The fundamental underpinning of “market forces” is akin to Newton’s Third Law. As in action-reaction. Commerce involves two (or more) parties that interact, and more importantly, react. One raises a price or degrades a product, the other might shop elsewhere. One lowers a price or improves a product, he might attract new customers. The interaction doesn’t happen in isolation or apart from the real world. Alternatives are available.

People don’t like that. The obvious case is the business owner seeking to achieve monopoly status, whether by undercutting or buying up the competition, or by getting the government to distort the market in his favor. The first two are part-and-parcel of “market forces,” and such strategies don’t work out in the long run. The third, unfortunately, is a tried-and-true method of personal gain at greater cost to the overall economy. Rent-seeking behavior LINK, especially when the government is large, is effective and lucrative.

The business owner is not alone in this. Consumers don’t like the vagaries of the market, so many look to the government to force businesses to provide goods and services on more favorable terms. Such rent-seeking behavior (it’s no different than what business owners do) is typically couched in more noble terms, such as safety or fairness or justice or equity, but it’s just another form of coercive taking of the fruit of others’ labor.

Speaking of labor... Organized labor in the private sector, aka unions, is an important and natural part of “market forces,” and serves to compensate for power imbalances between wealthy big business owners and individual workers. Where this goes wrong is the same place that the other elements of an economy (business and consumer) do - in seeking government involvement. Getting the one true monopoly in our society - the government and its sole control of coercion - to tip the scales in its favor.

To mute the effectiveness of the “reaction” part of market forces.

As bad as these distortions are for you and me and the economy as a whole, the damage is far, FAR worse when market forces are rendered nonexistent.

As is the case with public sector unions.

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The New York metro area was briefly held hostage by a Long Island Railroad union strike. The LIRR is the busiest commuter rail in the nation, transporting a quarter million people to and from work every day. It is not a private business, competing with other private businesses, and thus subject to market forces. It is a government-run monopoly. The governor caved pretty quickly, and gave the already-over-paid workers a sweetheart deal.

This raises a fundamental question: What counterweight is there to the public unions’ power, and in particular to the destructive power of a strike by a public union?

There really isn’t one. The only counterweight is the politicians’ fear of voter wrath, which is nebulous and attenuated by a zillion other factors. Especially in a one-party state like New York.

This isn’t new thinking.

In 1919, then-Governor of Massachusetts (and eventual President) Calvin Coolidge responded to a strike by the Boston police union by stating that “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.”

FDR, a champion of workers’ rights, nevertheless believed that public workers striking was anathema: “A strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to prevent or obstruct the operations of Government until their demands are satisfied. Such action, looking toward the paralysis of Government by those who have sworn to support it, is unthinkable and intolerable.”

Ronald Reagan famously fired 11,000 striking air traffic controllers.

These are the exceptions. These are the instances where the public good was elevated over the politician’s first goals of self-preservation and re-election.

Public unions have massive, election-tipping power. Living as they do off Other People’s Money, and insulated from market forces by the very people who sit on the other side of the bargaining table. A business owner’s negotiator facing a union boss should not be receiving bribes from the union boss, yet that is exactly what political contributions by public unions to political candidates are.

Taxpayers, the ultimate consumers of the services provided by those in the public unions, do not have a choice as to how their money gets spent. We cannot take our business elsewhere. We cannot apply market discipline to the equation. It is no surprise, then, that public unions continue to grow in power, and that public services continue to get more expensive even as their quality deteriorates.

This is not fixable by any changes in leadership. This is a structural problem, manifest at its core by the existence of public unions.

To repeat, private-sector unions serve an important role in a free market economy, as long as government provides neither benefit nor hindrance.

Public-sector unions, on the other hand, should not exist.

I follow a number of libertarian and pro-free-market sites and pages on social media, and I sometimes amuse myself by reading the comments under posts promoting capitalist ideas. Sure as the sun rises, I will find a plethora of criticisms and condemnations. All of which are contemptuous and condescending. None of which show the remotest understanding of what capitalism actually is.

Herein lies a big-picture problem for those of us who promote liberty. The natural reflex is to point out the errors in their arguments. Many of them conflate capitalism with anarchy or lawlessness. Many misattribute blame more properly assigned to government interference. Many commit logical fallacies. Many make nonsensical “empathy” arguments, or simply lob insults about how capitalists are heartless and selfish.

Our rebuttals can be as solid as the footings of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in whose shadow I grew up, but they won’t make a whit’s difference to those self-righteously obnoxious commenters.

They don’t care about the fact that capitalism is head-and-shoulders better than any of their socialistic systems at improving human living standards, or that the comfortable lives they live are the products of capitalism rather than socialism, or that the “features” they embrace are actually the flaws that are slowing human progress.

These people are like weeds in a garden. No matter how many you pull, more will emerge.

Thus the adage about “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” Which Thomas Jefferson did not coin, but which remains eternally (see what I did there?) accurate despite that misattribution.

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On line, in comments section, they are best ignored. Some of them are trolls, some are bots, some are useful idiots, some are just idiots, and some are selfish, immoral coveters of Other People’s Money who use the veneer of “I care more than you do” to justify their thieving ways. But in broader society, they must be fought. On our terms, not theirs. Counterattack - calmly and rationally - rather than allow them to control the narrative. Remember that you are presenting to whoever reads the conversation, not to them. You’ll never change their minds - your goal should be to win over everyone else. Point out the misery and destruction that socialism has always created, and tear down whatever utopian hairball they cough up.

And always remember - there is no utopia, even via liberty, capitalism, and free markets. Liberty just gets us to the best possible outcome. Emphasis on possible.

Finally, next time someone says “more taxes, redirect the narrative and ask them what their plan is to address the trillion a year being lost to fraud and waste and corruption.

The latest Current Thing is the release of classified government UFO files. People of countless stripes and flavors are hyperventilating and salivating over the prospect of little green men, revelations of alien visits, and explanations for the heretofore unexplained.

So far, near as I can tell, they are once again disappointed. Yet again, Charlie Brown runs at the football, and Lucy pulls it away at the last moment.

In this case, Charlie Brown is people’s bottomless desire to believe that science fiction overlaps into reality, and Lucy is reality itself.

Here is reality.

Space is unimaginably vast and the age of the universe is unimaginably long. I mean unimaginably in a literal sense - the human brain is not wired to comprehend sizes and time scales of such magnitude. Humans have only been “technological” in a fashion that could be detected by an alien civilization (e.g. transmitting radio waves) for about a century and a quarter. This means that, unless aliens have chosen to visit every star there is, they’d have to be within a few tens of light years of our Sun to a - notice us, and b - set up an expedition to come check us out. If they were that close and capable of traveling interstellar distances, we would certainly have “heard” their electromagnetic emissions by now.

I take a deeper dive into this (disappointing) reality here:

That’s not to say that there isn’t intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. As I noted, the universe is huge. Moreso, it’s old. A civilization could have come and gone a mere hundred thousand years earlier, nearby, and we’d have missed it. Point is, given the size and age of the universe, the limits imposed by physics, and the utter lack of evidence of life anywhere else (let alone intelligent life), there is absolutely no rational reason to think that the UFO files would contain anything to prove aliens.

Is it possible? Of course. You can’t prove a negative, but you’d be as likely, given the actual evidence (more accurately, the lack of it) expecting to find unicorns in a cave under Mount Ararat.

So, why do people persist?

For the same reason that people persist in writing, and reading, dystopian science fiction stories.

