Disentangling Economics and Politics

There's piece in The American Spectator boosting Trumponomics against "neoliberal economics" of the Republican and Democratic Parties. How exactly does by Adam Korzeniewski define all this?

Here's Trumponomics:

industrial policy, national economics, immigration restriction, and skepticism of globalism, [and borrowed from Henry Clay's American System] which focused on internal improvements (infrastructure), tariffs to protect industry, and subsidies when necessary.

Here's Neoliberalism:

Neoliberalism, broadly defined, constitutes a wide range of policies, including the deregulation of markets, elimination of trade barriers, increases in immigration, and the globalization of capital flow. These policies lead to the liberal calcification of corporations and government bureaucracy. They also treat people as interchangeable components in the economy, in which individual value and cultural norms are meaningless. 

Democrats add a twist:

President Biden’s neoliberal economic model leeches off the entropy of American economic power to accelerate the end of domestic industries and American jobs in favor of international corporate profits.

Hmm. Not quite. The problem is that we are mixing economics and politics here. First, let's try to understand economics and the market system.

Economics arises when people do not just produce for themselves, but exchange stuff that they have produced in return for something else, usually money. The next step is that people don't work making stuff for themselves at all; they hire out their labor, usually in return for money. And then some people work entirely in the money business, loaning money and investing in enterprises.

Obviously, this gets bloody complicated, right away. But, in another proof of God's existence, it turns out that humans can value everything that is offered for exchange by a concept we call the price system. There is no mystery about prices, as imagined by the classical economists and the Marxists. In marginal economics the price is whatever something just sold for, and whatever someone is willing to pay right now.

Thus, in a perfect world, markets would be markets, and no regulatory and tariff barriers, and anyone could work for anyone, and move to anywhere and capital, the mother's milk of enterprise, would go wherever it was most needed, all over the world.

But the world ain't perfect. Thus governments are instituted among men to protect us from pirates and plunderers. Trouble is that, as often as not, governments act as pirates and plunderers.  

So, the trouble with "neoliberalism" is that it tends to bend the arc of economics to favor big global corporations that fund politicians. Which often screws the little guy.

But the trouble with Trumponomics is that "industrial policy," "infrastructure," "tariffs," and "subsidies" are all in the eye of the beholder. They all tend to benefit existing economic interests and are used to buy votes.

And the trouble with government programs in general is that they subtract from the verdict of the market, that always wants to fund the most urgent need of the consumers as expressed by the price system. So, "industrial policy" may seem like a good idea, but it will probably end up benefiting existing established interests. Ditto "tariffs" and "subsidies."

And in fact the net effect of almost all government programs is that they try to violate my Four Laws: 

Socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices (Mises). The administrative state cannot work because the Man in Washington does not have the bandwidth to run the economy (Hayek). Regulation does not work because “regulatory capture” (Stigler). Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them (Chantrill).

Whenever you violate one of my Four Laws, chances are that you  are Making Things Worse. For the market giveth and the market taketh away. 

The story of the last 200 years, of the Great Enrichment, is also a story of ruined dreams. The handloom weavers were put out of business by power looms. The candlemakers were put out of business by Rockefeller's illuminating oil. The stagecoaches and the carters were put out of business by railroads. The sailing ships were put out of business by steamships. The horse-breeders were put out of business by automobiles. Silent movies were put out of business by talkies. Passenger ships were put out of business by airplanes. Mom and pop stores were put out of business by megastore chains. Mainframe computers were put out of business by minicomputers, then microcomputers, then server farms. Yes, we can help the latest industry put out of business by "progress," but for how long?

You think politicians and bureaucrats are smart enough to outguess the ceaseless innovations of the market?

Look, Trumponomics is a political program to help the ordinary middle class and soften the competition from Factory Girls in China. Neoliberalism is the political program of international business and the educated class that wants to live and work anywhere in the world.

In the best of all possible worlds we would come to a compromise between the two while still remembering that there ain't no hiding from the market. Not in the long term, not in the medium term.

