Imports and Exports Coexist in Harmony

 Imports and Exports Coexist in Harmony

 

Broken Promises: Over 30,000 Farmers Denied Funds

Lex Anteinternet: What's wrong with the United States? The Protestant Work Ethic.

Lex Anteinternet: What's wrong with the United States? The Protesta...: 

What's wrong with the United States? The Protestant Work Ethic.

Professor Galloway "on follow your passion".

His advice?

Don't.

More particularly, his advice is dedicated yourself relentlessly to something you are good at, and it will become your passion, in no small part as you'll make money at it.

There's plenty of evidence that's right. . . and just as much that it's wrong.

Professor Galloway is a Calvinist.  He comes by it naturally as his father is from Scotland.  

Oh, sure, you'll note that Galloway states he's an atheist. Well, like a lot of people who are something on an existential level, he doesn't know what he actual is. And what that is, is a Calvinist.  Perhaps a cultural Calvinist, but a Calvinist.

And it was Calvin, not the Church of England, or the Lutherans, who gave us the Protestant Work Ethic.

Well, that's great, right?

Not so much.

John Calvin was as French radical Protestant reformer who was grim in his outlook and basically an asshole.  One of his central core beliefs was double predestination, which held that from the moment of conception almost everyone was going to Hell.  

Calvin taught that all men must work, even the wealthy, because to work was the will of God. Irrespective of their ultimate fate, which they could in no way impact, it was the unyielding duty of men (and I do men men) to toil here on Earth as part of God's plan to continue the creation of the Earth.  Men were not, in his view, to become wealthy, I'd note, but were to reinvest the fruits of their labor over and over again, ad infinitum, or to the end of time.

Calvin held that using profits to help others rise from a lessor level of subsistence violated God's will since persons could only demonstrate that they were among the Elect through their own labor.

The Puritans were Calvinists, and so were the Presbyterians, the latter of which has generally slacked up on Calvinist theology a great deal.  None the less, the impact of Calvinism on the US has been huge.  It founded the thesis that you should work and work, well past the point where accumulation of wealth made any sense.  When you look at people like Elon Must or Donald Trump who have vast sums of wealth but keep accumulating, you are seeing the Protestant work ethic at work.

You are also seeing it when you lay people off in droves. They're lessors, and their economic plight is existentially foreordained.  If they were among the Elect, this wouldn't be happening to them.

Work is what it's all about.

You see that well expressed in Galloway's comments.  Galloway is an opponent of Musk, but they have essentially the same view on work.  Galloway presents in the grim Calvinist style.  You must find productive and useful work and love it, as that's the ticket to everything.

It isn't.

Contrary to what Galloway things, for one things, there are plenty of people who have done well in their carers and know a lot about what they do and hate it.  The legal profession is a poster child for this, but I've found it to be the case for medicine as well.  

And women have become particularly the victim of this in recent years, diving hard into careers as, John Calvin has told them, this would affirm that they were part of the Elect, in the modified American social view, only to find that they are miserable.

And all this because Calvin was flat out wrong.  His theology was wrong, and his understanding of human beings appallingly wrong.

The Catholic view has been much more nuanced than the Protestant one.  Catholicism itself holds to a degree that we work, because we have to, work being one of the results of the Fall.  It also hold, however, that we toil as part of a community and are never to put that aside.  The accumulative nature of the Protestant Work Ethic is basically antithetical to Apostolic Christianity, although there are certainly Catholics, such as Bill Gates, who have become extremely wealthy.  Largescale wealth, however, comes in Catholic theology with a heavy burden to everyone else.  Unlike Calvinist, you can't really morally justify investing over and over while those less well off suffer in your presence.  Indeed, that would be one of the four sins God hates.

Okay, so why is this a problem?

It's a massive problem in that deep in American culture is an anti human dedication to acquisition and toil, that's why.  People are expected to work themselves to death and tolerate those among us who acquire vast wealth.  Ultimately, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, who often have simply benefitted from the circumstances of their birth takes from everyone else, makes millions miserable, and actually makes the economy less and less productive.

Society doesn't exist to generate wealth for those who can accumulate.  Society exists for society.  That means, at the end of the day, that some must be protected, for the good of us all, from their appetites, weather that appetite be for drugs, dissolute living, or avarice.  

The fact that we have forgotten this is literally destroying the country.

Lex Anteinternet: Errare humanum est, perseverare diabolicum

Lex Anteinternet: Errare humanum est, perseverare diabolicum

Don't Believe Him | The Ezra Klein Show

Lex Anteinternet: Stores limit egg purchases.

Lex Anteinternet: Stores limit egg purchases.:   

Stores limit egg purchases.

 

Yep, that's right. In central Wyoming you are limited to one carton as people are trying to stock up to avoid coming price increases.

