The Democrats' Sticky Wicket

Because I am a serious and compassionate person, I feel the pain of the Democrats right now. Victor Davis Hanson has five possibilities for why the Biden administration is a total trainwreck, but Reason #5 is the one that resonates with me.

5) Biden is a hostage of both the Left and Hunter Biden. His task is to ram down a hard Left agenda, in the fashion of a torpedo that itself blows up when it hits the target.

My take is that when the Democrats decided to take out the surging Bernie Sanders in the North Carolina primary in 2020 with a huge surge in the black vote, he or his supporters demanded an IOU that went something like this: "you can have your moderate candidate, but here's the bill of particulars if you want our support in November."

In other words, the Democratic Party has become a far-left party, but it knows it needs to look moderate in order to win. So, the lefties could accept Biden as the front man. At a price.

Unfortunately, President Biden is not up to the job of telling his lefty supporters the facts of life, that if he implements their full agenda he will wreck the economy and wreck the Democratic Party.

For Biden is a pure politician, in the sense of Joseph Schumpeter in  Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Schumpter writes that, given that the trade of the politician is winning elections, it is astonishing that any governing gets done at all. The corollary is that sometimes you get a president that has absolutely no governing skills. He is all talk and sound bites.

In that case, of course, it stands to reason that Biden is being overwhelmed by his supporters, all of whom in one way or another demand more loot and plunder from the government. Some supporters, of course, just want a check. But, with the rise of the gigantic educated elite, there are a ton of people that want government money and power to back their project to fundamentally transform an unjust society into a just society.

Now, you and I think that this is a project doomed to disaster. We think that the less that the lower class just lives on checks and the more it works, the better for the lower class and the better for the rest of us.

But we also think that the various power projects of the educated elite, from climate change to corporate regulation to its whole race agenda, are all bound to end in tears, partly because 57 percent of them are lefty fantasy, and partly because there really is not much that government money and government force can accomplish, despite what the prophets say.

But what can President Biden do about all this? Really nothing. He's been a United States Senator all his life, and never really run anything in his life, until right now, when he is really too old to direct traffic, let alone get the various power players into a room together and knock their heads together.

This is where I insert my little joke about Biden being a proof of God's existence.

Why? Because I think that we need the current ruling class to be utterly discredited and removed from power.

But you can never send a ruling class to the exit unless it has royally screwed up. If we had a Chuck Schumer or an Andrew Cuomo as president he would find some way to keep all the balls in the air, and keep our ruling class in sinecures. Till next time.

Or, to use the Chinese approach to this: the failures of Joe Biden are likely to indicate to the American people that the Democratic Party has lost the Mandate of Heaven, whereas Chucky or Andy would have been able to create enough confusion to mask the utter failure of the Democratic Party, its policies and its world view.

So, if God still "has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America." as Bismarck observed over a century ago, then God would find a way to signal to us that it is time to throw the rascally Democrats out.

And declare a new Morning in America.

Atheism: The Religion of Not Believing in God

In a routine expedition to HalfPrice Books I picked up John Gray's Seven Types of Atheism. His basic line is that modern atheism is just Christianity without the God. Thus, he begins,

Contemporary atheism is a flight from a godless world. Life without any power that can secure order or some kind of ultimate justice is a frightening and for many an intolerable prospect. In the absence of such a power, human events could be finally chaotic, and no story could be told that satisfied the need for meaning.

So "atheists have looked for surrogates of the God they have cast aside." Instead of "belief in divine providence" they believe in the "progress of humanity." Thus most modern atheisms are really a re-imagining of the Christian narrative with different names on the beliefs. 

But first Gray wants to instruct us about the uniqueness of Christianity.

The notion that religions are creeds -- lists of propositions or doctrines that everyone must accept or reject -- emerged only with Christianity.

In most religions -- and that was originally true of Judaism -- what mattered was not belief but "observance," the observance of sacred rituals. Many religions have creator-gods, but the "divine mind" is not experienced universally as good, nor as intimately engaged with the world, nor that humans have a "soul" or a "self," nor a death involving a judgement by a Supreme Being.

