The cure is to cut off the food supply. Cut off welfare. Cut all non essential employment. End social security. End AFDC. End EBT. Debase the dollar value until minimum wage equals the value of labor. Defund all social services. Defund public schools. Defund police. Defund hospital emergency. When the supply of labor settles to equal the legitimate demand for labor then calm will be restored.
But actually, the people rioting are not the indigent rats, but the educated youth wing of the Democratic Party. The rats are doing fine, if you assume that, like the bottom 35 percent of white Americans, their men don't work much and their women don't marry much.
The problem with the indigent rats is the problem with George Floyd, with Rayshard Brooks, with Michael Brown, with Trayvon Martin, that they are young black men that have never twigged to the city market economy. They are not employed, not married, medicating themselves with drugs, etc. And, as with George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks, they are terrified of being arrested and sent back into jail.
Anyway, it go me to thinking. What do people want? Or, more importantly, what do each of my reductive Three Peoples want out of government?
Let us start with the People of the Responsible Self, the Commoners. Our defining characteristic is that we don't want power, and we don't want to be under someone else's power. Or, as Sarah Hoyt writes in "Vive La Bourgeoisie,"
You neither want to be ruled nor to rule. You want to rule yourself.
Or, to reframe what my friend wrote, We Commoners want the responsibility and dignity of saving for our own Social Security and old age. We want to supervise and pay for the education of our own children. We want to do our own health care and not have to dodge through all the crumbling monuments of "free" health care. As for the poor? We are willing to step up and help. But first, we think they should get a job, and that starts with an end to the minimum wage and all the gubmint programs that discourage the poor from getting with the program and learning how to become good middle-class wage-earners and accept the rules of the market economy.
Whatabout the People of the Subordinate Self, the Clients, the victims, the "oppressed peoples?" The defining principle of their lives is the belief that the world is a brutal place and the only way to survive is to find a powerful leader and serve that leader in return for the safety of his protection. You do what you have to do to earn his protection. In our society that means voting for the lefty party that offers free stuff, from welfare to to EBT to social services to Social Security and Medicare. It's a cold cruel world out there, and you have to find a warm hearth to keep warm.
Whatabout the People of the Creative Self, the educated Gentry? The defining principle of the Gentry life is to elevate yourself above the herd. Mere responsible behavior is not enough. You must "make your mark" in your chosen field. One of those fields is "activism" bending the arc of history towards justice for the traditionally marginalized, or the "oppressed peoples" of the world. And the way to do that, as has developed over the last century or so, is to create government programs that assign the responsibility for human welfare to wise, educated bureaucrats, politicians and activists. Thus the whole array of gubmint programs.
Now I say that the reason for Trump and Brexit and the populist nationalists in Europe is that the current welfare state is great for the educated Gentry, who have awarded themselves lots of remunerative and satisfying creative gigs. (Case in point: when I went to an engineering conference in Switzerland in 1990, all the European academics there seemed to have some EU grant or gig. They were all as happy as clams). The welfare state is great, at least on the surface, for the Clients and the Victims, because it puts off the evil day when they knuckle down to the fact of the market economy and start down the Road to the Middle Class.
But the current setup is not so great for the People of the Responsible Self, the Commoners. For one thing, the educated Gentry likes to imagine us all as racist-sexist-homophobes. For another, the politics of the Gentry is all about nice gigs for themselves and free money for the Victims. But they never think about how their policy "plays in Peoria."
For instance, if Commoners weren't putting payroll taxes into Social Security and Medicare and unemployment insurance, they could be saving their own money for retirement and then using it on the way to start a business or buy a house or educate the kids. If we didn't have the gubmint housing programs with 80 percent down 30 year loans then we would be back to the pre-WWII rules where you probably put 50 percent down with a ten-year mortgage. If that were the case, then housing prices would be a lot lower and ordinary people could afford to buy houses. Especially the ordinary people that saved a little money for a big down payment.
I want to dwell on this housing thing. "Everybody" thinks that we need the government and Fannie/Freddie to make housing affordable for ordinary people, especially minorities. But all the subsidies and 80 percent loans and 30-year stuff means that more people can afford to spend more on housing, and that bids the price up. Is that good or bad? Is it affordable? You tell me.
To wrap up, if you want to understand the present political situation, it helps to see that the educated Gentry is getting what they want and the Clients and victims get their "benefits." But, I would say, ordinary Commoners are told to step to the back of the line, and like it. Because pejoratives.
Or, as I say, "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice."
At the present moment, our educated Gentry has No Idea about this. Because they are wonderful and Commoners are white supremacists and systemic racists.
When you think about it, it shows that the educated Gentry is clueless. Because if they were half as wise as they pretend, they would be on to the fact that the ordinary Commoner has been getting shafted, by them, for years.
The job of any good colonialist is to know when "the natives are restless" and why.
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