Why Aren't Conservatives Any Good at Beautiful Phrases?

How come liberals get all the good lines? "Net Neutrality," which means that Google and Netflix get to ride free on the wires of the internet bandwidth providers? Or "Affordable Care" which means that health care is force fed and rationed through an administrative-state regulatory apparatus? Or "common-sense gun laws" which means that liberals get to make guns illegal?

A friend complained about that to me, and I answered my standard line:  conservatives are not that interested in power. That means, of course that conservatives are not that invested in coming up with catchy slogans to persuade people to vote for us so we can give them more government. We reckon that, by and large, the market economy should be left to itself and that if there is anything wrong it will get worked out in the law courts with judges figuring out how to deal with accidental injustices that emerge from the ceaseless innovation of the market system. It is, you might say, a reactive approach.

But our liberal friends are different. Their very meaning of life, the universe, and everything is bound up in their political faith. And you will notice that religion, down the ages, has been pretty good at the compelling phrase. In fact, given that religion is about finding meaning where meaning may not exist, it stands to reason that good phrase-making, conjuring up an answer to the age-old question of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, is central to its purpose. Let us state this again. It may be true -- hey, it probably is -- that the universe is a meaningless void with the odd particle or two coalescing into something more. But we humans insist on living as though our lives do have meaning. I reckon this is because the definition of a living entity is something that acts as if it has meaning and purpose. And that goes for your average worm and even your average virus as well. Otherwise what's the point?

You can see here the genius of the notion of the separation of church and state. It may be that the latest evolution of religion is the final truth about Meaning. But maybe not. If the former is true, then let the priests should set forth the final glorious phrases about the glorious and heavenly world promised to us. If the latter is true then it is probably a good idea not to link religion, the map of meaning, to the state, which is the apparatus of force.

It may be, again, that the current manifestation of government is the highest and best that can ever be imagined. But maybe not. If the former is true then let the governors and the judges and the bureaucrats have all the scope for the application of government power that they have in mind. If the latter is true then the power of government leaders and functionaries should be strictly limited so that they do not do too much damage before the world is liberated from their imperfect rule by new improved notions of government.

The same thing applies to the economy.

It may be that the present ideas about the market economy and the framework of commercial law is the highest and best that can ever be imagined. But maybe not. If the former is true then we must hold it solid, and not change it, or suffer it to be changed. If the latter is true then we must adapt our thoughts and actions to the truth that the market economy and its institutions are bound to evolve and change, and the arrangements of the market economy should be allowed to develop as new technologies, new innovations, and new forms of corporate organization appear.

I have, of course, just outlined the justification for the Greater Separation of Powers that I have obtained from Michael Novak's The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism. He argues that the three forms of social power, the political, the economic, the moral/cultural, should not be combined into a totalitarian single entity, but should be kept separate from one another, and any two of them should be prevented from ganging up on the other one.

You may notice that the whole point of most religion down the ages, and most politics, is that extraordinary power is needed, either military or priestly, in order to prevent the world from descending into Chaos and Disorder or Sin and Death. And certainly the modern political/religious movement we call the left believes that it has found the answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everything and that this meaning -- that mainly involves liberation and emancipation of traditionally marginalized peoples by political activists acting in accordance with Lefty Writ -- can be instantiated through the agency of political power and political movements.

It is the faith of people like me that the lefty faith has been shown by clear and convincing events -- from the fact of the Soviet Union to the fact of Venezuela -- to be one of the most appalling disasters of human social cooperation. Take China. Back in 1800 the per-capita income in China was about $3 per day in today's dollars. In 1960 it was about $0.50 per person per day when in the US it was north of $50.00 per day. It wasn't until China adopted capitalism in 1978 that its income started heading North from the human disaster of $0.50 per day. And this is why we insist that political and moral/cultural power should be limited and should be separated from each other.

More, we free spirits insist that the lesson of the last two hundred years, called by some the Miracle and by others the Great Enrichment, demonstrates that we cannot set up a rigid framework for anything political, economic, and moral/cultural, because the world is changing all the time, and we humans respond to the world's changes by changing ourselves.

