There was a time when I was a liberal
By Stuart J. Moskovitz :
Standing+Wolf [–Playlists 102 to 106]:
The welfare state is an abomination to anyone sharing those values. It enslaves people, makes them dependent, degrades the individual human being’s feeling of self worth, of motivation, of dignity.
The root or core element isn’t the “welfare” state, but the state that’s declared its independence from us, the people and the Constitution, the state whose only loyalties are to itself and the Democratic [sic] party. So-called “welfare” is only a means to advance the cause of statism and a symptom of its malice.
I sometimes like to think of the Democratic [sic] party as the biggest and most powerful major metropolitan narcotics-based gang. It’s got the organization. It’s got the people on the street. It’s involved in everything, and whatever’s going on, it knows about right this minute. There could be a few casualties now and then, (teen-aged girls getting raped and shot and so forth,) but it’s close to the people. It knows what they’re thinking, and if they think they’re not going to do what the gang says, they’re dead. Life is simple with gangs in charge on the streets and representatives of the Democratic [sic] party in command at city hall.
It is not a revelation that if we broke up the gangs, we would drastically reduce the violence. But legislation enabling enhanced enforcement procedures against gangs is nowhere to be found. Al Sharpton says not a word about providing law enforcement agencies with extra enforcement powers to bring this travesty to an end after decades of misdirected pseudo-liberal “solutions.”
Sorry, Mr. Moskovitz, but you might as well launch an advertising campaign for public politeness. Your term “pseudo-liberal” hits the nail squarely on the head, as does putting the word “solutions” in quotes, though your use of “misdirected” isn’t just outside the scoring rings of the bullseye, but all the way off the target.
Gangs and the narcotics trade they operate at the lower and middle levels and the violence and murder they perpetrate are integral, vitally necessary components of what’s known as “government” in Democratic party [sic] success stories such as Chicago, New York, Lost Angeles, Detroit, et alia. Gangs and drugs and violence and illegitimacy and poverty and despair are supposed to seem serious national problems—serious enough to justify new so-called “gun control” laws, for example—but that’s just public relations fantasy. In gritty reality, which is never mentioned and always deliberately looked away from by the failed main stream “news” media, the propaganda agency of the Democratic [sic] party, gangs and narcotics and violence and poverty are to large cities as unions are to the former “big three” automobile companies. Much as unions present an unavoidable cost of doing business in some industries, so does life on urban serf reservations include some unavoidable unpleasantness.
“Aw, go back to bed, Standing Wolf!” you may well object. “You’re saying all that ugly nasty stuff is part of liberalism? You’re either having a nightmare, or sleep walking, or more likely both at once, you cranky old coot!”
The self-proclaimed “liberal” dream truly is America’s nightmare; most unfortunately, it’s real.
What we call “youth” gangs or “street” gangs are fundamentally unchanged from the Tammany Hall era. The foot soldiers aren’t still scrappy, predominantly Irish immigrants who aspire to city jobs and Democratic [sic] party largesse, and today’s narcotics business looks superficially very different from the nineteenth century’s gambling and prostitution and untaxed liquor and extortion, but the alliance between the Democratic [sic] party and gangs is unchanged; indeed, it’s stronger than ever.
We who live in relatively safe suburbs and rural areas don’t comprehend gangs. We see them as forces hostile to governance, enemies of the rule of law and civilization itself. We regard drug addiction as an abnormality, a medical and social problem that’s evidently going from bad to worse. We perceive murder and wanton violence as aberrations, and believe government ought to take action against them. We tell ourselves the “liberal” plan has been somehow “misdirected” or allowed to “go awry” by some tragic accident or failure to anticipate unintended consequences.
We’ve got it all wrong. I mean this literally: everything we think we know about gangs and narcotics and violence and poverty and life in the more dangerous portions of America’s largest cities is illusion.
