Don't Forget, There Must Be an Enemy

It's always annoying when, after a shooting, our liberal friends all line up to blame guns, gun owners, the "gun lobby," and racists and whatever else moves.

Then there are the conspiracy theorists on our side who impute all kinds of sinister motives to our rulers. For instance, it turns out that FEDS were interacting with the Buffalo shooter.

It's easy to imput malevolence in our liberal friends, but I don't think so.  I think they are just stupid, and when you are stupid you naturally try to cover up your mistakes and blame the other guy -- who is, after all, the enemy.

The fact is that when something bad is happening, we expect our governments to protect us from the danger. That applies whether the something bad is a crazed shooter, a crazed Putin, a nasty outbreak of inflation, a failed harvest, or a shortage of infant formula.

Most of the time, our government can't help us.

Where do crazed shooters come from? Do they come from the availability of guns? From the absence of fathers in many homes? From various mood-altering drugs, legal and illegal? Do they come from the media's endless publicity of disasters, showing angry youngsters how to make a name from themselves? Do they come from the collapse of the authority of parents and neighbors over the past century? Is it a consequence of the overabundance of female teachers in the government schools?

And is the government's response ever serious, or just a need to be seen to Do Something?

If you accept my notion, from Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and from Curtis Yarvin that politics is all about the enemy, then you can see that government is always in a position where it must be seen to be Doing Something about the enemy du jour. Because if the government is going out and defeating the enemy, what's the point?

And if the government failed to defeat the enemy, then what's the use of government?

No. You are not allowed to think such thoughts!

I read Michael Barone today inverting the notion of Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. Today, he said, we have a situation where politics is the leisure of the theory class, that anyone who is anyone gets their status from some political appointment. And, I would say, any position in the vast universe of government and its satellite organizations is a lot easier to obtain than success in business. In fact, the theory class is almost all courtiers. That's why they are right on with all the hot issues from climate change to systemic racism. Courtiers are nothing if not followers of fashion. And not just in silk stockings.

Maybe we are starting to see the fundamental weakness of the welfare and administrative state. It's one thing when the government is just in charge of repeling boarders, keeping out the Huns and the Mongols. That's a pretty simple concept. But when you have expanded your mandate to include everything from pensions to health care and tasking the police with defending elementary schools then you have a bunch more things that could go wrong. And because we are talking about government things do go wrong. A lot.

But if something goes wrong it must be the politician's fault, right?

You can see why politicians have to be expert at blaming other people for their mistakes. They must do that or resign. And who wants to resign, Nancy Pelosi, age 80? 

The best people to blame are the supporters of the Outer Party. I mean: if they were decent people they would be members of the Inner Party and down with the ruling-class agenda, right?

I take another position. I say that anything the government does is bound to be a mess and a failure. That's illustrated by the Four Laws:

Socialism cannot work because prices.
Administration cannot work because bandwidth.
Regulation cannot work because "regulatory capture."
Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them.

What does this mean? It means that top-down government only works for sending young men to their deaths in battle. Everything else is too complicated for a top-down hierarchy to succeed.

And then there are the Germans. They discovered in WWI that top-down didn't work in the military either. Authority had to be pushed as far down as possible. You didn't just march across No Mans Land with bagpipes playing. You snuck across, from shell-hole to shell-hole, trying to be inconspicuous, and you had to rely on some corporal to make it work.

That's my line on government failure. What did you expect, cupcake?

The Fire Next Time

With today's inflation numbers coming in with Drudge's flashing blue light -- remember that? -- I find myself saddened, having been a young man in the inflationary Seventies.

Aren't we humans supposed to learn from our mistakes?

And isn't the point of wise old men in human culture -- Biden, Pelosi, Schumer -- that they carry the memory of former times and stop the young firebrands from making the same deadly mistakes that they made in their youth?

But my reading of US politics since the dawn of the 1980s and its rling-class notion of Ronald Reagan as an "amiable dunce" is that our Democratic friends have exerted every effort NOT to learn the lessons of the Seventies and Arthur Laffer's  supply-side economics and the Laffer Curve that suggests that, at some point, when you increase tax rates you get less revenue. See "laffer curve debunked."

Well, they are going to learn their lesson this time, "good and hard." But so are the rest of us, and so are the ordinary Americans that don't know nothing about economics but vote their perceived interest, and the lower-class Americans who are the ones that will really be hammered by the economic chaos of the next few years.

And some eevil speculators, like the chappie that did The Big Short during the 2006-08 bear market, are going to make out like bandits.

Think of that liberals. Every time you do something really stupid, some eevil Wall Street guy cleans up. Mind you, sometimes the eevil speculator is George Soros and uses his ill-gotten gains to finance all your sacred activism! Yay!

But what is the lesson that the Next Regime needs to learn from the current debacle? I'd say there are two lessons.

First, the over / under politics of the last 170 years since it was codified by Marx is social poison. It is a false narrative to tell the lower classes that, by looting the middle class and the rich and getting entitlements in return, they will win the "struggle for justice." No they won't; they will just become the serfs and creatures of the new ruling class and will not be learning the skills to wive and thrive in the market economy.

Second, the administrative state of the last 120 years since it was imagined by the Fabians and the Progressives is a conceit of the educated class. Human society and the market economy are too complicated to be directed by an administrative elite of the educated and evolved.

Back in the day, when our Founding Fathers were codifying the structure of the United States they were conscious that they were doing something new and risky. How could they construct a government without a hereditary monarch and make it work? They studied all the authorities, ancient and modern, to answer the question. I'd say that the result of their studies was practically a miracle and a proof of God's existence.

But what should the Founders of the Next America know? I say that the answer is contained in the Greater Separation of Powers proposed by Michael Novak in his Spirit of Democratic Capitalism and in the fundamental limitations of political power laid out in my Four Laws.

The notion of the Greater Separation of Powers is that the three sectors of modern society -- political, economic, and moral/cultural -- should be separate. When politics meddles in the economy, and when businessmen meddle in government, the result is not good. When politics and religion get together the result is not good, especially for people believing in the wrong religion. Whenever all of the three sectors combine the result is really bad. And we have a name for a society in which all three are combined: Totalitarian.

My Four Laws are, of course, not mine. They are the ideas of far better men than I.

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).

Well, maybe that fourth law really has been invented by me. Because when I Google Search it I just get entries on welfare reform until I put the law in quotes. And then all the responses are directly connected to me.

But do you see that the Four Laws are a direct attack on the politics and government of the last century or so -- and its conceits?

Socialism: how did that work out, Vlad and Joe and ZeDong and Fidel?

Administrative state: how is that working out, St. Anthony Fauci?

Regulation: Remember when we deregulated railways and airlines? Oh the huffing and puffing!

Gubmint programs: Yeah, you try reforming gubmint pensions and gubmint health care.

My hope and faith is that the architects of the next regime will be maybe half as wise as the American Founders of two centuries ago.

But don't get your hopes up. Not yet.

Rep. Clyburn's "Tell" on Reconciliation Package

One of my maxims is Chantrill's Law, that government programs cannot work because you can never reform them. Of course that is just one side of the fact that government programs cannot work because you can never cut them.

Why? Because all government spending is loot and plunder, goodies handed out to the supporters of the regime. No different from the jolly old Vikings. And one thing that supporters of the regime demand is that their checks never be reduced, or, God forbid, taken away.

