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" Working for God on earth doesn't pay much.. . ...but His retirement plan is out of this world.."
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April 24, 2019
All Gave Some~Some Gave All
*****
Warren’s Old Voter Records Were Just Dug Up… And They Could Tank Her Chance at the Nomination
BY JOE SAUNDERS
In the crowded Democratic field for the 2020 race, there’s no denying that Elizabeth Warren has staked out a lane on the far left.
The woman who created the Obama-era Consumer Finance Protection Bureau — one of the loudest proponents of super-taxing American millionaires just for having the temerity to make a lot of money — is almost as well known for being a class warrior as she is for pretending to be a Native American.
But a look at Warren’s voter registration records shows that her affinity for the Democratic Party might be almost as manufactured as her ostensibly Indian lineage.
According to a lengthy profile of Warren published by Politico, the fire-breathing leftist who represents Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate now was a registered Republican for a large part of her adult life.
In fact, according to Politico, it wasn’t until Warren, now 69, was a 47-year-old professor at Harvard that she changed her voting registration to Democratic.
The Politico piece downplays just how strongly Warren might have felt about politics before she changed parties in 1996 (the height of the Clinton years in the Oval Office, it should be noted).
Warren herself told the publication the only Republican she voted for in a presidential race was Gerald Ford in 1976.
(At first glance that might speak well of her for having the sense to avoid voting for Jimmy Carter, but it can’t help but bring up the question of why she apparently chose Carter over Ronald Reagan in the 1980 vote. By then, it should have been clear to every voter in the United States conscious enough to fog a mirror that Carter was a disaster of rare distinction.)
“I was just never very political,” Warren told Politico. “I just never thought much about the political end.”
Maybe. Or maybe she just happened to be on the side of the politics of the moment. As Politico points out, the 1970s when Warren was at law school and the 1980s when she was beginning her career at the University of Houston, “the right and Reaganomics were ascendant.”
One of her first papers at the University of Houston, according to Politico, was a look at how public utilities are regulated — and it came to the conclusion that they were being over regulated. (It’s a fair bet the current iteration of Elizabeth Warren couldn’t even bring herself to say the words “over regulated.”)
According to Politico, Warren now dismisses the paper as a kind of academic youthful indiscretion.
“I followed theory and tried my hand at what all academics did then in our field, and that was theory,” she told Politico. “I pretty quickly discovered not only that the theory was wrong, but it was deeply misleading.”
(OK. But that’s generally the kind of thing one discovers in the process of producing a research document — not something that comes years afterward, at a time when it’s politically convenient.)
According to Politico, the stirrings of Warren’s great awakening came in the 1980s when she started studying the issue of bankruptcies in the U.S. and started to sympathize with Americans who couldn’t make it financially.
In fact, in 1989, Warren and two co-authors published a book about bankruptcy law titled “As We Forgive Our Debtors,” that, according to Politico, “helped make them stars in their fields.”
In the 1990s, she joined a federal commission studying how to reform bankruptcy laws, Politico reported, and ended up on the wrong side of a fight that culminated in 2005 when then-President George W. Bush signed the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act.
But by then, Warren’s politics had solidified.
The woman who was a Republican when it suited the times — during the ascendancy of Reagan and the Reagan administration — had switched sides to become a Democrat when it suited the times — midway through the Clinton years.
By 2012, she was positioned for a run for Senate in Massachusetts to take back the “Kennedy seat” for Democrats that Republican Scott Brown had won in an upset victory in the special election of 2010 after Ted Kennedy’s death left it vacant.
There’s much more in the profile — it’s pretty lengthy — including a line about how Warren’s evolution “breaks the mold of the traditional White House contender and is key to understanding how she sees the world: with a willingness to change when presented with new data, and the anger of someone who trusted the system and felt betrayed.”
That sounds more than a little bit like preemptive absolution. It’s the kind of line that — intentionally or not — could provide some inoculation for Warren against attacks in the Democratic primary campaign that accuse her of being hypocritical, a liberal who only became liberal when it would pay off — kind of like claiming Indian ancestry to further her academic career.
