What CAN We Do When Things Go South?

Everyone is writing about the poor bloody white working class this week. Including me at the American Thinker, where I blame liberals, and Victor Davis Hanson, who writes about how his bright white students couldn't get into elite colleges. I argue that liberalism, with its welfare, anti-marriage, pro-abortion, anti-responsibility agenda, couldn't have been better designed to demoralize cultural groups and remove them from an "overpopulated" world.

So women, minorities and the exquisitely insultable student activists at the university are next.

All this is very poignant to me after reading Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation where he makes the argument that the working class very sensibly pushed for "social protection" from the brutal market system and its commodification of land, labor, and money.

Year Zero for Karl Polanyi is the Elizabethan Poor Law in which the government acted to protect the poor that had been hurled off the land by enclosures and the agricultural revolution.

Only I am reading Marriage and the Family in the Middle Ages by Frances and Joseph Gies. It paints a rather deeper and more nuanced picture of life in Europe before the agricultural revolution.

In the first place, despite the attempt with primogeniture to keep aristocratic families dominant forever, even the best families never flourished for more than a century. Death, political shenanigans, and bad luck all acted to change the guard at the top. The same thing happened, to a lesser degree, lower down the social scale. And simply put, people without land or without a city occupation didn't marry and have children. They still hung around their family but they got exiled to Outer Slobbovia as swineherds or something. Karl Polanyi suggests the idea of a free-floating proletariat. But nobody lived in those days except in the context of a family.

Secondly, the Gieses write that already in the 15th century people were working for wages on the farm. It's difficult to be sure, but I get the impression that, for a lot of people, it was better to work for wages as an agricultural laborer, man or woman, than to have to deal with the risk and uncertainty of land ownership. This gives the lie to Polanyi's suggestion that wage labor was an invention of greedy capitalists in order to reduce labor to a market relation rather than the organic way in which people wrested their living from the soil. On the contrary, it seems more likely that then as now many, if not most, people liked the simplicity and risk avoidance of wage labor. You do your work and you get paid. Period.

Thirdly, I have come to understand the whole social protection idea as a recipe for disaster. The whole idea of modern social democratic politics is to shield the worker from the horrors of the naked marketplace, and provide a decent work and home environment for people that would otherwise be ruthlessly exploited. But the contrary argument is that this protection makes the worker singularly ill-prepared for any adversity. If you have spent your entire life just picking up a paycheck and letting your union leader do all the fighting, and let the government take care of your old age pension and healthcare, what happens if the music stops and the social protection system breaks down? What happens is that you suddenly discover that you don't have the minimum skills you need to survive in the turmoil of change.

The truth is that no matter what happens to you and me, the world carries on. The Gieses write about how that happened even in the aftermath of the Black Death in 1349 and thereafter. They quote from the heartbroken letters of people experiencing the death of all their loved ones. But then they look at manorial court records and discover that the abandoned farms and houses were pretty quickly taken up by relatives of the deceased. And life went on almost as if nothing had happened.

So here we are looking at the collapse of the good old white working class, wringing our hands about their pathologies and their early deaths. But the truth is that tomorrow nobody will care. Things may have gone south for the white working class, but the world carries on.

So if you want to wive and thrive in the world, you'd better not be tempted by any of that free stuff. The way to survival is to have survival skills, and make sure that you are one of the survivors.

Everything is Pointing to "Time for a Change"

There is a reason why every election is either Four More Years or Time For a Change. It is encapsulated in Kevin D. Williamson's catchphrase that Politics is Violence.

When you look at what politicians and political activists do, it all comes down to violence, or as the protagonist in the Brit House of Cards, says: "I put a bit of stick about." That's the point. When activists get the President of a Missouri university to resign that's not mild advocating for peoples' rights. That's a power play; that's intimidation; that's the threat of violence.

But the thing about power is that it works two ways. In the doer, it performs the operation that "good sherries sack" performs on Sir John Falstaff: "It ascends me into the brain; / dries me there all the foolish and dull and curdy /vapours which environ it." Or, in short, power is the best aphrodisiac.

