OK, Inequality is Bad. But Can We Do Anything About It?

After 286 pages in The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility showing that despite the determination of western elites to eliminate inequality it is alive and well, from Sweden to the US to China and especially India, Gregory Clark, professor at a gubmint university, ends his book with a the usual blather in the passive voice suggest more gubmint programs to end inequality.

Even though he admits that the competition among elite parents for places at elite schools probably doesn't make much difference.

Even though he admits that gubmint interventions like Head Start don't make much difference.

Even though he proposes that assortative mating has limited benefits to elites.

Says he:

A better, more humane, less competitive, social world than ours may exist, but it is not that obvious how we will attain it in a world where people have such strong aspirations for the social success of their children.

Would it?

Let's do a Great Reset on the inequality front.

Let's say that, most likely gubmint programs won't really do much about inequality. Want to know why?

It is encoded in my understanding of politics and government, that politics is war, Us against Them, because "They" are an existential threat, and government is force.

You think you are going to solve inequality by war and force? By taxing people and then having bureaucrats handing out loot and plunder to the supporters of the elite?

Obviously, in the last 200 years, the Age of the Educated, the elite has strongly believed in its power to change the world. Its power strategy, becoming more and more naked over the years, is an over-under strategy, of justifying political power because it helps the underdog. And the Educated Class gets to distribute the loot to its supporters -- er, worthy underdogs.

Does it? Gregory Clark shows, it seems to me, that the Rule of the Educated seems to have made very little difference to the lower classes. On the other hand, we know from the Great Enrichment that the operations of capitalism, which nobody really understood 200 years ago, has increased per capita income by 30 times in real terms. What did the Educated Class have to do with that? Nothing.

Suppose we approach the question of inequality by another way. Suppose we say, for a start, that the social problem of inequality -- specifically the problem of the lowest class that tends to be vagabonds, or "Travellers" or homeless -- should be solved by social methods, by people working together to help other people, and not by Educated Class educrats ginning up yet another gubmint program that ends up being nothing more than a program of taxation collecting loot that is handed out to regime supporters. And all imagined by gubmint professors at gubmint universities using gubmint research grants to propose another gubmint program. What could go wrong?

My effort in this department is Road to the Middle Class, first put on the internet in April 2004. My idea was that, to wive and thrive in the modern world, the underclass needed to acquire cultural skills: religion, law, mutual aid, and education. Religion and law are of course the necessary cultural framework to make the commercial city work. Education is needed because you need literacy and numeracy to do useful work in the city. Mutual aid is the welfare state society of the 19th century when "everyone" belonged to the Masons or the Elks or the Oddfellows and dozens of others. These mutual-aid societies provided, first, death benefits. Then they looked after widows. Then they had "lodge doctors," young doctors just out of medical school who would help birth your child for a song.

But let us look at other means of helping the lowest class.

Voluntary Slavery. Yes, did you know that back in The Year 1000 you could go to your feudal lord, place your head between his hands and become his slave -- and get food and lodging? But you already know about this. It's called "Welfare."

Servant. If you read 19th century novels or watch 20th and 21st century TV series about the good old days, you will notice that everyone either had servants or was a servant. That ended after World War II and the beginning of the full-on welfare state. One thing about servants: they weren't allowed to marry, and they weren't allowed to have "followers." Do you think we could serve the poor better by giving them jobs as servants?

Apprenticeships. In Shakespeare's time you went to work at age 8 unless you went to a grammar school like young Bill. Later "everyone" went to work at 12 or 13 as a servant or an apprentice. Thing about apprenticeships was that the employer was supposed to supply practical education to the apprentice. You think that might suit the average teenager and the lower-class teenager better than the gubmint teacher thingy? Notice that we could have Big Woke & Co. pay for all this. Actually, right now, at Walmart stores there is a back room where employees can take on-line courses and up their skills. And get more money. Then there is Walmart's $1 a day college program. Maybe this would be better than more taxes.

