Ted Cruz, Railsplitter

The biggest applause line for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) speech on March 23, 2015 at Liberty University was his actual announcement that he would run for President of the United States. The second biggest applause line was this:

Instead of a president who boycotts Prime Minister Netanyahu, imagine a president who stands unapologetically with the nation of Israel.

Yep, those conservative Christian students at Liberty University stand with Israel.

And the speech also hit the other standard conservative applause lines: to "stand up and defeat radical Islamic terrorism," to repeal "every word of Obamacare," to repeal "every word of Common Core." And the flat tax, and abolish the IRS.

But the speech was really about introducing Ted Cruz as an American everyman, with both parents from humble origins, with a mother the first in her Irish Catholic family to go to college and become a computer programmer in the 1950s, with an alcoholic father that nearly abandoned his family but for Jesus, with Ted going to college and working two jobs when his father's business cratered into bankruptcy during the 1980s oil price crash. And then there's his wife Heidi starting a business "in grade school" baking bread for folks working in the apple orchards. Can you say "not Bush" and "not Clinton?"

The conservative response to Ted Cruz's speech have seemed a little jaded, and the liberals, of course, want to define him already as the Second Coming of Joe McCarthy. But my take was that this was a carefully constructed strategic speech, your basic born-in-a-log-cabin, man-of-the-people, hope-and-change speech. Of course it was.

Cruz openly appealed to conservative Christians.

Today, roughly half of born again Christians aren’t voting. They’re staying home. Imagine instead millions of people of faith all across America coming out to the polls and voting our values.

And of course he appealed to the rest of the conservative coalition with applause lines on liberty, the Second Amendment, abortion, and a message of hope for middle-class strivers with small businesses growing and prospering and "young people coming out of school with four, five, six job offers."

Obviously the speech was pitched at the conservative base, but Cruz left a wide opening to move to the center.

And one other thing. The left likes to paint Ted Cruz as a mad bomber. Hey, the GOP establishment likes to do the same. But Cruz is cool, medium cool. The problem with advertising him as a mad bomber is that, when voters get to see him on TV, they will experience a disconnect. They will wonder what's so bad about such a mild-mannered candidate.

There was nothing wild or extreme in Ted Cruz's announcement speech. Just standard conservative boilerplate that puts him in the mainstream of conservative politics. The only people likely to be annoyed would be liberals.

One other thing: Ted's elder daughter Caroline. She high-fived some of the audience as the Cruz family moved around the stage after the speech. Can anyone spell P-O-L-I-T-I-C-I-A-N?

Ted Cruz did say a lot of things that liberals think nobody should be allowed to say in America.  But apart from gentry liberals, who would have a problem with that?

If Feminism is all about vicitmization, then who will save the victims?

We all know that the patriarchy is the source of all our problems on the racism, sexism, and homophobia front. But suppose it isn't?

Yes, I know. If there is one thing we all agree on it is the evil of the patriarchy that kept women barefoot and pregnant since the dawn of time. But wait a minute! Chaps like Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn and The Faith Instinct suggest that the invention of religion helped free humans from the rule of the alpha male and created the egalitarianism of the hunter-gatherers.

OK, let's just say that the evil of patriarchy kept women barefoot and pregnant since the dawn of capitalism when a ruthless individualism was born out of the comfortable village communism that obtained somehow under the boot of the feudal system. But wait! Chaps like Alan MacFarlane in The Origins of English Individualism say that the birth of individualism in England in the mid 12th century meant that women were owning property as individuals and could sue in the manorial courts. In the much-loved extended family women were always under the control of some patriarchal male.

Well, anyway, everybody knows that women were beside themselves with boredom in the heyday of 1950s suburbia. Or at least Betty Friedan was, in The Feminine Mystique. Except of course that it is women that like nice leafy nests in which to raise their children in suburbia away from the testosterone of the big city. It is men that like standing on the corner, watching all the girls go by.

Here is what I really think. I think that some sort of patriarchal society, where women are expected to value family before career, is essential to the survival of the species. Sorry about that, girls.

Exhibit A is the National Young Feminist Leadership Conference. Robert Stacy McCain writes about it in "Warriors Against Human Nature." He tells us about the emergence of queer feminism, as against the old traditional "binary" feminism.

