White working class – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

October 9, 2024October 26, 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quote of the Day: Hayek on Knowledge | Learn Liberty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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RogerG

Sources:

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

September 27, 2024October 26, 2024

The United States of California

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to the United States of California. Yuck!

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

RogerG

September 20, 2024October 26, 2024

Republican Marxism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here he is at his most calloused:

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

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

Opinion/Cartoon: Social Security Funding

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

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

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

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

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

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

Versus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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RogerG

Sources:

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

March 17, 2024March 18, 2024

The Divide in the Republican Party

Republican Party Has Lost Its Way and Identity | Janice S. Ellis

Much has been made of the divisions in the Democratic Party with the fringe left making life difficult for Joe Biden. But what of the dissatisfaction in Republican ranks with Donald Trump? The number of non-endorsements grew beyond Larry Hogan of Maryland and Nikki Haley’s refusal to fall in line, and now includes Mike Pence’s rejection of Trump (watch below). Biden and Trump must be some of the most detested candidates ever to be foisted on the American public. 2024 is proving to be an election of the abhorrent.

Biden is sliding off into senescence as he flails ever further left. Trump can’t help being repellent. Both parties and their candidates are pandering in ways that sacrifice the country’s fortunes. Biden attaches himself to a toxic cultural revolution, works to bury the country in greenie central planning, is busy driving the economy into the ditch in a flurry of tax/spend/regulate, and in a bumbling incoherence that strives to rescue Hamas in ceasefires as it calls for its defeat. Whew, what a cognitive mess.

Trump isn’t any more intelligible. He’s quite prepared to unleash Putin on Europe after stopping aid to Ukraine. He promises a “beautiful” settlement on abortion which can only mean more sanction of more death for the unborn. He complains of Biden’s contributions to the national debt while he guarantees an enlargement of it. He won’t touch entitlements; the two biggest – Social Security and Medicare – will soon be ballooning the debt to such an extent that servicing it, in times of high interest rates, will crowd out defense and most of the other normal functions of government. Of course, the payback for all the borrowing will fall most grievously on the young and yet-to-born. But who cares? Right? They don’t vote. The irresponsibility slaps you in the face.

He’s quite happy to trundle down the failed road of protectionism, corporate welfare, and coerced unionization. Welcome to the new “blue-collar” Republican Party, which is not much different from the “New Deal” Democratic Party, the party with the same combination of 1930’s policies that succeeded in turning a depression into The Great Depression. The thought of that prospect makes Trump seem appealing, as appealing as the next hit of methadone.

Mike Pence is a throwback to a time when the Republican Party made sense. Yep, some of that agenda didn’t cater to big business’s claim on the budgetary carcass, or big labor’s demand to rope workers to its chariot. Free market economics isn’t simpatico with featherbedding or the ladling of undeserved benefits to groups for no other reason than feeding their government-fueled bigness. Trump, though, is all-in with his tariffs and his groveling at union shops.

Pence represents the approach that gave us one of the longest, if not the longest, sustained period of economic growth. For decades after Reagan, subsequent presidents were surfers riding the big wave. Even a Democrat president, Bill Clinton, had to concede as much in his 1996 state of the union address, “The era of big government is over.”

Then, along comes the Obama and Biden Democrats to implement their hostility to success and resuscitate the cult of big government. Then, along comes Trump to hitch Republican fortunes to the cult. Big names in the Republican tent are keen to construct a welfare state for hopefully their newfound blue-collar constituency, and even to declare their conversion to unionization and dislike for right-to-work. The outspoken Sen. Josh Hawley (R, Mo.) burnished his about-face by joining striking UAW workers recently in Wentzville, Mo., and announcing his opposition to any federal right-to-work legislation. Heaven forbid that workers should not be forced into a self-serving, left-wing labor cartel. Nixon’s 1971 remark that “we’re all Keynesians now” could be updated to “we’re all for closed shops now” for the now “populist” GOP.

Funny thing, none of this big government agenda ever really worked. The illusion of success peaked in the 1950s when America’s foreign competitors were still clearing the rubble from WWII. America was never bombed or invaded so much excess was tolerated in a constricted market without economic rivals. Fat labor contracts and absurd work rules with much featherbedding larded American manufacturing and transportation. Hawley is happy to bring it back, with the stagflation of the 1970s tagging along.

