Our times seem to be especially fraught with some of the worst invective, character assassination, and outbursts of anger bordering on rage. Disruptive chants and slogans have replaced reasoned discourse. I’ve complained about this often. Astonishingly, it has taken place at a time when we are spending trillions on education. As it turns out, mass education hasn’t produced mass wisdom. The situation raises serious questions about our educational system. Are we educating citizens or producing close-minded activists?
Watch this episode of young climate-change activists making demands at a recent (August 22) DNC meeting in San Francisco. The Sunrise Movement is most certainly the Sundown Movement, the sundown of reasoned discourse.
Very little intelligent dialogue takes place, nor is there any evidence of its presence in the short cognitive histories of these young people. They jump from rash conclusion to street activism with nothing prior or between.
The same is true in much of our political landscape. Brusque knee-jerk reactions take the place of thoughtful discussion and civil discourse. I doubt if the groundwork in the form of sufficient knowledge has been made in order to make it possible. So, it’s back to chants, slogans, disruptions, and hectoring. I cringe just thinking about what will happen if Pres. Trump gets the chance to fill another Supreme Court vacancy.
In the case of the above video, the instigator is the previously-mentioned Sunrise Movement. When I look into the faces of these young people, I slump into depression thinking of what our media and schools have done to their minds. All is not lost though. There are still a few golden and older voices in the wilderness, even if they’re no longer with us. Two of those voices belong to the late Milton and Rose Friedman. Their legacy continues in the Free to Choose Network. Airing this month on Amazon Prime Video are “The Real Adam Smith: Ideas That Changed the World” and “Sweden: Lessons for America?”. I viewed both recently.
The first should be a must-see for Pres. Trump and some of the hosts on Fox News. Are you listening Tucker? The second one should be required viewing for – wait, it’s a list – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, her political soul mates, the activist base of the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders, much of the rest of Democratic Party’s wannabee presidents, and those protesters pushing their way into the DNC’s meeting in San Francisco.
Pres. Trump reacts to trade issues in the same way as a developer dealing with his project’s immediate circumstances and the relevant people before him. Tariffs for him are like the rent charged in Trump Tower. It adds to his bottom line. The “trade deficit” is treated as a debt or loss in his books. It isn’t quite that simple. Tariffs are taxes paid by consumers in one way or another. Call it a value-added tax on imports, and operates in like manner. As for the “trade deficit”, it is just one component in the balance of payments. A shortfall in it will lead to surpluses in the other two components: the financial and capital accounts. The importer gets dollars and we get their goods. The dollars end up in financial instruments (bonds, government debt for example) and foreign direct investment.
For Trump, the dollars flow in the pockets of foreign fat cats as they live in, get this, a non-dollar society. How does that work? It doesn’t. The fat cat must translate his dollars into his country’s currency to buy that swank penthouse in Shanghai or keep the Benjamins to spend them on a Montecito mansion. He’ll need renminbis in the PRC or hand over the dollars to the old-moneyed seller in posh Montecito. Another option is parking the money in our government debt. Whichever way, dollars eventually come back here.
Could trade deficits have downsides? Yes, they could. Some regions could fall into depression as they lose out in the international competition. The social effects of economic decline aren’t pretty. Shuttered factories and businesses, distressed neighborhoods, family breakdown, substance abuse, people locked into a cycle of life with few prospects, and welfare dependency are symptoms of the malaise.
This is one weak spot in the film. Free trade has a ying and yang quality. It works best among countries with free economies, more or less. The role of similar social expectations and norms among nations can’t be counted out. I suspect that the PRC sees trade as another weapon in the long twilight struggle for national and ideological dominance. If their people get richer in the process, that’s icing on the cake. The country is certainly one for us to be very leery.
Nonetheless, the first film – “The Real Adam Smith” – lays out a useful primer for the value of free trade, one that Trump and his courtiers should understand. It might restrain them in their enthusiasm for punishing our literal and natural allies with tariffs. But we can hold two ideas at the same time (per Hillary’s iteration, and true). President-for-life Xi may be Trump’s friend, but he isn’t ours.
The second film – “Sweden: Lessons for America?” – is a necessary corrective to a popular urban myth for self-styled urban sophisticates. They pride themselves in being smarter, more intelligent, and better informed than the rubes. For them, the right side of the political spectrum is populated with Morlocks.
The prejudice was on full display when Paul McCartney accepted the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in 2010 and bellowed this insult at ex-President George W. Bush while President Obama and wife were in attendance: “After the last eight years, it’s great to have a president who knows what a library is.”
