Category: Ideas and Policy

Global Poverty in Decline

The Portly Politico2 Comments

Regular readers know that I frequently cite pollster Scott Rasmussen’s #Number of the Day series from Ballotpedia.  I do so because a.) his numbers often reveal some interesting truths about our world and b.) blogging is, at bottom, the art of making secondary or tertiary commentary on what other, smarter, harder-working people have thought, written, and done.

Yesterday’s #Number of the Day dealt with global poverty; specifically, Americans’ ignorance to the fact that global poverty has declined substantially over the last twenty years.  Indeed, global poverty has been reduced by half in that time.

I’ll confess I was ignorant of the extent of this decline, too, although it makes sense that poverty has decreased, especially when you consider the rise of post-Soviet market economies in Eastern Europe and China’s meteoric rise since the 1980s.

I suspect that the perennial culprit of the Mainstream Media is to blame, in part, for this ignorance, coupled as it is with progressive politicians.  The rise of “democratic socialist” candidates—as well as the lingering effects of the Great Recession—would have Americans believe that the global economy is in terrible shape, and that “underprivileged” parts of the world labor in ever-worsening poverty (so, let’s just move them all here—that’ll solve poverty!).

It’s refreshing to see that capitalism is working its economic magic, and people all over the globe are lifting themselves out of poverty.  If representative republicanism and strong civil societies can take root and flourish in more places, the ingredients will be in place for continued economic and cultural growth.

Democrats Favor Socialism

The Portly Politico10 Comments

Republicans and conservatives have long understood that many Democrats [not-so?] secretly harbor a love for socialism, and that socialistic policies are their end-goal.  As I wrote in “Democrats Show Their True Colors,” “democratic” socialism has been growing in popularity in the Democratic Party, and the party has tapped into its progressive roots and lurched violently to the Left.

Scott Rasmussen’s #Number of the Day today backs this trend up with hard numbers.  He writes that 57% of Democrats have a positive view of socialism, while only 47% have a positive view of capitalism.  That 47% figure is down from 56% just two years ago.

71% of Republicans, on the other hand, view capitalism positively, while 16% of RINOs view socialism favorably.  I don’t understand how any Republican can view socialism favorably; I suspect they view “socialism” as “limited government-run enterprises,” like the Tennessee Valley Authority or the Department of Motor Vehicles.  I can’t imagine many of them support true, complete government ownership of property and the means of production.

These trends toward socialism on the Left make Republican victory—as unlikely as it might be—in the 2018 midterm elections all-the-more crucial.

Back to School with Richard Weaver

The Portly Politico16 Comments

Every year, I try to sit down and re-read at least the introduction to Richard Weaver’s seminal Ideas Have Consequences, probably the most powerful book I’ve ever read.  I tend to undertake this re-reading around the time school resumes, as it helps remind me why I teach.

In addition to Ideas Have Consequences, Weaver wrote some of the most eloquent essays on the South—and what it means to be Southern—in the twentieth century.  In 2014, I posted the following quotation on Facebook; I will allow it to speak for itself.

I’m undertaking my annual baptism in the works of Richard Weaver to focus my philosophical thinking for a rapidly approaching school year, and, as always, I’m presented with an embarrassment of riches. Few thinkers cram so many nuggets of truth into so little space. Every paragraph of Weaver’s writings yields insights that speak to the very heart of humanity.

Here’s an excerpt from “The South and the American Union,” an essay from _The Southern Essays of Richard Weaver_, published posthumously in 1987. It might clarify a few things for some of my Yankee friends who have expressed a certain bafflement with Southern mores and attitudes…:

“The Southern world-outlook was much like that which [Oswald] Spengler describes as the Apollonian. It knew nothing of infinite progressions but rather loved fixed limits in all things; it rejected the idea of ceaseless becoming in favor of ‘simple accepted statuesque becomeness.’ It saw little point in restless striving, but desired a permanent settlement, a coming to terms with nature, a recognition of what is in its self-sustaining form. The Apollonian feeling, as Spengler remarks, is of a world of ‘coexistent individual things,’ and it is tolerant as a matter of course. Other things are because they have to be; one marks their nature and their limits and learns to get along with them. The desire to dominate and proselytize is foreign to it. As Spengler further adds, ‘there are no Classical world-improvers.’ From this comes the Southern kind of tolerance, which has always impressed me as fundamentally different from the Northern kind. It is expressed in the Southerner’s easy-going ways and his willingness to things grow where they sprout. He accepts the irremediability of a certain amount of evil and tries to fence it around instead of trying to stamp it out and thereby spreading it. His is a classical acknowledgment of tragedy and of the limits of power.

