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91

No Clear Vision with Government Regulations

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Linda Langlois expresses a relatively minor and easily overcome problem that she’s experiencing courtesy of the state’s regulatory regime:

Every few years, I go online to Readers.com to order my reading glasses. For several years now, I have needed the 4.00 strength and have received my eyeglasses within a few days. So imagine my shock when my online order this week elicited this pop-up: We’re sorry, but Rhode Island restricts the sale of the following: Reading glasses with powers over +3.25.I have emailed the governor’s office but have had no reply. I searched online for Rhode Island restrictions, statutes, laws, etc., to find

Wondering what changed, I contacted Reading.com, and the company’s spokesperson directed me to the relevant statute, which forbids the sale of corrective eyeglasses or lenses “unless a licensed optometrist, physician, or optician under the laws of this state is in charge and in personal attendance at the booth, counter, or place where those articles are sold.”  The exception is for “simple reading magnifying glasses,” defined as those with “over plus 3.25 diopters or equivalent magnification.”  However, this statute is not new, so nothing should have changed for Ms. Langlois’s recent order.

I asked Reading.com for further explanation but have received no response.  Perhaps the company only recently discovered the statute.  One might reasonably wonder whether the new requirement to collect sales taxes from Rhode Island residents made the risk of unlawful sales greater than the cost of adding protections against them.

Whatever the case, this is another of the countless ways Rhode Island’s government makes life more difficult and more expensive for residents and those who want to do business with us — reducing the ability for our own businesses to innovate.  It is also a fine example of the frustration that people feel.  Think of the process by which this law might be changed.  Consumers or out-of-state retailers would have to lobby the General Assembly and overcome the entrenched interest of licensed optometrists, physicians, and opticians.  If it became a fight, politicians would have to run on campaigns to change this tiny law and then expend political capital to make it happen.

After a few experiences like this, residents can conclude that the only solution is to leave.  We would all benefit, however, from the election of politicians who operate under the general principle that government oughtn’t meddle so much.

92

Gaspee on 10 and Robber Barons in the Government

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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.

96

Live by the Facebook, Struggle by the Facebook

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Think whatever you like about Diamond and Silk, specifically, and capitalizing on the political success of Donald Trump, generally, but their conflict with Facebook provides a very helpful lesson for one’s interaction with the Internet:

Diamond And Silk have been corresponding since September 7, 2017, with Facebook (owned by Mark Zuckerberg), about their bias censorship and discrimination against D&S brand page. Finally after several emails, chats, phone calls, appeals, beating around the bush, lies, and giving us the run around, Facebook gave us another bogus reason why Millions of people who have liked and/or followed our page no longer receives notification and why our page, post and video reach was reduced by a very large percentage. Here is the reply from Facebook. Thu, Apr 5, 2018 at 3:40 PM: “The Policy team has came to the conclusion that your content and your brand has been determined unsafe to the community.” Yep, this was FB conclusion after 6 Months, 29 days, 5 hrs, 40 minutes and 43 seconds. Oh and guess what else Facebook said: “This decision is final and it is not appeal-able in any way.” (Note: This is the exact wording that FB emailed to us.)

Obviously, this is just one side of the story, but the fact remains that anybody who builds their Internet presence primarily by using somebody else’s platform is subject to the whims of that other party.  Use Facebook to build a following, and that other party is Facebook.  Build your online presence with a heavy reliance on Google referrals, and online giant’s algorithm may subtly shift to move you down the list of every search.

And it won’t always be obvious that it’s happening.

The lesson is a back-to-basics one.  Use these platforms for self promotion, but get people interacting with a URL that you own, and build it up with your content, not the tricks that social media allow.

That’s harder, yes, but it’s a more stable strategy than building on a foundation that others can disappear with the push of a button.

97

Rent Seeking Pot Dealers Look to the Government Crime Boss

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Could there be a more clear example of rent seeking crony capitalism than a direct payment from marijuana interests to pay off government officials to block competition?

The offer came with a condition. State regulators would have to change their plan to hike the number of state-licensed pot dispensaries from the existing three to 15.

“We’re very sensitive to the state and its challenges,” Reilly told members of the House Finance Committee. “And if there is a way to find the $5 million that you need to plug the budget hole that you need for the coming fiscal year, we’d like to be part of the solution.” …

Regulators say the plan would increase competition among dispensaries, lower prices, offer a wider array of tested marijuana strains and improve access for patients, whose numbers keep growing.

