Will Trump's Controversial Immigration Plan Actually Make Any Real Difference?

Yesterday a commenter named Oddstar expressed the view that I had "missed the point completely" on the subject of the Trump candidacy.  According to Oddstar, the main focus of Trump's candidacy is not, as I had argued, seeking to transform our government by supposedly replacing incompetence with managerial competency, but rather is seeking to have the government push back against immigration to avoid having demographic transformation spell "the end of the Republican Party and the conservative movement."  I responded to Oddstar in the comments, but I thought that the subject deserved the treatment of a full post.

I admit that I don't understand what inspires the voters who say that they back Trump.  It's entirely possible that a perception that immigration is out of control and transforming the country for the worse is the biggest factor in their inspiration.  The problem I have is that even Trump's proposals, as radical as some of them sound, do not really envision major change to the fundamental aspects of our immigration regime that are bringing about the ongoing transformation (and that have continuously transformed our country since its founding).  Trump's immigration proposals would offend lots of people, foreign and domestic, for not much noticeable change even over several decades.

Here is a link to Trump's "Immigration Reform" plan.  The majority of it deals with the issue of illegal immigration from or through Mexico.   He's going to "build a wall" and "make Mexico pay for the wall."  He's going to step up immigration enforcement and make it really, really strict.  Interestingly, there is no reference in this plan of Trump's oft-mentioned proposal for a "pause" in immigration from Muslim countries.  Possibly, he came up with that one some time after this plan was posted last fall.  The subject of legal immigration does come up, but is discussed in vague terms.  He's going to require employers to "hire American workers first," and increase "prevailing wages" for immigrants under the H1B visa program.  But there's nothing on any specific lowering of legal immigration quotas or on how many legal immigrants Trump thinks should be allowed into the country in a year.  Certainly, he does not propose eliminating legal immigration.

Trump's proposals do not really deal with the big numbers in immigration that drive the ongoing demographic transformation of the country, and instead deal with what are essentially side issues.  Consider the subject of illegal immigration from Mexico.  I have long thought that most to all Mexicans who might potentially come to the U.S. were already here.  After all, there are only about 120 million Mexicans, and the segment of the population most likely to emigrate -- poor but ambitious young men aged about 20-35 -- is only a small slice of that.  Many segments of the Mexican population are proportionately far less likely to emigrate (for example, those with successful careers in Mexico, women and children) and some large groups are not likely to emigrate at all (for example, those over 50).   The 5 to 6 million Mexicans already here illegally are really a very large part of the segment of the Mexican population that might potentially seek entry here.  

And sure enough, when you look into the statistics, you find that illegal immigration from Mexico has been net negative since 2007!  That is, for eight years now, more illegal Mexicans have left the U.S. each year than have arrived.  Here is research from Pew that shows that the number of illegal Mexicans in the U.S. peaked at approximately 6.9 million in 2007, and had fallen to approximately 5.6 million by 2014.  Of course the tremendous irony here is that making it impossible to get back in may slow the outmigration of illegals and cause the number here to remain higher than it otherwise would.  But let's not trouble Mr. Trump with such complexities.  And, by the way, the Pew research also shows that illegal immigration from the rest of the world (which in the aggregate adds up to about the same amount as the illegal immigration from Mexico) has also been net negative since 2007.

Trump's proposal for a "pause" in Muslim immigration deals with relatively tiny numbers in the overall picture.  According to data compiled by Breitbart here, the number of immigrants from Muslim countries obtaining permanent resident status in 2013 was about 123,000; another about 40,000 obtained refugee or asylum status.  

But what are the big numbers in the immigration arena that are currently driving the demographic transformation?  Primarily two things: (1) Legal immigrants, and (2) children (and grandchildren and great-grandchildren) of illegal immigrants already here.  Legal immigrants currently arrive at a rate of around one million per year, and over time that adds up a lot -- the total number of legal immigrants living in the country is estimated by Wikipedia at 37 million.  (Trump uses a figure of 42 million -- close enough.)  Children of illegal immigrants under current practice receive what is called "birthright citizenship" under the 14th Amendment.  There is a controversy over whether that is a constitutional right versus something that can be changed in a statute by Congress, and I won't attempt to resolve that controversy here.  But Wikipedia here has an estimate that there are approximately 4.5 million children of illegals in the country today who have the "birthright citizenship" status, with about 300,000 per year added to the total.

