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.

In Politics You Never Admit You Were Wrong

For years I've used Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution as a way of understanding politics, that when things go wrong, the activists amp it up and start canceling their opponents: Reign of Terror.

But I can see, back when I started writing about reigns of terror, that I didn't have the key insight that drives political activists to destroy the opposition.

The problem with politics is that you can never admit you were wrong. Or made a mistake. Or shoulder the blame.

Obviously, this is crazy. Human life, every human life, is one mistake after the next. Successful people, happy people, are the kind that realize that "Houston we have a problem" and work like mad to solve the problem.

If fixing mistakes is one of the key skills for a happy and successful life, why don't politicians admit their mistakes?

I think it is because politics is always about fighting an enemy. As in: Nazi Carl Schmitt, that the political is the friend - enemy distinction. As in: Curtis Yarvin, that there is no politics without an enemy. 

Think of it.

• If you've been leading the fight to an enemy for years, can you turn around and say: wow, this enemy is not as bad as we thought?
  
  
• Can you admit that your strategy for fighting the enemy was all wrong, and so now it's back to square one?
  
  
• Can you admit as President Roosevelt in December 1941 that you screwed up the intelligence and the Japanese were able to cruise a force half way across the Pacific to bomb Pearl Harbor?

Obviously not. 

If you admit any of these things, then there is only one thing to do, and that is to resign. So the only way to hang onto your political leadership is never to admit being wrong. And the political system accommodates this. After a couple of presidential terms, the voters typically decide it is Time for a Change. What they are really saying is: you promised Heaven on Earth, you failed to deliver, and so you are outta here.

This approach allows us to understand the present moment.

• If you have spent the last two years pushing mandatory masks and mandatory vaccinations and the science starts to show that you were wrong, then you have a bit of a problem.
  
  
• If you have been pushing entitlement programs for the last century and the entitlement programs are broke, then maybe your brilliant plan was not o brilliant.
  
  
• If you have been enacting welfare programs and the result is that lower-class men don't work much and lower-class women don't marry much, and the young men of these families are violent criminals and only aspire to rapping, then maybe you have a problem.
  
  
• If you passed civil rights laws half a century ago, and you elected the First Black President fifteen years ago, and blacks are still poor and criminal and violent, then maybe you have a problem.

Do you see the point? The last thing that any politicians does is admit he screwed up. The last thing that any ruling class does is admit that its programs and policies were and are a disaster. 

Because once you admit your mistake, there is only one thing to do, and that is to resign.

• Would any politician of your acquaintance admit a mistake and resign?
  
  
• Would our educated ruling class ever admit a mistake and resign?

There is a reason for this, and I use Nicholas Wade and his Before the Dawn to illustrate it. Male chimps defend the troop's territory from other male chimps. But when there are no more male chimps left, then the troop ceases to exist and the females are absorbed into another troop. Same thing with human hunter-gatherer bands.

So, for males, politics -- the pursuit of the enemy -- really is a matter of life and death, or at least status vs. oblivion.

But what do humans do when they are oppressed by rulers that are screwing everything up? There seem to be several alternatives.

1. Exhaustion. That's how most reigns of terror and great purges end.
2. Bouncy castles. Truckers get together and set up inflatable castles in the capital city.
3. Scapegoat. We all come together and select a scapegoat and make them responsible for everything. As in "time for a change" elections.
4. Revolution. The ruling class is ejected and replaced by a new one.

I sure would like it if our problems could be solved by something less than bloody revolution.

But here is a new concept: Any problem that is less than life-or-death shouldn't be the responsibility of politicians and politics. Because almost every human activity is likely to go wrong and require people to get together and fix it. It needs people with a "Houston we have a problem" attitude.

And politics is the one human activity where you can never admit you were wrong and then get together and fix it.

Lefties Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Well. President Biden goes to New York City and says the whole problem with violent crime is gun shops in other states.

The Justice Department is sending additional prosecutorial resources to help shut down what’s referred to, as you all know, the iron pipeline that funnels guns from shops in states like Georgia, crime scenes in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and so many other places[.]

'Cos you cain't buy a gun in New York City. No Sir. And people wouldn't be getting shot if only the "ghost guns" weren't sneaking into NYC by the back door.

Or, here's a lefty book that says that Ronald Reagan was a racist. No, no, no, writes Paul Kengor, a Reagan biographer: one of Reagan's best friends was black. No doubt, but Reagan was still a racist dog-whistler, don'tcha know.

Actually, the lefty has a point. The whole point of lefty race politics since the Civil Rights era is that ordinary middle-class whites have to pay. And if they object, they are racists. And if a politician arises that rallies the middle-class/working-class whites, he's a racist dog-whistler. That goes for Nixon, Reagan, Trump. And my liberal neighbors already hate Ron DeSantis.

On the other hand, here's the FBIs raiding an operation, Feeding Our Future, that appears to have been scamming the federal school lunch program in Minnesota to the tune of $244 million. Apparently, the head of Feeding our Future regards the whole thing as an attack on the Somali community.

Look. The way to understand all this is that the whole lefty program is on fire. It doesn't work. It never worked. That's because top-down government is good for only one thing: military conquest. And the point of the top-down thing in the military is to force the young men to sacrifice their lives without rebelling against the generals and nobles and kings that issue the orders.

If you are not conquering something and driving the men before you and listening to the lamentation of the women, then politics ain't working for you.

Because politics come down to fighting an enemy -- it could be Commies, Fascists, greedy bankers, far-right racists, dog-whistlers -- and then handing out loot to the supporters. And that is all. Everything else is window dressing.

Thus, people in receipt of loot and plunder are just sitting there, cashing checks and buying luxury items. Like the folks at Feeding Our Future. What they are not doing is contributing to the economy.

If they are not quite in the top tier, they are getting gubmint checks and doing some king of illegal grift on the side. I remember a comment in the Wall Street Journal after the welfare reform in the 1990s. Oh, said this black lady. We always worked, but under the old welfare rules we got the checks and worked off the books. Then there was the guy with a construction business that hired people off the books. When he went broke the state got involved, because it wanted its back taxes.

One of the off-the-books employees was claiming unemployment as he worked of the books, and another was claiming disability as he worked off the books.

No kidding. Why, that's racism straight up!

OK. Let's review all this.

President Biden and guns. Hey, Mr. President. If everyone is getting a check on the one hand, and doing some sort of a scam on the other, then the general illegality is going to mean that they aren't going to want the cops around too much. And that means that they will be doing their own law enforcement, gang to gang, gun to gun. And if the guns aren't avaiable at the gun shop on the corner then any aspiring rapper that won't stand for any dissing is going to get a gun from somewhere else.

Guess what. If the black community has developed a culture of gubmint checks and off-the-books side hustles, then they ain't gonna be getting ahead in the ordinary economy where you get a job and pay taxes and expect law enforcement to take care of the crooks. 

And all this is a consequence of liberal policy. Because when you enroll the lower class in all kinds of free money programs, then you create people whose whole lives are organized around how to qualify for the free money and how to scam the free-money programs with side hustles.

I'm here to say that I don't think it is a very good idea. Is that racist of me, dear liberal friends? Too bad. It's still your fault.

And when, after 70 years, Social Security is running out of money, that's liberals' fault.

When after 50 years, 70 percent of black kids are born out of wedlock, because, among other things, you can't get welfare if you are married, that's liberals' fault.

When the black-on-black murder rate is ten times the white murder rate, that's not because of guns from out of town. It is because lower-class gangs live by violence, and they always have. In Britland, which has strict gun control, there are still plenty of Muslim gangbangers that get access to guns. Supply and demand, don'tcha know.

But liberals will never admit they were wrong. People in politics never admit they were wrong. The only thing you do with people in politics is you show them the door. Time for a Change. Old chap.

Enough of Enemies; Enough of Loot and Plunder!

The fact is that one of the instinctive roles of male humans is to defend the territory. Because the territory has food on it. Defending the territory and its food is a matter of life and death.

But, since the Industrial Revolution food is something humans buy with money. Therefore, access to or control of food-bearing territory is not a matter of life and death.

If we apply Nazi Carl Schmitt's dictum that the political is the distinction between friend and enemy, we can see that it used to make complete sense. Friend is someone that shares the food-bearing territory and fights to defend it; enemy is someone threatening to take away our food-bearing territory.

So when, e.g., Frederick the Great of Brandenburg invaded Silesia in 1740 it was not about defending Brandenburg's food-growing territory but it was about increasing the area of food-growing territory over which Fred could rule and tax. It worked out well for Our Fred, and he was a decent flute player that liked to play music of an evening. Of course, it could be that he sent the wrong message to the future rulers of Germany.

Then came the Industrial Revolution.

Then came Stalin. He starved the peasants of the Ukraine so he could buy industrial equipment from the West. Way to go, Joe.

Then came Adolf Hitler. He believed that Germany needed Lebensraum to grow food for its people. In the East. But Germany was an industrial nation that could buy its food as long as it wasn't in a world war.

