[T]he story of the progressive movement can best be understood as activists going wherever the field is open. If the people are on your side, expand democracy. If the people are against you, use the courts. If the courts are against you, run down the field with the bureaucrats, or the Congress, or the presidency. Procedural niceties — the filibuster, precedent, the law, custom, the Constitution, truth — only matter if they can be enlisted to advance the cause. If they can’t, they suddenly become outdated, irrelevant, vestigial organs of racism, elitism, sexism, whatever. Obstruction, or even inconvenience in the path of progressive ends is prima facie proof of illegitimacy. The river of history must carry forward. If History hits a rock, the rock must be swept up with the current or be circumvented. Nothing can hold back the Hegelian tide, no one may Stand Athwart History. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. This is the liberal gleichschaltung; get with the program or be flattened by it.
Jonah Goldberg, “Obama to Congress: It’s My Way or My Way”, National Review, 2014-11-21.
October 30, 2018
QotD: The Progressive strategy
October 29, 2018
ESR responds to the synagogue attack
Eric Raymond posted this after hearing the news of the attack on the synagogue in Pittsburgh*.
To my Jewish friends and followers:
I’m grieving with you today. I know the neighborhood where Tree of Life synagogue sits – it’s a quiet, well-off, slightly Bohemian ‘burb with a lot of techies living in it.
I’m not Jewish myself, but I figured out a long time ago that any society which abuses its Jews – or tolerates abuse of them – is in the process of flushing itself down the crapper. The Jews are almost always the first targets of the enemies of civilization, but never the last.
But I’m not posting to reply only with words.
Any Jew who can get close enough to me in realspace for it to be practical and asks can have from me free instruction in basic self-defense with firearms and anti-active-shooter tactics. May no incident like this ever occur again – but if it does, I would be very proud if one of my students took down the evildoer before it reached bloodbath stage.
US official statistics indicate that Jews are still disproportionally the target of hate crimes:
US Hate Crime Data for 2016 (Most Recent Year Available): Blacks vs. Muslims vs. Jews pic.twitter.com/INkyUxCZYS
— Mark J. Perry (@Mark_J_Perry) October 28, 2018
Michael Brown at Townhall.com:
Premeditated, cold-blooded murder is always unspeakably evil. But it is even more evil when the innocent, unsuspecting victims are children in a school or worshipers in their congregational building. How can we even describe monstrous evil like this?
In recent years, we have witnessed horrific school shootings and barbaric church shootings. Now, we have witnessed Jewish blood being shed in a synagogue. And it was not just during a normal Sabbath service. It was during a bris, a special time of celebration when a Jewish baby boy is circumcised on the 8th day.
Families have come together for this special occasion, sometimes spanning three or even four generations. A new Jewish life is welcomed into the world. And at the end of the ceremony, a prayer called shehecheyanu is recited: “Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has granted us life, sustained us and enabled us to reach this occasion.”
In the midst of this a mass murder took place.
Sadly, different groups will seek to politicize the slaughter. But at times like this, we do well to hold our peace. Already this week, an allegedly unstable Trump-lover was arrested for his role in the attempted pipe bombings. Now, an alleged Nazi Trump-hater was arrested as the synagogue shooter.
So, I appeal to all people of conscience: Let’s focus on the victims rather than on political debate. Let’s hold our tongues out of respect for the dead.
* Rather than give the killer any “glory” by using his name, I’m following the recommendations of the Some Asshole Initiative.
Baseball Season 1918 I OUT OF THE ETHER
The Great War
Published on 27 Oct 2018Der Deutsche Baseball!
The $15 Minimum Wage Is Turning Hard Workers Into Black Market Lawbreakers
ReasonTV
Published on 11 Oct 2018An in-depth look at New York’s car wash industry, and the real world consequences of politicians interfering with a complex industry they don’t understand.
Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.
