Ruthless Capitalism

Summer Fundraiser 2012, Day Five
Well, here we are at Day Five of our Summer Fundraiser.

And just as I was about to say how time flies when you’re having fun and go on to describe how this came to be themed (is that a verb?) as the Summer of Our Discontents, I got hit with a mud pie.

And it wasn’t any Mississippi Mud Pie either. More like sour mincemeat with greasy generalizations glazing a most unpalatable dish. (Yes, I know that’s harsh, but this is catharsis, man. A way to exorcise the pain of the comment. So there.)

Until I read Anon’s comment, I had great plans for this edition. In fact, I was half done with my screed, “The Prince of Lies” and the purported “niggerization” of our presidential campaign rhetoric by the eeevil Romney. I was on a roll, I tell you, even pulling in Dinesh D’Souza’s sad tale of helping Obama’s brother with his child’s hospital bill… Yeah, that Obama, the one with his “fairness” doctrine that permits him to let his own family molder in neglect. Shameful.

But never mind; that rant will have to wait now because I didn’t stick to business, and allowed myself to read a few comments… until I got to the comment. It was yet another screed by that busy bee, Anonymous. However, this time A’s essential wrongness was indigestible. I couldn’t simply scrape those lumps off my mind and return to dissecting the MMSM coverage of the man from Wherever.

When you read the comment in toto, you may wonder at my indignation. Poor Anon! Sometimes just being in the wrong place at the wrong time — rather like those deer who sometimes try to occupy the same exact space my car happens to be traversing — can cause unwonted suffering. Here’s the thing: I am sick unto death (to coin a phrase) of non-Americans dissecting us and finding fault. It’s bad enough when the Un-Americans show up; though they’re usually so foul-mouthed you don’t see them get through. But today’s comment plucked my final nerve; that camel’s back will never be the same.

In other words, Enough already! I grew to loathe those ugly Americans’ remarks when they’d show up on the Baron’s essays on Big Peace and say relentlessly, “Europe’s done, stick a fork in it”. It got so that I didn’t mind when he ceased posting there.

But I am unutterably tired of Europeans who don’t know one whit more about us and yet feel qualified to pontificate just the same. Not only punting, but providing jejune “solutions” so they don’t have to twist their hands anxiously anymore… Lord, spare us.

[And while You’re at it, a well-aimed boot up the backside of the BBC would be real fine, too.]

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Anon said:

Here in Europe we have always viewed America as tending towards extremes. Most British — and Europeans in general — believe in a mixed economy and would welcome the renationalisation of our railways. When an American stands up and demands total free enterprise then we tend to shudder as it implies ruthless capitalism, no workers’ rights etc

Even though we are Christian, we find the American brand of fundamentalist Christianity with its refusal to believe that evolution could have taken place once God had set the whole thing in motion, as rather stomach-churning.

However, we are now in a dilemma. Faced with an American president and his foreign secretary who are either closet muslims or muslim sympathisers then we have no choice but to hope that the Republicans reverse the islamification of America and restore Christianity to the heart of the nation even if it is a form of Christianity that we find difficulty with. Perhaps the same is true of Putin and Holy Russia. We deplore the jailing of the members of Pussy Riot but we want Christianity in Russia to withstand the onslaught of Islam.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph! You face a “dilemma”?? How about us poor sods who have to make our way through this… this swamp of unknowing??

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Here in Europe we have always viewed America as tending towards extremes.

Is this a royal ‘we’ or do you speak for all Europeans? I find Europe pretty “extreme” myself. No death penalty is quite extreme for a mass murderer of innocent children. You just can’t have a moral middle ground, can you? A place where some crimes whose nature is so evil as to be considered beyond human ken that their perpetrators forfeit their own right to life? What does this “humane” inhumanity say to the victims and their families? To me, it says, “sorry, but your suffering doesn’t measure up to our boundless tolerance”. That’s morally disgusting. Just as there are some things worth dying for, there are others worth execution. Any less devalues life itself.

Most British — and Europeans in general — believe in a mixed economy and would welcome the renationalisation of our railways.

Bully for y’all. Whatever a mixed economy is, if it includes Greece you can keep it.

Since you live in a tiny country; it might work —the nationalization of your railroads, I mean. As an aside, though, I’ve read enough complaints on British fora about litter bin tyrannies and arrogant electric utility executives to be impressed with government-run anything in your country or anywhere else. It seems to make people callous.