So what does Trump propose to do about these big numbers?  To start with, he has no proposal at all to lower the million per year of legal immigrants, at least no quantitative proposal.  On the birthright citizenship issue, he does take the position that a statute could do away with it.  OK, but, assuming that the courts went along with that, would Trump and a Congress really try to take the citizenship away from the 4.5 million who think they already have it (as opposed to only making a prospective change going forward)?  And how about the as-yet-unborn children (and grandchildren, etc., etc.) of those 4.5 million -- would anyone really take the position that they don't have citizenship status?

In summary, with illegal immigration net negative for years now, and no real prospect for another big wave of illegals coming from Mexico, there are only really two places where the ongoing demographic change of the country through immigration can be materially altered, namely by change to legal immigration quotas and by change to birthright citizenship rules.  And either of those, if implemented today, would only proceed to effect change very slowly over many years.  The legal immigration piece is by far the bigger of the two.

Now, how do we feel about the number of about one million per year for legal immigration to this country.  Even most people in the conservative and libertarian movements support some substantial level of legal immigration, if not precisely that number.  Here is a comment by Noah Rothman from the magazine Commentary from last August:

Trump’s “plan” is an assault on not merely the illegal immigrants who have violated American laws, but those who have played by the existing rules to come to the United States. The proposal amounts to a declaration of war on America’s immigrant community, an attack on the foundational nature of America’s character as a melting pot for all the peoples of the world, and the inception of a police state that is incompatible with a free republican democracy.

So, Mr. Trump, do you propose lowering the million per year, and if so to what?  Half a million?  Ten thousand?  Obviously, this is a subject on which he does not want to be pinned down.

By the way, there are things in Trump's plan that even I can get behind.  Exhibit A:  he proposes that immigrants be permanently ineligible for welfare and handout programs.  Amen to that.  That level of foolishness is what gets us people like the Tsarnaevs.  The funny thing is that people who are ineligible for welfare, and therefore work because they have to, tend to end up grateful, while those who take handouts tend to end up resentful and angry.  It seems counterintuitive, but there is plenty of evidence to support it.

Anyway, the idea that Trump's proposals as to immigration are going to fundamentally alter demographic transformation of the country just looks to me to be wrong, and not a reason to support Trump.

Roy Spencer, Donald Trump, And The "Main Project" Of The Government

A recurrent theme here is that the "main project" of the government, and of each and every one of its agencies, is to promote and enhance further growth of the agency in particular and the government in general.  Examples of prior posts are here and here.  One of the great advances of the past twenty or so years is that the conservative movement has gradually caught on that this is a huge problem.  Without constant push back, the state has a tremendous internal incentive to grow unchecked like a cancer and rapidly take over our whole economy and our lives.

Roy Spencer had a post on Friday that addresses the climate change branch of this "main project," and is very related to my own post on Friday.  Roy's post is titled "On that 2015 Record Warmest Claim."   For those unfamiliar with Dr. Spencer, he is a research scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, and is one of the people (along with John Christy) responsible for producing the satellite-based temperature series generally referred to as UAH.

Unlike the guys from NASA and NOAA, Spencer takes on the problem that the NASA/NOAA temperature series show 2015 to be the warmest year ever, while the satellite series from UAH and RSS do not.  Spencer starts out by declaring a modesty that is completely lacking in the NASA/NOAA guys -- and which, to my mind, is the fundamental hallmark of the real scientist versus the unprincipled advocate:

I’m not claiming our satellite dataset is necessarily the best global temperature dataset in terms of trends, even though I currently suspect it is closer to being accurate than the surface record — that will be for history to decide. The divergence in surface and satellite trends remains a mystery, and cannot (in my opinion) continue indefinitely if both happen to be largely correct.      

And then he gets to what he calls the "elephant in the room":

By now it has become a truism that government agencies will prefer whichever dataset supports the governments desired policies. You might think that government agencies are only out to report the truth, but if that’s the case, why are these agencies run by political appointees?  I can say this as a former government employee who used to help NASA sell its programs to congress: We weren’t funded to investigate non-problems, and if global warming were ever to become a non-problem, funding would go away. I was told what I could and couldn’t say to Congress…Jim Hansen got to say whatever he wanted. I grew tired of it, and resigned.

