Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop on Russia-Collusion

OK, so the smoke signals say that the Mueller probe will not be coming out with a smoking gun that will put President Trump away for good. The latest I have heard is that Mueller will make a confidential report to the new Attorney General Barr and nothing to see here.

On the other hand, the Pelosi Democrats seem to want to be able to harass the president with House impeachment investigations all the way to the 2020 presidential elections.

So I am thinking about what President Trump and his White House are planning to do after the Special Prosecutor Mueller winds up his investigation. As they say, Trump is like a cobra: he always strikes back. But how?

Here is what strikes me. It has been pretty obvious now for weeks that 1) the Obama administration spied on the Trump campaign in "collusion" with the Clinton campaign and 2) the DOJ and FBI conspired to gin up a pretext, first to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove the president, and second to sicc a Special Prosecutor on him to see what he could find.

I would think that the Donald Trump we know and love would want to raise the roof on all this. So why hasn't he?

I suspect that the reason is that he doesn't want to raise the roof until the Mueller report is in the can.

But it seems to me that the president has every reason to fight back against a monstrous abuse of federal government power.

For me, Trump would have two reasons to fight back. The first reason is a defensive reason, where Trump says to Our Nance that if you House Democrats want to spend the next two years investigating me then I am going to spend the next two years prosecuting Hillary Clinton -- oh and the various liars like Brennan and Clapper. The second reason is an offensive reason, where Trump spends a lot of time in the 2020 election campaign accusing Democrats and the Deep State of epic levels of corruption, therefore vote for Trump who is the only guy in the room willing to take on the slimy Deep State.

Notice that the defensive option would be private, a quiet word to Our Nance that it just isn't going to be a good idea to sicc her lefty idiots on the president. The offensive option would be public, but it wouldn't work to start on it now, because the media would wrap it in a blanket and refuse to report on it. Republicans only get their narrative out during an election campaign when they are using paid media to communicate with the American people. So the president would not want to start on his offensive campaign until next year.

I mean, the two scandals are perhaps the most egregious abuse of federal government power in my lifetime. Are we going to brush the whole thing under the rug? Are the American people not to be allowed to give their judgment on the whole thing?

Like I say. I am waiting for the other shoe to drop on the 2016 election shenanigans.

OK, So Bernie and Donald are Both Corporatists...

One thing that the failure of gentlemanly conservatism has taught me is that there are only about five people in America that believe in the classical liberal position, that is,

the... regime of property rights, free enterprise, free trade, individual rights, and a worldview based on well-ordered liberty emphasizing cooperation within and between nations.

I guess that Kevin Williamson would be one of the five.

But then, what do you say, if you are an elected politician, to the average sorts of people that believe that the job of the government is to protect them?

Do you say to the people of Rust Belt America, well, chum, everything goes in cycles, and so your lifetime jobs in big manufacturing corporations were never going to last forever. And so, chum, you'd better suck it in, take your losses, and move on?

You don't, because the role of a politician, whether an elected politician of the 21st century or an absolute monarch of the 18th century, is to protect your people. Otherwise you are just a tax-sucking parasite.

So, it makes complete sense that both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are singing the same song, though admittedly to different tunes. Even if that scandalizes Kevin Williamson, who hates both the lyrics and the tunes. If you are running for elective office you are not going to get elected on the platform of promising to enhance "the well-ordered liberty emphasizing cooperation within and between nations."

What "Trump and Sanders — and, to a considerable degree, figures such as Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez" — believe in Kevin calls corporatism,

the subordination of private business interests to the “national interest,” something formally short of the Marxist-Leninist model of outright appropriation of the means of production but functionally similar to it.

Well, they would think that, because they are running to be president of the government of the United States -- the head of the apparatus of force and coercion in this land -- and thus naturally promise to protect its citizens from the Winds of Change using the means at hand.

Now it is my belief that 97 percent of the ways in which governments promise to protect their citizens are pure horse-pucky. But put yourself in the position of the politician running for election. You just aren't going to get elected by telling everyone to cool it, believe in the Great Enrichment, and wait for the next round of prosperity to roll in.

No, the internal logic of politics requires the candidates to promise a quasi-military campaign to lead the nation forward to peace and prosperity. That is why the Democrats are all climbing on board the Green New Deal. It promises a quasi-military campaign to save the US from the just-around-the-corner calamity of climate change. That is why Donald Trump ran on the platform of Make America Great Again. The Democrats' slogan promises to save us from an existential peril; Trump's slogan evokes the image of a quasi-military campaign to restore America to its former glories.

