The Discerning Texan
-- Edmund Burke
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
More on Why We Celebrate
Personally I think that anyone who thinks that they believe in the philosophy of Socialism owe it to themselves and to their fellow citizens to read this essay--particularly the portion which explains why Capitalism is the greatest engine of wealth creation for rich and poor--before they make any more catastrophic mistakes at the ballot box. A few examples from Whittle's Capitalism discussion in Part 1:
As I said yesterday, for Americans today is the day to count your blessings and to be thankful that you live in the greatest, strongest, wealthiest, most generous, least prejudiced Nation on Earth; not to mention Earth's Last Best Hope. Be sure and take the time to read Trinity in its entirety (again: Part 1 here; Part 2 here). My guess is that once you do, you will then want to buy Silent America, which is a collection of some of the most spot-on essays about the USA you will ever read. I will end my post with the words Whittle uses to begin his posts: Happy Birthday, America!Now people on the left have, in their guts, a revulsion towards the rich and the wealthy, because whenever they see wealth they naturally assume that it was stolen from people without any – the poor. That rich man in the private jet has taken the wealth from all the poor people and is therefore a criminal.
If you think about all of the protestors you see on TV, whether they be against US “imperialism”, or globalization, or corporations, or claim to be champions of the Poor, both here at home and for poor nations in the world – all of this anger and seething resentment, all of this bitterness and invective, can be attributed, when all is said and done, to having chosen to believe that there is only so much wealth in the world, and that rich people and rich nations gain and maintain wealth by stealing prosperity from the weak.
This is so idiotic, so demonstrably false, that you really have to wonder why we are having this discussion. All of the money owed to rich nations by the poor – money that was lent to them to lift them from poverty, and then squandered on palaces for dictators and Socialist prestige projects like International Airports in the middle of nowhere -- all this money totaled together, is a small percentage of the wealth generated by rich countries in a single year. The idea that the United States can steal 10 trillion dollars a year from dirt-poor nations that don’t produce anything of value is absolutely insane, and yet, and yet, we hear it again and again and again from the professionally outraged who must be obtuse beyond human understanding to keep making such an absurd lie the basis of their entire philosophy.
[...]
Now in order to fully appreciate why Capitalism is such a blessing – including being a blessing for the poor – we have to understand what poverty is. We have to have a definition of poverty. And we have to understand what it really means to be poor in a rich country, and to be rich in a poor one.
We keep hearing certain professional (as in paid) complainers bleating about how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. That’s just wrong. That’s demonstrably, provably false. It’s a lie.
The rich get richer, and the poor get richer too. At least here they do.
American poverty is defined by a certain income. These people are poor by definition. I’m not trying to be sarcastic, and I’m not trying to minimize the pain of it – I’m just stating a fact.
Now, what does it mean when we learn that the poorest Americans have incomes higher than 90-some percent of the rest of the world? What does that mean?
Poor people in America have electrically powered homes. They have the same clean running water the rest of the city residents have. Almost all have telephones and television. Many have a third-hand piece of crap automobile like my last three cars. (My current ride has had one previous owner and 12,000 miles and it feels new. I’ve never owned a new car.)
Does it suck to be poor in America? It depends on who you talk to. If you spend your life calculating what Bill Gates makes while you were sleeping, chances are you’ll be pretty ornery. But if you look out into the rest of the world, and even a few decades back into history – American history, a rich country’s history -- then you just might begin to realize that you, a poor American, are living better than just about any other humans in history, and I am including the richest people of just sixty or seventy years ago – a single human lifespan for a poor American. A hundred years ago, if the Crown Prince caught the flu, that richest, most powerful person on the earth, likely as not, died. At this hour, at this instant, people of all incomes are being saved from certain death in clinics and hospitals by treatments unimaginable a few short decades ago.
Some facts are undeniable – that’s why we call them “facts.” Lifespan and infant mortality are scientific data sets that pay no attention to ideology. The first has been rising, the other dropping, all across the globe, and doing so spectacularly where capitalism has taken hold. Rich capitalist countries -– the ones with those evil kkkorporations -- are also far cleaner – Greener, you might say – than poor, socialist ones. That’s got to stick a little, thinking about that up there in that tree night after night, for years.
