The Great Liberal Forgetting about Law

The whole point of law and the legal system, on my understanding, is that is replaces the old system, which was the Hatfield-McCoy system of revenge.

In the old system it was my kindred against your kindred, an eye for an eye. Revenge for a perceived hurt. And retribution.

Then there was the good old Saxon tradition of Wergild. La Wik.

[Wergild] was a precept in some archaic legal codes whereby a monetary value was established for a person's life, to be paid as a fine or as compensatory damages to the person's family if that person was killed or injured by another.

I suppose you could call the Wergild system "reparations." Has a familiar ring to it.

In other words, at some point the principle of revenge and retribution was formalized into an informal legal code. Progress, if you see what I mean.

The whole point of the legal system is to remove the temptation to go to war over a perceived wrong, because all parties can trust the legal system to be unbiased.

Now let's talk about US politics.

Back in the day, we were all taught to believe that the Nixon Watergate saga was the worst thing since the assassination of Julius Caesar by Brutus & Co.: "Speak, hands for me." And I admit, I drank the KoolAid back then.

But as Geoff Shephard writes at The American Spectator, it's a funny thing but all the Nixon conspirators that were tried in DC were convicted, while the chaps tried elsewhere were not.

Republicans don’t stand a chance of acquittal in a politicized case brought to court in D.C. This was clearly demonstrated almost 50 years ago in the Watergate prosecutions, where — with two notable exceptions — every case tried in D.C. resulted in a conviction and every case tried outside in an acquittal.

Now we have the words of the forewoman at the Sussmann trial, where lawyer Sussmann was accused of lying to the FBI about who was employing him.

After the verdict, the jury forewoman, who declined to give her name, spoke to the media. She said charges should never have been filed against Mr. Sussmann in the first place.

“I don’t think it should have been prosecuted,” she said of the case. “There are bigger things that affect the nation than a possible lie to the FBI.” 

 Bless Her Heart, as the ladies say down South.

But, as the DC juries on the J6 defendants have decided, mostly, you can't be too careful with "armed insurrectionists" getting waved into the Capitol by thoughtful police officers. There are, apparently, no bigger things than the horror of invading the sacred precincts of Congress to do a bit of site-seeing.

And by the way, just what were various FBI assets up to on January 6 in and around the Capitol? Inquiring minds would like to know.

The problem here is that our liberal friends, encouraged by their liberal law professors and their noble liberal activists -- not to mention a Supreme Court that believes that the law should follow the liberal world view -- have No Idea what the law is all about.

The point about law is that it is there to adjudicate disputes in a dispassionate fashion so that passionate partisans can't impose their partisan will on the rest of the nation. Because they are right and the enemy du jour is wrong.

The whole question of using the legal system to help your friends and beat up your enemies obviously came into sharp focus with the five year effort to Get Trump.

Not because Democratic partisans are fools and knaves, although they are. But because when the other guys reckon they can't get a fair deal in the legal system then they will eventually try to overturn the system.

And you really don't want that, dear liberal friends, because, in the wise words of an apochryphal Washington Post headline: "End of the World: Women and Minorities Hardest Hit."

You do care about women and minorities, right?

Shootings, Gun Control, Escaping Arrest

Is it the best of times, or the worst of times? Are mass shootings a verdict on everything from our gun culture to broken families to untreated mental illness? Or on the failure of the liberal welfare/administrative state? Would making guns illegal save lives? Are state patrol officers finding that a lot of drivers won't pull over for a traffic stop?

Are mass shootings a sign of the times, or are they notable because in our modern era, there just isn't as much homicide as in the good old days? Do we expect the government to make us safe, irregardless, whereas in the old days people died. For all kinds of reasons, at any age?

When liberals react to the latest shooting -- but not to the average weekend in Chicago -- are they trying to Do Something? Are they attacking The Enemy, white males? Or are they trying to show women that they, the liberals, are doing everything they can to protect them?

And how about this, from Steve Sailer:

Since January of this year, more than 900 drivers have failed to stop for a Washington State Patrol trooper trying to pull them over.