On McCain's testimony, queer feminism is the invention of Judith Butler in her 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, now required coursework at hundreds of US colleges. Here's how it works.

Professor Butler declares that the division of humanity into male and female is an artificial illusion, the gender binary produced by the heterosexual matrix. Therefore, those characteristics we think of as naturally male (masculine) and female (feminine) are not natural at all, according to Queer Theory. Instead these categories are imposed on us by the oppressive demands of the male-supremacist system of patriarchy.

Er, which US political party is supposed to be anti-science?

But suppose that all that the feminist cultural Marxist rubbish were true. Then how do you account for this piece on privilege? Here are Lee Habeeb and Mike Leven writing about "Why Won't Liberals talk about the Most Important Kind of 'Privilege' in America?" It's marriage privilege. You see, they write, studies show that the children of married parents do much better in life by any measure you like. Oh, there is one other little matter. Studies show that children of married parents do better if there aren't too many children of single parents in the area.

Yes, liberals and queer feminists. Marriage: It's for the children.

Want more? Here's a young academic that doesn't dare assign any reading or do or say anything that might set off the liberal students in his class.

All it takes is one slip—not even an outright challenging of their beliefs, but even momentarily exposing them to any uncomfortable thought or imagery—and that’s it, your classroom is triggering, you are insensitive, kids are bringing mattresses to your office hours and there’s a twitter petition out demanding you chop off your hand in repentance.

Or the special snowflake liberal students might get you fired.

It's easy to laugh at all this. After all, medieval scholastics (they say) used to argue about the number of angels that you could fit on a pinhead. Nothing new here.

It would all be great fun if lives weren't being ruined. I am talking about the millions of children of single parents, who are predominantly from the low income 30 percent, because liberals condone single parenthood. I am talking about the millions of women that listen to their liberal instructors and direct their life trajectory away from marriage and children and then wake up at 50 empty and alone, wondering who will take care of them in their old age.

You see liberals: the problem isn't economic inequality. It's "spiritual inequality," as Robert William Fogel says. The problem isn't money; the problem is that the modern administrative welfare state incarcerates the poor in cultural ghettos. What's your four-point program for that?

My take on feminism and abortion and childlessness and twentysomethings in the city is that it is a self-indulgence of the rich and the well-born. The fact is that marriage and children is a life of work and effort, for both sexes. A certain amount of money allows you to choose a life of personal growth and creativity, become an artist or a writer, instead of a wage slave and a parent. Really, who wouldn't choose hanging out in the city with witty, intelligent friends against a life of diapers and bosses and meltdowns?

Who wouldn't? Anyone with half a brain. The fact is that feminism and gentry liberalism are merely the modern instantiation of age-old upper-class self-indulgence. What we call the "patriarchy" is merely the call of the genes. They demand to be reproduced and they demand to flourish. Or else.

The funny thing about queer feminism is that it demands victimization. McCain quotes feminist professor Sandra Bartky:

Feminist consciousness is consciousness of victimization... to see oneself as a victim.

Of course, it's not funny at all. It's an argument for force. If someone is a victim, because of social injustice, then it stands to reason that government must act to end the injustice. That is the common thread that runs down left-wing thought from the French Revolution  down to the present. If there is something wrong in society then it can only be solved by political action, which means force.

If you have a taste for power then you have a taste for politics. And politics executes its program in government. So anyone with a taste for power will naturally find their thoughts turning to some great injustice that can only be resolved by government action. If that person with a taste for power cannot find a real injustice to fight they will find some minor injustice and inflate it into a great political cause.

The genius of Marx was to find in the working class such a victim -- even though the working class in the 19th century was improving its lot beyond anything ever known in history.

The genius of the cultural Marxists was to generalize the victimization-of-the-working-class meme into a general concept of victimization that could be applied in behalf of anyone and everyone against a target oppressor class, the capitalists, the patriarchy, whoever.

But if women can only be safe when protected by powerful feminist activist custodians that means that women just aren't strong enough to live as the "independent woman" of Simone de Beauvoir of The Second Sex. And if women need protection from powerful patrons or matrons, what then is the difference between a patriarchy and a liberal femiarchy? Power is power; all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Anyway, what matriarch could really be free enough of victimization to be able to protect the poor little queer feminist victims?