For the problem is always, I would say, that whenever government gets involved in the economy, you can be sure that someone is looking for a bit of loot and plunder, and the politicians are only too glad to help out.

The Folly of the All-powerful Intelligence Community

In his notion of the Fourth Branch of Government, Sundance proposes that ever since 9/11 -- and accelerated under Obama -- the United States has come to be ruled by the Intelligence Community -- FBIs, CIAs, NSAs, -- and their bureaucratic appendages and combinations. It was of course the intelligence community that was front and center in the 5-year Deep State war on Trump.

Of course, this game is an old game, pursued by rulers all over the world and all through history, the lust to keep an eye on dangerous elements in society and keep any opposition subdued and safe: down to a dull roar.

And now we have Nancy Pelosi's secret police, an expanded Capitol Police force, that will have offices in various cities "with the first field offices located in California and Florida."

Of course, we all know that secret police and shadowy intelligence agencies are a monstrosity, as proved by the headline secret police agencies of the 20th century, the Cheka/NKVD/MVD/KGB of Soviet Russia. The Gestapo of Nazi Germany. And I don't even know what the secret police in China is called.

But I think that secret police are stupid. And a secret police or ramped up intelligence agencies are a "tell" that the ruling class isn't really legitimate and really doesn't get it.

But, of course, before the illegitimate regime and its secret police exit stage left, there is always the butcher's bill. And beyond the butcher's bill, the millions of lives for whom the "authoritarian government" has Made Things Worse.

In reading Sundance's piece, we are to understand that the Obama administration wanted more political push for its "fundamental transformation" agenda. So it had no problem siccing its gumshoes on the Tea Party in 2010. But, you may remember, in 2010 the Republicans still gained an extraordinary 64 seats in the House of Representatives. Good work Barack!

So, in the Trump years we had an unprecedented use of the intelligence community to harass candidate Trump and later President Trump. And, you can say, look at the results! They got rid of Trump! Yay! But first, what a bunch of second-raters, 

the new woke FBI of hard noses like James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Kevin Clinesmith, and Jim Baker

as Victor Davis Hanson points out. Yeah, that's what you call a First Team. And then Robert Mueller.

The Mueller bully team collapsed and found no collusion with the Russians, despite a 22-month, nearly $40 million blank check... And Mueller embarrassed himself with befuddled congressional testimony, in which he was either unaware of or lied about Fusion GPS and the Christopher Steele dossier—the seed and fertilizer of the entire Russian “blockbuster” collusion hoax and hence his own investigation. 

Maybe Our Nance's Capitol Police is brighter and smarter and meaner than the Keystone Kops of the Get Trump team. But I doubt it. I think I had my "aha" moment on this watching the 2020 Russian movie Dear Comrades! about a strike in the Soviet Union in 1962. There's a KGB officer in the movie. And it seems to me that his #1 concern is keeping his record clean at the office and not making a false step. He is a mouse and so are all the other local political figures.

Oh, I don't think that the stepped-up intelligence community and Nancy's Specials will be completely useless. I expect they will help extend the life of our current old and tired ruling class for a few years. And they will manage to wreck the lives of numerous ordinary people who dare to challenge the ruling-class narrative and a few elite people that prove to be a nuisance the way that Trump did.

Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida! That means you!

My belief, that Government is Force and that is all, has been strengthened by re-reading Crane Brinton's The Anatomy of Revolution, start here. At the end of it all, he asks: did the revolution -- in England, in America, in France, in Russia -- really achieve fundamental change to the country in question? Not so much. After it was all over, England was still England, America was still America, France still France, and Russia still Russia.

If you want proof, read Philosopher Putin's review of Russian and Ukrainian history. You'd almost think the Bolshevik Soviet era was just an embarrassing hiccup in the glorious arc of Russian history.

The point is, Brinton writes, that human society is a lot more complex and a lot more difficult to change than the average intellectual and politician and revolutionary thinks. The wise man thinks of human culture in terms of geology and glaciers. Slow, but relentless.

