#the flaws of redistribution and equality instead of equal opportunity

[inthegardenpraying]

“Listen, now. On the other hand, you have fresh, young forces that are being wasted for lack of support, and that by the thousands, and that everywhere! | A hundred, a thousand good deeds and undertakings that could be arranged and set going by the money that old woman has doomed to the monastery! | Hundreds, maybe thousands of lives put right; dozens of families saved from destitution, from decay, from ruin, from depravity, from the venereal hospitals—all on her money. | Kill her and take her money, so that afterwards with its help you can devote yourself to the service of all mankind and the common cause: what do you think, wouldn’t thousands of good deeds make up for one tiny little crime? For one life, thousands of lives saved from decay and corruption. One death for hundreds of lives—it’s simple arithmetic! | And what does the life of this stupid, consumptive, and wicked old crone mean in the general balance? | No more than the life of a louse, a cockroach, and not even that much, because the old crone is harmful. | She’s eating up someone else’s life: the other day she got so angry that she bit Lizaveta’s finger; they almost had to cut it off!” | Dostoevsky, Fyodor/Crime and Punishment: A Novel in Six Parts with Epilogue/Vintage Classics/p. 68

[commiedervish]

Communism and Islam

This article aims to highlight a common misunderstanding of communism in the Arab world, a misunderstanding that has proven to be ill and unfair and we shall suffice to address those flaws. This misunderstanding is with regards to an alleged dogmatic link between communism and atheism. However, there is no linguistic, logical, or political innocence in the making of such a connection. Rather, it is a dangerous conspiracy against the communist worldview that has woven its way ever so cunningly by the west’s capitalist arsenal into the Islamist and Nationalist groups in Arab countries siding with their corresponding dictatorial regimes, which are supported by interests of the liberal bourgeoisie.

What does it mean to be a communist in the middle east? In what way are communism and atheism connected (or not)? As we all know, the golden standard, the tried and tested, ideal way to fight communist thought in any religious community is the accusation of atheism. Yet this approach is but the weakest of impulses at their disposal, and that argument falls apart when one can similarly express skepticism about religion with accusations of terrorism and inhumanity.

The accusation of atheism, however, is not the only argument used against communism. Authoritarian regimes have represented unjustified and unparalleled abuse of the truth. Tyranny based on private property and ownership is incompatible with the principles of equitable distribution of wealth and perhaps the elimination of the state apparatus itself, which is essentially a repression apparatus. They seek to protect their own existence and maintain their tight grip on control.

What is communism?

It is a political theory originating from the works of Marx and Engels. Its founders willed it to be an alternative to the capitalist system which is based on private ownership of the means of production.

As such, communism establishes an economic system that has no place in it for private ownership of the means of production, and it aims to redistribute wealth among people and eliminate the class struggle between them.

Communism is the culmination of the historical growth of society over the centuries, from slavery to feudalism to capitalism, that is a history of class struggle — one class that owns the means of production, and another that owns only its labor power. Marx proposes communism as a solution to the issues of equity and abolition of class society, which is only possible through the revolution of the oppressed class against its oppressors, a proletarian revolution against the class of greed, extravagance, and abundance.

What is atheism?

Atheism is the lack of belief in a superpower or supernatural being/deity, be they pagan Gods or the God of monotheists. The term originates in the 5th century BC. Thus, there is no relation between atheism and communism, which appears in the 19th century AD.

The Arab people’s memory is rich with the history of atheists, from Abu Jahal and Abu Lahab, to the Carmatians and philosophers who were accused of apostasy and heresy.

Marx, on the other hand, did not concern himself with atheism or faith, and the question of the existence of a deity did not fit into his theoretical and political plan directly. The communist worldview is specifically the abolishment of class struggle and achieving equality via the just redistribution of wealth. Marx considers the matter of atheism and faith a personal matter with no bearing on the bigger picture of the politics and economic structure in society. The most notable of the marxist view on religion is that it’s perceived as what an oppressed, despairing people resort to when they’ve found no solution to their dreaded material conditions. They believe in an alternative, another world more merciful and beautiful than the capitalist system, which became an apparatus for human repression and the crushing of any possibility for a just and equitable way of life. Instead of a revolution, the religious person suffices to imagine a better world after death. However, Marx did not fight religion, merely classified it as an ideology, as in a system of values and beliefs that a society develops as a reflection of itself, its law and politics making up its economic base.

Communism & Islam:

In a passage written in November 24, 1917, Lenin says:

“Muslims of Russia and the East…all you whose mosques and prayer houses have been destroyed, whose beliefs and customs have been trampled upon by the tsars and oppressors of Russia: your beliefs and practices, your national and cultural institutions are forever free and inviolate. Know that your rights, like those of all the peoples of Russia, are under the mighty protection of the revolution.”

Lenin even oversaw the return of certain religious artifacts such as the Othman Quran. Furthermore, some principles of Islamic law were instituted alongside the Communist legal system, Jadids and other "Islamic socialists" were given positions of power within the government, and an affirmative action system called "korenizatsiya" (nativization) was implemented to help local Muslim populations. Friday was declared a legal day of rest throughout Central Asia.

All arguments against communism with the accusation of atheism and anti-theism fall apart simply by considering these facts.

Who is the real Communist? Or what form of communism do we need today in the Arab countries that are living in a state of revolutionary tracks? A true Communist is one who succeeds in overcoming the meager contradiction between faith and atheism and recognizes it as a contradiction that is only beneficial to the political feud that reduces the debate in the battle between freedom and identity and between liberals and collectives, simultaneously increasing the hunger of the miserable and the gain of the wealthy.

We must approach communism beyond disbelief and faith. What matters to us is equality of opportunity, and a just and decent living. What remains is a vast field for freedom of values, beliefs and rituals, but provided that everyone respects the right to hold different beliefs, the right of the believer to believe and the right of an atheist to be an atheist.

There were many people in the world who were atheists before Marxism, and our Arab-Islamic history is replete with atheists, and they have nothing to do with Marx's communism.

And there are anarchists, nihilists, and atheists who have nothing to do with communism, and there are reckless people in every religion but they do not know anything about communism. In contrast, there are Communists who respect the morals of others and their beliefs more than some religious people themselves. Some of the Arab rulers are Muslims, but they are despotic, immoral, and impetuous.

In conclusion:

We have had enough of the vicious cycle of ideological differences, the clash between believing, disbelieving, praying, singing, covering, and undressing. Now is the time for free political thought in our countries, to wake up from our ideological battles and to work on real and incendiary issues. The noise of the specialized parties over the legitimacy of the mosque or the courtyard is also a form of circumventing the revolution and taking us back to a discussion that ended with the end of the era of ideologies.

Communism is not oppressive to any religion. Rather, it is fairness to the people with all its classes, sanctities, memories, rituals and heritage, and all possibilities for a decent life without poverty. “The people” is a broad term encompassing everyone, those who pray, as well as those who don’t.

[translated, with minor edits and additions, from an article by Um-Al-Zayn bin Sheykhah, posted on the Workers’ Party of Tunisia’s Facebook page.]

[nerdsideofthemedia]

Faunus and the White Fang: The Portrayal of Racism

RWBY has been adored by the progressive community due to the portrayal of 4 strong young women, at least 2 of whom are LGBTQ+. Not to mention the inclusion of other LGBTQ+ minor characters.

Despite this, the show is far from flawless, and it’s time to address what is probably its biggest problem: the portrayal of racism. I suspect this may end up being my most controversial post yet, but, like someone said, “It’s both possible, and even necessary, to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects”.

Before I start I think it’s important to clarify that unlike in conversations about being a woman and LGBTQ+, in this one, I come from a place of no experience, since I am a white European. I do not intend to speak over POC, nor do I claim that my knowledge on the subject is flawless (far from it). Hopefully, this is only the start of a conversation and not the entirety of it.

To be clear: I am not a part of RWBY hatedom. While it’s flawed, I like it, I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t. I am criticizing this aspect because racism exists in real life, so how the subject is handled is important and I don’t want the edgelords controlling this entire conversation because their stance on racism in real life is: it doesn’t exist.

Lazy worldbuilding

Like Bright and Crash, RWBY, for the most part, frames individuals as the main culprits of racism instead of the systems which favor certain groups over others. We see this with Cardin, Cordovin, V1 Weiss, Roman and the village people (in the Adam short). Yes, those racist individuals exist, sometimes like caricatures however, they are far from being the only or even the most relevant type of prejudice.

By putting the blame on very specific characters, racism is presented as something easily identifiable and fixable when it’s neither of those things for a significant portion of the population. People often ignore that though laws have changed, biases didn’t magically disappear, segregated neighborhoods didn’t desegregate themselves and the wealth accumulated before wasn’t redistributed. The racist policies of the past created the now and will affect the future unless we try to fix the system.

Keep in mind that the Faunus Rights Revolution happened after the Great War, so… less than 80 years ago. Considering this timeline, it’s just unlikely the Faunus would be equal anywhere, let alone in 2 kingdoms (Vacuo and Vale) and the only thing we see in Mistral is the possibility of discriminating with the ramen shop owner.

The mere fact this sign exists shows discrimination is possible but that shouldn’t be the only thing shown.

Atlas is the exception. In “Tipping Point”, we can hear a conversation about the Faunus, which mentions economic disparity and lack of opportunity, but it quickly fades into the background.

