In recent conversation with Tim Ferriss, Canadian writer-explorer Wade Davis took a slight detour to speak of the community benefits of Canada’s socialized healthcare system:
It has everything to do with social solidarity. It has everything to do with every Canadian knowing that they belong, and knowing that if their kid gets sick, they will get exactly, and I tell you, it is exactly, the same care as any other Canadian, including the Prime Minister. Yes, I sometimes have to wait for medical service in Canada, but everyone does, but no one is left behind. And that is one of the reasons that we have a less highly charged society, why we seem to get along better.
At the same time, Rod Dreher observes this of Canadian healthcare:
… the state and the medical profession are rapidly creating a culture in Canada in which people who cannot care for themselves will be pushed to commit suicide so as not to be a burden on others — in part because the healthy and the financially well off will have been conditioned to think that they have no obligation out of sheer human decency to help those who are suffering. Remember, the concept of “soft totalitarianism” that I talk about in Live Not By Lies is a totalitarianism that takes root because of a population’s unwillingness to suffer pain and anxiety. We see in Canada that the state and other institutions captured by progressive ideology are teaching Canadians to internalize an ideology that tells them that some lives are unworthy of life, and should be ended “beautifully” by the system.
For our purpose, here, let’s not focus on the practical reality of whether Davis’s testimony is correct and, instead, focus on the socialist belief, whether true or not. A shared government system, the thinking goes, provides “equitable” care to all. Sure, the privileged must sacrifice on behalf of this levelling, but they are rewarded with life in a friendlier, more-communal society.
Yet, people remain human and self-interested. If you feel that you’ve been tolerating a lower degree of service for the benefit of others, you may resent those who waste your shared resources to prolong, as Dreher puts it, a “life unworthy of life.”
Notably, Dreher takes that phrase from a Nazi principle, which dovetails with his characterization of euthanasia as evidence of “the re-paganization of a once-Christian civilization.” He points out that, in ancient Rome, early Christians would rescue unwanted babies whose parents had left them outside to die of exposure. Indeed, perhaps the most significant practical (as distinct from theological) attribute of Christianity, producing all that followed, was the idea that every person matters as a being in relationship with God.
These days, unwanted children are aborted, rather than left to die. While that may be more humane, in a sense, it also comes with the assumption that their lives are not worthy of life because their parents do not wish to care for them. The poor, disabled, and merely unhappy are now receiving the message that the caretaker collective has reached the same conclusion.
When government is tasked with maintaining social solidarity and possesses the means to kill nicely, citizens may feel as if their community is more tightly knit, but with a sharper edge. Move beyond that people aren’t “left behind,” but their encouraged to suppress the highly charged desire for life and drop out of life with a smile.
Featured image by Francisco Goya on WikiArt.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- McKee adopts all of RI’s homeless (on the way to socialized housing)
- Barrington teachers get COVID-excess accountability (well, it’s a start)
- How and why the media ignores the most important story in RI education
- Pandering to radicals for a non-existent gun problem in Rhode Island
- Voter fraud and the story the RIGOP needs to tell
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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Stephen Skoly considers a run for CD1, Neil deMause talks publicly backed stadiums, Joseph Allen on AI, Mike Davis talks about Senator Whitehouse and the Supreme Court, and Mike Stenhouse of the RI Center for Freedom and Prosperity.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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Announcing the move of his cable news show to Twitter, Tucker Carlson suggests that most of what mainstream journalists report is factually true, but their stories are chosen and constructed so as to paint a completely false image of reality. Take Rhode Island education as an example.
As long as I’ve been following the story, government-run education in Rhode Island has been expensive and ineffective relative to other states (let alone to private options and the world). Just a few years ago, a team from Johns Hopkins University conducted a review of education in Providence, and the Wall Street Journal characterized its findings as “An Education Horror Show.” As a result, the state took over the schools, but without any signs of improvement. Why?
Because the teacher unions dug in, and Education Commissioner Angelica Infante-Green (then newly appointed) attempted to work with them. Whether you agree with me that her decision (urged by the politically ambitious Democrat governor, Gina Raimondo, no doubt) was a cataclysmic mistake or see it as a necessity, even if challenging, you simply must acknowledge that the unions are central to the story of Rhode Island education.
