Neo-Feudalism is not an Accident

Yesterday I wrote a piece on the over-under coalition that our ruling class runs.  It's a joint effort of the People of the Creative Self and the People of the Tribal Self.  The People of the Creative Self want to rule, and the People of the Tribal Self want to belong and to get free stuff.

Now I find that everyone is writing the same thing.  Fred Bauer writes about the "new feudalism." He references Joel Kotkin's argument that California is calcifying into a neo-feudal society with a ruling class of oligarchs (tech and finance) and clerisy (media and government) backed up by an increasing corps of serfs (working and non-working poor).  The middle class of yeomen get to be the piggy in the middle.

The problem is, of course, that neo-feudalism leads to neo-stasis, neo-inflation, neo-injustice, and neo-cruelty.  Because Hayek and his settled science that a political elite cannot organize a prosperous society because the job is just too big for politics.  But liberal fundamentalists think that their old-time statist religion is good enough for them and if it's good enough for them it better be good enough for the rest of us or else.  Don't bother them with the science!

The point is that this neo-feudalism was baked in the cake way back in the beginning of the rule of the educated ruling class a century ago.  Indeed, that's probably why Bismarck liked government social insurance for the Germans: he was a genuine feudalist, not a cheap neo- version!

In this dispiriting time of Obama malaise we can take comfort that the internal contradictions of neo-feudalism are finally eating the ruling class alive.  The Obamacare mess is a direct result of imagining that with a 2,000 page bill and a stack of regulations you can reorganize health care.  The immigration mess is a result of the ruling class not being serious about defending the border and telling the people of Central America with nods and winks that they are all welcome to come and join the serfs.

It's interesting to read the report of a meeting on "June 30 between President Barack Obama and a host of leftist pro-amnesty groups including the Center for American Progress, the Service Employees International Union, the National Immigration Law Center, and the Leadership Council on Civil Rights."

Obama did most of the talking, promising the groups that he would take executive action to slow deportations and grant legal status to millions of undocumented workers. Obama also said he would criticize Congress for its lack of action on immigration reform, ignoring the fact nobody on Capitol Hill trusts the president to carry out any laws they’d pass.

But the president still made the activists unhappy, because he "argued forcefully that the U.S. had to signal its intent to enforce the law through deportations" and he told the groups that he had to enforce the law.  For them, open borders is a moral issue.

It's also a moral issue for the rest of us.

The truth is that neo-feudalism is not just a power thing, it's a religion.  And the only thing that will cure liberals of their religion is utter destruction at the polls.

But first we need a cultural renaissance that floods the zone with a love of freedom and responsible individualism.  That's because, as Andrew Breitbart said, politics is downstream from culture, and right now liberal culture is dominant. In fact, liberals are ramming their culture down our throats.

Who knows, maybe the day we pluck up the courage to tell the liberal Savonarolas and Torquemadas to take their hate and shove it we will find that a freedom culture has been there all along.

The Double Game of the Ruling Class

On the one hand our educated rulers insist that there is no difference between the races.  On the other hand they insist on treating the races differently with "affirmative action" and "diversity."

But now, with the modern analysis of the human genome, we know that humans really do display genetic differences that are "recent, copious, and regional."  Those words come from Nicholas Wade's controversial Troublesome Inheritance. Meanwhile, as Michael Barone reminds us:

The American Anthropological Association states that race "is a recent human invention" and "is about culture, not biology." The American Sociological Association calls race "a social construct" and decries "the danger of contributing to the popular conception of race as biological."

On the one hand our educated rulers insist that they must rule over us because we can't be trusted not to fall for nationalist and racist demagogues.  On the other hand they invented "identity politics" so they could appeal for votes on the basis of sex, race, and language.

Then our educated rulers fell head over heels in love with Barack Obama, a man that clearly governs as a racist demagogue.

On the one hand our educated rulers insist that Americans follow the law.  On the other hand President Obama rules with his phone and his pen.  We know why this is so; it is because it is impossible to write laws with the complexity to grasp a comprehensive task like, e.g., health care or immigration.  It is mere common sense to know that all human activity relies, in the end, upon the flexibility and good will of the humans involved.  But the whole point of a legal system is to draw simple lines in the sand.  It is also common sense that when many lines are drawn in the sand for many laws the result will be indecipherable.

