What Makes People Take to the Street

Everybody, by now, realizes that US politics is hitting an inflection point. The Trump phenomenon means that a chunk of GOP voters are saying, Who Cares, let's break the thing. And then on the Democratic side we have Black Lives Matter tearing the place up and the ideological base plumping for Bernie the Socialist over the capa de tutti capi of the Clinton Crime Syndicate.

Well, I've been reading Michael Mann and The Sources of Social Power, Volume 2: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760-1914. So there. Now Michael Mann is a Brit and his brain is completely clogged by center-left academic syndrome, a fatal disease. So his narrative is all about those poor exploited workers and peasants and how they struggled for political, social, and economic citizenship. He means that they struggled to be accepted as a partner in political, social, and economic power.

Apart from being annoyed by his smirking leftism, I am trying to get the story behind the story of the glorious rise of the glorious working class in the 19th century. Here are my takeaways.

• When people experience an economic reverse, as artisans impoverished by de-skilling implemented by industrial manufacturing, or peasants ruined by low grain prices, they don't tend to think about what to do to make themselves useful again in the economy, now that the old gig is up. They tend to go to the government for subsidies or credit relief or some such dodge, and if all else fails they take to the streets.
  
• The advantage of giving everyone the vote is that it keeps them all in the system. On Mann's finding, workers didn't go for revolution in the long 19th century unless they were excluded from the political system and didn't have a voice in the councils of power.

Now let's return to the present. We have the white working class kicking up a storm, and we have Black Lives Matter kicking up a storm. What is going on here?

Let's introduce another idea. The final convulsion of young men at the end of the world. There is the Ghost Dance movement of the Plains Indians that erupted in the 19th century, centering on the use of magic Ghost Shirts. La Wik:

[P]roper practice of the dance would reunite the living with spirits of the dead, bring the spirits of the dead to fight on their behalf, make the white colonists leave, and bring peace, prosperity, and unity to native peoples throughout the region.

Another 19th century magic cult was the Militia United in Righteousness, known to us as the Boxers, that rose up in China at the turn of the 20th century. The Boxers believed they were invulnerable to western bullets.

Numerous conservative pundits have noted that the white working class has been pushed outside the magic circle of respectability. Their opinions no longer matter in the councils of state. And Barack Obama famously wrote the white working class off in his "bitter clingers" speech to donors in 2008. So the only thing left for the white working class is some kind of a Ghost Dance with Donald Trump, believing that he will make America Great Again. Here is Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.

Middle Americans, as they appear to the makers of educated opinion, are hopelessly shabby, unfashionable, and provincial, ill informed about changes in taste or intellectual trends, addicted to trashy novels of romance and adventure, and stupefied by prolonged exposure to television[.]

The point is that when ruling class liberals say that and they believe it then they are writing a whole segment of America out of polite society; they are giving themselves a license to ignore those Americans and their needs and their grievances. And that means, per Michael Mann, that the only way for Middle Americans to get the attention of the ruling class is to start breaking things.

And as for Black Lives Matter, it cannot have escaped anyone's attention that liberals have encouraged blacks in social dysfunction the better to harvest their votes at election time. Camille Paglia:

I have been disturbed and repelled for decades by the way reproductive rights have become an ideological tool ruthlessly exploited by my own party, the Democrats, to inflame passions, raise money, and drive voting.

OK, so she was talking about abortion. But Democrats do that with race too, to "inflame passions, raise money, and drive voting." And it works.

But you'd think that, over the years, as things don't get better that African Americans would begin to get restless. And maybe their restlessness would tear the Democratic Party apart.

But the basic message from Michael Mann echoes in my mind. If you treat everyone as an equal, with a right to be in the room at the negotiating table, then you can usually stitch up some sort of political deal to keep the peace. You may make a nonsense of economics, and justice, but you will keep everyone in the tent.

But that's not what the modern ruling class has done. Just saying.

Imagine That You Head a University Without a Mises Library

Jay Nordlinger is doing a series of Impromptus here, here, and here, on the classical liberal university in Guatemala City, Francisco Marroquin University. The university has things like the Ludwig von Mises library. The university has also had an effect on the state of Guatemala. Guatemala now is #33 on the Freedom Index.

