Mucking Up the Trust System

The whole point of the modern global economy is Trust.  It instantiates the idea that we can work and produce in relationships with people who are not our blood kin.



Because we mostly take it for granted that we can trust people across the world to produce a good for us, it is difficult to understand how radical this is.



One way to appreciate the radicalism of global commercial trust is to rehearse the culture of China.  It is said that what prevented China from taking over the world was that the power of the top-down imperial state forced ordinary people to retreat into and defend themselves from the rapacious Mandarins in their kin networks.



In other words, a flourishing commercial culture requires the emergence of a trust culture and requires a government that keeps its hands off the people and their business.  China in the early modern period lacked this culture and so it suffered the two century humiliation of European dominance.



But don't worry.  Today's West is busily trying to demolish the trust culture that conquered the world.  That's what President Obama is doing when he, as the president of all of us, continues his Alinsky tactic of division from reelection campaign to everyday governance.



There's nothing remarkable in what the president is doing.  It's what any political leader does.  He rallies his supporters behind him in a war against evil.  The innovation is that never since the 1930s has a president rallied his supporters so nakedly against the productive sector, corporations and successful businessmen.



The trouble is that the president is demolishing the trust culture upon which our prosperity is founded.  Lewis Lehrman, in a quick history of money and credit, shows how the government's appetite for resources leads it to demolish the delicate skeins of money and credit.



Money and credit are based on trust, they entail "moral obligation," Lehrman writes.  Inflation through unrestricted fiat money creation is the breakdown of trustworthy money.

Inflation prevails in America and the world today because of a breakdown of the institutions of trust that convertibility to gold once provided for the dollar. People no longer gladly accept and hold the dollar for long periods. They try to get rid of it in favor of something real: commodities, automobiles, real estate, equities, art, antiques, or coins. Producers and consumers have lost faith in the dollar because the government and the Federal Reserve have created more dollars than participants in the market desire to hold. Government overproduced money and credit in order to finance its colossal deficits and manipulate the economy, prices, demand, and employment levels. As a result, the paper dollar has ceased to be real money.

The problem is that inflation leads from bad to worse.  "Inflation or monetary depreciation entails a price revolution. It often precedes, and indeed it may cause, a more thoroughgoing political revolution."



There's a book about that: The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History by David Hackett Fischer.  The classic Price Revolution is France in the 18th century.  France found that it could not keep up with the Brits to finance their Second Hundred Years War and so defaulted on its sovereign debt, again and again.  Naturally the French blamed the greedy bankers.



But the problem with screwing up the government's finances is that it lowers the prestige of the ruling class enough so that, in the end, you get the French Revolution.  Not that the French Revolution was much of an improvement on the douceur de la vie under the ancien régime.



The fact is that politics is about division.  A politician must divide the nation into "us" --  the ruling class and its supporters -- and "them" -- those dastardly Tea Party types that deserve what they get from the IRS.  Everybody does it; it's just that some people do it more ruthlessly than others, eh, Mr. President?



But the way you do division is to sow distrust among the people.  As in greedy insurance companies and greedy bankers and corporate greed.  Because if people trust their local supermarket and their local gas station and their local doctor why would they demand that the government solves the problem of greedy corporations and tax the rich to teach them a lesson?



Government is force, but even government needs an excuse, a justification, for waging war on regime opponents.  If you wonder how it's done, just listen to President Obama for a month or two.  Every word out of our president's mouth is about preparing the battlefield for another campaign of division.  It sows the fruited plain with the tares of mistrust.  To justify another program of coercion.



The great achievement of Christianity, according to Max Weber, was to get Europeans to trust people outside the limits of blood kin.



The great achievement of the Left is to get people everywhere to mistrust and hate anyone outside their "identity" group.



Go figure.

What Is To Be Done?

What is wrong with the Republican Party?  And what is to be done about it?

That seems to be the consensus problem-of-the-week for conservatives.  From Bob Dole to Ben Domenech.  And let's not forget the March Commentary piece by Michael Gerson and Peter Wehner.

And a reader of my "Riots and Liberals" piece asked for more than just diagnosis.  How do we deal with liberals and "disincentivize their actions."

