Category: Culture – Language – The Arts

The Black-White Achievement Gap and Its Parallel in the Middle East

THE ACHIEVEMENT GAP

My post, “Race and Reason: The Achievement Gap — Causes and Implications“, long predates the summer of Black Lives Matter riots and the ensuing effort to whitewash (dare I say that?) the deep-seated and insurmountable differences between blacks and other racial-ethnic groups.

A key element of that post, but by no means the only key element, is the persistent intelligence gap, which is perhaps best measured by SAT scores on math. I introduce in evidence the misnamed and misguided “Race Gaps in SAT Scores Highlight Inequality and Hinder Upward Mobility” (Brookings, February 1, 2017).

The report is misnamed and misguided because inequality and upward mobility are the result of inherent differences in intelligence, not causes of those differences. (There is, of course, a feedback mechanism at work, but it rests on lower average intelligence among blacks.) Here is the meat of the report:

The mean score on the math section of the SAT for all test-takers is 511 out of 800, the average scores for blacks (428) and Latinos (457) are significantly below those of whites (534) and Asians (598). The scores of black and Latino students are clustered towards the bottom of the distribution, while white scores are relatively normally distributed, and Asians are clustered at the top:

Race gaps on the SATs are especially pronounced at the tails of the distribution. In a perfectly equal distribution, the racial breakdown of scores at every point in the distribution would mirror the composition of test-takers as whole i.e. 51 percent white, 21 percent Latino, 14 percent black, and 14 percent Asian. But in fact, among top scorers—those scoring between a 750 and 800—60 percent are Asian and 33 percent are white, compared to 5 percent Latino and 2 percent black. Meanwhile, among those scoring between 300 and 350, 37 percent are Latino, 35 percent are black, 21 percent are white, and 6 percent are Asian:

The College Board’s publicly available data provides data on racial composition at 50-point score intervals. We estimate that in the entire country last year at most 2,200 black and 4,900 Latino test-takers scored above a 700. In comparison, roughly 48,000 whites and 52,800 Asians scored that high. The same absolute disparity persists among the highest scorers: 16,000 whites and 29,570 Asians scored above a 750, compared to only at most 1,000 blacks and 2,400 Latinos. (These estimates—which rely on conservative assumptions that maximize the number of high-scoring black students, are consistent with an older estimate from a 2005 paper in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, which found that only 244 black students scored above a 750 on the math section of the SAT.) …

Disappointingly, the black-white achievement gap in SAT math scores has remained virtually unchanged over the last fifteen years. Between 1996 and 2015, the average gap between the mean black score and the mean white score has been .92 standard deviations. In 1996 it was .9 standard deviations and in 2015 it was .88 standard deviations. This means that over the last fifteen years, roughly 64 percent of all test-takers scored between the average black and average white score.

Note that the black-white gap shown in the third figure is inconsistent with the difference between the white and black means. The gap doesn’t shrink in the 2010s. Note also the following observations by the authors of the report:

The ceiling on the SAT score may … understate Asian achievement. If the exam was redesigned to increase score variance (add harder and easier questions than it currently has), the achievement gap across racial groups could be even more pronounced.

A standardized test with a wider range of scores, the LSAT, offers some evidence on this front. An analysis of the 2013-2014 LSAT finds an average black score of 142 compared to an average white score of 153. This amounts to a black-white achievement gap of 1.06 standard deviations, even higher than that on the SAT….

[T]here is a possibility that the SAT is racially biased, in which case the observed racial gap in test scores may overstate the underlying academic achievement gap. But most of the concerns about bias relate to the verbal section of the SAT, and our analysis focuses exclusively on the math section….

Finally, [these] data [are] limited in that [they] doesn’t allow us to disentangle race and class as drivers of achievement gaps. It is likely that at least some of these racial inequalities can be explained by different income levels across race….

However, a 2015 research paper from the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley shows that between 1994 and 2011, race has grown more important than class in predicting SAT scores for UC applicants. While it is difficult to extrapolate from such findings to the broader population of SAT test-takers, it is unlikely that the racial achievement gap can be explained away by class differences across race.

In fact, my post includes hard evidence (from earlier data) that the race gaps persist across income levels. That is, blacks are less intelligent on average than whites (and others) in the same income bracket.

The evidence notwithstanding (because it is ignored and twisted), the current dogmas (critical race theory, or CRT; diversity, equity, and inclusion or DEI) insist that white culture — including the tenet of racial equality under the law and the importance of dispassionate, scientific inquiry— must be rejected because it is all tainted with racism. Rejection means the suppression of whites and white culture so that blacks may reach their true potential.

The true potential of blacks is determined by their intelligence and their culture. Blacks, on average, are less intelligent than whites, and black culture (in America) fosters violence, disdain for education, and family dysfunction to a greater degree than is true for whites, on average. (But that, somehow, is whitey’s fault.)

Where will this lead? Right where Dov Fischer predicts it will lead:

[T]he same disadvantaged groups who today rely on blaming instead of self-help will then be at the same exact rung on the social order that they are today, just as 50 years of racism-free society and Great Society “entitlements” have not accomplished equality of results today, even as newcomers from Asia entered this country these past 50 and 60 years and leap-frogged those already here.

Blacks, on the whole, are not where they are because of whitey, but because of their genes and culture. But whites (and East Asians) will nevertheless be burdened and suppressed for the sake of “equity”.

THE PARALLEL IN THE MIDDLE EAST

A parallel to the racism of CRT and DEI is that Israel is the aggressor, and that Palestinians are victims. They are “obviously” (to a leftist) victims of Israel because they live (mostly) in territories that were or are controlled by Israel: the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. There is also Israel’s controversial nation-state law, which according to an anti-Zionist source

declare[s] that only Jews have the right of self-determination in the country, something members of the Arab minority called racist and verging on apartheid.

The “nation-state” law, backed by the right-wing government, passed by a vote of 62-55 and two abstentions in the 120-member parliament after months of political argument. Some Arab lawmakers shouted and ripped up papers after the vote.

“This is a defining moment in the annals of Zionism and the history of the state of Israel,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Knesset after the vote.

Largely symbolic [not observed in practice], the law was enacted just after the 70th anniversary of the birth of the state of Israel. It stipulates that “Israel is the historic homeland of the Jewish people and they have an exclusive right to national self-determination in it.”

The usual suspects have declared that the separation of Palestinians (and other Arabs) from Israel and from its governance amount to apartheid., a crime against “international (leftist) law”. From this it follows (to a leftist) that acts of savagery — like those committed by Hamas against Israelis on October 7, 2023 — are justified because Palestinians are victims It further follows (to a leftist) that Israel’s fully justified prophylactic retaliation is aggression.

Let’s examine those premises.

It’s true enough that the denizens of Gaza are poor and feckless. But what makes them victims? They are about on a par with most non-Jewish Semites, except for the relative handful who are members of a professional caste or oil-rich. The basic problem with most such members of humanity —whether in the Middle East or elsewhere — isn’t that they have been put down by anyone (e.g., Israelis) but that they lack the intellectual and cultural resources to raise themselves up.

A “funny” thing about Israel is that it is of a piece with the surrounding lands occupied by non-Jews, but it has become a relatively prosperous place because Jews have the intellectual and cultural resources that undergird prosperity.

For their success and for the fact that they are Jews, the Jews of Israel are the targets of envious failures (Palestinian and Muslim hot-heads), Jew-haters (in addition to the hot-heads), and leftists who can’t bear to think that Palestinians (like American blacks) mainly have their genes and culture to blame for their failings.

Israel was founded (re-founded, really) in the wake of the Holocaust. It wasn’t meant to be anything but a Jewish state, run by Jews for Jews — a safe haven for a historically oppressed and brutalized people. Israel has been under attack by Muslims since its modern founding. But Israel has a natural right to self-defense and to preserve its Jewish character, just as the American rebels of 1776 had a natural right to declare themselves independent of a despotic King and rapacious Parliament.

So, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank became de jure parts of Israel (though the Gaza Strip was foolishly handed over to anti-Israelis) as a matter of the natural right of self-defense. As for Palestinians living in Israel proper, why should they have a voice in the governance of a country that was re-founded for Jews? Well, despite the nation-state law cited above, they do have a voice in the governance of Israel.

So, all of the leftist propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, Palestinians aren’t victims, except of their own genes and culture. But unlike the “liberals” of old, the left nowadays focuses on demonizing the meritorious instead of helping those who need help.

Finally, there is the accusation that Israelis are sometimes brutal in their own defense. Why shouldn’t they be? It’s impossible to defend a country against determined enemies without being brutal toward them — just as it’s impossible to protect law-abiding citizens by disarming them and depriving them of police protection. The left sees Israelis as brutal because the left despises Israeli Jews, not because Israelis are any more brutal than leftists like Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and their many successors unto the present day.

Coda: There was a time when most Americans recognized the need for superior force as a bulwark of the defense of America. It is a sad commentary on the state of America that a sizable and influential segment of the populace no longer believes that America is worth defending tooth and nail. (Just look at the response to the rise of China, our trading “partner”.)

Those pampered idiots believe that it is necessary for America to be taken down a peg or two, and that it is wrong for America (but not other nations) to excel. As beneficiaries of American exceptionalism, they are able to spout such nonsense and to tear down the very laws and traditions that shelter them from the wrath of the rightfully aggrieved victims of their beliefs and policies: hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding victims of unfettered illegal immigration, unnecessary Covid lockdowns, prosperity-draining regulations and regulatory agencies, unnecessarily high energy costs because of the climate-change hoax, etc., etc., etc.

The Residue of a Powerful Government

The aphorism “luck is the residue of design” is attributed to Branch Rickey, a baseball, player, manager, and executive. Rickey’s long and successful career as a manager, general manager, and c0-owner of major league teams was marked the breaking baseball’s “color barrier” by signing Jackie Robinson, a future Hall-of-Famer, to a minor league contract.

It is widely believed that John Milton wrote something to the same effect, but I can’t find a source for that assertion.

There is a saying attributed to Seneca the Younger, a Roman philosopher: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” But that attribution is also doubtful. The saying attributed to Seneca the Younger is however a better expression of the concept that “luck is residue of design” is meant to capture.

Now that I’m done with that bit of etymology, I want to expand on the idea that luck is the residue of design.*

Design, or preparation, is the residue (result) of assiduous thought and planning Assiduous though and careful planning arise from conscientiousness and intelligence.

There are some cultures in which such traits are prized and rewarded. Those cultures become peaceful and prosperous. But when assiduous thought, careful planning, conscientiousness, and intelligence are no longer prized and rewarded, the culture is doomed to subside into mediocrity or worse.

When government goes beyond the bounds of defending citizens from each other and foreign enemies, and ventures into the realm of economic and social engineering, it undermines the system of rewards for assiduous thought, careful planning, conscientiousness, and intelligence. Worse yet, it fosters a culture that denigrates those traits.

Having observed the evolution of the culture of the United States for several decades, I can assure you that unless the power of government isn’t curtailed sharply and soon, it won’t be long before America resembles a third-world country — complete with a wealthy, smug oligarchy that doesn’t give a damn about the rest of us.

* Thanks to an esteemed correspondent, I have learned of two more — and better — quotations in the same vein. One is spuriously attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” The other is genuinely attributed to Louis Pasteur: “Dans les champs de l’observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés.” (“In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.” From a lecture at the University of Lille on 7 December 1854.)

“Licking” in the Age of Wokeness

Eons ago, when I was a freshman in college, I learned that “licking” was the art of adapting a story or novel to a movie script. That use of “licking” seems to have vanished, which is unsurprising in an age when actual licking (and other such things) is a staple of film fare.

In any event, I use “licking” here to mean the adaptation of a piece of literature to a script. The script in this case is that of Lessons in Chemistry, a 2023 release on Apple TV+, which in eight episodes veers wildly from the novel on which it is based: Lessons in Chemistry: A Novel, by Bonnie Garmus. The novel and the TV adaptation are set in the 1950s.

“Licking” sometimes involved changing the ending of the story. And the writers of the TV version certainly did that. But that was the least of their sins. The most of their sins was their feat of making Garmus’s story even more woke than the print version.

