The Only Program Government Knows How to Cut is Defense

I've been staring at my charts on usgovernmentspending.com for a while now. And now I can tell you what they say.

They say that government is a dab hand at wars. It can crank up defense spending into the stratosphere, cover the oceans with ships and the the sky with aluminum. It can rout out the Kaiser and the Führer.

And then it can unwind the whole thing and send the surviving kids back to college and work and wiving and thriving. Look at the chart below.

But do you know something about that chart? It shows us that government seems to be constitutionally unable to say: you know what, this government child-custodial facility thing just isn't doing the job. It was a good idea while it lasted, but now it is time to give the whole thing back to the private sector. For the children. We'll create a Teachers Veterans Administration (TVA!) to take care of the demobilized teachers, and treat their post traumatic stress disorder, but failure is failure, and we don't believe in reinforcing failure.

Yeah. That graf reads like utter folly. Who would dare to propose that we shut down the entire government education system? And yet, what good is it doing? It does a fair to middling job of educating the children of the middle class. That's because the middle class insists on it. But it is utterly failing to educate the children of the poor, and we know why. On the one hand, most people in the inner city think of education as a jobs program. And then schools are forbidden to discipline minority youths, because disparate impact.

The same applies to all the big government programs. Social Security? Imagine the economic growth if people were saving at Fidelity and Vanguard instead of sending money direct to grandpa, do not pass go. Medicare? Imagine the economic growth if middle-class women were saving for end-of-life care, and imagine the health care prices if grandma was bargain-hunting for health care the way that she bargain hunts for deals at Stein Mart.

And welfare? How about bullying the 1% to "give a little more" the way we presently suggest tax increases on the wealthy and Wall Street.

I know. This is all pie-in-the-sky until the whole system collapses and maybe not even then. Government is an armed minority occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants to reward its supporters with free stuff. It will be ever thus.

But the one thing government cannot do, is too afraid to do, is to cut spending when it runs out of money. Greece didn't have the balls to cut all the goodies to pensioners and university freeloaders. Venezuela has let the economy collapse rather than tell its supporters to hike it up and accept less free stuff from the state.

So I propose a new catchphrase for government. If you can't turn it off, don't turn it on. Don't start a program of new delicious free stuff unless you have the balls to turn it off when the nation can't afford it.

In fact, it is pretty obvious that the only thing that government can turn off is its war machine. Government is pretty good at ramping up spending for a war, and OK at paying for it without wrecking the economy. And it is pretty good at cutting spending to the bone when the war is over, provided it doesn't try to deflate to restore its inflated currency to the pre-war parity.

So I say that until government can show that it can cut spending on social programs as easily as it can cut defense, there should be no more social spending. This proposal is just common sense. Social spending is nice, and makes us feel that we are helping the poor. But there is one thing worse than not helping the poor, and that is going Greek or Venezuelan. When the poor are in danger of starving to death.

On Rattlesnake Mountain

A couple of days ago, on my 70th birthday, Lady Marjorie and I hiked up Rattlesnake Mountain, about 30 miles east of Seattle, to Rattlesnake Ledge, where you can look out at North Bend, Washington, and the trucks coming down I-90 from Snoqualmie Pass.

Naturally, when we reached the ledge we had lunch. As everybody knows, the whole point of hiking is: Lunch. Of course, I parked myself right next to a chasm in the rock where I had to give pretty girls a hand if they didn't fancy jumping across like a guy.

But we were both amazed at the people on the trail. Apart from the white guys out for a hike together and the white girls and the odd white family, there were tons of East Asian families on the trail. And a ton of South Asians too. Many were clearly immigrants, but their children were not. I suppose that Amazon and Microsoft had let out for the day.

Oh, and there were even some African Americans on the trail, which is unusual. And one Muslim couple -- you could tell because the man was dressed American while his wife wore a proper head scarf and associated paraphernalia.

It's helpful to see Americans and future Americans out on the trail, far from a political convention or a peaceful protest or an MSM camera. There they were living their lives, out with friends and family, and passing each other on the trail in perfect amity.

When we got back to the car we fell into conversion with three California girls who wanted to see a waterfall. And I thought that California girls went out with the Beach Boys.

