Three Reasons Why Protest is Poppycock

Yes, it was Marx that said "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

Thanks Chuck, I needed that. I think you will agree, old chap, that we are certainly in the farce era where leftist "protest" is concerned.

Because when millionaire black football players are "taking a knee" to protest police brutality against African Americans we are not talking about the wretched of the earth desperately trying to get the ear of the ruling class. We are talking about privileged young men who, like a young woman I once knew, want to get into "activism."

And African Americans are not the wretched of the earth. They are a "protected class," a race specifically called out in the laws of the United States for special consideration. I know: can you spell racism?

Hey, Hegel "remarks somewhere" -- actually in The Phenomenology of Mind -- that the thing and its opposite are really the same, as in the north pole and the south pole of a magnet. So racism and anti-racism are really one and the same. Ask the anti-fascists of Antifa about that.

But the basic thing about "protest" is that it is a show of force. Every protest says: accede to our non-negotiable demands or we will fill the streets with real violence. That is why they used to talk about "marches" and "demonstrations" before the advent of that peculiar catchphrase "peaceful protest."

There are three things wrong with the left-wing culture of protest.

The first is that the threat of violence is only appropriate for individuals and groups outside the system, that do not have a vote and a representative in the councils of power. That is the whole point of universal suffrage and representative government, to make sure that everyone has a right to be heard in the councils of government. And you will notice that our liberal ruling class makes it its business to represent everyone that might possibly be regarded as "marginalized," and outside the system. In other words, even illegal immigrants are represented by the system. So no need for protest. But note well, dear liberals, that the right to be heard is not the same as getting your way.

The second is that protest, shows of force, by people inside the system, like NFL players, is in fact a betrayal of the whole point of having representative government. The idea is that we will not resort to threats of violence or violence itself or the hell of civil war. Instead we will resolve our disagreements by bargaining and votes in the various representative councils, and the loser accepts the verdict and goes home in peace, resolved to "fight" at the next election. But as soon as you have a protest you are saying, forget it. If I don't get my way I'm going to resort to force. The point of protest is to intimidate the supposed ruling class. But notice that in today's world almost all protests are in fact endorsed by the liberal ruling class. It is considered scandalous for conservatives to protest about anything, because white privilege.

The third is that every wrong in the world cannot be solved by politics. It is one thing to use politics to stop government actively discriminating against people by race, as was done in the Jim Crow era. "Everyone" can agree to stop that. But what about forbidding people to discriminate in the private sector? That's what Barry Goldwater was voting against when he voted against the Civil Rights Act; but Barry Goldwater was a libertarian. And then what about mandating representative percentages of traditionally marginalized groups in corporations, through polices of diversity and inclusion. I would say, following Hegel and Marx that "diversity and inclusion" are the farcical end-point of the whole idea that you can legislate equality, and prove Hegel's point that the thing and its opposite are really the same, for "diversity" seems to be a doctrine of suffocating uniformity and "inclusion" seems to be profoundly exclusive. To me, at least.

So let's get back to first principles. The whole point of the 18th century ideas of limited government was that the powers of government should be limited, so that people of different opinions and faith had a space to live and were not commanded by the force of government in every detail of their lives. Also, they thought, if you allowed government greater powers it would cause people disadvantaged by the petty authoritarianism of government officials to form a head of rebellion.

Now it is my view that it is pretty grand of liberals to complain about the abusive tweets of President Trump. Have not liberals been calling their opponents names these 50 years and more, as racist, sexist, homophobes, and now "white supremacists?" What is the vile accusation of "racist" next to "sons-of-bitches?"

What do you think happens when you stigmatize people, day after day, year after year, with your vile pejoratives, liberals? Why, I'd say that one day people will get fed up with representatives that won't stand up to liberals and they will elect a president that can dish it out to liberals and tell 'em to put it where the sun don't shine.

So don't be surprised if the liberal "protest" culture inspires a countervailing protest culture in the nation's normals. The only thing I know about such a culture is that liberals will hate it and be completely bewildered about where it came from.

