There is no such thing as learning loss. Our kids didn’t lose anything [during the pandemic]. It’s okay that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.
So says Cecily Myart-Cruz, president of the United Teachers Los Angeles union. A union representing 33,000 teachers and associated educational staff.
“Education is political”, says Ms Myart-Cruz, who boasts of her ability to act with near-impunity, and whose list of Intolerable Things includes cognitive testing, “structural racism”, border controls, policing, and the supposed “privilege” of parents who would like their children to actually learn things, including times tables. Our Mistress Of Higher Purpose struggles to comprehend why parents might object to their children’s education, even in basic skills, being supplanted by the nakedly self-serving and increasingly weird activism of the people paid to teach them those basic skills. Instead, she endorses claims that such objections must be driven by “white-supremacist thinking”.
David Thompson, “Activism Farms”, DavidThompson, 2021-08-31.
December 1, 2021
QotD: When mere teaching isn’t enough, indoctrination takes over
November 19, 2021
QotD: People who are interested in history versus “academic” historians
One of many reasons I never went anywhere in my career as an academic historian is that I actually like history. I find it interesting. That’s because I find people interesting, and history is, above all, the study of people and how they be.
Your average academic historian lives entirely in xzheyr own head. They hate and fear people. They have no interest in how people actually are, only in how they should be. Thus, academic history quickly devolves into the worst kind of Social Justice Mad Lib, a never-ending, ever more frantic search for ever more obscure terms to complete the equation: “Despite [barbarities], the [micro-group] were actually only doing it because they were oppressed by the Pale Penis People, because [reasons].”
For example:
This is one of those things that’s true even if it’s not true, because Clown World, but I actually looked this guy up and yeah, he’s real — he’s a “Professor of Practice in Media and Activism at Harvard University”, which is exactly what it sounds like: basically, a tenured pest, who makes very nice bank making students protest shit for class credit. The “new book” referenced in the screenshot isn’t on Amazon yet, so maybe that’s not real, but again, Clown World — even if it’s not real, it’s real, because that’s exactly the kind of thing academic historians do. You probably remember it well from your own college days, if you were in college at any time between about 1985 through 1995, the heyday of “everyone you’ve ever heard of was secretly gay!” pseudo-scholarship.
Severian, “On Boredom”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-17.
November 17, 2021
The Supreme Court of Canada — four-ninths woke
In The Line, Leonid Sirota discusses a disturbingly narrow victory for freedom of speech in the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Ward v Quebec (Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse):
“Supreme Court of Canada, Ottawa”by daniel0685 is licensed under CC BY 2.0
The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Ward v Quebec (Commission des droits de la personne et des droits de la jeunesse) has attracted considerable public attention, and for good reason. Although no law was in danger of being found unconstitutional, the case did concern the limits of the freedom of expression, which have always been controversial, and are perhaps more controversial now than they had been in decades. In brief, the issue was whether nasty jokes by an “edgelord comedian”, as The Line‘s excellent editorial described Mr. Ward, at the expense of Jérémy Gabriel, a well-known disabled child artist, amounted to discrimination that could be punished by an award of damages.
Much has already been written about the Supreme Court’s narrow decision in favour of Mr. Ward; for my part, I have already commented on (mostly) the majority opinion on my blog. Here, I focus on the dissent, in which, as The Line put it, “[t]here’s an incredible amount of popular modern discourse seeping into judicial reasoning” that “culled plausible-sounding legalese from Twitter logic”. That sounds about right.
But let me put it slightly differently. The dissent is, in a word, woke. And I do not mean “woke” as a generic insult. Nor do I mean, incidentally, that Mr. Gabriel is a snowflake. I think he deserves sympathy on a human level, though not the protection of the law for his claim. Rather, what I mean by calling the dissent woke is that it embraces a number of specific tenets of contemporary social-justice ideology, which, if they become law ― and they were just one vote away from becoming law ― would be utterly corrosive to the freedom of expression.
