Rebane's Ruminations

Performance Registered Advisor

George Rebane

In the 21may22 Union’s inserted adverts there was a slick one from local investment advisor and financial columnist Marc Cuniberti.  He is now “accepting new clients for the markets of 2022”, who no doubt have formed a line outside his office door.  Jo Ann and I are lifelong investors who, from time to time, have allowed various investment advisors and wealth managers to manage a part of our portfolio.  All of these people have been of good reputation, trustworthy, ethical, professional, and careful, quick, and kind.  But none of them have been able to match our own acumen in the markets, and all of them have required payment of perverse money management fees.  So, we have switched them out, and finally decided that, while we can do well in portfolio management, we’re not worth a hill of beans in picking investment advisors.

In recent years I have been given to quite a bit of puzzling in the financial engineering field, and quite successfully, I might add.  My claimed forte is in the areas of monetary utility and risk tolerance. (see figure)  In those endeavors I have had a jaundiced attitude toward the wealth management industry that charges you a fee regardless of the performance they deliver on your portfolio – they play a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ game.  As an entrepreneur and algorist I offered our last advisor an opportunity to retain our account by modifying his fee structure so he would have more skin in our game.

In the new ‘skin in game’ (SIG) fee structure, we would split our portfolio’s annual gain, say, 80/20, with him during profitable years, and we would pay no fee for years with no gain.  Instead, we would then get a dollar amount credit for the year’s end market value loss in our portfolio.  The credit would be applied toward gains in profitable years.  There were a few more obvious details involved, but you get the idea.  If he made us a bunch of money, he would also get a heap more than the percent or so of the total year end value of our portfolio.  In other words, he, like us, would be betting on his performance with a SIG fee structure.  Sadly, he wouldn’t touch that deal with a ten-footer, and since then I have talked with a number of money managers in our circle of friends, and they were of the same mind – ‘No way Jose!’

So circling back, how do we choose a money manager in today’s investment world?  Then looking at Mr Cuniberti’s ad this morning, the idea of a Performance Registered Advisor (PRA) came to me.  To become a PRA, an investment advisor would first qualify for some existing certifications that put letters after his name before applying to Portfolio Registration Services (PRS), the auditing and clearinghouse that vets and maintains the nation’s PRAs in good standing.  PRS would charge a nominal fee for its services from its members.

To become a PRA, an investment advisor will have to have at least one half of his gross assets in a registered and audited portfolio of investments of the type that he offers to his clients for two years – in short, at all times his clients would be able to invest in the same securities that make up the advisor’s R&A portfolio.  Each PRA’s R&A portfolio would be audited monthly for its market value and yielded dividends.  With modern brokerage houses, this would be a completely automated process.  The PRA would then publish monthly the financial performance metrics of each PRA, and allow the PRAs to include these nationally-reputable metrics in their advertisements and other promotional materials.  For obvious reasons the R&A portfolios’ specific securities and asset allocations would remain confidential.  The published metrics would include such items as percent gains/losses YTD, 1-year, 2-years, …, 5-year, etc.  The PRS may also publish (for a fee?) the PRA’s performance by investment sector – say, real estate, energy, high tech, commodities, etc.

With this data available, the retail investor now has reliable information on the investment performance of the candidate advisors he is considering in his short list.  And, of course, if a wealth advisor chooses not to become a PRA, then the client would want to know why, before giving the candidate further consideration.  But the bottom line is that such a new and transparent view of the investment advisor industry would immediately cut through the BS in which today’s investors find themselves inundated by all the slick ads that address none of their concerns about the management of their portfolios.

Scattershots – 20may22 (updated 22may22)

George Rebane

‘Biden’s Strange Help for Cuba’  To be charitable, Team Biden’s foreign policy continues in chaotic shambles.  Cuba, Russia’s prime ally in the western hemisphere, is economically and politically on its ass, and Biden is now going to help stabilize the country by relaxing travel restrictions, money transfers, and commercial financing from the US.  From the 20may22 WSJ, “The Administration says it wants to help the Cuban people. But like the Obama Administration, Team Biden fails to acknowledge that the cause of the island’s privation is the regime itself.”  This is the same for America today where Biden daily denies that the cause of our privations is his incompetent cum anti-American regime.

[21may22 update]  To those of us who continue to suffer the outrageous slings and arrows of woke progressives in our daily round of jousts, the words of Charles Mackay (1814-1889) are an ever-timely tonic.

