The Paradox of Individualism

In our age we are taught from our cradle to honor altruism and fear selfishness.  Of course, we are social animals and we survive by sticking together and helping each other.  And our mothers start working on us at an early age: "don't be selfish, share your toys."



On the other hand, our Marxist friends like to conjure up a collectivist golden age when everyone got along and people worked producing things only for use.  Alienation began when people started working for wages, producing for exchange rather than for use.



What a bunch of baloney!  There was never a collectivist golden age.  Before the modern age people were slaves and serfs; they worked, according to the medieval scholars, for the household, the family unit.  Guess what that meant?  It meant that everyone in the family was subordinate to the head of the household.



People weren't producing for use, whatever that means, in those far off days: people were producing for the family unit and producing what the household head told them to do.  Women and young people, especially, were ruthlessly exploited in peasant families.  In return for their labor they got what the head of the household said they could have.  There was no responsibility; there was no accountability.  It was the rule of the strong, and the weak knew that it was best to go along to get along.  It was the world of the aggressive and the passive aggressive.



But the modern era of individualism is different.  It is not, as Ayn Rand seems to suggest, celebrating the "virtue of selfishness."  It is encoded in the idea of the invisible hand.  You got some selfish needs?  Then produce something for other people that other people are prepared to pay you for.  It is encoded in the idea of individualism.  Individualism is not individual selfishness, it is a notion of individual responsibility, and it starts with the Axial Age religions that converted the tribal collective gods, the ones that distributed gifts to humans in response to propitiatory sacrifice, into the one God before Whom we are each individually responsible for our actions.



Notice how the invisible hand fits together with the notion of individual responsibility.  You, the responsible individual, are not sitting in some peasant family, waiting for the boss to tell you what to do.  You are an individual, free and responsible, and you wake up in the morning thinking: wow, what can I do to earn a living, to get my next meal?  Well, you do what Booker T. Washington did, on his journey across the South to get him an education, when he woke up in the morning after a night under the wooden sidewalk.  He went down to the dock and offered to help unload a ship.  With his wages he bought him a breakfast.



It's a paradox.  Under collectivism we become whining victims pushed around by the local household boss or the government, endlessly complaining about what "they" have done, and crawling around to find ways to scam the system.  Under individualism we become responsible individuals that spend our lives worrying about what the other person wants and needs -- and is willing to pay for.



Which is more selfish?  Which is more self-centered?  Which is more social?  Which is more "alienated?"  On the answers we give to those questions about collectivism and individualism depends all that the world can do for us, and all we can do for the world.



It all reduces to a curious paradox.  The notion of collectivism, which seems to evoke altruism and solidarity, always requires the application of force.  The notion of individualism, which seems to encourage unbridled selfishness and egoism, in fact demands of us a constant solicitude for the needs of others.



Why is that?  It starts, perhaps, with the recognition that society is not a system, a mechanical contraption driven by Newton's laws, but an unconscious biological organism of constantly interacting cells.  Under Newton, each cog in the system responds to force.  Under biology, each cell instinctively knows what to do and does it.



And then?  Well, that is up to us to decide.

The Top 20% Just Wants to be Free

Even as the mechanical vice of Obamacare slowly clamps itself on the American people, so that they are forced into a one-size-fits-all plan for healthcare, mandated by a committee of lifer bureaucrats at the IPAB, you still see stuff like this.

"Talent Just Wants to be Free: Why We Should Learn to Love Leaks, Raids, and Free Riding."  That's a book by Orly Lobel, a law professor at the University of San Diego.  Talented people just don't want to be mewed up at some big institution.  They want, they need to be free to job-hop and re-skill, as the mood takes them.

Lobel critiques the dog-in-the-manger attitude of big institutions.

She identifies a “control mentality” in many companies that locks up employees and stifles creativity through the aggressive use of noncompete contracts and copyrights on inventions. She thinks bosses are too worried about “brain drain” to recognize the opportunities for “brain gain.”

 Today in my AT piece "The People of the Lie" I make a joke about the internal contradictions between the managerial liberalism of the Progressive Era and the community-organizer liberalism of today's "progressives."

But there's another contradiction in our ruling class that is just as glaring.  It is the contrast between the natural culture of the top 20% that lives by creative work and the rest of America.  Liberals (and conservatives) want to have exciting and creative careers and understand that excitement means risk.  But then the same liberals turn around and built mind-numbing one-size-fits-all government programs for health care and education and welfare.  They run around practicing a politics that demonizes corporate chieftains for not providing complete satisfaction and life-time tenure to their employees.

