Yes, What DO Women Want?

A century ago, German sociologist Georg Simmel noted that the emergence of women into the public square was just the beginning. The public square had been created by men for men. But we would have to wait to find out what women would do to adapt it to a more "feminine sensibility."

With all the flap over the "rape culture" on campus, culminating in the fantastical Rolling Stone story on gang rape in a frat house at the University of Virginia, and the flap over rape allegations in Lena Dunham's autobiography, the question arises anew: "What do women want?"

At mid 20th century, Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex told us that the ideal was the "independent woman." And Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique told us that women were dying of boredom out in the suburbs. But what did women really want?

The problem is that there is a difference between what women want and what left-wing activists say they want.

And the problem with left-wing activists -- and indeed anyone doing "activism" -- is that all questions are reduced to politics. But politics is not culture; politics is the pursuit of power. It's hard to know how politics is going to deal successfully with a "rape culture".

The UVA scandal has taught us a lot. It seems that "Jackie," after refusing to report a sexual assault in September 2012, then eventually got to talk to the Dean of Students and then got involved in sexual assault support groups, and got to improve her story, as people do over time. Unfortunately, the sexual assault support groups are really activist groups involved in "doing something" about the campus "rape culture" and supporting the push by the Obama administration to force universities to implement administrative tribunals to deal with sexual assault accusations on campus.

Here's my take. No good will come of politicizing the abusive treatment of young college women. This is not a political problem that can be solved by legislating liberal morality. It is a cultural problem. The problem is: how do we develop a consensus of cultural rules for relations between the sexes after the invention of the Pill and the 1960s sexual revolution? Because it seems pretty obvious that the sexual revolution has encouraged young men to treat young women like meat. And it seems to prod young women into getting drunk enough so that they can lower their inhibitions enough to do the "hook-up" thing when they want to score some desirable male.

The only problem is that young women get really angry when their drunken sexual experiences lead to nothing but heartache. So they use the current non-judicial administrative system to punish the young men that took advantage of them. Or their mothers do it for them.

Back in the Sixties we were told to abolish the "parietal" system in which colleges took over the supervision of adult children from parents. If a young man were mature enough to go to Vietnam, we were told, he was mature enough to conduct his sexual life without parental supervision.

Obviously we are now seeing a revival of the idea that colleges have a parental responsibility for the young people enrolled there. And, of course, the left-wing activism culture encourages the idea that young women are "victims" and not the independent women imagined by Simone de Beauvoir. The left-wing culture requires victims for its political mechanics to work; there must be victims or there is nothing for politics to do. But victimhood reduces young women to the status of "special snowflakes" that need to get together to "share" their stories of abuse and plan "protests" to change the campus "rape culture" and implement administrative processes to act for them when they are abused.

What's needed, of course, is for us all to develop a new culture of responsibility where sex is concerned. We need a consensus on what is acceptable behavior and we need young men and women to propagate that culture by the age-old methods of shame and guilt, naming and shaming, for those that violate the consensus. We don't need more campus bureaucrats and more interventions by federal Title IX bureaucrats and activists. We need a new self-regulating culture.

This is not that hard. Humans are social animals that naturally and instinctively do what the culture expects of them.

Right now the culture expects students to do the "hook-up" culture, get drunk and do things they'll regret. Then it expects them to use the system to find someone to punish for the heartache of rejection. Thanks, liberals, we needed that.

So now we must build a new culture. But first things will have to get worse. Because there is nobody at our universities except foolish liberals, and the only thing liberals know how to do is politics.

But the "rape culture" isn't a political problem; it's a cultural problem, the problem of "what do women want" now that we have thoroughly destroyed the old culture of "gentleman" and "nice girls" and we haven't yet succeeded in replacing it with anything that works.

Georg Simmel: Types of Relationships by Reciprocal Knowledge

The thing about the "other" is that you don't know everything about him, and you don't want to know. And even in groups, people don't know everything about each other. So Georg Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff devotes a chapter to the different kinds of groups and relationships between members of the groups.

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

One type of group where the members know very little about each other is a political interest group. The members make monetary contributions to the group, but they are "psychologically anonymous" to each other. They don't need to know each other's personality; they don't want to know. This "increasing objectivization" is characteristic of our age.

This question of incomplete knowledge about other people in this objectivizing age raises the issue of "confidence" in other people. "[C]onfidence is intermediate between knowledge and ignorance about a man." If you know everything about a person you don't need confidence; if you know nothing, forget it. This is characteristic about the whole of modern society; we know only what we need to know about another party, whether in business, in scholarship, in politics. We only need to know what we "have to know for the sake of the relationship [we] wish to enter."

