After Boston: Taxonomy of Political Conflict

When a nation state has a problem with another state, a problem that can't be resolved by diplomacy, it cranks up the printing press and goes to war.  That we understand.  But what about lower-level disagreements?



For instance, what about guerrilla movements?  Here you have an armed group dedicated to the overthrow of an existing government.  But a non-state actor like a guerrilla group cannot go head to head against a government in a full-scale war, so it must fight an "asymmetric" war, making life difficult for the government with raids on government facilities and enticing the people to withdraw support from a government that can't keep the peace.  Of course, very often a guerrilla group is financed by a state.  In fact, it is likely that very few guerrilla groups can survive without some sort of support from a state that wants to stir up trouble.



Then there are simple terror groups, that don't have the finance or the popular support to hide out in the country and maintain a permanent force under arms.  These groups are still groups with political agendas, but without the means or the ambition to conduct a full-scale guerrilla campaign. They really got going in that late 19th century when the combination of explosives and modern publicity made it possible to kill one person and frighten a million.  But you gotta give them credit.  You can really lower the prestige of a government with some well-placed bombs.  Maybe you can get the government to spend trillions of money for little return, like the US in the years after 9-11.



Then there's the lone wolf copycatting the terror conspiracies.  Perhaps Major Nidal Malik Hassan, the Fort Hood bomber, comes into that category.  A man is inspired to imitate others, and does so.



But let's not forget the left-wing activist group.  It is the cadre group representing itself as a spontaneous uprising of the people.  It is a political tradition of "peaceful protest" designed to project the impression in the media that injustice is abroad in the land and that helpless victims need relief.  The left-wing activist group is seldom popular, but achieves notoriety and momentum for its agenda through media facilitation.



Then we have the popular movement like the Tea Party that represents a genuine stirring in the people, and that moves fairly quickly to influence electoral politics.



Lastly we have the "mentally ill" single shooter, who doesn't have a political strategy, but just wants the notoriety of a bloody deed.



Everyone from the president on down is stigmatizing the perpetrators of the Boston Marathon bombing as cowardly and cynical.  No doubt they are right.



But all opponents of a political regime face the same problem.  They want to replace the government.  Government, let us not forget, is force, and politics is division.  So any political actor that wants to replace the current regime of force must follow a strategy of division that ends up with his group taking over the levers of force and coercion.  Until the day of the final victory, he must divide the people from the government.



Clearly, this strategy of division must usually include creating the notion that the government has lost control and cannot keep the peace.  At the state level, this allows the opponents of the regime to rail about the waste of war.  At the guerrilla level they rail about the inability of the government to control its own territory.  At the terror bomb level, they demonstrate the inability of the government to protect people on the street from cowardly murderers.  At the left-wing protest level, people rail about the continuing stain of injustice.



At each level of insurrection, the actors are using the weapons that they believe are most effective for them, given the political and financial assets at hand, to make their point and delegitimize the government.



Force is force, and division is division.  Sometimes bloody deeds succeed; sometimes they don't.



But if you ask me, I'd say that far too many people think that they can improve life for themselves and the world through politics.   For the vast majority of people, the best way to improve life for themselves is to follow the advice of Rupert Murdoch and "produce something that other people are willing to pay for."



Maybe, if you do that, you can be a part of the movement that has got people in the United States from $3 per day in 1800 to a life of $120 per day right now.



That would be making a difference.

Murdoch Makes Moral Case for Capitalism

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch is evidently a supporter of the Australian free-market think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs.  So they called on him to give a speech at their 70th Anniversary dinner recently.

In his speech, Rupert Murdoch took the opportunity of insisting that conservatives forget about the efficiency argument for capitalism and concentrate instead on the moral case.  We will never win the argument on efficiency, he argued, because morality trumps efficiency every time.  We must insist on the (4:10 mark) "justice and fairness, yes, the morality of free markets."  At the 7:70 mark:

Crony capitalism is not capitalsm, it's cronyism.  So long as we allow the debate to be framed by people who think the market is efficient because it is based on a human failing  we are going to lose every argument.

So what moral argument did he make?  Simple.  He made the invisible hand argument, a staple of free-market apologetics since 1776 and Adam Smith.  But he made it very well, so here it is, at about the 8:00 minute mark.

The only way to uphold market freedom is to show the people that the market doesn't succeed because of greed.  In fact, it's just the opposite.  The market succeeds because it gives people incentives to put their own wants and needs aside to address the wants and needs of others.  To succeed you have to produce something that other people are willing to pay for.