I would go so far as to say that if you are a politician and are not running on a platform to reenergize the nation and lead it forward to the Promised Land, you really don't understand elective politics.

Now, if you are a politician with half a brain you know that all the horse-pucky about glorious victories is rubbish. What matters is "regime of property rights, free enterprise, free trade, individual rights, and a worldview based on well-ordered liberty emphasizing cooperation within and between nations."

But how are you going to explain that, e.g., to the followers of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who literally know nothing? What if the redoubtable AOC herself literally knows nothing? Is the agenda of Bernie and Warren and AOC better than Trump's? Do they really understand the facts of life, or do they believe the horse-pucky?

What we know about Trump is that, in the event, he has negotiated trade deals that don't seem to be outright protectionism, but do seem to renegotiate things a bit in our national interest. And by lowering tax rates -- especially on  corporations -- and throwing out a bunch of regulations the president seems to have kicked the economy into high gear, which some may say amounts to governing with "worldview based on well-ordered liberty emphasizing cooperation within and between nations."

In other words, Trump ran as an unapologetic nationalist and protectionist, but seems to have government almost as a classical liberal. Who predicted that?

On the other hand it may well be that his policies, which have raised wage rates in the US, and his browbeating of the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low, and his failure to rein in spending, may unleash a bout of inflation which will inevitably lead to higher interest rates and a recession. Right now it is about ten years since the trough of the last recession, which is about the record for an uninterrupted economic expansion.

So it may be that the Democrats, despite their Medicare For All and free college for all and Green New Deal will govern like President Trump and, despite the rhetoric, encourage "well-ordered liberty."

But my money says that the Democrats really believe their rhetoric. Or at least they had better, because their party base has been carefully taught to believe all the horse-pucky about glorious administrative government programs and Green New Deals, whereas nobody in America's education system is teaching MAGA hat-wearers how to be more effective activists for racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Just saying.

Socialism is About One Thing Only

This word from the nation's leading political philosopher:

We know that socialism is not about justice, it’s not about equality, it’s not about lifting up the poor.  Socialism is about one thing only: power for the ruling class. (Applause.) And the more power they get, the more they crave.  They want to run healthcare, run transportation and finance, run energy, education — run everything.

They want the power to decide who wins and who loses, who’s up and who’s down, what’s true and what’s false, and even who lives and who dies. 

Wanna know who wrote that? I dunno: some speechwriter. But President Trump spoke it at Florida International University in Miami, Florida, yesterday February 18, 2019.

Of course the president made these remarks in respect of Venezuela -- before an audience of mostly Latin Americans -- and you can imagine that the cheering Latin Americans from Venezuela, from Cuba, and from Cuba in his audience would have rather firm views about socialism.

But I think that the president is also noticing that the Democrats are regressing towards socialism, and why not dig 'em in the ribs. That's what all the kids are being carefully taught in the schools and universities, so it stands to reason that America is Ready for Socialism.

Unless they really aren't, once you explain the whole procedure to them. I was reading a day or so ago that Americans are all in favor of Medicare For All until you explain the details to them.

I gotta say, I love  the president going all Ronnie Reagan and making Reaganesque -- or even Thatcheresque -- speeches about socialism.

Someone has to do it.

And the reason is exactly as the president said in his speech:

Socialism is about one thing only: power for the ruling class. (Applause.) 

Gee, I wish that *I* had come up with that line. It applies, liberals, to chaps like you. If you are a well-educated professional then chances are that you get to dabble your toe in the ruling-class power game. As a university professor. As a research scientist. As a government adviser. Nice work if you can get it.

If you wonder why the educated class seems to be friendly towards socialism that is the reason. There is money for the educated professional willing to hire out for government.

Actually, we should be compassionate towards the educated. If you get advanced degrees it does not necessarily translate into money and status. And after you have made the substantial investment in an advanced education you are looking for a payoff that, at least, will pay off the substantial investment you have made.

In the old days, of course, universities were mostly churning out priests for the state's established church. Then the Germans invented the research university to churn out research that would beef up the German state and help it fight against France. In our own day the university and the educated understand exactly that their job is to support the ruling class in all its endeavors, from the courts to the science supporting the war on climate change to the social science needed to support the far-flung activities of the administrative state.