And the bottom line is that nobody knows what the future holds. Whatever your glorious vision of freedom and liberty and justice and equity may be, the future will probably make mincemeat of it, just as your political gumshoes make mincemeat of a lot of ordinary people that just want to live their ordinary lives without being put in the meat grinder of politics.

The Three Functions of a Ruling Class, Then and Now

I was checking out the meaning of noblesse de la robe yesterday, and of course it led me to the three Estates of old-regime France. Let us rehearse it.

The First Estate was the clergy. Their job was managing the moral framework of France.

The Second Estate was the nobility. But they had two jobs! Nice work if you can get it. There was la noblesse de la robe. Their job was running the higher administrative echelons of the justice system, where, I suppose, they got to wear cool robes lined with ermine or something. La Wik:

[They] were French aristocrats whose rank came from holding certain judicial or administrative posts... The most influential of them were the 1,100 members of the 13 parlements, or courts of appeal.

The tippety-top of la noblesse de la robe was the Parlement de Paris, the closest thing to a Supreme Court. And, in the years before the Revolution of 1789 the Parlement de Paris sometimes handed down decisions that challenged the power of the KIng, Louis XVI.

Then there was la noblesse de l'epée. Yessiree, the nobles of the sword. La Wik:

[They] were the noblemen of the oldest class of nobility in France dating from the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, and arguably still in existence by descent. It was originally the knightly class[.]

And it got me to thinking. I dare say that, if you are a person with pretensions to be part of a ruling class, you probably need to be in one of the three noble categories: priest, high administrator, or warrior.

Because some things never change, and our brains are still programmed in much the same way as in 1788.

Now obviously, our cancel-ologists and our Karens and Beckies are the modern priests, searching and destroying sin and corruption wherever they find it in unredeemed racist-sexist-homophobic sinners. And some of them are like itinerant friars, our activists, that don't just sit there issuing sermons on Sundays, but go out into the community to purge it of evil elements.

And just as obviously we have our own special noblesse de la robe. That's all the educated snobs in administrative government and its regulatory agencies, that love to issue ukases to the rabble about recycling and vaccine passports.

Whatabout the vitally important noblesse de l'épee, working out at the local fencing club? Well, it's pretty obvious. These folks are the heroic peaceful protesters celebrated in verse and song, the BLMs and AntiFas heroically battling it out with far-right extremists that dare to pollute the sacred streets of our progressive cities with their conspiratorial disinformation. And as you get older, you learn the fencing skills of elective politics.

One of the things that exercise my mind is that the old male pursuits of war and aggressive hierarchy are less vitally important these days than in the good old days when you never know when the Vikings or the Huns or the Mongols might show up.

But men still want to smite the attacker of their sacred ancestral lands. And they still want to be cock of the walk in whatever society they strive, whether in politics, business, religion, activism. If nothing else there is the necessity of achieving high status because hypergamy as practiced by our female friends.

But can't we do better?

Isn't there a better way of moral preening than cancel culture and Greta Thunberg style "How. Dare. You?" Isn't there a way of setting a moral example without the abomination of what we call "virtue-signaling?"

Isn't there a better way of serving the administrative needs of society other than nice cozy sinecures in administrative bureaucracies funded by the state, you professors?

Isn't there a better way of protecting society from violence than posturing in the street as the street thugs of the regime, as close as you can get to the fascist Sturmabteilung of the National Socialist German Workers Party without actually putting a swastika on your arm?

There's gotta be a better way than the corrupt and vile culture of our present ruling class.

All is Proceeding as I Have Foreseen?

Obviously America is at a confusing moment in its history. Obviously the narrative of the educated ruling class of the last century is a little tattered and worn. Obviously we really don't know what narrative will take its place. Here are some confusing confusions to confuse you today.

At National Review: Bring Back the Tea Party. I doubt it. We don't need an organic movement like the Tea Party. We have already created a Republican Party that is focusing more and more on the needs of the average Commoner, the average middle-class Anybody. We have Donald Trump and now Ron DeSantis who are clearly fixin' to lead the middle-class against the Overclass.

