Don't Let Your Kid Grow Up to Be An Environmental Cop

We had a very nice trip to the good old convict prison at Port Arthur in Tasmania. It flourished between the 1830 and 1877. And it was trying to reform prisoners with sensible solitary confinement and other methods out of Jeremy Bentham's utilitarian playbook.

I'm afraid I was pretty cavalier with the guide by treating the whole thing as a joke, a bureaucratic monstrosity, and implying that things are no different today.

Because really, imagine what future earnest critics will say about today's policing and prisons and welfare and education. And environmental politics.

Our guide was a good chap, but it turned out that two of his kids are well-educated environmental cops, runnin' around making sure the farmers aren't killing Tasmamian Devils and stuff. There's a bit of a problem with Tasmanian Devils because, as carrion eaters and not very fast on their feet, they tend to end up as road kill when they are helpfully eating road kill on Tasmania's highways. Something must be done.

But it all got me to thinking about how many of our well-educated kids are ending up as Give-me-the-facts-ma'am environmental gumshoes. Or shall we call them enforcement officers willingly doing the dirty work of stopping people from growing food and building roads and making products and services, because saving the planet.

But that is not really my problem. I am thinking about what will happen when the people finally rebel against their empoverishment by the ruling class's environmental cops and regulators. All those educated gumshoes are going to be really pissed off when the peasants with pitchforks start coming for their careers and their pensions. They won't understand that they have been blindly squeezing ordinary people as thoughtlessly as the overseers and constables of the old Port Arthur convict settlement.

Because most people most of the time just accept that working people were horribly treated back in the 19th century but that things are much more evolved and advanced today.

The point is that there are shoals and shoals of these educated fish in the US in the state and local environmental bureaucracies and they have all drunk the KoolAid. What are we going to do with them after the revolution?

Maybe they don't all believe the lies. Maybe they are just going along to get along. I just finished a rant by Sarah Hoyt about the lies in YA fiction, with "100 lb girls taking out men four times their size in books and movies." It got to the point where her son wanted to be a girl because they had all the fun.

But years later at the grocery store, she asked him about this.

I don’t remember why I reminded him of his “I want to be a girl moment.”  He looked at me and curled his lip.  “Yeah, I got over it.  I realized it wasn’t real.  There was no relation between girls on TV and in books and real girls.  Most real girls just want to talk about hair and clothes and go shopping.  The fun ones will play space-games, but mostly they just want to treated like they’re a space-princess and rescued and stuff.  I’ve yet to meet one who likes fighting and running.”

So there really is hope for the young generation. But the problem is, as Sarah Hoyt writes, that to break out of the Port Arthurs that today's liberal Jeremy Benthams have imprisoned us in is going to take a lot of busting out. And it ain't gonna be pretty.

Did you know that at the narrow neck of land between Port Arthur and the Tasmanian mainland they set up a "dog line." They chained dogs there at night on the assumption that the dogs would bark and attack any convicts trying to escape.

The wonders of the bureaucratic mind.

The Liberal Syllabus of Errors

What with ISIS and the slow death of Obamacare, not to mention the mess in education and the White Death of the white working class, it's a good time to take a look at the pile-up of errors committed by our liberal friends. What went wrong, and why?

As you may know, my conceit is that I have developed a strategic view of the modern politics and government. I argue that politics is violence (real or threatened) and government is force. Put another way, politics comes down to the mob threatening someone with a "peaceful protest" or actual street riot, and government always comes down to men with guns.

The corollary (or whatever you want to call it) of this argument is that political activists and government re like sharks; they must keep moving on some project that threatens violence, or needs force, or they will die.

In the good old days government concentrated on two things. The first thing was the domestic threat to its rule, usually from barons and marcher lords. The second thing was the foreign threat from evil foreigners and/or barbarians. This was all natural and physical, because there can only be one ruler in a territory, and as land and its food was life, the survival of the group, or clan, or nation, depended on keeping other people away from the sacred food that grew on our sacred land.

But capitalism changed all that. Natural resources, including food, were still important, but you didn't have to sit on them; you could always buy them.

So it was natural that a movement should arise that took a stand against the old "hit them before they hit us" approach to foreign policy. People started to ask what armies and borders were all about, when all we needed to do was buy the things we needed. Arms are for hugging; war is not the answer. That is what they said then and they still do today.

