"Nothing is Working. Or Is It?"

In a piece on the disaster we call the Biden administration, Will Alexander wonders it it's really the disaster it seems.

For instance, in the Del Rio bridge disaster with 12,000 Haitians under the border bridge, the result was that the Biden administration shipped nearly all of them into the US. So, from the left's point of view, it's working. Another 12,000 potential Democrat voters migrated into the US.

And the GOP governors sent a message to the president asking for a "open and constructive dialogue regarding border enforcement". Like that's going to work. As Alexander writes:

We’re now dealing with anti-American, Trump-hating, political psychopaths who want to use race, COVID, climate change, and chaos to outlaw political differences using arbitrary policies that look to fundamentally destroy America as we know it.

OK. So which is it? A total disaster of the incompetents? Or a cunning plot by "political psychopaths"?

I'd say both. 

First, the big government welfare state doesn't work. It Makes Things Worse. There's a good piece by Orthodox rabbi Dov Fischer about how the Democrats have wrecked blacks. All in the name of helping them. 

Second, when your glorious plan of paradise isn't working out, and instead is littered with disaster, you don't give up. Not the French Jacobins, not the Russkie Bolsheviks, not the Maoist cultural revolutionaries. That's what the whole notion of a Reign of Terror and Virtue is about. It cannot be that our glorious vision was a fantasy! The problems must be the work of "saboteurs and wreckers." We must double down and fight through to the final victory

That is a way to understand the US history of the last 50 years. It cannot be that the Great Society programs were a disaster visited on the poor. It cannot be that Keynesian economics caused the inflation of the 1970s. It cannot be that "supply-side" economics caused the revival of the 1980s. It cannot be that ordinary Americans revolted against HillaryCare. It cannot be that the Tea Party was an organic revolt against Obama's big government orgy. It cannot be that Trump represents an ordinary middle-class revolt against the conceits and the failures of educated-class big government. No: there is "systemic racism" every way you look.

What is needed is to double-down on more government, with pitiless ideological domination and elimination of "hate" speech. That should do it!

The lesson, of course, is that all Reigns of Terror and Great Purges eventually end, and normal life resumes, sort of. But the butcher's bill!

By the way, both Putin and Xi have been selling the glories of Russian civilization and Chinese civilization lately. What's that all about? Are they, like Trump, extolling the virtues of the Russian nation and the Chinese nation? Any mean tweets from the Kremlin or the Gate of Heavenly Peace lately?

Or are they just realists, understanding that any people wants a history, a narrative that extols its past, and experiences itself as the culmination of its story, its narrative of How We Got Here. You know, like when Trump did a speech right in front of the US presidents engraved into the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Actually, I think the decisive moment will occur when women give up on the Democratic message. See, the whole point of the welfare state is that it "protects" us. And "women expect to be protected."

But what happens when things fall apart and women discover that the folk that promised to protect them have, in fact, abandoned them to the wolves?

The answer, spelled out in A Woman in Berlin by Anonymous, is that they find new protectors. So the German women in May 1945 sought out Soviet officers to be their protectors. And many other German women became GI war brides. Of course they did.

When the women of America make this switch, there won't be trumpets and banners and glorious speeches. Things will suddenly change and nobody will really know why.

A trial run on this is the whole COVID vaccine thing. Right now American women all think that vaccination protects them and their loved ones. However, some women -- nurses -- close to the firing line seem to be telling us that vaccination is not what it is cracked up to be. I predict that some time in the next 12 months, American women will decide that the whole COVID response has not protected them. And so they will seek out new protectors.

Let's put it this way. President Trump campaigned in a manner that really appealed to men. Starting with his mental pugilistic antics at the 2016 Republican debates, he showed that he would "fight for you." But women hated his "mean tweets." They want to be told how our national leaders will protect us. There's a reason why Democrats tend to use memes like "our community" and "our democracy" that appeals to the woman's need for protection. But a lot of Americans hate their use of the racist-sexist-pejoratives. Did you know that "pejorative" comes from the Latin pejorare meaning "making things worse?"

One fine day, a Republican presidential candidate will discover how to appeal to the woman's need for protection.

Then, look out, Wokies.

Angelo Codevilla RIP: Nuggets from "America's Ruling Class"

As we all know, Angelo Codevilla died this week after being hit by a drunk driver. You and I know him as the author of an epochal article written in 2010 in The American Spectator titled "America's Ruling Class."

In the article he described America as divided between the Ruling Class, "supported by no more than one-third of Americans — and a country class comprising two-thirds of the country."

Let me say that this is the one thing where I disagree with Codevilla. I don't believe in the binary Ruling Class and Country Class. That's because I believe in a Three Layer understanding of society. Codevilla hints at this when he writes of entertainment that

since the 1970s most of Hollywood’s products have appealed more to the mores of the ruling class and its underclass clients than to those of large percentages of Americans.

So in my "Three Layers in Brief" I adapt his two layers into three: Ruling Class, Country Class, and "underclass clients." 

But I agree that only the Ruling Class and the Country Class are involved in politics. The "underclass clients" are just serfs of their Ruling Class lords.

But here are a couple of really important takeaways from "America's Ruling Class" that I got from re-reading it yesterday. I express them as questions that I have for a while about today's America.

"Why are Social Media and Big Tech and Big Business in the tank for the Ruling Class?" Because they have to be.

Health care:

[T]he health care bill of 2010 takes more than 2,700 pages to make sure not just that some states will be treated differently from others because their senators offered key political support, but more importantly to codify bargains between the government and various parts of the health care industry, state governments, and large employers about who would receive what benefits (e.g., public employee unions and auto workers) and who would pass what indirect taxes onto the general public. 

This is what I call sharing out the "loot and plunder" with regime supporters.

Finance:

The financial regulation bill of 2010, far from setting univocal rules for the entire financial industry in few words, spends some 3,000 pages (at this writing) tilting the field exquisitely toward some and away from others.

Again: can you spell l-o-o-t-a-n-d-p-l-u-n-d-e-r? 

So, in general, "By making economic rules dependent on discretion, our bipartisan ruling class teaches that prosperity is to be bought with the coin of political support." As in the classic line: "nice little business you got here; pity if something should happen to it."

Now whatabout the professions? 

