Suppose We are Not Heading for Civil War?

Lots of experts are predicting civil war -- the next step from our current "cold civil war." I also have a military acquaintance that is worried about that.

Heck, I'm worried about that.

And I am worried that, in the aftermath of two-a-day mass killings, one by a lefty Warren supporter and one by the son of a licensed psychotherapist, President Trump caved on the "white nationalist" canard.

Hey, if Trump the brawler doesn't have a Twitter come-back for the usual accusers of racism, then ain't nobody ready to confront the race-card issue.

I mean, it means that President Trump doesn't feel it is safe to say, for instance.

What planet are these Democrats and "fake news" journalists on? I just don't care about race; I only care about Americans. And if you ask me, when it comes to race and racists, it takes one to know one.

But the time is not yet ripe.

Still, I can't help feeling that, rather than get to a race war, we are actually getting to the moment of Thermidorean Reaction. That's the moment in the French Revolution and its aftermath when Robespierre fell, the Reign of Terror ending, and pretty soon the French had Napoleon to rule them.

The notion is that the religious fervor of a Reign of Terror cannot last forever, because ordinary people just want to get on with wiving and thriving. Example du jour is Ferguson, Missouri, where the white Mayor James Knowles -- a known Republican in a 67% black city -- got reelected in 2017 with 57% of the vote. Joseph Duggan:

Blacks, whites, and, increasingly, Latinos, live side by side today in the community. Those who are staying in Ferguson or who will move there tend to be motivated by solidarity—on being together as neighbors first and foremost without undue impulses of activism or ideology.

The point is that humans are progammed to come together at a moment of crisis to defend the homeland or the race, or recover from a natural disaster, or combine to kill some scapegoat, or whatever. But we are also programmed to wive and thrive and tend our families and communities. And that most of the time.

The game of a ruling class is to rile up the natives when it needs them for some ruling-class power project. And that project must be represented as a response to an existential peril, according to my maxim that

The only warrant for government action is existential peril.

In other words, if you are a ruling class and you want to flex your ruling-class muscles, as ruling classes often do, then you must sell the people on an existential peril. It could be the Nazis, the Commies. It could be "white nationalists;" it could be climate change.

It could be a true peril. It could be a brazen lie. From the ruling-class perspective, it doesn't matter.

My feeling is that the way that the ruling class has elevated the race issue over the last half century is sending a message. Our ruling class is running out of existential perils with which to frighten us.

Meanwhile, its failures have been piling up: big government in all its aspects from unaffordable entitlements to failing schools. Cultural deserts, from the white working class dying of despair to the women traumatized by the sexual revolution to blacks producing 75% of children outside marriage, to the radicalization of the universities, to the LGBT folly, to the recent classification of illegal immigrants as the archetype of helpless victims.

If I were the secret Mr. Big of the present ruling class I would be afraid, afraid that the whole thing could come tumbling down. And I would know that the only thing to do would be to rile up the natives in one more big college try. In other words, a Reign of Terror and Virtue.

But the point is that a ruling class that opts for a Reign of Terror is a ruling class that is looking right into the face of failure. Because when things are going good you don't need a Reign of Terror, you just go on your next Royal Progress and greet your happy peasants with the usual Royal Wave.

Four Laws: The Man in Washington Cannot Outperform Consumers and Producers

There are, I believe, Four Laws, scientific principles, if you like, that need to be understood in relation to all proposals for More Government.

The First Law is that Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices. This law was discovered in 1920 by Ludwig von Mises.

The Second Law is a corollary of the First Law. It argues that the Man in Washington, the Planner directing the economy, cannot outperform the consumers and the producers because he does not have enough information. This law was enunciated by Friedrich von Hayek, a student of Ludwig von Mises. He first enunciated this Law in his The Road to Serfdom:

The Road to Serfdom was written during World War II when the Austrian Hayek was living in England. It was addressed "to socialists of all parties" and the argument was against the consensus among all educated people that "planning" was inevitable, a vital response to the increasing complexity of modern society. As Hayek writes, of that consensus,

[T]he complexity of our modern civilization creates new problems with which we cannot hope to deal effectively except by central planning.

