Socialism is Anti-Choice and Anti-Life

Socialism Mural, photo by Ben Sutherland, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

At some point back in the mists of time, like a month ago or whenever, we were talking about everyone’s fave subject ever, abortion.

I’ve already waxed poetic on my kinda sorta pro-choice-I-guess-but-I-don’t-love-it opinion on this subject¹ here: The Tomiknockers – Ordinary Times (ordinary-times.com)  But today I’d like to address one of the more common criticisms of the pro-life movement – that they’re not “pro-life”, but “pro-birth”.  According to this concept, pro-life people only care about babies till they’re born, and then they don’t care what happens to them, because they tend to be Republicans, and those big fat meanie pants failed to sign off on every item on the Democrats’ social spending wish list.

Ordinary Times recently ran an article to this effect, written by Birch Smith: The Pro-Life Movement Must Embrace Continuing Moral and Practical Obligations – Ordinary Times (ordinary-times.com)

This is an argument that has always confused me, even when I was pro-choice without qualms.  Does social spending equal LIFE?  Really?  How, exactly, does a pittance of money with all the wrong strings attached to it, promote life?  Is desiring a reduction in inefficient, ineffective government programs really the equivalent of wishing death onto people?

After reviewing the results of these social programs, I’m very far from convinced any of that is the case.  And issuing a blanket ultimatum, demanding that your political opponent either agree with everything on your personal agenda, without question, without pushback, no matter how stupid or misguided your suggestions may be, or else they literally want people to DIE, is not an argument, it’s emotional manipulation.  Encountering this mindset is like negotiating with a terrorist.  One may as well be dealing with Hans Gruber, as a leftist who thinks of a new way to spend taxpayers’ money.  Remember how everyone thought he was politically motivated, all principled and stuff, when really he was just a thief?

This line of argument is dirty, and it’s not the American way.  To demand that American voters sign on with every element of the most leftiest left of agendas, regardless of outcome, regardless of cost (both in terms of money and of human suffering), to demand that elected representatives agree to every piece of pork thrown into the trough, or else they want people to literally die is not only uncharitable, it’s simply untrue.  I have never encountered a single person anywhere on the political spectrum who wanted poor people to suffer and children to experience deprivation.  Maybe you don’t know any conservatives other than Twitterbots with 27 followers who get paid to stir the pot, but in my experience conservatives have as much if not significantly more interest in helping the poor as the most bleeding heart liberal.  I’ve repeatedly witnessed conservatives bending over backwards to help families get and stay on their feet – on a personal level, not just signing a check over to the IRS.  They simply have a different set of solutions other than more disinterested social workers shuffling papers around a desk and a few extra bucks on an EBT card.

Just because someone doesn’t agree to expanding government programs in every arena all the time, does not make them bad, awful, evil, fascist, fetus-loving baby-haters.  Saying so is lying, and resorting to a “you beat your wife, don’t you Sir” type of argument. In reality, conservatives often reject liberal big-government solutions to poverty because they suck. A sucky solution is oftentimes worse than no solution, since sucky solutions often compound the very problem they were created to solve.

If you look at the track record of government programs to help poor families, we’ve seen trillions of dollars thrown at the problem in America since LBJ started the War on Poverty in 1964.  More than $16 trillion dollars, to be exact.  Yet poverty rates haven’t improved much at all.  In 2014, fifty years after the War on Poverty, despite being surrounded by largesse that would make a Rockefeller blush, nearly 22% of children lived in poverty.  In 1964, it was 23%.  Over $16 trillion for about a 1% return on the investment.  War on Poverty at 50 — Despite Trillions Spent, Poverty Won | Cato Institute

What’s that they say about throwing good money after bad?  Oh yeah, to not to.  I understand that some of you suffer from the Gambler’s Paradox – imagining that this time it will be different, this time, your social spending will pay off big time – but I don’t, and I don’t have to support those who would continue to plunge taxpayer money into a roulette wheel hoping against hope that this time they’ll get three cherries instead of three baggies of meth.

Despite being inundated with coronavirus relief funds, a recent visit to Nearest Big City (I mean, pretty much any of them, pick your poison, but this one was Seattle) certainly seemed to indicate things getting WORSE with the application of copious money, with tent cities and shantytowns of dilapidated RVs cluttering every vacant lot, and literal tons of garbage strewn around what was, just a few years ago, an absolutely breathtaking city in a decidedly liberal state (Washington hasn’t had a Republican governor since 1985, and Seattle hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1969.)  If money were the answer, if launching a spate of new government programs was the answer, surely money and the already existing programs we’ve had for decades, both on the national and local levels, would mean things were on the upswing in the poverty department.  Instead we’re seeing the creation of a permanent underclass, a veritable army of miserable people living in the streets, and yet you’re telling me that still more money will fix the problem?  Brings to mind the definition of insanity, and all that.

