Election Season is upon us, and everywhere are the markers of the two major political parties in the U.S. Everywhere, you will see the blue and the red. Everywhere, you will see the donkey and the elephant.
The elephant.
I would like to propose a change to the Republican Party visuals. I would like to replace the elephant with the wolf.
Now that sounds like a strange decision and not one that would immediately play well. After all, aren't wolves evil creatures who prey on the sick and weak? Well... that's the view of them from a herd mentality, and that's what I want to talk about today - herds and packs.
This morning, I mentioned something about a political group with a Cause and various Arguments, and my husband said, "Yeah, this reminds me of my Social Problems class in college. The professor kept saying that a Social Problem arises because the society as a whole comes to the conclusion that there is a problem. I kept saying that a Social Problem arises because a few leaders decide that it is a problem and go about convincing enough of the other people that it is a problem, whether it is or not."
I came fully awake. "You're right and your teacher was wrong, and I know why," I said.
A while ago, I came to the startling realization that human beings are pack animals by nature. I'd been following the research of one of my friends into wolves and wolf behavior, and doing some of my own research into the similarity of genetics in social behavior between humans and prairie voles. Our interests intersected, and I found a whole world of fascinating information. Humans and wolves have very similar social-behavior genetics, and naturally tend to form very similar social structures. After a while of saturating my brain with information about alphas, family packs (the naturally-formed wolf pack resembles a family tribe of an alpha, his daughters, and his daughters' mates, who include formerly-lone wolves from other packs), roles, and tactics, I made the inescapable conclusion: Humans are also pack animals, endurance hunters, and family units, just like wolves.
(And, as the part of the research that led me in this direction, humans are by nature sexually monogamous in bonded pairs. But that, and the liberal Democrat view on it, is another discussion entirely!)
Why was this such a startling conclusion? Just like my husband's Social Problems teacher, the education system is saturated with teachers and administrators teaching and reinforcing the idea that humans are herd animals. Children in school are treated like herd animals, and expected to act like herd animals. Examples of human behavior are often likened to herd behavior, even when the full story of any given incident indicates differently. We even use terms like "sheeple" to refer to "The Masses"... Wait, I've heard that term before. Yes, I have, and so have you. It came out of early socialist philosophy. The very idea of a Communist Paradise requires a type of herd mentality and, since humans do not naturally work together in herds the way that herd animals do, all actual implementations of Communism have required a "shepherd", a member treated as if he is of a different species (some animals are more equal than others), who is determined to be qualified to shove the herd when it isn't 'naturally congregating' in the right direction.
This goes all the way down to government-run healthcare, in which Former President Obama's famous line to Jane Strum about her elderly mother, vital and strong-hearted, would be better off with the pill than the pacemaker. "Devil take the hindmost". Well, to be more accurate, in my part of the country, the hindmost is generally taken by the wolves. The exception is The Children, who are protected not because they are weak, but because they are the future of the herd.
Now herd mentality actually works for herd animals. They will stampede together when the decision is made. They will line up together to protect the young when that decision is made. If a herd did not actually come to a herd decision through their herd behavior, they would flee wildly in all directions, trampling even their young, or refuse to stand up against an enemy that the entire herd can drive off together... kind of like humans in cities, being pushed into herd behavior and not being able to synthesize it. For this reason people are trained, in an emergency, to point at someone and say, "You call 911" instead of hollering, "Someone call 911!" which, in a herd, may result in many people calling, but, in a group of bystanders, all too often leads to everyone leaving the job to someone else. When you tell a specific person to call 911, a specific other person to direct traffic, etc., you may not wind up with a fully elegant solution, as you don't know which of the strangers are better or worse at the roles you are giving them. You will, however, always wind up with a better situation by organizing them into an impromptu pack (that is what you are doing) than leaving them as a disorganized non-herd.
Pack mentality among wolves incorporates a sense of what we would call 'natural rights', in which each member of the pack has a certain level of autonomy and a structure of authority to handle matters that cannot be handled individually. They put up with this because they can get more, more meat, better homes, more security than they can alone.
Now unlike Democrats, Republicans favor a governmental structure in which the top parts of the government are limited in power, because human beings work better in a series of packs, the leaders of those packs coming together to form structures that only handle what can't be done within the packs themselves, just as the individual only yields what authority he must to do in within the pack what he cannot do as a lone wolf. They tend to be willing to put up with a little more structure and authority than the Libertarians do. But they do not have the mentality that human beings are a very large herd which must be pushed about by a shepherd, as the Democrats do.
So when the Democrats like to say, "Wolves, eh? Wolves take the hindmost," what can we point out? In a wolf pack, the 'hindmost' is still a subordinate in the pack. Have you ever seen overindulgent people with their (often small-breed) dogs? The dogs are a holy terror and they give in to every little doggy whim, because they 'just want their darlings to be happy'. I am reminded of Democrats promising their "masses" every little bit of food, shelter, healthcare, bread, and circuses, delivered to them for free and to make them happy. A dog (by taxonomy merely a subordinate wolf in a human pack) who is treated this way will become fearful and aggressive. He develops anxiety issues and winds up a very unhappy, unhealthy pup. What a subordinate wolf needs desperately is to know that he has a place in the pack, to be given a role, a job, and to know that he has received a portion as large as it is because of the health of the pack. The "hindmost" in the pack needs what Republicans promise - workfare and an improved economy in which he can take up his place and feel secure in his pack.
Consider this in your own lives, taking it out of politics for a moment. Consider your place of employment, your gatherings for hobbies, your weekend activity groups, even your momentary inadvertent social structures, like the passengers of an airplane, the other people in a movie theater, the crowd at the scene of an accident. Are they acting as a pack or a herd? If they can be chivvied into an impromptu pack, will the experience be better for everyone?
And when you hear the grand speeches of the politicians, ask yourself: Are they treating us like herd animals or pack animals? What do their wordings and their programs imply?
