George Rebane
Yesterday’s early snowfall left our rooftop satellite dish glommed up and dysfunctional. So Jo Ann and I, with our puppy, watched the inaugural doings at our neighbors who also happened to be close friends and more wisely had their dish installed at easily accessible ground level. What we witnessed was and continues to be an historical transfer of power and change of governance, most certainly in its style but hopefully also in its execution.
President Trump’s inaugural speech painted a decidedly dark and depressed state of our union that he ascribed to years of power accumulation toward a hubristic center that is distant from most Americans. The basis for his offered solutions to the categorical problems we suffer from is to “give power back to the people.” This echoes the national perception that our government is supposed to be Lincoln’s ‘of, by, and for the people’. But today our country is so deeply divided that even this universally accepted shibboleth has a radically different interpretation for the socialist/collectivist Left and the conservative/libertarian Right.
Those like me heard ‘power back to the people’ as Trump’s intention to devolve a goodly number of federal tentacles with the accompanying reduction in the sheer size of inward-facing, people-controlling government, and pass these functions back to local control or even do away with some of them completely. In short, it was a herald for a rebirth of federalism.
But that is not the Left’s view of ‘people power’ which received its perennially persistent form from Comrade Vlad the Former that is still practiced by Comrade Vlad the Latter. These worthies teach us that the goal of collectivist governance is universal democracy. Nothing shall come between the people and their central government. All things of moment shall be determined by the wholesale will of the people executed in the form of national referenda, initiatives, and plebiscites.
Our social engineers of whatever hue all promote such application of universal suffrage because they know that when herded, the controlling majority becomes very controllable. The herd has always allowed itself to be stampeded in desired directions and soothed by siren songs even as they amble to their own slaughter. The hard fast rule is to excise any tendency toward dispersed discussion and decisions, but instead restrict dialogue to be between the directed masses and the center. In that form of social organization dissenters can be quickly dispatched before their cries are heard. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, … have been expert at such purposely shaped and carefully managed ‘socialist democracies’. Given this, even today’s mildly attentive American has no problem in distinguishing which kind of democracy is the goal of his leftleaning neighbors.
Our Founders knew through brute force intellect the philosophical arguments against the inevitable tyranny of centralized control. And they knew that it was easier to herd sheep and nigh impossible to herd cats. Therefore they gave us the mechanism by which the independent minded states could be barely herded and then only under defined dire circumstances. They based their social model on the free individual abiding by a social contract constrained by his common God, shared culture, and universally recognized greed. Practicing self-interest and understanding it in his neighbors gave rise in America to a working paradigm that needed only a modicum of monitoring and management through a few powers relinquished to the collective (i.e. government). And even that collective to be trusted had to be local enough so that the individual citizen could keep his eye on the doings of power. All of that is and has been outside the ken of and completely foreign to the logic of the Left for whom the greater good always comes from the greater government.
In recent decades our constitutional republicanism has received the added imprimatur of science. We can now explain in mathematically precise terms why nature has only evolved life forms with distributed control structures. Stated another way, there is no known plant or critter whose life – i.e. bodily functions that enable survival – is controlled from one supreme centrum or master controller. Our bodies, through our diversely purposed organs down to our individual cells, are controlled locally, employing inputs through local interfaces that convey two-way information and transmit resources. The overarching paradigm here is ‘Keep it Simple Stupid!’
Nature (i.e. the structure of our universe) ‘knows’ that the bigger and more complex a system is, the more difficult it is to monitor and control. The relationship between a system’s input, its environment, current state, and its output (response) is determined by what we now call its transfer function. The truth of the matter is that transfer functions of large complex systems are not only unknown, but unknowable in Nature and within our current state of knowledge. Our Founders and their intellectual descendants knew this before science confirmed it. But the anti-intellectual Left continues to wallow in their hubris of central control that hearkens back to the misery of monarchies and theocracies (both ancient and contemporary).
