Get a Clue on Reality of Politics and Journalism, Ron Fournier

For years I've been wondering how the Obama administration does it.  I mean how it has managed near zero pushback from the media?

I know that the media are all liberals and liberals believe that the Democrats' hearts are in the right place.  But still, somewhere, somehow there must have been a liberal joournalist whose desire to make a name for himself should have won out against tribal loyalty.  After all, you don't make a career in journalism by going along to get along.  Not any more, not while dead-tree journalism is flushing down the toilet.

There must me more to the Obama message discipline than tribal loyalty, and the "more" has been slowly dribbling out in the lame-duck years of the Obama presidency.  We've seen that Obama officials go nuclear against journalists that displease them, pushing back with appalling invective in a brazen attempt to intimidate.  And we've seen that the Obamis appeal over the heads of the journalists to the Democratic-contributor suits at the media outlets to keep the junior journos in line.

Now we see, from a frustrated Ron Fournier, that there's another method to the Obama media blitzkrieg: the media minder.  Quoting a Washington Post staffer, he writes:

"Almost every officially sanctioned exchange between reporters and the proverbial 'senior administration officials' is conducted in the presence of a press staffer, even when the interview is 'on background,' meaning the source will not be identified by name."

The purpose of the "press staffer" is not just to intimidate the reporter but also the administration official.

"If you have a minder there, it sits in [a source's] brain that they're supposed to stay on message," said Peter Baker, who covers the White House for the New York Times. "They're less likely to share something other than the talking points."

Ron Fournier's solution to this problem is to "flip the script," to refuse to play by the rules, to make the administration fear the reporter rather than the other way around.

But this is rubbish, at least for reporters in a Democratic administration.  And it violates what I call the "Jack Patera Rule." Or you can call it the "blood in the water" rule.

The story is simple.  Years ago, Jack Patera was the first head coach of the expansion Seattle Seahawks.  Every week the local sports journalists would interview him on various pre- and post-game shows, respectfully asking the usual nuts-and-bolts questions about the game.  But then the day came when Jack Patera was fired as head coach, and we found out that the journalists had never liked him. Then all the dirt came out.  No kidding!  You guys thought Jack was a loser all along?  Why didn't you tell us, you rough, tough, muckracking journos?

Of course the sports journalists didn't tell us.  Because day-to-day their jobs depended on the nuts-and-bolts PR of interviews and canned questions about the team and the game.  If they had started asking difficult questions, then they would have lost their jobs.

Because the whole point of sports journalism is to do PR for the home sports teams.

Until there is blood in the water, and the coach loses his job.  Then it's shark feeding time and the journos can circle in for the kill.

That's why Ron Fournier needs to get a clue on the journalists that cover the Obama administration.  If any journalist "flipped the script" on the Obamis it would be his last interview.  Game over. Career over.  There are lots more journalists where that one came from, hungry journalists willing to play doormat for the next interview.

Until there is blood in the water, and everyone agrees that President Obama is the worst president ever and the officials of the Obama administration are the most useless and incompetent and corrupt ever.  Then you'll see courage returning to the press corps. Then you'll see the sharks going in for the kill.

The only guys that could have "flipped the script" were the Obamis.  They could have said: Look, everyone wants to be able to control the message, but you can go too far.  Isn't the whole point of the media is to shine a light upon the government, and give it some feedback?  That way, maybe, we can avoid making a few real boner mistakes.

But that was never the way that the Obamis approached things.  They wanted to push as many left-liberal policies past the point of no-return as they could, never mind how it was done.  We can assume that they believed in the ratchet effect.  Once you start a government program it is almost impossible to stop it.

And, of course, there is the little matter of power.  Men like power, and will seize it if they can.  What's the point of political power if you don't use it?  The place to learn the game of power when you are merely a bush-league politician is in bullying young bush-league journalists around, because they need you more than you need them.  By the time you have graduated to big-league politics you are practiced enough to bully big-league journalists around!

Which way is best for an administration?  Is it best to use the utmost ferocity in your messaging and make the journos fear you?  Or is it best to ease up a bit and let them criticize you?

Stay tuned for the final two years of the Obama administration to find out.