Friday, September 7, 2018
Wednesday, August 22, 2018
Kneeling for the flag: A different perspective
Here we go again. Football season is nearly upon us. With it comes a batch of politics that the fans, in general, do not want. Attendance is lower. Ticket sales are cheaper. Pretty soon the players who are protesting their unfairly bad treatment at the hands of their customers are going to find that their customers aren't paying enough money to give them those multi-million dollar salaries.
Ok, that was a bit of a dig at the process, and perhaps an unfair one, considering the point I've come to present today. We seem to have two sides to this issue. One side says that these players are doing something utterly necessary and justifiable, because of the problems that those who share their ethnicity face every day in this country due merely to being of that ethnicity. The other side says that no amount of problems justify disrespect to the country itself and its national symbols, as if the players are protesting, not their problems, but the very fact that America exists. They also may downplay or deny any problems being faced by this ethnicity and point to the powerful and wealthy football players themselves as proof that these one-percenters have nothing to complain about.
But let's step to the side for a bit and look at this through a different lens.
There's no denying that there is still injustice for black people, particularly black men, in this country today. A very carefully-done bit of research shows that they are less likely than whites to be shot by police (the very thing that the football players mention the most) in equivalent situations. However, in equivalent situations, police use unnecessary force on blacks, especially black men, more than upon whites. They are more likely to be searched, more likely to be stopped, and more likely to be treated poorly when they are stopped. Now many whites have one, maybe two "this policeman was an idiot" stories to gripe about. Blacks have more, and I can see how a tipping point is reached in which "this policeman was an idiot" becomes "policemen themselves have it out for me".
I can understand this because one of my great-grandfathers lived the same life, only worse. Because of his ethnicity, he lived in the poorest parts of town. Because of his ethnicity, he faced violence as a daily possibility. In a world that was getting electricity into regular homes, he lived in a dwelling no more sophisticated than an African tribal hut. He and his family often lacked for the simplest necessities - food, clothing - and faced, at best, a level of threat from others that was similar to the worst threat faced by blacks from the KKK. Even more so, his was the first generation that, due to government reforms, was actually permitted to go into town and learn a trade so that he could actually have a job; his parents worked very hard to sell a few meager supplies here and there, but were not allowed to be actual legal employees, due to and only due to their ethnicity.
Now that's notable. The country was changing. The threats were beginning to wane. The opportunities were starting to come in. Things were improving. But he wanted more and better, and he started engaging in protests against the government. Instead of working within the system to secure further liberties, he chose to speak against the system and wish it to be changed to a new one. Like the football players' message - and if they want to convey a different message, they really need to find a different method - he wanted a change of government rather than for the government to use its existing powers to bring about the change he wanted.
Ok, granted, I don't know to which extent this specific man wanted this specific goal. But I can tell you that, whether he wanted it or not, he got it - and the same people who are pushing the black football players' protest got into control in his own country. The same ideology that leverage black racial struggles into fuel for the revolutionary fire leveraged his racial struggles into fuel for their own revolutionary fire, and he twigged on very quickly (a survival trait, in this case) as to the purpose and eventual fate of fuel.
He fled Eastern Europe, Russian territory, for the U.S. right 'round the neighborhood of 1905.
I'm not going to praise the Russian Imperial Government. I don't have a strong favorable or unfavorable opinion of Tsar Nicholas II, though I question whether his children really deserved to be hunted down and shot in the dirt like dogs. I'm not even sure if the rights my great-grandfather was looking for would have been attainable through the system, though I have to say that it looked like they were on the right track. But I can say this: the Bolshevik Communism that replaced it had no inherent human rights (even during periods when the government temporarily conceded privileges that we in America would call 'rights'), and had no love for Jews. My great-grandfather and his people were tools, and fools, for a political system that didn't care about them beyond what could be profited from their blood, sweat, and tears.
It is from that perspective that I see the football players kneel. I don't try to minimize the struggles of their people or claim that they have no grievance. (Though I include a few grievances that they seem uninterested in, like the government funding of an organization originally created to target their babies for death due to despising their ethnicity.) Neither do I believe that their particular form of protest is good and honest and totally justifiable. I believe they have the freedom in this great country to engage in their protest, just as they have the freedom, should they choose to leverage it, to use this system to correct the problems they face. My issue with their behavior is that they are targeting the system itself, and looking for changes that remind me strongly of my great-grandfather, the tool, the fool, for a political party that neither favors nor esteems them.
About ten years after my great-grandfather fled to New York City with little more than what he could carry, in hopes of avoiding the fire that would have burned him up, the young woman who would become my great-grandmother joined him. Her family had actually been, despite her shared ethnicity, as wealthy, powerful, and esteemed as those football players who are kneeling on the field. She had learned quickly what the football players will learn if they succeed in their protest; the new system is no kinder to them than to the people for whom they kneel.
Ok, that was a bit of a dig at the process, and perhaps an unfair one, considering the point I've come to present today. We seem to have two sides to this issue. One side says that these players are doing something utterly necessary and justifiable, because of the problems that those who share their ethnicity face every day in this country due merely to being of that ethnicity. The other side says that no amount of problems justify disrespect to the country itself and its national symbols, as if the players are protesting, not their problems, but the very fact that America exists. They also may downplay or deny any problems being faced by this ethnicity and point to the powerful and wealthy football players themselves as proof that these one-percenters have nothing to complain about.
But let's step to the side for a bit and look at this through a different lens.
There's no denying that there is still injustice for black people, particularly black men, in this country today. A very carefully-done bit of research shows that they are less likely than whites to be shot by police (the very thing that the football players mention the most) in equivalent situations. However, in equivalent situations, police use unnecessary force on blacks, especially black men, more than upon whites. They are more likely to be searched, more likely to be stopped, and more likely to be treated poorly when they are stopped. Now many whites have one, maybe two "this policeman was an idiot" stories to gripe about. Blacks have more, and I can see how a tipping point is reached in which "this policeman was an idiot" becomes "policemen themselves have it out for me".
