The Eternal Temptation of Monoculture

At Quillette Keith E. Stanovich worries about the "Social Science Monoculture." The monoculture's latest wizard wheeze is "faith in science" questionnaires. Only trouble is that the way you score high on these tests is by parroting the liberal line on everything.

On about the same day over at UnHerd Tom Chivers reviews a book from a Harvard professor on trying to convince science deniers -- you know who they are -- that they are wrong in "How not to talk to a science denier."

Hey, maybe the only common thing about these science deniers is that they don't want to take their science from conceited puffed-up liberals.

But I want to know what is wrong with these liberals that they think that their saving faith is the only saving faith, indeed the only truth.

Actually, we know. It was all told to us years ago by Thomas Kuhn in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Despite all their talk about experiments and reason and logic, real scientists act like any other human group: they don't like people that rock the boat and don't go with the program. So, Kuhn writes, scientific revolutions only succeed when the old generation dies off. In other words, the old science is good enough for the old generation.

In a sense every science is a church of its current members. It has an orthodoxy that all sensible church members believe. And the members are not too kind with heresies and the heretics that advance them.

Of course, this monoculture can condense into a war strategy, such as "the long march through the institutions" that La Wik attributes to Sixties activist Rudi Dutschke (I thought it was Antonio Gramsci).

What ties all these world views together is the notion that "we" know the truth, the real meaning of "life, the universe and everything." And it is our sacred duty to preach that truth throughout the world and banish the Evil One from the face of the Earth.

No we don't!

If you remember, one of the Temptations of Christ was when Satan took "him up to an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them." And the point is that all that power and all that glory counts for nothing, for less than nothing.

But in every human burns a fierce flame that, if only he or she had the power they could force the world to "get sorted." And everyone would live happily ever after.

No it won't!

Monocultures don't work!

Why? Because the way the world works is by adaptation, by fixing things that go wrong, because even "The best laid plans o' Mice an' Men / Gang aft agley." The world does not work by implementing a prophecy, just like the prophet imagined it.

So if you are an academic department and all the professors are lefty liberals and there is no room for a conservative, then your scholarship will shrivel into counting the number of victims on a pinhead.

If you are science researchers and anyone that disagrees with you is a "science denier" then the work you do is probably rubbish. Because even a science denier can probably point to a problem or two in your magnificent theory.

And when it comes to morality and politics, my reductive Three Peoples theory shows, as clearly as can be, that the different kinds of people in the world need, and naturally turn to, different religions and different politics. And if one group of people forces their religion and their politics on the rest of society, then they are going to Make Things Worse -- for the rest of the world and even for themselves.

It is telling that the two most obvious monocultures are those of a strict religion and of an army. What is telling is that in these strict hierarchical structures the folks at the tip of the spear are expected to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the ultimate, inevitable victory. In other words, it is all about the agenda of the Chief Priest or the General-in-chief. And the job of the lesser mortals is to sacrifice themselves for the good of the order.

The whole point of our American system is precisely to break up all this: to limit government by dividing it into three branches; to limit moral hegemony by separation of church and state. And indeed to separate the political sector from the economic sector from the moral/cultural sector as envisaged by Michael Novak in what I call the Greater Separation of Powers.

Why? Because nobody knows the real, ultimate, God-spoken meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" and anyone that forces the rest of the world to bow to their vision of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" will only build a pile of skulls, butcher's bill to follow.

It's fascinating that after a century of mammoth world wars and slave states, our best and brightest still don't get it.

So, US Imperalism is Dead

Let us propose the following idea. After the humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan, the notion of the US as the global guardian of democracy -- er, Democracy -- is dead.

It's the end of the Age of US Imperialism. And Joe Biden did it.

I don't know exactly when the US ruling class decided it wanted to be the Global Hegemon. I'd say the 1845 annexation of Texas and the Mexican-American War that followed would be a bit early. And college President Wilson's entry into World War I would be a bit late. Spanish-American War? Maybe.

The point is that when you are a political entity -- whether monarchical or oligarchic or democratic or Soviet or fascist or tin-pot dictator -- the natural, instinctive thing for you to do is to swagger on the international stage: win a nice little war.

Don't try a World War. Not unless your name is Wilson or Roosevelt.

In my view this aggressiveness in political elites is a vestigial survival of the old reality of politics, that of defending the border of your food-growing territory against an "other" that would like to appropriate your food-growing territory for itself.

The food-growing territory thing is just the same as chimp society, where the males defend the border against males from the neighboring band, and the females munch on the food produced by the food-growing territory as they bear and raise baby chimps: the more food, the more baby chimps. That's how Nicholas Wade describes it in Before the Dawn.

You could say that the ultimate description of this ape culture is in Geoffrey of Monmonth's History of the Kings of Britain. Old pal Geoffrey is quite open about kingly conquest and the slaughter and plunder of the defeated. He speaks openly of times when Britain was more or less depopulated after a particularly severe bout on the wrong end of conquest-ology.

But it doesn't matter where the food is grown. Not any more.

But when the universe changes, and owning food-growing territory isn't all that important, then you can expect that the ruling classes will be the last to know. They will still keep on keeping on at their conquest and loot and plunder, because that is all they know.

The point is that it really doesn't matter who owns the food-growing territory any more. Food is for sale; grain from the western Canadian prairies gets put on ships in the harbor of Vancouver BC and gets sent all over the world.

It doesn't really matter where products and produced and manufactured.

Now there are a few caveats. You really don't want to get all your oil from the Arabs in the Middle East. They are a bit late to the modern era and haven't yet cooled their jets in the marketplace. So it's a Good Thing for everyone to do a spot of fracking on their own lands and get the natural gas out and not rely upon the Arabs for their fossil fuels.

You don't really want the Chinese to do all the manufacturing in the world. We need jobs for our kids too.

The point is that expanding your food-growing territory doesn't make you richer any more. It doesn't feed any baby chimps any more. Wealth doesn't come from broad rich acres but from what the World Bank calls "intangible capital." That is to say that wealth is not even the physical capital of buildings and factories. Eight percent of wealth is the intangible capital inside peoples' heads.

So I say that this old instinct needs to be properly sublimated, like with modern business and sports. We don't need men to be strutting the world showing their military stuff. Men need to get their aggressions out on the sports field and as road warriors. And jolly good fun it is for all.

So forget the US Empire. Let's just be a nation state devoted to keeping its people safe and prosperous. And minding our own business.

But whatabout Russia and China? Don't we need to keep them in check? Maybe, somewhat.

But I'd say that what Russia does about Belarus and Ukraine is not really worth going to war over. And I would say it is a good thing for Germany to integrate with Russia on the Nordstream 2 pipeline front.Is Russia really going to threaten to invade Europe as it did in the post-WWII era of the Soviet Empire? I doubt it. But Russia really benefit the more that it gets integrated into the European economy.

And China. China is pretty sure to want to reclaim Taiwan. Because national pride. And it is going to want to bully everyone around the South China Sea. And it seems to want to do a replay of the old China policy of the tributary states around the Chinese periphery, and tie them down with the Belt and Road initiative. Which I expect will be a mixed blessing for the Chinese people.

I accept the need to oppose the Soviet Union and prevent it from its millennial dream of conquering western Europe in fulfillment of Marx's religious prophecy.

But after the end of the Soviet Union the US should have dissolved NATO and gone home. Because the US Empire doesn't make any more sense than the British Empire.

The thing about the British Empire is that is was rather an accident. The Brits and the Portuguese didn't like the high prices for spices and silks available at the western end of the Spice Route and the Silk Road. They figured that they could get a better deal with sailing ships around the Cape of Good Hope and on to South Asia. And they were right.

But then, as they established ports in India and South East Asia, they came into conflict with the local feudal lords, and ended up teaching them lessons. And forming empires. And then they got into the slave plantation thing and set up colonies in South America and the Caribbean, and made a ton of money, for a while.

And, with the instinct to extend the border they established the European colonial empires. But it wasn't the colonies that made them powerful; it was the trading.

And the proof is that after World War II when the European powers gave up their colonies to local native tin-pot dictators the only people that suffered were the locals that got plundered by their new rulers. And a few whites left over in Rhodesia and South Africa. But hey, we got Elon Musk, born in South Africa, and he is reinventing space travel, the rascal, right here in the good old USA instead of in South Africa.

If you look at the awful far-right neo-fascist populist nationalist regimes about which our lordly global educated elite like to expectorate, you don't see anyone bent on world conquest. Not Donald Trump, not Nigel Farage, not Marine Le Pen, not Viktor Orbán. Of course, to our democratic rulers they are all Literally Hitler. But then everything is Literally Hitler to our noble lords of the global elite.

But I admit. A world of nation states run by Trumps and Farages and Le Pens and Orbáns wouldn't be much fun for the educated, credentialed, global elite. Because it would be a boring middle-class sort of thing, with everyone minding their own business instead of strutting out and Changing the World!

Regime Change: What Does It Take?

When you are an armed insurrectionist busily conspiring and insurrecting for regime change, you often ask yourself: what are the magic incantations that might work? What does it take for the old regime to just pick up sticks and head for the exits?

Because we armed insurrectionists really don't want any violence -- or even the mostly peaceful protest beloved of our lefty friends. No butcher's bill for us, please. 

