The Eternal Question About Government

Government knows only two modes. First there is the call to arms against an enemy. The call to arms may be against the Vikings, the Frogs, the Krauts, the Commies, the A-rabs, the Pox.

But the question is ever the same. Is a total mobilization of The People to fight the Foe the only option? Or even the best option?

We can see this with World War COVID.

Was it really a good idea for President Trump to make it a headline affair? With daily press conferences at the White House?

Was it really a good idea for Democrats in Fall 2020 to raise questions about the "Trump vaccine?"

Was it really a good idea to push universal vaccination? And vaccine mandates? And tell anti-vaxxers that they are bad people, aka the enemy?

My point is that this is the way that government approaches everything. There must be an enemy! We must all unite together! Anyone that doesn't rally to the colors is a coward! You must follow the orders of the leader! Attack! Attack! Attack!

Let's say, for the sake of argument that when the nation is threatened by a new pestilence, then the strategy of mobilizing the country as for war, and creating an army to attack and vanquish the foe is appropriate.

But, I think, it is pretty obvious that, by now, the World War COVID approach is no longer appropriate. And the question is: was it ever appropriate? How do we know? How can we tell?

Let's segue to the question of governments and the poor.

Obviously, I would say, the COVID lockdowns were a mistake because they have flung a lot of marginal people out of work. And people who have responded to the government rent and mortgage pauses by skipping on your payments you are now in a world of hurt.

So now what? Do we throw more money at the folks thrown out of work whose lives are now in a spiral dive? Maybe homeless?

Let's go back to the Crash of 2008. Whatabout the people thrown out of work back then? That lost their houses because of their underwater mortgages? How good of an idea was it to subsidize mortgages, pump housing prices into the sky, and then have to deal with the human rubble after the crash? How well did government deal with and help the human rubble of the Crash of 2008.

By the way, back in the 1980s our liberal friends were making a big issue of the homeless, that they blamed on Reaganomics. But maybe they were folks thrown out of work in the stagflation and subsequent credit crunch and recession in 1980-81. And the inflation of the 1970s? Due to the Great Society of the 1960s and coincident Vietnam War? And maybe the end of the government-subsidized union jobs that got union worker wages way above the market rate?

By the way, back in the 1930s we had another crack-up, deriving from the Crash of 1929 and the failure of the Federal Reserve Board to act as lender of last resort. And the FDR government mucking around with 1,001 gubmint programs recommended by the best and brightest that didn't help get the US out of the Great Depression. Back then they call the homeless camps "Hoovervilles." Or Skid Row bums.

Oh, back in the 19th century we had the Long Depression in the 1870s after the US did a bit of Deflation after the civil war to get back on the gold standard. About ten years of misery and ruin. Back in the day, young chaps like Andrew Mellon and his dad Thomas Mellon reckoned that the economy moved in about five good years followed by five bad years, rinse and repeat.

Back in 1820, after the end of the Napoleonic Wars things were pretty bad for workers and peasants in England, and they had the Captain Swing riots.

Back in Prussia, after the Seven Years War, King Frederick tried to get the economy going again. He "did what he could to help the peasants... a downtrodden class." But his "simple agrarian reforms... was hampered by the conservatism of the countrymen"; an echo of centuries of agricultural "improvement." And his clumsy efforts to promote industry were a mixed bag.

And prior to that, in the age of agricultural "improvement" peasants were chucked off baronial estates because they did not pay.

And the governments of the age lurched from anti-vagrant laws to indoor relief to outdoor relief to workhouses to I know not what. In other words, they didn't have a clue. Never did, never will.

See, I think that the current liberal lurch towards criminal reform and release of criminals pre-trial -- except when the criminals do a car-jacking on a Democratic congresswoman -- is really a reaction to the failure of liberal politics. See, it's one thing to use state violence on armed insurrectionists, who are, after all, the enemy. But it cannot be that state-certified victims can be hunted down like armed insurrectionists. That's only for the enemy.

Unfortunately the inner-city thugs are just behaving like pre-agricultural humans. They are patrolling the border of their urban territory, and anyone they encounter is an enemy, and subject to looting and plundering.

But how to cure them of this culture?

Well, I think that politics and government, with their friend-enemy distinction, are not the vehicle to help the poor. In fact, I suggest, the history of the last 200 years is that the introduction of the poor into the industrial economy was totally unexpected and unpredicted by the best and the brightest. And even when it was in full swing, by the middle of the 19th century, you had rich kids like Marx and Engels predicting that it would all end in tears. Only they were wrong. Dead wrong. In fact, their solution to the workers problem was Communism, the worst nightmare visited upon humans short of a plague that takes away one-third of the population.

Actually, it makes sense that politics and government would not be the solution of the poverty problem. Because politics is about the enemy -- and we don't really want to think of the poor as an enemy. And government is about force -- and we don't really want to use force on the poor, do we?

I have a modest suggestion. Government is for war. And only war. Everything else must be done either at a local, municipal level, or by voluntary associations.

Back in the day, about the first thing that Hitler and his pals did was demolish the vast growth of German associations, by forcing them to have Nazis in control. In the conventional-wisdom The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard J. Evans writes about Northeim, in Saxony right in the middle of Germany. 

Northeim had a rich associational life, much of it more or less unpolitical[.]

That included the local "consumer co-operative... clubs for the disabled... the Boy Scouts... singing clubs... shooting clubs... swimming association... football clubs... gymnastic societies." But the Nazis burned them all down and co-opted them into the national state.

Is the co-opting of everything in America into the woke any different? Except for the lack of jackboots and swastikas?

See, underneath the stunning brightness of the glorious state is a vast human network of social interactions beneath and beyond the gaze of the political class. And it may be that most of the work of the world has been and will always be conducted by the ordinary people in their ordinary clubs and association and charities. And that without them human society would grind to a halt.

But do our rulers have a clue about that?

OK, Inequality is Bad. But Can We Do Anything About It?

After 286 pages in The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility showing that despite the determination of western elites to eliminate inequality it is alive and well, from Sweden to the US to China and especially India, Gregory Clark, professor at a gubmint university, ends his book with a the usual blather in the passive voice suggest more gubmint programs to end inequality.

Even though he admits that the competition among elite parents for places at elite schools probably doesn't make much difference.

Even though he admits that gubmint interventions like Head Start don't make much difference.

Even though he proposes that assortative mating has limited benefits to elites.

Says he:

A better, more humane, less competitive, social world than ours may exist, but it is not that obvious how we will attain it in a world where people have such strong aspirations for the social success of their children.

Would it?

Let's do a Great Reset on the inequality front.

Let's say that, most likely gubmint programs won't really do much about inequality. Want to know why?

It is encoded in my understanding of politics and government, that politics is war, Us against Them, because "They" are an existential threat, and government is force.

You think you are going to solve inequality by war and force? By taxing people and then having bureaucrats handing out loot and plunder to the supporters of the elite?

Obviously, in the last 200 years, the Age of the Educated, the elite has strongly believed in its power to change the world. Its power strategy, becoming more and more naked over the years, is an over-under strategy, of justifying political power because it helps the underdog. And the Educated Class gets to distribute the loot to its supporters -- er, worthy underdogs.

Does it? Gregory Clark shows, it seems to me, that the Rule of the Educated seems to have made very little difference to the lower classes. On the other hand, we know from the Great Enrichment that the operations of capitalism, which nobody really understood 200 years ago, has increased per capita income by 30 times in real terms. What did the Educated Class have to do with that? Nothing.

Suppose we approach the question of inequality by another way. Suppose we say, for a start, that the social problem of inequality -- specifically the problem of the lowest class that tends to be vagabonds, or "Travellers" or homeless -- should be solved by social methods, by people working together to help other people, and not by Educated Class educrats ginning up yet another gubmint program that ends up being nothing more than a program of taxation collecting loot that is handed out to regime supporters. And all imagined by gubmint professors at gubmint universities using gubmint research grants to propose another gubmint program. What could go wrong?

My effort in this department is Road to the Middle Class, first put on the internet in April 2004. My idea was that, to wive and thrive in the modern world, the underclass needed to acquire cultural skills: religion, law, mutual aid, and education. Religion and law are of course the necessary cultural framework to make the commercial city work. Education is needed because you need literacy and numeracy to do useful work in the city. Mutual aid is the welfare state society of the 19th century when "everyone" belonged to the Masons or the Elks or the Oddfellows and dozens of others. These mutual-aid societies provided, first, death benefits. Then they looked after widows. Then they had "lodge doctors," young doctors just out of medical school who would help birth your child for a song.

But let us look at other means of helping the lowest class.

