Government is Force. Part 742

It's just a minor piece from Steven Greenhut in California, "Taking Property for Fun and Profit," about high property prices in California and the resort to government to Do Something about it.

That is to say, they propose to solve the problem with Force. Of course they do, because Government Is Force.

You don't like the way that the world has treated you? If you are the Vikings you get in your longships and head out for a bit of loot and plunder. If you are a worker in the late 19th century hammered by the Long Depression of the 1870s and 1880s, you strike your employer to protest wage cuts.

If you are a homeless mom in Oakland, why, you take over a vacant house and the local activists celebrate you.

As one of these Oakland moms said, “Housing is a human right. I pay bills there. I pay water, PG&E, internet. We live there. We want to purchase the home; it needs to belong back in the hands of the community. It was stolen through the foreclosure crisis.”

Or this in Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles city council might use the power of eminent domain to seize a 124-unit apartment building called Hillside Villa in Chinatown.

See, back in 1986 when the owner built the apartments, part of the deal with the government was to provide some below-market-rate apartments. Now, 30 years later, the owner wants the rent the apartments out at market rates, but "Councilman Gil Cedillo’s plan would have the city take the apartment building to maintain the lower rents."

The point is that all this government force doesn't solve the housing affordability crisis. As Greenhut writes:

The bigger issue, however, is that Los Angeles and other California cities have screwed up their housing markets through decades of excess regulation, slow-growth rules, rent controls, and other policies that depress housing construction and drive up the price of the housing that everyone says they want.

Yeah. And where are the wise heads in the media telling us everyday that regulation, slow-growth, environmental rules, rent control are the best way in the world to destroy the housing stock in a city and make it affordable only for the very rich?

How can it be that a presidential candidate like Bernie Sanders that wants government to take over everything from health care to student loan forgiveness is not laughed out of court?

OK, so Bernie's supporters feature kids from educated families that have had everything handed to them and don't see why it shouldn't continue.

And every kid today seems to be taught the holy art of activism and peaceful protest and the fun of making protest signs and banners.

But suppose I sent out to the local yard-sign company and axed 'em to make me up a sign like this to put in my front yard?

Or this one?

Do you think that I would get my car keyed by some irate Bernie Bro? Or similar Subaru type with a COEXIST bumper-sticker?

You tell me.

Now I think, in fact, that we humans are in a confusing transition era, between the necessity of force to protect our food-growing land in the old days and the necessity, today, of cooperating with everyone in the world to make and sell things.

And I think that our lefties are glorious reactionaries, overflowing with nostalgia for the good old days when every man word his salt was a warrior. Or a revolutionary.

But I say that today's activists are reactionaries, imagining themselves as revolutionaries. Bu they are really modern Don Quixotes, for

activism is part medieval knight-errantry, part pro-regime street-thuggery, and part activisme, or gentry kids putting on a play.

"Activisme" is French for "activism." If you were wondering.

But it still comes down to "Government is Force." And, I think, force is on its way out. Like slavery.

But you knew that.

Deficits: Where Does It End?

The deficit hawks are always there, worrying about deficits as far as the eye can see. And they are right. Sooner or later the bill will come due.

Here's a piece featuring Fed Chairman Jerome Powell worrying about how the Fed can fight the next recession when interest rates are already at all time lows. Well, it turns out that he'll just print money, like the last time. But whatabout the budget?

“Putting the federal budget on a sustainable path when the economy is strong would help ensure that policy makers have the space to use fiscal policy to assist in stabilizing the economy during a downturn,” Powell told the House Financial Services Committee.

Yes, Yes. Of course. Let's Do Something about the deficit and solve all our problems. We could, you know. Because we did it before. See my "Federal Debt Analysis" and this chart.

See what's going on? In World War II our politicians shot the federal debt up to 120 percent of GDP to fight the Nazis and the Japs. Then, for the next 35 years until 1980 they brought the federal debt down to about 30 percent of GDP.

Look what happened then. Our politicians, led by Ronald Reagan, pushed the federal debt up to 60 percent of GDP by the end of the 1990-91 recession.

