How's That Fundamental Transformation Doing?

Now that President Obama is into his second term, let's take a look at that "fundamental transformation" he was talking about right after the election in 2008.

"Fundamental transformation" is the basic conceit at the heart of progressivism.  It imagines that by changing the configuration of free stuff it can end centuries of oppression and inequality.  Here is young Ezra Klein imagining, in the aftermath of the Obamacare employer mandate delay, that we are just a course change away from Obamacare success and health care as free stuff.

Congress should use the next year to improve the employer mandate. There are plenty of better ideas out there: The Senate Health Committee’s bill used a mandate with a smaller penalty, but one that accrued to both full-time and part-time workers. The House bill tied its penalty to the percentage of payroll an employer spent on health care. We can do better, and we should.

And then, in a couple of years, when the exchanges are up and running and expensive employer-based plans are getting hit by the “Cadillac Tax”, perhaps employers will be open to rethinking whether they should be in the health-insurance business at all. If and when that happens, Congress should happily help them ease out of it.

Notice how Klein does not really think of health care as something where the American people are involved in the decision making.  "We" will decide, and in a couple of years employers will be ready for single-payer.

The ruling class is the ruling class, and that means that the default option is that it has the power to nudge the nation towards its vision of society.  The current ruling class believes in a society where the big shots get called by the educated elite on the key questions of pensions, health care, education, relief of the poor and sexual relations, and the economy and the environment.  Indeed, pretty well everything.

In between calling the big shots, the ruling class gets to administer the whole thing.

The best way for the ruling class to get where they want is to jog along, adding a new program here, adjusting an old program there.  But ruling classes not not really like such a low-energy governance.  They want to sit on Olympus and make the heavens echo with the thunderbolts of their power and glory.  That is what "fundamental transformation" is for.

But the risk is that fundamental transformation will wake the sleeping multitude.  It will make them realize that they don't want fundamental transformation at all, but just a little bit of free stuff here and there before they go back to sleep.

When this happens it is called "biting off more than you can chew."  The Obama administration has been in such a hurry to fundamentally transform everything that it might teach the American people that really they would rather just be left alone.

That gives conservatives a chance for political power and the opportunity to dial back on the fundamental transformation.

Although, of course, the truth is that conservatives have no intention of leaving the American people alone either.  We want to blow up the welfare state and all its anti-social free stuff and create a beautiful vision of a truly civil society of neighbors and associations.

If we conservatives ever got to do that, the American people would probably be as mad as hell and run us out of power for a generation.

A Ruling Class That Wants to be Free

I don't blame President Obama.  For over a century the educated ruling class has longed for the freedom to finally implement its program of pragmatic, expert-backed government programs to end poverty and every other social and economic ill.



Finally, with Obama's election and a filibuster-proof US Senate he and the ruling class had their chance for a decisive breakthrough.  They would end the chaos in the financial markets with a proper regulatory regime; they would end chaos in health care with a first step towards a properly thought out comprehensive plan for national health care.  And they would take decisive action to end carbon pollution with a comprehensive program to phase out fossil fuels in favor of renewables.



And yet.



Something is wrong.  The Federal Reserve is still printing money to keep interest rates low, four years after the bottom of the Crash of 2008.  The economy is not recovering at anything close to the usual pace.  The comprehensive health program is foundering as businesses in terror stop hiring.  And the green energy plan is running full tilt into an energy revolution that will make natural gas and oil abundant for centuries -- and worst of all, the climate is not heating up like the settled science predicted.



To me, it all sounds like the Nazi invasion of Russia.  After a year or so, it ran out of gas in the foothills of the Caucasus, a few hundred miles from the oil wells that Nazi Germany wanted.  And then the Russians at Stalingrad broke up the left flank of the huge Nazi salient. So, after various mistakes, the Nazis failed in their strategic thrust into Russia.



But we ask today: what were the Germans trying to do?  They were in the process of becoming the most advanced economy in the world.  They didn't need to own the natural resources or plunder them like the conquerors of old; they could buy whatever they needed with their valuable merchandise exports.  The Germans invaded Eastern Europe just at the point where it had become obvious that the age of invasion and plunder was over.  Wealth, we had found out in the 19th century, is not sitting on the ground or in a mine or an oil well.  It is between the ears of each citizen.



So here we have the educated ruling class in the United States that thinks that the only way to the future is for it to invade and plunder the entire social space and fill it with comprehensive and mandatory programs.  It is an invasion that is doomed to failure just like the Nazi invasion of Russia.



