LIBERALISM AND VIOLENCE

One of the most pernicious and popular myths in the landscape of American politics is that individualists, commonly called conservatives, Tea Baggers, or right-wingers, are prone to violence, and are a real danger to the safety of our republic.  Well, that’s baloney.

Who is more likely to become violent:  someone who wants to be left alone and leave others alone, or someone who is convinced that his omniscience and moral superiority requires that he force others to do his bidding?

Historically, violence has always been initiated by the statists, commonly called Liberals, Progressives, or the Left.   (Democrat and Republican aren’t really valid terms because there are a few Democrats who are more individualistic, and a great many Republicans who are statists.)

In general, the position of the statists is that only government can do certain things, such as take care of the poor.  It is their contention that, if left to our own devices, We, the People of the United States, would not take care of our poor, so the government must seize our assets and redistribute them.  This is a critical point!  Statists do not claim that government control of the economy or of the people would generate more wealth.  They claim only that it would generate more tax revenue.  The government, even by their own admission, cannot create wealth; it can only move it around.  A pithy bumper sticker says, “The government can’t give you anything it hasn’t taken from someone else,” and the statists have never, to my knowledge, denied this.

Therefore, it is at the very core of the statist philosophy that force is morally acceptable if used against those who have wealth.  A free citizen, if approached by a beggar, would have the choice to help or walk away.  History has proven, over and over and over and over and over (can you tell I’m getting tired of having to point this out?) that the American people are the most generous on Earth.  Even in dire times, they have supported their chosen charities to an astonishing level.

But, you see, that phrase in italics tells the story.  Free people will choose what they wish to support, and it may very well not be what the statists would choose.  And this is precisely, solely why statists always – ALWAYS – initiate force against the people:  their view of how a country should be run cannot be achieved unless the government has the authority to seize wealth from those who have it and give it to the chosen ones.  “If only,” they wail, “those selfish, rich, white people would just give us their money, we wouldn’t have to take it by force.”

Statists often claim that the government can do things the people, collectively, can’t because it has more money than the people.  This idea is utterly preposterous, and here’s why:  The government cannot have more wealth than its citizens because it cannot create wealth.  Any wealth the government has must be seized from the people, and it can’t seize more than is there.

Not kindness, but naked, armed force is the heart of statist/liberal politics.   Not empathy, but pathological arrogance and ego-centrism are liberalism’s motive force.  Simply put, the liberal dream cannot be achieved in a free country, or in a country where the people have the means of meeting force with force.

Rebsarge

8 Feb., 2014

THE GENESIS OF THE MIDDLE CLASS

(I had actually written the first draft of this before I heard Barack Obama’s insanely stupid comment that the government had created the middle class by applying the GI bill after WWII.)

Where did we get a middle class?

In the beginning, everybody was dirt poor, and I mean DIRT poor.  Now, I’m talking about the real beginning, before there were enough people to call a “society,” or even a village.  Each person had to produce whatever they needed to live; there were no stores, or even other people to trade with.  There was no upper, middle, or lower class.

People being as fecund then as now, at some point, there were enough individuals that somebody said, “Look here.  I’m really good at gathering firewood, but I can’t make those dandy badger hide skivvies nearly as well as you.  How about I bring you some wood, and you make me a pair of skivvies?”  (Actually, this is an exact quote.  Some translations have it as porcupine quill skivvies.)   Thus was born the idea of trade and the specialization of labor.  It probably didn’t take long before people were trading all kinds of things. 

This barter economy went on for a long time because there was no such thing as money.  People traded goods and services directly for goods and services.  Some gradually amassed more wealth than their neighbors, but the differences weren’t great because the limiting factor was how much livestock or whatever one person could manage.

Now here’s a critical distinction:  wealth vs. money.  Wealth is real stuff – goods and property - chickens, firewood, berries, those nifty badger hide skivvies, clubs, flint knives, etc..  In a village where everybody likes his yardbird, the citizen with a mess of chickens would be considered wealthy.  ‘cause he’s got all that wealth, see?

