What to do if a LIberal Talks Climate Change in the Hot Spring

I know I shouldn’t care when a liberal art historian from San Luis Obispo says that he’s known about climate change since 1998.

Because anything you say is just going to spoil the relaxed atmosphere around the steaming pool fed by sulphurous hot water at Sol Duc Hot Springs here in the Olympic National Park in western Washington.

What are you going to do? Everywhere you run into them the privileged members of the ruling class are going to do their cultural imperialism bit with a little microaggression to make you feel uncomfortable and to remind you who has the whip hand in America. And no safe spaces in sight.

And really, what good would it do to remind your friendly local art historian that according to settled science we are presently in an Ice Age. That’s why they call the current climate an “interglacial.” Or that you worked as an environmental engineer for 30 years. Or that you’ve created and worked with computer models man and boy, and you’ve always made sure that the computer model doesn’t make you do something stupid.

Because, after all, you can always tell a liberal, but you can’t tell him anything.

What about some other ripostes?

To the “97% of scientists agree” we could say that 97% of scientists like a big budget. The biggest budget they ever got was for making a bomb, and they only felt regret after they had spent the money and they knew that it worked.

To “climate deniers” we could ask if liberals really regard disagreement on science into the scientific equivalent of anti-semitism.

To the idea that the climate might spin out of control, we could argue that if so it would have done so billions of years ago when carbon dioxide was a much bigger proportion of the atmosphere.

When it’s all about saving the planet, we could say that we thought that salvation was a religious concept.

But all this is beside the point. Right now if you tell a liberal what you think they are going to be outraged, because the whole point about being a liberal is to be in the in-crowd. The truth is that we non-liberals are all Aunt Ems. For twenty years we have wanted to tell liberals what we think of them but because we are decent people we can’t.

And anyway, first we change the culture, then we stop the racist, sexist, homophobe insults. And then we win the politics. Anything else is just a meaningless culture of complaint.

Three Peoples: What If Most People Want to be Peasants?

In my Three Peoples theory, there is a basic assumption. In today's world, people start out as People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants. But each in their own way, people are not content with the life of the subordinate; they struggle upwards and become People of the Responsible Self, and start to contribute to society and the world as responsible individuals, not as subordinate peasants and working stiffs.

But what if this is wrong? What if people are perfectly content to sit on their behinds, doing what they are ordered to do and not a jot more, forever complaining about "them," yet forever waiting for "them" to solve their problems rather than solving them themselves?

That is what has crashed in upon me with the Trump phenomenon. Donald Trump is promising to Make America Great Again. Not the American People. Not business owners and entrepreneurs. Not responsible individuals each doing his or her share. And the white working class, dying of despair in the ruins of the old manufacturing economy, has rallied to his promise of good jobs at good wages.

Maybe this is the last hurrah of the white working class before it succumbs to the verdict of history, which is always oblivion. Because everything is born to die, humans, jobs, cities, towns, nations, civilizations, religions. Even gods die, Nicholas Wade has written, when people stop believing in them.

On this view, the People of the Responsible Self are a subculture, squeezed in between the vast rabble of subordinate workers and peasants. The real cultural and political action is the Patron/Client relationship between the People of the Creative Self -- who used to be warrior landowners but are now the ruling class of the educated elite and the Social Justice Warriors -- and the People of the Subordinate Self, the foot soldiers in the social justice army. The first provide the ideas and the leadership; the last provide the votes and the street muscle. The first enjoy the money, power, and the love of beautiful women that come with primacy; the second get a modest competence, and such free stuff as the social justice lords distribute to their loyal servitors.

Is that all there is? I would it were not so.

For instance, the whole point of the modern world and modern capitalism is that people go out and innovate; they create new products and services for their fellow men, acting without permission from the lords, and create the Great Enrichment. Where would we be without these creative, responsible souls that have brought us so much. And yet these inventors and business creators have been roundly excoriated as robber barons and exploiters.

And yet, as Eric Hoffer writes, there are two options in the world. Either people work to the command of a master, or they are responsible for figuring out what to do and doing it. Economics and the theory of the market and the experience of socialist states tell us that the boss-driven economy cannot work. Because, as Ludwig von Mises wrote, the socialist command economy cannot compute prices.

And yet, as Hegel says, in the Patron/Client or Master/Slave relationship, despite appearances, it is the Client or Slave that learns through his work how to master the world and make it serve his needs. The Master sits around, enjoying the perks of money, power, and the love of beautiful women while the Slave acutally learns how the world works.