For one thing, the dissent erases the line between words and actions, so that disfavoured words are treated as deeds and therefore subjected to vastly expanded regulation. Justices Abella and Kasirer (with whom two others agree) write:
We would never tolerate humiliating or dehumanizing conduct towards children with disabilities; there is no principled basis for tolerating words that have the same abusive effect. Wrapping such discriminatory conduct in the protective cloak of speech does not make it any less intolerable when that speech amounts to wilful emotional abuse of a disabled child.
In what is going to be a theme of my comment, this twists the meaning of words beyond recognition. Conduct is conduct and speech is speech. Using words instead the proverbial sticks and stones is not just a disguise. It’s the better part of civilization. The law relies on a distinction between words and actions all the time. This is a principle, and a general one, but it has also been a cornerstone of the law of the freedom of expression in Canada since the early days of the Charter. I have criticized the majority decision for disregarding precedent and doctrine. The dissent does the same, only much worse.
Besides, as I once noted elsewhere, the negation of the distinction between speech and conduct often combines with a belief that violence against some politically heretical group or other is permissible with the toxic belief that “[w]hat one says, or does, is expression; what one’s opponents say, or do, is violence.” This, in turn, means that law dissolves into a raw competition for political power, with the ability to decide whose expression will be stripped of its “protective cloak” and proscribed as the prize.
November 14, 2021
The Media — declining to report the news and instead depleting the strategic reserve of Narrativium
This week’s excerpt from Andrew Sullivan’s Weekly Dish explores the many, many ways that the mainstream media have been actively abandoning any semblance of informing their audience and instead now concentrate almost exclusively on propagandizing them:
The news is a perilous business. It’s perilous because the first draft of history is almost always somewhat wrong, and needs a second draft, and a third, and so on, over time, until the historian can investigate with more perspective and calm. The job of journalists is to do as best they can, day by day, and respond swiftly when they screw up, correct the record, and move forward. I’ve learned this the hard way, not least in the combination of credulousness and trauma I harbored in the wake of 9/11.
But when the sources of news keep getting things wrong, and all the errors lie in the exact same direction, and they are reluctant to acknowledge error, we have a problem. If you look back at the last few years, the record of errors, small and large, about major stories, is hard to deny. It’s as if the more Donald Trump accused the MSM of being “fake news” the more assiduously they tried to prove him right.
You know the situation is bad when Andrew Sullivan references Donald Trump without a sneer!
We found out this week, for example, that a key figure in the emergence of the Steele Dossier, Igor Danchenko, has been indicted for lying to the FBI. He is also charged with asking a Clinton crony, Charles Dolan Jr: “Any thought, rumor, allegation. I am working on a related project against Trump.”
The evidence from another key source for the dossier, Sergei Millian — touted across all media, including the Washington Post — has also been exposed as potentially fake. What has the Post done? As their own indispensable Erik Wemple notes, instead of a clear retraction, the Post has just added editors’ notes to previous stories, removed sections and a video, and altered headlines retroactively. This is a bizarre way of correcting the record: “No such case comes immediately or specifically to mind, at least no historical case that stirred lasting controversy,” said W. Joseph Campbell, a professor and journalism historian at American University.
This doesn’t mean that Trump wasn’t eager for Russian help. But Trump was right, in the end, about the dodgy dossier; he was right about the duped FBI’s original overreach; and the mass media — Rachel Maddow chief among them — were wrong. And yet the dossier dominated the headlines for three years, and the “corrections” have a fraction of the audience of the errors. Maddow gets promoted. And the man who first published it, Ben Smith, was made the media columnist for the NYT.
Think of the other narratives the MSM pushed in recent years that have collapsed. They viciously defamed the Covington boys. They authoritatively told us that bounties had been placed on US soldiers in Afghanistan by Putin — and Trump’s denials only made them more certain. They told us that the lab-leak theory of Covid was a conspiracy theory with no evidence behind it at all. (The NYT actually had the story of the leak theory, by Donald McNeil, killed it, and then fired McNeil, their best Covid reporter, after some schoolgirls complained he wasn’t woke.) Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
The MSM took the ludicrous story of Jussie Smollett seriously because it fit their nutty “white supremacy” narrative. They told us that a woman was brutally gang-raped at UVA (invented), that the Pulse mass shooting was driven by homophobia (untrue) and that the Atlanta spa shooter was motivated by anti-Asian bias (no known evidence for that at all). For good measure, they followed up with story after story about white supremacists targeting Asian-Americans, in a new wave of “hate”, even as the assaults were disproportionately by African Americans and the mentally ill.
