Ferguson's "Great Degeneration" and How Things Are Getting Worse

I just picked up a copy of Niall Ferguson's 2012 book The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die. He says: Look, there are four things a society needs to get right. He calls them black boxes.

1. Democracy meaning the political black box.
2. Capitalism meaning the economic black box.
3. Rule of Law meaning the legal black box.
4. Civil Society meaning the social interaction black box.

Obviously there are ways in which each of these black boxes and work well and interact well with the other black boxes. And there are ways in which they degenerate and make things worse, both in their internal operations and in their interactions with the other black boxes.

Ferguson creates a beehive metaphor and uses it to analyze our present political situation.

In politics, Ferguson asks if we are creating too many dependent drones for the worker-bees to support. And in economics, Ferguson asks if we are creating problems when corporations play an active part in political life and governments distort the economy with subsidies, tariffs and regulation. In law he asks if the rule of law has not degenerated in the the rule of lawyers. In civil society he asks how a free society can flourish when its voluntary associations -- created for objectives other than profit -- are in decline.

So, he argues, we should be putting curbs on the ability of the political system to distribute loot and plunder, and in particular for the elder generation to loot the younger generation through explicit and implicit debt.

In the economy we should be limiting the power of regulation to encourage a house price bubble that leads to the Great Recession of 2008, where regulation and government supervision creates a more fragile system. Shouldn't regulation make a system more "anti-fragile" that "becomes stronger when subject to perturbation."

In law we should be encouraging a system that develops "low-cost enforcement of contracts." One measure of the health of the legal system is the length of time and the expense of setting up a new business. Ferguson prefers the Anglo-Saxon "common law" to the Continental "civil law." 

When it comes to civil society, Ferguson cites his experience in "clearing the beach" at his house on the coast of South Wales. When he moved in the beach was cluttered with rubbish, from plastic bottles and bags to beer and soft-drink cans. When he found that the local council would not help, he organized volunteers to clear the beach. After a couple of beach cleans the Lions Club got involved.

The Lions brought a level of organization and motivation that far exceeded my earlier improvised efforts. As a result of their involvement the shoreline was transformed.

Yeah. Maybe we should apply the civil-society model to all kinds of other things, from education to welfare.

Of course, everything that Niall Ferguson proposes is, to me, conventional wisdom -- my conventional wisdom: the sensible things we should be doing -- should always be doing -- at the political, economic, legal, and lifeworld level to regenerate the health of our society. And not just once, but all the time.

But our lefty friends want to do the opposite. And reading the book made me realize just how crazy things have gotten since 2012.

One of the things that Ferguson warns about is debt: that government debt is a generational charge on the young generation. Our lefty friends are heaping debt upon debt. One of the things he warns against is loading too much regulation that distributes political favors around and, like in mortgage finance, makes the economy more fragile. One of the things he warns against is the rule of the lawyers. But our lefty friends are all over the legal system trying to enforce changes that they cannot get by legislation and the political process. One of the vital parts of human society is the social lubrication of civil society organizations; the only thing our lefty friends understand are AstroTurf activist organizations.

In other words, if you accept Niall Ferguson's world view, you can't help feeling that everything our lefty friends are doing and want to do are making things worse.

And the reason for all this isn't mysterious. As the educated elite has enforced its political formula, of allies helping oppressed peoples against white oppressors, the ordinary middle-class commoners have staged an organic Great Rebellion that switched Congress to the Republicans and then elected Donald Trump as president.

For now, after herculean effort, the ruling class has rolled back the Rebels. But, as they said of the Bourbons, they have learned nothing and forgotten nothing, and instead are doubling down on the agenda that Niall Ferguson judges is the cause of The Great Degeneration.

The purpose of politics and economics and law and civil society is to help the society of humans flourish and live in harmony. They are, in the notion of Jürgen Habermas, the Lebenswelt, the life-world in which humans communicate and develop moral agreement and resolve their differences.

Obviously, when the parties do the opposite, then that spells Trouble, right here is River City. And that, I think, is a shame.

How Whiteness Transformed China

China is celebrating the centenary of its Communist Party this week as a glorious liberation from western colonialism. Here is President Xi Jinping (hey, I thought that presidents were a white thing): 

The Chinese nation is a great nation.

Stop right there. Nation? What's all that about, whitey? 

