Max Weber and the End of the German Miracle

We have all been taught to believe that Germans are Nazis and anti-semites, potential Teutonic brutes every one.

So it has taken me a lifetime to build a full appreciation of the Germans. The fact is that after the Brits maxed out with David Hume and Adam Smith in the late 18th century, it was the Germans that took over and invented the modern world: not just in philosophy but in automobiles, diesels, relativity, quantum mechanics.

Hume said that we cannot prove causation, only correlation. But it was Kant that made sense out of that and proposed that even though we can't prove cause and effect we operate in the world by creating a mental model of the world in our brains, in concepts by intuition and concepts of understanding. By proposing that the world outside could be different from the world inside the brain, I think that Kant laid the foundation for the German-led physics revolution in the early 20th century. Then Fichte proposed that the entity building the mental model of the world was das Ich, the Ego, and we were off to Freud and modern psychology.

Adam Smith started economics on its modern journey, but it was mostly Germans like Karl Menger that solved the problem of the dual track of use value and exchange value in the marginal revolution of 1870 -- which Marxists have still not dealt with.

The last two bright stars in the German firmament were Georg Simmel and Max Weber, sociologists that died in 1918 and 1920 and that did their best work in the years before World War I. If they had lived... Well the world might have been very different. Or maybe, like the rest of the German intelligentsia, they would have been forced to flee to Britain and the US.

Right now I am reading a translation of Max Weber's introduction to his sociology, titled The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. It is part of the work that was unfinished at the time of Weber's death, so it tends to be fragmentary and sometimes confusing.

But Weber's work is clearly post-Marxist. He has read and understood Marx, but knows that Marx is stuck in a time-warp of pre-marginal economics. In Weber's Theory he fully understands the marginal revolution of 1870 and entertains and discusses the theory put forward by Dr. Otto Neurath about the possibility of economic calculation under socialism. There is a footnote that references Ludwig von Mises' paper of 1920, "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth" that denied the possibility of economic calculation under socialism and that developed into Mises' book Socialism.

It makes you think: what if Weber had lived and put his encyclopedic authority on elite German thought in the 1920s?

All that stuff went into the shadows in the inter-war years, and only flourished again when German refugees like Mises and Hayek got noticed in the Anglo-Saxon world after World War II. Meanwhile, the biggest contribution we got from Germany has been the identity politics of race and gender ginned up by the Frankfurt School as a substitute for the failed class politics of Marx.

Yet there is hope, and today you can read about a successful entrepreneur like Bob Luddy, CEO of CaptiveAire, talking about learning Austrian economics and unlearning Galbraith.

In recent years we have heard a lot from liberals talking about settled science and the deniers that deny it. Only, of course, climate science is a very new science and is full of uncertainties and dueling theories. It isn't settled, and the proof is that the climate models can't model the climate.

But our liberal friends are remarkably uninterested in any science that challenges their faith in top-down administration of society by a corps of unelected experts. Who would guess that the science is settled on most of this. We know that top-down government-administered programs are a nightmare. Government programs can't adapt to changing situations, and they cannot be reformed short of disaster. And they are brutally wasteful, both of human talent and national treasure. And that is because of the German ideas that socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices, and bureaucratic government cannot work because it just does not have the bandwidth to, e.g. administer the whole health-care system.

The point of knowledge, I feel, is that it offers a more efficient model for human action than raw trial-and-error. When you ignore or deny knowledge, you are insisting on doing it the hard way, in war, and famine, and revolution.

Yes, But What Do We Do About It?

Here's George McGovern´s pollster Pat Caddell speaking at Hillsdale College. Yeah, he's now almost a conservative. His February 2016 poll reported that:

• 72 percent of Americans think there is a two-track economy, where "most Americans struggle... and where the huge corporations get all the rewards." 
• 66 percent of American believe the country is in decline.
• 78 percent of Americans think the two main parties are too beholden to special interests to do meaningful change.
• 72 percent agree that the problem comes from "corruption and crony capitalism" in Washington D.C.
• 74 percent think that the biased media is part of the problem.

Well, yes. But what do we do about it? Do we smash the corporations, as bankruptcy attorney Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) wants us to do? Or do we renegotiate NAFTA and fine corporations for sending good jobs abroad, as Donald Trump wants us to do?

