After Orlando: Socializing Young Men to Cooperation

I want to dissent from the outrage about young men up and killing people.

Everybody thinks it is a dreadful scandal. To me it is the most natural thing in the world that young men should delight in massacre and mayhem. The challenge, and it is a big one, is to socialize them to Work.

Young men are wired for their characteristic role in hunter-gatherer societies, which societies are, scientists tell us, always at war and losing about 500 per 100,000 of the population to violent death every year. (Our violent death rate is more like 5 per 100,000 per year.) The role that young men play in hunter-gatherer society is the dawn raid on the neighboring village, to kill all the men, and take the women and children into slavery. They are socialized to Fight.

But we in the western world are two revolutions removed from that. First there was the agricultural revolution, that reduced warfare to the marcher lords and their followers on the border of the agricultural realm, while everybody else went to Work on the farm. Then there was the industrial revolution that reduced the armed forces to a professional army, augmented from time to time with a mass draft army, while everybody else went to Work in the factory.

In the western world we want our young men to be socialized to Work, not to Fight. All in all, we have done a good job of it, and young western men mostly do their duty and obey the rules, go to Work, and follow the law.

But there are couple of exceptions, and we know who they are. First of all there are the lefty activists, that have a culture of "violent resistance." Yes I know. The left usually advertises its faith in Peace and Justice, but when you get into the lefty literature -- try the Hardt and Negri Empire trilogy -- they believe in revolution. Here's Huffington Post chappie Jesse Benn flying his true colors.

Violent resistance matters. Riots can lead to major change (*note the irony of that hyperlink going to a Vox article). It’s not liberal politicians or masses that historians identify as the spark underlying the modern movement for LGBTQ equality. Nor was it a think piece from some smarmy liberal writer. It was the people who took to the streets during the Stonewall Uprising. It was the Watts Rebellion, not the Watts Battle of Ideas, that exposed the enduring systemic neglect, poverty, inequality, and racism faced by that community. Similarly, it was the LA Uprising, not the LA Protests, that led to significant changes in the Los Angeles Police Department. More recently, the Ferguson and Baltimore Uprisings both helped prompt the Justice Department to investigate their corrupt police forces.

I love that guy. Hey kids! Let's all get into the violent resistance game. Personally, I think that conservatives should form their own protest group and practice violent resistance against the cruel and corrupt and unjust liberal ruling class and their bribed apologists in the universities and mainstream media, our present cultural hegemons and political masters. Not.

Sorry lefties. You've lost the plot. Violent resistance is one thing when you are the working class in 1848 and you don't have the vote. You are outside the political system and the only way you can get the attention of the ruling class is by street action. But once the working class got the vote it stopped its street action.

It was about 1920 that the left realized that this was a problem. Who was going to get into the streets for street action and revolution if the working class had lost its revolutionary fervor?

Perfectly simple, said the Frankfurt School chappies. They deployed the Eisenhower Doctrine before Ike had even thought of it. If you have an insoluble problem, said Ike, make it bigger. So Frankfurters expanded their class politics to identity politics. Anyone that they decided was marginalized and/or oppressed could now pour into the streets and demand their rights.  Yeah! Violent Resistance, baby!

This is all tremendous fun and it annoys the bourgeoisie something fabuloso. You can put your rent-a-mob into the street and hand our protest signs from here to eternity. And you can threaten, as our liberal friends did back in the Sixties, that unless Congress did something there would be a Long Hot Summer. Right now partly-funded-by-George-Soros Black Lives Matter is playing the same game.

Then along came the Muslims.

I feel sorry for the Muslims. They are playing on a bit of a sticky wicket. Their strike-first-and-ask-questions-later culture seems to be uniquely unsuitable for the modern global capitalist world which thrives on trust-the-stranger across the whole wide world. Why, proper Muslims don't even trust their women out of doors. They marry their cousins and they don't trust anyone outside the tribe, let alone outside their religion.

And it is clear that Muslims believe in power.

