RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Slavery is the worst kind of bondage where the individual has no rights and is treated as chattel. It disappeared in the United States with the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863: “…that all persons held as slave are, and henceforward shall be free.” However, enfranchisement came slowly. It was not until the 19th Amendment was ratified on August 18, 1920 that women were able to vote. And it was only on August 6, 1965 that President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which enforced the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution that had been adopted in 1870. It would be another year before poll taxes – a uniform tax on all individuals regardless of financial means, the payment of which was required in order to register to vote – would be declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections.

Nevertheless, there are other forms of dependency, not as cruel or degrading as slavery but nonetheless demeaning and inhibiting, like addiction to drugs, alcohol or even social media. And there are forms of dependency that chain individuals to a business, a movement or a state. It is dependency on the state, and all that entails, that concerns this essay.

The elected Washington politician who served because he or she wanted to improve the condition of his or her constituents is a species at risk of extinction. Certainly, there are exceptions, but they have become rare, as the benefits of power, fame and money have grown more ubiquitous for those who serve in Congress. Also, among endangered species is the individual who once traveled to Washington, accepting less pay and longer hours, because he was on a noble enterprise to help fellow citizens. But, with an expanded administrative state, he has become a supercilious, egocentric bureaucrat seeking the monetary and retirement benefits now due a public sector worker.

http://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/3955/Doomsdays-of-the-Endgame-Part-1.aspx

This week, the towering anti-communist dissident Vladimir Bukovsky was laid to rest in a London cemetery. In Washington, American democracy threw dirt on itself.

Impervious to the irony, the Democrats of the House of Representatives staged another fake impeachment “show trial” in its coup like no other to thwart the anti-communist will of the American electorate that sent Donald Trump to the White House. 

The battle is not drawn in such terms; they have been taken from us. But to understand the desperate, unceasing efforts to unseat President Trump requires a longer lens on recents events, one that can focus on over a century of what Whittaker Chambers described as “the forces of that great socialist revolution, which, in the name of liberalism, spasmodically, incompletely, somewhat formlessly, but always in the same direction, has been inching its ice cap over the nation.” Chambers was writing in the 1950s, when the socialist “New Deal” was only two decades old. In 2016, six decades past Chambers, as the socialist ice cap had all but completely smothered our democratic republic, Donald Trump won the presidency. With his agenda to save America by restoring the nation-state, President Trump became a one-man counter-revolutionary army.

The revolutionaries within — leading figures in what is known as “the Swamp” — responded as true Marxists do: by any means necessary. And why not? Their ideological roots in varieties of Marxism are documented in my short book, The Red Thread. The dangers they pose in these endstages of our democratic republic cannot be overstated. That makes Election 2020 our D-Day for re-taking our Swamp-occupied continent. Maybe the second time around, a wiser, battle-tested counter-revoutionary Trump will call in reserves who actually support him. This is precisely what our deeply embedded and powerful communistic enemies, confronting this unexpected American “insurgency,” fear more than anything.  

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/11/americas-drift-toward-feudalism/

America’s emergence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries represented a dramatic break from the past. The United States came on the scene with only vestiges of the old European feudal order—mostly in the plantation economy of the Deep South. There was no hereditary nobility, no national church, and, thanks to George Washington’s modesty, no royal authority. At least among whites, there was also far less poverty in America, compared to Europe’s in­tense, intractable, multigenerational poverty. In contrast, as Jeffer­son noted in 1814, America had fewer “paupers,” and the bulk of the pop­ulation was “fed abundantly, clothed above mere decency, to la­bor moderately and raise their families.”

Yet in recent decades this country, along with many other liberal democracies, has begun to show signs of growing feudalization. This trend has been most pronounced in the economy, where income growth has skewed dramatically towards the ultrarich, creating a ruling financial and now tech oligarchy. This is a global phenomenon: starting in the 1970s, upward mobility for middle and working classes across all advanced economies began to stall, while the prospects for the upper classes rose dramatically.

The fading prospects for the new generation are all too obvious. Once upon a time, when the boomers entered adulthood, they en­tered an ascendant middle class. According to a recent study by the St. Louis Fed, their successors, the millennials, are in danger of be­coming a “lost generation” in terms of wealth accumulation.

