Tom Grey on May 11, 2019 at 4:13 am at 4:13 am said:
Thanks for a great summary, RC! “Immoral cad” on that private, sexual alpha-male not quite monogamous way which the Dems claimed, under Clinton’s perjury, was merely private sex.
* * *
At a few points in the last 10 years, I even found myself missing Bill.
That’s how bad the Democrats have gotten.

Prime example is his tweets about the China trade deal. I think they only confuse the matter as they lead the Chinese to draw conclusions that may or may not correct and probably contradicts what is being said in negotiations. And finally they cause havoc with the market which is not healthy.

Sometimes staying quiet is the proper path and he has done that on some issues I wish he would do that with China.

1) I dismissed out of hand the scare talk, “Hitler/Mussolini/authoritarian”. It just didn’t make any sense to me.

2) I saw he was striking a very deep nerve with the voting public. Even if he didn’t make it himself, I thought, these issues he surfaced were not going away

Nevertheless I was stunned when he won. And equally stunned by the way he won, flipping Midwest industrial states that had been voting Democrat for generations. Even now I don’t think this has been fully assimilated. Shortly I after the election I read about a Democrat meeting or rally where Joe Kennedy III – who could be more mainstream Democrat than a Kennedy? – said, “We’ve got to figure out why all these longtime Democrats voted for Trump” and he was booed. Two and a half years later and their denial has only gotten worse.

You are getting close to blasphemy questioning the genius of Heinlien, thanks for saying it.

Heinlein is confused. ‘Poverty’ as the term is most commonly used refers not to an absolute standard of living but to a relative one. ‘The poor you will have with you always’ was not uttered during the 19th c. Age of Progress, but in 1st c. Judea.

You’ve had in the past advances and declines in the standard of living consequent to technological innovation and process improvements on the one hand and social and political breakdown on the other. A fine example in historical time would be the economic implosion of much of Europe during the period running from the mid-3d century to the mid-7th century. I really don’t think you can attribute it to the expulsion of some hated population of geniuses. There were instances during the Medieval period of European countries expelling their Jewish population. It’s possible that Spain (after 1492) and Britain (after 1292) suffered losses for throwing away human capital. I don’t think Heinlein’s going to locate an economic historian who will advance the thesis that the injury to these countries was so severe as to constitute a ‘lapse into abject poverty’ as the term ‘poverty’ would have been understood during the Medieval period or the Renaissance.

Heinlein seems to be inspired by 20th century events, the ‘throughout history’ flourish notwithstanding – the Communist countries and African states with colonial populations or middlemen minorities.

And no, human capital isn’t locked up in some tiny crew of geniuses. It adheres to all of us to one degree or another. And everyone who innovates is drawing on an already established body of technical knowledge to which others have added to in small increments.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/cuba-food-shortage-rationing-1.5132297

This reminds me.

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as ‘bad luck’.”

– Robert A. Heinlein

We are having a run of good luck right now.

I would be happy to see a landslide next year but I worry about vote fraud.