Category Archives: culture

DSA and Government Structure

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The Wall Street Journal editors are rightly worried about the ascendancy of the Democratic Socialists of America. The center of their concern rests on DSA intent to restructure our government:

…replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.

Sure. Parliament, with its largely figurehead House of Lords, and Parliamentary Superiority vis-a-vis the British courts has worked so well for the UK.

Similarly, the Duma and the National People’s Congress have done so much for the people of Russia and the PRC.

The DSA isn’t about “radical change” for the sake of us average Americans; it’s about a naked grab for party political power–which is to say a naked grab for personal power for those persons atop the DSA. That the bulk of the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians are silent or openly supportive of DSA goals shows how thoroughly Party has chosen to absorb the DSA into its core (or, the other side of that coin: how thoroughly the DSA has coopted Party). The only Party members who are beginning to object to the DSA are on Party’s far right–that fringe group who are Establishment Democrats.

The contest for power within Party is one that legacy Party politicians—those Establishment Democrats—think they can win. They’re likely wrong on that. Keep in mind, in this intraparty power struggle the DSA leadership has made no bones about their candidates running on the Progressive-Democratic Party ticket. It’s a ballot line, and nothing more. DSA plans to supplant the Progressive-Democratic Party, whether by absorption or by replacement.

“Socialism’s Slippery Definitions”

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The subheadline makes it plain:

The hard left is whatever it needs to be at the moment.

That’s certainly the case for the Left and for far too many others. The even plainer fact, though, is that there’s nothing slippery about American English dictionary and textbooks written in American English definitions of socialism. Socialism is government ownership of the means of production—government ownership of an economy’s businesses—from which flows government determination of what to produce, allocation of that output, and determination of the wages involved. All because, hold socialists, government knows better than any of us how to determine what to produce, how to allocate that output, and how to determine the wages involved.

All of the rest, those slippery definitions, are simply taken from the Left’s Newspeak Dictionary. Those slippery definitions, too, are little more than a variety of labels used to obscure. Democratic socialism, social democracy, even communism (itself misused in such discussions) are used only to create artificial definitions, as Matthew Hennessey noted in his article at the link, to suit the moment.

It’s unfortunate that our education systems, up through graduate school, fail to make clear which of those competing definitions is the accurate one.

It’s unfortunate, and dangerous to our economy and so to our national security, that one of our political parties actively and enthusiastically trades on those false definitions of the Newspeak Dictionary in its own push to inflict socialism, that government control of the engines of our economy, on our nation.

Foolish Move

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Congresswoman Nancy Mace (R, SC) has introduced legislation that would make illegal formation of House caucuses organized around race, ethnicity, or national origin.

If adopted, the measure would effectively force the dissolution of Democrat-aligned groups, including the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus.
The proposal could also affect GOP-affiliated organizations, including the Black Republican Congressional Staff Association, the GOP Latino Staff Association, and the Republican Asian American Staff Association.

It’s a nice idea, blocking race-based organizations and the like in the House. Mace’s argument is straightforward and entirely legitimate.

Race-based caucuses are not diversity. They are federally sanctioned segregation. You do not get to lecture America about inclusion while running an organization which checks your skin color at the door. The hypocrisy ends now.
It is time to end taxpayer-funded discrimination in this institution[.]

There is, though, no way to enforce the intent of the thing, even were the legislation to pass. The caucuses won’t disappear. The groups will just continue to meet informally in glorified coffee klatches and therewith continue to coordinate legislative proposal and votes. Nothing material will change.

Are They Not Working Americans?

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The news writers in The Wall Street Journal note, correctly, that

IRAs and workplace retirement accounts were created to help working Americans save for old age by providing tax incentives for doing so.

Then they spent more than 2,700 words decrying some who have had more success at that than others, as though those with that success do not deserve that success while claiming that such success is a mark of dysfunction of those IRAs and workplace retirement accounts and the associated incentives.

But how did these successful ones achieve the growth of their retirement-oriented accounts? One example:

Gregory Baszucki’s [IRA] holds at least $68 million—and possibly a whole lot more.
Baszucki, 61 years old, is one of hundreds of people who bought stakes in promising startups when the shares were worth peanuts, stashing them in retirement accounts and watching their values balloon to eight figures or more. What they are getting, essentially, is the mother of all tax breaks.

That’s wrong how, exactly? Baszucki did what he was encouraged to do by financial planning experts and by Government through its design of the retirement savings programs. He stashed away some stock shares in his IRA so their value could grow tax deferred, or tax free if he put them in a Roth IRA, th latter which is designed explicitly to allow retirement savers to set aside already taxed monies to grow and be free of taxes on withdrawal. What these news writers carefully ignore is the broadly chancy—extremely so—nature of startups: most of them fail. Baszucki could easily have lost all of his stakes in their entirety. That he has been better than most of us in choosing startups for his investment money, or luckier, is an outcome to be celebrated by the rest of us and an outcome which we all can achieve with our own skill and/or luck.