“This mentality is by nature incompatible with its great rival, the Faustian. Faustian man is essentially a restless striver, a yearner after the infinite, a hater of stasis, a man who is unhappy unless he feels that he is making the world over. He may talk much of tolerance, but for him tolerance is an exponent of power. His tolerance tolerates only the dogmatic idea of tolerance, as anyone can discover for himself by getting to know the modern humanitarian liberal. For different opinions and ways of life he has no respect, but hostility or contemptuous indifference, until the day when they can be brought around to conform to his own. Spengler describes such men as torn with the pain of ‘seeing men be other than they would have them be and the utterly un-Classical desire to devote their life to their reformation.’ It happened that Southern tolerance, standing up for the right to coexistence of its way of life, collided at many points with the Faustian desire to remove all impediments to its activity and make over things in its own image. Under the banner first of reform and then of progress, the North challenged the right to continue of a civilization based on the Classical ideal of fixity and stability….”

There are so many great passages I could cite (“Man [to the Southerner] is a mixture of good and evil, and he can never be perfected in this life. The notion of his natural goodness is a delusive theory which will blow up any social order that is predicated upon it. Far from being a vessel of divinity, as the New England Transcendentalists taught, he is a container of cussedness.”), for almost all of Weaver is quotable.

HSAs are A-Okay

The Portly Politico6 Comments

My Congressman, Tom Rice, sends out little e-mail updates on a regular basis.  In his latest newsletter, the South Carolina US-7 representative included a link to a video (below) of his statements before Congress about expanding Health Savings Accounts, or HSAs.

The gist of the proposal is to expand health-savings accounts to allow account holders to contribute more to them.  The current legal annual contribution (in FY2018) for a single individual is $3450, up from $3400 last year and $3350 the year before.  That comes out to $287.50 a month, which can be contributed pre-tax directly from an account holder’s paycheck.

The way the law is currently written, HSAs are excellent both to cover medical expenses before reaching your deductible (and, naturally, most HSA-compliant plans are high deductible ones) and to save and invest for retirement.  You can accrue a qualified medical expense today—say, a visit to the emergency room—and you can submit that receipt in a decade (or longer—there’s no apparent time-limit) to take out that amount.

To give a hypothetical:  let’s say you have a medical bill for $3000.  Yes, your annual contribution to your HSA could cover that.  But, let’s say you’ve built up a good emergency fund, and elect to pay the bill out-of-pocket through that fund.  In, say, five years, you need to tap your HSA funds for some reason.  If you’ve kept the receipt (and credit card statements help, too), you can file that with your HSA and withdraw the $3000.

Why go through the trouble?  Because many HSA administrators—including my own, HealthSavings Administrators—allow you to invest in mutual funds with your HSA contributions.  If you’re making an 8% annual return on those contributions, that $3000 today will be worth around $4100 in five years (investment math folks, please check my numbers; regardless, you get the point—money grows).

Alternatively, if you don’t tap that money for decades—and keep contributing—you’ll have a very nice retirement account growing tax-free for all those years.

My current health insurance carries a $6550 deductible—which I didn’t even come close to hitting in 2017 when I broke my left wrist, although it was still expensive—but I’ve accrued enough of an emergency fund that I could meet that expense should the need arise (I pray it doesn’t).  If my emergency fund were sunk into something else—say, a new car, or a less flood-prone house—then I could tap into my HSA contributions from the past few years.

And here is the other benefit of HSAs, the one that I’m sure Congressman Rice as in mind:  they help you reach your deductible, and bring some market forces to bear on healthcare costs.

I suspect that one of the culprits of high healthcare costs is the lack of transparency—no one knows how much anything costs, and everything is fungible.  When I broke my wrist, I received a hefty ER bill (about $3000) about four months after the fall (I don’t understand the delay on that; it seems like they could just tally it all up and print it out at the time of the accident).  I called the hospital, and they told they were “running a special”—if I paid in full that day, they’d knock HALF of the cost off the bill.  Because I’m an extreme budgeter and have an emergency fund, I could do it, and leaped at the “special.”

Most people don’t have enough money saved up to even meet a $500 emergency, but an HSA makes it more doable.  Even without an emergency fund, if an account holder were making monthly contributions, he’d be able to take advantage of such price reductions.

HSAs aren’t a magic bullet to bringing down healthcare costs, but they would go a long way to addressing the problem.  If we lived in a pre-Obamacare age, you’d be able to get a high-deductible, HSA-compliant plan for probably $50-100 a month, depending on age and health.  Even if you didn’t want to manage the money in various investments, the incentives to save—namely, the pre-tax benefit—are enough that many Americans would likely take contribute to their HSA.

When Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson was running for president in 2015-2016, he proposed transferable, minimally-funded ($5000 at birth, I believe) HSAs be issued for all Americans.  The ability to transfer funds between family members and to grow that wealth over time would be huge.

Similarly, President George W. Bush proposed giving Americans the option to contribute their Social Security contributions into personally-managed investment accounts.  That would reduce the astronomical costs of that federal boondoggle and give Americans much greater returns on their investments.  Naturally, Democrats rejected that plan out of hand, and accused Bush of hating old people.  Yeesh.

