Here's Why Politicians Always Call for Unity, Dennis Prager

Conservative radio host Dennis Prager is annoyed with politicians that continually call for unity. And then he quotes a bunch of politicians calling for unity, from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama to Donald Trump. That's baloney, he writes.

One would be hard-pressed to name a single free society that was ever united outside of wartime. The only truly united countries are totalitarian states.

But that is exactly the point, the point of government. Wartime.

That's why I hammer away at my catchphrases like Government is Force and Politics is Violence.

When politicians are calling for unity they are calling us to war. They are saying, as they sang in Les Mis,

Will you join in our crusade,
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?

Politicians are always calling us to war. Of course, in the old days governments actually admitted this. But now, in the age of the welfare state, government is said to be all about peace and justice, but this is a lie. It is a lie that today's ruling class tells itself. Nobody here but us bespectacled librarians.

Government is always saying: enough of the namby-pamby stuff, it is time for force. We must gather together, unite, bury our enmities, and go forth to smite the foe. In the case of health care, the foe is insurance companies and their profits. In the case of race, the foe is white privilege. In the case of the Great Recession, the foe is greedy bankers.

The excellent Reverend Al Sharpton understands all this perfectly with his slogan, No Justice, No Peace. He is brilliantly inverting the do-gooder dream of peace and justice and making it into a war cry.

When you look at all this squarely in the face you realize that we humans have a problem. The people that govern us always get into power with a war cry. And yet we humans are supposed to be social animals who get on by peaceful cooperation. How do we get back to peaceful cooperation when our leaders are always rallying us to unify so we can go off to war?

I don't know the answer to this. The partial answer is that instead of unifying to smash an internal enemy -- which must deal with the contradiction that we are unifying in order to divide -- we unify to smash an external enemy.

Notice that this is what Donald Trump is proposing. He wants us to unify against the Mexicans and against the Chinese and teach them a lesson. He is calling for economic war on the foreigners. Of course he is; he has to be calling for war on something. On the other hand Ted Cruz is calling us to arms to battle the Washington cabal. Hillary Clinton is Fighting For Us, and Bernie is fighting for free stuff for college students.

The next thing for which our politicians will unify us will be the War on Islam.

The problem is that there is no mechanism for undoing the precipitate of force in our own society, the programs to force us to pay for retirement, health care, education, and welfare. All these things could be done without force, but who will dare to start the unwinding of our heritage of force?

In today's America there is nothing that will unify the people like a proposal to reduce the amount of government force in America.

The Problem is not "A Drought of Ideas"

Over at the American Interest Walter Russell Mead looks at a failing black college in South Chicago. He blames Democrats for presiding over a corrupt and dysfunctional system, and Republicans for not coming up with alternatives. And then he blames the cognitive elite for "A Drought of Ideas."

Vain and self-aggrandizing politicians deserve a lot of the blame for not trying to tackle the problems sooner, but they are far from being the sole guilty parties. After all, politicians can’t fight for solutions that don’t yet exist. And that there is so little creative thinking about these issues is the fault of think tanks, public intellectuals and academics. It is the cognitive elite that has let the country down.

Well, yes, I suppose. But that ignores the fundamental error of our times that "think tanks, public intellectuals and academics" should be in pole position on the NASCAR Politics 500.

Would we ever worry about the cognitive elite and food, and say that the cognitive elite has let us down on food? Fortunately, think tanks, public intellectuals and academics don't have a lot to say about food production, distribution, and retailing. Otherwise I am sure it would be just as screwed up as health care.

I'd say that the fundamental problem of our times is not the failure of the cognitive elite. The fundamental problem is that something like 35-50 percent of our GDP (used here as a stand-in for the day-to-day activities of Americans) is controlled by government. And government is force. And government cannot learn. And anyone that is getting a government check, from grandma to crony capitalist, will kill rather than give it up.

OK, suppose we throw away all the government programs because government cannot learn, i.e., learn from its mistakes. What then? I think there is still a problem, as was identified by Milton Friedman. He argued that governments always tax up to the limit and spend up to the limit that the society of the time allows. Our 21st century governments have spent the last century and more ramping up spending, on the idea that government can help people. And it has steadily ramped up taxes, on the idea that the rich should pay their fair share.

Now here we are, a century later, and the programs don't really help people. Social Security discourages people from saving; Medicare encourages grandma to make an avocation out of going to the doctor; welfare encourages people to molder away in useless lives instead of getting a job; education is just a jobs program for teachers and administrators that does an OK job educating middle-class students and a dreadful job of educating lower-class students. And as for taxes! Taxeas are a monstrous tangle of subsidies, credits, set-asides and pay-offs. And the taxes on labor make the simple notion of getting a job and getting paid a nightmare for employer and employee.

So I don't think that we can say that the problem is just a drought of ideas. The problem is that the game of taxing and spending has reached its limit. There is no longer any real slack that politicians can use to say: hey kids, how about this free stuff. And the same thing applies to taxes. The obvious new source of taxes is a VAT, but that would go hardest on the middle class and we can't have that.