You can see the world changing even as the Obama offensive starts to falter.  There is Michael Barone, who talks about the end of Big Unit America.  There is Walter Russell Mead, who writes about the end of the Blue Social Model.  There is America 3.0, by James C. Bennett and Michael J. Lotus about the change from a society run by "powered machinery" to a "post-industrial, networked, decentralized society."  Then there is Kevin D. Williamson and The Future is Going to be Awesome about the inevitable failure of big one-size-fits-all pensions, healthcare, and education.  Finally, there is good old George Gilder, back with another bleeding-edge book.  This time it's about Knowledge and Power, how the information theory of Claude Shannon is really the basis of capitalism,  and how it's going to transform the economy.

If all these people are saying almost the same thing, then something is astir in the land, rather in the same way that supply-side economics was astir in the 1970s.  And oh so conveniently, our liberal friends are crashing and burning the economy in another Bourbonesque effort to prove that they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.

What all the writers above are saying is that the essence of capitalism is that it is alwa surprising us.  To use Gilder's information theory approach, entrepreneurs are always creating new information out of the noise of the world.  But as the noise from government increases then it becomes more difficult for the information from the entrepreneurs to get heard.

I've been saying for a while now that you don't just come to the end of an era, the era of the educated ruling class, and hand it off to a new ruling class.  Usually the ruling class has to run out of money first, like in Egypt or in France under the ancien régime. On this view, the overreaching and the failures of the Obama administration are a necessary prelude to a genuine change in our society.  The ruling class has to be off-balance, demoralized and discredited before it will agree to surrender its power.

Our ruling class wants to be free -- to dominate us.  In George Gilder's view the ruling class needs to be chained and fettered.  It is the entrepreneurial class that should be as free as air -- to amaze us.

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

Many people sneer at the famous words of that slave-owning white guy written down a couple centuries ago.  So let us think what these words should mean to moderns like us in the year 2013 CE.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

What does it mean to have an unalienable Right to Life?  No doubt it meant to those old white guys the right not be be killed at the pleasure of some government functionary or puling aristocrat.  But in our age we understand more completely what it means.  It means that we are not on this earth to follow a career, or to be a creative artist, or a political activist.  It means that our job has to do with Life, its creation, its birth, its nurturing, its preservation.

In the old days the facts of life were inescapable; that's why the rules about courtship and marriage were so strictly enforced.  But ever since the sexual revolution and the practical availability of effective contraception and abortion it has been possible to forget about the facts of life, to treat the sanctity of life with oblivious disregard.

We humans are here on this earth firstly to attend to Life.  And for the vast majority, a life that ignores Life is a life wasted.  In other words, a life without children is a life of folly.  The fact that we have loosened the bonds of custom to allow people to live lives oblivious the the facts of Life means that people are free to make the life-wasting decision to utterly ignore the importance of Life.  The right has responded to this by attempting to legislate boundaries to abortion, but I think that is a mistake.  We criminalize too much in our society.

We should build a culture that celebrates Life, that judges a childless life to be an incomplete life.  We should build a culture that makes abortion safe, legal, and shameful.  We should brand sexual libertines as selfish children.  But let's keep the criminal law out of it.

What does it mean to have an unalienable Right to Liberty?  No doubt it meant to those old white guys the freedom of the city against the serfdom and the domination of the landed aristocracy.  But for us it means the right to live your life without constant supervision from the administrative state.  It means that everything that is not specifically forbidden is allowed, and that the list forbidden things should be short and succinct.  This does not mean that everything is allowed and Katy bar the door.  It means the real meaning of freedom: we are free to make mistakes.  If we do not allow young people to go off and make mistakes, then we do not have Liberty.

What does it mean to have an unalienable Right to the Pursuit of Happiness?  No doubt it meant to those old white guys the acquisition of property.  That is how John Locke presented it before Thomas Jefferson changed life, liberty and property to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  But it was a felicitous choice of words, for it implies more than just the economic world of work and acquisition.  It suggests instead a larger life project.  It suggests the individual's right and responsibility to find his own way to contribute to society.  For happiness is not just the bliss of release from work on a weekend, but the satisfaction of having contributed something to your fellow humans.  He cannot be happy who has merely worked and labored for himself alone.  He is happy who has labored and created for others, and loved and thought of others.  The rights of Life and Liberty only make sense if they free us to contribute to our fellow humans in social cooperation.

