Good Luck, Joe. You'll Need It

So you, Mr President and your Democratic friends have got rid of the awful Trump. So what comes next?

I'd say that the most important thing for your administration to do is to avoid the mistakes of the early Obama administration. There were two big ones.

First, there was the decision to make the "stimulus" all about loot and plunder for Democratic Party constituencies like public-school teachers instead of restarting the wheels of commerce after a generational financial crisis.

Second, there was the push for Obamacare, all about making health care a totally centralized administrative system, instead of restarting the wheels of commerce after a generational financial crisis.

Incidentally the financial crisis was caused by the bursting of a housing bubble caused by gubmint subsidy of home mortgages that encouraged Americans to buy houses on low down payments and 30-year fixed mortgages. This housing subsidy is the big reason why housing prices, to this day, are sky-high and very difficult for ordinary young middle-class Americans trying to buy a house for the first time.

I noticed that President Trump, in his farewell address, catalogued all the wonderful things he had done for ordinary Americans. But you, President Biden, have emphasized, after restarting the economy, climate change and systemic racism. And the stimulus bill you have proposed so far sounds just like another loot and plunder operation for the Democratic Party supporters.

Frankly, I believe that climate change and systemic racism are both catnip for the educated Gentry, and provide nothing for the vast majority of Americans.

I don't have much to say about climate change, although I think it is an instance of the Left's Conceit that it knows what is good for the rest of us. 

The decarbonizing plan is an utter folly that will visit enormous hardship on ordinary Americans. Cheap energy is, and will continue to be, the basis of a healthy economy that extends prosperity to all walks of life. I maintain, according to the notion of Daniel Botkin in Discordant Harmonies, that there is only a climate problem if the climate changes too fast for plant and animal species to migrate with the climate. An example of dangerous climate change is cold weather on the farms of folks in the far North and the harvest fails and they all die -- as in Scotland in the 1690s at the depths of the Little Ice Age.

It's telling that the Scottish famine in 1690 was a tragedy while the Irish potato famine 150 years later was a scandal. The difference is that by 1840 we Westerners had the means to get food to a famine area. Today we have probably an order of magnitude more "means" to adapt to climate change.

Then there is systemic racism. One fine day, a brave politician is going to call an end to what I call the School of Hate. But I doubt if it will be you, Mr. President.

I get the liberal obsession with race. The civil rights movement was, for liberals, an ecstatic moment, a supernova of surpassing brightness that lighted up the moral universe. But once you have made discrimination by race illegal then, as my grandfather would have said, it's all over bar shouting. By placing the chains of race guilt upon ordinary white Americans for the last half century you have committed a moral crime that, to me, is morally equivalent to the Jim Crow laws that you fought to eliminate. But this moral crime is, to me, just one of the Left's Crimes.

It seems that our problems are insoluble. But, as Ike said, if you have a problem you can't solve, make it bigger.

I think that our Big Problem is that our educated ruling class operates according to a political formula that violates what I call the Four Laws of modern governance. I wonder if you have heard about them, Mr. President. I would recommend putting them on your desk, as President Truman had "The Buck Stops Here" on his desk. Here they are:

Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises). 

The administrative state cannot work because the Man in Washington does not have the bandwidth to run the economy (Hayek). 

Regulation does not work because “regulatory capture” (Stigler). 

Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them (Chantrill).

Really, everything that our educated ruling class has attempted since the turn of the 20th century attempts to violate these laws. But breaking these laws is catnip for the ruling clique and the larger ruling class, because they all provide for the satisfactions of ruling class members: ambition, honor, and vanity. 

Now I think that the present violations of the Four Laws have gone "about as furr as it can go." Any more ordure piled on top of the mountain of legislation and regulation of the past century is going to seriously break the United States. But your party, Mr. President, wants to double down with Medicare for All, which violates all four laws, and your Green New Deal which will probably be mostly a regulatory scam and only violate the last three laws.

But that is just nuts and bolts.

To make the problem even bigger, I think it stems from the insularity of our ruling elite, that cannot imagine the notion of people not like the educated elite, and that these other people would choose to live a different life than the educated, and worship different gods. If you read about my Three Peoples notion, Mr. President, you will see how understanding the people of today as belonging to different worlds -- the world of the Creative, the Responsible, and the Subordinate -- immediately raises the question of how to make it possible for these very different kinds of people to live in the same society. Notably, the "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" doctrine of Allyism lacks such a world view. It only sees the world in the black and white of allies fighting for the oppressed peoples against the white oppressors.

Now I think that Allyism basically reduces to this: that the woke elite gets to buy the votes of the oppressed peoples with loot and plunder seized from the white oppressors. In other words it is a Viking world view masquerading as noble benevolence. It is the Big Problem with the left's Activism Culture. That is perhaps why my basic critique of your side, Mr. President, is called the Great Reaction, a lurch to the primitive:

Socialism is a return to slavery; the welfare state is a return to feudalism; identity politics is neo-tribalism; reparations is neo-vengeance; activism a return to revolution, rioting for the ruling class, part medieval knight-errantry, and part activisme, or gentry kids putting on a school play for their parents; helpless victims are a return to sacrifice; totalitarianism is a return to the scapegoat; social justice is good old loot and plunder.

My prediction, Mr. President, is that by the third year of your presidency we will be seeing serious economic problems, and that your supporters will be looking around desperately for a reason, some fault of the big corporations or the lack of a proper minimum wage or the rampaging evil of systemic racism. And you will find yourself called upon to take drastic economic and political action that will only make things worse. For that is the way of the world, that the rulers and their supporters are the last to know there is a problem.

My diagnosis of our national problem is that it issues from a wrong turn by our educated elite. You and your supporters, Mr. President, interpret your culture of creativity in terms of creating a new society. Run by people like you.

But I say that the correct agenda of a culture of creativity is creating a new Me, and leaving society alone. You create a new Me in the Hero's journey into the unconscious, and if you survive the journey, you will come back much sadder and wiser. Only then will you be qualified to help other people. And you will probably die on the border between Order and Chaos as a Sacrificial Hero. I have written about this, Mr. President, in my writing on "A Vision of the Good Life Better Than the Left."

The presidency of Donald Trump was a wake-up call to our present ruling class, that they are "not fit for purpose" as the Brits say. Unfortunately, it is clear that our ruling class has not gotten the message. Indeed, the only message it has had in the last four years was to deep six President Trump.

You will notice, Mr. President, that in the urge of your supporters to deep-six Donald Trump there is nothing that exhibits any concern for the American people, apart from the educated gentry of the ruling class and its clients the "oppressed peoples." This means that the American people are condemned to suffer in the next few years from the blindness and the myopia of your supporters.

It will not be a happy time.

Trump's Biggest Failure: The Race Issue

There are all kinds of articles around today mourning President Trump's out-of-control insults. There's Bush appointee J.T. Young warning us not to throw out the baby -- the populism that Trump fed and watered -- with the bath water -- Trump and his insults.

The Left’s legitimate fear is that conservative populism could be an even more potentially potent political force than the potent one Trump wielded. Instead of Trump suppressing its growth in suburbs and among women, another candidate — such as a woman like former UN Ambassador and South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley — could draw in millions more.

Well, OK. So the suburbs and the women don't feel threatened by the left yet. They still think themselves above the bitter clingers and the deplorables of the white working class, darling. So Ben Franklin's adage still applies, that experience keeps a dear school but they will learn in no other.

