The lesson of the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years is that it was not planned. Not legislated. Not even expected. Nobody saw it coming except some Brit in 1685 that took a look at the new manufacturing and wrote that
The point is that the Great Enrichment was a succession of what George Gilder calls Surprises, economic revolutions that nobody saw coming, whether the textile revolution, the steam revolution, the oil revolution, the electricity revolution, etc. Not only that, but the political system usually tried to stop the revolutions, as it is presently trying to do with Uber and AirBnB. Of course it does. Politics is about power, and the ruling class using the power of government to enrich itself and its supporters. Economic revolutions upset the balance of power and threaten the rule of the ruling class.
You can see why economic revolutions are a Surprise. Take the current possibilities of "blockchain," the technology behind the Bitcoin cybercurrency. You tell me: is this going to change the world, blow current government finance out of the water, or is it a flash in the pan that is being hyped by a bunch of nerdly cyberpunks?
The question is the same as asking about Apple Computer back in 2001. On December 8, 2000 Apple stock closed at $1.08. Today, August 16, 2018, it is trading at $213. So, if I had bought $10,000 of Apple stock for Christmas back in 2000 I would have stock worth about $1,970,000 today. But hey, who was thinking about that back then? Apple hadn't even produced the first iPod yet. And when they did, it was just something that The Kids were interested in.
So, I dare to say, it is not politics that has radically improved peoples' lives over the past 200 years. It is chaps like Steve Jobs, and the nobodies that invented the Spinning Jenny, and that started drilling for oil, and that figured out the relation between electricity and magnetism and then brought electric light and the telephone to every household. And the mechanic Henry Ford that started the process to bring the price of the average personal automobile down to about three to six months of the average worker's wage.
Yet the believers in politics never rest. Here is Sen. Elizabeth Warren with a proposal to put corporations completely under the knout of politicians with her Accountable Capitalism Act. Here are the folks in California trying to gin up state-wide rent control. And there is this piece by Steve Baldwin about the myriad ways in which President Obama tried to increase Democratic and political control of America.
Actually I understand what is going on. These folks are trying to make the world safe, to nail down their idea of the safe and just society, and defend against disruptive and dangerous irruptions. And what we humans are instinctively programmed to do is defend our "patch of land" from all who would threaten it.
But the world has changed. Now we live in the market economy. Now the threat is that your corporate job will be canceled by the next economic revolution. But that is pretty mild compared with the Mongols sacking your town and killing all the men and enslaving all the women.
People aren't willing to settle for the uncertainty of the market. They want everything nailed down. If they are renters, they don't want to pay more when housing demand goes up. If they are homeowners they don't want their view spoiled by a new housing development. If they are workers they don't take kindly to pay-cuts and layoffs during a recession. And there are always Sen. Warrens and President Obamas to give voice to their rage.
My sister wonders how come the Founding Fathers had a better understanding of human nature than today's experts. How was such a group of intellectual giants possible? I think the answer is that the bourgeois thinkers in the 17th and 18th century were consciously trying to tame the power of kings and aristocrats, so they built a system to limit political power of the Old Regime. But our modern ruling class cannot get its head around the notion about someone else getting power. I mean, darling, imagine some rude, crude monster like Trump getting power. Not going to happen, not on our watch!
Now you would think that the smart guys would say: yeah, our ideas are great, but suppose some yahoo were to become president and use our powers against us?
The fact is that Trump has done exactly that. Obamacare was too complicated to be fully encoded in legislation, so most of it was left for "the Secretary" to enact in regulations. Guess what: Trump has unwound Obamacare with regulations that reverse the regulations of the Obama guys. No fair! Illegal! So write a couple of tame professors in The New York Times. Well, then, you chappies, the Obama boys should have taken their time and written the entirety of Obamacare in the original Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
Actually, it's worse than that. The problem with government programs and big entitlements is that you can't reform them, because the beneficiaries will resist to the knife any attempt to reduce their benefits. You the rulers have to cheat. With Medicare a bunch of "reforms" were passed deep in Obamacare that nobody campaigned on and that amounted to stealth rationing. We are talking about Sarah Palin's "death panels" and the protocols of Medicare Hospice, in which the "system" decides at some point to throw the switch and have you starve to death, courtesy of Medicare, while telling the family comforting words about their "journey."
I'd say that when you pass significant Medicare changes without getting the consent of the governed, or pressure universities to institute special administrative panels to attack "rape culture" on campus without even going through a formal regulatory process, you are committing injustice. But that is the problem with the modern state. It is doing so many things that the bandwidth of the legislature is not broad enough to legislate it. So it ends up doing stealthy stuff behind the curtain. I call that sort of governance is simple injustice.
But there is none so blind as he that will not see. As progressives flop around from one power grab to another they fail to see the bigger picture. That politics makes most things worse. That the regulatory state serves only the powerful and the well-connected. That the Great Enrichment happened while nobody was looking.
And that the need to defend that "patch of land" to the last man went out with the agricultural age.
The problem is that if our ruling class would ever come to the realization that its use of political power is cruel and unjust it would have to confront another problem: what use is the ruling class, anyway?
But that is the point about ruling classes. After the first generation, the revolutionaries, they are all idiots.