The takeaway is this:  whether it’s in healthcare or retirement savings, the American people know best.  Yes, we’d need some additional financial education—which we desperately need anyway—but, c’mon, are you going to continue running the same inefficient, wasteful systems just because a small percentage of people won’t adequately manage their money?

Liberty works in nearly every arena, and it would work in healthcare and health insurance, too.  HSAs are the wave of the future, and I’m glad to see Tom Rice is championing them.

Trump’s Economic Growth Isn’t Due to Farm Exports

The Portly Politico2 Comments

President Trump has enjoyed massive economic growth since his election, much less his actual inauguration.  The latest economic growth numbers for Q2 put the annualized rate of growth at a whopping 4.1%.

Naturally, the progressive Leftists are grasping about for any explanation they can to account for this growth, or to downplay it.  One of the more novel proposals is that the only reason growth is so high is because farmers are rushing out their exports to other nations ahead of planned tariffs—and the retaliatory measures they will garner.

While I’m willing to concede these premature exports may account for some of the growth rate in Q2, I doubt very seriously that there are enough additional soybean exports to China in a three-month period to bump the entire economic growth rate by more than a fraction of a percent.

Consider all the factors at play here:  the 2017 tax cut, specifically to the corporate tax rate, created a yuge incentive to companies to repatriate dollars held overseas, and made American companies internationally competitive again (prior to the cuts, our corporate tax rate of 35% was one of the highest in the developed world).  The easing of pressure on corporate rates and individual income tax rates have boosted business and consumer confidence, and wages have increased as unemployment continues to fall.

Even before the passage of the tax cut, deregulation within the executive branch began stimulating the economy.  In his famous Gettysburg campaign speech, in which then-candidate Trump put forth his reform agenda for the United States, he promised an executive order requiring the removal of two regulations for every one new regulation written.  In classic Trumpian fashion, the President delivered—and then some:  in 2017, the Trump administration cut a whopping twenty-two regulations for every one regulation passed.

The one-two punch of deregulation and tax cuts has juiced the engine of the economy with rocket fuel, but the media loves to run with the narrative that it’s all smoke-and-mirrors, and we’re only enjoying this growth because a bunch of farmers rushed out exports early.

They push that story for two reasons:

1.) They can’t give Trump credit for anything positive

2.) It draws attention to the downsides of tariffs, and the cloying sentimentality of the farmer struggling under Trump

I have a great deal of respect for farming and the rural life, but these aren’t Nebraska homesteaders or Jeffersonian yeoman farmers we’re talking about.  Not that that matters—big corporate farms shouldn’t be punished for being big; I’m merely cautioning readers to take such rhetoric with a massive dose of soy (actually, pick something else; we don’t need anymore soy boys).  The mainstream media is going to spin this story in the most maudlin fashion possible.

Tariffs historically have hurt farmers, who often pay the price of tariffs both ways:  they pay more imported goods, and they struggle to access foreign markets competitively when they export their products.  And, as I wrote recently, I don’t think tariffs are without their costs.

That said, there’s no way Q2 GDP growth can be driven solely, or even mostly, by farm exports.  Further, it seems that such robust growth makes tariffs more affordable, in the sense that the United States can spare a few decimals of growth in exchange for greater protections of worker.

Finally, tariffs-as-bargaining-chip seems to be working.  China’s economy is in free-fall, and the Chinese have to eat.  Even with tariffs on US soybeans and other farm products, China needs what we’re growing more than we need what they’re churning out.

In short, stay the course, President Trump.  Rebalance our trade agreements, make the income tax cuts permanent, and keep regulations light.

Dissident Write

The Portly Politico10 Comments

I possess the bad habit of reading constantly.  That might seem like a virtue—or a lame rhetorical device to get your attention—but it has developed into a minor problem.

My tendency towards bookishness doesn’t just limit itself to the classic “chubby-bespectacled-kid-reading-in-the-car” stereotype, although that’s true.  Ever since I got my first smartphone (a beautiful Lumia I picked up for $32.23 running the Windows Phone OS, well after Windows lost any kind of developer support) in 2016—I was very late to the game there—I can’t stop reading articles, op-eds, news stories, fiction, eBooks, and the like wherever I am.

That doesn’t make me particularly more intelligent (or interesting), but it has exposed me to some writers who are.  More specifically, I’ve come to learn of a number of writers and websites whose writings are provocative, engaging, daring, and fun.

So much of what we read and consume online and in print media is dull, predictable, and morally indignant.  There’s a great deal of lifeless writing and commentary, and it’s frustrating to read writers—on the Left and the Right—who fall into the same grooves.

