The Left Pursues Its Goals By Any Means Necessary

Stephen Kershnar

By Any Means Necessary

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

October 29, 2018

The American left have clear goals. However, their unprincipled pursuit of them is a troubling indication of what can be expected of them when they next regain power.  

            Democrats have three central goals. First, they want to socialize as much of the economy as they can. In particular, many of their leaders want to socialize medicine (Medicare for all), education (make college free), and elections (publicly finance elections). Other sectors, such as manufacturing and high tech, they wish to regulate as much as possible in pursuit of their views on discrimination, diversity, the environment, healthcare, privacy, retirement, safety, unions, etc. Sometimes this is to be done via regulation, other times via government contracts, subsidies, and tax breaks.    

            Second, they want an interventionist foreign policy. Obama’s war on Libya, meddling in Syria, continuing Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and frequent use of drone killings was unsurprising. Earlier, Bill Clinton involved us in wars in Serbia and Somalia. Historically, Democratic presidents oversaw the two world wars as well as the Korean and Vietnam wars. This tendency to get the U.S. mired in wars, some of which were not in the U.S.’s interest, is different from some Republicans, although not left-leaning ones such as the Bush dynasty and John McCain.   

            Third, Democrats reject the Constitution as envisioned by the country’s founding fathers. They reject the notion that the federal government has few and enumerated powers. Instead, they view the Commerce Clause as permitting Washington’s vast centralized control. They also reject the founders’ vision of limits on the police’s power to search (Fourth Amendment), individual gun rights (Second Amendment), and restricted eminent domain and regulatory powers (Fifth Amendment). Consider, for example, how Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer would have ruled on most of these issues. The founding fathers would have thought that the Constitution disallows Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and the current smorgasbord of welfare programs. These programs result in the federal government taking and spending more than one in five of the dollars Americans earn.  

            These goals reflect a coherent, albeit mistaken, vision of centralized-and-powerful government as necessary to correct and, in some cases, replace the free market. The left views the Constitution as open-ended and thus allowing for reinterpretation, if not rewriting. On this vision, the hands of white men dead centuries ago should not reach out and control our destiny.

  

            What is disturbing is the any-means-necessary way that the left pursues these goals. One area in which this occurs is in their attempts to rein in speech. The American left simply does not believe in free speech like it used to. Facebook, Google, and Twitter all censor political speech. While this is legal because they are private companies, one would expect the American left to join the right in denouncing such censorship. Instead, crickets.

In academia, campus administrators try to censor, regulate, and chill speech as much robust discussion of race, gender, sex, etc. as they can get away with (see, for example, Michigan, Stanford, and Wisconsin). The courts have had to repeatedly slap them down.

The courts have had to protect religious speech on gay marriage (see Masterpiece Cakeshop) and spending on political speech (see Citizens United) as leftist state officials tried to clamp down on it. Elsewhere, Antifa, Black Lives Matter, campus protesters, and political mobs intimidate, and sometimes smash, those with whom they disagree. Consider, for example, the violence in Berkeley, Charlottesville, Portland, and Washington D.C.  

            A second area in which the any-means-necessary stance can be seen is in the tolerance of criminality in politics. Contra to the left’s stance, it is clearly unlawful for tens of millions of illegal aliens to work, live, and use fraudulent documents in the U.S. Similarly unlawful is their ignoring hearings regarding their often spurious claims for asylum.

            Sanctuary cities involve state and local authorities refusing to participate and, in some cases, preventing the federal government from finding and returning illegal aliens. This refusal to participate in the federal government’s efforts might be legal, depending on the degree to which they refrain from helping the federal government rather than blocking it. Still, if Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi decided to be sanctuary states with regard to the environmental regulation, gay marriage, or transgender bathroom use, the left would need fainting couches.  

            Everyone who closely followed the FBI and Department of Justice’s Russia investigation knows that leading officials were neck deep in criminality and corruption. Consider, for example, those who misled the FISA court, leaked information to the press, put a spy into the Trump campaign, lied to Congress, hid and slow-walked documents to keep them from Congress, or tanked an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s crimes. For example, no adult thinker believes that Clinton’s minions were permitted destroy evidence under subpoena. The list of leading FBI and DOJ officials who have been fired or demoted because of misconduct is impressive. Here are just a few: James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Bruce Ohr, Lisa Page, and Peter Strzok. Other officials are so conflicted that in a sane world they would never be permitted to oversee the investigation (see, for example, Rob Rosenstein and Robert Mueller) and would be forever banned from government.

            A third area of the any-means-necessary approach has to do with the double-standards that infect the left. Claiming that merit matters and then flagrantly discriminating against Asians students is one example (see, for example, Harvard). Another is the different attitudes toward sexual-harassment allegations the left has with regard to Brett Kavanaugh when it still celebrates Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy and shields Keith Ellison. A third instance is the deafening silence when the Obama administration ran up the debt to the point that it is larger than the economy. Now that Obama is out of power, the left now worries about fiscal responsibility. 