The point is that in modern society, the personal and the subjective is often replaced by the objective, even in personal relationships where "among educated strata" people relate only as "acquaintances." We know only what is appropriate to know about the other, and the deliberate "staying away" from other knowledge about someone is termed "discretion." There is a boundary, different with different people, beyond which we do not go. The question is what "the individual must know" about the other: the businessman in a long-term contract; the master employing a servant, the "superior who advances a subordinate." The telling opposite of discretion is indiscretion, the violation of boundaries, by betraying a secret thought, or prying into other peoples' lives, or taking advantage of the "slips and helplessnesses of the other."

This relationship at a distance clearly defines modern friendship and marriage. Although they would seem to require total immersion in the other in fact the relationship is usually differentiated. Maybe one friendship is based on affection, another on intellectual aspects, or religion. Such relationships require that people do not look beyond their mutual spheres of interest, in observance of appropriate discretion. In modern marriage, the question of confidence and discretion is difficult, because modern marriage is not a fixed "social and economic institution" but more freely erotic.  Of course, the "conventional or material motive" is still strong, but "the sociological idea of modern marriage is the commonness of all life-contents". A marriage may result in a happy and vital union, or the opposite when anticipated unity is disappointed. In fact, despite the idea of complete union, marriage, like other relationships in the modern age, needs "only a certain proportion of truth and error... and a certain proportion of distinctness and indistinctness in the image of our life-elements." We can give only what the other "may accept" and indistinctness and unclarity may be needed to keep mutual attractiveness alive. Confidence and discretion are needed to make modern marriage work.

Next: Secrecy

No, Harvard Students. You are the Oppressors

I've been taking a class in philosophy at our local flagship state university, the University of Washington. And one of the takeaways was that the two most talkative women in the class seemed to equate politics with protest marches.

I never got to talk to them about this; but I can guess where is comes from. Social Justice 101. And my suspicion was confirmed when Harvard students demanded in an open letter the postponement of finals exams.  Because social justice.

“Like many across the country,” its authors claim, students “are traumatized” and “visibly distressed” — to the extent that there is now a “palpable anguish looming over campus.” The “national crisis” that has been provoked by the cases of Garner and Brown, they argue, has left them with no choice but to “stand for justice rather than sit and prepare for exams.”

This is a joke. It assumes the world-view that the world is composed of oppressors, oppressed, and champions of the oppressed. So Harvard students, in doing the Lord's work of championing the oppressed would be oppressed by having to take their finals on time.

No, Harvard. Because the progressive world view, of oppressors, oppressed, and champions of the oppressed is a lie. It is no less a lie than Marx's world view in 1848 that the world was composed of bourgeois, proletarians, and educated youth.

In fact, in today's world there is no "white privilege." There is only "liberal privilege." The only "micro-aggression" is the aggression that lefties use against their chosen opponents. "Check your privilege" can only apply to liberals. Because conservatives don't got none.

The oppressor/oppressed world view is no less a lie than the Gruberist world view, that there are greedy corporations, working people, and an educated elite that's needed to legislate government programs to protect the people from the robber barons and the racists and sexists.

Here's another world view. There's the unjust liberal ruling class, assisted by its bribed apologists in the universities and the government bureaucracies and the activist groups. Then there are the liberal clients living on government benefits and/or lifetime government jobs. Then there is the ordinary middle class, trying to make a life obeying the law, going to work, following the rules while being harassed by the ruling class and its paid lackeys.

And you, Harvard students, are the bribed apologists and paid lackeys of the ruling class. In case you didn't recognize yourselves. That's why you went to Harvard: to get the connections you need to make a career in the ruling class. Like Jonathan Gruber.

But my favorite world view is simply this: There's a creative class, that transforms the world with surprises, including knowledge, technology, products and services, and social change. There's a responsible class, that tries to live as responsible individuals, serving itself by serving others. And there's a victim class, that experiences itself as subordinate and helpless victims of the tides of power and change. Each of these three classes has its good side and its bad side. The creatives can transform the world with good ideas or bad ideas. The responsible middle class can responsibly develop the ideas of the creatives for good or for evil. The victims can be genuinely suffering from no fault of their own or they could be gaming the system.

People of good will get together and try to tease out the good from the evil, knowing that it's not easy. That's because what I may think of as good another might think of as evil.

