The Symptoms of Big Government

If you are any kind of conservative or libertarian you probably want to end deficit spending.  You'd like to end the pay-as-you-go entitlement programs that politicians voted for a generation ago and that we have to pay for.  And you'd like to end the Federal Reserve Board's policy of stimulating the economy with cheap money to create jobs.

I'm all in favor of balancing the budget -- but not by increasing taxes.  I'm in favor of putting the obligations of the entitlement programs front and center -- but not if it means increasing payroll taxes on the American worker.

And I froth and the mouth about the Keynesian consensus that the Fed can and should goose the economy to stimulate employment.  But I look at the Fed as a relief pitcher that the government calls in when it's got the economy in a jam with all the bases loaded.  There is no substitute under the present political economy for a central bank as the lender of last resort to lend money during a liquidity crisis.

The real problem is that we get liquidity crises like the Crash of 2008 because of big government.  So long as government is goosing the housing market with loans to sub-prime borrowers we are going to need the Fed to come and clean up the mess while continuing to pay a trillion a year in pensions and a trillion a year in health care.  And so long as we have wars we are going to need the Fed to help the government finance the war.

So long as the American people believe in programs like Social Security and Medicare in which rich older Americans stand under a geyser of benefits paid for mostly by younger, poorer Americans then it doesn't matter what we do about balancing the budget or facing up to the real future costs of the programs.  And we will need the Fed to come in and clean up the mess with a blast of inflation every ten years or so.

And frankly, I don't see that changing in my lifetime or the lifetime of my children.  The basic reality of all politics, from a guerrilla insurgency to a continental empire, is that the government buys support by offering loot to its supporters.  In the United States government offers pensions for people and subsidies to special interests.  And anyone that raises an objection is anathematized as someone that wants to hurt "seniors" or the "poor" or the "traditionally marginalized" or "working families."  If you ask a senior about Medicare or Social Security they will remind you that they already paid for their benefits.

We are not going to change big government by treating the symptoms.  We have to treat the disease, and the disease is the idea that the welfare and security of the American people are founded upon a government safety net.  Until that idea fails and is replaced by another idea then we are stuck with the current system.

It's pretty obvious how we would get to a place where things change.  First the American people would have to believe that the current system had failed.  They will only do that when enough Americans personally suffer horribly from the failures of the current system.

When a sizable minority of Americans get really riled up because they have been unjustly treated by the current system then they will be ready to become foot-soldiers in a movement to change things.

But frankly, the American people are probably more likely to support a system of total government control of everything than to vote for a system that dismantles the current system and returns America to freedom and limited government.

Who's the Real Freeloader?

Humans are social animals; we work together for the sake of society. But humans are not just social, we are also selfish.  And we like free stuff, from grocery coupons to government subsidies and handouts.  We are willing to work for our daily bread, but we wouldn't pass up an opportunity to get it for free.

Every human society has to deal with this human characteristic.  When other people sign up for free stuff, we call it freeloading.  When we do it, we call it "rights."

Longshoreman Eric Hoffer nails it as usual in The Ordeal of Change.

In practically all civilizations that we know of, and in the Occident for too many centuries, work was viewed as a curse, a mark of bondage, or, at best, a necessary evil.

In all those civilizations, it would appear, work happened because the ruler ordered it.  And that is also what happened in the modern socialist states.  The work of the people was organized in massive Five Year Plans that specified in mind-numbing bureaucratic detail, what work was to be done.  It was a set of marching orders for the people.

In such a system, the Russian people have joked, "we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us."

You could call such a system Springtime for Freeloaders.  People only do the minimum amount of work that will keep them out of trouble with their administrative bosses.  Their work and their emoluments are decided by higher-ups, and they have no opportunity to improve their lot by individual action.

But there is another way.  In this other way the worker is responsible for finding work that is beneficial to society and then doing it.  He may do it well, or he may do it badly. Either way, there are consequences to him.  In this system, it is clear, the freeloaders go to the wall.

Hoffer does not say this, but it seems pretty clear that the old way, in which work is a curse, the ruler takes responsibility for ordering the work to be done.  It is in the new way, in which work is a virtue, that the worker shoulders the responsibility for figuring out what needs doing and getting the work done.

That is why it is proper to call the first, age-old, system, collectivism, and the new worship of work individualism.  In the first system, social responsibility is collective; in the second system social responsibility is individual.

