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A Warning to Progressives and Conservatives
Politics are messy; to say they are complex, or even confusing, is to give them way too much credit. Let’s stick with messy. So we generalize and compartmentalize because it is far easier than attempting to make the far more difficult and detailed argument. We see our adversaries, call them leftists, but most of these folks are not ideological at all, just disengaged, or unwilling to stand out. There is risk when one stands out; real risk, of being seen as one of us, as sympathetic, as conservative, as outside of the intellectual bubble, as a rebel. Cancel culture is real.
There are terms for these folks in Leftist dogma – useful idiots or fellow travelers. Needless to say, if you follow the Marxist revolution to its conclusion, these non-ideological supporters do not fare well, but they do serve a useful purpose in the struggle. They help the left win. But they aren’t Leftists, and we should stop labeling them as such.
There are true Leftists out there, that is for sure; the CPC, Bernie, the leaders of BLM, George Soros to name a few, but most Democrats fall among the Useful Idiots and Fellow Travelers, or as currently called, progressives.
Progressives like to think of themselves as empathetic and altruistic, not ideological. For them, ideology is defined by purpose, to “make a difference”, to “improve the human condition” or to “pursue fairness, equality, and equity”; that is to hijack government, enhance its power and authority and direct it to enact, fund, manage and underwrite an unending series of massive social experiments and counter-experiments.
This purpose is of course, in direct conflict with the limitations placed upon our federal government by our Constitution. I should point out that no such limits are placed upon local and state authority, except by their own founding documents and when in conflict with federal law. So, for example, if Massachusetts wants to enact a health insurance mandate on its citizenry, it can do so, provided it has the continued support of its citizens. They can, of course, change this course by moving to another state with no such mandate or by electing sufficient support for its repeal. That is the beauty of so-called “federalism.”
Conservatives who support a constitutionally limited federal government are at a significant disadvantage when federal courts fail to heed constitutional stop signs and when faced with political opposition to legislation defined within the progressive purpose. Take Social Security and Medicare, for example. The failure of these programs is obvious and predictable; failure is an imminent actuarial fact. And yet, they remain, held up as important and immutable as sunshine. Opposition to these doomed programs is impossible. On the other hand, take global climate change. As much as it has been cited by progressives as an inevitable, existential human threat, the predicted calamities have failed to materialize, the globe-altering changes have not happened and the threat has failed to produce. Progressive purpose, you see, is political. It defies accountability, fact, and reality, at best, a rallying cry and at worst, a means to power and a font for corruption.
The true Leftists (and not the progressives) recognize this and want to ride these corruptible progressive fellow travelers and useful idiots to power. Once all opposition is sufficiently thinned and progressives are no longer useful, they will be jettisoned like so much flotsam.
The last election is evidence that this strategy is gaining. We are all at risk.
Published in General
Voting for Biden was a vote for the destruction of America. If you side with the enemy, you are the enemy.
They want to use the point of a gun to force others to comply.
What happens when Blue states change their election laws to facilitate fraud? Will the people of those states be powerless to overturn the leadership? Will multiple states become like Chicago where the citizens are stuck with corrupt leadership forever??
They obviously don’t need to change laws to corrupt elections, as was evidenced last November. Eventually, there will be decline and emigration, which comes with loss of seats in Congress and power. My daughter was offered a job in Evanston, IL and another in Nashville. She chose Nashville, even though she is an academic with reflexive politics. No one wants to live in a septic city, not even a progressive.
Evanston is only stupid, not septic. Not yet. But the worst parts of Chicago are starting to slop over. A graduate student from Maryland was stabbed to death on Wacker near Van Buren. That is less than two blocks from Willis (nee Sears) Tower. People don’t get knifed in the Loop.
Partial answer – We in Calif can go mask free right now, as the Governor is facing a reality: people have voted with their feet to the extent that two or more Congressional seats are now extinct. Also the people who leave are either the poor, who know AFDC will care for them wherever they go, or those well off enough to deal with the interruption of income while making the move, and having resources to land on their feet at the new place.
So he is losing the tax base.
Word was Newsom was going to keep restrictions in place, but so far it looks like he has folded.
Nice post Doug. Just a nit to pick here. What you call leftists in your post I call progressives while what you call progressives in your post I call liberals.
Very good article, Doug.
It was marked by one flaw.
The intent of these Progressivist programs was and is to increase the legal, economic, and psychological dependence of the American people on the State.
They’ve not failed. They’ve succeeded spectacularly on all three fronts so far, and continue to roll up the remaining resistance among the Americans.
You meant that they’re imminent financial failures. But financially, they’ve not failed and are not doomed, as I will explain.
The source of the almost universal belief among conservatives that they are failing financially is the common misconception that these programs work like the retirement programs of the voluntary sector of society:
These free-society solutions must spend working-age income to purchase assets sufficient to fund the retirement-age benefit payments, through dividends plus depletion of capital.
If they do not, then “failure is an imminent actuarial fact.” They are “doomed programs”
But SS and Medicare don’t work that way.
In these programs, the benefit payments in the year are funded 100% by taxes and net borrowing in that year.
This little-known fact is the key to understanding why SS/Medicare is not failing financially–not doomed–so I will repeat it.
Not by income-producing assets with market value, as is the case of the free-world methods above.
So the fact that SS/Medicare taxes bring in less than outlays does NOT mean the system is failing. The system continues to be funded entirely by current-year taxes and borrowing, exactly as it has been since inception. More importantly, that is how I assume it will continue to be funded (with some inconsequential changes in superfluous accounting rules which Congress will proudly and loudly pass). The exhaustion of the so-called “SS fund” will presumably be a semantic-only event, with no real effect on anyone–no changes in taxes or benefits.