In terms of race issues, Remnant is wildly unexplored, even the renowned for its racism, Mistral. Maybe the writers just thought digging into politic could make for a boring story or maybe they didn’t want to risk alienating the portion of the audience that listens to edgelords. In either case, it makes no sense to have racism as a major theme.

Justifying racism

“Early men were scared to death of the Faunus, and honestly, it’s not too hard to sympathize with that. Seeing something that looks like you and acts like you walk out of the forest and reveal a pair of fangs, can be a little… upsetting.”

Qrow, World of Remnant about Faunus

This does sound a bit like justifying racism and trying to present as understandable. This is an idea that I see a lot. In a review of a book that had a new species and racism as a theme, one of the complaints was that there was no justification given for the treatment like welfare and gangs. Those aren’t causes of racism – they’re just excuses.  If anything, they have a lot more to do with stereotypes and wealth disparity caused by racism.  

RWBY does make this mistake with Blake’s speech in True Colors, which is reminiscent of when people hold all Muslims accountable for an attack done by one, judging them all for that person’s actions, even though we’d never do that for our own race.

“We’re just as capable of hate and violence as the humans, but I don’t think any of us would jump at the chance to point that out. So why are we letting Adam do it for us? By doing nothing and staying silent, we let others speak and act in our place. And if we’re not proud of the choices they make, then we have no one to blame but ourselves.”

Ghira does the same in the Adam character short, claiming Adam’s violence is the reason why people attack them. If you judge an entire race based on the actions of a few – that’s on you.

Um, actually Antifa is the problem

While the White Fang is not the only group of people fighting for Faunus rights (in the first episode, we learn they interrupted a peaceful protest), they are definitely the ones who are given the spotlight and it’s very unfortunate how they’re portrayed. With the exception of Ilia (and arguably Sienna), they are shown to be so radical that they are not only OK with destroying cities, but also mass murder. They are terrorists and don’t even deserve a face.

In contrast, the racists both deal with their shortcomings fast (Weiss and Cordovin), they all are worthy of sympathy and redemption (even Cardin and the ramen shop owner). I think the writers were going for “racists are people too”, which is a troublesome stance to take when you frame the ones fighting racism as flat out evil.

I imagine that Atlas is going to be shown to be more unforgivably racist and the Faunus will be more sympathetic, but… even so, it kind of feels like trying to make a case for “both sides”. Yikes!

Menagerie

I’m not entirely sure Menagerie was meant to be a paradise. It looks like it, Sun expresses loving it, but Blake quickly claims it’s overcrowded. I’ll give it that it seems a lot less developed than the other kingdoms judging by its constructions, but that’s about it. I think that if they were not going for a positive perspective on it, we should have been made more aware of Menagerie’s drawbacks.

To be clear, it’s wrong to force someone to live somewhere they don’t want to live, but I think it’s a bit problematic to present it as a paradise when in the real world, white supremacists are increasing and their way of speaking is by defending a white ethnostate, claiming homogenized societies are better.

Due to the lack of good characterization of the rest of Remnant, it makes it harder to believe Faunus really went to Menagerie due to being too jaded to be somewhere else because of racism.

Adam’s scar

I have written about Adam before and just so we’re clear, I stand by my post – I’m OK with him being there to be Blake’s cruel obsessive ex-boyfriend who wants to harm her and that he basically represents the last obstacle to close Blake and Yang’s arcs of running away and facing abandonment issues, respectively.

This been said, considering the story, the scar was a huge mistake and I have no idea why someone thought it was a good idea. We’re not supposed to feel sorry for him, it doesn’t make us empathize with him – he’s clearly beyond redemption when it’s revealed and it doesn’t tie to his main motivation, his obsession for Blake, which is the cause of him being in the story. The scar would only make sense if he was an anti-villain, someone with a good cause, but evil methods (Black Panther’s Killmonger). That has never been his story though. He’s always put Blake above his cause and ultimately, he meets his end because of his obsession with her, not because she decides to confront him about his methods. Not to mention that if the scar was tied to his motivation, we should have seen it a lot earlier, not 2 minutes before he died.

Giving him a scar that reveals a cruel treatment of Faunus by humans for no other reason than to show racism is going to have a spotlight in the next volume is incredibly cheap and an awful idea, especially when it basically means nothing for Adam himself and doesn’t humanize him at all – he’s literally trying to kill 2 main characters at that point.

“Remnant can’t be racist, because…”

I also want to counter a few bad arguments against the idea there can’t be any systemic racism in Remnant. The examples usually given are Leo being the headmaster of Haven Academy and Neon representing Atlas in the Vytal Festival.

Leo

Thanks to Raven, we learned Ozpin chose the headmasters in other academies, therefore it’s possible to infer Leo was Ozpin’s attempt at fixing Mistral’s racism.

Neon

Yes, she studies in Atlas, but the headmaster is Ironwood, chosen by Ozpin and probably is also fighting against racism as far as the academy goes.

“They wouldn’t allow a Faunus to represent their kingdom”.

The equivalent of “I can’t be racist, I have a black friend”. Allowing a Faunus to go helps with the “we’re not racists, we even have a Faunus representing us”.

Other than Ironwood, I see no one else who could even have a say in that decision.

“She wouldn’t accept to represent a racist kingdom”

This either reveals an incredibly dishonest take or an almost child-like naivety. I am sorry to burst your bubble, but often people do go against their own interests provided the salesmen know how to sell it (there are Muslims who voted for Trump, women who fought against women’s voting rights, etc.). We can have prejudices against groups we’re part of.

Many will gladly go against their groups’ interests, provided they have something to gain (more than a few people spring to mind).

In this case, her decision doesn’t even hurt Faunus as far as we know – it just advances her fame.

“The townspeople weren’t racist since they were wearing masks and had weapons and we never see what’s inside of the truck”

I cannot believe I have to dignify this with a response… First, the inside of the truck is irrelevant. We had no reason to believe it was anything bad and one certainly can’t start shooting someone else just because they find them “suspicious”. Murders have happened because of racist jackasses who wanted to play hero by attacking a black “suspicious” person. Second, it’s Remnant, a place so full of monsters, teenagers are allowed to have weapons. They are clearly needed to go from one town to another. Sure, they could have dropped their weapons, but that still doesn’t change they weren’t attacking, not even in self-defense. Third, Ghira was still in charge of the White Fang and we know that during this time, the methods of the group were mostly peaceful, even if they were already wearing masks.

“They allowed an army of Faunus to go to Mistral”

OK, this is by far the most difficult one to justify, but not because of race – it’s just the authorities should have handled it all by themselves and I highly doubt they would allow civilians to fight against a terrorist attack. As for the racism point, the Faunus clearly warned the authorities, so I think it’s very unlikely they were bad guys and their weapons were awfully rudimentary. It’s not a great explanation, but I don’t think it’s more of a hit on verisimilitude than letting civilians fight.

Conclusion

I think the problems in the portrayal of race is due to a lack of understanding of racism, insufficient worldbuilding which should have been done before beginning to write RWBY and, probably, trying to avoid alienating any groups in the audience, which is not likely when the subject is racism and should not be the goal. This resulted in a mess where it feels like there is a need to frame racism as wrong, yet understandable (WoR), easy to fix, and too worried about holding the audience to task, hence sticking to cartoonish racism. While all of that is already pretty bad, it’s impossible to deny that it isn’t made worse by the rise of white supremacist groups.

I wish the writers will be more careful during the Atlas arc, but I fear we might be entering a white savior’s narrative as Weiss will probably be the focus of it. I tend to give credit to RWBY for putting the minority character at the center of their struggle, but ultimately Blake was there to fight her own and I suspect they will do the same with Weiss – she will fight her father for the rights of the Faunus (at least partially) and she will be the one who ultimately fixes racism…yeah, we might be heading to a white savior narrative.

I am hoping for the best while preparing for the worst. Still, no matter how well the next arc is handled, it cannot fix the past volumes retroactively.

One last note, I think the election of Trump should be more than enough to reveal that racism is alive and well, but if you want to understand systemic racism and the portrayal of racism in media, here are a few links:

7 Ways We Know Systemic Racism Is Real;

Adam Ruins Everything (it’s a video);

NCSC Implicit Bias;

ContraPoints – America: Still Racist (also a video);

Bright: the Apotheosis of Lazy Worldbuilding (video);

Renegade Cut - Green Book - A Symphony of Lies (video).

More RWBY posts:

Filmmaking and Bumbleby

Bumblebee was Always the Plan

Bumblebee was Always the Plan part 2

BB & Renora

Weird Post on Weiss’s Clothes

Foils: Adam and Yang (this one is in wordpress; it was my first one and I didn’t have Tumblr then)

Let’s talk about Adam Taurus (I didn’t post this one on Tumblr because the title and tags could lead Adam fans thinking this was about “his wasted potential” when really it defends the decision of killing him off and explains why it happened)

As usual, the original.

