When They Start to Cheat

When do people start to cheat, financially? Typically, not till they are going broke. When do they start cheating politically? When their perfect plan isn't working any more.

So when our Democratic friends spend half a billion dollars getting ballots to the ballot drop-off box, and when Michael Sussmann walks free but Peter Navarro gets put in chains. And when Democratic voters think that the Republican Party is no longer a party but a rebellion. And when the Census Bureau suddenly discovers a big mistake in the 2020 Census that just happens to benefit one party in several states...

Well, it all adds up, and it adds up to Democrats realizing that they are in a heap of trouble, going broke, politically. Of course, we are talking about politics here, and "there is no politics without an enemy." So, the trouble is not that Democrats have gone bat-sh*t crazy on climate and race and crime and spending, and realize: wow, we really screwed up. No, it's the other guys that did it: the climate deniers, the racist-sexist-homophobes, the gun lobby, and billionaires that don't pay taxes.

And it is fascinating for me to read about various Democratic individuals and groups that have literally No Idea how they got into such a mess.

You could say that it just shows the problem with totalitarianism. When you combine religion and politics it means that every political act is sanctioned by God (or your secular equivalent). So of course none of our political actions are wrong or evil or stupid. Because we are talking about God's or History's Truth here.

Anyway, the whole point of the Separation of Powers, and the separation of religion from politics, and the idea of an independent judiciary, and the idea that you really don't want a big government that spends 35 percent of GDP, and all the rest, is that: what if the government, the priesthood, the political judges, the economic czars get it wrong? How do you fix it?

That's the place America is at today. Our ruler are absolutely determined and convinced that the Big Problems are climate change, that requires a complete revolution in energy use, and Systemic Racism, that requires the complete politicizing of education and employment.

But what if they are wrong? What if transforming the energy economy is just as disastrous as Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward, in which, it is estimated, 30 million Chinese died of starvation? When would we know enough to put a stop to it? How would we stop the political freight train in time?

What if fighting System Racism sets up a race war as the people on the losing end decide they are not going to take it any more?

I just get the feeling that none of the headline people -- or their aides and staffers -- have any idea other than defeating the enemy. That's what people in politics do. That is all they do. That's the only thing they know how to do.

If there's a glorious victory, then history is written by the victors, and it is all about how Washington or Lincoln or FDR or Obama saved the world. If there's a humiliating defeat, then the erstwhile leaders and their lieutenants of the ancien régime are the most evil monsters that ever were. And the history is written, again, by the victors, whoever they are. But whoever they are, they just saved the planet.

What the Heck is Politics About Anyway?

Here's a piece about Blair and Clinton and how brilliant they were back in the day, by John F. Harris at Politico. He remembers covering a joint press conference of the two at Downing Street in the Nineties.

I was a White House reporter at the time, and the news conference remains one of my vivid memories in six years covering Clinton’s presidency. 

Hmm. I wonder why that would be? Anyway, here's what he thinks of Blair and Clinton and their "Third Way."

The problem with traditional liberalism was that it was stuck in a rut — more responsive to its interest groups than the broader public interest, insufficiently attuned to the imperative of economic growth. The problem with the post-Reagan, post-Thatcher right was that it had turned brutish and backward-looking — enmeshed in racial and sexual prejudice, indifferent to the challenge of expanding opportunity to people who didn’t already count as society’s winners.

And today, 30 years after those heady days -- for John F. Harris, at least -- things are dark.

Blair and Clinton were describing the world as a fundamentally hopeful place. Now we have had nearly a generation of real-world experience with that century — marked by war, climate change, virulent nationalism, tribalistic identity politics and a malevolent media ecosystem trafficking in misinformation, commercialized contempt and nihilism.

I was reading a piece a couple days ago with a similar cast, about the glories of the politics of defending Social Security and securing rights for workers. 

OK, so let's do a counternarrative. Suppose the whole Blair Clinton "Third Way" was a lie, a clumsy attempt to rescue the big-government welfare state from oblivion. How would we know? For instance, what has the Democratic Party or the British Labour Party done recently about, say, the white working class allegedly "dying of despair?" They certainly don't count as "society's winners." But what has the progressive world done for them lately, except stigmatize them as white oppressors and supremacists and racists?

Suppose the generation of "war, climate change, virulent nationalism" etc. is a consequence of the collapse of the lie of Blair and Clinton? War? Well, was beating up the Muslims in the Middle East such a good idea? Back in the day, progessives and "Third Way" chappies were down with that. Climate change? Er, could you show me just how climate has changed, significantly, truthfully, so that it required a gigantic government program to save the world? Virulent nationalism? Do you think it might have something to do with Enoch Powell's judgement that the European Union could not work because it has no demos, no European people? Thus the peoples of Europe rally around, and identify with, the nation states to which they feel they belong. The problem is not the peoples of Europe; the problem is chaps like John F. Harris that sneer at nation states and thus naturally sneer at nationalism and patriotism as "virulent."

