Is the Politics of "Crush or be Crushed" The Only Way?

I got an email yesterday from Sam, a long-time reader of my blog, and he wonders if the Left has it right after all, that "the ends ALWAYS justifies the means." He continues:

[W]hile I debated how many Bastiats could dance on the head of an anarchistic needle the Left was busy owning education, passing socialist programs for over a century, wholly controlling the popular media sphere, co-opting judeo-christian religion, dominating every bureaucracy, writing every rule, setting every tone, winning and losing battles but nearly always the victor in culture wars. 

Frédéric Bastiat was the French economist who famously developed the notion of the Broken Window fallacy, "what is seen and what is unseen" and the modern idea of cost as the foregone opportunity.

In other words Bastiat was at the center of what we might call "Second Wave" economics, that included the idea of marginal price and demolished the Marxian economics that was built upon a tendentious reading of classical economics and its dichotomy between use value and exchange value. It is because of chaps like Bastiat that Marxists, to this very day, cannot venture out of the fenced pasture of Marx's economic writings. To do so is to abandon the Marxian dream.

OK, great. So the science is on our side! That, and $7, will get you lunch at McDonalds. My reader Sam continues, noting that history doesn't care how the winner wins, but the fact of winning.

When learning about a past war, no student cares if one or both sides followed the Geneva Conventions.  They only care about who won, because that is all that matters.  I now believe that it is not enough to win the argument, but to force it as well.  The left wins because they have no compunction putting the boot heel to their opponents, so I now believe liberty lovers have to get the bigger boot.  An unavoidable contradiction.  After all, did the founding fathers content themselves with posting their grievances and accepting their lot through gritted teeth - as we do today - or did they rise up and double down on the violence inflicted upon them?  What's one of the few culture wars that the Right has won?  Gun ownership - the one right that the leftist government must get bloody to trample.  Coincidence?

 Of course, to the Left, it is always the capitalists that strike first. The whole idea of "capitalism-and-imperialism" in one word is that capitalism grew across the world as much by force of arms as by exchange and markets. And in a milder vein, Karl Polanyi in his Great Transformation argued that the introduction of the exchange economy in the colonies more or less forced the locals out of their rural idiocy into the global exchange economy.

So if you are a lefty, capitalism is the most powerful force in human history, crushing everything in its path, and it is the bounden duty of all the Melissa Clicks of the world to shout F-words in the face of policemen and call for muscle at their glorious little peaceful protests and fight to protect those in the path of the capitalist Godzilla.

So who is right? How about everyone?

It is true that capitalism and freedom have increased per-capita human income by 30 times in 200 years, but it is also true that it has obliterated everything in its path, and utterly transformed the human experience. In other words, capitalism is transforming the world with almost brutal power, whatever we do or say.

It was completely understandable for the early Left to raise a banner against capitalism and predict that it would all end it immiseration. And it was worthy of the Left to protect and advocate for each new wave of migrants to the city. But it is also true that left politics has encouraged the migrants not to assimilate to the ways of the city and to surrender to the market as the bourgeoisie does. This has caused untold misery, from the death camps of communism and fascism to the predictable miseries of the Castro Brothers' Cuba and Chávez Venezuela, to the demoralization of the white working class where drug addiction and suicide are abroad, and the devastation of the western underclass where the women don't marry much and the men don't work much.

Capitalism and freedom are as inevitable as a Law of Nature. But it is also inevitable that people will fight being thrown into the deep end when they arrive in the city from the countryside, and it is inevitable that sauntering politicians will appear to lead those fighting against their dunking into the capitalist swimming pool.

My reductive Three Peoples theory is an attempt to make sense of this world. The People of the Subordinate Self are people that have not yet acculturated to the modern market economy. They look to a powerful patron or a strong leader as a means of support, and they get it. The People of the Responsible Self are people that has surrendered to the market economy and the radical idea that it is their job to find out how to be useful to the world, and then do it. The People of the Creative Self are people that have mastered the modern world and now they want something better. They want not just to adjust to the world but to amaze it. Thus art-for-art's-sake, progressive politics, the start-up culture, and, at the low end, work/life balance and "lifestyles."