But we humans still come up with beautiful words to symbolize our deepest hopes and yearnings, and would be political and moral/cultural leaders indefatigably coin new phrases to capture a vision of what might be.

If only most of these phrase-makers were not liberals and lefties in thrall to vile superstitions that has visited the most foul injustices and disasters upon the human race.

Newt's Five Scandal Theory of Spygate

Perhaps the biggest need surrounding the Gathering Storm of Obama era scandals, the ones that have coalesced into the Russia Collusion scandal, is to craft them into an overarching narrative.

Why? Because as long as they stay fragmented the guilty will get away free and we will not be able to refer back to something like "SpyGate" and know that every living American will know what we mean.

Dear old Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House, has come up with a 5-part explanation for the SpyGate scandals, and that effort is a start. Newt says that there are five reasons for the scandals, as follows:

1. 40 years of Clinton Corruption, starting with the fabled cattle futures.
2. The deep state defense of Clinton, instead of dealing with her manifold crimes and misdemeanors.
3. The campaign to undermine and discredit Donald Trump, particularly in the anti-Republican Department of Justice.
4. Deep state resistance to accountability and transparency.
5. Panic breaking out among people that might "find themselves in danger of criminal charges."

You can see how all these explanations are cascading. Without the Clinton corruption, the deep state would not have been forced to defend the Clintons; and the deep-state defense wouldn't have been possible without the DOJ's anti-Republican bias,  and without anti-Republican bias the folly of DOJ Clinton defense would not have led to hiding the ball, and without Clinton defense the deep state operatives would not be panicking about exposure.

But really, it all issues from the Clinton private e-mail system. Without the Clinton e-mail system the DOJ would not have been put in the position of pressuring the FBI to go easy on Clinton, and I suspect that would have reduced the need to know what the Trump campaign knew about them.

In fact I would go so far  as to propose that illegal use of government surveillance and police powers tends always to issue from some petty illegal government action precipitated by a rules-don't-apply-to-me corrupt leader. Once a government cabal starts down this road it tends to get ensnared in its own illegality, as in the Shakepearean tag "oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive."

Or, as they said in the Watergate era, "it's not the crime, it's the cover-up."

May I make a small request of our noble political elite? Would you please stop your corrupt and vile behavior? Because, as in real war, it is the buck privates, the low-level political operatives that get chewed up in the meat-grinder. So if you are in politics to represent the little people -- and what politician isn't -- then the first thing you should be thinking about is the little guy in your campaign  or your administration that is going to be taking the enemy fire rather than you, the political general well behind the front lines.

But still, while Newt's five-scandal theory is a good idea, I am still drawn to Verdi's demand of his librettist, Piave, in the TV series The Life of Verdi. Verdi demanded that Piave stop pouring out so many useless words. He wanted them all to be boiled down into just a few, or even the One Word that he would set to music.

That is the challenge of the Obama-Clinton-Deep-State scandals. They need to be reduced to "one word," the one word that every American will henceforth know and associate with something foul, something unclean, "something rotten in the State of Denmark."

I'd say that the One Word should help symbolize what every ordinary American knows. If he or she had been caught mishandling classified government information, they would now be in jail.

Peterson and Jung and Nietzsche, Oh My!

If you've dabbled in cultural sensation Jordan B. Peterson as I have, and got through his Maps of Meaning, and if you are not mad at him, like the New York Times set and alt-right Vox Day, you want to check the backup. Because Peterson owes a lot to Nietzsche and Jung.

Nietzsche is a problem, because Nazism and Nationalism and Anti-Semitism. And Jung--

Also, Jordan Peterson is proposing the primacy of instinct and affect, rather than reason. And that is a problem for most of us moderns, because whether you are on the left or the right, you believe that your side is based on reason and the other side is based on emotion, or worse. Because science.