Today, July 4, 2013, the United States of America stands in a perilous place.  The plans and the shibboleths of our educated ruling class lie shattered and twisted all around us.  America aches for a new birth of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, yet no savior offering Hope and Change is in sight.

Nor should there be.  The millennarian hope that climaxed in 2008 in the days after the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency of the United States was a chimera.  All extravagant hope based upon politics is a chimera.  What is needed, what is always needed, is for each individual, and each little platoon, to use his or her right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness to build hope and change in his own life and in the lives of those immediately around him.

In that is the promise of America, and in that is the foundation of our glorious American Exceptionalism.

Is Politics Violence?

In his excellent manifesto, The End is Near and it's Going to be Awesome, Kevin D. Williamson advances the idea that "politics is violence."  Here is how he describes his notion in Chapter 2.

Politics is violence. Perhaps that seems too strong for you?  If so, try the following experiment: Stop paying your taxes, or refuse to send your child to the local government school or a government-approved alternative, or build an addition onto the back of your home without approval from the local authorities, or have your child sell lemonade on the sidewalk without official blessing, or feed the poor in Philadelphia without government permission, and see how long it takes for the government to dispatch to your home a team of men with guns to enforce your compliance, seize your property, or put you in a cage.(p.38)

Why, even the Department of Education has guns.  "Kenneth Wright of Stockton, California, got a good close look at them when the Department of Education sent a tactical-entry squad to his home in the early hours of June 7, 2011."(p.41)  No doubt that arises because so many clauses in legislation involve the words "the Secretary shall enforce..."

Er, wasn't it the KGB that used to specialize in early morning visits?

Then Williamson invokes the shade of George Washington that "Government is not reason.  It is not eloquence.  Government is force".(p.43)  Only it seems the first president never said it.  But you get the point.

So let us ventilate a couple more Williamson quotes. "Politics is the art of obtaining and using the power of government."(p.44) Or this, after a discussion of justice, fairness, liberty, equality and the problem of anyone establishing the "superiority of [their] first principles to the satisfaction of the general public": "The politician is the man who has the power to make his preferences mandatory."(p.72)

But actually, the politician is the man who divides the voters into for or against.  His profession is to rally enough voters into voting for him and/or voting against the other guy.  Then, when he gets into office, he and his faction work to exploit divisions in the legislature to pass their program of coercion.

Therefore I argue that politics is not exactly violence, or the "art of applied violence."(p.44)  Politics is division.  The art of the politician is the art of assembling a majority -- of the voters, of the legislators -- on some program of government force.  And he does it by finding the seam of division, finding the sweet spot to divide people into us and them, that will assemble enough people to vote him into office or vote his program into force.  Some people are already for or against.  Some people can be persuaded.  Some people can be intimidated.  Some people can be bought.  We know that politics is division because politics is always a question of "issues."  An issue is a point of disagreement between people in the public square.

But whatever politics may be, Government is force.  Whatever George Washington may have said or not said, that is the fact.  But it is an inconvenient fact.  That is why governments expend so much effort into presenting themselves as sweetness and light and the friend of the little guy and the fount of compassion.  That is what NPR is for: broadcasting stories about nice compassionate government programs helping people.  Yet people are wondering these days why the government is purchasing so much ammunition.  The answer is that government is force and no government department thinks itself serious unless it has its own corps of enforcement officers.  Government is force.

We know that government is force by the way that politicians and activists go out into the world to seek support for their programs.  The issue is always force.  Back in the 1800s the issue was the oppression of the workers that could only be ameliorated by force.  In the 1900s it was the poverty of the workers that could only be improved by compulsory social insurance.  Now we have race, sex, gay marriage, and the remedy is force.

No doubt force is needed.  There will always be pirates and plunderers.  But the whole point of humans is that we are social animals.  The great achievement of the agricultural revolution was that it reduced homicidal death by a factor of ten from 500 deaths per 100,000 people per year to 50.  The great achievement of the industrial revolution is that it has reduced homicidal deaths by another order of magnitude down to five deaths per 100,0000 per year and better.

Yet the politicians call for force.  It's not that politics is violence, although it certainly encourages violent emotions and worse.  Politics is the art of dividing people on programs of force.

Or more simply: Government is force; politics is division.  And the intersection of politics and government is war.

Inventing Conservatism 3.0

If modern conservatism were a software product, then Burkean classical liberalism would be Conservatism 1.0.  Supply-side economics and Reaganism would be Conservatism 2.0.  The new books by George Gilder and Kevin Williamson would be Conservatism 3.0.

