Sabotage! At the Starbucks

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, February 04, 2022

 

A lot of horrible stuff can go on in this world without the ladies and gentlemen of Washington, D.C., taking much notice — but when prices go up at Starbucks, you can bet Pramila Jayapal is on the case. She knows her people.

 

On Wednesday, Representative Jayapal (D., Wash.), the socialist-adjacent whackadoodle chairman of the House Progressive Caucus, demonstrated the fine grasp of economics for which socialist-adjacent whackadoodles have long been famous when she blamed “corporate greed” for recent price hikes at Starbucks. Now, given the generally loopy and irritating corporate activism that Starbucks has indulged in over the years, it does not exactly break my tender little heart to see these rat bastards get a whole venti cup of imbecilic Seattleite coffeehouse radicalism poured right down their corporate shorts.

 

But as much fun as that is to watch, there is, alas, a deeper point that must be acknowledged.

 

Representative Jayapal’s idiocy is derivative idiocy, idiocy with a long history, and here she is simply echoing Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), who exhibits precisely the keen and nuanced understanding of economic issues that one would expect from a failed author of get-rich self-help books (e.g., All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan). Senator Warren insists that our current inflation troubles are the result of “concentrated corporate power” and “price gouging.” As Milton Friedman once observed, blaming inflation on price increases is like blaming rain on wet streets. Politicians tend to end up with the vector of causality pointing in the wrong direction.

 

You could spend an afternoon chronicling the apparently staggering economic ignorance of a Jayapal or a Warren, but that would be a mistake, because the fact is that they are not talking about economic ideas at all. They are laying the rhetorical ground for the liquidation of the kulaks as a class.

 

I have a theory that a lot of those old 1960s radicals turned away from left-wing politics for the same reason they stopped taking LSD: It’s like watching the same movie over and over again; they know how it turns out. It is a tragedy in three acts: (1) Utopian idealists come up with The Plan to fix x, y, and z. (2) The Plan fails for reasons well understood by F. A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises and basically everybody except the utopian idealists. (3) The failure of The Plan is blamed on the kulaks, who therefore must be liquidated as a class.

 

V. I. Lenin was the first one to get his dress over his head about kulaks as such. There never was a very good definition of a kulak — basically, it ended up meaning any peasant who owned one more chicken than Lenin thought he should — but as the grand plans of the Russian socialists failed (and, boy, did they fail), the kulaks were blamed for it. They were, as Lenin said, “bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people, profiteers who fatten themselves during famines.”

 

When it isn’t kulaks, it is wreckers. Or saboteurs, or furtive reactionary counterrevolutionaries. It is anything and anyone except The Plan. As every good utopian knows, The Plan cannot fail — The Plan can only be failed. And that is how the people-over-profits socialist humanitarians of the 20th century ended up murdering more than 100 million people in the pursuit of fairness and social justice.

 

In spite of what some of my more excitable friends on the right sometimes say, I do not think that Warren et al. are about to put us into camps. But I do think that as their big economic ideas come to nothing — and to worse than nothing — they are going to be looking for people to blame. And that isn’t going to stop with the guys who run Starbucks and whoever the Republican nominee is in 2024.

 

So we should recognize this stuff for what it is: conspiracy theory. It isn’t as daft and exotic as the Q stuff, but if you think that the Democratic brand of kookiness is any less toxic than the Republican brand, remember that it wasn’t too long ago that the anti-vaccine nonsense was coming from Kamala Harris. The Democrats may put a little more polish on their conspiracy talk, but crazypants is crazypants.

 

When the utopians start blaming the saboteurs, there is trouble on the way. And tensions are running very high at the moment. I’m not saying a nickel increase in the price of a grande peppermint white hot chocolate is going to turn into actual blood in the streets — but, you know: first Wordle, now this.