I can understand this because one of my great-grandfathers lived the same life, only worse. Because of his ethnicity, he lived in the poorest parts of town. Because of his ethnicity, he faced violence as a daily possibility. In a world that was getting electricity into regular homes, he lived in a dwelling no more sophisticated than an African tribal hut. He and his family often lacked for the simplest necessities - food, clothing - and faced, at best, a level of threat from others that was similar to the worst threat faced by blacks from the KKK. Even more so, his was the first generation that, due to government reforms, was actually permitted to go into town and learn a trade so that he could actually have a job; his parents worked very hard to sell a few meager supplies here and there, but were not allowed to be actual legal employees, due to and only due to their ethnicity.
Now that's notable. The country was changing. The threats were beginning to wane. The opportunities were starting to come in. Things were improving. But he wanted more and better, and he started engaging in protests against the government. Instead of working within the system to secure further liberties, he chose to speak against the system and wish it to be changed to a new one. Like the football players' message - and if they want to convey a different message, they really need to find a different method - he wanted a change of government rather than for the government to use its existing powers to bring about the change he wanted.
Ok, granted, I don't know to which extent this specific man wanted this specific goal. But I can tell you that, whether he wanted it or not, he got it - and the same people who are pushing the black football players' protest got into control in his own country. The same ideology that leverage black racial struggles into fuel for the revolutionary fire leveraged his racial struggles into fuel for their own revolutionary fire, and he twigged on very quickly (a survival trait, in this case) as to the purpose and eventual fate of fuel.
He fled Eastern Europe, Russian territory, for the U.S. right 'round the neighborhood of 1905.
I'm not going to praise the Russian Imperial Government. I don't have a strong favorable or unfavorable opinion of Tsar Nicholas II, though I question whether his children really deserved to be hunted down and shot in the dirt like dogs. I'm not even sure if the rights my great-grandfather was looking for would have been attainable through the system, though I have to say that it looked like they were on the right track. But I can say this: the Bolshevik Communism that replaced it had no inherent human rights (even during periods when the government temporarily conceded privileges that we in America would call 'rights'), and had no love for Jews. My great-grandfather and his people were tools, and fools, for a political system that didn't care about them beyond what could be profited from their blood, sweat, and tears.
It is from that perspective that I see the football players kneel. I don't try to minimize the struggles of their people or claim that they have no grievance. (Though I include a few grievances that they seem uninterested in, like the government funding of an organization originally created to target their babies for death due to despising their ethnicity.) Neither do I believe that their particular form of protest is good and honest and totally justifiable. I believe they have the freedom in this great country to engage in their protest, just as they have the freedom, should they choose to leverage it, to use this system to correct the problems they face. My issue with their behavior is that they are targeting the system itself, and looking for changes that remind me strongly of my great-grandfather, the tool, the fool, for a political party that neither favors nor esteems them.
About ten years after my great-grandfather fled to New York City with little more than what he could carry, in hopes of avoiding the fire that would have burned him up, the young woman who would become my great-grandmother joined him. Her family had actually been, despite her shared ethnicity, as wealthy, powerful, and esteemed as those football players who are kneeling on the field. She had learned quickly what the football players will learn if they succeed in their protest; the new system is no kinder to them than to the people for whom they kneel.
Monday, August 13, 2018
Conservatism and Slippery Slopes
It took some doing to figure out what to title this thought. After a while of thinking it through, though, I realized that a repeating theme through this post is going to be the "slippery slope". I am going to say some things, and people are probably going to initially react in horror. That's because of "slippery slopes" that are etched in our own brain. You use certain words - liberals like to call them 'code words' - and people who don't understand you are going to slide right into a set of well-worn tracks and assume your meaning based on the continued motion of well-trodden path. I'd like my readers to take a moment to shake themselves loose of the well-trodden paths, and not assume the meaning of my statements until I explain them.
First statement: The more I deal with liberals and children, the more I understand why not everybody is going to Heaven.
Yeah, I started out with the inflammatory-looking one on purpose, just to wake everybody up. I want to make it excruciatingly clear that I am not talking about sin. I am not making any particular person out to be evil. I could already hear the cries of "I work a job and I am nice to people and how dare you say I don't deserve" or whatnot. Yeah, cut that out, ok? I don't deserve Heaven. It isn't because I'm some sort of rotten and mean person who is worse than you. It's because I could be better than you and still not deserve it. This has nothing to do with whether you are a nice person, or even a good person. It has to do with heart and will.
Here's a second statement to add to the first one. Both Christianity and American Conservatism require by their very nature enough hearts and minds willing to follow it from their own free will.
The reason for this is that you can't force someone to follow a philosophy except by means of an oppressive authoritarian dictatorship. This is something liberals do understand all too well; it is why virtually every implementation of socialism thus far has been authoritarian. I'm about to hear the "Social Democrats" fuss at me over certain European countries that do not meet some sort of mystical requirement for being full-out Communist. Knock it off. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must know that "Social Democrat" is a form of socialism that is only halfway implemented, and that the areas in which it is implemented do indeed easily meet the definition of "Communist". I'm going to get back to that thought in a moment.
Now I mentioned Christianity and American Conservatism for a reason. Both of them spring from the same root. To be more clear, Conservatism sprang from a period of reformation of Christianity, and Christianity sprang from the root of the One God, previously known by the world as the Hebrew God, and now known to be open to all takers. This is important, because this is the source of my point: To truly grasp and follow either, you have to be willing to do so.
You may have noticed - I certainly have - that a great many political topics have seemed to become needlessly complicated. So many of the minutiae being argued about nowadays seems blindly simple to the uninvolved. So many easy solutions lie by the wayside. This is because liberals are trying to rules-lawyer their way to forcing us to acknowledge that they have some sort of right to what they want. This in turn forces people to go on the defensive and enact laws meant to prevent authoritarianism, but ironically increase it themselves, pushing the government into places where it shouldn't have had to go. The only way you can force someone to follow a philosophy is by means of an oppressive authoritarian dictatorship.
