The Definition Of Insanity

There are those who say that the definition of “insanity” is doing something over and over, and expecting a different result.  

As, for example, nations trying out socialism.  As Venezuela has done, and whose endgame was predicted three generations ago:

In 1944, Friedrich Hayek warned in The Road to Serfdom that tyranny inevitably results when a government exercises complete control of the economy through central planning. Over half a century later, beginning with Hugo Chávez’s revolution, Venezuela began its own road to serfdom by expropriating thousands of businesses and even entire industries. The more fortunate companies left before it was too late, while the businesses that remained were handed over to the Venezuelan military, under whose oversight they were neglected into ruins. In a typical demonstration of class warfare, the government publicly vilified these business owners as unpatriotic, greedy lackeys of American interests, claiming that Venezuela’s poverty had been a direct result of their existence.

Chavismo created an atmosphere of distrust in which no one felt safe enough to invest in Venezuela. More important, the courts were no longer the place to get redress. Since 1999, the Venezuelan judiciary had been systematically stacked with judges loyal to the executive. Twenty years after socialism took hold of the country, Venezuela has hit rock bottom on every possible development index. Today, 90 percent of Venezuelans are living below the poverty line and inflation rates exceed 1 million percent. Record numbers of children are dying from malnutrition, and nearly all of the country’s hospitals are either inoperative or in critical need of basic medical supplies. Frequent nationwide power outages have left, at times, up to 70 percent of Venezuela in darkness. Chávez’s socialist agenda purported to be in service of the entire nation, but as Hayek reminds us, “the pursuit of some of [the] most cherished ideals . . . [produces] results utterly different from those which we expected.”

But that’s not the most comprehensive defenition.  To be truly comprehensive, you’d need to add the clause “and then import it to the United States”:

[Seattle] reporter Eric Johnson recently released a documentary called Seattle is Dying which dared to document the city’s collapse into Third World status. 
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But instead of working to resolve the root of the problem (i.e. brain dead liberal economic policies that always lead to destitution and collapse), the city’s elite have launched a P.R. campaign to brainwash local citizens with engineered happy messages that are dutifully broadcast by local news networks.
As Seattle’s City Journal reports:
“Earlier this month, leaked documents revealed that a group of prominent nonprofits—the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Campion Advocacy Fund, the Raikes Foundation, and the Ballmer Group—hired a PR firm, Pyramid Communications, to conduct polling, create messaging, and disseminate the resulting content through a network of silent partners in academia, the press, government, and the nonprofit sector. The campaign, #SeattleForAll, is a case study in what writer James Lindsay calls “idea laundering”—creating misinformation and legitimizing it as objective truth through repetition in sympathetic media.”

It took me a second to realize that the hour-long video was from KOMO, one of the city’s Big Three stations.

Watch the video. See if anything looks familiar if you’re from Minneaopolis and Saint Paul.

19 thoughts on “The Definition Of Insanity

  1. Can anyone explain why the former Soviet Union went seamlessly from socialism to a capitalist oligarchy and why Seattle is going from a capitalist oligarchy to socialism?

    Could it be that they are the same thing?

  2. Got to where it said Seattle spends a billion per year dealing with nuts and bums.

    A billion per year. Where’s it going? It’s going down the leftist’s favorite rathole: the non-profit industry.

    The non profit industry is where the less well connected, rank and file leftists kill time in between SJW actions, political campaigns and where they make enough cash for kombucha and weed.

    It’s where elected leftists stash cash…our cash…for paying people to run phone banks, maintain voter lists, turn out at protests and selected legislative hearings. They’re run by connected gritters and sometimes by leftist politicians themselves.

    Would someone like to tell me a billion dollars a year won’t finance a mental hospital, *and* a long term detox lockup?

    Yeah, public mental hospitals and lockups will be expensive, largely ineffective shit holes; it’s the natural state of public anything. But it’s better than letting society’s casualties roam the streets.

    Hell, if you can keep unions out, they sometimes actually work pretty well.