And it makes sense that a chap like me that never got beyond a Bachelors in Civil Engineering and never really had an interest in power, corporate or otherwise, should be a Trumpist deplorable. Your deplorable is a guy that just wants to be left alone to get on with his life. He is not that interested in money, not that interested in power, not that interested in status.

But if you are educated, and you are interested in money, or power, or status, then you are likely to be attracted to the doings of big government. You could, of course, become a businessman, or an artist, or a writer, or invent some other creative project.

But you will probably choose government, because the other routes to fame and fortune require imagination. Government is just force; we all understand that. No imagination needed.

Yay President Trump! Keep up that socialism talk, pal. I love it!

NYC Amazon Fail Shows Divide in Democratic Party

Amazon's recent decision not to build an office in New York City illustrates the fundamental divide in  the Democratic Party.

There is the old feudal wing, -- represented by  Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) and Mayor Bill di Blasio (D) -- where the feudal lords look after their serfs by bringing home the bacon, what used to be called Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. Then there is the priestly wing -- represented by the saintly Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) -- which is on a divine quest to bend the arc of history towards justice by propitiating the progressive gods, that is to say by activism and the peaceful protest. For her, Amazon is the incarnation of the Foul Fiend.

Of course, for a chap like me, both approaches are rubbish. The taxes and regulations in a great  metropolis should not be so high that the politicians have to sweeten the pot with tax abatements and subsidies. Still, I understand that politics it is all about the hustle. Making politics into a religion is of course a recipe for disaster and 100 million deaths, because moral questions are not negotiable like economic questions. But I get that politics and religion have mixed it up forever.

Still, it is comforting for me that the Democrats are divided like this, between the feudal wing and the priestly wing. It creates a space in the middle where deplorables can roam.

To me, the feudal barons are playing a zero-sum game of privilege and tribute. Play the game with us, they tell Big Business, and we will protect you from the mob. Vote for us, they tell their subordinate voters, and we will deliver the Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. Only, of course, the magic of capitalism is its constant churning, its creative destruction. So the idea that the feudal lords are providing jobs, jobs, jobs, rather than the robber barons is baloney. What is needed is the next generation of business startups to great new industries by innovation that will lead in time to jobs, jobs, jobs, for the feudal retainers.

The activist priests, on the other hand, are worse. Really, we should consider the priestly SJWs as a kind of death cult -- 100 million dead, don't forget -- that are leading their peaceful protesters to economic Armageddon. As Stalin, Mao once did, and now Maduro is doing. But, of course, the college-educated whites that are devotees of the progressive left are not worrying about economic issues like the feudal retainers that respond to the old cry of jobs, jobs, jobs. They are educated and expect that the world will always provide for them; they do not experience life as a existential struggle to put food on the table.

History doesn't repeat itself, they say, but it rhymes. The last lefty enthusiasm here in the United States was  the Sixties, when the radical Baby Boomer children of liberal parents thought they were going to fundamentally transform America. Only the American people elected Richard Nixon, to the disbelief of the special people.

The solution to the monstrosity of the Nixon presidency was, of course, impeachment on a phoney-baloney pretext that persuaded the Goldwaters and the Scotts of the 1974 US Senate to drive down Pennsylvania Avenue and tell Richard Nixon that he had to go. But I don't think that the old game is going to work this time. Just saying.

If history rhymes again we will see Donald Trump reelected and the usual suspects desolated  by another epidemic of Post Election Stress Disorder.

Strange, isn't it, that an epidemic of PESD only occurs after a Democratic loss. Why is that?

Now the Lawyers Want to Do Diversity and Inclusion

About 130 years ago Friedrich Nietzsche imagined a world Beyond Good and Evil.  He railed against "the priests," starting with Zoroaster in what we now call the Axial Age. Nietzsche thought it was a very bad thing to repress our natural and healthy tribal hate for the other and instead turn the hate against ourselves, as in Original Sin.

Now, I have to say that I disagree with Fritzi on this, because I think that the idea of Original Sin and Divine Justice was pure genius, because it taught humans living in cities not to blame the other guy all the time and stick a knife in his ribs just to make sure, but to think that maybe the problem starts at home! For city life depends on getting along with strangers, giving the stranger the benefit of the doubt, giving him a chance to prove his good faith before deciding to stick him in the ribs.

