Arabs, Power, and Charles Koch

An acquaintance told me a story about his college days in the 1970s in the UK. He opted to live in a student dorm for foreign students. The idea was that one Brit student should live with the foreign students to interpret British culture to the foreigners.

But he found that mostly he was trying to explain the foreign students to each other. The foreigners were just as confused about other foreigners as they were about the Brits!

But one group of students was different. The Arabs. The only thing that Arab students understood was power, power and possession.

That was back in the 1970s so I am sure that things are different now.

OK. Let us segue to a video featuring Charles Koch, he of the Koch Brothers, and Mike Rowe of "Dirty Jobs," who makes a living championing the "skill trades." Pull quote from Koch:

People who lead happy, fulfilling lives are ones that develop their abilities and figure out how they can best contribute … and they’re rewarded for it and respected for it.

Of course this is the basic contract of the exchange economy. Find something to do that other people will pay for, and do it. It is based on true altruism, thinking about the other and their needs before thinking about your own and setting forth your non-negotiable demands.

The other philosophy, the power philosophy, is based on the idea that you compel your welfare out of the sweat and the work of others. By the dawn raid on the neighboring village. By defeating the neighboring country and imposing an bone-chilling indemnity on it.

The great lesson of the last 200 years, the Great Enrichment, is that the way to human prosperity is the way of surrendering to the market, and doing what the market -- which is nothing but the aggregate expressed needs of other people -- demands with its price system.

Oh and one other thing. Innovation. The great thing about the last 200 years is that numberless nobodies had an idea for a product or a service that nobody else had thought of, and they went out and did it. When this idea was a true innovation, in technology or in organization, the innovator very often built a huge business making huge profits, while the business lowered prices of oil by 90 percent or steel by 67 percent.

The big thing about this age of innovation was that the powers that be did not, or could not, prevent it. That's why Charles Koch in the video talks about "permissionless innovation." You shouldn't need to ask someone's permission to try something new. You shouldn't have to get credentialed to do hair-braiding. Or even inventing a new pharmaceutical drug.

The big thing about all this is the retreat from power. The basic assumption is that humans can work together and do things for each other without the overweening threat of force. This, according to my acquaintance, is something that the Arabs in the 1970s did not understand.

And, of course, it is something that our liberal friends do not understand. They think that the economy must be dominated by a central administrative authority of credentialed experts, and that these powerful experts will lay down the parameters of human cooperation in the economy.

I wonder what it would take for our liberal friends to abandon their faith in power and surrender to the altruistic wisdom of the market.

Yes, But How Bad Is It?

Yesterday the jauntily optimistic Rush Limbaugh had a field day with a piece in The Claremont Review of Books on the 2016 election as "The Flight 93 Election." The piece argued that, if conservatives are right about our issues, then conservatism -- its gradualism, its respect for the rules -- must be wrong. It's time to say "let's roll," and accept that we have to crash the airplane, even if we die in the process.

We are getting to the point, writes the anonymous author, where the left doesn't think it needs us any more.

Among the many things the “Right” still doesn’t understand is that the Left has concluded that this particular show need no longer go on. They don’t think they need a foil anymore and would rather dispense with the whole bother of staging these phony contests in which each side ostensibly has a shot.

 Actually, I think it is better to compare this time with the Soviet Great Purge of 1936-38, and I just happen to be reading a book about it, Child of the Revolution by Wolfgang Leonhard. Leonard was a red-diaper baby whose lefty mother took him to the Soviet Union in the mid 1930s when Germany became too hot for her after Hitler came to power.

To illustrate my point, let us compare two texts. The first is from Portuguese-born SF writer Sarah Hoyt. She is writing about an American instructor at her Portuguese university giving a lecture in American literature.

Until in the middle of a lecture he said something like “When any writer sets out to do x, he–” And stopped, growing pale, and started apologizing profusely.

Apparently looking on that sea of female faces, he thought he was about to be crucified. When we got it through his head that we were not offended, he said “Oh, wow. American women would be. I’d have to say he or she.”

OK. Now let's switch to Leonhard in a class in Moscow in 1937. The teacher was reading "a passage out of a book by the anti-fascist author Georg Born." But a whisper ran around the class and then a kid stood up.

