The Left, Socialism, and Open Borders Immigration

It's not where you are that determines your prosperity, it's who you are.

For some reason unfathomable to a rational person the Political Left always seems to prefer being the last to sink in a bog to grazing with everyone else in a lush meadow. Since Marx promulgated his egalitarian anti-capitalist drivel, the Left has tried over and over to implement his flawed political/economic model, always with the same disastrous results. Whether the example is the communist versions of the USSR, the People's Republic of China, Castro's Cuba, or the Social Welfare States of Europe and Latin America, the final outcome is always a stagnant economy with a starving population.

These people never give up. Their mendacious rhetoric is always able to convince the ignorant and stupid to implement their schemes, always with the same long term disaster. In the worst cases cited above, the mob was stampeded into a 'revolution' to put the Political Left in power. In the more insidious implementations in the modern Western Democracies, the Left has utilized the ignorant and stupid mob to vote them into power. Once their foot is in the door, promises of something for nothing keeps the mob in their pocket no matter how obvious it becomes that the promises are blatant lies.

To guarantee that the gullible mob continues to dominate the electorate, the Left has refined two schemes to drastically increase their numbers. The first is to not only support the mob by wealth transfer, but to actually pay them to breed. The Welfare States in Europe and North America have become baby factories for the Left's constituency. In this scheme, the Left is seeking to augment their supporters by in effect an inverse eugenics mechanism.

Not content with destroying from within the prosperous civilization created by the Western peoples (primarily the currently despised 'white males' and the Judeo-Christian religion), the Left has a second game plan to guarantee the total collapse of Western Civilization. They have opened the doors of the Western Democracies to the Third World, and convinced the unwashed masses that they can all be prosperous by merely moving. But, as the first line of this essay implies, those that invade the First World will not become prosperous First Worlders, but the countries that they invade will become Third World hellholes like the ones they left behind. This has already become painfully apparent with the Muslim invasion of Europe. They have added virtually nothing to the economies of the invaded countries, and the Islamic 'no go' slums that they have created are cancers that will quickly kill their hosts. The U.S. Southwest is on the verge of economic collapse due to the Latin American invasion there. And in both the U.S. and Europe the threat of open borders enabling infiltration of Islamic Jihad is a serious security problem.

The thing that is difficult to understand is why the Left thinks that any of these schemes are in their long term interest. Not only does history demonstrate a high likelihood that their dominance will not last their own expected lifetimes, but their descendants are guaranteed a much less desirable world to live in. These people seem to exhibit a shortsightedness that can only be viewed to be as ignorant and stupid as the mob they exploit.

Women and Big Government

Women are naturally pro big government. Since they cannot physically prevail against the larger male, they must rely on convincing one or more males to defend them. By passing laws that they think will require males to defend them, they see big government as a form of legal jiu-jitsu. Before Women's Suffrage women had to convince their male acquaintances of the necessity of such laws in spite of the more powerful and dangerous government the laws imply. Once they obtained the vote, it became obvious that they no longer needed the acquiescence of the males - they could, as in jiu-jitsu, use the male's strength against himself, so to speak. Thus we see that, after a century of women voting, government has grown into a nanny state - providing the female with not only protection against physical harm, but guaranteeing food, shelter, health care and anything else her little heart desires. The Welfare State is the direct result of Women's Suffrage. In fact, it has evolved to the point that, in the welfare class, the presence of the male is actually discouraged.

The historic flaw in democracy is the Tyranny of the Majority, i.e., the tendency of 51% of the electorate voting to have the remaining 49% for dinner (and not as guests!). Since there is naturally a slight majority of females in the population, there is a ready-made majority to exploit. The Left has done just that, with the constant drumbeat of more promised security, more freebies, more equality, etc., that appeal to the supposedly underdog females. The fact that, in almost every election, the female vote is significantly in favor of more government proves the point.

Western Civilization was built by males, and over centuries ceded many rights and protections to women. But ceding control will almost certainly be its downfall.

Discrimination

This essay was written in the 1980's and published on OpEds.com in 2005.  Its relevance to the U. S. scene seems to increase with each passing year.

Discrimination, particularly racial, has commanded the limelight of the media and the almost undivided attention of the citizenry in America for most of the last half of the Twentieth Century. The Supreme Court's 1954 ruling against school segregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, opened the floodgates. Since then there have been uncountable laws and rules written, bureaucracies created, suits filed and children bused, wheelchair ramps built and parking places painted, all trying to eliminate both real and imagined discrimination in every possible form. Some of the more blatant cases of discrimination, particularly those denying equal protection under the law, have been eliminated or at least minimized, but in many cases there has been only exchange of one form of discrimination for another.

