Yes You Have Lost Your Freedom, But....

I started a post awhile back that I had labeled "Thinking Statistically While Living Anecdotally". The general idea was that our direct knowledge is always limited such that much in life requires secondary knowledge to determine the accuracy of something. That is what schooling is all about: to learn how to obtain direct knowledge while accessing a large base of secondary knowledge. So it is with this mindset that I struggle to better assure myself that what I fear is real and not a reaction to manipulation, to discern how my observed reality corresponds (or not) with larger trends.

It is in that context that I saw a post by Alex Soros (son and heir to George Soros) citing an Atlantic article, The Great Normalization. My quick summary of the article is that everything the right is complaining about with respect to crime and the economy is untrue -- crime was markedly down in 2023 from 2022 and inflation had eased and was now within normal levels. As the title tagline said, "Last year, the crime and inflation crises largely evaporated. So did the leading theories about what had caused them." The article then goes on to purportedly demonstrate that defunding the police and printing money was not the long-term disaster that conservatives claim.

Now let's also roll in a recent Forbes report, U.S. Producers Break Annual Oil Production Record. According to the article the US is currently producing more oil than ever and this may be also be true of natural gas --

The U.S. is also on pace to set a new natural gas production record this year. Through September, we are running a little over 4% above last year’s record. However, to my knowledge the EIA does not report weekly natural gas production numbers. Therefore, this record can’t be estimated as precisely as the record for oil.

Thus the narrative that Biden "green policies" have strangled the oil and gas industry is apparently incorrect.

Returning to the Atlantic article, author Rogé Karma helpfully explains --

Many economists now believe that the pandemic played a more central role in the inflation story than they previously realized. An analysis by the Brookings Institution concluded that inflation was mostly a story of pandemic-shutdown ripple effects.

and

Not everything is back to normal. Pandemic learning loss has erased two decades of student progress in math and reading. The abrupt rise of remote work continues to wreak havoc on both commercial real estate and the housing market. Even so, when it comes to crime and inflation, the Great Normalization was remarkable. Huge problems rarely improve so much, so fast, in such defiance of conventional wisdom. More remarkable still is the fact that hardly anyone seems to have noticed. According to Gallup, 77 percent of Americans believe there is more crime in the U.S. than there was a year ago. Economic sentiment has begun to tick up, but it is still near the lowest levels on record. This may help explain Donald Trump’s strength in electoral polls. A recent Wall Street Journal survey found that U.S. voters overwhelmingly believe that Trump will do a better job than Joe Biden when it comes to the economy (52 percent to 35 percent), inflation (51 percent to 30 percent), and crime (47 percent to 30 percent). Voters seem to be yearning for a return to the normalcy of pre-pandemic times, and Trump is promising to give it to them. The absurdity of Trump as the normalcy candidate is almost too much to bear—especially because the normalcy that voters are desperately craving is, in many ways, already here, and Biden helped deliver it. Many economists now believe that the pandemic stimulus was key to the U.S. economy performing so much better than those of other advanced countries. The stimulus also might have played an underappreciated role in reducing crime by keeping local governments and the community organizations they support afloat. “The only reason cities did not completely fall apart during the pandemic was because of a huge boost in federal funding,” Patrick Sharkey, a sociologist at Princeton University who studies urban crime, told me. “I’m very convinced that is a central part of the explanation for why violence fell in ’22 and ’23.” Even as the pandemic has released its grip on our economy and civil society, it has yet to fully work its way through our politics. Before voters will credit Biden for making things better, they’ll have to be convinced that things are, in fact, better. In the meantime, the sitting president will almost inevitably take the blame for whatever America is unhappy about. That’s about as normal as it gets.

OK, so where does that leave us? Are things better in reality than we believe them to be? Are progressive policies not the social and economic disaster than we fear?

First note the limited (albeit important) focus of the articles I referenced above. Nothing in the article addresses other important issues such as DEI, trans, open borders and national defense, et al. And related thereto, nothing in the articles addresses important questions of constitutional rectitude in the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of government.

Second, both reports rely on government statistics. How reliable are those statistics? My guess — but it is only a guess — is that the data on oil and gas production is probably good (but I don't know), the data on crime might be right but incomplete (the report focuses on murder and other violent crime, but there were similar results for property crime which seems counterintuitive and for which reporting could go down when people no longer believe it will be investigated), and inflation data has long been suspect because of changing government calculation methods.

The way the Soros/Atlantic report was brought to my attention was Mollie Hemingway retweeting @seamusbrunner's comment:

Soros and Laurene Powell Jobs (who bought the Atlantic) are among the largest peddlers of disinformation. #CONTROLIGARCHS

But is the Atlantic article disinformation? Can we ignore the data and, if so, why?

I think the answer is "yes" and "yes" but the why is difficult. The timing of the Soros/Atlantic publication is important, coming as it does during the World Economic Forum meetings in Davos. The main theme of Davos is central planning — that the technocratic elite of the world are better at organizing things than free markets and individual liberty. So it was and is important to the elite for people to accept that their physical and financial security is enhanced, not threatened, by central control. When the elite, like John Kerry, say that we need to curb food production to save the planet, the unwashed masses might wonder how they are going to eat? When the elite, like Klaus Schwab, say you will own nothing and like it, the unwashed masses who had always thought property ownership was key to personal and familial security might wonder if it will be denied them?

So how do you counteract this human skepticism? You produce articles that highlight how intuition was wrong, that counter-narratives to the approved narrative are in error. You ignore or minimize other issues of concern that have arisen from elite management. The Progressive Bargain has always been that you trade liberty for security — a bet that most people will make that trade. So if the economy is good and crime is down, do you really care that your existence is at the whim of people you never put in charge? If your stock portfolio is going up, do you really care that your speech is restricted? If you do not have crime in your neighborhood, do you really care what religious practices are forbidden, who is imprisoned and how?

I do. Even if the economy is good and my neighborhood safe, I will not sell my birthright.