Remember "It's the Economy Stupid?"

Back in the day, they say, they had a big sign up in the Clinton 1992 presidential campaign headquarters: "It's the Economy Stupid!"

The idea, I assume, was that while all the people that politicians talk to are grifters and hangers-on, the voters are just thinking about the price of meat at Safeway this week and whether wages are keeping up with prices.

Oh and you'd better not mess with my Social Security and Medicare.

But I say that Obama in 2009 and Biden in 2021 ignored that golden rule. Obama's stimulus package in 2009 was all about throwing money at teachers and setting up Obamacare rather than restarting the economy after the generational Crash of 2008 and the subsequent Great Recession.

The same is true of Biden's early stimulus package and subsequent "infrastructure" and Build Back Better packages. They had nothing to do with getting the economy on track after the disruption of the COVID scare. They were all about servicing elite Democratic constituencies and their demand for loot.

I suppose it is natural for the monarch in any regime to live in the bubble of his court, and not really pay enough attention to the real world outside. In the last few days, for instance, I have been writing about the willful failure of our ruling class to grasp the importance of the work of Charles Murray, that Great Society programs don't work and that the economy is favoring high IQ workers and really hurting ordinary average folks without standout talent.

My point is that, before the rulers hand out the goodies to their supporters, as all regimes have done since the dawn of time, they need to make sure that the Commoners and the peasants are doing OK.

And I would say that the Bidenoids are clearly acting as though the overall health of the economy, as experienced by ordinary Commoners, is not something that lordly courtiers need to concern themselves about.

I was reading Ben Stein at The American Spectator and he was talking about his dad.

Some of you will recall that my father, Herbert Stein, a noted economist from about around 1945 to 1999, was instrumental in helping the U.S. shift from a wartime economy to a wildly prosperous peacetime economy.

He served as a LTJG in the Navy, and then on a series of commissions and committees that planned how to get from huge wartime deficits under FDR — and rightly so, of course — to a sustained balanced budget peacetime economy[.]

Imagine that! The powers that be were thinking about how to transition from war to peace! And the result of their work was this:

I'd say that the reduction of federal debt from 1945 to 1980 was pretty decent. I'd say that the ruling class had its eye on the ball. But obviously, not since then.

I'd say, looking at the chart, that we are in for some unpleasantness at the Bellona Club in the next few years. The job of a ruling class is to make sure that any unpleasantness is confined to court circles and that it should not impacts ordinary Commoners and peasants.

Of course, that is to say nothing about the green agenda -- that I regard as a combination of ruling-class fashion parade and ruling-class moral preening. Greenology was referenced recently over at WattsUpWithThat in respect of how our greenie friends are in the early stages of turning the economy upside down in order to replace fossil fuels with renewable resources. They call it "deep decarbonization." As an engineer that worked for a while in electric generation planning, I am here to say that these chaps have no idea.

More than that, I say that our greenie friends are sending the economy off a cliff and you have no idea what we are going to experience when we hit the rocks at the bottom.

Except that fortunately the Germans are going to hit bottom first. And give us time to deploy our parachutes.

For those of us that have parachutes.

I don't know what the bottom line is for ignoring the "It's the Economy, Stupid!" My guess would start at losing Congress in 2022 and the presidency in 2024. But what do I know?

Yes, But the Republicans Have Nothing

Now that our Democratic friends are staring utter failure in the face, the latest "messaging" is that Republicans don't believe in anything, e.g., WaPo's Jennifer Rubin: "Republicans are embarrassed to tell us what they are for."

Well yes. And part of that is that chapettes like Jennifer Rubin and the whole of the rest of the educated class sneers at the modest goal of ordinary American Commoners to live an ordinary life of going to work, obeying the laws, following the rules, having children and living in a nice house in the suburbs.

People on the right get in on the sneering act too. David Cole at Taki's is always up for a sneer at the utter ineffectiveness of Repubicans.

And frankly, I get it. What in the world is the point of arguing whether John Locke was a Christian or not when our lefty friends are telling us to worship their LGBT gods or else?

