Leading the Revival of Individualism & Self Reliance

Africa’s Socialism Is Keeping It Poor.

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It has been widely, vividly, but nonetheless wrongly believed that socialism is the appropriate system to improve the living standards of Africans. Worse yet, it has been misleadingly claimed that socialism is compatible with African culture because African culture is fundamentally a collectivist culture. However, one fact remains indisputable: socialism has failed wherever it was tried, and the African countries that have experimented with socialism were not exempted from its failure.

The undeniable fact remains that Africa has the lowest living standard of all continents after Antarctica. The reason why the living standard of the majority of African countries is so low compared to the rest of the world, is because socialism has impoverished the African continent. At the outset of the post-colonial era in the 1960s many African countries — such as Tanzania, Angola, Mali, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mozambique, Egypt, Senegal, Guinea, Congo and many more — have embraced socialism as their economic and political system.

These countries that have embraced socialism became significantly worse off by the 1980s. For example, Tanzania was one of the fast-growing economies in East Africa until Julius Nyerere implemented the “Ujamaa,” which means socialism and brotherhood in the Swahili language. Before the implementation of the Ujamaa; Tanzania had a GDP similar to South Korea . Subsequently to the implementation of Ujamaa, economic growth became unsurprisingly stagnant. The policy of collectivization impoverished the Tanzanian people. Food production fell, and the country’s economy suffered . This decline in productivity has made Tanzania one of the poorest countries on the continent. In Ghana, under the rule of Kwame Nkrumah, one of the foremost African political leaders of the post-colonial era; socialism was also implemented as the economic system of the country. Socialism, as a domestic policy in Nkrumah’s seven-year development plan, was to be pursued toward “a complete ownership of the economy by the state.” A bewildering slate of legislative controls and regulations were imposed on imports, capital transfers, industry, minimum wages, the rights and powers of trade unions, prices, rents and interest rates. Private businesses were taken away and nationalized by the Nkrumah government. The result has also been unsurprising. Resources were mismanaged, inflation rose, and economic stagnation occurred in Ghana. Zimbabwe has also suffered from the myths of African socialism under Mugabe’s rule. Mugabe collectivized the means of production in the late 1980s when he became Zimbabwe’s strongman. Rampant corruption, huge budget deficits, and mismanagement of resources have dragged the economy, hyperinflation, 60 percent unemployment, and a desperate shortage of hard currency. These examples clearly demonstrate how socialism had utterly stagnated the economies of these countries until a market economy was once again reinstated.

But the question remains as to why Africans deeply believed in socialism and embraced it in the 1960s. In Africa, socialism was presented as an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist ideology while capitalism was perceived as the ideology of the oppressor, the colonizer, and of profit. Africans strongly believe in socialism because they think that socialism is compatible with African culture since African culture is a collectivist culture. African culture values the group over the individual. It values the concept of sharing, solidarity, and altruism. Of course, all these moral virtues are well-intended, but they play no substantial role in the improvement of the living standard of people. What improves the living standard of people is the ability to retain private property, to voluntarily exchange with one another what we own in order to create capital. Some African countries in the post-colonial era resisted the socialist temptation; notably countries like Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, and South Africa.

For example, in the 1960s and 1970s, Côte d’Ivoire was the most economically advanced country in West Africa. While its neighbors were embracing socialism, Côte d’Ivoire opted for a market economy. Despite having an authoritarian political regime, like all African countries during that time; the Ivorian people were, nonetheless, economically free. They had the freedom to create businesses, and to expand private property. From 1960 to 1979, the GDP in Côte d’Ivoire grew at 8.1 percent per year, which means that in real terms capita, it increased from $595 to $1,114. Cote d’Ivoire’s economic expansion during that period was called “The Ivorian Miracle” because the country was exporting agricultural goods to the neighboring countries have had a shortage of food production due to their socialistic policies. The Ivorian Miracle made Côte d’Ivoire the most prosperous nation in West Africa between 1960 and 1980.

What Africans have failed to grasp about capitalism and the free market is that, it is not a system intrinsic to Western culture. It is a system intrinsic to human nature regardless of race, ethnicity, or the local culture. Socialism has failed in Africa as it has failed in Eastern Europe, India, China and in South America. Even if Africa is culturally collectivist, it is important to comprehend that a group is a collectivity of individuals whereby each individual within the group is stimulated by the pursuit of his own interests. The pursuit of one’s self-interests is an intrinsic factor of human nature that no central authority can change regardless of the goal of the common good. Despite the collectivist nature of African culture, African culture is not exempted from that natural law of human nature. Coercing human nature to do something that is not in harmony with the nature of human understanding, will result in failure. That is why socialism, wherever it is tried, will always fail.

Germinal G. Van is an author, political essayist and libertarian scholar, born in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, West Africa. This article first appeared at mises.org.

Urban Democrats Are Driving Jobs And Prosperity Out Of American Cities.

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Finance giant JPMorgan is considering moving its headquarters out of New York City and its gleaming skyscraper buildings. While the company is playing coy with these reports, it has already been slowly relocating many of its operations and jobs to lower tax locations in Ohio, Texas, and Delaware. The Lone Star State currently hosts 25,000 of its employees, and Texas will likely surpass the New York portion in coming years.

The resulting move will harm the middle earners of New York far more than that of the wealthy, who can easily move to a better tax climate. Not only is the state tax structure prohibitive, but Alexandria Ocasio Cortez may be responsible for the pink slips at JPMorgan, which anticipated thousands of educated technology workers to come to the area as part of the planned Amazon headquarters in Queens. But after the freshman lawmaker lobbied against the project, the retailer changed plans. Many good jobs and the growth they sustain at JPMorgan will likely follow.

The exodus is part of a trend sweeping traditionally Democratic states over the last several years. Whether it is the state and local tax deduction changes or burdensome regulations, the trend is becoming increasingly clear. General Electric pulled up stakes from Connecticut awhile ago, and Cigna is considering doing the same. A whopping 1,800 businesses left California in 2016 alone, while manufacturing firm Honeywell moved its headquarters from New Jersey to greener pastures in North Carolina.

None of this is news to businesses or to readers of my columns. However, there seems to be no learning curve among the liberal governments of these tax happy locales. So why are we looking to federalize this model? Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has proposed this tax model on steroids should she be elected next year. For her, along with many of the politicians in these blue states and cities, the planned taxes and regulations are meant to be targeted mainly at wealthy citizens.

However, the primary losers in this formula are middle class workers. Between the loss of jobs and revenue, these states and cities press even harder on millions of middle income taxpayers to make up the difference. There is a pervasive ripple effect of driving large companies from former business hubs. Not only does each corporation create thousands of jobs, but the business is a critical part of the local economic foundation.

