They Are All Idiots!

Some people are wondering just what the point of NFL players of "taking a knee" is supposed to be all about. Apart from letting NFL players feel they are relevant.

Or what about this? It turns out that, as Bolivarian socialist Venezuela replaced staffers in its national oil company with political hacks, the replaced workers mostly headed for Colombia, with the result that Colombia's oil production is up, hitting almost one million barrels per day, and Venezuela's oil production is down, from 3.5 million to 1.9 million barrels per day.

Or what about here in the United States? Instead of getting Americans to save their own money for the great expenses of life, we have government programs that put lifer bureaucrats in charge of everything from retirement to health care and education, according to systems that were old a century ago.

In California, Governor Brown has signed legislation declaring California a sanctuary state, doing a spot of nullification just like the slave South. By the way, California has the most tech billionaires and the highest poverty rate, and the rich live is glorious comfort on the temperate coast while the peons live in the sweltering Inland Empire and Central Valley. So history does repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Then liberals these days are running around calling people not just "racists" but "white supremacists." Actually, in this case I think they are right. The culture and politics of the lily white folks from Northern  Europe have transformed the world in the last half millennium, and we ought to be proud of what we have done. Anyone of North European extraction that does not marvel at the achievements of her North European ancestors is a fool and a knave.

And of course our liberal friends are determined that we should "do something" about gun violence in the aftermath of the Las Vegas attack. Do you know why they use the word "gun violence?" It is because two-thirds of gun deaths are suicides.

For me, the best way to deal with all this is to say they are all idiots. Why are millionaires taking a knee when they could be contributing their time and money to personally solve social problems? What was the Bolivarian socialist Chávez thinking when he staffed the Venezuelan national oil company with political cronies? What were the Democrats thinking when they replaced healthy saving with government compulsion on retirement savings? What is Governor Brown doing when he declared that the writ of the federal government does not extend to California? What are liberals doing ramping up the race rhetoric 50 years after the civil rights acts of the 1960s?

Really, there is no answer except to say they are idiots. Because was it not worse than a crime, a blunder for socialist Venezuela to politicize its oil industry? Worse than a crime to weigh down the modern state with vast ineffective social programs? Worse than a crime to lower the wages of American citizens with a flood tide of illegal immigrants that live partly outside the law? Worse than a crime to divide the races with race politics half a century after doing the heavy lifting of removing governemnt racial discrimination?

Over at the Z blog, the Zman is pondering the likelihood that we are coming to the end of an age. Our present age was trying to solve the problem of "how whites would deal with whites" over borders, peoples, and commerce. But now we are entering an age of great migrations -- such as 4 billion Africans on the move -- and great migrations happened to coincide with the end of the Roman Empire. To murder an old song,"comes migration, nothing can be done."

We are all like the coward Falstaff, that whimpered before a battle that he wished it were evening, and all well.

When you think about it, it is impossible that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything could be tucked up into bed each night.

Stupidity, mistakes, evil, storms, hurricanes, massacres are all part of the inscrutable mystery of life. For the only constant in life is that is stumbles from one disaster to another. And yet the world keeps turning.

And after all, what is a little hurricane and a few feet of rainfall compared to the Armageddon of a supernova?

Or Is It Just Well-to-do Women That Are The Problem?

Yesterday I raised the outrageous suggestion that maybe it ain't men that are the problem, but women. Of course this is nonsense; everybody knows that women are helpless victims -- Lady de Courcy and Lady Arabella excluded -- since the dawn of time and the invention of patriarchy by a clique of men within the inner ring of Stonehenge. Or something.

But now I just started a biography, Jane Austen: A Life, by Claire Tomalin and I have to admit I was wrong. It is not all women; it is rich women.

You see, back in Jane Austen's time, the normal thing for gentry women to do was to suckle their babies for about three months, and then send their babies out to some woman in the village to raise the baby for the next couple years. Only when the baby was properly civilized was it returned to the maternal nest.

So Charles Dickens was not making it up! Little kiddies were subject to the most frightful and routine abuse in the good old days -- at least from our modern and enlightened perspective with its proper and necessary substitution of scientific peer review for the old ways of wives tales.

Actually, I would say that, down the ages, rich women have routinely handed off the raising of their children to the servants: nurses, governesses, etc. And this has caused not a little sorrow to their children.

Now comes the New York Times with its celebration of 100 years of communism. You see, communism liberated women, but only in part. It got them out of the home but didn't really allow them to rise to executive positions on the collective farm and the factory.

In other words, communism didn't really raise women to the level demanded by the feminist revolution and make them into Simone de Beauvoir's "Independent Woman," with her career and all.

And they talk about male privilege!