[cynical-amphisbaenia]

What classpect would work for this person? They're a self-appointed therapist friend; nobody comes to them for advice because they don't actually have their life together but when the opportunity arises for giving advice they go for it so hard. They secretly just really love nitpicking thing. Really hates being seen as the "bad guy" or having their own flaws brought out to them. Is generally honest, compassionate and quick to apologize though. 1/6

Really idealistic - vehemently rejects anything that doesn't align with their inner values and their brand of morality. Has almost a "maintainer" role in conflict situations; if they see something that doesn't serve equality and is, at least in their eyes immoral or ignorant, they will attack it until the situation is "equalized" or more attention is brought to the subject. 2/6

Self improvement is one of their core values so they're not totally fixed in what they do, and are willing to slowly change and adapt what they believe in. They're oddly hard on themselves in a sort of meta, philosophical way ("is this ~The Right Path~ for me?", "am I ~Healthy~?"), and they like to self analyze to make sure they're acting in a way that's "correct". 3/6

They find it hard to break out of thinking ruts long enough to fact-check anything so they're actually not that objective, but they're good at coming up with ideas or simply intuiting what might be necessary in any given situation. Kinda cares what people think about them and secretly wishes they were more impressive, but finds it very hard to maintain a good reputation because they're so neurotic. 4/6

They've had kind of a rough childhood and been bullied pretty badly, so they've gotten good at picking things up on an emotional level that other people might have not, and have had to hold on to their hopes, wishes and ideals to keep themselves going. They've also lacked friends and even when they asked for help, they didn't get it, so they've taken up on trying to nitpick and help everyone themselves. 5/6

They don't have a lot of hope in their ability to express themselves clearly, and have always had a problem with that (speaking too quietly, etc), so they sometimes write stories to express their inner frustrations about their feelings and their ideals. They hope that putting their feelings in allusions and metaphors will make it hurt less if they get rejected again. 6/6

Hello, thanks for asking! There's two main classpects that appear possible, although you may want to consider switching the classes too.

The most likely one is Sylph of Heart. They appear to like to meddle with the Heart of others through nitpicking, giving advice to heal and creating equality based on their morals. They also appear to try to fix Heart in themselves by constantly trying to self-improve. 

However, Rogue of Hope could also be an option. They value things like wishes and hopes, but seem to have lacked a lot of encouragement in their life. So instead, they attempt to give this to others in the form of advice. This is less likely though as there’s no evidence of stealing Hope, but rather just Rogue-like traits that align with them when considering them as a Hope player. 

You could also consider Sylph of Hope if you believe their form of advice heals others’ hope and particularly positive emotions, plus is a form of encouragement, rather than is a general way to help people with their emotions, personal issues and morals (as would be the case if they’re a Sylph of Heart). 

Similarly, you could consider Rogue of Heart if they are sacrificing their own self to be able to give advice to others (hence stealing their own Heart and redistributing it to others). The key way to determine this is what form of advice do they give more often, as well as a general consideration of which aspect appears to be more important to them.

I hope this helps! Feel free to ask any other questions. ^^ 

[buxina]

I’m skimming through the White House’s 1776 Commission Report (released on MLK Day, of course) and it...sure doesn’t disappoint. 

Pretty much all of it is a masterpiece, but I’m clipping some choice quotes: 

Under a subsection on Slavery under “Challenges to America’s Principles” (but somehow is entirely about how the founders have been unfairly maligned): “The most common charge levelled against the founders, and hence against our country itself, is that they were hypocrites who didn’t believe in their stated principles, and therefore the country they built rests on a lie. This charge is untrue, and has done enormous damage, especially in recent years, with a devastating effect on our civic unity and social fabric.”

Under a subsection on Progressivism under “Challenges to America’s Principles” (the subsection that comes after it is on Fascism): “Far from creating an omniscient body of civil servants led only by ‘pragmatism’ or ‘science,’ though, progressives instead created what amounts to a fourth branch of government called at times the bureaucracy or the administrative state. This shadow government

never faces elections and today operates largely without

checks and balances.” 

Some tepid, re-heated culture wars, communists coming for your toothbrush etc: “While America and its allies eventually won the Cold War, this legacy of anti-Americanism is by no means entirely a memory but still pervades much of academia and the intellectual and cultural spheres. The increasingly accepted economic theory of Socialism, while less violent than Communism, is inspired by the same flawed philosophy and leads down the same dangerous path of allowing the state to seize private property and redistribute wealth as the governing elite see fit.”

Under a subsection on Racism and Identity Politics under “Challenges to America’s Principles” (surprise, the section is mostly dedicated to denouncing ‘identity politics’): “The Civil Rights Movement was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders. The ideas that drove this change had been growing in America for decades, and they distorted many areas of policy in the half century that followed. Among the distortions was the abandonment of nondiscrimination and equal opportunity in favor of ‘group rights’ not unlike those advanced by Calhoun and his followers.”

lol what: “In portraying America as racist and white supremacist, identity

politics advocates follow Lincoln’s great rival Stephen A. Douglas, who wrongly claimed that American government ‘was made on the white basis’ ‘by white men, for the benefit of white men.’ Indeed, there are uncanny similarities between 21st century activists of identity politics and 19th century apologists for slavery.” 

of course the report’s obsessive fixation on ‘identity politics’ gives the game away: “Advocates of identity politics argue that all hate speech should be banned but then define hate speech as only applying to protected identity groups who are in turn free to say whatever they want about their purported oppressors. This leads to a ‘cancel culture’ that punishes those who violate the terms of identity politics.”

hmmm yes really makes you think huh: “In the view of these progressive educators, human nature is ever-changing, so the task of the new education was to remake people in order to improve the human condition. They sought to reshape students in the image they

thought best, and education became an effort to engineer the way students think.”

The report has an entire advisory board of Heritage Foundation-types, but they could’ve gotten the same results had they just hired a single, zealous PragerU intern to write it and paid him $200 and then given the rest of the money to me to pay off my student loans...

[galeahad]

The Pursuit of Happiness

The most iconic line of the Declaration of Independence of the United States stands out for a reason, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." (The Declaration of Independence, 1776). The right to pursue happiness, and the right to be happy are fundamentally different. While there are infinite theories about what constitutes happiness and how to achieve that happiness, it is not society's role to give each happiness. In Dylan Matthews' article "The Case Against Equality of Opportunity," besides missing the point of Equality of Opportunity overall, Matthews misunderstands the pursuit of happiness with happiness itself.

The purpose of equality of opportunity is to remove discrimination because of a specific trait one has, such as race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy status, transgender status, sexual orientation, national origin, age, disability, or genetic information. If this idea were universally applied, unquestionably, that would be the ideal goal of equality of opportunity. This notion is rooted in an idea crystalized in the article "I, Pencil," with the line "[h]ave faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand." (Read, 1964). However, because the United States, and indeed any endeavor of man, is not perfect, there are additional barriers that might crop up, where further intervention may be necessary. The difficulty is, instead of expanding government control to the point of legislating parental actions, such as Matthews falsely claims would be required, the right method of removing these barriers would look similar to school choice. Instead of forcing inner-city children to go to their neighborhood school, which may have inadequate funding and is academically lagging, families should have the opportunity to send their children to any nearby school. Michael Sandel offers a helpful look at this situation when he explores a homeless man sleeping on the street, "[i]n order to know whether his choice reflects a preference for sleeping out of doors or an inability to afford an apartment, we need to know something about his circumstances. Is he doing this freely or out of necessity?" (Sandel, pg. 46, 2009). By implementing school choice and allowing the student's family to pick, we would then learn the family's preference and what they choose to pursue happiness.

The number of times Matthews confuses Equality of Opportunity and Equality of Outcome is quite interesting for someone who later argues for the implementation of economic Equality of Outcome. Matthews provides what he believes is an example of Equality of Opportunity in two families that teach their children different trades during their childhood. A child knowing how to play the violin is an outcome of the way their parents raised them. This sequence of events has nothing to do with Equality of Opportunity; the Equality of Opportunity discussion would begin if that family were denied a violin's purchase because of their race, religion, and so forth. These two families are enjoying their right to pursue happiness, which is teaching their children a trade.

Economic mobility is presented as a method of measuring equality of opportunity. However, this is merely introduced as a strawman argument used to reject the premise of equality of opportunity as a whole, using the logic "if we cannot measure it, what is the point in trying to obtain it?" Which is, by itself, a flawed notion. There is no quantifiable measurement for happiness, yet most people strive to live a happy life. Matthews goes on to say it would be "madness" to have proper intergeneration elasticity; he justifiably applauds the notion of the lower class being able to reach the middle and upper class but rejects the idea that the upper class could fall to the lower class, citing a father banishing his son from his inheritance (Matthews, 2015). When discussing economics, intergenerational elasticity should be viewed in terms of economic choices, not familial ones. Matthew's example of Megan Ellison can be used as a hypothetical of what could happen with the upper class falling to the lower class. Ellison used her inheritance on filmmaking, as Matthews points out. If Ellison's movies failed and lost all of her money, she would have taken a financial risk and lost, sending her to the middle or even lower class. This is what a free society looks like; this is not madness. Sometimes one fails in their pursuit of happiness. One could argue that the risk of failure is what makes a success so sweet.

Equality of Opportunity is the best solution for a world where people want what is fair, not what is equal, and as Dr. Paul Bloom points out, this is the case in the United States (Bloom, 2015). Matthews explores the idea that Equality of Outcomes will help all, even those who have metaphorically lost the lottery of birth; "equality of outcomes would also help these poor, smart strivers. The difference is that while equality of outcomes promises gains for every poor person, equality of opportunity explicitly leaves some people out" (Matthews, 2015). Matthews leaves out a few things here. First, he fails to remind us that by equalizing the outcomes, the upper class are being heavily taxed, potentially enough to move them out of their current income bracket, which, as he mentioned, would be madness. Second, once basic needs are met, giving someone additional money will inherently not improve their happiness. You cannot merely redistribute wealth and expect an increase in society's overall morale; the pursuit of happiness is from where that comes. It is also interesting to question what outcomes Matthews intends to equalize. Should we only equalize economic outcomes? What about gender distributions in career fields? After all, there is a consensus about a lack of women in STEM fields. Then the question arises, should we mandate equal outcomes in all career fields? No one is going to argue we need more women working in coal mines or on oil rigs. As soon as we begin to pursue Equality of Outcomes, we abandon both fairness and the pursuit of happiness.  