The existence of discrimination in a society is indicative of a more fundamental underlying problem. Discrimination can only exist when there are identifiable factions in the society. A homogenous population defies discrimination, since there is no identifiable attribute upon which to target individuals to discriminate against. But since most social systems develop identifiable factions sooner or later, it ultimately becomes necessary to address the subject of discrimination of one faction against another.

The solution that has been proposed and attempted by the simple-minded idealists is to legislate the problem away by defining any and all discrimination as illegal. This is the current state of affairs in the United States, but the approach has two shortcomings. The first is the fact that laws are only definitions and no real problem has ever been solved solely by trying to define it out of existence. The second shortcoming stems from the reality that not all discrimination is unjustifiable.

In a social system based upon the principle that all members are equal under the law, no discrimination by the government against any law-abiding citizen should be condoned. The social system as a whole can afford the luxury of presupposing innocence of each individual and only discriminating against those that have been proven as undeserving by due process of law. Relative to the individual the state has virtually unlimited resources, and therefore it is reasonable for the government to amortize the risk of possible damage by an individual over the population. For the individual, however, the situation is very different. Not only is the average citizen blessed with modest resources, but also above all he (or she) is a mortal. As such, survival demands that the individual use any and all information at his disposal to protect his life and property from a hostile world. If experience, valid information acquired from others, or even unfounded rumor suggests that additional risk is associated with the members of any group, the individual must be allowed to take such information into consideration in his dealings with the group. This is true whether the identification of the group is based on race, creed, sex, political affiliation, length of hair, style of dress, or just plain ugliness. Mortality and limited resources deny the individual the otherwise noble philosophy of judging everyone innocent unless proven guilty. In addition, it is unreasonable to expect the state to protect an individual from all risk, and it is even more unreasonable for the state to force any individual to assume additional risk.

A gray area exists with respect to private organizations. If an organization is sufficiently large it would seem reasonable to require it, like the society as a whole, to amortize the risk of each individual over all the individuals with which it interacts. The problem exists in determining where to draw the line as to whether or not each particular organization is 'sufficiently large'. Not only is the wisdom necessary to make such a determination beyond any mortal, and especially beyond those that usually try, but the existence of such an arbitrary 'cut-off' only serves to complicate the subject discrimination, not to eliminate it. An exception to this might be corporations, since a corporation is an entity created by the government and enjoys several legal advantages by virtue thereof. It is not mortal and by definition has limited liability. It would therefore be reasonable to deny it an exemption from anti-discrimination law.



Unfortunately, it must be acknowledged that group or faction based discrimination does create a burden on the targeted individuals. In addition, the severity of the burden increases as the relative size of the targeted faction decreases. One of the primary factors of the discriminatory burden is the cost to the targeted individual in determining by trial and error whether he or she will be subject to discrimination in dealings with others. It is therefore proposed that a reasonable, proper and adequate measure to protect the rights of all parties is to require any discriminatory behavior on the part of all private business entities to be publicly declared. Such declaration would at a minimum entail a declaration of discriminatory bias in every advertisement published or displayed by the entity desiring to discriminate. Failure to properly declare bias would then expose the guilty party to criminal prosecution or civil suit.

This approach has several attractive features. First and foremost, it retains the inalienable right of the individual to minimize his risks in the necessary day to day dealings with his fellow man. It puts the burden of action on those that wish to discriminate, but in such a way that protects the privacy and autonomy of the individual. An individual that has no public business dealings with others is unaffected by the rule. It addresses all forms of discrimination without explicitly reciting a list of particulars. It spares those targeted by a properly declared discriminatory policy from the cost and embarrassment of attempting to interact with the discriminating faction, and in addition allows all concerned who are offended by a particular case of discrimination to boycott the business. Last but not least, it spares the society the greater costs of the inevitable failure ensured by attempting to regulate day to day behavior of a large segment of the population by government decree.   

Democracy and Demagoguery

As has been said by many others, and covered in several 'Rants', democracy does not work. Whether any government 'works' in the sense of being a stable and contributory adjunct to a prosperous and free society remains to be proven. A more focused question here is whether any representative government can work in the above sense, and the original objective of the Founders of the United States Government had hoped that they had achieved such a goal. We are close to definitively proving them to be wrong.

It is fairly obvious to this author that a fully enfranchised citizenry of a representative government system such as ours is doomed at the outset. Maybe in a pure democracy (everyone voting on every piece of legislation) the majority would mostly avoid shooting themselves in the foot on taxes and similar matters, but then again there is the spectre of the 'tyranny of the majority' in which any identifiable minority faction will be exploited to benefit the majority. In the representative version, there will always be a majority - poorer, dumber, more ignorant or just envious - that are vulnerable to demagoguery. This has been the evolution of the situation in the U.S., particularly as we have embraced universal suffrage over the last century or more.

