Sure the Central Planning Elite has Failed. But People Still Want Free Stuff

In these bleak Obama times it's bracing to read a good solid piece by Kevin Williamson, "Unmanageable Man," that prophesies the end of the central-planning era.

Take violence, he writes.  It's down and nobody knows why. Some people think it's due to "broken-windows" policing, but crime is down in cities that didn't do the Bill Bratton thing. Some people think it's abortion. Or no-fault divorce. Or some other government program of the central-planning state.

But the truth is that nobody knows.

It all comes down to the fact that you can't manage man. Cue Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek on the complexity of all human action and the "pretense of knowledge" which in our public-policy debates "is practically an article of faith."

Reality is remorselessly wearing away the planners' pretense, according to Williamson.

In 2008... their ambitions were done in by the houses in which we live... Washington's response was to apply to health care the same effective management it had brought to housing policy, executing its program with approximately the ineptitude that might have been expected.

Thus with the failure of the central-planning paradigm the Left is reduced to "performing public-relations work on behalf of a collection of parochial economic interests and sundry tribal enthusiasms."

Of course, this failure will inspire the Left to redouble their efforts, "with denunciations of enemies of the people, and demands for ever-more-extraordinary powers to deal with the [permanent] emergency."

But the "world is moving on from command and control" with Google a world away from the Rayburn Office Building.

Power is shifting decisively in the direction of technology, capital, and innovation, and the planners are on the verge of losing, and spectacularly.

"Rare words, brave world," as Falstaff said. This is wonderful, stirring stuff, red meat for a libertarian conservative like me.

But I want to throw some cold water on things before we get too excited.

I think that the point of central planning is not that it is effective, but that it provides a rationale for our modern ruling class, to give it permission to do what any ruling class does naturally, which is to reward its supporters with loot and plunder.

In other words I believe that the central-planning philosophy is a specific instance of behavior that you will find in any ruling class. Any government, from a robber band to a global empire, stays in power by rewarding its supporters with loot and plunder. The chief of a robber band is merely frank about it: he simply promises his recruits the prospect of loot and plunder from the band's successful raids upon innocent travelers and isolated farm-houses. A guerrilla band chief offers his fighters various government positions after the present unjust regime has been defeated and run out of the presidential palace. Kings of feudal kingdoms offer their barons rich lands and estates in return for their loyalty. Our modern educated elite offers "rights" to workers, to women, to minorities, to gays. It promises tax credits for electric cars to its environmental followers. It promises labor-friendly laws to its labor union supporters. It promises wind-farm subsidies to its green billionaire pals. The central-planning both a claim to competence and a cunning effort to bring the entire economy under the supervision of administrative ukase; anything can be ordered from the central planning bureaucracy, with supporters rewarded and opponents punished. And everything is justified in the national interest: greedy bankers and ruthless speculators beware.

How convenient. How ordinary.

So what if the centrally planned housing policy nearly wrecked the economy? For decades politicians could promise "affordable housing" to voters and get elected. So what if centrally planned "universal health care" wrecks the health care system? It offers free stuff to millions of moderate income voters who will vote appropriately at the next election.

The central planning conceit quiets the conscience of the educated ruling class. It also has clear advantages for many of the supporters. If you are a serf-like person, one whose philosophy of life is to find a powerful patron and shelter under his umbrella of power, the rigid administrative state and availability of free stuff solves a big problem. It frees you from making decisions about your life.

In the modern individualist society the individual bears the burden of making all kinds of key life decisions: what job to get, how much house, car, entertainment he can afford. How to educate the kids. How much to save. How much is enough for health insurance.  It is a heavy burden. It is responsible individualism.

But the big government welfare state run by the educated ruling class offers a way out. Its free education system makes it only too easy to dump the kids at the government school. Its Social Security/Medicare programs make it easy to put off saving for old age. Its health insurance subsidies mean that moderate income people can get by spending less money on health care. If you want to opt out of the mandatory centrally-planned system you have to pay twice.

