Newsom Means Well, But . . .

Gavin Newsom Means Well!  Doesn’t He?

Gavin Newsom means well (at least for himself). His rhetoric is all about victims who need his help, criminal cartel members and illegal immigrants hunted by ICE, struggling minimum wage workers, people with sexual habits or practices that differ from the average in society (while the straights won’t bother to use their chosen pronouns), ethnic sub-populations that have been chronically disadvantaged and marginalized. The many people in the intersections of all of these group characteristics. Newsom asserts that they all need Newsom’s help!

Fear not! Gavin the magician, the valiant dragonslayer is hard at work. Struggling on behalf of the marginalized ones. Not to mention the health of the globe(!) which needed Dr. Newsom, a decade or three ago! It may already be too late to save our planet, much less us.  Right?

Gavin Newsom, the social warrior, the common man’s man! And his pocket minions in the state legislature, they’re the common man’s men (and women), also! Aren’t they?

How could we all not love them, and hold them up as personal examples of what we all want to be when we grow up?

The Problem With It all

Gavin’s good intentions do not a guarantee of good outcomes.

The threads this series of posts are not about blue states verses red states. This isn’t about tax ideology or about political twitter fights. Its about things that work and things that don’t work. Its about the general good, which helps everyone in society, not just whichever the special interest group we focused on today.  Pragmatic solutions succeed.

The largest economy in the United States is collapsing under the weight of decisions that were sold to the people of California, as progressive improvements, but are now revealing themselves to have been catastrophic economic blunders.  A focus on special interests of a few, almost always works against the general good of us all.

The Real Tapestry of Society

No single thread makes a tapestry.  Only when many threads are woven together can the beauty of the whole tapestry be seen.

The core and sadly destructive fallacy which misleads modern governments and populations is the assertion that we need to focus on the needs and wants of a nearly endless list of special interests in our society. Meanwhile “we the people” have been led by the nose to an apparently endless stream of sad stories about particular people or groups of people. This knavish practice has been going on since sometime deep in the Cold War era. Almost all of those stories have led us to becoming increasingly divided as a people.

To one degree or another, practically everyone struggles for their existence in this world. Nothing is free. No one hands us the easy life on a platter. Even the more fortunate ones with more resources than most of us do not have a free ride in life.

Politics is always about control. In modern republican democracies, control is always to some extent about votes. Votes are not just bought with the money of the power elites, as the more cynical among us would assert. Rhetoric wins votes, and yields control to the best of our storytellers.

The Folly – The Divisive Nature of Political Rhetoric

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a corrupt donkey or a marauding elephant, an economic raging bull, or a reserved and reticent bear.

We are all different from one another. All of our families are dysfunctional in one way or another. Though most of us try to hide it, each of us has some advantages and some ways in which we are broken. To whatever degree we succeed, we spend most of our lives getting over ourselves, and becoming the best people we can be, despite the odd or irregular conditions we are born into. Every man for himself is not the uniting spirit of the nation’s e pluribus unum motto – which translates to out of many one.

Not so with modern political rhetoric.

The nominally unintended consequences of modern identity politics is division. The glaring example of this which is currently in our face is the bigger-than-life collapse of the beautiful, once prosperous and successful state of California, under the one-party leadership of their ardently divisive governor, Gavin Newsom, and his gang.

Follow The Money

Here’s the economic truth of it all: The financial base of the successful in society can be tapped to help the less fortunate of that society. That is the basic truth about the virtue of charity, simple and plain.

Even if the charity is not voluntary on the part of the giver, if government extortion is used to finance state charity for the forgotten poor of society it is still a sort of virtue, and it is certainly a boon for those who receive it. Surely the financial abundance of a wealthy society can (and must) be used to help the poor and down trodden.

Going Too Far Kills the Goose that is Laying the Golden Eggs

Government enforced charity is a boon for the poor until the unsupportable burden of that charity causes the economic base which is funding the charity to collapse or to completely disappear.

To see the pragmatic and multi-faceted “receipts,” follow the links listed below.