For the same reason that people persist in believing and repeating end-of-the-world theories.

For the same reason that researchers continue to find new ways that human activity is destroying the planet, even when the old ways turn out not to be such a big deal.

Because they are interesting.

Because saying “there are no aliens” is boring. Because saying “things are incrementally getting better” is boring. Because noting that the world is not ending is boring.

No one is going to pay a writer for a future tale of humdrum suburban contentment, and no one is going to pay a researcher for concluding that people and things are just fine if you leave them alone.

Even newspapers that publish human interest stories find ones that warm the heart. They don’t run stories about Joe and Sue Johnson coming home after a normal day’s work to make dinner and hang out in front of the TV with a couple beers and a bucket of popcorn. Perfectly fine and normal day, they’re both content, but nothing remarkable enough for anyone else to care, so it’s “not a story.”

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This aligns with the “do something rather than nothing” aspect of human nature that drives government size ever upward. We aren’t wired to contentment or appreciation for the good-but-humdrum. Boring is a disappointment, even if boring is better than the alternatives. Unlike a Snickers bar, boring doesn’t satisfy. So, we are disinclined to accept that Area 51 isn’t hiding secrets about alien spacecraft, or that UFOs are either classified military stuff or “we haven’t come up with an explanation.” By the way, not having an answer is not an invitation to insert your own evidence-free speculation or to say “well, you can’t prove it’s NOT aliens, so…”

As Carl Sagan helpfully opined, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

As Christopher Hitchens pithily noted, “that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”

The burden of proof is on the person making an “aliens!” claim. And, again, ‘stuff we cannot explain’ is not evidence of aliens. If something appears to violate the laws of physics, what’s more likely? That our observation is flawed, or that physics has been invalidated by some visitor whose likelihood I’ve already discussed?

Yes, I’m being a party pooper, but reality is indifferent to our desires, and someone does have to say it from time to time.

Might I be wrong?

Of course.

Show me some evidence. I’m not averse to proof. It’s just that I haven’t seen any yet. And, no, a lack of explanation for a phenomenon is not an invitation to insert your pet “theory” (which is in just about every case nothing more than wishful thinking) into the void.

Same goes for dystopian fiction, end-of-the-world scenarios, and other iterations of the sky falling. I prefer to believe in human ingenuity continuing to improve our lives and living standards, and continuing to overcome the problems that arise. History is on my side.

As for the “whistleblowers” who purport to have inside information? Beware of appeals-to-expertise, assurances of “secret knowledge,” and the like. Shouldn’t we question their motives as well as asking for evidence of their claims?

New York City is one of the progressive meccas that has embraced the notion that low-level criminals are actually victims who should be pitied rather than punished. Between the elimination of bail for many offenses, non-prosecution of many repeat offenders, and a wholesale disinterest in enforcing the law for entire categories of crimes (e.g. shoplifting, fare-beating), the city’s scofflaws have never had it so good.

With a new caveat.

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In 1938, construction began on a bridge traversing Puget Sound between Tacoma and the Kitsap Peninsula. The bridge, nicknamed “Gallopin’ Gertie” by construction workers due to its tendency to bounce in high winds, opened to traffic July 1, 1940, and collapsed in spectacular fashion just four months later during a period of high winds.

I won’t go into the physics and engineering behind the bridge’s collapse here, other than to note that there is still disagreement. Broadly, however, it was a structure that collapsed because it got pushed too hard by external forces.

Watching current events, I sometimes fear that our nation may be headed in that direction. In particular, the recent antics in Virginia, where Democrats attempted to gerrymander the state’s Congressional districts in a fashion that would virtually eliminate Republican representation in a state where 46% of the voters opted for Donald Trump in 2024 but got rebuffed by the state’s Supreme Court, cast a bleak picture. Unwilling to abide by the law of the land, the Democrats now want to upend their third branch of state government by immediately setting a mandatory retirement age of 54 so they can seat a fresh set of judges who, presumably, would rule differently and allow the gerrymander to stand.

This is pure banana republic shit, and it’s a signal for what they want to do on a national level if given the opportunity. It was just a couple weeks ago that James Carville tipped his hand by urging the Dems to pack the Supreme Court should they get the reins of power in 2028.

Why, and to what end?

Socialist darling Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently tipped her hand by noting that her aspirations were nothing as mundane or transitory as the Presidency. She wants to transform the nation into a socialist hellhole paradise. She seems to believe that she and hers can succeed where countless others have produced only misery, privation, and death in the past. In pondering her past public pronouncements, I cannot but conclude that she is a classic example of Dunning-Kruger Effect, but seasoned with an instinctive social media canniness that has enabled her to effectively pitch woo and bullshit to the gullible and ignorant.

Obama took the nation leftward. Trump put the brakes on that. Biden promised a return to normalcy but went even harder to the left. Trump, again, was something of a reset, but the Overton window had shifted and remained shifted leftward. A sprinkling of Dems (John Fetterman, Bill Maher) are now calling for normalcy, but they are in the wilderness compared to a crop of young leftists emerging as the new voice of the party, following in the AOC path, and continuing to cow the rest of the old guard into obeisance. Zohran Mamdani and his clones are popping up like mushrooms, and Abigail Spanbergers are lying their way into office by promising moderation then turning hard left.

There’s a ton of hope among the Trump-skeptical and Never-Trump middle and right that the Dems might go “normal” once Orange Man is out of office. Or, if they win the House or all of Congress in the mid-terms. This is the wishfulest of wishful thinking, from all I see. The evidence for it is nonexistent. All the Dems want is power. Unlimited, unfettered, and permanent. Power, first and foremost, to crush their foes under their boots, and reward their friends by taking everything they can from society’s wealth creators. Like the wind that tore down the Tacoma Narrows bridge, they are indifferent to the damage they will cause.

In the words of Daffy Duck, “consequences, shmonsequences...”

Of course, tearing it all down is the goal of some of the Marxist long-thinkers, and has been since the Frankfurt School’s inception nearly a century ago. They want to destabilize society because they believe they can built a socialist utopia out of the ashes. It’s the deep arrogance of intellectual elites who’ve never actually had to work productive jobs in their lives, an arrogance that has plagued many societies and will continue to plague many more.

And the Democratic Party continues to give them free rein and full sail.

In yet another “whatever it takes” moment, California Democrats, freaking out that their “jungle primary” system for Governor (intended to lock Republicans out of any chance at the governor’s mansion) might put two Republicans and no Democrats on the ballot for the general election this fall, are scrambling to rewrite the law they passed fifteen years ago. Hoist with their own petard, doth spake the Bard.

The panic is as palpable as the hatred.

Those who know me outside this blog, or who are social media friends, know that I’ve been on a live music frenzy ever since the pandemic lockdown ended. With 168 shows under my belt since I took the “more!” vow in early 2022, I feel I have enough experience to offer up some… experience.

I am far from the first to offer an etiquette guide for attending live music performances. Yet, despite the existence of many (easily findable in seconds via the same gizmo you are using to read this), I witness, far too often, behaviors that do harm to everyone’s enjoyment. While a good bit of this is cribbed from those who walked this ground before me, some is my own, and I hope for a level of completeness I have yet to find elsewhere.

The first three are just for fun. A couple others are “take it or leave it” suggestions, but many do need to be said. While they may seem like common sense, common sense is not as common as we would hope.

• Unless it’s in an arena or stadium, it’s a show*, not a concert. That’s the rule, I didn’t make it up, don’t blame the messenger.