Thing is: hierarchy, or inequality, is universal. That was the point about Jordan Peterson's lobster thingy. Even lobsters have hierarchy, and the reason is because it reduces violence on the lobster front.

The question is: what kind of hierarchy is beneficial and what kind of hierarchy is harmful.

My guess is that most kinds of gubmint wars on inequality in fact have the opposite effect, and entrench and create new, harmful hierarchies. That is, after all, the lesson of socialism, that equality leads to a brutal hierarchy and millions of deaths.

So let's think about how we can create and adapt hierarchies that are beneficial and actually helpful to the less fortunate.

Yes, Whatabout Gay-Lesbian vs. Full-on LGBT?

Here's an interesting take. Gay writer Bruce Bawer in "The Great Consonant Shift" wants to know how come, all of a sudden around 2000, the gay-lesbian rights movement transformed into LGBT? See, according to Bawer, gay-lesbians and transgenders are about as different as different can be.

Being gay or lesbian or bisexual is about which sex one is attracted to. To be transgender is to claim that you’re a member of the opposite sex[.]

You see, to Bower it is perfectly natural and physical to have gay marriage, but to have trans rights and the right to transition is completely different.

Probably not. The whole game of modern politics is "rights." That how the educated ruling class justifies its power. It conducts its "over-under" politics by championing the "rights" of some marginalized group against the insufferable heedlessness or active opposition of the booboisie.

I say that some marginalized groups championed by the ruling class are genuinely marginalized; others are "fake," members of the ruling class playing oppression theater and acting the part of a marginalized group. I say that workers of the industrial revolution and the blacks of the Jim Crow era were genuine victims. Feminist women, gays, lesbians, transgenders, post-civil-rights blacks, etc., are fake victims.

Your mileage may vary.

Actually, my question is really: "why gay marriage?" That's because I believe that the purpose of marriage is the protection of women. Men are naturally sexual predators and need to be curbed, and marriage is one of the ways that human society puts the curb on men. But gays and lesbians? What's the point beyond, of course, the question of gubmint benefits.

Oh yeah, I get it. Humans are social animals, and the point of gay rights and gay marriage and the pejorative "homophobe" is to raise the social status of gays and lesbians. Because all the world's a stage for social status games.

Back in the day, before the narrative was changed to tell us that gays and lesbians had been discriminated against and marginalized since the dawn of time, you get Eveyln Waugh's 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited which represents homosexual love as a kind of Oxbridge-upper-class exoticism: a stage that our hero goes through at Oxford with a troubled scion of the decaying aristocracy.

But Bawer inspired me to check up on the history of human marriage practices, starting of course with our pals the gorillas and the chimpanzees.

Chimpanzee marriage. Chimpanzees are territorial, and the males defend the food growing territory and form a male hierarchy: the higher up the hierarchy the more sexual opportunities with the females. See Nicholas Wade in Before the Dawn.

Gorilla marriage. Gorillas seem to live in bands officiated by a single silverback, and the females seem to attach to a silverback for safety reasons. Gorillas are not territorial like chimpanzees; they just move through the countryside in search of food but do not establish territory. They do not compete for food-growing territory.

Human hunter-gatherers. Scientists say that there is some polygyny -- multiple wives -- but mostly hunter-gatherers live by arranged marriage using "brideprice" or "brideservice," where brideprice is payment by the groom's family to the bride's family and brideservice is "labor performed by a prospective groom or newly-wed husband for the family of the bride."

Agricultural humans. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that in the agricultural age men had as many wives as they could afford -- until the Catholic Church started asking high-status males the reason why. So high status men had lots of wives. But for low-status men it is clear to me that you were only allowed to get married if you could afford it. That was the whole point of doweries. A guy would only marry a girl if the bride's family coughed up enough of the ready money so he could keep the new family alive. Note that slaves didn't get married except in the Americas where more slaves meant more field labor. And note that domestic servants in all 19th century novels and 20th century TV serials about the good old days were, and remained, unmarried.