This just like occupational licensing.  Established businesses use political clout to leverage government and block competition, which makes markets more efficient and helps consumers.

Rhode Islanders should take this as a lesson in political theory, as well.  Those on the progressive side tend to think of government as “the people’s” source of leverage against powerful special interests, but it quickly becomes the opposite, as the special interests give government cash in order to come around to the idea that it’s to the people’s benefit for the special interest to benefit.

In this case, the pot dealers see upstarts moving in on their business, and they’re looking to the crime boss of the area to muscle them out through extortion and threats of violence (via fines and maybe incarceration). The picture gets clearer and clearer.

98

The Illness of and Medicine for Corporate Crony Incentives

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With a mention of the questionable benefit from having wooed General Electric to Boston with $150 million in subsidies, Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby argues against the crony-capitalist bribing of companies to locate within a jurisdiction:

Amazon says it is seeking to build its new home in a metropolitan area with a large population, an international airport, and good schools. But as everyone understands, it also expect to be courted with publicly-funded “incentives” — some combination of property-tax abatements, job-creation credits, direct grants, sales-tax refunds, land-acquisition assistance, and the other varieties of corporate welfare that governments have concocted to lure businesses. Amazon knows how the economic-redevelopment game is played in what The Economist calls this “sweet land of subsidy.” (Just this week, Wisconsin agreed to pay Foxconn a staggering $3 billion in subsidies to construct a flat-screen factory in the state.) If cities and states are determined to compete for Amazon’s new campus by showering it with fistfuls of taxpayer dollars, the company can’t be blamed for pocketing the largesse.

But what excuse do mayors and governors have? Again and again they spend taxpayers’ funds to woo companies in this way. Again and again the taxpayers get jilted.

Yet, this is the strategy that our Democrat governor, Gina Raimondo, wishes to expand in her recently proposed budget, including special subsidies to lower-end cronies, from students to small businesses.  Under this model, the government makes it unreasonably difficult for individuals and businesses to act economically and then tries to take credit for easing the burden with subsidies… for those individuals and businesses willing to kneel before the bureaucrats and be bought into the game.

By way of a bigger-picture medicine for this hard-to-kick mental disease, I like Glenn Reynolds’s suggestion:

State tax abatements and other “incentives” should be treated as taxable income at the federal level. States should be encouraged to have low taxes for every company, not just the favored few.

99

The Magic of a Free Market Policy

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Instapundit Glenn Reynolds makes a telling connection.  He leads with a quotation from former President Obama during the presidential campaign season while responding to Donald Trump’s promise to increase job creation and manufacturing within the United States:

“Well, how exactly are you going to do that? What exactly are you going to do? There’s no answer to it,” Obama said.

“He just says, ‘Well, I’m going to negotiate a better deal.’ Well, what, how exactly are you going to negotiate that? What magic wand do you have? And usually the answer is, he doesn’t have an answer.”

The news to which Reynolds links the reminder is this, from Bloomberg:

U.S. manufacturing expanded in December at the fastest pace in three months, as gains in orders and production capped the strongest year for factories since 2004, the Institute for Supply Management said Wednesday. …

The figures suggest manufacturing strength will persist into early 2018, even after the ISM’s semi-annual survey of purchasing managers published last month showed factories anticipate growth in capital spending to slow this year. The December monthly poll was taken before President Donald Trump signed the tax legislation, which provides companies with incentives to invest more, Fiore said in an interview.

The most telling part of Obama’s rhetoric is the mention of a magic wand.  Progressives think that government does things, and the world responds.  Central planners inject resources here or there, and that produces a predictable reaction in the market.  Look at Rhode Island’s Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo.  How are we going to improve the economy?  Well, we’ll find companies that the government experts believe will benefit the local market, and we’ll cut them special deals to move here.  It is a magic wand, with the progressive wizards wielding the wand.

The free-market conservative approach isn’t so presumptuous.  We assume that people want to be productive, create things, and make money, and so if we broadly make it cheaper and easier for them to do so, we expect that they will.  We can’t really predict where in the market the slack will go, but we trust that freedom and individual initiative will put the resources where they will be most effective, given the actual conditions and interests of the area.

