Category Archives: Socialism

UPDATE II: Dispatch from Third-World Washington State

Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Government, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Private Property, Regulation, Socialism, The State

Today, once again, the lights went out in my neighborhood, just as I was preparing to file my weekly column and meet my deadline. The outage was protracted, so the generator needed to be rolled out and powered up. Those of you who’re fortunate enough to be able to remain in the dark about generators—that was me back in South Africa, ironically—should know this: Until such time when you wire up your home (as one ought to do in Third World WA), there are lots of things to do, not least of them lugging extension cords upstairs and unpacking heaters again.

Down the hill, the crew from Puget Sound Energy was visible as the men worked to pry electricity cables from the thicket of trees and branches. As I said before, the grid and power lines suffered mostly tree damage. In this part of the world, the trees are everywhere intertwined with the cable. Why? Why isn’t a wide, tree-free swath maintained around these vital structures? Why are trees not chopped back, in the name of civilization and the sanctity of property, pets and human life?

Here’s why—in all likelihood—we suffer the same severity of damage, year-in and year-out, when snow, ice and wind arrive: the self-defeating dementia of tree fetishists and “Watermelon” legislators — green on the outside; red on the inside.

For one, your property is not your own. You are prohibited from felling unsafe trees. Each request must be backed by a letter from an arborist and a hefty shakedown “baksheesh,” exacted by the goons at the municipality. Such regulation is probably responsible for loss of life, as most people cannot afford to pay the hundreds charged for a permit to chop down an unstable tree on their nominally owned property.

Again, the “Watermelon” worldview creates more havoc than it prevents, and results in loss of life and livelihoods. For instance, because of wood fires, the usually pristine air in our part of the world resembled, at one stage, the air above the shanty town of Soweto. The resources and energy spent–and the lives lost–because of this mess are many times the cost or worth of a few thousand trees.

Alas, one look at Puget Sound Energy’s Facebook Page tells you that the average customer is unquestioning in his supine gratitude to the utility for merely wiring him up again—some after a week. He or she thinks like subjects, not customers.

As long as I’ve lived in WA, PSE has been ill-prepared for our weather. And unless it is beavering away behind the scenes, the utility has been, seemingly, unwilling to lobby the gang of greens in Olympia on behalf of its long-suffering customers; lobby to let it, PSE, maintain a tree-free grid. Puget Sound Energy should petition the gangsters in the Capital on behalf of its customers, who, due to regulation, are catapulted back to the Dark Ages almost every other winter.

And yes, privatization and private property rights that allow all the above would be just swell.

UPDATE I: Welcome to new reader Orin Blomberg. Here on BAB, we all huddle around the epistolary fires of freedom.

UPDATE II: We all love and respect the natural world. Let us look after it as private property owners. Any resources that fall to state control suffer the tragedy of the common. As was explained in this article:

Regulation is always the culmination of agreements between the regulated and the regulators, to the detriment of those left out of the political loop. The state and its corporate donors will invariably come to a consensus as to what constitutes reasonable damages to them, not to the aggrieved. Thus regulation always works to the advantage of the offenders. …
The root of environmental despoliation is the tragedy of the commons, i.e., the absence of property rights in the resource. One of my favorite running routes wends along miles of lakeside property, all privately owned, and ever so pristine. Where visitors dirty the trail that cleaves to the majestic homes; fastidious owners are quick to pick up after them.
In the absence of private ownership in the means of production, government-controlled resources go to seed. There is simply no one with strong enough a stake in the landmass or waterway to police it before disaster strikes. …
Entrusted with the management and regulation of assets you don’t own, have no stake in; on behalf of millions of people you don’t know , only pretend to care about, are unaccountable to, and who have no real recourse against your mismanagement—how long before your performance plummets?

Moreover, in case newcomers to this site doubt this writer’s commitment to the humane treatment and welfare of animals, please read posts like “Who Own the Food Chain,” “A Halibut’s Heart In A Harpy’s Hand,” as well as the many other articles under the “Environmentalism and Animal Rights” categories.

