Emotion Rules the World, Scientists Say

One of the universals of our time is that both sides of the political battlefront insist that they are on the side of reason and logic, while the other guys are for feelings and emotion.

For instance conservatives offer the constitution and limited government as the acme of logic and reason, while the left with their "living constitution" are just trying to legislate their feelings. But liberals regard "nationalism" as a tribal atavism that appeals to clan loyalty, while ignoring the reality of centuries, millennia, of patriarchal and racial hegemony and domination.

In reality there has been a two-century-long argument about reason vs. emotion that is best represented by the two intellectual movements we call the Age of Reason and the Romantic Rebellion.

Crudely, the Age of Reason argued that wouldn't it be nice if we could all get together and discuss things rationally rather than through religious fanaticism, and the Romantics argued that all the important things come not from reason but creative inspiration.

Very good, you reply. But what do "scientists say?" Thank you senator. I'm glad you asked.

I am presently reading Matt Ridley's 1996 book The Origins of Virtue: Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation. In it he assembles a ton of science on cooperation, starting with the question of the Prisoner's Dilemma and the development of the winning Tit-For-Tat strategy for iterated Prisoner's Dilemma.

Well, it turns out that there is something better than Tit-for-Tat, which assumes you know nothing about the other person beyond their actions in the game. In fact when humans are acting in the world they are not going blind, but know the other person's reputation. And humans are very good at looking at another person's face and judging their honesty and reliability.

In other words, interpersonal relations are not just a question of the rational interplay of actions, but are guided by emotional and instinctive judgements.

The point of all this is that cultural values like the reputation for honesty and virtue are not just the detritus of the age of superstition or leftovers from Newtonian mechanics, but real, ongoing cultural goods that make human life better, both materially and spiritually, and also reduce the negative stuff of conflict and mayhem. Successful societies feature these cultural values and habits.

So, to get straight to the political point, the left's attack on all these so-called "bourgeois virtues" is something that goes against "science." But you knew that.

OK. So what is the bottom line here? I think that it is to change the basic world-view of our time and illuminate that the problem we are called to solve is not to battle against hegemony and injustice but to promote trust and virtue. The "science" of human behavior seems to suggest that, once you have rolled back gross domination and hegemony then you can dial back the force and allow a hundred flowers of trust and virtue to bloom, because trust and virtue are incredibly beneficial to humans, both individually and collectively.

And we need to look again at "who benefits." When the problem to be solved is hegemony and domination then, of course, the key problem is "who rules," who brings the right force to bear so that hegemony and domination are rolled back. But when the problem is to give space and opportunity to trust and virtue then the question of "who rules" recedes into the background and the individual development of character and virtue comes to the forefront. The culture of "who rules" obviously is the culture of a group that wants to be a ruling class. The culture of character and virtue is the culture of people that want to contribute individually to the whole, not as master, nor as slave, but as a responsible or creative person devoted to contribution and competence rather than dominance.

The point of the culture of competence, of trust and virtue, is that it is not necessarily logical and reasonable, but emotional. For whatever we determine by intellect and by reason we implement by habit and training so that it becomes "second nature."

Only, of course, it is reason and consciousness that is "second nature" and instinct and emotion and the unconsciousness that are the first nature.

Nietzsche Railed Against "The Priests." But Now "The Priests" are Wealthy Liberals

It's no secret that our lefty friends think that by importing tons of non-white immigrants to the US they will eventually turn America into a "majority-minority" country, where dead-white males no longer rule from the grave. Yesterday I proposed that probably the future won't be that simple, mainly because the old black-white binary is being complicated by yellows and browns -- who often identify as white, or non-black. Today Edward Ring at American Greatness writes that majority-minority will never happen.

Who knows? My view is that tribalism is a movable feast. "Race" used to mean the English race, the German race, etc. But then the Europeans became nations, as in the British nation. And race became Africans vs. the rest.

OK. So all these races and nations are what I call fake-tribalisms. Humans are tribal, so if you are going to do politics you need to enlist your supporters into some sort of fake tribe: fake because the original meaning of a tribe was a tribe of the kindred, people pretty closely related to each other. Then you lead your fake tribe to victory, or maybe oblivion.

But after World War II our global ruling class decided that Nation was a Bad Thing, because Hitler. So therefore "patriotism" good; "nationalism"  bad. The dull French president Macron is the latest to croak this ruling-class notion. What the ruling class is saying is that politics and tribalism are fine if the ruling class controls the narrative, but if a chap from the wrong side of the tracks shows up and creates a fake tribe that challenges the divine order of the educated ruling class, well, that is Bad.