What will happen when JPMorgan leaves Manhattan? The cumulative effects of rents unpaid, restaurants not frequented, and investment in the surrounding area will jeopardize much smaller businesses dependent on corporate employee dollars. JPMorgan will likely be the vanguard of the coming business exodus. It is not just a hypothetical situation, as changes in corporate taxes have had this effect before. Consider the effects of an anchor business leaving a city, just as the financial sector may consider darting New York under the tax plans of Warren or Bernie Sanders.

The loss of an industry harms the middle class far more than corporate stakeholders, as seen in Rochester, New York, when one of the largest employers, Eastman Kodak, hit hard times. Once a center of filmmaking technology, Rochester grew as Eastman Kodak did. At its peak in the early 1980s, the company employed more than 60,000 people in the area. Over the next few decades, it fought a losing battle with digital technology, employment costs, and the New York tax and regulatory scheme. After years of steep decline, the company filed for bankruptcy in 2012.

Today, Rochester is in dire straits. The average household income is only half of the national average and its once burgeoning middle class is now a hollow shell of its former self. Its population has fallen by a full third since 1960. The city ranking as the 16th sharpest population decline between 2010 and 2017, according to census figures, It is also ranked as one of the worst cities to live in the country. The effects of the fall of Eastman Kodak cascaded into other businesses in Rochester. Pensioners dependent on the company face uncertainty. Restaurants, services, and real estate companies all languish as the local economy continues to sputter.

Many of the Democrats running for president, or who are in charge of the blue state economic models, do not see the next Eastman Kodaks. By making it impossible for businesses to operate, they will inevitably harm middle class workers they seek to help. Corporate boards can create golden parachutes for themselves or declare bankruptcy. A shift worker awaiting a corporate pension does not have the same financial luxury.

Politicians love to preach that their proposals will make the economy fairer by targeting the most productive members of their states and cities. However, the encompassing butterfly effect spells bad news for people like you and me. Every time you vote for a proposition or a candidate promising a repeat of bad policy, just remember that it will ultimately be the middle class that will pay the largest share. So much for fair taxes.

Kristin Tate is a writer and an analyst for Young Americans for Liberty. She is an author whose latest book is “How Do I Tax Thee? A Field Guide to the Great American Rip-Off.” 

A Little Bit Of Knowledge Sharing Goes A Long Way: Let’s Learn From Switzerland How To Administer A Healthcare System.

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Caught in a proverbial whirlwind of presidential politics, today’s complicated Medicare-for-all debate now focuses on who will pay for it and how. Some candidates say, perhaps grudgingly, that taxes will have to go up for the middle class. Others say no, heavy taxes are only needed for the wealthy and especially for corporations. Some say private health care insurance will become illegal; others say there will be private and public alternatives but that everyone will be covered.
As the debate intensifies, the how-and-who question becomes ever more complicated. Even the most dedicated policy wonks and candidates seem hard-pressed to provide a coherent answer. It’s rather strange that no one has introduced the Swiss health care experience into the debate. It’s also strange that we rarely hear mention of the U.S. experience with automobile collision liability insurance, which offers useful insights.
Consider the Swiss approach to health care. First, every person is required by law to purchase basic health care insurance from a private insurance company, of which there are some 80 in number. The premiums vary across the 26 Swiss cantons; In 2017, the individual average payment per person was $450 per month. Any payment in excess of 8 percent of income was tax deductible.Once insured, the policy holder has it for life, at the original annual premium, and can go to any doctor in Switzerland. There aren’t many impoverished Swiss, but they receive a state subsidy that pays for the insurance. The Swiss also have taxpayer-supported emergency room services, making it something of a blended system.Of course, the United States isn’t Switzerland, not by a long shot. In 2017, the Swiss population stood at 8.4 million people. Swiss per-capita GDP was just over $80,000, compared with just under $60,000 here. In 2014, Switzerland had just a half-million people living under the poverty line, or 6.6 percent of the population. In the United States, the 2014 share was 14.8 percent. It’s an exceptionally wealthy, smaller country.Even so, some version of the Swiss health care approach may deserve consideration. After all, it works, at least in the eyes of the Swiss people. And rather than a one-sized-fits-all approach, the program is loaded with opportunities for people to pick and choose coverage from private firms that have to compete to satisfy patients.

As far as overall costs, in 2017, Switzerland spent $8,009 per capita for health care, second highest among the 36 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries. The United States was number one, at $10,224, or about 28 percent more than the Swiss.

Now, what does this have to do with the U.S. approach to automobile liability insurance?

Think about how people are compensated when they and their property are harmed in auto collisions. Do we have a national auto insurance plan? A system paid for with taxes so that everyone gets covered? High insurance taxes for rich people and no tax at all for the poor?

No. Our auto insurance system—like the Swiss health care program—is determined by each of the states.

47 of our 50 states require those who own an automobile to purchase insurance coverage from private providers. The required coverage varies, and people in each state can choose the insurance they will purchase. Three states—Arizona, New Hampshire, and Virginia—do not require coverage, but heavily incentivize people to buy it in other ways.

Somehow, it works! And there is no national debate about how to deal with the auto insurance crisis. Maybe it is time for one of our aspiring presidential candidates to refresh the health insurance debate. Health care might be a different animal, but not so different that we can’t pay attention to a few lessons that are right in front of us.

Bruce Yandle is a distinguished adjunct fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and dean emeritus of the Clemson University College of Business and Behavioral Science.

The Sharing Economy Increases Human Wealth While Decreasing GDP. Let’s Try To Measure The Right Things.

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Human wealth should be defined by the widely shared ability to use things that help us flourish. It’s hard to aggregate these “things” in any shared measure, since wealth includes owning a nice car or being able to use Wikipedia immediately and for free. If I buy, or even rent, the car, it counts toward GDP; using Wikipedia counts for nothing in the National Income Accounts, but it’s pretty useful in terms of increasing my utility.
One thing that this means, of course, is that the idea that price-based “standards of living” have been stagnating is just misguided. New measures of GDP would help, but the larger problem is that any purely market-focused metric will miss the ability, and in fact the desire, of human beings to cooperate in groups.To paraphrase Adam Smith, the diversity of things that can be shared is limited by the extent of the cooperation horizon. In the case of Wikipedia, this means that the community working on providing informative entries should be worldwide, to encompass as much expertise as possible.
But that is not always the case, because larger “cooperation horizons” may be associated with higher transaction costs. In the case of sharing physical products or tools rather than information, there is a problem of delivery and return of the physical items.But there are still possibilities for sharing.
For one thing, the software or app that makes the platform work can be shared. It can be “open source,” in fact, with systems of access to editing and credit for improvements that work for Wikipedia. Ironically, investigating the history of open source illustrates some of the problems and paradoxes at work. One of the ur-texts of the history is “Computers: Software Is for Sharing,” published by Time magazine on July 30, 1984. If you can get access to it, you’ll see that the article describes the problem of splitting software from the physical electronic platform for which it was created.The irony is that this article about how information wants to be free is itself trapped behind Time’s paywall. The notion of “open source” is generally associated with software, but observers in a variety of fields have recognized the underlying problem: economic efficiency would seem to dictate that price equals marginal cost, but for software and other kinds of information the marginal cost is essentially zero. In economic terms, information “wants” to be free.“Free” could mean libre, or exempt from restrictions, meaning that there are no restrictions on publication or dissemination. But “free” also has the literal meaning of gratis, being available without charge, and available for adaptation to contexts quite different from its creation or original use. One advantage of making information free is that it connects with “permissionless innovation,” by making it possible for entrepreneurs, inventors, and people who have a problem to take something someone has devised for use in one setting and use it for their own purposes. Cooperation is useful, because we can’t know what innovations will be useful, either in their first form or in their subsequent forms.All of this is clearly an argument for using “open source” conventions, wherever that’s possible. The phrase “open source,” and the sentiment it embodies, is ancient. But the modern use in the context of software and widely disseminated information is usually dated to 1984, when Stewart Brand told Steve Wozniak:

It seems like there’s a couple of interesting paradoxes that we’re working here… On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.