[22may22 update] ‘Russia/Putin & the West’ is an extensive two-part pro-Russian harangue on today's geostrategic politics and the evolving world order by someone signing himself as ‘Sam Parker’.  The document is published on an extensive website called Behind The News Network, and it was composed just before the Ukrainian invasion which it anticipates.  The piece came across my desk from a correspondent questioning the authenticity of the essay, which in Part1 starts out as sober and neutral look at the modern history of Eurasian Russia cum USSR, and then (in Part2) morphs into a pro-Russian propaganda piece detailing the country’s military superiority over anything the US and NATO can muster to counter Russia’s just aims to militarily defend itself against the geo-strategic machinations of the sinister US-based ‘Rockefeller Empire’.  To me it comes across as a sophisticated outlet of anti-western fake news.  Judge for yourself.

The Great Replacement (update 21may22)

George Rebane

All socio-economic problems depend on their numbers, not understanding these replaces reasonable discussion with emoting.

The ‘great replacement conspiracy’ is the latest kerfuffle to rise to national prominence.  The Left is accusing the Right of fostering this theory of dark-skinned immigrants and illegal aliens being welcomed into America to outvote and outbreed the European-descended whites.  (more here, here, here, here)  History tells us that such replacement concerns first started in France long ago, and in the US ascendant Democrats have crowed for years, and continue to do so today, that the Republicans are being replaced as their party shrinks.  But no matter where it started, the point I want to develop is that in our innumerate nation, almost everyone today is ignorant of what replacement means and really is.  And the evil party is using this ignorance to continue to divide us.  So let’s clear up some cobwebs in order to correctly assess what all the fuss is about.

The general notion of replacement requires first and foremost the existence of a defined ‘container’, be it a region of square miles full of people, a jug that can hold fluids, or a bowl containing different colored marbles.  Given the container, we now have to consider two distinct cases.  Case1 in which the container has a not-to-exceed carrying capacity, and Case2 in which the container’s carrying capacity is not limited.

Case1.  Suppose we have a small bowl that can hold five marbles, and to start, it contains three Amarbles and two Bmarbles.  We all understand that if Bmarbles are reduced to one by adding one Amarble or one Cmarble, that Bmarbles are being replaced both in their absolute number and in their share of the bowl’s contents (going from 40% to 20%), now leaving the A, B, C marble count at 3, 1, 1 respectively.  No one should have a problem understanding this kind of replacement.

But is it possible for replacement to occur if a categorical population (e.g. Bmarbles) remains unchanged or even increases?  Well yes, this gives us Case2 where we suppose Amarbles increase by two to five, Cmarbles double to two, and Bmarbles remain unchanged at one.  Now the share of Bmarbles has dropped from 20% to 1/8 or 12.5%.  The Bmarble share has definitely been replaced by the greater shares of Amarbles and Cmarbles.

The more interesting Case2 scenario is when the number of all three kinds of marbles increases over time.  Let’s suppose that Amarbles increase at the rate of 4/year, Bmarbles at 1/year, and Cmarbles at 3/year.  If at the beginning of the year we had A, B, C marbles numbering 3, 1, 1 respectively, then at the end of the year they would number 7, 2, 4.  So focusing on Bmarbles, we see their number double, but their share drop from 20% to about 15%.  Again, Bmarbles had 5% of their share replaced by the population increase which was taken up by the shares of Amarbles and Cmarbles.  So it’s easy to see that replacement can take place in populations that also increase over time, but only at a rates lower than that of the other population cohorts.

Sandbox – 17may22

[President Bumblebrain rushed up to Buffalo today to make some political hay out of the latest killing spree by a deranged shooter who claims to be a leftwinger, and is accused by the lamestream as being a “white supremacist” rightwinger.  In his speech to the nation our fearless leader’s pabulum included, “I promise you, hate will not prevail.”  What his adoring legions don’t understand is that hate doesn’t have to prevail.  Delivering occasional massacres here and there, hate can just keep boiling along at the current rate, as long as the killers know that wherever they decide to open fire, they will be the only ones with a gun.  gjr]

Picking on Piketty

George Rebane

Admittedly not a difficult task.  I just finished Brief History of Equality (2022) by Thomas Piketty.  Darling of the international Left, we have encountered this French economist before in these pages (here).  Our American Left is in thrall with the man’s wisdom, prescience, and prescriptions for a better world.  Piketty’s thoughts and nostrums on economics and the future global order are important for Americans to understand since they form the illustrated intellectual basis for much of the Democrats’ social, economic, and even foreign policies.  Piketty’s extensive neo-Marxist works give our Left the veneer of legitimacy to sway the country’s center and undecided toward wholesale collectivism.

