Gentrification: It's the Capitalists' Fault!

Here I thought that gentrification was a liberal thing: liberals with a little less money that corporate strivers buying low and selling high in marginal urban neighborhoods.

But class warrior Gavin Mueller paints a different scene. Forget about Richard Florida and his "creatives". The gentrifiers are "bureaucrats and IT workers with a few more years of beards and bong hits in them". And gentrification is a big-money game.

Gentrification has always been a top-down affair, not a spontaneous hipster influx, orchestrated by the real estate developers and investors who pull the strings of city policy, with individual home-buyers deployed in mopping up operations.

So the whole thing reduces to the usual left-wing narrative of class warfare with the "broken windows" policing of Rudy Guiliani doing a right hook on the poor and the Jane Jacobs worship of the urban environment doing a left hook while the corporate interests advance up the middle and mop up with the profits.

Well, yes.  You combine the profit motive with access to government influence and you can turn the city upside down, and the poor will get the shaft. Factor in government programs encouraging minorities to buy houses they can't afford and you compound the problem.

So what do we do? Apart from left-wing organizing and right-wing laissez-faire?

Maybe the short-term option is to do nothing and let liberal gentrifiers and lefty community organizers and the crony capitalist real-estate developers stew together a little.  They are, after all, Democrats, every one.

Meanwhile let's try to think things out a little.

First, the poor are always going to be living in the worst part of town, and that means they will always be vulnerable to redevelopment, because that's how capitalism works. You buy low, you add value, and you sell high. So the poor are always going to find themselves chased around town. Because reality.

Second, cities are always changing, and if you don't like change driven by real-estate developers than you are choosing change driven by politicians and activists. Which means incompetence and no change until the bottom drops out. See Detroit.

You can have public housing; you can have subsidies; you can have programs. But the poor will still be living in the  worst part of town. And if you don't redevelop the worst part of town it will get even worse

Of course, everything that liberals do, from lefty community organizers to creative-class urban pioneers to crony capitalists, make the poor's situation more difficult. That's because welfare, subsidies, public transportation make the poor vulnerable and dependent on government.  People that have jobs are people that can move around and adapt.  People that live on welfare and housing subsidies and rely on public transportation are stuck.

So the real solution is to reform the welfare system so that poor people mostly have jobs. Then they have the economic power to make choices rather than slither, by default, into the worst part of town, because dependency.

But that sort of thing doesn't interest lefty class warriors. The solution must be political. It must be a crackdown on business interests and capitalism. It must be bigger government.

It's all such a bloody shame.

Wascally Republican Racists

One of the fundamental beliefs of today's liberals is that they are for civil rights and Republicans are racists. The proof is that Barry Goldwater voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and that the South voted for Goldwater in 1964.

(In fact Goldwater was a libertarian who had desegregated the Arizona National Guard and voted against the Civil Rights Act because he felt it was too intrusive.)

And then there was Richard Nixon's supposed "Southern strategy" to pick up white Southern racist votes in 1972.

Recently there have been three items in the liberal media, all featuring photos of Gov. George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door, that assume this meme.

But Ed Driscoll has taken one look and decided to invoke Ian Fleming and Goldfinger.

And there's a telling boner on MSNBC's part in this hate-fest. Its chiron tags Wallace as an (R). In fact Gov. George Wallace (D-Alabama) was a lifelong Democrat.

But once the Civil Rights Act passed and blacks began to vote in Alabama, Wallace got religion and bid for the votes of African Americans and appointed blacks to his cabinet. A true politician.

Liberals need to paint Republicans as racists, because their policies have betrayed the spirit of civil rights. They have turned equal rights into a racial spoils system and injected race relations with the poison of cultural Marxism and identity politics. According to fashionable liberal psychology, the way your deal with that is "projection," projecting your own faults on your political opponents.

In reality, Republicans are embarrassed by race. We'd love to have blacks voting Republican but we know it ain't gonna happen as long as Democrats manage to whip them with the fear that Republicans want to return blacks to the days of Jim Crow. Anyway, the result of affirmative action is that overwhelming numbers of blacks work for the government. They ain't gonna be voting for the party of limited government any time soon.

Republicans have never bid for the votes of Democrats. What happens is that individual Democrats find themselves echoing one-time Democrat Ronald Reagan: I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me. And they find themselves voting Republican.

But there is a germ of truth in the liberal accusations on Wascally Wepublican Wacism. It is that the victims of liberal race politics are predominantly lower-middle class and working class whites. It is their jobs in government and elsewhere that have been targeted by affirmative action. And the same applies to university admissions.

I don't know how racist the lower class whites are, but if I were one, I'd be pretty angry with the Democratic Party that once loved me as a working stiff and now sneers at me as a racist redneck.

Moore vs. Krugman Cage Fight

Libertarian economist Mark Skousen is boosting a grand debate at the next FreedomFest in Las Vegas July 8-11, 2015. It's between NYT columnist and Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman and WSJ columnist and supply-sider Stephen Moore. They are going to debate a bunch of topics, one by one.

