Liberals Wrecking the Law

On my understanding, the modern interest of the state in law issues from the desire of the rulers to appropriate the reputation of law in commercial disputes, and use its prestige in support of state power.

The fact is, as I discovered from reading a history of law some years ago, is that most of law is concerned with commercial disputes and inheritance issues. It was only in the modern era that states began to get into the law-making business.

So now we have legislators and judges poking into the interstices of society pushing their private agendas onto the public square. And as Roget Kimball writes of an Appeals court decision against President Trump's executive order on immigration, the judges break down pretty clearly on partisan lines. You could tell how a judge would vote based on which president appointed him.

As Byron York points out, the decision broke 10 to 3 along partisan lines: the 10 judges who decided against the travel ban were appointed by Presidents Clinton or Obama, the 3 judges who supported the ban were appointed by one of the Bushes.

This, as they say, is not good. And, to add insult to injury, the decision was based on statements that Donald Trump made on the campaign trail. Their decision, the judges imply, would have been different if Trump had not made political statements about immigrants.

I suppose we should take heart from this, that liberal judges are so far into the weeds that they will grab at anything to justify their legislation from the bench. It suggests we are reaching the collapse of liberal judicial philosophy from its own internal contradictions.

The problem for me is that, even if liberal judging collapsed tomorrow, we are so far into the weeds that it will take forever to get out.

That's because the growth of big government and the administrative state and its regulations and its administrative courts -- and of course the liberal lawyering that encourages people to sue people and corporations with big pockets -- has utterly buried the legal system and prevented it from doing its job, which is to adjudicate honest disputes between parties over some messy train-wreck of a business deal or a bankruptcy, to patch up the mess after something has gone badly wrong.

Instead we have liberals and the left endeavoring to use law as the sharp end of their arc of history that bends towards justice. Having first determined some sort of outcome, for health care or relations between the sexes, liberals use law to force their desired outcome on society.

It all comes down to a feeling I have that is growing in me, that liberals really do not understand what they are doing. They have a narrow vision of what they want, in respect of equality and justice, they have protocols of tactics and sound bites, they have the power to impose their will, but they do not really think about the collateral effects of their actions. You have Hillary Clinton and the Democrats protesting the results of the 2016 election without really thinking about what happens to America when election losers do not concede their defeat.

It would be nice to feel that average people would revolt against the liberal culture of politics-all-the-time, and the social and cultural destruction that it meets out.

But ordinary people are just trying to make it from day to day; they must find support where they can, and for many that means attaching themselves to the Democratic Party and its neo-feudal government entitlement apparatus. They must find a powerful patron or suffer extreme marginalization and oppression.

Still, as Adam Smith says, there is always a great deal of ruin in a nation. Unfortunately nobody knows how much is too much, and how much liberal lawyering will end up destroying the law.

Why It Has Come to the Spit-Viper Left

What is it about the world that Russell  K.Nieli calls the Spit-Viper Left? Todd Gitlin, he writes, thinks that the left

may subconsciously feel that reason and argument are no longer on its side. Free speech, a fruitful exchange of ideas, mutual intellectual enrichment — these are not its modus operandi. And those among the most illiberal segments of the Left on college campuses often attract to their protests even more radical and more illiberal supporters from beyond the university, who bring with them a love of violence, confrontation and disruption.

Not to mention lovely money from dear old George Soros.

Well, that's not my line.

My line is that the left is running out of victims for whom it can justify its eternal lust for revolution.

As I say, you have to understand that the left is rich kids looking for a reason to riot. All young men like an excuse to riot, but rich kids need something higher and nobler than simple street riots. That's because they are high-class, not yobbos and deplorables; they have to dress up their adolescent rage in haute couture. No J.C. Penney for them.

But the rest of us can be forgiven for humming the refrain of Elvis Presleyś "Hound Dog."

Well they said you was high classedWell, that was just a lie.

Kids looking for a fight are just kids looking for a fight.

But we have to admire the genius of rich kids Marx, son of a prominent lawyer, and Engels, son of a textile manufacturer. They would gin up the best excuse for a riot ever, and lead the downtrodden workers in their existential battle against the cruel capitalists and the bumptious bourgeoisie that were keeping the people down. The workers were outside the system, without a vote, and Marx and Engels would lead them in a revolution against the power of money and exploitation.

Only the bourgeoisie and the capitalists were not that interested in power, in keeping people down. So when the workers presented their grievances the bourgeoisie realized that, even if the workers would use their numbers to despoil the property owners, it was unjust to keep the workers outside the system.

But if the workers were now inside the system, what price revolution and the intoxication of riot and mayhem for the next generation of lefty activists?