If you are a creative person and you don't want the risks of the start-up culture and invent the next iPhone or the first viable nuclear fusion technology or work in some billionaire's space program, then advocating for those struggling to adapt to the market economy is a natural. The problem is that the creative people running things quickly learn to assume that everything they want for the marginalized is good and beneficial. They think of themselves as kindly librarians rather than ruthless power politicians. That is why AFL leader Samuel Gompers a century ago advised the workers to keep their distance from middle-class socialists. As a later politician put it: they are not interested in you, they are interested in your vote.

It is to deal with this issue, what we might call an instance of the "principal-agent" problem, that I have come up with my "little darlings" notion. If you are a member of a group favored by our current progressive ruling class and lovingly adored as little darlings, beware. One day the ruling class will tire of you, and it will find a new little darling to flatter with its favors. Once upon a time the progressives looved the working class, and lavished it with privileges and benefits. But then the progressives found a new love, African Americans and women, and so they left the working class out in the cold, even stigmatizing it as a bunch of racist, sexist, homophobic Archie Bunkers. In the end, the progressives care about their power, not about the people for whom they advocate. You can see that in the tactics of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton as of mid-February 2016. She thought she was going to cruise to the Democratic presidential nomination, but now that Bernie Sanders is showing form, she is resorting to race politics to stir up the African American voters in South Carolina.

So the white working class got left by the roadside, just like Joe Soptic. And far too many African Americans live in corrupt crime-ridden hellholes, fifty years after the Civil Rights Acts, courtesy of their liberal patrons that seem to be able to coexist with the murdering gangs that help them get out the vote. Women have been pitched out of suburban complacency into glittering careers only to find themselves hag-ridden by the impossible tradeoffs of the "work/life" balance.

Yes, but meanwhile the liberals are trashing the greatest country in the world and all we can come up with is Donald Trump! Isn't it time to take a page from the liberal playbook and crush them as they crush everything in their path?

We could, but I don't think it would do us any good. Our theory and our practice is built on the fundamental truth that the modern capitalist market economy cannot be run like a feudal estate. That is the meaning of Mises' argument for the impossibility of socialism, and Hayek's argument that the bureaucrat in Washington just cannot know enough to run the modern economy. We cannot resort to the bully-boy tactics of the left because that would destroy the economy and raise up a rebellion of people unjustly hurt by our bully-boy tactics. The argument for the market economy and limited government is not just that it is moral and right, not just that it works, but that it is both. The smaller the government, the less it is crushing its opponents and provoking them into a head of rebellion, and the more that nobodies get a chance to reinvent the world and surprise us with a new economic miracle.

If you are a member of the ruling class you almost certainly believe in power, and that means you worship the power of the state. So, how well is that working in Venezuela right now? There is not much glory and power in being the boss of a failing country. Now look at China. Mao Zedong plus the Communist Party plus socialism was a poverty-stricken wasteland. But Xi Jinping plus the Communist Party plus capitalism is growing into a global behemoth. Imagine what China could become if it junked the Communist Party bit.

So I am still keeping the faith. I believe that the progressives, far from preparing for their triumphal march at the Capitol breathlessly reported by TV personality Caesar Flickerman, are desperately patching up a failing dynasty. They thought they were going to sweep into power in 2009 and whip the economy into shape with a big stimulus, whip the banks into shape with Dodd-Frank, whip healthcare into shape with Obamacare, and save the planet with green energy. Oh, and clean up Bush's mess in the Middle East. They really did! Now they are like the Chinese mandarins around the emperor in the Forbidden City in the last decades of the 19th century. They don't know whether to double down on the progressive playbook, or...

Yes, just what do the progressives propose to do next? Free college? Free healthcare? $15 minimum wage?

That, and $7, will get you lunch at McDonalds.

Trust but Verify at the GOP Establishment

One fallout of the death of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia was that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had to announce, right away, that the Senate would not be considering Supreme Court nominees this year.

This is a pity, according to Mark Kirkorian. Politically, it would have been nice to duck and weave a bit and so avoid antagonizing moderate voters.