But Peterson is saying that humans are basically instinctive creatures, and that the great issues of life are not reducible to reason. Moreover in his system, if it is a system, the highest and best is the sacrificial hero, the one that dares to live on the border between the known and the unknown, between order and chaos, the man that surrenders his life to the exploration of this dangerous territory, and bringing it into our understanding and consciousness, and sharing that understanding with the rest of humanity.

From Jung Peterson brings the notion that the unconscious mind is primary, both in its manifestation of the personal unconscious, our personal instinctive response to day-to-day life, and also in the manifestation of the collective unconscious, the ways in which humans as a whole symbolize and experience the larger meaning of life in spirits and gods and the like.

You can see how foreign this is to the official narrative, which is that we are rational creatures. In the right-wing version we are rationally seeking a way from serfdom and subordination to freedom and liberty. In the left-wing version we are rationally seeking a way from slavery and oppression to liberation along the arc of history bending towards justice.

And yet I propose that the right-wing version of reason has brought us to the neo-serfdom of the welfare state, and the left-wing version of reason has brought us to the über-slavery of the communist state. So maybe there is a problem.

What if this is all wrong, and reason is not the means to anything in particular? What if, as settled science is starting to discover, reason evolved out of humans rationalizing their social behavior, and just accidentally happened to be a good basis for math and physics?

In many ways, the whole story of the last 200 years of western culture is the realization, beginning with Romanticism at the turn of the 19th century, that reason cannot be the whole story. How can it be when humans are overwhelmingly consumed by "affect" or passion?

It really changes things when you decide that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is not the construction of the best rational system but something else.

Then comes Nietzsche with the scandalous notion that the Christian framework of the last 2000 years is outta here, and the only reality is the will to power, and that morality is a cheap trick.

Now I have been slowly trudging through the Germans in the last few years, from Kant to Hegel to Schopenhauer and now Nietzsche.

The thing about Nietzsche is that you are never sure when he is being serious and when he is just trying to nudge you off dead center and make you think. For instance, in Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche praises the Jews for their amazing survival down the ages through all travails and hardships -- "the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe"-- and sneers at German anti-Semitism. Later on he develops his notorious "master morality and slave morality." But by The Genealogy of Morals he divides the noble masters into the "warrior caste" and the "priestly caste," and while the warriors are simple and forthright, the priests are the most appalling haters. And guess what: the most obvious instantiation of a priestly people is the Jews, and Christianity is a 2000 year cunning plot to dethrone the warrior caste. And the Jews are therefore the world-historic leaders of a slave revolt that has demolished the old aristocratic masters.

Hey Fritzi! Doesn't your division of the masters into warriors and priests rather chip away at your initial notion of the masters as true unselfconscious aristocrats?

I know! Why not divide the human race in three, according to my reductive Three Peoples theory. Then we still have the slaves, the People of the Subordinate Self, we still have the masters, divided into the natural aristocracy of the business world and the priestly haters of the politically correct. In between are the People of the Responsible Self that are neither leaders nor followers, but partaking of something in-between: neither groveling slaves sucking up to their liege lord in return for handouts, nor ego-maniac masters, either business masters-of-the-universe or priestly left-wing haters. What's not to like?

Notice that your business masters-of-the-universe can be the sacrificial heroes of Jordan Peterson's narrative, for in business many are called but few are chosen. Here is how the natural aristocrat lives, from Nietzsche:

To be incapable of taking one's enemies, one's accidents, even one's misdeeds seriously for very long -- that is the sign of strong full natures is whom there is a excess of the power to form, to mold, to recuperate, and to forget{.]

He has a point. If you are a man of action you really don't have time for worrying about enemies, mistakes, because it is always time to get on with the next thing.

But as for the lefty priestly haters.-- Yeah. Hating, remembering accidents and misdeeds, forgetting nothing. And doing nothing. That is where they live and breathe. For the whole point of a lefty activist is to live in the festering wound of a grievance, and make it bigger.

