Posted on 05/15/2014 6:42:26 AM PDT by Dqban22
Why the Left Doesn’t Care about Bad Economic News
Posted By Dennis Prager On May 14, 2014 @ 12:15 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 16 Comments
This perception is wrong. It is their goals that are irreconcilable. And until conservatives, independents and the Republican Party understand this, it will not be possible to defeat the left.
Take economic indicators. Most conservatives talk and act as if bad economic news disturbs the left as much as it disturbs them. It doesn’t.
Almost everywhere the left is in control — in California, for example — the economic news is awful. But this has no effect on the ruling Democrats, the Los Angeles Times editorial page, New York Times economics columnist Paul Krugman or others on the left.
There is one overriding philosophical reason and one political reason for this. But before I identify them, permit me to note some of the economic facts of life in California.
Unless otherwise noted, the following data have been culled by Chapman University Professor Joel Kotkin, and published in the Wall Street Journal, the Orange County Register and elsewhere. (For the record, Kotkin is a self-described “Truman Democrat” who voted for the Democrat governor Jerry Brown of California.)
—In the last 20 years, about 4 million more people have left California than came in from other states. Most of those leaving are young families.
—In the last 15 years, one-third of California’s industrial employment base has disappeared. That’s 600,000 jobs that have disappeared.
—California has the 48th-worst business tax climate. (The Tax Foundation)
—California’s electricity prices are 50 percent higher than the national average.
—Middle-class workers, those who earn more than $48,000, pay a top income tax rate of 9.3 percent. That’s higher than what millionaires pay in 47 other states.
—California’s unemployment rate is fourth highest in the nation.
—From 2010-13, California produced fewer than 8,000 jobs, while the country added 510,000.
California faces enormous underfunded public employee pension obligations. (Bloomberg)
—An estimated 25 billion barrels of oil are sitting untapped in the Monterey and Bakersfield shale deposits. California is therefore sending billions of dollars to Texas, Canada and elsewhere to buy natural gas and oil that it could have produced itself.
—Twitter, Adobe, eBay and Oracle, among other major California tech companies, have moved many operations to Salt Lake City.
—Hollywood is doing more and more of its filming in Louisiana, Canada and elsewhere to avoid California taxes.
—Toyota just announced that it is moving its U.S. headquarters from Los Angeles to Dallas. This will eliminate 3,000 or more generally high-wage jobs.
—Occidental Petroleum recently announced that it is moving its headquarters from Los Angeles to Houston.
—Until relatively recently, half of the country’s top 10 energy firms — ARCO, Getty Oil, Union Oil, Occidental and Chevron — were based in California. Today, only Chevron remains, and it is gradually relocating in Houston. (Reuters)
—Houston has added nine million square feet of new office space. Los Angeles has added one million.
The rest of the history
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dennis-prager/why-the-left-doesnt-care-about-bad-economic-news/print/
Something don't add up.
I read and re-read this article. Where is the WHY in “Why the Left Doesn’t Care about Bad Economic News”?
All I see is (important) statistical and economic information. Mr. Prager never offers his ‘why’.
The worse the economic news the better. It is all means to an end.
“Tyrants must have popular support to be able to accumulate power that ultimately will only be sustained by force. The poor always have and always will substantially outnumber the rich, and are the natural path to aggregating this power. The destructive nature of redistribution only aggravates poverty, thus creating an even greater groundswell of support for the redistributionist. A self reinforcing circle of destruction.”
I read it yesterday - what I got was
“bad economy = more democrat voters”
The answer is that they don’t care. Yes, of course, as individuals with a heart, most people, right and left, care about people losing their jobs. But in terms of what matters to the left and the policies they pursue, they don’t care. The left and the political party it controls do not care if their policies force to companies to leave the state (or the country). They don’t care about the coming high inflation caused by Quantitative Easing (printing money) — Krugman calls it The Inflation Obsession — or the job-depressing effects of high taxes, or energy prices that hurt the middle class, or compelling businesses to leave.
They don’t care because the left is not interested in prosperity; the left is interested in inequality and in the environment. Furthermore, the worse the economic situation, the more voters are likely to vote Democrat. The worse the economic situation, the greater the number of people receiving government assistance; the greater the number of people receiving government assistance, the greater the number of people who will vote Democrat.
Therefore, both philosophically and politically, the left has no reason to be troubled by bad economic news. And it isn’t. It is troubled by inequality and carbon emissions.
Yeah, that about sums it up.
I’ll offer it: they want communism or socialism, and don’t care about private enterprise or business or private property rights. Of course, if anyone says this, they are mocked, or called “McCarthyite.”
I think if you turn your back on absolutes, embrace godlessness, celebrate debauchery and perversion, attack the few remaining in the faith community, and allow your state to be overrun by non-producing illegal aliens, and you tax every other business into bankruptcy while individual public pensions are measured in 100s of thousand dollars annually and you expect anything but bad economic news you have to have the IQ of a cantelope.
Does God punish or does God let us punish ourselves?
