COUNTERFEIT COMPASSION: The Failure of Liberal Economic Policy

Taxes -  Regulations -  Illegal Immigration   -Minimum Wage  -  Environmental Policies   

 Since I'm about as obtuse as it's possible to be about things economic, I'm surprised to find myself understanding a few things and wanting to write about them.   I guess it was the Trump Presidency and the frequent repititions I'd hear about his economic successes, from him and from conservatives, that finally made a few things make sense for the first time.  (No way I'd ever have become a billionaire.)

SO. Reducing taxes and regulations on business brought back businesses that had left the country because of high taxes, allowed those in the country to hire more employees and expand their producion and sales.  

OK so far?  

That reduced the unemployment numbers enormously, the lowest for many years, and most tellingly among minorities.   A great sucdcess one would think.  Conservative economics works, it does what the liberals say they want to do but they actually have the opposite effect,.   Their high taxes drive businesses out of the country or at least force them to cut back on hiring and expansion.  Unemployment goes up.  

There's also a big paradoxical benefit that I'd never heard before:   MORE money flows into the government through taxesw when these policies are in place than when liberal policies are in place.  Cuz the expansion of business bringing more profits means more taxes, not higher taxes, more taxes.  Golly wow, wouldn't you think the liberals would learn a lesson from this?  Why don't they?:  Why is Biden now doing the exact opposite of what Trump showed works?  

Oh I suppose they'll just say it's all a lie.  Sigh.

There are lots of reasons to want to have a protected border but one big one is that illegal immogrants take jobs away from unskilled American workers.   Something I hadn't known was that Cesar Chavez opposed illegal immigration because they took jobs from the members of his Farm Workers union.  So why do liberals want to do this to American labor?   

Another policy that kills jobs for unskilled labor is the minimum wage, so dear to the hearts of liberals.  I understood that such a law forces businesses to cut back, can even drive some out of business altogether, which isn't good for the employment statistics.  Now I've been hearing from some black pundits like Larry Elder how it deprives young blacks of entry level work opportunities, prevents them from finding unskilled work because businesses aren't going to pay such high wages for that work.  These are young people just entering the work force who don't have families to support, most living with their parents.  They need the experience of holding a job more than anything else and are now being deprived of that normal opportunity to learn in order to move up as they acquire skills and work habits.  On a recent You Tube snippet of his show Elder played an old clip of economist Milton Friedman saying that the minimum wage is the most "anti-negro policy ever" or words to that effect. 

You'd think SOME liberals would wake up, wouldn't you?  Or are their motives in fact not what they claim they are? .  

Oh and shutting down that gas pipeline.  Supposed to be better for the environment?  But it turns out it takes thousands of trucks polluting the envornment to transport the gas that had been transported more cleanly in the pipeline.   So implementing regulations they intend to be good for the environment actually increases the carbon footprint so greatly it would be laughable if it were not so painful.  I guess putting all those truck drivers to work is a tgood thing at least.  

And then they shut down our own energy production for similarly wrongheaded good intentions which means the loss of thousands of jobs and the loss of the energy independence Trump had achieved, making us dependent again on foreign oil supply.  

And all that is just NORMAL liberal economic stupidity although it is trending into the Marxist influence that is growing today on the Left..  

LIVING THE CHEAT: We Aren't Animals and This World Is Not All There Is

In this fallen world the Evil One is still Prince and under his rule humanity stumbles around in the dark, accumulating sins against God and suffering the consequences, most mistaking this life for all there is.   

Some even revel in it.  Carl Sagan introduced his 1980 TV series “Cosmos”with this famous line:  “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be.  Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us . . . .    We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.“

To which I say a hearty “Bah!  Humbug!”

And then there was Darwin who said  “There is grandeur in this view of life . . .  [that]  from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful  and wonderful have been and are being evolved.”   He does suggest a possible origin by a Creator but since that wouldn’t  be the biblical Creator and today it’s all nothing but chemistry anyway I give it the same Bah-humbug. 