Obamacare is Like Any Government Program

My Man Kevin D. Williamson does a pretty fair job of pointing out why Obamacare necessarily was and is a failure. It's because, he writes, any human activity in necessarily a process of trial and error, making mistakes and fixing them. Or, in other cases, just admitting failure and moving on.

Emotionally mature people and highly effective institutions are quick to admit error. The best of them in fact embrace periodic failure as a necessary part of experimentation, learning, and institutional evolution. (Megan McArdle covers this ground brilliantly in The Up Side of Down.)

But then he chokes up.

Feedback matters. One of the reasons the private sector often is so much more effective than government is that market competition forces firms and entrepreneurs to admit error or suffer dire financial consequences.

I think Kevin misses the point here. The point is that people create government programs precisely because they do not want to admit error. They do not want to follow the dictates of the price system. They do not want to follow the verdict of the consumers. They want something free or subsidized and they want other people to pay for it. And then after they get it they get mad if anyone proposes to reduce their subsidy or free stuff.

The whole point of government is to enact the conceit that you can enact any law, lay new taxes, and then sit back for ever and ever admiring your handiwork. That is just not how things work in the real world. In the real world you launch a product and, assuming it isn't a failure from the word go, you spend the next few years getting the bugs out, and really, you never stop adjusting the product and its price in response to price and consumer signals. But government can't do that. That's because the congresscritters and presidents have other fish to fry.

That is why nobody has done anything about Social Security even though it is going to run out of money. That is why the government used Obamacare to make a bunch of changes to Medicare under the table while everyone was arguing about the 35 million without health insurance. That is why education gets more and more expensive but doesn't improve its results.

The reason is that just about everything the government does is an attempt to deny reality. It is the earthly equivalent of religion, which is an attempt to believe that all will come right in the end: the good will go to Heaven and the evil will go to Hell. Or be reincarnated as cockroaches.

The official word on this was enunciated by Ludwig von Mises in his 1920 paper, "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth." He argued that while the socialist commonwealth could decide, e.g., how much wine to produce, the problem of how to produce it, and what means, and with what intermediate products and where, and with respect to other possible uses of the means of production immediately becomes too complicated for bureaucratic administration. The human mind "would simply stand perplexed before the problems of management and location." And so, in the socialist commonwealth the socialist manager decides to do nothing. Not until the perplexing problem becomes a national crisis. In other words, without the guidance the price system the socialist manager just does not know what to do. So he blunders forward, making mistake after mistake, only without the price system to give him feedback he does not correct his mistakes, and anyway, the one thing a politician cannot admit is making a mistake.

You can say at least that the folks that look to government have a clear idea of what they want. They want to be free of the stress and heartache of having to face up to the realities of day-to-day life in the marketplace. And when they enact their particular program they get to capture the work of their fellow citizens and apply it, gratis, to supplying their wants. But then things start to go downhill: slowly in the case of Social Security; rapidly in the case of Obamacare. And then the stress and heartache return, big time.

But not to worry. Most of the things that government does are not really that important. Pensions? Well, it is nice to give grandpa some money, but if grandpa didn't get his check the world would go on. Education? Yes, even education is probably not doing that much for us. If government education collapsed tomorrow then mothers would take over. And since most women are now numerate and literate they could teach the three Rs of Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic to the kids in the neighborhood. Health care is a similar good. It is only one of the seven or eight factors contributing to our modern life expectancy. And if there were no Medicare at $600 billion per year, then grandpa and grandma might die a little earlier than right now, but life would go on.

That is the key point. Obamacare may be a failure, but life will go on. The problem only arises in a country like Venezuela where the failures of government policy and the failure to reduce government spending results in runaway inflation and a collapse of normal economic relations.

But even then, as Germany proved in 1923, once the government grasps the nettle and stabilizes its finances then things can get back to normal. But you might get a Hitler as part of the package.

You might ask: But why is government so bad at economic management? I think that the answer lies in the real job of government: protecting us from foreign invaders. In that case there is a single goal, and all  must work for that goal. It is bootless to worry about mistakes or blaming anyone, or whether we are winning or losing. The national leader cannot, for a moment admit to making mistakes or the possibility of defeat, because that would affect national morale and reduce the chance of victory.