The reason that men work, girls, is that, down the ages, that was the only way they could get laid. If men, in the last 200 years, have sought careers, it is because that was the way to get laid with high-status babes. Settled science: hypergamy.

Also, of course, upper-class men work these days because the poor do not. The whole point of being rich is to differentiate yourself from the poor. Back in the good old days the poor worked their tails off, at least that is what we are told. So it was shameful for a rich man to work. But now the poor don't have to work, what with welfare and disability and all, and so now all rich people are busy, busy, busy morning to night. Those that don't have a proper job work their tails off in the family charitable foundation.

Before I get back to women, a word from my old liberal boss. He was frustrated by the folks working for him, especially the programmers, because they were always going off on tangents, such as rewriting subroutines that already worked to make them more elegant.

Of course, this was never true about me. Oh no.

Now it is my view that the job of women on this earth is to bear children and raise them to adulthood, to "keep them alive," as my daughter says. Everything else is tangents.

The job of men is to make themselves useful, as in keeping women safe so they can bear children and keep them alive. Everything else is tangents.

Since our age, thanks to the Great Enrichment, is the richest age ever, you would expect more people than ever before going off on tangents. You would expect to see women schucking off the kids on day-care and government child-custodial facilities so they can go out and have a career. You would expect to see men filling their lives up with meaningless hobbies and all-night video game sessions.

And you would expect a lot of people to be opting out of the whole mating and raising the next generation thing. Because they can.

In my view, following my reductive Three Peoples theory, this is a particular problem for People of the Creative Self. In fact I believe that the cult of creativity is precisely a tangent, a distraction, from the real job of creation, which is creating children. It is just the sort of thing you would expect well-to-do women and well-to-do men to do to differentiate themselves from the common herd and its daily grind of wiving and thriving. The clue, I think is in Charles Taylor's notion of "expressive individualism," or George Simmel's "qualitative individualism" in which individuals would want to differentiate themselves from other individuals.

Of course, it may be that in the future well-to-do and high-status women will want to differentiate themselves from the common herd that goes out to work as assistant director of diversity and inclusion at Amazon's HR department and drops the kiddies off at school. I suspect that the home school movement and similar cultural developments are signaling this.

Here is another thing. If you are a well-to-do woman, educated, liberated, and independent, why would you want your little kiddie rolling in the mire, getting polluted by the lower-class culture of the child-minder and the government teacher?

But then there is the bigger question: how should we raise our children, given that we still do not know the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, despite the best efforts of prophets, divines, ideologues, and our modern social justice warriors?

Are Women The Big Problem?

Dear old Ben Stein is upset that a long-time liberal friend, Mrs. B., has cut off their friendship after the 2016 election. Apparently her "daughter had apparently undergone an incident in Carmel in which she felt threatened by a Trump supporter because she was wearing a Hillary T-shirt."

As for why Ben should choose the initial "B" for his onetime friend, I couldn't possibly comment.

Then there is the CBS lawyer, Hayley Geftman-Gold, who on Facebook inadvertently advertised after the Las Vegas shooting her contempt for country-music fans. Frankly, I don't think she should have been fired. All she was doing was expressing the conventional wisdom that all Good Little Girls share in the liberal bubble. Like Mrs. "B."

It's interesting that one concert goer said she likes country music concerts because everyone there acts like family.

Is this the new woman, roughed up by the sexual revolution and radicalized by the feminist movement?

Not at all. I'm happily re-reading Anthony Trollope's Dr. Thorne right now (available on DVD, etc.) and the two notable adult woman are both "Bs." There's Lady de Courcy of Courcy Castle. What a piece of work she is. And then there is Lady Arabella Gresham of Greshambury. So I suppose we should talk  about "Lady Bs." The big thing about these two women is the rules about the young marriageable women they allow in their august houses. The rich Miss Dunstable, heir to the Oil of Lebanon cosmetic fortune, is invited to Courcy Castle, because son-of-the-house Frank Gresham must marry money. But the sweet innocent Mary Thorne, our beloved heroine, the girl next door that Frank really loves, must be banished from Lady Arabella's house, because she has no money and, worse, she is a bastard with no breeding, no bloodlines, darling, for all that she is Dr. Thorne's niece.

Yep. Women may not commit horrendous mass shootings, but they sure know how to stick in the knife, and they always have.

Now, if you ask me, this is a Big Problem in our global society going forward. The whole point of the Great Enrichment is that people consort with all kinds, anyone that can be trusted. Playing high school or aristocratic Mean Girls is not what it's all about. Any more than lifetime employment. Any more than affirmative action and quotas and diversity and inclusion and all the other reactionary government policies that liberal force on us.

You can see the problem in the basic difference between male honor and women's honor, as explicated by James Bowman in Honor: a History. Honor among men is the reputation for physical courage, standing in line with his brothers and not acting like a coward and breaking and running. But honor among women is different. Honor among women is the reputation for chastity, and I mean that in the broadest sense of being pure and undefiled. Two cultures, and ne'er the twain shall meet.