Pence is a living reminder of what worked. There are a few people still breathing who don’t suffer from the amnesia. But amnesia is in vogue. Democrats remain hooked on the belief in a coterie of Harvard grads scattered in big government bureaus who will save us from ourselves, or, for some, Karl Marx’s scheme can be magically made to succeed. Come to think of it, it might be less amnesia than the sheer stubbornness that comes with ignorance.

For Trump partisans, amnesia remains as the lone explanatory contender. Either that or blatant opportunism of people who should know better. That’s the divide within the party: those with amnesia and those like Pence. Please watch Martha McCallum’s interview with Pence, about 5 minutes into it, for a reminder that there are people who remember Reaganomics.

RogerG

April 16, 2023

The C-Suite Doesn’t Have a Clue

What was Anheuser-Busch, Inc., thinking? For that matter, what was Disney, Inc., thinking? Dylan Mulvaney as the face of Bud Light? Add the bigs at MLB, the NFL, NBA, and NHL to the socially detached. The list of corporate heavies insulting their customer bases is quite long. They aren’t even aware that they have positioned themselves at the edge of a culture war. A beer brand strongly identified with the lunch-pail crowd decides to make a boy-turned-girl the face of its product. Did it occur to anyone in the c-suite that this could be a problem? I guess not. Why? The mediocrities at the helm of our big corporations are people completely out to lunch, out of touch, or what have you.

I suspect the disconnect has much to do with something identified by Charles Murray in his book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010”. An intensifying social nepotism among people of increasingly uniform background has created an insular managerial class ignorant of the world beyond their bubble, much like the nobility at Versailles. Thus, they are caught flat-footed when an advertising strategy that is broached at a wine soiree goes awry. It only sounds compelling to those similarly closeted. Outside, for the rest of us, it’s absolute looney tunes.

This is a girl, Alissa Heinerscheid, the vice president of marketing for Anheuser-Busch, with the monotonous social resumé of her class: the same elite schooling and social entanglements and experiences. They don’t drink the stuff but are identical to the other inhabitants of corporate headquarters. They have the sensibilities of the Harvard life but lack an acquaintance with regular life. I suspect that the same happenstance applies to every institution under the management of the socially privileged and cocooned.

Alissa Heinerscheid: Leaked Photos Show Bud Light Executive Who Wants ... — Alissa Heinerscheid, Anheuser-Busch ad exec.

Alissa Heinerscheid: VP behind Bud Light's Dylan Mulvaney campaign who ... — Alissa Heinerscheid as a Harvard undergrad at one of her Isis Club’s bashes.

Credentials are no protection from the bumbling mediocrities who have such great power over livelihoods. We are living through a time when “elite” and “expert” makes one cringe, like watching the face of transgenderism become the face of Bud Light.

Be my guest and watch the Sky News report on the story.

RogerG

March 13, 2023March 15, 2023

The Cause of Our Discontents

May be an image of 3 people, people standing and outdoors — Trump supporter and Antifa member confront each other, 2017.

“We are divorced, North from South, because we have hated each other so.” — Mary Boykin Chestnut from her diary at the onset of the American Civil War.

Today, one could substitute “urban from rural” for “North from South”. Please be cautioned, though, that some blowhards will manage to warp the nature of the divide. Marjorie Taylor Greene, that grand dame of unhinged hyperbole on the right, recently tweeted and repeated on Sean Hannity, “We need a national divorce.” She added, “We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government.” Her national divorce is incomprehensible since her blue/red dividing lines don’t neatly conform to state boundaries. It is more intrastate than anything, between a plethora of blue freckles against a sea of red across the entire national domain. That reality captures the essence of the current impasse. The root of our disjunction is cultural. A fundamental difference of ethos separates the blue dots from the red swaths.