Wozniak replied, “Information should be free but your time should not.”

Brand reportedly responded: “But then, at what point of amplification is your time being so well rewarded that it’s getting strange or so under-rewarded that it’s strange? There’s problems there with the market.”

Open source software is freely available, freely reproducible, freely editable, and technology neutral. Where does it come from? Clearly, society needs inventors to discover new information and programmers to create new software. We must cover the average costs of this valuable service. But once that new information exists and is available to anyone, the cost of sharing is negligible.

The cost of dissemination is a few keystrokes, an internet connection, and space to store the digital content. Information needs to be libre, but it can’t be gratis. Open source software, managed by a cooperative system that solves problems of triangulation, transfer, and trust, is one answer. Wikipedia, for example, doesn’t pay anyone, but it can provide incentives through giving public credit for doing good work.

Economists call this “voluntary provision of public goods.” The mystery, in traditional neoclassical economics, is not why there is so little of this kind of cooperation, but why there is so much. To be fair, Adam Smith and other “founders” of political economy were quite aware of the diversity of human cooperative capacity, but we have lost sight of this sphere of activity in favor of a narrow focus on markets.

Alexis de Tocqueville famously highlighted this general capacity for cooperation by forming voluntary groups, for humans in general but with a focus on the USA in particular. Tocqueville was no fan of using majority rule for everything. The problem with political democracy, he said, is that citizens are isolated and “enfeebled.” They can do hardly anything by themselves, and they can’t force others to help them. He admired the American solution to this problem: Organize into private groups, and leave government out of it. As Tocqueville put it:

The political associations which exist in the United States are only a single feature in the midst of the immense assemblage of associations in that country. Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds — religious, moral, serious, futile, extensive, or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found establishments for education, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; and in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it be proposed to advance some truth, or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever, at the head of some new undertaking, you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association….

[The people] all, therefore, become powerless if they do not learn voluntarily to help one another. If men living in democratic countries had no right and no inclination to associate for political purposes, their independence would be in great jeopardy, but they might long preserve their wealth and their cultivation: whereas if they never acquired the habit of forming associations in ordinary life, civilization itself would be endangered.

An interesting recent example, one that is largely operating at a level below public recognition, but which is nonetheless quite widespread, is “tool libraries.” It’s not pure ownership, it’s not renting, but it is cooperative sharing. And it doesn’t appear at all in GDP, even though voluntary private associations like this dramatically increase our wealth.

Suppose there are 30 of us, all of whom live in a small neighborhood, or even in a single block of a densely populated city. What we share is that each of us has a tool, a different tool, for woodworking or car repair, or some specialized activity we are all very interested in. Then the 30 of us collectively have an extensive tool “shop,” though the shop doesn’t exist in any one place. LocalTools.org provides software for groups of people to use to share tools, and to do it in a way that dramatically reduces the cost of having a well-stocked workshop.

After all, good tools, especially specialized tools, are expensive, and it is the nature of highly specialized tools that most of us don’t need them very often. But the right tool, exactly the right tool, is often indispensable for doing a task well. Maybe that tool is a compound miter saw, and maybe that tool is open source software to adapt to local conditions for sharing a compound miter saw; many things are now possible.

If a local group can solve the problems of finding each other, registering which tools are available and when, making it possible to reserve one or several tools, effecting the delivery and return of the tool, and using sensors connected to software that measures abuse or damage to the tool, with a time stamp to attribute responsibility, then a group of people can each have better tools than any of them could have afforded individually. This kind of organized sharing is enormously beneficial, because it also reduces storage costs dramatically. There are problems to be solved, but rapid progress is being made in solving sharing problems.

Centralized ownership with sharing, or distributed ownership with sharing, simultaneously increases wealth and decreases measured GDP. We shouldn’t let our inability to measure increased wealth convince us that we aren’t making progress. Because if there are opportunities to cooperate, people who are allowed to help each other will find ways to do it. The misguided focus on outdated metrics based on price rather than cooperation is leading to concerns about a “growth recession,” when we are actually in a golden age of rapidly increasing wealth.

Michael Munger is Professor of Economics at Duke University and Senior Fellow of the American Institute for Economic Research. This article appeared at aier.org.

The Literary Poetic Justice Warrior Fighting Hollywood’s Progressive Bigotry on Broadway – Atticus Finch

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Harper Lee’s marvelous 1960 novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, is now a Broadway play starring a dumber Jeff Daniels as widowed father and attorney Atticus Finch. Set in the Democratic Jim Crow south, specifically 1936 Alabama, the novel is a charming story of childhood set against the backdrop of segregation and overt racial hatred. It also contrasts youthful exuberance and traditional social mores, kindness and revenge, progressive education and home schooling, and civilization vs. mob rule.

Most importantly, great literature, including To Kill a Mockingbird, uses well conceived fictional characters to instruct its readers about the heights of human virtue and the depths of human depravity. Without it, the alternative is a society with no depth of soul. As literature teacher Lisa VanDamme tells us,

Extensive knowledge of the consequences of history’s ideas and actions, of the classics of literature and the characters and situations they describe; these are the raw material from which rational moral principles are drawn.

While Aaron Sorkin’s Broadway production combines some interesting stagecraft and great performances, it gives the racial aspect center stage. To that end, the story’s hero, Atticus Finch, is riddled with guilt, aloofness, indecision, and anger. In contrast, the original Atticus Finch was independent in every sense and never wavered in his convictions. Ostensibly, the intention was to make the production relevant to 21st sensibilities and audiences, which is a nice way of saying submission to today’s progressive philosophy of anti-west tribal group-think. For Sorkin and Daniels to tell their  tale, Atticus had to be emasculated.

The Essence of a Father

Harper Lee’s masterpiece was an enlightening study of human nature. Her characterization of Finch illustrated the classical liberal values of self-reliance, compassion, tolerance, justice, and most of all, the essential role of a loving, dedicated father in the life of a child. When Atticus’ daughter Scout comes home from first grade, after being told by her new teacher that her father doesn’t know how to teach reading, she complains, “But if I keep going to school, we can’t ever read anymore.” Here, Atticus takes over.