Collectivists like to advertise that collectivism is gentle and compassionate, while individualism is cruel and harsh.  And they are right, up until the first moment when there is work to be done.  At that point, the collectivist system starts to rely on coercion.  It may be the shaming by the tribal group, the physical presence of the village Big Man, the charisma of the feudal lord, or the Terror of the Communist commissar.  But force is needed.  The proof is in the failure of 19th and 20th century communes, starting with Robert Owen's New Harmony, Indiana, that lacked the power of coercion over its members and failed from an excess of freeloading.

Individualism is different.  It is true that it seems a most frightful thing, the individual pitched alone against the world, and its frightfulness would be true if man were not a social animal.   Man's social nature means that this aloneness is his fear that he might not discover what he can contribute to the world.  Once he has taken the first step to offer his services to the world his aloneness begins to soften.  Under individualism, the successful man is the one who has most to contribute to the world, and to whose charisma the whole world flocks.

On my view, individualism has been developing and spreading for over two millennia. Following Robert Bellah I date the birth of individualism to the Axial Age when the modern religions from Judaism to Hinduism to Christianity burst onto the world.  For these new religions began to dissolve the old idea of collective, tribal gods, and established an individual relationship to God.

But these religions did not immediately take over the world; they were city religions for people that were casting off their rural habits and entering the commercial world of the city.  In China, individualism went universal about 500 AD when feudalism collapsed and was replaced by imperial bureaucracy.  In Britain individualism started to spread in the 13th century when tenant farmers began to buy and sell their copyhold land as individuals in the local manor court.

But clearly individualism did not hit a critical mass until the industrial revolution when all of a sudden the British rural masses in their millions migrated from the land to the mining villages and the textile towns, and ran headlong into the global exchange economy and its culture of responsible individualism.

This industrial revolution has been going on now for over 200 years, and its flame front has burnt outwards from Britain to Europe and North America to Asia and to Africa. It is clear that the revolution has meant a startling change in the experience of life for those people that experience it.  The sudden exposure to full frontal individualism is terrifying and insulting to many people that first experience it as they immigrate in their millions to the city each year.

If there is one clear political fact of the last two hundred years it is that the immigrants to the city are not yet ready for individualism.  Socially, culturally, politically, they seek socialization under the old regime.  They celebrate their old ethnic origins and join ethnic fraternal associations to maintain their old solidarity; they join labor unions to mobilize against their employers; they vote for political machines that offer them benefits in return for their vote and their loyalty.  In fact they vote to continue the old regime of compulsion and coercion that obtained in the old country, the land they left when they decided to find opportunity in the New World. They are not reactionary in doing this; they are merely continuing their old traditions in the new place, and the old tradition said that you need a patron, a strong man, on your side if you are to survive in this brutal world of power red in tooth and claw.

Eventually the immigrants takes to the culture of individualism, but usually not in the first generation. Eventually they come to believe that the industrial economy rewards skills and effort and they step away from tribal affiliation and the old faith in safety inside the fortified castle walls of a patron lord.  They take up a new faith; they become People of the Responsible Self.  They socialize and connect to their fellow humans not by subservience to the patronage justice of a noble lord by by surrender to the justice of equality under the law of the market.

But meanwhile the immigrant feels that the only way to achieve safety and a decent standard of living is by picking up the crumbs from the table of economic redistribution.  He experiences corporations as exploitations, and small businessmen as cunning middle-men.  He cheers when government brings a corporation low and boosts the tax on rich people; else the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Only government can guarantee security.

From the point of view of responsible individualism the world-view of the city immigrant is self-destructive freeloading.  The immigrant votes for politicians that take money from hard-working citizens and spread it around among their political cronies, their contributors, and their lesser supporters.  These are monies ripped from the productive economy as much as a robber rips the purse of a citizen on the street and are then put to use in maintaining a political army that produces little or nothing of economic and productive value. It is the conflict between the idea that economic transaction are positive-sum events, a so-called "win-win" situation, and the idea that all transactions are zero-sum events, where one person wins only at the expense of a loser.

The zero-sum world-view is as old as the hills.  It stands to reason that if the tribe of the bull starts hunting in the lands of the tribe of the antelope that there will be less food for the tribe of the antelope.  If Farmer Adam and Farmer Bob each have identical acreage, the only way for Farmer Adam to increase the yield from his farm is to take some acres from Bob.  If I take a fish from the sea then there is one less fish for others to catch.  It just stands to reason that you have to fight for your share of the pie, and the only practical way to do that is to find a powerful patron that will defend you from the exploiters. And if some rich person earns more money than you, it stands to reason that somehow that rich guy stole it from the likes of you.