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On March 4, 2015, a group of union leaders, activists, and elected officials were arrested for blocking traffic during a protest in front of a Vegas Auto Spa, a small car wash in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Chanting “No contract, no peace!” and “Si se puede!,” they had come in support of striking workers, who had walked out demanding a union contract after allegedly being subjected to dismal working conditions.
For David Mertz, the New York City director and a vice president at the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU), it was an inspirational moment in an ambitious six-year campaign to unionize the city’s car washes industry.
“These workers were willing to stand out there during one of the coldest winters … literally in decades to fight for their rights and for basic human dignity,” says Mertz, who was also arrested that day. “You have the ability to make change by coming together, and when you do that sometimes you find that you’ve got some friends on your side.”
In the past six years, the car wash industry, which employs low-skilled, mostly immigrant workers, has also been the target of lawsuits for alleged underpayment of wages, including a handful of cases spearheaded by the New York State Attorney General’s office. Working conditions in the industry were also cited as a raison d’être in the successful campaign to raise the state minimum wage to $15 per hour, which takes full effect at New York City car washes in January of 2019.
As Reason chronicled in a feature story in our July 2016 issue, the real world impact of the unionization drive, the lawsuits, and the $15 minimum wage has been mainly to push car washes to automate and to close down.
Two years later, there are more unintended consequences. The $15 minimum wage is fostering a growing black market—workers increasingly have no choice but to ply their trade out of illegal vans parked on the street, because the minimum wage has made it illegal for anyone to hire them at the market rate.
The minimum wage is also cartelizing the industry: Businesses that have chosen to automate are benefiting from the $15 wage floor because outlawing cheap labor makes it harder for new competitors to undercut them on price and service.
As a sequel to the 2016 article, this video takes an in-depth look at the real world consequences that result when politicians interfere with a complex industry they don’t understand, enabled by media coverage that rarely questions the overly simplistic tale of exploited workers in need of protection.
Written, shot, edited, and narrated by Jim Epstein.
QotD: The very first Progressive president
I’m thinking of an American president who demonized ethnic groups as enemies of the state, censored the press, imprisoned dissidents, bullied political opponents, spewed propaganda, often expressed contempt for the Constitution, approved warrantless searches and eavesdropping, and pursued his policies with a blind, religious certainty.
Oh, and I’m not thinking of George W. Bush, but another “W” – actually “WW”: Woodrow Wilson, the Democrat who served from 1913 to 1921.
President Wilson is mostly remembered today as the first modern liberal president, the first (and only) POTUS with a PhD, and the only political scientist to occupy the Oval Office. He was the champion of “self determination” and the author of the idealistic but doomed “Fourteen Points” – his vision of peace for Europe and his hope for a League of Nations. But the nature of his presidency has largely been forgotten.
That’s a shame, because Wilson’s two terms in office provide the clearest historical window into the soul of progressivism. Wilson’s racism, his ideological rigidity, and his antipathy toward the Constitution were all products of the progressive worldview. And since “progressivism” is suddenly in vogue – today’s leading Democrats proudly wear the label – it’s worth actually reviewing what progressivism was and what actually happened under the last full-throated progressive president.
Jonah Goldberg, “You want a more ‘progressive’ America? Careful what you wish for: Voters should remember what happened under Woodrow Wilson”, Christian Science Monitor, 2008-02-05.
October 28, 2018
QotD: Revolutionary price controls and the plight of Washington’s army at Valley Forge
By the end of 1775, Congress had already increased the nation’s money supply by 50 percent in less than a year, and state paper issues had already begun in New England. The Congressional Continental bills followed what was to become a sequence all too familiar in the western world: runaway inflation. As paper money issues flooded the market, the dilution of the value of each dollar caused prices in terms of paper money to increase; since this included the prices of gold, silver, and foreign currencies, the value of the paper money declined in comparison to them. As usual, rather than acknowledge the inevitability of this sequence, the partisans of inflationary policies urged further accelerated paper issues to overcome the higher prices and searched for scapegoats to blame for the price rise and depreciation. The favorite scapegoats were merchants and speculators who persisted in doing the only thing they ever do on the market: they followed the push and pull of supply and demand. In another familiar attempt to deal with the problems of inflationary intervention, they outlawed the depreciation of paper, or the rise of prices.
