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What Is Socialism?

Thanks to our poor K-grad school educations and ill-informed chattering classes (minions in the media and many in the punditry), “socialism”, the word, flutters about with scarcely a thought or understanding.  When the word is thrown out, particularly by those who are about to be pasted with it – Are you listening Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, Gillibrand, Sanders? – they either deny or don’t respond.  What are they denying or ignoring?  Do they even know what they’re denying or ignoring?  I kinda doubt it.

Our decrepit textbooks frequently malign our understanding with a definition like “government ownership of the means of production”, or some such.  No, it ain’t that pat.  Break it down.  “Ownership” is control and the “means of production” is property.  Thus, socialism is government (or “public”) control of property.  The control can be in the form of outright ownership or allowing people to have title but they, essentially, don’t have much say-so in the disposition of it.

Since the commercial and industrial revolutions, our notions of property – also called assets – have expanded way beyond those common in primitive barter societies.  So the control, if it is pursued, has a lot further reach.

Here’s a ringer for you: a capitalist can be a socialist. It’s simple.  A guy or gal with many assets in their possession can use them to bring about “public” control of property.  Not all capitalists support capitalism.  Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s partner, was a rather interesting case in point – one of many.

Well, how were the words “capitalism” and “capitalist” coined?  The words entered wide usage in the 19th century within the constellation of people and groups aligned with the Socialist International.  They were then popularized by Marx and Engels in their screeds.  The socialists needed a word to encapsulate the people who they hated, what Adam Smith referred to as the men of commerce.

Title page of the pamphlet announcing the Second International, a global gathering of socialists in 1889.

Think of socialism, then, on a spectrum with “free markets” at the other end.  In our modern lexicon, you are entering the “socialism” orbit when you blather about “single payer”, “free college”, a Green New Deal, confiscatory taxation, etc., etc.  All of them involve government control of other people’s property beyond the normal concerns about health and safety.  That’s where we find the Dem Party of today.

To be real, socialism comes in many shades.  We could go to the militant side where “communism” sits.  We could go to the nicer place with “democracy”, as in democratic socialism.  In fact, they would all call themselves “democratic socialists”, even Lenin. It’s just that a communist is impatient.  He or she wants it NOW!

Warren and Harris say, “Not me!”  Elizabeth Warren: “I am a capitalist.”  Kamala Harris: “I am not a democratic socialist.” Mmmmm.

Sen. Kamala Harris (D, Ca.) and would-be president.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D, Mass.) and would-be president.

So, are the denials of Warren and Harris, et al, legit?  Not quite.  If anything, they fall within the capitalists-who-support-socialism league.  Do they really understand what they claim they aren’t?  All evidence points to … “No”.

RogerG

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More Numbers: Women Up, Women Down

Mike Allen’s Axios AM this morning came out with numbers from the Institute for Policy Research showing women as slightly better educated than men and slightly less likely to be in the workforce. Once again, numbers don’t lie, conclusions do.

What do the numbers mean? Can’t tell. Numbers naturally bounce within a range. The better educated factoid may mean – emphasis on “may” – a profusion of girls willing to sit a total of 16-18 years in a school desk to get degrees in the “soft sciences” and the law. Without a deep dive, who knows what the figure means. High concentrations in the “soft sciences” – a term meant to cover a subject without much math, physical science, and classical reading – says nothing about employability and practical knowledge given their huge corruption potential. “Better educated” may mean a greater acceptance of curricular hoop-jumping, not “better informed” or any other similar synonym.

Students in a women’s studies class at Pepperdine University.

For instance, identity studies (gender, race, ethnicity, etc.) doth not make an Einstein. They make partisan activists.

Watch the drop in female workforce participation be used to press the campaign for more government spending and employer mandates. But, as before, what does the number really mean? It may mean more women choosing child-bearing and raising than a paycheck. An uptick in fertility might go a long way in explaining the statistic.

Don’t think for a moment that such women don’t contribute to the national wealth. Raising the next generation is the most fundamental act in making social capital, the basic stuff of economic growth. A unionized government worker isn’t a substitute for mom.

When we allow superficial numbers to proliferate, and put them in the hands of partisans to be massaged for political impact, we get nonsense, and worse. We get a ballooning public debt that will fall upon the heads of those very same kids. Number crunching becomes kid crunching.