With a history of more than 5,000 years, China has made indelible contributions to the progress of human civilization. After the Opium War of 1840, however, China was gradually reduced to a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society and suffered greater ravages than ever before. The country endured intense humiliation, the people were subjected to great pain, and the Chinese civilization was plunged into darkness. Since that time, national rejuvenation has been the greatest dream of the Chinese people and the Chinese nation.

To save the nation from peril, the Chinese people put up a courageous fight. As noble-minded patriots sought to pull the nation together, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement, the Reform Movement of 1898, the Yihetuan Movement, and the Revolution of 1911 rose one after the other, and a variety of plans were devised to ensure national survival, but all of these ended in failure. China was in urgent need of new ideas to lead the movement to save the nation and a new organization to rally revolutionary forces.

With the salvoes of Russia's October Revolution in 1917, Marxism-Leninism was brought to China. Then in 1921, as the Chinese people and the Chinese nation were undergoing a great awakening and Marxism-Leninism was becoming closely integrated with the Chinese workers' movement, the Communist Party of China was born. 

In other words, China's rebirth was nothing but Whiteness, Whiteness, Whiteness.

Let's start with the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement. This was started by a young Chinese man that read a Christian missionary pamphlet after he had failed the state examinations. La Wik:

The uprising was commanded by Hong Xiuquan, an ethnic Hakka (a Han Chinese subgroup) and the self-proclaimed brother of Jesus Christ. Its goals were religious, nationalist, and political in nature; Hong sought the conversion of the Han Chinese people to the Taiping's syncretic version of Christianity, to overthrow the Manchus-led Qing Dynasty, and a state transformation. 

Can you spell Whiteness? Then there's the Reform Movement of 1898 initiated by the Guangxu Emperor and canceled by Dowager Empress Cixi. It included.

abolishing the traditional examination system... eliminating sinecures... establishing Peking University... building a modern education system (studying mathematics and science instead of focusing mainly on Confucian texts)... changing the government from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy... applying principles of capitalism to strengthen the economy, modernizing China's military and adopting modern training and drill methods... rapid industrialization of all of China through manufacturing, commerce, and capitalism... establishing a bureau for railways and mines[.]

 Whiteness squared. Then there was the Yihetuan Movement (or the Boxer Rebellion). Now we are talking. It really was an anti-western, anti-Christian anti-Whiteness movement.

Villagers in North China had been building resentment against Christian missionaries and the growth of foreign spheres of influence after the Sino-Japanese War of 1895. In a severe drought, violence and murder spread across Shandong and the North China Plain, targeting foreign property, Christian missionaries and Chinese Christians.

Then the Revolution of 1911. It established the Republic of China. Republic? That's Whiteness, if ever I saw it.

Then in 1921, "the Communist Party of China was born." But, but, but, Communism is a western idea. Whiteness. Now read this, from Unherd, the Brit opinion site: "China's Communist Party owes it all to colonialism."

Trigger Warning: the following hate speech may blow your mind.

The CCP was not founded in Shanghai by accident. The first congress was held in the newly built home of one of the 15 revolutionary pioneers, Li Hanjun, at 106 Rue Wantz in what was then the French Concession.

Shanghai was home to a nascent labour movement and its international ambience meant that not only people but also ideas flowed freely. Moreover, the foreign concessions meant that the activists could meet and conspire out of the reach of the Chinese authorities.

There were, of course, a ton of Christian missionaries in China.

One of these missionaries, a Baptist from Carmarthenshire [Wales] named Timothy Richard, is still remembered in the Communist Party Museum on the former site of Peking University as the first person to publish the names of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in Chinese.

A group of 2,000 Chinese studied in France during and after World War I.

After their exposure to the radical ideas circulating among workers and activists in Europe they returned home and, in January 1921, formally adopted the creed of Marxism-Leninism. 

How dare, how dare the French indoctrinate those 2,000 innocent Chinese with their Whiteness ideas!

My favorite quote to illustrate the experience of the Chinese people encountering the West is this, the comments of a "Dr. Wu," at the beginning of David Aikman's Jesus in Beijing published in 2003. Dr. Wu and others had been tasked with accounting "for the success, in fact, the preeminence of the West all over the world."

We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West has been so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism, and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don't have any doubt about this.

Yes. And now our lefty friends are determined to eliminate Christianity from the West. Because Whiteness or something.

Personally, I have enormous compassion for the Chinese and their "century of humiliation." There is nothing harder than living in a political and cultural world that is coming to the end of the line. Who is to blame? What do we do? Will these foreign ideas help us or will they destroy us? And, you can bet that the ruling class of the time is going to be up to all kinds of tricks as it tries to hang onto power and blame anyone and everyone else for the problems.

