"Whatever the Left Touches, It Ruins"

My text today is from Dennis Prager, the radio host, writing about the descent of late-night comedy from Johnny Carson to Stephen Colbert and his recent gay-themed comment about President Trump's mouth.

The left ruins everything it touches, writes Dennis:

The universities, the news media, the entertainment media, the fine arts, the courts, the high schools, and the elementary schools... all ruined wherever leftism has achieved dominance.

Why is that?

The answer, of course, goes all the way back to the French Revolution (and before that to Rousseau and no doubt to Plato) and the idea that government can be salvific, and save society. In President Obama's words, supposedly borrowed from Martin Luther King Jr., we are talking about using government to bend the arc of history towards justice.

Hey, Barack! What Martin Luther King Jr. actually said was "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."

But this means using government force and political power to change human minds. Unfortunately, government force and political power are probably only good for breaking things.

There is a role for force and power, as in breaking up racist accommodation laws preventing blacks from sitting at the same lunch counter as whites, or anti-Semitic policies preventing Jews from attending pricey private schools, as Ben Stein writes. But when it comes to racial quotas and reeducation classes, you pretty soon get into the weeds.

And when you mobilize so-called "peaceful protesters" into violent antifa mobs that shout down and threaten conservative speakers, then you are bending the arc of history towards injustice.

That is why conservative politics has concentrated on limiting government -- because the more force the more injustice -- and designing government institutions from the view that politics is civil war by other means.

I mean by that to design government institutions so that they function to encourage people to compromise their differences rather than take them to the proof of civil war. The point of the complicated US constitutional system is to make it very difficult for one faction to seize all the powers of government and impose its vision on the rest of America.

Case in point: Obamacare. You may think that socialized health care is a good and just thing, and "single-payer" the best way to get there. But there are plenty of people that disagree. So if you pass a health care law that forces everyone into the one single government plan, you are forcing people to pay for something they think is wrong. Those people experience the wonders of Obamacare as injustice.

So the question becomes: how pressing, how important is health care that you must force people to enroll in and pay for your plan and risk their anger and resentment? Or how important is intersectionality that you must name and shame everyone around you that fails to toe the ideological line as a racist, sexist, bigot?

My answer is: not that important.

As you know, I define government as:

an armed minority, occupying territory, and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters.

In the limited government case, the supporters are merely the armed forces that protect the borders of the territory, and thus nobody except the soldiers and the veterans look to government for rewards for their support. But once you get away from the limited government it is Katy bar the door, because there is no limit to the rewards the government can offer to win the support of the voters.

But the real case against big government comes after the program has been passed, and after the government has won the support of new supporters with its new rewards. And this case is quite simple: what happens when the world changes?

Let us take a simple case: suppose there is a new life-saving procedure in health care. What do we do? Do we increase funding to provide the new procedure to the people? Do we reduce the use of other procedures? Do we privilege certain people with certain conditions to get the new procedure? How do we get the bureaucrats to get off their backsides to write the new regulations? And how to we get the politicians to write new laws to adjust the health care system to the new reality?

The science was settled on this a century ago when Ludwig von Mises wrote that socialism could not work because it could not compute prices. You can see this applies to any government program that is trying to avoid the discipline of the price system. And then 70 years ago F.A. Hayek said that administrative government could not work because a thousand bureaucrats could not outperform a million consumers and producers. In today's language we would say that the bandwidth of government is too narrow to respond effectively to changing conditions. And then there is the theory of "regulatory capture" developed by George Stigler and others that the regulators of all regulated industries end up being owned by the industry they regulate.

But there is a bigger problem that just the give-and-take of daily adjustment to the normal changes of the world. It is this.

What happens if you are an oil state and you have committed your oil revenues to a ton of vote-winning programs and the price of oil drops by 50 percent? We see that in Venezuela right now. What happens is that the government dare not do the sensible thing and cut government spending to fit its reduced circumstances, because that would prompt riots in the streets. Instead it prints money, crashes the economy, and ends up in exactly the same place as if it cut spending, with riots in the streets.