If women are victims then they cannot be allowed out alone at night. They must be guarded and supervised. And obviously the guarding cannot be done by women, who are victims. Only men can do it. So we are back to the patriarchy.

Michael Barone has a piece out today on Raul Emanuel's campaign for re-election as mayor of Chicago. He writes about the rise of "gentry liberals" as a political force with the election of John Lindsay as mayor of New York City in the 1960s. Typically, gentry liberals have acquired power in coalition with African Americans while antagonizing the old white ethnics that used to supply the Democratic votes in the big cities.

Lindsay constructed a new coalition of gentry liberals and blacks, setting up a police civilian review board and claiming credit for preventing a riot in Harlem. He showed disdain for ethnic and middle-class whites, a “new snobbery” as I called it at the time.

Lindsay’s policies played a major part in a negative national trend, as crime and welfare dependency roughly tripled in the 1965–75 decade, and New York City teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. Other cities with fewer strengths went into death spirals, like my native Detroit.

Gentry liberalism has tended to be really bad for big American cities, from New York to Detroit, and particularly bad for the minorities that vote with the gentry liberals.

I'd say that goes for any victim group. By allying themselves with gentry liberals the victims are just setting themselves up for more failure and heartache. Because in the end, the allies of the gentry liberals are just votes, to be discarded when no longer useful for the liberal project of power.

There is, in other words, no substitute for getting out of the victim syndrome, getting away from the mechanical model of political system, and becoming a responsible individual. "In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista," as Burke wrote two centuries ago, "you see nothing but the gallows."

And nothing has changed on the left-wing front since then.

What Does President Obama Think He's Doing on Iran/Israel?

We conservatives look at President Obama's Iran policy and we shake our heads. We ask ourselves: what is the point of a nuclear deal with Iran? Why does the president send a friendly message to the Iranian people for Nowruz? What is the point?

Then we look at the president's rocky relationship with Israel and with Benjamin Netanyahu in particular and we wonder: what's the problem? Why are we still pressuring Israel into making concessions and reviving a peace process with the Palestinians when it is clear that the Palestinians don't want peace with Israel?

We know that President Obama has no thought of a "peace process" with Republicans. His approach to Republicans is Reaganesque: "we win and they lose." With Republicans President Obama is not interested in a treaty, in negotiations to compromise the liberal vision of a more equal America with the conservative vision of a more free America. For him, the two visions are incompatible. More freedom means less equality.

Nor do liberal social activists think about a peace process with the racists, sexists and homophobes they they have sworn to destroy. Why would they? Their righteous vision is to eliminate the evils of racism, sexism and homophobia from the face of the earth. What is there to compromise on that?

I got a clue about President Obama and the liberals from a review of the recent Israeli election by a liberal Israeli writer, Ari Shavit: "Is Israel losing its soul?" Liberal Israelis were stunned by Netanyahu's win. A university student texted: "This country has no future... If I want to lead a normal life, I have to leave."

Er, yes. If you live in Israel you had better understand and deal with the fact that Israel is surrounded by enemies. There is no such thing as a normal life with its normal lefty cravings for "social justice and affordable housing and cheaper consumer goods." But the Israeli left doesn't want to believe that. Even though Shavit writes that he gets the history of the last decades: the failed peace process and the collapse into chaos in the Arab world,

The aggregate result of these traumas is an understandable but dangerous shift to the right. Because the old peace-idea was not replaced by a new peace-idea, many Israelis fear for their future and are no longer willing to embrace American and European peace initiatives, which seem to them completely divorced from reality. At the same time, some Israelis have developed xenophobic tendencies that do not stem from inherent racism, but from a deep fear that the center-left in Israel and the international community cannot assuage.

Oh, I see. The problem is that "the old peace-idea was not replaced by a new peace-idea."

So I suppose that in November 2016 when a Republican is decisively elected president our liberal friends will be texting to each other in shock and trying to imagine how President Obama, ably assisted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, failed to inspire Americans with his peace process with Iran/Russia/China. Etc.

What is it about the "peace-idea," and its kissing cousin, the "peace process?"