RogerG

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Numbers Don’t Lie, Conclusions Do

Just watched Chris Wallace’s interview of presidential adviser Stephen Miller on Fox News Sunday.  Wallace pressed Miller with numbers as “facts” to contradict the claim of an emergency on the southern border.  They are facts-as-numbers, not facts-supporting-the-conclusion.  The rhetorical hocus pocus plagues the immigration debate so much that it’s hard to think straight on the subject.

About the “facts”: they are numbers produced by a formula.  The formula is overly reliant on tabulations at 48 border crossings along the 1,954 miles of the US/Mexico border because that’s where the bulk of counters are located.  Border crossers are channeled and monitored there to profoundly influence whatever sum total happens to result.  The vast voids between will contribute very little due to the emptiness.

The Tijuana border crossing.

It’s like limiting the threats to life and property to the number of reports making their way to the DA’s desk.  The number is shaped by public perceptions of law enforcement’s effectiveness, personnel, bureaucratic behavior, social norms, and political will.  See, there’s more to the number than the number.

Conclusions about “no emergency” are leaps and bounds beyond what the numbers can support.  The presence of anywhere from 11 million to 21 million illegals should tell you something.  The huge range means that we don’t know, and if we did, that would imply the complicity of government officials to allow illegal entry so illegals could be counted.  Absurd … I think.

The reality should instill some humility, but it doesn’t. The battle of the numbers becomes the battle of tomfoolery.

RogerG

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Rushing to Insanity

Mayor Eric Garcetti announces his intention that LA Department of Water and Power not replace three coastal gas-burning power plants but instead find a combination of renewable energy sources sufficient to take their place. (Sharon McNary/KPCC/LAist)

Today’s Democrats are like migratory birds.  They are hardwired to travel in certain directions.  For North American humming birds, it’s south; for Democrats, it’s left.  In other words, even if blindfolded, Dems migrate ever closer to Havanna — as a model of societal organization, that is.  Take for instance the rush to embrace the Green New Deal.  Take for instance the LA mayor’s drive to hobble power generation for the city by closing down 3 natural gas power plants and replacing them with the fairy tale of … full-on “sustainables” – i.e., wind and solar.  Get ready for more middle-class flight and rolling blackouts.

Here’s the story:   https://laist.com/2019/02/12/la_mayor_wants_to_shut_down_three_power_plants_in_favor_of_clean_energy_alternatives.php?fbclid=IwAR2rteqX3dw92uBjGzyibxVtf-YMXpq1DGFE6aPj6dHc2vEQUtDYgSBDAmk

The pic shows LA’s powerful and influential lining up like Canadian geese.  This certainly is a rush to the future … if your future has in store a lifetime lockup in a mental hospital.  Knowingly taking poison isn’t a sign of mental stability.

Watch out USA.  A Californian with presidential ambitions, Sen. Kamala Harris, wants to bring the California psychosis to a neighborhood near you.  If you’re poorly informed, just remember that a Californian with a “D” after their name is shorthand for a candidate’s toxicity.

RogerG

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A Stunted Bullet

California governor Gavin Newsom announces the end of the high speed rail project, Feb. 12, 2019. (AP)

Is it a coincidence that the Green New Deal is all the rage as 43 states have legalized the relocation of dime bags of pot to the aspirin isle of the pharmacy, if not the produce section of the supermarket?  Our teenage central planner’s (Ocasio-Cortez) afterbirth – The Green New Deal – disappeared without a trace as people began to realize the insanity of reshaping our society according to the musings of sophomores in pot-smoke-filled dorm rooms.

The same fate awaited the LA-to-SF bullet train because the idea probably originated in the same dorm room.

What’s left is a rump.  Were the same young and addled geniuses responsible for a bullet train from … Bakersfield to Merced?  With the fiscal probity of drunken sailors, Californians showered $5.4 billion on the $100 billion psychedelic vision.  Virginia’s governor, Ralph Northam, showed the way out of the morass: allow it to be born – Bakersfield to Merced – and then abort it.  Gavin Newsom, California’s hair-gelled governor, played the role of Kermit Gosnell.

Good riddance.

RogerG

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The Green New Deal, Prussia, and War Socialism

To be blunt, telling a person what to think is not wrong; claiming the power to make another person think that way is wrong.  The former is necessary for dialogue in a community of free association.  Before there is a voluntary dialogue of views, one must first have a view contra another’s.  The second half of the first sentence is the Green New Deal (GND), which is grounded in the rationalized Prussian state and more fully implemented in the full-mobilization governments of the warring parties of WWI – what was called War Socialism.

