OK, Mr President. Now Stop the Next Bubble

After the usual Keystone Kops shuffle, with the Senate parliamentarian nixing a couple items in the House Bill, the Republican Tax Cuts and Jobs Act heads to the president for signature.

Right here, right now, Mr. President, there are two things to do.

1. Get interest rates back to normal. After the Crash of 2008 we have had ten(!) years of low interest rates. And no wonder, for the economy took a while to recover from the credit meltdown. But now we have sensible supply-side policy in place, instead of stupid subsidize-and-regulate. My guess is that the invigoration in economic growth -- already forecast to hit 4% annually in the current quarter -- means that we need to get in front of the business cycle, and increase interest rates now so that we don't have to play catch-up as usual to kill an overheating bubble economy. This time there is going to be an unusual factor, the repatriation of perhaps trillions of dollars in profits of US corporations, that I expect is going to unleash a huge credit boom in the US. Please, Mr. President, get the word out to the Federal Reserve Board that you will give them cover as they bring interest rates back to normal and maybe pitch them up 0.5-1 percent above normal to cool the over-excitement. Oh, and yes, the spending on interest on the National Debt will go from $314 billion a year in FY 2018 to $900 billion and very likely more. You can check out what will happen on my Interest Analysis page at usgovernmentspending.com. But I am sure that your chaps at the Treasury are already eager users of the Interest Analysis page.

2. Start increasing the down-payments on home mortgages. The main cause of the Great Recession was the violation of Walter Bagehot's dicta in Lombard Street about credit. First, all credit should be properly collateralized, meaning that if a loan is terminated, the value of the collateral is sufficient to pay the balance of the loan. Second, borrowers should be able to pay their payments. In the 2000s, as a result of US government policy, people got 100 percent loans, meaning that in any downturn they went underwater and couldn't liquidate their mortgage without somebody getting a haircut, and sub-prime borrowers got about half of the loans, meaning that in a downturn a ton of borrowers would not be able to make their payments. Hello! The whole policy of subsidizing home mortgages has been a disaster, because quite simply the easier you make it for people to get mortgages the higher house prices will go and the more difficult it becomes for young people to buy their first home. And the bigger the financial panic when the music stops, housing prices crater, and the sub-prime borrowers go to the wall.

I don't know whether this policy is possible, or if you care about it, Mr. President. And if you pursue it the Democrats will be all over you as a pal of The Rich, because high interest rates, and a racist sexist homophobe, because sub-prime minority home-buyers. So you will never get the credit you deserve.

But there is such a thing as doing the right thing.

How Come All Those GOPe Senators are Voting For the Tax Bill

If there has been one constant in the first year of the Trump presidency it is that there are quite a few GOP senators eager to announce to the world their independence from the hated Trump. Your McCains, your Flakes, your Corkers have all been a thorn in the side of the Trump agenda.

But now it looks like they are all voting for the Trump tax package. What gives?

I admit that the settled science on this is not very helpful. The book on this was written by James Buchanan and Gordon Turlock, an American and a Brit, in The Calculus of Consent. Their line was that, in any legislative initiative, the folks in favor of the proposal would expect a material benefit for their constituents, and those against would expect a material cost for their constituents.

So if the proponents lacked a majority of representatives for passage they would have to buy votes from the waverers, putting sweeteners in the proposal to get to 51 percent and passage.

So what is the game that the GOP waverers are playing on the tax bill? I will tell you.

There is an additional factor that is not covered in The Calculus of Consent. It is this. If you are a GOP senator you need to show to the world that you are a big enough and powerful enough that the president and the congressional leaders will need to give you your own special Christmas ornament on the bill's Christmas tree. For if you are not big enough to get your own special deal, what are you? Chopped liver?

So now, miraculously, all the guys that were causing trouble and saying that they would not support the tax bill are now all in favor. And it looks like the final tax bill will pass in the House and in the Senate if they can drag ailing senators like McCain (R-AZ) and Cochran (R-MS) into the Senate to vote for final passage.

So nothing has changed since the times of the good old barons of old, who would sulk in their castles until the king showed them some respect and ransomed home their captives, or not.

The signal finding of The Calculus of Consent was that the only just form of voting was unanimous consent. That way the proponents of a measure would have to pay the costs to be borne by the opponents of the measure. The example they used was a new county road. The proponents would believe that the road would benefit them; the opponents would be opposed to paying for something that would not benefit them. So unanimous consent would have to pay the opponents or give them a benefit in lieu.