Industrial humans. The whole point of the industrial era is that it is the era of the Great Enrichment. The economy was no longer static, founded upon the food from food-growing land. Anyone could get married and hope for the best. Exit arranged marriage and enter romantic marriage, because the chances are that any young man and young woman could make it, because economic growth.

See, my line is that in the post-industrial era we have sexual freedom because we can afford it. Not because we are advanced and evolved and special. We can afford to have gays getting it on with multiple partners because AIDS vaccine. We can afford to have lesbians living together because we don't need a male around the house to do the plowing. We can afford to have childless couples because we don't need child labor on the farm any more.

And we can afford to have the scions of the educated elite running around getting into "activism" and gay rights and transgender rights and "1619 Projects" not just because of Adam Smith's old maxim about "a great deal of ruin in a nation" but because we can afford to have a lot of people running around doing stupid things. At least, we think we can.

Of course, I believe that modern politics is a domestication of the old warrior ethic. Just like chimpanzees, territorial human males had to defend their territory from other groups. The defenders were heroes and were rewarded with high status. But now we have brave road warriors competing for market share; we have brave startup entrepreneurs risking everything on a business idea; we have brave "activists" challenging the bigots and the oppressors and demanding their "rights." And we have a new feudalism as many people choose the low-risk neo-serfdom of work at a corporation.

The interesting question is what happens next. I think that modern "rights" politics and its domesticated "activist" warriors has gone about as far as it can go. I think that "liberation" especially in sexual matters is probably going to reverse itself, because I think that women instinctively hate the sexual free-for-all: they expect to be protected. I think that the big-government welfare state with its domesticated form of loot and plunder has gone about as far as it can go.

But I doubt if we will see the end of the "rights" activists in our lifetime. They are having too much fun. So the question really is:  what comes after "trans"?

I suspect that in another twenty years we will be reading articles by transgender activists that are mortally offended by whatever it is that comes next on the gender front.

Understand Your Liberal Friends and Be There For Them As Their World Collapses Around Them

We merry band of racist-sexist-homophobes, we happy few, have observed the "unfriending" thingy ever since the Dawn of Trump back in 2016.

Liberals get a social-media post or an email from an acquaintance about some political issue and they can't take it. So they "unfriend" the friend.

This happened to me back in early 2017 when a friend I had been going with to coffee for years said he was going away for a couple of weeks. So to speak. And now I am seeing it happening to others. Their liberal friends are angry, and they lash out.

I wonder why.

Well, I was reading a piece on "Lying to Liberals" by Auguste Meyrat at American Mind and he 'splained it all to me. Our liberal friends believe what they are carefully taught. All humans do.

When it comes to the legacy media, well-known technocrats, or leftist politicians, they will default to an assumption of truthfulness. Reporters can repeatedly report lies... Collecting the evidence and doing the work of finding and accepting the truth is much harder than simply trusting them, so people ignore the red flags and contradictions.

But, of course, eventually the truth starts knocking on the window, and it becomes more and more difficult to deal with the glitch in the Matrix.

What do you do when the world is not behaving the way you were "carefully taught?" You get angry. You lash out at the friends that don't go with the narrative. Then you "unfriend" them rather than face up to the fact that your understanding of the world, the "narrative" you go with, has crashed and burned.

I like to think that I have never done this, because, I tell myself, I am actually interested in the ravings of lefty lunatics. I am interested in understanding the narrative they subscribe to and figuring out at what point they have to give up and admit they were wrong. And I am interested in analyzing the lies they believe and trying to figure out the best place for a flanking attack. At least that is what I say to myself. No doubt I am just as bad as everyone else and I cling to crazy conspiracy theories about crazy lefties just as lefties cling to crazy conspiracy theories about right-wing white-supremacist patriarchs.

But I am here to urge my racist-sexist-homophobic friends to be understanding with your lefty friends. This is only the beginning of a long journey through hell for our lefty friends. 

