I have updated the “Abortion Q & A” page with this:
Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, Inc., is devastating in its revelations about the racist motives of Margaret Sanger, a founder of Planned Parenthood, and of abortion’s “disparate impact” on blacks. For a synopsis of Thomas’s opinion, see “Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Margaret Sanger Walk Into a Segregated Bar…“, by John Zmirak, The Stream, May 29, 2019.
A new page at Politics and Prosperity, here.
Abstraction is the problem. Government officials and their enablers in the academy have a habit of judging voluntary social and economic outcomes by arbitrary standards. From there, they go on to prescribe costly, flawed, and counterproductive social and economic policies.
For example: The “poverty rate” (an artificial construct) is “too high”; therefore, poor people should be given handouts, which only worsen poverty by disincentivizing work. Or “not enough” persons have health insurance; therefore, taxpayers must be penalized for their success by subsidizing the health insurance of low-income persons, whose health outcomes are barely affected by their easier (and costly) access to health care. Or blacks are “discriminated against” because they have lower grades, lower earnings, etc., than whites East Asians, and Ashkenzi Jews; therefore, persons in the latter three categories must be penalized (through adverse selection for jobs, promotions, university admissions), in favor of blacks — despite the fact that the noted disparities are due to differences in intelligence. (There’s more here, here, and here.)
Though much of the private sector has became government-like in its huge, bloated, rent-seeking rigidity, it remains inherently superior in its ability to detect and solve actual problems. Why? Competition and pursuit of profit. When an entrepreneur perceives a need, he perceives a real one — a product or service that fills a gap or improves on an existing product or service. Yes, the entrepreneur doesn’t always get it right, but because there are many, many entrepreneurs all seeking to satisfy needs, they get it right in the aggregate.
Entrepreneurs, unlike government officials and academics, aren’t trying to second-guess markets. Instead, they’re using markets to advance the interests of consumers, in the hope of making profits — which are the reward for advancing consumers’ interests.
Government officials and academics, on the other hand, have no skin in the game. Their “profit” comes from imposing their will on others, however costly, inefficient, and socially and economically counterproductive that may be. And when they fail, they aren’t held accountable, except occasionally on election day. But most government officials and academics are unaffected by that kind of “accountability”, so they aren’t deterred from making the same mistake (more government) again and again. Hope springs eternal failure isn’t penalized.
Government screws up because government officials and their academic enablers have no skin in the game. They are paid regardless of how badly they do, and their prestige depends not on the actual success or failure of their schemes, but on the mere adoption of those schemes.
Formal musical composition in the tradition of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Dvorak (to mention only a representative selection from a vast array) took a turn for the worse in the early 1900s. “Modern” music as it was then and has remained, consists of the following styles:
Gloomy music for a gloomy day/event/epoch — sometimes vocalized for extra dreariness.
Hyper-caffeinated cacophony for noise addicts.
Ponderous musical platitudes, piled high and at great length.
Random noise and random silence, in various proportions.
Throw in dissonance, atonality, lack of rhythm — and just plain non-musicality — and you’ve got “modern” music.
The index page at Fox News proclaims “Dems Decry War on Women” in the pointer to this story, which includes such profundities as these:
“We are not going to allow them to move our country backward,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota vowed as she spoke to the crowd.
Another White House hopeful, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, called the measures “the beginning of President Trump’s war on women.”
And Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey urged those protesting to “wake up more men to join this fight.”
The country moved backward — with a jolt — 46 years ago when the Supremes legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade. You would think that the opponents of capital punishment would be decidedly against the execution of innocents. But that would require a degree of logical consistency that eludes the “liberal” mind. Roe v. Wade wasn’t just a defeat for the unborn, it was also a victory for post-coital birth control — a judicial ratification of irresponsibility.
As for Trump’s nascent “war on women”, hadn’t “liberals’ long ago decided that Trump’s war began when he hit puberty, if not before?
What’s missing from all of this drama is the central fact that the Democrat Party long ago declared war on babies. And the war goes on, more shrilly than ever.
Victor Davis Hanson, like many others before him (and like) me, sees the unraveling of America portended by Petronius’s The Satyricon (ca. 60 AD):
Certain themes … are timeless and still resonate today.
The abrupt transition from a society of rural homesteaders into metropolitan coastal hubs had created two Romes. One world was a sophisticated and cosmopolitan network of traders, schemers, investors, academics, and deep-state imperial cronies. Their seaside corridors were not so much Roman as Mediterranean. And they saw themselves more as “citizens of the world” than as mere Roman citizens.
In the novel, vast, unprecedented wealth had produced license. On-the-make urbanites suck up and flatter the childless rich in hopes of being given estates rather than earning their own money….