It is true, for example, that certain activities in modern cities, such as public utilities, cannot be resolved purely by competition. This leads the planning advocates to the following:

What they generally suggest is that the increaing difficulty of getting a coherent picture of the complete economic process makes it indispensible that things should be coordinated by some central agency if social life is not to dissolve in chaos.

Hayek argues that the opposite is true.

This argument is based on a complete misapprehension of the working of competition. Far from being appropirate only to comparatively simple conditions, it is the complexity of the division of labor under modern conditions which makes competition the only method by which such coordination can be brought about. There would be no difficulty about efficient control or planning were conditions so simple that a single person or board could effectively survey all the relevant facts. It is only as the factors which have to be taken into account become so numerous that it is impossible to gain a synoptic view of them that decentralization becomes imperative. But once decentralization is necessary, the problem of coordination arises -- a coordination which leaves the separate agencies free to adjust their activities to the facts which only they can know and yet brings about a mutual adjustment of their respective plans...

This is precisely what the price system does under competition, and which no other system even promises to accomplish.

The above is the problem with Hayek. He writes long sentences in complicated prose that are unquotable!

But what Hayek is saying is that you guys that think that a complex economy requires coordination from the top -- from people like us -- in fact the opposite is true. The more complex the economy becomes the more it becomes impossible for the sainted planners to know enough about the various activities to make the right decision, or even have enough hours in the day to begin to make enough decisions to keep the economy from falling apart.

In modern parlance we would say that the economy is an emergent phenomenon, not a system, and so mechanical decisions, based on reading this dial or pulling that lever, cannot suffice. Or we could say that the planner-in-chief and his assistants just cannot have the bandwidth necessary to apprehend all the information necessary to understand the economy, let alone have the time left to adjust the economy to keep it on track.

In Britland, where Hayek was writing at the time, they started to talk about the planner the "Man in Whitehall." In Margaret Thatcher's era they would say that the Man in Whitehall cannot know enough to direct the economy. In the US we have our Man in Washington.

And here the situation is that the Man in Washington, the administrators and whatever, cannot know enough to direct their programs effectively. Because it is just too complex. That is why, for instance, we had the No Child Left Behind program and the Common Core education standards are all about. National standards! A gentle push to educators to make sure they do their jobs! But, you will notice, nothing has happened. That's because with a top-down planned system the problem is not just an inability to respond to individual events, but that the whole system is designed to prevent individual response.

I think though, that the "bandwidth" argument is the best, because you can make a comparision with the internet. Google Maps, for instance, is collecting traffic information every second from all over the world. And then distributes it out to each individual smartphone. How do they do it? Not with an administrator directing traffic, but by a decentralized system that runs by itself.

Emergency, White Supremacy, and Identity Poltics, Oh My!

Here's My Guy Kevin Williamson railing against the eternal emergency.

Rule One: In the present emergency we need "certain illiberal and anti-democratic measures are necessary" to save us. Rule Two: There is always an emergency.

Then there's Jeff Goldstein inveighing against all identity politics. After all, he argues, "white supremacy" is an inevitable consequence of identity politics.

[I]n a cultural and political climate that rewards and empowers identity groups while it brackets individualism as some deplorable and dangerous social ill, those most marginalized by the prevailing norm would seek to gain power and “legitimacy” within that very system.

And this rather charming notion from Evan Sayet, comedian.

“One reason conservatives are so happy and [l]efists are so miserable is that capitalists need friends,” wrote Evan Sayet. “They need business partners and investors, trading partners and customers so satisfied they come back again and again. 

“The socialist needs enemies,” Sayet went on. “There must be people who hate him and oppress him. If he’s not hated and oppressed then socialism doesn’t exist. 

“If he [the socialist] can’t find any such hatred, he’s forced to make it up[."]

All of which is merely illustration of my maxims:

The only warrant for government action is existential peril.

Therefore the world must be coming to an end unless we act now.

And the perennial:

Politics is division. 

You want to create a political movement? You want to win an election? Then you must unite your followers around you into a political army. And the way to do that is to unite them against an enemy.

Not to forget Hegel and the Freud movement. Not to mention Newton. Action and Reaction are equal and opposite. The thing is equal to its opposite. We project our own faults on our enemies.

So all politicians need an emergency in order to get anything done. Otherwise life is just looking for friends and customers and business partners.

