But Can Trump Beat Clinton?

My man Steve Sailer took one look at the Trump 5-state sweep of Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maryland, and Delaware, and predicted the Democrats' race-based general election strategy, based on the six states that were closest to flipping in 2012: Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Nevada, Michigan.

The Democrats are going to go to Florida and Nevada and tell Hispanics that this is Race War: Trump has insulted your illegal alien Mexican compadres and therefore has insulted Florida’s Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Hispanic Miscellaneous, who must stand shoulder to shoulder with Mexican illegal aliens and tell the White Man (i.e., Donald Trump) where he can put it. Similarly, Nevada’s Filipinos will be told over and over by Hillary’s people that they are Honorary Hispanics and Official Nonwhites.

The thing is that if the election is conducted upon such lines then Trump is just the candidate to counter it. The point is that for 50 years Republicans have been terrified, not just of touching the Third Rail of Social Security, but the radioactive Kryponite of race.

I say that Trump is the only guy with the cojones to appeal directly for black and Hispanic votes and accuse Hillary Clinton of racism and worse when her minions gin up the Race War.

This sort of fish-market behavior is tough for regular Republicans to do, because we are all socialized to be good bourgeois responsibles. The whole point of middle-class morality, the bane of Alfred Doolittle, is to get outside your tribe, get along with strangers and not insult them.

But politics is war by other means. And as long as the race card works Democrats are going to play it. They will play the race card until one day some brash guy Trumps it.

Can Donald Trump do it? Nobody knows. But if anyone can do it, he can.

Let us rehearse what Trump has done this election season. He has revived the white working class and brought it in from the political wilderness where it had been left to die -- and is in fact dying of drink and drugs and despair -- by a Democratic Party that had graduated from class politics to race and gender politics and a Republican Party that had nothing to say to an abandoned working class.

Obviously the Democrats will be going after Trump hammer and tongs, starting no doubt with the miserable Trump University. The question is: can Trump dominate that battlefield? If he can, he can win; if not we get Hillary Clinton and a 5-4 liberal Supreme Court and a bigger clumsier administrative state.

But there is hope. I expect that African Americans are sadder and wiser after the existential disappointment of Obama. And I dare say that Hispanics and East Asians are a lot less Democratic inclined than they were. After all, if America's First Black President can't bring on the millennium, how can Hillary Clinton be anything but worse?

For those disappointed that 2016 will not see a glorious conservative renaissance, the old saw still applies: Put not your trust in princes.

The Bigger Task for Conservatism

Powerline contributer Steven Hayward asks today "How Did the Left Get the Drop on Us" after the resounding conservative victory of the Reagan years? His answer is that we conservatives assumed we had won the victory of the big ideas and just needed to work out the details.

And it was easy to argue against socialism and its totalitarianism during the Cold War rather than against the amorphous and contradictory mess of the welfare state.

I would disagree with this line. I have always felt, going back to the Reagan years, that conservatism needed a much broader and deeper foundation than the Reagan revolution provided. I felt that, without a strong moral/cultural movement, the Reagan revolution would lack staying power. Even so, I have been surprised by the ease with which the left has rolled back the culture and economics of the Reagan years.

In retrospect, the success of the revanchist left is not so surprising. Educated people, the ones that write and talk, are all raised in a liberal culture and really know nothing other than the platitudes they learned in their student years and that roll forth from the media and the New York Times and NPR. The average educated person has never encountered "conservative" ideas and has no basis for critiquing, e.g., the politicization of mortgage credit that led to the Crash of 2008 and the conversion of the banking industry into a regulated industry by Dodd-Frank. Nor could they possess the knowledge that an administrative-bureaucratic initiative like Obamacare would be bound to fail, because Hayek.

Also, the collapse of conventional Christian religious belief has left a hole that had to be filled by something. People that don't believe in God don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything.

That is why I have been interested in books like Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform by William G. McLoughlin, who argues that every period of political reform in the United States has been preceded by a religious revival or Awakening. That is why my bible is The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism by Michael Novak, which argues for what I call a Greater Separation of Powers between the political sector, the economic sector, and the moral/cultural sector of society. That is why I believe in the late Andrew Breitbart's dictum that politics is downstream from culture.

That is why I have written my American Manifesto, to imagine the possibility of an America after the collapse of the welfare state.