[The] novel’s accepted norms are pornography, gratuitous violence, sexual promiscuity, transgenderism, delayed marriage, childlessness, fear of aging, homelessness, social climbing, ostentatious materialism, prolonged adolescence, and scamming and conning in lieu of working.
The characters are fixated on expensive fashion, exotic foods, and pretentious name-dropping. They are the lucky inheritors of a dynamic Roman infrastructure that had globalized three continents. Rome had incorporated the shores of the Mediterranean under uniform law, science, institutions—all kept in check by Roman bureaucracy and the overwhelming power of the legions, many of them populated by non-Romans.
Never in the history of civilization had a generation become so wealthy and leisured, so eager to gratify every conceivable appetite—and yet so bored and unhappy.
But there was also a second Rome in the shadows. Occasionally the hipster antiheroes of the novel bump into old-fashioned rustics, shopkeepers, and legionaries. They are what we might now call the ridiculed “deplorables” and “clingers.”…
Globalization had enriched and united non-Romans into a world culture. That was an admirable feat. But such homogenization also attenuated the very customs, traditions, and values that had led to such astounding Roman success in the first place….
But the new empire also diluted a noble and unique Roman agrarianism. It eroded nationalism and patriotism. The empire’s wealth, size, and lack of cohesion ultimately diminished Roman unity, as well as traditional marriage, child-bearing, and autonomy….
[W]ide reading ensures erudition and sophistication, and helps science supplant superstition. But sometimes education is also ambiguous. Students become idle, pretentious loafers. Professors are no different from loud pedants. Writers are trite and boring. Elite pundits sound like gasbags.
Petronius seems to imply that whatever the Rome of his time was, it was likely not sustainable—but would at least be quite exciting in its splendid decline.
Petronius also argues that with too much rapid material progress comes moral regress. His final warning might be especially troubling for the current generation of Western Europeans and Americans. Even as we brag of globalizing the world and enriching the West materially and culturally, we are losing our soul in the process.
Getting married, raising families, staying in one place, still working with our hands, and postponing gratification may be seen as boring and out of date. But nearly 2,000 years later, all of that is what still keeps civilization alive.
Hanson omits — because Petronious’s prescience was limited — the end game, in which the glory that was Rome was extinguished by internal rot, military failure, and invasion. The first of those — internal rot –is well underway in the United States, “thanks” to the Democrat Party. The second — military failure — has become more or less a habit since the Korean War — a habit that will resume with the eventual return to power of the Democrat Party. The third — invasion — probably will be accomplished in bloodless form by the determination of China’s leadership, when a Democrat administration (having disarmed the country) accedes to military and economic coercion.
And, ironically (but blessedly) that will put paid to the kinds of excesses that Democrats have fostered in their zeal for (evanescent) power: pornography, gratuitous violence, sexual promiscuity, transgenderism, delayed marriage, childlessness, fear of aging, homelessness, social climbing, ostentatious materialism, prolonged adolescence, and scamming and conning in lieu of working.
America’s virtual state of servitude will also put paid to the last vestiges of liberty in the land, though they would have eventually disappeared under Democrat rule.
I quote:
“This award will inspire me in future years to bring again the message of civility and decency and progress to all of those who, like you, revere the law,” retired Justice Anthony Kennedy promised today as he received the Henry J. Friendly Medal at the American Law Institute’s annual meeting.
Two summers ago, “it seemed to me appropriate to re-read Plato and Aristotle,” Kennedy related, remarking that “it always irritated me that they gave a low grade to democracy” in their evaluations of different forms of governance. The philosophers held this view, Kennedy explained, “because they thought that democracy did not have the capacity to mature.”
“It is our destiny to prove them wrong,” Kennedy continued; “at the moment, we are not doing that.”
Nor will “we” ever. Democracy is an inherently corrupt and corrupting institution when its mandate is limitless and it empowers the rabble. (Democracy = demos, the mob + kratos, rule.)
Kennedy lives in a fool’s “paradise”, some of which is of his own making. See, for example, “A Nation of Enemies“, “Judging the Justices: The Thomas Standard“, “The Kennedy-Roberts Court in Retrospect“, “The Kennedy Retirement“, “The Kennedy Retirement: Hope Springs Eternal“, “It’s Official: Kennedy Is Now a Member of the Court’s “Liberal” Wing“, and “Anthony Kennedy: Useless Idiot“.
Commenting on a billionaire’s offer to pay off the student loans of the graduating class of Morehouse College, she says:
It’s important to note that people shouldn’t be in a situation where they depend on a stranger’s enormous act of charity for this kind of liberation to begin with (aka college should be affordable)….