And let's not forget the problem of the people that confuse being pro-free-market with pro-business (15:55 mark):

Many of the same people who appreciate that too much welfare can be bad for a single mother somehow believe that spending tax dollars on industrial hubs is an excellent investment.

Yes.  Rupert Murdoch, the prince of darkness, telling it like it is.

Liberal Fingerprints All Over It

Our liberal friends think of themselves as caring, but rather overwhelmed idealists: fighting hard to make a better world against the WASPs at the country club and the bigots at the megachurch, but overwhelmed by their rather charming academic disorganization.

In reality, we live in the house that liberals built, from the schools to the culture to the safety net.  And it ain't in too good a shape.  There are signs of cracking, and the porch is leaning dangerously.  But don't look for liberals to agree to repairs.  They have other plans for the maintenance money.

Meanwhile the bad news keeps coming.

There's the Gosnell abortion case.  A black businessman in Philadelphia ran an abortion mill for decades, apparently marketing to poor black women, and now he's in the dock for botched late-term abortions and a host of regulatory infractions.  But where were the diligent regulators of whom we've heard tell?  Well, it seems that the regulators were leery about regulating abortion businesses.  You can see why.  They knew that they could get into trouble with liberal activist groups, and that is something that a bureaucrat understands in her bones is the one thing to be avoided in her smooth progress towards that defined-benefit pension.  Jennifer Rubin has a lot to say about this.

For a conservative, the Gosnell case is breathtaking.  Here we have liberals telling us that nobody can be trusted, that regulators are needed to keep and eye on everyone. Health care?  We gotta have universal health care so the government can make sure that everyone is covered.  But guess who doesn't get regulated?  Liberals' pet abortionists.

Then there is the utter mess in the economy and the culture.  It's lucky that liberals are the ones that have cratered marriage in the lower orders, have blitzed a generation of men by allowing them to moulder away on long-term unemployment.  Imagine if Republicans were in charge right now.  Why back in the 2000s then House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi started blaming Bush for the "jobless recovery" ere the Nation Bureau of Economic Research had pronounced on the end of the recession.

But let us set the stage with a chart of workforce participation of mature Americans in the last century from Blackrock. (link no longer works)

Here's the article link.  It shows how men 55-64 have reduced their participation in the workforce from the 90 percentile to 70 percent over the last century, while women in the 55-64 group have increased their participation enormously.  Meanwhile men over 65 have reduced their workforce participation from 75 percent down to 20 percent while women over 65 have actually increased their participation.

So the great Social Security revolution has principally helped older men (while you could say that Medicare has really helped women).

But then there is the family.  Robert Samuelson presents an even-handed analysis using a Third Way analysis from some liberals and the libertarian case from Charles Murray and Coming Apart.

Samuelson presents Murray's argument thus:

Having a child out of wedlock became more common and acceptable; the sexual revolution enabled men to get sex without marriage. The waning power of religion undermined the importance of family. Feminism and expanding welfare programs made it easier for women to survive -- through jobs or aid -- on their own. Liberalized divorce led to more breakups.

And here is the liberal line:

In a paper for Third Way, a liberal think tank, economists David Autor and Melanie Wasserman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology attribute the decline of marriage -- which, like Murray, they say is concentrated among the poorly educated -- to the eroding economic heft of men compared with women. Women are more independent economically; men are weaker. Marriage has lost much of its pecuniary pull.

Is it the culture or the economy?  And did we just fall into the creek, or were we pushed?

The missing link, in my view, is that the whole question about humans as social animals is: what to do with the men.  In the last century we have reversed the question and asked what to do about the women?  But that is nonsense.  Women are never a problem; they always do what they are told.  Men, on the other hand, are like dogs; they get into mischief unless they are given a job to do.

In the hunter-gatherer culture men worked pretty much as full time border warriors, rather like chimpanzees.  So when the agricultural age opened, with the enlargement of the zone of peace, what was there for the men to do?  Well, it turned out that women were particularly ill-suited for plowing: they tended to suffer miscarriages.  So there was the solution.  Men could do all the heavy work around the farm.

Then came the modern era of the city and the industrial revolution.  Now what to do, especially after mechanization started to reduce the amount of heavy labor?  The answer was the Protestant answer, the idea of work as a calling, work made into a religious duty.  Now men could be sent off, not to the border wars or the army or the plow, but to the factory or the office where they could compete with each other for the glittering prizes: money, power, and the love of beautiful women.  Well, at least it kept them out of mischief.

