Trump Budget: Two Years of Trillion Dollar Deficits

Now that I've got usgovernmentspending.com updated with the Trump FY19 budget, here are the takeaways.

First, the tax cut is going to increase deficits, big time. Here are the deficits predicted by the FY18 budget:



And here are the deficits predicted by the FY19 budget.



Yikes! Back to trillion dollar deficits! Most of the increase in the deficit comes from the Trump tax cut. For instance, the budgeted FY18 federal revenue in the FY18 budget last year was $3.81 trillion, whereas in the FY 19 budget it is $3.42 trillion. That's a decrease of $391 billion.

But I wonder how accurate the forecast can be. See, here are the projections of income tax revenue, first in the FY18 budget.



Now here is the income tax revenue from the FY19 budget after the Trump tax cut.



So the Feds are expecting the Corporate Income Tax take to drop by $100 billion in FY18. Really? I'd expect a one year bump as corporations like Apple bring home billions in profits parked offshore and pay tax on their ill-gotten gains. But the Feds expect a bump in Individual Income Tax in FY18, the first year of the tax cut.

What about the spending side? Here is Defense in the FY18 budget.



And here is Defense in the FY19 budget.



So you can see that Trump is putting about an extra $100 billion a year into defense that puts it above the trillion-a-year mark by FY22.

But the basic math on the federal budget is this, for FY18.

Federal Pensions	$1.0 trillion
Federal Health Care	$1.2 trillion
Federal Education	$0.1 trillion
National Defense	$0.9 trillion
Federal Welfare	$0.4 trillion
All Other Spending	$0.6 trillion
Total Federal Spending	$4.2 trillion

It is interesting, is it not, that all the arguments about federal spending are usually about the All Other Spending part of the budget. Which is a mere $600 billion a year. Meanwhile the big money, year after year, is in Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and Defense.

And remember, Donald Trump says he is not going to touch Social Security and Medicare.

Now, if I had my druthers, we'd privatize Social Security and Medicare so that the workers spent their lives saving for retirement and end-of-life health care rather than lending it to politicians in the hope that they would get it back in their retirement years. And most probably the workers would pass a ton of that money on to their children.

But imagine what would happen if we suddenly saved a couple trillion in the federal budget. According to, I think, Milton Friedman, the reality of governments is that they tax and spend up to the limit allowed by the bond market and the voters. What would happen to that $2 trillion a year in savings from people taking over responsibility for their golden years? Would it be returned to the voters in tax cuts? Or would our ruling class find other ways to bribe the voters?

I am not sure that I want to know the answer to that question.

No, Democrats Are Not Just Americans With Different Ideas

Today as I was updating usgovernmentspending.com with the new numbers -- and Trump is proposing a couple of years with $1 trillion deficits! -- I heard Michael Medved telling his audience that the partisan divide is rather overblown, and that Democrats are really good guys at heart with different ideas for America.

Well, not quite, Michael. First of all, the differences in ideas make a big difference. And second, there is a very large stream in the Democratic side that regards politics and political power as a saving religion, and that to oppose them in any way is a damning sin, of racism, sexism, and homophobia, and that the power of the state should be used to shut the opponents up.

In my view, that is a big deal.

First of all, the basic differences in ideas.

Democrats believe in the administrative state. They believe that numerous things that we do together should be done under the supervision of experts and administrators and paid for with taxes. There's a trillion in government-administered pensions, more than a trillion in government administered health care, and more than a trillion ind education.

If we conservatives had our druthers, we would get these importance social protections out of the hands of government, because government does things very badly.

But the truth is that the Democrats own the inside track on this. Most people have enough of the serf in them that they feel safer with the local liberal in charge of their protection: guaranteeing pensions, health care, and education for the kids. People like me would like to persuade the American people to change their minds about this, but we recognize that we have a long way to go. So, for me, there is a quiet resignation that things are not going to get better; we are going to have big government and the administrative state around for a long time, even if, with President Trump, we are taking a whack at out-of-control regulations.

But the big thing, and the thing that is really non-negotiable, is that most Democrats, and certainly all the little kiddies going through elite finishing school, have a saving faith in the power of politics to change peoples' lives and fight injustice. In other words, they believe that political power is the means to bend the arc of history towards justice. I call this the "activism culture."

