Going My Way?
Can news that Michigan unions intend to make union membership a constitutional right and the California ban on leaving homosexuality actually be a sign that the liberal cause is lost?
Michigan public unions began pushing the initiative last year, shortly after Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder—facing a $2 billion fiscal hole—capped public spending on public-employee health benefits at 80% of total costs. This spring, national labor unions joined the amendment effort after failing to prevent Indiana from becoming a right-to-work state.
Bob King of the United Auto Workers said that Michigan’s initiative would “send a message” to other states tempted to follow Indiana’s example. The UAW, along with allies in the AFL-CIO and the Teamsters, poured $8 million into gathering 554,000 signatures—some 200,000 more than needed—to put Protect Our Jobs on the Michigan ballot.
And as to California: “SAN FRANCISCO — Gay rights advocates are making plans to get other states to join California in banning psychotherapy aimed at making gay teenagers straight, even as opponents prepared Monday to sue to overturn the first law in the nation to take aim at the practice.”
Are the liberal states in effect “seceding”? Building their own more perfect bunion? Are they re-writing the Constitution according to the dicta of political correctness and cannibalizing or invading the remaining United States to form their own PC Universe?
If there’s any lesson to be drawn from recent weeks, it’s that people used to spending other people’s money can’t stop. They’re addicted. As the Union Leader put it there is now an “Obamaphone electorate” — “a lot of people are going to vote for Obama purely for the free stuff.” And they’ll find way to keep it free no matter what.
The Daily Telegraph notes that France has bought into the idea that tax increases are a better solution than spending cuts. To save Leviathan, French Prime Minister Hollande is willing to raise the tax rate to any level necessary to pay for “social gains”. Even if it means going to 75%.
Harvard Professor Alberto Alesina says this flies in the face of all we have learned about austerity. “The accumulated evidence from over 40 years across the OECD speaks loud and clear: spending cuts are less recessionary than tax increases,” he said.
France above all screams out for a blast of tax-cutting Thatcherism and pension reform. The International Monetary Fund says the country’s “tax wedge” – or tax as a share of labour costs – is one of highest in the world at almost 50pc.
Just 39.7pc of those aged 55 to 64 are in work, compared with 56.7pc in the UK and 57.7pc in Germany. Early retirement incentives are to blame. “French workers spend the longest time in retirement among advanced countries,” says the Fund.
France coasted through the last decade, losing 20pc unit labour cost competitiveness against Germany as it screwed down wages and pushed through the Hartz IV reforms. French industry has been losing 60,000 jobs a year for a decade. Manufacturing has shrunk to 12pc of GDP, as bad as Britain.
Who needs to manufacture anything? Just buy it at the store. There is no reality that can’t be denied. Joe Scarborough, when caught with a miscaptioned tape describing a crowd shouting “Ryan” when they were shouting “Romney” said he didn’t want to take no backtalk from what he called “cheetos-eaters living in their mothers’ basements”. So no, he’s not going to change; and they’re not going to change. In Spain it’s down to dumpster diving. And the dominant ideology on the Continent still comes down to this: wait for your Obamaphone.
MADRID — On a recent evening, a hip-looking young woman was sorting through a stack of crates outside a fruit and vegetable store here in the working-class neighborhood of Vallecas as it shut down for the night. …
“When you don’t have enough money,” she said, declining to give her name, “this is what there is.” …
The woman, 33, said that she had once worked at the post office but that her unemployment benefits had run out and she was living now on 400 euros a month, about $520. She was squatting with some friends in a building that still had water and electricity, while collecting “a little of everything” from the garbage after stores closed and the streets were dark and quiet. …
Most recently, the government raised the value-added tax three percentage points, to 21 percent, on most goods, and two percentage points on many food items, making life just that much harder for those on the edge. Little relief is in sight as the country’s regional governments, facing their own budget crisis, are chipping away at a range of previously free services, including school lunches for low-income families.
Of course none of these services was “previously free” in the first place. That was the Big Lie told from the beginning to the 47%. The “free” stuff was simply paid for by someone else’s taxes. With governments in the red, Spain must raise taxes to 21% to keep things “free”. And to protect union jobs in Michigan they will just make everyone uncompetitive so there’s no where to relocate the plant to. Whether Romney wins or loses, the liberal cause will spend the next four years trying to wall off economic reality; build their paradise on earth — no matter what. Will this work? Who knows? But they are sure going to try.
