Are Entitlements Making America Anemic?

An interesting editorial appeared in the Wall Street Journalwhere Anthony Gill, a professor of political science, attempted to explain the success of the Taliban through an economics prism.  He referenced economist Laurence Iannacone, who argued that “organizations are “club goods” wherein members share many collective benefits such as welfare provision and fellowship.  Those benefits depend on active contribution. If everyone participates willingly, the organization is vibrant.  If many members are free-riders-receiving the benefits without pulling their weight-the quality of the good dissipates and the organization becomes anemic.” Perhaps this can be extrapolated and applied to western democracies as well,where religious and traditional beliefs have been replaced by government mandates and reliance on the state. With 61% of Americans paying no taxes in an era where the current administration is intent on increasing entitlements, most notably the $3.5 Trillion domestic spending billworking its way through Congress, are we ourselves becoming anemic?  With free pre-K, universal child care payments, paid family and medical leave and free community college setting the stage for the next push for single payer health care and guaranteed universal income, more beneficiaries will likely choose to remain on the sidelines and take a pass on “active contribution” without any disincentives.  Professor Gill observes that “to limit free riding, strict religious groups (like the Taliban) require members to prove their loyalty via costly and visible behavior that deters the lazy…”  In other words, they employ a carrot and stick approach, something that progressives in this country continue to move away from by removing disincentives that would otherwise keep the “lazy” productive.  Witness the Obama Administration that removed the requirement that an able bodied recipient had to prove to the welfare office that they were actively looking for work, or when a clean drug test was eliminatedas a requirement to receive benefits.  Reward sloth and,surprise…..you get more sloth.  Iannacone again: “stigmatizing behavior also limits the outside opportunities of group members and binds them to the organization.”  The welfare stigma has long been eliminated where even the term “welfare” has been replaced with “benefits” and the embarrassing food stamps and welfare checks replaced with credit cards.  And with the stigma removed, the immediate result was benefit cards being used in strip clubs and to purchase booze and cigarettes. Stigma eliminated, replaced with pride in being able to “work the system”. Not cool.  Especially not for the 39% of us who are actively contributing.  You know, the ones pulling the wagon. And with the most progressive tax structure in the world, where the top 10% of earners pay 71% of the tax burden, the Democrat party’s rallying cries of “tax the rich” and “pay your fair share” become even more repugnant in their outright misrepresentation of the facts. Professor Gill closes with a nod to the Taliban: “despite the seeming irrelevance of religion in the secular West, policy makers and military strategists would do well to understand its power elsewhere in the world.”  Perhaps we should consider a little religion as a potential cure for our anemia here at home.

Despondent

Sorry about this rant but it's raining and I’m depressed. I look on with a combination of amazement and disgust as the Taliban, appearing to all the world as a bunch of primitive, illiterate, goat herding, pajama-wearing, with a turban on one end and either decidedly unfashionable sandals or an absurdly out of place pair of white high-top basketball sneakers on the other, parade around Kabul with our military gear. Now I don’t doubt their resolve as a fighting force, but how can it be that our guys look like Robo-cop and these scruffy characters look like they just rolled out of bed and remained caught in the bedsheets. And yet we are the ones that turned tail, and they rule the day. What’s wrong with this picture? And even more infuriating is the fact that they now are in possession, gifted by our hapless government, of the latest in assault weapons, complete with high tech optics, thousands of dollars in hardware, that I as an American am banned from owning despite my Second Amendment protections. Once again, playing out on network television, a level of irony and hypocrisy that is apparently lost on the public. Like the thousands of illegal immigrants allowed into and dispersed across our country unfettered by Covid testing, vaccine passports, mask mandates, and all the other edicts American citizens have to endure, here we have the Taliban parading around Afghanistan with American made assault weapons that Americans are not allowed to own. Given to them by…..America. And if you really want to blow a gasket, head over to your local gun shop and price out an AR fitted with a Trijicon scope and a pair of night-vision goggles. Merry Christmas, indeed. And that won’t even be the fully automatic version. We haven’t been able to own those bad boys since 1934. Not that you’d want one. With ammo shortages continuing to plague sport shooters in the US, apparently, the only folks not concerned with keeping their magazines topped off are, you guessed it, the Taliban. Why? Because we left them enough ammo to last for years. Genius. So as we Americans sit here watching our country disintegrate and our rights dismantled, we may want to consider to whom can we turn for guidance. Maybe we should consult with the Taliban.  