In my previous remarks on Brief History I concentrated on some of the technical points from his earlier works, specifically points that evinced his massive blindspots about human nature, especially when it comes to our economic behavior in the presence of monetary risk.

In this coda I want to put a ribbon around his arguments promoting the new world order he has invented and labeled “federalized democratic socialism”, along with various other derivative names.  This is a destination form of collectivism that Piketty describes as “decentralized” socialism, hence the appended ‘federalized’ attribute.  Such decentralization will result when the masses come together to “develop new forms of sovereignism(sic) with a universalist vocation.”  If you understand any of this ideo-babble, you’re a better man than I.

Open Letter to Don Rogers

[This piece was published in the 11may22 Union op-ed pages here.]

Your weekly column – ‘The gritty middle way’ - in the 6may22 Union (here) was a thoughtful, well-written piece that I and many of your readers enjoyed reading.  By now, most of the newspaper’s readers know that, counter to your protestations, you have become markedly left-of-center in your politics.  We have all witnessed the transition over the last few years.

The essay’s great opening – “Humans live in tension between the collective and the individual, neither ant drones nor lonely snow leopards.” – sets the stage for a good discussion of that gritty tension.  As you might expect, your words will sound very different to right and left readers who don’t necessarily inhabit the extremes of their respective polar regions.

The discerning reader is jarred a mite when he runs into “the farther right and farther left have uncannily similar root worldviews in common. Just understand that America’s actual risk of living under the thumb of fascist overlords or critical-theorist Marxist mobs amounts to the same fever dream born of indigestion from bogieman stories repeated mostly on blue screens.”

This observation and a couple of others can qualify as a litmus test for an intellectual leftist – they do not see the asymmetries in the ideological foundations of individualism and collectivism.  For them, “our yearnings in politics would have us believe that the end of the rainbow, the prize, lies at one pole or the other, sweet relief to be found there.”  However, that is not true.  Were we to believe polls and voting patterns, we would know the overwhelming share of liberal voters embrace large government collectivism, seeing no natural limits to taxation, regulation, and centralized control – reaching for the undefined but uniformly applied ‘common good’ dominates all political thought.  This is the foundation of the ‘fair share’ dictum - from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs – enforced equity über alles.

On the right the conservative, most certainly the conservetarian, sees no desired end in fascist governance.  For after all, fascism is the other dominant form of collectivism that also requires a very large autocratic government to implement its principles of social order and economics.  This is anathema to the overwhelming share of those on the Right.  Perhaps unrealistically, but the mainstream rightwinger’s desiderata are based on a smaller government minimally regulating open markets, staying out of people’s lives, and subsisting on minimum tax revenues.  The real political bookends for us are quite different than those apprehended and preached by the Left.  An easy proof of this is in the readings of your cited Levin, who describes a leftist society accepted by the Left, and Lakoff, who demonstrates repeatedly that he has no idea what the Right believes and seeks.

What the left-leaner also misses is that his desired social order requires the practice of wholesale altruism to make it work, and populated by perfected Marxists who have always been beyond the pale of human action (see Hardin’s ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’).  Historically, all leftwing nostrums to achieve such a glorified state of affairs require an initial phase of large-scale authoritarian social conditioning, wherein some eggs have to be cracked to make the sought for omelet.  This road, de rigueur to the intellectual Marxist, is kept hidden from the hoi polloi lest they up and embrace the ever-present siren song of the capitalists.

So, in sum Don, your commentary invites the reader to an admittedly difficult, yet reasonable, and reasoned middle path, avoiding both sides bounded by indistinguishable brambles and thorns.  Sadly, as attested by more than two hundred years of history, along with today’s petabytes of data, that is not the real world – it never was.  May the conversation continue.