That’s really bothering you, isn’t it. Yes, sir. Do you know what a compromise is, he asked? Scout replies, bending the law? No, an agreement reached by mutual concessions.

He continues to speak as an adult while respecting her childhood,

It works this way, he said. If you’ll concede the necessity of going to school, we’ll go on reading every night just as we always have. Is it a bargain? Yes, sir!

He then cements the deal with an understanding, and uses the adult language she had learned reading with her father every night,

By the way Scout, you’d better not say anything at school about our agreement. Why not? I’m afraid our activities would be received with considerable disapprobation by the more learned authorities.

This is the stuff of civilization, the trader principle in action. Yet, there were very few examples of fatherly affection or life lessons in the play – the children were played by young adults. Lee’s novel was once popular reading among American junior high and high school students. Like Scout and her brother Jem had a virtuous moral character to aspire to, so did America’s teenagers. In fact Atticus, in partnership with the Finch’s African-American housekeeper Calpurnia (whose motherly wise counsel was also omitted), gave young readers an emotional experience of admiration for man’s highest potential. Sorkin and Daniels chose to offer a more “mature” version.

The Virtue of Virtue Signaling

Throughout the novel, Atticus respects the life experiences of others. He is also aware of a justice system whose participants include flawed characters. Although averse to criminal law, he is asked to defend a black man against a fraudulent rape charge of a white woman. After interviewing the defendant, Tom Robinson, he agrees to take the case because he knows Robinson, also a loving and dedicated father, is an innocent man. He also knows Tom is likely to be convicted and his own family ostracized. In the play, Daniel’s portrays Atticus as man too naïve and confused to know this. But why?

A rhetorical question to be sure. Sorkin took an American treasure and turned it into a vehicle for race hustling. The rationale is economic inequality and crime statistics disparities between whites and blacks in America. White privilege and its systemic racism (whatever that means) are the villain, and it can’t be their fault, they’re progressive elites after all. Yet the root cause of progressivism is hubris, and its mission is an enlightened society planned by their experts. As such, in the early 20th century, it became a popular idea to weed out the undesirables according to their Darwinesque fitness tests. Their scientific application of this is eugenics, and it is justified as women’s health care. Because America’s northern capitalists won the Civil War for the abolition of slavery over the agrarian feudal lords of the south, this seemed like a pretty good alternative, and the rationale for Jim Crow segregation.

Despite this oppression, economist Thomas Sowell observes that “The poverty rate among black families fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent in 1960, during an era of no anti-poverty programs.” Two parent black families were the norm, yet the resulting “systemic racism” of 1965s progressive Great Society now manifests itself in postmodern urban plantations that have the same attributes as antebellum southern plantations – dilapidated housing, government dependence, violent surroundings, despair, and broken families.

Atticus Faces a New Collectivist Threat

This is where Atticus Finch and Tom Robinson come in. The greatest social problem facing America today is fatherless children, and it is never discussed. Not only do many young boys have no loving and dedicated father at home, masculinity and self-reliance are marginalized in favor of victimhood. This, despite the fact that America today is the most open, prosperous, and opportunity laden society in the history of the world. Heroes, real and fictional, only show up in comic book movies, professional sports, and narcissistic politicians. What America really needs are more classical liberal heroes, but Sorkin and his ilk have no use for self-reliance and tolerance.

Otherwise, the Broadway show has some wonderfully entertaining and worthwhile moments. The script included a lot of very funny dialogue, as did the novel, but in the end, the Mockingbird symbolizes innocence. Tom Robinson was innocent, yet killed, and there were other innocent characters in the novel who enhanced the lives of those around them, especially the reclusive neighbor Boo Radley, who faced obstacles rooted in collectivist thinking. Not the least of which were the two mobs, the one that threatened Atticus while trying to lynch Tom Robinson the night before the trial, and the jury that convicted Tom Robinson at the end of the trial. Scout was able to disarm the first mob by appealing to a couple of its members as individuals.

Unfortunately, despite his best efforts, Atticus was not able to dissuade the jury. He had to deal with them collectively and couldn’t overcome their collective peer pressure. But this is no reason for Sorkin and Daniels to form another mob to kill the mockingbird by hanging undeserved guilt around his neck, and maybe yours.

 

Splinternet: The Balkanization Of The Internet.

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Fifty years ago this week, at 10:30 on a warm night at the University of California, Los Angeles, the first email was sent. It was a decidedly local affair. A man sat in front of a teleprinter connected to an early precursor of the internet known as Arpanet and transmitted the message “login” to a colleague in Palo Alto. The system crashed; all that arrived at the Stanford Research Institute, some 350 miles away, was a truncated “lo.”

The network has moved on dramatically from those parochial—and stuttering—origins. Now more than 200 billion emails flow around the world every day. The internet has come to represent the very embodiment of globalization—a postnational public sphere, a virtual world impervious and even hostile to the control of sovereign governments (those “weary giants of flesh and steel,” as the cyberlibertarian activist John Perry Barlow famously put it in his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in 1996).

But things have been changing recently. Nicholas Negroponte, a co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, once said that national law had no place in cyberlaw. That view seems increasingly anachronistic. Across the world, nation-states have been responding to a series of crises on the internet (some real, some overstated) by asserting their authority and claiming various forms of digital sovereignty. A network that once seemed to effortlessly defy regulation is being relentlessly, and often ruthlessly, domesticated.

From firewalls to shutdowns to new data-localization laws, a specter of digital nationalism now hangs over the network. This “territorialization of the internet,” as Scott Malcomson, a technology consultant and author, calls it, is fundamentally changing its character—and perhaps even threatening its continued existence as a unified global infrastructure.

The phenomenon of digital nationalism isn’t entirely new, of course. Authoritarian governments have long sought to rein in the internet. China has been the pioneer. Its Great Firewall, which restricts what people can read and do online, has served as a model for promoting what the country calls “digital sovereignty.” China’s efforts have had a powerful demonstration effect, showing other autocrats that the internet can be effectively controlled. China has also proved that powerful tech multinationals will exchange their stated principles for market access and that limiting online globalization can spur the growth of a vibrant domestic tech industry.

Several countries have built—or are contemplating—domestic networks modeled on the Chinese example. To control contact with the outside world and suppress dissident content, Iran has set up a so-called “halal net,” North Korea has its Kwangmyong network, and earlier this year, Vladimir Putin signed a “sovereign internet bill” that would likewise set up a self-sufficient Runet. The bill also includes a “kill switch” to shut off the global network to Russian users. This is an increasingly common practice. According to the New York Times, at least a quarter of the world’s countries have temporarily shut down the internet over the past four years.

