Women and Careers and Children and Overpopulation

One of the standard memes of the feminist movement is the marginalization of childbearing. Educated evolved women are so much better than barefoot and pregnant: they can have careers; they can be, as with Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex, "independent women."

It is without doubt a wonderful thing in our age that well-born women have choices. They are not, as they used to be, mere chattels in some "household." They are not, as they used to be, mere partners in some bourgeois household. But then we get to this, in The Atlantic's review of a collection of essays, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision not to have Kids.

Not having children isn't selfish. Not having children is a perfectly rational and reasonable response given that humans are essentially parasites on the face of a perfectly lovely and well-balanced planet, ploughing through its natural resources, eradicating its endangered species, and ruining its most wonderful landscapes. This might sound misanthropic, and it is, but it is also true.

Well, yes. If you have decided that humans are parasites, etc., then who would want to have children?

But I contest the "rational and reasonable" line. All religious and ideological notions are really rationalizations of a world view. They are not science; they are attempts to understand the mystery and the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. That is why in The Faith Instinct Nicholas Wade writes that no human society we know of has ever done without religion. I would include in the notion of "religion" our modern secular religions from rationalism to socialism to feminism to environmentalism.

That's where that stuff about "parasites on the face of a perfectly lovely and well-balanced planet" comes from. It comes from the adaptation of the Christian doctrine of sin and salvation for the purposes of the salvific secular religion of environmentalism. The "rational and reasonable" line comes after you have made the religious leap of faith into the need to save the planet from its evil human "parasites." And from that it's just a small step for woman to decide that having children is a terrible thing to do.

Look, I believe in freedom. I believe that people should be allowed to make mistakes without government stepping in with law enforcement officials and their court orders or SJWs stepping in with their naming and shaming.

But to me this notion of educated women being too good for bearing and raising children is self-serving rubbish. Quite simply, if you are not having children then you are voting you and yours off the planet. How smart and educated is that?

For sure, it may be that we humans are parasites. It may be that our activities may destroy some life on the planet. Maybe. What is almost certain is that, give a couple of million years or so, humans will go the way of all other species since time began: to extinction. That is what the theory of natural selection means.

Oh and by the way: the great extinctions in the past have not extinguished all life on the planet. Some life has always survived. When we talk about saving the planet we are really talking about saving it for ourselves.

Meanwhile we are left wondering about the meaning of life and the mystery of the universe.

But back to religion. One thing that is striking about religions, prior to the modern secular religions, was how pro-natal they were. Go forth and multiply; prohibition of homosexuality. What could be going on?

How about this. Any world view or religion that does not direct humans, male and female, towards procreation may not be long for this world. One thinks immediately about the Shakers. Fabuloso religion and all that. But the Shakers died out, because they preached celibacy. says Wiki:

Shakers were celibate; procreation was forbidden after they joined the society (except for women who were already pregnant at admission).

The result, of course, is that there aren't any Shakers around these days, not so you'd notice. The Mormons, on the other hand, are strongly pro-natal, and they are growing all around the world.

Could it be that all the non-natal religions that flourished down the ages are now, so to speak, extinct? And may that happen to liberalism, environmentalism, feminism, etc.?

Let me just close with the words of liberal Christian Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. He says you gotta have both. Not just breeding, not just noble thoughts, but both. Here is how I put it in An American Manifesto.

First, we recognize the importance of ordinary human flourishing: forming families, owning property, doing it for the children. Second, we recognize that we all search for something higher and fuller.

The problem with Ayn Rand's "virtue of selfishness" is that it misses out on the higher and fuller. The problem with what Rodney Stark calls "upper-class asceticism" is that it misses out on ordinary human flourishing. You gotta have both or you are not long for this world.

The feminists at The Atlantic think that the only thing that matters is the higher and fuller bit. It's higher and fuller, on their account, to rise above mere reproduction and have a career, or do something creative, or be an activist fighting for Anita Sarkeesian's "collective liberation for all women."

And as for overpopulation, the bane of the early 20th century eugenicists and right-on liberals ever since, there is this little problem. Right now in Russia, in China, in Europe, in Japan, women are having less than 2.1 children per lifetime. That is the road to social and cultural extinction, and I, for one, want none of it.

So don't say I didn't warn you.

Tie Clintons and Dems to the Rich, Writes Jay Cost

In the good old days, writes Jay Cost, the Democrats were for the little guy and the Republicans for the fat cats.