I think it is a way of avoiding the fact of a conflict, a way to dodge uncomfortable truths. The Appeasement of Hitler defined the 1930s as the leaders of France and Britain didn't want to face the fact that Hitler was preparing for war. If they negotiated with Hitler then they could think about negotiation and put off thinking about the state of their armed forces and their alliances and the need to formulate and act on a strategy to neutralize him.

That's what liberals used to do during the Cold War. They talked about a peace process and about arms control and about "moral equivalence." They did not want to think about how to roll back the Soviet Union and its proxies.

Today it's déjà vu all over again. Liberals don't want to think about the meaning of the immigration of Muslims into Europe. They don't want to think about the Islamic muddle in the Middle East.

And really who can blame President Obama and the liberals? They live and die with their race and class and gender politics here at home. They don't have time to think about pointless conflicts in far-away lands that nobody really cares about.

Paul Krugman and the "Austerity" Con

Way back when, in 2011, the Congress and the president cooked up a deal we call "sequestration" in the big debt ceiling crisis. The result was that real, biting spending cuts and tax increases were scheduled to go into effect in 2013.

In April 2013, according to Ramesh Ponnuru in National Review, Paul Krugman argued that this "austerity" would hurt the economy. It turns out he was wrong. During the "sequester" US economic growth has been higher than before the sequester.

What does this all mean? It means that Keyneianism is faux science.

When Lord Keynes proposed his Keynesianism in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, he advanced the idea of the "multiplier." Additional government spending during an economic downturn, he argued, would stimulate spending in the private sector and thus one dollar of spending would create additional economic spending and thus pull the economy out of recession. Ever since, Keynesians and liberals have repeated "multiplier, multiplier, multiplier" like a mantra. They believe in it, they really do. The government should borrow more and spend more. Because multiplier.

But you and I are entitled to step back and wonder what really is going on here.

Let us first pull out the pony that really is in there at the bottom of the manure pile.

During a financial panic like the Crash of 2008 there is a danger that the credit system will collapse. The reason is quite simple. The credit system runs on two principles, one, that people can make their payments, and two, that the collateral offered against a loan is sufficient to pay off the loan if the borrower stops making payments.

In the Crash of 2008 both principles failed: one, people got laid off and couldn't make their mortgage payments and two, the collateral on their low or no down-payment loans could not liquidate the loan.

Ever since the 19th century this problem has been solved by a central bank acting as the "lender of last resort" acting on the Eisenhower principle that if you can't solve a problem, you make it bigger.

In a crisis, the government "saves" the financial system by bailing out the failing banks and GSEs and hedge funds by lending them money to tide them over and effectively pledging the entire productive capacity of the nation as collateral.

This "lender of last resort" thing works pretty well unless you are Greece or Argentina. In those cases the entire productive capacity of the nation isn't enough to serve as collateral for the bailout loans.

Once the financial system is saved, other factors come into play, among them "austerity." The obvious thing to do after a crash is for everyone to clean up their balance sheets. Corporations cancel projects that now appear to be malinvestments; governments cancel wasteful spending. The new lean corporations and governments will waste less and the economy then rebounds smartly. This much is obvious. A losing product is a weight on the corporation's profitability, and all government spending is a weight on the economy.

But spending does not appear "wasteful" to the politician. A politician is a man or woman that wins election and reelection by promising loot to his or her supporters. Cut Social Security? But granny will starve! Cut Medicare? But granny will die! Cut unemployment benefits? But workers will starve! Cut green energy subsidies? But the earth will fry! You can see why it makes complete sense for the bribed apologists of the ruling class to come up with the word "austerity" to cover all these horrific outcomes.

Anyway, we just had a real test of the "austerity" thesis, because eevil Republicans tricked the president and the Democrats into modest spending cuts during the "sequester." And the economy didn't tank.

This happens all the time, only the mainstream media doesn't like to talk about it. At the end of 2013 the eevil Republicans ended extended unemployment benefits. Result? About half of the gain in employment has been from people coming off extended unemployment benefits.

In 1996 eevil Republicans forced a welfare reform bill on President Clinton and the Democrats. Activists said that children would starve. Instead mothers got jobs. In the 1981 recession President Reagan cut domestic spending. Result? The biggest, fastest recovery ever.