Voluntary Slavery. Yes, did you know that back in The Year 1000 you could go to your feudal lord, place your head between his hands and become his slave -- and get food and lodging? But you already know about this. It's called "Welfare."

Servant. If you read 19th century novels or watch 20th and 21st century TV series about the good old days, you will notice that everyone either had servants or was a servant. That ended after World War II and the beginning of the full-on welfare state. One thing about servants: they weren't allowed to marry, and they weren't allowed to have "followers." Do you think we could serve the poor better by giving them jobs as servants?

Apprenticeships. In Shakespeare's time you went to work at age 8 unless you went to a grammar school like young Bill. Later "everyone" went to work at 12 or 13 as a servant or an apprentice. Thing about apprenticeships was that the employer was supposed to supply practical education to the apprentice. You think that might suit the average teenager and the lower-class teenager better than the gubmint teacher thingy? Notice that we could have Big Woke & Co. pay for all this. Actually, right now, at Walmart stores there is a back room where employees can take on-line courses and up their skills. And get more money. Then there is Walmart's $1 a day college program. Maybe this would be better than more taxes.

Thing is: hierarchy, or inequality, is universal. That was the point about Jordan Peterson's lobster thingy. Even lobsters have hierarchy, and the reason is because it reduces violence on the lobster front.

The question is: what kind of hierarchy is beneficial and what kind of hierarchy is harmful.

My guess is that most kinds of gubmint wars on inequality in fact have the opposite effect, and entrench and create new, harmful hierarchies. That is, after all, the lesson of socialism, that equality leads to a brutal hierarchy and millions of deaths.

So let's think about how we can create and adapt hierarchies that are beneficial and actually helpful to the less fortunate.

The Eternal Misdirection of Leftist Politics

I finished Andy Ngo's Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy today at the gym, and my takeaway comes in the last chapter, where he describes -- after telling the story of his Vietnamese "boat people" parents -- "who they are" in Antifa.

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.

Gollygeewillikins, and I wonder how student debt and housing unaffordability came about? It couldn't be the Democratic Party shoveling cheap debt at everyone over the last 50 years, could it?

Suppose that we say that we actually are going to solve the problem of student debt. How do we do it? By making college "free?" By forgiving student debt? By regulating college fees and housing payments?

See, the basic problem is that government is always about loot and plunder. College debt started with free stuff for students, and free money (from student debt) for colleges. The net result has been that college debt and college fees have risen to meet the available demand. So the obvious solution is to stop the student debt program.

Only, of course, then the students are going to be mad, because they can't afford to go to college, and the colleges are going to be mad because they need that free student money, and the parents are going to be mad because college will cost them more. Hey, don't worry! No government is ever going to do that. Because no government ever dares to reduce the loot and plunder.

Same with home prices. High home prices came about because of the fixed 30-year loans from the New Deal era Fannie Mae. Government could afford to guarantee those loans, because it's government. Naturally, home buyers borrowed the maximum amount they had in mind, and home prices soared into the stratosphere to the benefit of existing homeowners. 

The solution is clearly to end the subsidy for mortgage loans and for low down payments. But any program to do that would result in, at best, 50 years of flat home prices and, at worst, a housing price collapse. That would not be good. And anyway, as right now, the government is often in the position of wanting to gun the economy to fight recession with low interest rates, and that usually results in a boom in housing prices.

So, if you are in education you are not going to stand for a policy that cuts the flow of Benjamins. If you have a home that has gone up by 500 percent in the last 30 years, you are not going to stand for a policy that will lower the value of your house.

If your are a millennial or a Gen Z you blame "the system," and you take to the streets.

If you are a politician then you blame "systemic racism."

If you are a corporate CEO you try to keep one step ahead of the "liberal activist groups" or "lefty racist hate groups" with occasional corporate virtue-signaling.

So the only way the madness ends is the day that the US gubmint can't sell its debt in the financial markets.

Any other ideas? I've seen the proposal that makes colleges liable for student debt. My own idea would be to replace "free" education with direct payments to students that would slowly fade away and to encourage employers to fund their employees' education.

I'd end the mortgage monster by slowly reducing the amount that could be borrowed down to about 50 percent of the home's value, and slowly reducing the maximum period of a home loan from 30 years down to 25, then 20, then 15.

But I doubt if any of these ideas are politically possible, Because the only way government works is by buying votes at the next election, and paying off the supporters with loot and plunder. The last thing government will ever dare to do is cut spending programs. That's why you get hyperinflation in Weimar Germany and today's Venezuela. Government dare not reduce its programs, because voters.

Lower Class Lives on Gubmint Checks

I suppose that I knew this all along, but it's still shocking. According Richard Shinder, commenting on a piece by Phil Gramm and John Early in the Wall Street Journal, the point isn't that inequality isn't as bad as our liberal friends like to lecture us. Hey, if you don't take gubmint payments into account, of course inequality looks bad. But he takes Gramm and Early to task for this:

Left largely unremarked upon in their essay are the costs and consequences of both current and prospective redistributive policies, other than observing a collapsing labor-force participation rate among lower-income households and that the percentage of income attributable to government payments among the bottom quintile of U.S. households now exceeds 90 percent.

Yikes.

Of course, that chimes in with Charles Murray in Coming Apart. In the bottom 35 percent of Americans, the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. 

As I was returning home from coffee this morning I passed by a house still with its Biden/Harris yard-sign displayed. Only this sign had stuff like Truth Peace Kindness on it.

I thought to myself: you liberal gentry living in swank houses one block from Green Lake in Seattle have No Idea.

The fact that the bottom 20 percent of Americans get 90 percent of their income from gubmint is Your Fault, liberals. Oh, it's happened for a variety of reasons, but mostly because of the gubmint programs that you have passed over the years. Because You Cared.

The situation, I suggest, is the same as the end of the feudal age when, according to Marx,

A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart well says, “everywhere uselessly filled house and castle.” ...

And the reason, I found out, was because the nationalization of armies by the absolute monarchs meant that the feudal lords didn't need to keep extra hands around in case they needed to go to war on the lord next door.

Look, nothing to see here. All ruling classes use their feudal retainers to support their power plays. If the lower quintile is useful as a vote bank, or useful as street fighters or as the army's cannon fodder, then the ruling class will support the lower class. If the world changes, well then those chappies are going to be "eating the paint off the walls" as they said in Russia right after the end of the Soviet Union.

That's why I say: don't be a Little Darling of the ruling class. Right now they say they looove you. And so they do. But next week? Reasons of state will govern, and if reasons of state say that the old white working class ain't what it used to be, then it's Coi-t'ns (That's "curtains" in standard English) to the white working class. As Bugs Bunny used to say.

Right now, I read, the Biden administration is pushing its big $2 trillion infrastructure bill to Congress -- to "rebuild infrastructure and reshape the economy." Except that half of it seems to be simple redistributive payments, that's not actually going to build anything. Well, of course, because the Democrats are an over-under coalition, with Jobs for Gentry and Checks for the "oppressed peoples." And "reshape the economy?" Oy, I don't like the sound of that. I'll bet it really means "wreck the economy." As in Oops...

That is the game that the left has been playing for the last century, to use the poor as a political weapon, and buy their loyalty with loot and plunder from taxing the productive sector.

And lots of nice liberal ladies are persuaded that this loot and plunder operation is the very essence of justice and peace and kindness. And they will continue to believe what they have been carefully taught right up until the moment that the poor are reduced to eating the paint off the walls.

I tell you what I think Our Great Challenge for the next 20 years will be.

No, it will not be Climate Change. It will not be Systemic Racism. It will simply be getting the bottom 20 percent back into the workaday economy, back to work, back to marriage and children and trying to rise out of the lower class into the competent middle class.

And that ain't simple.

Reducing Yarvin's Four Strata to Three Layers

Back in the day Curtis Yarvin had a nice sensible Three Layer theory of Gentry, Commoners, and Clients. But now he has revised it into four strata, as follows:

Across human history we see four different ways of living. Let’s label these varieties of social existence cosmopolitan, traditional, deracinated, and ancestral. For variety, we’ll pair these adjectives with synonymous nouns which almost no one knows: armigers, yeomen, lazzari, and autochthons.

Only, then he goes and adds another stratum on the bottom end: the "human rubble of the old regime’s failed experiments." For human rubble, you could also substitute "white trash," which, according to Nancy Isenberg in White Trash, has been a thing in the Anglo-American world for hundreds of years. Back in 1500, the Brits had a law to deal with "vagabonds and beggars." Nothing new on the human rubble front.

Now, by lazzari Yarvin refers to the "name for the Neapolitan underclass in the Bourbon era," and he includes the gang members in this classification. By saying that they are deracinated he means that they are uprooted -- uprooted yeoman that just need to be re-yeomanized. I don't think so. I agree that the lazzari are uprooted, but I don't agree that they were previously yeomen.

