O.J. Plus Zimmerman Equals The End

If you're an average white racist bigot you might be asking yourself when's it gonna end?  I mean the whole race-hustling business that maintains the idea of white guilt.  For white guilt, we know, must be requited by affirmative action, quotas, and reparations.



The corollary is the idea that blacks can't be racist because they are oppressed.  You can only be racist if you have the Power.



So the question is: when would we be able to tell that blacks were no longer oppressed, assuming that there is some objective criterion for such a judgment.  Assuming that there is some criterion other than: because left-wing activists say so.



I would say that if it ever happened in America that a black defendant that murdered a white girl got off because a black jury refused to convict then you would start wondering if the worm had turned.



I would say that if it ever happened in America that black activists and the mainstream media could force the government to prosecute a white man who pretty obviously had killed a black man in self defense then you would have some justification for saying that the age of Jim Crow was over.



That's why I say that OJ + Zimmerman = The End of Oppression.



The point of the OJ criminal trial, when O.J. Simpson was tried for the murder of his white wife and acquitted by a black jury, was this.  The trial advertised to the world that blacks had the Power.  They had the power to say to the criminal justice system: we ain't gonna convict one of our own.



The point of the Zimmerman prosecution, when "white Hispanic" George Zimmerman was prosecuted for the second-degree murder of black Trayvon Martin, was this.  The fact of the prosecution advertised to the world that blacks had the Power.  They could rise up and protest and demand that a white guy be put on trial even though police had judged he had acted in self-defense.  They had the power to say to the state government in Florida that we demand you put one of the "other" on trial.



You can see where I am going with this.  If blacks now have the Power --  the power to act on a modest scale more or less as white southerners did back in the days of Jim Crow --  then maybe they aren't oppressed any more.



And if blacks aren't oppressed any more, maybe it's possible for blacks to be racists.



In fact, it turns out that blacks think that blacks are more racist than whites, according to a recent poll.

Among black Americans, 31% think most blacks are racist, while 24% consider most whites racist and 15% view most Hispanics that way.

But that is another story.

President Obama's Accidental Achievement

On coming into office, President Obama told us that he planned on "fundamental transformation."  I wrote yesterday that fundamental transformation is a progressive conceit.  And anyway, Obama is failing in his fundamental transformation, big time.

He has utterly failed to be a "post-racial" president.  Instead he has ginned up racial division.  He has utterly failed to improve health care.  Instead he has created a "train wreck."  He has utterly failed to make government more transparent.  Instead he has led an administration that is notably non-transparent and notably quick to use the federal bureaucracy to intimidate the president's opponents.

And that leaves out the stupidity of the stimulus, the hyper-regulation of Dodd-Frank, the chimera of climate change.

So liberals will probably get their "fundamental transformation."  Only it won't be the kind they were planning on.

Instead of the endless liberal moral melodrama featuring endless liberal Scarlett O'Haras, we are more likely to get an age of Rhett Butler: the age of I don't give a damn.

On race, there's a good chance that the president's race hustling will finally provoke the end of white guilt.  After the beer summit and the Trayvon Martin case, it's time to say, frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

On health care, there's a good chance that the president's mendacious promises and incompetent rollout on Obamacare will create room for some practical reform, moving away from highly regulated first-dollar coverage towards HSA-type catastrophic coverage and transparent pricing.  In other words, letting Americans decide what they want to pay for out of their own pockets with a decent provision for the old and the poor.

On the economy, there's a good chance that the hyper-political hyper-regulatory follies of the last decade will be so discredited that we can do some sensible reform: reversing the cheap money, high borrowing for the federal government and switching to hard money and spending cuts.  And the demolition of Sarbox and Dodd-Frank wouldn't hurt.

On climate change, there's a good chance that the Ruling Class's obsession with carbon dioxide will collapse as the science proves to be a lot less settled than we were told, and the crony capitalist scandals of green energy discredit the whole effort.

Back in the 2000s Judis and Teixeira were boasting of an Emerging Democratic Majority.  My guess is that it will evaporate in 2014 and 2016.  Why?  Because the Obama Democrats failed to show a bright future to the women, minorities and young people that they captivated in the 2000s with the promise of hope and change.

The truth is that they had it in their grasp.  If Obama had really brought the end of race politics, if he had done an Obamacare that featured a bipartisan compromise, if he had curbed the stimulus, and pushed a less regulatory Dodd-Frank, he might now be leading an America bursting with hope and confidence.

But he didn't.  That's because neither he nor the elite liberal ruling class has a vision beyond the idea of ruling and administering the United States like a feudal estate.  They, the ruling class, are the guys with the ideas and the power. We, the country class, should shut up and do what we are told.

George Gilder is just the latest to tell us why the liberal way doesn't work.  In Knowledge and Power he argues that humans advance by surprise and learning.  People come up with new ideas that nobody thought of before.  And then they learn how to apply the idea to society: the fabled learning curve.  Think the last two centuries starting with the Industrial Revolution.

But the liberal vision is one of revolution and stasis.  The idea is to set up an administrative system with a political reform and then sit back and let it run.  We know what happens when you do that.  You get a sterile system that slowly runs down and dies.

The recurring story of the last two centuries is that the way to flourish is to surrender to the process.  Come up with a good idea instead of going with the flow.  Think of serving others first rather than grabbing for your share.  But the truth is that we are all afraid.  We want to be sure that we get our share; we worry that we won't have anything valuable to contribute.  And so we gum up the works with force and rigid system.  And fight over a shrinking pie.

We can do better, and with the ruin of his administration President Obama may be clearing the way to a better future.

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.