Either way, you can see that the whole procedure is still robbery, the same as a gang of robbers -- with the addition of impunity, according to St. Augustine.

Look, it is tremendous fun to have stick it to people you don't like and make them pay for your stuff. That is the whole principle of the left. I can understand that, as per Conan the Barbarian, the best thing in life is "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!" Yay! And he got it from Genghis Khan.

But I think we are coming to a point in history when it is time to put away childish things, and say that nearly everything should be done, not by force, but by cooperation and consent.

But I don't see my liberal friends being within a country mile of understanding this, nor women in general. Yes, women are in favor of big government, per this. Which means that women are in favor of forcing other people to pay for their stuff.

And you thought women were all sweetness and light.

Like I say, government is force, and politics is division, and system is domination.

Oh, and there is no such thing as justice, only injustice.

And you have to give each GOP senator their own special goodie in order to get their vote for a tax bill.

The Six Worst Injustices of the Liberal Domination

For a while now I've been writing that "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." And the justification I would come up with that, once your rebellion against injustice succeeds and you wield the levers of political power, then you get to impose, by force, what your tormentors used to do to you. And you have the nerve to call it justice.

Imagine my shock and surprise when I found that the philosopher Schopenhauer agrees with me! He argues in The World as Will and Idea under §62 that right is merely the absence of a wrong.

[T]he concept of wrong is the original and positive, and the concept of right, which is opposed to it, is the derivative and negative; for we must keep to the concepts and not to the words.

So that's all right.

Thus energized, let us think a bit about the wrongs, the injustices forced upon us by our left-liberal ruling class in the name of justice.

The first two are obviously the negative and the derivative of my Perfect Plan.

The liberal ruling class has confirmed workers and peasants in their pre-urban tribal, racist, subordinate culture, instead of leading them to the Promised Land of middle-class responsibility, and this is unjust. This has obviously been really cool for liberals, because they have acted as the patrons and the champions of the working class and marginalized minorities, and reaped the political power of giving people free stuff. But it has not been so good for their clients: the working class that right now is dying of despair, and the blacks that are alienated from the rest of society and encouraged to be racists and maintain a separate culture from the rest of America.

The liberal ruling class has attacked and marginalized the middle class, especially with its experimental and creative intersectional sexual culture that it forces upon everyone, instead of allowing the middle class its own space for Christianity, marriage, family, and individual responsibility.

The liberal ruling class has wrecked education. Government compulsory K-12 education has worked well for the children of the educated and for the folks with lifetime tenure as employees and administrators of the government education system. But the government education system has always operated as the agent of the ruling class, implementing its latest power project. First it was to marginalize the Catholic Irish; then it was to prepare children to be good obedient factory and office workers. You could see that this agenda a rough kind of sense to it, making the children of the immigrants and the working class numerate and literate whether they liked it or not. But in recent years the education system has veered towards educating children as little liberals. The result has been utter mayhem in schools in minority-dominated inner cities. And that is to say nothing of higher education, with which liberals have made debt slaves out of university students.

The liberal ruling class has wrecked health care. Back in the day, ordinary people got health care from the "lodge doctor" at their mutual aid association: the Masons, the Elks, or their union. Young doctors just out of medical school would work almost for free serving the lodge members while they were starting their careers. But now health care is crony capitalized, as the health care professionals insist on their pound of flesh every time the politicians offer new free stuff to the voters.

The liberal ruling class has wrecked retirement. The Social Security system is not a pension system, but an income transfer system that takes money from young workers with families and pays their well-to-do parents. It is generational injustice, where the beneficiaries get to determine how much the kids have to pay. And worst of all it denies workers without family wealth the chance to build wealth that can be then used partly as retirement income and partly as wealth to transfer to the kids.

The liberal ruling class has wrecked charity. Back in the old days, before the welfare state, the poor really were starving and dying. But in those days the only effective charity was voluntary charity from charitable women and organizations. Today the hunger problem has been solved, and welfare excuses the poor from work and marriage. This is a vile injustice, both on the welfare recipients that do not take responsibility for their own lives, and on the ordinary middle class people that pay for government officials to buy the votes of the poor with the middle-class's money.

Aside from these six injustices, I'd say that the Liberal Domination has been going swimmingly.