I respect Matthew's desire to help the poor. My concerns are his methods for doing so and what appears to me is either a fundamental misunderstanding of Equality of Opportunity or a willful misrepresentation grounded in his belief that Equality of Outcome is a better alternative. The Founding Fathers began this country with a declaration of war rooted in equality and freedom, explicitly stating the right to pursue happiness. The most effective means of pursuing happiness is giving all individuals equal opportunity under the law.

  References  

Bloom, P. (2015, October 22). People Don't  Actually Want Equality. They Want Fairness. Retrieved from evonomics:  https://evonomics.com/people-dont-actually-want-equality-want-fairness/

Matthews, D. (2015, September 2015). The  Case Against Equality of Opportunity. Retrieved from Vox:  https://www.vox.com/2015/9/21/9334215/equality-of-opportunity

Read, L. E. (1964). I, Pencil. Retrieved  from https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/I%20Pencil.pdf

Sandel, M. J. (2009). Justice: What's The  Right Thing To Do. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Retrieved from  https://archive.org/details/JusticeWhatIsTheRightThingToDoByMichaelSandel/page/n45/mode/2up

The Declaration of Independence. (1776, July  4). Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.

[logothanatos]

A Generalized Reaction to the "Science" of the Google Memo

The Conservative Bias of Exclusive Research Interest in Synchronic Rather than Diachronic Group Differences

First of all, why are we still prioritizing the discovery of synchronic gender differences over diachronic gender differences? Even if these differences have an inextricable biological dimension, and this dimension can explain behavioral predilections or preferences (even by significant gaps), it is nonetheless the case that phenotypes themselves are subject to social selection and that social selection mediates access to environmental factors that may prime preferences and predilections. The access to resources for phenotypic expression are both technically and socially mediated. The complexity is such that we can even treat susceptibility to large alterations in outcomes based on the presence or absence of an environmental trigger as itself a trait that can itself be selected for, both in the biological sense of natural selection and in the social sense (that may correlate with traits such as resilience). And in terms of social selection at least, we would imagine that there would be a bias towards selecting those more indifferent to environmental triggers than less in an over-all high-stress, highly-competitive status-seeking social environment.

This means the allocation of individuals to different social spaces is likely to make biology salient in any study where the "environment" is treated as homogeneous. Not because the biology has a generalizable significant contribution to trait differences, particularly in short-term time frames, but instead because, in a sense, we actively albeit unwittingly "choose" to give biological characteristics perceived as discrete and localizable importance, particularly as we use them for proxies of other things or associate them with other things. Note that in the literature, when the relative homogeneity or heterogeneity of "environment" is mentioned, it does not often actually include the social bonds formed amongst the given population but quantitatively common static technical and geoecological background features across individuals in the population. This itself is a philosophically narrow understanding of environment--it never occurs to anyone why such a narrow definition of environment is actually pertinent to the larger nature/nurture debate given it excludes in advance features that may be seen as key parts of environment, or views which argue the term "environment" carries largely contextual meanings that require some sort of synthesis.

The Suspicious Conflation Between Biological Influence and Agential Responsibility

 Biological causes for social phenomena are being mistakenly used to erase agency here. If biology were intractable, neither evolution nor development would be a thing in biology. This is why it tends to be normatively irrelevant. The real question that is far more complicated is whether we are using our agency as, say, "autonomous biological units," in fair ways, and this cannot be settled by merely treating differences in preferences or disposition as localizable and atomized and disconnected from each other, whether biologically or socially. The task of biological science should be limited to telling us what trade-offs we might expect in the short-term v. long-term in the sorts of changes we would like. The only point I agree with throughout this debacle is that expecting perfect gender parity (even gender-proportionate gender parity if across diverse social spaces) is unrealistic, esp. if seen as a permanent goal that has more priority over other issues. Some who support the Google memo have noted that gender discrimination, hostility, or tension can itself be a cause of rather than an effect of disparity. This seems to acknowledge sociological factors, except it doesn't because there seems to be a dichotomy regarding the causal direction. If indeed a lack of parity can cause disproportionate sexism, and disproportionate sexism can, aggregately, contribute to mass exodus from a field, then it is reasonable to assume there is a third variable that is more largely causally relevant. What triggers this seemingly circular causal relation, given its susceptible to infinite regression? What is this third variable? Culture--that is, symbolic-material communication that analogically underpins biology as much as society--and/or political ecology/economy! Culture is not simply the reaction people have to things (such that "culture" on one side here is the internal masculinized culture of the work space that can lead to disproportionate experiences of sexism, and "biology" is the preferences supposedly leading to the gender disparities)--culture is the whole pattern of action-reaction that we abstractly define in terms of norms and values regulating individual's conduct with each other. Now to get to the meat of what I find problematic about the science here.

The Major Flaw in All Scientific Studies Which try to Segregate Biological and Environmental Causes in Order to Make a Significant Claim Regarding the Intrinsic or Extrinsic Nature of a Trait

Perhaps a major flaw in these studies is always going to be the attempt to correct for sociological factors--the simple reason being that measures of sociological factors such as gender equity and gender egalitarianism cannot be operationalized without ignoring controversies surrounding what they effectively behaviorally entail. A lot of people arguing this seem to assume the normative conclusions that can be drawn from the science are straight-forward--this is simply not true given how we categorize social things (say, as gender equity or egalitarianism) in particular is highly dependent in advance on our normative model of society. That is, a study that is trying to draw conclusions about what gender equality ought to look like by having already taken for granted what "gender equality" looks like behaviorally isn't going to get very far. The studies require that we accept, then, this assumption that what is being corrected for unambiguously counts under these categories, so that the more statistical facts count towards a further normative conclusion. This is exactly why this is so controversial, and people keep discussing the data rather than its normative underpinnings. In the spirit of doing precisely otherwise, notice that all these studies rely on a liberal notion of equality that is primarily based on meritocratic juridical-legal interpretations of equal access to opportunity. The notion of "equity" is also fraught in that it assumes fairness and impartiality in the social selection process that is entangled with just-world meritocratic notions as a paradigm of equity (e.g., hence the sense that resoruce distribution is correct because given to the "deserving"), which seems to ignore that an impartial and fair selection process still may reproduce largely unequal starting places (and thus inequality of opportunity). And this is not necessarily always clearly compensated for through the welfare state (and even when it is, this corrective act presupposes precisely a lack of equity and equality in need of continual [even if not escalating] correction). This is literally one of the key arguments against meritocracy--just like capitalism is a system of capital accumulation, meritocracy is a system of "genetic asset" concentration into or by relatively insular social groups which is particularly a problem in a society with high wealth stratification, high status-seeking competition, artificial scarcity, ghettoization, etc.. It is especially a problem most importantly in the presence of power differentials (as the cultural gatekeepers' process of social selection begins to have undue importance to life outcomes across the board, since they stand in the way of not only access to the social group but to the resources necessary to attempt building the traits required by the group in the first place!). What's the relevance?

Well, a study of gender differences may well have accounted for income inequality or wealth stratification, but insofar as lessened income inequality and wealth stratification is because of State redistribution efforts or State employment and not a fundamental cessation of the aforementioned dynamic tendency, it does not cease the feedback loops involved in differing in-group culture between the sexes that affects receptivity to certain activities (as active interests, even for males, have a strong component of social feedback, perceived shared values, and/or openness to different aesthetic and organizational values) and it also also doesn't cease the self-fulfilling prophesy involved in gender polarization. In fact, we would expect the gender differences in "preference" to grow, because the sort of equity or egalitarianism we're talking about may simply protect women from the economic effects of taking lower-status work (e.g., State making up for loss in wages, etc.) without also threatening the male workplace culture that is a gatekeeper to this more high-paying sector of the labor market. Basically, the costs to being an asshole are the same if not lower in male-dominated fields, and women may be less willing to directly contest this given they can switch fields while having a social net to cushion them if the pay is low or working hours long. Indeed, mix this with two other factors, artificial scarcity (no, "equal opportunity" does not fix this problem) & excessive specialization, and the gap in gender differences is even further widened. That liberal egalitarian/equitable policies don't cease these differences--and that they may in fact exacerbate it--need not be explained in biological terms (tho we can draw a biological story). These liberal legal-juridical policies are insufficient to address gender differences even if they are fair, if the system as a whole unfairly incapacitates different groups of people from creating their own effective and sustainable social spaces by which to define the culture characterizing the process of production and management. In this case, there may remain gendered personality differences that may have a partially biological basis, but without any baring on its own on "preferences" in the grand scheme of things (the author of the Google memo is, after all, arguing biological personality and interest differences exist such that they would impede on "preference"). A positive liberty notion of freedom of association is key as something one would want to track in this sort of study in group differences in personality and interests, it would seem to me.