Political terms, like liberal and progressive, have been around a while. Democrats self-described as “liberal” in the 60s and 70s, for those who supported the big government programs of the day – Medicare, the War on Poverty, abortion rights, opposition to the Vietnam War. Mondale was a self-described “liberal.” When he lost the presidential election in a landslide, being “liberal” became a pejorative term. Progressive, an earlier political label that had long fallen out of favor (attached as it was to some unsavory ideas as espoused by the likes of Margaret Sanger), re-emerged, was whitewashed and is now used in the way I described it above. Democrats like “progressive” as it denotes progress, as if politics were a Darwinian struggle for nirvana. But it really represents a concentration of authority ostensibly dedicated to making things better, but which actually becomes a struggle to punish opposition, retain power and concentrate the corrupt spoils of authoritarian control.
You are right, of course. So I guess, the government can simply print unlimited TBilla and hand them to the Federal Reserve in exchange for cash to be handed out to retirees? What could possibly go wrong?
Great thinking on the issue. Of course much of what goes on continually relating to government spending has to do with “Qualitative Easing” QE which in the good old days was called printing up money.
The 23 to 32 trillions of dollars leaked from America’s middle incomed over to The Too Big To Fail world of financial people was also supported by QE.
Likewise, however many trillions we have dumped into dubious programs supposedly about “efforts to combat COVID” also require QE.
There are even cynics who think that the reality of so many elderly dying after their injections is a feature in the scheme of things, not a bug. How can younger people be given a “universal annual income” if the seniors are still getting all their Soc Security checks each month?
The Government
‘What could go wrong with that?’ is an interesting question, but it is a red herring in the context of this article and my criticism of it. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the particular spending programs, including SS/Medicare. It has nothing to do with the fallacious idea that SS/Medicare are headed for financial failure, which is the subject of my comment.
You are confounding two completely different questions.
Doug,
Is it your understanding that the Social Security Administration is recognized by the courts as a separate legal entity, one that can own assets and owe liabilities?
If so, we need to resolve that question first in order to agree on the true answer to the question we are discussing.
I believe that SSA has the status of merely an administrative unit of the Federal Government. It may administer assets and liabilities of the Federal Government (which the courts do regard as an independent entity). But all of those assets and liabilities are held purely by the Federal Government.
Well it is a feature that is somewhat useful to many governments with social programs for older citizens. The warehousing of old people together after they were infected like in NY seems to fit the narrative.
The error in your view that the SSI fund owns assets is that, if it does, they are assets of the Federal Government.
What are those assets? They are, supposedly, “securities”. In other words, they are IOUs.
There is nothing wrong with that. A pension fund, or a citizen with a nest egg, or a life insurance company, all own assets that include securities: IOUs.
To see your mistake, you have to ask yourself this question: Who owes the money?
In the case of a real asset, the answer is always, “someone other than the asset owner”. If I say that I hold an IOU as an asset, and it turns out that in reality, the answer to “Who owes me the money?” is “Me”, then I do not actually own an asset at all. The person who owes and the person who is owed are the same person. The “security” is not a security at all, just a sleight of hand trick.
So the SSI fund in fact doesn’t hold any assets. To pay itself back the money “owed” would require the Federal Government to give up ownership of X dollars and gain the ownership of X dollars.
I hope she isn’t going to vote Evanston while in Nashville. Cuz eventually that means having to flee again. Her, and many others.
I think they already have, or at least the major cities. I remember hearing after the 2012 election there was one precinct in or near Philadelphia that had zero votes for Romney.
The 2020 tomfoolery in Pennsylvania with judges changing election law is more proof . . .
‘Fraid so. I sent her to college and she was converted, but she is more Libertarian than Red.
Now you see, I thought libertarian was generally to the right of conservative.
Some of them are hard to distinguish from commies. Some of them who think they are left libertarians are actually capable of making a lot of practical sense on some topics, and are infuriatingly naive on others.
I have a solution to the present ideological Tower of Babel around political labels:
Now, instead of you writing,
and people responding,
You will just say, “My cousin LuluBelle is an 8F, even though she voted for Trump who as you know was a C7.”
I suppose for the first couple years, people will respond, “Wait…I can’t remember. What does an 8F believe about the right to tax, again?”
But within a decade, we will all be able to read the codes with ease.
[TAGS: Attempt at H…wait. Never mind. Like the Lady Referee said, if you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you]
Yes, and there seem to be differences between how groups describe themselves and more reasoned labeling. Anarchists for example I would put at the extreme right of a scale power, with power-aggregating “archy”s on the left and individual control on the right, but anarchists always, these days, seem to serve the goals of the far left.
What’s the code for a redhead walking down the sidewalk?
That’s because they have adopted the dumbest form of anarchy ever conceived, anarcho-communism. Create anarchy to tear down all the existing systems, and then perfect, stateless communism will spontaneously sprout and we’ll all live in perfect harmony forever, sharing everything down to your toothbrush.
You have to share YOUR toothbrush, but I ain’t sharing mine!
:-)
And so it begins…
They can’t properly define “fascist,” why should they do any better with “anarchist?”
I just started doing the design, and already you are already changing the User Requirements? Sheesh. It’s why I got out of the consulting line.
OK, fine. I gave the estimate and SOW for your ER to the PM–it will now be a four character code instead of 2. It will handle redheads and three other hair colors (configurable at install time), walking and skipping, and sidewalks only, with the possibility of a future enhancement for wilderness trails at an additional charge.
Remember, she’s hot.