Or Breitbart's Joe Pollak on Trump's "will to win:"

His boldness made him an extraordinarily successful president — until his disastrous January 6 challenge, which has left the Republican Party divided and dispirited.

Well yeah. Because the Washington DC GOP has lived for decades in fear of being named and shamed and shunned. And January 6 proved that they still live in fear.

Look, I've been reading a bit about male insults and vaunting in Bernard Cornwell's novels on England's Alfred the Great. His hero, Uhtred, is half way between the nice literate Christian peacemaking of Alfred and the pagan insult and revenge culture of the Danes. But when it is time for battle, then the nicey-nicey goes out the window. It is all insults and vaunting and fighting. And the best man wins.

If you are going to have a guy fighting for you, then he is going to be showing that he is unafraid of the enemy. His insulting, his vaunting, are the way he tells his supporters that he has got their backs, and they can follow him, because he has the victory glint in his eyes.

But one thing Trump never did. He never took on the Race Issue, the number one rule in America today that you are a white racist if "we" say you are. And there is no defense, no recourse.

And in the years that Trump did nothing about the Race Issue, the left came up with a new race canard, the doctrine of "systemic racism" which means that whites are guilty forever.

The next leader of the conservative populist movement has to take the Race Issue, head on, and say to any race accusation: It Takes One to Know One.

Then he should have a stable of follow-on comments, such as: "the American people that fought a war to free the slaves? Those are your racists?" Or, "the American people that elected a Congress that passed the civil rights acts? Those are your racists?" And so on.

This is not that hard. So long as our liberal friends have the cowskin Race Whip in the back pocket we conservative populists are going to be slaves on the liberal estate, touching our forelocks to the liberal overseer and begging Massa not to bring out the whip for a flogging.

Obviously, that man is not Nikki Haley. It will be the politician that first rises out of the current funk and has the courage to tell his populist supporters that the January 6 Capitol riot and its aftermath of fences and riot troops shows that the ruling class is afraid of them, that it fears their strength, and rightly so. And so, On to Richmond!

And yes. No harm in a little Whataboutism. Whatabout BLM/AntiFa? When is our government going to protect us from them with fences and National Guardsmen? Like they jumped to protect themselves in Washington in a New York minute.

This is not that hard. Our liberal overseers will continue to insult us and abuse us and belittle us, and play their race cards and gender cards and now transgender cards. They will continue this until their abuse starts to cost them. And then it will be too late.

Nothing New: Movements that Decide to Cleanse Society of Evil

The indispensible Angelo Codevilla, pseudonymous author of "The Flight 93 Election" back in 2016 has another one. It's called "Millenarian Mobs" and it's about the movements that arise all the time to cleanse and purify a fallen world.

Our present movement of purifying wokies are nothing new.

The Americans who confess other people’s racism absolve themselves inexpensively by a moral mechanism common to humanity: the more I profess to hate evil, the more I showcase my own goodness...

Again and again over the centuries, persons who have imagined themselves cleansed by ritual confessions have believed themselves elevated above the rest of humanity and, hence, entitled to oppress or even annihilate those around them.

And the toppling of monuments is nothing new: "Smashing others’ idols was, and remains, a staple of tribal warfare."

But down the ages the social-cleansing have been attacks by subordinate revolutionaries on the ruling class, today's revolutionaries are not exactly opponents of the ruling class. As we would say, the wokies are youngsters often from the educated Gentry class that, in normal times, would expect to ascend in good time into the ruling elite. But, 

Always, millennial movements grow out of ordinary struggles. A few firebrands interpret the struggles radically, gather followers, and lead them along their own apocalyptic logic to bloody disaster. Social dislocations, as well as injustices, failures of leadership, and excessive expectations have been like tinder waiting for sparks.

In our time these millennial movements have tended to be "violent, revolutionary totalitarianism," combining political hegemony with a secular-religious puritanism.

Almost invariably the leaders have been outcasts, or what Marxists call “lumpen-intellectuals.”... Their initial focus was some obvious evil. As often as not, they claimed heavenly messages or apparitions as their authority. Their audience was twofold: those who saw themselves as the evil’s primary victims and those who wished to shed their responsibility for it. To the former, the prophets promised redress and immediate relief, while to all, and especially to the latter, they promised a role in a holy enterprise. Some sort of confession of sin and cleansing ritual would follow.  

 "Those who had undergone cleansing believed themselves so pure that they were no longer capable of sin." But there was work to be done: cleansing the rest of society. And lower down the scale it was simply a question of killing your enemies.

I think this is the key point of the article. Educated people don't justify just going out and killing people; they have to persuade themselves of their innocence; they need to rationalize their revolution. Only when educated people feel that they have cleansed themselves do they proceed to the vital task of cleansing others. Don't they just!

But the rioters that plundered the Magnificent Mile in Chicago, they are just looking for an excuse to lurch to the primitive, back to good old loot and plunder and vengeance. As one BLM organizer put it: "That's reparations."

In our day we have a political elite concerned with holding onto power, and apparently using "the revolutionary movements as allies against their socio-political competitors." As I would say, they are Gentry using their lower-class Clients to sock it to the Commoners. Thus we have the rulers joining with the wokies to make ideological war on the Commoner middle class that, led by Trump, is getting restless.

Don't be fooled by the talk about the "oppressed" and the "oppressors," says Codevilla.

Today, we need not imagine that the corporate magnates, the hard-bitten politicians, the FBI officials, who kneel draped in Kente cloth in penitence for “white racist America,” who declare solidarity with the mobs that deface statues—that any of them believe in anything other than their own power and advantage. Nor need we imagine that the majority of those mobs’ members are doing anything other than enjoying a holiday from the law.

 These people are playing an old, old game, the game of divide and conquer to stay in power. And the only thing to do, the only thing that would ever do, is "to treat the millennialist mob as the enemies they are" and do something about it.

It may just be necessary to win an election or two. Or not.

The Third Imperial Age Is (Was) The Lefty Age

A couple of days ago I was commenting on a piece by Financial Times conventional-wisdom journalist John Lloyd that maybe we are entering the Third Imperial Age. His notion is Russia and China taking over the world.

Where the Second Imperial Age was the European imperialism of the last 500 years. But a sharp-eyed reader emailed me to say:

The power seeking imperial types turned their attention from conquering neighbor lands in 1917.  The Russian Revolution launched the third imperial age of socialism.  Power seekers expanded their power and wealth by attacking with taxes the productive endeavor of wealth creators.  Imperial government expanded and their welfare clients bred themselves into over supply.  The peak occurs when government harvests near half of all wealth created.

Hey! How come I didn't think of that! Is he right or is he right?

Yes indeedy. Lefties are all about power, political power, and only power. Talk about imperialism! The worst: the very worst.

Now let us rehearse imperialism down the ages.

First Age of Imperialism. It features chaps like China that believed -- when not distracted by a Time of Troubles -- in conquering neighboring states and making them into tributary states, states that send tribute to the Son of Heaven at the center of the world in Beijing. As it should be. Also Rome, which believed in sending the legionaries out every now and again for a spot of loot and plunder and slaves. But most of the rest of the time they let the folks trade to and fro. Except for the Carthaginians. Carthago delenda est. When the Romans ran out of loot and plunder and slaves they inflated the currency and slowly deflated the Roman Empire so that Edward Gibbon could write a book about the whole procedure.