At the other end of the scale is the modern American safe-space university where student activists are outraged by the Chalkening of Trump 2016 slogans on campus. They feel that the Chalkening is a form of political violence.

(Of course, they are right. On my view politics is violence and so when Trump supporters chalk the campus with Trump slogans they are in fact making a show of force. Just like lefty peaceful protesters.)

The natural reaction of conservatives is to brand the administrators of these special snowflake universities as spineless. So they are, no doubt.

But I think that they are rather trapped by their liberal ideology. If you believe in the current mainstream identity politics then you believe, on principle, that activists organizing peaceful protests on anything must be given the benefit of the doubt as to their sincerity and as the the justice of their cause. After all, nobody with white privilege can really know what it is like to be marginalized and oppressed.

And anyway, I suspect that most academic careerists are rather narrow and limited people. They are good at what they do, attaching to a mentor, getting through a PhD, getting tenure track and impressing the right people on the way to tenure. I doubt if a person with those kind of skills is going to end up as a great academic leader with the chops to defend the principle of open debate and freedom and lead a university through tough times.

I don’t think that your average academic really can see around the corner to the end game of the activist culture. I don’t think they really understands how it leads to SJW mobs, to the bad science of climate change, to the subvention of the university to the power of government and its agenda of force, and ultimately to rebellion and conflict.

We have seen the Trump phenomenon, and how the Trump supporters can explain away anything. You think that campus lefties are any different? Call it group think, or peer pressure, or witch hunt: all humans are social animals and they don’t like to stick out as different. We all, almost all, go along to get along.

Of course, our liberal friends in the ruling class, who never hear a discouraging word about their follies and their corruption, imagine themselves a cut above the average Trumpster. They are educated, you see. Not only that, they have graduated summa cum laude from liberal confirmation preparation classes, and know the liberal catechism by heart.

The problem for liberals is that, educated as they may be in liberal pieties and the rituals of peaceful protest, they do not understand the larger processes of power. That has been the lesson of the Obama administration, which has recklessly pushed the limits of its power and provoked a head of rebellion that has resulted in the most Republican Congress in 70 years and now provoked the Trump phenomenon.

Here is what the Obamis don't understand.

The reason for the rule of law is not to protect private property. It is to provide a process for adjudicating disputes in a way that both sides to the dispute can respect.

The reason for a legislature is to require that changes in government force have a majority support. And according to Buchanan and Tullock in The Calculus of Consent the way that legislative voting systems work is that, to get a majority, the supporters of a legislative proposal have to buy the support of people nominally opposed to the measure.

The reason to have a Supreme Court that does not find rights in the penumbras of the Constitution is that decisions that find new rights in dark corners set up conflict and disunion. As in Roe v. Wade, and maybe in the gay marriage case.

The reason to limit the president’s power to take unilateral executive actions is that unilateral executive actions really make the people on the receiving end angry, because, after all, an executive action is the unilateral power play of the sovereign, done without consultation and compromise.

The reason to limit the scope of government regulation and to maintain a small and limited government is that the regulatory state ends up being springtime for special interests that can influence and corrupt government in a thousand ways without showing up on the media radar.

Notice that I am not talking here about deliberate attempts to nobble the opposition with malice aforethought, like Lois Lerner and the IRS attempt to hinder the operations of Tea Party groups. And I am not talking about the liberal attack on “dark money” or the liberal proposal to criminalize the opposition to their climate-change agenda. And I am not talking about the fact that settled science says that big government cannot work because it cannot compute prices and it does not have the bandwidth of the market and the price system. I am just talking about the divisive effects of unilateral executive actions and the inevitable corruptions of big government regulation.

The reason for all these checks and balances on the use of political power is to soften the clunking fist of government power. It is to present government action as a kind of consensus rather than a brutal cram-down. It is to pretend that everyone is included in the political community and has a right to be consulted and to be heard. It is, in many ways, pure illusion, because force is force, and power is power, but it softens the hard edges of political conflict.

