MAKING POVERTY GREAT AGAIN

If you’re sort of rich and really old they’re coming for you

Image courtesy of ChatGPT

Though not rich, I’m certainly old and quite busy connecting the dots regarding undisguised, full frontal attacks on ‘Capitalism’ or if you prefer, Entrepreneurism. They aren’t limited to one country; in fact when it comes to naked attacks on property and wealth, Canada and the US are running neck to neck. From California to New York City to Vancouver, there is a surge of self-righteous far-left agitators whose aim is to saw off the comfortable branch they’re roosting on.

Some call it Cultural Communism, but no matter the label, it’s not an attack from the outside; it’s coming from inside our elites, not the rabble nor the poor and/or oppressed. It’s been festering like a boil in Academia where it was hatched by the likes of Sartre et al in the ‘thirties. Pierre Elliot Trudeau had the disease, so it’s baked into our Constitution, his special contribution to History. In other words, this is nothing new except that now, the boil has burst. Even people who don’t care about history and certainly don’t know it, are forced to pay attention. Something unprecedented is happening.

I recognize this trend because I used to be one of those people who couldn’t admit that maybe Capitalism wasn’t ALL bad. The disease had infected me, and it’s because of that lefty craziness in my past that I am, to put it bluntly, without assets in my old age. I don’t own my home and have neither savings nor investments.

I made the two worst decisions of my life because I was once in the thrall of anti-capitalism. First, I frittered away the nest egg that I had after my divorce instead of investing it in real estate, cheap like Borscht in those days. Second, I didn’t hang on to my lucrative job at a growing Canadian high tech company until they went public and I could cash in my 2cent shares for ones on a par with the banks. I didn’t like them enough, you see. There were other factors but at bottom, I was a far lefty pinko idiot. I could also blame genetics: my father practically gave away his controlling interest in the rubber factory he had inherited, and my grandmother racked up so many debts she had to move to another city to avoid the furious merchants she owed. To top it off, my mother was an out and out anarchist. So of course I have few assets and still suffer from a disturbed relationship to money and wealth.

Though to parse the current Zeitgeist, being poor is a very good thing. According to some very learned and accredited folks, poverty is a wonderful condition, to be admired and sought after. We all know via good old Schwab that we ‘will own nothing and be happy’. But now this Communist Manifesto has been hitched to the even older thing called Ageism, and voila, you get Professor Samuel Moyn at Yale.

A much published, respected historian, he recently freaked out a lot of people with an article in the New York Times that was also printed in the far left rag, Harper’s Magazine. To which I still subscribe because one has to keep one’s enemies close. The Old Guard, Confronting America’s gerontocratic crisis is the sort of article that you have to read twice to make sure you didn’t misunderstand what the author was saying. Let’s begin with the cover. It’s shocking. I couldn’t believe the wrinkly, ugly and just plain demented looking visage of an ancient white man staring out at me. It was clearly doctored because although I live surrounded by old folks, I’ve never come across anyone looking that old, angry and insane. We oldies work very hard NOT to look like that. I for one really don’t want to scare anyone and when gazing at my reflection, hope to see at least some resemblance to my younger, more attractive self. Harper’s is doing the opposite because the story was written precisely to put the fear of old people, especially those with some dosh, into the reader. I had already been alerted to this piece a week earlier by Matt Taibbi, who wrote an entire post about it with the header: Old People Suck and We Should Take Their Stuff!

I can’t really improve on that summary though I wish I could argue that Professor Moyn doesn’t really mean it. While he admits somewhere that there are in fact more penniless oldies than actual grifting millionaires/billionaires, it doesn’t get in the way of his argument that the old in North America have way too much money and power and are to blame for all its ills, ranging from NIMBYism to the young neither voting nor procreating, and so much else. And that if we want to improve things for everybody, well, we should just put those old hoarders and grifters in a place where they belong: at the fringes of society, without any assets and administered by a no doubt benign state. This isn’t ageism: it’s Communism married to Ageism in a novel mix. There is a historical precedent for this in China, where Mao’s Red Guards wreaked havoc on the old who owned too much and played the violin and even read books. They simply had too much of everything, so they had to go.