Fighting the Left-wing Culture

Here's a touching story from Taki on-line magazine.  It's about Roy Griffis, who's been writing for years, but could never break through the liberal gatekeepers in the entertainment and publishing industries.

But now, as Amy Sterzinger writes, Griffis is finally getting published, because of the growth of indie publishing efforts like Liberty Island.

You can see why he's had a problem.

Griffis began writing as a teenager. By his 30s he’d given up on selling stories to magazines, with their labyrinthine rules about which viewpoints were correct for sympathetic characters to hold. He turned to screenplays. But screenplays introduced him to even more of what he calls the “good-think rules” for media. When working on a history piece set during the Korean War, Griffis was using North Korean characters as antagonists in the drama, and the producer told him: “Let me check and see if they’re okay.”

Hello! Can anyone spell C-E-N-S-O-R-S-H-I-P?

Anyway, Griffis has started writing novels, and has written two series already.  So I though I'd better get started on his "By the Hands of Men" series. Imagine a book uncensored by the lefties at the Ministry of Lefty Publishing.

Of course, in all ages the gatekeepers are trying to control what is thought and said -- particularly the best that is thought and said.  That's how you do social control.  Right now I'm reading a book on the Bronte sisters, The Bronte Myth by Lucasta Miller, and back then they said that Jane Eyre was full of "coarseness." They meant that it had too much sex and violence for nice young ladies.  I expect they were right.

It used to be the church that did all this social control, and now it's liberals.  Right this week, Tracy von Slyke has been writing in the British Guardian about the intolerable racism of the BBC Thomas the Tank Engine TV series.  You see, the steam engines are the good guys and all exude white smoke and the dirty diesels spout black smoke.  And as for the Fat Controller, that icon of the white patriarchy!

Never mind that "everybody" in England in the 1950s hated the diesels, including lefties that hadn't yet realized that coal was the root of all evil.  (By the way, steam maxes out at about 6% efficiency, and diesel at about 40%)

The problem is everywhere.  I get to watch children's cartoon features when I'm visiting my grandchildren and the lefty cultural assumptions in the movies frankly terrify me.  But what's a grandfather to do?  Well, he can start patronizing the adversary culture.  Over at Vox Popoli, Vox Day is aggressively trying to lead the Science Fiction/Fantasy world away from lefty cultural control, and getting the lefty Torquemada treatment for his pains. And he is actively involved in a center-right SFF publishing venture, Castalia House.  Don't ask me why it's based in Finland.

My guess is that the current lefty cultural offensive is going to run out of steam in the next couple of years, as Americans resist its totalitarian mind control with a "backlash."

But a tactical reverse isn't enough.  To beat the lefty culture we need the counterforce of a righty culture with culture warriors ready to do battle and die for the cause.

Maybe, just maybe, the retreat of the big five publishers at the hands of Amazon and the possibility of non-Hollywood movies getting made will make a difference.

But don't hold your breath.  I'm still under the influence of Eric Hoffer and The Ordeal of Change.  He points out that the intellectuals are a class that got started with the invention of writing, and they are nothing but trouble. Half the time they are employed by the state and happily order the people around at the command of the rulers.  But when the state collapses, as it does from time to time, then the intellectuals are out of a job and get angry and take up their pens against the state as revolutionary leaders of the people.

Go figure.

Obamas' Problem, Chris Cilizza, Is That Liberalism is Unjust

We conservatives have been waiting for this: the moment when liberal pundits would view the failed Obama presidency and sigh that the job was just too big for one man.  Déjà vu Jimmy Carter all over again.

So here comes liberal worthy Chris Cillizza telling us that "It's virtually impossible to be a successful modern president." No!

For you young 'uns, a bit of history.  Back in the 1970s when the liberals ruined the economy with Keynesianism and big government and Jimmy Carter had his head handed to him by the Soviets, the best and the brightest all opined that, gosh, the job was just too big for one man.  Maybe we needed a committee of presidents instead of one man.

Earth to liberals:  The problem isn't the man. The problem is the system, the whole unjust system of administrative bureaucracy by the best and brightest that you call "liberal" and "progressive."