And yet, as the market participant learns, the way of the world is to find something that other people want and give it to them, in products and services.

And yet, despite the rhetoric of the liberal Patrons that teaches everyone to kow-tow to their Masters or be flayed alive as racists, sexists, and homophobes, in fact almost everyone pitches in with a good grace, and with a live-and-let-live attitude, and almost everyone contributes willingly to the common good, and accepts with a good grace the verdict of the market.

In other words, despite the temptations of subordinate helplessness, people do not wait around for the boss to call the big shots, as bosses like to do. They get on with things and make decisions on their own without waiting for the big guy to tell them what to do. This has been the theme of the modern era both in the civil economy of the industrial revolution and latterly in the just-in-time culture developed by the Japanese. It is also the theme of military doctrine, because the lethal battlefield inaugurated with rifled guns has forced soldiers into hiding where they cannot easily be ordered around by officers and NCOs. Instead, soldiers must be resourceful and self-motivated; otherwise the army cannot function.

There is in this a profound contradiction, and expression of negativity, of two principles wrestling with each other. And that, according to Hegel, is how the world works

Indeed, if all the world's problem were resolved tomorrow it would be the end of life as we know it. The whole point of life is that we do not know the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

And we never will.

So it may be that, however much we humans seem to be tempted by the Patron/Client relationship, our fate is that we must, like Adam and Eve of old, leave the Garden of Eden and go forth into the world of uncertainty and risk. Because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge and can never go back to the bliss of ignorance and instinct.

Out In The Woods: America's Big Problem Is Liberals

Here I am out in the woods -- OK I am staying at Sol Duc Hot Springs Resort in the Olympic National Park -- and I don't have a clue what happened with The Debate last night.

Did The Donald raise the delicate question of the President and the Secretary of State emailing using an unsecured private server and lying about it? Did he mention how if anyone else working for the federal government had done such a thing they would be vacationing right now at Camp Fed?

Did Hillary push the line that all the Democratic operatives with bylines have been pushing: the desperate national problem of Trump Lies?

I don't have a clue, because I am out in the woods, with no cell signal and no wifi. The last hint of cell signal was about 10 miles back down the road. But what about data?

So I am going to write about the bigger question, the question that faces us whether Trump wins the election or Hillary wins the election.

It is the problem of liberal hegemony. Simply put, it is the problem that today in America if you dissent from the liberal line in thought, word, or deed, you are branded as a racist, sexist homophobe.

We conservatives have been joking about Hillary Clinton's "deplorables" remark, but we shouldn't.  What was amusing was the clumsiness of her remark. The way the pros do it is not to actually categorize half of Trump's supporters as deplorables and irredeemable. You are supposed to be much more vague, to make racism, sexim, homophobia into a vague infection of the body politic. Because Rule One in politics is that you don't insult the voters.

By the way, "irredeemable" is a religious term. It means that the people in question can't be saved by Christ the Redeemer. So what in the world is Hillary Clinton, the globalist progressive, doing using terms more appropriate for the sawdust trail? Is that her famous Methodism rearing its head?

Here's the problem. If you want to talk about racists, then the chaps you need to work on are the racist black Reverends and the well-born racist activists running Black Lives Matter. Only you wouldn't dare.

If you want to talk about sexists, then the chappettes you need to talk about are the feminists that have escalated the age-old war between the sexes into an all out Armageddon. And the problem with the feminists is not merely political; it is existential. Under the influence of the feminists and progressive politics women are having a ton less children. In fact, in most rich countries women are not having enough babies for population replacement. If you don't think that is a problem then you don't have a clue. But you better not mention this.

If you want to talk about bigots, then you need to talk about the virulent bigotry coming from the LGBT chaps. Look, the bushes may be full of homophobes, but they aren't organized politically. Gays and lesbians are organized, and they are ready to pounce on anyone that dissents from their LGBT orthodoxy.

As I have written in my latest AT piece, there is a reason that the globalist progressives do their racist, sexist, homophobic accusation thing. To make their globalist governance thing work they need to devalue and destroy the culture and the politics of the nation state. They need to destroy the loyalty that people have for the flag, and for the idea that America is the best country in the world and the American people are the best people in the world. That is why liberals insist on the right of a black football player to disrespect the national anthem but run a white baseball player out of town for tweets opposing the black Charlotte Rioters. That is why they are out accusing everyone of Islamophobia, to the extent that people are afraid to report suspicious Muslim terrorist behavior. That is why people don't have the guts to tell black racists to take it where the sun don't shine. The globalist-progressives need to divide America in order to conquer it.