Red States vs. Blue States (especially California)… Flat Tax vs. Progressive Tax… Austerity vs Stimulus… Inequality vs. Growth… Market Healthcare vs. ObamaCare… Easy Money vs. Deficit Spending…Market Capitalism (USA) vs. State Capitalism (China)… and many more topics.

Of course, as a libertarian conservative I come down pretty hard on the Red State, Flat Tax, Austerity side of this argument. But I get what the other side is saying, and how faithfully the Paul Krugmans of the world represent them.

If you are a liberal you live and work, most likely, in a big organization like a school or a government bureaucracy. You experience the world as an underling. Your security and your livelihood depends on the "fairness" of your superiors or, failing that, your ability to curry favor with your bosses. Or maybe you are living on a government pension, Social Security or SSI or welfare. In other words these people are still living within the feudal system. They know that they depend upon a strong and generous patron that "takes care of them."

The idea of the market economy is terrifying to these people. They think: but what if my boss didn't like me? What if I got laid off? What if the employer came by and insisted upon "give-backs?" How would I pay my mortgage?

So these people buy the liberal Keynesian message. It is monstrous to talk about "austerity" and cutting government spending. How could people survive if their benefits were cut? It is monstrous to talk about a flat tax. The rich should pay more, because people like me on a fixed income can't afford any "cuts.".

The whole panoply of liberal macroeconomics is a response to the feudal culture of liberal voters. They want everything sewn up and guaranteed, from pensions to healthcare to benefits to job tenure.

But reality is that nothing is guaranteed. All government guarantees are made at the expense of what Amity Shlaes calls "The Forgotten Man," the folks that aren't represented by some special interest. So when the feudal horde of liberals demand to continue their pensions and benefits and rights undiminished through hard times like the Great Recession they are making it worse for people that don't have powerful interests on their side.

Because the best way to recover from a recession is if everyone is working hard to adjust to the new economic conditions. If the government beneficiaries had to share in the hardship, maybe they'd increase their work effort and contribute to the recovery.

Perhaps that's why this fall, after six years of the Obama administration and its full-on Keynesianism, average people are tuning out the message of the media and the administration that things are getting better.

The record of the Obama administration is that things have gone pretty well if you are well-connected, a liberal billionaire or a unionized government worker or a liberal activist or a government pensioner. But things are not so good for the rest of America and the rest of America is beginning to register its frustration.

It's right that Paul Krugman should represent the liberal feudal horde and their interest in their government benefits. But there is another story, and it's right for Stephen Moore to debate it with liberal icon Paul Krugman.

A Grand Strategy for the War Against Islamism

As the Obama administration stumbles towards existential ruin, I hope that the Republican candidates for president in 2016 have their foreign policy and defense teams hard at work on a grand strategy for the post-Obama years.

Really, the utter confusion and failure of the Obama years is a blessing, because the Democrats' foreign policy has been exposed as nothing more than anti-Bush animus and base-pleasing catchphrases. In 2016 Americans will be ready for grownups to take office and restore America to power and respect in the world.

Very well, but what should this new team do about the Islamist challenge? What should we do to vanquish yet another challenge to the culture and society of responsible individualism and its differentiation of human social relations into three parts: political, economic, and moral/cultural?

This is not just an intellectual game. The half millennium of western hegemony has been an astonishing act that has plunged the world into an unprecedented adventure of prosperity. Yes, it's been imperial and it's turned the world upside down. But it's ended the domination of Malthus.

Obviously we must first try and understand what the Islamist challenge means to us. Never mind what it means to the Islamists. What about us?

What is more sensible than to experience Islamism as yet another reactionary backlash to our radical western project of responsible individualism?

Let us understand the great conflicts of the last century as the failed fascist/socialist rebellion against responsible individualism. Really, according to the ideas of Rene Girard, they are "monstrous doubles" of unrestrained violence.

The socialist reaction was an attempt to hide from the awful challenge of responsible individualism by returning to a kind of neo-feudalism, where a wise aristocracy of the best and brightest would rule over a society of semi-servile worker victims and protect them from the dangerous bourgeoisie. Only it didn't work; it send 100 million humans to unmarked graves.

Then there was the fascist reaction. It attempted to hide from the awful challenge of responsible individualism by returning to a frank tribalism of blood and race. A charismatic tribal leader would rule over a grateful people and purify the tribe from harmful race pollution. Only it didn't work; it sent 40 million humans to their premature death.

In each case an elite stepped forward to protect a frightened populace and help it avoid the perilous step of leaving the tribe or the feudal manor for a life of individual responsibility. Instead of stepping into the modern economy where each man and woman offers his or herself in service to the rest of humanity, surrendering to the market and accepting its economic verdict, the elite would keep the people safe in the old ways.

Only it didn't work, because humans in the 20th and 21st centuries have already eaten from the tree of economic knowledge and have been expelled from the Garden of Collective Eden. There is no going back.

The result of it all? The monstrous bourgeoisie flooded the world with a tidal wave of life, liberty and prosperity.

Now comes Islamism and the best way for us to understand it is as yet another lurch back to tribalism and servile collectivism.

