No, Capitalism Doesn't "Keep People Down"

We have a twentysomething son of a friend staying with us, and very helpful it is. Because an old geezer like me isn't up to date on all the liberal memes, not as much as I ought to be.

Already I have been inspired to make a chart of Deirdre McCloskey's Great Enrichment notion, showing the US and the UK starting at about $3 income in real dollars per person per day in 1800 and reaching $120-140 per day right here in 2017. Go take a look at the links: it's really cool.

But my young friend also has the opinion that capitalism "keeps people down." OK, never mind that the charts just mentioned give that notion the lie.

It is true that capital-ists are often discovered trying to keep people down. I don't mean the meanie-jelly-beanie that won't give his workers a raise. I mean dear old Warren Buffet. The dear chap announced back in the Obama days as how chaps like him should pay more in taxes because his secretary paid more percent of income in tax than he did. Well, Warren old chap, I doubt it. But if she does the reason is that she is paying payroll taxes which are a cunning way to prevent ordinary middle-class people from building assets that can be handed down to their children -- in other words keep them down. So yeah. Warren Buffet wants to keep people down.

And let us not forget that Buffet's support of the Obama administration helped pipelines from being built in the frack-alicious Dakotas, and that helps Warren make lots of lovely money hauling crude oil around in his Burlington Northern trains. But Mr. President, Is It Safe? No, transporting crude oil in trains is a lot less safe than transporting it in pipelines. Any fool knows that. It's the science.

Then, of course, there are out-and-out crony capitalists like Elon Musk, who is making big money from renewable energy credits with his Tesla electric-car company and from NASA with his SpaceX outfit. I know: electric cars and reusable rockets are cool. Still...

Look the problem here is not that capitalists "keep people down." Of course they do, just like SJWs keep the notorious racists, sexists, and homophones down. And just like the welfare state keeps the old white working class and women and minorities down, anesthetized by welfare and healthcare entitlements and opioids. One of the basic facets of social animals is hierarchy. Hierarchy, or pecking order, is one way to avoid violence, and the war of all against all. So today's top dogs certainly have an advantage. In order to have access to money, power, and the love of beautiful women you have to fight for it, like these giraffes.

But the whole point of markets and prices is that you can only be "kept down" so long as you don't have a better idea, and only so long as crony capitalists have access to politicians to write laws to block up-and-coming businesses with licensing laws and regulation. And even politicians and the current crony capitalists are not really smart enough to keep a good man down for long, except in full-on socialist countries.

The astonishing thing about the last 200 years of the Great Enrichment is that, time after time, the ruling class and the crony capitalists were caught looking the other way, and not really understanding the threat from the latest innovation until it had got itself fully in the saddle and able to bribe politicians just like the old rich.

But what really keeps people down are government programs. That's because it is almost impossible to reform government programs. Why? Not because of capitalism, but because of the selfishness and meanness of the government's clients, who will war to the knife to keep their free stuff, their subsidies, their credits.

And why not? Who would go out into the world and endure the stress and humiliation of working for a boss or a demanding consumer when you could get it all almost for free just by bribing and threatening a politician?

No. It is not capitalism that keeps people down. It is government.

Health Care: The View from the Inside

A couple days ago I got an email from a physician, giving me the inside word on the problems of the health care system from his 40 years of experience. He'd read my American Thinker piece, "The Meaning of Kinda-sorta Obamacare Repeal and Replace." His analysis was deep and penetrating.

But who cares? Right now we have a health care system that is riddled with political corruption. I don't mean this in the sense of politicians and crony capitalists milking the system, although I am sure there is plenty of that.

No, I am talking about the bigger issue, the fact that down the years the politicians have offered free stuff to the voters, and the voters have only ever asked: "does that come with sprinkles on top?"

To keep the free stuff coming, the health care system has become horribly distorted, quite apart from the fact that it is administered and regulated by the administrative and regulatory state, which means, according to settled science, that it will be a dysfunctional mess.

And it won't get any better. That's because Rule One of government spending is that the politicians dare not cut spending, ever. President Trump proposed spending cuts of $50 billion (in a $4 trillion budget) and the media couldn't believe it. The end of Meals on Wheels! Oh no!

(I know! Why doesn't George Soros pick up Meals on Wheels. How about it George?)

Or, as my physician emailer put it:

How is this to be done when people become more devoted to free stuff than to the free market?

My line on this is that it all depends on what you are prepared to surrender to. Because you must be willing to surrender to something. That is the basic meaning of social animals and social cooperation.

On my reductive Three Peoples theory there are obviously three ways to surrender.