It used to be that the Republicans were the party of big business and Democrats the party of organized labor. The GOP charged that the Democrats were a bunch of socialists, and the Democrats responded that the GOP was a pack of plutocrats. But about 40 years ago, things started to change; labor began to decline, and new campaign finance laws allowed business to subsidize politics more thoroughly. In the 1980s, the Democrats responded by courting business energetically—yet they never ditched their claim that the GOP alone is elitist.

Nobody has done this better than the Clintons and their Clinton foundation which has hoovered up money from the rich and powerful all over the world. And yet Hillary Clinton has opened her campaign with the statement that

Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion.

 The trouble is that while Republicans have argued against Big Government, Democrats have defined that as arguing against Social Security, Medicare and help for the downtrodden.

Republicans have signally failed to define Big Government as the friend of the 1%.

But what about corporate tax payouts? Or farm subsidies for the largest agribusinesses? Or regulations that effectively subsidize big companies by crowding out competitors? These issues would put Democrats in a quandary, for they would force Democratic candidates to defend the big-government programs that favor not the poor or the middle class, but the social and economic elites who have purchased seats at their party’s table.

Jefferson and Jackson built the Democratic Party on the idea that "big government inevitably favors the most powerful interests in society." Ronald Reagan ran on the same premise.

Jay Cost proposes that Hillary Clinton is offering the presidency on a platter to a Republican Party that could define her has the handmaiden of the rich and powerful.

And really why not? Big business, from Gates and Buffett to the high tech Tim Scotts and Google guys are all in the pocket of the Democrats. What's not to like about a Republican Party that scorns Big Business and the Clintons as out of touch elitists -- and their little media dogs too?

Yeah! Why not?

Because the dirty little secret is that the big programs in Big Government are in fact programs for the middle class: Social Security and Medicare. See usgovernmentspending.com for details.

Sure, there are tons of corporate welfare programs sucking billions out of the government and the economy. But the real money is in middle-class entitlements. And nobody wants to do anything about them, except crazed Republicans like small-town guy Paul Ryan that want them reformed before they run out of money.

I mean, are Republicans dumb or something? Why would anyone try to reform the entitlements before they had actually bankrupted the country and shot grandma off a cliff?

Dems' Cringe-worthy Hunt for White Working-Class Votes

One of the staples of modern political life is the cringe-worthy attempt of some Republican politician to appeal to black and/or Hispanic voters. Republicans would like to appeal to blacks and Hispanics but they don't know where to start.

The other side of the coin is the cringe-worthy attempt by the Democratic Party to appeal to the white working class, particularly the male white working class. That's what What's the Matter with Kansas was all about. How could the white working class vote for the dastardly country-club Republicans when everybody knows that the folks that really care about the white working class live in the Democratic Party. Here's liberal loyalist Doyle McManus at the LA Times faithfully reporting on the latest Democratic efforts to recapture the white working class.

Democrats were once the party of the white working man — but that was a long time ago.

In the 2012 presidential election, Barack Obama won only one-third of the votes of white working-class men, a modern-day low. Mitt Romney, who didn't seem much like a blue-collar guy, swept the votes of those working stiffs by a huge margin.

And it got worse in 2014. Apparently, "some white noncollege voters have come to view Democrats as a party that cares about women and minorities more than it cares about them." No kidding!

So what's the solution. It's Hillary Clinton. No kidding!

Sainted Hillary is, first of all, doing the populist thing by railing at Wall Street. Says she: "And there's something wrong when hedge fund managers pay lower tax rates than nurses."

But that's not all. Saint Hillary is also calling for a cleanup in government. She "called last week for outlawing campaign spending by undisclosed donors, 'even if that takes a constitutional amendment.'"

That last sound bite, of course, is about the great white whale of Democratic concerns, the outrageous idea, approved by the US Supreme Court in Citizens United, that conservatives ought to be allowed to band together in corporations and fund videos critical of Hillary Clinton.

Good luck with all that, fellas.

But let us step back and think a little. How was it that the liberals and the Democrats, staunch protectors of the working stiff in the Great Depression, came to lose their support?

Was it a conspiracy? Mere stupidity? The evil Frankfurt School? Or what?

I think that the First Cause was civil rights. For liberals ever since the 1960s, the fight for black civil rights defines who they are. Bliss it was to live in that time when liberals held off the racist, sexist, homophobic bigots in the Republican Party and passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In fact, of course, Republicans also voted for the civil rights acts. It was Southern Democrats that voted against them.

Unfortunately the civil rights revolution and the notion of equal opportunity was followed by Affirmative Action and de-facto quotas in government hiring. Nobody seemed to realize that the burden of this policy would fall not on evil Southern white bigots and the sons of slaveowners but on working class whites in the North: Irish and Italian ethnics that probably arrived in the US in the 19th century after the end of slavery.

