George Rebane
Readers were recently introduced (here) to the sad story of the iGeners. Professor Twenge of San Diego State expands on the travails of that sensitive, coddled, and brittle generation in her 2sep17 WSJ essay, ‘The Smartphone Generation vs Free Speech’. Here we learn that the iGeners’ prime concern is “emotional safety”, something that makes them vulnerable to an open exchange of ideas and free speech. At university, their overarching demand is that the administration continue to provide them a secure ‘home environment’ rather than an education that includes exposure to a diversity of thought. Safety – physical, emotional, intellectual, … – is concern one.
[update] The constant din from socialists fomenting the goal of national collectivism is that government needs to be the final arbiter of everything and the universal source of succor for all. Prescriptions promoting this agenda flow abundantly during times of disaster and depression. To overuse a metaphor, to a socialist every storm, natural or social, is a perfect storm. An expression of this arising from Harvey is government subsidies – who should get what and when. In the 31aug17 Sandbox and 'Socialists' Conundrum' comment streams ‘corporate subsidies’ have become casus belli for our leftwing readers; specifically, why should Exxon/Mobil (XOM) receive any government favors?
Such discussions always erupt and bloom enthusiastically without any of the participants agreeing on or even understanding the definition of ‘subsidy’. And these proceed from the Left with the tacit premise that government creates the wealth that it selectively dispenses. Few on the port side of our ship of state acknowledge that government has nothing save what it takes from its citizens and their wealth creating enterprises. Some such takings are surrendered willingly; today most are not. The Left counters this inconvenient truth by citing numbers indicating that most people are in favor of ever higher taxes and expanding leviathan. What they seek to hide is that those seeking government redistributions are not the ones who create the wealth or pay sufficient/any taxes – they are simply voting on what should be done with other people’s money.
In pillorying XOM, leftwingers bring in factors such as a privately held company’s executive salaries in the attempt to rile the proletariat against capitalism (an overarching goal). The underlying theme is that the company really belongs to ‘the peehpul’, and it has gone rogue in its operations as a private enterprise. The unstated companion thesis is that government bureaucrats would do a much better job managing such an asset for the benefit of its citizens if it were to nationalize and operate the company. History provides no supporting evidence for this.
North Korea cools US heads. The 3sep17 WSJ reports “U.S. Defense Secretary James Mattis warned North Korea in stark terms on Sunday that any attack on the U.S. or its allies would trigger a massive military response, in comments that came after a national-security briefing with President Donald Trump called in response to Pyongyang’s sixth and most powerful nuclear test.” This should warm the cockles of progressive and libertarian hearts. It used to be that we promised “fire and fury” in response to NK threats to homeland or allies. Now the Fat Kid shoved that response up our collective bunghole, and told the world flat out that after his last ‘People’s 6.3 Earthquake’ he’s prepared to detonate a thermonuclear device over continental US that would effectively put us back into the 19th century within one millisecond. That has scared and cooled our heads sufficiently to condition our response from ‘threat’ to ‘attack’. Maybe our next step toward greater cool would be for Trump or Mattis or … to announce, ‘I want to make it perfectly clear, if NK kills one more than 20M Americans, and I do mean just one more single red-blooded American than 20M, then we will rain down a deluge of UN sanctions on that country like the world has never seen.’ If anything, that should stop them in their tracks.
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