Understanding Individualism

The last century has seen a great ideological war about the foundation of the good society, and that war has really been about capitalism.  Is it a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?

In about the middle of the 19th century, capitalism became, for a growing sector of western society, a scandal, and that sector is identified with the name of Karl Marx.

It seemed to young Germans like Marx, in the decade when the old peasant order in Germany was collapsing and the industrial system was taking off, that the new industrial order was a murrain on society.  Yes, it was ushering in prosperity, at least for some, but it was demolishing the old collective ways in which humans came together in society and substituted nothing but exploitation: in one word, "naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation."

As the years passed and Marxism gained traction, a rather romantic notion of pre-capitalist society grew up.  People may have been poor in the old days, but at least they weren't thrown out into the world "on their own."  They had the comfort of a collective village or extended family.  Instead of going out into the world working for wages making things for strangers people lived and worked for each other.  This idea developed into the Marxian idea of "alienation."  The peasant worker worked in the village for family and neighbors "for use" but the factory worker worked for strangers "for exchange" in a barren world of ruthless market prices.

This all fed into a Three Ages model.  In the old days people were poor but they were happy, because they lived for each other.  Then came The Fall into market capitalism and individualism where people became separated from the collectivity into a cold hard world of the "cash nexus" and selfish life "on our own" where the weak went to the wall.  But soon will come the age of socialism when the collective spirit will be restored and come to its full flowering in a new heaven on earth.

One of the main props of this argument was the idea that Britain, the vanguard of the industrial age, had been a peasant society up until about 1660.  Over the next century, with the expulsions from common land by the Enclosure movement, a vast army of landless laborers was pitched out of its rural cottages into the industrial slums of Manchester and the coal mines of Newcastle.

But Alan Macfarlane in The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property, and Social Transition argues that England was already a capitalist, market driven society as early as 1250.  Already, at that time, people were buying and selling land, people could will real and movable property, women could own property and represent themselves in court, workers regularly worked for wages, and parents routinely sent their teenage children away from home to become apprentices and servants.

All this is significant because in the supposedly traditional peasant community that the medievalists have proposed, work and home were one, so children grew up to become workers for the family; homes featured an extended family of multiple generations; women were married off young in arranged marriages and were completely ruled by the patriarch of the household;  old people were cared for in the family home until they died.

So Macfarlane argues that England was clearly not a traditional peasant society, not as late as 1250.  That means that the industrial system was not a sudden plague visited upon a defenseless England in the 18th century.  People had lived as individuals for hundreds of years already.  In any household that had limited land the children were sent out to work and the farm work was done by hired laborers.  It is reckoned that about half the population of England was working as hired laborers or as servants.

Macfarlane also calls in the testimony of people that had seen and reported on both England and France or Germany in those centuries.  Their testimony is that England seemed to be a lot more prosperous than the continental nations.  Individualism and freedom and prosperity went together.

Now in our society "individualism" has a bad odor.  It is associated with Ayn Rand and ruthless business practices, and "higgling" in the marketplace and a lack of compassion for those less fortunate, and "the sneering question: 'will it pay?'"  But I have come to realize that this understanding of individualism is completely wrong.  Individualism is not a doctrine that makes a virtue of selfishness.  It is really the opposite: it commits the individual to individual responsibility for serving others and society in general.

Individualism starts with the Axial Age religions where people first start to experience themselves as personally responsible to God for their lives.  I suspect and assume that this started in the cities of the fertile crescent in the Middle East.  But it includes Confucianism in China, Hinduism in India, as well at Judaism and Christianity.  The result is what I call the People of the Responsible Self, people that believe themselves personally responsible for every facet of their lives.

You can see that traditional peasants are not People of the Responsible Self.  They are People of the Collective Self and also People of the Helpless Self, helpless before weather, before pestilence, before the power of the lord, and before war.

But you cannot live like a peasant in the city.  You cannot repose in your family and wait for the patriarch to order you around.  You must go out and get a job.  You must figure out where the employers are and you must search out the employer that might hire you and you must persuade him to hire you.  If you rise in the world like Abraham Lincoln, once a hired laborer and soon a hirer of others, then you must start to figure out not who has a job for you but what the consumers want from a person with your skills and your products.

