Hey Fed! How About Doing Something About the Inverted Yield Curve, Geniuses!

Yesterday, August 14, 2019, the stock market fell out of bed with the Dow losing about 3 percent.

What is going on?

Could it be that the Treasury Yield Curve -- see here -- is inverted, and an inverted yield curve is a pretty good sign that monetary policy is too tight and is forcing a recession?

Now, in the past the Fed has forced a recession in order to squeeze inflation out of the economy. Are we fighting inflation right now, Fed? I hope not. I've heard from real-estate people that the real estate market has been flat for the last year.

Yesterday, according to the US Treasury, 1-month Treasury Bills closed at 1.96%; 5-year Treasury Notes closed at 1.51%; 30-year Treasury Bonds closed at 2.03%.

So we are at an ace of a true inverted yield curve when shortest term rates are higher than long-term rates.

Hey Fed? You guys colorblind? Don't you see the flashing red light? Inverted yield curve! That means recession warning.

President Trump has been calling for lower interest rates for several months. But hey, he's just a yahoo.

And only last week the Fed finally lowered its key rate by 0.25%.

Hey Fed. Why not get your rate down to 1.5% right now, and worry about whether you acted too precipitately in 6 months?

The truth is that the Federal Reserve Board, brought into being after the 1907 Crash, has been an amateur disaster ever since. The idea was that it was sick and wrong to leave the financial system in the hands of robber baron J.P. Morgan.

Yeah, well. How did that turn out?

The Fed screwed up the 1929 stock market crash, letting banks fail for 4 years. When the whole point of a central bank is to be the lender of last resort. Lender of last resort, to keep the financial system from cracking up, chaps!

The Fed screwed up in 2008, with Little Ben Bernanke advertising that he didn't have the legal authority to rescue the financial system, specifically Lehman Brothers, without legislation.

Good grief, Ben. Don't you understand the meaning of "lender of last resort?" Ain't you read Walter Bagehot's Lombard Street? And anyway, who cares about legal authority! If you are Chairman of the Federal Reserve you do what it takes to stop a financial panic. Period. And if the second-guessers come after you and blame you for this or that undotted "i" or uncrossed "t", well, you fall on your sword, or go to your execution, knowing that you did the right thing. That is what Sacrificial Heroes do, chum. As opposed to deep-state swampies.

Anyway, the biggest item in the financial bailout of 2009 was the $3.3 trillion "guarantee" for money market mutual funds, and the bailout of Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac at $5.3 trillion. Total amount was almost $17 trillion. Was all that authorized by legislation? The TARP bank bailout at $0.7 trillion was penny-ante compared to that.

So here we have the Fed stumbling and bumbling about what to do about interest rates. With recession warnings sounding in our ears all over. What else is new?

Look. There's no surprise about this. The Federal Reserve System is an administrative state thing, staffed with bureaucrats. What would they know about the credit system? The Federal Reserve Board is full of political hacks. What would they know about central banking and "lender of last resort?"

The story of the Federal Reserve is that it is always a day late and a dollar short. As you would expect from deep-state swampies.

What I say is that it is time to reform the Federal Reserve System, and set it up so that it is run by people that know what they are doing.

But the problem is Chantrill's Law. That it is impossible to reform any government program. Because beneficiaries. Nobody will permit their loot and plunder to be diminished in their lifetime. Even if the world is crashing in ruin about their ears.

China's Big Problem

Just yesterday, President Trump announced delays in the imposition of tariffs on the Peoples Republic of China. Which encouraged the stock market, getting increasingly spooked by the inverted Treasury yield curve.

Inverted yield curve means that short term Treasury interest rates are higher than long-term rates. Normally, every longer term Treasury security has a higher rate than the next shorter term. Right now, 1-month bills are 2.09 percent, 5-year notes are 1.57 percent, and 30-year bonds are 2.15 percent. Not good, because the whole credit system works on the basis of longer term securities having a higher rate than shorter term.

An inverted yield curve is a recession warning. I'd say that the Fed should lower short term rates to 1.5 percent right now. But bureaucrats are slow and sluggish.

But never mind about us. Whatabout China?