However, to Politico writer Alex Thompson’s credit, the article nears its conclusion by pointing out what the revelation might mean to Warrant’s presidential hopes:
What Warren’s Republican history means for her presidential prospects remains unclear. There’s a version of this story in which her politically mixed background makes her the ideal candidate to capture not just the American left but also the center — a pugilistic populist vowing to take on corporations, a policy-savvy reformer who believes that markets are essential to the economy.
But that’s not the political landscape of 2019. Warren’s tough stance during the financial crisis got her tagged by Republicans and many Democrats as more Harvard liberal than an up-by-the-bootstraps working mom from Oklahoma. And her work on the CFPB alienated much of the financial services industry. Meanwhile, much of the left wing of the Democratic Party, for which she was the banner-carrier after the financial crisis, has found a new champion in the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. And members of the growing Democratic Socialists of America and the hosts of the popular leftist podcast Chapo Trap House have criticized Warren for her adherence to capitalism. As of this writing, she is generally polling fifth in the Democratic field, and her 2020 fundraising has fallen short of several other rivals’.
Now, it’s entirely possible that Warren’s political evolution was genuine. Anyone’s opinion can change with age and the lessons of life.
It’s just decidedly convenient that Warren’s personal ideologies took her from being a Republican in Texas to a liberal Democrat in Massachusetts at times when it was remarkably convenient to be mouthing the respective ideology.
When you take into account that this is the same woman who, for decades, pretended for purposes of employment to have Native American lineage, only to have her own DNA test prove how preposterous the story was, it might give a cynic the idea that Warren’s beliefs are based more on what they can do for Warren than for what they can do for the country.
Democratic candidates competing with Warren would be fools not to notice just how obviously opportunistic Warren’s conversion was — it doesn’t take a lot of conviction to be a Democrat in Massachusetts, especially as a member of the Harvard faculty.
But betting on Democrats not to be fools is always a risky business.
In the unlikely event Warren ends up winning the Democratic nomination, it’s rock solid that American general election voters wouldn’t be fooled by her at all.
NBC Host Asks Where Mueller Said There Was ‘No Collusion’, Lawyer Pulls Out Second Page
NBC Host Asks Where Mueller Said There Was ‘No Collusion’, Lawyer Pulls Out Second Page
BY BEN MARQUIS
The long-awaited report from special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation was finally released on Thursday and the principal conclusion was quite clear. There is no evidence of conspiracy or coordination — collusion, if you will — between Russia and members of the Trump campaign.
That is a conclusion that was reached quite some time ago by a significant portion of the American people, but Democrats and their media allies have been focused on continuing to press the narrative of Russian collusion and obstruction of justice despite the utter lack of evidence to support that narrative.
That was made quite apparent on Thursday when a pair of MSNBC hosts — Brian Williams and Nicole Wallace — seemed incapable of accepting the “no collusion” conclusion, even when it was quoted directly from the Mueller report on air.
One of President Trump’s attorneys, Jay Sekulow, appeared on MSNBC on Thursday to provide analysis and answer some questions about the report’s conclusions.
Williams kicked things off with a condescending remark about Attorney General William Barr, who had summarized the report in a brief press conference ahead of the report’s release.
Williams said, “My first question, I’m afraid, is going to verge on plain English. Where did the attorney general get off with that characterization this morning, including four mentions that there was no collusion? What document was he reading, compared to the one we’re left with?”
Without hesitation, Sekulow replied, “Well, page two of the document says, ‘The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign coordinated with the Russian government in its election of interference activities.’ So it’s right from the document itself.”
Holding up the report, Williams incredulously asked, “Have you read part one?”
“I have read part one and part two,” Sekulow replied.
“Do you find good news in here for the president and administration?” Williams asked with an air of disbelief.