Then we had the mother of all financial crashes, 1929 excepted, in 2008. And our politicians ran the federal debt up to 100 percent of GDP.

So you tell me. What is different about now compared to the 35 years after WWII?

Well, all I suggest is that, back in the day, the ruling class all agreed -- nod, nod, wink, wink -- to haul the debt down from the wartime peak at 120 percent of GDP. No talking out of school, chaps, we just do it.

But then the Dems did the Great Society in the 1960s and failed to curb it when the data showed it was a failure, as documented by Charles Murray in Losing Ground.

So chaps like Ronald Reagan said: OK, if you Dems aren't going to curb your failed programs we aren't going to play green-eyeshade accountants over taxes. We are just going to cut tax rates and let her roll. Hey, the spending programs all benefit your Dem voters anyway; it's your job to look after them.

And that has been the rule ever since. When Dems get in they up taxes a bit and spending a lot. When GOPs get in they cut taxes a chunk and increase spending a bit.

President Trump has done nothing except continue that policy. Only now the federal debt, instead of 30 percent of GDP in 1980, is over 100 percent of GDP.

So, sooner or later, something will have to give. But what?

OK. So what gives? Well, roughly speaking 25 percent of the federal budget is defense, 25 percent is health care as in Medicare and Medicaid, 25 percent is Pensions including Social Security, and the rest is up for grabs, except for interest on the debt which right now is at about 10 percent of the federal budget.

Right now, nobody is willing to cry Uncle. Old men won't let anyone touch their Social Security. Old women and daughters of old women won't let anyone touch their Medicare. Defense? Maybe. Welfare? Maybe. The "Remainder" that includes interest on the debt? Well, that's the money that the educated Gentry feeds on in grants and deep-state sinecures.

So you can see that nothing will happen until the pips begin to squeak.

And you can be sure that whatever happens the old geezers like me will demand to keep the benefits we paid for and the deep state will demand its grants and sinecures.

So the guy that will get hurt will be that fellow behind the tree.

The only optimistic thought is that the ruling class will want to solve the problem without a total economic meltdown because if there is a true economic meltdown then their power as a ruling class might come under revolutionary challenge.

And we wouldn't want that would we?

But, there is a problem. Look at Nancy Pelosi. I look at Nancy Pelosi and I don't see a full deck of cards. I see someone blundering around in a strange land that Daddy never told her about.

And that could be a problem.

Scott Alexander's Two Tribe System vs. My Three Peoples

I just picked up a link to Scott Alexander's Slate Star Codex piece "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup." It models the US as Blue Tribe vs. Red Tribe on the current political color model inaugurated in 2000 that makes liberals blue and conservatives red. Rather than lefties red on account of the Red Flag of communism.

The Red Tribe is most classically typified by conservative political beliefs, strong evangelical religious beliefs, creationism, opposing gay marriage, owning guns, eating steak, drinking Coca-Cola, driving SUVs, watching lots of TV, enjoying American football, getting conspicuously upset about terrorists and commies, marrying early, divorcing early, shouting “USA IS NUMBER ONE!!!”, and listening to country music. 

The Blue Tribe is most classically typified by liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated, mocking American football, feeling vaguely like they should like soccer but never really being able to get into it, getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots, marrying later, constantly pointing out how much more civilized European countries are than America, and listening to “everything except country”.

This was written back in 2014. Before Trump.

Notice what is missing? The Victims Tribe. Actually, Alexander does get to them, eventually, when he says that

Research suggests Blue Tribe / Red Tribe prejudice to be much stronger than better-known types of prejudice like racism. Once the Blue Tribe was able to enlist the blacks and gays and Muslims in their ranks, they became allies of convenience who deserve to be rehabilitated with mildly condescending paeans to their virtue.  

Oh. But do you notice something? Blacks and gays and Muslims are not accorded the dignity of identity, or of a tribe of their own. They are just to be enlisted into the Blue Tribe. In other words, Alexander confirms my doctrine of the Victims as "Little Darlings" that the Blue Tribe dotes on. The Little Darlings are wonderful and pure and perfect until they are no longer useful politically, like the white working class.

