Mend the Fed? Be Careful What You Wish For

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has accused the Fed of keeping interest rates low at the behest of President Obama. Marco Rubio waffles about Fed overreach that has led to an unhealthy “Fed-centric economy.” Ted Cruz talks about tying monetary policy to the price of gold.

But I wonder if anyone has really thought about what it would mean to reform the Federal Reserve System.

No doubt, the Fed’s zero interest rate policy is all about keeping the government’s debt interest costs down and protecting debtors from the aftermath of the Crash of 2008. But what would it mean to return to a normal interest rate policy?

No doubt the Fed has badly warped the economy, not just in the past few years, but ever since its inception in 1913.

No doubt, all things being equal, it would be best to link the dollar to gold.

But what, really, should we do? And more to the point, what do we dare to do?

We all complain about the Federal Reserve System. But do we really want to do anything about it?

Modern central banking started with the Dutch and their Amsterdam Exchange Bank. It provided the credit that enabled the Dutch to fight and win independence from Spain. Then the Dutch Prince William of Orange invaded Britain in 1688 and within a decade founded the Bank of England and used the British National Debt to conduct a Second Hundred Years War against the French, ending with victory in 1815. But the fact is that the central bank tended to roil the economy badly, since its war finance operations created inflation, and its post-war resumption tended to bankrupt debtors with withering deflation. Even without a central bank, the US Revolutionary and Civil Wars created first ruinous inflation and then bone-jarring deflation.

Our situation is the same, but different. Now the central bank is involved in goosing and/or cooling the economy on the conceit that monetary policy can help moderate the boom-and-bust cycle.

But I suspect that the real role of the central bank today is to smooth over the distortions caused by the huge presence of government operations in the modern big-government economy.

In the old days, the central bank’s credit operations helped the government commandeer the nation’s resources so that it could fight its national wars. That would result in ruinous inflation during the war and ruinous deflation after the war.

But today the central bank’s credit operations are intended to help the government commandeer the nation’s resources so that it can conduct its redistribution operations, from Social Security to mortgage subsidies. This has resulted in a century of inflation punctuated by various financial panics and banking collapses. The Crash of 2008 was caused by the Fed trying to cool the Fannie/Freddie fueled housing bubble of the 2000s. Call it the government’s clumsy right hand trying to correct the errors of its clumsy left hand. But before that was the Savings and Loan collapse, in which the government’s subsidized Savings and Loan lenders collapsed in the 1980s. It was a case of the government’s deflationary policy of the 1980s having to deal with the fallout of its inflationary policy in the 1960s and 1970s.

We are taught to believe that the Fed wisely guides the economy with the predictions of its economic models and economic data. But most likely it is just muddling through, trying to pick up the pieces of the government’s continuing failed interventions in the national economy. And every time we never see the crash coming.

So what are the chances of reforming the Fed so it doesn’t keep interest rates down to reduce the government’s interest payments. or reduce the “Fed-centered” economy, or get back to gold?

I’d say the chances are slim to none. As long as the government is seizing 35 percent of GDP to redistribute to to powerful interests, and using the credit system in all kinds of ways to favor certain interests, it is going to set up inflations and deflations, and crashes, and it will need the power of the printing press get itself out of a jam, by bailing out banks and frequently acting as lender of last resort to prevent a “sudden stop” in the credit system, and using cheap money to "stimulate" the economy.

And we will continue to build up the Chairmen of the Federal Reserve System, from William McChesney Martin to Alan Greenspan to Ben Bernanke to Janet Yellen, as wise financial soothsayers protecting the nation from fearful portents in the financial heavens.

Because the alternative of recognizing that they are all dull political hacks fumbling their way in the dark is too horrible to admit.

No, The US Budget Is Not Bankrupt

In the American Spectator today they do the usual piece about how the United States is bankrupt, that Barack Obama is doing nothing to fix the budget and that spending is going up and revenue not so much. So it says:

The U.S. is bankrupt. Not in the same sense as an individual, of course. Uncle Sam has the power to tax. But at some point even Washington might not be able to squeeze enough cash out of the American people to pay its bills.

Actually, the US is not bankrupt. That's because, unlike you and me, the US is a sovereign nation and it can renege on anything it wants. Only one thing matters to a sovereign nation: Can it sell its debt? Venezuela is bankrupt; it cannot sell its debt and so it pays its bills by printing currency and launching hyperinflation. And yet it is not bankrupt. It is still operating, and it will continue operating even after it reduces the economy to ruins.

