The Plague of Fake Politics

When you are part of the ruling class -- or even a ruling-class wannabe -- you want to do ruling-class things. And what a ruling class does is politics.

In our age the ruling class is the so-called educated class that first emerged in the Enlightenment and first got its hands dirty in the French Revolution. Then, in the 19th Century we saw the emergence of Educated Youth, the Marxes and the Engels of the time, well-born young men that chose politics as a way to advocate for the lower class.

Thus was born today's over-under politics where the wealthy and the well-connected use the underclass as a tiger-paw to maul the middle class. Marx was the son of the best lawyer in Trier and Engels was the son of a textile baron sent to England to keep an eye on Daddy's business.

The thing is that this sort of politics is fake. Marx and Engels were not advocating for the rights of well-born scions, they were advocating for the workers. Er, what would rich kids like that know about the needs of the workers? Because the telling thing about Educated-Youth activism is that it seems to require All Power to the Scions! In our day we are talking about graduates of selective colleges making their chops as "community organizers" for a year before moving on to a liberal foundation and then a career in electoral politics. Fake politics is great for the well-born scions. And that is the point.

So now we have the fake "caravan of Central American migrants" organized by the usual crew of liberal church groups. Sorry fellahs, but glomming onto a group of Central Americans and using them as camera bait is not "activism;" it is fake politics. It is US liberals looking for an issue on which to perform activism and create meaning for themselves.

And the same goes for the March for our Lives movement that features the teenagers from Parkland as its media bait. Kids don't have the experience and the connections to mount huge rallies in Washington DC. It takes well-connected professional activists and well-connected billionaires. It is fake politics. It is not about "gun violence," which is mainly a problem in black inner cities; it is all about creating meaning in the lives of well-born, well-connected liberals: fake politics.

Next week is going to be Town Hall for our Lives, featuring the same stand-up kids in front of cameras. Sorry liberals; this is fake politics, once again.

If all this stuff is fake politics, what is real politics? I will tell you. It is some whacko guy running for president and discovering a whole demographic that none of the fake activists had ever thought of representing.

The problem with all this educated-class fake politics is what comes later. It is what I call the "little darlings" problem.

Suppose you are Marx and Engels and you want revolution for the working class. Or you are Beatrice Webb and you want legislation mandating labor unions and social services for the working class. Just trust us, they said, and we will change the world for you and protect you.

Only they didn't. Marx and Engels and their adepts Lenin and Stalin and Mao and Castro and Chavez led the workers into a maelstrom of starvation and killing. Beatrice Webb and US liberals led the workers into a box canyon by promising cradle-to-grave jobs and welfare. But now the working class in England and the US is dying of despair because the world they were taught to live in has collapsed. Go watch the Up Series if you want to see this happen in real time. There are no more lifetime jobs in manufacturing; there are no more secure union jobs except in government. The glorious movement to lift up the working class was not about the working class at all; it was all about the power and the glory of the Marxes, the Lenins, the Webbs, and the college-taught "activists" luxuriating in the activism culture of today.

The same thing has been happening with the women's movement, run by well-born women that fancied a life that was more than marriage and children. No problem, girls, except that, for some reason, the women of today are less happy that the women of the Fifties. Why would that be? Could it be that most women -- well-born women educated at selective colleges excepted -- want marriage and children and a part-time job? Has anyone asked them?

Here's what I keep coming back to. It is that, in this age of politics-with-everything we have grasped the wrong end of the stick. The record of the last 200 years is that the day-to-day work of human social cooperation can best be left to the market in goods and labor, with sensible laws to encourage faithful dealings and reward trust. It is not a good idea to marshal people into political tribes and teach them to trust their leaders. Political leaders are like the generals of armies. They get to go home to a well-earned retirement; it is their foot soldiers and caravaner migrants that get to pay the bills of their leaders with their lives.