This all makes sense if you accept my weight theory of government spending. If you remove the glacial ice sheet of government spending from the land then not only does the land bloom, but the very ground itself rises! Because science.

So we can see what the "austerity" game is all about. It is a cunning ploy by the ruling class to avoid the obvious truth. All government spending is a waste. It is a waste because it takes money out of the private sector and spends it on the little darlings of the politicians. And the little darlings respond to the benefits they get from the government by reducing their work effort. Talk about a multiplier!

The mantra of conservatives and conservative politicians ought to be "weight, weight, weight." If we want to increase growth, if we want to decrease inequality, if we want to live simply so that others may simply live then we must lift the weight of government off the brow of labor.

Every day in every way we should think: how could we reduce the weight of government on the people? Because granny. Because women. Because the poor. Because marginalized minorities. Because all government is a weight, all of it.

But don't tell Paul Krugman and the Democrats.

How Would Corporations Become the Employers of the Poor?

It's all very well to say that corporations should act like the noble lords of the year 1000 and take the heads of the poor in their hands and make them into their bondsmen, their slaves. And then train them in the culture of work and service.

But how? In the first place we don't give corporations the right to compel people the way that governments do. That's part of the modern Greater Separation of Powers of which we've heard tell. These days we try to separate the political and its force from the economic and its prices from the cultural and its social and moral pressure.

So it was easy for the lord of the year 1000 to combine all three and take the responsibility of feeding the poor by taking them into bondage, where they got fed in return for that bill-hook and whatever work the lord's overseer could extract from his new bondsman. But today it isn't so simple.

Using Eric Hoffer's analysis of work, we would also say that work in the year 1000 was regarded as a curse, a mark of bondage. The submission of the hungry man to the dominion of his lord obviously fits comfortably into that culture.

In that old system, says Hoffer, the lord told you what to do and when to do it. But now things are different. Now "the chief problem is not to induce people to work but how to find enough jobs for people who want to work." Now work is not a mark of bondage but "a mark of uprightness and manly worth." We talk about people that go to work, obey the law, follow the rules as the very salt of the earth.  This situation, writes Hoffer, "is not only unparalleled in history but remains more or less incomprehensible to many people outside the Occident."

Well, that was back in the Sixties. Now China and India have abandoned the failed idea of the totalitarian state and the collapse of the three sectors, political, economic, and cultural into the single all-powerful party government. And the Soviet Union is no more. Now everyone is getting the work bug, now every peasant is turning up in the city and learning to deal with the modern paradigm. It's not the lord's job to put you to work. It's your problem.

Suppose we collapse the current welfare system, as an evil and corrupt system that effectively enlists the poor as a kind of state militia, housing in their public housing barracks, paying them as though they were soldiers, and leaving them to fester in their barracks as soldiers in the standing armies of the absolute monarchs first used to do five hundred years ago.

How would we get there from here? There is the whole paraphernalia of labor market regulations that create the modern underclass. It starts with the prohibition on child labor, the collapse of apprenticeship, the swingeing taxation on labor through "social insurance" programs that rack the cost of labor into the stratosphere. And then there is the minimum wage, which keeps young and inexperienced workers out of the labor force where they might compete with older workers.

For me, this whole superstructure of the left's political faith is a massive human disaster. It chops up the high road to prosperity with monstrous barriers and tolls and opportunities for the dominion of political power over the radical equality of the market and the constant urge of its price system.

In my ideal society, with limited government and radically reduced taxes, people would naturally seek employment, and the least skilled and least desirable bringing up the rear.

Why would corporations employ the scum of the employment market? Why would they pay enough for a "living wage?" Why would they bother to provide a genuine path upwards for the least among us?

Suppose we give corporations subsidies to employ the poor? Yes, but then we are opening the doors to crony capitalism and political chicanery. We would encourage fly-by-night operations taking the subsidies and delivering nothing in return. And of course the left would pounce on every minor problem and glitch and use it to smear the entire private sector and the whole idea of a market economy just as they do today.

Suppose we order the corporations to employ the poor? Yes, but then they are going to demand quid-pro-quos, and then we are back into the whole lobbyist special interest game that ends up benefiting the powerful and hurting the people.

