The Wages of Division

Everyone is tut-tutting about the breakup of national politics in Britain, particularly with the triumph of the Scottish National Party in Scotland. The Labour Party was pretty well eliminated in Scotland in the UK General Election of May 2015.

But really, this is the wages of identity politics. The average grubbing practical politician may not realize it but identity politics, getting people to vote according to class and race and gender, is going to break up the nation state.

The idea of the nation state is really rather new, a few hundred years old at the max. And I suspect that it developed not because all of a sudden people started to believe in nations, but because the logic of interstate politics demanded a bigger military and political unit than the feudal king, the temporary winner in the game of baronial politics and strategic marriage. The political unit had to be large enough to support a significant standing army; it had to be supported and funded by a thriving commercial economy. And it helped to have a single language. In fact, the emerging nation state imposed a common language on its subjects.

In the 18th century you can see that the national politics in Britain was simple faction: one faction of the landed magnates against another. Disraeli fires the last shot in this war in Sybil when he spends a chapter or two drawing up a bill of indictment against the evil and corrupt Whigs; they got their wealth in the plunder of the monasteries in the 16th century, in case you didn't know.

In the 19th century politics in Britain started to show the influence of class. The Reform Bill of 1832 was about extending the franchise lower into the middle class. Later reform bills extended the franchise into the working class. So politicians learned how to make class appeals, and the factional politics of Whig vs. Tory morphed into the class politics of Liberal/Labour vs. Conservative.

The genius of this class politics, we can now see in retrospect, was that it didn't disturb the nation state idea. That was tested in World War I when the working classes of the world identified with their nations rather than with their class.

Responding to this fact after World War I the Frankfurt School came up with a new twist on class politics: what we now call identity politics. The Frankfurt School taught politicians how to divide people not just by class but by any kind of identity that worked politically. The point was to seize the commanding heights of compassion and identify yourself with an historically oppressed group.

In our day this idea has turned into stupidity and the left's support is always for the identified marginalized group: blacks in the US or South Africa; women; gays, Muslims in the West; Hispanics in the US; Catholics in Northern Ireland; Palestinians in the Middle East; Catalonians in Spain.

In Britain, this played out as validating the irredentist yearnings of the Celtic fringes in Scotland and Wales so that the Blair Labour government legislated regional assemblies for the Scots and the Welsh.

Well, golly gee. Now that brilliant plan has developed into full-on Scottish nationalism and a movement for Scottish independence. Be careful what you wish for.

So what did the Frankfurt School geniuses think they were doing? I imagine they thought they were building a global over/under coalition between the enlightened educated and Marxist avant-garde and the global under-privileged whoever and wherever they were. And this wave of the future would throttle the evil and oppressive rule of the international bourgeoisie.

Allow me to propose my own view against the world view of the educated ruling class of gentry liberals.

The global gentry liberal elite establishes and maintains its power by a cynical revival of pre-modern instincts in its "under" supporters, and it obstructs the "unders" from taking their rightful place in the middle class. Of course it does. When the working class worked its way up into the middle class it stopped voting for the parties of the left.

The whole panoply of administrative welfare state politics and government encourages people to identify as subordinate subjects, clients to a political patronage machine, grubbing for free stuff from a great lord. The subordinate subjects, in the limit case of the African Americans in the United States, end up as a dysfunctional under-class in some declining city where the women don't marry and the men don't work.

The science ought to be settled by now. The way to a meaningful life in the modern world is to climb out of the underclass by getting an education and getting a job. Then you abandon the culture of subordination and take on the armor of responsibility. You shuck off the culture of the people of the subordinate self and you join the people of the responsible self.

Now people of the responsible self are natural citizens of the nation state. They want to work and thrive in the market economy and they want to marry and have children and they want the state to protect them from enemies foreign and domestic that might interfere with their day-to-day work of wiving and thriving. They take pride in taking care of their own and they also extend their circle of caring to other people that need help because that's who they are.