Second Age of Imperialism. It features European nobodies heading out across the world to trade. Christopher Columbus, son of a Genoese wool-worker that owned a cheese stand. Robert Clive, son of a small landowner. A troublemaker, he was sent out to India and started out "as little more than a glorified assistant shopkeeper." But then he learned a spot of soldiering and went on to win the battle of Plassey. Captain Cook was the second son of a Scottish farm laborer. He began his naval career as a merchant navy apprentice in coasting ships carrying coals from Newcastle. Alexander Hamilton, "bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar,"was a teenaged businessman in St. Croix, and was so smart the local gents sent him to New York to go to school, where he taught the Yanks how to do the National Debt. Cecil Rhodes, son of a curate, was asthmatic and was sent out to South Africa for his health. He and his brother failed trying to grow cotton, but then he headed out to the Kimberley diamond fields. All these nobodies were advancing the frontiers of trade, and if they made a spot of money they often returned to the home country and were stigmatized as "nabobs." Not quite out of the top drawer, old chap.

Third Age of Imperialism. It features rich kids with a faith in the power of politics to bend the arc of history towards justice. It has featured the two biggest slave states in history. Karl Marx, son of the top lawyer in Trier. Friedrich Engels, son of a textile manufacturer. Vladimir Lenin, from "a moderately prosperous middle-class family" got kicked out of university for mostly peaceful protesting. Mao Zedong was the son of "one of the wealthiest farmers in Shaoshan." Frankfurt Scholar Max Horkheimer was the son of "a successful businessman who owned several textile factories." Herbert Marcuse, of "repressive tolerance" was the son of "a well-off businessman." These intellectual giants advanced the idea of societies that were, at very least neo-feudal, with the ruling class taxing 35-50 percent of income to hand out to its supporters, and at the worst, as in the Soviet Union and Maoist China, the most savage slave states in history.

So, on this notion, we would say, pace John Lloyd, that the Putinist regime in Russia and the Xi regime in China probably represent the "Autumn of the Third Imperialist Age" as the internal contradictions of big government and its force and the divisiveness of politics-with-everything combine to inspire educated rich kids in general -- and foolish young women at The New York Times in particular -- to indulge in witch hunts and cancel culture to force the world to bend the arc of history towards justice, or else. Until we normals get a clue and tell them to go drink their fair-trade coffee where the sun don't shine.

See, my impossible dream is that maybe, maybe, we are entering a post-imperial age based on the principle that loot and plunder does not pay. I'd say that the First Imperial Age proved the limitations of the loot-and-plunder model; that the Second Imperial Age proved the potential of the trading model, especially when led by nobodies; that the Third Imperial Age proved beyond a doubt that we humans should be better than loot-and-plunder lefties.

But that's just my opinion. You opinions may differ.

When All the Gubmint Programs Fail At Once

I watched the Ken Loach movie Kes last night, because I'd read a piece arguing the child actor actually was viable. Usually, child actors are hopeless.

Kes is the name of Billy Casper's trained kestrel, that he took from its nest as a chick and trained up all by himself using a book on hawking he stole from the local used-books store.

Billy is a "hopeless case" kid whose Yorkshire mining village is a hopeless case in the 1960s as oil takes over the world from coal.

So Billy is a "hopeless case" going to a hopeless case gubmint school where the kids all sit around like zombies, living in a hopeless case gubmint "council house" in a village where the men all work in the gubmint coal mine, a hopeless case industry that you will remember blew up during the Margaret Thatcher years.

The school Billy attended and that is featured in the movie is a "comprehensive school" built in 1963 and demolished in 2011. Comprehensive schools were a hopeless idea of the Labour left that helped demolish the "grammar" schools that had provided a route up out of poverty for British youngsters since before the days of William Shakespeare, son of a glover that went to the grammar school in Stratford on Avon.

I say all this because it seems to me that the current cancel culture frenzy really comes down to the fact that the whole gubmint-program world that our liberal friends have created for our benefit is falling down around their ears. And they cain't stand it, as Lina Lamont would say.

Ken Loach is a lefty film director whose "socially critical directing style and socialist ideals," according to La Wik, "are evident in his film treatment of social issues". I suppose the idea back in 1969, when Kes came out, was to highlight the injustice suffered by the Working Class in the Tory years of the Fifties and early Sixties. Of course, today a Ken Loach would be directing movies showing how the white working class in the North of England were a bunch of racist-sexist-homophobe haters as proved by their recent shift to the Conservative Party in the latest "Get Brexit Done" election.

What struck me in Kes was the hopelessness of being on the receiving end of lefty politics and government. Back in the immediate post-WWII era the left was serving up gubmint education, gubmint housing and gubmit nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy. And the poor working class was on the hopeless receiving end of it all.

But whatabout Reform? Can't we reform all those well-intentioned programs and make them work? I doubt it. Because of the fourth of my Four Laws. It says

Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them.

And you can see the truth of that in the current presidential election campaign here in the good old US and A. Our liberal friends are not proposing to reform education or housing or union-blighted industry. They are merely proposing new stuff, defunding police and ramping up racist DIE and going full bore on the Green New Deal.

And who is going to get screwed into hopelessness by the current lefty agenda? Why, almost certainly black voters. Defund the police? That'll really improve the safety of inner-city "communities." Kill school choice? That'll really brighten up the scene in inner-city schools. Green New Deal? That'll really help the workers that depend on trucks and diesel-powered equipment to do their construction and technician jobs.

You can read about this all the time: Stephen Greenhut writing about California's "absurdly high cost of living, driven by a host of progressive policies." Do you think our liberal friends have a clue about this?

Then there is the nearly two-century cultural effort to steer the subordinate class away from middle-class values. There's the absurd effort of the Smithsonian -- now taken down -- to identify middle-class values such as "rugged individualism... emphasis on scientific method... protestant work ethic" with "whiteness." Do these progressive nut-cases not understand that these "civilized" values are exactly what they say they are: the kind of values you need to wive and thrive in the city. "Civilized" means "citified" because the Latin "civis" means "citizen." Get it, wokies?

Actually it all makes me realize that I need a "Four Laws Explained" maxim. As in:

Four Laws: Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises). But socialism means More Jobs for Gentry.

The administrative state cannot work because the Man in Washington does not have the bandwidth to run the economy (Hayek). But the administrative state means More Jobs for Gentry.

Regulation does not work because “regulatory capture” (Stigler). But regulatory agencies mean More Jobs for Gentry. 

Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them (Chantrill). But government programs mean More Jobs for Gentry.

Yeah. Who knew? Cui bono? I could go on.

Marxism means more jobs for Gentry. 

Universities mean more jobs for Gentry. 

Safe spaces means more jobs for Gentry. 

Think tanks mean more jobs for Gentry. 

Climate change means more jobs for Gentry. 

Systemic racism means more jobs for Gentry. 

Systemic oppression means more jobs for Gentry.

I never would have guessed. Government, any government, means more jobs for the educated Gentry. So you know what side they are going to come down on any issue. Does it mean more jobs and more power for the educated Gentry?

The Crimes of the Wet-Noodle Manifesto Signers

Yesterday I sneered at the nice liberal signers of the Harper's Manifesto. But now I want to cut a bit deeper. And I echo Angelo Codevilla, who calls the current political regime a "Scamocracy in America." He refers to "the long-running race and poverty scam, the education scam, the environmentalist scam, the sex scam, the security scam, and now the pandemic scam".