Money is something that stands for wealth.  Today, a dollar bill stands for a certain amount of real, tangible goods.  The bill, itself, isn’t wealth.  It is, in every particular, a universal certificate of value. A barter economy doesn’t need money.

I’ve never travelled with chickens, but intuition tells me they’d be a pain in the butt before you’d gone very far.  A barter economy, in which people trade wealth directly, limits mobility.  It also limits invention because whether its chickens or hide skivvies, having ones’ wealth concentrated in such commodities is very time-consuming.  Also, if you can barter for anything you need, there’s not a lot of motivation to invent.

Back to the story.  Many years after the passing of the guy who started trading firewood, somebody came up with the idea of leaving the chickens at home and travelling with certificates, or chits, as we call them in the Marines.  He’d go to the next village and strike deal to trade 20 chickens for a camel.  To the camel dealer he’d give a chit that was redeemable for 20 chickens.  The camel dealer would send his lackey to Chickenville.  The lackey would present the chicken chit, and haul the chickens back to Camelville.  As long as everybody actually had the wealth that was represented by the chits, it worked great.  A pox on the SOB who figured out he could write chits for anything, whether he had it or not, but it probably happened fairly early in this whole process.

This business of chits, or certificates was revolutionary.  It allowed people to travel much more easily, but sooner or later, the camel dealer would have needed to trade for a new cook pot, which was available in Camelville, but the proportion of the wealth being traded was odd.  A whole camel would buy one hell of a big pot – or more little ones that anyone could reasonably use – and trading just a camel’s leg for a pot of the right size would markedly diminish the value of the camel for later commerce.

But, wait!  The camel dealer has this chit for 20 chickens, and two chickens would get him a perfect pot!  So he goes to the pot dealer (different from modern pot dealers, BTW), and says, “Hey, ol’ Cluckenheimer in Chickenville is holding 20 chickens for me – see, here’s the chicken chit – and I’ll sign two of them over to you in exchange for a pot.”

Do you see what happened right there?  Commerce happened without a single chicken actually changing hands!  Brilliant!  Man, did that ever catch on!  Pretty soon, folks were trading chits for everything under the sun, and, true to human nature, some sharpies started trading counterfeit chits, and even stealing the real ones.  (The convenience was a two-edged sword; you could hide a stolen certificate for a dozen camels considerably easier than the camels, themselves.)  As Sir Walter Scott would observe later, it is an ill wind that blows no one some good, and this mischief with certificates and robbery was no exception.   It led to the rise of a subspecies of HH Sapiens called “factors,” which morphed into bankers.

In exchange for one chicken, the factor would hold the certificate for the others and guarantee its legitimacy.  These certificates were the beginning of money. This development allowed people to accumulate money, rather than the wealth it stood for.  By trading money for wealth, or even for more money, some people rose above the subsistence level.  It was literally possible to have more money than actual, real wealth.

Now here’s where we get to the point of this riveting drama.  For the longest time, there was one class of people: struggling.  Even the best off among them struggled.  After the development of the rudiments of money, there came to be a class that struggled a lot less.  Now there were two.

Eventually, the specialization of labor and the mobility of the population allowed some, but not all of the upper class to actually become even more wealthy, and now there were three.  There were the poor, who struggled with subsistence.  There were the quite wealthy, who had considerable wealth and/or the money that represented it.  And in the middle, there was a – wait for it - middle class that had risen from real poverty, but hadn’t attained great wealth.  This happened at least several weeks before the end of WWII.

The admonitions to take care of the poor that fill the Old Testament stand witness to this shift.  In fact, the Bible speaks of the rich and the poor as being very distinct from the intended audience of the Books.  This group that was neither rich nor poor was the “middle class.  In Biblical days, the vast majority of very wealthy people were actually the ruling class – the royalty, dictators, and high priests – many of whom had seized the wealth of those who had created it.  This actually created a fourth economic class: looters who existed only because there were wealthy producers for them to devour.

