The Question of Neo-feudalism

If you go to Wikipedia's entry on neo-feudalism, you get the center-left ruling class's take on the concept. For them neo-feudalism means the privatization of governance, in big corporations. From the right it seems to be a way of critiquing the welfare state and social democracy.

But I want to think of neo-feudalism not as something imposed by a political or economic elite, but as something freely chosen by modern people.

I take as my text Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877. In it he discusses the experience of the recently freed slaves in the mid 1860s.

For [the adjustment to a new social order] required the abandonment of some traditions inherited from slavery and the adaptation of others to the logic of the economic market, where the impersonal laws of supply and demand and the balance of power between employer and employee, rather than custom, justice, or personal dependency, determines a laborer's material circumstances. (p.106)

Many slaves refused to work for big plantations after getting freedom; others were outraged that they would have to find their own food.

We all, from left and right, use the word "feudalism" as a pejorative. From the left it is thrown at corporations and globalization; from the right it is thrown at big government and entitlements.

But I want to use the word in a different sense. I think that most of us choose to live in dependency. For instance, the Bureau of Labor Statistics table of employed persons for 2014 shows 135 million wage and salary workers and only 8.6 million self-employed unincorporated workers. OK, so there are 23 million people in "management, business, and financial operations occupations," presumably including everyone from CEOs of mega-corporations down to the president of B&B Drywall and mid-level corporate bureaucrats.

I am trying to say that most of us reject a life directly exposed to "the impersonal laws of supply and demand." We choose to work for a boss as an employee, meaning that we let the boss deal with the day-to-day risks of supply and demand in return for a regular paycheck. And then we complain if he makes a killing, or if we get laid off because our "non-negotiable demands" have bankrupted his firm.

For many of us, even the risks of working for a small company and its exposure to the impersonal market are too much. We look for employment in a big corporation or a government where the impersonal laws of the market are far away, and insured against by seniority rules, grievance procedures and a pot-pourri of benefits and pensions.

Obviously there are many kinds of people in the world. Some are adventurers and seek out risk and difficulty. Others seek out a comfortable billet from which they can never be fired.

The problem is that neither the risk-taker nor the risk-avoider truly face reality. The risk-taker will fall back on relatives or the bankruptcy laws if his plans go awry. And the risk-avoider is never willing to pay the real cost of allocating all risks to his employer or his local politician. So we have highly-leveraged bankers and hedge-fund operators looking for a bailout during a financial meltdown. And we have government pensioners outraged by "austerity" and oblivious to the fact that their demands end up bankrupting the nation when the government runs out of other peoples' money.

So what's the solution? It's perfectly simple. We reduce the incidence of force. If the risk-taker gets in trouble we help him because he's a human just like the rest of us. If the risk-avoider gets laid off because his employer has been asleep for the last 50 years we help him too. Because he's human and we are too.

But I don't believe we want to encourage people to believe they have a right to assistance, enforceable by government enforcement officers. That way is the law of the jungle, not the kindly assistance of neighbors and friends.

Whose Side is Trump On?

Did you know that Donald Trump is a friend of the Clintons, and has contributed to their campaigns? I didn't either.

I say that because when Jonah Goldberg complains that Donald Trump is turning Hispanics away from the GOP with his crude complaint that Mexico is sending criminals and rapists to the US, maybe that's the point.

Maybe the supposedly Republican Trump, the pal of the Clintons, is doing a bit of double-agent work.

I say this because it is still remarkable to me how the independent campaign of Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996 helped elect Bill Clinton. We know that Ross Perot hated the Bushes; maybe that's all there was to his campaign. Maybe.

The thing about Hillary Clinton is that she's not very imaginative. (Oh, you've noticed!) So you wouldn't be surprised to see her trying to reprise the techniques of 1992 when she and Bill were young.

You never know. With Hillary Clinton's luck, Donald Trump might turn out to be a net plus for the Republicans.

Look at it this way. No sooner had Trump damned all immigrants than an illegal immigrant felon, released from custody in the sanctuary city of San Francisco, killed a nice middle-class white woman on the tourist waterfront. (A "sanctuary city" is a liberal enclave that arrogates to itself the right not to obey federal immigration law. Do not try this if you are a Christian bakery.)

So that allows Republican presidential candidates to say that they utterly reject the racist sexist nativist rhetoric of Donald Trump. But they also declare that it is time for liberals in their precious gentry liberal enclaves to start obeying immigration law before more innocent middle-class white women tourists are shot down in cold blood.

After all, the whole point of politics is to turn lemons into lemonade.

So, to you folks panicking that Trump is throwing away the Latino vote, and to you Democrats that think that Trump will hand the 2016 election to Hillary, I say: hold your horses.

Let's just say that Donald Trump is a bull in a china shop. And there is no telling whose precious china he will smash.