   

            One can understand why Democrats and the left want to pursue socialism, interventionism, and rewrite of the Constitution. The any-means-necessary pursuit of it, though, is disturbing.

Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Day of Absence, and Other Out-of-Control Protests

Stephen Kershnar

Arrest Violent and Destructive Campus Protesters

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

October 15, 2018

            In recent years, out-of-control protests have rocked college campuses.

            At the University of California at Berkeley in 2017, masked and black-clad Antifa and other black bloc members protested a planned speech by libertarian Milo Yiannopoulos. They set fires, destroyed property, violent assaulted and pepper sprayed people, and threw rocks at the police. This intimidated Berkeley authorities into canceling not only Yiannopoulous’s talk, but also a later talk by conservative intellectual Ann Coulter.

At Claremont McKenna College in 2017, Black Lives Matter protesters prevented audience members from entering a building where conservative intellectual Heather Mac Donald was to speak. Out of fear for her and others’ safety, the college moved her to secure location where she had to speak over the web. The protesters were mad at Mac Donald because, in her book The War on Cops (2016), she argued that no one is more committed to protecting black lives than data-driven and accountable police departments.   

At Middlebury College in 2017, protesters caused the college to cancel a talk by political scientist Charles Murray. With police escort, Murray had to flee the campus. Protesters assaulted the female professor who invited him. Murray along with Harvard University’s Richard Herrnstein wrote the ground-breaking book: The Bell Curve (1994). This book argued that general intelligence is in part inherited, affects how well people’s lives go, and should affect public policy.

At Evergreen State College in 2017, campus protestors disrupted the campus after a biology professor, Brett Weinstein, refused to stay off campus during the Day of Absence. This is a protest day in which, following the election of Donald Trump, campus activists demanded that white people stay off campus. Campus police told the professor that it could not protect him and recommended he stay off campus. Weinstein and his wife (also a professor there) left Evergreen. Evergreen later paid them half a million dollars for failing to properly protect them.  

Despite these protests, there are only a few areas of unprotected speech in the Constitution and they are irrelevant to the above political speech. The Constitution does not protect fighting words, incitement of imminent violence or destruction, defamation, obscenity, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Campus political speech does not fit into these categories.

In the context of fighting words, governments may ban words that are directed at an individual and that that tend to provoke an immediate violent fight. They may not punish, ban, regulate, or financially burden speech merely because it might offend a hostile mob. In the context of imminent law lawless action, the state may ban speech that is intended to bring about imminent lawless action and likely to do so. In the context of defamation, a victim may recover for defamation only if the speaker carelessly made a false statement directed at an individual and it causes unjust damage to the target’s reputation or livelihood. None of this has to do with careful arguments on immigration, intelligence, policing, and political correctness.  

In contrast to the political speeches, the protesters committed crimes such as assault (including battery and threats), disorderly conduct (including disturbing the peace), trespass, and rioting. Thus, protesters who were violent and destroyed property should have been arrested.

            There are also good moral reasons to allow such speech. One reason to protect free speech, even when offensive, is that on the whole it contributes to the marketplace of ideas. Just as the marketplace of goods usually results in the spread of goods that are better or cheaper than competitor goods, the marketplace of ideas usually results in the spread of ideas that are true or better justified than competitor ideas.

A second reason is that people should be able to shape their own lives. They can do so only if they can consider the full range of ideas and decide for themselves what to believe and how to live. This is hard to do when campus censors and leftist thugs shut down access to some ideas.

            A third reason is that campus history at universities such as Michigan and Wisconsin shows that when campuses try to ban some types of speech (usually hate speech), this is invariably done via rules that are vague, too broad in that they cover protected speech, and lead to overreach. For example, such rules generated complaints when students expressed ideas in class such as homosexuality is a disease, minorities have difficulty in certain courses, and Jews use the Holocaust to justify mistreating Palestinians. These topics are worth discussing even if one disagrees with them.

            There are further good reasons not to ban speech that is merely offensive (again, consider bans on hate speech). First, as philosopher J. Angelo Corlett argues, there is no principled ground by which to decide which speech is truly offensive and which is not. For example, it is unclear whether the claim that the Christian God condemns gay people to hell is offensive or merely reports what the Old Testament says.

What is offensive can’t be merely what offends someone because this applies to almost every controversial statement worth listening to. Even if there were a principled criterion for what is offensive, there is no principled measure of when something is offensive enough that it should be banned.      

            Worse, a ban on ban offensive speech would likely be applied inconsistently and without regard to context. Corlett notes that the same people who want to ban racist words (chink, kike, nigger, and spic) because they offend people are often oblivious to the offense caused when the American flag is burned or confederate monuments smashed. Those who want to mechanically prohibit words usually fail to take context into account. A black chemistry student saying to a fellow black student, “Nigga, you da shit!” is not expressing hate or causing offense. Note the n-word here is being mentioned not used.