But what I have not been able to imagine is a religious movement to counter the secular religion of political correctness that has rolled over America and the west since the end of the Reagan years. We all know what political correctness is about; it is a reformulation of the totalitarian culture of Marxism based on race, sex, and economic identity rather than the pure economic class conflict of the original Marxian program. It uses all the tools of religion, from the building of an orthodoxy of correct opinion to the hounding of heretics with its Social Justice Warrior Inquisition; it is religion in everyting but name.

I have analyzed society into three parts, with my Three Peoples theory, and I have posted a dire warning to all those that trade their birthrights for a mess of pottage as the "little darlings" of the ruling class. But what I do not see is the moral/cultural or religious awakening that could challenge the PC culture and then move into a great reform era to end the cruelty and injustice of Big Government.

Obviously the Trump phenomenon in the US and the rise of nationalist parties in Europe reflect the bankruptcy of our current transnational ruling class with its foolish conceit that it can rule without the political advice and consent of ordinary people and can mix the world's peoples together and remain in control of the ensuing cultural mashup. But this neo-nationalist movement seems to be political rather than cultural, so it ignores the Breitbart dictum that politics is downstream from culture. Indeed, all observers agree that the Trump phenomenon is populist, a mere rebellion of the people against the ruling class, rather than a revolution in thinking.

Possibly the moral/cultural movement is already aborning, and staring us in the face, and we cannot see it because we are blind to it, being old and set in our ways.

And probably nothing will change until the present ruling class runs out of other peoples' money. After all, the French Revolution could never have happened without the Bourbons running out of money to fight against the Brits in the Second Hundred Years War. And the Bolshevik Revolution would never have happened without the Romanovs running out of money in World War I. And the Reagan revolution could never have happened without the stagflation of the Carter years.

But who can wish for revolution? It is grand to imagine the humiliation of today's rulers, but not to experience the reality of revolution and armed teenagers in the streets.

So there is no alternative to plugging away, trying to imagine a cultural and moral and religious awakening that will inspire the American people to reject the soft totalitarianism of Obamism and the conceits of left-wing activism.

Three Peoples: What the Better People Owe to the Other People

A great theme of the 19th century was to persuade the bourgeoisie to care about the working class. In Marx, of course, this theme extended to revolution: the bourgeoisie would be made to care with the help of a revolutionary avant-garde cadre and the working class as a magnificent revolutionary army.

But the broader culture centered on helping the working class with beneficial legislation in the form of the right to vote, wage-and-hour laws, social insurance, elimination of child labor and funding of child education. To fund this, the bourgeoisie agreed to be taxed. It wasn't just practical; it was experienced as the right thing to do.

In my reductive Three Peoples theory, this means that the People of the Responsible Self agree that they ought to help the People of the Subordinate Self. The reason to do this would be partly because it is the right and responsible thing to do, and partly because it keeps the working class out of the street where they might harm the middle class. But also it involves a recognition of the Other. We People of the Responsible Self may want a society that honors and rewards people that go to work, obey the law, and follow the rules, but we accept that other people do not think as we do. The People of the Subordinate Self look to a powerful patron, economic or political, for protection, and they have a right to do so. It is, after all, the only way to live, as far as they know.

Enough of what the People of the Responsible Self and what they owe to the People of the Subordinate Self. What about the People of the Creative Self?  What should they owe to the People of the Responsible Self? Should they treat the People of the Responsible Self in the avuncular way that they expect the People of the Responsible Self to act towards the People of the Subordinate Self? Or should they regard the People of the Responsible Self as racists, sexists, homophobes, and general all-round religious bigots that should be made to care about the much superior culture of the People of the Creative Self?

The answer of the People of the Creative Self make to this question is unequivocal. The creative people are the bosses and the People of the Responsible Self had better kow-tow to the creative gods or the creative people will know the reason why. This started, on the view of Deirdre McCloskey in her Bourgeois Equality, no later than 1848 when the "clerisy" came out for nationalism, socialism, labor-unions, and economic regulation as a four-front war against the bourgeoisie and everything it stood for.

Of course, while the People of the Responsible Self are to bow the knee to their betters in the creative class and follow every latest rule promulgated by the executive committee of the People of the Creative Self or else, the People of the Creative Self can have no restriction on their behavior and life projects. Because creativity.

