No, New Yorker, YOU are the American Tragedy

My text today is from The New Yorker reacting to the election of Donald Trump. David Remnick writes:

The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism.

Hello? "American republic?" I thought you chaps believed in democracy, not the republic of laws and limited government set up by the Founders. What's with the sudden concern for the "republic?"

"Tragedy for the Constitution?" I thought you chaps believed in a living constitution, after the original Progressives, that the Constitution should be updated according to the will of Supreme Court justices who would just happen to be malleable creatures of the educated ruling class. You know the drill: finding penumbras under which favorite liberal issues just happen to be hiding.

"Nativism?" Well you got me there. As an immigrant American I am all in favor of limiting immigration to keep the culture of Americanism strong and undiluted by country folk that still think like peasants and nomads. Although it certainly wouldn't hurt for all those liberals to leave the country as they promised.

"Authoritarianism?" Well, I see your point. Donald Trump might do a few things you don't like. But if we are talking about authoritarianism, how about the presidency of Barack Obama, with its executive actions, its egregious use of administrative and regulatory ukase, its abuse of the IRS to punish conservatives, its corruption of the FBI and the Justice Department to give Hillary Clinton a pass, and the cram-down folly of Obamacare?

"Misogyny and racism?" The thing I love most about liberals is their utter blindness to their own anti-woman and ugly racist politics. The Great Society welfare state has been a disaster for lower-class women who are treated as disposable one-night stands and are reduced to marrying the state. Oh, and they can kill their babies any time they want. But Trump is a misogynist.

And racism! Do you not understand, Mr. Remnick, that the whole point of modern liberal identity politics is to hive off tribal groups into their silos and keep them there? To keep blacks voting 90 percent for Democrats, and women voting for Uncle Sugar? I have been reading today about a poor helpless Hillary voter going to work at the Pentagon and seeing nothing but men and being frightened. Golly, I wonder where she got the idea to be frightened! My line on this is that you can't get 90 percent of a group to vote for anything unless you frighten the pants off them. Well played, Dems and media. You got you base well and truly frightened. But that is what the Democratic race and gender politics is all about. Frightening people so they can be used as pawns for liberal power politics.

I don't know if Donald Trump will turn out to be a half decent president or a continuation in the line of failed presidents. But I do know this. Our liberal ruling class is a disaster.

And the disaster really issues from the lies that the ruling class tells itself and its supporters.

And that is an American tragedy.

The Revenge of Archie Bunker

It was back in March that I thought of the meme that defines the election of 2016. It was in a blog post I called "Trump Hauls White Working Class into the GOP Boat."

And I suggested that Archie Bunker is the poster boy for all this.

If we mark the debut of All in the Family in winter 1971 as the date that the white working class was cast out of the Democratic Party, branded as racist, sexist, bigoted Archie Bunkers, every one, then the white working class has been wandering in the wilderness for about 40 years, just like the Israelites. 

Only now the white working class has found a home, found a politician that speaks to it. It means the end of the Republican Party that I have known and supported, as a party of small government and the home of the People of the Responsible Self. But I am willing to let the white working class in. Because we should always shelter the homeless.

And really, would it harm the Republican Party to adapt itself to the political needs of the white working class? A little less immigration, a little less racial spoils, a more moderate reform of entitlements than hardcore libertarian conservatives like me would like? Is that so hard to swallow? 

 I have written that I think that the Democrats' abandonment of the white working class is one of the crimes of the century. Whaddya mean, dumping the white working class after calling them the salt of the earth and loading them up with political loot?

And I shall write later about the bigger issue, the record of vile injustice practiced by the left ever since the false dawn of 1848. There is no fundamental conflict between employers and workers; workers have benefited enormously from capitalism, and once the workers got the vote there was no need for special privileges for the workers. There is no fundamental conflict between men and women, white and black, gay and straight. Once women got the vote, once blacks got the Civil Rights Acts, once gays got the police off their backs, then the "activists" should have gone home and let the law take its course.

But people do not go into politics to pass and law and then let the grass grow. They go into politics to taste power and visit humiliation on their enemies. And so the left has mixed ordure, the ordure of division and coercion, with its noble ideals, and the result is ordure.

