More Tlaib: How To Tell a Genuine Movement for Justice

It really is something. We have four Women of Color congresswomen, the Squad, running around the world making like they are helpless victims "fighting racism, oppression [and] injustice" as tweeted by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI).

How do we know they are lying? I will tell you. You know they are lying when there is almost no possibility of them losing their jobs, of getting arrested and interrogated, or sent to a concentration camp as a result of their "activism."

Because real activists, real political opponents of a regime are, in the time-honored phrase, risking their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for the cause.

Like the protesters in Hong Kong right now, protesting against the Communist Party of the Peoples Republic of China. I would say, speaking personally, that they are risking everything.  I'd call that "fighting" of a very different order from the four Squaddies, who are the Little Darlings of the US ruling class, on account of their race, their gender and their lefty political agenda.

The activism of the Squaddies is fake activism. It is political activity endorsed and applauded by everyone from The New York Times to the "studies" professor at your local state university. The Squaddies are in fact the bribed apologists of the ruling class, enacting fake activism just as they have been carefully taught by their Rules for Radicals instructors.

Here's a look into what real activism means. It's a piece from Quillette about the tactics used by the Hong Kong demonstrators.

One of the reasons for the effectiveness of the protest movement is the decision to remain leaderless. 

Standard doctrine is that every political movement needs "strong and charismatic leaders to succeed."

Many resistance movements such as the Civil Rights Movement with Martin Luther King Jr., the resistance to apartheid with Nelson Mandela, and the India Independence Movement with Gandhi benefited greatly from such leadership. 

Yeah. That works well when you are dealing with western democracies, like the US and the UK. Yes, and even the eevil raciss apartheid regime in South Africa. But the Commie bastards in China?

Joshua Wong, the strong and charismatic leader of the Umbrella movement in 2014, was jailed in 2017 for unlawful assembly. With strong leaders present, the authorities can arrest them, fatally weakening a movement.

So today's movement in Hong Kong is "leaderless."

Just as they are doing with seemingly every obstacle in their way, Hong Kong protesters innovated around the need for a strong leader. They are using communications technology to be both highly organized and leaderless, leaving the authorities unable to take out any key elements that would cause the effort to collapse. 

Remember? The whole idea of the internet, when invented by DARPA, was that it was decentralized and could survive having links chopped off.

Now, it is perfectly obvious that the four Squaddies don't have to worry about stuff like that. They are celebrated by our ruling-class media and would never get taken out by the authorities. Because the whole liberal-left universe would rise up with one voice to damn to bottomless perdition anyone that tried.

So you can see that the folks at Google, guys like James Damore and Zachary Vorhies, are the real thing. They got fired from Google for their insolence, their acts of lèse majesté. Not to mention their acts of sacrilege against the sacred objects of the regime religion.

Yes. The whole game of liberal activism is fake. Because it is all conducted with the concurrence of the regime. The purpose of the liberal activist is to gin up an apparent groundswell of support for some lefty agenda item: See! The People are rising up in rebellion. We must Act Now!

Notice that if unapproved groups try a bit of activism and peaceful protest they are roundly condemned by all the right people as racists and terrorists.

But real "activism" is a political movement that sets itself up in opposition to the ruling class, where its activists run the risk of losing their jobs and having their lives ruined.

It has been many a long day since that was true about any lefty activist in the US and Europe.

Understanding Tlaib: The Culture of Innocence

There's an ad that runs constantly at my gym LA Fitness. It has the girl gym employees protesting against stinky gym bags, complete with protest signs and rhyming couplets.

There is something about women picking up on a political meme. It shows that the political issue in question has passed from the phase of a genuine movement against injustice to a fashion statement.

Want to see confirmation of this? Try this piece on "luxury beliefs," where the upper class has moved on from defining itself in terms of luxury goods -- that you can't afford -- to luxury beliefs that you can't afford. Example: "monogamy is kind of outdated," according to a young woman Yale graduate who is from "an affluent family and works at a well-known technology company."