The book is a long, feminist rant. The TV adaptation is a feminist, racist rant, amplified through a bullhorn. Things that aren’t in the book but which are in the TV version:

  • Calvin Evans (the white, male protagonist) and Elizabeth Zott (the white, female protagonist) live in a black neighborhood.
  • There is a black neighbor woman (more about her below) who abandoned her law career to put her husband through medical school.
  • The same black woman leads a crusade to keep the corrupt, all-white, city council and greedy developers from replacing the neighborhood with a freeway.
  • Elizabeth Zott, who (for reason too convoluted to discuss here) becomes the host of a successful TV show about cooking (an early Julia Child). That much is in the books. But when Elizabeth alienates her sponsor — the maker of a hydrogenated shortening — she manages to replace that sponsor with … Tampax. Not in the book, but essential to the arch-feminist tone of the TV series.
  • Calvin Evans, as a child, is placed in an orphanage run by Catholic priests. That’s in the book. What’s not in the book is that he’s held back from adoption because the priests exploit his nascent brilliance as a chemist to distill and sell bootleg whiskey.
  • A clergyman — white in the book, black in the TV show — helps Calvin’s daughter, Mad Zott, find the orphanage. The book’s clergyman didn’t know Calvin; the TV’s show’s clergyman was a long-lost friend.

Similar things can happen relatively infrequently -in life but when they’re packed into a single TV series, you know that you’re getting a message like this one:

  • White folks and black folks can get along just fine — as long as white folks are willing.
  • White folks who live among and socialize with black folks are open-minded, loving people. (How about white folks who live among or near violent black folks? Are they open-minded and loving or just stupid or too poor to move?)
  • Bad things happen to black folks because of white folks. (Hmm … that’s the theme of CRT, which fails to acknowledge the weighty burdens of lower intelligence and a culture of irresponsibility and violence.)
  • Catholic priests are b-a-a-d people, unless they’re homosexuals. (Sodomizing young boys is really bad, but it’s usually done by homosexuals, which is why the badness shown in the TV version skirted that issue.)

About that black neighbor woman: Like the black neighborhood, she didn’t exist in the book. The middle-aged, white housewife who befriended Elizabeth in the book had to be replaced by a younger, black housewife-lawyer-crusader. In other words, more of the same: arch-feminism and racism.

The book was a feel-good story that probably appealed mainly to white women in search of escape and a bit of inner rebellion. The TV series is a feel-good story for well-off white folks of the kind who hate Donald Trump and believe that anyone who might vote for him is a misogynist, racist Neanderthal.

Cloaks of Authority

From a commentary about the biblical significance of the cloak:

The use of cloaks as a symbol of authority is prevalent throughout the Old Testament. In ancient times, a cloak was a sign of status and power and was often worn by kings, priests, and other high-ranking officials.

There are many other symbols of authority; for example, a judge’s robe, a crown, a scepter, stars (on an epaulet), a corner office on the top floor of an elegant office building, and the Oval Office in the West Wing of the White House. Titles also confer authority, even without the trappings of a robe, a crown, and so on. But let us here call all such things cloaks of authority.

Cloaks of authority used to obscure the human beings in whom authority is vested. That is no longer the case in the age of the internet, which spreads truth and fiction in equal measure — and leaves it to the individual person to sort them. The sorting, of course, is done mainly in accordance with the individual’s preconceptions about who is “good” and who is “bad”. And most persons, it seems, seek out the truth or fiction that supports their preconceptions.

Nowhere is this state of affairs more evident than with respect to the presidency of the United States. Perhaps it’s just my faulty memory, but it seems to me that most voters used to believe that one candidate was better than the other, and they accordingly voted for that candidate. Now, it seems that most voters are fearful of what one or the other candidate might do if elected and vote against that candidate because he represents the greater of two evils.

Given that, the presidency (among many other positions of authority) is no longer held in awe, though it is regarded in fear by about half the populace. But even those citizens who support the incumbent do so, for the most part, because he is considered to be the lesser of two evils.

One might say that the imperial presidency is in decline because the “emperor” has no cloak.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

Americans, like most people in the world, are besieged by authority. How (many? most?) Americans can still believe that theirs is a land of liberty puzzles me greatly, and has done so for many years.

Take Joe Biden — please! — who yesterday said of China’s Xi: “He is a dictator in the sense that he is a guy who runs a country that is communist,” … adding that the Chinese government “is totally different than ours.” Different? In what way?

Atop of all of the millions of pages of federal, State, and local regulations that specify what Americans may and may not do and how their products and services must be produced (or not) — and atop of all of the chicanery that Democrats (mostly) deploy to acquire and sustain the power to tell Americans how to live — there has arisen in the past decade a vast industry of government lying, spying, censorship, and unequal justice that Xi might have designed. (See, for example, “Obamagate and Beyond“, and consider the latest revelation about the censorship industry.)

Americans, like most Westerners, seem to mistake relative prosperity for liberty. (There’s a good example of that in “Biden’s Popularity and Gasoline Prices“.) But like the proverbial frog in the pot of water, Americans will understand what’s happening to them only when it’s too late to do anything about it. (See “Economics: America’s Mega-Depression” and “Convergence Theory Revisited“.)

You have been warned.

Why Freedom of Speech?

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter dismays the left and elates the right. Why? Because of the expectation that Twitter will henceforth stop censoring “misinformation”, that is, facts and arguments that subvert the tenets of wokeism. Chief among those tenets are:

  • Gender fluidity (e.g., the beliefs that “men” can bear children and that sex is “assigned” at birth)
  • Climate change as mainly a human-caused “problem”
  • The dictatorship of “science” (when certain “scientists” proclaim “truths” favored by the woke, such as the aforementioned commitment to human-caused warming as a “scientific fact”, which it isn’t)
  • Conservatism and constitutionalism as fascistic (a classic case of psychological projection)
  • Blacks as oppressed victims of whites, who are all racists (despite strong evidence that blacks earn less than whites, have less wealth than whites, and commit crimes more often than whites because of innate differences in intelligence and cultural reinforcement of dysfunctional behavior).

There’s much more (see this, for example), but you get the idea.

Imagine what the worlds of politics, journalism, entertainment, advertising, and employment would be like if conservatives had been as successful at suppressing the ideas of wokeism as wokeists have been successful at suppressing their ideological opponents’ views. If you liked the 1950s, you’d love the absence of wokeism.

Wokeism has succeeded largely because of the mistaken idea, held by many on the right. that absolute freedom of speech is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Absolute freedom of speech is the devil’s playground. It fosters the operation of an intellectual version of Gresham’s law: Bad ideas drive out good ones. This perversion of the “marketplace of ideas” is reinforced by the government’s (i.e., the left’s) command of public education indoctrination; the legalistic trick (known as section 230 of the Communications Decency Act) that allows leftist information brokers to suppress conservative views; and the removal of all constraints on what the left-dominated media may present as “entertainment” and “news”. The latter two instruments of left-wing subversion were and are enabled by free-speech absolutists on the right.

I have elsewhere and at length (e.g., here and here) explained and explored the wrongness and consequences of free-speech absolutism. Here, I will focus on the question posed by the title of this post: Why freedom of speech, that is, what is the good of it?

Has it ever occurred to you that there is no such thing as “free speech”? Think of the many times you that have held back or softened your views out of consideration for the feelings of others, out of fear that you couldn’t adequately defend your views, or because you feared the repercussions of candidly stating your views (e.g., derision, outrage, ostracism, and violence)?

Free speech — speaking one’s mind without restraint at all times and in all places — is the province of innocents and madmen. For most human beings, speech approaches (and sometimes attains) openness and candor only among intimates. Even then — when marriages, romances, and friendships fail — the limitations of openness and candor (“free speech”) become apparent.

Even among academics who work in fields that are supposedly objective (e.g., the “hard sciences” and mathematics) there are rivalries, jealousies, and political differences that stand in the way of openness and candor. It’s not that academics don’t say what they really think; they are notorious for doing so. It’s that the purported objective of free speech — the pursuit of truth through the competition of ideas — is unlikely to be attained when hypotheses and facts are skewed by academicians’ biases. A leading example of this phenomenon is the scientific consensus group-think about “climate change“, which is a shining example of a hypothesis that has been disproved by evidence but survives and thrives on ignorance and emotionalism. (As do many other ruinous manifestations of “free speech”, such as recycling, “green” energy, anti-COVID masking, the innocence of Trayvon Martin, and the saintliness of George Floyd.)

Freedom of speech, at bottom, is really the freedom to express an opinion (or emotion), however wrong-headed and socially acceptable that opinion may be. And, to reiterate, there is no guarantee that the mythical “marketplace of ideas” will favor opinions that foster social comity or scientific truth. To the contrary, given the left’s dominance of the “marketplace of ideas”, favored opinions will be (and are) those that foster social discord and hysterical attachments to pseudo-scientific fraudulence.

Freedom of speech therefore favors irrationality and emotionalism. It does not — as evidenced by the current state of America — favor truth, justice, or the general well-being of the citizenry.

What is the alternative? It is certainly not Biden’s disinformation czardom ministry of truth, or any of its stealth successors, which will only make things worse.

Freedom of speech, which is really freedom of political speech, is beneficial only if a vast majority of the populace shares certain fundamental values:

  • Free markets produce the best outcomes, especially when people take personal responsibility for their economic situation.
  • Social comity rests on taking personal responsibility for one’s actions, not making excuses or blaming “the system”.
  • The last six of the Ten Commandments are the best guides to proper behavior.
  • Duly enacted laws are to be upheld until they are duly revised or rescinded.
  • Social and economic freedom come down to mutual trust, mutual respect, and mutual forbearance, which describes the state of liberty. Without those things, there is no liberty.

Those who do not hew to the foregoing tenets are the enemies of society and liberty and should not be heard or read. The Framers of the Constitution could not envision a free society in which the foregoing tenets were routinely and gleefully violated. That is because there can be no free society where the foregoing tenets are routinely and gleefully violated.

Would you expose your children to the allurements of socialists, pedophiles, drug dealers, etc., etc.? If not, then why on earth would you give socialists, etc., free rein to teach in public schools, dominate the airwaves, and run for political office?

Liberty is not license, despite the serpent-like pleadings of the licentious.

To put a point on it, freedom is culturally determined. Those who do not subscribe to the fundamental norms of a culture of freedom should be ostracized and, if that doesn’t work, sent packing.

What Do Wokesters Want?

I am using “wokesters” as a convenient handle for persons who subscribe to a range of closely related movements, which include but are not limited to wokeness, racial justice, equity, gender equality, transgenderism, social justice, cancel culture, environmental justice, and climate-change activism. It is fair to say that the following views, which might be associated with one or another of the movements, are held widely by members of all the movements (despite the truths noted parenthetically):

Race is a social construct. (Despite strong scientific evidence to the contrary.)

Racism is a foundational and systemic aspect of American history. (Which is a convenient excuse for much of what follows.)

Racism explains every bad thing that has befallen people of color in America. (Ditto.)

America’s history must be repudiated by eradicating all vestiges of it that glorify straight white males of European descent. (Because wokesters are intolerant of brilliance and success of it comes from straight white males of European descent.)

The central government (when it is run by wokesters and their political pawns) should be the sole arbiter of human relations. (Replacing smaller units of government, voluntary contractual arrangements, families, churches, clubs, and other elements of civil society through which essential services are provided, economic wants are satisfied efficiently, and civilizing norms are inculcated and enforced), except for those institutions that are dominated by wokesters or their proteges, of course.)

[You name it] is a human right. (Which — unlike true rights, which all can enjoy without cost to others — must be provided at cost to others.)

Economics is a zero-sum game; the rich get rich at the expense of the poor. (Though the economic history of the United States — and the Western world — says otherwise. The rich get rich — often rising from poverty and middling circumstances — by dint of effort risk-taking, and in the process produce things of value for others while also enabling them to advance economically.)

Profit is a dirty word. (But I — the elite lefty who makes seven figures a year, thank you, deserve every penny of my hard-earned income.)

Sex gender is assigned arbitrarily at birth. (Ludicrous).

Men can bear children. (Ditto.)

Women can have penises. (Ditto.)

Gender dysphoria in some children proves the preceding poiXXXX

Children can have two mommies, two daddies, or any combination of parents in any number and any gender. And, no, they won’t grow up anti-social for lack of traditional father (male) and mother (female) parents. (Just ask blacks who are unemployed for lack of education and serving prison time after having been raised without bread-winning fathers.)

Blacks, on average, are at the bottom of income and wealth distributions and at the top of the incarceration distribution — despite affirmative action, subsidized housing, welfare payments, etc. — because of racism. (Not because blacks, on average, are at the bottom of the intelligence distribution and have in many black communities adopted and enforced a culture the promotes violence and denigrates education?)

Black lives matter. (More than other lives? Despite the facts adduced above?)