Where monumentally thick governments, like that of China, are finally forced to get out of the way and let people work to improve their own lives –- we call this process ”making money” -- the results are simply dumbfounding, given the amount of poverty that has been foisted on that industrious nation for a few millennia of raw tyranny. Ask your solid, upper-middle-class in Egypt, or Vietnam, or Belarus, if they’d like to get a chance to start a new life as a poor American. Then get the hell out of their way, if you don’t feel like tasting the sidewalk.
One of the few places where longevity is falling drastically is in the ruin of Russia and her poor, literate, long-suffering people. Communism is still killing those poor bastards. It’s like a disease that stalks you even after it’s been eradicated.
What a filthy legacy.
Now I told you this one would be tough, but we’re almost done with it. In order to show how Capitalism helps the rich, the poor, and the middle, we have to look at income. Unfortunately for the grey-ponytail crowd, this will require just a smidgeon of math and a little tiny bit of other stuff they didn’t study for when they were out getting high behind the dumpsters.It involves a graph. If you are one of those people who are now reaching for a pencil and paper, then you already pass and spend the rest of study period at the library. The rest of you pay attention, especially you kids way in the back whose every other word is Nazi! The rest of us are getting a little tired of having to keep explaining this to you. So pay attention!
In your mind, draw a vertical line down the left side of a piece of paper, and a horizontal one across the bottom. Yes, it makes an “L” Moonflower…
The left-hand, vertical line represents the number of people. The higher we go, the more people there are. The horizontal line is income: the further to the right, the more silk you get to wear.
Now place a bell-curve along the bottom line. Okay? A Bell Curve. Simple.
Now, down on the bottom left are the poorest Americans. There are relatively few really desperately poor people. As we move to the right, into higher incomes, we see more and more people -– the line goes higher. We’re still on the left side of the curve -– the cheap seats. Most of the people -– the bulge in the bell -- make an average salary: that’s why we call it “average” (You statisticians leave means and medians and that stuff out of it. Just play along.)
Okay, now as we move to ever higher incomes, we see fewer and fewer people making the big bucks. Numbers go down. And then all the way at the end sit Bill Gates and Sam Walton all by their stinking rich selves. Okay?
Let’s call that a snapshot of America today.
Now, if we rob from the rich, and give to the poor, then what happens?
The rich people get poorer, the poor people get richer…the ends contract…the bell curve gets narrower. The right side, the rich side, moves left – poorer. The left side, the poor half of the curve, moves right – richer. In a socialist utopia, there is no curve; there’s just a single vertical line in the middle called The Salary. Collect all the revenues, add ‘em up, divide by the total number of people, and pay them all the same exact amount.
Everybody makes the same: the Salary. Let’s say it’s fifty grand a year. Brain surgeons, the guy who cleans the toilet at the 7-11 –- everyone makes fifty grand.
Fifty grand! Woo-hoo!
Now let’s set aside for a moment the non-trivial issue of whether or not such a society -- which rewards 12 years of intense medical study and endless hours doing breathtakingly difficult and essential work exactly the same as the guy who spent his teen years stealing stereos, getting high and listening to White Snake -- is more “just” and “compassionate.” Look at the bell curve -- or what’s left of it.
There it sits. It will start to slide left as motivation and industry and ambition and just plain dreaming of a better life goes out the window. What’s the point? Fall asleep behind the glass at a service station, you make The Salary. Put in overtime, start a business, get an extra degree, invent the telephone –- you get The Salary. Only we’re not producing as much. The Brain Surgeon decides it pays just as well to take tickets at the movieplex, and he’s got a lot more free time, plus the movie. Productivity goes down. We produce less, so now the average of what we make goes from fifty grand to forty-three nine. Then thirty-six grand. Then Twenty-One. Then eleven. But everybody’s equal! Equally destitute and equally hopeless.