So, the identity politics politician needs white supremacy as an enemy to unite the Coalition of the Fringes. Otherwise the various entities of the coalition will start fighting each other.

Oh, lefties, and by the way. If you chaps demonize whites as the root of all evil, and start kicking them off social media and firing them from their jobs, then you are going to provoke them into forming a racial movement based on whiteness. Because some guy is going to come along and play your lefty game with what you lefties might call "the white community" if whites were part of your movement. Which is, as the comedian just pointed out, that "[t]here must be people who hate [you] and oppress [you]."

The whole basis of humans as social animals is that we band together for protection. And the impulse to band together is the feeling that there is a dangerous something out there. It might be a lion, a tiger or a bear, oh my. Or it might be the malevolent tribe next door. Or it might be the whole white race, organized into a secret conspiracy of white supremacy. Or, it might be the blacks, the browns, the yellows, the females, the educated, the LGBTs organized as a political coalition to name and shame whites as "white supremacists."

But the basic problem of every aspiring leader is that if there is no emergency, no enemy, no existential peril then there is no need for political power.

And what does the leader do then poor thing?

Marianne Williamson: Getting Only Half the Point

At American Greatness Matthew Boose takes a look at the unexpectedly popular Marianne Williamson who, he proposes is bringing something to politics other than mere wonkery.

Like Trump, Williamson is an outsider who understands that politics is about bigger things than what can be reduced to policy bromides. 

Well yes. But Mariane Williamson is a preacher -- if a new-age preacher -- and I thought that we were supposed to have a separation between church and state.

Williamson is outraging the liberals, apparently, because she is saying that you can't cure depression with drugs, and that is "anti-science." Well maybe she has a point. Maybe we have a problem, Houston.

To admit that America is broken spiritually invites reflection on the cultural revolution of the past half-century. Has America really progressed, or have things gotten worse?

Why are there so many mass shootings these days? Why are young Americans killing themselves at record high rates? Why are they having children at record low rates? Why are diagnoses of depression and anxiety so high, despite a marked jump in antidepressant use? Why is life expectancy in the wealthiest nation on earth going down, rather than up? 

Yes but. Politics is downstream of culture is downstream of religion. The job of politicians is to divide the voters at election time -- on my maxim that politics is division -- and the job of policy wonks is to figure out how to divvy up the loot one more time -- on my maxim that government is an armed minority that taxes the people to reward its supporters.

The whole question of what is the good life, what is the right way of life, what is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything comes upstream of politics. It is the subject matter of religion.

And, according to the Bill of Rights, the United States shall have no establishment of religion.

However, even a semi-moron can see that religion is always bumping into politics and politics is always bumping into religion. That is because when the nation's legislators make laws they are necessarily informed by their various religions. They have a vision of the Good Life and Justice and they are bound and determined to get there.

In our age, with the decline in authority of Axial Age religions, new religions are popping up all over. They may be Socialism, the idea of building a Heaven on Earth with government power. They may be Nietzsche's Übermensch off in the mountains doing his Zarathustra thing. They may be Jungians getting in touch with their personal or collective unconscious. Or they may be new-age gurus like Marianne Williamson.

And wouldn't you know. All these religions seem to take a remarkable interest in politics.

But our Founding Fathers knew that this was a problem. The problem was identified for our age by our liberal friends who found it intolerable when fundamentalist Christians were "legislating morality." Or when McCarthyites were flushing Communists out of the State Department and the public schools.

But now the shoe is on the other foot and liberals and lefties all over are legislating their morality and getting conservatives bounced from their jobs at Google and Mozilla. Notice that the liberals that are beside themselves with McCarthyism have no problem with the defenestration of folks that don't worship in their church.

To talk about our political problem in terms of Trump and Williamson going a bit deeper than the usual idiot wonks is to miss the problem.

The problem is that, with government so busy with 1,001 programs -- all of which come down to some sort of idea of Good and Evil which all originate in some sort of religion or quasi-religion -- there will inevitably be a lot of religious conflict arising out of some peoples' religion getting to set the government agenda and other peoples' religion getting marginalized as "bigoted" or "superstitious".

If government were smaller then people could exercise their religions and project their values in the public square without having to fight to get government on their side.