The thing about reason is its one-dimensionality, its uni-directionality. But life, the universe, and everything is contingent, uncertain. Oh, and hidden. Could it be that the means that living things have appropriated for life in this world, instinct, passion, archetypes, "affect," are necessary and flexible ways of getting on the world whereas reason, with its path to freedom and its arc bending towards justice, is not?

The Problem with Politics

Here's a poll result to tell you something about America. About 54 percent of White Democrats now think that racial inequality is caused by discrimination, up from about 42 percent in 2006.

So. After half a century of race politics, repeatedly "doing something" about civil rights and racial discrimination, White Democrats think that nothing has changed. Even that things are getting worse. So we need legislation to bend the arc of history towards justice.

What planet do these people live on?

Well, we know. They live on a planet where the stories are written and told by lefty adepts of the Frankfurt School and Herbert "intolerant tolerance" Marcuse. They live in a left-wing culture that believes that the way to get to justice is with political power. They relentlessly blame and divide, because that is how you motivate people to get out and vote.

But I think that this just shows the utter folly of ideological politics. Because it never knows when to stop.

The point about racial discrimination is that it is only a problem when government actively enforces discrimination, as in the Jim Crow South. The Southern Democrats wrote Jim Crow laws because the railroads really didn't want to have segregated railroad cars. Bus companies didn't want to divide up the bus and put their black passengers at the back. So the segregationists had to write a law.

OK. So you write a Civil Rights Law to sweep away all those Jim Crow laws. Then what?

What happens is that the activists that built the political movement that passed the Civil Rights laws aren't satisfied. You can see why. As with any army after you storm the citadel of your enemy, the question is what to do next? Unfortunately, the usual response to victory is to double down and build an empire. It is not enough to defeat the racists: they must be hunted down and the last vestige of their evil spawn eliminated from the world.

And so, in the wake of the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s the victorious liberals could not just declare victory and go home. They had to enact Affirmative Action -- a  program of flat-out racism -- through their power in the administrative state. The feminists could not rest with equal pay laws; they had to amp up the pressure with the notion of comparable worth. And then they noted all the areas in which women were "underrepresented" as in the executive suite and STEM and demand inclusion and diversity.

Now we have gays that cannot be satisfied with gay marriage. They have to go after bakers that don't want to bake cakes for gay weddings.

Meanwhile, what are the evil corporations and entrepreneurs doing now? They are trying to defeat the new segregation. You see, all nation states have laws against foreigners migrating to and working in the homeland. So the big corporations are busy figuring out how to get around laws limiting the employment of foreigners. The corporate suits get people here to the United States on various visa programs, people that cost them less than Americans born in the USA. And the  cool thing is that employees on temporary visas that do not have green cards are in a position similar to the indentured servants of old. They cannot leave their employment without risking their visa, and so are tied to their employers and the lower wages.

It's interesting. What is the difference between the Jim Crow laws of the South and the normal laws of any nation state that limit immigration? They both discriminate against people that have not yet enjoyed the bounty of the Great Enrichment.

Actually, our liberal friends are not shy about criticizing people that want to limit the access of foreigners to the US labor market. Those evil Southerners were racists. The immigration restrictionists are xenophobes. No skin off the liberal noses, of course. They figure that what with their education and their Deep State connections they are in with the in-crowd. Conservatives and deplorables need not apply.

So maybe the next glorious movement is to lower all national barriers and make the workplace open to all. Or maybe, on the notion that immigration is invasion -- ask the Native Americans -- we should keep the nation state and its borders until something better comes up.

The point remains. Once you have struck down the legal discriminatory barriers, then if there exists residual discrimination there exists a market opportunity for any canny entrepreneur. Hey, if minority  and female and transgender workers are not getting their fair whack, then an entrepreneur can hire them and make money. Until the day comes when the previously discriminated against are no longer underpaid, and there is not longer an opportunity to make money.

That is the whole point of the market economy. In fact that is what the left complains about. The market doesn't think of people as people. The only thing the market understands is  produces and prices and service. And this is supposed to be soulless. Well, so it is. It means that the market doesn't select people because of their gender or their race or their national origin. It only asks: can they get the job done, or, if they can't, can I train them up to get the job done.