The gentry liberal ruling class is at war with the people of the responsible self because the people of the responsible self want nothing from the political class except peace and security. They don't want free education; they'd rather buy their own and get the right education for their individual children. They don't want a state pension; they'd rather save their own money and retire when they want to rather than when the government wants them to. They don't want government health care; they'd rather pay for their own and get what they need, not what a cabal of political activists wants them to need. They don't want and army of experts regulating everything and "keeping us safe." They prefer to make their own mistakes and learn from them.

On this view you can see that the gentry liberal ruling class has done a pretty good job of marginalizing the people of the responsible self and riling up the tribal instincts of the people of the subordinate self. Nothing remarkable or scandalous about this. They are just following the logic of their political needs.

But the problem is the law of unintended consequences. Politics is division. The more politics, the more division, and for the gentry liberal ruling class politics is everything. We are now seeing the long term result of ruling class identity politics. The result is the breakup of nation states into smaller states, smaller states that cannot swing their weight in international affairs.

It's all very well to have a Scotland. But what happens if the Russian bear should come calling? It's all very well to encourage African Americans in racial pride; but what happens when a Detroit or a Baltimore self-destructs? It's all very well to encourage a Latino identity in Hispanic immigrants; but what happens if, say, California decides to secede.

Our liberal friends have the conceit that their superior intelligence and evolved culture makes them the natural cultural leaders and political authorities, and equal to every political challenge. Don't worry; they can handle the elements of their coalition of the fringes.

But suppose they can't? That's what the collapse of the Labour Party in Scotland suggests. Once the lordly liberal elite has taught the Scots or the Muslims how to organize and protest for their rights there is always the possibility that their students will strike out on their own and start their own activism schools.

And then what?

How Humans Can Cooperate Without Being Forced

I don't now why it is, but today there's an explosion of pieces on the virtues of capitalism.

First there is the excellent Kevin Williamson asking why the left is so firmly opposed to President Obama's (!) free-trade bill before Congress. The left these days is full of nostaglia for the glory days of the 1945-73 period, when growth was good and unions were strong. Look, Williamson writes, growth was good because the Second World War had destroyed so much. He quotes Ike's Cross of Iron speech:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

Well, lefties are all opposed to defense spending, although defense spending was up at 10% of GDP through most of the post-war period. They are opposed to military force, except to fight Fascists. But they are all in favor of force when it comes to competing with foreigners to serve the consumers.

The president's Trans-Pacific Partnership would liberalize trade between twelve Pacific nations (not China).

With the exception of those under White House discipline, progressives are almost uniformly hostile to TPP, as indeed the Left is generally hostile to all international trade deals. 

So what's their problem?

The Left wants to withdraw from international trade and detests globalization. Progressives lament an almost entirely mythical “race to the bottom” in global commerce. 

The Left seems to hate economic cooperation among nations, and is getting nasty about the Chinese.

The anti-capitalist progressives have made clear what they do not want: free trade, free exchange, nasty foreigners and their nasty cheap goods, international exchange with fewer bosses declaring who may buy and sell and under what conditions, etc. What is it they do want?

You can't have a rerun of the 1945-73 period without the prior destruction of war. So what is it that the Left really wants?

"Capitalism is cooperation," writes Williamson. And that theme is taken up by David Boaz celebrating F.A. Hayek's birthday.

When we see an orderly process, we naturally assume that someone has designed or planned it. Hayek says that we fail to distinguish between two kinds of orders: the "made" or planned order, such as a business firm or other limited organization, and the "grown" or spontaneous order, such as the whole society or market process.

It is The Fatal Conceit of the Left not to understand that the economy doesn't need a guiding hand. It needs rules; it needs a government to punish thieves and robbers: street and corporate. But not a gentry liberal class regulating and directing traffic.