The other thing about power is the effect it has on the recipients: They hate it. That is why, after a few years of a president from the A party, a majority of people decide that they have had enough and that it is Time for a Changen and a dose of the B party.

In my view, we are probably experiencing in this political cycle a Time For a Change election that we haven't seen in my lifetime. Because for anyone that isn't a card-carrying liberal, these are the worst of times, with the public square filled with the most revolting liberal activists that turn your stomach with their hatred, their hypocrisy and their power to ruin your life. And that is to say nothing of the utter folly of Obamacare and the sluggish economy.

In addition, President Obama seems to be loading the barrel with dynamite. The issues that he's put off, for the obvious reason that only his extreme liberal base wants them, issues like the closure of Guantanamo and the Keystone XL pipeline,those are issues he's suddenly decided to push.

The reason that he's prevaricated on them is a simple one. They are the kind of issue that inflame the Republican base and that your average wet-noodle moderate doesn't like either. So why poison the well for Hillary Clinton on this? You tell me. The president's reasons for cancelling the Keystone pipeline are laughable on their face. We don't need the jobs, apparently, because the economy is doing OK. We don't need the pipeline because energy prices are down and we don't really need them lower. Really, Mr President. Any Republican president coming up with reasons like that would get roundly humiliated.

The point about Bill Clinton was that, liberal as he was, he was a brilliant politician and knew where to position himself somewhere just short of enraging the opposition. Barack Obama was careful enough in his election and reelection not to get too liberal. But now that he's off the leash, well, he's off the leash.

I expect that in future years we will use the example of President Obama sending his southern army group into the Caucasus as an example of stunning strategic overreach. But that time is not yet.

But it is Time for a Change. And how.

Perhaps the Wages of Liberalism is Cultural Death

I've been having something of an epiphany in the last couple of weeks, ever since reading Karl Polanyi's Great Transformation and running at the same time into Kevin D. Williamson's report on the Tudor war on the castles in his The End is Near.

Karl Polanyi dresses up in rather fine livery the left's central argument that the working class were cruelly treated in the heyday of capitalism in the early to mid 1800s owing to a cavalier rejection of an age-old social consensus that provided for the poor. In response to the cruel capitalist industrial revolution the workers naturally pushed for "social protection" against the ravages of the market and its commodification of their labor with market wages and the ruthless proposition that they work or starve.

This is all part of the left's standard narrative, arguing that the Manchester liberals cruelly broke up the old Poor Law that had protected the poor in England ever since the Tudors.

Kevin Williamson reports indirectly in The End is Near how the Tudor Poor Law came to be. In my view he rather damages the narrative about the old social compact. The Tudors, he relates, were engaged upon a project to build their monarchial power in a nation state. To do that they had to crush the power of the barons. We are talking about the powerful families that we've grown to know and love that appear in Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays: marcher lords of the north like the Percies; the Dukes of Buckingham, Earls of Worcester, and so on. The Tudors disarmed these folk and disbanded their private armies. And they demolished their castles. Thus ended the great age of medieval castles and also the end of the heyday of primogeniture in the nobility. It was the immense power of the castle, according to Frances and Joseph Gies in Marriage and Family in the Middle Ages, that induced the nobility of Europe to concentrate family power in the eldest son and the family castle.

But this is what occurred to me. Once the nobles were stripped of their castles and their private armies, who needed the useless mouths of peasants? Now the noble families would express their power through money: money for grand houses in the capital city, and money to influence and persuade.

Now exactly at the same time we experience the agricultural revolution: its enclosures, its sheep farming its drainage and improvements. The result of the revolution was to maximize the income from the noble or the gentry estate. They kicked out the peasants from their customary subservience that was useful to the lord only when he needed the peasants to form his army. The Tudors, naturally, were left holding the baby. Eventually, as governments will, they decided to "do something" about the poor, with the Poor Law and the Statute of Artificers.