In my view, today’s liberals have forgotten all these timeless nuggets of political wisdom in the rush to implement any and all items of the liberal agenda during the blessed hour of power during the Obama years. But I think that this reckless program of power is a gigantic mistake, and liberals will pay for this mistake big time in the years ahead.

Trump, the Revolted Public's "Objet Trouvé"

What is not to like when people start noticing your book as a key to understanding the times of our Trump. That’s what they have done with Martin Gurri and The Revolt of the Public. OK, so I haven’t read the book, not yet, but the argument seems to be that the people are revolting because they have been promised stuff that hasn’t happened. On Gurri’s blog, he writes:

The American public, like the public everywhere, is engaged in a long migration away from the structures of representative democracy to more sectarian arrangements. In Henri Rosanvallon’s term, the democratic nation has devolved into a “society of distrust.” The reasons, Rosanvallon argues, are deep and structural, but we also have available a simple functional explanation: the perception, not always unjustified, that democratic government has failed to deliver on its promises.

Right now we are merely at the stage where the electorate is eager to punish its rulers.

Now let’s have some more of the same.

The public, I mean to say, cares a lot about outcomes and not so much about the legitimacy of the ballot box or the authority of elected officials. And if the outcomes demanded are a tangle of contradictions that divide the public, the sense of being betrayed and abandoned by “protected classes” is shared across large majorities of mutually hostile persuasions. The landscape in a society of distrust tilts steeply toward repudiation: everyone, at all times, wants to stand against.

To which I would say, no kidding Sherlock! You mean that democratic politics, which is all about politicians making ridiculous promises and conducting civil war by other means and setting neighbor against neighbor to win elections, ends up in a society of distrust in which people fall back into their pre-industrial sects and tribes?

The public “cares a lot about outcomes” as in free stuff? And the public doesn’t much care about where it comes from? Could there be a problem with that?

This shows that my catchphrases about politics is violence and government is force tell you all you need to know. If politicians promise the voters loot and plunder from the exactions of the tax gatherer on the One Percent, then people are going to very quickly revert to the good old hunter-gatherer culture of the dawn raid on the neighboring village for loot and rape and plunder. In that sort of culture you don’t care about the niceties of inter-village Rules for the Conduct of Dawn Raids. What counts is the vision of all the food in the neighboring village and all the nubile young women they have over there wandering around with nothing to do.

Once you start the mission creep beyond the simple notion of government keeping us safe you are setting yourself up for disappointment and the society of distrust.

There is even a problem in the very first promise that government makes: to keep us safe. Nobody can make that promise. There is no such thing as “safe.” There is only life and its uncertainties and its ups and downs. There will be tough times and we will have to deal with them and it will be dishonest to blame the whole thing on the usual suspects and the convenient scapegoat. It will be no use complaining that “I paid my share” and demanding my entitlement. Because if the land is devastated by war, or famine, or earthquake, or just government mistakes, then everyone has to pitch in and dig out of the hole.

That’s why I think that the modern idea of pensions and entitlements midwifed by the government is not just a bad idea and cruel and unjust besides, but the fount of folly: worse that a crime, it’s a blunder. It works fine, as long as nothing goes wrong. But it always goes wrong because nobody should make predictions, especially about the future. Something always goes wrong, and then there is nothing to do but to try to dig out of it.

The great avoidable follies of the last two hundred years during the Great Enrichment from $1-3 per day to $100 per day have been people refusing to submit to reverses when things go wrong for them and demanding that other people pay instead. And the worst of it is that time and time again the evolved and the educated have encouraged the people in their folly. There were the artisans that were put out of business by machine industry. There were the industrial workers outraged by the remorseless workings of the international price system. There were the Germans, in the most advanced country in the world, reduced to rage by their loss in World War I. Now we have the world’s Muslims, humiliated and enraged by the five-hundred-year hegemony of the West.

Then, of course, we have the people encouraged to rage by liberals right here in the good old USA: blacks and students in the Sixties, women in the Seventies, gays in the Eighties. Now liberals are trying to do a number on Hispanics and provoke them to rage as well. What could go wrong?