Or is the problem that government taxes corporations and individuals a total of $6 trillion per year? Could it be that entitlement spending has pounded the heart out of America? Could it be that $1.5 trillion a year in dysfunctional government health-care spending and $1.0 trillion a year in dysfunctional education spending are part of the problem?

Could it be that we have not got a foot out of the Garden of Eden since the dawn of history, where the politician "tempted me and I did eat?"

Let us think about what politics would naturally look like when the politicians had given us all the seed corn to eat and there were no more cheap answers, not even "smash the corporations."

The politicians would be distracting us and dividing us by tribe and by identity. They would be telling workers that the corporations were robbing them blind and giving their jobs away to China and India. They would be telling women that all men were filthy sexual harassers. They would be telling blacks that the police were out to get them. They would be telling gays that haters were out to get them. They would be telling the poor that the rich should be made to pay their fair share. They would be telling the taxpayers that the poor should get out and get a job.

But the people would never believe rubbish like that...

Notice what nobody is saying?

Nobody is saying that maybe all these entitlements were a mistake. Maybe we should gradually scale them down, so that almost everyone funds their own retirement, that almost everyone pays for their own health care, that all the mothers in the neighborhood get together to educate their children, that we relieve the poor with the old ABCDEFG method used by charity workers in the 19th century.

Nobody is saying that we should think about the universal garnishing of workers' wages with payroll taxes and income tax withholding.

Nobody is proposing to lift the huge weight of government wage-and-hour regulation, including the minimum wage, from off the brow of labor.

Nobody is proposing to stop corporate subsidies for their favorite projects.

Nobody is saying that we need a constitutional amendment to stop government dangling free stuff in our faces.

Nobody is saying that we should get government out of the pension business completely and make government bureaucrats fund their own retirement.

Nobody is musing that maybe more government force will not be the answer to the accumulation of a century of government force where business and the economy are concerned.

None of this should be surprising. It is, after all, only a couple hundred years since the eternal advice of Gerald O'Hara that "land is life" has been invalidated by the rise of capitalism and the market economy. Now it doesn't matter who owns the land. The only thing that matters is that everything is available to buy and sell in the marketplace. So the need to aggressive defend your land or conquer other land is no longer important. All you need to do is to offer your services and ideas on the market.

But we humans still instinctively know that it is force, and force only, that rules. Power and possession are the only realities. Smash the invader! Smash the corporations! Smash the cops! Smash the patriarchy! Smash the lesser races! Smash the racists! Smash the ruling class! Smash the politicians! Oh, and smash the media!

Obviously, we are not yet near the End of History, whoever wins the election on November 8, 2016.

A House Divided Cannot Stand

In his Clash of Civilizations Samuel Huntington argues that the world, following the centuries of western hegemony, is now divided along civilizational lines. So if you are a politician in Singapore or China, you extol the obvious superiority of Confucianism, and if you are a political leader in a Muslim country you extol the obvious truth of Islam and the Prophet, peace be upon him.

Huntington believes that the ideological age, in which half the world was run on socialist ideas, is over, and that we are reverting to a religious age, with cultural rather than ideological cues. International and intranational conflict, he writes, now occurs along civilizational -- actually religious -- fault lines, not ideological fault lines, as during the Cold War.

Except that the ideological fault lines were religious, if we accept that socialism/communism/progressivism is a secular religion.

On this view, the leaders of the West should be extolling the virtues of Christianity, as the rest of the world extols their Axial Age religions; only they are not. In fact, the West is divided between a nominally Christian capitalist side and a progressive/secular religious side.

The interesting thing is that the progressives use not their religion, but tribal cues, to rally their voters. Thus they have spent the last 50 years raising racial and sexual consciousness among women and minorities. This is palpable in the current 2016 election cycle as Democrats rally women against the sexual harasser Donald Trump and blacks against the police with Black Lives Matter.

Notice that our Democratic friends are not raising issues; they are raising race and gender identity. Now, nominally, this race and gender politics proposes the white male as an "other." But really, behind the screen, they are attacking our Christian, capitalist, limited government culture.

