Getting Down to the Philosophical Difference
Many of our differences, even our semantic differences, come down to the question of whether everything aspect of our lives has to be aligned and associated with a political identity.
Trillo, Mattiello, the Bully Justin, and the Question of Our Day
However we feel about Joe Trillo or his recent behavior, the story of his 1975 altercation raises questions about the kind of society that we want to be.
The Feeling of Society When the Cultural Seasons Change
The madness of our time may result from the general public’s “whoa, there” response to progressives who’ve forgotten the keys of their incremental strategy.
The View the Left Has of “Conservative” Judges
One really must wonder where folks like Art Corey get their ideas:
Congratulations to Republicans on their big Supreme Court win. Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation could ensure GOP control over the court for a generation. Who could have imagined that obstructing Merrick Garland would result in not one but two hard-right conservatives joining the court?
“Hard-right conservatives”? What? Kavanaugh was the more-moderate pick, and the whole thing about “conservative” jurists is that they rule according to the law, not ideology or a party’s contemporaneous requirements. The GOP won’t “control” the court; the court will ensure that legislative changes to the law happen in the legislature, whichever party happens to control it. That’s why this is so wrong:
But the Republicans’ lust for power has blinded them to the truth that the court derives its legitimacy from the belief that it is above politics.
If the court is above politics, it has to be because it rules according to the written law, whether or not a particular ruling is politically popular or corresponds to the temper of the time. The entire “living Constitution” idea pushed by the Democrats and the Left more broadly is what makes the court inevitably political. That is why the progressive wing of the court has ruled much more in lock step than the conservative wing and why this seems either disingenuous or naive:
So now any liberal group with business before the court could rightly question the legitimacy and impartiality of its decisions.
Corey would do well to recall that progressive Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg regrets making injudicious statements about Donald Trump not because she allowed herself to have political thoughts, but because it was “incautious.” In other words, she should have kept her bias well hidden.
But nobody is fooled any longer, which is why conservatives seek originalist judges who will rule impartially and restore legitimacy to the court. Every judge has bias; what’s needed is a legal philosophy that really does leave that aside. Conservatives’ hope is that the experience of his confirmation will provide Justice Kavanaugh with some inoculation against the social pressures that sometimes push judges toward the elite (which is to say, progressive) understanding of the law.
Tempering the Terror of a Climate Doom Report
WPRI reporter Tim White tweeted that this New York Times article about the United Nations’ accelerated doom-saying about climate change is “truly terrifying.” My response was to ask if this section (emphasis added) doesn’t set off his alarm bells:
Avoiding the most serious damage requires transforming the world economy within just a few years, said the authors, who estimate that the damage would come at a cost of $54 trillion. But while they conclude that it is technically possible to achieve the rapid changes required to avoid 2.7 degrees of warming, they concede that it may be politically unlikely.
Look, one needn’t be a climate change skeptic to acknowledge the layers of assumptions that go into these scary warnings. First, one must ignore the lack of warming over the last two decades and assume that the models will be more accurate going forward. Then, one must assume that the change really does derive from human activity and that it’s possible to avert the worst. Then, another wave assumptions comes with predictions about the effect on weather, creating soaking rains where that will be harmful and droughts where that would be harmful, all coming together in a way that doesn’t equalize the effects (by, for example, simply moving where farming must be done). Add in the effect of technology and changes in energy production that have made the United States a leader in CO2 reduction. And don’t forget that one must balance the estimated $54 trillion in costs from warming against whatever the cost would be to rework our economy — including an assessment of the people who bear those costs.
Put that all on a scale that pivots on the promise that giving more power to the people who brought the warning, and a tempered reaction to the terror is justified.
The Environment in Which We Train the Future’s Leaders
On the American campus, Catholics are forced out of their jobs in the name of presenting a diversity of ideas while hoax papers are published because academics really do believe that identity politics can tell us about the physical universe.
Funny How Rhode Island Works
Readers know that I’m not a fan of our campaign finance regime. It imposes a complicated, intimidating set of laws for grassroots candidates and groups that creates opportunity not only for prosecution of them, but also political attacks on their donors.
I have a hard time, therefore, getting worked up about the apparent probability that the campaign of Democrat Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello funded a mailer allowing Republican Shawna Lawton to endorse him in a high-profile way against his Republican challenger, Steven Frias. To the extent the activity is illegal, it is because of this complex, unconstitutional labyrinth we’ve built, with incentive to find workarounds.