"Why are the professions in the tank with the Ruling Class?"

What about the doctors, and the American Medical Association (AMA)?

Those who run the AMA, however, have a government contract as exclusive providers of the codes by which physicians and hospitals bill the government for their services.

Oh. So now I understand why various professional organizations have issued threats to their members that they will lose accreditation if they, e.g., don't support mandatory COVID vaccination. The professional association gets a government grant, and so is now in the pocket of the Ruling Class, and anyway has to keep good relations with the regulatory authorities. 

In other words any high profile institution in America needs to maintain good relations with the Ruling Class. Or else. And that will continue, until it doesn't.

Now, I notice, after reading "America's Ruling Class" all over again, that my maxims about government apply in spades.

Government is an armed minority, occupying territory, and taxing the inhabitants thereof to reward its supporters.

Government is force plus loot and plunder.

All government is unjust, because government leaders reward their supporters before the rest of the people.

And, I would say, that the $3.5 trillion "infrastructure bill" is an indication that the Ruling Class feels it needs to amp up the provision of loot and plunder to its supporters. Seems like the natives are restless on the loot and plunder front.

Why is that, you may ask? I think it is because when you distribute loot and plunder to your supporters they don't say: "wow, thanks a million" for ever after. Next election cycle they take the previous handout for granted and expect to get more. So once you start handing out loot and plunder you have to keep on keeping on, scraping up new loot and plunder to distribute. Otherwise your supporters will drift away. 

Obviously, Stein's Law applies here. "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."

And the problem with loot and plunder is that it represents a part of the economy that is cast in concrete. And as the Ruling Class extends the concrete -- or if you prefer, continues paving over the nation -- there comes a point at which there is no fertile land left. What happens then? Nothing good. 

You many not like the price system, but the price system forces people to face reality, first gently, and then not so gently. But with the loot-and-plunder system things are different. The loot-and-plunder system allows people to ignore reality. Until that day when the whole system collapses.

So, if you are a wise Ruling Class, you keep the loot and plunder down to a very dull murmur. Because you want the economy -- upon which your sacred taxes rest -- to look after itself, as an "emergent phenomenon" that all-unknowing, responds to changes in the firmament and corrects itself before you and I have a clue what is going on.

Our Ruling Class has not kept the loot and plunder down to a dull murmur. That means that it has a problem. That means that it has to back up its loot and plunder with threats and force. That means that our Ruling Class is headed for the waterfall.

But so are you and I.

Looking back at "America's Ruling Class" it is interesting to review the Trump Era. We may call Trump an idiot. We may say that his first mistake was not to fire all the insiders in the government and replace them with his own people. And so on.

But I would say that the Trump Era gave us a vital and important thing. It prompted the Ruling Class to show its claws. Or, if you like, we got to see into its subterranean "intelligence community" depths. And it let the rest of us see how corrupt and clueless it is.

For that, we Americans will be grateful to Donald Trump for ever more.

And to the searing analysis of the late Angelo Codevilla.

The Tell: It's Just a Waste of Time to Talk to Those Guys

Remember back in the day when "all good people" were concerned about The Workers? The general tone was that, even though the workers were rather over-inclined to use violence, they had a point. Life was rough for factory workers, and they were often treated like virtual slaves, or as economic and disposable commodities. Their "rage" was understandable. So all good people were open to acceding to the just demands of the workers. Even if they were a bit rude and crude.

Now, I get the feeling, these days, that "all good people" don't give a damn about the just demands of ordinary middle class people. The current violence in southern Australia over COVID vaccination is a case in point.

As I understand it, the government of Victoria, capital Melbourne, is planning a strict COVID regimen.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews has announced that anyone who does not “take the jab” will not be permitted to work, shop, attend any venue or participate in the Melbourne economy.  Vaccination passports and identification will be required for all functions of life. 

And then Andrews paused the construction industry for two weeks to flatten the curve of a upsurge in COVID cases.

Construction union workers went to their union leader to protest this attack on their livelihood, but the union leaders refused to advocate for the workers. The leaders were not down with the workers and their demands; they were pals of the rulers and the rulers' agenda. So the workers took to the street.

Hello, union leaders! The whole point of legitimating unions, which are in fact a conspiracy against the consumers, is that they moderate the "rage" of the workers into legitimate channels. So if you tell your members to get lost, what is the point of you?

And then the government of Victoria. Sending in the police and using aggressive tactics:

Thousands of heavily outfitted and well-armed jackboots -with armor plated MRAP vehicles in support- confronted the protest groups throughout the Melbourne metro area.  The police deployments forced the groups to assemble at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance where a stand-off took place between the protestors and thousands of police units surrounding them.  Once they had the protestors surrounded, the police began tightening the perimeter, until they eventually opened fire with tear gas and rubber bullets.

Now, I am one week away from reading Carl Schmitt and his notion of the political as a "friend-enemy" distinction in which conflict -- killing -- is always the final possibility.

So when a government soft-pedals BLM protests, when e.g., "Melbourne police units who took a knee during last years Black Lives Matter protests in Melbourne," the rulers are saying that BLM activists are on the "friend" end of the "friend-enemy" axis. 

When a government cracks down on construction worker protests, when e.g., "Once they had the protestors surrounded, the police began tightening the perimeter, until they eventually opened fire with tear gas and rubber bullets" the rulers are saying that construction worker protesters are on the "enemy" end of the "friend-enemy"axis.

Obviously, we had the same thing here in the US. BLM and AntiFa protests are regarded by the rulers as understandable and are accommodated. BLM and AntiFa protesters are typically released from custody the day after an arrest.

Compare that with the reaction to the January 6 Capitol riots. Our Democratic friends called it an "armed insurrection" and many of those arrested are still in jail in solitary confinement. 

Using Schmitt's analysis, the situation is obvious. BLM and AntiFa protesters are regarded as "friends" by the ruling class. Trump voters are regarded as "enemies."

Our liberal friends are very sensitive to issues related to nuclear power. They think it is way too dangerous to allow the use of nuclear power to generate electricity.

But I would say, after reading, learning, and inwardly digesting Cart Schmitt's Concept of the Political, that all politics is nuclear. And the point of electoral politics is to institutionalize the conflicts of politics into safe channels, to turn civil war into the sham fight of an election; to turn the looting and plundering of a village into the routine taxation of workers so that the politicians can use the proceeds to reward their supporters.