So, on this view, the whole history of the Poor Law is not about a caring and humane society, but just politicians trying to patch up the latest disaster. The poor in the reign of Elizabeth I were a problem for the government, so the government "did something" to try and make it go away. It didn't go away, not until the industrial revolution 200 years after the Tudor bid for national, central power.

So now I am looking at the latest flap about the white working class, publicized in The Atlantic, about how the working class are dying off from alcoholism and drug dependency, and I am thinking that to the regime the working class, like the "useless retainers" of agricultural England, are just an embarrassment. Back in the 19th century the working class were useful soldiers to deploy in the political battles of the day, one in which the old landowners could stick one in the eye of the parvenu factory owners and capitalists and join with the socialists that were engaged in their own bid for political power.

Now that the working class doesn't enter into anyone's political calculations, what with the votes of blacks and women and Hispanics and gays being more useful to America's party of the left, the Democratic Pary, the white working class is toast. And since they have spent the last century sucking off the teat of government as little darlings of the liberals, they lack the fighting spirit that you need to make a difference in war and politics.

We sentimental conservatives have nurtured a daydream that one day the white working class would get a clue and join the Republican Party. But, writing over the weekend about the decline of the working class I suddenly had a thought. What if they don't hit bottom? What if they just subside deeper and deeper into despair and alcohol. What if they just keep going on down?

We don't like to think about it, but the truth is that it's the way of the world. They say that languages and cultures are disappearing every day. Here in Australia we just had a day with a tour guide, Bridget, who's an Australian indigenous. But she is living with a "white fellah." Bridget makes her living being a professional indigenous, telling us about how her grandmother was abducted from her parents and taken to a mission to be raised by the cruel nuns.

But Bridget is living with a white fellah, and you can see where that leads. Right now, she says, 78 percent of indigenous in Australia live in urban areas.

You can emote all day about the noble working class and the authentic indigenous experience. But the world is living in cities and people are offering their labor on the labor market. Liberals have told the working class and the indigenous that they are special people and have been cruelly treated and they care about them.

No doubt. But the only way to wive and thrive in the world today is to learn how to live and work in the market economy and make your peace with it. Anything else -- from the liberal politics of class to the liberal politics of race or the liberal politics of gender -- is liberal flim-flam, and the wages of liberal flim-flam is personal extinction, which is a lot different from the hard, but bearable, cultural separation from pre-industrial culture as you move and adjust to the city.

Like I say in my American Thinker piece this week, liberal politics encourages extinction. Liberal welfare encourages people not to work; liberal sexual revolution encourages people not to marry; liberal abortion encourages people not to have children. And the stirring up of grievance, like with the Black Lives Matter folks, funded in part by George Soros, encourages people not to be responsible. When you look at liberal politics that way you have to wonder: is all this deliberate? Are liberals actually trying to extinguish their political clients?

I have to believe that liberals are not evil, just stupid. The alternative is unthinkable.

Working Class Angst: The False God of Politics

In the same week that The Atlantic published scary numbers about white working class collapse in the US a Brit feminist got herself all over the media sneering about a British male MP worrying about boys in Britain.

And so it goes. A couple of years ago Charles Murray warned in Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010 that the bottom 30 percent of white Americans were not doing well. The men don't work much and the women don't marry much. Liberals ignored Murray, as they have done since The Bell Curve that told uncomfortable stories about race and IQ.

So this new factoid from The Atlantic fits into my big theory about the Fall of the White Working Class.

The problem started when the working class got seduced by the Educated Youth of the 19th century. As in most cases where some poor working girl got into the wrong company, and allowed herself to imagine that the rich boy liked her for her mind, it all was bound to end in tears.

Looking back, you could say that the writing was on the wall from the moment in the 1970s that liberals started to sneer at the white working class with All in the Family and Archie Bunker. The Brits also had sneering TV sitcoms in that era, notably Steptoe and Son.

