Rare News Desk
It’s only 150 years too late, but finally there’s a collection of Kronies action figures. Hey kids, you got yours? The new campaign pits the “Kronies” against the Entrepreneurs. (H/T Ed Driscoll)
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“Big G and the Kronies are ready to take on any competitive threat to their power,” the video says. Yay Big G! The Entrepreneurs, on the other hand “are ready to steal your customers with superior products and crush your profit margins with competition.” Eeek!
The Kronies include Kaptain Korn, Ariel Stryker, Bankor, and Parts and Labor. Sound familiar? The Kabal of Kronies is led of course by Big G himself. Get connected to the G-Force!
Now this important disclaimer: “Do not attempt to be a real Krony without sufficient political influence.” I’ll say.
Back when Saul Alinsky was teaching his young skulls full of mush how to become community organizers, he first had to clear out the mush, according to Ryan Lizza in the New Republic.
[W]hen Alinsky would ask new students why they wanted to organize, they would invariably respond with selfless bromides about wanting to help others. Alinsky would then scream back at them that there was a one- word answer: “You want to organize for power!”
Yay! Get the G-Force!
The Weekly Standard’s Jay Cost points out the teeny little problem with G-Force power. It gets applied to a zero-sum game. Take the current flap over inequality.
A narrow focus on economic inequality overlooks the fact that, over time, everybody’s standard of living tends to improve.
Looking at things through the historian’s lens, it is clear that almost everyone wins with economic development.
Think back to England in the Industrial Revolution. The population increased from 8 million in 1800 to 30 million in 1900. Even if the capitalists were as bad as advertised, the British still somehow found the wealth to sustain an extra 22 million souls in the 19th century. And by 1900 even goo-goo reformers like Rowntree and Booth reckoned that only 30 percent of Brits lived in poverty.
On the other hand, the game of political power is necessarily zero sum. Economic exchanges have the capacity to create wealth, which can accumulate in ways that make everybody better off eventually. Not so with power. Political transactions do not create new wealth, and political power is a commodity whose supply never changes. One side’s gain must always be another’s loss.
Conservatives have tended to hyperventilate over Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and Barack Obama’s years as a community activist. The reality is that their politics is a zero-sum game that creates rage and anger in the opposition, and the victims of political power see injustice and outrage wherever Big G’s power is deployed against them. Writes Cost:
Why should we doubt that [Obama’s] efforts to deal with income inequality will only make the nation’s political inequality worse?
That’s the point. For 150 years, the left has assumed that you can fix income equality by rejiggering political inequality. But when it comes to the crunch, and actual government programs, the left can never see beyond merely using power to give free stuff to its supporters, also known as cronies, Barack.