So, liberal friends. You are all in a tizzy about the dangers of nuclear power, but are perfectly happy with the nuclear nature of politics.

I use my reductive Three Peoples theory to understand and to throw further light upon this. You might call it the Three Peoples Approach to Politics.

I would say that the People of the Subordinate Self band together under a leader that promises to deal with the rulers on their behalf.

I would say that the People of the Responsible Self organize organically among themselves when dealing with the rulers.

I would say that the People of the Creative Self see themselves as the wise and evolved priestly class called by God or Gaia to impose their wisdom on the heathens.

I think that our present ruling class really has No Clue about the dangers and follies of its present war upon the ordinary middle class. It seems to me that on issue after issue, the ruling class thinks that it is just a waste of time trying to reason with the deplorables. So they don't. So they lie and cheat and issue lockdowns and vaccination mandates and masking orders. As though the ordinary American people are just peasants and serfs.

I think that our rulers are making a gigantic mistake. I think that the one thing that every scion of the ruling class should be doing is making a genuine attempt to understand where the ordinary middle-class Trump voter is coming from.

Instead, it seems, the moderates in the Democratic party are allowing themselves to be bullied into moving left by the current generation of progressive activists, for whom politics is a religion. And they find themselves forbidden to talk and negotiate with the leaders of the ordinary American middle class. Indeed, I suggest that the story of Donald Trump is the story of the ruling class and educated America doing "whatever it took" to get rid of Trump. Trump, clearly, is the "enemy."

But Trump is merely the leader of ordinary middle-class America. If you make war on Donald Trump you are making war on ordinary middle-class America.

Is that really what you want, dear liberal friends?

Doughnut Economics: Springtime for Activists

The "tell" in Doughnut Economics: 7 Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist by Brit academic Kate Raworth is right at the beginning when she describes the dilemma of a well-born Chinese woman.

Yuan Wang arrived at Oxford University to study economics. Born in China and raised in Yorkshire... [she] was determined to make a difference in the world.

She thought that economics was the way to do it, but soon got "frustrated."

She found the theory -- and the maths used to prove it -- absurdly narrow in its assumptions.

See, that's the basic religious and cultural meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" for the well-born youngster. They want to do something creative, to make a difference. I call it Activism Culture.

And that is the underlying agenda of Doughnut Economics. How can we activists deploy economics to make the world a safer and a juster place, given that the two big problems are the Ecological Ceiling of planetary pressure or a Social Foundation of human well-being?

Well, current macroeconomics does not represent a useful knowledge base for dealing with an Ecological Ceiling of planetary pressure or a Social Foundation of human well-being. Something new is needed, and it must not be based on the economics of old that just wanted to increase GDP. The economics of Paul Samuelson and his hydraulic Circular Flow diagram just isn't going to solve climate change or transition from exponential economic growth to a sustainable economy and society.

The big problem with Kate Raworth is that economics cannot tell humans what to do. It is only an analytical tool to help humans get an idea of what might happen if they change the economy in accordance with the demand of well-born activists. Let's look at the seven things she thinks economics should be about in the 21st century. And my critique.

Proposal	Raworth's Justification	My Opinion
Change the Goal from GDP	to the Doughnut	Any "Goal" is political or religious
See the Big Picture	beyond market to "embedded economy"	But this is no longer economics but the entirety of human knowledge
Nurture Human Nature	with socially adaptable humans	This is religion, changing humans' experience of life's meaning
Get Savvy With Systems	understand complexity	Good idea, and recognize that no government or globalist plan will understand complexity to the depth it needs to
Design to Distribute	create economy that is distributive by design	You mean double down on the welfare state? Economics can probably help you understand that this is doomed to failure
Create to Regenerate	recycling by another word	Well, yeah. If you work on externalities, the cost of our actions on other people, you can help
Be Agnostic About Growth	because it won't last forever	I think it is fair to believe that when growth tapers off, or even declines, today's and tomorrow's economics have No Idea what to do about it.

OK. How many of these seven things come within the purview of any economics? The point about economics is that it is an attempt to understand the market and human action in a market system. And one aspect of that is to understand how government action affects the market and the behavior of market participants. One of the conceits of economics is that it is "value free." Thus Hilary Putman and his The End of Value-Free Economics. But economics tries not to impose its values on human interactions; it just tries to understand them. But anybody at all serious about economics tends to realize that as soon as you start imposing your values on human interaction, by government or by church, you pretty soon experience negative economic impacts as people find it harder to live their ordinary day-to-day lives 

The bottom line about Doughnut Economics is that it is not really about economics. It is all about politics. That has been the faith of left-wing believers since at least Marx, that by political means it is possible to create a juster society. So the honest thing to do would have been to call the book Doughnut Politics: 7 Ways to Think Like a Lefty Activist. Or, if you like, Doughnut Activism: 7 Ways to Change the World.

Of course, politics is not really mentioned in Doughnut Economics, not as such. But when you imagine the human world as a doughnut with an Ecological Ceiling and a Social Foundation, and if you experience penetrating the Ecological Ceiling of planetary pressure as causing an "overshoot of pressure on Earth's life-giving systems", and if you experience a fall through the Social Foundation below as "a lack of life's essentials such as food, education and housing" there is an unsaid assumption that educated and caring people -- activists -- are called upon to do something about it. And how are they going to do it? Obviously, by their domination of the political, cultural and secular religious institutions of global society. They are going to tell the rest of us what to do, because they know.

Suppose Raworth is right, that we have to Do Something about climate change and lack of justice in food, education, and housing. But is there is one thing we know it is that top-down direction of the economy does not work. Then the question becomes: what do we do when the elite and activist supervision of things environmental and social falls short of the mark? For instance, just this week I read about a minor cock-up on the doughnut front. In western Europe there was a lack of wind in the North Sea last week, worst in 20 years. That meant that natural gas plants had to step in and generate electric power to make up for the power that the wind turbines weren't generating and that meant that natural gas prices went through the roof and that meant that fertilizer factories closed down and that meant that carbon dioxide supplies for the food industry were cut off and that meant that grocery stores may run out of food.