Without missing a beat, Sekulow read directly from the report in response to Williams, and said, “The investigation did not — page 181 — the investigation did not establish the Contacts described in volume one — that’s the Russian contacts — amounted to an agreement to commit any violation of federal criminal law, including foreign influence and campaign finance laws.”
Wallace asked if the president’s team of attorneys intended to release a rebuttal report to Mueller’s report, as had been previously suggested as a possibility. Sekulow replied that, while his team had certainly prepared for a scenario in which they would have to release a rebuttal, it didn’t appear at this time that doing so would be necessary, given the way the Mueller report had essentially cleared the president of any criminal wrongdoing.
The liberal media — and that includes Wallace and Williams — have perpetuated the narrative for the past two years that the Mueller investigation would eventually prove devastating to President Trump and lead to his impeachment or resignation from office, which is not the case.
Given their utter and complete devotion to that narrative, they — and countless others like them — are simply incapable of accepting the clear and unmistakable fact that President Trump did nothing wrong. Despite two years of digging, Mueller’s team was incapable of finding anything with which to bring the presidency crashing down.
Unfortunately, while the “collusion” narrative is for all intents and purposes dead and buried, the left will undoubtedly continue to breathe life into the “obstruction” narrative, which Mueller conveniently tossed off to Congress without a determination.
The Democrats will continue their blindly staunch opposition to the president, regardless of the fact that it is pretty hard for someone to illegally “obstruct” an investigation of a crime that never occurred, and when what is characterized as “obstruction” is little more than an innocent man loudly and repeatedly maintaining his innocence.
Drive-By Muthings
If you haven’t seen the short video of an 8-year-old’s impersonation of AOC – Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – you’re in for a treat.
It’s both a brutal smackdown of the New York socialist and absolutely hilarious. It’s a page right out Rules for Radicals: “Ridicule is man's most potent weapon."
Click here
* * *
Ever get a letter from an elected official that either says nothing or is loaded with BS? Well, here’s a fun way to respond.
Whenever Charlie Jarvis received a dumb letter from a business, he’d return the letter to the company president or CEO with the following note attached(hat tip: Dan Kennedy)…
“Apparently some horse’s ass has stolen some of your stationary and is sending out letters that make you look stupid. I thought you’d want to know.”
I think I’ve just discovered a new hobby!
* * *
From Monday’s Wall Street Journal…
“The Social Security program’s costs will exceed its income in 2020 for the first time since 1982—two years later than officials projected last year—forcing the program to dip into its nearly $3 trillion trust fund to cover benefits.
“But by 2035, those reserves will be depleted and Social Security will no longer be able to pay its full scheduled benefits, according to the latest annual report by the trustees of Social Security and Medicare.”
I’m sure Congress will jump right on this and fix it.
Biden 3.0 Has To Recant Past Positions
Biden 3.0 Has To Recant Past Positions
President Barack Obama (left) listens to Vice President Joe Biden deliver remarks. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)By Dick Morris
As Joe Biden launches his third bid for president (the others were in 1988 and 2008), he will run into a collection of his old positions and commitments out of which he will have to wriggle.
For my military knowledge, though I’m plucky and adventury
Has only been brought down to the beginning of the century.
Like the major general, Biden has a lot of catching up to do. His current issue positions leave him far behind the current wave of young “progressives” who set the tone for today’s Democratic Party.
For example, Biden supports capital punishment. In 1994, he helped to write the crime bill that, he explained, “authorized the death penalty for dozens of existing and new federal crimes.”
A sponsor of the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act that expanded civil forfeiture, he bragged that “we changed the law so that if you are arrested, and you are a drug dealer, under our forfeiture statutes, the government can take everything you own.”
And, as the senator from Delaware, he supported and defended mandatory minimum sentencing, saying, “We have laws that don’t allow judges discretion to sentence people, flat time sentencing. You get caught, you go to jail.”
His record on abortion will get him in deep trouble on the left.
