Who Deals with the Freeloaders and Predators?

The two Big Problems of human society, in my view, are Freeloaders and Freebooters.  I have a whole chapter about it in "Freebooters and Freeloaders." Who are they?

The Freebooters are the common criminals that prey on the poor.  That's what we have police forces for.  That's just the domestic freebooters.  The foreign freebooters are the neighboring state, the expansionist empire, the marauders and the pirates.  That's what we have armies for.

But what about the freeloaders?  They are the people looking for free stuff.  And it's a curious thing that the government that defends us from freebooters, common criminals and dreaded foreign powers, is the agency that tends and feeds the freeloaders.  Why does it do that?  Because that is how all governments maintain their power.  They originate as rebel or conquering armies that distribute baronies to the captains in their armies.  They continue by buying the loyalty of their supporters with government spending and privileges.

So we could say that governments exist to protect the people from the predators.  But they do it at the cost of encouraging the freeloaders.  Two steps forward and one step backward.

What do we do about the freeloader problem?  That's what we have religion for, and specifically the post-Axial Age religions that advance an individual relationship with God.  Put it this way.  The only way you can deal with a common criminal is by arresting him and locking him up.  But freeloaders are different.  They are people that don't actively break the law.  They are just sneaking around looking for handouts.  It's obviously a universal human trait or we wouldn't have supermarket specials and coupons and airline frequent flier programs.

The way you deal with freeloaders is you make them ashamed of their idleness. You shame them into getting a job.  That's what religion does.

Back when Jane Austen was writing novels it was nothing for the rich to be idle.  And the worst of the worst were the young heirs that wasted their youths on gambling and dissipation.  I am thinking in particular of young Tom Bertram in Mansfield Park.

Not any more.  The liberal trustafarians of our own time all present themselves as busy as bees running their family foundations and funding social justice projects.  High class women don't sit around embroidering and making calls. They all have college educations and have careers.  Rich people don't have social cachet these days unless they are doing something.

So much for the rich.  But at the other end of the spectrum the modern welfare state actually encourages the poor in their idleness.  It makes a virtue out of freeloading!  And this is coded into the very design of the authoritarian welfare state and its over-under governing coalition.  The "over" part gets the jobs, the money, the power and the love of beautiful women.  The "under" part gets to freeload with a share of the loot, a payoff for voting the "overs" into power.

Now I maintain that the secular liberal political movement is actually a secular religion.  It is not just a governing party but a way of life.  So here we have a religion that actually promotes freeloading!

If you ask me, something's gotta give.

Here's my idea for a better America.  Keep the government focused on fighting the freebooters and the predators.  Government is force, and the only thing it can do is wage war on someone.

But we need a new religion to shame the freeloaders.  Religion is all about the meaning of life and what it takes to live a good life.  And the way that religion works on people is by shaming and shunning the backsliders: "social control" as our liberal friends put it.

But first we've got to chase the present liberal priesthood out of the temple, because their religion is a false religion.  If a religion does not shame its believers away from freeloading then it is worth nothing at all.

How to Teach Rapists Not to Rape

There's a big flap going on in SF quarters right now about rape.  Conservative SF writer Larry Correia in his blog affirmed the advice of Miss Nevada that women should take self-defense classes to protect themselves from rapists.

Apparently this is all wrong.  The current liberal narrative is that there is a "rape culture" in the US and that instead of teaching women to defend themselves we should "teach men not to rape."  After all, rape is not women's fault so why should it be their responsibility to defend themselves?

This would be comical if it weren't so serious.  Look, if women are to go out into the world as independent women without the protection of their fathers then there's a chance they might run into a nasty.  What's a woman to do then?  Teach the guy not to rape?

Women in general and feminists in particular have no idea how men's minds work.  One of the biggest differences is that if you teach a girl something she will dutifully learn it and repeat it back to you.  But boys resist learning.  That's why we have Basic Training and Boot Camp for soldiers.  Basic Training is not about teaching anything.  It is about ramming lessons home to a "licentious soldiery."

I have a little private joke about Jaques' tale of the second age of man in As You Like It:

And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. 

My point is that you don't see little girls "creeping like a snail / Unwillingly to school."  Why?  Because little girls do what they are told and are glad to do it.  Want to teach men not to rape, other than nice well-brushed upper-middle class lads?  You put the fear of God or the drill instructor in them.

And that brings up the bigger point.  It's about the social triad of economy, government, and religion.

Ideally, in the best of all possible worlds, people would exchange and barter like they have for 200,000 years and cooperate with each other, making and doing things that are useful for other people. After all, exchange and barter are what has created the miraculous global economy.