Pervnado Meets OxyContin

What do the current enthusiasms about sexual harassment in the workplace and college campi and the opioid crisis have in common?

In regard to the Pervnado of mostly liberal icons having their wicked way with innocent Good Little Girls, you can easily miss the point, as Suzanne Fields does when she writes that

Nobody wants to return to the artificial morality of the 1950s, when women were denied the freedom to be their sexual selves and harassment was often accepted as the way of life for men in power and left women powerless.

Hmm. What exactly does it mean to say "women were denied the freedom to be their sexual selves?" And really, did women in offices suffer sexual harassment in those days, or was it only on Hollywood's casting couch and in Mad Men's fictional advertising agency?

I'd say that "the rules" right now are that women are free to use their "women's wiles" including their sexual power but they are also able to turn around and change their minds. That is what the whole game of "microaggressions" and "safe spaces" is all about. The fact is that women expect to be protected. Women may demand the right to be "intersectional feminists" and be gender queer black women bisexuals, but if something goes wrong they are going to expect "justice." If there are not enough women in the executive suite then women expect the rules to be changed to help and protect them.

One way or another -- sexual revolution, women in the workplace, or whatever -- women expect to be able to strut their stuff and also get protection. It's coded in the genes. The question is, half a century after the sexual revolution with its promise of pregnancy-free sex, what does it mean for women to be their sexual selves and be protected from the preverts of Gen. Jack D. Ripper's memorable obsession?

My guess is that feminists are going to be no help at all, so it is going to be up to female normals to reestablish some sort of sexual code. I have an idea that it will mean something like the old code that, when a man proposed to a woman, he was on the hook unless and until she broke it off.

But I tell you, politics and politicians and gender activists are not going to be the ones to lead us to the Promised Land. It has to be a cultural thing outside the arena of politics and government. Because politics is division and government is force.

Then there is the opioid crisis, with the white working class dying of despair. One of the chroniclers of the problem, Angus Deaton, proposes a new "social contract."

That is, the basic positive relationship between people and society, starting with a good job that pays good wages. That’s how one gets going on the American Dream.

But that is what got us into the mess in the first place. Educated elitists, activists and politicians created the welfare state and work-place rules that taught the American people to believe that all they had to do was to get a good job with benefits and then they could repose upon their benefice for the rest of their days and get a defined-benefit pension to boot.

Sound really copacetic, right? Except that some people used political power to deal themselves a better deal that the market really justified, as in unions, and dealt themselves defined pensions in an unknown future, and the economy and the world changed. Right now we have government employees using their union power to deliver princely pensions. Only it is bankrupting state and local government, particularly in liberal states like Connecticut and California.

If you guarantee somebody something, then somebody else has to pick up the risk proposition. In a political system it means that the powerful get to decide who gets the goodies and who pays the price. There is only one just way to proceed. Everyone must be subject to market changes and accept that it might move against them and force them to look for another job. You wanna pension? Then save your money. You want medical care when your body starts to give out in your fifties? Then go out and get health insurance now. Yeah, we will look after you, pal, if you make all the wrong decisions, but you won't much like it. The wonderful thing about human society is that we can take care of each other. The horrible thing about human society is that most of us, including me, freeload off the rest of society, in ways we often don't appreciate.

But the one thing to avoid is a comprehensive and mandatory government program to take care of us. Because at the latest in 50 years, you will be suffering with an expensive, inefficient system that is being scammed fifty ways from Sunday, and that is impossible to reform because of the fierce opposition of the scammers and other dogs-in-a-manger.

Yeah, we all want our cake and to eat it too. And that applies to every area of human life, but in particular to sex and work. The challenge, and it is eternal, is to limit the power and the looting of the freeloaders and the folks that want to get their money back when the cards go against them.

Another Year of the Woman

Remember 1992? I do. It was the Year of the Woman. The idea was that women had been horribly treated, e.g., by Clarence Thomas talking about pubic hairs and coke cans, according to star witness Anita Hill. And therefore we needed to elect women up and down the ballot.

Funny, isn't it that in the Year of the Woman we also elected a notorious womanizer as president, and when it came to examining his peccadillos the Women were nowhere to be found.

Nothing has changed, has it, in 25 years. If Democratic women all get in a twitter and "can't believe he said/did that," then the Republican in question is guilty until proven innocent and a bunch of independent women buy into the latest slur and don't show up to the polls. Hey! It works every time.

