You can insist it’s immoral or simply scoff as if these folks don’t count, but this is simply the sort of thing that happens when radicals seize control:
A potential lurch to the left in Germany’s election on Sunday is scaring millionaires into moving assets into Switzerland, bankers and tax lawyers say.
If the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), hard-left Linke, and environmentalist Greens come to power, the reintroduction of a wealth tax and a tightening of inheritance tax could be on the political agenda.
It’d be interesting to know whether financial advisors of various sorts have seen an increase in requests for an exit strategy since the last election and, in particular, Matt Brown’s latest announcement.
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To be honest, there isn’t much content to the topic, yet, but Rhode Islanders may find themselves triggered by the Epoch Times’ headline on a Reuters article featuring our former governor, Gina Raimondo: “US Commerce Chief to Push Investment in Domestic Economy.”
“For America to compete globally, we must invest domestically—in American workers, American businesses, and American innovation,” Raimondo will say at the Washington Economic Club, according to excerpts from the speech. …
Raimondo’s prepared excerpts say she will argue China’s R&D spending requires a response: “We must expand R&D investments and move innovations from the lab to the marketplace at 21st century speed.”
This may sound encouraging to conservative ears, but it requires some translation.
In the Ocean State, we know from painful experience that when Raimondo talks about “investment,” she means giving government more leverage in the economy. As an “investor,” a Raimondo-style government isn’t expressing confidence in you so much as confidence in bureaucrats’ ability to manage you.
She’s precisely that sort of progressive who thinks we must compete with China by becoming more like China, which is to say centrally managed. An “investment” in workers means telling them what jobs they should take. An investment in businesses means government picks favorites with whom to work (with a nice little boost taken off the top for the politicians’ careers). An investment in innovation means government officials will tilt the playing field in favor of ideas that they like or that interest them.
That is not and should not be how America functions. Moreover, it isn’t a strategy by which we’ll be able to compete. Even if (in theory) the Chinese Communist approach works for China, it won’t work for America because our culture and systems would require an impossibly radical change to make it function. The resistance alone will doom the effort, and time and propaganda spent cracking down on the regime’s domestic enemies will undermine the cause.
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The Democrat candidate for Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe (who is the former governor and a long-time Democrat Party insider going back to the Bill Clinton White House) said the quiet part out loud during a recent debate:
I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions. … I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.
You see, that’s for teachers unions and radical activist groups to decide, not you foolish parents. You just pay the bills.
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Related to the controversy in North Smithfield over analogizing between mask mandates and the Holocaust, well-known conservative and Jewish writer Dennis Prager’s latest column is titled, “Who Would Hide a Jew If Nazis Took Over America?“:
So, then, here are two questions for American Jews to ponder:
If a Nazi-like doctrine took over America, and you could knock on the door of someone who obeyed all government orders regarding masks, regardless of their rationality, or someone who questioned government authority and obeyed few or none of its mask orders—on whose door would you knock? If you were given the choice between knocking on the door of an atheist professor and the door of an Evangelical pastor or a Catholic priest—on whose door would knock?
Two key points: 1. Most people will fail hard moral tests, but those who emphasize morality (e.g., priests) will be more likely not to, and 2. The kind of people who’ll fight against oppression are by definition going to be eccentrics.
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Providence middle school teacher Ramona Bessinger shared on her Facebook page a Planned Parenthood poster that she was “encouraged to post” in her classroom last school year. Here’s the main body of the text:
Beyond the Birds and the Bees is a sexuality education program for high schoolers that is science-based, sex-positive, and affirming to all. Topics include gender & identity, birth control, sexually transmitted infections (STIs), healthy relationships, consent, and pleasure.
By way of translation, “sex-positive” means encouraging kids to have and experiment with sex, which makes sense, because teens who aren’t having casual sex don’t need Planned Parenthood. The more sexual activity the organization can encourage children to have, the more they’ll come around for medical visits, especially Planned Parenthood’s major revenue source: abortions.