But if you were a white working-class man you'd probably notice that it suddenly became much harder to get hired on at the local police or fire department. Because Affirmative Action.

These days it's even worse for the white working class because you need academic credentials to get a police or fire department job. Sons of white professionals are lining up for those lifer government jobs.

Then there was forced busing, a gentry liberal idea to bus children across town so that schools would be properly racially integrated. The Irish in South Boston took extreme exception to this notion.

Then there was Archie Bunker. When Norman Lear adapted the British series Till Death Do Us Part from London to Queens in New York City in 1971 he probably wasn't planning to make Archie Bunker a stereotype for white bigotry and racism. But he did. And he made it seem as though the white working class was responsible for all the racial sins of the world, and so he ended up loading all the sins of the eternal white racist ruling class upon a simple union worker on a loading dock in Queens.

By the end of the 1970s, every liberal knew to sneer at the white working class, and the die was cast.

But did the Dems have to demonize the white working class? Probably not, but that's the way it turned out. Perhaps it was inevitable. If you are going to concentrate on delivering benefits to women and minorities, then you probably find that you have to demonize the old beneficiaries of your political power, the white ethnic working class.

Will the Dems be able to recover in 2016 some of the ground lost in 50 years of advancing the interests of women and minorities? Probably. But if they pander to the white working class, won't that dilute their message to the other victims?

Steve Sailer likes to describe the Democratic Party as a Coalition of the Fringes. Their problem is that each Fringe in the coalition is competing for the loot with the other Fringes. You have to get them to focus on an external enemy, or they will start to fight among themselves. Will Wall Street, greedy bankers, and the horror of conservatives banding together to commit politics really get the goat of the white working class?

I wonder.

A Presidential Campaign is for the Young and Hungry

If there is one thing that's obvious about Hillary Clinton's campaign for President of the United States and her recent trip to Iowa it is that it is old and tired.

It makes you think of a long-established corporation, headed by a CEO that's worked his way up, marketing yet another product. Or maybe a long established TV network pushing out a new sitcom on "Linear TV" in a world going Netflix.

The point is that Hillary Clinton is the head of a political machine that's at least 20 years old. The machine is full of lifers jockeying for position and backbiting and gaming the system just like the employees in any corporate or government bureaucracy. It's Clinton's job to keep the machine going, and keep the benefits going for the lifers.

That's not the way that politics works. A political campaign is more like a revolutionary movement or a business startup. A charismatic leader gathers young and energetic people around him. They work insane hours and come up with amazing new ideas and manage to achieve the impossible. Suddenly it all catches fire and takes the world by storm.

Think Barack Obama and 2008 and all the talk about Data. His campaign pushed way out in front on using the internet and Big Data to tailor its message and reach more voters. But you hear now that the GOP has caught up and reckons that one of the reasons it won the the US Senate last fall was Data.

Of course there are all kinds of other problems with the Clinton campaign. One of them is that the Democratic agenda over the last decade had been bad for the ordinary unorganized middle class. The whole Democratic and liberal politics revolves around organizing people into interest groups and servicing them as clients of the political system. If you are not an established interest, like a corporation or an interest or an approved victim group, then you don't have a seat at the table.

The whole point of politics down the ages has been to organize people into a political army to fight for political power and then reward them with the spoils of victory. The whole point of capitalism in the last 500 years has been to limit that predatory approach to human cooperation and governance and encourage and reward people to serve their fellow humans outside the force-field of government and politics.

The question is: can anyone persuade a majority of the American people to abandon the apparent safety of clientage and entitlement for the uncertainty of freedom and responsible individualism?

Who knows?

Yes, But Suppose It's the Democrats in Trouble

Everyone who is anyone likes to pontificate about the divisions of the Republicans and their narrow demographics. Why, pretty soon only dead white males will be voting for Republicans!

Of course, that's silly ruling-class groupthink, and mind-numbed robots believing their own talking points. The truth is that the Republican Party is not the party of the rich: billionaires like Gates and Buffett and Cook make it perfectly clear that they are liberals. The Republican Party is not the party of the whites; it is simply the party of people that think of themselves as typical Americans, people that don't put a hyphen in front of their American identity, as in African- Jewish- Latino- Gay- Evolved-American. And that's leaving out the people that scorn the hyphen and think themselves as just, e.g., feminists.

Steve Sailer cunningly calls the Democratic Party the Coalition of the Fringes.

