What Will Happen to the Economy Post-COVID?

The three trillion dollar stimulus of the last year -- see my COVID-19 page for details -- carpet-bombed the economy during the spring lockdown. But now what?

The hard part of national economics is what to do after the war or the stock-market crash or the epidemic, and past history is not very encouraging.

Back in the days of the gold standard, governments would implement policy of "resumption," to cancel the inflation of the war years and return the value of the national currency to its pre-war level. The idea was to pay back holders of government debt for their losses during the war inflation. The results were not happy.

After the Napoleonic War the Brits were determined to get back to pre-war parity. The result was deflation and unhappy workers, like the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 and the Captain Swing riots of 1830. Of course it all ended happily ever after with the Great Reform Bill of 1832.

After the US Civil War which featured a ton of paper money and debt, the government determined to return to the pre-war parity of the dollar. This led to the Great Panic of 1873. Farmers that took out mortgages in the 1860s were screwed because their farm mortgages were underwater -- also debtors in general. What followed was the Long Depression. And then there was the Panic of 1893 with a depression that lasted until 1896. Remember William Jennings Bryan and the "Cross of Gold" speech, as in "You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." He means the gold standard.

After World War I countries like Britain and the US went back on the gold standard at pre-war parities. And the workers and debtors hated it. Of course, Germany, dismembered by the Treaty of Versailles, was unable to service its war debts and keep paying all its social democratic benefit programs and so devalued the currency in hyper-inflation and wiped out the widows and orphans in the middle class that kept their savings in Reichmarks. Thanks, pal, said Adolf Hitler.

After the 1929 stock market crash the US Federal Reserve Board fluffed its first financial crisis by failing to act as lender of last resort. With the help of the New Dealers this gave the US a ten-year Great Depression that only ended when the US started spending (and releasing business from regulation) in the run-up to World War II.

After World War II there was not a depression. But the dollar was kept at its pre-war value. The US government ran surpluses for a couple years, but managed to get the federal debt down from over 100 percent GDP down to 35 percent of GDP. I still don't know how they did it.

Then we had the Crash of 2008, when Little Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, failed to act as lender of last resort when Lehman Brothers went south. Ben, oh Ben! Then with Barack Obama as president the federal government decided it was more important to do gubmint health care than to get the economy back on track. Thanks, Barack!

So here we are about to emerge from the tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the question is: how well will the federal government handle it, threading the needle between getting the economy back on track, avoiding inflation, and doing or not doing the massive agenda of the climate change religion?

How should the federal government thread the needle? Honestly, I don't have a clue. Except that I know that one thing to do is to put off the elimination of fossil fuels for now, and avoid new subsidies for "renewable energy." And I have a feeling that a President Trump, who knows a thing or two about debt, would do a better job than Joe Biden who, I suspect, literally knows nothing except how to play the game of politics, and will outsource economic policy to conventional-wisdom swamp creatures.

One thing from the post WWI German hyper-inflation. Stocks and gold did all right. Bitcoin? Wasn't invented yet.

An Immigrant's Thanks to America

As I get older I appreciate more and more that life is a process of lucky breaks and of successfully dodging bullets.

What a lucky break that my dad, who worked in export for the British electrical manufacturer AEI (now defunct), and got sent out to Denver in 1965 to assist in a wacky electric generation project. 

And so I got to fly out from my first term at the University of Leeds in England to Denver in December of 1965. And I still remember the glorious Colorado dawn viewed from my parent's apartment on 8th & Clarkson on my first morning in the good old USA.

Then we headed out on 6th Avenue in my dad's 1955 Olds 88 and up into the Rocky Mountains on US 40. And so, as soon as I graduated from engineering school in 1968 I immigrated to the United States of America and became a citizen as soon as possible in 1975.

What a lucky break that, with my parents living in India in 1947 the Indians were too busy killing each other in "communal" riots over partition to worry about killing the imperialist Brits, and that we all got out alive in 1948 and returned to Britain.

What a lucky break that my mother, born and raised in Japan, got out in 1940 to "help" her sister with her new baby in Calcutta, India, a comfortable year before Pearl Harbor.