But there is a problem.  Some people don't want to do that.  They would rather just take from other people.  They may be thieves snatching stuff from others, or they may be in a gang organized to prey on others.  Or they may be in a predatory army or a political party offering free stuff to its followers.

That's why we need government: to punish the predators and freeloaders.

But the problem is that all governments are organized as a kind of criminal conspiracy.  All governments are armed minorities occupying a patch of land from which they seize resources from the inhabitants to give to their supporters.

So we have a little problem.  The very people that are charged with defending us against predators are themselves predators.  Or, to put in in rape terms, the very people that we charge to protect us from the rapists are very often rapists themselves.

I don't need to mention any names of famous politicians for you to get the point.

So what's the solution?  It's religion, of course.  Religion does not merely teach men not to rape, it teaches them the concept of divine justice. If they rape and pillage they will burn in hell.  Yes, and they will still burn in hell even if they "get away with it" and escape human justice.  Because God Knows, and God will judge all the sinners in the next life.

What we see in our liberal universities and schools is liberals trying to create a secular religion to replace the religion of Judeo-Christian personal responsibility that they have spent the last century trying to destroy.  All the stuff about sexual harassment and rape culture and freshman indoctrination is an attempt to restore some sort of order after the liberals declared that the old order of male courtesy towards women was nothing but patriarchal oppression.

Meanwhile we are raising a generation of feral young men that have never had fathers.  But no worries. We will just teach these home-boys not to rape.

It's not the Corporations, It's the Government

Yesterday talk-show host Rush Limbaugh riffed off a piece in Redstate.com about crony capitalism.  Big business, you see, doesn't like Dave Brat and his populist anti-corporatism.  They are afraid that Tea Party populism could upset their relationship with their "strongest champions on Capitol Hill."

Look, I understand how business feels about this.  It's all very well for a Tea Party candidate to rail against bankers and demand that we put them in jail, but what are the bankers supposed to do when the government comes calling and demanding that they lend money to deadbeats?

So big business does what comes naturally.  It goes along to get along.

My poster-boy for this attitude is none other than folk-hero Warren Buffett.  Good ole Warren knows which side his bread is buttered on, as I wrote in 2010.  His insurance business makes a ton of money on life insurance for small businesses so their heirs can have cash to pay estate tax.  And he also likes to buy businesses when the principals die and the business needs to be sold quickly to pay estate tax.  And he's making a ton of money with BNSF oil trains while new pipelines like the Keystone XL are held up by coal-speculator Tom Steyer and his green friends.  Plus, did you notice, Warren just gave away a billion or so for abortion.

That's what you call taking care of business.

I maintain that business doesn't care one way or another what government does.  It just wants to stay out of trouble, and when government wants its help for, e.g., getting Obamacare off the ground, then business is perfectly willing to help, for a fee.

I have a friend that seems to get a lot of his news from Comedy Central Stewart/Colbert. And he fervently believes in the sins of the insurance companies and the banksters.  There's no doubt that insurance companies and banks are in up to their necks with the ruling class.  But that tells us nothing.  Why are corporations so interested in government?  It's simple: government is interested in them.

Remember Bill Gates?  He and Microsoft wanted nothing to do with politics until the day the federal government came calling with an anti-trust suit.

It's the old saw from Trotsky: You many not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.  Which means that you have to pay attention, whether you like it or not.

Yes, insurance companies are monsters that deny you coverage just when you need it.  And they are deep in Obamacare with the "risk corridors" that compensate them for losses in the transition.  But insurance companies have been regulated by government for over a century.  Why?  Because people get pissed off when the insurance company doesn't pay when they have a loss due to something-or-other in the "fine print."  But why did the fine print get there?  I will tell you why.  Because people cheat.

Yes, banksters are monsters that got themselves in a mess with reckless loans and derivatives in the 2000s.  And they oughta go to jail.  Just don't forget that the monetary/financial/credit system is dominated by government, starting with the Federal Reserve System and continuing to Fannie and Freddie the mortgage twins.  Due to lefty activists, the government set policy for Fannie and Freddie that forced them to increase loans to marginal borrowers.  It seemed like a good deal to the banks at the time because they could sell all their dodgy loans to Fannie and Freddie.  Then they started packaging mortgage loans to sell to European banks and pension funds and mitigating the risk with derivatives.  Yeah, but they should have known!  Except that if they didn't get into the profitable mortgage business they would have shown reduced earnings and been bought up by another bank, or something.