We don’t live there, so we rarely see much more of it than what shows up in the “news,” which is cobbled together and written and edited and heavily weighted to further the illusion. Most of us had parents, and many of us are parents, so how would we know what it’s like to be on your own from early childhood? Most of us aren’t drug addicts. Few of us have been reminded dozens of times a day in dozens of ways we’re poor, pitiful, helpless victims of racism and society and sexism and capitalism and inequality of opportunity and wealth. Few of us are so poorly educated, we couldn’t even begin to tell the difference between one of President You Didn’t Build That’s eloquent straw man arguments and the straw sale of a gun to a criminal through a person who’s not prohibited by law from possessing firearms. Few of us can even imagine being so ignorant of the law, we not only wouldn’t know a felony from a misdemeanor from a parking ticket, but couldn’t guess there might be differences, couldn’t wonder what their significance might be except in terms of jail or prison time to be served as a result of getting caught.
Like many of the rest of us, I’ve wondered why people in those [fill in the blank] cities don’t rise up in righteous wrath, march down to city hall, and demand protection from the gangsters, though the answer was staring me in the face the whole while: prisoners at least aspire to a code of conduct that forbids snitching. We citizens of education and rationality and logic and moral principles and belief in civic virtue, precisely because we aren’t state “welfare” serfs or drug addicts or wild-hearted adolescent kids without families or role models or teachers or abstract values of any kind, necessarily misperceive what actually goes on at the bottom of the increasingly rigidly stratified social pyramid.
Conservative women who not only haven’t had six kids by four passing strangers by the age of 22, but would be horrified by the very idea of feeding them junk food and tucking them into beds that mice and rats leave droppings on every night, can’t so much as begin to make sense of each month’s wait for the “welfare” check to be delivered and expedition to Wal Mart and week of eating less cheaply. Conservative men not only don’t practice “fire and forget” sex, but could no more easily abandon pregnant women and small children than chop off our own fingers. Very few of us live—literally live—first, last, and exclusively for the next beer or bottle of wine or drink or hit of heroin or handful of mind-numbing pills. If you don’t need a drink or hit more than anything and everything else in the world, there’s no way you’ll ever understand how or why some boys grow up to be street corner drug dealers.
If you don’t spend your entire life in a loudly and endlessly proclaimed racial or ethnic prison whose towering grey walls are ignorance and poverty and addiction and “welfare” and despair, you’ll never understand why “making the rich pay their fair share” amounts to a ray of light in the darkness.
Do I mean we’re poor, pitiful, helpless creatures of privilege?
No. I mean we understand the illusion of state serfdom or the shadows it casts, in Platonic terms, but very little of the thing itself. I certainly don’t claim to be some exalted expert, though by your leave, friends, I believe I can offer a few observations that may prove useful:
1.) Poverty is inevitable and partly accidental; state serfdom is deliberate and inflicted from on high by people who benefit from both its existence and unvarying perpetuation.
IQ points and any number of other abilities are distributed on bell curves, so it shouldn’t be surprising some people are naturally more and some less able to look after ourselves and prosper. In general, smart people earn more than dumb, as do those with uncommon athletic skills, those with unusual musical abilities, et cetera. Education makes a huge difference, and that’s not randomly distributed, but that helps illustrate my point: a few very lucky children born into state serfdom do well in spite of the prevailing sorry excuse for education available to them.
In a free America, some people would be poor, some rich, and most of us would fill the middle of the income bell curve. We’d ascend and descend the income ladder in accordance with our native abilities, education, hard work, lucky breaks and bad luck, and age. As free America prospered, so would—and did—all participants, or as John Kennedy put it, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” He neglected to mention a falling tide lowers all boats. Tides rise and fall; once upon a time, however, everyone benefitted from the nation’s steady economic advance. We had booms and busts and panics and depressions and more booms galore; on the whole, however, things gradually got better for the vast majority of us.
Long before Tammany Hall rose to political prominence, politicians bought votes with tax dollars. The less idealistic, more “practical” Democratic [sic] party—the party of slavery, please let me remind you—did a more effective job of buying votes than Republicans, and eventually made a veritable science of it. Franklin Roosevelt was by no means the first of his party to approach vote buying in a systematic manner: merely the first to undertake it on a national scale and surround it with a strong fence of law the Supreme Court conveniently ruled constitutional, often under the commerce clause. So-called “social security” was and remains a “benefit” that works first and last to the Democratic [sic] party’s electoral advantage.
Lyndon Johnson rewrote the book on all that. Instead of buying votes, his vaunted “War on Poverty” used the nation’s hard-earned tax dollars to create a vast, rapidly growing constituency of unquestioning lifelong Democratic [sic] party loyalists. Why pay for taxi rides when you can own and operate a car less expensively and enjoy added freedom of mobility? Why buy votes when you can own voters?