I was reminded of this an an excellent show at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Mashup: The Birth of Modern Culture. It is a celebration of creativity for creativity's sake, "documenting the emergence and evolution of a mode of creativity that has grown to become the dominant form of cultural production in the early 21st century." All the great artists of the last 100 years are celebrated above all for their creativity and their breaking down of barriers to artistic freedom.

A central part of the creative culture has been to épater la bourgeoisie by sneering and trashing the bourgeoisie and its responsibility culture.

I'm here to say that this is wrong. I hold that the immortal words of the actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell at the turn of the 20th century still apply: Do anything you want, but don't frighten the horses in the street.

Of course in those days the advice was practical rather than moral. The creative culture was still strictly elite and small; it needed to be careful lest its creative freedom unleashed a backlash against the culture of creativity.

The measure of a man is made not when he behaves because he is afraid of getting caught. It is when he has the power to crush and humiliate others and enjoy the lamentation of their women, and he stays the coup de mort.

I am here to say that it is cruel and unjust for today's cultural elite to force their culture on the ordinary middle class of Bible-believing middle-class Christians and ordinary middle-class businessmen. I take this attitude from the work of new-age philosopher Ken Wilber. His central idea is a developmental model of human consciousness taken from the developmental psychologists.

But he issues a caution to enthusiasts. When you construct a multi-level consciousness system you become aware that the people that live in the higher levels tend to look down on the lower orders as fools and bigots. The people in the lower levels tend to think of the people in the upper levels as mad and bad. It is a recipe for discord and chaos.

You can see that there is only one way to avoid chaos and violence. The people in the upper levels need to put themselves in the place of the Other and recognize that the Other will never understand them. So it makes sense to act with compassion towards those less evolved and educated than oneself. And it is also right to take Mrs. Patrick Campbell's advice and not frighten the horses in the street.

Unfortunately I do not think that our liberal friends, the People of the Creative Self, have the wisdom or the compassion to see this truth and act upon it. Certainly in the Obama years they are engaged in a full-frontal offensive against the People of the Responsible Self, humiliating them, and driving them from the public square.

This culture of cultural aggression is cruel, it is unjust, and it is wrong. But I do not see any chance of a peace process on the horizon.

The "Liberals are Just Too Smug" Meme

At least some liberals are beginning to get it. Sort of. According to Emmett Rensin in Vox, liberals are just too smug.

The smugness has occurred because, over the last half century, the working class has moved away from liberals and their political organ, the Democratic Party.

Beginning in the middle of the 20th century, the working class, once the core of the coalition, began abandoning the Democratic Party. In 1948, in the immediate wake of the Franklin Roosevelt, 66 percent of manual laborers voted for Democrats, along with 60 percent of farmers. In 1964, it was 55 percent of working-class voters. By 1980, it was 35 percent.

And in the white working class, the decline has been sharper. The result, according to Rensin, is that a "movement once fleshed out in union halls and little magazines shifted into universities and major press, from the center of the country to its cities and elite enclaves."

The result has been the "what happened to Kansas" attitude, the smug assumption in LiberalLand that the poor schmucks don't know what is good for them. For,

It is central to the liberal self-conception that what separates them from reactionaries is a desire to help people, a desire to create a fairer and more just world. Liberals still want, or believe they still want, to make a more perfect union.

 Well, you know what my answer would be to that.

First, to echo Ronald Reagan, the white working class didn't leave the Democratic Party; the Democratic Party left them. In the 1960s liberals decided that they wanted to help create a fairer and more just world for women and minorities, not working people so much. And part of that turning was to marginalize the white working class as racist, sexist bigots like Archie Bunker that didn't deserve that high-mined help of the liberals.

Second is the delicious confirmation of my idea that liberals like to think they are kindly librarians just trying to help people find a book. But liberals do not "help" people by taking them by the hand and leading them to the Promised Land. They propose to help by occupying the commanding heights of culture and government and using force create that fairer and most just world. That's why I never stop rapping out my catchphrases: government is force, politics is violence. It is one thing to help people. It is another thing to slam down your clunking fist and bellow THIS is the way it's going to be. And my belief is that the "help" that liberals gave the working class is a sufficient reason for the working class's troubles today. It is my belief that to thrive in the city you need to become middle-class and bourgeois and accept the idea of personal responsibility. Liberals told workers that they didn't need to change their culture and become middle class; liberals would take care of them. Until they didn't.

