Maggie's Farm

VDH, via Vandy: (link fixed)

Some people screw up or are unlucky. We're here to ensure they end up the same as you who don't screw up or are luckier. We can't say they are in any way culpable, so we blame either the system or you who are better off. The best way to level the playing field is to tax all we can, take our percentage, and redistribute the rest. Lots get hired to administer to even more. The rules don't apply to ourselves, who are wealthy but not the targeted culpable. We know privately all this is not sustainable, but assume the better off will find a way to save themselves and thus us, before we bankrupt ourselves - after we are gone. And we don't care really whether this is always legal, or fair, or workable, because we know it is moral and we are far more moral people than you.

What I most value in websites and commentary is to be given a new idea to ponder.

It's fine to have your own ideas reinforced and expanded, but a fresh thought or image is a precious thing. I'm sure everybody agrees that, since the Progressive Era of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the government's solution to any problem or issue is more government. Government is a like a handyman with only one tool - a hammer.

So I liked our link to Mead this morning: Why can't DC think outside the blue box?

Sure, the Repubs have had some good ideas about health care which entailed less government, like permitting interstate insurance purchasing, but, in general, policy ideas from DC entail simply more governance, and stale ideas of government power and control, and government largesse, from the late 1800s and the 1930s (see Rep. Dingell's astonishingly honest statement posted today: It's taken a long time to 'control the people').

We need more new ideas to unleash the powers of the people to make their own way and to make their own choices. Prosperity and opportunity comes from the new/old ideas of freedom.

Government hammers and government cheese are not fresh ideas: they go back at least to the Pharaohs. What our Founders came up with is revolutionary today.

One Longs For 1776, The Other For 1936. It is true.

When our Dr. Bliss writes on the topic, she tends to put it in terms of peoples' dependency and security wishes which are placed on government, while imagining government as an altruistic, caring, "ideal" parent (as if an ideal parent were a constantly gratifying one without realistic limits, who can make everything right), or Santa or a god.

I know what she means, but I do not think of these things in those terms. I think of it in terms of power. Governments tend to accumulate power. People who work in government tend to enjoy power and, for reasons I cannot comprehend, tend to think that they are smarter and wiser than us regular citizens. Unlike wealth, however, power is indeed a zero-sum game. Any power our federal government accumulates comes from your own personal supply of it, or your town's, or your state's.

Wise adults are not prodigal with their funds, nor should they be with their far more precious freedoms: our funds are got by labor, but our freedoms from external powers are given by God but got by blood. America is uniquely formed on the ideal of limited government and maximum individual freedom. What is idealized, so to speak, is the genius of the individual - not the ancient notion of the divinity of rulers and government and their powers.

America is not for sissies, and was never meant to be. She was designed for the brave, the bold, the resourceful, and the independent. Designed for the New Man of the Enlightenment, rather than for the weary and government-oppressed and controlled of the rest of the world. People who wanted a chance, not to be ruled and "governed" and "helped" by their betters.

That's why people came here from all over: to take their chances for their dreams in a New World of freedom from the Powers. But how much of their - our - depressing history came with them?

What if the founding idea was wrong? What if most humans are more serf-like, dependent, and willing to be ruled than our founders thought? Our founders, after all, were not exactly ordinary people (whatever "ordinary people" means - I've never met one).

How many Lefties would be standing at the 1775 Concord bridge today with a squirrel gun to resist a "tyranny" which was peanuts in comparison to an admittedly elected American government of today? This is why I write here on occasion about the danger of selling our birthright of freedom for a lousy bowl of lentils (not to disparage the lowly lentil - lentils with chopped carrots, shallots, etc makes a fine bed for a medium-rare breast of Ruffed Grouse with a generous drizzle of gibier sauce over it all).

This CS Lewis quote is always worth repeating:

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. 

Number and Percent of Nonpayers At Record High; More Tax Filers Now See IRS as a Source of Income.

Remember when being called a "taxpayer" was equivalent to being called a "solid citizen"? This trend is not good for America. Every voting citizen should pay their dues to the club of America.  

The issue of salt seemed to link with our post on Woodrow Wilson and all of our routine posts about Brit Nanny-Fascism.

Just skim this Tierney piece on the salt "controvery" in the NYT. "Advocates" are promoting their dire data, and the other side is promoting their own - or debunking that of the advocates. (Reminiscent of global warming - and salt, like CO2, is essential to life on earth.)

My point, though, is that the assumption seems to be that if excess salt intake is bad for some small minority, then the government should regulate it. That's the technocratic, government-by-expert thing we have been seeing lately.

Is there anything the scientific technocrat busybodies don't want to control in my life?

Where is individual choice, individual responsibility, and freedom in the equation? Whence a government's power to determine the salt in my food?

Two posts about Marxism on Maggie's in two days! That's a record. And now for a third:

The Left in the Western World, such as it is, remains Marxist at core. I have read and studied Marx, as has Mead. They have some worthwhile and interesting insights into psychology, sociology, and human nature.

The problem is their reductionism. The rare people in the modern world with fresh new insights - eg Freud, Marx and Engels, Adam Smith, Burke, etc. often find their notions reduced to simplistic, reductionistic equations which they might not have anticipated.

