Spirit Level Week: What About Equality?

The hot new liberal book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argues that, since the more equal developed countries demonstrate lower health and social problems, we should implement more egalitarian initiatives, such as higher taxes on the rich and employee-owned companies. But can this politically compelled egalitarianism work in practice?

Back to start: Equality Without Context

Let us look at the question from a Marxian perspective. Marx maintained that laws and culture are a "superstructure" built upon the base of underlying "productive forces." Here is what he wrote:

[M]en inevitably enter Into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely [the] relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of consciousness.

It is notable that hunter-gatherer society was usually extremely egalitarian. Men combined immediately against anyone who tried to become a powerful leader. Boasting, e.g., about hunting prowess, was verboten and food-sharing was widespread. In Marxian terms, we can say that the nature of hunter-gatherer life called for a strict egalitarianism.

But the agricultural revolution seems to have changed all that. It ran on different productive forces, and the superstructure was different. From our perspective, agricultural society was remarkably oppressive and hierarchical. It was a status society, in which the status of the people and the social hierarchy was fixed and inherited. A warrior landed class ruled over all. We can see that the peculiar nature of agricultural life required this exploitative superstructure, for the agricultural peasant is extremely vulnerable to plunder and piracy. He must store enough food to survive from one harvest to the next and save enough seed corn to grow the new crop as well. The peasant desperately needs defense from raiders, and the price in subjection and servitude was very high.

It seems clear that the industrial revolution changed the productive forces significantly. The productive forces that got us from $3/day two centuries ago to $100/day today require, according to Deirdre McCloskey in her Bourgeois Cycle, a bourgeoisie dignified and free. Bourgeois trading and bourgeois innovation are astonishingly productive, creating a free lunch of wealth in which all can participate. The social superstructure is egalitarian, in that anyone can trade and innovate, but it is also hierarchical, allowing successful upstarts to become very wealthy, lording it over their fellows with trophy wives and executive jets before they get religion and give all their money away in philanthropy.

Wilkinson and Pickett see an end to the economic growth and innovation of the bourgeois era. On the one hand, people in the developed countries no longer find improvement in their quality of life from income increases, and the search for material wealth increases anxiety rather than wellbeing. On the other hand, we need to transition to a sustainable lifestyle to deal with the "problems of global warming and the environmental limits to growth."

You can see what is going on here. Wilkinson and Pickett are proposing a return to a hunter-gatherer social system, where competition and innovation is self-consciously directed at combining "acceptable living standards with a sustainable economy".

Never mind whether this vision is desirable. Is it possible? If modern society is governed in order to return it to the steady state of the hunter-gatherer era, can we survive and thrive? On Marx's view of the productive forces, we are bound to wonder. And, to apply the Precautionary Principle, we would have to suggest that the burden of proof is on the egalitarians to prove that their egalitarian future will actually work.

One thing to keep in mind: the egalitarian countries admired by Wilkinson and Pickett are often
countries with a very low total fertility rate. Germany reports 1.36 children per woman and Japan reports 1.26 children per woman. However Sweden is up at 1.80. Maybe the problem will be solved when the egalitarian countries cease to exist.

Next: The Bourbon Left

Spirit Level Week: Who's To Blame?

In The Spirit Level Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett determine that people in developed countries with high inequality (i.e. the US and UK) suffer more health and social problems that people in low inequality countries (i.e. Sweden, Japan).

Back to start: Equality Without Context

For Wilkinson and Pickett, the solution is government programs to mitigate inequality, such as higher taxation of the rich and/or promotion of employee-owned companies.

We hope we have shown that there is a better society to be won: a more equal society in which people are less divided by status and hierarchy; a society in which we regain a sense of community, in which we overcome the threat of global warming, in which we own and control our work democratically as part of a community of colleagues, and share in the benefits of a growing non-monetized sector of the economy.

In other words the solution to our problems is the enactment of the current center-left agenda, a world congenial for university professors to live in.

Yesterday, we looked at the absent historical context in Wilkinson's and Pickett's analysis. Now let's look at the absent political context.