So when House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) went on TV recently he advocated for cutting down the cost of the reconciliation bill by shortening how long some of the programs in the bill will be in place, because once a program is in place, it will “be difficult to take it away.”

You know when you turn the shelf life of something and reduce the number here, let’s say make a five-year plan rather than a ten-year plan, you know very well that it’s very hard to get rid of these programs that ever are initiated five years out. So, you know that you’ll get your way anyway in that event. Because whatever you get, it’s something that’s hard to take away when they expire, right?”

Is Rep. Clyburn right, or is he right?

He's right until the federal government can't pay its bills. Then the only question becomes will the government start cutting programs or will it just inflate them away with Money Printer Go Brrrrrr.

And that is why Republican voters are always pissed off at their representatives because they have no spine. Cut all these useless programs, we say. Why don't you cut Obamacare? Why don't you cut welfare? Why don't you cut health care for illegal immigrants?

But not Social Security and Medicare, the primary programs for average middle-class people. Heavens no!

Of course, every government program that ever lived has always been justified by its usefulness, its justice, its diversity, its anti-racism, its equity. But all that is really lipstick on a pig. The only thing that matters is handing out stuff to your supporters.

And this really illustrates the utter moral bankruptcy of our liberal ruling class. For all the pretty talk, what they want is to stay in power, and whether they know it or not, the key to staying in power is to offer goodies at the next election.

And I say that every new program ends up Making Things Worse. And more Unjust as well.

Let's go through the programs in historical order.

Education (est. $1.3 trillion in 2020) was supposed to raise the people up. And drive crime down. That's what Horace Mann told us in the 1840s. Well, now it is just a jobs program for unionized supporters of the regime, and more and more does less and less actual education and more and more indoctrination of ruling-class ideology, as in Critical Race Theory. So government education Makes Things Worse.

Social Security ($1.1 trillion in 2020) was supposed to be a fully funded insurance program. But in fact it is just a transfer program from workers to retirees. If it had been a genuine savings program then the savings of the retirees would be creating jobs for workers. And people would retire when they could afford to -- in other words when their savings had created enough jobs for the young'uns to pay their pension.Oh, and get this: retirees would often have wealth to hand down to their children! But, in fact, Social Security will run out of money and then they will either raise taxes on workers, cut pensions on retirees (probably by raising taxes on Social Security payments), or just inflate pensions away. So government Social Security Makes Things Worse.

Medicare (gross $0.92 trillion in 2020) has always been funded mostly by the federal income tax. So it means that rich people subsidize middle-class health care and end-of-life care. Frankly, I'd prefer it if the middle class paid our own health care, and if the rich earned brownie points by helping those who cannot-afford-health-care-through-no-fault-of-their-own. But the main thing would be to have health care not be government-regulated stem-to-stern. Because "regulatory capture," dontcha know. Yes, but whatabout "end of life" health care? Well, don't look now but the experts and the bureaucrats and the scientists are busy stitching up Medicare to make sure that grandma doesn't cost too much at end of life -- as in Medicare Hospice, which in my experience is a conveyor belt to the graveyard. So government Medicare Makes Things Worse

And so on.

But here is my secret hope. I hope that the lefty progressives from Sen. Sanders to Rep. Clyburn to Rep. Cortez are overstepping the mark. I hope that they are making ordinary Americans so mad that the ordinary Americans will elect a Congress and a President to go ahead and repeal everything done during the Biden administration. Just because Let's Go Brandon!

But I realize that I am dreaming of a world that will never be.

But what is life without its dreams and fantasies?

The Difference between RINOs and the New DINOs

We all know about RINOs, the Republicans In Name Only that routinely betray the Republican Party's base and truckle to the Democrats. Hello Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY).

But now Edward Ring at American Greatness wants us to think about the DINOs, Democrats In Name Only. I know what you are saying: If Only.

DINOs are Democrats from California:

They see a dismal reality—unreliable energy, water rationing, traffic gridlock, unaffordable housing, out-of-control homelessness, rampant and unpunished crime, burning forests, and an increasingly worthless system of public education—and all of it is a consequence of progressive politics. They’ve realized that the progressives will do nothing but make these problems worse.

Hey, fellahs. You think?

Ring is talking about chaps like Joel Kotkin the writer, and then two Dem politicians, Michael Shellenberger and Kevin Paffrath. Shellengberger ran for governor of California in 2018 and Paffrath is running right now in the Newsom recall.

Now I think that there is a fundamental difference between RINOs and DINOs.

RINOs like Liz Cheney are people that say to themselves: "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." And I understand that. Why be

The boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle's wreck
Shone round him o'er the dead.

Get a clue and get your share of the loot! Right Liz?

But the DINOs are different. I think that they are starting to realize that there is no happy ending to the current Democratic Party lurch to the left. Better get off the bus before it's too late.

You could call them rats leaving the sinking ship. But I will not.

Instead I will call the current Democratic Party the inevitable consequence of the over/under political formula of all center-left political parties since the gradual emergence of the middle class starting in 1500.

What I mean is that, back in the feudal era, politics was top-down. A hierarchy, just like Jordan B. Peterson's lobsters. Occasionally, a feudal vassal would challenge his liege lord. But not too often. Meanwhile the lobsters peasants knew their place, unless the word turned upside down in a famine or a plague.

Today, I would argue, a ruling class has two options, It can champion the middle class against the lower class or it can champion the lower class against the middle class.

Do you see that for the educated class immediately below today's rulers the option of championing the lower class against the middle class is a much better option? Why? Because there is more loot and plunder for the educated class in various bureaucracies, corporate, government, and activist. No surprise that Americans with advanced degrees tend to vote Democrats. Advanced degrees are credentials that you need if you want to advance in the bureaucracy. 

A government that champions the middle class against the lower class does not have much to do because the middle class just wants to get on with their ordered lives, and doesn't want the government taking a lot of money from them to give to the poor and the bureaucrats. No angle for the educated class.

And, of course, all the projects that any government gets into tends to Make Things Worse, as in the quote above and as I have been arguing in my Making Things Worse series.

Why does government keep Making Things Worse? Because all government is a violation of my Four Laws: trying to game the price system; trying to fix things with government bureaucracies that just don't have the bandwidth to act effectively; ignoring the fact that all regulation ends up in "regulatory capture;" and lastly, that all government is loot and plunder, anyway, and therefore amounts to taking stuff from A to give to B without any value in exchange.

Of course, there is also Stein's Law: "if something cannot go on forever, it will stop."

The DINOs are starting to realize that Houston We Have A Problem. To coin a phrase. In other words, things cannot go on forever.

The problem is that for the lower class, for now, the system works. They get a lot of free stuff as supporters of the ruling class, and don't get to experience the heavy hand of taxation and regulation experienced by the ordinary middle class.

But this may change as the Afghan debacle continues, with inflation, rioting renters and borrowers when Biden finally ends the rent and mortgage moratoriums, and the increasingly aggressive vagrants and beggars of the homeless encampments. Pace the BLMs and AntiFas, the lower class does not want to "defund the police." 

The DINOs just have a feeling in their bones that is telling them that it's time to fix things before they spiral out of control. Because Literally Hitler.

See, I think that our noble global elite misses the point when it determines Never Again: never allow another Hitler to rule.