My hope for the Trump presidency, which began last night with his statement, "I love this country," is that he manages to turn a bunch of blacks and Hispanics into typical Americans that simply love America. That is the whole point of capitalism and the Great Enrichment. Instead of everyone sitting on their patch of land and defending it to the death, we all mix together and produce and consume and buy and sell with only one principle to guide us: to trust people that demonstrate trustworthiness.

And the way to give the marginalized a break is to break down the ramparts of economic privilege, the domination and hegemony of the administrative, regulatory state. The science is settled on this, you know. Bureaucrats just can't do the job; only producers and consumers and prices can do it.

"What About the Workers?"

The great theme of the 2016 election has been the sudden discovery of the white working class. It's as though somebody asked, as they did of Peter Sellers' character droning in a British upper-class accent hears a voice from the audience: "what about the workers?"

Gosh! I thought we had dealt with the problems of the workers, two generations ago. I thought they were put to bed so we could all work on women and minorities and gays.

In fact, of course, politics has ever created more problems that it solves, and every group that gets "helped" by government ends up with what I call the "little darlings" problem. Simply, if you become the little darlings of the ruling class you are getting set up for disaster, because the day will come when the ruling class no longer likes you, or needs you.

Even liberals are coming round to the notion that something went wrong with the white working class -- in The New Yorker yet. Well, yes, liberals. What went wrong is that you gave the white working class special privileges and enabled a generation of the working class to avoid the challenge of embourgeoisment. You taught them to believe that good manufacturing jobs at good wages would last forever, and vote Democrat. Then you went off and taught women and minorities to believe in liberal promises and vote Democrat.

But I am just thinking, on this Election Day, November 8, 2016, about the folks you see in the photos at Trump rallies. I suppose they are all racists, sexists, homophobes, as the liberals insist. But to me they just look like ordinary Americans. OK, ordinary white Americans.

It makes you realize how Republicans have failed in the last few elections. The party leaders have failed to connect directly with ordinary, typical Americans. They have instead appealed to libertarian conservatives like me, and Christian conservatives in the Religious Right, but not ordinary unaffiliated, typical Americans. It is shameful that it took a political neophyte like Trump to connect the party with typical Americans given that Michael Barone writes that the Republican Party has always been the party of people that think of themselves as "typical Americans."

In a long article on "Economic Growth," John H. Cochrane, an economist, lays out in excruciating detail how the present government makes life difficult for the average "typical American" with its taxes and its subsidies and its regulations and its favors and its rigidities. It's been a long time building, and it is hard to imagine how any government in the near future will have the mandate to do anything about it, since politics is and has always been about taxes and subsidies and regulations and favors and rigidities. Until the Huns ride in from the Asian steppe.

But I still have in my mind the images of ordinary Americans at the Trump rallies getting enthusiastic about a political leader that is actually speaking to their concerns.

According to Larry Summers, the Republican Party has combined "social conservatism and an agenda of helping rich people." Well, yeah. That is the image that Democrats and liberals want to propagate, and they do it very well. But it doesn't really connect with the idea of former construction worker Sean Hannity that Republicans are really people that follow the law, go to work, and obey the rules. The point about free-market economics is that it allows unknowns to enter the marketplace and thrive without having all the good paths reserved for the established and the well-connected. If you call that "helping rich people" well I gotta bridge to sell you.

And I get what he is talking about. If you think that life is a patron-client experience, where people are all People of the Subordinate Self that rely on the power of a patron to survive and prosper in this world, as proposed in my Three Peoples theory, then you really cannot believe in the notions of economics and the city economy of trusting the stranger without the intervention of the powerful patron on your behalf.

But I think that Republican voters are and have been people that are not organized into political armies under some patron for the purpose of wresting loot and plunder from the economic system. They may be that way because they are established middle class, or because they are aspirant, seeking to rise. But I don't think that the Republican Party is the part of "the rich." Not today. It must be pretty obvious that these days "the rich" are people that are very careful to keep on the right side of the Democratic Party and the liberal culture in general. The point about Peter Thiel, Trump supporter, is that he is an outlier.

My view of the world is that progressives -- Marxists socialists, whatever -- have created human wreckage wherever they go. There is a ton of wreckage in the welfare state today after about a century of progressive politics, and it is not just the white working class that got wrecked. How about the black underclass and how about women?

Yeah. "What about the workers?"