Most assertions of government authority aren’t quite so heavy-handed. Recent years have seen the emergence of a softer form of digital nationalism, evident in the proliferation of so-called data localization (or data protectionism) laws in countries as varied as Vietnam, India, Argentina, Venezuela and Nigeria. Broadly, these laws take two approaches. Some countries require that data on their citizens (or certain types of data, such as medical or financial information) must be physically stored on servers within their countries. Others allow the data to leave their borders but insist on a copy remaining domestically.

Many of the justifications cited for such laws are valid, ranging from privacy concerns to national security. But sometimes the very real failings of the internet, such as hate speech and disinformation, are co-opted to justify laws that give repressive governments a way to monitor online activity and speech. For all of the undeniable faults of the multinational tech companies, a Vietnamese or Cambodian dissident might still prefer their information to be under the control of Google or Facebook rather than their own governments.

According to a recent study by a Brussels think tank, at least 45 countries now have some version of data localization requirements in place. The trend is no longer restricted to authoritarian states. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Korea and Switzerland are among the countries that now restrict cross-border flows of data. The European Union’s influential General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), while not specifically about localization, imposes such stringent obligations that it makes it hard for companies to move data across borders, thus effectively serving as a similar requirement.

The cumulative effect of all these laws is starting to be felt throughout the network. Companies that work with data in multiple jurisdictions are among the hardest hit. Peter Yared, the founder of InCountry, a San Francisco startup that helps businesses comply with international data regulations, says that companies are struggling to understand local requirements, purchase or rent servers, hire staff and deploy new software to comply with a panoply of emerging (and often fluctuating) laws. “People in compliance, information security and technical operations departments are starting to sweat a little bit right now,” he says. “It hasn’t quite hit business leaders yet that they could face large fines or be ejected out of large markets like India.”

Many of these laws are ostensibly designed to rein in Western multinationals, but bigger companies are generally better able to accommodate the resulting uncertainty than smaller ones, which lack the necessary resources. Likewise, developing countries, often at the forefront of digital nationalism, could end up being among its chief victims. Countries such as India and the Philippines have important outsourcing sectors that rely on a unified global information network. Their moves to set up roadblocks on that network could come back to haunt them.

The great risk is that digital nationalism will Balkanize the internet, breaking it up into a patchwork of incompatible and irreconcilable fiefs. To an extent, this scenario, sometimes referred to as Splinternet, is already happening at the level of content and services. China’s population (around a fifth of humanity) does not have access to Wikipedia, Facebook and most of Google. When the EU’s GDPR first came into effect, many American media companies decided that the safest course of action, at least temporarily, was simply to stop offering their content to European consumers.

This Balkanization also could play out in the internet’s underlying core technical infrastructure. Over the last decade, several countries, citing cultural sensitivities, have considered banning or otherwise restricting the .xxx top-level domain name (generally used for pornography), raising the prospect that the internet’s naming system could eventually fracture. Responding to Edward Snowden’s revelations about U.S. spying, Brazil mooted the idea of building a separate undersea cable link to the EU to bypass existing internet infrastructure. And recent debates at the Engineering Task Force, a key internet standards committee, have sometimes been tense. In the lead-up to the introduction last year of a new security standard, representatives who wanted to maintain a backdoor for government agencies clashed with those advocating more robust encryption.

None of these debates has so far managed to shake the underlying foundations of the network, but the prospect of a technical Splinternet is no longer as inconceivable as it once was. In the decades ahead, we may look back wistfully to a time when data could move freely across the globe, without virtual customs or immigration checkpoints.

The internet was never just a technology or an engine of globalization. It was, at its core, an idea. Stefaan Verhulst, a co-founder of the GovLab at New York University (a think tank where I am a senior fellow), argues that, in its early days, the internet was very much a project of classical liberalism, embedded with “ideals like human rights, freedom of expression and free trade. If you care about those notions, then internet fragmentation is a problem.”

Like classical liberalism, the internet may also be a good idea in urgent need of updating. Much as the individualism and freedom of classical liberalism have been distorted into the inequalities and ethical transgressions of modern capitalism, so the internet’s culture of “permissionless innovation” has been abused, transformed into the centralized, controlled network of today. The original dream of an unfettered global public sphere is probably over. Understanding why that happened is the first step to reclaiming at least part of the original vision and to mitigating the most damaging effects of digital nationalism.

It’s no coincidence that the rise of digital nationalism corresponds with a similar resurgence of its offline variety. A technology community that has long prided itself on its radical difference, its apartness, turns out to be susceptible to many of the trends that influence the world at large. Over the last decade or so, the internet has suffered the same distortions of wealth and power—and the same resulting resentments—that have spurred the rise of illiberal nationalism and populism. Google today accounts for around 90% of online searches around the world; Facebook and Google together draw an estimated 84% of global advertising dollars (excluding China). Amazon accounts for 49% of online spending in the U.S., and Alibaba claims 60% in China. This was not the original dream.

Many of the anxieties to which this consolidation of power has given rise are legitimate; some are spurious and are used to advance ulterior motives. It has all been fertile ground for digital nationalism. When governments call for regulation to combat fake news, they tap into real concerns over the unaccountable power of social media; they also open up avenues for censorship. When developing countries insist on keeping their citizens’ data to combat “data colonization,” they raise genuine issues about the Western, especially American, bias of the internet; they also create backdoors to eavesdrop on citizens and erect barriers to protect local commercial interests. Modern nationalism, as the Harvard sociologist Bart Bonikowski has noted, depends on the widespread “mobilization of resentment”; this is true of both its digital and offline variants.

It turns out that the way to deal with offline and online nationalism may be quite similar: Restore a sense of inclusiveness and fair play, flatten some of the sharpest inequalities and rediscover and stress the principles that made the network so inspiring (and radically creative) in the first place. As it happens, there is a tool kit, both existing and emerging, to do some of this.

Mr. Verhulst, from the GovLab at NYU, argues that laws and principles from a previous era should be updated for the 21st century, by applying telecom universal service obligations to broadband, for example, and diversity and equal-time rules (sometimes applied to radio and television) to large news and social media networks. “It’s not like we don’t know how to go about this,” he says. “We just have to be more creative and think of what we can learn from models that were used in the past.” Competition law is another area that has received a lot of attention, specifically the need to update its provisions to take account of the (nominally) free business models practiced by many digital companies.

Another idea is to develop “club”- or “zone”-based approaches to running the internet—discrete, interconnecting blocs whose nation-members would make commitments to liberal principles like free trade, privacy and freedom of expression. Such blocs would be a far cry from the original vision of a single global network. But adherents, like Geoff Mulgan, the former head of Nesta, a British innovation foundation, argue that such “coalitions of the willing” are the best way to arrest the continuing fragmentation of the network. “I don’t see what the alternative is,” Mr. Mulgan says. “The old global vision is breaking up.”

The question is no longer whether national governments should have a say but what form their authority will take and how it will ultimately shape the network. In the old vision, nation-states were the enemy of innovation and freedom. Those were the Wild West days, and it is understandable that internet purists—and many average users—are nostalgic for them.

