Capitalism is Not a System

A great irony of our modern era is that at exactly the same time that the Cartesian-Newtonian world-view was emerging the anti-systemic capitalist culture was emerging as well.

On the one hand you had the billiard ball determinism of Newtonian mechanics.  On the other hand you had the infinite complexity of the market process.

So why do we talk about the free-market "system", the price "system", the credit "system" when they aren't systems at all.  System is mechanical, system is an equal and opposite contest of rational Newtonian forces.  But the free market, prices and credit are the realization of human cooperation and competition between adaptable flexible people.  They are not systems at all.

Socialism and communism, on the other hand, are attempts to reduce human interaction to rigid systems.  They are attempts to universalize the taxing bureaucracies of the absolute monarchs and the articulated military machines those monarchs developed out of the undifferentiated feudal host.

When you wanted to fight an early modern battle, the undifferentiated feudal host didn't do the job.  You needed to articulate it into a uniform hierarchical system with interchangeable parts.  That's why the generals of the absolute monarchs developed the regiment, the battalion, the division, and why Napoleon developed the Army Corps.  The army commander needed a way to communicate his will down to the smallest subordinate unit and the individual soldier.  It takes a system to force everyone to obey the supreme commander.

After a century or two the Germans started to take a critical view of all this.  Chaps like Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in The Dialectic of Enlightenment concluded that applying reason to society resulted in system and domination, for what men want from reason is to dominate nature and other men, so domination is encoded in the very meaning of Enlightenment and the Age of Reason.  System is domination, I like to say.  And the reverse is true: domination implies a system to keep everyone in place.

Then we get to Jürgen Habermas and his effort in the Theory of Communicative Action to divide the world into two parts, the world of system and domination on the one hand and the world of communicative action on the other.  So Habermas sets up an opposition of System and Lifeworld (Lebenswelt).  Notice that the book's title in German, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, suggests that "Action" is a limiting translation that does not communicate the full meaning of Habermas' project.  "Handeln" in German means "action" but it also means to trade, deal, negotiate or haggle.  Itinerant Jewish peddlers are associated in German with "Handeln."

So the real meaning of Habermas title is "Theory of Communicative Negotiation."  And actually, that's what the book is all about.  How do we negotiate truth values and understanding and agreement about what the world looks like and what to do about it?

Now it is clear that the market, the process of buying and selling and pricing and borrowing and lending, is implied in the full meaning of "kommunikativen Handelns."  Every capitalist act is a communicative trade, deal, negotiation or haggling.  Every human act is a communicative trade, deal, or negotiation.

But government administration is a process of rule setting and enforcement, of system building and adjustment, of intimidation and coercion.

No doubt that's why Habermas picked up the word Lifeworld from Edmund Husserl.  It is a useful way of opposing the mechanical assumptions of "system" and foregrounding the idea that all human action in the world is connected with "life".

So perhaps we should talk about  the "price lifeworld," instead of price system, the "credit lifeworld" instead of credit system,  and maybe the "civil lifeworld" instead of civil society, because we want to emphasize the two-way communication, the essential "intersubjectivity" of human action in the world.

Alternatively, given the replacement of Newtonian physics by Einsteinian and quantum physics, perhaps we should pick up the language of the physicists.  The basic physics of sub-atomic "particles" is quantum field theory, and the basic mathematical formulation is called the probability function.

One of the basic methods of analysis in this new physics is through analysis of conserved qualities.  Mass, for example, is not conserved; that's what E = mc² is all about. But energy is conserved, angular momentum is conserved (so-called "spin"), electric charge is conserved, and so on.

It is clear that the interactions between humans could use the notions of "field" or "probability function" that were developed for the new physics.  Any particle exists in a probability function until it actually participates in an event.  Just as prices are just methods of communication until an actual exchange act at an agreed price takes place.

I don't know where all this should end up.  I just think we should lose the old Newtonian, Enlightenment words like "system."  Because they are not communicating the right message.

We humans live and work in a lifeworld, not a system or a matrix.

Horowitz's Foreign Policy Indictment

It was in the summer of 2003, David Horowitz writes in National Review, that Democrats broke the post 9/11 consensus and started the "Bush Lied" meme.

The moment when Republicans lost the national-security narrative — and abandoned their role as defenders of the homeland — came in June 2003, just six weeks after the Saddam regime fell. That month, the Democratic party launched a national television campaign claiming that Bush lied to the American people to lure them into a war that was “unnecessary,” “immoral,” and “illegal.”