Now I believe that the crucial feature of the modern world is the bourgeoisie and its culture of dignity and innovation that is not that interested in power. But it is obvious that many people really have a problem with this. Lefties. Fascists. Tin-horn dictators. Liberal experts. Liberal activists. Muslim terrorists. And these chappies have spent the last 170 years trying to drive a spike into the heart of the not that interested in power culture.

Look at the German problem, in World War I and World War II. What were the Germans thinking? They didn't need to conquer Europe with their excellent soldiers. They were already conquering it with their excellent philosophers and physicists and chemists and Otto and Diesel cycles. And air conditioning. Did you know that the Germans invented air-conditioning so they could make beer in summer?

Look at the Soviet problem. The clueless Bolsheviks thought that the road to the future was worker power supervised by right-thinking lefties that believed in worker power. Wrong! Worker power and government force turned out to be a complete disaster and reversed the trajectory of the rising Russian Empire into a dysfunctional mess.

Now we have the frustrated Muslims of the Middle East thinking that the answer to their problems is power. No it isn't Muslims, but it looks as if we are going to have to teach you that the hard way.

But there is another problem. Liberals and Democrats. They have built their political machine on the Frankfurt School, by dividing the national community into a Coalition of the Fringes of identities, helpless victims that need liberal experts and activists to represent them against the implacable horde of typical Americans. Thus women, blacks, Hispanics, gays, and Muslims all need the beneficent Oz to fight for them against the brutal bourgeois regime that has raised per capita income from $3 to $120 in 200 years. The horror!

Yes but what happens when young men start doing a spot of violent resistance in San Jose and beating up gay Hispanics Republicans? What happens when a young Muslim-Afghan-American shoots up a gay bar in Orlando?

I'd say that it might encourage some individuals in the Coalition of the Fringes to wonder which side their bread is buttered on. Maybe, just maybe, we should all think about ourselves as Americans, and not as hyphenated identity groups. Maybe, just maybe, gays and Hispanics and African Americans should think about what the Democrats have done for them lately.

Maybe, just maybe, we should return to our basic western menu, which is to socialize young men not to murder and mayhem in inner-city gangs and liberal activism and Muslim terrorism. Maybe we should socialize them back to Work.

That is after all what Hegel was suggesting with his tortured Master and Slave myth. Once you stop the kill-or-be-killed culture , the Fight of the hunter-gatherers, then you enter the world of Work. You start to learn how to dominate the world rather than other men. And you start to recognize other men as men and not as opponents in the Fight.

Yes, I've been reading Kojève's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel as every good lefty used to do, and I'm going to be using his analysis rather freely in the future.

Because if you want to defeat the left you must first understand the left.

And the key to the future is to deal firmly but kindly with the foolish people that believe that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is power. As some chappie said about 2,000 years ago. Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.

Don't Call It Free Trade

There is a lot of noise going on right about now about "free trade." Donald Trump has come out against it. And here in The American Spectator Esther Goldberg is praising it with faint praise. The point is that:

When traders are purchasing and selling from different countries, the terms under which they may do so is established by Trade Agreements between their respective governments. These Agreements are complex because they have to accommodate a host of interest groups that have been lobbying for terms that will benefit their particular industry.

Actually, that is true about all economic activity. There are trade agreements "to accommodate a host of interest groups" wherever you look, only we usually call it regulation or consumer protection or labor law. Right now we are watching the battle of the special interests as Uber and Lyft elbow aside the taxi-cab industry and its bribed apologists in City Hall. In the middle of the ride-sharing vs. taxi-cab war there is an interesting question raised about fingerprinting. Uber and Lyft think that fingerprinting is unnecessary since their apps identify everyone, driver and customer. And former Attorney General Holder says that, anyway, fingerprinting is racist. But the taxi-cab drivers have been regulated and fingerprinted by City Hall, and they want, as the mom-and-pop shopowners in Zola's novel about department stores, Au Bonheur des Dames, wanted, to continue the ancien commerce. All the way to their eventual extinction.

But I think that the best place to start is with this argument. If you are not going to permit market pricing, just what is your brilliant idea, genius?