• Unless it’s verifiably 30 or more years old, don’t wear the shirt of the band you are seeing to the show. Everyone there is already a fan, and you’ll just be one of dozens or hundreds or thousands. Wearing a different shirt opens conversations and can make you new friends. So does a “World Tour 1978” shirt that you bought… in 1978. Wearing your favorite band’s shirt to another band’s show promotes your favorite band far more than wearing it to their shows.

• Don’t listen to the band on the way to the show. Keep your palette clean, and be more open to the live interpretations you are going to see.

  • Controversial take: don’t listen to the original band if you are heading to a tribute show.

• Buy merch (band merchandise) before booze, especially for smaller acts in smaller venues with cheaper ticket prices. Merch revenue is a big deal to smaller acts and openers. Bring cash, and tip your merch seller, even if it’s just a buck or two.

• Keep your conversations to a minimum, even if you think the show’s so loud no on can hear you. You’ll be surprised how far your voice can carry. Lean in and speak only as loudly as necessary to be heard, and for pity’s sake don’t run commentary or endless monologue to your friend or partner. No one is there to hear your esoterica.

• Follow basic phone/camera etiquette.

  • Make sure your flash is off!! Check that before the show starts, when you are reminded to make sure your phone is silenced. It is silenced, right? Right??

  • Don’t take phone calls during the show. Should I even have to write this?

  • Take vids of songs or song bits if you wish, but don’t video the whole show. You’ll never watch it, nor will anyone else, and you’ll miss out on the live experience.

  • Don’t hold overhead. Be aware of the people behind you. They have the same right to see the show as you and don’t need their view blocked by you holding your phone up high. Hold at chest or face level where it won’t bother anyone.

  • Lower the screen brightness to near-minimum. Bright screens are terribly distracting.

• Respect:

  • The bands. All of them. Applaud. Don’t shout at or curse at them. Don’t throw things on stage. Don’t heckle.
    
    And for pity's sake don’t yell “Free Bird!”
    
    Seriously. The joke was old by the mid-80s and the performers have heard it a zillion times. It’s not even ironic any more.

  • The venue. You paid to watch a show, not to trash the place or act like an asshole. If you’re an angry or stupid drunk, save the drunk for when you’re at home.

  • The people working the show, including security. They’re trying to earn a living, and they don’t have the option of leaving if you act like a jerk.

  • Your fellow show-goers. They paid to see the show, not you.

    • They don’t need to smell you, so please show up clean and deodorized.

    • They don’t need you splashing your drink on them.

    • They don’t need to hear your warbling, so unless it’s a sing-along song, keep the volume low or lip synch the lyrics. That said, if it is a sing-along, go for it! Belt your guts out, on-key or off. That’s when no one cares if you can’t sing a note.

    • Be courteous. Don’t make a stink about people needing to get up during a show to go to the rest room. The Golden Rule goes a long way.

    • If seated, don’t stand for more than a moment or two unless everyone behind you also stands. Especially if you’re tall. If you’re a shortie? Do as you please :).

    • Lose the hats. Unless it’s something like a low profile ball cap, hats just block the view of people behind you. No one cares about your fedora or cowboy hat.

    • Don’t put your girlfriend on your shoulders. It may seem cool, but it’s not for the dozens behind you whose view you are blocking.

    • Wait your turn - at bars, at merch tables, at toilets and port-a-potties, and at the entrances.

    • Don’t bring signs, or if you absolutely must, use them sparingly and between songs.

  • Yourself.

    • Bring earplugs if you suspect a loud show. Consider concert-grade earplugs.

    • Leave yourself enough time to get to the show, get through security, get through ticket-taking, visit the merch table, and get a beverage if so inclined.

    • Manage your consumption so that you a - don't become a problem, and b - can get home safely.

    • Hydrate!

    • Plan for both hot and cold venues. Some spaces can be ice-box cold, others can become hot boxes, no matter the weather.

    • Wear comfortable shoes, especially if it’s a General Admission/standing show. Sore feet can ruin a great event.

• Know your height. Show some love to the young and to the vertically challenged. If you’re at a General Admission show near the front and you’re tall, find the person behind you who’s a head shorter and move him or her in front. If there’s a kid behind you, move kid and parent up. That show is a far bigger event for the youngster, so make his or her day even better.

• Don’t muscle up.

  • Don't start fights. Walk away from anyone who does.

  • If you don’t get there early enough to get on the rail, too bad. Don’t squeeze someone else out, and don’t bully your way in front of people who got there before you.

  • If someone’s trying to get back to his friend(s), don’t be that “not gonna let you pass” jerk.

• Know your mosh pit etiquette.

  • Throw hands and bodies in fun, not in anger.

  • Help the fallen back onto their feet.

  • If a mosh pit forms and someone slams into you, don’t get mad. Either deal with it or relocate.

  • If you’re on the edge of the pit, help the moshers stay on their feet.

  • If someone in the pit is trying to get out, let him.

  • If you find something that somebody dropped or lost, hold it up high and look around.

• Don’t be too cool for the room. Which means… you’re there to watch and listen and have fun and be part of a shared experience, not to judge or preen or be your own show or try to impress other people. Everyone’s there for the performers, not for you.

Got any I missed?

Hit me up in the comments!

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* Behold:

”I got six hundred miles to ride to do one more show, oh no,” - Lynyrd Skynyrd

“You've got to see the show, it's a dynamo, you've got to see the show, it's rock and roll,” - Emerson, Lake, and Palmer

“As long as we can make it to the show tonight,” - Grand Funk Railroad

“We do so many shows in a row,” - Jackson Browne

“But I must let the show go on,” - Three Dog Night

“The show must go on,” - Queen

“You came to see a rock show,” - Peaches

Ah, inequality. Like the gender pay gap, it’s an incredibly simple concept to thump one’s chest about. ‘It’s wrong! It’s bad!! Something must be done!!!’

The chest thumpers are great at demanding that something must be done, but they are oddly quiet when questions about “how did it arise” are asked.

They are also usually missing-in-action when people question the assertion itself.

As is so often the case with such remarkably simple distillations as “women make 78 cents for every dollar men make,” or “the wage gap between the rich and the poor is big and growing,” things are not quite what we are told. Just as the gender wage gap collapses to just a couple pennies, if that, once other variables are factored in, inequality starts looking less scary once you are clued into the fact that the problem is, as Reason’s Andrew Heaton points out, one of measurement.

Income and wealth reporting in America do not factor in government’s distortions. Your income is tracked pre-tax and pre-receipt of benefits. Since our tax code is highly progressive, with higher earners paying the lion’s share of taxes and a higher percentage of their income than lower earners, the inequality scale gets tipped back toward level simply by looking at after-tax income. After that, factor in the countless government programs that support those on the lower end of the income scale. Sixty to seventy percent of Americans actually receive more from the government than they contribute.

What else isn’t factored into the inequality reporting? Employer-provided benefits, such as health insurance. Again, factoring this into the equation would flatten the curve. As the linked video shows, there’s more, including the individual-vs-household wrinkle, and the fact that people’s income and wealth increases as they get older. There’s a reason that one’s fifties are known as “peak earning years.” Not only does your compensation tend to grow with improved skills and experience, but the power of compound interest grows your savings and investments, and the costs associated with raising children go away once they become adults.

Declining birth rates (meaning an aging population) skew income and wealth among the older age brackets upward. That would be Baby Boomers (and Generation Jones, and early Gen-Xers) for those who like the labels game.