But this has nothing to do with recent legislation from the Democratic Washington State Legislature.

Strachan and others in law enforcement connect the increase in failures-to-yield to passage last year of House Bill 1054, a sweeping police tactics law that, among other things, barred high-speed pursuits except in very limited circumstances. The law was part of a package of police reforms majority Democrats passed in response to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and other high-profile police killings — reforms aimed at addressing racial disproportionality in policing.

You know. I think that 97.2 percent of all politics is just virtue-signaling and posturing and conceit from the ruling class.

After all, courtiers don't wear silk breeches and silk stockings any more. How then are they going to stand out from the crowd and demonstrate their lofty specialness?

And then there is the larger point, that politics is all about the enemy, so if you are a politician you are nothing unless you are valiantly fighting the enemy. Any enemy.

The enemy can be a foreign enemy, the dastardly Putin. Or it can be a local enemy, the dastardly "gun lobby." Or it can be an existential enemy: climate change.

But "there is no politics without an enemy."

I have this crazy notion that we are in the Autumn of the Political Age, because we don't really have Huns and Mongols and Nazis to fight. We don't really have gangs and criminals to fight, except in lower class Democratic cities. And, really, there is nothing we can do about existential perils like climate change.

But a politician needs an enemy, like a drunk needs a pick-me-up.

How the Next Regime Dishes the Lefties

In the last weeks there have been a lot of "far-right" thinkers pondering about the failure of conservatism. Here's the Zman today up at Taki's. Conservatism is dead. So let's conduct an autopsy.

One reason we conduct autopsies is to better understand what to avoid in the future. The same is true of these debates going on within what is left of conservatism. This dustup between William Voegeli and Glenn Ellmers is a good example.

I did a piece criticizing Voegeli and Ellmers at Amerian Thinker.

One reason conservatism failed, I think, is that it was merely defending itself. But you have to go on offense, for "offense is the best defense."

Or, any politics must have an enemy. And what do you do with an enemy? You go out and defeat it.

This has been the strength of the left since Marx. There's always an enemy. First it was the capitalists and or the bourgeoisie. Then it was Southern racists. Now it is the ordinary white middle class, the white oppressors of which you've heard tell.

So I say that the new politics needs to be an expanding middle. The ordinary middle class are the good guys; the pointy-headed intellectuals and the "experts agree" and the wokey activists are the bad guys. In any politics we must decide who are our friends are and who is the enemy.

In the next regime, our friends are any people that come join us in celebrating the ordinary arc of human life, people who want to wive and thrive, get married have children, work a decent job, and leave a little for the next generation. We say to the lower class: you could be our friends, and we will look after you.

Our enemy is the Cathedral, the educated class that has spent the last 50 years making war on the middle class. They must be beaten, despoiled, and humiliated. And don't forget the lamentation of their women.

How do we beat them? I'd say it starts with demolishing the current education system. First, we replace the government K-12 system with vouchers, so parents send their kids to the school of their choice. Then we attack occupational licensing and credentialism. Then we demolish the universities. Universities used to be the place where the ruling class trained the priests for the state church. Today universities are the place where the ruling class teaches the kiddies to hate their country, hate their history, and hate the middle class.

Let's do the numbers on education. RIght now, total government spending on education is $1.3 trillion. Let's say that the population under 25 is 28 percent of 330 million. If we divvy up the $1.3 trillion that adds up to $14,000 in vouchers per kiddie. Wow, that's real money, especially if the moms in the neighborhood get together to create a group homeschool.

But whatabout the teachers, the professors, the administrators, the DEI specialists? What will happen to them? No problem. They will still have jobs. Providing they teach the kiddies what the parents want them to teach, because vouchers. Of course those educationists that are rabid lefties and LBGT groomers, well, they will have to change the cut of their jib. Maybe they could get jobs at McDonalds.

But whatabout science and research? Perfectly simple. We reward billionaires that fund research with medals and tax rebates.

But maybe we can save a bunch on education by implementing my plan of apprenticeships for everyone that isn't going to be a physicist or a philosopher. The whole point of apprenticeships is for young'uns to get paid for doing something useful while they are learning to be useful.