It is telling, I think, that our lefty friends are already so paranoid a mere five months into the glorious Biden-Harris administration. Obviously they must feel, at some unconscious level, that all is not copacetic in liberal-land. OK, sure, they blame eevil racist Trump conspiracy theorists for everything that is going wrong: of course they do. But still, they feeel that something is wrong; something does not compute.

But think how much worse things are going to get for them. Already we are seeing the first uptick in inflation. Guess where that is going to go? We are seeing the push-back on CRT by concerned parents at local school districts. Is that merely the first ripple of a tidal wave? We are seeing surprising elections of Republicans in Hispanic voting districts. We are seeing sweetie New York Times journalist Mara Gray traumatized by Trump car parades and US flags on Long G-island over the Memorial Day weekend.

Think what it will be like for them if the schools and CRT thing blows up into a political hurricane? Think what it will mean for them if Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) switches parties and switches control of the United Senate. Think what it will be like for them if the 2022 mid-terms turn into a Democratic bloodbath. Think what it will be like for them if Trump gets his own social media platform going. Think what it will mean if moderate Democrats panic and break ranks and run for the hills in the months ahead.

See, what I say is: don't "unfriend" your liberal friends in the months and years ahead. Be there for them. They are going to need you as their whole world-view crashes in ruins about them, and they don't know what to do about it.

Politics Equals Us vs. Them Equals Hate

In my eternal quest to understand the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" I come back again and again to politics. Here are all my maxims that mention politics:

Politics is the art of division.

Politics is all, and only, about rallying the men to fight against the foe — external and internal enemies — in the present emergency.

Politics is the royal road to injustice.

Politics is the exercise of collective power against human opposition. (Curtis Yarvin)

There is no politics without an enemy. (Curtis Yarvin)

The only thing that politics knows is hate and loot and plunder.

The more politics, the more injustice.

When a political movement achieves its objectives it doesn’t go home.

When a political movement achieves its objectives it doesn’t have to play nice any more.

When a political movement achieves its objectives it is time to crush its enemies.

Nietzsche: “the priests” teach us to hate ourselves. Me: the politicians teach us to hate others.

Politics is the division between “us” and “them;” Religion is the division between “good” and “evil.” Totalitarianism is the division between “us good people” and “them evil people.”

Politics is about trying to get things you shouldn’t want.

The first rule of politics is: never tell people the truth.

Politics and government are all about force; law is all about private property; religion is all about morality.

Politics is downstream from culture (Breitbart) is downstream from religion (Wright) is downstream from the meaning of “life, the universe, and everything” (Chantrill).

I think it is time to add a couple new ones

Politics equals "Us" vs. "Them."

Politics equals Hate.

See, the guy that got me going on this is my own special Seattle City Councilman Dan Strauss. I had a phone conversation with him a while back, and before he got to his signature line "I have a meeting in five minutes" he allowed as how he was all opposed to "hate." And he spoke the word "hate" with particular affect to show how he hated "hate." Hatey hate hate.

But really, Dan old chap, if you are in the politics business, you are in the "hate" business. Why? Because the whole point of running for election is that there is a crisis! If we don't act now, our city will wither away. Because greedy landlords. Because lack of needle exchanges. Because lack of affordable housing. Because potholes in the street. Because lack of public transportation. Because lack of social workers to help people in crisis. And why do we have all these crises? Because there are evil people out there preventing helpless victims from getting the help they need.

Politics is all about "Us" the good people and "Them" the bad people. See, if things weren't that bad then we wouldn't need politicians to "fight" for us.

The same goes for "activists" that are all about fighting for justice. If you are fighting for justice there must be injustice out there. What kind of person perpetrates injustice? An evil person. So activists hate evil unjust people: probably white supremacist patriarchs, I expect. They usually are. The point is that once you have declared a moral quest, as activists do, then you have divided the world into "Us" and "Them" and you have determined to fight the Evil One.