Meanwhile, as Charles Murray has shown in Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010, the top 20% is doing fine, with good marriages, satisfying careers and incomes and wealth, while the bottom 30% is getting absolutely hammered, with the women opting out of marriage and the men opting out of work.

And in case you didn't know, the children of single women with live-in boyfriend are anything from six times to thirty times more likely to suffer child abuse than the children of married biological parents living together.

In the middle, ordinary Americans just want to keep a decent job, hope to buy a home one day, pay their bills, and get through this Obama economy.

One of my favorite websites is Penelope Trunk.  She combines career coaching with homeschooling and has just launched a company, Quistic, that provides online career coaching courses.

Absolutely fabulous, and no doubt a marker for where the world of the educated American is going.  No limits, no borders, no guard rails.  Just push out there for a creative, adventurous life.

Meanwhile ordinary people are getting hammered by the economy, by the lousy schools, by their health care premiums going into the stratosphere.

And young people!  Why the twentysomethings aren't in the streets yet is a mystery to me.  They have lousy schools, lousy job prospects, and they have been saddled with enormous student debt that operates like a permanent income tax on their income for the next 20 years.

Really, you expect this.  The ruling class takes care of its own.  If you are an educated person in America things are pretty good, and this is the era of the educated class.

But everyone else is just furniture to the educated class.  They are bitter clingers to sneer at, or they are traditionally marginalized to rile up with identity politics.  They are children to shuffle from school to school; they are welfare clients to shuffle from program to program.

That's why you get revolution.  The ruling class warbles on its way, as unconcerned as a seagull, congratulating itself on the wonders it performs for the lower orders.  And, like the landed magnates of old, it will tell you that its own local peasants are as happy as clams.

It's nothing but blue skies until all of a sudden a cloud forms on the horizon no bigger than a man's hand, and then pretty soon the whole nation is consumed in a perfect storm.

Because the peasants weren't happy; they just knew enough to keep their mouths shut.  The lower orders aren't grateful for the wonders performed.  All government is force, and force leads directly to injustice.

There's a piece in The New Republic by liberal guardian Franklin Foer.  He's worrying, as many liberals are worrying, that government is losing its reputation for competence.

But really, all talk of government competence is myth-making.  In reality, government screws everything up, because almost every government action amounts to an attempt to block and harass the normal operation of peaceful cooperation.

Sean Trende makes this point indirectly when he warns that Obamacare won't be the end of liberalism.  It will just end the current Obama era with the Democrats dominant.  Whenever a party has been counted out, it has always roared right back on the back on the current ruling party's staggering blunders.

That's the point.  Government, all government, is nothing but a parade of blunders, and the stupidity of supposedly intelligent elites is a constant in history.

Liberals have had a good run for about a century since folks like President Wilson started boosting the notion of competent, rational government, and Franklin Foer is right to worry.

Conservatives, of course, have developed a comprehensive critique of competent government stretching over the last century.  It's telling that in his article, Foer doesn't mention it: not a word, not a name, not a single idea.

First rule of war, Mr. Foer.  Always know what your opponent is thinking.

Meanwhile, it's time for thoughtful people to think about how we can help the ordinary people suffering under the injustice of the authoritarian welfare state instead of just thinking about our own needs for talent to be free.

Hate Killed JFK, and other liberal myths

Fifty years ago today, President John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Texas by Lee Harvey Oswald, an avowed Marxist who had traveled to the Soviet Union and had a curious relationship with the Castro regime in Cuba.



So it makes complete sense that for fifty years liberals have been blaming the assassination on right-wing hate in Dallas.



For seventy years, since the end of World War II, liberals have been mucking about with healthcare, so it makes complete sense that they attribute the mess to insurance company profits.  Only insurance companies don't have high profit margins.  In 2009 when President Obama was talking about "insurance companies making record profits" they were actually #86 on the list of profitability.  Brewers were #1 at 25.9% profit margin.   Oil and gas production came in at #23 and 9.7% and Health Care Plans came in as #86 and 3.3% profit margin. Latest profit margin for Microsoft in 2013 is over 28%. So how about an Affordable Beer and Software Act?


What about greedy bankers that tell the politicians what to do and caused the crash of 2008?  In that case why is the government fining J.P. Morgan $13 billion for lying to investors back in 2006 about the quality of mortgages they were selling?  Shouldn't the big banks have the Justice Department in their pockets?  Apparently the Obama administration is worried about the perception they were too easy on the banks.  But guess what?  Back in the 2000s the banks were getting in trouble for not lending to low-quality borrowers?  When the government can blow one way in the 2000s and another way in the 2010s, as the mood takes it, who is in charge?