Da Fix is In!

The problem with the ruling class giving itself a pass, as in the classified emails and private server of Hillary Clinton, is the question of where it ends.

Obviously, the whole point of being a ruling class is to afford yourself and your supporters a certain relief against the rigors of the rule of law. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

So it makes sense that the White House and the Department of Justice would put the screws to the FBI when the FBI was investigating one of its own. And it makes sense that a little man like James Comey would bend under the pressure. Not just the White House but the whole Democratic Party and the Democratic Party operatives with bylines were telling him to put it where the sun don't shine.

But how far do you go? The whole point of politics and the rule of law is not "justice," at least not in my view. The whole point is to head off civil war. Government is force, and the people on the receiving end of force don't like it. If you keep your government force going too strong then the people on the receiving end might decide to create a head of rebellion.

That is why I rehearse constantly my catch phrases about Government is force, politics is division, system is domination, and Government is injustice. I am reminding the ruling class that everything that government or a politician does is riling up some yahoo somewhere. And the longer it goes on, the more likely that some yahoo will talk to his buddy and start to think that force must be met with force.

The problem with our liberal masters, as I see it, is that they really have no clue how deep is their self-dealing and how corrupt they are. They have no clue what a corrupt operation Obamacare is, or their climate agenda. There is a simple reason for this. Our liberal friends think that they are the good guys and that everything they do advances emancipation, liberation, and justice. And their willing accomplices in the media repeat back their catch phrases back at them. Of course they do. Not only is the ruling class intermarried with the media class, but it is clear to me, from nods and winks in the Obama era, that it is not good for one's media career to be a nail that sticks out -- apart from the basic fact of media life that the media lives by access to the powerful, and access can be easily withdrawn.

So Hillary Clinton has skated on her illegal and insecure private email scheme. For now. The problem is: next time. What happens when Hillary Clinton -- or any member of the ruling class -- next needs to compromise the justice system in order to skate on corruption or abuse of power? How much deeper into the corruption of the justice system will she need to go?

Our Democratic friends reject as laughable the idea that the Clinton scandal is "worse than Watergate." Oh really. As I recall Watergate issued from some over-enthusiastic campaign operatives burgling the offices of the Democratic National Committee. The Clinton e-mail scandal issues from the decision of the Secretary of State to conduct her business not on secure State Department systems but using her own private email server. So the Watergate scandal began with illegal actions by underlings; the Clinton scandal begins with illegal action by the principal. And we are not just talking about illegal action but illegal action that endangers national security. You tell me which is worse.

OK, now let's segue to the bigger issue. The problem is not just corruption of the justice system to evade responsibility for illegal action. The problem is that, now that progressivism has got into its mature stage, and government is gigantic and complicated, government has to evade the law, just to keep on keeping on, with executive actions and administrative ukases that amount to legislating. That is because government is doing complicated things that need constant adjustment to deal with unanticipated consequences of the original government intervention. We see the Obama administration doing this with Obamacare. And there is a strong current, supported in the ruling class, for using administrative ukase and regulation to enact policy that could never get a majority in Congress, especially with regard to climate and the environment.

Again, our ruling class is missing the point with its clever end run around the legislative process. If you want to enact climate change policy that will stand the test of time you need to go through all the flummery of legislation and vote-trading and a bipartisan consensus. Then, when the going gets tough, you can appeal to Democrats and Republicans and the whole American people to support you, since the policy was honestly proposed, honestly debated, and honestly voted in. But when you do things the Obama way, with phones and pens, with activists pushing through dubious policy in the depths of the bureaucracy, then people start to complain that The Fix Is In. And then nothing that you do is fixed and permanent, because tons of people think that you cheated, and they know that nobody asked their opinion.

We see this problem all across the west as the voters start to rebel against the globalist agenda of no borders and global migration and global commerce. The global elite never asked anyone's permission; they just believe that globalism and transnational government is necessary and that nation states deserve to go onto the waste heap of history and that they, the global elite, know what they are doing. They are wrong, and millions of people are going to suffer for their error and their arrogance.

And we know that they are wrong because they need to violate the law to get the job done.

But What About the Issues?

Everyone in the snooty set can tell you how base and shallow the 2016 election is. We are arguing about locker-room talk and mere e-mails. Eeuuw.

But what about the Issues?