"Comrade teacher, my father told me that Georg Born was arrested a few days ago as an enemy of the people."

Our teacher went pale as ashes.

Now, my theory is that a revolution transitions into its Reign of Terror phase when it is clear that the millennium is not here, and ain't gonna be any time soon. That is when the party leader needs to start dealing with the "enemies of the people" before they start up a head of rebellion.

And really, why be surprised that liberals are amping up the terror? Things aren't going too well for them right now. Their high-handed assumption that the economy would bounce back with a quick kick in the stimulus has proved wrong, and so the introduction of Obamacare created double-trouble by weighing down the already deflating economy with the lead weight of regulation.

And the point is that, like lefties everywhere since the French Revolution, their religion is politics; they think that the way to solve the problems of the world is through politics. That means, to deploy my catch-phrases, they always think that a bit of government force is needed, a bit of political divisiveness is needed, and a few more of the bad people need to be crushed by government injustice.

The point is that, as we have seen with every lefty regime since the French Revolution, this is not going to end well. As in revolutionary France, as in fascist Germany, as in the Soviet Union, as in Castro's Cuba, as in Pol Pot's Cambodia, as in prostrate Venezuela.

Let us give Wolfgang Leonard another word. He is talking about the four types of members in the Komsomol, the Soviet youth movement, in the 1930s.

There were first the enthusiasts--young people bursting with activity and initiative[.]

[There were also members, like Leonhard, who] joined the organization from political conviction and found themselves principally attracted by questions of the organisation's programme and political discussions.

[There were "careerists,"] principally among the sons and daughters of officials of the Party, state, and economic organisations.

[Then there were young people who] had joined it because that was what everybody else did... because it was the thing to do. I found this type mostly among the girls in the Komsomol[.]

Nothing changes, does it.

Personally, I think that the Obama PC push has been a strategic error for the liberals. The future outlined in The Emerging Democratic Majority by Judis and Teixeira was that the new majority of women, minorities, the educated, and young people would rule for the next thirty years.

And so the new majority might have done if Obama & Co. hadn't pressed the pedal to the metal, and inspired the Republican base to rebel against leaders that weren't leading, and provoked the dying-of-despair white working class to get angry and follow the populist Trump.

Now the whole conservative movement is in ruins and nobody knows what comes next. Or, if you use Mencius Moldbug's formulation, the good old days of the Cathedral and the Inner Party ruling the nation and the folks in the Outer Party touching their forelocks are over.

Now of course, it's possible that the bishops of the Cathedral may turn into Jacobin monsters, mobilize their Black Lives Matter shock troops and wipe white middle-class Americans off the map.

Or not.

What is certain is that the politics of the last 30 years, since 1988 and the end of the Reagan era, is over. Something else is going to take its place.

And one thing more. However crazed the crazies may be, there is a moderating factor. It is that for a modern ruling class to rule successfully it must make capitalism work. The reason that 2016 is the end of an era is that the economy has not been doing well, and the people are restless.

Get the economy right, and all things are possible.

But that is a very hard lesson for religious enthusiasts, particularly our modern secular religious enthusiasts, to learn. Because, after all, when the question is saving souls, or saving the planet, who cares about stupid things like profit and loss and economic growth?

Reality Check on "Tax the Rich"

Hillary Clinton is proposing a ton of new federal spending, including free college. So where is she going to find the money? Here's how she explained it recently in Tampa:

We are going to the top one, ten percent, the millionaires, the billionaires, they are the ones that are going to have to start paying.

What's that? To start paying? Where have you been all this time Mrs. Clinton? Don't you ever stop by usgovernmentrevenue.com to check up on the facts? If you did you would find out that the top 1 percent already pay about 40% of the federal income tax.

And do you notice something else about the chart on "Income Tax and the Top One Percent?" It shows that the share paid by the rich has been going up. Except when we get big hunking recessions. Then the income tax share paid by the 1% goes down, as their share of income goes down.

But hey, what about the rest of the rich, the top ten percent? What about them?

OK, let's to to the IRS data on income tax collections, because that gives us income tax return data on the top 1%, top 10%, top 20%, and top 50%. Here's a table showing the latest tax return data, for 2013.