[…]
State and local governments presumed to know what market prices of the various commodities should be, and laid down price regulations for them. Wage rates, transportation rates, and prices of domestic and imported goods were fixed by local authorities. Refusing to accept paper, accepting them for less than par, charging higher prices than allowed, were made criminal acts, and high penalties were set: they included fines, public exposure, confiscation of goods, tarring and feathering, and banishment from the locality. Merchants were prohibited from speculating, and thereby from bringing the needed scarce goods to the public. Enforcement was imposed by zealots in local and nearby committees, in a despotic version of the revolutionary tradition of government by local committees.
Price controls made matters far worse for everyone, especially the hapless Continental Army, since farmers were thereby doubly penalized: they were forced to sell supplies to the army at prices far below the market and they had to accept increasingly worthless Continentals in payment. Hence, they understandably sold their wares elsewhere; in many cases, they went “on strike” against the whole crazy-quilt system by retiring from the market altogether and raising only enough food to feed themselves and their own families. Others reverted to simple barter.
Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived In Liberty, Volume IV, 1979.
October 27, 2018
The Progressive case for Americans to pay higher drug prices than the rest of the world
Tim Worstall carefully explains — in full compliance with Progressive philosophy and pointing out that Trump is wrong (which is extra bonus Progressive points) — why Americans should continue to pay more for drugs that are cheaper in other countries:
Working out which drugs work and how is expensive. There’s then another expensive in actually proving this well enough to gain a licence. All in costs are in the $1 to $2 billion range dependent upon who you want to listen to. Unfortunately, once you’ve done all that and paid all that anyone could just come along and copy your drug. Which means you don’t make your $2 billion back – that in turn meaning that no one does spend $2 billion, we don’t get new drugs and we all die in ditches.
This is a classic public goods problem and the solution we use – not the only one, not even the only viable one – is patents. You get about 10 years, the time between approval and patent expiry, to make your $2 billion back. Then anyone can copy it and we all get cheap copy drugs.
For this system to work it is not necessary that everyone pay these high patent protected prices. There’s no point in trying to charge some farm worker in S Africa $10,000 a year for HIV retrovirals anyway, they don’t have the cash and demanding it will gain nothing except their death. We just need some group to pay the high prices so that drug development still happens. Everyone else can get drugs at some margin above their manufacturing, not development, costs.
So, who is it who should be carrying this cost of producing this public good? Good progressive principles tell us that it should be the rich folk. Imagine that we used some other system of drug development, maybe taxpayers cough up for it all. It’ll still be the rich doing the paying, right? So, patents, where the rich pay full freight for drugs, the poor don’t, this meets our equity criterion.
And who are the rich in this global sense, for we’re talking about a global public good here? That would be the citizens of the richest large nation, the largest rich nation, the United States of America. So, yes, Americans should be paying high prices for drugs and the rest of us shouldn’t.
Do note that we’ve used impeccable redistributionist logic to reach this conclusion. It’s only if you think the rich shouldn’t be paying to benefit the poor that this is a bad idea. Which might be why Trump is agin it but it still puzzles as to why the progressives would be.
October 26, 2018
An old-fashioned Fisking
The always-entertaining David Thompson harks back to the early days of blogging by indulging in what used to be called “a Fisking“:
In the pages of the New York Times, a philosophy professor named George Yancy is gushing his little heart out:
It is hard to admit we are sexist. I, for instance, would like to think that I possess genuine feminist bona fides, but who am I kidding? I am a failed and broken feminist.
Upon which revelation, I suppose we could all just stop and go home. But no, let’s press on.