Not a good idea, Adolf.

Now, of course, ever since World War II, our global elite has decided that nations and national leaders are literally Hitler, and it is their sacred duty to stop Literally Hitlers anywhere they rear their mustachioed heads.

But, our global leaders are still acting like male humans defending their territory. All across the world leaders during the late COVID emergency have been acting like male humans defending territory, issuing orders to the troops -- er, ordinary citizens -- to keep in line, to wear their uniform masks, get their vaccinations. Or else go to the brig. Just like the GIs in World War II.

And after the War on COVID our leaders are proposing to bravely lead us to Build Back Better with a whole raft of programs to dish benefits out to the people. And mobilize for the Next World War, the Green New Deal that will decarbonize the world before it's too late.

Needless to say, those that get on board with the new World War Green will be handsomely rewarded. Others will pay for their armed insurrection.

The thing that keeps bothering me is that, whether we are talking about hunter-gatherer bands in the Amazon rain forest or the cult followers of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, proprietor, we are talking about the same thing.

First there is the enemy to be defeated before it's too late. And then there are the glorious perks to all the faithful friends and followers.

In other words, whenever politics is involved it is always about the enemy, and then always about rewarding the followers. Just like in the Amazon rain forest. Just like with feudal lords and their retainers. Just like the Soviet leaders and their nomenklatura. Just like western leaders and their loyal deep state.

But, you only need to mobilize against the enemy when your life depends on the continued possession of food-growing territory. If you are growing food to sell, if you are making stuff to sell, if you are doing anything in the modern economy, you don't need to defend your food-growing territory. What is more, it doesn't make any sense to invade a country and plunder its resources and sell its inhabitants into slavery. They will benefit you much more doing what they are already doing and selling it to you. That's because 80 percent of wealth in the modern economy is "intangible capital" which is a fancy way of saying the knowledge and skills of humans.

Do you understand what I am saying? I am saying that the modern state with its compulsions, its endless partisan squabbling, its gigantic loot and plunder operation -- that in the developed world means something from one third to one half of gross domestic product -- is an echo from the past, the past of primitive humans that lived and died on food-growing territory that they defended with their lives. That's why I call it the Great Reaction.

Loot and plunder? The last major loot and plunder operation that I know of was the looting and plundering of eastern Germany by the Soviet Union after World War II. How did that work out, Joe Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev, Mikhail Gorbachev?

See my point? If you are in the enemy plus loot and plunder game you ain't doing yourself a favor. Although of course, you do get to drive your enemies before you and hear the lamentation of their women. If that's how you get your jollies.

The next Big Thing for humans is to get beyond the primitive culture of enemies and loot and plunder for the friends.

But I don't know how we get there.

A Lefty Reviews the Last 30 Years

Like about 2-1/2 other people, I believe that all humans live in their own bubble, their own explanation of reality. And it's mostly stuff we have picked up from the Zeitgeist, the narratives being offered by the various Professor Marvels out there: political prophets, ruling class stenographers in the media, gubmint professors and teachers.

But it's helpful to get a full meal of lefty narrative in one place, such as Ryan Cooper's look at the American left over the past 20 years.

I entered high school in 2000, and watched in bafflement as the Supreme Court handed the presidency to Bush in a decision even a 14-year-old could see was cynical politics dressed up with legalese.

So, Ryan, baby, now you know how the Trump supporters feel, I'm sure.

when Bush defeated John Kerry — the only time a Republican has won the popular vote in a presidential election since I was 2 years old, by the way — running on war and homophobic panic.

"Homophobic panic?" I must have missed that.

My half-baked suspicion at 17 years old that "invading Iraq for no reason seems like a really bad idea" turned out to give me more wisdom on war than three-quarters of Congress and the entire D.C. foreign policy establishment.

Good point. But if you are World Hegemon -- from any party -- you make sure to dominate the towel-heads sitting on top of the world's oil.

[In 2008] I was bewildered to learn that Wall Street had somehow built a grenade under itself that blew up and took the global economy down with it. 

Akshully, Ryan, the crash had a lot to do with the gubmint's 50 year program to subsidize home mortgages that created a massive bubble in home prices. Kinda like right now.

Then came Obama, a "golden opportunity was almost totally squandered. "

Influenced by neoliberal economists the president hired (most of whom were deeply implicated in the crisis itself), the party passed an obviously inadequate stimulus package that stopped the recession but led to the weakest economic recovery since the 1930s. 

Well, Ryan, racist-sexist-homophobes like me think that the Obama stimulus failed because it was just a payout to Democrat supporters, not a program to restart the economy. But what do we know?

Their one major social policy achievement before that loss was a heavily compromised health care reform that, while better than nothing, failed to truly solve any of the real problems — like the endless cost bloat that continues to devour the economy from the inside. 

If you think that the problem with the health care system is not enough government, I gotta bridge to sell you.

The disappointments of Obama led directly to the first major leftist grassroots movement of the century: Occupy Wall Street. 

No, Ryan. There is no such thing as a "leftist grassroots movement." They are all AstroTurf, gussied up by the scions and the functionaries of the ruling class, chaps like you. That goes for BLM too.

Earth to Ryan: grassroots movements are the ones that make the educated ruling class -- chaps like you -- react in horror. 

The disappointments of Obama and the example of Occupy no doubt helped inspire the second leftist mass movement of the last two decades: Black Lives Matter.

OK, so you think the problem is "mass incarceration and police brutality." We racist-sexist-homophobes think the problem is gubmint education and gubmint welfare programs that create a huge underclass of boys without fathers: men that don't work much and women that don't marry much.

But now we have Bernie Sanders and

The American left has a serious national presence for the first time since the 1940s, a toehold in Congress, and a significant presence in many state governments.

 And the supporters are young!

One byproduct is a truly enormous partisan age gap — probably the largest in American history, and one that was important for Biden's victory in 2020.

Except that now

Biden's approval rating among under-30s has dropped by 50 points, likely thanks to the party's constant dithering on passing its own agenda, and disgruntled leftists have been known to turn to the right on occasion. 

And the electoral success of the left is triggering a crackdown.

what traditionally happens in American history when there is any serious leftist political movement is it is smashed through a combination of state repression and racist vigilante violence. That's what happened to the multi-racial labor coalition in the South after the Civil War. It's what happened to a budding socialist movement during the First Red Scare between 1918 and 1920. And it's what happened in the McCarthy era.

You see what I mean about people living in a bubble? But I wonder, exactly, what Ryan means by "racist vigilante violence?" Rittenhouse? Blacks murdering blacks in Chicago? MAGA types hanging a noose around innocent Jussie Smollett?

But that is nothing compared to what will happen if the Republicans get back into power.

Republicans are openly announcing that they intend to replicate the McCarthy formula by whipping up a shrieking moral panic over "woke" phrases and "critical race theory," by which they mean anything that discusses racism whatsoever. 

Yes, well. Don't look now, but what I read tells me that the Republican Party is becoming more and more the party of the working class: people that have a job but don't have a college degree. And that includes, I read today, 80 percent of Hispanics, who are turning rapidly to the Republicans.

But hey, McCarthyism! Here's how Ryan Cooper ends his salute to the left:

The future isn't set in stone, but unless the Biden administration and congressional Democrats do something to protect democracy and America's civil rights, the relative toleration the left has enjoyed since 2000 will come to an end. But there's still time to recognize that American democracy needs the left as much as the left needs democratic freedoms. 

 You know, I think there's a word for this kind of word salad: word salad.

But imagine an America that provided even "relative toleration" in the nation's universities and elite media institutions to the center right -- never mind the "far-right!" Imagine that!

Facing Down the Religion of Leftism

One of the standard conservative narratives is that conservatives are influenced by reality and objective truth whereas lefties are simply religious believers that will say and do anything to advance their sacred cause.

Actually, I think that the ZMan puts out a straw-man when he writes that "bourgeois objectivism" is the problem,

the assumption that all social problems have a correct set of answers and the point of politics is to discover those solutions.

I think that is more the assumption of our educated ruling class, who themselves are bullied about by the lefty crazies.

So I would analyze our situation as this:

There are lefty crazies, who want to transform the world with politics elevated to a kind of religion.

There are Inner Party educated-class liberals, who believe themselves to be the only qualified people to direct the political affairs of the nation.

There are Outer Party conservatives that believe in ruling with a light touch, but truckle to the Inner Party Pooh Bahs.

All the above sectors belong to the ruling class of educated people, the Educated Gentry. There are two other sectors:

There are ordinary middle-class Americans that just want to live their lives, do their jobs, and live a decent life. I call these people Responsibles.

There are lower-class Americans that attach to lefties and or the educated ruling class because they are Subordinate people that need a lord to protect them.

Since the Outer Party conservatives do not have a religious priesthood directing their morality, they are rather less energized than the Inner Party and its lefty priesthood. It is this that demoralizes and annoys folks like the ZMan.