All have been based on propositions touted as scientific truth by the most highly credentialed persons in America—experts certified by the U.S government, enshrined by academia as science’s spokesmen, and fawned upon by the media working in concert to forbid any disagreement on the matter whatsoever. Yet virtually all their propositions have turned out to be false, and indeed have produced effects opposite to those claimed.

 Or, as I like to say, our ruling class has made things worse. Actually, I divide the "scams" of the ruling class into two categories, the Left's Crimes and the Left's Errors.

Under the Left's Crimes I adduce that:

1. The left led the workers into the wilderness
2. The left led women into the wilderness
3. The left led minorities and LGBT into the wilderness

The left separated all these folks away from full membership and allegiance to the nation state. And that is a crime because the nation state is the best thing going until the planet unites to battle the Trisolarians from Alpha Centauri.

Under the Left's Errors I adduce that the following programs do not work. But nothing is done to reform them.

1. Social Security
2. Medicare
3. Medicaid
4. Public Schools
5. Welfare
6. Economic Regulation
7. Racial Preferences

There is a reason why nothing is done to reform them. It is that you cannot reform government programs, not until they collapse and run out of money.

But then I have written about "The Six Worst Injustices of the Liberal Domination,"

1. The liberal ruling class has confirmed workers and peasants in their pre-urban tribal, racist, subordinate culture
2. The liberal ruling class has attacked and marginalized the middle class
3. The liberal ruling class has wrecked education
4. The liberal ruling class has wrecked health care
5. The liberal ruling class has wrecked retirement
6. The liberal ruling class has wrecked charity

Want some more? How about "The Left's Syllabus of Errors, Part One."

1. The French Revolution
2. The socialist communities, like New Harmony.
3. Marxian economics
4. Top-down administrative government
5. Interventions to favor the left's Little Darlings, from workers to women to minorities to LGBT
6. War on religion
7. War on the nation state
8. Support or large-scale migration
9. Climate change
10. Oh, and Postmodernism

The point, and I do have one, is that the problem with the left is its worship of political power, the faith that justice rides on the back of political power, wielded by the right people.

But humans are social animals; we thrive by reducing the amount of force, because force is destructive and expensive. That is the point of all social animals, to reduce force. And the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years has demonstrated that we can transform the world without politics by letting nobodies define the future with technological and non-political innovation, penalizing people only for untrustworthiness and failure to contribute.

Meanwhile, here are the Four Stages of Marxist Takeover, from a KGB-trained Russian, Yuri Bezmenov:

1. Demoralization
2. Destabilization
3. Crisis
4. Normalization, with a "new normal."

The good thing is that you can stop the process anywhere you want.  And, it seems to me, that the Brinton Thesis, in Anatomy of Revolution, is that the Crisis is also the point where the Thermidorean Reaction takes over. Why? Because people cannot live forever in the white heat of a revolutionary Reign of Terror.

Most normal people want to live normal lives, working and wiving and thriving.

Hey, isn't it great that we have a Trump here in America and not a Kerensky, as the Russkies had in 1917. It's another proof of God's existence. Or, as Bismarck is supposed to have said: "There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America."

The Left's Crimes Against Humanity - Table of Contents

The Left's Crimes Against Humanity: A Bill of Indictment

1. The Stealth Repeal of Welfare Reform
   
   
2. The Left's Murderous Cult of Power
   
   
3. The Left Led the Workers into a Wilderness
   It gave them neo-feudalism rather than a road to the middle class


4. Forget 1619 NYT. Learn About 1917
   
   
5. Liberal Crimes of History: The Workers
   How the left led the workers into the wilderness


6. Liberal Crimes of History: The Women
   How feminists led women into the wilderness


7. Our Elite's Crimes Against Humanity
   Its solutions for workers, blacks, women and LGBTs were the wrong solutions
   
   
8. The Crimes of the Wet-Noodle Manifesto Signers
   
   
9. When All the Gubmint Programs Fail At Once
   
   
10. The Third Imperial Age Is (Was) The Lefty Age
    
    
11. Nothing New: Movements that Decide to Cleanse Society of Evil
    
    
12. Trump's Biggest Failure: The Race Issue
    
    
13. Good Luck, Joe. You'll Need It
    

Our Elite's Crimes Against Humanity

What? Our noble elite and our creative Educated Gentry? Crimes against humanity? Isn't that putting it on a bit thick, old chap?

Not if you subscribe to my notion of the Great Reaction, that socialism is gussied-up slavery, the welfare state is gussied-up serfdom, and identity politics is gussied-up tribalism. Etc.

Not if you subscribe to my notion of "Little Darlings," that our modern ruling class cultivates client groups to increase its power and then dumps the Little Darlings when it is time to move on to a new, lusciously curved, younger and innocent Little Darling.

Whatabout women? Christopher deGroot has a long piece on how the feminists are making things worse for most women. And men too. Oh, things are pretty good at the top for Gentry women that can afford careers and marriage and children and cheap immigrant servants. But whatabout the rest of women, for, as he quotes G.K. Chesterton:

“Feminism is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.”

Wait! I thought that only approved Educated Gentry intellectuals had the right to opine on slavery!

But I think this is a very good way of approaching "issues." You should ask: "in what way is this better than slavery?" Or, alternatively, "in what way is this better than serfdom?"

Our Democratic friends on the presidential campaign trail are outdoing each other in various "Something for All" comprehensive and mandatory programs, from Medicare to College to Childcare.

So, in what way are these programs different than life in the good old agricultural estate, with the noble lord enserving his underling famers in exchange for free benefits? Or, if you prefer, the good old slave plantation and the good old slave driver with his cowskin whip.

See, I interpret the history of the last century or so in this way.

Part One: The Educated Gentry declared themselves the protectors of the workers. Now, did we have an open and frank discussion of the issues about this, trying to balance what the Gentry thought about the helpless workers with what the workers thought about the workers and also what the taxpayers thought about helping the workers? And did the activists intern with noble philosophers and social scientists to imagine what "we" wanted the workers to be in 100 years?

No. In fact what happened is that the Educated Gentry won the votes of the workers by offering them free stuff, and things were copacetic for a while as certain workers obtained above-market wages, and everyone's children got rough, tough education in the Three Rs from rough, tough schoolmarms in government schools. But in the end the workers all lost their high-paying manufacturing jobs and the schools became mere government child-custodial facilities doing useless fad-following.

Now, I think that the right thing to happen would have been to continue the culture that the workers were developing on their own, from unions (without special privileges) to mutual-aid societies to mechanics' institutes to the Christianity of the kind practiced by the hero and the heroine of George Eliot's Adam Bede.

Part Two: The Educated Gentry declared themselve the protectors and the liberators of women. Now, did we have an open and frank discussion of the issues about this, trying to determine what the Gentry thought about the helpless women with what women -- high, middle, and low -- thought about their lives and also what the taxpayers thought about helping women? And did the feminist activists intern with noble philosophers and social scientists to imagine where "we" wanted women to be in 100 years?