The Grecian Formula for Game Theory

It is said by Jeremy Bulow and Kenneth Rogoff in the Wall Street Journal that the Greek "Yanis Varoufakis, who was pushed out as finance minister on Monday, prided himself on using game theory in his negotiations." Could be.

But game theory also includes the Prisoner's Dilemma. In a repeated game the Prisoner's Dilemma shows that in a long-term relationship it always pays to be trustworthy. But in a final transaction with another party it always pays to cheat.

So I get what the national socialist leaders of Greece's Syriza Party are doing. They are doubling down, playing double or quits. They are playing the final game where it pays to cheat. Because it is not their money that they are playing with.

They are playing the 150 year old game of the left: pay up or we will teach you a lesson.

And France's socialist President Hollande and the lefty Spanish party Podemos, and Italian Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement are all agreed that the EU (i.e., the Germans) should pay up and keep the Greek pension checks coming.

But I am interested in my own game theory, that every government is an armed minority in some territory that supports itself by rewarding its supporters with taxes on the work and wealth of the people in its sovereign territory.

The corollary of my theory is that you must think of the government and its supporters as an army on the march. Never mind about the battles: the first priority of the generals of the army must be to keep its soldiers fed and clothed. Because once the food gives out and the boots fall apart then the army will collapse and the generals won't have an army any more.

Now you understand what the July 5 Greek referendum was about. It was held to rally the troops one more time, to get them to forget for a week that they are running out of food and medicines, to keep the Syriza army in being for one more week so that the Greek government could keep up its rhetoric and keep threatening the EU and its bureaucrats.

The other lefty European parties have chimed in because that's their game too. To keep marchn' and protestin' in the faith that disruption will shake out new benefits from the political system. For now.

I use these metaphors for a reason: to demonstrate the cruelty and injustice of the left's politics. They use their supporters like soldiers in the armies of old, when poor villagers went for a soldier because they were starving. They use them for their power games, but in the end they leave them to die by the side of the road, sick and starving, as the generals of armies have ever done.

Once you accept the government's free stuff you are starting on the road that leads to Greece. You are placing a life bet that the government's checks will keep coming. But the trouble is that you are placing a bet like the starving yokel of the 18th century. You are forsaking the chance to become self-supporting with work and service, and marching down the road to nowhere, hoping that the government's commissary keeps the food coming.

In the aftermath of the July 5 referendum the Greeks were laughing and chanting in the streets. For what? That they were brilliantly manipulated by their leaders for one more week?

In the end, such leaders end up like Robespierre, sent to the guillotine and reviled as the "dirty Maximum."

Next Up: Greek Limbo

All of us peasants just want the Greeks to be kicked out of the Euro so we can get on with our lives. But James Delingpole doesn't think so. Because, as was true of the Soviet Union, you are not allowed to leave the Euro or the EU.

That's because "we" are the Ruling Class of educated experts and "we" will decide when it's time to go.

The annoying thing about Syriza and the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is that they know exactly how to play against the educated ruling class. They would, since they are part of it. Educated lefty experts.

Incidentally, why aren't people calling them "fascists?" They are blaming foreigners and Jews. They have a "stab in the back" myth. And they seem to think that they can do anything they like to the economy. Let's see. A socialist is a lefty pushing class warfare. A fascist is a lefty pushing race warfare. A progressive is a lefty pushing identity politics warfare.

Let's look at all this through my microscopical lens. In which any government is an armed minority occupying some territory and using the usufruct (the right to enjoy the use and advantages of another's property short of the destruction or waste of its substance) of the people that live there to reward its supporters.

Oh, maybe "usufruct" is too tame a word, since what governments typically do is use the peoples' property and destroy it as well.

The way this racket works in the modern age is that politicians bidding for power offer potential supporters benefits and pensions. They they win. Then they enact pensions for their supporters. Then they run out of other peoples' money. Then the fun begins.

The fun in the Greek case is that the Greek governments have been playing the game perfectly for 20 years. They entered the EU on a lie, but a lie that perfectly aligned with the needs of the politicians, to offer their voters more benefits. Then in 2009 the whole thing went belly up. But not completely, because Greece was able to take advantage of the EU ruling class's need to keep Greece in the EU. They could continue their unsustainable pensions by borrowing more money from the EU ruling class.

How unsustainable? Rich Galen has the numbers:

According to Eurostat, the EU statistical arm, Greece leads the EU in percentage of GDP that goes to pay pensions: 17.5 percent. Although we think that every dollar we earn is going toward someone's pension in the U.S. that number is about 6.8 percent of GDP.

