Missing the Point on Economics and Government

Thanks to the magic of the internet, I got to read a piece in the London Guardian about "How Economics Became a Religion" by John Rapley.

The article is a promo for Rapley's book just out, Twilight of the Money Gods: Economics as a Religion and How it all Went Wrong. I think that Rapley, at least in the Guardian's "long read" article, misses the point completely.

Rapley writes about how

Economics offers a comprehensive doctrine with a moral code promising adherents salvation in this world; an ideology so compelling that the faithful remake whole societies to conform to its demands. It has its gnostics, mystics and magicians who conjure money out of thin air, using spells such as “derivative” or “structured investment vehicle”. And, like the old religions it has displaced, it has its prophets, reformists, moralists and above all, its high priests who uphold orthodoxy in the face of heresy.

Well, yes. But there is a tendency for all doctrines to elevate themselves above mere practical utility and attempt to penetrate the empyrean. For one thing, it helps in fending off pretenders to knowledge who have no business challenging the high priests of the temple.

But the point about economics is that its practitioners are very useful to politicians, because economists advertise that they can help to keep the ship of state from foundering on hidden economic reefs.

It is one step from merely using economists as cooks in the kitchen of economic policymaking to elevating them to the status of priests and shamans versed in the mysteries of economic divination, in order to represent ordinary political power plays and routine political looting as the divine rulings of the immortal gods rather than shabby efforts to use the economy as a piggy bank to reward the supporters of the ruling class, in accordance with my dictum:

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

Now in the dim and distant past, before the advent of modern economics, rulers frequently got into a bit of a jam when it came to funding their wars and rewarding their supporters. To my recollection, Edward III ruined a few Italian bankers in his efforts to fund the First Hundred Years War against France and to set up the Black Prince as a prince among men. Henry VIII, he of the multiple wives, had several financial crises during his reign, which included debasing the currency. He had it harder than Edward III because his policy of disarming the nobles meant that he needed to fund the entire national security budget through taxes and with credits from the merchants of London rather than in the old feudal way of Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays when each nobleman talked about bringing "our powers" to the battle.

But then the Dutch invented central banking in their war of liberation against the empire of Spain, and when they invaded Britain in 1688 they brought their financial technology with them. The result was that the Brits won the Second Hundred Years War against the French even though they had cranked up their National Debt to 250 percent of GDP by 1815 and the decisive Battle of Waterloo. France lost the war because it was cursed with financial twerps like John Law that ruined French finances (he was treated as a demi-god until it turned out he had feet of clay).

In the middle of all this, enter the classical economists with their notion of the division of labor and their two-pronged value theory: use value and exchange value -- plus comparative advantage, free trade and all that. All this was pretty magical, but nobody thought to sell it to the people as magic. Not yet.

It was Karl Marx who elevated economics to the status of a religion. That's because Marxism is a secular religion promising heaven on earth if only we follow the prophet Marx and his precepts, which were a dog's breakfast of classical economics, a mashup of use value, exchange value, surplus value, and the obvious point that, in a competitive market, all the profit gets squeezed out and everybody gets poorer and poorer as they fight for market share on diminishing profit margins. Marx had the brilliant insight that you could dress up your political ideas as "science" and promise to save the world from a fate worse than death.

Of course, Marx finished his Capital in the early 1860s and published Volume 1 in 1866-67, just before the marginal value revolution of 1870 that made nonsense of his economics. Hey, that happens, but you will read Marxist writers in vain to discover any attempt to revise Marx's prophecy in light of the new science. So they had to elevate his prophesies into Holy Writ.

Up until Bismarck's social insurance politics of the 1880s government's only interest in economics was in funding its wars, and this could be done using the precepts of central banking developed by the Dutch and brilliantly executed in the US by folks like Alexander Hamilton.

But the big-government state that Bismarck and the social reformers instantiated before and after World War I raised the stakes on government. Government began interfering with the workings of the price system and the economy in a number of ways, and so government needed technical experts to make sure that its usual blunders didn't pitch the economy into a big financial panic.

Just as natural science allows humans to build structures and engines and internets that would be impossible without the technology built upon a foundation of natural science, it is also true that government could not run the current mega-state with its myriad of taxes and privileges and subsidies without a technology to guide them.