Guess who is the villain du jour?

Yes, indeed, it’s the Baby Boomers, who after a stretch of being mocked as out of touch (OK Boomer) are now being blamed for accruing too much of society’s wealth. Who are being targeted by the usual suspects: the coveters of Other People’s Money, whose rapacity is endless and whose hunger is never satisfied.

While those coveters (including, but not limited to, the socialists, the “democratic socialists,” the mainstream Democrats, and the overt Marxist) are taking legitimate aim at the problems inherent in Social Security, they are of course aiming to “fix” the system not by reforming it, but by pulling the rug out from those who have been in it the longest.

And increasing taxes on “the rich” some more. Even though “the rich” already pay most of the taxes.

And... taxing wealth, in addition to income.

Imagine...

You work a lifetime. You pay your income taxes. You pay your payroll taxes. You pay your Medicare taxes. You pay your sales taxes, your property taxes, your gasoline and other excise taxes, your capital gains taxes, and fees on a list of things too long to tabulate here. After all that, you feed, house, and clothe yourself, perhaps raise a family or support others, spend on pastimes, entertainment, education, and the like, and have enough over to invest in your future. After decades, you can justly claim you’ve paid your dues and that what you have left is yours.

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Unfortunately for you, if those investments did well, you are now “wealthy” in the eyes of people who don’t care about you other than as a potential revenue source. A goose to be plucked.

They can’t simply say “I want your money,” however, because that would be so nakedly unseemly no one would support them. So, instead, they make you the villain. They blame you for being prudent and successful.

No, strike that. They claim that your success is not “yours.” Just as criminals are merely victims of society rather than predators, and just as no poor person got that way by making bad decisions or living beyond means or opting to sit on a couch rather than work, the wealthy are simply stealers of other what other people created, so they don’t deserve to keep their wealth. Yes, there are poor who suffered bad luck, or are the product of bad circumstances, just as there are wealthy who were born into it, or got lucky. The existence of the former is not an excuse to tear away a person’s lifetime of saving and investment. Nor is the existence of the latter. Those who claim otherwise, purportedly in the name of charity and humanity, are the least charitable and most inhuman people you will meet. There is nothing charitable about giving away someone else’s money, and there is nothing human about depersonalizing someone in order to make it more palatable to steal from him.

David Mamet wrote that socialism is the abdication of responsibility. That is proven true every day, but it is also proving true in a larger sense. It is also the erasure of responsibility. Act in a fashion responsible to yourself - live within your means so that you can see to yourself your retirement - and someone will look to take away the fruit of that responsibility.

He will look to do so...

• By ganging up on you. One robber is just a criminal. A few million are a voting bloc, and eventually a government.

• By lumping you into a category. An individual is an anecdote, a human being, a story, a “this could be me.” One faceless member of a vilified group stops being a person and stops drawing a human response.

• By crediting your success to someone other than you. “Society” is why you have wealth and savings, therefore “society” gets to take what he decides is its rightful share.

Taxing the successful has become more than about the money. It is an end unto itself. It is a form of societal vengeance, where people who are angry that their vision of how things should work keeps smashing against the wall of reality are lashing out against the “villains” they’ve created in their heads.

How do I know this? There is literally a trillion dollars being wasted in fraud and duplication and inefficiency and nonsense out there, but rather than go after that, rather than say “I can get money for my pet projects by cleaning up the government’s corruption just a little bit,” they try to pluck more feathers from the geese they already pluck to excess.

Most of the people participating in this “societal vengeance” are, I’m sad to say, patsies who’ve been suckered down a bad path. Well-intentioned people who have been played into abetting a long-form destruction of the one system (capitalism built upon a foundation of individual rights) that has proven to work at improving human living standards.

Who has played them? A combination of Marxists, intellectuals, and malevolent foreign actors running disinformation campaigns.

Baby Boomers are the current targets, but rest assured, they won’t be the last.

The above meme was offered by one of many libertarian themed Facebook pages I follow. It’s a snarky riff on the cliche about people complaining about affordability while sucking down high-priced bespoke beverages on a regular basis. The snark suggests that the cost of that indulgence isn’t big enough to solve the affordability problem, so go ahead and enjoy it.

It misses some obvious points, obviously.

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The Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is the current focus of leftist ire. Purportedly despised because of heavy-handed tactics and over-broad action (with some justification), it is actually being targeted by progressive taste-makers and narrative-dictators because it is the mechanism by which Trump is undoing the Democrats’ decades-long plan to flood the nation with migrants and thus permanently (they hope) tip the electoral scales in their favor.

In yet another demonstration that Trump remains an epic troll, he ha proposed renaming ICE as National Immigration and Customs Enforcement, aka NICE, just to make its foes ‘not-NICE.’

As I mentioned, there are legitimate gripes about ICE enforcement tactics and targets. However, from what I see, its biggest detractors use those as stalking horses to mask their opposition to the entire enterprise.

That’s fine. Everyone tries to find the path of least resistance in advocacy.

My interest today is not ICE per se, but rather the selective nature of criticism of the government and its seemingly bottomless pit of bureaucracies. This was brought to mind by a Facebook ad for libertarian-themed T-shirts.

I was quite tickled by the one deriding a different federal agency: the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE), more commonly known as ATF.

And I was simultaneously prompted to note that the stereotypical anti-ICE protester is quite likely to be very pro-ATF, given that ATF has long been chock-full of people extremely interested in curtailing Americans’ Second Amendment rights.

The stereotypical libertarian, on the other hand, is likely to have a dim view of both, and then some.

Consider this quip by Milton Friedman:

Pick at random any three letters from the alphabet, put them in any order, and you will have an acronym designating a federal agency we can do without.

It suggests two things: that most government is useless or worse, and that there is a ridiculous amount of government.

Friedman refers to what many call “three-letter agencies,” even though many (such as FEMA, USAID) break the pattern. A similar term, “alphabet agencies,” refers to the 69 offices created by FDR during the New Deal.

Friedman was being somewhat tongue-in-cheek, because he did feel that some pieces of the government bureaucratic sprawl should be kept. When queried about the 15 cabinet departments (within which all the three-letter agencies exist), he was quite clear in which he’d keep and which he’d toss.

The short list of keepers?

Defense, Justice, State, Treasury.

Interior only until all federally owned land was sold off.

Some functions of other agencies (e.g. Energy) should be rolled up into these few, and some others should be reduced in size and scope, e.g. Health and Human Services has a legitimate role in matters of contagion.

The clip covers 13 of the 15, omitting Homeland Security and Veterans’ Affairs. As to the latter, other sources indicate Friedman believe that it should only be kept long enough to pay vets out via lump-sum. As to the former, the interview pre-dated the creation of DHS, but I figure Friedman would have rolled up some of its functions into the keepers and done away with the rest.

As to immigration?

There is no doubt that free and open immigration is the right policy in a libertarian state, but in a welfare state it is a different story: the supply of immigrants will become infinite.

Friedman understood the moral hazard associated with providing financial support to those who would come to the US, and he and I share(d) the view that an open immigration policy must be predicated on the deconstruction of the welfare state.

All that said, I return to the crux of the matter.

Within those fifteen cabinet departments, there are 441 agencies (or perhaps a few more).

There is little doubt in my mind that most of those agencies could be eliminated, with the sprinkling of things they do that are legitimately within the purview of our Constitution and its enumerated powers allocated to the few agencies that should be kept.