Let's look at the manufacture of iPhones, recently analyzed by MIT and announced in the MIT Technology Review by Konstantin Kakaes. Right now, iPhones are assembled in China and Brazil.

According to IHS, a market analyst, the components of an iPhone 6s Plus, which sells for $749, cost about $230. An iPhone SE, Apple’s newest model, sells for $399, and IHS estimates it contains $156 worth of components.

Assembling those components into an iPhone costs about $4 in IHS’s estimate and about $10 in the estimation of  Jason Dedrick, a professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. Dedrick thinks that doing such work in the U.S. would add $30 to $40 to the cost. That’s partly because labor costs are higher in the U.S., but mostly it’s because additional transportation and logistics expenses would arise from shipping parts, and not just the finished product, to the U.S.

So yeah. You could assemble iPhones in the US and they wouldn't cost that much more. Hey, what's $30 to $40 marked up to retail? (My $100 smartphone plus $30-$40 would cost a lot more, percentage-wise.) But you can see that you would immediately get into a regulatory minefield. That's because pretty soon you would be issuing regulations about how much of of the components in each iPhone could be manufactured abroad. And then you would need an inspectorate to make sure that nobody cheated. And what would happen when the smartphone industry switched to another business model that was not covered by the carefully regulated iPhone manufacturing accords?

The point is that you can talk glibly about free trade and protection and regulation and consumer protection but you are always really talking about how much clunking fist can the marketplace tolerate before it turns into Venezuela.

And then there is Deirdre McCloskey's Great Enrichment. We are talking about per-capita improvement in 200 years from $3 per day to $100 per day and very likely more. How did it happen? It happened because the machine spinners put the cottage spinners out of work. And the machine looms put the hand-loom weavers out of work. And the oil industry put the coal miners out of work. And the diesel factories put the Baldwin steam locomotive workers out of work. Right up to the present day when the smartphones put the mainframe computer and the minicomputer and the desktop computer and the laptop computer workers out of work. And then there is Amazon.

All this happened, the enrichment and the extinction of ancien commerce, because innovators innovated and nobody succeeded in stopping them.

We humans have a dream of eternal life, of endless perfection in the heavenly arms of God. It sounds good, except that to try and implement it on Earth means government and force and the forcible prevention of innovation and young people "having a go."

And yet the fact of human life and of the institutions we create is that we and they are born, we and they grow, we and they may reproduce and bring our progeny to adulthood, and then we and they grow old and die. We can't live forever, and neither can our jobs. And neither can our corporations. And neither can our governments. And neither can our civilizations.

The ideology of protection and regulation and consumer protection and government is to regulate and limit everything by force. It is not the way of life. It is the march of death.

Breaking Out of the PC Box

Presidential candidate Donald Trump recently got in trouble for objecting that the federal judge in his Trump University case was probably biased, being a member of a La Raza associated lawyers group and all.

And the GOP elders all united to condemn Donald Trump for racism.

Come on, Americans, this circular firing squad has to stop.

Not that I blame the judge, Gonzalo Curiel. Getting on the bench is a political thing, and if you have Hispanic ancestry it helps to belong to a Hispanic group to demonstrate your racial bona fides to the Great Mentioners that get your name on the List.

But unhyphenated Americans have got to get with the program. We must stop the silencing, the oppression, the totalitarianism of leftist PC politics. Jonah Goldberg this morning has a piece on liberals wanting to start a "conversation," which usually means liberals getting set to shut you up.

And that means, following Vox Day, that we have to take the attitude of "We Don't Care" whenever liberals play the racist/sexist/homophobe card.

Let's give the liberals credit. The whole intolerant tolerance thing invented by Herbert Marcuse is pure genius. You set up a frankly racist sexist politics and then you accuse anyone that objects to your racist sexist politics of racism and sexism. What is not to like?

And liberals will go on doing this until we non-hyphenated Americans say: "Call me a racist, sexist hompohobe. I Don't Care."

And the time to start practicing this new and improved attitude is right now while Donald Trump is running for president.

