Was Trump's "Go Back" Tweet a Blunder?

The usual suspects are horrified that President Trump tweeted an invitation for Rep. Omar (D-MN) to go back to Somalia and fix her homeland before she tells us what to do here in the good old US and A.

Of course everyone does this. My favorite is the explanation of the meaning of "whingeing Pom," an Australian insult usually directed at Brits. The explanation on Urban Dictionary (slightly modified) 

Brit: "It's bleedin' hot 'ere in Australia"

Aussie: "go back to Britain you whingeing pom"

All good fun and let me buy you a drink afterward.

So either President Trump has sunk his chances for reelection or he has lanced the boil on the American heartland.

You know what I am talking about: The Race Card.

Because liberals have been playing the race card, woman and girl, for 50 years.

And that's odd, when you think about it, because if, with the Civil Rights Act, we have banned racism, what's the fuss about? I mean, let the racists say what they want: the law is clear. You can't discriminate against people on the basis of race. Full stop, done deal. Who cares, any more?

Well, lotsa people.

But then I thought: this is a girl thing, the Complaint Culture and "I can't believe you said that!"

And what we are talking about here is the insertion of girl Complaint Culture into politics.. And this is wrong.

Look, politics is about one thing and one thing only. Protection. Politics and government are there to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic.

But. This only affects men, because, down the ages, invasion and conquest has most closely affected men. That's because the disposition after a conquest is that the men are killed and the women are taken over by los conquistadores. Maybe the women are sold into slavery.

Example: Briseis, the queen of Lyrnessus, sacked by the Achaeans on their way to Troy. Of course the king of Lyrnessus and the three brothers of Briseis were killed. But Briseis merely became a slave, the concubine of... Well that was the problem. Did she belong to Agamemnon or Achilles?

Fast forward 2,000 years and the Vikings visiting Britain in 1,000 AD. In the fall they sailed their longships up the rivers of Britain, killed the men, took the grain, and sold the women and children in the slave market of Dublin, Ireland.

Fast forward another 1,000 years to the sack of Berlin in 1945. In A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous, the German women are anxious to become the mistress of a Russian officer, rather than the other ranks, because it is safer, and, I suppose, the officers are thought to be less brutal. Or maybe this is just hypergamy at work. But, the women hid the teenage girls in the attic. The men? They were all away getting killed in the Army.

See what I am getting at here? The prime question in politics is a guy thing. Because it is the men's lives that are on the line where enemies foreign and domestic are concerned. The women? Well they will try to figure out how to survive through the holocaust.

Notice how the women's Complaint Culture is not really dealing with matters of life and death. Instead it is about calling out some woman who has stepped out of line. This means that all the questions of life and death -- of protection -- have already been solved. The only question is the hierarchical sorting out of the Mean Girls. Who will be Queen Bee and who will the whore that all decent women agree cannot be received in polite society.

When you are complaining about racism and pointing the finger at an unreconstructed racist you are arranging the deck chairs on the replacement of the Titanic. Who will get to sit next to the Duchess of Windsor on the upper deck, darling, and who must be denied entrance to the sacred royal precincts?

And this is probably always the case. You have a war or a big political battle. You win the war, or pass your comprehensive and mandatory reform bill. Now the man's work is done. Now the women get to work to decide who is in or out, who is up or down, and who needs to be disciplined for violating the comfortable consensus of the respectable women of the community.

So it is completely appropriate that the current catfight in the Democratic Caucus is about the women calling each other names. Because the important battles were fought decades ago.

But now President Trump has got into the act and said something that has offended all liberals and all women that have #WeBelieve sign in their yards. What they know is, well, "I can't believe he said that."

When someone is "offended" we are talking about girl stuff.

But I say that, at some point, some man has to step forward and lance the boil, or cut the Gordian Knot, or comment about the emperor's clothes, or just step up and snatch the Race Card off the table and tear it in two.

Somebody has to say that all this racist sexist homophobic name-calling has to stop. Because I say so!

And I suspect that it is the world-historical role of Donald J. Trump, insulter extraordinare, to do this for America in respect of the Race Card.