There is zero doubt in my mind that bad behaviors can be found in every single agency. This should make our default opinion one of skepticism and suspicious watchfulness, rather than “I like this agency because it does some stuff I like” deference.

Worth noting is that “stuff I like” is almost always the spending or handing out of Other People’s Money, the infringement of the liberties they don’t care about, or the coercion of people they don’t like.

So, rather than liking the ones that your counterparts hate, why not hate them all until they prove they deserve otherwise?

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Budget carrier Spirit Airlines went out of business the other day, costing 17,000 people their jobs and stranding an untold number of travelers. The usual suspects “pounced,” blaming the Iran war’s impact on fuel prices.

Many of those “usual suspects” won’t admit their own culpability for that collapse, of course. Their support for politicians that blocked past merger attempts, out of misguided antitrust concerns, and their support for anti-carbon energy policy that stifled domestic petroleum exploration, both contributed to the factors that led to Spirit’s demise.

Now, it may very well be that Spirit’s no-frills, school bus/sardine can, charge-for-every-extra business model wasn’t resilient enough to survive a disruptive event even apart from government’s distortions, but we won’t ever know, will we?

Which is terribly convenient for the interventionists.

And just terrible for the rest of us.

People are conditioned to see only proximate and visible correlations. They often mistake those correlations as cause-and-effect. This is a well-understood fallacy, and it’s often pointed out. What is less-frequently noted is what Frederic Bastiat called “that which is unseen.” The lost opportunity, or opportunity cost, if you prefer. What might have been if Spirit was allowed to merge with one of its suitors. What might have been if domestic petroleum exploration was not hampered by the Biden administration. What might have been if countless other bits of government didn’t make operating an airline more complex and more expensive.

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We are perpetually pitched the proposition that government intervention makes things better. In most cases, we find that it only makes things better for a few special interests and strokes the egos of the do-gooder classes who are mostly immune to the negative impacts of the policies they advocate. Everyone else suffers. But since the alternative, the “what might have been,” gets buried by the taste-makers and narrative-writers, few realize the opportunity they have had taken from them. And even when they are harmed more overtly, as with the case of Spirit’s collapse, they have the finger of blame pointed at the wrong culprits.

What’s the remedy? Call them out. I’m not the first to note the culpability of the Spirit finger-pointers. I shouldn’t be the last. Share the message. Inform people what the government’s “helpful” hand is costing them.

Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s meant you were well-acquainted with a number of... I’ll call them urban games. Among them was stoop ball, where we would take turns throwing a ball (a “spaldeen” or Super Pinky or tennis ball - the latter always “recovered,” never bought) at the flight of concrete steps that led up to one of our homes. Catch on one bounce? 5 points. Catch in mid-air? 10 points. Ball bounces twice or more? Your turn is over.

That was our version. There are others.

If you hadn’t heard of a “stoop” before, you have now.

Why they exist - why builders would go to the trouble of elevating entrances to residences in cities such as New York, is its own tale and the basis of today’s blogbit.

Stoops became a common architectural feature as cities grew, because horseshit. Literally. Before automobiles displaced them, horses were the primary means of transportation for distances that were not comfortably walked. With horses comes horse manure, which when wet or fresh or rained upon generates stink and becomes street filth, and when dried and clomped or trod upon aerosolizes and gets breathed in. Stoops elevated home entrances above all that and set them further away from the thoroughfares where it was concentrated. Many homes built in that era still have boot scrapers set at the base of the stoops.

By the 1880s, horse droppings had become a major public health hazard in NY City and other urban spaces. A horse produces over twenty pounds of manure and about a quart of urine every day, and NYC had between 100,000 and 200,000 horses. Yes, that’s a low-end estimate of 400,000 TONS of horseshit and nine million gallons of horse piss dispensed onto city streets every year.

Beyond the direct peril from tracking all that into homes and breathing in horseshit particulates (not to mention the stench), all that waste drew and spawned flies and other vermin. Thousands died every year from maladies brought on by these living conditions.

What solved this problem?

Not government. Not improved sanitation practices.

Human innovation, in the form of the automobile.

As Thomas Sowell noted in Economic Facts and Fallacies,

A 1972 study showed that the amount of pollution per mile traveled by horse was a hundred times the amount of pollution per mile traveled by automobile... Since the cars produced in later years have had reduced pollution levels, the disparity today would be even greater.

Also from Economic Facts and Fallacies,

It should also be noted that the replacement of horses by automobiles made it possible to “restore more than 80 million acres of forestlands that had once been cleared for horse pasture.

Forest cover in the United States has more than tripled since 1900. Human innovation, in building materials, in farming efficiency, and in many other areas has enabled us to do more with less land, and thereby to liberate land once used to support human activities to return to a wild state.

Many have noted that the average person today has a standard of living that the wealthiest of a century or two ago could never dream of, no matter how much money they had. That is the result of human progress, and human progress is born of and accelerated by liberty, capitalism, and a framework of individual rights.

Government committees don’t innovate or invent. Bureaucrats are the biggest obstacles to human progress, no matter how loudly they bleat about wanting to protect us from the perils of unchecked progress.

Because humans are wired to exaggerate peril, many of us allow an irrational or fact-deficient fear of change to override a proper embrace of progress. We cry for an infinite level of safety, even when we know deep-down that there is no such thing, and when we know deep-down that we tolerate certain levels of risk every day.

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Why do we allow cars to travel at 55 or 65 or 75 MPH when tens of thousands die every year in accidents and when limiting cars to 15 MPH would save most of those lives? Because we accept a level of risk in exchange for living more freely and benefiting more greatly from the advances of technology.

Yet when it comes to things that are less mundane and more mysterious than driving cars, we lose perspective. Air travel is 100x safer than traveling by car, yet fear of flying is far more common than fear of driving or being driven.

To justify our irrational emphases on things we don’t fully understand, we engage in argument from perfection fallacies. Rather than compare real-world A to real-world B, we compare real-world A to some mythical and unattainable nirvana. Cars pollute, but rather than appreciate that they pollute far less than horses, some simply want them gone. And, rather than embrace the natural evolution that has made them cleaner and more efficient, some insist that the government specify in what way they should become cleaner and more efficient. While that might not sound like a problem, government is not only not prescient enough to choose the best path, it by its very nature gets things wrong.

In much of the world, there are small and short trucks that serve their owners efficiently.

In America, ironically due to government mandates designed to enhance efficiency, they do not exist.

Rather than let markets sort out what best serves people (and efficiency does serve people), people empower other people to tell the innovators how and what and where and how much, and justify it by comparing the real world to some fantasy land rather than by comparing real alternatives, opportunity costs, and the harm done by stifling innovation.

The digital age has fostered a culture where everyone’s half-baked or wholly ignorant opinion gets far more attention than it deserves. That in turn has fostered an arrogance that prompts people to decide how things should be absent real thought or analysis or information, and in turn to legitimize interventions by power-hungry ignoramuses (ignorami?) that almost always do more harm than good.

Yes, there are trade-offs in every decision. Our problem is that we don’t think in terms of trade-offs when it comes to politics and policy. We don’t see “at what cost” or “what adverse effects will this have” brought up. We fall for nirvana fallacies and arguments-from-perfection, and until that changes, it is inevitable that human progress will be slowed and stifled.

This has happened all over the world. I was told, when I worked in defense, that fully half of Soviet military technology was stolen from the USA. More recently, we see how stagnation in Europe, thanks to massive government involvement and control, has sunk those nations to wealth levels below the poorest American states. Lag by a percentage point or two every year, and in a couple decades the harm done compounds to a big number.