And what does the Republican Party have to offer to counter the wall-to-wall spending something-for-everyone spending spree and saving the world from climate change?

Because everyone deserves free stuff and everyone wants to save the world from burning up.

Well. I'd say that the free-stuff and save-the-world is on the way to self-destruction.

Free stuff? I discussed that yesterday in respect of Charles Murray's work. His books show pretty conclusively that the big-government model of the Great Society programs Makes Things Worse for the very people they are intended to help. And the current education and credentials system modified by racist DEI is making life really cool for the educated class, but Making Things Worse of average people and much worse for lower class people.

And I think that ordinary people are going to be reacting big time against the green agenda that means the end of personal transportation and cheap energy.

But then what?

Thank you Senator, I'm glad you asked that.

I used to wonder about what the next regime would be like.

Wait, using the "downstream" notion of Andrew Breitbart, I'd have to say that I know what the next politics will look like, what the next culture will look like, what the next religion will look like, what the next meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" will look like.

And I am here to say that I didn't invent any of it. It's all out there; all you have to do is look for it.

First of all, you must understand that there are three kinds of people. I didn't invent that; tons of thinkers have come up with the idea of Three Layers of humanity. Curtis Yarvin's idea is that the top layer is Educated Gentry; the middle layer is ordinary middle-class Commoners; and the bottom layer is Clients -- or serfs or underlings.

The Clients need a boss to tell them what to do; the Commoners need a set of rules to tell them what to do; the Gentry need the chance to invent new rules, be creative.

The next regime needs to help the Clients learn how to live by a set of rules rather than today's order from the boss. It needs to help the Commoners get a bit creative; and it needs to teach the Gentry that ordinary people are not their playthings: their creative projects should be about improving themselves, not improving others.

Second, we need to internalize what has happened in philosophy, and knowledge generally in the last 200 years. I call it the German Turn and it left the lefty dream of Heaven on Earth and the Road to Justice in the dust 50 years ago.

Roughly speaking, the human world of the future will not be a system, a political cultural machine. It will be an emergent lifeworld, a community in the world with other humans with whom we communicate and negotiate and develop moral agreement in an ongoing person-to-person process, per Jürgen Habermas.

Notice how, at present, the way the world works is that the Educated Gentry imposes its moral system on the rest of us rather than engaging and negotiating morals and values with others as respected people that just think differently than they do.

What sort of person would the people in the new Educated Gentry of the human lifeworld be? I've sketched it out in my series "A Good Life Better Than the Left."

I have to say that none of these ideas are mine. They are all ideas and concepts that are out there in the world that I have encountered in my reading. And I don't suggest that anything is the last word. Indeed, the whole point of the notion is that it is emerging, developing, through the interactions of people, and not a fixed eternal system imposed from above or from outside.

Then, of course, it doesn't matter if Republicans Have Nothing. Things will just develop, on their own.

Charles Murray and the Ruling Class

There's a podcast up on Powerline with Steven Hayward interviewing Charles Murray and Steve Sailer on race and Year of George and the Great Awokening.

Charles Murray, of course,  is the author of several books on big government and race and IQ, and Steve Sailer blogs on the Unz Review and always has naughty statistics on race. 

This gives me a chance to pass Murray's major books in review. Here are some excerpts from a review of Murray's work that I wrote in 2014.

First, Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950 - 1980, published in 1984, says that

the liberals confidently instrumented their Great Society legislation with studies and social science research that would confirm their "elite wisdom." But when the results came in and pronounced the failure of their policies, they said nothing and did nothing.

Then came The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life in 1996.

[I] thought it good, but unexceptionable. Of course IQ is important in an age when wealth doesn't come in broad rich acres but right between the ears. I read [the] warning about a cognitive elite but didn't really pay much attention, not then. 

Then Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960 - 2010 in 2012 that I thought the best of his books.