Over the last century the Democrat Political Party has utilized demagoguery to gain and remain in power a large percentage of the time. Class Warfare, 'something for nothing', free lunches, you name it, have won the game for them over and over. The Republican Pary has adhered to fiscal and constitutional principles more closely, and has suffered defeat for their efforts more often than not. As a Maryland politician said when a reporter questioned her for telling one group one thing and another group the opposite, "I tell them what they want to hear". Demagoguery works!

The problem in the Republican Party in the 2016 Presidential race is that, contrary to the norm, a bonafide demagogue is in the running. And although it seems that somewhat less than a majority of registered Republicans are taken by the demagoguery, a sufficient plurality is gullible enough to possibly make him the Republican candidate in November. At that point we would have a Democrat demagogue against a Republican demagogue, and could very likely prove the thesis of my first paragraph. A century of democratically elected representation has brought us to the brink of implosion, and one more demagogue may very well be the final straw.

It is possible that one of the several principled Republican candidates can pull off both the nomination and the election, but the odds are against it. As the pilot of the PSA jet said seconds before it plowed into a San Diego neighborhood in 1978, "Brace yourself".

Returning to the abstract question of whether any variation of representative government can work, it doesn't seem too hopeful. Perhaps conditioning suffrage on demonstrating with some sort of standardized competency exam a rudimentary knowledge of the functions of government would help, but then the inevitable question is: who defines the exam? It seems all too likely that all forms of government are vulnerable to ultimate demise - monarchies and dictatorships to mortality and representative versions to demagoguery.  Sad.

Swatting Bees

Note: this post was originally published in 2007 on OpEds.com.  Its relevance today should be obvious.

Living in a rural area, one has to cope with the fact that private property is a human invention, only respected by some (but not all) humans. Other species may be territorial, but claims are made and defended only by bluff or violence.

I have been doing battle for years with carpenter bumblebees. Left to their druthers, they'll eat up your exposed rafters and beams on your buildings by drilling tunnels all through the lumber. Fortunately, although these are very territorial, they apparently don't sting. They do engage in a lot of bluffing, however, which can be quite intimidating until you realize that it is just a bluff. They'll swoop at you at high speed, and then hover a couple of feet away, looking you right in the eye.

Carpenter bees also have a behavior pattern that brings me to this story. They post sentries at various locations within a hundred yards or so of their home. A sentry will hover at the apparently assigned location until a intruder, usually another insect, comes by. The sentry will then chase the intruder, or if it is a larger animal, make a few swooping passes and try to stare it down, as described above. At the time it hovers in front of you, it is vulnerable to being swatted if you're quick enough.

This provided me with entertainment one year. I decided that a tennis racket would make a great bee swatter, and would allow me to improve my reflexes at the same time. So I would stand at one of the sentry locations and wait for the sentry to hover in front of me. With considerable success, I was able to knock them down with the racket and then stomp them if they weren't dead.

This went on for a couple of weeks, during which I kept count of how many bees I had killed. The problem was, there seemed to be an unlimited supply of sentries. As fast as I would kill one, a replacement would take its place, sometimes as quick as in a minute or two. After about 65 kills, I finally decided that they were reproducing faster than I was killing them, so I changed my war plan. I went down to the outbuilding that they had infested, waited until nightfall and they were all home asleep, and caulked all the holes up. This did not completely eliminate them, but it eliminated most of them for the rest of the summer.

The moral of this story is clear. Until I took out the source of the problem, I was making no progress in eliminating the problem. The analogy with Muslim Jihad is a no-brain-er. Until we eliminate the source of the 'insurgents', terrorists, or whatever you wish to call them, they will just keep coming. Until we plug up the holes, we will forever be swatting bees.

Guns or Gun Control?

There are numerous arguments for possession of firearms by the citizenry. The least important were advanced by the NRA and others around the time of the initial anti-gun legislation – the 1968 law passed as a knee-jerk reaction to the assassinations of the Kennedys and King. These arguments were that people should have arms for hunting, shooting sports, and collections, and probably lost the NRA many members, including the author.

A more important reason for arming the citizen is for self defense. Most people can agree that one must be able to defend oneself against wild animals such as bear, wolves, coyotes, cougars, snakes, etc., as well as rabid animals, wild and domestic. Most rational people also understand that, in defending against animals or humans, it is very desirable to have at least as effective a weapon as the attacker, or preferably better. Against most attacks that one is likely to encounter, the gun is the defensive weapon of choice.

This brings us to one of the most voiced arguments against gun control or confiscation. It is often said that if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. It is certainly true that criminals will always be able to obtain the weapons they desire from the black market, which incidentally will flourish if guns are banned. The only people that will be disarmed by such laws will be the law abiding citizens that would pose virtually no danger possessing arms in the first place.

