Another Thing That Marx Got Wrong

I attended a neighborhood Block Watch party the other night and got to talk with the lefty girl across the street. She was worried that the tech kids working at Amazon were not interested in social justice and politics. Imagine!

That got me to descanting to the neighborhood folks that people in business have never been that interested in politics: John D. Rockefeller retired from Standard Oil at age 50 and invented modern philanthropy. Today's billionaires want to go to Mars. Etc.

But somehow that led me to an epiphany. It is this.

Marx in his Communist Manifesto imagined that the rising bourgeoisie and the capitalists were in the process of replacing the Old Feudalism of lords and peasants with a new feudalism of capitalists and workers.

The new lords of commerce, Marx prophesied, would rule over business and politics the way that the great barons of the land ruled over the world in their day. Of course they would, liquidating the incredible wealth of their capitalist enterprises into the ready coin of political power.

But Marx was wrong, because the new lords of commerce were not that interested in power. Instead of building themselves into a new ruling class they retired from business and invented modern philanthropy.

Here is where my epiphany comes in. Marx was not completely wrong about the rise of a new feudalism. He wasn't wrong about predicting that the workers would become the new serfs and peasants.

What Marx got completely wrong was that he imagined that it would be the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy of the market, that would step into the space vacated by the aristocracy of the land. In fact, it was the aristocracy of the word, the new educated sons -- and eventually daughters -- of the bourgeoisie that would eventually lord it over the industrial serfs.

Why would what be? Because unlike the capitalists, who were not that interested in power, the educated sons of the bourgeoisie were very interested in power, and they wanted it for themselves so that they could fundamentally transform the world -- or failing that be the chaps issuing the orders.

When you think about it, it made a lot of sense. The brutal fact about being the son or the daughter of a successful capitalist is that you are probably not going to repeat the combination of cunning, hard work, and luck that your father had. So what do you do to make your life meaningful? Hey, you mount up on a white horse and promise to save the world with the most basic and instinctive means, a political army to smash the evils and injustices of the world.

The awful truth is that this New Feudalism is a stunning success. Nearly everyone is perfectly happy being a subordinate peasant in the new estates of the new political magnates of ideology. Oh, people complain about "them," how "they" haven't built a pedestrian crossing here, or a bike path there, or a gender-neutral bathroom at the Opera House. But they do not imagine anything; they just accept an eternal subordination to the aristocracy of the word, the cultural elite that rules our minds as though it were the most natural thing in the world, because after all, it was ever thus.

Well, I for one believe that the age of industrial subordination is coming to an end. That is how I interpret the prophecy that AI will take over the world. You won't be able to sit like an automaton doing a repetitive job all your life, because all such jobs will go the way of the farm laborer.

In the future people will have to imagine how to serve their fellow humans and then do something about it. But here is the dirty little secret about this. Almost all humans are skilled communicators and cooperators, because those are the basic skills of social animals, that we learn as children just by being children and learning to talk and learning to play with other children. People are thinking that only geniuses will have jobs in the new world that is to come, but I suspect that they are wrong. Yes, we will still put geniuses to work solving impossible scientific and logical problems; but the rest of us will be as busy as bees doing regular human stuff: interacting, talking, exchanging, cooperating.

And maybe, maybe, we will prove Marx completely wrong and build a society without the eternal yoke of feudal subordination.

I am not talking about a perfect society where people paint in the morning, and politic in the afternoon and then talk philosophy in the evening. I am just talking about a society where the center of gravity occurs around a culture of cooperation and personal responsibility.

Why is Average Household Income About Same as Per Capita Income?

A reader of my AT piece on foreign policy in the light of GDP asks the following question:

If per capita GDP in the US is about $53,000, then why is "household income... about the same, if a typical household is 4 people?"

Well, according to Google, average household income in the US in 2014 was $73,300. And the average household size is 2.54.

Let's try the simple math, and see how it comes out. There were 147 million employed persons (from USBLS Household Survey), and 2.54 in the average household in 2014. That seems about right, because 2014 population is 319 million. So that makes 319 million / 2.54 =  125 million households.

Per worker GDI is $17.5 trillion / 147 million = $119,000.

Per household GDI is $17.5 trillion / 125 million =  $140,000.

So what's the difference? Why are these back-of-the-envelope estimates about twice the official number?

Maybe it's because total personal income is about twice raw salaries and wages, as from the BEA, where 2015 US "Personal Income" is $15.3 trillion and "Wages and Salaries" are $7.7 trillion. The difference is things like employment benefits, capital and interest income, and government transfers.

Or maybe the bean counters are looking at an entirely different way of figuring household income, and I don't have a clue what is going on.