Kinda like our own ruling class that, after a century of spend and elect, seems to be hitting the wall. It sees that something is wrong, but can't even begin to figure out what it is. Whiteness! Yeah, that must be it!

When the Ruling Class is Wrong

The thing about the market is that every day it is commenting on who is right and who is wrong. Mostly it is right; sometimes it is wrong.

But politics is different. In politics the ruling class, right or wrong, gets its way almost all the time. That's because of the natural human instinct to trust its rulers and suspect that the opposition is close to being traitors.

And, given that the one job of the ruling class is to defend the people against enemies, and lead the nation in wars to defend itself, it makes sense that its view dominates the public square and that objectors don't get much air time. It is only when the ruling class has been defeated in war that it loses its warrant to set the agenda. The Chinese have a phrase for this: losing the Mandate of Heaven.

The most obvious case where this is a problem is the question of climate change and green energy. Right or wrong, the ruling class has bought into the idea of dangerous warming due to emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. If the rulers are right then they will be saving us from a fate worse than death. But if they are wrong they will be causing enormous misery and suffering, all for nothing.

Now I believe that the whole climate change and green energy thing is a grift, a chance for the entire global ruling class to use its political power and go to war against a dreadful existential peril and also do what comes naturally, which is to hand out loot and plunder to supporters, such as subsidies for billionaires to build wind farms and subsidies to nice liberal ladies to buy hybrid cars and for lesbians to buy electric cars.

Suppose they are wrong and we are right? How do we effect "change?" The answer is: we don't; we can't. Not until things start to break. 

Here's a developing possibility: "NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio urges residents to reduce electric use during heat emergency." If you read the article it mentions power outages and voltage reductions, all on a day when the temperature at La Guardia Airport reached a mere 98 degrees F. What is not mentioned in the article is that Indian Point Nuclear Power Station, just up the Hudson River, with over 1 GW capacity, was shut down on April 30, 2021. Total demand right now is about 12 GW.

Obviously, it will take blackouts, big blackouts, blackouts that shut down whole states, before the ruling class will reverse its aversion to nuclear power and fossil fuel as demanded over the last generation by lefty activist groups. Oh, and also, it will require blackouts in locations where our ruling class lives and works.

Meanwhile,the energy contribution from "renewables," despite government subsidies and compulsion, is still minuscule. My guess is that it is physically impossible to power the whole economy from "green" energy.

So, in my view, a magnificent crash is coming. And really, the sooner the better. Because the sooner the crash comes the less expensive it will be, and the less suffering it will cause.

Of course, this applies not just to energy but every other foolish thing that our ruling class has done over the last century, whether it is government pensions, government health care, government education, government welfare, all the programs that amount to loot and plunder and which cannot be reduced because of the risk of insurrection by the folks presently in receipt of loot and plunder.

It is said that young people today approve of socialism, particularly if it gives them free health care and free college. I sympathize. They are entering the adult world after a century of loot-and-plunder politics and all the good ones are taken. So the kids are saying: we want some too!

Sorry kids. If you were smart you would start a comprehensive and mandatory movement to "end privilege now." You would want to end the taxes that go to pay for boomer entitlements, taxes that go to support dysfunctional schools and universities, "free" health care that is provided by a huge expensive corporative and credentialed blob, home mortgage subsidies and low-down payments. Because all that stuff is what is making it impossible for you guys to get a start in life.

But you don't get it. You've been carefully taught by the monopoly government education system that the solution to all problems is another loot-and-plunder operation.

People who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

Because, as Margaret Thatcher said: at some point you run out of other people's money.

I should say: the ruling class runs out of other people's money.

Hey Transgenders, Don't Frighten the Horses

Yesterday, June 29, 2021, the US Supreme Court voted not to review a transgender bathroom case in which a transgender high-school student (girl turned boy) had sued and won in federal court to be allowed to use the boys' bathroom. MSNBC :

Grimm’s right to use a boys bathroom was upheld in rulings by lower federal courts, which had ruled that he was protected by a federal law that bars school programs from discriminating against students on the basis of their sex.

No kidding!

But I would suggest to my liberal friends that this development runs afoul of two principles that, in my opinion, trump the holy writ of non-discrimination.

