In This School of Life, We Learn...

Those "In This House, We Believe" signs are breeding like rabbits in my rich-bitch liberal neighborhood. So I have finally decided to produce a countersign.

"IN THIS SCHOOL OF LIFE, WE LEARN"

That's what it starts out with, because the delicious thing about the #WeBelieve sign is its pure liberal conceit. As though there was no argument about its facile slogans. But life is a process; we learn from out mistakes as we go along.

"GOVERNMENT IS FORCE"

Hey kids! Notice what happened to United Airlines the other day? They called the cops to eject a paying passenger from an airplane. They called on the government's men with guns, and the only thing the men with guns understand is force. And everyone hates it. United could have solved their little problem with money. Instead they opted for government's "sweet use of force." When you advocate for a new government program you are saying that the only solution is force.

"POLITICS IS DIVISION"

They say that if you put a bunch of Americans into a room to solve a problem they will do it by giving each participant a piece of the solution. But politicians play a different game. Their game is to divide the electorate in two, so that they get the 51% and the rest get nothing.

"SYSTEM IS DOMINATION"

I got this one from lefty rich kids Horkheimer and Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment. Apart from extending identity politics beyond the sacred working class to women and minorities they wrote: "What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men." No kidding!

So, you see, when you combine the government and politics and system you get an unholy brew of force, division, and domination. Sad.

"SCIENCE HAS A PROBLEM"

I mean this in every sense. The first, from F.S.C Northrop is that knowledge begins with a problem. If you don't have a problem, you don't need knowledge or science, or wisdom or anything. Second, in the sense applied by Horkheimer and Adorno above, which the environmentalists understand in their better moments: science easily leads to domination. Third is the unholy combination of science and government. When you combine science and politics you get politics, as in "climate deniers." When you combine science and government you get government and its force, as in H-bombs and bird-killing eco-crucifixes.

"SEX IS AMAZING"

Among the more evolved and educated among us there has grown up a cult of creativity. To participate in an original creation of a work of art, or science, or gadget, or activism, is the highest form of life, and only the best need apply. In fact, of course, everyone, even the meanest among us, can participate in the wonder of creation, just by having children. It is telling that the initiates into the cult of creativity, who I call the People of the Creative Self, rather tend to devalue the ordinary miracle of children. I suspect they are wrong.

"MEANING IS CRITICAL"

David Bohm writes that meaning is just as real as matter and energy. It's just that there is more meaning in a human than in a rock. But meaning is something about which we wrestle every day. That's why Douglas Adams introduced "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything" as a constant theme in his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Meaning is not just critical; it is paradoxical.

"MIGRATION IS INVASION"

You can say that no human is illegal all you want, but migration is a serious business. Ask the folks on the receiving end of the northwestern Europeans that migrated all around the world starting in about 1492. In our time the left has made a scandal out of European migration, calling it colonialism. In other words, for the last 500 years Europeans have been migrating and invading all across the world, and that is bad. But now that the rest of the world wants to migrate to the West migration is good? Explain that to me Sherlock.

 "GOD IS NOT MOCKED"

The guy that invented the notion of "GOD" was a genius, because he encapsulated, for any era, the fundamental mystery about "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." And whatever silly signs we post in front of our homes, whatever silly ideas we post on our blogs, whatever the lying talking points we spout on the nightly news, God is not mocked. What a relief.

The Left's Argument ad Hitler

President Trump's press secretary Sean Spicer got into trouble this week with a Hitler remark. You are not allowed to say that at least Hitler didn't gas Germans. Because the Holocaust. And Marine Le Pen got into trouble by saying that the real France was not the France that send the Jews to the gas chamber.

We moderns like to attach guilt to whole nations, e.g., Germans for killing the Jews. It's almost impossible to counter, because it's a "when did you stop beating your wife" question. Just try: "hey, the Germans weren't all bad" on your liberal friend and see where it gets you.

Personally, I feel that it is not quite true that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. I'd say that assigning collective guilt is the mark of a true monster.

And, of course the worst of the worst were not the Nazis and the fascists but the Commies in the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China. They killed far more than Hitler's Germany, and practically took their nations back to the Stone Age. But somehow nobody is trying to cover the Russian and Chinese people with collective guilt.

