Gee, Why Would These Folks Be Rebelling, Liberals?

Yesterday I was bemoaning how politicians only know politics, and politics is always about loot and plunder: vote for me and you will get free stuff.

But then I read this Joel Kotkin piece in American Mind: "The Rebellion of America's New Underclass," and it nicely illustrates the problem.

I mean the problem of the "unanticipated consequences" of political loot and plunder.

Kotkin notes that the young are the particular victims of the current economic lockdown:

• "Many young people, including college graduates, are now often employed in these low-wage ['personal contact'] industries.
• "privileged...  radicals... putting into action the political indoctrination they imbibed in college and, increasingly, even earlier."
• "the end of a remarkable period which saw, first, the ascendency of the middle class and then, particularly after World War II, the steady improvement of conditions for the working class."
• "urban renaissance... at the cost of 'the deprivation, frustration and anger of those who are becoming the new urban serfs.΅
• "Particularly impacted, first by lockdowns and then by the riots, have been urban small business owners."
• "Particularly vulnerable are the two thirds between 25 and 32 who lack a 4-year college degree."
• "Yet even educated youth now suffer consistently lower wages than their counterparts from previous generations"

And of course what these young people want is loot. As offered by Bernie Sanders and so forth.

Gosh! Now this couldn't be the fault of our ruling class, could it?

It couldn't be that college has become ridiculously expensive, powered by student loans that have absolutely no connection with marketable skills?

It couldn't be that a lot of kids are kept in school when maybe they could be doing better by working in apprenticeships at low wages building up skills.

It couldn't be that the importation of low-wage furriners has the double effect of pricing student-debt-loaded Americans out of the job market while providing serf labor for big business, because H1B-type workers cannot easily change jobs, like the agricultural serfs of old.

It couldn't be because of tons of occupational licensing that serves to prop up the old guys and keep out the young competitors.

It couldn't be because of the substantial taxation on labor with various payroll taxes that can add 30 percent to the lost of labor.

It couldn't be because of minimum-wage laws that prevent youngsters without connections from getting a start in the labor market (while rich kids get to do unpaid internships).

It couldn't be because of complicated zoning laws and the expensive development process that obviously privileges existing developers against new entrants.

It couldn't be because the whole education system is a government loot-and-plunder operation privileging government workers and resistant to change and reform.

It couldn't be because energy is getting more expensive as electric utilities are forced to load up on expensive and unreliable and subsidized "renewable"energy.

It couldn't be because the current welfare system discourages the two-parent family and encourages young lower-class women to have children without benefit of father, so that in the white underclass, at least, the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

It couldn't be because liberals have been teaching the lower classes for over a century to believe in themselves as victims rather than get on the Road to the Middle Class and learn the ways and the skills of the city.

"Only by restoring broad upward mobility can we hope to maintain a healthy democratic society", writes Joel Kotkin.

But he really doesn't have a clue. The way to restore upward mobility is to prevent the established -- government union workers to licensed physicians to Social Security recipients -- from taxing and looting the youngsters.

And all the "it couldn't be"s that I have listed above, or almost all, derive from the left and its religious faith in the power of government programs to "bend the arc of history towards justice."

No! The great lesson of the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years is that it was always a surprise. Nobody saw it coming, not machine textiles, not steam power from coal, not oil from under the ground, not even Amazon and its on-line marketplace.

I mean. Who among us bought Amazon stock the day it went public in 1997 at $1.97 per share (in today's shares)? Today Amazon is at $2,618 per share. So, suppose you bought $5,000 of Amazon on a flyer in 1997? Today it would be worth $6.6 million.

But who among us ever imagined Amazon would end up like this? I certainly didn't. Hey, I bought books on Amazon, but never imagined what it could become, now with a fleet of 80 aircraft delivering goods!

But that's my point. The whole of the last 200 years of astonishing economic growth has been on the backs of the Amazon of the day, that nobody saw coming.

And that means that, Rule One is: nobody has a clue. 

Especially politicians. Especially activists. Especially journalists. Especially professors. Especially nice liberal ladies with social moralizing yard-signs out front.

Now. Who amongst us is going to go first and tell the liberal Emperor he has no clothes?