You Didn't Earn That
Developments in the Europe and the United States may provide into the future of the West. Both the Federal Government and the European Union face a choice: either control everything or accept a diminished role as society Balkanizes. If European nations and American states cannot be completely centralized they must diverge and the remaining federal structures reduced to performing consensus services, such as national defense, foreign affairs and perhaps (and only perhaps) border control.
Perhaps some 21st century political visionary will use information technology to define virtual states within the framework of existing territories; domains which define one’s tax rates, rights, duties and benefits resembling millets under the Ottoman Empire.
Millet is a term for the confessional communities in the Ottoman Empire. It refers to the separate legal courts pertaining to “personal law” under which communities (Muslim Sharia, Christian Canon law and Jewish Halakha law abiding) were allowed to rule themselves under their own system. After the Ottoman Tanzimat (1839–76) reforms, the term was used for legally protected religious minority groups, similar to the way other countries use the word nation. The word Millet comes from the Arabic word millah (ملة) and literally means “nation”. The Millet system of Islamic law has been called an early example of pre-modern religious pluralism.
It would be ironic if the demands for multiculturalism and creeping sharia result not in a “we are the world” society dominated by a nomenklatura as much as devolve into a completely fragmented one where the public space is governed by a truce and everyone returns each evening to his own people.
Belmont Commenters
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Union membership would have to be a _constitutional_ right because it’s actually against rule of law.
Two parties A and B should not acquire rights against a third party C that they do not hold already individually, in particular the right to force an unrelated employer C to negotiate employment with them, any more than A or B could do it alone.
You can always have a unlawful constitution, though. It’s a sign to move out.
Wretchard, as I said in your September 28, 2012 “The Co-candidates” #48. “Why the very real possibility of a 0bama win when it seems that Romney should win by a landslide… Look at recent news from Florida, over a Million plus dual registered voters from the Deepest Blue east coast, keeping the East Coast Blue and swinging the “swing State” blue too! Mexifornia is another state that has had massive exodus, mainly to Red State economies… What do you think will happen there??? Maybe those pollsters know something the rest of us do not!” Voter Fraud is far worse than most believe it to be and not just in Federal Elections….
A 21% VAT on a simple five-step value chain (baked goods for example: raw material provider, manufacturer, wholesaler, retailer, consumer) can get very expensive. Unitizing the price of the flour to make a loaf or bread to 1 Euro (to make calcs easy) and applying a manufacturer markup of 20%, wholesaler markup of 20%, and a retailer markup of 50%, I come up with a loaf of bread that costs 2.86 Euros. In contrast, using a simple 8% sales tax on the retail price, I come up with 2.33 Euros. I can’t imagine what the State’s rake on something with a complex supply chain like a car or refrigerator would be.
“If European nations and American states cannot be completely centralized they must diverge and the remaining federal structures reduced to performing consensus services, such as national defense, foreign affairs and perhaps (and only perhaps) border control.”
I would prefer this set-up over having the country run by Barack Obama. Voting with one’s feet would be a viable option in this scenario. Let the Californias, the Illinoises, etc, raise taxes and give out free stuff to their hearts’ content and let the states that actually want a rational economy have one.
The only trouble is it won’t work. It’s been tried – West and East Germany, North and South Korea. The trouble is all the productive people leave the Californias and the North Koreas, leaving no one in those entities to provide the money for the free stuff the state wishes to hand out. So, these places always end up building walls to keep people in.
You just can’t have a socialist paradise without a gulag. That’s another reality the Party of Denials wishes to deny.
“banning psychotherapy aimed at making gay teenagers straight”
Could such a law be used to ban therapy that liberals would approve of?
To some extent the States were designed to compete. But this is not without its dangers. One of the major causes of the Civil War was the need to protect the economic basis of the rival sections. Suppose the Blue States began to be beggared by competition with the Red States, which could be the equivalent of Hongkongs in a Depression ridden landscape. They would have to build a wall.
So expect the Michigan initiative to go national; ditto the ban on whatever the gay rights lobby does not like. If you can’t mandate unions or LGBT rules throughout the 50 states, then you have no chance of preserving them in sections. Ultimately, as Lincoln said, “a House divided against itself cannot stand. It must become all one thing or the other.”
The experiment to watch here is Europe. Spain and Greece are already way past Great Depression levels of unemployment. Europe will blow first. One reason why the Atlantic is wrong about the Obama Phone trope being racist is that from a global perspective, most people waiting for their Obama Phones — in a manner of speaking — are actually white Europeans.