But things have changed a lot since that first email was sent in California. Amid the creeping nationalism and illiberalism of today, we may no longer have the luxury of rejecting governance and governments. Fifty years after the birth of the internet, it may well be that national governments, wielding enlightened regulation, are the last best hope for maintaining a network that is—at least relatively—open and free.

Mr. Kapur is a senior fellow at the GovLab at New York University. This article first appeared at wsj.com

6 Charts Show The Overwhelming, Never-Ending Growth Of Big Government.

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Federal spending and federal taxation in the United States set new records in 2019. And the federal budget deficit swelled to more than a trillion dollars. Europe is in the middle of an enormous spending binge. But apparently hard-core laissez-faire libertarian purists have taken over the world’s governments.

At least, that’s the case in the minds of many leftists and conservatives who have convinced themselves that “market fundamentalists” have conquered the world’s institutions, and have enacted a global regime of near-zero taxation, free trade, and almost totally unregulated markets.

We hear this over an over again when everyone from The Pope to Bernie Sanders claims “neoliberalism” — a term used to “denote… a radical, far-reaching application of free-market economics unprecedented in speed, scope, or ambition” — has forged the world into a paradise for radical libertarians.

As one writer at The Guardian assures us, the UK must end the nation’s “generation-long experiment in market fundamentalism.” Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson insists that American policymakers “worship” markets and have a near-religious devotion to capitalism.

The neoliberal takeover is so complete, in fact, that we’re told neoliberals are the ones really running the Labour Party. Meanwhile, sociologist Lawrence Busch informs us of a “neoliberal takeover” of higher education. “Free-market fundamentalists,” Busch contends, have transformed America’s colleges and universities into swamps of capitalist obeisance.

By What Metric?

But whenever I hear about how government intervention in the marketplace is withering away — to be replaced by untrammeled markets — I am forced to wonder what metric these people are using.

By what measure are governments getting smaller, weaker, and less involved in the daily lives of human beings?

In this country, at least, this case certainly can’t be made by consulting the data on government taxation and spending.

From 1960 to 2018, federal tax receipts per capita increased from $3,523 to $5,973, an increase of 70 percent.

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Combining state and local taxation with federal taxes, the increase is even larger. Taxation per capita at all levels combined grew 118 percent from $5,247 in 1960 to $11,461 in 2018.

The size and scope of government isn’t just growing to reflect population changes. After all, the US population only grew 81 percent from 1960 to 2018. And the federal government, embroiled in a global cold war amidst a rising tide of social programs, wasn’t exactly vanishingly small in 1960.

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In all these per capita graphs, I’ve factored in population growth because many defenders of government growth claim that governments must get larger as populations increase. Even if that were true, we can see that total spending and taxation is outpacing population growth considerably. But it should not simply be accepted that population growth ought to bring increases in government spending and taxation. Military defense of the United States doesn’t become more expensive simply because the population grew. Moreover, innovation and productivity gains make products and services less expensive in a functioning private economy. This is often masked by relentless money supply inflation in the name of price “stability.” But the natural progression of an economy is toward falling prices. Only with government procurements have we come to expect everything getting more expensive every year.

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Fueled by huge deficits, federal spending has outpaced tax collections. Per capita federal spending increased by 191 percent from 1960 to 2018, climbing from $4,300 to $12,545.

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The deficit topped a trillion dollars during the 2019 fiscal year, a new high for a so-called “boom period” during which deficits are supposed to shrink.

Ultimately, of course, huge deficits will put an additional burden on the taxpayers beyond the hundreds of billions of dollars per year necessary to simply pay interest on the debt. The huge debt levels put upward pressure on interest rates, and require more central-bank interventions designed to prop up demand for government debt. These interventions both crowd out demand for private debt, and have led to asset-price inflation as a result of money-supply inflation. This benefits the wealthy, but harms first time home buyers and ordinary savers.

The government spending itself is a problem as well. Governments try to play off government spending as if it were all a free gift to the taxpayers as some sort of “return” on the “investment” of taxes paid.

As Murray Rothbard has noted, however, government spending is just as damaging as the taxation that came before it. Government procurements bid up the prices of goods and services that could have been available at lower prices in the private sector were it not for the government spending. Steel and other materials would be less expensive for entrepreneurs. High tech workers could be employed innovating and making things for ordinary taxpayers instead of for government agencies and bureaucrats. Small business owners and ordinary consumers all are worse off as a result.

So, given that spending and taxation are at or are near all-time highs right now, where exactly is this takeover by laissez-faire libertarians we keep hearing about?

It’s certainly not in the regulatory side of the government.

The number of pages published in the Code of Federal Regulations increased 710 percent from 1960 to 2018, and 37 percent over the past twenty years. Every additional page represents new regulations, new rules, new punishments, and new fees. These are costs employers must contend with, and consumers must ultimately pay for. Protectionists who think that manufacturers would flock to the United States were it not not low tariffs might consider the regulatory burden placed on employers by our own domestic policies.

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Both staffing and budgets for federal regulatory agencies continue to balloon. The combined budgets for federal regulatory agencies have more than tripled over the past 40 years, rising from under 20 billion in 1978 to 65 billion today.

Part of this has been to pay salaries for the ever growing army of federal employees. Employees at regulatory agencies doubled over the past forty years, rising from 140,000 full-time equivalent positions in 1978 to 280,000 today.

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The US population increased by 47 percent during that time.

When the federal government isn’t spending more, it’s taking on more risk, committing the taxpayers to more bailouts, and flooding the market with government insured debt. As The Washington Post reported earlier this month, “In 2019, there is more government-backed housing debt than at any other point in U.S. history.” And these government guarantees are up considerably since the 2009 housing crash. The Post continues: “Now, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration guarantee almost $7 trillion in mortgage-related debt, 33% more than before the housing crisis … Because these entities are run or backstopped by the U.S. government, a large increase in loan defaults could cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.”

Yet, in spite of all this, we’ll no doubt continue to be told that government is withering away, government institutions are “underfunded,” and extreme anti-government libertarians have taken over. Of course, it’s entirely possible that the success of certain free-market ideas — however limited that success may be — has helped to restrain the growth of government taxation and spending. Without this so-called “victory” of the libertarians, we might be looking at a per capita tax burden that grew 200 or 300 percent in recent decades, rather than a “mere” 118 percent.

But given the ongoing growth of government taxation, spending, and regulation, it should be abundantly clear that we are hardly living in an age of “market fundamentalism,” laissez-faire libertarianism, or policymakers who “worship” the market. If anything, trends appear to be moving in exactly the opposite direction.

Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. This article first appeared at mises.org.

The World’s Least-Free Countries Reveal Just How Much ‘Socialism Sucks’.