As long as Democrats keeps assuming that 2016 is of course Hillary’s Turn, both personally and as the Designated First Woman President, that kicks a lot of cans down the road for the Democrats in keeping their Coalition of the Fringes from turning to full circular firing squad mode on each other quite yet.

Now Richard Fernandez has weighed in. He quotes  Jamelle Boule of Slate who thinks that liberals need Hillary to win in 2016 and nail down the "gains" from the Obama years.

Hillary alone has a chance of winning and she must win in order to preserve the gains of the Obama era and second, only Hillary the figurehead can hold together a Democratic party seriously split by Obama’s shift to the Left.

Then, Fernandez reminds us, there are the pardons that will be needed, and Hillary is probably the only candidate that can bring the Jews back to the fold.

She must function like a monarch, a unifying figurehead who will keep all the Big Tent’s identity groups from ripping each other’s guts out over the last remaining piles of other people’s money.

Hello Chicago where the money has already run out; they just haven't hit the wall yet.

In my view it is better to think of the Democrat coalition as the Coalition of the Demented. Here we are, after two hundred years of Deirdre McCloskey's "Great Enrichment" founded on capitalism, limited government, and responsible individualism, and every group in the Coalition of the Demented insists that the whole thing has been a great mistake, or at least desperately flawed and needing radical change.

Ruling-class liberals say that it will all go to ruin unless they are there on the ramparts holding out against the barbarian Robber Barons. Feminists say that we need to defeat the patriarchy and liberate women from marriage and children or we will all go to ruin. Workers say that we need to hog-tie employers or we will all go to ruin. Minority race-baiters say we must privilege minorities or we will all go to ruin. Environmentalists say we must stop using fossil fuels or we will all go to ruin.

How is it possible that these demented souls are not laughed out of court? And how come that Hispanics and blacks don't get that environmentalism is taking money directly out of their pockets in high electricity rates and fewer jobs? How long before they get that the anti-natalism of the feminists goes against everything they instinctively feel about family?

The answer is: not until they stop thinking of themselves as hyphenated Americans and start thinking of themselves as typical Americans. Obviously our liberal friends will fight hand-to-hand to keep all these people on the fringes, experiencing themselves as victims and Fringe-Americans.

Here's the thing. We conservatives and Republicans have got to get our story out. That this Great Enrichment is the most amazing miracle ever. That capitalism is the best thing since sliced bread. That the responsible individual of the modern era is an astonishing person that has pacified the world. That big government is a rolling disaster that screws up everything. That government is a temptation for bullies to bully. And so on.

My point is this. How in the world have we got to a point where the people that deny the marvel of the Great Enrichment are the dominant influence on the culture? How could they ever have persuaded us?

Never mind. Let us not think about what has gone wrong. Let us think of what to do next.

It is our job and our destiny to push back against the madness of the Coalition of the Demented and persuade good people to accept what is right in front of their eyes: that this world is a wonderful world, and we should do all we can to preserve its wonders and stop wrecking it.

Like I keep saying: Obama and his left turn are the biggest gift to typical Americans that believe in responsible individualism. Because Americans have, right in front of their eyes, that liberalism doesn't work, and that liberals don't care about people like them.

Hiding from the Truth on: Government is Force

If you haven't got that I have a real thing about "Government is force" then now is the time to get it.

Many liberals don't get it, and I understand why. If you read The New York Times and listen to NPR you'd easily get the impression that government is a matter of nice librarians trying to help our kids.

Ruling classes tend to do this sort of thing. They don't like to look at the dirtier side of political power, and they don't want you to do that either. They'd rather concentrate on telling you about the wonderful things their kindly librarians are doing for the people.

Now comes a delicious article from Robert Tracinski at The Federalist: "The Party of Coercion Doesn't Understand It." Says he:

[Y]ou would think they would have highly developed thoughts about what a law is and how laws are actually enforced.

But you would be wrong.

Sally Kohn recently argued, bizarrely [at Talking Points Memo], that law as such is not coercive.

But, of course, it serves the liberal purpose not to think too deeply about the subject. If they ever thought about how government is force and law is coercive they would find it more difficult to justify new government programs and coercions.

I'm slowly reading Jürgen Habermas' Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy at the gym. And he has the same problem as Sally Kohn.

Habermas developed a beautiful idea in The Theory of Communicative Action that, in a world of big business and big government with their dominatory systems, we need a place free of domination where people can communicate by exchanging truth values with sincerity and free of the threat of force.