Un bel di, one fine day, a politician is going to crack the code on this, and the corrupt and vicious globalist-progressive cabal will collapse like a house of cards.

But meanwhile, we are living under the cruel and unjust rule of the Hillary Clintons and the Barack Obamas, and the country is splitting apart.

What we need, of course, is a nice little war to unify us. Bismarck did it, first with a nice little war against Denmark(!), then a war against Austria-Hungary, then a war against the French. All very clean and surgical. At the end of it all, he had unified the many German states into one German nation. Here at home in World War II, FDR unified all the Irish and the Italians and the Jews, the immigrant wave of 1900, into a single American nation. It took 20 years, and the rising generation of the Sixties, to start the process of splitting us all apart.

Now we need someone to unify blacks and Hispanics into the single American nation, in the teeth of opposition from our globalist-progressive ruling class.

If you haven't figured it out, I will explain what is going to happen. Sooner or later, our leaders will have to unify us to fight a war against global Islam. What will happen is that, just like with the German-Americans in World War I, Muslim-Americans will go all quiet. Because, apart from a few crazies, they want what America provides; otherwise they wouldn't have come here.

In One of Ours about World War I, the incandescent writer Willa Cather creates an incident, in passing, with a couple of Germans out in the heartland that got a bit shirty during World War I, because they still had a loyalty to Germany. The local authorities brought these doughty German farmers up in court, and the judge was kind to them. He said to the German Americans: cut it out, or we will have to throw the book at you. And that was the end of that. I dare say the same thing would work with America's Muslims.

America's real problem is not racist, sexist homophobe conservatives; it is not racist blacks, or sexist femininsts, or bigoted LGBTs. And it is certainly not the poor bloody deplorable white working class.

America's Big Problem is liberals.

The Downside of Government Programs

I hadn't heard of Edward Conard before, but apparently he worked with Mitt Romney at Bain Capital. So he should know a thing or two, being as how Bain was what you might call a corporate repair shop. Its job seemed to be taking in beat-up corporate jalopies and doing a complete makeover, before sending them back on the road, all fixed up and slicked up.

Conard's first book was Unintended Consequences, "which set the record straight about the financial crisis of 2008 and explained why U.S. growth was accelerating relative to other high-wage economies." In other words, it wasn't the banks' fault.

Now in The Upside of Inequality: How Good Intentions Undermine the Middle Class Conard shows how how pretty well all the standard nostrums won't work to get the economic moving again.

Yes, he says, inequality has been increasing, but only at the very top end. And how are the 0.0001 percent getting rich? We all know the reason. It is chaps like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates coming up with long-shot technology startups that can grow into $500 billion corporations with very little additional capital.

The thing to understand about today's knowledge-based economy, compared to the old manufacturing economy of old is that it doesn't take much to scale up to a global scale. In the old economy a Rockefeller or a Ford had to borrow money and/or sell shares to scale up; a Steve Jobs or a Mark Zuckerberg doesn't. He gets to keep all the value for himself and his startup buddies and early VC investors.

Aside: Someone once told me that they had encountered Bill Gates in a store just after Microsoft had gone public. He asked Bill why he did it. Gates answered: to share the company with the employees.

But who cares about the inequality? Zuckerberg isn't hurting anyone except when he is buying the houses close to his place in Palo Alto. He is making money just like an entertainment star does, because people all over the world love his product.

The basic proposition in the modern economy, according to Conard, is this. To succeed in the modern economy you need two things, "properly trained talent" and a capacity for risk-taking.

And the reason that the US has been growing faster that our high-wage pals in Europe is that we have been doing the knowledge economy thing better than they.

That doesn't necessarily mean "education." Most people going to college are majoring in things that have nothing to do with the new economy. And according to Conard, pretty well all the usual suspects to fix education aren't going to make a difference. Most useful training takes place on the job.

And most people don't want to put their savings at risk. That is why we have banks. Banks take risk-averse savings and lend them to people that are taking a risk. Of course, lending is supposed to be properly collateralized and credit-worthy. But sometimes you get a Black Swan and the banks go south.

So how do you mobilize risk-averse savings? You have to balance it with equity. That just means that the startup guys need equity capital to provide a cushion against failure for the risk-averse folks. The more equity out there the more risk-taking propositions the economy can address.