That said, the investigation is unearthing an education in the way Rhode Island politics work, and the stunning thing is that the most objectionable things are treated as incidental… and they’re all completely legal. I’ve already highlighted one connection:
House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello has put Edward Cotugno, the mail-ballot guru who helped him eke out an 85-vote victory in 2016, back on his campaign team and given his son a $70,000 a year State House job.
Mattiello, D-Cranston, hired Michael Cotugno as the legislature’s new associate director of House constituent-services.
Included in the evidence packet that the board provided to The Journal on Friday, in response to a records request, was an Aug. 14, 2016, text from “Teresa” to [political consultant] “Jeff” [Britt] and his partner, Daniel Calhoun, who is still listed as a $60,891-a-year legislative employee on the state’s transparency portal.
Think of this. Under Mattiello, the legislature has given well-paying legislative jobs (of unknown difficulty) to the son of his “mail-ballot guru” and the man who shares a nice Warwick house with one of his campaign operatives, and the thing we’re supposed to be upset about is a relatively small contribution toward political free speech!
But arguing that the campaign finance investigation is the only reason we know about the rest doesn’t justify burdensome campaign finance laws. When people act in suspicious ways (like endorsing people of other parties or independent spoiler candidates), we should… well… suspect them of having some ulterior motive, unless they can express a persuasive rationale for the odd decision. And if somebody who benefits from that persuasion wants to fund it, their money doesn’t change the validity of the argument.
Ultimately, the answer is just to reduce the size of government and the value of controlling it.
Kavanaugh Hearings Show the Choice That Has Been Coming for You
The Kavanaugh hearings have given us a look at what the Left has slowly been doing to those who disagree at the margins and signaled just how close we’ve come to “too late” to oppose them.
The Future of America Hinges on Giving Teen Lingo Space
We’re in surreal times and should not allow the political fight of the moment to erode the gray areas that allow us to be human.
Going Nuclear on the Second Amendment
Arguments about the proper interpretation of the Constitution don’t often enough acknowledge that it can be amended.
Looking for Rhode Island-Style Innovation
Rhode Island does need an economy that capitalizes on cross-pollinated innovation, but that means getting government and faith in central planning out of the way.
Having a Standard Policy on Government’s Consumer Leverage
The Town of North Smithfield has entered into a “boycott” of Nike over the company’s elevation of the controversial football player Colin Kaepernick as its poster boy. As a general rule, I’m not a fan of the government’s use of its economic power to push political positions — not so much because politics is inappropriate to government, but because of the government’s responsibility to be a good steward of public dollars.
Of all the reasons a town government might select a shoe, a ball, or a shirt for purchase, politics ought to be vanishingly minor. Buy the product that best suits the town’s needs. That said, if the people of North Smithfield have a different political philosophy, the importance of my opinion, standing at my desk over here in Tiverton, is also vanishingly minor.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Rhode Island isn’t quite as circumspect:
“The Town Council’s passage of this inflammatory resolution over the objections of the many residents who came out to oppose it is shameful,” the ACLU said in a statement. “By punishing the right to peacefully protest and refusing to recognize the racial injustice prompting that protest, the resolution shows a disdain for both freedom and equality. Rhode Island is better than this.”
Lamentably, neither the ACLU nor journalist Linda Borg mentions that Kaepernick was more specifically insulting at the beginning of the whole controversy, notably with socks depicting police officers as pigs. Be that as it may, I don’t happen to recall the ACLU’s shaming of either of our last two state treasurers for the long list of corporate decisions for which they wish to use our public investments as leverage. Raimondo’s preferred activism was to hurt gun companies, while Magaziner has preferred environmentalism and identity politics.
In these instances, again, I’d suggest that government officials should just buy the products and make the investments that best serve within the narrow range of what the products and investments are for. If a Nike product suits a town’s needs, go ahead and buy it. If the best candidate to run a company in which the state has invested happens to be a white man, don’t stand in the way of the company’s hiring him.
Making decisions on some other basis comes with a cost, and as a general matter, that cost will be larger than the benefit of an activist’s statement.
