Metrics Don't Matter

Cracking open today’s WSJ, you’ll find an article entitled “There’s No Escaping Hauser’s Law” by W. Kurt Hauser on its opinion pages. The pull quote reads, “Tax revenues as a share of GDP have averaged just under 19% whether tax rates are cut or raised. Better to get 19% of a larger pie.”

Seems plausible enough. At least, there appears to be enough data to back it up. So, why is our government doing everything it can to keep its heel firmly planted on the neck of business?

The Left’s battle cry remains, “Tax cuts? Who will pay for it?” It implies that there is presently not enough money to pay for government programs. We can agree on least that much. The solution would seem to be growing the pie and thus increasing the revenue stream to government coffers by first and foremost lowering taxes.

Since we refuse to do this, it becomes obvious that for the Left tax revenue is not the issue. Socialism is.

The disagreements we have on this blog are relatively minor. We all share the same basic assumptions. Not so the Left. The Left does not believe in economies; they do not believe in the individual’s right of free expression; they do not believe in success; they do not believe in failure as an option. The Left intends to enforce equality. For this to happen, success must be reduced to failure. Failure is so much easier to achieve. So, failure it is; standards removed; judgment banned.

It took Marx over 300 pages to write “Das Kapital”. It would take me at least that much to refute it. And even so, the Left cannot be converted. Equality is like a religion to them. And it’s taken on aspects of jihad. That’s why the Left refuses to engage (except on its own terms). The Left aims to win. Worldwide communism; worldwide Caliphate.

Anyone who still thinks Obama is in some way deficient is a fool. In the U.S. president’s mind he is succeeding. Brand Obama a socialist or a Muslim all you want. It does not scare the Left. They operate under entirely different assumptions. To them, capitalism’s success is a false success. It is evil. Equality is their one and only goal. Whether it is achieved by forced labor (“Arbeit Macht Frei”), gulag or shariah is all the same to them. Capitalism must be destroyed. It’s a war in which the only outcome can be the domination of one over the other. Metrics don’t matter.

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Beatific But Improbable

You label Jeff Adachi a ‘progressive‘. ‘Progressive’ essentially means ‘communist’. Adachi was apparently not paying attention or absent from school when ‘progressivism’ was presented in a series of lectures at Berkeley. He appears to have missed at least one of its critical lessons - the one about the eventual fate of the proverbial ‘golden goose‘.

The concerns Adachi raises do not enter in any discussion relating to progressivism/communism. In fact, these can be regarded as inconsequential - ‘category error’ - and quite unrelated to the field. The roadmap to communism as laid down by Marx, Alinsky, Cloward, Piven and others, is in fact a recipe for slaughter. At that point the narrative ends and we are left to imagine the rest. The ritual sacrifice of the ‘goose’ effectively ends the earthly portion of one‘s obligation. What follows is some version of the ‘Last Supper’ after which we can presumably collectively cross over into the balm of salvation. Iran’s ayatollahs are promoting a similar scheme.

It never ends up being neat as all that. After all was said and done, Jim Jones’ tropical kindergarten compound still left the task of disposing of the bodies. In North Korea, it left an entire population languishing on the razor’s edge of starvation. Mao’s original vision had to be rolled back considerably when it became apparent that the apocalypse was still quite a ways off.

The latest to have come knocking at heaven’s door is Barack Hussein Obama. The plan is to keep boiling the milk and reducing it to that sublime essence that simply melts in one’s mouth. Obama missed none of the lessons. As such, he knows full well what he’s after: that final cleansing by fire after which blind and bloodless justice will reign unimpeded in the rarified air of Reverend Wright’s (Liberation Theology) church. It’s a world without metrics - without standards - in which every last one of us is cipher equal; in which there is no difference even in difference. The thief and the robbed are the same; as are the murderer and the murdered; the lewd and the chaste; rich and poor; stupid and smart; the worker and the one with his hand out. Sounds like somebody’s beatific but improbable vision of heaven to me.

The Tables Are Turning

We’ve come full circle. The various struggles here in America as well as around the world all have a common denominator. At first blush it appears to center on the Tea Parties vs. the Washington establishment; or Palestinians vs. the Jews; or Islamists vs. the West. But that’s only seeing individual trees in the forest. The overall theme of the forest is consistent: The masses are rising up against the elites and the elites are fighting back trying desperately to protect the status quo.

Elites can be found on both the right and the left of the political spectrum. The Jews have been the world’s foremost elites. They have traditionally defined themselves as God’s chosen people.

For most of their history - having been denied their own soil to cultivate - they have doggedly tilled their own domain: the mind. As such, they have succeeded in defining the narrative of ‘success’ for the rest of us. Jews are hard working and disciplined. They have become highly influential within the ruling structure of numerous (particularly western) nations. They have become instrumental to the advancement of the arts, science, technology and finance. They have (perhaps) disproportionally reaped the rewards of their forward thinking under the guise of academic accolades and material success.

While there is no doubt that Jews have contributed greatly to our modern standard as we have come to accept it, this has also sown the seeds of resentment among the rest of us. While it is commonly said that those who align with the Jews will never be wanting, and those who abandon them will be assigned their own special ring in Dante’s hell; with each passing day, this particular paradigm becomes increasingly less relevant. Jews, in effect, have become the target of a predictable world-wide push-back against elitism.