The first is the Mrs. Patrick Campbell principle. It is is said to be in answer to a young actress that complained to Mrs. Pat about two male actors being a bit too friendly with each other. Said Mrs. Pat:

Does it really matter what these affectionate people do — so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses!

I would say that the whole point of current LGBT politics and activism is precisely to frighten the horses in the street: and not in the sense of frightening them into stampeding, but to frighten them into shutting up or else they will lose their jobs. Which suggests one of my main maxims:

There is no such thing as justice. Only injustice.

In other words, when you have climbed into the ruling class power seat and you start to have the power to reverse decades, or centuries, or eons of injustice, I tell you that the people on the receiving end of your "justice" will experience it as "injustice."

The other important point is that gender specific bathrooms are not there in order to discriminate against transgenders. They are there to protect women from male harassment. Why in the world should we worry about that, you may ask? Because of Freud's famous remark (which I had thought was made by Oscar Wilde)

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is 'What does a woman want?'

I say, Siggie, that you are asking the wrong question, you silly boy. It is not what women want, it is what women expect. And what women expect is:

Women expect to be protected.

So, you LGBTs and liberals and wokies and judges and nice liberal ladies and all the ships at sea. With this bathroom thingy you are heading right into Trouble, with a capital T, right here in River City. Because biological women really don't like biological men in the women's bathroom. I mean that women really don't like men in the girls' bathroom!

You will notice that the LGBT activists chose a biological woman acting as a man in order to demand the right of transgenders to use the bathroom of their choice. Of course they did. Because when you want access to the other guys' bathroom you certainly don't want to go to the court system on behalf of a biological male wanting to use the girls bathroom. Whatever the civil-rights laws may say about discrimination, you wouldn't want to be persuading judges to permit biological males in the women's bathroom. Not yet. Not this week.

On this subject I am a true Leninist: The worse the better.

The fun thing about this is that, back in the day, liberals were bellowing from the rooftops about "legislating morality" and protecting women from the male gaze, and liberating women. Today, everything that liberals do amounts to legislating their morality and forcing it upon the rest of the world.

And also parading a battalion of fake victims before the world.

And this issue also attaches to my concept on women in the public square. The public square, according to German sociologist Georg Simmel, was created by men for men. So women coming into the public square a century ago could be expected to transform it to suit "a more feminine sensibility."

What women in the public square do not like -- do not like -- is the idea of men coming into the women's bathroom. Because "women expect to be protected."

Just sayin'.

The End of Over/Under Politics

Back in the day, we didn't have over/under politics. Back in 12th century England, politics was all about squabbling nobles. In Eleanor of Aquitaine by Alison Weir there isn't a word about the middle class or the oppressed peoples. Politics is all about King Henry II of England and his Angevin Empire -- which included England and a good half of France. When he wasn't putting down rebellions among his feudatories he was playing political games with the King of France and quarreling with his sons.

And if he got really annoyed with one of his feudal retainers he would lay siege to his castle and destroy it and probably set fire to the town around it.

I guess if you were a poor person you just hung on and hoped that your lord would prosper -- and not tax you too heavily to finance his wars.

But then there was the Black Death and in its aftermath wages went up and the lower orders became a bit uppity what with Wat Tyler's Rebellion in 1381 against the poll tax needed to finance the Hundred Years War.

And then came the nationalization of the armed forces and the development of agricultural "improvement" and the surplus peasants were sent packing.

Thus the first Vagabonds and Beggars Act of 1497. And the first Poor Law in 1536, although the first big poor law was in 1597. Clearly, in this world, the poor have emerged into political consciousness: as a problem, rather than an opportunity.

So how do we get from the taken-for-granted hierarchy of the Middle Ages to the over-under political philosophy that is clearly in full bloom with rich kids Marx and Engels by 1850?

Well, more research is needed. But, to start with, in the 18th century, we have Rousseau. In The Discourse on Inequality he argues that mankind in the "state of nature" is driven by pity and self-preservation. Says SparkNotes:

Man in the state of nature has few needs, no idea of good and evil, and little contact with other humans. Nevertheless, he is happy.

But he has "perfectibility." And this drives him to respond to his environment, and live in groups, and develop reason and society. But this is not good, because

As men start to live in groups, pity and self-preservation are replaced by amour propre, which drives men to compare themselves to others, and to need to dominate others in order to be happy.

This leads to a dangerous instability between rich and poor, leading to war, that is solved by a trick where the rich entice the poor into a political society that merely "fixes the relations of dominance." And, of course, private property is the cornerstone of this dominance.