We Must Stand Up to the Ideological Gestalt Targeting Children
Wesley Smith catches more evidence of our society’s descent into madness:
When I read Jane Robbins’ piece in The Federalist reporting that doctors were actually performing mastectomies on girls as young as 13 who identify as boys, I couldn’t believe my eyes. But sure enough. Not only is it happening, but a medical study published in JAMA Pediatrics recommends that children not be precluded from such radical body-altering surgery based simply on their youth …
A doctor need not be a religionist or disagree with the concept of gender dysphoria generally to be morally opposed to cutting off the healthy breasts of adolescents (or inhibiting the onset of a child’s normal puberty) as a form of “doing harm” in violation of Hippocratic ideals. But if Emanuel and his ilk have their way, in the not too distant future, a surgeon approached to perform a mastectomy on a girl who identifies as a boy could be forced into a terrible conundrum: either remove the child’s healthy body parts–or risk being charged with transphobic discrimination, investigated by medical authorities, and possibly forced out of the profession.
Now factor in the fact that “guidance” in public education generally takes the tone that teachers and school administrators should help students move in this direction — even to the point of conspiring to deceive their parents if they might have a different view. What’s coming into shape is a culture that encourages children to experiment with their sense of identity, which experimentation is then hustled along from youthful exploration to physical expression through the school system and then solidified into irreversible medical steps through drugs or surgery.
Smith makes an important point when he brings into the discussion the silencing of Brown University researcher Lisa Littman, who found evidence that transgenderism spreads faddishly among peer groups. Based on public outcry, the university disappeared the study and apologized for it. As Smith suggests, this episode illustrates that the medical consensus on which we’re being told to base radical child-abusing policies cannot be taken as trustworthy on its face, but is very probably contaminated with ideology.
Cable Street and the Facially Fascist
Comparing the Battle of Cable Street with today’s Antifa attacks would be a good lesson in critical thinking, if our education system were keen on teaching that skill.
Innovative Ways to Corrupt Government
I suspect this sort of thing (or perhaps more-mild variations) are more common than we know:
“Public records obtained by CEI show a pattern of law enforcement offices turning to off-the-books payments for privately funded lawyers to push a political agenda that was roundly rejected at the ballot box by the American people,” said Horner. “The scheme raises serious questions about special interests setting states’ policy and law enforcement agendas, without accountability to the taxpayers and voters whom these law enforcement officials supposedly serve.”
These public emails and documents reveal the details of an unprecedented, coordinated effort between environmental groups, plaintiffs’ lawyers, and major liberal donors using nonprofit organizations to fund staff, research, public relations, and other services for state attorney general offices. One nonprofit uses a center, established by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, to pay for Special Assistant Attorneys General (SAAGs) for the AG offices that agree to advance progressive legal positions. Offices that have taken on board a privately funded prosecutor are Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Washington, and the District of Columbia. Senior attorneys from the activist AG offices have even flown in to secretly brief prospective funders of another nonprofit, Union of Concerned Scientists, which has recruited AGs and served as their back-room strategist and advisor on this since at least 2015.
Government has so much power that special interests will inevitably seek innovative ways to leverage it. Yesterday, my Twitter stream was full of investigations into relatively low-dollar campaign finance questions concerning relatively unknown candidates for office, as if the inherent corruption of big government’s every day operation is less scandalous!
However one balances newsworthiness, the solution is the same: shrink the size and authority of government and thereby reduce the incentive to invest in corruption. Unfortunately, people tend to support big government because they want it to do a particular thing. If their fellow citizens disagree and bring about an elected government that is less inclined to do that thing, they’ll seek other means.
The Most Critical Consideration for an Inspector General
This came up in my discussion last week with John DePetro (for which I have no audio), but the point is significant enough to merit a quick post. As most people who follow Rhode Island politics, Republican candidate for governor, Patricia Morgan, earned some attention for making the notion of an inspector general part of the campaign and naming her first choice:
At her Warwick campaign headquarters, Morgan, the House minority leader, announced that if elected governor, she would create an office of the inspector general, and she named Arlene Violet, a former state attorney general, as her first choice to run that office.
An inspector general would root out waste, fraud and corruption and make the government more accountable to the taxpayers of Rhode Island — goals that reflect Morgan’s vision of government.