In my view the activism culture is built on the truth that, at the beginning of the 19th century as the industrial revolution was getting into full swing, the vast majority of people in the industrializing regions were "outside the system." The whole governing thing was reserved for the absolute monarchs with help from the land-holding aristocracy. In the first half of the century the issue was to include the rising middle class into the system, and after the middle-class got the vote then the issue became the franchising of the working class. The activists assumed that revolution would be needed to get the unfranchised into the system.

The assumption of revolutionaries like Marx and Engels was that the rising power of the bourgeoisie, the captains of the new industry, would become the equivalent of the old aristocracy and grab power, using the wealth of the new industrial system. Just as the old aristocracy kept the jealously kept the wealth of the land for them and their descendants, so the captains of industry would rule over the world tightly holding on to their industrial gains. The workers of the world would be "immiserated."

Obviously, the only way the unfranchised could get the attention of the rulers was by marches and demonstrations and demands, and so the modern activism culture was born. And it makes sense. If you are inside the system with a vote then the powers-that-be will pay attention to you, because they need your vote. But folks outside the system need a more direct way of influencing the government.

But there is a problem. Once a group has been franchised with the vote, and admitted into the system, what is left for the activists to do? This was the problem faced by the intellectuals of the Frankfurt School after World War I when the Social Democratic Party of the German workers became the government of Germany. The answer for them was to realize that there were others in the world not yet franchised and admitted into the system: women and racial and sexual minorities. The activists that once championed the workers could now advocate for the victims of the patriarchy and of slavery and of colonialism.

This has been tremendous fun for the activist community, right down to the present moment, giving meaning to the lives of countless well-born scions. But it is based upon a lie.

The lie is the notion that the captains of industry and the middle class is a ruling class intent upon its own power project and determined to keep down the people outside the system. In fact the captains of industry are not that interested in power, and the middle class is not that interested in power. It is a monstrous injustice to act as if men have been keeping women barefoot and pregnant since the dawn of time and enslaving and colonializing brown people since the days of Columbus.

In fact the capitalists and the bourgeoisie got out of slavery in the 19th century and colonialism in the 20th century because, frankly, they did not pay.

Moreover, the record of the last century is that mobilizing whole peoples to fight injustice is counterproductive. The lesson of the Soviet Union and China and other countries that followed the activist agenda is that when you decide to organize a country in a crusade against injustice you create killing fields and miseries and injustice unimaginable under the old regime.

So the position of conservatives in respect of the left and its #Resistance and AntiFa and SJWs and the gender and race studies kiddies at the university is that these are budding totalitarians and must be stopped at all costs. Their ideas are wrong, their methods are wrong, and they must be stopped.

The left's ideas are wrong, because the market system does not require detailed top-down supervision; on the contrary, it stagnates when subordinated under administrative control. Indeed the science shows that socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices, and the same applies to the administrative state that tries to administer prices: it is called the economic calculation problem. Then the administrative regulators of  regulated industry tend to become "captured" by the industry they regulator: regulatory capture. And then legislation on economic matters tends to buy the votes of people indifferent to a project and burden the defeated minority with costs but no benefits. This is the finding of Buchanan and Tullock's The Calculus of Consent. This is why I say that there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. It is one thing to remove an injustice. But once you start to implement a program of justice you will immediately create injustice.

The left's methods are wrong because people inside the system do not need to threaten each other with "peaceful protest." We have had two hundred years of the Great Enrichment since the dawn of the industrial era, and the overwhelming fact is that the market system accommodates and enriches all comers. Force is not needed except to punish people that rob and steal and cheat.

My hope is that the #Resistance will harm the Democrats in the next two election cycles so much that the Democrats will be forced to curb the activists and hide them away. And that will deal with the problem until next time.

The alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

Suppose that Gentry Liberals are Democrats' Biggest Problem

Let us consider the latest Michael Barone piece, that "Gentry Liberals Own the Democratic Party." He means that:

In our three largest cities -- New York, Los Angeles and Chicago -- gentry liberals have become the dominant political demographic.

But, of course, Donald Trump is president. Then,

Gentry liberals have produced the metropolitan areas with the highest income inequality in the nation. They decry gentrification -- and the accompanying movement of low-income blacks and Hispanics out of their neighborhoods -- even as they cause it. They sing hymns to diversity even as they revel in the pleasures of communities where almost everybody believes and consumes exactly the same things -- and votes Democratic.