But as the poster’s headline suggests, let’s move “beyond the birds and bees.” The URL promoted on the poster directs readers to a page that describes the organization’s “teen nights”:
Join us each month for a fun, interactive, sexuality education workshop created and led by our STARS peer educators. Past topics have covered:
- Reproductive freedom and advocacy
- Gender and identity
- Anatomy and reproduction
- Pregnancy and STD/STI prevention
- Healthy relationships
- Pleasure and healthy communication
Planned Parenthood frontloads three themes that apply to other left-wing advocacy groups. Indeed, one might describe them as definitional of the progressive strategy:
- Encourage children toward unhealthy behavior that undermines traditional values.
- Deprive them of stabilizing strategies such as logic and a belief in objective reality.
- Pressure them to become left-wing activists.
If they disconnect Americans from those practices and values that induce health, then we’re available to be recruited to press for a revolution that directly profits the radicals. The more suffering their policies create, the stronger their emotional play will be.
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For a recent episode of the Jordan Peterson Podcast, the host had a conversation with four Bitcoin enthusiasts: John Vallis, Richard James, Gigi Der, and Robert Breedlove. As befits a college professor and intellectual, Peterson leads them to cover the basics of the technology as well as to explore some of the more-profound implications of the innovation.
Even Peterson, however, gets a bit too caught up in the more-expansive questions. Toward the end of the episode, the quintet get all poetical about the ability of Bitcoin to help people offload calculations of what they value, which is a point Peterson seems to find particularly exciting. Money, after all, is just a medium for holding, carrying, and transferring value, and prices are merely a statement of that value in a particular time and place. If a government or central bank is manipulating the currency, it interferes with our ability to translate value into prices. Take that away, and we might have a mechanism to externalize our pricing.
On the surface, I think the Bitcoiners overstate how revolutionary it is. Sure, a clean window makes it easier to see what’s on the other side, while a filthy one can create illusions, but that doesn’t change the nature of what you’re doing when you look through it. The basic dynamics of the price are still there, if impurely expressed.
More profoundly, though, they display an error common among those whose libertarianism is less adulterated than mine — an eagerness to attribute to materials and mechanisms the capacity to answer immaterial and spiritual needs.
Even with the purest currency utilized in the purest of transactions between two people, part of what sets the price is internal to them. I recall overhearing a lead carpenter on the phone negotiating with a side-job client. “You sound desperate,” he said, and then he doubled his hourly rate.
More to the point, though, the price in a transaction between two people has to account for what they both value, and sometimes price and value can be inversely related. This is often relevant in arguments about how much some category of job should pay. Some of the premium that shows up in pay for men, for example, derives from their willingness to do more-strenuous, more-dangerous work; a person’s risk of harm or death has to be priced in, which means they value the work less. In contrast, activists often complain that teachers aren’t paid in proportion to their value to society, but part of that is accounting for the fact that teaching is very fulfilling, which means they value the work more and can be paid less.
The purity of Peterson’s currency won’t suddenly lead him to pay five times as much for things that people are willing to give him at cost because they made them for love of the craft or to hand over an equal sum to somebody who gives him a gift for love of the giving. Indeed, being paid for a thing changes the nature of the transaction; things inherently mean more when they are given freely.
Theoretically, we could put a monetary value on things like fulfillment at work or friendship, and if we don’t take them into account when debating the economy, we’ll wind up distorting prices even more detrimentally.* But by their nature, these calculations must remain internal to each one of us.
* What this means in practice is letting the market set the rate; the providers and the consumers balance their values.
Featured image by Icons8 Team on Unsplash.
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Lung-function appears to be fully recovered in minors:
[Open full post]In one [study], Swedish researchers found that even asthma patients had no significant impairment in lung function.
In the other, German researchers found unimpaired lung function after kids and teens had a COVID-19 infection — unless their infection was severe.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has raised questions about if and how the lung is affected after clearance of the coronavirus infection, especially in young people from the general population with less severe disease. Until now, this has not been known,” said Dr. Ida Mogensen, a post-doctoral fellow at the Karolinska Institute, who led the Swedish study.