The Left is full of examples, as they doctrinaire Leftists aren’t allowed to say anything outside of the fashionable-for-the-moment-until-we-condemn-it-in-a-few-years orthodoxy.  If one of them ever-so-slightly speaks out of turn, they’re kicked out of the club.

The ones that bother me the most are writers on the Right who have fallen into predictable patterns (the biggest offender that pops immediately to mind for me is National Review‘s David French, the most noodle-wristed combat veteran I’ve ever read; with all due and much-deserved respect to French’s heroism and service, he’s grown increasingly lame and ineffectual as a writer).  I understand writers have to carve out their niche, and that they shouldn’t violate their principles just to be different, but I want to see some gutsiness.

On that note, and in the spirit of my 2016 TPP Summer Reading List, I’d like to share with you some of my favorite writers, the ones that I clamor to read when I see they’ve written something new in my RSS feed (disclaimer:  I don’t agree with all of these writers’ conclusions—of course!—which should go without saying):

1.) Patrick J. Buchanan – Pat Buchanan was President Trump’s John the Baptist, the voice crying in the wilderness at the dawn of a globalist era, warning of what was to come, and foretelling the coming of one greater than himself (please, don’t think I’m comparing Trump to Jesus; the metaphor breaks down at that point).  Buchanan was calling out the shortcomings of massive free-trade zones and the like since the early 1990s.  His book Death of the West is a must-read for every American—if you’re not worried about massive, unchecked immigration now, you will be after reading this prophetic tome.

Buchanan is more isolationist than I would be on foreign policy, but he brings an important perspective to the discussion of international relations.  Buchanan has colored, if not entirely changed, my views on tariffs, family policy, immigration reform, and foreign policy.

He’s nationally-syndicated and appears on a ton of websites, including Taki’s Magazine, the home of several writers on this list, such as…

2.) Jim Goad – Holy crap.  Talk about a gutsy, controversial, in-your-face writer.  After reading one of Goad’s acerbic pieces, you practically have to wash your brain with holy water.  But, damn, can he write.

Goad is the grandfather of modern dissident writers.  He cut his chops as an ultra-edgy zine publisher in the early 1990s, back when weirdos who couldn’t fit into mainstream society could publish bizarre stories and borderline-pornographic material and become part of a cool counterculture.

Goad doesn’t pull any punches—he wrote a whole book called The Redneck Manifesto—and I can’t do better than to recommend you read him for yourself.  Just make sure you’re not at work.

3.) Ann Coulter – I cut my l’il conservative teeth reading Ann Coulter, who was a hard-hitting conservative polemicist before it was cool.  She completely and unabashedly called the 2016 election with an audacious level of confidence.

Coulter catches a lot of flack because she’s a.) super conservative and b.) incredibly caustic.  Her writing is so satirical and witty, most Lefties often miss (or willfully misinterpret) her clear-as-a-bell message.  I once got into a minor Facebook dispute with an ultra-hip progressive musician (buy his music; he’s an amazing songwriter) who drew the conclusion that Coulter was racist, even though she was denouncing racism in the very paragraph he posted.  It was to no avail (but you really should buy his music).

Yes, she’s a bit prickly.  Yes, she gets carried away with her political endorsements sometimes (she’s publicly stated her regret for being an early fan of disgraced New Jersey Governor Chris Christie—it’s okay, Ann, me, too).  But, like Goad, she doesn’t pull any punches, and she will take the conservative message into the lion’s den and back—fearlessly.

Coulter’s two chapters on the French Revolution in her book Demonic consist of one of the best overviews of the topic I’ve ever read.  Written in typically Coulter-ish style, she goes into macabre detail to illustrate how truly evil the French Revolution was.  There are many excellent scholarly works on the French Revolution, but few offer so much intense, damning clarity to the calamitous 1790s.

4.) Gavin McInnes – current CRTV host and Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes is my hero.  He’s single-handedly made traditional family values punk.  McInnes possesses a boyish, mischievous spirit that public schools and soy-rich diets have bred out of modern men.  His memoir, Death of Cool, had my sides splitting with every paragraph.  If you want to know how to live hard and survive, pick up a copy.

McInnes is the son of Scottish immigrants to Canada, and he grew up pretty much doing whatever he wanted in a poorly-supervised suburb of Toronto.  When his first child was born, he became a Christian—he’s Roman Catholic—when he saw her heel.  He asked, “How did that come about by accident?”  That was after a life of founding and losing several fortunes; sleeping—in graphically depraved ways, according to his telling—with what seems to be hundreds of women; taking lots of drugs; and fronting several popular Canadian punk bands.

And everyone says conservatives are boring old white dudes.

I don’t know if McInnes is writing now that he’s with CRTV, but you can find his archives on Taki’s Magazine.