Let us use the concept of "less wrong" as developed by Kevin Williamson in The End is Near and It's Going to be Awesome.  He asks the question: "How do private companies know what to produce for public use" without someone issuing specific orders?  The answer is simple.  They respond to their mistakes.  They realize from day to day that they are getting things wrong, and so they work to make things "less wrong."

The system works because the underlying spontaneous order, even though its vast complexity is beyond our understanding, has a built-in mechanism for getting less wrong over time, mostly through trial and error -- which is to day, mostly through failure.

Actually, what we are really looking at is the vital importance of death.  "When hordes of people don't show up to buy the product, the product dies."  So why is America in such a mess?  The answer is politics.  Here is the money paragraph:

The problem of politics is that it does not know how to get less wrong.  It is as a practical matter impossible to design a national health-care policy that can be tweaked and improved every quarter, or on-the-fly in real time as software is...  Resistance to innovation is part of the deep structure of politics.  It never goes out of business -- despite flooding the market with defective and dangerous products, degrading the environment, cooking the books, and engaging in financial shenanigans that would have made Gordon Gekko pale to contemplate.

I suppose that the root of the problem is the whole question of Social Darwinism.  What do you mean that biological evolution is science but social evolution is horrible?    Death and extinction apply to everything living.  Animal species that can't compete go extinct, and so do cultural species, such as corporations and nation states and empires.  Ask the Soviet Union.

George Gilder in Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How It is Revolutionizing Our World applies the lessons of Claude Shannon's communication theory to the economy.  Claude Shannon defined information as surprise.  But Shannon's law does not such apply to communications.  It applies also to the economy.  For surprise in the economy has a difference name.  It is called profit.  Profit is a surprising surplus in the corporate accounts.  That is how the iPod worked.  It was a surprise.  Nobody back in 2000 imagined how light, portable electronics would revolutionize human communication.  That is how Apple climbed back from near bankruptcy.  One "i" surprise after another.

Gilder argues that the world is noise.  But knowledge is information.  So it is that humans, by learning and creating, are inserting surprising information into the limitless ocean of noise.  Every little surprise has the potential to add to our knowledge, and create more information in the ocean of noise.  Living things, of course, are such islands of surprising information.

Governments, of course, are opposed to surprise.  So governments are forces that are trying to rub out the little surprises of life that turn into knowledge and prosperity.

You see how both Gilder and Williamson are saying the same thing.  Learning from mistakes, getting things less wrong, creating surprises.  This is nothing less than life itself.

Not learning, not adapting, not changing, not creating surprises.  That is the road to death and extinction.

It's not really that hard to understand.

Cost and Trende Have Spoken on Immigration

The GOP's kindly friends in the Democratic Party have been telling them for months that that the Republican Party  needs to get with the program on immigration, otherwise they'll never ever get an Hispanic to vote for them.



Fuggedaboutit, say conservative election analysts Jay Cost and Sean Trende.  The GOP's main problem is that people don't think it cares about average people like them.  Exactly, because my friend Stephen thinks of the GOP as the party of the bankers.



If only.  If only it were true and those greedy bankers were busily slipping money to Tea Partiers instead of marching in lock-step with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-WallStreet) because they know what side their bread is buttered.



The biggest problem Mitt Romney had in 2012 was the downscale white voters that didn't show up to vote.  In a choice between an "urban liberal like President Obama or a severely pro-business venture capitalist like Mitt Romney" writes Trende, they decided to stay home.



You can see how Obama's Joe Soptic TV ad nicely made the point that Romney was exactly what he was, a severely pro-business venture capitalist.  It doesn't really matter that what the downscale white voters objectively need according to settled science is a million venture capitalists shaking up the economy and renewing failing, badly managed corporations, because the good old jobs with good wages are gone forever.   Not only that, but the downscale white voters are not now, and never will be again, the little darlings of the ruling class that they were back in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.



But enough of the past.  Cost and Trende argue that there is nothing in the Senate's immigration bill for ordinary downscale voters.  Any politician that planned to appeal for the votes of ordinary, average people would be making populist attacks on the immigration bill, saying that it took jobs away from ordinary Americans and handed them to corporate and union fat-cats.



Gee, Sarah Palin just did that, calling the Senate bill an "amnesty bill filled with favors, earmarks and crony capitalists' pork".