But I’ll even throw this essential argument away for a minute.
Let’s just agree that everybody makes fifty grand. Forever.
If we went perfectly communist a hundred years ago, when the Big Idea started, that “average salary” would have been closer to five grand a year.
Doh!
What the hell can you buy today with five grand? Well, quite a lot of hay, some dry goods, perhaps a corset for the missus. But it doesn’t buy anything of value today. What will fifty grand buy in a century? Some crappy new Volvo, perhaps a PlayStation? What about a personal transporter, or a NeuralBoy? You’ll need to make 500 grand to afford those puppies.
Now if you’d just been smart and listened to Adam Smith, he’d tell you: you don’t improve people's lives by narrowing the bell curve. You improve people’s lives by moving it to the right.
Is this so hard to figure out?
I guess so. For some people this is like learning calculus –- in Greek.
If your goal is to pull the money from those goddam rich people, then realize all you can do is raise the poor to the middle. On the other hand, if you don’t give a damn about people richer than you, and everyone does the best they can, then there is no limit to how far right a wealth-creating engine can move the curve. Poor people today make more money than average people did a hundred years ago, and they can buy much cooler stuff with what they make –- like televisions.
So write this on your palm, because there will be a test in the afterlife: if you want to help the poor by taking from the rich, all you can do is take all that they have. Take from the industrious, the ambitious, the clever and the hardworking long enough, and they will go somewhere else and get rich -- again.
And then where are you? Your bell curve gets narrower, and as the gap between rich and poor shrinks, you have a few years, maybe a few decades of smug satisfaction as the whole edifice topples slowly to the left and collapses. The rich get poorer -- good for you – and the poor? Well, simple. They starve to death.
Behold Africa. What an egalitarian paradise! All starve equally.
On the other hand, there is no limit –- again -– no limit, to how far to the right, how rich, capitalism can make even the poor. Some people will do better than others, because some people work harder, or smarter, or longer than others, and some are just plain luckier. That’s life. And if that’s the case, then some people, by definition, will be the rich half, and some will be the poor half. And at the far end of the poor half will be the people we call The Poor. It doesn’t matter how much money they make, or don’t make. The bottom ten or fifteen percent we will define as The Poor. Seventy-five years ago, these poor Americans lived in shacks with dirt floors. Today they live better. Not as well as the rest of us. But better. The rich get richer, and the poor get richer, too.
Labels: America, Capitalism, Fourth of July
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
July the Fourth and American National Identity
To many Thanksgiving is the day we are supposed to give thanks for all the good things that we have. But Thanksgiving in America is much more about familial and religious connotations; whereas the Fourth of July is about being thankful for one thing and one thing only: that we live in the Greatest Country on Earth--and the greatest experiment in self-governance and greatest argument for the economic theory of Adam Smith in the History of the World. My humble opinion.
And so today I embark on a a journey back to discover why I feel so strongly; and then to then bring that knowledge back around to the danger that the America we love so much faces today; namely being slowly strangled to death by its own media and by a Marxist-based PC theology that has never worked successfully anywhere it has ever been tried, and which has claimed millions of lives in its totalitarian and false utopian efforts to impose that sickness on the rest of us.
I am fortunate, because I had a grandfather who took the time to teach me about History. Starting around when I was a 5 or 6 my grandfather would sit with me and page through a large book which was my own Thru the Looking Glass view of Wonderland. It's title was 'LIFE's Picture History of World War II'. I can still remember him sitting patiently as I turned each page and explained what each picture in this huge book was about, and its context.
