Let's All Hate on the Baby Boomers

Since the Baby Boomers are now munching down on Social Security and Medicare, at enormous expense, it is natural for our younger friends to get a little shirty.

After all, Social Security and Medicare are flat-out generational injustice. The federal government has a compulsory and mandatory program to which workers are forced to contribute, and seniors get to collect on a formula that has nothing to do with what the young workers can afford, as they struggle to get a job, get married, and raise a family.

But Social Security was passed in 1935, before the Baby Boom was even a twinkle in its father's eye. And Medicare was passed in 1965, before the Baby Boom got to vote.

But the Baby Boom could have Done Something about it. It could have reformed Social Security and Medicare; it could have protected the family; it could have rallied against the race and gender politics of the liberals.

So the Baby Boomers went 100 percent for sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. Of course, doesn't every young generation want to let it all hang out? So the Baby Boomers fought against the Vietnam War -- like the Irish rioted against the draft in 1863 in New York City. Young 'uns generally don't like fighting in their fathers' wars, unless, as in World War II, they have no option.

Let's divide and conquer. Let's talk about the liberal Baby Boomers. The truth is that they believed in everything they did to destroy the Fifties world, because they thought that world was racist and sexist and oppressive. They were taught by their teachers to be civil-rights workers and Peace Corps volunteers and they went out and did it. They weren't perfect -- hello Bill and Hillary -- but basically they were good little boys and girls that learned their lessons well and applied them exactly as ordered.

What about conservative Baby Boomers? Well, we came into the world and didn't like the liberal world of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. we agreed with the Cold War and many of us served in the military. We worked, we wived, we thrived, and now we have built a nice retirement for ourselves way beyond the government entitlements. We wanted to reform the welfare state and we succeeded here and there. Of course, we were hypocrites and backsliders and didn't always live up to what we professed. But it wasn't the hypocrisy that beat us, it was that overall, we failed; we failed to change the culture, and now America is roiled in a culture war where it is very difficult for anyone to stand against the liberal hegemony without losing job and reputation.

And then there are the ordinary people, the ordinary middle class and working class Baby Boomers that just did what they could to live their lives, without any thought that they could or should change things.

The truth is that we are in the middle of something that is much bigger and consequential than the post-WWII Baby Boom. We are in the middle of a battle to decide between two great contesting notions of how the world should work.

On the one hand is an unexpected, unsought-for Great Enrichment, from $3 per person per day to the present $145 per person per day, that has issued from the market economy and the failure of the ruling class to prevent innovation from changing the world.

On the other hand is the notion that politics and government can transform the world, that government programs and administrative systems can and should provide a better, more just distribution of the good things in life, particularly the material things in life.

On the one hand we have a faith in social cooperation with the minimum of force; on the other a faith that bold, vigorous experimentation with political and administrative systems is the only way to roll back centuries of privilege and exploitation.

At some point, and it may not be far in the future, these competing faiths will be brought to the proof. For me, the question is not in doubt: the big government philosophy of systems and government domination will run out of money and collapse, à la Venezuela, because nothing less than utter failure will prompt a turning from the big government model and its tempting offer of free stuff.

And yet. The two great socialist states, Russia and China, have abandoned the follies of full-on socialism, but not the faith in ruling-class supremacy, and the right of a ruling class to meddle and loot the people that work and strive for a living.

And governments have not really got beyond the economics of the Dark Ages, when the Carolingian kings thought that markets were a good idea, especially if they charged 10 percent duty on all transactions.

But by all means blame the Baby Boom. we grandpas and grannies are old and cranky, and it is time to set us straight.

It's June, So The May Days are Over

After the debacle of the election in Britain, where Prime Minister May managed to give away a huge pre-election poll lead to a hung Parliament, the only recourse is to Shakespeare.

A couple of weeks ago I read a piece by a British Conservative crowing that the Tories had finally put it all together, economic freedom of Thatcher, the tradition of Lord Salisbury, and the populism of Disraeli.