They are missing the point. The middle class wants a government that makes the trains run on time, and keeps the economy on an even keel, so that ordinary middle class people can wive and thrive and save and indulge in hope about the future. When the government fails in this basic task, and things spin out of control, that is when the middle class turns to a populist nationalist who blames everything on The Jews or The Rich or The Blacks or The Woke.

(You know, just as nice liberal ladies all vote for nice progressive candidates that say that racist-sexist-homophobes are to blame for everything).

A Trump is a signal that the ruling class is not doing its job. If you want to be a successful ruling class, then Job One is to make sure that the middle-class sheep can safely graze. If you ignore the signal, or use state power to neutralize it, then you are asking for trouble right here in River City.

Because the guy that the middle class elects after you chaps have dumped Trump is not going to be a guy that merely makes Mean Tweets.

And the DINOs are starting to get it.

Disentangling Economics and Politics

There's piece in The American Spectator boosting Trumponomics against "neoliberal economics" of the Republican and Democratic Parties. How exactly does by Adam Korzeniewski define all this?

Here's Trumponomics:

industrial policy, national economics, immigration restriction, and skepticism of globalism, [and borrowed from Henry Clay's American System] which focused on internal improvements (infrastructure), tariffs to protect industry, and subsidies when necessary.

Here's Neoliberalism:

Neoliberalism, broadly defined, constitutes a wide range of policies, including the deregulation of markets, elimination of trade barriers, increases in immigration, and the globalization of capital flow. These policies lead to the liberal calcification of corporations and government bureaucracy. They also treat people as interchangeable components in the economy, in which individual value and cultural norms are meaningless. 

Democrats add a twist:

President Biden’s neoliberal economic model leeches off the entropy of American economic power to accelerate the end of domestic industries and American jobs in favor of international corporate profits.

Hmm. Not quite. The problem is that we are mixing economics and politics here. First, let's try to understand economics and the market system.

Economics arises when people do not just produce for themselves, but exchange stuff that they have produced in return for something else, usually money. The next step is that people don't work making stuff for themselves at all; they hire out their labor, usually in return for money. And then some people work entirely in the money business, loaning money and investing in enterprises.

Obviously, this gets bloody complicated, right away. But, in another proof of God's existence, it turns out that humans can value everything that is offered for exchange by a concept we call the price system. There is no mystery about prices, as imagined by the classical economists and the Marxists. In marginal economics the price is whatever something just sold for, and whatever someone is willing to pay right now.

Thus, in a perfect world, markets would be markets, and no regulatory and tariff barriers, and anyone could work for anyone, and move to anywhere and capital, the mother's milk of enterprise, would go wherever it was most needed, all over the world.

But the world ain't perfect. Thus governments are instituted among men to protect us from pirates and plunderers. Trouble is that, as often as not, governments act as pirates and plunderers.  

So, the trouble with "neoliberalism" is that it tends to bend the arc of economics to favor big global corporations that fund politicians. Which often screws the little guy.

But the trouble with Trumponomics is that "industrial policy," "infrastructure," "tariffs," and "subsidies" are all in the eye of the beholder. They all tend to benefit existing economic interests and are used to buy votes.

And the trouble with government programs in general is that they subtract from the verdict of the market, that always wants to fund the most urgent need of the consumers as expressed by the price system. So, "industrial policy" may seem like a good idea, but it will probably end up benefiting existing established interests. Ditto "tariffs" and "subsidies."

And in fact the net effect of almost all government programs is that they try to violate my Four Laws: 

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).

Whenever you violate one of my Four Laws, chances are that you  are Making Things Worse. For the market giveth and the market taketh away. 

The story of the last 200 years, of the Great Enrichment, is also a story of ruined dreams. The handloom weavers were put out of business by power looms. The candlemakers were put out of business by Rockefeller's illuminating oil. The stagecoaches and the carters were put out of business by railroads. The sailing ships were put out of business by steamships. The horse-breeders were put out of business by automobiles. Silent movies were put out of business by talkies. Passenger ships were put out of business by airplanes. Mom and pop stores were put out of business by megastore chains. Mainframe computers were put out of business by minicomputers, then microcomputers, then server farms. Yes, we can help the latest industry put out of business by "progress," but for how long?

You think politicians and bureaucrats are smart enough to outguess the ceaseless innovations of the market?

Look, Trumponomics is a political program to help the ordinary middle class and soften the competition from Factory Girls in China. Neoliberalism is the political program of international business and the educated class that wants to live and work anywhere in the world.

In the best of all possible worlds we would come to a compromise between the two while still remembering that there ain't no hiding from the market. Not in the long term, not in the medium term.

For the problem is always, I would say, that whenever government gets involved in the economy, you can be sure that someone is looking for a bit of loot and plunder, and the politicians are only too glad to help out.

The Only Game Politicians Know

Reading about the five-year hit job on President Trump, detailed by Julie Kelly in American Greatness, makes you think.

What on earth did these intelligence community gum-shoes, these Democratic operatives with bylines, these Schiffs and Robert Muellers think they were doing?

I mean, isn't it a bit of a problem using the police and intelligence agencies to fight your normal political opposition, in an election year, as requested by the campaign of Hillary Clinton, Democrat?

And now we have Nancy Pelosi's latest wizard wheeze to have a January 6 committee with specially selected members, to advance the narrative that, what, Trump supporters are dangerous insurrectionists?

But, parenthetically, if the Trump supporters that broke into the Capitol and apparently wandered around taking selfies are dangerous insurrectionists, then whatabout BLM and AntiFa?

I mean, to me, BLM and AntiFa seem pretty focused on something, and that something seems to be what President Obama called "fundamental transformation." Or revolution by another name.

It makes me wonder: what am I missing here?

I am coming to think that politicians and bureaucrats aren't really that smart. The only thing they know to do is to play campaign tricks, to play their racist, their class narratives, their anti-business screeds. Because politics is division into Us and Them. But once things get beyond this narrow focus, they are all at sea.

One "tell" on this was when Democrats were all dumping on President Trump's Operation Warp Speed vaccine policy last fall. Your Joe Bidens, your Kamala Harrises were all tweeting that they didn't trust President Trump. But now...

I mean, if Democrats can't trust President Trump to have an honest get-the-vaccine-out policy that obviously helps his re-election, why should any Republican trust any of the ever-changing COVID policies of the Biden administration?

And if the health bureaucracy keeps changing its mind about masks and not-masks, vaccines and immunity, lockdowns and non-lockdowns, without really telling the whys and wherefores, and without really telling us what the all-important science says, why should we trust them?

Because they are just politicians, after all, and Narrative is All.

And they really don't know anything else.

But, I suppose, that's why we have revolutions, why we have changes of regimes: because down the ages, tribal chiefs and kings and dukes and dictators have really not been that smart. Just because they won some war, or assassinated some previous big-shot, or rallied a majority of the nobles against the current ruler, doesn't mean that they have a clue about anything else.

I mean, look at Lenin and Stalin, that threw the Russian people and its economy in the garbage can in pursuit of some crackpot economic conspiracy theory. And then, when things went wrong they decided the problem was "saboteurs and wreckers" and launched the secret police on the people to purge them.

Ditto Mao Zedong.

I mean, what's wrong with these people?