What a lucky break that my father, born and raised in St. Petersburg, Russia, got out in 1918 before the full force of Leninism and civil war could suck him up and destroy him.

Of course, the fact is that we are all the result of lucky breaks and dodged bullets, because if any one of a dozen events had gone the other way none of us would be here.

And so I look on the lucky breaks of my life and my ancestors and marvel.

And now I have six grandchildren, thanks to my two whip-smart accomplished daughters, and now I know that the meaning of life, the universe and everything, is grandchildren.

It's easy to get discouraged by the stolen election, by the Woke Reign of Terror, by the stupidities of Democratic governors imagining that you control an epidemic by keeping people out of churches, by the deficit, by the looming horrors of unfunded entitlements, by the blindness of the Great Reset and Building Back Better. All these inanities will cost us, although I expect they will cost me personally less than ordinary American commoners, to say nothing of "women and minorities hardest hit." And we will not get past the inanities and injustices of today until our liberal friends see disaster and ruin staring them in the face and the American people turn away from them with disgust and scorn.

But meanwhile on this Thanksgiving Day we are still Americans, the best people in the world. We still live in the United States of America, the best country in the world. 

And we ain't seen nothing yet.

Now Penguins are Getting Triggered

Sooner or later it had to happen. Penguins down at the South Pole would want into the fun and games of micro-aggressions and taking offence.

And now it has happened, reported by the lefty wizards at Vice.com. The special snowflake LGBT+ staffers at Penguin Random House are all in a twitter because Penguin is going to publish the sequel to the #1 best-seller 12 Rules. The new book is titled Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life.

(That title is interesting, because in my reductive Three Peoples theory, the middle people are the Responsibles, the people of Order, and the Creatives are the chaps trying to live beyond Order.)

They are all in a twitter because Peterson, who opposed the Canadian C-16 law on preferred pronouns, has become the preferred target of hate for Good Little Girls that Literally Know Nothing. Here is one foolish young thing quoted at Vice.

“He is an icon of hate speech and transphobia and the fact that he’s an icon of white supremacy, regardless of the content of his book, I’m not proud to work for a company that publishes him,” a junior employee who is a member of the LGBTQ community and who attended the town hall told VICE World News. 

It is bootless to get into their whiny girly complaints, except to note that women have a Culture of Complaint.

But obviously Penguin has missed an opportunity to Send a Message to its employees. Something like this:

Hey snowflakes! Get a clue! The whole point of non-fiction publishing is to get new ideas out there. Guess what! New ideas are almost always deeply unsettling to the defenders of conventional wisdom and the status-quo: evidently chaps and chapettes like you.

If you feel that you are not up to the challenge of living and working in the public square where uncomfortable ideas are bruited about by thinkers and writers that may not be quite out of the top drawer I invite you to hand in your resignation. You are not a good fit at Penguin.

Not only that, but any student of The Ruling Class by Gaetano Mosca would know that a sensible ruling class always allows room for upstarts from the lower classes. They bring much needed vigor into the ruling class and help it avoid decaying into a sterile aristocracy that is closed to new blood. A sensible ruling class also keeps the vapid twitterings of upper-class girls on its staff well in check.

I checked over to my pal Vox Day who is a severe critic of Peterson. Of course he is crowing, and offering a copy of his Jordanetics to the snowflakes.

My problem with Vox Day is that when he says something like this that Immanuel Kant was "wrong, completely wrong, and utterly wrong... And the Jungians are not merely wrong, they are mad" he is telling us that he does not understand the German Turn that more or less invented the modern world.

And all Kant said was that we cannot know things-in-themselves, but only appearances. What is so wrong with that?

Jordan Peterson is saying that if we understand Kant and then go through the whole German Turn to Jung then, well then the Jungian archetypes give us a cloudy window into the goings-on inside our unconscious mind. Then if we want to understand hierarchy as a way to reduce violence we should take a look at lobsters, which have been doing hierarchy for 350 million years. Then 12 Steps and Beyond Order: 12 More Steps to Life. Then the idea of the Sacrificial Hero who gives his life on the border between Order and Chaos so that others may live.