Claims that the solution to American decline is more money, more money, more programs, and more money, ring hollow at this point.  It hasn’t worked, dudes!  How about justifying the programs which already exist, earning my support by showing me the stellar results that they’ve yielded thus far BEFORE asking for more?  Because from my view here in the cheap seats, it appears that those programs not only failed spectacularly, but they also unleashed a tsunami of unintended consequences.  Turning over an unbelievable fortune into the hands of disinterested bureaucrats to shuffle about as they will has had devastating effects on the social fabric, encouraged absolutely gross levels of corruption, and led to a wider gulf between rich and poor than ever before.  The “I don’t care about outcomes, I paid my taxes, not my problem, hand me my phone wouldya so I can tweet about UBI” mindset that embodies Democrat policies on social spending has created mindboggling amounts of human despair – and deaths from that despair have never been higher, a trend that was well underway long before the Covid lockdowns.

Suggesting that the solution to the utter failure of the War on Poverty is that poor people be aborted rather than than born – because that IS the implication, isn’t it, that if conservatives don’t sign off on every liberal dream and socialist scheme, that they no longer have the moral standing to prevent babies from being aborted, too bad for them! – rather than at least consider a different approach to solving the poverty problem is vile.  It’s positively obscene, and it’s a tacit admission that Democrats know full well their social programs solve nothing, help no one, create nothing but a morass of dependency from which few escape, so why not just kill your baby and make it a little easier on ‘em, would ya?²

A whole lot of people simply do not agree that throwing even more money into the gaping maw of bureaucracy, making jobs for a bunch more overeducated middle managers who do nothing of substance in exchange for a hefty paycheck every month, is in any way beneficial to children, the poor, or basically anyone other than the grifters who now run this country.  Because that’s what it is, a grift.  Liberal social programs are a money transfer from people who actually do the heavy lifting of making America work, into the pockets of the useless class – and by useless class, I do NOT mean poor people, but those so-smart leeches in the employ of Big Mama Government.  Not all government employees are leeches, but some of them certainly are, and I think we’ve given them enough of our blood already.

There are many other ways to help poor families in America aside from the pro-corporate-pseudo-socialism Democrats peddle.  Creating opportunities.  Removing stumbling blocks like overbearing licensing laws that prevent people from starting their own businesses.  Removing the burden of ridiculous edicts that help corporations, since they’re the only ones who can afford to comply, at the expense of their smaller competitors, stifling competition, driving up prices, and eliminating the jobs that small business creates.  Simplifying American law so we don’t have to continue paying an army of lawyers to interpret the rule book.  Getting rid of onerous child care regulations that grossly inflate the cost of child care and put it of reach of many poor families, keeping women at home when some would prefer to be in the workplace…or worse still, forcing them to leave their small kids in dangerous situations while they work.  Enough screwing with the energy supply to please Greta Thunberg and her corporate masters who have invested billions in “green energy” that isn’t green in any way other than the amount of money it sends into the pockets of the already-rich.  And hey, here’s a crazy thought – stop having extended shutdowns that caused a third of small businesses and over 40% of black-owned businesses to go under permanently while big business survived relatively unscathed.   Gas prices, food costs, medical care, housing, higher education – all arenas of commerce in which the government has involved itself extensively, driving up the cost of living and hurting poor families disproportionally.

Honestly, the best thing the government could do for the poor is to quit meddling in every aspect of everything all the time (except for maybe, you know, the stuff in their job description like stopping riots that burned several small businesses to the ground and caused many others to close permanently).  Because they suck at it.  Government is simply terrible at running things, failing at even their most basic purposes.  They take forever to fill a pothole, they can’t even plow the streets in the winter, 36 million people cannot read well enough to hold a job, they shove people with coronavirus into old folks’ homes, and yet you’re telling me we need MORE government ineptitude?

Leftists claim to care about families and children and small adorable babies.  Like, so so much, way more than conservatives, I am told, and the proof is not their outcomes in any arena ever, but because they like to throw money at bureaucrats!!!  They care about small adorable babies so much, I am told that they elected Joe Biden to the presidency, because he is a Democrat, and Democrats will make a lot of super awesome government programs that will absolutely totally completely superduperly, protect Americans from bad things happening, ever.  No bad things will ever happen as long as we have enough government programs!!!