And whaddya know, there's an outfit called Praxis that's pushing apprenticeship as an alternative to college.

Whatabout dishing the credentialists, from lawyers to physicians? I would say that any organization that issues credentials has to accept unlimited liability for the errors of its credentialees. So law schools and state bar associations and medical schools and medical associations will be liable for the mistakes of the folks that they have declared to be ready for prime time.

Yep, I suspect that these special interests are not too interested in anything more scary than keeping the low-renters out of their sacred precincts.

Yes, but how do we know whether our doctor or lawyer -- or auto mechanic -- is competent? Hey, I know. How about a combination of liability insurance and a ratings system -- like eBay and Etsy and Amazon and TripAdvisor? You think?

Then there is climate change. With President Biden talking about high gas prices as an "incredible transition" and Democratic politicians all over the place putting bans on natural gas hookups for new construction, I'd say we are getting to a place where we can say that climatistas are the enemy of the ordinary middle class: enemies of affordable energy, enemies of personal transportation, enemies of a safe place to raise your children, enemies of comfort: indeed enemies of the ordinary middle class.

We say to the educated class: Go Away, or you will regret it.

Don't Forget, There Must Be an Enemy

It's always annoying when, after a shooting, our liberal friends all line up to blame guns, gun owners, the "gun lobby," and racists and whatever else moves.

Then there are the conspiracy theorists on our side who impute all kinds of sinister motives to our rulers. For instance, it turns out that FEDS were interacting with the Buffalo shooter.

It's easy to imput malevolence in our liberal friends, but I don't think so.  I think they are just stupid, and when you are stupid you naturally try to cover up your mistakes and blame the other guy -- who is, after all, the enemy.

The fact is that when something bad is happening, we expect our governments to protect us from the danger. That applies whether the something bad is a crazed shooter, a crazed Putin, a nasty outbreak of inflation, a failed harvest, or a shortage of infant formula.

Most of the time, our government can't help us.

Where do crazed shooters come from? Do they come from the availability of guns? From the absence of fathers in many homes? From various mood-altering drugs, legal and illegal? Do they come from the media's endless publicity of disasters, showing angry youngsters how to make a name from themselves? Do they come from the collapse of the authority of parents and neighbors over the past century? Is it a consequence of the overabundance of female teachers in the government schools?

And is the government's response ever serious, or just a need to be seen to Do Something?

If you accept my notion, from Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and from Curtis Yarvin that politics is all about the enemy, then you can see that government is always in a position where it must be seen to be Doing Something about the enemy du jour. Because if the government is going out and defeating the enemy, what's the point?

And if the government failed to defeat the enemy, then what's the use of government?

No. You are not allowed to think such thoughts!

I read Michael Barone today inverting the notion of Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class. Today, he said, we have a situation where politics is the leisure of the theory class, that anyone who is anyone gets their status from some political appointment. And, I would say, any position in the vast universe of government and its satellite organizations is a lot easier to obtain than success in business. In fact, the theory class is almost all courtiers. That's why they are right on with all the hot issues from climate change to systemic racism. Courtiers are nothing if not followers of fashion. And not just in silk stockings.

Maybe we are starting to see the fundamental weakness of the welfare and administrative state. It's one thing when the government is just in charge of repeling boarders, keeping out the Huns and the Mongols. That's a pretty simple concept. But when you have expanded your mandate to include everything from pensions to health care and tasking the police with defending elementary schools then you have a bunch more things that could go wrong. And because we are talking about government things do go wrong. A lot.

But if something goes wrong it must be the politician's fault, right?

You can see why politicians have to be expert at blaming other people for their mistakes. They must do that or resign. And who wants to resign, Nancy Pelosi, age 80? 

The best people to blame are the supporters of the Outer Party. I mean: if they were decent people they would be members of the Inner Party and down with the ruling-class agenda, right?

I take another position. I say that anything the government does is bound to be a mess and a failure. That's illustrated by the Four Laws:

Socialism cannot work because prices.
Administration cannot work because bandwidth.
Regulation cannot work because "regulatory capture."
Government programs cannot work because you can never reform them.