Yeah, there's a lot of talk in high places about crackpot conspiracy theories about stealing elections, about the COVID-19 epidemic.

But whatabout the biggest conspiracy of them all, Marxist economics? That the capitalists were out to screw the workers? And that the religious cult selling this narrative has been pushing it all through the biggest increase in the income of the common man in all history, what economist Deirdre McCloskey calls The Great Enrichment?

Maybe it's a good thing that politicians are really dumb, that the only thing they know, per Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy is how to get elected and reelected, and the fact they get any governing done at all is remarkable.

Because if they were smart, imagine the damage they could do!

Here's another thing: the pedal-to-the-metal spending binge that the Democrats are pushing right now.

I'd say that rebalancing the economy after the COVID mess is a really tricky thing to accomplish. I'd say you'd want to get people off unemployment as quickly as possible. I'd say you'd want to end mortgage and rent forgiveness as quick as possible. I'd say you'd want to put the whole de-carbonizing agenda on a 5-year hold, because you really don't want spiralling energy costs to interfere with the rebalancing of the economy. I'd say you'd want to tell all the lefty interests that, hey, we want to help you and advance all your agendas, but first we've got to put the economy to rights. 

I'd say that because the Democrats are not doing anything close to this that they are going to create an economic mess that will really upset the ordinary non-political middle-class voter and elect a Republican Congress and a Republican President that will make the amiable Trump look like a walk in the park.

That's what my Four Laws are supposed to teach:

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).

 The first two laws deal with the fantasy that you can run an economy like a lord of the manor runs his estate. The second two laws deal with the problem that all politics and government ends up as loot and plunder.

And unless the politicians get smart and keep the lord-of-the-manor stuff and the loot-and-plunder stuff down to a dull roar they are going to create a mess that will kick them out of office.

Four Laws: Government Cannot Reform

There are, I believe, Four Laws, scientific principles, if you like, that need to be understood in relation to all proposals for More Government.

The First Law is that Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices. This law was discovered in 1920 by Ludwig von Mises.

The Second Law is a corollary of the First Law. It argues that the Man in Washington cannot outperform the millions of producers and consumers: he just doesn't have the bandwidth. This law was enunciated by F.A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom.

The Third Law is that government regulation of the economy cannot work, because of "regulatory capture" of the regulators by the regulated. It was developed by George Stigler.

The Fourth Law is mine own. It states that government programs cannot work because government can never reform them.

Why is this?

It is because every government program is a program of loot and plunder, taking money from the general population to give to the supporters of the regime.

This is obviously true in the case of Vikings in their longships sailing up the rivers of England in the autumn to kill the men, enslave the women and children, and empty the storehouses of grain and the churches of silver. It is obviously true of the Pirates of the Caribbean of yesteryear and the Somali pirates of today.

You can see it in the operation of the feudal system where the kings needed to reward their baron supporters with manors and estates that would be taken from the baronial opponents of the king.

You can see it in the various leftist ideologies from Communism to Critical Race Theory. The whole point is to rally the helpless oppressed to your banner and smash the capitalists or the racists. And then each supporter will get his share.

But the same principle obtains in every democratic election in these United States. The Democrats always offer new spending -- in the interests of Justice, of course -- and the Republicans always offer tax cuts. Donald Trump in 2016 proposed to benefit the middle class by reducing immigration and increasing tariffs on China. The middle class understood that these measures were designed to increase their wages.

But no politician is out there saying: "hey, this program doesn't work, so we better cut it back." Not if it benefits his supporters.

So you can never reform Social Security; you can never reform Medicare. You can never reform education.

Let's look at an example: the folks at AntiFa.

Here's what I read in Andy Ngo’s Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. He wrote of Antifa members that

While some are indeed highly educated and in white-collar professions ranging from law to academia to health care, those who are involved in the street violence are disproportionately individuals dealing with housing insecurity, financial instability, and mental health issues like gender dysphoria...

Grievance ideologies resonate with millennials and Gen Z because of an economic reality they experience: crushing student debt, job insecurity, and the inability to ever afford a home.

Now, I would say that "crushing student debt" is a direct result of "free money" flowing from students to universities arising out of the federal government's student loan program. You think that anyone, Democrat or Republican, is going to turn off the spigot? I'd say that "job insecurity" is a direct result of increased immigration since 1965. You think that the Democrats are ever going to agree to reduced immigration? And "inability... to afford a home" is a consequence of the subsidies for long-term mortgages that started in 1938. You think that any damn politician has the cojones to turn off the spigot for low-down payment long-term fixed-rate mortgage loans?

Notice how Democrats are perfectly happy to encourage Antifa to riot in the streets and loot mom-and-pop stores. But they are not going to do anything about the "root causes" of the grievances of the millennials and Gen Z.

The normal way in which government responds to the failure of its programs is to throw more money at them. Of course it does, because all politics is an appeal to supporters that are looking to use their vote to obtain benefits, and all government is a mechanism for the rulers to distribute loot and plunder, "free stuff," to their supporters.

You see confirmation of this in the incidence of hyperinflation, of which the marquee example is Weimar Germany after World War I. In the years before World War I Germany had been the leader in creating social democratic programs like pensions and health care. But after World War I and the Allies' demand for reparations there was No More Money. Did the post-war German government cut the programs down to match the reduced revenue? Not a bit of it. They kept the programs and printed the money until the economy completely collapsed and then the people were desperate enough to agree to anything, in the hope that some sort of life could emerge from the debris.

We see this principle operating in US politics over the last half century. Back in the day, Republicans were all for balancing the budget. So when Ronald Reagan became president, what did he do? He cut taxes, and gussied up some sort of a deal with the Democrats to cut spending. Only spending was never cut. Since then Republicans have just pushed for tax cuts and left the spending alone. Candidate Trump was specific that he would not cut Social Security and Medicare. And believe me, pensions and health care is where it's at:

Total Government Spending in the United States Federal, State, and Local Fiscal Year 2021
Government Pensions	$1.5 trillion
Government Health Care	$1.7 trillion
Government Education	$1.1 trillion
National Defense	$1.1 trillion
Government Welfare	$0.4 trillion
All Other Spending	$1.8 trillion
Total Government Spending	$7.7 trillion
Federal Deficit	$1.0 trillion

So. Nothing will be done about reforming the system until we run out of Other Peoples' Money. And maybe not even then.

Like I say. Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them.

War Correspondent Reports from Culture War Front

All I can say, reading the "White Man Faculty" piece on "Academic Hysteria Part II," is I thank God I don't live and work in the trenches of the culture war. Instead I am with the artillery, shooting off rounds every now and then, and not worrying too much where the shells will land.

And I don't seem to worry about wokey artillery shells landing on me. Maybe I should!

Of course the WMF piece is full of things like the absolutely useless and ignorant black females that teach many of the CRT courses and seminars. But what struck me was the go-along-to-get-along attitude of the whites in the academy.

I'm not too surprised, since I've just finished reading The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz. It's all about artists and writers captured by the post-WWII communist governments in Poland and the Baltics. The fact is that humans are go-along-to-get-along animals. Especially artists and writers. Which is another way of saying we are social animals.

White Man Faculty writes about how many of the CRT presenters look like they belong in Seattle's CHAZ/CHOP zone, and how "presentations are incredibly illogical, inconsistent, non-factual, and disjointed."

