"Single Payer" and the Implicate Order

Yesterday, in the airport at Fort Lauderdale, I overheard a Bernie Bro telling a couple of listeners that “next time” Bernie would win and bring on “single payer.”

This bearded young man had majored in drama and done a bit of theater.

I did not try to enter into a dialog with the young man, so I did not say:

“So, kid, you like guns.”

“Guns? What do you mean? Guns kill people and if it wasn’t for the NRA…”

“I get it. But government is force, and that means, at the end of the day, government men with guns enforcing the law. So you like the idea of government men with guns.”

“What do you mean? I just want a just and rational health-care system.”

“But you want a system, and system means force.”

It is a delicious irony of our modern age that everyone is competing to be Mr. Nice Guy. The lefties talk about bending the arc of history towards justice, but forget that the means appointed comes down to thuggist activists backed up by men with guns, their loyalty bought with handsome pensions. Mr. Nice Guy with a gun?

On the other hand, the amazing emerging order of what we call “capitalism” that has brought the west from the indigence of $1 per head per day to $100 per head per day, is an order of remarkable ruthlessness. It says that if you can’t sell your skill or product on the market for the amount you had in mind, well, too bad for you: get a clue.

It allows you to dabble in a bit of theater, even amateur theatricals, but it doesn’t say you have a right to do that and get health care too.

By the way, did you know that Chinese factory workers are now getting about $3.60 per hour, or nearly $30 per day? I don’t know how that works out for the population as a whole, but it sure looks better than the 30 million that died of starvation during the Great Leap Forward in the 1950s.

OK, let’s get to the point. Right now I am reading Ian McGilchrist’s The Master and the Emissary. It’s a review of human brain science, and the emerging idea that left and right brain are complementary. The right brain takes the whole world as a whole with judgment; the left brain develops a theory of the world. Moreover, according McGilchrist, the right hemisphere is “primary;” for it defines the whole that the left hemisphere reduces to a mechanical theory.

Then there is David Bohm and his idea of the “implicate order,” the notion from post-Newtonian science that the world is not a machine, but something far deeper and more mysterious. In the dumbed-down version in Unfolding Meaning: A Weekend of Dialog, Bohm explains that the world is not a whole built up of parts but something more complex, for while the whole and the parts are not exactly one and the same thing they are so interrelated that it is certainly wrong to think of the whole as constructed from the parts. Bohm uses the example of a hologram projected by laser light. If you project the light through a small part of the hologram you will get the whole picture, but it will be low resolution. The more of the hologram that is illuminated, the more resolution will appear in the resulting image.

Now the hologram is a direct demonstration of quantum mechanics, so the experiment is demonstrating that each part of the universe, at the quantum level, contains some encoded information about the whole.

I would argue that my airport friend’s “single-payer” health system is a Newtonian mechanical universe in which the whole is a bolted-together machine of parts. But the Newtonian universe is all about force: action and reaction are equal and opposite.

I would argue that the market “system” is not a system at all but an implicate order where the whole and the parts are intimately connected, where the whole is certainly more than the sum of the parts. Let’s quote Bohm at length:

[I]n each sub-whole there is a certain quality that does not come from the parts, but helps organize the parts. So the implicate order does not deny the significance of parts or sub-wholes, but rather it treats each in its own way as relatively stable, independent and autonomous. Wholeness is seen as primary while the parts are secondary in the sense that what they are and what they do can be understood only in the light of the whole.

In other words, to understand what the molecules in a human cell are doing, it helps to know they are part of a live human.

But the key thing to note, Bernie Bro, is that the cells and the parts of the cell are doing what they do without the clunking fist of the whole human creating a “single payer” to subsume the parts under the hegemony of the whole.

So the president of the nation does not "deny the significance of parts or sub-wholes" of the health care system but "treats each in its own way as relatively stable, independent and autonomous."

On the other hand it is also true that if enough individual parts do not contribute to the health of the whole then the whole will die.

By the way, in his commentary on Kant and Schopenhauer, Bryan Magee comments that Schopenhauer’s most important advance on Kant is to critique the Kantian idea that we can know sense impressions but not “things-in-themselves.” The mistake in Kant  is to talk about plural “things” instead of one “thing,” the whole. Because the whole is not the sum of the parts but completely interrelated with the parts and already encoded in the parts, and the parts are not really the parts but partaking of the whole.