But if the foreign threat had dissipated and the old marcher lords had been replaced by corporate barons that fought for market share rather than territory, what need of government?

Good question, senator.

The answer is that advanced people came to realize that all was not well with the world after all. They discovered that the most frightful exploitations were being perpetrated against the workers, the people that toiled in factories in the early industrial revolution. Something must be done, they cried. And they taught the rising working class to organize and "smash the bosses." Not just the workers, in peaceful protests and work stoppages, but government was needed to force the bosses to give the workers an even break.

And so the advanced people led the working people in a century-long campaign of "social protection" to provide a safe space for the factory workers. The advanced people had lots of ideas and they used their political power to implement their ideas in beneficial social legislation and regulations.

But then a century later the economy changed and life-long factory jobs disappeared from the economy. The social model constructed in landmark legislation by the advanced people for factory workers didn't apply any more. The workers were used to be taken care of by the advanced people and didn't know what to do. So they gave up and took to drink and opiates.

Anyway the advanced people had moved on from helping working people. Now they wanted to help women and racial minorities and sexual minorities.

Nowadays the advanced people have become deeply concerned about frightful oppressions perpetrated against women, against racial minorities, and against sexual minorities. Something must be done, they cried. And they taught women and racial minorities and sexual minorities to organize and speak truth to the power of the white heterosexual patriarchy, and smash the glass ceiling, and demand their representative share of jobs, and the respectability of marriage equality.

You can see that the advanced people are using the same strategy against the powerful patriarchy as they did a century ago against the powerful capitalists.

But what was the point of helping the workers? The advanced people set up a rigid system of government protection that the advanced people thought would help the workers in their fight with the employers and provide them with decent pensions and health benefits. Unfortunately the advanced people fenced the workers into a rigid system that fell apart when globalization and unionization had made factory labor in the western world too expensive.

What would have really helped the workers? I'd say that it would have been more helpful to let the workers work out their own destiny, to involve the state in some of the most egregious problems but not to create such a rigid regulatory system that protected the workers so well that they lost the get-up-and-go needed to adapt and thrive. It is clear now that when the world changed it left them high and dry.

Now the advanced people are doing the same thing with women, racial minorities, and sexual minorities. Are they really helping them? I'd say that it would be more helpful to let women, racial minorities and sexual minorities to work out their own destiny, to involve the state in some of the most egregious problems, but not create a rigid regulatory system in which employers are considered to be discriminating against minorities unless they employ government-mandated quotas of protected minorities.

One day the world will change, and when it does the protected minorities will find out, just like the workers, that the social protections they were given don't protect them at all when the world changes, and everyone has to scramble to adapt to the new reality.

So I argue that the governing strategy of the advanced people, the modern ruling class, is cruel and unjust. It cocoons its favored clients with benefits and free stuff, but it condemns them to live in dependency without maintaining the robust skills that people need to thrive in a market system that is always changing, always improving, always adapting, always learning.

Our advanced people, our ruling class, are not evil: just conceited and wrong. They imagine that they are intelligent and wise enough to determine what is best for other people.

In this conceit they are wrong. Probably it is best for humans in this sub-lunar world to stick to taking responsibility for themselves. Because when they decide that they are smart enough to take responsibility for others, they are probably only doing what will help themselves.

When you think you are god's gift to the working class, or to women, or to minorities, you are probably going to find yourself piling error upon error, and spreading misery instead of content, because you probably don't know what is best for other people.

But where is the human that can ever admit such a thing to himself, let alone to others?

Is Obama Actually Trying to Destroy the Democratic Party?

Conservatives look at President Obama and wonder who the real Obama is. Or rather, we wonder if our instincts, that he is a full-on cultural Marxist lefty, can really be true -- in this day and age. Because surely in 2015, after a century and a half of Marxist mayhem and stupidity, nobody can really believe this stuff.

But here is Paul Sperry writing in the New York Post about the doings of Organizing for Action, the daughter organization of Obama's campaign organization Obama for America. OfA is out there organizing hundreds of thousands of newly minted community organizers.

Through social media, they mobilize flash mobs against “biased cops,” “climate-change deniers,” “Wall Street predators” and “gun extremists.” They hold rallies against conservative foes of gay marriage, LGBT rights, abortion and amnesty for illegal immigrants.

