It's all about appearances

The Friday Dec 20th front page of the Detroit News carried the beginning of an editorial by editorial editor Nolan Finley titled "Trump is no John Dingell" to which I say thank goodness. For why I say that,see below. The subtitle is "Congressman was something Trump isn't: a gentleman."

Mr Finley was referring to a remark Trump made that perhaps the deceased Mr Dingell was 'looking up" at us from hell.  Yes, in street talk it was a cheap shot. I think Trump should have ignored the whole thing about Debbie Dingell supporting the President's impeachment despite the fact that president Trump lauded Mr Dingell's service upon his death.

That not everyone we are nice to will return the niceties is a fact we all experience. Trump does need to ignore the petty stuff and focus on what is important to the voters. What I'm focusing on is what Nolan Finley is focusing on: appearances.

To Finley, Dingell appears to be the gentleman while Trump is the uncouth cad. But I see Trump being very gentlemanly to those who don't attack him. This brings me to a long held observation of mine: that both parties have been playing the game called  'I'll pretend you are a morally astute person if you'll pretend I am. Thus we can both appear to be respectful.'

The only trouble is, the democrats seldom practiced it while the republicans foolishly played along. This in turn gave the Democrats the impression that they own the moral high ground and the Republicans are just me too-ers, which for along time, they were.

 Trump refuses to play that game. While he isn't challenging their claims to the moral high ground, his ignoring of those claims is driving them nuts. His sin? He's no longer pretending the progressives  are the good guys i.e. he's destroying their appearances of  moral goodness and political caring. Their world of appearances isn't working any more.

And that's why they hate him and those who voted for him.

Why I was no fan of Mr Dingell see this post by Danial Greenfield.

More on appearances soon.

Why the unceasing push to oust President Trump. Part 1.

Since president Trump's election what we've been seeing in the media and the Democrat party is a total revolt against him personally. Trump was elected legally by winning more electoral votes than Hillary just as our Constitution requires.

But this legal election was and still is unacceptable to the entire Democrat Party leadership. Even though Democrats have always considered Republican presidential wins a disaster for their party, they nevertheless abided by the outcome and focused on the next election.

Not this time.

So what is it  the Democrats are afraid of? Why can't they wait until the next election whether it be 4 or 8 years? Why does Trump need to be so feverishly ousted now"

Could it be because they were so close to cementing their socialist dictatorship with Hillary as leader that they now think they may never be this close again?  After all, president Obama had spent 8 years conditioning  the American people to a new, more austere normal of 2% or less GDP growth and  weakening our military and strengthening our enemies. The population was being conditioned to accept the Progressives' 'tough love' As Sen Dianne Feinstein once put it.

Or could it be the fear that the American people are rejecting their socialist ideology and must not be allowed to make that choice again by reelecting Trump to a second term? I think this is definitely a big part of it.

These Democrats seem to be focused on the expediency of the immediate moment with "impeach him by any means necessary" while ignoring long range consequences like losing future elections. It's what pragmatism has taught them and teaches students today.

Speaking about the nature of the concrete bound mentality novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand wrote:

"This kind of psycho-epistemology (concrete bound, unprincipled thinking-ME) works so long as no part of it is challenged. but all hell breaks lose when it is--because what is threatened then is not a particular idea, but that mind's whole structure. The hell ranges from fear to resentment to stubborn evasion to hostility to panic to malice to hatred."*

This is what we've been seeing since November 2016.

But why now and why is Nancy Pelosi all in for impeachment when she was originally against it? Again Rand explains"

"It is a conspiracy, not of men, but of basic premises--and the power directing it is logic: if, at the desperate stage of a losing battle, some men (Nadler, Schiff, et al-ME) point to a road logically necessitated by their basic premises, those who share those premises (Pelosi et al-ME) will rush to follow."**

So what premises are the Democrats following? We know the Democrat Party has been taken over by the Progressive movement which has no respect for American individualism but rather worships collectivism. It's the idea that the sovereign power lies with the state i.e. the government then the individual is the right-less subject of the state which is the voice of the people.