You know, government programs like the FDA, which back in February (after first allegedly ignoring reported problems for months) closed down a baby formula plant that made a real whole lot of the formula in the US, particularly for special needs infants.  Now why, you may ask, FDA aside, since it IS their job to close down potentially germ-infested factories and we can hardly fault them for that (although that delay before investigating is not a good look, nor is the fact that they didn’t discover these problems in the first place, and were only investigating a whistleblower’s accounts – so what exactly are all these government agencies administrating, if they don’t prevent or even find problems??), should such a huge percentage of America’s baby formula come from just ONE factory?

The uberiberal wunderkinds at NPR wondered that too, and even their nanny-state-loving brain trust had to conclude it was due to massive amounts of government money directed at the WIC program, regulatory barriers, and stiff tariffs that had stifled competition, leaving that white gold in the hands of just three companies.  Not-exactly-conservative-themselves CNN joined the pile-on, explaining how government regulations mean that bringing new formula to the market is a multimillion dollar proposition that requires the better part of a decade if not longer, enabling corporations to face little to no competition.  But hey, the wonks have deemed this ridiculous, convoluted system that created a choke point in formula production “highly cost-effective” – at least for the government’s pocketbook, if not for parents who are desperately searching Facebook Marketplace looking for a can of formula at black market prices right now.

Against this backdrop of hungry babies and desperate parents, you’re gonna come at me with “conservatives don’t care about kids because they don’t let the government run everything”?  Really?  Well hey, geniuses, look what happens when you put the government in charge.  Babies HAVE NO FORMULA.  This is what even the best-intentioned central planning gets you – empty store shelves.  Conservatives know this, which is why we hate big government and economic micromanagement.  It’s because we LIKE babies, children, families, and poor people, and we don’t want them to suffer because Paperfiler Q. Desksitter doesn’t have the faintest clue about how to run the world.

Wait, what?  Conservatives like poor people?  I can hear you now decrying that statement as a lie, because after all, despite corporate interests inundating the Democratic Party with money, despite corporations including the superevil Goldman Sachs paying Hillary Clinton at least 22 million dollars in speaking fees and the Obamas getting $50 mil from their Netflix deal and $65 million from Penguin-Random House, somehow it’s those evil Republicans and their tawdry relationship with Goya Beans and that pillow dude that is the real problem.  And I mean hey, Democrats, it’s America, make your money, but don’t pretend you’re a friend of the little guy while hiding that bag with a giant $ on it.

A good many poor people actually ARE conservative.  Look back upon those thinkpieces the liberal genius class wrote back in 2016 musing on “hmm why do these mysterious creatures known as the lower classes continue to vote Republican against their ‘interests’,” in case you have forgotten.  Well, it’s because no matter what false and sparkling promises are made by leftist demagogues, those of us who are monetarily-challenged have more real world life experience in our collective pinky fingers (albeit rendered gnarled and arthritic by working for The Man) than the entire student body of Berkeley has in their entire Great Leap Forwards.  Thus we know that putting elitists in charge of anything actually important – like, ya know, food – invariably ends in disaster.  Our ‘interests’ lie in the direction of having adequate baby formula on store shelves, and we know that the hive mind of the free market is way better at doing that than workers at the DMV.

The biggest reason by far why I’m a conservative is because I am poor, because we have struggled, and it’s been tough at times, yet we kept on keeping on.  Things got better, and it wasn’t because of anything that government, huge corporations like the ones presently soaking us for gas money and medical bills, or big money charities full of corruption, ever did.  It was because of what WE did, what our families did, what our friends and neighbors and coworkers and a church that we did not even attend did, and even, as crazy as it sounds to the tankies in the crowd, because of what our employers did.  It was the people who knew us and for some unknown reason, loved us, and not a social worker whom we did not even know, who supported us when we needed a little extra help.  The stuff those other entities – government and corporate interests most particularly – did to us and to the nation as a whole has, with very few exceptions, made our meager successes harder to come by, not easier.

I want other poor people to succeed beyond their wildest dreams.  I want people like me – the people who aren’t the scum of the earth but the salt, the working poor, who ask for nothing but a fair shake, to be able to achieve the American dream, and I want it to come easier to them than it did for us.  I want all American families to be successful both now and into future generations.  And I know 100% without a doubt that liberals don’t have any answers beyond “more money, more programs, more failure, pls terminate your pregnancy to keep this Ship of Fools afloat.”

Conservatives want every person in this great country of ours – even the smallest ones – to have every opportunity to be the best them that they can be.  You know what doesn’t help accomplish that?  Shoveling money into a stupid, greedy, corrupt, surely-one-formula-factory-will-be-more-than-enough, flirtin-with-socialist-yet-totally-pro-corporate bureaucracy that has driven America into life-ruining levels of inflation and food shortages, taking food from the mouth of babes, literally.