And yet, no matter how bad the presentations are, no matter how obviously wrong the information provided is, and no matter how transparently illogical and inconsistent it all is, I note that my colleagues, with few exceptions, accept it all without question and parrot the most astonishing nonsense without the slightest hesitation or question.

He goes on:

I note as well a strong correlation between those who blindly accept non-political nonsense without question and those who swallow the political social justice nonsense also without question. Amusingly, all of these dogmatic and conformist leftists, without the slightest shred of irony or self-awareness, decry the “closeminded” and “rigid” and “unthinking” attitudes of all those dastardly (White, of course) people out there (all living in trailer parks, no doubt) who oppose the social justice agenda.  

But really this is no different than the judgments of any religious group members against other groups and churches. We all confidently expound upon the closed minds, the bigotry, the superstition of other faiths and world views.

And academics are really the modern equivalent of the universal Catholic Church. They are priests in gubmint seminaries, and gubmint expects them to support its agenda. If you don't support the pope's dicta on Christianity you don't belong as a priest in the Catholic Church. Ditto to our modern academics.

But I am not downhearted. That's because, as you know, I regard reigns of terror, purges, and cancel cultures as the sign of a religious movement failing to deal with its failure of prophecy.

When prophecy fails, humans don't abandon the faith. Not right away. Instead they amp it up. For a while.

And I think that the fundamental reality of our age is that the faith of our Wokies, from silly liberal ladies and their #WeBelieve signs to bigoted academics, is that the whole idea of a society ruled by its educated class is crumbling into dust.

And the reason it is crumbling into dust is the fundamental error at its heart, that a human society can be directed from the top by wise educated experts and ethicists. Doesn't work that way. The only thing a political elite is good for is directing a war -- and usually the war is not really about defending the people but an excuse for the rulers to flex their muscles. Hello climate change!

Did I mention my Four Laws that illustrate the truth of this?

1. Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises)
2. Bureaucracy cannot work because it lacks bandwidth (Hayek)
3. Regulation cannot work because "regulatory capture" (Stigler)
4. Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them (Chantrill)

There is one government program that rulers can cut. They can and do cut military spending after the end of a war. That's about it.

So, I am not downhearted. I believe we are heading into a golden age where the prestige of revolution and politics will be reduced to a dull roar. I express this by saying that the Age of Revolution is over, activists. And the Age of Politics is over, politicians and bureaucrats.

But what will this new age look like?

I have no idea.

But it won't get much of a start until our young'uns tell their teachers and CRT facilitators to go take a jump in the lake.

Another Four Law. But What to Call It?

I've been pondering adding another law to my Four Laws. Did I mention what 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).

My fifth law has to do with our current Big Problem, that the lower part of the Ruling Class -- not the actual ruling clique but the whole educated Gentry -- overloads the political system with 1,001 different wizard wheezes for government programs. And the legal system. What we call "lawfare," where 1,001 activist groups are manipulating the legal system with attempts to mandate this or that use of government power to bend the arc of history towards justice.

One example of this problem is, of course, climate change. The whole educated class is down for the cause, and is pushing it in a hundred different programs and a thousand different legal cases. Meanwhile the media and activists and leading government scientists all turn the question into a moral crusade and stigmatize any opponent as a "climate denier."

The point is, once the educated gentry has got the bit in its teeth like this, what can the average person -- or the aggregate of average persons -- do against the flood tide of educated and expert opinion, except brace for the inevitable crash landing.

And, in the broader context, where is the justice in a system where the ruling class can bully the rest of the country into submitting to and paying for its 1,001 wizard wheezes, which are not really about making things better but flattering the activists in question into thinking that they are "making a difference?"

Because it is really hard to come up with a political program that really does make things better, rather than merely feed the conceit of the activist in question. Here's a potential maxim:

All activism comes from a place of privilege.

But that doesn't quite get where I want to go. I am thinking about the right of the average Commoner to live his life in peace without being jostled around by privileged Gentry on some conceited mission to save the world.

What I am really asking for is a political threshold that must be exceeded before an eager activist can lasso the whole of society into his moral crusade.

It goes back to the other Four Laws. Don't muck about with the economy and its prices, because 1000 to 1 you will only make things worse, Mr. Socialist. Don't think you can run the Districts from some bureaucracy in the Capitol, Mr. Credentialed Bureaucrat. Because you don't have the bandwidth to do so. Don't think you can regulate the malefactors of great wealth, Mr. Regulator, because all you'll do is get captured by the regulated. Don't start any new program, Mr. Activist, because you will cast some social/economic activity in stone and prevent its improvement.

I guess this goes back to my notion that "the Age of Politics is over." What I mean by that is that politics, the practice of civil war by other means, really should not go much beyond resolving and compromising conflicts that might lead to civil war. Anything else should be done outside of politics.

On the other hand, by meddling around in politics, our liberal friends are actually creating new instances of conflict where the people adversely affected by their noble activism may be prompted to form a head of rebellion to obtain redress against new injustices. I guess that is what I mean by suggesting that our lefty friends represent a Great Reaction. They are returning us to an age where people feel the only way to get their voices heard is by force.

RIP Rush Limbaugh.

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.

Progressivism is Like a Shark

Suppose I were a progressive strategist, high up in the rarefied air of the top-flight Biden transition team, planning for the glorious future of progressivism. What would I be thinking?

Well, of course, I couldn't be that person, because I would not want to be part of a team that was going to turn America into mush.

See, I see our Big Problem this way. The problem is that, as far as big government is concerned we've gone about as furr as it can go.

But government can never say, OK, bit of a cock-up on the spending front; we are going to have to cut all your favorite programs so that we can heal the nation's economy. As in, no, really, it's serious this time!

Exactly. No politician is ever going to get elected, or long stay in office, with that kind of a program. In reality, of course, it would have been a good idea not to pass Social Security, and instead implement a mandatory national savings program. If you are going to force workers around with a FICA payroll tax why not force them to put the money in a 401K at Fidelity or Vanguard? But it's too late for that. Because the folks that paid their payroll tax all their lives expect to get their gubmint pensions: I certainly do.

It's Chantrill's Law, last of the Four Laws. Government programs don't work because you can never reform them. The whole point of a government program is to bribe the voters. But the voters do not take kindly to being unbribed.

So now we have all these programs sucking the life out of the economy, but you can never unsuck them. Of course, with Medicare and student debt we have created monsters where the cost of health care and a college education have ballooned into the stratosphere as a consequence of the subsidies to the health-care professionals and the education professionals. It's like mortgage subsidies, peasant. If you subsidize mortgages so that peoples' mortgage payments go further and more people can qualify for mortgages, why, the result is that you bid up the price of housing, and you are back where you started, if you are lucky. No kidding!

But there is a problem. You can't get people to vote for you just because you gave them loot and plunder a couple of elections ago. You have to rejustify government every election cycle with new glorious vistas of the future. This is why the Democrats are pushing the notion of climate change.

On the one hand, climate change is a physical necessity, because we are burning the Earth up with the burning of fossil fuels. So we have to act now. On the other hand it puts money into the pockets of millions of educated gentry supporters of the regime. Only problem is that it will be paid for in reduced income for the vast majority of people, specifically ordinary Commoners with ordinary jobs and lives, and by the Clients, the lower classes that won't have the jobs afforded by a growing economy.