But I have to say, all this raises the question of what women are doing in politics at all. Because the women only show up after the basic question of do we live or die has been resolved.

And I think that the question of punishing the local whore or any other woman who steps out of the comfortable consensus of the community of women is not something that should be resolved by government force and formal politics.

The whole point of the community of women and their naming and shaming is that it is a method of social control that stops short of force and violence. So, if you ask me, mashing this culture of naming and shaming up with government force and night-sticks and so on is the first step to totalitarianism.

As the case of Briseis illustrates, the resolution of any conquest comes down to "who gets the girl." Or, if you like, who gets a share of the loot and plunder. But mixing the women's culture of complaint and naming and shaming into the division of the plunder, I think, is probably a monumental blunder.

But what do I know?

Is There a Difference Between Ethnic Politics and Identity Politics

In his latest column at NRO Jonah Goldberg is trying to draw a line between good old ethnic politics, which he says is harmless, and identity or "categorical" politics, which is not.

First, Jonah on identity politics as ethnic politics:

[T]his form of political engagement is as old as the country itself, because it’s as old as politics itself. From the Pennsylvania Dutch (who were actually Germans) to the Irish of Boston and New York, to the Scandinavians of the Midwest, various European ethnic groups engaged in politics in much the same way later waves of Vietnamese, Chinese, Hmong, Arabs, and Hispanics have, never mind the most obvious example of African Americans.

This, he thinks, is a far cry from categorical politics,

[t]he notion that all you need to know about a person is the color of their skin still strikes me as close to the definition of racism, whether you’re talking about black people or white people or people of some other hue. If you think you know what a woman is going to say before she says a word simply because you believe all women think a certain way, you’re a sexist.

I think I see what he is trying to say here. Let me help, by making my own judgements.

Ethnic politics is the politics of people arriving in the city from the farm and forming a defensive community based on their previous identity, as members of the tribe in the old country: Germans from Germany, Irish from Ireland, Italians from Italy. It is perfectly natural and physical, and confirmed by settled science such as the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma.

Categorical politics is when ruling-class intellectuals and politicians gussy up ethnic loyalties into an intellectual system and, as often as not, into a Saving Truth, and they use it not as a defensive system but as an offensive system, an ideology of conquest and domination.

Let us say it again. I think the difference is that when ethnic groups newly arrived in the city group together it is a natural and physical effort to band together for self-protection.

But when ruling-class intellectuals and politicians turn ethnic loyalties into a categorical system then you are facing exploitation, straight up. Because the folks in the categorized group are no longer merely banding together for self-protection. They are now Little Darlings, soldiers in the ruling-class army, and they are merely soldiers to be used, abused, and disposed of, in service to the ruling-class's power project. Hello white working class!

But we would expect this, we Hegelians, knowing that the thesis is equal and opposite to the antithesis, that the Master is very often manipulated by the Slave, and that there is no difference between the North Pole and the South Pole of the magnet. The follow-on Germans in the psych business called this  thingy "projection."

Thus we would expect that our lefty friends -- devoted unto their sacred tenure and their well-earned pensions -- would, by their devotion to the demolition of oppression and exploitation, create the most exploitative and oppressive structures in history. Their very devotion to the acquisition of power to help those ethnic groups would, by the nature of the process, create power that would dominate and oppress the very groups they turned into helpless victims.

You lefties listening? I thought not.

But what should happen? How should ethnic politics fit into our glorious modern world?

Thank you senator, I am glad you asked that.

My reductive Three Peoples theory is intended to answer such questions with great depth of understanding and breadth of wisdom.

Obviously, the People of the Subordinate Self are the folks that naturally and physically coalesce into ethnic groups when they approach to politics. They are people that look to a leader to protect them in the terrifying new world of the city. They look to their leaders to tell them how to vote, because they are not really newspaper readers; indeed they really do not relate to the world of ideas. Not yet.