Against this progressive push, Donald Trump openly wraps himself in the flag and the nation. Although, of course, his core voters that show up at his rallies are overwhelmingly white and ordinary middle-class.

If Trump were the racist, sexist that our Democratic friends want him to be then he should be openly making a racist, sexist pitch for his Trumpster votes just as Democrats are unashamed as making a sexist pitch for "nasty women" and a racist pitch by endorsing the racist Black Lives Matter.

But here is the thing. If Huntington is right, and the coming fault lines across the world are going to be religious, then the divided West better get its act together. Because in any conflict the side that is united has a huge advantage over the side that is divided.

To raise the question is to answer it. Right now, native Westerners across the West are starting to rise up against their globalist rulers, and they are doing it over the question of religion. People in the west are clearly stating that they do not want a Muslim minority in the West that achieves strategic concentration.

As this Muslim issue develops it will put pressure on the western women who are clutching their pearls this season over Donald Trump's locker-room talk. And the Muslim issue will put pressure on African Americans that are more worried about police shootings than about the cultural collapse in the black majority inner cities and the threat that rising Hispanic and Muslim numbers represent to their special status as liberals' favorite victims.

For years I have worried about how conservatives can possibly push back against liberal identity politics -- i.e. sub-national tribalism -- because how can you do the politics of division when your basic line is that Americans are the best people in the world and America is the best country in the world? Where is the encouragement for rage and coming out to vote out the corrupt rascals?

The basic thrust of Huntington's Clash of Civilizations argument is that wars on the fault lines between civilizations force secondary actors to decide which side they are on, and usually they side with their co-religionists. So you can see that as the fault lines develop in the coming years, they are going to force the West to decide which side it is on, and the current divide between Christian capitalists and progressive identity believers will have to be resolved one way or another.

But there is another question, that Huntington doesn't address. He talks about fully westernized politicians like Lee Kuan Yew putting on the armor of Confucianism when running for office in Singapore. But was that just a blind?

Put it this way. How much of the western cultural agenda is optional if you want to be a leading civilization that can carry a big stick in the world and win fault-line wars? Capitalism? Limited government? Democracy? Rule of Law? Christianity? Tolerance? Science? Free speech? You tell me.

The Ruling Class Looked After Tom Hayden

Radical leftist Tom Hayden, founder of the Students for a Democratic Society and author of the Port Huron Statement, is dead.

The New York Times obituary shows what a great gig being a lefty radical was in our times. Given that Hayden was, at least in his early years, a revolutionary, he got pretty gentle treatment from the ruling class.

Which, I suppose, goes to show that Tom Hayden was never a revolutionary, but just the cat's paw of the educated ruling class. Here is how the NYT obit handles this:

Like his allies the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who were assassinated in 1968, Mr. Hayden opposed violent protests but backed militant demonstrations, like the occupation of Columbia University campus buildings by students and the burning of draft cards. He also helped plan protests that, as it happened, turned into clashes with the Chicago police outside the Democratic convention.

Isn't that cute: "opposed violent protests but backed militant demonstrations." You have to admire our liberal friends for the way they make their aggressive political activists into peaceful protesters.

But if you are a millimeter to the right of Tom Hayden, don't try this at home. As we have seen with the Trump campaign, when our lefty friends send protesters to attack a right-wing racist like Trump it is the right-wingers that are to blame for any violence. Just for being there.

What is all this about? I boiled it all down a while back when I was having a dialog with lefty Fredrick deBoer. He argued that:

a progressive is “someone who is interested in power, specifically, the empowering of other people.” So, for him, the question is “how far to get the government involved in empowering people.”

You can see the problem. It is government empowering people. Who in the world can think that government can do much in the empowering people department once it takes the shackles off the slave?

Really, government can do two things. It can emancipate the slave, and it can give people pensions. That is all. So the government can successfully free the African slave and eliminate residual servile injustices. But once the government gets into the quotas and diversity business it starts a new arc of slavery.

And then I came up with the notion that the thing about conservatives is that we are people that are not that interested in power. There is a reason for this, and that is that the way the modern economy rewards people that are more interested in serving other people through the market rather than dominating them with political power. And it refuses to believe that government can empower people.

That's the thing about a life like Tom Hayden. Tom Hayden was interested in power, and he thought that government power could be used to empower people. So all his life he was seeking political office and power so he could use it to help people.