After all, what do you think a "preference" is, and how does one prove the presence of a preference? It can't just be that women choose divergent paths along gender because they have the flexibility or opportunity to do so--how do we know choices ever reflect actual preferences? Are professed preferences more real than acted-on preferences or vice versa? Do individual or discrete preferences have effects on observed or chosen behavior independent of other preferences? Whether or not gender (in its biological or social dimensions) has an effect on preferences, could it be isolated from other identity dimensions' possible effects on preferences such that we can single out gender differences in the field as what mostly accounts for a lack of parity (it seems not--if the effect is compounded by a class difference [female / male pay gap] that gets reproduced and is more environmental than biological, how can we be sure it doesn't swamp the effects of gender differences on parity across the division of labor [after all, a lot of these studies track gender egalitarianism, and not anything else that contribute to differences in the sexes, so it is often in fact not corrected for--even political elitism is not corrected for])? "Preferences" (if defined as any choice or activity given committed priority against some other) are instead determined by a confluence of overlapping selection processes and the clustering of disparate traits that may seem to be largely unrelated but affect the social experience and function of partaking in some activity (in having a preference) in interaction with others of diverse genotype. If we define a preference more specifically as something one chooses under "free" conditions, then, while operationalized, it's not particularly meaningful to debate whether this is a preference or not without a notion of what counts as a "free condition." And in addition, even if that question is settled, its still a mistake to to treat preferences as functionally isolated from each other. If anything, these continual debates just reminds me that we need a biology whose primary unit is the function rather than the genotypes or even the phenotypes.

Conclusion

In conclusion, studies that try to disprove social theories of gender difference while simultaneously proving biological theories of gender differences seem to have a tendency to interpret the dichotomy as a theory of the extrinsic nature of the gender differences versus a theory of the intrinsic nature of gender differences. After all, that is why proving their hypothesis forces them to work within a false dichotomy that frames the possible interpretations of the data. The issue of accounting for sociological factors is thereby almost always oversimplified. Just think about the mostly laughable notion that it makes scientific sense to plot gender egalitarianism in linear terms as well as implicitly treat it as necessarily equivalent to gender liberality in all factual circumstances. What people miss is that whether a trait is intrinsic or extrinsic is not even an empirical question and has nothing to do with environment v. genetics, biology v. society, or nature v. nurture. These latter questions are transmutations of the former question that arose with the development of distinct metaphysical schools of natural philosophy into science. Nonetheless whether one holds traits to be intrinsic or extrinsic is likely going to affect one’s perception such that one will favor one narrative mode than the other (i.e., a biological or sociological narrative). This is simply due to the fact that one associates that which is most proximate and embedded within the anatomy and physiology of the body as congruent with the self than things otherwise--an unjustified assumption. Yet most recent science (in developmental biology and in epigenetics) has already shown this dichotomy of gene causality v. environmental causality to be largely silly, and at best only heuristically useful under limited circumstances, such that a reduction of self to the body is suspect.

[stoweboyd]

The Earth’s Political Axis Has Shifted: Do the Democrats See It?

Steven Erlanger writes about Theresa May, and how she’s deeply attuned to the transition away from the left-versus-right political dynamic, and she’s moving the UK’s Conservative party toward the closed end of the new, and highly disruptive political axis:

Theresa May Buries Thatcherism in Play for U.K.’s Working-Class Votes | Steven Erlanger

Mrs. May is moving away from the Conservatives’ neoliberal, Thatcherite past and reshaping the party as a more nationalist, meritocratic one that cares about social benefits and equal opportunity.

[...]

She hailed “a manifesto to see us through Brexit and beyond” and a “plan for a stronger, fairer and more prosperous Britain,” one “rooted in the hopes and aspirations of working people.” Her speech essentially tried to justify her decision to call a new election three years early to get her own mandate and ensure a larger majority in Parliament through March 2019, when two years of negotiations with the European Union are supposed to end.

But as she made clear on Thursday, some of her policies draw a clear contrast to her predecessor, David Cameron, who quit when he lost the referendum on leaving the bloc and was also associated more with the neoliberal, free-market economics that British and European populists have attacked.

[...]

One of the reasons for the Conservatives’ large lead in the opinion polls is that UKIP is falling apart and moving toward the Conservatives. It is being joined by working-class Labour voters, especially in the north of Britain, who favored a British exit and do not consider Mr. Corbyn a plausible prime minister, even if they like some of his traditional left-wing redistributive policies.

[...]

While Mr. Cameron seemed to appeal to “the aspiring classes,” Mrs. May has pitched her appeal to citizens who are worried about an uncertain future, who are known widely as “Jams” — those who can “just about manage” to get by.

To broaden the perspective beyond the UK, I return again to the City Journal piece on the social criticism of Christophe Guilluy by Christopher Caldwell (see my earlier comments in Christoper Caldwell, The French, Coming Apart). Guilluy makes the distinction between the politics of the metropolitan French, who are a combination of the economically successful bourgeoisie of the major cities and urban immigrants. 

The working class non-immigrant French have been increasingly pushed from the metropolitan cities, out into la France périphérique. They have become what I call the Left Behinds, like the Americans living in flyover country, here, that rejected the metropolitan ideals of Clinton, and took a chance with Trump, who at least acknowledged their existence and grievances.

Here’s Caldwell from The French, Coming Apart:

Since the age of social democracy, we have assumed that contentious political issues inevitably pit “the rich” against “the poor” and that the fortunes of one group must be wrested from the other. But the metropolitan bourgeoisie no longer lives cheek-by-jowl with native French people of lesser means and different values. In Paris and other cities of Guilluy’s fortunate France, one often encounters an appearance of civility, even consensus, where once there was class conflict. But this is an illusion: one side has been driven from the field.

The old bourgeoisie hasn’t been supplanted; it has been supplemented by a second bourgeoisie that occupies the previously non-bourgeois housing stock. For every old-economy banker in an inherited high-ceilinged Second Empire apartment off the Champs-Élysées, there is a new-economy television anchor or high-tech patent attorney living in some exorbitantly remodeled mews house in the Marais. A New Yorker might see these two bourgeoisies as analogous to residents of the Upper East and Upper West Sides. They have arrived through different routes, and they might once have held different political opinions, but they don’t now. Guilluy notes that the conservative presidential candidate Alain Juppé, mayor of Bordeaux, and Gérard Collomb, the Socialist running Lyon, pursue identical policies. As Paris has become not just the richest city in France but the richest city in the history of France, its residents have come to describe their politics as “on the left”—a judgment that tomorrow’s historians might dispute. Most often, Parisians mean what Guilluy calls la gauche hashtag, or what we might call the “glass-ceiling Left,” preoccupied with redistribution among, not from, elites: we may have done nothing for the poor, but we did appoint the first disabled lesbian parking commissioner.

Upwardly mobile urbanites, observes Guilluy, call Paris “the land of possibilities,” the “ideapolis.” One is reminded of Richard Florida and other extollers of the “Creative Class.” The good fortune of Creative Class members appears (to them) to have nothing to do with any kind of capitalist struggle. Never have conditions been more favorable for deluding a class of fortunate people into thinking that they owe their privilege to being nicer, or smarter, or more honest, than everyone else. Why would they think otherwise? They never meet anyone who disagrees with them. The immigrants with whom the creatives share the city are dazzlingly different, exotic, even frightening, but on the central question of our time—whether the global economic system is working or failing—they see eye to eye. “Our Immigrants, Our Strength,” was the title of a New York Times op-ed signed by London mayor Sadiq Khan, New York mayor Bill de Blasio, and Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo after September’s terrorist bomb blasts in New York. This estrangement is why electoral results around the world last year—from Brexit to the election of Donald Trump—proved so difficult to anticipate. Those outside the city gates in la France périphérique are invisible, their wishes incomprehensible. It’s as if they don’t exist. But they do.

[...]

The two traditional French parties—the Republicans, who once followed a conservative program elaborated by Charles de Gaulle; and the Socialists, who once followed socialism—still compete for votes, but along an ever-narrowing spectrum of issues. The real divide is no longer between the “Right” and the “Left” but between the metropoles and the peripheries. The traditional parties thrive in the former. The National Front (FN) is the party of the outside.

In an era when conservative and socialist metropolitans have identical platforms, the hypocrisy latent in the left-versus-right dimension becomes clear. Obama’s policies, if you look closely, were really more like a moderate Republican than a socialist. Obamacare was originally Romneycare, remember, the product of a moderate republican governor of one of the most ‘liberal’ (or, in the new orientation, one of the most ‘metropolitan’) of US states, Massachusetts. 

So, Theresa May is getting the jump on this wholesale political realignment, and pledging her loyalty to the Jams, the left behinds, the peripheral, a class that wants a more closed society with less immigration, less ‘free trade’, less metropolitanism. 

Macron notably stands to the side of the old political axis, neither conservative or socialist, but both: he’s openly a metropolitan, neoliberal globalist, in favor of French involvement in the EU and hypercapitalist global trade. Le Pen is a deeply flawed politician, who is likely to be dogged by the National Front’s history indefinitely. But that doesn’t mean that her current positioning -- as the champion of the left behinds, the advocate for a more closed society and reorganized economic order -- isn’t sensible and attractive to her supporters. It is. But that slot could be filled by a more traditional conservative moving to the new dynamic, like Theresa May has done in the UK. It just won’t be Juppé. 

Cameron, her predecessor, was blindsided by the future, too, just like Clinton’s democrats, UK’s Labour, and France’s Socialists and Conservatives.

