Millennials: Why Government is Force

In my last post I took a look at a recent poll of millennials, and determined to open a conversation with my millennial friends.  Now we get down to serious business, the radical idea that government is force.

Congressional candidate Dave Brat caused a bit of a ruckus recently when some oppo researcher uncovered a paper the professor had written.  He wrote that "The government holds a monopoly on violence."

To our liberal friends this is shocking, but Charles W. Cooke isn't impressed:

Who among us genuinely doubts this to be the case? Only those, I would venture, who are so uncomfortable with the consequences of their philosophy that they seek the dull refuge of lazy euphemism and collective myopia. It is, it seems, decidedly easier idiotically to repeat that “government is the only thing we all belong to,” or that “government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together” than to acknowledge that, whether one is advocating a small government that takes care of the basics or a Leviathan that seeks to meddle in the smallest recesses of the human heart, one is invoking Thomas Hobbes.

Actually, I would argue, all ruling classes like to elide the truth about government.  That is why Russian peasants were taught to think of the Czar as their "Little Father."  That is why we symbolize the US government as Uncle Sam. Remember Soviet dictator Stalin as "Uncle Joe?"  The truth is that every government maintains power by the unspoken power of its force, whether it is led by a patriarchial feudal lord, an absolute monarch, a revolutionary leader or a democratic president.

The modern state is worse than most, and its power begins with its ruthless tax bureaucracy.  Try and mess with the IRS and see where it gets you.

Guess what?  The modern tax bureaucracy is not an invention of big government liberals, or the evil bourgeoisie but the absolute monarchs.  Back in the 1600s kings found that they needed more money, a lot more money, to prevent takeover by the neighboring monarch, so they invented the tax bureaucracy to drill down through the guilds and the lords so they could tax individuals and extract the money they needed for their armies.

In due course along came the modern democratic revolutions.  But the tax bureaucracy stayed and flourished, because the first thing a government needs is money.  Indeed, a democratic government needs much more money than an absolute monarch.  It needs money not just for armies, but money for its supporters, money to buy votes, money even for old-age pensions and vital infrastructure.

Moreover, every government we know of was founded on force.  Our own US government was founded on a successful rebellion, and the land we love was taken by force from the "native Americans."  Modern Russia was born in a coup against the Kerensky government.  Modern France was born in a bloody revolution.  Modern Germany was born through a couple of wars.  Modern Britain was born in a convenient Dutch invasion in 1688, known today by the lazy euphemism of Glorious Revolution.

Every government works overtime to show that it's not really all about force.  That's why every government works to show it "cares about people like me" and does everything "for the children."  And that's why our Democratic friends are always going on about Republicans being "heartless" when they want to cut spending.  But what about the heartless payroll taxes that take money out of the pockets of ordinary workers before they even see the money in their paychecks? What do you call that?

Put it this way.  Back in the days of Watergate and the Bush years, it wasn't hard to find a political writer worrying about whether Nixon or Bush was planning to cancel the next election.  Today we have conservatives worrying about Obama's illegal administrative actions.

It's pretty obvious what is going on. When you are in the opposition you are always worrying about whether the government will jump the tracks and start ruling by decree rather than the rule of law.  Instinctively, people know that behind its pretty words, government is force.  That's OK when our guys are in charge, because they have their hearts in the right place.  But when the other party is in power, every patriotic citizen should be eternally vigilant, watching for abuses of power and ready to protest against injustice.

I know this is all pretty radical.  So let's amp it up with the idea that government always wants a war, foreign and domestic.  Because, if government is force, it stands to reason that government will look for things to do that require force.

Millennials: Let's Talk!

The folks at Reason-Rupe just released a poll about Millennial political opinions.  Not surprisingly, you Millennials are confused.  A majority, 59% are in favor of tax cuts, but 66% percent think that raising taxes on the rich would help the economy.

57 percent of millennials want wealth distributed according to achievement, but 68 percent say government should ensure that everyone makes a living wage.

You can see what is going on here.  You millennials have been buffeted around by everyone's political talking points, and so you want plenty of things that are mutually incompatible.  Join the club!

It would be nice to have a consistent view of the world of politics, although, of course, Ralph Waldo Emerson warned us that a "foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers".

Let us be clear about this: "foolish consistency" only applies to other people.  For you and I a consistent view of the world is nothing less than common sense, or even the sophisticated German idea of a world-view, a Weltanshauung.  Everybody has one, but not everyone has thought about it, or tried to resolve the inevitable inconsistencies.

I'm going to talk about my world view in this and subsequent pieces.  I believe that the current system is reaching the end of its useful life.  It may have been a good idea, a century ago, to build a government welfare state state featuring government furnished, government administered benefits like old-age pensions and health care and education and welfare, but today I think we can see that reform is needed.

The trouble is that ideas that seemed pretty good a century ago can be totally out of place a century later.  It seemed like a good idea to provide a basic pension to old people back in 1900, especially since few people lived as long as 65 years old.  But the problem is that the funding mechanism set in place for Social Security back in 1935 -- a mere 2 percent of wages -- becomes a monster in 2014 at over 12 percent of wages.

The point is: how can we, as a society, provide decent safety nets for our people without breaking the bank.  For make no mistake, the burden falls heaviest on you guys, the millennial generation.  The way that Social Security and Medicare are set up the only flexibility is on the payment side.  Try to reduce benefits on the baby boomers and see what happens to you.  But saddle Millennials with student debt and a lousy job market and who cares?

Then there are the social issues.  Everyone wants to be free, but where does freedom turn into license?  Conservatives don't much like gay marriage.  But liberals don't much like sugary soft drinks.  They hate to bow to other peoples' morality.  Yet everyone is mad to "legislate their morality" on the rest of America.