Ironically, the seeds of animus against Jews may have been sown by Jews themselves. Marx’s dialectical materialism (which includes the core idea that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles") stood Moses’ law (“thou shalt not covet, steal…”) on its head. It codified what had always been quite obvious (the have-nots wanting what the haves have) and made it inevitable, sanctifying the revolution (or cleansing) by which excess and inequity are tempered. But Marx focused only on the economic aspect. He evidently did not realize that there are other hierarchies, some based on birth, others on skin color, and still others on degrees of brutality.

The mullahs of Iran also represent an elite. The same tide set to sweep the high and mighty from their pedestals applies there as well (minus the economic aspect). It is only by brutality, fear and oppression by which they can continue to rule. And, again, in America, we are finally waking up and seeing that the ruling elites have become far too big for their britches. A political re-alignment has been long overdue. The proletariat is preparing to reclaim their nation.

World unrest stems from a push-back against the ruling elite by whatever ‘isms’ they choose to identify themselves. Left or right, elites are elites. The tables are turning. The last shall be first and the first shall be last.

It Won't Work Here

No doubt, our health care system needs improvement. Health care in America is way too expensive. Over the years there have been many calls for reform. I too agree that reform is long overdue.

If I were to reform health care, I would talk with people in the industry. I would listen to their ideas. I would then ask them to put something together that makes sense. Some of it I already know first hand. I know that in India I can get first class medical care at one-tenth of what it would cost me here in America. I know that one reason for this is competition. If I think an Indian doctor is charging too much, I simply go to another. A second reason for the high cost of health care in America is the high premiums doctors (and medical staff in general) must pay for liability insurance. A fix in this part of the equation would involve the thorny issue of tort reform. I am convinced that this, coupled with some version of patient-controlled medical savings accounts, would solve the lion’s share of our medical insurance problems.

Karl Marx was once to have said, "First you socialize medicine and everything else follows like night follows day." Whether or not this quote is accurate, or even if it can be attributed to Marx is not the issue. Significant is that the quote exists and has likely found itself into various socialist catechisms. Additionally, it is also likely that Barack Hussein Obama (who has never been known to be a stickler for exactitude) is profoundly aware of it. At any rate, our star-crossed president is acting as if he believes it.

In a nutshell, I would suggest that health care can be fixed by taking the advice of professionals and proceeding reasonably and incrementally towards a solution. Obama, on the other hand is looking to ‘fix’ health care by taking an entirely ideological approach. As such, this would not necessarily require expertise. All he would need to do is to pass into law a loose framework that remains open to interpretation. It must be remembered that, in Obama’s mind, the goal is not to fix health care. The goal is control. The clue that this is indeed this administration’s plan is obvious by their relentless bashing of the industry and shunning its experts.

We have learned much about the Left in the past year. We have learned who they are and how they operate. The implementation of policy is a reasoned and linear process. It is like an equation whose variables cannot be assumed to be such intangibles as falsehoods and emotion. It may work in the Middle East where ignorance, cruelty and cult of personality still reign supreme; where self-destruction is part and parcel with articles of faith; where martyrdom, not progeny, is seen as the link to salvation.

But it won’t work here in these United States.

A Fool's Errant

Evo Morales's climate ambassador may well have let the cat out of the bag and articulated for us what's really at stake. For those whose aim it is to turn the world upside down, 'climate gate' is indeed only a footnote. Whereas 'global warming' is merely a previously effective tool that has worn dull, the thrust toward 'socio-economic justice'; progressivism, i.e. communism and, hence, toward reaching that first inevitable step to its world-wide implementation, remains vibrant and dangerous as ever. ‘Vibrant’, because enough has now been put in place (including a leader, sympathetic to the cause, in the target country); and, ’dangerous’, because what is envisioned has never worked, cannot work, and will never work as advertised.

When Karl Marx wrote “Das Kapital”, the march of ‘fellow travelers’ into that vaunted bloody revolution and beyond was confined to occur within the borders of any given nation state. Since then, the world has grown considerably smaller; boundaries have become blurred. The prize, so desperately sought by the communists has always been that hugely successful bastion of unabridged capitalism, America. It was difficult to turn America against itself, especially on the basis of the economic argument alone. In America, after all, the poor tended to have many more advantages than the richest do in much of the rest of the world. The mission of the communist crusaders needed to be slightly modified. It would become necessary to turn the rest of the world against America.

‘Global warming’ was tailor made to bring this about. Even Americans in significant numbers were recruited to the effort. In fact, so much in resource and emotion was invested in the project, it became too big to fail. So, when the science propping it up proved fraudulent, enough else was already in place as to reduce the potentially explosive University of East Anglica e-mail disclosures to merely a passing mention. Leftist governments (including the U.S.), media, academe and public opinion were all already committed to a fool’s errand. The most powerful people in the world had already placed their bets. It would only become a matter of riding out the squall and pretend nothing had been revealed.

It will be interesting to note how many eyes Bolivia’s representative’s frank talk at the climate summit in Copenhagen will have opened. My guess is none; apart, of course, from eliciting howls from the skeptic choir that already stands excluded, denounced; discredited; ignored.