100

“Principles” Do Seem to Have Selective Application

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I wouldn’t 100% endorse Kurt Schlichter’s criticism of national Republicans, but he articulates a feeling that a great number of conservatives around the country surely share:

Yeah, so after nearly two years of tiresome finger-wagging about “the Rule of Law” and how we need to put our “principles” above our desire for “winning,” the whole sordid scam we always knew it always was is revealed for the world to see. They can’t hide it anymore and they aren’t even trying. Their glorious “conservative principles” aren’t principles at all but a skeevy ploy designed to tie our hands and keep us from pursuing policy goals our establishment coalition partners disfavor. They want open borders. They want illegals. They want cheap foreign labor that doesn’t get uppity to man their donors’ corporations so the Captains of Crony Capitalism don’t have to fuss with American workers who won’t tolerate being treated like chattel. Yeah, “we’re better than that” all right – if you mean that we are better than enforcing the laws the American people passed through a constitutional process if the ruling class decides it doesn’t like them.

One aspect that Schlichter leaves out is the role that the national Democrats are playing by being so radical.  In the absence of a plausible alternative for either party, the power of voters loses out in the balance against the power of moneyed special interests.

Whatever the case, this isn’t a healthy development.

101

How Was It Not Obvious That You Never Tell the Enemy When You’ll Be Done?

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Jessica Donati’s thoughts upon leaving her Afghanistan assignment with the Wall Street Journal are worth a read, if you can get past the pay wall, but this is the part that seems most timely, just now:

The Obama administration’s military surge ended in 2012, but local forces weren’t prepared to take over. The Taliban swept through rural areas, and an Islamic State insurgency took root, capitalizing on popular frustration with a government often seen as dominated by brutal former warlords.

The surge-and-slip-away strategy was an obviously problematic one to anybody who pays even passing attention to human nature and has a cursory familiarity with history.  The same can be said of this, from Vance Serchuk’s commentary on President Trump’s stated policy for that nation (also WSJ… sorry):

The first and most important of [the lesson that Trump appears to have learned from the Bush and Obama administrations’ results] is the rejection of fixed timetables for U.S. withdrawal. Instead the president is taking a conditions-based approach that removes any deadline for pulling out.

That’s significant because America’s recurring efforts to extricate itself from Afghanistan—from the Bush administration’s push to hand over the Afghan mission to NATO, to the Obama administration’s pledge to bring all forces home by the end of its term in office—have helped foster the very conditions that have forced the U.S. to stay.

This U.S. exit-seeking has encouraged the Taliban to think it can outlast America on the battlefield, deterred Afghan civilians from siding with the coalition, and given regional powers like Pakistan incentives to hedge against the U.S. by supporting insurgent groups.

Again, how was this not obvious beforehand?  Scheduling a departure — even making it clear that you’d rather leave than settle in — changes the enemy’s strategy to digging in and waiting.  So, the enemy waited.  Obama looked for the first plausible moment to hand off control to an inchoate authority.  And now we’re still there and moving back in.

102

Maine Tourism: Jobs Americans Will Do When Immigrants Aren’t Available

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A few days ago, I noted that Maine’s waiters and waitresses had actually organized to fight against a minimum wage increase.  Now Jazz Shaw has spotted a story out of Maine that messes with another mainstream narrative.  Apparently, when the number of available immigrants for low-end work hits a ceiling, employers will find ways to make the positions into jobs that Americans will do:

The article describes some of the “creative ways to attract local labor” and they include things such as offering flexible hours and even… (gasp) higher wages. If your business is booming all summer to the degree that you can’t hire enough workers to meet the demand, then in a normal capitalist system the demand for labor would drive up the cost. Higher wages attract more and better workers… it’s really that simple. And if that enhanced compensation package is attracting more employees locally, why are you relying on the H-2B program to begin with?

The economic questions with immigration are not simplistic.  Fluid immigration is arguably a subsidy to employers; rigid immigration is arguably a subsidy to workers.  (Although, of course, a sense of fairness does seem to make the former argument more natural than the latter.)

As we work through these policies, though, deceptive rhetoric is kind of like a subsidy to those who dominate the media.  Ultimately, there’s no such thing as a “job Americans won’t do.”  There are just jobs that Americans won’t do for the compensation that employers want to pay.  Immigration policy, in this regard, should balance the needs of employers who can add to the economy if they have lower labor prices with an appropriate aversion to allowing global poverty to drive down salaries in the United States.