There was, it seems to be, a certain tactical cunning in the demonization of Archie Bunker.

Think about it. As the liberals pirouetted elegantly from their Dance of the Exploited Working Stiff to their Dance of the Oppressed Minority, not to mention the Dance of the Patronized Feminist, it made common sense to blame the poor bloody working class for their racism and bigotry. Because when Affirmative Action came along, it was working-class whites that had to pay the bill. With expanded welfare it was working-class dads that would be cast into outer darkness. And when the Stonewall Inn production number debuted, it was a natural to stigmatize the simplistic morality of lower-class whites in the campaign to make the world safe for gay wedding cakes.

Back in 1800, George Eliot taught us, the rising yeomen of England -- chaps like Adam Bede and his incandescent love interest, the Methodist lay preacher, Dinah Morris -- wived and thrived in the challenge of industrial revolution on the rock of their Methodist faith and their sterling character. And when Eliot got to Middlemarch and the Reform Bill, she gave us Mary Garth as the working girl with a character of diamond.

In other words, these ordinary working folk that rode the wave of the industrial revolution did not rely on the honeyed words of upper-class liberals. They were grounded by their religious faith and their sterling character, and that is what sustained them through the turmoil of the age.

But the working-class generations that followed them listened to the liberals. Let us use our political power and savvy, these rich kids said, and we will give you benefits. Why not? It was free, after all.

And for a season, it all worked so wonderfully well. As liberals like to remind themselves repeatedly: back in the 1950s good liberal policies delivered good jobs at good wages. And then in 1973 the music stopped. The Big Corporation/Big Labor/Big Government condominium started to crack.

It doesn't really matter what went wrong. Maybe it was the whole idea that government could successfully intervene between employer and employee. Maybe the whole industrial manufacturing paradigm changed. Maybe the world was sucked into a maelstrom of low-cost production and low-cost labor. Maybe dreaded H-1B visas and illegal immigration killed the full-time job at good wages and good benefits.

The point is that by then the liberal rich kids had tired of their working-class mistresses. They were in love with blacks and women. The working class was fat. And old.

What was the working class to do? It had put all its marbles in the welfare state basket. Well, now we know what it did, thanks to The Atlantic and Nobel laureate Angus Deaton. It took to drink. And opoids. And started to die off.

But don't worry, working class. Recent polls indicate that women, last-but-one main squeeze of the liberals, are less happy than they were back in the awful conformist 1950s. It looks like women are next to go in the meat grinder. Could it be that it just doesn't pay to be the little darling of the liberals? Could it be that the wages of sinning with the liberals is death?

It's not as if we hadn't been warned. Remember what happened to Mimi, La Bohème and temporary squeeze for the rich kids playing at writing the big novel in a Parisian garret back in 1896?

The solution for the white working class is to come on over to the Republican Party. But there's a problem. Everyone in the Republican Party is sustained by a non-governmental faith. National-defense conservatives believe in responsible national defense. Economic conservatives believe in responsible economic action under the unhampered market. Social conservatives believe in putting their trust in Jesus. Second-Amendment conservatives believe that the government is minutes away when seconds count. Nobody believes in government picking up the tab.

There is really no place in the Republican Party for the Joe Soptic kind of American that thinks it is Mitt Romney's job to pick up the tab for his sick wife.

But here is an interesting aside. In the Republican Party the base seems to be at war with the elite, but in the Democratic Party the base is expertly led by elite community organizers. So with Republicans we get dissident voices constantly expressing their annoyance with the bosses. But in the Democratic Party the bosses fake the voice of the base with their peaceful rent-a-mob protesters.

Back to business. All this stuff about responsibility is covered in the Bible, for those with a yen for that sort of thing. Put not your trust in princes. Don't give up your birthright for a mess of pottage. And so on.

The whole Obama era is a campaign ad for this. When it comes to Hope and Change, don't put your hope in government to make the vital change in your life.

Hope and Change must start with you, and not some smarmy politician.