Here is what I am arguing.  With the growth of cities and the market economy and the wage economy humans cannot thrive in a peasant-type society.  People must live as individuals; they must be responsible for themselves; they must reach out beyond their household to find out how they can serve their fellow humans.  That is the meaning of individualism; that is what People of the Responsible Self do.

So to ask whether capitalism is a good or a bad thing misses the point.  Capitalism is the way of the city.  The people of the city are the People of the Responsible Self.  People of the Responsible Self are individuals.  They live by the ways of individualism.

And the sooner we all understand that and recoil from the progressive dream of a heaven on earth, the better.

The Bonfire of Interest Group Liberalism

For over half a century conservatives have been warning that nothing good will come of interest group liberalism.  It leads to the special interest state and reduces society to unconstrained scramble for loot in the halls of government.



Back in the 1940s, with the golden glow of the New Deal in their rear-view mirrors, the hagiographers of the the Roosevelt era were inclined to see the clash of special interests as a good thing.  It was a natural way for coalitions to come together and hash out their differences.  But then in 1969 Theodore Lowi argued in The End of Liberalism that interest group liberalism was just a contest of political power and had nothing to do with the rational or moral questions underlying political questions.



Well, now we have Obamacare and its bonfire of the special interests.  Former regulator James V. DeLong reprises the appalling record of special interest log-rolling that it took to concoct this monster.



And now liberals are shocked, shocked, that it is all falling apart, that the president's promise that you can keep your health plan was all a lie, that millions of people are losing their health plans, and that people are experiencing sticker-shock as they shop for new plans.



Listen, liberals.  The science has been in on this for decades.  Hayek wrote that the government could never have the bandwidth to run anything.  Buchanan and Tullock invented public choice theory to show how special interest lobbying and voting always resulted in the majority eating the minority for lunch.  And then there is "regulatory capture," the idea that an regulated industry always ends up capturing the minds of the regulators set up to control them.



Actually, I think that liberals know all this deep in their hearts.  Their problem is that they are riding the dragon and they don't know how to get off.  They got the power they have by promising stuff to people, and their power depends on keeping on keeping on.  They have even figured out ways to import more voters likely to vote for more programs.



Anyway, there's a chance that the American people will make a decisive turn in the next two election cycles as ordinary middle-class Americans experience directly how interest group liberalism hurts them.



Or maybe they won't, and we'll keep on floating down the river to the waterfall.

Liberals' Two Trick Pony

Obviously, with the rollout of Obamacare, liberals are in a tight spot.  And we know why.  It goes back to Hillarycare and the "Harry and Louise" TV commercials run by the insurance industry.

Harry and Louise liked their health insurance and they didn't think that a plan devised by a Hillarycare bureaucrat would be good for them.

That's why President Obama had to lie, again and again, and say that if you like your plan you can keep your plan.  Otherwise no Obamacare.

In the Weekly Standard the able Jay Cost has just analyzed the political situation Obamacare represents.  He says that it's like the First New Deal with its top-down corporatism, the Agricultural Adjustment Act -- which required farmers to plow in their wheat and kill little piglets -- and the National Industrial Recovery Act -- which set prices and wages throughout the economy according to NRA "codes."  The First New Deal was a political expression of the Progressive era's faith in "the management of the entire American economy by technocratic experts for the greater good."

Obviously there is a ton of this top-down technocracy in Obamacare.  That's the whole point behind setting minimum standards for health plans.  Foundation policy analysts and government technocrats know better than ordinary people.  Everyone from the president to his press secretary have recently told the American people that their old policies were no good.  They needed the new ones with better coverage.

But the New Dealers pivoted after a couple of disastrous years to the Second New Deal.

It was the failure of the First New Deal that brought about the rights-oriented Second New Deal, and with it Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act guaranteeing labor unions the right to organize, and eventually the Fair Labor Standards Act providing for a federal minimum wage. Liberalism shifted from attempting to manage the economy directly toward supplying the downtrodden with tools to fight their own battles.

Better hurry up repeal Obamacare, writes Cost, or the "rights" side of it, the subsidies, will win the day for the Democrats, and nobody will dare take those benefits away.

But I think that Cost misunderstands where we are politically.  He is assuming that the politics of Obamacare will play out merely as a ruling-class power play.  I don't agree.