Gee, funny how the first thing that happened after economists really got into the saddle was the mother of all financial crashes, the Great Depression of 1929-33.

Obviously, after a blunder like the Great Depression, government needed a miracle, and it got one, in the form of Keynesianism. Keynes taught a receptive audience that it was the height of progress and sophistication to spend borrowed money on the regime's supporters in the aftermath of a financial crisis. Obviously, governments could not say that the point of Keynesianism was to clean up the mess made by interventionist government. Instead they let it be known that their tame economists were geniuses that had completely reformed the old, classical economics that had got us into the Great Depression. Eventually, the government's tame economists decided that they had tamed the business cycle. Of course they did. That was in the 1960s, right before the inflation of the 1970s and the big recession of 1980-81.

With that sort of politics and its constant mumbling and bumbling, pretty soon you need to make economists into demi-gods, cunningly manipulating the economic world from Mt. Olympus, so that the politicians on the bridge can report to the people that they will navigate the ship of state out of financial trouble with a magical economic compass that only those initiated into the mysteries of the New Economics could read. It's the obvious thing to do. When practical knowledge fails, humans resort to magic.

And naturally, just as we tend to venerate Albert Einstein as a kind of demi-god for coming up with relativity, we tend to venerate the economists that walk on the death-defying tightrope of economic policy, trying to find cunning ways for the government to win elections and hand out free stuff without going full Venezuela.

Obviously it is best not to let the plebs see how this sausage gets made. It is better to distract them and rulers since the dawn of time have done that in a condominium with shamans, temple priests, and established churches. Or, as Rapley writes,

Over time, successive economists slid into the role we had removed from the churchmen: giving us guidance on how to reach a promised land of material abundance and endless contentment. 

Of course they did. The ordinary person doesn't understand economics. So the sensible thing for the ruling class to do is to cloister the right kind of economists in educational monasteries and treat their utterances as holy writ. As was the case with good old established churches, the politicians get to appoint the abbots and bishops of the economic monasteries and cathedrals and the abbots and bishops loyally maintain the fiction that their divinations come directly from God, er, science. Nothing to see here. It's the way it always works.

I see what Rapley's game is. You can see it from the blurb at Amazon.

Imagine one day you went to a cash-machine and found your money was gone. You rushed to your branch, where a teller said that overnight people had stopped believing in money, and it all vanished. Seem incredible? It happened, and it could happen again. Twilight of the Money Gods is the story of economics, told not as the science it strove to be...

Well, yes. The government's tame economist bishops and abbots are exactly what the established church abbots and bishops were: ruling class stooges. And when the music stops the bishops and the abbots won't be a bit of good to help you get money out of your local ATM.

When the music stops the key thing is for the government to step into its role of "lender of last resort." Walter Bagehot wrote the bible on that in Lombard Street. In the 2008 crash the government ended up doing a pretty good job of last-resort lender, after a brief panic when Ben Bernanke muffed on his priestly job of bailing out Lehman Brothers in September 2008. He said he didn't have the legal authority to bail them out. Oh please, Ben. The only job of the Federal Reserve is to be lender of last resort. Period. And you muffed it, and you made it worse. Of course, Ben Bernanke was an academic economist.

The whole lender-of-last-resort operation in 2008 added up to about $16 to 20 trillion in bailouts and (mostly) guarantees. See my TARP bailout page for details. So in the end the priests and abbots of the global established church of economics did their job and applied extreme unction to the economy with the appropriate rites, incense, and laying on of hands. Whatever that means.

But don't forget the unforgettable Mrs. Proudie. There must be a role for her in the New Church of Economics. 

The Lesson of the Charlie Gard Affair

The Charlie Gard case is exciting conservatives from the US to the Vatican, because of what it says about government programs.

Charlie Gard is a baby in the UK with a severe genetic condition that has resulted in irreversible brain and organ damage. But there is an experimental treatment called "nucleoside therapy" and a US hospital has agreed to offer Charlie the treatment.

The BBC has a helpful article "Charlie Gard case explained" to help the perplexed.