Though we are a nation already pretty substantial... yet it is easy for us to be ten times richer.Carew Reynell was the guy's name. Ever heard of him? Didn't think you had. Me neither. In fact Reynell had it wrong. We are 30 times richer than 1800. And not much enrichment happened between 1865 and 1815 because the Brits were busy conducting a Second Hundred Years War against the French.
The point is that the Great Enrichment was a succession of what George Gilder calls Surprises, economic revolutions that nobody saw coming, whether the textile revolution, the steam revolution, the oil revolution, the electricity revolution, etc. Not only that, but the political system usually tried to stop the revolutions, as it is presently trying to do with Uber and AirBnB. Of course it does. Politics is about power, and the ruling class using the power of government to enrich itself and its supporters. Economic revolutions upset the balance of power and threaten the rule of the ruling class.
You can see why economic revolutions are a Surprise. Take the current possibilities of "blockchain," the technology behind the Bitcoin cybercurrency. You tell me: is this going to change the world, blow current government finance out of the water, or is it a flash in the pan that is being hyped by a bunch of nerdly cyberpunks?
The question is the same as asking about Apple Computer back in 2001. On December 8, 2000 Apple stock closed at $1.08. Today, August 16, 2018, it is trading at $213. So, if I had bought $10,000 of Apple stock for Christmas back in 2000 I would have stock worth about $1,970,000 today. But hey, who was thinking about that back then? Apple hadn't even produced the first iPod yet. And when they did, it was just something that The Kids were interested in.
So, I dare to say, it is not politics that has radically improved peoples' lives over the past 200 years. It is chaps like Steve Jobs, and the nobodies that invented the Spinning Jenny, and that started drilling for oil, and that figured out the relation between electricity and magnetism and then brought electric light and the telephone to every household. And the mechanic Henry Ford that started the process to bring the price of the average personal automobile down to about three to six months of the average worker's wage.
Yet the believers in politics never rest. Here is Sen. Elizabeth Warren with a proposal to put corporations completely under the knout of politicians with her Accountable Capitalism Act. Here are the folks in California trying to gin up state-wide rent control. And there is this piece by Steve Baldwin about the myriad ways in which President Obama tried to increase Democratic and political control of America.
Actually I understand what is going on. These folks are trying to make the world safe, to nail down their idea of the safe and just society, and defend against disruptive and dangerous irruptions. And what we humans are instinctively programmed to do is defend our "patch of land" from all who would threaten it.
But the world has changed. Now we live in the market economy. Now the threat is that your corporate job will be canceled by the next economic revolution. But that is pretty mild compared with the Mongols sacking your town and killing all the men and enslaving all the women.
People aren't willing to settle for the uncertainty of the market. They want everything nailed down. If they are renters, they don't want to pay more when housing demand goes up. If they are homeowners they don't want their view spoiled by a new housing development. If they are workers they don't take kindly to pay-cuts and layoffs during a recession. And there are always Sen. Warrens and President Obamas to give voice to their rage.
My sister wonders how come the Founding Fathers had a better understanding of human nature than today's experts. How was such a group of intellectual giants possible? I think the answer is that the bourgeois thinkers in the 17th and 18th century were consciously trying to tame the power of kings and aristocrats, so they built a system to limit political power of the Old Regime. But our modern ruling class cannot get its head around the notion about someone else getting power. I mean, darling, imagine some rude, crude monster like Trump getting power. Not going to happen, not on our watch!
Now you would think that the smart guys would say: yeah, our ideas are great, but suppose some yahoo were to become president and use our powers against us?
The fact is that Trump has done exactly that. Obamacare was too complicated to be fully encoded in legislation, so most of it was left for "the Secretary" to enact in regulations. Guess what: Trump has unwound Obamacare with regulations that reverse the regulations of the Obama guys. No fair! Illegal! So write a couple of tame professors in The New York Times. Well, then, you chappies, the Obama boys should have taken their time and written the entirety of Obamacare in the original Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
Actually, it's worse than that. The problem with government programs and big entitlements is that you can't reform them, because the beneficiaries will resist to the knife any attempt to reduce their benefits. You the rulers have to cheat. With Medicare a bunch of "reforms" were passed deep in Obamacare that nobody campaigned on and that amounted to stealth rationing. We are talking about Sarah Palin's "death panels" and the protocols of Medicare Hospice, in which the "system" decides at some point to throw the switch and have you starve to death, courtesy of Medicare, while telling the family comforting words about their "journey."
I'd say that when you pass significant Medicare changes without getting the consent of the governed, or pressure universities to institute special administrative panels to attack "rape culture" on campus without even going through a formal regulatory process, you are committing injustice. But that is the problem with the modern state. It is doing so many things that the bandwidth of the legislature is not broad enough to legislate it. So it ends up doing stealthy stuff behind the curtain. I call that sort of governance is simple injustice.
But there is none so blind as he that will not see. As progressives flop around from one power grab to another they fail to see the bigger picture. That politics makes most things worse. That the regulatory state serves only the powerful and the well-connected. That the Great Enrichment happened while nobody was looking.
And that the need to defend that "patch of land" to the last man went out with the agricultural age.
The problem is that if our ruling class would ever come to the realization that its use of political power is cruel and unjust it would have to confront another problem: what use is the ruling class, anyway?
But that is the point about ruling classes. After the first generation, the revolutionaries, they are all idiots.
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