Up With The White Cisgendered Heteropatriarchal Conservative Gun Nut!

     Given any particular inane notion, even a blatantly counterfactual one, you could find someone to swear that it’s the Gospel truth. There are people who’ll tell you that water fluoridation is part of a Communist plot, that the banks are plotting to destroy capitalism, and that contemporary toothbrush heads are made tiny to promote the sale of “designer toothpastes.” Indeed, there are people in this world who would insist to their last breath that the sky is tiger-striped, that drinking water causes impotence, and that the moon is made of green cheese.

     I’m not kidding, Gentle Reader. I’ve met some of those folks.

     For any well-confirmed fact, there’s someone out there who’s made it his personal mission to deny it and to belittle those who’ve proclaimed it. You might not be able to find him with Google, or on Facebook, but take my word for it: no matter what fact you might have in mind, he’s out there. In both senses of that phrase.

     When it comes to political, social, and economic disputes, much of the Sturm und Drang is counterfactual and worse.

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     Here’s today’s stimulus to the bile gland:

    

     “Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.” -- Amy Wax and Larry Alexander

     The quote you just read comes from an excellent Jonah Goldberg column I read recently. It reminds me of Walter Williams’ formula to avoid poverty:

     Avoiding long-term poverty is not rocket science. First, graduate from high school. Second, get married before you have children, and stay married. Third, work at any kind of job, even one that starts out paying the minimum wage. And, finally, avoid engaging in criminal behavior.

     After seeing these quotes, most of the successful, responsible adults reading this are probably thinking, “That’s good advice. A little simple, but it’s the sort of thing parents used to tell their kids and it works.”

     However, Jonah Goldberg noted a quite different response to that essay that contained that initial quote:

     A coalition of students and alumni responded to the essay in predictable fashion. [Amy] Wax and [Larry] Alexander were peddling the “malignant logic of hetero-patriarchal, class-based, white supremacy that plagues our country today. These cultural values and logics are steeped in anti-blackness and white hetero-patriarchal respectability . . .”

     The important part about the furious response cited above is that the Wax / Alexander / Williams formula for “making it” (in the sense of not being trapped in poverty and dependency) has been well confirmed, repeatedly so, over virtually the entire history of this country. Indeed, Charles Murray – is there a social scientist the Left hates more than Dr. Murray? – laid out the same program in his 1980 book for intelligent laymen, Losing Ground. Myron Magnet condensed the recipe and made it even more explicit:

     After all, it is not impossibly hard to rise out of poverty in late twentieth-century America. That’s why the vast majority of people whom the census counts as poor – most of the non-underclass poor – don’t stay poor long. Statistics suggest that the recipe for escaping long-term poverty is straightforward: finish high school, get and keep any full-time, full-year job (even at the minimum wage), get married as an adult and stay married, even if it takes more than one try. “These are demanding, although not superhuman, tasks,” drily remarks the report of the Working Seminar on the Family and American Welfare Policy, a group of scholars and former government officials

     Now, we know from painful repeated experiences that one who endorses such a view will make enemies. Who are they? How many are they, and how influential? Perhaps most important, what’s their angle? Or in somewhat less loaded terms, what do they hope to achieve?

     Ponder those questions for a moment.

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     It is normal to admire the hugely successful, and to aspire to equal (or exceed) their attainments. Of course, “success” is something for which every individual has a personal metric. I have no doubt that somewhere in this hallowed land there’s someone who measures “success” according to the number of his illegitimate children. As I said at the outset, any notion, however bizarre, will find a champion somewhere.

     Yet for most of us, the “success” we can reasonably hope for is a matter of two parts:

1. Attaining material sufficiency and perhaps a little more;
2. Staying out of serious trouble with the law and the neighbors.

     These are achievable goals for nearly everyone sufficiently hale in body and mind to:

1. Finish high school;
2. Get and keep a full-time job;
3. Get married and stay married.

     That’s not a pipe dream; it’s a well-confirmed fact. The perpetually aggrieved can rail against “the system” all they like, but the fact remains that self-sufficiency and ordinary respectability are attainable through that simple formula.