China has a big problem. Its leaders are under the misapprehension that the name of the game is political power, political power for them and theirs. We, the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, must have the power to Make China Great Again.

This, of course, is the reactionary doctrine running through all Communist, Socialist, Nationalist, and Fascist politics. That the key question is who holds political power, and what power plays are necessary to make the political entity powerful in the world and bring on a secular paradiase.

Whereas the lesson of the last 300 years is that the secret to success is to reduce political power to a bare minimum.

Put it this way. The peoples of the world who have become the most prosperous in the age of the Great Enrichment are the ones that embraced capitalism and free markets. The ones that crashed and burned are the ones that adopted some form of socialism or Communism, such as Leninist Russia, Maoist China, Hitlerite Germany, and Nehru's India. And of course there were lots of tin-horn dictators hither and yon.

The political movements that enacted the horrors of Communism etc., basically all made the error of assuming that the rising power of capital would replay the political story of the agricultural age, with a landed warrior class oppressing and impoverishing a landless peasant class. Only now it would be a capitalist class oppressing a proletarian worker class.

Only it didn't work out that way. You can see that in my chart of the Global Great Enrichment.

Do you see what is going on? India and China were stumbling along at agricultural-level income until they abandoned socialist economics and switched to capitalism about 1980. Soviet Russia was stumbling along half way between industry and agriculture. Bit of a sticky wicket after the end of communism. Etc. Notice WWII starting 1940: just about everyone took a dive except the good old US and A.

The Chinese government, inspired by President Xi, seems to think that they are going to rule the world by being rough and tough. Control their own people. Control all their tributary states with the Belt and Road Initiative. Steal everyone's technology.

Except that they are scaring the pants off all their neighbors. And the capitalists are starting to move their supply chains out of China because, well, just to be safe. And wealthy Chinese are panicked to get their wealth out of China, because, well, just to be safe.

My point is that if you want to be global hegemon then you ought to copy the British and the US model and at least try to be avuncular, rather than the roughest, toughest guy on the block.

Trouble is that everyone in politics has basically signed onto the roughest toughest hombre west of the Pecos model, from the Commies to the SJWs to AntiFa. Whereas the model that really works is to be the place where everyone wants to keep their money, from equities to real estate to government bonds. That means that you have to have limited government that lacks the power to stick people in jail when the mood takes it, and seize peoples' assets when the mood takes it, and name and shame individuals when the mood takes it.

Come on China! You chaps ae probably the smartest people in the world, after the Jews. Get with the program! Become the place where all the smart people want to live, where all the smart people want to invest, where all the smart people want to keep their money!

You'll be amazed at the results! So will we.

Four Laws: Regulatory Capture

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

And nobody wants to be against settled science. Oh no. That's superstition and bigotry!

The First Law is that socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices.

The Second Law is that the economy cannot be directed by the Man in Washington.

The Third Law is the law of regulatory capture. What on earth is that?

The idea of economic regulation is that the chaotic capitalist economy needs rules and regulations to keep it from ripping off consumers and polluting the land. So let's make a law, and set up a regulatory agency and staff it with experts. And make the capitalists conform to sensible rules, especially related to prices, to keep them from looting and plundering.

But there's a problem, and it is associated with economist George Stigler. The problem is even mentioned in the authoritative La Wik. It is called "regulatory capture."

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.

In other words, the corporations getting regulated learn how to game the system. They learn how to make friends with the regulators, how to get them to understand their world view, to sympathize with their problems, and even come to live in the same world as the regulated industry. Let's go back to La Wik for a more expansive description of the situation.

For public choice theorists, regulatory capture occurs because groups or individuals with a high-stakes interest in the outcome of policy or regulatory decisions can be expected to focus their resources and energies in attempting to gain the policy outcomes they prefer, while members of the public, each with only a tiny individual stake in the outcome, will ignore it altogether. Regulatory capture refers to the actions by interest groups when this imbalance of focused resources devoted to a particular policy outcome is successful at "capturing" influence with the staff or commission members of the regulatory agency, so that the preferred policy outcomes of the special interest groups are implemented.