Golly who knew?

See that's the problem with our current global ruling class. They know, they know, that they are the smart ones, and they know, they know, that their solutions to the world problems are what it is going to make the world Build Back Better. And the best way they know is to change things with politics and government.

But that is not how the world works. The world is "one damn thing after another," as someone said. Economics is the study of just how, with one damn thing after another and the help of the price system and the individual efforts of millions of people, somehow humans manage to struggle on from day to day. And, in the last 200 years, increase real per capita income by 3,000 percent. It asks: how did that happen? Not because of wise, knowledgeable elites and academics but by anybodies with a new idea changing the world, and fixing mistakes on the way, mistakes that you and I never hear about.

Kate Raworth and her student Yuan Wang beg to differ. They have a better idea. Maybe they do. But what happens when there is a small glitch in the Matrix, the most windless week in the North Sea in 20 years? Well, then the market system and its pricing steps in. And you may not like the result.

Now, at the end of Doughnut Economics on page 258 Raworth has "Table 2. The ecological ceiling and its indicators of overshoot" including Climate Change,Ocean Acidification, Freshwater Withdrawals, and so on, as compiled by Steffen et al. "Planetary boundaries: guiding human development on a changing planet," an article in Science in 2015. For each indicator Steffen et al. have proposed a planetary boundary. For carbon dioxide it is "at most 350 ppm" and we are at 400 ppm and rising.

Well? Is rising CO2 a problem? Experts say it is. And anyone that disagrees, including retired experts, is stigmatized as a "science denier."

This, of course, is the way it has always been in human history until quite recently. Anyone that challenged the received wisdom, as promulgated by elite academics and soothsayers was stigmatized, and perhaps executed as a heretic, an evil opponent of the Truth.

Or, as Bryan Magee writes in Philosophy and the Real World: An Introduction to Karl Popper,

[A]ll, or almost all human societies of which we have knowledge seem to have an interpretation of the world which was articulated in some myth or religion, and in primitive societies any questioning of its truth is usually punished by death.

Obviously this approach to human society has not changed much. The method of Soviet Russia and Maoist China was to direct society from the top and to punish, often by death, those that objected.

But our era has thrived on an opposite idea, that Magee calls "the era of criticism." In this notion all theories, scientific, economic, and political, should be constantly tested and criticized. And out of the criticism we will discover and develop new theories that resolve the problems -- and there will be problems -- in the current theories.

Kat Raworth imagines that her Doughnut Economics is a critique of "neoliberal" economics that she represents as coming from the folks that formed the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947. Maybe. Only I get the feeling that she has never read the books by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek and Co. Reading Doughnnut Economics I do not detect the least whisper that she knows anything except the mainstream economics that goes from the classical economists to Marshall to Keynes to Samuelson. Samuelson is the guy she goes after. Well, I never paid Samuelson no nevermind, because I think his macroeconomics misses the point. I experience western macroeconomics as a crude effort to help welfare-state politicians avoid crashing the economy, and not really providing an insight into the way that the capitalist economy works. So how do you like them apples?

Let's get back to the big issue, climate change, the basic justification for Raworth's Rule of the Experts.

For instance, the UN's IPCC has sponsored the development of dozens of computer climate models. All of them predict significant warming of the planet, year on year. But the models all "run hot." They have predicted higher temperatures that have transpired in the record.

So? Well, in Magee's notion and Karl Popper's notion, we now start to subject the models and their assumptions to rigorous critique and try to figure out why they have prophesied an increase in temperatures in excess of the actual record. Is it because they misunderstand the way the climate works? Is it because they can't simulate the intertropical convergence zone? Is it because the models aren't detailed enough? Who knows?

And anyway, is it a problem if temperatures increase? And how would we know? The temperature record shows that the Earth has been quite a bit warmer than the present, as recently as the Roman Warming and the Medieval Warming. On the other hand, the Earth is presently in an "interglacial" period in the middle of an Ice Age in which CO2 in the atmosphere has been down to 180 ppm. And scientists say that C3 photosynthesis stops at about 150 ppm, meaning all the plants die.

But let us assume that the scientists are right and that global temperatures are increasing and the reason is the increase in CO2 due to burning of fossil fuels. If we do nothing, what happens?

Well, what happens is that humans adapt to the new climate. We move grain agriculture northward. And if the deserts move northward from Africa into southern Europe we migrate northward. And if the sea level rises we move cities inland. Is it possible that we encounter a real crisis where millions of humans perish? Certainly. And there will be wars and rumors of wars and frightful outcomes. Kinda like things have ever been.

But what we do not know is if the outcome from doing nothing is worse than the option of letting our educated betters decide for us.

For instance, our betters tell us, on the one hand, that we are running out of fossil fuels, and on the other hand that fossil fuels are going to change the climate. Well, if fossil fuels run out, that will take care of that, right? No more warming from increased CO2. And it's not as if we don't have the knowledge and technology to create nuclear fission plants. And it is not as if we are probably close to effective nuclear fusion energy.

See, the problem with the whole Ecological Ceiling thing is cui bono. Who benefits? And the answer is that a climate crisis benefits people like Kate Raworth that seem to go from international conference to international conference advising corporate execs on the right and proper way to respect the Ecological Ceiling.

Just as the problem with the Social Foundation thing is also cui bono. "Doing something" about social problems, for the last century, has been all about politicians buying votes from the proposed beneficiaries of programs to prop up the Social Foundation. Because justice.

Now my particular prejudice is that I believe that politics and government and elite academic ukases are the wrong way to deal with almost everything. Carl Schmitt says politics is about friends vs. enemy, and killing the enemy if necessary. It is all the other things, from work and markets and social interaction and religion and culture that really make the human world go round.

So my question to the Kate Raworths of the world is: are you really sure that your doughnut model -- even if it is a sensible understanding of the human world -- can really be managed with politics? And do you think that the stigmatization of people that disagree with you as enemies, that is inevitable in politics, is going to solve anything?

I'm sure you have never thought about such question in such terms. Of course not, because nobody ever taught you to think like that.

And anyway, Carl Schmitt was a Nazi. So there.