And yet, a single four-month-old story in GoLocalProv is the only instance I can find covering John Lancellotta’s lawsuit against the West Warwick school department alleging that he was let go because he exercised his constitutionally guaranteed right not to pay dues to a teacher union. Why?
Because for a variety of reasons journalists don’t want to help spread the information that teachers don’t have to join their local unions. A few of them came of age at a time when unions were considered heroic, and they can’t shake that narrative, so Lancellotta falls immediately into the character of suspicious troublemaker. The younger journalists have recently emerged from a K-BA system that is more about indoctrination than education. Others are fully onboard with the progressive movement of which government unions are a driving organizational force. Some are probably (consciously or otherwise) wary of landing on the disfavored list of the most powerful people in the Ocean State.
As a purely economic decision, remaining in a teacher union makes no sense for any individual teacher, yet it’s extremely rare for teachers not to opt in. This results from a multilayered campaign to prop up union membership. The broadest layer is of inculcated ignorance, whereby teachers simply don’t know their rights. Colleges of education certainly won’t explain their options to students, and journalists help to keep teachers from having reason to investigate for themselves.
As the layers become more focused, they involve deception about what being in or out of the union entails. Another layer lays deliberate obstacles to being non-union (e.g., the district office simply begins deducting dues, and the superintendent tells the teacher she has to discuss the matter with the district’s union leader, who imposes improper obstacles). The most pointed layer includes experiences such as Lancellotta’s, which send warning messages to any teachers who still come to the conclusion that avoiding the union is the right decision for them.
Whatever individuals’ conclusions might be, a fully informed citizenry would be familiar with this reality and understand its connection to school failure in Providence and elsewhere. Unfortunately, as Carlson explains, a well funded and influential industry is dedicated to ensuring that the public is not familiar with any reality but the one ideologues want to be true.
Featured image by Kristina Flour on Unsplash.
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Clearing out some old links reminded me that Rhode Island’s “pay equity” statute goes into effect this year, as Jack Kelly wrote in Forbes in late 2021. While generally supportive of the legislation, Kelly did acknowledge the potential for “unintended consequences”:
According to Joshua Nadreau, a partner in the Boston office of the labor and employment law firm Fisher Phillips, Rhode Island’s statute is “one of the few pay equity laws that targets protected classifications other than sex or gender.”
Nadreau posits, “This may add considerable burdens to employers who may not have historically tracked this demographic information. How many employers track the religion or sexual orientation of their employees? One of the questions I have is whether an employer will be held legally responsible for a pay disparity between various protected classes if it doesn’t even possess the information to make that determination in the first place.”
More insidiously, “merit” is a tricky thing. It’s not always easy to articulate why an employee is a “rock star,” and managers can easily disagree. A key component of judgment for a manager is whether an employee is a personality match for that manager, and such subjective factors will now leave employers vulnerable to lawsuits. Stack these requirements onto the side of the scale in favor of employers’ not expanding or staying in Rhode Island. This sort of legislation makes employees more costly while doing nothing to make them more valuable.
Dragging down the economy isn’t the only reason to be wary of policies that seek to “correct” social outcomes. I recently had cause to run a pay-related regression analysis that had sex as one of the variables. The analysis did find that women make less when starting a new job, all else equal, although the “all else” was missing some very important variables (like industry). However, that’s the subject of a continual back-and-forth. The overlooked consideration that piqued my interest was that the gap is much less significant for younger women than for older ones.
Add in the fact that younger women are more likely still to be pursuing education while their male peers are more likely to start working full time sooner (often in jobs with lower ceilings), and it’s entirely possible that young women actually have an edge. In 20-40 years, we could see a complete reversal and worsening of the pay gap.
I’d need to do more research before insisting that’s the case, but the point is that it’s not even a matter of discussion. The unintended consequences, in other words, could be massive, devastating, and long-standing when a moral panic produces reckless social experimentation by a cultural elite with little ability or appetite to think a contentious topic through completely.
Featured image by Lucas Sankey on Unsplash.
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On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- Duplicate votes: rare and easily caught or the tip of the iceberg?
- McKee extends the “emergency.”
- Why doesn’t anybody qualified want to run for Congress?
- Ray McKay’s entry for Senate.
- Bud Light steps into the quiet rage.