The point is -- apart from lunch -- that we tend to forget that while some damn politician is hard at work dividing people, capitalism is hard at work mixing them up. That's because capitalism is about two things: innovation and trust.

Well, that's not quite correct. Capitalism starts with you trying to figure out how to serve the market so you can earn a living. If you are really smart you figure out something new, something you think can work but that other people don't. You innovate, and if you are really lucky you change the world and add to the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years. But it is still worthy and honorable just to find a job that pays a decent wage.

The other thing is trust. This is not merely because trusting is a good thing, and the basis of humans as social animals. Trust is a cost reduction device and a wealth multiplication device. The more people you can trust the bigger your market.

It makes me think about the amazing disconnect in the modern world. Here we have the Great Enrichment, the absolutely amazing 3,000 percent rise in per-capita income in 200 years, born and bred from capitalism, and all fashionable people think it stinks. So we also have the most amazing reactionary political movement: socialism, progressivism, fascism; that are all harking back to the old ways: the equality of the village, the hierarchy of the feudal estate, the instinctive ties of tribe and blood. And the most advanced thinkers are supposed to be the chaps advocating Back to the Future. What's wrong with this picture?

Here we are in 2016 with the glorious choice between Trump and Clinton, between back to Fifties when the white working class had good jobs at good wages and the race/gender poisonous politics of the liberal elite.

Yet, day by day, hour by hour, capitalism is bringing people together, in work, and in consumption, and in innocent sharing of the delights of a hike followed by lunch on Rattlesnake Mountain.

Maybe there is hope for the future, after all.

Hillary's Speech: One More "Big Push" for The Narrative

A lot of people seem to think that Hillary Clinton's speech accepting the nomination for president from the Democratic Party was second rate.

Obviously, it wasn't great, but it did what it needed to do. It needed to roll out The Narrative, one more time.

What is The Narrative? It has two parts, of course. One part is that government and progressive liberals have smashed one injustice after another to enable us to work at a decent job and be protected from injustice and hardship. The other is that if you don't agree with us you don't deserve a voice, because you are a racist, sexist homophobe.

Obviously the second part of The Narrative is what really gores conservative oxen. But the first part is the one that keeps 'em coming and voting for Democrats.

Last night The Narrative was clearly pitched to women, what with all the emphasis on glass ceilings and creating a world where women can be whatever they want to be.

But how?

If we pivot to the economic part of Hillary's speech it is about government creating good jobs and good wages for people.

My primary mission as President will be to create more opportunity and more good jobs with rising wages right here in the United States.

But how?

Clinton will reverse Citizens United, fix corporate tax breaks, big bad Wall Street, clean energy jobs, allow immigrants to stay, kick China, increase Social Security checks, and build infrastructure.

Now, here’s the thing, we’re not only going to make all these investments, we’re going to pay for every single one of them.

And here’s how: Wall Street, corporations, and the super rich are going to start paying their fair share of taxes.

The funny thing is that it is Wall Street, corporations, and the super rich that provide the funding for the Democratic Party, even as the Bernie bros supply the foot-power. And we are going to tax them more? I wonder how that will work.

In the same week as the Democratic National Convention we have seen a couple of news items that puts this into relief.

First, here's news item from Bloomberg about home ownership falling to the levels of the 1960s. Actually, if you look at the graph, it shows a flattish line from the 1960s to the 1990s, a huge increase from the mid 1990s to the mid 2000s, followed by a huge decrease from the mid 2000s to the mid 2010s that erases the gains of the previous ten years. So, the whole CRA/Fannie/Freddie effort to lower loan origination standards to help inner-city residents was a complete wash. What goes up must come down.

Then, here's an opinion item about the concerns of construction company CEOs and CFOs. Do they care about taxes and regulation? No, their big concern is the shortage of skilled labor, "welders, carpenters, HVAC technicians." The article goes on to talk about the lack of vocational training and the "boys adrift" problem.

So. What does this tell us. My point is that when government gets the bit between its teeth it can repipe the plumbing of the economy. But it cannot force outcomes.

The government can force money into housing. So it pushed a bunch of lower-income people into their own homes for a season. But now the poor bloody millennials can't afford a house and the lower-income people are back to renting.

The government can force money into favoring the education of girls and make them all into college graduates. But it doesn't think about what making education girl-friendly does to boys.