103

Thoughts on a Baseball Stadium

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Even the best argument for government involvement in a new PawSox stadium reasons backwards; why is it government’s role at all to ensure that we have entertainment and will absorb the risk for private investments?

105

Labor Unions, Less About Workers and More About Government

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The American Interest offers what might be termed a labor thought for today if it hadn’t been sitting in my bookmarks for a week:

It’s significant that ground zero for public sector union reform is the upper-Midwest, once the capital of organized labor. Democrats try to cast such reforms as a betrayal of workers, but in a post-industrial age when half of union members are public employees whose demands for fatter benefits packages come at direct expense of the taxpayers, many voters don’t see it that way. As James Sherk noted in our pages last year, “A movement formed to defend blue-collar laborers now fights primarily to help white-collar workers expand government.”

That point cannot be sufficiently emphasized:  labor unions, overall, are now dominated by the public-sector subsegment, which has a very different model.

In the private sector, the union negotiates with management for the share of profits from sales to customers that goes to the workers.  In the public sector, the union helps elect management with whom it can conspire to take more money from taxpayers, who must either leave the area or pay up once the unions achieve political dominance, as they have in Rhode Island.  That is, in the public sector, it’s a process more resembling theft than negotiation.

Of course, one should note that the strength of unions in the private sector, such as it is, often comes with their ability to manipulate the law to force clients — mainly governments — to use union labor or to box competitors out of big markets — like government projects.  In that regard, even more of organized labor should properly be seen as existing in the public sector.

106

Government Coercion by Another Means

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Here’s the article I mentioned in this week’s podcast, about tax deals for corporate charity:

A bipartisan group of congressmen recently introduced a new bill intended to reinvigorate America’s poorest communities. The Investing in Opportunity Act (IOA) will allow investors to temporarily delay paying capital-gains taxes on their investments if they choose to reinvest the money into “opportunity zones” or distressed communities across the country.

The legislation was cosponsored in the Senate by Republican Tim Scott of South Carolina and Democrat Cory Booker of New Jersey, and in the House by Pat Tiberi (R-Ohio) and Ron Kind (D-Wisc.).  These congressmen report that their bill has garnered bipartisan support in both chambers, and they believe that its provisions will allow for tremendous economic growth in some of the country’s most underserved communities.

I might have misspoken in the podcast and attributed the article to the legislator.  The legislator is Tim Scott; the writer is Alexandra Desanctis. Whatever the case, this isn’t a direction in which we should go.

There’s a push among conservatives, recently, to rephrase policies in terms more amenable to the themes in which the Left has caught up the public conversation.  On one end, this is an obvious thing to do — to explain why conservative policies are the ones that will actually help individuals and families come to their full fruition.

Less obvious are policies that accomplish some of the Left’s goals (like making government central to charity), but that have potential to start to reshape thinking.  In that way, for example, taking the step suggested by Representative Scott could lead, in the future, to the additional step of questioning why government’s picking charitable causes at all.

I think this proposal goes a little too far over that line.

108

Using Mal-education to Enslave a People

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That American students are learning to believe their country and culture are uniquely bad is evidence of a deliberate attempt to trick them into giving up their opportunities and freedom.

109

A Tale of Clashing Intra-Boomer Greed

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Essays by Joel Kotkin are often frustrating.  On one hand, he’s clearly more reasonable than the typical mainstream liberal and willing to consider evidence even if it leads him to conclusions that conflict with the standard liberal line.  On the other hand, he pulls up sharply short of following his thinking all the way through.  Consider this, from a column attacking Baby Boomers for their role in constructing the civic society that has produced our terrible presidential choices:

Trumpian boomerism is easily evidenced in my own neighborhood of Villa Park in Orange County. Our lovely, well-maintained and aging little enclave is friendly, civic-minded and civil. But it also is the center of opposition to such things as school bonds that would improve local schools now in a shocking state of disrepair. Villa Park residents helped defeat the last school bond, and it’s a former (thank heaven) City Council member who seeks to lead the effort to overturn the one on the ballot this year.

The arguments of the anti-bond advocates, like those backing Trump, base their pitch on accusations of public incompetence but rest on a culture of selfishness. Many opposing the bonds, which would cost them a few hundred dollars a year on their property tax bill, think nothing of spending lavishly on luxury vacations or home upgrades. The fact that better schools might increase their own property values seems to sail against their mind-set, which apparently renders them oblivious to the penury imposed on the next generation.