Yeah, you gotta point there, Manny (short for Emmanuel). You are telling me that if we deplorables mean to overthrow the rule of the educated ruling class we need to change the tune. We have to send the globalist narrative into the basement and also blow up the globalists' identity politics that provides the ruling class with useful idiots to harass the ordinary non-victim folks that just want to get a job, get married and raise children.

In fact, what we need is a religious Reformation featuring some Luther chap with the balls to tack his "95 Theses" to the university doors and challenge "the priests" of the academy right where they live.

Oh wait. Someone is already doing this with "It's OK to be White" posters and t-shirts triggering our beloved academic bureau-cats something fierce.

But I think that is the whole point. We need to attack our ruling class and its "priests" in the academy and the media and the culture, and make complete fools of them. We need  to call out their corruption, their hypocrisy, and above all their vile system of indulgences.

Yes, you too can go to college and cleanse your white and male guilt by appropriate and generous contributions to the Holy Catholic Church of Left-liberalism. But if we catch you pasting up "It's OK to be Male/White" posters then we will hurl you headlong to bottomless perdition, there to dwell in adamantine chains who durst defy th'omnipotent to arms. Or something.

I'm reading Nietzsche at the moment, and he has nothing but bad things to say about "the priests" who get to order us around. Here is Nietzsche fulminating against "the priests" in The Anti-Christ. Who gets to define the "moral world-order", he asks? Who gets to be "everywhere indispensable... at birth, marriage, sickness, death, not to speak of 'sacrifice' (meal-times)[:]" the priest.

Supreme Law: 'God forgives him who repents' -- in plain language: who subjects himself to the priest. --

Are not our liberal and lefty friends now "the priests" at whom Nietzsche railed? Do they not everywhere interpose themselves in our lives, forcing us to pay tithes and obtain indulgences and support them in the manner to which they wish to become accustomed in divers offices and sinecures?

Here's a notion. The reason that e.g. wealthy neighborhoods are trending Democratic is that wealthy educated people are predominantly enrolled in the secular priesthood, as teachers, professors, government bureaucrats, government regulators, earning good money and lifetime tenure and paid from the public purse. Much easier than going out and failing with a couple of business startups: because that is hard.

Why do you think that 97 percent of climate scientists believe in global warming? It's because it pays their lunch ticket. More research is needed. And how!

But the thing about cloistered priesthoods and ruling classes and aristocracies is that their sons and daughters revert to the mean. The follow-on generations really don't have the talent and the drive of their founder ancestors. And so ambitious youngsters outside the magic circle start to challenge the eternal truths of the rulers and their priests.

And one fine day, when the rulers find themselves running short of cash...

So all I have to say is let's challenge the elite narrative, and enlist the deplorables in a new fake tribe that includes everyone except illegals and Muslims and the hoity-toity in their wealthy neighborhoods.

Let's call ourselves "Americans."

Suppose It's Liberals That Created Angry White Shooters

I know we are all supposed to join in the liberal group hate on angry white men that pop up all the time to commit mass shootings, in Las Vegas, in bars, and synagogues.

And the only solution is to ban all guns.

But what if liberals are to blame for the anger of angry white men?

I mean, if you spend your whole life nattering on about the patriarchy, white nationalism, toxic masculinity, And if you decide to blame all white men for the crime of slavery, and if you force young white male college students to go to lefty reeducation camp as part of their college orientation, and if you reserve police and fire slots for diversity, and if you empower the good little girls at Google to come out and peacefully protest the toxic masculinity at Google, and if...

Well, I don't  know what the liberal psychologists say, but I am sure that if we were talking about People of Color then our liberal masters would be telling us that the reason these same People of Color were erupting onto the streets in mostly peaceful protest was because they could no longer contain their "anger" at the oppression and injustice visited on them by the cruel and unjust white patriarchy.

So it could be that the anger among gun-toting white males might have been created out of whole cloth by liberals.

Right now, liberals are starting to amp up a campaign against white women who vote Republican. Can you believe it? A majority of white women voting for the Trump  Republicans? So we have the new memes coming out, of "Becky," of "basic white bitch," and other notions that are intended, I suppose, to shame white women into voting Democrat. But what if it has the opposite effect?