Always with respect and best wishes,

George Rebane

Scattershots – 6may22 (updated 14may22)

George Rebane

The 2016 election integrity and voter fraud issue is far from dead.  Besides the many tomes presenting evidence that somehow didn’t reach the courts or were summarily dismissed by dismissive judges, there is a whole trove of (video and smartphone tracking) evidence of hundreds of paid ‘mules’ stuffing multiple ballots into ballot drop boxes in selected voting precincts across the nation (more here).  The whole thing is documented in a new film ‘2,000 Mules’ by documentary filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza.  It is now showing at a big screen near you, and you can also watch its online 7may22 premier for pay here on Youtube.  The lamestream has been hyper-silent about this movie, and you can bet the ranch that neither Bumblebrain, Ms Pelosi, nor SFB Schumer will watch it.

[13may22 update]  In ‘Imagine the Unimaginable’ Victor Davis Hanson succinctly lays out the dire straits in which our beloved republic finds itself.  As he makes clear and most RR readers know, all of our maladies are self-inflicted.  VDH ends his warning of the radical Left in America’s fundamental transformation – “When revolutionaries undermine the system, earn the antipathy of the people, and face looming disaster at the polls, it is then they prove most dangerous — as we shall see over the next few months.”

[14may22 update] ‘Abortion-Rights Marches Planned Across U.S. to Protest Possible Overturning of Roe v. Wade’  Here’s a photo of certifiable young idiots created by the evil party Democrats who continue to broadcast their latest Big Lie that federalizing abortion rights will outlaw abortions and end up “killing women”.  Even Scientific American (here) and the prestigious British medical journal Lancet (here) have decided to expand into American law and politics to proscribe the anticipated “blood on their hands” SCOTUS ruling that would allow the several states to make their own abortion laws.  This is more corroborating evidence that idiocy is independent of intellect.

Democrats speak in ‘poetic truths’ (updated 10may22)

George Rebane

Hoover Institution senior fellow and national commentator Shelby Steele has coined an appropriate tongue-in-cheek label for the gigantic lies that issue daily from our Left.  It turns out that such lies may be viewed as “poetic truths” when broadcast by politicians and political activists.  Poetic truths are "narratives that play down or disregard reality and facts to advance a favored ideological position."  The current claimant of the most audacious poetic truth is Ms Nusrat Choudhury (pictured), whose statement that “the killing of unarmed black men by police happens every day in America” patently qualifies (emphasis mine and Sen Kennedy’s).

She maintained the correctness of this statement to Sen John Kennedy who questioned her during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that revealed her (lack of) qualifications to become a federal judge pursuant to having been nominated by the nation’s First Incompetent, President Bumblebrain himself. (more here)

When the dissemination of prime-time, first-rate whoppers comes up for discussion, our leftwing neighbors, both national and local, volubly maintain that both sides are at least equally guilty, with the Republicans dispensing the majority.  By any comparative listing of such poetic truths (aka Big Lies), the contest is not even close, nor has it ever been.  Historically socialists are the big liars, for that is the requirement for their public square bamboozles to gain any traction in governance.  Today’s examples overwhelm –

‘Our southern border is secure, there is no border crisis’,

‘Crime rates are not up, there is no urban crime wave in America’,

‘Increasing taxes will not exacerbate the ongoing stagflation’,

‘Increasing taxes will grow the economy’,

‘Tax rates do not affect investment and productivity’,

'You can keep your doctor ...',

'Obamacare will reduce national healthcare costs',

‘Fossil fuels are bad and unnecessary; our energy needs can be met entirely by renewables’,

'America is better off being energy-dependent on foreign suppliers,'

‘Illegal immigration and illegal aliens in the workforce are necessary for economic growth’,

‘Capitalism and minimally regulated markets are arbitrary, cruel, and don't work’,

‘Men and women are exactly the same, making sexual distinction racist and unnecessary’,

‘Christians are intolerant’,

‘Trump’s collusion with the Russians swung the 2016 election’,

‘The tenets of Critical Race Theory are not taught in our K-12 schools’,

‘Merit based education (especially in STEM subjects) is racist’,

'Western culture is intrinsically racist',

‘America is a systemically racist country’,

‘Blacks don’t overwhelmingly kill blacks, cops gratuitously kill blacks,’

‘Government enforced equity motivates better than equal opportunity,’

‘Multi-cultural factionalism serves to unite America,’

… and on and on.