So when Marxists and their brethren want to force march us towards a better world, they are just repurposing Christianity, but without God and with Marx instead of Christ.

The New Atheism of the 19th Century. Chaps like Comte believed that "magic, metaphysics and theology belong in the infancy of the species." But now we adults "accept science as the only authority in knowledge and ethics." But science, to Gray, is just a tool for the human animal to deal with the world. Suppose religion really is an "illusion." Who is to say that the creation of illusions not is an important part of survival? And there is the embarrassing fact that atheism tends to ally itself with pseudo-science. Comte thought that bumps on the head were significant; Dawkins believes in "memes."

Secular Humanism. In Christianity, humanity is a "species in need of redemption" with an apocalyptic myth that Jesus would return and found the kingdom of God. But the Reformation replaced the apocalypse with a "conviction that evil could be slowly diminished in history." Thus, with God removed, we get to the idea of modern meliorism, of gradual improvement. Then there was Gnosticism that believed that "salvation was achieved by acquiring a special kind of knowledge."

The modern myth of progress came into being as a fusion of Christian faith with Gnostic thinking. 

But, of course, science has nothing to say about improvement in history.

Faith in Science. Following Darwin's theory of evolution, a lot of thinkers harnessed evolution to "theories of innate racial inequality" and eugenics to improve the race. "Herbert Spencer used evolutionary ideas to vindicate untrammeled capitalism... Beatrice Webb... suggested that Stalin's Russia embodied the next stage of social evolution." Francis Fukuyama "had no doubt that an evolutionary process was at work, leading to the advance of "democratic capitalism" throughout most of the world."

Modern Political Religions. Gnosticism "is the belief that humans can be delivered from a dark world by the saving light of knowledge." Plato and Socrates may have believed that goodness and truth were one, but not that they could be realized in history. But Christianity plus Gnosticism combined to form the "explosive force" of political religions in the modern west.

[Forget] the idea that secular and religious movements are opposites... Jacobinism and Bolshevism were secularizing forces; but both were channels for the millennarian myths of apocalyptic Christianity... [W]hen the Nazis tried to create a "science of man" based in physiology, they continued an Enlightenment project. Liberalism emerged in the seventeenth century as the application of a universal morality inherited from monotheism.

We do not live in a secular age, for "secular thought is mostly composed of repressed religion."

God-haters. Think Marquis de Sade, Dostoevsky, and William Empson. Says Gray about de Sade:

Hating the Christian God, he also hated Nature, cursing it even as he obeyed what he believed were its laws... For Sade's libertines... nothing but a world-destroying act could sate their passions... the satisfaction that comes from doing evil.

For writer Lev Shestov, Dostoevsky is "the greatest artist in human misery." He "was chronically unhappy and spread unhappiness around him.

And said William Empson of the Christian God: "the God of Tertullian, Augustine and Aquinas, is the wickedest thing yet invented by the black heart of man."

Atheism Without Progress. This is the kind of atheist that John Gray prefers. He starts with George Santayana, born in Madrid in 1863 who became a Harvard professor and then quit in 1912 when he received a small legacy. He ended his life in a nunnery. For Santayana, religion is natural to humans. He wrote:

Why should we be angry with dreams, with myth, with allegory, with madness? We must not kill the mind, as some rationalists do, in trying to cure it... Values presuppose living beings having a direction of development... so that good and evil may exist in reference to them.

Says Gray: "Without valuing organisms there are no values."

Next, Gray considers Joseph Conrad, who spent years working in sailing ships in the late 19th century. He was an atheist and rejected the idea of progress. Says Gray:

The seaman's struggle with the ocean is a cipher for the human situation in a godless universe.... None of the visions of improvement conjured by modern thinkers could stand up against his "deep-seated sense of fatality governing this man-inhabited world."

The Atheism of Silence. Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer just stepped away from monotheism without regret. But his life was a contradiction.

Himself extremely wilful, Schopenhauer was convinced that all human troubles came from the will... Anyone who grasped this truth would turn away from life and mortify their appetites, he believed.