In other words, gentry liberals pursue politics that is very nice for gentry liberals, cities with expensive streetcars and bike lanes and yeasty cultural resources, and sky-high prices that keep the deplorables out of town. And every gentry liberal can enjoy the comfortable reassurance of #WeBelieve yard signs on every corner. President Obama is the poster boy for gentry liberals; he "has lived all his adult life in gentrified neighborhoods."

But there is a problem.

Dominating the party is one thing; producing candidates and issues with appeal to the broader national electorate is another. Gentry liberals have the microphone and the money to dominate the Democratic Party. Whether they can overcome their snobbish disdain and bitter contempt for those beyond their comfortable enclaves and come up with a winning national strategy is unclear.

Well, yeah. I hope that the dominance of the gentry liberals, the folk I call the People of the Creative Self, increasingly marginalizes the Democratic Party from the American mainstream. Hopefully this gentry-liberal dominance already is doing it.

For instance, one can only guess that Nancy Pelosi's eight-hour filibuster from the floor of the House of Representatives was an attempt to deflect the rage of the gentry liberals that the orange clown had run the table on the Democrats with the tax cut plan, the SOTU speech and the government shutdown. Not to mention the fact that, more and more, it seems clear that the Obama administration was spying on the Trump campaign on the excuse of trumped-up fake dossiers.

But will the Trump-led Republican Party actually take it to the Democrats and marginalize the preening educated-class liberals, gentry liberals, People of the Creative Self? Here's a piece that might influence you. J.B.White calls Donald Trump "The OODA Loop President."

What's that, you say? Well, the OODA Loop is the brainchild of a true American character, John Boyd, a fighter pilot that also lived to create the transformative F-15 and F-16 fighter jets from a desk at the Pentagon.

OODA stands for observe, orient, decide, act. It encapsulates what any warrior -- or market warrior -- does in a fight. But it takes time to go through the cycle, from one action to to the next. Thus speed is of the essence. The idea is to get inside your opponent's OODA Loop, disrupt his plans, and act faster than he can respond.

Which Trump seems to be able to do.

But there is another aspect of Trump, that came out in his SOTU speech: his apparent mastery of the "cares about people like me" metric. White writes that Trump prominently acknowledged

haunting, memorable, and heartbreaking trials and tribulations made extremely personal by a range of attendees who suffered great loss.

You know, of course, which voters would be most affected by this kind of rhetoric. Ordinary middle-class women, who would like respond to Trump's acknowledgement of the trials and tribulations of ordinary Americans as "caring about people like me."

The mainstream media has made a big deal about the notion that women vote for Democrats. And so they do, unless you subtract gentry liberal women, the #MeToo Pussyhat brigade, and black women. Then you find that ordinary middle-class women are not overwhelmingly Democrat at all.

But suppose that Trump starts successfully appealing more and more to ordinary middle-class women that are not gentry liberals, what then?

Well, we are going to find out pretty soon, as we swing into the mid-term election season.

You see, my judgement is that the whole liberal agenda is a gentry liberal conceit from entitlements to labor law to economic regulation to environmentalism and climate change. On my view, the diversity and inclusion movement seems to be all about getting gentry-liberal women jobs in universities and Silicon Valley. But the gentry-liberal agenda is not much fun for ordinary middle-class Americans.

What ordinary Americans want is a decent job, an affordable house in a decent area, decent schools for the kids, decent roads, and decent health care. Gentry liberals make that more difficult.

And Donald Trump seems to be the Great Communicator that can help ordinary Americans see that.

FISAGate: Don't Forget That These People are Idiots

So here we are, reaching the "what did the President know and when did he know it?" in the FISAGate scandal.

For you young-uns, the "what did the president know" meme was made famous by then Sen. Howard Baker (R-TN) during the hearings of the Watergate committee headed up by dear old (actually very canny) Sen. Sam Ervin (D-NC).

Of course, the FISAGate thing will never get as big as Watergate, partly because Democratic scandals are never as big as Republican scandals. The mainstream media make sure of that. And besides, FISAGate cannot be a big thing, because that would mean that President Obama was involved and that would be racist.

Yesterday, texts between FBI love-birds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page revealed that "potus wants to know everything we're doing."

Well, well, well. And here I thought that President Obama never knew anything unless he'd read about it in the newspaper.

As this self-inflicted scandal starts to knife into Democrats, it is important to get one thing clear.

High government officials are not what you are taught to believe: dedicated public servants, highly qualified experts, keen analysts, men of the people, and all that stuff.

