Monday (Labor Day) roundup

The title to this one is pretty clever clickbait, actually, if you have a genuine appreciation for human advancement. It's an Associated Press article entitled, "Trump's Rollback of Pollution Rules to Hit Coal Country Hard." Now, a guy like me sees that and thinks, wait a minute. In what sense? It's going to be a great boost for the coal industry, increase jobs and keep energy cheap. Ah, as it turns out, the sense in which the author means it is that an EPA study says a lot of people in West Virginia are going to DIE because of the rollback.

Even though it's rife with confirmation bias, four paragraphs in, the article quotes a fellow who makes the most sense of anything that follows:

Knotts, a coal miner for 35 years, isn’t fazed when he hears that warning, a couple of days after Trump’s West Virginia rally. He says the last thing people in coal country want is the government slapping down more controls on coal — and the air here in the remote West Virginia mountains seems fine to him.

But the AP is counting on most people reading it to come to it with the correct understanding - that it's good and proper for a bunch of unelected pointy-head do-gooder agency types far removed from the day-to-day economic situation in West Virginia to determine what is good for the folks who live there.

Arrogance dressed up as compassion.

This is a view I've been pondering all day. Joel Kotkin, writing at the Orange County Register, says that the concentration of wealth within the tech sector is leading to oligarchical socialism.

Where do we go after Trump? This question becomes more pertinent as the soap opera administration seeks its own dramatic demise. Yet before they can seize power from the president and his now subservient party, the Democrats need to agree on what will replace Trumpism.

Conventional wisdom implies an endless battle between pragmatic, corporate Clintonites on one side, and Democratic socialists of the Bernie brand. Yet this conflict could resolve itself in a new, innovative approach that could be best described as oligarchal socialism.

Oligarchal socialism allows for the current, ever-growing concentration of wealth and power in a few hands — notably tech and financial moguls — while seeking ways to ameliorate the reality of growing poverty, slowing social mobility and indebtedness. This will be achieved not by breaking up or targeting the oligarchs, which they would fight to the bitter end, but through the massive increase in state taxpayer support.

It will be a kind of central planning that allows the cattle-masses to kid themselves that they're still sovereign individuals, since they'll have gig-economy occupations:

Greg Fehrenstein, who interviewed 147 digital company founders, says most believe that “an increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people. Everyone else will increasingly subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial ’gig work‘ and government aid.”

But it will all be happening in a milieu of collectivism, shaped by do-gooder techies:

Particularly since Donald Trump’s election, the leaders of corporate America — especially in tech and finance — have merged with the Democrats. They appeal to progressives by advocating politically correct views on immigration, gender rights and climate change, while muzzling conservatives both inside and outside their companies.

But now the socialists have raised the ante for progressive credibility. Going beyond green and identity issues, they are raising issues that impact most families. Arguably their strongest case can be seen in health care, now the top issue with voters, according to Gallup. In some states, notably California, socialists are also backing a drive for rent control to help families cope with high rents and low wages.

The end product of what Kotkin sees happening looks a lot like what James Burnham envisioned in 1941 in The Managerial Revolution:

The tech moguls get to remain wealthy beyond the most extreme dreams of avarice, while their allies in progressive circles and the media, which they increasingly own, continue to hector everyone else about giving up their own aspirations. All the middle and upwardly mobile working class gets is the right to pay ever more taxes, while they watch many of their children devolve into serfs, dependent on alms and subsidies for their survival.

The Red Hen in Lexington, Virginia, has not recovered financially from its kicking out of Sarah Sanders' dinner party, and the owner has brought upon herself the opprobrium of other downtown Lexington business owners.

In a different context (a US move with regard to Palestinians), Reuters assumes the same confirmation bias as the AP does in the above-discussed article on coal mining. It expects the reader of the article linked to and excerpted from this Power Line piece to view this as a distressing move. But you, dear LITD reader, know how to properly view what's being reported:

This is good news that I missed a few days ago: U.S. halts funding to U.N. agency helping Palestinian refugees. I would say that headline is wrong in two respects. 

The United States on Friday halted all funding to a U.N. agency that helps Palestinian refugees in a decision further heightening tensions between the Palestinian leadership and the Trump administration.

A spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas denounced the decision as “a flagrant assault against the Palestinian people and a defiance of U.N. resolutions.”

This is a theme that recurs throughout the Reuters article. The Palestinians think we have an obligation to support them:

In Gaza, the Islamist group Hamas condemned the U.S move as a “grave escalation against the Palestinian people.”

“The American decision aims to wipe out the right of return and is a grave U.S escalation against the Palestinian people,” said Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri.

Yes, I hope that President Trump intends to wipe out the fictitious “right of return” once and for all. UNRWA has been a key player preserving the myth that millions of Palestinians are “refugees.”

The Trump administration explained its decision:

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said the business model and fiscal practices of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) made it an “irredeemably flawed operation.”

“The administration has carefully reviewed the issue and determined that the United States will not make additional contributions to UNRWA,” she said in a statement.

Nauert said the agency’s “endlessly and exponentially expanding community of entitled beneficiaries is simply unsustainable and has been in crisis mode for many years.”

Lest you try to hold Sweden up as some kind of shining example of how to do "universal" health care, consider this:

Swedes are frustrated over their universal healthcare, one of the main pillars of their cherished welfare state, with long waiting queues due to a shortage of nurses and available doctors in some areas. 

"Swedes have little confidence that politicians will solve this," said Lisa Pelling, chief analyst at progressive think tank Arena Ide. 

"There is a risk their faith in the welfare state will be eroded," she told AFP. 

Swedes, who on average pay more than half of their income in tax, see access to healthcare as the most important issue in the September 9 general election, polls suggest.

Prime Minister Stefan Lofven's Social Democrats, the largest party, are on course for a record low score, after losing voters disgruntled over rising immigration putting a strain on the welfare system to the far-right Sweden Democrats. 

- 'Lose time'-

Swedish law stipulates patients should wait no more than 90 days to undergo surgery or see a specialist. Yet every third patient waits longer, according to government figures.

Patients must also see a general practitioner within seven days, the second-longest deadline in Europe after Portugal (15 days). 

Yet waiting times vary dramatically across Sweden's 21 counties responsible for financing hospitals.

The boldface type statistic is exactly what I mean by the term "cattle-masses," for which I am routinely taken to task in the LITD comment threads. Those who do so are completely wrong. We are becoming more cattle-like by the hour. There are lots of people, in Sweden and in post-America, who are perfectly fine with government, the entity in society with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, taking over half of a person's hard-earned money. They have been propagandized into believing that it's not theirs in the first place.

Buzz Aldrin is definitely not pleased that the new Neil Armstrong biopic excludes a scene of Armstrong planting the flag of the United States of America on the moon.