The fatal conceit of intellectuals, [Hayek] said, is to think that smart people can design an economy or a society better than the apparently chaotic interactions of millions of people. Such intellectuals fail to realize how much they don’t know or how a market makes use of all the localized knowledge each of us possesses. 

As in Jonathan Gruber.

There's a lot of talk about "settled science" these days, although I thought that the whole question had been settled by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions forty years ago. Science is settled, as in "normal science," until it gets upset by a revolution, a change in paradigm. I'd say that settles it.

Now liberals talk a pretty good line about climate science being "settled". That's because they don't want to argue the science of climate and whether there really is catastrophic global warming that would need the moral equivalent of war, led by a general staff of gentry liberals, to correct.

On the other hand liberals are completely uninterested in the settled science of economics, that a government-run economy is a really unscientific, not to say unjust, not to say superstitious, way to go. Why? Oh I'd say that settled science says that a government-run economy is The Road to Serfdom. And we don't want that.

Look I get it. The Left's religion is that everything must be done by politics. The US's gentry liberal class wants to believe that we need "smart people" like them to organize our economy and society.

If politics is a really bad idea for organizing the economy then what will the Lefties do then, poor things? If "smart people" aren't needed to direct economic traffic or to lead the Army of Climate, then what will the gentry liberals do then poor things?

The modern era is unprecedented in this one weird way. We have developed knowledge that tells us that free exchange is the fundamental difference between humans and the rest of life on earth. We don't need alpha males ordering us around, telling us what to do. We just need alpha males to catch the malefactors and a community of women to shame the freeloaders.

Fix that one weird thing and humans will freely cooperate and flourish without the need for force.

Why Are We Helpless at the Feet of the New "Aristos"

Today there are a couple of pieces out about today's aristocracy. Or maybe we should say oligarchy. Or gentry liberals. Or just ruling class.

First, there's the excellent Kevin Williamson writing about the progressive need for the monster of "inequality" to fight. It's relatively easy to eradicate "absolute poverty." But relative poverty is a different matter. "Economic inequality... is never going away." Because it's like the SAT; it's automatically normed into a Bell curve.

The enduring nature of economic inequality may be a political blessing for progressives — it provides a perennial source of discontent — but it is a problem, too, for one very important but under-appreciated reason: The main sources of economic inequality are not matters of public policy.

 No problem. The progressives will make it a matter of public policy.

In a liberal society, some things are not political questions, but the Left, with its authoritarian mottos — “The personal is the political,” “If you’re not part of the solution, then you’re part of the problem,” etc. — is in its most fundamental assumptions the opposite of liberal: It is totalitarian.

Fighting inequality justifies the progressive lust for political power, its faith in political power. So it's never going to go away unless we People of the Responsible Self make it go away.

Now here's a Breitbart London guy, Jonathan Foreman, writing on British Election Day that it really doesn't matter who wins. The same Establishment will be in power. He's criticizing a book by a Guardian writer that assumes that the Establishment is very different from reality: "equal parts fantasy, ignorance and ideologically-motivated dishonesty."

It took no note of the way power in the UK long ago shifted away from landowning peers, bowler-wearing toffs and other targets of early 1960s satire and into the hands of a new establishment increasingly dominated by a metropolitan bourgeoisie whose attitudes and aspirations are not in the least deferential to the old upper classes and their way of life.

 If you really want to know who belongs in the Establishment here's how to do it.

All you have to do is identify those individuals whom our System rewards with sinecures and other unelected official positions that bring with them prestige, power and money. 

Many of those positions are to be found in "Quangos" (quasi-autonomous-non-governmental organizations), those 900-odd uniquely British, peculiar institutions that might have been designed to keep influence in the hands of the Right People.