Suppose Your Were a Kid in 1930s Germany...

One of the conceits of our time is that the baby-boomers were rebels, taking on the tired establishment of the time with their questioning and their critique of establishment hypocrisy.

Of course, this is rubbish. Young people are not brave warriors against the status quo but blind dupes of a cunning ruling class. That is the whole purpose of government schools and government universities, to make sure that young people learn the approved opinions and develop the approved enthusiasms. Baby-boomers went along with peace, love and all the rest because everyone else was doing it.

We may say, perhaps, that the baby-boomers were the dupes of a rising liberal ruling class -- but then the liberals had been in the ideological ascendant since the early 20th century: the federal income tax and the direct election of senators, passed as constitutional amendments, were at the center of the Progressive Era agenda.

And given the purging of conservatives and Christians all over the education system and culture industry, it is less likely today that any kid would dare to profess unsound opinions, or even know about them.

So it is salutary for me to be reading A Child of Hitler: Germany in the Days When God Wore a Swastika by Alfons Heck. Heck was a kid in the Rhineland during the Hitler years, aged 10 in 1933, and of course he was an enthusiastic Nazi. That is what kids do; they inhale the sweet aroma of the new thing, and enthusiastically exhale it, joining the Hitler Youth and believing everything handed down from on high. Just like our modern social justice warriors know nothing beyond what they learn from their lefty "studies" teachers.

We conceited, enlightened folk like to lecture the Germans about their guilt, and we have been so successful that German women have mostly stopped having children. But really, what is an individual supposed to do? A ten-year-old is supposed to avoid joining the Jungvolk like everyone else? And then get into a sophisticated analysis of the Versailles treaty?

So, should a kid in our US government schools get into an argument with his unionized teacher about diversity and/or transgender rights? Or, for the really courageous, about climate change?

Nobody, but nobody is really in a position to challenge the ideological status quo at age 10, or 16, or 26 or indeed any age. Nobody challenges the status quo except foolish cranks, that have veered off the road by reading other cranks, who have gussied up critical political and cultural ideas not because they are geniuses, but because they are cussed.

If the crank turns out to be right, 20, or 30 or a hundred years in the future, it merely blind luck. The rest of us must keep our powder dry and make our peace with the current ruling class.

The best any secret rebel can do is keep a weather eye out for storms.

But then, how can you know the political weather when the ruling class is faking the weather reports? Put it this way. Right now, any ordinary American had better make pretty sure that nobody denounces them as a racist, or sexist or homophobe. Or they could lose their job. Suppose you think that the current policy of the United States government is in fact profoundly racist, in that it categorizes people by race and judges events not by how they benefit designated race categories? What do you do?

In other words, how do you fight government racism when to do so would subject you to denunciation as a racist?

First of all, you would have to be a ideological genius to see through the lies and propaganda of the ruling class, and how many of us are equal to that? Then you would have to be the kind of person that didn't give a damn about  people calling  you nasty names, and how many of us have the thick skin for that? You would be the kind of person that didn't care if they went to your boss and had you fired, and how many of us are willing to be that much trouble to our bosses?

How many people are like that? 0.02 percent? Or 0.01 percent? We humans are social animals, and that means that we go along to get along, because that is how social cooperation works.

I'd say that true genius is the ability to keep your powder dry and emerge at just the right moment, when the ruling class and its ideology are in trouble, and knock over its equestrian statue at just the right moment when it looks like you are incredible brave, but in fact the ruling class leaders just left town in the middle of the previous night. Emile Zola evokes that rather nicely with his Fortune of the Rougons, about how the successful coup of Louis Napoleon in 1851 played down in the provinces. The way it works is that you have to have back channels so that you know what is going down before the other folks in town.

For most of us, Candide's famous phrase applies: il faut cultiver notre jardin. We need to go work in the garden. Anything else will get us ground to dust under the wheels of history.

The Left's Syllabus of Errors, Part One

I experience the left as a reactionary and nostalgic movement that arose at the time of the industrial revolution with the goal of turning back the clock to an imagined golden age of perfect and equal community.

Obviously, the first error of the left was the French Revolution, and that is where the term "left" was invented. My knowledge about the revolution is sketchy, but it is obvious to me that the French Revolution is an example of How Not to Do It. Whereas the American Revolution and the Constitution are an example of How To Do It. The result of the French Revolution was that French hegemony in Europe was over. For most of us, that was great. For the French, not so good.

The second error was the folly of the socialist communities like New Harmony, Indiana, founded by Robert Owen who bought Harmony from a German Protestant sect in 1824 and tried out his socialist ideas -- for two years until the experiment failed.