The speech of Hillary Clinton gave no nod at all to the damage government does. In her Narrative government is the wonderful beneficent Oz breaking down barriers and making us Stronger Together. Nothing about the Law of Unintended Consequences.

That's why I bang away with my talking points: Government is Force, Politics is Violence, System is Domination, Government is Injustice.

Until the ruling class starts to think seriously about the damage its rule has done, the only thing ordinary people can do is vote to tear it all down.

Because the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years was from innovation, not from government, and we have seen in the last ten years a perfect illustration of this. Government and the ruling class have forced "clean energy jobs" on us as a solution to climate change. It has been a disaster. Meanwhile, completely unheralded and unsung, the "fossil fuel industry" has conducted the innovative fracking revolution with hard work on horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing of rock around well bores. The result of the fracking revolution is a 50 percent drop in energy prices.

Obviously the ruling class will not change its mind until it has been well and truly humiliated, again and again. Because until then the ruling class will not see that it has a problem.

The 2016 Election is a Test

One of my recurrent themes is that the Obama "fundamental change" strategy is not just wrong from a conservative point of view, because it re-feudalizes the American people and a lot more besides.

No, my argument is that, from the point of view of liberals themselves, you don't want to push the liberal agenda Obama-style, by a partisan vote on Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, by executive actions, by Dear Colleague letters on campus rape and transgender bathrooms, by Supreme Court ukases on gay marriage.

Why? Because government is injustice, at least to the people on the receiving end of government force.

Now when you are on the receiving end of force you have the options of Hegel's Master/Slave Fight to the Death. You can fight or you can surrender. But when you surrender you are not entering into consensus with the victor; you are just bowing to his superior force, for now.

That is why Daniel Patrick Moynihan said that to pass a program like Medicare you needed a 70-30 bipartisan vote in the Senate. The point is that to make a program part of America rather than just the Democrat agenda you needed the opposition, or at least a part of the opposition, to sign off on the bill. You needed the appearance of consensus.

When you pass transformative bills like Obamacare without a single Republican vote and you push your agenda with unilateral executive or regulatory actions, and you use your cultural hegemony to pass your agenda on abortion or gay marriage through the aristocratic branch of government, the US Supreme Court, you are pursuing a strategic policy of force. You are saying, whether you know it or not, that your power play is irreversible, that the peasants better shut up and tug their forelocks or else.

My theory is that all government action, particularly action that does not have the penumbra of "consensus," provokes a head of rebellion. Because government is force, because government is injustice. We certainly saw how liberals experienced government as injustice when the Bush administration was in power. It inspired them to rise up and elect the First Black President and the most Democratic Congress since 1964.

But now we have the most Republican Congress since 1928. Could that be because the Obama administration made no effort to cobble together bipartisan "consensus" for its marquee legislation? Could that be because the Obama administration weaponized the IRS against the Tea Party groups?

We conservatives have made much of the cultural Marxist strategy of the Frankfurt School, featuring Antonio Gramsci's march through the institutions and Herbert Marcuse's intolerant tolerance. We like to characterize them as unstoppable and inevitable. But the problem with them is that they are pure power plays. They can only work in the long term if the people just lie down and surrender in the Hegelian Master/Slave Fight to the Death. In the long term, though, it is also possible that the people will rise up against the Masters and rebel, or through the knowledge they have acquired through their Work demand that the Masters accord them recognition.

That is why I say that the 2016 election is a test. It is a test to see whether Donald Trump's social media savvy can upend thirty years of the cultural hegemony inspired by Marcuse. Up to now, if you disagreed with liberals on anything you were branded a racist, sexist homophobe. If you disagree with gays you are a hater. If you worry about immigration, you are a xenophobe. But Trump has turned the tables on the liberals, as no conservative has been able to do since Ronald Reagan. As Newt Gingrich keeps saying: he has never seen anything like it.

Because the basic question is: will the March Through the Institutions and Political Correctness fundamentally transform our western society, or will the people rise up and destroy it?

I was out and about yesterday in Seattle as my daughter and husband and grandchildren were in town. I looked around at all the ordinary white people and thought: did all these ordinary people deserve this abuse from their educated and evolved betters?

I don't think so. But I don't know if those ordinary people will stand up rebel against their Masters and Make America Great Again.

But that's why we have elections.

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?