Money: Mitt’s Mark of Cain

Individual Rights, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Morality, Private Property, Socialism, Taxation

Mitt Romney is a marked man in socialist-minded America. Over the past two years, he paid a “mere” 15 percent on $42.7 million, “because his income was derived almost entirely from capital gains and dividends from his extensive portfolio of investments.”

Of this $42.5 million fortune made over the past two years, seven million was given to charity. More than Mitt paid in taxes. Of that generosity mainstream morons disapprove because Romney’s charities tend to be Mormon related.

Contrast Mr. and Mrs. Romney to the miserly Joe Biden and his lefty wife. The latter gave between 0.1% and 0.3% of their income to charity. Not exactly the two tithes the Romneys spare for the poor.

There is a lot wrong with Mitt’s political philosophy. There is not a lot wrong with Mitt the Man.

UPDATED: Decoding The Plan to Make Detroit Work (Blame Honky)

Africa, Debt, Economy, Federalism, Government, Intelligence, Race, Racism, Socialism, Taxation

If these minority penalizing budgetary cuts were inflicted in New Hampshire, Desiree Cooper of Detroit Public TV would have probably cried foul. But they aren’t, so Cooper keeps her cool in an excellent factual account about Detroit’s black-dominated city council, and its efforts to save the city’s finances by consolidating services. (Read: directing these to those who PAY.)

This invariably means directing services to the dwindling tax base (You Know Who), so that this productive, paying minority gets the best bang for its huge outlays and goodwill and… STAYS IN TOWN. These good people want to remain in the city they helped build.

Have their overlords realized, perhaps a little late in the day, that keeping the taxpayers who pay their salaries happy might just be the key to their own statist status? As Cooper puts it in this remarkably impartial report: It is these “dedicated Detroiters, the more affluent Detroiters who are part of the tax base [that] the city desperately wants to hold on to.”

Barbara and Spencer Barefield are an example. The couple has “what they consider a small house amongst Palmer Woods’ mansions.” They (and their ilk; nudge-nudge) will be accorded “preferential treatment in this community’s upkeep, maintaining roads, sidewalks and streetlights. That could mean the difference between residents staying or leaving.”

Of course, it is a travesty to frame as “preferential” the provision of basic services in return for enormous outlays. It shows you how far we have gone in assimilating Karl Marx’s maxim, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

The Barefield are Detroiters of quite a deep dye, as they are prepared to put up with a $900-a-month utility bill!

READ MORE about the “Detroit Works” project, undertaken by Mayor Dave Bing and his crew—architect Rainy Hamilton, Karla Henderson who heads Detroit Works, City Council President Charles Pugh, and others—in an attempt to save the city (and their sinecures?):

With a sprawling city, 139 square miles, and few resources for city services, Mayor Bing took the Detroit Works project as an opportunity to redefine the city’s physical, economic and social landscape. He began by taking inventory, taking a close look at what Detroit really has.
Demographers have identified at least 100 distinct neighborhoods within the city limits. With that in mind, Detroit Works unveiled its short-term plan, classifying the city’s neighborhoods by their quality of housing and stability of population.
The degree of city services and investment would depend on whether the neighborhood is deemed steady, transitional, or distressed.

UPDATE (Dec. 13): Erik in the comment below blames honky in what sounds like vintage Yankee propaganda. You’ll get better historical facts about the South from reading or watching the brilliant timeless “Gone with the Wind.” So too did Mencken write about the civilization destroyed by the “dirty Yankees.” The South was the seat of the country’s aristocracy—and some of the finest families in America.

Although my book, Into the Cannibal’s Pot, advances the cultural argument in explaining underdevelopment, it is also highly critical of it. As follows:

In “Into the Cannibal’s Pot,” I concur to an extent with thinkers such as Etounga-Manguelle. Indubitably, in Africa “magic wins out over reason; community over individual; communal ownership over private property; force and coercion over rights and responsibilities; wealth distribution over its accumulation.”Indeed, human behavior is mediated by values. However, I criticize the cultural argument for “affording a circular, rather than a causal, elegance: people do the things they do because they are who they are and have a history of being that way.”
But “why have some people produced Confucian and Anglo-Protestant ethics—with their mutual emphasis on graft and delayed gratification—while others have midwived Islamic and animistic values, emphasizing conformity, consensus, and control? Why have certain patterns of thought and action come to typify certain people in the first place?” Such an investigation, I conclude, political correctness prohibits.
In any event, bad leaders or bad weather patterns are not what shackle backward peoples. Not exclusively. As cities across England burn because of the “unequal civilizing potential” of certain peoples—James Burnham’s coinage—it has become clear that the values and cultural influences which people (and peoples) bring to the polity cannot be tweaked out of existence like some unsightly nose-hair.