Message to "Emergent Majority:" They Lied

On the 15-hour trip from San Francisco to Sydney, en-route to a 21-day vacation in Australia, I got to watch the 2014 movie of Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth. Brittain was becoming an adult in that fateful summer of 1914, and after seeing her lover and her brother  and his friends eaten up by the war machine she asks what's the bloody point?

Of course, women have been asking that for millennia. They just don't see the point of war -- or guns -- until the barbarians are at the gates. Then they ask: "Mr. President, is it safe?" But most of the time they are right.

The 2014 movie rather brightly illuminates the incompetent brutality of government. Every young man goes off to war, either wanting to do his bit, or afraid of not being seen to do his bit. We are, all of us, social conformists. And it was a stupid, mindless thing, the Great War.

Of course after the war Vera Brittain becomes a conventional center leftie, and her daughter, Shirley Williams, became a Labour Party Cabinet Minister and Member of Parliament.

To me, as a racist, sexist, homophobe conservative, there is a startling blindness in people like Vera Brittain and her daughter. What, after all, is the difference between the blundering Asquith government of 1914 that used their political power to blunder into a stupid war, and the blundering social democratic governments of the remainder of the 20th century that blunderingly used their political power to lead the British working class into the dead end of council estates and bog-standard comprehensive schools -- all the while providing for themselves lots of addicting political power and sinecures?

So here I am staying in a "life-style" hotel in Sydney's Pyrmont district looking at all the millennials and thinking to myself: do you chaps not realize that the politicians and the intellectuals are lying to you and wrecking your lives no less than the mindless generation of 1914?

I write this as we digest the news of the startling win for Tea Partier Matt Bevin for governor of Kentucky, an open Christian conservative who's pro-gun and anti-Obamacare.

Ah, but wait till 2016, the Democrats say, when we energize our coalition of the young, the minorities, and the urbanites that elected Barack Obama twice.

To which I say: do you not realize, dear coalition of the ascendant, that the Democrats utterly lie to you? You have just come up through the government education system, and if you have been to college you probably have excruciating debts. Yes, the Democrats talk a good line about how the evil Republicans marginalize women and gays and minorities. Do you not realize that you are the #1 victims? Do you not realize that it is your borrowed money that funds their disfunctional educational and indoctrination machine -- which you, more that you know, have been programmed to support? Do you not realize that the soft economy of the 2010s is a direct result of liberal policy and government for decades?

If you are young and bright and eager, do you not realize that everything that big government has done over the last century makes it harder for you to live and work and thrive? First there are the swingeing taxes on work, the "payroll taxes" that are government's big protection racket. Then there are the regulations that make life difficult for new entrants, from the "sharing economy" to the energy economy. Then there is the politicization of everything, from women in the workforce to supposed sexual harassment in the university and the workplace. Do you not realize that all this is a racket, designed to capture your minds with appealing words and increase the power of politicians and activists?

Really, I suppose, the #1 job of every ruling class is to capture the minds of the young generation and put the bodies of the young in service to the regime. And, as much as they blunder and fail on just about everything, they sure do a job on the young, most of the time.

I remember my own modest awakening. It was after the surprising 60-40 reelection of President Nixon in 1972. Naturally, at the time, I was a squishy liberal that was excited by the New Politics of Sen. George McGovern. How could it be that American voters, of which I was not yet one, could vote against George McGovern by such a huge majority?

That was the beginning of wisdom. Because a young person has two choices. Either to write off the voters as mind-numbed bigots or to think more deeply. What is it that the voters wanted in 1972 that the Democrats so obviously failed to offer? Were the voters wrong, or were they onto something?

Worse and Worse: Now the White Working Class is Dying Off

There is a reason that the Bible says "put not your trust in princes." It's because you shouldn't. I am not talking about the moral case for not trusting politicians. That goes without saying. I am talking about the practical case, as in ending up as road kill.

