George Rebane
The dilemma of socialism is that it needs large masses of the ignorant and poor to stay in power. Socialists know that public policies which enable and empower the individual will grow the economy but doom collectivist governance.
Los Angeles gets a new national monument that President Obama will dedicate on his most recent fund raising trip through soCal. The huge land area covered is essentially all of the San Gabriel Mountains north of the greater LA area. The former national forest will be put into a permanent category of limited or no public use. Located next to where millions of people live, this takings is a poster child of Agenda21 in operation. Jo Ann and I spent much of our youth and family recreation days in those mountains. As a high schooler and college undergraduate I and my friends were often in those mountain canyons and ridge tops since we lived in the Foothill Blvd corridor right below the mountains. And within minutes from their homes, LA area families with picnic baskets or sleds and saucers would be enjoying themselves in summer and winter. Those accessible mountains were a godsend to rich and poor alike, and for generations a draw for people to move to California – where else could you ski in the morning and then spend the afternoon on a sunny beach? The LA Times today murmurs that some local leaders have had the temerity to opine their concerns that this federal takeover “will limit access” to this priceless recreation area. Sadly, Angeles National Forest RIP as Agenda21’s stack and pack corrals Americans into ever narrower corridors of access and mobility.
Meanwhile the markets are roiling as investors don’t have a clue about the Fed’s pulling the plug on zero interest rates, and the extent of the new recession into which the EU is sliding. Germany, the continent’s economic powerhouse, is faltering and Chancellor Merkel is asking her coalition government to come together to do some massive reduction of red tape that stifles their important business sector. This reminds us of the dysfunctional progressive mind. How come when socialists are in a panic about their latest economic debacle, they agree with the rest of us that reducing regulatory red tape on businesses will promote economic resurgence and growth? But then when the economy is not in dire straits, they can’t connect the dots as they pile on regulatory burdens which kill jobs and stifle the economy. Stupid is as stupid does.
Congressman LaMalfa and contender Heidi Hall met in the Rood Center last night for a civilized town hall debate sponsored by the LWV, who did an excellent job in organizing the affair. The audience was overflowing with rows of chairs set up in the hall outside the BoS chamber. From my perch I could see that the crowd was composed of about 80% liberals who had been turned out to give Ms Hall some much needed support in her run for LaMalfa’s seat. What impressed me again when I see so many leftwingers at such an event is that they immediately display themselves as the fervent faithful of something that can only be called a fundamentalist religion. The crowd was at times hard to control by the moderator as they enthusiastically applauded Ms Hall’s hot button points and exercised their disagreement with the congressman’s politically incorrect counters.
The crowd most vehemently demonstrated its unwavering faith when the candidates responded to climate change questions. Predictably Ms Hall was a true believer, and Mr LaMalfa was the skeptic. To the liberals the congressman’s skepticism was lese majeste of the highest order that volubly agitated them. For them the debate has been over for years, and the flood of contradictory evidence against AGW was non-existent, illegitimate, and ranged somewhere between blasphemy and irrecoverable stupidity. For me it was another witnessing of the mob mentality that today rules the land. From such ranks we draw those who believe the President has an endless “stash” of cash to dispense, and others who make the public case that Obama should be given “all the power he needs” (forget the Constitution) so that he can do all the good things he has promised.
And what gets totally ignored by these legions of liberal lemmings (here and across the country) is the continuing stream of reports like ‘The Global Warming Statistical Meltdown’ in the 10oct14 WSJ by Dr Judith Curry, former chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. The good professor brings us just the latest results of studies and investigations giving more evidence “that basic assumptions about climate change are mistaken: the numbers don’t add up.” The report details the specifics about the data, the models, the projections, the history of erroneous predictions, and the ever more extreme portents for the remainder of the century (apparently to hide past screw-ups). So how many in that Rood Center crowd will even read/hear about these results? How many of them even understand the basics of the reported sciences? That’s what I thought.
Finally, our Union's publisher Jim Hemig wrote an interesting piece in today’s (10oct14) edition (here) talking about the community’s perception of the newspaper as favoring either the Right or the Left. The paper has appeared to tilt one way or another in the past, enough to cause some to take a more formal look at its contents over time. The NC Republican Women Federated had a concern last year that the paper’s tilt was leftward, and therefore quietly launched a study that actually tallied the perspective of the published articles and letters to the editor. To their surprise, the data showed that The Union was a pretty much middle of the road publication giving almost equal coverage to both sides (perhaps save for their syndicated columnists). They later met with Mr Hemig to discuss their remaining concerns. In today’s piece Jim Hemig makes the case that The Union indeed tries hard to reflect a non-partisan policy. He concludes with –
But I’d like to challenge the extreme activist folks to join me in the middle of the road and to avoid labels. Maybe it’s not the most attractive place to be. But if we focus on local issues and avoid the stereotypical labeling of “sides,” we can truly discuss and help resolve problems in order to make our community the best it can be.