If you read the BBC story it takes the line that science has decided the case and

courts ruled that the original [hospital] decision should stand and that it would be in Charlie's best interests to be allowed to die with dignity.

Notice the passive voice. What is more,

The therapy is a treatment, not a cure. And it is highly experimental.

All very good. And perfectly logical and in accordance with science and expert opinion. But this was not a passive decision as implied by the BBC's passive voice. What happened is that the British government decided not to spend the money to keep Charlie Gard alive.

Naturally the BBC is perplexed that folks like the Pope and Donald Trump have intervened. Thus

The president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, however, says such interventions from high-profile figures, no matter how well-intended, are "unhelpful".

Of course he did.

Now I want to make two points here. The first is that the BBC and the British National Health Service all believe in the supremacy of the administrative state and its scientific world view: that expert opinion, based on settled science, administered through government programs, should be dispositive.

The second is that most people are perfectly happy with this, because it removes them from responsibility.

On the first point, the only problem is: what if the experts are wrong? We have the example of climate change where the ruling class, prompted by international bureaucrat Maurice Strong, decided that carbon dioxide was a problem and then set up an ideological system on the assumption that carbon-based energy equals more CO2 equals runaway global temperature equals the end of the world, therefore the ruling class should control the production and use of energy. OK, but what if they are wrong? How would we know? How could we correct the mistake?

Because that is the question of first interest in any system or culture or any situation in life. What happens when things go wrong?

On the second point, of comprehensive government programs, specifically "single payer" health care, the system takes away the right of individual action against the system. The system, here including the Great Ormond Street Hospital and the court system of the UK, decided that it is "in Charlie's best interests to be allowed to die with dignity." Even though Charlie's parents had found the money to  pay for Charlie's treatment outside the NHS system they were forbidden to remove Charlie from intensive care in Great Ormond Street Hospital to seek this treatment. In other words, the state has primary custodial rights over the children of the UK, not the parents. The parent has no right to dissent from the state's custodial supremacy.

It is my belief  that most  people are quite happy with this, for a simple reason. When the state has supreme rights over you and your children, it relieves you of the responsibility of making tough decisions. If you are the subordinate subject of a national health system and the system says you are too old to get a hip replacement, well, that's it. You complain about the system and about its injustice, but you don't do anything about it. You don't have to, because the system decides for you.

In reality, if you have a ageing mother that needs a hip-replacement or an expensive experimental cancer treatment, you could pay for it yourself. You could mortgage your house, draw down your IRA, whatever, to save mom's life. And if you decide not to then, if you are a woman, you will feel guilty about it for the rest of your life.

See the benefit of the government program system? If anything goes wrong, you can just sit back and blame the system, or the insurance companies, or the drug companies, because they did nothing to help your mother. You can see that this plays beautifully into what I call the woman's Culture of Complaint.

If you think that, then according to my reductive Three Peoples theory, you are a Person of the Subordinate Self. OK, no problem, the world has always been full of workers and peasants.

But if you are a Person of the Responsible Self you rebel against the notion that the government gets to decide whether to pull the plug on your child, or that the government gets to decide whether you are too old to get a hip replacement. You are the kind of person that agrees to take responsibility for your actions, even when you make the wrong decision. You are the kind of person that is willing to live with the guilt of being wrong. You are willing to live with the knowledge of your own selfishness when you decide not to empty out your life savings to save your child's life.

Now right now I am involved in an end-of-life situation with Lady Marjorie's mother. About a month ago we put her into hospice mode. That means that she can't be kicked out of her retirement community. Hospice care is free under Medicare, but you don't get to go to the ER when you have a medical emergency. Instead you get palliative care.

So, at some point last week the hospice people advised not to use antibiotics to fight a possible infection, under which Marjorie's mother was in extreme distress with coughing and liquid in the respiratory system. Instead they applied palliative care. Which basically means applying pain medication and other measures until the patient expires.

Do you see what is going on here? The system is getting to decide what to do about the end of life of an ageing Medicare recipient. And the system has a rather obvious interest, that of limiting heroic methods and the associated expense to save a life. And being a system, it does not make moral and ethic decisions. It makes technical decisions, like the decision about Charlie Gard, that "it would be in Charlie's best interests to be allowed to die with dignity."