See, I think that at the moment we are at a critical inflection point in the arc of identity politics. Up to now white liberals have been pursuing identity politics for fun and profit to gin up anger and votes among minority voters, particularly blacks who vote about 90-10 for Democrats. And then there are the feminists and the LBGTQs. But the major liberal leaders are all white and over 68: Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer as of November 23, Hillary Clinton. But the next rank, and much younger, are Kamala Harris, Cory "Spartacus" Booker, and even Keith Ellison. And they are non-white.

I don't know what you think, but I believe that the next generation of Democrats are going to find it harder to get the votes of white women, and I think that the reason is fairly simple.

It is one thing for white liberals to descant upon the wonders of diversity and inclusion, walking, as they do, the privileged corridors of liberal power. But if you are an basic white male or a basic white bitch just trying to make a living you experience a different world. You experience a world in which you can lose your job for saying the wrong thing. You know that, when it comes to the lineup for lifer government jobs you go to the back of the line. You think that people like that are going to vote Democratic? If you do, I gotta bridge to sell you.

Oh I know. The liberal grand strategy is that whites will soon become the minority and that Democrats will rule forever after. Maybe. But there is nothing that says that the current coalition of the ascendant: the educated, the non-white, will stay together. Whatabout Latinos? They seem to be curiously non-political, just trying to get ahead doing the construction and restaurant jobs that working-class white did a generation ago. Are they really going to vote Democratic forever? And whatabout the various Asians? Plus there is another rather tricky question. Will the "browns" want to be in the same party as the "blacks?" In the last half-century the politics of race guilt has worked pretty well on middle-class whites and not so well on working-class whites. But how will it work on non-black non-whites?

And here is another question? Does the educated class, white and brown, continue forever as the party of big government and using the lower orders as their political cats-paws? Who knows? All we know is that humans are tribal, but that all modern forms of tribalism like "race" and "gender" and "class" are fake tribalisms, invented by political entrepreneurs to enlist people into their political armies and use them as political pawns. But, for sure, today's successful tribalisms will be replaced, in due time, by new tribalisms invented by new political entrepreneurs. And the purpose of the new tribalisms will be  to combine and divide the electorate in new ways with the simple goal of figuring out how to get to 51 percent.

Look, I'm no genius. All I know is that things won't turn out quite like the self-proclaimed political geniuses imagine.

Why Don't We Fix the Deficit? Part Two

A few days ago I proposed that fixing the deficit was impossible, because governments cannot cut spending, not until the Mongols appear on the horizon.

But suppose there really is an Easter Bunny, and we really could cut spending. What should we do?

I'm glad you asked. First of all, we should understand that we are starting in a currency or inflationary crisis. Despite what you have hears, it is quite easy to end an inflationary spiral. Just go look at Germany in 1923. At some point in 1923 the Weimar government appointed a chap to replace the currency with a new one "backed" by new debt, and there would be no unlimited printing of money. Bang. End of hyperinflation. Who knew it could be so easy? Venezuela, please copy. By the way, if you had your money in stocks or gold in  the post-WWI period in Germany, you did OK.

But then what? Here's what I propose:

1. No government pension plan. In a nation with not just Fidelity, but Vanguard, there is no need for a government Social Security plan costing about a trillion a year. And government employee pension plans that are bankrupting the states. If you insist on compulsion, then force people to save 10 percent of their wages, each in their own Personal Wealth Account at Fidelity. Or Vanguard. But what happens if there is a crash and people can't afford to retire? Good question. People have to put off their retirement for a few years, that's all. Which means that they are contributing to the economy by working and creating products and services. But what about people that fall through the cracks? I have one word: billionaires.
2. No government health care. Do you know what would happen? The girls would make sure that the man in their life had a decent health-insurance plan. Or they would just present themselves as helpless victims when they got sick and get some billionaire charity to take care of them. At end of life?  Well, it would depend on the daughters. But here is what I wonder. I wonder what health care would look like if it was run by Wal-Mart -- or Jeff Bezos -- instead of by rich-bitch doctors and political hacks.
3. No government schooling. I tell you, if the government schools were run by and for conservatives our liberal  friends would be screaming the house down. But hey, if just about every teacher and every professor and every administrator is a Democrat: no problem. But, you ask, how could we afford to educate our own children when student debt is already ruining our young adults? Perfectly simple. We would reintroduce paid child labor. We already have unpaid child labor as children are forced to work every day in Government Child Custodial Facilities -- for nothing. I would have most kids leaving school before high school and entering employer-paid apprenticeship programs. And before that? Most mothers are up to the challenge of home-schooling. And for those that can't I recommend billionaires. By the way, don't forget that the poor  helpless Irish in the Catholic Church organized a complete education system for Catholics in the 19th century when Catholics in the US were the poorest kind. And then there are billionaires.
4. No government welfare. In the 19th century "everyone" belonged to a mutual-aid society, whether a labor-union, the Masons, the Elks, or the Oddfellows. If you insist on compulsion, I suggest that people be forced, at the point of a government gun, to belong to a mutual-aid society. The thing about mutual-aid societies is that they have a way of dealing with the grifters and scam artists that want to take but not give. But what about people that have fallen into poverty through no fault of their own? I have two words for you: family and billionaires.