Liberals "know" that their issues are dispositive, that "police reform, that abortion rights, that labor unions are important[.]" Period. And the same with gay rights, the environment, transgender bathrooms etc.

But do you know? We have already done all these issues. Police no longer walk around cuffing people. Abortion is here to stay. Labor unions have risen and fallen. Environmentalists are all over our governments. The Supreme Court just imposed gay marriage. Government spends about a third of our national income, and regulates far more.

The problem for liberals is that they have enacted just about everything they ever dreamed of and now they are scraping the bottom of the barrel worrying about the one-tenth of one percent that have gender identification issues.

And I think that a man from Mars would have to say that all these efforts to help people and make a fairer and more just society are a mixed bag. Let's say that, on balance they have improved things.

But that means that thoughtful people would be concerned that many things in the liberal agenda need tidying up, and other things will have turned out to be not such a good idea and ought to be repealed. Maybe the travails of the white working class illustrate the operation of the law of unintended consequences, that piling all those social gains on workers in the first half of the 20th century set them up for a fall in the second half. Maybe, just maybe.

But what do liberals do now, poor things?

The smug style did not arise by accident, and it cannot be abolished with a little self-reproach. So long as liberals cannot find common cause with the larger section of the American working class, they will search for reasons to justify that failure. 

So liberals must mend their ways and find a way to understand the American working class before they can hope to get back to creating a fairer and more just world.

I don't think so. The problem is not what to do about the American working class. Liberals already did it, and the doing was the problem. As I wrote in The American Thinker:

Perhaps the answer is in the great question asked by Frederick Douglass. “What shall be done with the Negro?” And his answer: “Do nothing with us.”

Really, the same could be said for the white working class, that all of a sudden we recognize is in bad shape after a century and a half of doing from the state, with a suicide rate among white working class men only exceeded by the suicide rate among Native Americans.

As Douglass said, “Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us.” The doing with the Negro was the worst, and still is, but the doing with the worker has come a close second. First the worker had to be exempted from the law against combinations, then protected from the exploitation of long work days. Then the worker had to be protected from want with government social insurance instead of his own mutual-aid society. The result was inevitable. The working class came to expect that the ruling class would look after it with good jobs and good wages forever.

Now the ruling class smugly reckons that the working class is just a bunch of bigots and bitter clingers. So Emmett Rensin wants American liberals to recover their empathy for the working class so they can play the mischief with them all over again.

The problem is not that American liberals are too smug. The problem is the things they know that aren't so.

Nationalism, Socialism, Regulation, and One Candidate for Each

I just got my Bourgeois Era, Vol 3, Deirdre Nansen McCloskey's Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World. And what do I read on the second page of the "Exordium?"

For reasons I do not entirely understand, the clerisy after 1848 turned towards nationalism and socialism... and proliferating regulation for imagined but not factually documented imperfections in the market[.]

What do you think I thought about that?

I thought that today in America we have one presidential candidate for nationalism, Donald Trump. We have one presidential candidate for socialism, Bernie Sanders. And we have one presidential candidate for regulation, Hillary Clinton.

So we have one candidate for each of the reactionary movements that arose in the 19th century to battle against "capitalism."

And who is the one candidate that stands for the bourgeoisie and freedom and God, against all that horrible reaction? Why, the much maligned Ted Cruz, that everyone hates. (Actually, it turns out that Ted made a lifelong friend in college. A black guy from Jamaica, David Panton)

But let's get back to nationalism, socialism, and regulation.

The reason that people hate capitalism so much is that it gives them no place to hide. If your skill starts to decline in value, partly because people in another country can do what you do for less, capitalism tells you to get back out there, train for something else. If you find yourself in adulthood with a wasted government education and you can't even get a job dismembering chickens alongside illegal Mexicans, then capitalism says find a job, any job, at any wage, and learn by doing. If prices shoot up because of a war or a government stupidity and you want the government to control those evil CEOs, capitalism says, get a clue: No government can outsmart the market.

So when Donald Trump says that he will make America great by whacking on foreigners, it seems to offer a way out of competing mano a mano with the rest of the world.

So when Bernie Sanders proposes to hammer the banks and give hard-pressed millennials free college and health care, it seems to offer a way to fight back against the demoralizing reality that the market demands you shape up to it.