There's only one problem with the zero-sum world view. In the human exchange economy of the city it's dead wrong. It's wrong because when people specialize and exchange their goods and services both parties to each exchange benefit.  It's a positive-sum, win-win world in the city.

This is the great divide in the modern era.  It is the divide between the people that look at a corporation and see a predatory beast or a robber baron and the people that see a productive enterprise showering the consumers with mass products.  It's the divide between people that revolt at the idea of corporate "personhood" and people like Mitt Romney that say that corporations are composed of people.  One kind of person believes we must tether and yoke corporations before they impoverish us all; the other kind of person wants to set corporations free so they can commit "creative destruction" and bury the world in products that enrich us all. One kind of person thinks that we must tax the freeloading rich in order to bring justice to the poor; the other kind of person thinks that taxation is theft, and the people on the receiving end of government spending are freeloaders.

Now we can understand the major dimensions of modern politics.  There must be a political party to represent the world-view of the zero-sum believers, and there must be a political party to represent the world-view of the positive-sum believers.  In the United States the Democratic Party represents the zero-sum believers, who include many recent immigrants, African Americans still struggling to make it in the city, feminists and gays that believe government power is needed to fight discrimination, and the educated class that stands to gain from the opportunity to administer big government programs.  In the back row are the rich, who benefit from a big government that regulates business and looks after its well-established friends. The Republican Party represents the middle class that has risen up from indigence and believes in hard work and opportunity. Typically Republican Party voters are more religious than Democratic Party voters because they naturally take up the Axial Age religions that encourage the transformation of consciousness from a collective to an individualistic, self-responsible world view.

The history of the last two centuries seem to suggest that as immigrants live their lives in the city they begin to learn its ways, and their children learn it even better. They gradually come to recognize that they can make it in the city.  They begin almost helpless, ignorant of the ways of the city; they eventually graduate into full membership in the freedom of the city.  If this is true then it makes sense for a zero-sum political party to provide benefits to immigrants in their early years of indigence and ignorance of the ways of the city. And it makes sense for a positive-sum political party to sell the idea of the American Dream, that opportunity is available to all, provided we don't throttle all opportunity with a too-large and too-powerful government that plays favorites and substitutes the judgement of fallible politicians and experts for the daily judgements of the market.

The question is how to balance these two opposing positions: how to give comfort to the helpless beginners struggling to learn life in the city while also providing the environment that allows talent to flourish and businesses to grow without an overweening government that siphons off wealth to reward its supporters.

In other words the challenge is to soften the hard edge of the two positions: one that regards corporations and wealthy producers as freeloaders skimming the profits off the economy; the other that looks at the timid people just learning the ways of the city and branding them as freeloaders and welfare cheats.

That is the challenge for Americans in the waning years of the Obama era.

The Silence of the Lambs

I'll be going to dinner with some liberal friends tonight.  And every time I do that I think of the things I'd like to ask them, but am too polite to do.

Can liberals really stand by in silence as the President of the United States arbitrarily writes the law, on Obamacare, on immigration, without benefit of Congress?  Would not liberals be tearing up the carpet if a Republican president were doing anything remotely similar?  Do liberals not understand how their silence enrages conservatives who think of, or hope for an America where both sides of the political divide recognize the need to make their own representatives obey the law and respect the constitution?

Can liberals really sit back in silence when partisan Democratic prosecutors in Wisconsin conduct a years-long investigation into the relations between conservative political committees and Governor Scott Walker in the hope of finding something, anything with which to hang on him?  Do liberals think that this could never happen to them?

And what about the criminal indictment of Governor Perry in Texas for threatening to veto an appropriation for a public integrity office in Austin?  Well, OK, a number of liberal commentators actually have objected to this.

Look I get what is going on here.  Your ordinary rank-and-file liberal has never heard about these matters.  They are just not the sort of thing that gets liberal commentators all riled up; they are not the kind of thing that publicity-seeking liberal activists are interested in.

So if a rank-and-file liberal hears about any of these issues they just shrug and forget about it. Hey, it's not their ox getting gored.

