The Wall and the Shutdown

Right now the federal government is "shut down" with no end in sight over President Trump's demand for a border wall. Trump's position is easy to understand. The wall was his biggest campaign promise and trump has probably learned from George H. W. Bush's "read my lips" promise which was a big factor in his single-term as president. As it is, Trump has backed off a lot from his original promise of a wall going from ocean to ocean. The current one will be much smaller but will still target areas with the most border crossings.

Trump's desire for a border wall is reasonable. It may not stop border crossings but it will slow them a lot. $5 billion sounds like a lot of money but the wall will pay for itself in reduced border enforcement costs (like the $1.3 billion the Democrats proposed) and reduced demand for federal aid for illegal immigrants. It will also help wages since the flood of unskilled workers depresses wages in general.

So why are Democrats so opposed to the wall? I can think of a few reasons, none of them complimentary to the Democrats.

The first is simple opposition to Trump. Many people reflexively take the opposing side from anything that Trump proposes, even if it means reversing themselves. So they are willing to see the government shut down rather than see Trump fulfill a campaign promise.

Opposition also comes from people who believe in open borders. They want to welcome anyone who wants to come to the US. While laudable, they will eventually run into the adage that you can have open borders or a welfare state but not both.

The Democratic Congressional leadership has to answer to both of these groups but I think there's more to their opposition than just this. After all, their counter-proposal is for money for border enforcement. This should be treated as a trap. Border enforcement without a wall means more children separated from their parents and more children dying in custody. That stokes opposition to Trump and helps motivate people to vote Democrat.

In the long-term, though, the Democratic party is counting on a continuing moderate influx of Hispanics. They are counting on this group to give them a permanent majority through demographics. The Democratic leadership may be willing to moderate the influx through heightened enforcement but they want to be able to revert. That's why they can't allow a wall. They are expecting that two years from now President Beto will agree to slashing enforcement funds again. But you can't defund a wall. It keeps on stopping immigrants, even if the current president welcomes them.

Hollywood and McCarthyism

Hollywood loves to make movies about the days of the McCarthy hearings and the Blacklist when writers couldn't get work (actually they could but they had to use pseudonyms or fronts). These movies always side with the poor people accused of being communists, usually portraying them as hapless victims who only joined the Communist Party to impress a girl or some such. The almost never show the truth which is that the Communist Party of Hollywood was dedicated to the overthrow of the US government and was directly controlled by the Kremlin. All of this came out in the early 90s after the fall of the USSR during a brief period when their records were public.

The point of all of these movies is to make us root for the dissident and boo the officious accuser who is willing to ruin the lives of hard-working, talented people over a difference in philosophy. Hollywood is for the underdog.

Except is isn't.

Look at what happened to Kevin Hart. He was chosen to host the 2019 Oscars. Within three days he was out after people dug up some homophobic tweets he made a decade or more ago. Never mind that he recanted and apologized for them years ago. He was judged unsuitable to host the Oscars.

Hollywood has taken the place of McCarthy and no one is there to stand up for their victims.

Note, the one exception to the movies about the Hollywood communists was the Coen Brothers' Hail Caesar. That movie correctly showed a group of writers who were dedicated communists although it was an over-the-top portrayal that included kidnapping an actor and sending the ransom to the USSR. After The Majestic, I can forgive the Coens' exaggerations.

How Socialism Fails - a Case Study

Whenever Venezuela is brought up as an example of failed socialist policies, American socialists immediately claim that the country is not really socialist and that it's problems are due to corruption and the plummet in oil prices rather than socialism. Regardless of other issues, their policies on food prices are pure socialism and should be examined as such.The following is a highly simplified account of actual policies Venezuela practiced and their results. Given Venezuela's hyper-inflation, their real prices are meaningless so I made up some round numbers to illustrate the point.

The government decided that food prices were too high so they went to the grocers and told them, "You are charging $10 for beef. We want you to cut that in half." So the grocers went to the farmers and told them, "We were paying you $7 for beef but now we can only afford to pay you $3". It cost the farmers more than $3 to produce the beef so they either went out of business or started selling beef to unofficial markets. Soon a black market for beef was established but black market beef cost $12.

The government asked the grocers why their shelves were empty and they replied, "There's no beef available. The farmers won't sell it below cost so they've gone out of business." So the government went to some select grocers (meaning friends of officials) and gave them money to buy beef from other countries. Depending on the grocer there were four ways the money was used:

1) The grocer pocketed the money and used some of it to bribe officials to look the other way.

2) The grocer bought foreign beef and sold it to the black market.

3) The grocer bought foreign beef and sold it at $5. The first person through the door was someone from the black market who bought all of it.

4) The grocer bought foreign beef but kept it in a back room and only sold to close friends and family.

The result for all of these is that the shelves remained bare and the only way for the average person to buy beef was on the black market.

This is the inevitable result of well-meaning government officials who try to help people by ignoring markets and setting prices too low. Shelves remain bare and a black market develops. The Soviet Union was notorious for bread lines and for its black market.