It was a meme that carried Barack Obama into the White House and built the Democratic majorities in Congress that could pass Obamacare.  Only, of course, if Bush had "lied" then the Democrats had lied too, because they had access to the same intelligence.

Bush could not have lied to Kerry or the congressional Democrats about WMDs in Iraq, because Kerry and other Democrats sat on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees and had access to the same intelligence data that Bush relied on to make his case for the war. When the Democrats authorized and supported the war, they knew everything that Bush knew. The claim that he lied to get their support was itself the biggest lie of the war. Its only purpose was to hide the Democrats’ own perfidy in abandoning the nation’s mission for partisan gain, and to discredit the president and turn the country against him, at whatever cost, in the hope of winning the 2004 election.

In Horowitz's view Republicans lost their right to be taken seriously as defenders of the homeland when they failed to push back on the "Bush lied" meme.  So here we are ten years later and Republicans just lost an election where no Republican candidate made national security a big issue.  Indeed, when Michele Bachmann and others made an issue of Hilary Clinton aide Huma Abedin's family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, even Republicans sat on her.



Why won't the Republicans fight, asks Horowitz?



The answer is, because they don't want their army to get demolished.  For warriors like Horowitz it is always time to fight.  But Republicans understand that they must pick their fights.  They cannot, like the Democrats, inject their memes into the public square and expect them to find their way into the mind of every American.  In the summer of 2011 Republicans could not have won the hearts and minds of Americans with complaints about a "jobless recovery".  They just don't have the cultural power.  Sometimes they just have to retreat.



Let's look at the political cultural scene from 30,000 feet.  On the one hand there are the liberals, who don't really like capitalism and don't really like western cultural hegemony.  They see themselves as an educated elite with the moral right to rule America.  Their political power is based on identity politics and the distribution of free stuff by the welfare state.



On the other hand there are the conservatives, who believe in capitalism and believe in an aggressive defense of western culture, from the nation state as a solvent for tribal animosities to the idea of limited government, civil society, traditional religion, and traditional families.



But the American people are right in the middle.  They don't really like capitalism although they like personal achievement; and they like the free stuff from the welfare state.  They are patriotic, but also tribal.  They are traditional, but they like to kick over the cultural traces.  And they vacillate between isolationism and making the world safe for democracy.



In other words, liberals and conservatives have to dissemble.   Liberals have to pretend that they like a strong growth economy and the flag of the United States and "working families."  Conservatives have to pretend that they support Social Security and Medicare and "our teachers."



You can only win as Ronald Reagan when liberals have been messing things up royally for a few years.  You can only win as Barack Obama and bring the troops home when the American people get tired of war.



But if the facts of life are conservative, as Margaret Thatcher may have said, then the facts will eventually win.



Liberals had a chance to adopt the broad outlines of a new political consensus in the 1980s to replace the Keynesian administrative welfare state consensus of the post-WWII years.  But they didn't.  They didn't buy supply-side economics, they didn't buy the reduction of administrative regulation, and they didn't buy the idea that the US should oppose totalitarianism.



The Obama years are the full-dress trial of whether America can flourish with a return to Keynesianism in economics, regulation in government, and "leading from behind" in foreign policy.



In my view, given the liberal refusal to learn the lessons of the Reagan years, we are bound to learn the Reagan lessons the hard way, in economic distress, in cultural decay, and in an advance of Iranian-led Islamism.



When the American people have had enough they will tell us, and there will be plenty of Republican politicians ready, willing, and able to lead us to the sunny green uplands of conservative prosperity and civil society cooperation.



But until then, we must learn to wait.

Keynes is Still Get-out-of-a-jam Economics

Oh dear.  Niall Ferguson, author of numerous books on finance and banking, has received an offer he couldn't refuse from the gay mafia.

He made the mistake of attributing the Keynesian formula of borrow and spend and inflate to Keynes's gayness and childlessness.  Good lord, man.  You should know that you are not allowed to make silly remarks on gays in today's America.  Christians, black conservatives: open season.  But not gays.

Can't you read?  It says right there in the First Amendment that hate speech, as defined by liberal activists, is not a right.

OK.  So I'll retreat to the second line of defense.  Keynes thought the way he did because he was a Bloomsberry, and wanted to knock down everything that Victorians and Edwardians held dear.  All part of the left-wing attack on capitalism and individualism and Christianity.  Nothing personal, old chap.  I expect that Ferguson had something to say about this in The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization.