But when the People of the Subordinate Self get their city legs and learn how to wive and thrive in the city they no longer need the protection of the ethnic association. And so they become city people, bourgeois, where, as People of the Responsible Self, they understand that it is each individual's job to make himself useful to his fellow citizens, by his work skills, his contribution to civic associations, and her contribution to the network of neighborhood women. A member of the bourgeoisie, the Bürgertum, does not feel threatened by the market; he knows it is dangerous but he has learned to ride it like a surfer. So he does not need to hide from the world in his ethnic group.

Now we come to our pals the People of the Creative Self. These are people that want a bit more out of life that to merely function as responsible citizens. You can see this when considering their gods. Whereas the People of the Subordinate Self think of gods as temperamental lords rather like the earthly leaders that have their quirks that you have to deal with, and the People of the Responsible Self think of the one God as a just and wise lawgiver that tells his people the rules you need to follow to be a success in life, the People of the Creative Self understand that it is up to them to invent their own life, to create it. In this, they are like gods; it is gods that create the world. In fact they want to be as gods.

Now there are two ways to be creative and be a hero. You can be an Egoistic Hero, that comes into the world to create amazing monuments, or to lead the oppressed to liberation, or invent amazing inventions. Or you can be a Sacrificial Hero, a Christ-like figure that goes down into the underworld to encounter the evil demons in his unconscious and then, shimmering with this hard-won knowledge, he returns to the public world to explore the border between Order and Chaos, and probably die in the process.

The Left's Error, in my view, is that it has chosen the path of the Egoistic Hero, and that means that all the efforts of lefty People of the Creative Self are devoted to self-glorification. Look at me the Glorious Activist! Look at me the conquering feminist! Look at me challenging the white supremacists!

If you look at a lot of the ideas that have come out over the last century, you can make a good point that it is all about trying to figure out what a creative life means.

But what people don't really want to know is that the creative process is one blind alley, one dry hole, after another. It is not about cutting a fine trajectory in the world.

And the point about identity politics -- or ethnic politics or whatever you call it -- is that it belongs only to people just starting out in the city that do not yet feel the competence to interface directly with the market.

For People of the Responsible Self to band together and exploit the People of the Subordinate Self is wrong.

For the People of the Creative Self to systematize ethnic politics into categorical politics is not just wrong; it is evil.

But I fear that the lefty People of the Creative Self are going to find that out the hard way.

As Nietzsche says, again and again: Being a "free spirit" is hard.

When the Other Shoe Drops

The great question about life, the universe, and everything is: am I seeing reality or am I blinded by my "priors" and am therefore interpreting reality into a comfortable Matrix?

For instance, I was talking with a liberal friend who was all worried about the German "with alleged neo-Nazi ties' that murdered a German CDP politician. But in the Breitbart piece, the German police are more worried about this:

Another major issue for Berlin police has been the influence of Arab clan criminal gangs who are said to extort and threaten police officers who try and investigate their illegal activities spreading rumours of sexual impropriety with prostitutes and other threats.

Of course, this is just like the US during the great immigration before and after 1900. There were immigrants gangs up the ying-yang: Irish, Jewish, Italian, you name it.

But then they grew up to be nice middle-class suburban homeowners.

And now we have black and Hispanic gangs. Because that's what the immigrants to the city do.

So which is the problem? The neo-Nazis or the immigrant gangs?

Now we have AOC bridling at the treatment she is getting from Nancy Pelosi. Apparently Our Nance is giving Our Alex jobs to do, and she has less time for activism.

And that made me think about what happens when Our Nance retires and a POC takes over as top Dem in Congress.

See, the guys I read say that the current Democratic shtick works so long as whites don't panic. So long as whites run the Democratic Party, and whites experience themselves as the default Americans, and whites can be taught to be guilty about slavery and patriarchy and the nice gay guy next door, the current Democratic Party is doin' fine.

But what happens to nice liberal women when the Democrats in Congress are run by AOC, Omar, Tlaib, and their non-white gal pals?  The truth is that upper-class educated women have had a pretty good run for their money for the last 50 years. They have been making like they are poor helpless victims. But I tell you nice liberal white girls: to the POC women you are all Beckys (Note that La Wik does not call the term racist).