That was the genius of the Frankfurt School and its leading lights, Max Horkheimer and Ted Adorno, sons of rich businessmen, after World War I. These two invented our modern identity politics. They switched the strategic direction of leftist politics from working-class revolution to sexual and racial revolution.

But again, the bourgeoisie was not that interested in power. It understood and respected the claims of women and minorities, and gave them the vote. Hey, and even Affirmative Action and quotas.

And what about gays? Hey, give them gay marriage, said the judges.

Do you see the problem? The whole program of the left is that there has to be brutal exploitation and oppression and the only way to fight it is with resistance and protest. But what is the point if the normals keep conceding the legitimate grievances of the marginalized outside the system?

Good point and if the bourgeoisie has such a record of fairly and generously conceding the legitimate grievances of the marginalized then what exactly is the point of or the need for revolution?

For now, in 2017, we are down to the bottom of the barrel. Who is the left advocating for today? It is advocating for illegal immigrants, insisting that no human is illegal, and for Muslims who want nothing more than to kill little children at rock concerts and make sex-slaves of white working class girls.

If I were a lefty, I would be getting a bit panicky. I would be forbidding anyone from uttering a discouraging word at my lefty university and I would be reinventing the KKK to patrol the borders of the university and keep the racist, sexist, homophobe haters out. And as for the people pushing back against Muslim terror? Why, I would call them evil Islamophobes.

Hey, for once, the left is right. The people resisting Muslim terror really do have a phobia, i.e., a fear, of Islam. Yay lefties! For once you have got it right. Although I would hardly think Islamophobia is a disease, but just a healthy instinct for self-protection.

Now I am a normal kind of person, although a wee bit of a lone wolf. So I can look at a situation in a normal kind of way and respond to it, sensibly and normally. But imagine if I were a lefty.

Exactly. I would be as angry as a Spit Viper. Whatever that is.

Single-payer Healthcare: Clueless

The State of California has been taking a look at a state "single-payer" health plan. The idea is that health care ought to be a "right." Only it will cost $400 billion a year, in a state with a general fund budget of $124 billion a year.

Really does anybody have a clue? Let us count the ways.

In the first place, health care is not a thing. It is not something you can just set up as a government program and leave it.

Of course that is true about everything the government does. You can't just pass Social Security and leave it to the bureaucrats forever. Eventually, Social Security runs out of other peoples' money.

But health care is probably a couple orders of magnitude more complicated than raking in and just handing out money. Which the government is farily good at.

Health care is a universe of needs and products, and it is changing every moment. Now, settled science has discovered that in a universe of wants and of products and services competing to supply those wants there is one certain truth. The only way to manage and to adjudicate between the competing needs and products and services is through a price "system." Only it isn't a system. It is an emergent phenomenon, as they say in chaos theory.

But government doesn't do that. It sets up an administrative system, based on the state of play between needs and products and services on Day One. And then it proposes to administer that system for all eternity.

Only eternity ends up in administrative failure in the not-too-distant near future. Because what will health care look like next year? What will it look like ten years from now? Nobody knows. So that is why we need prices and markets to guide the evolutions, the innovations, the changes that will be coming next month, next year, and next decade. There is one thing that government cannot do, and that it manage change.

But what about the poor? Well, people that don't have the ready are people that must line up and wait for the kindly DMV clerk to get to them. That is the inevitable situation of workers and peasants that rely upon a powerful lord to spread his benison to his faithful followers. That is what a "right to health care" means.

But chaps like me don't want that. We want to pay for our own health care and we want to influence the market in health care so that it responds to our needs, on a day-to-day, month-to-month, year-to-year basis. Just like the market in groceries.

The assumption about health care is that it is vital, as important as food and shelter. But this is not quite true. In his Rising Life Expectancy James C. Riley explains that there are about eight factors that have contributed to modern life expectancy of about 75 years at birth, and "bio-medicine" is just one of them. Others are: sanitation, income, aseptic childbirth, education of women, vaccination, etc.

We can see the problem that "single payer" health care will get into. We can see it in education, which has been an elite project for the last 100-200 years. The ruling class has always felt that it knew what sort of education their subjects needed. But they have usually tended to propose the system that they prefer for themselves. So we now have a luxurious system to educate good little girls through college, but a lousy system for educating the middle and the lower income groups. But who cares about them? The real clients of the education system are the teachers and administrators. Who cares about the kids?

Now, if we accept that some sort of subsidy is needed, for education and for health care, why not just give the subsidy directly to the people? Why divert it through the special interests, the hospitals, the doctors, the nurses, the drug companies? Why not just give everyone a subsidy to buy health care as they think fit?