Like I say, the more we know about life, the universe, and everything, the more amazing and mysterious it becomes.

How to Solve the Pronoun Crisis, Senator

Good old Steve Sailer is having fun with the gender pronoun issue. Remember the Pablo Gomez flap, about the transgender activist that up and stabbed someone? Gomez wanted to be called They, so Sailer had some fun with it.

And of course the kindly folks at GLAAD are right in the middle of it.

Really, you have to give the liberals credit. This business of people demanding that you call them he/she/xir/They, because anti-LGBTQ hate, is a brilliant tactic. It wrong-foots everyone that isn't a right-on "woke" liberal.

But I have a solution.

I propose that we conservatives make the following non-negotiable demand.

We demand that all "woke" Americans use the following pronoun when referring to a conservative: God.

Any liberal that does not refer to a conservative as God, as in "Chris Chantrill was discussing the liberal hate against Charles Murray, and 'God' said that Murray is right. Liberals are protesting Murray because 'God' has spent a lifetime writing books to show how liberal policy and liberal governance hurts the very people it is supposed to help. And liberals don't care."

Yes, this could really put the cat among the pigeons. And anyone that doesn't use the pronoun that the person in question wants is a bigot and a hater. Right liberals?

Now, I reckon that using God as a pronoun will get a bit old after a while. So I think that we should have backup pronouns ready for action.

What would work best to really annoy liberals?

Yes. You got it. We should demand to be called "Barack" or "Hillary" or "Maddow," or any headline liberal. How about "Chuck-you," Rush Limbaugh's friendly nickname for Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) who reportedly harassed a Trump voter on Sunday night at a fancy-pants Manhattan restaurant.

Can you spell "hate?"

Mind you, if Chuck-you Schumer is "going off" on innocent Trump voters at swank Manhattan restaurants like Sette Mezzo, even the wife of Joseph A. Califano and the daughter of CBS founder William S. Paley, well, it tells us that the pressure is starting to tell.

But I think that an arriviste like Chuck Schumer is mouthing off on genuine American top-tier grandes dames is a bit much. I think that the girls of Manhattan -- and you know who you are -- should  get together and do a bit of "I can't believe that Chuck said that." It's the line that rules the world.

And do you know what Chuck was pissed off about. It was that Trump was "a liar."

Golly gee-williikins, Chuck. Ain't you ever heard the one about the politician? You can tell he is lying because his lips are moving.

But you, Chuck. You are not a politician. You are a United States Senator. And that is different.

Hey, that's a good idea. How about we conservatives demand that all liberals call us "senator."

Or they are haters.

But what really gets me is the name of the swank restaurant that is good enough for the likes of Chuck. "Sette Mezzo?" Why do all those pretentious restaurants have pretentious names like that?

Are Trump and the Republicans Finished?

Everyone is in a fine froth about the failure of Ryancare (or Trumpcare) last week, and everybody is busy blaming someone.

It was Speaker Ryan, who should have known that you don't do major health care reform in a month.

It was the House Freedom Caucus that would compromise on anything.

It was President Trump, who didn't appreciate how difficult and complex health care is.

It was Steve Bannon, who threatened the House Freedom caucus guys.

Then there is the meme that Trump, or Ryan, or the Republicans, have spent all their political capital and are finished.

Well, which is true?

I don't know. But my smart retort is that government is a total disaster all the time. Almost everything it does is stupid and wasteful and cruel and unjust. It is almost impossible to get anything worthy and sensible done.

That is why governments employ flacks whose sole job is to tell us what a wonderful powerful guy the president is, on down to the worthy bureaucrat churning out life-saving regulations and "our" nurses and schoolteachers who are saving lives and caring for our children.

So the Republicans in Congress tried to do something really difficult and President Trump was trying to push whatever it was over the finish line.

And they failed.

And leaders are supposed to never fail.

I suppose this is all about the Pharoah being a god, and a god being necessarily omnipotent, and therefore any political failure bringing into question the divinity of the Pharoah.

Or, as the Chinese say, losing the Mandate of Heaven.

But it's pity, because normal human activity on this world constantly encounters problems and setbacks. The measure of a man or a woman is how they handle adversity. It's a bit hard to expect presidents and speakers to be perfect.