	Income share	Income Tax share
Top 1%	19.0%	37.8%
Top 10%	45.9%	69.8%
Top 20%	61.9%	82.1%
Top 50%	88.5%	97.2%

Hello, Hillary Clinton? You say it's time for the rich to start paying? When the fabled One Percent is already paying 38 percent of all individual federal income tax receipts? When the top 50 Percent is paying 97.2% of income tax receipts? Which planet are you on, Madam Secretary?

Now stop me if I've got this wrong, but I thought that the central conceit of our ruling class that they were the educated ones; they were the informed ones. They knew the facts, and if they didn't they could get an expert to brief them. And I thought that the hit on Donald Trump was that he was a lying populist appealing to "hate" and "xenophobia." I thought that a politician that said Yeah! We're gonna make the rich pay! was a populist thug. Maybe even a demagogue. Maybe even a fascist demagogue.

Now, of course, I suppose there is a principled argument that the top 50% should really pay all of their income in tax, and that having them pay nearly all the income tax receipts doesn't really begin to provide the government with enough resources to meet human needs. Because, yeah! the rich can afford it.

Now Hillary Clinton, according to reports, wants to spend more money "for college education, child care, mental health, drug addiction, green energy, solar panels, and national infrastructure."

Really. Aren't we already spending a ton of money on all this stuff? And really, will spending more on all this stuff really make a difference? Isn't the problem with with government spending on colleges that it has alreadyramped up the cost of college so that students can't afford to go to college without loans? Child care? Isn't the problem that child care is already regulated out the wazoo? Aren't we already spending a crony capitalist's ransom on green energy and solar panels?

As I said. The conceit of our ruling class is that they are the smart guys.

Here is something even smarter. The Great Enrichment of the last 200 years came not from government programs and educated experts and politicians, but from nobodies with an idea that turned into a huge business that provided new products for the masses at low prices.

And I'd say we need to keep taxes low so that these inventive nobodies will keep doing more of it.

The Meaning of Phyllis Schlafly

Was Phyllis Schafly, who died over the Labor Day weekend at the age of 92, a brilliant conservative mastermind, as Ann Coulter suggests? Or was she a privileged wife of a wealthy lawyer, as the New York Times obituary suggests?

I didn't become aware of her until her activism to stop the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, and of course at the time, having been carefully taught as all middle-class children are, I thought she was bat-shit crazy.

And now? Today I reason backwards from the fact that women in first-world countries aren't having enough babies to achieve population replacement. I'd say that is a real problem. It is the first problem. If women aren't having enough babies then you are in a world of hurt.

Today I reason that all the world's problems stem from the mechanical Newtonian model of reality that imagines all the things in the world as billiard balls. It works, as far as it goes, in a lot of things having to do with mechanics: building bridges and stuff.

But the world has moved on. Today our fundamental understanding of life, the universe, and everything is the quantum mechanical state function. Everything is a cloud of uncertainty until something happens. And even then you can't be too certain about anything until a lot of things happen.

Notice that although we like to think of markets using mechanical and hydraulic metaphors like the push and pull of supply and demand, it is also possible to think of them in a quantum mechanical way. There is no such thing as a price until an actual exchange transaction takes place. And there is no such thing as a market until a bunch of transactions take place. So really, prices and markets are the most modern and sophisticated things around.

Today, physicists say that the basic principle of life, the universe, and everything is asymmetry.

Yet our culture and our politics is driven by the totalitarian mechanical mindset and the rage for symmetry and sameness. Everything must be determined by government force. Everything must be equal. Everyone must be shamed into the correct opinion.

I don't know what Phyllis Schafly knew or what she thought. She was such a controversial character that everything written about her had the taint of partisan apology.

But I think that, when the modern era -- with its big government, its totalitarian politics, and its heaven-on-earth theology -- grinds into dust, the new thing that replaces it will look a lot more like Schafly's notion than the Newtonian mechanical force machine of liberal/progressive/cultural Marxism and the top-down rule of the experts.

Here's My Detroit Speech

Last Saturday Donald Trump committed lèse majesté and addressed an African American church in bombed out Detroit. He was very nice to the church members, and I would be too, if I had an opportunity to speak. Here's what I would have said.

Thank you for inviting me to speak to you. Because I am not a politician I am not going to tell you what you want to hear. I am going to tell it like it is, in the immortal words of Howard Cosell. I hope you will not be too angry with me.