Having helped to craft legislation to create an inspector general a few years ago, I find this approach worrying. State government already has multiple offices for people auditing and reviewing government’s activities. The whole reason to create a new office of the inspector general is his or her independence. The most important components of any plan for such an office, therefore, are the way in which he or she acquires the position, who can take that position away, and how it is funded.
One could reasonably argue that such a job ought to be defined in the state’s constitution, but at least creating the job through the General Laws would impose political pressures on the legislature and the executive not to be seen meddling too much. The notion that a governor could come in, create the office, and then appoint a person of his or her choosing is contrary to the fundamental spirit of the policy.
McKee vs. Regunberg Shows the Challenge Facing Moderate Democrats
Dan McKee’s embarrassing performance debating Aaron Regunberg on WPRI exposes a danger and presents a lesson for other non-progressive candidates for public office.
Gaspee on 10 and Robber Barons in the Government
If you haven’t caught Gaspee Project Clay Johnson’s conversation with Bill Rappleye on 10 News Conference, be sure to check it out (in three parts).
Rappleye seemed baffled by some of Clay’s views, but he articulated them very well — better than is often the case.
One interesting point that I would have taken in a somewhat different direction than Clay was Rappleye’s characterization of “unfettered capitalism” as the playground of robber barons. Clay’s answer was that a “free market” isn’t only free from excessive government interference, but also from other institutions or forces that seek to restrain competitive activity. That includes monopolies or cartels that effectively control markets based on their own power, without reference to the tax-and-police powers of the state.
A classic example of this was Cornelius Vanderbilt’s ownership of the Albany Bridge, the only way to get trains from west of the Hudson River to New York City in the mid-1800s, and his closure of that bridge to manipulate the markets and buy off his competitors. This example is also helpful in that it illustrates why one might reasonably propose that government get involved to regulate use of a private bridge, if not take it over completely, or to create public bridges to compete.
Such questions can become tricky quickly, but the key point in 2018 is that those conditions exist in a much more limited way. Technology has empowered so much innovation that the problem has flipped. Metaphorically, thousands of entrepreneurs around the country are deciding that relying on the Albany Bridge makes them vulnerable or is simply irrelevant, and so they’re building new bridges or figuring out how to avoid the use of bridges altogether. And here comes Mr. Vanderbilt, looking for government to stop that innovation so this antiquated structure remains viable.
As I mentioned back in 2016, the robber barons created a market for progressive politics to use government against the powerful industrialists. Now we have an even more-powerful monopoly — government — that has much more total authority over us than mere economics, and it has been working to bring other powerful forces, like industrialists, to heel.
Betting the Farm on a Free-Market Solution
Courtesy of EcoRI, here’s an interesting take on a Tiverton farm that is apparently soon to become a solar power plant:
The 72-acre farm is filled with history and habitat. Thousands of trees, a pond alive with frogs, an 18th-century farmhouse, and the grave of an American Revolutionary War soldier are among the property’s many treasures, buried or otherwise.
Julie Munafo’s family has owned Wingover Farm since 1970s, but a pending sale could lead to the destruction of more Rhode Island open space — another act in a growing pattern that sacrifices natural resources for energy production.
The state — thanks to generous economic incentives that are energizing shortsighted development — is paying for the rampant expansion of its renewable-energy portfolio, mostly ground-mounted solar panels, with forests and farmland.
The interesting part is that an environmentalist publication is using a notably contra-government tone in favor of preserving the open space. The only semblance of an answer mentioned in Frank Carini’s article is for people to attend meetings to help figure out better rules for placing solar farms, but that is insufficient on its face. The problem will remain that (at the behest of environmentalists) the government has created financial incentive for solar farms. Making it more difficult to site them will only raise the cost, which is just another way to lower the subsidy.
Eliminating the subsidies altogether would be a better option. The progressive complaint against free-market solutions is that they give people or groups with money an advantage, but progressive solutions that leverage government give people or groups with power an advantage (and, of course, money is one source of power). At least in the free market, people with money are competing with other people with money.
Happily, those with more-material intentions will be the most keen to make sure their investments are well placed and efficient, while those with more-altruistic intentions will have an edge in projects that have a moral or aesthetic angle. A nostalgic family looking to offload a farm, for instance, might sell it for less to developer who plans to sacrifice profit for preservation.
Whom the Wavemakers Wash Out with the Tide
How typical of the Rhode Island Way is Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo’s Wavemaker program?