Oh and don't forget to add in the secular liberal Puritanism that stigmatizes and shames and shuns anyone that doesn't salute when the identity-politics parade goes by.  What I want to know is who will write The Pink Letter for our age in which a conservative young woman gets shamed and shunned and forced to wear a pink "B" because she didn't want to make a wedding cake for a pair of sue-happy gays with contacts at the local Human Rights Commission?

But of course liberalism is not merely unjust.  It studiously ignores, as any pony-tailed lefty fundamentalist would do, a century of settled social science.

Correction.  It would be settled science if more than 2 1/2 liberals had actually read it and if more than a couple of liberal professors had actually got their students to study it.

Let's review the settled science.

Settled Science Part One.  It was nearly a century ago that the Austrian Jew Ludwig von Mises wrote that socialism couldn't work because it couldn't compute prices.  For about 20 years lefty writers tried to refute Mises.  Then they gave up and pushed him down the memory hole.

Settled Science Part Two.  Mises' student, F.A. Hayek extended his teacher's argument.  He said that administrative government couldn't work, for two reasons.  Reason one was that the administrative bureaucrat could never know enough to run a large program when compared against millions of consumers and producers interacting via the price system.  Reason two was that you could never write a law that covered all the contingencies of a large government program, so bureaucrats would have to write regulations on the fly.  But wait a minute!  I thought that writing laws was the job of Congress, not the president and his assignees.  Hello Injustice.  Hello Obamacare!

Settled Science Part Three. All legislating involves the springtime of the special interests and the buying of votes to force the legislation down the throats of the minority.  This settled science is called "public choice" theory.  The go-to guys are James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock in The Calculus of Consent.  Interestingly, if you are interested in justice, the only voting system that does not involve raping and pillaging the minority is the voting system of unanimous consent.  That way the majority has to buy the votes of the entire minority; in other words the majority will have to compensate the minority for its costs.  Notice the gravamen of this settled science.  All legislation is unjust except unanimous consent, because all majority voting amounts to two wolves and a sheep voting on what to eat for breakfast.

The answer to the injustice of liberal politics is simple, Chris Cillizza.  Read, learn, and inwardly digest the settled science and stop this culture of denial.  Cut government down to size, so that it is within the span of control of a single man.

Actually there is a bigger question here, and it issues from my apothegm that "government is force."

If government is force then everything that government does has the character of a war: a war on terror or a war on big banks. (Har Har.  I notice that progressive darling Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is perfectly happy with the crony capitalist Ex-Im Bank).

Then there are the wars on drugs, on poverty, on bigotry, on ignorance.  They go on forever.

And that's the problem.  You can see it from the failed presidency of George W. Bush.  He realized that he could only fight one war, the war in Iraq.  So he let everything else slide, including the housing bubble that was the consequence of a war for affordable housing and a war against redlining.

Here's my point.  The president is really nothing more than the commander-in-chief.  He is there in case the United States needs to go to war.  If the United States is engaged in a bunch of stupid local liberal wars like the war on poverty and the war on bigotry then the president isn't going to have enough bandwidth to do his job when a real war comes along.  He's going to be distracted by all the liberal activists showing up to insist that he nullify the immigration laws, etc.

So, Chris Cillizza and all you big-government believers: here's the bottom line.  If you want the president to be successful, then stop the expansion of government.  Don't have the government in charge of social services and turn everything social into a war against something.  Put the people in charge of helping the poor and educating the children.  Because justice.  Don't have the government regulating business: it won't work.  Public choice theory says that the regulators will end up being "captured" by the businesses they regulate.  Don't regulate business.  Because justice.

There's really a simple reason why we should cut the size of government.  We humans are social animals that thrive by communication and cooperation.  We are not Newtonian mechanical monsters that move by force.  Big business and big government are systems, and systems are there to dominate.  Even German neo-Marxists like Jürgen Habermas can figure that out.

It's Not the Economy, Stupid!

A big hinge-point in my adult life from 1968 to now is the Turn of 1998.  That's when nice kindly women voters decided that since the federal budget was in surplus it was time for government to "do" stuff again.

