How Another Newsom Recall Effort Helps America

California isn’t as bad as millions of people outside the state have been led to believe. No, not every downtown street is awash in homeless drug addicts, schizophrenics, and predators. No, not every retail shopping district has crumbled under the onslaught of brazen shoplifters and smash-and-grab gangs. And despite almost every major “news” network in the nation pretending that an allegedly unprecedented onslaught of bomb cyclones is literally washing the entire state into the Pacific Ocean, overall California still has the best weather in the world.

Nonetheless, California is broken. Even if you aren’t one of the millions of Californians who doesn’t have to step over syringes and feces day after day merely to walk your children to school or get to work and back, and even if you aren’t one of the hundreds of thousands of business owners who no longer has a business or one of their employees who no longer has a job, California is broken.

For the vast majority of people living there, just surviving in California is a challenge. The median home price is nine times the median household income, and the prices of gasoline and utilities are the highest in the nation. California also has the highest tax rates, while it has among the worst public schools, the worst crime, the worst roads, water rationing, energy shortages, and a housing shortage. Pay all that money, for that, and go broke. Welcome to California.

California also has a brutal, overwhelming, complicated array of laws and regulations, worse than any other state. California also has the highest number of regulatory agencies. These agencies write and enforce rules that not only change all the time but are often in conflict with each other. Businesspeople in California have to choose which laws to break because total compliance is impossible. Chief Executive magazine has ranked California as the worst state for business for the last 19 years in a row, which is as long as they have been doing the rankings. Give the best years of your life, bet your fortune on being an independent entrepreneur, and endure nothing but harassment from your own government. Welcome to California.

Another Newsom Recall

This is the context in which yet another attempt to recall Governor Gavin Newsom was launched this past Monday, February 26, by the same team that successfully qualified a gubernatorial recall back in 2021, forcing a special election.

Newsom deserves it. He’s been on the road, barnstorming America, hoping to convince a critical mass of liberal voters that preserving the right to on-demand, late-term abortions is the most important issue of our time and that, as U.S. President-in-Waiting, he is their savior and protector. Meanwhile, the citizens of his own state desperately cope with an economy that’s breaking them, caused by a hostile, indifferent, incompetent, bloated network of state and local governments, all of them hijacked by special interests, all of them controlled by Democrats, with their absentee leader, Gavin Newsom, presiding over the whole failed, misanthropic mess.

Along with a broken economy, Newsom and the political machine that made him have done a superb job of rigging elections to prevent any return to sanity or humanity. Automatic voter registration, mailed ballots, and ballot harvesting, paid for by donations from leftist billionaires and public sector unions, all ensure that hand-picked and housebroken candidates continue to win elections all the way from local water board up to and including the governor.

But there’s still the recall. It’s the last viable avenue for grassroots activism to make a difference in California. Citizen democracy in California was once robust but has been deliberately diminished. Ballot initiatives where citizens can enact annoying laws like the legendary Proposition 13, which forbids rampant escalation in property tax rates, have been all but eviscerated thanks to “reforms” passed by the state legislature in recent years. But while initiatives have been safely regulated to the point where only billionaires, multinational corporations, and government unions retain the financial throw weight now required to get them qualified for a state ballot, the simple recall remains viable for the common activist.

The secret to the ongoing viability of recalls in California, at least until a few more “reforms” come down from a state legislature that is determined to preserve their absolute one-party rule, is that the petition verbiage needed to qualify a recall can fit onto one page, which means it can be mailed inexpensively to, for example, households where at least two registered Republicans live. Packaged with clear instructions to voters on how to sign the petition, a reply envelope, and an added form to make a donation, signature gathering for recall campaigns using direct mail can be self-sustaining. The horror!

Win or Lose, an Attempt to Recall Newsom Helps Republicans Everywhere

If this latest attempt to recall Newsom succeeds in forcing him to again defend himself in a special election, but he survives the recall attempt, it will nonetheless be a win for Republicans all over America. Democrats in California are the ATM machine for Democrats in the rest of the nation. Every dollar that is spent defending Newsom on his home turf is a dollar that isn’t exported to swing congressional districts across America. They’re not small dollars.

In opposition to the 2021 attempt to recall Newsom, the governor’s allies raised over $88 million. The recall committees altogether spent not quite $21 million. Depending on whether you consider the gross or the net amount, that is at least $67 million in campaign contributions that did not go off to bolster campaigns for Democrats in other states.

Here’s how much of a difference this money can make. In November 2022, the median amount of money raised by an incumbent U.S. Congressman in a battleground district (rated as “toss-up” by the Cook Political Report) was $5.5 million. This means $67 million would cover 100 percent of the campaign expenses in 12 close congressional races. We may assume median spending for congressional seats will be higher in 2024 than in 2022. But in 2024 congressional races in swing districts, where funding is already flowing in from around the nation, it’s reasonable to assume $67 million will go a long way. If a Newsom recall is qualified for the California ballot this year, that money is going to stay home. Successfully placing a Newsom recall on the ballot during this critical election year in California is going to damage the Democrat’s plan to recapture control of the U.S. Congress. It matters that much.

And who can be certain Newsom will survive a recall this time? As California rolls predictably into another spending deficit, California’s public institutions will falter even more. Fed-up voters may finally see past Newsom’s slick pompadour and telegenic smile and realize that all his blather about the threats of MAGA and the climate “crisis” were just distractions. They’ll connect the dots at last. It’s impossible to live here, and Newsom and his Democrats are the reason why.

Ultimately, rescuing California will depend on finding new candidates with the common sense and charisma to offer obvious solutions to voters: prosecuting criminals again, enabling school choice, and deregulating the housing and energy industries. Subjecting Newsom to a recall election will therefore also provide a forum for aspirants to replace Newsom. They will have a chance to explain their vision and offer voters an alternative to the corrupt, punitive governance that has made their lives far too difficult for far too long.

Win or lose, getting a Newsom recall effort onto the state ballot this year will force the governor to defend a record he can’t defend. At a critical time, it will spotlight the failures of his administration and his party. It will force Democratic donors to divert what might easily be up to $100 million away from close races in the rest of the nation. It will bring national attention to the failed one-party state called California and remind independent voters all over the country that the obsessions of social liberals may not be more important than retaining the ability to earn a living under a business-friendly government. And it will provide an opportunity for new candidates to get visibility for themselves and their ideas well in advance of California’s 2026 gubernatorial election, when Newsom will be termed out even if he survives this latest assault.

In short, trying yet again to recall California Governor Gavin Newsom is a healthy expression of democracy. Bring it on.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Irreconcilable Differences – California’s GOP Falters Within

Two very different visions for California. Steve Garvey, the leading Republican, is too conservative for California. He voted for Trump, twice, and supported Republicans for years.
– Adam Schiff campaign ad, February 2024

Usually, whenever you hear anything coming from Congressman Adam Schiff, a creature of the D.C. swamp for nearly 25 years, it’s likely the exact opposite is true. But he’s right about one thing: there are two very different visions for California. They couldn’t be further apart.

Democrats want California’s public schools to remain in the iron grip of left-wing teachers’ unions. They want to continue to enforce racist policies in defiance of even California’s voters, who in November 2020 decisively rejected their attempt to repeal affirmative action. They want to force Californians to pay the highest prices in the United States for rationed energy and water. They resist laws that might once again make crime illegal in this once safe state, and they want to continue to give politically connected developers tens of billions of dollars to construct housing for the homeless, a policy guaranteed to keep the vast majority on the street to die slow deaths. There’s much more. The system is set up to reward indolence and resentment. Hard workers are dupes.

The State of California is a textbook example of what happens when leftist oligarchs, environmentalist extremists, academic socialists, corporatists and crony capitalists, labor unions (mostly in the public sector), ambulance-chasing trial lawyers, and a media best described collectively as negligent, lazy cowards all join hands and decide to loot the middle class. The people being driven out of California are variously described by Democrats as too privileged, too independent, too unsustainable, recalcitrant, troglodytic, superseded, irrelevant, unwanted, and guilty by reason of whiteness. The attitude of California’s upper class towards the people whose hard work built the state is either hurry up and die or get lost and good riddance.

California is fast becoming a feudal economy, with the aforementioned upper class doling out alms to a dependent lower class that reliably votes for them in exchange for more promises. The middle class and any chance for ordinary people to attain financial independence are being systematically destroyed under the guise of climate and equity. This political economy is fast being exported to the rest of the United States and, by extension, everywhere else in the world where a pesky, resource-guzzling middle class has arisen.

Schiff got something else right in his presumptuous ad. He correctly calculated that uttering the name “Trump” and associating his Republican opponent with Trump and MAGA policies would be the most effective way to undermine that opponent. And in that comment, Schiff also inadvertently touched on the problem that is killing California’s Republican Party. To Trump or not to Trump. To MAGA or not to MAGA.

Irreconcilable Differences?

The schism in California’s Republican Party precedes Trump. The party has been split on how to handle social issues and immigration policy for decades. Democrats have successfully stigmatized all Republicans as race bigots ever since the party supported Prop. 187 in 1994, which would have prevented illegal immigrants from receiving public healthcare services, and as gender bigots ever since Prop. 8 in 2008, which banned gay marriage. California’s voters, by the way, approved both of these measures.

When Trump came along, however, the Democrats were able to hold him before gullible voters as the personification of racism and bigotry. Trump’s pugilistic spontaneity played into the hands of Democratic candidates and campaign consultants who, already armed with far more money than Republicans could ever hope to raise, simply tagged every Republican candidate with guilt by association, and their candidates kept on winning. In 2016, the GOP still controlled a dismal 25 out of 80 seats in the State Assembly. By 2022, that number had declined to only 18 GOP seats. Similarly, in 2016, the GOP controlled 13 of the 40 seats in the State Senate, and by 2022, that number had fallen to only eight GOP seats.