Will the Democrats swing into the realignment or fight it? Does Clinton’s fumble mean that they will point their north star away from metropolitanism, away from neoliberal free trade, globalism, and the supposed benefits of an ‘open’ society? Will they fight to become the people’s party, embrace populism, and reject the left-versus-right alignment of conventional politics, instead of remaining the party of the bourgeoisie and their metropolitan allies: minorities and the urban poor? Can they return to their roots of supporting working people and unions, for example, and grassroots opposition to big business and the power of big money? Can they embrace populism and reject globalism?

We’ll just have to see. But so far, not so much.

[avanneman]

Robert Kagan writes an interesting essay, with some stretchers, and not a few omissions

In one way, Robert Kagan’s recent “long-form” (7,000 words) essay in the Washington Post, “The strongmen strike back”, is an honest, intelligent examination of the rise of illiberalism in the modern world, a phenomenon as incontestable as it is dispiriting. In another way, Bob’s latest and longest is a bit of a con job, and certainly not his first.

Bob, you may (or may not) remember, was a speechwriter for Secretary of State George Schultz during the Reagan Administration. In 1997, he joined with Alan Vanneman non-fave rave William Kristol to form the “Project for the New American Century”, which should have been more accurately called “Project for the New American Invasion of Iraq,” because that was its purpose. In January 2002, Bill n’ Bob joined forces to sell their dream with a pack of lies headed “What To Do About Iraq”, which included the following whoppers:

Reliable reports from defectors and former U.N. weapons inspectors have confirmed the existence of a terrorist training camp in Iraq, complete with a Boeing 707 for practicing hijackings, and filled with non-Iraqi radical Muslims. We know, too, that Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of September11, went out of his way to meet with an Iraqi intelligence official a few months before he flew a plane into the World Trade Center. As Leon Fuerth understates, "There may well have been interaction between Mr. Hussein's intelligence apparatus and various terrorist networks, including that of Osama bin Laden."

Well, I’ll do a little understating myself: any dish issuing from Bob’s kitchen should be consumed cum grano salis, if not a kilo.

Bob does some interesting, and not always inaccurate—though not always accurate, either—score settling from the early days of the Reagan Administration, pointing out that UN Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s famous essay “explaining” the different approaches the U.S. should pursue when dealing with right-wing authoritarian versus communist totalitarian dictatorships didn’t exactly hold up when examined in the cold light of experience. We didn’t have to prop up the right-wingers, turning a blind eye to their oppression. Instead, we could let them safely mutate into anti-communist democracies. And the communist dictatorships? Well, they could change too. And of course they did, to everyone’s amazement and joy.

As Bob “explains” it, getting rid of right-wing authoritarianism back in the days of Ronnie was pretty easy: “The Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, Haiti’s Jean-Claude Duvalier, Paraguay’s Alfredo Stroessner, and the South Korean military junta were all forced out by a Reagan administration that had quickly abandoned the Kirkpatrick doctrine.”

Well, that’s pretty wrong. If you want to be picky, Pinochet and Stroessner were still in power when Reagan left office, but, more importantly, all of these thugs were essentially forced from power by domestic developments. What Reagan himself deserves credit for is letting himself be talked out of continuing to support them, by people like Bob and Paul Wolfowitz (another non-fave rave, though I don’t seem to have gone after him in print very often), particularly Marcos, and particularly particularly the South African apartheid government, of which Bob amusingly and unsurprisingly omits all mention. Reagan, unlike William F. Buckley, to whom Mr. Kagan administers a particularly extended and accurate beatdown,1 was not a racist (probably), although the Reagan White House contained not a single black staffer (one had to be borrowed from Vice President Bush for a photo op). But while Reagan (probably) did not believe in segregation, he hated the Civil Rights Movement, and, most importantly, he luved segregationists, and he luved luved the South African apartheid government, insisting that they had “stood by us in all our wars,” a “perfect” lie, because entirely inaccurate, unusual even for Ronnie.

Okay, I digress. But Bob had it coming.

Still, Ronnie did preside, quite competently, with a significant assist from Margaret Thatcher, over the demise of the Soviet Union, one of the great events of world history, and no one can take that away from him. But, as Bob notes, sadly, the euphoria of those days now looks painfully innocent. The problem is, Bob never asks himself why. At least, not in public.

Instead, Bob portrays the rise of authoritarian nationalism around the globe as though it were a sudden infestation of motivelessly malignant mushrooms, springing up from the earth for no rhyme or reason. He never asks himself how the ideals of the global elite, which he, and I, share with almost equal conviction, led us to this—because, of course, he doesn’t want to believe that they did lead to this.

A few fellow globalists can help. Fareed Zakaria has a nice post focusing on “The two issues that undermined the E.U.”:

The first was — after the Soviet Union’s collapse — the rapid integration of many new countries that were far less economically and socially developed than the E.U.’s original members. Since 1995, it has expanded from 12 countries to 28. Originally focused on opening up markets, streamlining regulations and creating new growth opportunities, the E.U. soon became a “transfer union,” a vast scheme to redistribute funds from prosperous countries to emerging markets. Even in today’s strong economic environment, spending by the E.U. accounts for more than 3 percent of Hungary’s economy and almost 4 percent of Lithuania’s.

This gap between a rich and a poor Europe with open borders inevitably produced a migration crisis. As Matthias Matthijs pointed out in Foreign Affairs,2 from 2004 to 2014, about 2 million Poles migrated to Britain and Germany and about 2 million Romanians moved to Italy and Spain. These movements put massive strains on the safety nets of destination countries and stoked nationalism and nativism. The influx into Europe of more than 1 million refugees in 2015, mostly from the Middle East, must be placed in the context of these already sky-high migrant numbers. And as can be seen almost everywhere, from the United States to Austria, fears of immigration are the rocket fuel for right-wing nationalists, who discredit the political establishment that they deem responsible for unchecked flows.

The second challenge consuming the European Union has been its currency, the euro. Launched more with politics than economics in mind, the euro has embodied a deep structural flaw: It forces a unified monetary system on 19 countries that continue to have vastly different fiscal systems. So when a recession hits, countries do not have the ability to lower the value of their currency, nor do they get substantial additional resources from Brussels (as U.S. states do from Washington when they go into recession). The results, as could be seen for years after 2008, were economic stagnation and political revolt.

Economist Paul Krugman has repeatedly written that when the idea of the euro was first discussed, he argued (repeatedly) to European economists that it would be a disaster in case of a significant recession, only to be laughed at for his pains. A mere American wouldn’t/couldn’t understand these things. Although there were many factors at work, I believe that the European elite, fearful that the American behemoth would bestride the world now that the Soviet Union had collapsed, thought to invent/restore a fantasy Europe—a sort of cosmopolitan cross between the 18th century and the “belle epoch” preceding the First World War—that would be equal in size and superior in sophistication to the U.S. They forgot that the cosmopolitan Europe of their dreams existed only for the upper class. Only the rich could afford to travel, “everyone” spoke French (more or less), and everyone was welcome, more or less, because they spent cash rather than collecting unemployment insurance.

I ran a post several years ago on Paul’s complaint, “Paul and the Europeans”. Since that time, Krugman has continued to bemoan the fact that the E.C. leadership seems impervious to criticism. Their mistakes are correctable, but they just won’t correct them. In his article for Foreign Affairs, Matthias Matthijs argues that Germany needs to recognize and accept its role as “benign hegemon” for Europe, as the U.S. did for Western Europe during the Cold War. The only problem is, the U.S. only did so in response to the Soviet threat. It’s not very likely that Angela Merkel’s successor will be “more European” than she is.

Of course, when it comes to retrograde nationalism, we in the U.S. are as bad as Europe, if not worse, so what happened here, other than what supposedly “can’t happen here”?3 Bob makes no mention of the constant disastrous interventions by the U.S. in the Middle East, a few of which I discuss here, in particular how the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War led to the seminal 21st century event, the terrorist attack on 9/11, as convincingly argued by Christian Alfonsi in his important (and neglected) book Circle in the Sand. I summarized Alfonsi a decade ago in the following manner:

U.S. policy makers received frequent warnings that presence of a substantial number of U.S. troops could lead to disaster. During the leadup to the first Iraqi War, the U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Charles Freeman, warned the administration that “It remains our judgment that Saudi and Arab political realities preclude a U.S. military presence in the Islamic holy land which appears to be open-ended or semi-permanent.” During the war itself, a report issued by a committee headed by Richard Clarke stated that “A permanent U.S. presence will provide a rationale for, and could become a target for, the terrorist threat that will outlive the war.” But the Saudi ruling class wanted us there, as did Israel, and the Israel lobby here in the U.S.

Bob says not a word about the endless U.S. interventions, hypocrisies, and disasters in the Middle East, about which I’ve ranted endlessly—for example, here and here—which have cost trillions of dollars, cost thousands of lives and disrupted millions, because he is complicit in them, and worked endlessly to make them happen. Over and over again, our activities have made things worse in the Middle East, not better, and have contributed to the flow of refugees to Europe, contributing to the destabilization of the West, damaging two cultures instead of just one. It was America’s “Military Intellectual Complex”, aka “Those Who Lunch at the Palm”, of whom Mr. Kagan is a lifetime member, who brought us all this, and who still dominate almost the entirety of the spectrum of “thoughtful opinion” allowed to find voice in the mainstream press. Anyone who dares to suggest that the second invasion of Iraq was anything other than an “honest mistake”, rather than a many-footed conspiracy to insert an American army in the Middle East for decades to come, is treated to another conspiracy, that of silence.4

The silence of the otherwise voluble Mr. Kagan on these issues is stunning, but he is in fact silent on many things—for example, the failure of the American elite to recognize, until it was too late, the possibility of catastrophic market failure in contemporary capitalism. Markets were supposed to be infallibly self-policing. Instead, Wall Street drove itself straight off a cliff. Worse, when the federal government intervened to save Wall Street from itself—and to save the entire world economy from Wall Street—this necessary action prompted an hysterical response from the populist right—the Rush Limbaugh, Drudge Report right—with which Bob and his fellow neocons had allied themselves back in the early days of their “war” against the Democratic Party in the days of Bill Clinton, an unholy alliance that I’ve repeatedly denounced, most recently in a piece declining to mourn the death of the Weekly Standard.