The third error is Marxian economics, based on Karl Marx's idiosyncratic reading of classical economics and its dual theory of value: exchange value and use value. Marx published his theory in 1867 and in 1870 it was blown up by the marginal revolution, that there was no such thing as use value and exchange value, only marginal value. But here we are, nearly 150 years after the marginal revolution and Marxists still haven't digested the annihilation of their flawed economics.

The fourth error is the faith in top-down administrative government, started in a big way by Bismarck in Germany and his government social-insurance scheme in the 1880s. It was left to the economist Ludwig von Mises to predict in 1918 that socialism could not work because it could not compute prices. But this is true of all government centralized administrative programs. Designed to sidestep the price system, these cunning plans always founder on the fact that they cannot adjust day-by-day to changing circumstances. In fact they are designed to prevent adjustment. Thus they always end up in bankruptcy, injustice and waste, whether in pensions, health care, education, or welfare.

The fifth error is the left's intervention to favor its little darlings. This started with the workers, and ended up with unionized workers bankrupting the industries they had organized. It continued with the left warping the law to favor its feminist and minority clients, thus making both women and minorities worse off. The best way to approach marginalized communities is to start with my catchphrase that there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. Thus it is one thing to write civil rights laws; it is another thing to legislate and impose initiatives to benefit "underrepresented" groups.

The sixth error is the left's war on religion. Experts now agree that all humans practice what we would call religion, some way of understanding the meaning of life, the universe and everything, and what to do about it. The deep wisdom of the American founders was to understand that religion and politics needed to be separated. But the left is a secular religion and thinks nothing of installing its preachers throughout the government. There is a word for this combination of religion and government power: totalitarianism.

The seventh error is the left's war on the nation state. With Marxism the left determined to press for a global government based on the class principle, that workers of the world would combine together to fight the capitalists. But World War I showed that the workers identified first with their nation states, British workers believed in Britain, German workers in Germany, French workers in France. In other words the nation state was an astonishing concept that could command the loyalties of humans from all walks of life living in a geographical area, and get them to loosen their blood and tribal and class ties in favor of a single abstract notion of a nation and its people. Then, when the ruling class screwed up in the aftermath of World War I with inflations in the 1920s and the Great Depression in the 1930s, ordinary people strengthened their loyalty to nation, and supported Mussolini, Hitler, Baldwin, and Roosevelt that promised to make their nations great again. The ruling class interpreted this loyalty, after World War II, as "fascism" and a disaster which should never be allowed to happen again. But they were wrong. What never should have been allowed to happen again was the ruling class screwing up the economy again, as in the 1970s inflation and the 2000s housing bubble.

The eighth error is large-scale migration. This error proceeds from the ruling class's war on the nation state and its conceit that it can rule over the result. In fact the best political unit currently on offer is the nation state with its fiction of a single people speaking the same language and descended from a common ancestry. The lesson of US immigration down the decades is that the new immigrants always tend to form sub-communities walled off from the national community, and that it takes a war, e.g., World War II, to bring them all together.

The ninth error is climate change, the notion that we are roasting the planet with fossil fuel use. It may be true, but since we are presently in an "interglacial period" in a major ice age, probably not. In any case, humans are good at adapting, and not so good at predicting. When we make a mess, we work to clean it up. We are really bad at predicting what is going to happen next week, or next year, or next century, and spending a ton of money on the assumption that we can predict the future is utter folly.

Well, that's enough for starters. Next, Postmodernism.

"Trump's Not Getting Anything Done"

I had lunch recently with a liberal friend who declared that Trump wasn't getting anything done.

So I had the option of silence or disagreement.

I decided not to disturb this New York Times reader. After all, why argue the point? As far as I know, President Trump is doing a pretty good job of reversing tons of regulations pushed through by the phone-and-pen Obama administration. He seems to be cleaning up ISIS in Syria; he is putting the brakes on full-bore green energy. He seems to be putting the kibosh on "net neutrality." His Education Secretary  seems to be moving forward on a conservative agenda, maybe introducing a smidgen of choice.

Trump has not, of course, repealed and replaced Obamacare, and I don't know if that is good or bad. I'd say that the time to fix Obamacare will be when Democrats are shouting the house down that Something Has to be Done, because their voters are being hurt. Obviously we have not reached that point, and meanwhile Democrats are enjoying the fun of making Republicans squirm and look foolish.

All in all, I am not sure if Trump  is an idiot, as his opponents insist, or that he just plays one on TV.

What I would like to see is tax reform, simply a bill to reduce deductions and carve-outs and replace them with lower tax rates. Especially for corporations.

