The Only Thing That Politics Knows is Loot and Plunder

Back in the riots of the 1960s and 1970s guess what the radicals demanded? Less money on police and more money on school lunches and social services.

So now what do the radicals want? To defund the police and spend the money of social services and minority communities.

What is going on here?

I will tell you. If you are in politics the only thing you know is loot and plunder. That is what politics is about and what it has always been about since the dawn of dawn raids.

So the politician cannot see further than selling the notion that the other guys are screwing us and now we are going to screw them back.

By the way, in the City of Seattle, for 2017, the last year with data from the Census Bureau, police cost $200 million out of a total $3.75 billion in spending. Guess what the biggest item is? It is $1.1 billion for "Fuel and Energy" which comes mainly from the municipal Seattle City Light. 

Hey, I know wokies! Why not privatize and sell off City Light! Think of the proceeds that you can spend on lefty wish lists! But of course, that would never occur to you.

Back in the Sixties, as now, the residents of the inner cities resented that the rich folks looked down on them.

This has been the story of big city politics since the middle of the 19th century. The Irish were looked down upon as "shanty Irish" until they made their way into the middle class as "lace-curtain Irish." Jews that started immigrating after the 1905 pogroms were considered dumb, until they started knocking on the doors of Harvard, and the gentlemen at Harvard decided that the pushy smart Jewish kids weren't gentlemanly enough. Italians were notorious gangsters, until they got into the middle class and Frank Rizzo became mayor of Philadelphia on a law-and-order platform.

When an ethnic group first arrives in the city it feels like the whole world is out to get it. But then, slowly, inch by inch, it claws its way into the middle class, getting education and skills and learning how to interface and live with the market economy, which doesn't care about your ethnicity, not much, as long as you are trustworthy and deliver.

But there is a way to slow this process down. You can give a group of workers monopoly privileges working in a labor union in a large corporation. Then they'll think it's their bargaining power that has given them prosperity, rather than their skills and the innovation of their employer. You can give them welfare and free lunches and funnel money to them through community activist groups. Then they'll think that political power is the name of the game. And, as happened after the Great Society, the men won't work much and the women won't marry much.

Wrong idea. What gets people to be accepted as ordinary citizens is that they submit to the city's market economy and learn how to wive and thrive according to its rules. Then they find that it doesn't matter who looks down on them. They got their job, they got their family, they got their savings, and they got their respect.

Now, my notion with the Great Reaction is that liberal and lefty politics is a lurch back to the primitive, replacing market trust with fear, law with vengeance, and so on.

And I believe that the left's encouragement of resentment and class politics is one of the great crimes of the age. Because the one thing to learn, when you get to the city, is to forget your tribal resentments and your fear of the tribe next door, but to plunge into the market culture of trust and service.

And I believe, with my Little Darlings theory, that leftist politics is all about leftist power, not about helping the downtrodden. Leftist politics is all about finding the latest oppressed group and enticing that group into political followership with the prospect of loot and plunder. Because lefties understand only political power; they are utterly ignorant of the settled science that shows how and why we live in the Great Enrichment that has raised real per-capita income by 30 times in the last two hundred years.

But, I always say, to make the cultural adjustment to the market economy culture is the hardest thing in the world to do, because humans are programmed to mistrust the tribe next door, because the tribe next door represents a competitor for their food growing territory. Who knew that the way to prosper was to offer your services on the open market and to trust anyone that acts trustworthy?

But alas for the folks in the looted areas, their businesses destroyed, their hopes dashed. Because the lesson of the Sixties Riot era is that the riot areas never come back. See Detroit and Newark.