5.) Christopher DeGroot – Rounding out our list is Christopher DeGroot, another regular at Taki’s Magazine.  I don’t know much about DeGroot’s background, but he’s one of the best writers on issues of gender relationships out there.  There’s a whole “manosphere” dedicated to promoting and discussing ideas of traditional masculinity, but a great deal of that world is dominated by pick-up artists (PUAs) and sex addicts—and even racists (real ones, not just normal conservatives who get called racist because we want people to have less government intrusion into their lives).

DeGroot is a wordy, philosophically-minded writer, and you can tell he thinks deeply about everything he pens.  Most contributors to Taki’s write—I would guess—around 700-800-word essays, maybe hitting 1000-1200 now and then.  I’m pretty sure everything DeGroot has written is at least 1200-1500 words.  Talk about getting more bang for your buck.

Again, all I can do is recommend you check him out.

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That finishes up this list.  It’s certainly not exhaustive—I will have to do a “Part II” at some point—but it’s a good, quick look at who I’m reading on a daily or weekly basis.

One parting warning:  I’m not responsible for blown minds from reading the works of the above writers.  Draw your own conclusions, and share your favorite writers—non-fiction, fiction, poetry, etc.—below!

Numbers Don’t Lie – The Electoral College

The Portly Politico7 Comments

Pollster Scott Rasmussen writes a brief, daily post for Ballotpedia called “Number of the Day.”  It’s an excellent, bite-sized chunk o’ statistical knowledge that gives an enlightening view of our nation from one of America’s great polltakers.

Monday’s “Number of the Day” was “49.5% of the U.S. Population Will Live in Eight States by 2040“—and continued with a discussion of the Electoral College.

For the unfamiliar, the Electoral College takes a lot of heat, usually from progressives (and especially so since President Trump won the 2016 election in the Electoral College, but lost the popular vote by margin of some millions).  There have been multiple attempts to abolish the Electoral College throughout American history, with the most successful effort coming after Richard Nixon’s electoral victory in 1968 (of course, that effort failed—fortunately).  Critics argue that the institution is “undemocratic,” as it seems to violate the principle of “one person, one vote.”

Fortunately, the Framers of the Constitution were wise enough to realize the pitfalls of popular democracy, which they believed devolved into mob rule and, ultimately, tyranny (see also:  the French Revolution), and also anticipated the dangers of a small group of urban voters being able to swing presidential elections at the expense of voters in rural States.

It is precisely this fear that Rasmussen’s demographic data highlights.  Rasmussen writes that nearly half of the nation’s population will live in one of eight States by 2040:  California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Illinois, and North Carolina.  That means that, in a popular system, those States could nearly swing a presidential election themselves.

Some readers might object that those voters are not uniform, and a popular vote would put a State like Wyoming more into play (as those ~600,000 voters—projected to be around 688,000 in 2040), but that assumes a level of individuality that, while attractive to the libertarian-minded, is not realistic.

Rural sections of the country have different goals, values, and concerns than urban centers.  A State with one or more major metropolitan areas would dominate national politics.

Rasmussen touches on this dynamic in Congress, too.  Currently, large States enjoy a huge advantage in the House of Representatives, the most “democratic” chamber at the federal level.  Small States, on the other hand, possess greater leverage in the Senate, where every State gets two Senators, regardless of population.  California—with its fifty-three Congressmen—can run roughshod over Wyoming in the House, but California’s Senators have the same clout as Wyoming’s two.

In essence, then, the different sections of the country have to reach some level of compromise to accomplish anything.  Rural States have to throw urban States a bone to get legislation passed in the House, and urban States have to support some rural State measures.

Indeed, this is largely how the farm bill and food stamps get passed:  rural Republicans vote for food stamps for the urban poor, and urban Democrats vote for corn subsidies for rural farmers.

That’s all Civics 101, but, as Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote, “People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.”

A final thought:  what happens when rural-urban compromise breaks down?  The values of the rural portions of the country—chiefly the South and Midwest—are increasingly at odds with the values of the bicoastal elites and their scattered archipelago of continental metropolises.  In that case, shouldn’t we throw out the system, as we’ll just get gridlock?

To quote the Apostle Paul, “God forbid!”  That divide highlights the necessity of separation of powers.  I’d rather not have a demiqueer otherkin alternative poetess-programmer (that’s the most ridiculous caricature I could conjure up) and xyr pansexual two-spirited Wookie life-mate ramming ultra-leftist progressive policies up my butt like a hamster at their next vegan pottery party, just as I’m sure the Wookie life-mates wouldn’t want me dictating my rustic Biblical morality to them (but, just so we’re clear, you people have lost your way).

The only major threat, as I see it, is that Congress has so abdicated its responsibility to the executive branch and its unelected bureaucracy of careerist swamp creatures, that we could see the further rise of executive overreach.  That’s why progressives howl at the moon in protest to President Trump—they think he’s going to wield the sword of executive power against them the way President Obama did against us.