Look, let's ease off from the conspiratorial view of the big bad capitalist or the evil and corrupted deep-state administrative swampie. But people instinctively act in what they think is their self-interest. It's just natural that the folks getting regulated are going to have a life-and-death interest in the regulatory rules, and they are going to want those rules to be forgiving. And the regulators are mostly just administrative place-men -- of the kind that we have recently come to know in the Trump Russia Collusion game -- and their natural instinct is to play it safe, opt for a quiet life, and make sure that they don't risk their pensions.

We see the phenomenon of "regulatory capture" all around us. The green energy industry is perhaps the most egregious, because its interests align with our globalist elite. Everyone, from climate scientists to wind-farm manufacturers and owners, to electric car manufacturers, is in on the game, with subsidies and grants for all. But we've already had a couple of mega-failures with renewable energy, including a mega-blackout in South Australia where the swampies are now suing the renewable energy producers for the blackout. Imagine! The greenies force a crazy technology on the electric industry and then are shocked, shocked when it turns out that the subsidy bottom-feeders aren't quite up to snuff. And now there has been a major blackout in Britland involving renewable resources.

Then there is the health-care industry that is regulated up the ying-yang, but whose pricing is almost impenetrable. Why be surprised? The health-care industry must try to stay in business while being regulated by the government, forced to provide low prices to Medicare and Medicaid, having to deal with insurance companies, and last but not least, having credentialism and licensing up the yahoo for all its physicians and nurses. You don't think that the health-care industry is right in the middle of all political initiatives related to health care? Imagine if the health-care industry were not organized like an electric utility but instead like WalMart, with weekly specials and bargains and loss leaders and I know not what. How about this special: Free laser surgery with your colon surgery! Well why not? While you are recovering from cancer surgery why not get your eyes done?

Actually, what you have probably noticed is that the regulatory capture problem is not just a matter of a regulated industry corrupting its regulators. That, you might say, is the case of "pure" regulatory capture.

In many cases the regulated industry is part of a political movement. The politicians and the activists determine on some vital project that is going to cure cancer or save the planet. But what do they know? They must find the chaps with the business chops and the technical know-how, and co-opt them into the movement. So the idea that the industry is being rigorously regulated and kept honest is a lie from the get-go. The industry instead is a bunch of grifters and subsidy hounds that are twice as smart as the activists and politicians, and know how to milk a cow. Think of chaps like Elon Musk, who seems to have the rare talent of showing up wherever there are big fat subsidies to be lapped up. And know that for every public figure like Musk there are a hundred mini-Musks below the radar.

I worked for many years at a consulting engineering company that specialized in serving public (i.e. municipally-owned) electric utilities. Its first Managing Partner was a guy that was an activist in the public power movement in its hey-day in the 1930s.

In other words, regulatory capture is often not just the innocent corruption of a regulatory agency and its bureaucrats, but a deliberate act of loot and plunder by our modern equivalents of Vikings and Mongols, the politicians and the activists.

Nobody is saying that there shouldn't be laws regulating business and transactions between people. That we should just shrug our shoulders at "externalities" like air and water pollution. But the point is to try and diminish negative externalities by use of the price system -- such as by taxing pollution -- and the ordinary legal system -- by suing people that have harmed you -- rather than hand it off to a regulatory agency and its bureaucrats and their pals in the industry they are regulating.

White Supremacy, White Nationalism, Toxic Masculinity: What's Not to Like?

For nigh on 50 years, the worst thing in the world was to be called a racist. It was shameful thus to be called, and liberals used the epithet ruthlessly.

Now, apparently, the cry of "racism" does not pack the punch it once had. So now we are supposed to cringe at the cry of "white nationalist," or "white supremacy." And don't forget "toxic masculinity."

Now is our chance, to take the new vile accusations of the left, and put 'em where the sun don't shine.

I don't know exactly what is meant by "white nationalism," but I'd say that any ideology for any nation state in the world is bound to be based on the ideas of some white man that lived in the last half millennium. Even the idea of a nation state is a white idea.

And what was the whole idea of a nation state? It was to replace the constant war-of-the-nobles of the feudal era. Good or bad, kids? Check out Shakespeare's Wars of the Roses plays if you are not sure.