This is the quandary that California’s state GOP leadership confronts. Trump earned 6.0 million votes in California in 2020, up from 3.9 million in 2016. Trump earned substantially more votes in California than the 4.8 million registered Republicans in the state at that time. But despite having a solid base in the increasingly polarized state, Trump is represented by Democrats as a toxic brand, which condemns GOP party leadership and any politician not residing in one of the diminishing number of safe Republican districts to either publicly renounce him or have no chance of being elected.

How do you turn this around if you can’t unite? Republican registration in California is up slightly since 2020, increasing to 5.3 million. But Democratic registration, thanks to a system saturated with money and set up to sweep in every holder of a driver’s license and every college student, has surged since 2020 from 8.9 million to 10.6 million. You may call this the product of voter fraud, or just call it what is beyond debate, the product of a nearly omnipotent political machine. Whatever it is, it rolls on, saving people from the Trump boogeyman. Many of these registered Democrats can perhaps be forgiven because they have never heard the other side of the story.

A state party and its candidates can afford to be disunited when they have billions to play with. That would be California’s Democrats. Regardless of how you may assess their unity or lack of unity, they’re loaded. Adam Schiff, as a candidate still in primary season, already has $35 million stockpiled for his campaign. His principle primary rival among the Democrats, Katie Porter, has $13 million on hand. Which brings us to Steve Garvey, the Republican, who, according to his own campaign consultants, has raised a whopping $1.2 million through the end of January. You can’t run a campaign for U.S. Senate in California, with 39 million people and 7 major media markets, on $1.2 million. And it gets worse.

Two GOP Candidates, Two Strategies

For several years, a solid GOP candidate has quietly earned credibility among California’s grassroots voters through smart, resourceful campaigning, thoughtful policy positions, an articulate delivery, and an uncompromising stance on the issues that matter to conservatives. I asked Eric Early, also running for U.S. Senate, what happened. In California’s top-two primary, if Republicans split the vote, Californians will have a choice between two Democrats in November.

Early explained his reasons for entering the race. At the time he declared, there were no other Republicans considering running who might have a chance to make it through the primaries, while at the same time, three competitive Democrats (Schiff, Porter, and Barbara Lee) had already lined up. With the possibility that these three Democrats would split their party’s votes, Early saw an opportunity to capture votes from a unified GOP and advance to the general election.

Steve Garvey belatedly decided to become a candidate after polling showed Early to actually hold a lead against the other three Democrats. He was recruited because of his name recognition, although one must realize that Garvey’s celebrity status is tempered by the fact that he retired from baseball nearly 40 years ago. Garvey was a big star in his day, but if you’re under the age of 60, or even if you’re over 60 but never followed baseball, he is pretty much an unknown.

Perhaps Garvey’s appeal lies in his potential to raise big bucks from donors who themselves fall into his favored category—old baseball fans living in Southern California. That slice of California’s electorate probably does have a disproportionate ability to pony up cash for the candidate of their choice. But how’s that working out so far? Will anyone bet the ballpark on Garvey?

So far, Garvey is doing as good a job as can be expected of walking a difficult tightrope. If he falls off to one side, it will be because he didn’t sufficiently renounce membership of the Trump cult and hence lost every moderate voter. If he falls off to the other side, it will be because, in the process of distancing himself from Trump, he failed to rise above the vapid clichés and grasping RINO pablum that have by now completely alienated California’s conservative grassroots. Embrace Trump, lose the moderates. Reject Trump, lose the GOP grassroots, six million strong.

The Path to Reconciliation

Ultimately, what it takes for a candidate to walk this political tightrope, if that is even possible, is to reject Trump at the same time as you endorse, with no reservations, nearly every policy Trump stands for. The challenge, should one accept it as their only option, is to separate MAGA from Trump. Because the primary goals of MAGA are sound. They rest on several broad and coherent planks: Controlled, merit-based immigration. Fair, reciprocal trade with other nations. Pragmatic energy and infrastructure policies that balance the needs of people and the environment. Colorblind merit over mandated quotas based on race and gender. Law and order. More accountability and common sense in public education and less politicized curricula. And maintaining strategic and technological supremacy instead of engaging in regime change wars all over the world.

Those were Trump’s policies during his first presidency. They hold up to scrutiny. They are coherent. In the hands of the right U.S. Senate candidate, they are winning planks to loudly proclaim, even in California. A Machiavellian Democratic political consultant will effectively use Trump to stigmatize MAGA. But they cannot use MAGA, when it is accurately and resolutely articulated, to stigmatize every other Republican candidate on the ballot.

Eric Early, Garvey’s GOP rival who preceded him in announcing his candidacy, put it this way. “If we are going to go down in the general election, at least let’s not go down like a bunch of patsies. If we try to be Democrat-Lite, we lose. There is only one principled conservative in this race who will walk it and talk it. I won’t go down as just another patsy, hoping that the media will somehow take a liking to me.” Early describes the schism among Republicans as succinctly as it can be expressed, saying “there are Never Trumpers and there are Trump supporters.”

If you accept Early’s argument, then reconciling California’s GOP’s grassroots with its donors comes down to finding candidates that are not trying to be Democrat-Lite. MAGA policies offer a common-sense, surprisingly moderate, comprehensive, hopeful, constructive alternative to the mess Democrats have made of California. If all you can say is Democrats are bad, we’re not Democrats, and we disavow Trump, you have nothing to offer.

Unfortunately, for the last several years, in an attempt to attract donors, attract fair media coverage, and attract independent voters, California’s state GOP has fitfully navigated the precarious and irreconcilable political tightrope with donors and moderates on one side and their grassroots on the other. It has been an impossible journey that has only taken them backwards. At this point, with the registration gap widening, hopelessly outgunned financially, with no power whatsoever in the state legislature, and having alienated their own base, it’s time to recognize that the state party has lost its footing.

There is another way. Understanding MAGA, expressing MAGA, and persuasively making the case for MAGA right here in California, that is what still offers the GOP a path to unity, voters, donors, and victory.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Realigning California is not Impossible

It’s no secret that California is a juggernaut, exercising influence in national politics even disproportionate to its status as the largest state. And it’s all bad news. From California comes progressive authoritarianism in all its toxic iterations: climate fascism, big tech censorship, Hollywood cultural propaganda, and billions in campaign contributions to Democrats in every state from New Hampshire to Hawaii.

Often lost in the chorus of condemnation coming from the American right is the fact that struggling within the one-party state called California is a beleaguered minority of GOP voters. A minority so sizable, in fact, that in the 2020 election, Donald Trump received 6 million votes in California, edging out Texas and Florida to have the most Trump voters in the country.

If you examine California’s political geography, a pattern emerges that is precisely the same as in most other states. The big cities, run by politicians typically controlled by public sector unions, are solid blue. But in the hinterlands, many rural counties are solidly Republican. The registration numbers reflect a sizable number of Republican voters, despite being not nearly enough to win statewide elections. The pattern is typically 60/40.

For example, in the 2022 elections for higher state office, Democrats swept the field. Newsom got 59.2  percent of the vote to be reelected governor. Eleni Kounalakis got 59.7 percent to win Lieutenant Governor. The down-ticket Democrat candidates for state office also all won; Secretary of State 60.1 percent, Controller 55.3 percent, Treasurer 58.8 percent, Attorney General 59.1 percent, Insurance Commissioner 59.9 percent, and Superintendent of Public Instruction 63.7 percent.

In the California State Legislature, it’s the same story. The Democratic candidates hold 32 of the 40 seats in the State Senate, and they hold 62 of the 80 seats in the State Assembly. Democrats exercise absolute power in California. But this disenfranchises a sizable minority, since 40 percent of voters can be relied on to vote against Democrats, and in California’s top two general election system, that means they’re voting for Republicans.

There are many ways to look at 40 percent. On one hand, you can consider it indicates landslide proportions, which it is, and give up. But if you take a good look at the mess Democrats have made of California, you might decide it’s entirely possible to swing an additional 10 percent of voters against Democrats and start winning elections. You’d be up against a powerful coalition of public sector unions, who are the top contributors to almost every Democrat that’s had a seat in the state legislature in at least the last 20 years. And you would find them allied with tech billionaires, Hollywood influencers, and an assortment of activist nonprofits and their affiliated PACs. Together, these special interests fuel an agenda that has turned California into a feudal society and stands poised to turn the rest of America into the same medieval mess.

This failure needs no explaining. Californians live with it every day. Tens of thousands of homeless, dying on the streets because politicians are too crooked and too cowardly to just round them up and get them sober, like they used to. Criminals openly looting and terrorizing citizens because prosecutors—elected by Democratic megadonors—have decided incarceration is not the answer. The highest taxes and most burdensome regulations, all for nothing, because California has unreliable energy, rationed water, unaffordable homes, terrible schools, and it’s not safe.

California today is run by this formidable coalition of special interests, more united and more powerful than their counterparts in other states, serving themselves and their donors. They win because, along with all that power and all that money, they sell a message that goes something like this: “Vote for us because Donald Trump will destroy democracy.” Meanwhile, compliant “news” networks associate any Republican with Trump—that is, when they’re not selling climate porn, systemic racism porn, pandemic porn, gender bigotry porn, and other distracting forms of fear-based propaganda.

Propaganda works, but it’s a dangerous game. One by one, people see through the lies. All they need is a wholesome alternative. A message of hope and an agenda to back it up. It isn’t enough to say that Democrats ruined the state, because Democrats have convinced voters that Republicans will ruin it even more.