At American Spectator: Anarchy and the Roots of Wokism. A.J. Caschetta illuminates the words and actions of the anarchists of the 19th century. And it illuminated for me the idea that the great task of our modern era is to channel the instincts of pre-urban -- and even pre-agricultural man -- into safe channels. For my take on the anarchists and our modern BLM/AntiFa street fighters is that they want and need to be warriors, slaughtering the enemy. But, I like to say, the old need for warriors to defend the border is kinda vieux jeu old chap. But we men still need to work out our aggressive instincts. Any ideas, before lefties level our society until the rubble bounces.

About my neighbor across the street: Helion Energy Builds... Fusion Power Plant. Hmm. When I talked to David on Tuesday night at the annual street Block Watch party he talked about a manufacturing facility. But Helion Energy is a startup trying to make the technology for real fusion power plants. The real thing: wind and solar need not apply. David says that Helion Energy will be going public fairly soon. Peter Thiel is an investor.

From NYMag: The US's Secret Drone Assassination Thingy. Did you know that the US has a secret drone program that can launch missiles at known terrorists? And the command hierarchy goes all the way up to the president who gets to sign off on the go-nogo decision. This piece is about a weirdo, David Hale, that was in the program flying a computer. And then started taking docs out of his office in the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and handing them off to journalists. He is the "Second Snowden." I don't know about you but I have a real problem with these shadow agencies.

From Western Journal: Make It Too Expensive to Drive a Car. Heard of the MBUF, the Mileage-based User Fee that's included in the infraststructure bill? This is the sort of stuff I really hate. You liberals want to tax cars by the mile? Then debate it in the House, the Senate, and get the consent of the governed, you twerps.

From the American Spectator: The EPA's Bureaucractic Goon Squad. The EPA is busily raiding auto repair shops that will modify your car computer to make it perform better. Yeah, nearly all gubmint agencies in the front rank have their own police forces. The police police may not be allowed to use force to apprehend home invaders, but don't you dare modify your car from its bureaucrat approved settings.

I tend to think that the good thing is that our ruling class really doesn't have a clue. But the bad thing is that it really doesn't have a clue.

Ignoring Supreme Court: It's OK When We Do It

I get why the Biden administration is extending the rent moratorium. Their lefty activist pals are all in a twist on the injustice of making oppressed peoples pay rent.The Noive! What is the point of an ally if he/she/xir can't shove it on the white oppressor landlords on behalf of the oppressed peoples?

But I'd say, with all my years of wisdom and experience, that the sooner you Bidenoids get the economy back to normal, with no stimmy checks, no extended unemployment benefits, no rent moratoriums, no mortgage pauses, no mega-trillion handout bills, the better it will be for you in 2022 and 2024.

Frankly, I am sitting here "literally shaking" my head at what I consider the serial stupidities of the Biden administration. For me it starts with this chart from my ugovernmentspending.com.

To my way of thinking total government spending, federal, state, and local, has been about 35 percent of GDP since 1980.

Let me be clear about this. That means that 35 percent of the national GDP is decided By Force. I think that is wrong; I think it is unjust, and I think that trying to increase it, as the Bidenoids are proposing to do, and at least attempt major tax increases, is going to end in tears, in part in Democeratic circles, and in part among the voters on the receiving end of this injustice. And look at the chart: in the peak of COVID-ology governments in the US were spending 45 percent of GDP. Almost as much as in World War II. 

I think that if Democrats think they are going to boost spending above the 35, 36 percent of GDP they are going to reap the whirlwind. Don't know quite how, but I think that the 35 percent GDP number is not an accident; it represents the correlation of political forces over the last 40 years. There is no broad-based warrant for a surge in spending. Except for Democratic lefty activist groups.

Obviously in this moment our Democratic friends are trying to push through a major increase in spending. That they imagine will be permanent. I suspect that they will live to regret it.

I've been re-reading Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution, and one of his takes is that revolution and counter-revolution exacts a terrible toll on ordinary people, through the disorganization of the economy by the rip-tides of politics.