I never thought to see the day when post-war Europeans would be eating out of trash cans like they were in those 1945 post-war films of shattered Berlin and Vienna. But it’s only just begun.
“If European nations and American states cannot be completely centralized they must diverge and the remaining federal structures reduced to performing consensus services, such as national defense, foreign affairs and perhaps (and only perhaps) border control.”
From your keyboard to God’s email inbox with a flag.
Welcome to the (new and improved) Hotel California, kid…
VAT is only good if you add value.
Income tax is only good if you declare income.
Tax collection is only good if you have good and equitable taxes and fair enforcement.
Tax contributors are only going to “contibute” if they see a benefit to them for good and solid government services.
If not – country dries up and fails.
“And to protect union jobs in Michigan they will just make everyone uncompetitive so there’s no where to relocate the plant to.”
Several years ago I watched a union leader say on TV that we had to make sure that all those foreign countries paid their workers the same wages as we did in the U.S. in order to make things “fair.”
Now add in the Obama Admin R2P concept to that thought process. So pretty soon we will be sending B-2′s with nukes to China and everywhere else necessary to make sure they accede to our demands to pay their workers UAW style wages.
“Our target is the automobile factory at Kotlas in response to their refusal to meet our humanitarian demands to raise their worker’s pay to current U.S. levels. Wing Attack, Plan R!”
And I understand that recently in Berlin they demonstrated in favor of a wealth tax, taxing people not on what they made in income but on what they own, how much money they have in the bank, etc?
Who needs to manufacture anything? Just buy it at the store.
That would be a Type 9 person, as in Ice 9, in Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle”.
rwe @ 10: So pretty soon we will be sending B-2′s with nukes to China
I thought you were going to end the sentence right there, after all, they’re already paid for them, it’s about time they demanded delivery.
The most interesting thing about liberals these days is they’re not just who they are — they’re also you! Take the self-described “conservative” Andrew Sullivan. He says, “But I’d be dissembling if I did not argue that on a whole array of issues, Obama is simply and unequivocally the more conservative candidate.” Obama is the conservative’s choice.
You don’t say?
Similarly there are heck of a lot of “Catholic organizations” that are really nothing but Democratic Party front groups. In an article titled “Warning to all Catholics: Prepare for Catholics for Obama Phone Calls!” the author relates a call from a ‘Catholic’ push pollster.
When asked for her name, the push-poller declined to divulge it to a “crackpot”.
This is not the time or place to discuss religion. But we are not discussing religion. This is about identity theft. It is one thing for a left wing person to have views at variance with Mormons or Conservatives or Catholics. That’s they’re prerogative. It is quite another to pretend to speak in their opponents names. I may dislike this or that belief system, but it is low blow to represent yourself as a representative of that belief system. That is a false flag operation. It’s fraud. And that, alas, is par for the course.
You would think that people like Andrew Sullivan would be content to express their own views without resorting to masquerade, but that would be too simple. There is in that act of impersonation an implied contempt for the reader. About the most civil reply you can give is, ‘beat it, swampy’.
To really understand whats happening you have to turn to a cookbook;
” Place all ingrediants in a large bowl and mix on medium speed untill well blended – or – untill you can’t tell one ingredient from another, it is all a Homogenised sameness.”
The next step of course is the oven.
It’s going to get pretty hot soon.
“…they will just make everyone uncompetitive so there’s no where to relocate the plant to.”
Guilds and unions don’t simply raise their own costs. They justify doing so to an extent by asserting that they are assuring standardization and quality control. The real source of their wealth is their ability to raise costs for those not in the club and introduce barriers to entry for competition. If you want to you do not have to join the union, but then you have to pay an “agency fee” equal to the union dues. If you want to use a lower cost foreign flag transport system then you can’t ship directly between US ports, thus increasing your time and the expense of shipping your goods. If you want to build a plant in Carolina the NLRB will introduce expensive roadblocks. This never works over time. People relocate, plants relocate, the protected merchant marine withers.
The California protection of homosexuality from intellectual medical or social examination is (pardon the word) straight up totalitarian thuggery. There is no natural barrier to them progressing to declare that other conduct, such as advocating Capitalism or Heterosexuality, is a mental defect or even criminal. Now in theory the ability to politically manage behavior has always been in the system and liable to abuse. What restrained that power and protected unpopular segments were two conditions. First no restraint could be imposed contrary to the will and interest of the majority. Second the majority was not an intolerant monolith but was generally tolerant by culture and an inclusive composite welcoming new groups in through a sophisticated process of assimilation. California shows what happens when those conditions are eliminated. The state is controlled by an intolerant minority hostile to the majority.