In The Social Contract "agreed upon by all citizens for their mutual preservation" Rousseau defines the "sovereign" as "the collective grouping of all citizens" that "expresses the general will that aims for the common good." It is in conflict with the actual "government to exercise executive power." And the "sovereign" and "government" are typically in conflict.

Then we have Babeuf, in the French Revolution. His "newspaper Le tribun du peuple (The Tribune of the People) was best known for its advocacy for the poor and calling for a popular revolt against the Directory, the government of France. He was a leading advocate for democracy and the abolition of private property."

But both Rousseau and Babeuf were commoners -- Rousseau was the son of a watchmaker; Babeuf the son of an officer who was working as a domestic servant at the beginning of the Revolution. 

Next we get Saint Simon, born an aristocrat, and another socialist theorist. But he recommended the rule of an "industrial class... [that] included all people engaged in productive work that contributed to society such as businesspeople, managers, scientists and bankers, along with manual labourers, amongst others."

Honestly, I don't see how all this muddle gets to Marx and the brilliant idea that rich educated kids like him will lead the helpless workers to glorious revolution and heaven on Earth.

But, clearly, the logic of politics as war by other means leads Marx to invent a struggle of the poor helpless workers against the monstrous and evil capitalists and bourgeoisie, not because the capitalists and bourgeoisie are necessarily evil but because the logic of his over/under political system requires an enemy.

In fact, of course, the two centuries since the French Revolution and the century and a half since The Communist Manifesto have seen a Great Enrichment, an increase of 30 times in real per capita income in the western world. And we have had scientific experiments on whole populations that have conclusively demonstrated that the market economy delivers prosperity to ordinary people and poor people, and that the ideas of Marx lead to slavery and death camps and famine.

So I say that the current spasm of over/under politics, in the antiracism of Allyism, with allies advocating for "oppressed peoples" against "white oppressors" is more nonsense driven by the logic of over/under politics that requires the middling sort of people to be the enemy. That's because the logic of politics requires an enemy, and the logic of over/under politics requires that the enemy be the middle. Who else could it be?

I say there is a reason why over/under politics switched from Marx's over/under politics of class to the current over/under politics of race. The reason is that by, say 1970, the numbers weren't working, because the Great Enrichment had lifted too many helpless workers into the responsible middle class. So a new concept was required, of racial oppression and white guilt. "Anti Whiteness," if you will.

But what do we do about it?

I don't think that the answer is a conscious whiteness race movement. And my reason arises out of my reductive Three Peoples theory. In the Three Peoples theory it is easy to understand the logic of the left's over/under politics. The "over" class of rulers is the educated elite, the Cathedral of Curtis Yarvin's notion, and it wants to be important, wants to rule. But the ordinary responsible Commoners of the middle class don't want too much government rule, thank you very much, so the obvious thing for the overclass to do is to champion the "under" class, the Subordinate Clients, and hopefully get to direct traffic. This situation is obviously a class situation.

And I don't think that the middle middle people experience themselves as "white." That's because the logic of being middle class and doing middle-class things is that you work to serve the consumer and you associate with people that you can trust because they exhibit a record of trustworthy behavior; you obey the law, you go to work, and you follow the rules, and you don't really think about it. Notice how this middling trust culture differs from the overclass where you trust people with the right ideas and credentials and from the underclass where you associate with people of your race, or class, or language, or kindred.

And that is why I think that the future for the middle middle is a class identification of being middle class commoners rather than white people.

So I believe that the Great Rebellion of Commoners will not be defined by race but by class.

Yes, but whatabout the non-white members of the middle class? Won't they identify with their ethnic and religious origins rather than with whiteness?

No, I don't think they will, and the reason is war. In my view all groups and tribes and nations are defined by the war in which various disparate elements are drawn together and forged into a political (or military) army. This experience creates a new cultural community, a new identity, a new "band of brothers." If the "army" wins its war then it defines a new community, a new identity. In our time, the "band of brothers" creates a new nation. If it loses, of course, it disappears into the mists of time.

So my prophecy is that the facts of the situation today in which the ordinary middle class finds itself attacked by the Cathedral is radicalizing the middle class, and the experience of defending the middle-class identity, and the instinctive political strategy of the politicians representing the middle-class identity, is creating a new political identity and a new unity. And the disparate people that are coming together into this new identity will increasingly experience themselves as united into a nation of commoners rather than the previous identity they may have experienced.