In my view, the Issues are in worse shape than the candidates. Because we are a century out from the great expansion of the welfare state, and we are now experiencing the unintended consequences of big government picking up the tab for the Big Four programs that my website usgovernmentspending.com is intended to highlight. And nobody really has a clue what to do.

Government really should not be in the pensions business. Government has obviously failed at this, because both pensions for government employees and government pensions for ordinary citizens are breaking the budget. This means that young working people, trying to get a life going and raise children, are on the hook to pay pensions for their parents whatever the economic weather. I call this generational injustice. In my view the average person should retire when they have saved enough to stop working. And really, for most people the best thing would be to slowly ease off on work and not really retire at all until they get deep into dementia. Of course, we the people should help people that are poor in old age through-no-fault-of-their-own. But let's do it without government.

Government really should not be in the health-care business. Our lefty friends obviously think otherwise, and their reason is to say that people cannot afford to face any big health crisis; government has to step in. The problem is that the science doesn't really back this up. For instance, people on Medicaid don't have better health outcomes than people of similar income without health insurance. What does that mean? And how would health care look if it were, for example, modeled on the corporate model of a Walmart or an Amazon? I'm not sure that Walmart or Amazon are appropriate models for health care, but I am sure that putting government in the middle of health care is not a good idea. Suppose, for example, that the great foundations of the nation all agreed to focus on delivering health care for the poor. I wonder how that would work. I wonder how geriatric health care would look without the distorting effect of Medicare. Of course, we the people should help people that are poor in old age through-no-fault-of-their-own. But let's do it without government.

Government really should not be in the education business. The story of education is that ruling classes have always been in interested in forming the minds of the young. The classic line is that of the Jesuits, who determined that if you gave them the child before age seven, they could give you the adult. The French revolutionaries were adamant that they were going to replace the Jesuit system with their own education based on the cult of Reason. And then in the 19th century various ruling-class enthusiasts proposed new government-based schemes to form the minds of the young. But now we have a monster government-based education system that is clearly running aground, with government-supporter teachers and administrators demanding money from politicians but not delivering much in the way of education. Meanwhile -- and I just learned this -- there is Google Classroom. What in the world will happen to education with Google Classroom running the show? Of course, we the people should help people that are poor through-no-fault-of-their-own with the education of their children. But let's do it without government.

Government really should not be in the welfare business. Government welfare is nothing new. Heck, it goes back at least to the Roman Empire and the annona, the Roman free-grain program. In our modern era, government welfare started with the Elizabethan Poor Law that was the ruling-class response to the agricultural revolution, when, as Marx wrote, the "mass of free proletarians was hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers, who, as Sir James Steuart well says, 'everywhere uselessly filled house and castle.'" The Poor Law uselessly failed to solve the problem of the broken-up feudal retainers for two hundred years until the industrial revolution sucked the rural poor into textile factories. Now we have the Great Society welfare programs that have demolished the low-income family and have erected huge barriers to the poor getting off welfare and into the job market with effective 50 percent marginal tax rates. Of course, we the people should help people that are poor through-no-fault-of-their-own. But let's do it without government.

Yes, but how? Well, we will have to start with a new culture, and then we will need a ruling class that is not that interested in power, and a people that are not that interested in free stuff.

Yes, imagine a culture where the culture vultures don't serve as sycophants of the ruling class. And I have to say that I don't know where that is going to come from. But then, the old are always the last to know.

One thing is for sure. The problems aren't going to go away soon, whoever gets elected on November 8.

How to Talk to Liberals About the Obamacare Meltdown

Let's jump the gun a little and imagine that Donald Trump wins on November 8. What are we going to say to our liberal friends over Thanksgiving dinner?

I think that the best thing would be to blame the whole thing on Obamacare -- more in sorrow than in anger, of course.

The whole problem, I'll say, is that liberals don't want to learn the science about administrative government, from socialism to the administrative rule of the experts. If I were a liberal, I'd say that liberals were in denial about the settled science on socialism and administrative government. But since I'm not I'll just say that you could look it up. It's all out there, in books not yet banned by the SJW book burners.

Look, everybody does this. It's not just Christians denying the fact of evolution.