But as I say, System is Domination. When  the system decides whether you live or die, it is not science or law or morals or ethics. It is Domination.

And that is something that our liberal friends do not understand.

Of Course the Norks Want Nukes

The general line of the global ruling class on the North Korea problem seems to be that North Korean nukes is a very bad idea.

That's because the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un is a crazy man, etc.

I don't think so. I don't think that Kim is crazy. I think that Kim is merely playing the hand that was dealt him.

In my view, a small, weak country like North Korea needs to have nukes, because that's the only way that it can deter the larger powers from bullying it around and even invading and toppling the government.

Why do you think that the US invaded Iraq? Or kicked Libya into chaos? Why do you think that the whole world is mucking about in Syria. I will tell you.

It's because these small, weak countries did not have nukes.

Now think about the situation of dictator Kim. Or rather think about him as the third generation of the Kim dynasty in North Korea.

Kim is faced on one side by South Korea, a vibrant state and growing economy that is now, with a per capita GDP of $27,000, right there in the rich kids club. By all rights, Kim should just give up the game and surrender North Korea and its $600 per capita GDP into the prosperous arms of its southern neighbor. Hello! $27,000 versus $600!

But then on the other hand there is China. China kinda likes the idea of a throttle-bottom North Korea between it and the rich kids in South Korea. And no doubt it likes the idea of North Korea as a burr under the saddle of the US. But, from the point of view of Kim, there is a problem. The Chinese leaders might revise their idea of the benefit of a miserably poor buffer state. Or it might decide that the time has come for the Kim dynasty to be replaced by a real puppet regime.

So it makes complete sense for Kim to bankrupt his $600 per capita GDP country so he can have nukes and ICBMs. Because so long as he has nukes and can theoretically nuke the US, or Japan, or South Korea then he feels that he is safe from invasion and replacement.

Yes, you say. But what in the world is dictator Kim doing building ICBMs and nukes when his country is a dirt poor basket case limping along at $600 per capita per year? The answer is obvious. Rulers do not care about their people. They only care about staying in power, and as long as the leader remains in power, life is good. No doubt the Kim family have resources stashed in banks and whatnot outside of North Korea so that they have a place to go if and when they get removed from office. But that is Plan B. Plan A is to rule North Korea.

But meanwhile, dictator Kim needs nukes. And he needs us to think that he is crazy enough to use them.

Venezuela: For the Left, It Is Only About Power

July 5 is Venezuelan independence day, so what better for President Maduro's colectivo thugs than to attack the opposition-led National Assembly! That from a report by The New York Times.

I seem to remember back in the day that when right-wing Latin American dictatorships deployed armed street gangs, we were taught to call them "death squads." What happened to that?

It would be comical if it were not so tragic that the lefty president of  Venezuela, who speaks for the people, would send his supporters to rough up the representatives of the people. Meanwhile, reports the dead-pan Times, the Venezuelan Supreme Court, "which is loyal to the president," is looking into removing the Attorney General Luisa Ortega, who recently "sharpened her criticism of the president’s plan to let a constituent assembly of handpicked loyalists write a new Constitution."

I'll bet that if the US Supreme Court were loyal in that way to President Trump that the Times would not be so nonchalant about loyalty.

As I say, this would be funny if it weren't so tragic. Hey, Maduro, fellah, the whole point of constitutions and national assemblies is to avoid riots in the streets by people who judge that they are outside the system and cannot get a fair hearing when the government gets together to decide what the next policy of force is to be. Once you short-circuit the democratic process then you are signalling to the opposition that force and rebellion are the only recourse for the opponents of the regime.

As Dennis Prager likes to say, I am getting real clarity on this, and it doesn't hurt that I am right in the middle of reading a biography of Karl Marx.

The whole point of the last few centuries is that, for the first time ever in human history, the decisive question is not defending our borders from the neighboring tribe. Used to be that our patch of land was decisive because we grew our food on it, and without that food we were toast. Good land meant good food,  and land was life. "Land, it's the only thing that lasts," said the doomed Gerald O'Hara in Gone With The Wind.