They are idiots. They are fools, knaves, and weaklings stumbling around trying the clean up the latest fine mess their fools, knaves, and weaklings of bosses have got them into.

By bosses, I am thinking, of course, of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Knowing that these two were supposed to be the one-two First Black President and First Woman President is bound to tell you something about their personal intellectual qualities.

Now I don't know if the whole FISA court shenanigans was a four-stage deep state plot to influence the 2016 election, as Conservative Tree House seems to think, or whether it was just a Keystone Kops affair of idiots tripping over themselves. It really doesn't matter now.

But I will tell you what. The "brilliant" idea of the Trump-Russia collusion thing will go down as the biggest mistake in recent American history. What if the Obama administration had been using the FISA court to spy on the Trump campaign? The Republicans would never have raised it after winning the election, because it would be too hard to give it traction without the help of the mainstream media. The only way to be sure that Republicans would investigate it would be to back them into a corner with a Trump-Russia special prosecutor investigation, because it just makes it a bit easier to make sense of the foolish Trump-Russia conspiracy meme.

However, I do think that the Republican investigators do seem to know what they are doing, and they have been quietly working away for the last year building a trap for the Obama administration Heffalumps to fall into. Why do I think this? Because things seem to be falling into place with curious regularity on the FISAGate front.

One thing that is curious to me is the choice of Carter Page as the reason for the FISA court application. As information comes out it appears that Carter Page was an FBI informant and seems to have been used in counterintelligence against the Russians. This is a man that Ann Coulter calls Agent 000. (Er, is that Agent Double-Oh Zero or Agent Triple Zero?). I suppose that Carter Page was just the convenient name that happened to be around. I mean, you wouldn't want to compromise real intelligence investigations with a dead herring like Carter Page. Plus, the only reason he was associated with the Trump campaign was apparently, according to Coulter, that nobody in the foreign policy community would have anything to do with Trump, dahling. So the Trumpists were stuck with a fellow not quite out of the top drawer, old chap.

All this is to say that regimes and dynasties all have their sell-by date. That's because the scions of the revolution aren't quite as sharp as the original revolutionaries. Stalin was not as smart as Lenin, although certainly just as brutal, and Gorbachev was totally lacking in the brutal ruthlessness that a true tyrant needs.

Our present progressive elite has been around more or less since the end of the US Civil War, and the world we see around us is the result of their political agenda to create a wise and compassionate administrative state. But today's progressive scions really don't know what they are doing or why. They are just Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls from good families that learned their lessons well.

If you listen to their propaganda, you will hear that they have heroically tamed the capitalist (and now racist sexist homophobic) beast and saved capitalism (and the white patriarchy) from its own worst instincts.

But I think that our progressive elite has merely looted the modern economy, like any conqueror, to reward its supporters. Eventually they will run out of other peoples' money and then the fun will begin.

In the old days the political elite was confined to its necessary role as protector against existential perils like the Mongols. That was merely because the pre-industrial state could not support a government sector that extended much beyond defense; it just did not have the money.

But today's elite has looted the economy to pay pensions to grandpa, health care to grandma, free education to Johnny, and a welfare bureaucracy to keep the poor out of the way. And now they are having a problem coming up with an encore. Meanwhile their government-employee supporters are looting government services like police and fire and education to pay for their well-deserved retirements.

The elite's self image of educated and evolved experts wisely helping the oppressed and the marginalized has had an amazing run. But now it is challenged by Trump, who is offering an alternative narrative.

Whereas the progressives have done a great job splitting off the working class and now minorities and women from the mainstream of American life, Trump is proposing to unify the whole country around the narrative of celebrating America, good ordinary America and Americans, and anyone can join.

It is going to be really interesting to see if he can pull it off. There is one thing that is going for him. Lefties like Stalin and Hitler resorted to the nationalist meme because they realized that in the modern era it was the only way to unify people to their standard. You can say that Stalin  and Hitler were monsters, but they surely knew how to play the game. People belong to nations now, and nothing else works as well.

Great Reaction: The Left's Neo-Tyranny

I am continuing to develop my idea of the left as a Great Reaction, a movement against the radical Great Enrichment of the last 200 years that seeks to return to the good old days of exploitation and oppression.

Because what else can you call a movement that stands against a culture that has increased per-capita income from $1-3 per day in today's dollars to the current $150 per day in the US? Why would anyone argue, except in the details, against a phenomenon that has transformed the world from hunger to abundance?