These are serious disadvantages, but the only healthy approach is to consider them as excuses because Republicans can win in California if they focus on and offer solutions for just three huge things: education, public safety, and the cost of living. These solutions are known and rehashed so often you can’t enumerate them without being stamped as a wonk. Oh well. Here goes:

For education, streamline the process for new charter schools to be opened and for existing charter schools to stay open, implement universal education savings accounts, and reform public school union work rules so teachers can be hired, retained, and compensated based on their success in the classroom instead of based on seniority.

The biggest issue with public safety is to repeal the laws that downgraded penalties for drug and property crimes. Close behind is to insist that funds to help the unhoused go into erecting inexpensive tent cities on inexpensive land, with some of the savings going into mandatory drug treatment and job training. Break the homeless industrial complex which has wasted billions only to make the problem worse.

As for cost of living, candidates need to openly proclaim that the scarcity agenda imposed on Californians will not fix the climate, if there even is a “climate crisis.” Then they need to promise to repeal every law and regulation that unreasonably stifles private investment in new home construction, along with laws that restrict investment in practical energy and water supply solutions. They can begin by promising to repeal the California Environmental Quality Act and the Global Warming Solutions Act. And they can remind concerned voters that there will still be an overabundance of federal protections that will remain to safeguard the environment.

California just needs more candidates with the courage to stand firm on these three issues of universal and nonpartisan appeal and with the charisma to communicate the upside of these positions. The opportunity here is that if a few businesspeople, engineers, and other pragmatic, capable individuals were to step forward to run for office, they would dilute the inevitable attacks from the corrupt special interests that run California today. The more good candidates step up, the more will be willing to step up, because there will be strength in numbers.

Emphasizing tough solutions that will solve California’s three biggest problems will find growing support from an electorate that’s reaching the limit of its patience. With courage, optimism, and adherence to specific solutions, a team of like-minded politicians, sharing a unified message, will eventually realign California. The way things are, it may be just a matter of time.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

More Infrastructure is Key to Lowering Home Prices

Housing. Shelter. Room at the Inn. A hearth and a home. From the moment neolithic humans emerged from caves to build structures in the open, atop a defensible hill or along a life giving river, having some place warm and dry to call home has been a primal necessity and a prerequisite for civilization.

This imperative is not lost on California’s legislators and elected executives, or its litigators and judges. In response to a chronic housing shortage in the state that has only worsened for the last several years, in the 2023 legislative session California’s state lawmakers approved and Governor Newsom signed a host of new laws designed to facilitate construction of new housing.

According to the law firm Holland & Knight, more than 32 new housing oriented statutes take effect on January 1st, 2024. There are 4 new laws to streamline the process of acquiring building permits, 7 that enact specific housing related exemptions to CEQA, 6 that impact “density, land use, and planning,” 3 that incentivize more construction of Accessory Dwelling Units, 2 designed to empower a greater role for state agencies to enforce housing law, 7 to reduce obstacles to construction of more affordable housing, 3 to reduce the required number of parking places to accompany new housing, and more.

If you’re a housing wonk, you may spend days analyzing these new statutes. But it doesn’t take an expert to identify a fundamental flaw in all this legislation, motivated perhaps in equal measure by good intentions and sops to subsidy guzzling politically connected developers who bankroll reelection campaigns. The flaw is simple: California’s state legislature created a housing shortage by engineering a regulatory environment that made it almost impossible for unsubsidized developers to build homes that people could afford. Instead of fixing that, they’re just imposing more laws and regulations.

There are plenty of things they could have done to rectify what has become a structural barrier to building affordable market housing. They could relax zoning laws that all but prohibit housing on open land outside of existing cities, instead of strengthening these defacto “greenbelt” cordons around every city. They could also mandate a cap on local building fees to some percent of a new home’s sale price, and they could restrict to county attorneys general and the state attorney general the ability to file CEQA lawsuits. These two steps, which are currently embodied in a ballot initiative that a pro-housing PAC – with the unsubtle name “Californians for Homeownership” – are attempting to qualify for the November 2024 ballot, would encourage more unsubsidized private sector developers to try to build and sell affordable homes while still making a profit. The state legislature has the power to do this without a ballot initiative, and they should.

Meanwhile, however, there is an even more fundamental obstacle to making housing affordable in California, and to explore the remedy is to challenge ideological schisms that limit innovation and impede consensus. California needs more energy, water, and transportation infrastructure. And even if they were not operating in a hyper-regulated environment, the job of upgrading and expanding infrastructure is beyond the capacity of private investment.

The economic argument goes something like this. The cost to build, for example, an aqueduct to transport winter floodwater from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to capacious and quick-charging storage aquifers in the San Joaquin Valley, is so great, that if 100 percent of the construction cost was paid for by a private company, the ratepayers who eventually consumed that stored water would pay a price too high for low to moderate income households to afford. Agricultural clients might be able to grow pistachios and almonds, which fetch a high price per pound, but tomatoes, which bring in less revenue per ton, would disappear from California’s fields. The principle expressed by these examples extends to all enabling infrastructure. When end-users have to pay too much for energy and water, the standard of living goes down, the cost of living goes up, and economic activity falters.

Californians thus have to answer a tough question: Do they want to businesses to leave and residents to struggle financially, or do they want to subsidize the cost of public works in order to bring down the amount that private partners have to recoup from ratepayers? In the 1950s and 1960s, the so-called Pat Brown Democrats answered this question unequivocally. The State of California built the most magnificent system of water storage and interbasin transfers in the world. It built the best network of universities in the world. And it built freeways and expressways that connected every corner of the state and facilitated an era of spectacular growth. There was surplus energy and water, the state was affordable, and millions of people moved here to follow their dreams.

That’s over now. What’s changed? It isn’t so much that Californians aren’t willing to spend massive amounts of public money on infrastructure. The problem is the choices they’re making are terrible. They’re not pouring hundreds of dollars into enabling infrastructure, but rather into disabling infrastructure. Instead of upgrading our natural gas pipelines, retrofitting our natural gas fired power plants with advanced combined cycle turbines, building an LNG terminal in Ventura County, and drilling for more – all activities that are so inherently profitable that the private sector could pay for nearly all of this expansion – instead the state legislature has declared war on natural gas, is bent on killing the industry, and is spending or planning to spend tens of billions to subsidize solar farms, battery farms, and offshore wind. These are all technologies that remain unproven at scale and may be obsolete within a decade or two. There’s more.

Instead of permitting desalination plants on the Southern California coast, plants that could be built with a minimal infusion of public funds, or developing creative ways to divert flood waters from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta while at the same time reinforcing century old levees, California’s state legislature is going to build a 45 mile long tunnel under the Delta to transport water from just one river, the Sacramento, to southbound aqueducts. The estimated cost for this gargantuan undertaking is $20 million.

Which brings to mind a third hideous example of hideous waste, High Speed Rail, which was sold to voters as a system that would get passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in two hours flat, and only cost $30 billion to build. Estimated travel time has inexplicably expanded to over four hours, and total estimated cost is now over $130 billion. Will it ever get built? Pat Brown Democrats would have upgraded our railroads, widened and resurfaced our freeways, maybe – gasp! – even built a few more freeways, and spent a fraction as much doing it.

Again. What happened? The problem isn’t necessarily that leaving projects to public agencies breeds inefficiency. It does. For that matter, in a hyper-regulated environment, which California certainly is, inefficiency and cronyism is bred into private sector corporations as well. But something bigger is at work, which might be properly described as the spirit of the time. In the 1950s and 1960s there was a consensus that California needed to grow, that development was a good thing, and the state government went to work to build practical energy, water and transportation infrastructure that made everything else possible. The farm economy grew. Suburbs expanded around the old cities, and homes were affordable. The state thrived.

The spirit of the time is very different now. The consensus among California’s elite is that the state has grown quite enough, at the same time as literally everything affecting land development, land management, or energy and water policy has to be evaluated through the filter of the climate crisis. Hence “renewables” to the exclusion of clean, ultra efficient advanced natural gas power. Hence water rationing instead of investment in practical water supply infrastructure. Hence trains, light rail, and high-density housing instead of new roads and new suburbs. No wonder everything costs so much.

What ought to be blatantly contradictory in all this is how counter the result is to all the human values that California’s elites purport to cherish. We need extensive infrastructure because it fosters private sector freedom and growth. When the public subsidizes energy and water infrastructure, and deregulates land development, ownership is decentralized. When infrastructure is inadequate and prices soar, the only winners are the corporations and rentiers, who invest in the artificially inflated assets and artificially overvalued commodities, making excessive profits as the consumers struggle.

And so then we come full circle. The state government, having failed to invest on the front end to make life’s essentials within the reach of ordinary Californian households, finds itself captured by politically connected corporations that prosper when prices are high, and at the same time finds itself now spending more public money merely to subsidize, in perpetuity, those millions of low and lower-middle-income households who can’t pay their rent or their mortgage. What great irony.

A condensed version of this article originally appeared on the website of the Pacific Research Institute.

The Intellectual Foundations of MAGA

Republicans are dumb. They are easily led suckers, voting against their own best interests, manipulated by dangerous demagogues. This accusation is accepted as fact by most Democrat voters and is relentlessly reinforced by the media Democrats rely on. From MSNBC, Democratic strategist James Carville says Republicans “have a lot of stupid people that vote in their primaries.”  From New York Magazine, “Is DeSantis Just Not Dumb Enough for Republicans?” From Vanity Fair, “Is the Sheer Stupidity of Republican Politics Breaking Through?”

Even some conservative columnists can’t criticize the Democrats without taking a shot at those stupid Republicans. Daniel Henninger, writing for the Wall Street Journal, characterized national politics this year as “The Stupid Party vs. the Evil Party.” As for the leader of the Republican Party, we have this from The New Republic, “Trump Is an Extremely Dumb Fascist.” And as James Carville said, “When stupid people vote, you know who they nominate? Other stupid people.”