But the culture of war and existential survival does not apply to the day-to-day process of production and consumption. And so when you apply the culture of war to pensions and health care and education you make a complete mess of it.

African Americans: Please Don't Go into the Wilderness

The whole cunning plan of leftism, since its invention in the 1840s, is to hive off groups of people in nation states into a different loyalty.

The idea is to persuade those newly-arrived in the city that they don't belong with the city folk and shouldn't try. They should instead establish a separate identity, under the kindly leadership of the local lefty rich kids.

This is a very bad idea, and has brought death to something like 100 million humans and misery to countless more.

The best thing for the country folk newly arrived in the city is to learn city ways and the city culture of responsible individualism. But the leaders of the city poor have preferred to appeal to their country tribalism, and teach them to believe that the resident city folk have it in for them, and that the prosperity of the city folk is based on exploiting the poor suffering worker. But not to worry, the rich-kid leaders will make the bloody bourgeoisie pay up. (Bourgeoisie is French for city folk).

After the left had had their evil way with the working class they went on to segregate women and minorities away from the city folk; women from marriage and children, and non-whites from whites.

The left has been particularly successful in segregating blacks from the common herd. Something like 90 percent of blacks vote for Democrats, the party of rich kids and the marginalized. But the next favorite minority group, Hispanics, only voted 66 percent for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

It is not the purpose of this article to inquire why this might be so.

I don't know whose idea it was, but in the last two years of the Obama administration someone decided to angry up blacks after a stupid black thug in Ferguson, Missouri, got himself shot by a policeman after he robbed a convenience store. The consequence is that, in cities where Black Lives Matter activism is strongest, murder is up big time and 20 percent in the US overall in the last two years. The reason is simple. In cities where Black Lives Matter activism is influential the police have stopped using the broken windows/data-driven/CompStats policing strategy that aggressively targets gang-associated thugs. So black thugs kill other black thugs, and liberals know that the reason is racism.

But people are idiots, and so if you are a Democrat you believe that Black Lives Matter and that police are targeting and harassing young blacks. Now black NFL players have got into the action. Of course they have; they are just following the Zeitgeist like 97.2 percent of the rest of us do.

But I plead with our African American friends not to follow this folly and wander out into the political wilderness. Don't let the politicians and the activists run your life. They don't care about you; they only care about your vote.

And I think that in the near future we will see a sea change in the nation's politics. I expect that Hispanics and Asians will move into the Republican Party as they become solid middle class and think of themselves as "whites." The thing about Hispanics and Asians is that they don't have "white guilt." Hispanics, according to opinion polls, think that blacks are lazy. I suspect there will come a time where Hispanics and Asians will unconsciously want to differentiate themselves from the struggling lower orders, as those newly arrived in the middle class tend to do. And struggling lower orders for them will be blacks.

I also expect that the next generation of Democratic politicians will be unattractive to the broad middle class. When the Nancy Pelosis and Chuck Schumers finally retire, white pajama boys like Jon Ossoff and hard-left minority politicians like Tom Perez just aren't going to appeal to the broad middle of America.

The bottom line is that if you want to wive and thrive in the modern world you need to learn the cultural code of responsible individualism, the creed of the middle class. Otherwise you will just be the shock troops in some politician's political army, and when you are no longer useful the politicians will leave you by the roadside to wither away and die.

And the only way for African Americans to finally get their full and deserved membership in the great American nation is to stop the left-wing protest rubbish and just get with the program, the program of the middle class and its culture of responsible individualism.

There is no other way.

Of Course Trump is "Divisive"

All the liberal media is united: President Trump's tweets criticizing the NFL players "taking a knee" during the national anthem are "divisive."

Well, of course it is! Politics is about winning elections, and that means dividing the electorate. You can do it with a scalpel, or do it with an ax.

That's why I have my catch-phrase: Politics is Division. Actually I think a more accurate catch-phrase would be: Politics is the Art of Division.

The question is whether President Trump is a skilled divider or a clumsy one. That is all.

Democrats perhaps are inclined to believe that Trump is an evil divider. Maybe they are right. But maybe they really have no clue how evil and divisive their politics of race and sex is.

For instance, I assume that the NFL players are taking a knee because Black Lives Matter, and young black men are getting killed all over, especially by white cops.