For in the real world people only "get" the notions that are taken for granted in their cultural bubble. Their beliefs and their understanding of the meaning of life, the universe and everything go without saying. But other peoples' faith and beliefs are experienced as a threat.

You can see the problem. If people get the power of government on their side then they will use it to neutralize the "threat" from other peoples' beliefs.

And since, on my reductive Three Peoples theory, there are at least three kinds of people on this Earth that means that there are three world views competing for that government dollar and the opportunity to legislate their morality.

The less government there is the more that each of the Three Peoples can live according to their values and not keep bumping into people that think they are a threat.

Four Laws: Socialism Can't Compute Prices

There are, I think, Four Laws, scientific principles, if you like, that need to be understood in relation to all proposals for More Government.

The First Law was first enunciated in 1920 by the Austrian Jew Ludwig von Mises, the man that founded the Austrian School of economics in an article titled "Die Wirtschaftrechnung im sozialistischen Gemeinwesen" and translated into English by S. Adler as "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth."

Mises expanded on his argument at book length in Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, first published in German in 1922. The short form of his argument is that socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices.

In his 1978 Foreword to my copy of Socialism Nobel economist F.A. Hayek writes:

When Socialism appeared in 1922, its impact was profound. It gradually but fundamentally altered the outlook of many of the young idealists returning to their university studies after World War I. I know, for I was one of them... 

Socialism promised to fulfill our hopes for a more rational, more just world. And then came this book. Our hopes were dashed. Socialism told us that we had been looking for improvement in the wrong direction.

What exactly did Mises argue?

Let us assume, he writes, that the socialist state resolves the problem of consumption by handing out coupons for the various consumption goods to which the comrades are entitled. Immediately a market will arise. For instance, "beer tipplers" will want to exchange their non-alcoholic drink coupons with the alcoholic drink coupons of "teetotallers." And then an exchange problem arises.

If, for instance 1 cigar becomes equal to 5 cigarettes, it will be impossible for the administration to fix the arbitrary value of 1 cigar = 3 cigarettes as a basis for the equal distribution of cigars and cigarettes respectively. 

And, in fact, the socialist commonwealth will find itself using the informal prices in the consumer "market" as a guide to socialist production.

The problem is that there are no upstream prices, no way of rationalizing the production processes to deliver, in the end, consumer products in accordance with the demands of the comrades. It is one thing for Robinson Crusoe to make a complete inventory of costs and benefits in his solitary life as he evaluates economic options in his solitary attempt to survive. "In the case of more complicated and more lengthy processes of production it will, plainly, not answer."

In an exchange economy we get prices as the unit of economic calculation.

In the first place, it renders it possible to base the calculation upon the valuations of all participants in trade.

So prices reflect the net effect, today, of all the participants in the market. It also enables participants to determine whether they can participate profitably in the market, making their product or providing their service. Finally, prices provide a way of referring all exchange values back to a single unit: i.e., money.

Of course, money and prices do notd tell us directly about "extra-economic" values. Except, that obviously, they do. Because the "beer-tippler" unconsciously values his beer over other potential choices, such as food for his children. And his choices ripple through the economy.

It is tempting to think of a socialist commonwealth as rather like a big business, that has various divisions and relationships. But the economic calculations of big business are always related to market prices outside the boundaries of the corporation.

For each separate calculation of the particular branches of one and the same enterprise depends exclusively on the fact that is precisely in market dealings that market prices to be taken as the bases of calculation are formed for all kinds of goods and labor employed. Where there is no free market, there is no pricing mechanism; without a pricing mechanism, there is no economic calculation.

This is the vital point. In the market economy, people are buying and selling millions of items every day, setting prices that reflect their value preferences on that day, and those prices ripple up through the production system. And those prices reflect not just what people think and want today but what they think of the future. This is most notable in commodity and stock prices.

Of course there are substitute pricing mechanism in the socialist economy. First of all, there are the prices of commodities and labor outside the socialist commonwealth that the socialist planners can use in their plans.