Look, I'm with Dave on this.  We've got to pull crony capitalism out by the roots. But we also have to realize that the problem isn't the crony capitalists.  The problem is the government, and behind the government the liberal ruling class.  And behind the ruling class are the ordinary Americans pissed off because life isn't free and demanding that government "do something" about it.

Matt Ridley's "Rational Optimist:" It Takes a Collective Brain

What makes humans different?  In our modern era our opinion leaders have been moving closer and closer to the Folger's TV commercial insistence that there's "no difference."  People can't tell the difference between Folger's mass-market coffee and the other kind -- at least not after a satisfying restaurant meal.  Nor is there any difference between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom.  We are all Darwin's creatures.

But Matt Ridley in The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves wants us to accept that there really is a difference between us and the ape species nearest to us in the living world.  The difference is specialization and exchange.  In economic language, the difference between us and the apes is Ricardo's law of comparative advantage.  Humans instinctively understand that, rather than do everything for myself, it's better for me to specialize on something I'm good at, while my neighbor specializes on something else.  Then we can exchange.

But only humans know this.  If you set up an experiment with apes, they don't get it.  Writes Ridley:

The primatologist Sarah Brosnan tried to teach two different groups of chimpanzees about barter and found it problematic...  They could not see the point of giving up food they liked [to get] food they liked even more.(p.59)

Get it?  The whole point of barter and exchange is to give up something that's valuable to you in exchange for something even more valuable.  And chimps don't get it. Barter, trade, exchange: it's a human thing.  We really are different.

In A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World William J. Bernstein shows that human trade is not just a modern thing since the breakup of feudalism. Trade started at least 6,000 years ago.  We know that because archaeologists have found obsidian chips hundreds of miles away from their volcanic sources.  People started trading for these razor sharp cutting tools between 6,000 and 12,000 years ago.  Pretty soon people were trading in copper so that they could make weapons and helmets for the continual warfare that obtained in ancient times.

But Matt Ridley wants us to look further back for the dawn of trade.  Half a million years ago hominids were making tools to butcher animals, and they'd been doing it the same way for a million years.  But then something changed.  It's hard to know when, but by 72,000 years ago archaeologists have found perforated shells from estuarine snails at locations that were up to 100 miles away from salt water.  The snails didn't get up and walk.  Most likely they were traded.  People that trade or exchange are people that specialize.  Specialization leads to expertise, and expertise leads to improvement, and improvement leads to innovation.

There's a scale effect here.  The bigger the population the more specialization, the more exchange, the more connections and the more innovation.  Conversely, a small isolated population tends to regress towards less specialization, less exchange and even a negative rate of innovation, a loss of current skills and expertise.  That's what happened to the natives of Tasmania.

"Human cultural progress is a collective enterprise and it needs a dense collective brain."(p.83)  The bigger the collective the more "collective brain" connections and the more progress.  Thus capitalism thrives in cities, and cities specialize: New York in finance, Dallas and Houston in oil, Silicon Valley in information technology.  Even pop-pysch bestsellers get this, as in Richard Florida's Rise of the Creative Class where creatives clump together in "ideopolises."

The biggest impediment to the big collective brain is big government.  Here is how the founder of the Ming dynasty took China from #1 to a wasteland of poverty.

forbid all trade and travel without government permission; force merchants to register and inventory of their goods once a month; order peasants to grow for their own consumption and not for the market; and allow inflation to devalue the paper currency 10,000-fold.(p.183)

Today big government would like to reduce travel to reduce "carbon pollution;" Lefty economist Thomas Piketty proposes a global cadaster of private wealth, and self-sufficiency and "local" food is celebrated by the latest generation of upper-class ascetics.

The point is that the collective brain doesn't just sit there; it does something.  So whatever the challenge, whatever the problem, specialists will start working on a solution.  The more people on the problem talking to each other and exchanging with each other and "borrowing" ideas from each other, the sooner they'll innovate themselves out of a jam. "[T]he human race has become a collective problem-solving machine and it solves problems by changing its ways."(p.281)

And that's the reason to be optimistic, despite the official pessimism about food scarcity and climate change.  Ordinary animals do what they do, and if the world changes and their habitat disappears they disappear with it.  But humans are different.  We don't have a fixed niche; we don't have a fixed way of doing things.  We see a problem and we solve it -- with our collective brain.

Trying to Think Strategically About Iraq Mess

The conventional wisdom response to the sudden ISIS offensive in Iraq, taking Mosul and Tikrit and coming within range of Baghdad, is panic.  It sees Iraq collapsing before the unstoppable momentum of the Sunni extremist militia.