I know the answer to that. Not enough opportunity for graft.

Liberals Do Too Believe in Borders

I was at a good liberal friend for dinner last night. They didn't have a "We Believe" yardsign out in front but they did have the No Borders yardsign: "No matter where you are from, we're glad you're our neighbor."

And during the meal my liberal host opined as how he was opposed to borders.

Of course I was very nice and didn't contradict mine host in his own house. But I got to thinking on the way home.

Wait a minute! Liberals do too believe in borders. They believe that no conservatism should take place inside the borders of a university. They believe that no conservatives should get tenure within the borders of their university. They believe that no Christianity should take place within the borders of a government child-custodial facility. And they believe that no federal immigration enforcement should take place within the borders of a liberal city.

And the liberals also believe in a strong border police. You might almost call it a wall. What do you think all those anti-fa and Black Block protesters are all about? They Shall Not Pass, those nasty stinky deplorable racist, sexist, homophobes. And the liberal KKK will make sure of it. Yes. really, those peaceful protesters are nothing more that the liberal militia, just like the racist militia in the Jim Crow south.

Hey, how about those right-wing militias that the FBIs have to kick in the butt to get them to do anything but grouse around at their local gun range? The left-wing militias are out and about every day marchin' and protestin'. And they are up to the task of intimidating the lifer admininstrators in the university, the ones that actually need intimidating. There is the Berkeley Militia; there is the Middlebury Militia. And you will note that the folks on the barricades are usually little rich kids. Just like the rich kids in Les Mis back in Paris in the good old 19th century.

So the only question is: which borders matter to the ordinary person in Manchester, England, or San Bernardino, or Paris or Nice. Does the average person want to protect the world from corruption by racist, sexist homophobes, or does the average person want to be protected from low-wage competition from immigrants and terrorism from woke Muslims?

You tell me. I've got to go downstairs and finish loading the FY18 budget up on usgovernmentspending.com.

When Will The Ruling Class Cry "Uncle" On Islam

Our beloved Mark Steyn today satirizes the establishment instructions after the Manchester bombing by invoking the naughty "Carry On" movies. Keep Calm and Carry On, the WWII posters used to say, and the Carry On movies made a joke of it for about twenty years.

And that is what the establishment proposes after the Manchester killings.

That's because, I suppose, the ruling class thinks that while it is OK to angry-up blacks and feminists and gays and ordinary liberal college graduates against the Deplorables and the irredeemables, there is one thing that is not allowed! Not to be endured! And that is for the ordinary white middle class and the remainder-of-the-day white working class to get angried-up.

Because that would be fascism.

What is going on here?

It is simple. After World War II the wise and the evolved elite decided "never again." They would create a politics that would never descend into extreme nationalism and fascism.

The obvious solution was that the lesser lights would be excluded from national and international politics. Only the educated and the evolved need apply. This would prevent the outbreak of aggressive nationalism and populist leaders like Mussolini and Hitler.

But, as I have said before, this completely misunderstands the rise of Mussolini and Hitler.

That is because, as I say, Trump is the idiot you get when the usual idiots have screwed up.

As in the Great Depression.

Here is my analysis of how we got to fascism in the 1930s. First of all, there was World War I. This was a gigantic mistake of the powers-that-be who hadn't really thought through that there was no point in Germany defeating France and France defeating Germany. For what? Money-losing colonies in Africa?

After World War I the Allies decided to make Germany pay. Fine, but that unbalanced the international financial system and led to loans to the Germans so they could pay their reparations. And then Winston Churchill and others felt that the UK had a moral obligation to return sterling to the pre-war parity against gold. That led to deflation.

Then we had the fairly new US Federal Reserve System stumbling and bumbling around: first it was expansionary, then in the bubble of 1928 it turned contractionary and let the whole financial system collapse after the Crash of 1929. Because bureaucratic stupidity.

When you have the governing class idiots stumbling and bumbling like that, you tend to get populist leaders that offer extravagant promises to get out of the mess that the ruling-class stumblers and bumblers have created. Sorry about that. It has something to do with rats trapped in a maze.

Today the problem we are facing across the West is that the ruling class decided it would be a good and noble idea to allow immigration of non-white peoples into the predominantly white European first world.

In part, I suspect, this impulse was a judgement that eventually the whole world would get mixed together, and partly a conceit that the educated and evolved had a duty to help and educate the marginalized peoples of the world. And in part, I suspect, the impulse was a response to the empty wombs of educated first-world women. If first-world women weren't having babies, then we would need to import women that would have babies and provide the workers to pay the taxes to fund the west's bankrupt pension and health-care entitlements.