The thing to remember is that the Greek leaders are not in the same boat as the Greek voters. They don't care if the pensions can't be paid. They'll find some other gig somewhere. And meanwhile they are having the time of their lives winning elections, running plebiscites, tweaking the noses of the rich uncles in Frankfurt, Berlin, and Brussels. Emile Zola already had that figured out over a century ago in Germinal. Community organizer, name of Etienne, comes into town, organizes the striking miners, leads them to sabotage the mines, then skips town as the miners face starvation.

And the same goes for the politicians and bureaucrats running the EU (and the US). They don't care about you and me. It's not their money. Their pals will give them a gig, somewhere, somehow. And if they don't it was all great while it lasted. Power is the great aphrodisiac, said Henry Kissinger.

And the band plays on.

Wake Me When It's Over

We've seen this all before. It was back in the 1960s that the Democrats got a big presidential win and passed a bunch of big-government programs. And the left figured that they were going to take over. There were the hippies and the New Left and Cloward-Piven. The hippies were going to make love, not war. The New Left, inspired by Frankfurt School acolyte and One Dimensional Man Herbert Marcuse were going to transform politics, and Profs Cloward and Piven were going to overthrow the establishment with street action.

Well, they got their Medicare and Medicaid forever, and hippiedom too. And they successfully moved the center of gravity of left-wing politics from class to identity. But Cloward and Piven failed to crash the system.

And most of all the average American just wanted to live a middle-class life in peace. This was symbolized by Ben Wattenberg's 47-year-old housewife from Dayton, Ohio in his book The Real Majority. The theme was taken up by Richard Nixon and his Vice-President Agnew who talked about the "silent majority" that hadn't been yelling its head off during the Sixties.

And so we got a conservative revolution and Ronald Reagan and a 20 year economic boom.

Evidently liberals have interpreted the Obama victory of 2008 as a call for a new Sixties and a new lurch to the left, even though the result has been the most Republican Congress in almost a century.

Of course, after the Supreme Court decisions on Obamacare and gay marriage it looks like the liberals were right. But I have a feeling that they are going to be radically, embarrassingly wrong.

The thing is that we don't know, we can't know, because liberals have forbidden anyone to disagree with them.

But the question is: can we roll back the Obamacare entitlement? Everyone knows that once you give people an entitlement they will resist reform until the place goes Greece. But we must remember that Obamacare was not like Medicare and Social Security which gave the broad middle class something they had never had before. The average American already has health insurance and the average American is pretty upset that Obamacare has messed with their health insurance. Also, I suspect that the folks getting the Obamacare subsidies are pretty upset and confused right now.

As for the social issues like gay marriage: In my view the decisive demographic in all social issues is women: middle-aged women, just like Ben Wattenberg discovered in the 1960s. That's because things like abortion and marriage are central to women's lives. In the end it doesn't matter what the ruling class -- or men -- wants on social issues. What matters is what women want.

It turned out, after Roe v. Wade, that women do not want unrestricted abortion as the high-class feminists wanted. That's because for the average woman, child-bearing is central to her life. Not so much for elite women. There's a similar aspect to gay marriage. Lots of elite people are gay or know someone who is gay. Down in the trenches, not so much. And marriage is central to the life of a middle-class woman.

As you know, I look at the world through the filter of my three peoples model: people of the creative self, people of the responsible self, and people of the subordinate self. Because of the influence of the people of the creative self we all get the impression that everyone agrees with their current enthusiasm. In all the fuss and feathers of elite-class enthusiasm it takes a long time for the influence of the people of the responsible self to be heard.

I was out to dinner last night with Lady Marjorie and her mother and her niece at Ray's Boathouse in Seattle: the last night before the Fourth of July holiday weekend. We were at a table for five, but nearby were several middle-aged middle-class couples out on date night sitting together in booths that looked out on a sun-drenched Puget Sound. It was touching to see the satisfaction of the wives to be out to dinner with their husbands. They looked, from moment to moment, at their husbands with gentle married love. From time to time they would gently put an arm around their husbands.

What do people like that think about things in Obama's America? That's what I want to know.

The Unanticipated Consequences of High Deductible Obamacare

The big takeaway on Obamacare is the mindless ruling-class faith in bureaucracy and regulations. Set up an administrative system, the Obamateers seems to think, and equitable benefits will result.

Of course that is pure fantasy. What really happens when a government sets up an entitlement system is that people learn how to game it. Like welfare. Like Medicare. And the costs spiral out of sight.

You dangle a bunch of free stuff in front of the voters and then hide the costs in Medigaps and do-nut holes. But it still costs an arm and a leg.

That's why I was really surprised by the Bronze-Silver-Gold metallic system for Obamacare. To get the only affordable plans you need to go for the Bronze plan. But the Bronze plan typically has eye-wateringly high deductibles. To get rid of the deductibles you have to go for the Gold. But the Gold plan has eye-wateringly high premiums.