But, of course, Scott Alexander goes on for 8,500 words without really describing the point of it all.

The point is that the Blue Tribe is the Gentry, the creatures of the ruling class, and they are ambitious. Yarvin calls their ambition thymos, from the Greek, meaning in Plato: Spiritedness (ego, glory, honor). For Yarvin, "thymos is somewhere between ambition, honor, and vanity."

And the Red Tribe is the Commoners, ordinary people that just obey the law, go to work, and follow the rules.

I am referring here to Curtis Yarvin's "Clear Pill" notion of a three-layer society, of Gentry, Commoners and Clients, where

The gentry are urbanites, cultivated and ambitious; the commoners are suburbanites, educated and independent; the clients are Marx’s proletariat and lumpenproletariat, uneducated and/or dependent.

Yarvin's three layers correspond pretty nearly to my reductive Three Peoples theory, in which my People of the Creative Self are his Gentry, my People of the Responsible Self are his Commoners, and my People of the Subordinate Self are his Clients.

Now it seems to me pretty clear that the thymos of the Blue Tribe or Gentry depends upon the opportunity for glorious deeds. Back in the day, these deeds were military, warrior deeds. These days the warriors are become social justice warriors, bending the arc of history towards justice and bravely whacking the Red Tribe, the Commoners, into surly and demoralized obedience for the notorious thought crimes of racism-sexism-homophobia. And the Blue Tribe, the Gentry, are held together by their hatred of ordinary Commoners. Not really accorded agency are the Clients of the ruling class, blacks and Hispanics and Muslims and immigrants, who are useful as soldiers in the political wars.

The whole of Scott Alexander's piece describes in excruciating detail how the Blue Tribe hatred of the Red Tribe works. And, boy, it works beautifully. But what it does not point out is the point of it all, indeed the point of all tribalism.

The point of tribalism is to unite the group to fight against the foe. Which is usually next door. And it performs a real function, which is to protect the tribe's food-growing land and the very food that the tribe eats.

Obviously this tribal instinct can be abused. For instance, it can be turned inward so that the tribe finds itself split into two factions that experience each other as the enemy rather than the tribe next door. Maybe the tribe will split in two and divide its tribal lands in two.

Or, as in the 20th century, the tribal instinct can be used to make the industrial nation state next door the enemy, when the nation state is no longer a semi-isolated group depending for survival on its food-growing land but on its ability to produce and sell its industrial and intellectual products. What, you might ask, is the point of Germany and France going to war in 1914? Or in 1939? Hitler had the idea in Mein Kampf that Germany needed food-growing land. Because of course it did.

The same argument can be made about the current culture war between the Blue Tribe and the Red Tribe, or the domination of the Commoners by the Gentry and their allies the Clients. If there is no external enemy then you naturally switch to an internal enemy.

If you are going to have politics you are going to have Us and Them. Because that is the whole point of politics, to stand forth as the savior of the tribe and protect the tribe from its enemies.

Now, given that humans naturally divide up into Us and Them, into Red Tribes and Blue Tribes, it would seem that wise men would seek to find a way to tamp down this natural divisiveness down to a dull roar.

Oh yeah. Limited government. Separation of powers. Creating a defense in depth against political ambition and rage. Oh, and above all, separating government, the sector of force, from religion, the sector of meaning.

Oh yeah. That's what all the political thinking of the eighteenth century was about: trying to avoid a repeat of the religious wars of the seventeenth century. By getting everyone to cool their jets, and trying to take religion out of politics.

But try telling your Blue Tribe friend that modern leftist politics is religion by any other name.

Hey, today's lefty liberals have almost convinced me of Marx's dictum that

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. 

Only it's not quite the way that Marx and Bernie and the Bernie Bros and the Blue Tribe of the Gentry think. It's not about heroic revolutionaries saving the proletarians from the savage power of the bourgeoisie. Not any more.

No, I'd say that today's class war is about saving the ordinary Commoner from the Gentry's need for meaning.

And that's what gives my life meaning. So to speak.

The German Turn: How Germans Invented the Modern World

If you want to understand the modern world, a good place to start is with Kant, woken up from a dogmatic slumber by the philosophy of David Hume.