What does it all mean?

In my view we should look at this by recognizing that our educated ruling class is, first of all, like any other ruling class.  It wants to rule.  It wants to use government to implement its vision of a good society.  Generally speaking, in the modern era, that means government as an aesthetic project, producing a society that is pleasing to the eye of the educated ruling class.

Let us call this ruling class the People of the Creative Self; they believe in the German cult of creativity that began not later than the Romantic movement at the turn of the 19th century.  They believe, of course, that they have a heavenly mandate to create a new society on earth by creative political innovation.

The ruling class has a problem because its creative vision clashes with another group, the modern middle class that I call the People of the Responsible Self.  The People of the Responsible Self believe in responsible individualism.  They believe they should be free, as responsible individuals, to live lives substantially free from detailed government regulation, and they believe that they should be free to worship God (or Gaia or Mammon) in their own way.

The People of the Responsible Self create a problem for the educated ruling class, because they disagree about the nature of the good society.  Nobody can tell what will result from a society of responsible individuals working and playing individually without conforming to an overall national plan. In consequence the ruling class has been forced to appeal over the heads of the responsible individualists to the lower orders to get the support it needs for its aesthetic project.  But there is a problem. The lower orders are not responsible individualists or educated creatives.  They are tribal.  If you want to win their votes you must make tribal appeals; you must act like a tribal leader and frankly offer them free stuff in return for their support, and you must couch your appeal in terms of an embattled tribe struggling to exist in a world of enemies: bosses, patriarchs, KKKs, bigots, etc.

There is, of course, a fundamental contradiction here.  How can the educated ruling class create a perfect world of aesthetic harmony and liberation and emancipation when it obtains its political support by frank appeal to race and gender and the shameless offer of loot?

It can't, and that's why we see the whole progressive project of the educated ruling class collapsing all around us.  What our educated ruling class needs to learn, in the words of Chief Justice Roberts, is this: "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race."  The way for a ruling class to achieve a society that soars above racism and sexism is to lead without resorting to appeals based on race and gender.

Hypocrisy, they say, is the homage that vice pays to virtue.  We are all hypocrites, and all end up undone by our hypocrisy.  Especially ruling classes.

Government Professor Attacks Austrian Economics

I get that Noah Smith's gig at Bloomberg View is to bring a light touch to economics and business.  And as an assistant professor of finance at a government university, it doesn't hurt your career to take a swing at Austrian economics, the brain-child of Austrians Carl Menger and Ludwig von Mises, and call its supporters 9/11 truthers with brain worms.

Back in the good old days, it was Immanuel Kant that decided that philosophy needed a critique.  That's why he called his great works The Critique of Pure Reason, The Critique of Practical Reason, etc.  Ever since, inquiring minds have buzzed around the flame of "critical theory."

Now the point of so-called Austrian economics is that it is a critique of modern government and its interventionist economy.  The point of so-called Keynesian economics is that it is an apology for interventionist economics.

You can see where professors at government universities would come down on that.

When the classic economists first developed economics as a system it was a critique of mercantilism, the theory that government needed to supervise the economy to encourage exports and the inflow of gold.  National wealth, it was thought, was founded on a big hoard of gold; imports were a drain on national strength.  Nonsense, said the Adam Smiths and David Ricardos.  What matters is to encourage the markets and trade.  Leave off promoting exports and penalizing imports: all you are doing is cutting off your nose to spite your face.

But the rise of government programs in the late 19th century created a problem.  The new government programs interfered with the normal operation of the economy.  In broad terms they represented government spending that had to be maintained through good times and bad.  In the Great Depression of 1929-33 this created a huge problem.  "Orthodox" economics said that you should let the markets find a new equilibrium.  But meanwhile people were suffering, and that included big special interests.  So the government raised taxes and spending to keep things going, only they didn't.

Keynesian economics was hailed as the answer to the problem of the Great Depression, because the raising of taxes and spending didn't get the US out of the Depression.  A new approach was needed to get the government out of the jam.  The solution was to increase the money supply and use it to pay for the increased spending.  If that meant a little inflation, so much the better because it would float investments that the market collapse had put underwater.

