What the Heck is Politics About Anyway?

Here's a piece about Blair and Clinton and how brilliant they were back in the day, by John F. Harris at Politico. He remembers covering a joint press conference of the two at Downing Street in the Nineties.

I was a White House reporter at the time, and the news conference remains one of my vivid memories in six years covering Clinton’s presidency. 

Hmm. I wonder why that would be? Anyway, here's what he thinks of Blair and Clinton and their "Third Way."

The problem with traditional liberalism was that it was stuck in a rut — more responsive to its interest groups than the broader public interest, insufficiently attuned to the imperative of economic growth. The problem with the post-Reagan, post-Thatcher right was that it had turned brutish and backward-looking — enmeshed in racial and sexual prejudice, indifferent to the challenge of expanding opportunity to people who didn’t already count as society’s winners.

And today, 30 years after those heady days -- for John F. Harris, at least -- things are dark.

Blair and Clinton were describing the world as a fundamentally hopeful place. Now we have had nearly a generation of real-world experience with that century — marked by war, climate change, virulent nationalism, tribalistic identity politics and a malevolent media ecosystem trafficking in misinformation, commercialized contempt and nihilism.

I was reading a piece a couple days ago with a similar cast, about the glories of the politics of defending Social Security and securing rights for workers. 

OK, so let's do a counternarrative. Suppose the whole Blair Clinton "Third Way" was a lie, a clumsy attempt to rescue the big-government welfare state from oblivion. How would we know? For instance, what has the Democratic Party or the British Labour Party done recently about, say, the white working class allegedly "dying of despair?" They certainly don't count as "society's winners." But what has the progressive world done for them lately, except stigmatize them as white oppressors and supremacists and racists?

Suppose the generation of "war, climate change, virulent nationalism" etc. is a consequence of the collapse of the lie of Blair and Clinton? War? Well, was beating up the Muslims in the Middle East such a good idea? Back in the day, progessives and "Third Way" chappies were down with that. Climate change? Er, could you show me just how climate has changed, significantly, truthfully, so that it required a gigantic government program to save the world? Virulent nationalism? Do you think it might have something to do with Enoch Powell's judgement that the European Union could not work because it has no demos, no European people? Thus the peoples of Europe rally around, and identify with, the nation states to which they feel they belong. The problem is not the peoples of Europe; the problem is chaps like John F. Harris that sneer at nation states and thus naturally sneer at nationalism and patriotism as "virulent."

Suppose the glorious fight for Social Security and the rights of workers has resulted in the "dying of despair" of which we've heard tell? Because pensions are thing that ought to be outside politics, and workers' rights mean nothing if there isn't an economy to produce products and services that can provide the economic basis of worker prosperity.

Let's take another tack. How would the world be different if the progressive movement and rights for workers and Bismarckian pensions had never happened?

Or let's put it this way. Suppose that the government enacted rights for agricultural workers in 1400? Do you think it would have made a blind bit of difference over the next 400 years as peasants starved with the end of the agricultural era up until starving peasants started moving into the the cities because that's were the jobs were?

Suppose, after passing the Social Security Act in 1935 the US had got into World War II and lost the war. Do you think that there would have been any Social Security checks for old geezers like me? Suppose the Ukrainians lose their war against Putin's Russia? Do you think that workers' rights and the "Third Way" will make a blind bit of difference to the vengeance of Putin on Ukraine and the Ukrainians?

The reason that the Labour Party spawned Tony Blair and the Democratic Party spawned Bill Clinton was that the voters hated the lefty politics that came before them. So Blair and Clinton muddied the waters and said they were new and improved, a Third Way between left and right, New Democrats that had learned their lessons from the Reagan years.

But, of course, after Blair and after Clinton the two parties returned to their roots. And their roots are that politics is the way to save the world. And anyone that opposes their brilliant ideas to save the world are their enemies and must be destroyed.

Yes, politics requires an enemy. If you are going to save the workers then you promise to fight against the employers. If you are going to save women then you promise to fight the patriarchs. If you are going to save the blacks then you promise to fight the white racists. If you are going to save the gays then you promise to fight the homophobes. And that is all.

But does all this fighting actually help the helpless victims on behalf of whom the fight is joined?

Probably not. But don't mention that to John F. Harris or any of your wokey friends.

Economics 075 for Uncle Joey

President Joe Biden is pretty good at preposterous stories about his storied past. With the latest being that he almost went to the Naval Academy.

One thing I haven't yet heard from him was how he schooled Milton Friedman back in college when little Joey took Economics 101.

Today I am reading Veronique de Rugy on Biden & Co's "magical economics." It's a good line, because if you have half a brain you have to think: what was the BIden team thinking? Maybe they needed a dose of Economics 075 from yours truly. I call this Economics 075 to accord with the number of years I have been on Earth and how that experience has taught me a lesson or two.

Lesson One: Money, money, money. If you look at the time series of M2 money at St. Louis Fed's FRED database, you will see that M2 has gone from $15.5 trillion at the end of 2019 to $22 trillion on May 2, 2022. That is up 42 percent in less that 2 1/2 years. Can you spell inflation, Joey?

Lesson Two: Spend till you Bend. Federal spending in FY 2019 was $4.4 trillion. In FY 2022 it is budgeted at $5.8 trillion. That is up 32 percent in three years. You really think that increasing spending makes America more prosperous, instead of just shoveling money at Democratic voters? I gotta bridge, Joey.

Lesson Three: "Incredible Transition." President Joe Biden has represented the sharply higher fossil-fuel energy prices as part of an "incredible transition" to clean energy. Personally, based on my Four Laws, I believe that such a government-driven transformation of energy production and use is bound to end in disaster. Because, as Stalin and Mao and other lefties have demonstrated in double-blind experiments, Socialism Does Not Work. And nor does any top-down economic policy. The market economy, the social cooperation between producers and consumers, is a discovery process that changes direction every single hour of every single day. Top down ukases never work. They are useful only in wars, which always result in a staggering net loss of human welfare.

I believe that the social experiment of the last century, an experiment in the top-down supervision of humans by educated visionaries and expert administrators, is proving to be a great folly that has visited, in its worst aspects in Soviet Russia and Maoist China, unimaginable horrors and miseries. And in the case of the western democracies it has birthed a society of jolly good fun for educated folk but not so much fun for the ordinary middle class, and a definite downer for the lower class, where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

I think that the administration of Uncle Joey shows that the educated ruling class really has No Idea what a mess it has created, and that the worst is yet to come. It has No Idea that almost everything it proposes is most likely to Make Things Worse for ordinary people and crater the lives of the lower orders.

So my Three Point Plan for America and the world is:

First: get back to a money tied to gold or some other entity that can't be manipulated by government. Except during and after a war. Because post-war deflation is Not Good.

Second: reduce government spending to a maximum of 20 percent of GDP, with most "entitlement programs" replaced by genuine savings programs by and for individuals.

Third: Stop pretending that the ruling class has a clue about anything from climate to racism. Return to a society where law is not something manipulated by the Supreme Court and religion is not ruling-class woke ideology.

Is this Economics and this modest Three Point Progam too much to ask of our august rulers?

The Great Liberal Forgetting about Law

The whole point of law and the legal system, on my understanding, is that is replaces the old system, which was the Hatfield-McCoy system of revenge.

In the old system it was my kindred against your kindred, an eye for an eye. Revenge for a perceived hurt. And retribution.

Then there was the good old Saxon tradition of Wergild. La Wik.

[Wergild] was a precept in some archaic legal codes whereby a monetary value was established for a person's life, to be paid as a fine or as compensatory damages to the person's family if that person was killed or injured by another.

I suppose you could call the Wergild system "reparations." Has a familiar ring to it.

In other words, at some point the principle of revenge and retribution was formalized into an informal legal code. Progress, if you see what I mean.

The whole point of the legal system is to remove the temptation to go to war over a perceived wrong, because all parties can trust the legal system to be unbiased.

Now let's talk about US politics.

Back in the day, we were all taught to believe that the Nixon Watergate saga was the worst thing since the assassination of Julius Caesar by Brutus & Co.: "Speak, hands for me." And I admit, I drank the KoolAid back then.