But when you accept the government's mess of pottage you slide from proud independence into quasi serfdom. It doesn't really matter that much to you if the centrally-planned programs don't work too well. You can tell your best friend that at least you have health care, at least the kids are getting an education; you can tell your buddies that you don't have to worry about retirement, what with Social Security and the government pension. You can shuck off the burden of responsible individualism and ease off the work effort a little.

It is perfectly obvious that the centrally planned welfare state is perfectly acceptable to millions of people. Oh sure, they grumble and kvetch about the "system" but they don't actually do anything about it.

So I'm afraid that the failure of central planning doesn't mean the end of liberalism as we know it. Our liberal friends will still be offering free stuff way into the future. They will just have to look for a new rationale, a new apology for their rule, that will satisfy their own quest for legitimacy and quieten any nagging questions in the minds of their bribed apologists and their electoral supporters.

I have enough respect for our liberal friends to know that they will come up with something.

Obama and Clinton's False Social Revolution

After the left-wing radical president Barack Obama, is the choice before America really between the radical left-wing Hillary Clinton or the radical left-wing Elizabeth Warren?

That's the helpless feeling you get from reading Stanley Kurz's latest piece in National Review. Author of a book on Obama's radical past, he's commenting on an article by Alana Goodman in the Washington Free Beacon on "The Hillary Letters," the correspondence between Hillary Clinton and left-wing radical Saul Alinsky.

Yes, it turns out that Hillary Clinton has been allowed to cover up her radical past, including a correspondence with Chicago radical Saul Alinsky. She didn't just write her undergraduate thesis on Alinsky. She corresponded with him.  And after graduation from law school she went to work with a radical left-wing Chicago law firm, Treuhaft, Walker, and Bernstein.

Barack Obama also spent his formative adult years in left-wing Chicago and seems to have been mentored by left-wing terrorist Bill Ayers.

In her thesis, Clinton concluded:

If the ideals Alinsky espoused were actualized, the result would be a social revolution.

So, Kurtz suggests, eight years of Obama followed by four years of Clinton or Warren would indeed amount to a social revolution. It would change the United States forever.

But I disagree. The left-wing "march through the institutions" is not a social revolution, it is a palace coup, a cunning political manipulation from above. It is not a popular revolution from below, seeking to overthrow an existing corrupt regime and create a new order; it is a flagrant machination orchestrated within the ruling class that seeks to change everything through a new concentration of power and a withering of the public square and the power of ordinary people. The result of eight years of Obama and four years of Clinton or of Warren would be Bolshevism lite, the seizing of power by an American nomenclatura and the reduction of ordinary American citizens to a virtual serfdom.

To show how this is so, let us analyze the words of Alinsky from his Reveille for Radicals, quoted by Stanley Kurtz.

Radicals want to advance from the jungle of laissez-faire capitalism to a world worthy of the name of human civilization. They hope for a future where the means of economic production will be owned by all of the people instead of the few.

The jungle metaphor is a favorite of the left, advanced particularly by the Fabians, who liked to say that their rational plans would replace the law of the jungle. But this is nonsense. Capitalism is not the law of the jungle; capitalism cannot even start until there is a state pacifies non-state actors and protects economic transactions with the rule of law enforced by the courts.

Let us take apart two radically incorrect assumptions that Alinsky makes.

First, the jungle metaphor suggests that under capitalism only the strong survive and the weak get eaten up by predators. But this is rubbish. Under capitalism only the companies that produce the products that people want at the prices they are willing to pay get to rule the roost. Companies that take their eye off the ball go broke. Only government power can interfere with this process. We have seen how this has worked out in the decades since Alinsky wrote. Great companies have come and gone. The big beasts of the mid 20th century, the steel and auto companies, are reduced to being wards of the state.