This generational shift will shape our future economic, political, and social order. About 90 percent of those born in 1940 grew up to experience higher incomes than their parents, according to researchers at the Equality of Opportunity Project. This proportion was only 50 percent among those born in the 1980s, and the chances of middle-class earners moving up to the top rungs of the earnings ladder has declined by approximately 20 percent since the early 1980s. Corporate CEOs used to boast of starting out in the mailroom. There will not be many of those stories in the future.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/thanks-private-property/

Families will argue this Thanksgiving.Such arguments have a long tradition.

The Pilgrims had clashing ideas about how to organize their settlement in the New World. The resolution of that debate made the first Thanksgiving possible.

The Pilgrims were religious, united by faith and a powerful desire to start anew, away from religious persecution in the Old World. Each member of the community professed a desire to labor together, on behalf of the whole settlement.

In other words: socialism.

But when they tried that, the Pilgrims almost starved.

Their collective farming — the whole community deciding when and how much to plant, when to harvest, who would do the work — was an inefficient disaster.

“By the spring,” Pilgrim leader William Bradford wrote in his diary, “our food stores were used up and people grew weak and thin. Some swelled with hunger… So they began to think how … they might not still thus languish in misery.”

His answer: divide the commune into parcels and assign each Pilgrim family its own property. As Bradford put it, they “set corn every man for his own particular. … Assigned every family a parcel of land.”

Private property protects us from what economists call the tragedy of the commons. The “commons” is a shared resource. That means it’s really owned by no one, and no one person has much incentive to protect it or develop it.

REGULAR POSTINGS WILL RESUME ON MONDAY NOVEMBER 18TH

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Social justice is generally thought of as being fair and just relations between an individual and society. But to understand it, we must first consider its antithesis, justice, as expressed in our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and as it was historically understood. Justice is freedom from encroachment on our rights to speak, to assemble, to own property. Justice reflects our inalienable rights that will not be denied. Social justice, in contrast, involves positive rights – the right to food, shelter, education, healthcare, etc. Justice allows for the precepts of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Social justice involves the provisioning of things. Since governments have no resources other than that which they take, social justice is, as the Libertarian Leonard Read put it, “robbing the selected Peter to pay for the collective Paul.” 

Social justice warriors would have us believe government has the virtues of individuals – a moral sense that invokes empathy, mercy, love and concern for the less fortunate. But governments have no feelings. Men and women do. It is justice, not social justice, that is the purpose of a democracy. Politicians, advocating for social justice, have joined their cause with emotion. They argue that only the state has the means to gather and equitably distribute wealth in the amounts required. However, Father Martin Rhonheimer, president of the Austrian Institute of Economics and Social Philosophy in Vienna, wrote that as “…social justice is essentially a moral virtue, it applies to all other actions of human beings, insofar as they relate to the common good.” It is a Christian teaching. Father Rhonheimer went on: “Social justice in this sense applies to the actions of capitalists, investors and entrepreneurs, and also to citizens feeling responsible for persons in need and for the poor.” In other words, social justice can be accomplished by individuals and eleemosynary institutions as wells as by government – and it is in many places.

Words are cheap and some who promote social justice are distinguished by hypocrisy.  Cuba’s dictator Fidel Castro impoverished his people materially, spiritually and democratically, yet he once spoke of his goal, as being “… not Communism or Marxism but representative democracy and social justice in a well-planned economy.” He could not provide his people a basic subsistence, and he certainly could not or would not give them justice. When trust is placed in the state as arbiter and promoter of the common good, abuses of power may be seized by elected legislators and unelected bureaucrats What is lost, in a clamor for social justice, is the justice inherent in free markets, derived from a free people making millions of individual decisions, operating under the rule of law.