My judgement about the last 18 months of COVID-ology is that it represents something getting close to a revolutionary disruption. The result will be that the top 25 percent of Americans will do fine; the middle half will do OK, and the bottom 30 percent is having their lives totally disrupted, and many of them are going to be screwed for the rest of their lives in drugs, despair, and homelessness.

And I expect that there will be major political disruptions that nobody will have seen coming.

The whole point of the Era of the Educated Ruling Class is the conceit in the Allies narrative, that "we" are the allies of the working class/oppressed peoples against the rich/white oppressors.

But I say that the educated ruling class has Made Things Worse. It made things worse for the white working class that is now "dying of despair;" it has made things worse for women, that have been disrupted from modesty, from marriage, and from children and neighborhood social works; it has made things worse for blacks, who are leading the nation in murders of and by blacks; it is making things worse for marginal people of all kinds: people with marginal job skills, marginal social skills, marginal common sense.

And now the Biden administration is defying the United States Supreme Court on the rent moratorium.

You don't wanna do that, Bidenoids. You'll regret it.

Peggy Noonan Always Echoes "Respectable" Elite Opinion

Last Saturday, so I understand, Peggy Noonan wrote a piece writing off Donald Trump as "crazy, dishonest, and incompetent" according to Conrad Black.

I have always valued Peggy Noonan as a important meter telling us what "respectable" elite opinion is saying right now.

And yes, I get that right now "respectable" elite opinion wants to put Donald Trump (and the questionable election that you are not allowed to question) out of sight and out of mind. But in fact, as Black writes, Trump's achievements were considerable:

The near elimination of illegal immigration and of unemployment and the sharply rising incomes in low-income ethnic minority areas, reduced taxes, the identification in sober terms of the Chinese challenge, the elimination of oil imports, the extermination of ISIS, shaping up of NATO, the Abraham Accords in the Middle East, and the pressure on Iran and de-escalation of the confrontation with North Korea[.]

Actually, says Black, Never-Trumpers like Noonan got it wrong all along:

they were useful idiots for the Democrats and must now wear their responsibility for the probably dishonest election of the most incompetent administration in American history.  

I think the question is rather whether we are seeing a basic realignment of American politics that puts the ordinary middle class at the center of politics, as various aborted movements suggest, from Nixon's Silent Majority to the Reagan Democrats to the Gingrich Contract with America to the Tea Party to the Trump Car Parades.

Or whether we are seeing a totalitarian educated elite slowing cinching down its domination until nothing moves, as suggested by the Zman. For, he says, good decent people that believe in compromise, the faith in due process, are always at the mercy of the true believers.

As long as people are willing to accept “well we have to respect the election results” as an excuse for not opposing evil, there is no escaping the gathering darkness. It is only when the opponents of radicalism commit to its utter destruction through any means necessary that the tides of war will change. 

Of course that is the lesson of Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution. The radicals won the revolution because they didn't believe in due process. They believed in the truth of their ideology. Of course, eventually almost every revolution returns to normalcy, as with Charles II after Cromwell, Napoleon after the Reign of Terror, and Khrushchev after Stalin.

But then there is the notion of God's Fifth Column, a book by William Gerhardie, discussed by William S. Lind.

His theory was that, just at the point where everyone who was anyone agreed events would go in a certain direction, they instead headed off on a wild, wholly unpredicted tangent.

Back in 1914 nobody thought that the nations of Europe would destroy themselves in a Great War. Right now nobody except crazy conspiracy theorists thinks that the current regime in the US is going anywhere but onward.

Why do we get surprised by history? Lind thinks it is because anyone in the prediction business has to predict a continuation of things as they are. Anything big departure is too crazy to consider in respectable circles.

Which gets back to Stein's Law: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."

But the only question is: When? Peggy Noonan will tell us. After it happens.

Because it stands to reason that "most incompetent administration in American history" is not going to end well.

Let's Call It Climate Imperialism

It's one thing for our glorious global elite to pat itself on the back as it mobilizes the world to save the climate by eliminating CO2 production. It's another thing when climate change politics start to hit ordinary folks at their jobs and in the pocket book and at the pump.