Is there no end to this administration’s folly!

Both embarrassing and dispiriting, but what would you expect from a nation that boasted about having brought a master's program in gender studies to Kabul’s Stone Age university? We have been stripped naked on the world stage, our elite political class seen as the incompetent, self-serving boobs that they really are. Humiliating does not even begin to describe it. The WSJ made an outstanding observation that President Biden was somehow able to to dismantle every single President Trump agreement and accomplishment except the one he made with the Taliban. And with both President Trump and Vice President Pence now voicing their version of the actual agreement, it appears that President Biden’s blame game is just more posturing and finger pointing from this foreign policy dunce. Again from the Wall Street Journal: former defense secretary Robert Gates wrote in his 2014 memoir that then Vice-President Biden “has been wrong on nearly every foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades”. Thus President Biden’s only real achievement appears to be having attained a remarkable level of consistency to our detriment.

The Sky Is Falling!

You have forever besmirched the reputation of our military in Afghanistan, our international reputation as an ally; threatening our sovereignty in indecision at our southern border; tolerating mayhem and lawlessness in our streets; confusing us to the point of ambivalence in our response to Covid; spending us into insolvency; fanning the flames of Inflation. What do you have in store for us next JB?

The Woke Olympiad

 The Olympic Games have been crippled by the pandemic, yet it’s the media that seems intent on delivering the deathblow.  For years they have been criticized for showing less sport and more fluff.  Personal interest stories seem to dominate the coverage with the actual event a brief interlude between the requisite pre-game sob story and the post-game celebration.  And its win-win for the mediaeither way.  If their chosen competitor fails to achieve glory, then the story becomes all about their failure to win, their losing with dignity or the ascendency of the young heir apparent.  It’s been trending for decades and its getting worse.  With one network winning the rights to the games, the helpless viewer is left enduring the coverage or laying down some cash to purchase a premium Olympic channel to actually get a choice on what to watch, rather than stay up all night enduring Greco-Roman Wrestling while waiting for the promised coverage of the trampoline finals. This year we saw the huge amount of media attention piled on gymnast Simone Biles with headlines trumpeting her as the GOAT, expected to win as many as six gold medals.  With that kind of media pressure, exerted round the clock by social media, it is not unexpected that the talented Ms. Biles had a mental health crisis of sorts and withdrew from all but one event.  Similarly the US Women’s Soccer Team, defending World Cup Champions and media darlings for their fight for equal pay and their outspoken, gay, anti-Trump, team captain, veteran Megan Rapinoe, were overexposed in the press with expectations for overcoming their history of lackluster Olympic performance by adding a gold medal to their world championship.  The result was an opening game thumping by Sweden followed by a pedestrian performance that led to them squeaking by the Netherlands on penalty kicks to gain a spot in the elimination round.  This of course was followed by a match with Canada, a matchup that the media was quick to dramatize with a history of the US having snatched victory from them in London and the fact that they had never beaten the US in a major tournament.  Ever. Until yesterday, of course. 