It ought to be a scandal that a federal judge belongs to a group with "Raza" in its name. It ought to be a scandal that Justice Sotomayor can utter a racist catchphrase to suggest that a "wise Latina" has a special inside track on the law. It ought to be a scandal that liberals are packing public institutions across the land with knee-jerk liberals on the argument of "diversity." It ought to be a scandal that Reverends Sharpton, Jackson, and Wright have not been dispatched to Outer Slobbovia for their frank racism.

Look, I know why the Republican elite responds to a cry of racism by cowering in their bunker. It is because their experience is that you can't win, because The New York Times can put you above the fold for a month to make sure that you know your place, because their experience is that a misplaced word can cost you your career. And it's because Republicans are decent people that are not that interested in power and just want everyone to get along.

Trouble is that Republicans are dealing with people who are interested in power, very interested in power. The aftermath of the anti-Trump riots in San Jose, California illustrated that perfectly. A Huffington Post writer, Jesse Benn:

Violent resistance matters. Riots can lead to major change (*note the irony of that hyperlink going to a Vox article). It’s not liberal politicians or masses that historians identify as the spark underlying the modern movement for LGBTQ equality. Nor was it a think piece from some smarmy liberal writer. It was the people who took to the streets during the Stonewall Uprising. It was the Watts Rebellion, not the Watts Battle of Ideas, that exposed the enduring systemic neglect, poverty, inequality, and racism faced by that community. Similarly, it was the LA Uprising, not the LA Protests, that led to significant changes in the Los Angeles Police Department. More recently, the Ferguson and Baltimore Uprisings both helped prompt the Justice Department to investigate their corrupt police forces.

What this young man does not seem to understand is that once you justify violence for your side, the good side, then you have licensed it for the other side, the bad side. The whole paraphernalia of laws and institutions and elections and representation is to provide ample opportunity for people with a grievance to advertise their oppression and get the ruling class to pay attention without going into the streets.

That's why the liberal resort to shutting up their critics is wrong; that is why teaching young heads full of mush that "riots can lead to major change" is wrong. That's why the cringing GOP establishment is wrong.

If we shut down robust debate in the public square then we are setting ourselves up for trouble. If we practice racism and call it "diversity" then we are setting ourselves up for trouble.

The reason that Donald Trump is presumptive nominee of the Republican Party is that the professional politicians in the Republican Party have failed us. Not because they are evil and feckless, but because they have been cunningly herded into a box by the left and its Frankfurt School identity politics.

Well, now it is time to break out of the box. Frankly, I don't know how to do it. I figure that the professional politicians and activists are the ones that should know the techniques of changing the "conversation."

But somebody has to figure it out, and soon.

Conservatism is Dead. So What Comes Next?

There's a piece in the American Spectator today saying: sorry, neoconservatives, you were wrong, about Iraq and other things. Then there is Vox Day responding to SF novelist John C. Wright about what to think about "Who Killed Conservatism."

The point is that the conservatism that triumphed with the Reagan administration in the 1980s is dead. Who killed it? No, not the neoconservatives, and not the various sectors of the conservative movement, or the "cuckservatives."

What killed conservatism was the so-called "progressives."

The point of post-World War II conservatism was to amend soften the administrative state of the Roosevelt years, to bring back some semblance of the market and unbuild the corporative regulative state which was strangling America. And it proposed to continue the containment of the Soviet Union started by Democratic President Harry Truman. Oh, and it was on-board with the civil rights revolution. In the votes for the Civil Rights Acts the northern Democrats were most in favor, Republicans next, and Southern Democrats last.

This conservative movement had its finest hour in the 1980s when the misgovernment of the 1970s from both parties provided an opening for an "amiable dunce" like Ronald Reagan to implement a supply-side revolution based on lower tax rates, spending cuts, and deregulation, and a determination to win the Cold War.

The success was remarkable, and conservatives thought that liberals had got the message. The economy thrives best if the government keeps a distance, and the Soviet Union was an evil empire.

But it turned out that liberals merely hated the Eighties and the message it brought, and instead signed up for a hyped-up Marxism from the Frankfurt School, that switched the focus of leftist politics from the working class to racial and gender identity politics.

