Friday roundup

Andrew Ferguson at The Weekly Standard on the upcoming get-your-minds-right sit-down Starbucks is going to make its employees - er, associates - endure:

The Starbucks event is a superior instance of American business’s approach to problem-solving. It begins with a grand gesture: the closing of the 8,000 company-owned Starbucks outlets, including those that are right across the street from each other. The ensuing program—details not yet revealed—will be presented as an act of contrition on the part of an artificial entity, the corporation, that by its very nature cannot feel contrition, or anything else. It will be an intimate and personal process staged by hired “diversity trainers” for maximum publicity. And it will be wreathed in unassailably uplifting politics to hide the creepy methods that are, we’re told, the fruit of the very finest social science. I bet the baristas can hardly wait.

Reprogramming Day was announced in a press release issued via a two-and-a-half-minute video (another sign of our times: a video is necessary in the age of tl;dr). The CEO of Starbucks, an earnest man named Kevin Johnson, stared into the camera looking woebegone and jowly. He said he felt terrible that police were called a few days earlier to haul away two black men from a Philadelphia Starbucks on the assumption that they were loitering. In pursuit of more enlightened racial attitudes, he said he will join all his partners—his genteelism for employees—in submitting to “training around unconscious bias [and] conscious inclusion.” He said that this will be “just one step in a journey.” Then he said it was the “first step in a journey.” Then he said it again.

Three of the organizers enlisted by Starbucks, from such humdinger outfits as the Equal Justice Initiative, the NAACP Legal and Education Fund, and Demos, say this can't just be a one-off, that this new level of puking all over itself must become an ongoing aspect of company culture.

We have been clear from the start that the company must build a framework for anti-bias training that extends beyond the planned May 29th training and that becomes part of the company culture. In addition to the need for an anti-discrimination curriculum—which will consist of an ongoing education for all employees, with real measures for evaluation and monitoring—we made clear that a thorough review of the company policies . . . is necessary as they move forward. We expect to issue a report to Starbucks, with recommendations about the company’s policies, a multi-phase training framework, and the ongoing work they will need to undertake in order to really move the ball.

Ferguson does a fairly deep dive into results of studies looking into whether all this diversity hoo-ha has really had any impact on the insides of the heads of employees or students or whatever comprises the body of a given organization. Results: It ain't doing zip.


Are you surprised to learn that its main impact is that it's kept management from getting sued?

John Hawkins at Townhall offers "5 Ways America's Success Is Ruining Our Culture."

South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg has used his veto power to squelch the plans of the Women'sCare Center, which offers services to women who are incoveniently pregnant but nonetheless want to keep their babies, to open a clinic on the city's west side. Hopefully, the final chapter on this is not yet written. Per Alexandra DeSanctis at NRO.

Jonathan Lesser at Politico on how it's time and then some to give up on subsidizing electric cars, not to mention jackboot measures like what California has in mind:

If you believe the headlines, traditional automobiles are speeding toward a dead end. All those V8s, V6s and turbocharged vehicles we’ve grown to love will soon be replaced by squadrons of clean, whisper-quiet, all-electric vehicles. And if you believe the headlines, the environment will be much better off.
Policymakers at every level have done their part to push electric vehicles by creating a tankful of subsidies. Thanks to laws signed by both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, electric-vehicle buyers can feast on federal tax credits of up to $7,500 that reduce the initial purchase cost of their vehicles. Not to be outdone, many states also dangle their own mix of goodies for electric vehicle buyers, including purchase rebates as large as $5,000, additional rebates for vehicle chargers, and free use of public charging stations—which, of course, are only “free” because they’re subsidized by ratepayers and taxpayers. Some states even give electric vehicles preferential access to carpool lanes.
Then there are the electric vehicle mandates. In January, California Gov. Jerry Brown decreed that 5 million electric vehicles must be on his state’s roads by 2025, along with 250,000 charging stations. Eight other states are following California’s lead. One California lawmaker has even introduced legislation to ban all internal combustion vehicles by 2040.