     So what do the perpetually aggrieved hope to achieve by railing against the formula as “cultural values and logics...steeped in anti-blackness and white hetero-patriarchal respectability” -- ? It must be extraordinarily valuable to them, considering that the price to be paid for heeding their ravings is the continuation of millions of Americans mired in poverty and dependency.

     Insanity – genuine, no-foolin’ certifiable psychosis – is certainly one possible explanation. But insanity on this scale would normally have been detected by concerned relatives and friends, and the sufferers packed off to some pleasant institution where the accommodations have padded walls and the doors lock from the outside. If we omit insanity for the moment, what remains?

     Not all the activists for any blatantly stupid notion are interested in personal power. Not all intend to run for office or hope to be appointed “Commissar for Screw Standards” in some hoped-for communist utopia. Not all are hoping to get laid. But they seek something, and their spittle-flecked denunciations of the proven formula for self-sufficiency and self-respect is their avenue toward it. Ferreting out that something has become an urgent necessity.

     More anon.

Sturdy Wisdoms: The Worst Habit

     [Just yesterday, after a jaunt on which I spent far too much money on cheese – it’s one of my more difficult-to-resist vices – I received an email from Dystopic of The Declination. He drew my attention to his most recent essay, and mentioned that he’d come to an opinion about mortgage debt that differed greatly from his original one. He wrote that the change was because of the essay below, which first appeared at Eternity Road on December 13, 2006. In appreciation of his missive and the implied compliment...and yes, in recognition of the folly of spending so much on exotic cheeses that I was moved to inquire of the cheese shop proprietor whether financing might be available...I repost it here. -- FWP]

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     Your Curmudgeon is rather older than most wanderers of the World Wide Web, including most of those who hawk their opinions to a general audience. He received a different sort of upbringing from most, too. As his years lengthen, he finds himself ever more frequently revisiting the teachings of his youth and reviewing them for continuing soundness and applicability.

     Many of those lessons are still quite serviceable -- infinitely more so than the guff that's displaced them in more recent years. In part, that's due to an underlying shift in premises; half a century ago, no one would have dared to posit that right and wrong are relative, or that there can be no absolute moral standards, or that "good for you" and "bad for you" are anything but matters of opinion. Today one seldom hears anything else. If you don't believe it, either you don't have children or you haven't paid enough attention to what their "teachers" have been telling them.

     Accordingly, your Curmudgeon has decided to trot out, one by one, the sturdiest and most useful of the simple wisdoms with which his own parents and teachers equipped him. It is his opinion that their promulgation could do quite a lot to correct the faults of modern American society, and even more to quell the rising tide of dissatisfaction with life that afflicts so many of our teens and young adults.

     Of course, opinions will vary. Read on, and judge for yourself.

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     High among the homiletic primaries is this one: don't allow yourself to form bad habits. From the ordinary meanings of the words, this would seem self-evidently wise. For a "bad habit" is a behavior pattern that does harm to oneself. Of course, there's a heavy murk around that word "bad," whose variable interpretation has been the ingress for a lot of irrationality, but we'll get to that some other time.

     There are any number of habits on whose badness Americans would generally agree -- and not by thin majorities, either:

• Avoidance of exercise;
• Routinely bad nutrition and overeating;
• Impropriety of disclosure (i.e., the habit of revealing sensitive facts about oneself or one's family, friends, and acquaintances to persons who ought not to be told);
• Excessive television watching;
• Smoking;
• Drinking to excess;
• The use of recreational drugs.

     The above is, of course, a partial list. Other bad habits less dramatic in their effects would draw general concurrence as well. But there has been a sea change in American attitudes so complete, yet so quiet, that the very worst of all habits, by which millions of persons have utterly destroyed themselves and their kin beyond all hope of renewal, is almost never addressed. Indeed, when it's mentioned, most persons either refuse to acknowledge it or turn away to conceal their embarrassment.

     The habit of which your Curmudgeon speaks is living beyond your means.