And now, with three accusers of Donald Trump renewing their accusations of sexual harassment, going back to the 1980s, we can see the meaning of the whole Weinstein mess and the current mayhem in liberal media on the sexual harassment front.

This is all about another Year of the Woman in 2018 -- hey it's about time, for the last Year of the Woman was a quarter of a century ago. The idea, once again, is that Republicans don't care about women, indeed treat them like dirt, and therefore women should vote for good caring Democrats that care about people like you. So if we elect a Democratic House we can have a nice Trump impeachment, and if we elect a Democratic Senate as well we can have a nice Trump trial in the Senate. Also, there is an additional benefit that the mainlining of the question of sexual harassment conveniently pushes the Clintons away from front-rank politics. I suspect that until recently, the Clinton Crime Syndicate called all the shots in the Democratic Party universe, and you didn't cross the Clintons, not on anything, if you knew what was good for you.

The sweet article in the New York Times about movie star Salma Hayek's horrible experience with Weinstein shows how the system works. Yes, her problem with Weinstein was all about him wanting a piece of her action, and making her life a hell because she wouldn't lift her skirts. But believe me, I think you would find that's how the whole liberal politics-media-entertainment works, if you ever got a chance to look on the inside. Nice little body/career you got here. Pity if something should happen to it.

Notice how in the Republican Party all the disagreements seem to be out in the open between the McCains and the Flakes and the Trumps and the Bannons? Notice how you never seem to hear about any problems and disagreements on the Democratic side? Ever wonder why? It's not because they all get along in Demo-land. It's because they are all afraid.

But I think that the whole Year of the Woman operation is getting out of control. Because when you are getting beloved names in the New York Times and NPR bubble getting swept away, why then you are getting into a little bit of a witch hunt. Which is shocking, because as everyone knows, from watching Arthur Miller's The Crucible, it is only crazed 17th century Puritans and 20th century anti-Communist McCarthyites that you need to worry about on the witch-hunt front.

Hey, remember when Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998 and tried in the Senate? Democrats all closed ranks around this serial abuser of women. And won seats in the 1998 off-year election, which is extraordinary for the second term of a two-term president.

Is this a conspiracy, deep down in the deep state and the office of Mr. Big of the Democratic Party? I suspect not. I suspect that it is all what Jung calls the collective unconscious. You don't need a Mr. Big to tell everyone what to do. Look at the good little boys and good little girls at the FBI that just automatically knew what to do to protect Hillary Clinton and automatically knew how to spy on the Trump campaign using the FISA court. Nobody told them what to do. Nobody needed to tell them what to do. They just knew that Donald Trump had to be stopped and so they did what it took to do that.

Only, of course, they didn't quite succeed in 2016.

But will they succeed in 2018? We don't know. My guess -- and my hope -- is that our current ruling class is too soft to make this latest Year of the Woman work. I suspect that they are like the regime in France before the French Revolution. They are scions, and don't have the street toughness that real guardians of the regime need to have.

But I could be wrong.

The Three Peoples Theory and Work

I was walking down the Yellow Brick Road reading a lecture on work by dear old lefty Herbert Marcuse entitled "The End of Utopia" and I had a thought.

My reductive Three Peoples theory does not directly address the question of human work, not yet. And that is wrong.

In his lecture, from Five Lectures, Marcuse looks forward to a time, after the revolution, when "alienated labor" will be a thing of the past, and liberation and happiness will reign. He makes a distinction between "the realm of freedom" and "the realm of necessity." True freedom can only exist in a world in which the question of necessity has been removed. He look to a "new theory of man" that posits

a freedom no longer based on and limited by scarcity and the necessity of alienated labor... the negation of the need for the struggle for existence... the negation of the need to earn one's living; the negation of the performance principle, of competition; the negation of the need for wasteful, ruinous productivity[.]

In a world freed from necessity, Marcuse sees a flowering of the "aesthetic," featuring "a convergence of technology and art and the convergence of work and play... a society in which even socially necessary labor can be organized in harmony with the liberated, genuine needs of men."

Now, I don't know how that plays to you, but I immediately thought: this is how a young twentysomething thinks, the sort of chap that lives in some trendy urban district and dresses in artistical black. This representative of the People of the Creative Self thinks of work as a creative endeavor. In response to a question from his grandfather in respect of his career plans, he might say that he "wants to do something creative." He thinks, in other words, exactly like Herbert Marcuse, without the Marxist jargon.