And this from the article:

Those entrepreneurs and their financial backers are increasingly using that strategy to pile up giant retirement-account balances, all subsidized by US taxpayers….

This is plain wrong, to the point of deliberately offered disinformation. Of course none of that is subsidized by taxpayers. The government simply isn’t getting the tax revenue from those giant retirement-account balances; no one else is paying in that revenue in the place of those account holders.

Steven Rosenthal, a retired tax lawyer lately of the Tax Policy Center:

We aren’t talking about saving enough for your needs in retirement. This isn’t keeping you off the dole in old age. This is yacht financing or dynasty building.

And

Senator Ron Wyden (D, OR) and Congressman Richard Neal (D, MA) plan to introduce a bill this week that would require annual withdrawals from accounts over $10 million for individuals of any age. The planned legislation stemmed in part from long-running concerns that some investors might circumvent annual contribution limits on retirement accounts by undervaluing shares in companies that aren’t public, “thus substantially increasing their tax benefits,” the Government Accountability Office wrote in 2014.
“This is an egregious loophole we’ve got to close,” Wyden said. “Congress created tax-advantaged retirement accounts to help more Americans save for a dignified retirement, not to help the ultrawealthy dodge taxes on insider deals and build titanic fortunes.”

The Progressive-Democrats’ position less obtusely stated: “Give us the damn money, already. It’s not yours, it’s Government’s.”

This is the arrogance of those presuming to determine what the needs of others are; this is the resentment of those who don’t have presuming to determine the legitimacy of the wants of those who do have. And dynasty building? There’s something wrong with parents looking to leave their children better off than they are? To these resentful ones, yes: success must be capped, and the children must be knee-capped of their inheritances.

Are the Baszuckis of our nation not working Americans? Of course they are. This is nothing more than a naked drive to punish those who have been more successful than others by taking away their success and redistributing it to those favored by Know Betters. It’s what the Progressive-Democratic Party wants; it’s what the Democratic Socialist of America party, a core constituent of the Progressive-Democratic Party has as its explicit goal; and it’s what the fundamentally mendacious press is pushing.

A fundamental question that Know Betters and Redistributionists must answer is this: what’s their limiting principle defining how much success is too much? What’s the basis for their claimed principle—should they have the integrity to name one?

No point in waiting for an answer. It’s a an amorphous, generalized claim born nakedly of covetousness, it’s wrong, and it’s anti-American.

Quitters?

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American AI developers are all up in arms over the successes of People’s Republic of China AI models, especially those that are being released as open source. The American executives’ beef centers on how good those models are and how cheaply produced they are.

OpenAI and Anthropic executives are sounding the alarm about the rise of cheap AI, particularly powerful new models produced in China, suggesting they will lead to a “dystopian” AI future and present unacceptable security risks without regulation.

And

The emergence of highly capable, open autonomous AI systems—including Moonshot AI‘s Kimi K3 model and Alibaba’s Qwen 3.8 Max, which were released in recent days and viewed favorably by investors and users—has turned the AI race on its head once again. Kimi K3 also was competitive with US models on some benchmarks.
…
“One probable outcome of an open-weight-model-dominant world is full AI communism, which is precisely what China proposes: rather than a market product, AI is a ‘public good’ which will ultimately be provided by the state as a kind of ‘digital public infrastructure,'” Dean Ball, OpenAI’s head of strategic futures, said in an X post Friday.

The general thrust of these bleats and cries to Mommy Government is that these personages think that the PRC’s scientists and programmers are smarter than American scientists and programmers, and they want to cower inside a truly dystopian regulatory moat that would stifle American innovation in AI altogether.

That’s as unacceptable as it is despicable. AI development—American AI development, especially—enormously benefits from open competition. Competition is what drives at an accelerating rate the quality of any product class, and especially AI. Especially AI, too, is a competition we must win—where winning isn’t across the finish line first, since with all product development, there is no finish line. Winning here means maintaining a significant (not just by a nose) lead.

Thus, American AI development must proceed apace, without regulatory restriction. We have enough laws on the books to handle its misuse, just as we have for any tool. American execs need to stop bleating and get competitive, on quality, on price, on rate of improvement.

The sole exception to largely unfettered competition should be AI models from companies domiciled in, or associated with companies domiciled in, the People’s Republic of China.

That exception, though, has nothing to do with those models’ costs or capabilities or open source availability or nearly anything else. This exception is driven solely by the national and corporate security threat those companies and their models represent. Those companies, via the PRC’s 2017 intelligence law, are entirely beholden to the PRC intelligence community for conducting espionage on any subject, in any venue, and against any potential source that the intelligence arm of the PRC government wishes. These companies should be barred from the US, and other nations wishing to remain free from PRC…influence…should do the same.

And this central truth: American scientists and programmers are every bit as good as, if not better than, PRC scientists and programmers. As are the scientists and programmers of other nations wishing to remain free.