By autochthons Yarvin means pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers, the "original inhabitants" of a place. They really cannot fit in today's society because they never learned to be bored, boring farmers sitting in one place watching the corn grow. Various commentators have noted that these pre-agricultural people tend to extinction when confronted by the modern world, as in native Americans, Australians aboriginals, and Amazon tribes.

Now I think that Yarvin has muddied the waters with his new strata. I like his armigers, or, as I would prefer, armigeri, just to make it sophisticated and Italian. But I think that yeomen is not a good fit. This is because I feel that to make it in the city you cannot be a yeoman right off the farm. You have to transform yourself into a bourgeois, a burgher, a townie. That's why I like Yarvin's Commoner from his Three Layer theory and my Responsible from my reductive Three Peoples theory. If you look at the heroes of Thomas Hardy and George Eliot novels, these agricultural yeomen had to transform themselves to make it in the new world of the nineteenth century. And they did.

See, I look at the lazzari, the autochthons, and the human rubble as "misfits." They do not fit in the modern world of the city, the employment at will, the hegemony of the market, the need to upgrade skills to keep yourself employable in the city economy. Moreover, they are people that do not really "get" how life operates in the city. They are Subordinate people that expect to live as a subordinate to someone who will make all the decisions and tell them what to do.

There are a ton of people that inhabit this Subordinate realm. The whole arc of labor unions, wage-hour laws, government pension systems and government health care are really manifestations of the fact that a lot of people don't want to be free burghers. They want to be taken care of. The only problem is that, as Yarvin says above, they tend to become "human rubble," the detritus from the latest wizard wheeze dei armigeri. I call them Little Darlings, because their descent is usually assisted by the armigeri enlisting them as special people in their political army, for their votes, and then abandoning them by the side of the road when they are no longer politically useful. As in white working class.

Now we like, with our modern conceit, to sneer at the old world of serfs and slaves. But you tell me what a corporate employee with life-time employment is, other than a serf. You tell me what a welfare recipient is, who goes to the government for money to live on, other than a slave. Oh yes, back in the day you could apply to become a slave to your local feudal lord. Slaves weren't all conquest slaves, or sold to the highest bidder in West African slave ports.

But I think it is nicer to call the misfits, the serfs, the slaves, as Subordinates. They are people that don't have the spirit, the chops, the cultural preparation to be Commoners in the city: not yet, maybe not ever. And that's OK

But let us at least admit that the lazzari, the autochthons, the "human rubble" are all "misfits," people that have not found a place in today's rapidly post-industrializing society.

And, by the way, suppose they never do find a place in today's society. Do we put them all on "reservations" where they can drink themselves to death? Or do we let them molder away in the countryside blacking out with OxyContin, like the white working class that is "dying of despair?"

Or do we make everyone go through post-industrial boot-camp? I mean, if it was copacetic to put a whole generation of young men through boot camp in World War II and then the GI Bill to beat the Nazis and make the kids into good Fifties factory workers and suburbanites, why not do it again?

Only, of course, I wouldn't trust i nostri amati armigeri to do it right. With their record, they would probably create a whole new category of "human rubble."

When Government Screws Up: Skid Row Syndrome

When the economy goes south, the result is very often a Skid Row, that Seattle claims for its Yesler Way that was once a hill down which loggers skidded logs down to waiting ships.

But now Skid Row refers to a district where unattached men spend useless lives eking out an existence in cheap flophouses and drink. Only now it's homeless shelters and drugs.

Skid Rows were notable in the Fifties, as the haunts of men thrown out of society by the Great Depression. Then in the 1980s Democrats made a big thing about the "homeless" resulting from Reaganomics -- but probably the economic disruptions of the 1970s when the Good Union Jobs of the Fifties got hammered by the rise of Japan Inc. and inflation changed the terms of trade for millions.

Obviously the Great Recession of 2006-08 resulted in another surge of homeless and people were thrown out of work by the unwinding of the real-estate bubble financed by liar loans and Fannie/Freddie.

And now the forced lockdowns of the COVID era are tumbling another generation of the marginal onto the streets.

Mostly, of course, these people that have fallen out of society are men. That is because, I assume, women are coded to find shelter: somewhere, somehow, they have someone that will give them a roof over their heads. Whereas men... yes what is it about men that they spiral out of the social structure and end up on the street, or living in a Hooverville, or Skid Row, or a homeless encampment around Seattle's Green Lake?

In part, these recurrent crises are the result of the constant economic revolution of the capitalist era: the textile revolution, the steam revolution, the steel revolution, the electric revolution, the auto revolution, the computer revolution, the internet revolution. All these revolutions tended to transform the labor market for men, and it seems that some men aren't very good at picking up new skills and reinventing their working lives.

But a lot of the problem has been government. Let's leave aside the economic impact of wars, which goes without saying. But we can say this:

• The Great Depression of the 1870s was the result of government deflation getting the dollar back to its pre-civil war parity. A lot of unions got started in the 1870s; I'm not sure how much good they did.
• The Great Depression of the 1930s was the result of government deflation after WWI leading eventually to a big stock-market bubble and government failure to act as lender of last resort in the subsequent credit crisis.
• The 1980s homeless crisis was probably a result of the Reagan administration fighting the 1970s inflation. You can call this Reagan cruelty or 1970s inflationary stupidity. Take your pick.
• The Great Recession of 2006-08 was the result of the government encouraging home loans to people that weren't creditworthy and whose loans weren't properly collateralized. All intended to help minority homeowners who were then hardest hit in the subsequent housing crash. And then Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, failed to act as lender of last resort in the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. Oh Ben!
• The homeless crisis of 2020 was caused by government lockdowns to prevent the spread of the COVID-10 virus that particularly impacted low-skilled workers that couldn't "work at home."

Let's admit that, from time to time, we moderns are going to experience economic dislocations in which marginal men will be hardest hit.

What is our 5-point plan for dealing with this recurrent problem?

Because right now, dealing with the problem of dysfunctional men is the last thing on the political agenda of our noble educated Gentry. To President Obama they were "bitter clingers." To Hillary Clinton they were "deplorables." To the wokerati they are "white supremacists."

See, I think that we've got our priorities completely backwards. I think that nine times out of ten women are pretty good at accessing the help that societies deal out. But men are too proud or too stupid to ask for help. They would rather molder away in drink and drugs than admit they have a problem.

And that has clearly been going on for hundreds of years, from the vagabonds and beggars of England in 1500 to the "waste population" that the Brits wanted to ship off to North America in 1600 and Australia in 1800, to the Captain Swing rioters in England right after the Napoleonic Wars, to the workhouse surplus population of the Dickens era, to the "shell-shock" victims of World War I and the "combat fatigue" of World War II and the PTSD of our current era.

Got any brilliant ideas? I certainly don't.

Oh No! I've Been Banned By Google!

Yesterday I got an email from "Google Publisher Policy" telling me that my page christopherchantrill.com had been in violation of its "Google Publisher Policies." As follows:

• New violations were detected. As a result, ad serving has been restricted or disabled on pages where these violations of the AdSense Program Policies were found. 

Who, me? I thought? Let's look at Google's "Google Publisher Policy." For instance: "We do not allow content that:

• incites hatred against, promotes discrimination of, or disparages an individual or group on the basis of their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or other characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization.

Examples: Promoting hate groups or hate group paraphernalia, encouraging others to believe that a person or group is inhuman, inferior, or worthy of being hated

I think that what Google didn't like was my blog post "My '1584 Project'" from a couple of days ago. In that post I made the argument that, if Nikole Hannah-Jones was going to push her "1619 Project" that dramatized the arrival of the first slaves in North America as the true founding of the US -- Talk about inciting hatred! -- then I had the right to come up with a counter-narrative.

If NHJ was going to represent 1619 as the true founding, how about 1584, which was the date that the Roanoke Colony was founded. And what was the Roanoke Colony all about? It was all about cleansing England of its "waste population," according to scholar Nancy Isenberg in White Trash. So you tell me which is the true founding of America? Sending the waste population of Europe to the Americas or sending slaves to North America? Both pretty shameful if you ask me.

But here is what I think triggered Google's hate speech AI thingy. I included a paragraph from Isenberg's book that listed all the pejoratives used over the years to describe White Trash:

Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Crackers. Clay-eaters. Tuckies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers. White [N-word]. Degenerates. White trash. Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people. 

[My bold]. In the original I did not use "N-word." I used the original unredacted text -- once used by white supremacists and now by black rap artists -- in the interest of scholarly accuracy. But, of course, Google's Department of Ideological Conformity would have found [N-word] and flagged it as an example of "incites hatred..." and so forth.