The problem is that such an approach would presuppose a certain level of trust between conservative voters and the Republican leadership. Such trust does not exist. After serial sell-outs and surrenders, you can excuse a conservative voter for assuming that the Senate GOP would supinely hand the Court – and the republic’s very future – over to Obama.

Why is it that, according to polls, that only about 40 percent of the GOP party base view the party leadership favorably?  Something like 40 percent of Republicans don't trust the party leadership, whereas only about 10 percent of Democrats don't trust their leadership.

It's easy to say that the reason is simple. Democrats do what the base wants, while Republicans keep betraying their base. OK, but if you are a Democrat you ought to be mad as hell right now because the Obama economy has done nothing for its minority and female base. The Democratic base ought to be mad as hell and not going to take it any more. But it isn't.

So what's the GOP problem? Is it the donors, that keep the GOP doing free immigration and export of jobs despite the wishes of the voter base? If only it were that simple. There are other, more intractable, reasons that makes the GOP establishment betray its base, time after time.

Strange New Respect. That's a term invented twenty years ago by the American Spectator writer Tom Bethell to describe the fate of good kick-ass conservatives after they go to Washington. The problem is that they are human; they want to be liked. They want to be invited to Georgetown dinner parties. And so they succumb to the liberal ruling class culture, and one day the Washington Post or the New York Times writes a piece about the "strange new respect" that Joe Redneck now enjoys.

Politics is Downstream from Culture. The fact is that the ruling culture in the United States these days is liberal. As we conservative diehards like to say, the media, the schools, the arts, Hollywood, TV, the universities, they are all full-on liberal and they all take up the latest liberal fad without even thinking. Yesterday it was gay marriage; today it is transgender rights; tomorrow who knows. The GOP establishment does not have the power to push against the liberal national culture. The whole point of political correctness is to make it very dangerous to push back against the liberal agenda. If we want to reverse the numbers, and make 40 percent of Democrats mistrust their leaders, then we have to change the culture first, and frankly, I don't see that happening in half a century. On my Three Peoples theory it would require the People of the Creative Self to change their spots or the People of the Responsible Self to stage a full-on cultural rebellion, and I don't see that happening, not while the current ruling class is turning out a generation where 40 percent like capitalism and 40 percent like socialism and a large majority supports gay marriage.

Obama and the race issue. It's hard to oppose President Obama without being suspected of racism. So President Obama has had a pretty easy time of it. There are always second tier media types ready to roll out the race issue when anyone opposes the president, and all the media big shots need to do is vaguely refer to the groundswell of "concern."

Memory of government "shutdowns." Back in 1995 the newly elected GOP Congress went up against President Bill Clinton in a showdown over budget cuts. And the GOP lost the propaganda war. Speaker Newt Gingrich was seen as a beast kicking kids out into the cold.

Memory of the Clinton Impeachment. In 1998 the GOP thought it had a winning issue in the Monica Lewinsky issue and the Clinton impeachment. Instead, the Democrats managed to turn the whole thing around and characterize special prosecutor Ken Starr as a sex-crazed fiend. And the American people just didn't want to kick out a president. The result was that Democrats gained seats in the 1998 mid-terms. Ever since, the GOP establishment has feared that they will inevitably lose any propaganda war.

So here we are in 2016 and we have a candidate who has, so far, successfully challenged the conventional wisdom about how to deal with the ruling culture: Donald Trump. He has successfully trumped the culture of political correctness with the culture of insult. Who knew?

On my Three Peoples theory, Trump has energized a section of the People of the Subordinate Self, frustrated white working class folk that are looking for a leader, no questions asked.

Can Donald Trump roll back the dominant liberal culture all on his own and lead a new Republican coalition of the Responsible people with a rump of the Subordinate people?

One thing is for sure. After a century or more of the present liberal educated ruling class there ought to be a growing group of people that experience the rule of the liberals as injustice, straight up. That's on my theory that all government is injustice and all opposition to government is a fight against injustice.