Rather than challenge the “stupid” stereotype, David Brooks, the New York Times’ thoroughly housebroken token conservative, has tried to contextualize it, recently stating on PBS Newshour that “this is a working class party,” referring to the Republican base in the Trump era.

The narrative is widespread and clear. Republican voters, MAGA voters in particular, are universally stigmatized by America’s mainstream thought leaders as uneducated rubes. As Obama once famously sneered, they are “clinging to their guns and religion.”

The perception being marketed as a truism in America is that MAGA Republicans are at best incapable of supporting a coherent national political agenda and, at worst, are willfully supporting dangerous policies that will put an end to democracy in America.

All of this is utterly false. There is a coherent intellectual and moral basis for the MAGA agenda, and there is basic agreement among MAGA Republicans over not only the broad themes but also many of the policy details that define that agenda.

Immigration policy is an obvious example where the MAGA position—restoring control of who enters the nation and basing legal immigration on merit—has a clarity that is completely lacking in the current de facto policy. Since Biden took office, nearly 8 million people have illegally crossed into America from Mexico, entering the country with minimal screening across a border that has been thrown wide open. Cities are going bankrupt trying to support them with food, shelter, healthcare, and education. At the same time, drugs pour across the open border, a primary cause of over 110,000 drug overdose deaths in 2023.

The MAGA position is both humane and realistic. It is impossible to admit everyone into the United States who wants to live here. There are an estimated 700 million people in the world who live in extreme poverty. An estimated 2 billion people live in conflict zones. Just allowing 10 percent of these people into the United States would nearly double our population. That’s the reality.

What is humane is to control the border and strictly regulate admittance to the U.S. so that people around the world will stop trying to get here. Then they would no longer be victims of human trafficking or risk dying during their trek. At the same time, fewer Americans would die of drug overdoses. While vigorous debate might take place over how many immigrants the U.S. should admit legally, under MAGA policies, whoever did immigrate would have skills that America needs. The MAGA strategy would be to use immigration to enhance America’s economy, bringing in people who will adopt our traditions and create wealth and opportunity for all Americans. A strong America will retain the capacity to be a force for stability around the world, offering an inspiring example of success for other nations to emulate.

Trade policy is another fundamental plank of the MAGA agenda. And here, the “free trade” mantra has been taken too far by both parties. America’s manufacturing capacity has been hollowed out, leaving the nation dependent on imports for vital medicines, finished goods, strategic minerals, even computer chips. For decades, as American companies have moved operations offshore to escape overzealous regulations and find cheap labor, millions of Americans have lost good jobs.

In fear of MAGA trade policies, there is a howling chorus of neoliberals claiming “protectionist” mandates will crash the global economy. The problem with this claim is that the global economy is already in danger of crashing. Nations have built their economies on the basis of exports to the U.S., and they need to rebalance their economies to develop domestic markets. And to stimulate an economy stripped of good jobs, America is about to hit $35 trillion just in federal government debt, well in excess of the nation’s entire GDP. Adding state and local government debt and unfunded liabilities for Social Security, Medicare, and public sector pensions will easily vault the estimated total government debt in America to over $160 trillion. It can’t go on.

Restoring American manufacturing and reducing America’s trade deficit do not have to spell the end of free trade. But judicious use of tariffs, particularly on imported goods that are subsidized by their governments, and modifying the tax code to discourage American companies from divesting their American operations are elements of what MAGA adherents call fair trade. It can be free, but it also has to be fair. And again, if America doesn’t successfully navigate this rebalancing, the trade deficit and federal debt will crash the economy, dragging the world economy down with it.

One might at least consider the moral and intellectual worth of these economic arguments concerning trade and federal deficits, but not according to the Los Angeles Times. When MAGA Republicans dug in their heels over federal spending earlier this year, Jonah Goldberg, writing for the LA Times, said “the GOP’s stupidity and hypocrisy are showing.” But stupidity, Mr. Goldberg, is thinking that America’s debt binge can go on forever.

Examining what defines MAGA politics must include foreign wars. An illustrative example of how Americans are being trained to think was evident on CBS News last week, where in coverage of the war in Ukraine, the reporter displayed a map of Eastern Europe and said a Russian victory would “bring the Russians to NATO’s doorstep.”

For anyone slightly familiar with the last fifty years of European history, this remark is blatantly deceptive propaganda. In 1989, on the brink of its peaceful dissolution, the Soviet Union still controlled what was referred to as the Warsaw Pact, and the Central European borders of NATO stopped on the eastern frontier of West Germany and Austria. Yugoslavia and Finland were neutral. Since that time, NATO has expanded eastward to include Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia (formerly Czechoslovakia), Romania, Bulgaria, parts of the former Yugoslavia, and East Germany (reunited with Germany). Ukraine, which might have remained neutral, was never on “NATO’s doorstep.” The doorstep was moved east. Acknowledging this does not equate to Russophilia. But it’s a pertinent fact that belongs in any honest discussion of the war over there today.

It would be foolish to suggest that America should abandon foreign entanglements altogether. But just as with free trade vs. fair trade, there is a long way to travel between frequent, expensive interventions with a devastating cost in human lives and “isolationist” foreign policy. If it is realistic and prudent for the U.S. to maintain a strategic and technological military supremacy over other major nations, then wouldn’t that goal be better served by not squandering resources on countless, endless, unresolvable conflicts everywhere on earth?

Why was it necessary to invade Iraq? We had the regime all bottled up, with no-fly zones north and south. About all Iraq still had left back in 2003 was the military wherewithal to serve as an effective regional counterweight to Iran. That would come in handy just now. Does anyone think people in the Middle East are better off since the U.S. and its allies went in and removed Saddam Hussein in Iraq, or, for that matter, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya? The dead can’t answer. The living endure chaos and violence without end. Where is the moral worth in this outcome, or the brilliant strategy? The MAGA foreign policy would be to minimize foreign interventions, putting those resources instead into research and development to maintain a decisive technological edge. We cannot, and should not, try to do it all.

A final, fundamental pillar of MAGA concerns environmentalist extremism, which, even more than mass immigration, has crippled the ability of most Americans to afford a decent standard of living. Energy independence and cheap energy have been abandoned to be replaced with “renewable” wind and solar energy projects that degrade thousands of square miles from upstate New York to the California coast. Equally impractical and oppressive are environmentalist-inspired restrictions on not just drilling but mining, logging, farming, ranching, new roads, freeways, and housing. Every essential in America is artificially in scarce supply, and this is the real reason for inflation. There’s no end in sight. The MAGA policy would be to deregulate all of these essential industries, forcing corporations to compete again on price, and to redirect public investment into practical infrastructure and away from costly “green” solutions that are neither green nor solutions.

There is a common thread in all of these mainstream, uniparty, establishment policies that MAGA threatens. Money. American corporations and American billionaires make more money when there is unrestricted immigration. It drives down wages. More people in America also means more shortages—particularly as long as the U.S. remains in the grip of extreme environmentalists. More people and less home building means higher prices, making home ownership out of reach for more Americans. But it creates a tremendous opportunity for corporate investors to buy up the nation’s housing stock and turn America into a nation of renters. And the scarcer that housing gets, the better their real estate investments perform.

So-called “free trade” is also an obvious moneymaker for America’s multinational corporations and globalist billionaires. Moving America’s industrial base into nations with cheap labor and minimal regulations is extremely profitable for the movers. But it destroys the workers it leaves behind. As for foreign wars, one of America’s most respected presidents, Dwight David Eisenhower, warned the nation in his farewell address as president of the “military industrial complex.” His warnings are more relevant than ever.

MAGA voters have been tagged as stupid, dangerous simpletons, ready to vote for politicians that will plunge America into a new dark age. To reinforce this smear, MAGA voters are depicted as intolerant bigots, and news reports focus on the polarizing issues of abortion, transgenderism, sexism, racism, and gun violence, to name just some of the big ones. On these issues as well, the MAGA perspective is rooted not only in intellectual coherence, but also in common sense. But these issues, while also of critical importance to our future, are also a distraction, chosen to trigger an emotional response that dominates the psyche. The real threat that MAGA poses to the establishment is financial, involving immigration, trade, war, and “environmentalism.”

In all four cases, the MAGA position is founded on a solid intellectual and moral foundation, aspiring to the optimal well-being of all Americans and ultimately to the benefit of everyone else in the world as well. MAGA Republicans are not dumb.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

The Inherently Destructive Uniparty Agenda

It’s easy enough to blame Democrats for everything, but as a rapidly increasing percentage of American voters have realized, Republicans share the blame. These politicians are controlled by their donors, and in America today, the big donors are in agreement regardless of which party or which candidate gets their money.

This, then, is what has become dubbed America’s uniparty. And while wealthy elites have always exercised disproportionate influence in American politics, and, for that matter, the politics of virtually every nation that has ever existed, what is happening in 21st century America is unique.

To begin with, for most of American history, elites have competed for political power and influence, with the differing agenda and interests preventing one faction from acquiring absolute power. But today, on the issues that will have the most profound impact on our future, America’s elites are perfectly aligned. Also today and without precedent in American history, the goals of America’s elites are in conflict with the interests of the American people.

There are two broad, interrelated areas where the uniparty consensus currently aims to break the American people, destroying our coherence as a nation along with our prosperity and individual freedom. They both relate to how we are handling immigration. America’s de facto immigration policy is to invite millions of people per year to enter the United States. Because this policy also effectively excludes immigrants who have the means and the integrity to attempt legal entry, the millions who cross our borders each year are the most desperate people from the most failed nations.