Just a minute.  Let's try to think strategically about this.  In the first place, it seems that the Sunni rebels have been defeated in Syria and recently have been confined to the northeast along the Syrian border with Turkey.  You could say that their invasion of Iraq is an act of desperation, because they have nowhere else to go.

But what about the collapse of two Iraqi divisions in the path of the invaders?  What's that all about?  Well how about this?  The Iraqi soldiers know very well that Mosul and Tikrit are Sunni heartland.  They know that the Shia-led army doesn't belong there, and that the people in that area don't like them and would probably whack them if they had a chance.  So they got out while they still could.

And this brings up the bigger picture.  The first reaction of the Shia-led government in Baghdad was to connect with their Shia brethren in Iran.  So the whole conflict could escalate quite quickly into a Sunni-Shia war with Shia-led Syria on one side and Shiite Baghdad and Iran on the other and the Sunni ISIS rebels in the middle.

Next question.  What do you think the Saudis think about that?

Look.  The only thing we care about is the oil.  The lefties that complained about that back in the 2000s had a point, although they got things backward as usual.  The point is that, right now, we need the Middle East oil, and we can't let the Middle East descend into Sunni-Shia mayhem.

There's a line that Winston Churchill is responsible for all this, because it was he that converted the British Royal Navy from coal to oil a century ago, and that meant strategic domination of the Middle East.

It's pretty obvious what we need to do, at a grand strategic level.  We need to free ourselves from Middle East oil.  For years that was impossible because oil production in the US was declining and the Middle East had the cheapest oil.

But now we have fracking.  Actually, according to the Baron of the Bakken, Harold Hamm, it's not really fracking that defines the new revolution in hydrocarbon discovery but horizontal drilling.  And here's a tip: my lawyer friend in the oil and gas business says that they are redrilling lots of old wells using the new horizontal technology.

Remember 2008?  In September the GOP was moving the needle with "Drill, Baby, Drill" and the Democrats had to pretend that they were all in favor of doing something about high gasoline prices.  But then came the crash and the Obama administration and the environmentalist war on carbon. (Hey Tom Steyer, how are those coal plants you financed in Indonesia coming along?)

One of the things that the GOP presidential candidate in 2016 needs to do is put up North Dakota as the poster boy for their "clear plan" for economic growth.  North Dakota, home of the Bakken oil field, came in first in economic growth for 2013 among the 50 states for the fourth year running.  North Dakota growth in 2013 was 9.7%.  And the BEA revised 2012 from 13.7% to 20.3%.  Yeah, Walmart is paying $17 an hour in North Dakota.

The point is that North Dakota symbolizes what Republicans want for all American states.  And the whole point of growth in North Dakota is that it is reducing the strategic importance of the Middle East.  So the day might come when we could apply the Hillary! doctrine to the Middle East:  At this point, what difference does it make?

Meanwhile, it's Frack, Baby, Frack.

Liberals, Shocked, Shocked that Government is Force

One of my favorite themes is that our liberal friends are a little to quick to suggest that the kind of government they advance is really just the benign program of a bunch of kindly librarians.  This allows them to forget, as they crunch down ruthlessly on anyone that disagrees with them, that government is force.

Now David Brat, economics professor and giant slayer, has dared to write that the "government holds a monopoly on violence."  He has even referenced Nietzsche and the last man.  And liberals from the Wall Street Journal's news side to the liberal blogosphere are hyperventilating, according to Charles C. W. Cooke.

OK. I get it.  Liberals really don't want the idea to get about that government is always and everywhere an overgrown band of thugs.  They don't want you to think that if you don't take care to limit its power government will sooner or later come and get you.  That's because they want to increase the powers of government.

I recently wrote an emailer that government can do three things: it can do war, it can do jails, and it can do loot.

I was at a party last night with a bunch of liberals, and afterward my mind was in a frenzy.  And I thought: government can do three things: it can do war, it can do loot, and it can do jails.  So it tries to solve every problem either with a war, such as a war on poverty, or a jail, such as our national child custodial facilities called "schools", or a handout to its supporters, as in Medicare, Social Security, handouts, crony capitalism, etc.

He replied by raising the question of "regulations" and imagining that I would characterize regulations as jail or loot.  It's true that it does seem a bit extreme to think of regulations that way.  But I'm reading Matt Ridley's Rational Optimist right now and his sweep of history has trade originating way before the start of cities, and even farming.

In other words barter and exchange are not a new and frightening thing that started with the industrial revolution.  It's been going on since the dawn of time.  Because Ricardo's law of comparative advantage applies to all living things, because everyone benefits from specialization and the growth of the "collective mind."  And most "regulation" of business was fully covered in the common law, which was judge-made law that evolved out of the legal conflicts between merchants.