No! No! No!  That's what I wanted to bellow to the soccer moms back then.  Everything government does is a mess; everything it does is a waste, from the Pentagon down to midnight basketball.  If you girls want a nice kindly society where people help each other, then start helping each other.  You ain't gonna get it from bigger government.

I return to 1998 today because of Michael Barone's piece about Obama's poll troubles.  It's not about the lackluster economy, writes Barone; the economy is growing, so things can't be too bad on the economic front.

No, Obama's problem is that the world on his watch is becoming noticeably disorderly.  And the distaff side notices that keenly.  Mr. President, Is It Safe? That's what women always ask.

Americans, unlike voters in many other countries, demand the maintenance of order in the world as well in their own nation. From the early days of the republic, there has been an unspoken awareness that what happens in the world affects their own lives.

The fact is that, under Obama, it is not safe.  The border is not safe, Chicago is not safe, the Middle East is not safe.  If we get down to the economy, well, the economy is not safe either.  And don't get me started on the federal budget.

In other words, the world is in a situation where US women have started to worry again about the safety of their loved ones.

Let's rehearse the model of the Democrats as the Mommy Party and the Republicans as the Daddy Party.  Women are always ready to forgive their loved ones for their folly, and slip Junior a $20 bill while Daddy isn't watching, while Daddy always wants the kids to learn the hard way.  But when things get hot and heavy then women rely on men to do the heavy lifting -- i.e. fighting -- to get the world back in order again.

Back in the 1970s the world was coming unstuck and so women found themselves supporting the rough tough Ronald Reagan, even though all the good and the great told them he was an extremist. Women knew it was Daddy Time. But 20 years later all seemed right with the world so women were ready to start slipping $20 bills to delinquent Junior again.

Today, it's obvious that we have squandered the legacy of Ronald Reagan, so the voters are coming to see that it's time to square up and restore order.

But it's such a shame that we can't learn from the past.  It's not that hard.  Government is only good for fighting wars.  Come peace time we should roll government up and deliver social services to our less fortunate brethren ourselves. To delegate the job to lifer bureaucrats and power-hungry activists and politicians is utter folly.  But hey, who can say No to free stuff?

At least we can thank President Obama and the Obamis for showing us how clueless and mindless and useless government can be. From the TSA to the VA and every IRS in between.

Millennials: Who's the Dominator, Business or Government?

We've been looking at business and government, and noting their huge power to dominate in the modern age.  But which is worst?  If you ask the politician or the activist they would say it's no contest.  The only thing saving the worker from a fate worse than death is the social legislation and regulation that the modern state has enacted over the last century to curb the power of business and corporations.

It was, of course, Karl Marx that set the campaign against business into overdrive.  Actually, his critique was nuanced.  He marveled at the wonders of technology and the world-wide reach of the trading system; he just felt that it would all end in tears because the efficiency of the system would squeeze out the worker, with corporations lowering wages down to subsistence level as they competed for business with each other.

In a way, Marx was right.  Older established corporations wither away and die all the time, and their workers suffer.  That's what the Joe Soptic steelworker story was all about in 2012.  But the story of the last century and a half is that while some workers suffer when their industries decline and fail, most workers benefit as technology and markets throw up more products at lower prices.  In the process farmers have become miners and steelworkers and manufacturing workers, and manufacturing workers have become service workers.  To put it crudely, whereas workers used to wield a shovel to move the earth, and then a machine, most workers today use machines (computers) to interact with other people.

It got to the point, in 1920, when the thinking Marxists of the Frankfurt School started moving towards the idea that both modern business and modern government were dominatory, exploitative entities.  What was needed was something to balance the power of system.  And Jurgen Habermas suggested that the answer was the free and intersubjective communication between humans as equal humans rather than the mechanical forces of business or government systems.  You mean they use machines to interact with other people?

But I want to push the argument a little further.  I want to suggest that, even in the interest of pure power, there is a limit to how far you can use business or government to dominate people.  Let's take business first.