More pointedly, I am sexist. There are times when I fear for the loss of my own entitlement as a male. Toxic masculinity takes many forms. All forms continue to hurt and to violate women.
The word toxic, by the way, is deployed no fewer than nine times, excluding various synonyms, as if it were an incantation. Now brace yourselves for some full-on testosterone-jacked beastliness.
For example, before I got married, I insisted that my wife take my last name… While this was not sexual assault, my insistence was a violation of her independence.
To reiterate. Asking a fiancée if she’ll change her surname upon marriage, as is still the custom, perhaps to avoid confusing people as to whether you’re actually married or not, and possibly to avoid imposing on any children lengthy hyphenated surnames… this is not sexual assault. I’m glad we’ve cleared that up.
[…]
Or, as our educator puts it, tearfully, his face reddened with shame,
When I was about 15 years old, I said to a friend of mine, “Why must you always look at a girl’s butt?” He promptly responded: “Are you gay or something? What else should I look at, a guy’s butt?” He was already wearing the mask. He had already learned the lessons of patriarchal masculinity.
Yes, adolescent butt-watching. Oh calamitous woe. And which, apparently, girls never indulge in. Presumably, we should only be sexually attracted to personalities, and never the fleshy packaging.
There was no wiggle room for me to be both antisexist and antimisogynistic and yet a heterosexual young boy. You see, other males had rewarded his gaze by joining in the objectifying practice: “Look at that butt!” It was a collective act of devaluation.
Or possibly the reverse.
The acts of soul murder had already begun.
I’ll just leave that one there, I think.
October 23, 2018
California (secessionist) dreaming
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, L. Neil Smith suggests that the kindest thing to do to California is to allow it to secede from the Union:
… some Californians bleat that they want to secede from a United States that threatens to make them straighten up and fly right. Superficially, that might be a workable idea: on paper, California has one of the largest, most powerful economies in the world — bigger than that of many independent nations. It has a long, wonderful coastline and a couple of really good natural ports. Its agricultural sector is second to none. There is oil and gas within easy reach. It has no real military defenses, but I’m sure they’d be more than willing to leech off America’s defenses, our Navy, our Air Force, and our nuclear umbrella, like the deadbeat pajama boys they resemble, living in their mothers’ basements.
But wait. On the reasonable assumption that the California secession movement is limited to people in the counties that voted for Hillary Clinton, and that people in the counties who voted for Donald Trump do not want to secede, I consulted a California county-by-county election map for 2016. Blue counties dominate all but a tiny spot on the northern coast, which is too bad; most of the interior — the most productive part of the state — is bright red.
So here’s my brilliant idea. Instead of fighting another bloody, stupid, senseless War of Secession like the one we had in 1865, let’s grandly and magnanimously permit the state of California to secede — even insist on it — one county at a time. Those counties that vote to secede may do so and create the People’s Republic of Californistan, or whatever.
In exchange for defending this dog’s breakfast of a polity, we will keep all of our military bases and installations, somewhat like Guantanamo Bay Naval Air Station in Cuba. I believe the legal term is “adverse possession”. Those counties that do not vote to secede — we wouldn’t want them to become like the captive peoples and nations of Europe during the Cold War — may remain in the Union, joining the adjacent state (mostly Nevada) or forming their own. To paraphrase the Borg, “We will add their productiveness to our own.”
However the trouble (for California, anyway), if you look at the map, is that county-by-county secession leaves the people’s Republic without visible means of support, a vagrant state, as it were, full of pencil-neck politicos and other worthless parasites, guilty of loitering on our Left Coast. They’re already bankrupt, after decades of Leninist-Stalinist policies. Now they will never recover with their productive counties gone — and we get their avocados!
Let them eat software.
October 22, 2018
The Last German E-Boat
Mark Felton Productions
Published on 24 Sep 2018S-130 is the very last of Germany’s sleek S-Boats, the fast motor torpedo boats known to the British as E-boats, that ravaged shipping around the shores of the UK. Now being restored in Britain, this boat is a rare wartime survivor with an equally fascinating postwar story to match.