But you can be sure that once we get a Republican president in 2017 with a Republican Congress my liberal friends will be once again sensitive to the slightest appearance of impropriety and corruption, and their concern will by amplified by a hundred journalists and a thousand "activist" organizations.

OK, OK. It's what I call the Incoming Missile Syndrome.  Everyone responds and leaps for cover when the incoming missiles start raining in on their firebase.  But when you are sending mortar rounds out to some enemy trench half a mile away, who cares?  They had it coming.

There are, of course, maxims that deal with this sort of thing.  "Let sleeping dogs lie." "Do as you would be done by."  The point is that if you poke your political opponents you may find too late that you have provoked them into a political rage that will end up hurting your side more than it disables the other side.

Or maybe not.  They say that the attacks on the Koch Brothers are bearing fruit.  Would-be conservative contributors are said to be skittish because they don't want to attract attention to themselves.

But I suppose the ruling class has always tried to intimidate the opposition.  Nothing changes unless there are people who can look back after the revolution and declare how they "boldly did outdare / The dangers of the time."

But I'd still like it if my liberal friends actually had a single independent thought in their NYT/NPR prompted minds.

Liberals Lose the Plot

You've probably heard vaguely about the Rotherham 1400 in England. How "Asian" (read immigrant Pakistani) men ran a rape operation that preyed on underage girls for years right under the noses of city officials who did nothing for fear of being labeled racists.  Here's the BBC report. This flap has occurred in the wake of a report that identified the coverups going back into the 1990s.  And why did it occur? Here's what rank-and-file bureaucrats had to say:

Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.

Golly, I wonder how the lifer bureaucrats got that idea?  By the way, you might not have realized it, but pretty well all the politicians in Rotherham are Labour.  Did you know that pretty well all the politicians in and around Ferguson, Missouri, are Democrats too?

By the way, a high proportion of the victims were known to authorities because they had been identified by the child protective bureaucracy because of dysfunctional family issues.  Oh, and they were white.

You could get a look into the British government bureaucrat culture that condoned all this by reading the Inspector Gadget police blog. Only you can't, because the police inspector that ran the blog has shut it down as ordered by his superiors. OK, it's still on the Wayback Machine.  Again and again, Gadget illuminated the multi-culti left-wing culture that was forced on British policing by the higher-ups.  And he would write about "The Swamp" where the white welfare underclass lived in government housing in utter social collapse.

If you read Victor Davis Hanson you will experience that a similar project is going on in the US.  The liberal welfare state vigorously enforces the law on white middle-class suburbaners.  But when it comes to the Hispanic folks living out in the rural California Central Valley where Hanson lives there seems to be no attempt at law enforcement.  You can see how that works.  Liberals believe that Hispanics are victims and thus exempt from full responsibility.  And individual law enforcement officers know that enforcing the law on "immigrant communities" means nothing but trouble.

Let's return to the block quote up above.  These bureaucrats go to diversity training where they are trained to be super sensitive to any action that might be construed as racist.  So it's not surprising that they act as required by their training.  Most people -- up to 85 percent -- are conformists that do what they are told.  And as for bureaucrats with lifetime tenure...

Let us rehearse what has happened here.  Liberals, in their devotion to the struggle against injustice have upended the good old system that called for the law to apply equally to everyone.  Nobody got a pass, not the noble in his castle, not the peasant on his farm.

But under liberalism, under the necessity of wiping out racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia, the rule of law has been bent and broken.  You can't expect the victim classes to be subject to bourgeois law.  That would be unjust!  That would be like saying that the rich and the poor have an equal right to sleep under the Seine bridges in Paris.

There's another consequence of the necessity of wiping out racism, sexism, classism, and climate change.  You have to exempt the ruling class from the rule of law, as well.  We see this in the actions of the Obama administration.  It's so important to implement universal healthcare that the administration has to be able to make law up as it goes along.  It's so important to amnesty millions of illegal immigrants that we can't wait for Congress to get around to passing a law.  It is so important to dig out the racists in the Ferguson, Missouri, police department that the Attorney General of the United States needs to show up and whip the investigations along.

The point of the rule of law, of the separation of powers, of equality under the law is that anything else leads to mistrust and conflict.  Liberals think that their moral superiority franchises them to bend the rules a little in order to push along the march of progress.

They are wrong, of course, and they will pay for their folly.

Unfortunately the rest of us are going to have to pay for liberal folly as well.  Big time.

