When Will Liberals Lose Control of their Identity Politics?

Our liberal friends live under the sure knowledge that they can control events.

First, their big government administrative state is based on the assumption that rational experts can mold society through government programs. Their faith is a big conceit if wise experts do not in fact able to administer society like a bureaucracy from their perches of power in government.

Second, their identity politics is based on the faith that cunning liberals can always manipulate their client identity groups and turn them out at the next election.

We know that the first assumption is baloney. The liberal administrative state has hollowed out society and severely damaged the "little darlings" it was supposed to help, starting with the working class and now the black underclass. Women and other minorities to follow in due course.

But what about the second assumption, that clever liberals will always be able to manipulate their various identity groups into docility, marchin' and protestin' in accordance with their AstroTurf suppliers, voting the Democratic line, and following the leadership of their liberal betters?

Let us suppose that the Black Lives Matter movement started out as pure AstroTurf, or if it did indeed start out as pure spontaneous rage it soon acquired well-born leaders and money from Soros. There is a real question as to whether it is getting out of control. I don't suppose that the wise experts that have advised the movement imagined that young hot-heads might take the movement's rhetoric literally and start shooting cops. After all, we are all advanced and evolved and working for common-sense gun control. But now at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia we have a few activists going off script and bad-mouthing Hillary Clinton.

I suspect that when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were getting all enthusiastic about Saul Alinsky in their youth they were not thinking that the marchers and protesters that they community-organized might one day get ideas of their own and reject the wise and evolved leadership of their educated community organizers.

Nor, I suspect, did liberals imagine that the day would come when liberalism would be led by the gay mafia, and that gays would not be grateful for "marriage equality" but determined to continue gender politics to transgender bathrooms and polyamory.

And then there are the Muslims. I'm sure that the vasts majority of Muslims living in the West are good docile followers of their evolved liberal activist bosses. But then there are the others.

Maybe liberals got the wrong impression from their experience with the white working class. The white working class was glad to strike and riot when the rich-kid Class of 1848 ordered it. The white working class was glad to sit back and pick up the free stuff when the New Deal gave it the CCC and Social Security. The white working class was glad to walk down the street from high school at get a good lifetime union job at good wages in the 1950s. And when the liberals deserted the white working class and started dating the new fresh meat of women and minorities in the Sixties the white working class obligingly went home and died of despair, as per the Washington Post.

It was all so simple in those days. But now, influenced by the Frankfurt School, liberals have, after the style of President Eisenhower, made the problem bigger. Now they don't just have the white working class to manipulate but a huge Coalition of the Fringes. I'd say that the huge coalition of victims is getting a bit too hot to handle.

Just what is the evolved educated plan for damping down the black hot-heads? That has always been Society's Big Problem, converting young men from war to marriage and work. Liberals seem to think that the opposite is true. Meanwhile Michelle Malkin has started #BlueLightFridays to honor the blue lives that protect us.

Just what is the evolved educated plan for dealing with the Alluha Akbar fanatics from doing what comes naturally, according to Lawrence H. Keeley in War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. Yes, you wouldn't believe the number of skulls that archaeologists have dug up that show signs of having been severed from the rest of the body.

One of the things I'm getting from War Before Civilization is an appreciation of the difficulty of getting humans to live next to each other in peace. For instance, Keeley writes that humans have always been a bit leery of military heroes, and have tended not to choose them as leaders, preferring instead men of wealth and substance and negotiating skills.

The whole idea of liberal activism and identity politics is to stir up division and resentment and use people as weapons in the political wars, leading willing followers to a glorious victory of peace and justice against their slave masters and patriarchs. That sort of thing can work when you have, e.g., Bill Clinton, the most talented politician of his generation leading the identity politics brigade. But lesser lights, like Obama and Hillary, don't seem to have the chops for that.

It reminds me of the German problem. Under the genius Bismarck the Germans unified themselves in three short, sharp foreign wars. But then came Wilhelm II, a man without any genius and without the sense to put Germany's destiny in the hands of another Bismarck. The rest is history.

This problem is as old as the hills. The son of the guy that creates a dynasty whether corporate or political, usually isn't up to the mark. And then things start to go wrong.