My grandfather--after seeing my boyish fascination with the Swastika symbol and the order and pagentry of the photos of the pre-war Nuremberg Party Rallies--helped me understand how Hitler and the Nazis grew from Germany's lost sense of national pride, which had been robbed from it and gutted by the Allies after World War I. My grandfather told me that the Germans were a proud, industrious people, and when they lost World War I, there was a national shame that many (if not most) Germans felt; and that it was because Hitler understood that shame; and the longing of Germans for its lost pride--that enabled this minor corporal from the defeated German Army to become the leader of an even more powerful Germany. The people--out of their need for a national identity that they could take pride in--chose Deutschland Uber Alles over no pride at all. So pride only for pride's sake--with no reason or basis behind it (e.g. "the master race")--is not necessarily a good thing; however if there is basis; if the country is morally worthy of that pride, it can be a unifying force for good. American history is full of such examples. "Nationalism" has been given a permanent connotation by the left of being something bad; I would argue that it is only bad when the nation is not based on freedom, equality of opportunity, democracy, and morality.
Often when leafing through that book, my grandfather would talk about the dangers of appeasement: about how Europe sat by and did nothing while Hitler continued to violate the Treaty of Versailles; while he built an Army and Air Force and Navy much larger than that which Versailles allowed. He also talked about Churchill--how all along Churchill warned everyone about Hitler, but that no one wanted to listen to him that this man was worth fighting; not after the carnage of "the War to End all Wars," World War I. This war, he said was so bloody and so awful that even the Allies did not even want to think about fighting another war--and could not get behind the idea that anyone else--even a bitter defeated former enemy--could contemplate such a thing. So, despite the writing on the wall, Western Europe sat back and watched helplessly as Hitler annexed Austria and marched into Czechoslovakia. And on September 1, 1939, the world learned that Churchill had been right all along.
Then, when we would get to the part in the book about the shooting war: about the invasion of Poland, about blitzkrieg and France falling without a shot, and about the Battle of Britain; my grandfather would talk how he remembered listening to overseas BBC broadcasts during the blitz, and what a great man Churchill was. But also always pointing out that--if we had stopped Hitler earlier--while he was building up his forces, not nearly as many people would have died in that war.
We even dug up a boxed archive of his old 78 records--which I still have--called "I Can Hear it Now", which is an Edward R. Murrow-narrated set of old speeches before and after the War. Here were the voices of the people on the page: Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt... We would play those on his record player and the voices from the book would come alive. These are my fondest memories of childhood--and no doubt they have helped shape my own outlook today.
That LIFE photo book was the first of many my grandfather would talk about with me. He used to also talk a lot about the Civil War; I think he once even told me that we share a distant relative who fought for the Confederacy in Hood's Texas Brigade. But when it came to the Civil War, the man my grandfather talked about most was Lincoln. He talked about how terrible and morally wrong that slavery was, and how Lincoln freed the slaves. He said that because Lincoln wanted to free the slaves, the South formed their own country and went to war (a not entirely accurate explanation of why the war started, but close enough for a child...). And because the South was defending its own territory and had better Generals, it was winning that war, which made Lincoln very unpopular in the North, because so many people died and it looked like no progress was being made with numerically superior forces. He talked about how things were going very badly for the Union, and pointed out that Lincoln who would not give up when everyone else was ready to. He would even bring up Lincoln when he talked about Churchill. He would say that these were men who were examples of people who always did the right thing, no matter what the personal cost to them was. And he said that as long as we had people like Lincoln, America could never become weak.
My initial fascination with World War II led to a general interest in history, and to further discussions of the American Revolution and World War I. We talked about Texas Independence and Sam Houston and William Barret Travis at the Alamo. My grandfather talked about the people that came over from England and Scotland--my ancestors--and how they were fleeing religious persecution over there and looking for a better life. In short, my grandfather provided depth and context to my American experience. It was probably those conversations with him, more than anything else, that instilled a national pride in me at an early age. Because he took the time to tell the story about America's struggles and heroes; about people who sacrificed everything, I came to appreciate that there really was something special about this place. And this was before I even groked things like wealth and economics.
I do remember asking him, though, what would happen if America lost its national pride, and I distinctly remember him saying he didn't think that would ever happen; he did not think America could become like Nazi Germany, because he thought that enough people would always love this country so much that we would never completely lose our national pride the way the Germans did after World War I.