What it meant was the end of the Age of Reason, the conceit that humans had banished ignorance and superstition with the triumph of human logic and reason.

It started with Kant and ran for over a century. Whether you consider it ended when Hitler flung the brain of Germany across the Atlantic to the US of A, or perhaps later with Marcuse and Habermas, I call it the German Turn.

Back in the day it was called "the German pestilence that would ruin almost two millennia of facts about the Bible."

My relationship with the German Turn began when I read this, from F.S.C. Northrop of Yale. It's in The Meeting of East and West, Chapter V, German Idealism:

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature, which defined the foundations of traditional French and Anglo-American democratic culture, has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.

If you have never heard of F.S.C. Northrop, here is a clue from British philosophy popularizer Bryan Magee, who wrote "F.S.C. Northrop... remains one of the only two people I have ever met with what tempts me to call... a genius for teaching."

Never have I known anyone so excited by ideas; and he was able to pass on not only the ideas but also the excitement. He would walk into the room already talking, and from then on perfectly formed sentences would come geysering out of his head as if he were a gusher blowing its top... [W]e were stimulated as I have never known any other teacher stimulate his students. Bright young graduate students would emerge from his seminars thrilled by the prospects they had just glimpsed and impatient to pursue them... and they would rush straight to the library, lusting to get at the books.

But what does this mean?

It means, to begin with Kant, that we don't experience the world directly as commonplace objects like mothers, tables, chairs, dogs, horses, and food, as we imagine. We cannot know "things-in-themselves" but only the sense impressions from our five senses, most notably vision, that have been processed into a vision of the world by our brain and its "categories."

What, you might ask? What craziness is this, when we can't even accept the reality of the every-day world around us? Well, I would now say, after 20-odd years reading and thinking and writing about this, it is the beginning of wisdom.

Here is what I wrote, for American Thinker, nearly 15 years ago in "Conservatives and the Creative Impulse." Let us start with the phenomenon of Freud and the notion of the unconscious underneath our conscious mind.

Freud's psychology may seem to conservative Americans as a sudden, irrational outburst from Teutonic Europe.  But his psychology develops naturally out of Kant's conscious ego, Fichte's impulsive ego, Hegel's stage theory of consciousness, and Schopenhauer's theory of repression.  The key link in this chain is Johann Gottlieb Fichte, because he isolates the key factor in human knowledge: humans.

How does knowledge come into the world?  Descartes thought that knowledge came from a scientist making logical inferences from known indubitable facts to a necessary theory.  But Fichte showed that facts are dead, and dead men tell no tales.  It is the free imaginative act of the scientist that breathes life into facts to create a new theory.  And that act comes from impulse: "All our thought is founded on our impulses," he wrote.  It was surely Fichte that gave the great generation from Einstein to Heisenberg permission to think the unthinkable and shock the world with modern physics.

Of course Fichte’s discovery applied not just to scientists. Artists and writers were delighted to think the unthinkable—and do it too. A century later, Freud taught the young artist to regard his dreams as a holy font of impulse welling up from the unconscious id and to fear that repressing it would lead to neurosis. 

I am in the middle of reading Freud's On Dreams, and I must say I find it indigestible, partly because I find Freud too mechanical and Newtonian. I prefer the chap that came after Freud, C.G. Jung, who connected the unconscious with all the myths of mankind, as an expression, a welling up, of the human unconscious. Oh yeah. Whatabout Richard Wagner, who created a four-opera cycle about German pre-Christian mythology, The Ring of the Nibelungs, right in the middle of the German Turn.

But notice that Freud did not just appear out of nowhere, and did not invent his idea of the unconscious out of whole cloth. He is the heir to the German thinkers that came before him. Jung says that C.G. Carus invented the unconscious, and Eduard von Hartmann reinterpreted Schopenhauer's Will and Idea into unconscious and conscious thought.

Actually, you could say that the whole German Turn is the development of understanding about the unconscious. When Kant says that we don't know things-in-themselves, but only sense impressions, he is telling us that, unbeknown to us, our unconscious mind is creating an image of the world out of our sense impressions, a theory about the actual things-in-themselves or whatever it is out there.