Kotkin seems not to consider that bonds typically require higher tax bills for 20 to 30 years.  Boomers are more likely to have purchased their homes when property values were much lower (even if only 15 years ago), and they are more likely to have finished paying off their mortgages; they’re also farther along in their careers and wealthier.  “A few hundred dollars a year on their property tax bill” is therefore not as big a deal to them as it is to those in Gen X who may be struggling to get on the other side of life’s financial hump or Millennials looking to buy houses (or even rent them) for the first time.  Long-term debt will also affect whatever generation comes after today’s kids in the same way.

In fairness, it’s entirely possible that Boomers in Kotkin’s suburb of (typically liberal) coastal California haven’t thought this through, either, and are, indeed, acting out of greed.  But even if we cede that point, we still must challenge his assumption that more money will improve education.  The same teacher unions that have helped to diminish public education in the United States have spent decades driving up the cost, pushing taxpayers toward antipathy to new expenses and forcing administrators to cut corners when it comes to maintenance and capital improvement.

That is, to the extent greed is involved, it is in no way one sided.

111

Experts Are Great… Just Not If They’re Too Powerful

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Economist Arnold Kling makes a case for decentralizing the political power of experts that reads almost as if it was written with Rhode Island in mind, particularly the Commerce Corp.:

The additional power that is being granted to experts under the Obama administration is indeed striking. The administration has appointed “czars” to bring expertise to bear outside of the traditional cabinet positions. Congress has enacted sweeping legislation in health care and finance, and Democratic leaders have equally ambitious agendas that envision placing greater trust in experts to manage energy and the environment, education and human capital, and transportation and communications infrastructure.

However, equally striking is the failure of such experts. They failed to prevent the financial crisis, they failed to stimulate the economy to create jobs, they have failed in Massachusetts to hold down the cost of health care, and sometimes they have failed to prevent terrorist attacks that instead had to be thwarted by ordinary civilians.

Of course, modern society requires experts, but Kling suggests that they have to be subject to the incentives and controls of a marketplace of competition and voluntary action:

Given the complexity of the world, it is tempting to combine expertise with power, by having government delegate power to experts. However, concentration of power makes our society more brittle, because the mistakes made by government experts propagate widely and are difficult to correct.

It is unlikely that we will be able to greatly improve the quality of government experts.

Instead, if we wish to reduce the knowledge-power discrepancy, we need to be willing to allow private-sector experts to grope toward solutions to problems, rather than place unwarranted faith in experts backed by the power of the state.

One tweak I’d make is to note that the market naturally combines expertise with power, only it will tend to be granted based on proven success and can be removed as swiftly as a failure or competition can make somebody else’s product or service a better deal.  Government’s role should be to prevent experts and companies using their temporary advantage to build permanent walls against innovation and competition.  Instead, regulation, corporatism, and government-business alliances have tended to be halfway steps to monopoly and protectionism.

112

Malevolence in Manipulation of the Insecure

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Reflecting on the recurring question of whether Barrack Obama is “incompetent or malevolent,” in reaction to national security advisor Ben Rhodes’s admission that his administration worked to scam America into the Iran deal (among other things), Richard Fernandez suggests that incompetence may be the more dangerous possibility:

For all his persuasiveness, incompetence is Satan’s principle problem. The devil always sets out to construct heaven and winds up with hell because he uses the wrong principles.  Castro, Kim, Stalin, Chavez, Mao — who all would have ruled the universe if they could have, yet finished up ruling trash heaps — probably were surprised at the turn of events. Yet why should it be surprising? Mordor in The Lord of the Rings was the shabbiest place on Middle Earth just as Pandemonium, Milton’s capital of hell in Paradise Lost, is the most frightful place in the universe because these turkeys were going about it the wrong way and were too proud to admit error.

Of course, a blend is generally at work, inasmuch as Satan is malevolent but sells the wrong principles to his followers, the failure of which then reinforces their grievance against the world.  In that line, Fernandez suggests that “society is stupid” and inclined toward being groupies for the “madman on stage.”

Perhaps “unthinking” would be a better term for the masses, but it’s difficult not to see malevolence in the manipulation of them.  And malevolence finds a convenient tool in human beings’ insecurity.  In particular, look to the federal Dept. of Justice’s insistence that it has the authority to interpret federal law newly to invalidate North Carolina’s recently passed law on bathroom assignments.  To progressives in the federal government, this is a transparent power play, but the tyrants’ power lust dovetails with more submissive emotions among their supporters.