Let me explain.  After the humiliations of Prussia at the hands of Napoleon, the Prussian state was rationalized around the administration of academics under the Hohenzollern monarchy as the cure for what ailed the nation.  For people like the philosopher Hegel (Google him), it was the perfection of political organization.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, U. of Berlin.  Portrait made in 1831.
Prussian king William is crowned Emperor William I of Germany, Hall of Mirrors, Versailles, France, 1870.

This gave rise to his history-as-progress thing, and would flower into Obama’s silly talk of being on the right side of it – which means to agree with him.  Add a dose of “experts” rooted in opinionated “science” and you’ve just short-circuited popular sovereignty.  Oh, lip service is paid to “democracy”, but it’s only of the kind that is allowed to agree with the stale and calcified opinions of a claque of “experts”.  Thus, we have the unelected administrative state and the Green New Deal demand for a whole lot more of it.

Modern industrialized war provides the opportunity to put the grotesque plan into operation.  Since it’s all about government controls in time of war, it’s socialism, thus War Socialism.  It also explains the constant search for the “moral equivalent of war”.  Declaring a war-like situation is the go-to excuse to marshal the state, create new claques of “experts”, bust the budget, and control the lives of people.  Once again, welcome to the Green New Deal.

The parallels with that other high priest of the “laws” of history, Karl Marx, are aplenty.  He announced the need for a lot of consciousness-raising by a prescient few.  Lenin called them the “vanguard elite”. As in the Communist Manifesto, so in the Ocasio-Cortez Green New Deal.  Who else but the few self-anointed gnostics, schooled in the theology of the global warming apocalypse, can be entrusted to lead us to the promised land?

 

Don’t dare, you “frontline communities”, use your democratic voice to build coal-fired power plants to sell electricity to communities stuck in the brave new world of windmills and solar farms.  If you try, the full force of the soviet will descend upon you.

Speaking of soviets, the GND has them too.  The vague references to local community councils will be nothing but warrens of left-wing activists, just like the soviets of revolutionary Russia.  The boilerplate title of “workers, soldiers, and peasants” was nothing but cover for Bolshevik militancy.

And so we are to go the way of Venezuela, Cuba, the Soviet Union, etc., etc.

Empty shelves in a Caracas supermarket.

Ocasio-Cortez, our teenage central planner, symbolizes the extreme myopia of many that are treading a well-worn path from the post-Napoleonic Prussian state to the garrison governments of the world wars and the spawning of systematize totalitarianism.  Don’t expect the realization to suddenly dawn on her and her Twitter followers.  She is to erudition what an oil slick is to water. It only floats on the surface and there ain’t much beyond that.

RogerG

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PBS, Intellectual Fraud, and Immigration

I watched PBS’s Frontline “The Gang Crackdown” on MS-13 till I couldn’t take it anymore, roughly ¾ of it.  The program was a goulash of logic that raised more questions than it answered.  And when it tried to answer some, the explanations resembled Alice going down the rabbit hole.  The thing was an affront to common sense.

The broadcast tried, in the tradition of the world’s best sleight-of-hand magicians, to associate the presence of MS-13 to reactionary American public officials.  As they did so, anyone watching it would be blinded by one basic question.  Where do we find these MS-13 miscreants?  They reside within the suddenly blossoming enclaves of immigrants, many of them “undocumented”.  Suddenly blossoming!  We wouldn’t have this problem if we hadn’t lost control of our borders.  Dahhh!

MS-13 murder scene.

Such logic apparently never dawned on the script writers – or at least there’s no evidence of it.  Instead, they steered the viewer into a sojourn of the crime and poverty of third world countries, the reactions of law enforcement, and the unchallenged opinions of open-borders activists.  Clearly, the program could have benefited from more of the kind of pushback that was only reserved for Trump and federal and local law enforcement.

Activists protest the Trump administration’s approach to illegal border crossings in Washington, Thursday, June 28, 2018. (AP File Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

The lambasting of American authorities was partnered with an unstated inference.  Call it innuendo with a light touch.  Bad conditions everywhere in the world obliges the US to accept nearly anyone needy.  Why else the hackneyed reference to the plight of El Salvadorans, et al?  Everyone living in a dirt floor hut is now to be recast as a “soon-to-be-American”.  Emma Lazarus’s poem is sentiment, but it is also suicide as public policy in the era of a gargantuan welfare state.