I've already looked at the question of regime change in reviewing a piece by Malcolm Kyeyune on the current regime:

Every ruling class throughout history advances various claims about its own legitimacy, without which a stable political order is impossible. Legitimating claims can take many different forms and may change over time, but once they become exhausted or lose their credibility, that is pretty much it.

Interestingly, I've already written about Kyeyune, in "Two Strikes Against the Ruling Class -- in One Day."

So what does it take for a ruling class to lose legitimacy?

Lose a war? You know, I think this is probably rather important, especially because I think that defending the people against enemies, real and imaginary, is the one and only job of government. When there's a cock-up on the war-making front, I think that there is an unconscious feeling that the ruling class doesn't have a clue. And this feeling might even include women, who, as you well know, "expect to be protected."

Money Printer go Brrrrrrr? I wonder if this is a consequence rather than a leading indicator of ruling class exit. Because the two German hyperinflations occurred after defeat in war. On the other hand, there is Venezuela, where the Old Regime of Hugo Chávez is still in power under the expert guidance of President Maduro. Certainly, inflation is a sign of ruling-class incompetence. We know how to keep inflation in check. Because Science.

Economic Crisis? The classic case is the Great Depression that ended the 60-year domination of the Republican Party after the Civil War, and began the 70 year domination of the educated class through the Democratic Party. Obviously the Carter era "stagflation" was a real body blow to the "leave it to the experts" political formula of the New Deal. And the Great Recession and its slow recovery didn't do any good for the current ruling class. But, I suspect, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Crack-down on Opposition? When a ruling class is in the cat-bird seat the opposition is rather amusing, and the regime can afford to let it warble its ineffective tune. But when things are getting serious, then there is a tendency in all ruling classes to get the word out that the opposition is really a deadly threat to all good people. Of course we have seen this in black and white over the last year, as "everyone" agreed that the BLM/AntifFa riots were nothing-to-see-here, while the January 6 riots were an "armed insurrection."

Censorship? A confident ruling class sneers at censorship. It wants to know what the fools and knaves in the opposition are saying. It knows that it can haul out its tame journalists any time to laugh and sneer at the opposition's pathetic lies and utter detachment from reality. But when things are getting too close to the bone, then it is time to crack down on "disinformation." Because Science.

Ramming Stuff Through Congress? According to the Moynihan Rule, you don't want to pass major legislation with less than a 70-30 vote in the United States Senate. I think the idea is that political peace means consensus, where the opposition doesn't feel too threatened. But the current Democratic Congress that is more-or-less evenly divided between the parties is ramming controversial stuff, including major climate-change stuff, on simple majority votes. The implication is that if we don't pass this now we will never get to pass it. Which suggests that the ruling party is not long for this world.

Impeaching Presidents? It's telling that the impeachments of presidents generally resulted from a feeling of outrage against a president that the ruling class considers illegitimate. The first president impeached was Andrew Johnson, right after the Civil War for daring to fire his Secretary of War. Then Richard Nixon, regarded by all good liberals as illegitimate (my liberal boss had a $3 bill Nixon coffee mug). Then Donald Trump, regarded by all good liberals as a liar and a colluder with Russians. Bill Clinton? I'd say that was more: if you guys can impeach Nixon for practically nothing then we can impeach Bill Clinton for lying about "I did not have sex with that woman..."

Government of Old Men? What is it about the current era that we have aged presidents and leaders? Trump, 75; Biden, 78; Pelosi, 81; Schumer, 70. Is it a case of OK Boomer hanging on? Is it that the next generation just isn't up to snuff? Or has the current generation kept genuine challengers to their power under wraps? Or is it just that modern health care keeps older people more active and thus able to hang onto their power? Why would younger politicians not be able to challenge the existing generation?

I'm sure there is more, much more. But, I'd say, the portents and the runes and the joss sticks are not too favorable right now.

Ruling Class: Hoist with their Own Petard? Or Not?

In this chaotic moment, the question is whether it is all part of our ruling class's brilliant and eternal strategy to maintain itself in power. Or whether it is all a Baldrick's Cunning Plan, as rehearsed over and over on the Blackadder TV series.

If you remember, the whole schtick of the Blackadder series was that the British ruling class since whenever had been a bunch of snobby twerps.

Odd, isn't it, that that kind of comedy has kinda gone out of fashion. We don't really see too much comedy on TV or anywhere about how the woke lefty ruling class is a bunch of vicious snobby twerps that wouldn't be seen dead in a Chevy on the levee.

So, on the one hand, I get the line of the Zman that we have a Roman Empire Mk 2 that conducts its business at a level way up beyond the ken of the ordinary mortals of the plebs.

On the other hand I would point to the shambolic Russia collusion epic that dogged Donald Trump for five years. And we had the shambolic effort to find ballots in the 2020 election when it turned out that Donald Trump won more votes than the ruling class had expected, and so extraordinary measures were needed to ensure a correct result. And now we have the shambolic disaster in Kabul. And the shambolic lockdowns and vaccine passports that really do nothing to deal with the COVID epidemic. And the ridiculous overreach in the Democratic Congress to pass everything including the kitchen sink in one year.

I just can't help feel that these rulers really aren't up to snuff. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe they are smarter than they appear.

See, I think that the over/under political formula of our educated ruling class is breaking down because of the "internal contradictions" of the over/under formula.

Back in the day, Karl Marx argued that there was an "internal contradiction" between what he called "commodity production" and "surplus value," the value of labor snitched by the capitalists from the workers. Except that the classical economics he used for his theory got blown up in the 1870 marginal revolution. So there wasn't an internal contradiction after all.

Our rulers are getting boxed in, more and more, by the logic of their over/under political formula, that they are the allies, the noble advocates of the oppressed peoples against the white oppressors.

Previously, of course, their over/under political formula was that they were the saviors of the working class against the capitalists and the malefactors of great wealth. But they switched horses in the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s, abandoning the old working class and now advocating for blacks and women.

Only, the program of the ruling class necessarily includes rewarding loyal supporters in the ruling class as well as helping the working class and/or blacks and other oppressed peoples. So they are become the very exploiters that they claim to oppose. And the victims of all this is the middle class caught in the middle.

Look, this is the soft underbelly of every ruling class since the dawn of time. They pretend to be the saviors of the people from a fate worse than death, but really they are always just in it for themselves. And, as often as not, they are not very good at pretending.

In our time we may say that the more that the ruling class finds more ways to distribute loot and plunder to its supporters the more it visits injustice upon the broad middle class. And the more it provokes the middle class into forming a head of rebellion. Thus Trump.

And so, in its very program of helping the oppressed it creates a new class of people oppressed by its loot-and-plunder operations. Thus Trump.

And thus, repeating the words of Hamlet, our ruling class blows up its own regime with its own brand of injustice that it fervently believes is the royal road to justice.

But here's another idea. I would say that the one big thing that ends a ruling class is defeat in war. See, the whole point of a ruling class is to protect the people from foreign enemies.

You know, like our noble ruling class protects oppressed peoples from systemic racists.

But if you lose a war, Joey Boy, who needs you?

Oh, I know. Our ruling class doesn't really think of the Afghan business as a war. Our rulers are way above such sordid stuff. Instead they are Building Back Better, and working for Equity. Stuff like that.

Only, deep down below all the modern frooh-frah there is still the basic Freudian unconscious, and the Jungian archetypes and collective unconscious.

Today, we read, twelve US Marines were killed at Kabul airport. I wonder how that affects the unconscious of the average American voter, and in particular the average American woman voter.

You may think that the average American voter will not be happy with all this. I couldn't possibly comment.

The Political Necessity of White Supremacy

 The basic tactics of the progressive over/under political strategy is to convince the "under" voters that they have no place else to go.

In the days when the left was the protector of the workers, they taught the workers that unless they voted for the left they would lose their jobs, their lives, their dignity to the malefactors of great wealth.

But, when you think about it, it has always been a lie. Ever since the vote started expanding in the mid 19th century, governments across the west have extended benefits to the workers, from wage and hour laws, child labor laws, public schools, and then the entitlement programs of the 20th century.

Crabbed old guys like me say that it would have been much better for the workers to build out their own organizations, from labor unions to mutual-aid societies, rather than take the hand of government, but that is beside the point. The politicians offered goodies, the workers voted for politicians that offered goodies, and here we are.

In other words, it is a lie to say that only the politicians can save the workers. But, by golly, the narrative worked, for about a century.

Since the 1960s the progressives have altered their over/under political strategy. Now they are the protector of minorities, and particularly the blacks. Ever since the Civil Rights Acts, the left in the US has told blacks that unless they voted for Democrats they would soon be back in chains. Because Jim Crow, because the KKK, because white supremacy. Obviously it works, because blacks vote 90 percent for Democrats, and you cannot get humans to vote 90 percent for anything unless you scare the pants off them.

You might say that it is a lie to say that only politicians can save the blacks from the white supremacists.s But by golly, the narrative has worked, for over half a century.

Meanwhile, as Charlie Eastman writes in The American Spectator, 

Democrats’ social justice policies (defunding the police, ending cash bail, refusing to prosecute crimes, eliminating standards in academics, “disrupting” traditional family structures, etc.) have created a deadly reality for blacks living in Democrat-run cities — there is no place more dangerous for a black person to live in America today.