For if land is not decisive, and instead its food can be traded for labor, for goods, for inventions, for energy, then the importance of political and military power fades away. Power is no longer the regime's granaries, or its army, or its armed forces. Power is the intangible capital in the minds of the people, and the more you leave them alone to get on with it, the more intangible capital they create in their fertile imaginations and their busy lives.

But this is what the left has turned against, ever since Marx. Here's a piece from Karl Marx: The Passionate Logician by Joel Carmichael about the first trip Marx made to England with Engels and encountered there the workers and the Chartists.

The workers still respected law and order and believed that they could improve their situation by organizing in trade unions and by influencing legislation. This was all the more puzzling for Marx, for according to his and Engels's theory, it was logically necessary for workers in the advanced industrial countries to be on the threshold of "bursting asunder" the old order.

The point is that all the rubbish about revolution has nothing to do with the workers' needs and aspirations. They do not imagine themselves the rulers and the movers and the shakers. They just want a decent life and a modicum of respect. The whole superstructure of revolution and "fundamental transformation" is the secular religious dream of the secular sons of the bourgeoisie, poets and writers and intellectuals and activists that imagine themselves as rulers. The workers don't want to fundamentally transform anything; they just want to wive and thrive and they want their needs to be considered in the councils of power. Marx and Engels understood this. When they actually referred to the workers privately in their letters "the workers were referred to simply as jackasses, gullible fools, etc."

In other words, the political activists on the left are just like ruling-class apologists of the state. The left talks about the wonders of the oppressed and the marginalized, and the ruling class makes a big fuss over "our" soldiers and police that keep us safe. But the truth is that all they care about are their local political feuds and their foreign wars. The "people" and the "heroes" are in the final analysis nothing more than cannon fodder, the dupes of the ruling class.

The left is no different from the kings and the emperors of old. They have their power project and they need a people to do the fighting and dying for them. Part  of that process is flattering  the people that they are the chosen  ones, and that the bourgeoisie, or the Soviets, or the Muslims, are their dangerous enemies. We have always been at war with Eastasia.

I suppose the only saving grace is that the left's fantasy of power always leads nowhere and every leftist regime ends in economic ruin, so the left will never inherit the earth.

But in the meantime millions of lives are ruined every time some leftist fantasy meets reality and flushes itself and its dupes down the toilet.

Getting to the Why of Marxism

I picked up a biography of Karl Marx: the Passionate Logician by Joel Carmichael at HalfPriceBooks the other day for the princely price of $3.00, and I'm glad I did.

Because the book helps me understand the why of the most destructive and reactionary political ideology in human history, responsible for millions of deaths and unimaginable human misery.

Carmichael does a splendid job of laying out the ideological fervors that were consuming rich university kids like Marx in the early to mid 19th century and that led to the Communist Manifesto and Marxism.

First of all, everyone in Germany and Russia in the early 19th century was consumed by Hegel. Why? Well, Carmichael proposes, partly because Hegel made dialectics not just about logic and argument, but about the real world. If you like, Hegel gets over the problem of Newtonian mechanics that the world, the universe, is like a billiard table where everything is determined like the movement of cannon balls and planets. In Hegel, things change by the to-and-fro movement from thesis to antithesis and back, which is a lot closer to the real world of constant change and oscillation.

Then everyone was transfixed by the early years of the industrial revolution, where sensitive urban souls got to see for the first time the reality of poverty in the lower orders. There must be a better, higher way, they thought, and being young men they quickly decided that the best answer would be a gang rumble, the intoxicating violence of revolution. They would rebel in the name of the proletariat, of which they knew nothing.

So in the first half of the 19th century we got a two-stage development of socialism, first in the ideas of Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen, and then in the more pointed ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Étienne Cabet, Louis Blanc, and Moses Hess. The point of all of these ideas was that the welfare of mankind was far too important to be left to the likes of merchants and bankers. Educated men of virtue needed to intervene, with the glorious promise of socialism where property would be abolished and people would live in genuine equality and harmony.

Those times were rather like our own time. Here was a radical revolution in the economy, throwing the modestly fed, clothed and housed artisans and craftsmen of the guilds out of work. It looked like things were spiraling downwards as the world of the craftsman was replaced by the teeming slums of the proletariat and the manufactory.