But did he follow that advice? Not a bit of it. With financial independence he did exactly as he pleased, "playing the flute and attending the opera." He never married, but "pursued erotic pleasure." He "denounced the world as illusion" but lived a life of "disciplined intellectual labour... was careful with money." He believed that human life is "purposeless striving" and "the world was in need of redemption." So what!

John Gray concludes his disquisition on atheism with the following thought.

Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means... But there is no need for panic or despair. Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think.

The Difference between RINOs and the New DINOs

We all know about RINOs, the Republicans In Name Only that routinely betray the Republican Party's base and truckle to the Democrats. Hello Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY).

But now Edward Ring at American Greatness wants us to think about the DINOs, Democrats In Name Only. I know what you are saying: If Only.

DINOs are Democrats from California:

They see a dismal reality—unreliable energy, water rationing, traffic gridlock, unaffordable housing, out-of-control homelessness, rampant and unpunished crime, burning forests, and an increasingly worthless system of public education—and all of it is a consequence of progressive politics. They’ve realized that the progressives will do nothing but make these problems worse.

Hey, fellahs. You think?

Ring is talking about chaps like Joel Kotkin the writer, and then two Dem politicians, Michael Shellenberger and Kevin Paffrath. Shellengberger ran for governor of California in 2018 and Paffrath is running right now in the Newsom recall.

Now I think that there is a fundamental difference between RINOs and DINOs.

RINOs like Liz Cheney are people that say to themselves: "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." And I understand that. Why be

The boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle's wreck
Shone round him o'er the dead.

Get a clue and get your share of the loot! Right Liz?

But the DINOs are different. I think that they are starting to realize that there is no happy ending to the current Democratic Party lurch to the left. Better get off the bus before it's too late.

You could call them rats leaving the sinking ship. But I will not.

Instead I will call the current Democratic Party the inevitable consequence of the over/under political formula of all center-left political parties since the gradual emergence of the middle class starting in 1500.

What I mean is that, back in the feudal era, politics was top-down. A hierarchy, just like Jordan B. Peterson's lobsters. Occasionally, a feudal vassal would challenge his liege lord. But not too often. Meanwhile the lobsters peasants knew their place, unless the word turned upside down in a famine or a plague.

Today, I would argue, a ruling class has two options, It can champion the middle class against the lower class or it can champion the lower class against the middle class.

Do you see that for the educated class immediately below today's rulers the option of championing the lower class against the middle class is a much better option? Why? Because there is more loot and plunder for the educated class in various bureaucracies, corporate, government, and activist. No surprise that Americans with advanced degrees tend to vote Democrats. Advanced degrees are credentials that you need if you want to advance in the bureaucracy. 

A government that champions the middle class against the lower class does not have much to do because the middle class just wants to get on with their ordered lives, and doesn't want the government taking a lot of money from them to give to the poor and the bureaucrats. No angle for the educated class.

And, of course, all the projects that any government gets into tends to Make Things Worse, as in the quote above and as I have been arguing in my Making Things Worse series.

Why does government keep Making Things Worse? Because all government is a violation of my Four Laws: trying to game the price system; trying to fix things with government bureaucracies that just don't have the bandwidth to act effectively; ignoring the fact that all regulation ends up in "regulatory capture;" and lastly, that all government is loot and plunder, anyway, and therefore amounts to taking stuff from A to give to B without any value in exchange.

Of course, there is also Stein's Law: "if something cannot go on forever, it will stop."

The DINOs are starting to realize that Houston We Have A Problem. To coin a phrase. In other words, things cannot go on forever.

The problem is that for the lower class, for now, the system works. They get a lot of free stuff as supporters of the ruling class, and don't get to experience the heavy hand of taxation and regulation experienced by the ordinary middle class.

But this may change as the Afghan debacle continues, with inflation, rioting renters and borrowers when Biden finally ends the rent and mortgage moratoriums, and the increasingly aggressive vagrants and beggars of the homeless encampments. Pace the BLMs and AntiFas, the lower class does not want to "defund the police." 