And, what is the biggest danger for a black person in a Democrat-run city? Not white supremacists, but other blacks.

Eastman writes that Victor Davis Hanson tags "the entire woke movement is a cover-up of sorts, a means of deflecting attention away from the Democrats’ policy failures", but I think that misses the point.

The point is that every political movement unites its supporters by terrifying them about some malevolent "other." Let's advance the argument by checking Donald Trump's agenda. We were going to Make America Great Again. But first we had to deal with the Deep State, the Chinese, and illegal immigrants. This is not rocket science. Trump supporters are the middle middle class whose jobs are likely to be affected by cheap Chinese imports, low-wage immigrants, and the scorn of the Deep State and its power to wreck the lives of ordinary Americans.

Now, are these "others" real threats to the ordinary American, or are they Trump-invented devils? I'd say that, by and large, they are genuine threats to ordinary Americans. They are certainly not existential threats, but real enough.

Now, whatabout the Democrats? They advanced the notion last year, using the death of George Floyd in police custody, that the police and white supremacists were an existential threat to blacks. Really? I'd say that the real existential threat to blacks is two-bit crooks like George Floyd passing fake $20 bills in convenience stores. I'd say that the real existential threat to blacks is that their murder rate, mostly black-on-black, is about 8 times the white murder rate.

But let us give the Democrats a break. When you have a voter block that votes 90 percent for you, then the only political tactic that keeps them at home is to scare the pants off them.

Notice that Democrats use the same tactics on their other "oppressed peoples" voters.

I've noticed that gay acquaintances are more aggressive around me. Could that possibly be that if the Supreme Court reverses the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage that they feel that it will be all over for gays?

Women are taught to believe that if the Supreme Court reverses Roe v. Wade, that it will be all over for women: back to the back-alley abortion.

Environmentalists are taught to believe that the oil and coal companies are catapulting us towards the catastrophe of climate change and the end of human life on this planet.

Do you see how the fact that the overclass established gay marriage and abortion by judicial decision and environmental regulations by executive decisions means that there is really no established cultural consensus on these issues. They were imposed by the ruling class.

Therefore gays and feminists and environmentalists and blacks have to vote Democrat otherwise it's the end of the world.

Interesting isn't it. We are conditioned to accept that to have Democrats running around yelling that the end of the world is coming -- because white supremacy, abortion, climate change -- is perfectly normal and acceptable.

And I get it. The only warrant for government power is existential peril, and if you want political power, for whatever reason, you will pretty soon figure out that you'd better find an existential peril, or get out of the political power business.

But what we need is a politician with the native instinct and cunning to blow up the Democrats' race narrative, preferably right in their faces. What is needed is something like Marx's "nursery tale" comment in the Communist Manifesto. Something like this:

It is high time that the middle classes should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of White Supremacy with the boring truth, that the middle class just wants to wive and thrive and survive.

And that everything that the left puts out is a lie, including "and" and "the."

Poor Bloody Germans -- and US

Everybody knows that the Germans are guilty forever for electing and then knuckling under to Hitler and his totalitarian fascist regime.

How could Heidegger collaborate with the Nazis? La Wik: "There is controversy as to the relationship between his philosophy and his Nazism." And how could you read Nietzsche, the "Nazis' favorite intellectual?" How could ordinary people go along with Hitler and put on those swastikas, and serve in his Wehrmacht?

But I have begun to think, now that our ruling class and government are getting more, er, authoritarian, that maybe it is time to give the Germans some slack.

After all, who among us really has the courage to risk job, bank account, and freedom from the bottomless malevolence of the Deep State? Or stand up in class and take your college instructor to task for his lefty lies? Or dare ever again to protest in front of the US Capitol while Nancy Pelosi is the boss of the Capitol Police?

I'd say you have to be almost crazy to have the courage to stand without flinching against the power of the state. Especially when the state feels threatened, as right now.

Let's rehearse how the Germans got to Literally Hitler.

First, they lost the Great War, mainly thanks to US President Wilson, a former college president, who sent the dough-boys into France to show the world who was boss.

Second, their brilliant Reichsbankpresident Havenstein blew up the currency with money printer go brrrrrrrr.

Third, President Wilson & Co. imposed a humiliating peace on the Germans at the Treaty of Versailles, including reparations and breaking off East Prussia from the rest of Germany.

Fourth, Germany got really screwed by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the failure of the US Federal Reserve to perform its job as "lender of last resort."

So, by 1933, Germans were looking for a "strong leader" to get them out of a mess. Generally, the logic of being a strong leader is that you identify some enemy and lead the nation to defeat it. Hitler chose the Jews.

Imagine what is in store for Americans in the next few years.

First, President Biden has lost a war in Afghanistan and has humiliated the United States.

Second, our brilliant Federal Reserve is printing money go brrrrrr.

Third, the Europeans are probably going to humiliate President Biden and the US. Hey, maybe the Germans will tell us to get out troops out of Germany while they go dance with the Russians.

Fourth, there's likely to be riots in the streets when Biden lifts the moratoriums on rent, mortgage, and student debt.

One of the things about the German experience in the 1920s was that the middle class got royally screwed by the hyperinflation and then royally screwed by the Great Depression.

One thing about the American experience in the 2020s is that the middle class is getting royally screwed by inflation, by lockdowns, by systemic racism, by CRT in schools, by outrageous college costs. Oh, and energy costs.

So, by 2024, Americans will be looking for a "strong leader" to get us out of a mess. Generally the logic of being a strong leader is that you identify some enemy and lead the nation to defeat it. I wonder who our Literally Hitler will choose as the enemy. Probably not the Jews. Probably not the Blacks. That's been tried before. Hey, I know! How about the Wokey Deep State!

Yep. It looks like 2024 will be a replay of 2016. Only the players will know their lines a lot better than in 2016.

I wonder who will be blamed forever after as Literally Nazis.

The Democrats' Sticky Wicket

Because I am a serious and compassionate person, I feel the pain of the Democrats right now. Victor Davis Hanson has five possibilities for why the Biden administration is a total trainwreck, but Reason #5 is the one that resonates with me.

5) Biden is a hostage of both the Left and Hunter Biden. His task is to ram down a hard Left agenda, in the fashion of a torpedo that itself blows up when it hits the target.

My take is that when the Democrats decided to take out the surging Bernie Sanders in the North Carolina primary in 2020 with a huge surge in the black vote, he or his supporters demanded an IOU that went something like this: "you can have your moderate candidate, but here's the bill of particulars if you want our support in November."

In other words, the Democratic Party has become a far-left party, but it knows it needs to look moderate in order to win. So, the lefties could accept Biden as the front man. At a price.

Unfortunately, President Biden is not up to the job of telling his lefty supporters the facts of life, that if he implements their full agenda he will wreck the economy and wreck the Democratic Party.

For Biden is a pure politician, in the sense of Joseph Schumpeter in  Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Schumpter writes that, given that the trade of the politician is winning elections, it is astonishing that any governing gets done at all. The corollary is that sometimes you get a president that has absolutely no governing skills. He is all talk and sound bites.

In that case, of course, it stands to reason that Biden is being overwhelmed by his supporters, all of whom in one way or another demand more loot and plunder from the government. Some supporters, of course, just want a check. But, with the rise of the gigantic educated elite, there are a ton of people that want government money and power to back their project to fundamentally transform an unjust society into a just society.

Now, you and I think that this is a project doomed to disaster. We think that the less that the lower class just lives on checks and the more it works, the better for the lower class and the better for the rest of us.

But we also think that the various power projects of the educated elite, from climate change to corporate regulation to its whole race agenda, are all bound to end in tears, partly because 57 percent of them are lefty fantasy, and partly because there really is not much that government money and government force can accomplish, despite what the prophets say.

But what can President Biden do about all this? Really nothing. He's been a United States Senator all his life, and never really run anything in his life, until right now, when he is really too old to direct traffic, let alone get the various power players into a room together and knock their heads together.

This is where I insert my little joke about Biden being a proof of God's existence.

Why? Because I think that we need the current ruling class to be utterly discredited and removed from power.

But you can never send a ruling class to the exit unless it has royally screwed up. If we had a Chuck Schumer or an Andrew Cuomo as president he would find some way to keep all the balls in the air, and keep our ruling class in sinecures. Till next time.

Or, to use the Chinese approach to this: the failures of Joe Biden are likely to indicate to the American people that the Democratic Party has lost the Mandate of Heaven, whereas Chucky or Andy would have been able to create enough confusion to mask the utter failure of the Democratic Party, its policies and its world view.

So, if God still "has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America." as Bismarck observed over a century ago, then God would find a way to signal to us that it is time to throw the rascally Democrats out.

And declare a new Morning in America.

Atheism: The Religion of Not Believing in God

In a routine expedition to HalfPrice Books I picked up John Gray's Seven Types of Atheism. His basic line is that modern atheism is just Christianity without the God. Thus, he begins,

Contemporary atheism is a flight from a godless world. Life without any power that can secure order or some kind of ultimate justice is a frightening and for many an intolerable prospect. In the absence of such a power, human events could be finally chaotic, and no story could be told that satisfied the need for meaning.