Photo credits: British Power Boat Trust, Exercise Tiger Memorial, Barry Lewis, Jim Linwood.
October 15, 2018
QotD: Bureaucracies
… bureaucracies have lives and characters of their own, irrespective of the sort of men they employ. The public schools are made up mostly of good people, but they don’t work very well. One imagines that most IRS agents are scrupulous and dedicated. (The DMV people just hate us.)
Kevin D. Williamson, “Agents and Agencies: Donald Trump should push for intelligence reform”, National Review, 2017-01-06.
October 12, 2018
The Hindenburg Line Breaks – The Lost Battalion Returns I THE GREAT WAR Week 220
The Great War
Published on 11 Oct 2018The Hindenburg Line or Siegfriedstellung is the backbone of the German defenses on the Western Front and this week 100 years ago, the Allies break through during the Battle of St. Quentin Canal. At the same time, the political fallout within Germany continues and the Allied Army of the Orient continues its offensive on the Macedonian Front.
October 11, 2018
It’s all in the spin – “Another ‘human trafficking operation’ that wasn’t”
Elizabeth Nolan Brown on how to pitch a “human trafficking” police sweep that doesn’t actually uncover any human trafficking at all:
One hundred and twenty-three missing Michigan minors were found during a one-day “sex trafficking operation,” the New York Post reported yesterday. Similar statements showed up in other news headlines across national and international news. What the associated articles fail to mention for multiple paragraphs is that only three of the minors are even suspected of having been involved in prostitution.
Officials said the operation — a joint effort of the U.S. Marshals Service, the FBI, Michigan State Police, and multiple local Michigan police departments — identified three “possible sex-trafficking cases” among the 123 minors that were located on September 26, according to a press release.
What’s more, all but four of the “missing children” were not actually missing. In the remaining cases, minors were listed in a police database as missing but had since been found or returned home on their own. “Many were (homeschooled),” Lt. Michael Shaw told The Detroit News. “Some were runaways as well.”
The one-day “rescue” sweep was a long-time in the making, with police beforehand “investigating their whereabouts by visiting last known addresses, friend’s homes and schools.”
Nothing in the U.S. Marshals report on the operation makes mention of any arrested kidnappers, “traffickers,” or other adults involved in endangering or exploiting any of the missing minors that were identified. Which makes sense — very few missing children are actually abducted. And when runaway teens do engage in sex for money, the vast majority do not have “pimps.”
QotD: The radical, right wing US Supreme Court
We don’t have a “radical right-wing Supreme Court,” despite lots of mewing on the left to the contrary. Here are some things that would be at the top of the list for a radical right-wing Court: (1) ban abortion nationwide as a violation of the right to life protected by the due process clause; (2) rule that publicly-provided (but not funded) education is unconstitutional because it inherently involves viewpoint discrimination by the government, or at least require vouchers for those who object to the public school curriculum; (3) overrule an 1898 precedent and completely abolish birthright citizenship; (4) Use the First Amendment as a sword to require “fairness” in the left-dominated media. Not only is the Supreme Court not about to do any of things, I don’t think any of these things would even get one vote on the current Court. Moreover, merely bringing the scope of Congress’s constitutional back to where it was, say, in 1935, which was already much broader than the original meaning of the Commerce power, probably wouldn’t get more than one or two votes. What you are looking at right now is a conservative Court that will only affect society on the margins, not a “radical right-wing” Court.
David Bernstein, “WE DON’T HAVE A ‘RADICAL RIGHT-WING SUPREME COURT'”, Instapundit, 2018-10-09.
October 8, 2018
Enzo Ferrari – Tank Sounds – French-American Animosity I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
The Great War
Published on 6 Oct 2018Chair of Wisdom Time!