I think that Obamacare will provoke a movement of rejection in the suburban middle class.

The Democrats have done a pretty good job since the demolition of George H. W. Bush in dividing the middle class.  They have done this by making the "economically conservative, socially liberal" middle class ashamed of the social conservatives.  The high point of this political thrust occurred when George W. Bush ran as a "compassionate conservative."  Didn't matter: the Democrats insisted all along that Bush was a religious bigot and social neanderthal.

As long as the economy was tricking along, the divisive strategy worked.  And let us not forget the moderate Democrats that were run in 2006 and the healing words of Candidate Obama to end the division of red states versus blue states.  A whole generation of young people were successfully raised in our government schools to believe in the liberal way.

But the reality of Obama provoked an immediate reaction.  We call it the Tea Party.  It rolled to an astonishing 63 seat pickup in the House of Representatives in the 2010 midterms.  Then, as we know, the Lois Lerners got to work at the IRS and slowed the Tea Party momentum.  Also, Obamacare hadn't actually been implemented so as you would notice until last week.

Now the American people, non-political middle-class people, the Harrys and Louises, are finding out that they can't keep their health plans.

At this point there is no telling what will happen.

But I suspect that the politics of Obamacare can't be confined into a ruling-class inside-the-Beltway power play.  The Obamacare issue will spill out into the country and will energize people that never took any interest in politics.  It may even teach the mind-numbed Millennials a thing or two.

My line is that average middle-class Americans belong to the People of the Responsible Self.  They experience themselves as individuals responsible individually for the conduct of their lives.  When the ruling class enacts its big government programs it denies the average middle class the right and the opportunity to live a meaningful live as responsible and productive citizens.

There has to be a consequence for a ruling class that cruelly and unjustly denies its people the right to live as responsible, contributing citizens.

GOP Establishment vs. Tea Party

Charles Krauthammer's appearance on Comedy Central's Daily Show seems to have sparked a big row.  It's between what might be called the Republican establishment's accommodationist stance towards the welfare state and the constitutional argument against it, typified by the Tea Party movement.



Charles Krauthammer defends the establishment argument here, and Andrew C. McCarthy makes the constitutional argument here.  Former leftist Ron Radosh votes for accommodation here.



I think the disagreements are based on the different assumptions of the different parties.



I don't think that anyone is suggesting that Republicans go into the elections of 2014 and 2016 and propose to end entitlements as we know it.  That is what the Republican establishment, as practical politicians, are telling us.



Anyway, the Tea Party folks aren't proposing to end entitlements; they expect to get theirs.



What thoughtful conservatives argue is that the authoritarian welfare state is doomed.  It is doomed because it has made promises that can't possibly be redeemed.  In their secret hearts conservatives would like to believe that they can persuade Americans to wean themselves off the entitlement drug.  But the truth about addiction is that people don't wean themselves off until they "hit bottom."  They have to see the wreck of their life in living color before they will swear off the demon rum.



I don't think anyone can expect that entitlements will end any other way.  They will end when the checks stop coming and the checks will stop coming when the government's credit is totally tapped out.



The question is what comes next.  How can we rebuild America on better principles?  The Tea Party, aided and abetted by folks like Mark Levin and his bestselling books such as The Liberty Amendments are reminding us that America is supposed to be about limited government.  A limited government can't make the kind of reckless promises that have got us into this mess.



Let's take Social Security.  We conservatives look at the current system and we call it unjust.  It is unjust because it expects the working population to pay seniors for the promises of the politicians irregardless.  The act of paying your payroll taxes is completely divorced from the process of getting your checks.



To illuminate this, let's look at a private system of savings for retirement.  You save your money, according to your means; you invest it in broad market index funds and bonds.  Every year you look at your nest egg and figure out whether you can afford to retire.  Let us illuminate what it means when you reach that point.  You are basically saying that the capital you have saved can now create enough jobs to support you in your retirement.



Let's say you have saved $250,000.  That money is out in the economy providing capital to companies that use the money to create jobs.  In return you get, say, 5% return, which is $12,500 per year.  Or you can get an annuity which will pay you about 10% on your money.  If that $250,000 is not enough, then you work a few years more.  If the market tanks, then you have to wait to retire until it's recovered.