I know the apologists will offer “Yes, but...”

To which I say, “where’s your evidence?”

I got tons on my side.

There are few economic transactions that make as little sense as purchasing a new car. You acquire an expensive asset that loses a large chunk of its value the moment you drive it off the dealer’s lot, and it continues to rapidly lose value the first few years you own it. While it comes with some intangibles, including less time and money spent on maintenance, barring bad luck you are better off buying a used car and driving it for many years.

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Jimmy Kimmel, whose woker-than-thou antics are a disgrace to the concept of a civil society, uttered yet another hate-filled inanity when he called Melania Trump a “widow-in-waiting,” just a couple days before the latest attempt on Trump’s life. Trump, in his usual untethered id fashion, responded with remarks clearly meant to intimidate Kimmel’s bosses into firing his apoplectic ass. In this he was joined by Melania, who tweeted,

People like Kimmel shouldn’t have the opportunity to enter our homes each evening to spread hate.

…

Enough is enough. It is time for ABC to take a stand. How many times will ABC’s leadership enable Kimmel’s atrocious behavior at the expense of our community.

Concurrent with this is the indictment of former FBI director James Comey for sharing an image depicting “86 47” on Instagram. Note that Comey was a private citizen at that time.

“86 47” is a reference to a common shorthand from the hospitality world that means “we are out of something,” and to Trump’s status as the 47th President. Since its inception a century ago, the meaning of “86” has expanded to various similar definitions, and some (tendentiously, I would argue) interpreted Comey’s use as one calling for “eliminating” Trump by violent means.

Given the flood of incendiary rhetoric aimed at Trump by the deranged Left (not to mention a passel of Never-Trumpers on the Right), it’s natural to say “something has to be done!”

It’s also not surprising that Trump’s thin skin has him saying stuff that a President - or any elected official or government employee - should not.

The government is debarred from infringing on free speech, plainly and overtly, by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Yes, there are exceptions, including incitement, but incitement is - and should be - a very high hurdle to clear. In Comey’s case, there are enough benign interpretations of “86” to cast substantial doubt on intent, and I (and many others) feel the indictment is a waste of time and taxpayer dollars. And I don’t believe, based on everything I’ve seen, that Comey should or would be convicted at trial.

An acquittal would still, unfortunately, be a success for the Trump camp. The threat of government’s heavy hand is enough to chill speech, as the Supreme Court just affirmed in its ruling on First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, Inc. v Davenport.

Unfortunately, this is far from the first time that Trump and his administration have sought to stifle free speech via various mechanisms, including lawfare, regulatory selectivism, and “be a shame if...” rhetoric. Free speech warrior Greg Lukianoff covers this history here, and makes the crucial point:

The point is not that every one of these efforts succeeds in court. Almost all fail, and thank the First Amendment for that. The point is, as we have said many times, that the process is part of the punishment. Legal fees are a punishment. Regulatory uncertainty is punishment. Discovery is punishment. A delayed merger is punishment. A panicked boardroom is punishment. A newsroom wondering whether the next story is worth years of legal hassle is punishment.

Do Donald and Melania have 1A rights?

Of course they do.

With a caveat.

Harken back to Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk who refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses in the wake of the Obergefell v Hodges ruling that legalized them nationwide. The Supremes ruled that Ms. Davis’s 1A rights did not apply when she was acting as an agent of the government, that her beliefs could not override her duty to carry out the law. Davis’s argument was about freedom of religion, but the principle remains. People acting as “government” are, in that role, on the “shall not infringe” side of 1A, rather than “being infringed.”

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The President and the First Lady and every prominent politician need to respect the fact that they are not private citizens, and that as acting representatives of the people, i.e. the embodiment of “government,” they have an obligation to avoid even the whiff of violating citizens’ freedoms.

Five years ago, during Biden’s term, I denounced the “soft coercion” that government and the institutions in bed with it applied to speech and speakers they didn’t like. I denounce, as vigorously, attempts by this administration to do the same.

It was wrong then, and it’s wrong now.

It’s also a counterproductive waste of time, resources, and good will. Trying to muzzle assholes only serves to make them more sympathetic and to undermine the government’s high ground. Just as banning hate speech simply moves it underground where it will fester and grow like mushrooms in the dark, trying to “cancel” or impose flimsy indictments on people who say stupid stuff isn’ going to solve the problem.

Does this mean that incitement should never be prosecuted? Hardly. It just means that the case needs to be clear-cut and proximate. Prosecuting Comey because some loon might interpret his comment the wrong way is miles away from prosecuting someone who directly agitated someone else into committing a violent act. Pressuring ABC to fire Kimmel is as offensive coming from a Republican administration as pressuring social media companies to suppress the Hunter laptop story is coming from a Democratic administration.

The answer to bad speech is good speech and sunlight. Let them say their hateful garbage, and just call them out when they do. Don’t stoop to the level of the cancelers you hated a few years ago, before cancel culture started fading into the history books. And for pity’s sake, don’t play the ‘whatabout’ game here no matter how tempting it is.

Free speech is too important to be end-arounded just because tit-for-tat or payback time or “they’ve gone too far.” All those reasons may be empirically substantiated, but they aren’t going to get you what you want, and in giving in to them you become what the people you criticize are.

This is one of those times to call Trump out, to criticize and reject his words and deeds, even if you broadly support him. Don’t conflate affinity with blind loyalty.

Another attempt at assassinating Trump brought out the usual garbage on social media. Some were stumbling all over themselves in their rush to be the first to declare this a setup or a false flag operation. Some pretended to take the high road, no matter their own history of incendiary rhetoric. And some tut-tutted the perpetrator while simultaneously coughing up the “both sides are guilty” cliche.

As someone who has spent a lot of time in libertarian circles, I am well familiar with the “pox upon both their houses” trope. I voiced it many times in my younger days before I gave up on the Libertarian Party and its collection of nut-bars.

The “pox upon both” perspective is one of disengagement. It asserts that neither major party is redeemable or salvageable, and that the whole political enterprise is beyond fixing. This viewpoint makes one irrelevant, because the major parties have no reason to try and court such voters. It’s only when one’s vote is seen as “in play” that parties might fine-tune their platforms to draw that vote. Thus, instead of washing my hands, I pitch liberty in whatever form fits the circumstances of the moment, hoping that I can convince readers to migrate towards a “more freedom, less government” stance and drag one or both major parties in that direction.

Contrast that with “both sides” denouncement. It’s not the same thing. Instead of disengagement, it’s an evasion of criticism of the team the denouncer prefers.

It is also an equivocation. In bringing up “both sides” or engaging in whataboutism, the denouncer implies equal or near-equal culpability.

Which is sometimes the case, to be sure.

But not always.

Consider the relationship between mainstream Democrats and today’s Left. The former routinely bend the knee to the latter, guiltily supporting their radicalism. Ditto for the left-leaning press, which continues its rage-infected spewing of hot and inflammatory rhetoric. A handful of outliers are belatedly trying to urge a restoration of sanity, but they have gained little traction and are treated with suspicion by the rest.

Contrast that with the relationship between mainstream Republicans/legacy conservatives and the firebrands of the alt-Right. The former are not only embarrassed by the latter, they denounce and reject the garbage spewed by the likes of Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, and denounce the nuttiness that comes from Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and their ilk.