But now we are reminded, from Macbeth, the truth about politics

      It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

We humans always want to breathe meaning into the world, as in Douglas Adams' memorable line about the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." But reality always reminds us that, whatever the meaning is, it has surely escaped us, up until now.

So the Brits will stumble on, governed by the usual idiots, either the cuckservative May or the lefty Corbin.

To hope for anything else, of course, is to become Falstaff, who whimpered to Prince Hal that

I would 'twere bedtime, Hal, and all well. 

Prince Hal tells Falstaff that he owes God a death, and Falstaff goes into a long prose soliloquy about honor in which he decides that he'll have "none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon."

And yet to live with honor is a far, far better thing than to live like als Knecht, as a serf.

We all want our worries and our fears resolved, by bedtime if not sooner, but the truth is that the world spins on in riot and confusion. Perhaps the big problem is our Newtonian science, that delivered a mechanical regularity to planetary orbits and artillery shells, and inspired humans to extend it into the super-mechanical philosophy of socialism and the materialist program of Communism, the fantasy that we could order our affairs on Earth with the mechanical organization of an 18th century platoon with its officers in front and its file-closers in back.

What we have learned, from the revolution in science that began with Einstein's revolutionary papers on relativity and black-body radiation is that the basic fact of life, the universe, and everything is the uncertainty and improbability of the micro-world, where everything issues from a roll of the dice, or maybe not.

So Theresa May gambled and lost; so the ruling class in the US put up Hillary Clinton and can't believe she lost to a Trump. So we normals would like to get back to simple wiving and thriving and forget the poison of political correctness perched uneasily on top of big government entitlements. So liberals would like to save the planet from plant food, carbon dioxide, and Islamists would like to purify the world for the sake of Mohammed, peace be upon him. So President Trump would like to make America Great Again, and liberals would like to celebrate diversity while denying conservatives the right to speak at their universities. So some of us want to deal decisively with terrorism; so others want to fight hate and xenophobia.

Truly, a tale told by an idiot... and yet surely we must believe in a glorious sunset into which every hero will eventually ride.

Liberals Want to Take Their Dollies Home

For years and years liberals have insisted that conservatives bow the head and submit to liberal hegemony. But now that a Republican has won the presidency and is beginning to roll back liberal policy, liberals are having a fit and are threatening to take their dollies home if we won't play according to their rules.

So California is going to double down on its green energy program, even as it suffers under the second highest electric rates in the nation. And it's proposing to do its own single-payer health plan.

There are two things wrong with this. First, that the whole green energy thing is a scam, a direct equivalent of the revivalist preachers that relieved credulous widows of their savings in return for the promise of salvation. Second, that the single-payer notion is a scam that will deliver VA level health care to the poor and the middle class while the rich go in for medical tourism. It's the science, liberals.

But hey, that's what federalism is all about: let the states experiment all they like, and then see where Americans want to go to live.

But probably California's moves to run its own climate program and its own health care system are half-baked liberal ideas, like the half-baked idea that the Russians hacked the election.

Oh and like the half-baked idea that liberal activist groups should get a payoff from settlements reached by the Justice Department, just terminated by Attorney General Sessions. Imagine the wailing and the gnashing of teeth if conservative activist groups like Judicial Watch got loot from the Justice Department!

Now we have Dennis Prager worrying about a cold civil war turning violent.

Do liberals have a deep and dark plan to neutralize all opposition and create a one-party state?

I suspect that liberals are idiots, and the SJWs are worse.

I think that liberals are operating under a fundamental delusion. That delusion is that they are the guerrillas in the hills valiantly battling against the entrenched forces of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Oh, and hate.

Of course, this is nonsense. Liberal students are running riot in the universities not because they are valiant protesters battling against the system but because their college presidents and administrators have taught them to be activists and protesters, and they are simply good little boys and girls doing exactly what their ruling-class teachers have taught them.