"We aren't funded to deal with non-problems."  I would say it's an obvious truism.  And this principle goes way beyond the climate wars.  It's the complete explanation for why no amount of government anti-poverty funding can ever eliminate (or even reduce) poverty (as measured by the government); why no amount of government anti-hunger funding can ever eliminate (or even reduce) hunger (as measured by the government); why no amount of government housing funding can ever eliminate (or even reduce) the "housing shortage" (as measured by the government; and on and on.  More generally, it's the fundamental reason why government failure is a political rather than a managerial problem.  Better management can never do away with the fundamental problem that everyone in the government has a desperate need for the problem they are dealing with to persist.  The government fails because its fundamental imperative is that it must fail.

And then of course we have stepping into the Republican presidential nominating process a guy whose message, if he has any message, is that the government is failing not because of that fundamental imperative, but rather because it is run by incompetent people and if only you put a really competent businessman like him in charge, everything will promptly be fixed.  In short, this message is the opposite of the message that the conservative movement has been gradually building for decades.  The one message is, "Government is fundamentally not competent to fix or address the personal problems of the people, and therefore it must be drastically cut back."  The other (Trump) message is "The government's only problem is bad management by incompetent people; put me in charge and I can and will fix everything."

Last week the National Review ran a big forum in which some 22 prominent conservative writers expressed their reasons for opposing Trump as the Republican nominee.  Many of them remarked on Trump's message being very much the opposite of the main conservative message of smaller and limited government.  Contributors noted that Trump had supported, among other things, the Obama "stimulus," single payer healthcare, the auto company bailouts, the bank bailouts, aggressive use of eminent domain, trade protectionism, stricter gun control, and numerous other such government-as-solution-to-everything proposals.  

To me it seems almost impossible that anyone could be such a narcissist as to believe that if only the people put him in charge of the $4 trillion annual enterprise known as the federal government, that by the force of his brilliance and managerial competence he could cause it promptly to succeed at the myriad of tasks at which it has heretofore been failing.  But then, Obama is clearly such a guy.  Now we have another one in Trump.  With any luck he won't be given the chance to fail; but if he does get the chance, the odds of failure are virtually 100%. 

It's Easy To Prove Your Hypothesis If You Just Pretend That The Adverse Evidence Does Not Exist

In my last post I discussed what seems to me a very odd fact, namely that the proponents of the diet-heart hypothesis in the field of nutrition somehow massively carried the day against their opponents despite huge amounts of contrary evidence that would seem to completely refute the hypothesis.  Thus the diet-heart hypothesis really started to get traction in the 1950s following the six- and seven-country studies by Ancel Keys, purporting to show a neat and direct correlation between dietary fat and heart disease in the populations of seven countries -- Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Finland, the Netherlands, Japan and the United States.  Yet even at the time Keys published his studies, it was widely known that data from other countries (for example, France, Switzerland and Mexico) would contradict this seemingly neat pattern and refute the hypothesis.  Keys just ignored these other countries.

Maybe Keys could be forgiven for doing early studies much less lavishly funded than what we would expect today?  Well, consider that as late as 2007 one Dr. Daniel Steinberg -- a long-time promoter of the diet-heart hypothesis, leader of the so-called LRC study in the 70s and 80s, and main author of the 1984 "consensus statement" recommending the low fat diet to all -- wrote a book called "The Cholesterol Wars."  In that book, Steinberg cites the Keys studies as a principal proof of the link between diet and heart disease; and Steinberg discusses the Keys studies without mentioning the existence of the multiple other countries where the data do not support, and indeed would refute, the hypothesis.  And then he confidently asserts that the hypothesis is proved.  (The subtitle of the book is "The Skeptics vs the Preponderance of the Evidence").  Hey, it's easy to prove your hypothesis if you get to pretend that the adverse evidence does not exist!

