Category: Socialism

The Upside of Zohran Mamdani

What I like about the winner of the New York City mayoral Democrat primary is that he is not a 'stealth ideologue' a phrase I have been using for years to characterize the likes of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris.  Mamdani, unlike the mendacious foursome just mentioned, comes clean about what he and the Dems intend:

Mamdani is now the mainstream of the once great Democratic Party.

The only difference is that Mamdani isn’t afraid to say what other Democratic politicians try to hide.

Think about what Mamdani has proposed or supported:

  • A yearlong freeze on rent
  • A $30 minimum wage
  • Free bus service
  • City-owned grocery stores
  • Defunding the police
  • Calling Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide.

“Mainstream Democrats” support every one of these positions in one way or another.

With the advent of Mamdani it will be more difficult now to remain a Useful Idiot as so many of the supporters of the Dems are. You know these people. We have them in our families and in our neighborhoods and workplaces.  A lot of them are the "college-educated white women" of a certain age.  They rescue cats and dogs and support what they sincerely believe are good causes. But they are lazy and inattentive and too wrapped up in their private lives to pay proper attention to current events. Their loving and nurturing feminine nature impairs their political judgment and makes them easy marks for the fraudulent come-ons of professional pols like Phony Joe Biden who has 40 years of experience of looking into the camera, smiling, and making an emotional appeal. The women think, "He's a nice man!" They cannot see past the polished style to the lack of substance.  Conversely they cannot see past Trump's off-putting style to his genuine and salutary substance.  In the case of pretty boy Gavin Newsom, they are so taken by his style that the question of substance doesn't even arise.  I had to agree with Sean Hannity one night when he remarked that Joy Behar of The View has a "crush" on him. Joy Behar, that well-fed paragon of wisdom and insight!

But old men, too, are part of the Useful Idiot contingent.  Lazy, inattentive, superannuated and superficial, pissing their lives away hitting little white balls into holes and — worst of all — living in the past.  Mamdani, as a sort of Fidel redivivus, may help these Rip van Winkles wake up.

One more thing. It is good that the battle lines are clearly laid out. Let the battle begin, the battle for the soul of America. Mamdani is a Great Clarifier as is our boy Trump.  John Catsimatidis, billionaire, said on Stuart Varney's show this morning that  Trump has God on his side. How would he know? Does the billionaire have a hot line to the divine? What is within the range of our knowledge, however, is that Trump's the man to save the Republic, and make the whole world a safer place, as he already has.

Related: Should Mamdani be Deported?

The Militant Defends Religious Liberty!

Will wonders never cease? This article receives the coveted MavPhil nihil obstat.  I found nothing in it to disagree with. Excerpt:

Today anti-Catholic prejudice is being whipped up by Democrats and the middle-class left, who argue the “main threat to democracy” comes from “semi-fascists” and the far right, including Catholics who they smear as reactionary.

“The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade at a time when it has an unprecedented Catholic supermajority,” The Associated Press complained June 30 in an article entitled “Anti-Roe justices a part of Catholicism’s conservative wing.”

While acknowledging that the 71 million Catholics in the U.S. have a wide range of opinions on abortion, the article pounds away at the six justices who “were raised Catholic.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett is a special target of leftists, who insist she seeks to impose her religious and moral agenda through her votes in court cases.

Nowhere in the AP article does it explain that the Dobbs ruling is based on a reading of the Constitution, not on religious belief. Or that the decision neither bars nor restricts abortions, but turns this decision over to the people in each state and their elected officials.

Exactly right. This is not to say, of course, that I share The Militant's stated goal of "overcoming capitalism." Capitalism, rightly deployed, is not the problem but the solution. I am for free markets and for private property. Private property is the foundation of individual liberty. Socialism, however, requires public ownership and control of the means of production, central planning, top-down interference with states, localities, and the private lives of citizens. What public control comes to, however,  is State control which is to say: control by the few who run the omni-invasive and omni-(in)competent State.  

Socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried, and it must fail because it collides with certain  essential truths about human nature. One of them is that people need incentives to behave in economically and socially productive ways. People will work their asses to the bone if they see some benefit that will accrue to them and theirs (family, friends, local community, tribe), but will slack off like Maynard G. Krebs if forced to labor for some such nebulosity as 'the common good.'  

No Takers Without Makers

You can't take wealth and 'redistribute' it unless someone makes it. But human nature is such that people need incentives to make things. People will work hard for themselves, their families, their friends, and their communities but not for something as nebulous as the 'common good' when, as inevitably is the case under socialism, the 'common good' is primarily the good of the central planners who then generously allow some 'trickle down' to the centrally planned.  There can be no government-sponsored social programs without a robust economy, and no such economy without capitalism.  That is the point of the graphic below.
 
But leftists, in the grip of utopian fantasies, do not understand human nature; worse, they deny that man has a nature, holding that humanity is itself a social product.  
 
 
Socialism-capitalism
 
 

A Socialist Argument for Border Control

Three years ago on this date on my Facebook page.  Redacted and improved.
 