The DINOs just have a feeling in their bones that is telling them that it's time to fix things before they spiral out of control. Because Literally Hitler.

See, I think that our noble global elite misses the point when it determines Never Again: never allow another Hitler to rule.

They are missing the point. The middle class wants a government that makes the trains run on time, and keeps the economy on an even keel, so that ordinary middle class people can wive and thrive and save and indulge in hope about the future. When the government fails in this basic task, and things spin out of control, that is when the middle class turns to a populist nationalist who blames everything on The Jews or The Rich or The Blacks or The Woke.

(You know, just as nice liberal ladies all vote for nice progressive candidates that say that racist-sexist-homophobes are to blame for everything).

A Trump is a signal that the ruling class is not doing its job. If you want to be a successful ruling class, then Job One is to make sure that the middle-class sheep can safely graze. If you ignore the signal, or use state power to neutralize it, then you are asking for trouble right here in River City.

Because the guy that the middle class elects after you chaps have dumped Trump is not going to be a guy that merely makes Mean Tweets.

And the DINOs are starting to get it.

Marc Andreessen: Systemizing the Great Enrichment

In the last 200 years, according to economist Deirdre McCloskey, mankind has experienced a Great Enrichment, a real increase in per-capita income of about 30 times, from $1 to $3 per day to over $100 per day. There has never been anything like it.

How did it happen? In my telling, it came from "anybodies" inventing and implementing new technologies that changed the world, starting with machine textiles. Then it was "anybodies" inventing steam pumps to pump out mines, then steam locomotives and steamships that carried people and goods all over the world. Then illuminating oil for oil lamps, then personal gasoline-powered transportation, then airplanes, then electricity for illumination and transportation, then radio and TV to beam news and entertainment to the masses, then computers, then the internet, then social media.

It all happened despite everything, because of "anybodies" getting an idea and running with it. But now, with the mainstreaming of venture capitalists, we have people like Marc Andreessen actually out there looking for people to be the next economic revolution.

Marc Andreessen, you will remember, was the guy that made Netscape into the web browser that changed the world. But now he and Peter Thiel -- of PayPal -- are out looking for the guy that will invent the next Netscape. And they think they know the kind of person they are looking for. Here's how he describes it in an interview with Richard Hanania.

We’re funding the new things, the new technologies; we basically make bets on very fringe ideas, many of which don’t work. We work typically with very idiosyncratic, strongly willed iconoclastic entrepreneurs who are not necessarily the kinds of people who you’d want running a big bank, but are the right people to build a new technology company.

Andreesson talks about the crisis in the science research game and the reproducibility crisis in research. But then there are the guys that just can't take the bullshit any more.

But now if you’re really sharp and young and hungry and aggressive and ambitious, you look around you and… I hear this all the time, from our founders I hear “I looked around, what I saw was incredibly depressing, and I realized I had to get out of there. I had to get into a position where I could do my own thing because I want to be part of a high-performance environment that doesn’t tolerate all this bullshit.” 

He talks for a while about "regulatory capture" and how established corporations naturally sew up the market. Call it the death star. What to do?

We run a continuous flow of X-wing fighters up against the death star. It’s all of our startups. We’re just constantly funding these very fired-up entrepreneurs with these very disruptive ideas, and I’ll discuss disruption in a second because it’s very critical here and the theory of disruption is often mischaracterized.

Then we get down to the nuts and bolts of Thiel fellowships, where Peter Thiel pays kids not to go to university.

The Thiel fellowship is super interesting. I’m super open on these things, and even I was like “really? 19-year-olds?” Basically he paid a bunch of 19-year-olds to drop out of college, they all moved to a group house in San Francisco, and he told them all “go nuts.”...

But you look at that cohort of kids, they’ve been successful beyond belief! Ethereum! Ethereum is a $300 billion outcome in ten years; a Thiel Fellow. Sigma, another company we’re invested in is extraordinarily successful… they’re revolutionizing computer design; Thiel Fellow. And there’s another dozen of these that are like these really spectacular breakthrough…

Actually, if you think about this it is really scary. It was one thing when "anybodies" were inventing machine textiles and steam engines. But when chaps like Andreesson and Thiel are deliberately seeking out market disrupters, and funding them, and letting the chips fall where they may...