Carl Schmitt's The Concept of the Political

Carl Schmitt is known to us as a prominent Nazi. He joined the Nazi party in 1933, and called for burning of books by Jewish authors. He was appointed State Councillor of Prussia by Göring. The SS gave him trouble in 1936 but he retained his professorship at the University of Berlin till 1945.

But Schmitt is also the author of penetrating political analyses, and has attracted the interest of people like tech billionaire Peter Thiel and neo-reactionary Curtis Yarvin.

The Concept of the Political was first published in 1932. This analysis is from a translation by C.J. Miller published in 2020. The book is short: eight chapters in 63 pages.

I.

Schmitt starts by noticing that nobody has ever defined the political. Mostly it is used to contrast with other antitheses such as "politics and economics, politics and morals, politics and law" and even the antithesis between politics and civil law. He observes that

In general, “political” is in some way equated with “state,” or at least related to the state. The state then appears as something political, to political as something related to the state[.]

Sometimes the political is understood in legal opinions in a technical sense, for instance in the concept of "political association" or "political assembly." In the progress from the absolute state of the 18th century to the limited state of the 19th century to the democratic state of the 20th century the understanding of the state and society changed as people began to deal with the penetration of the state into all social affairs. 

II.

So what is the political? Schmitt sets forth the following definition.

The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be traced is the distinction between friend and enemy.

It is easy to compare the friend-enemy distinction to others, such as “good and evil in the moral; beautiful and ugly in the aesthetic”. But it is a mistake to imagine that the political is related to these other distinctions, because only in politics does disagreement lead to conflict.

[The enemy] is just the other, the stranger… so that in extreme cases conflicts with him are possible.

Conflicts, he points out, cannot be decided by "a general norm," nor by the the decree of a 'disinterested' and therefore 'impartial' third party." Only the participants in a conflict can decide 

whether the otherness of the stranger in the concrete case of conflict means the negation of their own form of existence, and whether he must be repulsed or fought off in order to preserve their own way of life in accordance with their being.

Of course, the enemy is easily thought of as "evil." But the "evil" need not be the enemy. The political, and its "friend-enemy" distinction, is independent of other distinctions.

III.

Although the political is independent of other distinctions, people have tried to soften the friend-enemy distinction: in business, liberalism has softened the enemy into competitor. In a moral world there are hopefully only debate opponents. But, aside from hopes and aspirations, the friend-enemy distinction is something apart.

Thus the enemy is not a competitor or opponent in the general sense. He is also not a private opponent whom one hates with a feeling of antipathy. The enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collective of people confronts another fighting collective. The enemy is always a public enemy[.]

The political is the most extreme kind of human antagonism, and any antagonism "becomes more political the more it gets to the extreme point." And, of course, the more extreme that political antagonisms get within a state, the closer they get to civil war.

The word “conflict,” he writes, “does not mean competition” or “debate” or the routine “struggle” of life. It means killing.

The terms friend, enemy, and conflict… refer specifically to the real possibility of physical killing.

IV.

What about religion? According to Schmitt, when a disagreement between religions escalates into a “religious war,” the war is political, because the opposing religions experience each other as enemies. Same with the Marxist “class struggle.” It may start out as economic or cultural, but when it escalates to civil war -- or world revolution -- we are talking about the classes experiencing each other as enemies, not merely as ordinary exploiters or average wage earners.

Of course, the political is not the source of absolute power: the state dare not abolish the right of workers to strike. And various associations can combine in an alliance against the state. But whatever power associations may have

Neither a church, nor a trade union, nor an alliance of the two would have prevented a war that the German Reich under Bismarck wanted to wage.

And whatever the power and influence of different sectors in society, it remains that the "possibility of grouping friend and enemy" is "decisive in relation to the other associations."

V.

The state -- as political entity -- contains enormous power, waging war with human lives at its disposal to send out and kill other people. But the point of its power is to create the "normal state" where "peace, security, and order" obtain. But this leads to the need to identify "internal enemies" as genuine threats. This could mean "ostracism, banishment... the declaration of the enemy within the state" that can escalate to actual civil war. At this point, of course, the "constitutional" state is dissolved until the struggle is decided.

A member of a church may die for his faith, but only as a "private matter." An "economically oriented society" can deal with "troublemakers" by non-violent means, for to kill people for an economic purpose "is horrible and insane." But conflict is different. War is not "normative", it is "existential," and "a real struggle against a real enemy, not in any ideals, programs, or norms."

Thus, the idea of a just war is nonsense, or political propaganda. So is the idea of "outlawing" war. If a people is determined to maintain its existential existence, then it must be prepared to decide for itself who is a friend and who is an enemy, and act upon this decision.

If a people fears the toils and risks of political existence, another people will relieve it of these toils by taking over its "protection against external enemies"and thus its political rule[.]

Either a people provides for its own protection or it must be obedient to another that secures protection for it. A people that has subcontracted its protection to another is not long for this world for "a weak people disappears" as a political entity.

VI.

Because the political "presupposes the real possibility of the enemy" it means that the idea of a world state is nonsense. It would require a world in which nobody feared an enemy. And a world without enemies would be a world without politics. Thus "humanity cannot wage war" because the notion "excludes the concept  of an enemy." So, whenever a state wages war in the name of "humanity" it "wishes to cheat" according to Proudhon.

Thus the idea of the League of Nations (or the United Nations) as an association of humanity is nonsense. It is a club of nations, an "intergovernmental association which presupposes the existence of states." And if a "world state" ever existed, the next question is "who will be given the terrible power of an economic and technical centralization covering the whole world?"

VII.

There is an ongoing question of whether man is good or evil, but Schmitt asserts that political theories are clear on this

[T]he strange... observation remains that all genuine political theories presuppose man as evil... as a dangerous and dynamic being.

Indeed, it is by recognition of this that a thinker reveals himself as a political thinker. Schmitt quotes Hegel and Lenin to show how they understand the nature of the "enemy" the "people" and the "conflict." Except, of course that for Lenin the "people" is a class.

Political thought and political instinct thus prove their worth theoretically and practically in their ability to distinguish friend from enemy.

On the other hand the inability to make the friend-enemy distinction "appears as a symptom of the political end". And he proposes the Russian nobility before the revolution, the "relativist bourgeoisie" and the ancien régime aristocrats of France as people that did not see who the enemy was.