So when Hillary Clinton... well, I'm not sure what Hillary Clinton stands for, except that she is a ruling class elitist that proposes that people like her make all the decisions for us. Only we know that the elite educated bureaucrat in Washington DC cannot know what millions of producers and consumers know from the signals of the price system. Settled science.

But why are all these people rebelling against the will of the market? It is because, I think, the natural and instinctive thing to do when the world turns against you is to lash out. See, the point is that if you are a hunter-gatherer and you are all out of food because of weather and animal migration, the sensible thing to do is to raid the neighboring village and steal their food. If you are a farmer and your harvest got destroyed in a hailstorm, then the practical thing to do is go to your lord of the manor, place your hands in his, and enter into slavery and three meals a day. If you are a corporation and your market just dried up because the boss's son screwed the business up, then the sensible thing to do is to go bribe a politician in return for a spot of beneficial regulation from the Clinton Crime Syndicate.

So, of course when capitalism fairly got started in the 19th century reactionary movements of opposition sprouted out of the ground. Capitalism, exchange economy, free market, whatever its name it is a wrenching change from the old ways. And even without the periodic messes from government stupidity, there are always people experiencing decline because capitalism has invented something new that has made their skill obsolete or at least less valuable.

And so we have presidential candidates bidding for the support of the disappointed ones. Some people seek shelter in the nation. Some seek shelter in the collective under some great lord. Some seek shelter in government manipulation of the market. And hey presto, there is a candidate for each reaction, for each lunge for the sweet use of force.

Because when peaceful cooperation fails to deliver the goods, humans instinctively resort to force.

The Whys and the Wherefores of the Factory System

If you are like me your understanding of the factory system that started up with the Industrial Revolution is a mish-mash of history and Marxist revisionism. Yes, the factory system was efficient, but it achieved its efficiency by exploiting the workers. Yes it produced cheap products, but it threw artisans out of work, "de-skilling" the work environment so it could pay workers less. And, of course, it replaced production for use with production for profit, replacing use value with exchange value.

But now I've read Joel Mokyr's review of the factory system in The Gifts of Minerva, and I find I'm not quite sure what he argues. So I figured I better write a blog post and get the whole thing clear in my mind.

Big picture: The industrial revolution was not a finance thing, of capitalists accumulating and profiting. It was a knowledge revolution, an interaction of "propositional knowledge" with "prescriptive knowledge." Some people invent a machine or a technique; the next question is: how or why does it work? Then there is a theory like Newton's mechanics. How can it be exploited into useful products? When you have a world of constantly expanding knowledge and constantly improving technique, people have to get together to compare notes and transfer knowledge.

Now the British economy at the time of the industrial revolution was typically a domestic economy. People usually worked at home. The stereotypical process at the time was the textile "putting-out" system, where entrepreneurs supplied cottagers with machines and materials and paid piece-rates on finished products.

Why then did entrepreneurs change the system to a factory system, where workers had to commute to work and get paid hourly wages instead of work at home and get paid piece rates? You'll be shocked to learn that it wasn't so that they could extract more socially necessary labor and convert use value into exchange value. No, the reason was practical and prosaic. Mokyr comes up with four main drivers towards the factory system.

Fixed costs and scale economies. Many of the new technologies could not work at the scale of a domestic cottage. Many of them represented fixed costs, and the employer had an interest in supervising the workers and maximizing the machine utilization.

Information costs and incentives. Piece-rates incentivize the worker to maximize quantity. But suppose consumers are more concerned about quality? Then the employer will also focus on product quality. Then he will want to bring the work in-house and pay the worker a time wage so he can specify exactly the process to be used and inspect the quality of the product. Also, in a complicated production process it is difficult to "disentangle" the value of the individual contributions of workers. In addition, the new processes required more "team production," such as the continuous flow, or assembly-line production system.

Labor effort. The Marxians argue that putting labor in a factory makes it easier to get workers to work longer hours and increase profits. Alternatively Gregory Clark argues that the factory helps get more effort from workers lacking self-control. There is, of course, an economy of scale in supervising workers at a central location rather than running around visiting their cottages.

Division of knowledge. Mokyr argues that the new factories required a lot of specialized knowledge. How to build them, how to fix them, how to improve the process. "[A]fter 1760, efficient production required more knowledge than a single household could possess." Here we have an interesting counterpoint to the Marxist "de-skilling" argument. The new processes required specialized knowledge. The machine operator or line worker may have needed less skill than the old domestic artisan worker, but could not thrive unless backed up by mechanics, process experts, and specialized knowledge that were constantly adapting to new propositional and prescriptive knowledge.