Yes, she personally intends to have a monogamous marriage — but quickly added that marriage shouldn’t have to be for everyone.

So, the rich and famous can talk about letting it all hang out. But the only thing is that, according to science in Coming Apart by Charles Murray, the rich don't actually do that. Instead they have fabulous careers and merger marriages while the bottom 35 percent don't work much and don't marry much.

Here's another example. Squad member Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) declining to go to Israel to see her grandmother if she couldn't do "activism."

I have decided that visiting my grandmother under these oppressive conditions stands against everything I believe in--fighting against racism, oppression [and] injustice.

Now, Rep. Tlaib, as I understand, represents a district that includes the Muslim part of Detroit, Michigan. Are the Muslims fighting there against racism and oppression and injustice? I doubt it. I've been to the Muslim area of Detroit, and eaten in a Middle Eastern restaurant there. It looked to me as though the Muslim "community" in Detroit was doin' fine. The black community, not so much.

Are the Muslims in Detroit being denied the vote? No, I don't think so; certainly not if a Muslim woman from Palestine gets to be their representative. Are the Muslims in Detroit unable to get jobs? I doubt it, considering the apparent prosperity of the Muslim quarter around Hamtramck. Injustice? Hardly, considering how much horsepower our ruling class puts into fighting Islamophobia.

I mean. When the ruling class is putting a thumb on the scales of justice in your favor, I don't believe you can cry "injustice" with any credibility.

I am trying to follow the demand that the opera composer Verdi places on his librettist, Piave, in the TV series The Life of Verdi to avoid extra, useless words. In fact, how about distilling the whole thing down to "one word!" says Verdi. "Oh yeah," says Piave, rolling his eyes.

So what I am trying to do is distill the whole fake "culture of activism" down to one word, or at least a Nietzschean aphorism. "Luxury Beliefs" is certainly a starter. Then there is the notion of "The Conceit of Innocence."

Here's what I mean by the Conceit of Innocence.

Marx proposes that the workers were helpless innocents. Very good. The workers certainly had it tough in the 1830s, although perhaps not as tough as their ancestors struggling in the breakup of the feudal system. But the activists leading them were usually not workers. They were, like Marx, scions of the middle class, that were doin' fine. So they chose to lead the workers to paradise; it gave their lives meaning.

You can certainly say that Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington were the real deal, former slaves. Of course, they were guys that wanted to be not-slaves, to be independent, responsible free men working for a living. Then there was W.E.B. Du Bois. He was a middle-class black from way back. La Wik:

[His mother] Mary Silvina Burghardt's family was part of the very small free black population of Great Barrington and had long owned land in the state.

Du Bois was a lefty academic. He believed that the black population should be led by its "talented tenth."

The feminist movement has always been a movement of the well-to-do, and it remains so today.

Let's return to the "luxury beliefs" above. Marx, Du Bois, and feminists like Simone de Beauvoir were all upper-middle-class intellectuals. They made their bones spinning likely stories about racism, oppression and injustice. Their writing gave their lives meaning.

Now let's talk about a real movement for justice: the Indian National Movement. The story of the Brits in India and the movement for an Indian Nation is almost a stage play about the modern era.

The Brits in India starts with the Brits establishing trading ports at Bombay, Madras and Calcutta. They wanted to trade in Indian textiles and spices, but they had a problem: the Indian feudal lord next door. The Brits wanted a nice stable law-governed place where they could do business. But, from the Muslim Mughals to the local Hindu prince, the status quo was a feudal lord and his court. And below that were lesser landowners and the peasantry. For the Brits this was inconvenient and also dangerous, because the feudal lords operated on a loot and plunder system which might extend, with the Marathis, to actual raids into neighboring feudatories. Bad for bidness.