Hey kids, let's look at White America and see how it's doing! My takeaway is that [Murray says] that the top 25 percent, the cognitive elite, is doing fine. (Hey, why wouldn't it, since the elite has used its power to make America in its own image!) The middle 40 percent are doing so-so, but the folks in Fishtown are in real trouble; the women don't marry and the men don't work.

I have a blow-by-blow analysis of Coming Apart starting here.

Since then, Murray has written Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America in 2021. As the blurb says:

American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. 

I have a blow-by-blow analysis of Facing Reality starting here.

But this week we had Charles Murray on a podcast, and the big takeaway for me was his comment on the reaction to The Bell Curve published in 1996.

The key section starts at about 10:00. Says Murray:

People didn't read The Bell Curve even when it first came out... Were there responses I respected and of course the politic thing for me to say is, to be very serious, yes, there were... Well, it's really hard for me to think of any that impressed me and there were some were written by very famous scholars that I just thought were pure "horse manure." and others in which I thought they were knowingly lying, that these people were too smart and too well informed not to know that they were lying about what was in the book.

OK. So there's a "tell" here. What is going on? Why don't liberals want to honestly discuss the question of IQ and race? The Bell Curve said that jobs increasingly required high cognitive skills, and that people without high cognitive skills would be at a disadvantage. E.g., especially, blacks.

The answer is The Sixties. In the Sixties liberals set the future by passing Civil Rights laws that made discrimination by race and sex illegal. And they passed the Great Society legislation that mandated a bunch of handouts to the poor. And they started Affirmative Action that deliberately discriminated against whites.

Charles Murray in Losing Ground said that the handouts didn't improve the lives of the poor.

Charles Murray in The Bell Curve said that the future belonged to the cognitive elite, and blacks would be particularly disadvantaged.

Charles Murray in Coming Apart said that, looking at whites only, the cognitive elite were doin' fine, the middle were doing so-so, and in the lower classes the men didn't work much and the women didn't marry much. In other words The Bell Curve was right. The policy of the cognitive elite discriminates against all people with a less-than-magnificent IQ -- including whites with low IQs.

Oh, and by the way, since Coming Apart was published we now know about the white working class "dying of despair" from drink and drugs. Golly, that couldn't possibly be about the low IQ whites just not being able to make it in the economy that privileges high IQ could it? Nah! Not a chance.

You expect our liberal friends to say, oh well, looks like we screwed up? So let's all get together and try to fix things?

Well, the record of the last 35 years since Losing Ground in 1984 is pretty clear. Our liberal friends aren't going to admit that they screwed up: not on big government programs and not on race. Instead they say the whole thing is due to white racism. And patriarchal sexism, and vile homophobia. And anything else, including the kitchen sink, that they can throw at ordinary Americans.

And if you disagree with them you are going to be downrated on Google Search because "disinformation," fired from your job, and canceled from social media.

I mean, if the black crime rate is nine times the white crime rate it can't be because the politics and programs of our liberal friends in the cognitive elite actually Make Things Worse. No. It must be the "hate" of far-right white supremacist armed insurrectionists.

And that is where America is today. Unless and until we do something about it.

What I Think, and Why Regarding the Political Moment

All of a sudden, I am reading articles about what conservatism should be. "Common good" conservatism? Just regular old  conservatism without the modifiers? National conservatism? Or what?

I think it's important to know who is doing the asking. In my view the Hobbeses, Lockes, Burkes, that were celebrated in Buckleyite conservatism were a class of the high bourgeois trying to imagine a ruling class of people like them rather than the royalty of old. In other words, if you weren't anointed by God, how do you justify your regime?

I would say that it was a basically honest attempt to form a new politics, for it clearly was interested in the class interest of people like them, but it also thought that the lower orders would benefit too.

This view of ruling has been challenged by an openly educated, intellectual class that has justified its rule on the notion that it rules not in the interest of the upper echelons but in the interest of the lower class. That's what communism, socialism, the welfare state, the managerial state are all about.

I think that the view of the educated, intellectual class has basically been a lie. I would say that the liberals / socialists / progressives have basically ruled in their own self interest, based on a cruel hatred for the middling sorts of people and an agenda that seems to care for the lower class but in fact confirms it in its serf-like, dependent status, and actually Makes Things Worse for everyone except the educated ruling class.