Police are racist Nazis and ought to be de-funded. (So that law abiding blacks and other Americans can become easier targets for rape, murder, and theft.)

Grades, advanced placement courses, aptitude tests, and intelligence tests are racist devices. (Which happen to enable the best and brightest — regardless of race, sex, or socioeconomic class — to lead the country forward scientifically and economically, to the benefit of all.)

The warming of the planet by a couple of degrees in the past half-century (for reasons that aren’t well understood but which are attributed by latter-day Puritans to human activity) is a sign of things to come: Earth will warm to the point that it becomes almost uninhabitable. (Which is a case of undue extrapolation from demonstrably erroneous models and a failure to credit the ability of capitalism — gasp! — to adapt successfully to truly significant climatic changes.)

Science is real. (Though we don’t know what science is, and believe things that are labeled scientific if we agree with them. We don’t understand, or care, that science is a process that sometimes yields useful knowledge, or that the “knowledge” is always provisional, always in doubt, and sometimes wrong. We support the movement of recent decades to label some things as scientific that are really driven by a puritanical, anti-humanistic agenda, and which don’t hold up against rigorous, scientific examination, such as the debunked “science” of “climate change”; the essential equality of the races and sexes, despite their scientifically demonstrable differences; and the belief that a man can become a woman, and vice versa.)

Illegal immigrants migrants are just seeking a better life and should be allowed free entry into the United States. (Because borders are arbitrary — except when it comes to my property — and it doesn’t matter if the unfettered enty ro illegal immigrants burdens tax-paying Americans and takes jobs from working-class Americans.)

The United States spends too much on national defense because (a) borders are arbitrary (except when they delineate my property), (b) there’s no real threat to this country (except for cyberattacks and terrorism sponsored by other states, and growing Chinese and Russian aggression that imperils the economic interests of Americans), (c) America is the aggressor (except in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Gulf War I, the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and in the future if America significantly reduces its defense forces), and (d) peace is preferable to war (except that it is preparedness for war that ensures peace, either through deterrence or victory).

What wokesters want is to see that these views, and many others of their ilk, are enforced by the central government. To that end, steps will be taken to ensure that the Democrat Party is permanently in control of the central government and is able to control most State governments. Accordingly, voting laws will be “reformed” to enable everyone, regardless of citizenship status or other qualification (perhaps excepting age, or perhaps not) to receive a mail-in ballot that will be harvested and cast for Democrat candidates; the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico (with their iron-clad Democrat super-majorities) will be added to the Union; the filibuster will be abolished; the Supreme Court and lower courts will be expanded and new seats will be filled by Democrat nominees; and on, and on.

Why do wokesters want what they want? Here’s my take:

  • They reject personal responsibility.
  • They don’t like the sense of real community that is represented in the traditional institutions of civil society.
  • They don’t like the truth if it contradicts their view of what the world should be like.
  • They are devoid of true compassion.
  • They are — in sum — alienated, hate-filled nihilists, the produce of decades of left-wing indoctrination by public schools, universities, and the media.

What will wokesters (and all of us) get?

At best, what they will get is a European Union on steroids, a Kafka-esque existence in a world run by bureaucratic whims from which entrepreneurial initiative and deeply rooted, socially binding cultures have been erased.

Somewhere between best and worst, they will get an impoverished, violent, drug-addled dystopia which is effectively a police state run for the benefit of cosseted political-media-corprate-academic elites.

At worst (as if it could get worse), what they will get is life under the hob-nailed boots of Russia and China:; for example:

Russians are building a military focused on killing people and breaking things. We’re apparently building a military focused on being capable of explaining microaggressions and critical race theory to Afghan Tribesmen.

A country whose political leaders oppose the execution of murderers, support riots and looting by BLM, will not back Israel in it’s life-or-death struggle with Islamic terrorists, and use the military to advance “wokeism” isn’t a country that you can count on to face down Russia and China.

Wokesters are nothing but useful idiots to the Russians and Chinese. And if wokesterst succeed in weakening the U.S. to the point that it becomes a Sino-Soviet vassal, they will be among the first to learn what life under an all-powerful central government is really like. Though, useful idiots that they are, they won’t survive long enough to savor the biter fruits of their labors.

A 100-Day Scorecard

On January 6, 2021, in “Here We Go … “, I essayed 17 predictions about changes Democrats would attempt to consolidate their grip on America and make it over into a European-style “social democracy” with the added feature of subservience to China and Russia. As I said in the original post, not every item on the list will be adopted, but it won’t be for want of trying.

How are my predictions panning out? Quite well, sadly.

Judge for yourself. Here they are:

1. Abolition of the Senate filibuster.

2. An increase of at least two seats on the U.S. Supreme Court (USSC), though there may be some vacancies to be filled.

3. Adoption of an interstate compact by states controlling a total of at least 270 electoral votes, committing each member state’s electoral votes to the presidential candidate who compiles the most popular votes nationwide, regardless of the outcome of the popular vote in each state that is a party to the compact. (This may seem unnecessary if Biden wins, but it will be a bit of insurance against the possibility of a Republican victor in a future election.)

4. Statehood for either the District of Columbia or Puerto Rico, or for both of them. (Each would then have two senators and a requisite number of representatives with full voting privileges in their respective bodies. All of them will be Democrats, of course.)

5. Empowerment of the executive branch to do at least three of the following things:

a. Regulate personal and business activity (in new ways) with the expressed aim of reducing CO2 emissions.

b. Commit at least $500 billion in new obligational authority for research into and/or funding of methods of reducing and mitigating CO2 emissions.

c. Issue new kinds of tax rebates and credits to persons/households and businesses that spend money on any item on a list of programs/technologies that are supposed to reduce CO2 emissions.

d. Impose tax penalties on persons/households and businesses for their failure to spend money on any item in the list mentioned above (shades of the Obamacare tax penalty).

e. Impose penalties on persons/households and businesses for failing to adhere to prescribed caps on CO2 emissions.

f. Establish a cap-and-trade program for CO2 emissions (to soften the blow of the previous item). (Needless to say, the overall effect of such initiatives would deal a devastating blow to economic activity – meaning massive job losses and lower real incomes for large swaths of the populace.)

6. Authorization for an agency or agencies of the federal government to define and penalize written or spoken utterances that the agency or agencies declare “unprotected” by the First Amendment, and to require media enforcement of bans on “unprotected” utterances and prosecution of violators (e.g., here). (This can be accomplished by cynically adopting the supportable position that the First Amendment protects only political speech. The purported aim would be to curb so-called hate speech, but when censorship is in full swing — which would take only a few years — it will be illegal to criticize or question, even by implication, such things as illegal immigration, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, anthropogenic global warming, the confiscation of firearms, or the policies of the federal government. Violations will be enforced by fines and prison sentences — the latter sometimes called “sensitivity training”, “citizenship education”, or some other euphemistic term. Candidates for public office will be prime targets of the enforcers, which will suppress open discussion of such matters.)

7. Imposition of requirements for organizations of all kinds — businesses, universities, charitable organizations, clubs, and even churches — to favor anyone who isn’t a straight, white male of European descent. (The “protections” will be enacted, upheld, and enforced vigorously by federal agencies, regardless of their adverse economic and social effects.)

8. Effective nullification of the Second Amendment through orders/regulations/legislation, to enable gun confiscation (though there will be exemptions for private security services used by favored elites).

9. Use of law-enforcement agencies to enforce “hate speech” bans, mandates for reverse discrimination, and gun-confiscation edicts. (These things will happen regardless of the consequences; e.g., a rising crime rate, greater violence against whites and Asians, and flight from the cities and near-in suburbs. The latter will be futile, anyway, because suburban and exurban police departments will also be co-opted.)

10. Criminalization of “sexual misconduct”, as it is defined by the alleged victim, de facto if not de jure. (Investigations and prosecutions will be selective, and aimed mainly at straight, white males of European descent and dissidents who openly criticize this and other measures listed here.)

11. Parallel treatment for the “crimes” of racism, anti-Islamism, nativism, and genderism. (This will be in addition to the measures discussed in #7.)

12. Centralization in the federal government of complete control of all health care and health-care related products and services, such as drug research, accompanied by “Medicare and Medicaid for All” mandates. (Private health care will be forbidden or strictly limited, though — Soviet-style — there will be exceptions for high officials and other favored persons. Drug research – and medical research, generally – will dwindle in quality and quantity. There will be fewer doctors and nurses who are willing to work in a regimented system. The resulting health-care catastrophe that befalls most of the populace will be shrugged off as necessary to ensure equality of treatment, while ignoring the special treatment accorded favored elites.)

13. Revitalization of the regulatory regime (which already imposes a deadweight loss of 10 percent of GDP). A quantitative measure of revitalization is an increase in the number of new rules published annually in the Federal Register by at least 10 percent above the average for 2017-2020.

14. Proposals for at least least two of the following tax-related initiatives:

a. Reversal of the tax-rate cuts enacted during Trump’s administration.

b. Increases in marginal tax rates for the top 2 or 3 income brackets.

c. Imposition of new taxes on wealth.

15. Dramatic enlargement of domestic welfare programs. Specifically, in addition to the creation of “Medicare and Medicaid for All” programs, there would be a “fix” for Social Security that mandates the payment of full benefits in the future, regardless of the status of the Social Security Trust Fund (which will probably be abolished). (Initiatives discussed in #5, #7, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13, #14, and #15 would suppress investment in business formation and expansion, and would disincentivize professional education and training, not to mention work itself. All of that would combine to push the real rate of economic growth toward a negative value.)

16. Reduction of the defense budget by at least 25 percent, in constant dollars, by 2031 or sooner. (Eventually, the armed forces will be maintained mainly for the purpose of suppressing domestic uprisings. Russia and China will emerge as superpowers, but won’t threaten the U.S. militarily as long as the U.S. government acquiesces in their increasing dominance and plays by their economic rules.)

17. Legalization of all immigration from south of the border, and the granting of citizenship to new immigrants and the illegals who came before them. (The right to vote, of course, is the right that Democrats most dearly want to bestow because most of the newly-minted citizens can be counted on to vote for Democrats. The permanent Democrat majority will ensure permanent Democrat control of the White House and both houses of Congress.)

If you’re keeping up with the news, you will know that almost all of those actions are underway or clearly telegraphed by official statements. It’s hard to chosse the most chilling of those statements, but the one that clearly reveals Biden’s totalitarian urge is his campaign against “white supremacy as domestic terrorism”. This will morph into the suppression of anyone who dares question the doctrine that blacks are where they are because of white racism, and not because of their generally inferior intelligence and cultural traits, or anyone who questions the justice of racial discrimination when it favors blacks. Stay tuned.

The Second Coming of Who?

William Butler Yeats’s “The Second Coming” is quoted often these days, especially the line “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”. And with good reason, given the maelstrom of strife and lunacy in which the nation and the world seem to be swirling.

Science and mathematics are in the grip of irrational forces; that is to say, sadly, the academic-media-information technology-corporate élites who have swallowed “wokeness” hook, line, and sinker. The same élites are responsible for the wholesale violation of immigration laws; the advancement of shiftless, violent, and less-intelligent citizens (and non-citizens) at the expense of blameless others; the risible belief that one’s sex is “assigned at birth”, to justify self-destructive and child-destructive gender-shifting; the repudiation of America’s past (the good with the bad); the destruction of the religious, social, and economic freedoms that have served all Americans well; the blatant theft of a presidential election; and much more that is equally distressing to contemplate.

Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919, in the aftermath of what was then the world’s most destructive war and in the midst of the pandemic known as the Spanish flu, which was far more lethal than the one from which the world is now emerging. It was a time of moral and physical exhaustion.

What is most remarkable about Yeats’s poem is its prescient second stanza:

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming!

Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

And thus did those “rough beasts” Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese warlords — all “men on horseback” — emerge to take advantage of the moral and physical exhaustion of the time.

No such person is now on the horizon in America (though the élites feared that Trump might be that man). But if the maelstrom continues to swirl, a man on horseback will emerge, either from within or from without. In the latter case, given the feckless leadership in America, the man on horseback is likely to ride out of China, perhaps accompanied by a Russian.

And given a choice between a man or horseback and the élites who have corrupted America and who pamper the rabble, the man on horseback will be welcomed with open arms by those who are suffering at the hands of the élites.

“We Believe”

Unless you live in Deep-Red territory, you will have seen one or more of these in your neighborhood:

These signs are displayed in front of two of the ten houses on my short street. I’m surprised that there aren’t more, because I live in Deep-Blue Austin.