     This venerable phrase has almost been effaced from our culture. Yet our nation's habit of living beyond its means is a regular news feature, reported through innumerable channels at least once per month. What else does the federal deficit signify? What else does the American trade deficit signify? What else does it mean when the dollar drops in value against the currencies of other lands? (It's been quite a long time since a physician last clapped your Curmudgeon on the shoulder and told him that he's "sound as a dollar," and not because your Curmudgeon is quick to take umbrage at insult.)

     What's bad in the large is just as bad in the small, yet nearly all of us do it, and very few of us will admit to it.

     Likely you, Gentle Reader, are nodding, perhaps a bit reluctantly, at the unwisdom of "living beyond your means." But you haven't seen your Curmudgeon's kicker yet:

If you've borrowed money, for any reason whatsoever, that you can't immediately pay back out of your own reserves, you're living beyond your means.

     Yes, that includes home mortgages and car loans.

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     A century ago, "mortgage" was a dirty word. (Car loans were, of course, unknown.) In fact, the word means "death pledge." It denoted a promise to return the mortgaged property to the legal ownership of the mortgagee -- the lender -- upon the mortgagor's -- the borrower's -- death. Indeed, it still means exactly that.

     Mortgages in the Nineteenth Century were almost exclusively the province and the bane of farmers. Private housing in non-farm areas was very seldom mortgaged. The income tax, the rise of the lending industry, and the demographic and financial conditions that prevailed after our two World Wars were the impetus by which Americans were goosed into thinking that living in homes they do not own, that could be ripped out from under them at any moment, was perfectly all right.

     It's hard to get reliable statistics on the matter, but according to a financial professional of your Curmudgeon's acquaintance, no fewer than 75% of all private homes are mortgaged. The deeds to those homes are encumbered in such a fashion that the persons who "own" them could be stripped of them at any time. It would not surprise your Curmudgeon too greatly if those provisions were invoked to put force behind a Kelo-esque eminent domain proceeding; financiers and politicians have always traveled in the same circles.

     But even apart from the hazards involved in living in mortgaged housing, it's almost always unwise to undertake a mortgage for reasons of simple financial prudence:

• It's a long-term obligation, typically 15 years or more;
• The lender is legally privileged over the borrower -- that is, nearly all the options rest with the lender, nearly none with the borrower;
• The borrower's income, upon which he depends for his debt service, is almost never guaranteed;
• A default on a mortgage is regarded as the worst of financial sins, and in the worst case can ruin an individual's financial standing for the rest of his life;
• In the event of a default, the borrower seldom recovers any significant percentage of his notional equity in the mortgaged property.

     If a mortgage, which is secured by real property and carries tax advantages that are attached to no other form of debt, is unwise, then what need one say about chattel loans on cars and other movable property? What need one say about credit-card debt, which carries extremely high interest rates and has ruined millions of families in the past quarter century alone?

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     Many a reader has been saying to himself "But how could I get the things I need without incurring these debts?" for several paragraphs now. Such questions arise from a perverse sense of "need" far more often than not. Americans are hooked on material self-indulgence; easy credit is the pusher that feeds our habit. Most of what we have, we do not need. We want it, and we certainly enjoy it, but those are far different things.

     "Need" is the gateway drug. "Need" is habitually "defined down" over time: from a house, to a car, to better clothes, to a better car, to a really nice house in a "suitable" neighborhood, to designer jeans and sneakers for the kids, to the latest iPods^®, to a PlayStation 3 ^® and all the "hot" games for it, to a Giant Economy Size bottle of Chivas Regal to dull the pain from having to pay for all that stuff.

     Man's needs are food, clothing, shelter, and heat. All else is discretionary. The truly prudent man does not incur debt to pay for discretionary items.

     Let it be admitted that most Americans, despite their debt anchors, manage to skirt the shoals of financial disaster. But an appalling number do not, and a significant fraction of those never quite recover from the wreck. Compound interest, which master financier Baron Philippe de Rothschild called "the eighth wonder of the world," is in fact the eighth horror of the world for those habituated to debt. Its ability to drain all the vitality from one's present and hope from one's future is unequalled by anything but cocaine and heroin.