The only thing that can stop the coalition between lefties and their educated-class allies is a Great Rebellion of the ordinary middle class. No doubt the Outer Party will adapt itself to become its leaders.

But I do not think that the Great Rebellion has a chance without the lefties and the Inner Party having first ruined the country and the lives of the ordinary middle class.

Yes, I know. You would think that the Biden administration has been chosen by God to do just that.

See, I think that it is natural and physical that stupid scions of the educated class would believe stupid things like the idea that politics can bend the arc of history towards justice.

And, unfortunately, over the past 200 years, the stupid scions of the educated class have been able to persuade the lower class that loot and plunder delivered by the government was the answer to their problems. It is only in the past 50 years that the social center of gravity has tended towards the middle, where the biggest sector of society has become the ordinary middle class, rather than the lower-class peasants or lower-class industrial workers.

I think the sign that the current lefty plus Inner Party sector is in trouble is precisely the culture war of the past couple of decades. A confident ascendant ruling and cultural class does not need to amp things up.

Indeed, a witch-hunt / reign of terror / great purge / cancel culture is a sign that things are going wrong for the believers, that the prophecy of the lefty prophets has failed, and that the progressive, or lefty, or liberal era has Made Things Worse. When the prophecy of your priests has failed, you do stupid stuff, like:

Defunding the police and letting criminal defendants go free.

Creating a crazy cult that the planet is going to burn, unless we go back to sun power and windmills.

Making a sacred cult out of abortion.

Enlarging an already over-large government entitlement state.

In fact, I believe we need a radically reduced state. Why? Because the modern economy rewards people that are trustworthy and punishes people who are untrustworthy. Thus, most people are "nudged" by the need to present themselves as trustworthy, and act in a trustworthy fashion. They don't need much supervision and ordering about.

We need police forces to repress those that refuse to be trustworthy, and we need navies to deal with pirates that might take a shine to a 200,000 ton container ship. That is all.

But what comes next? 

I don't know, but I suspect that the current system will need to collapse in hyperinflation and misery before we can get a majority of people to stand up against the lefty activists and the educated-class grifters.

Here's how I look at the history of the world so far.

First there was the Age of War. It made sense because land was the only thing that mattered. It paid to defend your land and you could increase your wealth by conquering your neighbor's land.

Then there was the Age of Politics. It made the Age of War look like a walk in the park, with monster wars about -- what exactly? And monster governments that oppressed and killed their own people -- for what exactly?

Now comes the Age of Trust. Trustworthy people will wive and thrive; untrustworthy people will struggle, unless and until they mend their ways.

Of course, we could give Elon Musk a gubmint contract to take all the untrustworthy people to Mars and let them figure it out there. Just as the Brits gave Sir Walter Raleigh a gubmint contract to take the "waste population" to the Americas. See "My 1584 Project."

But human life will always be a muddle. Sorry, make that "emergent phenomenon."

Waukesha: Because Liberalism Made Things Worse

The important thing to understand about the Waukesha nightmare and the liberal meltdown on the criminal justice system is that liberals are in the position of the proverbial little Dutch boy, trying to save the country by plugging a hole in the dyke with his finger.

Maybe that worked in the story, but it doesn't work in real life.

The problem with the criminal justice system is not excessive bail. Or crazy Soros prosecutors. Or too many black men in jail.

The problem is the liberal welfare state, and in particular the way it has hammered blacks.

You can see that in the headline black victims.

Rodney King: "beaten by LAPD officers during his arrest, after a high-speed chase, for driving while intoxicated on I-210." Context: Resisting arrest.

Travyon Martin: "fatally shot in Sanford, Florida by George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old Hispanic American." Context: Martin was on top of Zimmerman, bashing his head, when Zimmerman shot him.

Michael Brown: "fatally shot by 28-year-old white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson in the city of Ferguson, Missouri." Context: Brown was suspected of a theft and wrestled for Wilson's gun.

George Floyd: "murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota, during an arrest." Context: Floyd was resisting arrest, and high on drugs.

Jacob Blake: "shot and seriously injured by police officer Rusten Sheskey in Kenosha, Wisconsin." Context: Blake was going for a knife when shot.

All of these victims were not just victims of police brutality, they were the logical consequence of the last 150 years of educated-class politics that treats the lower class as helpless victims unable to fend for themselves.

Item: I say that the cultural agenda since 1800 should have been to encourage farm-workers and industrial workers to become responsible middle-class citizens and grow out of any serf status lingering on from the Middle Ages -- or slave status lingering on from King Cotton.

Item: I say that the welfare programs passed in 1965 were exactly the worst thing to do when African Americans were emerging from a century of Jim Crow. It blitzed the black low-income family, and the black low-income family is still blitzed.

Item: I say that politics and government are only good for waging war and handing out loot and plunder. The more government, the more everything devolves into a war and the more the economy is reduced to a handout of loot and plunder.

Item: I say that humans are social animals, and that nearly all human social life should be enmeshed in a network of voluntary social, religious and cultural institutions, and not by government. I particularly mean that poverty should be managed by mutual-aid organizations and not by government.

I say that if you want to understand the politics of our liberal friends it makes sense if you realize that they have No Idea that the "items" above are the reason why blacks are in endless problems with family dysfunction and run-ins with the police. They have No Idea that mental illness and homeless problems issue directly from their politics that has hammered families and encouraged people to look for help from the government instead of their families.

So liberals want to lower bail requirements, because they see, before their eyes, how low-income people are oppressed by the criminal justice system. They just cannot see upstream that the overburdened criminal justice system is the consequence of their policies.

So liberals want to create housing for the homeless, because they cannot bring themselves to understand that people with broken lives, issuing from liberal policies, are blotting life out with drugs.

Obviously nothing can be done while our liberal friends are the ruling class, because they cannot see, will not see, that all these problems are a direct consequence of the wise and evolved policies that they have legislated and administered over the last century and more.

Straight White Males Not Going to College

I'm sure we've all seen the latest on college entrants, that girls are in the majority and white males are not signing up, not much. From The Wall Street Journal:

At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline. 

And working-class white males are the cause of the decline.

In The American Spectator Scott McKay goes into details of what is wrong, including wokism and female teachers all the way through that tend to regard boys as "bad girls who need to be managed." And there is power.

Drunk on the power and money their predecessors left them, and unfettered by any accountability that politicians (at state schools) and donors should have imposed on them, they decided a couple of decades ago that they were to be the molders of a brand new kind of American. 

 But do you know? I think that there is less here than meets the eye.

I don't think that anyone is really thinking about what they are doing. They are just picking up the Zeitgeist and going with it.

If you read a book by any liberal, what jumps off the page is the assumption that the way of liberals, as of right now in 2021, is the eternal way of the Universe. It is not that other ways are marginalized; it is just that nothing exists except the liberal way.

Now occasionally someone has a strategic idea in education, like Horace Mann and the common school. He had been to Germany and liked the system there, and also, as an upper-class Transcendentalist, liked the idea of educated kids away from the middle-class Puritanism and Catholicism of their parents.

Then, at the turn of the 20th century, leading minds thought that children should be educated in high school to be good factory workers.

And then people thought that women should be educated just like men.

And then, after World War II and the GI Bill, people thought that everyone should go to college.

Then, after the Civil Rights era, people thought that minorities should go to college.

Now, with the Woke Era, we have everything being turned into a Woke Revival.

And, because almost all education is non-profit, government-funded, we have the problem of all government programs that they are loot and plunder for the supporters and you can never reform them.

I think that we should think of education more as if it is the US in Afghanistan. Where, it turns out, we have been teaching young girls how to be modern 21st century woke feminists. Hoo boy. In other words, the people in charge have No Idea.

Personally, I think that the sooner education crashes and burns the better. Then we can build an emergent system, driven by the needs and the culture and the beliefs of each of us, based on home-schooling and pod schools and micro schools, parental authority, child labor connected to a new apprenticeship system paid for by corporations, men teaching boys, and on and on.

But not run by the government: run instead by parents.

Because the way of the centrally organized top-down culture of ruling-class orthodoxy is the way of disaster -- don't you think Joey S, and Mao Z.D.?

As we will soon find out.

What Does a Culture of Real Criticism Mean?

In yesterday's post on The Emergence of Criticism I discussed the utter novelty of a society in which criticism was genuinely tolerated.

Normal human society has one myth and one religion and if you don't agree you are a problem.

I interpret this not as a scandal but as a profound understanding of pre-scientific society. In other words, before humans had a developed system of understanding and predicting the common events of life, it was perfectly serviceable to have myths and legends and evil spirits to explain things. If you don't have Newtonian mechanics, what are you supposed to do in the matter of understanding and prediction?

But then, after humans have developed a serviceable system of mechanical prediction, what are we supposed to do about the myth and legend and evil spirits system that got us here for the previous 100,000 years, or however long humans have had conscious minds that could gussie up myths and legends and evil witches.

Obviously, we have to think about it.