Read it, Erik. Mimicking whitey, if that is indeed your and Sowell’s explanation for black dysfunction, falls flat when it comes to Africa.

UPDATE II: Who’s It To Be? Teddy No. 1 or Teddy No. 2? (‘Nut Gingrich’)

Elections, Foreign Policy, Founding Fathers, History, Ilana Mercer, Nationhood, Neoconservatism, Political Philosophy, Politics, Republicans, Socialism, The State, War, Welfare

The excerpt is from “Who’s It To Be? Teddy No. 1 or Teddy No. 2?” now on WND.COM:

“What are the odds that a Democratic commander-in-chief and his chief Republican rival declare their philosophical fidelity to the Progressive Theodore Roosevelt on the same day?

In an effort to better conjure Roosevelt, the shameless Barack Obama had flown to Osawatomie in Kansas, where, in 1910, Teddy delivered his “New Nationalism Address.” So radical was the Roosevelt political program that its author was condemned as “‘Communistic,’ ‘Socialistic,’ and ‘Anarchistic’ in various quarters.”

On the day of this staged affair—in eerie synchronicity—Newt Gingrich, whose favorability among Republican “caucus goers” is at 33 percent and rising, described himself to broadcaster Glenn Beck as “a Theodore Roosevelt Republican.”

Back in the day, “the Eastern United States denounced [Roosevelt] as a ‘communist agitator.’” This was “the most radical speech ever given by an ex-President,” writes Robert S. La Forte in The Kansas Historical Quarterly:

“[Roosevelt’s] concepts of the extent to which a powerful federal government could regulate and use private property in the interest of the whole and his declarations about labor … were nothing short of revolutionary.”

As La Forte chronicles, “Roosevelt had no interest in retaining the ideals of Jeffersonian ‘state’s right’ demagogues, as he called them. He was interested in a Hamiltonian concept of power which he described as the ‘New Nationalism.’”

Roosevelt’s speech, seconded White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, “Really set the course for the 20th century.” Yet to listen to the president in Kansas, a vote for “a Theodore Roosevelt Republican” is a vote for a Mad-Max dystopia, where “everyone is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.”

Don’t look for a “square deal” from the characters on the other side of the aisle. “We want to avoid becoming a welfare state like the European states” is the stock phrase we get from GOP pointy heads. Truth is not their stock-in-trade. As they tell it, America has a long way to go before it turns as Rooseveltian as Europe. …”

The complete column is “Who’s It To Be? Teddy No. 1 or Teddy No. 2?” Read it now on WND.COM.

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STAIRWAY PRESS HAS LAUNCHED A HOLIDAY GIVEAWAY AND FACEBOOK EVENT FOR MY BOOK, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.

Invitation have gone out from The Cannibal’s Facebook Fan page. (“Like” The Cannibal when you pop by.) On offer is Mercer merchandise galore. Every fifth buyer of Into the Cannibal’s Pot will receive a free copy of my libertarian manifesto Broad Sides: One Woman’s Clash with a Corrupt Culture, together with a CD of the progressive rock guitar virtuoso and composer Sean Mercer.

Order NOW and The Publisher will endeavor to deliver in time for Christmas.

And do please “Like” Into the Cannibal’s Pot’s Fan Page.

UPDATE I (Dec. 8): Nut Gingrich is what a a LRC.COM blogger has christened You Know Who, pointing out Nut’s support for “two governments in the United States: one that follows the Bill of Rights and one that doesn’t (for our “security,” of course).” MORE.

UPDATE II: More explosive details about “Newt’s grand schemes for a small, unintrusive federal government”: “NEWT PRESENTS A FRESH NEW VIRTUAL FACE” by Ann Coulter.