Here is where Conard introduces something I didn't know. Apparently one of the provisions of Dodd-Frank is to make it harder for the Fed to act as lender of last resort.

Rather than strengthening the Fed's ability to act more effectively as a lender of last resort in a bank run, policy makers have done the opposite. They have made banks more responsible for bank runs by intentionally weakening the Fed's ability to act in a panic. Banks pulled back by raising credit standards.

Hello! The "Intellectual Yet Idiot" class provoked the Crash of 2008 because the Fed felt it could not rescue Lehman Brothers under current law. So the Fed is still stupid like it was in the 1929-33 crash. The whole point of the Fed is to be a lender of last resort that lends whatever it takes to keep the financial system afloat, as per Lombard Street by Walter Bagehot. And then worry about the fallout later. Period.

In the event, not just the Fed but the US government ended up guaranteeing just about everything in the financial system, as my TARP bailout page shows.

The point about the banking system is that is really is doing a conjuring trick. It is taking risk-averse savings and making it into semi-risk capital. Of course that proposition goes south every now and again.

But the big message of The Upside of Inequality is that there really is not much that government can do about inequality or indeed anything else. Yes, we should help the poor, but we should not expect to get much result. We should fund education, but it is not going to have much result.

What we could do, in a chapter called "Real Solutions," is this:

• Encourage "ultra high-skilled immigration." Because that would help the "properly trained talent" problem. 
• Lower the marginal corporate tax rate, to attract employers back to the US. 
• Demand balanced trade. Not to save manufacturing jobs but because when we run a trade deficit we import a lot of risk-averse capital that gets invested in government bonds. Not good. We need more risk capital. 
• Increase bank guarantees, not reduce them. 
• Don't enact a middle-class tax cut. That would slow growth.

Of course, after reading a 250-page policy book I rather wonder about the premise of policy analysis books. They are always recommending some sort of pushme-pullyou hydraulic replumbing of government to get the right pressure to force growth -- or equality or justice -- out of a sputtering jalopy.

But what do people really want? The working class of 200 years ago was walking from starvation to wage jobs in the city. The immigrants from Mexico have been doing the same.

But once everyone has got to the city and has got a half-decent job, what then? Most people just want to sit back and live a modest life and blame "them" if and when things go wrong. They don't care about "growth" except when their part of the world is declining, and the kids have to move away to get a job. But they do want that free stuff the politicians keep offering.

Really, nobody has thought about what comes next. What you might call the Downside of Government Programs and free stuff.

OK. We know what comes next. The whole big-government edifice crumbles to dust because its free-stuff concept has completely wrecked the economy and the culture.

But after that. What do we do then?

Come on geniuses. Give it your best.

Reticent Voter? I Don't Think So

The guardian of the conventional wisdom, Peggy Noonan, says that 2016 is "The Year of the Reticent Voter."

Not after this CBS News item about rust-belt Democrats leaving the sinking ship.

And not after yesterday. I was in line at the supermarket and a 50-ish white guy started rambling pro-Trump asides about Trump and Clinton. In the heart of Washington State's 7th Congressional District, one of the most Democratic districts in Congress! With women and minorities present!

Imagine someone daring to mention the name of Trump in the middle of Liberalville! Where the special snowflakes and the SJWs roam! The noive!

After leaving the store I realized that I should have sat him down, bought him a cup of coffee, and de-briefed him for the benefit of my readers.

No. I don't think this is the year of the reticent voter. I think this is the year that the Republican Party truly becomes the party of Middle America.

They used to talk about "country-club Republicans," and I suppose the insult had a grain of truth in it. Certainly, the GOP was heavily influenced by Buckley's National Review, by free-enterprise advocates, and latterly by the Religious Right.

And that meant that the "Reagan Democrats" could never really belong to the GOP, because, as we are seeing this year, the white working class wants the government to take care of it. It wants a degree of Patron/Client relationship, and if the old GOP stood for anything it was that it stood against Patron/Client politics.

(If you want an unsettling comparison of Patron/Client with Master/Slave and Lord/Serf, you could read this piece that a lefty calls a defense of slavery.)

But the truth is that in a country where the Patron/Client government programs of Social Security, Medicare, and government education are sacrosanct, then the championing of a government of personal responsibility is a dead letter.

That is what Donald Trump has demonstrated. And that is why the NeverTrumpers are so annoyed.

I've been watching recent Trump speeches, such as this one in Chester Township, PA, and can appreciate what he is doing. He is saying that when he is president he will care for everyone. He riffs off the Charlotte Riots by advocating for the decent folks that have to live in the riot-torn cities, trying to build a life of work and raising and educating children. Think of them, he says.