This is a self-organizing and self-correcting system.  (Oh, and by the way, the news has been reporting for a while that baby boomers are putting off retirement, because they lost so much in the Crash of 2008).



The role for the welfare state in this is,  possibly, to take care of the people who have failed to save money, or have become disabled -- all through no fault of their own.  Although I think that it is better for charitable relatives and neighbors to do the taking care.  The role of the state, it seems to me, is to borrow money after a great disaster to keep house and home together while people work to recover from the crisis.



The problem with government running a safety net is that government is an armed minority that stays in power by giving out loot to its supporters.  It has ever been so, ever since the Iliad, and it is certainly still so in the day of the advanced administrative welfare state.  So instead of creating a cooperative, social network of people caring for each other, government always gives you a predatory elite and its ravenous supporters that understand nothing except power and pillage.



The fundamental weakness of the welfare state system comes fully into focus when things go wrong, as right now, when the government has to cut back a little on its disbursements in so-called "austerity."



What happens?  The supporters of the government, the pensioners and the government employees, pour into the streets and "demand" their rights.



It ought to be obvious, to anyone with a brain, that the administrative welfare state is not a self-correcting system.  Instead, it is a system that is always careering towards chaos and conflict.



I like to say that the problem with government is that the only thing it knows how to do is conduct a war.  So everything it does has to be turned into a war: on poverty, on drugs, on bigotry, on racism.



The problem with wars is that there necessarily has to be a winner and a loser.  That is not cooperative; that is not social.  It is martial.  And that is why conservatives argue that the social safety net should not be a government safety net.



Once the government is in charge then the safety net turns into jobs for the boys, and subsidies for the cronies, and outlandish promises that can never be redeemed.  Of course it does.  That's because government is an armed minority: an army.  The political leaders are the captains and they love to fight.  The individual soldiers are recruited with the lure of loot, and they expect to get it, or else they will offer their soldiering talents to another captain.



In real life, of course, the captains use the soldiers as cannon fodder.  The soldiers often don't get their loot; they die of disease or get killed in a battle.  And sooner or later they don't get paid.  That is the lot of the political supporter too.  They get all carried away with the promise of the free stuff.  But in the end their glorious leaders betray them, and leave them to rot by the side of the road, used up and broken, just like broken-down soldiers of real armies.



That, of course, is what is happening right now to the supporters of Obama, like the woman who liked the idea of Obamacare but didn't realize that she would be the one to pay for it.



Socialism, progressivism, statism, call it what you will, has always lived on utterly empty promises.  Obama's promises for Obamacare are more egregious that most, but not too much.  The problem for Obama and for his liberal cohorts is that perhaps the Obamacare promises should have been a little less specific, and should have been a little less short-term.



After all, when millions of women are getting cancellation notices from their insurance companies, they know that they cannot keep their health plan, as the president promised.



But it is only when administrative liberalism has hit bottom that the practical Republican politician and the Tea Party radical will be able to unite and offer the American people a new social safety net based on limited government and consensual cooperation.

Why Obamacare Equals Injustice

The Weekly Standard guys have piece on the Five Deceptions and Disasters of Obamacare.  I think we can use it to illustrate why, necessarily, all big government programs are unjust.

Here are the five Obamacare deceptions:

• Deception #1: Universal coverage
• Deception #2: No new taxes on the middle class
• Deception #3: Annual premium savings of $2,500
• Deception #4: No increase in the deficit
• Deception #5: You can keep your plan if you like it

Given that the program was designed to enroll the uninsured through a) subsidies for the near poor and b) fines on the rest of the uninsured, you can see that the deceptions were deceptions pure and simple.  Also, given that the program required all plans to include mandatory prevention and contraception plus provisions to subsidize the old and the sick, the idea that the plan could cost less was a fantasy.

So what is really going on?  Partly it's the liberal fantasy that "there has to be a system."  And there is the liberal assumption that ordinary people just don't have the mental equipment to navigate the health care system on their own, so they have to be "nudged" to do the right thing.  Then there's the political imperative: politicians are people that offer free stuff to their supporters.  That's how you get to 51 percent.

