There are a couple of must-reads that were published this week. The first, by Kurt Schlichter, warns leftoids that their eagerness to silence dissent will strike back at them with a fury. Schlichter feels the passion of the shiv. You can tell because his article is sharp, hungry for leftoid vitals, and remorselessly allergic to the supine “to be sure”-isms which typify cuckservative mewlings.
But then, those concerns apparently aren’t worthy of attention. The news covers, day in and day out, some overeating foreigner and drug lord baby mama who Donald Trump was mean to a couple decades ago, but no reporter ever asks our guy about his problems. And they don’t merely ignore him. They come after him, jamming things down his throat like gender neutral bathrooms and murderous Muslim refugees and Wall Street scams that mean he gets about .001% interest on that money he saved just like the experts told him to. And he’s expected to just take it.
This will not end well.
It will end either with leftoid retreat or leftoid heads on stakes. The choice of fate is theirs.
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The second article comes from the now-famous Publius Decius Mus, who whacks another two-by-four against the fiveheads of plush cucks like James Pethokoukis.
Whenever you find an article that begins with the title, “The Conservative Case” for or against something, lock your door, check your wallet, and grab your gun. You know what’s coming is an unadulterated sell-out of everything “conservatism” purports to hold dear.
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Pethokoukis, like a good AEI-nik, would presumably dismiss such concerns as “the politics of envy” or some-such. True Conservatives™ don’t care about income inequality! The aggregate is what matters!
Matters to what? “The Economy?” Oh. Gains accruing to techies and hedge fundies are more than enough to offset losses everywhere else and that’s apparently good enough for Pethokoukis, who—like nearly all economists—bases his case on a narrow economic analysis that ignores the broader political sphere. Here we find another typical misinterpretation of Reagan. The Gipper’s successful policies proved that it’s all about incentives. All hail Homo economicus!
True, incentives matter. What do open borders and trade-giveaways incentivize blue collar workers in the heartland to do? Give up and shoot heroin?
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Pethokoukis makes the highly unoriginal point that “Google, Facebook and Uber” show the continued dynamism of the U.S. economy. This is like John Kerry praising Apollo 11 in his acceptance speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Can’t think of anything to say? Moon shot! Oh, you’re talking about the economy? Google! Is any cliché more tired at this point? Google—actually Alphabet—has made a few people rich but otherwise has depressed high tech wages in Silicon Valley by its relentless importation, and advocacy for same, of foreign programmers who will work for less and transform neighborhoods through over-occupancy. All this to make porn searches more efficient. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook is even more aggressive about screwing American workers—fwd.usa, anyone?—and his company even more useless. Uber promises to turn unemployed American workers, and untold foreigners, into cab drivers. But you hail them through a smartphone, so it’s high tech! These, and dozens more that Pethokoukis could have mentioned but mercifully did not, are far cries from the robber barons of old, who electrified the nation, linked us by rail, road, sea, and air, and built our greatest monuments. In the process, they employed millions, created wealth for tens of millions more, and improved standards of living for people on every rung of the ladder.
But for Pethokoukis, the true measure of national success is “translat[ing] entrepreneurial daring into wealth.” […] And what about the people who aren’t entrepreneurs and can’t be? Are they just losers? Does the wealth ever get to trickle down to them? That is, in the form of something other than lower iPhone prices?
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Like all conservative Hegelians, Pethokoukis is endorsing, if implicitly, rule by the administrative state. “Truth” derives from scientific principle, which is published in academic “studies.” For their own good, the voters should not be allowed to contravene said “truth.” If the people don’t like current, academically endorsed immigration and trade policies, then the people are wrong. Which is manageable, as long as the political class successfully conspires to thwart their will. But when a “demagogue” comes along who threatens to implement the people’s will, that must be stopped!
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The actual, political truth is that men are free “of all but moral law.” And there is no moral imperative for or against immigration or trade. If the people want them, they may lawfully enact them. If they don’t, they may restrict either, to the extent that their preferences in the moment dictate. Even if a consequence is that their economy contracts.
An economist will gasp at this heresy against his faith. But politics is greater and higher than economics. A failing economy might be a merely economic problem but a failing society is fundamentally a political problem.
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The left rules out-of-bounds any discussion of the cultural or political effects of immigration as “racist,” and the conservatives go along. Hence they can only talk about immigration in economic terms, as if human beings were widgets.
Beautiful. This was a shiv aimed straight at the heart of Cheap Chalupas. I wonder how our favorite econo-autist is doing? He’s been on a “DAS RACISS” rearguard action lately, content to polish the knobs of various open borders leftoid freaks like Esssra Klein and Noah Smith. The Trumpening making him butthurt?
The rest of the article is even better than the excerpts I’ve quoted above. The closing sentence is absolutely killer. Read it in full and feel the force of a righteous revolution bearing down on the complacent, arrogant, smug equalist leftoid Hivemind and their cuckservative suck-up lackeys.