Truth is, of course, that the noble task of purging our society of hatred and all the rest is not quite as simple as flagging banned words, Google. And I suggest to you, Google, that you are starting down a rabbit hole that will end in nothing but hate and violence, and you will find yourself, Google, in the middle of the cross-fire.

Indeed, as we hurtle into what seems like a revolutionary and inquisitorial maelstrom, with defenders of the establishment like Google trying to push back on the barbarian hordes, the only question to me is the size of the butcher's bill.

But, of course, the midwits operating the Google Publisher Policies have No Idea about this. Defending the ruling class and its orthodoxy and its perquisites is just what a good Googler does, instinctively, because that is what he or she has been carefully taught, from year to year, in his or her dear little ear.

The only good thing about this, I reckon, is that the folks at Google and elsewhere in tech are flying blind. Or, to change the metaphor, they are like a colonialist army marching up some mountain valley in Afghanistan, utterly blind to the unseen bandits watching from the heights.

The Google guys really do not know what they are getting into. And neither, I suspect, does anyone else.

My "1584 Project"

Remember when the peerless New York Times journalist put up her "1619 Project" and the editors announced it thus?

The 1619 project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. [emphasis added]

Yes, of course, that bold bit has since been memory-holed. Because reasons, chiefly because a lot of historians weighed in and said this narrative is, as they say in Critical-Theory-Land, "overdetermined." And, I understand, the chief writer in the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has taken her Twitter feed private, because reasons.

I get all this. It's because we humans all want to recite "the story so far," the comforting story about how "we" -- whoever "we" happens to be -- are the culmination of the history of the world so far. Educated blacks like HNJ want a narrative special to them. And our liberal friends are deeply in love with the "oppressed peoples, allies, white oppressors" narrative which is all about how liberals are the saviors of the world because they are the allies of the oppressed peoples and plucked them from out of the clutches of the eevil white oppressors.

The purpose of the 1619 Project is, of course, to throw offal on the "founding narrative," that the American people are the best people in the world, the United States is the best country in the world, and our founders are the best politicians in the world.

Which is really cool if you are a liberal, but not so much fun if you are, say, a gap-toothed white redneck. Where do you fit in to all this virtue-signaling?

Enter my "1584 Project." It is critical theory on steroids, because it is a critique of the "1619 Project" as a prime example of the domination and hegemony of the educated class. You see, it may very well be that August 20, 1619 marked the arrival of the first slave ship in North America. But back in 1584 the first ships from England arrived off the coast of North America to found the Roanoke Colony.

What was the Roanoke Colony? According to La Wik, It was the brain-child of Sir Walter Raleigh, who was awarded a charter by Queen Elizabeth I to "discover, search, find out, and view such remote heathen and barbarous Lands, Countries, and territories ... to have, hold, occupy, and enjoy." He sent an expedition out in 1584 which made landfall at "Port Ferdinando" by Roanoke Island. Raleigh's people spent the next couple of years trying to establish a colony, but gave up, probably abandoning a few colonists to their fate.

But what was this colonization all about? If you read Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, it is all about the problem of "waste population" in England in the 16th century.

I know, let's tell a story.

Back in 1000, let us say, the Brits lived in a pure feudal system where they lived as serfs in a medieval manor. They could, if they chose, become slaves of their lord, and get their three squares a day directly from the loving lord rather than scratching for it as agriculturalists farming the open field system.

But in the 12th century, according to La Wik, "some fields in England tilled under the open field system were enclosed into individually owned fields." Then came the Black Death and that really got the break-up of the feudal system going.

Many farms were bought by yeomen who enclosed their property and improved their use of the land. More secure control of the land allowed the owners to make innovations that improved their yields.

The nobles also liked the enclosure concept. Their idea was to enclose land so they could graze sheep. This became a political issue by 1500, so that in his Utopia Thomas More could speak of how when gentlemen "that carry about with them... a great flock or train of idle and loitering serving men" die, their heirs "thrust [them] out of doors."

And what do they do, these landowners?

[They] leave no ground for tillage: they enclose all into pastures... and leave nothing standing but only the church to be made into a sheep-house.

The money, says More, is in the growing "of the finest and the dearest wool" and that is what the "noblemen and gentlemen" were doing. Not coincidentally, the first vagabond act was passed in 1495.

To add insult to injury, monarchs in the 16th century started disarming their nobles and creating national armies. This created another reason for nobles to kick their "idle and loitering serving men" out of doors.

By 1584, Richard Hakluyt in his "Discourse Concerning Western Planting" proposed not just the advantage of merchants and artisans improving the waste lands of the Americas, but the benefit of exporting the human detritus from the improvement and enclosure movement. Isenberg:

[T]he bulk of the labor force was to come from the swelling numbers of poor and homeless... Idle and unused they were waiting to be transplanted to the American land and be better... put to use.

Then the convicts. Here is what Hakluyt planned for them in America.

Among the first waves of workers were the convicts, who would be employed at heavy labor felling trees and burning them for pitch, tar, and soap ash; others would dig in the mines for gold, silver, iron, and copper. The convicts were not paid wages. As debt slaves, they were obliged to repay the English commonwealth for their crimes by producing commodities for export.

Anyway, after the Roanoke Colony failed the Brits tried again with Jamestown, founded in 1607. It struggled as badly as Roanoke, but then in 1609 John Rolfe introduced a strain of tobacco from Bermuda, and "tobacco quickly became the new gold --  the ticket to wealth."

But for that the planters needed labor, and so they pleaded for "more indentured servants and laborers, who, like slaves were sold to the highest bidder." Actually, the normal game was that men that did not pay for their own passage to the Americas paid instead with a term of indentured labor. And contracts of indenture bound servants to their masters and even their heirs. If an indentured servant died, his wife and children were expected to work out the term of indenture.

So the waste population of England was not that different from the conquest slaves of West Africa.

Of course, some of the indentured servants escaped, and learned to live off the grid as squatters and crackers.

They lived off the grid... disappeared into unsettled territory and squatted down... anywhere and everywhere.

As early as the 1750s they were called the "scum of nature" and "vermin"; they had no means of support except theft and license.

Thus the whole pejorative vocabulary of White Trash, from Nancy Isenberg:

Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Crackers. Clay-eaters. Tuckies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers. White [n-word]. Degenerates. White trash. Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people. 

Don't you think it is time for a new movement among the elite, to champion the White Trash against their oppressors? Oh wait. In that case the moral narrative would be about "oppressed white trash, gentry oppressors, and don't cares."

Did you know about the "maroons?" They were communities of escaped African slaves all up and down the eastern coast of the Americas. They usually lived just far enough out of town that the powers-that-be wouldn't be bothered to bother them.

So really, the maroons were the same as the white trash, the squatters and crackers, that lived far enough out of town that the powers-that-be wouldn't bother them. Both white trash indentured servants and negro slaves were useful to the ruling class to work in their money-making plantations, if they could keep them from escaping.

In my narrative of The Story So Far, I reckon that, at some point, the benefit of slave labor began to burn out. Eventually the powers that be started to realize that free labor was much more profitable than slave labor. And so indentured servitude and slavery became a scandal to the great and the good.

However, I maintain that the pendulum has swung back somewhat to feudalism, for in my critique of the left as a Great Reaction, I call socialism a return to slavery and the welfare state a return to feudalism. In the welfare state the workers give a lot of their wages back to the government in return for benefits. And what is that, in effect, but a kind of quasi-serfdom?

There seem to be only two ways of recalling the past. Either it was a golden age or it was a shameful barbarism. Or both.

But I think a better way is to be understanding about the past. It was what it was. We should be hesitant to praise it unduly, and we should be disinclined to sneer at it.

For who knows how our own age will be judged by those that come after us.