In the high-deductible plans that big corporations have implemented to control costs they typically sweeten the pot with Health Savings Accounts so you can pay for your deductibles. In Obamacare they sweeten the pot with subsidies on your premiums. And reports indicate that Obamacare subsidy customers are getting blown away both by the premiums and the deductibles, so that they don't pay their premiums and don't go to the doctor.

The high-net-worth Jonathan Grubers of the world that designed Obamacare should have taken a look at the mini-med plans that corporations offer to their low-wage workers. These plans typically offer co-pays for routine medical expenses. They don't offer real insurance coverage against big bills.

Hey, Prof. Gruber. The low-wage workers don't need traditional heath insurance policies because they don't have a high net worth to protect from unexpected health care costs. And that probably goes for all the people that qualify for Obamacare subsidies.

People without high net worth can get health care and then declare bankruptcy when the going gets tough.

I don't know how smart the Republicans are. But they might think about exploiting this minor little flaw in Obamacare. Or not.

But the Wall Street Journal has come out with an article about the impact of the high-deductible Obamacare plans. David Goldhill and Paul Howard write:

As millions of Americans move onto high-deductible plans, they will change their behavior—and the incentives of the market. Under these plans, in a typical year consumers will pay most, if not all, of their health-care expenses out of pocket. Since they will be spending their own money, they will compare prices for checkups and procedures. Providers will have to earn their business on the basis of quality, price and service, the way companies do in the other four-fifths of the U.S. economy. Competition has the potential to transform America’s sclerotic, overpriced health-care system into something much more transparent and affordable.

You wonder: did the Obamateers really understand that? They don't seem to like it. That's the point of the current "underinsured" campaign that is starting to hit the media. Many Democratic voters are perplexed at having to pay for any health care out-of-pocket.

But for Goldhill and Howard this unanticipated consequence of Obamacare is an unexpected opportunity. We market fundamentalists understand that the only way that we can get the health care system to respond to consumer needs is to irradiate it with the cleansing rays of market prices. Imagine if the Obamateers accidentally wrote a bill and after we found out what was in it we discovered that it would beat the special health care interests into line and force them to deliver what the customer needs and wants at a price the customer is willing to pay.

Imagine that.

Ban Polygamy Now!

The slippery slope argument against gay marriage was that, next, we'll see the social justice warriors insisting upon "polyamory," or polygamy. And of course, no sooner had Justice Kennedy imposed gay marriage on America than the push for polygamy began.

(By the way, I voted for gay marriage in Washington State Referendum 74 which passed 53.7% to 46.3% in 2012, but I still think it's stupid.)

In The American Spectator today Scott McKay proposes, among other things, that Republican candidates should "Push a constitutional amendment to ban polygamy, and demand the Democrat nominee join you in making it happen."

I couldn't agree more. You only have to watch Raise the Red Lantern to realized what a bad idea polygamy is. If nothing else each wife is fighting with the other wives to get hubby into her bedroom so that she can get pregnant and raise her status. It doesn't seem like #LoveWins there.

Oh well. As Doc Martin says, I don't see why everyone has to be happy.

The real problem with polygamy is that it cuts low-status males out of the marriage market. As my daughter Beatriz Williams writes in her Tiny Little Thing, the attitude of women towards husbands is "why not the best?" Perfectly natural and physical. But when high-status men grab all the girls for themselves, guess who gets left standing when the music stops in the game of musical chairs?

Polygamy is profoundly inegalitarian. Monogamy, on the other hand, is profoundly egalitarian. Monogamy gives the lower-status man a chance at love and marriage and children. Polygamy, not so much.

But wait! Don't liberals looove the poor and the marginalized? How could they advocate policy that bears down so cruelly on the poor?

In that case liberals would hate the welfare state. As Charles Murray writes in Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010 the administrative welfare state of the liberals has turned low-income America into a no mans land of dysfunction where the men don't work and the women don't marry.

Why don't liberals do something about the horrors of the welfare state? Because liberals care about themselves: their power and their class interests. When it comes to the poor, liberals only care about their votes. Family destruction in the inner city is no skin off liberal noses. Those voters keep voting for their benefits, so they must be happy with their liberal political leaders.

But why are liberals so bent on sexual libertinism?

Liberals are the people of the creative self. One of the easiest ways to get creative is on the sexual front. It doesn't take any effort, doesn't take any years of training. You just follow your bliss. And there's always parents to bail you out of trouble.

Also liberals are culturally and politically opposed to the people of the responsible self and their bourgeois notions about cultural matters.

Of course today liberals will swear on a stack of constitutions that they would never vote for polygamy, just as Candidate Obama in 2008 found that his faith prevented him from proposing gay marriage.

OK, writes Scott McKay. Let's call the liberals' bluff on polygamy. Let's ask them to vote for an anti-polygamy Constitutional Amendment and see what happens.