No. In fact what happened is that Educated Gentry women set the agenda, and basically forcing the rest of womankind into their notion of what women needed. And what women needed, according to Gentry Women was to have fascinating careers just like the men in their lives. Er, did they ask their men about just how fascinating those careers were? No, I thought not. Then Educated Gentry women wanted all women to have access to abortion and divorce and the right to have sex without humiliation. Yep, it turned out that Gentry women in the workforce -- and the right to have their incomes counted when applying for a mortgage -- has made everything more expensive, so that, while it more or less works for Gentry women, it doesn't work very well for Commoner women. And let's not even think about lower class women where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. Oh, and, girls, how great is it when the sexual revolution means that women are expected to "put out" in the immortal phrase of Tennessee Williams. And when women are expected by their lovers to "get rid" of the products of liberation? And when divorced women end up as cat ladies?

Now, I think that the right thing to happen would have been to continue the culture that worshipped women and wives and mothers and put them on pedestals. Because, after all, "career" comes from the French "carrière" or racetrack. I think that we should have patted the Educated Gentry women for their conceits about career and "leaning in" and wanting to be in politics, First Woman President, etc. But whatabout Commoner women that want marriage and home and children? And whatabout lower-class women that just want a male provider, thank you very much? Gee, I wonder what they want?

Part Three: The Educated Gentry declared themselves the protectors of the blacks -- and subsequently every imaginable oppressed group under the sun. Now, did we have an open and frank discussion of the issues about this, trying to determine what the Gentry thought about the helpless blacks with what the blacks thought about themselves and also what the taxpayers thought about helping the blacks? And did the activists intern with noble philosophers and social scientists to imagine where "we" wanted the blacks to be in 100 years?

Well, we started out right, with a genuine civil rights movement that used non-violent protest to demand equality of rights. And we passed a Civil Rights Act and Sen Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) promised to eat the paper the bill was written on if it led to quotas. But, of course, in accordance with the divine law divined by longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer, every political movement ends up as a business or a racket. And we have had quotas, timetables, diversity, inclusion, and flat out racism ever since.

Now, I think that the right thing to happen would have been for Hubert Humphrey to spend the rest of his live advocating against quotas and timetables, and for the Supreme Court to retire all the activist groups that supported the civil rights movement. And I think that the right thing would have been not to have the welfare expansion under Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, and I think that blacks should have been encouraged to develop the responsible culture already flourishing in their black churches. Instead Educated Gentry activists have whipped up racism into a national crisis, decades after the passing of the laws that made government and corporate racism illegal.

And let's pass over in silence the question of Latinos and LGBTs, etc. Not to mention the nightmare of xenophobia and Islamophobia.

Now Christopher DeGroot finishes up his piece worrying about single women electing more Democrats, and how stopping that

may be just as important as checking excessive immigration and trying to preserve what Peter Brimelow calls the Historic American Nation, each essential if there is to be an American right in the future.

But I don't think it is a question of "an American right." I think it is a question of forming a head of rebellion, civil or otherwise, against the monstrous and heedless Educated Gentry that, as they say, "literally knows nothing." Except the selfish status  and power games it plays within its Educated Gentry bubble and expects the rest of us to ooh and ahh over. Or regret it.

Look, as Bismarck said: "God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America."

And I would say that the emergence of Donald Trump as the champion of the Commoners is another proof of God's existence, and Bismarck's claim to wisdom.

All we need to do, as "an American right" or anything else, is march towards the sound of the guns. That is all any man, since the dawn of firearms, has needed to know.

Liberal Crimes of History: The Women

When another age dawns, and the heroes of the present age have been tossed to bottomless perdition, there to dwell in adamantine chains and all that, to be reviled forever as fiends and monsters, the bill of indictment about how the left betrayed women will look something like this:

They led women into the wilderness of victim feminism instead of sensibly adapting the male-created public square to suit a more feminine sensibility.

Were women the helpless victims of the patriarchy in times gone by? My guess is: probably not. But women certainly occupied a separate world from men, and women relied on men to keep them safe. In hunter-gatherer and horticultural society it seems that the men did nothing except hunt and fight and herd the livestock, and the women did everything else. In agricultural society the men did the plowing and the herding, and the womrn did mostly everything else. In industrial society the men go to work and do Honey Dos and the women do pretty well everything else. Maybe there is something more than patriarchal oppression going on here. But what? You tell me.

In today's world one of the salient facts is that well-born women have a yen to live in the public square, to establish status by working outside the home in bureaucracies and rising to supervisory positions. And since work these days tends to include a lot of jobs much less physical than plowing and fighting and mining and well-drilling, and blacksmithing, and fabricating, women see the opportunity to sally forth from the domestic sphere to partake in the public square. Why should men have all the fun?

This has created a culture clash, because the public square, created by men for men, has a male culture that expects its participants to be creators, fighters, and destroyers. Women, on the other hand, are learners, carers, and teachers, so as they come into the public square they want to adapt it to their culture. Men deal with defaulters differently, either with death or with exile. Women deal with defaulters using naming, shaming, and ostracism. How do we adapt a public square to the needs of both men and women?

The left sees everything as a political question, a civil war by other means, and so feminist activists of a lefty persuasion have liked to characterize the movement of women into the public square as a fight of helpless women victims of the patriarchy finally coming out into the light after millennia in the dark imprisonment of patriarchal oppression.

But why should work for wages be such a glorious goal for women? For men, it is a yoke we have to bear: to put bread on the table, to attract a mate, to compete for the glittering prizes. Maybe it is just as well that men have to work, because idle men seem to resort to wine, women, and gambling, as the idle upper-class young men do in Trollope.

If you ask me, people down the ages, men and women, only worked when they had to, and almost invariably, except for the richest kind, they had to. Women worked dawn to dusk on cleaning, food preparation, weaving and sewing, child care, and on a whole rainbow of social interactions with the community of women in the village or other community. What about men? In the old days they did nothing except hunt and fight. In the enslavement of the agricultural age they began to plow and to manage farms. In the city they went out to work for wages.

But, of course, there is more to life than working to put bread on the table. That other side of life is the fight for status, and both men and women play this game: only they do it differently. For men it used to be the actual fight for advancement in the male hierarchy. But now it is the fight for the selective college, the prestige job, the glittering career, the top dog as CEO or president. But what about for women? How do they play the hierarchy game?

Yes, how do women play the hierarchy game? I have my ideas, but I admit that I really know almost nothing about it. Whatabout the mother in Trollope's Lady Anna? She's a middle-class girl that marries an earl, but the earl pretty soon tells her that he's already married. So she spends the rest of her life trying to prove that she really is the Countess Lovel and get her daughter, Lady Anna, to make a suitable marriage. That, I suspect, gives us a real insight into the way that women play the status game. Today, upscale women are bribing college officials to get their kids into fancy colleges. So nothing has changed. Why do modern women want corporate careers? Because it gives them status; because you are nobody in the educated class unless you have a status job.

So the left has told women to liberate themselves and get out into the labor force and earn as much as men. Wait! It is unjust that women as a whole learn less than men! It is monstrous that women earn less than men because they are less inclined to bid for for money! Well, of course. Politics is division, and so anyone in politics is looking for a way to divide Us and Them.

And don't get me started on sex. Oh yeah. Women are supposed to be free to be themselves, to enter into sex without the traditional stigma of an "easy" woman. And women should have control over their own bodies. And women should be able to dissolve abusive marriages. Just between you and me -- and don't tell anyone I said that -- I think that all this -- the sexual revolution -- has been a disaster for women and that the whole #MeToo culture and microagressions and safe spaces is an inchoate rebellion by women against the modern liberated sex revolution.