Something doesn’t sit quite right in this story out of North Smithfield, as reported by Lauren Clem in the Valley Breeze.
Danielle Ferguson, a parent of a high school student there, spoke at a school committee meeting in opposition to mask mandates. She suggested that the government “wants everyone to be fearful so that they can take away our rights.” Revving up a bit (which happens when people are passionate enough to speak in public meetings), she noted that “the Jews got on the bus willingly.” And so:
According to a Sept. 10 letter from a group of teachers to the North Smithfield School Committee, the Holocaust comment was reported to the Anti-Defamation League. The ADL responded by viewing a video of the meeting and expressing deep concerns about the statement.
“The comparison of mask mandates in schools to the events of the Holocaust is deeply offensive and inappropriate, and trivializes and delegitimizes the memory of victims and stories of survivors,” the ADL said.
Teachers responded by condemning both the initial comment and the lack of an immediate response by the School Committee. NSHS Special Education Department Chairperson Christine Welch presented the letter signed by 27 teachers to the School Committee on Tuesday.
To be clear, the teachers’ true target appears to be the school committee, spreading a stain on them and forcing them in line. The comments, they wrote, “should not be met by the silence of the members of the committee.” Silence is violence, you know. According to this paradigm, people in government can’t simply allow constituents to speak at public meetings, and treat them as equals with whom to debate. They must use their positions of authority to proclaim the necessary truth and publicly condemn those who depart from the progressive line.
As somebody who has sat on a town council while progressives stood up and ranted that I was a Nazi and an image of me as Hitler floated around social media, I’d suggest that the attacks on Ms. Ferguson are utterly ridiculous. The progressives and teacher unions don’t care about trivializing the Holocaust; they’re major practitioners of that act.
All they’re doing is kicking up a cloud of dirt to distract from Ferguson’s reasonable point — namely, that the victims of the Holocaust didn’t know where the oppression was going, or else they would have reacted differently. Petty tyrannies have a way of becoming not-so-petty.
Indeed, 27 government employees with authority and influence over children demanding that elected officials publicly condemn the parent of one of their charges seems like a big goose step in that direction. Further, it was shameful of the committee members to comply with the demand, particularly Peg Votta, who said, ““We tell kids when you see something, say something, and we didn’t.” As if a mildly heated statement during a public hearing was a wrongthink crime.
What Ferguson said wasn’t an outrage. If it was objectionable at all, the affront was its lack of originality and repetition of a comparison that is so common as to be cliché.
Featured image by Gustave Dore on WikiArt.
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It seems we’re seeing increasing numbers of videos of the progressive elite being heckled by bystanders, such as this one of a pompously garbed Hillary Clinton being called a “war criminal” in Northern Ireland as a retro-garbed child carries the trail of her gown (or cape, or whatever).
Two thoughts. First: but for social media, we wouldn’t know any of this sort of thing was happening, which raises a question about how frequent this actually is as an everyday experience for this people who so richly deserve it.
Second: how long until the rotten vegetables start flying?
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It’s hard not to see something more behind this incident:
14 soldiers with the Mexican military were apprehended by U.S. federal law enforcement officials during the early morning hours on Saturday after they crossed over onto U.S. soil, according to a report. …
“CBP said the soldiers, their weapons and equipment ‘were secured for safety and processing,’ and noted the soldiers said ‘they did not realize they had entered the U.S.,’” the Associated Press reported. “One of the Mexican soldiers ‘was assessed a civil penalty after CBP officers discovered a personal use amount of marijuana in his possession,’ according to CPB.”
I’m not sure I believe they were just out for a drive in our military vehicle and uniforms and didn’t happen to know where the border was.
Maybe. Or maybe it was a test. Whatever the case, the incident does make one wonder how much is going on that isn’t caught.
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