Who pays? Who benefits? Clearly, America pays, and the Democratic [sic] party benefits—but that’s only the visible scum on the surface of the post-constitutional pond.
2.) You might reasonably suppose nobody benefits from poverty, but you’d be mistaken: poverty is a massive feral government industry, and in still more significant economic terms, it’s fertile ground for the illegal narcotics industry.
I couldn’t begin to tell you how much money the feral government spends “fighting” poverty every year, nor how much more money Americans spend on illegal drugs: not billions, but trillions, I’m sure. Do you suppose social workers are in charge of “welfare?” Do you suppose street corner drug dealers are the captains of the narcotics industry?
Both the feral and many state governments are heavily so-called “invested” in the poverty the “War on Poverty” is supposed to be doing away with. How’s the war going? Obviously, it’s going very well: it’s been raging since the middle 1960s; there’s an apparently endless supply of poverty to fight and poverty fighters taking home pay checks and numerous layers of managers to direct the war, and no visible end of economic stagnation to ensure the supply of poverty will remain inexhaustible for years to come. Above and beyond all other considerations, the “anti-poverty” scheme has handed the Democratic [sic] party the single largest reliable constituency in the country.
Scratch a self-described “liberal,” and there’s a good chance you’ll find someone whose pay check is directly or indirectly based on the “social injustice” or “inequitable distribution of wealth” or “racism” he claims to hate about America.
Urban “youth” or “street” gangs own, operate, manage, and staff the end points of the narcotics industry’s global distribution network. Each gang has its own local “franchise,” you could call it, and offers “products” and “brands,” and competes with other gangs for market share, customer loyalty, and of course, profits. In case you’re curious, the mark-up between a firearms factory and citizen exercising the right to keep and bear arms can be as high as 100%, though it’s normally much lower; by contrast, during its journey from alleged “laboratory” to addict’s nose or veins, a kilogram of cocaine or heroin can generate 10,000% profits for a markedly longer and broader, more complex distribution network. There’s more to gangs than narcotics sales, but let’s be halfway realistic, okay? There’s a great deal of money changing hands, and snow balls would last longer in Hades’ boiler toom than the gangs remain in business if they didn’t pay off the right people.
Narcotics wouldn’t be prodigiously profitable if they were legal. There’s a certain amount of open market capitalism involved; on the whole, however, the narcotics industry in the United States is more organized than competitive. Who are the investors? Who are the top players? Who are the major and minor distributors? Whom do they pay off, and how much, and what’s the money spent on or “invested” in? Inexplicably—unless not the least bit inexplicably—the failed main stream “news” media don’t have the resources to devote to such low priority stories. We know many of the larger cartels on the far side of our southern purported “border” are engaged in bloody warfare with one another and the Mexican government; on our side, by contrast, there doesn’t seem to be a greatdeal of ultra-violent contention. I have a hunch our highest narcotics industry investors and managers are better organized.
Oh, by the way, have you noticed lots of banner headline victories in the famous “War on Drugs” lately? Neither have I, though I’m very sure fighting it keeps lots of feral government employees and other cops and prison guards and lawyers in pay checks and perhaps even pay-offs, too. My reference to pay-offs is just a wild shot in the dark, of course. I was just speculating. Don’t mind me, please.
3.) Gang life isn’t all work and no play. Gangs are substitute families for kids, far more boys than girls, but some girls, too, who don’t have concerned, doting parents or inspiring teachers or concerned Boy Scout leaders or church youth group advisors or uncles or aunts who are glad to coach them through the mysteries of algebra and French. Gangs are tribes, and it’s no mere coincidence highly social Homo sapiens gathers first and last in families and tribes. City states and little countries and coast to coast political parties and nations and empires are recent developments. Families and tribes still claim our first loyalties.
In the absence of everything we American Thinkers know as social structure, teen-aged children of state serfs join gangs, acquire the dominant moral values and culture, get addicted to drugs and booze and responsibility-proof sex, find employment, dress for success, get kicks out of preying on non-gang members, keep up with the latest developments in the firearms industry, and fight and die for their tribes as needed.