Because the whole point of cultural leftism is to oppose and marginalize the growth and achievement ethic of the capitalist entrepreneur.  When you do this you have to replace it with something else, and the Bloomsberries and lefties were happy to oblige.  That something else is the administrative welfare state.

But the administrative welfare state creates a problem.  It puts the credit system on the moral equivalent of a war footing.

In the old days, a nation's economy would only get into trouble as a result of a war.  War credits would upset the balance between debtor and creditor.  During the war debtors would benefit as inflation and government borrowing reduced the value of their debts.  After the war creditors would benefit as financial assets increased in value.  Deflation.

But in the welfare state the government inflates the economy even in peace time.  The result is credit booms that end in recession.

That's all very well, but the government still has to keep paying off its supporters through its welfare-state distribution programs.

Under the old gold standard, you took your lumps.  If the market crashed then bad debts got liquidated and people started over.  Of course, the central bank acted to prevent a liquidity crisis and the collapse of the whole credit system, including both sound and unsound borrowers.

But in the crisis of the Great Depression the political hacks at the Federal Reserve Board didn't understand their job.  They allowed banks to fail and allowed the money supply to contract through the knock-on effect of bank failures.  This was regarded as a failure of capitalism.

Also, the US government raised taxes and raised government spending during the collapse.

It was Keynes who had the genius to come up with a plausible economic doctrine to prevent a recurrence of the Great Crash.  Government would now do what came naturally, and borrow and inflate madly during a recession.  That would tide the economy over until business activity recovered.

Probably, Keynes was wrong.  Probably the only thing needful to do is to stop systemic bank failures until the panic is over.  In other words the government uses its credit to bail out the banks and guarantee deposits until the liquidity crisis passes.  Then it's back to business as usual.

It's salutary to look at the lessons of the Crash of 2008.  In that case, with the failure of Lehman Brothers, the government did not perform its proper function of preventing systemic bank failures.  So you could say that it failed to learn the lesson of the Great Depression.

The policy to prevent systemic bank failure is not a Keynesian innovation.  You can see it developed in the classic Lombard Street by Walter Bagehot.  That was back in the 19th century.

Really, the danger of Keynesianism is not that Keynes was gay, it is that it is causing on the wrong thing.  The problem is not a lack of stimulus.  The problem is to deal with the load of bad debt that appears in a market crash.  In the 1929 crash the problem was bad margin credit on stocks and bad farm loans.  In the 2008 crash the problem was bad mortgage loans.

So the task for the government during a credit crisis is to deal with the uncertainty --  the lack of "credit" -- caused by the bad debt, the debt that is secured by assets that are no longer worth enough to liquidate the debt without loss and the debt of non-performing debtors.  Keynes muddied the waters by focusing attention on the aftermath rather than the crisis itself.

(One of the ways of dealing with the aftermath is with a "bad bank," a government bank that picks up and sequesters all the bad debt so that the players in the credit market can now be confident that their counterparties can be trusted.)

But all that misses the basic point, that modern welfare state governments weaken the credit system because they are always gaming it to pay off their supporters.  Who knows when we will be able to deal with that problem?

Nobody Knows Nothing Except Cooperation

My whole life is about understanding the world in which we live: the world of the utterly unappreciated  social miracles like the "price system" and the "credit system" that are not really systems at all, but universes of humans cooperating together.



So here comes Kevin Williamson from National Review writing about the same thing.  He reminds us of Leonard Reed's great discovery: "Nobody knows how to make a pencil."  There are a few people, somewhere in this world, that know how to do bits of it.  But for the rest of us, all we need to know is how to use a pencil.

That is the paradox of social knowledge: Of course we know how to make a pencil, even though none of us knows how to make a pencil, and pencils get made with very little drama and no central authority, corporate or political, overseeing their creation.

But if everyone can enjoy the use of a pencil or an iPhone, how come the Obama daughters go to a better school that the offspring of immigrants?

The reason for that is politics: not liberal politics, not conservative politics, not bad politics, but politics per se... The useful knowledge in any modern society is distributed rather than centralized... Markets work for the same reason that the Internet works: They are not organizations, but disorganizations... pockets of organization, their internal structures and relationships to one another in a constant state of flux. Market propositions are experimental propositions.

So when you have centralized systems -- of education, for example -- you get the Obama daughters getting a good education and the poor getting a lousy education.  Because that's how politics works, always and everywhere.



And then we come to the central truth, the one we do not want to confront.

 Conservatives like to say “Markets work,” as though that were an explanation of anything. What we really are saying is: “Failure works.” Corporations are mortal. Failure is not only an important part of the market process, it is the most important part of the market process.