Meanwhile, let’s not mince words. Three (or four) attempts on Trump’s life and the assassination of Charlie Kirk are directly attributable to the scorching-hot temperature that the Left, including the mainstream Democrats and their lackeys in the press, have produced ever since Trump threw his hat into the political sandbox. This isn’t about policy differences, it’s about the worst sort of political violence. If you don’t it, then denounce the heat, full-stop. Don’t mewl about how bad the other side is in the same breath, and don’t use it as an excuse to repeat your past denunciations. Save those for another time. Clean your own house. And if the other side doesn’t follow suit, you will have the moral high ground.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, it was just a few days ago that Jimmy Kimmel referred to Melania as an “expectant widow.” Hasan Piker forcefully called for murder in the streets. A few years ago, Jane Fonda joked about murdering Trump. Madonna, the day after Trump’s first inauguration and before he even had a chance to do anything of substance, proclaimed at a rally that “I have thought - a lot - about blowing up the White House.” Murderer Luigi Mangione is seen as a hero by far too many leftists and progressives. Countless other examples can be found.

Of course, whenever called out in the wake of actual violence, these flame throwers retreat to “hyperbole” or “humor” cop-outs.

A few tepid, “let’s have both sides be better” whinges are nothing more than a refusal to recognize their role in this loon’s attempt.

In circumstances such as these, “both sides” is merely an excuse not to admit to or dial back your own contributions to the toxicity that inspires would-be assassins.

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A footnote. Obama crawled out from his cozy echo chamber to inform us that we don’t really know the shooter’s motives. OFFS and Holy Mother Of Pearl!! Yes, we did, well before his pontification hit the Internet. Even in retirement his condescending, partisan arrogance is unabated. But, because he is “polished” where every other President of the 21st century was crude in one way or another, people still worship the ground his divisive, derogatory, and destructively partisan self floats above.

The other day, a small fundraiser was held in Los Angeles, where people paid up to $100,000 a plate to hobnob with a number of Democratic governors with White House aspirations.

With all the Left’s chatter about finding new ways to fleece the rich not just of more of their income, but of their actual wealth, one wonders why anyone who has the means to cough up a six figure check for a political war chest would choose to side with Team Blue.

I was prompted to recall the denouement of Animal Farm, when the pigs hosted a dinner party for the other human farmers. The other animals, peeking through a window, realized that, to their dismay, the pigs had become indistinguishable from their human oppressors.

So it goes. The “party of the people,” the group that tells us all our ills are the fault of those who have more money than we do, is all about money and power. The “filthy rich” that are vilified publicly? They know the game, too. There are very few investments that pay off as well as political donations.

This isn’t news, of course.

But the level of outrage is higher than it has been in quite a while.

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It has gone way beyond Trump. While the Untethered Orange Id continues to be a focal point, and still lives rent-free in many people’s heads to the exclusion of rational thought, whoever is writing Team Blue’s agenda is now focused on the true and forever goal of all big-government types: Other People’s Money.

And this time, it’s folded together with naked class warfare intended to deflect from Team Blue’s long list of failures. By insisting that wealth inequality is both sinister in origin and an existential problem, Team Blue hopes to convince voters to give it the power it so desperately craves. And as I recently blogged, they don’t care what norms they break or what institutions they trash in its pursuit.

No one who craves power so nakedly should be allowed within a million miles of it. Yet those are the people voters keep sending to represent them.

When I first started blogging, I named the blog Pigs and Sheep, with “Be Neither” as the sub-title. Many got the Orwellian reference, but many didn’t get that I was trying to open eyes rather than simply denounce. While I evolved the blog title to something that seems to work better, my view hasn’t changed. The biggest threats to our liberty and to human progress are the people who seek to run our lives “for our own good” and the people who blindly believe and regurgitate their bullshit.

There will always be pigs among us. The fight we face is perpetual.

The New York Times recently ran a bit where a roundtable of Best-and-Brightest, including the Left’s latest It Boy Hasan Piker, justified petty theft, now dubbed “microlooting.” The headline argues that since the rich don’t play by the rules, why should they?

How wrong is this? Let me count the ways...

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Democratic strategist and Crypt Keeper stand-in James Carville recently offered up a playbook for Team Blue the next time it has the reins of government. He suggests they make quiet plans to increase the number of Supreme Court justices from 9 to 13 and to make both D.C. and Puerto Rico states. This will turn the Court into a rubber-stamp for Democratic policies and give the Dems four more sure-thing, forever Senators.

Stack these on top of the aggressive gerrymandering efforts in California, Virginia, New York, and Illinois, and the long-con effort to fill America with migrants that can eventually be turned into reliable Team Blue voters.

The goal?

Permanent control of the reins of power in America.

A one-party nation.

The checks and balances built into our system neutered.

And all that comes with it.

Yes, it is true that both parties have sought permanent majority power, but in the past they have done so by altering their messages, competing for votes, and fighting for new constituencies. Remember GWBush’s Compassionate Conservatism? That “Democrat-Lite” reimagining was supposed to build a permanent majority. It didn’t work.

Yes, it is also true that gerrymandering is as old as the nation itself. Doesn’t mean we have to like it. The effort in Virginia seeks to change a 6-5 Democratic House seat advantage to 10-1. In a state where 46% of the voters chose Trump over Harris. California Democrats, already holding a 43-9 advantage in the House, hope to make it 48-4. In a state where 38% of the voters chose Trump over Harris. Similar existing disparities in Illinois will be amplified.

And, yes, the GOP is trying something similar in Texas. That is the excuse given for the Team Blue efforts, along with mantras about saving democracy.

Which is superficially bullshit, but is actually quite tell-tale.

Team Blue, today, doesn’t believe in our republican form of government. Division of power, enumerated powers, checks and balances, deliberate difficulty in making big changes, and a Court that says “no” when the Constitution’s limits are exceeded are part and parcel of the American system. A system that is not “democratic” by the majority-rule definition. So, all those features are treated as obstacles to be overcome. Even the Electoral College, intended to keep big states from dominating small states, is under attack via the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

To what end?

For the betterment of the nation?

This is the party that has shown zero interest in making government more efficient.

That doesn’t give a flying rat’s ass about waste or fraud.

That dismisses, with prejudice, all warnings about the entitlements fiscal cliff or the runaway debt.

That wrecked health care.

That doesn’t care about the rights of victims of crime.

That feels entitled to take not only as big a chunk of successful citizens’ income as it can get away with, but actually desires to take their wealth, the fruit of their lifetime’s labor.

That rejects equal treatment under the law.

That will stick its nose into every crevice of your life in order to regulate it.

That has made the states it has long controlled so unbearable that people are uprooting their lives in order to escape.

That has turned the nation’s public schools into disasters.

That created a permanent dependent class and institutionalized the poverty it purported to fight.

That authored an endless stream of bad-idea policies - and keeps trying them over and over even as they fail over and over.

What are the real goals? Why do they seek to take total control of the government, permanently, by shady means rather than by winning voters more honestly?

They claim it’s to help the needy and the oppressed, to promote equity and inclusion and diversity and justice. To save the planet from humanity’s excesses. To restore the order that the orange bull in a china shop upended.

They claim they need the obstacles the other team continues to erect removed, so they can accomplish all this.

They want to be “China for a day.”

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Or, more accurately, forever.

They say past performance is no guarantee of future results. They say this when it comes to successes, however. Failure, on the other hand? When the failing team promises to do more of the same? We can easily predict how that will turn out.