This completely changed the rules.

There really is no compromise between a free-market national conservatism and the left's gender identity politics. But the conservatism of Bill Buckley and the Jewish neoconservatives was not built to deal with that. So it had to be destroyed.

But nothing happened for a while as the two implacable sides faced off through the Bush and Obama years. However, we can now see that something was building, ready to blow the lid off.

But what everyone forgot about was the white working class, once the "little darlings" of the liberals but cast out to outer darkness when the liberals got race politics and gender politics in the 1960s, and now dying of despair.

The interesting thing about the new liberal politics was that it did not make ordinary white middle class Americans into the villains, although it did continue to harass corporate CEOs and "country-club" Republicans. Instead it made working class white Americans into its Emmanuel Goldstein. They were racists and bigots, like Archie Bunker. It is hard to know why liberals did this. My guess is that liberals could not square the circle politically if the white working class was to continue being its little darlings as well as their new hot numbers, blacks and women.

It has taken 50 years for white working class Americans to find a way out of their despair as the forgotten Americans. That's because the Republican Party and conservatives generally had nothing to say to working class Americans because Republicans and conservatives are People of the Responsible Self that think you should get off your butt and make things happen in your life rather than wait for a leader to lead you to the promised land. The white working class, then and now, is People of the Subordinate Self. It expects to be led.

Well we know what happened next. Donald Trump. Who knew that you could bring the white working class into the Republican Party by offering to build a wall with Mexico, and hammer the Chinese sending us all those cheap smartphones and making "politically incorrect" statements that would have sunk any other candidate?

And who would have thought that Trump's candidacy would have demolished the old conservative coalition? As Newt Gingrich has said:

You have a Trump -- this absurd amateur. I mean it's not technically possible -- all of us, men and women in politics -- it's not technically possible to announce in June for the presidency never having run for anything and then beat 16 people... And he just beat them all.

 Actually, there is nothing unusual here. The Republican Party is constitutionally incapable of fishing for votes. It has always been, in the words of Michael Barone, a party of people that think of themselves as "typical Americans." Thus, it has never had anything to say to hyphenated Americans. But it has never had to, because group after group has been thrown out of the Democratic Party: social conservatives, Christians, and they had nowhere to go but the Republican Party. Finally the white working class has finally given up on the Democrats and found a candidate to bring them into the Republican Party.

Now things will never be the same. And really, it's a good thing. That's because we have been waffling on with the old conservatism when the assumptions have changed.

We are no longer dealing with the old liberal ruling class that just wanted to regulate everything from Washington. We are dealing with a progressive cultural Marxist movement that wants to fundamentally transform everything in America. So now we need a different political and cultural movement to defeat and destroy the progressive left. We cannot continue with the go-along to get-along conservatism of old.

Is the answer coming from Vox Day and the AltRight? Day says that the AltRight stands for the following

1. Nationalism
2. Western Civilization
3. Winning

I imagine that is based on the idea that the national state is the best thing yet invented for creating a unified political community, a demos. And that western civilization with its markets and law and limited government is the best thing yet invented for humans to wive and thrive. And that the time has come to stop being the Outer Party that governs when in office, while the Inner Party rules when in office. (Compare the Bush and Obama administrations.)

But you can see that, whatever is going to replace the old conservatism, we really haven't a clue how the replacement will work out.

The White Working Class Was Once the "Little Darlings" of the Ruling Class

Another day, another WaPo article about "The incredible crushing despair of the white working class." And as usual it blames the white working class for its problems. Working class blacks are three times more likely to have an optimistic view of the future.

What's the problem?

Part of the optimism gap is indeed because of "a shrinking pie of good jobs for low-skill/blue collar workers," Graham said in an email. "Whites used to have real advantages (some via discrimination) that they no longer have ... they are looking at downward mobility or threats of it, while poor blacks and Hispanics are comparing themselves to parents who were worse off than they."...

If you're a working-class white American, in other words, it may seem as though you are stuck with a losing hand in a bleak zero-sum game: Minorities are getting richer. The rich are getting richer. They're all doing so at your expense, and it's difficult to imagine things being any different in the future.