[10may22 update]  Poetic truths also come in the complimentary form of the sound of silence.  The evil party again demonstrated its true colors when both the administration and Democratic congressional leaders chose to remain silent on the historical travesty of compromising SCOTUS deliberations by leaking a draft of the forthcoming ruling on the continued federal involvement on abortions.  The leak, if allowed to become a precedent so prevalent in other governmental branches, departments, agencies, … will completely politicize the last vestige of non-political functions of our federal government.  The Democrats quickly doubled down on their ‘ascent by silence’ with a chorus of Big Lies about the impact of the upcoming Roe v Wade ruling that would range all the way from summarily prohibiting abortions in the land, to banning every other social activity that today we are free to perform – e.g. gay marriage.  The poetic truths Democrats perpetrate on the poor and the poorly informed knows no end.

As always, Democrats are invited to counter.

Sandbox – 3may22

[California’s 2021 population shrank for the second year in a row. (here)  Our local leftwingers have continued to ignore this phenomenon in the large, and most certainly deny its most proximal cause that can be remedied by rolling back the atrocious tax and regulatory policies with which our one-party monopoly legislature has burdened the once Golden State, and continues to do so unabated.  Reporting on this, the lamestream media (e.g. NPR) explains to its audiences that all this is due only to lower birthrates, Covid deaths, and not enough ‘immigration’ (aka influx of illegal aliens).  Nowhere is mentioned the ongoing Great California Exodus of businesses and workers numbering in the hundreds of thousands annually.  The state’s Democrats continue to count on their double dummy constituents to keep them in office and pay no attention to those behind the curtain who have put California at the bottom in about every measured QoL category. gjr]

Roe v Wade v Dodd (updated 6may22)

George Rebane

According to a leaked draft, SCOTUS appears prepared to rule on Mississippi’s Dodd v Jackson challenge to the longstanding and contentious 1973 Roe v Wade decision to legalize abortion as a constitutional right in all 50 states. (here and here) By various attempts to overturn RvW since then, many states have additionally ruled that RvW really only grants abortion rights during the first 30 or so weeks of pregnancy.

Now DvJ has reduced this down to the first 15 weeks. (more here) And this started the brouhaha that was appealed all the way up to SCOTUS, which, according to the draft, promises to reconsider the whole question of constitutionality and to reinstate federalism by again allowing the several states each to legislate their own abortion laws. 

The Left, generally against federalism, hates this and anybody and everybody who wants to restrict a ‘woman’s right’ to an abortion, up to and including a post-partum killing.  And for good measure, all progressives want the state to pay for such abortions on demand.

My own take on abortions is included in the 2012 post ‘Abortion and the Two Bodies Problem’.

[4may22 update]  There was a gathering of Nevada County’s ignorant and double dummies to protest the SCOTUS draft on Broad Street. (here)  It is hard to believe that any of these fellow citizens and neighbors, among whom we must live, know the contents of RvW, Mississippi’s DvJ, or the leaked draft.  The depths of their considerable deficits allow them to comfortably demonstrate for democracy while denying the ability of Americans in the several states the ability to vote for the abortion policy that they and their fellow residents support.  The facile way they continue to be manipulated by the nation’s leftwing elites recalls Lenin’s definition of ‘useful idiots’.

[6may22 update]  Another illustration of the intellectually brain-dead Left is their ongoing charge Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh broke their promise to the Senate that they would honor Roe after being confirmed.  There is no evidence whatsoever that they made any such commitments during their hearings, yet the Democrats and their lamestream have now adopted that as their latest Big Lie, adding it to their already historic collection that continues to grow at an increasing pace as the November election approaches.  Another one of their 'poetic truths'?

On the lighter side, the photo below was recaptioned by one of our regular readers.  He didn’t specify whether the new non-scalable fence is supposed to keep the Republicans in or out.

Scattershots – 1may22

George Rebane

‘Workers of the world, arise and celebrate the day that brings us together to again be thankful for the blessings of collectivism that unite us in a revolution to make socialism available to all peoples everywhere.’ - or something similar.  I just thought it would be appropriate to make up that piece of crap on May Day.