The present mania for "systemic racism," in my view, is a confirmation that today's educated ruling class does not rule for the benefit of the lower class or "minorities." There would be no need to make a big fuss about racism if the progressives were really benefiting minorities and the oppressed; everyone would understand how the traditionally oppressed were making great strides under the benevolent rule of the educated and the evolved.

Thus, in my view, the big publicized racist incidents of the last few even-numbered years, from 2014's Trayvon Martin to 2020's George Floyd, are not an indication that eevil white oppressors are oppressing innocent oppressed people, but that there is a whole generation of minority underclass people who have been utterly trashed by the progressive administrative state and the educated class culture on which it stands.

I would say that the simple fact is that government programs supervised by the educated class cannot be the basis of human society. Human society is not an administrative hierarchy; it is an emergent phenomenon with interconnections and relations that we barely understand. Call it the "lifeworld" -- a term invented by the German Husserl and further developed by the German Habermas -- as, according to La Wik,

the "background" environment of competences, practices, and attitudes representable in terms of one's cognitive horizon.

This idea obviously has a connection with Burke's "little platoons" and the idea of a whole network of social organizations separate from and independent of government.

I say that the only warrant for government power is "existential peril," in other words an emergency that requires the mobilization of society and its resources to fight something that will destroy "us." Obviously, you would expect, the biggest problem in human society is dealing with would-be leaders that are selling an "existential peril" that is not, in fact, an existential peril. But how do we tell?

I think that the way to understand politics at the present moment is that the ordinary middle class, the Commoners, are starting to organize in an organic fashion, and are trying to coalesce around a politics that will represent their interest, to live responsible lives with marriages, families and children, and to live such lives by following the rules, going to work, and obeying the law.

You can see that the old conservatism, based on the culture of the upper middle class, does not serve. And the progressive educated class has clearly shown itself, over the last century, as the enemy of the ordinary middle-class Commoner.

Who should lead the ordinary middle-class Commoners? Politically it is simple.

First it was Richard Nixon, with his vice president that championed the "silent majority." And you will remember that the Deep State dispatched him in his second term with a threatened impeachment in the House.

Then it was Ronald Reagan. I remember attending a Republican presidential caucus in 1980 and being amazed by the clearly Commoner Reagan supporters from down the hill that showed up to win the caucus. The educated class tried to get rid of Reagan with "Iran Contra" but failed.

Then it was Donald Trump. He connected with the Commoner middle class and won the 2016 election. They tried to get rid of him with investigations and Deep State shenanigans and two impeachments in the House, and eventually succeeded in the curious case of the election of 2020.

Looked at that way, you can see that the question of the political rise of the Commoner middle class is not a shocking new thing that started with Donald Trump.

I would say that the resistance to the rise of the Commoner middle class has been getting more and more determined. It seems that though the question will soon come to a head.

We may all hope that it does not include violence and a butcher's bill. But you never know. Sometimes ruling classes go quietly. Sometimes they have to be shown the door. Sometimes they have to be ejected.

Time will tell.

Really, Nobody Knows Nothing

So, after all the threats and backing and filling Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) failed to change the filibuster and failed to get the Democrats' federalizing-of-elections bill through the Senate. Today there's a thumbsucker from Politico to explain that it's all Chuck's deep strategy.

His long arc of aligning Democrats for a bill designed to fight gerrymandering, expand early voting and make Election Day a federal holiday ended up persuading literally dozens of them to change the filibuster — despite previous vows in writing that they would do no such thing.

Which means what? Other than Democrats understand that if they don't change the rules they are toast?

Meanwhile down in California Gov. Newsom is pushing a new CalCare state gubmint health plan, and some wild ones in the state legislature are proposing to double state taxes! I wonder what the people that already have health insurance think of that?

The Zman says that it's the end of the line for the left. Their old ideas had basically burned out by the 1980s. The post-Cold War reboot with cultural Marxism and the woke is basically self-destructing in the current crisis.