Gerson and Wehner call for a five point program for Republican revival.  First the problems:

1. Fewer white people, so Republicans must reach out.
2. Foreign policy failure, and Republicans have been losing the argument in the war on terror.
3. Weak candidates.
4. Stale ideas
5. Reputation for judgementalism.

Their solution?

1. Focus "on the economic concerns of working-and middle-class Americans."  Like "end corporate welfare as we know it."
2. Welcome immigrants instead of dissing them.
3. "[E]xpress and demonstrate a commitment to the common good". Defuse the idea that Republicans are hyper-individualistic with appeals to "civil society."
4. Make GOP approach to social issues "aspirational rather than alienating."  The problem is not gay marriage, it is the collapse of heterosexual marriage.
5. Don't make war on science.

OK.  so what does Ben Domenech have to say?  He points out that the Republicans have done best when they have been populists.  So is there a way for them to be populist and also "restore the party’s standing as the adult in the room"?

Maybe. He thinks the GOP can be populist and also call for bold reform of, e..g., Social Security and Medicare.

The truth is, however, that politics runs on fear, fear of the enemy.  And if that is not enough, it crosses over into the territory of religion and rails on about good and evil.

So it must take up the problems of the moment and drench them in the language of warfare and the opposition of right and wrong.  

That is what liberals do when they talk about corporate greed and intolerance.  Why can't I get a job?  It's because of greedy corporations.  Why is my house in foreclosure?  It's because of greedy bankers.  Why does health care cost so much?  It's because of those greedy insurance companies.  Why is my life a mess?  It's because of those judgemental conservatives.  And after they have got people riled up then liberals proceed to implement their top-down centralizing ideas.

In a way, the ideas don't matter.  It is the Alinskyizing of the guilty parties that creates the opportunity for political change.  You have to have things going wrong and have the effrontery to blame the ruling class.  Then you get into power and you start to legislate.

So you can expect GOP rhetoric in the next couple of years to return to the "liberals, liberals, liberals" line of the good old days.  Why can't I get a job?  It's because of job-killing liberals.  Why can't I get health insurance?  It's because of corrupt and unjust Obamacare liberals.  Why does it cost me $100 to fill up my truck?  It's because of corrupt liberals and greedy green energy.  Why is food so expensive?  It's because of cruel liberals forcing farmers to grow corn for fuel instead of food.

But even then, conservatives are operating under a disadvantage, because liberals, as the ruling class, get to define reality.  The fact is that liberals get to tell little children what to believe in school, and liberals get to tell young adults what to believe in movies and on TV and the social media sites.

Conservatives have plenty of good ideas, but, we will find that we can only go forward with those ideas after the liberal ruling class has been utterly discredited.  Maybe it can't happen until the current school system breaks down and middle-class parents desert it.

But there is a light in the tunnel.  It is that the Obama way is going to get utterly discredited in the next three years, as scandals multiply and people start to suffer until the administrative monstrosity of Obamacare.

But still, so long as liberals can hand out free stuff to their supporters, so long will they maintain political power.

My point is this.  We know what needs to be done.  But Americans will not agree to change until they see disaster in the face.  They would be fools to do otherwise.  When that day arrives conservatives need to be ready not just with the right politics and a program, but also a moral/cultural system to demolish liberals as a ruling class.

Then we can move into a better world.

Poor Bloody Corporations

You can see what the Dems are up to.  Haul Apple CEO Time Scott up on Capitol Hill.  Get shocked, shocked that Apple has avoided billions in taxes.



Then Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) calls for tax increases on corporations.  Says he: "We need additional revenue from corporations whose contributions to the treasury have gone down."  I guess he's looking at this chart.

It shows that corporate income taxes have been going down as a percent of GDP over the long term.  But what of it? Is it because corporate incomes taxes have gone down as a percent of GDP or because corporate profits have gone down as a percent of GDP?



And anyway, corporate income tax rates are higher in the US than almost anywhere else.



So does it matter?



Put it this way.  If you are a government dependent, then of course you want to suck the economy for whatever you need for your next check.



But if you are a young person looking to get a job or pursue a career then the only thing that you care about -- or should care about if you have a clue about the economy -- is robust and increasing corporate profits.



And you certainly don't want corporate profits going to the government where they won't create new jobs.



Hey, maybe the extra tax money will go for a couple dozen new $177,000 a year Lois Lerners at the IRS to help implement Obamacare.  What's not to like!