So without access to a computable transfer function we cannot reasonably relate any system’s (e.g. government, economy, home heating system, MRI, environmental policy, …) gazintas to its comzatas, and without that ability we cannot determine the gazintas needed to get the desired comzatas – we don’t know what comzata here if we make something gazinta there, capice? And here’s the ideological litmus test, if you understand this you have a chance of being a classical liberal. And if you don’t, you most likely believe that there exists a body of elite experts who can fashion and enforce behaviors (aka public policies, laws, regulations, …) that deliver the ‘greatest good to the greatest number’. The more devout of you leftwingers also believe that Comrade Josif Vissarjonovich was correct when he observed that “you need to crack a few eggs to make an omelet.”
Many people of the Left in the US and across the world are in a pre-hysterical froth, today demonstrating across the Earth against what they know in their hearts, that Donald Trump will not only destroy their quality of life, but also deny us a future in which mankind will finally find its altruistic destiny of universal happiness and contentment within the embrace of a nurturing and unspoiled Gaia.
But the observable logic of these women (and their “girley men”?) is both revealing and regrettable as their signs with emblazoned “Stay Out of My Uterus!” testify. They still don’t understand that that is exactly what the Republicans want the government to do, is to stay out of their private parts. It should be up to women everywhere to determine what goes into their private parts and what comes out of there. However, what those leftwingers in the streets will never understand is that we want neither to subsidize nor direct the traffic that women encourage through those conduits. Your sexual plumbing is your own business, so don’t demand that I maintain it from my earnings.
I believe that President Trump will do his best to get that message out and then implement its financial provisions. And that is only one aspect of the across the board insane worldview that the hundreds of thousands today on the Mall share. By any measure not one of their touted grievances about America’s women hold water. And there is no evidence that our new president will do ANYTHING to denigrate the country’s women (past private pussy grabbing conversations aside, which were just testeronic braggadocio that really did not denigrate womanhood per se). However, that cannot be said about the output continually delivered by our leftwing entertainment media.
So the conversation from Trump’s inaugural address comes down to his proposal to henceforth put ‘America First!’ in the minds and energies of Americans. I and mine interpret this new and strongly stated objective as the intent for the federal government under Trump and the Republicans to reinstate America’s national interest as the prime directive for implementing policies that increase the quality of life and future prospects for America’s citizens. ALL other interests are to be suborned to America’s national interests.
Those who have globalist aspirations or simply seek to denigrate President Trump on a partisan basis will attempt to convince the pre-educated that America First is code for America Űber Alles. There is no evidence for this and such an argument is false on its face. However, America First does promote policies, both foreign and domestic, that increase the common weal of the broad population of American citizens. In the domestic domain this involves policies that enable individuals to maximally achieve their potential with a minimum of imposed wealth redistribution. Contrary to leftwing dogma, reality dictates that a lower Gini Index (here), indicating more equality, does not guarantee a higher quality of life. No measure of QoL should include covetous envy of your neighbor’s property. But sadly that is the very foundation of socialist thought, and the inevitable policies that ensue. I believe President Trump also believes that.
On the foreign scene President Trump’s message is consistent with a policy that encourages us to negotiate win-win trade arrangements with all sovereign-nation states that already pursue their own national interests. How well he and his team will do that remains to be seen. But I take heart in that the people he has nominated to fill those slots are people who understand the real world and have a demonstrated success working in such an environment.
And the message to our enemies, both declared and still in the contemplative phase, should be that memorably proclaimed by JFK – “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” And the first liberty that we will take will be to return to a government that is of, by, and for the people wherein we understand that ‘for the people’ means for the benefit of all America’s citizens. And further, that no one should mistake that ‘for the benefit of all’ in any way demands such benefit to bestow equal outcomes for all – such an imposed equality does everything but “assure the survival and the success of liberty.”
Now let’s let President Trump get his team in place, give him some time and space, and see what he can and will accomplish on our behalf, and what kind of greatness is he really talking about. It is clear that today’s demonstrators will have none of that.
[22jan17 update] We need to remind readers new to the socio-political doings on Earth that yesterday’s worldwide women’s marches had little to do with women or women’s rights. It was simply the global Left flexing its considerable bought and paid for (here) muscle, and for the time presenting itself as adherents of socialism. They have correctly identified growing global nationalism in the defense and continuation of Westphalian world order as their mortal enemy. Here the only naivete opponents of socialism may embrace is that socialism is the destination of such marching hordes. Their real objective to the rest of us is much more grim.
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