Human Rubble - Contents

The Human Rubble from the Rulers' Failures

1. Should Blacks Join the Culture War?
   
   
2. The Embarrassing Poor
   
   
3. Social Darwinism and Liberal Programs
   
   
4. A Brief History of Welfare
   
   
5. A New Kind of Corporate Welfare
   
   
6. How Would Corporations Become the Employers of the Poor?
   
   
7. Why Government is Ruling-Class Conceit
   
   
8. Karl Polanyi: Speenhamland and the Poor Law
   
   
9. Karl Polanyi: Critique of "The Great Transformation"
   
   
10. What CAN We Do When Things Go South?
    
    
11. A Short History of Safe Spaces
    
    
12. The Cruel Fate of the Ruling Class's "Little Darlings"
    
    
13. It Ends Not with a Bang, but a Whimper
    
    
14. Kevin Williamson is Wrong About the White Working Class
    
    
15. Trump: The Monday Morning Quarterbacks
    
    
16. My Theory of Slavery and Other Oppressions
    
    
17. Self-Deceit at the Heart of the Liberal World View
    
    
18. But What About the Issues?
    
    
19. The White Working Class Again
    
    
20. How Little Darlings Get "Hurled" to Cultural Perdition
    
    
21. Getting to the Why of Marxism
    
    
22. Great Enrichment Means Creative Destruction
    
    
23. One of These Victim Groups is Not Like the Others
    
    
24. The Power of Nostalgia
    
    
25. White Trash: The View from Mt. Olympus
    
    
26. My "1584 Project"
    
    
27. Oh No! I've Been Banned By Google!
    
    
28. When Government Screws Up: Skid Row Syndrome
    
    
29. Reducing Yarvin's Four Strata to Three Layers
    
    
30. Lower Class Lives on Gubmint Checks
    
    
31. The Eternal Misdirection of Leftist Politics
    
    
32. OK, Inequality is Bad. But Can We Do Anything About It?
    
    
    

White Trash: The View from Mt. Olympus

I had been thinking I ought to read White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg ever since it was published in early 2016. Naturally, I was afraid that it would be just the usual liberal rubbish. But you never know: I might learn something!

Yes indeedy, the Better Sort of people have every been worried about

Waste people. Offscourings. Lubbers. Bogtrotters. Rascals. Rubbish. Squatters. Clay-eaters. Tackies. Mudsills. Scalawags. Briar hoppers. Hillbillies. Low-downers. White niggers. Degenerates. White trash. Rednecks. Trailer trash. Swamp people.

And the Better Sort has been worried about them for centuries.

But who are they, these problems? How, for instance, do they fit into a three-layer social theory like Curtis Yarvin's Gentry, Commoners, and Clients.

Well, I have to admit they don't. They are lower-order people that aren't part of the system. They are "off the grid." And that is what is so threatening about them. They are living in the swamp, in the woods. They are people who upped and went "out west" and now they are living in despicable shacks up in the hills, multiple generations in one room and who knows who is shacking up with whom. Of course, they don't work. Instead they forage, or hunt, or steal, or... well, who knows exactly how they manage?

But what are we going to do about them? I guess when you are the ruling class, or the Gentry class that does the ruling class's bidding, the fact of an unorganized rabble out there that isn't connected into your power tributary system is clearly a problem. Suppose they get out of control?

Obviously the solution to the White Trash problem has changed over the years. Back in the day, they got shoved off the land they occupied as it got scarfed up by politically connected gentry. That was when agricultural land was the foundation of wealth.

At the turn of the 20th century Gentry people were into Darwinist eugenics. So the solution was the stop these defectives from breeding.

During the New Deal the solution was to try and round them up and put them into model communities funded by the government. Or build bloody big dams with the Tennessee Valley Authority.

In the Sixties, it was time to make fun of them with TV series like The Andy Griffith Show, Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C, and The Beverly Hillbillies. Or was it? After all, by putting hillbilles into Beverly Hills, you get to hit two birds with one stone, White Trash and Movie Moguls.

ON the other hand, with NASCAR and 1970s TV series like Smokey and the Bandit we are starting to celebrate hillbilly values. Or with the movie Deliverance showing the country hicks as dangerous monsters threatening young male city-slickers.

Or, with the 1980s, we get Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker at their PTL Club evangelical TV show. And later reality shows like Here Comes Honey Bo Boo and Duck Dynasty.

The truth is that Our Betters really don't have a clue what to do with the out-of-control White Trash. And Isenberg reflects that truth. She's a professor at Louisiana State University and her book carefully hews to the liberal line.

So she's outraged by the snobby attitude towars mudsills and clay-eaters in the 19th century. She is appalled by eugenicists in the early 20th century. She is understanding about the New Deal effort to clean up the dirty whites. But then what?

Thing get complicated in the Civil Rights era. Because the victims du jour are now poor blacks, not poor whites. So the helpless victims of the New Deal era become the racist followers of Southern segregationists. And Sarah Palin, who came up from pretty humble beginnings to get elected Governor of Alaska and GOP vice-presidential nominee, is dismissed as an ignorant simpleton, the "first female redneck on a presidential ticket... [that] had attended six unremarkable colleges."

Look, I get it. You wanna get a book published by Viking; you gotta toe the ideological line. And these days, we Gentry chappies are concerned about our intersectional Little Darlings, from upper-class women sobbing about sexism in politics to blacks to helpless gays and transgenders, the homeless, and migrants.

So Isenberg gives us a helpful look at conventional Gentry wisdom about the white underclass. In today's Gentry firmament the white underclass is a bit of a bother.  It is, you may think, a "glitch" in the Matrix, something that does not compute with your world view. You brush it aside as an annoying interruption of normally scheduled service. So you understand why President Obama talks about bitter clingers and Hillary Clinton about a "basket of deplorables." And why the media condemned the tiki-torch bearers of Charlottesville as white racists.

Nothing remarkable here. We humans have to brush off things that don't conform with our view of reality. Otherwise we'd never get to work in the morning. Indeed, scientists say, there is no reason to bother about any unexpected informaiton unless it looks like it is going to kill you.

And that is why everyone from professors to activists to the media are out to get Trump. Because if Trump suceeds then he is going to damage their nice comfortable world of sinecures and cultural hegemony.

But White Trash for me points out that all the upper class frenzy down the ages about the fractious lower class is just so much idle chatter. Instead the upper class should just do its job: don't get into stupid wars, don't loot the economy to reward your supporters; don't allow people to scam the system and erect privileges for themselves; don't fall down on the job in the next credit crisis.

Looking at the bigger picture I'd say that every time you have a big event, whether the Industrial Revolution or a big war or a big credit crisis then millions of people are going to be thrown out of the system; many of them will never get their lives together again. But it certainly helps to hand out money to the victims: keeps them from tearing the whole thing down.

Can we do anything else? Education? Training? Model communities? Maybe. But I'd say that 97 percent of all government programs is the Gentry wanting to feel good about itself.

The Power of Nostalgia

One of my Big Ideas is the notion that the left, far from being a progressive force, is in fact a movement of nostalgia, a Great Reaction back to the good old days of perfect community and justice. I suppose that this becomes obvious in the writings of Rousseau and his celebration of the Noble Savage and the opening of his Social Contract: "Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains." (French: L’homme est né libre, et par-tout il est dans les fers. So, strictly speaking, "fers" should have been translated as "irons.")

But we deplorables would say that the opposite is true. Freedom is not a category in ape society or in hunter-gatherer society. Freedom only gains salience later on. But when?

I know. Let's get all Hegelian and start looking at things through their opposites, in this case, slavery.

Slavery, said someone I read recently, only begins with the agricultural age. Hunter-gatherers, he assumes, did not know slavery. I suppose that is true in the sense that back then in your average dawn raid you would kill all the men and appropriate all the women.

But why not enslave the men and put them to work? I suspect that would be because it was too dangerous. The way I understand it, men did nothing, back in the hunter-gatherer age, except hunt and prepare for war. I don't think that captured men can be trusted to be slave spear-carriers in a hunter-gatherer society where the armed forces are the entire male population. But once agriculture has started and most males are disarmed, or at least not raised as warriors, then you can afford to have subordinate men doing subordinate tasks subject to the overseer and his whip.

But then why does slavery not continue today? Max Weber argued that slavery does not pay in the modern economy. Only when the supply of slaves is plentiful and their price is cheap does slavery make economic sense. Yet clearly in the agricultural age some form of slavery is universal, if we consider feudalism as a form of slavery, where humans are bound to the land of their feudal masters. And feudalism only started to break up when the market economy began to thrive towards the end of the Middle Ages.

 Now, I was reading Trollope's Last Chronicle of Barset yesterday and Trollope had some gentlewomen complaining about the men and their devotion to hunting, fishing, and shooting. Do you see what is going on here? The average gentleman of Trollope is installed in a country estate where all the work of managing the agricultural estate is done by others. So the gentleman may do as he pleases, and what he pleases is to revert to hunter behavior, as a pastime. In our age, we have men that enjoy getting up a workshop full of power tools where they can make things, as the craftsman did in olden times before the invention of machine industry.

So it is perfectly natural and physical for humans without a real job to revert to olden times. Of course we would expect Educated Youth of the 19th century to have a nostalgic regard for the good old days of the feudal estate with its comfortable fixed hierarchy about which any young sprig can imagine himself having a paternal and beneficial role.