So the premises are 1, statism, all forms of authoritarianism, 2, pragmatism, the range of the moment to hell with consequences thinking, and 3, sacrifice, the surrender of values for the sake of surrendering them which means the government gets to force us to make the sacrifices it thinks we should make.

In closing I think the Democrats are making a mistake in thinking the Trump administration is diametrically opposed to their statist ideology. He isn't. He still thinks Eminent Domain is a good idea. He also thinks all America's problems are the result of irrational deals. What he does not understand is that all those deals that hurt American citizens are there by design. Its' what the Progressives want: the US population to be dependent on them for most everything.

* Pg 40 in Rand's essay The Missing Link in her book Philosophy: Who Needs It. still in print.

**Pg 103 in Rand's essay An Untitled Letter also in Philosophy: Who Needs It.

Two bad ideas

The Sunday  Dec 8th Detroit Free Press had a oped by Freep writer Nancy Kaffar titled "How Michigan can make right-to-read suit go away."It says:

" The students filed suit in 2016, asking a federal court to recognize that a right to literacy is implicit in the U.S. Constitution and integral to participation in a democracy. They contend that the Detroit school district's failures are so widespread and so consistent that it's clear the system is at fault, and that it's up to the state to fix it."

There are several bad ideas in that paragraph not the least of which is the notion that America is a democracy. The founders wanted little to do with a democracy. They knew from history that democracies always collapsed into some form of dictatorship. They wanted a Constitutional Republic where the government was limited to a list of precise powers enumerated in a written Constitution.

There is some debate about the alleged difference between a 'pure democracy' and a republic where representatives are elected by a democratic vote. It's been my understanding that in a 'pure democracy' everything can be put up to a vote, where a majority can vote away the rights of minorities.

This was tried in ancient Athens and led to its collapse. Our founders knew this. To prevent majority rule from voting away the rights of minorities they knew they had to put restrictions on what may and may not be put up for a vote. To their credit, that's where the concept of a constitution devoted to the protection of individual rights came in.

But since those days our government has been tirelessly trying to remove those limits on its powers through the use of regulations. And it's been successful to the point where the government can now do almost anything it wants through regulations while us citizens can't budge without getting permission from permission grantors aka regulators, controllers, and various planning commissions.

In closing the issue of democracy I want to point out how obvious are the attempts by Progressives to do away with those constitutional restrictions on the government's power.

We can see how the Democrats have been trying to limit (regulate) free speech, freedom of association, do away with religious freedom, the second amendment's right to keep and bear arms and the 4th amendment's right to privacy. And by constantly referring to our nation as a democracy, today's intellectuals will wipe out in the minds of the young the existence of a constitutional republic and thus vote away those constitutional restrictions.

Now about that law suit by the students. They are right in attacking the utter failure of the government controlled Detroit school system. It is a disgrace. But they are wrong in seeking a Constitutional right to literacy.

There can be no such thing as a right to a thing before one does something to earn it by either buying it, receiving it as a gift or creating it yourself. A right is a government protection to the freedom of action, the freedom to pursue one's own life, liberty and one's own happiness. A right does not mean the government must provide one with those things.

And so it is with education. If one has a right to be taught to read then someone must be forced to teach him. It is true that a child needs to be taught by his elders how to survive and reading is just one of the skills needed.

 But if the government contracted with the people to educate students and have failed to do so then the governmentis guilty of a breach of contract, a violation of students and parents rights for which they-in government-need to be punished. But government isn't going to punish itself.

So if we want a better educational system we need to get government out of it completely. Just as government is not an economic entity and cannot regulate an economy without disastrous results, so government is also not an educational entity and cannot produce educated students without equally disastrous results.

Government is an institution of legalized force. By its nature it will always want to grow itself. When mixed with education it will teach all its students the value of government, how government control and government money will be the solution to all of their future problems.

The students then as adults will have been indoctrinated with the notion that when something goes wrong the proper action will be to turn to government and cry "do something!" Just what the government craves. Now is the time to start auctioning off one school or district at a time to private  entities whether for profit or non-profit, doesn't matter. But I caution the students to reconsider making reading a Constitutional Right to be forced on teachers who in reality want and enjoy teaching.

The best corrective measure for reading failure is to privatize all of education. The sooner the better.