Instead of teaching gullible teenagers and migrants to trust in their leaders we should be teaching people to understand and master the bourgeois bargain. The bargain is simple: it is your job to figure out how to contribute to society with your mind and your body, and then do something about it. And don't think that the job is over once you have found your first job. The world changes, and we all need to change with it, or else end up on the dust-heap of history. Sure, "society" can help, and government has role to play. But what if the government is wrong? What if government's health care programs make health care impossibly expensive?  What if government schools don't prepare our children for the real world? What then?

There's a cute piece today by Christopher DeGroot, who sneers at Kevin D. Williamson for sneering at the white working class for not getting with the program and doing something about it when the good old jobs started to fade away.

The problem is that the white working class made its mistake a generation before the jobs started drying up in the Seventies. Their mistake was the trust the activists of fake politics who "cared about people like you."

No they didn't. All politicians care about is your vote. All the activists care about is your body showing up at their "peaceful protest." And that is all.

What Do We Do About the Experts?

I was recommended to read The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor by economics professor William Easterly.

Easterly tells a story familiar to the rebels that don't like being dictated to by the educated elite. The way of the world is for the best and the brightest to decide what is good for us, and then implement it, for our own good, of course.

Easterly approaches the issue with a review of development economics, the notion that experts and administrators know how to bring the backward nations of the world into the modern age with targeted plans formulated and executed by a central government advised by international experts.

On Easterly's telling, this all began a century ago at the intersection of economics and colonialism. The western colonial governments were starting to get a bit uncomfortable with the western domination of the rest of the world. How did democracy and self government mesh with the colonial domination of Africa and Asia? The answer was a clever one.

The backward people governed by the western colonialists were really too backward to be able to govern themselves and come up with ideas and plans for their own development, so the answer was for autocratic governments, colonial or post-colonial, to execute on economic development plans developed by European experts, the chaps who knew what they were doing. Politics was the answer.

It actually makes a lot of sense. If you are the ruling class the last thing you can countenance is to get up and abandon the levers of political power, and say to yourself, OK, our rule is unjust and we should just get the heck out of here. Instead what you do is elide the truth of your unjust rule, and perform a misdirection play. You say to yourself and to the world that, well, these backward people aren't really interested in political rights. So the best thing to do for them is to implement a targeted plan of economic development created and executed by us, the knowledgeable ones.

This is smarter than you might think. It appeals to the existing colonialists, and it appeals to any budding local nationalist revolutionary cadres. It flatters liberal reformers and it sidesteps the whole question of political legitimacy. Thus, between the world wars, there was a big effort to come up with a development plan for China, in which both the Rockefeller Foundation and Sun Yat-sen/Chiang Kai-Shek supporters collaborated. It conveniently dropped the question in which ordinary Chinese people were intensely interested, of western enclaves in China where western law superseded Chinese law.

Or in Africa, the colonialists came up with development plans after World War II to benefit "the natives" without really tackling the who-whom question of whether the western colonialists should be the ones to dictate such matters.

Of course, there were people that questioned the technocratic development model, and Easterly frames this opposition in the contrast between the two winners of the 1974 Nobel Economics prize,  F.A. Hayek and Gunnar Myrdal. Hayek is famous for his opposition to the expert technocratic model; Myrdal was a full-on supporter of the technocratic model. But guess what: the technocratic model enthusiasts refused to engage with the Hayekians, saying that everyone agreed that the technocratic model with its carefully-crafted plans was the way to go. Somehow that sounds familiar.

In other words, people in the political world cannot coutenance anything unless it is a political solution, directed by the powerful. We know what is best, say the colonialist oppressors; We know what is best, say the post-colonialist autocrats. And why not? If you have managed to get yourself to the top of the political heap, you must be a genius, right?

No doubt, but what is interesting me, at the half-way point in the book, is that Easterly is carefully making his case on the argument from racism, that the western colonialists and experts were and are racists that operated on the assumption that ordinary people in the Third World just did not have the chops to develop their countries on their own.

But I want to make the problem bigger. After all, the whole point of the western welfare state is that ordinary western people just don't have the chops to manage their retirement, their end-of-life health care, their children's education on their own. They need the support of technocratic government programs.