But of course that wasn't good enough for the educated youth of the 19th century and it is certainly not acceptable to the progressive ruling class of the 21st century.  They want power, not justice.

Yeah.  There is a role for "regulation" but the problem is that it's a two-edged sword.  You can use it to curb corporate monopoly power, but what do you end up with?  You end up with the Interstate Commerce Commission that was supposed to curb railroad monopolies and ended up preserving the transportation status quo in a century-long railroad bankruptcy.  How do you know if your regulation is curbing monopoly and "externalities" or setting you on the road to "regulatory capture?"  The answer is that you don't.  The answer is that any government regulation will probably end up advantaging some special interest.

Start with Obamacare, which was advertised as bending the cost curve and reducing the cost of health insurance for the average family by $2,500 a year.  But now we read about the Obamacare "risk corridors" that are intended to bail the insurance companies out of losses in the transition period to full Obamacare.  What's that all about?  I thought that the whole point of Obamacare was to curb the eevil insurance companies from ripping us off.  The fact is that a monster government program like Obamacare has unlimited opportunities for special interests to carve out cozy little monopolies and subsidies that are too small for the media to sniff out and scandalize.  Of course it is.  Because we know that government regulation almost always leads to regulatory capture.  Because government is force.

And when it comes to green subsidies to green crony capitalists the media doesn't show up, because they favor subsidies and monopolies when it serves the liberal agenda.

Dave Brat is right.  If you don't start your day remembering that government is force, then you are already half way to deluding yourself that your program of government force is nothing more than a couple of librarians discussing a poster celebrating literacy.

Could a Democrat Get Cantored?

Everyone who is anyone agrees that the Tea Party is a dangerous bunch of extremists.  That's when they aren't agreeing that the Tea Party is a bunch of clueless Sharron Angles and Christine O'Donnells.

But I find myself wondering: could anything like the Tea Party happen to the Democrats?

Let's look back.  The last time that the Democrats had agitation in the ranks was the Occupy movement in 2010.  Was that a grass-roots movement?  Er, I don't think so.  The media climbed aboard it immediately, and the Obamis seemed to think it was going to power them to reelection and the war on inequality.  It looked suspiciously like a political cats-paw owned and operated by the ruling class.

Then there was the 2000s with the Kos Kidz.  But were they really a bottom-up movement like the Tea Party?  At any rate they seemed to get on pretty well with the Democratic establishment, pushing them just a little bit harder on Iraq than the regular politicians wanted.

Or the Democratic Leadership Conference that operated in the late 1980s and the 1990s?  The idea was to moderate the Democratic brand to make it more electable.  That meant a "third way" between left and right.  But was it a grass roots movement?  Hardly.  The grass roots was lefty.  The DLC was an attempt by a group of Dem leaders to present the Democratic Party in a new moderate way to the voters after the evident success of the Reagan revolution.

OK, what about the Sixties, and the movement against the Vietnam War, the New Left, the McGovern generation?  Was that a genuine revolution?  Not really.  Wasn't it really a movement at the top?  Wasn't it really the radical kids of elite liberal parents living out the logical implication of their parents' political beliefs?  At any rate the media, after a few false starts, got solidly behind the kids.  Walter Cronkite turned against the Vietnam War in 1968 and the Tet Offensive.  I'd say that the Sixties radicals amounted to a palace coup against the old big-city machines run by the Daleys, leaders of the white working class.  When the smoke cleared you had elite liberals in charge of the cities with an African-American militia to supply the political muscle.  And the old white working class headed for the suburbs.

Seems to me that in America right now you could not get in the Democratic Party a real bottom-up political movement like the Tea Party.  The Democratic Party is completely run by the ruling class.  There is no opportunity for dissent, no opportunity for some nobody like a Dave Brat to step into a Congressional primary.  Why, we just saw liberal poster girl Sandra Fluke told to go to the back of the line when she thought she'd run for Congress.  That's because the Democratic Party is a great big political machine and there are dozens of young Democratic lawyers and activists higher up the food chain from newcomer Fluke.  And they get first dibs at the loot.

The point is pretty simple.  The Democratic Party is a great big looting and pillaging machine.  You join the party or vote for its candidates because you want a share of the loot.  Hey, how about these SSA administrative judges handing out billions in Disability Insurance to the folks!  But the Republican Party is for people that don't really want loot.  They want to live their lives as People of the Responsible Self.  And every few years the GOP party supporters revolt against their Outer Party leaders that succumb to the temptations of office, and just want to go along to get along with the ruling class in the Inner Party.

Like right now.