The point is pretty simple for me. Ever since the "useless" feudal retainers were first "hurled" upon the labor market five hundred years ago, government has tried various forms of force and compulsion to deal with the poverty problem. Government has tried compulsion every which way from Sunday, from incarceration to housing to money to food.

But there is another idea, that hasn't been tried in over a century. It's the system that was used by charities towards the end of the 19th century and described by Marvin Olasky in The Tragedy of American Compassion. It's as simple as A-B-C-D-E-F-G. It starts with A for Affiliation. Who is affiliated with this person down on their luck and could be persuaded to step up and help? It goes on to D for Discrimination. That's about separating the sheep from the goats. You want to help people who really need help and would benefit from help and are not just working the system like that fine old proletarian Alfred P. Doolittle. The process culminates ends with Employment, Freedom, God.

Employment is where the corporations come in. But would they step up to the plate?  I think they would.

The point is that corporations follow the zeitgeist. They do what is expected of them. And we need to change the culture from the current Poor Law mentality in which we don't expect anything from the poor except to have the government give them money, courtesy of the parish beadle or the government social worker, and hope they don't cause any trouble. We don't expect anything of ourselves except to pay our taxes.

We need to change the culture.  We need to make the poor everybody's business, from the householder to the small retailer to the construction company to the big corporation. So everybody pitches in to help, not because they must, because they are compelled, but because the culture tells them what to do and they do it.

But can we change the culture?

Our liberal friends have done a bang-up job pushing their cultural agenda, from environmentalism to the sexual revolution to gay marriage. That's what it would take to change the culture on welfare. The problem is not the corporations. They will do the right thing, because corporations always need the good opinion of the public. The solution doesn't belong to corporations. It belongs to us: imagining the possibilities and then making the possibilities happen.

So if we want the corporations to give work to the poor, we have the change the culture so that it is the most natural thing in the world for a corporation to hire, train, and bring the poor into the modern work culture, where the poor get to believe like the rest of us that work is "a mark of uprightness and manly worth."

A New Kind of Corporate Welfare

The best way to get into the middle class is on my Road to the Middle Class featuring a self-directed program of religion, education, mutual-aid association, and living under law.

But it's not for everyone. That's obvious, or we wouldn't have our burgeoning underclass wherever welfare states are found. The foundation of human society is voluntary cooperation; but there's always a temptation to ease off in the harness and hope the other horses take up the slack.

That's why God invented divine justice: to take care of the slackers.

But why wait for God to take care of things? Almost everyone can contribute their little bit, and it's a shame to segregate the unskilled, the unlucky, and the un-motivated off in a welfare concentration camp in the inner city to be used as cannon fodder in the activism wars of the Reverends, marchin' and protestin' and stuff.

My plan is that we ramp down the welfare programs and send the welfare folk to place their heads in the hands of the corporate CEOs. It's similar to the old way of the year 1000 when a starving man would place himself into servitude as a bondsman by placing his head in his lord's hands: a head for food.

I say this because it is obvious that the old plan, of giving people money for nothing, has clearly failed. That's what the conservative Charles Murray has found in his Coming Apart and that is what the liberal Robert D. Putnam has found in his Our Kids. Middle-class, educated, career-oriented people of all races, including African Americans, are pulling away and the lower 30 percent, black and white, is descending into cultural chaos. The men don't work and the women don't marry.

Marx well said that the agricultural revolution "hurled" the rural poor, the band of "useless" feudal retainers, onto the labour market. There, of course, they lingered for a century or two as miserable proletarians until sucked up into the mines and factories of the industrial revolution where they were treated as little better than slaves.

But in time the capitalists realized that treating people like slaves wasn't good for profits. In the first place the workers formed labor unions to oppose the bosses and time has shown that labor unions are poison for a corporation, the best way to kill it off. The whole point of a corporation is a team, with everyone working towards the corporate goal of great products, good jobs, and fat profits. It doesn't help to have a head of rebellion right on the factory floor.

It was a German general that articulated in 1921 the new corporate attitude, General Hans von Seeckt said he wanted

[To make] of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier.

He was talking about the need for a new kind of soldier, but you can see that the corporation needs the same kind of employee. Both organizations need swift, efficient team members, but more than that they need responsible team members, not mere underground drones marching around in their platoons in the movie Metropolis.