At any rate, sign-sighting tells me something about the persons who post the signs — in addition to their visceral leftism, virtue-signaling (to others of their ilk), and pathetic resort to sloganeering as a religion-substitute.

What is the meaning of each slogan? Here are my interpretations:

Black live matter — We don’t care about black-on-black murder (and other crimes). We don’t care about the demonstrably higher rate of criminality among blacks. We just want to wallow in white guilt about the rare instances in which white (and sometimes non-white) police officers unjustifiably kill blacks.

No human is illegal — This is a bit of nonsense which signifies support for illegal immigration. It labels the believers as persons who disrespect the rule of law and are eager to import more votes for left-wing politicians.

Love is love — This is another bit of nonsense which signifies support homosexuality and the “marriage” of homosexuals. It signifies an eagerness to reject civilizing social norms, as long as the results don’t directly affect the eager believer.

Women’s rights are human rights — This defies translation. Perhaps it means that women are human beings, which is a rather banal statement. And what are “human rights”, anyway? They seem to consist of a list of things that do-gooders would like to force the “haves” to pay for so that they (the do-gooders) can feel better about themselves.

Science is real (or is it “racist“?) — We don’t know what science is, but we believe things that are labeled scientific if we agree with them. We don’t understand (or care) that science is a process that sometimes yields useful knowledge, or that the knowledge is always provisional and always in doubt. We support the movement of recent decades to label some things as scientific that are really driven by a puritanical, anti-humanistic agenda, and which don’t hold up against rigorous, scientific examination. (Examples are the debunked “science” of “climate change”; the essential equality of the races and sexes (despite their scientifically demonstrable differences); and the belief that a man can become a woman, and vice versa.)

Water is life — I don’t water my property, and you shouldn’t either. (Well, may you should quit cooking, taking showers, and washing your car. Watering my property is a way of preserving vegetation that absorbs CO2, provides shade, and harbors wildlife — so there!)

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere — This is more incoherent nonsense. Imagine a regime that condones the stoning to death of adulterers, and imagine a regime that punishes such activity. Does the first regime somehow infect the second one? Or is it possible that the second regime might be a threat to the first one. Of course, true believers who post yard signs filled with nonsense are the kind of people of support regimes of the first kind because they are anti-American and not beholden to “decadent” Western values, such as the prohibition of stoning as punishment (or the defense of the millions of victims of abortion).

Ho, Ho, Ho?

Despite the impending vaccination of most Americans, and the surcease from COVID-19 that should result from it, I am not eagerly anticipating 2021. It will see the installation of the Harris-Biden regime, which in fairly short order will disarm America in the face of growing threats from Russia and China, and impoverish it by tilting at the windmill of “climate change”. Perhaps, when Russia and China take over, that foolishness will come to an end.

The prospect of Russian-Chinese hegemony over the U.S. might have been dreadful (correct usage) as few as twelve years ago, before the advent of Barack Obama’s warm-up act for state socialism. Now, with Harris-Biden poised to complete what FDR, LBJ, and BHO started, and with wokeness in the saddle, Russian-Chinese hegemony may well seem like a logical continuation of the status quo. I take that back: Harvard will have to quit discriminating against Asians, if Harvard continues to exist.

On a brighter (?) note, I am in my 80th year* and rapidly approaching what used to be considered great old age. Which means that whatever happens with Harris-Biden, Russia, and China — or another plague — may not be mine to endure for too many years. Though I do rage — albeit silently — when I think of the lives that my children, grandchildren, and their progeny may be forced to lead.

That wasn’t a bright note, was it?

Here’s one: The flight of tech companies from California to Texas and financial companies from New York to Florida may hasten the bankruptcy of California and New York. And I wouldn’t be surprised if a large number of Blue States join Red ones in refusing to bail out California and New York. I hope I’m around to see it.

Happy New Year?
__________
* For the benefit of anyone who says things like 25-year anniversary, when 25th anniversary is correct, or — even worse — 25-year birthday, being in one’s xxth year means that one is approaching xx years of age, not that one has already reached one’s xxth birthday. I learned this as a lad, whilst listening to a Canadian radio station that broadcast from a city across the river from the one in Michigan where I was raised. In those days, Anglo-Canadians were more British than American in the way that they used English. Americans also used to know what being in one’s xxth year means, witness an obituary of Alexander Graham Bell from The New York Times of August 3, 1922:

SYDNEY, N. S., Aug. 2.–Dr. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, died at 2 o’clock this morning at Beinn Breagh, his estate near Baddeck.

Although the inventor, who was in his seventy-sixth year, had been in failing health for several months, he had not been confined to bed, and the end was unexpected….

The inventor of the telephone was born in Edinburgh, on March 3, 1847.

A bit of arithmetic will tell you that Dr. Bell was 75 years old at the time of his death, having observed his 75th birthday on March 3, 1922. In other words, he had completed 75 years of life and was in his 76th year when he died.

Is Jill Biden a “Doctor”?

Eugene Volokh parses that question at length. He concludes in the negative. He alludes to the real reason for his conclusion, but doesn’t come right out and say it: An Ed.D. degree is a joke.

Jill Biden is the holder of an Ed.D. degree. It would therefore be possible to construct a syllogism which concludes that Jill Biden is a joke. But a more apt syllogism would conclude that Joe Biden is a joke (albeit a dangerous one), who is being foisted on America by a tacit collaboration of politically corrupt Democrats and spineless Republicans and Supreme Court justices.

For another perspective on “Doctor” Jill Biden, see Derek Hunter’s “Jill Biden Is Not a Doctor, Probably Isn’t a Good Person, Either” (Townhall.com, December 14, 2020).

Not-So-Random Thoughts (XXVI)

“Not-So-Random Thoughts” is an occasional series in which I highlight writings by other commentators on varied subjects that I have addressed in the past. Other entries in the series can be found at these links: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII, XXIV, and XXV. For more in the same style, see “The Tenor of the Times” and “Roundup: Civil War, Solitude, Transgenderism, Academic Enemies, and Immigration“.

CONTENTS

Free Trade Rethought

The Death Penalty

State Actors in Action

Red vs. Blue

Serfdom in Our Future?

FREE TRADE RETHOUGHT

My position on so-called free trade:

  • Estimate the amount by which the price of a foreign product or service is reduced by the actions of foreign governments or their proxies.
  • Add that amount to the price as a tariff.
  • Regularly review and adjust the schedule of tariffs.

All other trade would be unencumbered, excepting:

  • the importation of products and services otherwise restricted by U.S. law (e.g., tanks, artillery pieces)
  • the exportation of products and services that are used directly in the development, manufacture, and operation of sensitive military systems (e.g., fighter aircraft, anti-missile defenses).

Selective tariffs, based on actual costs of production, would encourage the efficient use of resources and protect American workers who would otherwise be victimized by unfair trade. But that’s it. Sweeping tariffs on imports — just to “protect” American workers — do more than protect them. They also penalize American consumers, most of whom are also workers.

William Upton, writing in light of current events (“Make America Autarkic Again“, The American Mind, March 13, 2020), would go a lot further:

In our over-globalized world, a policy of total autarky is infeasible. But a degree of autarky should be recognized as self-evidently in America’s national interest.

Autarky, for those unfamiliar, was an economic and industrial policy of self-reliance wherein a nation need not rely on international trade for its economic survival. This is not to say that said nation rejected international trade or isolated itself from the global economic order, rather that it merely could survive on its own if necessary….

[Oren] Cass notes that sound industrial policy has allowed nations like Germany and Japan to retain strong manufacturing sectors. Cass also emphasizes the pivotal importance of manufacturing, not just for the economy, but for American communities:

…

[M]anufacturing is unique for the complexity of its supply chains and the interaction between innovation and production. One of the most infuriating face-palms of modern economics is the two-step that goes like this: First, wave away concern as other countries with aggressive industrial policies … attract our critical supply chains overseas, explaining that it doesn’t matter where things get made. Second, wait for people to ask “why can’t we make this or that here,” and explain that of course we can’t because all of the supply chains and expertise are entrenched elsewhere. It’s enough to make one slam one’s head into the podium.

There may be something to it.

THE DEATH PENALTY

I was surprised to read the assessment by Theodore Dalrymple, a former prison doctor, of the death penalty (“The Death Penalty’s Demise and the Withering of Authority“, Law & Liberty, February 11, 2020). On the one hand:

If I had been a prison doctor while the death penalty was still imposed in Britain, I should have had the somewhat awkward task of certifying murderers fit for execution….  It was not permitted to execute madmen even if they had been sane at the time of their crime; but with the ever-widening and loosening of psychiatric diagnosis, I should no doubt have been tempted always to find a medical reason to postpone the execution sine die. I would have found it hard to sign what would have amounted to a medical death warrant, all the more so with the man before my very eyes. Nor would I have much relished attending the execution itself, to certify that the execution had worked….

But while I should not have wanted to participate in an execution, I was nevertheless viscerally in favour of the death penalty because it seemed to me that there were crimes (though by no means all of them murder) so heinous, so despicable, that no other penalty was adequate to express society’s outrage at, or repudiation of, them. Moreover — though quite late in my career — I discovered evidence that suggested that the death penalty did in fact act as a deterrent to murder, something which has long been contested or outright denied by abolitionists.

But on the other hand:

Does its deterrent effect, then, establish the case for the death penalty, at least in Britain? No, for two reasons. First, effectiveness of a punishment is not a sufficient justification for it. For example, it might well be that the death penalty would deter people from parking in the wrong place, but we would not therefore advocate it. Second, the fact is that in all jurisdictions, no matter how scrupulously fair they try to be, errors are sometime made, and innocent people have been put to death. This seems to me the strongest, and perhaps decisive, argument against the death penalty.

And on the third hand:

Although, on balance, I am against the death penalty, I do not assume that those who are in favour of it are necessarily moral primitives, which abolitionists often give the impression of believing. For most of our history, the rightness of the death penalty has been taken for granted, and it cannot be that we are the first decent, reflective people ever to have existed. The self-righteousness of the Europeans in this respect disgusts me when they set themselves up to judge others. France, for example, abolished the death penalty only in 1981 – AD 1981, that is, not 1981 BC. When the death penalty in Britain was abolished in 1965 after many decades of campaigning by abolitionists, more than 90 per cent of the population was still in favour of it. Almost certainly it believed, if not necessarily in a fully coherent way, that to abolish the death penalty was to weaken the authority of society and to lessen the majesty of the law. It was also to weaken the prohibition against killing and, though involving the taking of a life (the murderer’s), also lessened the sanctity of life….

In Britain, one of the effects of the abolition of the death penalty, the downward pressure on all prison sentences, has been little remarked. Punishment has to be roughly proportional to the gravity of the crime (exact proportionality cannot be achieved), but if murder attracts only 15 years’ imprisonment de facto, what sentences can be meted out to those who commit lesser, but still serious, crimes? Moreover, the charge of murder is often reduced to the lesser crime of manslaughter, in which sentences – as a consequence – are often derisory….

It is scarcely any wonder that in the years since the abolition of the death sentence, Britain has gone from being a well-ordered, non-violent, law-abiding society to being a society with the highest rate of violent crime in Western Europe. Of course, the abolition of the death penalty was not the only cause, for crime was rising in any case, but it brought its contribution to the festival of disorder that followed.

It seems to me that Dalrymple ends up arguing in favor of the death penalty. He is correct about its deterrent effect (same post). He is wrong to give heavy weight to the possibility of error. And he overlooks a conclusive argument in its favor: there is one less criminal who might be let loose to commit more crimes. All of those points and more are covered in these posts:

Does Capital Punishment Deter Homicide?
Libertarian Twaddle about the Death Penalty
A Crime Is a Crime
Crime and Punishment
Saving the Innocent?
Saving the Innocent?: Part II
More Punishment Means Less Crime
More About Crime and Punishment
More Punishment Means Less Crime: A Footnote
Clear Thinking about the Death Penalty
Let the Punishment Fit the Crime
Another Argument for the Death Penalty
Less Punishment Means More Crime
Crime, Explained
Why Stop at the Death Penalty?
Crime Revisited

STATE ACTORS IN ACTION

Once upon a time I made a case for rescuing the First Amendment from its enemies in

the telecommunications, news, entertainment, and education industries [which] have exerted their power to suppress speech because of its content….  The collective actions of these entities — many of them government- licensed and government-funded — effectively constitute a governmental violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of speech (See Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944) and Marsh v. Alabama, 326 U.S. 501 (1946).)