            Conservative intellectuals’ speech on campus is legally protected and morally deserves to be protected. In contrast, protesters’ violence, property destruction, and suppression of speech should lead to arrests.

Weak Majors and College as an Investment

Stephen Kershnar

Subsidizing and Encouraging Weaker Majors

Dunkirk-Fredonia Observer

October 1, 2018

            There is an interesting issue as to whether it is wise to heavily subsidize weaker college majors.  

            College is a risky investment. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, roughly 59% of students who enrolled in colleges (and universities) in 2009 graduated in six years. Only about 40% graduated in four years. Jaison Abel and Richard Dietz of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found in that in 2010, 62% of college graduates had a job that required a college degree. As a result, more than half of those who enter college don’t get a job that requires a college degree.

            College is expensive for students and, often, parents. According to Project on Student Debt, in 2015, 68% of college graduates had student loan debt. According to the Federal Reserve, the average debt in 2017 for student who had taken out loans was $39,000. The amount of these loans can also be seen in that Americans owe more in student-loan debt ($1.5 trillion) than credit-card debt ($0.9 trillion). Students frequently default on these loans. More than one in nine people with student loans default. A college student also loses years of income and on-the-job training.  

            Taxpayers and others also pay for college. Writing in The Atlantic, University of Colorado Law Professor Paul Campos reports that in 2014 federal and state taxpayers paid roughly $160 billion ($7,900 per college student) to colleges. Many pay for the student-loan defaults.  

            In The Case Against Education (2018), George Mason economist Bryan Caplan concludes that the return on investment for return for fair and poor students is often small (1-2%) and, in some cases, negative. On his account, a fair student is in the 41% of cognitive ability and the poor student in the 24%. Caplan also found that the social return on investment (return taxpayers get for investing in a college education) for college is poor and, sometimes, negative in part because the college student gets most of the return on the investment. Again, the return is noticeably worse for fair and weak students. This will become an issue at SUNY-Fredonia because more than a quarter of recently admitted students graduated in the bottom half of their high school class.

            The problem is exacerbated with weaker majors. Weaker majors have some of these features: higher unemployment, lower salaries, weaker students, and a less important subject matter. They include art (drama, music, studio, and visual arts), communication, education, ethnic and gender studies, and recreation (parks, recreation, and leisure and, also, physical fitness). Stronger majors include accounting, computer science, economics, engineering, mathematics, and physics. Some majors are harder to categorize. Consider English and psychology.  

            Subsidies for weaker majors should be reduced. Lessening subsidies to these majors might be done by offering them at fewer or no state colleges or by using merit-based subsidies as a way of discouraging less capable students from studying them. Private universities would likely still offer these majors and taxpayers generously subsidize these universities through below-market loans, grants to students, grants to universities, and tax breaks.  

            Here is the argument. First, if, on average, one college major has a lower return on investment for students and taxpayers than a second, then it should receive less of a subsidy. Second, on average, weaker majors have a lower return on investment for students and taxpayers than stronger ones. Hence, weaker major should receive less of a subsidy. A similar argument suggests that students should be encouraged to choose stronger majors. This is especially true for fair and poor students.

            It is arguably callous, if not cruel, to subsidize and encourage fair and poor students to have weaker majors when they are less likely to graduate, less likely to do well in the major, and, if they graduate, less likely to get a job that requires a college degree and pays well. This is similar to how it was arguably callous, if not cruel, in the years leading up to the 2007-2008 subprime mortgage crisis, to subsidize and encourage poor people to take risky loans for houses they couldn’t afford.

            One objection is that weaker majors do not give students a worse return on investment. However, writing in Forbes, Niall McCarthy found that in 2017, the majors with the lowest median salaries included exercise science, education, music, and psychology. According to a 2015 study by Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, the majors with the lowest median earnings include counseling psychology, early childhood education, drama and theater arts, studio arts, and visual and performing arts. It also found that the majors with the highest part-time employment include visual and performing arts, studio arts, and music.

            A second objection is that even if weaker majors give students a worse return on investment, they do not give taxpayers a worse return on investment. I can’t find evidence for this claim. Perhaps I am missing it. Even if there were such evidence, there is little reason to believe that the greater return to people other than the student would outweigh the lesser return to the student.

            A third objection is that even if weaker majors give students and taxpayers a worse return on investment, neither taxpayers nor students should care about a major’s return on investment. This might be because money is not a good measure of what these majors provide. Instead, the value might be the students’ love of the major or the benefits it provides to the rest of us that markets don’t value.

Consider the arts. Even if students are willing to face lower salaries and worse employment to pursue what they love, the rest of us shouldn’t have to pay for it. Taxpayers can probably get much of the benefits through top-ranked programs in these fields. For example, in music consider Julliard, Curtis, and Eastman and in film consider USC, NYU, and UCLA.

It is unwise to subsidize and encourage weaker majors, especially for less able students.