There had been a very gradual shift in the structure of human society from the days of our wood-swapper.  The middle class was not created by the rich, and it sure as shootin’ wasn’t created by any government!  It was created by poor folks who slaved and worked and saved and took risks and lifted themselves by blood, sweat, and sheer force of will.  Some of them continued on the trajectory and became wealthy. .  The rich didn’t voluntarily build up some of the poor for the purpose of creating a middle class.  The middle class was not created by gutting the rich and giving their wealth to the poor, and Obama’s statement that it was is a measure of the man’s willingness to lie through his teeth.  (Or of his sheer, jaw-dropping stupidity.)

The existence of a middle class is an indication of a healthy economy and society only insofar as its existence proves that growth is possible – that it is possible to have wealth beyond what is needed for subsistence.  The middle class is not a primary, or essential part of our society or our economy.  It is, rather, proof of the moral substance of our form of government, and its decline is presaged by the decline of that government.   “Preserving the middle class,” as our president is fond of ranting about, is absurd.  The only way to help the middle class is to leave them alone!  If one would increase the size of the middle class, one should concentrate on eliminating things that keep the poor from advancing, or, specifically, protect and promote the things that allowed a middle class to exist.

Two things, other than hard work, made the birth of a middle class possible.  One was the existence of wealth, in the first place.  Careful, now; that’s wealth, not money.  A society must be able to produce wealth sufficient to meet the primary needs of the people, and a little more for those driven to accumulate.  If a society produces no wealth, there can be no advancement from poverty.  Had there been no wealth to be gathered, what could possibly have motivated the poor to work like that?

The second thing was freedom.  Freedom allowed those with the drive, intelligence, and a measure of luck to rise above poverty.  In essence, they had someplace to go and the freedom to go there.  Had there been no freedom, those in power would certainly not have allowed anyone but themselves to have any wealth, at all.

The surest way to destroy the middle class is to destroy those two things – destroy that to which the people might aspire, and destroy their freedom to build themselves up by honest effort.  Destroying the rich will accomplish both, and we will be back in that medieval state in which the terms “rich” and “poor” are replaced with the terms “powerful” and “powerless,” with the powerless living in horrid squalor while the powerful suck the life out of them in a ghastly ritual of economic cannibalism.

The sheer, staggering moral stature of the American Republic has always been proven by the fact  that the rich and the powerful were two distinct groups.  When the statists have destroyed the rich, there will be only the powerful.  The rest of us will exist only at their pleasure.

And that, brothers and sisters, is precisely their objective.

THE GOP HAS BECOME A GANG.

We have become so jaded and cynical in the last 50 years that certain critical distinctions are very commonly dismissed or ignored, altogether.   I’d like to address two of the many.  One is the difference between leadership and manipulation, and the other is the difference between a team and a gang.

LEADERSHIP

This is not about skills or methods.  It’s a comparison of leadership to manipulation.

I don’t know how many times I’ve heard coworkers say leadership is a myth – a con game to sucker people into doing what’s good for the company.  I’ve sat with these people in some pretty decent workshops on leadership and team building and seen them tune the speaker out, pretend to read the written material, and blow the whole thing off as a bad joke.  This is partly because  there are many more really sorry workshops on these subjects, and people have just had it up to there with over-intellectualized baloney.  I get that.

In reality, though, there is a huge difference between leadership and manipulation.  Some of the mechanisms are the same, and when a person studies leadership, there is a moment when they realize they have an incredibly powerful tool - one that can be used for good or evil with equal ease, like a gun or a claw hammer.

Quite simply, leadership is getting them to do, for their own benefit, things they would not otherwise do.  Manipulation is getting people to do, for your benefit, things they would not otherwise do.

The problem is that the question of who is benefitting has been made unnecessarily confusing.

An awful lot of people have been taught an exclusive model of benefit.  That is, they can’t grasp that something could be of benefit to them and to another person, especially if that person is their employer.  The exclusive model of benefit (and that’s a term I just made up.  I don’t know if there’s another, better term.)  is the result of generations of statist influence in schools, especially colleges.  The Left has done a great job of brainwashing the American people into thinking anything that benefits a business owner will automatically screw them.  It’s the “pie” model vs. the “farm” model.   A farm can produce more and more if it is worked right, but there’s only so much pie, and a piece you get is a piece I can’t get.