We are at an interesting moment in the history of the world. We have a ruling class that just stole an election so it could install a vapid ageing idiot as president. We have chaps like Vox Day still flapping around in the age when reason and logic were going to save the world. We have lefties and their silly snowflake adepts running around trying to stop free speech. We have a clueless health bureaucracy flapping around with terminal incompetence.

And then we have you and me and that fellow behind the tree that hope that we will survive the current madness until a time that the world gets a clue again.

Commoners and National Politics Since 1960

If the 2020 presidential election was stolen, that the Commoner's president was chucked out by the Gentry ruling class, it ain't the first time. Let's run a little narrative about the experience of US Commoners in national politics since 1960.

1960 - The election of Richard Nixon is stolen by Democratic machines in Illinois and Texas. Richard Nixon was born a Commoner: his dad ran a grocery store and gas station in Whittier, California after his ranch failed.

1963 - Right-wingers in Dallas are blamed for the assassination of President Kennedy by leftist Lee Harvey Oswald.

1974 - Commoner President Nixon, champion of the "silent majority," is hounded out of office for deeds that our Democratic friends do every day.

1980 - Candidate Ronald Reagan attracts "Reagan Democrats" to his campaign but all the best people dismisse him as a right-winger and an "amiable dunce." Ronald Reagan was born a Commoner: his dad was a salesman and his mother a member of the Disciples of Christ.

1986 - Deep state runs Iran Contra investigation to try to impeach President Reagan, but fails when Reagan plays Sergeant Schultz and remembers nothing.

1988 - Bush the elder promises "No New Taxes" but reneges, betraying his Commoner supporters.

1992 - Many Commoners desert President Bush and support third-party candidate H. Ross Perot and that helps elect Bill Clinton president.

1994 - With Newt Gingrich in the lead, Commoners elect the first Republican Congress in 40 years, helped by backlash against HillaryCare. Gingrich was born a Commoner: son of a teenage couple whose marriage broke apart within days.

2001 - Second President Bush appeals to patriotism and sends US Commoners to fight in endless Middle Eastern war.

2010 - Spontaneous Tea Party of Commoners arises, rebelling against left-wing agenda of President Obama and his Obamacare. Obama siccs little Lois Lerner on them to hinder their acquisition of tax-exempt status.

2016 - Son of millionaire Donald Trump -- who plays a Commoner on TV -- runs for president explicitly as the candidate of the Commoners. Hillary Clinton calls his supporters a "basket of deplorables." Obama administration spies on Trump campaign and interferes with transition by spying on Trump officials.

2020 - Entire ruling class, from media to social media billionaires to street "activists," runs against Trump, president of the Commoners, and probably steals the election.

As I review the narrative that I have written above, one thing seems to come out at me, something I wrote in my "Commoner Manifesto."

A spectre is haunting the liberal elite -- the spectre of the Commoners. All the powers of the liberal establishment have entered into a secular alliance to exorcise this spectre. Etc.

Am I right or am I right?

It seems to me that as we look back over the last 60 years, what we see is the gradual coming-into-focus of a genuine American Commoner movement. In the beginning, this movement was led by Commoners that had vaulted into the political class with luck and talent, but the movement did not seem to have legs without a leadership from on high.

I propose that in 2010, with the Tea Party, a new phase began, when Commoners organized themselves for political action without assistance from on high. A big "tell" for me was Nancy Pelosi's comment that the Tea Party was AstroTurf. Our Nance could not comprehend political action unless sponsored from on high.

I propose that in 2020 the Trump Car and Boat Parades are another organic self-organizing movement of Commoners. OK, I'm sure that it all had help from the Trump campaign. But something caught fire.

The question is whether this movement can continue without the inspiration and energy of Donald Trump. If he is defeated in the post-election shenanigans does he return triumphant at the head of a veritable army of deplorables? If he wins does the movement continue without the spur of humiliation and injustice?

My feeling is that the Commoners all across the western world are being screwed by the educated ruling class and its Gentry supporters, and they are all waking up to the fact of their domination by an unjust ruling class. This injustice is a result of the current administrative state and its "activism" partners extending a seductive offer to all members of the Gentry: jobs and power to flatter its ambition, its vanity, and its honor. The problem is that everything this unholy alliance does ends up screwing the ordinary Commoner. And it always involves the humiliation and the marginalization of the Commoner.