As Greenwald noted, the NYT “published an emotionally gut-wrenching but complete fiction that never had any evidence — that Officer Sicknick’s skull was savagely bashed in with a fire extinguisher by a pro-Trump mob until he died.” The media told us that an alleged transgender exposure in the Wi Spa in Los Angeles was an anti-trans hoax (also untrue). They told us that the emails recovered on Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian disinformation. They did this just before an election and used that claim to stymie the story on social media. But they were not Russian disinformation. They were a valid if minor news story the media consciously kept from its audience for partisan purposes.
November 10, 2021
When the police get posh – “The ruling class needs a woke paramilitary vanguard for when the people revolt”
In The Critic, Harry Miller decries the comfortable middle- and upper-middle-class wokesters who can posture and protest and cause mass disruptions to the workers and lower-middle-class with impunity, because on the very few occasions they are brought to court, the judiciary demonstrate that their hearts are with the posh protest movements, not with the people:
Of course, there is a risk when elected leaders burn up the air miles to feast with the Bacchanalian elite, whilst simultaneously preaching that climate armageddon will only be avoided if the hoi polloi ditch their cars and, once a week, take the peasant wagon to Lidl. When “let them eat cake” becomes “let them eat insects and plant based mash”, there is a heightened risk that the working class will take to the streets to sing “One Day More” with a spare rib in one hand a pitchfork in the other. And it is the working class which poses the threat as the middle class can afford to make a virtue of its suffering. Trading in the Discovery Sport for a hybrid Mini Countryman and a bag full of social bragging rights is substantially different from having to choose between putting on the heating and a week on the beer in Faliraki.
In anticipation of the backlash the government has turned a blind eye to the politicisation of the police and is now recruiting exclusively from the middle class. Why else do you suppose a career in the police is now only open to those with a degree? The ruling class needs a woke paramilitary vanguard, well versed in the etiquette of uncritical obedience, for when the people revolt.
When the police embrace a political cause, there is no expression of support that is too extreme. Humberside Police endorsed a lunatic with connections to organised crime who once told Julie Burchill, a writer of Jewish heritage, that Hitler had the right idea. And the national lead on Hate Crime, Paul Giannasi OBE, recently introduced the concept of laudable hate, provided it serves middle class preoccupations such as gender identity or preserving the tundra.
And then there is the obscene spectacle of politically sponsored riot shields being paraded by the police through the streets of Leicester. We are meant to swallow the lie that this is a benign display of support for a marginalised community when, in reality, it is an emblematic reminder to the working class to Remember The Battle Of Orgreave. On the 18th of June, 1984, ordinary working people lent their support to the picketing miners and were met with a baton charge, preceded by the pounding of riot shields, in scenes reminiscent of Zulu. Lest they forget.
Photo from The Critic
The crimes of the woke middle class, where they are prosecuted at all, come with the safety net of a judiciary that is also in on the racket. When six XR zealots found themselves in the dock for progressing the cause of Greta Thunberg by taking hammers to the glass frontage of Shell’s London Headquarters, Judge Gregory Perrin advised that their actions had no defence at law. Nevertheless, he offered gratitude for the care and diligence taken by the jury when it returned a not-guilty verdict. Last week, three activists were found guilty of criminal damage for graffitiing “Lies, lies, lies” on the Westminster Office of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in response to its sin of climate scepticism. Before being slammed with peppercorn fines, the criminals — Clare, Jessica and Rupert — were praised by the bench for their openness and honesty. It is yet to be seen whether similar leeway will be afforded to working class criminals who, in pursuit of Net Zero, begin half inching insulation from Travis Perkins.