Take the Marxists. I've noticed, reading Marxist tomes, that there is remarkably little interest in the marginal revolution of 1870. Karl Marx wrote his Capital around the apparent contradiction between the idea of use value and exchange value. Food is useful, yet it is cheap; gold is useless, but it is dear. What gives? So Marx built a whole world view on the notion that the change from working for use to working for wages resulted in alienation from the real world into an imaginary world where labor was nothing more than a commodity sold on the market. The idea of marginal value explained all this by saying that people live and work and exchange on the margin. They ask: do I want to work some more or would I rather go to the pub? Do I want to buy this gold ring at this price, or for a slightly lower price.

Why would a Marxist want to learn about that? It would destroy the whole elegant system that Marx set up. And so, a century later and more, Marxists still prattle on about commodification and alienation as though the marginal revolution never happened. Millions have suffered and died in consequence.

The same thing happened to the world view of the rule of the "best men" and the rule of the experts through administrative government programs that got going in the late 19th century. In 1918 Ludwig von Mises published a paper "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth" that argued that socialism couldn't work because it could not compute prices. Then 30 years later his student F.A. Hayek reminded the administrative left what this meant for them. It meant that bureaucratic government could not work because of a bandwidth problem. A few thousand bureaucrats and their ukases could not out-perform a million consumers and producers and their prices.

The point is that prices tell consumers and producers whether or not to change their behavior. If prices go down they tell consumers to buy more. If prices go up they tell producers to find an innovation to make things less expensive.

The point about a government program is that the bureaucrats and the program clients do not change their behavior when things change, because of the absence of prices. And so government programs always fail.

Obamacare is a program based on the world view of administrative government. Just set up an administrative system with the right people in charge and you can deliver lower-priced health care to the 30 million without health insurance. That is the idea.

OK, Sherlock, so what is the problem with Obamacare? Let me count the ways.

1. It doesn't make sense for many people to buy health insurance. The whole point of health insurance is to protect your assets from a catastrophic expense. So health insurance makes sense for people with retirement assets and homes. It does not make sense for young and poor people without assets, because if they get huge health bills they can just declare bankruptcy. It does not make sense for millionaires that can afford a million or so in health expenses. This means that most of the 30 million do not have health insurance because it does not make sense for them, and that employers were right to offer mini-plans to their young employees who just needed a bit of help with their medical bills.
2.  A big administrative system like Obamacare cannot adjust to changing conditions. That's because it is an administrative system that does not respond to price signals.
3. A big administrative program like Obamacare ends up being Springtime for the Special Interests. It was passed with a handout to hospitals and insurance companies, and is falling apart now that the government is trying to claw back the "risk corridors" that bought the support of the insurance companies.
4. Program beneficiaries learn how to scam the system. The people signing up are the people that are eligible for subsidies. Unfortunately they still face big deductibles and they hate that. Most beneficiaries of government programs think that free is the only fair price for a government program.
5. Most people already have health insurance and they hate having to pay for other peoples' insurance as well.
6. The difference between insurance and government insurance is that government insurance has free stuff up front. This helps pass the program (just listen to President Obama in his speeches defending Obamacare) but it just raises the cost overall. For instance, science says that preventative medicine doesn't improve health outcomes. Tell that to a liberal.
7. Single-payer is not the answer. Single-payer just means that the whole health care system will be freed from price signals and turn into extremely expensive bureaucratic mush. That is what the science says.

But the big problem is the big problem with all government programs. It is impossible to reform them. Of course it is, because the reason people like them is the free stuff, and they will hang onto their free stuff even while the world collapses around them. People should pay for their own pensions, for their own health care, for their kids education, for the relief of the poor in their town. Anything else is theft.

There's another bit of science that my liberal friends seem never to have heard of. It comes from Buchanan and Tullock's The Calculus of Consent. The book is an analysis of legislative voting systems. What happens is what we all know. The proposers of any initiative find that they must buy the votes of people on the fence. So, with majority voting, the proposers must buy the votes of the legislators in the middle to get a majority. And the minority that doesn't stand to benefit from the program gets to pay without getting any benefit. Buchanan and Tullock discovered that there is one voting system that does not screw the minority. It is the system of unanimous consent. With unanimous consent, the proposers are forced to pay the minority for the costs they impose on them. I think there is a word for that: justice.

