Europe Needs Doughnut Shops

The stagnation and decline in Europe raise several thoughts. In the aftermath of World War Two their private sector was woefully unable to provide the immediate needs of a devastated population. This reality and the greater tolerance for socialist ideology and central planning paved the way for the welfare state and the European Union.

As the time line left the post WW II causes behind, the social costs of the welfare state became more pronounced. A low birthrate and a wave of new immigration magnified that cost.

Europe was forced to share the cost with everyone. There was not a large enough wealthy class to absorb this cost. The United States has not yet faced that reality; a large part of the American electorate clamors for benefits without the desire to pay for them with higher taxes. But the high taxes in Europe had consequences, curtailing an entrepreneurial spirit by raising the costs of startups. With no population growth the lack of economic growth will be devastating.

The challenge of the welfare state in Europe is the same as it is here. How do we provide for those who fall between the cracks of a capitalist system without creating a sense of dependency and embedding an underclass in a cycle of poverty?

The history of immigration in America is a story of the impoverished of the world taking advantages of opportunities unique to this country. This story of Cambodian doughnut shops in California is an old tale in the United States with new actors. Relatively low taxes and regulations allowed immigrants to escape their condition.

In the absence of this opportunity in Europe the immigrants present a greater problem; becoming a permanent underclass with all the social threats that entails. A welfare state presents problems of costs and perverse incentives with a native homogenous population, but combined with a policy of open borders both the fiscal and social costs become unbearable. America has a better record of absorbing immigrants partially because of better economic opportunities and partially because of our diverse culture.

Europe is at a crossroads of slow economic growth from a post war period of regulation and high taxes and the creation of a new growing underclass of immigrants that are not being absorbed. Avoiding the ensuing financial, social and political costs is unimaginable. England embraced Brexit for several reasons; most often stated was the loss of sovereignty and control of their destiny. They may simply be the first to leave a sinking ship.

The Complex and the Difficult

from The Wall Street Journal, The Humanities’ Decline Makes Us Morally Obtuse by Paula Marantz Cohen:

The assumption these days is that people are monolithic—either completely good or completely bad. The best way to repudiate that assumption it to study the humanities, which illuminate human life in all its complexity. How can you think about crime or misconduct in such an unimaginative way if you’ve read great literature: adultery after “Anna Karenina,” bad parenting after “Death of a Salesman,” political extremism and even murder after “Julius Caesar”?

The greatness of these works is that they don’t excuse the conduct in question, but they do help explain it as a function of human frailty and misguided motives, sometimes of the most high-minded sort. They expose the back story that otherwise would be hidden from us so that we can, if not sympathize, at least go some way toward understanding what happened. They humanize what would otherwise look like simple stupidity or evil.

When we read the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights as first written, the disjunction between their call for freedom and equality and their maintenance of a slave-holding society is appalling. These documents imply an ideal of which the founders fell abysmally short. But this need not negate the greatness of their vision or incite us to denounce these men as entirely benighted. Both the ideal and the reality are part of the story that needs to be taught.

The humanities teach understanding, but they also teach humility: that we may be wrong and our enemies may be right, that the past can be criticized without our necessarily feeling superior to it, that people’s professed motives are not the whole story, and that the division of the world into oppressors and victims is a simplistic fairy tale.

We speak about the decline of the humanities without fully recognizing how it has hurt our society. If we want our nation to heal and thrive, we must put the study of literature, history and philosophy back at the center of our curricula and require that students study complex works—not just difficult ones.

HKO

College has largely become an over priced trade school. Demonization has been substituted for understanding; virtue signaling has been substituted for humility.

Should the Religion of a Supreme Court Justice Matter?

It is interesting that of nine justices, all but one is either Catholic or Jewish. The ninth, Gorsuch, was raised Catholic but is currently an Episcopalian. Catholics represent 5 of 9 Supreme Court justices but only 23.9% of the population. Jews are a third of the Supreme Court but comprise only 1.4% of the population. Should any of this matter?

Particularly with the concern over the future of Roe v Wade, Catholic over representation deeply concerns many of the left. Jews are far more over represented percentage wise, but it would be deemed far more politically incorrect to express this concern.

Most Catholic Supreme Court justices are conservative, but Sonia Sotomayer is the exception. Joe Biden is a Catholic and was asked about how he reconciled his Catholic faith with the religion’s pro-life stand. He responded that he was not compelled to force his religious faith on his fellow citizens.

This question answers itself. The fact that these two religious groups are so over represented on the court indicates that religious affiliation is an irrelevant concern. The Catholic position on abortion is less indicative than its relationship to the state.

Anti-Catholic sentiment has been part of our political picture since the immigration waves of the early 20^th Century. American Protestants, particularly evangelicals and populists, questioned the loyalty of Catholics to the Vatican over its commitment to the United States. Similarly, Jews were suspected of higher loyalty to the Jewish state.

At the end of the 19^th century Catholics aligned more with the Democrats and the Protestants more with the Republicans, although this reversed in the election of 1896. Evangelical Protestants were comfortable using the power of government to promote its religious and moral agenda. The Protestant religious agenda was critical to the Progressive political movement. It found its way into the legislation of Prohibition, which Catholics did not support.