Moyn is resurrecting the Red Guards for North American sensibilities:

…I mean it when I say that curtailing the excessive authority of some has to be for the sake of all. Building a fairer system with the elderly divested of political power, wealth and property but guaranteed dignity and state support at the end of their lives—would help everyone including most of the aged…

As someone who already lives like that, I can report that I live in fear of the day the far left Carney government reads my posts on, say the Vaccines, the Pandemic or indeed just about anything critical—and practically everything I write is critical of government overreach and public stupidity—and decides to fine me for ‘hate speech’. The law that permits this is coming sure as the sun rises every day. I have yet to see signs of widespread resistance among the general Canadian public. Only a small minority is actively working to stop these fascistic laws from becoming The Law.

But back to Professor Moyn. I say he has proven that the more educated and intellectual one is, the higher your chances of being abysmally stupid. And dangerous. If I had college age kids I would worry. If a respected intellectual like Moyn can get away with such dangerous drivel, I certainly wouldn’t want him teaching my kids. His brand of Communism Light is not that rare; flourishing not just in in Academia but also Think Tanks, Government Agencies, NGOs and what have you. Even in New York City, which has a mayor brimming with save-the-world ideas that have already failed several times over. As Taibbi points out, the entire premise of this deplorable article is that ‘nobody really owns anything’. Not to be left behind, In California they are passing laws that undermine the ability of CEOs to own their companies. Talk about taking a chainsaw to the roots of the capitalist tree. The predictable result is that people with money are leaving the state, taking their companies and jobs with them. Well done!

And here in BC, we truly are ahead of this curve of calamity. Since the Cowichan ruling came down from the secretive chambers in Ottawa, the entire Lower Mainland’s somewhat wealthy homeowners no longer really ‘own’ their property. They have company, co-owners if you like. Several tribes are claiming ancestral rights to this land and the law is clear: the tiny minority of tribal people in BC are now legally in charge of your property. Several clearly worried experts in aboriginal law and fee simple law have said so. Not only that, when the elected premier, Eby, decided to fight back because his spooked voters were turning on him, the triable elders bullied him into backtracking. Which he has done.

So it looks like Professor Moyn is onto something, joining a growing trend to dismantle the entire framework of individual initiative, risk and reward that is Capitalism. We thought we defeated the evil commies and swastika waving fascists with WW2. It now turns out we replaced it with one-size-fits-all Capitalist Hatred.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that our society is in dire straits. All of us in the West are in danger of soon waking up in a third world country managed into the ground by insane elites like Eby or Carnage Carney. In Canada, that would be a Banana Republic with Polar Bears. It makes for an entertaining image, doesn’t it, even if the idea itself is frightening and not impossible at all.

But before I go:

I promised you a Sauna Story, and I always (mostly) keep my promises.

Regularly visiting two different saunas here in fair Victoria, usually awash in old people, I generally keep shtum or say the ‘wrong’ thing. For example, I drove an old white man to jump up and shout ‘Everything that’s wrong here is Trump’s fault! And literally dash out as if the place was on fire. My bad! I had remarked to the young-ish man next to me that I thought it childish and stupid to make Trump the all-purpose scapegoat for Canada’s—make that the world’s, woes—knowing I was pushing buttons of people dozing in the dark corners of the sauna. I couldn’t see this guy until he jumped up in a rage because it’s shaped like a railway car without windows, a long dark corridor where people sit, sweat and sometimes chat while contemplating the wall in front of them. Young-ish man and I stared at each other for a long moment and then burst into helpless giggles. I admit that incident made my day. People who hate Trump are in the majority here, but they aren’t generally this funny. And what a shame that is.