No Wonder The Pols Think Businessman Trump’s Crazy; He Understands Scarcity

Business, Economy, IMMIGRATION, Islam, Jihad, Republicans, Terrorism

Yes, it’s scarcity—the thing politicians are incapable of grasping—that’s at work in Donald Trump’s thinking. “No Wonder The Pols Think Businessman Trump’s Crazy; He Understands Scarcity,” now on The Unz Review, argues that Donald J. Trump’s Muslim moratorium is rooted in an aversion, so natural to a business man, to squandering scarce resources, money or manpower.

“… Good businessmen are programmed differently than politicians. As a tremendously gifted entrepreneur, Trump is averse to squandering scarce resources, money or manpower.

By contrast, politicians do not understand the natural economic reality of scarcity. They control the production of money for their promiscuous purposes, and they exert power over millions of interchangeable people in their territorial jurisdiction.

To a politician, 14 lives in 322 million is a small price to pay for “our freedoms.” Trump’s political rivals look at the price exacted by a Muslim like Syed Farook and his bride in the aggregate. Fourteen dead is not a steep price to pay for unfettered immigration from Islamic countries, peddled politically as “our values,” “our tolerance,” “our greatness.” This callous calculus is second nature to politicians like Lindsey Graham or Darth Vader Cheney. …

Not to Trump. “This must stop. We can’t have this,” he roared.

See, statistics are funny things. Insignificant probabilities, in this case an attack on each one of us, are immaterial unless they happen to YOU or ME. It is this calculus that politicians peddle. They rely on the fact that we’ll adopt their sloganeering because each one of us is unlikely to die by Muslim.

But to do nothing stateside, as Trump’s rivals imply, is to accept that lives lost are, in the grand scheme, insignificant.

The opposite is true for Trump. Taking losses offends his sensibilities. Trump, the consummate businessman, abhors and is angered by the preventable squandering of scarce assets: American lives. (Yes, Trump is an America Firster.) The death of a few Americans pains Mr. Trump, something that cannot be said about Obama, Hillary, Bernie or any of the insider GOPers.

How can you tell? The politicians – Rubio, Ryan – offer up platitudes; political niceties to excite the asses in the anchor’s chair. They propose nothing to stop the slaughter, stateside. Instead, they demand a leap of faith – that you believe dropping “daisy cutters” on Muslims in the Middle East (only on the bad ones, naturally) will reduce the danger to Americans at home.

The instincts of private enterprise and politics – never the twain shall meet. Private-enterprise driven considerations are aimed at conserving, not squandering, scarce resources. If it loses an asset, the Trump Organization hurts.

Read the rest. “No Wonder The Pols Think Businessman Trump’s Crazy; He Understands Scarcity” is now on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine.

The Opportunity Costs* Associated With Consumption Of Toxic Commentary

Economy, Intelligence, Journalism, Liberty, Media

QUESTION: “Why are insightful commentators and thinker whose observations have predictive power generally barred from the national discourse, while the usual foolish, false prophets are called back for encores?”

ANSWER: “The opportunity costs associated with consumption of toxic punditry are low or non-existent. Having their worldview affirmed, even affirmed in a parallel universe, is worth a lot to news consumers, who are keener to avoid the pains of cognitive dissonance than to get the real deal.”

I plagiarized myself above. “PUNDITS, HEAL THYSELVES!” (2004) is still correct after all these years.

However, the shift is coming. The cost of following the bimbos and their TV beaus and anchor, left and right, is rising. Advice: Look at their legs, don’t listen to their words.

***
Opportunity cost (a concept your kids teacher likely doesn’t know): “The benefit that is sacrificed by choosing one course of action rather than the next best alternative.”

The Week’s Trump-Dominated Tweets (December 5 To 9)

Ilana Mercer, Islam, Jihad, Media, Politics, Terrorism, The State

UPDATED: Libertarians Should Look Inward For Reasons Funding Drying Up*

Ilana Mercer, Intellectualism, libertarianism, Liberty, Political Philosophy

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Jim Ostrowski has posted to Facebook a column by EPJ’s Robert Wenzel titled “LewRockwell.com in Financial Trouble?” Jim, who has never enjoyed a feature column on the “libertarian sites” he slavishly touts (sorry pal; just standing up for what you deserve), and has been called by Murray Rothbard “one of the finest people in the libertarian movement” (damn straight), should contemplate the following:

If these iconic, but waning, sites had not diligently and systematically expunged or marginalized their best and brightest, presumably because we do not conform strictly to party-lines; they’d have long since harnessed the energies, intellectual and other, of individuals who, after working in the trenches like dogs for little to nothing, and without ANY libertarian support—are in a position, finally, to boost atrophying sites and help increase their audiences.

Robert Wenzel is right. The problem of dwindling funding (usually associated with reduced readership) is not all the doing of the neocons or the libertarians who don’t like cookies or pop-ups. (The love of cookies inspired the title of a chapter in my next book, not that you’ll hear about any of my books, all good for liberty, from the libertarian sites you know.)

Non-establishment libertarian sites operate in as cultish a manner as do beltway libertarians. In the liberty-oriented community, people tend to huddle in atrophying intellectual attics, and quibble about detecting and expelling contrarians. Dare to dissent, and keepers of the flame will take it upon themselves to read you out of the movement (check).

This, naturally, makes for tribalism, not individualism. The bad, moreover, have a nasty habit of crowding out the good. Or, as one Objectivist wag once wrote, “Quality is never the result of intellectual purges: the most creative and independent thinkers are the first to go.” That makes perfect psychological sense: those who remain feel more secure, group cohesion having trounced intellectual vitality.

Infrequently, on the occasion that this column is featured by one of the sites discussed, I will invariably get the odd letter or two to say: “Wow, never heard of you. Where have you been hiding? Why aren’t you a regular?”

Why am I persona non grata in libertarian circles after, oh, close to 20 years of quality writing? Take a guess?

The last of the letters I quote verbatim:

“Next to Rothbard, I believe you and Hoppe are the best libertarian writers I know of. I’ve read all your articles. I had been arguing with x and others about immigration for months. Some of the self-proclaimed dictatarians [sic] of libertarianism blocked me because I disagreed with them. You were the only person who challenged the libertarian establishment on immigration, and you were right.”

No, the Ron Paul Revolution is over and it is not the only act in town. If Ron-Paul-Only institutions are faltering, they need to look beyond the neocons and “the bizarre anti-ad perspective of many ‘libertarians,'” in the words of Wenzel, and do a little navel-gazing.

UPDATE (12/8): Jim Ostrowski knows I’m right, but won’t “Like,” because he’s being … lawyerly. He, like myself, deserves the prominence which would have PAID dividends to those who gave it. So, I’m sorry: You huddle in compliant ideological attics; you never tolerate the slightest dissent; you behave like mainstream; you’ll dry up.

*****

* For the same reason, The Independent Institute should stop hitting me up for money on Giving Tuesday or on any other day. (I’ll choose The World Parrot Trust and Project Perry any day. And I did.)