In the aftermath of the Great Recession of 2007-09 Keynesian economics has actually worked pretty well from the Democrats' point of view.  They have maintained benefits for their supporters and the economy has not crashed like it did in 1929-33.  But the downside is that growth has been pitiful.  Of course it has.  Huge amounts of money have gone to maintaining people in their current situation with welfare payments and bailouts of banks and auto companies; that means that people have not adjusted to the post-crash reality as fast as they could have.

Austrian economics says that all this is rubbish.  It says that the first problem is cheap money to get out of a recession: all that does is ignite a new unsustainable boom and an inevitable crash.  What is needed is to liquidate the malinvestments of the previous boom as quickly as possible so that growth may resume on the basis of a balanced credit system not a credit system artificially boosted by cheap money.  But the Keynesians say that liquidation is cruel and hurts the vulnerable.

Since Austrian economics is a critique of our current authoritarian welfare state and its interventionist economics it is not surprising that everyone from mild conservative-libertarians to wild-eyed radicals have piled on.  It is these wild-eyed radicals that Noah Smith is sneering at.

In my view some kind of Keynesian economics is inevitable so long as we maintain a big-government state.  The fact is that big government is stupid and unable to adjust to changing conditions.  So it needs the manipulations of the Keynesians to keep it going and to get out of jams.  The fact is that devaluation or inflation is the easiest way for government to get out of a jam without having to deal with riots in the streets.

But Keynesian economics is cruel and unjust and the Obama economy proves it.  Who is benefitting right now? Rich guys like me that are 100% invested in the bubble stock market and poor people chugging along on EBT and disability.  Oh and don't forget the federal government that is paying $225 billion a year in net interest instead of $1 trillion a year that it would have to pay if interest rates were allowed to rise to a normal level.  Who is being screwed? The average worker that is afraid to quit their job, the young people that can't find a job, and the mom-and-pop investor with money in the bank or the bond market that's earning zero interest.

Meanwhile, let's have a laugh at the crazies on the right.  Good call, Noah Smith.

Is Obama Channeling Kaiser Bill?

Remember dear old Kaiser Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany?  He was notorious as a shallow man that mouthed off when he should have kept quiet.  And he was good at divisive politics, riling Germans up against each other, and Germany against the rest of Europe.

And it didn't end well for the Germans and for Germany.

Now we have an American head of state, President Barack Obama, that seems to incarnate the worst features of Kaiser Bill.  He's shallow, and he's careless with the partisan rhetoric.  And he's too lazy to bring different interests together to solve problems.  Did he really believe his words in 2004 when he electrified his fellow Democrats?

There is not a liberal America and a conservative America. There is a United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America, a Latino America, an Asian America — there’s the United States of America.

Roger L. Simon brings all this up on the Fourth of July to ask a question:

How do we become — on this Fourth of July — the United States of America again? 

Yes indeed.  What must we do to become again that last best hope of mankind on earth?

Simon has a simple message.  Let's get over ourselves.  We conservatives may have the better ideas, but we certainly aren't perfect.  So let's get out this Fourth of July and talk to our liberal and independent friends.  Let's not say I told you so.  Let's commiserate with them.

Don’t point to the polls and brag “I told you so!”  Commiserate with them instead.  You and they are Americans, after all, as Barack Obama once said and then forgot or ignored, and it is our great country that has come to this pass.  And, as we all know, as America goes, so goes the world.

Things are too serious for gloating and end-zone dances.  We are all Americans, and it's up to us to fix things.  If we won't do it, who will?

The good thing about the current crisis is that after the Bush years, when liberals persuaded themselves that Bush was uniquely stupid (for following policies, mostly, that the Clinton administration set up in the 1990s), the liberal answer in Obama has been an unqualified disaster.

Back in 2009 liberals thought that all they had to do was turn the Keynesian levers and all would be well.  They didn't even have to ease up on the entitlements and wait for the economy to recover.  Full speed ahead on the liberal agenda!

Instead they have been totally bushwhacked.  Nothing has worked the way they thought it should, the way they knew it would because they are, after all, the smart people, the evolved people.

So now liberals are going to be a lot more humble than they used to be.