- McKee’s binding to Biden.
On WNRI 1380 AM/95.1 FM, John DePetro and Justin Katz discuss:
- The high price of detecting voter fraud.
- Neronha and McKee’s strong relationship of occasional “hellos.”
- AG’s Twitter serving as his platform for backlash.
- Cranston St. Armory’s plan to evacuate warming shelter and relocate families.
- Raimondo and government inevitably sneaky industrial policies.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
Guests: Dora Vasquez Hellner, Army veteran
Alyson Matera, Rhode Island National Guard
Host: Darlene D’Arezzo
Description: Our guests represent a broad range of years of service and experience. Dora Vasquez Hellner is retired with 23 years of military experience. Alyson Matera is active and has 8 years of service to her credit. They share common experiences as well as distinct and different service. A brief history of women in the military is not only interesting but also remarkable. They also comment on the challenges women have faced over time and the alarming experience of sexual trauma some women have experienced in military serviced.
Artsy people’s complaining about gauche wealth-culture is nothing new, but something about this complaint by progressive podcaster and musician Bill Bartholomew struck me as oblivious of the obvious:
Working late on Friday to frame out a roof on Ocean Drive 15 years ago, while watching BMWs roll by, I had similar thoughts. But I also appreciated the consistent and interesting work available to me as a carpenter, as well as the beauty of location and architecture around me. The same qualities attract many tourists each year.
Note, however, Bartholomew’s snobbish juxtaposition of “hooting and hollering” from people he looks down on and the “vibrant” lives of people he prefers. His artist’s view might move toward my artisan’s perspective if the funding structure of the arts hadn’t shifted so dramatically from the patronage of the wealthy to the dole of the government.
Progressives and socialists (if there’s a difference, at this point) fall into the trap of thinking that government control will change the aspects of society they want changed while preserving those they value. They can be surprisingly reactionary about the latter, tightly gripping the false beliefs that (1) their views will guide government (which they won’t, even if politicians’ ape their slogans) and (2) that government is capable of nuanced and fine-tuned control of progress. It isn’t. Government is a blunt tool.
The trends in Newport and across the state are the consequence of the choices Rhode Islanders have made through their government, but the ability to imagine an outcome does not mean it’s really available. You cannot have the past back. You cannot freeze the present. The city is going to change one way or another. If government seeks to preserve its architectural character, then the prices will go up. If activists demand housing prices freeze or go down, the city must change.
I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: A crucial element of Rhode Island’s charm is its diversity of neighborhoods — the unique character of small areas. That doesn’t happen with planning; it happens with freedom, and freedom brings change, leaving us only the choice to adapt.
Maybe the entirety of Newport will become AirBnBtown, but then workers will be able to demand a premium for their travel there. (More economic liberty might produce innovative ways to get them to work and reduce the traffic.) Or maybe the economics of property value will make lower-cost housing profitable for developers in ways that will make the trust funders complain.
My prediction is that if we stop trying to control everything and let niches develop, taking enjoyment from the excitement of watching the future unfold, our attitude will change as a community. Sure, everybody gripes a bit as things change, but if they can carve out a place, even the things they gripe about gather a familiar warmth around them. And if the change is fundamentally incompatible with any given person’s preferences, maybe Newport isn’t the place for him or her. Why should we entertain such people’s demand that everybody else accommodate their tastes?
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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As an undergrad, back when the Internet was still brand new, I decompressed by reading through Stephen King books borrowed from the Carnegie Mellon library and noticed something. One of his recurring techniques was to imagine the familiar as the monster. Cujo was a dog. Christine was a cool car. Firestarter was a little girl. The title character in Cycle of the Werewolf, which became the movie, Silver Bullet, was the local priest.
As a non-King movie, Child’s Play, showed, the idea caught on, and naturally, artists’ explored the opposite: heroes whose appearances or identities are typically associated with villains.
One of the defining peculiarities of the present day is that this species of literary device has become written into our society and is affecting our ability to assess reality. Consider this headline: “‘Drag Mom’ Who Mentored 11-Year-Old At Satan-Themed Pub Sentenced For 11 Child Sex Felonies.”
At this point, we’re being encouraged to actively suspend our common sense and long social experience to avoid harm before it’s done. What do we think is going to happen?
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