I've mentioned in a previous post that I believe there to have been two Civil Rights movements. In the first, Democrat governments tried to get the government involved in "race" by Jim Crow laws in the South. In the second, Democrat politicians tried to gain power and get the government involved in "race" by Reverse Discrimination laws on the Federal level. Though you will never hear me disparage the overthrow of a single Jim Crow law, I must say that the true winners of the entire era were the Democrats. Considering disparate levels of fatherlessness, joblessness, jail population, poverty etc. we can hardly say that the true winners were actually the blacks. Like I said, liberals understand that the only way to force a philosophy on someone is by authoritarian dictatorship; their goal was to get the government involved in race, which is why the leadership was able to so quickly switch their allegiances from one race to another.
I believe that this is a very important point to make because there are elements in the Republican Party who have taken on that liberal point, muddying the actual definition of Conservatism. Their ardent support of President Trump, whom I do not oppose - this is not anti-Trump sentiment being expressed here - has confused people, especially since he ran as a Conservative. That is at the heart of why I, in a "safely" blue state, voted Johnson. (Before anybody jumps on me for this, the election results bore out what I had suspected; all of Johnson's votes in my state would not have defeated Hillary had they been Trump's votes instead. Sad to say, that's the way it was.) I'd also like to specifically call out Dominionism, which is at times conflated with Conservatism. Dominionism - trust me, I know what I am talking about here - is not a Conservative philosophy. It harkens back to pre-Reformation Christianity, in which unwise people violated the spirit of God's Laws and the message of Salvation by falling back upon that bastion of liberalism: oppressive authoritarian dictatorship. (Granted, even so, they were gentler than most... the more Biblical you get, the more you are protected against it, hence the rise of the Reformation in the first place.)
Back to my core point, to make sure it is understood. At the core of Conservatism is an understanding that we should hold to principles of guarded liberty, personal responsibility, and a very real sense of our government as something that must be under our control: not only for the people, but also of the people and by the people in a very real sense. We must be active individuals in our homes, in our workplaces, in our communities as well as in our government (as voters, for most of us), careful, and self-disciplined, because a government of an undisciplined people will never fail to establish its own discipline over them, and that is how the authoritarian dictatorship starts.
I do believe that the "silent majority", found in every corner of the country from the much-discussed 'heartland' to the simple New England farmer types from which I partly descended to the grateful Cuban refugees to the black families who still remember the pre-Reverse Discrimination mandate to be articulate, clean, and responsible, are willing and able to return to a time when our salvation depended more on our personal lives than our Federal laws.
Now I said I was going to get back to a point about the Social Democrats, and I'd like to close with it. I've been linking Conservatism and Christianity throughout this post. I do not want to make the same mistake as the Dominionists. I do not believe Conservatism to be especially blessed by God in the same way as God blessed the Nation of Israel or anointed King Saul, whom later-King David refused to cut down even when Saul was corrupt and oppressive in his later years. I do not believe Conservatism to be the only Christian-derived form of government, nor do I believe it to be necessary in any way to be a Christian, though I confess I suspect that Christians will find themselves living it in their personal lives no matter what their political affiliations. Conservatism is a derivation, a lesser production, a philosophy meant to address the here-and-now, and it is not especially favored by God aside from the natural benefits of working alongside the laws of nature rather than against.
I could picture some sort of unusually eloquent and gentle-thinking Social Democrat asking me, "Perhaps you might think the same thing of this philosophy as well? You do want to make it clear that Conservatism can be derived from Christianity without leading to an oppressive authoritarian theocracy. Think of Social Democracy in the same way; it is derived from socialism, but it is not going to lead to full-on Communism." To that, I would like to return to the concept of the slippery slope. You start at a point and fall into well-worn tracks that take you off the very edge of the precipice. In Conservatism, particularly American Constitutional Conservatism, there are a set of Human Rights very clearly enumerated. These are stops, barriers between us and an authoritarian theocracy. How firm are they? Whether any given Conservative personally believes in God or not, those who set up the barriers understood them to have been fixed by a Supreme Authority, quite out of their hands and well beyond their 'pay grade', and so the philosophy demands that they be treated that way whether you are a Christian or not. This, then, is the question to ask the Social Democrats: Where are your stops? What are your stops? Who laid them down, who keeps them steady, and under what circumstances could you violate them? In the area of health care, as we have seen with cases like Alfie Evans and Charlie Gard, the part of the country that follows Communism does so to the point where that particular country's government has the power of life and death over innocent citizens. So what *can't* Social Democrats allow the government to do, and why?
Or are the stops nothing more and nothing less than the current will of the people in charge, to be kept, discarded, violated, or worshiped at their desire?
First statement: The more I deal with liberals and children, the more I understand why not everybody is going to Heaven.
Yeah, I started out with the inflammatory-looking one on purpose, just to wake everybody up. I want to make it excruciatingly clear that I am not talking about sin. I am not making any particular person out to be evil. I could already hear the cries of "I work a job and I am nice to people and how dare you say I don't deserve" or whatnot. Yeah, cut that out, ok? I don't deserve Heaven. It isn't because I'm some sort of rotten and mean person who is worse than you. It's because I could be better than you and still not deserve it. This has nothing to do with whether you are a nice person, or even a good person. It has to do with heart and will.
Here's a second statement to add to the first one. Both Christianity and American Conservatism require by their very nature enough hearts and minds willing to follow it from their own free will.
The reason for this is that you can't force someone to follow a philosophy except by means of an oppressive authoritarian dictatorship. This is something liberals do understand all too well; it is why virtually every implementation of socialism thus far has been authoritarian. I'm about to hear the "Social Democrats" fuss at me over certain European countries that do not meet some sort of mystical requirement for being full-out Communist. Knock it off. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must know that "Social Democrat" is a form of socialism that is only halfway implemented, and that the areas in which it is implemented do indeed easily meet the definition of "Communist". I'm going to get back to that thought in a moment.
Now I mentioned Christianity and American Conservatism for a reason. Both of them spring from the same root. To be more clear, Conservatism sprang from a period of reformation of Christianity, and Christianity sprang from the root of the One God, previously known by the world as the Hebrew God, and now known to be open to all takers. This is important, because this is the source of my point: To truly grasp and follow either, you have to be willing to do so.