Wilkinson and Pickett note that inequality has risen in the United States and the United Kingdom recently, especially in the 1980s during the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the ministry of Margaret Thatcher. In both nations, inequality increased by about 40 percent. The question is: was that good or bad? Was it inevitable, after the Great Inflation of the 1970s, or could it have been avoided? They also show that in the United States social mobility, expressed as a percentage of sons' income explained by fathers' incomes, as gone down since 1980. Is that due to fathers giving their sons a leg up at the family firm? Or is it the result of lousy government education in the inner cities, and the demolition of the low-income family by welfare?

The fact is that it is very difficult to obtain clear answers to these questions, good people disagree profoundly about them. Moreover, it is very difficult to change any government program once it has been started up.

So when a couple of university professors talk easily about reducing status and hierarchy, regaining a sense of community, overcoming the threat of global warming, and turning work into a community of colleagues, we have to ask a question. What gives us any confidence that political action can ameliorate these problems? Let's take them one by one:

• Status and hierarchy. If you start more government programs you are going to increase status and hierarchy. Today we have a definite hierarchy in the west. The educated ruling class is at the top of the hierarchy and uses its political and cultural power to shame and blame anyone that dares to challenge it. So more of the same will reduce status anxiety and oppressive hierarchy?
• Sense of community. More politics will restore community? It is precisely the government takeover of many social and moral tasks that has torn the gut out of "community." Ordinary people are denied local cultural and social power by a centralized bureaucratic state. Reduce the power of the state and you will get more of a sense of community.
• Global Warming. Whatever may or may not happen with global warming, the scientific consensus is that reducing our carbon footprint is going to do very little to reduce carbon dioxide. The left's program of big government to the rescue is likely to be an economic disaster.
• Community of Colleagues. Yes, it sounds very nice, but this is the central error of the left, that everyone wants to get out in the evening for a nice political meeting. Some people want to be involved in management; some don't. It is certainly true that employee ownership exposes employees to significant risk, because it ties their entire prosperity to the success of their employer. Some people think that people shouldn't put all their eggs in one basket. And anyway, it is unlikely that center-left professors have a clue what will work in the economic sector. Even the people that are most successful in business haven't got a clue. And, of course, if economists knew what would work they would all be billionaires.
• Non-monetized Economy. I'll tell you what you'd get in a non-monetized economy. Status and hierarchy; who you know, not what you know. The miracle of the money economy is that it is no respecter of persons. A product is a product; a service is a service. Remove money from the equation and you get people-to-people. Status not contract.

The big question in the years ahead is what to do about the monster state we have created over the last century. How are we going to reform it? How can we reform it? Wilkinson and Pickett do not address the question of government reform. Well, they wouldn't. They are professors from government universities tied into the educated ruling class. Why would they imagine that you can improve on a good thing? They don't even think about it. They just know that more power for the educated ruling class is a good thing.

Next: What About Equality?

Spirit Level Week: Equality Without Context

I first became aware of The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by British university professors Richard Wilkinson and Kat Pickett over the weekend. I followed a link from RealClearPolitics to The New York Times: "Eliminating Inequality is Good for the Soul" was the link. Actually, the article by Nicholas Kristof was titled "Equality, A True Soul Food." Writes Kristof:

So why is inequality so harmful? “The Spirit Level” suggests that inequality undermines social trust and community life, corroding societies as a whole. It also suggests that humans, as social beings, become stressed when they find themselves at the bottom of a hierarchy.

So I picked up a copy of the book. It argues, from lots of research and government data on developed countries, that health and social problems are higher in more unequal societies, right across the income spectrum. Getting specific, these problems are higher in the US and the UK, where inequality is high, than in Germany, Sweden, and Japan, where inequality is lower.

Let's accept the book's argument, that people do better in an equal society, and think about what it means.

The big problem is that Wilkinson and Pickett provide no context. They present data that shows inequality; they talk about hierarchy, about exclusion, and about deprivation as though humans are blank slates on which social and political structures write their story.

OK, let's provide some context. The US is more unequal that Germany and Sweden. Why might that be?

The US is notable in that, ever since the 1830s, it has been receiving millions of immigrants, people who, in most cases, have come straight off the farm. This was true for the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, and then, after World War II, the blacks coming off rural poverty in the South, and latterly Hispanics coming off the farm in Mexico. These are people thrown into a world for which they are ill adapted. They are not migrating from one farm to another. They are moving off the farm and parachuting into the industrial city. They are going to have to struggle and adapt to make it in the urban industrial world of the city. You think that's easy?

