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Greg Jayne, Opinion page editor

It is one of the most pointed and most flexible pejoratives in the conservative lexicon, a word that can be twisted to fit nearly any situation.

So, when the Washington Legislature last week approved a family leave bill with bipartisan support in both chambers, Rep. Liz Pike, R-Camas, pulled out an old standby and said, Its one step toward a socialist state government.

And why wouldnt she? Socialist and its linguistic corollary, socialism, resonate as four-letter words in the American ear, making them useful for driving home a point without having to employ nuance. Not that anybody employs nuance these days. We live in an era, after all, in which the leader of the free world believes meaningful communication can be had 140 characters at a time.

Anyway, the point is not to focus on Pike. She did not create the current political climate and, to her credit, she is nothing if not consistent. Pike was re-elected last year with 56 percent of the vote, her constituents know what they are getting when she represents them in Olympia, and she works hard on their behalf. That is to be respected even when you disagree with her.

Instead, the intent is to focus on this notion of socialist and its use as a pejorative suitable for nearly any occasion regardless of accuracy. Websters tells us that socialism means any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.

That would seem to make cries of socialism squishy at best and empty at worst. Socialism is about government ownership of the means of production, which would cause a collective aneurysm in the American public. Until the government begins taking over Starbucks, Boeing and Apple, we are far from becoming the United Socialists of America.

No, the United States remains deeply beholden to capitalism, as well it should. We have a gross domestic product of more than $19 trillion 25 percent of the worlds production and about 60 percent bigger than the next-largest country, China. American capitalism has created an endless string of innovations that have benefitted the global quality of life and have generated an extraordinarily high standard of living.

And yet, there is reason for concern. A poll conducted last year by Harvard University found that 51 percent of American adults ages 18 to 29 do not support capitalism. Only 42 percent approve of the system that helped create their iPhones and their lattes and their economic freedom.

This is understandable, considering that millennials experience with capitalism consists largely of the Great Recession and the calamity that ensued. But it should be noted that the recession was much worse in many of the worlds other nations. And it should be noted that capitalism is the worst economic system except for every other one ever conceived.

Yet as America wrestles with the future of capitalism and as conservatives throw around words such as socialist to try and instill fear, it seems that efforts would be better spent on trying to make capitalism work for the masses.

Take the family leave bill. Washington became the fifth state to approve of one, and when the law takes effect in 2020, it will allow employees to be paid while taking time off for a birth, adoption or a serious family illness. The alternative is for workers, even many with full-time jobs, to be unable to afford time off for life-changing events. If this counts as socialism, well, were all better for it.

Because if conservatives are intent upon opposing anything that falls under their definition of socialism, they should start dismantling police and fire departments. They should disassemble the U.S. military. They should leave roads and schools and social safety nets solely to the private sector.

That might help rid America of what some view as the evils of socialism, but it might also call to mind another pointed and flexible word: Dystopia.

Read more from the original source:
Jayne: Accusations of socialism bandied about too frequently - The Columbian

In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 referendum I considered publishing a special issue of the magazine in which, in a series of specially commissioned signed essays, we would indict the guilty men of Brexit. As Ive said before, I am no ardent Brussels-phile but the referendum campaign had appalled us. David Camerons carelessness and insouciance in calling and leading such a wretched campaign and then walking away from the consequences of his actions disgusted us.

We despised the narcissism and game-playing of Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, newspaper columnists masquerading as statesmen. The xenophobia of the right-wing press and Nigel Farage had been loathsome. The Remain campaign had been little better, from the fear-mongering of the Treasury to the lacklustre performance of Jeremy Corbyn.

***

The inspiration for the issue would be Guilty Men, the celebrated polemic written by Michael Foot, Frank Owen and Peter Howard and published in July 1940 under the pseudonym Cato, named after the Roman senator and historian. The three authors were all employed by Lord Beaverbrook, a Conservative and appeaser, hence the desire for anonymity. Catos 15 guilty men included Neville Chamberlain, Stanley Baldwin and Lord Halifax. Their appeasement of Hitler had led to the Dunkirk catastrophe. Our guilty men would have been Cameron, Johnson, Gove, Farage, Duncan Smith, Corbyn, and so on.