And the fear of failure seems to haunt all the folk in the political sphere. They have to appear omnipotent, or nothing at all.

Perhaps it arises out of the impossibility of a political career. As I read once, it is an amazing achievement for a Briton to get a seat in the House of Commons. But backbenchers are nobodies. It is even more astonishing to become a junior minister, practically impossible to become a front-rank cabinet minister, etc.

So every politician is haunted by the fear that the astonishing run of luck is about to run out.

On the other hand, I understand the necessity for oppositions to say See, I Told You So at every opportunity.

But here's a scary item from The Telegraph's eternal pessimist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. He says that US corporate credit is contracting at a record rate, almost as bad as 2008, so...

This morning energy stocks are down.

Everyone is Between a Rock and a Hard Place

We conservatives are naturally angry that Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has announced that he will vote against the Supreme Court nomination of Neil Gorsuch. And he will probably filibuster Gorsuch too.

But what else is Schumer to do? The liberal base is all riled up and it demands "Resistance!" The great and powerful United State Senators cannot just wink at each other and let a Republican Supreme Court nomination through on a nod. The base wants blood, and by God, they are determined to get it.

But I understand the fury of the base. The liberal cognitive elite has used the Supreme Court to enact its policy preferences -- abortion for upscale women, gay marriage for upscale gays -- in the teeth of reluctance from the broad American mainstream. Suppose the Supreme Court became dominated by conservative "originalist" justices? What would happen to abortion and gay marriage and the rights of undocumented immigrants and criminal defendants then?

Liberals are tied to the mast, and must defend the activist Supreme Court to the knife. Otherwise all the Court's progressive jurisprudence comes into play.

The irony is that I'll bet my nickel that if abortion and criminal rights and gay marriage had been left to legislatures we would have arrived at some sort of messy, human accommodation on these issues. But because liberals on the court rammed all this down our throats we are mad as hell and we are not going to take it anymore.

The joke on liberals is that they are using the courts to enforce their moral agenda, just what they inveighed against when they insisted we get the government out of the bedroom.

The short-term result of liberals fighting over Supreme Court nominees will be the end of the filibuster to resist any presidential nomination, so nominations will be purely partisan. There could be eight years of this, liberals, before you get the whip hand again.

But the Republicans are also between a rock and a hard place on Obamacare. The Republican base hates Obamacare and wants it destroyed. But Obamacare has become yet another entitlement, and you touch entitlements at your peril.

Plus Donald Trump was elected courtesy of the white working class voters, and the white working class voters want their entitlements, thank you very much. They earned it.

And they used to talk about the Democratic Party as a coalition of conflicting interests that somehow got it together to win elections.

So the liberals are hoist by their own petard on the Supreme Court, and conservatives are trapped by the success of Donald Trump.

How will it all end up?

Oh, that's simple. It will end up in war. Either a global war against the Muslims or a civil war here at home. And in the chaos of war and its aftermath all the petty squabbles of today will go up in the smoke of a million funeral pyres.

But why? How come we can't just get along?

That's a good question, Senator.

Healthcare Showdown: Obamacare vs. Trumpcare

Remember when the Democrats were shoving the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act through Congress back in 2010?

It seemed like they were all singing from the same hymnal. Everyone knew to repeat the same talking points: If you like your plan... If you like your doctor... etc.

But with the Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare it's like the gang that couldn't shoot straight. All the different conservative groups are fighting with one another. There is no single set of talking points.

Today there's going to be a vote on Speaker Ryan's American Health Care Act. Everyone is making predictions about pass or fail, but I'd say that the science says that every vote is a horse-trade, with many Republican votes available to the highest bidder until the last moment.

So we are in the same position as Obamacare, when Harry Reid was buying the votes of Democrats to get his bill passed in the Senate. Only it's the opposite.

I guess that while the Congress is so divided on an issue, it means that things aren't bad enough to warrant a reform.

Because in my view the problem with the government doing anything is that you can't get the votes to fix it until the boat has gone over the waterfall. That is why it is a bad idea for government to do anything other than fight wars.

But why is it that Democrats always seem to speak with one voice, whereas Republicans and conservatives always seem to be at sixes and sevens?