The split consists of mutually incompatible mindsets with one being revolutionary and the other defensive of America’s founding. Both sides didn’t mutually move way from each other. One leaped from the other as if it had the plague. The key precipitating factor is the adoption of a radical cultural revolution by social, commercial and political elites in concentrated urban and academic nodes. Ronald Reagan once said, “I didn’t leave the Democratic party, the Democratic Party left me.” Well, America didn’t leave rural areas, but it certainly was kicked out of these nodes of concentrated power and influence. The separation is the logical outgrowth of the radicalization of our cultural elites.

The radicalization of the blue dots – what today makes them blue (actually red in its historical meaning) – consists in the adoption of a particular Marxist’s ideas on how to advance the revolution in spite of popular resistance to it. Antonio Gramsci in the 1930’s penciled out his grand strategy to advance the worldwide revolution. Karl Marx’s original idea was the organic development of a worker class consciousness which would culminate in the seizure of the means of production and set the world on the path to utopia. Others, including Lenin and Gramsci, noticed that it wasn’t happening as predicted. Lenin’s solution was a vanguard elite to precipitate the overthrow of the existing order. For his part, Gramsci advocated a “long march” through cultural institutions and civil society, the social elements that lie mostly between the people and government (civil society: churches, charities, social organizations, schools, businesses).

May be an image of 1 person — Antonio Gramsci

Lenin’s coup d’état expired with the implosion of the USSR in 1991 – speaking of internal contradictions that culminate in revolution (typical Marxist rhetoric). Gramsci, who died before he was set to be released from Mussolini’s jail in 1937, would posthumously succeed beyond his wildest dreams. He became the darling of the 1960’s New Left that would quickly morph into today’s progressivism. A hive of intertwined Gramsci acolytes dominates many of our important institutions such as the schools, the Fortune 500 c-suite, media, entertainment, foundations, charities, mainline churches, the administrative state, the Democratic Party, and of course higher ed.

The danger of this new Gramscian upper class to the rest of the country, so isolated as they are, was best expressed by Charles Murray in his book, Coming Apart:

“Many of the members of the new upper class are balkanized. Furthermore, their ignorance about other Americans is more problematic than the ignorance of other Americans about them. It is not a problem if truck drivers cannot empathize with the priorities of Yale professors. It is a problem if Yale professors, or producers of network news programs, or CEOs of great corporations, or presidential advisers cannot empathize with the priorities of truck drivers. It is inevitable that people have large areas of ignorance about how others live, but that makes it all the more important that the members of the new upper class be aware of the breadth and depth of their ignorance.”

Truckers Shutting Down DC To Protest The Federal Government And Its "Bulls**t" — Truckers descend on DC in 2022.

So ubiquitous are Gramsci’s ideas that you at least know them intuitively. They are everywhere. The notorious CRT is just the application of Gramsci’s Critical Theory to racial matters. It’s the same formula when considering gender, ethnicity, or mixtures of the host of identities (intersectionality) encompassed within the “other”, the so-called oppressed. Favoritism and oppression in the Gramscian hivemind are embedded in the culture, even if it has been superficially expunged from government. It’s systemic in the culture, they say. Real revolution won’t happen if the broader culture isn’t enlisted in the effort. Today, they succeeded for the most part.

The influence of the hivemind may be what John O’Sullivan had in mind in his law of organizational behavior: all organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. The prevalent hivemind is too powerful to ignore. The evidence is all around. TV commercials are replete with representations of the “other” far beyond any reasonable relationship to their portion of the population. Those same ads are boosters for the ideology’s favorite products such as ev’s, as well as campaigns against the hated plastics and fossil fuels, alongside a push for the stakeholder corporate-management nonsense that threatens the health of my pension. MLB moved the Allstar Game; the NFL diluted the national anthem with the addition of an identity anthem; the kneelings; the black power fist thrusts. Popular entertainment and their awards extravaganzas are not without their ritual display of the putative threat of systemic racism and illusory attacks on the “other”. DEI and CRT are everywhere in curriculums, hiring, and admissions, with a baleful effect on standards and morale.

An entire industry has appeared overnight to cater and push the agenda on adults and their children. All of it is meant to bend the mind to accept the advantaging of one group at the expense of another, all of it based on race, gender, and ethnicity identity. We’re back to a new Jim Crow.