Now it is no surprise that some lefty artistical kid from the People of the Creative Self would believe in work as creative play, but I immediately thought: what about the rest of us?

Obviously, when we talk about the People of the Subordinate Self then we are talking about people that work because they have to: this is "alienated labor" in the full Marxian sense of the word. The lowest level of this approach to work is the slave who does not do a stitch of work unless directly ordered by his overseer with the encouragement of his cowskin whip.

But it is interesting to recognize that this is not the way that work works in the real world. Nobody is a complete subordinate slave. Even the lowliest worker has some responsibility. And the record of slave plantations is that the slave-owner prefers to give the slave a certain amount of responsibility, such as growing his own food, rather than bear the burden himself of ordering the slave's every movement and providing every need. The slave-owner might even rent the slave, e.g., Frederick Douglass, to somebody else. You can see that the same thing applies to serfdom. The serfs are not slaves; their lords do not direct their every move, and the self needs to figure out how to farm and make his own food for his own family.

The record of capitalist employers in the wake of the industrial revolution is that they want and prefer, more and more, responsible and flexible employees. They do not want drones that work like automatons on the assembly line; for one thing, such workin' stiffs tend to join unions. Wal-Mart, for instance,  encourages its employees to take on-line courses in the back room, and it rewards them for upping their game.

Of course there is an exception to this. The socialist state likes its people dumb and stupid and subordinate. It doesn't want responsible, independent citizens, but subordinate subjects that can be ordered around by socialist managers with a taste for power. Anyone else is a wrecker and a saboteur.

What about the People of the Responsible Self? How do they think about work? It is obvious. People of the Responsible Self recognize that work, their contribution to society, is what enables them to hold their heads up in the world. For them, it is a thing of pride to have marketable skills that enable them to live a decent and independent life, serving their fellow men and respected by their fellow humans.

Notice how this attitude towards work is not comprehended by the Marcuse approach to work. In his world you are either working under the knout, in "alienated labor," or you are living in sunlit uplands in a "convergence of work and play." This is why my Three Peoples theory is so superior to the Two Peoples narrative of the left that does not even rise to the sophistication of Hegel's Master and Slave dialectic. My theory, reductive as it is, understands the great human middle, and not just the two extremes.

Now we come to the question of work for the People of the Creative Self. Here, of course, work is not something you do because you have to in order to get bread on the table. It is not even something you do to hold your head up in the world as a respectable bourgeois that pulls his weight. Your work is a creative project, something that is new and original. This is an individualism different from the responsible individualism that is celebrated by economics and sneered at by the Fabians. It is, as Charles Taylor writes, "expressive individualism," that expresses the individuality of its person as a efflorescence, a flowering, rather than merely as a separate atom.

There is one little problem with the notion of work as a creative enterprise. It is that, as Schopenhauer writes in The World as Will and Idea, that the creative individual is one in a million.

[E]verything that is excellent is always a mere exception, one case in millions, and therefore, if it presents itself as a lasting work... exists in isolation, is preserved like a meteoric stone, sprung from an order of things different from that which prevails here. (p.335)

Think Michelangelo, think Einstein. But the People of the Creative Self want to believe that creativity can become routine and unexceptionable, as least for special people like themselves.

You can see that my Perfect Plan fits into all this. First, it wants to encourage all People of the Subordinate Self to take on something of the armor of light, and become as responsible as possible, each according to his ability. Secondly, it recognizes that in the arena of creativity many are called but few are chosen, and thus many would-be creatives cannot really expect to be much more than merely People of the Responsible Self with a certain flair not given to the ordinary deplorable. Perhaps all they can aspire to is to drive a Subaru rather than a Honda. It therefore behooves the creative to treat the People of the Responsible Self with respect and compassion, for there but for the Grace of the God of Creativity go I.

The other thing about work is that, without work, most people go to the bad. This is because, as Schopehnauer writes, most of our life is lived in trying to obtain the satisfaction of some desire. But once the desire is achieved, we are back to zero, either overcome with "ennui" because suddenly our life has no purpose, or seized by a new desire and the need to obtain satisfaction. Thus it is that we work all our lives towards the shining goal of "success" or "retirement" only to find that success doesn't solve anything and that life in retirement still needs a purpose. There is no land of freedom in which work and play converge in some kind of aesthetic experience and everything is "organized in harmony with the liberated, genuine needs of men."