Yes I know I am being a bit naughty about billionaires stepping in to help the folks that have fallen on hard times through no fault of their own. But really, wouldn't Tom Steyer and George Soros and the Koch Brothers and Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates and Beto O'Rourke's wife and Uncle Tom Moneybags be doing more for The People if they eased up a bit on politics and malaria in India and helped more people here at home?

If we did all what would it really save? I'm glad you asked that. Here are the US government spending numbers for 2016, the last year for which we have state and local data, from our good friends at usgovernmentspending.com. The numbers are for total spending: federal, state  and local.

Function	2016 Spending Percent GDP
Pensions	6.87
Health Care	8.14
Education	5.60
Welfare	2.44
TOTAL	23.05

Now, since total spending in 2016 was 35.98 percent of GDP you can see that government spending would reduce to 12.93 percent of GDP if we cut out all the programs that people could easily do for themselves.

Wow! Imagine government spending at 13 percent of GDP. Imagine what it would be like living in an America like that!

The only problem is that it could never happen. Because Milton Friedman wrote many years ago that government always taxes up to the maximum that the people will tolerate. So the problem would be that even if we did "privatize" (actually "socialize," because "society," as in each on of us, will pay for pensions, health care, etc., instead of  government) all  the programs I propose the ruling class would still find ways to buy the support of the voters at election time and would still end up taxing us up the ying-yang.

What Will It Take to End the Progressive "Great Reaction?"

I suppose that the split decision of the midterms is the best outcome, although as a racist, sexist homophobe, I'd have preferred a GOP House. Our progressive friends really need to understand that their politics-is-everything schtick is a no-go. And the only way to do that is to give them the stage so that the American people can honestly and fairly decide if that is what they want.

Yeah! Imagine a 2020 election with a reelected Trump and a GOP Congress and the Notorious RBG replaced by another teenage rapist.

The dispiriting thing about the current progressive wave for me is the realization that this is what they  teach kids at school. When the girls at Google all come out on a protest it is not some desperate cry of the oppressed. It is good little professional-class girls acting out what they have been taught in school and university: activism, peaceful protest, demands. And professional-class liberal women are not victims. They are part of the ruling class, pal.

But this is all rubbish. There has never been a time in human history like the present. I am talking about the reality that today most people are able to satisfy their needs without kowtowing to their political lord and relying on his grace and favor. That's because of the market economy, which does not care about lords and ladies and the nobility of their grace and favor.

The problem with the market economy is that it doesn't provide the ego-stroking that the scions of the ruling class demand and expect. Time was when you had to stroke the pride of your lord because it was he that protected you from pirates and plunderers, and you paid for your protection with a bit of droit de seigneur. But now your average person can with modest effort acquire competences that free him from the need to attach to a powerful patron. So there are millions of people in the modern world living and going about their business having cut the humiliating bonds to the better sort.

But what will the better sort do then, poor things?

That is what the left is all about, glomming onto people that haven't yet learned the culture of the city and the market economy, people who still "know" that the way to get on is to connect into the power structure. That is why I call the left's welfare state "neo-feudalism." Back in the 19th century ordinary people developed their own welfare state through the huge culture of mutual-aid societies: everything from labor unions to Masons, Elks, and Odd Fellows. But then along came the left and the progressives with the need among those they called the "best men" to supervise the ordinary folk. They took the working class and diverted it off the road to the middle class and taught them to subordinate themselves to political parties and government programs.

Was that really a good idea for the working class? It seemed to look good for a while, until the factories and corporate bureaucracies started to hollow out with the rise of Japan, China and India and the global competition that put an end to the monopoly rents that, for a season, made worker aristocrats out of labor-union members.

In the last 50 years progressives have made blacks and women their special charge. How has that been working out? Perhaps the great benefit of Barack Obama, the First Black President, is for blacks in America to realize that, contra the wild enthusiasm of 2009, politics is not the answer. Certainly, we understand, blacks are disappointed with the results of the Obama presidency.