Really, we have no idea what will be the net result of this. It could be the proverbial step too far. Or it could be the best thing since sliced bread.

Meanwhile Dave, my neighbor across the street, with Helion Energy, a fusion power startup, is building a plant in Everett, Washington, in the next stage in its attempt to create useful fusion power.

According to company officials, by applying proven and patented technologies, Helion is working towards building the world’s first commercially-viable fusion power plant which runs on a fuel that can be derived from water.

Really though, I'd prefer my own little fusion plant in the back yard. So I didn't have to rely on the grid.

Odd, isn't it. Here we have the Marc Andreessens and the Peter Thiels of the world basically drilling holes in the economy and blasting away with dynamite. While the Joe Bidens and Mark Milleys and Dr. Faucis are running the ship of state on the rocks. 

If you aren't scared stiff you don't understand what is going on.

Idle Prognostications About the Next Regime

One thing about everything going wrong on Joey's watch is that it delegitimizes the whole regime and its sacred narratives, including:

Over/Under Political Formula. When the whole nation is getting whammed by big-time inflation, does it matter if you are black, white, or whatever?

Save the Planet. I get that every ruling class has to save us all from existential peril. But let's just wait until a real peril shows up. Humans aren't that good at predictin' and prophesyin' but we are real good at adapting when the chips are down.

World Hegemon. If you are not prepared to be a real Hegemon, what's the point of fiddling around in the Middle East -- or Europe for that matter? 

Politics as Royal Road to Justice. Politics is division and government is war plus loot and plunder. I'd call that the very definition of injustice, but your mileage may vary.

Entitlement State. If we all saved for our own old age that would save about $1.5 trillion in government pension spending, $1.7 trillion in government health care spending. If we sent our kids to the neighborhood micro school, we could save $1.2 trillion in government education spending. Numbers for 2019.

The thing is that it is impossible to change any of these elements in the current ruling class political formula. Because nobody agrees to give up their share of the loot and plunder until after the Taliban takes over and they are just trying to stay alive.

It is only at the point of regime change that the government can do anything serious. But, just in case we have regime change somebody has to think about what it would look like.

Middle Über Alles Political Formula. The new regime will exalt the ordinary All-American middle-class patriot over fashionable and conceited wokey elites and their neo-serf Little Darling vote-banks.

Death to Pirates. The new regime will feature a world-class pirate-hunting navy. Its purpose will be to make sure that no pirate ever tries to take over a merchant ship engaged in honest commerce.

Market Über Alles Economy. There will be no economic regulation and departure from the voluntary market system. Because all compulsion and regulation means a reduction in overall prosperity. The market means that each of us figures out something useful to do and offers that service on the open market. 

Education with Moms and Dads. No more government education. Instead early education will be run by moms at home schools and micro schools, and normal education through high school will be combined with Jobs for Kids. Yeah. Children will have jobs -- working for pay instead of for nothing at government child-custodial facilities -- and their employers will teach them the Three Rs and whatever else takes their fancy. Dads will be in charge of sports, hiking, hunting and fishing.

Saving for a Rainy Day. No more entitlements. Every worker will save for their own retirement -- and sickness, and end-of-life health care, and unemployment and starting their own business. People that fail to save will be forced to save by deductions from their paychecks.

Everybody Helps the Poor. Instead of shuffling the relief of the poor onto gubmint bureaucrats every American will be involved, from billionaires to teenage kids. Meanwhile, of course we will encourage the rebirth of fraternal organizations and mutual-aid societies that were once the glory of America.

The New Separation of Church and State. The new regime will enforce a separation of church and state, and by church will mean every organization or movement that advertises a moral narrative about the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

You can see, of course, that this is pie-in-the-sky, because it abandons the eternal rule of politics and government, that it is a war for the survival of Our Community, and loot and plunder will be distributed after the glorious victory.