Our problem, of course, is that our ruling class, led by what Gurri calls the “protected classes,” is like every ruling class. It knows how to do the daily observances of its ruling class dominance ritual, like the citizens of the Hunger Games Capitol. But it has no idea what the rituals mean. It was the long-dead ancestors of the ruling class that actually wielded swords and plotted revolution and sent the old regime packing. As in any late dynasty, our current rulers really don’t know what they are doing. Hey Barack!

Barack Obama was educated in the community organizer tactics of Saul Alinsky. And young Hillary Clinton also studied the master. The trouble is that it is one thing for a leader of the oppressed to harass and humiliate the ruling class, as Alinsky proposed. It is another thing when the community organizer is a member of the ruling class -- the President of the United State even -- and his rank and file are funded in part by a regime supporter like George Soros.

If you don’t understand the difference then you are a feckless ruling-class scion that is cruising for a bruising. And The Revolt of the Public will continue to coalesce.

Two Hundred Years of Hiding from the Market

Now that we are reaching the twilight of the western welfare state, it is time to confront our history.

Point One is that nations under capitalism have experienced a Great Enrichment that has raised per capita income from $1-3 per day to $100 per day. As Deirdre McCloskey writes, there has never been anything like it, ever.

Point Two is that nations and peoples have all fought tooth and nail against capitalism: taxing it, restricting it, abolishing it, regulating it, anathematizing it.

On the one hand everyone expects capitalism to deliver ever increasing benefits. On the other hand everyone is outraged whenever it falls short of perfection. And nobody is willing to submit to the market when it tells us unwelcome news.

What is our problem?

Our problem is, I think, that the human response to setback is cornered-rat syndrome. You lash back when you are in trouble, on the chance that force will solve your problem. And if you are being attacked by the neighboring village, it's the appropriate response, because the alternative is death or slavery.

And so the industrial workers naturally fought back against the relentless demands of the international price system. When their employers sought to cut wages in an economic downturn, or improve efficiencies by reallocating or laying off workers to be able to reduce prices to compete against international competitors, they were outraged and fought back.

It is hard, very hard, to accept the verdict of the price system and surrender to its dictates. It is much easier to rail against unfair competition, against cheap imports, against rapacious financiers, against ruthless CEOs and the One Percent.

Also, if you are one of the People of the Subordinate Self then your idea of human socialization is that you surrender your liberty to a great lord or politician or gang boss, and then you are his responsibility.

I have written, in my Little Darlings theory, that anyone that signs up as the retainer of a great lord has really checked out of history. Enrolling as the retainer of a lord is the same as enlisting in the army. From that moment forward you are merely cannon fodder, and sooner or later you will be served up as food for powder. Great lords and political leaders are not interested in you, they are interested in their power project. On this theory, the People of the Subordinate Self are the walking dead. And this was confirmed in Gregory Clark's Farewell to Alms, which argued that prior to 1800 in England, the poor had fewer surviving children than the rich, and so suffered in a society of lowered expectations where the children of the poor did worse than their parents. After 1800, with the Industrial Revolution and capitalism and all, the poor multiplied and their children expected to live better than their parents.

I think that the way out of the demonization of capitalism is to recognize that the price system is not a system, and capitalism is not an ideology, as is socialism. Capitalism and prices are examples of what we now call emergent phenomena, of which the state function in quantum mechanics is perhaps the poster child. Everything in the world is a possibility until there is a transaction. And then the millions of transactions get rendered down into widespread prices. These prices are not the dominatory oppression of some economic  hegemon but a discovery process, the precipitate of millions of human actions.

In my view the answer to all this is a cultural revolution. Just as Christianity asks us to surrender to the power of God's love, capitalism asks us to surrender to the verdict of our fellow consumers and producers in the world market. Until we do, the present alarums and excursions will continue.

Coach to Conservatives: This is a Football

Back in the day, George W. Bush campaigned for a kinder, gentler America. It reflected his own personal decency, and the need for Republicans to soften their image, carefully burnished by Democrats, as witch-hunting bigots.