Suppose the glorious fight for Social Security and the rights of workers has resulted in the "dying of despair" of which we've heard tell? Because pensions are thing that ought to be outside politics, and workers' rights mean nothing if there isn't an economy to produce products and services that can provide the economic basis of worker prosperity.

Let's take another tack. How would the world be different if the progressive movement and rights for workers and Bismarckian pensions had never happened?

Or let's put it this way. Suppose that the government enacted rights for agricultural workers in 1400? Do you think it would have made a blind bit of difference over the next 400 years as peasants starved with the end of the agricultural era up until starving peasants started moving into the the cities because that's were the jobs were?

Suppose, after passing the Social Security Act in 1935 the US had got into World War II and lost the war. Do you think that there would have been any Social Security checks for old geezers like me? Suppose the Ukrainians lose their war against Putin's Russia? Do you think that workers' rights and the "Third Way" will make a blind bit of difference to the vengeance of Putin on Ukraine and the Ukrainians?

The reason that the Labour Party spawned Tony Blair and the Democratic Party spawned Bill Clinton was that the voters hated the lefty politics that came before them. So Blair and Clinton muddied the waters and said they were new and improved, a Third Way between left and right, New Democrats that had learned their lessons from the Reagan years.

But, of course, after Blair and after Clinton the two parties returned to their roots. And their roots are that politics is the way to save the world. And anyone that opposes their brilliant ideas to save the world are their enemies and must be destroyed.

Yes, politics requires an enemy. If you are going to save the workers then you promise to fight against the employers. If you are going to save women then you promise to fight the patriarchs. If you are going to save the blacks then you promise to fight the white racists. If you are going to save the gays then you promise to fight the homophobes. And that is all.

But does all this fighting actually help the helpless victims on behalf of whom the fight is joined?

Probably not. But don't mention that to John F. Harris or any of your wokey friends.

Economics 075 for Uncle Joey

President Joe Biden is pretty good at preposterous stories about his storied past. With the latest being that he almost went to the Naval Academy.

One thing I haven't yet heard from him was how he schooled Milton Friedman back in college when little Joey took Economics 101.

Today I am reading Veronique de Rugy on Biden & Co's "magical economics." It's a good line, because if you have half a brain you have to think: what was the BIden team thinking? Maybe they needed a dose of Economics 075 from yours truly. I call this Economics 075 to accord with the number of years I have been on Earth and how that experience has taught me a lesson or two.

Lesson One: Money, money, money. If you look at the time series of M2 money at St. Louis Fed's FRED database, you will see that M2 has gone from $15.5 trillion at the end of 2019 to $22 trillion on May 2, 2022. That is up 42 percent in less that 2 1/2 years. Can you spell inflation, Joey?

Lesson Two: Spend till you Bend. Federal spending in FY 2019 was $4.4 trillion. In FY 2022 it is budgeted at $5.8 trillion. That is up 32 percent in three years. You really think that increasing spending makes America more prosperous, instead of just shoveling money at Democratic voters? I gotta bridge, Joey.

Lesson Three: "Incredible Transition." President Joe Biden has represented the sharply higher fossil-fuel energy prices as part of an "incredible transition" to clean energy. Personally, based on my Four Laws, I believe that such a government-driven transformation of energy production and use is bound to end in disaster. Because, as Stalin and Mao and other lefties have demonstrated in double-blind experiments, Socialism Does Not Work. And nor does any top-down economic policy. The market economy, the social cooperation between producers and consumers, is a discovery process that changes direction every single hour of every single day. Top down ukases never work. They are useful only in wars, which always result in a staggering net loss of human welfare.

I believe that the social experiment of the last century, an experiment in the top-down supervision of humans by educated visionaries and expert administrators, is proving to be a great folly that has visited, in its worst aspects in Soviet Russia and Maoist China, unimaginable horrors and miseries. And in the case of the western democracies it has birthed a society of jolly good fun for educated folk but not so much fun for the ordinary middle class, and a definite downer for the lower class, where the men don't work much and the women don't marry much.

I think that the administration of Uncle Joey shows that the educated ruling class really has No Idea what a mess it has created, and that the worst is yet to come. It has No Idea that almost everything it proposes is most likely to Make Things Worse for ordinary people and crater the lives of the lower orders.

So my Three Point Plan for America and the world is:

First: get back to a money tied to gold or some other entity that can't be manipulated by government. Except during and after a war. Because post-war deflation is Not Good.

Second: reduce government spending to a maximum of 20 percent of GDP, with most "entitlement programs" replaced by genuine savings programs by and for individuals.

Third: Stop pretending that the ruling class has a clue about anything from climate to racism. Return to a society where law is not something manipulated by the Supreme Court and religion is not ruling-class woke ideology.

Is this Economics and this modest Three Point Progam too much to ask of our august rulers?

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?