My view is that politics is civil war by other means. When you sign up with a political party it is the same as joining the colors in the army. In the end, you will end up left behind on the side of the road on the route of march, hungry, or wounded, or both. Because the rank-and-file in anything is merely a creature of the bosses: army bosses, political bosses, corporate bosses, union bosses. After they leave you by the side of the road?  Then you will die.

A century ago the working class signed up with the parties of the left. Hey, the Marxes and the Webbs and the Roosevelts said: We care about you workers and we are outraged at your sufferings and we will make your evil employers pay.

Yeah. Life was rough in the early years of the industrial revolution.

Only the politicians that so loooved the working class eventually got tired of them. It's the way of ruling class aristocrats, whether they wear lace or Gore-Tex. They get tired of their wives and their concubines and their useless retainers and go seeking fresh flesh.

These days the lefty aristocrats absolutely looove women. And blacks. And Hispanics. And gays.

So now we read that working class whites with little education are suffering from an increasing death rate. From alcoholism. And heroin. And opoids. Who could have seen that coming?

Not much different from the white working class in Britain. White working class boys are the worst performers in school. Who could have seen that coming?

God, what a bloody shame. So it's worse than what Charles Murray said in Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010. He wrote that in the bottom 30 percent of whites the men don't work much and the women don't marry much. What an optimist! It turns out that reality is a bit worse than that. The white working class are also drinking themselves to death. And drugging themselves to death. And who can blame them?

First we had the Great Society, which made it easier for poor women of all races to marry the state instead of marry the fathers of their children. Then we had affirmative action, which put blacks, and then women, in front of ill-educated whites when it came to government jobs. Then we had Hispanic illegal immigration, to which liberals turn a blind eye, so that now it is difficult for a mechanic in Florida to get an on-the-books job. No problem, you say? Well try getting a mortgage without an on-the-books employment history.

Hey liberals! This is all your work. Welfare? Check. Affirmative Action? Check. Illegal immigration? Check.

No wonder the white working class is all excited by Donald Trump. He's actually proposing to do something about one of the things that hurt them.

Of course, the crush on Trump won't work. That's because of the first paragraph above. Put not your trust in princes.

The mistake the working class made was to believe that politics could improve their lives. What it did was entangle their lives in politics, for good or ill. It started out good, if you believe that the New Deal and labor unions and government entitlements are good for people. But, of course, politicians are a bit like insurance salesmen and greedy bankers. They are real good at selling you the insurance policy or the low-down mortgage or the cool free pension. But they really don't care about how you are going to pay for it. They just want their commission or their election win. What comes after is your problem. Oh, and then there were the unions. They worked for a while, enforcing good jobs at good wages out of big corporations. Until the big corporations went under. Those days are gone unless you work for the government.

Look chaps. If the white working class wants to get out of its death spiral, it's got to bottom out of its addiction to government and then get with the Twelve Step Plan.

You see, the dirty little secret of life under the industrial revolution is that you don't put your trust in princes. You put your trust in God. You get your life together. You learn self-discipline and you learn to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. No politicians. No activists. No union leaders. Just you and your determination and God.

But there are always flim-flam men out there offering a short cut, courtesy of the sweet use of force. Make those capitalists cough up! Make those racists pay! Make those sexist bosses pay women equal pay for equal work! Make those bigoted cake makers shape up!

But politics is violence, and government is force. If you want to wive and thrive, you need to get clear of the violence of politics and the brute force of government.

Karl Polanyi: Critique of "The Great Transformation"

Karl Polanyi wrote The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time in the Second World War while a refugee from fascist Europe in Britain and the US. It is a ringing critique of the market economy.

We analyzed Polanyi's argument, chapter by chapter, starting wth "Capitalism as a Utopian Movement." But now it's time to critique the book.

The Great Transformation really amounts to a recapitulation of the moderate leftist argument made more argumentatively by Marx and his epigones.

Here is what Polanyi argues.