Leo Goldstein (“Google and YouTube Are State Actors“, American Thinker, March 9, 2020) finds a smoking gun

in the FCC Obamanet orders of 2010 and 2015. The 2015 Obamanet Order, officially called Open Internet Order, has explicitly obligated all internet users to pay a tax to Google and YouTube in their ISP and wireless data fees. The Order even mentions Google and YouTube by name. The tax incurs tens of billions of dollars per year. More specifically, the Order said that by paying ISP fees (including mobile wireless), each user also pays for the services that ISP gives to platforms and content providers like YouTube, even if the user doesn’t use them….

Platforms and content providers are misleadingly called “edge providers” here. Thus, every ISP customer in the US is obligated to pay for the traffic generated by Google, Netflix, Facebook, and Twitter, even if he used none of them!

Off with their heads.

RED VS. BLUE

The prolific Joel Kotkin weighs in on the Red States’ economic and electoral advantages:

Even in a state as deeply blue as [California}, Democrats’ disdain for the basic values and interests of their own base could unravel their now seemingly unbridgeable majority. At some point, parents, artists, minorities, small businesspeople and even sex workers will not be mollified sufficiently by a fulsome expression of good intentions. If more voters begin to realize that many of the policies being adopted are injurious, they may even begin to look again at the Republicans, particularly once the toxic President Trump is no longer on the ballot scaring the masses to toe the line. [“Democrats Risk Blowback with Leftward Turn“, newgeography, March 1, 2020]

* * *

The political and cultural war between red and blue America may not be settled in our lifetimes, but it’s clear which side is gaining ground in economic and demographic terms. In everything from new jobs—including new technology employment—fertility rates, population growth, and migration, it’s the red states that increasingly hold the advantage.

Perhaps the most surprising development is on the economic front. Over the past decade, the national media, and much of academia, have embraced the notion that the future belonged to the high-tax, high-regulation economies clustered on the East and West Coasts. The red states have been widely dismissed, in the words of the New York Times, as the land of the “left behind.”

Yet the left-behind are catching up, as economic momentum shifts away from coastal redoubts toward traditionally GOP-leaning states. Just a few years ago, states like California, Massachusetts, and New York held their own, and then some, in measurements of income growth from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Now the fastest growth is concentrated in the Sunbelt and Great Plains. Texans’ income in the latest 2019 BEA estimates was up 4.2 percent, well above California’s 3.6 percent and twice New York’s 2.1 percent. The largest jumps—and this may matter a lot in 2020—took place in the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Iowa. [“Red v. Blue“, City Journal, February 7, 2020]

But:

[S]ocialism is gaining adherents even in the upper middle-class and among the oligarchy. One critical component lies in detestation of all things Trump even among CEOs, most of whom, according to a recent Chief Executive survey, want him impeached. Corporate America is increasingly embracing the notion of a guaranteed income and is adopting politically correct positions on such things as immigration, particularly in tech and on Wall Street.

But the most important driver for socialism comes from the burgeoning green movement. Long dominated by the elite classes, environmentalists are openly showing themselves as watermelons — green on the outside, red on the inside. For example, the so called “Green New Deal” — embraced by Sanders, Warren and numerous oligarchs — represents, its author Saikat Chakrabarti suggests, not so much a climate as “a how-do-you-change-the entire-economy thing”. Increasingly greens look at powerful government not to grow the economy, but to slow it down, eliminating highly paid blue-collar jobs in fields like manufacturing and energy. The call to provide subsidies and make work jobs appeals to greens worried about blowback from displaced workers and communities.

Combined with the confused and vacillating nature of our business elites, and the economic stagnation felt by many Americans, socialism in the West is on the rise. An ideology that history would seem to have consigned to Leon Trotsky’s “dustbin of history”, could turn the land that once embraced Adam Smith closer to the vision of Karl Marx. [“The West Turns Red?“, newgeography, February 25, 2020]

I have shown the economic superiority of the Red State model. But that isn’t enough to rescue the country from the perpetual allure of socialism. As I say here,

… States and municipalities governed by Democrats will ever more boldly pursue policies that undermine traditional American culture (e.g., unabated encouragement of illegal immigration, accelerated favoritism toward “identity groups”) and which are broadly destructive of the economic and social fabric; for example: persisting in costly, money-losing recycling and composting programs that do nothing for the environment (taking into account the environmental effects of the vehicles and equipment involved); the replacement of fossil-fuel sources of electricity by unreliable and expensive “renewable” sources; encouragement of homelessness by subsidizing it and making it socially acceptable; discouragement of family formation and stability through the continuation and expansion of long-discredited vote-buying welfare programs; openly persecuting conservatives and conservative institutions.

All of that will intensify the divisions between Red and Blue States, and the divisions between Red State governments and the Blue cities within them. But that is a first-order effect.

The second-order effect is to make living in Blue States and cities more onerous for middle-to-low-income earners (and even some among the affluent), who will seek greener (Redder) pastures outside Blue cities and Blue States. But many (most?) of those refugees will not flee because they have come to believe that big government is the cause of their problems. Rather, they (especially the younger, more mobile, and more “socialistic” ones) will flee because they don’t want to suffer the consequences of big government (high taxes, high housing costs, etc.). But, being addicted to the idea that big government is good, and ignorant of the connection between big government and their woes, they will continue to vote for big-government politicians and policies. Thus will Blue States and Blue cites gradually turn Purple and, in many cases, Blue.

You read it here.

SERFDOM IN OUR FUTURE?

I recently mused about Walter Scheidel’s book, The Great Leveler. Kotkin addresses the thesis of that book in “Who Will Prosper After the Plague?” (Tablet, April 13, 2020):

[T]he wreckage [caused by the Black Plague of the 14th century] created new opportunities for those left standing. Abandoned tracts of land could be consolidated by rich nobles, or, in some cases, enterprising peasants, who took advantage of sudden opportunities to buy property or use chronic labor shortages to demand higher wages. “In an age where social conditions were considered fixed,” historian Barbara Tuchman has suggested, the new adjustments seemed “revolutionary.”

What might such “revolutionary” changes look like in our post-plague society? In the immediate future the monied classes in America will take a big hit, as their stock portfolios shrink, both acquisitions and new IPOs get sidetracked and the value of their properties drop. But vast opportunities for tremendous profit available to those with the financial wherewithal to absorb the initial shocks and capitalize on the disruption they cause….

Over time, the crisis is likely to further bolster the global oligarchal class. The wealthiest 1% already own as much as 50% of the world’s assets, and according to a recent British parliamentary study, by 2030, will expand their share to two-thirds of the world’s wealth with the biggest gains overwhelmingly concentrated at the top 0.01%….

The biggest long-term winner of the stay-at-home trend may well be Amazon, which is hiring 100,000 new workers. But other digital industries will profit as well, including food delivery services, streaming entertainment services, telemedicine, biomedicine, cloud computing, and online education. The shift to remote work has created an enormous market for applications, which facilitate video conferencing and digital collaboration like Slack—the fastest growing business application on record—as well as Google Hangouts, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams. Other tech firms, such as Facebook, game makers like Activision Blizzard and online retailers like Chewy, suggests Morgan Stanley, also can expect to see their stock prices soar as the pandemic fades and public acceptance of online commerce and at-home entertainment grows with enforced familiarity.

Growing corporate concentration in the technology sector, both in the United States and Europe, will enhance the power of these companies to dominate commerce and information flows….

The modern-day clerisy consisting of academics, media, scientists, nonprofit activists, and other members of the country’s credentialed bureaucracy also stand to benefit from the pandemic. The clerisy operate as what the great German sociologist Max Weber called “the new legitimizers,” bestowing an air of moral and technocratic authority on the enterprises of their choosing….

Members of the clerisy are likely to be part of the one-quarter of workers in the United States who can largely work at home. Barely 3% of low-wage workers can telecommute but nearly 50% of those in the upper middle class can. While workers at most restaurants and retail outlets face hard times, professors and teachers will continue their work online, as will senior bureaucrats….

The biggest winners in the fallout from the coronavirus are likely to be large corporations, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and government institutions with strong lobbies. The experience from recent recessions indicates that big banks, whose prosperity is largely asset-based, will do well along with major corporations, while Main Street businesses and ordinary homeowners will fare poorly….

In the Middle Ages, many former citizens, facing a series of disasters from plagues to barbarian invasions, willingly became serfs. Today, the class of permanently propertyless citizens seems likely to grow as the traditional middle class shrinks, and the role of labor is further diminished relative to that of technology and capital.

In contrast to the old unionized workers, many people today, whether their employment is full-time or part-time, have descended into the precariat, a group of laborers with limited control over how long they can work, who often live on barely subsistence wages. Nearly half of gig workers in California live under the poverty line.

Now comes the payoff:

Historically, pandemics have tended to spark class conflict. The plague-ravaged landscape of medieval Europe opened the door to numerous “peasant rebellions.” This in turn led the aristocracy and the church to restrict the movements of peasants to limit their ability to use the new depopulated countryside to their own advantage. Attempts to constrain the ambitions of the commoners often led to open revolts—including against the church and the aristocracy.

… As steady and well-paying jobs disappear, the demands for an ever more extensive welfare state, funded by the upper classes, will multiply.

Like their counterparts in the late 19th century, the lower-class workforce will demand changes. We already see this in the protests by workers at Instacart delivery service, and in Amazon warehouse workers concerned about limited health insurance, low wages, and exposure to the virus.

As the virus threatens to concentrate wealth and power even more, there’s likely to be some sort of reckoning, including from the increasingly hard-pressed yeomanry.

In the years before the great working-class rebellions of the mid-19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville warned that the ruling orders were “sleeping on a volcano.” The same might be seen now as well, with contagion pushing the lava into the streets, and causing new disruptions on a scale of which we can’t predict.

Something like socialism (for non-elites) may emerge for the rubble. It will be the 21th century equivalent of bread and circuses: share just enough of the wealth to keep the proletariat in line.

Something Cheerful

I have trained a Pandora station to play popular songs from the 1920s and early 1930s. I wrote about the music of that era in an earlier post, “It’s Time to Revive 1920s’ Jazz“. Here’s the post in its entirety (with some updated links), plus an addendum about a long-forgotten singer who will brighten your day.

I often wonder why the popular jazz of the 1920s, which faded in the mid-1930s, isn’t still widely popular. It’s rhythmically inventive, driving, and upbeat — as opposed to the monotonous and often dreary, dissonant, and unmelodic droning of what later became known as jazz. (I’m not writing here about the New Orleans style of jazz, which is a genre of its own, and has never died out. If you’re unsure of the distinction, click on the links at the end of this post.)

The jazz of the ’20s (and early-to-mid-’30s) evolved into the swing of the ’30s and 40s. Swing evolved into the ponderous big-band sound of the ’40s and ’50s.

Rhythmically inventive, driving, and upbeat popular music returned in the mid-’50s, with the birth of rock and roll. The Beatles and their ilk put a twist on rock and roll, and the genre evolved into what is known as classic rock — the sound that dominated the mid-’60s to early ’70s. Its variants — some of them close to the classic sound — survive and thrive to this day.

But nothing — with the possible exception of early swing — has yet to rival the musical sophistication of ’20s jazz. Bands led by the likes of Red Allen, Bix Beiderbecke, Johnny Dodds, the early Duke Ellington, Jean Goldkette, Fletcher Henderson, Isham Jones, Vincent Lopez, Jelly Roll Morton, Red Nichols, King Oliver, and Paul Whiteman (to name only a small representation) recorded thousands of foot-stomping tunes (plus innumerable blues, ballads, novelty tunes, other non-jazzy material).

It is de rigeur in some musical circles to deride the offerings of the larger ensembles, such as those led by several of the band leaders mentioned above. But their tight orchestrations delivered as much toe-tapping vitality as anything offered up by smaller groups.

For a feast of ’20s jazz — and much more — go to The Red Hot Jazz Archive, tap your toes, and lighten your spirit. (RealPlayer required.)

One of my favorites, which number in the hundreds, is “Dinah“. Not a jazzy song, you say? Well, dig these variations on a theme:

Cliff Edwards (1925)

Jean Goldkette (1926)

Joe Venuti (1928)

Red Nichols (1929)

Louis Armstrong (1930)

Bing Crosby with the Mills Brothers (1932) (After a ballad-y start, Bing rips into it. Bing as you’ve probably never heard him.)

The Boswell Sisters (1934) (The Bozzies followed Bing’s lead.)

Quintette of the Hot Club of France (1934)

Fats Waller (1935)

And feast your ears on this long anthology of Bix Beiderbecke‘s recordings. Beiderbecke crammed a long lifetime of music into his brief 28 years.