Meanwhile there is an argument on the right at The New Criterion between "common-good" conservatism, that proposes to use government power more than the traditional conservatism of the Founders and Buckleyite conservatism. Who really founded conservatism? Hobbes, Locke, or Burke, or what? It sounds like it's the end of the line for the old conservatism and the old conservatives don't like it.

Yes. Where do we go next? Assuming it's not the Sixth Mass Extinction. (It really is curious how "it's the End of the World" has gone from wacko religious cultism that everyone who is anyone sneers at to received wisdom in all the best circles.)

Look, I have no idea what the Next Politics is going to be, but the big challenge for the Next Regime is going to be unwinding all the free-stuff programs of the present regime.

Unless the whole current system crashes and burns, so that people are not saying "you'd better not touch my Social Security / Medicare / Gubmint Pension" and instead are pleading for a political Savior to save something out of the wreck.

I wouldn't wish the latter on anyone, but I'm not sure that political change is possible until people get desperate.

See, what I experience right now is that the Democrats see pretty clearly that it's the end of the road for them. Otherwise why would they be trying to pass everything including the kitchen sink and changing the voting rules as well? There's a pretty obvious "tell" in all that: now or never.

Also, you tell me: do humans tend to believe in End of the World religious cults in normal times or when there are unusual social stresses rending the social fabric? Or do political regimes adopt End of the World rhetoric in the autumn of their rule as a last desperate effort to stay in the saddle?

Or, for that matter, why do people believe in Revolution? What is millennial hope, and where does it come from, in religious or in political terms? And, where is it going to?

Now do you understand why Candide said that now he had to go work in the garden. In the garden? Isn't that what Mr. Craven heard, and what brought him back home to Misselthwaite in The Secret Garden? Is there something deeply philosophical and meaningful about gardens, and maybe it's about time that Chuck Schumer did a bit of planting and digging in his garden. Since Spring is coming up, and all? 

You do have a garden, Chuck, right?

No. The Rulers Really Do Believe

There's a Michael Goodwin piece out today about how the Dems are doing their usual blame game to explain why things are going wrong: Big Grocery, the "supply chain." Or even ordinary Dem voters, per Paul Begala:

“I think the problem for the Democrats right now is not that they have bad leaders. They have bad followers, OK?” 

Of course, as I point out, that is the way that the primitive mind works. There must be a fault, and most likely it isn't me, but that guy over there behind the tree.

But I had an Aha moment over the last couple of days, with the Biden administration announcing it was going to have to change the "messaging."

They really do believe their agenda. They really do believe that the planet is going to fry unless we cover the world with solar panels. They really do believe that systemic racism is the worst thing since sliced bread.

That's the way to understand the White House decision to change the "messaging." The program isn't the problem; the problem is just that "we" haven't communicated it properly to the American people.

The crazy leaders aren't the problem; the doubting followers are the problem, as Paul Begala tells us.

As in: Napoleon's crazy idea to invade Russia wasn't the problem. It's the soldiers that didn't fight hard enough at the Battle of Borodino. 

Let's concede that Joe Biden is an average pol that doesn't have an idea in his head. But he knows enough to wish that he had been a civil-rights campaigner and to develop the wish into an actual fantasy of being there. He knows enough to know what the other people around him believe and to imagine that he believes it too. He knows how to recite the responses.

So, the rubbish that the three liberal justices were talking when the Supreme Court was deciding on vaccine mandates: really, those liberal justices really believe!

Justice Sotomayor's reported meltdown over facemasks: yes, she really believes the lies and rubbish that has been coming from government experts for the last two years.

And you would believe too if your only media was regime media and your only friends were liberal friends and your only teachers were liberal teachers.

Now, of course, if you are in politics you naturally embrace ideas that call for bold leadership, that call for you to lead the people to the Promised Land. And, of course, you are tempted to believe in traitors or bad "messaging" when things go wrong.