Only, as Jill Leovy wrote in Ghettoside, things are a bit more complicated than that. The basic problem is that when a gangbanger kills someone in the 'hood, the prosecutors can't get witnesses to testify because the gangs intimidate them. So the black residents are angry that the guilty go free. The cops compensate by arresting young hoodlums for minor offenses, for which the cops can testify. But the black residents are mad about that too, because they don't like the police harassing them in their daily lives.

What's a mother to do? Well, when I was a juror in a case where a young black guy had been brought up on some minor offense with cops the only witnesses, the solution was simple. We looked to the one black woman on the jury to find out which way she was going to vote. Guilty, she said. So we honkies agreed with her. Go along to get along, as the saying goes.

The problem is that liberals are idiots. Here's an example. The Guardian is all wigged out that Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election because too many women voted with their husbands than for the "First Woman President." And that is what academic "surveys show."

The key distinction, according to [Oregon State University Assistant Professor] Kretschmer’s research, is that single women tend to cast votes with the fate of all women in mind, while women married to men vote on behalf of their husbands and families …

 No kidding, Sherlock! And it really is monstrous that married women should be looking at the larger picture, that what matters is that their husband has a good job which helps support them and their children to raise the odds that the kids will get out of the nest and go on to wive and thrive in their turn.

The intriguing thing about the left's folly is that they don't seem to realize that their unmarried, unchild-centered world where "women cast votes with the fate of all women in mind" is going to go straight down the toilet, because the bottom line for human society is not to bend the arc of history towards justice but, as Black Swan guy Nassim Nicholas Taleb says, to bend the arc of history towards Survival.

Because if women don't have babies and raise them to maturity there won't be a tomorrow.

Because only if you and yours survive unto the next generation, only then you can start to worry about justice.

Except that, as I say, there is no such thing as justice. Only injustice.

Meanwhile the results are in on President Trump's political division operation on the NFL. By 64-25 percent, the American people think that "NFL players should stand and be respectful during the national anthem."

The thing about Donald Trump is that he is doing things that nobody on the right dared to do. Nobody dared to take on the liberal cultural hegemony and tell that dominatory hierarchy to put it where the sun don't shine. And that's because up till yesterday, politicians on the right knew that they simply could not win in such a fight. Because as the old saying had it, you don't pick a fight with a guy that buys ink by the barrel.

The thing about sayings is that they are true until they are no longer true. I suppose the old saying has now been replaced with a new one, that you don't pick a fight with a guy that buys his bytes by the billion.

Maybe that's why liberals have been amping up their hate machine these last years and calling everyone "haters." They don't like losing their cultural hegemony, and so they are trying to shut everyone up with naming and shaming while they still can.

Anyway, as I wrote a year ago about the time of the Republican National Convention: "All I Know is that Gentlemanly Conservatism is Dead."

Was I right, or was I right?

Yes, Just What Is "Fascism?"

I don't know if you have noticed, but our lefty friends have been getting very free with their accusations of "fascism" lately.

Oh, I know. It really doesn't mean anything. It is just lefties amping up the volume on their pejorative-spouting machine. It doesn't mean anything more than the vile accusation of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and hate.

By the way, I just read a beautiful definition of leftism, on Taki Magazine.

Leftism is hatred in the name of love.

Isn't that absolutely right on?

So back to fascism. The reason I feel authorized to write on what lefties mean by fascism, is that I've been reading a very readable review of the Frankfurt School, meaning mainly Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. It's The Frankfurt School by Zoltán Tar. H & A write about fascism as though "everybody knows what fascism means" without actually defining it in a way that is helpful to me, a sinner. They write about the "authoritarian personality" of the typical middle-class person, or of fascism as the "highest stage of capitalism." This is how Freud and Marx twist peoples' minds into pretzels.

So here goes:

Fascism is what you get when the middle class can't take it any more.

Fascism is what you get after World War I when the government finances of Germany and Austria and Italy were ruined by the war, and the politicians and the experts didn't have the guts to make the necessary spending cuts to put their national finances in order.