This place is way too big to accommodate an efficient, user-friendly nationalized railroad. The one we have is semi-nationalized. That is, it’s corrupt, feather-bedded, subsidized, and the employees steal it blind. The infrastructure is outmoded. No one cares because no one has to care to keep their jobs. The people in charge are free from scrutiny and accountability. That’s simply how nationalized systems work. But go for it.

I’d love to see some attention paid to regional bus systems here. We already have the road infrastructure and it is potentially capable of being restored at a far cheaper level than building or modernizing track. The rails are fine for coal, though.

In intensely urban areas government transportation works, but again, it’s corrupt, over-unionized and a last choice for many users. Alternative modes of urban travel — e.g., small fleets of vans that serve specific areas — are regulated to death, often before they ever get the first passenger. Regulated literally to death — as in driven out of existence on purpose. They cannot survive in the places that need them most due to the obstacles of red tape, corrupt apathetic bureaucracies with their Byzantine regulatory powers, and the demands that they unionize their few workers. So instead, human ingenuity being what it is, there’s a black market in such methods of mass transit. Lone operators who move fast and learn to dodge the government mafia. They’re meeting a need the government refuses to meet, the same way the illegal cats in the bodegas keep the mouse population from taking over. In a reality-based government, small grocers would get a tax break for keeping cats.

Unions are job-killers here and everyone knows it. They exist to fund the luxuries to which union leaders have accustomed themselves; that’s how the dues of the rank-and-file are employed. Give chained union workers the chance to leave those unions whilst retaining their jobs and they do, in droves.

Public sector unions have ruined teaching and eroded what was once a robust work ethic. They cost municipalities grotesque sums and their benefits and pensions are literally bankrupting towns and cities.

For example, as costs have gone up, the quality of teachers has gone down. Sure, there are many good, dedicated teachers who work in spite of the union burdens and obstacles. But the stupidities of politically correct “zero tolerance”, incompetent and mediocre staff, plus the heavy burden of administrative positions (needed to process governmental paperwork and oversee diversity compliance) are choking these systems. The children lose; the sadists and the comfortably incompetent thrive. The good teachers simply persist.

We’re fortunate here though: at least some of us have the choice of taking our children out of government schools in order to insure their academic and social and cultural literacy. Not everyone has that choice: the poor, in particular, are ill-used by these time-servers. And many of those in charge are sadists: I’ve seen the brutality with my own eyes, had it admitted to me by employees in the system.

I like independent schools, answerable to the parents and to their boards of directors. After all, who else really cares deeply enough to make the place run well? There are already plenty of regulations in place to make such schools safe and workable. The small rural school our son attended even had bus service at regional pick-up points. And parents are so desperate for decent educations for their kids they are willing to have small children spend more than an hour each way on the bus to get it. These weren’t rich folk, either. For the most part they were middle and lower-middle class parents who were willing to sacrifice mightily to avoid the brutal public school system.

When an American stands up and demands total free enterprise then we tend to shudder as it implies ruthless capitalism, no workers’ rights etc .

What, did you get caught in an Occupy zone? Poor baby.

You mean when an “American stands up and demands, etc” you infer a perceived meaning and impose your own bloody definition on “total” and “free enterprise”, right? First, define “free enterprise” — then explain what this term means in its totality since I’ve never seen it in operation. Those are beanbag words: we toss them around for a while; when everyone gets tired they go home until the next game of “Ain’t It Awful”. Spare us.

And what is “ruthless capitalism” for heaven’s sake? Do you mean the crony capitalism currently cemented in place throughout the West? Surely you don’t believe the City of London escaped this criminal enterprise, do you? How do you think Soros was able to screw the Bank of England to the wall, taking pensioners’ savings with him? Nor did France escape his clutches, either. And he may be an American citizen but he’s Hungarian-born and bred and a purely native product of Europe if ever there was one. But he couldn’t ever have worked in a vacuum without the cooperation of your political and financial criminal class.

But now you’ve surpassed America, haven’t you? Now you have an even more criminal and corrupt and unaccountable European Union of your very own. Your political class lied to you, shoved that “Constitution” offal down your throats and off they rode to Brussels to grab some of the pork being doled out: real democracy at work. So where’s your Tea Party, mate?

Oh wait. What do you mean by “no workers’ rights”? Where on God’s green world do you get your information about work and workers in this country? Of course they have “rights”; employers have rights, too. And they both have obligations. This kind of talk is demagoguery. It’s socialist sloganeering, ignoring the truth and investing in fear. I suggest you do some reading on the morality of free enterprise. You could begin with the Acton Institute, which publishes books and pamphlets on the subject. Just go to the Home Page and begin reading their essays.