But nobody should underestimate the power of the liberal ruling class to reassert its cultural power, and make Republican men into mice, and thus continue the frustration of the GOP base that keeps voting conservatives into office only to find that nothing changes.

Six Good Things About Capitalism

Everybody is recoiling in shock at the Millennial Kids. How could they be rallying to the socialist Bernie Sanders? Don’t they know that socialism has been a disaster wherever it was tried? Did they never hear of Venezuela?

OK, I do understand. Bernie is offering the Kids free college. And who ever refused a politician offering free stuff until they got their first paycheck and notice the deductions?

But why be surprised? The Millennial Kids have been taught for 20 years by government teachers. You think the lifer wardens and trusties at the government child-custodial facilities are going to teach the inmates about the wonders of life outside the razor wire?

So when Peggy Noonan wrote that:

In the young [Sanders’] support is understandable: They have never been taught anything good about capitalism and in their lifetimes have seen it do nothing—nothing—to protect its own reputation.

she struck a chord in me.

Actually, those Kids probably have seen a capitalist do something to protect its reputation. Ever heard tell of them “Koch Brothers.” They have put their mouth where their money is.

And look where it got them. It got them mentioned by the execrable Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) and denounced by the left everywhere as the epitome of evil villainy. Do you wonder why most capitalists keep their heads down?

So it falls to us foolish scribblers to stand up for capitalism. Here are six good things about capitalism. (Hey, Peggy, how often do you use your bully pulpit to say anything good about capitalism?)

Capitalism has increased per-capita income by 30 Times in 200 Years. That is 30 times as in 3,000 percent. As Deirdre McCloskey writes, there has been nothing like it, ever. She calls it The Great Enrichment and The Bourgeois Era, but that doesn’t really begin to describe the utter impossibility of the whole thing.

Capitalism is not investment, or savings, or accumulation. It is Surprise. Capitalism is the surprise of the textile revolution. Imagine! Cheap cotton textiles for the masses! It is the surprise of the oil revolution, bringing the illuminating oil for those oil lamps in Western movies from 80 cents a gallon down to 8 cents. When I was a young computer guy, working on an IBM 1130 with 32KB of memory and a 1MB disk, I never imagined the possibility of a smartphone with 32GB in my pocket which would play tunes in my car. Back then, it was inconceivable! Not to mention the pseudo-random noise communications.

Capitalism is permanent revolution. You want revolution, you Bernie guys? Real revolution, unlike the fake revolutions of lefty politics where one ruling class is replaced with another? If you do, then you want capitalism. Capitalism is the story of nobodies changing the world. Who was Hargreaves, inventor of the spinning jenny? A nobody. Who was John D. Rockefeller, inventor of the oil industry? A clerk in a store. Who was Andrew Carnegie, who brought us cheap steel? A telegraph messenger. Who was Steve Jobs? A college dropout. You want to talk revolution, forget politics and create a business start-up.

Capitalism gives young people a chance. Notice something about corporations in their growth stage? They hire young people. Notice something about well-established corporations and government? They are full of time-serving middle-aged lifers. ‘Nuff said.

Capitalism learns every day. Government never learns. Of course, capitalism doesn’t want to learn. That’s why capitalists like the ethanol guys in Iowa are so eager to crony up with government and get permanent subsidies. But the capitalists have to learn, and they learn every minute, every day from the world’s most amazing information system, the price system. Of course, the price system isn’t a Newtonian mechanical system at all; it is more accurately a probability state function, like in quantum mechanics. If you want a system, go to government, where Newton’s Third Law operates in a blind battle of equal and opposite forces battling to a bloody stalemate.

Capitalism is the deadly foe of discrimination. Can’t get a job because you are brown or black or white or female or male or gay or Muslim or Christian or an immigrant or young or old? Capitalism says: No Problem! We’ll hire anyone, especially if you are cheap! That’s why they had to have all those Jim Crow laws to enforce segregation in the South and the Davis-Bacon law to enforce “prevailing wages” in construction to keep blacks from competing with whites. And that’s why we are talking about building a wall on the Mexican border.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. Capitalism is the magic bullet for young people, because it is a rebellion of termites constantly undermining the foundations of established privilege and power.