Cue a plug for my "little darlings" theory. Don't become a little darling of the ruling class. Because when they are done with you they will throw you onto the ash heap of history. Like the medieval peasants.

Once upon a time the ruling class loooved the white working class and gave them lots of presents and gew-gaws, as Sugar Daddies will do: Union laws, child-labor laws. Social Security. Medicare. Medicaid. Obamacare. So you learn to be a medieval peasant all over again and tug your forelock when the lord drives by in his private jet.

But then comes the day when the lord fancies a new bit of crackling. In the 1960s it was blacks and women. And so, rather quickly, working class whites became embarrassing. And then downright bigoted and mean. You got movies like In the Heat of the Night where the hero is a black man and the villain is not the racist white planter but the greasy white soda-jerk.

But never mind about the Washington Post and its articles written over the grave of the white working class. go read the comments under the article. Where's all that celebrated liberal compassion?

Yep. The comments that I read told the white working class to stop propping up the bar and go and get a job. Or words to that effect. Try this:

Why can’t poorly educated angry people who believe in conspiracy theories get jobs? Probably because those are the exact qualities employers DON’T want.. 

DON'T become the little darlings of the ruling class. I am talking to you, ladies. I am talking to you, African Americans. I am talking to you, Hispanics. Or you too will end up on the ash heap of history, just like the white working class.

I always wondered what happened to people thrown on the ash heap of history. Now I know. They do not die, they only fade away, from the death of hope.

You can see that the various means by which humans fortify hope are important. There is the charismatic leader, the tribal gods. There are the Axial Age religions that promise humans the ability to understand the world and work to live in it. There is the millennial hope of leftist movements for perfect community and equality. There is the revival of tribalism in fascism and Black Power. And of course there is the hope provided by the comfort of being the ruling class's little darlings.

You can see the advantage of the Axial Age religions. They do not get blind-sided by history, like the rise and fall of tribes. Or the vagaries of ruling class favors. They simply say things like: If you love God, God will love you back. Or: God sent his Son to die for you so you don't need to sacrifice any more.

Well, it looks like the white working class will have its revenge, as its support of Donald Trump has demolished the conservative-Republican coalition of the last 50 years. So conservatism and today's Republican Party might end up being thrown on the ash heap of history.

How do you like them apples?

The Childless Liberal City

On the one hand liberals believe in creativity. On the other hand they don't believe in having children. Not much.

On the one hand cities are crucibles of creative innovation. On the other hand cities are not that good for children.

On the one hand women are good little girls that suck up the Zeitgeist and believe what they are told to believe. On the other hand women want to live in a leafy suburb when they raise their children.

So here comes urbanist Joel Kotkin writing about families and cities. Cities, he writes, have been all about family.

What is a city for? Ever since cities first emerged thousands of years ago, they have been places where families could congregate and flourish... As for modern European cities, the historian Philippe Ariès argued that the contemporary “concept of the family” itself originated in the urbanizing northern Europe shown in Rembrandt’s paintings of bourgeois life. Another historian, Simon Schama, described the seventeenth-century Dutch city as “the Republic of Children.”

And if you want a cheap look at that, go watch The Admiral, about the very bourgeois Admiral Michiel de Ruyter of the Dutch Republic in the 17th century. The movie-makers go to a lot of trouble to show de Ruyter, who beat the Brits in several sea battles, as a man that just wants to go home and live with his wife and children in the Dutch city.

But today the city is not very family-friendly. I suppose we have urbanist Jane Jacobs and her Death and Life of American Cities to thank for that. Jacobs, who came to adulthood during World War II and whose husband bought a building at 555 Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, championed a Village kind of life with stores and sidewalks and vibrant street life. And activism. Jacobs had three children.

But most women don't want to raise children in the hurly-burly of the city. That is why women (and not eevil auto companies and oil companies) have driven the move to the suburbs. Women like fluffy nests and back yards and flowers and greenery. And 80 percent of people want to live in a detached single-family house.