They’re involved in non-narcotics crime such as car theft, prostitution, rape, armed robbery, extortion, loan sharking, et cetera, though the big profits are in drugs. Gangs don’t often go door to door getting out the vote for carefully selected candidates who promise to represent them to the best of their abilities; they do, however, contribute millions of dollars annually to rugged individuals who could order in veritable legions of law enforcement officers if, for some reason, they were so inclined. There’s plenty of law downtown; on the streets and in the alleys in the more dangerous parts of Democratic [sic] party urban strongholds, by contrast, gangs serve as something like trusties in jails and prisons: they keep things mostly orderly most of the time.
Gangs are a way of life—such as it is, of course.
4.) According to enlightened and evolved “liberals” high in the Department of “Justice” in Washington, D.C., the fact that more non-white than white children are disciplined in public schools is proof positive racism is at play, so discipline obviously needs to be reapportioned on a racial basis. Does that make any sense? No, but I doubt it’s an accident a disproportionate number of people who’ve been enticed and “entitled” into lifelong state serfdom with so-called “welfare” dollars are non-white.
My hunch is the original high-sounding “War on Poverty” was conceived and put into motion by people who wouldn’t have dared try to reduce white citizens to abject government dependence for political gain, but figured blacks were more likely not to know the difference and less likely to object if they did. I doubt many people said so aloud, but many acted on the assumption,“Those people are really very childlike at heart.”
I wrote yesterday I believe what’s called “liberalism” and “progressivism” will presently be widely seen as monstrous moral wrongs in the same class with racial segregation and poll taxes and literacy tests and slavery before them. I say “welfare”-based state serfdom is naught more nor aught less than the successor to Jim Crow. Much as no one today argues in favor of the states’ rights approach to the slavery question, so will no one argue for “liberal” or “progressive” ideas once today’s paternalism and social engineering and patently fake “social justice” and “positive rights” and redistributionism have run their course. “Liberals” insist on being judged by their intentions; once the results of their policies become fully apparent, however, I believe we, the people will shudder in loathing and disgust.
5.) State serfdom is a form of imprisonment. It’s voluntary to the extent a few people can and sometimes do wrench themselves free of it; it’s involuntary to the extent it’s excruciatingly difficult for teen-aged third generation “welfare” kids who’ve received grossly sub-standard educations and lived all their lives in “liberal” urban reservations even to imagine any other way of life, still less strive for it. As it’s nearly impossible for us to imagine their lives, so is it equally difficult for them to envision ours. We can see the disparity in net results between the American way and the “liberal” way, but the propaganda agency never rests.
It’s no mere accident the urban reservation is saturated with violence and murder and addictive drugs and liquor stores and bars and all manner of criminal activity that would be run out of ordinary towns in short order. Those are expressions of depression and despair and a stunted, maimed culture, and the narcotics industry also happens to be enormously profitable.
At the risk of boring you with idle and perhaps even irresponsible speculation, I’ll mention I’ve wondered once or twice why the DEA never brags and boasts about narcotics king pins it arrests and packs off to prison for life. Can you imagine how much larger a share of the admittedly largely imaginary feral budget it would receive if it could claim victories instead of just putting in time on the beat and busting the occasional low level nitwit?
Except for gang murders and violent crime, which have been the norm for decades, life for state serfs seems generally to be fairly quiet. They’ve got distractions to help them pass the time: a little money now and then, television, booze and drugs of every kind and description, and local topics of conversation like everyone else. Back in the 1960s, our national so-called “leaders” in Washington, D.C. were scared half to death of urban riots by “uppity” black people, and desperately hoped “welfare” would keep “those people” quiet.
The ploy more or less worked. Flash mobs swarming through malls and fashion stoes aren’t city-wide riots that leave hundreds dead and whole blocks burned to the ground. Much as state serfs have accustomed themselves to a base level of gang violence, so has the nation apparently accommodated itself to a bearable level of urban social disruption. “Things could get a [fill in the blank] of a lot worse in short order,” people think, which helps keep everyone too fearful to step very far out of line.
As a social engineering experiment, “welfare” seems to have been fairly successful thus far: the worst urban areas are fairly quiet; government employment and revenue requirements have grown by leaps and bounds, and the narcotics industry is thriving.
For self-described “liberals,” what’s not to like?
— by Standing+Wolf
SALLY CAN DANCE 