And the left is who has put women in this box. The personal is the political: that's what they say. But I say that reducing human life to the political is a Great Reaction against the modern discovery that we probably need less force -- less government -- and less division -- less politics -- and overall less meddling in other peoples' affairs to make the modern world go round. The problem is that women getting themselves out of the box the left has put them in is going to be a process of trial and error, as is everything in this world. The undoing of a mistake is much harder than getting into it.

But when women have emerged from the hell of lefty idiocy, they must face the future as Scarlett O'Hara had to: "Where shall I go? What shall I do?" It is, frankly, a challenge. Freedom is like that. And the truth is that most of us don't really want that. We want to be told what to do and them complain about it.

Liberal Crimes of History: The Workers

When another age dawns, and the heroes of the present age have been tossed to bottomless perdition, there to dwell in adamantine chains and all that, to be reviled forever as fiends and monsters, the bill of indictment about how the left betrayed the workers will look something like this:

They led the working class into the wilderness of welfare state dependency instead of into middle class responsibility.

Why did they do this? In part because of the Marxist doctrine that the way to understand the 19th century was as a class conflict, a war to the death between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, because what else could it be? And the Fabian and Progressive idea that, while class warfare was a bridge too far, the working class certainly needed a wise and educated elite to guide it into proper channels.

If there is a clue to what is wrong with these two notions, it must be that -- well I'll be blowed -- the Marxist doctrine amounts to the dictatorship of the Marxists who will lead the proletarians in the war to the knife against the bourgeoisie, and the Fabian/Progressive doctrine that amounts to the oligarchy of the educated elite that will advise and administer the wise programs that will benefit the workers and soften the hard edges of a laissez-faire economy that only asks "will it pay?"

Let us be clear about this. In the Marxian outcome, the Marxist dictators run everything; they obliterate private property and any right to disagree with the rulers, and the kill millions of people and they impoverish the rest. Marxism is slavery.

In the Fabian/Progressive outcome, the economy gets rigidified with money-losing state enterprises and the workers get reduced into modern day serfs that the educated elite regards as "deplorables," really not quite out of the top drawer.

The fundamental error of the Marxists is that the bourgeoisie had it in for the proletarians. No they didn't. The fundamental error of the Fabians and the Progressives is that capitalists are economic robots and the that workers are helpless: thus both need supervision. Oh, the capitalists got pretty mad if the workers decided to strike to keep their wages up in a depression. But the normal bourgeois capitalist just pays his workers the market rate -- and not because he is a moral exemplar or moral degenerate, but because paying his workers more is risky on the profits front, and paying them less makes it difficult to find good workers.

And the fundamental warrant for the good faith of the bourgeoisie is that it did not have a problem with giving the workers the vote. Did the bourgeoisie rise up in fury during the campaigns to extend the vote from the middle class to the workers? It did not.

But the Big Thing is this. The bourgeoisie does not believe in political power. On the contrary, it believes in the limitation of political power. That's because the basic philosophy of the middle class is live and let live, trust and reciprocity. Again, there is no moral wonder in this. In middle-class life you quickly find out that trust and reciprocity is the way to prosper. Of course, the capitalists also know that there is money to be made in catering to the power-driven chaps in the political class: money in return for contracts, subsidies, privileges.

The big problem for the workers, in the aftermath of their adoption by the Marxists and the Fabian/Progressives, is that once they have been enlisted in the political army of the left it is almost impossible to leave. This is the way of all armies: once you have joined the colors your leaders will lead you hither and thither in their various wars, threatening you with frightful penalties if you "desert." But when you are no longer useful to them, they will demobilize you and expect you to pick up the pieces, or, if things go badly in their power project, they will just abandon you along the route of march.

The fact is that if you want to thrive in the cities of the industrial economy you need to become a citizen -- for that is what bourgeois means -- and you need to learn the ways of the city, its culture and its moral code. It's not exactly a walk in the park, but millions have done it.

But if you enlist in the Marxist movement or go along with the Fabians and the Progressives you won't learn the skills and the culture you need to be a responsible citizen that can wive and thrive successfully in the city. And that is a crime against humanity.

The point is that if the Marxists and the Fabians and the Progressives has never been, then the workers and the capitalists and all the folks in between would have wived and thrived and everyone would have lived happily ever after. Because the market economy rewards people that do that.

Instead, the Marxists came along and divided us, and the Fabians and the Progressives came along and dominated us. And the world is a worse place because of it.

Forget 1619 NYT. Learn About 1917

One of the things our liberal friends want to ram down our throats, as evidenced by the New York Times "1619 Project," is that the United States was born and raised on slavery and racism.

Of course, the interesting story is not that, in 1619, North Americans from northern Europe were racist and introduced the first slaves from Africa into North America. The interesting question is why slavery and racism should have become a scandal. I would say that slavery became a scandal not later than 1800 and racism became a scandal around 1900.

The question is "why?" I have a short, Nietzschean, answer to that. It is because slavery and racism Do Not Pay. Yes, yes; I know. The issue is much more complicated than that, but still...

Now let us talk, NYT girls and boys, about something much more important: 1917. Anyone want to guess what I am talking about?

I am talking about the Bolshevik Revolution that enslaved the entire Russian people (and other non-Russians in the Russian Empire). If you want to talk about slavery, how about the Soviet Union, the second biggest slave state in history?

What? Only the second biggest slave state in history? So what was the biggest? Really, do you have to ask? I am talking about Maoist China, that enslaved the glorious Chinese people in one of the greatest crimes of history.

Get it NYT? Slave State #1: Maoist China. Slave State #2: Soviet Union. Total dead as a result of Communism, according to The Black Book of Communism by Stéphane Cortois et al., 100 million men, women and children. Population of the world in 1950, the heyday of the Communist states. was 2.55 billion. So the death toll of Communism was approximately four percent of the total world population.

So how does the United States rank with those two slave states? You tell me, pal.

Another thing, NYT. Those two slave states, the greatest slave states in human history, were not just socialist, or Communist. They were national socialist states. That is to say that they were both self-consciously about "socialism in one country." I thought you guys were nothing, if not anti-fascist.

Hye NYT. How about a "1917 Project" all about the great slave states of the 20th century.

And now we have the comical tweet you NYT chaps sent out on Twitter on 9/11 (and have since deleted):

18 years have passed since airplanes took aim and brought down the World Trade Center.

Hey NYT. How about a "9/11 Project" all about how educated liberals in the United States rammed 9/11 down the memory hole just as soon as journalistically possible.

You know, back in the day, NYT, your national socialist pals in the Soviet Union -- hey, remember NYT chappie Walter Duranty that said of the Ukraine famine in the 1930s, nothing to see here, move right along -- and your national socialist pals in Maoist China -- hey and in NYT's Herbert Matthews' beloved Castroite Cuba -- used to send people to "re-education camp." Do you think that maybe some of the folks in your Twitter unit need a spot of re-education, to purge them of the folly of their woke lefty stupidities?

Of course, I am not talking about a real "re-education camp" of the kind presently universal in our glorious US universities where youngsters are prepared for a life of debt slavery for the glorious necessity of keeping all the diversity and inclusion administrators and deputy diversion and inclusion administrators in work. Oh no. I just think that you should send some of the good little boys and good little girls presently working at the NYT -- that have been carefully taught from year to year in their little ear to hate and to fear the good old US and A -- to Seattle so they can have coffee with me. Maybe I could teach them something, or maybe not. Because, after all, those good little boys and good little girls at the NYT know which side their bread is buttered, ideologically speaking.