A total of 240 college graduates working in science, technology, engineering, math and design occupations have been awarded Wavemaker Fellowships to help pay their student loans, the R.I. Commerce Corporation announced Thursday.
The average award in this, the third year of the program, is about $3,600. The tax credits are intended to keep recent college graduates working in Rhode Island, rather than become part of a “brain drain” to other states.
Put aside chuckles at the notion that keeping 240 Rhode Islanders each year does much to help the brain drain problem and the question of whether that $3,600 is actually persuading most of them to stay here despite options elsewhere. Who pays for this program?
The answer is that we all do. The money is skimmed from all of the various taxes and fees that we all pay, and as small as the $864,000 price tag may be, it ultimately becomes concentrated on the most active participants in the state’s economy, who must find ways to pass the burden on. One can’t trace such things, dollar for dollar, but it’s a relatively safe bet that the burden ultimately comes to rest on those with the least economic leverage.
Of course, we know it’s not only $864,000 per year. For the Wavemaker program to seem so ordinary, there must be many other programs that follow a similar philosophy. For such a seemingly inconsequential program to be proposed, enacted, and implemented, it must accord with Rhode Island’s political and economic strategy, which we can summarize as getting somebody else to pay for politically convenient favors… preferably somebody whose face we will never have to see.
Car Inspections and “Why Do We Live in This State?”
The absurdity of Rhode Island’s computerized car-inspection regime points to the desperate need for us to figure out what boundaries government should be allowed to impose on our behavior.
Does Regunberg Want Rhode Island to Confiscate the PawSox?
If anybody should not be skipping debates, it’s Democrat Lieutenant Governor Daniel McKee. Apart from his status as incumbent, he’s an experienced manager running against a far-left young guy who has just about no real-world experience. He ought to seek out opportunities to illustrate the contrast.
The example that brought this advice to mind was the RIPR interview/debate that I mentioned the other day. At one point, Regunberg responds to a question about the emigration of the PawSox to Worcester with this:
First of all, I just want to say that this is a really sad moment for our state. It’s a sad moment for Pawtucket. It’s a sad moment for families across Rhode Island to lose this icon from our state. I think there’s blame to go around at the state level. As you know, I supported the Senate proposal, which I think would have had a shot of keeping the team here, and the speaker did not. What I get the most frustrated with, however, is this idea of a small group of millionaires and billionaires who are making that choice to take this treasure out of our state for their own profit maximization. I don’t think that’s right.
Interviewers Ian Donnis and Scott MacKay didn’t follow up on this stunning statement, but McKee should have been there to do so. Sure, progressives can declare that the decisions of people who act in their own interests with their own property are “not right,” but when those progressives are trying to win government offices, the matter cannot stop there.
What exactly would Regunberg propose to do about? Effectively socialize the baseball team, with government taking it over? Increase the corporate welfare that the state might have offered the team to stay… helping those “millionaires and billionaires” even more?
I contacted the candidate for a response to these questions, but he has not replied. It’d be nice if journalists would pose such questions directly to young progressives while the microphone is already on, but in the absence of that, the duty falls to the opposing candidate.
The Millennial Wave That Might Not Be
For years, we’ve heard how much attention must be paid to the Millennial generation, because its members would soon change the face of society and politics. They may very well do that, as a large generation, but a tidbit from Ian Donnis’s latest Friday column reminds us that Millennials are human, too:
Which generation has the greatest increase in voter registration in Rhode Island from 2014 to 2018? Would you believe the Silent Generation (people born between 1928-45), which had a 39 percent bump, from 996 to 1,381 over the last four years, according to Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea’s office. Boomer (born 1945-64) registrations jumped 30 percent, from 4,163 to 5,423, while Xers (1965-1980) climbed 20 percent, from 5,055 to 6,060. Generation Z (1997-) is up 9 percent, 3,290 to 3,574, while Millennial (1981-1996) registrations dropped 11 percent, from 12,275 to 10,892.
So why would the number of voter registrations among Millennials drop as we head toward elections that the mainstream media has been hyping as their chance to save humanity? An answer would take more digging than I’ve time for at the moment, but I think we can return to my old thesis about the “productive class.”