This line was startling to me, because the default conventional wisdom of the past decade has been to care about minorities and women -- as minorities and women -- and completely leaving out the ordinary non-minority-and-women people that are also struggling in these times. For Trump "inclusivity" means everyone, not just outreach to the previously "excluded."

You can see why the white guy at the supermarket would have been touched by this. Democrats haven't cared about people like him since before Archie Bunker was dispatched to Outer Slobbovia as a racist sexist bigot. But Republicans haven't cared either. They have appealed to people that obeyed the law, went to work, and followed the rules and didn't expect nuttin' from government. But people like my white guy want the government to care about people like him.

Well, Donald Trump has changed that, and he has changed the Republican Party.

It means, in the future, that the Republican Party won't be trying to do serious reform of the welfare state. Not until it is well and truly broken and the people demand that the government "do something" about it.

That's a pity, because when the welfare state breaks, it will be women and minorities -- and the white working class -- hardest hit. As usual.

Charlotte Riots: But the MSM Calls Them "Protesters"

Let's start by telling it like it is. The last two nights were "The Charlotte Riots." Yet well into last night, September 21, the mainstream media were talking about "protesters."

This is the result of our center-left ruling class allowing the rhetoric of the left to colonize our political discourse.

It is simply misleading to characterize any street action as a "peaceful protest." All street action -- in fact all political activity -- is at least a show of force. Back in the day, in the Sixties, they used to call the street actions "demos" or "demonstrations." That at least had the virtue of being semi-honest. Demonstration does actually mean "show." It just misses out the force aspect.

We know how we got from "marching" to "demonstrations" to "peaceful protests." The ordinary woman in the street doesn't like street action. She understands, at a gut level, that street action is not good for women, because young men released from restraint turn quickly to raping and pillaging. Not because they are evil, but because that is how they are wired. The great achievement of civilization, and particularly capitalism, is to tame young men from the dawn raid to work and to sports.

But the problem with a successful social and cultural revolution like capitalism is that pretty soon a Pharaoh arises that knew not Joseph. Dull minds like Obama and Clinton arise in the political arena and don't get how fragile the peace is. So the young Obama gets all edgy about "community organizing," what used to be called street agitation. And good little girl Hillary Clinton goes all goo-goo about Saul Alinsky and writes a thesis about him.

And I run into good little girl liberal friends who say that they always wanted to get into "activism." Truly, these people know not what they say.

It really is a ridiculous hypocrisy that these people, that talk about peace processes and disarmament on one side of their mouths, can advocate domestic turbulence and riots out of the other side.

But that is nothing new. We humans are famously capable of complete mental blindness. Conservatives have our own blind spots.

The problem with the whole political project of the left is its politics. Politics is division; politics is violence. You can say that you are fighting for justice all you like, but the fact is that when you implement your government program to fight inequality or the rape culture or the minimum wage you are taking money, by force, from some people and giving it to other people. It cannot be any other way. Government is force, from the moment that the insurgent rebels take up arms against the evil old regime and take the capital to the annual budget where the ruling party decides who is to get what from the taxes it enforces, to the daily show of force by policemen and the daily show of force by the national armed forces.

The whole point of modern political science prior to Marx and Co. was to limit political power to the minimum needed to keep the peace. All those Hobbeses and Lockes and Humes and Montesquieux and Tocquevilles and whatnot were trying to discover just how much politics was needed to keep the peace. The great argument of The Federalist Papers was to argue that the new Constitution and its increased powers for the central United States government were the minimum necessary for a nation state to survive in the world.

The 200 year fantasy of the left has been to ignore the lessons learned by its predecessors. The left believes in a politics that would transform the world, a one final outburst of political power after which a world of peace and justice would obtain. But this is madness. Politics is power; politics is division. Government is force; government is injustice. And ever will be.

So, in the utter failure of the Obama years we are reduced to Donald Trump, a mere real-estate developer, becoming the voice of reason, saying after the Charlotte Riots:

Well, there really has to be – you have to have law and order, at the same time you have to have a certain spirit, a certain unity. There’s no unity. You look at the level of hatred – you know the rocks being thrown and everything happening, it’s so sad to see, you know, that this is so sad to see that this is the United States of America. And it’s so sad to see. But there’s just no unity. There has to be a unity message that has to get out and it starts with leadership.

Golly. Where are all the wise men when it takes an amateur to state the obvious?