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Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell are well-known free market economists, and they do not look with favor on a disturbing trend among American young people. “In the spring of 2016,” they tell us, “a Harvard survey found that a third of eighteen-to twenty-nine year olds supported socialism. Another survey, from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, reported that millennials supported socialism over any other economic system.” (p.8)

Unfortunately, the young people in question have little idea of the nature of socialism. Lawson and Powell would like to remedy this situation, but they confront a problem. Ordinarily, one would urge students to read Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson, Mises’s “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” and similar classic works, in order to understand the basic facts about the free market and socialism, but the millennials are unlikely to do so. One must attract their attention. What can be done?

Lawson and Powell have had the happy idea of presenting elementary economics in a humorous way that will appeal to those “turned off” by serious and sober scholarship. In the latter adjective lies the key to their approach. Both of the authors enjoy drinking beer, and they travel around the world to various socialist countries in pursuit of their beloved beverage, making incisive comments about the economy of each country as they do so. They write in a salty style that will make millennials laugh, though some readers will find it jarring.

For the young, “socialism” means no more than vague ideas about “fairness”, but, the authors note, the term has a precise meaning: “To separate the state from socialism in any large society is like trying to separate private property from capitalism. It can’t be done. I’ll say it once more for the people in the back: socialism, in practice, means that the state owns and controls the means of production.” (p.128) No country is completely socialist, but some are more socialist than others. How can the degree of socialism be evaluated? Lawson has, along with James Gwartney, produced an annual economic freedom index for the Fraser Institute, which the authors use to answer this question, sometimes with surprising results.

Many professed socialists look to Sweden for inspiration, but according to the freedom index, “Sweden gets a 7.54 rating, which is good enough for twenty-seventh place out of the 159 countries in the study. . .Bottom line: Sweden is a prosperous, mostly capitalist country.” (pp.10-11)

The authors must now confront an objection. Why should we not prefer welfare-state capitalism to the straightforward free market economy the authors want? They reply that Sweden prospered under freedom, but the increased taxation needed to finance the welfare state has brought about stagnation. “Sweden grew most when it was freer than it is today.” (p.13)

If some people admire Sweden, few except fanatics have good words for the economy of Cuba. Nevertheless, must we not recognize the wonders accomplished by the Cuban socialized medicine? We must give the devil his due. Lawson and Powell are not convinced. “Official Cuban health statistics are impressive. . .Yet, we also know that the hospitals most Cubans use are so poorly equipped that people often have to bring their own sheets. What gives? The silence [on the streets} is part of the answer. The lack of automobiles means a lack of traffic fatalities. Since automobile accidents are a leading cause of death among younger people, the lack of automobiles has a disproportionate impact on life expectancy statistics for reasons that have nothing to do with health care. The low rate of infant mortality is a product of data manipulation.” (p.53)

Why has Cuban socialism, like all other centralized socialist economies, failed? The authors present with great clarity the essential point: “’[A]lmost a hundred years ago, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises explained that socialism, even if run by benevolent despots and populated with workers willing to work for the common good, could still not match capitalism’s performance. Socialism requires abolishing private property in the means of production. But private property is necessary to have the free exchange of labor, capital, and goods that establish proper prices. Without proper prices, socialist planners could not know which consumer goods were needed or how best to produce them. . .Socialism also gives tremendous power to government officials and bureaucrats who are the system’s planners—and with that power comes corruption, abuse, and tyranny.” (p.37)

Socialist tyrants were the greatest mass murderers in history, and the young must be apprised of this melancholy fact. “Stalin ranks just behind Mao as history’s second greatest mass murderer, with Hitler coming in third—and all three dictators were, of course, committed socialists of one sort or another.” (p.115)

Some millennial socialists respond with a distinction. The despotic governments mentioned were not genuinely socialist. The authors answer with appropriate severity: “This is the same dirty trick socialists have played for decades. Whenever things go south, as they inevitably do, they claim that it wasn’t ‘real’ socialism. I [Lawson[ find the whole thing more than a little disingenuous and very irritating. When socialists, democratic and otherwise, held up Venezuela as a great socialist experiment in the 2000s, the message was, ‘See, we told you so; socialism works!’ but when failure happened, the message changed to, “No, wait—that’s not real socialism!’ They want to claim socialism during the good times but disavow it during the bad.” (pp.127-128) A related gross error, the famous “nirvana fallacy,” is to compare an ideal state of affairs, conjured up by socialists, with difficulties of real-world capitalism.

If the authors are ready to rebuke the errors of misguided youth, they look with sympathy on some of their hopes. Many young people condemn the drug war, with its rampant racism and mass incarcerations, and they are right to do so: “The U.S. government’s war on drugs is unwinnable because, in the language of economists, it is a supply-side war, when demand isn’t very price-sensitive. This means when the U.S. government scores a ‘win’ in the war, the price of the remaining drugs goes up more than the usage falls. As a result, net revenue to drug cartels increases, which increases their ability to corrupt law enforcement and buy weapons and other smuggling equipment. The result has been an endless cycle of increasing violence along the entire supply chain in Central and South America. . .” (p.135)

It is not only the drug war, but the war on terror as well, that ought to be condemned, and here once more, the many millennials who protested against the war are in the right. “We feel the same about the war on terror. The wars and violence associated with it in the Middle East are a major reason for Europe’s immigration wave. . .advocates for capitalism can be against war precisely because war undermine capitalist institutions and freedoms.. . .Chris Coyne wrote a book entitled After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy, in which he shows that when the U.S. engages in foreign intervention, it rarely creates the kind of lasting institutional change that supports what some might call a ‘neoliberal’ society.

Economist Robert Higgs’s classic book, Crisis and Leviathan, shows how crises in the United States, especially wars, have led to expanded government at the expense of markets. Chris’s latest book, Tyranny Come Home: The Domestic Fate of U.S. Militarism, co-authored with another friend of ours, Abby Hall, has shown how U.S. military interventions abroad ‘boomerang’ back to the United States in ways that decrease our freedoms at home. See, anti-war isn’t a uniquely leftist position. Capitalists should be anti-war too.” (pp.136-137. I regret the use of “neoliberal” as a term of praise and the solecism “advocates for.”)

I confess that I approached the authors’ project of a drinking tour of the socialist countries with skepticism. Would it be more than a jeu d’esprit? Reading the book has laid my skepticism to rest. Socialism Sucks has the potential to do great good, if it gets into the right hands, and its impressive sales suggest that it will do so.

David Gordon is Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute, and editor of The Mises Review. Originally published at mises.org/wire.

California’s Disastrous State Illustrates The Limits Of Progressivism.

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More than 2 million Californians recently were left without power after the state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric—which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year—preemptively shut down transmission lines in fear that they might spark fires during periods of high autumn winds.

Consumers blame the state for not cleaning up dead trees and brush, along with the utility companies for not updating their ossified equipment. The power companies in turn fault the state for so overregulating utilities that they had no resources to modernize their grids.

Californians know that having tens of thousands of homeless in their major cities is untenable. In some places, municipal sidewalks have become open sewers of garbage, used needles, rodents, and infectious diseases.