Why is that?

It is because you can't win when you are up against the cultural elite. They can name and shame you and you can't name and shame them. The Russians and the Chinese are not collectively guilty because the cultural elite does not want to smear them. Hey, at least Lenin and Mao were trying to do something about evil capitalism. Or something.

But here is my approach to the Hitler smear.

The people turn to idiots like Hitler when the usual idiots have failed.

That's how Hitler got his chance in Germany. Here's how.

First, the usual idiots got Germany into a two-front war, with France and Russia, in 1914.

Then, the usual idiots lost the war.

Then, the usual idiots in Germany after the war failed to cut government spending to match the reduced tax base of 1919 and thereafter, resulting in hyperinflation.

Then, the usual idiots in Britain, France and the United States tried to get back to the old gold parity, forcing a nasty deflation on the world.

Then, the usual idiots applied a ton of band-aids to the problem and ended up with the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression.

At some point, the people of Germany decided: enough of these usual idiots. Let's try this Hitler chappie.

Sorry, Germans, that was a bad choice. But I am sorry that the usual idiots decided that they had to blame every last German for their mistake in order to cover up their own crimes against humanity.

It's not that different from the present.

In the US the usual idiots subsidized home mortgages, setting up a decades long boom and bubble in house prices, which crashed in 2008. And that really screwed the average middle class, not to mention young people.

In the US the usual idiots got us into a stupid war in the Middle East.

In the US the usual idiots thought that the solution to the crash was more financial regulation, more health care regulation, more environmental regulation and a war on college men as rapists. So we got a decade of sub-par growth, and heightened racial and other tensions. And sharply higher health care costs.

So now we have Trump.

The point is that when the usual idiots blame the people for electing a Trump or a Hitler, they are missing the point.

The problem is not the people. The problem is the usual idiots. They are the governing class, so when things go wrong, it is their fault.

OK, the problem is not just the usual idiots; the problem is also that the people keep voting for the usual idiots that offer them free stuff, that propose a way out of our problems without it costing anything, that warp the economy in an attempt to avoid dealing with the problems that come from taking 35 percent of GDP and spending it on government programs, and handing out subsidies and special favors left and right.

Imagine the United States as a nation where the people said: no free pensions; no free health care; no free education; no free nothing. I know. It is impossible to imagine.

But when the voters feel they are stuck in a corner, like a rat, they have two options. They can curl up and die, or they can strike out and hope for the best.

But as long as our liberal friends can get people to cringe when they depart from the received wisdom on Hitler, on race, on gender, on gays, on immigration, they will keep doing it.

And so the only thing left for the people to do is to elect a Trump. Or a Hitler.

United Airlines and the Sweet Use of Force

Everyone is having a grand old time about United Airlines calling the cops to drag a passenger off one of its airplanes, because he wouldn't give up his seat as ordered.

A lot of people are saying "there oughta be a law." Or that airlines should give up overbooking. But that is stupid. United Airlines has been punished enough already. And every other airline has taken note.

I want to talk about that charming phrase of Deirdre McCloskey: "the sweet use of force." This in a series of books about how the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years is due to the, probably accidental, absence of force. The Great Enrichment came from innovation that government failed to smother in its cradle.

Now it seems that at the Chicago gate at which United Flight 4311 was overbooked, there weren't enough volunteers for bumping at the price offered by United officials at the gate. But the airline just had to get four United employees to the destination so they could fly an aircraft the following morning. So the officials, instead of raising the ante, looked in the rule book and discovered that they had the legal power to remove people from the airplane by force.

So, with the sweet use of force they solved their little problem and got their United crew on the flight so that they could report for duty at the destination airport next morning.

But the point of capitalism, of markets, of money, of prices is that you can get things done without force.

And that is the most amazing and wonderful thing in the world.

Force always looks tempting to the man or woman that has men with guns at their command. But force is a very blunt weapon. And humans really hate being on the receiving end of force.

Now, I understand that when it comes to their own money, most everyone is a Scrooge. They don't want to spend it on other people.

But that doesn't change the wonderful thing about money that it removes the need for force.