 Hey! No big deal, right. How bad can those Quangos be? This bad: 

Quangos cost the taxpayer some £170 billion per year, employ almost a million people, and exercise vast power without democratic accountability. The few thousand people who run the “Quangocracy” are almost the very definition of an Establishment. Especially given the fact that once you’ve been appointed to a Quango, you’ve basically made it into the magic circle, and you’re in forever. Moreover, so long as you don’t break with Establishment mores or bien-pensant political codes, further boons in the form of more board memberships and leadership positions (some of them high-paying and influential) are likely to come your way.

What are we talking about here? We are talking about someone like a certain Suzi Leather: "Booker Prize judge, Chair of the British Council, President of SOAS, Chair of the Human Genetics Commission, Commissioner of the National Commission for Education."

We have a similar system here. We have all kinds of boards and commissions and research institutes that are staffed and led by the right kind of people. We have people at the highest levels of the mainstream media married to people with high positions in the Obama administration. Michael Barone came up with a name for these people: Gentry liberals.

Gentry liberals think that it's all perfectly normal to have their flagrant nepotism and conflicts of interest, although they'd be outraged if a Republican did that.

But it is a scandal that we conservatives and libertarians haven't completely de-legitimized these proud and conceited toffs.

In fact until we do knock them off their perch then our project of freedom and limited government and cities on a hill is going nowhere. Same goes for the chaps in Limey-land.

Maybe we shouldn't be too hard on ourselves. They didn't get the French Revolution until the old regime had really screwed up, running out of money and losing wars and stuff.

Above all, according to Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution, you need a rising class of people that are just feeling fit to be tied by the old regime, like the Puritans in Stuart England, the rebels in colonial British North America, and the philosophes in 18th century France.

In my view, what we need is a class of cultural and political leaders that can articulate the yearnings and the needs of the middle in the US and the UK. That middle would be the folk I call the People of the Responsible Self, responsible individuals that ask only to make a useful contribution to society, not to lord it over the masses.

Up to now in the modern era you have to tip the hat to the new ruling class, the People of the Creative Self, and their over-under coalition with the People of the Subordinate Self. Both the British Establishment and our gentry liberals have done a masterful job of assembling their coalition of the marginalized, people who genuinely were marginalized or could be taught to feel marginalized.

OK. That's the world we live it. The point is not to understand the world; the point is to change it.

Yeah. Why shouldn't conservatives read Marx?

"Mendacity is the System We Live In"

Remember Brick and Big Daddy arguing about "mendacity" in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof? The argument about Brick living a lie ends with Brick admitting that they had been lying about the results from the clinic and Big Daddy's abdominal pain.

Right now I'm in the middle of another pack of lies with the Brit comedy Season 4 Doc Martin. The Doc's lying to himself about his hemophobia, Louisa's lying to herself about her love for Martin, Al's been lying to Pauline, Aunt Joan about a car accident and a wealthy older couple about blindness. And as for the evil Edith, I suspect that something dishonest in her past will come out shortly. It ain't good to see our beloved characters wallowing in the mud.

So let's switch to something more palatable. The Clintons and their lying. As we conservatives know to our cost, the Clintons have been lying about things from Whitewater to emails -- for the last 25 years or so. They've been getting away with it because of the mainstream media, which likes to support their mendacious evasions with classic lines like "everybody lies about sex."

But maybe the Clintons are past their lie-by date, and the mainstream media just isn't that interested in covering for them too vigorously any more. Or maybe the Clintons look and feel too much like the dreadful 1%. Or maybe it isn't as charming when Hillary does it.

And that is to say nothing about the manure pile of lies that Democrats and liberals have piled up over the years for various tactical political reasons. You could start with the notion that Social Security is an insurance program. You could continue with the notion that the high incarceration of black males is due to institutional racism. You could stop, for the time being, with the idea that the Crash of 2008 was the fault of greedy bankers. We should stop right there before January 20, 2009 because we don't want to accuse President Obama of lying. That would be racist.