In other words, what happens when whites no longer feel safe? What happens when the white Beckys no longer feel safe? Politics is about protection, pals, and women "expect" to be protected.

When whites are just the largest racial/ethnic minority, what then? Do all the non-whites gang up on whites? Or do we get a Polar Alliance of Europeans, East Asians, and higher-caste South Asians against the Tropical Alliance? And what about Hispanics? I've heard that Hispanics think of themselves as racially white but ethnically Latino. What does that mean?

Of course, my bigger point is that you can rile up the voters in any way you want. It can be by race, by gender, by ethnicity, by class, by occupation, by religion. That's because all tribalism is fake tribalism, gussied up by political leaders looking to lead a movement. Oh, and this from Singapore guy Lee Kwan Yew:

In multiracial societies, you don't vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.

So the fact that, over the past 50 years, politics has developing slowly towards an open politics by race, means nothing. Politicians will divide us by something. Race, class, gender, religion. Anything will do, because that is how humans divide themselves into tribes, by gussying up some notion of "the tribe," or "the race," or "the Chosen."

There is another way of creating a fake tribe. It is the fake tribe of the Nation. That's what President Trump was doing on July 4 when he headed up a Salute to America and gave a speech in which he declared America to be the bestest country, and Americans to be the bestest people in the world. And forever after.

The point to keep in mind is that our present politics was born right after World War II when all the right people decided that we must never let the nationalist beast out of its cage. Never again.

So they built the administrative state, of the elite, by the elite, for the elite. In the best interest of us deplorables, of course. And they did civil rights, because it was the right thing to do, and then discovered that a conscious race policy and gender policy of riling up selected races and genders was good politics. For the elite. For the moment.

But now we are 50 years down the road, and things are different. The Old Guard of the Democratic Party is about to die off, and be replaced with eager graduates of the race and gender seminaries that have been carefully taught in all the doctrines of the faith, of the Great Awokening.

Yes, every army needs efficient subalterns and field officers to carry out the policy of the higher ups.

But somebody, somewhere has to have a strategic mind and see beyond the conventional wisdom and the routine training that are needed to sustain an efficient ruling class.

And I suspect that in the next few years we are going to see that the folks that inherit the Democratic Party will turn out to be complete idiots utterly unprepared for dealing with the situation that their white mentors set up 50 years ago.

In the same way that in the last few years we have seen that the folks that inherited the Reagan Republican Party turned out to be complete idiots and were replaced by Trump.

As Jordan B. Peterson says: we see the world through the lens of our values. And the brain scientists say that our brains ignore almost all the information coming in through the five senses to focus on the information that it thinks it important.

The question always is: am I ignoring the one thing I ought to be paying attention to?

And the answer is: Probably.

You Create a Political Entity by Fighting and Winning a War

Those people wanting to transcend the nation state and create transnational political entities miss the vital point. All nation states were created, and sustained by war.

You'd think they would get it, because the left's love of "activism" is all based on some lefty leading a tribe of helpless victims to glorious victory on the political stage. And the memory of the victory sustains the victors as a powerful group for decades after the victory. See: the workers; women; blacks; gays; etc.

But what our lefty friends have succeeded in doing is weaken the nation state, both by their bureaucratic, administrative love of the transnational institution in which they have personal and career interests, and in the sub-national political movement where they teach the leaderless to identify as a sub-nation of helpless victims and lead them to glorious loot and plunder on the government free-stuff front.

Notice that at the sub-national level this exactly mirrors the nation-state politics model. You enroll people in a war -- in this case a sub-national political identity war -- and lead your troops to victory. If you win then you get to lead this sub-national group for the next 30 years because of the fake-tribal identity you have successfully forged.

But, I would say, if you do not find another war to fight and win then, after a generation, the unity that you forged will start to rust, and that is because there will be a new rising generation that wants to establish its own power foundation, and that may well conflict with the old generation.

Notice how this worked for the US. FDR successfully molded the workers of the 1930s into a political movement and then sent all their sons off to World War II and won it. The result was 20 years of a solid national American identity that only started to break up in the Sixties when the kids of the World War II generation started to come to maturity, and wanted their own place in the sun.