Will 2016 be the year that the scions of the giants that made the West lose control? I can't say I'm confident that they have the wisdom to cede control to someone that knows better.

Stay tuned for the next exciting episode.

It is not "Good Government" Reforms that Wrecked the System

No, Megan McArdle, it is not "good government" reforms that have wrecked the political parties and made them dysfunctional. It is the nature of government itself. McArdle writes, bemoaning the way that the Democrats foisted Clinton upon us:

How can we explain this? For one thing, I think Clinton’s candidacy -- like Trump’s candidacy, in its own, very different way -- points to the fatal weakness of the political parties. Decades of “good government” reforms have systematically stripped the power that parties once had: to control money, to control committee assignments, to control how much pork politicians get to brag about to the voters back home. What’s left is a hollow shell that cannot effectively respond to either grassroots insurgencies or to outsize figures who effectively turn the party apparatus to their own ends. If you think, as I do, that parties play a vital role in organizing political action toward coherent goals and long-term accountability, that’s something that should worry you.

Sorry, but I don't think that political parties, strong or weak, are much good at "organizing political action toward coherent goals and long-term accountability." See I don't think that "political action" is much good at anything except fighting enemies in the here and now. And when they do have coherent goals they have no clue about the damage their goals might cause. I don't think that political actors think much beyond fighting the next election and rewarding their supporters.

Correction. I do think that the Democrats have thought about the long-term advantage of immigration in creating new Democrats. It has worked pretty well for them up to now, but I think that in the near future it is going to blow up in their faces over the Muslim Question.

But, seriously, Megan. The big question is what politics is good for, anyway, beyond protecting us from enemies foreign and domestic. And really it doesn´t do that good a job of protection anyway. We get existential perils like fascism and communism rising up and our leaders usually fail to act before we get dumped into bloody big world war. And we get full-scale crime waves before our leaders settle on anything approaching coherent goals for dealing with them.

We are in a mess today not from the wrong type of politics but from politics in general. We are reaching the limit of the progressive politics advocated by the Progressives of a century ago, where rational experts would administer the society based on the best ideas of social science. The product of this elite movement is today's gigantic government that cannot act to fix anything. That's because once government sets a program in motion it cannot effectively reform it because the people benefiting from the program will organize to prevent any change that reduces their checks.

If you look at the world and its affairs it is pretty obvious that the important work of the world is to fix problems and clean up after them. What happens when a corporation starts to lose money because its products aren't selling too well in the market? It makes hard choices, probably laying off employees and redirecting resources to get the company profitable again. (Here we are using profit in the sense of using resources, human and natural, wisely).

But when does a government ever do that? Typically whenever a government faces making spending cuts it advertises its program as a balance between spending cuts and tax increases, to "share the burden." In other words the people facing a cut in their free stuff have to be rewarded by seeing other people suffer with an increased tax burden.

And the point is that the key is not whether or not to start some wonderful new program. The key is what do you do when things go wrong. The problem is that the answer is usually: Nothing. The Greeks did nothing until the nasty Germans forced them to enact spending cuts. The Argentines did nothing in 2002 until they devalued and replaced dollar accounts with peso accounts, wiping out middle-class savings. The Venezuelans are letting the whole economy go down the toilet rather than cut back on spending programs for its supporters when the oil price crash unbalanced the government's budget.

What are our political parties doing to deal with the fact that entitlements like Social Security and Medicare are going to eat the federal budget? What are they doing to fix the lousy education that kids get in the inner city? Democrats want to increase Social Security payments and reduce the disciplining of minority students in schools. So their solution is to make the problem worse. And Republicans aren't much better.

The fact is that the "coherent goals and long-term accountability" of the Progressives a century ago is what has brought us the election of 2016 in which the electorate is in a foul mood because it knows that something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

The problem is that nobody dare even think about what should be done. That's because we the American people will string up on a lamppost anyone that suggests that we start to dismantle the entitlement state and the free stuff that we were promised.

Let's Get a Few Things Straight About "Free Trade"

Everyone seems to be ganging up on "free trade" right now, from Donald Trump to alt-right chappies like Vox Day.