I suppose that every mature ruling class gets tangled up in its lies, just like Big Daddy and Brick, and the folks in the jolly old Cornish village of PortWenn. Ruling classes lie because they don't want to face up to the truth of their corrupt and incompetent rule, and their subjects put up with it because they don't want to give up their free stuff.

When you are in the opposition and support the "out" party you know -- because you long to -- that sooner or later the tissue of lies will break. But the tissue of lies usually is a lot stronger than you think. In fact it probably lasts until the ruling class runs out of other peoples' money. When the money runs out and the checks stop coming: that's when ordinary people get angry about politicians' lies.

Look, I'm no fool. I know that the bright and bushy tailed Republican presidential candidates are liars too. In particular they are careful not to tell Republican voters anything that they don't want to hear. They talk, for instance, about paying down the debt without actually getting into details, what the mainstream media calls "specifics." The jolliest game in politics is to get your opponent trapped into revealing specifics while you descant beautifully about Time for a Change.

But here's a fearless prediction. I think the biggest issue coming down the pike is going to be the enormous weight of state and local government employee pensions. Never mind about federal deficits; start worrying about your municipal bonds. What's been happening is that state and local governments have been pruning services in order to fund their underfunded defined-benefit pension plans. The solution, of course, is to move government employees off defined-benefit plans and onto defined-contribution plans, the way that corporate America did a generation ago.  But meanwhile the governments are papering over the problem with debt.

At some point, I'd guess, the voters are going to get really mad about the gigantic pensions that government employees get while the education for their children gets worse and worse. And states and big blue cities will start defaulting and going bankrupt. But that point is not yet. Because mendacity.

When Identity Politics Stops Being Fun and Games

On Thursday, May 7, the Brits go to the polls and it looks like nearly all the Scottish seats in the Westminster Parliament will go to the Scottish National Party.

That means that the 5 million Scots will almost certainly negotiate independence from Britain and go it alone.

How did this happen? How could Scotland decide that it would do better outside the United Kingdom after 400 years of union?

There is one simple answer. This is the fruits of the left's identity politics. It started with the class politics of the 19th century, and now it's about every kind of division that can be exploited by politicians.

It's one thing to do the class warfare thing, workers against the capitalists, but it's a bit different when you start encouraging any minority to present its grievances on the street or the ballot box. Where does it stop?

The problem is that humans naturally identify more strongly with local and blood ties. The nation state, a people joined together by language that appears to us to be the most natural thing in the world, is in fact a highly artificial construct. Humans are not naturally national; they are tribal. And tribes is what the left has encouraged ever since the Frankfurt School decided in the aftermath of World War I that pure class politics wasn't as powerful as tribal politics.

It all looked so cool back then. The world was full of marginalized peoples, and the left would advocate for them, for the fringes against the center.

There was one little problem with the idea. The left assumed that these fringes would always be conformable to leftist leadership. The left would encourage separatism and particularism, but when the evil right wing had been vanquished then the fringes would all unite under the avuncular wisdom of their left-wing leaders.

Only this week the Labour Party in Britain is finding out that the fringes might not coalesce under their size leadership. They might just decide to go it alone. Because tribalism. The Scots are still receptive to left-wing leadership. But they prefer a home-grown Scottish lefty leadership to the British kind. Who could have seen that coming?

Try Godwin's Law, and the H word. That chap had it figured out almost a century ago.

There's a reason why I keep hammering on the idea that "politics is division." It's true. The art of the politician is to divide the electorate so that 51 percent votes for him. But that's not the end of the matter.

The art of the statesman is to realize that after the divisiveness of the election campaign he must re-unite the nation. In the election, he will say, we are Democrats and Republicans. But after the election we are all Americans. You must be careful with the politics and the division. You never know where it may end up.

But then there is President Obama.

President Obama has operated in the opposite direction. He started out talking about unity and ended up the most divisive president in modern times. In 2004 and even in the election campaign of 2008 he was all about unity. Said he in 2004:

Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.

Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America.

(APPLAUSE)

There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America.