You may have noticed - I certainly have - that a great many political topics have seemed to become needlessly complicated. So many of the minutiae being argued about nowadays seems blindly simple to the uninvolved. So many easy solutions lie by the wayside. This is because liberals are trying to rules-lawyer their way to forcing us to acknowledge that they have some sort of right to what they want. This in turn forces people to go on the defensive and enact laws meant to prevent authoritarianism, but ironically increase it themselves, pushing the government into places where it shouldn't have had to go. The only way you can force someone to follow a philosophy is by means of an oppressive authoritarian dictatorship.
I've mentioned in a previous post that I believe there to have been two Civil Rights movements. In the first, Democrat governments tried to get the government involved in "race" by Jim Crow laws in the South. In the second, Democrat politicians tried to gain power and get the government involved in "race" by Reverse Discrimination laws on the Federal level. Though you will never hear me disparage the overthrow of a single Jim Crow law, I must say that the true winners of the entire era were the Democrats. Considering disparate levels of fatherlessness, joblessness, jail population, poverty etc. we can hardly say that the true winners were actually the blacks. Like I said, liberals understand that the only way to force a philosophy on someone is by authoritarian dictatorship; their goal was to get the government involved in race, which is why the leadership was able to so quickly switch their allegiances from one race to another.
I believe that this is a very important point to make because there are elements in the Republican Party who have taken on that liberal point, muddying the actual definition of Conservatism. Their ardent support of President Trump, whom I do not oppose - this is not anti-Trump sentiment being expressed here - has confused people, especially since he ran as a Conservative. That is at the heart of why I, in a "safely" blue state, voted Johnson. (Before anybody jumps on me for this, the election results bore out what I had suspected; all of Johnson's votes in my state would not have defeated Hillary had they been Trump's votes instead. Sad to say, that's the way it was.) I'd also like to specifically call out Dominionism, which is at times conflated with Conservatism. Dominionism - trust me, I know what I am talking about here - is not a Conservative philosophy. It harkens back to pre-Reformation Christianity, in which unwise people violated the spirit of God's Laws and the message of Salvation by falling back upon that bastion of liberalism: oppressive authoritarian dictatorship. (Granted, even so, they were gentler than most... the more Biblical you get, the more you are protected against it, hence the rise of the Reformation in the first place.)
Back to my core point, to make sure it is understood. At the core of Conservatism is an understanding that we should hold to principles of guarded liberty, personal responsibility, and a very real sense of our government as something that must be under our control: not only for the people, but also of the people and by the people in a very real sense. We must be active individuals in our homes, in our workplaces, in our communities as well as in our government (as voters, for most of us), careful, and self-disciplined, because a government of an undisciplined people will never fail to establish its own discipline over them, and that is how the authoritarian dictatorship starts.
I do believe that the "silent majority", found in every corner of the country from the much-discussed 'heartland' to the simple New England farmer types from which I partly descended to the grateful Cuban refugees to the black families who still remember the pre-Reverse Discrimination mandate to be articulate, clean, and responsible, are willing and able to return to a time when our salvation depended more on our personal lives than our Federal laws.
Now I said I was going to get back to a point about the Social Democrats, and I'd like to close with it. I've been linking Conservatism and Christianity throughout this post. I do not want to make the same mistake as the Dominionists. I do not believe Conservatism to be especially blessed by God in the same way as God blessed the Nation of Israel or anointed King Saul, whom later-King David refused to cut down even when Saul was corrupt and oppressive in his later years. I do not believe Conservatism to be the only Christian-derived form of government, nor do I believe it to be necessary in any way to be a Christian, though I confess I suspect that Christians will find themselves living it in their personal lives no matter what their political affiliations. Conservatism is a derivation, a lesser production, a philosophy meant to address the here-and-now, and it is not especially favored by God aside from the natural benefits of working alongside the laws of nature rather than against.
I could picture some sort of unusually eloquent and gentle-thinking Social Democrat asking me, "Perhaps you might think the same thing of this philosophy as well? You do want to make it clear that Conservatism can be derived from Christianity without leading to an oppressive authoritarian theocracy. Think of Social Democracy in the same way; it is derived from socialism, but it is not going to lead to full-on Communism." To that, I would like to return to the concept of the slippery slope. You start at a point and fall into well-worn tracks that take you off the very edge of the precipice. In Conservatism, particularly American Constitutional Conservatism, there are a set of Human Rights very clearly enumerated. These are stops, barriers between us and an authoritarian theocracy. How firm are they? Whether any given Conservative personally believes in God or not, those who set up the barriers understood them to have been fixed by a Supreme Authority, quite out of their hands and well beyond their 'pay grade', and so the philosophy demands that they be treated that way whether you are a Christian or not. This, then, is the question to ask the Social Democrats: Where are your stops? What are your stops? Who laid them down, who keeps them steady, and under what circumstances could you violate them? In the area of health care, as we have seen with cases like Alfie Evans and Charlie Gard, the part of the country that follows Communism does so to the point where that particular country's government has the power of life and death over innocent citizens. So what *can't* Social Democrats allow the government to do, and why?
Or are the stops nothing more and nothing less than the current will of the people in charge, to be kept, discarded, violated, or worshiped at their desire?
Thursday, July 12, 2018
Immigration and Health Care - what can we afford?
This is, as usual with me, kind of a sideways look at the issues that people have been bringing up lately, mostly in liberal forums and among liberal friends' facebook posts. The issues might seem only tangentially related, but, when I look at them together, I find an interesting set of connections. These issues are illegal immigration (specifically, open borders), and single-payer health care.
What connected the two for me was a series of articles (isn't it funny how each day seems to have a 'theme', in which articles show up in multiple disparate feeds and sources?) about the struggle that much of Western Europe is having with their health care systems, and the effect that an increased flow of refugees has had upon them. In parts of Sweden, overcrowding and a lack of funding has actually led health care groups to start giving rural families lessons on how to deliver a baby by themselves.