I suspect that Easterly will get around to that, but he understands that to persuade the political and cultural elite he must argue from racism and not from economics.

For the extraordinary Great Enrichment of the last two hundred years took place in spite of everything and everybody. In my view nobody knew what was happening in the west 200 years ago, and if they had they would have stopped it. Ruling classes want to rule, and that is all. Ordinary people want to hang on to what they have, and that is all. Both are lemmings, that keep on going until they go over the cliff.

We have increased per-capita income by 30 times in 200 years, yet we can still get a Venezuela. How come?

How to Solve the Lefty Boycott Problem

What do we do about the lefty habit of launching boycotts against conservative media types?

This week it's Laura Ingraham's turn as young teenage activist David Hogg, presumably prompted all the way by David Brock's Media Matters outfit, has successlfully scared most of the Laura's advertisers to stop advertising on her FoxNews TV show.

Oh, and don't forget the NRA. Lefties love to launch boycotts against the eevil NRA.

Of course before Laura it was Sean Hannity,  and before him Bill O'Reilly. And they have tried a few times to scare Rush Limbaugh's advertisers off his program.

So what do we DO about it?

Do we return fire, and punch back twice as hard, as a famous community organizer once said, and target advertisers on lefty shows? Do we ignore the lefties? Do we turn the other cheek?

Or do we adopt the strategy of Vox Day, advertised in his SJWs Always Lie and SJWs Always Double Down ebooks. Here is the SJW Survival Guide from SJWs Always Lie. Rule Three is:  never apologize, because it only encourages them.  Rule Seven is: make the rubble bounce.

So Laura Ingraham should not have apologized to David Hogg.

Vox Day's bigger agenda is that, if you don't like social media deplatforming you then you need to take action and make your own platforms. That's why Day has produced a "fork" to Wikipedia, calling it Infogalactic. Only trouble is that Infogalactic's traffic is going down, not up.

The problem for conservatives and non-lefties is that we don't believe in boycotts. That's because we don't believe in the basic faith of the left in political action. We don't believe that labor unions are the solution for the workers. We don't believe in the wonders of the welfare state. We don't believe in the efficacy of government experts. We don't believe that Affirmative Action or "inclusion and diversity" is going to correct historical discrimination.

So, while everyone on the left believes in the use of activism and "peaceful protest" to fight against injustice, we don't. Oh, we believe in laws against major discrimination, but not much more.

Actually, we believe that only government should be forbidden to discriminate on the basis of race and sex. Because the whole point of freedom is the freedom to discriminate. So, on this view, if Google and Facebook want to drive conservatives out of the public square, go ahead fellahs. Of course it might not be a good strategic plan and good for business to piss off half of the country, but, as they say, it's a free country, and the whole point of freedom is the right to make mistakes.

The big risk for companies that bail on conservative media advertising is that sometimes the boycott backfires as the listeners and viewers decide to boycott the boycotters and, sometimes, the conservative show won't have the advertisers back if they suddenly get sadder and wiser.

The best thing to happen would be that all the rumpus and accusations the 2018 activist wave result in the reelection of the GOP Congress in November. Because what cooled the jets of the last lefty activist era, the fabled Sixties, was that the voters elected Republican Presidents five times out of six between 1968 and 1988. It was only when Bill Clinton declared himself a New Democrat that the voters elected a Democrat. And then, after he sicced Hillary on the health care system, the voters elected the first GOP Congress in 40-odd years.

That is the sort of thing that people with a faith in the saving grace of political power really understand. The trouble is that there is always a new generation of well-born youngsters with a desperate hunger for revolution, baby.

Myth and Religion in an Age of Science

I sent a piece to American Thinker last night to urge that we reclassify all lefty ideologies as religions. The idea was to be able to apply the First Amendment to our lefty friends respecting establishments of religion.

Because if the US has an official religion right now it is the congeries of lefty ideologies, and don't you dare question the experts on their political correctness.