That is why I have advanced my notion that there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. Injustice is what the ruling class dishes out through its control of the government and the public square and the good little boys and girls in the university. Disagree with a liberal and you could lose your job, or have your social media accounts suspended. But if you are Black Lives Matter spewing racist bile, no problem. If you are a Muslim extremist spewing religious bigotry, no problem.

Justice is what the outs are fighting for; they are fighting to end the domination and hegemony of the ruling class. But once the outs get in power then all they are doing is imposing their ideas on the rest of society, as liberals do today.

I just think that liberals have no clue what they are doing. They are religious enthusiasts pushing their Truth upon an ignorant hive of superstition. They have no clue what their ruthless deployment of power is doing in the hinterland. They all go to school and learn Activism 101 and think it's great. But activism is stylized violence against the Other, and the Other doesn't like it.

What is more, Activism 101 is teaching a lie. It is not about brave young insurgents risking life and limb battling against The Man and his bribed apologists; it is the ruling class teaching its young scions how to intimidate the rubes.

As I understand history, its periods of activism, of revolutions, of Reigns of Terror, of Awakenings are necessarily short. That's because you cannot keep the fervor up forever. For one thing, as Crane Brinton writes in Anatomy of Revolution, ordinary people hate the mobilization and the regimentation. Pretty soon they want to get back to work, and get married and have children. They are not, and never can be, permanent revolutionaries.

We are in the swing of events right now, and cannot tell what will come of them. My prediction is that liberals are in for a nasty shock, and I suspect that the mechanism for applying the shock is going to be the liberal refusal to defend us against Islamic terrorism.

The remedy for Islamic terrorism is pretty simple. You send anyone involved in an Islamic terror cell back to the Middle East. But liberals won't let us do it, and eventually it is going to cost them.

But meanwhile liberals are in a snot that we normals won't play according to their rules, and they want their dollies back.

Some Things You Can't Even Give Away

The Lady Marjorie and I have been cleaning out her mother's condo in Philadelphia. And we have learned a few things.

When you are clearing out grandma's house there are three categories of Stuff.

1. Stuff that people will pay for.
2. Stuff that you can give away.
3. Stuff that you cannot give away.

You can get auction houses to come and get stuff that can fetch them a half decent price.  There are all kinds of ways you can do this, depending on who is going to pick up the risk on what it is all going to sell for.

You can take all kinds of stuff to Goodwill and the other charities that accept donations.

But it is the final category that interesting: the stuff you cannot give away, the stuff that you have to pay someone to take off your hands, the stuff that the auction houses don't want and Goodwill won't accept.

In other words, this stuff is worth less than nothing.

Here is what I am talking about. World Book Encyclopedia. Goodwill won't take it, because nobody wants an encyclopedia these days. Golly, I wonder why. Here is something else: electric typewriters. Nobody wants these miracles of mechanical technology any more, not unless it is an antique manual model. What a shame!

OK. So you that throw these things in the dumpster. But there is something more.

Nobody wants wall units, those majestic pieces of floor-to-ceiling furniture that once supported your stereo, your TV and VCR, and displayed your china collection.

You can see why. Encyclopedias? You can get it for free on the Internet. Typewriters? Hey, it's not just that you can type up anything you want on your laptop; you can dictate into your smartphone. You can even dictate into your smartphone and have it translate into another language.

But the sacred shrines of the household, the wall units, what about them?

It is obvious. Today, people hang giant-screen TVs up on the wall, and they stream everything with Apple TV, or Roku, or Amazon Fire. But what about those china collections? I suppose the answer is that china is not an expensive luxury any more. Good china, cups, mugs, glassware are no longer prized possessions. You can get 'em good and cheap anywhere. Who needs to announce their wealth and taste with stuff anymore?