He looked into the matter and found that

 . . . widespread adoption of electric vehicles nationwide will likely increase air pollution compared with new internal combustion vehicles. You read that right: more electric cars and trucks will mean more pollution. 

Speaking of electric cars, Dylan Byers at CNN on how Mr, Grandiosity, Elon Musk, is trying the patience of his benefactors:

 On a recent earnings call, he interrupted analysts who asked about capital expenditures and Tesla Model 3 production: "Boring, bonehead questions are not cool," Musk said to one. "These questions are so dry. They're killing me," he said to another. 

While Musk may be right that one Tesla crash pales in comparison to tens of thousands of fatal auto accidents, it doesn't mean it doesn't warrant coverage. As Jalopnik's Ryan Felton points out, "it'd be wholly irresponsible to avoid scrutinizing whether [autonomous] technology can perform in the real world."

Musk's dismissal of analysts' concerns is also hard to justify. Musk's visions can't be achieved without financing. Today, Goldman Sachs predicts Tesla will need $10.5 billion in new capitalover the next two-and-a-half years to keep operating and meet targets. 

Musk is a long-term thinker in a short-term world, but his runway is running out. Tesla needs to demonstrate real, tangible progress to convince everyone other than his most bullish investors that he's still a safe bet.  

A parlor game I often run in my head consists of coming up with a top-ten pantheon of figures who shaped conservatism. Most of the names I usually include are probably among yours, too: Edmund Burke, Frederic Bastiat, Herbert Spencer, Michael Oakeshott, Richard M. Weaver, James Burnham, William F. Buckley.

We'd do well to take a closer look at nineteenth-century British jurist and writer James Fitzjames Stephen. His best-known work, Liberty Equality Fraternity, derives its title from the slogan of the French revolutionaries, and is one of those literary situations in which the employ of an idea is for the purpose of showing how it's inevitably going to be distorted (sort of like Hayek dedicating Road to Serfdom to the world's socialists).

At Law and Liberty, Mark Pulliam juxtaposes Stephen's worldview with that of John Stuart Mill, whom Stephen was refuting in his book.

LITD likes the way Stephen thinks:

Stephen and Mill both embraced utilitarianism, but advocated dramatically different views of liberty, owing in substantial part to their disparate conceptions of human nature. Stephen believed that Mill — who espoused unfettered individual liberty in matters of conscience, speech, and morality — had “formed too favourable an estimate of human nature.” Unbridled liberty, Stephen complained, “would condemn every existing system of morals” (which ultimately rest on compulsion). Stephen insisted that Mill was naïve in presupposing that man’s self-control, guided by customs and reason, would protect him from his baser instincts — passion, wickedness, and weakness.

Stephen, in contrast, was a devotee of Thomas Hobbes (and especially his magnum opus, Leviathan), and had a deeply pessimistic vision of mankind, whom he regarded as prone to conflict and overwhelmingly “selfish, sensual, frivolous, idle, … and wrapped up in the smallest of petty routines.” Accordingly, Stephen felt that goodness had to be inculcated externally, by society’s promotion of virtue and religion. Left to its own devices (as envisioned by Mill’s harm principle), humanity would resemble a “stagnant marsh … putrefying and breeding fever, frogs, and gnats.” Stephen saw laws promoting morality as a desirable form of coercion, constituting (in a hydraulic metaphor that he frequently turned to) pipes, channels, and pumps, directing the “water” (humanity) to a useful purpose — “a proper water-works.”

If Stephen’s reasoning at times seems anachronistic to the modern reader, it is because we have become accustomed to the Pollyannaish view of human nature held by Mill — a utopian fallacy of modernity. If man is basically good, as modern liberals and radical individualists assume, he will independently make sound decisions and can realize his potential greatness of character entirely on his own. Stephen sharply disagreed.