Thankfully, it is the liberals' own mentors, the postmodernists, that can tell us what is happening.  History, they say, is an apology for power.  Or, to turn it around, power needs a narrative, a story, to give it legitimacy.  Every bid for power is like that.  Think how the North American colonists railed against the evil King George.  Think how the liberals railed against George W. Bush.



If the liberals want to muck around with the health care system they need to find a plausible story to justify it: hence the record insurance company profits.  Yeah, just imagine those greedy CEOs wallowing in profits while little kids die of disease!  And just imagine how much money the government will need, forever, to run its fabled health insurance exchanges.



If liberals want to muck around with the credit system they need to find a plausible story to justify: first their desire to force banks to lend to high credit risks, and second, their need to blame someone when the credit system busts a gasket.  It's all the greedy bankers, chum.  In course it is.



The lesson of the Obama years is that the politicians will say anything, absolutely anything, to get their program of power passed in Congress.  And they they will say anything, absolutely anything, to keep the program going when it hits the iceberg.



So let's get a clue, shall we?



There's a difference between power politicians and greedy businessmen.  When businessmen lie and defraud they can be prosecuted and fined.  But there is no penalty for a political lie, except being voted out of office.  When a businessman lies you can have him up in court where there are detailed rules about admissible evidence and about perjury, and detailed instructions for the jury.  But in politics there are no rules, and the ultimate jury, the voters, can freely vote their hopes and fears and refuse to face the truth.



But obviously, right now, the American people are seeing a trial of liberal credibility such as we have never seen in our lifetimes.  We conservatives had better make the most of it.

GOP: Conservatives vs. Moderates

On the O'Reilly Factor, Dr. Charles Krauthammer tried to pour oil on the troubled waters of the Republican divide.  All this is just a question of tactics, he said.



But conservative firebrand Jeffrey Lord begs to differ.  Republican moderates, he argues, are willing to accede to the leftwards ratchet.  Republican conservatives want to ratchet the government to the right.  Moderate George W. Bush wanted a compassionate expansion of federal education funding with No Child Left Behind.  Conservative Ronald Reagan wanted to abolish the federal Department of Education.



Allow me to translate.



Republican conservatives are ideologues.  We believe in limited government.  Republican moderates are pragmatists.  They do not believe in any principled limits to government.  If someone comes up with a good idea for a government program to help children, why, what's the harm?



The harm, according to conservatives, is the free stuff.  Politics is almost always about politicians promising free stuff to their supporters.



When some politician comes up with a plan for a government program to help children, it always involves a free or subsidized delivery of benefits to the children of the politician's supporters with funds to be supplied by taxing or regulating people who are not the politician's supporters.



That is unjust.  It is force.  But worse, it doesn't even work, because the program to help children slowly turns into a jobs program for the program's bureaucrats and doesn't help children.



Or take Obamacare.  The "good idea" is to provide health insurance to people that currently don't "have" it.  It is claimed that about 30-45 million people don't have health insurance.  You can see that these 30-45 million people would approve of "getting" insurance, provided that they didn't have to pay for it.  Now it stands to reason that such a plan, if it subsidizes the previously uninsured, is bound to shift costs to the presently insured.  But Obama and the boys wouldn't admit that.  They claimed, from behind a barricade of complications, that "if you like your plan, you can keep your plan."



In fact, of course, as we are experiencing day to day, Obamacare does shift costs to the insured.  And the mechanism that the Obamis used to do this is to force health insurance companies to change the pricing and the content of their health insurance plans.  This year the government is forcing people with individual plans to pay more for coverage; next year it will be the turn of employer plans.



Now, the whole point of politics is, as the song goes:

You've got to accentuate the positive

eliminate the negative

Latch on to the affirmative

But don't mess with mister inbetween

Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of Obama and the boys, the negative has decided not to get eliminated. Tens of millions of people are going to have to pay more for health insurance, and they know it.



So the Obamis have screwed up on the basics of free-stuff-ology.  They have failed to hide the costs of the free stuff that were always going to be forced upon average middle-class Americans that go to work, pay their taxes, obey the law, and make sure to have health insurance.  Result: political death spiral.



Back to the difference between Republican moderates and Republican conservatives.



Republican moderates believe that there's not much you can do about free-stuff politics.  The American people want free stuff and they will vote for politicians that promise it.  You gotta go along to get along.