Now for the long-forgotten singer: Annette Hanshaw. Until I set up my Pandora station, which I call Upbeat, I hadn’t heard of her. The only female singers of that day whose works I was familiar with were Ruth Etting, Helen Morgan, Bessie Smith, and Ma Rainey. Smith and Rainey were blues singers. Etting and Morgan were identified (in retrospect, at least) with torch songs: Etting with “Body and Soul“, Morgan with “Bill“. Hanshaw’s renderings of “Body and Soul” and “Bill” are vocally superior to those of Etting and Morgan, though less torchy.

Hanshaw’s sprightly soprano is simply too cheerful to be subdued by songs of longing and regret. It’s not a perfect voice (the lowest notes are weak). But it’s such a happy voice that I must share some links to a few of the dozens of her songs that I’ve heard on my Upbeat station:

“Am I Blue?” (a happy blues song with Hanshaw at the mic)

“Button Up Your Overcoat” (in her Betty Boop/Helen Kane voice)

“Get Out and Get Under the Moon“

“Happy Days Are Here Again“

“I Can’t Give You Anything But Love“

“I Get the Blues When It Rains” (more happy blues)

“I Love a Ukelele“

“I’ve Got a Feeling I’m Falling“

“Let’s Fall in Love” (as close to a plaintive sound as she gets)

For many many more songs by Annette Hanshaw, go here and here.

P.S. After I had added the paragraphs about Annette Hanshaw, I found John Wilson’s article, “The Influence of Jazz on Modern Singing” (The New York Times, August 20, 1990). It’s a review of a book about jazz singing. This is spot-on (except for the part about Hanshaw’s age, as discussed below):

There is a fascinatingly abbreviated saga of Annette Hanshaw, ”the Louise Brooks of jazz,” as Mr. Friedwald calls her. She was born wealthy: ”no two-bit manager ever cracked the whip and tried to Svengali her into sounding like everybody else.” She became a star through her records, starting in 1926, by using the musical idiom of the 20’s in what Mr. Friedwald terms ”a creative modern way.” Although she had virtually no ambition, despised being a celebrity and was terrified of audiences, in her eight years of recording she made ”the period’s most consistently excellent series of female vocal records outside the blues idiom.” She retired permanently at the age of 28 and lived happily for 50 more years without singing.

Actually Hanshaw retired permanently after a 1937 radio appearance when she was 36. She recorded her final disc in 1934 (“Let’s Fall in Love” is on the A side) — her only recording of that year. The mistake about her age is due to an error someone made somewhere along the line (and which seems to have gone uncorrected by Hanshaw), namely, that she was born in 1910, though her real birth year was 1901. The error persisted in the Times’s 1985 obituary for Hanshaw, and wasn’t rectified until many years after her death. In any event, she did live for 50 years after her final recording, but she was almost 84 when she died, not 74, as the Times‘s obituary says, or 78, as Wilson says.

A Footnote to “Peak Civilization”

I ended that post with this:

Every line of human endeavor reaches a peak, from which decline is sure to follow if the things that caused it to peak are mindlessly rejected for the sake of novelty (i.e., rejection of old norms just because they are old). This is nowhere more obvious than in the arts.

It should be equally obvious to anyone who takes an objective look at the present state of American society and is capable of comparing it with American society of the 1940s and 1950s. For all of its faults it was a golden age. Unfortunately, most Americans now living (Noah Smith definitely included) are too young and too fixated on material things to understand what has been lost — irretrievably, I fear.

My point is underscored by Annebelle Timsit, writing at Quartz:

The endless stretch of a lazy summer afternoon. Visits to a grandparent’s house in the country. Riding your bicycle through the neighborhood after dark. These were just a few of the revealing answers from more than 400 Twitter users in response to a question: “What was a part of your childhood that you now recognize was a privilege to have or experience?”

That question, courtesy of writer Morgan Jerkins, revealed a poignant truth about the changing nature of childhood in the US: The childhood experiences most valued by people who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s are things that the current generation of kids are far less likely to know.

That’s not a reference to cassette tapes, bell bottoms, Blockbuster movies, and other items popular on BuzzFeed listicles. Rather, people are primarily nostalgic for a youthful sense of independence, connectedness, and creativity that seems less common in the 21st century. The childhood privileges that respondents seemed to appreciate most in retrospect fall into four broad categories:

“Riding my bike at all hours of the day into the evening throughout many neighborhoods without being stopped or asked what I was doing there,” was one Twitter user’s answer to Jerkins’ question. Another commenter was grateful for “summer days & nights spent riding bikes anywhere & everywhere with friends, only needing to come home when the streetlights came on,” while yet another recalled “having a peaceful, free-range childhood.” Countless others cited the freedom to explore—with few restrictions—as a major privilege of their childhood.

American children have less independence and autonomy today than they did a few generations ago.

For many of today’s children, that privilege is disappearing. American children have less independence and autonomy today than they did a few generations ago. As parents have become increasingly concerned with safety, fewer children are permitted to go exploring beyond the confines of their own backyard. Some parents have even been prosecuted or charged with neglect for letting their children walk or play unsupervised. Meanwhile, child psychologists say that too many children are being ushered from one structured activity to the next, always under adult supervision—leaving them with little time to play, experiment, and make mistakes.

That’s a big problem. Kids who have autonomy and independence are less likely to be anxious, and more likely to grow into capable, self-sufficient adults. In a recent video for The Atlantic, Julie Lythcott-Haims, author of How to Raise an Adult, argues that so-called helicopter parents “deprive kids the chance to show up in their own lives, take responsibility for things and be accountable for outcomes.”

That message seems to be gaining traction. The state of Utah, for example, recently passed a “free-range” parenting law meant to give parents the freedom to send kids out to play on their own.”

“Bravo!” to the government of Utah.

Transport yourself back three decades from the 1970s and 1980s to the 1940s and 1950s, when I was a child and adoslescent, and the contrast between then and now is even more stark than the contrast noted by Timsit.

And it has a lot to do with the social ruin that has been visited upon America by the spoiled (cosseted) children of capitalism.

Other related posts:

Ghosts of Thanksgiving Past
The Passing of Red Brick Schoolhouses and a Way of Life
An Ideal World
‘Tis the Season for Nostalgia
Another Look into the Vanished Past
Whither (Wither) Classical Liberalism and America?

Peak Civilization?

Here is an oft-quoted observation, spuriously attributed to Socrates, about youth:

The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.

Even though Socrates didn’t say it, the sentiment has nevertheless been stated and restated since 1907, when the observation was concocted, and probably had been shared widely for decades, and even centuries, before that. I use a form of it when I discuss the spoiled children of capitalism (e.g., here).

Is there something to it? No and yes.

No, because rebelliousness and disrespect for elders and old ways seem to be part of the natural processes of physical and mental maturation.

Not all adolescents and young adults are rebellious and disrespectful. But many rebellious and disrespectful adolescents and young adults carry their attitudes with them through life, even if less obviously than in youth, as they climb the ladders of various callings. The callings that seem to be most attractive to the rebellious are the arts (especially the written, visual, thespian, terpsichorial, musical, and cinematic ones), the professoriate, the punditocracy, journalism, and politics.

Which brings me to the yes answer, and to the spoiled children of capitalism. Rebelliousness, though in some persons never entirely outgrown or suppressed by maturity, will more often be outgrown or suppressed in economically tenuous conditions, the challenges of which which almost fully occupied their bodies and minds. (Opinionizers and sophists were accordingly much thinner on the ground in the parlous days of yore.)

However, as economic growth and concomitant technological advances have yielded abundance far beyond the necessities of life for most inhabitants of the Western world, the beneficiaries of that abundance have acquired yet another luxury: the luxury of learning about and believing in systems that, in the abstract, seem to offer vast improvements on current conditions. It is the old adage “Idle hands are the devil’s tools” brought up to date, with “minds” joining “hands” in the devilishness.

Among many bad things that result from such foolishness (e.g., the ascendancy of ideologies that crush liberty and, ironically, economic growth) is the loss of social cohesion. I was reminded of this by Noah Smith’s fatuous article, “The 1950s Are Greatly Overrated“.

Smith is an economist who blogs and writes an opinion column for Bloomberg News. My impression of him is that he is a younger version of Paul Krugman, the former economist who has become a left-wing whiner. The difference between them is that Krugman remembers the 1950s fondly, whereas Smith does not.

I once said this about Krugman’s nostalgia for the 1950s, a decade during which he was a mere child:

[The nostalgia] is probably rooted in golden memories of his childhood in a prosperous community, though he retrospectively supplies an economic justification. The 1950s were (according to him) an age of middle-class dominance before the return of the Robber Barons who had been vanquished by the New Deal. This is zero-sum economics and class warfare on steroids — standard Krugman fare.

Smith, a mere toddler relative to Krugman and a babe in arms relative to me, takes a dim view of the 1950s:

For all the rose-tinted sentimentality, standards of living were markedly lower in the ’50s than they are today, and the system was riddled with vast injustice and inequality.

Women and minorities are less likely to have a wistful view of the ’50s, and with good reason. Segregation was enshrined in law in much of the U.S., and de facto segregation was in force even in Northern cities. Black Americans, crowded into ghettos, were excluded from economic opportunity by pervasive racism, and suffered horrendously. Even at the end of the decade, more than half of black Americans lived below the poverty line:

Women, meanwhile, were forced into a narrow set of occupations, and few had the option of pursuing fulfilling careers. This did not mean, however, that a single male breadwinner was always able to provide for an entire family. About a third of women worked in the ’50s, showing that many families needed a second income even if it defied the gender roles of the day:

For women who didn’t work, keeping house was no picnic. Dishwashers were almost unheard of in the 1950s, few families had a clothes dryer, and fewer than half had a washing machine.

But even beyond the pervasive racism and sexism, the 1950s wasn’t a time of ease and plenty compared to the present day. For example, by the end of the decade, even after all of that robust 1950s growth, the white poverty rate was still 18.1%, more than double that of the mid-1970s:

Nor did those above the poverty line enjoy the material plenty of later decades. Much of the nation’s housing stock in the era was small and cramped. The average floor area of a new single-family home in 1950 was only 983 square feet, just a bit bigger than the average one-bedroom apartment today.

To make matters worse, households were considerably larger in the ’50s, meaning that big families often had to squeeze into those tight living spaces. Those houses also lacked many of the things that make modern homes comfortable and convenient — not just dishwashers and clothes dryers, but air conditioning, color TVs and in many cases washing machines.

And those who did work had to work significantly more hours per year. Those jobs were often difficult and dangerous. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration wasn’t created until 1971. As recently as 1970, the rate of workplace injury was several times higher than now, and that number was undoubtedly even higher in the ’50s. Pining for those good old factory jobs is common among those who have never had to stand next to a blast furnace or work on an unautomated assembly line for eight hours a day.

Outside of work, the environment was in much worse shape than today. There was no Environmental Protection Agency, no Clean Air Act or Clean Water Act, and pollution of both air and water was horrible. The smog in Pittsburgh in the 1950s blotted out the sun. In 1952 the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire. Life expectancy at the end of the ’50s was only 70 years, compared to more than 78 today.

So life in the 1950s, though much better than what came before, wasn’t comparable to what Americans enjoyed even two decades later. In that space of time, much changed because of regulations and policies that reduced or outlawed racial and gender discrimination, while a host of government programs lowered poverty rates and cleaned up the environment.

But on top of these policy changes, the nation benefited from rapid economic growth both in the 1950s and in the decades after. Improved production techniques and the invention of new consumer products meant that there was much more wealth to go around by the 1970s than in the 1950s. Strong unions and government programs helped spread that wealth, but growth is what created it.

So the 1950s don’t deserve much of the nostalgia they receive. Though the decade has some lessons for how to make the U.S. economy more equal today with stronger unions and better financial regulation, it wasn’t an era of great equality overall. And though it was a time of huge progress and hope, the point of progress and hope is that things get better later. And by most objective measures they are much better now than they were then.

See? A junior Krugman who sees the same decade as a glass half-empty instead of half-full.

In the end, Smith admits the irrelevance of his irreverence for the 1950s when he says that “the point of progress and hope is that things get better later.” In other words, if there is progress the past will always look inferior to the present. (And, by the same token, the present will always look inferior to the future when it becomes the present.)

I could quibble with some of Smith’s particulars (e.g., racism may be less overt than it was in the 1950s, but it still boils beneath the surface, and isn’t confined to white racism; stronger unions and stifling financial regulations hamper economic growth, which Smith prizes so dearly). But I will instead take issue with his assertion, which precedes the passages quoted above, that “few of those who long for a return to the 1950s would actually want to live in those times.”