Bob, to his credit, parted ways with the Weekly Standard crowd during the Obama Administration, serving under Obama and defending the administration’s record against his former comrades in arms like William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, who continued to pour vitriol on the administration at every opportunity. But Bob, while ceasing to sin, failed to offer confession for past errors. When Bob attacked the know-nothing populism of Donald Trump prior to his nomination, gadfly Fareed Zakaria remarked “Where were Republican moderates 20 years ago?”, skewering Bob in particular for his praise of everyone’s favorite Alaskan airhead, Sarah Palin: “I don’t take this elite foreign policy view that only this anointed class knows everything about the world,” said Bob. “I’m not generally impressed that they are better judges of American foreign policy experience than those who have Palin’s experience.”

To be fair, liberals did their own share of sinning during the Obama years, another topic about which I’ve raged on a number of occasions, most extensively here. Obama was too kind to the billionaires, and neglectful of the middle class. Liberal intellectuals in the U.S. have always wished that they could run things the way intellectuals do in Europe, not noticing that the U.S. and Europe are, like, different. During the Obama Administration, liberals finally achieved their dream of “universal” health care, refusing to realize that most Americans didn’t want it. They already had health care, through their employers or through Medicare, and they knew that extending it to “everyone” simply meant that they would pay higher taxes to provide health care to the poor, largely nonwhite, and they didn’t want to do that, because, yes, a significant portion of the white working class in the U.S. is at least mildly racist, something that liberals don’t want to admit is true.

In both Europe and the U.S., there was an irrational blowback against the kind of countercyclical spending necessary to prevent the world economy from dropping into full recession. In the U.S., it was enhanced by the Democratic Party’s determination to enact universal health care. They had the votes, but they didn’t have the country, as they found to their sorrow in 2010, when the Tea Party hysterics took control of the House of Representatives. The stunningly incompetent rollout of the Affordable Care Act following Obama’s re-election in 2012 only made things worse, leading to a second blowout in the 2014 midterms, leading to Republican control of both Houses of Congress.

Unfortunately, Obama’s elitist tendencies were not confined to health care. Like the European elite whose influence they envy, the liberal elite in the U.S. has made a cult of environmentalism, not caring the extent to which increasing the cost of energy, which is always the effect and often the explicit goal of environmental programs, reduces economic growth and lowers the standard of living of the working and middle classes. If you’re in the top 20 percent, as almost policy makers are, you don’t notice so much, and, besides, it increases the value of your vacation home. I unloaded, a lot, on the sins of liberalism in general, and liberal environmentalism in particular, in a recent post, so I’ll just quote a chunk of it here, updated with added bile for flavor:

Environmentalism is the opium of the upper-middle class, transporting them into a world where “science”—science itself!—proves that they should be in charge. There is no doubt that there is ample scientific evidence to prove that anthropogenic global warming is occurring, and that it will have detrimental effects in the future, but this evidence provides no real guidance as to what “must” be done, and, above all, no proof that the endlessly prophesied apocalypse is approaching. To fill this politically inconvenient void, liberals have concocted an incoherent and self-defeating laundry list of policy prescriptions based on sentimental nature worship that prioritizes the “interests” of favored biota such as salmon and timber wolves over anyone who isn’t a comfortable member of the upper middle class—for example, the decision of coastal liberals in both New York and California to ban fracking, eliminating the sort of blue-collar jobs that they supposedly love, while keeping the price of natural gas from falling even lower than it already has, which would lead to the more rapid replacement of coal-burning power plants than has taken place while also stimulating economic growth.

If environmentalists were really concerned about, you know, the environment, they would embrace fracking, and they would embrace nuclear power. And they would also embrace genetically modified organisms. The worst nightmare for environmentalists, of course, would be a low cost method for extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, meaning that we wouldn’t have to change our evil ways at all!

I am what European “thinkers” refer to with the utmost scorn of which they are capable (which is a lot), a “Thatcherite/Reaganite neoliberal”. I believe (correctly) that only capitalism can provide for everyone what it has provided for a very large percentage of the populations of Canada, the United States, western Europe, and Australia, a comfortable standard of living. However, I acknowledge that capitalism makes a much better “fit” with some cultures than others. It helps if you are Protestant or Confucian, and most countries are not. Free markets do not automatically function with the perfect efficiency that so many assumed back in the heady 1990s. Expanding the European Union did not mean that all of Europe would enjoy the “European miracle” that occurred in Western Europe in the 1950s and 1960s, when a largely working class population became largely middle class. Furthermore, sadly, the narrowing of economic inequality that occurred at the same time seems to have been a product of a variety of unique historical factors rather than “progress” pure and simple, meaning that explicit measures of economic redistribution are necessary, as I argue here.

There is no question but that the Digital Industrial Revolution is proving as disruptive as the earlier one driven by steam, boosting the incomes of literally billions of people around the world but also filling their lives with uncertainty and doubt. Authoritarian governments have arisen to fill the vacuum. Bob (remember him?) devotes the closing paragraphs of his essay to the particularly worrisome case of China, which is worrisome indeed. But, Bob, I don’t think “invasion” is the answer.

Afterwords Bob, of course, does not advocate invading China. But he, recycling his denunciation of the “Kirkpatrick doctrine”, warns that, in light of the ever-expanding techniques of social control provided by digital technology being exploited by both Russia and China, we should “reconsider the idea of supporting “friendly” dictatorships. Well, I didn’t know we were “supporting” them. We’re just not trying to overthrow them. And, in the past, Bob has been pretty impatient with anything less.

I’ve explained here (well, around paragraph 15 or so why I think trying to kick the ass of a country four times our size is a bad idea. I also think just harassing Russia and China is a bad idea as well. I remember that, back during the Cold War, splitting the Soviet bloc by befriending China, as Nixon and Kissinger did, worked out pretty well for us, so well, in fact, that while many presidential candidates promise to “get tough” with China, no president has been similarly inclined. Even Cap’n Bad Ass keeps losing his nerve, because every time he talks tough, the stock market goes down.

Like Bob, I believe in liberalism. But I believe that the policies he has advocated have been massively counter-productive, and that he has frequently been grossly disingenuous in his advocacy, making league with massively illiberal types such as Rush Limbaugh, Matt Drudge, Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin, and various other assorted airheads and plug-uglies. Isn’t, you know, “truth” supposed to be something of a liberal value?

Many paleocons and other anti-Trumpers of various hues are asking themselves rather pathetically, “what would Bill Buckley do?” Kagan’s answer, hardly unjustified, is “try to prevent black people from voting.” My own take on Buckley’s racism is here ↩︎

This is an excellent article, examining the flaws of the EU in detail. ↩︎

Back in the thirties, Sinclair Lewis, then America’s most famous novelist, wrote “It Can’t Happen Here”, a not very good and not often read dystopia describing the rise of fascism in the U.S. ↩︎

In a followup to his essay, Bob answered selected questions posed by readers. None of the questions selected pertained to the long record of deceit and incompetence in the Middle East that Bob and his pals have compiled over the years. ↩︎

[republicstandard]

Archbishop Justin Welby and the Truth About the Economy

“All I’ve got is a red guitar, three chords, and the truth,” sings Bono, lead vocalist of rock band U2. If you want to call yourself a guitarist but don’t want to spend hours learning scales and chord progressions using diminished and augmented chords, learn three chords and accompany a simple song.

Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, is a three-chord guitarist. Like Bono, Welby’s got a red guitar and amplifier – his team of media hustlers who plant stories about their boss’s ability to play three chords and make the Archbishop sound like Andre Segovia playing Paganini.

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Like Bono, Welby’s got three chords: reconciliation (remember his motherhood and apple pie address at the UN last month?), sex (the gay and transgender agenda) and equality (i.e. redistribution of wealth).

Welby doesn’t quite have the truth, either. Welby’s midweek rhapsody in red is shamelessly splashed on the front page of the Daily Mail (was the editor so desperate for a lead story?). This is followed by Welby’s “sermon to the nation” dragged across pages 6 and 7. Welby’s high-strung homily is an exercise in semantic subterfuge, moralistic flagellation, guilt stirring, hysteria-mongering laughable inanities, flagrant contradictions, Bible-misquoting, and plain porkies.

It’s like Harpo, Groucho, and Chico Marx coming together; this time reincarnated as Pope Francis, Jeremy Corbyn, and Justin Welby, all on steroids preaching the fifth gospel according to St. Marx.

Britain’s economy is broken, hollers Welby! Really? Are Britons queuing to buy toilet paper like the Venezuelans who have been distributing wealth for decades? Is Britain on the brink of an economic cataclysm like the Great Depression of 1929? Is the Bank of England printing £50million bank notes worth $1 US as in the days of the Weimar Republic when Germans had to trundle banknotes on a wheelbarrow to buy a loaf of bread?