So "atheists have looked for surrogates of the God they have cast aside." Instead of "belief in divine providence" they believe in the "progress of humanity." Thus most modern atheisms are really a re-imagining of the Christian narrative with different names on the beliefs. 

But first Gray wants to instruct us about the uniqueness of Christianity.

The notion that religions are creeds -- lists of propositions or doctrines that everyone must accept or reject -- emerged only with Christianity.

In most religions -- and that was originally true of Judaism -- what mattered was not belief but "observance," the observance of sacred rituals. Many religions have creator-gods, but the "divine mind" is not experienced universally as good, nor as intimately engaged with the world, nor that humans have a "soul" or a "self," nor a death involving a judgement by a Supreme Being.

So when Marxists and their brethren want to force march us towards a better world, they are just repurposing Christianity, but without God and with Marx instead of Christ.

The New Atheism of the 19th Century. Chaps like Comte believed that "magic, metaphysics and theology belong in the infancy of the species." But now we adults "accept science as the only authority in knowledge and ethics." But science, to Gray, is just a tool for the human animal to deal with the world. Suppose religion really is an "illusion." Who is to say that the creation of illusions not is an important part of survival? And there is the embarrassing fact that atheism tends to ally itself with pseudo-science. Comte thought that bumps on the head were significant; Dawkins believes in "memes."

Secular Humanism. In Christianity, humanity is a "species in need of redemption" with an apocalyptic myth that Jesus would return and found the kingdom of God. But the Reformation replaced the apocalypse with a "conviction that evil could be slowly diminished in history." Thus, with God removed, we get to the idea of modern meliorism, of gradual improvement. Then there was Gnosticism that believed that "salvation was achieved by acquiring a special kind of knowledge."

The modern myth of progress came into being as a fusion of Christian faith with Gnostic thinking. 

But, of course, science has nothing to say about improvement in history.

Faith in Science. Following Darwin's theory of evolution, a lot of thinkers harnessed evolution to "theories of innate racial inequality" and eugenics to improve the race. "Herbert Spencer used evolutionary ideas to vindicate untrammeled capitalism... Beatrice Webb... suggested that Stalin's Russia embodied the next stage of social evolution." Francis Fukuyama "had no doubt that an evolutionary process was at work, leading to the advance of "democratic capitalism" throughout most of the world."

Modern Political Religions. Gnosticism "is the belief that humans can be delivered from a dark world by the saving light of knowledge." Plato and Socrates may have believed that goodness and truth were one, but not that they could be realized in history. But Christianity plus Gnosticism combined to form the "explosive force" of political religions in the modern west.

[Forget] the idea that secular and religious movements are opposites... Jacobinism and Bolshevism were secularizing forces; but both were channels for the millennarian myths of apocalyptic Christianity... [W]hen the Nazis tried to create a "science of man" based in physiology, they continued an Enlightenment project. Liberalism emerged in the seventeenth century as the application of a universal morality inherited from monotheism.

We do not live in a secular age, for "secular thought is mostly composed of repressed religion."

God-haters. Think Marquis de Sade, Dostoevsky, and William Empson. Says Gray about de Sade:

Hating the Christian God, he also hated Nature, cursing it even as he obeyed what he believed were its laws... For Sade's libertines... nothing but a world-destroying act could sate their passions... the satisfaction that comes from doing evil.

For writer Lev Shestov, Dostoevsky is "the greatest artist in human misery." He "was chronically unhappy and spread unhappiness around him.

And said William Empson of the Christian God: "the God of Tertullian, Augustine and Aquinas, is the wickedest thing yet invented by the black heart of man."

Atheism Without Progress. This is the kind of atheist that John Gray prefers. He starts with George Santayana, born in Madrid in 1863 who became a Harvard professor and then quit in 1912 when he received a small legacy. He ended his life in a nunnery. For Santayana, religion is natural to humans. He wrote:

Why should we be angry with dreams, with myth, with allegory, with madness? We must not kill the mind, as some rationalists do, in trying to cure it... Values presuppose living beings having a direction of development... so that good and evil may exist in reference to them.

Says Gray: "Without valuing organisms there are no values."

Next, Gray considers Joseph Conrad, who spent years working in sailing ships in the late 19th century. He was an atheist and rejected the idea of progress. Says Gray:

The seaman's struggle with the ocean is a cipher for the human situation in a godless universe.... None of the visions of improvement conjured by modern thinkers could stand up against his "deep-seated sense of fatality governing this man-inhabited world."

The Atheism of Silence. Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer just stepped away from monotheism without regret. But his life was a contradiction.

Himself extremely wilful, Schopenhauer was convinced that all human troubles came from the will... Anyone who grasped this truth would turn away from life and mortify their appetites, he believed.

But did he follow that advice? Not a bit of it. With financial independence he did exactly as he pleased, "playing the flute and attending the opera." He never married, but "pursued erotic pleasure." He "denounced the world as illusion" but lived a life of "disciplined intellectual labour... was careful with money." He believed that human life is "purposeless striving" and "the world was in need of redemption." So what!

John Gray concludes his disquisition on atheism with the following thought.

Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means... But there is no need for panic or despair. Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think.

The Difference between RINOs and the New DINOs

We all know about RINOs, the Republicans In Name Only that routinely betray the Republican Party's base and truckle to the Democrats. Hello Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY).

But now Edward Ring at American Greatness wants us to think about the DINOs, Democrats In Name Only. I know what you are saying: If Only.

DINOs are Democrats from California:

They see a dismal reality—unreliable energy, water rationing, traffic gridlock, unaffordable housing, out-of-control homelessness, rampant and unpunished crime, burning forests, and an increasingly worthless system of public education—and all of it is a consequence of progressive politics. They’ve realized that the progressives will do nothing but make these problems worse.

Hey, fellahs. You think?

Ring is talking about chaps like Joel Kotkin the writer, and then two Dem politicians, Michael Shellenberger and Kevin Paffrath. Shellengberger ran for governor of California in 2018 and Paffrath is running right now in the Newsom recall.

Now I think that there is a fundamental difference between RINOs and DINOs.

RINOs like Liz Cheney are people that say to themselves: "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." And I understand that. Why be

The boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle's wreck
Shone round him o'er the dead.

Get a clue and get your share of the loot! Right Liz?

But the DINOs are different. I think that they are starting to realize that there is no happy ending to the current Democratic Party lurch to the left. Better get off the bus before it's too late.

You could call them rats leaving the sinking ship. But I will not.

Instead I will call the current Democratic Party the inevitable consequence of the over/under political formula of all center-left political parties since the gradual emergence of the middle class starting in 1500.

What I mean is that, back in the feudal era, politics was top-down. A hierarchy, just like Jordan B. Peterson's lobsters. Occasionally, a feudal vassal would challenge his liege lord. But not too often. Meanwhile the lobsters peasants knew their place, unless the word turned upside down in a famine or a plague.

Today, I would argue, a ruling class has two options, It can champion the middle class against the lower class or it can champion the lower class against the middle class.

Do you see that for the educated class immediately below today's rulers the option of championing the lower class against the middle class is a much better option? Why? Because there is more loot and plunder for the educated class in various bureaucracies, corporate, government, and activist. No surprise that Americans with advanced degrees tend to vote Democrats. Advanced degrees are credentials that you need if you want to advance in the bureaucracy. 

A government that champions the middle class against the lower class does not have much to do because the middle class just wants to get on with their ordered lives, and doesn't want the government taking a lot of money from them to give to the poor and the bureaucrats. No angle for the educated class.

And, of course, all the projects that any government gets into tends to Make Things Worse, as in the quote above and as I have been arguing in my Making Things Worse series.

Why does government keep Making Things Worse? Because all government is a violation of my Four Laws: trying to game the price system; trying to fix things with government bureaucracies that just don't have the bandwidth to act effectively; ignoring the fact that all regulation ends up in "regulatory capture;" and lastly, that all government is loot and plunder, anyway, and therefore amounts to taking stuff from A to give to B without any value in exchange.

Of course, there is also Stein's Law: "if something cannot go on forever, it will stop."

The DINOs are starting to realize that Houston We Have A Problem. To coin a phrase. In other words, things cannot go on forever.

The problem is that for the lower class, for now, the system works. They get a lot of free stuff as supporters of the ruling class, and don't get to experience the heavy hand of taxation and regulation experienced by the ordinary middle class.

But this may change as the Afghan debacle continues, with inflation, rioting renters and borrowers when Biden finally ends the rent and mortgage moratoriums, and the increasingly aggressive vagrants and beggars of the homeless encampments. Pace the BLMs and AntiFas, the lower class does not want to "defund the police." 

The DINOs just have a feeling in their bones that is telling them that it's time to fix things before they spiral out of control. Because Literally Hitler.

See, I think that our noble global elite misses the point when it determines Never Again: never allow another Hitler to rule.

They are missing the point. The middle class wants a government that makes the trains run on time, and keeps the economy on an even keel, so that ordinary middle class people can wive and thrive and save and indulge in hope about the future. When the government fails in this basic task, and things spin out of control, that is when the middle class turns to a populist nationalist who blames everything on The Jews or The Rich or The Blacks or The Woke.