In the end, we published an issue featuring a brilliant Andr Carrilho cover illustration of Boris Johnson with an elongated nose, the chosen line for which was The Brexit lies. But the idea of writing something more ambitious about the Brexit debacle the viciousness of the campaign, the lies and distortions, the divisions it exacerbated and revealed nagged at me.

I even discussed with my agent, Andrew Gordon, writing a short book, a contemporary reworking of Guilty Men for the age of Brexit. Youll have to write it quickly, by the end of the summer, he said. I didnt have the stamina for such an undertaking but I hoped another writer might and said so in a column. Someone must have been listening because last week a book about Brexit called Guilty Men by Cato the Younger, published by Iain Dales enterprising and nimble Biteback operation, landed on my desk.

***

The original Guilty Men opens with an impassioned account of the retreat from Dunkirk: How was it . . . that the bravest sons of Britain ever came to be placed in such jeopardy? Cato the Youngers version begins more prosaically with a short summary of the original book with which it shares a title before it moves on to the beaches of Kos in Greece and the worst refugee crisis in Europe since the end of the Second World War. From there, it recounts how Britain came to join the European Economic Community and how the conditions for Brexit were created.

It is not written with the swagger and literary flair of the Michael Foot original: after all, Foot was a belletrist as well as a politician and newspaper editor, a passionate student of the Romantics, especially of Byron and Hazlitt. But it makes its case forcefully as it indicts for the five sins of deceit, distortion, personal gain, failures of leadership and hubris 13 men and two women, Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel, who is damned because of her inflexibility on freedom of movement. (I suppose the title Guilty Men and Women would not have been so euphonious.)

In the concluding chapter, or envoi as the author prefers, there is an expression of defiance: We will come through and we will thrive. But the final note is long and plangent, a lament for what is described as a diminished sense of European fellowship, perhaps for ever. For ever is a long time, of course, but you get the point.

Guilty Men sold more than 50,000 copies in a few weeks and 200,000 by the end of 1940. No tract on foreign policy since Keyness Economic Consequences of the Peace in 1919 . . . had so decisively seared itself into the public consciousness, wrote John Stevenson in his introduction to the Penguin edition. Cato the Youngers Brexit Edition is unlikely to be a bestseller Britain is not existentially threatened by fascism, after all but its central idea is a good one (I had it myself!) and one wishes the pseudonymous author or authors well.

***

While we are on the theme of Brexit, here are some more variations. David Davis, who used to say that striking a free trade deal with the EU27 would be straightforward because the Germans would be so desperate to sell us their cars and the French their cheese and wine, has now said that the Brexit negotiations are as complicated as the moon landings. Andrew Adonis, speaking in the Lords, has called Brexit a hard-right nationalist policy. The diarist and theatre critic Tim Walker uses the neologism Brexshit. Nick Clegg has asked, rhetorically, if any of us remember the time when we were promised an easy Brexit. And the Labour MP Mike Gapes has suggested we are heading for a Wrexit crash.

***

Dunkirk and the failure of the Norwegian campaign opened the way for Winston Churchill to become prime minister and for the creation of the wartime coalition in which Clement Attlee served with such distinction. Today, in our age of illusion, there is no Churchill waiting on the Tory benches to replace the humiliated Theresa May. Compared to Churchill, Boris Johnson (for all his glorified Churchillian self-image) is a huckster and a popinjay, whose character flaws render him unfit to be foreign secretary, least of all prime minister. Churchill said that Chamberlain and the appeasers had led Britain to the bullseye of disaster. Something similar could be said of Johnson and of our present predicament. Guilty men, indeed.

Continue reading here:
The election sealed the deal Jeremy Corbyn's new socialism won the argument - New Statesman

Editor's note: Find a cited version of this column at http://www.vaildaily.com.

Several weeks ago on ABC's Sunday morning talk show "This Week," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told host George Stephanopoulos, "The democrats need a strong, bold, sharp-edged and common-sense economic agenda. That's what's been missing."

So I find it a bit ironic that seven months after losing the 2016 presidential election, Schumer feels the Democratic Party is still struggling to articulate a coherent message. Meanwhile, the Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren wing of the party delivers a very clear message. Unfortunately for their constituency, it's about a failed ideology socialism.