But as Geoff Shephard writes at The American Spectator, it's a funny thing but all the Nixon conspirators that were tried in DC were convicted, while the chaps tried elsewhere were not.

Republicans don’t stand a chance of acquittal in a politicized case brought to court in D.C. This was clearly demonstrated almost 50 years ago in the Watergate prosecutions, where — with two notable exceptions — every case tried in D.C. resulted in a conviction and every case tried outside in an acquittal.

Now we have the words of the forewoman at the Sussmann trial, where lawyer Sussmann was accused of lying to the FBI about who was employing him.

After the verdict, the jury forewoman, who declined to give her name, spoke to the media. She said charges should never have been filed against Mr. Sussmann in the first place.

“I don’t think it should have been prosecuted,” she said of the case. “There are bigger things that affect the nation than a possible lie to the FBI.” 

 Bless Her Heart, as the ladies say down South.

But, as the DC juries on the J6 defendants have decided, mostly, you can't be too careful with "armed insurrectionists" getting waved into the Capitol by thoughtful police officers. There are, apparently, no bigger things than the horror of invading the sacred precincts of Congress to do a bit of site-seeing.

And by the way, just what were various FBI assets up to on January 6 in and around the Capitol? Inquiring minds would like to know.

The problem here is that our liberal friends, encouraged by their liberal law professors and their noble liberal activists -- not to mention a Supreme Court that believes that the law should follow the liberal world view -- have No Idea what the law is all about.

The point about law is that it is there to adjudicate disputes in a dispassionate fashion so that passionate partisans can't impose their partisan will on the rest of the nation. Because they are right and the enemy du jour is wrong.

The whole question of using the legal system to help your friends and beat up your enemies obviously came into sharp focus with the five year effort to Get Trump.

Not because Democratic partisans are fools and knaves, although they are. But because when the other guys reckon they can't get a fair deal in the legal system then they will eventually try to overturn the system.

And you really don't want that, dear liberal friends, because, in the wise words of an apochryphal Washington Post headline: "End of the World: Women and Minorities Hardest Hit."

You do care about women and minorities, right?

Washington State Hybrid Electric Car Ferries

My state senator here in the 36th District in north Seattle sent me a nice four-page newsletter cataloguing all the magnificent ways in which he is spending our money.

Sen. Reuven Carlyle (D-36) is leaving the State Senate aftar 14 years of service in the state capital of Olympia, and what he's most proud of is "passing this year's $16.9 billion Move Ahead Washingotn -- a climate-friendly investment package that I believe moves our transportation system into the 21st century."

As the greenest transportation package in state history, Move Ahead Washington invests more than $4.2 billion in transit, bike and pedestrian projects. Notable projects include $836 million to build four new hybrid-electric ferries, $2.4 billion for fish culverts to preserve and protect salmon, $3 billion for road preservation and maintenance, and $3 billion for public transportation.

And not a cent for new road construction.

And guess what! There's $440 million for affordable housing, including $300 million for Rapid Housing Acquisition to house "unsheltered individuals as quickly as possible."

"Four new hybrid-electric ferries?"

I wondered about the hybrid-electric ferries -- meaning car ferries. What does it mean? Apparently Washington State plans to get its ferry system to emissions-free by 2050. Right now, the system burns 19 million tons of diesel fuel every year. Based on this promotional video, it seems that hybrid-electric ferry means:

• Charging ferries at ferry terminals between trips.
• "Using your diesels really just as a backup."
• "You can get over 20 percent improvement or reduction in fuel consumption"
• Terminal electric hookup and charging will be really safe.
• In Pacific Northwest a good proportion of power comes from hydro and wind.
• "25 minutes to charge the boat."
• "Cost effective, efficient, and responsible."
• "There's a lot of really cool technical challenges that we'll have to deal with."
• "Hybridizing the largest ferry fleet in the United States is a really monumental task."

You can see the red flags: 20 minutes to charge gigantic batteries? Cost effective, efficient, and responsible? Cool technical challenges?

You know sports fans, if they had Elon Musk in charge, I might believe they could do it. But a bunch of gubmint bureaucrats? And gubmit contractors? Dealing successfully with "a lot of really cool technical challenges?"

Senator Reuven Carlyle. I gotta bridge to sell you. Real cheap.

And of course it's all going to be more cost-effective, etc. And benefit the fish.

You know what I think. I think that Washington State is going to throw a lot of money down the plug hole for nothing in return.

And the idea of a gubmint ferry system doing a successful project to turn its diesel-electric car ferries into plug-in hybrid Priuses? Please! The current Jumbo Mk II diesel ferries each use four diesel engines developing 16,000 horsepower or 12 MW. So you realize what kind of battery is needed to power a ferry like this on a 30 minute ride?

And then we'll have the worst transportation system in the country, and Gov. Inslee (D-WA), or whoever inherits his lifetime position, will blame the failure on "systemic racism" and "right-wing extremism." Because every problem in this world is the result of Republican malevolence.

Oh. And whatabout when the first battery explodes from all the fast charging. Because the batteries will, no doubt, be under the car deck. At least with hybrid buses, the batteries are on the roof.

This is just an example of the problem with the climate change grift. It encourages government to embark on foolish, conceited, useless projects that will be the modern equivalent of the Soviet Union's White Sea Canal, of which La Wik says:

The canal runs 227 km (141 mi), partially along several canalized rivers and Lake Vygozero. As of 2008, it carries only light traffic of between ten and forty boats per day. Its economic advantages are limited by its minimal depth of 3.5 m (11.5 ft)... inadequate for most sea-going vessels.

We will say nothing about the 25,000 worker deaths during the building of the White Sea Canal. At least nobody will die on the hybrid-electric ferry project. Until the first battery explodes.

Buffalo Massacre: Warning to Liberals

The liberal response to the Buffalo massacre -- a white guy killing 8 blacks and others at a supermarket -- is to blame "white supremacy and violent extremism." Well, of course President Biden would say that. That's the standard liberal line on all interracial conflict: The Other Guys Did It.

But I am here to say: No, liberals, You Did It. Your "allyship" politics, your Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion politics, your blame-everything-on-the-whites politics. That's what did it.

Hello liberals. Here's a bit of Bible study for you.

"For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind." -- Hosea 8:7.

See, liberals, it is a bit cute to say that the perp subscribed to a "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory when not 20 years ago every Democrat was devouring The Emerging Democratic Majority by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira. That book confidently predicted a Democratic majority in America courtesy of immigration plus the young, women, and the educated.

I would say that the difference between immigration as a deep dark replacement conspiracy and a noble and just policy to open America to immigrants is not that big.

And what is an ordinary young man struggling to take his place in the world supposed to think when Democrats oppose any attempt to limit immigration?

I mean, the whole point of labor unions is the limit competition from low-wage non-union scabs. So it was OK for union workers to restrict entry to their workplace, but not OK to restrict immigrant entry to America? Explain.

Now I notice that New York Governor Hochul is telling us that the shooting "was committed by a racist snake who came from under the rocks lifted up in 2016."

And Buffalo, NY

Mayor Byron Brown (D) argued that “False information, hateful information,” and “attempts to indoctrinate people in different forms of hate and violence on the Internet and on the airwaves of this nation should just absolutely be banned.”

Of course. Anyone that disbelieves the liberal narrative on race is a "racist snake" and there oughta be a law to silence the racist-sexist-homophobic practitioners of "false information" and "hateful information." 

 But, as I say following Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and Curtis Yarvin, "there is no politics without an enemy."

Anyone and everyone in politics is defending "us" against "them," the enemy. So of course the politicians are coming out and telling us the fear the enemy.

Used to be that the enemy was the bourgeoisie. Then the capitalists. Then the patriarchy. Then the Southern Jim Crow racists. Then the white supremacists. Then the white oppressors. Now the Ultra MAGAs.

But of course. There must be an enemy.

Let's analyze the problem with the notion of "allyship." La Wik.

"Allyship" is an English-language neologism used in contemporary social justice activism to describe efforts by members of a privileged in-group, to advance the interests of marginalized groups[.]

Further:

Its usage has grown especially common in political activism and organizational rhetoric since the murder of George Floyd and the beginning of the international George Floyd protests in May 2020[.]