It’s not that anyone yearns for a return to the 1950s as it was in all respects, but for a return to the 1950s as it was in some crucial ways:

There is … something to the idea that the years between the end of World War II and the early 1960s were something of a Golden Age…. But it was that way for reasons other than those offered by Krugman [and despite Smith’s demurrer].

Civil society still flourished through churches, clubs, civic associations, bowling leagues, softball teams and many other voluntary organizations that (a) bound people and (b) promulgated and enforced social norms.

Those norms proscribed behavior considered harmful — not just criminal, but harmful to the social fabric (e.g., divorce, unwed motherhood, public cursing and sexuality, overt homosexuality). The norms also prescribed behavior that signaled allegiance to the institutions of civil society (e.g., church attendance, veterans’ organizations) , thereby helping to preserve them and the values that they fostered.

Yes, it was an age of “conformity”, as sneering sophisticates like to say, even as they insist on conformity to reigning leftist dogmas that are destructive of the social fabric. But it was also an age of widespread mutual trust, respect, and forbearance.

Those traits, as I have said many times (e.g., here) are the foundations of liberty, which is a modus vivendi, not a mystical essence. The modus vivendi that arises from the foundations is peaceful, willing coexistence and its concomitant: beneficially cooperative behavior —  liberty, in other words.

The decade and a half after the end of World War II wasn’t an ideal world of utopian imagining. But it approached a realizable ideal. That ideal — for the nation as a whole — has been put beyond reach by the vast, left-wing conspiracy that has subverted almost every aspect of life in America.

What happened was the 1960s — and its long aftermath — which saw the rise of capitalism’s spoiled children (of all ages), who have spat on and shredded the very social norms that in the 1940s and 1950s made the United States of America as united they ever would be. Actual enemies of the nation — communists — were vilified and ostracized, and that’s as it should have been. And people weren’t banned and condemned by “friends”, “followers”, Facebook, Twitter, etc. etc., for the views that they held. Not even on college campuses, on radio and TV shows, in the print media, or in Hollywood moves.

What do the spoiled children have to show for their rejection of social norms — other than economic progress that is actually far less robust than it would have been were it not for the  interventions of their religion-substitute, the omnipotent central government? Well, omnipotent at home and impotent (or drastically weakened) abroad, thanks to rounds of defense cuts and perpetual hand-wringing about what the “world” might think or some militarily inferior opponents might do if the U.S. government were to defend Americans and protect their interests abroad?

The list of the spoiled children’s “accomplishments” is impossibly long to recite here, so I will simply offer a very small sample of things that come readily to mind:

California wildfires caused by misguided environmentalism.

The excremental wasteland that is San Francisco. (And Blue cities, generally.)

Flight from California wildfires, high taxes, excremental streets, and anti-business environment.

The killing of small businesses, especially restaurants, by imbecilic Blue-State minimum wage laws.

The killing of businesses, period, by oppressive Blue-State regulations.

The killing of jobs for people who need them the most, by ditto and ditto.

Bloated pension schemes for Blue-State (and city) employees, which are bankrupting those States (and cities) and penalizing their citizens who aren’t government employees.

The hysteria (and even punishment) that follows from drawing a gun or admitting gun ownership

The idea that men can become women and should be allowed to compete with women in athletic competitions because the men in question have endured some surgery and taken some drugs.

The idea that it doesn’t and shouldn’t matter to anyone that a self-identified “woman” uses women’s rest-rooms where real women and girls became prey for prying eyes and worse.

Mass murder on a Hitlerian-Stalinist scale in the name of a “woman’s right to choose”, when she made that choice by (in almost every case) engaging in consensual sex.

Disrespect for he police and military personnel who keep them safe in their cosseted existences.

Applause for attacks on the same.

Applause for America’s enemies, which the delusional, spoiled children won’t recognize as their enemies until it’s too late.

Longing for impossible utopias (e.g., “true” socialism) because they promise what is actually impossible in the real world — and result in actual dystopias (e.g., the USSR, Cuba, Britain’s National Health Service).

Noah Smith is far too young to remember an America in which such things were almost unthinkable — rather than routine. People then didn’t have any idea how prosperous they would become, or how morally bankrupt and divided.

Every line of human endeavor reaches a peak, from which decline is sure to follow if the things that caused it to peak are mindlessly rejected for the sake of novelty (i.e., rejection of old norms just because they are old). This is nowhere more obvious than in the arts.

It should be equally obvious to anyone who takes an objective look at the present state of American society and is capable of comparing it with American society of the 1940s and 1950s. For all of its faults it was a golden age. Unfortunately, most Americans now living (Noah Smith definitely included) are too young and too fixated on material things to understand what has been lost — irretrievably, I fear.

I was going to append a list of related posts, but the list would be so long that I can only refer you to “Favorite Posts” — especially those listed in the following sections:

I. The Academy, Intellectuals, and the Left
II. Affirmative Action, Race, and Immigration
IV. Conservatism and Other Political Philosophies
V. The Constitution and the Rule of Law
VI. Economics: Principles and Issues
VIII. Infamous Thinkers and Political Correctness
IX. Intelligence and Psychology
X. Justice
XI. Politics, Politicians, and the Consequences of Government
XII. Science, Religion, and Philosophy
XIII. Self-Ownership (abortion, euthanasia, marriage, and other aspects of the human condition)
XIV. War and Peace

Looking for the Perfect Movie?

You won’t find it at Wikipedia‘s list of films with a 100-percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but you might find some movies that are worth watching. The list comprises only films with a critics’ consensus (staff-written summary) or at least 20 reviews. I went down the list and added to it the average rating given each film by users at the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). I also added my ratings of the films that I have seen and rated. (There are several that I have seen but haven’t rated (indicated by*); they’re now too dim in my memory to rate retroactively.)

To be precise, I worked my way down the list, which is organized chronologically, until I got well into the 2000s. I then saw that beginning in the late 1960s, the list became less and less about entertainment and more and more about propagandistic, leftist “documentaries”. I venture to say that every entry after 1999 is of that character. So the table below ends with the most recent movie in the Rotten Tomatoes list that I have seen and rated.

The table lists 198 films, beginning with The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920) and ending with Toy Story 2 (1999). How good are the 198? Well, 195 of them have an IMDb rating of 7.0 or higher; I rarely consider watching a film with a rating below 7.0. Moreover, 71 of the 198 have an IMDb rating of 8.0 or higher; I consider a rating of 8.0 or higher to be a badge of excellence. (You will note that my ratings are generally close to those given by IMDb users, with some notable and glaring exceptions.)

In addition to the following list, you may also wish to consult “Movies” (where, among many things, my rating system is explained) and “A Footnote to ‘Movies’“.

Rotten Tomatoes 100 percent

Fred Rogers: The Anti-Trump

Have you seen A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, the quasi-documentary about the life of Fred Rogers of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood? My children watched the show when they were young, as did tens of millions of other children during its run from 1968 until 2001. Anyway, having now seen the movie I can understand why it was so popular with young children.

I won’t reprise the film or Rogers’s life. (He died of stomach cancer in 2003, three weeks before his 75th birthday.) Just follow the links in the preceding paragraph if you are curious and know almost nothing about the man or the show. I had glimpsed the show in passing, but never watched it. It was literally “kid stuff” as far as I was concerned.

Having now seen the film, and read a bit about Rogers’s life, I applaud him and what he strove to do for children. What was that? It seems to me that it was to help them cope with the kinds of fears and worries that seem to trouble most children: the fear of dying, the fear of scary things, the fear of having one’s parents divorce, the feeling of being somehow responsible if they do divorce, and on and on.

Rogers’s efforts in that direction were laudable and probably helpful. He certainly wasn’t to be condemned for what some accused him of, which was to inculcate in a generation of children the sense that they were worthy of esteem no matter what they did. I don’t know what motivated such accusations. Perhaps it was part of the backlash against Dr. Spock’s “permissiveness”, with which Rogers could be associated. Perhaps it was Rogers’s rather prissy (public) demeanor, which some mistook for homosexuality. Perhaps it was his evident affection for persons as persons, regardless of their race or sexual orientation. Whatever it was — and it was probably those things and more — it was all misplaced aggression against a man who, in an earlier age, might have been proclaimed a saint.

Thus the belated film tribute, which IMDb summarizes thus:

Two-time Oscar®-winner Tom Hanks portrays Mister Rogers in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, a timely story of kindness triumphing over cynicism, based on the true story of a real-life friendship between Fred Rogers and journalist Tom Junod. After a jaded magazine writer (Emmy winner Matthew Rhys) is assigned a profile of Fred Rogers, he overcomes his skepticism, learning about empathy, kindness, and decency from America’s most beloved neighbor.

Tom Hanks may not be Mr. Clean, but he has that image. Top it off by casting him as the personification of “empathy, kindness, and decency” — who was also a Republican and an ordained minister — and what to you have? The anti-Trump, of course. Or the anti-Trump as Trump is widely perceived, which is what matters.

The only mistake made by the Hollywood types who wrote, produced, directed, and acted in the film (almost certainly anti-Trumpers to the last he, she, and it) was to release the movie almost a year before the presidential election of 2020. Unless the Democrat Party puts up a scold like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, a mid-2020 release would have underscored the contrast between Trump and the Democrat nominee. If Pete Buttigieg — the Mr. Nice Guy among the wannabe nominees — were to get the nod, the contrast would have been stark. (The mistaken perception of Rogers as homosexual wouldn’t have hurt, either.)

I am by no means being snide about Fred Rogers, who seems to have deserved all of the respect and adulation that came to him in his lifetime, and all that has followed him into death. But the aura of goodness that surrounds the memory of Rogers contrasts starkly with the bad things that are thought and said about Donald Trump because of his persona and rhetoric. (His persona and rhetoric detract, unfortunately, from the good things that he has done and is doing as president.)

Luckily, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood will be largely forgotten before votes are cast in next year’s presidential election. But it is still possible that the vast, squishy center of the electorate — people who would rather vote for “nice” than for their own interests — may reject Trump (and the GOP generally) and enable America’s version of the Thousand-Year Reich.

As Bette Davis‘s character famously said in another movie, “Fasten your seatbelts….”

Not-So-Random Thoughts (XXV)

“Not-So-Random Thoughts” is an occasional series in which I highlight writings by other commentators on varied subjects that I have addressed in the past. Other entries in the series can be found at these links: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII, XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII, and XXIV. For more in the same style, see “The Tenor of the Times” and “Roundup: Civil War, Solitude, Transgenderism, Academic Enemies, and Immigration“.

CONTENTS

The Real Unemployment Rate and Labor-Force Participation

Is Partition Possible?

Still More Evidence for Why I Don’t Believe in “Climate Change”

Transgenderism, Once More

Big, Bad Oligopoly?

Why I Am Bunkered in My Half-Acre of Austin

“Government Worker” Is (Usually) an Oxymoron

The Real Unemployment Rate and Labor-Force Participation

There was much celebration (on the right, at least) when it was announced that the official unemployment rate, as of November, is only 3.5 percent, and that 266,000 jobs were added to the employment rolls (see here, for example). The exultation is somewhat overdone. Yes, things would be much worse if Obama’s anti-business rhetoric and policies still prevailed, but Trump is pushing a big boulder of deregulation uphill.

In fact, the real unemployment rate is a lot higher than official figure I refer you to “Employment vs. Big Government and Disincentives to Work“. It begins with this:

The real unemployment rate is several percentage points above the nominal rate. Officially, the unemployment rate stood at 3.5 percent as of November 2019. Unofficially — but in reality — the unemployment rate was 9.4 percent.

The explanation is that the labor-force participation rate has declined drastically since peaking in January 2000. When the official unemployment rate is adjusted to account for that decline (and for a shift toward part-time employment), the result is a considerably higher real unemployment rate.

Arnold Kling recently discussed the labor-force participation rate:

[The] decline in male labor force participation among those without a college degree is a significant issue. Note that even though the unemployment rate has come down for those workers, their rate of labor force participation is still way down.

Economists on the left tend to assume that this is due to a drop in demand for workers at the low end of the skill distribution. Binder’s claim is that instead one factor in declining participation is an increase in the ability of women to participate in the labor market, which in turn lowers the advantage of marrying a man. The reduced interest in marriage on the part of women attenuates the incentive for men to work.

Could be. I await further analysis.

Is Partition Possible?