Let us imagine a blissful socialist community in, say, New Harmony, Indiana. The blissful communitarians decide that David Dao is going to be responsible for cleaning out the pigsties. But David says no.

Now what? Does the community just try to persuade David? Does it start a whispering campaign among the women to name and shame him into obedience? Does it send him to New Harmony jail until he reconsiders? Or does it put the dirty job of pigsty cleaning up for bid? As they used to say in northern England: "where there's muck there's brass." Brass means money for those of you unacquainted with northern English.

But wait! There is no money in New Harmony! So force is the only option.

Fortunately Chicago is not New Harmony. Money is permitted in the Windy City, although it can't be doing its job very well, given the level of murder in the Windy City. In the case of the United flight waiting at the gate in Chicago money is an option. What would persuade four people to give up their seats? Would it be $1,000 each? $1,500? $2,000 and a year's membership at the United Club lounge? Whatever the price, I am sure it is less than the price United Airlines is going to pay for the sweet use of force when money, money, money would have solved the problem in a heartbeat.

All you big government fans, please copy. Your policy of force looks cheap to you, but it costs a lot more in the long run.

Return to Slavery in Islamic Lands

Just this week the usually lefty suspects are reporting slave markets in Libya: BBC, Aljazeera, Guardian. The deal seems to be that migrants from sub-Saharan Africa are held for ransom in jails and put to work for no pay. If no ransom is forthcoming, then the slaves are killed.

We've already had the case of Boko Harum kidnapping high-school girls and distributing them to their soldiers as concubines. Not to mention the ISIS policy of using humans in conquered cities in whatever way seems appropriate to the local commander.

Now it happens that I have been doing a bit of reading on the subject of conquest and slavery over the years, and it is obvious that slavery and concubinage were ubiquitous in the good old days. Clearly, in the hunter-gatherer age, a tribe ceased to exist if it didn't have enough young men to defend its territory, and the surviving women and children would be distributed around as concubines and slaves.

Feudal Europe did not have slaves as such, but plenty of people were serfs, and it was OK to enslave non-Europeans and/or non-Christians.

Oh, and let's not forget the women slaves from Circassia that were sold at Kaffa in the Crimea and distributed to harems all over the Middle East.

Then we have the Vikings, who ran a jolly old slave market in Dublin, Ireland a thousand years ago. These slaves would have been Brits captured in autumn raid up the rivers of Britain. And the Vikings also ran slaves down the rivers in what is now Russia.

The remarkable thing about plantation slavery in sugar and cotton, which is held to be the original sin of the USA, is that it became a scandal at all. Because slavery has been ubiquitous down the ages.

Why did plantation slavery become a scandal? Was it because the old gentry in Britland didn't like the jumped-up nouveau-riche owners of West Indian slave plantations of the 18th century and decided to teach them a lesson? Or was it because capitalism and markets really don't like force and subjection?

What is interesting is that the movements opposed to capitalism have all tended to return to slavery and feudalism. The great socialist empires of the 20th century, the Soviet Union and Maoist China, used slavery on an unimaginable scale. And all the big-government schemes of the progressives involve high levels of human compulsion, what I call neo-feudalism.

So it really isn't surprising that the latest reactionary movement opposing modern global markets and freedom, the Islamic reaction, is virulently pro-slavery and is reviving the cultural and economic order of the European order prior to the Peace of Westphalia, that ended the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648.

So that when the Soviets invaded Germany in 1945 they only raped the women for a season, and in Berlin for a month. Oh wait. They sent millions back to the slave labor camps in Siberia.

My point is that there is something about capitalism that finds a problem with slavery, and I don't think it is because "we" are more evolved or moral than our ancestors. It is something more mysterious.

But as soon as capitalism gets pushed back, out come the slavers again, and out come the slave markets.

Why is that? Is it because capitalism rolls back the frontiers of power? Is it simply because slavery does not pay? Is it because under capitalism it pays to treat everyone as a potential business partner? Is it because under capitalism people are focused on making money rather than on accumulating power?

I don't know. But I think it is telling that the Great Islamic Reaction is featuring slaves and slave markets.