Frontline added nothing to the immigration debate but the tired Democratic Party talking points on the issue du jour.  A little more honesty would help, as well as a little more rationality.

RogerG

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Bankruptcy Again in California

PG&E trucks sit on a roadside in Paradise, California on Jan. 22, 2019.

Here we go again. PG&E filed bankruptcy. The utility’s previous filing for insolvency was in 2001. The purported reason for this latest at-bat in Chapter 11 is the fear of lawsuits from devastating wildfires over the past few years (17 in 2017). Yes, the state has been burning up. A multi-year severe drought hasn’t helped. Exacerbating the problem is rural residents’ preference for suburbia in wildlands. The explosive nature of the fires is kindled by wild land management practices of an eco-crazed state government. In this maelstrom sits a huge uility. Greenie mandates on the utility industry run rampant which divert revenues from day-to-day maintenance and upgrades. With some of the highest utility rates known to man, it’s perplexing that the hardening of its infrastructure is woefully lacking. The whole situation screams of a collapse waiting to happen. Well, here we go again.

Please watch the Wall Street Journal video on the infrastructure shortcomings of the utility.

https://www.wsj.com/video/how-to-prevent-the-next-pge-disaster/4C757550-66B1-469C-8405-B39CF6F2A49F.html

RogerG

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A President of/from/for … California

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., at a Dream Act rally in Irvine, California, on Oct. 11, 2017. (CNN)

I’m not sure if the prepositions “of” or “from” or “for” apply to the presidential candidacy of Kamala Harris.  One thing is certain though: she will take all that is California national.  What does that mean?  Let me list the ways.  Be prepared for far-reaching, zealous gun control; be prepared for a huge spike in energy costs; be prepared for open borders; be prepared for high taxes; be prepared for a mania of regulation; be prepared for more “free” stuff from the forced courtesy of the American taxpayer; be prepared for an enhanced campaign to ride religion out of the public square; be prepared for intensified gender confusion in public policy; be prepared for militant jihads against all sorts of “isms” and “phobias”; be prepared for the elevation of abortion to a civic sacrament; be prepared for the enactment of totalitarian environmentalism; and on, and on, and on, and on.  And I haven’t gotten to foreign policy.

Remember the personal assassination of Judge Kavanaugh. Harris led the mob.  This kind of behavior may be celebrated west of the Coast Range, but is it a role model for the rest of the country?  If it is proclaimed to be, it ought not be.  The video:

A vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for California as the new direction for the country.  If that’s your beau ideal, by all means, be my guest.  If so, one final (maybe 2) “be prepared”: be prepared for a new era of limits and your children not being able to leave home till 40.

RogerG

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Totalitarian Mind Control in Academic Jargon

Implicit bias is all the rage in social policy circles.  The rationale for the crusade is based on the assertion that we do something more than overtly act like racists (homophobes, Islamophobes, etc.).  We harbor hateful prejudices deep in our subconscious.  It’s not enough, it is said, to control the racist behavior.  We must expunge the lurking bad thoughts swimming around in those vast unconscious reservoirs in our brains.  The field is more than a rich source of consulting income for the high priests of the endeavor.  The dogma branches off into innumerable calls for the checking of privilege and other forms of sloganeering.  But is it true?  There’s good reason to say wowwww!

David Berreby

This came to mind while reading in my April 2018 issue of National Geographic Magazine the article, “The Things That Divide Us” by David Berreby.  A natural logic could lead one to rightly assume that evil behavior has tentacles in evil thoughts.  Fair enough.  The problem lies in ferreting out the purported bad biases.  Further, there appears to be a tenuous connection between the lurking prejudice and behavior.

And there’s good reason to question the attempts to measure the hidden bias.  Please read the following article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Can We Really Measure Implicit Bias? Maybe Not”, by Tom Bartlett, Jan. 5, 2017, https://www.chronicle.com/…/Can-We-Really-Measure-Im…/238807.

What we have in the National Geographic article is another non-scientist author claiming the certitude of a scientist with, in reality, an ideological ax to grind. Berreby has nothing but a BA in English from Yale to his credit.  He uses the tendentious claims of some psychologists to support what is in essence his political crusade.

Since the 19th century, we have experienced the attempt to marry science to politics.  The regions of the world laid waste by Marxism, eugenics, and National Socialism are a testament to its abject failure.  Informed decisions are one thing; totalitarianism is another.  It’s amazing that we have discovered a new way to construct Orwell’s Ministries of Truth and Love.

RogerG