But it worked so well that activist liberal women wanted in on the action.  The result, a century later is that women have invaded the "workplace" and transformed it from a place where men compensated for the lack of wars to fight to a place where women enforce the values of the community of women, discouraging bluff competition and requiring sensitivity.

We have turned the world upside down.  We have created a welfare state that discourages poor men from working and poor women from getting married.  We have destroyed the culture that helped men to sublimate their battlefield aggression into marketplace competition.  At least for the lower orders, closely patronized and supervised by the liberal administrators of the welfare state.

The rich and educated of today, of course, work and marry like mad.  Just look at this story about the two Thatcher grandchildren.  Surrounded by wealth and privilege they are devout Christians and obsessive hard workers.  Why is that, you ask?  Because the rich these days cannot just repose on their estates or their "funds."  They must work and excel; otherwise they will fall back into the the ordinary suburban middle class, and who wants that?

Drip by drip, creak by creak, failure by failure, the liberal cultural and political edifice is starting to fall apart.  Conservatives better be ready to offer an alternative when the revolutionary moment arrives.

There Is No Cunning Plan

Some Republicans seem to be frightened that President Obama is enticing them into a trap with his FY 2014 federal budget, what with his proposed chain-weighted CPI for Social Security inflation adjustments.  They think he is baiting a trap with this teenie-weenie entitlement reform to force them into agreeing to tax increases.



Then there are the House Democrats that seem convinced that the president's chain-weighting proposal is going to lead them into a frightful trap in the 2014 elections.  They fear that the House Republicans have a plan to beat them like a drum on Social Security.



I doubt it.  I don't think the president is that smart on the budget.  I think he is just doing what he has to do.  He has to show something on entitlements, like his Social Security plan.  He also has a bunch of less visible cuts on Medicare.  And what else is he going to do but propose massive tax increases?  After all, the alternative is to take a meat-ax to the entitlements and the crony capitalism and all the programs that dish out lovely grants to liberals.   That would be like running up the white flag.



And House Democrats doubtless think that the sun rises and sets on entitlements.  So they naturally fear that someone, somewhere has a cunning plan to deep six them and their noble constituents that have staked their lives on government benefits.



I lean on the old Hollywood saying about what makes a hit movie.  Nobody knows nothing.  In national politics it's a bit different.  Everyone knows what needs to be done, but nobody dares to move.  Democrats can't ask their supporters to eat entitlement cuts.  Republicans won't ask their supporters to bail out the unsustainable entitlements with tax increases.



The net result is that the officers are standing on the deck in the storm watching the ship of state crash its way onto the rocks.  Nobody dares to order the grumbling crew to do anything, because the officers are afraid of mutiny.



The ruling class is right to be afraid of mutiny.  Nobody said anything about financial mayhem and shipwreck when they promised Social Security and Medicare as a basic human right.  Anyway, all the money that people paid into FICA is locked away in those Trust Funds, right?



Nobody knows how all this will turn out.  No doubt that cunning politicians will find ways of winning and losing elections as we stumble on into the future.  And the cunning politicians on one side will outfox the cunning politicians on the other side.



One thing is for certain.  The folks that put their trust in government are going to find that their trust was misplaced.  It's the old story: women and minorities hardest hit.

Marx: Five Big Mistakes

We all like to rag Karl Marx on the failure of his "immiseration" thesis, that the workers would get poorer as the capitalists got richer.

Well, not all of us.  Tens of thousands of "progressives" still firmly believe in the immiseration doctrine.  That's what makes the fight against inequality meaningful.

But that wasn't the only big mistake that Marx made.  Let's enumerate them, one by one, starting with the gold standard, the immiseration thesis.