Meanwhile, what the US government ought to be doing in the next couple of years is putting America back to work after the economic devastation of the COVID epidemic.

But do you know, I think we are going to see a replay of the Obama administration. Instead of focusing like a laser on reviving the economy after the Mortgage Meltdown of 2006-08, the Obamis instead decided to go for Obamacare and burden the US economy with yet another entitlement program. The result was the slowest recovery from a recession in the post-WWII era.

Because Obama was a Lightbringer he was able to survive this foolishness and get reelected. But my fearless prediction is, assuming that the fix is in and Biden gets inaugurated on January 20, that by the Summer of 2022 the natives will be restless, and the Dems will lose bigly in November 2022. By November 2024, I dare say that there will be "mostly peaceful protests" against the feckless Biden administration, and whoever is running for president as a Republican -- as Trump or the heir to Trump -- will be conducting Trump Rallies that make the originals look like out-of-town tryouts.

Why do I say this? Because, for me, the consequence of the ruling class spending the whole of the last four years on getting Trump out by hook or by crook is that they have not begun to think about where they went wrong, and how it was possible for a clown like Trump to win the presidency, and how they should redirect their political and economic strategy for the future.

At least the colonialist Brits had the sense to understand that when the District Officers reported to the Governor that "the natives were restless" it meant something had to be done to quiet the natives back down again.

But our ruling class just does not seem to register that "the natives are restless" means that the rulers have a problem.

Maybe they can't do anything. Maybe politicians are like sharks; they have to keep moving forward to keep the water flowing over their gills.

So you keep moving forward until you run on the rocks and break up.

But I have a feeling that, to change the metaphor, when the ship of state goes aground on the rocks, the captain will not be going down with the ship. Instead the captain and officers will commandeer the lifeboat and the Deplorables and Bitter Clingers will be the ones left on the wreck of the USS America.

The End of the Commoner Rebellion

We don't know yet exactly how our Democratic friends are going to cook up the votes in the states remaining to be called in the 2020 Presidential Election as of this moment: in NV, WI, MI, PA, NC, GA. 

But I don't think it matters.

The fact is that President Trump didn't expand the map beyond his victory in 2016. To establish the Revolt of the Deplorables as a thing he needed to increase his 300 odd Electoral College votes to 350 or 400.

And if he has in fact increased his support among blacks and Hispanics, then he has lost support among white educated Gentry.

One of the notions of Gaetano Mosca in The Ruling Class is that the Commoners don't get a vote. Political change only occurs when the ruling class divides and the change faction wins.

My hope was that a Trump reelection would redefine politics in the US and that the educated Gentry would decide to compose its differences with the Commoners. But that did not happen. If you are an educated Gentry this morning you are saying to yourself and your educated Gentry friends: pedal to the metal, on Critical Race Theory, and on saving the planet from climate change. We've got those racist-sexist-homophobe bigots just where we want them.

In other words, the global educated Gentry is going to go Full Speed Ahead on its Great Reset agenda, "building back better" under the benevolent supervision of the educated and the evolved and the creative people. That means, of course, also, Full Speed Ahead on climate change and eliminating fossil fuels.

And all the Good Little Girls of intersectional politics are going to be cooking up new "1619 Projects" and other reasons to oppress the Basket of Deplorables. Because they had it coming. Let us rehearse Hillary Clinton's Basket of Deplorables speech one more time:

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.

Notice the end of the quote, that the "irredeemable... are not America." Do you see what that does? It empowers the speech police to go out throughout the land to identify and cancel anyone guilty of being "racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic  – you name it."

Hey, there is never a shortage of people ready to teach the other guys a lesson. And now that the Commoner Rebellion has failed, they will be out there working their tails off on social media, in the movies, in the schools, K thru retired professor.

Oh yes. In the end the Reign of Woke Terror will sputter out, perhaps in a Thermidorean Reaction, or perhaps just in exhaustion, or perhaps after defeat in civil war. But as of now I can promise you it has its bit within its teeth.

I feel that the Woke Religion is a Great Reaction, a lurch back to the primitive. We don't need religions with that kind of discipline, and the Woke Inquisitors are going to do nothing but harm. Tell that to the woke enthusiasts, and see what you get.

Nothing new, of course. There are always people hanging around panting to dive into a moral war against the Evil One. Usually the moral warriors are the Evil Ones they are supposed to be fighting. My belief is that in the modern era we really don't need such strong religion. But what do I know. There is always a moral component to humans as social animals, and always will be.

Then there is the Green New Deal, the plan to save the planet from runaway global warming from the burning of carbon-based fuels. If you are a ruling class you slobber at a supposed existential peril like runaway global warming. Because it licenses you to mobilize every corner of society in a gigantic war to save humanity. Think of the power, the glory! There are always people lusting after power and glory and there always will be.

Now my belief is that a totalitarian moral hierarchy that the current Woke Religion calls for, and the totalitarian economic/political hierarchy that the current climate panic calls for can only end in disaster. And that is because of my Four Laws.

Socialism cannot work, because it cannot compute prices.

Administrative government cannot work because it doesn't have the bandwidth to supervise everything. 

Regulatory administration cannot work because of "regulatory capture" by the businesses being regulated

Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them except by expanding them. 

In other words top-down anything, except in an actual war, doesn't work because it isn't social, and humans are social animals. When we set up a hierarchical top-down structure we are setting something in concrete, assuming there is One Correct Way, and the one thing we can be certain about in human life is that tomorrow the world will change and we will have to change our plans.

One fine day, we humans will emerge from the Dark Age into which our globalist educated Gentry is leading us. I just hope that my descendants are among the happy ones that survive till that day.

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?

Who Said: "Never Trust Experts"

Yeah. Back in the day, there was a politician that said, in a letter to a pal:

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you never should trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.

Right first time. It was Lord Salisbury, three times Prime Minister of Britland. And he actually practiced what he preached, because he acted as his own Foreign Secretary and kept the Brit Foreign Office and Sir Humphrey out of the loop.

But, in the end, I am not sure that keeping the striped-pants boys out of the loop was such a good idea. Because, 13 years after Salisbury gave up the premiership to his nephew Arthur Balfour, Britland got into World War I. Idiots. And I think the main reason for that was that Balfour and the striped-pants boys didn't have a clue.

For a start, they entered into an Entente Cordiale with France that Germany interpreted as an aggressive act against the Second Reich. Great going, guys! Generations of British politicians insisted that Britain should not ally with any continental power because the other powers would feel cornered. So the first thing that genius Balfour did was ally with a continental power.

Well, we know all about experts now, don't we, after the glorious success of the Wu Flu epidemic. They really didn't have a clue, and they recommended to Gov. Andrew Cuomo and other blue-state governors that they should unload hospitals of recovering Wu Flu patients and send them into nursing homes.

Except that nursing homes have a ton of elderly patients and the recovering Wu Flu patients infected the elderly and as a result about 50 percent of the Wu Flu deaths have been among the elderly nursing home and retirement home community.

Now I know that everyone wants to blame bossy Karen Cuomo for this, but, hey, did Cuomo ever bother to read a word about Lord Salisbury and his advice about experts? Or, for that matter, the wisdom of another 19th century statesman that was probably not an idiot, Otto von Bismarck, the chap that figured out how to unite Germany in three nice little wars instead of one big one? I doubt it.