So it is that most moralists and philosophers have recognized that life in this world is always going to be a vale of tears. Only in the Happy Land of eternity can Eternal Bliss be found. Anything else is to "immanentize the eschaton."

The Question of Women in the Public Square

Over a century ago German sociologist George Simmel, observing the emergence of women into the public square, wrote that women would over the coming years reshape the public square to suit a more feminine sensibility.

And so they have.

Now I would argue that the shape of our political institutions reflect the age-old need to curb the power projects of men. As politics is civil war by other means, the whole point of politics is in fact to direct the male aggressive instinct into political wars rather than actual fighting wars. And then, since men tend to abuse the rules of any political system there is a need for checks and balances to limit the harm that can be caused by men of overvaulting ambition.

But what we have not done is design institutions to deal with the way that women tend to abuse power.

I was reading a piece a couple of days ago by a conservative woman in tech that was helping with coding camps for young women. But she became embroiled in a political war with liberal women for whom the teaching of technical skills was of secondary importance to teaching creativity, networking,  feminist politics and beating up on conservative women. And these women were damaging this conservative woman's business.

At this point, I think it is important to note that so-called "witch hunts" are typically hunts of women by women. Even in the prototypical Scarlet Letter about the poor helpless Hester Prynne, it is clear that the folks giving her trouble are the other women in the New England village.

And in a book I read about witch hunts -- which typically occurred in borderlands where central government power barely projects -- the witch hunt usually ended when the witch hunt started to involve the wives of respected notables. At that point it was time for the ruling class to intervene.

So the question that I have is how we adapt our institutions to deal with the way that women typically project power and abuse power. How do we "regulate" the Culture of Complaint in which women meeting together typically dish the dirt on another woman that is not present when that culture extends beyond the neighborhood community of women into HR departments and university administration?  How do we deal with the teenaged "mean girl" culture when it metastasizes into feminism and the naming and shaming of victims on the say-so of the accuser? How do we deal with the HR mentality that is focused on "codes of conduct" and diversity and inclusion rather than getting the job done?

Now, everybody knows that it is a wonderful thing that women have entered into the public square, into politics, into "careers" and that women can now control their own reproduction. But I wonder. I don't know whether it is a good idea for women to be encouraged and accommodated into public life. I don't know if abortion and divorce and gay marriage and the sexual revolution are a good idea. For all we know they might be the high road to civilizational oblivion.

We are doing all this because we are now ruled by the religious and cultural norms of the educated class's culture of creativity rather than the old bourgeois culture of responsibility.

But my guess is that there is plenty of life left in the bourgeois culture of responsibility before it will be time to throw it on the dust-heap of history. Because we still need it.

I suspect that cultural and religious norms are important for one simple reason. Survival. I don't know the meaning of life, the universe and everything, but I believe that all the religions and the cultures and the politics of the world are attempts to guess the actions and the strategies that will put children on the ground and help the community thrive. Some guesses are better than others.

For instance, I think that the lefty guess in the Communist Manifesto was a bad guess that has resulted in millions of deaths and misery wherever it is tried.

I think that the religions and cultures of responsibility that started up when cities first started up 3,000 years ago are telling us that the culture of individual responsibility is a part of the necessary culture of the city. So I think that the cultures that exist to mess with the culture of individual responsibility are probably playing with fire.

In other words I think that everything in left-wing religion and culture that is trying to smash and demoralize the bourgeois culture of individual responsibility is probably a dreadful mistake that will lead to the end of civilization as we know it.

Of course, everything in this life, this world, this universe, goes in a cycle of birth, growth, decline, and death, and ultimate renewal.

So the left-wing culture that seems determined to destroy the bourgeois culture of responsibility is maybe nothing but a refiner's fire that will clear the decks for the emergence of the next big thing in the human story.

Maybe so. And maybe it all seems perfectly sensible and reasonable if you are a Martian observing events on the Earth from the intergalactic bleachers.

But for us here in the middle of things, it would sure be a shame if the whole thing -- our thing -- got wiped out by a bunch of lefties that want government to control everything and a bunch of feminists complaining that "I Can't Believe She Said That."

So I say we need checks and balances on the woman's Culture of Complaint if women are to continue in the public square.