See, I think that this is a suicide cult,  strategic error of monumental proportions. I think this is replaying the disastrous New Left politics of the 1960s that created the Nixonian Silent Majority and the Reagan Democrats. I think that this leftism is a fantasy ideology, created out of the desperate need, in a peaceful world, for something to fight against and require the sweet use of political violence and government force.

In my telling, the Democrats of the 1970s learned a terrible lesson. They learned that the average American hated their Cloward-Piven tactics and their internal colonization of middle-class culture with Alinskyism. And then when Ronald Reagan, the B-movie actor, cleaned their clocks not once but twice... Well, it led to Bill Clinton and the New Democrats who assured us that they were as patriotic as the next man and who declared that the era of big government was over.

In the event, once Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, he pivoted sharp left and got his face handed to him in the midterms of 1994. Thereafter the liberal Bill Clinton kept handlers like Dick Morris around to keep him in the safety zone.

But the real Democrats couldn't stay hidden, not forever, so after the mistakes of the Bush administration and the mortgage meltdown, they returned in full force under the leadership of Barack Obama, taught from his cradle by liberals and advised by red-diaper babies. Like David Axelrod.

Now we have the absurd antics of the feminist-inspired "rape culture" and "microaggression" activists, which I think is the particularly feminine contribution to leftist politics. Because while you could say that young men thrill to the cry of "smash the bosses" (or sexists or racists), the cry for safe spaces and "I can't believe I heard you say that" are obviously the product of a Double-X coded brain.

I suppose we have to go through this every generation. But it would really be cool if we could draw a line under this fantasy ideology, this nostalgia for a time of perfect social solidarity that never was, that has hag-ridden the modern era and sent millions of innocents to an early grave.

The encouraging thing is that it looks like the average American absolutely hates where the community-organizer tactics of Obama have brought us. They are actively yearning for something different.

And my guess is that, come November 2016 they are going to get it, probably by a decisive 55-45 election. And that should inoculate America against unashamed leftism for a generation. If we are lucky.

Islamists are Only the Latest Bunch to Push Back Against Capitalism

The Islamists that killed over a hundred people in Paris on Friday November 13, 2015 are, of course, our enemies. Yes, enemies, Mr. President and much worse than the awful threat of climate change.

But I take a philosophical view of the Islamist threat. To me, these young savages are just the latest in a string of political/social movements that have emerged to challenge the rise of the global capitalist economy and society.

Let us not forget what a stunning revolution and transformation the capitalist revolution has been, starting with the explosion of European traders and adventurers across the world starting in about 1500. Then, starting in 1800, we have seen the Great Enrichment of the industrial revolution, with per-capita incomes increasing by 3,000 percent in 200 years wherever capitalism was allowed to thrive.

The educated youth of the 19th century didn't like capitalism. They thought it was a busted flush and they didn't like the way it treated the workers. They created a movement of rejection, socialism/communism, that spread across the world like no religion before it. But China rejected socialism in 1979, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, and India gave up on socialism in 1993. Now just about everyone except Barack Obama and his Organizing for America recognizes the the free-market economy is here to stay. Everyone except the Islamists.

You can understand the feelings of the Islamists. Imagine the horror that Sayyid Qtub must have felt watching young Coloradans in Greeley slobbering over each other at a sock hop just after World War II. How could anyone endure such license, especially if he didn't get to join in?

So now we have the last people in the world rising in rage against the pitiless monster of capitalism that threatens to destroy their traditional way of life just like it has demolished just about everyone else's traditional way of life across the world. These people are the people of Islam.

It is a humiliating thing to live in the urban ghetto of some great western metropolis and know that you are the low man on the totem pole. It makes you easy to provoke into violence. Ever since the middle of the 19th century agitators and demagogues have known how to rile up the ill-educated young men of these urban ghettos and organize them for rebellion. In the 19th century the agitators organized young men into labor unions and social democratic parties. In the 20th century they organized them into fascist mobs and sent them into the meat grinders of the world wars. Russian communists starved millions of Ukrainians and sent millions into the gulag to work and die. Chinese communists starved millions in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. When all the rage was spent, then the survivors had to pick up their lives and start over, sadder and wiser, this time following the capitalist script.