Re Marx and Engels, every human is, in part, Homo economicus. But only in part. Humans are also Homo spirito, Homo ludens, Homo conflictus, Homo everything. That's why freedom is so important, if we accept our Western idea of the uniqueness and, almost, sanctity (not almost, if one has religion) of the individual.

At Chicago Boyz, Seizing the Opportunity to Destroy Western Civilization. A quote:

Narrative reduces personal experience to a linear progression where cause and effect seem to have a purposeful order. These narratives can then be shared with others, leading to the best definition of history ever: history is a fable agreed upon. Most personal narratives will never be the equivalent of the histories of Herodotus, Thucydides, or Gibbon; or even the fables of Aesop, La Fontaine, or Orwell. Most are simply humble habitual ways of thinking. As habits of thought, such narratives largely control how you react to unfolding events, whether it’s pricking your finger or waging a world war. 

At American Thinker, a brief word on the topic. 

America don't need no steenkin' noblesse. But, re the elites, Liberals are smarter. I knew that! They are smart and I am dumb. But not too dumb to be able to support my family and my wife's dumb animals in some degree of comfort and pleasure. 

Thank goodness for the equality of one dummie, one vote. I have two Ivy degrees but always doubted my brains. Guess I was right about something.

I do not know the history of how government unions came to be, but I deplore them. Who are they defending those employees from? Their evil neighbors who pay their salaries and their benefits?

The days of fat-cat evil Capitalists oppressing workers are long gone. Private sector unionization is in the dusk of its history, but government unionization is growing by leaps and bounds. Can anyone imagine a unionized military?

In my view, public employee unionization should be illegal because their opponent, in effect, is the public. But there is the basic right to free assembly. At the very least, public employee unions should be prohibited from politics and political contributions: that seems corrupt by definition but, again, there are logical consistency and freedom issues here.

People have been thinking about the topic lately:

From Declining unions, increasing stranglehold:

As the latest BLS statistics reveal, more union members – 7.9 million – now work for the government than the 7.4 million union members working for companies in the private economy, which has five times more workers. This imbalance has profound consequences for all workers, and for democracy itself.

From Rick Moran's WHAT DO WE OWE PUBLIC EMPLOYEES?

We have allowed public employees to ascend to a privileged place - a pedestal that they were never intended to occupy by the Founders - to the point where their influence over politicians, especially at the state and local level, have made them a force unto themselves in growing the size of government. More public employees means more union members, which means more dues money, which translates into more political contributions to friendly politicians who will gladly repeat the cycle.

This vicious circle must be ended. The biggest reason is that it is bankrupting us.

At Reason, Class War: How public servants became our masters:

People who are supposed to serve the public have become a privileged elite that exploits political power for financial gain and special perks. Because of its political power, this interest group has rigged the game so there are few meaningful checks on its demands. Government employees now receive far higher pay, benefits, and pensions than the vast majority of Americans working in the private sector. Even when they are incompetent or abusive, they can be fired only after a long process and only for the most grievous offenses.

It’s a two-tier system in which the rulers are making steady gains at the expense of the ruled. The predictable results: Higher taxes, eroded public services, unsustainable levels of debt, and massive roadblocks to reforming even the poorest performing agencies and school systems. If this system is left to grow unchecked, we will end up with a pale imitation of the free society envisioned by the Founders. 

Via View from 1776:

I will grant you that liberals always have the best of intentions.  They are always trying to make things better.  In doing so, they victimize many.  When I was growing up in rural Louisiana in the 1940s, both blacks and whites had strong, church-going families, low divorce rates, low rates of out-of-wedlock births and the crime rate was low.  Abortion was virtually unknown, and was certainly not a means of birth control.  All of that changed with LBJ’s Great Society programs.  In an effort to “help”, liberals gave people (both black and white) incentives to have children out of wedlock.  The result was several generations of welfare mothers, disintegration of the family, indigence, government dependency, soaring crime rates, etc.  All of this was predictable, but it was only ended in 1996 when, after two Presidential vetoes, a Republican Congress finally shamed Bill Clinton into living up to his campaign promise to “end welfare as we know it”.  Yes, the Great Society had noble intentions, but it harmed poor whites and poor blacks indiscriminately, almost destroying the black family. Liberals always have the best of intentions, but the results are often disastrous.

The Fable of Market Meritocracy 

"Markets don't reward smart people. They reward value." Yes, that is what markets are for. Markets are ultimately about human psychology; the only way to determine value and price, given human nature, fiat currency, and the annoying limitations of reality.

From Glucksman at City Journal's The Velvet Philosophical Revolution -Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the battle for political freedom goes on.

During four decades of ideological confrontation, theoreticians and journalists had argued about how a society should move from capitalism to socialism. There was no research on the opposite question—that is, on the transition from socialism to capitalism—apart from a few inconclusive studies, most notably in Poland, concerning the possibility of introducing some elements of the free market into a Communist society. As the philosopher Josep Ramoneda has observed, the whole world—Communists, anti-Communists, and those in between—took it as given that the Soviet Union and its satellites could not “return” to capitalism. So when, during the Velvet Revolution, demonstrators posed exactly this question—How can we go from socialism to capitalism?—there was no ready answer.

As Western intellectuals watched Berlin in November 1989, they reconsidered their long belief that the world was fated to be Communist—but retained their belief in fate.