I give you President Trump. Our lefty friends insisted that he was a racist sexist homophobe, because Charlottesville. But I'd say that President Trump has and does define himself as a leader of Americans, ordinary, patriotic, middle-class Americans. In other words, he defines himself exactly as you would expect a leader of ordinary middle-class American commoners rebelling against the rule of the educated overclass.

And I think the current instinctive panic of our Democratic friends, where they are trying to ram through their entire woke agenda in six months, demonstrates that, even if our Democratic friends don't consciously understand the rise of the Commoners, they just feel that something is rotten in the state of Denmark and the foundations of their world are shaking. So there is no time to be lost.

And they are right to be concerned. Because I prophesy that the Age of Domination of Over/Under Politics is coming to an end.

My Three Theses: Racism Does Not Pay

I understand race and slavery through My Three Theses on Abolition.

1. We abolished slavery because slavery Does Not Pay.
2. We abolished racism because racism Does Not Pay.
3. We will abolish liberal race politics because wokism Does Not Pay.

I discussed Thesis One, on slavery, here. Now let us discuss Thesis Two, that racism Does Not Pay.

Really there should be no need to go beyond the fact of Jim Crow laws in the South of the United States after the end of Reconstruction -- i.e., the military occupation of the South -- after the Civil War.

Why did the South need Jim Crow? Because otherwise people would not discriminate against blacks. At least, not enough.

Yes. Political folk have a real problem with businessmen and employers and corporations. They really don't want to discriminate. It's costly to have racially segregated railroad trains. It is crazy not to hire marginalized minority workers at a lower wage than privileged majority workers -- if it is more profitable. It is annoying to have to send blacks to the back of the bus. It means unhappy customers.

And clearly, the racism in employment since the Civil Rights era, half hidden by a score of euphemisms such as Affirmative Action, Diversity and Inclusion, Equity, and so on, costs money. Because all the HR and race-counting and Human Rights Commission busy work that a modern corporation is obliged to perform is a pure cost. Oh boy, what it would save not to have all those busybody women in HR collecting race and gender data so that the government can use it against the corporation!

But let us not just blame the racists for screwing the economy. Basically all wage and hour laws are put there to stop eevil corporate chieftains from using employees to get the maximum profit out of them, just like Marx said. 

Only, of course, nobody knows what makes the most money. Is it treating the employee as a widget? Is it treating an employee like a human? Is it reducing everyone to contractors with no benefits and no tenure? Encouraging and subsidizing employees that improve their skills? Firing everyone over thirty? Providing extensive benefits from pensions to health insurance? Paying premium wages? Paying low wages supplemented by profit-sharing in the good years?

Basically, I believe, the culture of capitalism is that you are the slave of the consumer. Whatever the consumer wants, and whatever price the consumer is willing to pay, that is final. And then there is trust. The point of trust is not that it is a good thing, although it is. The value of trust is that it reduces costs. That is why diamond merchants are often Hasidic Jews: they have a closed community and trust and reputation is everything, so they can exchange valuable diamonds and have faith that none of their fellow merchants will cheat them.

There is a Science to explain this. It is called the iterative Prisoner's Dilemma. It does not pay to cheat unless you will never see the other party to a transaction again.

This capitulation to the market is hard, very hard, for humans to do because we are all social animals and instinctively look for protection from our kindred and from the people that we know. Capitalism is an utter revolution in social relations that says that you trust those people that are trustworthy. It says that your life and prosperity depends on you serving your fellows, doing things that they are willing to pay for. And the customer is always right.

Racism is the old way, the way of the hunter-gatherer band, the way of the village, the clan, the ethnic ghetto in the big city. And it Does Not Pay.

Next up: We will abolish liberal race politics because wokism Does Not Pay.

My Three Theses: Slavery Does Not Pay

I had a brainwave a week ago, about slavery and race, and I announced my brainwave in a piece at The American Thinker. I call it My Three Theses on Abolition.

1. We abolished slavery because slavery Does Not Pay.
2. We abolished racism because racism Does Not Pay.
3. We will abolish liberal race politics because wokism Does Not Pay.

Oooh look. I already mapped the idea out in "Stop Moralizing about Race, Slavery, Empire" back in January 2020.

What on earth is this idea of Three Theses all about?

Obviously it issues from the first principle of my life, that all my ideas must cut across the grain of liberal ideas, creating confusion. Hopefully, strategic confusion in liberal-land.