Anyway, it is obvious that the judgments of the ruling class have been wrong, in various and numerous ways.

And it is obvious that we are going to have a smash-up sooner or later in which the average voters look for a new ruling class that will attend to their needs rather than tell them to keep calm and carry on.

Notice how the needs of the average voter conflict with the politics of the left. The left, since 1840ish, has been a political movement dedicated  to representing those people that are presently outside the system. First it was the workers, that in 1840 did not have the vote. Then it was women, then minorities. Now it is illegal immigrants and Muslims.

The reason that the left keeps finding a new group outside the system to represent is that it justifies the left's primary approach to society, which is that political force is the only option. There must be some issue, must be some group that requires educated young men and women to issue manifestos and non-negotiable demands and Occupy Wall Street and demand a resort to force and a new administrative government program.

My judgment is that this political philosophy is dead wrong. It is wrong because in the modern age it is seldom necessary to use force to solve social problems. The whole logic of the market system (which is not a system but an emergent phenomenon) is that anything is possible at a price. Even if you are excluded, and outside the system, you can still participate; it is just that you will suffer a certain amount of disadvantage. This might be if you are a Muslim that wants to pray five times a day in a workplace where nobody else does that. Or it might be if you were a conservative Christian working in a liberal media conglomerate. In either case, the Muslim or the Christian are going to have  to keep a buttoned lip.

We could have solved all issues these decades ago, but for the pride and idiocy of our ruling class, and the longer we wait to do something about it, the more gruesome the solution will be.

No, THIS is the Fundamental Error of the Left

Here is a piece, about the Left's stupid "net-neutrality" movement. The idea is to regulate the wild and crazy competitive internet business as though it were a monopoly radio business. It begins with the usual accusation about crazy lefties:

Leftism is a bereft ideology.  It is a certain set of ideas and government policies - all of which are horrendous when put into actual practice.  It pretends human nature isn’t human nature. And tries to reshape it - and the humans it imbues - with the fires and on the anvils of government.

But I think this is a misunderstanding of the left's position and world view.

Let us start with net neutrality. The left believes that unless strong and consistent government force is applied against corporations and businesses the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer.

This is encapsulated in the view of a young acquaintance that "capitalism keeps people down."

To say that this "pretends human nature isn't human nature" misses the point. That's because down through the ages the whole point of government was to keep the raiders out and the people down. Every tribe or dukedom occupied some patch of land, and defended it against raiders. The result of this was that the tribe depended on its rulers to protect it from raiders, and that meant that the rulers had to have a free hand. And a firm hand. You couldn't have any rebels in the tribe, because that would prevent the tribe from defending its patch of land from the rest of humanity.

In other words, in the old days the government had to keep the people down.

But now things are different. That's because everything is tradable. In the old days only luxuries and vital metals like tin, that was needed for bronze weapons, were traded. Food was grown and eaten right there on the patch of land. Thomas Sowell has shown that, in those old days, the price of grain would double from just one day's transportation by horse and cart. Right now, as I sit in a friend's house in West Vancouver, there are at least 12 grain ships sitting in the outer harbor waiting to go in and load grain from the giant grain elevators and transport it to the world. I wonder what the grain transporters charge to transport grain half way around the world: 10 percent markup? 20 percent? But you can see the point. You can trade grain across the world because the folks in India and China can afford to buy the grain after transportation half way across the world.

This is what the left doesn't get. You can trade everything, all across the world, and you now need force, not to keep the raiders out of the patch of land, but to keep pirates from attacking ships in transit.

In the old days men were needed to grow food and to defend the patch of land against raiders. Now men are needed to produce goods for sale on the market and to serve the consumers.

This has been an astonishing revolution, and it has only really kicked in during the last two centuries.

So it is not surprising that a reactionary movement erupted in the first years of the Great Enrichment on the belief that this new revolution was just a flash in the pan and that, sooner or later, and probably sooner, we would revert to the old regime of "immiseration." That how the world always used to world, in the Malthusian limit of food that could be grown right here on the patch of land, and any "surplus population" periodically starved in periodic famines.

I am reading right now Andrew Roberts' biography of Lord Salisbury, Salisbury, Victorian Titan. It covers three famines in the mid-19th century that were regarded in British politics as scandals. The first was the Irish famine of the 1840s. The other two were famines in Bengal. In all three the British government was criticized for not doing enough, and Lord Salisbury, then a young politician, felt deeply the obligation to relieve the famines.