Jordan B. Peterson comments on this. He says that we -- and the animals -- walk around in the world on the unconscious's autopilot until the moment that something unexpected happens. Then we freeze until we figure out what is going on. In other words, our unconscious theory of the world has broken and we need to mend it with a spot of conscious thought before we proceed.

So the point of the German Turn is to say that the magnificent skyscrapers of logic and temples of reason are built on hidden foundations that we ignore at our risk. These foundations are the hidden depths of the unconscious. Indeed, it may be that 90 percent of our brain action goes on in the unconscious. And, some naughty boys have suggested, maybe the conscious mind is just a movie -- think The Matrix -- that our unconscious mind runs in our brain to make us feel good about ourselves.

One of the consequences of the German Turn is the modern culture of creativity. To repeat Fichte: "All our thought is founded on our impulses." This, of course, is what artists and writers experience. Their stories and theories do not come from pure logic and reason; they come from somewhere deep in the unconscious, or, as opera composer Puccini said of Madama Butterfly, "the music of this opera was dictated to me by God."

Notice how the notion of creativity replaces the old notion of a fixed mechanical universe, and before that of a world run according to the whim of the gods. In the old days, we understood that we were the mere playthings of the gods, and subject to the power plays amongst them. How to get in their good favor? Sacrifice. Then, with the Axial Age religions, we might discover the workings of God's or Nature's universe and we spoke of God's Law. But now we are in the business of creating the future, not merely understanding God's plan and executing it. And our lefty friends are busy creating the future and heaven on earth with their critical theory and activism and peaceful protest.

I have tried to give expression to all this with my reductive Three Peoples theory. My People of the Subordinate Self are people that believe that powerful forces run the world, and that they need to find protection under a powerful lord. My People of the Responsible Self are people that believe in God's Creation and his rational Divine Law, and the point of life is to use reason and logic to find out and live God's plan. My People of the Creative Self are people that believe that they are creating the world through creative process. They are the people inspired by the German Turn.

However, there is a problem. You may have noticed it. There is a tendency for humans only to respect and understand their own kind. Thus People of the Subordinate Self have a tendency to believe that the  rest of the world is out to get them; The People of the Responsible Self have a tendency to think that the Subordinates are lazy bums and that the Creatives are whacky immoralists. The People of the Creative Self tend to believe that Responsibles are racist-sexist-homophobes and that the Subordinates are helpless victims of the bigoted Responsibles.

But I think that my wonderful Three Peoples theory, as a stage theory of consciousness -- see Hegel above -- understands and respects humans at all levels of consciousness as it also understands why people at different levels mistrust and dislike "the other."

I have recently come into contact with Curtis Yarvin's "Clear Pill" and his three-layer model of society, of Gentry, Commoners, and Clients. Says he:

The gentry are urbanites, cultivated and ambitious; the commoners are suburbanites, educated and independent; the clients are Marx’s proletariat and lumpenproletariat, uneducated and/or dependent.

So great minds think alike.

Now, I believe that Kant's dictum that we don't know things-in-themselves leads directly to the revolution in physics, of curved space in relativity, of indeterminacy and the state function in quantum mechanics.

I believe that Fichte's "impulse" theory of thought leads directly to our notion of creativity and the Freud and Jung theories of the unconscious.

I believe that Jung's theory of the individual and the collective unconscious and the archetypes allows us to connect with and understand our pre-rational ancestors and their mythologies.

And I believe that Nietzsche's theory of the will to power is what powers the modern notion of creativity and perhaps even Schumpeter's notion of economic "creative destruction." For instance, I was just reading Nietzsche this morning and he talked in Will to Power §784 about freedom and power.

One desires freedom so long as one does not possess power. Once one does possess it, one desires to overpower; if one cannot do that (if one is still too weak to do so), one desires "justice," i.e., equal power.

And this echoes Horkheimer and Adorno of the Frankfurt School in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order to dominate it and other men.