The American Catholics did not look to the government to be the center of their religious mission. This made them less likely to look to the government to enforce their religious codes on others. This was not due to a superior loyalty to a foreign papist monarch, but to a local community cohesion. The Catholics felt stronger about the separation of church and state than the Protestant pietists. Their parochial schools relied less on public education and government support.

Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayer are both Catholic yet have very different social views and opinions on their role fulfilling the promises of the Constitution. Yet both would likely agree that it would be dangerous to apply even an informal religious litmus test on a Supreme Court nominee.

A justice’s history of rulings prior to his or her nomination is the better indicator of his judicial philosophy. Even descriptions of originalism and activism are often more contingent on the issues than the justice. More than the distraction of these terms is whether the justice will lean more toward the constitutional protections of individual liberty over majoritarian democracy, but even this distinction may be contingent on the issue before them.

In this period of political transition the supremacy of the constitution over personal religious affiliations is far more important.

The Limits of the Meritocracy

From David Brooks at The New York Times, The Strange Failure of the Educated Elite:

Once upon a time, white male Protestants ruled the roost. You got into a fancy school if your father had gone to the fancy school. You got a job at a white-shoe law firm or climbed the corporate ladder if you golfed at the right club.

Then we smashed all that. We replaced a system based on birth with a fairer system based on talent. We opened up the universities and the workplace to Jews, women and minorities. University attendance surged, creating the most educated generation in history. We created a new boomer ethos, which was egalitarian (bluejeans everywhere!), socially conscious (recycling!) and deeply committed to ending bigotry.

You’d think all this would have made the U.S. the best governed nation in history. Instead, inequality rose. Faith in institutions plummeted. Social trust declined. The federal government became dysfunctional and society bitterly divided.

A narrative is emerging. It is that the new meritocratic aristocracy has come to look like every other aristocracy. The members of the educated class use their intellectual, financial and social advantages to pass down privilege to their children, creating a hereditary elite that is ever more insulated from the rest of society. We need to build a meritocracy that is true to its values, truly open to all.

The essential point is this: Those dimwitted, stuck up blue bloods in the old establishment had something we meritocrats lack — a civic consciousness, a sense that we live life embedded in community and nation, that we owe a debt to community and nation and that the essence of the admirable life is community before self.

HKO

The article explains more. The meritocracy sounds good but like all centralized policy is subject to overemphasize some objectives and disregard ingredients that have more influence than they realize. Intelligence may be an important attribute but there are other character traits that may be responsible for the outcome we attribute to intelligence. Steve Jobs was not the result of an IQ test.

It is an excellent article and should be read in full.

Targeted Resentment

How the Democrats Lost the White Working Class– Book review of White Working Class by Joan Williams- reviewed by Joe Queenan in Barron’s:

“The working class…has been asked to swallow a lot of economic pain, while elites have focused on noneconomic issues,” Williams writes. Elsewhere in the book, she adds, “During an era when wealthy white Americans have learned to sympathetically imagine the lives of the poor, people of color, and LGBTQ people, the white working class has been insulted or ignored during precisely the period when their economic fortunes tanked.”

Working-class people view work as a means to an end, not an end in itself. And working-class people do not think there’s anything heroic about making a living by designing apps or shorting Valeant. Heroism is what cops and firemen do.

“Daily life reinforces admiration of the rich but resentment of professionals,” she writes. “Most working-class people have little contact with the truly rich…but they suffer class affronts from professionals every day: the doctor who unthinkingly patronizes the medical technician, the harried office worker who treats the security guard as invisible, the overbooked business traveler who snaps at the TSA agent.”

At a certain point during the past half-century, it became acceptable to sneer at poor white people while expressing bottomless compassion for impoverished minorities. Williams believes this is because members of the elite, professional class do not have to compete with minorities for jobs or status or anything else, so it’s easy for them to be compassionate and understanding. Elites never say nasty things about minorities because they don’t know any.

HKO

The last paragraph strikes me a bit odd. I don’t think the elite compete with poor white people either. The last sentence insinuates that the elites would not like minorities if they knew any. Seems a bit racist. I don’t know if that is an accurate conclusion until I read the book. I find that the elites do spout off against minorities in the privacy of their country club but never in public or in the media.

Generation Z

from Selena Zito, Why the generation after millennials will vote Republican

“They are not as impressed with fame — celebrities, athletes, politicians — as are their predecessors, since fame in their lifetime has become rather easy to obtain with social media and reality TV,” Brauer added.

Generation Z is diverse. They are only 55 percent white and will be the last majority-white generation in America. And they have the most positive outlook toward the nation’s growing diversity of any previous generation.

Generation Z is a product of 9/11, global terrorism, school shootings, perpetual wars, the Great Recession, high unemployment and constant budget cuts. Because of all that, they are cautious, even fearful, of an uncertain world and economy. Security and safety are very important to them, as they have grown up in such an unstable society.

They are distrustful of “big” employers because they’ve seen good people, who did all the right things, get laid off from longstanding jobs and careers. They are cautious with finances, always looking for the best deals and the best value.

HKO

Selena Zito’s analytic creds are rising with me. Interesting trend in youth voting… and they like Trump.