What works? Hard work, family, mutual assistance, and a devotion to logic!

Joel Kotkin writes in the American Mind,

...The notion of America’s intrinsic evil may be popular on campuses, newsrooms and at CNN, but the ideology’s negative impact will be suffered by those left behind in these distressed communities. Diverting funds away from the police may have been seen as politically expedient, but it has not helped Baltimore, a city with a long history of police abuse, curb its astronomical murder rate. Similarly, “defunding” efforts are unlikely to bring down Chicago’s persistently high homicide rate, or in once-safe cities like New York, as it and other blue cities have emptied jails and reduced enforcement.

...In backing the Black Lives Matter movement, the corporate elite have decided to play the classic role that Lenin called “useful idiots”. Perhaps someone should let Jeff Bezos know BLM favors radical socialist economics to battle what its founders see as “racial capitalism ”. Liberals, particularly Jews, should recognize BLM condemns Israel as “genocidal”. Academic Melina Abdullah, a prominent BLM spokesperson in Los Angeles, is an open admirer of the racist, anti-Semitic Nation of Islam.

Adoption of the Black Lives Matter ideology threatens every institution it touches, imposing its will in Hollywood and the arts. Now as in the old Soviet Union or China today, culture is supposed to service the officially approved agenda. Race activists have been particularly successful in turning the education system, including primary schools, into instruments of indoctrination, through both social justice courses and activities increasingly required for both students and faculty.

Most amazing, given the enormous sacrifices for integration made by civil rights workers, some universities have embraced again segregation—what Western Washington University activists call “black student space” and even academic programs designed only for minority students. Worse yet, woke activists, white and black, denounce as “hopelessly white “behaviors that have worked for every ethnic group, including African Americans. The new notion, as the Smithsonian recently suggested, labels such things as intact family structures, frugality, and punctuality as “white” characteristics, opposed to universal keys to upward mobility.

...This is clearly destructive. Perhaps worst of all, Black Lives Matter is dismissive of the traditional family, but seeks to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure.” Given that much of the disparity between the races lies in the integrity of the family this approach seems patently self-destructive. The fact that seventy percent of Black children are born to single mothers should be seen as a critical problem, rather than celebrated as a departure from dreaded “whiteness.”

Rather than soulful sympathy and symbolic gestures aimed to redress past crimes, minorities need a program that addresses the real problems of unemployment, underemployment, rampant obesity, lack of affordable housing, and fractured families. To address these issues, minorities need to emulate the brave African-American business pioneers of the late 19th and early 20th Century, who formed a culture built around mutual assistance, family, and work.

...Whether in the Jim Crow South, the 1960s or today, what works for the aggrieved is not victimization and racial obsession, but adopting attitudes that have helped successful groups and people of all colors. Hard work, family, mutual assistance, and a devotion to logic are not constructs of Caucasian culture—many non-whites often exhibit these characteristics more than whites—but simply the surest pathways that have led even the most discriminated groups to a better future.

Read more here.

Hard work and persistence

Seth Godin writes,

The story we tell ourselves and the stories we tell our children matter far more than we imagine.

There's a huge difference between, "You got an A because you're smart," and "You got an A because you studied hard."

Or

"I succeeded in getting what I wanted because I'm pretty," and "I succeeded in getting what I wanted because I worked hard to be in sync with the people I'm working with (charisma)."

(And don't forget the way we process luck, good and bad, as well as bias and persistence.)

Smart and pretty and lucky are relatively fixed states, mostly out of our control, and they let us off the hook, no longer responsible for our successes and certainly out of control of our failures. (And, as an aside, pretty sends us down the rabbit hole of surface enhancements and even surgery).

On the other hand, hard work and persistence are ideas we can expand and invest in productively. (HT to Carol Dweck and John Medina).

Where is our future?

Chuck Devore writes at The Federalist,

Demographers estimate that in less than 30 years America will be “majority-minority,” with the white, non-Hispanic population dipping to under 50 percent. The future has already arrived in California, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Texas. Of those four states, California and Texas have demographic profiles most closely matching our nation’s demographic future. Which version of America’s future provides opportunity for all Americans, the California model or the Texas model?

A state’s poverty level is a good place to start for measuring the effectiveness of state policies that encourage job creation, self-sufficiency, and upward mobility. Since, for a variety of reasons, average poverty rates are higher among minority groups and immigrants, it’s important to both measure overall poverty rates and to compare rates between like demographic groups.

...The familiar official measure is more than 50 years old, and is showing its age. It has two huge shortcomings: it considers the cost of living to be the same in the 48 contiguous states (a patently ridiculous proposition when considering that the average rent in San Francisco in the first quarter of 2015 was $3,458 vs. $867 in Houston), and it doesn’t account for in-kind benefits, such as Section Eight housing subsidies and Electronic Benefit Transfer cards (food stamps).

Thus, the federal government’s main poverty gauge undercounts material poverty levels in high-cost states such as California, New York, and Hawaii, while over-counting true poverty in much of the low-cost Midwest and South.

...Both California and Texas have official poverty rates above the national average. But, under SPM, Texas’ poverty rate matches the national average while California’s is the nation’s highest with proportionately 47 percent more people living in poverty than in Texas and the United States.

Much of California’s nation-leading poverty rate is due to the high cost of housing in the Golden State, a significant portion of which is driven by hyper-controls on development, greenhouse gas fees, restrictive zoning, and taxes. It takes five years to get permission to build in California what commonly takes five months in Texas. If California is America’s future, then that future is overrun with poverty.

What’s remarkable (or not, depending on your worldview) about the huge disparity in poverty rates between California and Texas is that the states are diametrically opposed in their taxing, spending, and regulatory policies. California, featuring America’s highest marginal income-tax rate, ranks as the fourth-most taxed state in the nation, according to the Tax Foundation, while no-income-tax Texas came in at forty-seventh. In a broader survey of economic freedom that includes labor law and regulation, Canada’s Fraser Institute rated Texas and South Dakota as tied for first with California lagging far behind at forty-third, just ahead of New Jersey at forty-fourth.

In the time it will take for a child to be born, gain self-sufficiency, and start a family, America will become a majority-minority nation. Some politicians who size up this eventuality fear it and demagogue against demographics, while some pander to it, exchanging promises of government largess to buy allegiance. Neither path is worthy of our ideals. Neither path will lead to a prosperous America.

When developing policies and platforms to attract the support of America’s emerging majority, conservatives would do well to point to California as a cautionary tale while drawing inspiration from Texas—confidently and boldly asserting that freedom and hard work remain the main ingredients of the American Dream.

Read more here.

Many have forfeited winning for whining

I liked Greg Gutfeld's comments at Fox News much better than the ones presented here. Read and watch Greg here.

Thanks to Marisa Rickerson.