To me, the key thing about the Great Enrichment is that its cultural carriers, the businessmen and middle class of the modern era, are not that interested in power.

But our lefty friends very definitely are interested in power. And they naturally assume that everybody else is interested in power as well. For them, the transformation from the present hellhole of racism, sexism, and homophobia to the sunny upland of liberation and emancipation can only by midwifed by political power. The result is that, wherever leftism has been tried, in small utopian communities or the campuses of government universities or actual governments, it has implemented old-style tyranny, in the manner of Genghis Khan and other historical notables, where the government rules by intimidation and oppression, and you keep your head down and get with the program if you want to know what is good for you.

So the Great Reaction is a movement of neo-tyranny. It believes that tyranny, top-down political force, is necessary to implement its vision of a better world.

Let us give our lefty friends their due. At first look, it would seem that only overwhelming force would be equal to the task of rooting out oppression, exploitation, othering, slavery, serfdom, marginalization, and subordination in human society. And indeed there is something in every man that is tempted by the Last Temptation of Christ, where Satan tempts Christ with dominion over all the kingdoms of the world, to do evil that good would come.

And I have conceded that in hunter-gatherer society the need for defense of the tribal territory against the neighboring tribes is elemental. Without the means and the will to defend the territory there is no tribe and no community. Every hunter-gatherer tribe must be armed and ready against its neighbors.

And the agricultural community also requires particular protection by armed force, else the Mongols or the Vikings or the pirates of the Spanish Main will descend and rape and pillage.

So it stands to reason that force is needed in the world to protect the innocent from the spoilation of the guilty.

But how much force is needed? And against whom? Who whom: That is the eternal question.

The left is unequivocal. Force is needed, transformative political power, in order to battle against the forces of evil. What's more, it makes sense that as humans have developed greater and greater material powers, using the energy in chemical combustion and perhaps nuclear reactions to multiply the material force of human and animal power, then it would be necessary for the right people to apply extreme preventative force to keep the new powers from bursting their banks and destroying everything in their path like a flood.

The list of potential evils that leftist thinkers and activists have identified, against which they judged political power was necessary and against which they mobilized in ideological war, is long.

First there were the absolute monarchs, the target of the French Revolution. Their unjust rule had to be destroyed and everything associated with it. Of course, in the event the French aristocracy had been defanged by the absolute monarchs centuries before, according to Tocqueville in his Old Regime and the French Revolution. And the regime of Louis XVI was mild and progressive compared to what came after it. Plus, it was broke. Of course, no regime goes out into the good night without encouragement. Nevertheless, the French Revolution unleashed the monsters of the Terror, and several coups and revolutions throughout the 19th century. Maybe the evils of the absolute monarchs were not so deep as to require the neo-tyranny of regicide and the wholesale slaughter of the old aristocracy and the bloody aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.

Then there were the capitalists and the bourgeoisie, the target of the Communist Manifesto. It was obvious to any young head full of mush in the 1840s that the rising bourgeoisie and its Dark Satanic Mills were embarked upon a massive power project that would enslave the workers and make feudalism look like a walk in the park. These exploiters had to be stopped before they immiserated the entire working class and the petite bourgeoisie. In the event, the bourgeoisie did not oppress the world, because it was not that interested in power. The great capitalists, whether they liked it or not, were mewed into a system that rewarded them for actions that created products and services for the consumer. And the capitalist market exchange system put such a large premium on trust and faithful performance of promises that the capitalists probably could not have brought themselves to dominate the world with force, even if they had wanted to. Instead, the inventors of machine textiles clothed the world, the inventors of steam power gave ordinary people the means to travel the world. The ones that suffered were those eclipsed by the latest technical and market revolution that marginalized their once proud "buggy-whip" industry. It must be said that the prophesies of Marx and Engels represent the most utterly failed prediction in human history and the followers of their vision have unleashed unimaginable horrors upon ordinary people with deaths in the millions in the mania to stop the exploiters before they strike again with a new technological revolution, some invention to make, say, the smartphone look like the Ford Edsel. Maybe the neo-tyranny of a government-owned economy directed by political activists is not the solution to the hypothetical danger of worker immiseration.