At least everyone hates those evil banksters. Except that nobody seems to do anything about them.  What gives?

Let's start at the beginning, with the idea that government is force.  A little extreme, you think?  Well, it's my belief that you can be a patriotic American and support your government, and still be radically suspicious of every politician and activist.  Because when you come down to it, government not about the things we do together, as President Obama has said.  It is about things that we authorize the government to do with force, from the IRS and taxes to the EPA and environmental regulation.  The government does not say you may pay your taxes.  It says you must pay your taxes or go to jail.  The whole idea is for a majority in Congress or in the Supreme Court to force its ideas on the minority.

So let's take a broader look at government.  There's nothing wrong with government being force; it's just that I think that it's important to be clear about it.  People like to think that government that implements their idea is nothing less than justice.  I want you to think twice about that.

Will Obama's Cloward-Piven Actually Work?

Back in the Sixties, lefty professors Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven proposed a political strategy to crash the welfare system to force the Democratic Party to introduce a guaranteed minimum wage.

Ever since, conservatives have been terrified that liberals are always trying to crash the system and flood activists into the street so that they can stampede us into some new comprehensive and mandatory new program on the whole nation that makes government bigger and increases liberal domination.

Today, many conservatives suspect that the southern border crisis is a deliberate Cloward-Piven-type effort by the Obama administration to force a comprehensive amnesty bill down the throats of the American people.

Perhaps we should ease off the conspiracy theory stuff and relax a little.

First of all, governments know that it always takes a crisis to push through a change.  That's the meaning of the old chestnut from H.L. Mencken:

Civilization, in fact, grows more and more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.

 OK H.L.  But you are missing the truth that the whole point of government is to rally the people against an existential threat.  Politicians instinctively know that.  So politicians are always trying to turn a national hang-nail into the Second Coming.  Thus the crisis of the uninsured means we need a comprehensive health insurance program.  Rising global temperatures require an anti-carbon crusade.

Conservatives have their own longing for crisis.  We know, or we think we know, that there isn't a hope of reforming the welfare state and its middle-class entitlements until there is No More Money.  So we sometimes wonder if the best strategy is to pile on new entitlements, as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) wants to do, and so advance the day when the middle-class entitlements go broke.

But the real problem with a crisis is that it doesn't just empower the government to act.  It creates a revolutionary situation when anyone may grab the reins of state and change things.  It may be true that there isn't a hope of reforming entitlements until they go broke, but it is also true that the American people, as mobilized by various interests, may demand reform that makes things worse.

Just today there's an article by Steve Malanga about the state and local government pension crisis.  It's pretty obvious what needs to be done, but don't tell that to the government unions and the state judges.  There's a good case to be made that the government unions should make a good deal now rather than wait until voters get really pissed off by collapsing government services.  But, really, they won't.  The unions represent existing employees and retirees; most of them will get through their retirement before the crash comes, so why worry?

That's why I don't think that President Obama has some fiendishly cunning plan up his sleeve on immigration.  He has just been doing what the liberal activists groups have wanted, and he has lazily assumed that as things got worse they would create a crisis that would grease the skids for a comprehensive immigration bill.  But it looks like popular opinion is trending away from an elite cramdown as militia groups mobilize and blacks complain and protest about immigration.

There's nothing remarkable about all this.  It's the political analog of military strategy.  Do you seek the decisive battle or do you march around and avoid battle?  Democrats have tended to assume that they will win the decisive battle.  And maybe they are right.  Until they are wrong.

Death to the Moderates!

Everyone agrees that politicians win elections by appealing to the moderates.  Because they hold the balance between the partisans of the Democratic and the partisans of the Republican Party.

But now comes liberal enfant terrible Ezra Klein to argue that this is all wrong.  And the reason is that moderates aren't really moderate.  Instead they tend to hold a range of opinions on political issues all over the political map.  They only look moderate when you balance their opinions out!

What happens, explains David Broockman, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley, is that surveys mistake people with diverse political opinions for people with moderate political opinions. The way it works is that a pollster will ask people for their position on a wide range of issues: marijuana legalization, the war in Iraq, universal health care, gay marriage, taxes, climate change, and so on. The answers will then be coded as to whether they're left or right. People who have a mix of answers on the left and the right average out to the middle — and so they're labeled as moderate.

Now, to be honest, I usually don't give Ezra Klein the time of day, but here I think we should pay attention.

In reality, Klein writes, partisans of the political parties tend to be more moderate than the moderates, because the partisans tend to take up the ideas advanced by their parties.  Political parties are afraid of extreme positions that might not have broad support, for obvious reasons, and so their political partisans follow suit.

The rubber hits the road on all this when states start passing laws like open primaries to encourage the supposed moderate voters.

These reforms include open primary elections, nonpartisan redistricting, and public funding of elections. But "the bulk of studies on these reforms finds little evidence that they improve moderate candidates' fortunes."

The answer, Ahler and Brookman realize, is simple: these voters don't want moderate candidates because these voters aren't actually moderates.

The reason that "moderates" are so immoderate is that they are detached from the political public square, so they don't feel any pressure to moderate their views or make them consistent so that they could enter into a political coalition with a hope in hell of getting their ideas implemented.

On Klein's argument we should encourage party voting and identification because it encourages voters to develop a consistent set of political beliefs.

Klein shows a set of graphs showing the spread of opinion on 12 issues from very liberal to very conservative. He notes that on only two issues is the moderate position the "modal" position.  But, in bad news for conservatives, public opinion is skewed towards the liberal position on Social Security, Medicare, and taxes.

Which explains why nobody is interested in reforming them.

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.