Either way, California is lost, I believe it is unretrievable. I lived there for six years in the 1980s.
Glad I got out.
I read the article very carefully yesterday in the IBD.
Made several copies of it and shared it with others.
And Prager does gives us a WHY: The Left does not care about businesses leaving CA. They are more devoted to their religion of radical environmental extremism.
The Gay Bay has been having an employment boom. That’s about the only area in CA which has a decent economy. The money has been big so it’s funding that revenue flood.
Actually there has been somewhat of an uptick in revenue to the State Treasury largely due to capital gains and increased stock prices in CA’s technology sector based in Silicon Valley.
However, the state is much too reliant on this one source of revenue as other sectors including entertainment and energy are fleeing the state in droves along with manufacturers and small business. And the agricultural sector is being deprived of desperately needed water in order to protect the Delta Smelt.
Even the much vaunted green car company will most likely decide to build its battery making facility outside of the state because costs are much lower elsewhere. Already many tech companies such as Apple Computer have relocated many of their facilities and manufacturing outside of the state.
All the left cares about is a permanent government dependent constituency. Their economic policies are especially designed to create just that.
They do that because it’s an incredibly insidious and craven way to gain power.
They spin economic news positive on the macro level to create the general impression that the economy is well. This lulls people who are doing ok into complacency.
They allow, and indeed play UP economic pain on the micro level because it makes people who aren’t doing well believe that they are being cheated out of taking part in the prosperity. The solution for which are Liberal progams for government intervention such as forced redistribution.
When you get a Government check, you really don’t need to pay attention to the economy. You’re largely immune.
It goes far deeper than this. It is about shortage and control.
The left imagines only two kinds of people, “masters” and “slaves”. Or “elites” and “masses”, if you will. “Nobility” and “peasantry” also comes to mind. And ironically, time and again, they fix the ratio of masters to slaves at 1:9.
It is simple and easy to understand for them. They imagine themselves the “one out of ten” who are fit to be masters, to the “nine out of ten”, everyone else, who are only fit to be their slaves.
So how do they imagine themselves gaining the power of mastery over the slaves? Simple enough, by “controlling the means of production”, as Marx envisioned. But even that is not enough any more. The modern leftist seeks to “control everything”.
In their bizarre mindset, however, “everything” means the minutiae of life. They truly, deeply care about every piddly thing the slaves do, the less important the more intense they care about it. The truly important, major things in life is too complicated for them, so they prefer to ignore it.
Controlling everything, to their minds, is the key to controlling the slaves, because it means that everything is *rationed* to the slaves. And they do mean *everything*.
East Germany was a superb example, of the effort to control everything that was fungible. Even music and color were reserved by the state to honor the state. Toilet paper and razor blades were always kept in very short supply and poor quality. At the same time, their horrible pollution caused immense contamination and disease, and they did not care one whit.
They had thick dossiers of everyone in the country, and had coerced half the population to spy on the other half. About minutiae. They deeply cared about when people went to work and what route they took, what they ate for lunch, who their friends were, etc., ad nauseum.
In any event, among the other enemies of leftism, one reigns supreme. Abundance. In anything. But why oppose abundance? Simple.
Abundance in anything takes away the control of the state. This is because abundance means that the slaves can make choices. Abundance in anything becomes an alternative currency. And when there is an uncontrolled currency, there is an uncontrolled market.
So one of the biggest concerns of the left is to *create* shortage where there is none. Or at least convince people that there is a shortage when there is none. As well, to convince people to have less and pay more for it. Always less, until they are reduced to scraps from the tables of their masters.
Until everything that have is rationed to them. And they must obey their masters or they will have their rations cut off.
Look at what the left stands for today.
They want to control education. Of course, once they control it they seek to demean it until graduates know nothing more than they did when they entered, and what they know is corrupt and useless.
They want to control the environment. Such arrogance. But that control is to keep the slaves bottled up in giant cities, since they do not “deserve” nature, which is the property of the masters. Yet with that control, they are indifferent to pollution or desertification. They just want to control it, and keep the slaves away from it, not do anything productive or useful with it.
They want spies and secret police everywhere. Slaves have no right to privacy. But the masters are terrified of the idea of a slave revolt.
Many of the left are convinced that there are too many slaves in the world to control, so they want to start over, by exterminating 90% of the world’s population. Then the masters could start breeding replacement slaves like livestock. But this time, keeping the slaves down, so that they stay in their place and obey.
From our point of view, this is why we find liberal Republicans, RINOs, so terribly objectionable. While they disdain Democrats as lower class, their elitism is just as established in their minds. Yet they are so weak and cowardly that they gladly compromise with the Democrats.
It could be said that if Democrats wanted to launch a second Holocaust of the Jews, the RINOs would “compromise” with them, to only kill half the Jews. And then the RINOs would call themselves “moderates willing to cross the aisle.”
Well said! Indubitably and without doubt!
Inequality and carbon emissions. Must just be me but it looks like a money and power issue.
Regrettably true.
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