Republican conservatives believe that free-stuff politics is morally wrong.  It amounts to the dictum that Might is Right.  You gotta majority, you get to plunder the minority to hand out free stuff to your supporters.  Call it the Divine Right of Majorities; it's no better than the old Divine Right of Kings.



Republican conservatives believe that if the notion of humans as social animals means anything it means that we do not use force on each other, except in the case of murder and robbery.  This means, obviously, a policy of No Free Stuff, because free stuff always means that someone has been taxed or otherwise compelled to surrender their labor or property so it can be handed out to someone else.



Bottom line for Republican conservatives is that we believe we should always be trying to reduce the amount of free stuff handed out by the politicians and fighting attempts to increase it.



Leaving aside the moral question, there is the practical question.  As government has got bigger and bigger it has gotten harder and harder to find new ways to hide the fact that free stuff always has to be paid for.  Also, each free-stuff initiative kills off a zone of voluntary cooperation and freezes a relationship in place: so much money has be collected in taxes and so much money has be handed out to the government's supporters, and don't you dare try to "cut" the amount of free stuff.  Eventually, you run out of other peoples' money to hand out.



The idea of voluntary cooperation and the market has always struggled against the idea that the poor could never get an even break.  Of course the rich would use their power to loot and plunder.  Of course the poor would go to the wall.  Stand to reason.



The modern innovation is to come up with an explanation of why this isn't true.  If you prevent the powerful from using their power to loot and plunder you find that people can and will cooperate for mutual advantage.  The Invisible Hand doctrine says that if you go out into the world to serve people rather than plunder them you will find that there are people who are prepared to pay for your services.  The better you figure out their needs the more you are likely to get paid.  The newly escaped Negro slave Frederick Douglass went out into New Bedford, Massachusetts one morning and offered a woman to move a pile of coal.  After the job was done the woman paid him with two silver half-dollars.  And that was just the beginning of Douglass' life in freedom.



The great Question of the last two hundred years is over precisely this issue.  Can the market economy really deliver justice to the poor laborer?  Or is the relationship between employer and employee inherently unjust and exploitative?



The whole point of socialism/liberalism/progressivism is that only politics can repair the inherently unequal relationship between laborer and employer.



The whole point of modern conservatism is that socialism/liberalism/progressivism only makes it worse.

Should Conservatives "Toughen Up" Our Children?

The NFL "toughening up" scandal involving offensive lineman Richie Incognito and rookie Jonathan Maartin raises an interesting question.

What about toughening up?  What about hazing?  Is it a bad thing or a good thing?

After all, all military training involves some kind of "boot camp" in which recruits are deliberately given a "hard time".  For what exactly?  Is it to make recruits into obedience machines?  Is it to prepare them for the rigors of the march and the battle?  Or is it merely an exercise of power, like the slavemaster and his cowskin whip?

Here's an example of "toughening up."  It's the contrast between the rich kids in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and the country cousins.

In Mansfield Park there are six rich kids.  Four of them are clearly vicious.  Only one of them is really virtuous, and he is weak.  There are two poor kids, William and Fanny Price; they are noble, virtuous, and exemplary. The story of Mansfield Park is really just the story of the "toughening up" that William and Fanny have to go through before they get their reward.

Fanny has to go through years of humiliation as the poor kid in the household of rich kids, not to mention suffer the bullying of her nasty aunt Norris and the awful presence of the forbidding uncle Sir Thomas Bertram.  But she remains true and virtuous through all her trials.

William goes off into the Royal Navy at age 11 or 12 as a midshipman.  Readers of Napoleonic naval novels will know what that life is like.  William returns to Mansfield Park at the age of 19.  He is an impressive figure and Sir Thomas encourages him to relate his experiences.

Young as he was, William had already seen a great deal. He had been in the Mediterranean; in the West Indies; in the Mediterranean again; had been often taken on shore by the favour of his captain, and in the course of seven years had known every variety of danger which sea and war together could offer.

Everyone listens to Midshipman Price's stories, even the indolent Lady Bertram, who is shocked by his stories of danger and privation.

To [rich kid] Henry Crawford they gave a different feeling. He longed to have been at sea, and seen and done and suffered as much. His heart was warmed, his fancy fired, and he felt the highest respect for a lad who, before he was twenty, had gone through such bodily hardships and given such proofs of mind. The glory of heroism, of usefulness, of exertion, of endurance, made his own habits of selfish indulgence appear in shameful contrast; and he wished he had been a William Price, distinguishing himself and working his way to fortune and consequence with so much self-respect and happy ardour, instead of what he was!