Yessir, Trump was really successful on that price lowering thing.

Lex Anteinternet: Well that didn't take long. . .

Lex Anteinternet: Well that didn't take long. . .:   

Well that didn't take long. . .

 Trump’s Immigration Threats Are Already Wrecking the Food Industry

Immigrant farm workers are too scared to show up to work.

The past election featured a lot of really dimwitted comments by those who decided to vote for Trump about making the price of food "go down".  

Dimwitted.

The government has very little ability to make the price of anything whatsoever go down.  There are a few options.  For one, if an item is imported and taxed at the border, you can remove the tax.

That's the exact opposite of what the Genius with Really Good Genes proposes to do. That's going to raise prices.

Another is to impact the price of something the government actually controls, such as privatizing an industry or releasing a supply of something held by the government.

Neither of those are options right now.

Trump's really good brain has so far simply proposed to the Saudis that the produce a lot of oil.  The Saudis are likely laughing. 

If they did, that would drop the price of oil, which drops the price of everything else.  It also makes US oil completely unviable economically as its very expensive to drill for. We already know this as a few years ago there was a glut of oil, which dropped its price and stopped US drilling dead in its tracks.

One of the things Trump promised his followers that he would do, which he can do to some limited extent, is deport aliens.  Hopefully they're illegal aliens, but to a lot of his supporters, any alien will do, as long as the alien has brown skin.

Donald Musk and Ted Cruz, born respectively in South Africa and Canada, can stay, which is a real shame.  I'd be okay with deporting both of them.

US agriculture depends heavily on illegal aliens from Mexico.  It has for decades.  It's a situation which never should have been allowed to develop, but it was because both Republicans and Democrats turned a blind eye to it.  Now, the US is dependent on that migrant population.

Trump promises to deport all these people as quickly as possible.  That means administering a massive shock to the farm economy, which means the prices of everything at the grocery store will go up, up, up.  Trump will ignore that.  Consumers won't be able to, and those who knew that this would occur ought to be plastering these on self check out lines:

It won't end there of course.  The economic genius has fallen in love with tariffs, something that fell out of favor as they helped create the Great Depression, bring Hitler into power, and cause World War Two.  

Trump really doesn't seem to be the smartest bulb in the bunch and apparently he skipped lessons in history.  Part of the reason he cited for wanting to change the name of Denali to Mt. McKinley is that McKinley, who was President before income tax was legal, used tariffs to fund the rather small U.S. budget of the time.

What a boofador.

Trump tends to think like, and talk, like a gangster.  As we discuss in an upcoming post, he may have in fact learned a lot of his "art of the deal" by having to deal with the mafia on New York construction projects.  The mafia operates, in fact, a lot like Trump. They make big threats, and then hurt people, until a rival gang knuckles under or regular people give in.

The problem here, of course, is that countries aren't criminal gangs, usually (Russia sort of is), and they don't behave that way. Democratic nations particularly don't.  Trump is getting the middle finger from Canada and Mexico right now, but the besotted American public hasn't noticed.  If Trump imposes the tariffs he threatens to, Canada is threatening to flat out cease exporting into the US.  What Canada has in spades, oil and lumber, it can sell elsewhere.  We can't replace what we get from them.

That'll spike the price of oil massively. We can't offset the oil deficit that would result in as we're already, in spite of the moronic "drill baby drill" comments people make, drilling at capacity.  That would easily add 1/3d to the price at the pumps, if not 3 times to it.

And the removal of lumber would simply end the construction industry.

Canada is also a major exporter of hydroelectric power into the US.  If Canada starts taxing that, and it can, at a rate to offset tariffs, living in New England will be extremely expensive.

As for Mexico, go to the grocery store and see how many things are "grown in Mexico". With California in trouble due to Trump's immigration policies, and a retaliating Mexico you'll get to eat what can be produced locally.

Um, yum.  Canned corn will still be there.

It'd be tempting to say "people will get what they deserve, but Trump didn't even take 50% of the popular vote.

Let's say that again.  He didn't take even 50% of the popular vote.

He took 49.8%, which is regarded as impressive in American politics, but in reality is not.  50.2 % of the American public voted against him.

Third parties may have put Trump in office.

In some systems, if a person doesn't take over 50% of the vote, there's a runoff election between the top two vote getters until somebody does.  If that had been done, would Trump be President?

Anyhow, with about 50% voting for him, and 50% voting against him, Trump doesn't have a mandate to do squat.  Quite a few of his insiders know that which is why they're rushing to put in their projects while they can, which is really only until the next mid term election when an enraged public turns on the GOP.  It's going to happen.

In the meantime, the 50% of the country that didn't vote for Trump is going to endure rising prices, destroyed retirement accounts, a Federal government that won't help with local disasters, and the increasing slide of the country into a mean, childish, brutish, thugocracy.