We can understand why our liberal and lefty friends have seemed to condone this reactionary and nostalgic movement. The lurch back to tribalism is what leftism and liberalism are all about. They condone the frightened backward glance of the new arrivals in the city and enroll them in their welfare-slave plantation. Their cultural Marxism makes of every backward group a class of victims to be confirmed in their culture of victimhood.

But what do we do?

Let us recall the grand strategy of the Cold War and see if it yields any lessons for us. It seems to me that the Cold War proceeded in three stages.

First, thanks to George Kennan, was containment. The idea was to avoid the high-risk strategy of confrontation but still make it difficult for the Soviet Empire to expand.

Second, thanks to Nixon and Kissinger, was division. Richard Nixon went to China and divided the two Communist empires: Soviet Union and Peoples Republic of China.

Third, thanks to Ronald Reagan, was economic warfare. Reagan built up the US armed forces, challenged the Soviet Union with the Strategic Defense Initiative, and talked Saudi Arabia into increasing oil production and thus radically cutting the global price of oil and bankrupting the Soviet Union. Plus he kick-started the US capitalist economy into a 25 year boom, just when liberals said it couldn't be done.

Result: an amiable dunce dispatched Communism to the dust heap of history without firing a shot.

So here is my three-part grand strategy for dispatching Islamism to the dustbin of history.

First, harassment. We unleash our intelligence community and our special forces upon the Islamic State and all the hydra-headed Islamic groups that keep popping up.

Second, division. We secretly play the Shia against the Sunni and various tin-pot dictators against tin-pot imans -- while denying it to the world with a straight face, and we foment rebellion and revolution throughout the Islamic world against any regime that doesn't kiss the ring of western empire. Here's how they did it a century ago.

Third, frack, baby, frack. We push the technology of the current shale energy revolution to the full extent, fracking on federal lands, fracking offshore, aggressively exporting the new oil-extraction technology to our friends like the Poles. Result: energy prices go down and denies money to the oil-dependent Middle East. We reform out economy to unleash entrepreneurs, encourage work, reform and privatize entitlements, cut domestic spending, streamline regulation, restore the rule of law. We declare war on crony capitalists, foreign and domestic, and de-cartelize health care and education. It's odd how every item in this program of economic warfare means reversing Obama and liberal policy.

Then all we have to do is sit back, watch liberals declare that they knew Islamism was a busted flush all along, and we play parlor games like imagining what the next Obama will look like when a generation comes to maturity that knew not the follies of the America's First Worst President Ever.

Registering the Artillery for "Mann v. Steyn"

Have you noticed? the website that broke the Hockey Stick is stirring to life with a bunch of posts about the goings-on among the climate scientist set during the critical months when Michael E. Mann and the chaps at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit were pushing out the Hockey Stick for the United Nation's IPCC.

Here's a list of the latest posts at climateaudit.org:

Kevin O'Neill's "Fraud" Allegations by Steve McIntyre: about the Wegman Report on the Hockey Stick being a political hatchet job.

Black Tuesday of Climate Science by Jean S and Inventory of Hide-the-Decline by Steve McIntyre about the day they "hid the decline" of Keith Briffa's Siberian tree-mometers by terminating their temperature time series in the middle of a spaghetti graph blob right before they took a big decline.

Another Porky from Mann, Williams and Fontaine by Steve McIntyre about inconsistencies in Michael E. Mann's pleadings in "Mann v. Steyn" (and other respondents).

The Original Hide-the Decline by Steve McIntyre about the first appearance of hiding the decline in Siberian tree-mometers after the mid 20th century.

Rule N Revisited by Jean S about Michael E. Mann's questionable use of Principal Components Analysis in his Hockey Stick papers.

Who Wrote EPA's "Myths vs Facts" by Steve McIntyre about a document that contained statements and assertions that were untrue and undocumented in the "formal" documents they were supporting.

What could be going on here, the world wonders? It couldn't possibly be likely witnesses in "Mann v. Steyn" rehearsing their facts and getting their thoughts and their documents together, could it? It couldn't be the world's foremost climate artillerists registering their 155mm howitzers on the firing range, could it?

A white back an exuberant Mark Steyn was observing on his website in "The Lonesomest Mann in Town" that in the battle of the Amici Curiae, folks filing their own independent briefs in the trial of the century, "Mann v. Steyn," that he and his co-respondents had lined up a Murderer's Row of establishment liberal batters, from the ACLU to the mainstream media. Michael E. Mann's Amici batting order? Zilch. Not one settled scientist has sent in an amicus brief in support of Mann.

There's a telling remark on Wattsupwiththat.com about Michael E. Mann, who just gave a talk at the Cabot Institute in Bristol, England. A WUWT reader writes that

what I took away from this lecture more than anything else is that Mann genuinely believes he is right and that his work will save the world.

I have this mild feeling that we are about to witness a monumental train-wreck.  Oh it won't be featured on all the networks, and it won't appear as a feature in the Sunday New York Times Magazine. But you will know something has gone down because of a strange silence on the global-warming/climate-change front.

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.