Recently, I read an article arguing for the return of "regular order" to Congress, where bills would be introduced in committee and marked up and then brought before the full houses of Congress. Instead of the current system where bills like Obamacare and Obamacare replacement are cooked up by the leaders of Congress in congress with the special interests and then submitted for up on down votes by the members. And where appropriation bills are replaced by year-end "reconciliation" omnibus bills.

Yes, but. The problem is that government is so big that it is meddling in too many things to allow each issue to be worked out in subcommittees and committees. Even the big omnibus bills can't do the job. That's why they stuffed Obamacare full  of directives for the Secretary of Health and Human Services to develop regulations for this and that. And why Obama bypassed the legislative process with his phone-and-pen executive order policy.

Only, it is a century since Ludwig von Mises argued that socialism could not work because it could not compute prices. And the same applies to all centralized administrative systems. But it hasn't stopped the merchants of power, because people come to government precisely to use its force to dodge the directions of the market and the price system.

That is why all the big government programs are a mess; that is why omnibus bills and reconciliation are a monstrosity; that is why it is not possible for Congress to legislate using "regular order." All these  approached to social cooperation are trying to substitute the force of government for the give and take of the price system and the natural instinct of humans to resolve their differences peacefully. And these cheap resorts to force are all doomed to fail, at the cost of much human suffering: hello Venezuela.

Meanwhile Trump is dodging and weaving, trying to get something done, and the readers of The New York Times are being taught that he is not getting anything done.

Someone is going to be wrong about that one. I just hope it isn't me.

Universities Have Not "Drifted from their Historic Mission"

What is a university for? As soon as you start to try to answer that question you get buried in an avalanche of ordure. Perhaps nothing provokes a tsunami of blather like the question of the role of the university.

Here's one lament that moans about universities drifting from their historic mission. Or this young academic that has suddenly discovered the monster of bureaucracy, and is off to Germany, the birthplace of bureaucracy.

Is the mission of the university to prepare well-born youngsters for political leadership? Is it to teach the canon? Is it to advance the frontiers of knowledge? Is it to provide robust venues for argument and debate? Is it to protect the rights of minorities? Is it to indoctrinate the youth in ruling-class ideology? Is it to develop big bombs for the military?

Well, you tell me. The answer is that all kinds of actors are interested in the minds of the young, and are willing to spend money and time on that project.

And the thing about universities is that they are "non-profit"organizations. Which means that... it makes it much harder to figure out who is profiting from the university. Is it the students getting an education? Is it the professors that get to reorder young heads full of mush? Is it the donors who get to push the university towards their vision of the universe? Is it the politicians that fund its research? Or is it the senior administrators that get to use the university as an ATM?

What, indeed is the "historic mission"of the university?

Strictly speaking, a university is a gathering of scholars and teachers that offer to teach youngsters that gather together in residential colleges to receive instruction from the masters. Yes, back in the day the students ran  the residential colleges: imagine! But it was never that simple, because the powerful took an interest in the universities. Thus, for many years, the great universities like Oxford and Cambridge in England were primarily involved in training up the second sons of the nobility for the church. When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, the universities trained young men for the Church of England, the established state church. Even as late as 1832 we get the bourgeois mayor of Middlemarch sending his son Fred off to Cambridge to raise the status of the Vincy family. Only Fred didn't really want to become a priest.

The Germans had another agenda. Deep in the humiliation of the Napoleonic era they founded the University of Berlin as a vehicle of state power. They would educate a new generation of Germans to take it to the French, and invented the research university as one of the means to that end.

In the US, it was the various churches that built universities. Harvard was  founded in 1634 by the Puritans to train up clergy for the new commonwealth. But by 1800 more liberal religious ideas were in the ascendant, and Harvard became Unitarian. Yale was founded by clergy in 1701 to educate Congregationalist ministers. The first Catholic university in the US was Georgetown, founded in 1789. The first university after the German model was Johns Hopkins, founded by Daniel Colt Gilman in 1876. Notice that the university was funded by Johns Hopkins, entrepreneur, investor, abolitionist, and philanthropist. He was not a church.

So you can see that everyone that got into the university game had an agenda. They weren't interested in discovering what parents and children wanted in an education; they already knew what was good for them.

It is not surprising that as progressives/liberals/leftists rose to power and prominence that they would seek to remake the university into an institution that would raise up good little progressives and leftist activists. They did not want universities to be seminaries that churned out ministers to send out to the wilderness, or priests that would preach to the embattled Catholic faithful,  or founts of science and state power. They wanted to create secular seminaries that would produce social activists that would go forth and preach the gospel of equality, or rights, or, as now, "intersectionality." Of course they did.

