A Fine Summary of the "Gay Marriage" Gambit

I found this in a comment (5-13-08) on this blogpost-- http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/05/ol4-dr-johnsons-hypothesis.html
Needless to say, virtually no one in America actually understands the context "Michael S." elucidates:

The "gay marriage" issue can be understood as a consequence of the redefinition of marriage under a regime of income taxation, the welfare state, and private sector tax-incentivized non-cash employee benefits. This originally took place without the slightest consideration of homosexual relationships.

For most of its history marriage was an institution intended to provide stable conditions for the rearing of children and orderly procedures for transfer from parents to children of marital estates at the time of death of one of the spouses, with an appropriate provision for support of the surviving spouse through dower or curtesy. Homosexual relationships being sterile by definition, marriage had nothing to do with them. Even in societies that did not stigmatize homosexuality in the way Judeo-Christianity does, there was never any historical instance of "gay marriage." Harmodius did not marry Aristogeiton; Hadrian did not marry Antinous. Such a thought would have been risible to them, as well as to the rest of the society in which they lived.

Relatively recent legal and economic changes have tacked onto marriage certain aspects of which it never partook in the past. Spousal and family insurance benefits, tax advantages (in some cases) to being considered as a couple rather than as two individuals, etc., now indeed may outweigh in their economic importance the traditional legal consequences of marriage. Dower and curtesy, primogeniture vs. gavelkind, etc., all were more significant in a time when most deaths were intestate. Today most people with enough assets to worry about take care of such concerns via prenuptial agreements, wills, and trusts. Given all this it does not seem surprising that people in homosexual relationships want to climb aboard the insurance and welfare benefits-driven gravy train that marriage has become for heterosexual couples.

Marriage is a touchy issue because it is a nexus of civil society, religion, and the legal imprimatur of government. Most people are happy with the former two remaining as they are, whereas those that are not happy with them want to use the last of them to force a change in the others. Add to the mix the Frankfurt-school objective of demolishing the patriarchal family as a prerequisite to the total rebuilding of society. See, for example, Marcuse's "Eros and Civilization." I suspect it is more due to the influence of the Frankfurt school than we credit that "gay marriage" has become so significant as a focus of cultural warfare.

America's Economic Inflection Point?

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/31/america-in-2012-as-told-in-charts/

The most informative are the graphs for:

declining real median incomes

healthcare costs driving deficits

social security benefits growing faster than incomes

 

Note that last one: social security benefits have tracked inflation since 2000, but median incomes have declined 9%. Is it possible that the year 2000 was the American equivalent of the year 1970 in Soviet history--the time when stagnation and decline set in? We still have a trickle of productivity growth, but it all goes to the rich, the welfare class (including the largest welfare class, old people), and the health care sector. The remainder of the economy languishes. And the politicos and propagandists continue to spout their politically correct lies (also reminiscent of the old Muscovite empire's Orwellian inversions and concealments).

Dignity or Decline

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/opinion/sunday/douthat-The-Liberal-Gloat.html

 

A solid editorial that smacks both parties.

 

But, he should have brought out the implication that the Republicans are in a much worse position than they realize. The breakdown of local associations is virtually impossible to rebuild after a generation or two of absence. Welfarism caused the breakdown by displacing these traditional means of supporting the indigent, but removing welfare does not cause it magically to repair itself. If major government support were discontinued, a collapse into third world chaos would follow in large swathes of our great cities. The Democratic solution is to expand these areas of dependency, to render ever more of the population idle (but half-imprisoned) serfs on the DC estate. The Republican strategy is denialism and electoral defeat. This is a vicious cycle. And it only goes one way. As someone said, Cthulhu only swims left.

Squeezing the Free Market Out

If you add up the cost of government, the cost of health care not paid by the government, and the cost of higher education not paid by the government--you come up with 50% of GDP. What these costs have in common is that they're unavoidable. By comparison, in countries like France and Germany, all these expenses are covered by the government--and most of them have tax levels lower than 50%. If you added the costs of regulations in America, the number would be pushing 55% of GDP. In 1960, that number was more like 35%, and it would have been 30% if we were spending as little on the military then as we are now. At this rate, the involuntary percentage of our GDP will reach 70% by 2040. Can an economy that is 30% free and 70% socialist avoid stagnation? Can it even avoid decline?

Some Poor Realities

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/10/02/business/how-health-care-affects-income.html

The income estimates do not include unreported income, prevalent at the low and high ends of the scale. It also skips the value of services provided to our 2 million prisoners. By the way, the CBO is now basing its income estimates on the methodology exemplified in the graph. But, by including Medicare and Medicaid benefits as income, it completely alters the picture of inequality--and pushes the real working class to the bottom of the income pyramid.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/11/opinion/americas-ineffective-antipoverty-effort.html

A Republican doing what Republicans do not like to do: thinking seriously about reform of the welfare state, rather than wallowing in the idealistic rhetoric of abolition. The crux of his argument: "We can start by measuring outcomes (results) rather than inputs (how much money can we throw at the problem). Our effectiveness should be assessed, in part, by the per-person cost of moving individuals from dependency to self-sufficiency."