Looking back, I’m not sure the tactic was such a good idea. In retrospect it looks like an act of unconditional surrender in the culture wars. It has ended up meaning that liberals and activists can call out anyone they want as racists, sexists, homophobes, and conservatives and Republicans can’t. Because racism, sexism, homophobia.

Then along comes Donald Trump with his insult politics and the whole white working class prairie catches fire. He catches the rest of the field flat-footed. The other candidates are all house-trained and know, from experience, that a wrong word can trigger a media avalanche that buries their campaign and their career.

Corporations know which way the wind is blowing; that’s why Starbucks pushes its lefty Civility campaign, and activist outlets like Color of Change are busy intimidating corporations from advertising on FoxNews or sponsoring the Republican National Convention.

It probably makes sense for Starbucks to go all lefty. After all, the coffee-house and artists and writers go together like Sartre and Beauvoir.

So how does the right fight back for the right to stand without fear and intimidation in the public square?

If you read a lefty tract like Michael Mann’s Sources of Social Power you are shown a world in which the capitalists are engaged in a class war with the proletarianized working class, and the middle class in the middle has to decide which army to join. The very heavens are politicized. In reality, most people are people and they just want to get on in the world.

John D. Rockefeller, the clerk at a commission merchant, starts a business buying and selling barrels of oil, then expands into transportation, then pipelines and railroad unit trains and refineries, and pretty soon he’s put whaling Capt. Ahab out of work and taken over the whole illuminating oil business. Did John D. Rockefeller want to take over the world with his Standard Oil in a global power play? No. He retired at about 50 and invented modern philanthropy. Did he accumulate a vast fortune and then watched it trickle down to the workers and the traditionally marginalized? No. He made a fortune because he reduced the price of illuminating oil from about 80 cents a gallon to 8 cents a gallon, and successfully “scaled up” his business to meet the extra demand he provoked by reducing prices by 90 percent.

Was this capitalist di tutti capitalisti trying to screw the working class? Was he hatching a cunning plot to seduce the middle class into supporting his designs by giving them corporate pensions? No. He was just a kid that stumbled into a way to create a safe, inexpensive illuminating oil and had the smarts and the luck to make it big. Along the way, of course, he had to learn how to play politics, because state legislators didn’t think you should get rights-of-way for pipelines from Pennsylvania oil wells to New Jersey refineries without paying $200 to Pass Go, and because farmers didn’t think that oil unit trains should get lower rates than their carloads of grain.

Corporations and capitalists, whether they like it or not, have to live in the public square and deal with governments that want to loot them and activists that want to bully them. This means that cultural leaders need to counter the leftist shame-and-blame culture with a counterforce. It is a measure of the failure of libertarians and conservatives to do this in the face of the cultural Marxist identity politics that it took a complete political neophyte like Donald Trump to cut the Gordian knot and send the lefty culture warriors scurrying to their burrows for a magical moment.

And it is completely reasonable that Trump should have excited the white working class above all others in his wrecking-crew campaign. It is the white working class that has borne the brunt of leftist identity politics in the last half century, and they have been dying from despair.

I have always felt, ever since the Reagan years, that the Reagan politics of supply-side economics and deregulation was vulnerable to a lefty counterattack because it was not based on a cultural revolution that could marginalize the leftist culture of identity and the internal colonialism of adminstrative, bureaucratic government with something that could inspire Americans, and especially young Americans to reject the shabby top-down compulsion of big government. And so it is: when auditing courses at the University of Washington in recent years I kept encountering good little girls that parroted the lefty line that politics equaled a protest march to City Hall.

What would it take to create a moral cultural movement that created a generation of good little girls that parroted the idea that freedom and responsibility were the highest and best things for a good little girl to aspire to rather than to wave a sign at a TV camera in the safe space of a community-organized rent-a-mob?

The fact is that the so-called conservative movement has failed to do that, and the Trump phenomenon has announced that fact to the world. There is a feeling that we must all start over, reciting the coach’s age-old insult to his defeated team: “This is a football.”

Is There a Politics of Less?

I have a question. Is it possible to run for President of the United States offering less government? Or, to put the question more forcefully, can any politics succeed if it is proposing to reduce the amount of government?