He wrote in his book, “Promises to Keep,” which was released as he prepared to run in 2008, “I’ve stuck to my middle-of-the-road position on abortion for more than thirty years. I still vote against partial birth abortion and federal funding.”
In interviews in 2008 and 2015, Biden said he believes life begins at conception.
In 1995 and 1996, he voted to ban partial-birth abortion.
With the new left’s flirtation with abortions so late-term that they constitute infanticide, Biden’s position will not play well.
Reparations for slavery, endorsed at least in part by 12 of the 20 (as of now) Democratic candidates? That’s a no from Joe. In 1975 — 44 years ago, he said, “I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.”
Biden backed NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership recently killed by President Donald Trump.
Most candidates have the luxury of laying out a broad agenda of positive proposals to animate their candidacies. But Biden must open his campaign with a series of retractions and recantations to avoid being skewered in his opponents’ negative ads.
Biden would be only the second candidate in U.S. history to run — and possibly to lose — presidential elections in three different decades. Henry Clay, a loser in 1824, 1832 and 1844 was other. But at least he was a great senator.
Has only been brought down to the beginning of the century.
Like the major general, Biden has a lot of catching up to do. His current issue positions leave him far behind the current wave of young “progressives” who set the tone for today’s Democratic Party.
For example, Biden supports capital punishment. In 1994, he helped to write the crime bill that, he explained, “authorized the death penalty for dozens of existing and new federal crimes.”
A sponsor of the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act that expanded civil forfeiture, he bragged that “we changed the law so that if you are arrested, and you are a drug dealer, under our forfeiture statutes, the government can take everything you own.”
And, as the senator from Delaware, he supported and defended mandatory minimum sentencing, saying, “We have laws that don’t allow judges discretion to sentence people, flat time sentencing. You get caught, you go to jail.”
His record on abortion will get him in deep trouble on the left.
He wrote in his book, “Promises to Keep,” which was released as he prepared to run in 2008, “I’ve stuck to my middle-of-the-road position on abortion for more than thirty years. I still vote against partial birth abortion and federal funding.”
In interviews in 2008 and 2015, Biden said he believes life begins at conception.
In 1995 and 1996, he voted to ban partial-birth abortion.
With the new left’s flirtation with abortions so late-term that they constitute infanticide, Biden’s position will not play well.
Reparations for slavery, endorsed at least in part by 12 of the 20 (as of now) Democratic candidates? That’s a no from Joe. In 1975 — 44 years ago, he said, “I’ll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 years ago.”
Biden backed NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership recently killed by President Donald Trump.
Most candidates have the luxury of laying out a broad agenda of positive proposals to animate their candidacies. But Biden must open his campaign with a series of retractions and recantations to avoid being skewered in his opponents’ negative ads.
Biden would be only the second candidate in U.S. history to run — and possibly to lose — presidential elections in three different decades. Henry Clay, a loser in 1824, 1832 and 1844 was other. But at least he was a great senator.
If We Cancel Kate Smith, We Must Cancel The New York YankeesThe Yankees have banished Kate Smith to the dustbin for singing silly songs. Let's banish the Yankees for their decades of racism.
APRIL 23, 2019 By David Marcus
It was announced this week that both the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Flyers would stop using their traditional recorded version of Kate Smith singing “God Bless America” during their games. This happened after it surfaced that Smith had performed songs now considered racist during during her hey day in the 1930s. The Flyers, with whom Smith is more closely aligned as the good luck charm for their 1974 Stanley Cup run, even removed a statue of her from the Philadelphia sports complex.
In a brilliant monologue, sports commentator Jason Whitlock broke down the absurdity of these moves. The whole video is worth watching. Among other things, Whitlock points out that the song “That’s Why The Darkies Were Born,” recorded by Smith in the 1930s, was satire that was also performed by black civil rights legend Paul Robeson. I hope Robeson, one of the most important black figures of the 20th century, won’t have to meet this same fate.