By definition the majority are not radical rent seeking homosexuals. The Left has built their power by forming networks tying members of the majority into identifying with single narrow issues that they might if not identify with be willing to support. For example everyone knows someone who is gay or a single parent or a child of an illegal immigrant. By co-opting the majority into accepting a special plea they obscure the fact that the network of special favors is unstable and indeed mutually exclusive as they are competing for a finite number of resources.
The politics of balkanization, the deliberate rejection of assimilation, have weakened the broad tolerant majoritarian consensus that had served to protect the rights of minorities. Now there is only power as administered by the state and capturing that power is business of politics.
Sullivan is crazy, it really is a waste of time to go into the details, it’s the old wrestling in the mud with a pig issue. Would not even do so in a poli sci class, nor in a rhetoric class. Might do so in an abnormal psych class. Possibly in a class including Lakoffian linguistics/semantics, though he’s too crude for that, I’d stick with analyzing Axelrod, oh that would support a rack of PhD theses.
A phrase popped into my mind, “treason of the clerks”, La trahison des clercs, leading to:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Treason-Intellectuals-Julien-Benda/dp/1412806232/
Anybody ever read this? I haven’t. I might want to.
What it may be is our current situation, 80 years ago. There being nothing new under the sun, is this our direct precursor?
Julien Benda’s classic study of the European 1920s resonates today. La trahison des clercs is one of those phrases that bristle with hints and associations without stating anything definite. In his new introduction, Roger Kimball quotes from a contemporary, Alain Finkielkraut, who recalls in haunting words the essence of The Treason of the Intellectuals. “When hatred of culture becomes itself a part of culture, the life of the mind loses all meaning.” As Kimball reminds us, in the present age, only the title of the book, not its argument, enjoys currency. The book itself is well known without being known well. Its release at this time should overcome that neglect.
The “treason” of which Benda writes was the betrayal by the intellectuals of their unique vocation. From the time of the pre-Socratics, intellectuals, in their role as intellectuals, had been a breed apart. In Benda’s terms, they were understood to be “all those whose activity essentially is not the pursuit of practical aims, all those who seek their joy in the practice of an art or a science or a metaphysical speculation, in short in the possession of non-material advantages.” Thanks to such men, Benda noted, “humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.”
According to Benda, this situation began to change in the early decades of the twentieth century. More and more, intellectuals abandoned their attachment to the traditional panoply of philosophical and scholarly ideals. One clear indication of the change was the attack on the Enlightenment ideal of universal humanity and the concomitant glorification of various particularisms. The implications for intellectual life today are transparent, and this long unavailable classic of European thought should interest all those who teach and who preach the human sciences.
–
Not sure that has anything to say about Sullivan, what I see today is what would be considered actual madness forty years ago, in him, in much of the MSM, in Pelosi and Reid, and I’m not sure on which side of the line you put guys like Axelrod and Plouffe who apparently have *some* objectivity on what they are doing – but do it anyway. I wonder about Pelosi and Reid, I suppose they too know better, and were this 40 years ago they WOULD do better. Sullivan is mad as can be, he has embraced it, and I doubt he can see shore from where he’s swum out to. It’s possible that in a more sane environment he would have restrained himself, but you can’t unring some bells.
“Are the liberal states in effect “seceding”?”
The Liberal states have long become used to setting the standard for the entire nation by virtue of their wealth, influence in Congress, and the MSM.
That dog won’t hunt no more. Not only is their wealth and influence diminished and diminishing, people elsewhere in the country just don’t care about them any more. Rather, in “bitter clinger” territory something imported from those places is likely to be dismissed out of hand, based purely on the source. They have come to resemble that guy wearing an overcoat in July, standing in front of the public library, telling people that he is the Grand Archduke of Prussia – and could they lend him $5 until next Tuesday when his coronation is scheduled.
It seems to me there are several different issues at work here, intertwined in a way that amps the destructive effect.
In the case of the free loading rent seekers, their problem is that the math won’ t even come close to working . Our economy simply cannot support the ever growing, out sized expectations of our spoiled, coddled rent seeking class gone mad. Our Bernank/Buraq “extend and pretend” economy con on steroids will at some point bring our whole economic edifice down crashing down upon our heads, with the rent seekers being the first over the cliff into the abyss. We already can see part of this process eating away at the rent seekers. Rent seeking Federal and State workers are already losing their jobs to cover the free loaders giveaway programs that our betters, the politicians in charge, refuse to cut. At some point, probably just around some unexpected bend in the road, we will become North Korea with a bullet.