The Turow open-cast lignite mine is one of many production sites in Poland. But the citizens of the small town are angry. They demonstrate because they fear for their jobs.

Wow, imagine that! Innocent Poles are losing their jobs. Why, I am "literally shaking" as the Climate Nazis reenact the 1939 invasion of Poland. 

From the point of view of many governments, the most difficult plan is the inclusion of gasoline and heating in the EU’s new emissions trading scheme. As a result, prices would rise steadily in the years to come. 

Well. Of course the French gilets-jaunes of a couple of years ago were protesting -- mostly peacefully -- against higher gasoline prices. And now the EU courtiers are worried that the manifestations -- that is French for protest -- may spread across Europe.

Even a humble college student, Alexander Butler, from where I went to Uni at Leeds in England half gets the point. He says that the way to fight climate change is not the authoritarian way of China, with top-down enforcement of ruling class power.

Without freedom of expression or freedom of the press, an active civil society cannot flourish, and meaningful debate regarding climate change remains stagnant and controlled by censorship. 

Actually, young sonny, we don't have a "meaningful debate regarding climate change" because anyone that disagrees with the global ruling-class orthodoxy is branded a "climate denier." Now I don't know that I call it "authoritarian" to marginalize critics of climate science as deniers. The word "denier" came into use as a way to slap down critics of the narrative of 6 million Jews killed in Nazi death camps in World War II.

And that's not the way science is done, anyway. Science, ever since Kant, has been about battling theories. And the basic theory of the universe has changed about three times since Kant invented "critique" in Königsberg over two hundred years ago.

So how come we are all bound and determined that climate science is all buttoned up, shut up peasants?

I will tell you. Because the climate change movement is not really a movement. It is flat out Climate Imperialism, the global elite conquering and looting the ordinary people of the world so they can build big climate pyramids all over the world to their greater glory.

Look, in the old days, rulers were celebrated for their glorious empires, and nobody cared. I've been reading Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain that is built upon the fanciful notion that a bunch of bums from the Trojan War traveled to Britain and started up the glorious kings and histor of Britain. And boy, did all those kings make war and loot and plunder and put everyone they defeated to the sword! Even the Sacred King Arthur, he of the Knights of the Round Table and Queen Guinevere and the Holy Grail, is represented battling around in France just like the Angevins at the time of Katherine Hepburn playing Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Then there were the glorious Portuguese and Spanish Empires looting the world. And the British Empire, semi looting and semi trading, all over the world.

Then we had the Soviet Empire, mostly looting the Russian people, and for what?

And the American Empire, making the world safe for democracy. How's that going, experts?

And, up next, the Xi Dynasty in China. I bet that will be a doozy.

Hey I know. Let's declare a crisis from an overabundance of plant food, carbon dioxide, created by Trump Car Parade drivers and SUV drivers driving around needlessly. And let's tax and spend and kick the people out of their trucks and SUVs and make them travel in nice trains right of the 19th century. And build a glorious Woke Climate Empire all over the world to the greater glory of the global educated class.

See, if you are a ruling class, what you really, really need is to fight and preferably win some big war to put you in the history books. Bill Clinton at one point regretted that there was no war on his watch. Because history.

Look, the nasty truth about government is that unless there is a war you are just a middle-man negotiating with various special interests to see who gets the loot in the next $1 trillion infrastructure bill. It's really rather low-rent.

But imagine the glory of saving the world from climate change! It would be World War I and World War II put together. And the Big Man that presided over the whole magnificent war to end all wars would go down in the history books and kick Franklin D. Roosevelt off his catbird seat.

But if the whole climate change thingy is a grift, and the science is baloney, and the world isn't heating up and in fact is getting greener, and anyway CO2 isn't the main climate driver, well, fuggedaboudit, the climatistas will get to write the history, so shut up peasant.

But I do think we need to rename global warming climate change as Climate Imperialism. The left has invented a whole peaceful protest full of pejoratives suitable for hurling at Imperialists. So we could just turn the pejoratives on the Climate Oppressors, the vile climate Nazis. And show why they are Literally Hitler. And if you don't agree you are literally a Denier.