“Aka” (also known as)? The dim-witted AOC means “i.e.” (that is). And the parentheses are excess baggage. She proves, once again, that college and high school were wasted on her.
What AOC really wants is for taxpayers to be forced to throw their money away by subsidizing the education indoctrination of the unfit-for-college masses. (See this and the posts listed at the end.)
But … it would be a drop in the bucket compared with the Green New Deal.
… is that it rejects high standards and the application of those standards (e.g., profitability, actual accountability, high test scores). “Liberals” purport to have high moral standards, as exemplified in the term “social justice”. But those “standards” are nothing but excuses for abysmal performance, criminality, and other socially and economically destructive acts.
My thesis, which I posted here in August, looks better every day. The argument is brief, though the entry is long because of the ever-expanding list of links to supporting material. The recent infighting between Comey and Brennan supports my view that Brennan was the ringleader and Comey was nothing more than what he has always been: an opportunistic suck-up. In any event, the bottom line — a deep-state conspiracy against Trump, before and after the election — looks more like the truth with every new revelation about the Obama administration’s shenanigans.
They assume moral superiority.
They presume to impose their version of morality on others.
They care not that their actions are patently self-serving and destructive of the trust that binds people.
This newly enacted law is a likely vehicle by which to bring the issue of abortion back to the Supreme Court. If the issue does return to the Court, Roe v. Wade could be overturned if at least five justices follow the logic prescribed in a post that I wrote before Alabama acted.
I fear, however, that Roberts or Kavanaugh (or both) might try to assuage the left — which is a futile and therefore stupid thing to do. But it would be in the long and sad tradition of conservative cuckoldry to the left.
The title of this post is hyperbolic, but it is nearer today’s truth than was Lincoln’s assertion at the end of his first inaugural address:
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
The United States of 1861 was genetically and culturally close-knit by comparison to the genetically and culturally fractured nation of today. It is impossible to turn the clock back. We must accept the United States for what it is — a fractured nation dominated by a powerful, intrusive central government.
That government’s vast power, by the way, stems largely from Lincoln’s prosecution of the Civil War. The North’s victory in that war paved the way for the demise of the constitutional order — a strictly limited central government responsible to States that still possessed most governmental power. Decentralization made it easier for citizens to control the degree to which governments could prey on them. And it made voting with one’s feet a real option, even in that age when inter-State mobility was an arduous and risky proposition.
The so-called greatest generation has died out in my family, as it soon will die out across the land. The recent death of my mother-in-law at age 98 removed from the scene the last of my wife’s and my parents and their siblings: 26 of them in all.
Their birth years ranged from 1903 to 1922. There were, oddly, 18 males as against only 8 females, and the disparity held for all four sets of siblings:
7 to 3 for my mother’s set
2 to 1 for my father’s set
5 to 3 for my wife’s mother’s set
4 to 1 for my wife’s father’s set.
Only one of the 26 died before reaching adulthood (my father’s younger brother at 18 months). Two others (also males) died relatively young. One of my mother’s brothers died just a few weeks before his 40th birthday as a result of a jeep accident (he was on active duty in the Coast Guard). One of my wife’s mother’s brothers died at age 48 as a long delayed result of a blow to the head by a police truncheon.
The other 15 males lived to ages ranging from 65 to 96, with an average age at death of 77 years. The 8 females lived to ages ranging from 69 to 99, with an average age at death of 87 years. The longest-lived of the males was the only one to pass the 90 mark. Four of the females lived into their 90s, dying at ages 91, 96, 98, and 99.
All of the 25 who reached adulthood also married. Only two of them had a marriage end in divorce. All of them were raised in near-poverty or in somewhat comfortable circumstances that vanished with the onset of the Great Depression. All of them worked hard, whether in the home or outside of it; none of them went on welfare; most of the men and two of the women served in uniform during World War II.
Thus passeth a generation sui generis.
Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley,
The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter?
All, all, are sleeping on the hill….Where are Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie and Edith,
The tender heart, the simple soul, the loud, the proud, the happy one?
All, all, are sleeping on the hill.Edgar Lee Masters, Spoon River Anthology (“The Hill“)
Angry white males are meek and mild by comparison. Need I add that the angry females are leftists?
… is worse service. It figures, doesn’t it? One of the things that firms must do to boost output is to hire people with lower qualifications than previous hires. That’s good for dumber and less-educated workers. But it’s frustrating for consumers who encounter them in stores and over the phone. The solution, from my perspective as a consumer, is to shop where automation reigns. My Amazon membership of 21 years becomes daily more valuable to me.
Politics and Prosperity 