Actually, that is not fair to the politicians and experts. They know very well that the voters will punish them if ever they enact spending cuts. So they don't. They just wreck the nation and the economy with inflation because that is the easy way out.

Incidentally, that is why I demand the end of all government social insurance programs. If you have a financial crisis, such as the aftermath of a war, you can't prune back the government spending on social insurance, because of "the children" and so you end up wrecking the economy and forcing mothers of four into prostitution to keep food on the table. Yeah, that really is you might call "doing it for the children."

But eventually the middle class can't take it any more, and that is when they vote for a man on a white horse.

There is nothing shameful of outrageous about this. It is what any animal does when it is cornered. It strikes out, knowing instinctively that one alternative is certain death while the other alternative is only probable death.

That is what the German people did with Hitler. Inflation had wiped out their savings, and the Weimar regime couldn't seem to get its act together. Then the incompetence of the US Federal Reserve System led to the Great Depression. But along came Hitler blaming the Jews and the DolchStoß, the stab-in-the-back at the end of World War I. Oh yeah! That was what had caused the problem.

Well, now we have the immigration and the Muslim problem in Europe, and the ordinary people don't like it, and the ruling class is saying shut up or you will lose your job convicted of hate speech.

Obviously that kind of politics is not going to end well.

At some point, the middle class is going to say that they can't take it any more.

But the lefties, they see the growth of Alternativ für Deutschland and Front National and UKIP and Trumpism as the end of life as we know it.

So to lefties any return to nationalism is fascism, straight up.

Actually, I think the lefties made a grand-strategic error when they turned against the nation state. The  fact is that the nation state is the most successful model for organizing humans into a large political unit, based on the fiction of a national "tribe" united by its language and its totally fake common history. Lefties coulda been a  contender if they had made their peace with the nation state.

The point is that all this hyper-ventilation is utter baloney. The fascists are like any political party. They operate on the universal truth of politics: Politics is Division. You unite your supporters by dividing them from some other group. It could be foreigners, or radicals, or different races, or greedy bankers, or Jews or immigrants or Muslims. But that is how everyone does it. That is what our US liberals are doing with their identity politics; they are dividing America up by race and sex and sexual preference. The trick is to present the divisiveness of your own side as the very epitome of good thinking and the divisiveness of the other side that the most horrible extreme hard-right white supremacy ever.

See why "leftism is hate in the name of love?"

Now let us examine the turn to fascism in the light of my reductive Three Peoples theory, because all roads lead to the Three Peoples theory.

On my theory, the people that end up voting for the fascists are the ordinary middle class trying to live as People of the Responsible Self. But the aftermath of World War I, or the travails of the white working class, or the Venezuelan moms-for-hire in Colombia means that the ordinary people of the middle class cannot live as law-abiding People of the Responsible Self. The bottom has dropped out of the world of responsibility and reciprocity; the rules have changed. Now they must lie and cheat and prostitute themselves in order to put bread on the table. So they vote for a man on a white horse that promises to end the lefty hate in the name of love.

Really, this is only hard for those that will not see. I am talking about readers of The New York Times and their ilk.

Who Will Be Thrown Out Of the Dems Next?

A reader just sent me a puzzler. He agreed with my notion of "Fake Protest." But then what?

[W]hat to do about the throngs of self-proclaimed anarchist or anarcho-communists (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one), who state that ANY hierarchy is oppressive and need be subverted in order to empower the individual?  

He continues:

I find these types most frustrating of all since they are ostensibly fighting for the same general concept as me, a libertarian, but in practice walk and quack like standard-issue authoritarians.  As infuriating as these people can be, I think they represent an opportunity as recruits in the ongoing battle of individualists vs collectivists.

The frustrating thing for him is that the refugees from the Democratic Party -- lately, the Trumpists -- have "diluted the Right" and prevented the Republican Party from making a course correction away from the welfare state.

Yeah. What about the anarchist left? Who are they and what do they really want? How do we talk them off the lefty ledge?

This is where I roll out my politics-as-war metaphor. The fact is that once you enlist young men in your army, whether as a 19th century recruiting sergeant or as an Activism 101 prof at the U, the soldiers you enlist will be enrolled also in your ideological army, and they will keep believing until, as I like to say, Napoleon leaves them wounded, hungry, and dying on the road back from Moscow.