Second, there is no society where "the means of economic production will be owned by all of the people" and there never will be. The commanding heights of the economy can only be owned by the few. It is the same with democracy. Joseph Schumpeter clarified this for all time when he wrote in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy that democracy is impossible because the people cannot rule. Ruling is done by the few. The only thing that democracy can provide is for the people to select who will rule over them with elections and stuff. The same applies to the economic sector. We have seen what happens when the "means of production" gets "owned" by the people. The means of production, instead of being directed by the "few," the economic elite in the private sector and their assignees, are now directed by another "few," the political elite and their tame underlings in the public sector. It cannot be any other way. Moreover, the political elite is peculiarly unqualified to direct the economic sector. Their expertise is in politics, not in business and markets. They are expert in coming up with new ideas for winning elections, not in new ideas for winning market share. The fallacy of Alinsky's idea is cruelly confirmed in the dismal economic record of all socialist political regimes of the 20th century, from the brutality and the failure of the Soviet Union's economy to the famines and miseries of China's Mao regime to the impoverishment of Cuba under the Castro brothers. And now we see the economic implosion of Venezuela under the Bolivarian socialism of Hugo Chávez and his dim-witted successor Nicolás Maduro.

The truth is that the "jungle" metaphor applies to socialism, not to capitalism, for it is in socialism that the powerful rule and create out of the peaceable free-market economy a political jungle where only the politically connected survive. And the closest we can get to "all of the people" owning the means of production is for the workers to invest their savings in financial instruments: bank accounts, bonds, and stocks. All of these instruments offer "all of the people" legally enforceable rights to the fruits of the nation's economic production, each with different risks and rewards.

It's a pity that Saul Alinsky never had an epiphany on the road to Damascus and never stumbled upon the utter folly of the socialist dream. If he had he might have steered dull minds like Hillary Clinton away from the ignis fatuus of political power. Or maybe he would have been forgotten, and Hillary Clinton would have found another radical to write about in her undergraduate thesis, someone like Antonio Gramsci.

But never mind Hillary Clinton and her infatuation with the mirage of political power as human salvation. What is the problem?  Why has the glorious vision of Marx and the socialists failed every time it has been tried? I will tell you. It issues from the very nature of government.

Government starts as an armed band occupying some territory and forcibly taxing the people in that territory. It could be the glorious government of the United States, or it could be a criminal gang in South Chicago. It could be Mao ZeDong in his Red Base in southern China. The way a government, any government, survives is by rewarding its supporters with loot and plunder. In the case of a criminal gang the loot and plunder might be the proceeds of the drug business. In the case of a modern 21st century government the loot and plunder would be government entitlement programs: pensions, health care, education, welfare, all of which offer "free stuff" to voters. This free stuff is always taken from producers before it is given to voters. Often, in a cunning trick, the free stuff is extracted from the voters and then generously given back to them 30 years later.

No government ever, anywhere, has operated in a fashion different from the above model. It must be so, because government everywhere is about force. Government may be necessary force, where it protects its citizens from foreign predators and domestic robbers and fraudsters. Or it may be unnecessary force, where it takes taxes and fees from the productive to give to crony capitalists and influential special interests like teachers at government schools and health-care workers at government-subsidized health care facilities. This is not rocket science. Action backed by force is government. Action without the backing of force is not government, it is voluntary cooperation.

Let us recast Saul Alinsky's false vision of the good society. Let us replace his false idea that capitalism is a jungle and his fallacious idea that "the means of economic production [could ever] be owned by all of the people."

Conservatives want to advance from the jungle of big government oppression to a world worthy of the name of human civilization. They hope for a future where the means of economic production will be directed by all of the people in their individual voluntary actions instead of by the selfish dictates of a cruel and corrupt ruling class.

That is a social revolution we can all believe in. That is a future we can work for.

Who Would Want to Live Forever?

Everybody seems to want to extend human life. Government wants to do it, with the Nixon's War on Cancer. Women want to do it with their absolute faith in health care.

Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, also hails every new news item that promises to extend human life. And now we learn that PayPal guy Peter Thiel has a foundation dedicated to the extension of human life.

OK, I get it. We humans long for eternal life. That's why our gods promise it to us when we die: not only eternal life, but eternal life in Paradise, at least for the good guys.