Or get some of their materials. Here’s a good place to start:

Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy

Here’s another one: a bit out of date, but the best explanation of both basic economics and the realities of U.S. political maneuvering you’ll find:

The Way the World Works by Jude Wanniski

That book is twenty years old now, but it’s still worth your time. Wanniski wrote it in his prime, his intellectual juices flowing. Later, he went haywire, finding Louis Farrakhan a fine fellow, but that was afterwards; that sad detour took nothing away from his agile ability to explain sane economic policy. We just don’t get to see it in operation, that’s the problem. I was much heartened to read that Paul Ryan likes Wanniski. Back before blogs were much in evidence, I was reading JW’s online Lessons in Economics. Eventually Mr. Wanniski and I corresponded about music — e.g., why Gershwin was so consummately an urban composer.

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And from your socialist generalizations, you make the jump to what you think is American religion:

Even though we are Christian, we find the American brand of fundamentalist Christianity with its refusal to believe that evolution could have taken place once God had set the whole thing in motion, as rather stomach-churning.

You really believe that’s the sum of Christian belief in America?? Seriously??

Bless your heart.

How about you take a tablespoon of Pepto Bismol and when your gorge has settled, we can discuss the realities. Again, I have to wonder where you get your information about our religious beliefs. It’s true; we’re more spiritually-oriented than Europeans are, generally speaking, and those beliefs run the gamut from sublime to silly.

We don’t have anything near the numbers of cathedrals that y’all acquired over a millennium, but then again, even our cathedrals are living places where people attend services and consider those places to be “our churches” rather than our monuments. There are some historical edifices not used but kept in good repair — mostly Anglican relics in areas long since turned to less formal rituals. And some churches get sold and converted to nightclubs or whatever. But religious practices here are lively and varied. From congregations like those snake-handlers in the Appalachian mountains all the way over to the dogma-free Unitarian churches raising money for the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Again, to get a grip on reality, try some bibliotherapy. You could begin with a history of religion in America’s earliest beginnings.

Even then, it was quite varied. Here in the Commonwealth we had the Church of Virginia, a mini-me Church of England which sent its episcopal candidates back to England for investiture for several generations. By the time our notions of the firm separation of church from state had been established, it was the Anglican Church — as opposed to the Methodists, Baptists, etc. And the historically black American Methodist Episcopal Church, the AME. But we’ve got Quakers, Congregationalists (these are left from the Puritans in New England), and the Mennonites, the Brethren, various Lutheran synods, the Church of God, the Four Square Church, the Greek Orthodox, the Russian Orthodox, etc. The Mormons have a separate and bloody history, but they finally assimilated without losing their center. And now even more of the various Middle East refugee ancient Christian churches are arriving. Oh, and the Korean Church… etc. et al, et ad maiorem Dei gloriam. Oh dear, speaking of the Korean Church, I just read that Sun Myung Moon is dying.

The synagogue in America is also alive and well. Jews have been here since the Dutch allowed them to land in New Amsterdam after they were turned away from English-held harbors. But then again, anti-Semitism came along with that very English “new city on a hill” imagery so dear to the Puritans. It would be the New Jerusalem, a Jerusalem conveniently Jew-free, of course.

Somewhere you can find a facsimile of the letter President George Washington wrote to a Jewish congregation in Rhode Island. We were fortunate to have him — and at most, ol’ George was a respectful agnostic.

Religion in America has been a life-long interest of mine. It is, as they say on Facebook, “complicated”. On the one hand, I’m a product of a particularly lively moment of late mid-twentieth century American Roman Catholicism, while concomitantly being a first-generation American and also part of a minority religious ghetto in a majority Baptist area in the South. Sometimes it was more participant observation than real immersion. Yes, I’ve met snake-handlers — they threw rocks at the nuns — but I don’t personally know any Bible literalists myself. I’m sure there are right many here in our area but our paths don’t cross.

I knew Canuck Catholics in New England; they didn’t assimilate until they’d been here six or seven generations. Then they assimilated and imploded — mostly gone now, as are all the other ethnic churches. Maybe the Portuguese still survive on Cape Ann?. The French Cajun Catholic church in Louisiana is probably livelier — and far more racially integrated for that matter. Especially considering their convert Catholic Indian governor, Bobby Jindal.