There is more: mattresses, box springs, upholstered furniture. Forget it. You have to pay to get people to take 'em away. And the guy that took ours away says that stuff is worth less than ever before. He used to get $300 for a trucklead; now he is looking at clearing $100. It's hardly worth bothering. So you have to pay him to take it away.

Well, I don't know the moral and epistemological meaning of all this, whether it speaks of our obscene wealth or our obscene decadence.

I only close with this. When the World Bank did a study on wealth (pdf) back in 2000 they found that physical capital from resources, land, and plants and equipment added up  to a minor part of our capital and wealth. In the advanced countries "intangible capital," the stuff between peoples' ears, amounted to about 80 percent of all wealth.

So it really is true what they say. "Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal..."

But I say: What about grandchildren? Is it OK to lay up a batch of grandchildren? I hope so.

Muslim Problem Solved. Except...

My grandfather, who ran a small export business in Japan until WWII intervened, used to declare that "it's all over bar shouting."

So I am here to announce that the Muslim problem has been solved: it's all over, bar shouting.

It's all in a piece by David P. Goldman.

The Muslim problem is quite simple. Ordinary Muslims in the West are more afraid of the terrorists than they are of the police.

Right now, according to Goldman, the intelligence services attempt to penetrate the Muslim terror gangs by seeding them with Muslim criminals that get out of jail free by agreeing to inform on their terror pals. But the terrorists are on to the bureaucrats' game and so make the informers prove their loyalty to the Muslim cause by performing terror acts.

That is why almost all the terror attacks are committed by "known wolves."

No kidding. This makes a whole lot of stuff make sense.

The problem is not that different from the black gang problem, as told by Jill Leovy in Ghettoside. Everyone knows who done it, after some drive-by killing, but nobody will inform against a gangbanger, because they are afraid. On the other hand, black inner-city residents rail against the police that arrest gangbangers for minor offenses.

It was Civil War generals Sherman and Sheridan that taught us how to deal with terrorists and their sympathizers. Writes Goldman:

We don't have to be particularly smart; we merely have to do some disgusting things. Sherman and Sheridan suppressed sniping at Union soldiers by Confederate civilians by burning the towns (just the towns, not the townsfolk) that sheltered them. In other words, they forced collective responsibility upon a hostile population, a doctrine that in peacetime is entirely repugnant, but that in wartime becomes unavoidable.

By the way, did you know that Gen. Sheridan was an adviser to the Prussians in 1870 and taught them how to deal with French snipers and hostile populations?

We probably don't have to do anything that disgusting. The lesson comes from the solution to the "anarchist" problem in the US before and after World War I. I wrote about it here (H/T Steve Sailer).

The solution was to deport the anarchists, who were usually European immigrants, like Sacco and Vanzetti and the sainted Emma Goldman. After about 556 anarchists were deported the whole thing died down.

Except of course that our lefty friends have canonized the martyrs to the faith, as well they might.

Now, I must say that I am very encouraged by all this, because I see the solution to the Muslim problem also solving the world's lefty problem. Yay!

See, the only reason we have not gone Full Sherman is because of lefties, because they have selected Muslims as the next group "outside the system" for whom they are going to advocate for their "rights." I have written about this here and here. This advocacy for people outside the system made a lot of sense in 1850 when the workers were outside the system, and again, sorta, when women got the vote, and again when the Civil Rights Acts ended the Jim Crow era in the US South.

By the way, the KKK was the South's way to go Full Sherman and terrorize the people in the South so that they would fear the KKK more than the federal Reconstruction troops and officials.

My biggest fear right now is the escalating Partisan Stress Index of Peter Turchin and his Ages of Discord. Left and right in America are raising the stakes on each other, to levels last reached in the 1850s. Eventually it could lead to civil war again.

I don't know about you, but I really do not want civil war in the good old USA.

But not if the Big Problem is Muslim terrorism. That's because the only real job that justifies the obscene cost of government is to Keep Us Safe.