(You know, just as nice liberal ladies all vote for nice progressive candidates that say that racist-sexist-homophobes are to blame for everything).

A Trump is a signal that the ruling class is not doing its job. If you want to be a successful ruling class, then Job One is to make sure that the middle-class sheep can safely graze. If you ignore the signal, or use state power to neutralize it, then you are asking for trouble right here in River City.

Because the guy that the middle class elects after you chaps have dumped Trump is not going to be a guy that merely makes Mean Tweets.

And the DINOs are starting to get it.

Marc Andreessen: Systemizing the Great Enrichment

In the last 200 years, according to economist Deirdre McCloskey, mankind has experienced a Great Enrichment, a real increase in per-capita income of about 30 times, from $1 to $3 per day to over $100 per day. There has never been anything like it.

How did it happen? In my telling, it came from "anybodies" inventing and implementing new technologies that changed the world, starting with machine textiles. Then it was "anybodies" inventing steam pumps to pump out mines, then steam locomotives and steamships that carried people and goods all over the world. Then illuminating oil for oil lamps, then personal gasoline-powered transportation, then airplanes, then electricity for illumination and transportation, then radio and TV to beam news and entertainment to the masses, then computers, then the internet, then social media.

It all happened despite everything, because of "anybodies" getting an idea and running with it. But now, with the mainstreaming of venture capitalists, we have people like Marc Andreessen actually out there looking for people to be the next economic revolution.

Marc Andreessen, you will remember, was the guy that made Netscape into the web browser that changed the world. But now he and Peter Thiel -- of PayPal -- are out looking for the guy that will invent the next Netscape. And they think they know the kind of person they are looking for. Here's how he describes it in an interview with Richard Hanania.

We’re funding the new things, the new technologies; we basically make bets on very fringe ideas, many of which don’t work. We work typically with very idiosyncratic, strongly willed iconoclastic entrepreneurs who are not necessarily the kinds of people who you’d want running a big bank, but are the right people to build a new technology company.

Andreesson talks about the crisis in the science research game and the reproducibility crisis in research. But then there are the guys that just can't take the bullshit any more.

But now if you’re really sharp and young and hungry and aggressive and ambitious, you look around you and… I hear this all the time, from our founders I hear “I looked around, what I saw was incredibly depressing, and I realized I had to get out of there. I had to get into a position where I could do my own thing because I want to be part of a high-performance environment that doesn’t tolerate all this bullshit.” 

He talks for a while about "regulatory capture" and how established corporations naturally sew up the market. Call it the death star. What to do?

We run a continuous flow of X-wing fighters up against the death star. It’s all of our startups. We’re just constantly funding these very fired-up entrepreneurs with these very disruptive ideas, and I’ll discuss disruption in a second because it’s very critical here and the theory of disruption is often mischaracterized.

Then we get down to the nuts and bolts of Thiel fellowships, where Peter Thiel pays kids not to go to university.

The Thiel fellowship is super interesting. I’m super open on these things, and even I was like “really? 19-year-olds?” Basically he paid a bunch of 19-year-olds to drop out of college, they all moved to a group house in San Francisco, and he told them all “go nuts.”...

But you look at that cohort of kids, they’ve been successful beyond belief! Ethereum! Ethereum is a $300 billion outcome in ten years; a Thiel Fellow. Sigma, another company we’re invested in is extraordinarily successful… they’re revolutionizing computer design; Thiel Fellow. And there’s another dozen of these that are like these really spectacular breakthrough…

Actually, if you think about this it is really scary. It was one thing when "anybodies" were inventing machine textiles and steam engines. But when chaps like Andreesson and Thiel are deliberately seeking out market disrupters, and funding them, and letting the chips fall where they may...

Really, we have no idea what will be the net result of this. It could be the proverbial step too far. Or it could be the best thing since sliced bread.

Meanwhile Dave, my neighbor across the street, with Helion Energy, a fusion power startup, is building a plant in Everett, Washington, in the next stage in its attempt to create useful fusion power.

According to company officials, by applying proven and patented technologies, Helion is working towards building the world’s first commercially-viable fusion power plant which runs on a fuel that can be derived from water.

Really though, I'd prefer my own little fusion plant in the back yard. So I didn't have to rely on the grid.

Odd, isn't it. Here we have the Marc Andreessens and the Peter Thiels of the world basically drilling holes in the economy and blasting away with dynamite. While the Joe Bidens and Mark Milleys and Dr. Faucis are running the ship of state on the rocks. 

If you aren't scared stiff you don't understand what is going on.

Idle Prognostications About the Next Regime

One thing about everything going wrong on Joey's watch is that it delegitimizes the whole regime and its sacred narratives, including:

Over/Under Political Formula. When the whole nation is getting whammed by big-time inflation, does it matter if you are black, white, or whatever?

Save the Planet. I get that every ruling class has to save us all from existential peril. But let's just wait until a real peril shows up. Humans aren't that good at predictin' and prophesyin' but we are real good at adapting when the chips are down.

World Hegemon. If you are not prepared to be a real Hegemon, what's the point of fiddling around in the Middle East -- or Europe for that matter? 

Politics as Royal Road to Justice. Politics is division and government is war plus loot and plunder. I'd call that the very definition of injustice, but your mileage may vary.

Entitlement State. If we all saved for our own old age that would save about $1.5 trillion in government pension spending, $1.7 trillion in government health care spending. If we sent our kids to the neighborhood micro school, we could save $1.2 trillion in government education spending. Numbers for 2019.

The thing is that it is impossible to change any of these elements in the current ruling class political formula. Because nobody agrees to give up their share of the loot and plunder until after the Taliban takes over and they are just trying to stay alive.

It is only at the point of regime change that the government can do anything serious. But, just in case we have regime change somebody has to think about what it would look like.

Middle Über Alles Political Formula. The new regime will exalt the ordinary All-American middle-class patriot over fashionable and conceited wokey elites and their neo-serf Little Darling vote-banks.

Death to Pirates. The new regime will feature a world-class pirate-hunting navy. Its purpose will be to make sure that no pirate ever tries to take over a merchant ship engaged in honest commerce.

Market Über Alles Economy. There will be no economic regulation and departure from the voluntary market system. Because all compulsion and regulation means a reduction in overall prosperity. The market means that each of us figures out something useful to do and offers that service on the open market. 

Education with Moms and Dads. No more government education. Instead early education will be run by moms at home schools and micro schools, and normal education through high school will be combined with Jobs for Kids. Yeah. Children will have jobs -- working for pay instead of for nothing at government child-custodial facilities -- and their employers will teach them the Three Rs and whatever else takes their fancy. Dads will be in charge of sports, hiking, hunting and fishing.

Saving for a Rainy Day. No more entitlements. Every worker will save for their own retirement -- and sickness, and end-of-life health care, and unemployment and starting their own business. People that fail to save will be forced to save by deductions from their paychecks.

Everybody Helps the Poor. Instead of shuffling the relief of the poor onto gubmint bureaucrats every American will be involved, from billionaires to teenage kids. Meanwhile, of course we will encourage the rebirth of fraternal organizations and mutual-aid societies that were once the glory of America.

The New Separation of Church and State. The new regime will enforce a separation of church and state, and by church will mean every organization or movement that advertises a moral narrative about the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

You can see, of course, that this is pie-in-the-sky, because it abandons the eternal rule of politics and government, that it is a war for the survival of Our Community, and loot and plunder will be distributed after the glorious victory.

But I think that we are already in a new era where loot and plunder doesn't help anyone, not even the victors. And I think that the desperate all-out program of the Biden administration to go flat out on handouts to its supporters, to go flat out on systemic racism, and flat out on climate change is actually a sign that, in Kansas City, they've gone about as fur as they can go.

Hanson: Are We in a Revolution?

Today at American Greatness Victor Davis Hanson asks: "Are We in a Revolution and Don't Even Know It?"

Let me answer this: Yes, of course we are. The question is: where are we in the revolutionary cycle?

If you are a devotee of Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution then the question is where are we in the revolutionary cycle? Brinton's stages are:

The Fall of the Old Regime where a regime is discredited and running out of money.

The Rule of the Moderates and Dual Power where moderates are trying to rule but are in conflict with extremists that operate a parallel government.

Reign of Terror and Virtue with extremists purging the world of injustice and sin and vice.

Thermidor with a falling away into normal life, usually featuring a dictator, nationalism, and foreign conquest.

Now Brinton's book featured four revolutions: the English Puritan Revolution, the American, French, and Russian Revolutions.

I'd say we are in something different. But not completely different.

The big difference today, I would say, is that, while Brinton's four revolutions were all about the new middle class -- led by intellectuals -- taking power from a feudal or almost feudal ruling class, we have a different situation.

That's because our ruling class is the middle class led by intellectuals that took power variously in the last three centuries. And if you ask me all the phases identified by Brinton are happening all at once. We have a discredited old regime that looks to be running out of money; we have ostensible moderates like Biden in office but we have a parallel government of activists and "lawfare" operating in parallel and partly with the consent of the ruling class; we have the reign of "woke" terror busily canceling people on social media and purging any backsliders from positions in corporations, education, and media. And we have Donald Trump that our ruling class experiences as a nationalist dictator looking for trouble with China: literally Hitler.