OK, so there was the Cold War, and Ronald Reagan managed to cobble that war into a 60-40 election in 1984. But once the Cold War was won the Cold War unity began to fray, and by the 2010s a new generation arose that knew not Ronnie.

So my prediction is that we won't see any unity in the US unless we get involved in another war in which the ruling class and the opposition agree on unity, as they did in World War II and off and on in the Cold War.

Notice how the unity actually gets formed. In World War II the Democrats were all for the war, because, influenced by the intellectual lefties, they were for the Soviets and against the Nazis, and the isolationist Republicans were led by chaps like Charles Lindbergh and Herbert Hoover. But, says La Wik,

After the attack on Pearl Harbor caused America to enter the war in December 1941, isolationists such as Charles Lindbergh's America First Committee and Herbert Hoover announced their support of the war effort. Isolationist families' sons fought in the war as much as others.

Notice that the opposition only gave in after Pearl Harbor. They threw in the towel when it became political poison to be anything other than pro-war.

I think there is an important principle here. In politics the different parties are always arguing the toss and busily dividing the people. But occasionally the opposition realizes that it has to go along to get along. And so you get unity. For a season.

So, in World War I, the German-Americans had to shut up. In World War II the isolationists had to shut up. In the 1980s the anti-war chaps had to shut up when Ronnie charmed the voters into his 60-40 landslide. In 2001 the Dems stopped their anti-war politics for 6 months while Bush avenged 9/11. And for that season of unity, which may last for 20 years, or for 6 months, you get a national unity forged.

All I am saying here is that if you are a rising politician in this notably divided time, you need to put yourself at the head of a movement that fights and wins a war. It need not be a guns-and-bombs war, but you need to create a situation where the opposition dare not oppose you after the start of the war, and you need to win the war. After the war is won then you have to exploit the victory to set you and your movement up for a generation of political hegemony. Until a new generation arises that did not live through the war.

Notice how, for 50 years, white conservative American have not dared to question the post civil-rights unity on race and gender, on pain of being run of out polite society as a racist, sexist homophobe. It's one of the most successful political hegemonies in recorded history. Until it isn't.

Right now we have a new left, symbolized by campus lefties, by AntiFa, and by young women like AOC, Omar, and Tlaib that think they are the new wave that is going to change America. They are a new political movement that aims to fight and win a cold civil war for cultural and political domination of the US. Folks like Nancy Pelosi are trying to keep them in check, because their way of politics has been to elect a bunch of moderate Democrats to Congress (as in 2006 and 2018) and then pass Obamacare, or something.

If Donald Trump were to win by at least 55-45 in 2020 that would put paid to AOC & Co. and create a Trump-based unity for a season. If Trump were defeated in 2020 that would be First and Ten for the AOCs.

But the point is that if you want to unify the American people you have to fight and win a war.

What is the Point of Religion and Morality?

I was writing a while back about why Nietzsche is wrong about "the priests" teaching us to hate ourselves: beyond good and evil, and all that.

Because, I argued, people living in the city need to work with strangers and they need to get beyond a simple notion of my kin right, your kin wrong. And one of the ways to do this is to think to yourself: "Hmm, maybe I'm not right about everything. Maybe that weird-looking guy has a point.

AntiFa please note.

But then I thought a couple of days ago that maybe, ever since we stopped being hunter/gatherers, we have needed to gussy up cultural rules. Because we are no longer living according to our great-ape instincts. First we had to learn how to be farmers and subordinate serfs. Now we have to be good faithful cogs in the industrial machine.

So my line this week is that once humans got beyond being hunter-gatherers living in a band then we had to frame up new rules for living in groups, because the instinctual rules that our genes are programmed with probably won't all work in the new order. But, because we were able to reason, we could construct new rules without waiting for the genome to catch up.

So when you look at religion, all religion, from the earliest cultivators down through the Axial Age religions to the modern "woke" religions of the campus and the protest march, they are all artificial cultural structures that we humans have built to help us live in the new world we have built.