They are arguing that the market is soulless, and doesn't care a whit if communities are hollowed out when the market moves on or when cheap products produced by low-wage Chinese take American jobs. Here is Day quoting SF old master Jerry Pournelle:

But do understand, what is conserved is lower prices. Nor social stability. Not communities. Not family life. Indeed those are often disrupted; it’s part of the economic model. Under free trade theory, it’s better to have free trade than community preservation, better to have ghost towns of people displaced because their jobs have been shipped overseas; better to have Detroit as a wasteland than a thriving dynamic industrial society turning out tail finned Cadillacs and insolent chariots and supporting workers represented by rapacious unions in conflict with pitiless corporate executives.

First of all, we don't have completely free trade, never have. Secondly, as Deirdre McCloskey makes very clear in her Bourgeois Era books, the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years is founded not on accumulation, not on "free trade" but on innovation.

Wait, she was wrong. It was not "innovation" that did it but the failure to block innovation.

You can have all the capitalist accumulation, the freest trade in the world, and the world full of innovators. But if you allow the ruling class and its supporters to block innovation -- and they will if you give them half a chance -- then you are back to the good old days of economic stasis.

When the innovators are allowed to sell their innovations then you get disruption, because the folks doing stuff the old way are going to have to accept lower wages and even get put out of work. We humans hate that and will do anything to block the innovators and continue to enjoy our customary way of life and income.

I would argue that the history of the last 200 years is the history of the failed attempts to block the innovators. They tried to stop the machine spinners. They went in for machine wrecking in the Luddite riots. They forced automobiles to a speed limit of 6 mph. They licensed labor unions to prevent management from changing working conditions. Communism is an attempt to return to the Eden of perfect community before its disruption by Modern Industry. Fascism is an attempt to return to the Eden of blood and tribe. Environmentalism is an attempt to return to an Eden of an unspoiled Earth, and that is why environmentalists want to block the innovations of fracking and GMO foods.

Yes, Jerry Pournelle is right. Unblocked innovation means an end to social stability. But you can't have that social stability unless the rulers have the power to block innovation. And we are to understand that in the days when the ruling class had the power to block innovation society practiced a downward mobility where second sons of the nobility shoved aside the middle class and the second sons of the middle class shoved aside the lower class, who just had fewer babies and died faster than the higher classes. You can have your stability, but it comes at a price that is paid by the traditionally marginalized.

And let us not forget what happened in Detroit. It wasn't free trade that killed Detroit but political power. The ruling class gave the auto companies and the labor unions special privileges that allowed them to jack their prices and wages way up above the market. It was great fun, for the workers and the managers, while it lasted.

You can say if you like that it was free trade that killed Detroit. But what would it have taken to save it? 15% tariffs on imports, or 50% tariffs? What about a suspension of labor laws to force wages down? And what about if and when the import car companies started building cars in the non-union South?

The point is that the argument about "free trade" misses the point. The point is that reality always wins in the end. You can take your pick. Do you want to surrender to market prices and let overpriced and overprivileged Detroit go to the wall? Or do you want to wait for a Great Depression or an invasion? That's the way things used to be settled. If your ruler wasn't up to the mark then sooner or later some warrior lord would invade and loot and plunder his good rich acres. These days we do it metaphorically. We fail to keep up with the market at our peril. But our modern peril is not the old peril where all the men are killed and the women sent away into slavery. The peril is that we must accept the verdict of the market and work for less wages that in the past.

And there is more. The campaign against "free trade" makes a rather big assumption. It assumes that politicians and regulators can engineer a better social outcome than market prices. Really? I'd say that the record is pretty clear. It is that politicians and regulators suck at delivering anything except dividing the electorate and promising free stuff to their supporters.

Why in the world, in the decade after the real-estate meltdown and the Obamacare disaster, can anyone suggest that monkeying with the market is going to produce a good outcome for America and American workers?

I have a better idea! Let's unwind some of the government programs that make it difficult for workers to get jobs. Let's abolish the minimum wage, credentialism, child labor laws, payroll taxes and their unjust pension programs. Let's make it easy for employers to hire workers and let's make it easy to fire them. Let's encourage workers to save for a rainy day and for their retirement without the government getting in the middle.