Obviously, I would say, humans need a myth that explains the meaning of "life the universe, and everything" for the time being, and we always will.

But, it probably isn't a good idea to burn witches and heretics at the stake or send saboteurs and wreckers to concentration camps. Or imprison mostly peaceful protesters at the January 6 riots for six months while they await trial, or until they agree to cop a plea.

Yesterday I pondered Bryan Magee's idea that Marxism makes complete sense, because the idea of a world in which everything is not tied down by a saving myth -- as proposed for the Era of Criticism -- is too terrifying to contemplate.

Now, our Founding Fathers imagined a cunning solution to this problem, for their time, with the separation of church and state. In that way, in the United States of the time, no one Christian sect could make itself the state church. Of course, when it came to the Irish Catholics in the mid 19th century the political punks of the time -- I mean you Horace Mann -- decided to do an end run around the Catholics with gubmint common schools that would use the Protestant Bible. But God said to the Irish, "first build the school, then the church," and it was so, and the Irish nuns ran the best schools in the nation for the next century.

In our day the end-run Horace Manns are the lefty activists that are too stupid to understand that their activism and their cancel culture amount to an establishment of wokey religion: worse, a combination of religion and politics that we have learned to call totalitarianism, and as such a very present danger to the Republic and in simple terms a monstrous and evil injustice perpetrated on all Americans that don't worship at the church of Woke.

And the worst thing of all is that the wokeys have No Idea. They have No Idea that their activism is really a religion. And they have no idea that politics leads directly to injustice, do not pass Go. And they have No Idea that the conjunction of their activist politics and government is totalitarianism, straight up. No Idea.

I think that the answer lies somewhere close to elevating the Culture of Criticism to a Holy Writ. It is interesting, of course, that our lefty friends believe that their Critical Race Theory does just that.

It is comical, really, that in fact the lefty implementation of critical theory in fact does the opposite, and far from being a genuine critique of the ruling class and the ruling narrative is is fact a cunning way of bullying all narratives critical of our present ruling class out of the public square.

But here's the thing. The point of Popper's notion of falsification and the notion of knowledge -- beginning with a problem that requires the imagining of new theories and their testing and probable falsification -- is that in the modern world the path of the single myth and narrative fails every time it is tried, Joey S, and Mao Z.D.

The only way to avoid disaster and killing fields and utter failure is to abandon the Single Narrative notion and let a thousand ideas bloom, and set forth the idea that the only way forward is by trying things out and correcting the errors and then doing the whole thing over again.

And that means the end of political supremacy and cancel culture and "disinformation" findings and naming and shaming and shunning, and marches through the institutions and faculties that are 95 percent liberal and silly woke girls in publishing houses deciding not to publish "controversial" authors.

Not because it is wrong, but because, you silly ignorant liberals, it will end up in disaster for you and your ideas.

Why do you fools and knaves not get this?

It seems to me that the key to all this is that Americans be taught to believe that wokism is a religion. And that wokeys be put on the rack until they agree that their beliefs are a religion, and as such must not be established in the government as a state religion.

So let's do it.

Monoculture's Effect on Women

Over at National Review Carrie Gress writes about "Why Don’t We Tell Women What’s Making Them Miserable?" It's time to take a look at the mess of women's lives after feminism's "long march through American culture"as in:

Item: Women's mental health: "women are struggling: suicides, depression, substance abuse, and sexually transmitted infections have all increased dramatically over the last five decades."

Item: women at crisis-pregnancy centers live a life where they are "being trafficked, pimped, addicted, incarcerated, abused, and on and on."

Item: "Rarely is the suggestion made that women have been sold a poisonous lifestyle and the behaviors implied in that lifestyle are what actually need to be changed." For college freshmen "Heavy doses of gender exploration and safe-sex practices, and heaps of contraceptives, are all part of the welcome at most U.S. college campuses."

Hey, writes Gress, whatabout the basics:

Don’t sleep around, don’t do drugs, don’t have abortions, stop blaming the patriarchy, find a purpose outside of yourself, cover up some of that skin, don’t overspend, and figure out what is truly good, not just what celebrities say. 

But, of course, you are not allowed to say that. Thanks to feminism, "a carefully constructed closed system has been created so that anything outside its boundaries is almost unthinkable. "

But more-satisfying ways to live do exist, ways where dignity is honored, health is truly valued, body parts aren’t ignored or rendered useless, and relationships — which are at the true heart of most women — aren’t fleeting or shallow, useful or convenient, but deep, abiding, and life-giving. If only we could find a way to tell this to every woman.

Yes, well. But this amounts to a few flabby suggestions. How about something a little stronger.

Where do we start?

First, I think we need to recognize that feminism is an unjust system imposed on all women -- and men -- by ruling-class women. Feminism is a fantasy of life imagined by ruling-class Gentry women who have no right to impose their religion and culture on lower-class women, both ordinary Commoner women and lower-class Client women. See my disquisition on Three Layers, etc.

Let me amplify this: the feminist culture that has been forced on all women is one of the great crimes of the age. Personally, I don't think feminism works for ruling-class Gentry women, but if ruling-class women want to screw up their lives: hey, that's their business. But when they impose their culture on lower-class women, that is unjust; it is domination and hegemony, and it is wrong.

But, I think that even feminists get miserable when they practice feminism. Case in point is Ms. Feminist herself, Simone de Beauvoir, author of The Second Sex, in which she advertised the notion of the "independent woman." Never had kids with her beau Jean-Paul Sartre. But she hated that he cycled through each of his mistresses every week. And when they died, both the childless Sartre and childless Beauvoir had sorta "adopted" younger people to be their heirs. So, maybe they shoulda had kids together, instead of strutting around as liberated twerps.

And there is no such thing as the "independent woman." Why is that?

I capture this truth is my notion that starts with Sigmund Freud's question "What do women want?"

No Siggie, I say. It's not what women want, it's what they expect, and what women expect is:

Women expect to be protected.

The proof of this is that whores need pimps to protect them. Even though whores are "trafficked, pimped, addicted, incarcerated, abused, and on and on" by their pimps it is still better to have a pimp to keep all that stuff down to a dull roar.

Feminists to do not need pimps to protect them because they are upper-class Gentry and nobody would dare lay a hand on a Gentry woman. In other words, Gentry women expect to be protected and they are protected. Because privilege.

The next step in understanding the problem is my disquisition on Women in the Public Square. I say that women do not relate to the public square which is a male thing where you engage in verbal fisticuffs with the other guys, and which women Do Not Like, Not At All. Women do not do public verbal fisticuffs; they have a one-on-one chat with a woman friend and say: "I can't believe she said that." And determine never to talk to the third woman again. But you can't do that in the public square.

So Gentry women are trying to destroy the public square, with "safetyism" and the war on "microaggressions." What they are really saying is that they don't want nuttin' to do with the public square.

So, even for Gentry women, the public square doesn't work.

Never mind about Gentry women. Whatabout Commoner women? Guess how Commoner women get to be protected? Oh yeah: by marriage!

I would say that Commoner women are not interested in strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage of a public life like Gentry women. They just want marriage and family and children. That means that they would like a safe world where sex and marriage is bound by fairly strict rules, so that they can be courted by potential husbands instead of being subjected to "relationships." And they are naturally "chaste." Apart from anything else, there is a practical reason why honor for women is "chastity." You get too many sex partners and you are likely to get your reproductive system wrecked by STDs. But Commoner women don't get that protection in the world run by feminists.

I say that the feminist domination and hegemony of Commoner women is a crime. And upper-class Gentry women have No Idea about this.

Whatabout lower-class women, the Subordinates, the Clients? Let us start by reciting the words of Charles Murray in his Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. He writes that in the lower class of whites the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. I think it is fair to say that this is true for BIPOCs, only more so.

Do you see what is glaring out of the "the men don't work much and the women don't marry much?" It is telling us that unless you yoke lower-class men to the children they sire, by marriage, then they aren't going to work to support the wife and the children. Not much. And, of course, if the woman ain't gonna get a man to marry the mother of his children well, there's always welfare. George Gilder wrote Visible Man about this back in 1995.

I don't think that feminists are the sole guilty party here. The whole welfare state is to blame, liberals. It's another crime of the age, that lower-class women can't expect the fathers of their children to marry them.

Do you see what is precipitating out of this, so that women can get their mental health back together?

For upper-class Gentry women they need a male protector to keep them safe from mental distress in the public square.

For middle-class Commoner women they need rules to govern courting and marriage. So that they are protected.

For lower-class Client women they need a real simple societal rule. Men have to marry the mother of their children.

And then everyone would live happily ever after.

Because I am a kindly sort of chap, I say that we wouldn't jail the feminists that have wrecked the life of women. But we would take them down a peg or two.

The Eternal Temptation of Monoculture

At Quillette Keith E. Stanovich worries about the "Social Science Monoculture." The monoculture's latest wizard wheeze is "faith in science" questionnaires. Only trouble is that the way you score high on these tests is by parroting the liberal line on everything.