But I would like to focus for a moment on the New York Yankees, which is arguably the most important sports franchise in the world. The irony of this team cancelling Smith for actions she took almost a century ago that are only mildly problematic, while their own team refused to hire black ballplayers, is astounding.
Smith sang a silly song. The Yankees systematically denied qualified black baseball players the right to make a good a living for more than half a century. So why is Smith being exiled while the Bronx Bombers go along like nothing happened? The answer is that throwing Smith under the bus more than 40 years after her death costs nothing. It is the empty virtue signaling that corporate America prefers to reflecting on their actions.
If we must lose Smith — if her statues must be taken down, if her songs must be silenced — then how do we justify allowing modern players, including black players, to wear the uniform of a team that denied black Americans agency and personhood? Any fair treatment of this situation would require that the Yankee pinstripes be retired right along side Smith.
Amidst the controversy, Stephen Smith of ESPN chimed in to try to explain why banishing Kate Smith is acceptable. His co-panelist Will Cain argued that if we go down this road of dragging everyone who did something inappropriate nearly a century ago, who will be left? He even pointed out that maybe Barack Obama should be cancelled for his bigoted views on gay marriage, and that was only a decade ago. Smith thought he had an answer.
He said, “That’s pretty d-mn easy for you to say, because you’re not the offended party. It’s real easy for the group that is not the offended party to take that position.” Cain replied, “There will always be an offended party, Stephen A, and they’ll make that argument to you one day.” Count on it.
.@stephenasmith, @maxkellerman and @willcain discuss teams distancing themselves from singer Kate Smith amid claims of racism.
Smith’s deeply misguided point seems to be that if some group of people are offended — and it’s not entirely clear who actually is offended by Kate Smith — then their destructive desires must be entertained and acted upon. No discussion is needed, no context is required, no good works come into play. Just tear down the statue and throw the offender into the dustbin of history.
Fair enough. I am deeply offended by the fact that the New York Yankees refused to field a black player for the first half of the 20th century. Don’t tell me that’s just how it was. Don’t tell me it was the rule. Branch Rickey and the Brooklyn Dodgers had the courage to break that rule in the 1940s, well before the beloved Yankees did. How can this be forgiven? How can we celebrate their legacy while Kate Smith’s is destroyed?
The only fair and just thing to do here is for the New York Yankees franchise to fold, along with all but the expansion Major League Baseball franchises that came into being after integration. We can replace them quickly with new teams, teams that never denied black people the right to play. If Kate Smith is being cancelled for her actions 80 years ago, then so must the New York Yankees be.
These are the rules. Well, sort of. These are the rules when it doesn’t cost anybody any money. These are the rules when we decide to deride the memory of a woman who achieved greatness at a time when that was very hard.
She immortalized a second national anthem, and raised millions to support the war effort in World War II. Yet she is a problem for singing a satirical song. But Joe DiMaggio is a hero even though he consented to outright racism that helped him secure his job. Let’s end the Yankees. Please sign my petition.
David Marcus is the Federalist's New York Correspondent and the Artistic Director of Blue Box World, a Brooklyn based theater project. Follow him on Twitter, @BlueBoxDave.
LIAR Ocasio-Cortez Tries To Rob VETERANS
LIAR Ocasio-Cortez Tries To Rob VETERANS
At this point it’s safe to say that she is trying to destroy America.
Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) made stunning remarks last week at a town hall in New York City, claiming that the broken healthcare system at the Department of Veterans Affairs provides “Cadillac first-class health care” to veterans.
In a video clip flagged by The Washington Free Beacon’s Brent Scher, Ocasio-Cortez praised the VA healthcare system, saying: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
“The idea that this thing that isn’t broken, this thing that provides the highest quality care to our veterans somehow needs to be fixed, optimized, tinkered with until you don’t even recognize it anymore,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Here’s the thing, they are trying to fix it, but who are they trying to fix it for is the question we’ve got to ask. They’re trying to fix the VA for pharmaceutical companies, they’re trying to fix the VA for insurance corporations, and ultimately they’re trying to fix the VA for a for-profit healthcare industry that does not put people or veterans first.”