In the old days, before the welfare state, in the dark and savage days of the 19th century, almost every worker, high and low, belonged to a fraternal association or a mutual-aid society. These organizations sprang up, starting in the 18th century, when the dispersion of people across the wide world encouraged them to create an artificial notion of brotherhood beyond the boundaries of blood kin. So they imagined themselves in a brotherhood of Masons, who were not manual workers; Elks and Eagles, who were not beasts of the field. And they created a virtual community, so that an itinerant worker could find a friend wherever he showed up, and also buy insurance against death and a helping hand for his widow. But the welfare state put all that out of business.

Let's get things straight. It is utter folly to bet against the market. The market is today's economic reality and the only thing we know is that the reality and the prices will change tomorrow. The way to preserve community and family is to preserve community and family, which were and are the best bulwarks against the cruel winds of change.

The only certain thing is that if you let government start messing around with the market process it will screw things up and make them worse. Deteroit's problem started when the government repealed the laws against combinations and allowed the auto cartel to flourish and jack its wages and prices into the stratosphere. Without that very unfree trade policy then maybe Detroit wouldn't have crashed, but only declined into an impecunious old age.

Still, if we didn't have economic ruin and collapse what would government do then, poor thing?

Trump Night: What You Are Not Allowed to Say

Despite my disinterest in the Republican National Convention I did get to hear most of the speeches of Peter Thiel, Ivanka Trump, and Donald Trump in Cleveland on July 21, 2016.

I listened through my particular virtual noise canceling device, which says that, once government has got past protecting us from enemies foreign and domestic, it is tempting us with things we shouldn't have. So most of what poltical speakers say is nothing less than the voice of Satan.

Peter Thiel asked why we are stuck in the middle of fake culture wars while also speaking about how government could once do science and software. As in go to the moon. Well, we know why. Our liberal friends are running the culture war to stamp out all the dangerous sects and cults that oppose their cultural hegemony. These chaps that insist on the separation of church and state are determined to unite the state with their secular church of political correctness and silence all other voices. The culture war is not fake; it is real and deadly serious.

Ivanka Trump spoke to try and neutralize the "war on women" meme that Democrats have used so successfully in recent years. She worried about the fact that while single women earn about the same as men, married women with children earn much less. As if career and working and earning money is the most important thing in the world for women. Barbara Bush said it many years ago: at the end of your life you don't wish that you had spent more time at the office. We make men have careers because it is much better than having them do what comes naturally, which is rape and pillage and brawl in the streets. We've decided that women need careers because well-born women have always needed a way to differentiate themselves from ordinary baby machines. Used to be they differentiated themselves by doing nothing except sitting and sewing. Now they differentiate themselves by worrying about work/life balance.

Donald Trump showed that he has completely blown away the old Republican Party of gentlemanly conservatism. Gone is the old triad of social conservatism, economic conservatism, and national security conservatism. In its stead is a populist conservatism to "make it like it was." Except that the 1950s era of "good jobs at good wages" for high-school graduates that just stepped down the street to the unionized manufacturing corporation for a lifetime job is gone forever. But the fault is not the global corporations. The wicked globalist corporations that are shipping jobs to the Third World are just taking care of business. They know that a corporation can never stand still; it must always be preparing for the future. Today's profitable product is tomorrow's sad loser. And so it goes.

Politicians like Trump and Clinton can muck around a bit with the market; they can make things a bit more difficult for the Chinese, and harass illegal immigrants and people over-staying their visas, and reduce legal immigration, but they'd better not try too hard, or they will make a bigger mess than we started with. As in mortgage subsidies that ended up hurting the very people, women and minorities, that they were designed to help.

President Coolidge that that 90 percent of the people coming into his office were asking for things they shouldn't. They still are.

The Trump and Brexit phenomena tell us that something is wrong. The average person isn't doing so well. I say that is because of everything from the sexual revolution to education to family formation to the taxation and regulation of labor to the government's regulatory distortions. So we should unwind just about everything we have done politically in the last century except the civil rights acts of the 1960s.