Ironically, the rank condescension of an accomplished pop music star is rooted in a profound ignorance that is common in places like bein pensant circles in Georgetown. For the beautiful people, all the smart people are on the left side of the spectrum. In reality, they’ve adopted John C. Calhoun’s outlook, but the target isn’t African-Americans. It’s anyone who might wear a tool belt, pay a mortgage, attend a Bible-believing church, and just might register Republican. Johan Norberg, the documentary’s host, unwittingly presents proof of the presence in chic quarters of the “Ignorant” stamp on the forehead with a frequency equivalent to tattoos in the crowd of heavy metal concertgoers. Norberg does it by shattering their fantasies about Swedish socialism.
Bernie Sanders has frequently tried to distinguish himself from the brutal socialism in the Soviet Union and Mao’s China. He does it by attaching his socialist vision to Scandinavian “social democracy”, not Pol Pot. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , a younger Bernie Sanders with different genitalia, imitates him. Both invoke the experience of “democratic socialism” in Scandinavia.
CNN quotes Bernie Sanders as follows: “I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway and learn what they have accomplished for their working people.” The Danes recoil from the “socialist” label. Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen responded in a speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, “I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”
Bernie and AOC continue to maintain that these countries are working examples of a successful socialism. They try to do so, in spite of the Scandinavian leaders’ rejection of the “socialism” label, by emphasizing “democracy”. It’s rhetorical sleight of hand. The fact of the matter is that the scheme is all about government control. It matters little if the control is exercised through a small claque of ideological oligarchs or a mob of 50% plus one. Private property becomes meaningless if it is at the mercy of any assemblage of 50%-plus-one. “Democracy” is the cover for all sorts of sins.
To say it is “democratic”, also, doesn’t mean the administrative state goes away. Rules to avoid chaos and give direction will have to be promulgated by a commissariat approaching the size of the Soviet Gosplan. The likes of Bernie and AOC have all kinds of social and eco “justice” to pursue. AOC helped author one incoherent version of the Green New Deal and Bernie later came up with his own monstrosity. Whichever of the two routes you take, you’ll end up in the same place: central planning!
Plus, the two carnival barkers act as if nothing has happened since the heyday of Scandinavian socialism in the 1970’s. It’s here that the Swede, Johan Norberg, and “Sweden: Lessons for America?” clears away much of the verbal smog. To make it simple for Bernie and Alexandria, Sweden had a free market economy, lost it, then gained it back. How did they do it? They reined in their “social democracy”. Business taxes were lowered; pensions became contribution-based rather than benefit-based; universal school vouchers were implemented to the point of private high schools becoming half of all high schools; unions became cooperative rather than combative; the vaunted universal health care system is remarkably decentralized with vouchers and a growing number of private healthcare providers; and on and on and on. In many ways they are freer than us.
Bernie wishes that we could be more like Sweden. Oh really, Bernie? I don’t think so. There is one area that should especially draw the ire of Bernie and much of the Dem Party. Sweden makes everyone pay taxes. If you will receive government benefits, you will pay. They don’t have a tax structure that attempts to shoulder the burden of government on the pocketbooks of the wealthy and the businesses who are the engine of jobs. They tried that in the 1970’s and saw their economy slump and businesses flee. Don’t doubt for a moment that Bernie and AOC won’t try to inflict the horrible history on us.
Really, the amazing part of the story is the abject ignorance of the story. Bernie, AOC, and the like, stop history in the 1970’s. Democratic socialism’s failures are deleted from the record so they can ignore Scandinavia’s movement toward free markets. Our democratic socialist icons take the system of its heyday, pretend the failures and reforms didn’t happen, and attribute the successes of its reforms to the socialism of the earlier misbegotten period. This is circularity with a huge bite out of its circumference. It’s nonsense.
In Scandinavia, particularly Sweden, Adam Smith has made a comeback … out of necessity. Socialism failed. In America, especially among the Democratic Party base and millennials, Marx is making a comeback. Go figure. AOC tries to distance herself from Marx to be more politically palatable. So does Bernie. Yet, do they really understand Marx? I kinda doubt it. Marx is socialism with an eschatology. Strip the violent eschatology and you still have socialism. Our lefty politicos want socialism to be elected into power. But does the means of implementation matter? Socialism is socialism and it doesn’t work. Isn’t the emphasis on 50%-plus-one just another attempt at putting lipstick on a pig?
A return to a sound understanding of human nature and the modes of social organization that are attuned to it would be huge step forward in removing needless chatter and destructive venting. I doubt, though, that it will ever get a hearing in today’s toxic climate. Too many people just don’t know a damn thing. Many of them are on the left, but that won”t stop them from being oh so confident. There is nothing more dangerous than an over-confident ignoramus.
Please see the films.
RogerG