The Problem of Women and Politics

One of the things that you are not supposed to notice is that the rise of big government has coincided with the enfranchising of women. Before the 20th century, government was almost exclusively in the war business. But in the last century it has been in the taking-care-of-people business as well.

This is not surprising, when you think back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. The men were almost exclusively involved in protecting the border of the tribal territory. Then women were almost exclusively involved in taking care of everything else.

Naughty Steve Sailer refers to this in a piece about snooker. Billiards is almost exclusively a male sport, but now the champion woman snooker player is competing with men. But can she, or any woman, really play with the best men? Sailer recalls playing pool with an expert.

I had a boss in the marketing research business who was a really good billiards player. But his superiority over me was overwhelmingly mental in that he could see many shots ahead. We’d have conversations like this:

“Steve, why did you sink the 4 ball?”

“Uh, because I could, George.”

“But what does it leave you?”

“Uh [considering the question for the first time] … the 10 ball!”

“Sure. But what will that leave you?”

[Blank look on my face]

“You’ll next try for the 12 or the 2, and you’ll miss, and leave the cue ball set up for me with a slam dunk on the 9, then the 13, then the 11, then the 3, 7, uh, 5, 1, and the 8 ball. As soon as you chose to sink the 4, it was Game Over.”

Now it seems to me that this skill is exactly the skill that a military commander has to have. Military formations are sorta like billiard balls, at least in the Newtonian sense that military affairs, like billiards, are all about force, action and reaction, and so forth.

Sailer imagines that women excel in a different form of cause and effect.

I imagine there are women who can hold a similarly complex chain of social reasoning in their heads — “But if Sally tells Jane what Joe told her about Mike’s opinion of what Melissa said about Mary’s cousin Al …”

That sort of complex relationship dynamics, we all know, is not a major skill of men.

So a man's life tends to gravitate towards assembling the resources needed to defend the border, a business at which they are already well-programmed. A woman's life tends to gravitate towards assembling the resources to help her care for her loved ones. That is what she is programmed for.

So government, over the centuries, was really a male thing, and government was primarily about the problem of the border, and the problem of rebels within the border.

But women are not interested in that. They just ask: "Mr. President, is it safe?" and then return to important matters, like keeping the kids alive, maintaining her standing with the neighborhood women, and dealing with an end-of-life mother.

Now that women have the vote, it is not surprising that government has gravitated recently towards the woman's view of things, and got into the business of supplying resources for women to look after their loved ones.

You can see the problem here. A government with the resources to defend the border can use the resources to deal with troublesome regime opponents. A government with the resources to help women care for their loved ones can use the resources in a whole host of pet programs that reward the government's supporters rather than help people.

The great question of the modern age is how to keep government limited on the defense front to issues that really do involve the defense of the realm, and how to keep government limited on the domestic front to issues that really help people.

And I don't know how to do that.

Gorsuch Confirmed, So What?

Neil Gorsuch was just confirmed to be Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court by a vote of 54-45. So that's all right.

We know why the Democrats have to fight these Supreme Court nominations to the knife. It's because their pet issues -- abortion, gay marriage -- have been decided by the Supreme Court, and not by a bipartisan majority in Congress. So the composition of the Supreme Court is of vital importance to secular-believing liberals.

It all seemed so sensible and advanced a century ago when the Progressive movement came up with the idea of the "living constitution." Of course, that was then, when total government spending was less than 10% of GDP, whereas now it is 35% of GDP and very likely more.

The truth is that we are somewhere near the high-water mark of the great progressive tide and sooner or later it will start to recede. We can't really deal with more government spending, because it chokes off the natural workings of the economy. Yet we can't cut anything, from Social Security to government employee pensions, because nothing gets people to the polls like someone cutting their benefits.

So liberals are going to be on defense, protecting their privileges, and it will get worse before it gets better. That's because all the people displaying the "In This House We Believe" in the Liberal Commandments signs from Karen Joiner do not understand that what they are doing. They do not understand that all the Liberal Commandments amount to the legislation of liberal morality. They do not understand that their secular commandments are a violation of the separation of church and state. They do not understand that government is a very blunt instrument to use in enforcing morality.