So now in the field of world atmospheric temperatures (sometimes known as GAST -- global average surface temperature) and whether they are increasing, we were treated a couple of days ago to the big release from NOAA declaring 2015 to be the "warmest year on record"; and, by the way, "by a wide margin"!!!!!  The NOAA release is confidently assertive and admits of no ambiguity:

The globally averaged temperature over land and ocean surfaces for 2015 was the highest among all years since record keeping began in 1880. During the final month, the December combined global land and ocean average surface temperature was the highest on record for any month in the 136-year record.  

Of course, everybody who follows this knows that there are three independent data sources that attempt to track GAST -- one based on a ground-based thermometer network that is the source of the NOAA series (with the same or substantially-overlapping networks of ground-based thermometers also used by other agencies like NASA and the UK's CRU); a second based on satellites, with the data processed independently by two entities known as UAH and RSS; and a third based on radiosondes (balloons).  Everybody who follows this also knows that the ground-based thermometer records have been greatly "adjusted" by the people who publish them, and that all or nearly all of the increase in temperatures in recent years is in the adjustments and not present in the raw data.

So wouldn't you think that NOAA in its release would at the minimum acknowledge the existence of the other contrary data and attempt somehow to deal with the contradictions?  Well, take a look at that release; and, if you will, follow the link through to their full end-of-2015 Report.  You will not find the slightest mention that the satellite or balloon data even exist.  And of course that also means that you will not find any attempt to explain the discrepancies between and among data sets, or to justify why one is better than others.

And then there are the lapdog environmental-crusader journalists.  Don't they have some responsibility to their readers to give some kind of fair picture of the evidence?  Check out the New York Times article by crusader Justin Gillis that appeared in the number one position at the upper right of yesterday's print edition, "2015 Far Eclipsed 2014 As World's Hottest Year, Climate Scientists Say."  It's all just parroting and promotion of the NOAA (and NASA) line, without the slightest questioning.  There's a chart of the NASA data series right there on page 1, with a scrunched vertical scale to make the temperatures appear to zoom up over the past several years.  Then there's this quote from Gavin Schmidt of NASA/GISS, also on the front page:

“Is there any evidence for a pause in the long-term global warming rate?” said Gavin A. Schmidt, head of NASA’s climate-science unit, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in Manhattan. “The answer is no. That was true before last year, but it’s much more obvious now.”    

Huh?  Everybody who knows anything knows that the satellite and balloon data sets directly contradict this statement.  Does he really think we are this uninformed?  The two main satellite-based data sets, UAH and RSS, both show a pause exceeding 18 years, and neither shows 2015 as the warmest or second-warmest year (although 2015 is one of the warmer years in both sets, as would be expected in the presence of a strong El Nino).

At Breitbart a few days ago, James Delingpole points to a new video by climate super-alarmist Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann and others (Mann is the climate equivalent of Steinberg and Keys) attempting to discredit the satellite data.  OK, they are entitled to make their points, however flimsy.  But John Christy of UAH immediately produced this chart showing the extremely close agreement between the satellite and balloon data sets, even though the methods of producing the two are completely unrelated:

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I can only think that the idea is if you just present your own cooked data loudly enough and prominently enough and often enough, and just completely ignore all contrary evidence and pretend that it does not exist, then eventually you will carry the day by sheer force of will.  That certainly was the game plan of the diet-heart promoters, and it seemed to be working for a very long time.  But recently the contrary evidence has become just too overwhelming.  

Will that happen for the global warming hypothesis?  Probably when the next big La Nina kicks in.  Will they really be able to make enough data adjustments to make that go away?

"The Big Fat Surprise": How Science Is Corrupted By Government Money And Government Process

I haven't made a practice of reviewing books here, but it's time for an exception.  A few weeks ago a reader named Nina Teicholz, who is also an accomplished writer in the health arena, wrote to offer me a copy of her recent book, titled "The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat & Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet."  I took her up on the offer, and shortly after that the book arrived in my mailbox.  And then I actually read it, which is somewhat remarkable given that I'm about 20 books behind at any given time.  

This is a book that you really need to read.  And not just because you will finally learn some real information about what constitutes a healthy diet.  This is also a story of the corruption of science by government money and government process that has application far beyond just the field of nutrition.