But suppose that the "privileged in-group" that is practicing Allyship is not in fact advancing "the interests of marginalized groups" but in fact Making Thing Worse, in part by subordinating rising lower-class groups to the leadership of a "privileged in-group" that does not have their best interests at heart, and in part by enraging ordinary Commoners without any particular privilege who are stigmatized as "white oppressors."

The point is: how would we know? How would we know if the oppressed groups really are more oppressed that ordinary white working-class chumps? Experts and fact-checkers say that George Floyd did not die of fentanyl poisoning. But would the experts and fact-checkers have said that if George Floyd was white. Would they even have cared enough to publish an opinion?

See, in my view, the first thing that a wise ruling class does is recognize that, almost certainly, its power and its policy is creating injustice in the land. Not because the ruling class is evil, but because any government action from taxes to spending programs to regulation is almost bound to have unanticipated consequences that hurt ordinary people.

So if I were in the ruling class I would be saying: wow: there sure are a lot of conspiracy theories on immigration these days. I wonder why?

Instead, our current ruling class says that anyone that disagrees with them is a racist-sexist-homophobe and ought to be silenced for committing "disinformation" and "misinformation."

Sorry ruling class. This ain't gonna end well. Not for you, and probably not for America.

Voting Our Pocketbooks

Glenn Greenwald has tweeted a table from a recent PBS Marist poll and I was intrigued by the numbers.

Six years of the corporate media adopting as a core narrative the claim that the Trump-era GOP is full-on racist and "white nationalist," only for Latinos to say they prefer the GOP by 52-39%, and 41% of non-whites saying they intend to vote GOP in 2022.https://t.co/BgAC4pVH5b pic.twitter.com/SNGwzL33QR

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 29, 2022

You can find the poll pdf here.

As you can see from the tweet, college educated people and blacks tend to prefer Democrats. Latinos and whites tend to prefer Republicans.

I wonder if we are talking about race politics here, or just pure economic benefit.

Suppose that blacks and college-educated people vote Democrat because blacks benefit from racial quotas and educated people benefit from working in government education and bureaucracy.

Suppose that the non-college-educated and Latinos vote Republican because they are getting absolutely hammered by the double-whammy of COVID and Bidenflation?

Here area a few more numbers from rows just below the cutoff in the tweet.

Group	Sub-group	Dems	GOP
Race and Education	White - Non College Grad	33%	55%
	White - College Grad	51%	43%
Gender, Race, Education	Men - White - Non College Grad	28%	58%
	Men - White - College Grad	46%	48%
	Women - White - Non College Grad	37%	52%
	Women - White - College Grad	57%	38%
Generation	Gen Z/Millennials	45%	46%
	Gen X	41%	50%
	Baby Boomers	45%	48%
	Silent - Greatest	51%	39%

Now, when I look at those party preferences it seems to me that they are explained mostly by the moolah.

Men White Non College Grad? Doesn't get too much moolah from the gubmint. Women White College Grad? Probably working for government education or human welfare or in some sort of job where gubmint spending and/or regulation is intimately involved,

Now, I would say that the key thing about government moolah is that the wider -- and shallower -- you spread it the less that people appreciate it or get much out of it. So it's hard to really spread it out into the non-college crowd and really get them to appreciate it and really have it drive their vote for the big government party.

So, the most enthusiastic supporters of government are, of course, those who are getting the most out of it, whose income is totally, or mostly, from government.

Thus the most enthusiastic supporters of the Democrats are Blacks, Women College Graduates, and Silent - Greatest Social Security and Medicare recipients.

QED. 

The Why of Biden's La La Land

If you are a racist-sexist-homophobe like me, it is hard to get your brain around the policy bonfire that we call the Biden administration. Victor Davis Hanson calls it La La Land.

Open the borders. More mask mandates. Redo the 1970s inflation. Stop oil and gas production. Cancel pipelines. Asks Hanson:

What explains an America that suddenly no longer works? 

Maybe, he writes,

The administration fears the anger of the hard Left more than the furor of the American people.

I don't think that's the reason. I just think that Biden does unlimited immigration, COVID craziness, green energy, defund the police, unlimited bail, because for every one of these issues there are half-a-dozen activist groups creating an issue that you don't want to oppose. Not if you are a Democrat.

I just saw a piece today reporting that Charlie Crist in Florida wouldn't say nuttin' about teachers grooming kids. Because no Democrat can go against the LGBT agenda.

You would think that the Biden administration would have the chops to navigate a middle road between the world of left-wing activist groups and the ordinary middle class. And I think that, if 2020 had been an ordinary campaign year, then the candidate that would have emerged as Democratic nominee would have squared the circle between the crazies and the moderates. 

But because Democrats came together in a smoke-filled room to give the nomination to Biden rather than to a surging Bernie Sanders they had to agree to go with the full menu of crazy leftiness as the price of Sanders going along with Da Fix Is In.

Anyway, it is clear to me that Biden doesn't have the chops, or the authority, or the charisma to push back against the far-left agenda, from immigration to green energy to LGBT to wild-and-crazy handouts.

I think that in a way this is all providential. Maybe it's a good thing that the Dems, with an ageing president and a 50-50 Congress, are pushing wild-and-crazy extreme lefty La La issues. Because the utter failure of all these issues, all at once, is what it takes for ordinary people to get the message and go to the voting booth and say Go Away.

It takes mob scenes at the border to discredit the immigration activist groups.

It takes soaring gasoline prices to discredit the green energy scam.

It takes soaring grocery prices to force the Fed to stop printing money.

It takes Libs of Tik Tok videos of crazy lefty teachers boasting of teaching LGBT to pre-pubescent school-kids to prompt legislators and moms to cry Stop.

Otherwise the public square and the narrative is completely sucked up by the liberal activist groups and their well-connected activists and their inside track in the media and their defacto control of social media.

So What if College Women are D+38

I expect you've seen the poll that shows College+ women as D+38. They are the most Democratic among men and women, educated and uneducated. Scott McKay has a long article about it at The American Spectator. He goes into the travails of the educated woman, particularly the single educated woman.

Why are educated women so strongly Democrat? It seems weird. But not if you believe my maxim that "women expect to be protected."

If a woman is protected, she is happy. If she is not protected then she's going to find a new protector today.

The reason that educated women -- and especially single educated women -- working on their careers and living in urban condos are all Democrat is that women expect to be protected. If there isn't a husband to protect her then she expects the state to protect her.

Only, of course, the state doesn't protect you. The state will shovel loot at you, in return for your vote, but it won't protect you. The subhead for the American Spectator piece is:

Why are they surprised that they’re living alone with no prospects when they still think it was a good idea to vote for Biden?

Well, because women do what they are told, and expect to be protected in return. For getting on for a century, the feminist movement has taught women not to rely on men for protection but to get an education and a career. When they find they are not protected, and find they are not happy, they get angry, and they start to complain. Did I mention my idea that women have a Culture of Complaint?

It slots in with my maxim that "women expect to be protected." What does a woman do when she finds she is not protected? She complains to her friend. She votes Democrat. Eventually, she finds a new protector.

And that is what is going to happen in the next year or two as women are terrorized by the Biden inflation. They will find themselves utterly unprotected. They will complain to each other. They will complain to their Democratic politicians. Then they will abandon the Democratic Party and go find a new protector.

As the sainted Rush Limbaugh used to say: "Don't doubt me on this." 

Progressives: The Bill of Indictment

I think that there are three basic issues on which the ruling class of our time has utterly failed.

The first is the welfare state that supports the working class. I believe that this has been a strategic mistake that has Made Things Worse for the working class. I believe that what we should have done was encourage the mutual-aid aspect of labor unions, set up a legal framework to encourage workers to save for retirement and against sickness and unemployment, and keep government and its heavy hand out of the market economy.

The second is the promotion of feminism and the sexual revolution and abortion. I believe that this has been a strategic mistake that has Made Things Worse for women. I believe that the idea that the highest and best thing for women is to have careers is an utter misunderstanding of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" for humans in general and women in particular. We humans are social animals, not economic animals. We only work in the market economy to bring home the bacon. Men have careers so they can acquire high-status women for marriage. The sexual revolution goes against the instinct in almost all women, that sex is something you gladly and freely give to the man you love -- forever. And, of course, sex means children. A society needs abortion only when its women are expected to give themselves to men who can summarily dismiss them after they have won their love, or when women are expected to schedule children to suit the demands of their careers.