Failure means that every corporation goes to die, because in the end it fails to adapt, fails to anticipate the market, fails to serve the consumer.  Want to find an immortal corporation?  Try politics and the US Postal Service, or Amtrak, or your local education monopoly.  They are not really immortal, but living in an half-dead zombie existence, not really producing wealth and prosperity but sucking the blood out of the living to continue a twilight existence.  Being already half-dead they do not grow or evolve.  They merely suck the life out of others.



We do not have a market system or a profit system or a price system or a credit system, for these human cooperations we insult with the notion of "system" are anything but.  They are organisms, joinings, adaptation, trust, good-will, and hard-learned lessons.



The hardest thing for everyone is to surrender to the challenge of constant change.  Everyone longs for a reprieve from change.  The disappointed liberal longs for the certainties of the 1950s when everyone had a lifetime job -- except they didn't.  The conservative longs for the halcyon days of the nuclear family -- except that it never was.  The academic longs to implement his intellectual system -- except that no system survives the first day of implementation.  But reality is much bigger than that.  It is a triumph of not of dominating system, or frantic competition, but cooperation.  Williamson again.

But what is remarkable about human action is not its competitiveness but its almost limitless cooperativeness. Competition is one of the ways in which we learn how best to cooperate with one another and thereby deal with the problem of complexity — it is a means to the end of social cooperation. Cooperation exists elsewhere in the animal kingdom, but human beings cooperate on a species-wide, planetary level, which is a relatively new development in our evolution, the consequences of which we have not yet fully appreciated. If you consider the relationship of the organism to its constituent organs, the relationship of the organ to its cells, or the relationship of the single cell to its organelles, it would not be an overstatement to say that the division of labor is the essence of life itself: Birds do it, bees do it, but human beings do it better. 

But Marx, as we recently complained, wrote that the division of labor was an inhuman and destructive alienation.  What is wrong with these people?

Liberals on Koch

Years and years ago the culture king Richard Hofstadter wrote The Paranoid Style in American Politics.  That was in the glory days when liberals knew they were going to inherit the earth.  Here is Hofstadter stating his thesis.

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years, we have seen angry minds at work, mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated, in the Goldwater movement, how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But, behind this, I believe, there is a style of mind that is far from new, and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style, simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.

He goes on write about fear of Illuminism, Freemasonry, the Jesuits, ending up with the paranoia of McCarthyism and the John Birch Society.



Only, of course, there really were Communists in the State Department and they really were spying for the Soviet Union.



I like to say that, when people lose four presidential elections in a row, they start to get crazy, and they start to look for something under the bed.  That is what happened to the right in the late 1940s.  Also, of course, when things start to go wrong people are tempted to see the hand of Satan.



Things aren't going too well for liberals right now, and so they are inclined to look for the hand of Satan and hidden conspiracies.



Like the Koch Brothers, principal owners of Koch Industries, a private multinational corporation

involved in core industries such as the manufacturing, refining and distribution of petroleum, chemicals, energy, fiber, intermediates and polymers, minerals, fertilizers, pulp and paper, chemical technology equipment, ranching, finance, commodities trading, as well as other ventures and investments. The firm employs 50,000 people in the United States and another 20,000 in 59 other countries.

I don't know who first decided to gin the Kochs up as Principal Corporate Villains, but you can see the convenience of putting a human face on oil companies and conservative foundations.



Your average Exxon-Mobil is merely a public corporation led by faceless corporate bureaucrats.  The Koch brothers are libertarians that fund Reason magazine, the Cato Institute, have put a bit of money into climate skepticism, and also do things like fund a new science center at their New England prep school, Deerfield Academy.



Yes, the Koch brothers are libertarians not snaggle-toothed Christian conservatives.



Now the Koch brothers are thinking of buying the Tribune newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times that was once owned by the liberal Chandler family.  It turns out that the journalists at the Times are terrified.

The thought of the Koch brothers purchasing the Los Angeles Times so distressed staffers attending a recent in-house award ceremony that half of them raised their hands when asked if they would quit their jobs should the paper — which has come out of bankruptcy court and is very much for sale — fall into the two oil billionaires’ portfolio, the Huffington Post reported recently.

Oh please.



In my view liberals are shooting themselves in the foot by getting their knickers in a twist over the Koch brothers -- not to mention Christian conservatives, right-wing "hate groups" and corporate personhood.  It shows that liberals are worried.  And you don't want to let your enemy think that you are getting a case of the shivers.