Of course, the market does appreciate that beauty in newsreaders on TV is a plus. And in actresses in movies. And this is wrong. Maybe it is time for a a political movement to promote ugly people to the  screen.

And what about nerds? How come nerds don't get their fair share of jobs in the executive suite and all the plum jobs go to alpha males and sweet talkers?

Mind you, there is another way to look at this. Nietzsche does it with his analysis of Master and Slave morality. There is, he suggests, a need for hardness.

What if we resolve all our inequalities with a complete and total administrative program that litigates every possible inequality so that everything is fair and just? Nietzsche's argument is that this will lead to a flabby, weakened society that will topple over the day that the next Attila or Genghis Khan appears on the scene.

And maybe this is a flaw in capitalism. Maybe we are all getting too soft in the online smartphone world where everything is at our beck and call and we never have to sweat. Maybe we will all be swept away, to be replaced by --.

Maybe we need the storm and stress of politics and people forever fighting over the political spoils, and arguing about whether discrimination is getting worse. Otherwise we might all go to sleep watching youTube videos, and wake up one morning finding that humans are finished, over, departed.

On Political Insults and Worse

In the last week the MSM cabal has been chiding President Trump for calling immigrants "animals." Actually, as far as I can  see, the president was  referring to members of MS-13 the Salvadorean criminal gang.

Hey Donny, what's the big deal? The US has had criminal immigrant gangs since whenever.

But really, lefties. Have you looked in a mirror lately? Your whole cultural and political operation right now is about insulting people that don't agree with you as "racists, sexists, homophobes." Not to mention liberal use of "alt-right hate groups" and the very worst thing in the world, apart from Nazis, "hate speech."

Now I would say that, compared with the lefty insults, President Trump's use of "animal" is mild and humane. After all, he is merely demoting the human crooks at MS-13 to the status of the non-self-conscious denizens of the animals kingdom: beasts and monsters. But our Democratic friends are declaring their opponents to be evil, not merely bestial. Of course, I realize that our lefty friends are generally not believers in God, so they cannot believe in the Devil. Or can they?

Of course they can. According to settled science, like the psychological school that descends from Carl Jung, all our religious and cultural memes are manifestations of our unconscious minds. On this view, it doesn't matter whether you call it Satan or monster, everyone still has a hatred and a fear of the threatening Unknown and Chaos. And they are not shy about pointing it out.

So liberals are frightened to death of President Trump. Of course they are. President Trump is threatening to upset their nice comfortable world of nice comfortable sinecures for liberals and activists as far as the eye can see. I mean! It is possible that the great research universities of North America might have to retrench just a teeny bit! Oh no! What will the tenure-track associate professors do then poor things?

Why, President Trump is even hacking away at the administrative state, the notion that all liberals should have a job telling middle-class deplorables to get lost and damn well bake that cake for a gay wedding or else.

And it doesn't hurt to call all these people haters and deplorables. Not if it saves just one liberal administrative state job.

What our liberal friends do not understand is that, according to German philosophy, for every thesis there is an antithesis, for every magnetic north pole there is a magnetic south pole. If liberals are moving the arc of history towards their notion of justice, sure as heck there will be people out there that experience the arc of history bending towards injustice. If the government and the culture are making life more comfortable for liberals then chances are they are making life less comfortable and more frightening for deplorables.

They do not understand that if liberals politicize everything with their noble and righteous political activism to promote justice and equality, which seeks to make political issues of anything and everything, and then use insults and pejoratives to demean and marginalize the opposition, then there is likely to arise a counter-political movement composed of people that experience the political activism of liberals as a direct attack on them and everything they hold dear. These people will find themselves a political champion to say and do the things that they are afraid to do on their own.

Really, this isn't that hard.