The situation of the United States is that it has promised all kinds of entitlements and programs to the American people and the many special interests and client groups, and there isn't going to be enough money to pay for them all. Basically, Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid are going to eat the budget.

But really, what else is new? Every government has promised all kinds of things to all kinds of people and the fact is that a lot of people get disappointed.

So at some point the US will start to renege on its promises. It can do it clean, and cut the spending and reform the entitlements and put the special interests on a diet, or it can do it ugly, like Venezuela.

The problem is, of course, that when the cuts come, the recipients will be mad as hell and will declare that they won't take it anymore. Just like the folks in Greece. So the government will do nothing, until we get to Greece.

At no time is the US really bankrupt. The US has the power to renege on anything it wants to. So there! The only question, at any moment, is who it decides to renege on. Will it be entitlement recipients? Will it be government bureaucrats?  Will it be bondholders? Will it be holders of US dollars and dollar denominated bank accounts?

The answer is obvious. When the US gets into a bind about meeting all its obligations, it will take the easy way out. It will renege on the folks that have the least political clout. That is not bankruptcy. That is just politics.

So the US budget is not bankrupt. It is just a measure of how badly the government is lying to us.

Waiting for the Moral Revolution

We've heard a lot recently, all of a sudden, about the drugs and heroin epidemic in the white working class. Only, according to Kevin D. Williamson, it ain't just the white working class. It's everywhere, including in the Volvo and trustafarian set.

(I thought that liberals had abandoned Volvos for Subaru Outbacks years ago, but maybe not on the east coast.)

Seems like the driving force, what you might call the "root cause," of addiction in the Subaru set runs more towards "divorce, and addiction in the family" than the failure to find good jobs in the energy industry.

With all this "dysfunction" and "substance abuse" you really get to see the point of what liberals sneeringly call "organized religion." As if listening to NPR and reading The New York Times and babbling today's liberal talking points isn't organized religion.

The fact is that 99.7 percent of people aren't moral philosophers (assuming that moral philosophers are any more moral than other folks). They need to join some sort of moral community to get straight about things. There is no particular mystery about this. Humans are social animals, and they like to be well-thought-of by the people they know. Modern organized religion is a spontaneous means to do this. You join a church or a liberal activist group and you internalize its moral structure, and you behave in ways that win the moral approval of the others in the community. And you go on to have a stable, worthy life that leaves a brace of kids and a passel of grandchildren behind.

The glory of the US is that, by an accident of history, its moral communities have tended to live at arms length from the state and its political power. So churches have tended not to be bureaucratic Departments of State Religion, but entrepreneurial outfits that have had to figure out what ordinary people wanted in the moral community line, and then give it to them.

And yes, people want structure, and rules, and costs. That's what makes a moral community worthwhile.

Of course, not all moral communities are a good idea, and every moral community is one step away from getting in bed with the state to impose its moral code on the rest of society. We are seeing this with our gay friends who are busy agitating to make it a crime against the state to say or do anything against gayness.

That's been the problem with the Left from the beginning. It can't get its mind around the fact that limited government and the rule of law are designed to limit the enthusiasm of people just like them, who cannot see anything wrong in combining the political, the economic, and the moral/cultural into one total system, providing that they are in charge.

System is domination, as the Frankfurters imply, or at the very least, "internal colonization."

According to Kevin, "There were 47,000 lethal overdoses in the U.S. in 2014, almost 30,000 of which were prescription painkillers and heroin." Maybe that's a lot, maybe that's a little. Back in the 19th century, the consumption of alcohol was said to be four times what it is today. And you could get opium without a prescription. You have to think that that kind of consumption led to millions of broken lives and premature death. In those days it was cheap gin that had the working class by the throat. The current heroin epidemic is said to be caused by a crackdown on the overprescription of opioids and painkillers. But is this worse than it used to be?

Here's a thought. Maybe the peculiar placidity of the famous Fifties was due to the government regimentation of World War II. Maybe the government tamed everyone to live good regular lives when it sent a generation of young men into the services to fight Hitler and Tojo. But then the kids of the Greatest Generation grew up in the Sixties and decided to go for more excitement. Or something.

And then the government decided to kick the white working class to the curb and get in bed with minorities and women.

Here's what I think. I think that liberals have so totally messed up America's moral communities, by their moral imperialism the last hundred years, that it is going to take a moral revolution to recover.

And if you ask me what that means, I admit that I haven't a clue. 

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.