We moderns cuddle and protect our teenagers in "habits of selfish indulgence."  We mew them up in child custodial facilities where the only adults they meet are bureaucratic lifers.  We send them on to college with luxurious dorms and exercise facilities where all they learn is how to get good grades out of the professors for the least work.  We neglect to challenge them with "hardships" and forget to encourage in them habits "of usefulness, of exertion, of endurance."

This was not always so.  In England children, boys and girls, have been sent away from home since the 13th century to work as apprentices and servants in their early teens.  In North America things were no different. Abraham Lincoln was sent away to work on another man's farm at age 14.  Jay Gould was self-employed as a surveyor at age 18.  John D. Rockefeller built a house for his mother at age 18 while working as a bookkeeper at a commission merchant.

We may perhaps determine that the "toughening up" of the Miami Dolphins' Jonathan Martin went too far.  But how tough do you need to be to make it in the NFL?  Rush Limbaugh worked as a grunt for the Kansas City Royals way back.  And the players were ruthless with him.  It got to the point that he was afraid to go to the locker room and ask them to autograph baseballs for the fans.

But you know why the players were hazing him?  They liked him.

But what I figured out was it all happened 'cause they liked me. It wasn't the other way, that I saw that they disrespect me, dislike me. I'll tell you, it got so bad at one point that I refused to go down. I went up and I said, "You know what? Send somebody else down to get those damn baseballs autographed and I'm gonna find another way to the field to do the first pitch 'cause I'm not going in there. I'm just not going down there."

About two weeks later, a contingent of players came up to my office and said, "Where have you been?" They're in uniform and they're coming up into my office. "Where have you been? Come on back." They dragged me back down there and everything was okay. I wouldn't trade those five years for anything. That's why I say I learned more in those five years, the first five years out of radio than I ever did in the whatever, 10 or 12 in it.

They say that the basis of male honor is that you never quit on your buddies on the battlefield.  It's not patriotism that keeps soldiers fighting, you see; it's the loyalty each soldier feels for his buddies.  But how do you foster that feeling of comradeship, that feeling of loyalty that demands that you lay down your life to save the life of your buddy?

I don't know, but I'm pretty sure we need more of it here in 21st century America, and I don't think we can hope to teach virtue and courage by confining teenagers in schools under the authority of government bureaucrats.

Something else is needed.

Clueless Liberal in the Academy

Much of the time it seems to conservatives that liberals and Democrats have everything figured out.  They know how to rile up the base; they know how to frighten women with their "war on women" tactic.  They all seem to get the same talking points and stick to them.

But then some liberal academic writes an article for CNN that demonstrates their utter cluelessness.

Take Prof. Julian Zelizer.  He's a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University and he has written a bunch of histories and a biography of Jimmy Carter.  He's looking at the wreck of Obamacare and writing that liberals really screwed up by proposing a half-baked proposal like Obamacare.  Let's give him his say:

The ACA was a product of a kind of half-baked liberalism that has been popular among many Democrats for several decades.

Since the 1990s, many Democrats have settled for jerry-built proposals that shy away from direct and aggressive federal intervention. Many Democrats have concluded that in the current era, the only domestic programs that stand a chance of passing Congress are those that rely on the participation of market-based actors, limited federal funding and heavy federal-state collaboration in the administrative process.

 The problem for full-baked Democrats is that it's hard to develop a clear message that lets people see the benefits of a program, and it turns into the mess that Stephen Teles has called "kludgocracy."  The solution is clear: well presented programs like Social Security, with clear benefits and clear funding that people can understand.

So, according to Teles,

if the government chose cleaner solutions to big challenges such as health care and education, "government would be bigger and more energetic where it clearly chose to act . . . but smaller and less intrusive outside of that sphere."

The cluelessness of this idea is nothing short of breathtaking.  Let's go through it all step by step.

1. "Cleaner solutions."  Social Security is a stupid example, and it shows the insular thinking of our modern academics.  The point about Social Security is that it is just about money.  The government takes in money and it hands it out to its supporters.  It doesn't have to do anything, like run a health care or education or welfare system.  The science is in on this.  Government can't do anything well except shovel money at its supporters.  The reason is that government is force, but the production and consumption of goods and services needs to be price and consumer driven.
   
2. "Half-baked liberalism."  The reason that liberals have been offering half-baked liberalism is that, as Rush Limbaugh says all the time, liberals can't admit who they are and what they really want to do.  Liberals would love to offer comprehensive and mandatory programs for everything.  It's just that the American people would upchuck on the spot if they ever did.
   