You can see how this works in a news article from the Wall Street Journal. Audi is building a green field auto plant next to the village of San Jose Chiapa where they will build the Audi Q5 SUV for export all over the world. Of course, as part of the deal, they are setting up extensive training in Mexico for the new workers.

But they are also sending the top technical workers, the quality-control analysts and the like, to Ingolstadt in Germany for two years of training in the Audi systems and the Audi way.

Each Mexican worker is paired with a German "buddy" who acts as a mentor, showing the ropes.

We know what this is all about. It is "boot camp" in corporate culture. It is indoctrinating new workers into the corporate culture and system at Audi so that they can return to Mexico to make cars that meet the amazing modern standards that gives us amazing cars that work for 100,000 miles trouble-free. And also become committed members of the Audi team.

Of course people coming off welfare aren't going to go to Germany for training. But they can be handed over to buddies in factories and big-box stores rather than to Reverends in the protest line. They can be immersed in a corporate culture where going with the flow means doing a good job and being polite to the customers rather than making protest signs and yelling catchwords at a TV camera.

In addition these former welfare recipients will enjoy a predictable and secure world, with benefits and a reasonable expectation of stable employment and chances for advancement.

But best of all they will be living in a life that benefits them and benefits us all. As welfare recipients they are useful only for their votes to support the politicians that promise to defend old benefits and offer new benefits. As corporate workers they will be contributing to the economy and providing, in a modest way, products and services for others.

OK. Nothing new here. You can see bright young minorities in every bank branch and less educated ones at the local big box store.  And they are clearly being trained and indoctrinated in the corporate culture, to become "self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated," and hey, maybe even "joyful in taking responsibility" as a woman and a Target associate.

(See where that "associate" comes from? One guess: "In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.")

For over half a millennium, with Poor Laws and welfares, respectable society has punted on what to do with people "hurled" on the labor market by economic revolutions. The ruling class just handed out a pittance to the people left behind by progress. And really, in the Obama years we are seeing the final collapse of this cruel and inhuman cop-out in the absurd gussied-up protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere (which were, Messrs. Obama, Holder, and Soros will doubtless agree at the Last Judgment, pure astroturf).

Now is the time to put an end to this injustice, and use the most obvious resource invented to make lost souls into productive contributors. And really how come it's taken this long? Yes, corporations use systems, and systems are domination. But the fact is that corporations have taken the demoralized proletarians of Marx and Shaw and made them into nauseating middle-class bitter clingers, the despair of good progressives everywhere.

Wouldn't it be too harsh to render up the underclass to the corporations? Maybe. But we humans know that if you can't manage to socialize people with kindness then you have to "put a bit of stick about" as the chief whip Francis Urquhart says in the Brit version of House of Cards.

As God does with his divine justice.

A Brief History of Welfare

I had a minor epiphany over the weekend. Checking back to The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger, I recalled important information about welfare in the year 1000 in England.

The deal was that if you were starving you went to your lord and placed your head in his hands. He would then hand you a bill-hook, as a symbol of your servitude as his bondsman. It was called "head for food." You gave up your freedom for food and work.

So let's take a look at welfare down the ages, and let's start with the Roman Empire. In The Sources of Social Power, Michael Mann talks about the gradual decline of the peasants. The deal was that everyone was supposed to serve in the legions, but the problem was that as the demand for military service increased the peasant couldn't work his own land and serve in the military and provide his own weapons at the same time. So gradually the Romans started paying their soldiers for long service and supplying arms and armor.

Later on, the lower orders got hit by the slaves. The abundance of slaves meant that free men couldn't get work at decent wages. Also there was the little cultural problem common to both Greeks and Romans that free men didn't work for free men. No free man would work for another.

So that's why the Romans went for bread and circuses and the "anona" welfare system. The sturdy peasants were being slowly squeezed out of their landholdings and became concentrated into the cities where they were kept quiet with food and entertainment. Sound familiar?

Notice the difference with the feudal welfare system, where the lord accepted the risk proposition for the lives of his bondsmen. He took their work and fed them. Whether he made a profit on the deal was something else.

That something else was the agricultural revolution, which extended over several centuries in the middle of the last millennium. The agricultural revolution changed everything on the land. It resulted in Marx's famous declaration:

A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart well says, “everywhere uselessly filled house and castle.” ...