And so, every year at this time when I am looking up on the night of the Fourth, listening to the "1812 Overture" or "Stars and Stripes Forever" and watching the huge fireworks light up the sky, I get the same feeling of awe and thankfulness that I had as a child. To have lived in a place where so many people before me cared so much about this place that they sacrificed everything--including in many cases their lives; to live in a place where anyone can go to school, work hard, and make something of himself where nothing existed before; I could not imagine being more fortunate than to live in such a place.
I can remember sitting in my grandparents' home on Christmas Eve 1968 and listening to the Astronauts read Genesis 1 from Apollo 8 as it circled the moon. And I remember distinctly feeling that pride swell up in my gut. America did that. WE did that. I remember going outside that night and looking up with my father and grandfather at that Orb and just being in complete awe that I lived in such a place where it was possible to achieve such a wondrous feat. All because some men got together in Pennsylvania in 1776 and said: we are not going to take this anymore. To me it is still something that does--and ought to--instill awe and pride in every citizen of this country.
Now I am older, though, and it is hard not to notice how many people living here today do not feel that way about America: rather than awe, they show only scorn and criticism; rather than pride, they act ashamed because we have it better than others do. Rather than all the things we have done--and continue to do right, they dwell only on the mistakes and why the US is not entitled to such prosperity, that somehow the people that courageously crossed an ocean to build something are not entitled to the fruits of what they built, and that America is just another place to live. Bullshit. Show me a better one.
Today America is faced with enemies abroad not unlike Hitler's Germany in the 30's. Plenty of people are warning us that we simply must not allow Islamist Jihadists--who live only for our deaths--to continue to multiply while we preach the gospel of zero population growth. But while authors like Mark Steyn see it, our "intelligensia" is not listening. Many are saying: we cannot allow a rogue state led by megalomaniacal nihilist religious zealots--which is funding with its petrodollars the destruction of all that we have and care about--to acquire Nuclear Weapons, as Iran says it has the right to do. But the elites argue that if we just talk to them, peace can prevail. This is such an eerie parallel to the rise of Nazism that it defies the imagination. But the elites don't want to you get that message--can't have that evil nationalism getting in the way... For if you do hear it, it might interfere with their plans to make us all dependent on them, instead of on ourselves.
The very thing this country was founded upon was a person's right to be what he wanted to be, to rely on himself and his neighbors--rather than on Government--to make his way through life. The left decries things like patriotism and nationalism and wanting to protect what we have as "imperialistic." The Left wants to drown America's national identity; they believe in "Imagine there's no countries..." as some sort of mantra in the way Charlie Manson believed "Helter Skelter" was license to murder. It is nothing of the kind. Is is a cheap utopian pipe dream, even if it does come from my favorite band ever.
To this notion that pride in the American nation is a bad thing, I again call "Bullshit." In the case of America, national pride does have basis. We are arguably the most egalitarian, non-discriminative society on Earth, and we became that way precisely by fighting for the notion that this thing called America and the American Dream was worth fighting and dying for. And so it is. And if better men than me had not died for that dream, I would not be here today.
But that dream is slowly dying, as I see it. It is being denied oxygen by those whose utopian view of the world is not only unrealistic; but it has also led to over one hundred million deaths--all in the name of some global "collective ideal" that never existed and never will. Look at Europe, people. Socialism is either dead or dying virtually everywhere it has been tried. Even the Chinese are having to give it up.
There are still voices who see the tsunami on the horizon--but there are many more who are oblivious to the storm clouds gathering; and still others in our media who promote that oblivion. The Enemy is at the gates, and the Enemy to be feared the most is Internal, not the External ones. Because if we win the Internal War for America's National Identity, the External War will become a foregone conclusion; for we have shown that nothing can stop the will of the American people when we are all working in the same direction. But if we cannot summon that national pride internally, our enemies won't have to kill us, they will only have to outlast us until we surrender that last vestige of pride in the Greatest Experiment in Human History--out of our own complacency and unwillingness to do the right thing, even when unpleasant or unpopular.