In 2022.  Freakin’ food shortages.  It’s crazy.  Children are in the hospital right now, getting feeding tubes put in, dehydrated because they can’t get the only type of baby formula they can tolerate.  So please remind me, who exactly is pro-life again?  Because the way I see it, there’s one pro-life party and then there’s the Starvation League.

Trust us, they say, we’ll give you these vouchers you can redeem at your nearest Food Distribution Center for a can of Deprivation Good Start, since that is the corporate entity with which the Starvation League has signed a contract.  Oh no, they’re out of Deprivation Good Start?  Hmmm.  Welp, we’ll get back to you in 10-12 weeks with some sort of solution.  At least within six months!!  Probably!  In the meantime, here is a compilation clip featuring one White House Press Secretary lying about the situation and blaming it on consumers, another White House Press Secretary laughing at the very question, and the President bitching about how irritating it is that something as stupid as baby formula is on the front page of every newspaper.  LOLZZZZ, of COURSE government employees care just as much about your baby as you do!  To prove it, we’re not going to be having the press at any more of our baby formula meetings, and we can do that because we’re the government and we are answerable to no one.  If you don’t like it, well, I guess you should have gotten an abortion.  It sure would have made MY day easier.  Now quiet, the elites are talking about Trans Visibility Day!!  So stunning, so brave!!

The absolute best thing that we could do for poor families with small children right now is get the bureaucrats out of the way, reduce the government interference that is smothering the free market, quit funneling money into the pockets of a handful of favored corporations, stop shutting down factories and indeed, entire economies, in the name of a dubious approach to “public safety” that causes more long term harm than short term good.  Get Joe Biden and his army of lawyers and middle managers and ivory tower theoreticians out of the way and allow the people who are good at manufacturing and transporting products to consumers, to do it.  They can get these issues with the supply chain worked out before it’s more than just babies who are going hungry.

A relatively free market has more than quadrupled the number of breweries in America in the past ten years – to a whopping 9,247 in 2021, an industry growing despite coronavirus – while government contracts via WIC ensured we have just TWO companies making 80% of all the formula required for America’s cutest citizens.

And there is a LOT of regulation on beer, just sayin.   But what there wasn’t, was a government program shunting massive amounts of money to three favored corporations at the expense of a free marketplace.

Baby formula is simply the canary in a coal mine.  The effects of government interference in the marketplace run broad and deep.  If not for the near-stranglehold big government and the corporations that love it have on the American economy, it is very likely we’d be booming right now instead of recession-ing.  In a stronger economy, families could provide for themselves, not living month to month on the government dole, but by building real security in a stable career, and maybe even some savings – the type of security that can let us ride out troubled times.  And for those who don’t have that security, there are, and always have been, many other options for assistance other than some bored pencil-pusher throwing money around while society rots.  Heck, I’d be happy to see the already existing programs stick around as a safety net.  (Maybe not WIC tho, at least not without some serious reforms in the formula department.)  By all means.  Keep em.  It’s the 10,000 new ones y’all are suggesting that don’t make no damn sense.  Because I’ve seen this movie before, and the Law of Unintended Consequences always wins in the end.

Hang up that old saw that Republicans aren’t “pro-life” at all, but “pro-birth”.  Because relying on government programs and self-interested bureaucrats to meet basic human needs is far from pro-life.  Ironically, it’s not exactly pro-choice, either.

1. There’s been at least one member of the commentariat who claimed that I “turned conservative” because I was pro-life.  That simply isn’t true, although I did rethink my opinion about abortion when the small and squalling creature I brought into being through personal carelessness and poor medical advice, a creature whom I’d been informed by my fellow at-that-time liberal chums was an inconvenience, would undoubtedly have a miserable life and never be a contributing member of society, and was nothing but a “clump of cells,” turned out to be a fully delightful human being who changed my life in every way for the better.

   But just to set the record straight, keeping my baby instead of aborting him isn’t what turned me conservative.  I “turned conservative” because liberals have betrayed every principle they ever had in the name of political expediency, leaving me standing there saying “wut” with a blank look on my face, still thinking that this is all just a misunderstanding that is sure to be rectified soon. I’ll probably still be standing here in my profound befuddlement, saying “wut” over and over again, till I’m dragged away to the re-education camp.

2. If this sounds harsh or unfair to you, keep in mind that it has been socially acceptable for decades to call pro-life people “pro-birth, but anti-life”, implying or even stating outright conservatives want people to die in the streets as long as babies are born.  So I really don’t think that pointing out the greater implication being “pro-choice because anti-baby, those things are expensive, and they’ll probably have shitty lives anyway, no great loss” is in any way out of line or in violation of any not-already-completely-shattered norms of kindness or civility.  And it’s a lot closer to the mark.