But there's one thing that's helpful in deciding who to believe and who to distrust. Anyone that's proposing a new government program ought to be distrusted until they can prove their good faith. Why is that? It's because when you propose a government program, say on curbing the "rape culture" on campus, you are saying that the current system and culture has failed. So government force is needed. And government force means, as we learned in the Eric Garner case, that deadly force may be used. The question is: is this new application of government force worth the death of even one person?

The great thing about social animals is that they have found ways to reduce the use of force. They divide up the world into "us" and "them". For "us" force is not required, only the social cues of shame and guilt, kindness and love. For "them" of course, we have to be on our guard.

What the social justice warriors are doing is expanding the zone of "them" and the application of force. That's weird, because global international capitalism is a system that expands the boundaries of "us" almost to the whole world, and as this cultural revolution has expanded across the world it has reduced the incidence of violent death by about an order of magnitude.

Yet for 150 years the lefties of the world have worked themselves to the bone trying to roll back this beneficial system.

So what do the lefties and the Grubers and the Harvard students really want? They want the thrill of the hunt. They want to be the men with guns, the judges in their robes, the priests at the sacrificial altar. They want to be the guys ordered to eliminate the evil and the hateful from this world. They want power, and power, according to Henry Kissinger, is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Of course, anyone with power is automatically an oppressor. Or do social-justice warriors get a papal indulgence on that? Because they are using power on behalf of the oppressed? Or is there some other reason?

Back to the Solid South

Last Saturday, with the defeat of Sen. Mary Landrieu in a runoff election in Louisiana, the South lost its last Democratic Senator.

That's not surprising, since the South is racist and couldn't be expected to vote for a Democrat anyway. Because racism. Lots of liberals are writing angry screeds about this, in the aftermath of Landrieu's defeat, here and here.

It's the number one article of faith among liberals. Here's how the Narrative goes: President Johnson signed the civil rights acts of the 1960s sighing that Democrats had lost the South for a generation. Then Richard Nixon, courtesy of Pat Buchanan, formulated a Southern Strategy to court white southern voters angered by the end of Jim Crow. Therefore Republicans are racists.

This is the point where a conservative writer typically declares: No We're Not!

But let's face it; there's no defense from the charge of racism, so let's not even try. Let us merely invoke German sociologist Georg Simmel, who wrote that while people appealed to as individuals are intelligent and evolved, in the mass they can only be appealed to in their basest instincts. That's why politics is always about race and identity and ethnicity and loot and free stuff.

So let us stipulate that all Republicans and white southerners are racists, sexists, homophobes. Then what?

Then, does it really make political sense that liberals and Democrats make such a big deal about it? Should Democrats make a point of telling conservative white southerners that they are pond scum?

Let's turn it around. Republicans are often accused of hating, or at least writing off, African Americans. A perennial op-ed topic is declaring the need for the Republican Party to conduct "outreach" to African Americans that vote 90 percent for Democrats. Ditto women and Hispanics. The moral is that a political party exists to win elections; it is political malpractice to write off any group of voters as unreachable.

So why is it OK for Democrats to put white southern voters beyond the Pale? Or white working-class voters. Or white Christian voters?

Back in 2006 the wily Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) recruited a bunch of Democratic candidates and ran them for the US Senate. He carefully chose moderates, people with military service, in order to appeal to red-state voters. In short, he decided to court white middle-class voters. He was so successful that the Dems won the Senate in 2006, increased their majority in 2008, and used those moderate votes to ram Obamacare down our throats in 2009-10.

Ahem. Maybe, Chuck, it would have been a good idea not to sacrifice those moderates as cannon fodder in the Big Push for universal health care, as you now seem to recognize. In your speech to the National Press Club on November 25, 2014 you recognized that most Americans already had health insurance and that the uninsured rarely voted. You recognized that politically, Obamacare had a lot of potential downside and precious little upside. And it's not as if HillaryCare, in 1993-94, was wildly popular.

But my basic point is this. If it's considered to be stupid for Republicans not to reach out to blacks, women and minorities, why is it not considered to be stupid for Democrats to write off the white South and stigmatize them as racists? Not to mention the white working class, the white middle class, white Christians, and white Tea Partiers?

I know that politics is the art of division, but isn't that taking division a bit too far?

In fact, why does it make sense for liberals and Democrats to keep calling anyone that doesn't agree with them racists, sexists, homophobes and bigots?

Just asking.