The pure industrial system of human domination was not the satanic mill of the 19th century but the slave plantation of the 18th century.  People wrote books about how to organize a slave plantation on the "gang system" -- the prototype of the assembly line -- and how to apply a steady driving "force" to make the whole thing work.  Since the plantation owners on the West Indian sugar islands ran the government, they could apply whatever "steady driving force" they felt was needed.  And it was needed because post-pubertal males would not submit freely to the gang system.  But the plantation owners found that they got better results from their slaves by freeing them up to be creative and resourceful.

A century later the factory bosses found that it was almost impossible to get post-pubertal males to submit to the factory system.  The solution was compulsory education to get little kiddies used to submission for K through 12th grade.  Then they could be good productive employees in big organizations and do what they were told.

Still, businesses found that dutiful obedient employees weren't enough.  They needed creative resourceful employees that could solve problems and come up with new ideas.  So even as government was writing laws to regulate the relations between employer and worker the businessmen found that the best employees were free, creative employees.  Or they might leave.  Today, even at mega-corporation Walmart employees can go in the back room and take online courses to raise their hourly pay.  And if they see a product flying off the shelves at their store they have the authority to order more.

It's telling that when big government really got going in the 20th century it applied a degree of force in Soviet Russia and Maoist China that made the brutality of the slave-drivers look like a Sunday picnic.

But if you don't apply discipline, how do you get the workers to work?  In The Ordeal of Change longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer gives the answer.  It is individualism.  Why?  Because in the individualist society "the individual in the mass who turns to work as a means of proving his worth and usefulness."  In a collective society, you have worth just because you belong.  We are not talking about individual geniuses here.

All we can claim for the individual in [individualist] society is that he is more or less on his own; that he chooses his course through life, proves himself by his own efforts, and has to shoulder the responsibility of what he makes of his life.

In fact, individual freedom delivers the individual into the hands of a ruthless taskmaster: himself.

Do you see the paradox here?  In our society the left makes a big deal that we are all in this together and that you didn't build your business on your own.  But unless society promotes individualism the government or the employer will have to drive everyone at work.  It is only an individualist society where people motivate themselves to work, and thus do not need supervision and the encouragement of the overseer's lash.

In business, everyone is ceaselessly striving to improve their product or their service, to prove their worth and usefulness.  Even in my lifetime, we have seen the fall of the steel companies, the fall of the auto companies, the rise and fall of mainframe and minicomputers, the rise and fall of Sears and K-Mart.  Now we are seeing the old-line publishers in the coils of upstart Amazon.  Business reinvents itself every day; that's the only way it can keep offering jobs to American workers.

But look at government.  We are still in thrall to the bigger-is-better mentality as we try to make health care into a one-size-fits-all mega-program.  Suppose Obamacare is the best thing since sliced bread. How do we adjust it and reform it ten years, twenty years from now?  Notice how eager everyone is to reform Social Security and Medicare?  It is almost impossible to fix anything in government; that's because government is all about free stuff, and nobody will agree to give up their loot.  Don't cut my Medicare, says grandma.  Don't raise my payroll taxes, says the worker.  So nothing happens until the system breaks down.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, wrote Milton Friedman half a century ago.  If you want to lift the burden of responsibility from people and provide them with a safety net, then you must increase the level of force to make them work.  But if you leave people "on their own" then they will work and strive to provide products and services for other people.  If you leave business "on its own" then it will ceaselessly create a froth of new and improved products without anyone telling business what to do.  But if you decide to micromanage business and make it more socially conscious then you will have to ramp up the coercion and you will throttle the economy with rules and you will find that the poorest will suffer most.

These days the Millennial generation is having a tough time getting their adult lives off the ground.  There aren't many jobs and many Millennials are groaning under the weight of student debt.  The question is whether the answer is more government, to target the Millennials with special government programs and subsidies.  Or is the solution less government, to let Millennials create opportunities for themselves with a smaller government taking a smaller cut of the nation's product.

The answer, I suggest, is in the words of Aneurin Bevan, the British politician who got the National Health System started in the 1940s.  In order to get his bill passed he "stuffed their mouths with gold," in other words, he gave away the store to the medical profession.  Is that really the best we can do?  To help the poor we must enrich the special interests?  That's the way that Obamacare was passed, with handouts to insurance companies and drug companies.  There has to be a better way, and it probably means smaller government and fewer handouts to the powerful.