VIII.

Although "liberal thought" pretends to ignore the state and politics and imagine human interaction in terms of "ethics and economics, intellect and business, education and property" and care only about the individual, in its actions liberalism smuggles power and politics in the back door.

[It] no longer knows war, but only executions, sanctions, punitive expeditions, pacifications, protection of treaties, international police, and peacekeeping missions. The enemy is no longer called the enemy but in return he is set up as a threat to peace[.]

Thus a war is turned into a "'crusade' or 'the last war of mankind' using an array of propaganda". So, "this allegedly apolitical and apparently even anti-political system either serves existing groupings of friends and enemies, or leads to new ones, and is unable to escape the logic of the political." 

One can say that, since Carl Schmitt, the Nazi, published The Concept of the Political in 1932, nothing has changed.

Doughnut Economics: Growth Agnostic

In her Doughnut Economics: 7 Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist Brit academic Kate Raworth imagines the human world as a doughnut. If you penetrate the Ecological Ceiling or fall through the Social Foundation, here there be dragons, and you must call in and submit to the activist elite.

In "Be Agnostic About Growth" she proposes that GDP growth is not all it's cracked up to be. And she challenges her students on this by asking them to divide themselves according to the statement "Is green growth possible? Yes/No."

As these students quickly discover, our beliefs about economic growth are almost religious: personal in nature, political in consequence, privately held and little discussed.

Nevertheless, the question reduces to this:

No country has ever ended human deprivation without a growing economy.
And no country has ever ended ecological degradation with one. 

Raworth's goal is to stay in the Doughnut, "by ending deprivation and degradation at the same time." But what does that mean to GDP growth? Her goal is to design "an economy that promotes human prosperity whether GDP is going up, down, or holding steady." The goal is to "thrive" not just get richer. And that "calls for transforming the financial, political, and social structures that have made our economies and societies come to expect, to demand and depend upon growth."

The point is that GDP growth at a fixed rate is an exponential function that heads out to infinity a lot sooner than you think. Conventional thinking she represents as Walt Rostow's five stages of growth;

1. Traditional society -- where agriculture and artisans "place a ceiling" on productivity.
2. Preconditions for take-off -- the idea that economic growth is not just possible, but good.
3. Take-off -- mechanized agriculture and manufacturing make growth the norm.
4. Drive to maturity -- in which a wide range of modern industries is established.
5. Age of high mass-consumption -- growth delivers enough surplus income to provide bicycles, kitchen gadgets and cars.

Think of a plane that cruises forever "at a constant growth rate into the sunset of consumerism."

The early classical economists understood that growth would not go on forever. And Keynes saw "the economic problem" taking a back seat to "the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behavior and of religion." In other words, the exponential curve of GDP growth would eventually decay into an S-curve. And mainstream economists at places like the OECD are starting to realize that growth, at least in the richer countries, is starting to slow down.

But what are the consequences of lower growth? Some people think that growth must continue, because it is a "social and political necessity in every country." And they typically think that this growth is "environmentally sustainable." But Raworth thinks that this will not work. She sees three scenarios.

1. Relative decoupling: GDP grows faster than resource use.
2. Absolute decoupling: Resource use declines as GDP grows.
3. Sufficient absolute decoupling: GDP decline to force sufficient resource use decline.

When Raworth approaches responsible officials she sometimes finds one that admits that "sufficient absolute decoupling" is needed but is afraid to say so. In other words absolute GDP decline is needed to save the climate, but nobody dare say so.

Thus, for Raworth it is "science" that we need to "do something" or resource depletion and CO2 increase will crash the environment. So what should we do? What is needed to ensure "the Doughnut's safe and just space?"

Getting there calls for many sectoral transformations, including a strong contraction of industries (such as mining, oil and gas, industrial livestock production, demolition and landfill, and speculative finance), offset by a rapid and lasting expansion of long-term investment in renewable energy, public transport, commons-based circular manufacturing and retrofit buildings.

But we don't know what will be the net effect of such policies. All we know is that capitalist economies "have restructured their laws, institutions, policies and values" to expect continual GDP growth.

On the contrary, we need to ensure "the capacity to thrive when growth comes to an end." And right now we should expect governments to take desperate measures to keep growth going. So we must "learn how to land" and become "thriving, growth-agnostic economies" when we need to. Raworth addresses various social "addictions" that we need to address.

Financial addiction to gain. Gain is the basis of the modern economy. How do we get off the addiction. One method is to replace "the constant pressure to grow from shareholders." Another is "demurrage, a small fee incurred for holding money.

Political addiction: hope, fear and power. Politicians need growth to grow revenue to fund their programs. People fear unemployment, if that would come from the slowing or elimination of growth. Politicians don't want their country to fall in the GDP rankings so their country becomes a second rate power.

Social addiction: aspiration. We need to replace economic aspiration with something else. "What might we aspire to instead, if not more possessions? The New Economic Foundation recommends:

connecting to the people around us, being active in our bodies, taking notice of the world, learning new skills, and giving to others.

It all seems so hard, but we need "to come up with economic designs that would enable nations coming towards the end of their GDP growth to learn to thrive without it." Maybe in the modern economy we need the skills akin to that of the kite-surfer, using a supple body to adjusts to "the dynamic interplay of the wind and the waves."

Interestingly my Great Enrichment web page shows that GDP growth in the major countries is easing off. But can the ideas that Kate Raworth proposes work? And more to the point, will they work? My guess is no, for several reasons.

1. Despite Raworth's faith in the CO2 climate change hypothesis, my guess is that it is wrong.
2. Going back to solar and windmills will not work. Humans keep moving to more and more concentrated energy sources, from sitting in the sun to wood fires to coal-fired steam engines to oil-powered ships and cars, to nuclear fission power. The next step is nuclear fusion, and who knows what comes next.
3. Politics, whether national or UN based, is not going to solve any problems except responding to a genuine emergency -- like a hurricane. Politics is war plus loot and plunder to the supporters. It cannot "plan" a safe and just future. The Commies already tried that.
4. Educated people in rich countries may want to sit back and write poetry, but the poor and the ordinary middle class do not. They still want a better life for their themselves and their children. Since educated people drive the politics there is going to be a collision somewheres down the road.