We experienced a little bit of what this would be like during the "malaise" and guilt-tripping Carter years. Reagan snapped us and the rest of the world out of that particular funk. But the forces which put Carter there--the same forces which sentenced over two million souls to death by abandoning our commitment to Vietnam (does the term "Killing Fields" ring a bell?)--are still lingering, and they would have you believe they're stronger than ever. If so, it is only because of the success of the Internal Enemy in killing--via the media and Educational institutions--what little pride this country has left in who we are and where we came from.
But it would be orders of magnitude worse should we start losing cities. Because if we haven't won the Internal War for National Identity by then--this is when something akin to the Nazis becomes possible. When millions start dying because no one would listen to those warning of "the gathering storm", a path could then open for someone to come to power who would try and solve our internal problem the way the Nazis tried to solve theirs. And you know those guys are out there too... Is that what we want?
Fellow citizens, the Democrat party as we once knew it is dead. It has become a shell of its former self, and it is now the prima facia public face of our Internal Enemy, because Democrats have officially taken on a dead ideology and a nation-killing cancer of entitlements and political correctness. This is a party which will spend money on anything EXCEPT the defense of the nation and the maintenance of our national identity. They want our sovereignty to be swallowed up by our deferral to a United Nations which both envies and despises us. They call for us to cut the funding for the troops in Iraq so we would then have to abandon a third of the world's oil supply to our murderous Islamist enemies; they vote to defund a working missile shield--which they fought every inch of the way--to protect us from Islamist nuclear missiles, and in favor of obscenely expensive Government-run health care--which is also a proven failure; they argue for unlimited immigration of a largely uneducated class of social dependents, for not protecting our borders, for not taking the fight to our enemies abroad, and for a suicidal no-drilling for oil energy policy while we fund the Islamists' ability to kill us for their oil.
This is a party that does not believe in extending American power to protect America's interests--even where despotic dictators are oppressing their people; yet is eager for us to send troops and money to every single hellhole where human rights violations or poverty exists--with the only caveat seemingly being that America must first have no discernible stratgic or national interest there. This is a party that cares more about being "popular" with the leftist Elites in Europe and the rest of this insane planet, than it does doing what is best for the most benevolent, tolerant, successful, and freedom-loving society the World has ever seen.
One other note before I finish this, and that is about the recent Immigration Proposal, and the danger we all face. It is a fact of life that soon one in four voters in America will be Hispanic. And--while many of us (including myself) argued vociferously against the passage of this horrible bill--the Internal Enemy will portray the reason for its failure as being xenophobia or racism--the same tired argument they have been making since the 60's--but that will register with a lot of Hispanics unless we send the appropriate counter-message. What we must convey to our Hispanic friends is that race is not the reason at all we opposed the bill. It was not about Mexicans--which I can tell you from personal experience are some of the kindest and most civilized people I have met. Rather, we had to defeat this bill because it was going to have the impact of killing our hard-fought American Identity. It will be important to the survival to this country that we are able to explain to these fine people that we are not against Mexicans; rather that we are FOR a strong America. We simply must make the case that their future also lies with Republicans and in protecting America's national interests. Without a strong, focused America, there is no future for them or us.
In a submarine you don't start bailing water until you have plugged the hole. We must be able to explain the logic of that to our Mexican friends. And then we need to set about welcoming the ones who want to join the long line of great citizens willing to fight and die for this place. I would have no problem with providing education and eventual citizenship to any immigrant and his/her immediate family (after a background check) who is willing to join and serve a full term in our armed forces.
On the other hand, groups like La Raza, and other elements of the Reconquista movement have to be distinguished in the American mindset from the average immigrant who--like so many before them--wants to come to America because it is the "Shining City on a Hill" that the Gipper used to talk about. The Reconquistas are the enemies of America; the immigrant who wants to become a part of the American dream is our ally. Let us be mindful of the difference.
And so, here we are. All the history, all those who have given their lives, all those who risk it still--so we can live in the Greatest Nation on Earth. If that isn't a reason to be thankful and grateful, what is?
Happy Fourth.
Labels: America, American History, Border Protection, Fourth of July, World War II