Pretty cool! But now it's all about "Bucket" and rolling over the opposition with executive orders and regulatory harassment, and ginning up riots in black urban ghettos.

Doesn't the president realize what he is doing with this divisiveness?

My guess is that he doesn't. Any more than the Brit Labour Party leaders realized what they were doing when they gave Scotland its own legislative assembly.

People believe what they believe. They think that their beliefs are the best beliefs going. They think they are on the side of the angels. Everyone is like that.

So nobody sees the downside; nobody sees the cracks forming in the ground; nobody feels the first tremors of an earthquake.

Then all of a sudden it's too late.

Corporal Al Sharpton, File-closer for the Regiment of Race

Those of you that have indulged in, e.g., the Napoleonic War era Richard Sharpe novels by Bernard Cornwell will know about file closers.

Armies of the era used to advance across the battlefield in line rather than in column. But of course as they advanced they would suffer casualties, individual soldiers that fell and left a gap in the line. The job of the file closer was to beat soldiers in the second rank of the line into the first rank, and thus "close" the file.

The necessity of keeping a solid line in battle goes all the way back to the ancient Greek hoplite soldiers, and forms the foundation of male honor, that you don't run away from your brother soldiers in line.

The way I understand the current spate of publicized police shootings is that the Democratic colonels are desperate to keep their rank and file in line. Democrats are getting hammered in congressional and state elections, and they must, they absolutely must keep their loyal base, especially the African American base, in line.

That's the job of file closers like Cpl. Al Sharpton, to help the colonels to keep the troops from breaking rank and creating a rout.

Because if the African Americans don't vote 90 percent for Democrats in 2016, or stay home because they are demoralized after the promise of the First Black President evaporated into despair, then the Democrats are toast.

But what about the unanticipated consequences of this race politics? What might middle-class blacks be thinking when three out of the six Baltimore police officers indicted last week are black, and one is a woman? What might other Democratic supporters think: Hispanics, Asians, single white women?

That's why I think that Democrats, despite their public confidence, are actually panicking. They are looking at the numbers on their polls and they don't like what they are seeing. They are trying to amp up the rage because without it they cannot get their supporters to the polls in 2016.

But the problem is that you can't keep people angried up for ever. That's the lesson that Crane Brinton draws from the aftermath of various revolutionary reigns of terror in his The Anatomy of Revolution. The reign of terror and virtue when everyone is mobilized against the national or class enemy breaks down after a while, in exhaustion. People can't work forever as machines; they need rest, recreation, laughter. They even need to misbehave. So eventually you get the "Thermidorean reaction," named after the month in which Robespierre was guillotined and France started returning to normal after the Reign of Terror.

In our democratic culture we formalize this process. The supporters of the "out" party -- Democrats in 2006-08 -- get pissed off at the corruption and stupidity of the "in" party; they eagerly embrace the candidate that offers Hope and Change, and surge out to the polls to turn the rascals out in a frenzy of righteous enthusiasm.

But now we are at the other pole of the process. Supporters of the Republicans are getting totally pissed off by the corruption and the illegality of the Obama administration and the intolerant arrogance of its social justice warrior supporters. They scan the horizon for candidates that offer them a feeling of hope and a chance to be proud of America again, someone who will get the economy moving again, stop the illegal executive orders and harassment of conservative groups, and stick it in the eye of the juvenile social justice warriors.

Meanwhile the Democrats have Cpl. Sharpton out trying to keep the wavering troops in line, and they are desperately trying to keep the race card going by saying that calling rioters "thugs" is as racist as calling blacks by the N-word.

But what happens if it doesn't work? What happens if Cpl. Sharpton can't keep the troops in line and/or the race-baiting turns the rest of America off?