Britain’s economy is booming. Welby sheepishly (shouldn’t it be "wolfishly"?) admits to this fact but swiftly shushes it as if it is a Victorian child who must be seen and not heard. Has Archbishop Justin never read Aesop’s fable of the boy who cried wolf?

Welby tries to make a case for poverty. He wails:

"Chronically low pay means that a hard day’s work no longer keeps people out of poverty today: today, a majority of the poor are working families,"

How does Welby measure poverty? By focusing on income trends alone? If so, he falls foul of a major methodological flaw researchers are typically guilty of in their quest for “data opportunism” and the motivation to prop up a certain ideological agenda.

Income data and consumption data provide very different perspectives on just who is poor, note economists Orazio Attanasio, Erich Battistin and Mario Padula in their monograph Inequality in Living Standards since 1980: Income Tells Only a Small Part of the Story.

"Income, after all, is valued mostly because it allows consumption. Therefore, studying consumption directly provides a better measure of distribution of wellbeing than study of income."

Empirical evidence shows that consumption-poor households do not coincide with income-poor households and income-poor households report consumption levels far greater than their level of income. In fact, consumption of the “income-poorest” household exceeds earnings. Thus, many Britons who are “income poor” are not “consumption poor”.

Britain’s Office for National Statistics defines "poor" people as those who cannot afford "four or more essential items" including a one-week annual holiday away from home, a color television, a washing machine, and a car! Its report states:

"The largest gap between persistently poor individuals and the whole population was the ability to afford a one-week annual holiday away from home."

Welby doesn’t tell us if he is talking about absolute or relative poverty, primary or secondary poverty. Absolute poverty refers to the actual needs of the poor. It is not measured by reference to the expenditure of those who are not poor. “A family is poor if it cannot afford to eat,” writes Sir Keith Joseph. “Primary poverty has been largely eliminated; the Beveridge revolution has been carried out,” writes Tony Crosland. You can be poor if you can’t afford basic needs; or you can be poor if you can’t afford things other than the basic necessities of life – like three holidays a year in Lanzarote.

Economist Mollie Orshansky, who developed the official poverty measure used in the US, underlined the difficulty in measuring poverty. She observes:

“Poverty, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder. Poverty is a value judgment; it is not something one can verify or demonstrate, except by inference or suggestion, even with a measure of error. To say who is poor is to use all sorts of value judgments.”

If Welby were really concerned about what he calls poverty, he would first analyze its causes so he can propose solutions. But not once is there any mention of what actually causes so-called poverty in Britain! Is it bad choices, lack of education, dropping out of high school, family breakdown, divorce, poor parenting, drug addiction, poor stewardship of resources, excessive expenditure, or excessive market-driven consumption? Welby won’t tell us!

Correspondingly, he would analyze the causes of wealth. Are rich people getting richer because they are stealing from the poor – as is the case with certain rich people who are lambasted by prophets like Amos and Isaiah? But if a person gets rich by hard work, thrift, wise decisions, luck and taking risks – the foundation of capitalism – why is it morally legitimate to take what rightfully belongs to him?

Welby’s bugbear is not poverty; it’s inequality. He doesn’t love the poor as much as he hates the rich. It’s not that Britain’s poor have too little; it’s that Britain’s wealthy have too much. “Today the wealthiest 10 percent of households own more than 900 times the wealth of the poorest 10 percent, and five times more than the bottom half of all households combined,” moans Welby.

Doesn’t Welby understand that the economy in 21st century capitalist Britain is not a zero-sum game? Doesn’t Welby understand wealth creation? To cite just one example, the creators of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (much as I dislike their ideology) are young men who become filthy rich not because they stole from the poor. Rather, people like me benefit enormously from these social media giants without paying a single penny.

Very disingenuously, the Archbishop seems to suggest that the rich are to blame because they have stolen from the poor. Hence, his solution is to tax the rich till they bleed. Then we scatter their loot so “poor” vultures can feast on it. Britain’s economy needs “fundamental reform” because it is not working for all, he claims, but his pet ideology of redistributionism took off in Britain over a century ago with Lloyd George’s budget for 1909-10, which introduced progressive taxation.

Economically, Welby’s proposals are disastrous. Has he learned nothing from history? When Roman emperors began levying increasingly heavy taxes, mainly on the wealthy, partly to eliminate the Senatorial class, economic growth slowed to a standstill. Once the wealthy were no longer able to pay the State’s bills, the burden fell on the lower classes and ordinary people suffered. It was the beginning of the end of the Roman Empire.

Welby mentions Mrs. Thatcher in his Daily Mail diatribe. But does he not know that Thatcher wrought her economic miracle by reducing and not raising taxes? Can he not take a peek across the pond and learn how Donald Trump is creating jobs, growing the economy and helping the poor by reducing, not raising taxes?

Morally, Welby’s proposals are perverse. Re-distribution is immoral because it deifies the state as supreme in relieving poverty. It also has a peculiar doctrine of sin, which holds that economic inequality is itself evil. It then conflates these two very disparate doctrines by wanting government to “supply a subsistence floor beneath which no one may fall” and even more perversely “institute a ceiling beyond which no one may rise”, according to French economist Bertrand de Jouvenel who highlighted the immorality of redistributionism at Corpus Christi College, Oxford in 1951.

Welby’s ideology is also morally corrosive. It undermines personal responsibility by transferring authority for crucial life-decisions from individuals to the State. The state supplies our basic needs and leaves us only to decide how we should spend our pocket money.

If the state is going to confiscate large sums from the rich, it must invest this wealth. The state is not only supremely inefficient at investing, but by doing so, it deprives us from taking any initiative. Economically, redistributionism “has not significantly alleviated poverty but has instead substantially institutionalized it”, writes de Jouvenel.

But it is in his recourse to a theological justification for redistributionism, that Welby’s semantic subterfuges are most misleading. He writes:

“As a Christian, I start with learning from Jesus Christ that people matter equally, are equally loved by God, and that justice in society matters deeply – a theme that runs throughout the Bible.”

Welby is right. We are all equal. God created humans in his image and likeness, declares Genesis. God so loved the world that he gave His only Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life, declares John’s gospel. But to conflate the Christian doctrine of the metaphysical conception of the implicit transcendent worth of each person with the collectivist doctrine of equality of outcomes is not only wicked, it is bad theology.

Welby’s second subterfuge is to conflate biblical justice with social justice. He wants to "hard-wire justice into the economy". That is alarming. You can’t hard-wire your brand of "justice" into a free market without a totalitarian regime enforcing it. Justice is not redistribution. It is not equality of material conditions. On the contrary, justice demands individual rewards proportionate to the individual endeavor. This makes redistribution unfair and unjust.

De Jouvenel rightly noted that it has become "a loose modern habit to call ‘just’ whatever is thought emotionally desirable". Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek lambasted the "‘Mirage’ of Social Justice" calling it "a quasi-religious belief with no content whatsoever". Social justice was a particularly dangerous superstition, he said, describing it as "that incubus which today makes fine sentiments the instruments for the destruction of all values of a free civilization", leading to "the destruction of the indispensable environment in which the traditional moral values alone can flourish, namely personal freedom".

Welby’s most sloppy attempt at proof-texting is his appeal to Jesus’ discourse on the Final Judgement (Matthew 25: 31-46). Jesus welcomes the sheep on his right hand commending them for feeding him when he was hungry, providing drink when thirsty, and so on. Puzzled, they ask when they have served Jesus in such a manner. Jesus explains:

“As you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

Welby twists this text to support his agenda:

“In that passage, He (Jesus) explicitly says that judgment is linked to justice, namely, in the way in which we treat those who are most vulnerable and weakest. Out of that extraordinary passage comes the Christian call to work for the common good and for the welfare of everyone in our society.”

Biblical scholars, however, point out that "the least of these my brothers” are Jesus’ disciples (or even the Jews). It is the ‘smallest brothers and sisters’ of Jesus who benefit from these acts of kindness and what is done to them is done to him", explains New Testament scholar R. T. France. So it is not a response to human need in general, but how people have responded to Jesus in the person of his representatives.

If Welby reads the verses preceding his proof text in Matthew’s gospel, he will be embarrassed by the parable of the talents. Here, the master entrusts the different sums of money to three servants according to their abilities and expects his servants to increase his asset value using the mechanisms of the market.

The first two servants double their master’s assets; the third servant is afraid to take risks. The master commends the first two servants for doubling his wealth and condemns the third servant for playing safe. Instead of redistributing wealth by taking it from the first two servants and giving it to the third servant, the master takes even the little that the third servant has and hands it over to the first servant who has the most money, saying, "For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away" (Matthew 25:29).

If Welby reads Matthew’s gospel to the end he will know that the primary Christian call, the Great Commission, is not to work for the common good and for the welfare of everyone – it is, in the words of Jesus Christ, to "go and make disciples of all nations".

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The Archbishop of Canterbury is presiding over a failing church, which according to yesterday’s news has halved in membership in the last fifteen years in "unrelenting decline". Welby is neither Chancellor nor Governor of the Bank of England. As a three-chord guitarist, he shouldn’t pretend he is Django Reinhart.

Justin Welby wants to "hard-wire" justice into the economy. Christians should pray hard that Jesus Christ will hard-wire the gospel into Justin Welby.

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