Maybe now we can get together and do some stuff to fix the economy and the corrupted government.

But maybe not, because of the damage that the second coming of Kaiser Bill has wreaked upon the body politic with his divisive presidency.

There's a reason why presidents try to unify the country and don't normally rag on the opposition too much.  They know, or somebody tells them, that if they don't reach out to the opposition, the opposition won't be there to lend a hand when a president needs support from everyone.

So the first thing to do is to heal the partisan wounds that President Obama has so cruelly opened up in America's body politic.

Then we Americans can get to work.

Visting Philly's National Constitution Center

I  was naturally hesitant to visit the National Constitution Center July 2 on Philadelphia's Independence Mall, just down the street from the Liberty Bell.  Because you know what liberals can do to the constitution if you give them half a chance.

Of course, the Center isn't really all about the US Constitution.  It's really a potted liberal history of the US story so far.  But suitably toned down to avoid frightening the horses in the street.

The main exhibit is big on "rights" and "the vote" and I suppose it would have to be.  After all, the average person doesn't really think about limited government and the separation of powers.  They think about whether they can get a fair shake.

So, once the exhibit has dealt with the actual early US history (with slavery) and the revolutionary era (ending with a constitution and three-fifths of a person) it's on to the standard liberal story of America minus the worst excesses of racist-sexist-homophobe hate speech that we have come to know and love.  Ronald Reagan gets a fair shake and the exhibit ends with 2009 and America's First Black President.

That last item is a big deal.  On the day I visited the admission was free (courtesy of WaWa convenience stores) and the Center was thronged with African Americans.  They really liked checking to make sure that Barack Obama was featured in a major display.

There's also a temporary display on slavery at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, open through October 14, which is interesting on a couple of fronts.  It shows charts of the slaves and their children down a couple of generations.  It's remarkable to see how many children the slaves had and how many children and children's children lived to a ripe old age.  The exhibit also features the annual meeting of slave descendants at Monticello, and the struggles the have faced with the help of determination and strong families.  The exhibit was thronged with enthusiastic African Americans.

Naturally my favorite display was a humorous video "Ask Ben Stein" with our hero sitting at breakfast opening his mail and dead-panning answers to questions about the constitution. But don't spell "Bismarck" wrong or you'll get a severe gaze from the pedantic Mr. Stein.

We conservatives can't expect too much from a national constitution museum; liberals are bound to have the better of the argument.  But the exhibit does do a good job of making everyone feel we are part of the United States.  Americans have come from all across the world to participate in this impossible project of getting all the tribes and clans to live together in comity in a continental-sized nation state, and despite the best efforts of politicians and activists to divide us in the long periods between their occasional efforts to unite us, it's amazing that we are still here.

When you walk around the National Constitution Center and look at all the folks that have come to visit, you have to think that there is still a chance that America is the last best hope of mankind on earth.  You are tempted to believe, like America's foremost optimist:

And she's still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.

Yes. Ronald Reagan gets his slot at the National Constitution Center.  Right next to Barack Obama. 

Hobby Lobby and the Liberal Project

Just in case you are worried that the Supreme Court's Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. decision is the end of the world as we know it, I have good news.  It isn't the end of the world.  The Supreme Court has said that the government can't force a closely-held corporation to offer to its employees health insurance that includes abortifacients.  That's all.

Hey, no problem.  The answer is to pay for abortifacients directly through government grants and spending.  Or, according to Ben Domenech, by making regular birth control pills "over the counter" drugs instead of prescription drugs as at present.

My local GOP guys understand that, storm-in-a-teacup as the Hobby Lobby decision may be, the Dems intend to use it for another Big Push in their War on Women offensive.  So they've sent me an email excoriating the cheap rhetoric of the lefties:

This dishonest and inaccurate rhetoric shows that the Democrats are always playing politics - in no way does the Supreme Court decision deny women access to birth control.  Rather, the Court has ruled that the government cannot force business owners to violate their religious beliefs.

So the political argument will be "access to birth control" vs. "violate... religious beliefs."

I suppose that the bottom line is that when the Dems are in the White House we are going to get liberals legislating liberal morality on the rest of us.  To me as a libertarian conservative it amounts to dressing up the free-stuff politics of the robber gang in the modest garments of fairness and rights.