What does this mean? It means that top-down government only works for sending young men to their deaths in battle. Everything else is too complicated for a top-down hierarchy to succeed.

And then there are the Germans. They discovered in WWI that top-down didn't work in the military either. Authority had to be pushed as far down as possible. You didn't just march across No Mans Land with bagpipes playing. You snuck across, from shell-hole to shell-hole, trying to be inconspicuous, and you had to rely on some corporal to make it work.

That's my line on government failure. What did you expect, cupcake?

The Fatal Conceit of the Schwabs and Soroses etc.

Yesterday I blogged about dear old George Soros, speculator and funder extraordinaire, and his speech to Klaus Schwab's World Economic Forum at the meeting of the private jets in Davos, Switzerland.

Klaus Schwab opened the conference patting the fly-private worthies on the back for their wisdom and excellence.

Our multiple collaborative initiatives will drive progress by strengthening global and regional cooperation; by preserving nature and fighting against climate change; by developing new economic and social policies; by accelerating responsible ESG industry transformation, and by using the disruptive technologies such as AI, blockchain, and quantum computing, for the benefit of society.

The thing about this is that it is word salad, that nicely coordinates with what the rest of the educated global elite is thinking and wants to do. It imagines itself as a benign supervisor of the world, soothing its passions and directing it on the right path.

But Schwab is probably wrong. His ideas will probably die a painful death.

For instance, my guess is that "fighting climate change" is going to turn out as a gigantic mistake that may turf the current ruling class out of power. I am reading a detailed history of the French Revolution -- Simon Schama's Citizens -- and it mentions the critical importance of spiraling bread prices in early 1789. Ordinary people wanted the King to Do Something about it. Hello spiraling gas prices which President Biden calls an "incredible transition" to a post fossil fuel future.

And I think that "developing new economic and social policies" will probably be policies that seem nice and cosy to the global elite, but not to the ordinary punter.

For comparison, in 1787 the Frenchies had an Assembly of Notables to decide what to do about the finances of the French government. All very sensible, but then came July 13, 1788 and a monstrous hailstrom that took out the grain crops in France. Then followed a winter, the worst since 1709. The four-pound loaf went from 8 sous in summer 1787 to 15 sous in February 1789. You already know what happened next.

And I think that "responsible ESG industry transformation" will turn out to be a dead letter as the economy reels from the current inflation and gets completely transformed into something that nobody expected, least of all the fly-private barons of Davos.

It is, as Hayek wrote in his final book, a Fatal Conceit to think that you and yours can design and construct the political and economic order. Let alone the moral order! The world is the result of billions of experiments -- vegetable, fungus, animal, and even human -- that worked. It's odd that the official narrative accepts this with regard to Nature, but not with regard to human society. Let's take Hayek's words at the beginning of The Fatal Conceit.

To understand our civilization, one must appreciate that [it] resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection... of those groups that happened to follow them.

Our world is full of Fatal Conceits, of which the late lockdowns, the recent baby formula crisis, and the airline pilot shortage, and spiraling inflation are merely the ones we can see with our own eyes.

Another way of looking at it is to say that any number of things may go wrong for us humans. Obviously we can't prepare for all of them. And we can't decide which of them really will go wrong, and which we ought to prepare for. Because ten-to-one, the actual thing that goes wrong will be the thing we didn't think of. And all the preparations for the emergencies that didn't happen will probably have taken resources away from the effort to deal with the thing that actually did go wrong.

Another way of saying this is that humans have survived and flourished by adapting to changing conditions. When something goes wrong, we all pitch it to fix it. If we succeed, then we survive to live another day. If we don't succeed... Well, every story is a survivor story. The prisoners that died in the Kolyma goldfields, in the Holodomor, in the Great Leap Forward, in the dearth of 1789 in France: they are gone, and very few of their stories will be told.

For instance, my Dad left Russia in 1918 at the age of 16, just as the Bolshevik revolution was turning nasty. I wonder what happened to his school friends at the German speaking school he attended in St. Petersburg. My Dad's Russian mother escaped to England, and so did her sister. But what about their relatives?