So nothing will change until things get so bad that people no longer think that they can hold on to their particular government check, and no longer think they can get what they want from government.

It is pretty obvious that things would have to get really bad, as in riots in the streets, before people would agree to giving up their entitlements. The Charlton Heston rule applies. I'll give you my government check when you take it from my cold, dead hands.

But I am still thinking about the bigger question. Is it possible that there could ever be a government that deliberately did not spend everything it could and taxed everything it could? And that means: could there ever be a people that said, I don't want your stinkin' entitlements and I don't want you taxing the stinkin' rich?

Sadly, I don't think that humans are capable of that.

Nevertheless, I do have an idea. My idea is this. Instead of getting entitlements from the government, people would sign up with entitlement patrons. They would pledge themselves to that patron, and the patron would promise to take care of them. But the patron would not have any coercive powers obtained from the government to force the rest of the nation to contribute to the patron and his clients. In other words, people that want it could live under a kind of neo-feudalism, where they shelter under a powerful lord and get his protection. But nobody outside the powerful lord and his patronage network would owe him and his clients a thing.

We already have this, in the the form of big corporations that offer pretty good feudal benefits and protection, and big unions that offer the same. I just want to make sure that these patronage networks cannot plunder the rest of the nation to feed their clients, and right now crony capitalism and labor law allows corporations and unions to plunder the rest of society. But not as much as government.

Obviously, employees of big government could not have any such client rights, because their rights would be supported by state coercion, government force, and that would be wrong.

Could it work? We'll see. All it would take is for government to start failing at delivering its much-loved checks. Then people would have to start finding a new way to shelter under a powerful patron.

Can Ted Cruz Bring US Together?

On the day that my "I Want a President to Teach Liberals a Lesson" got an Instalanche from Ed Driscoll, let's imagine that the opposite is true.

Never mind about teaching lessons: Can Ted Cruz be the candidate to bring us all together?

I think that liberals are going to get a monster lesson in the next decade, like the one they got from Ronald Reagan back in the 1980s. It will be for a host of reasons, from the bankruptcy of the blue state to the rage of the excluded -- not the traditionally marginalized of liberal imagination but the real excluded that liberals have ejected from the public square and we know who we are. The point is that the divisive politics that liberals have pursued for the last 50 years is about to bite back.

All that aside, what we really need in a president is someone to bring us all together again after the astonishingly divisive presidency of Barack Obama. I give President Obama the benefit of the doubt. I believe that he really believes he is making the world a better place with his mean divisiveness. That's what a lifelong marination in liberalism will do to you.

Of course, bringing us together is what George W. Bush was trying to do 16 years ago with his kinder, gentler America, but liberals wouldn't let him. They needed him as Bushitler, and Bushitler he was. Liberals needed to rally their troops for the 2006 midterms and the 2008 election and by golly they did it. Because politics is violence, starting with verbal violence, and politics is division, starting with scapegoats. And the liberal religion is politics.

But is Ted Cruz, the scourge of the Washington cabal, the man to bring us all together?

OK, so Ted Cruz is not exactly the life of the party, but he has shown in his campaign thus far an astonishing capacity for sweating the details. So here goes on a three point plan to bring us all together.

• There must be a way to reach out to African American church ladies. Ted Cruz is openly Christian, and the church ladies of Charleston, SC, showed their Christian forgiveness after the monstrous act of Dylan Roof shooting up their church and killing their church members.
  
• There must be a way to reach out to the striver Hispanics. Never mind about building a wall, all I see is Hispanics working as hard as they can to build a life for themselves and their families here in the good old USA. Yes, the liberal policy of non-enforcement of immigration law is a scandal, but legal Hispanics are our people and we must be sure that they know it.
  
• It is time to start making fun of SJWs. Kyle Smith has a piece on retweeting social-media trolls, and he is right. It is time we laughed the SJWs into irrelevancy. The idea is to create the meme that we are all tolerant Americans and that these deadly serious SJW crybullies are nothing but a joke.

But not all of the bring-us-together plan would be sweetness and light.

I think it is time for Americans of good will to wage a war on the left-wing activism culture, because the left-wing activists divide us. Many of our liberal friends think that activism, and its fantasy of speaking truth to power, is the highest that anyone can aspire to. It is, obviously, the liberal equivalent of the Catholic family encouraging a child to find a "vocation" to be a priest or a nun. In other words, liberals see activists as the conscience of the nation. It is time for a president to remind our liberal friends that just as there is a very small divide between madness and genius, so there is very little distance between the conscience of the nation and the scourge of the nation.

Can Ted Cruz do this for America? Nobody knows. But I'll bet a primary victory that he has a team working on something like this. Because if an ordinary mortal like me can think about it, you can be sure that super-genius Ted has been thinking about it for years.

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.