Notice the cunning of religion on the Evil One front. Religion tends to say that it is not you that is evil, but Satan that has tempted or corrupted you. So, all an evil person needs to do is repent and all is well.

Notice the un-cunning of Allyism. Allyism says that the world is composed of "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors." Do you see how the only thing for the Allies to do is to defeat the "white oppressors" utterly. The "white oppressors" are the enemy, not Satan.

See, I think that politics is problematical, on its face. Because once you make something a political issue then you have reduced it to "Us" and "Them" and the only thing to do is to hate the "Them" and fight to defeat them.

And then, when the fight is over, it is time to reward the loyal soldiers and supporters with loot and plunder taken from the evil defeated "Them."

In my reductive Three Peoples theory I say that the world is not "Us" vs. "Them." I say that the world is peopled by different people, who look on the world in different ways, and expect different things from it. So, immediately the "Us" and "Them" of politics is problematical. The question becomes how to understand and organize the world so that different people can live in it and work and wive and thrive in it -- and just get along.

That is why I say that the Age of Politics is over, because the need for "Us" to fight against "Them" is over.

Tell that to your lefty friend.

How Meaning of Life, Religion, Culture and Politics Connect

We all know the basic truth of humans as social animals. It is the notion of Downstream-ism, that

Politics is downstream from culture, is downstream from religion, is downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

But why? I was writing about downstream-ism yesterday in "What if Wokism is Implied in the Civil Rights Laws," but after I finished it came to me, in a vision, how the four things -- politics, culture, religion, and the meaning of life -- are connected. So here goes.

The meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" is the vision of eternity. Of course, it is way short of the real meaning of life, the universe, and everything. I maintain that the more we know the more we know we don't know. Think of the simplicity of the universe of The Iliad that was just humans and the gods on Mt. Olympus. Or the geocentric model of the universe. Or explaining everything with spirits in the trees, or God creating the universe in six days and then deciding everything. Now we believe that the "observable" universe is huge, about 100 billion light years across. But really, we still don't have a clue.

The point is that at every stage in the story of human existence we seem to need a story of what the universe is and how it got there and what it all means to us. I wonder why?

Religion is the vision of eternity reduced to a system. That's what Moses did when he came down from Mt. Sinai. He reduced the divine vision he had experienced to the Ten Commandments. The vision of Jesus Christ was reduced by St. Peter and St. Paul to the systematic religion we call Christianity. The vision of Marx was reduced to the religious system we call Marxism. The vision of the Frankfurt School was reduced into the religious system we call Wokism, and woke priests are teaching it in the schools as Critical Race Theory.

Religion is inevitable. Most people live their daily lives; they have no time for visions in the wilderness or Nietzschean Thus Spake Zarathustras. So they experience the vision reduced into the processed food of church services on Sunday or mostly peaceful protests downtown.

Culture is the religious system turned into a true story. It is all about people living their lives according to the vision of eternity as promulgated into systematic religion. It is responding to our human need to see the world in human rather than systematic terms, and it is responding to the human need to experience and remember everything in a story, a narrative, and to see what happens to people if they go with the system. But what happens if they rebel against the vision turned into a system. Nothing good, needless to say. Obviously the story that Homer told in The Iliad is different from the story that John Bunyan told in Pilgrim's Progress is different that the story told by women novelists in the 19th century is different from the story told by James Joyce in Ulysses is different from the story told in the 20th century in 1950s TV sitcoms or by Eve Ensler in The Vagina Monologues.

Domestic politics is the religious system's true story reduced to enforcement by a ruling class. Enforcement is only experienced by those on the receiving end. To the rulers, politics is just good people doing God's work. It only makes sense that, when the rubber hits the road, something must be done about people that don't get with the program of the ruling class's vision of eternity, their well-thought-out religious system, and their morally improving tales. And of course, the foot-soldiers that get with the ruling-class's program need to be rewarded with loot and plunder.

International politics -- war -- is the defense of the religious system's true story against foreigners. That'll teach 'em!