They do not understand that the reason for limited government is to reduce the number of issues over which people can fight, so that we can avoid civil war.

Look at the top item on the list: Black Lives Matter. Just what is the government supposed to do about that? Stop police brutality? Or stop gangbangers killing other blacks? And what are we going to do about the fact that most black children don't have fathers, not in a practical sense of having a mother and a father in the house? And what are we going to do about the fact that government education serves the upper-middle class best and the poor worst?

And anyway, what are we going to do about the travails of the white working class, suffering elevated deaths from drugs, drink and suicide for 30 years while nobody noticed?

Our liberal friends do not understand that the bill for a century of progressive politics is coming due, and it ain't gonna be pretty.

The problem is that just about everything liberals have done over the last century is evil, as in identity politics; stupid, as in big government entitlements; or wrong, as in all the regulation and administrative ukase that benefits special interests.

The usual way of solving such problems is through the collapse of the current civilization.

Tell me it ain't so, Justice Gorsuch.

Democrats Ride the Tiger of Progressive Rage

Today the Senate Republicans voted to change Senate rules to end the Senate filibuster for US Supreme Court nominations. This was done after the Senate voted not to end debate on the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the court.

On the Drudge Report there is a mushroom cloud, as in "nuclear option."

It is not elected Democrats that are pushing the filibuster; it is progressive activists.

Apparently in progressive circles there is a strong belief that Republicans will pay for this vote to end the filibuster. But, as Jim Geraghty writes, maybe not. The progressives predicted doom and gloom for Republicans when they refused to bring Merrick Garland's nomination to a vote in 2016. And nothing happened. Actually less than nothing happened because Hillary Clinton's campaign barely mentioned the Garland nomination, the Republicans kept control of Congress and the American people elected Donald Trump.

Apparently, the Democratic rage at and consistent "Borking" of conservative Republican nominations to the Supreme Court is all about one thing and one thing only.

Abortion.

That's what Kristan Hawkins writes.

I suppose that is true. But it seems crazy.

The thing is that if the Supreme Court were to vacate the Roe v. Wade ruling it would not make much difference, because Roe v. Wade was a preemption of state laws. If liberals want abortion they can have it, in New York, in California, and wherever Democrats and liberals are gathered together and wear pussy hats.

So the progressives are getting all excited about nothing.

Meanwhile, we ought to get back to legislating changes in the law in the legislatures and untangling legal problems in the courts, rather than using the courts as a way for the elite to short-circuit the legislative process and implement its moral vision without consulting and persuading the broad American people.

But that brings us back to the Democrats. They are riding the tiger of progressive rage and hoping that they don't get thrown off and eaten by the electoral process.

Because ordinary Americans that don't listen to NPR and don't read the New York Times live in a different world from the religious cult we call "progressivism" with its sacraments of activism and peaceful protest, and I suspect that Democrats will continue to lose at the ballot box. That's because ordinary people don't like street action and heightened political strife.

I doubt if ordinary people understand that it is they that pay the price when politics transforms itself into street violence and ultimately civil war. But they know that they don't like the sound of political war drums.

Always in the back of my mind is Peter Turchin's Ages of Discord in which he notes that the "political stress index" in the US is soaring just like it did in the years before the Civil War broke out in 1861.

Today's elimination of the Supreme Court filibuster is just one more flashing red light telling us that all is not well in the United States, that both sides of the partisan divide are cruisin' for a bruisin'.

According to Turchin the present divide started with the election of Ronald Reagan, so you could say that it started when people like me decided that they couldn't take the progressive bullshit any more.

You can see that the progressive pushback ever since has been based on the Deplorables argument so thoughtfully advanced by Hillary Clinton in 2016.

How dare those Deplorables dare to oppose our glorious progressive vision!

Well, I would only tell my progressive friends that politics is a very blunt instrument, and that the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years that has brought the world's poor from age-old starvation to an astonishing competence has occurred in the face of non-stop leftist prophecy that the End is Near, the poor would suffer, and that only the political hegemony of the educated, evolved, compassionate people could stop it.

In other words, the progressives get it wrong. Politics is not the answer. Period.

And until progressives finally understand that -- and don't hold your breath -- the poor will suffer.