Really, the only thing we don't know is whether SpyGate, the incompetent deep state effort to trip up the Trump campaign in 2016 and cover up its illegal activities in 2017, will be the biggest political scandal in US history or whether it will all get covered up and smothered in a blanket.

Oh, silly me. Of course it will all get covered up and smothered in a blanket. If you want the biggest scandal in US history then you need MSM news-anchors day after day with eyebrows descending like thunder on the evil miscreants. And that ain't gonna happen.

And anyway, any criticism of the Obama administration and its minions is racism, straight up.

Oppressions of Liberal Cultural/Political Hegemony, Pt. 4

I've set forth some of the oppressions that the liberal ruling class has committed, here, here and here.

We all know that any ruling class is bound to commit injustice, because as a well-known philosopher said: there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. And who are the people empowered to commit injustice? You got it: the ruling class.

So it stands to reason that the ruling class in the West of the last 100 years and more, the educated class, will have committed injustice upon injustice, most likely in the implementation of its own vision of justice with the help of government force. 'Twas ever thus.

Previously I have discussed, starting here, its injustice committed with respect to socialism, big government, the war on the middle class, the war on religion, education, welfare, government pensions, and housing. Now let's look at:

The Homeless. The homeless began as an issue during the Reagan administration, no doubt as a way for liberals to do Activism. It was only to be expected that, in the aftermath of the cruel Reagan budget cuts -- courtesy of Budget Director David Stockman -- that there should be a tragic consequence. That consequence was "the homeless."

To put this in perspective, I suspect that after every major economic downturn there is a swelling in the ranks of people that got spat out of jobs and that never get their stuff back together again. The iconic example is the Skid Row bum that was the consequence of the Great Depression. The Reagan 1980s took place after the serious recession of 1980-81 when the Fed started wringing out the 1970s inflation. So you would expect a flux of men unmoored by the recession and cast upon the homeless shore. Now we have the aftermath of the Great Recession that started with the Crash of 2008. Obviously we should  have expected another wave of castaways landing on the beach.

The question is what to do about it. Should we have government programs to provide food and  shelter to the homeless, or should we leave it to the charities and the charitable?

In this sense, we should remember the 19th century approach to poverty. The ABCDEFG system was advocated by outfits like the New York Charity Organization Society, and advertised by Marvin Olasky in The Tragedy of American Compassion in Chapter 6: The Seven Marks of Compassion thus:

1. Affliation: getting the poor back in touch with their families, i.e., people that can be persuaded they have an obligation to help a particular individual.
2. Bonding: charity volunteers were instructed to bond with their charity cases, and "maintain 'the greatest patience, the most decided firmness, and an inexhaustible kindness'" towards the people they helped.
3. Categorization: are applicants truly helpless?  Or are they "Needing Work Rather Than Relief," or "Unworthy, Not Entitled to Relief." Inquiring minds want to know.
4. Discernment: this is about smoking out the frauds and cheats.
5. Employment: as in "Labor is the life of society, and the beggar who will not work is a social cannibal feeding on that life."
6. Freedom: "the opportunity to work and worship without governmental restriction." Hello credentialism.
7. God: as in "True philanthropy must take into account spiritual as well as physical needs."

It is fairly obvious that the current bureaucratic response to homelessness does not use this wisdom of the ages. Today, we allow the homeless to violate laws against using public spaces as encampments, public intoxication, public begging, etc. And this is unjust.

This is just part of a larger problem that liberals and their clients are exempt from many laws, and this is unjust.

Of course, no problem handed to a government bureaucracy is ever solved, for it goes against the basic rule of bureaucracy, that it progressively does less and less, and eventually does nothing while collecting salaries and pensions. Indeed, to solve the problem would to be put the bureaucracy out of business, a prospect not to be endured. And this is unjust.

Here in Seattle we have had homeless programs for over a decade, and the problem has only gotten worse. In a way, you can't blame the politicians, who are merely responding to political activists whose meaning of life is bound up with finding oppressions and exploitations to protest against. Thus, opposition to homeless programs has only now emerged in response to the Seattle City Council enacting a "head tax" on medium to large businesses in Seattle in order to expand funding homeless programs that, in accordance with a law of bureaucratic nature, keep expanding.