This is the real reason why government should be limited to the basics. It is almost impossible to cut government spending. In fact, I propose that the only spending governments ever dare to cut is military spending after the end of a war.

In fact, I propose a new and profound principle of government. No government should start a program unless history has shown that it is possible to cut such a program.

You can see why it is true what Dennis Prager says, that "whatever the left touches, it ruins." The reason is that the left has got everything wrong. It thinks it can make the world better with force, both the force of government spending and the force of government naming and shaming.

And it will get worse before it gets better.

The Three-part Identity of the British Conservative Party

In Britain they just had local elections and the anti-EU party UKIP got nearly wiped out. Does this mean the end of Brexit and eventually Trumpism?  Not at all, writes John O'Sullivan. It just means that the Conservative Party has pulled together the three strings of its bow and will likely score a blow-out in the elections for the House of Commons in June.

The wise heads all thought that Brexit would divide the Tory Party, but in fact they were wrong again. What Brexit does is bring the Tories home to their most glorious successes.

Toryism has three overlapping identities. It is the party of economic freedom and enterprise — Mrs. Thatcher is the purest symbol of that identity. It is the party of British nationalism — Churchill and Disraeli are the greatest figures in that tradition. Its third strand, however, is a more complicated one: It’s the party that always seeks to interpret, defend, and advance the interests of the British state in a skeptical and non-partisan way — Lord Salisbury and Sir Robert Peel are the most distinguished exemplars of that view.

The point is that the European Union is hostile to all three Tory identities. It is protectionist and opposed to economic freedom; it is globalist and opposed to simple patriotism; it is utterly committed to its agenda of the centralized Euro state, and unable to deal with critique and skepticism.

So when the Tories took Britain into Europe they lost the support of the patriotic working class, and up to 1970 the Tories had got the votes of one third of the working class.

When Nigel Farage started UKIP he was, as befitted a stockbroker, proposing to get out of Europe on "economic freedom and enterprise" grounds. But over the years UKIP has morphed into a Trumpist kind of party, nationalist and also protective of working class support for the welfare state, and UKIP has moved from being a drain on Tory votes to being a competitor for white working class votes in the old Labour heartlands of the north of England.  The North used to be the industrial powerhouse of Britain, from cotton to mines to steel to manufacturing, and now is suffering just like the US Rust Belt that elected Donald Trump.

Of course, the three identities of Toryism are, in many ways, contradictory. How can you be all for freedom and economic growth and still profess the nationalism of British is Best (or America First)? How can you be all for the nation state and still be skeptical like the Lord Salisbury who is famous for this quote:

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe the doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent; if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require to have their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of common sense.

There are other, equally delicious, Salisbury quotes here.

Of course our modern experts, the climate scientists, make the old experts look like pikers. To the climate community nothing is wholesome, or innocent, or safe! Not until you submit to the advice of the climate 97%.

But hey, let's not be afraid of contradiction. That was the whole point of Hegel. It is through the contradiction of opposites that we get to the next level in a synthesis of contradictions.

Now in Britain, the opposition to the tripartite Tory identity is split. The lefties go for the Labour Party and the globalists go for the Social Democrats, with each getting about 20 percent of the vote.

But in the US the lefties and the globalists are all in the Democratic Party, which means that the GOP could never get the blowout that the Conservatives are expected to get in Britain in the next election. Maybe that's a good thing, because blow-outs, while very exhilarating, tend not to be good news in the long term for the winning party.

I must say that I like the idea of a political party that is for freedom, nation, and skepticism. If you ask me we need more of it, particularly on the skepticism about experts front.

The Horror of Art for Identity's Sake

I was at the Boca Raton art museum yesterday, and came away unsatisfied. I could look at a glass show, including a big installation of glass night-sticks from an anti-Apartheid artist from South Africa and a wall full of stemware inspired by great literature. As the museum website says:

Works included in the Glasstress Boca Raton exhibition incorporate performance, video, interactive media, design, and even video games, and delve into substantial content, from race, identity, and colonialism to themes of science and nature and issues of biological diversity, global hunger, and climate change.

