The Virginian

How many decades now has the left been screaming about “trickle-down economics” and how the idea that a rising tide lifts all boats, or that giving tax breaks allows people to invest and thereby creates more jobs. is just “wrong, wrong, wrong, miles and miles of wrongitude?”

Thirty or so?

In fact, their mad infatuation with "democratic socialism" is part of this shrieking and this mindset. (Hello Occasio-Cortex Occasional Cortex.) And it's mind-bogglingly stupid as well as evil.

I didn't realize how much of both it is until a recent Facebook discussion in which a leftist got... vocal and defended trickle-up poverty.

Okay, they’re – probably, though I wouldn’t bet on all of them – not aware that this is their preferred pathway and end result. But it is.

The discussion was about charter schools funded by government, i.e., tax money.

The argument against them was the same it’s always been: it privileges a few kids, while the rest remain mired in failing government schools. I’d heard it a million times. I’d just never actually stepped back and taken a look at how ridiculous that is.

Look, there is no comment about the charters costing more (they usually don’t) and no argument about the fact that government schools are failing.

There is just this outraged screeching that not every kid can get the same thing. Which is kind of amazing when you think about it. Presented with a dysfunctional school system that has resisted every attempt at reform and that turns out increasingly worse-educated children every year, the outrage is not that we aren’t coming up with enough ways for children to escape it, but that one of the pathways for escape should be blocked because not every child can leave.

The same arguments are adduced against homeschooling (when the advocates of government scholastic prisons aren’t shrieking that homeschooled children are maladjusted and ignorant) because – and this is almost a verbatim quote from that Facebook discussion – a divorced mother of two who is making minimum wage can’t give them an appropriate education at home.

Uh? What?

So, what you’re saying is that if you can’t rescue everyone from, say, a house fire or the path of a hurricane, you should shoot those trying to escape so that everyone can die?

Thinking about it, I realized this is exactly how the left thinks about everything, even – or perhaps particularly – economics. ...

Or to put it another way, the left would rather we all starve in the dark than that someone light a stove and make some food.

Let us note, as well: this outcome wasn’t the result of the initially pristine Marxist doctrine becoming corrupt over time, but something apparent and present at the very beginning of the Soviet state itself. Solzhenitsyn cites, for example, one Martin Latsis, writing or the newspaper Red Terror, November 1, 1918: “We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. It is not necessary during the interrogation to look for evidence proving that the accused opposed the Soviets by word or action. The first question you should ask him is what class does he belong to, what is his origin, his education and his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. Such is the sense and essence of red terror.”
...
Others had made the attempt. Malcolm Muggeridge reported on the horrors of “dekulakization”—the forced collectivization of the all-too-recently successful peasantry of the Ukraine and elsewhere that preceded the horrifying famines of the 1930s. In the same decade, and in the following years, George Orwell risked his ideological commitments and his reputation to tell us all what was truly occurring in the Soviet Union in the name of egalitarianism and brotherhood. But it was Solzhenitsyn who truly shamed the radical leftists, forcing them underground (where they have festered and plotted for the last forty years, failing unforgivably to have learned what all reasonable people should have learned from the cataclysm of the twentieth century and its egalitarian utopianism). And today, despite everything, and under their sway—almost three decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the apparent collapse of Communism—we are doing everything we can to forget what Solzhenitsyn so clearly demonstrated, to our great and richly deserved peril. Why don’t all our children read The Gulag Archipelago in our high schools, as they now do in Russia? Why don’t our teachers feel compelled to read the book aloud? Did we not win the Cold War? Were the bodies not piled high enough? (How high, then, would be enough?)

Why, for example, is it still acceptable—and in polite company—to profess the philosophy of a Communist or, if not that, to at least admire the work of Marx? Why is it still acceptable to regard the Marxist doctrine as essentially accurate in its diagnosis of the hypothetical evils of the free-market, democratic West; to still consider that doctrine “progressive,” and fit for the compassionate and proper thinking person? Twenty-five million dead through internal repression in the Soviet Union (according to The Black Book of Communism). Sixty million dead in Mao’s China (and an all-too-likely return to autocratic oppression in that country in the near future). The horrors of Cambodia’s Killing Fields, with their two million corpses. The barely animate body politic of Cuba, where people struggle even now to feed themselves. Venezuela, where it has now been made illegal to attribute a child’s death in hospital to starvation. No political experiment has ever been tried so widely, with so many disparate people, in so many different countries (with such different histories) and failed so absolutely and so catastrophically. Is it mere ignorance (albeit of the most inexcusable kind) that allows today’s Marxists to flaunt their continued allegiance—to present it as compassion and care? Or is it, instead, envy of the successful, in near-infinite proportions? Or something akin to hatred for mankind itself? How much proof do we need? Why do we still avert our eyes from the truth?

My impression is that Trump has been steadily growing stronger and more confident as president since his inauguration. He still has some very bad moments and ill-advised tweets, but it is a fantasy that he will be driven from office barring anything truly scandalous from the Mueller investigation, and I’m pretty sure we’d have had it by now if there was anything to the Russia collusion story.

I’m thinking there’s an inverse relationship between Trump’s strength and media hysteria. Some clever person put together this montage of the media claiming routinely since January 20, 2017 that a “tipping point” had been reached, that the newest “bombshell” was curtains for Trump, that “the walls are closing in.” Talk about fake news. Heh. Enjoy this—we’ve got a long way to go yet.

Just how much money do you need to be among the global 1 percent?

According to the 2018 Global Wealth Report from Credit Suisse Research Institute, you need a net worth of $871,320 U.S. Credit Suisse defines net worth, or "wealth," as "the value of financial assets plus real assets (principally housing) owned by households, minus their debts."

More than 19 million Americans are in the 1 percent worldwide, Credit Suisse reports, far more than from any other country, while "China is now clearly established in second place in the world wealth hierarchy," with 4.2 million citizens among the world's top 1 percent.

As the court has explained again and again and again:

"(N)o one can fail to be impressed with the one pervading purpose found in (the 13th, 14th and 15th) amendments, lying at the foundation of each, and without which none of them would have been even suggested; we mean the freedom of the slave race, the security and firm establishment of that freedom, and the protection of the newly made freeman and citizen from the oppressions of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him."

That's why the amendment refers to people who are "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States "and of the state wherein they reside." For generations, African-Americans were domiciled in this country. The only reason they weren't citizens was because of slavery, which the country had just fought a civil war to end.

The 14th Amendment fixed that.

The amendment didn't even make Indians citizens. Why? Because it was about freed slaves. Sixteen years after the 14th Amendment was ratified, the Supreme Court held that an American Indian, John Elk, was not a citizen, despite having been born here.

Instead, Congress had to pass a separate law making Indians citizens, which it did, more than half a century after the adoption of the 14th Amendment. (It's easy to miss -- the law is titled: "THE INDIAN CITIZENSHIP ACT OF 1924.") Why would such a law be necessary if simply being born in the U.S. was enough to confer citizenship?

Even today, the children of diplomats and foreign ministers are not granted citizenship on the basis of being born here.

President Trump, unlike his critics, honors black history by recognizing that the whole purpose of the Civil War amendments was to guarantee the rights of freed slaves.

"U.S. workers are seeing the largest nominal wage increase in a decade, the Labor Department reported Wednesday, as companies compete harder for employees than they did in recent years."