Unfortunately, the statement that only criminals will have guns depends on the definitions of criminals. If guns are banned from the public, then only criminals AND the 'authorities' will be armed. Now most police today are pro-community, although many are too trigger happy for the public's good. A bigger concern is the fact that almost all in the law enforcement world harbor an 'us against them' mentality. This mindset is easily co-opted by a tyrant in a gun-free nation to produce yet another incarnation of the SS, Gestapo, Staci, KGB, or some other version of the jack-booted storm trooper. Any holdouts would be quickly purged from the ranks, either by just terminating their membership, or if necessary by terminating them. In every totalitarian nation, the police are the enablers of despotic rule, not a protection against it. Ultimately in a disarmed nation, the only criminals with guns are the tyrant's goons, legitimized by the title of Law Enforcement.

The most immediately relevant argument against restrictive gun legislation is the Constitution. Not only is no authority given the Federal Government to restrict ownership of arms by the citizenry, but the second Amendment explicitly forbids any infringement by government at all levels of the right of the people to keep and bear arms. This together with the tenth Amendment makes it clear that, short of Constitutional amendment to permit such restrictions, any such laws are illegal in themselves. Either we have a Constitutional government or we have no legitimate government, and in the latter case we need to flush the toilet and get rid of the stench.

Ultimately the most important and credible argument in favor of an armed citizenry is history. A madman killing 27 people in Connecticut with guns is a terrible tragedy, and a small group of madmen killing 2700 people in 2001 with box cutters and airliners is much worse, but the slaughter of tens of millions of people by tyrannical madmen in disarmed countries throughout history – particularly the twentieth century – is beyond tragedy. The carnage wreaked by, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and many other lesser monsters may have been with gas, guillotines, wood chippers, chainsaws, or other means as well as guns, but the common thread is that the victims were all disarmed first. The legend of the Japanese general that warned that an invasion of the US would be unwise because there would be a rifle behind every blade of grass underscores the value of an armed citizenry to the security of a free people. The Swiss have been able to resist the tyrannical ambitions of their neighbors in the twentieth century by merely being fully armed. Neither the Kaiser, Hitler nor Mussolini wanted to verify whether there might be a rifle behind every blade of grass.

The American people must not try to second guess whether Obama's gun grabbing ambitions include tyrannical dreams or not, although the arming and training of his FEMA goon squad does not tend to allay one's fears. There may be other reasonable initiatives that can be taken to try to minimize the risk of the madman massacres of late, but disarming the public almost guarantees madman massacres of much greater scale. Wake up America, and study history.

Consumption vs Capital Investment

Several terms are bandied about loosely without most people really knowing what they mean.  Examples are democracy, capitalism and free markets.  Let's look at capitalism.

A couple we know recently took a trip to northern Europe. In the videos that he took were many of the opulent castles and palaces that the kings, barons and czars - i.e., the 'wealthy' of yesteryear -built with the resources taxed or stolen from the peasants. What occured to me was that these wealthy only spent for their own aggrandizement. In other words, they only consumed. Their expenditures did not result in productive investment, and thus the only benefit (if you can call it that) to the peasantry was to be allowed to live for the benefit of the aristocrats.

As the mercantile class grew, more and more wealth gained from trade was reinvested in capital goods - ships, factories and the like. The wealthy became wealthier, but in addition the standard of living of the entire populace rose. With the Industrial Revolution, capital investment yielded ever greater returns in productivity. By the twentieth century the 'poor' were enjoying consumer goods and a standard of living that were undreamed of by the palace building kings and czars.

 The moral of all this is that what counts is not how wealthy some people are, but what they do with the money. If they spend it on lavish living or even give it to the poor for consumption, no standard of living increases in productivity occur. Only if their wealth is invested in capital goods - i.e. productive enterprises - is the overall standard of living of a society improved.

 A corollary to this fact is that when the government confiscates wealth from the members of a society and uses the funds for anything other than supporting the rule of law, property rights and enforcement of contracts that are necessary for a capitalist system to exist, the improvement in the standard of living will slow, stagnate or even deteriorate. Wealth transfer programs result in resources being diverted from capital investment to consumption, with the attendant loss in productivity.

 Since the majority of the people in a society put little to nothing into capital investment, their labors are no different than that of the serfs that built the palaces unless their efforts are directed toward building productive resources. As the Russians and Chinese found out, if capital investment is not allowed to flourish, the society soon is standing in lines for bread.

One principle obviously follows from the above observations. Taxing income, especially of the 'wealthy', puts the emphasis totally in the wrong direction. The taxation should be on building palaces, not on building factories. The proper form of taxation is thus on consumption by the individual, not on investment.

I also note that those who become wealthy manipulating or even destroying financial markets are NOT capitalists.  They are in many ways like the kings and barons of old - parasites that garner much of the wealth of a society for their own pleasures, but invest little to none of their wealth in capital goods for productive purposes.