Legerdemain & the Left

Professional magicians have long known that distracting an audience is the key to creating the illusion of magic.  But magicians aren’t the only ones where legerdemain is critical to fooling people—left wing politicians are also masters of distraction.

A magician must deceive his audience mercilessly, and in every way possible by using misdirection; and at no time is the magician doing what he says he’s doing.  With the deft use of misdirection, every word, every look, every gesture, leads his audience in the wrong direction.  In essence, misdirection is the predicate of a magician’s actions.  And the more natural the magician’s movements, the more complete will be the deception.

The political left operates in a similar fashion using a variety of machinations, i.e., strawmen, false dilemmas, etc., to deflect our attention from what’s really going on.  Even Aristotle in his arguments against democracy understood that persuasion – the language of politics – has a much lower evidence bar than the rigorous logic used in science, and you can persuade people merely by “seeming to prove” a truth.  As democrat political strategist James Carville said: “Truth is what you can make the voter think it is.”

And the go-to ploy that’s on page one of the democrat playbook is dividing people by creating resentment in the minds of voters.  Frequently we hear the meaningless phrase, “Pay their fair share” from the political left, but ask a liberal what exactly a ‘fair share’ is, or who decides who is and who isn’t paying their fair share and you will never receive a cogent answer.  Other favorite aspersions intended to distract are the phrases “obscene wealth,” and “unconscionable profits.”  But what is obscene wealth?  And why is it obscene?  Personally, I think it would be wonderful if every family in America had a million dollars in the bank and a 5 bed, 5 bath home on a golf course with an ocean view.

Meanwhile, the left choses these distracting terms when they should be addressing real issues for the simple reason that wealth isn’t obscene; it’s poverty that’s obscene.  And its poverty that needs to be reduced, not wealth!   History has shown repeatedly that increasing a country’s productivity, has been far more effective at reducing poverty than has redistributing income by increasing taxes on “the rich.”

We should also find the term ‘unconscionable profits’ curious.  Why does the left continually tell us that profits are unconscionable, but never that taxes are, even when taxes take more than half of what an individual has earned or when it adds to the prices we pay?  Take the gasoline tax for example.  Between federal gasoline taxes of $0.18 per gallon, and state taxes that average $0.25 per gallon, Congress, and your state legislators are directly responsible for about $0.43 out of every $3.66 you pay at the pump or 11% of the retail price.  Meanwhile, the markup on a gallon of gas averages 30 cents, but after paying their retailers (gas stations) and accounting for other expenses oil companies are left with a net profit of about seven cents per gallon, or roughly 2% of what you pay at the pump.  So, after doing the math, we see the government receives five and half times more revenue per gallon of gas than do the oil companies–interesting.

It wasn’t that long ago that Joe Biden tweeted, “The oil industry has a choice.  Either invest in America by lowering prices for consumers at the pump and increasing production and refining capacity or pay a higher tax on your excessive profits and face other restrictions.   It was no secret on the campaign trail that Joe Biden wanted to end America’s use of conventional energy such as coal, oil, and natural gas and has proposed or finalized regulations that restrict nearly every aspect of the oil industry. This radical energy policy is reality-defying based on an anti-fossil fuel fiction that is causing unnecessary hardship and costing Americans dearly as capacity for U.S. oil refiners fell in 2021 for the second year in a row, the most recent government data showed as plant shutdowns kept whittling away on their ability to produce gasoline and diesel.  Meanwhile pump prices are near $4 a gallon, more in some places as soaring demand for motor fuels collides with the loss of about 1 million barrels of processing capacity in the last three years and no amount of misdirection is going to change that reality.

Quote of the day: “Facts establish truth, not ideologically driven fantasies.”—Bill O’Reilly