However, I was also reading Jordan B. Peterson yesterday, and he says this about your modern ideologies. And he means all of them, from the story of "benevolent nature threatened by the rapacious forces of the corrupt individual and the society of the machine" to the brave pioneer "wresting the good life... from the intransigent forces of nature."

These stories are all ideologies... [But they] are dangerous. Their power stems from their incomplete but effective appropriation of mythical ideas... Ideologies only tell part of the story, but tell that part as if it were complete.

Peterson wants us to understand that everything is two-edged. Benevolent nature? Yes, but it includes malarial mosquitos. Noble pioneers? But what about the original inhabitants? The Great Mother is creation and destruction. The Great Father is security and tyranny, and if your appropriated myth doesn't weave that into the story then, in the words of Mary McCarthy, every word is a lie, including "and" and "the."

Yes, but isn't myth and religion old hat, because science? Well, I quoted Rodney Stark in my AT piece to the effect that

The everlasting basis for religion will be the human conviction and hope that life has meaning.

Or, as I like to quote from Douglas Adams, it is all about "the meaning of life, the universe, and everything." I think the point is that the reason that all living things do what they do is that they act as if their life has hope and meaning. Maybe there is no meaning of life in this universe. But it seems to me that everything in the universe seems to be acting as if there is. Or, to put it in terms of Jordan Peterson, our lives are based on affect, responding to unexpected stimuli with the response we call "emotion."

I see that he gets some of this from Nietzsche. I am reading Beyond Good and Evil at the gym and Nietzsche is pretty clear on science, philosophy, and everything. Kant and his categories? Sure, but suppose he was mistaken? Schopenhauer and his "will?" So let's unpack it:  the fact is that "will" is not something simple and certain, but complicated unit into which a whole world of meaning has been packed. Cause and effect? We should use them "as conventional fictions for the purpose of designation and communication -- not for explanation." Or,

It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that physics, too, is only an interpretation and exegesis of the world (to suit us, if I may say so!) and not a world explanation[.]

That is to say that science demonstrates the world; it does not explain it.

Actually I think the whole thing can be understood by turning Marx on his head. In his Theses on Feuerbach he famously writes:

Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.

Er, no Chuck. Let's look at this from the Peterson point of view. We achieve new interpretations of the world from experiencing the unexpected as an irruption of the dangerous unknown. There is a whole universe out there of which we know nothing, because it does not affect our lives. But when the universe whacks us upside the head we struggle to achieve a hard-won new interpretation the world. The point is not to change the world but to change  ourselves so we can better continue our lives in a less dangerous and more effective way.

Going along in the old way and ignoring new interpretations of the world may be sensible, or it may be suffocating. Going off in a new way may be beneficial, or it may be suicidal.

Changing the world, Chuck, might be the point or it might be a recipe for 100 million dead humans.

The point is to figure out the difference. And that is the job of myth and religion, not science, and not half-baked lefty ideology.

Why Pope Francis is Wrecking Catholicism

Here we are on Good Friday, and the big story is Pope Francis telling an atheist journalist that he is not  that into Hell. Writes George Neumayr,

In an interview with the Italian journalist Eugenio Scalfari, Pope Francis declared that the unrepentant don’t suffer in hell but simply “disappear.”

Of course, nobody really has a right to be scandalized by this. The Catholic Church operates as a "magisterium" which means more or less that what the pope says goes. So if the pope says that you don't get to burn in Hell for your sins but instead disappear into oblivion, hey, that's the plan.

However, in my judgement, what the pope is doing  is destroying the Catholic Church as an institution where people go to get an answer to the "meaning of life, the universe, and everything" in the felicitous phrase of Douglas Adams.

Ever since the Axial Age, humans have approached this problem through the cultural notion of a God that cares about good and evil.

(Did you know that before the Axial Age gods did not care too much about good and evil? A good place to start is Homer's Iliad. Those gods were playing politics, using humans as their chess pieces on the chess-board of the plains of Ilium).