Hey! I was driving south on Highway 99 and there was a guy, a white guy, by the side of the road peacefully protesting with a TRUMP RACIST sign. This on the day before Trump lifts the ban on federal funding for faith-based historically black colleges. As Ed Driscolll notes on Instapundit: "WORST. RACIST. PRESIDENT. EVER." I get the guy's point. Whatabout the non-historically-black-faith-based-colleges?

But back to my original point. Why is it that we have put slavery, universal throughout the world until the day before yesterday, behind us?

Inquiring minds want to know. You chappies at the NYT might want to start an "1863 Project." For it was on January 1, 1863 that the US President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

See, I think the big queston is why slavery became a scandal, and why good little boys and good little girls at the New York Times know to say "Eeuuww" when the topic of slavery comes up.

The Left Led the Workers into a Wilderness

On Labor Day we honor the workers, those who toil that we may live. But on this day I wish to raise the question of the betrayal of the workers, by those that claimed to love them and give them the justice and respect they deserved.

I am talking about the Left.

We see throughout the West that the old working class championed by the Left for over 150 years is coming on hard times. Many have blamed the global corporate elite, and they are probably right, in part.

But I wish to advance the notion that the miseries of the old working class and the lower middle class today is a direct result of leftist politics. The Left seduced the working class with glorious promises of love and security; but it led the working class into the wilderness.

What the working class needed in the early 19th century in the maelstrom between the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution was a Road to the Middle Class. Instead it got a neo-feudalism.

The problem with feudalism, from the point of view of the serfs, was that they were helpless before the power of their lords. They enjoyed, indeed, an informal right to live and grow food on the lord's land, but only at his convenience. There were, you may say, two understandings between lord and serf. The first was that the lord would allow the serf and his descendants to live, to wive and thrive, on the lord's lands, in perpetuity. The second was that the peasant would be protected from raiders and plunderers.

The truth is, however, that these understandings were, like everything in life, merely empty promises. The serf got to live on the lord's land so long as it was convenient for the lord. When the lord could make money with "improvements" he kicked the peasant off his land. When the lord could no longer enlist the peasant in his private army, then he pretty quickly got rid of the extra mouths to feed.

The central fact of the dilemma of the modern working class is that the rising educated class has used the working class as its foot-soldiers in its war to rule the world. And now the working class is no longer useful in the ruling-class power project. So the educated ruling class has abandoned the working class.

What the working class needed, as it became a "thing" in the 19th century, was to learn how to thrive in the culture and the economy of the city. The fact is, as I explored in my Road to the Middle Class that you need to acquire the culture of the middle class if you want to thrive in the city. There is no reposing upon your patch of land. In the city the economy changes all the time and you need to change with it. And this means that you must acquire the middle class culture of adaptability and responsibility. In my book I identified four cultural markers of the middle-class culture: religion, education, law, and mutual aid. You must acquire one of the Axial Age religions that teach you your responsibility before God's creation and God's law; you must acquire education in the skills that will make you useful, and thus employable, by your fellow citizens; you must learn and acquire the culture of law, the settlement of disputes by judges rather than vengeance; and you must enter into the culture of mutual aid, that thrived in the 19th century where very ordinary people banded together in lodges and societies like the Masons and the Elks to insure themselves against the uncertainties of life in the city.

What happened in the 19th century is that the rising educated class adopted the working class as its special project, and made the working class into its "little darlings." In return for becoming its neo-serfs, the underlings of the new class of political activists and administrative state experts, the new neo-feudal ruling class declared that it would protect the working class from the rigors of the market economy.

In other words, instead of becoming independent and adaptable to the changing trends and technological and market changes in the industrial economy, the working class became utterly dependent on the beneficence of the great Oz. And the day came when the working class no longer mattered to the political project of the educated class.

You might think that wage and hour laws and labor union laws universally benefit the working class, but you would be wrong. Perhaps the worker wants a more flexible arrangement than the 8-hour day. Or perhaps he would be willing to work for nothing to learn his employer's business. Or perhaps he would prefer to obtain health care outside the employer's benefit system. It might seem that labor unions universally protect the worker from the employer. But labor union agreements tend to privilege existing workers and protect them from competition. They encourage workers to think they have a job for life. They encourage workers to plunder their employer. The truth is that all life is contingent, and we must all adapt to the changes or die. To erect wage and hour laws and union protection panders to a mirage, that we can wish away the unalterable contingency of all life on this Earth.

You might think that free government education is an unalloyed good. And yet government education has become a huge and dysfunctional structure that is almost impossible to change. And it caters to current ruling-class conventional wisdom. What kind of education does the kid of a single-mother in a black ghetto need? Anybody ask her? What kind of an education does the child of a unionized factory worker need? Anybody ask? How useful is a college degree? For a child of privilege? For a kid that wants to be a programmer? Or a web designer? Should people start working at age 8, as of old? At 12? At 16? At 25 as a kid with a masters degree might? A century ago conventional wisdom in the educated class was that children should be eduacted to become tractable factory workers. That's what universal high-school education was all about. Is that a good idea? Has it been good for the children of factory workers? The truth is that education is a tributary of the ruling class; it is intended to confer rewards on the supporters of the adminstrative state. If it educates children, so much the better. But educate them for what?

You might think that the welfare state combination of old-age pensions and health care and unemployment benefits and industrial accident insurance is an unalloyed benefit. Except that the government collects the money and uses any surpluses for its own agenda.

Suppose all contributions to welfare-state benefits were owned by the individual beneficiary? In other words, for Social Security, you would have an actual account with Fidelity or Vanguard, and your current contributions to FICA, presently 6.2 percent of your wages from your employer and 6.2 percent of your wages from you would now be deposited every payday in your personal account and would grow over the years according to the laws of compound interest. Then, when you retired you could decide whether to take your pension out of the income of your account or to purchase an annuity. If you decide to live off the interest, then your children would inherit the balance of your retirement account.

Whatabout retirement health care? If you determined how to save for health care in your retirement years you could determine whether you wanted heroic care to keep you alive into your nineties, or whether you wanted minimal care. You tell me. Under present law, the ruling class decides what sort of health care seniors get, one size fits all.

Whatabout unemployment? Suppose instead of the current system, where the government collects money from your employer and distributes unemployment benefits as the mood takes it, you had your own unemployment account, paid into by your employer and backed up by a government insurance plan in case you lost your job and emptied your unemployment account. Perhaps you could use the money that had accumulated to start a business, or buy a house, or educate your children. Why not? Because some people would abuse it? But you wouldn't abuse it, so why do you have to be denied access to your savings, because "we" know better? In any case, big time unemployment events, like the Great Depression and Great Recession are really failures of government not of individuals, so why should you individually have to bail out the government and its follies?

My point is that the welfare state has been great for the ruling class: by, for, and all about the ruling class. It has handed out benefits to people, and earned their undying gratitude. Only, of course, the money originally belonged to the people; the ruling class is buying the loyalty of people using their own money sequestered away in government accounts and spending programs that the ruling class uses for its power projects rather than actually helping people.

And now the ruling class is tired of the working class. It has gone on to bid for the loyalty of others: women and minorities. But the game is the same. Offer to protect the people, and then charm them with benefits paid out of their own taxes, and pretend you are doing them a favor.