  3. BTW. My crazy, leftist Aunt parlayed a grad degree in some public policy major into a career in non-profits. She lived in SF for 40 years, but got priced out, so she moved to Seattle about 15 years ago. Evidently it’s heaven.

    She expressed dismay when we moved down here to Real America; said she’d never come down here to Klan kuntry to visit.

    I told her that was a shame, because as much as I’d like to see her, Seattle was just too dangerous a place for me to bring my family…we Skype family funcrions, works out real good.

  4. Mitch: Socialism has always ended in blood and tears, everywhere it’s been tried.

    Liberal: Those examples were flawed. Mistakes were made – no TRUE Socialist would have done it that way. Besides, America interfered to impose their capitalist colonial patriarchal oppressive diversity slavery arrrgh! Trump! I can’t even!

    Mitch: My work here is done.

  5. I had an online exchange with someone a couple weeks ago about why I, as a small-time investor who owns a few rental properties, have completely ruled out “investing” in St. Paul. They thought that the desperate need for “affordable housing” would be a great opportunity, but couldn’t grasp why there was such a desperate need for affordable housing.

  6. Yep, if you, for example, compare Sweden to the US, we have a higher per capita GDP, and a moderately higher wage. Yet, they have:
    Fully Funded Health Care at a much lower rate
    Fully funded public education through university level
    MUCH MUCH lower debt (including per capita, despite the claim by the far right for YEARS that they’d go bankrupt).
    A better credit rating (though the difference is slight)

    Sure, we spend more on defense (by far), but that doesn’t explain enough of the difference. Democracy’s with socialism in certain areas seem to be fully functional, as Sweden, Finland, Norway, Germany, France, Denmark and Canada have all shown, and the only insanity seems to be in buying into the denial cult around it as the US (and Mexico and Brazil and similar countries) continue to shred the middle class, using flat wages and vast income disparity (which reduce tax revenues) as justification to eliminate social safety nets.

    https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/sweden/usa

    By contrast, Trump cuts taxes on the wealthy, and now wants to pay for that by increasing the gas tax by $.25/gallon, a regressive tax paid mostly by workers…shifting the tax burden further from the rich to the rest of us. And now, they want to gut Social Security and Medicare.

    Insanity is believing the Republicans are doing anything other than bow down before the requests of the super-rich to lower their taxes and enact laws which make it harder for the middle class to negotiate, collectivize, or object. But hey, keep being the pawns, it’s worked out so well in the past 40 years.

  7. NW’s comment reminds me of friends who lived in apartments in Boulder where the landlord accepted Section 8. All of the ordinary ways smart landlords would get rid of problem renters were flat out prohibited. And yes, the Boulder police weren’t terribly helpful, either.

  8. NW – being in the process of selling off rental property has given some insight into that. The suburb’s inspection services were recently taken over by someone formerly with Minneapolis, and is looking to make rental inspections there as odious as they are in Minneapolis.

    Looking at the housing market, figured this is as good a time as any to get out. The incoming landlords are raising rent by almost 1/4 . I feel bad for the tenants – they’ve been great and haven’t increased prices much for them. They are both saying that there is nothing available for under $1200 metro wide.

    So yes, we likely need more housing. But, I’m not going to be the one dealing with owning it in a state that hates landlords.

  9. Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, once explained:

    “The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.”

    Applying this principle to housing: some people don’t have the skills to live in nice housing. They can’t afford to pay for it, they won’t take care of it, they don’t appreciate it, they will destroy it and then blame you because they live in destroyed housing with a Tahoe parked out front bearing Spreewells and a thumping stereo.

    The solution is not ever-increasing regulations on private landlords nor ever-increasing tax dollars spent on housing projects. The solution is letting poor people live in crappy housing until they develop the gumption to move up through their own efforts.

  10. We refuse to take Section 8 in our properties. Even though our ads specifically state that we don’t, at least half of the calls we get when we have a vacancy ask about Section 8. I know this is because there isn’t enough 8 housing for all who want it or qualify, and I do feel for these folks. Some will say, “But it’s great – you never have to worry about a tenant missing a rent payment.” Our response is that we don’t want the State of MN to be part of our business plan – or our partner. And with our background checks, we’ve always found people who can pay their rent. Outside of Minneapolis and St. Paul, landlords still have some rights in managing their properties. If the rest of the state starts applying the same standards, we’ll be getting out of the marketplace.