The reason that gods suddenly became interested in good and evil in about 600 BC was that the "informal social control" of the village was breaking down as humans started moving into larger, and more impersonal communities. That's from sociologist of religion Rodney Stark.

But Rodney Stark has also analyzed the workings of what we might call the religious marketplace. What do believers want, and what do religious entrepreneurs offer them?

The answer is that people want a religion that enacts the drama of good and evil, but they want it tailored to their specific needs. Some people want a very strict and demanding religion; others want a medium strict religion (and this is the sweet spot where most people live); some people want a very liberal religion. In times of trouble, people tend to want more strict religion. That is why, for instance, western New York State during the chaos of building the Erie Canal was called the "burned over district" and birthed a lot of religious movements including the Church of Latter Day Saints.

There is a tendency for religious entrepreneurs -- the Wesley brothers, Joseph Smith & Co -- to start fairly strict religions. There is also a tendency for religious bureaucrats to gradually ease up on the strictness of the church they direct. This is because, like all bureaucrats, religious bureaucrats tend, over time, to focus on the emoluments and perquisites of office rather than the actual mission of the church.

So it makes complete sense that during our lives the Catholic Church has de-emphasized the strictness of good vs. evil. But there is a problem, according to Rodney Stark. When ecclesiastics liberalize their churches and soften their doctrine the believers tend not to like it, and the ecclesiastics pretty soon start preaching to empty churches. On Rodney Stark's view this is exactly what happened to the Catholic  Church after Vatican II. Used to be that both clergy and laity were enthused by the specialness of their faith: the priests and nuns in their distinctive uniforms and status, the laity in their strict requirements for fidelity and observance.

Now, if you believe in the ideas of Rodney Stark you would think that, if the Christian churches are relaxing their religious discipline, then something would be likely to come along and fill in the gap left by the churches that were reducing the level of enthusiasm for the drama of good and evil. And of course this is exactly what has happened. The Gospel has been replaced by the Social Gospel. The moral drama of personal good and evil has been replaced, especially for educated people, by the moral drama of social good and evil, the plight of the poor, inequality, and the blight of capitalism.

There are many people that assert that the secular movements of the last two centuries are not religions, but I am not one of them. All these movements -- from the Jacobins of the French Revolution to the Communists of early to mid 20th century to the postmodernist SJWs of today -- are all running religions, that are intensely concerned with the moral drama of good vs. evil.

For instance, you may be concerned with the violence of Good Friday, the sacrifice of the Son of God in expiation of our Sins, and the almost melodramatic resolution of the Passion of Christ on Easter Sunday when Christ rises again from the dead. But surely the secular-religious passion of AntiFa, the anti-gun movement, and the campus SJWs show that ideological passion is alive and well, and that all over the world, people are motivated by the passion to fight for good against evil.

You might think, for example, that martyrdom is a dead-end. But in fact people are highly motivated to become martyrs. We see that in the Islamic movement -- and we see it with the mass shooters. Hey, the easiest way to go down in history is to get your 15 minutes of fame with a semi-automatic assault rifle.

And the proof of this is the reverse of it. During the Great Purges of the Stalinist Soviet Union, according to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, one of the most effective ways of breaking down non-believers was to tell them, in the isolation of the interrogation room, that they would disappear without a trace so they might as well give in and confess. This tactic did not work for religious believers, who already knew that they would go to Heaven.

For me, the current moral drama of the left and the SJWs is a dead end, for the simple reason that it has not confronted the "indirect social control" culture of the market economy. In my view, the true religion of today must blend the good vs. evil culture of the monotheisms with the "service is perfect freedom" culture of the market. For this is the basic proposition of the market economy. Think of some service, some product that other people want, and deliver it. Deliver it not just to your tribe, your clan, but to all the people, all over the world. What a concept!

So my idea is that the Religion of the Future must blend the women's culture that is best adapted to the culture of informal social control with the men's culture that is best for running the culture of formal social control with the impersonal culture of indirect social control that comes with the market and its prices.