And anyway, the idea that the corporate income tax is a problem misses the point.  Corporations are the government's main tax collector.  They collect the myriad taxes on labor that the laboring working stiff or stiffette never sees.  There's the 7.6 percent employer share of the FICA tax.  There's unemployment tax.  There's workers comp.  That's all paid by corporations -- out of money that ought to be going to workers.  You see, the ruling class decided decades ago that working stiffs couldn't really handle their own money.  So it would be safer for the government to look after it and put it in a Trust Fund (you know, just like the rich!) until the worker needed it.



Meanwhile the ruling class could use the money to buy votes.



Obviously our liberal friends are focusing on the corporate income tax because its an easy way to gin up outrage.  I recently had an email exchange with a chap that had all the talking points to hand.  The unspoken assumption was that we need the money for programs for people.  So the money has to come from somewhere.



No it doesn't.  In my view we need to break the spell at its source.  Government is force, so it stands to reason that everything the government does is done under the color of compulsion.  Whaddya mean that people can't be trusted to save for their own retirement?  Whaddya mean that seniors are helpless fools that can't pay for their own health care?  Whaddya mean that parents are so dumb that they can't be trusted to educate their own children?



That's what I contest.  Because once you have conceded that people are dumb or something then you have conceded the main point.  You have conceded that average people must be forced to do the right thing; the only question is how much force is necessary.



Government, on my view is the agent for defense against enemies foreign and domestic.  For that you need force.



Are we really saying that corporations are the enemy?  And rich people too?  Of course some people get rich because of government.  There are senators that have become multimillionaires without ever working in the private sector.  There are corporations that get rich from government contracts.  There are corporations that get rich from government subsidies.  Think green energy.



But then there is Apple.  Apple got rich on the vision of Steve Jobs to create the real life Dick Tracy watch, a tiny appliance that you can use as a audio or video link with anyone in the world.



Apple needs to pay more taxes?  So that it has less money to invent cool new appliances?



And let us not forget that cell-phones are perhaps even more beneficial in the Third World than in the good old USA.  Think of sardine fishermen off the west coast of India talking on their cell-phones with the sardine buyers in each nearby port to find the best price for their catch.



Please.  No. More. Taxes.  Because all government is a waste.  All of it.

All Wars Must End. Then What?

What are we to make of the president's End of the War speech at the National Defense University last week.  It's the one in which he said:

But this war, like all wars, must end.  That’s what history advises.  That’s what our democracy demands.

He is talking about the AUMF, the Congressional Authorization to Use Military Force that is now "nearly 12 years old."  He wants a national conversation:

 I intend to engage Congress about the existing Authorization to Use Military Force, or AUMF, to determine how we can continue to fight terrorism without keeping America on a perpetual wartime footing.

Is this a practical step, a final end to the failed Bush doctrine, or a grievous betrayal of the young men that fought and died in the war on terror, a progressive muddle that misunderstands the issue of militant Islam?



The answer, of course, is All of the Above.



On balance, I think this is a good thing.  Not because President Obama is doing the right thing, not at all.  I rate President Obama as a man that usually fails to think out of the box of his postmodern identity liberalism.  That is a failing that is costing and will cost America a bundle.  The one thing we need today in America is leadership that can think outside of the liberal conventional wisdom.



Surely, though, after twelve years since 9/11, it is time to step back and think seriously about what we are doing in the Middle East, in the war on terror, in the cultural conflicts of conservatism vs. the welfare state, secularism vs. religion, Christianity vs. Islam.



When you do that it is not that hard to decide what to do.



At the tactical level we need to make things difficult for individual terrorists and work on making them appear shameful and monstrous.  And please, there must be a way to make our airplanes safe other than the dead hand of the bureaucracy at the Transportation Security Administration.



At the strategic level we want to make life difficult for Iran and bolster the strategic situation of Israel.  It doesn't hurt that Israel now has petroleum wells out in the Mediterranean and that the fracking revolution is going to marginalize Mideast oil.



But it is at the grand strategic or cultural vision level that we have the real problem.  It is not because of Islam.  It is because of the problem of liberalism.  Instead of building a society of independent sociable individuals that freely and generously work and save and give, we have been busily building, for the last century, a balkanized culture defined by the old marks of identity -- sex, race, and tribe -- with a powerful addiction to government "free stuff."