Inflation Tax.  Last year many of us already saw the salacious intents of the Biden administration in how they were systematically going about to ruin the nation.  Among the many disasters they were cooking up was inflation.  Well, it’s here now, and the piece I posted then (here) is definitely worth reviewing by those who are impacted by inflation and those who are planning to be so impacted.  I count myself among the latter, so it’s time to review the taxing aspects of inflation (here).  And for those who are spreadsheet challenged, I made a spreadsheet with the formulas from the ‘Inflation – up close and personal’ post. Download InflationInvesting2

Wealth tax:  The Build Back Bullshit agenda is still not dead and buried.  Team Bumblebrain has every intent on passing most of its provisions, especially those increasing our taxes.  The administration's entire team on economics are double dummies who couldn’t pass Econ 101.  They continue to tell the sheeple that we can tax ourselves out of an inflationary spiral.  Even Keynes, the lord of demand-siders, counseled against raising taxes in an inflation infested economy. (more here)

Election corruption right here in River City?  My bride and a commenter picked up on a thinly disguised campaign ad in the 30apr22 Union for Natalie Adona, our Soros'(?) foreign plant Assistant Registrar of Voters, who is running for the county’s Clerk Recorder – Registrar of Voters in the 7jun22 election.  The ad, pictured below, is made to look like a public service announcement from the Nevada County Clerk Recorder – Registrar of Voters office.  Notice the formal seal in the lower right corner.  Were it a bona-fide voter info notice from that office, then it would have been published under the aegis of our current holder of that office, Greg Diaz.  It does not speak well for The Union to have allowed this campaign ad to appear without some corrective editorial comment.

A Nation to Transcend Stupid?

George Rebane

The Atlantic usually contains ideas that are antithetical to the perspectives with which I interpret what happens in the world.  A longtime and dear friend, who leans a bit to my left, forwarded to me an essay with which he concurs “with 90% of the points made in this article (regardless of the source!)”  After reading it, I must admit to a similar concordance.  The piece – ‘WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID’ – by Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist and NYU Professor of Ethical Leadership (here).

Dr Haidt is described variously as someone who “has attracted both support and criticism for his critique of the current state of universities and his interpretation of progressive values. He has been named one of the ‘top global thinkers’ by Foreign Policy magazine, and one of the ‘top world thinkers’ by Prospect magazine. He is among the most cited researchers in political and moral psychology, and is considered among the top 25 most influential living psychologists.”

In the cited essay, Haidt uses the Tower of Babel metaphor to interpret what has happened to America in the last two decades as “the fractured country we now inhabit.”  Like many of us, he sees that “something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.”  Regular RR readers will recognize these longstanding themes in these pages.

The author goes on to outline “the rise of the modern Tower” in concert with the rise of the smartphone, the internet and its extremely influential social networks which now unite the various thoughts and ideas of several billion people.  For Haidt “the high point of techno-democratic optimism was arguably 2011, a year that began with the Arab Spring and ended with the Occupy movement. … For techno-democratic optimists, it seemed to be only the beginning of what humanity could do.”  Then things started going downhill as “humanity rebuilt the Tower of Babel.”

The problem, as dissected by Haidt, began as social media weakened “at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories.”  He then goes on to detail how the Left has dominated the various institutions, specifically the media and academe.  He abets this argument by citing James Madison in Federalist #10 on “the innate human proclivity toward ‘faction’, by which he meant our tendency to divide ourselves into teams or parties that are so inflamed with ‘mutual animosity’ that they are ‘much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.’”  

But since then, thanks much to social media, the Tower has fallen and the factions no longer communicate.  The hows and whys of the fall are of some considerable interest to those of us who claim to pay attention.  He even details how closed groups of “jerks” dominate discussions and debates on the various blogs.  I won’t go on giving you clips of Haidt’s expansion of that very recent and ongoing history.  Suffice it to say that Haidt also agrees that we are at least two distinct countries – with appropriately differentiated cultures, languages, histories, values, … - sharing a common border.

What struck me as a significant shortcoming in Dr Haidt’s contemporary ontology is his apparent ignorance (neglect?) of some significant findings by sociologists that dovetail with teachings from the systems sciences.  He argues that ‘Democracy after Babel’ will require a ‘redesign of democracy’ that includes reforms in three categorical areas – “three goals that must be achieved if democracy is to remain viable in the post-Babel era. We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.”

When expanding on these areas, it is not clear at all that Haidt’s recommendations do not require the enlargement of our already encompassing government(s).  How else would democratic institutions be “hardened”, social media “reformed”, and the “next generation prepared” for a more compliant and compatible “democratic citizenship”?  What Haidt misses is the underlying truth that for large complex systems to remain viable, they need to be decentralized – they need to be based on a structure of distributed control and knowledge.  In this universe, nature does not support large systems that are centrally comprehended and controlled.  On Earth, the evidence for this abounds when we open our eyes and understand what we see in the natural world.