Or I could see an exhibition of rich American ex-pat artists from the 19th century.

Then I went home and stumbled over an article on the fatuity of "identity art," from an Australian! In Australia, you see, government is funding identity art by the bucket load, and that, according to Reilly Smethurst, diminishes people, for it celebrates them as they are rather than what they might be. Identity art and identity celebration is, in other words, patronizing, as in patriarchy. It's what you experience in Australia when you visit some aboriginal rock-art site and view the ubiquitous map of Australia showing the boundaries of the aboriginal tribal territories. How nice, to celebrate aboriginal Australia except that the time to do that was 300 years ago when the European voyagers declared Australia terra nullius and open to colonization and domination and hegemony by Europeans.

In a way, our times are terrifying times. It is plain that the old order is coming to an end, collapsing on its internal contradictions, as the Marxists used to say before the Soviet Union collapsed from its internal contradictions.

In art, I suppose, the next thing will be the 21st century version of the Armory Show, or the Salon des Refusés. But I hesitate to imagine what that might look like, since art and culture, in a way unimaginable a century or a century and a half ago, are bound tight into the ruling-class culture that right now patronizingly celebrates the identity of ruling-class-defined marginalized groups just the way they are. And every art curator is a Good Little Girl that has graduated from one of our modern finishing schools in identity politics and culture, also known as universities. How will artists be edgy and new when the ruling class celebrates the conceit of its own comfortable nostalgia of edginess and newness?

In politics, where I pretend to have some kind of knowledge, I would like to think that the next Big Thing is the middle class rebelling against the coalition of the rich kids, the "activists" of the last 170 years who believe in their creativity, and the underclass, the people that don't think of themselves as human agents.

These latter ones, immortalized as the People of the Subordinate Self in my reductive Three Peoples theory, are the people experienced by the prison physician Theodore Dalrymple, e.g., "the knife went in," according to a convicted murderer. What? All on its own? And lately by Kevin D. Williamson telling the story of the eviction of his tenant, now in eviction court explaining that "my check didn't come." And that's why the renter couldn't pay the rent this month or last month or the month before that.

I'd say that it is time for the People of the Responsible Self to rise up in a rebellion of responsibility. It really is too bad that ordinary responsible people have to pay for themselves, and also at the point of a gun for the irresponsible. It is time for the two century war against the responsible, waged by the rich-kid sons and daughters of the responsible using the subordinate workers and peasants and marginalized as their cannon fodder, to be turned back and demolished in ignominious defeat.

It is time for a glorious Age of Agency, a celebration of responsibility, in which the irresponsible will be cared for, not at the point of a gun or the naming and shaming antics of social justice warriors, but through the kindness and charity of ordinary responsible people that are glad to look after those less responsible than themselves, but that bridle at being forced to do so.

As for what an Art of Agency would look like, I'll admit that I don't have a clue. But I have an idea that if a dull old geezer like me can think of its possibility, some young punk is actually doing it. And it is that faith that sustains me in these dark fin-de-siècle days of political correctness and identity art.

Don't Give Me Your "Governing Well" Rubbish

Yesterday I was reading a piece about the liberal meltdown in the aftermath of the Trump accession; it was a piece by Roger Kimball at American Greatness, titled "Trump Critics Exude Desperate Political Nihilism."
And then it suddenly struck me.

I am am talking about the deep reason why liberals have gone ape-you-know-what since the Trump ascension.

The key is in Roger's quote from Peter Wehner, a kind of conservative. Never mind the maudlin meanderings of the New Yorker’s David Remnick that Trump’s election was

nothing less that 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.

Golly, reading that you get to wonder that maybe liberals actually believe their lies!

But that was not what really caught my attention. David Remnick is not a serious person. What gave me a sense of epiphany were the words of Peter Wehner.

What troubles many of us… who have devoted much of our lives to politics is that we have a president who doesn’t believe in the the higher purpose of his office, which is grounded in the conviction that governing well can advance human good.