On about the same day over at UnHerd Tom Chivers reviews a book from a Harvard professor on trying to convince science deniers -- you know who they are -- that they are wrong in "How not to talk to a science denier."

Hey, maybe the only common thing about these science deniers is that they don't want to take their science from conceited puffed-up liberals.

But I want to know what is wrong with these liberals that they think that their saving faith is the only saving faith, indeed the only truth.

Actually, we know. It was all told to us years ago by Thomas Kuhn in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Despite all their talk about experiments and reason and logic, real scientists act like any other human group: they don't like people that rock the boat and don't go with the program. So, Kuhn writes, scientific revolutions only succeed when the old generation dies off. In other words, the old science is good enough for the old generation.

In a sense every science is a church of its current members. It has an orthodoxy that all sensible church members believe. And the members are not too kind with heresies and the heretics that advance them.

Of course, this monoculture can condense into a war strategy, such as "the long march through the institutions" that La Wik attributes to Sixties activist Rudi Dutschke (I thought it was Antonio Gramsci).

What ties all these world views together is the notion that "we" know the truth, the real meaning of "life, the universe and everything." And it is our sacred duty to preach that truth throughout the world and banish the Evil One from the face of the Earth.

No we don't!

If you remember, one of the Temptations of Christ was when Satan took "him up to an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them." And the point is that all that power and all that glory counts for nothing, for less than nothing.

But in every human burns a fierce flame that, if only he or she had the power they could force the world to "get sorted." And everyone would live happily ever after.

No it won't!

Monocultures don't work!

Why? Because the way the world works is by adaptation, by fixing things that go wrong, because even "The best laid plans o' Mice an' Men / Gang aft agley." The world does not work by implementing a prophecy, just like the prophet imagined it.

So if you are an academic department and all the professors are lefty liberals and there is no room for a conservative, then your scholarship will shrivel into counting the number of victims on a pinhead.

If you are science researchers and anyone that disagrees with you is a "science denier" then the work you do is probably rubbish. Because even a science denier can probably point to a problem or two in your magnificent theory.

And when it comes to morality and politics, my reductive Three Peoples theory shows, as clearly as can be, that the different kinds of people in the world need, and naturally turn to, different religions and different politics. And if one group of people forces their religion and their politics on the rest of society, then they are going to Make Things Worse -- for the rest of the world and even for themselves.

It is telling that the two most obvious monocultures are those of a strict religion and of an army. What is telling is that in these strict hierarchical structures the folks at the tip of the spear are expected to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the ultimate, inevitable victory. In other words, it is all about the agenda of the Chief Priest or the General-in-chief. And the job of the lesser mortals is to sacrifice themselves for the good of the order.

The whole point of our American system is precisely to break up all this: to limit government by dividing it into three branches; to limit moral hegemony by separation of church and state. And indeed to separate the political sector from the economic sector from the moral/cultural sector as envisaged by Michael Novak in what I call the Greater Separation of Powers.

Why? Because nobody knows the real, ultimate, God-spoken meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" and anyone that forces the rest of the world to bow to their vision of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" will only build a pile of skulls, butcher's bill to follow.

It's fascinating that after a century of mammoth world wars and slave states, our best and brightest still don't get it.

Ruling Class: Hoist with their Own Petard? Or Not?

In this chaotic moment, the question is whether it is all part of our ruling class's brilliant and eternal strategy to maintain itself in power. Or whether it is all a Baldrick's Cunning Plan, as rehearsed over and over on the Blackadder TV series.

If you remember, the whole schtick of the Blackadder series was that the British ruling class since whenever had been a bunch of snobby twerps.

Odd, isn't it, that that kind of comedy has kinda gone out of fashion. We don't really see too much comedy on TV or anywhere about how the woke lefty ruling class is a bunch of vicious snobby twerps that wouldn't be seen dead in a Chevy on the levee.

So, on the one hand, I get the line of the Zman that we have a Roman Empire Mk 2 that conducts its business at a level way up beyond the ken of the ordinary mortals of the plebs.

On the other hand I would point to the shambolic Russia collusion epic that dogged Donald Trump for five years. And we had the shambolic effort to find ballots in the 2020 election when it turned out that Donald Trump won more votes than the ruling class had expected, and so extraordinary measures were needed to ensure a correct result. And now we have the shambolic disaster in Kabul. And the shambolic lockdowns and vaccine passports that really do nothing to deal with the COVID epidemic. And the ridiculous overreach in the Democratic Congress to pass everything including the kitchen sink in one year.

I just can't help feel that these rulers really aren't up to snuff. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe they are smarter than they appear.

See, I think that the over/under political formula of our educated ruling class is breaking down because of the "internal contradictions" of the over/under formula.

Back in the day, Karl Marx argued that there was an "internal contradiction" between what he called "commodity production" and "surplus value," the value of labor snitched by the capitalists from the workers. Except that the classical economics he used for his theory got blown up in the 1870 marginal revolution. So there wasn't an internal contradiction after all.

Our rulers are getting boxed in, more and more, by the logic of their over/under political formula, that they are the allies, the noble advocates of the oppressed peoples against the white oppressors.

Previously, of course, their over/under political formula was that they were the saviors of the working class against the capitalists and the malefactors of great wealth. But they switched horses in the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s, abandoning the old working class and now advocating for blacks and women.

Only, the program of the ruling class necessarily includes rewarding loyal supporters in the ruling class as well as helping the working class and/or blacks and other oppressed peoples. So they are become the very exploiters that they claim to oppose. And the victims of all this is the middle class caught in the middle.

Look, this is the soft underbelly of every ruling class since the dawn of time. They pretend to be the saviors of the people from a fate worse than death, but really they are always just in it for themselves. And, as often as not, they are not very good at pretending.

In our time we may say that the more that the ruling class finds more ways to distribute loot and plunder to its supporters the more it visits injustice upon the broad middle class. And the more it provokes the middle class into forming a head of rebellion. Thus Trump.

And so, in its very program of helping the oppressed it creates a new class of people oppressed by its loot-and-plunder operations. Thus Trump.

And thus, repeating the words of Hamlet, our ruling class blows up its own regime with its own brand of injustice that it fervently believes is the royal road to justice.

But here's another idea. I would say that the one big thing that ends a ruling class is defeat in war. See, the whole point of a ruling class is to protect the people from foreign enemies.

You know, like our noble ruling class protects oppressed peoples from systemic racists.

But if you lose a war, Joey Boy, who needs you?

Oh, I know. Our ruling class doesn't really think of the Afghan business as a war. Our rulers are way above such sordid stuff. Instead they are Building Back Better, and working for Equity. Stuff like that.

Only, deep down below all the modern frooh-frah there is still the basic Freudian unconscious, and the Jungian archetypes and collective unconscious.

Today, we read, twelve US Marines were killed at Kabul airport. I wonder how that affects the unconscious of the average American voter, and in particular the average American woman voter.

You may think that the average American voter will not be happy with all this. I couldn't possibly comment.

The Political Necessity of White Supremacy

 The basic tactics of the progressive over/under political strategy is to convince the "under" voters that they have no place else to go.

In the days when the left was the protector of the workers, they taught the workers that unless they voted for the left they would lose their jobs, their lives, their dignity to the malefactors of great wealth.

But, when you think about it, it has always been a lie. Ever since the vote started expanding in the mid 19th century, governments across the west have extended benefits to the workers, from wage and hour laws, child labor laws, public schools, and then the entitlement programs of the 20th century.

Crabbed old guys like me say that it would have been much better for the workers to build out their own organizations, from labor unions to mutual-aid societies, rather than take the hand of government, but that is beside the point. The politicians offered goodies, the workers voted for politicians that offered goodies, and here we are.

In other words, it is a lie to say that only the politicians can save the workers. But, by golly, the narrative worked, for about a century.

Since the 1960s the progressives have altered their over/under political strategy. Now they are the protector of minorities, and particularly the blacks. Ever since the Civil Rights Acts, the left in the US has told blacks that unless they voted for Democrats they would soon be back in chains. Because Jim Crow, because the KKK, because white supremacy. Obviously it works, because blacks vote 90 percent for Democrats, and you cannot get humans to vote 90 percent for anything unless you scare the pants off them.

You might say that it is a lie to say that only politicians can save the blacks from the white supremacists.s But by golly, the narrative has worked, for over half a century.

Meanwhile, as Charlie Eastman writes in The American Spectator, 

Democrats’ social justice policies (defunding the police, ending cash bail, refusing to prosecute crimes, eliminating standards in academics, “disrupting” traditional family structures, etc.) have created a deadly reality for blacks living in Democrat-run cities — there is no place more dangerous for a black person to live in America today.

And, what is the biggest danger for a black person in a Democrat-run city? Not white supremacists, but other blacks.

Eastman writes that Victor Davis Hanson tags "the entire woke movement is a cover-up of sorts, a means of deflecting attention away from the Democrats’ policy failures", but I think that misses the point.