Buffett Stock Tip: Sell Obamas

The thing about a chap like Warren Buffett, described by some as the world's foremost stock picker, is that he has to be careful.

A rich billionaire has to keep his friends close and his enemies closer.  Because billions.  Everyone wants a piece of Warren, including the tax man.

So Warren Buffett has sailed a very clever course during the Obama administration, as Andrew B. Wilson reminds us.  Back in November 2010 Warren wrote a letter to his Uncle Sam (printed in the New York Times) thanking his uncle for getting us through the Crash of 2008.

A grateful president gave Warren a Presidential Medal of Freedom not three months later.

And Warren has chirped up a couple of times about the benefit of increasing taxes.

Earlier this year, Fox News reported that Warren had given $1.2 billion to abortion groups since 2001.

I tell you what I call all of that.  I call that taking care of business.  A big billionaire like Buffett is a target for political activists.  It's a good idea for someone like him to kow-tow to the liberal household gods and buy a little protection.

But now it turns out that Buffett is helping finance the "inversion" of Burger King, as the burger business merges with Canada's Tim Horton and proposes that the resulting corporation be a Canadian corporation and lower its US tax bill.

Chaps like President Obama call the inversionists unpatriotic.

Wait!  I thought that dissent was the highest form of patriotism!

So what is Warren Buffett's game?  He has been making nicey nice with the Dems ever since he endorsed Obama in 2008.

I will tell you what Buffett is saying.  He is saying that Obama is now a busted flush and so he doesn't have to suck up to Obama and his Chicago machine any more.

In other words, the world's foremost stock picker is telling us that it is time to sell Obama.

Obama Era: A Rendez-vous with Reality

I have said it before, and I say it again.  The reason I voted for Barack Obama in 2008 with all the kiddies was because I felt that Democrats needed to own foreign policy.

Democrats needed to be in charge and experience for themselves what the US needed to do with respect to the forces in the world. Otherwise they'd just play politics like they did from the day after 9/11.  Remember? The first liberal meme on 9/11 was that the Bush administration had failed to "connect the dots."  Then they put Jamie Gorelick on the 9/11 Commission even though she was the one that put up a wall between the FBI and the CIA.

On Iraq, Democrats were for it before they were against it.  And now, it seems, per Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal, their bellwether liberal writers are weather-vaning back in favor of it: at least to the extent of favoring "doing something" about ISIS.

OK.  I'm not a genius. I wasn't thinking that some years down the road a complete conflagration in the Middle East would turn liberal eyes back towards the late 1990s consensus on foreign policy.  I just wanted the liberal ruling class to get its fingers on the levers of power and make up its mind what it wanted.

The other good thing about the Obama era is that Democrats have been in charge during the discouraging years immediately after the generational Crash of 2008.  Imagine if John McCain had won the election and stumble-bummed his way through 2009-12 like Barack Obama!  He'd already be down in the presidential basement and everyone would agree that he was worse than Herbert Hoover, and he would be proof, as if any proof were needed, that Republicans didn't care about ordinary people and only cared about The Rich.

Here we are, with Obamacare, ISIS, corruption, economic stagnation, race riots, and it's all hanging around Obama's neck.  So now Republicans have a chance for real economic reform.

But the basic problem is still there.  The American people really don't know from bupkis when it comes to the economy.  As Instapundit Glenn Reynolds writes, we still retain our paleolithic economic intuitions.

What do we need to do?  It's not rocket science.

We need to X out all the stupid economic regulation from minimum wage to child labor that makes it extremely hard for marginal people to get ahead in America.

We need to end the generational injustice of Social Security and Medicare.  Here's my idea of justice.  So long as you are able to work, you get to retire when you have saved enough money to yield an income to retire on.  That means, if you wonder, that the old 'uns like me have saved enough to create jobs for the people whose work will support us in our old age.

We need to make welfare time-limited.  That was the idea behind the reform of 1996, but Obama has quietly repealed it -- without the consent of the governed.  And the American middle class needs to be socialized to believe that it is the personal responsibility of each American to relieve the sufferings of the poor.

We need to go back to sound money.  Of course.  But the lesson of the 20th century is that you can't have sound money with big government, because Big G is always screwing up the economy and needing to devalue the currency in order to get out of a jam.