In other words, the German Turn leads to all things, both good and evil. And "creativity," rather than being the innocent craving of starving artists and writers for inspiration, is really a program of power. For, even back in mythology, it was understood that the god of creativity was also the god of destruction. As in Schumpeter's "creative destruction."

In a way, the German Turn is another expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Before Kant we were innocents in the Garden of Reason and Logic. But now we realize our nakedness, and are ashamed. We have learned frightful powers, and yet, as ever, there is no return to the Garden of Eden. Once you have tasted the apple of the Tree of Knowledge there is no going back.

So we go forward, terrified of our powers, and yet inspired to discover more, still the social animals of Africa that added a new dimension to social cooperation with language, still the creatures that developed logic and reason out of the need to keep our story straight in social interactions, and now conscious of our amazing and frightening creative powers.

That we have the power to make the world anew. And also to destroy it all in less time than it takes to say it.

Thanks to the German Turn it is the best of times; it is the worst of times: the age of wisdom, the age of foolishness.

As it ever was, and is, and shall be.

Bloomberg's Gaffes Tell Us the Truth about Politics

Rule One of politics is that you should never tell the truth. The reason is simple: the whole point of politics is to band together to get something that you couldn't get by ordinary free exchange of labor and/or money.

And obviously, you are going to have to lie to get that something that you shouldn't want.

So, we have the Dem's great billionaire hope, Michael Bloomberg getting blasted for saying, a few years ago, things that you are not allowed to say any more.

A gaffe in politics is when a politician accidentally tells the truth.

Do our liberal friends ever worry about things like that? That things you were allowed to say five years ago are now utterly beyond the pale?

Anyway, Pat Buchanan lists Bloomberg's No-nos for us. The first No-no is the "broken windows" policing concept, that you police the areas where the crime is.

"One of the unintended consequences is people say, 'Oh, my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana that are all minorities.' Yes, that's true. Why? Because we put all the cops in minority neighborhoods. ... Why do we do it? Because that is where all the crime is. ... And the way you get the guns out of the kids' hands is to throw them up against the wall and frisk them."

In the book Ghettoside Jill Leovy explains why this is a problem. I wote about this five(!) years ago at American Thinker. It's because in the black community people complain about crime this way. They complain that the courts won't convict the real criminals. Good point: but there is a reason for this. The gang-bangers intimidate potential witnesses, and so they don't testify, and the gang-bangers don't get convicted. But the black community also complains about police harassing folks on the streets. Well, the reason they do that is to nail the known gang-bangers for small infractions on which the arresting officer can testify and ordinary intimidatable eye-witnesses aren't needed.

Do you see the internal contradiction here? If so, go to the head of the class. You are a person that understands why politics never works.

Then there was the gaffe about the Great Recession, about the policy of ending "red-lining" or denying mortgages to poor, usually black, areas. Oh, Mikey, how could you?

"It all started back when there was a lot of pressure on banks to make loans to everyone. ... Redlining ...was the term where banks took whole neighborhoods and said, 'People in these neighborhoods are poor, they're not going to be able to pay off their mortgages, tell your salesmen don't go into those areas.'"

Now, the red-lining started in the New Deal area, after the federal government started its secondary market in mortgages to "help" end the Great Depression. You can see why they might do it. Now that the mortgage market had been taken over by govenment with its Federal Nation Mortgage Association the banks might not care too much about the creditworthiness of the borrowers since they would merely originate the mortage, get all the commissions, and then sell the mortgage to Uncle Sam's Fannie Mae.

Do you see the progression? First we have a Great Depression, the consequence of the Federal Reserve System absolutely cocking-up its response to the credit crisis consequent upon the stock market crash of 1929. Then we have the Federal National Mortgage Association, an attempt to revive the mortgage-lending industry after the wipe-out of the Great Depression. Then we have the need for government regulations to regulate the regulated. Then we have an additional unanticipated consequence, discovered in the civil-rights era, that the victims of the regulation were poor inner-city blacks, therefore racial discrimination. So we decide to take off the regulations that were put in there to stop corrupt activity. And then we have another financial crash that fortunately was a mere echo of the 1929 crash. Although in 2008 as in 1929 the Fed was stumble-bumbling around like a Skid Row drunk. Again.