In the last few weeks, Donald Trump has been reminding us that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, and that the KKK was a Democratic militia group, and Jim Crow was Democratic Party policy.

But it is also true that the Republican Party, after freeing the slaves, walked away from the freedmen, and left them to the tender mercies of the KKK and Jim Crow. Why was that? Well, it was because by the election of 1876 the Republican Party had other fish to fry, and spending blood and treasure on protecting African Americans in the South wasn't on the menu.

Still, African Americans voted for Republicans up until the Great Depression and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. What else were they to do? Meanwhile Republicans in the North were acting to curb the Great Migration with laws like the Davis-Bacon Act (Davis and Bacon were both Republicans) to prevent black laborers from the South from undercutting the wages of unionized whites in the North.

Northern Democrats and Republicans participated in the civil-rights legislation of the 1960s, even though Barry Goldwater voted against, on the libertarian grounds that he didn't want the government getting involved in private transactions.

Nevertheless, northern liberal Democrats took the credit for passing the civil rights laws and they deserve the credit. But let no one doubt that the great genius of the civil rights movement was Martin Luther King and his policy of non-violent protest adapted from Mohandas Gandhi in India.

Why then have not African Americans taken their place as full participants in the American Dream?

It is because, just as Republicans in the 1870s abandoned African Americans to the KKK and Jim Crow, the Democrats in the years after the 1960s abandoned African Americans in the inner cities to drugs and gangs. And eight years of America's First Black President hasn't made a difference. Black inner cities are still victimized by drugs, by crime, by joblessness, by lousy education, and by gangs.

Maybe it is time for a change.

But what? Can Donald Trump make a difference, with his promise to bring back manufacturing jobs and bring school choice to inner cities? Probably not. Would Black Lives Matter and its program of targeting police abuse make a difference? Probably not.

What will make a difference? I'd say that the only thing that can make a difference for African Americans is African Americans.

I'd say that the difference will come from African Americans deciding that they don't care about racism, don't care about police brutality, don't care about institutional racism. Because America lives on people deciding to go out and get a job and take care of their family, and do the best they can. African Americans have tried everything else. Maybe it is time to just go out and look after their own.

Because the thing about politicians is that they don't care about you, they only care about your vote. And the same goes for activists. They don't care about you, they only care about how many people they can get into the streets.

If you sign up with the politicians it is not different that signing up for the military. At some point you will cease to be useful to the generals, and they will cast you aside.

I can understand how African Americans might feel about things. As a conservative, this last year has seen the burial of all my hopes; the conservatism I believed in has been smashed to pieces.

So what do I do? Well, I keep on living, a day at a time, doing what I can in my small personal world.

I dare say the same applies to African Americans, after fifty years down the toilet. You go out, and work, and look after your family. Because nothing else matters.

The Spectre of White Identity Politics

When the young rich kids Karl Marx (son of the best lawyer in Trier) and Friedrich Engels (son of the textile firm of Ermen & Engels) wrote their Communist Manifesto they began:

A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power?

And so on.

But are we not now facing the spectre of white identity politics? The reason is not hard to find. Back in 1930, according to La Wik, the US was 89.8 percent white. As late as 1970, it was 87.5 percent white. But the 2010 census put whites at 72.4 percent.

Of course, this change is mainly a result of the 1965 immigration act that opened up the gates to immigration from areas other than Europe. Not to mention the elite benign neglect of illegal immigration.

Back in the 1960s, when the US was overwhelmingly white, it seemed to be a small thing to give blacks a helping hand in the job market with Affirmative Action. And anyway, as it turned out, the folks that paid for Affirmative Action were not upper-class white tolerant liberals but working class whites.

In the decades since, of course, liberals have discovered, thanks to Frankfurt School types like Herbert Marcuse, that race and gender politics is electoral gold. If you scare up blacks enough they will vote Democrat by 90-10. If you create a racial and gender spoils system, people will vote for race and gender loot. And who cares about the racist, sexist, bigoted Archie Bunkers left behind?

The answer is, of course that when the Archie Bunkers are hurting enough, from years of de-industrialization, and embattled enough, because the Democratic Coalition of the Fringes starts outvoting them, they start to see the point of identity politics. After all, blacks do it; Hispanics do it; Jews do it; women do it; gays do it. Why not us?