Now you can understand America under the rule of the woke. The vision of eternity is the idea of perfect equality here on Earth, the lion lying down with the lamb: all races, all genders, all workers, all activists, all billionaires. The religion is the commandments on the yard signs: Black Lives Matter, Love is Love, Kindness is Everything. The culture is the multiracial advertisements, the superhero heroines, the wise black grandfathers, the husbands as idiots, the businessmen as villains. The politics is the allies protecting the oppressed peoples from the white oppressors and mandating the teaching of Critical Race Theory in schools.

Got it?

What if Wokism is Implied in the Civil Rights Laws?

Over the weekend, thanks to John Derbyshire, I got to read Richard Hanania's "Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law." I'll have my American Thinker piece up soon.

Let's say the piece cured me of my faith that the Civil Rights laws were a Good Thing, even if the quotas and diversity and wokism are a Bad Thing.

But politics is downstream from culture is downstream from religion is downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." So now what?

Thank you, senator, I'm glad you asked me that. Let's start at the upstream source.

My "Vision of the Good Life Better Than the Left" is all about the question of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" in a world that, according to my reductive Three Peoples theory, has at least three different kinds of people in it. That means that society's ruling class needs to accept that creative people have needs and wants different from responsible people different from subordinate people. I develop an idea of how a society with three different sorts of people could work in An American Manifesto.

I say that creative people -- and I have the conceit to imagine that I am one such -- should accept the path of the Sacrificial Hero, in which life is a journey to the underworld of the unconscious followed by a creative attempt at the border between Order and Chaos, which will probably fail. This means, e.g., that if you want to get creative about sex as a transgender, you should understand that the whole thing is likely to end up as a total disaster for you and yours. That is the meaning of creativity: you will probably fail. But creative people need to understand that most people do not want this kind of life and do not understand why anyone would.

I say that responsible people should have the right to live boring responsible lives within the guardrails, living according to a fixed agenda set forth in one of the Axial Age religions or later modifications, such as the Code of the Bourgeois as developed in my Road to the Middle Class. But responsible people should understand that subordinates, the new migrants to the city, are scared and properly live in ethnic enclaves run by virtual ganglords until they learn the Code of the Bourgeois. But do not expect responsible people to understand creative people.

I say that subordinate people since time began have looked to a family patriarch or tribal chief or urban ethnic leader to provide a safe haven from a brutal world. But, in our modern world this is a mean and cramped life, for subordinate people since time began have been cruelly used as political cannon fodder by their leaders. If subordinate people want to live in their ethnic ghettos, so be it. But if they yearn for something higher and better, we noble creatives and responsibles should extend a hand and help them learn the Code of the Bourgeois as per my Road to the Middle Class. But do not expect subordinate people to understand responsible people or creative people.

Then there is the question of the religions that come downstream from the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything." We already have religions for responsibles and subordinates. The problem is the religion of the creatives, that right now is the false religion of Wokism. I say that the problem with the creatives' religion is that it has as its human ideal the Ego Hero rather than the Sacrificial Hero. The Ego Hero is the revolutionary that kills millions on his millennial quest, the activist that leads a community of subordinates to social hell, the nice liberal lady with virtue-signalling yardsigns in front of her house. Obviously our wokey friends will not change their religion until their current one fails them utterly: we can hope.

Then there is the question of the culture of the future. Well, obviously it would not be the current culture that only allows cultural expression by the creatives that endorse the current religious cult of wokism and cancels everything else. In other words, the culture of the future would feature cultural expression and experience not just for wokey college graduates that celebrate revolution, activism, peaceful protest, anti-racism, and gender bending. It would also have cultural space for ordinary responsible people that want to celebrate marriage, family, children within the context of a religion issuing from the Axial Age. It would also have cultural space for subordinate people and their cultural preferences -- I am ignorant enough not to know what that might be.