Why is that?  It's simple.  That is the way you increase the power of the liberal ruling class.  Divide and conquer, it is called.  Liberals want to segregate the population into separate identity ghettos and rile up each identity group with hate.  That's the way that government thrives.  When everyone is a helpless victim, surrounded by malevolent forces like The Man or The Great Satan, then they need government to protect them from everything.



The great virtue of the feckless Obama years, the years the locust ate, is that at the end of it we will be forced to get serious -- about not just the problem of Islam but the greater question of the putrid problems in our own culture.  For that we can thank our First Black President.



All we know is that it ain't gonna be easy.  But then nothing worthwhile ever was easy.

Critical Theory: Not Just a Punching Bag

Conservatives like to use the Frankfurt School (of neo-Marxists) and their "critical theory" as punching bags.  Not to mention as the source of all our problems.

Yes, it's true that all the cruel and unjust ideological repression against conservatives through the application of what we call "political correctness" seems to issue from the ideas of the Frankfurt chappies like Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and second-stringer Herbert Marcuse.

But in my view it is better for conservatives to study and understand the ideas of the Frankfurt School than to stigmatize and reject them as, for instance, the excellent Bill Whittle does here.

That's because if conservatives want to win the culture war we need to be able to understand and transcend the ideas of the left.  We need to grasp the kernels of truth in their critiques of bourgeois society, and then go on to show how they completely miss the point.

Let's take Max Horkheimer's definition of critical theory as an example.  He wrote that a theory is

critical insofar as it seeks "to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them."

Now, of course, lefties use critical theory in the limited scope that assumes that it is traditionally marginalized groups that need to be liberated and bourgeois culture that they need to be liberated from.

But what about liberals?  Think of the awful liberal bubble of The New York Times and NPR.  Think how they enslave liberal minds.  Think of a glorious future in which liberals could free themselves from their ideological devotion to "good" government and comprehensive and mandatory universal administrative programs designed and implemented by "large-minded" people.

Why not use critical theory to liberate liberals from the ideas that enslave them?  Who else could do the job but conservatives?  Actually, Jonah Goldberg already did it with his Liberal Fascism.

The Frankfurt School originated after World War I when German intellectuals realized that Marxism as defined by Marx and implemented by the Bolsheviks was a mess.  So they went to work to understand where Marx had gone wrong and to try to rescue their millennial Marxian hopes from despair.

By the time that Horkheimer and Adorno wrote The Dialectic of Enlightenment in the US during World War II they had despaired of the Enlightenment project.  Because they saw that fascism was already encoded in the notion of enlightenment and reason.  What man wants from nature is to dominate it and other men, they wrote.

When Herbert Marcuse came up with One-dimensional Man in the 1960s his grand contribution amounted to a lame notion that, now that the working class had made its peace with capitalism, narcotically immunized by big media and and advertising and consumer goods, the would-be revolutionaries would have to look elsewhere for the cannon fodder for their revolution.

But real thinkers like Jürgen Habermas began on a solution to the problem of enlightenment and its identification with domination.  He revived the idea that we are not just mechanical wind-up toys, cogs in a rational machine, but communicators.  So his Theory of Communicative Action proposes that the systems world of Enlightenment and instrumental reason should be balanced by a life-world of communication and negotiation.  In German, the "Action" in his book's title is "Handeln."  It means not just action but exchange, negotiation.  It also had a use in German as a pejorative when applied to Jews as hagglers and peddlers.

Now, of course, the silly lefty liberals in our US universities have made a complete dog's breakfast of "critical theory."  They have fashioned it into a club with which to beat conservatives and stigmatize us as racists, sexists, anti-choice fascists and homophobes.  Not to mention that their Gramscian "march through the institutions" turned the academy into a sterile monoculture.

Be of good cheer.  All is not lost.  We can see, finally, as we get into the scandal zone of the Obama administration that critical theory is leading liberals off the cliff.  It's encouraged them to think that they, the lame critical theorists, are the good guys, and the defenders of freedom and tradition are pond scum.

The thing is that critical theory and postmodernism can be applied to anything.  Used judiciously, they can be used to do a penetrating critique of any cultural tradition and expose its assumptions and hypocrisies.