Sooner or later the people will demand that the government Keeps Us Safe from Muslim terror. They will blow right by the left's vile lies about "hate" and "xenophobia" and "Islamophobia." They will ask the President "Is it Safe," and the President will respond by applying Shermanesque tactics to frighten the moderate Muslims into abandoning the extremists in their midst.

Obviously, we are not at the point where the President sends troops into Muslim neighborhoods to burn all their houses down. But I reckon that the first politician that figures out how to square the circle, by deporting Muslims back to their hellholes if they have information about terrorists in their midst and did not report it, is going to have a very big career.

And the point about President Trump is that he is starting to set out markers on the Muslim question, such as with his Muslim Ban from selected terror-supporting countries. Lefties are setting out markers about "hate" and "Islamophobia." Eventually, the American people will have to choose.

The Fundamental Fantasy of the Left

Radical leftie Freddie de Boer has a piece out warning the left that the Iron Law of Institutions, the notion that people work to maximize their power within an institution rather than work for the institution, also includes a statement of lefty principle, which is worth quoting.

[S]ocialism is desirable in part because it’s only socialism that guarantees true freedom, the freedom to live and behave free of want. We’re the movement that can make people really free because once in power we can let them pursue their own interests free of hunger, homelessness, and so on.

Very nice. But who is going to provide "the freedom to live and behave free of want"? Oh, I see, it is "us," because "once in power we can let them pursue their own interests "free of hunger, homelessness, and so on."

This is reminiscent of Nancy Pelosi telling us how Obamacare would let artists and writers stop worrying about paying for health care, so they could get on with writing and painting.

But socialism doesn't remove the who-whom question that Lenin raised. It just concentrates it in the "once in power people," the "We." Someone has to produce the goods and services so that people can "live and behave free of want," and someone has to tell them what to do.

Actually, there is no world "free of want." We all want, and that is why we work in the world. The question is who-whom. Who works, who consumes, who gives the orders, who takes the orders.

The bigger question is whether there is a social system that minimizes the giving of orders, and limits the power that is brought to bear on individual humans to get with the program and produce so that others may consume.

It is the faith of the socialists or the "Democrats and liberals from the radical left, the political tendency [de Boer] belong[s] to" that peace and justice and freedom from want are enhanced by a socialist politics. I would say that their faith is a delusion, proved by the history of the last 100 years.

The only alternatives that we know of are a system whereby a market with prices for everything from labor to cough drops signals to each and every one of us what we should do (or more important, not do) to get what we want. The other system is one in which powerful people, either feudal lords or politicians and their socialist managers, tell people what to do.

We have some history on this. Starting in about 1800 a market-based system started up in some lands of northwest Europe. The result over 200 years was an increase in per-capita income of about 3,000 percent, something that had never happened before in human history, ever.

Starting about a century ago, a socialist-based system started up in the lands of Russia and China. The result was famine and horror, and the leaders of both countries have stopped trying to implement socialism, mainly, I suspect, because a poor country can't throw much weight around in international power politics.

Now Freddie de Boer allows as how in any week he probably attends an "organizing meeting, union meeting, or protest" and very likely more. In other words, he believes in the power of politics, of the power of a union to extract more for wage-earners from the bosses, and the power of a government to extract more for voters from the rich.

I have a fundamental problem with this, apart from the history, which is pretty clear. The whole point of social animals is to declare a zone of peace in which the use of force is avoided as much as possible. Usually this is achieved by hierarchy, where the bottom dogs cringe before the power of the top dogs; but at least there is no actual force, not usually.

In the market system of price signalling the top dog is the price, and everyone cringes before the price. That is how the use of force is diminished.

The problem with socialism and all politics-centric ideas is that they reintroduce force into the place of social peace. They say that the peaceful process of working and consuming according to the dictates of prices just doesn't work. The only way is by force, by replacing the work boss -- with the power of hiring and firing -- with the political boss -- with the power of the state, or men with guns.