So, our times are different, and the exact framework of revolution will work differently this time.

Now, I would say that it was only in the Bolshevik Revolution that the modern "political formula" was practiced, as invented by Marx. That is, the Bolshevik Revolution was self-consciously an over/under revolution of the educated class allied with the lower class against the middle class, the "bourgeoisie."

Since then all modern ruling classes have operated on this principle. In the US we have an educated class that experiences itself as Allies of Oppressed Peoples fighting against White Oppressors. But I understand its "political formula" as the ruling class using real and imagined victims as cats paws to scratch and mutilate the ordinary middle class: to make the ordinary middle class the "other."

The question is: will the ordinary middle class find the cojones to fight back against the educated ruling class? And can it find a way to do this without a full-scale civil war with the attendant butcher's bill?

Now I say that if you look at US politics over the last half century you see the ordinary middle class being formed into a head of resistance against the educated ruling class again and again. Richard Nixon was elected by a middle class frightened by the Sixties Kids. Reagan was elected by the middle class reacting against the elite incompetence of the Carter "stagflation." The election of Obama was followed immediately by the organic self-organizing Tea Party that the Obama boys harassed with the IRS. And with Trump we had an open populist nationalist running a campaign for the votes of the ordinary middle class.

Obviously this recurring movement of ordinary middle-class Americans could be thrashed and dispersed by our current ruling class, with prejudice, if it got its act together. Or the movement could grow into a nationwide organic movement that would prove to be unstoppable by any ruling class that hesitated to use full Stalinist methods on its opposition.

And if you ask me, anything could happen. On the one hand we have the utter incompetence of the educated ruling class indicated by its failures in foreign policy and economic policy, and its mindless response to the COVID crisis. On the other hand you have the disciplined street thugs of BLM and AntiFa and the whole culture of left-wing activism that controls the conventional wisdom on every issue from race to climate change.

What will happen? Nobody knows. We don't know what happens when the educated ruling class and the ordinary middle class meet in political battle.

In other words, we are making history here. I think that there is a saying that you don't want to be there when history is being made. But I could be wrong.

Economics and Politics: The Biden Trainwreck

One of the problems with economics, in my opinion, is that politicians use it as a way of sailing too close to the wind.

Obviously, politics is all about using the wealth and production capability of a nation to wage war and to reward its supporters. Economics, starting with the classical economists, showed that making war and handing out freebies to the supporters doth not a prosperous nation make.

Before classical economics, it was easier for politicians to do what comes naturally: to wage war and loot and plunder. As long as you were the victor and you were doing the looting and plundering, what was not to like?

And hey, it all made a rough kind of sense. If wealth and prosperity were all based upon food-growing land, then it stood to reason that to expand the nation's food-growing land was beneficial. In Mein Kampf Adolf Hitler made the argument that of course Germany needed to grow its own food.

Today, however, food-growing land and prosperity do not go together. The Canadians have tons of food-growing land in the western prairies, and the ships queue up in Vancouver harbor to load up grain and take it to Asia. But who cares? What matters is excelling at value-adding activities from extraction, manufacturing, and the whole world of the modern economy of computers and the internet.

But politicians are still in the business of conquest -- usually in elections -- and distribution of loot and plunder to their supporters. So today, economics has become the technology of how much loot and plunder the economy can stand before it collapses in inflation. That is the point of macroeconomics, in particular Keynesian economics and the new MMT (modern monetary theory). The whole point of Keynesian economics was to give politicians an excuse to run deficits in the wake of a recession like the Great Depression. The whole point of MMT is to give politicians an excuse to continue spending and electing to the max. Because if the debt is in your own currency, who cares?

And there is a tendency in political circles to push things just a little further, because, if the current level of taxation and spending and regulation hasn't killed the economy, what damage could just a little more do?

Well, I think we are in the middle of a nation-wide test of going as far as it can go. Because when you crank up unemployment benefits into the stratosphere, and suspend rent payments for the renters, and suspend mortgage payments for the borrowers, and suspend student debt payments for the university graduates, what happens next?

Also, there is the little problem, which goes beyond economics, that government cannot withdraw a previous award of loot and plunder without incurring the rage of the recipients and the withdrawal of grateful political support.

For instance, if I were a Democrat right now it sure would be nice if the government were not spending $1 trillion a year on mostly white Boomer Social Security and $600 billion on mostly white Boomer Medicare. Talk about systemic racism! But, of course, nobody can ever reduce those entitlements and give them to deserving non-white post-Boomer voters. It would be electoral suicide.

But right now, someone has to take the bull by the horns and terminate the cool unemployment benefits and terminate the rent moratorium and deal with the mostly peaceful protests that will be ginned up by the activist left in opposition. Because we cannot continue with those loot-and-plunder giveaways without continuing to destroy the economy in a storm of inflation.

This is not rocket science. But it does go against the natural instinct of a politician, which is to give out tons of loot and plunder but never, oh never, to take it away.

And it does go against the experience of every Democratic politician in the land. For a Democratic politician loot and plunder has worked every time it has been tried. There are no wise heads telling today's politicians to Remember the Seventies. Or telling them to Remember Obama's Jobless Recovery. Why not, Nancy Pelosi? You were there in the Seventies. You observed how the Reagan revolution wrecked the 50-year-old Democrat hegemony. What happened to Leadership, Nancy Pelosi?

If you ask me it is an Act of God that Democrats are in charge of the post-COVID economy, and that the voters will blame Democrats for whatever goes wrong on their watch. It is Democrats that have to end the rent moratorium, Democrats that have to end the unemployment bonuses. And Democrats that have to take the heat. And it will serve them right.

And, Democrats, the sooner you do it, the better. Because the longer these freebies go on, the more that the recipients will cry bloody murder when you end them, the more that lefty mostly peaceful protesters will riot in the streets, and the more that the economy will spin into inflationary chaos in the meantime.

Imagine if Trump were president in charge of ending the freebies! Oh, the Horror!

Instead the Democrats are going to experience the Perfect Storm consequent on their whole philosophy of looting and plundering the economy to reward their supporters.

See, Democrats. Economics is not supposed to be a how-to on how for you can go to plunder the economy without wrecking it. It is supposed to show that politics is a wealth-subtraction business, always and everywhere, and the less of it, the better.

Making Things Worse: Civil Rights and the Sexual Revolution

Aside from the basic governmental function of defending the people from enemies, foreign and domestic, most government action actually Makes Things Worse. This is particularly true of our modern progressive educated ruling class, whose religion is that politics can bend the arc of history towards justice.

We have already seen how government education and pensions and government healthcare and home mortgages have Made Things Worse. Let us continue.

Government Civil Rights. When the United States Senate debated the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) spoke out against it. He argued that the Civil Rights Act should only ban discrimination by government. It should not ban discrimination by corporations and individuals. Thus he said on the floor of the Senate that the act

would embark the Federal Government on a regulatory course of action with regard to private enterprise in the area of so‐called “public accommodations” and in the area of employment — to be more specific, Titles II and VII of the bill.

This act branded Goldwater -- who had demanded the desegregation of the Senate cafeteria on behalf of his black aide -- a racist to the end of his days.

But imagine if the Civil Rights Act had confined itself to discrimination by government. Then we wouldn't have the current regime of government forcing private institutions to discriminate on the basis of the latest fashion in elite circles.

The necessity of Jim Crow laws in the South was that outfits like bus companies, railroads, and ordinary lunch counters, needed to be forced to discriminate against blacks. Because the logic of the market economy and private enterprise is that a customer is a customer. What matter is whether the customer is trustworthy, whether the customer pays his or her bills. 

But the natural instinct of government is to discriminate, because that is the nature of politics: for US and against Them. Political leadership is all about rallying the tribe or the nation to arms in the present emergency against the existential peril. So, what is needed is not legislation to supervise individuals and corporations; what is needed is legislation to supervise politicians and bureaucrats, to forbid them from following their natural political instincts and discriminate in favor of "our people" against "their people."

Is discrimination against other people by race or by sex or by national origin by private individuals and corporations wrong? Probably. But not illegal. Humans have ways of socializing people away from wrong that falls short of government force. It is call naming and shaming, and women are particularly good at it.

The conclusion is obvious. Government laws that forbid discrimination by private individuals and corporations is wrong and Makes Things Worse.

Government Sexual Revolution. Back in the day, fathers made sure their daughters were safe from guys unless "their intentions were honorable." Back in the day, divorce was unthinkable. Back in the day, abortion was monstrous. Back in the day, nobody got married unless their marriage was primed with a dowry or a bride price that basically provided the wherewithal to survive. What happened?

In part, of course, our increased prosperity and our increased medical knowledge has transformed the world. An abandoned mother can, sort of, raise her child. A girl pursued and abandoned by a faithless lover can get an abortion. Divorce isn't the end of the world, especially when women work in the market economy.

If we say that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is for humans to produce the next generation and leave a better world for their children, then it makes sense to restrain young men that just want to get laid; it makes sense to force men to support and father their children; it makes sense to pressure married couples to stay married and not imagine that they could solve their problems with a new spouse.