For progressives, it isn’t tolerable for people to behave according to disagreement on anything that matters.  To the extent that it is not merely an admission of one’s powerlessness (accepting difference because one has no choice), allowing alternative views is either an indication of ideological confidence (that one will be proven correct) or an admission that one’s own views might be incorrect.  Being neither confident in their own understanding of the world nor willing to admit that their leading lights might have something wrong, they support the destruction of our entire system of government in order to impose their views on the country by whatever undemocratic means are available.

113

Raimondo, Healthcare, and Fascism

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Fascism is a variety of socialism that allows government officials to blame private businesses that have no choice but to do what they’re told, as Rhode Island is seeing with its health care system.

114

Will the Fire Alarm Wake the World Up?

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It’s beginning to look like the world may not quite manage to maintain its sleeping dreams through the end of the Obama Administration.  Having abandoned Iraq prematurely in order to have an election-year talking point, Obama is now quietly ramping up boots on the ground — naturally, without the sort of debate and fanfare that would lead to Americans’ knowing what’s going on:

The U.S. military has around 5,000 service members in Iraq, officials said on Monday, far more than previously reported, as the Obama administration quietly expands ground operations against the Islamic State.

The number of American forces in Iraq has come under increased scrutiny following the death over the weekend of a Marine staff sergeant, the second combat casualty in renewed U.S. operations in Iraq. He was killed when militants launched rockets at a small U.S. base around the city of Makhmour. The existence of the Marine detachment had not been known prior to Staff Sgt. Louis F. Cardin’s death.

And today, Europe added another substantial terrorist attack to its growing list:

As many as 31 people were killed and more than 180 injured as coordinated terrorist bombings rocked the Brussels airport and subway system during rush hour Tuesday morning in the Belgian capital. …

“We are at war,” French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said Tuesday. “We have been subjected for the last few months in Europe to acts of war.”

We learned after the ’90s that our society’s vacations from history only last so long, and that the longer it takes us to wake up in our own beds, the more difficult it is to get things back in order.  This isn’t a time for either denials or impetuous decisions.  Our civilization’s history and our nation’s founding documents chart a course for us — not an easy one, but a sure one in which we can have confidence.  We need only shed the hubris that we’ve evolved into new moral creatures.

115

Proper Political and Moral Alignment

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With my belated discovery of Netflix (coinciding with an adjustment of habits to bring some balance to my daily life), I watched Romero last night.  It’s about Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, who was assassinated in 1980.

Inasmuch as the oppressors in power in that country at that time were an alliance of capitalists and militarists, the movie implies sympathy for the Marxists on the other side (although not as strongly as I’d expected).  At least as portrayed in the movie, Romero wasn’t interested in communism, but he couldn’t remain passive about the real violence against the people, including some of the more-radical priests under his authority.

Given his concern for the poor (sounding very much like Pope Francis), Archbishop Romero brings out an important theme that those who watch the world more with a political eye than a theological one might miss.  Those who oppress the poor are the enemies of morality, but acknowledging as much doesn’t, of itself, make their opponents its heroes.

That is, Marxists who leverage the ire of the poor in order to foment revolution and bring themselves into power aren’t made moral (or intellectually correct) just because they’re fighting real oppression by somebody else.  Even within the narrow realm of movies about political violence against the Catholic Church in Latin America, one can support this truism with For Greater Glory, a story about the Cristero War in Mexico, when Catholics resisted the oppression of Plutarco Elías Calles, who more or less fit the mold of a Marxist revolutionary and who governed that country in the early part of the Twentieth Century.

Properly understood, the collection of views that currently fall under the banner of conservatism in the United States provides a basis for society that resists these unstable extremes.  Archbishop Romero was a heroic figure, and when, in the movie about him, he led a group of El Salvadoran peasants into a church that the military had made into a barracks, it occurred to me that conservatives have ceded ground that is rightfully ours when it comes to supporting the poor and oppressed, balancing order and economic liberty with a moral culture, concern for charity, and belief in equality.

Waking up with these thoughts on a gray February morning brought something of a melancholy feel to the morning.  Today we’ll have further indication whether the United States is truly prepared to give itself a presidential choice between a devotee of the socialist fantasy and a dangerous egomaniac who’s won his popularity as a reality TV cult of personality.  Either way, I suppose, we’ll have opportunity for heroes and martyrs, and after all, a well-balanced sword must be ground from both sides.