The situation of women, in my view, is similar but different, with attempts to mobilize women on the issue of pay parity and to push women towards the mechanical arts of STEM, and indeed that women should have "careers" just like men. I suspect that when women free themselves from the baleful influence of "the priests" of progressivism we will discover that "What Women Want" is very different from what "the priests" have been carefully teaching them.

At some point all of this "Great Reaction" foisted upon us by the rich kids of the left is going to collapse in moral and cultural bankruptcy, and then we can build cultural movements in genuine exploration of the market-economy world, and end the forced marches of political armies that are all about the glorious vision of entitled rich kids (Marx through Marcuse) where ordinary people are just  foot-soldiers rather than independent agents exploring the fascinating modern world on their own account.

I suspect that the inflection point in the modern era will be the moment when educated-class white women finally realize they have been had, and that the artificial attempt to elbow into the man's world of career and hierarchical status ends in nothing but tears for most women.

The problem is that the inflection point will not be the end of the Great Reaction, but perhaps the end of the beginning. Because there are going to be a lot of angry women on the day after they wake up from the Big Sleep of progressivism, and hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

And we are going to have to get through all that anger before we can start to build the future.

Building the future? What will that look like?

I am here to tell you that Rule One is: nobody knows nuttin' about the future.

The Three Peoples and Power

It's all very well to talk about my reductive Three Peoples theory, but what about power? I told an acquaintance about my theory and he immediately started talking about being in meetings where people naturally genuflected towards the guy that exuded power.

Yeah. It's a problem. How do my Three Peoples -- the People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants;  the People of the Responsible Self, middle-class bourgeois; and the People of the Creative Self, artists and writers -- stack up with respect to power?

My unconscious finally decided last night, and woke me up to tell me. I think that the determining factor was having lunch with a guy in Manhattan on Monday. He had come up through the Irish Bronx, and his dad had made it as a city bus driver. One day, he told me, the call came in from an Irish friend for his dad to be at the bus depot on Monday morning, and his dad was a made man.

That's how the People of the Subordinate Self relate to power. They don't expect to wield it; they just form up next to a power outlet and hope that one day they get to plug in. Of course the other side of it is that, when the power goes out in the power outlet, or the jobs leave town, or the political regime changes and abandons our subordinate chappies, then they just wither away, "die of despair" in the words of the Washington Post, or even stage a futile riot or uprising. But power, for the People of the Subordinate Self, is something that someone else does for them.

What about the People of the Responsible Self? I think it is pretty obvious that for responsible people, power is something you find and develop in yourself. In consequence, responsible people are in favor of limiting power in the human world: limiting the power of politicians and government, limiting the power of others. The only legitimate power, in the words of Jordan B. Peterson, is the power of competence; you acquire power and status not from force or intimidation but from the power of your competence. And of course competence is a positive power, that benefits the world rather than looting it.

Then we come to our friends, the People of the Creative Self. I've puzzled a bit about this, because I want to keep it simple, and really, power is not all that simple. But I think that the experience of power for People of the Creative Self is encapsulated in the notion "we are the power." Whether we are talking about a king or an elected politician, or a business magnate, or a rich-kid intellectual or a lefty "activist," we are experiencing a person that believes in power, the power of their creative genius to change the world. Now this power might be beneficial, as in the power of a technical innovation to transform peoples' lives or the intellectual power to reform society to reduce injustice. Or it might be the creative force of evil, such as the power of the Frankfurt School intellectuals to create an identity politics that teaches people a new form of hate or the power of a new government program to make people into subordinate drones. And there is the creative power of activism to get people fighting each other.

My point is that power in the People of the Subordinate Self is the power of sucking up to the powerful, using the power of others; power in the People of the Responsible Self is the power of competence, of being useful to other people, a two-way exchange of competence more than power; power in the People of the Creative Self is the power of transformation, transforming the world with the power of your originality, your charisma, your brilliance, projecting yourself upon the world as the source of power and light.

In my view, the power of sucking up, while annoying, is basically harmless; the power of competence is beneficial and social. It is the power of creativity that is the problem, for it drives forward with a self-confidence that is often conceit, secure in the faith of its brilliance but too proud to submit its creative brilliance to the judgement of its fellow men.

In my judgement the great problem of the world is the conceit of the People of the Creative Self and their faith in their own brilliance. For the problem is that there are many brilliant ideas in the world but only a few that are any good. So anyone with half a brain knows that every creative idea needs to go through the annealing fire of a blacksmith's forge and the tempering process of the hammer. The model that works is the business start-up, in which a brilliant technology or business idea is tried out by people that are willing to accept the verdict of the market and their fellow humans.