The last word on Tom Hayden, I think, is provided by his pal Jeff Greenfield. He writes.

In the Port Huron Statement, Hayden wrote: “We would replace power rooted in possession, privilege or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, reflectiveness, reason and creativity.”

Do you see what is going on here? It is explained by my reductive Three Peoples theory. Tom Hayden wanted to replace the Patron/Client culture of the People of the Subordinate Self and its power and possession and privilege and feudalism with the culture of the People of the Creative Self and its roots in "love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity." Charles Taylor calls this attitude "expressive individualism."

But my problem with Tom Hayden and the entire leftist secular religion is that they are missing the middle term, the responsibility culture of the People of the Responsible Self. There can be no love, creativity, reflectiveness, reason and creativity until the power-only culture of Patrons and Clients is mitigated by freedom and responsibility.

And then it why the left comes to ruin every time. They cannot get away from their millennarian faith in political power. They think they can direct traffic into the right lanes with political power.

They are wrong, and millions of people have died because of the left's faith in political power.

Let's Call It All "The Big Fork"

Over at Vox Popoli, I am reading about Infogalactic, which is Vox Day calls the Big Fork of Wikipedia. The idea is to take all Wikipedia content and then remove the influence of the 500 gatekeepers that make sure that, e.g. the notion of "cultural Marxism" is merely a right-wing conspiracy theory. (Really, go read the Frankfurt School at La Wik.)

The Big Fork seems like a ludicrous notion. Replace Wikipedia? What are these people smoking? But why not?

For you chaps and chapettes not familiar with software jargon, a "fork" in a software system is where you divide a software system, with one version going one way, and another version going another. Here is La Wik. And here is Infogalactic.

Also in progress is Brave, a browser project headed up by Firefox reject Brendan Eich, and Gab, a replacement for lefty-run Twitter.

But really, as worthy as this is, it is just bagatelle, and doesn't solve anything. Let's do an Ike and make the problem bigger.

One of painful realities of the Trump phenomenon, for me, is the end of the hope that "we" might reform the welfare state. The reason that Trump has brought the Trumpers into the GOP is that he is pandering to the grievances of the white working class. The old pre-Trump GOP did not pander to the longing for the good old jobs at good wages and so the white working class moldered away in a political no-mans-land. And the white working class is not interested in the Ryan agenda, the privatization of Social Security, or the replacement of Medicare with a premium support program that would give every senior a fixed amount of money to apply to their individual health insurance plan. So don't look for any of that in a Trump presidency.

So what do we do now? It's obvious. We don't propose comprehensive and mandatory reform programs. We demand the right to do a Fork. Right in their unjust liberal faces.

Now any Fork must address itself to the Four Bigs in government spending. That is what usgovernmentspending.com is all about. As I am sure you know, government spending for 2017 for the Four Bigs looks like this:

The Four Big Programs in 2017
Government Pensions	$1.3 trillion
Government Health Care	$1.5 trillion
Government Education	$1.0 trillion
Government Welfare	$0.5 trillion

It is pretty obvious how to fork education. We are already doing it with "school choice" and home-schooling. But we need to revamp the education fork in terms of rights. That's the language that liberals understand:

We parents demand the right to educate our children. Period.

There are already minor efforts to fork health care.  Christian churches have developed Medi-share, a health-care sharing cooperative, where members share health expenses. It's a great idea, quietly going off and doing it your way, recreating the concepts of the mutual-aid movement of the 19th century. But I think that something a bit more aggressive is called for.

We demand the right to direct our own health care. Period.

Instead of dutifully going along with Medicare and or Obamacare, or some comprehensive reform which the Democrats will never agree to, we should demand the right to make our own arrangements, while agreeing to pay our share of those who can't afford to do so by-no-fault-of-their-own.

What about pensions? Of course every middle-class person has some sort of an IRA or a 401k account. But that is in addition to Social Security. Everyone has to pay into Social Security. Baloney.

We demand the right to make our own arrangements for retirement. Period.

Instead of dutifully going along with the Social Security scam, or some comprehensive reform that the Democrats will never agree to, we should demand the right to opt out and make our own arrangements while still paying the pensions of people unable to fund retirement through-no-fault-of-their-own.