May be an image of 1 person and text that says 'SRENIEW "I have dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.' -Martin Luther King WRONG! MODNN WOKE @Ramireztoons michaelpramirez.com'

The assault on the minds of children is the most outrageous. Outright pornography is introduced to adolescents under the guise of furthering tolerance for the sexual “other” (transgendered, etc.). The distinction between mere tolerance and ideological recruitment won’t be fully appreciated on the part of the teacher-as-propagandist or obviously an impressionable high school sophomore, thereby artificially swelling the ranks of this new “other” in a social contagion. Behavior and language – if presented on radio or television, they would be eligible for a fine or loss of license – is now part of school and training curriculums, and the inventories of school libraries, for 8-year-olds in some places. Child abuse laws in states like California have been warped to shield children from parental interference in a minor’s choice to engage in essentially experimental sex-change interventions.

California has gone so far as declared itself to be the newest kind of sanctuary: a haven for a minor’s decision to break free of their parents’ influence, from any place, state, or country of origin. An underground railroad to the golden state for legally protected child sexual mutilation will soon follow.

A child’s newfound identity as a gender “other” will be reinforced by an absence of countervailing views, opposing opinions having been quashed by entrenched activists dominating society’s institutions. The struggle in the newsroom at the NY Times is instructive. Prior to 2021, the paper treated the issue of trans ideology as if there was only one side, the trans activists’ side. You know, it’s the same one given to your kids in their school: sex isn’t binary; denial of gender identity is bigotry; refusals to affirm a child’s self-diagnosis are akin to murder by suicide; a medical consensus exists in support of all things trans; the recent increase in teen trans self-identity isn’t evidence of a social contagion. Truth be told, a defensible counterpoint can be made to each one of these contentions, but it didn’t appear on the pages of the Times. Then, dissenters found other outlets like Bari Weiss’s Substack page.

After activists in the newsroom got opinion editor James Bennet to resign for approving a Tom Cotton op-ed, his replacements began to show some spine in not kowtowing to the radicals in their midst. Some opinion pieces questioning the newsroom orthodoxy began to appear. The hive was riled about having to face an opposing point of view. LGBTQ+ activist groups penned a letter to the paper condemning the openness. A group of contributors sent one railing against the simple recognition of another side in the debate. For them, there is no debate.

Their mind is closed and want to see everyone’s mind similarly clamped shut. In one of the letters, they declared, “. . . stop questioning science that is SETTLED.” Where have we heard that before? End a debate by simply issuing the fatwah of “SETTLED” without stooping so low as to prove their position.

The censorship makes the unproven and untrue seem plausible. At this point, the Gramscian “long march” sheds its cloak of tolerance to expose its true totalitarian nature. The philosopher Robert P. George has an eloquent description of the difference between an authoritarian and totalitarian:

“Ordinary authoritarians are content to forbid people from speaking truths. Totalitarians insist on forcing people to speak untruths.”

Cancel culture is forcing the gullible to speak untruths. We are running the danger of an entire generation being coaxed into believing contestable ideas are uncontestable. That’s dangerous. It’s one sure way for humaneness to disappear from humanity. People are frog-marched out of their jobs and free speech and conscience are suppressed. Public intellectuals, academics, and people of professional accomplishment who disagree are dismissed as “deniers”, “. . . phobics”, haters, and blocked from outlets.

The reigning neo-Marxists have, maybe forever, mutilated the meaning of words such as “consensus”. Their “consensus” – “the science is SETTLED” – is the wedge that is driving rural from urban. The blue nodes are the nexus of this Gramscian cultural revolution. Pardon people in the countryside for noticing this lurch into insanity. A good portion of the country doesn’t want to go where DEI consultants want to lead it.

Previously travelled routes to the socialist hyper-state have only led to misery. Now, will I be “cancelled” for saying it?

May be an illustration of standing and text

RogerG

The Cultural Commanding Heights Do Not Like the Hinterlands

A mural by street artist PBOY depicting yellow vest protesters inspired by Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People. (photo: Philippe Lopez/AFP)

“The green dreams of urbanites spark outrage in rural areas.” – Joel Klotkin, executive director of the Urban Reform Institute, and respectively Presidential and Washington Fellow at Chapman and Claremont Universities

Joel Klotkin’s newest piece on the urban/rural divide would be a revelation for those comfortable in their biases and lifestyle in their insulated, well-to-do urban enclaves (see below).

