Good News on Unemployment

Here's the headline I've been waiting for -- for years. From Drudge: "Boom: Jobs Surprise" followed by "But Unemployment Rate Ticks Up" from 5.6 percent to 5.7 percent.

Anyone who knows how the employment market really works knows that the sign of a really good jobs market is when people start returning to the labor force faster than they are actually getting jobs. When that happens the unemployment rate ticks up even though people are getting jobs like gangbusters. And that's what's finally happening.

In the latest BLS Household Survey the Labor Force is up from 156.129 million to 157.180 million, an increase of 1,051,000! But the Employment Level number is up from 147.442 million to 148.201 million an increase of a mere 759,000. When that happens, the Unemployment Rate ticks up.

That is what you call good news. And if you look at the charts you see a steady increase in the Labor Force, starting a year ago when the Republicans in Congress cut back extended unemployment benefits. Employment Level seems to have gone into overdrive a little over a year ago.

It's sad, of course, that the mind-numbed Obama economic policy has been so hard for the folks pitched out of work by the Great Recession. No doubt a Republican president would have done better, because he'd have done less Keynesian foolishness.

But those of us that like to blame Obama for the lackluster economy better understand one thing. If a Republican president had presided over the worst recovery since World War II the media would have persuaded the American people never to let Republicans govern again. Just like they did in the 1930s when incompetent government created the stock bubble and then failed to rescue the financial system thereafter and then slowed recovery with stupid lefty stimulus programs. Talk about a ThreePeat.

So really, if and when the Republicans get into the White House in 2017 with the economy in good shape it means that they can do sensible reforms of the welfare state without being in the "stimulus" phase of the political cycle. Hey, how about those entitlements!

But the next question is the Fed. Will the Fed now, finally, start returning interest rates to normal and let mom and pop savers actually get a return on their savings? And how fast? Remember last time? The Fed started increasing interest rates in 2003 and took about three years to get back to normal, by which time the real-estate market was in a monster bubble.

Anyway, it looks like the economy is at first and ten on the 40 yard line. That's good news for the American people, who have been remarkably patient about the economy for the last six years.

Then and Now: "And Mary Pondered These Things in her Heart"

The wonders of the rape culture are something to behold. First there was "Jackie," freshman at the University of Virginia, who conceived a story about rape on shards of glass in a fraternity house. Then there's the Columbia mattress story, where we have now heard the side of the German student accused of rape (for which the police declined to prosecute).

I've said it before in 2008, so I'll say it again. This is all about sociologist Georg Simmel's century-old prediction that eventually women would transform the public square to "suit a more feminine sensibility." And it's about the clash between women's "liberation" and the basic instinct that every woman needs to be right with the other women in her community.

In Honor: A History, James Bowman says that honor for a woman is her chastity. But we should understand chastity in a wider sense than not having sex before marriage and not having sex with other men. It is about not being wrong, ever. A woman cannot say: Gee, I screwed up; but let's forget it and start over. Starting over is for men, not for women. A woman must reinterpret events that might throw a bad light on her to show that she was innocent all along. I am not saying this in a pejorative sense. I suspect that this attitude is deep in the Darwin, a necessary part of the female role of bearing and raising children. After all, one mistake and your kid is eaten by a wolf, or nowadays, darts into the street and is run over by a car.

There's another thing too, something I learned from James A. Ault's Spirit and Flesh: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church. It's the story of a liberal's sojourn in a fundamentalist church community. You know, patriarchy and barefoot and pregnant and all that. Only it wasn't.

It is true that women did not hold any offices in the fundamentalist church of his study. But Ault found that it was misleading to assume that they had no power. On the contrary, they controlled the church. And they controlled it through their gossip network. The women’s gossip network got to define reality, who had said what to whom, and who had done what to whom. This made the women of the church enormously powerful. But their power often was used destructively, and the church would split every year or two.

We are now reaching the point where the majority of university students are women. And a larger and larger number of university teachers and administrators are women. This means that a moral equivalent of the "women's gossip network" is getting to define reality in the university.

How do you explain "Jackie's" transition from disappointment at failing to win the love of "Randall" by rousting him out in the middle of the night with a story about being forced to perform oral sex at a fraternity to the magnificent story of the Night of the Shattered Glass? (Notice how careful "Randall" was to get a couple other friends to accompany him to rendezvous with "Jackie"?) "Jackie" started talking about it with the campus counselors.