The only thing that I take a little issue with our publisher is in his view of the utility of labels. Labels are words that effectively summarize a longer discourse or definition of the referent so that subsequent discussion or debate can proceed in a more facile manner. When it comes to people and their socio-political ideologies, a correct label attached to such people efficiently communicates great predictive power as to the referent’s behavior. The problem with labels that Hemig attempts to sidestep or avoid is totally one-sided. Those of the Left want to hide the true and comprehensive nature of their beliefs, those of the Right are proud of their beliefs, will expand them at every opportunity, and don’t mind a bit to be appropriately labeled.
More specifically, the Left’s labeling problem goes back to the earlier part of the 20th century when the various forms of practiced collectivism began to get a bad reputation that dealt with everything from totalitarian state mass murders to milder forms of state coercion and limits on liberty. Today people of the Left don’t want to be labeled ‘collectivist’, ‘communist’, ‘socialist’, ‘fascist’, ‘progressive’, ‘liberal’, or ‘leftwinger’. These same people will never publicly avow their socio-political beliefs beyond the fuzzy and non-operative ‘kumbayah, it’s nice if everyone was just nice to each other, and shared everything’ tenet. They don’t want to be pinned down on their ideals and what's needed to achieve them, and so they claim that sticking such labels on them is a pejorative act of ‘name calling’.
We of the Right have no problem being identified or called out as ‘conservative’, ‘classical liberal’, ‘libertarian’, ‘rightwinger’, or even ‘conservetarian’. We wear such labels with pride because they represent beliefs which we are willing to nail to every city hall door and proclaim to the world. But I fear that Jim Hemig does not share this view and takes refuge hoping to avoid an ideological dharma battle in that most indeterminate place of all, the middle of the road while holding up Rodney King’s plaintive placard, ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’
Were I the publisher, I would publish my credo (as I have here) and proudly say this is what I believe and how I see the world. And then I would go on to make sure that my newspaper fairly represented the **expressed** views of the people in my readership. Now that might cause the political content of the paper to swing sometimes to the Left and then later to the Right, depending on when which side is more energetic in getting their views communicated to the paper. Because of my inherent biases, I would not put myself into the position of the being the community's Judge, Jury, and Executioner of Correct Balance – I’d let my readers decide which way the winds should blow this week and the next, and … .
[11oct14 update] ‘The Capitalist Cure For Terrorism’ by former Peruvian high official Hernando De Soto attempts to apply the lessons learned in Peru’s decades long fight against their indigenous Shining Path communist guerillas. He is going around the MENA (Mideast North Africa) region giving talks at Islamic conferences giving them the good news of how Peru’s government empowered its rural population to create wealth and resist Shining Path’s collectivist message. Unfortunately, he is trying to force a square peg into a crescent shaped hole. His exhortations to the West are essentially to reapply – apparently this time with feeling – the nation building policies that have failed miserably during the last decade plus.
What De Soto fails to understand is that Peru’s population was already under one government with a couple of cohesive cultures joined by a religion that was not antithetical to the principles of entrepreneurial capitalism. And the Shining Path’s declared objectives were local – they wanted to bring communism to Peru. The situation in the MENA region is almost diametrically opposite in every dimension, starting again with the misunderstanding and misapplication of the concept of ‘terrorism’. The Islamists have a transnational and extremely complex concoction of cultures, religious sects, historical feuds, global objectives, and existential conflicts that overwhelm the simple comparisons and nostrums offered by De Soto.
The main takeaway from the last decade is again that all cultures are not equal in any sense of the word, starting with their intrinsic worth to themselves and to the of the people on earth. We in the West should again have learned that all cultures can neither accept nor implement all kinds of economic paradigms and systems. Capitalistic entrepreneurship has been there for the taking for over five hundred years. Why was it not immediately taken up by countries all over the globe as they saw what advantages it gave the people of Europe and its American diaspora? The Left offers tortured answers that all circle back to the evil imperialism of the West. But the real answer as shown by Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, … is much simpler – it takes time to for cultural shifts to occur. But in recent decades that interval has been shortened to the extent that America has been the world’s white hat sheriff.
When we withdraw from that role, as we are doing now, then global chaos is the result with bad guys expanding and entrenching on all fronts. But that’s the topic of a forthcoming post.
[12oct14 update] Apologies for forgetting to mention the insightful and data-filled Cato Institute policy analysis piece 'The Dead Hand of Socialism – State Ownership in the Arab World' (#753) where the mix of culture and socialism in the MENA region is dissected. The study also references the efforts of Hernando De Soto whose op-ed piece was cited above.
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