Joel Kotkin quoted in NYTimes OpEd About 2020 Election - Joel Kotkin — Joel Klotkin

They control urban-dominated states like California and are conducting a Sherman-esque scorched-earth march through the hinterlands to make them “howl” in forced conformity to a dubious enviro ideology. Their William Tecumseh Sherman flanking strategy involves the annihilation of vast stretches of flyover country in windmill forests and blankets of solar panels in conjunction with attacks on the farmers’ products and production inputs. Make no mistake about it, it’s at least a cold war, and occasionally a hot one, on those who feed the world’s hungry and provide the material backbone for the cultural commissariat’s own luxurious lifestyle.

Ironically, it’s an attack on themselves if they only thought deeper than a star-struck Davos groupie totally consumed in enviro agitprop. Anyway, they’re relaxed because it’ll bankrupt others further down the wealth pyramid first. They’re like Rome’s patricians laughing at Nero fiddling as the flames slowly approach their villas.

It’s an ideological crusade centering on climate change and should not be mistaken for real science. Leaps of faith are required to overcome huge holes in logic and fact. Here’s some “What’s” to ponder. What’s the degree of human impact on climate to ascertain urgency? What’s the level of positive effect on climate from a sudden shackling of the U.S. population to unreliable and expensive energy? What’s the influence on other countries, or will it be ignored? No amount of computer modeling can overcome these holes in the train of logic since software has always been susceptible to GIGO – garbage in, garbage out. The model is only as good as its designer. Artificial intelligence isn’t immune. On this topic, ideology trumps scientific objectivity all too often.

One fact constantly escapes the synapses of this secular faith’s upscale adherents: energy density. No amount of “we’ll innovate our way through the problem” can mask this ugly reality. Their favorite sources for energy “sustainability” are the feebly dense wind and solar – they need an awful lot of space to be practical. These contraptions require vast state-sized stretches of landscape on the order of magnitude of Tennessee to Texas, depending on how close you want to get to “net zero” in carbon emissions. What does that mean? It means the consumption of huge swaths of open space, wilderness, and land devoted to food and fiber. A dystopian future awaits in the nerve-rending and constant hum of wind turbines and a consigning of small town and rural residents to a hellish view of much of their surroundings under expansive pavements of solar panels or intimidating chorus lines of giant towers extending over the horizon. Watch real estate values and quality of life plummet for rural, small town, exurban residents.

May be an image of outdoors and text — A wind project in Michigan farm area in 2013.

May be an image of outdoors — A sea of solar panels in Portugal.

And guess what? You still need fossil fuel backup which adds to the cost misery of the whole scheme. If batteries are to be your lifeline around the problem of blackouts and having to fire up backup gas-powered steam turbines, remember, the law of tradeoffs isn’t suspended. More resources pumped into this black hole translates into lost investment in medicine, manufacturing technology, food production and distribution, water, etc. The alternatives sacrificed are too numerous to mention.

That’s the glory of free markets, though; the voluntary choices of thousands, if not millions, sort this out. The rule of bureaucrats and pandering demagogues in elective office, when given billions and trillions of dollars to play with, are more famous for boondoggles. Remember Solyndra or California’s train to nowhere, parts languishing and graffitied like a LA Stonehenge in the Central Valley? I don’t expect Millennials, Gen Z’ers, and those following to have an inkling of life in the old USSR under a vast bureaucracy’s central planning, given the sorry state of our schools. California is chugging full speed into this fog of ignorance.

May be an image of outdoors and text

California’s upper crust may be the most visibly intoxicated by the eco-jihad but the mania is evident worldwide. Farmers and rural and small-town residents around the world are about to be engulfed in a plundering of their spaces by the half-witted infatuations of zealots with money and influence. But a counterrevolution is kicking in. In Europe, French truckdrivers and farmers rose up in the “gilets jaunes” (yellow vests) protests in November 2018 against the new greenie fuel taxes. Dutch farmers were brimming with hostility over crippling emissions and fertilizer regulations just last year. So devastating are the potential impacts of the new rules that a projected 3,000 Dutch farms may be lost in the next few decades.