Now, Western Europe is learning a lesson that I learned in childhood. I did not grow up in a wealthy family. Actually, I grew up in a family that bounced back and forth between working poor and lower-middle class. At some times, we were actually quite poor by U.S. standards. We never lacked food, shelter, clothing, or medical care, however, and we actually had a fair number of nice toys. How did we do it? My mother prioritized, and she passed down that skill to us. In fact, I learned to prioritize, myself, as a child, for the toys that I wanted. I knew for a fact that I could not have all of the toys I wanted. I taught myself to think about what I wanted, check the prices, consider our family situation, and place all of my energies towards begging specifically for the subset of toys where "they can afford it" crossed with "I want it most". I found that, if I did that, I would pretty reliably wind up with what I wanted most on my birthday and Christmas, and I could build up my toybox over time on these principles. This served me well when I started earning my own money.
What happens when we look at the issues of immigration and single-payer together? Actually, I was able to come up with a chart that gave me an interesting view of the political philosophies and their response to these two issues. It is doubly interesting when I view these two issues as mutually exclusive in that we simply cannot, as a country and a society, afford both of them.
Conservatives oppose both open borders and single-payer health care. Why choose between two burdens upon the society?
Libertarians (large-L on purpose, as libertarians differ widely and overlap with conservatives) are in favor of open borders, but oppose single-payer health care. This is generally on principle, though some have tried to explain how it would still work when reality is applied.
Moderates want to kind of half-do both things; open up immigration further without inadvertently letting in the gang members and human traffickers, and have government-paid/government-involved health care without making it an actual universal social welfare program. As is usual for treading the very line of a fence without falling to either side, it's a very delicate balancing point with a very narrow margin for error.
Liberals want to do both, Western Europe be hanged (unless they're using it as an example that is, at this point, largely imaginary).
Now here's the interesting part. From what I've seen and read, there's a new (tiny) faction to consider, the one that actually deserves the badly misapplied label "Alt Right". And their stance is distinct from the rest. They seem to approve single-payer, but oppose open borders; in fact, they seem to oppose all immigration and all citizenship by people who are not white. Ironically, the system they desire is like the one that is breaking down in Sweden. Conservatives have oft celebrated the fact that our system works best in our country because of the great diversity of peoples and cultures; the Alt Right would sacrifice diversity in favor of socialism, while the Liberals seem determined against all notions of reality to force both to happen.
What connected the two for me was a series of articles (isn't it funny how each day seems to have a 'theme', in which articles show up in multiple disparate feeds and sources?) about the struggle that much of Western Europe is having with their health care systems, and the effect that an increased flow of refugees has had upon them. In parts of Sweden, overcrowding and a lack of funding has actually led health care groups to start giving rural families lessons on how to deliver a baby by themselves.
Now, Western Europe is learning a lesson that I learned in childhood. I did not grow up in a wealthy family. Actually, I grew up in a family that bounced back and forth between working poor and lower-middle class. At some times, we were actually quite poor by U.S. standards. We never lacked food, shelter, clothing, or medical care, however, and we actually had a fair number of nice toys. How did we do it? My mother prioritized, and she passed down that skill to us. In fact, I learned to prioritize, myself, as a child, for the toys that I wanted. I knew for a fact that I could not have all of the toys I wanted. I taught myself to think about what I wanted, check the prices, consider our family situation, and place all of my energies towards begging specifically for the subset of toys where "they can afford it" crossed with "I want it most". I found that, if I did that, I would pretty reliably wind up with what I wanted most on my birthday and Christmas, and I could build up my toybox over time on these principles. This served me well when I started earning my own money.
What happens when we look at the issues of immigration and single-payer together? Actually, I was able to come up with a chart that gave me an interesting view of the political philosophies and their response to these two issues. It is doubly interesting when I view these two issues as mutually exclusive in that we simply cannot, as a country and a society, afford both of them.
Conservatives oppose both open borders and single-payer health care. Why choose between two burdens upon the society?
Libertarians (large-L on purpose, as libertarians differ widely and overlap with conservatives) are in favor of open borders, but oppose single-payer health care. This is generally on principle, though some have tried to explain how it would still work when reality is applied.
Moderates want to kind of half-do both things; open up immigration further without inadvertently letting in the gang members and human traffickers, and have government-paid/government-involved health care without making it an actual universal social welfare program. As is usual for treading the very line of a fence without falling to either side, it's a very delicate balancing point with a very narrow margin for error.
Liberals want to do both, Western Europe be hanged (unless they're using it as an example that is, at this point, largely imaginary).
Now here's the interesting part. From what I've seen and read, there's a new (tiny) faction to consider, the one that actually deserves the badly misapplied label "Alt Right". And their stance is distinct from the rest. They seem to approve single-payer, but oppose open borders; in fact, they seem to oppose all immigration and all citizenship by people who are not white. Ironically, the system they desire is like the one that is breaking down in Sweden. Conservatives have oft celebrated the fact that our system works best in our country because of the great diversity of peoples and cultures; the Alt Right would sacrifice diversity in favor of socialism, while the Liberals seem determined against all notions of reality to force both to happen.
Tuesday, March 13, 2018
The Other Path to a Living Wage
Living Wage.
This seems to be the new socialist bugaboo. I do call it socialist, even though its implementation may be more fascist in appearance. I have said this before: Fascism and Communism are two fingers on the same hand of Socialism, though one may be purer than the other. In the former, the government controls the people through the companies, while in the latter, the government forbids the companies and controls the people directly. There is very little difference; in Fascism, the government forbears the existence of the companies for the time being, while in a free market economy, the government is limited in the ways that it is allowed to control them.