Back at the beginning of the agricultural revolution and its enclosures that started in around the 16th century, country folk started to get thrown off the land. Landowners found it more profitable to enclose the open fields of the medieval manor and often to raise sheep instead of crops. They needed less labor.

In the late 16th century in Britain the Tudors responded with legislation, the Poor Laws, that recognized the responsibility to take care of those thrown off the land. The Poor Law waxed and waned for the next 200 years, culminating in the Speenhamland Law of 1795 that created a right to existence -- and also collapsed the wages offered by employers, because the government would make up the difference.

But during the later 18th century a new utopian ideology grew up, that believed in the idea of the "self-regulating market." All the Poor Law stuff was rubbish to these people, and when they came to power in the Great Reform of 1832 they more or less abolished the Poor Law and forced workers to work in the labor market or die.

This capitalist ideology was founded on two ideas: first the idea that markets were self-regulating and didn't need the state to sort things out; second that labor, land, and money should be treated like commodities, bought and sold in the market.

But labor and land and even money, argued Polanyi, are not mere commodities; laborers are men, and land is nature, the source of life. And a market in money creates horrible panics and crashes. This ideology was based on the "commodity fiction" that labor, land, and money could or should be treated like goods offered for sale in the market.

The effect of the utopian economic liberalism on the workers and the farmers was so extreme that a counter movement arose to fight the utopian dreams of the economic liberals. Polanyi calls the clash of ideologies the "double movement." The opposing movement of "self-protection" was not organized or ideological. It just wanted social protections for the land-owners and the workers against the mechanical workings of the market and its sudden and periodic descents into economic crisis and unemployment.

The two opposing sides of the "double movement" were unable to compose their differences and so the world crashed into economic oblivion in the inevitable disaster of the Great Depression in 1929-33. Unfortunately the result of this was fascism, as people in their desperation chose strong charismatic leadership over either of the two sides of the "double movement."

So now what do we do, at the time that Polanyi was writing in the middle of World War II? What we needed to do was "planning and control," based on the idea of removing labor, land, and money from the market, and recognizing that you cannot make a "commodity fiction" out of things that are not really commodities in the first place.

OK, now let's take Polanyi's argument apart.

In the first place, the agricultural revolution wasn't the only thing going on in the 16th century in England. The other thing was the effort of the Tudor monarchs to build up the state and disarm the nobles. They demolished the castles and the private armies of the great lords, the colorful chaps that appear in Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays. This makes sense out of Marx's famous comment about "A mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers[.]" Of course it was. The nobles, stripped of their private armies, had no use for marginal retainers that could no longer be used as soldiers in the noble's feudal host. They would compete now in the capital city on the basis of their income, and their ability to afford extravagant display and to marshal political rather than military support as of old. In other words, the nobles needed cash, not men to demonstrate their strength and power. In this situation, the poor naturally became the charge of the folks that provoked their misery, the central government that was smashing up the old feudal order in its power project of centralization and nation-building. Needless to say, the government did the job very badly.

Now let's talk about the self-regulating market and the commodity fictions of labor, land, and money. First of all, let's concede the important thing. The market is not "self-regulating" like a steam engine with a governor. The market makes mistakes every day. John Kenneth Galbraith famously said that the stock market had predicted twelve of the last eight recessions.

I think it is incorrect to think of the market as self-regulating; on that I agree with Polanyi. The best way to think about it is to say that the markets (and businesses and consumers) learn from their mistakes. The market is not a machine; it is a daily learning process. As Kevin Williamson writes in The End is Near. Markets learn; governments don't.

It is also true that the idea of markets in labor, land, and money is a fantastical idea. It is indeed a "commodity fiction" to think of a market in labor, and every laborer's work time bought and sold as a stock or a bond. Who came up with that idea?

The answer is: everybody and nobody.

Let us get a clue from Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman philosopher. He writes that there are two options in deciding how the work of mankind gets to be done. Either the boss issues the orders, or the workers decide what to do on their own.