Europe isn’t alone. African countries like Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa have registered similar protests to Davos flights of fancy. The path to the ecotopia is lined with appropriated farmland, farmers, and everyone else who provide the hands, backs, and brains for the jet set to live in luxurious isolation.

Yep, ecomania among the insular well-to-do is poison to blue collars and everyone outside a country’s super zips. Joel Klotkin is right to use the world “colonize” in describing the imperial designs of cultural power brokers for the areas of the country who don’t vote and live like them. Occasionally, colonists rise up. Does Lexington and Concord remind you of anything?

May be an image of one or more people, people standing, the Arc de Triomphe and outdoors — The yellow vest protests in Paris, November 2018.

May be an image of standing and road — Farmers gather with their vehicles next to a Germany/Netherlands border sign during a protest on the A1 highway near Rijssen, Netherlands, June 29. They are protesting the Dutch Government’s nitrogen plans, which would eliminate a sizable number of farms. (photo: Vincent Jannink / AFP via Getty Images)

Please read Joel Klotkin’s piece below.

RogerG

A Picture Says a Thousand Words

The Great Awokening in the wake of George Floyd, and spurred on by Obama’s decade-long sermonizing, was actually The Great Disconnect for the Democratic Party. The Party is simply out of touch. No better example can be found of the Party’s separation from most people’s lives than the picture of a hard-working and dirty coal miner attending a University of Kentucky basketball game with his son (see below). This coal miner is as far removed from the funhouse/playhouse campus of Twitter as one can imagine – in ways more than geography. The picture captures the Democrats’ predicament.

The Democratic Party traded blue-collars for the pampered denizens of faculty lounges and white-collars sheltered in air-conditioned offices and free to be enraptured without consequences by gauzy ideologies. The hunt to combat climate change, an undefinable racism, and transphobia jumped to the front and center and over the concerns of people facing worsening family budgets, schools, and safety.

What do the Democrats have to offer? Nothing but misery. They’re after that guy’s job. Biden goes out on the stump and proclaims an end to drilling and the use of coal. The Party is all agog in fantasies of forests of windmills and vast expanses of solar panels replacing nuclear, coal, and natural gas. And why are they so enthusiastic about taking away that man’s livelihood? Answer: a climate-change hysteria that is as unscientific as it is illogical. It’s more religious than anything. It can only be entertained in the isolated and pleasant indoor climates made possible by the toil and sweat of people like that dirty miner in the stands with his son. The Party has become an institutional affront to most of working America.

Do you think that only he knows the dirty secret of the Party turning its back on him? To borrow from Biden, come on, man. Working America encompasses both sexes and all races and ethnicities. Work is color and gender blind. So, regardless of melanin count and genitalia, many are walking away from a party much more identified with techie billionaires, Antifa, and Sierra Club conferees. Thus, a rising GOP black and Latino vote.

For a Democrat, the picture below should hit you in the gut. What are you doing to that man and his son?

Michael McGuire covered in soot after a shift in the mines. He rushed to be with his son, Easton, for the first live basketball game together at the University of Kentucky. (photo: WKYT)

RogerG

April 16, 2022April 16, 2022

Republicans Dodging a Bullet

Macomb County Republican Party Convention from August of 2020.

Reporter Salena Zito, co-author of “The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics” of 2018, has long been sensitive to the views of those in Red America and accurately diagnosed the problem of an America dominated by an out-of-touch bi-coastal elite that set the stage for Trump’s amazing win in 2016. We have moved on, but Trump hasn’t. The Trump of 2016 is now the Trump of “I was cheated”, constantly regaling his followers at rallies with his complaints about 2020. In this column, she reports that the Macomb County, Michigan, Republican Party has had enough. At their county party convention, important for choosing county party leaders and candidates, county delegates threw out the party leadership that was obsessed with re-litigating 2020. We’ll have to wait and see if the party across the nation is willing to dodge the bullets that Trump is firing at it.

I have long maintained that Trump is principally responsible for the loss of the two Georgia Senate seats to neo-Bolsheviks, of all people, in Georgia of all places! A dispirited post-election Republican electorate was further dispirited by Trump’s post-election grandiose and unsupportable charges. If there ever was a time for “Move On”, this is it.