The point is that every political movement unites its supporters by terrifying them about some malevolent "other." Let's advance the argument by checking Donald Trump's agenda. We were going to Make America Great Again. But first we had to deal with the Deep State, the Chinese, and illegal immigrants. This is not rocket science. Trump supporters are the middle middle class whose jobs are likely to be affected by cheap Chinese imports, low-wage immigrants, and the scorn of the Deep State and its power to wreck the lives of ordinary Americans.

Now, are these "others" real threats to the ordinary American, or are they Trump-invented devils? I'd say that, by and large, they are genuine threats to ordinary Americans. They are certainly not existential threats, but real enough.

Now, whatabout the Democrats? They advanced the notion last year, using the death of George Floyd in police custody, that the police and white supremacists were an existential threat to blacks. Really? I'd say that the real existential threat to blacks is two-bit crooks like George Floyd passing fake $20 bills in convenience stores. I'd say that the real existential threat to blacks is that their murder rate, mostly black-on-black, is about 8 times the white murder rate.

But let us give the Democrats a break. When you have a voter block that votes 90 percent for you, then the only political tactic that keeps them at home is to scare the pants off them.

Notice that Democrats use the same tactics on their other "oppressed peoples" voters.

I've noticed that gay acquaintances are more aggressive around me. Could that possibly be that if the Supreme Court reverses the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage that they feel that it will be all over for gays?

Women are taught to believe that if the Supreme Court reverses Roe v. Wade, that it will be all over for women: back to the back-alley abortion.

Environmentalists are taught to believe that the oil and coal companies are catapulting us towards the catastrophe of climate change and the end of human life on this planet.

Do you see how the fact that the overclass established gay marriage and abortion by judicial decision and environmental regulations by executive decisions means that there is really no established cultural consensus on these issues. They were imposed by the ruling class.

Therefore gays and feminists and environmentalists and blacks have to vote Democrat otherwise it's the end of the world.

Interesting isn't it. We are conditioned to accept that to have Democrats running around yelling that the end of the world is coming -- because white supremacy, abortion, climate change -- is perfectly normal and acceptable.

And I get it. The only warrant for government power is existential peril, and if you want political power, for whatever reason, you will pretty soon figure out that you'd better find an existential peril, or get out of the political power business.

But what we need is a politician with the native instinct and cunning to blow up the Democrats' race narrative, preferably right in their faces. What is needed is something like Marx's "nursery tale" comment in the Communist Manifesto. Something like this:

It is high time that the middle classes should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of White Supremacy with the boring truth, that the middle class just wants to wive and thrive and survive.

And that everything that the left puts out is a lie, including "and" and "the."

Poor Bloody Germans -- and US

Everybody knows that the Germans are guilty forever for electing and then knuckling under to Hitler and his totalitarian fascist regime.

How could Heidegger collaborate with the Nazis? La Wik: "There is controversy as to the relationship between his philosophy and his Nazism." And how could you read Nietzsche, the "Nazis' favorite intellectual?" How could ordinary people go along with Hitler and put on those swastikas, and serve in his Wehrmacht?

But I have begun to think, now that our ruling class and government are getting more, er, authoritarian, that maybe it is time to give the Germans some slack.

After all, who among us really has the courage to risk job, bank account, and freedom from the bottomless malevolence of the Deep State? Or stand up in class and take your college instructor to task for his lefty lies? Or dare ever again to protest in front of the US Capitol while Nancy Pelosi is the boss of the Capitol Police?

I'd say you have to be almost crazy to have the courage to stand without flinching against the power of the state. Especially when the state feels threatened, as right now.

Let's rehearse how the Germans got to Literally Hitler.

First, they lost the Great War, mainly thanks to US President Wilson, a former college president, who sent the dough-boys into France to show the world who was boss.

Second, their brilliant Reichsbankpresident Havenstein blew up the currency with money printer go brrrrrrrr.

Third, President Wilson & Co. imposed a humiliating peace on the Germans at the Treaty of Versailles, including reparations and breaking off East Prussia from the rest of Germany.

Fourth, Germany got really screwed by the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the failure of the US Federal Reserve to perform its job as "lender of last resort."

So, by 1933, Germans were looking for a "strong leader" to get them out of a mess. Generally, the logic of being a strong leader is that you identify some enemy and lead the nation to defeat it. Hitler chose the Jews.

Imagine what is in store for Americans in the next few years.

First, President Biden has lost a war in Afghanistan and has humiliated the United States.

Second, our brilliant Federal Reserve is printing money go brrrrrr.

Third, the Europeans are probably going to humiliate President Biden and the US. Hey, maybe the Germans will tell us to get out troops out of Germany while they go dance with the Russians.

Fourth, there's likely to be riots in the streets when Biden lifts the moratoriums on rent, mortgage, and student debt.

One of the things about the German experience in the 1920s was that the middle class got royally screwed by the hyperinflation and then royally screwed by the Great Depression.

One thing about the American experience in the 2020s is that the middle class is getting royally screwed by inflation, by lockdowns, by systemic racism, by CRT in schools, by outrageous college costs. Oh, and energy costs.

So, by 2024, Americans will be looking for a "strong leader" to get us out of a mess. Generally the logic of being a strong leader is that you identify some enemy and lead the nation to defeat it. I wonder who our Literally Hitler will choose as the enemy. Probably not the Jews. Probably not the Blacks. That's been tried before. Hey, I know! How about the Wokey Deep State!

Yep. It looks like 2024 will be a replay of 2016. Only the players will know their lines a lot better than in 2016.

I wonder who will be blamed forever after as Literally Nazis.

The Democrats' Sticky Wicket

Because I am a serious and compassionate person, I feel the pain of the Democrats right now. Victor Davis Hanson has five possibilities for why the Biden administration is a total trainwreck, but Reason #5 is the one that resonates with me.

5) Biden is a hostage of both the Left and Hunter Biden. His task is to ram down a hard Left agenda, in the fashion of a torpedo that itself blows up when it hits the target.

My take is that when the Democrats decided to take out the surging Bernie Sanders in the North Carolina primary in 2020 with a huge surge in the black vote, he or his supporters demanded an IOU that went something like this: "you can have your moderate candidate, but here's the bill of particulars if you want our support in November."

In other words, the Democratic Party has become a far-left party, but it knows it needs to look moderate in order to win. So, the lefties could accept Biden as the front man. At a price.

Unfortunately, President Biden is not up to the job of telling his lefty supporters the facts of life, that if he implements their full agenda he will wreck the economy and wreck the Democratic Party.

For Biden is a pure politician, in the sense of Joseph Schumpeter in  Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Schumpter writes that, given that the trade of the politician is winning elections, it is astonishing that any governing gets done at all. The corollary is that sometimes you get a president that has absolutely no governing skills. He is all talk and sound bites.

In that case, of course, it stands to reason that Biden is being overwhelmed by his supporters, all of whom in one way or another demand more loot and plunder from the government. Some supporters, of course, just want a check. But, with the rise of the gigantic educated elite, there are a ton of people that want government money and power to back their project to fundamentally transform an unjust society into a just society.

Now, you and I think that this is a project doomed to disaster. We think that the less that the lower class just lives on checks and the more it works, the better for the lower class and the better for the rest of us.

But we also think that the various power projects of the educated elite, from climate change to corporate regulation to its whole race agenda, are all bound to end in tears, partly because 57 percent of them are lefty fantasy, and partly because there really is not much that government money and government force can accomplish, despite what the prophets say.

But what can President Biden do about all this? Really nothing. He's been a United States Senator all his life, and never really run anything in his life, until right now, when he is really too old to direct traffic, let alone get the various power players into a room together and knock their heads together.

This is where I insert my little joke about Biden being a proof of God's existence.

Why? Because I think that we need the current ruling class to be utterly discredited and removed from power.

But you can never send a ruling class to the exit unless it has royally screwed up. If we had a Chuck Schumer or an Andrew Cuomo as president he would find some way to keep all the balls in the air, and keep our ruling class in sinecures. Till next time.

Or, to use the Chinese approach to this: the failures of Joe Biden are likely to indicate to the American people that the Democratic Party has lost the Mandate of Heaven, whereas Chucky or Andy would have been able to create enough confusion to mask the utter failure of the Democratic Party, its policies and its world view.

So, if God still "has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America." as Bismarck observed over a century ago, then God would find a way to signal to us that it is time to throw the rascally Democrats out.

And declare a new Morning in America.

Economics and Politics: The Biden Trainwreck

One of the problems with economics, in my opinion, is that politicians use it as a way of sailing too close to the wind.

Obviously, politics is all about using the wealth and production capability of a nation to wage war and to reward its supporters. Economics, starting with the classical economists, showed that making war and handing out freebies to the supporters doth not a prosperous nation make.

Before classical economics, it was easier for politicians to do what comes naturally: to wage war and loot and plunder. As long as you were the victor and you were doing the looting and plundering, what was not to like?