“We have a responsibility to protect it, because if it is any community that deserves Cadillac first-class healthcare in the United States of America it is our military service members,” Ocasio-Cortez added.
The problems with the VA healthcare system have been widely reported on in recent years. One notable story about the horrors veterans face in the VA healthcare system came in 2014, when CNN reported that “at least 40 U.S. veterans died waiting for appointments at the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care system, many of whom were placed on a secret waiting list.”
“The agency has been beset by complaints of retaliation against whistleblowers, a scandal involving overprescription of pain medication and the routine awarding of millions of dollars worth of employee bonuses funded by taxpayers,” The Washington Times added.
President Donald Trump fired Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin 13 months ago and the position is currently held by Acting Secretary Robert Wilkie.
The Daily Wire
What Happened to Manners and What to Do About It
Jeffrey Tucker
There was that guy in high school who went on an overseas trip. He came back and regaled everyone with the glorious things over there that are so much better than they are here. We all hated that guy.
I’m that guy today.
Life in Seoul
I just returned from my first visit to Seoul, South Korea, speaking at a conference on digital economics. The event attracted some 2,000 attendees, mostly students who listened attentively and networked for 3 days of speeches, interviews, and debates.
There are many wonderful things that stood out to me from the trip. The prosperity of the place was exciting, the swirl of new ideas and technology, the fabulous food, the obvious industriousness of the city – it all made an impression. South Korea ranks as “mostly freed” on the index of economic freedom, so this makes sense. In particular, the country ranks much higher than the US on business freedom (93 for South Korea as opposed to 83 for the US).
But more than anything, what shocked me was the seeming universality of attention to manners on the part of basically everyone. The decorum of social engagement was everywhere present. It’s obvious even when hailing a city cab. The driver hops out and opens your door for you. Strangers greet you and everyone with overt acknowledgments of the dignity of your humanity.
This is inconceivable in the US. We don’t know what we’ve not experienced.
But it’s about more than that. Cocktail parties in Seoul were effortless social occasions because people move easily from person to person, exchanging bows and cards and pleasantries. People stand when others arrive for dinner. There is constant motioning for others to walk ahead. Expressions of deference, humility, and respect are everywhere.
The grace and decorum of everyday life penetrate to every aspect of society, wherever you are in the city. I deliberately left the posh areas of the city to wander through alleys in the downtown commercial districts to observe. Let’s see how the plain folks behave! It was the same there too. And I don’t mean just the treatment of me but everyone’s treatment of everyone else.
The effect on the overall happiness of daily life is palpable and notably different from the US where, for unaccountable reasons, old rituals of social engagement seem nearly to have vanished. The ubiquity of manners in Seoul grants ease to life. I found myself slowly decompressing, trusting, feeling valued, expecting smiles, and very much inspired to learn the routines myself so that I could reciprocate.
Socialist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) made stunning remarks last week at a town hall in New York City, claiming that the broken healthcare system at the Department of Veterans Affairs provides “Cadillac first-class health care” to veterans.
In a video clip flagged by The Washington Free Beacon’s Brent Scher, Ocasio-Cortez praised the VA healthcare system, saying: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
“The idea that this thing that isn’t broken, this thing that provides the highest quality care to our veterans somehow needs to be fixed, optimized, tinkered with until you don’t even recognize it anymore,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Here’s the thing, they are trying to fix it, but who are they trying to fix it for is the question we’ve got to ask. They’re trying to fix the VA for pharmaceutical companies, they’re trying to fix the VA for insurance corporations, and ultimately they’re trying to fix the VA for a for-profit healthcare industry that does not put people or veterans first.”
“We have a responsibility to protect it, because if it is any community that deserves Cadillac first-class healthcare in the United States of America it is our military service members,” Ocasio-Cortez added.
