Wokerupetence?

Nicole Gelinas, a writer/reporter who covers financial and related matters in NY City, recently shared details of the mayor's newest initiative to feed and otherwise see to the massive influx of migrants from points south. It's worth a read, here, but if you want the TL;DR, terrible mismanagement in feeding migrants led to a "better idea" - giving migrants prepaid debit cards so they could buy their own food. To that end, it issued an emergency, no-bid contract to an unknown and underqualified debit card vendor that, as reported, offered up some gobbledygook about "[serving} the “underbanked” and “narrow the racial wealth gap.”"

The vendor stands to make up to $53M simply for issuing debit cards in bulk, and the overall effort, to start out as a pilot program, could give $10K a year per migrant to perhaps hundreds of thousands of migrants. To do whatever they want with. As Gelinas notes, these aren't SNAP cards limited to food purchases, they're MasterCards usable for anything.

The obvious question is... why?!?! Why this no-bid contract, why these dirty details that were only discovered because someone actually read the damn thing, why this vendor, why this approach to the problem?

Incompetence?

Corruption?

Wokeness?

A combination of all three seems the correct answer. Thus, the portmanteau that is today's title.

Every time I see one of these stories (and it's way too often), I cannot help recalling the glimmer of hope I had that a new face coming into power might mean improvement over the previous face. In New York, Eric Adams replaced Bill de Blasio, and I figured that there's no way the new guy could be as bad as the old guy. Adams, despite his history in law enforcement, is proving not up to the task of mayoring. Worse, he appears to be far more enamored of the access to fame and stardom that his prominent position provides, spending a lot of time partying with A-listers and glitterati.

Even cynics, if they are to avoid a plunge into nihilism, are susceptible to this forever-hope of change for the better. Like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football, we hope that this time Lucy won't snatch the ball away.

There is a narrative, popular on the Left, that African nations are poor because the colonialists sucked all the wealth out of them across the past couple centuries. This rests upon the presumption that nations' wealth is a product of the resources within their borders - a notion that Barack Obama appeared to embrace.

Both are wrong. Wealth is the result of productive human activity, and there are many examples of wealthy nations that have no substantial domestic resources. Moreso, there are many examples of the "resource curse," the phenomenon of resource-rich nations lagging others in economic and societal growth.

The real reason so many African nations are poor is quite simple: Corruption. Low-level corruption, such as the bribes that any entrepreneur must pay as he works up the government/regulatory ladder, saps productive capital and undermines chances for success. High-level corruption, such as leaders literally stealing from successful businesses, does the same thing. Both discourage the risk-taking that's at the heart of growth, and both are the result of a loose-to-nonexistent commitment to the rule of law.

Domestically, we are in the midst of a potentially disastrous decline in rule-of-law reverence. It's born of many things, including tribalism, but the big accelerant is the "equality of outcome" vision of the Left that has been dubbed "equity." Equity, being in the eye of the beholder, invites - nay - demands that the usual equal treatment under the law, equal rights for all, and supremacy of the individual be rejected in favor of the Best-and-Brightest following their hearts and guts in deciding what will make society better.

This is tyranny. It's the "tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims" that CS Lewis warned us about:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals."

Re-read the last sentence and tell me that "woke" isn't exactly what Lewis describes.

I recently discussed how we've got so many laws that immoral politicians masquerading as crusaders can successfully attack any political foe. That masquerade is the statist Left's self-delusion, the self-satisfaction of being "omnipotent moral busybodies."

A wide swathe of the nation is being subject to the "intolerable insult" of being told they are evil people, of being divested of their rights, liberties, and the fruit of their labor. An as-wide swathe of the nation is cheering on this rapine, not realizing that they are next.

The only answer is less government, not better government. And, the only answer to the migrant problem is to stop providing for them. Why would a migrant who simply seeks to work in a land of opportunity choose to park himself in New York City, or Chicago, or San Francisco, where living costs are far higher than elsewhere? It's not for the jobs, that's for sure. As Milton Friedman noted:

“It's just obvious you can't have free immigration and a welfare state.”