Then there is Shortages. If a production unit runs out of a certain material then it shows that the socialist Plan has mistaken the demand for that factor of production. But then what? Does the production unit shut down until more product is delivered? Does it do a deal with another nearby production unit? Your pipe for my angle iron? Or do we wait for next year when the planners will have adjusted their plan to account for last year's error. In fact, though, socialist production enterprises tend to want to produce everything in-house, including manhole covers, because of the risk of running out and the uncertainty of getting stuff from other production units.

We moderns all complain about prices. But nobody does anything about it, and just as well.

Because the price system is another proof of God's existence. Who would have thought that individual buying decisions by individual consumers would transmit messages right through the economic "system" giving all participants daily nudges towards adjusting their activities towards satisfying the most urgent needs of the consumer? It's a miracle.

Politics is not about A Rational Disccusion of the Issues

This  morning I am reading a ton of tut-tutters tutting about the Democratic debates. They are upset that all the candidates were tilting against dragons and monsters instead of proposing sensible and rational solutions to our national problems.

One expert even noted how candidate Trump in 2016, despite horrendous mistakes and ignorance about policy, still dominated the debate stage with his insults and personal attacks on the other candidates.

Because politics is not about issues. It is about confronting the enemy.

No kidding! Trump dominated the stage by setting up monsters like illegal immigration and corporations outsourcing jobs, and promising to fight for America.

Rule One: Politics always involves an enemy. Doesn't matter who or what it is. It can be the Jews. It can be Big Pharma. It can be Big Oil. It can be the Commies. It can be radical Islam. It can be racism. It can be homophobia. The whole point is that there must be something, some enemy, some existential peril, for which only force is the answer, and we must band together to slay the monster!

But here is the problem. Suppose you are a peaceable sort of chap that doesn't see an enemy behind that rock? Well, then, you ain't gonna win the election.

The special innovation of the left is to have changed the identity of the enemy. In the old days of dynastic rulers the enemy was either some pretender to the throne or the prince next door. Then in the age of the absolute monarchs we had nation against nation with the subtext of religion. You see that in the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648 and also the Dutch invasion of Britain in 1688 to turn it into a Protestant bulwark against Catholic France.

But the French Revolution changed all that. It inaugurated a politics based on a secular religion, where the enemy was not the neighboring king or an ambitious aristocrat but the class of aristocrats and the class or priests.

Then Marx had the idea of the middle class and the new industrial lords of business as the enemy of the working class and humanity.

Then the Frankfurt School had the idea of not just the workers as helpless victims of the middle class but women and minorities too. They had suffered at the hands of the racist sexist middle class patriarchy since the dawn of time.

And so we get to today's politics which is all about finding some monster that is devastating the lives of some utterly helpless and innocent victims.

The most recent innovation is the idea of the end of the world caused by man's despoiling of the environment. Actually, this is not a new idea but an ancient idea. The Fall. The expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Actually, we are talking about the creation of human agency. Back before the Fall, you see, mankind did not have agency, was just an animal. But when you get agency you get responsibility. If things go wrong it is not just the gods dumping on humans, but humans making a wrong or evil decision, violating God's Law or, in more recent times, social justice.

(Isn't it interesting that the left is advancing the idea of human agency and responsibility in one area, climate change, while the entire rest of its politics is about non-agency, the helpless victimhood of minorities, women, and LGBT?)

So, in the left's worldview there are the responsibles: corporations, white supremacists, patriarchs, Christians, Republicans. They are to be held to the highest standards.

Then there are the victims: minorities, women, LGBT, illegal aliens, Democrats, Muslims. No standards apply, because, being helpless victims they do not have agency and cannot be held responsible for their behavior.

When you think about it, this is a beautiful system. It provides an eternal conflict for lefties to fight, and they are always on the side of the angels.

But my line is that the rise of the market economy and the transformation of wealth from land to "intangible capital" means that we need a lot less politics. Because there just aren't that many things that need to be resolved by force.

You can see the problem as faced by Republicans in the post-Reagan era. The gentlemanly Republicans kept getting snookered by the Dems because the Bushes and the Romneys believed in a kinder, gentler politics, a compassionat conservatism at the same time that Democrats were winding themselves up into a fury over racism, sexism, and homophobia.

Enter Trump with the streetfighter instinct to conjure up some enemies to slay. And now all the experts are tut-tutting about an unprecedented era of partisan division, and they are shocked, shocked, at Trump's crudities.