But we, whoever we are, have a different agenda, and the university as secular seminary is a direct attack on everything we hold dear. No wonder, of course, that in today's university, "conservatives need not apply." You don't want no stinkin' heretics in your school of secular orthodoxy.

But what do we do about it? My guess is nothing. The revolution in learning that issues from the internet means that you can learn anything anywhere. You do not have to go to an approved school to get the credentials to make you a safe hire.

I suspect that the modern bureaucratic system of education is a one-off, not to be repeated, the attempt of today's ruling class to ape the structure of the big corporation and big government, which seemed to be the wave of the future a century ago.

But we know that the world doesn't work like that. Big institutions are mature institutions, and the only way for them to go is down. Moreover, I would argue, non-profit ownership is itself a problem, because it fails to establish who is in charge and who is to take the profits and absorb the losses.

We know, with the advent of artificial intelligence, that the world is going to change more than we can possibly imagine. If there is one thing we should have learned from the successive economic revolutions of the Great Enrichment over the past 200 years, it is that the only thing to do is to change as well  as you can when  the new economic era dawns. The  worst thing to do is to resist economic change and erect non-profit institutions and government programs to create a walled garden that keeps the outside world from challenging the status quo. For now.

So the current conservative rage against the PC university misses the point. The current disappointment that universities have "drifted from their historic mission" is beside the point. Everything is going to change and the folks that imagine they are protected from the future by ivied walls or by government favor are living a fantasy.

Has The Left's Strategy Reached Its Bridge Too Far?

My claim to fame is the simple idea that the whole point of the left is to find a group "outside the system" and advocate for it.

The brilliance of Marx and Engels was to realize that their rich-kid revolutionary cult needed a reason to use the violence of revolution. And they found their reason in the workers. In the 1840s, when their young heads full of mush were cooking hash, the workers wanted what the middle class had got in the British Reform Bill of 1832. They wanted the vote. So they marched and Charted, mostly peacefully.

Imagine you are a rich kid who has been to university but who doesn't deign to actually work for a living (Marx) or or doesn't really want to deign to work in Daddy's textile firm (Engels). What better than to lead the poor excluded workers to bloody revolution?

But then the evil bourgeoisie upped and gave the workers the vote. So the workers lost their interest in riots in the streets. They settled down to getting free stuff from their elected representatives.

Now what?

Perfectly simple. A new generation of German rich kids, your Horkheimers, your Adornos, and your Marcuses, came up  with a replacement revolutionary creed. The workers be damned: the real wretched of the earth were women and minorities, not to forget the helpless victims of colonialism. Now woke rich kids would lead them to bloody revolutionary victory.

Only, the bloody bourgeoisie was perfectly happy to give women the vote, and minorities civil rights, and walk away from their colonial empires.

Anyway, imperialism got you into a real mess, like when the British Lord Salisbury argued against Home Rule for Ireland on the notion that it would encourage the natives in India to demand the same. The idea!

Anyway, now we have gay marriage and safe spaces on campus, so the only people left outside the system are illegal immigrants and Muslims.

So  of course the left is advocating for illegal immigrants and Muslims, because they are the only people left on the planet that are not already completely incorporated into the system, and for whom violence is still a viable option.

The question we must ask is whether bloody revolution on behalf of illegal immigrants and Muslims is going  to be a winner for the left, for whether it will turn out to be a bridge too far.

The simple answer is that We Don't Know.

It probably depends on the battle to come.

Will the people here in the US and in Europe rally to politicians that address them as the citizens and voters of nation states? Or will they rally to politicians that address them as members of racial or gender tribes, or as citizens of the world.

In the case of Muslims, I think the issue is whether Muslims can deal with the western notion of the separation of powers, that government and religion should be separate but equal. Over the 2000 years of Christianity a condominium has been established between temporal powers and spiritual powers. It is telling that both the left and Islam believe in totalitarianism. The one believes in a totalitarianism of secular politics; the other believes in a totalitarianism of the religious community: a theocracy.

Personally, I think that both the illegal immigrant and Muslim problem can be solved with strategic deportation policies. It took less than 500 deportations to deal with the US "anarchists" in the 1920s, and I should think that same would apply today. It is tremendous fun to rile up the ΅undocumented" and would-be Muslim terrorists. But the truth is that more than fun-and-games, people want to live in the prosperous West and wive and thrive here.

Anyway, we are living through the resolution of this great question: Where do we draw the line between the in-crowd and the outsiders? Are illegals and Muslims to be kept beyond the Pale. Or shall  we let them stay?

Meanwhile, what about the transgendered? Shall we let them serve in the military or not? Now there is an issue for the ages.