At some point the Commoners are bound to say: this far and no further. Have we already reached this point, or is it still in the future?

An Indictment of the Ruling Class

Reading the tone of the reporting of the election aftermath it looks like the usual suspects want President Trump to give up on the rather evidently stolen election.

Let's concede that, in the recounts and the Trump lawsuits that our Democratic friends will be able to cover up the dead bodies enough to get through to January 20 and the inauguration of Joe Biden.

But let us rehearse the Chris Chantrill narrative of why you ain't seen nothin' yet.

First of all, the cheating. Normal humans only start to cheat when things are going unexpectedly wrong. It can't be true that my business is losing money! It can't be true that the voters think they are getting screwed by the ruling class! So, a little thumb on the scales ought to get us through the current unpleasantness.

Second, the "deplorable phenomenon." Of course, ruling classes have always thought that the people they ruled were yahoos. Else why would the rulers be the rulers and the ruled the ruled? But the truth is that rulers tend to "overdetermine" their virtues, which are, after all, not universal but only present in a few exceptional individuals in the ruling class. The rest of it is ruling-class conceit. And so almost everything that a ruling class does is a manifestation of its conceit and its disdain for the lower orders.

Third, "the natives are restless." One of the points that Gaetano Mosca makes in The Ruling Class is that a good ruling class is always sensitive to the tides and passions among the masses. It knows that one of its biggest jobs is to keep the people more-or-less content. One of the strengths of the British colonial system was its recognition that when "the natives are restless" then the imperial regime needed to pay attention. But our ruling class has declared war on the basket of deplorables, because racist-sexist-homophobe, and counts it a virtue to humble and humiliate the plebs.

Fourth, naked self-dealing. Of course, a ruling class has to take care of its own, but any sensible ruling class knows that there are limits. In particular there is the injunction of the British actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell:

My dear, I don't care what they do, so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses.

There are a whole bunch of issues on which the ruling class is indulging itself and making things a lot worse for the average Joe. As in

Issue	Ruling Class	Commoners
Climate change	Jobs for gentry	makes energy more expensive.
Environmentalism	Jobs for gentry	makes houses more expensive.
Feminism	Gentry women feel good	turns world upside down for commoner women
Sexual Revolution	Bit of fun in college	turns world upside down for commoner women
LGBT	Gentry gets creative about sex	er, what?
Mortgage subsidies	Increases value of gentry homes	makes housing less affordable.
Education	Inside track on private ed.	puts education in hands of teachers' unions.
Mass transit	OK for gentry neighborhoods	makes it harder for suburb-to-suburb commuting.
Building codes	Enforces gentry- style luxury	makes housing more expensive
Diversity	Jobs for gentry	disfavors white working class
Student loans	OK for professional class	makes college unaffordable

The consequence of all these issues is that the educated ruling class soars above all the problems, because of various advantages, but the ordinary schmuck is left holding the baby.

My feeling is that our ruling class has literally no idea how it oppresses and exploits the ordinary Commoner American. The main reason is that the ruling-class's belief system, its religion, declares that the current ruling class of the educated gentry is the best thing since sliced bread.

But I like to use the "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" moral framework to show how deluded this is. First of all, just how oppressed are the blacks, Latinos, women, LGBTs supposed to be? Not very, I submit, because discrimination is illegal. And how oppressive are the white oppressors? Who are they, anyway? Since the whole educated class these days seems to be Democrats, down for the struggle, that leaves home builders, small business people, fundamentalist Christians, white males that drive trucks. And they are supposed to be powerful? And how noble are the "allies?" If you ask me, the allies are the people that have declared certain groups as oppressed, and other groups as oppressors, but they are the practically perfect people in every way with the power to make things right.

There's a famous saying, by Talleyrand:

He who has not lived in the eighteenth century before the Revolution does not know the sweetness of life and can not imagine that there can be happiness in life.

Yes. No doubt life is pretty sweet for our educated ruling class. But it ain't so sweet for many of the Commoners and even for the Clients of the ruling class. Maybe it doesn't matter.