Let me pose a few questions. Is it to your benefit if your employer is successful?  How about if his profits increase?  How about if they decrease?  There are no guarantees in life, but will you have a better chance of getting a raise if the company is making more money?   Will you have a better chance of getting a raise if you are contributing more to the company.  Actually, there is one guarantee: if your boss goes broke, you definitely don’t get a raise!

The objective of any business is to make money.  Professors and management consultants will tell you different, but they lie.  Of course there may be any number of secondary objectives that contribute to it, but the greatest objective of any business is to make money.

TEAMS

 

Let’s leave that lay right there for a minute and talk about objectives.  There is a specific term for an organization that has several members, each of whom plays a specific role in achieving the organization’s objectives.  That term is “a team.”  Let’s say the objective is to win football games.  Each of the 11 men on the field has a specific role to play.  Each must perform his assigned task, and stay within the rules of the game.  Because the objective is known, and each member autonomous, a leader can bring them together, motivate them, and help them channel their effort so the team wins games.  Winning is good for the individuals and for the organization - in the case of football, the school or the franchise owner.

That’s a critical point:  leadership requires an objective toward which the group can strive.  Sometimes, a leader can help the group set an objective, but leadership and objective go together.  If there is no objective – that is, if there is no real point for the group’s existence, how can anyone lead them?  To where would you lead them?  To what purpose?

As silly as it sounds, there are a great many organizations that don’t have an objective.  They have processes, or rules, but no objective.  Their sole reason for existence is to follow those processes.  Nobody knows where they are going, and nobody cares.  The only thing they care about is following those processes.  Imagine a football team with no field and no goal line.  What would they do?  How could they play?  There is actually a very good, real world example of a group that exists to follow processes with no regard to where they might end up.  Such a group is called “a gang.”

The gang requires members to wear certain garments, make certain hand signs, drive certain cars, have certain types of nicknames, scribble graffiti in specific fonts and colors, associate only with certain people, and a jillion other things.  Notice that none of these things have an objective beyond themselves.  As long as you wear the right colors, you’re cool.  Break the process, and you have a problem.  The only one who could possibly benefit beyond that is the boss; he (or she) gets the glory, the fame, the adulation, and usually first pick of the loot.  Hence, the boss of a gang is not a leader, but a manipulator.

A fixation on process to the exclusion of objective is one of the defining traits of a gang.  It makes leadership not only superfluous, but impossible.

The current version of the Republican Party is a gang.  They are fixed on following processes – wearing the right mantle, using the right phrases, sucking up to the right people – to the utter exclusion of any kind of objective.  They don’t care what happens to the country as long as they have good seats in the bus that is going over the cliff.  They are obsessed with straightening the deck chairs on the Titanic.  There may be real leaders in the party, but until the party finds an objective to pursue, we’ll never know.  And I can’t tell that they are even looking.

Rebsarge

27 Jan., 2014

COMPROMISE - A TACTIC OF LOSERS

There is an aspect of compromise that is generally overlooked, especially by those who hold compromise up as a moral imperative.  It is simply this:  If you are winning, why would you want to compromise?

Let’s define our terms here, because words really do mean things.  Compromise is NOT discussing differing opinions and selecting the best one.  It is not even discussing differing opinions and selecting the best parts of each and combining them into a much better synthesis.  These are simply rational operations.  If two people disagree on the best way to do something, and one of them realizes the other really does have the better idea and adopts it, it is NOT compromise!

Compromise is when two people hold different, or contradictory ideas.  They take some parts of one and some of the other, and produce a mongrel atrocity that hasn’t a chance in hell of working.  In economics, for example, one person might say, “The free market is the best and only solution to the unemployment problem,” and another might say, “No, the free market caused the problem; the only solution is government control of the market.”