Because if you look at politicians and governments, they are always in the business of doing more, or at least doing something.

And that is why, I think, the conservative agenda of less government never goes anywhere. Because really, where is the punch in a policy of, well, chaps, we really ought to wind Social Security down over the years and replace it with a genuine individual savings program. Here’s a better idea. Today’s Social Security is fundamentally unjust to gays and transgenders! We must reform Social Security to bring justice to gays and their partners!

You can see why I am thinking this. It’s all about Trump.

When I read the anti-Trump stuff, like today’s piece from the Knight of the NeverTrump Table, Kevin D. Williamson, he is perfectly right. Trump is clueless about “policy.” He reduces everything to vague calls to action. But, the conservative policy analyst inquires, what is Trump actually going to do about big, bloated government?

The point is, conservatives aren’t going to win the presidency with a carefully nuanced analysis of the issues. You win elections with promises of Change. Affordable Health Care! Make American Great Again! Justice for Seniors!

After the election is over, of course, it is back to the slow grind of policy, of this or that policy change forced through against some sort of opposition, won with the help of a few power players whose support is shamelessly bought with other peoples’ money.

If you reduce government you will kick over a hornet’s nest. That’s what I wrote about yesterday, retailing to you the story of the British Chartists in the 1840s. After the passage of the Great Reform bill in 1832 -- which you can read about in George Eliot’s Middlemarch -- Parliament passed an agenda that suited the newly franchised middle-class electorate. Free trade and Poor Law reform. But that infuriated the Poor Law recipients and the artisans that were making a decent living out of the old guild-privilege economy. And they took to the streets.

That is the problem that conservatives face. We want to do entitlement reform. But don’t tell seniors. We want education reform. But don’t tell teachers and parents. We want welfare reform. But don’t tell the tens of millions of EBT recipients. We want to repeal Obamacare. But don’t tell the 10 million or so that are presently enjoying the subsidies.

When you get into the weeds, like on the National Labor Relations Board or climate change, a conservative government can probably make changes. No doubt Big Labor and the greenies would get The New York Times and NPR in a fine froth about that. They will scream that it is the end of workers and the end of the climate as we know it. But the average American won't really care.

The dirty truth about government is that the only thing it can do is some shameful and crude thing to get out of the jam its previous policies has caused. So government totally screws mom-and-pop savers with its zero interest rate policy because it keeps the deficit down. Government passes Obamacare to paper over the royal mess caused by half a century of government meddling with health care.

And so it goes. Until the government runs out of other peoples’ money.

And then what will it do? It will take the easy way out, the one that puts the costs onto some group that isn’t well organized, or can’t really grasp what is being done to it.

That’s how I make sense of the Trump effect. None of the conservative candidates had a clear and persuasive message to go up against Trump’s promise to shake things up and make America great again. Why is that? It’s because nothing that conservatives propose has the gut-level appeal of Trump.

Or, for that matter against the Democrats’ appeal to Fight for Us and make the one percent pay for free college for everyone.

How to Make America Great Again

In the current presidential election year Donald Trump is busily promising to Make America Great Again with an end immigration and bringig jobs home to the United States while Democrats are promising to jack up the minimum wage to $15 per hour.

Michael Tanner reminds us that none of that is going to help. Good old 1950s manufacturing jobs are going away not just because of China but because of automation. And also because American companies want to manufacture products closer to their foreign markets.

Tanner has another idea. We can’t reset the economy to the 1950s, but

What we can to is prepare for a vibrant new economic future. That means cutting taxes and regulations to boost entrepreneurship. It means breaking the stranglehold that the teachers’ unions have over our schools so that we can educate future workers for future jobs. It means embracing economic growth as a goal. And it means understanding that free trade contributes to that growth and ultimiately produces more winners than losers.

But, of course, when people feel they are losing, their first resort is government. And to the only thing that government knows, and that is force.

I am reading about an interlude of force in my ongoing tramp through Michael Mann and The Sources of Social Power. Right now we are in the middle of the rise of the British working class between 1815 and 1880, and specifically the Chartist movement.