Hey, it should be no problem. We will wake up on some Sunday soon and find that we have all risen as if from the dead and that all the world is new again.

But I wish that Pope Francis were a sadder and wiser man.

"Informal Social Control" and "Formal Social Control" and the Left

I  was reading a piece today by ZMan about "Puritans and Progressives" and how similar they are.

[Just like the Puritans] [t]he modern Left is consumed with defining who is inside and who is outside their thing. The people inside are the righteous, while the people outside are all evil.

And it happens that today David French is reporting on the liberal rage at the idea -- the idea! -- of hiring National Review writer Kevin D. Williamson to write for The Atlantic. And then there is John Derbyshire writing about the travails of Amy Wax, a law professor who is getting in trouble for suggesting that “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely in the top half” at the law school at the University of Pennsylvania.

What is going on here? I think that the way to understand it is to use Rodney Stark's concepts of "informal social control" and "formal social control" from his book Why God?

Stark argues that the appearance of monotheistic religions in the Axial Age occurred because people were starting to live in communities that were too big to be regulated by the face-to-face informal social control of the village. In the village everyone knows everyone else and the community of women determine who is naughty or nice, as in my immortal catchphrase: "I can't believe she said/did that."

But when the world gets too big you need the impersonal authority of formal social control with governments for the external control of people's acts and monotheistic gods that can  peer into your soul to control your mental acts.

But the thing is that we are all programmed for the intimate world of the village and informal social control. So we are outraged, outraged that there are people out there actually allowed to write stuff that we know is evil and opposed to everything we believe. The nerve! And so we get the Puritan witch hunts of Salem, Massachusetts, of which everyone has heard tell. And we get the Reign of Terror witch hunts of the French Revolution, of which everyone has also heard tell, but with which some of our lefty friends fail to make the connection. Oh and the Great Purge of 1930s Soviet Union, and the McCarthy witch-hunts of the 1950s, and the Maoist Cultural Revolution of the 1960s.

Today we are having a similar experience with the postmodernists and "political correctness." And this witch-hunt was specifically recommended by left Herbert Marcuse in his 1965 essay on "Repressive Tolerance."

Our Big Problem, I think, is that there is another social control concept that has taken hold in the last 200 years. It is what we might call the "indirect social control" of the market economy. The market economy does not directly say: "Thou Shalt" and "Thou Shalt Not." It only gives you a nudge.

In my view there is a problem with the indirect social control of the market. It does not have enough valence, enough moral drama of good against evil. People want to live in the moral drama of the battle of good against evil, and they think something is missing in their lives if the moral drama is missing.

Against this appetite for moral drama is the opinion of Crane Brinton in The Anatomy of Revolution. In his view humans cannot handle the heightened drama of a witch-hunt or a Reign of Terror for too long. And so there is always a return to normalcy, what the left calls "Thermidorean Reaction" because the French Reign of Terror ended in the revolutionary month of Thermidor.

There is also a theory that witch-hunts stop when the hunters start coming for respectable women that are wives of local notables. It is one thing to sweep up witches on the margins of society, but quite another when high-born women are involved, darling. So does Prof. Amy Wax count as a high-born notable? Does the reign of microaggressions stop with her?

We shall see.

But I think that the key to the whole matter is to understand the interplay of the cultures of "informal social control," "formal social control," and "indirect social control."

And remember what Harry Hotspur said about the claim of Henry IV to be the King of England.

[The king]
Broke oath on oath, committed wrong on wrong;
And, in conclusion, drove us to seek out
This head of safety; and withal to pry
Into his title, the which now we find
Too indirect for long continuance.

Yeah! You give 'em hell Harry.

Because that is what the left has been doing in respect  of the market  economy for a century and a half: prying out the title of capitalism, which  they find too indirect, too lacking in moral drama, for long continuance.