3. "Less intrusive".  Give me a break.  Where in the United States is the government not intrusive?  The government wants to tell us how to do everything, from sugary drinks to toilet flushing.  And all because of liberals.  The reason we have the "kludgocracy" is not because liberals have been stymied in their grand plans but because there are 100,000 liberal activists all beavering away on their one little issue and getting legislation and regulations passed to intrude on every aspect of human life.

It ought to be obvious, to anyone that has a clue, that all government is a "kludge."  What do you think the Soviet Union amounted to?  It was a kludge with terror on the side.  Ditto Cuba and all the rest.  When you get government without terror on the side then you just get kludge.  You get politicians offering more and more benefits to get elected.  But without the terror.

Let's look at things another way.  Let's start with Mises.  Socialism can't compute prices.  Expanded to its full potential this means that all government programs are a mess because they are always trying to deny the reality of prices.  What does that mean?  It means politicians are always trying to pretend that their grand plans don't have real and inescapable costs.

You can see this with the progression from Social Security to Medicare to Obamacare.  Social Security was, at least in the prospectus, all paid for by the payroll tax.  But remember, it was never a real savings program.  It was always "pay as you go."  Medicare was only partly "paid for."  It was a kludge job.  It had to be, because, no doubt, people in 1965 wouldn't have agreed to pay the real costs.  Anyway, government lowballed the costs, conveniently forgetting that people would line up to consume free stuff, and how.  Then with Obamacare the government had to flat out lie, because nobody would agree to any new program that wouldn't let them "keep their plan."  And that would apply to a single-payer program as well as the half-baked kludge of Obamacare.

OK. Now let's go to Hayek.  The bureaucrat in Washington can't out-perform a million producers and consumers in the marketplace.  Producing and consuming products and services -- including so-called public goods like health care -- are complex operations, and require constant adjustment by consumers and producers to the marketplace.  "Marketplace" means adjusting every day what people want, what they are willing to pay for, what producers can produce, and at what cost.  Government can't do that.  It simply can't.  Government is a system that responds to activists, special interests and "peaceful protesters" instead.  In other words, government responds to the threat of force.

Finally, there's Buchanan and Tullock and "public choice theory." (Why am I having to educate a distinguished academic on this?)  Public choice theory tells us that every government initiative involves log-rolling.  Any proposed use of government force means that a majority of the legislature votes to tax a group of people to fund some program that will provide certain benefits to another group of people.  Typically, the people asked to pay the costs of the program will vote against it.  So the proposers need to buy the votes of people only mildly hurt by the program to bring the full force of the law on the hapless minority.  That's why every legislative bill these days is a 1,000 page monster.  You have to pay off all the big interest to get their buy in.  It makes sense -- see the progression from Social Security to Medicare to Obamacare above -- that this problem will get bigger and bigger as the government itself gets bigger and bigger.

Right at the end of The Calculus of Consent Buchanan  and Tullock describe the only just voting system.  It is unanimous consent.  Under unanimous consent the majority that benefits from a program must pay the costs of the minority in order to get their buy in.  Notice that the market is a system of unanimous consent.  Nothing gets produced or bought and sold unless the buyer and the seller agree.  What a concept.

Unanimous consent, I think, is a process that would truly give us a government that "would be bigger and more energetic where it clearly chose to act . . . but smaller and less intrusive outside of that sphere."

But Zelizer is an academic.  He would know that.

Understanding Individualism

The last century has seen a great ideological war about the foundation of the good society, and that war has really been about capitalism.  Is it a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?

In about the middle of the 19th century, capitalism became, for a growing sector of western society, a scandal, and that sector is identified with the name of Karl Marx.

It seemed to young Germans like Marx, in the decade when the old peasant order in Germany was collapsing and the industrial system was taking off, that the new industrial order was a murrain on society.  Yes, it was ushering in prosperity, at least for some, but it was demolishing the old collective ways in which humans came together in society and substituted nothing but exploitation: in one word, "naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation."

As the years passed and Marxism gained traction, a rather romantic notion of pre-capitalist society grew up.  People may have been poor in the old days, but at least they weren't thrown out into the world "on their own."  They had the comfort of a collective village or extended family.  Instead of going out into the world working for wages making things for strangers people lived and worked for each other.  This idea developed into the Marxian idea of "alienation."  The peasant worker worked in the village for family and neighbors "for use" but the factory worker worked for strangers "for exchange" in a barren world of ruthless market prices.