Same thing today. We have the global economy that is shattering all the comfortable assumptions of the industrial age. You can't hope to graduate from high school and get a lifetime union job at the local steel plant or auto factory any more. In fact some reckless prognosticators are predicting the end of the job altogether.

Since we can't just trust the market, it stands to reason that government must intervene, then and now, with its force. Or better yet: Revolution, Baby! We will replace private property and its injustice with the ethical principles of true community.

Now I think that there is a fatal flaw in the lefty analysis, both then and now. There is a basic assumption that the fall of the craftsman and the "deskilling" of work was universal. But in fact that was not so. The craftsmen might have been falling into poverty, but the new proletariat was overwhelmingly composed of people migrating from the country to the city. Presumably they made this journey because they felt that wage labor in the city was better than whatever they were experiencing in the countryside. No doubt, because the agricultural revolution of the previous two hundred years had reduced the sturdy European peasant to nomadic penury. That's why the Elizabethan Poor Law was passed in 1598: because landless peasants were roaming the countryside in Britain -- robbers and highwaymen -- and Something Had to be Done.

Same thing today. We see the decline of the white working class, previously propped up, like the guild craftsmen, by government-sanctioned privilege. But at the same time we see the immigrants from the Third World flooding into our cities, looking to wive and thrive in the modern economy. In Florida, where I am presently attending on Lady Marjorie's end-of-life mother, the hospital staff, the home health aides are mostly black immigrants from the Caribbean (BTW, one aide drives a Mercedes, and another drives an Infiniti: go figure). There is barely a white working class in sight. In China, I read, something like 12 million people are moving from the country to the city every year. Are all these people moving to misery? I doubt it.

But at least the Proudhons and the Marxes had an excuse. They were experiencing the beginnings of the Great Enrichment and it would have been reckless to assume that, in 1850, you ain't seen nothin' yet. And the socialist dream had not yet been tested and killed millions of people and tanked the economy wherever it was tried. Our modern lefties have no excuse; they are simply living in Cloud Cuckoo Land.

But here is their basic error: their attack on private property. The point about private property regulated by law is that it is an amazing advance over the alternative, which is property adjudicated by war. That was the old way, from the Romans to the Vikings. How did they get rich? They stole it. The point about Julius Caesar is that he spent ten years conquering Gaul and accumulating a rich harvest of loot and slaves. Ditto the Vikings, only they preyed on the Brits as well as the French.

Now go forward to the new way, practiced by the Brits in India. When they set up their trading posts at Calcutta and Madras and Bombay people from the hinterland flocked to shelter under their rule, because their's was a trading, merchant economy, not a looting, feudal economy. And when the Governor of Bengal, Warren Hastings, started doing a bit of looting and plundering, Edmund Burke had him impeached in the British Parliament.

No, property is not theft; it is an amazing human invention that allows humans to buy and sell rather than seize and hold. And notice that the socialist states all regress from buy and sell to seize and hold. Their only means is violence, and violence leads to poverty and riots in the streets, President Maduro, because government is force.

Then there is the price system. Marx built his whole economics on the contradictions in classical economics between use value and exchange value. But ten years after he published Das Kapital, Vol. 1, scientists realized that there wasn't such a thing as use value and exchange value, there was only marginal value. And then Ludwig von Mises made the prophetic statement, just as the Soviet Union was getting going, that socialism could not work because it could not compute prices. If any prophecy in this world has been confirmed by events, millions of deaths, and untold misery, it is the prophecy that socialism can only work when it merely banishes prices to the black market.

Yet day in and day out, people are going to government trying to get it to put its thumb on the price system and warp it in their favor. Where are the passionate rich young men, educated at the best universities, that are denouncing this vile and reactionary exploitation? Youthful educated passion, it appears, does not extend to descanting on the wonders of peaceful cooperation and enrichment by submitting to the prices set day by day in the market.

Anyway, now I have a better idea of what Marx and his pals in the mid 19th century were thinking, and why.

The Dead End of Institutionalization

Today I read a piece about the horrors of Medicaid-funded nursing homes. And then a piece about Oregon's foster care system housing children in hotel rooms.