As the Brits extended the sway of their European nation-state market-economy law-governed society it more-or-less forced the princes and a slowly emerging middle class to adapt to it. By the middle of the 19th century you could say that an actual "Indian public opinion" had begun to operate, because of communications, newspapers, and the India-wide regime of peace enforced by the British Raj.

Here's an example of what I mean. Starting in 1770, any time there was a failure of the monsoon resulting in a famine, the disaster became a political scandal for the Brits. The Brits responded by creating government programs of relief and of moving grain to the famine areas which got easier once the railway age got established. Here's my take. Before the Brits came India would have been so fragmented and communications would be so poor that nobody would know about a famine outside the affected area. Anyway, absent modern transportation there was nothing a ruler could do about it anyway. So no news. No scandal. Just an act of God.

The more the 19th century advanced the more that the notion of Britain being a foreign Paramount Power exercising hegemony over South Asia became a scandal: not just to the rising class of educated Indians, but to the Brits themselves. We moderns just experience foreign rule over a subject population as sick and wrong: racist, oppressive, and unjust, in the words of Rep. Tlaib. We cringe at the very thought of it.

So you can see that in India the notion of an Indian National Movement to create an India for the Indians is really an artefact of western European moral and political culture. Before the Brits got there it was unthinkable in the strict sense: nobody would have thought it. And when the Indians did in fact create an Indian national state, they created two of them: one Hindu and one Muslim. That, I propose is according to the logic of human life, that politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion.

Notice that the Palestinian Question, beloved by Rep. Tlaib, is not quite as simple as the Indian Question. In the good old days of the Ottoman Empire, nominally Muslim, all kinds of different religious communities existed side-by-side. As soon as the Ottoman Empire collapsed these religious differences took on a new salience, in which, obviously, the Jewish desire for their own nation state was a big factor. The Jews, being highly intellectual and westernized, were already prepared, without instruction from the Brits, to form their own nation state. The rest of the Middle East, not so much.

In fact, I would suggest that in the Middle East the national idea has not yet really triumphed over the previous culture of religion-and-tribe.

I guess here's my point about Rep. Tlaib and "racism, oppression and injustice." Such notions are western notions that only apply when the idea of nation of laws and the idea that there should be no discrimination by race have captured the culture.

And, I would argue, these notions are, to a great extent, not salient in a fully-developed western nation, where such questions have already been resolved. They are an obsession of upper-class scions looking for "luxury beliefs" to give their lives meaning and enable them to lord it over the lesser breeds without the law such as deplorables.

When you are an upper-class scion wanting to give meaning to your life through activism and fighting "racism, oppression, and injustice" you start, I think, with a Presumption of Helpless Victimized Innocence for your chosen victims. And you go from there.

Actually, I suspect that the Culture of Innocence is a necessary part of the culture of a minority community in a larger society. You have to have sharp elbows to survive, and you have to justify the sharp actions that it takes to survive in a cruel, heartless world. You can't allow yourselves to think about all the deals and compromises and betrayals that it took to survive. That's because you must be mobilized and prepared, at any moment, to fight for your life. So you develop a Culture of Innocence.

Obviously, this situation is the situation of Jews down the ages. The question is: can the Jews in, say, the US relax, and just take their place in our modern multicultural post-industrial society? Or should Jews remain mobilized, because at any moment, the left -- that was invented by Jews -- could turn on Jews in the service of black racists and resentful Muslims? Or maybe, pace New York Times, the threat could come from the right and its resentful deplorables?

You tell me.

UPDATE: See also "Deliver Us from Innocence" by Mark Bauerlein. From a reader.

The New York Times' Problem

Whaddya going to do, if you are the executive editor of the New York Times? I mean, how do you report the news and also cater to the world view of your employees and readers?

I gotta say, reading the inside story of Dean Baquet talking to the folks in his newsroom, that it ain't easy. For instance,

Staffer: Could you explain your decision not to more regularly use the word racist in reference to the president’s actions?

Baquet's answer is waffle-waffle-waffle.