Notice how my definition of government applies.

Government is an armed minority occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters.

It really doesn't matter who those supporters are: activists, bureaucrats, welfare clients, entitlements recipients, contractors, investment firms. Everyone wants free money from the government. The only question is how to frame your wants into non-negotiable demands. Politicians are not fools; they can see that today's activists are tomorrow's supporters, and so every new entitlement and program creates a new activist group that will provide funds for reelection and fight like cats to keep its loot.

And this is unjust.

Oppressions of Liberal Cultural/Political Hegemony, Pt. 3

I've set forth some of the oppressions that the liberal ruling class has committed, here and here. As I wrote,

To paraphrase Marx, it is high time that the ordinary middle class sets forth an indictment of the current ruling class, and enumerate the vile oppressions and dominations and injustices it has created during its rule of about 100 years.

So I have discussed its injustice committed with respect to socialism, big government, the war on the middle class, the war on religion, education, welfare, and government pensions. Now let's look at:

Housing. All humans need shelter, but shelter is expensive, and so humans have expended extraordinary effort to obtain shelter. They have developed many ways in which to obtain shelter from the elements. One way is to live in the house of your liege lord. Another is to board in the house of a widow. Another is to rent a dwelling or a part of a dwelling from its owner, popularly called a "landlord." Finally, due to the modern western idea of private property in land, people can own a parcel of land and the dwelling that stands upon it.

It seems to be the ambition of very many people to "own" their own home. Even the socialists appreciate this, as George Bernard Shaw writes of the first Adam seizing the most fertile and favorable patch of land he can find. But there is a problem. The time of life at which humans need to obtain shelter, in young adulthood, is also a time when they are ill-equipped with the financial means to do so. Thus, in the Middle Ages in Britain, young people could not get married unless they could obtain resources from both families, either by right of inheritance or by dowry or both.

In our time, young people can live in the house of their liege lord, as in public housing. They can rent space from a landlord. They can buy a house by borrowing a down payment from their parents and by pledging the house as collateral for a loan, a home mortgage. The culture of widows operating boarding houses seems to have gone out of fashion.

Now, we know from the rather young social science called economics that there are two ways to distribute things of value. You can do it with the price system, which basically balances the prices, purchase-wise or rent-wise, of houses against the amount of money that buyers and renters are willing to bid. Or you can resolve the matter by force, with government or liege lords establishing prices and rents by force. Government also has the option of meddling with the price system with subsidies and interventions in the credit system: semi-force.

The ruling class of the last 100 years has made many interventions in the housing market. It has devalued the currency; it has instituted rent control; it has subsidized mortgage credit with government-subsidized loans; it has instituted building codes to prevent the construction of "jerry-built" houses and latterly to require expensive "environmentally friendly" features; it has limited housing construction in environmentally sensitive areas. All these government actions are actually or potentially unjust, and simply enact the agenda of the ruling class without regard to the welfare of the nation.

But let us unpack the subsidization of home mortgages. As usual, a program advertised as creating "affordable housing" has achieved the opposite.

Let us start before the Great Depression. In the United States, you could borrow money to buy a house. Typically you had to put down about 50 percent of the purchase price and get a 10 year mortgage.

Do you see what this means? It means that the price of houses had to balance with the fact of buyers that could only borrow 50 percent of the purchase price and put down 50 percent of the purchase price as a down payment. It means that prices would tend to be low, low, low. It would, of course, privilege young people who could borrow down payments from their parents.

But after the Great Depression the FDR administration created the Federal National Mortgage Association to provide a secondary market in mortgages. Perfectly harmless, except that, with the government's backing, FNMA could buy 30-year mortgages and sell them bundled to widows and orphans and pension funds.

Do you see what this means? It means that people are now able to bid more for houses, because 30-year mortgages mean lower monthly payments. This means that house prices will go up.