Economics lesson aside, let's break into the actual thought. The usual suspects are now calling for a government-enforced "living wage", the ability of any job to support a spouse and family. They like to claim that this was quite possible and expected back "before all this deregulation", as if the 1950's may as well have been lived under the hammer and sickle or something. Frankly, I'm pretty sure they don't know what they're talking about. But let's take a moment and ask the question: Why are so many jobs no longer offering "a living wage"? There are a few reasons that we can note before stepping into this one. In the 1950's, a "living wage" supported a smaller home with fewer amenities, fewer electronic devices with monthly plans, fewer restaurant meals, and smaller wardrobes. If you were to study the time period and attempt to live only with the amount of stuff and amenities that they had, eating what they ate and owning the clothing that they owned, you might find that a minimum wage job would in fact provide your needs. But let's set that, also, aside for a moment and ask this question:
Are corporations not offering a "living wage" because they are already subsidizing it via government fiat?
A worker costs an employer a great deal. Government-required taxes and benefits alone may increase the cost of an employee a minimum of 25% and maximum (more common in larger businesses, which have additional mandates that small businesses do not) of 40% above the employee's base salary. Many of these 'benefits', like 'health insurance' (itself becoming increasingly expensive and useless), would have been paid by the worker back in the days of the Living Wage.
On the other side, we have corporate and personal income taxes. Why did I say "corporate and personal"? Many companies nowadays are taking advantage of the S-Corp filing status, and filing as if they are persons. That lowers the bewildering complexity of the process and may lower the tax rate. On the other hand, someone who makes $35K/year may be paying taxes on his company's $120K/year profits instead. When we talk about government income from employers, we need to include them. All in all, the top 1% of income earners pay nearly half of personal income taxes, the top 20% pay 85% (the bottom 60% pay 2%), and many, perhaps even most, of those are S-Corps rather than individuals like Elon Musk or Bill Gates. The average S-Corp tax rate is 31%, with a range of 19-35%. (Note: That information is pre-Trump and so is at least slightly out-of-date. But hopefully it gets some thoughts stirring.)
Including all Federal spending, over half goes to social welfare programs, and state spending further adds to the bundle. A cursory look 'round state budget pie charts shows that welfare spending seems to run about the 20-40% range in general. Where am I going with this?
The average low-paying job is indeed already paying a Living Wage.
How can this be? Well, in the 1950's, he would do it by giving you a paycheck with which you could purchase all that you need. Nowadays, he does it the same way the government does for nonworking families. He pays for your health insurance, pays for a fair bit of your tax burden (did you know he pays half your Social Security tax? Try to work for yourself and you'll quickly find that out!), and pays the government to give you food stamps, heating assistance, rent assistance, free school lunches for your children, possibly free medical care for your children as well (CHIP/SCHIP), and, as your salary, a small cash allowance with which to obtain that which he and the government through his taxes have not provided.
Indeed, we see that this provision is sufficient, as there are workers in California under an increased minimum wage who have asked for fewer hours in order to preserve the same Living Wage.
Now's the part where everyone starts accusing me of saying that the poor have it easy, that they are freeloaders, that I don't care if babies starve, yadda yadda. Let's see who can continue to keep an open mind and listen to what I have to say about that. This is not by any means an ideal situation, and the poor do struggle. The reason they struggle, however, is not due to lack of funding. It is because the method of that funding is almost the least efficient and least effective manner possible. I say "almost" only because full-on Communism exists in the world, and it is by far the least useful way to handle wealth.
Raising children has helped me to remember and think about what it was like to be a child. People look back to that time period fondly, thinking of it as being idyllic, because "the world was less complicated and more safe". Indeed, when an adult controls your life, you have less responsibility and you don't have to worry as much about the dangers that still surround you. You still have a chance of being hungry, of being homeless, but in that event the adult will tell you what to do. What people forget is the loss of freedom. Sure, there's a measure of it if you live in a suburban area and own a bicycle. Other than that, though... You still have to ask if you can go to a friend's house. You have to ask if you want to visit a museum. You have to accept the food they give you; your parents determine your diet. You are severely restricted in how you can earn income and how much money you will have. And, of course, your school takes up much more of your life than you would have ever remembered; your precious memories of freedom and fun were most likely snipped out of a plethora of weekends and holidays (the parts that don't involve mandatory visits and customs) and stitched together out of a pair of decades.
Well, the current method of providing a Living Wage is much like being a child. Someone else controls how often/much your house receives to heat, how much you spend on food, which doctors you see, and what your child eats for lunch every school day. This is great, if you live the exact lifestyle that these social programs were optimized for. The problem is that it does narrow you down into a specific form of lifestyle; a purely cash form of a Living Wage allows you to spend more on your housing and less on your cell phone, or more on your clothing and less on your groceries. It can be very, very frustrating to need money for one budget category and be blocked by the Government from simply doing what the middle class takes for granted and transferring it from another category.
What is the answer?
The obvious answer to me is to reduce and reform the welfare system, and with it the tax system. Every reduction in welfare spending must be paired with an equal reduction in employer taxes. I was hesitant to suggest this before, because there must be a time period, I thought, in which wages were still low and people would be hurting. However, the quick responses of businesses in handing out bonuses as they began to raise wages after Trump's tax cut surprised and emboldened me in saying this: As they spend less on the employees through the government, they will spend more on the employees through regular wages.
On top of that, market competition will come into play, this time with a strong emphasis on employee demands rather than employer offers. When you can get a job as a cashier at Walmart and have the government spend tens of thousands of dollars on welfare to make up your Living Wage, you will not have to insist that your employer pays you that wage or you will fight for one of the jobs that pays it. The employment market is indeed a market with customers and 'sellers', and companies that do not offer that wage will have difficult finding people qualified to do the work.
If we do this, I think we will find that the effect of "wages not rising with national wealth", an argument that Liberals tend to use to try to justify actions that depress wages further, will correct itself, and workers will receive their Living Wage as cash instead of an unholy mixture of cash, government-mandated employer spending, and government-mandated welfare spending.
This seems to be the new socialist bugaboo. I do call it socialist, even though its implementation may be more fascist in appearance. I have said this before: Fascism and Communism are two fingers on the same hand of Socialism, though one may be purer than the other. In the former, the government controls the people through the companies, while in the latter, the government forbids the companies and controls the people directly. There is very little difference; in Fascism, the government forbears the existence of the companies for the time being, while in a free market economy, the government is limited in the ways that it is allowed to control them.