Kate Raworth seems to think that because she and her pals in the international conference set have cool ideas that they should get to implement them. Given the prophecies of breakdown, we need to educate a new generation of economists that can go out into the world and change it. They need "the most enlightened economics education possible."

Given the diverse technological, cultural, economic and political routes that could take us into the Doughnut, there will be many ways of distributing the costs and benefits, power and risk, within and between countries and communities. That makes the political process of adjudicating between alternative policies as important as ever.

Raworth says we need more Yuan Wangs -- the student she introduced at the beginning of Doughnut Economics -- to advocate for the new future. 

My guess is that she and her pals have No Idea about the utter disaster they are creating.

Doughnut Economics: Redistribute, Regenerate

In her Doughnut Economics: 7 Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist Brit academic Kate Raworth imagines the human world as a doughnut. If you penetrate the Ecological Ceiling or fall through the Social Foundation, here there be dragons, and you must call in and submit to the activist elite.

In "Design to Distribute" she tells us that we don't have to put up with "growing inequality."

If every human is to thrive within the Doughnut, every human must have the capabilities needed to live a life of dignity, opportunity and community.

But millions of people don't. Where do they live? Used to be, they lived in "the world's poorest countries," those with "GDP per person of less than $1,000 per year." But now "three-quarters of the world's poorest people live in middle-income countries" like China and India. And they are becoming more unequal.

And in the richest countries, "the gap between the rich and the poor is now at its highest level in 30 years." So experts agree that we need to "tackle" rising inequality.

But what does economics say about inequality? The classical economists were concerned, but did not agree about what would happen to inequality with economic growth. Marx said the rich would get richer and the poor poorer. Alfred Marshall said that incomes would tend to converge. In the 1890s Pareto found that 20 percent of the people got 80 percent of the income, and this was a fixed order of nature.

Then Simon Kuznets -- "brilliant inventor of national accounting" -- in the 1950s found that "income inequality first rose, then levelled out, and eventually fell again, all while the economy grew." But then by the 1990s researchers decided that there is no pattern.

In 2014 Thomas Piketty decided to look not just at earnings but at wealth. He found that "returns to capital have tended to grow faster than the economy as a whole, leading wealth to become ever more concentrated." Kutzets findings were due to the capital-depleting effects of two world wars and a Great Depression, plus "post-war public investment in education, healthcare and social security." But once the returns on capital returned to normal, the rich got richer and inequality grew. Still, according to economists at the IMF in 2014:

[T]he notion of tradeoff between redistribution and growth seems deeply embedded in policymakers' consciousness.

But look at this. Wilkinson and Pickett in The Spirit Level found that inequality affects social welfare.

More unequal countries, they found, tend to have more teenage pregnancy, mental illness, drug use, obesity, prisoners, school dropouts and community breakdown, along with lower life expectancy, lower status for women and lower levels of trust. 

And, of course, the inequality "unleashes a market in political influence." And "increased environmental degradation."

The 2008 crash goes to prove it.

When the high-paid took on high-risk assets that turned out to be the bundled debts of the low-paid taking on mortgages they could not afford, the result was system fragility and financial crash. 

 And more unequal countries have less economic growth.

So, inequality is a problem. But can we do anything about it? Naturally, Oxford University economist Kate Raworth thinks we can.

The answer to this problem, says Raworth is the network.

The question, then, is how to design economic networks so that they can distribute value -- from materials and energy to knowledge and income -- in a far more equitable way.

Back in the later 20th century, the "authors of the neoliberal script" pushed back on progressive income taxes, labor law, minimum wage, and government health, education, and housing. But now economists are proposing higher marginal income tax rates; activists demand a living wage and a maximum wage; guaranteed access to work; and a national basic income.

But Raworth's plan is to distribute value, partly top-down and partly bottom-up.

Five opportunities stand out, concerning who controls land, the power to create money, enterprise, technology and knowledge[.]

For who owns the land Raworth cycles through giving peasants title to land, to Henry George's plan to tax land, to blaming the land "enclosures" of "both the state and the market encroaching on command land". So she decides that "neither the market, the commons nor the state" has an "infallible blueprint."

For who makes your money Raworth tells us that the banks create 97 percent of money and they put 75 percent of that into "buying stocks and houses" and only 13 percent into small businesses. Thus, when debt increases "a growing share of national income" is siphoned off to rentiers. What if the central bank took back money creation and forced banks to limit their loans to their depositors' savings? What if state-owned banks channeled loans to "long-term transformation, such as affordable or carbon-neutral housing and public transport." What if central banks "tackled deep recession by issuing money directly to every household" instead of trying to stimulated bank lending. What if communities created their own "complementary currencies." What if cryptocurrencies like Ethereum could be used to set up "peer-to-peer trading in renewable energy." Good luck with all that, I'd say.

For who owns your labor Raworth notes that across the West GDP has increased faster than labor incomes. The model of "labour, landlords, and capitalists" seems to relegate wage owners to be outsiders. But Marjorie Kelly proposes alternative enterprise designs, with employee-owned firms, issuing bonds  with "a fair, fixed return" to employees. "Employee-owned companies... born out of the cooperative movement... in England" offer their "members better pay, greater job security and a say in managing the business." But, perhaps, workers do better by opting for a fixed wage rather than accepting the risks of enterprise.

And who will own the robots? The digital revolution means a transformation of work. On the one hand, "anyone with an Internet connection can entertain, inform, learn and teach worldwide." With access to a 3D printer anyone can "print-to-order" the gadget they need. But then there is the network effect, that creates digital monopolies like Google and Amazon, that amount to "an enclosure of the twenty-first century's most creative commons."And what about all the jobs, from taxi drivers to heart surgeons, that could be digitized? Suppose job creation in non-digitized fields can't keep up? Maybe we should switch from taxing labor to taxing non-renewable resources. Or we could invest in "skilling people up.... in creativity, empathy, insight ,and human contact." But what if workers can't keep up "just from selling their labour alone"? Maybe what we need is for everyone to get a "robot dividend." But we need to be sure that the wealth created by robots is "widely distributed."