So Gov. Cuomo was just ignorant, an idiot like most politicians.

Now, of course, I have a deep philosophical system that addresses the Expert Problem. I understand, from reading The Millionaire Next Door and other works that the natural and physical thing for the scions of the educated Gentry is to become Experts, salaried experts in government and tenured experts in universities. It is much easier than a genuine life of creation, as in creating a new business, or even creating a new political party.

The scion of the educated Gentry loads up on university degrees at selective colleges and internships at well-connected institutions and then gets to work in the bureaucracy that supports the ruling class. In the government and in the university. Good work if you can get it.

And it doesn't matter if you make a complete mess of everything and bring the nation to the brink of disaster. You still got your gubmint pension, don't you Peter Strzok? You still got your tenure don't you, Professor Numbskull? Although, I suppose, things could get a little dicey if you once did a comic turn in blackface.

Now, I believe, according to my Four Laws, that administrative government of the experts cannot work because 1) there isn't enough bandwidth, 2) when you regulate business the regulated end up dominating the regulators, and 3) Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them, public school teachers. And that's to say nothing of the First Law, that socialism -- i.e., any gubmint program -- cannot work because it cannot compute prices.

So you should never trust experts because the only thing you should trust is the market and its prices and the fundamental fact of the market that it forces people to act responsibly and trust-worthily. Not because that is good or bad but because if you are not responsible and trustworthy nobody will want to deal with you.

But our liberal friends rather like the experts, and you can see why. First of all, it means jobs for liberals. Secondly, you can appeal to experts as kings once appealed to tame priests and diviners.

Yeah, funny thing how experts so often propose things that give the government more power. I wonder why that is so? And when the Little Darlings of the ruling class want to go out and protest, why, the experts say it is just fine. But it is not fine for ordinary commoners to go out and socially distance on the beach.

Yep. We live in interesting times. But I wouldn't mind if the present moment ends up giving experts a black eye. It might save these United States from civil war and demolition.

Deep Sixing the Socialist Idiots

Today Dinesh D'Souza has an excerpt from his book The United States of Socialism. He asks why the economic failures of socialism haven't made socialism a dead letter all over the world. Why do the AOCs and Co. still believe?

They are on a grand quest, and they refuse to look back. The[y] insist that they are the champions of a moral ideal. The only way to refute them is to refute their moral ideal, to expose their dream as a nightmare, to capsize their utopia. 

But, he writes, there is a problem. How to persuade people that Socialism is a fantasy? The problem is that, for humans,

a fantasy continues to hold its appeal even when it is exposed as a fantasy. So we have to expose the socialist utopia not as an illusion but rather as a racket.  

This approach would have the advantage, of course, of tying into Eric Hoffer's notion that

Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.

So, with socialism we would say that it starts with St. Simon, Fourier, and Marx as an incandescent dream. It becomes with social democracy and the welfare state a business of votes for benefits. And it became with Communism and now Wokism, the dull thuggery of: "nice little job you got here, real shame if it got canceled for Wrong Think, James Damore."

Of course, my Great Reaction notion is designed to be an all-fronts attack on leftism. And my Four Laws notion is designed to show that a government-run economy cannot work.

And my study of Prophecy indicated that prophetic failure does not extinguish the prophetic cult, not right away. But, hey, you'd think that after all the prophetic failures of socialism it would be about time for Good Little Girls like AOC to reject socialism. But they don't.

Well, we know why. Because the education system teaches Good Little Girls that socialism is good. Nobody is teaching the Good Little Girls that socialism is a lurch back to the primitive, that it is always cruel and unjust and always will be, that is always leads to poverty and famine, and that it imagines a world that can never be, not in this world and not in the next world.

This is actually not surprising, because with a government-dominated education system of course the system is going to shill for the ruling class and teach little children the wonders of a government-dominated society.

I guess the attack on socialism needs to operate on several levels. Let' s call it Routing the Left.

1. We need a meaning of life, a religion that appeals to educated Gentry more than the current over-under ideology that makes the educated Gentry into a convocation of saints trying to bend the arc of history towards justice. My idea, in A Vision of the Good Life, that we should teach the educated Gentry to be Sacrificial Heroes rather the Egoist Heroes, is one such effort.
2. We need a new common-sense, set of aphorisms that marginalizes the socialist fantasy. My Four Laws is one such, saying that socialism cannot work, because this and that and the other.
3. We need an ideological offensive that cuts across the grain of socialism putting everything about the left in a bad light. That, I believe is the role of my Great Reaction notion.

Hey, this is not rocket science. We need to engage people at all levels: at the prophetic vision level, saying here is a vision of the good life better than socialism; at the logic and reason level, saying that socialism cannot work, because reasons; and at the gut level, saying that anyone that believes in socialism is an delta-minus moron.

Elon Musk Schools the Karens

Well, well, well. After Gov. Karen Newsom (D-CA) told Elon Musk not to open his Tesla electric car factory in Fremont, CA, and after Alameda Country Interim Health Officer Karen Pan disallowed his plan to reopen, Elon Musk upped the challenge.

Tesla is restarting production today against Alameda County rules. I will be on the line with everyone else. If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2020

And went ahead and reopened his car plant. Hey, why not! He is saving the planet with his electric cars!

But I think that we should understand the bigger picture here. Musk is using the method of the great American philosopher, Jackie Gleason. He is saying "To the moon, Karen!"

Or maybe, in the case of Elon Musk, we are talking about "To Mars, Karen!"

The thing to understand, I think, is the fundamental difference in the way that men and women handle conflict and danger.

Women say: "Shelter in place." Men say: "March toward the sound of the guns."

Women run conflict in a static to and fro of each one takes a turn, as in:

Woman #1: [Yells at neighbor]

Woman #2: shares with her friends: "I can't believe she said that," then retaliates.

Etc., move by move. 

Men are different. Men run conflict as a war of movement, where you are always trying to stay one move ahead of the enemy.

This is confirmed by chaps like Sun Tzu, and lately by John Boyd's OODA loop.  The whole idea of Observe, Orient, Decide, Act is to understand the process that an actor in a conflict goes through, and to train yourself in the process so it is second nature. Then, the idea is that when you are in a conflict you "get inside the opponent's OODA loop" by responding to events and acting faster that he can react and act. It´s a guy thing.

It is not a Karen thing. Because Karen is a girl.

But there is a bigger issue here. And it points up the difference between the educated Gentry and the Commoners.

The educated Gentry is the most highly educated part of the population, meaning that its members are more likely to have excelled at formal education in schools and universities. There is a tendency in such social structures to develop One True Way on everything: "settled science" as we know it. Also there is a tendency for such institutions to come under the influence of the ruling class and to convert them from education institutions into ruling-class seminaries.

The Democrats, as the party of the educated Gentry, are big-time into formal structures and settled science promulgated from on high, and you peasants better follow along.

The Republicans, as the party of Commoners, are much more into informal education, learning by doing: a million consumers and producers responding to the price signals of the market and learning as they go and correcting mistakes on the way.

The Helpless Victims, of course, just sit there waiting for someone to tell them what to do. But as I say in my Little Darlings concept, the problem with being a Little Darling is that you are completely at the mercy of the ruling class, who may or may not really care about people like you.

