House of Eratosthenes

Unanswerable question of the day: If Roy Moore was to be opposed because it’s important to keep child molesters and creepers out of Congress, and this effort ultimately succeeded, then how come all the celebrating is on the side of the democrats who merely wanted to pick up a Senate seat? Oh sure I’m seeing a little bit of gloating from the Republicans who were anti-Moore, some “In Your Face!” But the narrative that things are made better with a Moore defeat, and would somehow deteriorate with a Moore victory, seems to have been tossed out the window. All this “in your face” stuff, every jot & tittle of it, is dedicated to a proposition of “you dummies picked the wrong candidate and now disaster has ensued.” This just adds to my conviction that there never was any logical coherence to it. Roy Moore, defeated, doesn’t open a hole in the ground, leap into it, reach up & pull the hole in after himself — that’s not how it works. He serves no jail time for having seduced or mistreated anyone. No one is protected by this ultimately successful, but very poorly thought-out, effort to protect children & women. Logical coherence would be…although this comes off as a bit daffy, because it is…Roy Moore was, and remains, a danger to these women-children, so he should win this Senate seat so we can watch him and he won’t have the time to be dangerous. Now he’s a free, private citizen, not convicted of anything, facing no trial, with spare time he would not otherwise have.

Allow me to suggest an answer for my own question. Republicans — Americans — labor under a strange relationship with this idea of voters being able to influence things. We’re excited by it, and at the same time we fear the responsibility that goes with it, with such an intensity that some among us are polarized by it, even repulsed and sickened by it. For them, this fear wins out, day after day. Like the drivers-ed student who wants to sit in the back seat while the other kids take their turn driving on the freeway, all the time, until the teacher finally has to call her out on it.

Spend it for me! We’re hearing much the same thing about the tax bill President Trump is trying to pass. It’s funny, to those of us who’ve been watching it awhile, how much more popular tax cuts are well before they’re about to actually happen, than they are when we’re right on top of the delivery, and there’s only 1 or 2 signatures or procedural moves remaining before they become law. It’s not at all unlike watching a cat try to figure out if it really wants to go outside. The democrats amp up their propaganda, yank the volume dial on it up to eleven, and we hear “trickle down is bullshit” from all directions. Suddenly, tax cuts are an “expense” the government can’t afford. I guess everyone else has to grapple with the situation of now & then having less, but the government is entitled to be protected from this, spending whatever it wants, while everyone outside of government has to scrimp, and squeak, and cope.

It isn’t based on reason. A large truck chips a curb a couple hundred feet away, repairing the curb depends on funds that ultimately come from Washington, so we have to send lots of money to Washington to get the curb fixed? That’s nuts. Even nuttier is the proposition that the curb will remain unfixed, because budget cuts, and we have budget cuts because of tax cuts. Oh, so we have to keep the government in the black so we can get our curbs fixed? The government’s not in the black. Not even close. Nor does the government have any qualms about spending money when it’s in the red. People who rail against tax cuts based on this loony line of reasoning, know all this full well. They’re not keeping a jaundiced beady eye on the bottom line of the government’s income statement, they’re only pretending to do this. What they’re doing is more like clutching a security blanket. They’re the student driver who doesn’t want to take the wheel.

I remember thirty years ago people used to deny “trickle down,” the favorite pejorative used by those who like to change what truth is, through their judicious selection of the words used to describe it. I’m sure they’d accuse me of using a “straw man fallacy” if I were to suggest that what they’re really denying, is free trade. But, that’s what they’re denying. Trickle down doesn’t exist, because you and I have “R” for Rich and “P” for Poor tattooed onto our foreheads and we carry these letters around, womb to tomb — what, that’s not what they’re saying? If not, then what does it mean to deny the opportunity exists for us to work hard and better ourselves? The opportunity is there or else it isn’t. Binary choice. I think it’s there, and I can present evidence. What’s the evidence that it’s impossible? And if it’s possible for a poor child to grow up and become not-poor…and been done…which it has. What else would you call that?

And yet, decade after decade, this tedious narrative rises up that trickle-down is a lot of baloney, and it’s our lot in life to soldier on, through the dash between the two numbers that will ultimately be carved on our headstones, with our prospects unchanged the whole time. In America! In the twenty-first century, yet. The departure from reality nauseates me. It’s disgusting, infuriating. When I think of people living in different countries, today, or who squirmed away in anguish in different times, that we have people here, now, indulging in this nonsensical un-fantasy that their ability to provide for themselves is so unmoving & unmovable, so static, so limited. Many among them have real talent. The loss of human potential — it’s just mind-blowing. What a bunch of spoilsports. They’re being fed this stuff. And they’re swallowing. Demanding seconds. It’s a national disgrace and a national tragedy.

But, as tempting as it is to get all wrapped around the axle of whether or not trickle-down is bullshit. Let us examine instead what truly matters in politics: The conditions under which the undecided will be won over to one side, or the other. What does it take for more people to accept the premise that trickle down is bullshit, that the free market doesn’t work, that liquid assets are static, immobilized, that we all carry on in futility until the final date with the Grim Reaper. And what does it take for people to reject this?