These people are all forgetting that death is an essential part of life with sexual reproduction. It only works if the Old Ones die off. They must die off to leave space for the Young 'Uns. Otherwise we get what we have now, Old 'Uns hanging on at enormous expense through the good offices of Social Security and Medicare, and blighting the youth of the Young 'Uns who are forced to pay for the support of the Old 'Uns while also trying to earn a living, buy houses, and raise families.

In the old days people died. They died being born, but now we have aseptic neo-natal care. They died as infants, but now we have pediatric care. They died of the usual infectious diseases, but now we have vaccination. They died of water-borne diseases like typhoid and cholera, but now we have sanitation. They died of plague, but now we have quarantine. They died of famine, but now we have global transportation.

They died of heart attacks but now we have stents. They died of cancer but now we have surgery and chemo.

Now people are living long enough to suffer from dementia and just flat out atrophy. And everyone is all agog to learn of cures for Alzheimer's.

Where are the environmentalists? Why aren't they putting a stop to all this nonsense? Why aren't they telling us that all this "progress" is killing the Earth, that extending human life span completely upsets the natural, organic trajectory of human life.

Well, of course, in a way, they are. They want us to stop having babies to avoid "overpopulation." They want us to reduce our "carbon footprint." And 100 years ago, in the heyday of eugenics, they were eager to cull the "unfit."

But they are not crazy. They don't suggest we should stop medical research and cut health care.

Here's my beef with all this. As a 68-year-old, I definitely feel that I'm done working for other people. I'm just too old and crabby, and a full day's work is too exhausting. But then I don't want to live into my 90s and become either physically weak -- so that I can't stand up and walk about -- or mentally weak with some sort of dementia. I'd just as soon be cut off in my mid 80s while I still have some physical strength and still have some short-term memory.

And then there is the question of money. If you are talking about 25 years of retirement, from the mid 60s to 90 or so, who in the world will have the energy and the cunning to manage their money all that time? Don't tell me government: politicians have been stealing from the entitlement "trust funds" ever since they were first created. And corporate pension plans aren't much better.

The fact is that you can't forecast 20, 25 years into the future. Someone has to take the hit when things go wrong. But under the current entitlement system the Young 'Uns are expected to pick up the slack when the forecasts of the politicians turn out to be a crock. When old line corporations buckle under the weight of their pension promises, it is the current employees that take the hit. That is what I call generational injustice.

Really, if we are to extend lifespan then people need to work longer. And that means we need to reprogram the genetic life trajectory so that people keep their energy longer. But would that really be a good idea? Would it be better than shorter lifespans with each new generation stepping up to the bat earlier?

My point is that nobody has really thought through what we are proposing when we call for increased lifespans, let alone living for ever.

Because my take on disease and aging is that it is all part of Nature's organic plan. We are born with soft baby skin and boundless energy, and we die, 80 year later, weak and tired, with hard scaly skin. That's not a process of decay.  That is genes turning on and off. That is Nature's program for our lives. And every generation we shuffle the cards with the wonders of sex.

What happens if we live forever and we don't shuffle the cards? What happens if old geezers hang on for decades and decades throttling the naive Young 'Uns with their cunning and their selfishness?

I will tell you what I think will happen if we discover the fountain of youth and decide to live forever. It will be the end of the human race.

But then, what of that? Every species lives its hour upon the stage and then goes extinct, leaving space for the rest of Creation.

I will tell you what I think about people that want to live forever. They don't have enough children. Glenn Reynolds has one, and Peter Thiel has none. Of course they want to live forever.

But when you have children that seem to be smarter than you are, and when you have grandchildren, and one looks to be a good software developer and one looks to be a good writer and one looks to be a social genius and one looks to be a kind carer, and one looks like a future beauty, who needs to stick around forever, taxing them and bothering and controlling them all to death?

Perhaps Hillary Clinton will have the last word. "What difference, at this point, does it make?"

The Wages of Hubris

According to Wikipedia, Hubris, the Greek word for "extreme pride or self confidence... indicates a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one's own competence... especially when the person exhibiting it is in a position of power."

What do you think? Does that describe President Obama and our liberal friends, or what?