The problems with the VA healthcare system have been widely reported on in recent years. One notable story about the horrors veterans face in the VA healthcare system came in 2014, when CNN reported that “at least 40 U.S. veterans died waiting for appointments at the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care system, many of whom were placed on a secret waiting list.”
“The agency has been beset by complaints of retaliation against whistleblowers, a scandal involving overprescription of pain medication and the routine awarding of millions of dollars worth of employee bonuses funded by taxpayers,” The Washington Times added.
President Donald Trump fired Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin 13 months ago and the position is currently held by Acting Secretary Robert Wilkie.
The Daily Wire
What Happened to Manners and What to Do About It
Jeffrey Tucker
There was that guy in high school who went on an overseas trip. He came back and regaled everyone with the glorious things over there that are so much better than they are here. We all hated that guy.I’m that guy today.
Life in Seoul
I just returned from my first visit to Seoul, South Korea, speaking at a conference on digital economics. The event attracted some 2,000 attendees, mostly students who listened attentively and networked for 3 days of speeches, interviews, and debates.
There are many wonderful things that stood out to me from the trip. The prosperity of the place was exciting, the swirl of new ideas and technology, the fabulous food, the obvious industriousness of the city – it all made an impression. South Korea ranks as “mostly freed” on the index of economic freedom, so this makes sense. In particular, the country ranks much higher than the US on business freedom (93 for South Korea as opposed to 83 for the US).
But more than anything, what shocked me was the seeming universality of attention to manners on the part of basically everyone. The decorum of social engagement was everywhere present. It’s obvious even when hailing a city cab. The driver hops out and opens your door for you. Strangers greet you and everyone with overt acknowledgments of the dignity of your humanity.
This is inconceivable in the US. We don’t know what we’ve not experienced.
But it’s about more than that. Cocktail parties in Seoul were effortless social occasions because people move easily from person to person, exchanging bows and cards and pleasantries. People stand when others arrive for dinner. There is constant motioning for others to walk ahead. Expressions of deference, humility, and respect are everywhere.
The grace and decorum of everyday life penetrate to every aspect of society, wherever you are in the city. I deliberately left the posh areas of the city to wander through alleys in the downtown commercial districts to observe. Let’s see how the plain folks behave! It was the same there too. And I don’t mean just the treatment of me but everyone’s treatment of everyone else.
The effect on the overall happiness of daily life is palpable and notably different from the US where, for unaccountable reasons, old rituals of social engagement seem nearly to have vanished. The ubiquity of manners in Seoul grants ease to life. I found myself slowly decompressing, trusting, feeling valued, expecting smiles, and very much inspired to learn the routines myself so that I could reciprocate.
I should add, too, that the manners were also reflected in the common dress in the city, which was very high by US standards; even the casual clothing was neat with careful attention to neatness, fashion, and detail.
Air We Breathe
The whole experience reminded me of a line from Edmund Burke: “Manners are of more importance than laws…. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in.”
The great economist Henry Hazlitt agreed:
It is true that a part of any code of manners is merely conventional and arbitrary, like knowing which fork to use for the salad, but the heart of every code of manners lies much deeper. Manners developed, not to make life more complicated and awkward (though elaborate ceremonial manners do), but to make it in the long-run smoother and simpler—a dance, and not a series of bumps and jolts. The extent to which it does this is the test of any code of manners. Manners are minor morals. Manners are to morals as the final sandpapering, rubbing, and polishing on a fine piece of furniture are to the selection of the wood, the sawing, chiseling, and fitting. They are the finishing touch.
Now, you are probably ready to dismiss all this with a shrug: that’s just their culture. And that would be right but that raises another question: why is it their culture? And why has the rise of extraordinary prosperity not shredded through it?
Actually, that’s probably the wrong question, born entirely of the US experience. In particular, people chalk up the remarkable brutality of social media – we are discovering too that algorithms cannot force people to be decent – to a spoiled population, granted access to everything with zero expectation of mutual obligation. Maybe there is something to that but that cannot explain the whole.