But that won't happen because every market distortion and every government program has its powerful supporters. That's why nothing changes until the economy hits the wall, and probably not even then.

But there is this. All government is injustice, particularly for those on the receiving end of government force. Usually the ruling class and its supporters have no clue that their self-dealing is causing rage and frustration out among the boo-boisie. Until all of a sudden the boo-boisie just can't take it any more.

Is 2016 a year in which the people decide they just can't take it any more? Don't hold your breath.

Cop Killers Target White Working Class

I just had another epiphany.

The first one this year was to realize that the liberal turn in the 1960s to race and gender politics had an unanticipated consequence. After the turn the white working class would be the poster boys for white racism. That's what Archie Bunker was all about in All in the Family. This nobody living in a small home in Queens became the poster boy for racism, sexism, and bigotry.

But how could Archie be racist, sexist and a bigot? He didn't have the power: that's what liberals tell us. He was just a nobody working at a warehouse, albeit as a supervisor.

But the logic of the situation required that the white working class pay the costs of the racist sexist government Affirmative Action and later diversity programs. It has to be that way, right? Government is force; action and reaction are equal and opposite and all the rest of the Newtonian system. If the government were going to favor minorities and women, then someone had to be on the losing side. And it turned out to be the white working class.

When you think about it, it couldn't have been any other way. Liberals weren't going to cut themselves out of the gravy train, they were too important with their sharing and caring and activism. Ordinary middle-class People of the Responsible Self weren't relying on government goodies, except don't touch my Social Security and Medicare. So the residual victim had to be the white working class.

This is the eternal fate of the "little darlings" of the ruling class down the ages, here here and here.

Now we come to epiphany #2. The current Black Lives Matter war on the cops, now reaching a crescendo with black shooters killing policemen, is a war on the white working class.

Who do you think works the streets in America's police departments? Graduates of "Studies" programs?Yeah, wherever working class whites have not yet been chased out by "diversity" programs, they naturally go for police jobs. Given that factory jobs have gone the way of the horse-and-buggy, getting a job at a police department is a natural for a white working class guy or gal.

Only now the police are the target of the latest fashionable liberal activism craze. The police are killing young black men, because they are racist.

Hello! Doesn't that just sound like 1971 and Archie Bunker all over again? But the point is that the police constable on the street is not the reincarnation of Bull Connor. Or even In the Heat of the Night's  Police Chief Bill Gillespie, played by Rod Steiger in the movie and -- hello -- Caroll O'Connor in the TV series.

The average policeman on the street is just a guy trying to stay out of trouble so he can retire and get his pension.

But now comes Steven Greenhut writing that the problem with police violence is police unions, that dominate local politics and jack up police salaries and work to reduce police accountability.

Do you see the parallel? Back in the 1950s the white working class was flying high with union protected "good jobs at good wages." Then Stein's Law -- if something cannot go on forever, it will stop -- kicked in. World competition started to wash away the foundations of the union game, because big corporations could no longer pass increased costs onto the consumer. So the great unionized industrial corporations went into decline, and the white working class lost their above-market wages and benefits. In fact, the old union game was a bubble and crashed, and so many folks in the white working class lost everything, the women and minorities hardest hit in the housing crash of 2008 and just like Joe Soptic in 2012. Now the white working class is dying of despair, according to the Washington Post.

Now the rot is setting in for the white working class in police departments. Police unions have jacked wages up above market levels. Police unions have made police less accountable so that activists are mobilizing against the police. And anyway, state and local governments are all going to go broke in the next couple of decades.

So the white working class is going to get hammered again. Not just from the well-born activists running Black Lives Matter who want to make them the scapegoats for the social disaster of the black underclass. But also from the "cannot go on forever" aspect of police wages and pensions.

But if you are a liberal living in your NPR/NYT bubble getting all excited about electing the First Woman President, or a good little girl working as an administrator in a university bureaucracy, you know nothing about all this. And you won't until the sh*t hits the fan.