Stephen defended the Calvinist notion that man is a flawed creature who struggles in choosing between good and evil. Man’s inherent vices can be overcome only by appealing to his better nature, liberating him to enjoy ordered liberty — the “freedom to be good and wise.” To this end, Stephen supported the propagation of morality, culture, tradition — and even religion — through law. To Stephen, the restraint of antisocial conduct builds character and makes liberty within civil society possible. In Stephen’s words, “Liberty means not the bare absence of restraint, but the absence of injurious restraint” (emphasis added).

By providing a context of culture and morality, and discouraging his baser instincts, civilized society allows man to exercise virtuous (i.e., true) choice. This is the essence of “ordered liberty.” Because morality is reinforced externally, through government and other institutions, Stephens believed—paradoxically to some modern readers – that “liberty…is dependent upon power.”

Stephen was a brutal realist, and an energetic instrumentalist. He believed that society can and should legislate morality; the failure to do so would lead to intemperance, debauchery, torpor, and anarchy. Stephen was anxious about the envious gaze of political majorities when it came to matters of economics (which he analyzed under the rubric of “equality”), but he felt that it was essential for a bourgeois society to reinforce its cultural norms through the apparatus of the state. Other than supporting the enforcement of morals, Stephens hewed to what is now regarded as the libertarian (or free-market) position, whereas Mill — the storied defender of liberty — advocated egalitarianism, and eventually even socialism. Ironically, Mill’s notion of laissez-faire did not extend to economic relations.

Stephen realized that the prevalence of indolence, imprudence, hedonism, and ignorance among mankind would — absent intervention — ineluctably lead to inequality of results. Left to their own devices, some people would become more prosperous than others, and Stephen felt strongly that such unequal outcomes were essential in a free society. “Human beings are not equal,” he recognized. Eschewing Mill’s egalitarianism, Stephen maintained that “Of all items of liberty, none is either so important or so universally recognized as the liberty of acquiring property. It is difficult to see what liberty you leave to a man at all if you restrict him in this matter.” Thus, to Stephen equality of results was antithetical to equality under the law (or liberty, properly understood), and to the rule of law.

Stephen emphatically rejected Mill’s view of women’s rights. Mill advocated complete equality between men and women, meaning the elimination of all privileges and disabilities based on sex. In the 19th century, this was a radical notion, which Stephen vehemently opposed. What Mill regarded as the subjugation (or “subjection”) of women Stephen (ever the instrumentalist) saw instead as arrangements necessary to preserve the bourgeois social order vital to the promotion of morality. Distinctions between the sexes, Stephen argued, are not only justified by physical differences (explaining why only men are conscripted for military service), but also to protect the institution of marriage and to foster women’s vital role as mothers and homemakers. Stephen’s views on this subject — a mixture of paternalism and pragmatism — generally mirror those of modern social conservatives.

Stephen’s view of “fraternity” — the relations among members of civil society — is misanthropic. Stephen expressed a negative view of mankind, which he regarded as being engaged in a Darwinian conflict, owing to the Hobbesian human condition:

I believe that many men are bad, a vast majority of men indifferent, and many good, and that the great mass of indifferent people sway this way or that according to circumstances…. [B]etween all classes of men there are and always will be real occasions of enmity and strife, and that even good men may be and often are compelled to treat each other as enemies either by the existence of conflicting interests which bring them into collision, or by their different ways of conceiving goodness. (Emphasis added.)

In his editor’s Foreword, Warner [editor of the 1993 edition of Stephen's book] describes Stephen’s vigorous defense of Victorian England against the challenges it faced by saying that he “lovingly cradles the high culture” of his era as the culmination of western civilization — the apogee of human progress. This state of affairs had been arrived at without universal suffrage, and Stephen was quite apprehensive about the threat that expanding democracy posed to the status quo he cherished. The threats of demagoguery and class envy — implicit in democracy — had to be resisted to preserve liberty.

Stephen provides good ammo for those arguments in which a lefty (or most breeds of libertarians) wants to say, "You conservatives talk a good game about freedom, but you sure do want to hold everybody up to your own moral standard."

Uh, yeah.