So can they, if they were honest.

But, if they were honest, they’d tell the truth about their goals:

• Feed their egos.

• Enrich themselves and their friends.

• Crush their foes and dance on their graves.

It’s that simple and that sinister. They won’t admit it, of course, neither to themselves nor to the rest of us. They will continue to peddle the fantasy that their sorta-socialism is the remedy for the nation’s problems, no matter the endless examples of why it doesn’t work. They will dismiss all criticisms as dishonest and selfish, even though they are the dishonest and selfish ones.

Show me a socialist-wannabe who figures to be on the giving side of Marx’s infamous aphorism, and I’ll show you a thousand who expect to be on the receiving side.

This is why they want permanent power, no matter how dirty their path to it might turn out to be. It’s all about what they can take from others and how much they can coerce anyone who doesn’t agree with them.

This is why, despite my myriad criticisms of today’s Right, I consider the Left to be the true threat to the nation today.

That Carville wants to sneak his agenda by the voters (“Don't run on it. Don't talk about it. Just do it.”) tells us a lot about their view of “democracy.”

Want to know what else we’ll get? Or, more accurately won’t get? There will be no Dems held accountable. The recent spate of Team Blue congress critters who resigned over misdeeds will be a phenomenon of the past. Only Team Red players will be held to task for things like harassment and embezzlement.

Single-party rule is the stuff of banana republics, and America is not immune from such disgrace. Despite the sordidness we witness today, our system isn’t totally dysfunctional. The Court, no matter its conservative majority, has rebuked Team Red multiple times, and we have Team Red congresscritters leaving Capitol Hill in disgrace.

Eric Swalwell was protected for years, until the “jungle primary” for California’s governor race brought the possibility of two GOPers emerging ahead of a pack of Democrats on the ballot for the general election. Suddenly, the open secret of his misogyny was dropped on him like a ton of bricks, and he went from front-runner among the Dems to under the bus and out of a job.

Think that would have happened if he had a clear path to victory?

If you do, I’ve got a nice bridge in Brooklyn that could be yours. Cheap.

I am not prone to cults of personality in my political perambulations. I don’t find discussions about the character, or lack thereof, in our politicians particularly interesting. Part of this is because so much of that “character,” from an average citizen’s perspective, is curated (or distorted) by the various gatekeepers, and by the politician him or herself. Part of it is because it is only policy that persists. When the politician leaves office, all the “character” stuff becomes historical footnote. There’s no utility in pondering whether LBJ was a racist or how much of a womanizer JFK was, it’s the legacy of their programs and policies that matters.

Ok, I’m done spraying “P” alliterations all over my keyboard. On to the matter at hand.

I feel safe to say that I am in a minority re character and cults of personality, especially nowadays when we have the polarizing (sorry...) Untethered One in the White House. Far more people either love him or hate him than view him dispassionately and through a “deeds not words” lens. This personalization (again, sorry...) is both the product (ugh...) of tribalism and a deliberate tactic sown by such as Saul Alinsky (is a sibilant alliteration as spittle inducing as a series of “P” pops?).

As I’ve often quoted,

Hate keeps a man alive. It gives him strength. - Quintus Arrius (fictionalized, in Ben Hur)

Hate is also an increasingly common basis for movements. As Alinsky advised in his final Rule for Radicals,

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

While Trump is an excellent target, he is not even close to the only one. Hate-based movements are all around us.

Like businesses, movements have life cycles. I’ve often shared Eric Hoffer’s aphorism about movements,

but there is also a sinister internal dynamic.

A movement born of hate coalesces around the target. Its members organize, and structures and hierarchies emerge. If and when the target is vanquished or leaves the scene or otherwise becomes irrelevant, some members of the movement will feel “mission accomplished” and either join another movement or go back to their real lives. They will generally be the more “normal” ones. They will leave behind the true believers, the fanatics, and those who feel actualized by their membership in the now-organized movement.

Those left behind will seek someone or something else to hate. The ratio of normals to fanatics decreases, and the tempering influence of the normals decreases. As the fanatics grow in percentage, their power within the movement grows.

Eventually, whether it be because the new target isn’t as satisfying, or because of Santayana’s “redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim” phenomenon, the hate turns inward. The normals and other moderates are kicked out for insufficient zealotry or purity, even if they have been loyal, contributing stalwarts.

The circle of purity grows smaller and hotter.

Like a black hole, it eventually forms an “event horizon,” past which no information is allowed to pass.

The in-group gives no consideration to critical feedback or dissent, and eventually becomes detached from reality.

So, we witness things like opposition to a policy simply because it was put forth by a hated foe, no matter its own merits. We witness people we used to consider rational so invested in their hate that they cannot have a conversation about anything without bringing the target of their ire into it.

We witness the breakdown of negotiation, of common-ground discussions, and of the give-and-take compromise that is the purpose of politics. Instead, we get... chaos. We see people motivated by vanquishing the other team, even if the victories are Pyrrhic, and even if the nation suffers. And, because such victories only satisfy briefly, a pursuit of more victories. If the next foe used to be an ally? So it goes.

I cannot imagine a more destructive attitude toward politics. This is how nations fail.

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Libertarians believe that most modern political and cultural problems are best addressed by getting out of people’s way. Libertarians believe that government’s intercession in problems should be limited to violations of individual and property rights, the resolution of contractual disputes, and depending on who you talk to, various matters pertaining to national defense.

The “best remedy is not to get involved” philosophy has been demonstrated time and time again, across the world and across a couple centuries. We’ve seen how bigger government creates more problems, we’ve seen how government-based remedies perpetuate rather than solve problems, we’ve seen how causes devolve to rackets time and again, and we’ve seen (most recently in Argentina) how dialing government back makes things better.

Unfortunately, because people are prone to judging real-world outcomes against an idealized, nirvana standard, and because the loudest people drown out everyone else (Peter Pomerantsev dubbed this “censorship through noise”) even when they spout easily refuted blather, the notion of “leave things alone” takes a back seat to what I’m going to call, for today, “conspicuous empathy.”

“Do something!,” even when “something” has made things worse in the past, almost always wins out over “get out of the way.” That’s because it’s easier for a politician to say “elect me and I’ll do that “something” that you’re asking for,” than for him to make the case that less is more.

The real culprits are, of course, the voters. The people who feel that demanding something be done shows them to be better than those of us who understand that the better path is undoing the “somethings” of the past. I’ve lost count of the number of times that someone has denounced the “get out of the way” crowd as uncaring or selfish.

While I’m often tempted to tell people “go [redacted] [redacted]” when they suggest or declare that I’m a bad person for not agreeing with their interventions, I mostly refrain. Instead, I do this. I blog about it, in the hope that highlighting the behavior in overt terms will help others recognize it, will show others that pushing back against it is not a lonely or outlier endeavor, and will get the conspicuous empathizers something to think about before their next reflexive “do something!”

In closing, I offer this. If your remedy for society’s problems requires trampling on the rights of some people, you are not a better person than those who preach “less.”

What does privilege mean? In modern politics, it’s a rhetorical cudgel used to assert that someone has advantages based on various forms of happenstance. Certain skin colors give you privilege. Your gender gives you privilege. Your parentage gives you privilege. Your height gives you privilege.

Here’s a chart I found on the Internet that depicts degrees of privilege based on a basketful of identity markers. I’m sure whatever academic “deep thinker” came up with this got quite the endorphin rush in telling the world how unfair it is.

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