And what about the Mattress Girl at Columbia? Six months after a night of rough sex, after which she and her lover started to drift apart, she accused him of rape. Through the Office of Gender-based Misconduct.

How do you explain this? Mattress Girl got angry. She started talking about it with friends and then with the campus counselors, and one thing led to another.

I will tell you what I think. I think that free sex just doesn't work for most women -- particularly well-born women. When a woman has sex she opens her heart as well as her legs, and she can't shut it off like a man, and go on to other sexual partners. So in the turmoil of the campus sex culture she gets to feel angry, abandoned, and ashamed. You can see the searing ambiguity in the relationship between Mattress Girl and her German lover. They were supposed to be friends, but a couple of times they ended up sleeping over and one thing led to another. I tell you: girls don't like that sort of thing.

There's a double standard here, of course, but it is not the one you think. Let's rewind to the most popular opera of all time, La Boheme. It involves two middle-class artists living in a garret doing the bohemian thing and getting it on with little Mimi, a seamstress, and Musetta, a girl with a sugar daddy. All great fun and all that. But don't start trying this bohemian stuff with Daddy's girl, or helicopter Mommy's girl. Oh no.

You see, in the lower orders, a girl accepts what the world hands out to her; she has to. And hey, suppose she managed to snag a college boy? But in the professional middle class things are different. Middle-class girls get protection, and the middle class doesn't take kindly to adventurers mucking around with their little darlings. If you want confirmation, just read Trollope's The Prime Minister, where a rich county girl, Emily Wharton, gets swept off her feet by an adventurer, Ferdinand Lopez, about whom nobody knows anything. Well, it all ends well because Lopez eventually gets run over by a train, and Emily marries the man she was always supposed to marry. But she takes a year getting to Yes because she is so ashamed of herself for getting into a mess with Lopez, the man from nowhere.

Ever since the Virgin Mary in Luke 2:19, and doubtless long before, women have been pondering things in their hearts. Mary had a lot to think over, what with her cousin Elisabeth getting pregnant and all and Mary wanting her baby to be special rather than a follow-on after Elisabeth's baby. I'm not saying that Mary got envious when Elisabeth suddenly got pregnant after years of trying and concocted the whole story about the angel to cover the fact that she ran out and got pregnant before she actually married her espoused Joseph. Oh no. After all this time, who can tell?

But as a conservative I have to believe that people don't change, least of all women.

I believe that we are seeing women today revolting against the sexual revolution, and they are revolting against it using the woman's cultural technique of the women's gossip network all gussied up into glorified bureaucratic categories.

The problem is that I wonder if the informal women's gossip network doesn't make a complete mess of the public square and the fact that the public square can't operate on feelings but must be based on facts, facts that can be adjudicated in court.

The lesson for men is simple. Get away. Don't go to college, don't work for big anything, because the women's gossip network is taking over, and you are in the target hairs.

The whole point of being a man is to make life into an adventure. That's what rape and pillage were all about; that's what ISIS is all about. For us civilized chaps rape and pillage are out, but there is still the start-up. Read Peter Thiel's Zero to One: Notes on Startups and How to Build the Future to get with the program.

Mad Dog or Plain Vanilla?

In the aftermath of President Obama's 2016 budget of more spending and more complex taxes, and a veiled challenge to shut the government down, Scott McKay recommends going big:

Stop wasting time and pass a flat tax in the House and Senate. Pass gigantic block grants dissolving entire federal agencies (Department of Education, EPA, Department of Energy) and moving their funding and powers back down to the states.

But the strategy developed by congressional leaders McConnell and Boehner is to flood the zone with vanilla changes to the president's budget and insert a couple of items for veto bait, to be compromised away to as to keep the meat of the changes. You might call this "leading from behind."

Jonah Goldberg also likes the value of vanilla, as in Scott Walker for president. The point is that about half Republican voters want an anti-establishment candidate, and the other half want a safe establishment candidate.

Walker is in the golden spot. He can, like Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day listening to Andie MacDowell explain the perfect man, reply “that’s me” to almost everything Republicans say they want. Executive experience? Challenge conventional thinking? Anti-establishment fighter? “Me, me, me.” 

Yeah. He's anti-establishment without being aggressive about it. The extraordinary thing about Walker's three campaigns for governor of Wisconsin in in four years in the teeth of a national liberal campaign against him was that he kept his cool. Liberals were foaming at the mouth, occupying the state Capitol, singing "Solidarity Forever" while getting arrested, threatening Walker's family and kids, but Walker stayed mild-mannered and "pragmatic." Then he drew the sting of compulsory paycheck deductions for state government employee union dues.

