Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Fwd: The growing divide

One of the frequent blind spots for economic libertarians, speaking as one who has personally dealt with this log in the eye, is a tendency to allow principles of how economies work and the beauty of trade to make us ignore perceived threats animating people who value more than just the power to buy and sell. The gigantism encouraged by our modern globalist system has many perks across many industries. But it has also given rise to a global corporate elite. This elite tribe of globalists share certain values: they are more tolerant of regulation, insomuch as it drives out competition; they are more welcoming of government expenditure, insomuch as it buys their products, builds their needed infrastructure, and subsidizes their hospital systems; and they care little about the subjugation of rights to speech and religion, so much as it makes their ability to sell in certain markets inconvenient.

If you want a video representation of this mindset, I could do no better than to offer this footage from a recent conversation with the leaders of Google dealing with an uncomfortable question last month about the monolithic nature of their engagement with politics.

Note the response from Eric Schmidt, who rejects the idea that anyone disagreeing with him politically could be operating from a position of "science-based thinking". The level of diversity and inclusiveness welcomed by Google is precisely as much as is needed to achieve their corporate aims. "You'll also find that all of the other companies in our field agree with us" – yes, we know.

In an economy that is increasingly driven by the global elite, will the values that have been central to our nation's history exist in a meaningful sense? Or will they be discarded as inconvenient bugs, virulent viruses passed on from our ignorant forefathers that must be cured? Can free speech and religious liberty survive in an environment when our corporate leaders see honor in stamping out fake news and non-science based thinking?

And this leads us back to the question of why we hate each other. The New York Times looked into rising contempt across partisan lines: "Democrats and Republicans truly think worse of each other, a trend that isn't really about policy preferences. Members of the two parties are more likely today to describe each other unfavorably, as selfish, as threats to the nation, even as unsuitable marriage material.

"Surveys over time have used a 100-point thermometer scale to rate how voters feel toward each other, from cold to warm. Democrats and Republicans have been giving lower and lower scores — more cold shoulder — to the opposite party. By 2008, the average rating for members of the other party was barely above 30.

By 2016, that average dropped by about five more percentage points, dragged down in part by a new phenomenon: For the first time, the most common answer given was zero, the worst possible option. In other words, voters on the left and right now feel downright frigid toward each other."

Today, the centralized power among the leaders of the global tech industry – who have little use for free speech and religion, and are thoroughly onboard with the Messianic aims of the environmental movement are steadily prodding governments to seal up the valves and the hatches. In a world where all the companies agree, what use are they after all?

The implicit motto of the global elites today is "no escape" – no escape valve from a permanently politicized life, where the only legitimate perspective is their monopolistic, secularized, authoritarian-friendly 

When we do not view each other as legitimate – particularly when decisions are not coming from the people or properly elected officials, but from some other force – it leads to resentment, escalation, and eventually something much worse.

http://thefederalist.com/2017/06/19/globalism-and-why-we-hate-each-other/#



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