Today, all Americans deeply know, seemingly as part of their cultural heritage, that a healthy diet is low in fat.  Indeed, not just low in overall fat, but particularly low in saturated fat, the kind that is found in large amounts in butter, milk and cheese.  Go to the market, and seemingly every product has a "low fat" option, generally accompanied by the phrase "heart healthy!"  Eat out with your friends, and observe them demonstrating their virtue over you by eating nothing but a salad, perhaps accompanied by a smidgeon of low-fat chicken or fish.  (Maybe this phenomenon is less prevalent outside of Manhattan.  But a great thing about living in Manhattan is how easy it is to horrify your friends by eating an intentionally high-fat meal in their presence.)

I've been on to the scam of the low fat diet for some time (see, for example, here from July 2013).  But it's actually harder than you might think to get your hands on real information on this subject.  Hundreds upon hundreds of articles just take it as a complete given that low fat equals heart healthy, without ever questioning where this idea ever came from.  Besides, the American Heart Association has been on the low fat bandwagon for decades, and same for the U.S. government dietary guidelines.  Hey, everybody knows it!

And now into the groupthink leaps Ms. Teicholz, with a thoroughly-researched tome on the development of the so-called diet-heart hypothesis.  She tells the story of how over the course of a few decades from about the 1950s to the 80s that hypothesis rapidly swept away all dissenters and rose to uncontested dominance in the field.  Oh, even as the evidence relating to the hypothesis ranged from ambiguous at best to completely adverse in many instances.  But the hypothesis was backed by a small group of intensely committed scientists and journalists who managed to get control over the principal scientific organizations (notably the American Heart Association in this instance) and the principal government grant-givers (here NIH and NHLBI), and used that control to marginalize and ultimately de-fund their opponents.

I won't attempt to go too deeply into the details, but a few examples will give some of the flavor. The diet-heart hypothesis owes its triumph more than anything else to the work from the 1940s to the 1980s of one Ancel Keys, a highly energetic and ambitious professor from the University of Minnesota.  In the mid-50s Keys proposed testing the hypothesis by doing a first-ever international multi-country epidemiological study.  In 1956 he won from the U.S. Public Health Service to fund the proposed study a $200,000 annual grant -- at the time an enormous sum.  The countries he chose to study were Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, Finland, the Netherlands, Japan and the United States.  And the results:

What Keys found, as he had hoped, was a strong correlation between the consumption of saturated fat and deaths from heart disease.  (page 38)

But here's the thing:  from previous work by Yerushalmy and Hellebore (1950) Keys already knew rough numbers for fat consumption and heart disease rates for 22 countries, which included five of the seven that Keys selected to study (the exceptions were Greece and Yugoslavia).  And the five countries for which these data were known all fit neatly along an upward-sloping line from low fat/low heart disease (Japan) on one end, to high fat/high heart disease (United States) on the other end.  Meanwhile, there were plenty of countries that were known not to fit into this neat pattern.  And these were not small or insignificant countries.  Examples were France, Switzerland and Mexico.  Well, they were just omitted from the study.  Teicholz:

[Keys] might have selected a European country to challenge his fat hypothesis, like Switzerland or France (or Germany or Norway or Sweden).  Instead, he chose only those nations (based on national statistics) that seemed likely to confirm it. . . .  Attempting to explain why Keys did not seek out countries that would offer more challenges to his ideas, [Keys colleague] Blackburn said, "Keys just had a personal aversion to being in France and Switzerland."

Sure. To this day, in books I have read on the supposed support for the diet-heart hypothesis, the Keys seven-country study is cited as among the most important evidence.

By the early 70s the need for some more definitive proof or refutation of the diet-heart hypothesis had become clear, but the main government funders (here mainly NIH) were daunted by the prospective cost.  Were they really going to spend literally billions to provide controlled diets for years to tens of thousands of people in two groups?  Instead, they opted to do two not-inexpensive studies, but kind of on the cheap.  $250 million was allocated to the two studies.  First up was the Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial, or MRFIT (pronounced "Mister Fit"), a massive test that ran from 1973 to 1982.  Here was the plan: they screened 361,000 middle-aged American males to find some 12,000 with particularly high blood cholesterol, greater than 290 mg/dL.  They divided these into two groups, an "intervention" group and a control group.  The intervention group got multiple such interventions, including counseling to quit smoking, medication to lower high blood pressure, and advice on a low fat, low cholesterol diet.  They drank skim milk, used margarine instead of butter, limited eggs to two of fewer per week, and avoided meat and desserts.  The control group's members were left to do as they pleased.  The men were followed for seven years.  Results?