But I think that we are already in a new era where loot and plunder doesn't help anyone, not even the victors. And I think that the desperate all-out program of the Biden administration to go flat out on handouts to its supporters, to go flat out on systemic racism, and flat out on climate change is actually a sign that, in Kansas City, they've gone about as fur as they can go.

Hanson: Are We in a Revolution?

Today at American Greatness Victor Davis Hanson asks: "Are We in a Revolution and Don't Even Know It?"

Let me answer this: Yes, of course we are. The question is: where are we in the revolutionary cycle?

If you are a devotee of Crane Brinton's Anatomy of Revolution then the question is where are we in the revolutionary cycle? Brinton's stages are:

The Fall of the Old Regime where a regime is discredited and running out of money.

The Rule of the Moderates and Dual Power where moderates are trying to rule but are in conflict with extremists that operate a parallel government.

Reign of Terror and Virtue with extremists purging the world of injustice and sin and vice.

Thermidor with a falling away into normal life, usually featuring a dictator, nationalism, and foreign conquest.

Now Brinton's book featured four revolutions: the English Puritan Revolution, the American, French, and Russian Revolutions.

I'd say we are in something different. But not completely different.

The big difference today, I would say, is that, while Brinton's four revolutions were all about the new middle class -- led by intellectuals -- taking power from a feudal or almost feudal ruling class, we have a different situation.

That's because our ruling class is the middle class led by intellectuals that took power variously in the last three centuries. And if you ask me all the phases identified by Brinton are happening all at once. We have a discredited old regime that looks to be running out of money; we have ostensible moderates like Biden in office but we have a parallel government of activists and "lawfare" operating in parallel and partly with the consent of the ruling class; we have the reign of "woke" terror busily canceling people on social media and purging any backsliders from positions in corporations, education, and media. And we have Donald Trump that our ruling class experiences as a nationalist dictator looking for trouble with China: literally Hitler.

So, our times are different, and the exact framework of revolution will work differently this time.

Now, I would say that it was only in the Bolshevik Revolution that the modern "political formula" was practiced, as invented by Marx. That is, the Bolshevik Revolution was self-consciously an over/under revolution of the educated class allied with the lower class against the middle class, the "bourgeoisie."

Since then all modern ruling classes have operated on this principle. In the US we have an educated class that experiences itself as Allies of Oppressed Peoples fighting against White Oppressors. But I understand its "political formula" as the ruling class using real and imagined victims as cats paws to scratch and mutilate the ordinary middle class: to make the ordinary middle class the "other."

The question is: will the ordinary middle class find the cojones to fight back against the educated ruling class? And can it find a way to do this without a full-scale civil war with the attendant butcher's bill?

Now I say that if you look at US politics over the last half century you see the ordinary middle class being formed into a head of resistance against the educated ruling class again and again. Richard Nixon was elected by a middle class frightened by the Sixties Kids. Reagan was elected by the middle class reacting against the elite incompetence of the Carter "stagflation." The election of Obama was followed immediately by the organic self-organizing Tea Party that the Obama boys harassed with the IRS. And with Trump we had an open populist nationalist running a campaign for the votes of the ordinary middle class.

Obviously this recurring movement of ordinary middle-class Americans could be thrashed and dispersed by our current ruling class, with prejudice, if it got its act together. Or the movement could grow into a nationwide organic movement that would prove to be unstoppable by any ruling class that hesitated to use full Stalinist methods on its opposition.

And if you ask me, anything could happen. On the one hand we have the utter incompetence of the educated ruling class indicated by its failures in foreign policy and economic policy, and its mindless response to the COVID crisis. On the other hand you have the disciplined street thugs of BLM and AntiFa and the whole culture of left-wing activism that controls the conventional wisdom on every issue from race to climate change.

What will happen? Nobody knows. We don't know what happens when the educated ruling class and the ordinary middle class meet in political battle.

In other words, we are making history here. I think that there is a saying that you don't want to be there when history is being made. But I could be wrong.

Economics and Politics: The Biden Trainwreck

One of the problems with economics, in my opinion, is that politicians use it as a way of sailing too close to the wind.