The People of the Subordinate Self surrender to their liege lord. He could be the village Big Man; he could be the lord of the manor; he could be the local politician. The subordinate worker or peasant surrenders to his lord in exchange for free stuff. Of course, the People of the Subordinate Self are not perfect. They are inclined to resent their lord when he doesn't deliver the free stuff as promised. Sometimes they form a head of rebellion complete with peasants with pitchforks, or they strike their employer.

The People of the Responsible Self surrender to the market. They are saying, in effect, that they agree to serve their fellow men and women by doing something useful for which people are prepared to pay. You can see that this is to aim higher than the People of the Subordinate Self, who just surrender to the local big cheese, and then wait for orders. I do not think we give this surrender option enough credit, for if you ask me it is a noble and selfless thing to abjure violence and the strong arm, and just say that you will accept the verdict of the market on your efforts to wive and thrive in this world. Of course, the People of the Responsible Self are not perfect. They are inclined to look to government for a bit of help when the market goes against them and revalues their contribution to the world downwards. Sometimes they get politicians to give them subsidies, and carve-outs.

The People of the Creative Self surrender to the verdict of history. It is not enough for them just to serve their fellow men and women by being useful. They aim higher than that. They aim to do something original and transformative: in business, in art, in literature, in religion, in politics. It is not enough just to do something useful, it must be special. Of course, the People of the Creative Self are not perfect. They are inclined to force their creations on the rest of us, whether we like it or not, in art, in politics, and the rest. And since the People of the Creative Self are now the ruling class, it means that they use government to force the rest of us to be the chorus of jolly peasants on the stage of their creative projects.

You can see the problem when you apply this theory to health care. The People of the Subordinate Self expect their liege lords to provide for them. The People of the Creative Self have all kinds of creative plans for health care from Health Maintance Organizations (Ted Kennedy's wizard wheeze) to "single payer." So it is only the People of the Responsible Self that are prepared to willingly surrender themselves to whatever the health-care market delivers.

But who cares what we think?

Hillary Clinton Epitomizes Government: A Train Wreck

I've been reading Niall Ferguson's 2004 book about American empire: Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire.

Yes, he was saying that the whole thing was a mess, back in 2004 before the real mess began in Iraq and before the Surge, and before the clueless eight years of Obama stupidity.

The thing is: the message of the book is that the American empire has always been a train wreck, even back in the 19th century when the US started getting into messes in Texas, Mexico, Cuba, the Philippines.

But the rulers always have tame operatives with bylines to concoct a pretty story, a narrative, out of the chaos of events.

This pretty-story thing is not really a scandal, because the only thing that government does is war. It can be war on the Nazis, or the Russkies. Or it can be back at home, making war on greedy bankers and homophobic racists.

Now the thing about war is that it is always going wrong, and the leaders have to buck up  the spirits of their followers to keep them "down for the struggle," as we now say.

In more conventional speech, we are talking about the need to maintain morale among the troops, so they will continue to march and fight in the government's latest war. The one thing a government must avoid is for people to lose heart and start to desert from its latest project.

Thus it may be a mistake for President Trump to run a government where he doesn't seem to care whether he is giving the impression of running a 24-7 train-wreck. It may be that people really do need to be constantly reassured that things are completely under control. It may be that a government that does not lie its head off, assuring everyone that the train wreck they can see right  in front of their eyes is not really a train wreck but merely a very brief setback, is not long for this world.

Now we have a ordinary Democratic operative with a byline, Doyle McManus at the LA Times, doing a puff piece on Hillary Clinton's reemergence into public life after her defeat in November 2016's presidential election. He writes about how she has a "right" to return to public life, but maybe she shouldn't.

Hillary Clinton has more than earned her right to be a major voice in American politics. She’s smart and forceful on a raft of issues, from working-class job creation to foreign policy. But she’s not great at running a presidential campaign. She’s tried twice, in races where she began as the presumptive front-runner, and lost both times. That’s enough.

Oh please. "Smart and forceful?" "Working-class job creation?" "Foreign policy?" The fact is that Hillary has been a train wreck on policy, ever since the late lamented Hillarycare. That is why it is always best for defeated candidates to get the heck out of public life. Indeed that is why it is a good idea for former presidents to get out of public life, Presidents Carter, Clinton, Obama. It is best for people to be able to forget the train wreck of your presidencies. And I don't mean that in a partisan way. Every presidency is a mess, when you look back at it. Hillary Clinton is the poster girl for government and political train-wreck.

Why is that? The reason is simple. In Colossus Niall Ferguson has a long chapter on the European Union. It is pathetic. The EU is a high-class bureaucrat's wet dream. It has committees and councils and initiatives left, right, and center, all run by high-born scions of the ruling class or retired members of the ruling class: Hillary Clintons every one. And what is the good of them? What have they ever accomplished? Nothing, except to make things worse.