America’s immigration policy, in practice, admits people whose life experience is to barely survive in nations ruled by thugs and fanatics. They are accustomed to endemic corruption and extreme poverty. As for the small fraction of immigrants who enter the United States legally, the criteria for their admission is more of a lottery than a merit-based criteria that might arguably be in the national interest.

But immigration—even the uncontrolled, meritless, flagrantly illegal, massive wave that Americans are now experiencing—would probably not be enough to break our unity and our freedom. It would be a challenge, but absent two other nihilistic factors, both driven by America’s elites, we might eventually assimilate the new arrivals and continue to thrive as a nation.

The first of these factors is the obsessive promotion of the climate “crisis.” Anyone even slightly skeptical of the alleged urgency of this crisis can immediately see what’s really happening: blatant propaganda being sold to the American people in a coordinated fear campaign. In every classroom, every newscast, every political speech, and every corporate marketing blitz, the message is the same: adapt or die. And adaptation, expressed in countless laws and regulations from the local city council to the U.S. Congress, the federal alphabet agencies, and even the U.S. Supreme Court, is almost invariably the same: stop developing land, depopulate rural areasdensify the cities, and engineer scarcity of every essential resource—land, water, energy, and food.

If America’s population were stable, this cramdown would be tough. But when we push our existing population out of rural areas and into cities at the same time as we’re also directing millions of immigrants every year into our cities, at the same time as we’re preventing our cities from expanding outwards and preventing construction of new, cost-effective sources of fresh water and cheap energy, what might have been merely tough is instead a recipe for disaster.

This engineered scarcity makes the second nihilistic factor all the more destructive because it puts the entire population under financial stress, which is a precondition for civil unrest. The second factor pushed by America’s elites is an obsession with race, and the incessant message on that theme—white Americans are oppressors, colonizers, purveyors of systemic racism, perpetrators of unconscious racism, beneficiaries of unwarranted privilege. Insofar as an estimated 85 percent of first generation immigrants living in the U.S. are nonwhite—it’s probably much higher in the last few years—training them all to view white people as the enemy is, again, a recipe for disaster.

These two factors, representing the consensus policy of America’s elites, are both inherently destructive. You can’t fill a nation with new arrivals at the same time as you make it nearly impossible to build any new housing or enabling infrastructure. You can’t fill a nation with nonwhite immigrants at the same time as you teach them to view all white people as their enemy. You can’t do this unless you are consciously trying to destroy a country. And that is exactly what America’s elites are doing.

For America to remain a successful nation, to the extent that immigrants are expanding the population, we must expand our cities, expand our production of energy, and expand our industry and infrastructure to guarantee abundant, affordable essentials. And to the extent that immigrants to America are nonwhite, we must invite them to adopt our culture and encourage them to assimilate, instead of feeding them a pernicious lie by telling them they are living in a hostile, racist society.

Why have America’s elites, for the first time in American history, decided it is in their interests to destroy the nation that gave them the opportunity to rise to positions of power and wealth? Some of the reasons are understandable, even if they’re fatally flawed. Some of them truly believe there are Malthusian and ecological limits that prevent global prosperity. Lacking faith in the power of innovation and free enterprise, they make the decision that managed decline is the only equitable path for America.

Others among America’s elites have concluded that the detriments of European colonization have outweighed the benefits and therefore feel ethically and morally bound to deconstruct European civilization and culture. These people are perhaps projecting personal guilt at having unearned or fortuitously earned personal wealth and privilege. Or perhaps they hold a suppressed personal vendetta against the culture that gave them everything. And some of them, perhaps, are simply overwhelmed by misplaced, hyper-emotional compassion for the less fortunate and lack the clarity necessary to realize that the only path to an equitable society is via the implacable gauntlet of immutable, colorblind standards, and the only culture that has ever come close to achieving that optimum ideal is European.

But there’s another reason for America’s elites to agree on policies designed to destroy America. Pure, naked, unmitigated greed. Masquerading as concern for the planet and compassion for people of color, America is being broken as part of what leftists—before they were blinded by green and woke corporate marketing campaigns—used to deride as “trickle up” economics. It’s fairly obvious once you take off the green blinders.

When resources are unaffordable, thanks to a punitive regulatory environment, only the wealthiest, most powerful corporations can still compete. Drive small farmers out of business, cut production, consolidate ownership, and make more profit. This is happening in every industry, and its justification is purportedly to save the planet. As for the woke element, the synergy is absolute. Fill the nation with people for whom the impoverishment they experience in America is undreamed of bounty compared to where they came from. If they nonetheless struggle to afford the essentials offer them government benefits, and encourage them to vote for those politicians who not only demonize the privileged whites but also promise to keep the government benefits coming.

That’s what America’s uniparty stands for. Political fights over other issues, while of genuine urgency, must be recognized in many respects as distractions peripheral to fighting the overall plan. The contradictions inherent in green and woke policies, institutionalized today in America, cannot stand. They will be discredited and broken, or they will break us.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

An Economic Bill of Rights for the 21st Century

Beginning April 1, the minimum wage for employees working in California’s fast food chains and health care industries will rise to $20 per hour and, in some cases, up to $23 per hour. Many employers managing independent restaurants, retail, and other industries will have to match the higher hourly rate to retain employees. And for hourly employees whose wages are indexed to the minimum wage, mostly in California’s unionized public sector, wages will rise proportionately.

There is no national consensus on the impact of minimum-wage laws. It is part of a much larger debate over what constitutes an optimal economic environment to enable, quoting from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “economic security and independence.”

In January 1944, in his State of the Union address, Roosevelt enumerated what has since been referred to as a “Second Bill of Rights.” Here it is:

1 – The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
2 – The right to earn enough to provide adequate food, clothing and recreation;
3 – The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
4 – The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
5 – The right of every family to a decent home;
6 – The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
7 – The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accidents, and unemployment;
8 – The right to a good education.

For the American Left, this list hasn’t changed much over the past 80 years. From the Democratic Socialists, we have this 2012 list “A Social and Economic Bill of Rights.” From Bernie Sanders a few years ago, we have the following “21st Century Economic Bill of Rights.”  An even more contemporary wish list comes from current presidential candidate, Democrat Marianne Williamson’s “Social and Economic Bill of Rights.”

The common thread in all these lists is the assumption that the government can make all of this happen. That hasn’t worked out in practice. Along the way towards fulfilling these objectives, rising government taxes and regulations managed to alienate a sufficient number of voters to prevent their achievement. And if history is any guide, every time governments seize sufficient power to reach for the quasi-utopian dream that socialists share, the dream has turned into a bloody nightmare. So what can be done?

In 1987, towards the end of his two-term presidency, at an Independence Day celebration at the Jefferson Memorial, Ronald Reagan unveiled his own version of “America’s Economic Bill of Rights.” Here it is:

1 – The  freedom to work.
2 – The  freedom to enjoy the fruits of one’s labor.
3 – The  freedom to own and control one’s property.
4 – The  freedom to participate in a free market.

It isn’t a puzzle to recognize the difference in emphasis between Reagan’s Bill of Rights, which enumerates freedom from government, and Roosevelt’s version, which requires massive government programs.

In California, the Democratic state legislature has attempted to enforce Roosevelt’s first two “rights,” the right to a “remunerative job” and the right to “earn enough to provide adequate food, clothing, and recreation,” by raising the minimum wage to more than twice the federal standard.

Doing this, of course, will eliminate jobs and increase the cost of living. Companies will either fold, cut jobs, or raise prices. Government agencies, already struggling with deficits, will have to contend with elevated payroll costs triggered by the minimum wage hike. All this means the recipients of pay increases will at best break even as they pay higher prices and higher taxes.

All this begs the question: If we agree on Roosevelt’s desired outcome and Reagan’s desired means, what government policies might achieve both? For nearly all of the outcomes on Roosevelt’s list, there is one economic variable that exercises a decisive influence: affordability. In Reagan’s estimation, the surest guarantee of affordability is to rely on the private sector.

Robert Reich, whose economic philosophy in general is a quintessential leftist blend of naivete, pandering opportunism, and big state solutions that will create more problems than they solve, does get some things right. He is quoted on the website “InequalityMedia.org,” which he co-founded, as saying, “In America, it’s expensive just to be alive.” He is correct. After listing a daunting number of reasons for this, mostly accurately, he goes on to state, “Jobs, the stock market, the GDP—don’t show how our economy is really doing, who is doing well, or the quality of our lives.”

Again, correct. And he’s on a roll. There’s more. Reich proceeds to describe how corporations are monopolizing their markets and how wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the richest one-tenth of one percent. All true. But Reich’s solution, along with most of the American Left, is to blame corporations, impose more taxes and regulations on them, and use that to grow government.

It doesn’t work. Corporations pass the costs on to consumers, making life even more unaffordable, while the higher taxes and regulations eliminate smaller corporations which prevents them from growing and forcing monopoly corporations to compete with them. The answer from the Left grows government at the same time as it further centralizes private wealth, which in both cases breeds greater inefficiency. That is why corporations in America today overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party, and it is why most Republicans are RINOs. They all follow the money, and the smart money knows that leftist rhetoric and leftist policies make them richer and stronger.

Ironically, it is America in the 1930s during FDR’s presidency and California in the 1960s when Edmund G. “Pat” Brown (Jerry Brown’s father) was governor that provide clues to how affordability can best be achieved through government policies. While there is plenty to criticize in both administrations, they both did something of surpassing, multi-generational benefit. They built infrastructure. Not nonsensical, pointless infrastructure. Actual practical public works that yield economic benefits to this day.

Between 1933 and 1939, FDR’s Public Works Administration built educational buildings, courthouses, city halls, sewage treatment plants, hospitals, roads, bridges, subways, dams, aqueducts, and rural electrification, among other things. To this day, Americans still use these public assets. Between 1959 and 1967, Pat Brown expanded the state’s public works projects to build new colleges and universities, freeways and expressways, and the California Water Project, which remains the most extensive system of water storage and distribution in the world. And to this day, Californians still benefit from these public assets.