But we are bigger than that. We really want to know. Why should we, in the current epoch, have decided to abolish one of the most ubiquitous human institutions, probably dating back to the beginning of agriculture.

Yes, what do the scientists say? Nils Petter Lagerlöf of York University:

The institution of slavery is found mostly at intermediate stages of agricultural development and less often among hunter-gatherers and advanced agrarian societies.

Oh oh. There's a clue. We just emerged from the agricultural age. So maybe there is something about agriculture...

We know all about the Romans and their slaves. They had Triumphs, parades in downtown Rome, to exhibit the slaves and plunder from their successful military -- shall we call them colonial imperialist? -- campaigns.

Don't forget the Vikings, bless their Scandinavian hearts. Sarah Pruitt:

Historical accounts make it clear that when they raided coastal towns from the British Isles to the Iberian Peninsula, the Vikings took thousands of men, women and children captive, and held or sold them as slaves—or thralls, as they were called in Old Norse. According to one estimate, slaves might have comprised as much as 10 percent of the population of Viking-era Scandinavia.

Dublin, Ireland, was the principal slave market in Northwest Europe.

Then there were peasants that actually requested to become slaves. You can read about that in The Year 1000 by Danny Danziger and Robert Lacey.

People also surrendered themselves into bondage at times of famine or distress...  [I]n the year 1000 the starving man had no other resort but to kneel before his lord or lady and place his head in their hands...  It was a basic transaction--heads for food.

Oh, and let's not forget the women slaves from Circassia that were sold at Kaffa in the Crimea and distributed to harems all over the Middle East. As I understand the Venetian and the Genoese merchants were very much into that business.

But, writes Max Weber in The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, slavery is problematical. Yes, the slave-owner enjoys "a more complete power of disposal over the worker than is the case with employment for wages.:" But there are costs (p.276):

1. Capital to invest in slaves is usually more expensive than "employment of free labor," including the "capital risk" of slave ownership.
2. Fluctuations in the price of slaves, and problems with recruitment of slaves.
3. If slaves can marry, then cost of women and children is borne by the slave-owner.
4. Difficulty in using slaves to operate "tools and apparatus" because of need for "high level of responsibility and... the operator's self-interest."
5. Impossibility of selection, hiring and firing.

Thus, writes Weber, slavery only works where slaves are cheap, with a well-supplied slave market, and put to work in slave plantations or "very simple industrial processes."

Of course, it would be remiss not to mention the greatest slave experiments in all history, the slave state of the Soviet Union, 1917-89, and the slave state of Maoist China, 1949-79. And why did Maoist China take the capitalist road under Deng Xiaoping in 1979? Because slave socialism Did Not Pay. And why did the Soviet Union start "perestroika" under Mikhail Gorbachev and collapse in 1989. I wonder why the noble Commies, devoted students of Marx and Engels, decided to end their experiment in slavery? I will tell you, it is because communism -- i.e., slavery -- Does Not Pay.

This is not to completely marginalize the noble activism of people like William Wilberforce, son of a wealthy British merchant in the Baltic trade, or the importance of the abolitionist movement that helped end the slave trade and thus make slaves a lot less cheap.

And it is not to hide the guilt of Venetian merchants that invented slave plantations on Cyprus to grow sugar cane. Or the Brits that made money growing slave sugar in the West Indies, or the Virginians that grew slave tobacco, or the Southerners that grew cotton with slave labor.

But if slavery Does Not Pay, then maybe we didn't need to have a civil war over it.

Yes, imagine what would have happened if the abolitionist activists and their mostly peaceful protests had cooled their jets? Suppose US had not decided to turn the question of slavery over to a civil war? Suppose our fearless leaders had just ended slavery by buying off the slave owners with 10 cents on the dollar for their slave investments as they did in Brazil and elsewhere. The Brits paid out £20 million in compensation to slave owners in the Slave Compensation Act of 1833 when Brit GDP was about £500 million. That's about 4 percent of GDP. So, in today's money that would cost the Brit taxpayer about £80 billion., Here in the US 4 percent of GDP is about $800 billion. I think that, in today's terms, with $2 trillion infrastructure programs it would be chump change. I bet it would have been cheaper than the Civil War.

Of course, in our day we have reintroduced the voluntary slavery of the Year 1000 where people can "surrender themselves into bondage." We call it "welfare."

Next up: We abolished racism because racism Does Not Pay.