On the other hand here's Ted Cruz saying the Senate should hold up the nomination of Loretta Lynch to be Attorney General until Obama compromises on immigration. Yeah! Sock it to 'em, Ted!

Of course, even Ted Cruz, the mad dog, takes care to sound eminently cool and reasonable when he performs on TV. Yet Scott Walker, speaking at the Iowa Freedom Summit, came out from behind the lecturn to walk the stage and appear animated. Even so, the Daily Beast blasted "that Scott Walker speech" as "shallow, tedious, and wrong." Or vanilla. (My takeaway from the Walker speech is that he's going to get a lot of mileage out of protesters showing up at his house. Distaff voters don't like that sort of thing.)

Ultimately, Republicans need to be true to their center, and that is the culture of responsible individualism. Republicans believe that we need less government because people can and should be responsible for their own. Democrats believe that only protest and activism and government force can roll back the injustice of the age.

It's up to Republicans to make the case that it's pretty remarkable that the Democratic over-under coalition has any business protesting injustice, when most of the injustice in today's America is the consequence of the unjust power of the present liberal, Democrat, ruling class.

Every insurgent group forms out of the chaos of injustice meted out by the current ruling class. The only question is strategy: should we be mad dogs foaming at the mouth for justice, or should be just be mild-mannered vanilla eaters proposing a few mild-mannered reforms?

Steady as She Goes Towards the Waterfall

Yesterday I was busy all day loading up the data from the president's Budget of the United States Government for fiscal year 2016 into usgovernmentspending.com. It was a little more hectic than usual because I inserted a bug into my routine to project state-and-local finances out to 2020, and it took me all day to figure out what I had done wrong.

Everybody is aghast that the president's FY 2016 spending proposal is 7 percent higher than the FY 2015 spending proposal. But actually, the FY 2016 spending proposal is $100 billion less than the FY 2016 spending proposal in last year's budget. Here are the numbers. As you can see, half the difference comes from "Other Spending."

The big problem is that the president has proposed nothing to deal with the elephant in the room, which is that health care will eat the budget (and Obamacare does nothing to help).

Look, I understand the president's problem. Even if he weren't committed to crashing the health care system so the government could go to "single-payer," whatever that would actually mean in practice, there is no percentage for a center-left politician in proposing a reform (i.e. reduction) in entitlements. Government is force, and governments bid for support by offering free stuff to their supporters, exploiting the culture of the robber band, the dawn raid, the conquering army, and the cringing peasant in all of us. No doubt that's why 62% of Brits say they want more government. The whole point of the Democratic Party is offering free stuff to its voters, and the voters believe in getting the full amount they had in mind. Hence the president's offer of "free" community college.

In the end, of course, the government runs out of other peoples' money, and you get Greece, or Argentina, or Venezuela. You get a devaluation, a seizure of assets, and the game begins again. Don't the people get it? No, they don't. They don't think beyond their world of subordination to a noble patron. The patron will provide, and if he can't it's because of the dark forces conspiring against him.

The only way out is for the people to develop a culture of responsible individualism that instinctively cringes at the thought of free stuff. How many people are there in the world that feel that way? It's hard to tell, but I don't think it's that many.

Plus, the big-government folks always have the people on their side who say "I paid into Social Security, so I got mine coming. And anyway, who would trust the stock market?"

There is a sturdy truth in that sentiment. The government will always have to hand out some sort of Social Security because if it didn't there would be blood in the streets. It would be much easier for the government to raid everyone's retirement account, or rob the corporations that represent the wealth in those retirement accounts.

Or maybe not. We hear this week that gentry liberals, through their elected Dem representatives, pushed back against the president's plan to tax their kids' college savings accounts. It makes sense. If there is one thing sacred, it is the right of the children of gentry liberals to go to selective colleges and acquire the right left credentials.

So maybe there's hope. Figure out how to appeal to the self-interest of gentry liberals and all will be well.

Hume Policing the Frontier Between the Observed and the Unobserved

Our judgments about cause and effect, according to David Hume in his Treatise of Human Nature, are nothing more than projections of our sense impressions, prompted by the "force and liveliness" of those impressions.