Now we get to politics. Politics is the art of uniting "us," the people, against "them," the enemy. It is pure tribalism, and, I say, all tribalism is "fake tribalism. Why? Because once humans get beyond the community of the kindred we invent a fake kindred, that might be a clan or a tribe or a class or a race or an order of nobles. Our wokey lords and masters have a politics of race, in which they are "allies" fighting for the "oppressed peoples" against the "white oppressors." My politics would be a politics of class, in which "we" ordinary Americans unite against "them," the wokey upper class of educated snobs and cancel cultists, while looking after the lower class of subordinates with a modest program of paternalistic support and understanding. It is totally fake, but every politics is fake.

Funny, isn't it? This politics has already been invented. That is what Trumpism is all about. It is nationalist, in the semse of America First -- or ordinary Americans first. It issues mean tweets to various ruling-class swells and functionaries and toadies and Democratic operatives with bylines, and it is avuncular towards the traditionally marginalized, with a below-the-radar offer to join the great American mainstream, any time you are ready, friend.

The Biden Agenda: It Still Comes Down to Loot and Plunder

One of my maxims is that politics and government reduce, in the end, to nothing more than the good old Viking model of predatory warfare followed by the distribution of loot and plunder.

So when the Biden administration announced its agenda of boosting the economy, fighting climate change, and fighting systemic racism, the only question that remained was who would get the loot and plunder.

All you need to do is look at my "Where the Biden Budget Bites" from a couple days ago.

Health Care gets a $300 billion a year boost.

Education: Our teachers get a permanent boost in education spending, doubling federal education spending.

Welfare: After the $1.7 trillion budget buster this year, welfare will settle down to about double the pre-Biden outlays.

Transportation spending will double by FY26 from the current $100 billion a year to $200 billion.

What is interesting is what is left out. Where does all the heroic green energy come in? Obviously it's not really in the budget, except for a few trains in the transportation budget. So that will have to come in subsidies and tax manipulations. I wonder what that will do to the economy.

Whatabout systemic racism? We can see this emerging in reports about grants for black farmers and reparations for blacks who have been left behind in the real-estate boom of the last generation.

But I can't help thinking of the larger issue. If you look at the long term record on government spending in the US, you see that over the last century, starting in the early years of the 20th century -- and especially after wars -- government spending has cinched up. But, if you look at the chart it seems that it has gone about as far as it can go -- once the COVID orgy is over.

What does it mean? It means that loot and plunder has gone about as far as it can go. Now, looking at the Biden budget, I'd say that the rulers are trying another post-war spending lurch. Will it work?

Honestly, we don't know.

The point is that, if you unpack the Biden agenda, climate change means loot and plunder for the educated elite and politically connected corporations. Systemic racism means loot and plunder for blacks.

OK, I get that. The Democratic Party is an over-under coalition of the educated / evolved and the helpless victims.

But what the Bidenoids are telling us is that they can't think beyond the age-old formula of war followed by the shareout of loot and plunder.

And the great middle of ordinary Americans are left out in the cold. Of course, we already have ours, in Social Security and Medicare and "free" K-12 education.

But you know what we want, we middlers? We want economic growth and tax cuts. I'd say that if Biden doesn't deliver that he will lose lots of middling sorts of votes.

See, my big picture notion is that war plus loot and plunder has passed it sell-by date.

The Soviet Union looted eastern Germany to the bare walls after 1945. So? How did that work out for the Russian people?

The Democrats shoveled out subsidies for housing and higher education. So? How's that working out for young families and students burdened with a lifetime of debt? How's that working out for minorities left way behind as the educated elite has feasted on the subsidies and the grants?

I think that the wave of the future is for humans to get beyond the Viking culture of raiding and looting and plundering. 

But, who will be the one to lead the people into a new economic paradigm, into a new politics, and a new culture that is not based on war and plunder.

And I don't just mean military war. I mean the fake war of climate change. I mean the fake war of fighting systemic racism. Because the whole point of these fake wars is the aftermath, the feasting on booty.

And I think that the age of loot and plunder is over. Because loot and plunder does not pay.