Like Obama and the Obamanauts.

So I say: forget about trashing the Frankfurt School and critical theory.  Read up on it.  Then apply its tools against fin de siècle liberalism.  Because everything that liberals say about the patriarchy or dead white males or capitalism applies in spades against the monstrous self-serving ruling-class ideology we call liberalism or progressivism or multiculturalism or whatever.

And this is just the moment to do it, as the Obama years-the-locust-ate collapse in a welter of scandals that all issue from the self-inflicted wounds of liberalism and its foolish attempt to keep the Marxist dream alive.

Let's face it: the original Marxism did nothing but harm to the working class.  Finally, through a maelstrom of purges and death camps the working class emerged and made a separate peace with capitalism.  So what did the Marxists propose as an encore?  To apply the same ideas to what Herbert Marcuse called "a new substratum of outcasts and outsiders."  It's the same thing.  Trust in us, the noble overclass, and we will protect you, the minority and the marginalized, from the evil white man and his cunning plan to oppress and exploit you.  And by the way, whaddya think of this free stuff?

Already, back in the land of Israel, Esau found out that it is not a good idea to exchange your birthright for a mess of pottage.  It didn't do the working class much good to exchange their benefit clubs and friendly societies for the administrative benefits and "free stuff" of the welfare state.  It isn't doing much good for today's "women and minorities."  Because, relying on government, they are always "hardest hit" when something goes wrong.  That's because when you get your stuff from government you let your ties of family and solidarity weaken and shrivel.  When you need them, when all of a sudden government isn't there like liberals promised, your social ties aren't strong enough to take the strain.

As the Obama administration spirals into scandal and failure conservatives have a once in a generation opportunity to lead America back to the ideas that made it great: freedom and civil society.

It would really help if, in between teaching the American people about truth, justice, and the American Way, we could eat the liberals' lunch, and apply critical theory to the hypocrisies of their rotting pile of multiculturalist diversity.

Tri-gate: Pay for Play

I know we are all supposed to be outraged at Lois Lane, er, Lerner's neat little trick of taking the Fifth right after her self-justificatory statement.



Yeah, what would Clark Kent down at the Daily Planet say about that?



But let's be practical.  Lois Lerner is merely telling Congress a simple fact.  Hey, pal, you want information, you gonna pay for it.  Immunity for Information.  Pay for play.  That's the First Commandment in the Beltway.



Immunity for Information.  That's how things go in the Obamian Culture of Intimidation.



Look.  We conservatives finally get to come up for air and have a good laugh.  Because liberals did this to themselves.  They believe in the chimera of Good Government.  Ethical activists and credentialed experts think up beneficial legislation and then the administrative state executes on it.



Settled science alert:  Hayek told us half a century ago that the Good Government/Expert/Administrative state model was bound to fail, because the man in Whitehall (he was still in Britland at the time) could never know more than a million consumers.



On top of that liberals believe in a kind of salvific politics.  Only elect the right man, the young and vigorous JFK, the charismatic policy wonk Bill Clinton, the intellectual Barack Obama, and the oceans will start to recede.



(Do these people not understand how religious this sort of thing sounds?)



But government is force.  Politics is division.  Administration is domination.  If you don't limit all three you lose society.  It turns into an internment camp.  Liberals think that because they are virtuous and well intentioned and intellectual that they can design a beneficent society administered by large-minded people like them.



But the philosophy of limited government says that anyone, no matter how virtuous and large-minded, is corrupted by power.  It says that the more government you have, the more force you have.  The more politics you have the more society will be divided.  And the more that you systemize things into administrative bureaucracies the more domination you have.



Well, now, five years after liberals went into a multiple political orgasm over the OMG! First! Black! President! we are starting to see the wages of folly.  That wonderful intellectual president has been presiding over an IRS that has specifically targeted grass-roots political organizations for delay and harassment.  The wonderful politician who was going to move beyond red and blue has tapped the telephones of AP journalists.  Not just right-wing nut-cases at FoxNews, but good liberal AP journalists!  And the most transparent administration in history is tangled in a web of lies and obfuscations over the murder of a US Ambassador.