But now you understand why Bernie Sanders doesn’t like capitalism. For an old geezer like him, there is nothing good there.

Feminists Reach that Scarlett O'Hara Moment

We all know the moment in Gone with the Wind. After lying and cheating and manipulating her way across 300 pages of novel -- or hours and hours of movie -- Scarlett asks the departing Rhett Butler.

"Where shall I go? What shall I do?"

After last week, in which ageing feminist icons were embarrassing themselves for Hillary, and the brash but eternally foolish Camille Paglia was coming out for Bernie, the real walk-the-walk feminist Carly Fiorina told it like it is.

To young girls and women across the country, I say: do not let others define you... A feminist is a woman who lives the life she chooses and uses all her God-given gifts. And always remember that a leader is not born, but made. Choose leadership.

But even this is pure modern fantasy. Nobody gets to live the life he or she chooses, least of all women, least of all feminists. Scarlett O'Hara did what she had to do, given the facts on the ground that the South was a devastated land, defeated in war, and given her dynastic desire to save Tara. She didn't choose it; it chose her.

Yes, yes, you say, but Scarlett lived in the patriarchal Old South. She didn't have the choices that today's young women have.

To which I say; Bologna. In my view, young people today are brutally limited in their choices by a cruel and unjust liberal educated ruling class. Back in the 19th century young people had a much broader canvas on which to paint, mainly because the old feudal order had broken down and the New World Order of the educated and the evolved hadn't yet established its hegemony.

Let's tell it like it is, in my language. First of all, a person needs to obtain food and lodging. So that limits the choices, for a start, because if you obtain food and lodging by working it kinda limits your choices. Work has a way of filling up the day. You can, of course, choose to live on welfare, or by living off someone else, or going to live on a commune, but I wouldn't recommend it. It helps, of course, if you have a university professor for a father, like Carly Fiorina. La Wik:

At the time of her birth, Fiorina's father was a professor at the University of Texas School of Law. He would later become dean of Duke University School of Law, Deputy U.S. Attorney General, and judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Her mother was an abstract painter.

So really all the guff about Carly working as a secretary is just presidential log cabin talk. No offense, but I'd call that being born on third base.

Secondly, a person needs to mate and have children. Oh yes, you can choose a diverse lifestyle, picking one of the fifty or so gender options at Facebook. But unless you have children you are voting you and yours off the planet. I suspect this is why almost all religions are pro-natal. If you are a Shaker and don't have children or a modern liberal and you only have one kid, you and yours aren't going to be around too much longer. At a societal level the anti-natal attitudes of modernity are yielding birth rates that point to declining populations everywhere from Germany to Japan. They had a similar problem in the high Roman Empire, and look what happened to the Romans.

Speaking of the Romans, I am reading SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by the worthy and feminist and lefty professor Mary Beard. She frequently alludes to the relative freedom of Roman women, even if it was not satisfactory to the culture of 21st century women university professors.

But really, in a society where ambitious men proved their worth by getting an army command so they could do a spot of conquering, as Pompey did in Asia Minor and the Levant, and Caesar did in Gaul, what exactly does Beard have in mind for women? As she writes, the tombstones of the era celebrate men's glory in war, and women's glory in tending the home fires. Remember, no free person in that era did anything that we would characterize as "work;" that was for slaves.

The reason we moderns do not continue the old culture is not that we are virtuous but that, on the one hand, we do not need many men to guard the ramparts of empire, and on the other that modern hygiene means that the average women needs to bear only about two children to continue the dance of the generations as against six or more back in the old days.

It is notable that the cultural change affected men first. In the 19th century we invented careers and wage employment and sports. Careers amount to a sublimation of the conquest instinct, and wage work substitutes for long-service rank-and-file soldiering. And sports sublimates the war instinct, where you can root for the home team against the rascally foreigners from another city.

Today, with modern hygiene and machine textiles, women do not have to spend their entire lives bearing and raising children and weaving on the home hand-loom. So where shall they go; what shall they do?

The instinct of the feminists was that women should have education and careers just like well-born men. That, of course, is what Carly Fiorina, the well-born daughter of a professor and an artist, assumes.