Or maybe it does. 

Everybody Gets the "Great Reset"

I was muttering about the two basic themes of the proposed Biden regime: "Build Back Better" and "systemic racism" a couple of days ago. 

Build Back Better is a meme of the World Economic Forum, part of its Great Reset. The founder of WEF is Klaus Schwab. All the right people are in on Build Back Better and the Great Reset, including Joe Biden and Boris Johnson.

And all the bad people are opposed. Like James Delingpole of Breitbart, who writes that the "Great Reset is Not  Conspiracy Theory" of right-wing kooks. If you needed persuading, Breitbart has a nearby article "John Kerry Hypes 'Great Reset': 'We're at the Dawn of Extremely Exciting Time."

Yes. I'll bet we are. Especially for ruling-class notables.

The point is that politicians of all stripes since the dawn of time have been complete suckers for the Comprehensive and Mandatory Program to Change the World. It's what they do. And here's what Portuguese-born Sarah Hoyt has to say about that.

If a story is too smooth, it’s a lie.  Whether it’s a political theory/prediction or a narration of an historical event, if everything fits... it’s a lie.  Real life is messy, self contradictory and confusing.  Real history stumbles, falters, weaves across the road like a spider on LSD. 

All government programs -- from the Communist Manifesto to the New Deal to the Great Society to Whip Inflation Now to Obamacare to Free College to the Great Reset -- are a lie.

But every political leader or political wanna-be sees himself as Henry V before Harfleur.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
...
On, on, you noblest English.
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!
Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,
Have in these parts from morn till even fought
And sheathed their swords for lack of argument:
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call'd fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war.
...
The game's afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'

Actually, the Brits besieging Harfleur were batting on a bit of a sticky wicket, because they were all dying of disease consequent upon being encamped in unsanitary conditions. Rule One for armies: First dig the latrines!

Do you get the point? It is that every political leader is proposing to lead his people once more unto the breach and fill it up with his English dead. Whether you are Al Gore proposing to fight climate change, or John Kerry salivating over an "extremely exciting time" or Barack Obama promising "fundamental transformation."

Nothing personal, you understand, it is just What Leaders Do. Here's another piece out today about the LBJ Goldwater election of 1964.

Then as now, the mainstream media were largely a cheering section for the Democrats, depicting their massive programs for social justice and economic equality as bold, brilliant steps into a brighter future. 

Actually, the Great Society was an unmitigated disaster, and one of its disasters was the marginalization of lower-class fathers, resulting in this chappie, the guy that was pursuing Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His name: "JoJo" Rosenbaum, white trash:

• Joseph Rosenbaum — depressed, homeless and alone . . . had spent most of his adult life in prison for sexual conduct with children when he was 18
• Rosenbaum met his father only twice and told his mother that he was molested by his alcoholic stepfather “on an almost daily basis,” according to court documents.
• When he was 13 his mother was sent to prison for two years, and Rosenbaum was sent off to a group home, where he began using heroin and methamphetamine, according to court documents.

Actually, it is my belief that this sort of thing happens all the way down the ages, for all kinds of reasons: conquest, famine, family breakup, stupid gubmint programs.

The peasants were dying in their millions at the end of the agricultural age; the Skid Row bums spent their lives on Skid Row after the 1929 Crash; the "homeless" are the victims of the end of manufacturing unions, and the major recessions and the government screw-ups of the last decades, including the COVID-19 screw-up.

As Sarah Hoyt says: "Real life is messy, self contradictory and confusing.  Real history stumbles, falters, weaves across the road like a spider on LSD. " And you'd better work like hell not to be caught in the undertow.

Because "sure as heckfire" the gubmint ain't gonna save you.

A Word in Your Ear, Noble Lord

My latest American Thinker piece "Trying to Think Ahead" got noticed by Instapundit and by Lucianne.com. And it got 558 comments so far. In the piece I merely asked why, if Dems are The Emerging Democratic Majority, they need to cheat. Surely a noble and confident aristocracy of intellect does not need to descend to the mass production of ballots.

And even if a charlatan like Trump should win a couple of presidential elections the ruling class still rules, right? No need to call in the Spanish Inquisition and cancel everyone for WrongThink.