This comes into particular relief for me because I have been reading manosphere stuff recently, including The Rational Male by Rollo Tomassi, The Decline of Males by Lionel Tiger, and also Bronze Age Mindset by Bronze Age Pervert. All these guys are trying to make sense of the present highly feminized culture.

Tomassi is saying that, since women have become ruthless hypergamists since the Pill and the sexual revolution released their inner slut, then men should stop being white knights and act like rough tough hombres. Bronze Age Pervert -- with many a Nietzsche reference -- suggests that we should get back to being pirates.

And Tiger, who is an academician and has a job to protect, proposes that maybe the culture is right and we don't need men any more.

When I read stuff that is off the reservation my mind starts to jump the fences too.

Let us take the Tiger world, and think about what it means that, back in the agricultural age, there were very clear rules about marriage, in which it seemed that the patriarchs ruled, and there was a clear division of labor between men that did the muscular stuff outside and women did the affective stuff, from sewing to child-minding and family relationships, inside. Yes but what did it mean? Did it really mean that the men ruled? I wonder, because in Victorian novels it seems that it is always the women that are most invested in promoting the best marriages.

Then we have the early industrial world in which married men were exclusively involved in work for wages outside the home 40 hours and more a week, surrendering almost all their wages to the wife, and the woman worked in the home and raised the children and related to the neighbors. So was that a patriarchal world where the men ruled the roost?

Now we have women all getting educations and careers, with the assumption -- that Lionel Tiger seems to accept -- that this is a good liberatory thing. Is it? Is it good for women when men start easing back on work? When they divorce their husbands, according to Tomassi, in order to hypergame to a better provider? When women are expected to have sex on the third date? When college students all get blind drunk before going out for the evening? Suppose this Brave New World is all a stupid mistake?

And I believe that we humans progress by blundering from one mistake to the next.

Here's an interesting note from Lionel Tiger. He suggests that in India, the infanticide of girls is primarily among Brahmin families, and the infanticide of boys is primarily among low-caste families. Could this be hypergamy at work, where it is difficult for Brahmin girls to marry up, and impossible for low-caste men to find anyone willing to marry?

See, I believe, with many others, that really it is women that are important and men that are expendable. But, I suspect, it is important for men to feel they are important because otherwise they will just take off and drink and whore and leave the women to get on with being important. In other words, human society has to figure out a way to keep men in the system contributing to society and helping get kids on the ground and provisioning the mothers until the kids get off the nest.

So, Sherlock, how would you set all that up in the modern post-industrial age? Honestly, I don't know, but I suspect that in 50 years things will look a lot different from now. Because I suspect that by then society -- high-status women, don'tcha know -- will have figured out that the current dispensation is a foolish mistake and that we need to honor men more. Not because men are better but because we need to give them a reason to stay in the game.

And the way you do that is by adjusting religion and morality and good and evil and make people  believe it.

Four Golden Rules of National Economics

Since our Democratic friends are raising the banner of socialism for the 2020 election season, perhaps it is time to rehearse the Four Big Reality Checks again, which demonstrate, with the help of "scientists say" that socialism and its kissing cousins, the administrative state and the regulatory state, cannot thrive.

Socialism cannot compute prices. It was shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution that the Austrian Jew Ludwig von Mises wrote a paper in which he stated that socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices. This paper, "Die Wirtschaftrechnung im sozialistischen Gemeinwesen," in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft, was translated into English as "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth" (1920) and published by Hayek in Collectivist Economic Planning in 1935.

In Socialism: an Economic and Sociological Analysis (1923) Mises reprises his argument. First he talks about marginal value and how money prices are, at best, a crude effort to tease out marginal value. And yet, money calculation is the only thing that works.

Only under very simple conditions is it possible to dispense with money calculations. In the narrow circle of a closed household, where the father is able to supervise everything, he may be able to evaluate alterations in methods of production without having recourse to money reckoning....

To suppose that a socialist community could substitute calculations in kind for calculations in terms of money is an illusion...

It will have no means of ascertaining whether a given piece of work is really necessary, and whether labour and material are not being wasted in completing it.