This all fed into a Three Ages model.  In the old days people were poor but they were happy, because they lived for each other.  Then came The Fall into market capitalism and individualism where people became separated from the collectivity into a cold hard world of the "cash nexus" and selfish life "on our own" where the weak went to the wall.  But soon will come the age of socialism when the collective spirit will be restored and come to its full flowering in a new heaven on earth.

One of the main props of this argument was the idea that Britain, the vanguard of the industrial age, had been a peasant society up until about 1660.  Over the next century, with the expulsions from common land by the Enclosure movement, a vast army of landless laborers was pitched out of its rural cottages into the industrial slums of Manchester and the coal mines of Newcastle.

But Alan Macfarlane in The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property, and Social Transition argues that England was already a capitalist, market driven society as early as 1250.  Already, at that time, people were buying and selling land, people could will real and movable property, women could own property and represent themselves in court, workers regularly worked for wages, and parents routinely sent their teenage children away from home to become apprentices and servants.

All this is significant because in the supposedly traditional peasant community that the medievalists have proposed, work and home were one, so children grew up to become workers for the family; homes featured an extended family of multiple generations; women were married off young in arranged marriages and were completely ruled by the patriarch of the household;  old people were cared for in the family home until they died.

So Macfarlane argues that England was clearly not a traditional peasant society, not as late as 1250.  That means that the industrial system was not a sudden plague visited upon a defenseless England in the 18th century.  People had lived as individuals for hundreds of years already.  In any household that had limited land the children were sent out to work and the farm work was done by hired laborers.  It is reckoned that about half the population of England was working as hired laborers or as servants.

Macfarlane also calls in the testimony of people that had seen and reported on both England and France or Germany in those centuries.  Their testimony is that England seemed to be a lot more prosperous than the continental nations.  Individualism and freedom and prosperity went together.

Now in our society "individualism" has a bad odor.  It is associated with Ayn Rand and ruthless business practices, and "higgling" in the marketplace and a lack of compassion for those less fortunate, and "the sneering question: 'will it pay?'"  But I have come to realize that this understanding of individualism is completely wrong.  Individualism is not a doctrine that makes a virtue of selfishness.  It is really the opposite: it commits the individual to individual responsibility for serving others and society in general.

Individualism starts with the Axial Age religions where people first start to experience themselves as personally responsible to God for their lives.  I suspect and assume that this started in the cities of the fertile crescent in the Middle East.  But it includes Confucianism in China, Hinduism in India, as well at Judaism and Christianity.  The result is what I call the People of the Responsible Self, people that believe themselves personally responsible for every facet of their lives.

You can see that traditional peasants are not People of the Responsible Self.  They are People of the Collective Self and also People of the Helpless Self, helpless before weather, before pestilence, before the power of the lord, and before war.

But you cannot live like a peasant in the city.  You cannot repose in your family and wait for the patriarch to order you around.  You must go out and get a job.  You must figure out where the employers are and you must search out the employer that might hire you and you must persuade him to hire you.  If you rise in the world like Abraham Lincoln, once a hired laborer and soon a hirer of others, then you must start to figure out not who has a job for you but what the consumers want from a person with your skills and your products.

Here is what I am arguing.  With the growth of cities and the market economy and the wage economy humans cannot thrive in a peasant-type society.  People must live as individuals; they must be responsible for themselves; they must reach out beyond their household to find out how they can serve their fellow humans.  That is the meaning of individualism; that is what People of the Responsible Self do.

So to ask whether capitalism is a good or a bad thing misses the point.  Capitalism is the way of the city.  The people of the city are the People of the Responsible Self.  People of the Responsible Self are individuals.  They live by the ways of individualism.

And the sooner we all understand that and recoil from the progressive dream of a heaven on earth, the better.

The Bonfire of Interest Group Liberalism

For over half a century conservatives have been warning that nothing good will come of interest group liberalism.  It leads to the special interest state and reduces society to unconstrained scramble for loot in the halls of government.



Back in the 1940s, with the golden glow of the New Deal in their rear-view mirrors, the hagiographers of the the Roosevelt era were inclined to see the clash of special interests as a good thing.  It was a natural way for coalitions to come together and hash out their differences.  But then in 1969 Theodore Lowi argued in The End of Liberalism that interest group liberalism was just a contest of political power and had nothing to do with the rational or moral questions underlying political questions.



Well, now we have Obamacare and its bonfire of the special interests.  Former regulator James V. DeLong reprises the appalling record of special interest log-rolling that it took to concoct this monster.



And now liberals are shocked, shocked, that it is all falling apart, that the president's promise that you can keep your health plan was all a lie, that millions of people are losing their health plans, and that people are experiencing sticker-shock as they shop for new plans.