Georg Simmel: Knowledge Truth and Falsehood

In order to live and thrive as social animals we humans have to have knowledge about each other, writes Georg Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff. That knowledge can be expressed by the price of a merchant's goods, his knowledge of his customers, by the teacher challenging her students, knowing their capabilities. Of course, we do not know the full truth about other people; much of other people is hidden from us. Failing perfection, we assemble a "personal unity" out of the "fragments" that other persons permit us to see, knowing also that often they deliberately conceal parts of themselves. Still, we know enough to get on.

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

The interaction between individuals is "based upon the pictures which they acquire of one another." But it is the very interaction between individuals under which the conception each has of the other takes shape and is legitimated. In science this is called circular logic; but between people it is life. We act based upon our overall knowledge of people and reality, yet our knowledge is shot through with error and distortion. Not only is complete truth impossible but untruth, even the Noble Lie and conscious self-deception, seems necessary in order to maintain life. It seems "we obtain the exact amounts of error and truth which constitute the basic of the conduct required of us, error and truth are psychologically coordinate".

The question of truth and deception have particular importance in relation to "the inner life of the individual with whom we interact. He may, intentionally, either reveal the truth about himself to us, or deceive us by lie and concealment." Our own inner lives, anyway, are a "chaotic whirling of images and ideas" of which we are rarely conscious, and we are even more selective about what we reveal of our inner life to others. "Whatever we say... is never an immediate and faithful presentation of what really occurs in us... but is a transformation of this inner reality... stylized by selection and arrangement." All interactions between humans necessarily lie somewhere on a line between "sincere revelations and mendacious concealments."

So we come to the lie, "the fact that the liar hides his true idea from the other." This is particularly important in modern society. No doubt lies have always been a part of human interaction, but in the primitive face-to-face society it is much harder to bring off. In our modern society of strangers we are less able to evaluate the truth of others' discourse, yet we rely enormously "upon the faith in the honesty of the other", for instance in the economy and its credit system, in science where scientists take for granted the ideas of other scientists. The lie in the modern world is a big deal, "for modern life is a "credit economy" in a much broader than economic sense."

Yet the lie also is permissible. The intellectually stronger tend to club the intellectually weaker with the lie, and the retail trade uses the arts of of the lie in boosting its merchandise. And even the most intimate relations, defined by nearness, "lose the attractiveness, even the content of their intimacy, as soon as the close relationship does not also contain, simultaneously and alternatively, distances and intermissions." All "relationships... presuppose a certain ignorance and a measure of mutual concealment". The lie thus occupies the aggressive end of a whole spectrum of social actions "attained by mere secrecy and concealment."

Thus social humans do not just live by communication and cooperation; social relations also necessarily involve distance, concealment, and at the extreme, the lie.

Next: Types of Relationship and Reciprocal Knowledge

Georg Simmel: Degrees of Domination

We moderns worship at the altar of freedom and equality, but Georg Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff warns us that domination and subordination are an inescapable part of being social. In almost every relation, one person is a little less equal that the other.

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

Simmel has previously gone into excruciating detail about "superordination and subordination" by type, that is, subordination to an individual, to a group, to a principle. Now he looks at the degree of subordination or domination.

But first he examines a peculiar case, that of superordinates without subordinates. He means a group of people that does not even think about subordinates. Examples are the Spartans, that just called themselves homoioi, or similar ones. Their subordinates were subject peoples, and they never talked about them. Plato speaks about the"born king" who is kingly whether or not he has a kingdom to rule. In the Salvation Army, everyone is an officer, and the Freemasons are all "sovereigns and born princes of the whole order." Whether such people live in the real world or an imagined world is a separate question.

Another question is the relation of superordination and freedom. People in a subordinate position naturally long for a liberation from that domination, and they often express their longing as a desire for freedom. We may describe this a desire for "equality with the superior". The proletarian naturally wants to climb up a rung to equality with the bourgeois. But then what? What happens next is a struggle for supremacy, a desire to be superior, for, as Simmel says, we want not only freedom, but "to use it for some purpose." In other words, domination. A peculiar instance of this drive for superiority is for an elite group to have its own laws. It may seem like domination for a group to subject its members to special laws, but that specialness or separation is a measure of the group's freedom and contributes to the sense among its members of their superiority.

However, a successful drive for freedom among a coalition of groups will immediately expose disagreement: As soon as feudalism was abolished in Bohemia in 1848 the differences between the poor peasants and well-to-do peasants came to the fore. The stronger group in a coalition may appropriate most or all of the gains from a political struggle for freedom.