Omnibus Bills and Us

My American Thinker piece this week made fun of the girlish horror at President Trump signing the bulging omnibus bill: "I Can't Believe He Signed That Omnibus Bill." But some people took me seriously; they thought I was tearing my hair out at the folly of Trump signing such a bill.

Actually, it was a joke, son. My notion is that whenever two women are gathered together, a lot of their conversation is about other women not present, as in: "I can't believe she said/did that." This ganging up on other women is probably why we humans still survive. It is, as Jordan B. Peterson writes,  "informal social control" by the community of women in a face-to-face community. As opposed to the "formal social control" of governments and men with guns.

But the Bigger Point is the point of the cartoon character Pogo: we have seen the enemy and he is us.

The reason for omnibus bills is the same as the reason for big government, and liberals wanting to take our guns "for the children" and the government taking 35 percent of our income every year and the Trump administration advertising special exemptions to its tariff proposals. We are all of us inclined to resort to force when our own interests are involved.

I was talking to a political candidate the other day and he complained lightly that too many people  in  politics are in it for the power. We agreed that power is an empty shell. This guy is a very personable man, who has been able to bring people together to do impossible things.

Very nice. But government, all government, is force. And once it gets beyond the simple acts of "formal social control" of repelling invaders and cracking the heads of thieves and robbers, then it is frankly serving the agenda of people that want something for nothing. Which is all of us.

Walter Williams had a characteristic piece today about this. Said he:

Suppose you are a 22-year-old healthy person. Rather than be forced to spend $3,000 a year for health insurance and have $7,000 deducted from your salary for Social Security, you'd prefer investing that money to buy equipment to start a landscaping business.

Well? What would be the best use of the money? The answer is obvious. The young man should use the $10,000 a year to start a landscaping business. The idea of surrendering the money to insurance  companies and politicians is utter folly. It is, in the biblical phrase, surrendering your birthright for a mess of pottage.

But what if you get ill and need expensive cancer surgery? Yes. It's a problem. Of course there are options. You could protect yourself with a true catastrophic insurance policy. Or you could hope to pile it all on your credit card. Or mortgage your business or your house.

And what if you ended up at 65 without any savings? Well, you might. But you would probably not have been so foolish. Instead, like the overwhelming number of people you would have saved for the rainy day. Plus, if you had any sense, you would have children.

And there is another reason. It is the secret of capitalism. Money given to the government is dead money, the same as the value of capital assets owned by the government in a dam or a municipal electric system. But private assets are the basis of credit, the means by which ordinary people lubricate each other's economic lives. They are what makes the world go round. Young people are usually on the receiving end of credit, to start businesses and pay for schooling. Older people are on the giving end of credit: advancing money and/or equity to young people to get a leg up on life. There is a word for this: generational justice. And the point is that there is no compulsion, only trust and reciprocity, and hard feelings if the deal goes wrong.

But when people engage with government, then we are talking about force. Of course, we do not talk about force in this context, oh no. We talk about the children, the workers, the disabled, the elderly. So we do. But conveniently forget that there are two ways to help people: with force and without force.

There is, of course,a certain frisson that comes from getting your share of the government loot. If you are Chuck Schumer, it says something about you and your power that you can get $30 billion for a tunnel across the Hudson River. The same goes for the chap that wants a new Air Force fighter jet, or the liberal that wants more money for "choice." But then there is also the frisson that comes from sailing up the rivers of Britain in the year 1000 and grabbing all the grain, killing all the men, and selling all the women and children into slavery. What is the difference.

And we are all players in this game, from the grandpa that paid into Social Security all those years, and the daughter that needs Medicare for her end-of-life mother, to the liberal all proud about the grant they just got for their activism.

And what exactly are we deplorables all upset about with the omnibus bill? Are we upset that it didn't slay enough liberal cows? That it didn't end Obamacare as we know it? The real money in the federal budget is the troika of Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, and Defense.  That is $3 trillion a year. The entire rest of the budget, including interest on the national debt, is $1 trillion. Here:

Federal Government Spending Fiscal Year 2018
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

So what's your problem, pal?