Listen, liberals.  The science has been in on this for decades.  Hayek wrote that the government could never have the bandwidth to run anything.  Buchanan and Tullock invented public choice theory to show how special interest lobbying and voting always resulted in the majority eating the minority for lunch.  And then there is "regulatory capture," the idea that an regulated industry always ends up capturing the minds of the regulators set up to control them.



Actually, I think that liberals know all this deep in their hearts.  Their problem is that they are riding the dragon and they don't know how to get off.  They got the power they have by promising stuff to people, and their power depends on keeping on keeping on.  They have even figured out ways to import more voters likely to vote for more programs.



Anyway, there's a chance that the American people will make a decisive turn in the next two election cycles as ordinary middle-class Americans experience directly how interest group liberalism hurts them.



Or maybe they won't, and we'll keep on floating down the river to the waterfall.

Liberals' Two Trick Pony

Obviously, with the rollout of Obamacare, liberals are in a tight spot.  And we know why.  It goes back to Hillarycare and the "Harry and Louise" TV commercials run by the insurance industry.

Harry and Louise liked their health insurance and they didn't think that a plan devised by a Hillarycare bureaucrat would be good for them.

That's why President Obama had to lie, again and again, and say that if you like your plan you can keep your plan.  Otherwise no Obamacare.

In the Weekly Standard the able Jay Cost has just analyzed the political situation Obamacare represents.  He says that it's like the First New Deal with its top-down corporatism, the Agricultural Adjustment Act -- which required farmers to plow in their wheat and kill little piglets -- and the National Industrial Recovery Act -- which set prices and wages throughout the economy according to NRA "codes."  The First New Deal was a political expression of the Progressive era's faith in "the management of the entire American economy by technocratic experts for the greater good."

Obviously there is a ton of this top-down technocracy in Obamacare.  That's the whole point behind setting minimum standards for health plans.  Foundation policy analysts and government technocrats know better than ordinary people.  Everyone from the president to his press secretary have recently told the American people that their old policies were no good.  They needed the new ones with better coverage.

But the New Dealers pivoted after a couple of disastrous years to the Second New Deal.

It was the failure of the First New Deal that brought about the rights-oriented Second New Deal, and with it Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act guaranteeing labor unions the right to organize, and eventually the Fair Labor Standards Act providing for a federal minimum wage. Liberalism shifted from attempting to manage the economy directly toward supplying the downtrodden with tools to fight their own battles.

Better hurry up repeal Obamacare, writes Cost, or the "rights" side of it, the subsidies, will win the day for the Democrats, and nobody will dare take those benefits away.

But I think that Cost misunderstands where we are politically.  He is assuming that the politics of Obamacare will play out merely as a ruling-class power play.  I don't agree.

I think that Obamacare will provoke a movement of rejection in the suburban middle class.

The Democrats have done a pretty good job since the demolition of George H. W. Bush in dividing the middle class.  They have done this by making the "economically conservative, socially liberal" middle class ashamed of the social conservatives.  The high point of this political thrust occurred when George W. Bush ran as a "compassionate conservative."  Didn't matter: the Democrats insisted all along that Bush was a religious bigot and social neanderthal.

As long as the economy was tricking along, the divisive strategy worked.  And let us not forget the moderate Democrats that were run in 2006 and the healing words of Candidate Obama to end the division of red states versus blue states.  A whole generation of young people were successfully raised in our government schools to believe in the liberal way.

But the reality of Obama provoked an immediate reaction.  We call it the Tea Party.  It rolled to an astonishing 63 seat pickup in the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterms.  Then, as we know, the Lois Lerners got to work at the IRS and slowed the Tea Party momentum.  Also, Obamacare hadn't actually been implemented so as you would notice until last week.

Now the American people, non-political middle-class people, the Harrys and Louises, are finding out that they can't keep their health plans.

At this point there is no telling what will happen.

But I suspect that the politics of Obamacare can't be confined into a ruling-class inside-the-Beltway power play.  The Obamacare issue will spill out into the country and will energize people that never took any interest in politics.  It may even teach the mind-numbed Millennials a thing or two.

My line is that average middle-class Americans belong to the People of the Responsible Self.  They experience themselves as individuals responsible individually for the conduct of their lives.  When the ruling class enacts its big government programs it denies the average middle class the right and the opportunity to live a meaningful live as responsible and productive citizens.

There has to be a consequence for a ruling class that cruelly and unjustly denies its people the right to live as responsible, contributing citizens.