The thing is that our modern societies need the kind of person willing to do stuff and make mistakes, and then get up, sadder and wiser, and do it all over again. It does not really want the reckless courage of the soldier; neither does it want the person that will not act because she does not want to make a mistake.

Sociologist Georg Simmel wrote over a century ago that the entrance of women into the public square would transform it to "suit a more feminine sensibility."

Obviously, there are advantages and disadvantages to that. My view is that some things are better left to men, such as software startups, which require a certain recklessness and standing with the brothers in the chaos of startup battle. But other things are better left to women. Caring for grandma, for instance. Men do a pretty sketchy job of that, if they can be persuaded to do anything at all.

I suspect that men and women have starkly different ideas about mass shootings. Men are perhaps too cavalier about the inevitability of mass carnage, as in battle. Women are perhaps naive in imagining that presidents can "make us safe."

Meanwhile I must get back to Dr. Thorne. We are approaching the denouement, when...

Well, I can't possible give the ending away. Let us say, following Trollope, who is always breaking the fourth wall, that Mary Thorne will either die of a broken heart or life happily ever after.

Are You Now, Or Have You Ever Been, A White Supremacist?

Since the new liberal insult-du-jour is "white supremacist," I think that, to paraphrase the words of Marx,

It is high time that White Supremacists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of White Supremacy with a manifesto of the White Supremacy itself.

Yes, Chuck, I couldn't agree more. Let us unmask the spectre of White Supremacy and see it for what it is: the most extraordinary breakthrough in human socialization since the beginning of agriculture. And, naturally, it has provoked the most horrendous movement of nostalgia and reaction for the Good Old Days of tribalism and hierarchy since whenever.

Call the reactionaries and nostalgists anything you want: Communists, socialists, progressives, activists, peaceful protesters, idiots.

As Marx so perspicaciously noted, a very large part of human socialization is driven by the underlying economic realities, and a lot of human culture is in fact a superstructure built atop the economic realities of the age.

The reality used to be that land was life, and you protected the food-growing land of your tribe or your lord to the death. Much of what we think of as natural human behavior is predicated upon this truth that is no longer true.

Today the reality is that food is cheap and available everywhere for money. Great ships are constantly lying in the outer harbor in Vancouver, BC, ready to steam into the inner harbor and load up each of them with 100,000 tons of grain from the Canadian prairie provinces and then transport that grain to the ends of the earth. So the food problem has been solved.

Thus it is no longer a matter of moment to defend our food-growing land to the last warrior. Now the question what each of us can do to serve other people so they can pay us the money we need to obtain the necessaries and the abundant non-necessaries of life, at Walmart or at Nieman Marcus according to taste.

Where once the boundaries of trust ended at the border of our food-growing land, now the boundary of trust extends across all the world to include all people that demonstrate their trustworthiness. See here.

This extension of the Culture of Trust from our own comfortable tribe to the whole world of people that demonstrate trustworthiness is the most mind-blowing development in human history. It is the foundation of what our lefty friends call White Supremacy, the culture that trust is universal and should be extended to all that are trustworthy. No wonder the people that believe in this new belief system have surrendered to the notion that they are the lords of creation and the last best hope of mankind on Earth, and superior to whatever came before.

But the old culture of mistrust still obtains. That is what government and politics is all about, to define the divide between "us" and "them" and to defend "us" to the last young 20-year-old soldier, or in our own time, the last "mostly peaceful protester."

And so the great worldwide movement of reaction and regression arose, to honor and revere the good old practices of divide and rule to maintain the old tribes and the old borders. Of course it did; that was the way that political leaders had always acted, in the good old way in which they had served humans well for tens of thousands of years. First it tried class politics to divide the bourgeoisie from the proletariat; then it proceeded to what we call identity politics, dividing race from race and sex from sex.

But this is all rubbish, because the old territorial imperative no longer operates. These folk are, we might say, superstitious believers in the old gods, Homeric heroes still looking to Mount Olympus for the word from on high.

And why not? The old divide-and-conquer, hierarchical culture worked pretty well for the rulers, from their legalized plunder of the farmers to their delicious droit de seigneur that would have made Hugh Hefner blush.

But what about right now? How does the divide-to-conquer culture work in the modern age? I am glad you asked me that. Fortunately thoughtful and caring people, inspired by arch-reactionary Karl Marx, went to work in Russia and China to see if the hierarchical divide-and-conquer culture could still work in the modern age. After 100 million human deaths and unimaginable suffering the verdict came in. The old way just doesn't work in the modern age. In fact, the old way makes things worse, much worse, for ordinary humans in the modern age, because the modern age has opened a new social contract: in return for the unimaginable prosperity of the Great Enrichment, people must surrender to the hegemony of the market, accepting the movement of prices and markets without demur, from the proudest billionaire down to the lowliest worker. Anyone that resists the new culture is doomed to disappointment and the killing fields.

