Category: ideological culture

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Accountability education and schooling folly general freedom ideological culture local leaders moral hazard nannyism responsibility too much government U.S. Constitution

Degrading Expectations

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, race, racism, low expectations, condescension, Stuyvesant High, quota, affirmative action

Expect racism to come from the Right . . . we are told by the Left.

On Wednesday, I considered the sad case of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, pushing racial resentment in a black church, asking for an “amen” after telling the parishioners that there was something very wrong with Asian students dominating that most meritocratic of institutions, Stuyvesant High.

Giving up on meritocracy is quite bracing, as is de Blasio’s lack of commitment to the culture of individual achievement.

His assumption? Black and Hispanic Americans just cannot compete on merit alone.

They don’t need to work harder, and we mustn’t expect them to. They needn’t change their values or encourage their children to be more academically ambitious. What’s the point in troubling to emulate successful cultures, like that of many Asians (many of them quite poor) who have been advancing so effectively? For de Blasio there’s no hope for blacks and Hispanics.

Except through him.

Note the two pillars of de Blasio’s vision:

  1. racial determinism, where individuals cannot hope to succeed outside the stereotyped behavior of their racial background, their skin color and physical features determining their performance,
  2. except when Government steps in to save them (this is statist messianism).

And yes, by “government” he really means “de Blasio” — or “progressivise politics.”

The first assumption has been called “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

The second is idolatry of the State and overbearing pride in one’s own ideological tribe.

You individuals have no chance to succeed, the idea runs, but We, the Progressives, will save you. Vote for us!

How insufferable.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Accountability education and schooling folly general freedom ideological culture local leaders media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies responsibility too much government

Demeritocracy

affirmative action, quota, college admissions, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, racism, discrimination, reverse, justice, fairness

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has a beef with Stuyvesant High School.

It’s about race, of course.

Stuy (as it is affectionately known) is a tuition-free accelerated academic/college prep program open to all city residents based on how well they perform on a specific test.

Unsurprisingly, Asians make up the bulk of the student body.

And de Blasio finds this horrific, a “monumental injustice” — there should be more Hispanic and black students, he says.

In front of black parishioners.

Demagoguery aside, the New York Mayor’s attack is really against the very idea of a meritocracy. The old Progressive vision was to pull from every ethnic group, economic strata, and community the best and brightest, allowing people to advance by study and hard work. Progressives called this “equality of opportunity”; most everybody else, “the American Dream.”

It was the Progressives’ pride and joy.

And today’s progressives are hell bent on destroying it.

They demand “diversity” instead — by which folks like de Blasio mean participation based not on talent and studiousness and sheer academic drive (which some cultures push more than others), but, instead, on today’s primary progressive obsession: skin color.

“My limited tolerance for affirmative action,” writes Richard Cohen in the Washington Post, addressing de Blasio’s excess, “possibly permissible when the poor are advantaged at the expense of the rich — hits a wall in this case.”

My tolerance for “affirmative action” hits the wall earlier: Help the poor afford to go where they can academically earn a spot. (Helping privately would be best.) But do not let race or any other demographic factor put a finger on the merit scale.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Accountability general freedom ideological culture insider corruption media and media people property rights Regulating Protest

Ortega’s Got to Go

Daniel Ortega, Nicaragua, rebellion, atrocity, protest, violence

Sometimes “if it bleeds, it leads” fails us. Only a few news outlets have given much attention to Nicaragua’s ongoing atrocities.

Weeks ago, mothers of some of the 76 people, mainly students, already killed protesting despot Daniel Ortega, were leading a march demanding justice . . . “when gunmen opened fire on the crowd.” The Washington Post report continued, “Witnesses have accused police and their civilian allies of initiating the violence that left as many as 18 people dead and more than 200 wounded.”

The June 2 headline summed up the last seven weeks: “At least 100 killed in Nicaragua as political violence intensifies.”

But time and tyranny march on. “Every day they’re killing more people,” an attorney with the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights told the Post. Friday, the group updated the death toll to 137.

Then on Saturday, the English-language Today Nicaragua informed that a 60-year-old man was cut down by a government sniper in Masaya, the former Sandinista stronghold, which is “now under almost total rebel control.”

What can we do?

We can educate ourselves on what’s happening — and pester more news organizations to cover Nicaragua.

We can learn from the experiences in Cuba, in Venezuela, and now in Nicaragua, that leaders seeking awesome powers to remake society to supposedly benefit the poor are ultimately batting zero in helping the poor. Instead, they’re busy at the plate for themselves.

And we can add our voices to Amnesty International’s condemnation of what it calls “the systematic ‘shoot-to-kill’ policy of President Ortega’s government.”