The third is the utter injustice of the post civil rights era. I believe that the resort to quotas and affirmative action and diversity and "underrepresentation" and equity in race relations is more than a strategic mistake, it is a vile injustice that has divided society and Made Things Worse for blacks and whites, but great for the administrative class. The point about law is that it is a replacement for the culture of revenge. You gotta problem, you appeal to the legal system for redress, not to your kindred or your race or your class. The whole point of law is that unless you treat everyone as an individual you enter an impossible thicket of special pleading  that will fail to resolve anything. That is the point of saying, in law, that government and businesses may not discriminate on the basis of race. It means that institutional decision makers are expected to treat people as humans, not as members of a particular group. That approach is not perfect, because humans are not just human individuals but people with individual characteristics and history and ability and weaknesses. But any other approach in a large society is doomed to failure and conflict.

Because our ruling class has imposed these three great errors on us and Made Things Worse, and doubled down on its mistakes, it must be removed as a ruling class and replaced with another. I suggest that the new ruling class should be drawn from the ordinary middle class, because the ordinary middle class is not that interested in power, and I believe that human society in the future is a society that needs a lot less political power. That's because, I believe, the last two hundred years of the Great Enrichment has demonstrated that the market economy is a much better way to resolve human differences than the old way of defending food-growing land from the Other.

The only question remaining is whether our present ruling class releases its grip on political power voluntarily or not. The only question, therefore, is the size of the mountain of skulls. It could be zero. Or not.

A History of Lefty Grooming

Our lefty friends seem to be mad as hell about being called "groomers" for grooming our kids in the glories of the LGBT life.

This is something of a breakthrough on the pejorative front. Ever since the end of the worst thing ever, McCarthyism -- imagine, the very idea of Communists in the State Department! -- our lefty friends have been doing the pejorative thing on us. Racist, sexist, homophobe, and all the rest of the -phobes.

Now, all of a sudden, our lefty friends are outraged, outraged, that we evil far-right violent extremists dare to say that schools with "transition closets" are grooming our kids for the LGBT life.

As Cpl. Jones would say in the Brit WWII series, Dad's Army, "they don't like it up them." I have no idea what he meant by that.

But really, isn't it the truth that leftism is groomism, and lefties are groomers. On everything.

Religious Grooming

The whole point of Horace Mann and the "common school" movement was first of all, to groom the children of the more severe Puritan sects away from their enthusiastic Christianity. Because the Boston Transcendentalists knew better. Later on, of course, the idea was to groom Irish kids away from their Catholicism, but the Irish weren't having it and built their own Catholic schools instead.

In my view not only is this vile and monstrous, but it also grooms the children of the lower classes away from the best road to the middle class, that encourages subordinate people to become responsible.

Anti-Capitalist Grooming

The whole point of grooming kids to love socialism or the welfare state is to make them into obedient subordinates. There was an excuse for Marx & Co. back in the day. The dark satanic mills of the early Industrial Revolution really did look pretty forbidding. Except, of course, that the workers were getting to live instead of dying out on the land, as they had in England since, say, 1500.

And the market economy encourages people to get out of subordinate peasantry and become an actor in the life not of making just for you and yours, but making stuff for the whole world and accepting its verdict in the wage you get for your labor, or the price you get for your product.

No doubt the market economy has its rough spots, particularly after wars when it is difficult for idiot governments to figure out how to return life -- and particularly the financial system -- to normalcy. But don't ever forget that in the last 200 years the average real per-capita income has gone up by 3,000 percent -- or 30 times. And nobody saw it coming. Oh, there was one guy, Carter Reynell in 1685:

Though we are a nation already pretty substantial... yet it is easy for us to be ten times richer.

But really! What did he know? Especially since it was three years before the Dutch invaded Britland in 1688 and installed the Dutch Finance that would lead to Britannia ruling the waves and Britons never, never, never being slaves.

Career Grooming

The whole point of feminism is that upper-class women don't really like to be domestic. So the schools groom girls to want to have careers.

I tend to find this amusing, for it assumes that men pursue careers because careers are rewarding and satisfying. Not exactly. Speaking as a man, a young man understands that he needs to have "prospects" if he expects to attract an attractive woman to his bed. Thus it is that in the lower classes, the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

And the problem with grooming women for careers is that it tends to take them out of the baby business in their peak fertile years. You tell me that this is a good thing.

Sex Grooming

The whole point of grooming kids for the sexual revolution is what, exactly? My judgement is that free sex is not good for women at any number of levels. First of all, women are much more at risk from STDs, because of the enclosed nature of their sexual equipment. Secondly, women really do not like serial sexual affairs. It affects their, er, mental health. Or, if you prefer a more universal understanding of women and sex, women really want to cleave to one man and love him forever. Oh, of course, all the men in the world are cads and layabouts and heartless. But a girl can dream, right?

Anti-Family Grooming

The whole point of leftism is to marginalize the family, so it grooms young people away from the mainstream life of marriage and children. No doubt there are people in the world that are marked out to be creative artists, and burying them for thirty years in the work of marriage and children is a waste of their transcendental talent. No doubt there are masculine women that are just the wrong fit for mothering. But for 97.2 percent of people they need to get married and have a family because if they don't they will miss out on the whole point of life. And that is grandchildren.

LGBT Grooming

If you really can't stand a sexual relationship with the opposite sex, well good luck to you, for it's hard to miss out on the mainstream of life. But grooming kids to believe that LGBT is creative, or cool, or deliciously rebellious, or that LGBTs are innocent oppressed people since the dawn of time, is sick and wrong. And to facilitate and groom kids for "transitioning" is not just stupid -- as in good little liberal teachers toeing the party line -- but cruel. Society's message to LGBT should be: do it if you must, but don't frighten the horses in the street. Because the bottom line for human life is babies on the ground, and every child needs a mother and a father: their mother and their father.

I think we need something that rhymes with Groomer. Groomer Doomer? Groomer Broomer? Groomer Fumer? Groomer Puma? Groomer Vroomer?

I will put my unconscious mind to work on it.

The Problem with Nominating a Weak Candidate for President

I feel for President Biden. I really do. I feel for the Democrats. I really do.

I feel for AOC. Here's her little problem. She thinks that the senior Dems are all sitting around doing nothing but slapping each other on the back and downing some bourbon. But they need to Act Now!

“If the president does pursue and start to govern decisively using executive action and other tools at his disposal, I think we’re in the game,” she said. “But if we decide to just kind of sit back for the rest of the year and not change people’s lives — yeah, I do think we’re in trouble. So I don’t think that it’s set in stone. I think that we can determine our destiny here.”

Guess what Sandy. The reason that Biden and Democrats in general are in trouble is precisely because you chaps in one year have managed to "change people's lives." For the worse. A lot worse.

Americans are in trouble, Democrats are in trouble, lefties like you, AOC, are in trouble because in early 2021 instead of saying: wow, after all the money printing and checks-for-everyone last year with COVID we had better trim our sails and get the economy back on track before we start handing out more loot and plunder.

But no. In order to "change people's lives" dontcha know, you guys passed the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 with checks for all.

So businesses all across the land found that nobody wanted to hire on to work for them. You think that maybe that is a problem, Sandy?

And now we have inflation roaring into double digits like it did in 1980. Before you were born, Sandy, at the end of 1989.

See, the way I figure, Sandy, you were conceived just after the third GOP president in a row had been elected. Do you understand why? Because in 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected to "make it stop." Meaning inflation and crazy lefties. Then Reagan was reelected in 1984 with a resounding majority to keep that "morning in America" going. Then George Bush was elected, three in a row. That very rarely happens.

And then, on or about your 3rd birthday, Sandy, Bill Clinton was elected president as a New Democrat promising that, hey, we aren't like the spend-and-inflate Democrats of the old days. No siree. We are New. We are Moderate. We are different.

And then, in January 1993, on taking office, Bill Clinton suddenly turned around and said OMG, I just looked at the numbers and things are worse than I thought. So it's going to be pedal to the metal on tax-and-spend. I just hafta.