More broadly, we tend to ascribe the crassness of daily life in the US to material decadence. Life is too easy so we no longer think we even have to try. We let ourselves go. We treat others poorly. We don’t expect to be treated well ourselves. We have all we need, and so easily, so there is no longer an incentive to cultivate higher sensibilities. We no longer need to be personally aspirational. It’s inevitable right?
Obviously, based on my experience in Seoul, it is not inevitable that high levels of prosperity correlate with loss of manners. Much less is it the case the market economy somehow erodes our sense of personal dignity; quite the opposite.
Now, you are probably ready to dismiss all this with a shrug: that’s just their culture. And that would be right but that raises another question: why is it their culture? And why has the rise of extraordinary prosperity not shredded through it?
Actually, that’s probably the wrong question, born entirely of the US experience. In particular, people chalk up the remarkable brutality of social media – we are discovering too that algorithms cannot force people to be decent – to a spoiled population, granted access to everything with zero expectation of mutual obligation. Maybe there is something to that but that cannot explain the whole.
More broadly, we tend to ascribe the crassness of daily life in the US to material decadence. Life is too easy so we no longer think we even have to try. We let ourselves go. We treat others poorly. We don’t expect to be treated well ourselves. We have all we need, and so easily, so there is no longer an incentive to cultivate higher sensibilities. We no longer need to be personally aspirational. It’s inevitable right?
Obviously, based on my experience in Seoul, it is not inevitable that high levels of prosperity correlate with loss of manners. Much less is it the case the market economy somehow erodes our sense of personal dignity; quite the opposite.
Choice in Philosophy
To replace decency with brutality is instead a choice we make. Those choices are based not on our income but rather on the ideas we hold about ourselves and others. And here is where the most striking changes have been consolidated in the US. We’ve gone through a philosophical shift over the decades and we are now reaping what the philosophers have sewn.
Judith Martin (Miss Manners) offers an interesting sketch of some latest changes. Among them is that the value of authenticity has normalized what was once considered vulgar. We have decided that being ourselves (including all the shabbiness that implies) is vastly more important than finding ways to behave more decorously and decently. We have celebrated frankness and discounted discretion. We claim we want honesty in all things even when that comes at the expense of respect and deference. We want everyone to be open-minded (what is truth anyway?) but this has displaced reverence for scholarship and knowledge.
These are seemingly small changes, based on a big shift in foundational ideas, but they eat away at the small and informal courts of taste and manners that once governed our daily interactions with others.
I can recall the shock I experienced when bumping into a 1939 book on personality. The author was very blunt: the point is not to become who you are but to improve yourself according to the highest standards. The personality is not something you discover but create. I’d never heard such thinking before. That’s because it vanished only a few decades later.
Blunt Instruments
There’s another factor worth exploring. Since World War II, we’ve allowed law, legislation, and regulation to govern so many aspects of our lives that were once left to evolving forces of society. The blunt instrument of law has come to rule our private associations, our diets and habits, our office behavior, our associations in public and private, our daily engagements with everyone.
We no longer speak about what is impolite or socially unacceptable but about what is actionable and illegal, fueling a litigation explosion and a culture of fake outrage. The court of manners has been replaced by the court of law. This has foster suspicion, distrust, and mutual recrimination, not to mention anger and resentment. This use of law might have had the effect of crowding out mechanisms of organic social evolution.
The good news: what bad philosophy has destroyed can be recreated one life at a time. Doing so requires no law or legislation. There is no need for lobbying or protesting. It only requires an earnest desire to improve your life and that of others around you through a rediscovery of older modes of behavior, as well a dedication to helping the corner of the world that is influenced by your choices become a better place to live.
At first, your new way will seem affected. But then habits form. Others will catch on and copy. Eventually, as Burke says, decency becomes “a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation” and the “air we breathe.”
It can happen. My trip to Seoul convinced me of that.
G’day…Ciao…
Helen and Moe Lauzier
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