Millennials: Business is More Than Domination

In the last post we looked at the two remaining mega-fauna on Earth: big government and big business.  Both are monstrous systems and the purpose of systems, the German neo-Marxists tell us, is domination.

But business seems to be something more, because in the last two centuries, the age of business, the per-capita income of humans within the boundaries of capitalism has gone up by 20 times.  There has been nothing like it in human history, ever.  Remember those Robber Barons?  Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie made a fortune -- by cutting steel prices by two-thirds.  Oil monopolist John D. Rockefeller made billions by cutting the price of illuminating oil, the stuff they used in those cute oil lamps in Hollywood westerns, by 90 percent.  Today the Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are doing the same thing with computers and devices.

But what is it?  Matt Ridley in The Rational Optimist calls it the collective mind.  Humans, unlike chimpanzees understand barter and exchange.  This means that humans can specialize and get really good at one thing, exchanging for the other things of life.  And that creates wealth, enormous wealth.

David Graeber in Debt: The First 5,000 Years confirms this idea.  There's an idea that the modern economy is founded upon money, he writes.  But really it's founded upon debt, and debt is founded upon the exchange of favors.  If I do you a favor then you owe me one in return.  People keep a rough balance of favors given and received, and it eventually gets formalized in debt and credit and money.  Credit, of course, means belief, the belief that the other guy will return the favor.  In The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt calls this "equality matching" that gets formalized into "market pricing."

And that's the point.  Big business may be monstrous and terrifying, but it is based on the exchange of favors and trust.  Nobody forces me to go to Walmart; it's the low prices that attract me.  Nobody forces me to buy at Whole Foods, but if I believe in buying local and organic food and sustainability and Fair Trade it makes me feel better to pay a little more to John Mackey.

But what about banksters and insurance companies and overpaid CEOs?  What about the hard-hearted private equity guy Mitt Romney that laid off steelworker Joe Soptic?  There's a chicken-and-egg problem to ponder here.  Who dances to whose tune: are bankers the dupes of the political ruling class or are politicians the bribed apologists of the corporate plutocrats.

It comes down to this: Does Warren Buffett call the tune for the Obama administration or does wily Warren contribute money and support (for tax increases) in order to curry favor with the Obamis in the hope that they will leave him and his trains alone?  Obviously it is important to get it right.  Because if you get it wrong then you have completely misunderstood the economic and political reality of the modern era.

Here's my take on this.  My take is that modern political power is founded upon a strong and vibrant economy. A politician cannot cut a dash on the world stage unless he is backed by a vast economy that can yield vast revenues with which the politician can project national power.  On this view businessmen are pets to be encouraged and fed so they will dutifully generate huge wealth.  But it is the political ruling class that calls the shots.  Of course, if the politicians come down too hard on the businessmen and loot the productive sector so badly that they wreck the economy -- hey, it happens -- then they lose everything.  And so do you and I.

I have developed a simple notion to illustrate what I mean.  It's the difference between Dutch Finance and French Finance.  In the 16th century the Dutch developed, for the first time, a national debt, money that they borrowed from the Amsterdam merchants, and they used that debt in a rebellion to free the Dutch people from the empire of Spain.  The Dutch debt was a "funded" debt meaning that taxes were specifically earmarked to service the debt.  The British were impressed by the results, so when they invited Dutch stadtholder William of Orange to come over in 1688 and run things as King William III, they set up the Bank of England and started a funded national debt of their own.  It worked so well that in a century later the Brits defeated the French in the Battle of Waterloo at the end of the Second Hundred Years War and the French have never amounted to much in the world since.  The Brits defeated the French because French national finance was all screwed up.  They used the state's power to exploit the economy; they spent more money than the economy could afford; they defaulted on their national debt several times.  The French Revolution, after all, began with a mess in the French government finances.  My point is that the government has the power to encourage business and grow the economy; it also has the power to wreck the economy.  The banksters and Matthew Josephson's Robber Barons are all hostages to the government's economic policy.