The alternative approach to successful societies in the post-Babel era, missed by Haidt, is to abandon globalism and work to enlarge the community of sovereign nation-states to have members with much smaller and more culturally cohesive populations.  I have lost track, but somewhere in the archives of such sociological studies are solutions that identify ideal national populations to be in the five to ten million range, and comprise of jurisdictional units that are not larger than 50,000.  This kind of global structure of independent states and free peoples would promote specialization, trade, and the ready transfer of ‘best practices’, as one people sees how another people have a better solution for a common problem.

Leftwing Journalism (Addended)

George Rebane

Reading this morning’s (28apr22) Union, I was both startled and disappointed when I came to the paper’s weekly Hits & Misses column (here).  Publisher Don Rogers usually places his contributions at the bottom, and there we saw –

MISS (from Publisher Don Rogers): To the kind of free speech as uttered by bullies, liars, abusers, propagandists, trolls, rumor-mongers, gossips and other asses lurking in social media, including the new owner of Twitter.

Now, it’s been no secret for decades that there is a great asymmetry between the reportage from our neighbors on the Left and Right.  (The published literature on that could fill a library.)  We have covered this phenomenon going on 15 years now.  Recent leftwing journalistic atrocities include the multi-year unabashed and still ongoing reporting of the Great Russian Collusion for which there is not a shred of evidence.  In a similar vein, material events of national importance are thoroughly buried in what is now correctly known as the lamestream media.  An example of that is the Hunter Biden laptop scandal which revealed influence peddling that included payoffs to the “Big Guy” principal, now in the White House, whose influence was peddled.

Such evidence-free, evidence-hiding journalistic behavior is to be expected in the national press, but not so much from local outlets in markets where the writers and readers know each other.  This is why I was surprised to read Don’s pre-emptive swipe at Elon Musk.

Readers may recall that I consider Don Rogers a respected friend, among the many I have on the port side.  However, his published Miss is so out of character of the man I know on two counts.  First, Musk’s stated intentions to open up Twitter to uncensored free speech should be welcomed by all who support our First Amendment, especially those who supposedly deal in ‘Truth’ as journalists claim in their code of ethics.  And second, Musk has yet to do anything at Twitter that would justify anyone to categorize him on Roger’s list of misfit communicators.  So why launch such a pre-emptive editorial attack that looks so much like gratuitous pandering to the county's growing progressive faction?

In expressing all this consternation, I am reminded that The Union is a privately owned enterprise, and has wide latitude in what kind of news and editorial content it is free to publish.  I don’t think that the above Miss crossed any libel lines, but I do think that Don Rogers does step over the bounds of editorial prudence when he joins the ranks of the country’s leftwing lemming chorus, all howling their imagined portents of Elon Musk single-handedly about to bring American democracy to an end by opening up Twitter to free speech.

Addendum:  Leftwing journalism cannot survive as a co-equal in an open market of ideas.  In such an environment, collectivist thought withers away into a dry shell of an echo, infrequently encountered and never taken seriously by those open to the greater wash of ideas that inundate the public square.  This is to be corroborated by the establishment of a very visible crutch that will henceforth support the already limping lamestream.  The Biden administration will seek to ensconce a permanent Ministry of Truth (aka Disinformation Governance Board) to oversee and variously censor ideas, opinions, happenings, and facts that counter the neo-Marxist narrative of socialism that has become the dissonant chorus from the Left. (more here and here)  The leader of these quenchers of free speech will be Nina Jankowicz, a renown incompetent in all but partisan zealotry, which she has demonstrated throughout her career (more here).  This woman is the carefully chosen poster-child for fettered discourse in the land.

Doing Healthcare Right

George Rebane

There’s no doubt about it, we don’t do healthcare right.  As every leftwinger likes to point out, we pay more for healthcare per patient and per capita than any other developed country with liberal governance.  Their solution is to nationalize America’s healthcare industry – aka adopting a ‘single payer’ system.  Given our inability to do bureaucracies right, every proposal to nationalize winds up raising our cost of healthcare and hiding such increases under variously camouflaged wealth transfer, money printing, and federal borrowing programs.