So, of course, in our modern era, we should expect a huge Great Reaction among foolish young people. Of course we have the neo-feudalism of the welfare state and the corporate hierarchy: people imagine with nostalgia the good old days of feudal security where people actually "belonged" and the master took care of them. Of course we have the neo-tribalism of identity politics: and the comfort of belonging to the kindred. Of course we have the neo-looting-and-pillage of the modern tax system that takes 40 percent of people's work for the ruling class to reward its supporters. Looting and pillage goes all the way back to hunter-gatherers and jolly good fun it was unless you were on the receiving end.

But I remind you of the advice given in Robert Graves I, Claudius to the Roman emperor by an advisor: trust no-one, not even me. Anyone that lives in subordination to a boss, a politician, a general, or a noble lord, is a hostage. His bread and meat come from the fact of his utility to the power project of his superior. But if his utility should ever shrink, or if the superior should lose the war in his power project, well, it is curtains for his supporters.

Thus we have Marx: "A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers[.]" Well of course, because once the feudal lords were forbidden their private armies they didn't need so many workers on their estates.

Thus we have Hobsbawm and Rudé writing about the "protests" of the agricultural laborers being shed by the farmers when the threshing machines came in.

Then we have Howard Zinn in A People's History of the United States in 1892 where at the Carnegie Homestead steel plant manager Henry Frick "decided to reduce the workers' wages and break their union." Or, as La Wik puts it: "As the mills expanded, the labor force grew rapidly, especially with less skilled workers. In response, the more-skilled union members reacted with a strike designed to protect their historic position." Of course they did.

Or my own experience, when my employer suddenly laid people off in a business downturn. How could they do this, moaned my co-workers, pointing to the employee manual that spoke about how the bosses cared about the professional development of their employees? No doubt they did care, until their business was threatened by losses.

One thing to remember about almost all "protests" and riots is to look for the guys that are losing a traditional way of life, and resorting to politics and violence to maintain it. Call it the Cornered Rat Syndrome.

 If you are a subordinate then you have hitched your star to someone else's fortune. If they go down, then you go down with them.

So, the meaning of life, the universe, and everything must include something about keeping your powder dry, and your skills up to date, and an emergency kit, and a full tank of gasoline, and so on.

Because when the balloon goes up then it is every man for himself, or, in French, sauve qui peut. And every story you ever heard from another's lips is a survivor story.

And, politicians don't care about you. They only care about your vote.

The antidote to slavery, and going down when your boss goes down, is Freedom and Responsibility. It is the notion that nobody is going to be there for you when it really counts. So you'd better take care of yourself and make sure, as much as possible, that you are not a helpless victim, without an option, without a bolthole, without a way out of Dodge.

Or as I like to say, don't be a "little darling" of the ruling class. Because your nostalgia for the Good Old Days is going to kill you.

One of These Victim Groups is Not Like the Others

The whole program of the Left focuses on the notion of victims. Looky here! Here are victims being marginalized and victimized by an unjust system! Everyone to the barricades!

I bring you four classes of victims. But one class is not like the other. Can you tell, before the end of the article?

Back at the end of the feudal era and the beginning of the 16th century, according to Karl Marx,

A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart well says, “everywhere uselessly filled house and castle.” Although the royal power, itself a product of bourgeois development, in its strife after absolute sovereignty forcibly hastened on the dissolution of these bands of retainers, it was by no means the sole cause of it. In insolent conflict with king and parliament, the great feudal lords created an incomparably larger proletariat by the forcible driving of the peasantry from the land, to which the latter had the same feudal right as the lord himself, and by the usurpation of the common lands.

Whaddya mean: "same feudal right," Chuck?

See, what happened is that the Tudor kings in Britain disarmed the private armies of the nobles. And so the nobles decided they didn't need no stinkin' peasants hanging around on the off-chance they might be needed as soldiers in a private war.

Poor helpless victims. And permanent outrage from the Left.

Then in the early 19th century, according to Marxist Eric Hobsbawn and George Rudé in Captain Swing -- when there were three classes in agricultural England, the nobles, the independent farmers, and the wage-earning agricultural laborers -- the farmers stopped hiring laborers. The new threshing machines meant that the farmers didn't need laborers trimming hedges for most of the year so that there would be enough labor at harvest time. So they dumped their laborers. You can get a modern view of things down on the farm at the time from the recent movie of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd. The farm laborers rioted and destroyed threshing machines in the Captain Swing riots of 1830. Yay!

More helpless victims. And permanent outrage from the Left.

Then, of course, we have the famous prophecy from Marx about how the capitalists and the bourgeoisie would "immiserate" the workers in the same way as the feudal lords exploited the peasants in the feudal era.

More helpless victims. And permanent outrage from the Left

Then, starting in the 1960s, the capitalists in America started to move industrial production from the United States to other parts of the world. This meant that the great white working class that had won decent wages and benefits with the help of the left found that the good old days were over. By 2016, The Washington Post reported, the white working class in the United States was "dying of despair."

More helpless victims. And raspberries from the Left.

Because, in 1971, Archie Bunker, white working class personified, was a racist sexist bigot. Yeah! Serves him right!

But why? Why did the Left abandon the white working class, sons and daughters of the "free proletarians," the "agricultural laborers," and the working stiffs of the 1930s?

Well, the simple answer is that the Left had moved on. It would now advocate and peacefully protest for women and minorities and gays and transgenders and illegal immigrants and the homeless and Muslims.

This is what I call the "little darlings" problem.

Mothers! Don't let your daughters grow up to become the "little darlings" of the ruling class!

That's because, as I have written in the past, the fate of little darling taken up by the ruling class and groomed as their supporters is that supporters of the ruling class end up like soldiers in Napoleon's army on the retreat from Moscow in 1812.

Same as the fate of the mistress of a wealthy scion. Or the working class girl in Rotherham, England.

The ruling class, any ruling class, needs bodies to fill the rank and file of its armies -- or its voting rolls. But the exigencies of power politics are not cast in stone for all time. Sometimes the path to power involves bread and circuses for the Roman mob. Sometimes it involves throwing good wages and benefits at newly enfranchised industrial workers. Sometimes it involves hyping up racial feelings and animosities between whites and blacks in the United States. Plus ça change.

And when the music changes, the former little darlings of the ruling class are thrown out in the garbage. As the song says:

She was poor, but she was honest
Though she came from 'umble stock
And an honest heart was beating
Underneath her tattered frock

The chorus goes like this:

It's the same the whole world over
It's the poor what gets the blame
It's the Left what gets the pleasure
Ain't it all a bloomin' shame?

Oh dear, I couldn't help myself.

OK. So now President Trump has taken up the cause of the white working class, left by the side of the road like Napoleon's soldiers in 1812 or Hitler's soldiers in 1945.

But, you mothers, Nothing Has Changed! Donald Trump has cunningly understood that there was a whole class of voters out there that neither party was mobilizing. And fortunately his Democratic opponent in 2016 Ivre de Chardonnay and her crack campaign staff didn't see what was happening. But Nothing Has Changed! The day will come when your daughters get sacrificed to political expediency just like the peasants, the laborers, the white working class and whoever is next for the chopping block. There is only one way to go. Keep your eye on the donut, and not upon the hole. Always be watching the winds of change and make sure that you and your family never get caught upon a lee shore.

E.g. my family's history. Father born in Russia. Got out in 1918 just in time. My mother, born in Japan. Got out in 1940, just in time. Me, born in India. Got out in 1948 right after independence.

Today, I and my descendants are right here in the good old US and A. But I don't believe nothing that  no politician says. There may come a time -- there will come a time -- when a chap like me and my descendants need to move on. Again.

For the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is really very simple. 

Wive and thrive and survive.

That is all.

Great Enrichment Means Creative Destruction

Here's a piece about how in California the union-backed legislature is pushing unionization on the tech industry and Mr. Subsidy Musk's Tesla electric-car gig. California Governor Jerry Brown tells Trump to keep his hands off California, Steven Greenhut writes, because, Brown says:

We’re the innovation capital, high-tech, agriculture, $40 to $50 billion industry. You don’t want to mess with California, because you’re going to mess with the economy.

Well there ain't gonna be no economy in California if you chumps keep piling costs and regulations on the tech industry, as in:

California is mucking around with billions in electric car subsidies, but amendments to the subsidy bill "would inject the state into an increasingly acrimonious union organizing campaign at automaker Tesla’s Fremont plant."

But suppose Tesla moves all  its operations to Nevada, where is is already building a battery plant?

Hey, what about  the unionized port workers, where

subsidies for cleaner equipment at the ports “cannot be spent on automated cargo-handling equipment,” reported the Bee, because “increasing port automation has been a major concern of port workers’ unions.”

 Here's another, where the food-workers union wants a bill that

would impose a new set of regulations on internet-based firms that deliver gourmet meals to a subscriber’s doorstep. The goal is to force these firms, which already are highly regulated by the state and feds, to be regulated by local health inspectors.