Actually, the socialists are right in their critique of money pricing, reducing all human economic interaction to the reductive test of "does it pay?" Surely we humans are better than that! No doubt we are, but the problem is that we don't have a better way of interacting with each other, to signal to other actors in the economic commonwealth what their products and services are worth to us, and they to signal to us what our contributions are worth to them. There ought to be an absolute scale of value, but there isn't. Not yet.

The theory of marginal value, that was discovered by three or four economists in the same year of 1870 -- the way that most discoveries are made -- shows the shifting sands of economic value. It says that we can have no theory of use value or theory of exchange value -- that prices reflect either an object's use value or its exchange value -- as the classical economists had proposed. All we can say is that, when buying the next (or marginal) item of some product, an actor is willing to pay a certain price. Why he was willing to pay that price and no more, and the counterparty was willing to sell for a certain price, and no less? We Don't Know.

The Man in Whitehall cannot direct the economy. Friedrich von Hayek, a student of Mises, came up with another way of expressing the economic calculation issue. He said, starting in The Road to Serfdom, that the big problem about socialism is that, by subordinating the economy to an administrative governmental authority, it treats the economy like a war.

[W]hile the general who is put in charge of a campaign is given a single end to which, for the duration of the campaign, all the means under his control have to be exclusively devoted, there can be no such single role given to the economic planner, and no similar limitation of means imposed upon him. The general has not got to balance different independent aims against each other; there is for him only one supreme goal.

And yet every administrative hierarchy implies the war metaphor, that there is a single goal to which all must contribute as directed by authority. It does not work, as Lenin said as a result of the experiment of war communism during the Russian Civil War,

Let us frankly admit our complete inability to conduct affairs, to be organizers and administrators. . . . If we are to be absolutely definite, we must know exactly what we are going to do over the year ahead. Who knows that? No one. 

Do you see the point? If you are fighting a war, then everything and everyone are to be sacrificed to winning the war. There is no competing goal, no alternative, to assembling all economic and human resources in the winning of the war. But an economy is different, for there the goal begins with the fact that there is not one goal, the survival of the nation, but a million goals, starting with the provisioning and survival of every single human in the nation. How in the world can "the Man in Whitehall" as they say in Britain, or the man in Washington, begin to have a clue about how to organize the economy to adjust it yearly, or monthly, or daily, to meet the needs of its millions of citizens?

And even suppose you have half a clue when you establish your budget at the beginning of the year, what about half way through the year when conditions have changed?

I have expressed this issue, in the past, as a bandwidth issue. The bandwidth of a centralized Department of Economic Planning is, at most, a thousand people (allowing that most of the bureaucrats will be filling out paper). But the economy is millions of people, as consumers and producers, making millions of decisions about what to buy and what to produce every day. And the price system adjusts the prices every day in response to changing conditions. In a way, it is a pitiless system, as businessmen that make the right decisions get rewarded with profits and people that make the wrong decisions get punished with losses. The successful businessman may be a monster that exploits his workers; the failed businessman may be a pillar of the community. But what else are we to do, other than reward correct decisions and and soften the blow of bad decisions with a law of bankruptcy?

Regulatory Capture. But at least we can tame the excesses of capitalism by regulation of the business sector, identifying hurtful and beneficial, and making sure that everyone earns a fair return on capital, whether human or physical. Right? Unfortunately, the economist George Stigler proposed that when you set out to make things fair and regulate an industry, the result is "regulatory capture," where the regulated businesses end up rewriting the regulations to favor established businesses and prevent competitors from disturbing the market. Even La Wik gets it.

Regulatory capture is a form of government failure which occurs when a regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or political concerns of special interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating.

And in fact we see that all businesses that get tangled up with government start to "capture" the politicians and bureaucrats that regulate them. We see this with the green energy industry that has fattened on green subsidies. We see it with the health care industry that is probably the most credentialed industry in the country. It need be nothing more than the desire of the bureaucrats to live a quiet life, and reduce the complexities of regulation. They will find themselves the handmaidens of the special interests.