There is a reason why most novels have a happy ending.

The World According to George Soros

One of the questions I have about the modern world is about George Soros. He says he believes in the "open society" described by Karl Popper in The Open Society and its Enemies. And Soros was actually a student of Popper back in the late 1940s while a student at the London School of Economics.

My problem is that I don't see how a genuine follower of Karl Popper would be funding lefty activists and "Soros DAs." For instance, according to La Wik:

Popper indicts Plato, Hegel, and Marx as totalitarian for relying on historicism to underpin their political philosophies.

So why then does Soros finance so many lefty activists, followers of Marx? I don't get it.

Anyway, George Soros gave a speech on May 24 at the gathering of the private jets at the World Economic Forum in Davos in Switzerland and he has thoughtfully provided the text at georgesoros.com. Do his remarks help me understand him? Maybe. He begins thus:

Russia invaded Ukraine. This has shaken Europe to its core. The European Union was established to prevent such a thing from happening.

Really? The EU was intended to stop Russian aggression? I thought that was NATO's job. He continues.

The world has been increasingly engaged in a struggle between two systems of governance that are diametrically opposed to each other: open society and closed society. Let me define the difference as simply as I can. 

In an open society, the role of the state is to protect the freedom of the individual; in a closed society the role of the individual is to serve the rulers of the state.

Jolly good show, old chap. Then he continues:

Other issues that concern all of humanity – fighting pandemics and climate change, avoiding nuclear war, maintaining global institutions – have had to take a back seat to that struggle. 

Oh really. Notice what he is saying? He just said that the role of the state is to protect the freedom of the individual, but then tells us that "fighting pandemics and climate change... maintaining global institutions" are almost as important.

Now I would say that if protecting the freedom of the individual is the role of the state then all the fun stuff like fighting pandemics and climate change is a buncha baloney. Because if you are in a fight against a pandemic or against climate change it means that the freedom of the individual takes a back seat to the prosecution of the war. And of course, if we good chaps of the open society are necessarily committed to fighting the closed society -- Russia and China, according to Soros -- then the freedom of the individual takes a back seat to that armed struggle as well.

Soros was there in the 1980s with his Open Society Foundation to help end communism, and the 1990s was a heady time. But then came 9/11.

After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, the tide began to turn against open societies. Repressive regimes are now in the ascendant and open societies are under siege. Today China and Russia present the greatest threat to open society. 

But why? Digital technology and AI. "AI is particularly good at producing instruments of control that help repressive regimes and endanger open societies." You mean like social media censoring anything that challenges the ruling class "narrative" as disinformation and misinformation and the abortive Disinformation Governance Board right here in the good old USA?

And yet, AI is not turning out so well in China, as President XI has locked down the whole country to fight the COVID Omicron variant. Why did he do that? Soros says:

Xi harbors a guilty secret. He never told the Chinese people that they had been inoculated with a vaccine that was designed for the original Wuhan variant and offers very little protection against new variants. 

 Really? But guess what. The whole Ukraine thing is giving Europeean leaders an idea. They see an opportunity to bind their nations into a federated Europe.

They wanted to use the invasion of Ukraine to promote greater European integration, so that what Putin is doing can never happen again. 

Enrico Letta, leader of Partito Democratico, proposed a plan for a partially federated Europe. The federal portion would cover key policy areas. 

In the federal core, no member state would have veto power. In the wider confederation member states could join “coalitions of the willing” or simply retain their veto power. Mario Draghi endorsed Letta’s plan.

Really? Well, bless my buttons. And imagine how the freedom of the individual will fare in this new federated European state. I wonder if there will be elections for the capo di tutti capi in this new federated state.

But it gets worse. Guess what is suffering as a result of the Ukraine war?

While the war rages, the fight against climate change has to take second place. Yet the experts tell us that we have already fallen far behind, and climate change is on the verge of becoming irreversible. That could be the end of our civilization. 

"Experts," you say? 

Well, this has been very helpful for me, in my quest to understand the mind of George Soros. It seems to me that he experiences himself as the monarch of the Open Society. And that this Open Society is, or ought to be, a federated Europe.