Times are very different now. The consensus among America’s elite—with California driving the bandwagon—is that the state has grown quite enough, at the same time as literally everything affecting land development, land management, or energy and water policy has to be evaluated through the filter of the climate crisis. Hence “renewables” to the exclusion of clean, ultra-efficient, advanced natural gas power. Hence water rationing instead of investment in practical water supply infrastructure. Hence trains, light rail, and high-density housing instead of new roads and new suburbs. No wonder everything costs so much.

The paradox in all this is how the result is counter to all the human values that American culture purports to cherish. We need extensive infrastructure because it fosters private sector freedom and growth. When the public subsidizes energy and water infrastructure and deregulates land development, ownership is decentralized. When infrastructure is inadequate and prices soar, the only winners are corporations and rentiers, who invest in artificially inflated assets and artificially overvalued commodities, making excessive profits as consumers struggle.

The formula for economic security and independence for American citizens is not more regulations, more taxes, and more government. The irony that Leftists must face is that more regulations benefit corporate monopolies and stifle competition, and without competition between private corporations, the cost of living increases at a rate that can’t possibly be mitigated by government benefits and subsidies to households.

Similarly, right-of-center critics of big government must distinguish between obvious wasteful spending based on fraudulent premises, versus the government sharing the burden of construction costs for infrastructure assets that will yield economic dividends for generations. It isn’t enough to fight against the waste. It is necessary to correctly identify the investments we need in sensible infrastructure and fight for them.

There is a compelling libertarian argument in favor of government spending on infrastructure that provides clear and long-term benefits instead of a permanent drain. When federal and state governments fail to invest on the front end to make life’s essentials within the reach of ordinary households, they will end up spending more public money merely to subsidize, in perpetuity, those millions of low- and lower-middle-income households who can’t pay their rent or their mortgage.

An economic bill of rights for Americans today might include the following: the government will invest in infrastructure that lowers the cost of living, and it will deregulate essential industries to ensure competition between large and small corporations.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

A Slavic Christmas

Last week I had the extraordinary privilege of attending an annual Christmas event held at a Christian cathedral in Sacramento, California. And here in the political heart of the Left Coast, for a few moments I was transported into a different world, where Christian faith and Christmas joy are still firmly in the center of what we now are expected to call the “Holiday Season.”

Performing that night was the Slavic Chorale, drawing its singers and orchestra musicians from first and second generation Slavic immigrants, mostly from Ukraine, but also from Russia, Belarus, Moldova, and Poland. The conductor spoke to the audience mostly in Ukrainian, and very occasionally in English. But you didn’t have to speak the language to feel the spirit in that music.

When the youth choir filed onto the stage, it was what one might imagine to be a typical scene in America 60 years ago. Children as young as five or six, scrubbed clean and wearing their Sunday suits and dresses, tow headed cherubs with blue eyes, heartbreakingly serious, singing their Christmas songs from memory.

The adult choir was also evocative of times long gone in America. There may be churches left with traditional values, but most of them are either mega churches with sermons that hybridize biblical teachings with motivational lectures on self-improvement, or they are defiantly traditional, forced to engage in political defense merely to carry on with what they believe. In many cases, of course, American churches have abandoned tradition, trying to be relevant by catering to woke ideology. But on this night, with these Slavic Christians, there was no agenda. It was a pure celebration of culture and faith.

Watching this community come together, and hearing echoes of America’s diminishing innocence and dwindling heritage in their robust chorus, made it achingly clear what we have lost. It also made clear what we are fighting for, when we push back against the indoctrination that has infected our public schools, our entertainment, our media, the uniparty, and nearly every civic commission, committee of “stakeholders,” or other mainstream institutions that today define American culture and determine America’s destiny.

This is a community we must fight for, right now, here in America. Innocent children, and hard-working parents who are raising them in faith. Does America still have a culture left that these Ukrainians care to assimilate into, or must we, if we can ever win, be thankful that their intact communities shall someday provide the model for us to restore our nation?

It was impossible to watch these people, on and off the stage that night, and not wonder what countless tales of tragedy they must carry. And it was impossible as well to not grieve that over there, on this same night, their relatives were still being slaughtered in a fratricidal war. Russians and Ukrainians share a great deal of common heritage, going back to the Kievan Rus in the 11th century. The clash that’s costing so many lives today was not inevitable.

It was not, for example, Russians who killed Ukrainians during the Holodomor, the horrific engineered starvation of an estimated 4 million Ukrainians in the 1930s. It was communists. Central planners, murderous communist fanatics who hijacked a nation, crashed the economy, collectivized – and destroyed – agriculture, then looted the grain producing regions of whatever food remained to supply the cities.

Russians today still remember the 1940s, when German armies overran 700,000 square miles, virtually all of Western Russia and Ukraine, in a war that took the lives of an estimated 14 million Russians and 7 million Ukrainians, along with 2.3 million soldiers and civilians from Belarus, 660,000 from Kazakhstan, and 550,000 from Uzbekistan. From the Mongols in the 13th century, to Napoleon in 1812 and Hitler in 1941, the collective memory of invasions from east and west exerts decisive influence on the character of Russians.

It is in this historical context that Russians view the addition of seven Warsaw Pact nations to NATO between 1989 and 1999. Apart from East Germany, which was reunited with West Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria were expected to remain neutral. Then in 2004, the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were added to NATO. Russians had relied on all these states as buffers between their nation and the West.

It’s perilous to attempt to describe, much less judge the moral worth of each antagonist in the war today between Russia and Ukraine. But it is reasonable to suggest that most Russians, in exchange for their 1989 agreement to peacefully break up the Soviet Union and grant autonomy to their Eastern European satellite nations, did not expect to confront the prospect of NATO bases on their doorstep. A quick look at a map of NATO member states, labeled by year of entry, ought to convey how visceral the threat must seem to a people whose history is defined by apocalyptic invasions.

What can be said, however, is how disgraceful it is for neocon uniparty ghouls to stare into partisan, pro-war media cameras and tell us, here in America, how wonderful it is for Ukrainians to die fighting Russians, so that all we have to do back here in America in order to “weaken Russia” is send them weapons.

Ukrainian nationalism has been stoked and warped by the ambitions of American globalists. Stoked by agents, money and weapons, and warped insofar as Ukrainian nationalism is now a fractious, externally funded coalition with cosmopolitan neoliberals at one extreme and hard-right neo-Nazis at the other. Both factions are now heavily armed and trained and only united in their shared determination to defeat Russia.

The Russian seizure of Crimea, a region for which Ukrainian claims are at the very least debatable, was preceded by the Maidan protests, a pro-Western movement allegedly orchestrated by the Americans. Take a look at maps of the Ukrainian elections of 20102012, and 2014. The pro-Russian candidates and moderately pro-Russian parties consistently prevailed in the south and the east, where, unsurprisingly, Russian speakers dominate. Ukraine was a divided nation in 2014, but might have peacefully forged a neutral path forward. It’s fair to ask which great power first decided that wasn’t acceptable.

And what of globalism, with “free trade,” and a “rules based international order,” or, as a cynic might sneer, the “globohomo” attempt to completely reinvent society? Would anyone today prefer life in Russia or China to life in the United States? That is unlikely, and consequently it is probable that most Ukrainians would rather be part of a Western globalist bloc than under the sway of the Russian Federation. But how long will that preference last?

Ask the Irish, the Dutch, the French, the Swedes, and the Italians, or the people of other European nations overran with migrants and overburdened with globalist restrictions on production of food and fuel. Don’t ask their political leaders, who supposedly speak for them. Ask the common man or woman living there. Ask the people who are now living in a nation they no longer recognize, where their voice is irrelevant, the religion of their ancestors is disparaged, and their votes are so pointless they may as well be living in a “managed democracy” such as they have in Putin’s Russia.

What is in store for Ukraine when this horrific war finally ends? If Zelensky and his Western backers prevail, what will be the fate of a land that’s been hollowed out as much by emigration as by war fatalities? Will they become a sanctuary nation, to be repopulated with African and Muslim refugees? Why not? Isn’t that the globalist playbook, and the obligation of compassionate Christians? And when does compassion become suicide? Shall any homogenous European culture survive the great reset?

These thoughts troubled me as I sat among these Ukrainians. But mostly I was inspired and energized by them. Scarcely acknowledging and profoundly immune to the darkness that eternally seeks to envelop the world, they live with fellowship and adhere to values that American leaders and institutions have abandoned. Their faith is unbreakable. It will never waver. Their joy is stronger than the tribulations they endure, because its source is not of this world. Peace will someday return to their homelands. Meanwhile, we Americans may be rescued by their example.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Netflix and the Erasure of History

“Trust should not be doled out easily to anyone, especially white people.”
Excerpt from “Leave the World Behind,” released on Netflix December 8, 2023

If anyone thinks Netflix has abandoned the so-called woke programming that earned them sustained criticism back in the spring of 2022 and may have played a role in their cratering stock price at the time, their new movie should put that thought to rest. Woke, for lack of a better term, is alive and well at Netflix. Their cozy relationship with nouveau plutocrat power couple and White House alumni, Barack and Michelle Obama, and the blockbuster bomb of a movie they’ve produced together, epitomizes the culture of Netflix today. Such casual racism. “Don’t trust white people.” It’s ok when they do it. But don’t you dare.

To truly appreciate where Netflix is today, one must recall how they began. During the golden age of movie DVDs, in the late 1990s, Netflix arose as the mail-order alternative to renting videos from walk-in stores. But creative destruction never ends. Just as Netflix movies by mail drove corner movie rental stores out of business, streaming made DVDs delivered by mail obsolete.