And now that President Obama and the Democratic Party are going to Congress for a vote to support a military effort in the Middle East to degrade the ISIS army, you might think that our liberal friends would be a little sadder and wiser. After all, didn't they tell us that the Bush administration's military effort in the Middle East was all about blood for oil?

But really, I don't expect much change. Because our liberal friends are our ruling class. They dominate the culture; they dominate our politics. Only in unusual situations after a manifest failure that even the least engaged average person can experience does the liberal ruling class experience a feeling of uncertainty.

Anyway, they explain it all away by saying that the US is ungovernable and the world is a complex place.

The best analysis of our cultural and political situation, in my view, comes from Dark Enlightenment writer "Mencius Moldbug's" notion of the "Cathedral."

The Cathedral is the state secular church of the academy, the media, the policy analysts and Hollywood.  It even has its Holy Office of the Social Justice Inquisition running around accusing everyone of crimes against multicultural orthodoxy. And then the two parties, following George Orwell, can best be described as the Inner Party (Democrats) and Outer Party (Republicans).

The Cathedral and the Inner Party are one and the same. The Outer Party has to watch its step, because the enforcers from the Holy Office and their pals in the Inner Party are always ready to pounce and punish Outer Party supporters for crimes against orthodoxy.

That's the basic problem you have if you are a conservative and you want limited government and you want to reduce the size of big government. You are up against the Cathedral and the Inner Party.

That's why I say that we are not going to get change just because President Obama and his supporters have run the nation and the economy on the rocks with their reckless hubris, their blind pride and faith in their big government project.

Oh, we'll probably get a Republican Congress in 2015 and a Republican president in 2017.

But that's not the point.

The point is that if you want real change it is going to take a moral revolution. As I've said in recent posts, that means something like the Protestant Reformation or the several Great Awakenings of the last 500 years. You need a cultural and social earthquake that grabs the cultural narrative and starts to push back against the Cathedral.

It all sounds really cool until you start reading a book like The Beginning of Ideology and realize that we are talking about massacres, repression and civil war. That's because a moral argument easily slips into a warlike argument. And then you take up Violence and the Sacred by Rene Girard and realize that once violence starts it is likely to take on a momentum and an energy of its own and engulf everything.

In other words, there is no way we will dethrone the current liberal hegemony and its big government welfare state without huge social disruption and violence, and maybe civil war. Maybe even world war.

It's enough to give you pause.  We conservatives would really like to roll back the cruelty, the corruption, the injustice, the waste, the delusion of liberal big government. We can see the hubris of President Obama and the liberals that has resulted in the adminstration of the Worst President Ever.

But the liberals are the ruling class. They own the state Cathedral of multiculturalism through their domination of education, media, and entertainment. They run the Inner Party, the Demoecratic Party.

And they ain't gonna go without a fight.

But don't worry. There won't even be a fight unless and until conservatives can ignite a new social/cultural/religious movement that inspires people with a new vision of the good life.

So right now there's no need for liberals to worry. Nothing is going to change. Not yet.

So that's why liberals are still so full of hubris. Even as they fail at everything they do.

Dems Governing Like Weasels

So here we are again.  Instead of going to Congress to get a resolution or a declaration of war on ISIS, President Obama is trying to weasel out of it by asserting that the Congressional resolution from the Bush era is all he needs.

What on earth does the president think he is doing? The point of going to Congress is not about some weaselly legal point.  It is that when the president goes to war he needs to establish some kind of consensus from the rest of the ruling class and from the American people that he needs to go to war.

The legal beagle stuff is beside the point.  The point is that when the leader of a nation takes it to war he needs the nation to be united, more or less, behind him.  He needs to persuade the nation that war is necessary.  He needs to get the opposition on board; he needs to establish a bipartisan consensus.

This is not rocket science.  This is common sense.

But the Obama administration has seemed to do everything under a blanket, or with cunning sleights of hand. This may seem awfully clever to the lawyers working out the legal ploys, but it misses the point.

If you are the leader of the country you must lead it. You must set forth what you want to do, win an election, and then do it. You must be on the phone the whole time wheedling and cajoling the great barons of the realm.