That is the whole point of armies; you make sure that the soldiers have no place else to go, except continuing on the line of march and following the orders of their officers.

And that is why the recent additions to the Republican Party have been Democrats cast out of the party, left by the side of the road by a progressive army that had used them up. First it was the fundamentalist Christians who found out they were not wanted in the Democratic Party in the aftermath of the Sixties. Then, in the Trump election, the white working class finally found a home in the Republican Party in the anti-immigrant, pro-patriot campaign of Donald Trump.

And the point is that, as Ronald Reagan said all those years ago: he didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left him. More generally, the Republicans and libertarians do not recruit people into a movement for, yay, justice or something. The Republican Party and libertarians are People of the Responsible Self; we do not do movements and cults and bending the arc of history towards justice.

So where does that put the anarcho-Communists? Nowhere close to giving up on the leftist project.

I suppose that anarcho-Communism is basically a young man's game. It appeals to the natural instinct in young men that is looking for trouble, the rebellion against the father. Maybe what happens to these radicals is that they grow up and get jobs and wives. And then they find themselves voting Republican.

And after all, Antifa and Black Block is great fun; you get to rumble and break things and fulminate against the Man, and the ruling class pats you on the head for being anti-fascist. Where in this story is anything pushing these youngsters away from their gang-like lifestyle?

No, I think the next candidates for Deplorability would be blacks and women. At some point, more and more blacks are going to tumble into the truth that liberals don't care about them; they only care about their votes and stirring up their hate. And women are going to tumble to the fact that abortion and the sexual revolution are denials of the very truth about womanhood.

Rightly or wrongly, I take the larger view. Our era is the most astonishing cultural revolution in human history, from the necessarily hierarchical agricultural age to the individual responsibility of the bourgeois age. We should expect, we should know, that the transition would not occur in a divine flash of light, but in an endless to-and-fro of trial-and-error.

But underneath all the Sturm und Drang is a profound truth. The exchange economy rewards people for serving other people faithfully and cheerfully. The more you accept this culture in your work and in your life, the better your life will be. And places that try to restore the old hierarchy in new clothes end up cratering, not just at the national level but at any level.

And that is my faith. We have an exchange economy and the prosperity of the Great Enrichment not because of wise rulers that cunningly executed on the bourgeois agenda. We just stumbled into it, and we thrived because the bourgeois agenda works for today's city economy.

As Nassim Nicholas Taleb says, the bottom line is survival. If you do things that enhance survival you survive. If you don't, you won't. Survive.

What Fools These Liberals Be

If my concept of Fake Protest means anything, it must issue from a Great Error, a profound misunderstanding about the meaning of life, the universe and everything on the part of our liberal friends.

Because, as we observe the fatuous conceit of liberal Fake Protest, we have to ask ourselves: what went wrong? Why are these people making such fools of themselves? Why, at the end of two centuries of The Great Enrichment in which nearly all humans, North Koreans excepted, have enjoyed part or all of the increase in income from $1-3 per day to $100 per day, inflation adjusted, why are there people running around insisting that great swathes of humans are the most abject victims of racists, sexists, homophobes, etc., and that the only recourse is more government power, more administrators, more regulatory intervention in the normal to and fro of human exchange?

Now, I am something of a Lone Wolf, tending my garden without much regard for others and how they do it. But I am social enough to know that the one thing I hate is making a fool of myself. So we must ask ourselves: why are liberals making such fools of themselves? Or let us ask another question during the current madness of tearing down Confederate war memorials. Do not liberals understand that they in their turn will be the target of the iconoclasts, as a new generation judges them as the most foul and most ignorant oppressors and exploiters since the dawn of time. Have they not read Charles Murray's Coming Apart in which he judges that the top 20 percent of white Americans are doin' fine, with university degrees, satisfying careers, and merger marriages, that the middle 50 percent is doing just so-so, and that the bottom 30 percent is not so good, with the men not working much and the women not marrying much? What about "the children" of that bottom 30 percent?

So what have our liberal friends got wrong? What has led them into their folly and, by hanging onto their folly, what has driven them to commit injustice and oppression and call it bending the arc of history towards justice?