And do you know what happened next, Sandy? Next was the 1994 midterms when the Republicans won both Houses of Congress for the first time in over 40 years! The GOP gained 54 seats in the House! Imagine! It's easy if you try.

So now President Biden is releasing about a third of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. But, but, but! I thought that fossil fuels were Over. That the future was electric cars and buses and wind and solar. 

What's the problem Joey?

Well, we know what the problem is. It is that Joe Biden didn't really "win" the Democratic nomination for president. He was handed the nomination by the wise men of the party. In part because they didn't want Bernie Sanders to be the nominee.

In other words, the wise men of the Democratic Party wanted to run with a man who could be sold as a moderate. Rather than a crazy lefty like Bernie.

Are you still listening, Sandy?

But, because Biden was handed the nomination rather than winning it in a fair fight with all the other candidates, he is weak. He can't stand up and tell the crazies to go fly a kite. And lefties have spending plans from here to eternity.

That's why we have had the budgetary train wreck of the last year, with Democrats trying to pass multi-trillion dollar spending bills when they have a 50-50 Senate and a 222-213 House. You don't get to pass pedal-to-the-metal spending with those kind of numbers. But when the lefty idiots and the Progressive Caucus are demanding action, well the old guard like Biden and Pelosi have to sound the charge and let the young enthusiasts do their Charge of the Light Brigade and learn a bloody lesson. Maybe.

AOC is all upset that the young people that voted for Biden and worked to get him elected are being pushed aside.

Could be. But let's do an Ike and make the problem bigger. Maybe the problem is with lefty ideologues like you, Sandy, and the lefty profs at all the universities, and the lefty media that censors non-lefty content. So that young people Literally Know Nothing, except what they learned from their lefty teachers and the lefty comedians and the lefty social media that censors all non-lefty content.

Maybe, Sandy, you and your pals like Saikat Chakrabarti have flown young people into a box canyon, telling them lies and fantasies about what politics can do for them.

And maybe next year all those young people are going to be wondering what hit them and how come they believed the half-baked lies of people like you, Sandy.

But I expect it will take a while longer before they really start to wonder. People don't just quit a cult the first time it disappoints them. Typically it takes years, because we humans tend to believe our priests and our shamans and our handsome political leaders. Until we are dying on the field or battle or starving in some crazy lefty famine.

Yep. Things don't look to good right now for Sandy and Joey.  But there's a reason for that. It is that Joey is too weak to do the right thing, and Sandy is too stupid.

No Liberals, Politics is Not the Answer!

Want to know the why of "gun violence" in black Chicago? It couldn't be, could it, that 

According to City of Chicago data, in every year from 1999 to 2009, more than 80 percent of all black women who gave birth were single.

I mean, imagine if poor women were pretty careful to keep the father of their baby around so that 1) they would have the financial support of the father and 2) the children would have a father around to teach them whatever it is that fathers provide.

Yes. Back in the day George Gilder wrote Visible Man about a teenage girl that had a baby and the father, a disabled ex-Marine, worked and supported her. Until she was old enough to apply for welfare and a gubmint apartment. Then she dumped him. I first wrote about this in 2011.

Then there is Ron Unz reviewing his California anti-bilingual education initiative of 25 years ago. Proposition 227 it was: "English for the Children." He was prompted to "do something" about bilingual education because he had read in The Los Angeles Times the following.

A group of poor Latino garment workers in Downtown Los Angeles had become so outraged at the refusal of their local Ninth Street elementary school to teach their children English that they had organized a public boycott.

Here are my takeaways on the issue from Ron's article:

• Republicans had opposed bilingual education for decades, but had done nothing about it.
• Experts said that the older you were, the easier it was to learn English.
• "schools were paid more money for every child who failed to learn English and financially penalized for those who did."
• "The official dogma behind bilingual education held that a young immigrant child required five to seven years to learn English,"

When the campaign got started, the anti-campaign (to keep bilingual education)

was a traditional, well-funded operation led by ace Democratic political consultant Richie Ross and a veteran campaign staff, backed by a field operation of thousands of local activists. It counted the public support of President Clinton, the chairmen of both the state Republican and Democratic parties, all four candidates for governor, every educational organization, every public and private union, and nearly every newspaper.

The anti-campaign tried to provoke a white backlash by portraying the measure as a giveaway to immigrants. And it messaged Latinos -- on Spanish speaking media -- to say "that the problems with bilingual programs had recently been fixed and that Proposition 227 would actually prevent children from learning English in school." 

But the measure passed with 61% of the vote, even though the anti-campaign had significantly reduced Latino support. 

Unz describes his experience talking to the Latino caucus at the California state legislature at the time.

At one point, I began suggesting that many Latinos didn’t like bilingual education, and [Diane Martinez] immediately interrupted and cut me off. “I know that!” she said, “Every election I walk door-to-door in my district, and everyone is always complaining to me about the bilingual programs. They all say that the system is no good, the classes don’t work, and their children aren’t learning any English. But they’re all stupid, ignorant immigrant parents, who don’t know anything about education. I’ve talked with the academic experts, and all the experts agree that the bilingual programs are successful.”

Guess what:

At her insulting characterization of her own Latino immigrant constituents, some of the other members of the Latino Caucus seemed to shrink down into their chairs in embarrassment, but none of them dared to challenge her harangue.

As Unz relates

Although the bilingual advocates were relatively few in number, they were fiercely committed to their programs and intensely focused upon that sole, overriding issue, expressing the sort of fanaticism that persuaded far larger organizations to steer clear of any direct conflict.

And so the Latino organizations in California kept out of the campaign and the Republicans stayed away, afraid that they would be tarred as extremist racist-sexist-homophobes. 

That's really the way that all politics works. Most people just want to live their daily lives and not get into arguments with other people.

But then there are the political activists -- and there is no politics without an enemy. The activists cow ordinary people and ordinary leaders who don't want to rock the boat. 

And so, you get a country bullied and bashed around by extremist political activists.

Like the "trans" issue.

Honestly. I don't know how we neutralize this power of the activist. Especially since all good little girls have been raised to believe that there is no nobler -- or more fashionable -- calling than to become an activist.

But politics divides, it make enemies out of friends and it makes people duck their heads to keep out of trouble.

And, of course it creates a political support system of "academic experts" who get government grants to produce the "science." In other words, they are well paid to support the activists.

And so every political issue reduces to "defeat the enemy, plunder the losers, and reward the supporters."

There's gotta be a better way.

Understanding the "Why" of the Current Crisis

Back in the day, writes Scott McKay at The American Spectator, we had a rough consensus. As in

the political consensus that has persisted for essentially all of our lives was established, to oversimplify the case, by William F. Buckley conservatives and Daniel Patrick Moynihan liberals. That consensus fueled an era marked by the welfare state, the regulatory state, the military-industrial complex, the education-media-political complex, and foreign adventurism for fun and profit particularly in the post–Cold War phase of the era.

But that consensus is dead: No more GOP Buckleyites, and no more Dem Moynihans. 

To guys like us, it seems like the left commands all the high ground. Sure, says McKay, but the left has a problem. Its crazy everything-is-oppression has led to the ridiculous moment in the Senate where a Supreme Court nominee dare not define "what is a woman."

McKay is an optimist. He writes that this moment will not tear the country apart, but rather prompt a political realignment, like Jefferson in 1800, Lincoln in 1860, and Roosevelt in 1932. In other words, Trumpism will win.

What? The Lincoln realignment did not tear the country apart? Ahem. 700,000 dead Americans might disagree with that.

Now I think that the Democrats have three problems.

1. Everything-is-oppression is a lie.
2. Politics-with-everything doesn't work.
3. Cancel culture is a sign that your agenda isn't working.

So let's unpack the three problems.

Everything-is-oppression I just read Thomas Sowell's Ethnic America where he recites the history of all the major ethnic groups in America. The key was not oppression, but the degree to which each ethnic group's culture was already adapted to individualistic life in the city -- before it hit the beaches.

The Germans already had a culture of responsibility. The Irish, Italians, and Blacks did not. Therein lies a tale. So when your politics is all about "we was robbed" instead of "how can we learn to thrive in the city" things ain't gonna go too well for you, because you have missed the point.