We know this is a cry of the forlorn & helpless. People say this when they’re having a tough time looking for work, or perhaps when they already do have a job and it pays well, but they’re singing in a gilded cage — they doubt their abilities to find another should they ever find themselves dismissed. It is despair, almost a cry for help, and I think in many cases it is exactly that. It is a cry of “I think I’m working very hard, why don’t I feel more secure?”

I do believe, if it were easy for companies to hire people, and therefore easy for people to find prospective employers who are serious, people in great numbers would reject this notion of the unmovable standard of living, and embrace the idea that their hands are indeed on the steering wheel and they can act as true captains of their own destinies — even if the unemployment numbers were very high, even if the income inequality was very high, even if differentials in personal wealth were very high. For people to utter this note of despair, you have to have a perception of stasis, a perception that moving money around is very hard to do, that no one’s buying and no one’s selling.

Rich Get Richer, Poor Get Poorer Obviously, if people go around saying “trickle down is bullshit” in great numbers, you’re looking at a place where democrats are more likely to win elections. And we know from experience all too well, this does NOT mean you’re looking at any likelihood the problem will be solved. Places where democrats run things, and have run things for decades and decades, where democrats are exceptionally likely to win the next election, where you’re more likely to see a re-animated dinosaur than a Republican elected to anything…people stumble around, like zombies, in perpetual despair, saying dumb things like “trickle down doesn’t work,” or “the rich get richer, the poor get poorer,” not expecting to hire anyone, not expecting to get hired, not seeing any way they can ever escape their current conditions. And generation after generation, this doesn’t get fixed. The democrats who run the place have no plan to make it any better. Perhaps if they ever needed to have such a plan, they’d make one, but they don’t. People are depressed so they’ll keep voting democrat.

I’m talking about what? Could be any one of a number of places. Detroit, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Sacramento, Atlanta, NOLA, LA, Chicago, NYC, Philadelphia…

The same people who benefit politically from this feeling of stasis, that it’s very hard to get the money moving, are the ones crusading non-stop for higher taxes. They’re also the builders of all our wonderful little-laws that say “You cannot work, and you cannot hire, unless…” People don’t notice the pattern. Which makes me think they must want to avoid seeing it. It’s pretty hard to miss, once you open yourself up to noticing it.

And so I have to wonder. Do we really have to have a knock-down drag-out about whether higher taxes make it harder to move the money around? That one seems, to me, to be like “people breathe air” or something — outside the realm of the disputed. But maybe I’m wrong.

But in my experience quibbling over this stuff, with people who are emotionally invested in the other side; their position is not “money is harder to move around when taxes are high,” it’s more like “money will NEVER move around no matter where the tax rate is, so it doesn’t matter.” Which is silly, to me, I guess because I’ve always seen people buying & selling things so I know that cannot be true. I know when I make money, I have to spend quite a lot of it. So people are making money off me. What, then, is going on with these zombies, these deniers of money-mobility; are they not paying for anything? Or do they think as soon as the money leaves their fingertips, it ceases to exist? That only the government can spend money in such a way that jobs will result?

People, in order to accept that there’s no such thing as trickle-down, that it must be up to the government to move the money around in such a way that everyone has a shot at getting some, must embrace strong doubts about the goodness of themselves & others. They must think we don’t need each other, that there’s nothing anyone can do to provide a valuable service to someone else, for lack of some educational credential or networking connection that’s always just out of reach. This would be the minimum of what is required to sustain the sad, sad narrative if “no such thing as ‘trickle-down’.” You don’t have to be “woke” into doubting it; you have to be depressed into doubting it.

And once enough people doubt it, there are some people who, rest assured, are getting & staying very, very powerful in their miserable little communities, and getting & staying very, very rich.

What all this diseased zombie-thinking has in common, is an alarming lack of regard for the end-game. None of it survives the innocuous question, “What’s your vision?” What is the sequence of events one hopes to get started, how does one thing lead to another, in fulfillment of something desired. Roy Moore is defeated; what’s better? Ah, who knows…Who Is John Galt. Stop arguing politics! Kardashians is on…

These are the baby-steps society takes, as it lurches toward a new world no one actually wanted. This is how & why we emerge into a new day, wherein we find only government can spend money in any meaningful way, which it does until government is broke, and then it spends some more, so that we’re all encumbered with the effects of runaway inflation eating away at our limited savings, which we cannot replenish. This is how we find ourselves living in a silly world where throwaway lines like “How do you do” and “You’re looking nice today,” among office-co-workers, have to be micro-managed by lawyers. This is the fulfillment of the darkest fears that led us to make the wrong decisions in the prelude; a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s the scary thing about being a grown-up, of moving into the front seat and taking the wheel. You have to reckon with the idea that decisions have consequences, both good & bad, that your happiness and success are your responsibility and no one else’s.