But this intellectual understanding doesn’t change the sense of foreboding, which is something like the Garden of Gethsemane or its parallel in Romero, when the archbishop kneels in the road and says, “I can’t… you must… I’m yours… show me the way.”

117

RI Foundation Becoming Hub for Top-Down Progressive Shadow Government

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In the Daily Signal, Kevin Mooney, who used to write for the Ocean State Current, takes a look at the private Rhode Island Foundation’s role in advancing left-wing causes and exploiting legal loopholes to move sensitive government activities beyond the reach of voters and transparency laws:

With almost $1 billion in assets, the foundation bills itself as Rhode Island’s largest grant-maker, awarding more than $30 million a year, according to annual reports. Tax records show that the foundation concentrated its most recent donations on left-of-center organizations, with a particular emphasis on environmental causes.

These organizations include Earthjustice, EcoRI News, the Climate Action Network, the Environmental Justice League of Rhode Island, and Grow Smart Rhode Island. Each has received tens of thousands in donations from the Rhode Island Foundation, according to the most recent tax forms.

Other left-leaning recipients of the foundation’s largess include Planned Parenthood branches in Rhode Island and Massachusetts; Direct Action for Rights and Equality, an anti-capitalist “social justice” group; the Economic Progress Institute, a Rhode Island-based progressive research group; and the Rhode Island Coalition Against Gun Violence, which seeks new gun controls.

Rhode Islanders who express concern over the Rhode Island Foundation’s penchant for funding liberal causes have been particularly critical of the nonprofit’s support for environmental groups standing behind a project called RhodeMap Rhode Island.

The RI Foundation’s left-wing involvement spans just about every area of progressive social activism, and as Mooney notes, the organization has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the state in the area of healthcare. (Cash is fungible, of course, so revenue is revenue.) In the past year, though, the Foundation has really taken additional steps toward helping to create and play a role in a shadow government.

As a tangential note, Stephen Hopkins Center for Civil Rights Giovanni Cicione tells Mooney that some of this growing private-sector cabal should be registering as lobbyists. I’d argue that includes the state’s new chief innovation officer Richard Culatta, whom Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo helped hire through the Rhode Island College Foundation. He’s going to be part of the governor’s cabinet of advisers, but he’s not a government employee and will be giving suggestions and promoting them not only to the governor, but to agencies and bodies throughout government. As of this morning, he was not listed on the Secretary of State’s lobbyist tracker, and it’s reasonable to expect he never will be, becoming instead just another example of how there’s no rule of law in Rhode Island.

120

The PC Monster Was Entirely Predictable

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Two items in the news remind me of a short story I wrote a long time ago, proving that the politically correct cry-bully monster currently rampaging on American college campuses could be seen a long way off, even by the likes of me.  Consider:

  • Tim Wolfe, the president of Missouri University, resigned his position potentially over fabricated incidents, but certainly over protests that no rational person could consider reasonable.
  • Nicholas Christakis, the Yale resident master whom a student berated with tearful swears over an only slightly un-PC email that his wife had sent offered a pitiful apology for his not-sufficiently-abject capitulation to the extended-adolescence masters attending his university.

In a short story I wrote in December 2001, titled “Guest of Honor,” a monster is slithering around a dinner party for representatives of our cultural elite. With the attendees nearly all devoured:

The nearest man, a much applauded professor of English, with patches on his elbows, knelt and, with arms outstretched, said, “Though I personally railed against the imperialist oppressions, perpetrated by fascistic elitist capitalists, that incentivized the agitated reprisals for which we all now answer, I comprehend the perceptivities of the Other and, in cognitionation of the acts wherewith Mother Nature will only benefit by the extirpation of all humanity…” But he managed to say no more before the blunt maw of death left only the echo of his voice and the jingle of the keys to his Volvo as they fell.

Then a famous opinion writer, to whom the professor had recently been talking, shrugged his shoulders and said, “What’s to be done? His appetite is of our creation, after all.”

The safe money, at this time, would bet that higher education in the United States will not respond to the monster’s younger siblings as it would to a threat to its credibility, its mission, and its existence, but rather will continue to deteriorate, at least to the point that people with more sense than flavor realize it’s not worth the expense of tuition or taxpayer dollars.

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