On September 29, Netflix shipped their last DVD to subscribers and cancelled the service. And with that, one of the last, best windows into nearly a century of American culture was closed forever. At its peak around 2019, more than 100,000 movie titles were available on DVD, arriving in the familiar red envelopes. But as the subscriber base for DVDs shrank and competition from other streaming services grew, Netflix management decided the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.

This is a rational business decision. Netflix, a content behemoth with an enterprise value that has soared to more than $170 billion, doesn’t need the headache of managing 17 DVD distribution centers tasked with shipping and receiving actual physical media. Netflix owns server farms that dispatch movies electronically, and their investment in physical assets must now prioritize production studios where the company invests literally billions in generating original content. With more than 50 percent of all video consumption in the U.S. now consisting of user generated content at zero cost to platforms like YouTube and TikTok, Netflix’s challenge is keeping their 240 million streaming subscribers, not hanging on to a dwindling cadre of 1.2 million DVD clients.

Nonetheless, losing public access to what was, by far, the greatest collection of movies ever compiled is a tragedy. Netflix streaming services currently offer around 3,600 movies, barely 3 percent of what could be found in their DVD archives. It’s easy to miss the significance of this loss for any American under 30 (or 40?). When it comes to mass entertainment, late millennials and members of Gen Z have spent their entire lives exposed to almost nothing but garbage – stylized violence, mandatory diversity, movies without plots; nothing but action, special effects, and political indoctrination. Why would anyone who hasn’t sampled the rich legacy of American film before the age of woke have any idea what they’re missing – not only what movies once were, but how they depict what life was once like?

For 25 years, Netflix gave us all a chance to touch the memories that defined us, the world we knew. Movies are an incomparable window into American history and culture, good and bad. They incorporate bits of everything, not merely the stories we told but the fashion, the music, the technology of the time. They show us what our nation looked like in each decade, who we were and how we lived.

The average American now spends two hours and 24 minutes every day on social media, typically either blowing out their emotional equilibrium in pointless, endless acrimony, or flipping through addictive, useless videos. The average American between the ages of 15 and 24 spends over an hour every day playing video games, equally addictive and equally useless.

Netflix, until September 29, offered something more. It not only offered a boundless oeuvre of cinematic drama, a glimpse into America’s soul, it offered long-form content devoid of cheap tricks and vacuous, agenda driven narratives. These old movies delivered intricate plots that required sustained attention.

With old movies we can see clearly how each decade brought a new way of looking at the past. What was dramatic and authentic then is often seen now as ham-handed and corny. In the early American Westerns, our portrayals of Indians were arguably toxic but also naive. A white actress would play the part of an Indian squaw, with incongruous blue eyes and red greasepaint on her face that the makeup artist didn’t even bother to extend to her hairline. White men would act the parts of Indians by wearing dark wigs with ponytails and neglecting to conjugate their verbs. And the music: a brass section ominously blasting pentatonic melodies in parallel fifth harmony every time an Indian appeared on the horizon or galloped up on horseback. There is value in seeing these tropes today. It reminds us how far we’ve come.

Old movies also remind us how far we’ve fallen. Movies show us what life was like before, for example, oligarchs started using “green” building codes to turn the U.S. into a rentier economy. Ward Cleaver today would not be strolling up a path surrounded by lawn to greet his wife and sons in a detached home with a yard. That man today would come home to a condo, his “owned” square footage part of a building with sixteen units per acre and no yard. He and his wife would both work full time to pay a mortgage that would consume every spare dime they could earn. Children, if they had any, would be holed up in a dark bedroom, glued to their screens.

Movies remind us of what we faced in more difficult times, and how we coped with challenges that dwarf – at least so far – the problems of today. Watch a young Sterling Hayden, a commander in the classic 1952 World War 2 drama “Flat Top,” whip his recruits into shape for air combat. Watch Henry Fonda try to keep his family together in “The Grapes of Wrath,” as they are displaced during the Great Depression in the 1930s. Watch Jimmy Stuart’s character in “It’s a Wonderful Life” fall into despair, then recover his optimism with the support of his small community, or watch the entire City of New York rally behind Edmund Gwenn’s character in “Miracle on 34th Street.” These and countless others were inspiring, sobering movies that have lasting relevance, produced by people who loved this country and wanted to encourage values of unity and selflessness. Movies made by people whose social consciousness expressed itself by presenting and upholding inspiring role models, traditional values, and patriotism, and by rejecting decadence. Try to find these classics on Netflix streaming. You might find a few dozen of the biggest hits. The rest, which are nowhere to be found, will fade further into obscurity, along with the culture that made them.

Movies from decades long past show what life was like in America before the nation simultaneously drowned itself in debt while its suddenly disenfranchised youth disappeared into an online stupor. They show us what life was like before, without anyone being consulted, and within just a few decades, we overturned our entire national ethnic composition at the same time as our ruling class decided to teach all of America’s new arrivals to view those of us who were already here as privileged racists living on stolen land. Movies made before this historic betrayal depicted a high trust society, flawed to be sure, but committed to a shared culture and shared heritage.

All of that is gone now. Without the ability to see our history, dramatized and made accessible through old movies, will enough of us tomorrow recognize the revolutionary intent of movies like Leave the World Behind? Its part in the movement to Fundamentally Transform America? Or will our history and our people have melted into an undifferentiated, timeless, Pavlovian, algorithmically curated now?

Netflix gave us something beautiful, then took it away. It was good while it lasted.

This article originally appeared on American Greatness.

The Role of Unions in a Perfect World

The optimal public policy regarding unions may not be realistic in states like California, but that shouldn’t prevent us from performing an occasional what-if. For anyone even slightly right-of-center, what unions have done to this state is a catastrophe. And even for those to the left-of-center, many are realizing, for example, that California’s failing system of public education is not because of inadequate funding, or due to the demographics of the students, but can be blamed primarily on a teachers union that has prioritized its political and economic agenda to the detriment of quality education.

It’s important, even if impossible to actually do anything today, to explore what might be the role of unions in California if the state legislature were ready to enact serious reform. Because not all unions are the same, and what has happened in California might happen elsewhere in the United States. We believe that preventing this is a nonpartisan imperative, and clarifying our intent may help prevent California’s plight from becoming America’s plight, and might even pave the way for eventual changes here.

This report is split into two parts, mostly to emphasize one main point, which is that public sector unions, representing government employees, are completely different from private sector unions, representing employees of private companies. It is necessary to expose once again how public sector unions, which should be illegal, have successfully pretended to face the same challenges and operate under the same constraints as private sector unions. Separately, it is necessary to explain how private sector unions have been corrupted, and have betrayed their own ideals and the aspirations of their members. We will begin with public sector unions.

Part One: Outlaw Public Sector Unions 

Money doesn’t guarantee victory in political campaigns. For proof, look no further than Meg Whitman, the California billionaire who in 2010 squandered $179 million in her futile campaign to beat Jerry Brown and become that state’s next governor.

When money is married to institutional power, however, it makes all the difference. This is why, 10 years after the Whitman debacle, Mark Zuckerberg was able to influence the presidential election outcome in an unprecedented way by spending $419 million on “get out the vote” efforts via left-leaning nonprofit organizations that go far beyond “traditional campaign finance, lobbying or other expenses.” Whitman’s money paid consultants and bought ads on television. Zuckerberg’s money went to supplement the activities of election offices in swing states – election offices that employed workers represented by unions that overwhelmingly favor Democrats over Republicans.

This is a critical distinction. Imagine if a pro-Republican billionaire had, like Zuckerberg, poured hundreds of billions of dollars into “nonpartisan” nonprofit organizations that in-turn used that money to launch get-out-the-vote campaigns in areas heavy with Republican voters. What are the chances the election offices in these cities would have cooperated?

Consider Maricopa County in Arizona, the City of Philadelphia, or the City of Detroit. Election office workers in these cities, and many others around the country, are represented by AFSCME, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees. In 2020, according to Open Secrets, 99.7 percent of AFSCME’s political contributions to federal election campaigns went to Democrats. Nationally, labor unions in 2020 spent a reported $1.8 billion on political campaign contributions, and of the public sector union share of that spending, 89 percent was spent to support Democrats.

Public sector unions don’t merely engage in political spending, their members occupy the bureaucracies that manage our elections. There are only five states that prohibit collective bargaining by public employees: Texas, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. The situation in Georgia exemplifies the power of these unions, because even there, while unions are not able to bargain, they are still permitted to recruit members and collect dues.

There is an inherent conflict of interest between the employees of government agencies and the interests of the general taxpaying public. When government programs fail, the natural inclination of a government employee is to protect their job security, which means they will claim not enough people were hired, not enough money was spent, and if more taxpayer dollars can get thrown at the problem, results will improve. This may or may not be true, but a taxpayer is much more likely to support programs that succeed, and to cancel programs that fail. From the perspective of a government bureaucracy, and the ambitions of the career bureaucrats that staff it, failure is an opportunity for growth and advancement.

This alone is reason enough to outlaw public sector unions. When a union agenda overlays onto what is already a built-in bias towards more government as reflected in the sentiments of government employees, that sentiment is buttressed with financial and political power, at the same time as it is corrupted further by the traditional union rhetoric that foments an adversarial relationship between employees and management. Which brings us to the next fatal flaw afflicting government unions: the fact that they elect their own bosses.