We need to get the government out of education.  Maybe the best thing to do is to repeal compulsory attendance.  Middle-class kids will grow up to be literate and numerate anyway.  So that means we can concentrate on the children of the  poor.  And it would be better if: a) the poor paid for their kids' education as they do in the Third World  (see James Tooley and The Beautiful Tree) and b) the slack were made up with money from billionaires and time from middle-class volunteers.

I know what you are saying.  Good luck with that.

That's why I say that the only way out is through a moral/religious awakening that sweeps away all the dogs-in-a-manger -- that's you and me -- that won't go with the program because they won't give up their own personal little benefit from the government.

But at least the Obama era will have given many of us a rather compelling rendez-vous with the reality that progressivism doesn't work.

And the result will be some sensible piecemeal reforms that will heal the economy until the next Obama era thirty years from now.

Understanding 200 Years of "Counter Ideologies"

Why do they keep coming?  I am talking about what Abram N. Shulsky calls "counter-ideologies" to liberalism (i.e., classical liberalism).

Despite its overall success, liberalism has for two centuries been dogged by a series of counter-ideologies. So far, they have all been defeated, but sometimes only at great cost.

We are talking about Romanticism, bohemianism, avant-gardism, "extreme nationalism," fascism, and "various forms of communism and leftist extremism." And now Islamism.  What is going on?

After much to-ing and fro-ing Shulsky comes to the conclusion that the weakness of classical liberalism is that its intellectuals no longer believe in it and "there are seemingly ineradicable longings of the human soul that it ignores or pretends do not exist."

Yes, but.

I take the position that of course there have been lots of "counter-ideologies" to our present world of --well, let's call it "global responsible individualism."  When you turn the world upside down, what do you expect?

When you write history, you write it as though your kind naturally acceded to world dominance by the grace of God of the inevitable march of history.  And to call your ideology "liberalism" kinda hides the truth.  Because the process was not liberal; it was instead a brutal process of creative destruction.  Old ways and empires and forms of dominance from one end of the world to the other were trashed and thrown on the ash heap of history.  And replaced with something different.

Of course people objected to this.  Of course the Islamists are hopping mad.  "We" are tearing their world up by the roots and, worse, treating the Middle East as a savage backwater that can be conquered and remade at the will and the convenience of our commerce and our power.

Let's unpack the term I've used "global responsible individualism."  I use that term because until just yesterday life for most humans was local, was subservient, and was collective.  People lived and died pretty near to where they were born.  They belonged to a small community that was profoundly hierarchical; there was a lord, and in your particular family there was a patriarch.  You did what you were told.  And life was collective.  You didn't think of "I"; you just lived the way of the ancestors and the tribe and the village without thinking that there could be another way.

But now that's changed. Let's start with global.  Both my grandfathers, I think, were born in England. But my father was born in Russia and my mother was born in Japan.  I was born in India.  My children were born in the US.  Two of my grandchildren were born in England, two in France, and two in the US. Just to make it fair!

Then there is the "responsible individualism."  In my view, starting in the Axial Age of the first millennium BC, the idea got about that people were responsible for the conduct of their lives individually to God. And there were consequences: Heaven, Hell, reincarnation as a dog.

My feeling is that few people were affected by this ideological revolution until Gutenberg, until the Reformation, until the industrial revolution.  The People of the Responsible Self were a small, but growing minority.  Then the movement went critical and conquered the world.

Now responsible individualism is hard.  Everything about your life is piled on your back; "you" not "they" is responsible. And the weight can become intolerable.  Of course people revolted against this revolution.   Artists didn't like the idea that creative inspiration was being devalued by reason and steam engines. Intellectuals didn't like the idea that the market economy was self-regulating and didn't really need people like them to run the trains. Workers were confused as they migrated out of rural idiocy into the rough and tumble of city work and life.  The rich didn't like the cities busting out and destroying their parks and shrubberies.

Of course there is unrest; of course there are counter-ideologies.  Of course there are wars and movements and religions and cults and disasters.  This is the biggest thing ever.

Meanwhile, as Instapundit Glenn Reynolds reminds us,

most people’s economic intuitions are — quite literally — paleolithic. Whole political ideologies have flourished by taking advantage of that.

Which is merely saying the same thing as Shulsky and me.  Here we are, billions of humans still mostly programmed for life in the Old Stone Age that was local, subservient, and collective.  And we are being forced to life in a world that is global, responsible, and individual.

Many people would rather go back to the old ways.