And that is exactly what Candidate and President Obama has not done.

First of all, Obama ran as a moderate, which he is not. Then he pushed through his economic stimulus program without Republican votes. Then he pushed through Obamacare without Republican votes.

It misses the point to say: Oh well, Republicans opposed everything the president proposed. Of course they did. That's why the president gets on the phone and buys the votes of the moderates in the middle. Like the ladies from Maine. Only he didn't.

Then he tried to put lefty extremists on the National Labor Relations Board, by nominating them to recess appointments when the US Senate wasn't in recess. Then his Environmental Protection Agency has been run as an extension of the greenie foundations. Then his IRS has harassed Tea Party groups. Then his Justice Department has been used as a catspaw in the liberal race theater operations.

My point is that this means that nothing the Obama administration has done is cast in stone. Because the president never got a bipartisan consensus on anything. Republicans can come in in 2017 and reverse everything, because the Obama administration never took the trouble to persuade and to make its agenda a national agenda.

Yesterday I read a horrified piece about the Democrats' "CATALIST" voter database. It was used in 2008 and 2012 to turn out the liberal base. J. Christian Adams wonders if Republicans will ever be able to win a presidential election again.

Maybe, maybe not.  Technology like CATALIST is all very well, but if you don't do the politics right, by leading and persuading, then you are going to find, in the end, that you have riled up the whole of the rest of America against you.

Rush Limbaugh has a catchphrase that liberals can't admit who they are, because if they did they could never win an election. But with the Obama administration the liberals are telling us who they are in a rather clear fashion.  They are all about gaming the system, using their insider status and contacts, using any means to achieve their ends.  And when backroom stuff doesn't work then they send out the SJWs, the social justice warriors, to bully and intimidate.

Well, I'm reading a book about the French Reformation, The Beginning of Ideology by Donald R. Kelley. It's all about ideological bullying in France in the 16th century.  And it ends up with massacres and a nasty civil war.

That is what liberals are ginning up. That's what they'd know they were doing. If they had any wisdom. Which they don't.

This isn't rocket science. It's time for President Obama to realize that the job of president is to lead and persuade. It is not to weasel.

Peter Thiel's Challenge

I just happened upon a 90 minute video interview of capitalist Peter Thiel -- as in PayPal, Facebook -- conducted by an obseqious Bill Kristol.

I can well understand Kristol's hesitating politeness.  Thiel is an impressive man, who obviously thinks about and knows his stuff. For instance, he writes in praise of monopoly against free competition: "Competition is for Losers." He means, of course, that you want to start a business where it will be difficult for people to copy you and catch up with you. As in PayPal and Facebook. You'll never make much money in a commodity business where a ton of steel is a ton of steel.

Mind you, Thiel talks in a veiled way.  He says that PayPal solved its problems with fraud with a combination of big data and the human factor.  What does that mean?

And what about the new Apple Pay and all the other payments solutions for mobile devices? Are they coming up with something new or merely playing catch-up?

But here is the takeaway for me on Thiel. He says that one question he likes to ask when interviewing job applicants is this:

Tell me something that other people don't believe in. And that's true.

That notion aligns with Thiel's preference for financing opportunities that will yield monopoly profits. It means in many cases doing something that other people think is impossible. For instance, you'd think that the banks and credit card folks would have got into the payments-by-email business before PayPal. After all, money transaction is what they do. But in fact, according to Thiel, they didn't, and the reason they didn't is that they thought that payments by email would be too hard, because of the fraud.

Kristol asked Thiel about his Question? How do people answer it? Usually they don't.  They fake it. And Thiel then went into a discussion of the social nature of opinion.  People just don't tend to stray too far from the herd.

Thiel got me to thinking.  What would I say in response to his question? Here's my first attempt.

Most people don't believe that the free market is just and fair. They think it needs to be hedged around by regulation and government ukase. They think, perhaps not as passionately as the Occupy protesters, that we need a government with a gun to the head of employers. In fact business runs on trust, and the way to succeed in the market place is to make sure that all your transactions reward and amplify trust.

