The Babbling Brooks of the NYT Babbles about Brokenness and other Fluffs He must like Utopias.

Abstract: David Brooks shows off his deep perceptive talents by essaying on the incoherent rants of some British cleric who runs amuck in the literary world. The sad, but predictable, case of Liverpool and its race riots run willy-nilly through a ‘new theory’ on reversing the roles of local and state governments with a stunning array of foolish comments.  Brooks is led down some path that Alice seemed to have missed.  There is wild talk of a ‘moral’ market and other strange notions. Brooks sums up this piece with the comment “that the only way to restore trust is from the local community on up” in one of those famous all-or-nothing leftist edicts where there is no middle ground. This is a farce but amusing to read.

As we peruse the hallowed pages of the near-bankrupt NYT—aka the Walter Duranty Papers[1][2]--a turn-of-the-crank Marxian puppet stage where intermezzos and grand opera ring until the wall paper curls, we must always be alert for true political designs and other odd bits of propaganda that are thoughtfully woven into the fabric of the average op-ed piece presented before us. There are more talented  writers and web-spinners like Maureen Dowd, the Old Red Lady [3][4][5] [than our current author] who offer us interesting political enigmas to dissect as she sandwiches literary clichés, unlikely metaphors and newsworthy characters with leftist political demands with sound and fury and the messages are usually very clear. But today our Chief Babbler David Brooks[6][7][8][9] broaches the banks of his pond to instruct us on broken societies. Brooks, in this episode, manages to leap beyond much of the sticky cliché besotted pulp that is both boring and intellectually insulting and spares us from the hackneyed nostrums that we need to ‘hear both sides of the story.’ But we need to be prepared to first hear the sobs of brokenness and then wade through a swamp of pity and social insanity until we reach the end and find out here was no clear fix recommended or intended. Thus, we are left hanging.

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[I offer extensive quotes in this blog so that the reader can view the exact language and can be confident that nothing was taken out of context or that nobody was misquoted. The easiest way to take in the salient points is to read the emphatic points in the quotes and then peruse my comments. Comments on my comments are always welcome: ryckki@gmail.com.]

We begin this episode with some stale facts:

“The United States is becoming a broken society. The public has contempt for the political class. Public debt is piling up at an astonishing and unrelenting pace. Middle-class wages have lagged. Unemployment will remain high. It will take years to fully recover from the financial crisis.”[10]-The Broken Society -By David Brooks Op-Ed Columnist Published: March 18, 2010 [Emphasis is mine in all quotes.]

We knew this. And, we knew that Obama and others had ‘solutions’ to our economic and financial problems as well and could guide us out of the swamp we are mired in. We know we are broke and heading for a currency default with our AAA credit rating now in serious jeopardy.[11] The liberals who now infect Congress and the White House  didn’t have any ‘solutions’ other than to print more money and bloat government like a sow with gangrene [ a reflection of California[12][13][14] and their  ejukashon[15]] so now they  promise  more and more as control more and they continue to  print more  money and monetize the debt and make matters worse. What else is new?

Now, the fix upon the fix:

“This confluence of crises has produced a surge in vehement libertarianism. People are disgusted with Washington. … But there is another way to respond to these problems that is more communitarian and less libertarian. This alternative has been explored most fully by the British writer Phillip Blond.

He grew up in working-class Liverpool. “I lived in the city when it was being eviscerated,” he told The New Statesman. “It was a beautiful city, one of the few in Britain to have a genuinely indigenous culture. And that whole way of life was destroyed.” Industry died. Political power was centralized in London.”-- The Broken Society

Liverpool was and is a dump and was wrecked by far left-wing activists.[16] The Toxteth Riots, a Labor Party stronghold [thus political power centralized there in contrast to Blond’s inaccurate comment above] had major problems with racism  that took place there in 1981 with tear gas and rioters of all colors and creeds fighting in the streets and need to quell the mess by massive government force. This war resembled Watts 1 and 2. Liverpool is a prime example of how importing poverty from Third World results in a massive incompatibility with the indigenous society in it is collision with modern education, work force ethics, conduct and government. We would expect a first-hand victim of this social wreckage to fly off the wall and scrounge for unworkable solutions to this problem. Phillip Blond is just the guy to stir the scant and misfiring neuronal remains of David Brooks.  He demonstrates just that in this article. He should study Oakland next.