1. Immiseration of the workers. Marx argued that the progress of machine industry run by the capitalists would slowly drive the small operators out of business, leading to poverty in the lower bourgeoisie and the working class.  Of course, there's a big truth in that.  It happens all the time.  Some giant of capitalism that bestrode the marketplace slowly loses its mojo.  Think A&P pushed out by Safeway.  Think Detroit pushed out by the Germans and the Japanese.  But every time, jobs in new industries spring out of the ground as the old jobs wither away.  As long as we leave them the space to grow.
2. Alienation. Marx argued that capitalism and the division of labor alienated workers from their true nature.  He had in mind the degradation of the manufactory where workers performed mind-numbing repetitive tasks that didn't require the skills of the old hand trades.  And there was a sense in which the working class was forced into the factories after being dispossessed of their rights by the enclosure movement that changed the tradition of collective ownership of the land to individual freehold.  But it is clear that many people actually choose to work for a big corporation.  They like the idea of the implied life-time employment, the benefits, and the meritocratic bureaucratic structure.  Is it alienation when people choose to work in the giant modern office factory over the hurly-burly of the small startup?
3. Labor theory of value. Marx took the problematic theories of value promoted by the classical economists, the divided notion of use value and exchange value, and mixed them up into the nonsense of his labor theory of value.  Yes, it's true that everything we know and do comes out of the brain or the labor of somebody, somewhere.  But today we understand that everything from the past is simply a sunk cost, not a value.  All the work of the past is done, the work that helped feed millions and also the work that went into useless pyramids and bankrupted great empires.  When you have done your labor and finished your product, the labor, the effort, the genius, that is all in the past.  The question is: what will the next customer pay for that product?  And all the effort and the labor that meant so much to you means nothing to him.  The labor theory of value stinks.
4. Socialism and bureaucracy.  Marx correctly sneered at Hegel's paen to the bureaucracy as a mediation between government and people.  That is rubbish, because the absolute monarchs generated their bureaucracies precisely as an instrument for taxing and controlling the people.  But Marx predicted that bureaucracy would wither away after the socialist revolution.  OK, Marx had an excuse back in the wild and crazy 19th century.  But we now know that the more socialism in a government, the more bureaucracy, and the more taxing and the more control.  Bureaucracy, as Marx insisted, is the administrative organ through which the sectional interest of the ruling class is imposed upon the people.  He was right on that one.
5. Disappearance of the division of labor.  Marx maintained that the alienating division of labor would disappear under socialism.  No longer confined by the limited, dehumanizing task, the laborer would be able to develop the full range of his talents and capacities, making a product in the morning, gardening in the afternoon, and going to the theater in the evening.  This is rubbish.  People like to specialize; to become an expert in something.  And there is no division of labor more rigid and dehumanizing that the administratively organized workplace of the socialist state.

What is striking about the Marxian vision -- and for that matter the modern liberal vision -- is its oblivious turning away from the fundamental truth of life: the cycle of conception, gestation, birth, growth, maturity, decline and death, and the renewal of life in a new generation with all the genes remixed.  The old must die so that the young can inherit the earth.

The cosmic joke on the modern ruling class is that the very thing that it sets its shoulders against, capitalism, is the very thing that approximates in its operation the metaphor of life.  Ideas, businesses, industries are all the time, all around us, getting created, expanding, contracting and dying, just like life itself.  And what do we do?  We rebel against it.  We want to live forever, we want to preserve our traditional standard of life from all external shocks.  And we want the rest of the world to pay for it.

Thanks Chuck.  But I sometimes wonder if we will ever get this world out of the ditch you got us into.

What Grand Bargain?

Some people are talking about a grand bargain on the federal budget.  Joe Klein, for instance.



You can look at the president's FY14 budget at usfederalbudget.us.



Well, sorta.  Joe says that Congress is fed up with the broken budget process and may do a deal this year.  He sees a moderate compromise of entitlement cuts and increased revenue.  And President Obama may possibly join in.  He's apparently "stopped trying to bang his head up against John Boehner and the Tea Party crowd."



Really?  The chap who's planning to flip the House of Representatives in 2014 with Organizing for America?



If the president were planning on a grand bargain, he would have started months, maybe years ago.  To get Democrats to sign on to entitlement reform and Republicans to sign onto tax increases would have required the patience and the political skills of -- well, a Reagan.  And President Obama is not that kind of politician.  He made his chops as a community organizer, riling up the welfare-state beneficiaries to demand their "rights."  And that's what he likes doing.



The death of Margaret Thatcher this week shows what I mean.  Thatcher came into office with a program, and she diligently and doggedly stuck to her guns for nearly 12 years.  This meant a huge effort in developing the intellectual horizon of what she wanted to do and then implement it in the hard daily grind of political and administrative details.



In President Obama we do see an intellectual horizon.  It's the liberal horizon of a bigger and bigger administrative state.  To the extent that we see the evidence of a hard daily grind it is clearly devoted to implementing that liberal vision.



Why would President Obama compromise anything away now?



Liberals will only be ready to compromise when they see political power slipping away, and today, they are very far from that.  In fact, liberals think the have an "emerging Democratic majority" of minorities, women, educated and the young, that will make them the default party of government for the next generation.