Obviously, politics is all about using the wealth and production capability of a nation to wage war and to reward its supporters. Economics, starting with the classical economists, showed that making war and handing out freebies to the supporters doth not a prosperous nation make.

Before classical economics, it was easier for politicians to do what comes naturally: to wage war and loot and plunder. As long as you were the victor and you were doing the looting and plundering, what was not to like?

And hey, it all made a rough kind of sense. If wealth and prosperity were all based upon food-growing land, then it stood to reason that to expand the nation's food-growing land was beneficial. In Mein Kampf Adolf Hitler made the argument that of course Germany needed to grow its own food.

Today, however, food-growing land and prosperity do not go together. The Canadians have tons of food-growing land in the western prairies, and the ships queue up in Vancouver harbor to load up grain and take it to Asia. But who cares? What matters is excelling at value-adding activities from extraction, manufacturing, and the whole world of the modern economy of computers and the internet.

But politicians are still in the business of conquest -- usually in elections -- and distribution of loot and plunder to their supporters. So today, economics has become the technology of how much loot and plunder the economy can stand before it collapses in inflation. That is the point of macroeconomics, in particular Keynesian economics and the new MMT (modern monetary theory). The whole point of Keynesian economics was to give politicians an excuse to run deficits in the wake of a recession like the Great Depression. The whole point of MMT is to give politicians an excuse to continue spending and electing to the max. Because if the debt is in your own currency, who cares?

And there is a tendency in political circles to push things just a little further, because, if the current level of taxation and spending and regulation hasn't killed the economy, what damage could just a little more do?

Well, I think we are in the middle of a nation-wide test of going as far as it can go. Because when you crank up unemployment benefits into the stratosphere, and suspend rent payments for the renters, and suspend mortgage payments for the borrowers, and suspend student debt payments for the university graduates, what happens next?

Also, there is the little problem, which goes beyond economics, that government cannot withdraw a previous award of loot and plunder without incurring the rage of the recipients and the withdrawal of grateful political support.

For instance, if I were a Democrat right now it sure would be nice if the government were not spending $1 trillion a year on mostly white Boomer Social Security and $600 billion on mostly white Boomer Medicare. Talk about systemic racism! But, of course, nobody can ever reduce those entitlements and give them to deserving non-white post-Boomer voters. It would be electoral suicide.

But right now, someone has to take the bull by the horns and terminate the cool unemployment benefits and terminate the rent moratorium and deal with the mostly peaceful protests that will be ginned up by the activist left in opposition. Because we cannot continue with those loot-and-plunder giveaways without continuing to destroy the economy in a storm of inflation.

This is not rocket science. But it does go against the natural instinct of a politician, which is to give out tons of loot and plunder but never, oh never, to take it away.

And it does go against the experience of every Democratic politician in the land. For a Democratic politician loot and plunder has worked every time it has been tried. There are no wise heads telling today's politicians to Remember the Seventies. Or telling them to Remember Obama's Jobless Recovery. Why not, Nancy Pelosi? You were there in the Seventies. You observed how the Reagan revolution wrecked the 50-year-old Democrat hegemony. What happened to Leadership, Nancy Pelosi?

If you ask me it is an Act of God that Democrats are in charge of the post-COVID economy, and that the voters will blame Democrats for whatever goes wrong on their watch. It is Democrats that have to end the rent moratorium, Democrats that have to end the unemployment bonuses. And Democrats that have to take the heat. And it will serve them right.

And, Democrats, the sooner you do it, the better. Because the longer these freebies go on, the more that the recipients will cry bloody murder when you end them, the more that lefty mostly peaceful protesters will riot in the streets, and the more that the economy will spin into inflationary chaos in the meantime.

Imagine if Trump were president in charge of ending the freebies! Oh, the Horror!

Instead the Democrats are going to experience the Perfect Storm consequent on their whole philosophy of looting and plundering the economy to reward their supporters.

See, Democrats. Economics is not supposed to be a how-to on how for you can go to plunder the economy without wrecking it. It is supposed to show that politics is a wealth-subtraction business, always and everywhere, and the less of it, the better.