The Fault is Not In Our Elites, But in the World They Made

For some reason, I can't get excited enough about the Republican National Convention to watch it. Perhaps it's because I am going to observe my 70th birthday at the end of the month.

Or maybe it's because much bigger things are afoot than Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.

I wrote some disparaging words about the failures of the "administrative faction of the ruling class" at American Thinker this week, including blaming it for World War I and its failed aftermath.

Looking at the big picture, I guess you could say that World War I tore apart the 19th century world and World War II put the world together again. Except for the Soviet Union.

That's because in the US and UK, the ruling class came together on World War II and forged their peoples, broken by 20 years of misery, back into a nation again. Talk to a person in their 80s, the generation that was young in the 1940s, and they are all pretty good with going along to get along with big government. Hey, big government had its finest hour in World War II.

The ruling class was so pleased with itself that it went to sleep and figured it would rule forever. But obviously with the Crash of 2008, political correctness, the rise of radical Islam, and Brexit and Trump, something has changed. The post-World War II world is coming to an end, and we don't know what will come next.

Here's a piece about the failures of the GOP elite by Jeffrey H. Anderson. He lists four failures: failure to listen to the citizenry, getting suckered into the Democrats' model for nominating presidential candidates (primaries instead of smoke-filled rooms), failing to make a big picture case, failing to back the viable challenger (i.e., Walker, Cruz). All in all, he writes, "the problems in our politics lie more with the elites than with the citizenry."

All true, but all ground level, tactical stuff.

And really meaningless, because the GOP elite doesn't have real power. They don't get to make the world; they just live in it. Their failure is really the failure to take down the political and cultural world constructed by the Democrats. Yet how are the GOPers to do that, since politics is downstream from culture?

Let us try and construct a big picture to explain our situation.

Back in the 19th century the Left, in what we will call a genuine concern for the plight of the workers, built a political movement by splitting off the working class from an identity with the nation. This project failed in World War I when the working class identified with their nations and fought in the trenches against each other. Anyway, it had turned out, capitalism wasn't "immiserating" the working class, it was enriching it.

Still, you had to hand it to the Left. Their project worked pretty well. It is only now, a century after World War I, that the working class, in Brexit and Trump, has become disenchanted with the leadership of the Left.

The point is that people respond to divisive politics, and are easily persuaded that "they" are out to exploit "us." And everyone is in favor of government putting its thumb on the scales of justice if it benefits "us." So it took a while for the workers to realize that the Left didn't care about people like them.

But the Left had another card up its sleeve. It went from class politics to identity politics. Now instead of splitting the working class off from the nation it would split off all kinds of groups, from women to racial minorities to sexual minorities. Looking at the result, it is clear that divide and conquer is not that hard to do. You can get women to believe that they have been kept down by the patriarchy, blacks to believe that they have been kept down by the police, gays that they have been kept down by Christian bigots, and so on.

Conservatives have reacted by fingering the tactics of this cultural Marxism, the community organizer tactics of chaps like Saul Alinsky and the activism culture that all good little girls learn in government schools. And we are outraged.

But from a big picture view we must understand that all politics is division: that is the politician's stock in trade. It is just that lefties are so much better at it. And they have set the rules so that their divisive tactics are all about communities coming together while their opponents' divisive tactics are bigotry and racism.

In addition the Left has grown the government from 7 percent of GDP to 35 percent of GDP as it has rewarded its supporters with government loot. But the more loot is handed out the less that capitalism can innovate and create new wealth. And the more that the losers get angry.

That gets us to Stein's Law. If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

Obviously, today's division cannot go on forever. So how can we stop all this division? The answer is right in front of us. The only time humans come together is during an existential emergency, like a flood or a war.

The only way we are going to be able to heal all the divisions provoked by the Left since World War II is by having us a great big war.

And it is pretty obvious what that war is going to be all about. Muslims.

Of course it's going to be pretty hard on Muslims who are, after all, just people. But the fact is that today's radical Islam is implacably opposed to everything that made the West great. Islam is opposed to the separation of church and state; it is tribal rather than national; it is opposed to social and economic innovation, the foundation of the Great Enrichment; it is social and religiously intolerant. It denies women a public life.