Political spending by government unions inevitably favors the candidates who will advocate for bigger government: more laws, rules, regulations, fines, fees, and taxes. That fulfills the ambitions of the union and its members: more money, more staff, more programs, translating into growth in membership dues and public employee compensation. When government unions negotiate for better pay and benefits, the politician sitting across the table knows that if they resist, they will be targeted for defeat in the next election. In any close race, and even in races where the incumbent would ordinarily have an advantage, the injection of union money will make the difference. There is no comparison in the private sector, where management is appointed by shareholders, and is retained or dismissed based on the success of the company, not the preferences of the unions representing its employees.

Unions in the public sector differ from private sector unions in another critical respect, which is that in their negotiations for better pay and benefits, they are not constrained by market realities. In the private sector, unions know that if they ask for too much, it will leave the company unable to compete, and this has a self-limiting effect on what they ask for. There is no such constraint on public sector unions. When they ask for increased pay and benefits, they know that the politicians they have elected will either raise taxes to grant these demands, or face defeat in the next election.

The consequences of allowing public sector unions to completely dominate a state can be seen in California, where public sector unions now collect and spend nearly one billion dollars per year in membership dues. The control this brings is easily verified. To fund the 2020 campaign to elect the Speaker of the California State Senate, Toni Atkins, every one of the top 10 contributors was a public sector union. For the Speaker of the California State Assembly, Robert Rivas, every one of the top 20 contributors was a public sector union. This dominance is seen across every elected office in the state.

In California, public sector union money is used either explicitly to fund political campaigns all the way from the governor and U.S. Senators down to every local elected position including school boards, city councils, county supervisors, water agencies, public utility commissions, transit districts, judgeships, etc., or is used to fund “nonpolitical” public education campaigns and “nonpartisan” get-out-the-vote campaigns. The result? California has the highest taxes, the highest cost-of-living, and the highest rate of poverty and homelessness in the nation. But for government unions, failure is success.

California is also the epicenter of high tech, and the ability of Google and Facebook to manipulate public opinion and voter turnout in elections is well documented, as is the propensity of these companies to support Democrats. But this behavior, decisive as it may be, would not be a match for the power of union-controlled government if it were out of alignment. Just as the unionized, overwhelmingly Democrat federal bureaucrats during the Trump administration actively thwarted his policy agenda and executive actions, if big tech were using its power to promote Republican candidates and causes, agencies, regulators, judges and politicians would swiftly find a way to stop them cold.

There is an innate incentive for government employees to want to grow government. This makes any political party or politician that is devoted to the principle of limited government automatically their enemy. To add to that inevitable and perennial conflict, the power of organized unions tilts the balance and rigs the game.

Public sector unions are one of the root causes of government overreach and inefficiency in America today. As long as these unions can use their financial and political power to serve the interests of government bureaucrats, proponents of limited government are fighting a nearly impossible battle. They should be outlawed.

Part Two: Reform Private Sector Unions

Unlike public sector unions, private sector unions have a vital role to play in American society. But these unions have become coopted by the same special interests they were originally formed to oppose. The political agenda of America’s unions is almost exclusively leftist, and being part of America’s institutional “Left” is not what it used to be.

For this reason, pressure from the outside, for example to require right-to-work protection for those workers who don’t want to be compelled to join a union, is not sufficient. Private sector union reform has to also come from within, and most likely from the grassroots members themselves demanding changes at the top. These members must recognize that the politics of unions in America today are not in their best interests.

The biggest misconception in American politics today is that the political Left is fighting corporate power. Leftists may still attack corporate profits and demand corporations pay their “fair share,” but on every major issue affecting the economic freedom and prosperity of working families in America, these presumed antagonists are actually in perfect alignment.

Labor unions, originally formed to defend the interests of workers, are no exception. Their decades of de-facto support for unrestricted immigration is a prime example. From the SEIU, “Stay strong against Trump’s wall!;” from the AFL-CIO, “oppose H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act of 2023.” Rather than protect the interests of American workers by controlling the borders, unions demand something that is impossible to achieve when borders are overrun with millions of immigrants, a “universal social insurance safety net and strong worker protections that bolster the health, welfare and economic security of all working families.”

America’s unions deny one of the most basic of economic truths, that increasing the supply of workers will result in lower wages.

There’s another basic economic truth that eludes America’s union leadership, which is that there are two ways to secure the “economic security of all working families.” The first is to collectively bargain and when necessary strike for higher wages and benefits. But the other, which truly will benefit all workers, is to support policies that lower the cost-of-living. Towards this second goal, unions have been actively hostile, because they have accepted the “climate crisis” narrative.

There is irony in the SEIU’s official position, which states that “climate change is real and poses significant threats to people’s health and livelihood, and disproportionately affects working people, the poor and people of color.” They’re sort of right. But it isn’t climate change, but the policies implemented to supposedly mitigate it, which disproportionately harm working people and the poor.

The position taken by the AFL-CIO on climate change exemplifies how opportunism has replaced a concern for the welfare of all workers. A June 2022 convention resolution states, “In every forum, we will demand that clean energy technologies be mined, produced, constructed and operated under union contracts.” Just a month earlier, in May 2022, the AFL-CIO announced, “We’re here for the signing of the Project Labor Agreement between NABTU and Ørsted—the culmination of years of hard work on a game-changing partnership that will change the trajectory of the entire offshore wind industry.”

The trajectory, overall, goes something like this: We will negotiate project labor agreements that guarantee our members well paying jobs working on projects that will greatly increase the cost of energy in America. In the case of offshore wind, that cost became prohibitive, when in November 2023, Orsted, the largest offshore wind farm company in the world, ditched its two planned offshore wind projects along the south coast of New Jersey.

Earlier this year, in August, another giant wind farm company, Equinor, pulled out of the Trollvind project in the North Sea because of unforeseen challenges including “technology availability, time constraints, and rising costs that made the project commercially unsustainable.” Also in August, Equinor sought “a 54 percent increase for the price of power produced at three planned U.S. wind farms” off the coast of New York. In the face of a likely denial, Equinor announced it could cancel U.S. offshore wind projects. In November 2021, Equinor abandoned a 1.4 GW floating wind farm off the shores of Ireland.

Wind farm developments, costing hundreds of billions to build at scale, only make financial sense to developers if they’re awarded massive government subsidies. But for big labor interests, fleecing taxpayers and punishing ratepayers so multinational corporations can make billions in profits on offshore wind is of secondary concern, as long as union jobs are created. Offshore wind projects typify the synergy between government subsidies, mega-corporations, and big labor that is the true motivating force behind climate crisis policies.

In California, a state that has completely succumbed to climate crisis panic, the High Speed Rail project fulfills all these criteria. The state is well on the way to spending over $130 billion on a system with ridership projections that aren’t more than a rounding error in total air and vehicle miles traveled each year by Californians, but it delivers thousands of high paying jobs to unions and lucrative contracts to the corporations they work for.

If unions don’t start fighting for practical infrastructure projects that lower the cost-of-living, expect more of these boondoggles. Another union supported project that will squander hundreds of billions in subsidies and raise prices to consumers is “carbon capture.” In a nation where production of natural gas and hydraulic fracking are under relentless assault, and nuclear waste is the boogeyman of the century, the consensus between government, corporations, and big labor is that we need to pump literally gigatons of CO2 exhaust into underground caverns every year. Go figure.

The only explanation for what is an otherwise inexplicable alliance between big labor and big corporations is a shared preference for economic centralization. Corporations in America stopped believing in competition a long time ago, if they ever did. But the innate corporate drive to expand and monopolize markets was challenged and limited by the power of the American Left. Today that balance has been lost. After the anti-globalization marches of 2000, and the Occupy Movement starting in 2011, corporations realized they could coopt the Left by assimilating their agenda on the broad issues of diversity and the climate crisis. And as they must have known, this has actually worked to their advantage.

In both cases, new barriers have been erected to exclude emerging smaller competitors. In every industry, the burden of hiring based on race and gender quotas instead of competence, and the expense of operating an expanded human resources department to enforce these quotas and fulfill the new reporting requirements, has given very large companies a decisive advantage. Unlike smaller companies, they can spread the expense over a much larger base of revenue.

This is equally true with environmental regulations, where the overhead and investment and additional operating costs necessary to comply will destroy the financial viability of smaller companies, at the same time as the big corporations easily have the resources not only to comply, but to buy up the smaller companies and further grow their market share. As for “renewables,” the more they cost and the more access to conventional energy is restricted, the more money pours into the industry from customers forced to pay the higher prices. The idea that major energy companies oppose renewables is ridiculous. It is in their economic interests to see the price of energy go as high as possible.

Unions support corporate consolidation and centralization of economic power because higher wages and benefits for their members become part of the overhead that drives smaller, non-union companies out of business. Big companies with captive markets are able to offer the highest compensation packages to union workers, because they have eliminated their competitors and can therefore pass the increased costs to their customers.

For unions in the United States to once again fight for the interests of all American workers, they will have to recognize hard economic realities. An unlimited supply of new residents in America will either drive down wages or overwhelm the welfare state; both of these outcomes are undesirable. Current environmentalist policies are too extreme, and while they benefit corporations, government, and labor unions representing workers in certain heavily subsidized industries, they are driving the cost-of-living out of reach for the vast majority of American workers.

Delivering an optimal standard of living to all Americans is only possible with controlled immigration, practical infrastructure investments, merit-based hiring, a regulatory environment that doesn’t wipe out competition between corporations, and policies with respect to energy and the environment that don’t inflict economic harm on working families. Unions might also recognize that most “renewables,” certainly including wind energy, biofuel, and battery manufacturing, are devastating to the environment.

These are facts that unions must face, and the agenda that unions should adopt. Such a reform is unlikely, but possible if they return to their founding principles. If unions were to adopt these principles, it would not only benefit all Americans. It would also restore America’s strength and enhance America’s standing as an example and an inspiration to the rest of the world, and offer again a model for other nations to follow.

This article was originally published by the California Policy Center.