In the UK there has been, since World War II, a significant influx of immigrants from the West Indies and South Asia, and this has swelled recently, by design, during the recent Labour government.

It is notable that, in the more-equal countries, in Scandanavia and Japan, there has been little immigration, until very recently. Here's a story about how Japan discourages immigration (and low-wage competition) from the Philippines.

Our lefty friends have, over the last two hundred years, been repeatedly scandalized by the messy facts of reality. First they were appalled by the chaos of the industrial revolution. Well, just how would this unprecedented change in human society from agriculture to industry occur without wrenching difficulties? In the early years of the industrial revolution, the migration was at least within the countries industrializing. But soon, with the advent of steam navigation, the great migration became trans-Atlantic. Now of course the Chinese people are migrating at a rate of 15 million a year into the burgeoning cities. The idea that a compassionate political elite could manage this migration, the greatest migration in human history and the greatest increase in human population in history, without severe problems is laughable. Of course, when an actual left-wing activist was in charge of China's adaption to the modern world, the result was that tens of millions of Chinese starved to death in the Great Leap Forward. Same thing in Russia, where about ten million people starved in the 1930s. At no time in the industrial development of the UK and the US was there famine. In fact the record for the US and UK is that, in the wake of the industrial revolution, increase in well-being was consistent and extraordinary with notable blips, in the 1840s and the 1880s and the 1930s when government screwed up the economy. In the US and UK, there was a notable increase in inequality in the 1980s. Perhaps that had something to do with the economic recovery after the Great Inflation of the 1970s. You remember the Great Inflation. It was caused by an excess of Keynesian economics and was inspired by the notion that politicians and economic experts could fine tune the economy, avoiding unemployment with just a little bit of inflation.

The lesson from the last two hundred years is that, when change happens, the result is that the early adopters do very well, but the great mass of people struggle to catch up. There's a word to describe how that appears in national income statistics. Inequality.

But if you remove the context from your analysis, you aren't going to know much about what your numbers mean. And Wilkinson and Pickett don't seem to have a clue.

Next: Who's to Blame?

The Wages of Illegal Immigration

We don't really know why the Mexican government has encouraged emigration from Mexico to the United States. We don't really know why liberals make it so hard to regulate illegal immigration. Victor Davis Hanson calls the immigration phenomenon a virtual Manhattan Project, whose outcome we can only guess at.

My guess is that the Mexicans in the United States will disappoint the Mexican government and US liberals. That's based on the three Mexican-born Americans that I know personally. Let's call them Jose, Juan, and Joaquin.

Jose is in his fifties, and waded across the Rio Grande as a youngster holding a basket of fighting cocks. He met his uncle at a store close to the border and then disappeared into the US. His family worked in the Yakima valley picking crops, and he seemed to enjoy the experience. Now he works as a budget analyst.

Juan lives in the Seattle area and works for the government. He works all the overtime he can, and when he's not working for the government he helps out at his brothers' nursery. One of over ten children, he worked as a youngster selling chiclets on the street in his hometown in Mexico. Unlike Charles Dickens, he has a positive memory of his child-labor experience, for he knew he was helping to feed the family. He now owns his own home and visits his home-town in Mexico by driving down in the gigantic family Suburban, complete with wheel spinners. His children seem to talk and act like regular native-born US children.

Joaquin is an upper-class Mexican, with an advanced degree and a thriving career selling services to municipal governments in the US. Of course, he's always been fully documented.

Here's my take on illegal immigrants. They are going to end up a dreadful disappointment to the class warriors and the race warriors here in the US. Opinion polls already show that Hispanic voters are not particularly oriented along ethnic lines. They vote their pocket books. As soon as they get established, they start to vote Republican.

That is about what you would expect. The two rigidly Democratic ethnic groups, blacks and Jews, vote 90 percent Democrat because their leaders have successfully frightened them with the race card, for blacks, and the Christian card, for Jews.