Obama's Son

How could it be surprising that Obama would compare Trayvon Martin, a criminal in training wheels, to the son he might have had? That Obama would implicitly promote Trayvon as a typcial young black man? Black leaders have not promoted the interests of their people since at least 1965. They are in league with the socialist project to corrupt and debase their character. Socialists undermine blacks to prove that more government is necessary. The economic incentives created by the welfare state strongly promote family dissolution among the working and lower-middle classes of all races. It's too difficult for these people to cut against clear economic advantages in favor of the less tangible advantages (all but forgotten among multi-generational black single mothers) of family cohesiveness. Socialist policies create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And, actually, Trayvon is typical of half of black men--but, he ought not to be and the Obamas and Sharptons, the race-hustlers, ought not to encourage this as a black self-image. A third of black men are felons. What percent serve in the military or make significant contributions of any kind? How many even support their children?

A Documentary on Taxation

It might be useful to literalize the notion that we pay a third of our income to the government. In this vein, a film depicting people working directly for all the government departments instead of paying taxes (indirect work) could also be amusing. Four months total for the government, eight months for one's family. That would be 3-4 weeks under a drill sergeant or commanding officer, another 4 weeks under orders from the local nursing home or retirement resort, 2-3 weeks attempting to impart knowledge and values to the new and rising generation, a delighful 2-3 weeks supporting the duskier races in their slums and ghettoes and prisons, and on and on and on... Being assailed by the hundreds of federal agencies one after another, then by hundreds of state and local agencies could create a memorable image.   

Crossing the Line

This is not the sort of review one expects to find in a leftist magazine like The New Republic: http://www.tnr.com/book/review/what-hope Nevertheless, even if enlightenment is achieved by the socialist component of our polity--I think a change of policy likely to lag very far behind, for political, psychological, and cognitive reasons. This is a key insight: Wax [author of the book under review] is well aware that past discrimination created black-white disparities in education, wealth, and employment. Still, she argues that discrimination today is no longer the “brick wall” obstacle it once was, and that the main problems for poor and working-class blacks today are cultural ones that they alone can fix. Not that they alone should fix—Wax is making no moral argument—but that they alone can fix.          The Johnsonian "Great Society" interventions in black America are as flagrant a public policy failure as the Nixonian "War on Drugs" that followed. In each case, the government stepped in, all money and arrogance, spent profligately to ensure black men no longer faced any financial responsibilities, ruined millions of American lives by process of moral hazard, and made the original problems much worse. The black family was ruthlessly destroyed as an institution, and black culture went with it. Further, as I've mentioned at other times, the black-white IQ gap is not irrelevant to the problem. It has persisted at the same level for the 100 years that IQ testing has been administered. But, to reiterate a basic consequence of this fact, if the top third of whites pull bachelors degrees, their average IQ would be about 114 and the minimum would be 106. Only 8% of blacks meet this minimum and 2.5% meet the average--a fourfold difference between college-capable whites and blacks. With ever more sophisticated demands faced by professionals, the fact that only 8% of blacks can hope to meet those demands constitutes a serious problem requiring such redress as we can muster. Wax does mention this, but only in a single paragraph that fails to grapple with its implications. I do credit her, however, with the courage to admit that the possibility of genetic differences in IQ between races yet remains, "the science on this question is inconclusive." (69) In the next quote, I disagree with the reviewer, who hasn't learned the limits of governmental competence. Throwing more handouts at black America will exacerbate the problem, which stems in the first instance from a lack of self-reliance reinforced over decades by the nanny state. Wax stipulates that the government should do all that it can to ensure equal opportunity, which includes providing decent education and enforcing civil rights laws. I [the reviewer] would say that there is somewhat more that the government can do, given the historical circumstances. Programs to ease ex-cons back into society could do infinitely more for black inner-cities than suing car companies over small differences in loan deals. The welfare state imposes a system of incentives on blacks that encourages irresponsibility. Black men who walk on their families are at the center of the problem. But, why do they walk? They did not do this in 1960. What has fundamentally changed except the vast and comprehensive governmental provision of all necessities to black mothers and children? And the less involved the father is, the greater the government's largesse. The incentives are clearly perverse, and they have achieved the effect one might have expected. Incentives work. I do not mean to claim that this monstrous bureaucratic affliction impacts only blacks--attenuated versions may be seen among other groups as well. The welfare state has entirely remade lower and working class American society. It has not only robbed these orders of all dignity, but even of the sense that human dignity has value. So have the economic incentives crafted by our left-wing experts corrupted the character of much of America. The author, seeing the psychological results without fully understanding the causes which lie embedded in the system, then moves on to her summation: Wax usefully asks: “Is it possible to pursue an arduous program of self-improvement while simultaneously thinking of oneself as a victim of grievous mistreatment and of one’s shortcomings as a product of external forces?” To the extent that our ideology on race is more about studied radicalism than about a healthy brand of what Wax calls an internal locus of control, her book provokes, at least in this reader, a certain hopelessness. If she is right, then the bulk of today’s discussion of black America is performance art. Tragically, and for the most part, she is right. This is dead on. The whole of our handling of black America since Johnson has been a cynical game of elites (especially gentile and Jewish elites) engaged in social status competition. The most "generous" on the face of it, at the superficial level, won the competition, as demonstrated by the ever leftward tendency of our politics. Assuming that the poor are angels who will not humanly respond to incentives in the way that the contemptible "bourgeois" would counted as a sound basis for policy design. It turns out the poor are human, and the incentives came into play, and the poor were ruined--just as the middle classes would have suffered ruination had the incentives been generous enough to tempt them. This is what comes of officially sanctioned lies. To adapt Henry James, these are the black and merciless things that are behind the great socializations.