This ties with another feeling I have about George Soros, as a Hungarian Jew that grew up in the hell of Nazism and World War II. It is the "never again" idea that we must never allow nation states to have the power they had in the heyday of fascism and Nazism. Thus the EU, thus globalism. Because never again Hitler.

But I am a student of Karl Popper, who went on to develop his Three Worlds theory of the meaning of life, the universe, and everything.

World 1: the realm of states and processes as typically studied by the natural sciences. 

World 2: the realm of mental states and processes.

World 3: the realm of the 'products of thought' when considered as objects in their own right.

For Popper the "products of thought" are both scientific theories and actual products of scientific theory and technology like jet airplanes and nuclear plants. And, I suppose, the poltiical theories about open societies and closed societies and their actual implementation in actual states.

I have a real problem figuring out how the real Popper aligns with the Soros idea of Popper. But who am I to say?

But, all in all, it looks like Soros is just an ordinary globalist that has signed onto all the "world's gonna end unless we..." stuff. And, when you think of it, any top-down narrative these days needs the lefty activists to enforce the will of the overlords. So therefore Soros DAs to keep the peasants from stepping outside their lane.

Corporations Need an anti-Diversity Vaccine

We all know the vital importance of everyone getting the vaccime. Why, people should be fired if they don't get vaccinated.

But think of America's worst pandemic since the Sixties Kids: Woke Capitalism; Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; and ESG.

The fact is that any corporation that gets woke goes broke. Just ask Dis-e-ney.

The fact is that any corporation that has a Director of Diversity is asking for Trouble with a Capital T. Just ask State Farm that ran into a buzz saw over the trans books it was shilling into schools.

Any corporation that gets into ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) that focuses on "sustainability" is pointing itself to the exit.

I was thinking of this in particular with respect to the twerps at State Farm. What on Earth did Michael L. Tipsord, State Farm CEO, think he was doing by letting his Chief Diversity Officer Victor Terry get off the bit and get into "a project to push LGBTQ books into schools?"

The answer is obvious. Once a corporation has a Chief Diversity Officer there is no end to the stupidity that the officer and his underlings will get into. 

It's easy for the CEO to think: OK now I've got a diversity officer so that's taken care of the lefty activist NGOs that keep turning up at shareholders' meetings. The problem is that he has introduced a lefty virus into the corporation that, like any virus, will take over the host unless it is kept severely in check. And with a virus, experts agree, nothing less than universal vaccination will work.

It's not just that the diversity guy will go out and hire stupid fools with the right DNA du jour who will degrade the corporation's performance because they are not up to snuff and know that they can't be fired for incompetence. The problem is that -- as with all political and cultural fashions  --the diversity gig will get out of hand. And that, unlike Kansas City, it won't quickly go as fur as it can go, but will metastasize into all kinds of fashionable folly advocated by the Activist Culture that will actively harm the corporation and infuriate its racist-sexist-homophobe clients. Maybe the virus will actually kill the host!

So every corporation needs a high-level officer whose sole job is to put a stop to stupid diversity stuff. And woke stuff. And ESG stuff. And indeed any stupid stuff that has nothing to do with the job of the corporation, which is to keep churning out widgets for the benefit of the customers.

Actually, the problem is bigger than woke and diversity and ESG. As my boss complained 50 years ago, the people working for him were always going off at tangents. And young as I was, I understood what he was talking about. If you are a software engineer, it is always a temptation to work up some cool software tool that improves the elegance of the software. It is always tempting to clean up the sofware mess resulting from years of updates and make it real shiny and cool. It is always tempting to go off and do something that has nothing to do with the job in hand, because it is fun and the project in hand is not fun, but just boring work. If you are an administrator it is much more interesting to introduce some new fashionable idea than just grind away at your real job. Because work is hard. That's why we get paid to do it.

But what should the officer be called? Chief Diversity Veto Officer? Chief Woke Alert Officer? Chief Corporate Vermin Eliminator? Chief Bureacratic Bloat Eliminator?

Your guess is as good as mine.