Frank Luntz: Sanders Most Likely To Win Democratic Nomination

RealClearPolitics ^ | May 12, 2019 | Tim Hains

[Antoninus]

I am an old-fashioned capitalist and I like trust-busting.

Exactly. Small to mid-sized corps are good for liberty and good government. Mega-corps are not. Never have been and never will be.

[from occupied ga]

Yes they’ve been on the books for decades, but that doesn’t mean they’re a good thing. If you don’t like Amazon you can shop someplace else. If you don’t like what the government does you’re SOL.

Sooner or later the morons who make up the Democrat base and the ignorant self absorbed millennials who are enamored with socialism are going to get back into the executive branch and then watch as they go after the NRA, FR and everything conservative.

[amihow]

You defeat you own argument with statement that I can shop somewhere other than Amazon.

[from occupied ga]

Only in your mind

[amihow]

Where do you shop?

[from occupied ga]

You first.

[Sam Gamgee]

Agree 100%. We also have the cult of consumerism, which is a concerted effort to push the “virtue” of consumption based on faulty Keynsian economics. (A lone man on a desert island with bananas can DEMAND a flat screen TV all he likes, but his DEMAND is not the same as economic growth). And the promotion of paper wealth - bankers and investment bankers making “money” by moving other money around, NOT be creating anything productive.

[amihow]

Are you in first or second grade?

[amihow]

Great point!!!

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

For those in favor of "trust busting" it is important to understand that your stance makes you philosophical cousins of the DNC.

In general I agree. However, there is a case which demands consideration. “People of the same trade,” Adam Smith wrote, “seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” And there is a “trade” in which this is certainly true.

I have reference, of course, to the trade of journalism. Not only do journalists read other newspapers, their news outlets participate in wire services which - especially in the case of the AP - actively tell journalists what kind of language is unacceptable. You can’t say “illegal aliens,” for example. Wire services are virtual meetings which never stop - and in the case of the AP, those meetings started before the Civil War.

These meetings have produced the “conspiracy against the public” which is the unanimity of journalists in proclaiming that “all journalists are objective,” and the exclusion from the trade of journalists who do not go along and get along. It’s not that breaking up the wire services would be a violation of the First Amendment, to the contrary the wire services aggressively suppress diversity in journalism and therefore subvert freedom of expression instead of promoting it. Journalism - for commercial rather than philosophically founded reasons - is negative. It hypes bad news about American society. All journalists know that, and still they claim objectivity. Well, guess what! “Negativity is objectivity” is a concept only a cynic could adopt.

Cynicism is, ironically, a form of naiveté. For if you are cynical about “A” you are perforce naive about the opposite of “A.” Per Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, society and government are good and (necessary) evil - in a very real sense, therefore, opposites. Wire service journalism is a trust which promotes cynicism towards society and naiveté towards government. And that, by my lights, is the true definition of “socialism.”

Given the exponential decrease in the cost of telegraphy bandwidth, there is no economic reason why telegraphy bandwidth must be conserved - and that is the only rationale by which the “virtual meetings” of the wire services have been justified.

[from occupied ga]

You ask for personal information that is none of your business and don’t offer any in return. Ain’t gonna happen. Where I shop what I buy and how much I pay is nobody’s business but my own

[amihow]

You speak like a child.

[from occupied ga]

You speak like a child.

You speak like a Democrat of the Bernie persuasion

[DoodleBob]

Thank you for your thoughtful post.

In effect, you're arguing that 'journalists' are seditious. While there may be merit to that argument in certain quarters, the reality is that seditious speech is constitutional. This article (which was written during the Obama Administration when people on the 'right' were under attack for their speech) does a nice job of laying out the whole argument.

The risk in all of these matters is that the club we'd love to give Trump to bash journalists, Antifa, and other losers is the same club that will be used by a statist Executive to bash Deplorables et al. I'd rather not be part of that exercise.

However, we needn't fret too much. The old MSM is losing their influence little by little, and with more and more people getting their news online (and gravitating to their own preferred sources like FR, Drudge, etc.) and fewer people turning to the MSM (and those that do are generally dying off), the 'journalists' are on the run. Indeed, even with new media 'journalists' get fired, their being told to "Learn to Code" is very telling. I'm hopeful for the future.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

In effect, you're arguing that 'journalists' are seditious. While there may be merit to that argument in certain quarters, the reality is that seditious speech is constitutional. This article (which was written during the Obama Administration when people on the 'right' were under attack for their speech) does a nice job of laying out the whole argument.

“Sedition” refers to criticism of the government. My critique of wire service journalism is not that it criticizes government. It does not - except to the extent that it complains that government is too humble when, by their lights, government should be all-encompassing. Society and government are two different things.

SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins.

Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness;

the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices.

The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions.

The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one . . .
For were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed, man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the protection of the rest . . . — Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)

The argument is not that the journalism trust is unfairly criticizing government officials - tho when Republicans are in office that is true - it is that it arbitrarily and capriciously attacks society. It attacks limitations on government.

That makes it ironic when that trust claims that the First Amendment means that they themselves cannot be held to account in any way.

Understand, the First Amendment did not establish freedom of the press, that already existed, but with limitations for libel and pornography which nobody wanted to abolish. Which is why, as Scalia pointed out, 1A protects “the” freedom of the press. The journalism trust claims that 1A makes journalists into some sort of priesthood or class of nobility which is above reproach. And the famous New York Times v. Sullivan decision supports their position. Sullivan is a unanimous decision. Unanimous, but wrong - or at least, bad precedent.

The Sullivan case was decided in 1964 by the Warren Court, and it is seriously anachronistic today. Back then, there were three TV networks, no Internet, and - although the trust I speak of was in full flower and had been for decades at the time - that fact was not before the Court in Sullivan. Bias in the Media was the air we breathed - and if you think it’s hard to talk to a CNN viewer now, it was worse then because all radio and TV carried nothing but the 1964 version of the CNN perspective.

Sullivan makes it essentially impossible for a government official to sue for libel. But since Democrats have no principle which prevents them from aligning themselves with “the media,” Democrats enthusiastically do exactly that. The result is that Democrats don’t get libeled, and Sullivan is, de facto, an anti-Republican decision (an idiosyncrasy of Sullivan is the Mr. Sullivan was not a Republican but also was not a Democrat in good odor with the national Democrat Party of the time. He was a Southern Democrat, and therefore in today’s terms he would be made an “honorary” Republican by the Democrats and, to repeat myself "the media," today. See, Duke, David).

Without Thomas Paine and Common Sense, arguably, there is no American Revolution. Democrats and the trust we call “the media” are counterrevolutionary. There were plenty of people in the United States who opposed the Revolution, and after its success a great many of them were persona non grata - and “got out of Dodge" to Canada or Britain. The Constitution was not written to promote the influence of such.