Nietzsche prophesied the Overman, the creative chap that rose above good and evil and realized that the real meaning of life, the universe, and everything was to boldly go where no man has gone before, to coin a phrase.

But in fact in many ways the opposite has happened, as government force and religious doctrine have combined in various totalitarianisms to force a single truth about Good and Evil on all humans or else. And you had better not boldly go anywhere without checking with the local SJWs.

You know what we are talking about. There was one totalitarianism that prophesied Workers Good, Capitalists Evil: 20 million dead. Then there was the totalitarianism that prophesied Aryans Good, Jews Evil: six million Jews dead. Now we have the totalitarianism that prophesies Activists Good, Deplorables Evil. There is no telling, yet, what the death toll will be.

So it is clear that we have not got Beyond Good and Evil. Not yet.

Nietzsche prophesied the Death of God, and maybe he was right, but it seems, at the very least, that God has been replaced by a whole underworld of demons. I'm not convinced that the change has been beneficial.

Put it this way: the God of the Bible may have died because fashionable educated people that write books stopped believing in Him, but the need for religious belief has not died.

Don't believe me? Then what in the world do the #WeBelieve yardsigns that sprouted in every liberal front yard after the Trump win in 2016 mean?

These are all religious beliefs, from racist and sexist religious beliefs to immigration religious beliefs, and a curious superstition that the realist world view that went out in the Enlightenment is still valid. Earth to liberals: we have had about three scientific revolutions since the realism of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas went out of style!

Now I have no problem with liberals believing anything they want. What I don't like is that today liberal secular religious dogma is enforced as a kind of orthodoxy of the State Church of the Educated Class, where you had better bang your head on the floor, as the Chinese used to do in front of the Son of Heaven, or else no job for you.

Put it this way. In the bad old days of "the priests," there was at least a nominal separation between the political sector and the moral/cultural sector. But in our modern world, where the enlightened and the educated fondly believe in an "ethical" community, the enlightened and the educated are stupid enough not to understand that they just mean by "ethics" that people like them will make the rules about good and evil, and you'd better not be caught on the wrong side or else.

So, a friend sent me a couple of links here and here about bar associations in the US and Canada instituting professional requirements for "diversity and inclusion," so that law firms would be required to hire lawyers in accordance with some sort of notion about race and gender representation.

Guess what, counselor. That is racism and sexism, straight up. And since it diversity in lawyering will not be Good for the Jews, it is also anti-semitism, straight up.

Back in the good old Sixties when we passed the Civil Rights Acts, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) got into hot water because he refused to vote in favor, on the grounds that the acts did not merely require government to stop discriminating, but private individuals too. As a libertarian, he believed that ordinary citizens have a right to discriminate. The problem was and is government that has and always will discriminate in favor of its supporters and against its opponents.

So if you are going to have a Civil Rights Act, it would be a good idea for it to state that government shall not discriminate on the basis of race or gender, period.

We can see that Barry was right, because the de-facto situation in the United States today is that government discriminates all over the place in favor of its racial, gender, and illegal alien clients in a blatant program of discrimination, whereas ordinary citizens are forbidden to discriminate on pain of administrative harassment by liberal-dominated Human Rights Commissions. And that is unjust.

The dirty little secret about discrimination is that most eevil businessmen will set aside their prejudices if the price is right. They may not like black homeboys, but if the homeboy works for less than a nice little teenage white girl, well... And who knows? If the homeboy puts his shoulder to the wheel and learns how to charm the customers the racist sexist homophobe of an employer might even hire one of the homeboy's buddies. By the way, businessmen also hesitate before hiring a minority because firing minorities can end up costing an arm and a leg if the minority decides to protest the firing by filing a complaint to the local civil rights commission. Just saying.

The only good thing is the historical record. It suggests that the kind of moral panic we are experiencing today is bound to be short lived. The various manias that flesh is heir to tend to exhaust themselves because humans cannot live forever at fever pitch. Eventually they instinctively return to wiving and thriving, which is their real life work.

And here is my idea on Good and Evil. The really bad stuff, like murder and mayhem, we punish with the criminal law. But lesser evils, like first trimester abortions, we deputize to priests and counselors selected by the sinners themselves, as in a church community. We do not give the priests of a conservative church the power to punish members of a liberal church. And we do not, as now, give the activists of the liberal Church of Progressive Wokeness the power to punish disreputable Deplorables.