But hey! How in the world can an individual worker know what to do? Well, he can know if he pays attention to prices. Suppose there is a fracking boom going on in North Dakota. Guess what! The price of labor in North Dakota goes up into the stratosphere. So ordinary truck drivers get the idea that it would be a good idea to move to get a job in North Dakota. Suppose you are a steelworker represented by a labor union. Things aren't going too well for the steel company and it wants to cut wages. But the union bellows about "givebacks" and keeps your wages up until one day the steel company goes broke and you are out of a job. What do you think about "givebacks" now?

So the truth is that the "commodity fiction" of a market in labor is actually a brilliant idea that enables the world to work without a boss. How cool is that? The only thing it demands is that everyone submit to the hegemony of the market. For a lot of people, maybe for most people, that is a bridge too far. It's great to ride the wave of progress, but quite another thing to swallow your pride and take your losses when the market turns against you.

For Polanyi the story of the century between 1840 and 1940 is the story of the "double movement" between the movement towards markets and the self-protection movement against them. The disaster of 1929 he lays at the impossibility of a self-regulating market. The only solution, he writes, is to take the humans and nature out of the market and substitute "planning and control." Which means, of course the rule of people like Polanyi.

In your dreams, Karl.

We should not be too hard on Karl Polanyi. He was writing before the world recovered after World War II. Before the German Wirtschaftwunder. Before the Reagan Revolution. Before the wonders of electronics and computers and smartphones and Google Search, and kids in a village in Ethiopia learning English and how to hack the camera on a tablet without an adult to show them how. Before the curtain was drawn back on the unspeakable cruelties of the Stalinist Soviet Union and the Maoist Great Leap Forward. Before China decided to embrace the market economy and India too.

Polanyi's panacea of "planning" died not later than the "stagflation" of the late 1970s. Planning by political and intellectual elites does not work. It does not work because government does not learn. Not until it is way too late.

The bottom line is that before 1800, according to researchers like Gregory Clark in A Farewell to Alms, England experienced "downward mobility" as the poor had fewer surviving children and the younger children of the upper class moved in on the lower classes. After 1800 began the revolution in expectations we call "upward mobility" where parents across all classes expect their children to live better than they did. A lot better: per-capita income in the "West" is now 30 times the level of 1800. Deirdre McCloskey calls it The Great Enrichment, and writes that there has never been anything like it, ever.

In McCloskey's telling, and in George Gilder's, the reason for the Great Enrichment has not been capitalism, thought of as the patient accumulation of capital. It has been surprises, like the textile revolution, the steam revolution, the railroad revolution, the electrical revolution, the automobile revolution, the electronic revolution, the computer revolution, the communications revolution, the information revolution. And the fact that the unhampered market allowed these surprises, these revolutions, to elbow the old ways aside before they could get their political representatives to saddle up and protect them.

There is no doubt that the industrial or market revolution of 1800 was a cruel shock that changed the world and caused a lot of suffering. It forced everyone to work according to the dictates of the market or starve, as Polanyi argues.

We humans have to choose. Do we want to submit to the dictates of the market, the collective boss of all the producers and all the consumers, or to the individual human boss? Do we see the modern world as the Great Enrichment or the Great Transformation?

And the truth is that under the hegemony of the market we have lots of choices. We can go work for the government and get a lifetime job. The only problem seems to be that government workers are all miserable: talk to a public school teacher. We can go work for a big corporation and get a good salary and benefits. The only problem is that when the corporation gets old and sluggish it responds with layoffs. And that probably means you if you have been there for 20 years and have received regular step salary increases every year. Or we can work for a startup, or as an independent contractor. It's a lot more risky, day to day, but it keeps you awake and focused on upon the donut -- what am I worth in the labor market and what can I do about it -- and not upon the hole. When you are in the market you detect its smallest changes, and so you get to respond first. You have already responded while the corporate types and the government types are sitting in their cubicles absolutely clueless about what is coming down the road, whether it's a gentle evening breeze or a killer tornado.