It is the easiest thing in the world to pretend that what I do with power is just sweetness and light, whereas what other people do is the work of Satan.

But I believe that the way to understand politics and government is that there is no such thing as justice. Only injustice meted out by the chaps in power.

And that is why it is best that the people in power should always be thinking about what the people on the receiving end of their power think about it.

For some reason, people in power don't tend to think about this, not until it is too late.

Trump's Paris Climate: Sound and Fury

Yesterday, June 1, 2017, President Trump announced that he would be withdrawing the US from the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

In response coal-plant investor and environmental enthusiast Tom Steyer talked about Trump's action committing "assault and battery on the future of the American people." And the AP released a "scientists say" article brimming with ruling-class conventional wisdom.

What on earth is going on here?

First of all, there is the complaint of my old boss, Stuart Alexander. He once complained about how the people working under him, especially the software people, were always going off on tangents.

Exactly. Life is hard, and people are always eager to take a break from the job in hand and worry about someone else's job.

Politicians are in charge of protecting their people from enemies foreign and domestic. But they spend most of their time doing other stuff, like regulating the fuel economy of cars and pretending that health care can be reduced to an administrative system.

Climate-change politics is an almost irresistible temptation for politicians because it is a war that isn't a war. As I say, the whole point of government is to protect us from existential perils, from the Soviet Union to global Islamic terrorism. What about catastrophic climate change? It is, you may say, Minecraft for the grown-up ruling class.

But it is all make-believe. Here's why.

In the first place, scientists have developed climate models that do not model the future. In yet another proof of God's existence, the climate has "paused" in the years since the climate models were developed. The world just is not heating up as much as the models predicted and continue to predict.

As Richard Feynman, a scientist, once said. If you gin up a theory and it doesn't predict then your theory is wrong. You better start over.

Yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and more CO2 will tend to warm the earth but we don't know how much.

Yes, the Earth is warming, but we don't really know why.

Yes, there is a "pause" in warming right now, but we don't know why.

Yes, the Earth has been warming since the Little Ice Age, but we don't know why.

Yes, the Earth is in an interglacial period in an Ice Age, but we don't know why.

Oh yeah. We have theories about all this stuff, but nothing dispositive.

Let's think about this in a completely different way, using the Antifragile notion of Black Swan inventor, Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

His point is that the problem for anyone is not the routine stuff; it is the unexpected catastrophic event. In finance, it is the financial crash. In politics it is invasion.

But what about climate? I'd say that the catastrophic event is not runaway climate due to increased CO2. We've seen the Earth with more CO2 in the past and with less CO2.

(Actually less CO2 is not good, because at about half the current CO2 concentration plants start to give up and stop photosynthesis.)

Let us start from the top.

What about an asteroid impact? What would we do to make sure that human life continues? That the US continues? That my grandchildren continue? In that order.

What about a Carrington event, a pulse of electromagnetic radiation (EMP) that takes out all electronics? What do we do to mitigate that? First, we would want to be sure that we can restart electronics. Then we would want to reduce the loss of life due to the pause until normal service is resumed.

What about nuclear war, such as an attack by the Norks? Star Wars? Aid to the devastated city?

What about Venezuela, where political stupidity wrecks a nation's economy? What about that?

What about the End of Entitlements, our own rendez-vous with Venezuela?

And finally, what about the Earth's temperature rising faster than it is right now?

Here's my judgement. I'd say that on nukes, Venezuela, entitlements, climate, we can just muddle through, as usual. And it wouldn't hurt for each of us to Go Mormon, and have a stash of emergency supplies handy.

It is on EMP and asteroids that government can help, for a start by moving electronics and the electricity system towards some kind of antifragility. There is no doubt that the bigger the event, the more people will die. But each of us had better understand that the ultimate goal is to make sure that some of us survive.

How much would it cost to make all of us survive? Most of us? Some of us?

That is assuming that we humans survive the advent of AI, of artificial intelligence.