All this while Lady Marjorie and I attend her mother, who lives in a retirement home cared for by paid home health aides.

We moderns live an astonishing fraction of our lives in institutions. We are born in hospitals, go to school in government child-custodial facilities, go on to college and live in barracks -- er, dorms -- and then spend our working hours in factory-like office buildings. Then we go to die in "retirement communities" if we have the ready, or Medicaid-funded nursing homes if we don't. Used to be that parentless children were stored in orphanages. Now they are put out to foster homes except when they are stored in hotel rooms.

I suppose the reason for all this is that humans, whenever they can afford it, pay someone to look after their children. Rich women used to have wet nurses to nurse their children. Wealthy Brits used to send their kids away to boarding schools and, according to Dickens, put unwanted stepchildren away in horror shows like Dotheboys Hall or Mr. Creakle's kindly educational establishment, Salem House.

And now, with the welfare state, everyone gets their kids institutionalized, at government expense, in government child-custodial facilities, and gets granny institutionalized in a retirement community or a nursing home.

(However, I heard from an acquaintance that Medicaid now prefers to keep granny at home, paying for a family caregiver and additional help if needed, rather than putting granny in one of those horror-show nursing homes described above.)

I wonder if sometime after the end of the present moral crusade for political correctness and race and gender politics we will experience a different kind of moral revival, one that regards the institutionalization and warehousing of the young and the weak and the aged as a moral horror, and the idea of putting kids away in school, or granny away in a nursing home, as an indictment of our society comparable to plantation slavery.

Think of it this way. Some people think that the modern school was invented to make children obedient enough to submit to the discipline of the factory system. It is, in other words, boot camp for factory work in the same way that military basic training breaks a military recruit to military discipline.

But if the factory system, of ranks of people doing simple and repetitive tasks under close supervision, is to be a thing of the past as simple repetitive tasks are taken over by robots and automation then humans will be released from wage slavery to take care of each other. Mothers will not need to go out to work but can stay home to raise their children in community with the other women in the neighborhood. Daughters will be able to look after their ailing parents rather than do stupid repetitive office work or school administration as they do now under the notion that they are pursuing "careers."

On this view the present situation, where women are to be "liberated" from the caring responsibilities of the home, will end and human civilization will revert to its old shape, where women are carers and men are fighters.

Honestly, I don't have a clue what is coming next and why. But I just have this nagging feeling that the modern habit of institutionalization is riding for a fall.

Just like the top-down centralized administrative model of politics and big business.

Should We Update the Fourth?

Today, the Fourth of July, many conservative outlets are running traditional restatements of the Fourth of July and the Declaration of Independence. Typical is this piece from Powerline, that quotes President Coolidge.

If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final, If governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed, that is final.

But it is just that iinality that our lefty friends contest. If it is true that all men (and women and LGBT) are created equal then how come men are still overrepresented as senators and corporate CEOs? If they are endowed with inalienable rights, then how come transgendered still aren't allowed in the US military? If governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed, what about the undocumented workers that do not get to give their consent?

The point is that for 200 years or so the left has been driving a coach and horses through the principles of the American founding and has turned the educated and the marginalized against it.

In fact the whole 200 year history of the left is a reflection of the fact that the ideas of the Founding are not the last word in human social relations and identity.

I came to this realization years ago reading F.S.C Northrop. He writes in The Meeting of East and West,

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.

 What does this mean? Well, in the German case, it means the whole Romantic movement, and Herder's contribution to German nationalism, and Kant's transcendentalism, and Hegel's dialectic -- the notion that reasoning and reality are not quite as simple as you might think.  Then came the middle-class Marx deciding that the bourgeoisie was no better than the feudal lords that the Enlightenment was supposed to throw on the dust-heap of history. In other words, the Declaration of Independence might be final for me, a upper-middle-class immigrant from Britain, but what about an illegal lesbian immigrant from Honduras?

In 1776 the Declaration of Independence was a statement of fighting words against the world of the absolute monarch, and its "final" words were directed against King George and his aristocratic supporters in Britain.