Over the last four years, the youngest Millennials have moved on from college, or whatever they were doing as they transitioned into their 20s, and the oldest Millennials moved into their late 30s and (gasp!) middle age. As I’ve been saying since even the oldest Millennials were still in their 20s, the people who tend to leave Rhode Island are those in the “meaty, motivated segment on the cusp of the middle class” — people who want to cash in their talents and labor to build their lives. That transaction remains much more difficult in Rhode Island than elsewhere.
The harder question may be who remains behind. Some Millennials in their still-idealistic (read: naive) youth, probably. However, the non-Millennial cohort could surprise us. Will they be defined by newly wizened GenXers who have too much experience to fall for socialist promises or seniors too far removed from their careers and too reliant on other people to resist the lure of big government?
We’ll see. In the meantime, perhaps we should take the lesson that demographics are not destiny and at least some people can change their minds… or move.
Kilmartin Wants the Cogs to Stay on the Political Gear
The RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity has already responded to a strange press release from Attorney General Peter Kilmartin in which the AG does little but attempt to sow doubt about information helping government employees decide whether they want to remain in their unions. The most important observation one can make about the press release is that Kilmartin never provides an example of the supposed “misinformation,” or even names the supposed interloper; he’s simply casting shade.
However, the most eye-catching part is probably this:
“If you are contacted about disaffiliating from your public-sector union in the wake of the Janus decision, it is critical that you seek advice either from your union, or from some other reliable source. No worker should rely solely upon any outside group seeking to have the worker waive such a critical right.”
So, this public official’s advice to any employees who have doubts about their unions is to get information from… the unions. One suspects that information would have a decidedly pro-union tilt, which is clearly what Kilmartin wants. Take special note of his formulation about “outside groups.” Implicitly, he’s saying that the unions are “inside groups.” Inside of what? Well, government. In his view, they are not essentially the privately run organizations that they actually are; they are part of a team with elected and appointed officials, helping to run government.
This is how progressives like to structure things. Every group is represented by some hierarchy, and the leaders communicate and then issue edicts to their constituencies. The “business community” works through whatever chamber or group government officials wish to select as their voice. Employees are addressed not as individuals, but as members of their unions. Even local communities aren’t so much electing representatives to go to Providence and advocate on our behalf as we are electing the people who will represent state government to us.
In this approach, employees aren’t valued individually for their work. They’re cogs in the unionized machine that does work for government (and cycles taxpayer dollars back into political campaigns). Those who fancy themselves not to be cogs in a machine should take a look at MyPayMySayRI.com.
Matt Brown Gets the Problems Right but the Solutions Dead Wrong
See, here’s the thing. I don’t think anybody outside of Matt Brown’s progressive base believes that his socialist policy suggestions will fix the problems he describes:
“How did we end up in the situation where the roads are broken, the hospitals are closing, the schools aren’t providing a good education for our kids, we’re 50th out of the 50 states for education of Latino children, the school buildings are falling down,” he said. “That’s a pretty extreme situation to be in. And that’s going to take some bold ideas and some real changes.”
How did we end up in this situation? Because big-government progressivism has redirected the money that we were taxed and feed from infrastructure maintenance to insider deals, interest-group buy-offs, and bureaucratic proliferation. Because the progressive urge to take control of everything has squeezed opportunity out of our state, leading to the exit of productive Rhode Islanders and a lack of paying demand for services such as hospitals (while lowering the availability and quality of those services and driving up the costs). And because co-opting public schools as a means of indoctrination and a funding mechanism for left-wing teachers unions has undermined the incentives for a healthy system.
If you agree with Matt Brown about the problems, you have to disagree with him about the solutions.
Young Democratic Socialists Are a Little Late in the Game
The pamphlet described in an article by Zachary Petrizzo on Campus Reform reads like a smoking gun memo from a strategy that was implemented decades ago:
The Young Democratic Socialists of America organization is urging socialists to “take jobs as teachers” in order to exploit the “political, economic, and social potential the industry holds.”
“Why Socialists Should Become Teachers,” an 11-page pamphlet crafted jointly by YDSA and the Democratic Socialist Labor Commission, contends that education is “a strategic industry to organize,” and offers prospective socialist educators “a basic roadmap for how to get a job in education.”