Just between you and me, I think that is rubbish. First of all, it assumes that the male education-and-career arc is willingly chosen by men. I suggest that men ideally would like to do nothing, but nothing does not get you money, power, and the love of beautiful women -- or even plump, pretty women -- so men go to work. Secondly, it assumes that women want to live like men, and they don't.

I think that, over the decades, women will move to a more integrated life, weaving together the themes of marriage, family, wage-work, teaching, telling stories, and maintaining family and friendship ties. That is how I experience modern women that have grown out of the indoctrination of their youth.

Here's an idea. Now that western humanity is more or less literate, how about we close down the literacy boot camps we call public schools, and just leave the education of our children up to the women? I predict that they will weave a dense cooperative network of homeschooling arrangements that will educate and socialize children much better than our present administrative and bureaucratic monstrosity? But what about the poor, you say? Well, how about our well-born women getting up off their duffs and opening charity schools in the inner city and getting all the neighborhood women involved? They could arrange "protection" from the local gangs.

But is this remotely possible in the near future?

You never know. The good thing about 2016 is that, thanks to people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the ruling class of the educated and the evolved is is a complete mess. With its pernicious program of internal colonization it has divided, demoralized, and destroyed a thriving bourgeois culture and brought the land of the free and the home of the brave to an angry and vindictive nadir.

But what is the alternative? Is it Bernie or Donald? Of course not. The way forward will be blazed by men and women outside the political world slowly, by trial and error, creating a new world out of the wreckage of the old, and presenting the old ruling class with a fait accompli.  Because politics is downstream from culture. Or, if you are a Marxist, society is an economic base that raises a cultural superstructure.

Then will come the ruling class's Scarlett moment, when they will whine: Where shall I go; what shall I do?

And we will say to the old elite, what Lee Iaccoca said years ago: Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

Take Your Pick: Nationalist, Socialist, or Both

In the sore losers department, National Review is running pieces today, here and here, mourning the sad state of America today, how our prosperity and our freedom have been lost to a powerful and unaccountable government by administrative hegemony. Charles Murray, as usual was way in front on this, with his quiet manifesto of revolution, By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission.

Mona Charen puts it best, in the aftermath of the New Hampshire primary, tagging the results as "victories of an inane socialist demagogue and a foul-mouthed nationalist demagogue." Gee, why don't we combine the two?

Look, there's no mystery about the anger. America is not working very well for ordinary Americans; they feel trapped. The sensible response of a trapped rat is to lash out. So Bernie Sanders encourages his Millennial Kids to lash out at Wall Street bankers and make them pay for free college and free health care. Donald Trump encourages his white working class supporters to lash out at the China that has stolen their good jobs at good wages.

Sanders blames greedy billionaires for the problems of the middle class and the poor; Trump blames treacherous immigrants, crafty foreigners and incompetent leadership in Washington. Some people seemed surprised that there was overlap between Sanders and Trump supporters, but it makes perfect sense.

Well, the richest men in America are people that have brought us Microsoft and Apple and Google and Amazon. And what have they done to deserve such riches? They have merely made it possible for anyone in the world to buy a smartphone for $99 that is cheaper and more powerful by orders of magnitude than anything dreamed of in the vacuum-tube-powered 1950s. That is how you make the really big money these days. Or, like Carlos Slim, you can do it the crony capitalist way by charging Mexicans an arm and a leg to phone home to Mexico. Why don't we make him pay for the wall?

The great truth of social animals is that War is not the Answer. Except for pirates and plunderers. The problem is to decide who is a pirate and a plunderer. The whole point of socialism from Marx to Bernie is to blame the capitalists for their riches on the pardonable assumption that they are no better than the feudal nobles of old. The whole point of nationalism is that foreigners are dangerous so we should put them down before they put us down.

And they were right, up until about 200-300 years ago. Feudal nobles were predatory scum, wasting the product of their peasants on their prideful power games. The national land was life, and the land of the neighboring tribe could be put to use feeding our people.