I’m not saying we would never use the word racist. I’m talking about that weekend. You quote the remarks. The most powerful journalism I have ever read, and that I’ve ever witnessed, was when writers actually just described what they heard and put them in some perspective.  

Translation: we are using "white nationalist" and "white supremacist" instead of "racist" these days.

Earth to New York Times bubble. The Civil Right Act was passed half a centuy ago. That was final. So now you chaps are reduced to accusing people of saying racist things. But what matters is racist acts, like, oh, I don't know, the government having racial quotas. The universities having diversity goals. And that includes diverstiy hires at the New York Times.

Rule One. The guy that brings up race is the real racist.

Why do I say that? Science, that's why.

See, science says that the interesting thing about, say, vision, is that the whole point is to decide what to notice. There is a riverful of information coming in through the eyes. But none of us has the time and the processing power to evaluate everything. We need to determine: what is the important information?

For instance that stripey-looking pattern over on the middle-right: how should I interpret it? As a pattern of sunshine through a patch of bamboo? As a rugby player? As a beautful young woman in a fashionable dress? As a zebra? As a man-eating tiger?

You can see that the name of the game is interpretation. It depends what you want to see. Are you a young man full of hormones? Are you a big-game hunter? Are you a tourist in a tiger reserve?

Are you a political lefty obsessed with race fifty years after the Civil Rights Act?

Psychologist Jordan B. Peterson of 10 Rules says that we look at the world through the lens of our values. Which is to say that we are programmed to notice the things that are important to us.

This is why conservatives are wrong to say that "we" use logic and reason while liberals and the left are directed by their feelings. Not at all. We conservatives believe that government should not be in the business of bringing all human life under the supervision of government. We tend to think that, after protecting us from enemies foreign and domestic, the government does not have much left to do. Of course we rely on science -- political philosophy and economics -- for this. But we don't know that our ideas are true. We merely have faith in them. Just as liberals have faith that racism is running rampant throughout our society, and cite events that prove, to them, that racism is still a scourge.

If you are a person that believes, according to the best science known to you and your pals in the liberal bubble, that racism is getting worse, because Trump is dog-whistling racism to his base, then of course you think that the New York Times should be shining the light of truth on Trump's racism each and every day.

If you believe, like me, that government basically did its job on race half a century ago in passing the Civil Rights Act, and that there is not much more that is possible for government to do without messing things up, then you look on liberal interest in racism as ignorance at best, foolishness at least, utter blindness to reality without doubt, and bad faith at worst.

And there is no doubt that if you are a racism-believer then Donald Trump rallying the white working class is a frightening, terrifying event. Why look at the "murder" of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri! Why hasn't the whole police department in Ferguson been sent to jail for racism?  Whatabout Trump and Cummings. How dare, How Dare the president criticize Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) for the mess in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hey, it all depends on how you interpret events. Do you think that Michael Brown was a drugged-out thief that was threatening a policeman? Or do you think he was a helpless victim gunned down by a racist white policeman? It all depends on the values filter with which you interpret events.

Do you think that Rep. Elijah Cummings is a corrupt politician or a heroic leader of his people? It all depends how you view the world, and whether you have a Black Lives Matter yardsign in your front yard.

Of course, in my view the problem is that the more people look at the world exclusively through the lens of their values the more, in effect, they are bringing their religion into the public square. There is nothing particularly scandalous about this; everybody does it.

But our Founders, back in the day, thought that religion and the state should be at arms length from each other. Because the larger a society the more likely that it will include people that disagree about the proper value-lens with which people should interpret the world. They thought, a century after the Thirty Years War and Salem witches, that when religious people get to dominate the public square with their values and name and shame people that disagree with them, then they are setting society up for a religious war.

And of course, the bigger the government the more it is using taxpayers money and the votes of the majority to impose one world view upon another.

But if you are a person that cannot see anything except "my values good" and "your values bad" then you will not have a clue about this.

Rather like the chaps that read and write the New York Times.

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!