November 6, 2021
QotD: Michael Bellesisles
… I offered a very limited defense of the History Biz. It’s not just that they’re rabid Leftists, I said. I mean, yeah, they are, no denying that, but outright “writing the conclusion before you even start asking the question”-type fraud, Michael Bellesisles-type fraud, is a lot rarer than you probably think.
Bellesisles, you might recall, is the guy whose revolutionary revisionist thesis was that the Founders weren’t really all that enthusiastic about guns, and didn’t own that many, and that whole 2nd Amendment thing was just an afterthought. Yeah, right. That one was written conclusion first, and since no remotely objective look at the evidence could ever possibly support it, he resorted to making lots of “evidence” up. But the reaction of the rest of the profession was interesting: They lauded Bellesisles to the skies. He won the Bancroft Prize for his work, which is the biggest one you can get in American history. Now, I’m sure you’re saying “of course they praised him, he was telling them exactly what they wanted to hear!”, and you’re right …
… but only to a point. Because eggheads are — as you might imagine — the pettiest, most envious bunch of little bitches this side of a junior high cheerleading squad, there’s no piece of research so meticulous, no conclusion so solid, that someone isn’t going to tear into it in one of the professional journals, for base personal reasons if no other. Lest you think I’m kidding, I personally know of a woman at a big league school whose husband was seduced, and her marriage ruined, by an open, obnoxious lesbian colleague, all because she, the hetero, had dared to question some of the lesbian’s work at a conference in their mutual field.
That’s the level of pettiness we’re dealing with here. And I can’t say for absolute certain that Bellesisles received no criticism whatsoever; he doesn’t work in my field, so even though I was certain that Arming America was bullshit of the purest ray serene, it wasn’t my problem, professionally speaking. But whatever, point is, in my fairly well-informed opinion, merely “telling them what they want to hear” doesn’t account for the entire profession ignoring the huge, blinking, neon red flags surrounding Arming America. Rather, I suggest it’s more of a Pauline Kael thing.
I actually kinda pity Kael — much like John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, she was a fairly big wheel back in her day, but if she’s known at all now, it’s for something entirely peripheral to her life’s work. In Kael’s case, it’s her declaration that it was impossible for Richard Nixon to have won in 1972, since “nobody I know voted for him” (it was one of the biggest blowouts in American electoral history). The Arming America thing is, I think, like that — nobody in academia owns a gun, or knows anyone who owns a gun, or knows anyone who knows anyone who owns a gun. So, yeah, they know all the scary statistics about how there are sixty gorillion more guns than people in America, but all of that iron belongs to the Dirt People, far away over the horizon. They’d never in a million years even be in the same zip code as someone who thinks Arming America was absurd on its face. Hence, it never occurred to them to question it.
It helped that Bellesisles was telling them what they wanted to hear, no doubt, but the main reason nobody challenged it was that they lacked the cognitive toolkit to even consider the possibility he might be wrong.
Severian, “Are They Trying to Lose?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-15.
November 4, 2021
QotD: The “Righteousness Fallacy”, California style
The Righteousness Fallacy (also known as the fallacy of good intentions) is described by author Dr. Bo Bennett as the idea that one is correct because their intentions are pure.
It recently occurred to me that California is a perfect example of this fallacy. Consider these three facts about the Golden State:
- California spends about $98.5 billion annually on welfare — the most in the US — but has the highest poverty rate in America.
- California has the highest income tax rate in the US, at 13.3 percent, but the fourth greatest income inequality of the 50 states.
- California has one of the most regulated housing markets in America, yet it has the highest homeless population in American and ranks 49th (per capita) in housing supply.
That politicians would persist with harmful policies should come as little surprise. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman once observed the uncanny proclivity of politicians “to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results”.
In his book Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman described the danger of such thinking.
[The threat comes] from men of good intentions and good will who wish to reform us. Impatient with the slowness of persuasion and example to achieve the great social changes they envision, they’re anxious to use the power of the state to achieve their ends and confident in their ability to do so. Yet … Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
Jon Miltimore, “Data Show California Is a Living Example of the Good Intentions Fallacy”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2019-01-09.