It's a problem. If we agree that politics and strong government is no longer a requirement in the industrial era how do you get the lefties to abandon their politics of outrage and demonisation?

To put it another way, how do we do the political equivalent of turning warriors into sports heroes? Notice how organized sports arose in the 19th century, just exactly at the time, I would argue, that wars became stupid.

Because here's the point. When we talk about a rational discussion of the issues what we are really saying is that here is something that can be resolved by the ordinary processes of the market economy and the give and take of day-to-day life. In other words, it need not involve politics.

I think that the secular movement we call conservatism is basically organized around the de-lethalizing of politics. That's what all the folderol of constitutions and separation of powers and due process is about. It is trying to lower the temperature so that nobody feels that they have to turn to armed force in order to get their injustice addressed.

But the left has operated under the faith that all the bourgeois constitutions and ownership and due process are a sham that is pretending that white supremacy and patriarchy and exploitation and oppression doen't exist.

Well, maybe they are a problem, but how bad can it be when per-capita income has increased by 30 times in the last 200 years?

But how do you resolve the argument, between the ordinary middle class that is not that interested in power and a secular-evangelical left that is organized for #Resistance and believes in the saving grace of political power?

Tell that to the activists.

"You Idiot:" Of Course We Were, Are

American Greatness's Julie Kelly admits it: "You idiot!" She admits that she was gullible and stupid and trusted people that she shouldn't have trusted. Then she lists all the things about which she and Beltway Republicans have been wrong since whenever. Including:

• Free trade; outsourcing.
• Nation-building in the Middle East.
• Immigration.
• Contempt for our fellow countrymen.
• And so on.

OK, free trade isn't a panacea, but the less restraints on trade the better, because restraints are usually all about helping powerful special interests. And free trade was a way of spreading the wealth around in the Cold War.

Nation-building wasn't so hot, but in the far-off days before fracking when Middle East oil was the name of the game, well, we had an interest in making sure that the oil got here. We needed to be able to bash the Wahabis and the Saddams and the Iranian mullahs around just to show we cared.

Immigration got me here, an immense benefit to America! And if feminists teach educated American women not to have babies, something's got to give. But every immigrant is another entry in the labor market and the law of supply and demand applies. And if employers are tempted to hire illegals under the table and avoid paying payroll taxes, and our Democratic friends exempt illegal aliens from the burden of following the law...

Contempt? Well, that's the name of the game with politics. Our guys are great guys and the others are contemptible. And what do you say about the white working class that kept voting for Democrats long after the Democrats made it perfectly clear that they didn't care a whit for the white working class?

The job of government is to protect us from existential perils. But should it protect each and every job from the next technical revolution? That is what a lot of us want when our industry goes into decline. Should government protect us from discrimination? Probably, but that does not mean that government should be doing quotas and timetables. Should government protect widows and orphans? Probably.

But here's an idea. Suppose we say that government's job is just to protect us from enemies, foreign and domestic. And that it is the measure of each of us how much we help people that have lost their job, that are marginalized because of their race or gender or class, that are too poor to help themselves through no fault of their own. That way, government stays in its lane, which is force, and the rest of us are under constant self-examination, worrying about whether we helped enough.

Couldn't we say that the welfare state is a moral cop-out that lets us all sit in front of our 4K digital wall TVs and say, well, I gave at the office in my paycheck, so don't bother me?

My line is that the industrial revolution has completely overturned the basis of human society in the agricultural age, which was to protect our food-growing lands from pirates and predators. The consequence is that we need much less force and political power.

But the politicians and the voters are acting as if nothing has changed. The Dems are running around conjuring up huge new applications of government power, from universal health care to the Green New Deal. Of course they are, because the business of political leadership is to lead a band of warriors to either conquer new lands and promise glorious loot and plunder, or to defend our land against other conquerors -- say, eevil fossil fuel producers -- and protect us all from their depredations.

It is very difficult for any politician to say: hey, not really much to do around here. I´ll just sit on the front porch to be ready in case anything blows up.

So all politicians run around like idiots, and their staffers and sycophants run around in circles to make it look as if they are doing something useful.

And the rest of us sit around and complain that "they" haven't fixed the pothole on our street.