Politics-with-everything The problem with politics is Curtis Yarvin's maxim that "there is no politics without an enemy." He means that every political issue degrades into a battle against the enemy. Thus the everything-is-oppression agenda which is all about fighting the white oppressors. But human society is about social cooperation, and in the modern city, economic cooperation. If the other guy is an enemy, then that really limits the amount of social and economic cooperation.

Back in the day the New Deal coalition had a political solution with a government program for everything. The whole point of the Buckleyite GOP was to say, well, not exactly, and it got to enact some moderating economic policy in the late 1970s and 1980s. But in the 2010s the Obama people went back to government with everything, including universal health care. And, because blacks hadn't caught up with whites, they bumped up the government's racist policy of "diversity" into the Allies narrative of we Allies stand with the oppressed peoples against the white oppressors.

Cancel culture When a political movement lurches into a Cancel culture where people can lose their job for having the wrong opinion, it is a sign that the movement isn't delivering on its agenda. This is actually true of every political movement that goes beyond fighting off the Huns or the Nazis or the Commies. Politics is about the enemy, it is about war. If war is not an appropriate means for achieving something then the political movement will fail, and in the last phase of the political movement's existence it will probably be doing a Reign of Terror like the French revolutionaries, a Great Purge like the Stalinists, or a Cancel Culture like the Wokies.

Earth to liberals! An ideological frenzy like Cancel Culture is a sign that your agenda isn't working, not because your opponents are monsters but because your ideas don't work!

The point of politics is to mobilize the tribe or the nation to fight against a frightful enemy. If the problem is anything less than that, then politics is probably not the appropriate means.

And that is not just because not every problem is an enemy. It is that politics cannot get out of the circle of defeat the enemy, loot his granaries, and distribute the loot to the supporters. Needless to say, this agenda is always a wealth-destroying process. If you look at any government program, or any election, you can always reduce it to the enemy, the plunder, and the goodies for the supporters.

Want an example? The education system under COVID. The agenda of the teachers is to protect themselves from the disease-ridden students. The teachers are not saying, we will risk our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor to teach the next generation of kids the knowledge and skills they will need to navigate the world. Not at all. They are saying, we will not teach these grubby kids unless we are safe.

As Eric Hoffer wrote: "What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation." One upon a time, universal education was going to save the world. Now it is a racket for teachers to get paid. See more in my "Age of Liberal Grift."

Stay tunes for more exciting episodes of The Next Regime.

Inflation is a Government Program

Oh well, another month of 10 percent inflation in the Consumer Price Index. And here's the point. The Fed hasn't started raising interest rates yet. Not until next week. And that means...

We've had a nice liberal guest around here, who keeps mentioning the availability of "affordable housing.," meaning, of course, government financed and assigned housing for approved poor people.

I just haven't had the heart to mention that the reason housing is so expensive -- and that housing prices here in Seattle are going through the roof -- is government.

Back in the day, before the Great Depression, all you could get was a 50 percent mortgage. And you had to refinance it after ten years. Do you see how that might keep house prices down? Because, you see, before you can borrow any money you have to pony up 50 percent of the home's value. In cash, in savings.

The federal government has been subsidizing mortgages since the invention of Fannie Mae in 1938. That set up government-backed 30-year fixed mortgages for homes. But, of course, no private lender can offer 30-year fixed rate loans. Not at 3 percent. Not with 2 percent inflation -- in a good year. So the gubmint does it. In the years since the total of such government-backed mortgages have gone to about 40 percent of GDP. So that's really an additional 40 percent on top of the existing federal government debt of over 100 percent of GDP.

By the way, why in the world does anyone buy 30-year bonds from the US government, knowing that it can inflate the value away any time it likes?

On top of that, government encourages low-down-payment loans, sometimes pretty close to 100 percent of the home's value. Which isn't too smart around 2006 at the peak of the last real-estate bubble. And, of course, the more that people can bid for a house with borrowed money the higher the prices go.

On top of that, ever since the 70s, because feminism, mortgage sellers have to count both man and wife income in evaluating creditworthiness. Since a lot of people believe in borrowing the full amount that the lender will allow, that means that more people are competing for more homes with more borrowed money in their pockets. And that means higher prices, and that means less affordable housing.

Because you see, a healthy credit system relies on two things: faithful payment of loan payments by the borrower; and proper collaterization of loans, so that if the borrower defaults the lender can get his money back. If either or both go south -- as they did in the 2008 credit crisis -- then you got trouble, right here in River City.

That's not the whole of it, of course. There are building codes, which make houses more expensive. There are environmental regulations, that limit the land available for housing. Oh no, we can build any more houses because there might be a landslide. Oh no, we can't build any more houses because there might not be enough water.

All of these wise and educated policies subsidizing mortgages means that more people compete for loans, and the more people that compete, the higher go the prices.

And then nice liberal ladies think the answer is government "affordable housing."

And that's just houses. Then there is everything else that's going up in price because the government is printing money and is stopping the fossil-fuel industry in its tracks and is still not backing modular nuclear plants, and and and.

And the tragedy is that it is all going to cause untold suffering to ordinary people and especially to poor people in the lower classes.

Because the more you muck around with the economy, with wars and lockdowns, and money printing and Fannies and Freddies and subsidies and handouts and regulations and programs, the more you jerk the ordinary person around. And end up Making Things Worse.

Politics and Enemies

I was reading a piece on Britain's far Left when I came to this:

I sensed the anti-democratic tendencies of the far Left when I first met Corbyn’s Labour Party in 2015. It was obvious in the way they spoke about their enemies, which they define as anyone who has ever disagreed with them... The violence of their language offered a creeping kind of dehumanisation of the enemy who is also — crucially — a voter: someone to be seduced by a serious politician is, for them, only someone to be despised.

And so, of course, violence against the enemy is no problem.

Violence was always acceptable if it was against your enemy: the rhetoric itself made it necessary. I heard many far Left cheerleaders call the throwing of milkshakes and eggs acceptable if they landed on the wrong kind of politician, and what comes after that? Quite recently a far Left journalist celebrated a policewoman being knocked off her horse. I saw a journalist attacked at a far Left meeting last autumn; they applauded when the victim left the room. At the last campaign rally in 2019, a Jew was physically attacked for carrying an anti-Corbyn banner.

Did I mention that Nazi Carl Schmitt wrote that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy? And that Curtis Yarvin writes that "there is no politics without an enemy?"

I am also around a liberal for a couple of days listening to ordinary by-the-ways about "affordable housing" and thinking to myself that, yeah, we have an affordable housing problem Because Liberals.

But the funny thing is that such people Have No Idea of the malevolence and the chaos that their Hundred Year reign has caused.

Because all problems are caused by the Other Guy, the racist-sexist-homophobes of which you've heard tell. We are the Good Guys.

Anyway, in the middle of the night I came up with two new maxims:

If you want more politics, you are really saying you want more enemies.

The more politics, the more enemies.

Am I right, or am I right? And that brings me back to Mircea Eliade:

[S]uffering proceeds from the magical action of an enemy, from the breaking a taboo, from entering a baneful zone, from the anger of a god -- and when all other hypotheses have proven insufficient -- from the will or the wroth of the Supreme Being. (p.97) The primitive... cannot conceive of an unprovoked suffering; it arises from a personal fault... or from his neighbor's malevolence... but there is always a fault at the bottom of it[.]

And that is exactly how our lefty friends think of suffering. If the homeless are homeless or there is a shortage of affordable housing, then there must be a fault. And chances are the fault is the malevolence of racist-sexist-homophobes.

UPDATE: Here's some more on the enemies front. Reporting on the Battle of the Bouncy Castle up in Canada, Giles Hoffman notes how the Canadian regime needed enemies.

Every conflict now is largely an information war and a public relations battle. The regime has a well-oiled propaganda machine, and they curated footage with spurious themes. For the regime, it was insufficient to have opponents; they needed enemies, which is why so much effort was expended to portray the demonstrators as dangerous ultra-nationalists and racists. 

Hey, no problem. There is no politics without an enemy. 

Yes, How Do We Best Help the Poor?