Now that is what I call civilized.

The Inevitability of Identity Politics

Steve Sailer explains our Democratic friends as the Coalition of the Fringes. Or the Margins. It is really simple. As I say, politics is division, between Us and Them. We know who We are, so the only question is to decide who They are. Now, imagine that you have constructed a Coalition of the Fringes, of blacks, women, LGTBs, Jews, and Muslims. OK, fine we know who We are. What about They?

While our society’s growing hate hysteria against straight white men may seem a bit demented, it is actually a logical requirement of the fundamental strategy of the Democratic Party: to mobilize a Coalition of the Margins comprising identity groups—such as blacks, transgenders, Muslims, and Jews—who don’t have much to unite them other than their resentment of old-fashioned Americans.

As they say, this isn't rocket science. Tribal politics is as old as the hills, and it has a very good and ancient purpose, to unit Our People to defend Our Food-giving Land.

As I keep writing, all this ancient tribal instinct and wisdom was swept away by the industrial revolution that made the "patch of land" sneered at in Fabian Essays in Socialism as the horrid forerunner of today's awful property system into an afterthought.

It's an odd thing to ponder. The origin of our modern property fetish was the survival importance of land, and yet now, when food-growing land is no longer a matter of life and death, we have planted its seed and grown a whole tree of property rights and culture to take its place.

In the old days of the "patch of land" there was a simple division between Us and Them. Us is the tribe of people occupying our patch of land. Them is the tribe next door that might challenge Us for possession of the patch of land. Them was the people We might have to fight to hold onto Our patch of land and its life-giving food.

But didn't the We ever descend into fratricidal conflict? No doubt We did, but as the anthropologists point out, We have hierarchy to discourage the war of all against all. In the old days, society was clearly defined by its order of rank, and so internal conflict was kept to a necessary minimum. It had to be if the society was to preserve its strength to defend its patch of land from the dangerous Them next door.

The thing is that now, with the old order of rank demolished in favor of equality, the social hierarchy is much more uncertain; it makes sense that more people than before would be tempted to challenge the hierarchical status quo to find out where they really stood in the hierarchy and how they might rise through a little strategic conflict.

And there is another thing. If the old conflicts over the patch of land are no longer, would not humans maintain their old instinct to defend themselves and their kind from existential peril, and negotiate their place in the hierarchy in a new way?

This is how I am starting to try to understand identity politics. It just makes sense that if the old order of rank has broken down with the modern notion of equality then people will renegotiate hierarchy in a new way.

When you think about identity politics the question of the Jews comes up immediately, because Jews have, down the centuries, tended to maintain themselves as a separate religious and tribal entity even while living as minorities all over the world. Think about it. Jews have managed to survive as a cultural and religious identity even though they have not had their own state since Roman times.

How do you do that?

We tend to view the Jewish question through the lens of anti-semitism, in the way we have been carefully taught, as a scandal of hate and fear. But I think we should realize that it makes complete sense that a nation or other political entity would turn on an identifiable minority in a time of crisis. In a crisis you need unity, and the way you get unity is by defining and mobilizing people against an enemy.  An  internal enemy is  very convenient because you don't have to go to war with them as  you often do with an external enemy. At the other pole, it makes complete sense that a minority group would maintain its identity and unity with a culture of siege, that the whole world is ganging up on it.

That is what our liberal friends do to mobilize their Coalition of the Fringes for political warfare. They mobilize their folks by whipping up anti-white-male-ism. Each member of the Coalition of the Fringes is encouraged to believe that any moment the whole white-male patriarchy might descend on them.

Of course, for the moment our liberal friends maintain their anti-white-male-ism culture by making it a vile hate-crime for any white male to object to his ghettoization as the fount of all evil. This is immensely cunning, since it makes it almost impossible for any white male to object. And this is similar to the Jews and anti-semitism. It is extremely effective to marginalize anyone that criticizes Jews as a vile anti-semite until the moment that it doesn't work anymore.

Put it this way. Once you have demolished the old feudal order of ranks and substituted the current political culture of identity politics then you are living in a world where everyone is taught to be terrified that if the Other Guys ever get power then it is "curtains" for Us and people like us.