That’s reality. We don’t get to choose whether or not to accept it. But, some people never stop trying. They’re dead inside, and you can tell they’re dead inside because they can’t explain how or why their choices might lead to success. The truth is, there is no connection for you to find, or for them to find. It isn’t there, because they’ve given up on maintaining one. They’ve been frightened & depressed out of it. They’ve taken a pass on adult living, and are just biding their time until that date with the Grim Reaper.

Re: Money will NEVER move… I had a buddy in grad school — flaming liberal, of course, because grad school — once ask me in a drunken bout of honesty to explain how stock prices work (he knew I’d worked in the financial industry before going ivory tower). So I started, but it quickly became apparent that wasn’t actually what he wanted to know.

What he really wanted to know — brace yourselves — is where the money comes from when you buy a share for $2 and sell it for $5. Where did that $3 come from? Thin air?

This is an adult. He owns a house, a car, student loans, student loans for his kids, medical insurance, life insurance. He pays his bills and his taxes. To all outward appearances a financially literate adult, he honestly thinks in his heart of hearts that this “Capitalism” stuff is either a scam, some chicken-blood voodoo santeria shit, or both.

Near as I can tell, the Leftist believes the following propositions about economics:

1) there is a fixed sum of money in the world. When you bought that $2 stock from me for $5, I now OWN that $3 in some irrevocable way. I am $3 richer, which means the entire rest of the world is $3 poorer, FOREVER.

2) Price is arbitrary. If you press them, most Lefties will probably give you some half-assed version of the Labor Theory of Value, but they don’t really mean it. Why is Microsoft’s price per share so much higher than MomandPop’s? Anticipated earnings, right? But there are way more Microsoft shares. Proportionally, MomandPop has the same revenue per share. So why is the one worth $100 and the other worth $1?

A better example is sneakers. Nikes cost about $5 a pair to make, they say. So that’s what they’re really worth. But slap LeBron James’s name on them and you can sell them for $200. Why? Marketing, man. Theres’ a perfectly good pair of sneakers over there for $50 without LeBron’s name on them, but Don Draper has convinced us all that they’re no good.

3) Because of 1 & 2, all commerce is, at bottom, robbery. They really do seem to think that we could all sit down and find out that a pair of sneakers is “really” worth $5, and a bottle of antibiotics is “really” worth $10. so we should just trade two pairs of sneakers for one bottle of antibiotics, problem solved.

4) Money — the paper stuff, the digits on spreadsheets — is all part of the con. That’s why we don’t see that sneakers are “really” worth $5. The dollar sign is inherently dishonest.

5) None of the above apply when it comes to stuff they personally like. Ask ’em why they’re spending $7 on that half-caff soy chai latte from Starbucks when they could easily just dump some cream and sugar into a cup of Folger’s and get the same thing for about 75 cents, and you’ll hear all kinds of stuff about production cost, labor cost, consumer preference… none of that applies to sneakers and antibiotics, though, because Nike and Pfizer are giant corporations that are evil. Starbucks, however, is a giant corporation that is good. This is also true of Apple, Trader Joe’s, etc., because….

6) Stuff they like doesn’t come from giant corporations. Steve Jobs actually hand-tunes each iPhone personally, from 100% post-consumer recycled parts, in his Cupertino basement. Starbucks is five guys in Seattle, personally roasting batches of locally sourced coffee. Trader Joe’s only gets inventory via donkey carts driven by authentic campesinos. You could show them the Apple factory, the Trader Joe’s fleet of pollution-spewing Jimmy Petes, the Silicon Valley apartments crammed with seventeen Bangladeshi visa slaves that do all Google’s work… none of it matters in the slightest. They know how it really is….
- Severian | 12/15/2017 @ 08:06
Sixteen Tons.
http://www.ernieford.com/SIXTEENTONS.html
I hear welfare cards are electronically reloaded by direct deposit these days.
Can I now pay my cable bill in Disney Dollars?
Hey! Can folks with California tax rebate IOUs pay their death taxes with California State IOUs?
What IS the interest rate on those?
Oooo….it’s all so….progressively socialist!!!!!

IN: Hey, old man! Your “free” healthcare is costing “the people” THIS much. How much longer is this gonna go on?
OUT: Sorry, your child has been deemed too unexceptional/dim/ retarded from the norm, to waste precious “peoples” assets with further attempts to educate/feed/house/supervise them in STEM/Humanities/Political Science AKA “business” economics/ programs any further.
- CaptDMO | 12/15/2017 @ 08:47
Sev, I can’t believe you totally forgot “fair trade!” I’m constantly reminded by our “betters” that the reason they spend 10 times the cost of a cuppa is that all that extra money goes to the poor farmer, no matter how many studies refute the claim by showing it all ends up in the hands of buyers and middle-men.
- P_Ang | 12/17/2017 @ 08:49

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They Walk Among Us, Dead InsideThursday, December 14th, 2017

They Walk Among Us, Dead Inside
Thursday, December 14th, 2017