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Suppose you want a massive expansion of the welfare state. You want, among other things, a college education to be free to anyone who wants one. In addition, you want free health care for all, and perhaps a guaranteed minimum income. Suppose further that you want your socialist government to work and not go bankrupt. To will the end is to will the means. Among the means:  A stemming of the tide of illegal immigration. So here you have the makings of a socialist argument for border control, an essential component of which is a physical barrier at the southern border. An essential component, not the only one. Mirabile dictu: A socialist argument for a conservative conclusion.
 
You can't have both open borders and socialism. I say to the libertarians: You want open borders? Go for it, but ONLY AFTER you have stripped the government down to its Lockean functions and instituted something like a Nozickian 'night watchman' state. (See Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia.) But of course that strip-down is not in the offing: the libertarian dream is u-topian. It's like Nowheresville, man, as Maynard G. Krebs might have said.
 
The welfare state in the USA is here to stay.  The only question concerns its size and scope. Will it metastasize unto the collapse of the nation?
 
An equal but opposite utopianism to that of the libertarians is the utopianism of the Green New Dealers.  To them and their democratic socialist fellow travellers, I say: you are going to have to become what you call 'xenophobes' and 'racists' if you want to implement a workable socialist scheme. You are going to have to become like us conservatives: 'nativists' and 'white supremacists' who hate the Other simply in virtue of his being Other.
 
Of course, none of these epithets apply to us. You only think they do in your perversity, ill-will, and deliberate self-enstupidation.

Garry Kasparov on Socialism

The following 'went viral' as they say about five years ago:

I'm enjoying the irony of American Sanders supporters lecturing me, a former Soviet citizen, on the glories of Socialism and what it really means! Socialism sounds great in speech soundbites and on Facebook, but please keep it there. In practice, it corrodes not only the economy but the human spirit itself, and the ambition and achievement that made modern capitalism possible and brought billions of people out of poverty. Talking about Socialism is a huge luxury, a luxury that was paid for by the successes of capitalism. Income inequality is a huge problem, absolutely. But the idea that the solution is more government, more regulation, more debt, and less risk is dangerously absurd.

The penultimate sentence needs some qualification, but otherwise Grandmaster Kasparov is enunciating very important truths with the authority of someone who speaks from experience.  Kasparov, ethnically Jewish on his father's side, was world chess champion from 1985-1993.  He was born Garik Kimovich Weinstein.  Jews dominate chess out of all proportion to their numbers.   A foolish 'liberal' would say they are 'over-represented.' 

Why foolish?  Because the term conflates the normative and the factual.  

Was Jesus a Socialist?

No way! He actually fed people.

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I came to this witticism via Karl White who got it from someone unnamed.  It is too good not to repeat and propagate.  So do your bit and spread it around.

You can't battle the Left effectively with just one weapon: the whole arsenal has to be brought to bear.  Sweet reason has its uses with some, and the hard fist of unreason with others. Mockery and derision can be effective. And throw in some contumely for good measure.

Don't forget: it's a war. If they win, we lose. They never rest, and so we must be ever-vigilant. Right now the bastards are doing their best to deploy the Chinese virus against Trump and his supporters.  Their nefarious actions are legion. One is the exploitation of the crisis to empty the prisons. They had that goal all along; now they can use the Chinese virus as an excuse.  Another is to use the crisis to close down the gun stores.  

Typically leftist: take the side of the criminal element, and violate the rights of the law-abiding. There is nothing progressive about leftists: an appropriate appellation is 'transgressive.' Open the borders; empty the prisons; violate the Constitutional rights of citizens.

Anyone who identifies as liberal, left, progressive, Democrat must be met with the (defeasible) presumption of scumbaggery: they are to be presumed morally obtuse  and intellectually self-enstupidated until they prove otherwise.  They bear the onus probandi.

But the presumption is defeasible. Allow those under scrutiny the opportunity to defeat it. Be tough, but fair.

I call this the political burden of proof.  My previous formulations of it have been too polite.

The Opium of the Redistributionists

A re-post from April 2016 that targets the hypocrisy of Sanders the Socialist.

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If religion is the opium of the masses, then OPM is the opium of the redistributionist.

Bernie Sanders, the superannuated socialist, "and his wife, Jane, paid an effective tax rate of 13.5 percent, or $27,653 in federal taxes on an adjusted gross income of $205,271." This is for 2014.  That is less than Mitt Romney paid, percentage-wise, in 2011.  But Romney paid more dollars and thus did more good than Bernie, if you assume that Federal taxes do good for 'the people' and not just for state apparatchiki. 

For Sanders, a legitimate function of government is wealth redistribution so that the government can do good with other people's money (OPM).  So why did Bernie take so many (legal) deductions?  Why didn't he pay his 'fair share,' say, 28% of his AGI? Why didn't he fork over 50%?  Surely an old man and his wife can live on 100K a year!  Why doesn't Bernie practice what he preaches?

Because he smokes the opium of OPM: it is the other guy's money that is to be confiscated, not his.  By any reasonable standard, Sanders is a 'fat cat.'  But he doesn't see himself as one.  And no doubt he thinks he earned his high senatorial salary when he produced nothing, but merely spouted a lot of socialist nonsense while acting the pied piper to foolish and impressionable youth.