In other words, "the quest for freedom... has, as its correlate or consequence, the quest for domination". But both "socialism and anarchism deny the necessary character of this connection." They argue that super-subordination will disappear once society is organized as the "coordination of all elements." Of course, it is almost impossible to implement such a plan because nothing "can eliminate natural difference among men" nor eliminate the need for "leaders and executors." But it might be possible to eliminate the feeling of "degradation and oppression" in the subordinates. Simmel suggests that this is possible by a "differentiation of objective and subjective life-elements, whereby subordination is preserved as a technical organizational value" that is not felt subjectively as degradation. Thus people may perform as subordinates at work but greet their boss as an equal in social situations. The elimination of degradation is also achieved by rotation of offices in small organizations and by short terms and term limits for elected offices.

Another way in which super-subordination is diminished is by the normal operation of democracy in which ordinary people, who have no expertise in governing, are supposedly the source of power, while the magistrates and representatives are the servants of the people. A similar threading of power was achieved in Britain after the Glorious Revolution. The clergy, opposed to parliamentary power, was given power over marriages and testaments and sanctions over Catholics; in return it recognized "that the divine world order had room for a parliamentary world order." Similarly in a bureaucracy the superior is often dependent upon the technical knowledge of the subordinate.

In general, we can view social domination in part as a form of the "objective organization of society." But domination also expresses "differences in personal qualities among men." We can imagine that social domination begins with purely personal qualities, such as force, piety, skills, that define superiority. As objective government structures developed the king had to be perfect: King David was said to be "singer and warrior, a layman and a prophet" and had the skills to meld secular power with "spiritual theocracy." But the development of the state and the division of labor makes the personal omnipotence of the ruler unnecessary, and develops into an objective form where the position not the person defines super-subordination. Outside of politics it is clear that the mere possession of money implies a certain social position. The modern economy creates an abundance of positions for which many people are qualified, while creating remarkable opportunities for the exceptionally gifted.

Against this tendency, socialism proposes a completely centralized and articulated hierarchy and presupposes, by its doctrines of equality, that all are equally qualifies for positions. It ought to implement a system of appointment to positions by lottery. And yet the existence of a cenralized government hierarchy destroys the principle that all are equal.

A related problem applies to any aristocracy, or rule by the "best." Artists commonly prefer aristocracy, where internal excellence is revealed in outer appearance.  Yet who is to determine the "best?" Neither the breeding of the best nor a free struggle for position has yielded the best, so perhaps the lesser evil of a general equality is best. Or maybe, failing any method of selecting the "best" and granting the necessity of government, perhaps the "best" superordinate is the "subjectively adequate individual." This is not as scandalous as it seems. Elections of the "medieval English parliament seem to have been conducted with astonishing negligence and indifference." All that mattered was that someone was elected from each district.

Earlier, Simmel has written that absolute coercion is rare; there is always some degree of freedom even for the most abject slave. Now he notes the ubiquity of some level of coercion in social relations, for instance in marriage laws. The coercion may make life unbearable, but it may also encourage people to make their life in common "at least as bearable as possible." There is in human life a constant drama between freedom and subordination, and the routine coercions of social life bring them into focus.

In the final analysis there is a basic problem in super-subordination, that "there are always more people qualified for superordinate positions than there are such positions." Moreover many people appointed to superior positions are less capable than those left behind as subordinates. It is telling that modern government and its perfect hierarchy tends to presuppose an infallibility in its functionaries that contrasts with the inadequacy of its actual executives. In fact, the absence of constant disaster indicates that many people of average ability can do the jobs of a governing hierarchy. In Athens, as today, people are more interested in personal qualities such as friendliness and caring about people like me than objective qualifications when selecting their representatives. Yet once elected, we accord our representatives respect. Even in the 17th and 18th century it was assumed that the subject, permanently in need of royal guidance, immediately acquired the necessary insights and public spirit on being appointed to public office.

Next: Knowledge, Truth and Falsehood

What Middle-Class Programs, Chuck?

Back on November 25, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) broke from the pack and told the National Press Club that passing Obamacare was a mistake. Said he:

After passing the stimulus, Democrats should have continued to propose middle-class-oriented programs and built on the partial success of the stimulus[.]

Instead, of course, Democrats chased after their Great White Whale and passed Obamacare.

I remember thinking and writing back in 2009 that Democrats were making a strategic mistake in just executing on their 2008 platform. Sorry, chum, I thought. Before you weigh us down with new entitlements you'd probably better get the economy moving again.