You can see the point here. It ties into my concept of "Cut the Cringe." We have got to stop the culture of appeasement, of being nice about our principles and our rights. We have got to demand our rights. Period. Because these basic things are too important to be left to politicians and bureaucrats.

The point is that, in the end, the government entitlement programs will all go broke. People that relied on them will be in a world of hurt. But we are Americans; we are not under martial discipline, we are not soldiers in an army. So we should not be forced to send our children to government schools, get our health care from government bureaucrats, or give our savings to politicians to spend and hope that there is money left when we are too old to work.

OK. There is one thing left. Welfare. What do we do about that? I think that we the people need to take the relief of the poor away from the government and do it ourselves. This is, of course, a radical notion, but what is the problem with that?

We demand the right to care for the poor in our own way.

I see an America in which rich Americans set up foundations to provide a way up for the poor, and in which middle-class Americans of all kinds pitch in to help poor people get on their feet again. The mechanical point would be to get the poor out of their current "poverty trap" where every dollar they make at work takes about 50 cents of benefits away. In a world where welfare is private, that wouldn't be a problem, because the question of benefits and work would be completely separate. The cultural point is that we are each our brother's keeper and ought to do something about it.

OK. So all this is crazy radical stuff that would never work. So what? Let us take Vox Day's Big Fork and make it bigger.

What Gods Do the "Three Peoples" Believe In

In my reductive Three Peoples theory I propose that three kinds of people live in the modern world. There are the People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants who are clients to some great lord. There are People of the Responsible Self, citizens that work in the city as responsible individuals. And then there are People of the Creative Self, that believe life should be more than just responsible; it should aim for a work of original creation.

But no man is an island; each of us must live in society. That is the point of social animals, that we work together. So what does that mean to each of the Three Peoples?

We humans symbolize this situation with the notion of "gods." Our God is the something to which we surrender and bend the knee, and that is what makes us social and connected rather than alone on an island.

The God of the People of the Subordinate Self is the great lord or patron. In return for his Patron's patronage he must surrender to the power and might of his lord, his political boss, his work supervisor. And the Patron distributes loot and plunder as the mood takes him. I have argued, in my "little darlings" notion, that in the end the People of the Subordinate Self get left by the roadside, for they are, in effect, the soldiers in the great lord's army, and when they are no longer useful, the lord will abandon them, as Napoleon abandoned his troops on the retreat from Moscow.

The subordination to a fickle lord or Patron is not an easy life, and so from time to time the peasants arm themselves with their pitchforks and rebel. But they are always too late.

The God of the People of the Responsible Self is the abstract, though personal, God of the Axial Age religions. He is no longer sitting in the middle of the village or on Mt. Olympus playing power games with the human lives under his charge. Now God is retiring from active rule, and setting forth abstract rules for humans to follow. The problem for humans is no longer to submit to the actual power and might of the ruler, but to submit to the abstract rules of the Law. This was incredibly sexist, for it is men that demand to be told the rules, so the new God came out with a girl concept as well. Now the thing to do was to submit to God's love, for God offered the perfect relationship: love God and God would love you right back. In our latter days, People of the Responsible Self have learned to submit to the market, that remarkable human notion, and offer themselves and the work to the rest of society in return for the hope of reward. Of course, the market also has its girl aspect, as in the long-term relationships between businesses and their customers.

The submission to an abstract God or to the market is a hard and challenging life, for all its rewards. And so the People of the Responsible Self are always tempted to take the easy way and return into the orbit and the protection of some new Patron. But they betray their responsibility when they do.

The God of the People of the Creative Self is the Creative Self. If the old God was the creator of the universe, or at least in on the design, the modern creative self aims to become as God. The nature and the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is not a mystery known only to God, but a Gordian Knot that creative man himself is unraveling and will eventually master. That is why our modern ruling class is full of plans for improvement and bending the arc of history towards justice. Society is, for them, a creative project.