I had always thought of the Chartist movement as purely a movement for political rights. But now I stand corrected. Instead, after Mann, I understand it as a response to a Perfect economic and political Storm.

This perfect storm included, first, the deflation after the Napoleonic Wars, as Britain paid off its war debt and returned the value of the inflated pound sterling back to its pre-war parity. Deflation always enrages wage workers and debtors, because the one thing that people hate is having their nominal wages reduced.

Second, Parliament repealed the old Poor Law that went back to the late 1500s, and made welfare much tougher and more shameful.

Third, the government moved against the traditional non-market privileges of artisans and city guilds so that these artisans were forced to compete with the market prices offered by a new generation of entrepreneurs.

Fourth, the textile industrial revolution was changing the terms of trade with economic and technical innovation, so any number of workers’ trades were getting severely affected.

Fifth, the 1832 Reform Bill extended the vote to the bourgeoisie but not the workers. Sixth, the government declared war on unions with laws against combinations in restraint of trade.

All in all, you can see why the artisans of Britain got a bit riled up back in the 1840s.

In the 1840s the government responded to Chartist agitation by using the army to break up demonstrations and insurrections, and since the newly franchised bourgeoisie sided with the old regime in defence of their property, the Chartist movement failed.

But the economic agenda of the Chartists got enacted in the end. Parliament enacted wage and hour laws, which restricted female and child labor and made the workplace much more male. It enacted safety and health legislation. It enacted government education. And eventually enacted privileges that allowed labor unions to represent workers and bargain with employers.

You can see that a wise and all-seeing government would have moderated with six-part storm. But that is easy to say after the fact. Nowadays we don’t believe in running surpluses to pay off the debt; we don’t believe in resumption at the old parity. No, instead we screw the creditors and the holders of inflated currency. So we have replaced one evil with another. We have restored the Poor Law, on steroids. We have regulated and twisted the labor market into pretzels. And we are now proposing to extend the vote to illegal immigrants.

And then we wonder why the economy is in the pits.

In The Sources of Social Power we are subjected to a panorama of power actors down the ages, manipulating and outflanking and blind-siding each other in the endless war of power. Of course Michael Mann is a right-on lefty. Not quite a Marxist, he can view the power politics of kings and barons with detachment. But he is definitely on the side of the workers when the Chartists are in the streets. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that maybe the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything is a little moderation in the deployment of social power, including his favorite little darlings du jour.

For Mann, the ideology and the deployment of the free market notions that have erupted in recent centuries are no different than the divide and conquer manipulations of the absolute monarchs. But it’s OK that the workers fill the streets and excite the social consciences of government university professors.

Back to the quote from Michael Tanner at the top. Notice what he is saying. Hey kids! Maybe the answer to our economic problems isn’t more regulation, higher minimum wages, and more government power but making it easier for entrepreneurs to start new companies and reducing the costly regulatory burdens on business. Maybe our education system should be prised out of the cold dead hands of the teachers’ unions. Maybe education shouldn’t be a mechanical government system at all.

In other words, maybe there in a place in this world for methods other than the sweet use of government force. Maybe there’s a way to help the low-paid other than telling their employers how much to pay them. Maybe there’s a better way to educate our children than send them to government child-custodial facilities staffed by lifer trusties.

There is nothing remarkable here. It is just considering the curious notion that the answer to many problems might not the clunking fist of more government power.

In my view the great event of the last 500 years is that we humans have discovered the wealth creating and directing concept we call the price system. But actually, it isn’t a system. It is what we have learned to call, from the relatively new chaos theory, an emergent phenomenon. It is like a biological organism like the human body. There is no boss in the human body, issuing orders throughout the body telling each cell what to do. The body is an emergent phenomenon communicating with itself in ways we barely understand, and the result is that it works. It enables humans to cooperate with each other peacefully, right across the wide world. But it starts with the same principle as the human body. Mostly, you just let the market, like the human body, just get on with it.

Is it possible that we could learn to understand our human society in the same way, or are we condemned forever to think of it as a system, ruled by the four IEMP social powers -- I should say social forces -- identified by Michael Mann: ideological, economic, military, and political?

I do hope not, because, as I like to say, System is Domination.