Socialists enter education in government schools. They get a high-paying job that is stable to the point of being just about permanent. And they gain access to impressionable children whom they can indoctrinate. As a bonus, part of their pay goes to labor unions, which cycle the taxpayer money back into activism and political donations.
The synergies here are so obvious that the plan is already in effect and undermining our society. But kids always have to feel like they’re coming up with radical ideas.
The Balance of Freedoms in Rhode Island
A thousand discussions could be sparked by the Cato Institute’s Freedom in the 50 States ranking and Rhode’s Island’s 42nd place ranking.
The datapoints that go into the index cover a wide range of issues and are subjective. For example, Rhode Island is number 1 in “marriage freedom,” largely on the strength of its same-sex partnership laws, but some might suggest that the use of government to redefine a cultural institution is hardly a marker of freedom. Some might also note that same-sex marriage accounts for 2% of a state’s overall score while religious freedom accounts for only 0.01%.
On the other end of the spectrum, the only area in which Rhode Island is dead last is asset forfeiture. However, another low rank for the state could arguably be considered its defining problem: labor market freedom. Here, our 49th place ranking results from laws on:
- General right-to-work law
- Short-term disability insurance
- Noncompete agreements permitted
- Minimum wage
- Workers’ compensation funding regulations
- Workers’ compensation coverage regulations
- Employer verification of legal status
- Employee anti-discrimination law
- Paid family leave
The total effect of these policies has been that Rhode Island hasn’t budged from 49th since the first year measured: 2000.
Rhode Island has a great deal going for it, but if people can’t find work here, they won’t live here. The Ocean State is roughly in the middle fifth for fiscal and personal freedom — although dropping from 18th to 27th in fiscal freedom from 2000 to 2016 and from 12th to 31st in personal freedom. If we take Cato’s weightings as our guide, that decline has been making life less free. But those changes pale in comparison to our languishing at the edge of the bottom fifth in regulatory freedom throughout, and that’s an area in which we need great resolve and quick action to improve.
Political Monday with John DePetro: The WooSox Debate the Chicken
For my weekly call-in on John DePetro’s WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM show, this week, about the merits of a political system that lost the PawSox and the wisdom of debating chickens.
Abuse and Statutes of Limitation: Keeping Our Hands on the Guardrails of Values and Justice
The emotions raised by an abuse scandal in another state shouldn’t lead us to discard careful consideration of our values and justice.
Another Angle (or Silver Lining) in the Loss of the PawSox
There’s another aspect of the Worcester’s PawSox gain that Rhode Islanders haven’t spent much time discussing, and it is visible in the reporting of Ethan Epstein in The Weekly Standard (emphasis added):
But the PawSox owners announced that the next two years they play at McCoy will be their last. Roughly three years ago, they announced their plans to vacate McCoy. Pawtucket, Providence, and Worcester jockeyed for position. The owners played the competitors against each other masterfully, and in the end, Worcester evidently made the team an offer it couldn’t refuse: It will build a new $90 million stadium and apartment complex. The state of Massachusetts is fronting $35 million; and “the city of Worcester is expected to borrow $100 million, some of which would be repaid by the team,” the Providence CBS affiliate reported. The deal required no input from the state legislature, and was put together in secret. The only apparent cost to the PawSox is that they will now known by the unfortunate moniker “WooSox.”
Somehow, the City of Worcester was able to pledge $100 million with no public awareness whatsoever. John DePetro and I disagreed, on WNRI earlier today, about the significance of this angle, but I don’t think it should be dismissed. I certainly want a governing system that allowed municipal leaders to do such a thing.
Yes, Massachusetts has been doing much better than Rhode Island in recent decades, with some solid reforms, and has therefore built up more trust equity with the voting public. By contrast, Rhode Island is still suffering a loss of confidence from 38 Studios which (importantly) has been further strained by Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo’s preferred economic development method of making special deals with powerful insiders and wealthy out-of-state interests.
That doesn’t mean Massachusetts’s luck will continue, or that Rhode Island won’t reevaluate its government. On the first count, I’ve long been noting that Massachusetts’s lead in education has been flagging ever since concessions to the labor unions under Deval Patrick, and we’ll have to wait a while to see whether the WooSox gamble pays off. On the second count, we can only hope that the nationally visible face plant with the erstwhile PawSox will cause insiders and the voting public alike to conclude that we just can’t continue on in the way that we’ve been governing ourselves.