But with the Deep State so ensconced in our national life, I sometimes fear that we’re living in pre-Augustusean times.  In the meantime, let us hope President Trump can correct the course; that Congress will once again jealously guard its prerogatives; and that the Electoral College stands for centuries to come.

Democrats Show Their True Colors

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Over the weekend, Democratic congressional nominee Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on a video with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.  The two self-styled democratic socialists were campaigning for Brent Welder in Kansas City.  In the video, the telegenic young Marxist boasted that “We’re gonna flip this seat red in November,” accidentally confusing the Republican Red for the Democratic Blue.

A minor gaffe, to be sure, but it’s interesting to consider the political party colors, which were reversed not too long ago.  Red has traditionally been the color of Communist, Marxist, socialist, and other leftist movements since the nineteenth century.  According to a piece from The Smithsonian (linked above and here), the media’s first usage of different colors to demonstrate presidential election results occurred in the 1976 race, in which Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter won when Mississippi went “red.”  Apparently, media outlets used the colors interchangeably until the 2000 election; we’ve stuck to red for Republicans and blue for Democrats since then.

In retrospect, though, the red coloring fits more with the ideology, goals, and history of the Democratic Party, and particularly its progressive wing (which, I would argue, is most of the party at this point).  Lately, Democrats have been flaunting their true colors unabashedly.

Take Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, for example.  She won a much-discussed upset in the Democratic primary for a New York congressional district against a powerful incumbent, Joe Crowley.  Her politics are stridently Leftist:  she supports Medicare for all, the abolishment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the forgiveness of all student loan debt, and a plethora of other unrealistic, expensive causes.

She’s also a much more appealing—and, therefore, more dangerous—face for “democratic” socialism than its other ubiquitous standard-bearer, Bernie Sanders. Senator Sanders is an aging, old-school socialist of the Trotskyite variety, much like his British counterpart, Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.  He’s never held a serious job outside of politics (which he entered in his forties), and he now looks like a kooky mad scientist who could disappear in a pile of dust and bones if a strong wind hit him (or if the deal he made with that necromancer is broken).

Ocasio-Cortez, on the other hand, is 28, and has the sort of Millennial profile that is common for my confused generation:  she worked as a bartender until a year ago; she’s passionate about many subjects, but not well-versed in any of them; she’s over-educated to the point of uselessness (see the previous phrase).

She’s also super telegenic and—except for some unfortunately-timed photos—a babe, and a Latina at that.

That’s a combination that Democrats can’t resist.  Like President Barack Obama—who was cool, African-American, a community organizer, and had a messiah complex—Democrats want a candidate who parrots radical ideologies while also validating them emotionally.  The hope is that an attractive young candidate will help them in future elections; thus, the constant touting of Ocasio-Cortez as the “future of the Democratic Party.”

Never mind that NY-14 congressional district that Ocasio-Cortez will soon represent (there’s not much chance of a Republican challenger succeeding in this district, which is a +29 D district) is nearly 50% Hispanic.  “Hispanic” is a tricky term, because it covers a number of different groups, but these aren’t your third- or fourth-generation Texas Hispanics (the ones who make up about half of the ICE agents Ocasio-Cortez wants out of a job); these are likely recent immigrants who, regardless of race, traditionally vote Democratic.  Some of them no-doubt originate from countries accustomed to leftist populist politicians.

Regardless, the Left is stripping down the last pretenses of being “moderate” or in favor of “common sense,” although you’ll still hear some use that phrase.  In the wake of President Trump’s election and administration, the Democratic Party has become increasingly open about its desire to soak the rich, redistribute wealth, take on a host of burdensome social and economic responsibilities, and generally move the nation further along toward socialism.

Outside of some parts of the South and the Midwest, the idea of the old-school “conservative Democrat” is long dead; it’s only now that the Democratic Party is showing its true colors.

To the Moon!

The Portly Politico8 Comments

Before beginning today’s post, a quick note about last Friday night’s concert:  the whole thing came off smashingly.  My buddy John and I gave a 90-minute performance at a coffee shop in Hartsville, South Carolina, Crema Coffee Bar, where we’ve played a number of such shows in the past.

This show was, easily, the most fun I’ve had playing this particular venue, our home-away-from-home in Hartsville.  John and I took turns playing original tunes, and we both unveiled new selections, John debuting an Irish tragedy entitled “The Sailor,” and I introducing my latest irreverent comedy tune, “Private Lessons (Goth Chick).”

We also enjoyed an excellent turnout, which is not to be taken for granted.  Live music doesn’t always have the appeal it once did, and sometimes promoting a show can come across as a bit needy—“please come listen to us!”—especially as everyone you know is in a band these days.  Fortunately, our friends and fans were hugely supportive, and it seemed like a capacity crowd at the height of the show.  A YUGE “thank-you” to everyone who came out.