The revolutions revolve:

“Blond[17] argues that over the past generation we have witnessed two revolutions, both of which liberated the individual and decimated local associations. First, there was a revolution from the left: a cultural revolution that displaced traditional manners and mores; a legal revolution that emphasized individual rights instead of responsibilities; a welfare revolution in which social workers displaced mutual aid societies and self-organized associations.

Then there was the market revolution from the right. In the age of deregulation, giant chains like Wal-Mart decimated local shop owners. Global financial markets took over small banks, so that the local knowledge of a town banker was replaced by a manic herd of traders thousands of miles away. Unions withered.

The two revolutions talked the language of individual freedom, but they perversely ended up creating greater centralization. They created an atomized, segmented society and then the state had to come in and attempt to repair the damage.”-- The Broken Society

This is so convoluted it is impossible to untangle the circular logic. There must be a punch line somewhere in this rag.

The Reformation Project:

“Economically, Blond lays out three big areas of reform: remoralize the market, relocalize the economy and recapitalize the poor. This would mean passing zoning legislation to give small shopkeepers a shot against the retail giants, reducing barriers to entry for new businesses, revitalizing local banks, encouraging employee share ownership, setting up local capital funds so community associations could invest in local enterprises, rewarding savings, cutting regulations that socialize risk and privatize profit, and reducing the subsidies that flow from big government and big business.”

He talks about morality? I can see part of what he means by a relocalization of the economy but the recapitalization of the ‘poor’ smells like more welfare to me.  Education of the ‘poor’ is usually a failure and it must have been a wreck in Liverpool. Since cognitive skills are not evenly distributed among peoples of various races we expect to see places like Liverpool, Watts, Baltimore City, San Francisco, Oakland[18] and Atlanta degenerate into social cesspools. People with talent and brains left Liverpool never to return and for good reason.

Didn’t they do this in the French Revolution?

“To create a civil state, Blond would reduce the power of senior government officials and widen the discretion of front-line civil servants, the people actually working in neighborhoods. He would decentralize power, giving more budget authority to the smallest units of government. He would funnel more services through charities. He would increase investments in infrastructure, so that more places could be vibrant economic hubs. He would rebuild the “village college” so that universities would be more intertwined with the towns around them.”-- The Broken Society

“Essentially, Blond would take a political culture that has been oriented around individual choice and replace it with one oriented around relationships and associations.”-- The Broken Society

“The only way to restore trust is from the local community on up.”-- The Broken Society

Well, there you have it or not. I missed the details. What I get from this seems to resemble what the utopians[19] were talking about many decades ago and seems to strongly resemble Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS)[20]  where there is little need for currency and swaps are controlled by individuals.

There are so many holes in this argument it resembles something freshly dug out of a dumpster:

[1] This system would migrate backward to the feudal system as only locals would make and enforce laws.

[2] There is no way to tax this system and who would pay for the army, Social Security and other government programs?

[3] To think that by multiplying our ‘government leaders’ some 10,000 fold might improve decision making of the cognitively disnimble is a joke.

[4] This just about cracks international trade and hikes inefficiency because the tendency would be to make any and all products locally.  In a country of 304 million people we could imagine some 25,000 different laws and government bodies with a few hundred tariffs and taxes upon those outside the utopias.

The Brooks summation comment that the only way to restore trust is from the local community on up in one of those famous all-or-nothing leftist edicts where there is no middle ground. I would only participate in such as system if I were Head of Secret Police.

rycK [a 5^th generation Californian in exile]

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