The results, announced in September 1982, were a disaster for the diet-heart hypothesis.  Although men in the intervention group had been spectacularly successful in changing their diets, quitting smoking, and reducing their blood pressure, they died at slightly higher rates than the controls.   

Oops.  Teicholz details how the results of MRFIT were then systematically suppressed and forgotten.  Meanwhile, the remainder of the $250 million went to a study called Lipid Research Clinic Coronary Primary Prevention Trial, abbreviated as LRC.  This study divided 3800 men who had high blood cholesterol again into two groups, both of which were counseled to reduce fat in the diet, but one of which also received an early cholesterol-lowering drug called cholestyramine.  In other words, diet was not part of what was tested; the test was of the cholesterol-lowering drug.  The results were reported in 1984.  The treatment group had "slightly fewer heart attacks" (page 128), but total mortality for the two groups was almost identical.  The treatment group suffered additional deaths from such things as suicide, accidents, and cancer.  And commenting on other similar studies, Teicholz says:

Other cholesterol-lowering studies where diet had been the only intervention consistently found higher rates of cancer and gallstones in the experimental group . . . .  In addition, populations found to have very low cholesterol, such as the Japanese, suffer from higher rates of strokes and cerebral hemorrhage compared to groups whose average cholesterol is higher.  (page 129)  

But somehow the extremely ambiguous results of the LRC study -- a study that did not even test diet at all -- got spun into being the definitive proof of the diet-heart hypothesis.  In 1984 NHLBI organized a massive conference specifically intended to generate a scientific "consensus" on the causes of heart disease.  The conference was organized by Basil Rifkind and chaired by Daniel Steinberg, two of the leaders of the LRC study.  The conference ended with a so-called consensus statement that admitted of no ambiguities:

The conference "consensus" statement, which Steinberg read out on the last morning of the event, was not a measured assessment of the complicated role that diet might play in a little-understood disease.  Instead, there was "no doubt," he stated, that reducing cholesterol through a low-fat, low-saturated-fat diet would "afford significant protection against coronary heart disease" for every American over the age of two.  (page 132)

And thus the low fat diet got an imprimatur of "consensus" from a small amount of highly ambiguous data.  Nothing since has been able to dislodge it.  Example: a long-running study of essentially everybody in the town of Framingham, Massachusetts reported follow-up results in the 90s.  Here are some:

In 1961, after six years of study, the Framingham investigators announced their first big discovery: that high total cholesterol was a reliable predictor for heart disease. . . .  However, thirty years later [1991], in the Framingham follow-up study . . . it turned out that the predictive power of total cholesterol was not nearly as strong as study leaders had originally thought.  For men and women with cholesterol between 205 and 264 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dL), no relationship between these numbers and heart disease risk could be found. . . .  [F}or men aged forty-eight to fifty-seven, those with cholesterol in the midrange (183-222 mg/dL) had greater risk of heart attack death than those with higher cholesterol (222-261 mg/dL).  (pages 64-65)

Teicholz describes several more studies with results that would either refute the diet-heart hypothesis or are highly troubling in other respects, notably showing higher total mortality for people on low cholesterol diets from causes including cancer, stroke and violence.  But so what?  Since when is it the actual evidence that counts when "science" turns on control of government funds and government-sponsored committees that control grants and publication rights.  The small clique of intense promoters of the diet-heart hypothesis -- notably Keys, Rifkind and Steinberg -- gradually got control of the key associations (e.g., American Heart Association) and government funders (e.g., NIH and NHLBI) and saw to it that their opponents lost their funding, were no longer invited to conferences, and could no longer get their papers published.  And thus,  the day has long since been carried.  It's just a part of our culture.  Everybody knows that a low fat diet is "heart healthy"!

Teicholz overall is a lot nicer about the state of corruption than I would be.  But low key can be very effective.  I'm just hoping that someone other than me pays attention.