This is what politics is all about.  Politics is division.  It is about hanging the labels of crony and greedy and banker and special interest on the other guys, and for Republicans that means the Democratic Party.  It is about showing that the Republican Party is the party that really cares about the ordinary American that isn't enrolled in the rank and file of the special interests: your greenies to reds to pinkos to blacks to browns to fems to gays.  Whatever happened to an America that cared for ordinary people, without separating and mobilizing them into warring and exclusive identities?



What a joke.  Here we have bourgeois capitalism, that has raised the common man from indigence to a suffocating prosperity.   Yet the common man is convinced that capitalism and capitalists are out to screw him.



Oh, I know.  In the old days the poor man could only hope to attach himself to a powerful patron.  And still he would starve and his children would die.  For many people, even most people, it still goes against instinct to imagine that the way to prosper is to throw yourself on the mercy of the consumers, and believe in the idea that you prosper by serving others rather than forcing them to cough up a livelihood for you upon the threat of force.



But that's the world we live in.  Until we can change it for the better.

Our Global "Little Darlings" Problem

In the old days they used to urge mothers not to let their babies grow up to be cowboys.  Or "pick guitars and drive them old trucks," as the song goes.  Instead, let them be "doctors and lawyers and such."

But I think the much bigger problem is letting your babies grow up to be the "little darlings" of the politicians.

The first people that grew up to be little darlings were the workers.  And look what happened.  Marxists used the workers to build the most oppressive regimes in history and basically enslaved the workers to produce useless products that nobody wanted.  That's when they weren't starving them to death with the aesthetic projects to build model villages and model tank factories in Magnitogorsk.

The ordinary democratic socialists were different.  They merely taxed the workers (or sneakily their employers) to the hilt; they took their savings and put them in non-existent "trust funds." All in all, they treat the workers as slaves on an advanced slave plantation.  I mean that they treat the workers humanely, but as cogs in a machine.

And as for the labor unions, the once authentic brotherhoods of the working stiffs, they are reduced to being political pawns, stooges for government bosses, as the IRS union has recently demonstrated.

Who was next to be anointed as political little darlings?  Women, of course.  Women were shockingly oppressed.  What they needed was the vote, government welfare, contraception, abortion, no-fault divorce, and careers in the workplace.  Everything except love, marriage, and children.  What's happened is that the lower-class culture has been demolished, as women retreat from marriage and men retreat from work.  Women have become the cats-paw of politicians, to be serially terrified by some new threat to their safety or health.

Then of course we have African Americans, or "minorities."  They have also become the little darlings of the politicians.  But, of course, to be any use to politicians they must be mobilized, and mobilization takes hate and fear.  So our liberal politicians use infinite patience and guile to keep African Americans terrified by a return to Jim Crow and police brutality.

The latest little darlings of the politicians are the gays.  In my young days, the most anti-gay folks were the left.  In Britain they used to equate gayness with upper-class privilege and decadence.  Today, of course, the left equates anti-gayness with right-wing hate and bigotry in the heartland, and the Supreme Court is one decision away from mandating gay marriage nationwide.

Here's my problem.  Any time that you gin up a political movement and use the government to advance your agenda, you end up becoming political cannon fodder.

Workers' rights:  Wouldn't it have been better not to create a gigantic welfare state and to nationalize the social welfare aspects of labor unions, so that workers could themselves build the kind of protection they wanted and were prepared to pay for?

Women's rights: Is free sex and abortion and easy divorce really such a benefit to women?  Doesn't it devalue love and marriage and children?  And doesn't every woman you know eventually return to all three, usually after it's too late?

Civil rights:  It's one thing to write a law to enforce racial equality.  It's another thing to make race a factor in giving out the goodies to your political supporters.  Politics is division.  When you inject race into politics, you sow racial division and conflict.

Gay rights: It's one thing to stop the police from raiding gay hangouts.  It's another thing to advertise that gay life is just a lifestyle choice, and gay marriage is just like marriage, and then force America to agree with you or else.

The problem with the "little darlings" problem is that in politics, nobody knows when to stop.  In the end you destroy what you started out to create, because government is force.  It turns everything it touches into a war, because that's what force is for.  It turns a people into the opposite of society, which is people living in amity with their neighbors.

The leaders of the workers ended up using government to destroy the great industrial corporations in steel and automobiles.  The leaders of the feminists ended up using government to destroy love and marriage.  The civil rights leaders ended up destroying the hope of amity between the races.  We don't yet know how the gay-rights movement will self-destruct.

Don't let your babies grow up to be little darlings.  It will turn them into missiles of social destruction.