Suppose you were a populist leader looking for a way to unify a nation or a culture under your leadership. What would you do? You would look for an enemy that you could use to unify your people. Hey, liberals do it all the time, only their enemies are the racists, sexists, homophobes right here at home.

Don't like it? Neither do I. But the fact is that you cannot unify people around the concept of rainbows and unicorns. You can only unify them to face and to fight an existential threat to their lives and the lives of their loved ones.

So maybe that's why I can't get too excited about the political conventions. I think that much bigger things are afoot, but we are only in the early stages of this sea change in our politics and our culture, and the great events of the political season are meaningless skirmishes as great movements arise to deal with our existential crisis, and mobilize us, willy nilly, for war.

Everyone is Playing "Time for a Change"

When you think about it, it is remarkable how much of politics is the Blame Game. In the 2000s liberals liked to blame George W. Bush for everything, although his Iraq policy was the consensus ruling-class "regime-change" policy. Now conservatives are blaming Barack Obama for everything, even though liberals are confident that the problem is that conservatives opposed everything that Obama proposed.

There is a reason why so much blame goes in in politics. It's because government is force, and force is a very blunt instrument. So politics always comes down to our guys shoving around their guys. But the question always is: what happens if something goes wrong with our plan to shove the other guys around?

Here's a chap who says that the problem is that "the center-left has told the bottom 60% of the income distribution in their countries the following story: 'Globalization is good for you. It’s awesome. It’s really great...'" and so on. Only, of course, it hasn't been so great for a whole bunch of people, and now they are angry.

Here's a chapette who says that the problem is that "America has been rocked by a series of semi-coherent social movements that blend some real and compelling grievances with a great deal of confusion, cinematic victim-mongering, and wildly imprudent demands."

But don't forget that the last 200 years has seen a Great Enrichment of 3000 percent, and it has been lifting billions out of poverty in the last couple of decades. You'd think that everyone would be over the moon.

They aren't over the moon because at the street level life is always hard and full of disappointment. I like to say that the most disappointed are the "little darlings" of the ruling class that have been promised goodies and are now disappointed that the goodies haven't changed their lives and, anyway, the ruling class didn't deliver on its promises.

So the global elite promised wonders from globalization. Actually, they were right. Cheap everything from China has been a global miracle. But plenty of people have been hurt, starting with unionized workers that priced themselves out of a job. Whatever the advantages of "free trade" (which is just another term for market prices) the constant innovation of the market through market prices creates plenty of angry losers.

So the angry losers are rallying to politicians promising to punish the evildoers. Of course they are. Governments always promise to protect us from existential dangers and what is more existential than losing your job to a foreigner?

Yes, but what about the future? How can anyone expect Donald Trump to deliver on his promises of curbing immigration and teaching the Chinese a lesson? Good point. How can anyone expect Hillary Clinton to deliver on the fatuous promise of universal government health care and keeping all the Democratic victim groups onside? Everything the government touches turns to dysfunction, because government is force, and force is useful only for breaking things.

The truth is that we only advance by trying stuff, and most innovation is a mistake. So we bumble along from mistake to mistake, and turn around to find that, after 200 years of mistakes, we have increased per capita income by 30 times! And there has never been anything like it, ever.

We all wish confusion on our enemies, to teach them a lesson, and so we demand that it is Time for a Change. But the way to the future is by finding a useful way to serve our fellow humans, and not to demand our pound of flesh up front.

In the real world, humans demand to get their pound of flesh, their government check, up until the moment that the government runs out of money. Governments know this, so they do anything rather than disappoint their followers with "cuts" or "austerity." Until it is too late, Venezuela.

It is easy to say: Don't rely on government, but the truth is that the government takes 35 percent of everything we produce, so we have to take the government's dime and go along to get along. When the crash comes, of course, it will be minorities and women hardest hit, although in the Crash of 2008 it was probably minorities and white working class men hardest hit. Those folks are hardest hit because they have no option than to play the government's game. It is only people up the food chain that can afford to save for a rainy day against the government running out of money.

Meanwhile, I'm angry, I blame President Obama and politically correct liberals, and I think it is Time for a Change.