And hey, it all made a rough kind of sense. If wealth and prosperity were all based upon food-growing land, then it stood to reason that to expand the nation's food-growing land was beneficial. In Mein Kampf Adolf Hitler made the argument that of course Germany needed to grow its own food.

Today, however, food-growing land and prosperity do not go together. The Canadians have tons of food-growing land in the western prairies, and the ships queue up in Vancouver harbor to load up grain and take it to Asia. But who cares? What matters is excelling at value-adding activities from extraction, manufacturing, and the whole world of the modern economy of computers and the internet.

But politicians are still in the business of conquest -- usually in elections -- and distribution of loot and plunder to their supporters. So today, economics has become the technology of how much loot and plunder the economy can stand before it collapses in inflation. That is the point of macroeconomics, in particular Keynesian economics and the new MMT (modern monetary theory). The whole point of Keynesian economics was to give politicians an excuse to run deficits in the wake of a recession like the Great Depression. The whole point of MMT is to give politicians an excuse to continue spending and electing to the max. Because if the debt is in your own currency, who cares?

And there is a tendency in political circles to push things just a little further, because, if the current level of taxation and spending and regulation hasn't killed the economy, what damage could just a little more do?

Well, I think we are in the middle of a nation-wide test of going as far as it can go. Because when you crank up unemployment benefits into the stratosphere, and suspend rent payments for the renters, and suspend mortgage payments for the borrowers, and suspend student debt payments for the university graduates, what happens next?

Also, there is the little problem, which goes beyond economics, that government cannot withdraw a previous award of loot and plunder without incurring the rage of the recipients and the withdrawal of grateful political support.

For instance, if I were a Democrat right now it sure would be nice if the government were not spending $1 trillion a year on mostly white Boomer Social Security and $600 billion on mostly white Boomer Medicare. Talk about systemic racism! But, of course, nobody can ever reduce those entitlements and give them to deserving non-white post-Boomer voters. It would be electoral suicide.

But right now, someone has to take the bull by the horns and terminate the cool unemployment benefits and terminate the rent moratorium and deal with the mostly peaceful protests that will be ginned up by the activist left in opposition. Because we cannot continue with those loot-and-plunder giveaways without continuing to destroy the economy in a storm of inflation.

This is not rocket science. But it does go against the natural instinct of a politician, which is to give out tons of loot and plunder but never, oh never, to take it away.

And it does go against the experience of every Democratic politician in the land. For a Democratic politician loot and plunder has worked every time it has been tried. There are no wise heads telling today's politicians to Remember the Seventies. Or telling them to Remember Obama's Jobless Recovery. Why not, Nancy Pelosi? You were there in the Seventies. You observed how the Reagan revolution wrecked the 50-year-old Democrat hegemony. What happened to Leadership, Nancy Pelosi?

If you ask me it is an Act of God that Democrats are in charge of the post-COVID economy, and that the voters will blame Democrats for whatever goes wrong on their watch. It is Democrats that have to end the rent moratorium, Democrats that have to end the unemployment bonuses. And Democrats that have to take the heat. And it will serve them right.

And, Democrats, the sooner you do it, the better. Because the longer these freebies go on, the more that the recipients will cry bloody murder when you end them, the more that lefty mostly peaceful protesters will riot in the streets, and the more that the economy will spin into inflationary chaos in the meantime.

Imagine if Trump were president in charge of ending the freebies! Oh, the Horror!

Instead the Democrats are going to experience the Perfect Storm consequent on their whole philosophy of looting and plundering the economy to reward their supporters.

See, Democrats. Economics is not supposed to be a how-to on how for you can go to plunder the economy without wrecking it. It is supposed to show that politics is a wealth-subtraction business, always and everywhere, and the less of it, the better.

Making Things Worse: Civil Rights and the Sexual Revolution

Aside from the basic governmental function of defending the people from enemies, foreign and domestic, most government action actually Makes Things Worse. This is particularly true of our modern progressive educated ruling class, whose religion is that politics can bend the arc of history towards justice.

We have already seen how government education and pensions and government healthcare and home mortgages have Made Things Worse. Let us continue.

Government Civil Rights. When the United States Senate debated the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) spoke out against it. He argued that the Civil Rights Act should only ban discrimination by government. It should not ban discrimination by corporations and individuals. Thus he said on the floor of the Senate that the act

would embark the Federal Government on a regulatory course of action with regard to private enterprise in the area of so‐called “public accommodations” and in the area of employment — to be more specific, Titles II and VII of the bill.

This act branded Goldwater -- who had demanded the desegregation of the Senate cafeteria on behalf of his black aide -- a racist to the end of his days.

But imagine if the Civil Rights Act had confined itself to discrimination by government. Then we wouldn't have the current regime of government forcing private institutions to discriminate on the basis of the latest fashion in elite circles.

The necessity of Jim Crow laws in the South was that outfits like bus companies, railroads, and ordinary lunch counters, needed to be forced to discriminate against blacks. Because the logic of the market economy and private enterprise is that a customer is a customer. What matter is whether the customer is trustworthy, whether the customer pays his or her bills. 

But the natural instinct of government is to discriminate, because that is the nature of politics: for US and against Them. Political leadership is all about rallying the tribe or the nation to arms in the present emergency against the existential peril. So, what is needed is not legislation to supervise individuals and corporations; what is needed is legislation to supervise politicians and bureaucrats, to forbid them from following their natural political instincts and discriminate in favor of "our people" against "their people."

Is discrimination against other people by race or by sex or by national origin by private individuals and corporations wrong? Probably. But not illegal. Humans have ways of socializing people away from wrong that falls short of government force. It is call naming and shaming, and women are particularly good at it.

The conclusion is obvious. Government laws that forbid discrimination by private individuals and corporations is wrong and Makes Things Worse.

Government Sexual Revolution. Back in the day, fathers made sure their daughters were safe from guys unless "their intentions were honorable." Back in the day, divorce was unthinkable. Back in the day, abortion was monstrous. Back in the day, nobody got married unless their marriage was primed with a dowry or a bride price that basically provided the wherewithal to survive. What happened?

In part, of course, our increased prosperity and our increased medical knowledge has transformed the world. An abandoned mother can, sort of, raise her child. A girl pursued and abandoned by a faithless lover can get an abortion. Divorce isn't the end of the world, especially when women work in the market economy.

If we say that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is for humans to produce the next generation and leave a better world for their children, then it makes sense to restrain young men that just want to get laid; it makes sense to force men to support and father their children; it makes sense to pressure married couples to stay married and not imagine that they could solve their problems with a new spouse.

Back in the day, the old rules were a matter of life and death. Today, not so much. Still, if you want a successful life and you want to leave prosperous children and grandchildren behind you then you need, in the breach, to follow the old rules. Girls need to feel that their lover will stick around. Children need a mother and a father: their mother and their father. Women need to feel that they will not be traded in for a newer model. Men need to feel that their wife will not suddenly take up an opportunity for a bit of hypergamy.

But today, the fashionable elite advances all these notions. And they are Making Things Worse.

More to come.

Making Things Worse: Healthcare and Mortgages

Aside from the basic governmental function of defending the people from enemies, foreign and domestic, most government action actually Makes Things Worse. This is particularly true of our modern progressive educated ruling class, whose religion is that politics can bend the arc of history towards justice.

We have already seen how government education and pensions have Made Things Worse. Let us continue.

Government Healthcare. Back in the day, when everyone (about 75 percent of people) belonged to the Masons or the Elks or the Eagles, each lodge had a "lodge doctor." I had a cousin who was a Mason -- he was a contractor that helped build his local lodge -- and he thought that lodge doctors was the best thing since sliced bread. You see lodge doctors were usually kids just out of medical school, and their were cheap. And, if you follow the link above, you will find that lodge doctors helped the poor. And, of course, doctors typically would attend to the poor for free. Not that they liked it, and not that they spent a lot of time and energy on the poor. But then I'm not sure that today's doctors put too much energy into their Medicaid patients, either.

Anyway, without government healthcare the cheapskates could get healthcare from their lodge doctors, others could have health insurance plans with whatever deductibles they had in mind, and the fancy-pants set would go to the Mayo Clinic. And we could all decide, years in advance, how much heroic care we wanted at end-of-life. Medicare, you know, has developed all kinds of protocols to speed end-of-life care. That's why Sarah Palin got into so much trouble talking about "death panels." How Dare She!

Then, there is the huge regulatory burden of government regulations and credentialization on healthcare. When you regulate an industry what you get is "regulatory capture." That's science, developed by George Stigler.

The conclusion is obvious. Government healthcare makes healthcare worse, and it won't get better until we break up the unholy marriage between government and the healthcare industry.

Government Home Mortgages. Back in the day, before the Great Depression, people only got to borrow about 50 percent of a home's value, and they could only get a ten-year mortgage, which terminated in a balloon payment, at which point you paid off the rest of the loan or you refinanced at the going interest rate. That meant that houses were smaller, prices were lower. But then the government created a secondary market in mortgage loans with Fannie Mae, and then they let Fannie Mae issue government-backed bonds, and then they let people borrow up to 80 percent of a loan and take out 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, and then they said that you had to take into account a wife's income when determining creditworthiness. And then home prices soared into the stratosphere and priced the kids out of the market.