Angelo Codevilla peers into his crystal ball:

Since 2016, the ruling class has left no doubt that it is not merely enacting chosen policies: It is expressing its identity, an identity that has grown and solidified over more than a half century, and that it is not capable of changing.

That really does mean that restoring anything like the Founders’ United States of America is out of the question. Constitutional conservatism on behalf of a country a large part of which is absorbed in revolutionary identity; that rejects the dictionary definition of words; that rejects common citizenship, is impossible. Not even winning a bloody civil war against the ruling class could accomplish such a thing.

The logical recourse is to conserve what can be conserved, and for it to be done by, of, and for those who wish to conserve it. However much force of what kind may be required to accomplish that, the objective has to be conservation of the people and ways that wish to be conserved.

That means some kind of separation.

As I argued in “The Cold Civil War,” the natural, least stressful course of events is for all sides to tolerate the others going their own ways. The ruling class has not been shy about using the powers of the state and local governments it controls to do things at variance with national policy, effectively nullifying national laws. And they get away with it.

For example, the Trump Administration has not sent federal troops to enforce national marijuana laws in Colorado and California, nor has it punished persons and governments who have defied national laws on immigration. There is no reason why the conservative states, counties, and localities should not enforce their own view of the good.

Not even President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would order troops to shoot to re-open abortion clinics were Missouri or North Dakota, or any city, to shut them down. As Francis Buckley argues in American Secession: The Looming Breakup of the United States, some kind of separation is inevitable, and the options regarding it are many.

I would like to believe Mr. Codevilla, but I cannot. My money is on a national campaign of suppression, which will begin the instant that the left controls the White House and Congress. Shooting won’t be necessary, given the massive displays of force that will be ordered from the White House, ostensibly to enforce various laws, including but far from limited to “a woman’s right to an abortion”. Leftists must control everything because they cannot tolerate dissent.

As I say in “Leftism“,

Violence is a good thing if your heart is in the “left” place. And violence is in the hearts of leftists, along with hatred and the irresistible urge to suppress that which is hated because it challenges leftist orthodoxy — from climate skepticism and the negative effect of gun ownership on crime to the negative effect of the minimum wage and the causal relationship between Islam and terrorism.

There’s more in “The Subtle Authoritarianism of the ‘Liberal Order’“; for example:

[Quoting Sumantra Maitra] Domestically, liberalism divides a nation into good and bad people, and leads to a clash of cultures.

The clash of cultures was started and sustained by so-called liberals, the smug people described above. It is they who — firmly believing themselves to be smarter, on the the side of science, and on the side of history — have chosen to be the aggressors in the culture war.

Hillary Clinton’s remark about Trump’s “deplorables” ripped the mask from the “liberal” pretension to tolerance and reason. Clinton’s remark was tantamount to a declaration of war against the self-appointed champion of the “deplorables”: Donald Trump. And war it has been. much of it waged by deep-state “liberals” who cannot entertain the possibility that they are on the wrong side of history, and who will do anything — anything — to make history conform to their smug expectations of it.

Still More Evidence for Why I Don’t Believe in “Climate Change”

This is a sequel to an item in the previous edition of this series: “More Evidence for Why I Don’t Believe in Climate Change“.

Dave Middleton debunks the claim that 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted the susequent (but not steady) rise in the globe’s temperature (whatever that is). He then quotes a talk by Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama-Huntsville Climate Research Center:

We have a change in temperature from the deep atmosphere over 37.5 years, we know how much forcing there was upon the atmosphere, so we can relate these two with this little ratio, and multiply it by the ratio of the 2x CO2 forcing. So the transient climate response is to say, what will the temperature be like if you double CO2– if you increase at 1% per year, which is roughly what the whole greenhouse effect is, and which is achieved in about 70 years. Our result is that the transient climate response in the troposphere is 1.1 °C. Not a very alarming number at all for a doubling of CO2. When we performed the same calculation using the climate models, the number was 2.31°C. Clearly, and significantly different. The models’ response to the forcing – their ∆t here, was over 2 times greater than what has happened in the real world….

There is one model that’s not too bad, it’s the Russian model. You don’t go to the White House today and say, “the Russian model works best”. You don’t say that at all! But the fact is they have a very low sensitivity to their climate model. When you look at the Russian model integrated out to 2100, you don’t see anything to get worried about. When you look at 120 years out from 1980, we already have 1/3 of the period done – if you’re looking out to 2100. These models are already falsified [emphasis added], you can’t trust them out to 2100, no way in the world would a legitimate scientist do that. If an engineer built an aeroplane and said it could fly 600 miles and the thing ran out of fuel at 200 and crashed, he might say: “I was only off by a factor of three”. No, we don’t do that in engineering and real science! A factor of three is huge in the energy balance system. Yet that’s what we see in the climate models….

Theoretical climate modelling is deficient for describing past variations. Climate models fail for past variations, where we already know the answer. They’ve failed hypothesis tests and that means they’re highly questionable for giving us accurate information about how the relatively tiny forcing … will affect the climate of the future.

For a lot more in this vein, see my pages “Climate Change” and “Modeling and Science“.

Transgenderism, Once More

Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Daniels, M.D.) is on the case:

The problem alluded to in [a paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics] is, of course, the consequence of a fiction, namely that a man who claims to have changed sex actually has changed sex, and is now what used to be called the opposite sex. But when a man who claims to have become a woman competes in women’s athletic competitions, he often retains an advantage derived from the sex of his birth. Women competitors complain that this is unfair, and it is difficult not to agree with them….

Man being both a problem-creating and solving creature, there is, of course, a very simple way to resolve this situation: namely that men who change to simulacra of women should compete, if they must, with others who have done the same. The demand that they should suffer no consequences that they neither like nor want from the choices they have made is an unreasonable one, as unreasonable as it would be for me to demand that people should listen to me playing the piano though I have no musical ability. Thomas Sowell has drawn attention to the intellectual absurdity and deleterious practical consequences of the modern search for what he calls “cosmic justice.”…

We increasingly think that we live in an existential supermarket in which we pick from the shelf of limitless possibilities whatever we want to be. We forget that limitation is not incompatible with infinity; for example, that our language has a grammar that excludes certain forms of words, without in any way limiting the infinite number of meanings that we can express. Indeed, such limitation is a precondition of our freedom, for otherwise nothing that we said would be comprehensible to anybody else.

That is a tour de force typical of the good doctor. In the span of three paragraphs, he addresses matters that I have treated at length in “The Transgender Fad and Its Consequences” (and later in the previous edition of this series), “Positive Rights and Cosmic Justice“, and “Writing: A Guide” (among other entries at this blog).

Big, Bad Oligopoly?

Big Tech is giving capitalism a bad name, as I discuss in “Why Is Capitalism Under Attack from the Right?“, but it’s still the best game in town. Even oligopoly and its big brother, monopoly, aren’t necessarily bad. See, for example, my posts, “Putting in Some Good Words for Monopoly” and “Monopoly: Private Is Better than Public“. Arnold Kling makes the essential point here:

Do indicators of consolidation show us that the economy is getting less competitive or more competitive? The answer depends on which explanation(s) you believe to be most important. For example, if network effects or weak resistance to mergers are the main factors, then the winners from consolidation are quasi-monopolists that may be overly insulated from competition. On the other hand, if the winners are firms that have figured out how to develop and deploy software more effectively than their rivals, then the growth of those firms at the expense of rivals just shows us that the force of competition is doing its work.

Why I Am Bunkered in My Half-Acre of Austin

Randal O’Toole takes aim at the planners of Austin, Texas, and hits the bullseye:

Austin is one of the fastest-growing cities in America, and the city of Austin and Austin’s transit agency, Capital Metro, have a plan for dealing with all of the traffic that will be generated by that growth: assume that a third of the people who now drive alone to work will switch to transit, bicycling, walking, or telecommuting by 2039. That’s right up there with planning for dinner by assuming that food will magically appear on the table the same way it does in Hogwarts….

[W]hile Austin planners are assuming they can reduce driving alone from 74 to 50 percent, it is actually moving in the other direction….

Planners also claim that 11 percent of Austin workers carpool to work, an amount they hope to maintain through 2039. They are going to have trouble doing that as carpooling, in fact, only accounted for 8.0 percent of Austin workers in 2018.

Planners hope to increase telecommuting from its current 8 percent (which is accurate) to 14 percent. That could be difficult as they have no policy tools that can influence telecommuting.

Planners also hope to increase walking and bicycling from their current 2 and 1 percent to 4 and 5 percent. Walking to work is almost always greater than cycling to work, so it’s difficult to see how they plan to magic cycling to be greater than walking. This is important because cycling trips are longer than walking trips and so have more of a potential impact on driving.

Finally, planners want to increase transit from 4 to 16 percent. In fact, transit carried just 3.24 percent of workers to their jobs in 2018, down from 3.62 percent in 2016. Changing from 4 to 16 percent is a an almost impossible 300 percent increase; changing from 3.24 to 16 is an even more formidable 394 percent increase. Again, reality is moving in the opposite direction from planners’ goals….

Planners have developed two main approaches to transportation. One is to estimate how people will travel and then provide and maintain the infrastructure to allow them to do so as efficiently and safely as possible. The other is to imagine how you wish people would travel and then provide the infrastructure assuming that to happen. The latter method is likely to lead to misallocation of capital resources, increased congestion, and increased costs to travelers.

Austin’s plan is firmly based on this second approach. The city’s targets of reducing driving alone by a third, maintaining carpooling at an already too-high number, and increasing transit by 394 percent are completely unrealistic. No American city has achieved similar results in the past two decades and none are likely to come close in the next two decades.

Well, that’s the prevailing mentality of Austin’s political leaders and various bureaucracies: magical thinking. Failure is piled upon failure (e.g., more bike lanes crowding out traffic lanes, a hugely wasteful curbside composting plan) because to admit failure would be to admit that the emperor has no clothes.

You want to learn more about Austin? You’ve got it:

Driving and Politics (1)
Life in Austin (1)
Life in Austin (2)
Life in Austin (3)
Driving and Politics (2)
AGW in Austin?
Democracy in Austin
AGW in Austin? (II)
The Hypocrisy of “Local Control”
Amazon and Austin

“Government Worker” Is (Usually) an Oxymoron

In “Good News from the Federal Government” I sarcastically endorse the move to grant all federal workers 12 weeks of paid parental leave:

The good news is that there will be a lot fewer civilian federal workers on the job, which means that the federal bureaucracy will grind a bit more slowly when it does the things that it does to screw up the economy.

The next day, Audacious Epigone put some rhetorical and statistical meat on the bones of my informed prejudice in “Join the Crooks and Liars: Get a Government Job!“:

That [the title of the post] used to be a frequent refrain on Radio Derb. Though the gag has been made emeritus, the advice is even better today than it was when the Derb introduced it. As he explains:

The percentage breakdown is private-sector 76 percent, government 16 percent, self-employed 8 percent.

So one in six of us works for a government, federal, state, or local.

Which group does best on salary? Go on: see if you can guess. It’s government workers, of course. Median earnings 52½ thousand. That’s six percent higher than the self-employed and fourteen percent higher than the poor shlubs toiling away in the private sector.

If you break down government workers into two further categories, state and local workers in category one, federal workers in category two, which does better?

Again, which did you think? Federal workers are way out ahead, median earnings 66 thousand. Even state and local government workers are ahead of us private-sector and self-employed losers, though.

Moral of the story: Get a government job! — federal for strong preference.

….

Though it is well known that a government gig is a gravy train, opinions of the people with said gigs is embarrassingly low as the results from several additional survey questions show.

First, how frequently the government can be trusted “to do what’s right”? [“Just about always” and “most of the time” badly trail “some of the time”.]

….

Why can’t the government be trusted to do what’s right? Because the people who populate it are crooks and liars. Asked whether “hardly any”, “not many” or “quite a few” people in the federal government are crooked, the following percentages answered with “quite a few” (“not sure” responses, constituting 12% of the total, are excluded). [Responses of “quite a few” range from 59 percent to 77 percent across an array of demographic categories.]

….

Accompanying a strong sense of corruption is the perception of widespread incompetence. Presented with a binary choice between “the people running the government are smart” and “quite a few of them don’t seem to know what they are doing”, a solid majority chose the latter (“not sure”, at 21% of all responses, is again excluded). [The “don’t know what they’re doing” responses ranged from 55 percent to 78 percent across the same demographic categories.]

Are the skeptics right? Well, most citizens have had dealings with government employees of one kind and another. The “wisdom of crowds” certainly applies in this case.