Some time in the next generation, the blacks and the Jews are going to start leaving the Democratic Party in battalion strength. When they do, we are going to have to worry about something else. Maybe it will be the monolithic Democratic Muslim vote.

Raising the Conservative Game

Ring out the old, ring in the new. 2010 was a great year for conservatives, as this center-right nation lurched away from a left-liberal central government. But what about the future? What really is our vision; what do we want to accomplish for America and what do we want America to become?

Here are some basic ideas for raising our game.

• No more Moral Equivalent of War. Way back, a century ago, philosopher William James proposed to replace war (which, in 1906, seemed on its way out) with the Moral Equivalent of War to inspire the youth of the world with high purpose. It sounds like a wonderful idea until you start to think about it. If you are going to rally the youth of America to some great political project, and you screw them up to a moral-equivalent-of-war fever, then you are bound to set up a moral equation: good vs. evil, us vs. them, inclusion vs. exclusion. At least, in the old days of the nation state, the us vs. them was Americans vs. the rest of the world. But when you do the moral equivalent of war instead of real war, you end up dividing America; you end up with the moral equivalent of civil war. Thus, people that oppose the war on poverty are mean-spirited; the people that oppose civil-right legislation are racists; the people that oppose saving the planet are deniers. Conservatives believe in something higher than the moral equivalent of civil war.
• Yes, there is a free lunch. When Milton Friedman and other economists railed that "there is no such thing as a free lunch," they were opposing the typical welfare state politics that takes money from Peter to give Paul a free lunch. Paul's lunch ain't free, chaps. Peter paid for it. But, as Deirdre McCloskey writes, again and again, there really is a free lunch, Virginia. It is the free lunch we have gotten from a bourgoisie, innovative and free. Today, food costs less than 10 percent of income, against 80 percent in 1800. We have tons of clothing, rather than one suit of clothes for work, and one for Sunday. Life expectancy at birth is 80 instead of 30. And it takes 10 hours to travel from London to Seattle instead of 10,000 hours. If that isn't a free lunch, I don't know what is.
• The difference between state and society. Scratch a liberal and when they talk about the needs of society they are talking about government programs. Surely, we can understand that the only thing the government can do is declare war and break things, or take money from Peter to pay Paul. But the whole point of society, of social cooperation, is what goes on between consenting adults outside the cockpit of force. We conservatives long for a society in which force, government force, is constantly being pruned back, instead of luxuriantly growing, year on year.
• The war on the poor. A century ago, you could say that something had to be done about the poor suffering in squalid slums. In fact, of course, they were doing much better than a century before, at least in the developing West. So now we have showered material goods on the poor so that the poor are fat and the rich are thin. But in doing so, we have demolished the culture of the poor. Their families are reduced to mother and children; their work culture has been ruined by government welfare, and their authentic institutions, the benefit club, the labor union, the ethnic association, have been bombed out of all recognition. Liberals did this, and they need to understand that their cruel, corrupt, unjust, wasteful, and deluded government programs are the bombers that devastated the poor.
• The Greater Separation of Powers. Our American founders gave us a government of three branches. They created this divided government as a defense in depth against political power. But now we need to go further, to construct a new bastion against power. We need to extend the idea of the separation of church and state into a separation of the political sector and the moral/cultural sector. Liberals have a meme that describes what we must avoid: "legislating morality." Yet they do it all the time, writing criminal laws to criminalize behavior they regard as immoral or unethical. Let conservatives counter with a new meme: "Don't criminalize immorality." We've got to find ways for naming and shaming bad behavior rather than criminalizing it. We also need to separation economy and state. The last 100 years is a story of the exploitation of the economic sector by the political sector, and it stinks. Money is worth 1-2 percent of its value a century ago, and politicians plunder the economic sector at will. This must end. The economic sector needs clear signposts and rules; it cannot thrive in a thicket of activist-inspired regulation.

Conservatives have one great near-term goal, the repeal of ObamaCare. That's great, but then what? In Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) we have a champion of spending restraint, as he cuts waste and shames the bureaucrats that repose on their sinecures. But you can't change America just by pruning and cutting. You've got to have a vision of the future. And we know, after the century of Big Government, that the great social needs of humans just don't get met by the liberal culture of compulsion.