White nationalism? Hey, if you are a non-white whaddya think is best for you? To side with the guys whose religion and culture birthed the amazing Great Enrichment that has brought the whole world out of one-failed-harvest-away-from-starvation. Or Back to the Future with the neo-feudalism of the Islamo-terrorists? I can't see into peoples' minds, but if I were an East-Asian American or a Hispanic American I would want to get on with establishing my family in the prosperous US economy, and making sure my kids get serious and get themselves a good education -- despite the government's best efforts -- and get a decent career going. The heck with protesting and identity politics.

Oh yeah. And what is identity politics but racism, straight up.

When we talk about "white supremacy" what do we mean? Government under law? The separation of powers? Human rights? The right to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances? The understanding of prices and markets with economics? The Industrial Revolution? The automobobble? Ocean transportation? The aluminum sky of jet planes?

Whatabout slavery? It was universal until, for some reason in the late 1700s a bunch of white people started to organize against it politically. But there is still quite a lot of slavery going on in the world today. In non-white lands.

Whatabout colonialism? Well, in India, the British colonialists reckoned by about 1850 that they ought to hand over India to the Indians -- at some point. But by just being there in India they taught the educated Indians about the nation state and its financing; they more or less encouraged the Indians to develop an Indian National Movement. Yep. That's your white supremacy: teaching the "natives" how to do it. How patronizing can you get?

The point about colonialism is that, some time in the 19th century, and gathering strength thereafter, the notion arose in white countries that colonialism was not the thing, old chap. And I think that is because, in the industrial era, westerners -- white people -- discovered that the old agenda of conquest and loot and plunder, that had obtained from the dawn of agriculture and before, did not pay any more.

In China, a Chinese Christian wrote about the Chinese experience of the collision with white supremacy. From Jesus in Beijing by David Aikman, about the "success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world."

At first we thought it was because you had more powerful guns that we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and the successful transition to democratic politics.

Can you spell "politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion?"

Yeah. So let's look at the two biggest countries in the world, the great agricultural cultures of India and China. Both of these countries have adopted white-developed political systems. In India we have the nation of federated states, with democracy and, after a pause of 40 years, capitalism. In China we have the Marxian Community Party running the place as what amounts to a national socialist state, because in 1979 the Communist Party leader switched from on white supremacy idea, socialism, to another white supremacy idea, capitalism. Whaddya know?

So. When the two most ancient cultures of the world adopt western -- or white -- ideas, what exactly are you trying to say with your pejorative of "white supremacy?" Enquiring minds would like to know.

And as for "toxic masculinity," you girls just have no clue what you are talking about. Yes, I know that the girls have all got together since time immemorial to complain about men. There is no question, we are insensitive beasts that only have one thing on our mind.

But the fact is that it is men that invented the modern world, in which women could now come out into the public square. It was men that discovered the Germ Theory and that made childbirth much safer for women and for the first time in the history of the world made female life expectancy longer than male life expectancy. OK. It was a girl, Florence Nightingale, that invented modern nursing. Yet it is also true that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.

I say that the emergence of pseudo-intellectual pejoratives like "white supremacy" and "toxic masculinity" are signs that the old pejoratives are losing their sting. And it couldn't happen fast enough.

But the thing to do with the new pejoratives is to rush to own them. Yeah I'm a white nationalist! You gotta better idea? Full speed ahead on white supremacy! With a bit more capitalism we could finally eradicate the last vestiges of hunger! Toxic masculinity! How about doubling the number of tech startups!

And here's a final thought. In the second half of the 19th century in the British Raj the question of "famine" became a thing. What? You think that India wasn't having famines all along, since well before the British East India Company showed up in Madras and Calcutta?

The point is that, by 1850 there was public communications that could broadcast the fact of famine far and wide. So people beyond the stricken area actually knew about it. And there was a technology, railways and steamships, that could in double-quick time get food to the stricken areas. And there was money, wealth, for handouts to the stricken areas to give people food and jobs while the famine lasted. And there was the idea that the government should "do something" when the monsoon failed.

All that is part and parcel, as the Brits say, of white nationalism and white supremacy and the toxic masculinity that invented steam transportation on land and sea.

Long may they reign!

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?