I say that every ruling class is basically in it for the power. They don't care about people like you. They only care about acquiring power. That's why it is probably best to confine governments to basics, like defending the people against enemies foreign and domestic. Everything else ends up with the government buying our support with our own money. Or, worse, buyin our support with other peoples' money.

Let me put it this way. Whenever the government is buying your support with free stuff it is only temporary, like wages paid to soldiers. When the time comes that you are no longer interesting, because the votes of people like you are no longer interesting to politicians, then look to your own resources rather than the help of government.

The Left's Murderous Cult of Power

One of the great facts of the living world is the fact of social animals. Although life, the universe and everything is a frantic lifelong effort to kill or be killed, yet success in staying alive depends on groups of animals declaring a zone of peace where violence is banished and cooperation reigns and trust is king.

But the left is a murderous cult that denies the facts of humans as social animals and the reign of trust, and it has declared war on the three ramparts of modern society: its peaceful economic cooperation that has extended economic prosperity to all that labor, its peaceful political process that adjudicates political differences without the resort to civil war, and its freedom of religion that allows people to practice their moral and cultural faiths without the resort to religious war.

The left is opposed to peaceful economic cooperation. Right through the astonishing history of the Great Enrichment in the last 200 years the left has insisted that it is all a mirage, and that only revolution and rapine can prevent the cruel hegemony of the capitalists. In fact, the Great Enrichment, which has seen per-capita income rise from $1-3 per day to $100 per day and more, is the fullest expression of the notion of social animals. The rule is that you seek out some work or make some product that other people are willing to pay for. And then you accept the verdict of the market. The left insists that this cannot work, because alienation, exploitation, oppression, and immiseration, and therefore activists should be empowered to regulate and dominate the commanding heights of the economy. And therefore it has waged war against peaceful economic cooperation between consenting adults for nearly two hundred years.

The left is opposed to peaceful political cooperation. It licenses itself to practice political "activism," to oppose anything using the threat of force and demand that society capitulate to its demands. This revolutionary doctrine had merit when workers first came to the city in the industrial revolution and lacked the vote and any political power. And so the mid 19th century in Europe featured street action by the working class that had newly migrated to the city. But the expansion of the franchise to the workers ended the occasion for street violence, and the workers happily stopped political violence once they were given a seat at the table of political power. The whole point of universal suffrage is that people give up, in exchange for the vote, the right to resort to civil war in the pursuit of their just demands and agree to abide by the verdict of the sham fight of elections in which the various political factions compete for the votes of the electorate, which now includes the entire adult population.

The left is opposed to peaceful moral-religious competition. That is the logic of Marx and his notion of religion as the "opiate of the masses" to be demolished by his ideological cult of socialism. It is also the logic of 20th century fascism, featuring Mussolini's Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato, or "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State." It is also the logic of so-called cultural Marxism, that seeks a cultural hegemony over society with all cultural forms subordinated to the cultural ruling class's secular religion. But this means that anyone opposing the ruling class's cultural hegemony is forced to raise a head of cultural rebellion, which quickly becomes a political head of rebellion when the cultural ruling class uses its political power to enforce its cultural will. But the whole point of freedom of religion, of the separation of church and state, is that the political power keeps out of religion and permits all those that practice religion in peace to compete for adherents and to influence the culture by their example rather than by their ability to compel general obedience to their beliefs.

The whole point of the modern human experiment is to test the possibilities of more cooperation and less force; it is, if you like the, radical human extension of Nature's idea of social animals. How much force is really needed to police the realm of economic cooperation? How much force needs to be deputized to government to enforce society's will against bad actors? How much force is ever justified in enforcing cultural and religious norms? The left's answer to these questions is: a lot, and we are willing to apply whatever force is needed to enforce our will.

In viewing the left's rebellion against the astonishing ideas of the modern era, we can at least understand the ground of their revolt. What do you mean, that the way to prosper in this world is to submit your economic life utterly to the market and its prices, to trust that there will always be a place and a life for a man or a woman who merely proceeds on the faith that the market will reward those that seek to serve it? What do you mean, that people should submit their political yearnings to the verdict of their fellow voters, and accept defeat with the mild challenge of "wait until next time!" and the resolve to fight the next election with improved arts of persuasion? What do you mean that ignorant and superstitious cults stuck in the past should be allowed to practice and proselytize on equal terms with my scientific and rational knowledge?

But the fact is that the left's fears have proved to be groundless. The Moloch of capitalism and the robber barons? They have transformed the economy, again and again, but it seems they are not that interested in power. Political power? It has come a cropper again and again in the modern era, and instead of being a force to protect the unprotected has more often protected the powerful. Religious power? The separation of church and state was working pretty well until the left came along with its march through the institutions that deliberately tries to intellectually terrorize those that disagree with it.

So why does the left hang on its gospel of power, after its prophesies have failed again and again, ruining millions and lives and its followers have killed in the hundreds of millions?

That is the great question that cries out from the mass graves of the left's millions of victims. What, on the grave of Marx, is the point of this murderous cult of power?

The Stealth Repeal of Welfare Reform

It is cruel, Mr. President. It is corrupt. It is wasteful, it is unjust. And it is delusional.

What I am talking about? I am talking about the reports from Benjamin E. Sasse and Kerry N. Weems, Mickey Kaus and from Robert Rector that your stimulus bill is repealing welfare reform.

All reports agree that the provisions in the bill that remove incentives to the states to reduce welfare caseloads will result in expansion of welfare programs. The bill will result in a return to the status quo ante 1996. And that is wrong.

I think it is fair to say that nowhere, Mr. President, did you say that you would be turning back the clock on welfare reform. I am talking about the rotted, dysfunctional welfare system that had been a national scandal for 30 years before President Bill Clinton signed off on the landmark reform bill in 1996.

The Obama administration has no mandate to roll back welfare reform. None at all.

This is wrong, Mr. President. It is cruel, corrupt, wasteful, unjust, and it is deluded. Let us count how this is so.

1. Cruel: Let’s roll the Ellwood and Jencks chart from their 2004 report on welfare. Need I say more? It is cruel to destroy the low-income family in America with your welfare benefits.
2. Corrupt: Let’s face it. We know why liberals like welfare. It is about patronage, about the same as pirate captains sharing out the plunder. Liberals share the wealth because that is how they buy the patronage support of Democratic Party rank-and-file voters. And then, of course, liberals get to award themselves big administrative jobs to hand out the loot. Pensions too. This is corruption, pure and simple.
3. Wasteful: I could go on and on. There is the waste of taxpayers’ money. There is the waste of the lives caught up in the “poverty trap” of welfare. There is the waste of talent in the people who supervise and administer the programs. There is the waste, dare I say it, of scarce global resources at a time when we are trying to save the planet.
4. Unjust: It is a gross injustice to force Americans to pay for this expansion of welfare. There’s a penalty for injustice, and it catches up with you in the end.
5. Deluded: Yes, liberals. Go ahead. Make my day. If you think that this is just a cute little sweetener for your friends, you don’t understand what you are doing. Let us leave aside the record of thirty years of social science, of political philosophy, of simple decency and common sense, all of which thunders that government welfare is a terrible idea that devastates lives. There is the simple politics of it. Government welfare is very unpopular with the voters. They hate it.

There is only one thing to say about the monstrous repeal of welfare reform by the Obama Adminstration and the Democratic Congress.

This shall not stand.