Hey! That explains the #Resistance against President Trump. Our liberal friends have been taught to hate and to fear everything about the racist sexist homophobe deplorables who were, every one of them, poised to descend on the helpless victims of the Coalition of the Fringes as soon as they got the  dog whistle from their racist sexist homophobic leaders. So of course, when Donald Trump won the 2016 election our liberal friends panicked!

I suppose you could say that the old feudal order of ranks has been replaced by an economic order of ranks. In the market economy you are ranked by your net worth as a measure of your value to other market participants. No doubt that explains why our lefty friends have made such a point over the last 150 years of attacking any notion that the verdict of the market is right and just. The whole point of the left is to contest the current order of ranks as injustice, and to keep their Coalition of the Fringes in fear and trembling. The left wishes, through a battle of the identities, to renegotiate the social and economic hierarchy.

Remember in the good old  days when our liberal friends castigated us for our inordinate fear of Communism?

All good clean fun, but I worry about the day when those notorious white males no longer agree to carry the sins of the world on their shoulders.

Nietzsche Liked Europe; Zweig Liked Europe, So...

So here we are with the Brits facing a March 29 deadline on whether to bail out of the European Union.

Really, anybody who is anybody has been pro-European for over a century. So what is the deal? Europe good; nationalism bad! Get with the program, deplorables.

Yeah. Bad boy Friedrich Nietzsche -- the chap that good little girls in the media know was "the Nazis' favorite intellectual," because... Yes, because they have been carefully taught, from year to year, in their good little ears -- was pro-European and sneered at German nationalism.

And I have just finished a memoir by Stefan Zweig, a smart (and rich) Jewish kid and mid-20th-century writer from Vienna, who writes proudly that his "ideas have always been European and not nationalist" and about "the belief in intellectual unity".

But suppose that this notion of a European intellectual community shared by all the great and the good is the root of the problem? Think of it.

First of all there is the language problem. The nations of Europe all speak different languages. I don't know how you create a political community out of communities that don't speak the same language.

Then there is the top-down problem, the conceit of the "European intellectual community" for the last several hundred years that they are the smart people in the room. Really? How would we tell?

From my perspective, I would say about intellectuals: Locke good. Rousseau bad. Montesquieu good. Hume good. Marx bad. But I realize that millions in the "European intellectual community" disagree with me. So who is right?

Well, there is the advice of St. Matthew warning about false prophets: by their fruits you shall know them. I'd say that 100 million dead is a pretty good verdict on Rousseau and Marx. I'd say that the US of A is a pretty good fruit for the Lockes and the Monesquieux and the Humes.

Just sayin'.

One of the key factors in the amazing Great Enrichment of the last 200 years when real per capita income in places like the US increased by 30 times, is that the successive economic and technological and financial revolutions were not decreed from above. They were the result of nobodies with a good idea that, against all probabilities, made it to the big time.

What they were not, almost always, were fashionable ruling-class pet plans offered as a national goal to which all heads would bow. I am thinking Green New Deal.

The basic mindset in the notion of the European intellectual community is that big changes are born of big minds with big ideas. It stands to reason, doesn't it, that we can't just blunder into the future; we need well-worked-out plans using settled science and the best minds in the world.

Quite. Except that was the line of the Marxists and the Fabians. They had a horror of people just going out and doing stuff without the proper forethought.

Except that the grand plan of a California bullet-train just got shelved by uber-liberal California Governor Gavin Newsom. Because all the grand planning added up to a big fat zero.

We humans long for a world of perpetual piece, where hardship and struggle have been eliminated, where people can finally live together in harmony.

We imagine the perfect community where people all work together for the good of all.

The joke is that while the great and the good of the last two centuries have been conjuring up grand plans to transform society and usually filling the graveyards with victims, the market economy, of individuals conjuring up new ideas and submitting them to the verdict of the market, has transformed human life beyond recognition. And all it takes is for the great and the good to get the heck out of the way and stop trying to boss everyone around.

And nobody saw it coming.

And yet here we are, raising up good little girls like Sandy the bartender and carefully teaching them the ideas that have yielded poverty and death every time they were tried. And because they are good little girls they believe everything they were taught.

We don't need a European idea. We  don't need a planetary idea. We just need people to go about their business and accept the verdict of the market -- as modified by common-law judges trying to pick up the pieces after something goes wrong.

But what would the European intellectual community do then, poor things?