But let us look at the bigger picture. Just what does Schumer mean by "middle-class oriented programs?" I mean, haven't the Democrats been passing "middle-class oriented programs" since at least the beginning of the New Deal? Isn't that what Social Security, Medicare, education, labor laws, minimum wage, unemployment compensation, training programs, disability, workers compensation is all about?  Why would there be a need for any "middle-class oriented programs" after 75 years of passing non-stop "middle-class oriented programs?"

Let's look at the reason we even needed to think about fixing the economy back in 2009. We'd just had the worst financial crash since the Crash of 1929. And why? Because of middle-class oriented programs centered on government-sponsored enterprises, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, that had flooded the mortgage market with sub-prime loans in accordance with government policy going back to the 1970s that had been pushed aggressively by Democrats. The idea was "affordable housing" -- for the middle class. That meant lowering credit standards and lowering down payments.

Could it be that it's the middle-class oriented programs that are the problem, not the solution?

I mean this. Suppose we decide that we've got to help the middle class climb out of the Great Recession.  What does that mean? Does it mean new regulations on business? Does it mean new subsidies for employment? A higher minimum wage?

Or do we admit that, after a great crash like that we can't just go on as before; we have to change the way government does business?

Could it just possibly be that the way forward is to dismantle all the economy-distorting programs that have been gussied up to help the middle class and try to let the price system and new businesses and good old-fashioned Yankee ingenuity solve the problem. How else does  the middle class get good jobs at good wages making and distributing and selling products and services that people want to buy. What a concept!

And we tell the truth to the American voters. There is no such thing as a lifetime job. That's not how capitalism works. Capitalism is revolution; capitalism is change; capitalism is new products putting old products out of business. Capitalism is new jobs putting old jobs out of business. If you want the prosperity that has lifted ordinary people from a life at $1 to $3 per day to $100+ per day then you have to accept the "creative destruction" of the modern economy.

Frankly, I don't know the way forward. The way you win elections is by waving some glittery thing in front of the voters, something to make them think that government cares about people like them. But all that does is pile more subsidies, more government spending, more distortions on to the economy on top of the existing subsidies, spending, and distortions.

Let's look at it another way, from the perspective of usgovernmentspending.com, using the overall government spending for FY 2014, federal, state, and local. We are talking $1.2 trillion in government pensions, $1.3 trillion in government health care, $1.1 trillion in government education, and $0.5 trillion in government welfare (excepting Medicaid). All of this spending is a handout; people are getting this stuff from the government without paying for it.

Do you think that the government handing out $3.9 trillion every year in various entitlements and welfare for the middle class and the poor might have something to do with the fact that the middle class is struggling in the aftermath of the Great Recession? Because the point is that before the middle class can earn money for themselves they first have to pay out the $3.9 trillion in transfer payments to seniors like me, to TANF recipients, to SNAP recipients, to Section 8 recipients, to the health care bureaucratic blob, to the education bureaucratic blob, to the welfare bureaucratic blob.

Now I understand Chuck Schumer. All he cares about is getting elected. If he can blame the Great Recession on greedy bankers, even though he is famously the "senator from Wall Street," hey, if it works, do it. If he can sucker the middle class with yet another "middle-class oriented program," hey, if it sells.

Chuck Schumer famously recruited good moderate Democratic candidates in the 2006 midterms that switched the Senate from Democrat to Republican. But then he stood by while the progressives executed their Big Obamacare Push that wasted 60 Democrats in the House in the 2010 midterms and has now swung the Senate back into the "R" column ib 2014. What was the point of recruiting those moderate candidates back in 2006, Chuck, if the Democratic Party is hard left progressive?

The whole point of elective politics is getting elected. Period. If we voters vote for shiny baubles, we deserve what we get. So long as voters vote for shiny things, the Chuck Schumers of the world are going to be dangling shiny things in front of us.

But sooner or later, as Margaret Thatcher said, the left runs out of other peoples' money. Because government spending is basically a waste. It is basically buying peoples' votes with other peoples' money and then giving it to them for nothing. That's not social, or economic, or fair, or just. It is just a waste. It just ends up wasting resources and wasting peoples' lives.

Here's what would really help the middle class. Privatize Social Security so that instead of paying payroll taxes people would be saving their own money for their own retirement. Privatize education so that mothers could band together to educate their children together. Privatize Medicare so that people saved their own money for their end-of-life care. Privatize welfare so that every middle class person was morally and economically contributing to the relief of the poor.

But what would be the point of that? How would a chap like Chuck Schumer ever get elected to political power if he didn't have any handouts to spread around on "middle-class oriented programs?"