I will tell you. The problem is that a ton of people in the liberal bubble do not understand that it is the president's job at all times to symbolize the unity of the American people, and to speak always against divisive voices. Because the unity of the nation is in fact a fragile thing; humans are always half a step from starting a quarrel, especially with their nearest and dearest. Obama is a fool; he thinks he can play one group off against another, divide and conquer. Maybe so, but you need to do it with the talent and the flair of a Bismarck or a Bill Clinton; otherwise, don't even start.

Our national elections are civil war by other means. The point of an election and its votes are to symbolize a fight over who gets to rule; we say that the candidate with the most votes wins. The election contest is a sublimation of an actual fight into a sham fight, and we declare the victor the candidate with the most votes rather than the winner of a bloody battle for the keys to the kingdom.

But after the election, the victor and the vanquished must get up and say that the election wars are all over, that we are not warring Democrats and Republicans, but Americans. And so each candidate congratulates the other candidate for a well-fought campaign, and they tell their supporters to stand down and resume normal life as Americans that all salute the same flag and the national anthem.

It shouldn't take a Donald Trump to remind us of that. And it shouldn't take riots to remind us that the first duty of every citizen is to keep the peace.

Everything the Left Believes is Wrong

I was thinking deep thoughts in the early morning today. Or rather, deep thoughts were suggesting themselves to me, in the sense that Puccini meant when he said that the music of Madama Butterfly "was dictated to me by God."

What came to me in the morning was this: Everything that the left advocates is poison for its clients.

The Working Class. The left invited the working class to rise up against the employers that had drawn starving peasants into the cities to jobs that, in the fullness of time, brought them to a decent competence. It steered the working class away from working with capitalism to fighting against it; it encouraged the working class in tribalism and a patron/client culture rather than to help the working class learn the ways of the responsibility culture of the bourgeoisie.

Blacks and Minorities. Let us just look at the latest outrage, the campaign against policing. The fact is that the police in inner cities represent the official government fighting against the unofficial government of the gangs. It is bound to be a war, and it has been ever since the Brits created the Metropolitan Police in London in 1829. Blacks and minorities cannot get ahead into the middle class until the gang culture is defeated, and peace is declared in the inner cities.

Women. The sexual revolution, abortion and divorce on demand, and the forced march of women into careers are all profoundly anti-woman. No woman that has been spared the full-on ideological training of the left likes a sexual free-for-all, or killing babies, or breaking up marriages, or forsaking her children for paid work. Yes, but what do women want? I hope that women get a chance to find out.

Gays. I get it. I get that sexual creativity kinda goes with the German cult of the creative, and my whole notion of the People of the Creative Self. The thing to remember is that most efforts at creativity fail: most business startups fail; most artists never have a career; most writers are forgettable; most scientists never produce anything original. Many are called but few are chosen. In other words, don't start out on a creative life unless you can handle rejection and failure. For liberals to pretend that LGBT is natural and physical is to lead millions of young people into the wilderness.

Force. Government is force, and the recipients of government action experience it as injustice. Now the two areas in which force is inevitable and necessary are defense: against enemies foreign and domestic. But liberals stigmatize national defense as imperialism, and policing as oppression. But it is perfectly OK to reduce the entire economy to rigid administrative systems directed by government force. Everyone must be driven into a single government pension plan; everyone must be corralled in a single government health plan; every child must be sent to a government school. Everyone must work according to centralized work-place rules set up by liberals. So liberals have the thing completely upside-down. They want to use force where it is optional, and they stigmatize force where it is essential.

Liberals. Yes, liberals are not just leading other people into the wilderness, but themselves as well. First of all there is the idea that they, liberals, should govern the rest of us because of their education and expertise. Then there is the conceit that liberals should be given lifetime sinecures as scholars and professors. Then there is the conceit that liberals should all be "activists" advocating political solutions to all problems. All this is a really bad idea, because liberals get the money for all this by taxing productive citizens so liberals can hang out enjoying comfortable sinecures that empower them to order the rest of us around. It will not end well, for us or for liberals.

I suppose that the unimaginable revolution we call capitalism and industrialism that has birthed the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years was bound to throw up a reactionary movement of resistance, and nostalgia for the old days of patrons and clients, slavery and serfdom (see Moldbug for heretical thoughts on this). I just wish it hadn't been so successful.

Because there is an awful lot of stuff that will have to be undone in the coming years. And unfortunately, nothing gets "undone" without a lot of misery and bloodshed.