When I drive to the gym in Seattle's Ballard / Ship Canal commercial neighborhood, I notice that many of the businesses have blocked off the street parking with concrete Jersey Barriers. The Jersey Barriers are put there to discourage the homeless from camping there.

Yes. The homeless. What Do We Do about the homeless?

And whatabout the drug epidemic, in general: fentanyl, etc.?

And is the current Democratic plan -- headlined by President Biden in his SOTU March 1, 2022 -- for more government assistance for child-care, pre-K, and health care a good idea?

I mean by this, do these kinds of services benefit Americans in the long term?

Then, I read, the 20,000 aides and staffers in Congress are thinking of forming a labor union. Yes, how has gubmint employee unions worked out so far, sports fans?

And let us leave the question of private-sector labor unions alone, even though my feeling is that labor unions typically thrive in an economic downturn when workers resist pay-cuts from their employers that are, of course, desperately trying to keep their businesses afloat.

See, I think that, probably, the huge amount of monies collected and handed out by government is a terrible idea.

Oh yes, partly because all government spending is a flat out distribution of loot and plunder to regime supporters.

But also because We the People should be doing most of the stuff that government does, on our own time and out of our own pockets, from education, to helping the poor, to dealing with the homeless.

And health care! Supposing health care was run by a combination of Amazon and church ladies?

Or. Suppose health care was organized the same way as auto repair?

And unions. See, I think that unions give people the idea that they have lifetime jobs. Sorry: ain't no such thing. That's what happened to the white working class. They had Good Jobs at Good Wages until all of a sudden, they didn't. Part of that was that government-regulated employer-worker relationships had helped unions bid labor rates way above market. Part of that was that workers comfortably fluffed up in a union job don't feel the need to keep their skills up to date.

Education? I don't know what kids should be learning today, and how they should be doing it, but I do know that when the government schools are all invested in renaming schools and critical race theory training, then Houston We Have a Problem.

Oh yes. Then there's the Science™. All the fashionable people know that the latest thing is "emergence." The world doesn't work by top-down administration but by creative "emergence" of new ideas and techniques and social and economic relationships.

But when so many things are administered as government programs, there is no opportunity for "emergence" to emerge. Did I mention 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).

This is not rocket science. 

Here in America we have the white working class dying of despair. We have black "aspiring rappers" stealing and shooting each other and spongeing off baby-mamas. We have the educated elite swanking around in credentialed sinecures. And we have government with a debt of way over 100 percent of GDP.

Something's got to give.

Changing the Tribal Rules

Here's a piece from Carl M. Cannon on the "Five Tribes" of America.

Back in 2018 the Five Tribes were:

Make America Great Again	12%
Mainline GOP	14%
The Detached	24%
Independent Blues	24%
The Resistance	26%

That was then. Now in 2022 the numbers are a bit different.

MAGA	14%
Mainline GOP	27%
Institutionalist Democrats	20%
Woke Democrats	19%
Multicultural Moderates	20%

Hmm. It seems to me that the second set of percentages are intended to obscure what is happening.

Is The Detached now supposed to be the Multicultural Moderates? 

Is The Resistance now the Woke Democrats?

Or what?

Or should we add the MAGAs and Mainline GOP together and make 26 percent in 2018 and get 41 percent as GOP supporters in 2022?

And add Independent Blues  and The Resistance in 2018 to get 50 percent Dem supporters in 2018, and add Institutionalist to Woke Democrats and get 40 percent Dem supporters in 2022?

So we would get Three Tribes, like this for 2018:

GOP Supporters	26%
Not interested	24%
Dem Supporters	50%

And again, Three Tribes, like this for 2022:

GOP Supporters	41%
Not interested	20%
Dem Supporters	40%

In other words, are the establishment pollsters trying to obscure the collapse in support for Democrats and the surge in support for Republicans, or what?

Look. There is no politics without an enemy. If you are into politics, the First Question is: who is the Enemy?

Ever since Marx (and probably before) the rising ruling educated ruling class has operated a political formula where an enlightened ruling class uses its enlightenment to advocate for the helpless lower classes. The Enemy was the bourgeoisie and the capitalists. Only today, two things have changed.

Back in the day, the Helpless Ones were the workers. Today the Helpless Ones are non-whites and non-heterosexuals. Back in the day the Enemy was the bourgeoisie and the capitalists. Today the Enemy is the broad white middle class. That is all.

Only, of course, there is a little problem. There is a real danger that the broad white middle class is now starting to include the rising Hispanic middle class, and the Tiger Mom East Asian middle class.

Nobody thought about that back in the day. Not that anybody thought about anything. They just established their political formula and the Enemy as the broad white middle class without really thinking about which side Hispanics and East Asians would end up on.

And even then, the Hispanics and East Asians might have stayed as Democrat voters. I mean, it's the sensible and practical and no-decision thing to do if you want to stay out of trouble, truckers. But now we have the lockdowns and the mandates and the inflation, and they are falling hard on the broad white-and-every-other-color middle class.

And what is the ruling class doing? It is not saying: wow, bit of a cock-up on the political formula front. Maybe we should have an all-hands meeting of the ruling class to figure out what to do.

No, the ruling class is doubling down on its folly. It is declaring emergencies over a peaceful trucker protest. It is declaring an armed insurrection when the wrong sort have a mostly peaceful protest. 

And that won't end well, ruling class.

The Lesson of the COVID Mess

I think it is pretty clear, by now, that the masks and the shutdowns and the vaccine mandates that were pretty universally applied by the world's governments during the COVID era Did Not Work.

And there is a real possibility that the government actions and mandates Made Things Worse.

Of course, I am biased here. I believe that, in general, government action Makes Things Worse.

Why? Because governments are an expression of politics, and politics is all about uniting to defeat the Enemy. And then sharing out the loot among the supporters.

And that is all.

Five hundred years ago there was little doubt that every human community needed a brave king to defend it from marauders and looters. And the way for a human community to thrive was to conquer and plunder. Anyway, that's what all leaders did, and nobody seemed to have much of a problem with that, except for the people on the receiving end.

But then emerged the modern economy in which ordinary people grew their own food less and less and labored instead for wages that they used to pay for food.

And the natural conservatism of the peasant -- for whom an agricultural mistake could result in starvation -- began to be supplanted by the creative experimentation of the business entrepreneur.

In the last 200 years, with one entrepreneurial revolution after another, the average real income of people in the developed nations has gone up by 30 times. You could look it up.

Nobody predicted it; nobody planned it. In fact, if the powers that be had an inkling of what was coming they would have strangled the baby in its cradle.

But the culture of the lord in his castle dies hard. Today, we don't have many lords in castles, but we do have lots of administrators in offices.

This is weird, because the science™ says that the world works not by top-down planning but by "creative emergence." Somebody has an idea, it works, and lots of people copy the Somebody's idea, and the world changes.

Thus, it is not surprising that the administrators in their offices all responded to the COVID crisis with top-down plans and regulations and mandates. That is what administrators do.

And administrators do not respond to changing conditions the way that markets do, by making bets on the future. They regulate and command. And then, long after the fact, they change their policy in the dead of night hoping that nobody will notice.

Because they are government they cannot make a mistake, because there is only one thing for a political or administrator to do when he makes a mistake, and that is to resign. That is why, when they make a mistake, they deny it and blame saboteurs and wrecker.s

In fact, I would say that the mistakes of the COVID era issue mainly from the necessity that administrators and politicians cannot ever admit a mistake.

When political leaders and their administrators make a mistake there is really only one thing for the people to do. They must form a mob and embarrass their leaders into resigning and leaving the leadership for others, sadder and wiser after the event.

This, of course, is the sense of René Girard's Scapegoat mechanism. We all get together to blame someone for what went wrong, and then come together and live happily ever after.

But I think that the whole COVID experience is telling us that there must be a better way, a different way from top-down administration and ukase. A way that issues out of modern science and its present doctrine that the world works by way of creative emergence: people having bright ideas that work and everyone else going along. Not because someone forced them but because humans naturally want to do what works.

Could that happen after the COVID screwup? Maybe, but I wouldn't place a bet on it.

Making Sense of George Soros, Klaus Schwab

One of the questions in the back of my mind is about George Soros. What is this billionaire Jewish currency speculator think he is doing with all his support of lefty activism? 