Hey, I call that a pretty good deal. Instead of subordination to a proud and powerful lord we humans merely get to accept the collective decisions of our fellow humans as expressed through the intermediation of the price system and its markets. In return we get the prosperity of the Great Transformation, which has increased per-capita income from $3 to over $100 per day in 200 years.

Yep, I reckon that White Supremacy thing has been the most amazing thing in human history. And anyone with half a clue in their brain has got on board. In particular I notice that the folks in South and East Asia, the great civilizations of the old days, are getting on board the White Supremacy train, after a bit of a slow start, and are adapting their societies as best they may to the new order.

I always like to quote a Chinese Christian on what White Supremacy has meant to the Han people.

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.

Wow. Imagine that. Christianity. What is it about Christianity, do you think, that has enabled the rise of White Supremacy? Could it be that the central concept of love, that you love God and God loves you right back, is exactly the right culture for the new age and its culture of universal trust for people that demonstrate their trustworthiness?

And that people that accept the culture of trust become unimaginably wealthy and powerful and almost by accident grind the old ways of tribe and borders into dust?

You might think that. I couldn't possibly comment.

Trump the Insult President

I always get inspired when I lunch with my liberal friends. Something about their conversation opens doors in my mind to the mysteries of life, the universe, and everything.

And something happened last week to help me understand the fact that Trump is the Insult President and that is what we elected him to do.

OK, so I've been writing about this at least since "All I Know is That Gentlemanly Conservatism is Dead."

The point is that for fifty years liberals have been insulting ordinary white middle-class Americans as racist sexist homophobes and our political and cultural leaders have failed to defend us.

And now the preferred liberal insult is "white supremacist."

Last week "protesters" invaded a speech given by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and you can see a protester next to her with a huge sign "WHITE SUPREMACIST".

Imagine Harvard allowing an alt-right protester to stand right next to Al Sharpton with a huge "BLACK RACIST" sign. That kid would have been gone before you know it.

Hey, you know what real white supremacy looks like? It looks like lefty protesters not even thinking of daring to insult a Secretary of Education with a lefty insult slogan, because the enforcers of White Supremacy would make sure that they would pay, big time, for such  an insult.

Also, there is the little problem that the people most shortchanged by the bureaucracy-is-everything government school system are minority kids in the inner city. And that is the boil that Betsy DeVos is trying to lance. So what do those protesters know about anything?

And last week President Trump had an insult interaction with the blonde mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Yeah, the sweetie pie was trying to Katrina him, and naturally Trump punched right back.

It makes you think of Martin Niemöller. First they called us racists, and conservative leaders did nothing. Then they called us sexists, and conservative leaders did nothing.

Well, the purpose of government is to protect people from existential dangers, and I'd say that failing to counter the left's propaganda machine counts as a failure to protect.

When the usual idiots can't or won't protect us from the lefty thugs then we are forced to look for other idiots to protect us.

Yep. What made Trump stand out in the Republican debates was his willingness, and his shameless talent for insult. And the Republican voters liked it. They obviously wanted a candidate with the talent and the cojones to tell his opponents to take it where the sun don't shine.

I don't blame liberals for being embarrassed and insulted by the Trump presidency. Why, the whole point of the Constitution and civil rights is that liberals can insult anyone they like and, when losing an argument on the merits, play the race card.

And for fifty years, Republican politicians didn't know how to respond. Until Trump.

And still, a bunch of Republican officeholders still don't get it. Here is Speak Paul Ryan saying that Trump needs to be more "inclusive with people." No, Speaker Ryan, you do not use lefty catchphrases like "inclusive" except ironically and sarcastically as a way to reverse and denormalize the left's culture of name and shame. In fact, the left's notion of "diversity and inclusion" is a lie, part of a political grand strategy to divide the American people into silos of race and gender identity so that liberals can conquer. And you, Paul Ryan, should know it.

Bottom line: We elected Donald Trump to take it to liberals and tell them to put it where the sun don't shine. It may all turn out to be a disaster, returning Democrats to power for a generation. Or it may not.

But if Democrats return to govern for a generation we are basically returning to the old trajectory, of what Margaret Thatcher called the "ratchet" where each lefty program ratchets us another step to the complete administrative state, and the succeeding conservative administration fails to restore the status-quo ante, let alone actually letting freedom and limited government unfold its wings. Hello Obamacare.

So why not try Trump the Insult President? He might lift morale among us normals and actually alter the course of civilization as we know it.

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.