OK, Petie boy, I got it! Those loaded words: "grounded" "conviction" "governing well" "human good." You are using these words as magic incantations, a magic spell. I get it.

So Roger Kimball is wrong. The Trump are not desperate nihilists; they are religious believers, driven to madness by the profaning of  their sacred relics.

The trouble with Trump, the reason that he has provoked such wailing and gnashing of teeth in Liberal Land, is that his ascension to the presidency strips the holy aura that every ruling class -- and particularly this ruling class -- conjures up to cover over the ugly nakedness of politics and power and elevate its rule into a noble, even a holy calling. Trump's crudities reveal government for what it is: grubby, incompetent, and not requiring any particularly refined talent or intellectual training. And that cannot be allowed! It is heresy! It is sacrilege! It is not to be endured, as my girl Rosalind says in As You Like It.

And so the Trump critics feel compelled to Resist! and do something, anything to restore the aura, to cover the blotched nakedness of their crumbling faith with the gorgeous shimmer of high fashion and good tailoring. That is why they have turned themselves into whirling Dervishes. It is a desperate attempt to bring back the exaltation they felt when celebrating the First Communion, marching in the pivotal first "peaceful protest" of their political lives in the confirmation of their lefty faith.

If Trump can be president, our sacerdotal class realizes, then anybody can be president, and politics is forever stripped of all the transcendental qualities with which that we have adorned it. Politics and “governance” is then just routine rewarding of loyal supporters, routine men with guns pushing other people around, routine tax collectors sticking up the populace with the demand that Uncle Sam and state and local governments get their 33% before anyone gets to go through the drive-thru at McDonald’s to get a well-earned sundae.

And what is governing well to advance the human good reducing to? At the federal level it is pensions and health care for seniors; at the state and local level it is pensions for government workers.

So your pretentious words are rubbish, Peter Wehner! There is no such thing as “governing well.” There is only a brief pause, every now and again, between long years of governing badly. There is no such thing as a government that “can advance human good.” There is only government, that in brief shining moments between centuries of robbery and plunder, does something completely out of the ordinary. almost by accident, like writing the US Constitution, and stops meddling, for one blessed hour, with ordinary people going about their ordinary innocent lives.

And that is enough of an exception to show that the exception proves the rule. I am thinking of my rule, that Government is Force.

You know what ordinary government is like? It is siccing the IRS on the government’s opponents; it is inventing an excuse to use the government's intelligence agencies to spy on the opposition. It is branding the free speech of your opponents as "hate speech." It is excusing the excesses of violent mobs as "mostly peaceful protest." Nobody can say, after an administration that sicced the IRS on his opponents -- and not real mobilized, weaponized opponents but a bunch of naive sincere Tea Party groups that wanted to do politics according to the prescribed rules -- no serious person can talk about the presidency and the “higher purpose of his office, which is grounded in the conviction that governing well can advance human good.”

All we can talk about is that government is force, and the first principle of honesty about politics is to notice that the people attracted to politics, from Remnick to Wehner to Podesta to Rove to Obama to Trump, are people that are interested in power.

As opposed to most people, who are not that interested in power.

Once we recognize the truth about government and politics, that government is force, whether it is forcing people to contribute to other peoples' pensions, other peoples' health care, other peoples' education, and forcing people to relieve the poor, and that politicians are people who are interested in power, then the blather of “higher purpose of his office, which is grounded in the conviction that governing well can advance human good” is revealed as a lame apology for a philosophy of force. Indeed, it is the moment to go straight to Edmund Burke and remember his indictment of that notable attempt to found a Republic of Virtue (read: advancing human good) in the French Revolution.

All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off... [and] at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.

He is arguing that it is not government power that makes the nation, but everything else. Because the end of state power is nothing but the gallows.

When governmental apologists make the argument that advancing the human good can be achieved by "governing well," they obviously have not read Deirdre McCloskey, who twinkles about "the sweet use of force."

On the contrary, I would say that if you want to truly "advance the human good" then you should be working on ways to improve the human condition, whether it is relieving the poor, helping old people, educating children, recovering drug users, assisting abandoned women, doing everything related to human community beyond the cash nexus, in other words the things we do together, without the use of force.