But in the unbelievable increase in prosperity of the last two centuries all this has been turned upside down. The way to make real money is not to exploit the peasants or the workers, but to come up with something new, like coal, oil, nuclear power instead of wood and windmills, textile manufacturing instead of hand-work, rail transportation, electricity, personal transportation, information and communications. And the way to prosper is to trust anyone that demonstrates trustworthiness.

Well, that doesn't seem to stir the hearts and minds of Americans in 2016. What we seem to want is scapegoats and... yes, what comes next after the sacrifice of the scapegoats?

Back to National Review and Charles Murray and their jeremiad against the unjust administrative state. The question is: who will bell the cat? Who will dare to start to wind down the vast wasteful looting of today's big government programs? Who will dare to dismantle the vast injustice of the administrative state? Who will dare to do that when the Millennial Kids are baying for free stuff, and the white working class is baying for the lost Eden of good jobs at good wages.

History teaches us that the only way we get to demolish the privileges and the plunder of today's regime is when Attila the Hun shows up and sweeps everything away.

The problem is that Attila is no respecter of persons. He sweeps away the good with the bad, and leaves misery and famine in his wake.

If only there were a better way.

Politics Always Breaks Your Heart

Government is a devil's bargain. One the one hand people need protection from pirates and plunderers. On the other, they need protection from the protectors.

Think of the situation of English peasants about 1,000 years ago. They were subject to the raids of the Vikings every autumn who would sail up the rivers, kill the men, take the newly harvested grain, and sell the women and children into slavery.

England needed a government strong enough to deal with the Vikings. And it got it, in 1066, from William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy. But the Normans were in fact Vikings that had conquered and settled down a century before in Normandy. Still, after the Norman Conquest the Brits went unconquered for 600 years, until the Dutch invaded in 1688 with a 500 ship invasion force.

Fast forward to 2016, and we have the Republican voters in open revolt against their betters in Washington, DC. So who do the voters choose as their champion against the dreaded establishment? Why, none other than rich kid Donald Trump, who has made a career out of playing footsie with the establishment. This is the man who is to be our savior?

If you vote for Donald Trump you are voting to kick out immigrants and teach China a lesson. If you are voting for Bernie Sanders you are voting to put Wall Street in jail and get free college and free health care. If you are voting for Ted Cruz you are voting against the two-party Washington cabal. That's the trouble with politics and government. It's always a war, and the leader is always promising to mobilize the nation (at enormous expense) to go out and defeat the foe.

The problem is that, in the old Pogo comic-strip line, we have met the enemy and he is us. We got the immigration crisis because we have been condoning illegal immigration for decades. We got the Wall Street crash because lefties like Bernie were advocating for decades against banks "red-lining" poorer neighborhoods and restricting mortgage lending there. We got the RINO Republican establishment because it is death to a politician ever to propose a cut in government spending of any kind, let alone a reform of the big entitlement programs.

Really, nothing has changed in the last 1,000 years. We demand to be protected in old age, we demand the government picks up the tab for educating our children and relieving the poor. And then we are shocked, shocked, to find that government is for sale to the highest bidder?

Here we are after 200 years of stunning capitalism that has raised per capita income by 3,000 percent in 200 years, and half the Millennial Kids think that socialism is a better idea. Here we had, in 2012, a presidential candidate in Mitt Romney who had done nothing all his life but turn around ailing churches, olympic games, and corporations. And we rejected him for a man that had majored in the divisive tactics of community organizing.

Winston Churchill is said to have approved of America because in the end it does the right thing after trying everything else. Even then, I suggest, we do the right thing for the wrong reasons.

So it is my great hope that the Republican Party will win in 2016 because of the support of the white working class that helped defeat Mitt Romney in 2012, and that the new Emerging Republican Majority composed of 50 years of Democratic rejects will revive the economy, repair the culture, clean the Augean stables at the federal government, and roll back the Muslim impertinence under the leadership of a guy that has spent his life playing the crony capitalist.

And after Donald Trump's victory in New Hampshire it is starting to look like the only thing to hope for.

What a country! What a world!