In fact, of course, things are not as well as they might be in the court of the ruling class. The rulers seem to be giving off signals that, as the Brits say, they have "lost the plot."

That is certainly my view. If you look at Joe Biden's agenda, "Build Back Better" is just part of the anodyne globalists-know-best agenda of the World Economic Forum. And "systemic racism" is part of the ruling class's desperate attempt to keep the black mamas voting Democrat -- and hand out goodies to educated blacks.

Then I thought even deeper, that Build Back Better (and climate change) is a politics pandering to supra-national educated globalists, while systemic racism is pandering to sub-national ethnic tribes.

There is nothing in the Democratic agenda for ordinary Commoner Americans. There is nothing for ordinary nationalists, citizens of the nation-state of the United States of America.

Now I would say that a ruling class that has no interest in pandering to the great middle sector of American voters has got a screw loose, and possibly may not be long for this world.

I think of the way the French aristocrats are portrayed in the TV series John Adams. They are all powdered and bewigged and gorgeously attired, both men and women. 

But our pal Benjamin Franklin, ambassador from the rebel American colonists to the court of Louis XVI, is dressed in homespun, does not wear a wig, and wears a coonskin hat that he sent home for. He is playing a role: the crude frontiersman -- he, the genius that connected lightning with the sparks from electrostatics, the natural leader that organized the first public library in Philadelphia. Ben Franklin was playing the part of the Commoner to those fancy-pants Frenchie aristocrats.

Of course, Donald Trump, real-estate magnate, also plays the part of the Commoner. I wonder why?

Now, I'm about two-thirds of the way through Mosca's Ruling Class. His basic line is that all societies since whenever have been governed by a minority, a ruling class, because it must be so. Every ruling class must come up with a "political formula," a justification for its role as the ruling minority that every ruling class invents to meet the "need, so universally felt, of governing and knowing one is governed not on the basis of mere material or intellectual force, but of the basis of a moral principle." A ruling class must persuade the rubes that it is not just in it for itself, but cares about the people.

In the old days, the political formula would be that the king is the Lord's Anointed -- and yes, in 1953 at the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth, she was Anointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

But in the United States the political formula is different. Our President rules on a formula that he is the people's choice, and the people chose him because he cares about people like you and me. Our educated ruling class rules on the formula that it is the educated class, the knowledgeable class, the caring class, that has the knowledge and the wisdom to run the complicated and sophisticated government that is so necessary in the modern age. Yahoos like Trump need not apply.

Notice the little glitch in the Matrix here? What if you are elected president and you stole the election? That is what the Dems and the ruling class have been saying about Trump and Russia Russia Russia. And that is the little problem that a President Biden might have going forward.

And what if you are a ruling class that is not very educated, not very knowledgeable, not very caring, and makes big mistakes like creating the Great Society that has marginalized the poor, that has bombed out the manufacturing sector, that cranked up a housing bubble that nearly wiped out the financial system and hurt the very people it was designed to help: minorities without the means to come up with a decent down payment on the home of their dreams?

What if you get elected president and your agenda is all about Jobs for Gentry in climate change and "systemic racism" and college debt forgiveness for wokies and nothing for the broad mass of Americans?

What if an ordinary American might well feel that the current ruling class rules on the basis "merely of material and intellectual force," because shut up peasants? And that there was no "moral principle" that he could see to justify the ruling class's use of force?

See the problem?

My gut feeling, you noble lords, you Bidens and Harrises and Schumers and Pelosis and all the ships at sea, is that you really have no idea that every ruling class must persuade the ordinary people that it does not rule merely for its own interest and power, but to recognize and promote the interests of ordinary people, the ordinary people that we saw so clearly in the Trump Car Parades and Trump Boat Parades this summer and fall.

Now I don't know whether the Trump agenda of build the wall, check the ChiComs, end the wars, and Frack Baby Frack, is really in the long term interest of America and the world. Time will tell on that.

But you can certainly say that Donald Trump, like no presidential candidate in recent history, really focused his agenda like a laser on flattering and persuading ordinary American Commoners that he understood them and would rule America in their interest.