I'd say the reason is power. The left is interested in power, specifically the cultural power to name and shame and the political power to order people around or else. (Economic power comes as a free gift when you have cultural and political power. Corporate CEOs all know which side their bread is buttered.)

But the whole program of the right, excepting chaps like Hitler and Peron, is to limit power. We believe in the remarkable idea that a nation or a people does best when the cultural Torquemadas are kept in check and the political bosses don't have clunking fists to stitch up the whole town under their rule.

So when Republicans get into power we don't have a new cunning plan to buy votes like the Democrats do. We just want to find a way to release the shackles of big government, and every Republican as a different idea about where to start.

Then there is President Trump, the hero of the white working class, and they just want to go back to the good old days of the 1960s and good jobs at good wages, with pensions and health care for dessert.

I expect that all the flap about health care will subside when the west finally gets around to Doing Something about Islam.

But it will still be interesting to see if Speaker Ryan and President Trump manage to stitch together a majority in the House today for the American Health Care Act.

Maybe the Jihadis Will Help Us Kill Two Birds With One Stone

Yesterday I read a profoundly troubling piece about Islam, an interview of a Pole that converted to Islam. I was alerted to the article by a reader of this blog. Today we have a jihadi attack on the Westminster Palace, the home of parliaments.

This is personal to me because, 50 years ago, I used to walk across Westminster Bridge and past the Houses of Parliament, exactly where the car crashed into the pedestrians, on my way to work at Sir William Halcrow and Partners.

However, I used to walk on the other side of the bridge. So that's all right.

On one particular day in 1965 I filed past the catafalque of Sir Winston Churchill in Westminster Hall where the British national hero lay in state.

The liberal Polish convert to Islam was adamant about Islam. It cannot adapt to the modern world without killing Allah. That's because Islam is completely black and white. Either something is halal, permissible, or it is haram, forbidden.

There is also one hadis saying: there are things that are haram and things that are halal and in between there is the zone of uncertainty – do not go there. 

 So that means no critical thinking is allowed for Muslims: no gray areas for them.

But the whole point of the West is the investigation of the gray area, wrestling with the problem of what lies between the permissible and the forbidden.

So, on this Muslim's witness, Islam must be at war with the West, even as it is tempted and corrupted by the cornucopia of the West's riches and gadgets.

So we get to my understanding of history.

The great revolution in the last two hundred years, with the industrial revolution, is that wealth no longer consists of food-growing land. So the great instinct of humans, to defend their patch of land from invaders in necessary border wars, is defunct. Now wealth does not consist in land, nor yet in natural resources; it consists of intangible capital, the ideas and the techniques in men's minds. And everything is negotiable; everything has its price, so you can always pay to get access to resources like food and fuel.

Naturally there has been a huge reaction against this new truth, because we are all primed to believe in Gerald O'Hara's faith in "land, it's the only thing that lasts." So said the proprietor of a cotton slave plantation, an agriculture that rapidly exhausts both land and slave.

Really, socialism is an attempt to return to a lost agricultural Eden. I saw a book at HalfPriceBooks last weekend titled something like American Socialisms. It is a history of the socialist experiments in the US in the first half of the 19th century, New Harmony, Brook Farm, Oneida, etc., the attempts to instantiate the ideas of Fourier and Owens. These were comical attempts to redo agriculture at a moment when agriculture was about to be transformed by the industrial revolution.

And so we get the great 20th century wars. First the two German wars, about what exactly? Germany, the most advanced country in Europe needing living room? For what? The prosperous Germans could buy anything the world had to offer.

Then we got the battle against Communism, a cold war of position and propaganda, that was won by the United States with a few border wars around the periphery of the Communist Bloc.

Now we are shaping up for a war against Islam. And now the jihadis just attacked the mother of parliaments.

We should thank the jihadis. They are, to coin a phrase, sending out a cry for help: Stop us before we kill again!

If they knew what they were doing, they wouldn't be doing minor acts of terror; they would be quietly biding their time until the moment came for the great uprising, what Hardt and Negri call

“Kairòs,” the “moment when a decision of action is made,” for the “extraordinary accumulations of grievances and reform proposals must at some point be transformed by a strong event, a radical insurrectionary demand.”

Well yes, but you wouldn't want to signal it, and teach the West to prepare a defense and a strategy against violent Islamism.