All that is a setup to my three mantras.  No there doesn't have to be a system.  The history of the modern era is that the economy is self organizing.  What we call the price "system" is not a system at all.  If anything, taking off from Heidegger, it is a discourse.  "Discourse is the Articulation of intelligibility," he writes in Being and Time.  What does he mean by that?  Well, with Heidegger, who knows! But let us assert that price is a kind of language with which we communicate our needs and desires.  Let us riff off Heidegger's actual words and say that Price is the intersubjective Articulation of human needs.  In a system, a government system, the intersubjectivity and the articulation are suppressed by the system architects and operators.  Because system is domination.

No, health care doesn't have to be a prize in the political auction of free stuff.  In fact that makes health care into an economic and social good into a political hostage.  You can't have health care unless you have kowtowed to the political machine.  You want health care?  Better learn to go along to get along.  Politics is division, civil war by other means.

No, health care doesn't have to be a government program.  Government is force, and government can only do simple things.  It can't, for instance, pull off a fairly simple website to show health plan alternatives.  So government gravitates to one-size-fits-all, as in Medicare and Social Security and childhood education.  And that one-size-fits-all gravitates towards the convenience of the producer interest, or the bureaucratic interest, or the activist interest.  And it sows conflict, because it forces people to fight each other in a futile effort to get the one-size-fits-all to match their own needs, and to hell with anyone else.

When you mix system and politics and government together, as we are doing with Obamacare, the result is injustice.  Of course it is, if system is domination, politics is division, and government is force.  The whole point of social animals is to reduce rigidity, smooth over divisions, and reduce the need for force.  

I suspect that it's just beginning to dawn on liberals and Democrats that Obamacare is an epic disaster and an injustice that will echo down the decades.

Put it this way.  Democrats dined out for decades on Herbert Hoover, the president that presided over the four years of economic disaster from 1929 to 1933.  I suspect that Republicans will be dining out on Obama and Obamacare for the rest of my life.

Are Conservatives Like Me Anarchists?

I'm a little perplexed.  Over the past two weeks I've been called an anarchist twice.  The first time was when I was explaining my civil society ideas to a 60-ish liberal, a man that started out adult life as an SDS activist at Boston University.



The second time was when a liberal took out after my piece "There Has To Be a System."



Who, Me?  An anarchist?  I have to admit it took me aback.



But then I realized that it all made sense.  To a liberal, a world without their big-government programs would indeed be a world without structure, a world of chaos.



But let's get one thing out of the way.  Wikipedia defines "Anarchism" as "a political philosophy that advocates stateless societies based on non-hierarchical free associations."  That's not what I or any conservative I know about or any libertarian I know about is proposing.  Anarchy comes from the Greek and means "without a ruler."



What libertarian conservatives do want is a state that is as small as possible, with a ruler whose powers are strictly limited to the need to defend people against looters and pillagers foreign and domestic.  We do want most social or "societal" functions dispatched by free associations, which might or might not be "non-hierarchical."  But we admit the need for a state.  It's just that we don't admit the need for a state of liberals, for liberals, and by liberals.  We think that such a state can be described in a single word: unjust.



So when liberals call me an anarchist they are projecting.  They are saying: but you want to tear down everything that we have spent the last century building.  And all that will be left is societal rubble.



This all issues naturally from the liberal analysis of the condition of humanity.  Starting at least with Marx, the left has asserted that capitalism is at least as hierarchical and exploitative as feudalism.  Under capitalism the workers are exploited.  The only solution is to meet force with force: a revolution to smash the power of the bosses, or "countervailing power" to match corporate power with union and government power.



If you think the lefty way then you think of society as purely a balance of power, just like the balance of power between nations.  Unilateral disarmament by the workers (and now the traditionally marginalized) would mean their utter destruction by the bosses.



(Yeah.  Funny how liberals call for unilateral disarmament between nations but not within nations.)



The conservative and libertarian worldview says that the fundamental relationship in the modern era is the economic relationship of the invisible hand.  The way to get ahead is not to go out looting and pillaging like some medieval king or some fascist or socialist dictator.  The way to prosperity is to divine the needs of the consumers and give it to them.



Liberals say no, that couldn't be true.  Unless we step in with our wage and hour laws, our social safety net, and our vigilant regulation of business then workers will get exploited without limit and we'll get a society of gross inequality with the rich and the poor and nothing in between.