The relation of the Creative Self to society has almost come full circle to the great lord or the Patron god. It is a temptation that few creative people seem able to resist, to sit on Mt. Olympus and order around the humans under their rule as the mood takes them. But I would say that the essence of the creative life is to submit to the verdict of the creative Muse. The fact of a life devoted to creation is that is is a failure: many are called, but few are chosen. Many people aspire to become artists and writers, but few make the grade. Many people start businesses and tech startups, but almost all of them are failures. If it is hard to be a peasant, and harder to stay responsible in the face of setbacks, it is harder still to aspire to creative notability.

You can see that there is a common theme here. A true and faithful person must surrender and submit to his chosen God, and not to do so is to betray your God and become antisocial and corrupted. A Person of the Subordinate Self has surrendered his life to the pleasure of his great lord, and the subsequent cruel fate that awaits him. A Person of the Responsible Self has surrendered himself to obeying God's laws and the verdict of the market. If it seems hard, well, it is. A Person of the Creative Self must submit to the creative process, and accept that very few people that aspire to works of original creation actually succeed in that Olympian ambition, just as very few aspiring Olympic athletes get to participate in the Olympic Games.

The whole point of this little exercise is, of course, to point out that humanity's Big Problem right now is the globalist Creative Class and its overweening conceit that it is called, like the peerless Lina Lamont, to bring a little joy to our humdrum little lives, so that all its hard work "ain't been in vain for nothin'."

Zuckerberg in the Pulpit over Peter Thiel

You won't get a better summary of the liberal line this week than this from Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. He's defending Facebook's early investor Peter Thiel, a gay that has committed the h-heresy of supporting and contributing to Donald Trump.

There are many reasons a person might support Trump that do not involve racism, sexism, xenophobia or accepting sexual assault. It may be because they believe in smaller government, a different tax policy, health care system, religious issues, gun rights or any other issue where he disagrees with Hillary.

Look at that paragraph. What Zuck is talking about is the thoughtcrime of thinking racist, sexist, xenophobic thoughts. Everyone agrees, he implies, that they must be stamped out with the utmost ruthlessness. But hey, on the issues, people have a right to advocate. At least for now.

OK, racism. Think about it. The time to be anti-racist was when government mandated that blacks should sit in the back of the bus -- and the bus companies went along, just as today Silicon Valley companies go along with political correctness. To be anti-racist at the end of the second term of the First/Worst Black President is to be a mind-numbed robot of the liberal line. The only problem with racism right now is that blacks with no jobs are killing each other in the inner cities and blaming the police, and the white victims of 50 years of liberal racist politics are finally deciding that they can't take it any more.

And sexual harassment! Honey, it's a bit late for that. That was the whole point of the sexual revolution, which posited the idea that men and women should get it on, irregardless. The unanticipated consequence was that women felt pressured to have sex on the notion that if they didn't give in they wouldn't get a boy-friend/husband/partner. The whole sexual-harassment game is an attempt by feminists to put the horse back in the barn again, the horse that they helped let out fifty years ago.

OK, let's get all Hegelian about this. Hegel says that opposites are really the same thing, as in the north and south poles of a magnet. If you have the notion of an Ego then you have a notion of an Other. But the Other is just another person's Ego (das Ich in German). So racism and anti-racism are just two sides of the same coin. If you make race into a big thing then you are a race-obsessed, whether you are racist or anti-racist.

Yeah. And what about this Othering of Peter Thiel. First of all he´s gay, so by going after him you are Othering a gay, i.e., you are a hater and a homophobe. Then, on top of that, he's a Republican, which in Silicon Valley is very Other. So Othering a Republican is flat out "hate." But wait! Thiel is gay and Republican! So Othering Peter Thiel must be racist, sexist, hate-ist, Other-ist, homophobic, whatever lefty pejorative you can dream up.

Not to get all sexist on this, although I am a profound sexist, all this Othering is really high-school Mean Girls stuff, as in "I can't believe she said that." It is tremendous fun if you are one of the Mean Girls but not so much fun if you aren't. And, of course, it is punching down, oppressing people that can't answer back. And we know that punching-down is bad, really bad.

But the thing is that high-school Mean Girls stuff is cat-nip for high-statue women. That is why the Trump pussy-tape was such a big hit. Every woman in America is telling her friends: "I can't believe he said that!"

Of course, the woman's culture of complaint, and talking about people behind their backs, is probably the most important human survival trait out there.

So I suppose we should just shut up and let the Mean Girls take over.