But when he starts to write about his discourse ethic in the context of law and democracy he seems to forget that law and democratic politics are about coercion and domination. He talks, on page 314, about the long struggle to bring issues such as "the question of spousal abuse or the question of day-care facilities for the children of working parents" to public notice and then finally "worked into legislative proposals and binding decisions."

In fact, such issues are never discussed according to Habermas' ideas about discourse ethics.  Great public issues are always promoted as monstrous public scandals and injustices. The opposition is always treated as beneath contempt. And, of course, the "binding decision" is a majority vote that always involves log-rolling as explained in Buchanan and Tullock's The Calculus of Consent where the majority is created by buying the votes of the legislators on the fence, and then rolls over the minority and forces the majority decision on the minority.

Suits at law also have the color of coercion. You go to law when you feel you have been damaged by another person, and you are trying to persuade the government's law courts to agree with you and force your opponent to compensate you for the tort you believe he has committed.

After criticizing liberal cluelessness on coercion for a few hundred words, Robert Tracinski comes to this:

This is precisely why we need a principle that helps us figure out what really is coercion, who is the aggressor and who isn’t, and when force is permitted to protect us against an aggressor. If only there were some principle to determine when government force is legitimate and when it is not, a principle long recognized in common law and extensively examined by political philosophers. If only someone were to write this down in a document. Something like, “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men.”

Liberals don't want to do this, because pretty obviously it would go against them. Does the government have the right to force you to send your kid to school? Does it have the right to harass you if you let your kid play in the park unsupervised? Does the government have the right to force everyone to pay for day-care for working parents?

When you look at political issues in that way it puts a different color on them. And liberals would rather not have any non-liberal view of political issues freely and openly discussed in America. 

Ted Cruz's Talking Points at the NRA Convention

If you are running for president there are two sides to the campaign. There is detailed development of granular policy analysts and policies. Then there is the sound-bite campaign, the carefully prepared talking points, the tape that the candidate rolls when he's asked a question.

So here's Ted Cruz, delighted to be at the NRA Convention in Nashville, TN, answering questions from a friendly reporter, PJTV's Amber Smith. Of course, he's inspired by the energy and the passion of the people at the NRA Convention, and millions of Americans across the country.

We've gotta get back to the commonsense principles the country was built on, the free market principles and constitutional liberties that made America great...

Here's what Cruz has to say to a softball question about "trust."

At the end of the day trust comes from two things: Do you tell the truth and do you do what you say you're gonna do?

Then he lays out his three point program:

1. Bring back jobs, growth, opportunity.
2. Defend constitutional liberties.
3. Restore American leadership in the world.

Here's how he actually laid it out.

I think the central challenge in this next election is to reignite the promise of America, turn that around, and I think there are three broad principles that, if we follow, will do exactly that: #1 we gotta bring back jobs and growth and opportunity, get back to small businesses growing, robust opp[ortunities], so that young people, when they come out of school, aren't up to their eyeballs in debt, scared if they're gonna get a job, worried if they'll be a barista at Starbucks, and not gaining skills for their career. We gotta get back to where young people come out of school and they got three, four, five job opportunities. And the way you do that is tax reform and regulatory reform. I'm running on a simple flat tax, so that every American can fill out his or her taxes on a postcard, and we can abolish the IRS. And regulatory reform: getting the federal regulators off the back of small businesses. The most important regulatory reform? We need to repeal every word of Obamacare. 

That's step #1. Step #2 is defending our constitutional liberties which the federal government has been assaulting in an unprecedented manner.

And then step #3 is we need to restore America's leadership in the world. Get back to [an] America where our friends trust us and our enemies fear us.

 Interesting. He seems to be pitching to small business moms and dads that are worried about their businesses, the regulatory nightmare, the strangulation of Obamacare, and the future of their college-bound children. Really, he's not even beginning to make a pitch for the great unwashed middle. Not yet.

And that makes sense, because at this stage of the campaign you are looking to hook up with voters that are fit to be tied by the Obama years.

And yet somewhere in the campaign are the policy guys that are working up the granular details of a future Cruz administration. What are they going to do about the financial system and the financial repression since the Crash of 2008? What are they going to do about labor law and the out of control NLRB? What about the FCC and internet regulation? What about the FEC and election regulation? What are they going to do about the environment and climate change and what are they going to do about the use of the federal government to steam-roller the social justice agenda of the left-liberal feminist and gay groups? What about immigration, and restoring the rule of law in the treatment of illegal immigrants. What about race relations? Do they have the balls to roll back the racist "diversity" agenda? To be continued...

In the days to come we'll take a look at the talking points of the other Republican candidates.