So let Joel Mokyr sum up:

[A]s long as the minimum competence requirement is small, plants can be small and coincide with households with all the associated advantages; when it expands it will require either a sophisticated and efficient network for the distribution of knowledge or a different setup of the unit of production... Factories thus served as repositories for technical knowledge and vastly reduced access costs to this knowledge for individual workers. (p.141)

In addition, of course, the industrial revolution featured "professional associations of mechanics, machinists, engineers, and skilled workers" which provided communications channels for the propagation of knowledge.

Similar arguments are made regarding the creative synergy of artists' colonies, and the concentration of the IT industry in Silicon Valley. The more you can concentrate people together at their work, the more they can talk to each other and exchange ideas and experience.

And, of course, there is the modern argument that, with the Internet and its efficient communication of information, we can all work at home as "telecommuters" and save the significant cost of commuting.

So there you have it. The factory arose because of the need to bring people together to exchange knowledge and information.

Students Were Wrong in 1962, and Wrong Now

Here is a lefty professor, Jonathan Zimmerman, author of Too Hot to Handle: a Global History of Sex Education, chastising modern students for doing the opposite of the kids that issued the Port Huron Statement in 1962.

Back then students wanted to take power away from university administrators; now students want new administrative structures at the university to implement their agenda for them. In 1962,

Students needed to ‘wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy’, The Port Huron Statement declared. Otherwise, the empty suits who ran the university would drown its emancipatory potential in a sea of bland rituals and senseless rules.

Now students want more bureaucracy in an already over-bureaucratized university.

[U]nlike their predecessors, these protesters demand more administrative control over university affairs, not less. That’s a childlike position. It’s time for them to take control of their future, instead of waiting for administrators to shape it. 

Well, I'd say that the infantilism starts with the idea that politics is good for anything except destruction. The infantilism of the 1960s was the infantilism of left-wing male activists, who wanted to create a dawn-raid-like chaos that appeals to the young male mind, with rape and pillage to follow.

The infantilism of the 2010s is the infantilism of left-wing female activists, who want a mean-girls naming and shaming of everyone not in the lefty mean-girls clique, and if anyone offends the lefty mean girls they get to go into their lefty safe-space kaffee-klatsch, no boys or townie girls allowed.

It cannot be said often enough: the university, down the centuries, has tended to be a seminary for the training of the ruling class's orthodoxy. When fictional Fred Vincy, son of a businessman in Middlemarch, went to university, it was to become a nice respectable clergyman.

But the Germans had other ideas; they made the university into a regime idea factory that would make the state strong. It was one of the seminal ideas of the last 500 years and it has strengthened the state enormously and covered university professors and administrators in money, power, and the love of beautiful women.

In the US we have adapted the German model to make young scions of the elite into "activists" who will advance the ruling-class agenda while appearing to challenge it.

The Port Huron Kids, in the age of "liberal parents, radical children," dutifully advanced the left-wing cause of their parents into new channels.

The Safe-Space Kids, in the age of diversity and hate speech, are also preparing the battle space for further left-wing advances.

But I argue that all these left-wing movements are tearing society apart. Government is Force; Politics is Violence. The end of government and politics is the silence of the grave and grass growing up in the streets. Yet human society is based on the idea of reducing force and curbing violence.

My old math teacher, Commander Bateman, used to complain that math was easy, just based on four rules. Yet everyone thinks that the complexity of the arts is easy, and the elegance of math is hard. Of course, the Commander was dead wrong. The simple elegance of math is the hardest thing in the world.

The same thing applies to capitalism and politics. All capitalism asks is that we all observe a simple principle. Find something useful, that other people will pay money for, and do it. Easy? Not at all. Grasping its simple elegance is the hardest thing in the world.

The whole effort of politics and government is to short this gentle idea with the mailed fist of force and the hurricane winds of political discord. People will be made to pay for my support and my security, or the lefty students thrilling to the fantasy du jour will know the reason why.

It is scandalous that we the people have not put an end to this madness that threatens our society and the safety of our children and the generations yet unborn.

It is even more scandalous that we have not even begun to fight.