Macomb County Republican delegate Jamie Roe described the scene: “Last night [April 14], everyone who was focused on winning the election in 2022 had been pushed over the edge.” He added, “Fed-up activists and elected officials joined together to remove the Executive Committee and officers from office and replace them with a new group focused solely on winning in 2022 and not on the past.”

The Trumpers have long called disloyal Republicans – disloyal to Trump, that is – RHINOs. Yet, expressing fealty to a person is much more reminiscent of “in name only” than loyalty to a party. The pot calling the kettle black? Projection?

Macomb County may be a healthy bellwether for this year’s elections. It was your typical blue-collar Democrat bastion but was shifting red as the Democratic Party became a reflection of our brain-dead college faculty lounges. A blue-collar Republican Party doesn’t have to be equally as brain dead. At last, the party may be in the process of shaking off the personality cult just in time for the Democrats’ march into cultural Marxism.

Please read the article.

See the source image

RogerG

Also on Facebook (Roger Graf | Facebook) and Substack (rogerlgraf.substack.com)

June 24, 2021June 25, 2021

Who’s Dumber?

Who’s dumber, a person without a college degree or a person with one? Additionally, who’s dumber, a person with a BA, MA, or PhD? Is it possible for a person to educationally advance and get dumber? A response might be to dismiss the questions as misleading for many reasons, but the common assumption is that a degree is a visa to smartland. Is it true? Recent voting patterns force us to confront the questions, and the answer may shock some of us.

I’m speaking of Tuesday’s NYC mayoral primary election. Boroughs heavily populated with blue collars, ethnics, and minorities – cohorts with few college degrees – are voting as if they have a dislike for socialism and affection for law and order. The lower the percentage of whites in the district, the lower socialist and woke vote. What? Yep!

Eric Adams greets supporters at a New York City primary mayoral election night party in New York City, June 22, 2021. (Andrew Kelly/Reuters)

The pundit Kyle Smith put it succinctly: “The socialists just can’t seem to process enough white people through Oberlin to get themselves to a majority, even in their intellectual capital, New York City.” Middle and upper-income whites have moved left, along with their sheepskins. Everyone else likes cops and abhors the coddling of thugs and the government largesse for the pampering (like Andrew Yang’s mass mailing of checks). Now that’s some real cognitive dissonance for the ladies on The View.

Ex-cop and law-and-order candidate Eric Adams won 46% to 17% for MSNBC lawyer Maya Wiley in early voting in the Bronx. Blue collar whites and Hispanics dominate Staten Island and turned out 31% for Adams and 13% for the AOC darling, Wiley. Over all, Adams holds a 9% lead as of now.

Where do we find the enthusiasts of wokeness? It’s clustered in tony, hipster micro-districts in Manhattan and Brooklyn, any place with the highest concentration of whites.

Affection for socialism is my metric for gauging dumbness, which is popularly synonymous with stupidity. Simply put, the mental contraption doesn’t work. Its boosters – AOC, The Squad, Bernie, the activist core of the Democratic Party – cite countries, especially Scandinavian ones, who are in reality more free market than these zealots’ dream for America. Sweden, et al, dumped the nonsense long ago, and the demise of the USSR showed that Green New Deal central planning, as with all central planning, is a prescription for chronic depression. Non-whites have a gut instinct for the reality that escaped the geniuses from Oberlin, et al.

A degree hasn’t inoculated many upper and middle-class whites, and everyone else who grace these ivy-covered halls, from stupidity. Does a modern college degree befuddle the mind with inanities? I’m sure that it depends. But as of now, it would have been better for many of our degree-holders to skip the expensive indoctrination, and the 5-figure debt, and follow dad and mom into the work world.

Moving left is moving socialist and into forever oppressed/oppressor victimhood, and voting like it. It’s stupid and morally corrupting. Is that what is meant by the ‘burbs turning blue, ergo dumb? One has to wonder.

RogerG
*Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/06/eric-adams-probably-defeats-socialism-in-new-york-city/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=featured-writers&utm_term=third
*Also on my website: libertatevitute.com