Force: Liberals Playing With Fire

First we thought it was just ordinary government incompetence. Now we understand that the slow snow removal in New York City after the Christmas snowstorm was actually a work slowdown organized by the supervisors in the city Sanitation Department. According to reporters for the New York Post:

Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts -- a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.

The supervisors are upset, apparently, over "a raft of demotions, attrition and budget cuts."

This shows, in a graphic way, the problem with allowing the government to do anything beyond fighting wars. Everything in government comes down to a power play. You would think that, in an emergency, the natural human instinct to come together would rule over petty interests and bureaucratic battles. But it turns out that in the modern centralized administrative state even the most basic functions of government, the recovery from a natural disaster, ends up sacrificed to the god of political power.

Conservatives and political scientists take note. This is the Achilles heel of our liberal friends. They just don't have a clue that government is force, and politics is power. If you let the government perform some service then it will turn it into a fight.

The great question for mankind, the social animal, is to find out how to limit the brutal cost of force and compulsion. In The Faith Instinct Nicholas Wade tells how, in hunter-gatherer societies, religion played a vital role in reducing the need for force. One strategy is the concept of divine punishment. "In small societies, the person who takes on the role of enforcer exposes himself to general resentment, not to mention retaliation from the miscreant or his relatives." It's usually best to get everyones' agreement and have the miscreant killed by one of his relatives. Alternatively, you can persuade everyone that God will punish miscreants, that God knows everything we do, and will punish misdeeds either in this life or the life to come.

A system of supernatural punishment carries enormous advantages for a primitive society. No one has to assume the thankless taks of meting out punishment and risk being killed by the offender or his relatives; the gods perform this chore willingly and vigilantly.

No legislation is needed. No police force is required. The question that must come to every concerned citizen is: Why do we have the expensive apparatus of legislation, police, courts, jails, and parole officers? And why have we dispensed, in a significant degree, with the notion of divine punishment? In my view, it is because we can afford it. We can afford the enormous expense of the force machine, whereas the primitive society cannot.

But, you may say, can we afford it? Can we save the planet when we are wasting precious resources on policemen, hangmen, and jailers? It's a good question.

Historically, of course, the development of penal institutions have paralleled the attack on divine punishment conducted by our liberal friends. Liberals wanted to do a bunch of things that the gods had traditionally disliked. They wanted to free themselves from social control, particularly on the sex front. Liberal men wanted multiple sexual partners. Liberal women wanted liberation from exploitation by the patriarchs. But the problem is that you can't limit the damage. If the gods don't care about sexual license then what do they care about? And when the gods aren't in control, you have to erect the vast apparatus of government compulsion that is so much a feature of our modern age, and which creates so much resentment among the non-liberal citizenry.

My advice to our liberal friends is to get back to some kind of supernatural punishment system. Maybe Gaia cares so much about the planet that she will punish people for environmental crimes without needing an expensive EPA. And if she cares about saving the planet, maybe she will expand her powers to other important areas of social control.

Either way, it is clear that the more government we have, the more we will place ourselves at the mercy of bloody-minded sanitation workers and their ilk, for whom nothing exists except their selfish needs and the satisfactions of wielding political power.

McCloskey Wrapup: Big Fact vs. Big Mistake

The great theme that runs through Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Cycle thus far--in The Bourgeois Virtues and Bourgeois Dignity--is the Great Fact. In the past two centuries the prosperity of the average human has risen from a life at $1-$3 per day to the present $30-$137 per day in constant dollars. For the average human, the difference is at least an order of magnitude. If you isolate on the fortunate United States and you account for improvement in products and services, e.g., airplane travel, the difference is two orders of magnitude, meaning that the average person swings 100 times the products and services that his ancestor enjoyed two centuries ago. This has never happened before in history. Never.

Back to start: Conservatism's Big Problem.

Now you would think that everyone would be sitting back gob-smacked, as the Limeys say, but in fact they are not. In fact just about everyone is pretty peeved about the whole thing, from conservatives that mourn the corruption of manners to Marxians--McCloskey prefers "marxoid"--insisting that the whole thing has been achieved on the backs of the workers. But for me the most telling objection to the Great Fact is the responsible prediction that McCloskey extracts in Bourgeois Dignity from John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy. Call it the Big Mistake.