The imperative of compromise says that each person must give away something of his own position.  The result is usually something like, “We’ll let businesses with more than 1,000 employees charge whatever they want, but smaller businesses will be controlled by the government,” or, “Instead of granting amnesty to 30 million illegals, like we want, or to none, like you want, we’ll grant it to 15 million.”   Each person must put up with something they consider thoroughly evil and unworkable.  The result is a bastardized monstrosity, and when it fails, both sides say it failed because of too much pollution from the other side.

It is precisely like arguing over the amount of rat poison to put in a pot of soup – and at this level of discussion, it doesn’t matter which side of this argument is considered rat poison.

Compromise is agreeing to be raped if the rapist will use a condom.  It is agreeing to give a robber some of your money, or a politician some of your freedom.

So.  Back to compromise as a tactic of the loser.

If you truly believe that you are right, and that you can win an argument, contest, or election, would you go to your opponent and say, “Hey, your ideas are insane bullpoop, but I want to let a little of it into my plan.”  Of course not.  If you are holding a winning hand, there’s no way you’d go out of your way to give the other guy a break, at least not on a major point of principle.

When someone calls for compromise, you know immediately that they don’t think they can win the whole thing, and are hoping to sucker you into letting them have a little bit.  Next time, they’ll get a little bit more, and a little bit more, and so on, until they’ve got the whole thing.  If they’re losing anyway, any little thing they can get is a victory for them.  Think about that.   The power held by the statists today was never once granted because they were wholly right.  They got it because the other side gave it to them, a little at a time, through compromise after compromise.  That’s right.  They have NEVER been right; they have only been canny.

Truth and right need never compromise.

Obviously, this is a two-edged sword!  If the statists have the winning hand, you better believe they won’t compromise, because they understand this business.  That is what happened with the sequester and the later shutdown.  The statists knew they could not lose in the long run because their propaganda machine would turn the entire nation against those who tried to hold the line.

To reject compromise altogether is a very brave thing.   You are saying, “It will either be my way or your way, but you’re not going to get my sanction for your idiocy by including some trivial aspect of my idea.” 

It is this courage of convictions that is so pathetically lacking in the Republican leadership.  They are scared to death of losing everything.  They honestly believe, apparently, that if we agree to eat some rat poison on issues where WE have power, the Democrats will agree to eat some when THEY have power.  Unfortunately, the Democrats know how this works, and while they will give every assurance of future poison-eating, they have no intention of actually doing it.  So we eat a little poison – we accept a little of the anti-life Democrat program – and a little more, and a little more, until one day, there is no food left, and it’s all poison.

As long as we are living with this half-assed whatever it is, the propaganda mill will keep telling people it isn’t working is because of the capitalistic pollution forced on them by those Tea Party radicals.  The people, being the result of a hundred years of compromise in education, will believe it, and vote accordingly.  The only solution is to force this nation to accept one set of ideas in its entirety.  The people will then be able to see what works and what doesn’t.

The alternative is to refuse to compromise on ANY principle.  Make them do it all their way, which will be a catastrophe, or accept it all our way.  The problem with this is that their way is not survivable, and they’ll never willingly go along with doing it all our way.  We have compromised over and over, until we have arrived at the point where no more is possible.  At the present time, the statists have the upper hand, and it looks like we’ll be trying things their way for a while.  That means, unfortunately, that they will do their best to destroy our means of ever regaining control and trying it all our way.  If they are successful in this, freedom will be banished from the world, and our children for generations to come – until He returns – will live as slaves of the drooling mob.

There are only two courses of action available to us:  to go along with whatever they drive down our throats, or to abandon the constitutional process and force the issue by a passage of arms. 

This is not a new choice.  We have never had more than these two courses.  If we reject compromise, altogether, we will be forced to live under statist tyranny or resist it by whatever means are necessary.

If we continue to accept compromise, we will be forced to live under statist tyranny until we can no longer endure it, and rise up.  But by the time we rise up, our strength will have been largely compromised away. Our chance of victory will be slim.

Rebsarge

11 Jan., 2014