In the history of the last century or so, the century of the Left, the constant demand has been to accommodate the outsiders with neo-feudal politics that betrayed the promise of the market and its culture of trust for the rest of us.

And the good old middle class has acceded to many of the left's demands, even though it has replaced the lean republics of the 19th century with bloated administrative states in the 20th century that have given out the national treasure to organized special interests.

But now, I suspect, we are reaching the moment of truth. Can the west accede to the demands of Islam? Can it accommodate Muslim immigrants without demolishing the idea and the practice of the west? Can we allow the left to champion another outsider group, and force us all to sit around for another fifty years while its members learn the way of the city and the culture of trust?

My feeling is that just as German follies gave us two world wars and Communism a half-century of cold war, we cannot avoid a momentous clash with the Islamic world.

The problem is, as the liberal Polish Muslim admits, there is no common ground between the west and Islam. And since Islam has nothing except oil and gas its strategy is naturally to migrate from the barren lands of Arabia to the rich lands of the west, and then metastasize throughout the host.

But I think that the necessary development of antibodies to Islam in the west will force us to finally deal with the Left, and its vile policy of indulging outsiders in their feudal, pre-bourgeois culture.

Because the only really valid job for government is to protect the people from foreign and domestic enemies.

And there is nothing like threats from knifers and bombers to remind us all of that.

Are We Peasants or Drug Addicts?

Yesterday, reacting to the quandary of Republicans as they try to "repeal and replace" the Obamacare entitlement I argued for a strategy that tries to keep a market going in the cracks between the monster brutalist skyscrapers of the welfare state.

That is because I believe in the 100 year old settled science of Ludwig von Mises, that socialism -- and by extension, the administrative state -- could not work because it could not compute prices.

Put another way, socialistic and administrative programs must fail because they have no mechanism, no feedback loop, to adjust to changing conditions.

Mises himself (I think) argued that the Soviet Union survived as long as it did because, while no genuine prices existed in the Soviet Union, there were reference prices in the outside world. So the Soviet bureaucrats and planners could do their sums using western prices.

So the trick is to preserve the market somewhere in the concrete desert of big government administrative programs, so that when the crash comes we have a beam of light in the darkness to tell us what to do.

Dennis Prager argues instead that the entitlement state is a disease, and that entitlements are an addiction worse than sex drugs and rock-and-roll.

All addictions -- whether to drugs, alcohol, gambling, sex or cigarettes -- are very hard to escape.

There is one addiction, however, that may be more difficult than any other to escape, in part because it is not even regarded as an addiction. It is entitlements addiction, the addiction to getting something for nothing.

Of course, Prager has a point. But I think that he misses the larger point. I believe that the pre-bourgeois mindset properly enjoins the workers and peasants to find a strong patron, adhere to him through thick and thin, and expect to receive scraps from the lord's table.

If you were a peasant in northern Europe your biggest fear was invasion by the nomads from the east. They would kill the men, take the food, and enslave the women. Compared to that the indignities of sucking up to a feudal lord and putting up with his droits de seigneur were minor inconveniences.

The great challenge of our modern era is to help people move from their age-old existence as People of the Subordinate Self that bow to a powerful patron, and become instead People of the Responsible Self that bow to the orders of the market and its prices.

The whole point of the left for the last 200 years is that it says: Oh No! to this program.

Instead the left says: You poor workers and peasants should not have to change from subordination to your liege lord and submit instead to the market. Instead, the left says, We will protect you from the rigors of the market and we will step into the place vacated by the feudal lords when they threw you off the land a couple centuries ago only to dump you into the cities to the slavery of the factory and the time clock.

Really, can you blame the workers and the peasants, and now the immigrants from rural Latin America and the tribal Middle East? It is a wrenching change, the biggest ever, to change from the tried-and-true culture of a tribal or feudal retainer to the responsibility culture of the individual in the city that must adjust to the dictates of the market and believe, against all instinct, that things will turn out all right for the man who dares to swim in the riptides of the market.

But still. Do you think that the average Venezuelan blames the leftist government for his miseries? Or do you think that the average person blames the saboteurs and wreckers, the bakers that are withholding bread from the market?

They talk about the necessity of education, but where are the schools teaching that the market is the royal road to prosperity and that the only wreckers and saboteurs are the politicians and activists blaming the private sector for their own mistakes and follies?