I think that their fundamental error is to believe that the hierarchical society of the agricultural age can and should continue as the model for the industrial and post-industrial age, that the only problem was that the wrong people were in charge. In the agricultural age, the fundamental fact was that land equals life, and the only thing to do is to defend your patch of land against the world. In reality, of course, it turned out that the farmers had to subordinate themselves to a warrior lord in order to defend that land, and the warrior lords took full advantage of the situation. subordinating the farmers to their rule in exchange for the offer of security. Thus the hierarchical feudal society. But in the new world, the evil and ignorant lords and the superstitious churches would be replaced by educated and evolved activists and experts: totally different, man; totally.

But in the industrial city the old culture of hierarchy cannot serve. This means that city people must learn how to conduct their lives in a different kind of subordination: to the market and its prices, rather than the lord and his lordly rules.

When the waves of people first arrive in the city the individuals are still peasants that know subordination to a lord; they have not yet learned the culture of individual responsibility and subordination to the market. So they subordinate themselves to urban political machines, to labor unions, to big corporate bureaucracies rather than to the market, for that is all that they know.

But what they need, in order the wive and thrive in the city, is to slough off the old ways of the subordinate peasant and put on the armor of a new culture, the culture of individual responsibility, and this is the only way because the city economy is too complicated to be directed by some lord, whether the lord of the land or the lord of the bureaucracy.

In my view the great error of the liberals and the socialist and progressive project has been that the leftists have hindered rather than helped the new arrivals to the city, by confirming them in their subordination to some great lord, or political big-shot, or corporate machine, rather than putting on the armor of light, the culture of individual responsibility that alone prepares the city dweller to wive and thrive in the new order. And as the years go by, the error is deepening into a crime, a crime of willful ignorance, at best.

I have written a book about the four skills people must learn on The Road to the Middle Class. Those cultural skills are: education, religion, mutual aid, and law. By education I mean the basic skills of literacy and numeracy that first emerged in the Fertile Crescent 3,000 years ago and more in the counting houses of the merchants and temples. By religion I mean in particular the cult of enthusiastic Christianity which has been down the ages the religion of people learning the ways of the city. It teaches people that they can be responsible beings bathed in the love of God. By mutual aid I mean the culture of social insurance in fraternal associations that grew up in the 19th century before it was blindsided by the welfare state. By law I mean the replacement of the traditional culture of feud with the culture of submission to the authority of the law.

In different ways our liberal lords have queered these four pitches. In education they have substituted regime propaganda for the basic skills needed for city life, and separated learning from working to a degree they never were before except for rich kids. In religion they have substituted their cults of creativity and victimhood for the city religion of Christianity. In mutual aid they have substituted top-down government programs for the social and mutual culture of fraternal association, the charming and cunning pretense of brother- and sisterhood among people that are no longer living in and around their blood kindred. In law they have substituted top-down administrative law for the reciprocal judge-made law common law. What all these actions do is put roadblocks and barriers on the Road to the Middle Class, and sequester the new arrivals to the city in ethnic, pre-middle-class ghettos. And this is no longer merely a dreadful mistake as it might have been a century ago, but a stupid crime against humanity, a willful blindness about the facts of the matter. It is, of course, unthinkable that our liberals lords have fought to block the Road to the Middle Class not because of folly and ignorance, but cynically and consciously in the knowledge that it enhances their political and economic and cultural power. Surely they are not that evil.

Because if the liberal barriers on the Road to the Middle Class are not accidents of stupidity, but planned and thought through, then the culture of Fake Protest is not just a foolish knee-jerk, a nostalgic attempt to re-create the world of 1850 when all the world was new, but a cynical ploy to enact a fake Theater of Protest that has nothing to do with the facts of the matter.

The basic science was set forth a century ago that socialism -- and by implication any administrative system -- could not work because it could not compute prices.

And so the question that every disciple of power must answer is to show why their new power proposal can possibly hope to outperform the individual actions of millions of consumers and thousands of producers as they interact with each other through the price system.

And that is why they resort to Fake Protest and invoke the power of government by a thousand dodges and catch-phrases, for they cannot answer the question.