Back in the day, the old rules were a matter of life and death. Today, not so much. Still, if you want a successful life and you want to leave prosperous children and grandchildren behind you then you need, in the breach, to follow the old rules. Girls need to feel that their lover will stick around. Children need a mother and a father: their mother and their father. Women need to feel that they will not be traded in for a newer model. Men need to feel that their wife will not suddenly take up an opportunity for a bit of hypergamy.

But today, the fashionable elite advances all these notions. And they are Making Things Worse.

More to come.

Making Things Worse: Healthcare and Mortgages

Aside from the basic governmental function of defending the people from enemies, foreign and domestic, most government action actually Makes Things Worse. This is particularly true of our modern progressive educated ruling class, whose religion is that politics can bend the arc of history towards justice.

We have already seen how government education and pensions have Made Things Worse. Let us continue.

Government Healthcare. Back in the day, when everyone (about 75 percent of people) belonged to the Masons or the Elks or the Eagles, each lodge had a "lodge doctor." I had a cousin who was a Mason -- he was a contractor that helped build his local lodge -- and he thought that lodge doctors was the best thing since sliced bread. You see lodge doctors were usually kids just out of medical school, and their were cheap. And, if you follow the link above, you will find that lodge doctors helped the poor. And, of course, doctors typically would attend to the poor for free. Not that they liked it, and not that they spent a lot of time and energy on the poor. But then I'm not sure that today's doctors put too much energy into their Medicaid patients, either.

Anyway, without government healthcare the cheapskates could get healthcare from their lodge doctors, others could have health insurance plans with whatever deductibles they had in mind, and the fancy-pants set would go to the Mayo Clinic. And we could all decide, years in advance, how much heroic care we wanted at end-of-life. Medicare, you know, has developed all kinds of protocols to speed end-of-life care. That's why Sarah Palin got into so much trouble talking about "death panels." How Dare She!

Then, there is the huge regulatory burden of government regulations and credentialization on healthcare. When you regulate an industry what you get is "regulatory capture." That's science, developed by George Stigler.

The conclusion is obvious. Government healthcare makes healthcare worse, and it won't get better until we break up the unholy marriage between government and the healthcare industry.

Government Home Mortgages. Back in the day, before the Great Depression, people only got to borrow about 50 percent of a home's value, and they could only get a ten-year mortgage, which terminated in a balloon payment, at which point you paid off the rest of the loan or you refinanced at the going interest rate. That meant that houses were smaller, prices were lower. But then the government created a secondary market in mortgage loans with Fannie Mae, and then they let Fannie Mae issue government-backed bonds, and then they let people borrow up to 80 percent of a loan and take out 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, and then they said that you had to take into account a wife's income when determining creditworthiness. And then home prices soared into the stratosphere and priced the kids out of the market.

Plus, as the science says in Walter Bagehot's Lombard Street, when you have mortgages that can't be liquidated because low down payments and borrowers can't make their payments because unemployment then you get the mother of all credit crunches as in 2006-08. So low-down mortgages make the credit system fragile. Imagine.

The conclusion is obvious. Government mortgages make homes more expensive and the credit system more fragile.  They make home ownership worse.

More to come.

Making Things Worse: Introduction, Education and Pensions

One of the constants in political rule is that, while the job of political leaders is to defend their people from enemies foreign and domestic, the worst enemies of the people are the politicians themselves.

The reason is not hard to find. Political leaders -- chiefs, dukes, kings, emperors, presidents -- have funded their armies and police forces, mostly, from taxation and forcible exactions from the people they are sworn to protect. It is a small step to expand the exactions from the amount necessary to protect the people into an amount sufficient to build an empire or a personal fortune, and distribute loot among your supporters.

In other words, it is a small step from improving the life of the people to Making Things Worse.

More and more, I find that I want to tell the story of our times as the story of The Educated Ruling Class that Made Things Worse.

You can see why that narrative might be attractive to me. It negates the story that the educated ruling class wants to tell, of itself as the enlightened, progressive, liberal people destined by the arc of history to Make Things Better -- by using political power. And I like the kind of narrative that cuts across the ruling class narrative. It makes me feel good.

So let us review all the glorious accomplishments of our rulers, and turn them upside down, proving conclusively that they Make Things Worse.

Government Education. Back in the day, when Shakespeare went to school, children started work at age eight: child labor. But his dad, a glovemaker, could afford to send his kid to the local grammar school. Lucky Will. 

What a wonderful thing that we ended child labor so that every kid could get an education! Not.

For one thing, you may not have noticed, we still have child labor. Kids are expected to go to school all day, then do homework. That is work, in my understanding. And do you know how much children get paid for working in school all day and doing homework in the evening? I'll give you one guess.

But but but! How could kids get an education if they didn't go to a free government school? Are you serious? First, we could pass a law that the employers of all kids under the age of 16 had to provide classes in the Three Rs. Second, we could encourage all employers to formalize their relationship with their young employees in an apprenticeship contract. Did you know that in the old days of apprenticeships the employer would typically commit to providing education and training to the apprentices? Third, we could ennoble billionaires that created and funded schools for the Oppressed Peoples.

I could go on.

Instead, we have one-size-fits-all government child custodial facilities, and the teachers in these schools are clearly a very powerful special interest that politicians hardly dare challenge. In the late COVID incident, teachers clearly signaled that they were more interested in their own health than in teaching children. And it seems that all over the land, the government school districts and universities are all deciding with one voice to teach critical race theory. What's that all about? When did we get to vote on that?

The conclusion is obvious. Government education makes education worse, and it won't get better until we stop governments educating our children.

Government Pensions. One of the constants down the ages is that rulers get support by rewarding their supporters. Feudal lords reward their vassals with nice choice manors -- taken, no doubt, from a disobedient vassal. Warrior lords reward their soldiers with loot and plunder. Absolute monarchs reward their supporters with sinecures and noble titles. Modern politicians reward their voters with entitlements. Governments reward their employees with lifetime employment and rich, fat pensions.

So I suggest that government pensions are monies forcibly removed from the economy and given as a reward to the supporters of the ruling class. They are, and have always been, a net loss to the prosperity and the wealth of the people.

But but but! Whatabout the poor? Whatabout widows? OK. But let us start with ordinary people. First, if ordinary people save for their own retirement, it means that every dollar of their savings will go to create jobs for the young'uns rather than get sucked up in taxes that are spent on today's geezers. What a concept! Second, and this is important, people will retire when they can afford to, or when their financial advisor recommends. They may retire at the point that they can convert their savings into an annuity, or they may retire at the point where the income from their savings is sufficient to provide a suitable income without dipping into capital. Third, they can use their savings at any point in life, to start a business, to educate the kids, to tide over a government recession. Fourth, they will be able to transmit their savings onto their children.

OK, so whatabout the poor? Well, in my perfect world the poor will have jobs. And if you authoritarians insist, we will force the poor to save for retirement, assisted by billionaires, starting with the Widow Jobs, who will be forced to sell The Atlantic and do something useful with her money.

Whatabout widows? Did you know that one of the reasons why my dad and just about everyone else back in the day joined the Masons or the Elks or the Eagles or the IOOF, or any other fraternal organization, is that they took care of widows. What? You didn't know?

The conclusion is obvious. Government pensions make pensions worse, and it won't get better until we stop governments fleecing workers and taxpayers to give pensions to its supporters.

More to come.

Disentangling Economics and Politics

There's piece in The American Spectator boosting Trumponomics against "neoliberal economics" of the Republican and Democratic Parties. How exactly does by Adam Korzeniewski define all this?

Here's Trumponomics:

industrial policy, national economics, immigration restriction, and skepticism of globalism, [and borrowed from Henry Clay's American System] which focused on internal improvements (infrastructure), tariffs to protect industry, and subsidies when necessary.

Here's Neoliberalism:

Neoliberalism, broadly defined, constitutes a wide range of policies, including the deregulation of markets, elimination of trade barriers, increases in immigration, and the globalization of capital flow. These policies lead to the liberal calcification of corporations and government bureaucracy. They also treat people as interchangeable components in the economy, in which individual value and cultural norms are meaningless. 

Democrats add a twist:

President Biden’s neoliberal economic model leeches off the entropy of American economic power to accelerate the end of domestic industries and American jobs in favor of international corporate profits.

Hmm. Not quite. The problem is that we are mixing economics and politics here. First, let's try to understand economics and the market system.

Economics arises when people do not just produce for themselves, but exchange stuff that they have produced in return for something else, usually money. The next step is that people don't work making stuff for themselves at all; they hire out their labor, usually in return for money. And then some people work entirely in the money business, loaning money and investing in enterprises.

Obviously, this gets bloody complicated, right away. But, in another proof of God's existence, it turns out that humans can value everything that is offered for exchange by a concept we call the price system. There is no mystery about prices, as imagined by the classical economists and the Marxists. In marginal economics the price is whatever something just sold for, and whatever someone is willing to pay right now.

Thus, in a perfect world, markets would be markets, and no regulatory and tariff barriers, and anyone could work for anyone, and move to anywhere and capital, the mother's milk of enterprise, would go wherever it was most needed, all over the world.

But the world ain't perfect. Thus governments are instituted among men to protect us from pirates and plunderers. Trouble is that, as often as not, governments act as pirates and plunderers.  

So, the trouble with "neoliberalism" is that it tends to bend the arc of economics to favor big global corporations that fund politicians. Which often screws the little guy.