But the point is that it was only in the 19th century that there was anything that anyone could do about a famine. First of all you need timely information about an impending famine, and it certainly helps to have a world-wide telegraph system for that. Secondly you need a transportation system that can rush grain from areas of surplus to areas of deficit. I don't know what date to establish as the first day when a government could do this on any scale other than local, but I'd say you need railways and steamships and telegraph before you can do anything significant.

Leftism is certainly bereft. But it is merely applying the age-old remedy for human problems. And that remedy, outside the immediate family or tribe, is force.

In the old days you sought shelter and safety from a tribal leader or local lord, and he dispensed justice and favors as the mood took him. Now you seek shelter and prosperity by finding a way to serve your fellow humans, across the globe, by performing some service that the market shows, by the price system, is valued by other humans.

Simply put: in the old days the ruler ruled. Today, the price system rules.

This is an incredibly advanced notion, that replaces the realities of the ten-thousand years of the agricultural age. It is hardly surprising that most people cannot yet grasp it.

Removing Trump Per 25th Amendment

I guess I was asleep at the switch, because I've only just woken up to the latest wizard wheeze of the ruling class; it is to remove Donald Trump per the 25th Amendment as "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office."

See, the idea, from Section 4, is that:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments... transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Pretty cute, huh?

The idea, from a long tweet series from Ross Douthat, is that removing Trump per the 25th Amendment has to do with the "central *use* of an elite - their ability to respond swiftly to a situation the public as a whole can't reckon with."

Oh yeah. Except I can't think of a case where the elite did usefullly "respond swiftly," and there are other cases where I'd say the elite did respond swiftly when it wasn't necessary.

In general, I would say that an elite is absolutely useless in doing the things it is supposed to do. I'd say that is to stop the people from doing something they might regret.

But the elite never does that. Instead it manipulates the people in order to increase its money, power, and the love of beautiful women. The whole point of the mega-administrative state is that it has been useful for the elite to acquire political power, by enticing the support of the people by offering them free stuff. Then it gets us into stupid wars that cost a ton of money and the lives of young American men. And then, per Margaret Thatcher, it runs out of other peoples' money.

So now the elite is saying that Donald Trump is somehow "unable to discharge" his duties? You mean that he gets pissed off when leakers and bureaucrats embarrass him with memos to the file? Golly! That's really bad! So that's why we need an elite. To punish populist presidents when they get mad having to deal with the permanent government.

One could ask: why aren't more presidents getting pissed off with the high-born leakers in the bureaucracy?

You know the answer to that. If you are Barack Obama, you don't have to bother, because the permanent bureaucracy is on your side, just waiting for a hint to go on a rampage to double and redouble the regulations of the regulatory state. If you are, say, George W. Bush you know that it is useless to even try to fight the permanent bureaucracy, 'cos they will probably eat you for breakfast one day.

Maybe it is time we had a president that lacks the trained-poodle blandness of a seasoned Republican. Maybe we elected Donald Trump to get into a knock-down drag-out fight with the permanent government before it is too late.

Because I will tell you what I think. I think that the good thing about the Trump administration thus far is that he has flushed the permanent state out of the bushes -- and on stupid penny-ante issues.

Who cares if the Trumpsters dallied with the Russians? It's the job of a candidate's people to make contact with foreign powers.

Who cares if the president asked James Comey to take it easy on Gen. Flynn -- although it looks like Flynn was a naughty boy taking money from the Turks. But hey, the Clintons take money from foreigners! They all do it!

My point is that if the Deep State was more serious, instead of a bunch of rich kids with sinecures, it would hold its fire for something really big and then swoop down with devastating effect. Right now, the Deep State is just teaching President Trump how to deal with it.

But aside from that, what exactly has President Trump done that is so horrible? He has a mild reform of Obamacare in the works. He is proposing a tax cut. He has cut back a bunch of stupid regulations. He has flooded the airwaves with his tweets.

But look at the good side, from the viewpoint of the elite. He is having difficulty with his wall and his immigration policies because of pushback from the Deep State. What is not to like?

Here's my beef. The "elite" ought to know that government handout programs are a really bad idea because you can never cut them. So a wise elite would always combine to prevent that. The "elite" ought to know that the science of regulatory government has been settled for a hundred years, ever since Ludwig von Mises pointed out that socialism couldn't work because it couldn't compute prices.

I could go on.

So what's the point of an elite that can't pull the people back from common mistakes? What's the point of an elite that makes really big mistakes?

I'd say that in President Trump the elite got the president it deserves. Trump is the result of decades of elite conceit that didn't bother to consider the needs of the ordinary man-in-the-street. The elite hasn't even begun to get serious about getting its own house in order before running over to Trump's house to complain about the dust and disorder there.