The world is still unwinding the horrors perpetrated upon the human race by the dedicated followers of Marx. But every political elite with half a brain now knows that, whatever its appetite for power, it cannot strut upon the world stage unless it fosters a vibrant market economy at home. But the idea of well-born political activists deciding that all the world's a stage and that the rest of the world is the captive audience for its activist struts and frets, its peaceful protests and its non-negotiable demands against the depredations of the monster du jour, has gone from strength to strength. The notion of a class of helpless victims, not so much of capitalism, but of patriarchy, or racism, or homophobia, cowering in cold fright waiting for the noble band of activists to liberate them into emancipation, has proved to be irresistible to a certain class of well-born youth. But each of these activist movements is a mere neo-tyranny, franchised by noble intentions with the right to dominate and humiliate the objects of their righteous rage.

I stumbled across a piece on discrimination today that belies the lefty assumption that all monsters are evil. Ben Shapiro writes:

Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute is fond of citing a 1934 study about discrimination against Chinese-Americans. The study followed a Chinese couple as they visited hotels and restaurants across the country. They were denied service a grand total of one time. Then, study author Richard LaPiere sent questionnaires to the various establishments asking whether they'd serve a Chinese couple. All but one that responded said no.

You can see that's why the South needed Jim Crow laws to make sure that people discriminated in proper fashion. Otherwise those Southrons might have proved to be way too soft-hearted to administer the tough and necessary agenda of their leaders.

The Great Reaction is a movement primed by the faith that the average human deplorable must be humiliated before he strikes again. And in the service of this witchhunt the movement has dug deep into the arsenal of pre-modern cultures that it likes to stigmatize as ignorant and superstitious. So we have the neo-tribalism of identity politics, the neo-feudalism of the welfare state, the neo-sacrifice of the environmental movement, and the neo-guilt of the modern Torquemadas.

And behind it all is the great temptation of neo-tyranny, the use of force to force the world to be good.

I don't think so.

Great Reaction: Plus Neo-Guilt

I was describing my concept of the Great Reaction to a friend, the idea that it is not surprising, given the astonishing Great Enrichment of the last 200 years, that a Great Reaction -- the left -- would have emerged to try and return to the good old ways.

There is the neo-tribalism that we experience with identity politics. There is neo-feudalism that we experience in the welfare state.

And then I said that we now have neo-sacrifice, the return to the sacrifice of the scapegoat to propitiate the gods, and also to redirect social conflict at a designated victim.

But then this friend mentioned guilt. Yes indeed. Another notch to the bedpost. Guilt is built into the Christian tradition to make people worry about divine justice. Divine justice is the clever idea that evil people may be able to get away with evil deeds, but God is not mocked. So you better be guilty about your evil deeds and seek absolution, because if you put it off you will find yourself at the Last Judgement facing you know who.

Well, in the secularization of the last century we were going to do away with guilt. Except now we have neo-guilt. Whites are supposed to feel guilt about white privilege. Men are supposed to feel guilt about the patriarchy. We are all supposed to feel guilt about environmental degradation. And now we are supposed to feel guilt about using fossil fuels.

So it turns out that our new masters have decided that we do need guilt after all. And the neo-guilt cannot be absolved by confession or by a personal apology. It can only be assuaged by sacrifice, by abasing oneself before the idol of equality, or diversity and inclusion, or recycling, or using mass transit.

Some day, we may suppose, we humans will assemble a new religion that makes its peace with the astonishing transformation of the last two centuries, and turn away the wrath of the Great Reaction that is attempting to return to the tried and true social culture of the agricultural and the hunter-gatherer age.

There is no doubt that human are tribal; but the question is how to build a society that challenges this tribal level instinct to enable people to live in the larger social units of today. So the left's neo-tribalism is not a solution.

There is no doubt that many people want to live as subordinates, relieved of responsibility for their lives, and push that responsibility onto bosses, patrons, politicians, union leaders. But the modern era needs the dominant culture to accept individual responsibility as a Good Thing; we cannot all live as subordinate victims. So the left's neo-feudalism is not a solution.

There is no doubt that there lives in every one of us a vindictive punisher that wants to sacrifice others at the altar of our rage. But sacrifice as a way to propitiate the gods or the mob goes against our modern culture of law, which is designed to limit the appetite for sacrificial scapegoating.So the left's neo-sacrifice is not a solution.

