Recall the hue and cry being raised over a good looking woman making an ad for blue jeans. It’s an emphatically one-sided hue and cry, though.
A clear majority of US voters who said they had seen the ad…according to a Napolitan News Survey. 70% said it was a typical ad, while 23% said it promoted white supremacy, and 7% were unsure.
Nobody in the middle or to the right of the middle thought anything of the ad other than it was an ad for jeans. That leaves the Left.
George Will wants a clear and present example of the wonders of socialism, so he’s pushing for the Progressive-Democratic Party’s most prominent socialist (yes, even more so than Bernie Sanders (D, VT) to become mayor of New York City.
I want him to win. I think every 20 years or so, we need a conspicuous, confined experiment with socialism so we can crack it up again.
That works out to about once a generation, which I think overstates the need. Every three generations—every 60-ish years—I think would be about right; the grandfathers would still be around to help the grandchildren with the empirical outcomes of their own dabbling in socialism.
I agree with Will’s basic premise, though: let New Yorkers get the socialism they want. Let the outcome of that serve as an object lesson of the destructive and life-shortening nature of that ideology. New York City is large enough and nearby enough that the results will not be able to be ignored.
Nevertheless, to paraphrase HL Mencken, give New Yorkers what they want, good and hard.
The Leftist dream of socialism won’t die, and neither will the Leftist dream of free money, which they masquerade as universal basic income, the steady handout of taxpayer money to everyone because—well, just because. The Left doesn’t care that handing out free money—one of the more extreme aspects of socialism—doesn’t work.
The Left simply doesn’t care about making lives better for Americans, only making their own lives better. Free money, this universal basic income, is just modern day bread and circuses offered in payment for votes so the Left can keep their Progressive-Democrat politicians in power, favoring them. They hope.
The editorial at the second link lays out a number of the ways that UBS fails us all.
Here’s another path to that failure. A UBS increases overall demand for goods and services beyond what producers can supply. This is textbook inflation. Eventually, production succeeds in getting supply increased to match that increased demand, and inflation abates. However, the higher price levels resulting from that bout of inflation remain in place, which means the handed-out money doesn’t have the buying power that it was represented as having: recipients can’t buy significantly more goods and services than they could before the handouts started due to that eroded dollar.
It gets worse. One of the areas of failure that the editorial pointed out was that recipients of free money took advantage of that largesse to work less. Since there is less work being done—this is a universal basic income handout, recall; all of us get it—it would take producers commensurately longer for production to catch up to demand. This would let that inflation run longer, elevating overall price levels even higher. That, in turn, would reduce the buying power of the handed-out money even further, leaving us recipients even less well off than before the handouts began, likely worse off in absolute terms.
Leftists and their politicians, of course, know this full well. They’re hoping us average Americans are too grindingly stupid to figure out that these folks are merely buying, and playing, us for their own power gains.
That’s the choice with which Ukraine is faced, at least according to Jillian Kay Melchior in her Wall Street Journal editorial. She summarized her view of the matter near the end of her piece.
That’s the temptation Ukraine faces as it considers sacrificing some territories ostensibly to save others. Many Ukrainians have loved ones in occupied regions, notes Yulia Marushevska, a Defense Ministry official: “Giving it up is not giving it up to keep it quiet there. It’s giving them up for destruction. It’s giving up your friend or brother.”
But that’s not the choice Ukraine presently faces. As the Russian state-owned and run outlet, RIA Novosti, put it in a headline as recently as 30 July,
There is no other option: no one should remain alive in Ukraine[.]
(It would help if Melchior had actually read the article in the original Russian or as translated into English. The headline she so carefully singled out is the outlet’s sarcastic summarization of its distortionate view of Ukrainian and Western persistence: Ukrainians must fight to the last soul. The article, though, does tout the Russian intent on encouraging that outcome if it’s what’s necessary for the barbarian to occupy the terrain.)
Nor is the article just editorial hype. The barbarian is bent on extermination of Ukraine as a polity and as a culture.
There is no Sophie’s choice for Ukraine here. Sophie had a choice: pick one of two children for the Nazis to murder. Ukraine has only national and cultural suicide on offer from the barbarian. Not some fraction of the nation to be murdered, but all of it.
It is the West—the Trump administration and Europe’s NATO member nations—which are faced with Sophie’s choice: pick one of several (so far, only Eastern European) nations for the Russian barbarian to murder in exchange for a phantom peace that would be nothing more than a small period of relative quietude.
There is, though, an actual choice. This one begins with changing the rhetoric from “Ukraine must be helped to fight on” and the more recent “cease fire right damn now” to “Ukraine must win.” That must be supported by overt and rapid transfers of arms and logistic support to Ukraine in the numbers and types the UA—with its superior and more current battlefield experience—says it needs and at the pace it says it needs them. Further, those transfers must come with no restrictions on the types and locations of targets against which the UA might employ them.
It’s simple, straightforward, and deucedly politically difficult given the timidity and/or self-serving political power seeking of too many politicians to carry out. The lede and second paragraph laid out the problem:
As the Department of Government Efficiency and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act make painfully clear, any entity relying on federal funds for fiscal stability had best reconsider its future.
Recently released US Census Bureau data on federal funds flowing to states reveal that in 2023 the average state relied on federal sources for 37% of its revenue—nearly double the 1990 average. Some states were far more dependent, like Arizona (49%), Alaska (45%), Wyoming (46%), and Louisiana, which counted on federal support for more than half its budget. States have…made themselves vulnerable to the ideological proclivities of presidential administrations.
And this:
More pernicious are the ways federal agency ideologues hold those funds hostage to their agendas. …
A massive amount of federal spending isn’t even going to projects most people care about. It funds the priorities of federal agency bureaucrats.
The solution is to identify the total amount of Federal fund transfers to each State in 2026 (or 2027, but no later). Call that baseline year Year Zero. In Year 1, make a single, no strings attached block grant to each State in the amount of 90% of Year Zero. In each subsequent year, reduce the size of the block grant by an additional 10% of the Year Zero amount. In 10 years, there will be no more Federal funds transferred to a State, and all the States will be free of Federal strings on their own spending and taxing imperatives.
This would have the additional benefit for the citizens of each State in that State government spending and taxing would be subjected to greater citizen visibility and discipline.
The only time States need Federal funds transferred is during a State- or region-wide emergency, and those funds should be readily available—as they are currently, and potentially the more so with the cessation of unnecessary transfers done currently on a just because and it’s always done basis.