October 24, 2021
Andrew Sullivan – “They are the Dana Carvey church ladies of our time, except instead of saying ‘Could it be Satan?!’ when confronting some cultural or moral transgression, they turn to the camera, clutch their pearls, and say ‘Could it be whiteness?!'”
Andrew Sullivan on what he titles “The Betrayal Of Our Gay Inheritance”:
It was, as it turned out, a bit of a non-event. The walkout by transgender Netflix employees and their supporters to demand that the company take down and apologize for the latest Chappelle special attracted “dozens”, despite media hype.
But the scenes were nonetheless revealing. A self-promoting jokester showed up with a placard with the words “We Like Jokes” and “We Like Dave” to represent an opposing view. He was swiftly accosted by a man who ripped the poster apart, leaving the dude with just a stick, prompting the assailant to shout “He’s got a weapon!” Pushed back by other protestors, he was then confronted by a woman right in front of him — shaking a tambourine — and yelling repeatedly into his face: “Repent, motherfucker! Repent! Repent!”
This is the state of what’s left of the gay rights movement in America. Judgmental, absolutist, intolerant, and hysterical, it looks to shut down speech it dislikes, drive its foes out of the public square, compile enemies’ lists of dangerous writers, artists, and politicians, and cancel and protest anything that does not comport with every tiny aspect of their increasingly deranged ideology.
The generation that now leads the movement does not seem to know the actual history of the gay rights movement, or the centrality of free expression to gay identity. They also seem to have no idea of the history of the movement against gay rights. Because if they did, they might be shocked at the ironies involved.
Anti-gay forces, hegemonic for centuries, were just like these trans activists. They were just as intent on suppressing and stigmatizing magazines, shows, and movies they believed were harmful. They too targeted individual artists and writers for personal destruction. They too believed that movies and comedy needed to be reined in order to prevent social harm. They protested in front of movie theaters. They tried to get shows canceled. And if you’d marched in any gay demo or Pride in the 1990s, you’d always be prepared to confront a grimacing Christianist yelling “Repent! Repent!” in your face.
In fact, it’s hard not to see the trans far left as a farcical replay of the Religious Right of the past. They are the Dana Carvey church ladies of our time, except instead of saying “Could it be Satan?!” when confronting some cultural or moral transgression, they turn to the camera, clutch their pearls, and say “Could it be whiteness?!”
This was never, ever the spirit of the gay rights movement in the past. In fact, it was America’s guarantee of free expression and free association that made the gay rights movement possible. It was the First Amendment, and the spirit of the First Amendment, that was easily the most important right for gays for decades. From the fledgling Society for Human Rights, formed in Chicago in 1924, and its pioneering magazine, Friendship and Freedom, to the struggles against censorship in the 1950s, with One Magazine, and erotic Physique pamphlets under siege, it was the First Amendment that, especially under Oliver Wendell Holmes, allowed gay people to find each other, to develop arguments for their own dignity and self-worth, and to sustain free associations when the entire society viewed them as perverts and undesirables and child molesters.
October 16, 2021
QotD: Social security
Julian Sanchez, “Social Security’s Progressive Paradox: Retirement ‘insurance’ as a Rube Goldberg machine”, Reason, 2005-05-02.
September 22, 2021
QotD: Urban bohemians
Powers fails to recognize that her bohemia is predicated upon a market liberalism that throws off so much wealth that you can live like a Pharaoh just by scavenging what other people throw out — as she and her slacker buddies did in San Francisco in the ’80s and early ’90s. Her bohemian lifestyle is part of the same system that underwrites free markets, consumerism, and tolerance for all sorts of offensive speech and alternative lifestyles. In other words, the liberty to be bohemian is a glorious result of the very capitalist reality that Powers says a real bohemian must be against.
Brian Doherty, “Rage On: The strange politics of millionaire rock stars”, Reason Online, 2000-10.
Update: Broken link fixed, thanks to “somercet1” for the heads-up.
September 12, 2021
Small signs of positive change in the culture wars?