Our schools and colleges have become incubators for social justice warriors. In an op-ed in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, Judge José A. Cabranes, a former general counsel and trustee of Yale University, wrote that “colleges and universities have subordinated their historic mission of free inquiry to a new pursuit of social justice.” He used, as an example, the change in the first sentence of Yale’s new mission statement, which before 2016 read: “Like all great universities, Yale has a tripartite mission: to create, preserve, and disseminate knowledge.” That sentence now reads: “Yale is committed to improving the world today and for future generations through outstanding research and scholarship, education, preservation, and practice.” In their desire to be woke, the word knowledge disappeared from the Yale mission statement. Despite claims of equitable treatment for all, due process for faculty and students disappeared. Despite assertions of inclusion, conservative ideas are condemned and treated as hate speech. Recently a Harvard student, protesting a representative of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency on campus to be interviewed by The Crimson, explained: “My feelings are more important than freedom of the press.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-secret-ballot-for-impeachment-would-be-a-terrible-idea/

Over at Politico, Juleanna Glover, a former adviser for several Republican politicians, floats the idea that President Trump could be removed from office if three Republican senators insist upon a secret ballot for the vote on removal, and stand with Democrats to block any rules for impeachment that would involve on-the-record votes.

It is hard to describe just how terrible an idea this is. It would represent senators trying to avoid accountability for their votes, during an exercise that is supposed to be a legislative effort to hold the president accountable for his actions. This country has never forcibly removed a president from office. For such a consequential and historically important vote, the idea of senators being able to not tell the public how they voted — or to publicly claim they voted one way when they secretly voted the other — is unthinkable.

We all know why some senators would want a secret ballot; plenty of Republican senators who privately can’t stand Trump and who would strongly prefer a President Pence would vote to remove Trump from office if they knew they wouldn’t face punishment in a subsequent GOP primary. In a 75-25 vote in favor of removal, all 53 Republican senators could insist they were among the “no” votes, with no official record to contradict them. (This might apply to relatively Trump-friendly red state Democratic senators like Joe Manchin, too.)

If Trump really is an unconstitutional menace who is abusing the power of the presidency for his personal interests, stopping him ought to be worth losing a Senate seat. And if this action isn’t worth losing a Senate seat over, then it’s hard to see how it is worth removing a president. In 1998, this country established the precedent that a president suborning perjury did not warrant removal from office. The bar is set high, and it ought to be set high. If a senator wants to say, “we’re less than a year from a presidential election, let the people decide if this justifies ending Trump’s presidency,” they’ve got that option, too.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/prediction-no-impeachment/

I’m afraid I’ve run out of metaphors for the “impeachment inquiry.” “Clown show” — I like clowns. The ad vendors and corporate won’t let me spell out “(excrement) show” without bowdlerization. “Death march,” maybe.

In any case, you know what I’m talking about — the ongoing kangaroo court inquiry in which the main complainant “whistleblower” is anxious to testify until his long-time connections with the people who are pushing the inquiry, as well as his long-time connections with the corrupt inner circle Trump would like Ukraine to investigate became known — at which point he became so scary that you can’t name him on Facebook, as if Eric Ciaramella were Voldemort in the children’s books.

Of course, if Ciaramella was not the whistleblower, his attorney — the one who was bragging that the “#coup” was on in January 2017 — could just say “Eric Ciaramella is not the whistleblower” instead of threatening people with meretricious legal arguments to suppress his name.

Which is “Eric Ciaramella.”

In fact, one of the most curious aspects of the “inquiry” has been just who may, and may not, testify — along with the fact that the fabled Adam Schiff is the only decider of who is called to testify.

Why, it’s almost as if there’s something that worries the Democrats about cross-examination of the guy that was their star witness a couple of weeks ago.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/andy-puzder-ah-the-irony-of-impeachment-look-how-trump-policies-work-for-dem-voters

While Democrats pursue their partisan crusade to impeach President Trump, their own constituents continue to benefit from his policies in the form of new jobs and better wages, reduced income inequality, a more equitable criminal justice system, and — at long last — real progress toward curbing the opioid crisis.

Perhaps that’s why 27 percent of those who signed up for tickets to the Trump pre-election rally in Mississippi were registered Democrats, and n Kentucky, 23 percent were Democrats.

Let’s start with the undeniably strong (and still growing!) Trump economy. The latest employment data are solid across all socio-economic groups, but especially for minorities.

African American unemployment reached an all time low of 5.4 percent in October, resulting in the smallest gap between black and white unemployment rates ever recorded. The Hispanic unemployment rate likewise reached an all-time low of 3.9 percent in September, and the Hispanic-American labor force participation rate reached its highest level in a decade the following month.

The left is fanatical about enforcing equal outcomes, and yet Democrats are trying desperately to get rid of a president whose policies have reduced economic disparities between racial groups to the lowest level in American history.