Of course, readers will quickly recognize that this story bears remarkable resemblance to the story of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis.  The AGW story is even far worse because all the proposed solutions are catnip to leftists looking for reasons to promote government takeover of everything.  Is there any hope of ever again looking at the evidence to see if the hypothesis has been refuted?  Perhaps if that occurs in the arena of nutrition, the good sense will spread.

The Most Important Lesson Of The Twentieth Century, Forgotten

If you had to name the single most important lesson to be learned from the history of the twentieth century, what would it be?  For me, there is one that far and away dwarfs all others.  It is that socialism doesn't work.  Not only doesn't work: inevitably leads to loss of freedom for the people, dictatorship, and impoverishment.  And, if a government attempts to impose a "pure" form of socialism, then it gets worse and worse: mass starvation and intentional slaughter of the people by the millions or tens of millions.  Oh, plus a corrupt elite that gets to live in luxury by controlling the military and secret police, all while everyone else starves.

In my days in high school in the 1960s, it was still barely possible to be a supporter of socialism under the theory of "you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs."  (The phrase was used repeatedly by the reprehensible Walter Duranty of the New York Times in justifying Stalin's atrocities.)  Sure they've had a few purges, the theory went (while suppressing the enormous numbers actually slaughtered), but with government-led regimentation of the economy, everyone will eventually be richer and the wealth will be far more equitably distributed.  But even then word of the economic disaster of China's "Great Leap Forward" was leaking out.  (Today we know that that effort in the late 50s and early 60s to collectivize the Chinese economy led to rapid economic collapse, mass starvation, and something in the range of 18 to 45 million deaths. )  Then when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990 and 1991, we learned that in return for decades of living in constant fear in a 24/7 prison state, the Soviet people had gotten an economy that was less than 20% the size of the main Western economies on a per capita basis, with the majority of that going to the military while the people lived in tiny hovels and ate potatoes if they were lucky.

But could it be that the problems of the Soviet Union and of Maoist China were just problems of proper execution, and that socialism would work just fine and achieve the utopian workers' paradise as soon as someone did it right?  To refute that possibility, we've been given one after another after another example of socialist disaster for the past 50 and more years.  Consider the cases of Cambodia (the "killing fields" of 1975 -79 -- estimated 1.7 to 2.5 million killed out of a population of about 8 million, and most of those shot rather than starved); Cuba (abject poverty and total repression, while the elite lives in luxury); North Korea (same plus periodic mass starvation and a gulag imprisoning hundreds of thousands); and, most recently, the complete self-destruction of Venezuela. 

And in the face of this history, we have running for President a candidate proudly declaring himself to be a "socialist."  Writing in the New York Post over the weekend, Paul Sperry points out that Bernie Sanders absolutely should be taken literally in his adoption of the word "socialist" to describe his program;  indeed Sperry suggests that the word "communist" would also be appropriate.  Sperry recites a litany of Sanders's actions embracing socialism and communism, from joining the Young People's Socialist League in college, to heading the American People's History Society ("an organ for Marxist propaganda"), to taking "goodwill" trips (during his tour as mayor of Burlington, Vermont) to the Soviet Union and to Nicaragua, to even flying a Soviet flag on his desk.

And with that background, Sanders is nipping at the heals of the supposed frontrunner for the Democratic nomination.  And what is the core of Sanders's support?  For starters, it's academics and young people who are either still in college or have recently completed a college education.  Could there be any clearer indication of the crisis in higher education today?  In academia they have completely abandoned any effort to learn about the world and pass the knowledge on to the next generation, and instead they have retreated into total self-absorption and delusion.

Not having a strong penchant for self-torture, I watched only small snippets of last night's Democratic debate.  But I've seen enough to diagnose Hillary's problem: she is very likely a socialist herself.  Confronted with Sanders's proposals for government takeover of the healthcare sector, takeover of health insurance companies, takeover of all big banks, and so forth, Hillary is unable to articulate why these are bad ideas.  Her best response is something like, "this is too expensive right now and we need first to digest what we've already started."  But fundamentally, she agrees with the concept that the government can and should assume collective responsibility for taking care of all significant problems of the people.  Certainly, she has never articulated a boundary or limit beyond which government takeover of the economy should not go. 