You might take a look at the 19th century, when ordinary people conjured up a universe of mutual-aid associations, when ordinary people paid for their kids' education, when government had not put a thumb on the scales of employer-employee relations, and when government had not transformed child labor by forcing children to work 5 days per week in government child-custodial facilities without pay.

You see, my Big Idea of "governing well" is that we all put our heads together to discover new ways to live and work together without getting government into the mix. And the first thing we do, aside from the usual thing about the lawyers, is to say that people interested in power need not apply.

The Wages of Narrative

As I was traveling from Seattle to Fort Lauderdale yesterday I saw (but fortunately did not hear) on CNN the sainted Hillary Clinton in an interview. The chyron said that she was now considered herself part of the "Resistance."

Oh please!

Actually, I suppose it makes a grim sort of sense -- and I do not mean in the sense that everything about Hillary Clinton is grim.

We have reached a moment when the idea of "narrative," the precipitate of the left's misreading of modern philosophy, is not just everything, it's the only thing.

The point of modern philosophy issues from the realization that you cannot put your finger on the really real. It starts with Descartes trying to doubt everything, continues with Hume showing that you cannot prove cause and effect, and continues with Kant and his realization that it is the mind that constructs an image of reality, a theory of the world, through the sense impressions it processes.

Then the left extended the idea from philosophy to politics, and declared that, always and everywhere, the powerful construct a false theory of the world to justify their unjust rule.

The left was right about that. Of course the ruling class tells lies to justify its rule and to bathe in a comfortable story of how it got to rule.

Today we have a world in which the left is the ruling class. It is the left's lies that justify the ruling class and its right to rule. Now the left's narrative of resistance has become the ruling class's narrative of power.

In that narrative an avant-garde of educated, evolved elitists advocate for and protect traditionally marginalized peoples from the hegemony and exploitation and oppression of privileged white males, and that justifies their political power and hegemony.

You can't argue with success. That narrative got the cadre of educated, evolved elitists all the way from the comfort of a privileged childhood to ideological hegemony and political mastery. Even though most of these elitists are educated white males or educated white females born to privilege and numerous connections to the powerful.

Right now the ruling class feels rocked back on its heels because a political neophyte beat their candidate in a normal "change" election. And now they must form a "Resistance" against the fascist power that oppresses them. What planet are they on?

First, liberals and lefties are the ruling class; it is their self-serving narrative that is the water that all we fish must swim in. So liberals and lefties should realize that many of us would find the taste of that water foul and unhealthy and determine to change the water.

Second, the most normal thing in the world is for voters to change party after two terms with the same president.

Third, all government is a train wreck. That's why rulers pay bribed apologists to construct a narrative that makes it all out to be a glorious victory. Unfortunately even with the best apologists in the world it becomes harder and harder as time goes by to persuade people with the fiction that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. 

Fourth, all government is force. People on the receiving end of force, whether black homeboys in the 'hood chased around by racist policemen or conservative student journalists in a liberal university, really hate it.

Fifth, the central argument of the left, that capitalists and the bourgeoisie and white men in general are monstrous oppressors like the feudal barons of old, is a lie. Simply put, the capitalists and the bourgeoisie and white men in general are not that interested in power. What do capitalists do? They retire and devote themselves to philanthropy. What does the bourgeoisie do? It gives workers the vote. What do white men do? They feel guilty about the race and gender crimes that the left scrapes up to intimidate them and give women and minorities affirmative action and welfare.

Sixth, and perhaps most important, is that power and force are not that important any more. The simplest illustration is the fall in violent human death, from 500 per 100,000 per year in hunter-gatherer society to 50 per 100,000 per year in agricultural society to 5 per 100,000 per year in capitalist society. Why did this happen. I simply believe that less force is needed today that in former times.

We live in a society where price and trade are lubricants that reduce the need for force. 

But the left is a movement that insists that, on the contrary, more force is needed. We tried that, in the Soviet Union and in China, and it led to mass murder and mass poverty. It is leading to mass murder and poverty in Venezuela today.