The process of forcible expropriation of the people received in the 16th century a new and frightful impulse from the Reformation, and from the consequent colossal spoliation of the church property. The Catholic church was, at the time of the Reformation, feudal proprietor of a great part of the English land. The suppression of the monasteries, &c., hurled their inmates into the proletariat. The estates of the church were to a large extent given away to rapacious royal favourites, or sold at a nominal price to speculating farmers and citizens, who drove out, en masse, the hereditary sub-tenants and threw their holdings into one. The legally guaranteed property of the poorer folk in a part of the church’s tithes was tacitly confiscated.

 So we can see that the unfortunates "hurled" on the labor market were either useless "feudal retainers," the bondsmen and others that had placed their heads in the lands of the lords, or they were succored by the Church and its monasteries. The formal and informal arrangements that integrated the poor into feudal society were broken up. The agricultural revolution did for the retainers and Henry VIII did for the rest.

By the end of the 16th century things were getting pretty grim out in the countryside, so the politicians decided to "do something." What they "did" was the Elizabethan Poor Law. The Poor Law was cunning. It put the responsibility for relieving the poor on each parish. But since each parish was stuck with the bill, you can imagine that each parish was eager to move its poor on to the next parish.

Later, as Foucault relates in Madness and Civilization, we get the great confinement: in hospitals, schools, prisons, etc. And of course in the British workhouse. The point, I suspect, is that the wealth unleashed by the agricultural revolution provided the means to confine people that society didn't know what to do with: the poor and sick, the criminal, the young. And really, what is easier? Just lock 'em up if you can't figure out what else to do with them.

Ever since, welfare has shuttled between "outdoor relief," which is money for nothing, and "indoor relief" which means incarceration in the French hôpital, the British workhouse, the government child custodial facility, the prison, or penitentiary or reformatory or custodial facility. In all cases society is paying the poor and the feckless to go away and not bother us.

Now in the years of the Poor Law before the industrial revolution the poor were kept away from the cities and on the land. This was enforced by things like the guild system which prevented the poor from finding employment in the city. And it kept the poor out in the country where they could never achieve strategic concentration. So the ruling class and its supporters were on one side, and the poor on the other.

The industrial revolution changed this situation, because the industrial revolution brought the poor into the cities where they achieved strategic concentration. And the politics changed too. Instead of the poor being outside the system, a mere expense to the ruling class, they entered the political system and became a power player, or at least a source of votes for ambitious politicians. This meant that welfare was no longer an annoying expense for the ruling class; now welfare payments became a reward to the poor for supporting the ruling class.

My little epiphany last weekend was to realize the profound difference between welfare in the feudal age and welfare today. Then as now the ruling class obtained the loyalty of the poor by giving them food and free stuff. But in those days the ruling political class was also the ruling economic class. They gave food to the poor out of their own pockets, but they also got the poor to work -- although Marx's comment about "useless" retainers suggests that they weren't doing much useful work.

Our age is different. In our age the political class buys the support of the poor with an abundance of "free stuff." But the poor don't have to work for their relief. As Charles Murray shows in Coming Apart the bottom 30 percent of white adult males aren't too interested in work. About 30 percent of them are effectively out of the labor force. The difference between now and then is that today the political class takes the money for the support of the poor by force from the economic sector. And it doesn't extract anything from the poor except their votes at election time.

Various reporters have noted that lack of employment is a killer in our society. It may be because humans need to be challenged by work in the world. It may also be that, as Eric Hoffer writes, our age is an age of work. It used to be that work was "viewed as a curse, a mark of bondage." But today work is the sign of worth and responsibility. No wonder that the unemployed are demoralized.

So maybe we have a possible solution to the 500 year Poor Law problem.

It is notable that in our society the people with limited appetite for risk find employment in large hierarchical bureaucratic institutions. In return for loyalty and a modicum of work, these big-company, big-government employees get security and pensions.

Why do we not apply the same logic to the poor? Put them to work in big corporations, with modest wages and modest work requirements. And the security that they crave.

And let's take the relief of the poor out of the political sector where the poor just become the pawns of the politicians as the politicians use them in their contemptible power games.