But the trouble with Trumponomics is that "industrial policy," "infrastructure," "tariffs," and "subsidies" are all in the eye of the beholder. They all tend to benefit existing economic interests and are used to buy votes.

And the trouble with government programs in general is that they subtract from the verdict of the market, that always wants to fund the most urgent need of the consumers as expressed by the price system. So, "industrial policy" may seem like a good idea, but it will probably end up benefiting existing established interests. Ditto "tariffs" and "subsidies."

And in fact the net effect of almost all government programs is that they try to violate my Four Laws: 

Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises). The administrative state cannot work because the Man in Washington does not have the bandwidth to run the economy (Hayek). Regulation does not work because “regulatory capture” (Stigler). Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them (Chantrill).

Whenever you violate one of my Four Laws, chances are that you  are Making Things Worse. For the market giveth and the market taketh away. 

The story of the last 200 years, of the Great Enrichment, is also a story of ruined dreams. The handloom weavers were put out of business by power looms. The candlemakers were put out of business by Rockefeller's illuminating oil. The stagecoaches and the carters were put out of business by railroads. The sailing ships were put out of business by steamships. The horse-breeders were put out of business by automobiles. Silent movies were put out of business by talkies. Passenger ships were put out of business by airplanes. Mom and pop stores were put out of business by megastore chains. Mainframe computers were put out of business by minicomputers, then microcomputers, then server farms. Yes, we can help the latest industry put out of business by "progress," but for how long?

You think politicians and bureaucrats are smart enough to outguess the ceaseless innovations of the market?

Look, Trumponomics is a political program to help the ordinary middle class and soften the competition from Factory Girls in China. Neoliberalism is the political program of international business and the educated class that wants to live and work anywhere in the world.

In the best of all possible worlds we would come to a compromise between the two while still remembering that there ain't no hiding from the market. Not in the long term, not in the medium term.

For the problem is always, I would say, that whenever government gets involved in the economy, you can be sure that someone is looking for a bit of loot and plunder, and the politicians are only too glad to help out.

The Folly of the All-powerful Intelligence Community

In his notion of the Fourth Branch of Government, Sundance proposes that ever since 9/11 -- and accelerated under Obama -- the United States has come to be ruled by the Intelligence Community -- FBIs, CIAs, NSAs, -- and their bureaucratic appendages and combinations. It was of course the intelligence community that was front and center in the 5-year Deep State war on Trump.

Of course, this game is an old game, pursued by rulers all over the world and all through history, the lust to keep an eye on dangerous elements in society and keep any opposition subdued and safe: down to a dull roar.

And now we have Nancy Pelosi's secret police, an expanded Capitol Police force, that will have offices in various cities "with the first field offices located in California and Florida."

Of course, we all know that secret police and shadowy intelligence agencies are a monstrosity, as proved by the headline secret police agencies of the 20th century, the Cheka/NKVD/MVD/KGB of Soviet Russia. The Gestapo of Nazi Germany. And I don't even know what the secret police in China is called.

But I think that secret police are stupid. And a secret police or ramped up intelligence agencies are a "tell" that the ruling class isn't really legitimate and really doesn't get it.

But, of course, before the illegitimate regime and its secret police exit stage left, there is always the butcher's bill. And beyond the butcher's bill, the millions of lives for whom the "authoritarian government" has Made Things Worse.

In reading Sundance's piece, we are to understand that the Obama administration wanted more political push for its "fundamental transformation" agenda. So it had no problem siccing its gumshoes on the Tea Party in 2010. But, you may remember, in 2010 the Republicans still gained an extraordinary 64 seats in the House of Representatives. Good work Barack!

So, in the Trump years we had an unprecedented use of the intelligence community to harass candidate Trump and later President Trump. And, you can say, look at the results! They got rid of Trump! Yay! But first, what a bunch of second-raters, 

the new woke FBI of hard noses like James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Kevin Clinesmith, and Jim Baker

as Victor Davis Hanson points out. Yeah, that's what you call a First Team. And then Robert Mueller.

The Mueller bully team collapsed and found no collusion with the Russians, despite a 22-month, nearly $40 million blank check... And Mueller embarrassed himself with befuddled congressional testimony, in which he was either unaware of or lied about Fusion GPS and the Christopher Steele dossier—the seed and fertilizer of the entire Russian “blockbuster” collusion hoax and hence his own investigation. 

Maybe Our Nance's Capitol Police is brighter and smarter and meaner than the Keystone Kops of the Get Trump team. But I doubt it. I think I had my "aha" moment on this watching the 2020 Russian movie Dear Comrades! about a strike in the Soviet Union in 1962. There's a KGB officer in the movie. And it seems to me that his #1 concern is keeping his record clean at the office and not making a false step. He is a mouse and so are all the other local political figures.

Oh, I don't think that the stepped-up intelligence community and Nancy's Specials will be completely useless. I expect they will help extend the life of our current old and tired ruling class for a few years. And they will manage to wreck the lives of numerous ordinary people who dare to challenge the ruling-class narrative and a few elite people that prove to be a nuisance the way that Trump did.

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida! That means you!

My belief, that Government is Force and that is all, has been strengthened by re-reading Crane Brinton's The Anatomy of Revolution, start here. At the end of it all, he asks: did the revolution -- in England, in America, in France, in Russia -- really achieve fundamental change to the country in question? Not so much. After it was all over, England was still England, America was still America, France still France, and Russia still Russia.

If you want proof, read Philosopher Putin's review of Russian and Ukrainian history. You'd almost think the Bolshevik Soviet era was just an embarrassing hiccup in the glorious arc of Russian history.

The point is, Brinton writes, that human society is a lot more complex and a lot more difficult to change than the average intellectual and politician and revolutionary thinks. The wise man thinks of human culture in terms of geology and glaciers. Slow, but relentless.

And the bottom line is that nobody knows what the future holds. Whatever your glorious vision of freedom and liberty and justice and equity may be, the future will probably make mincemeat of it, just as your political gumshoes make mincemeat of a lot of ordinary people that just want to live their ordinary lives without being put in the meat grinder of politics.

The Three Functions of a Ruling Class, Then and Now

I was checking out the meaning of noblesse de la robe yesterday, and of course it led me to the three Estates of old-regime France. Let us rehearse it.

The First Estate was the clergy. Their job was managing the moral framework of France.

The Second Estate was the nobility. But they had two jobs! Nice work if you can get it. There was la noblesse de la robe. Their job was running the higher administrative echelons of the justice system, where, I suppose, they got to wear cool robes lined with ermine or something. La Wik:

[They] were French aristocrats whose rank came from holding certain judicial or administrative posts... The most influential of them were the 1,100 members of the 13 parlements, or courts of appeal.

The tippety-top of la noblesse de la robe was the Parlement de Paris, the closest thing to a Supreme Court. And, in the years before the Revolution of 1789 the Parlement de Paris sometimes handed down decisions that challenged the power of the KIng, Louis XVI.

Then there was la noblesse de l'epée. Yessiree, the nobles of the sword. La Wik:

[They] were the noblemen of the oldest class of nobility in France dating from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, and arguably still in existence by descent. It was originally the knightly class[.]

And it got me to thinking. I dare say that, if you are a person with pretensions to be part of a ruling class, you probably need to be in one of the three noble categories: priest, high administrator, or warrior.

Because some things never change, and our brains are still programmed in much the same way as in 1788.

Now obviously, our cancel-ologists and our Karens and Beckies are the modern priests, searching and destroying sin and corruption wherever they find it in unredeemed racist-sexist-homophobic sinners. And some of them are like itinerant friars, our activists, that don't just sit there issuing sermons on Sundays, but go out into the community to purge it of evil elements.

And just as obviously we have our own special noblesse de la robe. That's all the educated snobs in administrative government and its regulatory agencies, that love to issue ukases to the rabble about recycling and vaccine passports.

Whatabout the vitally important noblesse de l'épee, working out at the local fencing club? Well, it's pretty obvious. These folks are the heroic peaceful protesters celebrated in verse and song, the BLMs and AntiFas heroically battling it out with far-right extremists that dare to pollute the sacred streets of our progressive cities with their conspiratorial disinformation. And as you get older, you learn the fencing skills of elective politics.

One of the things that exercise my mind is that the old male pursuits of war and aggressive hierarchy are less vitally important these days than in the good old days when you never know when the Vikings or the Huns or the Mongols might show up.

But men still want to smite the attacker of their sacred ancestral lands. And they still want to be cock of the walk in whatever society they strive, whether in politics, business, religion, activism. If nothing else there is the necessity of achieving high status because hypergamy as practiced by our female friends.

But can't we do better?

Isn't there a better way of moral preening than cancel culture and Greta Thunberg style "How. Dare. You?" Isn't there a way of setting a moral example without the abomination of what we call "virtue-signaling?"

Isn't there a better way of serving the administrative needs of society other than nice cozy sinecures in administrative bureaucracies funded by the state, you professors?

Isn't there a better way of protecting society from violence than posturing in the street as the street thugs of the regime, as close as you can get to the fascist Sturmabteilung of the National Socialist German Workers Party without actually putting a swastika on your arm?

There's gotta be a better way than the corrupt and vile culture of our present ruling class.