The job of Republicans right now is to be the Party of No.  Entitlement cuts?  Maybe, but not if it means anti-growth tax increases.  That's because the bottom line for Republicans, as the party of the People of the Responsible Self, is that Republican voters should have an economy in which they can make an honest living.



Democrats live and die on the free stuff they have won for their clients.  Republicans live and die on the ability of their voters to work and thrive.  Don't look for a grand bargain until one of the two parties fears annihilation at the polls.



Maybe in 2015 after the Democrats get annihilated by the unpopularity of ObamaCare?

Live by the State, Die by the State

There are two narratives out there about Margaret Thatcher.  The conservative line is that Maggie saved Britain.  The liberal line is that she divided the country and cratered manufacturing, wiping out the working class.



For a conservative view of the wipeout, let's turn to Brit-born John Derbyshire.

Mrs. Thatcher’s defeat of the frankly communist National Union of Mineworkers was a triumph for economic sense, but left mining towns and villages without work. Most of them remain in that condition today. As the grandchild of two coal miners from just such places, I know what has been lost.

The great virtue of John Derbyshire is that he tells it like it is, without shading his views in deference to the Zeitgeist.  That's what got him fired at National Review: saying something non-PC about race.



But he got me to thinking.  What did those miners think they were doing, joining a political strike against the government?  Didn't they understand that they were essentially engaged in civil war?  Didn't they get that, but for the left-wing press, they would have been tagged as rebels?  What did they think happens to defeated rebels in this sub-lunar world?



It's a bit rich to complain about your miseries after you've been defeated in a civil-war-by-other-means.



And the same goes for all those who worked for the failing nationalized industries in the 1970s.  What did those folks think would happen in the end, long after government had "saved" their jobs?   What did they think happened to the competitive qualities of their employer after he's been rescued by the government?  Did they think they could go on forever producing substandard products and services for their fellow Brits?



One of the great cruelties of our age is that lack of truth-telling from our educated elite.  And one of the failures on the truth front is the failure to tell people that when they get the government to bail them out they are forcing the rest of society to cut checks to them for doing, well, not very much.  A small business cannot survive at all not doing very much.  A big corporation cannot last very long without satisfying its customers. True, a government can go for quite a while by taxing and borrowing and spending.  But in the end it all collapses in inflation and default.



Our educated elite won't tell ordinary people just how much they risk by sucking on the government teat.  Because in the end a Pharaoh will arise that knew not Joseph, and will decide that it is too much trouble to continue the customary subsidies.  Anyway, he has other supporters he needs to look after.



What about the truth, from Deirdre McCloskey, that it is capitalism, not government, that brought us in 200 years from $3 per day to $120 per day?



There is no substitute for a robust independence and competence, in individuals, in families, in businesses, in nations.  When you work for years and years for some big corporation or government bureaucracy you get further and further from reality, where reality is the market wage you could earn if you got laid off tomorrow.



If you want to know why the ranks of people on Social Security Disability are expanding so rapidly, that's where you start.  With people who have been taking a paycheck for years at some long-established employer, but not really producing, not really keeping their skills up, not really making themselves useful and employable.



On the other hand there is capitalism and the market.  There is no doubt that capitalism is a stern taskmaster.  It operates by profit and loss.  If you can offer a product or a service to the market at a profit, you get to live another day.  If you can't, they you'd better think of something else.  But what alternative do you propose?  Do you propose to impose yourself on your fellow citizen and force them to support you, because this is such a cruel hard world?



Margaret Thatcher had an interesting take on earning a living, as she experienced it, growing up as the daughter of a shopkeeper.

For them [the critics] capitalism was alien and harsh: for me it was familiar and creative. I was able to see that it was satisfying customers that allowed my father to increase the number of people he employed. I knew that it was international trade that brought coffee, sugar, and spice to those who frequented our shop. And, more than that, I experienced that business, as can be seen in any marketplace anywhere, was lively, human, social, and sociable: in fact, though serious, it was fun.

Come on, fellahs.  The basic social contract is that we work to serve others, so that we may earn our own living from that service.  The alternative is the life of the robber, to hold up others and take their money.  But life is not so hard after all.  If you surrender to the rules of capitalism you can break through the seriousness of it all, and transform the struggle into fun.



And isn't that what the whole of human life is about?  It is a brave and resolute gesture against the awful truth, that we are just pond-scum living on the margin of a great rock in space, and that every one of us will soon return, dust to dust, ashes to ashes.



But meanwhile, let us live life as a glorious gift, and live and work and love, giving the grim reaper and our fears no more than a grudging respect.