And so the "march through the institutions" and the canceling of opponents. Because we are right, and they are wrong. And people are going to die if the racist-sexist-homophobe opponents get to set the agenda. So, the only solution is that people like us need to lead all the institutions in society. To save it from disaster.

That is what they believe, and that is what their friends believe, and that is what regime media teaches them to believe.

The Zman has a piece up today on how "the experts who run the country have become one of these fixed things that everyone accepts." And the way the system works is that, when the people get fed up they can exchange the in-party's experts for the out-party's experts.

But, people like me ask, what if the whole idea of government by experts is a crock? What if, according to the latest science, top-down expertism is folly, because the way the world works is through the emergence of new ideas and new people that just happen to have the right answer? I've just started a fairly accessible book, The Self-Creating Universe by J.J. Clarke, that is sifting all the ideas of the last two centuries to say that the creativity of self-emergence is the way the world works. It will be interesting to see how it deals with politics and the welfare state. After all, the book is written by a guy, a former philosophy professor that doubtless experiences himself as an expert.

Yes, of course the rulers cheat; yes of course they beat up on the opposition. And of course we hold them up to ridicule when they cheat and when they screw up.

But, I think, it is vital to remember that, besides all the cheating and oppression, they still believe. As political and religious leaders have always believed, down the ages. And don't think that Napoleon on St. Helena didn't still believe.

Nobody Saw Inflation Coming? Really?

Here's a puzzler, a piece that asks "Why Did Almost Nobody See Inflation Coming?" Really?

According to Jason Furman, "a survey of 36 private-sector forecasters in May revealed a median inflation forecast for 2021 of 2.5 percent."

Maybe their fearless economic models didn't factor in a doubling of the Fed's holdings of federal debt. Or wave after wave of "stimulus" otherwise known as free handouts. I mean, the federal government doesn't usually go pedal-to-the-metal like that too often.

Furman starts his piece with Queen Elizabeth II asking back in 2008 why "Why did nobody see it coming" with respect to the Crash of 2008.

Well, the answer is that a stock market crash reveals a lot of hidden rocks as the tide goes out.

Plus, of course, there is no telling how the central banks will fail to act as lenders of last resort. In the case of 2008, it was little Ben Bernanke who flinched from bailing out Lehman Brothers in September 2008. Because, he whined, he didn't have the legal authority.

And, with respect to 2008, what are you going to do? You had the Fed pumping out money. You had Congress demanding that Fannie and Freddie hand out low-down real-estate loans to minorities. So, at some point your get this, from usgovernmentspending.com.

Yes. That first peak is in 2003, and nothing happened. Then there's another peak in 2006 when the Fed started fighting inflation and the the Treasury yield curve went inverted. Agency debt, by the way, is principally Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debt, which is mostly repackaged real-estate mortgages.

The point is that, if you were sitting looking at the numbers of Agency Debt back in 2000, you would be saying to yourself: Hmm. I wonder when this little bubble is going to pop, as Agency debt was going north of 40 percent of GDP.

As Herb Stein said many moons ago, "if something cannot go on forever, it will stop." But the question is: when will it stop? 

The answer is: nobody knows.

And that is why fearless forecasters tend to get caught on the wrong foot. If you are a fearless forecaster you have to hedge your bets. You cannot say: the world will end in 47 days. Because the world might end in 37 days, or not for 20 million years.

Now, in the aftermath of the Crash of 2008 we learned about The Big Short by Michael Lewis. But that book was written after the crash. If the chaps shorting mortgage debt had been wrong, or had mistimed their shorting there wouldn't have been a book. They and their investors would have slunk off back to their holes and we would never have known about them.

Same thing about today's inflation. Anybody could have told you that the money printing of 2020 and the succession of stimulus packages would not end well. But when? And why? In a year? In two years? No doubt there are some fearless investors that have made the right call, and we will be hearing all about them in a couple of years. But, as yet, we do not know how it will all turn out.

The only sure thing, I would guess, is that the Biden boys will screw it up. It's the one thing that Barack Obama got right in his life. "Don't underestimate Joe's ability to (expletive) things up."