Conservatives say the science is settled on this.  Starting right when Marx made his predictions about the "immiseration" of the workers the lot of workers has improved.  And the lot of workers has improved fastest where the economy and the society were the most capitalist.  In the 1950s John Kenneth Galbraith talked about "countervailing power" between Big Business, Big Labor, and Big Government.  Today, of course the Big Businesses of the 1950s are a corporate memory and the private sector unions reduced to penury.  Instead we have the market-focused behemoths like Walmart, Microsoft, and Apple and Google.  But Big Government is bigger.



What did Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, say about corporate power?

There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else.

You can see why corporations like to get in bed with government when things start going south. Government can stop the consumer from "spending his money somewhere else" and can force him to keep spending his money at the old place.



Conservatives as anarchists?  No, liberals.  You are just interpreting the world anarchy, a "world without rulers," to mean "a world without liberal rulers."



Can't say I blame you.

Liberals Driving People Away From City

One of the hardy perennials of our national political garden is the liberal piece about racist whites bailing out of the city.  Here's the latest, Jessica Grose's "Rich People Love Diversity, Until They Have Kids," from Slate.



Things are getting worse, of course.

According to an analysis of census data by Kendra Bischoff of Cornell University and Sean Reardon at Stanford University, the proportion of families living in affluent areas doubled from 1970 to 2009—it went from 7 to 15 percent. At the same time, the percentage of families living in poor areas also more than doubled—it went from 8-18 percent.

You see, what's happening is that these affluent areas "deliberately exclude affordable housing."  That's how they stay uniformly affluent.



Meanwhile over at Forbes Joel Kotkin is reporting on the baby boomers moving away from the suburbs.  They are not moving back to the city.

Perhaps no urban legend has played as long and loudly as the notion that “empty nesters” are abandoning their dull lives in the suburbs for the excitement of inner city living. This meme has been most recently celebrated in the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.

On the contrary, they are moving further out, everyone except the most affluent, the ones that can afford the high cost of inner-city living.



The indictment that liberals hurl at the white flighters is that the middle class is abandoning the poor to the inner city.  And that they are racists.  Meanwhile liberals are moving into the city because they like to live in a diverse community and they care about the poor.



Of course there is a germ of truth in the liberal indictment.  Most non-liberal whites think that living next to underclass minority communities is utter folly.  You just don't want your kids anywhere near the dysfunctional and violent youth of the underclass.  And now we have a report of a white couple getting beaten up by a gang of black kids in Brooklyn.  So we were right.



But liberals are only telling part of the story.  Middle class and affluent folks are not leaving the city just to get away from the toxic and dangerous culture of the underclass.  They are also leaving to get away from the toxic political culture of liberals.



You see, liberal political control in a city is a long-term marker for decline.  It means everything from the inconvenience of up-to-the-minute micro-bossiness about recycling and plastic bags and all the latest liberal nostrums in the schools.  And for some reason liberals see nothing wrong with overgenerous public pensions bankrupting state and local governments.



Even if they are not conservative, most people just want to be left alone to live their lives in their own way among their own kind.  And especially they want to raise their kids in a safe and friendly environment.  And safety in this context means safe from liberal social engineers.



Here's another idea from the social scientists.  Guess who drives the urge to go and live in the suburbs?  It's women.  Women may like to live in the cool city when they are single twentysomethings.  Why not?  Young people tend to congregate where young people tend to congregate.



But after women get married and start a family they want a nest.  Ever notice that you never see birds nesting?  There's a reason for that.  If you want to get your fledglings off the nest you need to hide them away from the predators.  Human females are no different.  Once they get into the family way they experience no need to strut their stuff on the sidewalks of the city.  Instead, they want safety and security for the children they bring into the world.



That's what really powered the move to the suburbs after World War II.  Affluence and automobiles meant that women could bury themselves in leafy suburbs and, for the first time since their ancestors came off the farm, leave the edgy city to the fashionables.



Maybe, as the trendspotters would like, women would like to return to the city when their nests empty out. But by that time women are anchored in their dream homes and their relationships in the suburbs.  And they really don't need to return under the tutelage of liberals that take politics with every meal.



The exodus from the city to the suburb has nothing to do with racism or with evil oil companies killing the old streetcar lines.  It has everything to do with women nesting, and liberals driving normal people out of the cities with their poisonous politics.