The Metastasizing Injustices of Liberal Race Politics

Conservative media sources have noted the dog that didn't bark after the Iowa caucuses. Usually, after such an historic event, the liberal media is all agog with the wonder of the First Latino to Win a Presidential Caucus. But this time, when the son of a Cuban immigrant won the Iowa caucus all we heard was crickets. Until The New York Times ran a piece that told us that Ted Cruz wasn't really an authentic Hispanic. Or Latino. Or whatever the totem word is today.

How is that not being celebrated as historic or at least worth a headline for a day or two?

The answer is not that complicated: Neither Mr. Cruz nor Mr. Rubio meets conventional expectations of how Latino politicians are supposed to behave.

Neither of these candidates claims to speak for the Hispanic population or derive a crucial portion of their support from Hispanics, and neither bases much of his political identity on being a Latino.

For "conventional expectations" you should read "approved liberal ruling class expectations."

And just to make sure, race journalist Jorge Ramos had written a piece in January that "There is no greater disloyalty than the children of immigrants forgetting their own roots. That is a betrayal."

There is a reason why I keep banging away on the idea that Politics is Violence, or alternatively, that Politics is Division. The whole point of liberal race politics is to divide off preferred minorities into the Democratic Party in return for race-based benefits enforced by the government's men with guns. Blacks and women and Latinos qualify; others need not apply.

Back in the 1960s you could make a half-decent argument that blacks needed a leg up after 200 years of slavery and 100 years of Jim Crow. It was a specious argument even then, but life is more than just rigid application of the rules. It is unjust, according to modern Enlightenment ideas, to use the power of government to enslave or discriminate against blacks according to their race. It is still unjust to use cultural and political power to favor one group of people over another in the years since.

You can warble all you like about historical marginalizations oppressions and exploitations, but the use of government power to favor or disfavor particular groups is unjust. Who cares? Well, sooner or later, the people experiencing the sharp end of government injustice get pissed off.

That is one argument explaining the rise of Trump and Sanders in this election cycle. Trump represents the white working class that has been the main victim of liberal race politics over the last century. You might say that it took the white working class a powerful long time to get riled up. Sanders represents the Millennial generation that is suffering from the lousy economy and the sky-high college fees.

You can talk all you like about xenophobia and anti-immigrant bigotry, but wages are depressed by immigrants like me. The people that suffer most are the people with marginal skills and intelligence that are forced to compete at the low end of the wage scale against the new wave of immigrants.

You can talk all you like about the ignorance of the Millennial Kids warming to the socialism of Bernie Sanders, but the Millennials have been screwed. In part they have been screwed because the economy is still suffering after the real-estate collapse, and that collapse was caused by a government program to push mortgage loans on sub-prime, often minority sub-prime borrowers. The sky-high college fees are caused by mountains of government subsidies for higher education, which merely encourage universities to raise the tuition and hire more administrators and end up burying students in debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy.

Our government today is a huge pile of programs to help this or that group that suffered from perceived injustice at some point in the past. Every now and again one of those programs distorts the economy so badly that we get a crash of some kind. The crash may be financial, or it may be the slow-motion death by municipal unions at the City of Chicago.

Anyway, eventually the carefully constructed ramparts of privilege constructed by cunning politicians a generation ago or a century ago start to crumble. The injustices created by the ruling class and their government programs become so large that the victims start to reach a critical mass. And that is what we are seeing now.

Unfortunately there is nothing written in the sky that says that those suffering from injustice will choose appropriate means to right their injustice. Egghead "sophisters, economists, and calculators" like me think that the less government the better. But what do we know? The victims of government injustice just want someone to lead them and "do something" about it.

What everyone would like to know is what happens next. The answer is that nobody knows. And the truth is that whatever happens, there is no guarantee that it will solve anything, and do any more than replace an old injustice with a new injustice.

Politics is violence, and government is force. They are very blunt instruments for solving the problems of social animals like humans. Because the whole idea of social animals is to reduce the expensive resort to violence and force. You can see the problem when you consider that government is here to use violence to curb those that resort to violence, whether domestic or foreign. Where does that end?

It ends, for now, with an election in November. After that, who knows?