When governments open fire on peaceful protesters, it is past time for those governments to go.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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crime and punishment free trade & free markets general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies privacy property rights responsibility U.S. Constitution

Wouldn’t Freedom Be … Easier?

cake, gay rights, Supreme Court, freedom of association, discrimination, law. nanny state

To bake or not to bake, that is the question.

Actually, the question was may a state discriminate against Christians in regulating “public accommodations”? The Supreme Court has decided, in a supermajority 7-2 ruling, that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission wrongly prosecuted a Christian baker who would not make a special wedding cake for a gay couple — while the Commission shrugged when it came to bakers who wouldn’t bake Bible verse cakes.

The ruling came down along the lines I suspected in December: Equal protection. This narrow ruling focused “on what the court described as anti-religious bias on the Colorado Civil Rights Commission when it ruled against baker Jack Phillips,” Fox News informs us.

In his majority opinion, Justice Anthony Kennedy censured the “Commission’s hostility” to Phillips. And Kennedy recognized the root problem, the “difficult questions as to the proper reconciliation of at least two principles”:

  1. “the authority of a State and its governmental entities to protect the rights and dignity of gay persons”;
  2. “fundamental freedoms under the First Amendment, as applied to the States through the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Ah, discrimination. Has picking at this, like a scab, really increased comity? It sure would be easier were we to stick to freedom of association.

Wouldn’t that dredge up less animus?

States should not engage in invidious discrimination. Sure. Vital.

But businesses? Must they serve anyone and everyone? Even when it requires the baker or florist to create something custom — or the pianist to perform? Especially when customers can easily go to a competitor?

Besides, in Colorado, anti-discrimination laws were used by government to persecute Christians.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Accountability crime and punishment folly general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism privacy property rights responsibility tax policy too much government U.S. Constitution

Brave New Paternalism

Michael Bloomberg, tax, policy, nanny state, vice, social engineering, statist, technocrat

Michael Bloomberg is rich. He’s also in politics — a public health crusader.

And, for years, he “has personally funded and promoted all sorts of regressive taxes and regulations in an attempt to push people around,” the folks at Americans for Tax Reform tell us. “He uses the coercive power of the government to force people to live their lives as he sees fit.”

Onstage at a globalist event, One-on-One with Christine Lagarde — who is managing director of the International Monetary Fund — Bloomberg blurts out his approach to government policy regarding what he calls “those people.”

“If you raise taxes on full sugary drinks,” he says, “they will drink less and there’s just no question that full sugar drinks are one of the major contributors to obesity and obesity is one of the major contributors to heart disease and cancer and a variety of other things.”

Against the charge often made that such taxes fall heaviest upon the poor, he is forthright. Regressive? “That’s the good thing about them because the problem is in people that don’t have a lot of money.”

Notice that he is not talking about a public service campaign to help people learn how to drink (and eat) better. And he is not talking about removing all the government policies that have encouraged bad eating and drinking habits (as well as lethargy) — the government programs to encourage the overuse of high fructose corn syrup; the welfare state’s poverty trap that stifles life at the lower incomes; the subsidized consumption of food and drink — he wants to add another government program.

He can only see betterment by increased governmental bullying.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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Michael Bloomberg, tax, policy, nanny state, vice, social engineering, statist, technocrat

Photo by Center for American Progress

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Accountability folly general freedom ideological culture moral hazard responsibility U.S. Constitution

China Marks Marx Anniversary

Karl Marx, communism, socialism, death, failure, China, Chinese, German city of Trier

The Chinese government has sought to honor the birth of Karl Marx (1818-1883) by giving a giant bronze statue of the social philosopher and pseudo-economist to the German city of Trier, his birthplace.

Agreeing that Trier and Marx should be thus honored, local officials shamefully accepted the donation.

Marx was a bad guy. His willfully destructive anti-capitalist theorizing and polemics have been enlisted to enslave and murder many millions of people in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba and elsewhere. The story is told in works like Modern Times and The Black Book of Communism. One effective critique of Marxian ideas may be found in the second volume of Murray Rothbard’s History of Economic Thought.

We often hear that Communist implementation of Marxian theory poorly translates “real” communism/socialism/collectivism. No government unswervingly enacts all the ideas and prescriptions of a single intellectual founding father. But there is much in Marx’s volumes that openly demands the razing of the division of labor, profit-seeking, and other requirements of civilization.

In one article, Marx scribbled that “there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.” There’s plenty more where this came from.

When a major nation-state gives a town a statue, it’s hard to say no. But one needn’t accept it at face value. Install it on a base that lists the separate bouts of Marx-inspired mass murder. Or use it as a target in paintball tournaments.

Or just place it in the local cemetery. Where deadly ideologies should go.   

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

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