Just as the foreign policy of the US for the last century or so is a miserable story of stupidity followed by foolishness, so domestic policy is the graveyard of failed programs that are still on life support because they are supported by powerful interests that can make a lot of trouble for a politician.

Let's take the travails of the working class, now replicating throughout the West, about which Doyle McManus writes that Hillary Clinton has some expertise. Really? Who knew?

Look, pal, the working class is toast, and the reason is politics. In the service of noble ideals like compassion and justice, the governments of the western world meddled in the cultural and economic turmoil of the Industrial Revolution to regulate work and pay. It put its thumb on the scale of justice to "help" the workers. It enacted social insurance programs. It validated the tribal, class-bound culture of the working class, and discouraged the working class from getting into the middle class and its culture of responsibility. And so the working class assumed that government would always be there to help it.

Golly GeeWillikins! The day came when the kind Hillary Clintons of the world left the working class by the side of the road to die of despair! Who could have seen that coming?

Look, government does not care about people like you; the ruling class only cares about how it can use you in its power politics. If it can get you to vote for it on the promise of free stuff, Yay! If it can get gays to hate straights and vote 85-15 for Democrats, Yay! If it can angry-up blacks with Black Lives Matter, Yay! If it can wean women off husbands and children and instead work for taxable wages and decline into single parenthood and start to look to government for support, Yay!

But the rulers don't care about people like you. Hillary Clinton doesn't care about you. All they care about is their court politics of who is up and who is down, and how they can use political power to strut their hour upon the stage of power.

And so the whirligig of time spins on, from one train wreck to the next. And you and I are the folks that will pay the price. Every time.

My Take on the Comey Firing

If you want fun and games about President Trump firing FBI Director James Comey, go and read Mark Steyn. When it comes to searing political wit, Mark can't be beat.

But here is my take.

When Hillary Clinton decides to get her a home-brew email server and conduct the business of the Secretary of State on it, that is a problem.

It is not so much that it is illegal. It is not so much that it is the kind of action that would put the average federal worker or member of the armed services in jail. It is not so much that the whole episode shows that there is one law for ordinary people and Republicans like Scooter Libby and another law for the Clintons.

It is not that, from my understanding, any federal worker would go to jail just for copying some stuff onto a memory stick. It is not just that Gen. Petraeus got stuck with a big fine for allowing his mistress to see classified information.

No, for me it goes beyond that. Maybe I understand because I am a computer guy and I understand how much I don't understand about computer security and hacking.

The point is that if I were in Hillary Clinton's position I would never depart from security protocols, particularly where transmission of electronic messages was concerned.

I would think, based on my knowledge of computers and governments that probably the government's security protocols were woefully inadequate and out of date. But, I would think, nothing could be more stupid than to take my official correspondence off-line onto an unsecure private server.

I mean to say that, in my view, setting up a private email server on which official secrets might be stored is so egregiously foolish that the fool that did it should never serve in an official capacity. It shows an error of judgement so big that it brings into question the capacity of that person to make a sensible decision about anything.

Now I understand that Hillary Clinton is old and sick. And I assume, from the nods and winks, that she is an alcoholic. But she is not the only person in the ruling class. Surely there is someone in the ruling class with the wit and the cojones to say: this private email server thing is so stupid that it is going to lose us the next election. Get this woman outta here.

Now we know the story of the email controversy between the lines, and the impossible position that James Comey was placed in. He knew that Clinton had monstrously violated the law, and monstrously exposed classified information. But he also knew that if he didn't go public that the whole affair would never see the light of day because the Obama Justice Department would never issue an indictment.

So when Comey went public on the server issue back in July he was probably starting on a path that he knew would lead to his political immolation. But what was he to do? Pass the information to the Justice Department and wait for nothing to happen? And then resign? When would he do that? Most likely the Obamis in the Justice Department would fiddle around until after the election, so there would not be a decision over which he could resign -- before the election.

There have been many complaints about the Clintons and their corruption down the years, and how they get away with everything, because their supporters say things like "one free grope" in the decade when sexual harassment in the workplace became a Thing. Or they prevaricate about the facts on Hillary Clinton's email server, because First Woman President, or something.

I suspect that in the end, God is not mocked. There are plenty of Americans that are disgusted with Clinton corruption, and in the end the Clinton corruption bit the Clintons and the Democrats in the backside.

That is why honesty is the best policy, for a person and for a political party.

But now we need to make a new start. We need an FBI that goes by the rules, and we need a Justice Department that upholds the law. And those are two things that manifestly did not happen in the Obama administration.

It's not surprising. The whole point about being a ruling class is that you get to make the rules. But we bourgeois, we middle class people, we People of the Responsible Self, we believe that we should hold powerful people to account. If we don't we get people like the Clintons and political parties like the Democrats, and that is not good.

"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.