This is something that our liberals friends have not really thought about, bless their hearts. They think of themselves as enlightened activists battling against the patriarchy and the white-archy, just as haut bourgeois Marx and Engels saw themselves battling against the bourgeoisie for the liberation of the working class.

Liberals do not think, cannot think, that, just as Marx and Engels proposed a politics that would rain misery upon the working class, so liberal encouragement of racism in blacks and sexism in women, mixed-gender bathrooms for transgenders, would rain misery on just the people they pretend to help.

And so the result of a half-century of race and gender politics is to create a movement of white identity among people that used to think of themselves as Americans of German, Irish, British, Italian, Jewish origin.

Yes, did you know that German-Americans are the biggest US white ethnic group, at 50 million? and then Irish at about 33 million, and British merely in the 20-something range? Who knew?

Now you know the reason for my catchphrases: Government is force, Politics is division, Government is injustice. It's easy to play politics and divide up the electorate imagining that you are smart enough to manipulate all the divided groups with your superior intelligence. But government is force, and is experienced by the people on the receiving end as injustice. The more politics divides people by race and gender and the more the victors force injustice on the losers the more that the losers get angry and start to coalesce into a rebel coalition.

It is going to be much harder to put America back together again that it was to split it apart. I don't believe in the alt-right argument that America was to be willed to the British Posterity of 1790 America. It's too late for that. The slaves are here, the Germans are here, the Irish are here, the Italians are here, the Mexicans are here, and now the Chinese and the South Asian Indians are here.

Yes, but what happens next? Really, nobody has a clue. But I think we can guess that the political parties will realign along a different axis than today. And we will still have Big Government at the end of it.

Despite Univ Chicago Move, College PC Will Get Worse

Everybody is encouraged by the statement on freedom of expression sent out to entering freshmen at the University of Chicago this fall.

Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.

But I do not think that this will make a difference. The reason is that colleges are transforming from institutions that were primarily male to places that are predominantly female. According to the Washington Post in 2014,

Federal data show that female students became the majority in 1979 and for the past decade have accounted for about 57 percent of enrollment at degree-granting institutions. 

And that says nothing about the administrative staff at universities that appears to be predominantly female.

Conservatives like to complain that the culture of trigger warnings, safe spaces, and microaggressions is all a leftist plot, yet another attempt to bury the bourgeoisie. And I am sure that it is all of that.

But I believe that the PC university is also a reflection of its femaleness.

The fact is that men are fighters; women are lovers. Men meet each other at the drinking den, and relate to each other in what I call an insult culture. The normal way of interacting with other men is to banter and verbally spar with them. An acquaintance that grew up in Worcester, Mass., implied to me that the normal man-to-man form of address back there was "yer bastard," said with the proper Boston accent.

Women relate to each other in the kaffee klatsch, where never is heard a discouraging word, except about women not present. Women have a niceness culture, even though they are as socially ruthless as men. There is no "yer bastard" between women in the kaffee klatsch.

This means that the idea of a rough-and-tumble of ideas makes complete sense to men, but not to women. To a woman safe spaces, trigger warnings, and the avoidance of controversy are just the way that things ought to be done. So it is no surprise that three women teaching a course in "Medical Humanities in the Digital Age" at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs would announce "We will not, at any time, debate the science of climate change." Of course not. Good little girls do not debate; they share.

Men go to college to get credentialed, so that they can earn good money and win a high-status woman as a mate. If university becomes a kaffee klatsch, a safe space for sharing, then it won't be much use for men.

What will replace university? I suspect we already know. It is the startup culture. I know a bright young man that dropped out of college to join a Bitcoin startup. Now he's working with his buddy as a contract software developer in a "co-working space" in New York City. Startups, with their promise of fabulous loot and the fear of catastrophic failure, appeal to the warrior mind. They do not appeal to the feminine mind, and that is why women, well represented in corporate software in the days of COBOL and mainframe IBM, were not too interested when the software startup culture started in the 1980s.

The university started out as a seminary preparing second sons for the priesthood in the established church. Then the Germans turned it into a vehicle for national greatness. Then the left turned universities into secular seminaries, turning out well-born political activists.

I wonder what comes next.