     In what might be the supreme irony of ironies, innumerable Americans look for their salvation from their debts...to government. Not only is our government the most egregious abuser of credit in the history of the world, it has an unadmitted interest in encouraging debt to the widest possible extent. Widespread severe debt is the motivator for governmental abuse of the currency: inflation. Inflation in our fiat-currency system gifts Washington with billions of "free" dollars with which it can increase its power over the rest of us. But Americans with substantial savings will not tolerate inflation; Americans deeply mired in debt, seeing the chance to pay down their obligations with "cheap" money, will embrace it eagerly.

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     If you're a young person who has yet to acquire any debts, don't! Live beneath your means; acquire savings. Only borrow when utterly forced to do so, and only as a capital investment in yourself: that is, for tools or an education. Be ruthless in assuring that every dollar you make arrives in your pocket with no debt-service strings attached.

     A young man with a white-collar salary, who restricts his consumption for just ten years and puts his unspent balance into conservative investments (i.e., steady 3% to 5% returns), can usually produce the entire purchase price of a house at the end of that period. He'll have no trouble affording the cash purchase of a used car. Does it mean that he'll live in a less opulent style than that enjoyed by his coevals? Yes. But it also means that the fangs of the debt habit and the shackles of compound interest will have no chance to snag him.

     An older man who has lived free from debt can be certain of mobility and security. He will have savings. No occupational reversal will have the power to dispossess him. Neither will misfortunes of nature render him helpless. He will have leverage in all negotiations that a man chained to debt and beholden to creditors would not possess. He will be as free as his individual efforts can possibly make him. When he passes from this world, he will be able to leave his progeny a substantial patrimony. More, he will have already shown them an invaluable example.

     A sturdy wisdom indeed.

Quickies: The Richest Poor On Earth

     Kevin D. Williamson whacks us across the teeth with it:

     What is it, in terms of physical goods and services, that we wish to provide for the poor that they do not already have? Their lives often may not be very happy or stable, but the poor do have a great deal of stuff. Conservatives can be a little yahoo-ish on the subject, but do consider for a moment the inventory of the typical poor household in the United States: at least one car, often two or more, air conditioning, a couple of televisions with cable, DVD player, clothes washer and dryer, cellphones, etc. As Robert Rector and Rachel Sheffield report: “The home of the typical poor family was not overcrowded and was in good repair. In fact, the typical poor American had more living space than the average European. The typical poor American family was also able to obtain medical care when needed. By its own report, the typical family was not hungry and had sufficient funds during the past year to meet all essential needs. Poor families certainly struggle to make ends meet, but in most cases, they are struggling to pay for air conditioning and the cable-TV bill as well as to put food on the table.”

     It’s a point I and other commentators have made many times before:

In America, “poverty” is a statistical artifact.

     No one in these United States, unless he be at the top of Mount McKinley, involuntarily lacks food, clothing, shelter, or medical care. The number of persons actively looking for such unfortunates, pantingly eager to thrust largesse upon them, makes genuine, survival-level “poverty” an impossibility in America.

     Yes, there is survival-level poverty in other lands. Whose responsibility are those persons? In the overwhelmingly most common case, they exist for a political reason: i.e., the suppression of the capitalist dynamic Williamson extols in his article. No doubt the political masters of those lands find their poor as useful a stick to beat “the rich” with as do our own mealy-mouthed, wholly insincere "progressive" purveyors of fake “compassion” exercised solely at the voting booth.

     Which is what makes the political use of “the poor” as a shibboleth so gratingly offensive that when a conversational adversary uses it, it takes all the self-restraint I’ve got not to grab him by the lapels (or whatever else might be handy), slam him against the nearest vertical surface, and scream into his face until he faints from pure terror. But then, I’ve been advised by my physician not to allow my blood pressure to get above 200 / 130, by my lawyer to refrain from casually committing major felonies in public, and by my parish pastor not to play around the edges of the Fifth Commandment (Catholic enumeration).

     Remember that the next time some “progressive” tries to use “the poor” in a political argument. (You could tell him about me instead, but doing the job yourself is much more satisfying.)