Plus, as the science says in Walter Bagehot's Lombard Street, when you have mortgages that can't be liquidated because low down payments and borrowers can't make their payments because unemployment then you get the mother of all credit crunches as in 2006-08. So low-down mortgages make the credit system fragile. Imagine.

The conclusion is obvious. Government mortgages make homes more expensive and the credit system more fragile.  They make home ownership worse.

More to come.

Making Things Worse: Introduction, Education and Pensions

One of the constants in political rule is that, while the job of political leaders is to defend their people from enemies foreign and domestic, the worst enemies of the people are the politicians themselves.

The reason is not hard to find. Political leaders -- chiefs, dukes, kings, emperors, presidents -- have funded their armies and police forces, mostly, from taxation and forcible exactions from the people they are sworn to protect. It is a small step to expand the exactions from the amount necessary to protect the people into an amount sufficient to build an empire or a personal fortune, and distribute loot among your supporters.

In other words, it is a small step from improving the life of the people to Making Things Worse.

More and more, I find that I want to tell the story of our times as the story of The Educated Ruling Class that Made Things Worse.

You can see why that narrative might be attractive to me. It negates the story that the educated ruling class wants to tell, of itself as the enlightened, progressive, liberal people destined by the arc of history to Make Things Better -- by using political power. And I like the kind of narrative that cuts across the ruling class narrative. It makes me feel good.

So let us review all the glorious accomplishments of our rulers, and turn them upside down, proving conclusively that they Make Things Worse.

Government Education. Back in the day, when Shakespeare went to school, children started work at age eight: child labor. But his dad, a glovemaker, could afford to send his kid to the local grammar school. Lucky Will. 

What a wonderful thing that we ended child labor so that every kid could get an education! Not.

For one thing, you may not have noticed, we still have child labor. Kids are expected to go to school all day, then do homework. That is work, in my understanding. And do you know how much children get paid for working in school all day and doing homework in the evening? I'll give you one guess.

But but but! How could kids get an education if they didn't go to a free government school? Are you serious? First, we could pass a law that the employers of all kids under the age of 16 had to provide classes in the Three Rs. Second, we could encourage all employers to formalize their relationship with their young employees in an apprenticeship contract. Did you know that in the old days of apprenticeships the employer would typically commit to providing education and training to the apprentices? Third, we could ennoble billionaires that created and funded schools for the Oppressed Peoples.

I could go on.

Instead, we have one-size-fits-all government child custodial facilities, and the teachers in these schools are clearly a very powerful special interest that politicians hardly dare challenge. In the late COVID incident, teachers clearly signaled that they were more interested in their own health than in teaching children. And it seems that all over the land, the government school districts and universities are all deciding with one voice to teach critical race theory. What's that all about? When did we get to vote on that?

The conclusion is obvious. Government education makes education worse, and it won't get better until we stop governments educating our children.

Government Pensions. One of the constants down the ages is that rulers get support by rewarding their supporters. Feudal lords reward their vassals with nice choice manors -- taken, no doubt, from a disobedient vassal. Warrior lords reward their soldiers with loot and plunder. Absolute monarchs reward their supporters with sinecures and noble titles. Modern politicians reward their voters with entitlements. Governments reward their employees with lifetime employment and rich, fat pensions.

So I suggest that government pensions are monies forcibly removed from the economy and given as a reward to the supporters of the ruling class. They are, and have always been, a net loss to the prosperity and the wealth of the people.

But but but! Whatabout the poor? Whatabout widows? OK. But let us start with ordinary people. First, if ordinary people save for their own retirement, it means that every dollar of their savings will go to create jobs for the young'uns rather than get sucked up in taxes that are spent on today's geezers. What a concept! Second, and this is important, people will retire when they can afford to, or when their financial advisor recommends. They may retire at the point that they can convert their savings into an annuity, or they may retire at the point where the income from their savings is sufficient to provide a suitable income without dipping into capital. Third, they can use their savings at any point in life, to start a business, to educate the kids, to tide over a government recession. Fourth, they will be able to transmit their savings onto their children.

OK, so whatabout the poor? Well, in my perfect world the poor will have jobs. And if you authoritarians insist, we will force the poor to save for retirement, assisted by billionaires, starting with the Widow Jobs, who will be forced to sell The Atlantic and do something useful with her money.

Whatabout widows? Did you know that one of the reasons why my dad and just about everyone else back in the day joined the Masons or the Elks or the Eagles or the IOOF, or any other fraternal organization, is that they took care of widows. What? You didn't know?

The conclusion is obvious. Government pensions make pensions worse, and it won't get better until we stop governments fleecing workers and taxpayers to give pensions to its supporters.

More to come.

The Folly of the All-powerful Intelligence Community

In his notion of the Fourth Branch of Government, Sundance proposes that ever since 9/11 -- and accelerated under Obama -- the United States has come to be ruled by the Intelligence Community -- FBIs, CIAs, NSAs, -- and their bureaucratic appendages and combinations. It was of course the intelligence community that was front and center in the 5-year Deep State war on Trump.

Of course, this game is an old game, pursued by rulers all over the world and all through history, the lust to keep an eye on dangerous elements in society and keep any opposition subdued and safe: down to a dull roar.

And now we have Nancy Pelosi's secret police, an expanded Capitol Police force, that will have offices in various cities "with the first field offices located in California and Florida."

Of course, we all know that secret police and shadowy intelligence agencies are a monstrosity, as proved by the headline secret police agencies of the 20th century, the Cheka/NKVD/MVD/KGB of Soviet Russia. The Gestapo of Nazi Germany. And I don't even know what the secret police in China is called.

But I think that secret police are stupid. And a secret police or ramped up intelligence agencies are a "tell" that the ruling class isn't really legitimate and really doesn't get it.

But, of course, before the illegitimate regime and its secret police exit stage left, there is always the butcher's bill. And beyond the butcher's bill, the millions of lives for whom the "authoritarian government" has Made Things Worse.

In reading Sundance's piece, we are to understand that the Obama administration wanted more political push for its "fundamental transformation" agenda. So it had no problem siccing its gumshoes on the Tea Party in 2010. But, you may remember, in 2010 the Republicans still gained an extraordinary 64 seats in the House of Representatives. Good work Barack!

So, in the Trump years we had an unprecedented use of the intelligence community to harass candidate Trump and later President Trump. And, you can say, look at the results! They got rid of Trump! Yay! But first, what a bunch of second-raters, 

the new woke FBI of hard noses like James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Kevin Clinesmith, and Jim Baker

as Victor Davis Hanson points out. Yeah, that's what you call a First Team. And then Robert Mueller.

The Mueller bully team collapsed and found no collusion with the Russians, despite a 22-month, nearly $40 million blank check... And Mueller embarrassed himself with befuddled congressional testimony, in which he was either unaware of or lied about Fusion GPS and the Christopher Steele dossier—the seed and fertilizer of the entire Russian “blockbuster” collusion hoax and hence his own investigation. 

Maybe Our Nance's Capitol Police is brighter and smarter and meaner than the Keystone Kops of the Get Trump team. But I doubt it. I think I had my "aha" moment on this watching the 2020 Russian movie Dear Comrades! about a strike in the Soviet Union in 1962. There's a KGB officer in the movie. And it seems to me that his #1 concern is keeping his record clean at the office and not making a false step. He is a mouse and so are all the other local political figures.

Oh, I don't think that the stepped-up intelligence community and Nancy's Specials will be completely useless. I expect they will help extend the life of our current old and tired ruling class for a few years. And they will manage to wreck the lives of numerous ordinary people who dare to challenge the ruling-class narrative and a few elite people that prove to be a nuisance the way that Trump did.

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida! That means you!

My belief, that Government is Force and that is all, has been strengthened by re-reading Crane Brinton's The Anatomy of Revolution, start here. At the end of it all, he asks: did the revolution -- in England, in America, in France, in Russia -- really achieve fundamental change to the country in question? Not so much. After it was all over, England was still England, America was still America, France still France, and Russia still Russia.

If you want proof, read Philosopher Putin's review of Russian and Ukrainian history. You'd almost think the Bolshevik Soviet era was just an embarrassing hiccup in the glorious arc of Russian history.

The point is, Brinton writes, that human society is a lot more complex and a lot more difficult to change than the average intellectual and politician and revolutionary thinks. The wise man thinks of human culture in terms of geology and glaciers. Slow, but relentless.

And the bottom line is that nobody knows what the future holds. Whatever your glorious vision of freedom and liberty and justice and equity may be, the future will probably make mincemeat of it, just as your political gumshoes make mincemeat of a lot of ordinary people that just want to live their ordinary lives without being put in the meat grinder of politics.