Is this a good thing? I don't think so.

After World War II the federal government enacted other housing programs, mortgage loans from the Federal Housing Administration with lower down-payments. And of course, the Veterans Administration created the zero-down VA loan for veterans. The result, you can see, is to raise housing prices because the government low-down-payment policies allow buyers to bid up prices for housing.

Is this a good idea?I don't think so.

In the 1970s the feminists discovered that the practice of banks to count only the income of the husband in qualifying home buyers for a loan was male chauvinism. And so lenders were now required to count the income of both partners to a housing loan. The result, you can see, was to raise housing prices because the non-chauvinist rule allowed buyers to bid up the price of houses by qualifying them for bigger loans.

Is this a good idea? I don't think so.

In the 1930s, after the creation of FNMA, the bureaucratic mindset invaded the home loan market and the regulators started grading neighborhoods for creditworthiness. You can see that this is an inevitable result of government intervention, because once you have government subsidies then you have an opportunity to scam the system and therefore you have to have regulations to stop the scam artists. Certain neighborhoods were "red-lined" and often enough these were black neighborhoods. So activism organizations like ACORN pushed to pass the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 to stop redlining and increase the availability of mortgages to minority borrowers. Good idea, you may say. And I'll agree, up to a point.

But activism never stops with its victory. And so the war against redlining kept escalating, through the 1990s and into the 2000s. The federal government kept lowering the down-payment on mortgage loans and started requiring lenders and FNMA to increase the proportion of loans to people with lower credit scores. You can see that this kind of policy increases the number of people who can bid for houses and increases the amount they can bid with. So it tends to increase housing prices.

Is this a good idea? I don't think so.

You know what is coming next. By the 2000s the federal government was pressuring FNMA and Government National Mortgage Association to increase mortgages to "sub-prime" borrowers. And they were pushing 100 percent loans. What could go wrong? A couple of things. First of all, "liar loans." I can't imagine what that means. Also, because pension funds are often required to buy only the highest rated bonds, financial speculators figured out how to buy bundles of mortgages with high-risk loans and convert the high-risk bonds into lower-risk bonds with financial instruments called "derivatives."

Now for a quick lesson in finance, from Walter Bagehot in Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market published in 1872 after a major financial panic. Bagehot argued that to avoid panics the credit system needed two things to work. First of all, loans must be properly collateralized, so that if the loan is liquidated the lender will recover his investment by acquiring the collateral for the loan. Secondly, the borrower must have the means to service the loan. If either of these notions are ignored then, in a financial downturn, people in the money market will be afraid to buy loans, because they will worry about the quality of the loans out there and the ability of borrowers to service their loans. This worry is called a "loss of confidence" and you will hear a lot about it during any bear market.

So in the glorious 2000s both of Bagehot's principles for a solid credit market were being grievously violated by the government's subsidizing and support of low down payment loans and sub-prime borrowers. Thus, in the 2006-08 bear market people in the credit market started to stay away from outfits like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers that had invested heavily in housing-related derivatives. Both financial houses failed.

Is this a good idea? I don't think so.

Now back in 1913 the US passed the Federal Reserve Act to provide the United States with a central bank so that the panic of 1907 could never happen again. It was unconscionable that the United States should have to rely on a "money trust" headed by private banker J.P. Morgan when threatened by a financial panic. It needed a "lender of last resort."

Only in the next two financial crashes the bureaucrat in charge of the Federal Reserve Board did not act as lender of last resort. In September 2008, when Lehman Brothers failed, little Ben Bernanke said that he didn't have the legal power to act as lender of last resort and bail out Lehman Brothers. The Dow Industrials started losing 500 points a day, every day. Can you spell "loss of confidence?"

Is Ben Bernanke a coward and a poltroon? I think so.

You can see what this is all about. In its efforts to help would-be homeowners the government has raised housing prices, engineered at least one bone-shattering financial crash, and almost certainly made things worse.

There is a word for this sort of thing. Injustice.

More to come.