Does it issue from the trauma of being a Jewish kid in Hungary in the last days of Hitler's Reich? Or is is simply the conventional wisdom of an educated post-WWII European that the nation state equals nationalism equals Hitler?

And whatabout Klaus Schwab and his World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos every year and pushing the Great Reset and Build Back Better? Michael Rectenwald has a long piece "What is the Great Reset?" in Hillsdale College's Imprimis.

Apparently the Great Reset is "a means of addressing the 'weaknesses of capitalism' that were purportedly exposed by the COVID pandemic.

Appararently Klaus Schwab has been pushing the idea of "stakeholder capitalism" since the 1970s. "Stakeholder capitalism" means that

the management of a modern enterprise must serve not only shareholders but all stakeholders to achieve long-term growth and prosperity.

Schwab and the WEF have promoted this idea ever since.

They can take credit for the stakeholder and public-private partnership rhetoric and policies embraced by governments, corporations, non-governmentals organizations, and international governance bodies worldwide.

Then there is a thing called the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) Index, a kind of "social credit score" for corporations that has the effect of promoting lefty ideas like "commitments to already-vulnerable communities within their ecosystems."

BlackRock, Inc., the world's largest asset manager, is solidly behind the stakeholder model. 

And BlackRock is all-in on the climate-change movement.

In recent publications, Schwab and Thierry Malleret have pitted "stakeholder capitalism" against "neoliberalism," which they define as "a corpus of ideas and policies... favoring competition over solidarity, creative destruction over government intervention, and economic growth over social welfare."

In other words, today's corporate elite is in bed with the administrative elite which is in bed with the political elite, and a grand time is had by all. 

It does all help make sense of the whole COVID experience. Because the whole elite is using the same hymnal, reading the same music and singing the same words.

So of course the social media giants are all-in on suppressing "misinformation" and "disinformation." 

Did you know that Mark Zuckerberg was nominated to be one of Klaus Sachwab's Young Global Leaders -- along with Google's Sergey Brin and others you may have heard of?

Really, it makes much more sense for corporate leaders to be "in alignment" with political and cultural leaders than opposed to them. It avoids being branded as "robber barons" and "malefactors of great wealth" and all the other pejoratives that have been hurled at businessmen down the last couple of centuries.

And it gives the corporate elite a stake in the over - under politics of the current era. If you support "stakeholder capitalism" it means you care about the oppressed. It makes you one of the good guys.

But the science™.

See, the science these days says that a benevolent top-down hierarchy is not the recipe for peace and prosperity. The science tells us that top-down politics and economics tends to set the economy and the culture in concrete. And it keeps on going on until the day that it doesn't. On that day, the dam breaks and all hell breaks loose.

See, the modern view is that life, the universe, and everything is "emergent." New ideas, new complexities emerge from the primordial soup, and if they work they take over the world. If they don't work then you never hear of them.

A notion like "stakeholder capitalism" that operates with the conceit that it knows how to organize "all stakeholders to achieve long-term growth and prosperity" is wrong. We tried that back in the day with unionized manufacturing. All the workers at GM and Ford and General Electric were unionized and well-paid and pensioned. Until they weren't.

But that's OK. Because we now know that the white working class that benefited from the union-worker era were in fact racist-sexist-homophobes  and "bitter clingers" that had it coming.

So let's revisit the hit on "neoliberalism" that it favors "competition over solidarity, creative destruction over government intervention, and economic growth over social welfare."

Very good. But who gets to define "solidarity," "government intervention" and "social welfare?" And who gets to use their political and economic power to implement these ideas? And what if their brilliant idea is wrong?

We see what typically happens with this model from the late COVID experience. We are told that our betters are "following the science." But we learn later that they are just winging it. And when the opinion polls turn decisively against their policies of masking and vaccination they change their tune. But the science?

There's no doubt that we humans can help people when the market turns against them and their comfortable lives are threatened by a new technology. But we cannot stop "creative destruction" in its tracks with "government intervention." Because chances are that "government intervention" will make things worse, because ten-to-one government intervention will help the powerful and be completely oblivious about the non-powerful.

For example, the governments in the United States have fallen over themselves to make unionized teachers safe and force children to wear masks in school. But they have been oblivious to the harm done in all kinds of ways to ordinary non-organized workers like truckers.

I suppose then that the way to understand George Soros and Klaus Schwab is to understand that, like most humans, they think that what is best for them is best for the rest of the world. And you better fall in line, peasants.

Oh, and Whoa, listen to Dr. Robert Malone with Tucker Carlson on WEF and Young Leaders starting at 46:30.

Suppose the First Black Woman Crossed the Aisle

If I were the First Black Woman that President Biden nominated to the US Supreme Court I would be insulted.

Because after all, when President Biden says he is going to nominate a black woman -- as in East Asians need not apply -- that's racism, straight up.

I suppose that whoever he nominates -- and I understand that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson is the front runner -- she will be a faithful liberal vote, always voting with the other two women liberals on the court, Justices Sotomayor and Kagan.

Mind you, according to Instapundit:

Judge Jackson grew up in a major metropolitan area, and her father was a lawyer. She would be the fifth sitting justice to fit that profile. She earned both her bachelor’s and law degrees at Harvard and would be the seventh justice with an Ivy League undergraduate degree and the eighth graduate of Harvard or Yale law school.

So, a card-carrying member of the educated ruling class. 

That's really comical, representing a card-carrying member of the educated ruling class as the First Black Woman. A bit like First Black President Obama who was the son of an East African and a white woman, not a West African, from the people that were enslaved by other West Africans and sold to Brit slavers on the coast.

If I were the First Black Woman on the Court I would trot down to Justice Thomas after a day or two at the Court. And I would start to plot a bit of mayhem.

Because being a black woman I ain't gonna take no sh*t from nobody. Right Grrls?

But I doubt if she will. After all, she's a good little girl and went to Harvard and Harvard Law. You think she is going to break ranks and get combative?

For one thing, if you want to break the liberal ranks and start thinking for yourself you have to have done a bit of reading outside the liberal-lefty canon. You think that Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has done that? I doubt it. My nickel says she has deadly boring ruling-class-conventional-wisdom opinions on everything.

Hey, if she had ever broken from the herd she wouldn't be the selection of President Biden to be the First Black Woman on the Supreme Court. Because what liberals want now, what they have to have, is an absolutely reliable vote that will vote as a block with the other two liberal women justices. Until Hell freezes over.

Because that's all that our liberal friends have left.

Today Victor Davis Hanson writes about the ruling-class strategy of nihilism, that all the stuff they are doing is part of a dastardly plan.

But if you mention nihilism then for chappies like me you invoke the shade of Nietzsche, who wrote that nihilism is the second consequence of your God dying, as in:

God is Dead, followed by decadence, followed by nihilism, followed by the eternal recurrence, followed by the revaluation of all values.

Eternal recurrence? Think Groundhog Day.

But, see, I don't think that the current ruling class clamp-down and nihilism is a strategy. I think it is a consequence of our liberal friends's faith, in leftist politics, in government programs, in quotas, in mandates, in feminism, in LGBT.

And that the God of Lefty Politics has failed. And our lefty friends do not know what to do. Except double down on their lefty politics.

There is no politics without an enemy, and so our lefty friends are finding enemies under every tree and on every street. If the Great Society failed and it wrecked the lower-income family, then it can't be the programs that failed. It must be some enemy that sabotaged it. If Charles Murray suggests that the lower average IQ of blacks is a fact and thus we will never get "equality" then he is a saboteur and a wrecker and must be condemned. If the stock market crashed in 2008 it can't be the low-down liar mortgages that Democrats have championed since the 1930s. It must be greedy bankers. If the COVID administrative mandates aren't working it must be the anti-vaxxers that are to blame.

But don't expect the two liberal justices and the new addition, the black woman Harvard educated daughter of a lawyer, to understand any of that. They are clueless, and will remain clueless, until the whole society is collapsing around them. But they still won't get it.

And frankly, even if Judge Jackson has half a brain, she would be afraid to use it. Imagine the storm that would engulf her if she dared to step out of line. I am not talking about columns in The New York Times and insults from race hustlers. I am talking about removal from the Court. You think they wouldn't stoop to that?

I gotta bridge...