Mill again: "It is only in the backward countries of the world that increased production is still an important object: in those most advanced, what is economically needed is a better distribution, of which one indispensable means is a stricter restraint on population."(p.384)

Here we see the foundation of the 20th century and its centralized administrative state, supervised by a wise and disinterested educated elite. Here we see a forthright manifesto of force--benevolent, sensible, avuncular force, of course, but force nonetheless. Mill was saying that the only way to extend the benefits of the industrial revolution to the poor was by force, and the only way to prevent a population explosion was by force.

And Mill was wrong. Dead wrong. At the moment he was writing a nobody of the name John D. Rockefeller was just starting to reduce the cost of illuminating oil from 80 cents per gallon to 8 cents, and a nobody of the name of Andrew Carnegie was about to reduce the price of steel by two-thirds. Not to mention that in 1871 a chap called Orville Wright was born in Ohio. Not to mention that in 1870-71 about four people in four different countries reinvented economics with the marginal revolution.

On the population front, of course, we now know that middle-class people possessed of fantastic prosperity don't fill the world with an excess population. If anything, they need to be firmly walloped with a wet noodle and told to get a life and get some kids on the ground.

What we know today is that all that political force of the last century was unnecessary. The modern economy, driven by a bourgeoisie dignified and free, would have covered the poor in riches without all the government programs because, indeed, the staggering rising tide of the modern free lunch, the free lunch of cheap energy, cheap steel, cheap travel, cheap food, cheap everything, created a world in which the poor are fat and the rich are thin. And all the while nobody noticed. Or if they did, they complained because it wasn't good enough.

Let's say it again. Governments in the United States, as faithfully recorded and broadcast by usgovernmentspending.com, spends the following in FY 2011.

	Government Pensions	$1.0 trillion
	Government Health Care	$1.2 trillion
	Government Education	$0.9 trillion
	Government Welfare	$0.8 trillion

If the poor get rich along with everyone else, what's the point of four trillion dollars of compulsion every year?

Yes, you say, but what about government education? Surely that is worthwhile. Not really. Not according to Deirdre McCloskey. Once a family gets literacy, she argues, it never loses it.

Then male literacy in England rose to perhaps 30 percent in 1580 and to 60 percent by... the 1750s... My father was the first in his family to graduate from university... All of his three children did likewise... [B]oth of my two did, and doubtless my two grandchildren will, too.

McCloskey's Norwegian ancestors "were reading by the late sixteenth century, and never stopped." And all of this without compulsory government education.

But McCloskey is perhaps too optimistic. Perhaps there is a way to extinguish literacy. It is called the welfare state. Here is the testimony of police Inspector Gadget in Britain:

I once saw a bloke in custody, who was in my year at Ruraltown Comp[rehensive]. The Sergeant asked him if he could read and write before offering him the custody record to sign. He said he couldn’t. I interjected. ‘I was at school with you buddy, you can read and write for God’s sake’ he said ‘I used to be able to but I forgot how’. He hadn’t had to read or write anything for 20 years, so he simply forgot how. An ‘agency’ for everything, all on a plate. A filthy mean little plate, but a plate none the less.

The reason that most people acquired literacy over the past millennium is that it was useful to them, very useful. It kept them out of the mine and the stone pit. It qualified them for good jobs indoors. But when the government will give you money for nothing, what's the point?

The point is: when you find you are doing something wrong, something stupid, stop doing it.
Three hundred years ago slavery was ubiquitous; 150 years later it had become a scandal. Two hundred years ago, absolute government and its centralized administrative bureaucracy was a scandal. Today it is ubiquitous.

But big government doesn't have to stay ubiquitous. We can change it. We can make it a scandal again.

If we believe in the "bourgeois virtues" and if we believe in "bourgeois dignity" that people should have the dignity and the freedom to innovate for the benefit of each other, then there is only one thing to say about the vast centralized administrative state inspired by the Great Mistake of good old buffers like John Stuart Mill and what we might call the Great Lie of the not-so-good folks like the post-1848 clerisy of intellectuals and activists.

The saying has a familiar ring to it: "This Shall Not Stand."

And now, five years later, Bourgeois Equality, here.