The US started out with the economic policy of Alexander Hamilton.  As a kid, Hamilton had run a merchant's office in the West Indies.  As the nation's first Secretary of the Treasury he set up a funded national debt just like the Brits and the Dutch.  America's economy took off like a rocket.

Of course, if a businessman is smart he can make a fortune out of the government's mismanagement.  I am thinking of John Paulson who made billions betting against sub-prime mortgage securities in the run-up to the Great Crash of 2008.  But does John Paulson have political power?

Of course, I don't expect you to believe all this crazy stuff right off the bat.  But suppose it's true.  Suppose the politicians are in charge and the banksters are just their dupes.  What does it mean?  What does it tell us about the proper relationship between government and business, not to mention government and people?  That's what we'll look at in the next post.

Millennials: Is There a Difference Between Business and Government

In the last posts we looked at my radical assertion that government is force and that governments therefore are always interested in war --  not necessarily a shooting war, but some conflict with an enemy that needs to be subdued.

But what about business?  What about banksters?  What about corporate greed?  Aren't CEOs and used car salesmen just as bad as government?

The short answer is: yes, of course.  The modern market economy is a behemoth, and we are all helplessly yoked to it.  It is easy to see that the 19th century critics of capitalism were on to something when they complained about its terrifying force.  If Marx had been right in his prophesy that capitalism would "immiserate" the working class and the middle class his remedy, to smash capitalism, would have been modest and prudent.

But an amazing thing happened in the 19th century, and Marx's critique came out at just about the last moment when the idea of Capitalism = Disaster was credible.  It turned out by the end of the 19th century that capitalism's profits were trickling down to the working class.  And by the end of the 19th century thinking German Marxists had to admit that the immiseration thesis, that the working class would be reduced to a bare existence on the edge of starvation, had been exploded.

Indeed, the working class was thriving, building its own authentic social institutions like the labor union and the friendly society.

In consequence the story of the last century has been about a great contradiction.  All the best people had committed to a doctrine based on the idea that the economic institutions of the industrial revolution were leading straight to disaster; but the facts on the ground showed that the opposite was happening.  As transsexual economist Deirdre McCloskey writes in her Bourgeois Era books, the last two hundred years has seen, in the developed countries, a rise in income from $1 to $3 per capita per day to something over $100 per capita per day, using constant dollars. And any country -- think China -- that switches to the capitalist model repeats the story  There has been nothing like this in human history, ever.  We are talking about per capita income that has increased by 20 times in 200 years!

So the fact of our existence is that we are yoked to a merciless monster, the global market economy, from whom there is no escape.  But that monster keeps making us richer and richer.

And who has been affected more than the rich?  At the turn of the 20th century the poor were thin and the rich were fat, as they had since time immemorial.  Now, a century later, the poor are fat and the rich are thin.  Think about the deprivation this means for what Tom Wolfe called "social X-rays."  These days rich women have to starve themselves to show that they are different from the fat and disgusting poor. (Don't tell this to your liberal friend: they hate being told that the poor are as fat as butterballs.)

Let us stipulate (that's a fancy legal term meaning that we'll agree not to disagree) that government is force and capitalism is not much better.  My guy Jurgen Habermas calls it "system."  Government is a system and so is the market economy.  The thing about system is that it is set up for domination.  People in government and people in business act "strategically."  He means that governments and businesses act to manipulate the world, to "use" it, rather than to interact in a social manner.

We said earlier that governments are always interested in war, because since government is force it stands to reason that the people in government are always looking for a job that needs force or compulsion, whether it's ridding the world of Commies or ridding the nation of sugary soft drinks.

But what about business?  Businessmen talk all the time about capturing market share and burying the competition. But businesses are different when it comes to their customers.  They want customers to like them.  They want them to trust them.  That is why, when a corporation is discovered lying or making defective products the whole world descends upon them.  General Motors is the butt of every joke because of defective ignition switches that they tried to cover up.  But government?  Well you tell me how the VA and the IRS have reacted to recent scandals.  Lots of people are talking about "fake scandals" in the Obama administration.  But nobody is making excuses for General Motors.

So what is the difference between the monster of government and the monster of capitalism?

In the next piece I'll try to persuade you that it's government that calls the shots, not the banksters and the CEOs.