Now, if liberals had listened to all this, and got themselves up to date on the settled science they could have avoided the disaster of 2016 and they would be settling in for a generation of Democratic majorities. What a pity that they just couldn't bear to crack those books and learn their lessons like good little boys and girls.

Clinton Crime Family? Of Course

One of the benefits of the Clinton e-mail scandal and the broader Wikileaks disclosures -- not to mention books like Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer -- is that they rip the covers off all politics.

The pay-for-play operation that Hillary Clinton seems to have run out of the State Department seems egregious, but that is the way all politics operates. It is not that way because of the particular venality of the political operators. Politics attracts that sort of person.

It is really very simple. Human communities need protection from robbers and invaders seeking loot and plunder. So communities need guardians, armed and trained to prevent anyone from looting them of their product and their savings.

But once a community has a corps of armed guardians, what is to prevent the armed guardians from taking a cue from the robbers and invaders and doing a spot of rape and pillage on their own account? Not much, except the goodness of their hearts. In fact their hearts teach the guardians that that they deserve a bit of loot here and there. That is why St. Augustine wrote

Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made of of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed upon. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it hold places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity.

That is why people write satirically about the Clinton Crime Syndicate, or the Clinton Crime Family. Just as the residents within the territory of an urban criminal gang have to pay protection money to make sure that nothing bad happens to their nice little business, so aspiring crony capitalists need to pay off the Clinton Foundation against the loot potential in a Clinton presidency. Rich donors pay good money to rising politicians. And workers pay payroll taxes for the right to work, and professionals pay license fees for the right to practice.

There is no difference between a crime family and a guerrilla insurgency and a government, except the degree of "impunity." All of these regimes occupy territory, tax the inhabitants for the right to go about their business, and all of them reward their supporters out of the product of the inhabitants they tax.

Now the great success of the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years has been in innovation, also called "permissionless innovation." Entrepreneurs have been able to initiate new products and services without asking permission and as a result they have flooded the world with prosperity before the ruling class figured out what was happening. What was the decisive element? Probably that the entrepreneurs could keep most of their profits and the customers most of the benefits of the innovation without paying off the godfathers of the various crime syndicates, from the local mob to the national ruling class.

But in the Obama era we have seen a relapse to loot and plunder. Obamacare was a carve-out to various interests including hospitals and insurance companies. The costs were borne by workers forced to buy overpriced insurance and employers that had to work overtime to figure out how to avoid the costs. Green energy has been a bonfire of the special interests, with subsidies and credits being handed out to wind and solar and electric cars. And zero interest rate policy puts innumerable warps upon the financial system, all to get the government and the banks out of a jam.

If you need to wonder why economic growth has been so slow in the Obama years, look no further.

That is the point of limited government. It proceeds on the faith that almost all use of political power and government force will be harmful, so the less of it the better.

Of course, Donald Trump is not going to end all this. Here's piece in the British center-left Independent writing about how 94 percent of steel jobs left Weirton, West Virginia, after NAFTA, and how the residents are all in for Trump.

But.

Those steel jobs were union jobs, and the union workers were getting paid way above market rate. That's because of the crony deal, decades before, to give labor unions special privileges to combine against employers as part of their "rights." Sitting on their rights they never had to adjust to market realities, until it was too late. So now their good union jobs at good wages are gone.

But there are still steel companies in the United States. We have one right here in Seattle. It is a plant operated by Nucor, with 320 jobs. They used to call the Nucors "mini mills." A 2014 Seattle Times puff piece calls the plant "efficient, agile, smart."

And that tells the story exactly. Capitalism asks -- demands -- each one of us to be efficient, agile, and smart, and not imagine that political power and connections will keep us in the money forever. Because they won't.

When you sign up with the local crime syndicate for protection you are certainly buying the right to rest on your laurels for a while. But in the end you'll have to get with the program. That is what has been happening to the folks that luxuriated in the special privileges that government gave to certain workers a couple generations ago.

But the trouble about being the "little darlings" of the local crime syndicate is that one fine day the music stops, and you have to go out and find a job. If you have been coddled for 20 years by the local Big Man, you are going to find the experience utterly demoralizing and unjust.

The solution is never to get started into a life of cronyism. Stay efficient, agile, smart, and adjust to the world and its endless changes.

And keep the Clinton Crime family down in Arkansas, where it can only do limited damage.