 

But throw into the mix the current environment of woke activism and the coverage starts to get skewed towards that agenda with the media whipping it into a froth. Witness Raven Saunders, the gay, half green-haired US shot-putter who, after winning a silver medal, chose to remain after the medal ceremony and hold her arms in an X over her head, symbolic of the intersection at which oppressed people meet.  Or some such obtuse nonsense.  She apparently didn’t violate the specific Olympic policy and fortunately didn’t detract from the other medalists.  But how do I know what that display meant?  Because the media snakes stuck around to give her the airtime she was hoping for.  Complete with an interview. And later that night, the rainbow-haired Canadian runner Gabriela DeBues-Stafford, who went on to win the slowest of the three Women’s 1500 meter qualifying heats, held the camera like a magnet for an eternity while the announcer explained the LGBTQreason behind her recent changes in hairstyles.  Newsflash: nobody cares. The camera then blew past the next couple of apparently uninteresting and not black or gay enough competitors before coming to rest once again on someone who was either a real contender or who checked all the woke boxes for backstory. Not nice. A white Dutch runner who actually was a contender got the bum’s rush as well,with the announcer dismissing her as having had a lackluster year. Incidentally, she qualified. Take that.

 

The pot smoking, suspended US women’s sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson got some more press for her “miss me yet” tweet after the US failed to place in the 100 meter event, and was praised for her sportsmanship in congratulating the Jamaican sprint trio for sweeping the 100 meter final adding “powerful strong Black women dominating the sport”.  Wow.  Can you imagine if an athlete tweeted out “powerful strong white women dominating the sport” after, let’s see, how about water polo, synchronized swimming, virtually any long distance swimming event or maybe dressage to name a few? There would be outrage directed at someone daring to suggest anyracial dominance in a sporting event.  But nope, not Blackdominance. That’s to be celebrated.  In the meantime, you white folks shut up and get back in the pool or on your little horsies.  We will be coming for those sports eventually too.  

 

As for me, I do my best to carefully choose my events for viewing.  Gymnastics has become all about the backstory and now, Simone’s state of mind in anticipating a return to the beam event. Men’s gymnastics has taken a back seat to the media obsession with the Biles drama, so that has remained a safe option to avoid a woke lecture. Swimming remains a relatively safe choice, but track and field, the summer Olympics’ showcase, is more of a woke minefield.  Give me the events the media isn’t interested in, where I don’t need Turrico to fill me in, or just plain bungle the coverage altogether like he did with the Italians celebrating winning gold in the 100-meter and the high jump.  Equestrian events are obviously safe and it’s always a good day on the water with rowing, kayaking, canoeing, and that crazy whitewater thing. Cycling is also a relatively woke-free zone, especially the poorly covered but exciting track events. The BMX nonsense they can keep, with thoseadults on children’s bicycles. No thanks, back to the X-Games you go. And don’t get me started on what should and should not be included as Olympic events. I could go all Greek on you and pare this behemoth down to a week. Fencing, shooting and archery, is generally free of liberal intrusion but you may need to actively hunt for both coverage as well as stronger coffee pods given the time slots they’re telecast in.  In the final analysis the events that have become encumbered with woke backstories and garish displays of progressive groupthink are those in which Americans of color participate or in which LGBTQ members choose to wave their flag.  And the media obligingly gives them the airtime.  As opposed to say, showing us another more interesting sporting event.  This coverage has turned the games into the PEOPLE Magazine of sporting events.  And that’s a shame.  It’s the media that is turning viewers away from those sports, perpetuating their racist narrative. So go ahead, call me a sports racist.  But I tune into the Olympics to actually watch sports, regardless of the color of the participants, and I want to see the sports you don’t get to see that often.  Just spare me the whole woke backstory.

Call For Immigration

Under the cloak of the Covid confusion, the Biden administration, for all intent and purpose, declared our southern border open, allowing unrestrained immigration. Odd, our northern, eastern, and western borders not so? What's going on is obvious? The Democrat Party is infusing the county with immigrants dependent and beholding to them for providing access to the most benevolent of nations, with promised citizenship soon to follow. For nothing more than assuredly their gratitude at the ballot box. Oh, so simple, a little flouting of the law, a little circumventing of the Consitution; a little playing of the race card; some social injustice seeding, the usual character assassination of the opposition, the rallying of the faithful socialist enablers, and voila, you have an imaginative version of ballot-box stuffing. Paint us stupid for letting them get away with it.