Then there are proposals that would force home-health workers to divulge their cellphone numbers, to make them easier to organize in unions.

The funny thing is that the left began with the line from Marx about the free proletarians being "hurled" off the feudal estates in the agricultural revolution. That is the problem whenever you are a serf working and living on some lord's estate. It may feel secure, because the lord observes all kinds of traditional rights of the peasants. But the day will come when  he doesn't need his peasants any more.

And yet their entire politics is based on pretending that now things are different. Only they aren't.

The day would come when the steel industry wouldn't need their overpriced workers any more.

The day would come when the manufacturers didn't need their unionized factory workers any more.

The day would come when the Democratic party didn't need its white working stiffs any more.

The day will come when the ports don't need their $150,000 crane operators any more.

And this is not to say that the world is a cruel place that always screws the working stiff.

It is to say that the Great Enrichment of the last two centuries occurred because of innovation that was not stopped by the political system. Or, to use a less polite word, the Great Enrichment was a process of "creative destruction," as proposed by Joseph Schumpeter. Or, to put it even more plainly, the great innovations of the last two centuries, on which our modern prosperity is founded, caused hardship  and misery to a bunch of people that had a pretty good gig going.

As often as not, the people affected by "creative destruction" have gone to the politicians to save them from the end of their good times. And as often as not, the politicians have helped stave off the inevitable for a few years.

In fact, there is no escape from the creative destruction of the price system. You may think that you are safe in your government job, or your corporate bureaucracy. And you might be; the good times may just roll long enough for you to exit in style.

But sooner or later the market will have its way, and the hardest hit will be the people that have succeeded in hiding from the market in big institutions that seem to protect them from the tides of the market system. That's because when you are hidden away in a big institution you may not developed skills that will serve when the balloon goes up and the big institution has to lay off its employees to stay solvent.

Outside of big institutions you have to mark your skills to market every day.

It's a pity that our ruling class refuses to teach the people this vital life lesson. Do not think you can hide from the market in some big bureaucracy. You are subordinating yourself to the agenda of some Big Man, and the day will come when he doesn't need you any more.

Trumpers beware.

Getting to the Why of Marxism

I picked up a biography of Karl Marx: the Passionate Logician by Joel Carmichael at HalfPriceBooks the other day for the princely price of $3.00, and I'm glad I did.

Because the book helps me understand the why of the most destructive and reactionary political ideology in human history, responsible for millions of deaths and unimaginable human misery.

Carmichael does a splendid job of laying out the ideological fervors that were consuming rich university kids like Marx in the early to mid 19th century and that led to the Communist Manifesto and Marxism.

First of all, everyone in Germany and Russia in the early 19th century was consumed by Hegel. Why? Well, Carmichael proposes, partly because Hegel made dialectics not just about logic and argument, but about the real world. If you like, Hegel gets over the problem of Newtonian mechanics that the world, the universe, is like a billiard table where everything is determined like the movement of cannon balls and planets. In Hegel, things change by the to-and-fro movement from thesis to antithesis and back, which is a lot closer to the real world of constant change and oscillation.

Then everyone was transfixed by the early years of the industrial revolution, where sensitive urban souls got to see for the first time the reality of poverty in the lower orders. There must be a better, higher way, they thought, and being young men they quickly decided that the best answer would be a gang rumble, the intoxicating violence of revolution. They would rebel in the name of the proletariat, of which they knew nothing.

So in the first half of the 19th century we got a two-stage development of socialism, first in the ideas of Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen, and then in the more pointed ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Étienne Cabet, Louis Blanc, and Moses Hess. The point of all of these ideas was that the welfare of mankind was far too important to be left to the likes of merchants and bankers. Educated men of virtue needed to intervene, with the glorious promise of socialism where property would be abolished and people would live in genuine equality and harmony.

Those times were rather like our own time. Here was a radical revolution in the economy, throwing the modestly fed, clothed and housed artisans and craftsmen of the guilds out of work. It looked like things were spiraling downwards as the world of the craftsman was replaced by the teeming slums of the proletariat and the manufactory.

Same thing today. We have the global economy that is shattering all the comfortable assumptions of the industrial age. You can't hope to graduate from high school and get a lifetime union job at the local steel plant or auto factory any more. In fact some reckless prognosticators are predicting the end of the job altogether.

Since we can't just trust the market, it stands to reason that government must intervene, then and now, with its force. Or better yet: Revolution, Baby! We will replace private property and its injustice with the ethical principles of true community.

Now I think that there is a fatal flaw in the lefty analysis, both then and now. There is a basic assumption that the fall of the craftsman and the "deskilling" of work was universal. But in fact that was not so. The craftsmen might have been falling into poverty, but the new proletariat was overwhelmingly composed of people migrating from the country to the city. Presumably they made this journey because they felt that wage labor in the city was better than whatever they were experiencing in the countryside. No doubt, because the agricultural revolution of the previous two hundred years had reduced the sturdy European peasant to nomadic penury. That's why the Elizabethan Poor Law was passed in 1598: because landless peasants were roaming the countryside in Britain -- robbers and highwaymen -- and Something Had to be Done.

Same thing today. We see the decline of the white working class, previously propped up, like the guild craftsmen, by government-sanctioned privilege. But at the same time we see the immigrants from the Third World flooding into our cities, looking to wive and thrive in the modern economy. In Florida, where I am presently attending on Lady Marjorie's end-of-life mother, the hospital staff, the home health aides are mostly black immigrants from the Caribbean (BTW, one aide drives a Mercedes, and another drives an Infiniti: go figure). There is barely a white working class in sight. In China, I read, something like 12 million people are moving from the country to the city every year. Are all these people moving to misery? I doubt it.

But at least the Proudhons and the Marxes had an excuse. They were experiencing the beginnings of the Great Enrichment and it would have been reckless to assume that, in 1850, you ain't seen nothin' yet. And the socialist dream had not yet been tested and killed millions of people and tanked the economy wherever it was tried. Our modern lefties have no excuse; they are simply living in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

But here is their basic error: their attack on private property. The point about private property regulated by law is that it is an amazing advance over the alternative, which is property adjudicated by war. That was the old way, from the Romans to the Vikings. How did they get rich? They stole it. The point about Julius Caesar is that he spent ten years conquering Gaul and accumulating a rich harvest of loot and slaves. Ditto the Vikings, only they preyed on the Brits as well as the French.

Now go forward to the new way, practiced by the Brits in India. When they set up their trading posts at Calcutta and Madras and Bombay people from the hinterland flocked to shelter under their rule, because their's was a trading, merchant economy, not a looting, feudal economy. And when the Governor of Bengal, Warren Hastings, started doing a bit of looting and plundering, Edmund Burke had him impeached in the British Parliament.

No, property is not theft; it is an amazing human invention that allows humans to buy and sell rather than seize and hold. And notice that the socialist states all regress from buy and sell to seize and hold. Their only means is violence, and violence leads to poverty and riots in the streets, President Maduro, because government is force.

Then there is the price system. Marx built his whole economics on the contradictions in classical economics between use value and exchange value. But ten years after he published Das Kapital, Vol. 1, scientists realized that there wasn't such a thing as use value and exchange value, there was only marginal value. And then Ludwig von Mises made the prophetic statement, just as the Soviet Union was getting going, that socialism could not work because it could not compute prices. If any prophecy in this world has been confirmed by events, millions of deaths, and untold misery, it is the prophecy that socialism can only work when it merely banishes prices to the black market.

Yet day in and day out, people are going to government trying to get it to put its thumb on the price system and warp it in their favor. Where are the passionate rich young men, educated at the best universities, that are denouncing this vile and reactionary exploitation? Youthful educated passion, it appears, does not extend to descanting on the wonders of peaceful cooperation and enrichment by submitting to the prices set day by day in the market.

Anyway, now I have a better idea of what Marx and his pals in the mid 19th century were thinking, and why.

How Little Darlings Get "Hurled" to Cultural Perdition

So here we are in a week that the great white hope of progressives, Jon Ossoff, failed to pick up a GOP seat in Georgia by the cunning trick of being about the only Democrat facing a slew of ambitious Republicans in a "jungle primary" which means that if you get 50% of the vote you win the election without going to a general.

Only he came in a couple of percentage point short. So that's all right.

Then we have Bill O'Reilly getting run off FoxNews for sexual harassment allegations. I guess that the Murdoch kids are determined to wreck the business that their father put together, as foolish young scions often do.

Note to ambitious young women wanting to make it at CBSNBCABCCNN etc. The sexual harassment gambit will not work for you, because everybody knows that only conservative white men are a problem on the sexual harassment front.