That is simple. It would mean that instead of suffering a modest defeat in 2016, as you would expect after a two-term presidency, the Democrats will get clobbered, and we'll get the first landslide election since Ronald Reagan in 1984. (Bill Clinton in 1996 doesn't hit the 10% rule: he beat Bob Dole 49.2% to 40.7% in the popular vote.)

Stay tuned. More exciting coverage after these messages.

You Won't Believe How I Lowered my WSJ Digital Subscription!

Way back in the Dark Ages, in spring 2010, my Wall Street Journal digital subscription was $140 per year. But that was a mere two years after Rupert Murdoch had bought Dow Jones, the Journal's corporate owners, from the Bancroft family. Then the rate started going up.

In spring 2011 I paid $207 for a year's digital WSJ. Yikes!

In 2012, the Journal switched me to a monthly subscription, which I hated, at $17.29 per month, or $207 per year.

Then the billing boys went into a swoon and stopped charging me for months. I finally sent a letter to their back office in Chicopee, Massachusetts, begging them to bill me, and got a very nice email back from a Victoria Chin, who was trying to untangle back-office mess.

I completely agree that our technology needs work. This year, we began a migration of our customers from an old legacy database and fulfillment system to a brand new, more robust system. In the process, there was an error with your account that resulted in your credit card not being charged and the site being locked. 

I shoulda stayed in bed. When the Journal got its act together in November 2012 the monthly payment had gone up to $21.62 a month. That's $259 per year. Writing letters can cost you!

In September 2013 the rate went up to $22.99 a month. That's $276 per year.

In 2014 the rate went up to $24.99 a month. That's $300 per year. Whoa there, Rupert baby. You've just doubled my Journal subscription in four years!

But then, yesterday, I got an email from the Journal asking me to update my credit card information. It turned out to be an error, but it reminded me that my credit card information was out of date. I got online but couldn't get onto the payment information page. So I thought: Bucket, just like President Obama, and called up the 800 number to cancel my subscription.

But then, unlike the president, I cooled off a little, and decided that I'd continue if the Journal would crawl on their knees and cut my subscription rate.

And it turned out they would! So now I'm signed up for $14.50 per month, a manageable $174 per year.

Yay! But no doubt the rate will go back up, because I suspect that the $14.50 rate is a special limited-time offer available only to disgruntled old geezers and members of the Murdoch family.

And then we'll see.

Look, I love The Wall Street Journal, and got my start as a twenty-something in the 1970s, reading for the first time about Hayek and Mises, learning for the first time about Austrian economics and roads to serfdom.

In the late 1970s the edit page under Bob Bartley was the place to be. You got chaps like Irving Kristol on the Board of Contributors and you got Bob Bartley's wild young men like Jude Wanniski, and the famous meeting at Michael 1 restaurant in New York City where Bartley and Wanniski met with Art Laffer and Bob Mundell to cook up the Laffer Curve. What fun! Bartley stayed on as edit page editor until 2002, and then died of cancer in late 2003 at age 66.

Since the death of Bob Bartley the Journal edit page has been led by Paul Gigot. Paul's a great guy, but you don't get the excitement of the old Bob Bartley days. I wonder if that's because Paul Gigot spends a lot of time on TV. You just can't be changing the world on the edit page and presiding as a talking head on PBS at the same time. And where are the consummate intellectuals like Kristol? Where are the wild men like Wanniski?

Maybe that's the way it's supposed to be. Maybe what we have instead, with a whole universe of conservative thought sparking away, is progress.

And really, you couldn't hope for a better political setup than right now.

First, you have a Democratic president that has utterly failed to deliver on the promise of ending the race problem and the partisan divide. And he's failed to fix the economy.

Second, you have no less than three top-notch young GOP presidential candidates -- Walker, Cruz, and Rubio -- vying for the crown dropped nearly 30 years ago by the sainted Reagan.

Meanwhile, I'm still a subscriber of the Wall Street Journal. Until the next time they treat me like a rack-rented Irish peasant in a Trollope novel.

Then I'll show 'em!