  11. Yep, if you, for example, compare Sweden to the US…

    Why the fuck would anyone do that, dimwit?

    The populations of MN & WI alone exceed Sweden. Sweden’s population is homogenous; 95% Caucasian; no Milwaukee or N. Mpls. 90% of the population was born in Sweden; they have no moocher tradition.

    But hey, check back in 10 years Peevee, when the pile of muzzies they’ve taken in fully integrate Swedish society into Islam.

  12. So Pen is going to move to Sweden?
    If there was a country that I thought was better governed than the US, I would move there. Why doesn’t Pen?
    Maybe it’s the lower per capita GDP thing?

  13. Penigma, your generic comparison of Sweden to the U.S. has, really, a limited application to the question of “Geraldo” on the streets, don’t you think?

    That noted, one thing I noted while I was there is that, at least in the late 1980s, it was actually illegal to be homeless. If they caught you sleeping (and Geraldo-ing) on the streets, you would be taken in to a treatment center. In other words, unlike American liberals, they’re smart enough not to let bums live that way. Or at least were.

    Regarding healthcare, it took me about ten seconds to learn that in Sweden, the subjects to their national healthcare system complain vociferously about the waits to get anything beyond routine care. So if you’re OK with waiting a year to get a hole in your heart repaired, and in rural areas, obstetrics wards are so far away, they’re training people to give birth in cars.

    Danged fine system they got there! Sign YOU up. (not me)

    https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-09-swedes-world-class-healthcarewhen.html

  14. NW, We owned 4 rental properties in MN. Sold the MPLS & St. Paul units at a loss right away because the taxes and upkeep were already at the point it was a better deal to take the hit on our equity than try long distance management.

    Sold the last 2 couple years ago at a very modest profit. We rolled the sales into two historic (1902) 4-plexes in a up and coming town in SC. (I’m actually writing this on the balcony of one I’m getting ready for a new tennet right now.)

    We’ve spent a little less than $200k renovating them and they are beautiful if I say so myself. Our rent keeps moochers from even asking, and we’re making up for our MN losses. Our historic designation keeps our taxes frozen for the next 20 years.

    SC law gives a 30 day delinquency period on rent. After that, I have the right to evict; period.

    I’d sooner put a white hot ice pick into my ear than invest in rentals in another leftist state.

  15. 80% of Americans were happy with their health care before Obamacare. That’s why he had to lie — not once but more than 30 times — that under Obamacare, you could keep your doctor and health plan.
    Obama didn’t right the legislation. Pelosi and Reid wrote it. Obama had no idea what was in it. So political leaders Pelosi and Reid wrote partisan legislation that did not receive a single GOP vote.
    This is absolutely the wrong way to pass major legislation. But then, Obama, being raised in a one-party state (Hawaii) and a third world dictatorship (Indonesia) has never had a sophomore’s grasp of how democracy works. “I get 50% + 1 and I ram it down your throat” is not how you govern a people, it is how you rule 50% -1 of the people.

  16. Hang on there, Swiftee, that article is from 2015. Ms Wallstrom has no intentions of reducing the influx of people from the Middle East/Africa, just that others have to step up to help.

    Like say, Denmark, who has now reduced their influx – even tho’ the newest Danish political party “Stram Kurs” (ie, Hard Line) is taking the position that all non-Westerners have to go home – and especially the Muslims. Should make for an interesting parliamentary election in the new few weeks because Stram Kurs, in spite of all expectations, qualified for as a real political part and must be on the ballot and must be included in all debates.

    In a more up-to-date article, you can see that Sweden hasn’t reduced immigration.

  17. My article is 4 years old, yours says it’s just gotten worse. Personally, I don’t care what Sweden, Norway, Denmark or any of the other Western countries that are engaging in self-extermination do. We have our own problems.

    I’m just sick of brain dead liberals waving them around like trophies. Their salad days are over.

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