The truth is that there is no substitute for a free and open economy. Any kind of a short cut is going to favor the powerful and loot the powerless. Because that's the way that politics and power operates.

Government Can't Reform. But now we come to an even bigger problem, which I call Chantrill's Law. It is that, if you look at almost any government program you see that it is almost impossible to reform or change it. This is absurd. We know that every business and every consumer is making changes every day, based on perceived changing needs and market conditions. But government finds it almost impossible to change its programs. There are many reasons for this, including:

1. Government programs are, at bottom, loot and plunder, taking money from someone and giving it to someone else. People in receipt of government benefits will resist to the knife any attempt to reduce their benefits. The only way to reduce benefits is to introduce a moral factor, that the recipients are "welfare bums" or "greedy bankers" that deserve to lose their benefits because they are moral lepers.
2. The economy is too complicated for legislatures and bureaucracies to regulate. A legislature can only produce about three or four major bills a year. You think they have time to adjust and reform any of the dozens of programs the government runs? Especially as the committee chairmen and bureaucratic leaders resist the idea that there could be anything wrong in their feudal fief. Especially as there is an election coming up. The truth is that the only way a program gets reformed is when it is so screwed up that even a journalist can understand that something is wrong.

Really, the problem is not so hard to understand. We humans are biologically programmed to be a small hunter-gatherer band in which economic issues are resolved by reciprocal gift-giving and the charisma of the Big Man. But we have blundered into creating a society that has tribes and nations and empires, notions completely beyond the ken of our forebears of 100,000 years ago. The miracle is that, as we humans have clumped into larger communities, it turns out that we can adjust the reciprocal gift-giving through the price system, and the Big Man through presidents and legislatures, and that the price system works to coordinate all our different needs and abilities.

Who would have thunk it?

Trump Honors Armed Services on Independence Day

In all the arguments about President Trump's speech at the Lincoln Memorial on Independence Day, July 4, 2019, one thing seems to have been missed out.

What did he actually talk about?

I'm glad you asked, Senator.

First, he welcomed the distinguished guests.

Then he talked about the Declaration of Independence, and how Gen. Washington had it read to the troops in New York City facing the Brit invasion fleet.

Then, he mentioned the Constitution.

Then he celebrated explorers, the patriots that ended slavery, fought for civil rights, and expanded liberty; the inventors, the astronauts, culture and the arts, not to mention

the musical, the motion picture, the Western, the World Series, the Super Bowl, the skyscraper, the suspension bridge, the assembly line, and the mighty American automobile.

Then he called out living patriots in the audience by name that had made great contributions to America.

Then he mentioned service members that had died for our country, and their Gold Star families present at the speech.

Then he thanked Clarence Henderson, who in 1960 sat down at the segregated "Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina."

Then he mentioned the

heroes who defined our national character — from George Washington, John Adams, and Betsy Ross, to Douglass — you know, Fredrick Douglass — (applause) — the great Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, Amelia Earhart, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, Jackie Robinson, and, of course, John Glenn.  

Then, for the second half of the speech, the president honored the armed services of the United States in turn, starting with the Coast Guard, then the Air Force, then the Navy, and finally the Army. At the end of each tribute, there was a flyby of military planes.

At the end of the speech he told us that America was the bestest nation ever and that it would live for ever and ever.

We will always be the people who defeated a tyrant, crossed a continent, harnessed science, took to the skies, and soared into the heavens because we will never forget that we are Americans and the future belongs to us.  (Applause.)

The future belongs to the brave, the strong, the proud, and the free.  We are one people, chasing one dream, and one magnificent destiny.  We all share the same heroes, the same home, the same heart, and we are all made by the same Almighty God.  (Applause.)

And from the banks of the Chesapeake to the cliffs of California, from the humming shores of the Great Lakes to the sand dunes of the Carolinas, from the fields of the Heartland to the everglades of Florida, the spirit of American independence will never fade, never fail, but will reign forever and ever and ever.  (Applause.)

What, so to speak, is not to like?

Or, to put it another way. What is the point of a president who does not extol the United States of America and the American people to the heavens?