Why "defund the police"? Here's why. The movement among the woke left to defund the police goes against all common sense. So why are they pushing it? There's an agenda behind it that might seem counter-intuitive until you take a closer look. The latest example (via Hot Air), provides a good case in point:
There was a shooting in Oakland’s Chinatown neighborhood last weekend. A man attempted to intercede when two men got out of a car and attempted to steal purses from two women walking along the sidewalk. One of the robbers shot the man twice and then got back into his car and drove away. As you’ll see in this report, one local resident said of Oakland’s streets, “There’s no law and order. We’re going back to the wild, wild west.”
Carl Chan, president of the Oakland Chinese Chamber of Commerce in response to the shooting demanded help from the state by asking Governor Newsom to both declare a state of emergency for the city and deploy the California Highway Patrol.
That's a draconian solution. And that's exactly what those behind the woke left want. I cannot speak to the politics of Carl Chan, he may be a radical leftist or he may simply be playing into their hands. But his response is exactly the agenda that is being sought. It's all about the centralization of power into fewer and fewer hands. Here's their flawed logic - if we defund the police, there will be a rise in crime (including violent crime), probably dramatic. With increasing crime, comes a clamor to do something about it. With no levers to pull at the local level, there will be a call to the state to intervene. Once they have done so, established a precedent, there will be a subconscious understanding among the public that the state can do what the local municipality cannot accomplish. There will evolve both a comfort in that and an expectation. Over time it will become the norm. Municipalities will lose power as it becomes centralized to the state. Once that is accomplished, the process can be repeated from state level to federal level. The eventual result -- all the power centralized, all the control in the hands of a few. But here's the flaw:
Socialism is the useful idiot of Fascism.
The social justice warriors of the woke left are suckers if they think they are working towards a more egalitarian society. They are doing the dirty work of the corporate elite, corrupt trade unions, the government bureaucracy and fascists and communists of all stripes (from China). They are serving the goal of power centralization in the misguided belief that the downtrodden of society will be lifted out of misery and poverty once that occurs.
The corporate elites for their part, are not woke in response to market conditions - they are working under the assumption that as power centralizes, they will be part of the inner circle. Maybe they will. Crony capitalism as part of the oligarchy may be the outcome. Or maybe they will frozen out once they are no longer needed. It depends on what turn it will take towards the end of that path.
The thing is, power corrupts. Look at how Google, Facebook, Amazon and Twitter all unilaterally decided they could box out conservatives. They were doing it to curry favor of the left in order to hold onto a portion of that power. But if you go back to their roots, they were not doing that. At some point each of those entities decided it was okay to do what they wanted instead of what was ethical. They became corrupt as their power rose.
But as the number of those who have participatory access to that centralized power dwindles, they will come to see each other as potential threats. Most of them will also get boxed out, having outlived their own useful idiot moments. And those who retain power will become more and more paranoid about potential threats, and/or more avaricious and seek to neutralize any threat to their ever-increasing consolidation of power.
Socialism, communism and everything outside of individual liberty (maximized as much as reasonably possible) will ultimately end up in dictatorial fascism, with power truly held among very few, or perhaps even one despotic dictator. Don't believe me? There are myriad examples throughout history as proof. Even now it is true. Look at Kim Jong Un, who had his uncle brutally executed. This happened in an ostensibly communist regime.
Where individual liberty exists, nations thrive. Unfortunately it is also true that wherever it exists (and nowhere in human history has it been as enshrined in law as it has been in the United States), there are those who seek to pervert it or destroy it for personal gain. Those who succeed in doing so are not the weak, they are those who swindle the weak into inadvertently doing their bidding, while remaining unaware. These parties are playing with life as if it were a zero sum game and they are working with the mindset of winner take all. There are no win-win scenarios that are plausible to them.
Adam Smith in his treatise Wealth of Nations explained in economic terms why this is not true. It is a difficult read, but it is the truth. Austrian-British economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek further explained in The Road To Serfdom why the free market informs people and if left free is the most egalitarian option for humanity. I urge you to read both of these works. This is especially true if you are a self-proclaimed social justice warrior. If you do not want to invest the effort at least seek out more brief interpretations in order to understand what you are mistakenly trying to destroy.