The issues of granting these “positive” rights that determine Leftist outcomes like the ban on leaving Homosexuality or the granting of a right to unionize is a whole different matter that intrinsically is evil to it’s core. This political thievery is a pure taking of our rights under the dishonest cover of somehow providing a fashionable Leftist desired result. Once this train gets going, it will become a runaway train, because the pyschopath-taker’s power at some point becomes too great too stop. At it’s root this is just an Authoritarian power grab to enslave others.
That is why our ever appeasing RINO Leaders get it so wrong. Pretty soon, that limb the Leftist crocodile is gnawing on will be the one you are standing on.
But lastly the Andrew Sullivan problem is at the bottom of it all. He is selling his soul to gain power over others. Pure and simple. It is no longer a refusal to face reality. That is too generous and forgiving. He, Buraq, Nancy and all the others know better. They are simply mad for power, and will stop at nothing to get it. Unfortunately, there are millions of wannabe Andrews.
Wretchard’s post describes lunacy in several different forms. We live in jaw-dropping times. Unions become part of the Constitution, homosexuals get stuck in a rut, people can’t phone out for a pizza without Obama’s help, France dreams of free baguettes, Joe Scarborogh is down in his basement mis-labelling tapes, Spaniards are scavenging amongst the garbage, European governments are raising taxes on consumption when few people can afford to consume and so on and so on.
Now lunatics need minders and I suppose that’s the role that the leftist elite assumes for itself. If the lyrics to “Love and Marriage” had been written by the worst lyricist in the world, namely me, the song might go:
“Lunatics and minders, lunatics and minders,
Go together like a fee and finders,
Progressives fool and rule yer,
They do it because they are cooler.”
Seriously, this present madness can’t last so it won’t. Something different is coming and my prediction is “creative Balkanization” will be arriving soon.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=moby
W…
You’re describing Moby tactics made systematic — agitprop refluxed as it were.
“You would think that people like Andrew Sullivan would be content to express their own views without resorting to masquerade, but that would be too simple.”
One rarely met a Communist in the USA who stood foursquare for Communism. Most–almost all–called themselves something else: “brain trust,” comes to mind.
In 1900 there were less than 60 sovereign nations. Today there are almost 200.
Until the Soviet empire fell it was held by just about everyone that it would be a fixture on the world scene with no end in sight. Have the citizens of any of the great empires of the past anticipated the dismembering of their great states? It almost seems that, as disolution approaches, there is an increase in declarations of the permanence of the existing order. It is like the more plain the coming collapse becomes the more insistence there is that it can never happen.
There is no reason to assume that the American empire will hold up any better than those that preceded it. The people are no wiser than their ancestors and they learn the lessons of history no better than their forefathers did.
The quote from Lincoln about a house divided not standing is from the bible. It is a statement of revealed wisdom. Will the house become all one thing or all the other? Sometimes that does happen. More often they turn their individual rooms into separate apartments or move out to the back yard and build their own home complete with fence and flag. We are approaching a point where people in the house no longer wish to live together. The question is whether, if the divide proceeds to a splintering, the people of this nation are willing to engage in another devastating war to force reunification.
It is nice to hope that the states will move to force a transition back to federalism and that the federal authorities will accept a vastly diminished role as per the Constitution. This would be ideal. But there are people and organizations that have labored mightily over decades to push the nation to where it is today and I doubt they will accept a complete rollback of their efforts without reacting violently. Whether they will have enough support to actually attempt real violence is an open question. I think we will get some indication of this in the wake of this coming election.
Re. #3 el baboso – Speaking as someone who lives in a country with VAT and has run a business, VAT doesn’t work like that. Basically, what happens is that everyone along the chain has to account for VAT charged to his customers and is allowed to set VAT paid by him against that amount; some businesses (notably bakeries, which sell non-VAT goods but have to pay VAT on energy and packaging materials) end up actually receiving money back fromn the taxman.
No, the real problem is the bureacracy involved. With a simple sales tax, the only one who has to account for tax is the end seller, and that is fairly simple. With VAT, detailed records of purchases and sales have to be kept with draconian penalties for getting it wrong.
Also, VAT administration costs fall disproportionately on small businesses – which are the engines of economic growth. After all, a large concern simply plugs VAT calculations into its accounting software; a small concern has a great deal more cost involved than that in terms of time because the calculations will probably have to be done by hand.