How Can We Get The Government's Money Out Of Politics?

Buried toward the end of President Obama's State of the Union Address a couple of days ago was the usual progressive call to "reduce the influence of money in politics":

I believe we’ve got to reduce the influence of money in our politics, so that a handful of families or hidden interests can’t bankroll our elections.  And if our existing approach to campaign finance reform can’t pass muster in the courts, we need to work together to find a real solution, because it’s a problem.     

As with most everything else in this pastiche of vague platitudes, there were no specifics as to what he intends as the "real solution" to the supposed problem.  What would that be Barack?  Repeal the First Amendment?  (Progressive icon Senator Chuck Schumer has taken several runs at repealing the First Amendment in the name of "campaign finance reform" -- see for example here.)

Meanwhile of course Obama omitted any mention of the vast sums that the government itself spends every year to promote itself and its ongoing growth.  In his progressive world view, the government itself is just the neutral a-political experts using their perfect knowledge and expertise to improve the world.  Of course they need to explain how that works to the ignorant rubes!  Does Obama even realize that the government spends far more each year promoting itself and its growth than all the money contributed to political causes by all private citizens, rich and poor?  Without doubt, in Obama's mind, government using the taxpayer trillions to promote yet more government just doesn't count as "money in politics."

The SOTU came just a few weeks after the GAO slapped the Obama EPA for covertly using non-appropriated government funds to support enhancement of its own power via its new "waters of the United States" rules.  Here is a report in The Hill from December 14.  Excerpt:

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said a pair of social media campaigns by the EPA in support of its “waters of the United States” rule broke laws that prohibit federal agencies from promoting or lobbying for their own actions. . . .  “We conclude that EPA’s use of Thunderclap constituted covert propaganda, in violation of the publicity or propaganda prohibition,” GAO wrote.  We also conclude that EPA hyperlinks to the [Natural Resources Defense Council] and Surfrider Foundation webpages provided in the EPA blog post constitute grassroots lobbying, in violation of the grassroots lobbying prohibition.”  The GAO said the EPA also violated the law that prohibits spending government resources that have not been appropriated.    

If you don't remember from when this first came to light last May, EPA used the covert social media lobbying campaign to generate hundreds of thousands of astroturf comments on the proposed regulation.  Those comments were then used by EPA administrator Gina McCarthy in Congressional testimony in March in an effort to demonstrate supposedly overwhelming public support for the power-grabbing regulations, and to blunt Congressional criticism.  From a New York Times report on May 18:

“We have received over one million comments, and 87.1 percent of those comments we have counted so far — we are only missing 4,000 — are supportive of this rule,” Ms. McCarthy told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in March. “Let me repeat: 87.1 percent of those one-plus million are supportive of this rule.”

Caught red-handed, EPA's response was exactly what you'd expect:  hey, we were just trying to educate the public as to what was going on!  From The Hill:

“We maintain that using social media to educate the public about our work is an integral part of our mission,” EPA spokeswoman Monica Lee said in the statement.  “We have an obligation to inform all stakeholders about environmental issues and encourage participation in the rulemaking process. We use social media tools just like all organizations to stay connected and inform people across the country about our activities.”   

They have no idea that government self-promotion with taxpayer funds has any relationship at all to "money in politics."  Oh, and don't count on seeing a prosecution any time soon by the Obama Justice Department of those bureaucrats who spent unappropriated funds on illegal self-promotion.  

For a summary of just a few items in the tens of billions of annual government spending that goes to promotion of the growth of the government, see my article "The Main Business Of Government Is Promoting Its Own Growth."  Items covered there include the vast sums spent to encourage sign-ups for Obamacare; the aggressive campaign of the Obama administration to expand the usage of food stamps (SNAP); the Agriculture Department's fraudulent "food insecurity" surveys, cynically designed to promote expansion of DOA "nutrition" programs; the Census Department's fake "poverty" statistics, equally cynically designed to promote more completely ineffectual "anti-poverty" spending and programs; the vast grants by the Federal Reserve to community housing groups, much of which are used for lobbying for more government spending; and on and on and on.  

But hey, we need to "reduce the influence of money in politics."  That way, no one will be able to push back at all against the onslaught of government growth.