Andrew Sullivan is hopeful that the small signs he mentions here are not just straws in the wind, but the beginning of a real reaction against “the Successor Ideology” among the ultra-woke cultural elite:
… both The Atlantic and The New Yorker have just published long essays that push back against woke authoritarianism and cruelty. Since both magazines have long capitulated to rank illiberalism, this is encouraging. And since critical theory is an entirely elite-imposed orthodoxy, it matters when the ranks of the elite crack a little.
Anne Applebaum links the woke phenomenon to previous moral panics and mob persecutions, which is where it belongs. She too begins to notice the obliteration of due process, individual rights, and mercy among her crusader peers:
Even if you have not been suspended, punished, or found guilty of anything, you cannot function in your profession. If you are a professor, no one wants you as a teacher or mentor (“The graduate students made it obvious to me that I was a nonperson and could not possibly be tolerated”). You cannot publish in professional journals. You cannot quit your job, because no one else will hire you. If you are a journalist, then you might find that you cannot publish at all.
Applebaum’s Atlantic piece is a good sign from a magazine that hired and quickly purged a writer for wrong think, and once held a town meeting auto-da-fé to decide which writers they would permanently anathematize as moral lepers.
Similarly, it was quite a shock to read in The New Yorker a fair and empathetic profile of an academic geneticist, Kathryn Paige Harden, who acknowledges a role for genetics in social outcomes. It helps that Harden is, like Freddie DeBoer, on the left; and the piece is strewn with insinuations that other writers on genetics, like Charles Murray, deny that the environment plays a part in outcomes as well (when it is clear to anyone who can read that this is grotesquely untrue). But if the readers of The New Yorker need to be fed distortions about some on the right in order for them to consider the unavoidable emergence of “polygenic scores” for humans, with their vast political and ethical implications, then that’s a step forward.
The profile also puts the following woke heresy into the minds of the Upper West Side: “Building a commitment to egalitarianism on our genetic uniformity is building a house on sand.” And this: “Genetic diversity is mankind’s most precious resource, not a regrettable deviation from an ideal state of monotonous sameness.” The New Yorker is also telling its readers that there are around “thirteen hundred sites on the genome that are correlated with success in school. Though each might have an infinitesimally small statistical relationship with the outcome, together they can be summed to produce a score that has predictive validity: those in the group with the highest scores were approximately five times more likely to graduate from college than those with the lowest scores.”
All of this is empirically true. But if this is empirically true, critical theory, which insists that absolutely nothing but white supremacist society leads to inequalities, is dead in the water. Refuted. Proven false by reality. Finished — even as it continues to be the premise of other countless pieces The New Yorker has run in the past few years. At some point, this will require a measure of rethinking, a moderation of the left’s absolutist blank-slatism just as the evidence is finally disproving it once and for all. The Successor Ideology, remember, holds that genetics play no role in human society, and that all inequalities are a function of the environment. Take that absolute claim away — which is to say to subject it to empirical testing — and it crumbles. And The New Yorker just took it away.
And then, in the better-late-than-never category, The Economist, the bible for the corporate elite, has just come out unapologetically against the Successor Ideology, and in favor of liberalism. This matters, it seems to me, because among the most zealous of the new Puritans are the boards and HR departments of major corporations, which are dedicated right now to enforcing the largest intentional program of systemic race and sex discrimination in living memory. Money quote: “Progressives replace the liberal emphasis on tolerance and choice with a focus on compulsion and power. Classical liberals conceded that your freedom to swing your fist stops where my nose begins. Today’s progressives argue that your freedom to express your opinions stops where my feelings begin.”
The Economist also pinpoints the core tenets of CRT in language easy to understand: “a belief that any disparities between racial groups are evidence of structural racism; that the norms of free speech, individualism and universalism which pretend to be progressive are really camouflage for this discrimination; and that injustice will persist until systems of language and privilege are dismantled.” These “systems of language and privilege” are — surprise! — freedom of speech and economic liberty. If major corporations begin to understand that, they may reconsider their adoption of a half-baked racialized Marxism as good management. Maybe that might persuade Google not to mandate indoctrination in ideas such as the notion being silent on questions of race is “covert white supremacy”, a few notches below lynching.