Look liberals.  Politicians are merely professional specialists in winning elections.  That is all.  Activists are activists, narrow, driven people with an agenda.  Experts are thinking about their next grant.  And bureaucrats are thinking about keeping their noses clean for the next few years until they collect their pensions.  That is what you believe in.



There is such a thing as society; it's just not the same thing as the state.  Society evokes the idea that humans are social animals; we cooperate and work and play together because that's who we are.  But government is force; politics is division.  The more government you have, the less freedom you have. the more politics you have, the less unity you have.  With more government and more politics, the less society you have, because you have reduced society to an internment camp of force and division, mediated by systematic bureaucratic domination.



I don't think liberals really understand what is coming.  They are safe in the soothing NYT-NPR bubble.  But people are hurting.  They are hurting as they get stripped of their health insurance by Obamacare, as they are stripped of a future by the sluggish economy.



Think of the next three years as Oklahoma in the tornado season.  There are black clouds all around, but nobody knows when a line of thunderstorms will touch down into a twister.  And nobody can know whose house it will rip apart and whose life it will tear in pieces.



Conservatives and Republicans are notorious for being stupid about politics and messaging and tactics.  But when something big is in the air the minutiae of tactics usually don't matter as much as the professionals would like to believe.  What matters instead is what the Soviets used to call the "correlation of forces" or the "contradictions" of the existing order.



All we can know for sure is that the lives of millions of Americans are going to be ripped to shreds in the next few years as the tornado of bankrupt government touches down on the ordinary American heartland.



And all the while the job-for-life IRS myrmidons that dutifully ragged on mom-and-pop Tea Parties will be taking the Fifth and bargaining about Immunity for Information.

Richard Wagner: Most Hated Composer

Today's the 200th anniversary of Richard Wagner.  He's #3 in Charles Murray's list of classical composers compiled in Human Accomplisment.  But he's probably #1 on the list of most-hated composers.



That would partly be due to his anti-semitism.  And partly due to the fact that he wrecked the good old opera formula of recitative followed by beautiful songs.



But really, he upended music as a whole.  The best way to understand this is to listen to a movie (while you watch it).  It was Wagner that invented that kind of music, setting the tone of the movie, telling you in the feeling in sound of what is going on visually and what you should feel about it.



Wagner always lived the spirit of the age.  He was a Romantic, then a lefty revolutionary, then a Schopenhauerian pessimist.  And he did his best to bring all that out in his music.



This sort of thing infuriated the purists.  He took the Nordic myths about power struggles between the gods and turned it into a drama about power, duty, and love.  He took the Arthurian Tristan and made it all about sex.  He took Eschenbach's Parzival and made him into a post-aristocratic post-Christian upper-class ascetic.



That points up the main thing to know about Wagner.  He requires total surrender.  Think the opera is too slow? Too long? Too chromatic?  Too improbable?  Too bad.



My own relationship with Wagner began in the 1970s.  My wife had asked me to get tickets to the Flying Dutchman and Mr. Skinflint didn't do it.  But I got an LP of the Dutchman from the library and was blown over.   Not by the singing, but by the Prelude, which is an astonishing impressionistic piece that evokes wind and storm.  The story is about Senta's sacrifice of love.  All heroines in Wagner sacrifice themselves for love.



Wouldn't you know, by the time I actually got season tickets to the opera, Director Glynn Ross in Seattle was mobilizing for a full Ring cycle for the centenary Ring year of 1976.  So I got to go to Der Ring des Nibelungen, the whole thing.



People ask: how can you sit through four nights of opera, and long operas at that.  The answer, of course, is that going to the Ring is a ritual, and rituals are supposed to be boring; they are supposed to force you to get rid of your monkey mind and surrender to the experience.  It is, if you like, a form of meditation.



At the end of the Ring, after the end of Götterdämmerung, you know you have experienced one of the great aesthetic experiences known to man.  That is why the Ring is so popular, even though Wagner's music is so challenging.



What about the bad parts, the anti-semitism?  Wagner was undoubtedly a minor monster.  He aligned his life completely with the various spirits of the age.  And one of them was anti-semitism. When the Jews were released from their ghettos in Germany in the 19th century they exploded into the economy and the culture with a power that frightened lots of people.  Kinda like the way that liberals are terrified of conservatives and Christians.  Where do these people come from?



But like it or not, Richard Wagner was a musical genius, and after Wagner music will never be the same.