So who owns the ideas? Patents seemed like a good idea when it began with Venetian glass-blowers in the 15th century. But now it's got out of hand with Amazon getting a patent for its "one-click" purchasing. On the other hand there is a huge and growing "open source" community in everything from software to farm machinery. And there's the Open Building Institute with open-source designs for "ecological, off-grid-affordable housing available to all." But Raworth thinks that open source will need the backing of "a Partner State... to enable the creation of common value." The state can help: "invest in human ingenuity... in schools and universities"; ensure that "publicly funded research becomes public knowledge... in the knowledge commons"; "roll back... corporate intellectual property claims"; "publicly fund... community makerspaces"; encourage the spread of civic organizations.

But I'd say that Raworth's five point plan is just the fashionable conversation of a privileged academic that gets to go to all the cool international meetings. Whatever the future brings, it won't come from the credentialed fashionables, but from nobodies and anybodies getting their ideas up and going before the fashionables notice and start to screw things up.

But what about distribution globally? International inequality -- a legacy of colonialism, debt, privatization and trade rules -- is still extreme. And the nation state hasn't helped. International redistribution started with development assistance. In 1970 rich nations pledged 0.7 percent of GDP to poor nations, but in 2013 only spent 0.3 percent. If "well spent" imagine the lives that lost money could have transformed! Instead the slack has been taken up by the remittances back home from "global migrants." Rich countries have complained of corruption, but what if we distributed money directly to the poor through mobile banking and smartphones? Like Kenya and its M-PESA mobile money service? But also, how about a tax on "extreme personal wealth?" Or we could have "Commons Trusts... to protect and steward" a watershed or the global atmosphere. But hey, how about the Malawi kid that went to the local library in 2002 and learned how to make a windmill -- from the Internet.

Yep. 21st century economists are right here, ready to "design distributive flow into the very structure of economic interactions." Step right up.

Then Raworth discusses "Create to Regenerate." This, of course, is mainly about the environment and climate change.

Up to now, conventional wisdom is that environmental is a luxury concern. Only when income reaches a certain point do countries start to clean up the environment. 

But if you consider "a nation's global material footprint" including "biomass, fossil fuels, metal ores and construction minerals used world-wide to create the products that a country imports" then global footprints increase with GDP and the human impact on the planet goes up with GDP.

The reason for this, Raworth says, is a linear industrial system of 

take, make, use, lose: extract Earth's minerals, metals, biomass and fossil fuels; manufacture them into products; sell those on to consumers who -- probably sooner rather than later -- will throw them "away".

But this linear model is "flawed because it runs counter to the living world, which thrives by continually recycling life's building blocks such as carbon, oxygen, water, nitrogen and phosphorus.." 

Industrial activity has broken these natural cycles apart, depleting nature's sources and dumping too much waste in her sinks. Extracting oil, coal and gas... and dumping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Turning nitrogen and phosphorus into fertiliser, then offloading the effluent... into lakes and oceans. Uprooting forests to mine metals and minerals... with toxic chemicals leaching out into the soil, water and air. 

Governments try to check these "negative externalities" with quotas and taxes, but they won't do the job because "they are rarely set to the level required". This is a degenerative system, "devouring the sources of its own sustenance."  It's unacceptable for corporations to do nothing, or do what pays, or do their fair share, or do no harm. What's needed is a circular, regenerative system, "generous by design, giving back to the living systems of which we are a part."

For instance coffee grounds could be used to grow mushrooms and then used for animal feed and returned to the ground as manure. Cellphones could be designed for easy collection and disassembly. After consumption and use we can regenerate and restore what we have used and consumed. We need to stop thinking about wealth in monetary terms and adopt Ruskin's notion that "there is no wealth but life."

In the "generous city" architects and planners would have rooftops that grow food and welcome wildlife, pavements that release water into aquifers, buildings that sequester CO2 and turn sewage into soil nutrients with wildlife corridors and urban agriculture, renewable energy microgrids, affordable housing connected by public transport, neighborhood enterprise hubs, with skillful jobs to maintain it. The only question is, can economists show how to make it pay.

But extending this circular paradigm to corporations is not easy, and the average westerner owns more than 10,000 products made worldwide. 

Making it happen calls for rebalancing the roles of the market, the commons and the state. It calls for redefining the purpose of business and the functions of finance.

But, Raworth admits, it will come "from the innovative experiments of those who are trying to bring it about." Meanwhile there's an Open Source Circular Economy (OSCE) movement to extend the notion of open-source software and the knowledge commons to boost circular manufacturing. There's an open-source video camera, an open-source electric car, and open-source 3-D printers. Utopian? Don't forget Linus Torvalds, the father of open-source Linux.

In the future businesses could be like Anita Roddick's Body Shop, or John Fullerton reimagining finance, "turning savings and credit into productive investments that deliver long-term social and environmental value." It means separating deposits from speculation, and making it unprofitable to be too leveraged and too complex. There could be "complementary currencies" to encourage people to be environmentally sound, shop locally and travel publicly.

Government, the "partner state" has a role to play, 

including restructuring taxes and regulations, stepping up as a transformative investor, and empowering the dynamism of the commons.

Government will change from taxing labor to taxing non-renewable resources and subsidizing renewable energy. "Only the state can provide the kind of patient finance required to make a decisive shift." And this has started to happen on a local scale, at Oberlin, Ohio, home of Oberlin College.

And we need a new kind of metrics, a "living metrics" to replace the current "monetary metrics." So instead of just monitoring GDP we will monitor the many sources of wealth -- human, social, ecological, cultural and physical -- from which all value flows."

Could it work? My guess is: not likely. Just like socialism, you can imagine a wonderful perfect world, but then comes the problem of implementing it. We found that socialism required making humans into slaves, and mountains of skulls, and it still didn't work. Behind the wonders of the regenerative economy is the will of determined and vain people, that want to make the rest of the people into the mirror of their vanity with their clunking fists.

For the great question is: how will we fix mistakes? The problem with politics and noble elites with glorious plans is that they cannot admit to making mistakes. The wonder of the capitalist economy is that it is always making mistakes and fixing them. Companies are born, grow, decline and die, and nobody needs to be in charge, except the bankruptcy judge at the end. But governments and elites don't come and don't go quietly. And while they live, all governments since the dawn of time have lived by the distribution of loot and plunder to their supporters. Call that a circular economy if you like.