My next tour stop is the Juggling Gypsy in Wilmington, North Carolina, on Friday, August 3, starting around 9 PM.  You can learn more at www.tjcookmusic.com or on my Facebook page.

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I’ve written  a bit about space exploration and the formation of Space Force on this blog, and I’ve long been an advocate semi-publicly of expansion into space.  Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs when I still subscribed to the globalist rag that had me jumping for joy.  The essay, “The Case for Space,” is one of the best apologias written for the benefits we would reap from funding additional space exploration.  Tyson is a poor political pundit, and his fanboyish acolytes are so annoying, they reflect poorly on him, but he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to space.

I’m a fiscal, as well as a social, conservative, but I’m all about spending gobs of government cash on space exploration—and colonization.  I realize I’m committing the same error everyone does—“don’t spend my tax dollars… except on all this stuff I personally like or agree with”—but I see a role for the government in space exploration that makes sense constitutionally and functionally, in a way that, say, free bus fare for war widows isn’t.

Like Newt Gingrich—the other great modern essayist on space exploration—I see expansion into space as akin to westward expansion in the nineteenth century.  There were a lot of hardy pioneers that took the risks and were “rugged individualists”—but the government granted generous loans and tracts of land to railroad companies to open up those lands.  The government—largely Republican-controlled after the American Civil War—played a role in catalyzing western expansion.

Similarly, we see a mix of entrepreneurship and government support today, although the government seems bogged down in its usual bureaucratic inefficiencies, while the hot-shot mega-billionaire flyboys are taking the major risks.  Nevertheless, Gingrich wrote over the weekend about this very topic, marking the 49th anniversary of the moon landing.

As usual, the Trump administration, as Gingrich writes, is thinking “big league” when it comes to space, and Vice President Michael Pence is heading up a revived National Space Council.  The NSC is charged with exploring placing bases on the moon to reduce the costs of launches, which would be much more fuel-efficient in the moon’s reduced gravitational field (which is one-sixth that of Earth’s).

In a larger, cultural sense—since I’m not versed enough in the technical side of this subject, I’m deflecting to where I can bloviate on slightly more solid ground—I don’t understand the disinterest in, even hostility toward, space exploration.  In general, I’m dismayed by the lack of pioneering derring-do and spirit in American culture today.  Aren’t we descended from rugged frontiersmen and women who crossed oceans, forded rivers, climbed mountains, and endured dysentery to get here?

A few years ago, I stumbled upon one of those writers I love—a slightly fringe character who writes about weird, just-outside-of-the-mainstream topics.  The author in question is James D. Heiser, a bishop in the Evangelical Lutheran Diocese of North America and a founding member of the Mars Society, a group that aims to put Americans on Mars.

I first stumbled upon Heiser after reading a review of his book “The American Empire Should Be Destroyed”:  Alexander Dugin and the Perils of the Immanentized Eschatology, which is about the titular figure, an eccentric, Rasputin-like character who advises Vladimir Putin in some capacity.  That book led me to another Heiser work, Civilization and the New Frontier:  Reflections on Virtue and the Settlement of a New World, a collection of essays—mostly his introductory remarks at various Mars Society annual conventions—about the settlement of Mars.

The basic argument is that the quest to settle new worlds will stretch Americans not just scientifically, but spiritually:  in striving for the stars, we’ll cultivate the classical virtues that make civilization possible, and, in the process, reinvigorate our earthly civilization.

I believe there’s something to this thesis.  Struggle—be it the struggle to survive on the hostile Martian plains, or to make ends meet here on Earth—breeds growth.  Adversity is the heat that tempers the iron of the soul.

Space has much to offer:  abundant natural resources, the thrill of discovery, hot alien babes (just kidding about that last one).  But it also has the potential to inspire future generations of Americans to reach for the stars—both physically, and spiritually.

The Human Toll of Globalization

The Portly Politico30 Comments

Last week’s posts shared a similar theme:  the costs of unbridled free trade; the benefits of cutting corporate and income taxes to unleash economic growth; and the human side to economics that academics tend to miss.

The first and third topics referenced above came into sharp relief as I read an excellent piece by Chadwick Moore, “Left for Dead in Danville: How Globalism is Killing Working Class America.”  It’s a long-form piece of journalism for Breitbart, but it is well worth the read.  I encourage all of my readers to set aside twenty minutes to read it and its terrifying account of globalization gone wrong.

My post today simply seeks to offer up a summary of Moore’s findings, presenting them in an easily-digestible form for those who don’t have the time or inclination to read his full-length piece.

The conceit of the piece is simple:  Moore visited Danville, Virginia, a former textile mill town located on the Dan River, and very close to North Carolina.  The town was once—and “once” doesn’t mean “a hundred years ago,” but about twenty years ago—a thriving town that supported a solid middle-class through its robust textile industry.  Civic pride was abundant, and the Dan River Mill supported a number of youth and community activities and functions that are familiar to anyone who has grown up in a small town.