[What I mean by that is that little Ben Bernacke, Fed Chairman, was saying, in the fall of 2008, that he didn't have the legal authority to bail out Lehman Brothers, and so, instead of nipping the crash in the bud, it went on for another five or six months. Ben, oh Ben! What do you think is the meaning of the phrase that the central bank is the "lender of last resort?"]

See, to me, all this shows that utter flatulence of modern government. What's the point of having police if they don't beat up the latest gang-bangers? That's what police are for: keeping the lower-classes of the time down to a dull roar. And what's the point of government programs and regulation if they tie themselves in knots of utter pointlessness?

My line is that the dirty little secret of modern times is that, really, we need very little government. Because the vast majority of people are good little boys and girls that follow the rules, go to work, and obey the laws, unlike almost any era in history.

Back in the day we needed brave defenders to keep the Vikings or the Mongols from conquering and killing us, raping and enslaving our women, and stealing all our grain.

But in the last 200 years we have entered a new era, where it does not pay to conquer, loot and pillage. Just leave people alone to produce and exchange, and make sure that you are the ruling class that gets its percentage off the top.

Because even with two world wars and endless destruction, the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years has added up to an increase in personal income of 30 times. And we are now, according to experts, down to a global poverty rate of 10 percent that is utterly unprecedented in world history. And all through the development and intensification of people producing, inventing and exchanging, "ships setting sail again, all over the world."

However, now as ever, there is no greater crime in politics than telling the truth. Because we, the voters, insist that our leaders lie to us.

And Michael Bloomberg will have to pay the price for his truth-telling.

Facing the Racism Issue Fair and Square

A friend just wrote about how a TDS acquaintance accused him of racism three years ago. And how he is not a racist.

Then there is Edward Ring at American Greatness writing in "What is Racism Today?" about the utter bankruptcy of the racism issue today: "Unconscious Racism", "Institutional Racism", "Racial Profiling", "Disparate Outcomes/Wealth Inequality", "Environmental Racism", "Racist Voter Supression": all that stuff is just ruling class manipulation.

Listen. We passed civil rights laws half a century ago that made it illegal for the government and private institutions to commit racist acts. Did you observe a racist act yesterday? OK, get onto the Feds. Because racist acts are illegal.

Whatabout racist opinions? Yeah. Big problem. Only thing is that opinions aren't illegal, and can't be prosecuted. Because? Because down the years the legal system has decided that peering into peoples' minds is a very tricky business. And, if you didn't already know, the lefty totalitarian governments of the 20th century with their show trials showed in black and white why basing the legal system on the hunting down of bad thoughts is Not Good.

And anyway, everyone prefers their own kind: by race, by sex, by political allegiance, by every other way that people distinguish themselves as humans.

But here's the problem:

We have made white racist thoughts shameful, but we have celebrated black racist thoughts.

We have made male sexist thoughts shameful, but we have celebrated feminist sexist thoughts.

We have made homophobic thoughts shameful, but we have celebrated homosexual bigotry.

And yes. I am a racist-sexist-homophobe. How about you?

The problem is that, right now, even President Trump lacks the cultural power to tell the lefty racist-sexist-heterophobes to go pound sand. So what do we do about it?

We The People need to get out in front on this. And we need to do it with the male Insult Culture.

"I'm a racist? Oh yeah? So you advocate "diversity and inclusion." That's racist to the back molar."

"I'm a sexist? Oh yeah? Tell that to the feminazis! Talk about toxic sexism!"

"I'm a homophobe? So what! The gays already got their gay marriage."

The truth is that everyone is a racist. It's just that in our society the cultural wokerati have arrogated to themselves the power to determine what kind of racism is bad: anything expressed by white deplorables; and what kind of racism is good: "mostly peaceful protests" by Black Lives Matter.

Now President Trump is developing a masterful campaign to encourage blacks and Hispanics to leave their racist ghettos and identify as Commoner Americans in the coming elections. Dear God, I hope he succeeds.