Right now the business model of the People of the Creative Self is that they enlist the People of the Subordinate Self in their brilliant ideas with visions of sugar-plums, not to mention jobs and pensions. But then, in due course, they tire of their feudal serfs and abandon them. We have seen how the People of the Creative Self seduced and abandoned the white working class, and then seduced in turn blacks and women.

It is my hope that when blacks and women find out how they have been seduced and abandoned they will be ready to enroll in the ranks of the People of the Responsible Self and found their lives upon the acquisition of competence rather than subordination. If and when that happens we will then be able to insist that the proud People of the Creative Self, also called "Cloud People," submit their grand and creative plans to the verdict of their fellow humans, and abandon their current creative model in which the Cloud People get to open their creative ideas on the Great White Way without an out-of-town tryout and then force the rest of us to buy tickets in perpetuity.

Why Don't We Fix the Deficit? Part One

I was lunching yesterday with a guy in Manhattan who wants to do something about the deficit. He's an Irish kid from the Bronx that went to Fordham and had a successful career CFOing and COOing in the financial industry.

Yeah! What shall we do about the Deficit?

The short answer is Nothing. Not until the Mongols invade.

The reason is pretty simple. None of are willing to cut back on our government bennies. Not Social Security grandpas, nor Medicare grandmas. Not lifer public employees with their pensions. Not corporate America with their subsidies and carve-outs.

This is not just because we are all selfish and greedy. It is because we have all adjusted our lives and businesses to the current framework of government handouts, and if things changed it would cause, at very least, the inconvenience of adjusting our expectations and expenditures, and for many, real hardships and difficulties.

We humans usually only adjust to reverses in the face of disaster. When disaster strikes, then we all pull together and help each other out, and the Cajun Navy launches its flotilla of bass boats. But not until.

In other words, humans, the social animals, are pretty selfish creatures until disaster strikes. We reckon that people should stick to their own affairs. But when disaster strikes then we all pitch in to dig out of the rubble.

Obviously, the same thing applies to the Deficit. Nobody is going to agree to a cut in their take of government spending unless everybody else takes a cut also. And that ain't gonna happen, because we all have persuaded ourselves that we deserve our slice of the pie. Hey! I paid FICA taxes all my life! Hey, my business is vital to national security. Hey, we need well-paid teachers to teach Our Kids.

So no politician with half a brain proposes to cut the basic middle-class entitlements. Maybe that explains why Republicans could never get the white working class aboard until Trump ran and vowed not to touch Social Security and Medicare.

The fact is that governments find it almost impossible to cut spending programs, even in the face of economic disaster. Think Germany and Austria after World War I. The reason they went into hyperinflation was because they didn't have the guts to cut spending after the disaster of losing the war and all that lovely revenue. So they printed the money. Or Venezuela. You would think that Chávez's party, the party of the poor, would be able to persuade its supporters to take a cut in benefits when oil prices cratered in 2014 as a result of eevil fracking by eevil Yanqui frackers. But the Chávistas didn't dare.

Really, this is not surprising. The purpose of government is to protect its people. So it gives them bennies. But to reduce the bennies: you call that protection? Hey, pal. You reduce my bennies and I am going to go find another government to protect me.

Now, of course, government can be anything from a robber gang to an urban ethnic gang to a rebel insurgency to a genuine modern nation state. But the principle is the same. People put up with the taxation because they believe the government will protect them. And at the low end of the spectrum we call the taxation system of the urban gang "protection money."

Now to my definition of government:

An armed minority, occupying territory and taxing the inhabitants to reward its supporters.

Do you see what is missing? Protection. That is why Mao and Cho found they had to maintain their Red Base in southeastern China with terror. All that Mao did was loot and enslave the people in his Red Base to fund his Red Army. When you aren't protecting the people, and just taxing them and enslaving them you have to use force to keep them in line. Otherwise they will rebel.

When a normal government fails to protect its people it has to use terror to keep them from rebelling. That is what is going on in Venezuela right now. Since the Maduro government has utterly failed to protect the Venezuelan people from starvation and poverty it is reduced to beating up the opposition and jailing opposition leaders and anyone else who may object to the lack of protection from starvation and the elements.

But wait, you say. How does a government stop short of disaster, and pull back from financial disaster before it collapses in financial ruin and the president heads out of town to enjoy the loot conveniently stored offshore in a Swiss bank? Good question. We will investigate that in the next episode.