That's not to say that there isn't cheating and fraud in the world. But the way to succeed is to use TIT-FOR-TAT. Trust first, and then continue to trust if the other person is trustworthy. And avoid a "last transaction" because that's when it pays to cheat.

Here's another. Most people think of government as a powerful patron. You want to stay in good with your patron and collect the crumbs that fall from the master's table. But in reality government always betrays you. That's because government is force. It uses everyone that supports it as an army uses its soldiers, as cannon fodder in its campaign of force, in its endless wars, foreign and domestic.

Thiel's point is that you'll never amount to anything unless you've done a bit of contrarian thinking. Because if the herd is ever to change direction then someone has to swerve away from the herd and start off in a different direction.

Here We Go Again With Liberal Malaise

There really is a reason for the Six Year Itch.  After six years of a president even his supporters can begin to see that he's a fool and a charlatan.

So it was with Bush, so it is with Obama. So it wasn't with Clinton because the Republicans, in moving to impeach Clinton for crimes that would have sunk a Nixon, riled up the Clinton partisans for one more assault on the breach.

With a Democrat in the White House the Six Year Itch at the midterm election in a president's second term inspires the liberal pundits to civilizational exhaustion. The job is just too big for one man, they said after only three years of Carter.  But for Roger Cohen in the New York Times it's "The Great Unraveling." No, Roger, it isn't. It's just another routine failure of liberalism. But I get why it would feel that way to a liberal.

Beheadings? Yes, that's what you get when small insurgencies are on the loose because the big boys can't get their act together.

Aggression? Yes, that's what happens when you get fools talking about the importance of "soft" power over "hard" power.

Breakup? Yes, that's what happens when you weaken the national myth in the minds of the people with the cultural Marxist the multicultural myth.

And so on.

So the liberals are demoralized.  So their ideas are failing wherever they are tried. So what?

The problem is that we have nothing to replace liberalism.

Oh, sure; modern conservatism is better all round for America and the world.  But nobody is excited about it. There is no militant movement that is mobilizing a new generation to flush out the old order and replace it with something new. Instead the kids are all riled up about pot legalization and gay marriage.  Squirrel!

It's déjà vu all over again.

Thirty-five years ago in the Carter malaise liberals were telling us that America was ungovernable.  That we were entering a period of decline.  That there was nothing we could do about it.

Then along came Ronald Reagan. He showed that we could revive the economy, could govern America, could win the Cold War.

But what he couldn't do was move the needle on entitlements. So here we are 35 years later and the entitlements are eating us alive, but still nobody dares suggest reform.  The Elizabeth Warren Democrats are even calling for Social Security benefit increases!

If you look back at the great social/religious movements, starting with the Reformation, they were driven by young people, folks like Martin Luther rebelling against their royal official fathers. Young punks like Marx rebelling against their hauts bourgeois fathers. Young punks like the Sixties radicals pretending to rebel against their liberal fathers.

That is what is missing today.  There are no young punks planning revolution.  There are just the dumb-as-posts Occupy guys that are the drugged-up dupes of the ruling class.

Ten years ago and more liberals like Robert William Fogel were worried stiff that the evangelical Christians were building a Fourth Great Awakening that would take out liberalism and its beloved egalitarianism. So much for that fear.

No.  I suspect we must wait for the moment when African Americans and Hispanics start to become "haves" and start to want freedom and responsible individualism and start to rebel against their liberal masters and say "leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities." I don't want your stinkin' free stuff. That quote is from Eric Hoffer.

Meanwhile my work is to think through what the charismatic leader of this future movement will want to know and say.  And I think it starts with the fact that the payroll taxes that fund the entitlement programs are monstrously unjust to a responsible individual who says "leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities."

That's because the welfare state is based on the proposition that the workers give their savings to the government in payroll taxes and the government decides when and how to give it back to them.

Only a person unfit for freedom could tolerate such a system. Give my money to the politicians so they can buy votes for 30 years until it's time for me to retire?  You must be joking!

But that's the attitude it will take if we are ever to reform the current cruel, corrupt, unjust, wasteful and deluded system.