If liberals had any sense they would be working night and day trying to figure out how to fix the mess in the economy and the train wreck that we call the welfare state.  If liberals could straighten that out it wouldn't matter what a couple of libertarian businessmen were doing or what the Christian conservatives were doing.  Liberals would be expanding their majority as Americans in their millions would come to experience the liberals as wise and sensible leaders.



But in fact the liberals are sitting in a circle complaining that the all-powerful Koch brothers aided by the wascally Wepublicans in Congress have spoiled the soup.  They have no ideas for jump-starting the economy except more government spending and more debt; they have no ideas for fixing the welfare state other than more of the same.  Oh and they think it would be a great idea to go back to the tax rates of the 1950s when everyone had a good job at good wages at a big corporation.



That's when people gravitate towards the paranoid style in American politics.  When they are flat out of ideas and flat out of get up and go.


I was talking to a liberal friend the other day.  She still thinks that Barack Obama is an intellectual.  And she is old enough to know that you cannot believe anything you read about presidents until people start to write the show-and-tell biographies long after the powerful have left the stage.



Really, the liberal obsession with the Koch brothers is the most encouraging political portent out there.  It shows that liberals have lost it.

The Theory of Willful Blindness

A while back I took a look at "Marx's Five Big Mistakes," five big things that Karl Marx got wrong.  I mean things like the immiseration of the working class, the alienation of workers by the division of labor, the labor theory of value, the idea that bureaucracy would wither away under socialism, and that people would abandon the division of labor under socialism.

But then I got to wondering about the willful blindness that keeps people even today believing in these discredited notions.  I mean this.  You have to be really determined not to see if you believe still in the immiseration of the working class.  Yet tons of people fall for it every time that some new technology wipes out some industry of neo-buggy-makers.  It's the end of the world, they say, and soon nobody will have jobs.  

Or the division of labor.  Even the career coach mavens, people like the crazed Penelope Trunk, tell us to forget being a generalist.  Specialize on something, something you will find by trial and error.  Deadly serious sociologists like Emile Durkheim write that the division of labor is a manifestation of the nature of humans as social animals.  In social setting some individuals specialize on one task and others specialize on another task.  That's why it makes sense for them to cooperate.  So how could this be alienating?

I've suggested, following Anthony Giddens, that Marx came up with his stuff because the generation of Germans in the 1840s was beside itself about the backwardness of Germany.  Here were France and Britain with modern governments and there was Germany stuck in the feudal past with its little states and its disunity.

It wasn't just Marx.  Gertrude Himmelfarb, in her 1984 book The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age, suggests that the feeling of existential panic was widespread.  Things were changing so fast that people were convinced that disaster was just around the corner.

Obviously this sense of existential panic is a very human thing.  In our own time we have the panic over global warming.  Experience a trend in increasing temperature over a couple of decades and you'll get a ton of people panicking.  End of the world!

Now, the situation in England around 1800 is epitomized by the Rev. Thomas Malthus and his Essay on the Principle of Population first published in 1798, in which Malthus predicted that population would always outrun the resources available to sustain it.  Food increases arithmetically; population increases geometrically.  The poor were doomed.  At the time that Malthus published his first edition many people thought that Britain was losing population.  Then the Census of 1801 showed that population was increasing.  Who'd have thought it?

Actually it has turned out that Adam Smith was probably the best forecaster of those troubled times, according to Himmelfarb.

He made poverty remediable, not by interfering with the operation of natural laws but by the natural expansion of the economy that was the inevitable result of those laws.  Instead of pitting man against nature, labor against machine, class against class, worker against worker, he presumed an essential harmony of interests, in which everyone would benefit from the "natural progress of opulence."

That's what actually happened.  In 1800 the modern progress of opulence was just getting started, and still, it may be that you ain't seen nothing yet.

To Himmelfarb, it appears that a concern for the poor is a consequence of prosperity.  Alexis de Tocqueville went to England in the 1830s and was astonished both at the prosperity he encountered and also the numbers of the poor.  Himmelfarb writes of his opinion:

While "the English poor appear almost rich to the French poor; and the latter are so regarded by the Spanish poor," the number of paupers in each of these countries was in inverse relationship to the actual condition of the poor.

It's as though we experience things as worse the better they get.  And why not "do something" about the poor once you have the level of opulence to do it?

This is the real existential challenge for conservatives.  Elites are always going to panic over something or other.  It's what a ruling class does to justify its importance.  It panicked over the poor in 1800.  Over the working class in the 1840s.  Over the deserted farm in the 1930s.  Over global cooling in the 1970s.  Over "peak oil" in the 1990s.  Over global warming in the 2000s.