Because the educated Gentry is driving us down the road to the racial and sexual War of All Against All. They have the conceit that, because they are educated and evolved, they will be able to control the battle -- as maybe the Capitol guys in the Hunger Games.

In fact they are fools and knaves playing with matches in the middle of a drought. They have no idea of the disaster that they are setting up. Of course not. Because they have never had a serious thought in their lives.

Bottom line: we made racial and sexual discrimination illegal half a century ago. Now it's time for all the activists to go home and find something else to activate.

And the rest of us must stop being terrified of being called racists, expecially old geezers like me that can't be fired from their jobs by a lefty mob.

"Call me a racist? Sure. So what yer goin' to do about it? String me up from the nearest tree? Burn me like a witch?"

What Would It Take To Wean Kids Off Socialism, Bernie?

It's no secret that the prime supporters of ageing "democratic socialist" Bernie Sanders, winner in the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire, are young people.

Because?

Yeah, really. What in the world do rich white kids think they are doing?

There are many reasons offered to explain the support for socialism in the young:

• Socialist ideology is like a family: your share of the loot and your share of the work are determined by family relationships.
• What do you expect from the teachers at government child custodial facilities?
• Nearly all politicians and activists are in the game of selling more government loot. Where is the percentage for anyone active in politics to say: Hey, we need a lot less government force!
• Nearly all journalists are in the game of political push and shove. Who wants to read about price theory and regulatory capture?
• Nearly all academics are in the game of selling "with this weird trick we can tranform society." Just like the click-bait artists.
• Nearly everyone feels that, if they lost their job, where would they look fo help? The market?
• And anyway, whatabout Marx, Engels, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse and the rest? Exactly; rich kids, sons of businessmen. Why should our rich white kids be any different?

Plus, the world of universal wage labor and capitalist production is brand new. Five hundred years ago almost everyone in the world was a peasant, a serf or slave subordinate to some local lord. And that fake family, that would take care of you, maybe, was the inheritor of the extended family of the hunter-gatherer band.

So we are living in a totally new world, and it is not surprising that the most obvious cultural meme is what I call the Great Reaction, a retrospective ideology that instinctively lurches back to the old and familiar.

And even if we decided to teach the kiddies to love the market, which might work for boys that are coded for war and danger, whatabout the girls? We are teaching girls that they can be superheroes, but the most notable cultural development of recent years, I'd say, is the concern with "microaggressions" and "safe spaces," and that is girl stuff. Women are easily offended, and do not like to interact like men in the male Culture of Insult; and women do not like physical danger, not at all: they want to be safe and their loved ones too.

So I say that, probably for girls and young women, it's a hopeless cause. Women expect to be protected and always will.

But boys: Well, I think that boys should be chucked out of school at 13 and expected to take up apprenticeships -- or internships if you prefer -- and these apprenticeships should be away from home. And boys that want more school-learning should be forced to crawl over broken glass to get it. OK. I know this will never work for rich kids, because mothers. But for the rest it will generate rough, tough hombres with a Nietzschean tolerance for a good deal of "accidents and nonsense." And they will be the kind of men that don't want to be soft soy boys in their parents' basement. And they won't be Bernie Bros.

I also think that all government education should be transformed into parent-controlled vouchers, so that parents can choose their kids' education from a whole menu of options. Poor parents could choose KIPP schools to get their kids into the middle class. Or Rudolf Steiner schools for rich kids to make them into creative artists. Or home schools run by the neighborhood mothers. Or college prep schools to get kids into the fancy-pants selective colleges. Or other types of schools that I would never have thought of.

Hey, I know. Maybe the Bernie Bro phenomenon is the last gasp of socialism, because whatever comes next is going to be different.

What will that thing be? I have no idea, except that I suspect it will be derivative of the German Turn from Kant to Jung. But I am sure that it will make everyone from me to the local lefty absolutely outraged.

And why not?

Why should rich lefty white kids set the agenda for the nation? Whatabout diversity and inclusion? Whatabout if diversity turns out to be the rising generation of minority Commoners that want to be resourceful and independent and proud and not tied to liberal rich white kids?

Why can't the rest of us have fun?