If you want a good look at early American Protestant church history google the Three (some say Four) Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries. If memory serves, Wikipedia does a good job on the subject with lots of references. I could point you to some books, but it’s too varied a subject to narrow easily. Sure, you can find critiques of those six-day creationists, but the signal to noise ratio on that is eventually boring and as misleading as the aggressive atheists who want you to know that reason and rationality are winning and victory is just around the corner for their particular dogma.

The most interesting book I’ve read on religion lately is one by Spengler:

How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too)

In the final analysis Mr. Goldman thinks America and Israel might survive as cultures because of their religious belief system(s) — e.g., be fruitful and multiply for starters. I still can’t decide whether I agree with him. It’s tempting, but doing so seems to be a kind of special pleading. On the other hand, I don’t have to decide any of this. My job is simply to stay on the path in front of me, lighting it as best I can and leave the worrying to those who will follow.

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Finally our commenter wrings his/her hands anxiously before throwing Putin into the mix. These jumps are startling:

However, we are now in a dilemma. Faced with an American president and his foreign secretary who are either closet muslims or muslim sympathisers then we have no choice but to hope that the Republicans reverse the islamification of America and restore Christianity to the heart of the nation even if it is a form of Christianity that we find difficulty with. Perhaps the same is true of Putin and Holy Russia. We deplore the jailing of the members of Pussy Riot but we want Christianity in Russia to withstand the onslaught of Islam.

I don’t know how to let you down easy, gentle reader. Frankly, this isn’t thinking at all. The creationists make your stomach churn but you’re able to hold any number of contradictory ideas in your head at the same time without falling down in a dizzy faint.

Your dilemma is not our President or his Secretary Clinton. They are our problem. Your dilemma is being caught in the clutches of Magic Bullet Thinking. This is similar to the notion some folks on the other end of the political spectrum had in 2008: that the Magic Negro was going to give everyone a house, an income, a car to replace their junker, and for good measure he would cure global warming.

I’m sorry to break the news, but your hopes are… hopeless. Faiths do not get “restored” unless they’re going on display in a museum..

Here’s a likely scenario if Romney and Ryan pull this off. Note that their expressed concerns are largely domestic so far:

• A partial clawback of the monster mash, ObamaCare, especially the cynical emptying out of Medicare to pay for it.
  
• Some badly needed reform of Medicare. With a great deal of luck regarding House and Senate elections, they may finally get a means-tested system. America is not Europe, never will be. Means-testing is not perfect, but it’s fairer than what we have now.
  
• Opening a conversation about simplifying the tax code. It’s an unholy mess and it’s encouraging rich Americans to move out.
  
• The reset on Russia may be a toughening up and restoration of some testosterone in that relationship. What Putin does with his Orthodox Church — and that church does belong to the state (proving as did the state-owned churches in Europe it ain’t no way to run a religious enterprise) is his business. He’s busy shoring up his energy supplies and keeping the West in turmoil.
  
• If they restore anything, it had better be the walls of security against Russia that Obama so stupidly knocked over in Eastern Europe. What a betrayal!
  
• Yes, booting as many Muslim Brotherhood infiltrators out of government positions would be great… but not likely. It’s going to be hard enough for Romney to push back against the “Mormon question”, never mind those Muslims. If he works on restoring some sanity to the military, perhaps. But neither of these men has military experience and our soldiers’ suicide rate is up — will the former worsen the latter? As long as they make getting out of the sandbox a priority, probably not. Will their lack of experience hurt them here? I don’t think so. They couldn’t be worse than what we’re dealing with now and I’ll bet there will be less grandstanding and fewer security leaks for ego boosting purposes.
  
• Reassuring Israel without making Iran anymore insane than it already is. So don’t expect to see much overt posturing in that department.
  
• Many Americans — the ones paying attention — are far more worried about an Iranian EMP event over our globe. Google the term Electromagnetic Pulse. It means an instant restoration all right: returned to the 18th century with our huge dependent populations far too fragile to survive 18th century conditions for very long. Those who pray are doing so about this situation. The rest are waiting with bated breath to see if these two are any better than the last two when it comes to remedies. In terms of survival, such considerations are a MUST.

By the way, if you think Russia was ever HOLY Russia… ah, forget it. Go back to wringing your hands and watching the telly. Until it goes black anyway.

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A good fundraising day, indeed. We’re within shouting distance of where we should be and I have some new addresses for people I couldn’t reach before.

Donors came from far and wide, and some from just over the mountain:

Stateside: Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Virginia

Near Abroad: Canada

Far Abroad: Australia, British Virgin Islands, Slovakia, and the UK

We remain, as ever, grateful.


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