Why can't the left see that? It is because in their world narrative is everything. It is the narrative of inevitable victory that sustains an army through trial and setback, and that every army commander knows how to sustain. And it is the simple philosophy of the worker Nicholas Higgins in Mrs. Gaskell's North and South. For him the only remedy for workers like him is to fight the bosses.

And so the dullest woman in America reminds the world why she should never be president, by assuring us that she is down with the "Resistance."

We know, we have always known, that Hillary Clinton just does not get it.

On Political Lies and the Necessary Enemy

Notice the big thing about the current Cold Civil War in America? Each side accuses the other of lying.

Any liberal screed about Donald Trump will say that he lies. Of course he does. He is telling the white working class what it wants to hear. And any conservative worth his salt will say that liberals have been lying about everything since the dawn of time, or at least the New Deal.

But I would like to say to both sides: what planet are you on? All politics is about lying, at all levels. Politicians running for office lie, because the voters will not put up with the truth. Politicians in office lie because the people will not allow that all government is a controlled crash, and that failure and scandal go with government as bread goes with butter.

Of course, sometimes the lie problem gets bigger than normal. That's when the lies from your own side start to prick your ideological bubble. I'd say that this is a bigger problem for liberals, because liberals are protected from reality by the ruling class's ideological hegemony enfored through the mainstream media, education, and entertainment.

That's why liberals are beside themselves after the Trump win in November; they were utterly unprepared for the normal process where the White House changes party after two terms with the same guy.

So here is a piece by a liberal about liberal melancholy (from Freud, of course):

The real purpose of the Trump-Russia scandal is indeed to “save the world,” but not in the sense liberals think. For it allows liberals to sustain the illusion that their worldview still corresponds to reality, to avoid confronting the disquieting truth that the world as they knew it no longer exists, and that Trump himself is the bloviating, pumpkin-hued harbinger of its death.

But amusingly, the reality that he finds punctured is the "age of Third-Way liberalism, of technocratically managed economic growth through the promotion of interconnected markets, the free flow of financial capital, and deepening international trade," and this has created "a rising tide of people are returning to the moral and economic vision of the socialist tradition."

See, as a racist sexist homophobe I would have said that the writer J.M. Bernays misses the point. The problem is that on the one hand liberals have been fooling themselves that they are all in favor of international trade, which they are not. On the other hand liberals have been running the top-down administrative state that buys votes with government programs and screws up the economy and makes promises of free stuff to people that cannot be kept.  I would say that liberals have been lying to themselves for decades and that finally, now that they are running out of money to bribe the voters, they are reaping the whirlwind.

Victor Davis Hanson is more direct about all this.

The entire menu of race, class, and gender identity politics, lead-from-behind foreign policy, political correctness, and radical environmentalism so far have not won over most Americans.

And that means, he writes, that "You Gotta Lie."

OK. The lies of the left are particularly egregious, and their identity politics is nothing but a return to tribalism, and their form of tribalism is particularly harmful because the world of the market economy rewards people that extend their trust beyond the boundaries of tribe to embrace the whole world of people that can be trusted and their identity politics teaches people not to trust. The whole point of the left is to teach the workers that they can't trust the bosses and to teach women and minorities that they can't trust the white man.

But let's face it, the nation state is a form of tribalism, only its tribe is the people speaking the same language within some national territory. The leaders of the nation state and their bribed apologists are shameless in developing and broadcasting a national myth, of the glory of the people that became the British, the Germans, the French, the Americans. And never more so than when they are engaged in a world war against each other.

The argument that I make is that the nation state and its national myth is a better and more advanced myth than the class warfare myth or the minorities and women marginalization myth. It has room for the market economy, although it tends to  want to declare economic warfare on other nations. Not good.

But at least, in nationalism, the Enemy is beyond the border. In the left's politics, the Enemy is right here at home, just down the street.

And the left's politics of activism is always one step from actual political violence, because the demonstration and the "peaceful protest" is always and everywhere a show of force.