The current Wu Flu epidemic is showing us the problems in the One True Way approach of the educated Gentry. Their epidemic models don't work; their assumptions about social distancing don't work. Their from the top edicts, such as Gov. Karen Cuomo's order forcing nursing homes to accept Wu Flu patients from hospital or else, don't often work.

Of course they don't. That's because all human activity on this Earth is a cluster-f*ck.

Meanwhile ten thousand producers are adapting their operations to make masks and social distancing markers and restaurants are switching from eat-in to takeout.

The interesting point is that the top-down model beloved by the educated Gentry class with its hunger for "ambition, honor, and vanity" is anti-social. I mean that it is a command from on high, a pure hierarchy. It does not allow for flexibility and feedback and interaction.

The market, on the other hand is a truly social thing, with humans interacting and responding to each other in no particular hierarchy and doing things that benefit other people just because that is the way you get on.

Did I mention my Four Laws? That

Socialism doesn't work because it can't compute prices. 

Administration doesn't work because it doesn't have the bandwidth. 

Regulation doesn't work because "regulatory capture." 

Government programs don't work because you can never reform them.

If you want the economy to produce masks and gloves, let the price system go to work. If you want to restart the economy then let the business owners go to work. If you want to come up with a vaccine, then stop the FDA and let the drug companies go to work. If you want everyone to get back to work then don't pass a Karen Pelosi (D-CA) $3 trillion lefty make-work bill that will make things worse.

Know what? None of this is rocket science. It really isn't.

But there is a cultural problem. If you are in the educated Gentry, your self-image depends on your superior wisdom to order the lesser breeds without the law around. You cannot believe that the Commoners should be allowed to live without proper supervision from their betters.

But #WeBelieve that "kindness is everything." Just like it says on the yard-sign out in front.

Four Laws - Table of Contents

Four Laws: The Limits of Government in the Economy

The Laws

1. Four Laws: Socialism Cannot Compute Prices
   Thus the producers don't know what to produce
   
   
2. Four Laws: The Man in Washington Cannot Outperform Consumers and Producers
   Because there isn't enough bandwidth
   
   
3. Four Laws: Regulatory Capture
   The regulators get captured by the people they regulate
   
   
4. Four Laws: Government Cannot Reform
   You can't take peoples' checks away from them
   

Commentary

1. Can Government Correct a Mistake?
   
   
2. Clueless Liberal in the Academy
   
   
3. The Administrative State Doesn't Work. Because Hayek
   
   
4. Obama's Phone-and-Pen Politics is a Weakness, not a Strength
   
   
5. Four Golden Rules of National Economics
   
   
6. Four Golden Rules of National Economics
   
   
7. Controlocracy: Xi's Big Mistake
   Control wants to impede feedback
   
   
8. Don't Panic: I Say Bring Bernie On
   Let's face the socialist menace head on
   
   
9. Elon Musk Schools the Karens
   It's a gender -- and a class -- thing
   
   
10. Deep Sixing the Socialist Idiots
    
    
11. Who Said: "Never Trust Experts"
    
    
12. When All the Gubmint Programs Fail At Once
    
    
13. The End of the Commoner Rebellion
    
    
14. Progressivism is Like a Shark
    
    
15. Good Luck, Joe. You'll Need It
    
    
16. Another Four Law. But What to Call It?
    
    
17. War Correspondent Reports from Culture War Front
    
    

Don't Panic! I Say Bring Bernie On!

It looks like all the usual suspects are panicking, as usual. And none more so than your regular Democratic operatives with bylines in the media. (Imagine! Wikipedia actually has that!)

OK. So I panicked for a moment. But then I thought, hey, we gotta fight this battle sooner or later. And really what better with a moonbat like Bernie Sanders going up against a street-fighter like Donald Trump?

I was to yoga this morning and what do you think? Jim the yoga teacher was all embarrassed about President Trump mispronouncing the name of the guy that brought yoga to the West. Well, I doubt if the 100,000 Indians at the cricket stadium -- what? there's a 100,000 seat cricket stadium? -- were too worried about that! Turning the tables, I think that there is something charming about furriners trying to pronounce Anglo-Saxon names. But at least they tried!

But notice what my liberal yoga pal did not talk about. Bernie. Oh, last week, before the Mike the Tyke debate rout and the Nevada rout, he was mumbling about Bloomberg or something.

Here are a few Good Things about a possible Bernie nomination:

• It would teach all those nice suburban women a lesson. You girls ready for Bernie to take your health insurance away? Your SUV? Make higher education free so that your professional income can't compete against bright students with less money than you?
• It would teach those twentysomething kids a lesson. Yeah kids! Americans don't like socialism. So why don't you grow up!
• It would give America's gun owners a reason to show up and vote.
• It would make it harder for nice moderate Democrats to win in nice moderate suburban districts. Remember how all those nice moderate candidates in 2018 were going to vote against Pelosi? Hey girls! Cat got your tongue?
• It would permit eevil right-wing racist-sexist-homophobes like me to say forever after that, back in 2020, America was offered socialism and it voted it down (I hope) 60-40.
• It would help the next Clinton to move to the center and declare on a stack of Bibles that he was a New Democrat and utterly rejected the divisive politics of Bernie.
• It might even roll back the identity politics/intersectional priests and their ilk. For a while.
• It might help President Trump clean out the Swamp in his second term.
• It would make Florida red. Those Cuban-Americans aren't going to take Bernie lying down.
• And so on.

Of course, socialism is personal for me. My dad was born and raised in Russia and escaped in 1918 at the age of 16 ten feet ahead of the Bolsheviks.

Shall we rehearse my anti-socialist notions, just for fun? First there are the Four Laws.

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).

I think that is perfectly clear, don't you? And if you don't understand the first law, about prices, then you really don't get it. Prices, you see, are perhaps the most amazing cultural invention of humans ever. Prices enable us -- even the poorest -- to broadcast to the world what we are willing to exchange in the moment to moment dance of social cooperation, and for what value in exchange. It is what enables the unfathomable complexity of the market economy to function at all. The reason that socialism fails every time it is tried is because, under socialism, the consumers don't get a chance of feedback, to signal to the producers what they want -- or what they can be persuaded to want -- and what they are willing to pay.

Do you think that is enough? No. I think we need to mention the Great Reaction, the mad reactionary enthusiasm among lefties for the old days.

Socialism is a return to slavery;  

the welfare state is a return to feudalism;  

identity politics is neo-tribalism; 

reparations is neo-vengeance;  

activism is part medieval knight-errantry, part pro-regime street-thuggery, and part activisme, or gentry kids putting on a play;  

helpless victims are a return to sacrifice,  

social justice is good old loot and plunder.

 I'm sure the list isn't really exhaustive. But I'm working on it.

It all comes down to this, my US Politics in Four Lessons:

The American People are the best people in the world. 

The USA is the best country in the world. 

When you lose a normal change election you concede with a good grace. 

Anyone that accuses someone of being a racist is a monster.

Anyway. I am sure that Brad Parscale and the boys are busy working on the framework of a campaign against Bernie. 

And I am sure that President Trump is up to the challenge.

In face, think about it. What GOP nominee of the last 50 years is better adapted to run a campaign against a socialist and win? OK. Maybe Ronald Reagan.