But educated women are a bit different. It takes time for them to slough off their good-little-girl education and discover that they want what other women want. Also, they probably could never have afforded to buy 555 Hudson Street, even right after World War II.

Why do liberals insist on turning cities into hipster-friendly places that families don't like and can't afford? And why do they continue to make war on the suburbs?

I like to think it is because of their identity as People of the Creative Self. Liberals believe in living a creative life, but they do not think that creating children is creative. So they believe in making cities comfortable for creative people like them, people that dream in their twenties of getting into writing or activism, or "something creative."

And they believe in using political power to force other people to conform to their People of the Creative Self culture and to force them away from more traditional middle-class life style and culture.

Just like Jane Jacobs. Only she put three children on the ground as well.

Meanwhile things are going to get worse before they get better because anybody who is anybody instinctively supports the liberal densification agenda that wants to put everyone into dense cities even as people are fleeing the dense cities for the suburbs.

As even The Daily Beast recognizes.

The Paradox of Power and Not-so-Power

In the last week or so, while cudgeling my brain, like an Alger Hiss, over the newly published Bourgeois Equality by Deirdre McCloskey, I used my dissatisfaction with its 787 pages to come up with a new catchphrase.

I asserted that the notion that ties the bourgeois experience together -- its rhetoric, its innovation, its having-a-go -- is that the middle class is not that interested in power.

The "post-1848 clerisy" -- liberals and progressives and lefties --  are very interested in power, and especially political power. The Judgment of Marx in 1848 was that the economic power of the bourgeoisie, upon which rested the superstructure of its political power, could only be reduced by a countervailing political power organized by a revolutionary avant-garde of chaps like him. Liberals and progressives and lefties have not changed their opinion since.

For the left, the first and last and only way to change the world is through politics.

The counter argument, proposed down the ages, is that while political power has its moments, the meaning of life, the universe, and everything -- not forgetting the Key to All Mythologies -- is the limitation of political power.

Deirdre McCloskey makes this clear in her oft-repeated assertion that the last 200 years has seen a Great Enrichment in per-capita income from $3 per day to $100 per day wherever capitalism -- or innovation or "trade-tested betterment" or "having a go" -- was allowed to germinate and grow by the local political power structure. And there has been nothing like it before in history. Ever.

Her point is that the norm in human history is that the political powers-that-be have tended always to smother any signs of innovation in their cradles. That's because innovation and Schumpeter's "creative destruction" always threatens the status quo and the established interests, the regime supporters that get rewards for their support from the ruling class. And really, what is the difference between innovation and rebellion, from the point of view of the ruling class and its regime supporters?

The point is that enrichment is only possible when the political class takes its clunking fist off the brow of labor and allows it to innovate and creatively destroy the status quo. The more the ruling class believes in power the less it is likely to allow innovators and have-a-goers to innovate and have a go (and by the way, the less that the economy will throw off lovely lucre and tax revenue to increase the power of the state). The opposite is also true. The more a ruling class is not that interested in power and the more that it allows innovators and have-a-goers to have a go, the more enrichment will occur (and, by the way, the more that the enrichment will throw off lovely lucre and tax revenue to increase the power of the state).

Here we see the fundamental error that the "post-1848 clerisy" has been living for the last 170 years. The answer to the problem of injustice is not government power, because government is injustice. The answer to the problem of poverty is not yet another Poor Law, because the best solution to poverty is more enrichment from innovation and having-a-go.

Of course, we should not be so hard on the "post-1848 clerisy." They are not the only people that think the solution is power. Almost anyone that gets into politics ends up following the sterile road of power. Politics is about power, and it is a contradiction in terms to run for office and political power by promising to reduce the incidence of political power. Donald Trump is proposing to use the power of government to teach the Chinese and the Mexicans a lesson. His opponents in the Democratic Party are proposing the usual list of new expansions of government power to teach the One Percent a lesson.

And when we turn to the American people they always call for politicians to "do something" rather than "undo something."

It is, of course, a paradox that in order to promote enrichment the ruling class needs to lighten up on political power. It also makes complete sense.

The best way to increase the power and scope of the human experience is that you are not that interested in power.