There are clues in life that we were made for something better than a meaningless existence in a vast cold universe of burning rocks, no matter how prettily they twinkle in the night sky.    I’m thinking of the human soul that is deeply affected by, say, Pavarotti singing “Nessun Dorma” as you can see from quite a number of You Tube “First Time Reaction” videos, that I mention in a previous post.    Many things other than music also provoke deep feelings -- yes even the grandeur of the Cosmos and biological life --  but in my own experience it was music that brought this home to me years ago.  I would cry hearing a Mozart symphony, or especially Handel’s Messiah, because it seemed to me that there is nothing in this life that deserves such glorious expression.   How can there be such music when there is no reality to which it corresponds?   How can we be capable of such exalted feelings without anything in reality worthy of them?   

That was before I believed in God of course.  The thing is, once you know that there is nothing in this life that deserves such grand celebrations, that is,  if the Cosmos is all there is and we evolved from fish, it feels like a cheat.   It IS a cheat.  Because if this IS all there is then it is a huge cheat, a sick joke on the human race.  When we are given these pathetic counterfeits of greatness and grandeur as worthy of our deepest feelings it’s like trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear as the Proverb puts it.  

Then too, how do we talk ourselves into this common idea that we, these complex creatures what are way overqualified for mere existence in the physical universe, live that empty existence and then just go out like a light?  I don’t know for sure what Dylan Thomas had in mind when he wrote “Do not go gentle into that good night; rage, rage against the dying of the light,” but it’s always hit me as a protest against the cheat, the abysmal insult, of the idea of such a meaning-maker being extinguished at death.  Since he calls it a “good” night I’m unsure if he meant that but in my opinion he should have meant it.    

Shakespeare as usual nailed it:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

 

Absurdly we tell ourselves it’s honest, courageous, grown-up of us to accept this fate as reality itself.    Or we rationalize our complex meaning-making minds as sufficient unto themselves, though merely accidentally coughed up out of the chemical soup of the universe.   Some of us are just weak, it’s understandable if we have to invent a fantasy,  manage to find a meaning in what is only our own solipsistic invention that corresponds to no external reality.   But that’s OK, we’re good at doing that and we should be content with it.  Or something like that.   The great cheat of it can be denied by such rationalizations.    Religion is a crutch and all that.    Where’s the evidence?  they demand.      

Oh to pry even one person loose from these tawdry imitations at life so many of us have taken for granted as our lot.

NO, we are worth far far more than that.   We are an extravagantly over-designed being if the only point of it all is physical and chemical, and our experience of it can be cynically summed up as “Life is hard and then you die.”   We have plenty of pleasures, happiness, fun in this life, and plenty of worthwhile things to do, but we were made for more than the best that is possible here, if the Cosmos is all there is and ever was.

But the biblical God says otherwise:

What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour.

Man that is in honour, and understandeth not, is like the beasts that perish

Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.  (Genesis 9:6)

And from the hymn “O Holy Night”  -- “Then He appeared and the soul knew its worth.”

 You are an immortal soul.  You are not going to be snuffed out like a candle at death.  You will live on for eternity either in heaven or in hell. 

The Answer as Usual is No, Judgment is Picking Up Steam, Roaring Toward Us Like a Freight Train

 So it's pretty clear, isn't it, that the answer to the title question of the previous post is NO.  Oh we COULD, it's not impossible in principle, it's just impossible given the way people think these days.  Even going back to women's covering our heads in church, which is where I keep thinking it would have to start, is hardly likely, and if that is what would have to happen first none of the rest of it is going to happen.   Oh I still hope and pray for that, I'd love to be proved wrong, but the resistance to that one piece of scripture is adamant in my experience.  They got thtmselves convinced of the culture interpretation.  The author of that interpretation is a Christian of impeccable integrity.  Or they are the Pentecostals who insist on long hair but scorn the covering and do it with withering contempt for any other point of view.   And I got the accusation of "legalist" too of course.  No matter how good the credentials of those who have read it as I now do, no matter how good the reasoning in support ot it, the answer is ...   well, in my experience the answer is mockery and sarcasm.   

God could still turn the tide but it doesn't look like He wants to.   And again, if we don't return to that simple principle of male headship how can we expect to get anywhere on the subject of gay marriage, just to mention the most prominent issue.   Yes it probablly is the linch pin.  It came out of the wagon wheel and the wheel has wobbled on without it but eventually it has to fall off.   It would be SO easy to put it back in.

I like to think it's possible but I always come to the conclusion that it's not, and that means that things are just going to keep getting worse.  And it's getting so bad it's hard to see it as anything other than the looming Finale as I've described it in so many recent posts. 

What an arrogant know-it-all I am!