Venezuela got a lot worse after this. Because of their hyper-inflation and limited foreign currency reserves, the government couldn't keep subsidizing buying food from other countries so even the black market was affected.

This works the other way, too. The State of New York has very high taxes on cigarettes so there's a thriving black market from people who buy cartons of cigarettes in other states with lower taxes then sell individual cigarettes in New York.

The bottom line is that markets develop around what people will pay for goods and what sellers are willing to sell them for. If the government sets prices too low then the goods vanish from the shelves and move into a black market. If the government sets the price too high then markets will develop to get around the official prices.

And that's why socialism fails.

Why the Socialists Scare Me

Socialism is on the rise. A large percentage of the Democratic Party wants socialism. A Socialist made a strong showing in the presidential race in 2016 and a much-younger one managed to defeat the 4th-most powerful Democrat in the House. I find all of this terrifying.

Socialism means that the government either owns or controls "the means of production" which means most employers. It's a totalitarian philosophy where the government intrudes into every facet of your life.

"But wait", you say, "Scandinavian socialism" and "Democratic socialism!".

Ha!

Free college and centralized health care does not make a country socialist. That's just the bait. Scandinavian countries are basically capitalist and the socialists are insisting that capitalism is the cause of all of society's ills and needs to be eradicated. The Antifa movement calls itself "anti-fascist" but they are also anti-capitalist. What's more, the Scandinavian countries manage because they are small, homogeneous and xenophobic. They are the opposite of the racially (but not ideologically) diverse population the American socialists want.

As for the democratic part, socialists have a long history of being for democracy right up until they are in power. Then they change the rules to see that they never have to win an election again. They're already talking about how they'll do this. They lost two out of five presidential elections in the Electoral College so they want to abolish that. They've also noticed that the Senate gives as much power to small states as to large ones so they want to change that. They also noticed that members of the House of Representatives from small states represent fewer people than members from large states so they want to change that.

They want increased voting rights. If you're a convicted felon they want you to vote. They are even allowing non-citizens to vote in some municipal elections. They are also big on making it as easy as possible to vote (and as easy as possible to cheat).

They keep trying to change the rules for nominees to the Supreme Court. Since that hasn't worked, they are now floating ideas such as term limits or outright court packing.

They don't believe in individual freedoms, either, at least not the traditional ones. Freedom of speech has been under attack for years under the guise of "hate speech" where hate speech is anything they don't want to hear. If you only believe in protecting speech that you agree with then you support political censorship. And they really love that. For years, progressive speakers can say anything they want on campus but conservatives, even moderate ones, are protested as hate speech and have to provide expensive security. Recently that's gone a step further. Corporations are examined to see if the officers have the correct views and any deviation from the party line can result in the company being made unwelcome. This is an amazing guilt-by-association where the private opinions of one executive or board member taints an entire company.

Colleges have long been mono-cultures but now the tech giants are also embracing a far-left corporate culture and dissent is punished. During the 2016 election, someone wrote a pro-Trump message on the physical wall in the Facebook office and this was treated as vandalism. Only pro-Hillary messages were allowed. Google, Facebook and Twitter all have the reputation of being far quicker to punish conservatives than progressives.

And this is only getting worse. There have been a few recent incidents where Republicans have been equated with Nazis or Nazi-enablers. These didn't spring out of no-where, hundreds of miles apart. It's what the left is telling itself. After years of calling President Trump every name they can think of, they've gone on to do the same to the entire Republican Party.

Once you've outlawed hate speech and declared all conservatives to be white supremacists then you've shut down debate completely - which is the goal. I'm a conservative who believes in free speech and capitalism. If these socialists ever take power then I'll have to stay quiet or face the gulag.

And that's why they terrify me.

Obama admits that Identity Politics are Racist

At a recent event at Rice University, former President Obama said this:

"In those environments, you then start getting a different kind of politics … that's based on, 'that person's not like me and it must be their fault,' and you start getting a politics based on a nationalism that's not pride in country but hatred for somebody on the other side of the border. And you start getting the kind of politics that does not allow for compromise, because it's based on passions and emotions," Obama said.

"It's identity politics," Baker said.

"Which is why, by the way, when I hear people say they don't like identity politics, I think it's important to remember that identity politics doesn't just apply when it's black people or gay people or women," Obama said. "The folks who really originated identity politics were the folks who said Three-Fifths Clause and all that stuff. That was identity politics … Jim Crow was identity politics. That's where it started."

When you read a more complete transcript, he meant to be saying that President Trump is an evil nationalist who hates foreigners but he got sidetracked by Baker's interjection of identity politics and said a few true things that I don't think he meant to say. But he's right, identity politics and intersectionality are just as racist as Jim Crow. They judge people by race, gender, sexual orientation, religion and possibly a few other traits rather than who they are. They try to dismiss it by redefining racism so that only white people can be racist but that puts us right back to defining people solely by their race.

I'm old enough to have actually heard Doctor Martin Luther King on TV and believe in his goal of a society where people are judged for who they are instead of the color of their skin. The Left has rejected that vision and embraced a new one that is as bad as what King was protesting against.

I hope that President Obama isn't forced to retract his statement.