Economics lesson aside, let's break into the actual thought. The usual suspects are now calling for a government-enforced "living wage", the ability of any job to support a spouse and family. They like to claim that this was quite possible and expected back "before all this deregulation", as if the 1950's may as well have been lived under the hammer and sickle or something. Frankly, I'm pretty sure they don't know what they're talking about. But let's take a moment and ask the question: Why are so many jobs no longer offering "a living wage"? There are a few reasons that we can note before stepping into this one. In the 1950's, a "living wage" supported a smaller home with fewer amenities, fewer electronic devices with monthly plans, fewer restaurant meals, and smaller wardrobes. If you were to study the time period and attempt to live only with the amount of stuff and amenities that they had, eating what they ate and owning the clothing that they owned, you might find that a minimum wage job would in fact provide your needs. But let's set that, also, aside for a moment and ask this question:
Are corporations not offering a "living wage" because they are already subsidizing it via government fiat?
A worker costs an employer a great deal. Government-required taxes and benefits alone may increase the cost of an employee a minimum of 25% and maximum (more common in larger businesses, which have additional mandates that small businesses do not) of 40% above the employee's base salary. Many of these 'benefits', like 'health insurance' (itself becoming increasingly expensive and useless), would have been paid by the worker back in the days of the Living Wage.
On the other side, we have corporate and personal income taxes. Why did I say "corporate and personal"? Many companies nowadays are taking advantage of the S-Corp filing status, and filing as if they are persons. That lowers the bewildering complexity of the process and may lower the tax rate. On the other hand, someone who makes $35K/year may be paying taxes on his company's $120K/year profits instead. When we talk about government income from employers, we need to include them. All in all, the top 1% of income earners pay nearly half of personal income taxes, the top 20% pay 85% (the bottom 60% pay 2%), and many, perhaps even most, of those are S-Corps rather than individuals like Elon Musk or Bill Gates. The average S-Corp tax rate is 31%, with a range of 19-35%. (Note: That information is pre-Trump and so is at least slightly out-of-date. But hopefully it gets some thoughts stirring.)
Including all Federal spending, over half goes to social welfare programs, and state spending further adds to the bundle. A cursory look 'round state budget pie charts shows that welfare spending seems to run about the 20-40% range in general. Where am I going with this?
The average low-paying job is indeed already paying a Living Wage.
How can this be? Well, in the 1950's, he would do it by giving you a paycheck with which you could purchase all that you need. Nowadays, he does it the same way the government does for nonworking families. He pays for your health insurance, pays for a fair bit of your tax burden (did you know he pays half your Social Security tax? Try to work for yourself and you'll quickly find that out!), and pays the government to give you food stamps, heating assistance, rent assistance, free school lunches for your children, possibly free medical care for your children as well (CHIP/SCHIP), and, as your salary, a small cash allowance with which to obtain that which he and the government through his taxes have not provided.
Indeed, we see that this provision is sufficient, as there are workers in California under an increased minimum wage who have asked for fewer hours in order to preserve the same Living Wage.
Now's the part where everyone starts accusing me of saying that the poor have it easy, that they are freeloaders, that I don't care if babies starve, yadda yadda. Let's see who can continue to keep an open mind and listen to what I have to say about that. This is not by any means an ideal situation, and the poor do struggle. The reason they struggle, however, is not due to lack of funding. It is because the method of that funding is almost the least efficient and least effective manner possible. I say "almost" only because full-on Communism exists in the world, and it is by far the least useful way to handle wealth.
Raising children has helped me to remember and think about what it was like to be a child. People look back to that time period fondly, thinking of it as being idyllic, because "the world was less complicated and more safe". Indeed, when an adult controls your life, you have less responsibility and you don't have to worry as much about the dangers that still surround you. You still have a chance of being hungry, of being homeless, but in that event the adult will tell you what to do. What people forget is the loss of freedom. Sure, there's a measure of it if you live in a suburban area and own a bicycle. Other than that, though... You still have to ask if you can go to a friend's house. You have to ask if you want to visit a museum. You have to accept the food they give you; your parents determine your diet. You are severely restricted in how you can earn income and how much money you will have. And, of course, your school takes up much more of your life than you would have ever remembered; your precious memories of freedom and fun were most likely snipped out of a plethora of weekends and holidays (the parts that don't involve mandatory visits and customs) and stitched together out of a pair of decades.
Well, the current method of providing a Living Wage is much like being a child. Someone else controls how often/much your house receives to heat, how much you spend on food, which doctors you see, and what your child eats for lunch every school day. This is great, if you live the exact lifestyle that these social programs were optimized for. The problem is that it does narrow you down into a specific form of lifestyle; a purely cash form of a Living Wage allows you to spend more on your housing and less on your cell phone, or more on your clothing and less on your groceries. It can be very, very frustrating to need money for one budget category and be blocked by the Government from simply doing what the middle class takes for granted and transferring it from another category.
What is the answer?
The obvious answer to me is to reduce and reform the welfare system, and with it the tax system. Every reduction in welfare spending must be paired with an equal reduction in employer taxes. I was hesitant to suggest this before, because there must be a time period, I thought, in which wages were still low and people would be hurting. However, the quick responses of businesses in handing out bonuses as they began to raise wages after Trump's tax cut surprised and emboldened me in saying this: As they spend less on the employees through the government, they will spend more on the employees through regular wages.
On top of that, market competition will come into play, this time with a strong emphasis on employee demands rather than employer offers. When you can get a job as a cashier at Walmart and have the government spend tens of thousands of dollars on welfare to make up your Living Wage, you will not have to insist that your employer pays you that wage or you will fight for one of the jobs that pays it. The employment market is indeed a market with customers and 'sellers', and companies that do not offer that wage will have difficult finding people qualified to do the work.
If we do this, I think we will find that the effect of "wages not rising with national wealth", an argument that Liberals tend to use to try to justify actions that depress wages further, will correct itself, and workers will receive their Living Wage as cash instead of an unholy mixture of cash, government-mandated employer spending, and government-mandated welfare spending.
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