Pocahontas' Agenda on Victims of Socialism/Communism Day

Bill Maher just called Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) "Pocahontas" on live TV!

Jolly good fun, but then Sen. Warren reeled off her talking points, and Bill Maher didn't have anything witty to say about her foolish ideas. Here is my transcription (6:45).

When you talk about what's really the basics of the progressive agenda: raise the minimum wage; expand Social Security; reduce the cost of college so people don't get crushed by student load debt; more, not less regulation of... financial institutions; progressive taxation, make those at the top pay their fair share...

Americans by about two to one are with us on that.

Let's play President Eisenhower and make this problem bigger. I'm all for higher wages; all for better pensions; all for cheaper college; all for financial safety; all for the rich paying more on taxes than the poor. So let us tick off the reasons why I think that college professor Elizabeth Warren gets it all wrong.

Minimum wage. The problem with raising the minimum wage by legislation or by regulation is that wages are prices. And science tells us that when government messes with wages and prices it makes things worse. Right now Venezuela has wage and price controls and no food to eat. Let's admit that legislating wages levels is a denial of settled science, and basically puts the young and poor and untrained out of work while rich kids get unpaid internships. What could we do? Well, we could reduce legal and illegal immigration. There is no mystery here; it is simple supply and demand. More workers like me from abroad means more people competing for the same job.

Expand Social Security. Really? Right now Social Security has trillions in unfunded liabilities and it is the biggest government program in America, at $972 billion in FY17. You could look it up, Senator. But I'm all in favor of bigger pensions for Americans. I know. Let's privatize Social Security with a top-up for low-paid workers so that people are saving their own money, retiring when they want to, and maybe ending up with a significant net worth when they die. Whaddya say, Sen. Warren? Shall we call it "generational justice for workers?"

Reduce the cost of college. Stop me if you've heard this one, Sen. Warren, but the experts are pretty well agreed that the cost of college has gone up mainly because of government subsidies and government regulation. Here's a cunning plan: end all government subsidies for universities and end the Pell grants and the student loan program. Then see who really wants to go to college. To help poor kids get more education I propose a Billionaires College Fund, funded and run by America's billionaires, to provide college funds for needy students. And let's clear away all obstacles to on-line education. I also suggest a War on Credentials and a revival of apprenticeships where kids can work while preparing for their careers. Of course, some billionaires, like Peter Thiel, are paying kids not to go to college. I wonder why?

Regulate financial institutions. Everyone wants a safe financial sector that doesn't crash every generation. But expecting government to do a good job with that is like asking the fox to guard the hen-house. That's because it is government that is usually to blame whenever there is a financial panic. The Crash of 2008 was caused by government shoveling trillions into sub-prime mortgages that ended up being under-collateralized. The Tech Bust of 2000 was due to the Fed easing up after the Mexican peso crisis in 1994 and the Long Term Capital Management failure in 1998. More than that, the problem is that the government uses the financial system as a piggy bank, and time after time sets a bubble in motion with excessive credit creation, and then blames the "greedy bankers" when things go wrong. I don't see that you have any idea of this end of the credit problem, Senator.

Progressive taxation. You say that the rich should pay their fair share, Sen. Warren, so I guess you haven't noticed, as a busy politician, that the rich are already paying a ton of money in taxes. The top one percent get about 20 percent of the income and pay nearly 40 percent of the federal income tax. The top 50 percent of taxpayers pay over 90 percent of the federal income tax. I'm not sure what you consider a fair share, but I'd say that we must be pretty close to that right now. Personally, I'd prefer the rich to pay less in tax, because I think that whatever they do with their money, it is bound to create more jobs than government spending.

Aside from the arguments above, there is the simple math that government spending right now is about 34 percent of GDP and government revenue right now is about 33 percent of GDP. And that is before we figure the cost of regulation. I don't know what vital communal things government can do, but I'd say, on Victims of Socialism/Communism Day, that we have gone about as far as is prudent without descending into the vile dungeon of injustice and cruelty that always goes with socialist and communist governance.