Well, everyone in North Seattle is convinced. #WeBelieve signs and "Hate Has No Home Here" signs are everywhere.

Er... I know what you are saying. Liberals are the biggest haters in America. So the funniest thing since sliced bread is for liberals (and especially gays) to pretend that they have nothing to do with hate.

Actually, the truth is that politics equals hate. Politics is about division, and hate is the way you divide. Liberals live and die by politics, so they must be haters.

But I am thinking of the bigger picture. I am thinking about where Democrats go from here. Because their culture war on everyone that is white and straight just doesn't make sense to the ordinary American that is living outside the yeasty inner-city gentry neighborhoods where only liberals (and conservative spies like me) can afford to live.

Today I am mixing together my "little darlings" notion into a major attack on the left and everything it stands for. As you know, my little darlings notion says that if you are presently the little darlings of the ruling class, there is nowhere to go but down, because one fine day the ruing class will get tired of you, or decide they don't need you as their clients. You are like soldiers being marched across Europe in some dynastic war. The day will come when you find yourself sitting abandoned on the route of march. And then...

Well, the first time this happened to the little darlings was reported by Karl Marx when he wrote that "the free proletarians were hurled onto the labour market" when their lords no longer needed them during the agricultural revolution. That, as far as I can see, was back in the 16th century.

That's a good line, Chuck. Let's try it out on the modern era.

In the 1970s, the liberals, who had heretofore loooved the white working class, "hurled them onto the global labor market by importing millions of third world immigrants into the USA." Finally, after 50 years, the white working class realizes that they have been had.

In the 1960s, the liberals, who had heretofore promised to make women the darlings of their politics, "hurled women into the chaos of the sexual revolution," expecting women to indulge in sexual libertinism like men, get careers like men, go into the armed forces like men, oh and also, in between more important matters, bear and raise children. At the present time, women still don't realize that they have been had.

In the 1960s, the liberals, who had paraded as the friends of African Americans, instituted a huge expansion of welfare and affirmative action that has "hurled African Americans into a cultural spiral dive." Poverty is high; educational attainment is pathetic, and low-income African Americans are daily persecuted by the kindly attention of criminal gangs while rich liberal philanthropists like George Soros fund openly racist groups like Black Lives Matter and teach blacks to hate.

Then there are gays and Latinos, the emerging little darlings of the liberals. We don't yet know how and when these groups will get "hurled" in Marx's felicitous phrase. But my little darlings theory says that it is bound to come.

Because politicians and activists do not care about people like you. They only care about your vote.

What they really care about is power: the power to tell you what to think, what to do, and the power to make you pay if you don't.

The White Working Class Again

The decline of the white working class has shown up again this week. 

Naughty conservative Matt Stoller showcased the commenters to a piece at the Huffington Post on the white working class. He selected the comments that most callously declared that the white working class were a bunch of deplorables that had it coming.

And then Steve Sailer featured the death-by-despair statistics, cohort by cohort, of the white working class since World War II. He features a chart that shows the increasing deaths of each cohort as it ages from causes like suicide and drug and alcohol overdose, and things are getting worse, year by year, cohort by cohort. Much worse.

Reacting to Mark Stoller's piece, I am not that outraged by the hatred and the classism of the young liberals and lefties that read Huffington Post. They have been taught to hate, and contra South Pacific, written in a time when liberals confidently expected to inherit the world and rule it benevolently ever after, you don't "have to be carefully taught / To hate and to fear." It's the easiest thing in the world. Hey, even a government teacher can do that. All those commenters are doing is just repeating the lessons taught them at their government schools and colleges. They were taught, by good teachers and by indifferent teachers, to be the shock troops of the progressive movement and they show that their progressive boot camp was effective.

But on Steve Sailer's piece I was drawn to the units of death-by-despair on the chart. It was in deaths per 100,000, and in recent years, for recent cohorts of white Americans that did not graduate college, it is hitting 100 deaths per 100,000 per year.

What's the big deal? Well, it's because social scientists use the same unit of measure, deaths per 100,000 per year, to report murders and violent death. In The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Steven Pinker tells the story. Back in the good old days of the hunter-gatherers, violent death was about 500 per 100,000 per year. Back in the high Middle Ages, it was about 50 per 100,000 per year. And now, in the United States, violent death is about 5 per 100,000 per year.

The death-by-despair for the cohort of white working class Americans that were born in 1945, right at the end of World War II, is peaking at about 20 deaths per 100,000 per year. But the folks born since 1960 are all dying at rates over 100 per 100,000 per year. That is five times the rate for the cohort born right after World War II.

What is the lesson here? No really: why stop at one? Let us count the lessons.

First of all the lesson to the white working class, articulated by a black Republican politician from Louisiana. He warns all and sundry that politicians do not care about you; they only care about your vote. For about a hundred years, politicians on the left just loooved the working class, and wrote legislation to shower the white working class with benefits and privileges. Great: who doesn't want to win the lottery? But the downside is that those benefits and privileges slowed down the embourgeoisification of the white working class; it allowed them to maintain the tribal, subordinate culture of the peasant, and to delay putting on the armor of light, the culture of the urban middle class. So when the day came in the 1960s when the left started pitching for the votes of minorities and women the white working class was left by the side of the road like the soldiers of a defeated army. I go into this in detail in my pieces on the "little darlings" of the ruling class.

This is not the first time that people have died of despair. What do you think that cartoonist William Hogarth and his pieces on "Beer Street and Gin Lane" of 1750 were all about? Not to mention Alfred P. Doolittle, father of a poor Covent Garden flower girl, saved in the nick of time from death-by-despair by the horror of "middle-class morality." And, of course, there is the question raised by Gregory Clark in Farewell to Alms. His study of parish records in England showed that, prior to the Industrial Revolution, England was a downward mobility society. The second sons of the landed nobility moved down into the upper middle class, living as soldiers and clergymen as fictionalized in Jane Austen novels. The less able in the middle class were downshifted to be farmers, as fictionalized in Thomas Hardy novels, and those made landless could end up as vagabonds and highwaymen. But then came the Industrial Revolution and upward mobility. Until now.

Then the lesson to the sneering progressives of the Huffington Post. Right now, you chaps are the little darlings of the ruling class, which enjoys using you as their cats' paws against the racist sexist homophobe Republicans. Have you ever thought about what comes after? When the ruling class no longer needs your services? Or if President Trump succeeds in restarting the economy and moderate voters rally to a winner?

Finally the lesson to the proud liberal ruling class. Do you care what happens to the little darlings of your political projects? I notice, according to Larry Elder, that back in 2013 Sen. Harry Reid was talking about how Obamacare would lead to "single-payer." On "Nevada Week in Review" he said that the country needs to work its way past insurance-based health care.

What we've done with Obamacare is have a step in the right direction, but we are far from having something that is going to work forever.

 Er, no, Senator. An administrative program of health care, modeled on Medicare, is not going to "work forever." It's the science, Senator. It is already a century since Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises wrote that socialism could not work because it could not compute prices. It was left to others to fill in the details and realize that any government program is doomed to failure because every government program is an attempt to stop the world and order the tide to stop coming in. In real life things change every moment and everyone has to adapt to it, and the more people you exempt from this universal truth the harder it becomes to deal with change. When you pass a bill to make health care "work forever" as a government administrative program you are just fooling the voters and fooling yourself. You are just buying votes, living high on the hog for today and letting the future take care of itself. Settled science, pal.

I notice, Senator, that on climate, you liberals insist that immediate action is needed to head off gthe global disaster predicted by complicated climate models that have failed to predict the future. But on Social Security, which is known to be heading for disaster, you chaps are doing nothing, indeed the excellent Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and other Democrats are proposing an increase in benefits rather than a sensible attempt to match future revenues with benefits. And Medicare is the same, only worse.

We know, not just from the science but from the historical record, that no government program is "forever." Unfortunately, the way that government programs end is not by sensibly adapting every day to reality, or through the temporary pain of bankruptcy as individuals and corporations must enndure. They end in the hurricane of national debt default and the blizzard of inflation. And the horror of defeat in war.

As for me, I wish that the working class had not submitted to the seduction of those 19th century rich kids and abandoned the rugged wisdom of their labor union and friendly society mutual-aid philosophy. But what working girl can withstand the smooth talk of the well-spoken rich kid when he's taking her out to dinner and dancing at swank places and telling her how pretty she is? Yes, we all deplore the vile young Sir Felix Carbury seducing the village maiden Ruby Ruggles who thinks she is too good for the local yokel. But who is out there "peacefully protesting" the vile seduction of honest working folks by ambitious well-born Ivy League graduates and their bribed apologists.

Why is that?