Sanders and Warren are advocates of redistributing wealth; lax immigration rules, governmental intervention into health care, energy and business; and the acceptance that Washington should be the final arbiter of all problems.

Socialism has inherent defects

While socialism is antithetical to the ideals of the Founding Fathers, it tends to gain its strongest support among the young and those who are uninformed. On the surface, socialism sounds great; it has always sounded great and will continue to sound great within certain precincts. The only problem with socialism is that history exposes it as a bankrupt ideology.

But rather than describing socialism's failures tenet by tenet, the following apocryphal story illustrates socialism's inherent defects in an easy-to-understand way.

An economics professor at a local college made a statement that he had never failed a single student before but had once failed an entire class. The class insisted that wealth redistribution, aka socialism, worked because then no one would be poor and no one would be rich a great equalizer.

The professor then said, "OK, let's try an experiment." Henceforth, all grades would be averaged; everyone would receive the same grade, and no one would fail.

After the first test, the grades were averaged and everyone received a B. The students who studied hard were upset but the students who studied little were happy. As the second test rolled around, the students who had studied little now studied even less and the ones who studied hard decided they wanted a free ride, too, so they too decided to study little. The second test average was a D.

Now no one was happy. When the third test rolled around, the class average was an F; and from that point forward, the scores never increased, as bickering, blame and name-calling all resulted in hard feelings with the result that no one would study for the benefit of anyone else and the students all failed the class.

The professor then told them socialism as a form of government always fails because of human nature, i.e., when the reward is great, the effort to succeed is great, but when government takes the rewards away, no one will try to succeed.

human nature is part of ideological equations

Similar to the aforementioned students, the far left consistently overlooks the fact that human nature is part of any ideological equation. They fail to understand that socialism has never and will never work because it's based on a premise that's inconsistent with human behavior.

When people work, they expect to be compensated commensurate with their effort and skill level. And capitalism does that more effectively than any economic system yet devised by man. Capitalism provides an incentive for people to achieve because they know their efforts will be rewarded.

Conversely, socialism is a disincentive to achievement because people also know their work is valued only collectively, rather than being valued individually.

Quote of the day: "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent vice of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries." Winston Churchill.

Butch Mazzuca, of Edwards, writes regularly for the Vail Daily. He can be reached at bmazz68@comcast.net.

Read more:
Vail Daily column: When it comes to socialism, will they ever learn? - Vail Daily News

The Hindu

The Kochi tea party The Hindu There are two kinds of people in the world. One that drinks tea and one that doesn't. And right now, we aren't interested in the latter. Tea in the city has been, for years, associated with popular chayakadas serving strong, boiled and milky brew but ...

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The Kochi tea party - The Hindu

Theres something wonderfully comforting about a hot cup of tea even when its being consumed in the back of a bus with a bunch of strangers. Just ask Guisepi Spadafora, who spends his life road-tripping across the country hosting free tea parties out of the back of a bus.

As he explains in this video from filmmaker Jackie Snow, the Tea Bus wasnt born out of any particular passion for tea: Rather, it was born out of loneliness and a desire to make new friends. I didnt really have very much money and tea was this really easy and cheap way to get people together, he explains. He estimates hes served more than 25,000 cups to more than 15,000 people since the start of his endeavor.

Spadaforas passion project is self-funded, and he conserves costs by harnessing solar power and collecting firewood to burn for energy and even producing some of his own food, like kombucha. For things he cant provide for himself, he leans on the relationships hes built over time through his tea party endeavors, noting that I want to live in a culture thats less selfish and more sharing. (And to clarify, no, these tea parties have nothing to do with the political group calling themselves the Tea Party.)

Spadafora estimates that he lives on about one-fifth or one-sixth the amount of money a normal person does, but he measures his success by the sense of community that the Tea Bus fosters. What I found is when I offered something completely free with no strings attached, it really gives people the opportunity to have more deep, meaningful interactions, he says. Rather than coming into the situation with What can I get? it was more What can I give or what can I share?

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Originally posted here:
Watch: This Guy Travels Cross-Country Serving Free Tea Out of a Bus - Eater