And when the GOP is in the White House you'll get attempts to legislate the religion of the folks I call the People of the Responsible Self.

Why do politicians keep legislating morality? Because even though government is force, politicians still like to feel they are doing God's work.  Or history's work.

And that gets us back to the bigger issue.  Every ruling class is in the business of tossing out free stuff to its supporters; that's how it stays in business.  And since giving out free stuff usually starts out as robbery, it has to dress up its robbery in the decent drapery of religion.

If conservatives don't like that then we have to develop a civil religion that makes a scandal out of most of the free stuff that government gives out.  For instance we could start by pointing out how the low-interest Keynesian policy at the Fed is basically screwing the American middle class.  We could then say that free education is screwing the poor, because the schools for the poor are lousy.  Then we could go onto health care and point out that the scandal of the VA and Medicaid are not due to nasty bureaucrats but baked into the design of any centralized administrative program.

But people still like that free stuff.  So there will always be liberals and their government programs.

What Went Wrong: Let's Make It Harder to Hike Spending

To fix what went wrong we are going to have to change the culture from freeloading and buying votes to a culture of individual responsibility, as the previous installment argued. (Beginning of series here.)

But what about the medium term?  The answer comes from the problem described by John C. Goodman in his description of the Obamacare auction process:  Writes James V. DeLong:

Health expert John Goodman called Obamacare “a Rube Goldberg nightmare,” written “to appease every single Democratic constituency and every major special interest group.”  The process was like “going around a table asking each group what is the one thing they must have in order to support the legislation — the insurance companies, the drug companies, the hospitals, the labor unions, AMA, AARP, etc., [with] no one making sure that all the separate demands fit together in a sensible way.” 

Sound familiar to you?  It does to me.  James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock worked out the science of this half a century ago in The Calculus of Consent.  Talk about settled science!  In any voting system, they found, the proponents of a measure to spend public funds usually discover that they don't have enough votes for passage.  The reason is quite simple: apart from the proponents the rest of the voting population don't see any benefit for them in the proposal.  So the proponents of the measure have to buy the votes they need for passage from some of the voters that don't see any benefit for themselves.

Right at the end of The Calculus of Consent, after considering every voting system under the sun, Buchanan and Tullock finally present the voting system of unanimous consent, the startling idea that if government is going to do anything it ought to be forced to get the support of everyone that will be affected by the measure. Unanimous consent is great, according to Buchanan and Tullock, because it forces the proponents to pay for the costs that the opponents would be forced to submit to as the price of passing the proposal.  Can you spell J-U-S-T-I-C-E?

So here's the medium-term strategy for conservatives and Republicans.  If Congress wants to pass a measure to increase force – from tax increases to entitlement increases – then it should need a supermajority in both houses to pass legislation.  If Congress wants to reduce force, with tax cuts or deregulation, why then the maximum needed should be a bare majority.  Wait: here's a better idea.  A measure to reduce taxes or government compulsion should only require a simple majority vote of either house of Congress, subject only to the combined veto of the president and a supermajority of the other house.

Hey liberals!  If you are looking for an example of true right-wing extremism to sink your teeth into, you just read it.

We conservative responsible individualists are simple folk.  All we want is to stop the cruel and unjust externalities of free-stuff politics, and the way to do that is by changing the rules of the game to make it more difficult to buy votes and play redistribution.

We know that the world has plenty of genuine victims, and we feel genuine compassion about real suffering.  But if you professional victims want some cool benefit, then you and your patrons ought to have to pay for it.  Remember this: there is nothing in the world stopping sensitive and compassionate people from freely spending their own money to relieve the pain of genuine victims.

There are two ways of making your way in the world.  One way is the way of the predator that takes what he wants by force.  The other way is the human way of barter and exchange, of figuring out how to make some product or service that other people want and exchange it for something you want, with each human figuring out how to serve other people is a node in the buzzing network of the collective mind.

All we conservatives are saying is that if we want to fix what has gone wrong in America, the answer can be found by accentuating the positive of the collective mind, and eliminating the negative of force and its collective mindlessness.

And don't mess with Mr. In Between!