Then came NAFTA in 1994, followed by China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization in 2000.  After years of struggling to compete with foreign competition, Dan River Mills shut down in 2006 (it had been open since 1882).

As the town’s economy declined and unemployment skyrocketed, social problems grew.  Drug use increased dramatically, as did crime, and formerly-safe, middle-class neighborhoods devolved into dangerous slums.  More than a quarter of the town’s population is on food stamps.

Race relations also grew worse.  The town had enjoyed peaceful, working relationships between black and white citizens, who worked together happily in the mills and other businesses.  Now, the KKK plans rallies, preying off the desperation of the unemployed (the town is roughly half white, half black).

Moore gives a good bit of space to quoting Michael Stumo, the CEO of the Coalition for a Prosperous America.  Stumo elegantly explains the problem in Danville—as with many other small towns in Middle America—tracing it to China and the World Trade Organization.  Some choice bits to chew on:

“‘When China joined the WTO in 2000 with 1.3 billion people underemployed, it began pulling them out of the rice paddies, the farms, and rural areas, and putting them to work. The Chinese under-consume. They produce more than they consume, [in] a country that’s four and a half times as big as ours and relying on the American consumer to fund their path to wealth and doing so with a state-directed economy, which is different than communist, it’s a strategic mix of state capitalism with a little bit of private sector in it. We always thought communism would fail, but China found central planning 2.0 and is pretty good at it,’ he says….

‘We have free trade within the 50 states,’ Stumo says. ‘By impoverishing our middle class with this offshoring driven by free trade policy, you’re killing the U.S. consumer market, which drives growth, because they have no money. Five or ten percent cheaper prices is overwhelmed in this stage by lack of production and stagnant wages,’ he says. ‘The U.S. middle class cannot afford to fund the rise of other countries anymore.

‘Industry doesn’t stand still; industry is always incubating—you give up the jobs, the wealth creation, the supply chain clusters in communities, and that affects the service sector around them,’ Stumo says. ‘You pull those plants out, and a lot of people are out of work, and then the whole general wage level drops because burger-flipping isn’t an upward pressure on wages, but production is.'”

A degree of globalization, in an age of mass transit and mass communications, inevitable.  And open trade with lower tariffs generally is beneficial.  But naïvely-open trade with dishonest trading partners with slave-level wages primarily benefits the dishonest party.  Yes, there are some winners in the United States—I certainly enjoy a higher quality of life because of cheap electronics from abroad, for example—but as I wrote last week, isn’t it worth paying a little more for your television or washing machine, if it means an American keeps his job.

My thinking on this is simple:  the actual, physical and mental of work, in and of itself, important.  Yes, we could pay everyone a guaranteed basic income, or help people through more assistance programs (ignore the astronomical costs of those programs for the moment), but even if they worked beautifully in the material sense, they will, in the long-run, lead to a deterioration of real skills and, more important, a spiritual vitality.

I strongly believe that the three keys to happiness are faith, family, and work, in that order.  Work is ennobling, even if it is unpleasant at times.  As such, if the government is going to do something, would it not be wiser to offer assistance that requires work?

Tariffs accomplish this goal to some extent, and are entirely constitutional (indeed, one of the authors of the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, argued for them as Secretary of Treasury).  They also produce revenue for the federal government, and could be used to offset further reductions in corporate and income tax rates.

Ultimately, the social and civic costs of unbridled, unfocused free trade seem too steep.  Read Moore’s observations about the flood of drugs and despair into this once-civic-minded, prosperous town, and understand that the 10% discount you enjoy on your consumer goods is seldom worth the human toll.

To clarify once again, I’m not arguing we return to the massively high tariffs of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  That would be economically disastrous in other ways, and would further enhance our federal government’s penchant for corporatist back-scratching and favoritism.  But some judicious, targeted tariffs, especially against nations like China, are wise.  Why should we be subsidizing China’s growth at the expense of our own?

One final thought:  as I wrote Friday, a married man used to be able to raise his kids on a gas station pump-boy’s salary.  Sure, life was lean, and there weren’t a ton of crazy gadgets to play with or luxuries to enjoy, but the kids grew up well enough and the wife could stay home to raise them.  Are we really that much better off now, when both husband and wife slave for 40+ hours a week (and usually longer), outsource their parenting responsibilities to daycare and public schools, and can’t get out from under student loan, home, car, and consumer debt?

There are a host of factors driving the modern scenario of today versus the “blue-collar father” of yesteryear, but surely one economic solution is to stop burrowing out our families and towns in favor of frosty, urban cosmopolitanism and aloof globalism.  I care about the people of China, and I’m glad to see they’re no longer trapped in rice paddies and collectivized farms, but—like our great President Trump—I care about my country and fellow countrymen first.  So should the United States government—it’s job is, literally, to put Americans first.