unions became cooperative rather than combative; the vaunted universal health care system is remarkably decentralized with vouchers and a growing number of private healthcare providers; and on and on and on. In many ways they are freer than us.

Bernie wishes that we could be more like Sweden. Oh really, Bernie? I don’t think so. There is one area that should especially draw the ire of Bernie and much of the Dem Party. Sweden makes everyone pay taxes. If you will receive government benefits, you will pay. They don’t have a tax structure that attempts to shoulder the burden of government on the pocketbooks of the wealthy and the businesses who are the engine of jobs. They tried that in the 1970’s and saw their economy slump and businesses flee. Don’t doubt for a moment that Bernie and AOC won’t try to inflict the horrible history on us.

Really, the amazing part of the story is the abject ignorance of the story. Bernie, AOC, and the like, stop history in the 1970’s. Democratic socialism’s failures are deleted from the record so they can ignore Scandinavia’s movement toward free markets. Our democratic socialist icons take the system of its heyday, pretend the failures and reforms didn’t happen, and attribute the successes of its reforms to the socialism of the earlier misbegotten period. This is circularity with a huge bite out of its circumference. It’s nonsense.

In Scandinavia, particularly Sweden, Adam Smith has made a comeback … out of necessity. Socialism failed. In America, especially among the Democratic Party base and millennials, Marx is making a comeback. Go figure. AOC tries to distance herself from Marx to be more politically palatable. So does Bernie. Yet, do they really understand Marx? I kinda doubt it. Marx is socialism with an eschatology. Strip the violent eschatology and you still have socialism. Our lefty politicos want socialism to be elected into power. But does the means of implementation matter? Socialism is socialism and it doesn’t work. Isn’t the emphasis on 50%-plus-one just another attempt at putting lipstick on a pig?

A return to a sound understanding of human nature and the modes of social organization that are attuned to it would be huge step forward in removing needless chatter and destructive venting. I doubt, though, that it will ever get a hearing in today’s toxic climate. Too many people just don’t know a damn thing. Many of them are on the left, but that won”t stop them from being oh so confident. There is nothing more dangerous than an over-confident ignoramus.

Please see the films.

RogerG

July 10, 2019July 10, 2019

Add Degree Inflation to the Other Forms of Malignant Inflation

One evening I received a call from one of my students in my community college Physical Geography class. He was disappointed in his grade and begged for a higher one. This was his second time around but couldn’t show much improvement. I told him that I couldn’t in good conscience raise his grade as it would be unfair to the other students. He pleaded, “If I don’t get a higher grade, I won’t graduate and I won’t rise to anything in my life.” My heart sank after hearing this. I proceeded to dispel him of the crazy notion. It may be crazy but it is instilled in the young from pre-school on. How did we get to this place?

Somehow, going to college has become our society’s default path to personal advancement. Call it degree inflation. The relentless drumbeat of “college, college, college” has warped public policy with its plethora of taxpayer subsidized financial aid, degraded entry and instructional standards, and produced new “soft science” degree fields that have little bearing on real learning and improved abilities and does much to produce alienated and disgruntled students with a bent for political activism.

Oberlin College students protest a bakery for alleged racism. Later, the college incurred a $44 million judgment for defaming the owners and an employee.

And it fabricates a raft of “disparate impacts”, that old bugbear of civil rights warriors since the 1960’s. College degrees aren’t distributed evenly among social groups, and some groups have protected status in law and court decisions (the Civil Rights Acts and the Griggs decision). As the college degree becomes a de facto test for employment, the brunt will fall disproportionately upon these groups. A new college-industrial complex has taken shape to provide new barriers to job entry and advancement, whose relevance to work performance is more hypothetical than real. The case is laid out beautifully by Frederick M. Hess and J. Grant Addison in National Affairs, “Busting the College-Industrial Complex” (see here).

I suspect that a social bias is at work in this call of “college for all”. Most people making the push come from social strata who predominate in college admissions. It’s how they did it; it’s how their parents did it; it’s how everyone in their well-to-do neighborhood does it. When they get into positions of influence, it’s their preferred prescription for everyone to reach elevated levels of esteem. For them, anything else is for the hoi polloi.

Pres. Obama with daughter Malia, who attends Harvard, and Pres. and Mrs. Clinton with Chelsea who attended Stanford.

Illogic abounds in the process. On the one hand, they complain about the escalating cost of college; on the other, they push as many people as possible into it. It’s as if college advocates want to suspend the relationship between demand and price. You can’t, and when you try, the disjunction will show in other damaging ways.

To put it bluntly, college isn’t for everybody. Nor should it be. Anyway, the heralded thing is debased beyond recognition. Many of our young would be better served if they looked elsewhere for personal growth.

RogerG