September 10, 2021
QotD: Prole nationalism and the globalist elite
E.M. Oblomov, “The Case for National Realism: Diversity is the hallmark of empires, not democracies”, City Journal, 2019-01-02.
August 27, 2021
QotD: Music corporations, musicians, and hypocrisy
So says Tom Morello, guitarist for the Los Angeles-based band Rage Against the Machine. He and his bandmates are not simply against cops and the suburbs, of course. They also stand for the Zapatistas and the Shining Path, for freeing Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier, for giving California back to Mexico, and for destroying stores where rich people like themselves shop.
That’s pretty strong stuff coming from work-for-hire employees of one of the great cogs in the global capitalist machine, the megaconglomerate Sony, which wholly owns and distributes Rage’s music and even is a co-owner of the group’s publishing. Since 1992, Rage has sold nearly 7 million records, and it’s safe to say that nobody has benefitted more from that commerce than the band’s unabashedly capitalist paymaster.
Brian Doherty, “Rage On: The strange politics of millionaire rock stars”, Reason, 2000-10.
August 23, 2021
QotD: Leaving money in the hands of individuals
People do things with that money. And even if all they do is buy stuff (thereby allowing someone else to accumulate wealth) or invest it, that money gets aggregated and finds things to do, as it were. Wealth goes to work on things that seem interesting, might be interesting, or are otherwise likely to make money for the individuals who hold the wealth.
Individuals have money to start new businesses that would never have existed if they’d paid that money in taxes. Or they “invest” in free time and a really nice garden, which in turn lifts the spirits of people who invent something because they feel better than they would otherwise.
The left insists that if they leave money in individual hands, it will just be “wasted”. (Because, you know, no money spent on a vast apparatus, most of it a jobs program for useless paper pushers or power-hungry martinets is ever wasted.)
How do they know? Have they tried leaving enough money in the hands of those who earn it to make a difference?
Not in the twentieth century. Though we can infer from the fact that the most sclerotic, dying countries are the highest taxed ones, that perhaps what government considers “best” and what we consider “best” are not the same.
Not just taxes, but regulations too weigh heavily on possibilities. Sure, the left sees “lands saved” (or created. oop) when say, regulations curtail oil drilling. But what I see is energy taking up an excessive amount of every family’s money, wealth that would otherwise be freed for other investments, for starting businesses, even “just” for fun.
The problem we have is that leftists lack utterly in imagination. They see the “pristine” plots of land, or the things government does with our money and they find it good.
But they’re mind’s-eye blind. They can’t see the wealth that has been consumed for almost 100 years now say on the war on poverty to create chronic poverty having instead been used by individuals to create, to invest, to build, so that, in that parallel world in which money stayed in individual hands, we now have interplanetary travel, colonies all over the solar system, and squid farms on Mars that feed all of humanity.
Their lack of vision, their killing of possibilities without the slightest thought to them: That is a tragedy.
Sara Hoyt, “The Tragedy of the Squid Farms on Mars”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2018-12-05.
August 21, 2021
QotD: Why do government workers need unions?
Sure, we can understand this if she’s working for the bastard capitalists. They merely want to maximise their profit and screw the workers while doing so – as we all know. But government is omniscient, omnipresent and omnibenevolent. It cannot be true that someone working for government is in need of protection from government. Because all those fine folks that make up government simply could not allow it to be that state workers don’t gain adequate wages.
Seriously, come on, this is the Progressive insistence. That getting government to do things saves us from the ravages we endure if the capitalists do them.
But now survey the actual American workplace. Unions in the private sector pretty much don’t exist any more. It is the government workforces that are unionised, making up the vast majority of union members in the country. From that pattern of union existence we have to conclude that government screws the workers rather more than the capitalists do. Otherwise why would people desire let alone need the protection of unions when working for government?
Tim Worstall, “The Public Union Proof That The Progressive State Doesn’t Work”, Expunct, 2021-05-11.