Now we have another uprising against the capitalist revolution, the young Islamist men of the Middle East. Now another generation must be ground into the dust before they will submit to the greatest change in human social cooperation since the invention of agriculture and the marcher lord 5,000 odd years ago.

I suppose that millions of young Muslim men will have to die, and millions of young men in the rest of the world as well before the Muslim remnant submits to the greatest improvement in material life in human history ever.

If you ask me, it's a helluva shame. But what do I know? For all the lefty talk about war not being the answer, I suspect that the violence of war is needed as part of the human condition and that it does solve a lot of problems.

But capitalism teaches us that almost all of the time violence is not needed because almost everything can be resolved by the market. So we moderns are slow to admit that war is going to be needed.

The various outrages from the Beirut barracks in Reagan's administration to 9/11 to the terror outrages in London, Madrid, Paris, Boston, etc. are bringing the current rebellion to the point that it cannot be ignored.

But it ain't gonna be pretty.

Surrender and the Three Peoples Theory

I maintain that there are three kinds of people: I call it Three Peoples theory. There are the People of the Subordinate Self, your average workers and peasants. There are the People of the Responsible Self, your average monotheistic city dweller. Then there are the People of the Creative Self, your average artist and political activist.

The basic fact of social animals is that they thrive by surrender to the greater good. But, of course we humans are made of clay, particularly in our feet, and so we don't always surrender to the greater good in the way that we profess.

The People of the Subordinate Self are people that surrender to their lord, be he a marcher lord, a lord of the manor, a union boss, a corporate boss, or a community organizer. But these people sometimes rebel against their lord, as peasants with pitchforks. And that never ends well.

The People of the Responsible Self must surrender to the love of God or to the market. Because they understand that to thrive they must serve others, whether God, or the consumer or the market. But if they have a weakness it is to insist that everyone else accept the mandate of responsibility as they have done. This is wrong, because the People of the Subordinate Self want to avoid responsibility by surrendering their responsibility to a temporal lord.

The People of the Creative Self must surrender to the fact of creative process: many are called but few are chosen. A creative artist must surrender to the verdict of the world. And that verdict probably is that the artist should be content with merely being a competent craftsman rather than a creative star in the firmament. The weakness of the creative artist is to insist that society owes him a living, because he is so wise. Because being an artist is special. In politics, of course, the creative artists insist that the world tax and regulate itself to prove the wonder of the political artist's undeniable genius.

All kinds of People have their role to play upon the stage. But the first thing they need to accept is the implications of their identity choice. If you are a Subordinate Self then subordination to a lord is what you do. And subordinates tend to get left on the roadside by their lord when the going gets tough. If you are a Responsible Self then you must accept the rough with the smooth, and understand that your surrender to God or to the market means that you have to start over when things go south. If you are a Creative Self you must accept that you are probably not as creative as your mother thought. Maybe the best you can achieve is a decent and competent responsibility.

Just saying: there is a right way and a wrong way for each of the honorable choices to live life as a human. It comes down to the way that you choose to surrender yourself to the fact of your existence as a social human. And don't anyone ever forget it.

So What Does the Cruz Flat Tax Mean for America?

Talk about the nuclear option! Ted Cruz's Flat Tax Plan:

• Collapses the personal income tax down to one rate of 10% after a $36,000 deductible
• Eliminates the payroll taxes
• Eliminates the Death tax
• Eliminates the corporate income tax
• Imposes a 16% Business Flat Tax on business revenues, less deducations

So what does it all mean?

The reduction in personal income tax rates and the elimination of the corporation income tax is good, because it takes the game of loopholes away. Politicians love high tax rates because business and wealthy individuals will pay good money to carve out exemptions and subsidies.

The elimination of the payroll tax is yuuuuge. This is a monstrous tax on labor and in particular really burdens low-wage workers and low-wage employers. That's why so many workers work off the books and burden both on-the-books employers and employees.

The big question is the Business Flat Tax, which seems to be a tax on gross revenues. Cruz's site says: "The tax will be based on revenues minus expenses such as equipment, computers, and other business investments." That makes it sound that wage expenses will not be counted.

Here is what the Tax Foundation says about Cruz's plan, which it calls a VAT.

It’s actually pretty simple: there’s profits that go to shareholders, and there’s wages, salaries, and other compensation to workers. Both get taxed at the same rate: in this case, sixteen percent.