It's the job of conservatives to dampen these wild pendulum swings.  Because whatever the panic around the next corner, what in the world is going to improve things better than the natural human adaptability implemented in the price system and the credit system?  Certainly, it cannot possibly be another bureaucratic program run by the ruling class.

There's probably a deep reason why people are always so willfully blind.  It may be because every living thing must ignore most of the stimulus it receives through its five senses and only respond to things that are genuinely life-threatening.  So we are blind to most of the things in the world.

But the trick is to make sure that we aren't turning away from the one important stimulus that really is going to kill us.

And that's not easy to deal with.  It's probably why we humans are so diverse.  Some people respond one way to a crisis and some respond another way.  Chances are that one of us will be right, and the human experiment will continue.

The Greater Pigford Problem

Big Whoopee.  The New York Times has finally done a bit of investigating into the Pigford scandal, and found it a cesspit of corruption.



The original scandal was the the US Department of Agriculture had discriminated against some black farmers in the awarding of crop loans.  In 1999 the Clinton Administration agreed to pay $50,000 to each farmer that had been discriminated against in the period 1981 to 1996.  But it turned out that the cure was worse than the disease as tens of thousands of blacks signed up for free money.



Even Barack Obama got into the act, in 2007.

In 2007, then-Senator Barack Obama pushed for allowing late claims to be processed and setting up another billion-dollar payoff fund, in what became known as Pigford II, setting off a free-for-all. As of February 2006, “over 97,000 people had filed claims under the consent decree or requests to file late claims.”

How many black farmers had been discriminated against?  One USDA administrator reckoned, in testimony to Congress: "about fifty."



The problem here is not merely corruption, or the use of race to beat up on people making accusations about corruption.  It is the bigger problem of retributive politics.  Let alone redistributive politics.



What good does it do to hand around free money to any politically favored group when the group as a whole is cratering in the larger economy?



Here we have President Obama, the First Black President.  You'd think he'd really concentrate on formulating policy and executing on it so that the lives of black people would really improve.



You'd think.



But the results are now coming in.  Blacks are doing worse than the average American in the Obama economy.  Much worse.  In January 2009 the unemployment rate was 7.8 percent.  In March 2013 it was 7.6 percent.



For whites the unemployment rate in January 2009 was 7.1 percent.  Now it is 6.7 percent.





For blacks the unemployment rate in January 2009 was 12.7 percent.  Now it is 13.3 percent.

For black youth the unemployment rate in January 2009 was 34.8 percent.  Now it is 33.8 percent.

What we are seeing is same old same old.  From a president that promised to transform America.

You can check the numbers here.

So, what's the point of a First Black President if he can't do anything at the macroeconomic level for blacks?

Let's assume that the president really wants to help people of color.  Let's assume that he really wants to improve the lives, and especially the economic lives, of black people.

Given such a record of failure, you would have to assume that the president has pursued exactly the wrong policy to make life better for blacks.  Assuming that he honestly wants to do the right thing, you would have to assume that he doesn't have a clue what the right thing is.  Or worse, that the policy he thinks is the right thing is in fact tragically mistaken, and doesn't help blacks in the least.

In fact we had a curious confirmation of that last week when it turned out the sector that did best economically in the first two years of the Obama administration was the top 7 percent.

Why was that?  Well, the rich did well because their stocks rebounded from the 2008 crash while the home prices for the 93 percent didn't rebound.

Gee now, I wonder why?  Could it be that the average person was encouraged by the government to get way overleveraged by government programs that subsidized home mortgages?  And that the government subsidies led to a bubble in home prices?  And that the government in particular encouraged loans to sub-prime borrowers, particularly minorities?  And that minorities were hardest hit by the subsequent crash in home prices, because they had the least equity in their homes?

Do you think that maybe, after President Obama is gone and that racial minorities no longer have their racial pride to look after, that minority voters will respond to a political meme that declares the Democrats just don't have a clue what they are doing?

Because, really, the economic policy of the Democratic Party is really Pigford writ large.  Democrats believe that the way to help minorities is to find a racial scab and scratch it.  Find a racial wrong and pay reparations to the victims.

But the problem is that after the wrong has been righted and the reparations paid and the free stuff handed out to the Democratic Party supporters, the problem is still there.  

The victims have to get out and get a job.  How would they do that when the Democrats have been training them fo decades to believe in winning the political lottery as the meaning of life?