Yet no one dares question progressive orthodoxy by enforcing drug and vagrancy laws, moving the homeless out of cities to suburban or rural facilities, or increasing the number of mental hospitals.

Taxpayers in California, whose basket of sales, gasoline, and income taxes is the highest in the nation, quietly seethe while immobile on antiquated freeways that are crowded, dangerous, and under nonstop makeshift repair.

Gas prices of $4 to $5 a gallon—the result of high taxes, hyper-regulation, and green mandates—add insult to the injury of stalled commuters. Gas tax increases ostensibly intended to fund freeway expansion and repair continue to be diverted to the state’s failing high-speed rail project.

Residents shrug that the state’s public schools are among the weakest in the nation, often ranking in the bottom quadrant in standardized test scores. Elites publicly oppose charter schools, but often put their own kids in private academies.

Californians know that to venture into a typical municipal emergency room is to descend into a modern Dante’s Inferno. Medical facilities are overcrowded. They can be as unpleasant as they are bankrupting to the vanishing middle class that must face exorbitant charges to bring in an injured or sick child.

No one would dare to connect the crumbling infrastructure, poor schools, and failing public health care with the non-enforcement of immigration laws, which has led to a massive influx of undocumented immigrants from the poorest regions of the world, who often arrive without fluency in English or a high school education.

Stores are occasionally hit by swarming looters. Such Wild West criminals know how to keep their thefts under $950, ensuring that such “misdemeanors” do not warrant police attention. California’s permissive laws have decriminalized thefts and break-ins. The result is that San Francisco now has the highest property crime rate per capita in the nation.

Has California become premodern?

Millions of fed-up middle-class taxpayers have fled the state. Their presence as a stabilizing influence is sorely missed. About one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients live in California. Millions of poor newcomers require enormously expensive state health, housing, education, legal, and law enforcement services.

California is now a one-party state. Democrats have supermajorities in both houses of the Legislature. Only seven of the state’s 53 congressional seats are held by Republicans. The result is that there is no credible check on a mostly coastal majority.

Huge global wealth in high-tech, finance, trade, and academia poured into the coastal corridor, creating a new nobility with unprecedented riches. Unfortunately, the new aristocracy adopted mindsets antithetical to the general welfare of Californians living outside their coastal enclaves.

The nobodies have struggled to buy high-priced gas, pay exorbitant power bills, and deal with shoddy infrastructure—all of which resulted from the policies of the distant somebodies.

California’s three most powerful politicians—House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and Gov. Gavin Newsom—are all multimillionaires. Their lives, homes, and privileges bear no resemblance to those of other Californians living with the consequences of their misguided policies and agendas.

The state’s elite took revolving-door entries and exits for granted. They assumed that California was so naturally rich, beautiful, and well endowed that there would always be thousands of newcomers who would queue up for the weather, the shore, the mountains, and the hip culture.

Yet California is nearing the logical limits of progressive adventurism in policy and politics.

Residents carefully plan long highway trips as if they were ancient explorers charting dangerous routes. Tourists warily enter downtown Los Angeles or San Francisco as if visiting a politically unstable nation.

Insatiable state tax collectors and agencies are viewed by the public as if they were corrupt officials of Third World countries seeking bribes. Californians flip their switches unsure of whether the lights will go on. Many are careful about what they say, terrified of progressive thought police who seem more worried about critics than criminals.

Our resolute ancestors took a century to turn a wilderness into California. Our irresolute generation in just a decade or two has been turning California into a wilderness.

(C) 2019 TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC. Photo by Nathan DeFiesta on Unsplash

Two Bernies. One Creates Value and Jobs and Improves Lives. The Other Destroys.

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A pair of Bernies, one running for president, the other a wealthy corporate executive and philanthropist, are on opposite sides of the political spectrum, as well as the cultural divide. One has made life better for many. The other wants to suck the life out of as many as he can.

Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, now 90, recently said that Sen. Bernie Sanders, campaigning for president as a Democrat with a Socialist’s pedigree, is the “enemy of every entrepreneur.” Sanders, who represents Vermont, has made a public career out of vilifying corporations, free markets, and the wealthy.

Meet the creator. Fear the destroyer.

Marcus, with Arthur Blank and Ken Langone, started a company in 1978 that today has more than 2,200 stores across all 50 states and in Canada. When those men were putting long, grinding hours into their startup in the late 1970s, Sanders was “working” for the American People’s Historical Society. There he made a 30-minute documentary about Eugene Debs, the perpetual Socialist Party presidential candidate whom he called “the great American trade unionist, socialist and revolutionary.”

Home Depot currently employs more than 400,000. Since its inception, it has created millions of jobs. Home Depot also provided health care insurance for, again, millions of families whose husbands, wives, fathers, and mothers have worked for the company, now 27th on the Fortune 500 list, where it has been found every year for the last 25.

In addition to the jobs provided by Home Depot, vendors that depend on the company for much of their sales, many of them small businesses that have increased in value, have also created jobs as they have grown along with the chain.

Meanwhile, Sanders, who has never started a business, wants to guarantee a job to everyone through government fiat, and has overheated dreams about forcing the country into a Medicare for All system, an impossible-to-pay-for arrangement which no other nation in the world has, not even the Scandinavian countries he says are his models.

Marcus has also helped make Americans who never worked for Home Depot better off — and we’re talking about more than the millions of consumers who have eagerly patronized the chain, and contractors who buy material there. A share of Home Depot stock bought in March 1989 is now worth 200 times the purchase price. The company has created immense wealth for the millions who own and have owned stock directly and through institutions. In fact, Home Depot created as many as “20,000 millionaires overnight” when the company went public

Meanwhile, a share of Sanders, if there was such, bought in 1989 would certainly have brought a loss. Rather than create wealth, it’s Sanders’ aim to forcibly spread it around.

The pair is also far apart in philanthropical terms. While Bernie the Destroyer is fully committed to giving away other people’s money, Bernie the Creator, who understands the capitalism that Sanders hates “makes charitable-giving possible in the first place,” donates wealth that he produced. He recently said that he has given away more than $2 billion of his own money to roughly 300 different organizations. Sanders’ charitable contributions equal only 3.3% of his income, which is somewhat benevolent among the group of stingy Democratic presidential candidates, but less than half as generous as the American families earning between $25,000 and $50,000 a year.

Had a Sanders regime been in power when Marcus and his colleagues were starting Home Depot, the company simply would have never existed. Though he has tried to back away from some of his more hard-core socialist positions, because he knows they won’t play well to an audience larger than the hysterical fringe that’s followed him since his early days, Sanders at one time openly admitted he believed in “the public ownership of the major means of production and their conversion into worker-controlled enterprises.” Knowing this, Marcus and the others would have logically reasoned there was no sense in starting a business that the government was going to eventually seize.

In this tale of two Bernies, one has tried to foster the best of times while the other would usher in the worst of times if he gets the raw political power he craves. It’s wisdom vs. foolishness, light vs. dark, hope vs. despair.

— Written by J. Frank Bullitt

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