There is no doubt that every one of us feels guilt about not being the person we should be. But using guilt as a political weapon is a perversion of the purpose of guilt and the social institution of divine judgement, having God decide who is naughty or nice so that human judges don't have to, except in extreme circumstances. So the left's neo-guilt is not a solution.

It's curious how the radical modernizers of the left, that determined to build a perfect society with political power, and drive out all the superstitions of the past, have instead created a Great Reaction that brings all the old superstitions in the back door.

I wonder what that could be telling us.

"Victoria" Series Celebrates Bourgeoisification of British Monarchy

I've been watching Series 2 of the Brit Victoria TV show, starring Jenna Coleman as the young Queen Victoria, and I have to say that my overwhelming takeaway is this.

Queen Victoria and her husband Albert, Prince Consort, are represented, in episode after episode, as celebrating faithful, companionate bourgeois marriage, and that this is a Good Thing.

Over and over, we see the older generation -- from Albert's father, Duke of Coburg, to King Leopold of the Belgians, to King Louis-Philippe of France -- as immoral cynical corrupt immoralists. And the young generation -- Victoria, Albert, Prince Ernest -- as earnest, if human, moral improvers. They exemplify, in other words, the bourgeois ethos, that I suppose we may think to have dominated western Europe culturally in the mid 19th century.

And this is clearly represented on the screen as good and noble, a cleaning of the Augean stables of all the old feudal culture of power and corruption and droit de seigneur.

So, does this mean that the worm has turned and that the Victorian era, excoriated for the last century as stuffy and narrow-minded and bigoted, and patriarchal, is now to experience a re-evaluation and celebration as an era of high moral purpose?

I must say that I hope so. In my view the 19th century was a century of wonders and miracles, starting with the industrial revolution that rescued from starvation the free proletarians that had been "hurled on the labour market by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers" 200 years previously, as Marx so eloquently put it. You have the phenomenon of young entrepreneurs and adventurers from out of northwest Europe spreading out all over the world. And in the unprecedented Great Enrichment all kinds of flowers bloomed, from the rising working class to the middle class to emancipated women to earnest young aristocrats like Victoria and Albert. To represent the Victorian age as hide-bound and regressive, as our lefty friends like to do, is an epic mischaracterization. And the Victoria production is right there with its show and tell.

It is remarkable, is it not, that "Victorian Age" is made to stand for the whole global phenomenon of the rising bourgeoisie, whether nor not it happened in Britain, or North America, or elsewhere.

Now I, of course, am biased on this, because my two grandfathers were small businessmen at the end of the Victorian era in the years just before World War I: one of them in Russia and one in Japan. And the Great Reaction to the capitalist expansion that we saw in the two World Wars and socialist experiments was not kind to my family.

On the other hand we may perhaps seriously indict these TV programs, from Downton Abbey to Victoria to the constant redos of Pride and Prejudice as shameless nostaglia for an era of hierarchy and manners and camera-friendly sets and clothing.

Here's my take. I think that our modern women are going to be taking a serious look at what the  iconoclasts, the critics of the middle class, have pushed over the last century. The emancipation of women, the normalization of divorce, the sexual revolution, the cult of career, the notion of the "independent woman" have tumbled over one another over the last century in a narrative of women's liberation and emancipation.

But the question remains, as it is bound to do, as to what is the meaning of life for a woman, as compared to men and to humanity in general. We are now far enough down the road to wonder whether easy divorce is a liberation or an enslavement for women, whether the sexual revolution frees women or enslaves them to the male appetite, whether career opens up opportunity for women or warps them to the wage slavery of corporate cubicle-hood. And over all is the question of the protection of women from sexual and other predation.

Here's my take. The idolization of political power promoted by the left is a problem for women and other living things. The justification for political power is that the world is full of pirates and plunderers, and that human communities need protection from aggression.

But the left has taken this common-sense and built an idol to political power, building a faith on the notion that political power can deliver a world free of aggressions, political, economic, social, cultural, and sexual. This, I would argue, is a lie. We know that it is a lie in the political and economic sector, as political regimes and economies inspired by the left's power worship have delivered nothing but death and misery.

Now, I think, we are going to be digesting the next stage in this process, that the use of political power to enforce women's equality is just as cruel and unjust as the use of political power to enforce political and economy equality.

And it seems perfectly natural to me that the first step in this process is a revaluation of the Victorian Era, to discover what has really going on 100-200 years ago and to discover what golden nuggets might be recovered from the tailings of that revolutionary era to benefit us here today.