But where do the debutantes of forceful and lively impressions go after their first presentation to the monarch of our mind? They subside on the couches of the Memory and the Imagination, says Hume, and memory is "much more lively and strong than those of the imagination." A "perfect idea" is an impression that has entirely lost its vivacity. Thus banished to a nether world without the strong light of vivacity, our perfect ideas in the imagination are subject to the fancy and may stray to thoughts of "winged horses, fiery dragons, and monstrous giants." The natural thing is for ideas of the memory to fade away and become mere imagination. But sometimes ideas of the imagination can reacquire force and vivacity and counterfeit as memory. It is the practice of "liars", says Hume, by frequent repetition of their imaginary ideas, to end up believing them as reality.

Obviously, we cannot use the perfect idea of the imagination in any process of inferring from the observed to the unobserved.

But Hume famously goes further than this. He argues that there is no basis in reason to infer the unobserved from the observed at all. All we can argue is "constant conjunction." When we experience impressions in constant conjunction we come to believe they are related, from the force and vivacity of the impressions and their constant conjunction.

But notice that Hume does have a theory of cause and effect. He assumes that when people see a constant conjunction their minds are driven to assume that if one event occurs the other must necessarily follow. So he does believe in reason. The other approach is to assume that everything is contingent, that mental conjunctions are just as unprovable as conjunctions between forceful and vivacious impressions, that everything is merely a tissue of unprovable assertions and predictions.

The modern approach is the way of settled science. The more that theory about separate impressions gets confirmed and the more that predictions about cause and effect are successful, the more we are justified in putting our faith in their causal connection. But you never know. The practical thing to do is assume that everything works as advertised. Until it doesn't.

Get a Clue from Magical Thinking

Everybody sneers at magic these days. Because we are all scientists now.

So Richard Fernandez chuckles as he takes a look at the widespread resort to magical thinking abroad in the world today. In Venezuela the government is out of money, but its leader President Nicolas Maduro is promising more free stuff.

Free school stipends, free housing. No cutbacks to social welfare. How would the bankrupt state pay for it?  He said, that while “oil will never cost $100 again but God will provide. Venezuela will never do without.”

Nor is Bolivarian Venezuela alone in this. There is a wave of "anti-austerity" politics in Europe. In addition to the Greek Syriza party, there is the Podemos party in Spain. All these countries are broke, relying on the kindness of strangers. But the politicians assure their supporters that God (i.e., the Germans) will provide.

The truth is that our modern scorn at magical thinking misses the point. If you read the literature you will find that primitive humans did not resort to magic as a first resort. They only went to the rain-man after the rains had failed. The point of magic is to keep hope alive when all hope is lost. Even the modern corporate types discuss how corporate leaders can keep hope alive in difficult times.

An outbreak of magical thinking tells us that things are not going well. Indeed, the outbreak tells us that, absent a miracle, things are going due south.

Fernandez runs the gamut of magical thinking in the world today, from the lefty parties telling their followers that the free stuff will continue to Iranian mullahs that think that the death of a king called Abdullah in the Hejaz "will mark the beginning of a chain of great events that will shock the world." Then there is the ongoing cultural crisis of Islam that inspires its adepts to fly planes into tall buildings and assassinate cartoonists.

The world is full of this. The last months of every war tend to be the bloodiest, and the cornered rat is said to lash out in a final attempt to stay alive.

My point is that when you are in a tight spot, magical thinking is completely natural. When you are toast then you have two options: lie down and let the world roll over you, or double down. If you double down then you either go out in a blaze of glory or, against all odds, you win through.

Observe that this applies in spades to a leader, whether military, corporate, political, or patriarchal. An ordinary person can go into a hole to die, but not a leader. The leader's followers are expecting him to do something. Why? Well, it solves their problem. As long as the leader leads then they don't have to think about what to do. As long as the army is marching down the road, with the hope of supplies a day's march ahead, then the soldiers will go with the program. It is when food runs out and the unit leader has scarpered that the army falls apart. And once the army, or the government, or the family falls apart then people are in real trouble. That's because humans are social animals; we are nothing without the group.

Let us return to firm ground: the president's recent State of the Union speech. A number of commentators, from left and right, have noted the president's magical thinking. Particularly on foreign policy, the president was asking us to believe that everything was hunky-dory. I myself wrote yesterday about the absurdity of saying that "mandated sick leave and maternity leave, another equal pay law, and a higher minimum wage" have anything to do with what the president calls "middle class economics." Middle class economics, I wrote, is about responsible individualism, people taking responsibility for their lives, not government-mandated benefits for the peasants.