None of the proposed solutions are sustainable in the sense that they are able to keep a constant level of healthcare services within a non-increasing total cost share of GDP.  As documented numerous times in these pages, this is nothing new.  Even the progressives’ poster-child countries for nationalized healthcare have not been able to fashion or operate sustainable healthcare systems – they’re all reducing services and/or eating up bigger shares of their GDP.  None of these systems can last forever, as they continue kicking the cost can down the road.

Our private, semi-subsidized healthcare system is still the best in the world for delivering clinical care, new medicines, technology advancements, and innovative medical procedures.  Where we screw up badly is how we handle all the back-office stuff confirming the levels of delivered care and arranging for their payment through multiple agencies and from multiple sources.  That bureaucracy is enormously costly and screwed up to a fare-thee-well.  And folding these legacy processes and procedures within today’s bureaucratic mindset into a nationalized structure promises to deliver chaos on steroids.

McKinsey & Company, through its Center for Healthcare Reform, has completed a massive study of our healthcare industry, and identified specific improvements through which we could save more than $250,000,000,000 annually.  They have published their findings in a 76-page report titled ‘Administrative Simplification: How to save a quarter-trillion dollars in US healthcare’.  This is probably the most important new finding to come along that can move the healthcare debate off dead center and save enormous amounts annually.  You don’t have to read the entire thing to get the important details of how and where these savings will be realized.  The report begins with a 6-page executive summary with graphics that gets you up to speed.  Read it so that you’ll know what you’re talking about the next time you decide to sound off about healthcare reform.  (H/T to correspondent)

 

Should They Still Honor Your Wishes?

George Rebane

Many people of means make charitable donations and bequests with caveats attached that they are told will be honored after they die.  But not all people think that should be so.  The practice of subverting the will of the dear departed has a long history.  The Ford Foundation, founded in 1936 by Henry (died 1947) and Edsel (died 1943) Ford, is a good example of such radical repurposing that many such bequests have suffered.  In the Ford Foundation case, the transformation started soon after Henry’s death and was directed by its trustees so far afield by 1976 that its then chairman Henry Ford II resigned in disgust.

So, here’s the question – to what extent should the departed donor wishes to charities be honored?  We here consider only cases where the donor conditioned his donation subsequent to receiving bona fide and legal assurances in writing that his monies would be managed and dispensed according to his agreed upon wishes.  In short, the donation/bequest was made as part of a two-party contract.

Historically, there has been a debate in how much and for how long charitable organizations should honor their donors’ wishes.  As early as 1789 Thomas Jefferson weighed in to James Madison his strong opinion on donors setting aside real estate in perpetuum for a designated religious or charitable purpose.  Jefferson said, “The Earth belongs to the living, and the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.”  It might be a stretch, but one can see that sentiment applied to land, the desired uses of which may change over the passing decades as the country grows.

Leftwing political theorist Emma Saunders-Hastings teaches at Ohio State that philanthropy is a “deeply political activity” which gives the rich an outsized sphere of influence in a democracy, especially “in public life and by putting in place paternalistic relationships between donors and their intended beneficiaries."  In sum, it promotes inequalities that should have no place in democracies.  In her recent Private Virtues, Public Vices (2022) she argues against the notion wherein ‘donors claim to know, better than gift recipients, how their monies should be spent, placing donors’ ideas about what is best ahead of those of the beneficiaries.’

To many of us such a view about perpetuating donor values is a natural and acceptable given.  Donors give to an institution either because they believe in the concordance of their values with those of the institution, or they believe the institution is trustworthy and capable of promoting the donor’s values as prescribed and agreed upon.  Saunders-Hastings also has problems with the lion’s share of large donations coming from the rich whose values are definitely not those of the common folk, and therefore will perpetuate inequalities into the indefinite future, unless … .

Saunders-Hastings appears also being blind to a fundamental tenet of the nature of mortal humans.  Most people who are capable of enduring works see these as an extension of their being for those still living after they die.  Those with charitable instincts often see their wealth as delivering a twofer after they are gone – continuing to provide for a common good, and serving as a living memorial to a life well-lived and wealth well-placed.  To date, America has benefitted greatly from such donors of a wide range of means, who are not necessarily the claimed out-of-touch plutocrats. (more here and here)

But we return to the main question – when the donated money was left in trust, is it ever ethical for society to then later violate that trust; and, if so, under what conditions should that be possible without communicating fraud to potential donors and shutting off the funding of good works?