In that sense, a subtraction-method value-added tax is actually just a simple combination of a sort of corporate income tax and an ordinary payroll tax. (Fittingly, Senator Cruz’s plan uses this VAT to eliminate the corporate income tax and the payroll tax.)

According to the Tax Foundation businesses would deduct the monies they paid to other business for business services. But they would pay a tax of 16% on profits and and a 16% tax on labor (because the revenue that ended up as wages wouldn't be subtracted from its revenue.

This is, of course, a gigantic tax. If we assumed that the GDP is equal to about the gross revenue of businesses, then it amounts to a tax of 16% of GDP. No doubt it isn't that big. But still it is huge.

But let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the total Cruz taxes after the nuclear explosion are about the same as today's federal revenue at about 18% of GDP. What then?

Well what is going to happen is similar what the Austrian economists call "the liquidation of the malivestments of the previous boom." Today's businesses are organized around today's tax system and the exploitation of their business revenue by governments high and low. Today businesses pay a bunch of federal taxes on labor, from FICA to unemployment, some of which are passed through to employees and some of which aren't. It is obvious that many businesses are going to find that their business models are severely damaged by the Cruz plan. Others will find that they really benefit from the Cruz plan. At this stage, I suggest, nobody has a clue what will happen. My guess is turmoil for a couple of years, just like the first two years of the Reagan administration, followed by a staggering boom.

Of course, all the pettifogging tax regulations on business will be lighter, and that's a good thing. But nobody should imagine that such a remarkable change will be cost free. And don't imagine that crony capitalism will go away. There will still be ways to game the system and the lobbyists and the politicians will be working hard to make it happen.

The Dems are Breaking Rule One of Politics

Because government is force and politics is violence it is essential for every ruling class and government to present itself as a kindly librarian rather than an avenging angel. The reality is that governments, all governments, dispense injustice, and the more power they possess the more injustice they mete out to the subject population. So governments understand that you must hide the mailed fist inside a velvet glove.

So a wise government keeps its crazies in check. Because the crazies signal to the uncommitted that government is not a kindly librarian but men with guns.

The crazies at the University of Missouri, like the crazies at Yale that spat on conservative worthies like Kevin Williamson, are the fault of President Obama, the worst president ever.

President Obama's problem is the he actually believes the rubbish that his red-diaper-baby mentors taught him as an impressionable teenager. There is, of course, an evil cunning to Rules for Radicals and the intolerant tolerance of Herbert Marcuse. It all makes sense if you are Samson and the only way forward is to pull the temple down on you and everyone else.

In the real world these lefty tactics create intolerable misery and disaster for ordinary people. And in the theory of Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution the reign of terror sets up the end of the revolution and the beginning of reaction.

So in my view our genius president is doing our work for us. His genius activists that are reporting KKK hoodies on the Missouri campus are broadcasting to the American voter -- and especially the American woman voter -- that it is past time to shut down this present eruption of left-wing hysteria. And make no mistake, we are talking here about religious hysteria, the millennial longings of left-wing religious hysterics bursting their bounds as often happens in the cycle of religious enthusiasm.

Let us rehearse some political common-sense here. When you are the ruling class the one thing you need to do is to rein in the enthusiasm of your most enthusiastic supporters, the fools that think that government can actually deliver Hope and Change, rather than merely move the deckchairs on the Titanic. Because government is force, politics is violence, system is domination, and history is disaster.

As I've written before, we saw all this in the Sixties. Liberals and their willing accomplices in the media thought that they were witnessing the Revolution, a fundamental change in US politics. But what they achieved was to frighten the daylights out of the American people and usher in a decade or more of law-and-order national politics.

At the time I was a young'un and was experiencing politics for the first time. It was significant to me that Richard Nixon won in 1968 after all the tremulous expectations with Gene McCarthy and the Happy Warrior Hubert Humphrey. When Nixon won 60-40 in 1972 after I'd watched PBS having orgasms over George McGovern all summer I knew that the liberal version of reality sucked.

It was after the McGovern defeat that liberals spent 25 years sailing under false colors pretending that they did too believe in law-and-order and they too were patriotic Americans.

But with Barack Obama we have a president that knew not the lessons of 1972. And so Americans have had eight long years of lefty crazies off the leash. And they don't like it.

You see if they don't, come November next year.