All I am saying is this. When you see people descending into magical thinking, whether a gambler in Las Vegas or the president speaking before Congress, it is not the time to sneer. Magical thinking is as human as sex and violence. When you see someone doing some magical thinking, it is just a sign that they are in deep trouble. You should act accordingly.

What Middle-Class Economics Really Looks Like

President Obama introduced a new catchphrase in his 2015 State of the Union speech: Middle Class Economics. As he put it:

[M]iddle class economics is -- the idea that this country does best when everyone gets their fair shot, everyone does their fair share, everyone plays by the same set of rules.

Then he sharpened his definition.

[M]iddle-class economics means helping working families feel more secure in a world of constant change.

What does that mean? The president says it means government subsidized child care, government mandated sick leave and maternity leave, another equal pay law, and a higher minimum wage.

Of course these benefits have nothing to do with any kind of economics. They are simple government welfare state benefits, and the idea is to attract the votes of women and low-paid workers.

Nothing wrong with that. If women and workers want to subject themselves to the feudal mercies of the Great Lord Obama, that is their choice.

The telling point is that President Obama feels he has to cover the ugly reality of his class-warfare authoritarian welfare state in the clothing of the middle class. He's not just handing out loot to his faithful voters; he's upholding middle class values. He's not just appealing to the narrow interest of low-income voters; he's upholding justice for all. The Democrats have been doing this for a while, ever since they stopped openly pitching for the working-class vote. It tells us that they think they are batting on a sticky wicket.

The Wall Street Journal's Dan Henninger charmingly calls the president's policy "Obama's Peter Pan Economics."

In Mr. O’s world, tax revenue is sort of like Tinker Bell’s pixie dust. You just scoop up another handful and spread it wherever you want. As he said Saturday: Middle-class economics “means making it easier to afford childcare, college, paid leave, health care, a home, and retirement.”

 Henninger is right. Middle-Class Economics is a fairy tale. Here's how.

Government doesn't make childcare more affordable; it strangles it in regulations and certifications and makes it more expensive. Government doesn't make college more affordable; its subsidies have encouraged colleges to jack up tuition into the stratosphere so students can't any more work their way through college. Government doesn't make paid leave more affordable; it just forces workers to work for lower wages while their employers bank their vacation pay for them. Government doesn't make health care more affordable; it makes it impossible to afford unless the government is paying for you -- and that's assuming that the government covers the procedures you need. Government doesn't make homes more affordable. It doesn't make a home more affordable. It just crashed the housing market with its "affordable housing" policies and the people hardest hit were the blacks and Hispanics the very people that the policy was supposed to help. Government doesn't make retirement more affordable; it just sequesters middle-class savings and spends the money on buying votes for 30 years.

Hey GOP candidates for 2016! Here's the germ of a stump speech!

OK. Let's get back to first principles. On my view, government is force, and what governments do is distribute loot to their supporters. No loot, no supporters. The purpose of election campaigns and State of the Union speeches is to dangle the promise of loot before potential supporters, and entice them to vote for you.

But real middle-class economics and real middle-class culture is opposed to this. It imagines that it has evolved beyond the child-like complaint of "it's not fair", the wail of the people of the subordinate self. The middle class believes in responsible individualism. It says "tell me the rules, and I will follow the rules, go to work, pay my taxes, and obey the laws." And I will take responsibility for contributing my share to society. I will take responsibility for childcare, meaning that I will work to care for and raise my children. I will take responsibility for college, meaning that I will save for my childrens' education. I will take responsibility for paid leave, meaning that I will work to save money so I can take time off for a vacation, for sickness, for family emergencies. I will take responsibility for health care, meaning that I will select a health insurance plan that meets my particular needs and protects my assets. I will take responsibility for buying a home, meaning that I will save up money for a mortgage and buy a house that I can afford and that won't wipe me out if there is a recession. I will take responsibility for retirement, meaning that I will save money on my own time in my own way, and when I've saved enough (government mismanagement of the economy notwithstanding) I will retire.

That's what middle class economics really means. It means that people of the responsible self surrender themselves to the mercies of the market in the faith that by working and saving and doing useful things for other people, and constantly improving their skills,  they will wive and thrive in a world of constant change. The point of responsible individualism is that it is the taking on of responsibility that makes life meaningful. Otherwise you are just a peasant or a serf.

All the middle class needs is a government that keeps its cotton-picking hands off the levers of economic intervention, and do simple things like defend the nation against enemies foreign and domestic, provide a sound currency, provide a job market free from credentialism and a business environment where you can start a business in one day with one form.

That would be real middle-class economics.