But now we are engaged in a climactic struggle against the new ideology, the ideology that comes out of the French Enlightenment and German Romanticism. Listen: they had a point! John Locke is not the last word in political philosophy!

But now, I argue, you have to be a blithering idiot or a superstitious lefty not to see that the cure has been worse than the disease. Yes, American constitutionalism assumes that you are a middle-class individual. Not good enough. But treating everyone like helpless victims, oppressed and exploited by a racist, sexist, society, and developing huge administrative programs to minister to those making the transition from agricultural idiocy to urban competence, has in the worst case birthed the most evil killer regimes in human history, and in the best case provoked a demoralizing dependency on big government where in the bottom third of society the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

And while we have been having this argument over the last two hundred years something amazing has been happening. It is what economist Deirdre McCloskey calls "The Great Enrichment." We are talking about an increase in real income in the US from $3 per capita per day to the current US $144 per capita per day. As McCloskey writes, there has never been anything like it in history ever. Hey, we are talking about a 30-times increase in human prosperity. Almost two orders of magnitude!

Stop right there. Do you realize how utterly amazing that is?

Being a dull sort of person, it took me until a couple months ago to realize that I have the data on the Great Enrichment, right here on usgovernmentspending.com for the US, and ukpublicspending.co.uk for the Brits. Imagine! So I wrote about it here. No really, take a look at the data.

It is amazing, and the most amazing thing is that the Brit version shows that per capita income in the UK was going down in the UK until after the end of what I call the Second Hundred Years War between Britain and France on the battlefield of Waterloo. In other words, the Great Enrichment for the Brits might have started earlier but for the fact that its ruling class was fighting a jolly old war against the French.

The point is this. Our lefty friends have been spending the last 200 years telling us that it is the worst of times and the truth is that it is the very best of times. In fact there never was another time in history of such amazing prosperity, not just for kings and their feudal supporters and rich bankers, and not just for the middle class, but for workers all over the world.

Here is the clincher. In the Soviet Union and China, and also in India, the rulers that kicked out the Czars and the Sons of Heaven started out believing that the lefty gospel was true, that centralized administrative control of the economy was the way to material abundance, not to mention material equality. So we had a scientific experiment on the Great Enrichment, as near as that is possible with actual humans and actual economies and actual governments.

And the verdict is clear, as clear as things ever can be in human affairs. China started an amazing increase in human prosperity starting the day after it abandoned Maoist economics in 1979 under Deng Xiaoping and allowed capitalism to bloom. India started an less startling but still remarkable increase in economic prosperity starting in the 1990s after it abandoned the Fabian socialism that its leaders had learned from the Deep State of their British colonial masters. It is perfectly obvious that leftist economic thinking has nothing to do with the case in the economic miracles of China and India.

Yes, but what do we do? If the ideas of the American Founding, good as they are, do not persuade the average dull lefty then what?

Thank you senator, I'm glad you asked. The answer is my "In this School of Life, We Learn" yard sign.



I go through each item, line by line, at the American Thinker.

But the crux of my thinking is this. Every time that liberals come up with another plan for a big government program, the question to ask is this:

If government is force, and politics is division, then are things really so bad that the only solution is to divide Americans one from another in a new political battle, and is it really a matter of life and death, for surely that is the only warrant for another government program of force is that millions will die unless we force Americans into ranks and files to contribute to and to submit their lives to this new increment of systematic domination.

You will notice that the warrant for the global trillion dollar per year climate program is that it is "saving the planet." You will notice that the reaction of Democrats and #TheResistance to reform of Obamacare is that "millions will die."

Am I right or am I right? The only warrant for government force is that the alternative is the end of the world.

Now I am a dull sort of chap, and I don't pretend that I have come up with anything new with this. I am just parroting back what I have learned through my extensive reading. Some day some young genius will come and make these ideas dance.

But meanwhile this is all we have.

GOVERNMENT IS FORCE. I got that from a crazy libertarian.

POLITICS IS DIVISION. I don't remember where that came from.

SYSTEM IS DOMINATION. I got that from Frankfurt School lefties Horkheimer and Adorno.

Onwards and upwards, and God Bless the United States of America, the last best hope of freedom.