What Happens When We Don't Respect the Rulers

I am reading a gigantic history of the French Revolution, Citizens by Simon Schama, and right now I am in the middle of the events of 1789, just before the fall of the Bastille, where the Third Estate -- i.e. the middle class -- is testing its muscles against the other Estates of the Estates-General called by King Louis XVI to Do Something about gubmint revenue.

But I must admit I don't really get why the authority of the King has cratered, why the King can't just say Shut Up Peasants and make it stick like King Justin de Trudeau of Canada.

I suppose the reason is that, back in the 1780s everyone, from the princes of the realm down to the average lawyers, had read and learned and inwardly digested the essence of the Enlightenment -- chaps like Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Buffon and Denis Diderot -- and therefore the medieval forms and processes of the French monarchy didn't have the authority to rule. Of course, maybe if they had a war to fight...

Now I am also reading a piece by Jeffrey A. Tucker at Epoch Times where he is going through the Come to Jesus moments of the last couple of years: "How the Pandemic Response Changed My Thinking" in several ways, as in

1. The Role of Information It's not enough to have information out there, as in the internet. People can still grab the wrong idea and screw things up, from politicians to experts to the people.
2. Trust in Big Tech Back in the day it seemed like Big Tech "had a libertarian ethos." Not any more, as Big Tech amplifies the regime narrative and "censorship and cancellation became the norm."
3. Administrative State Revealed The Administrative State Rules! "At times, it seemed like the legislatures and even the courts were utterly powerless or too cowardly to do anything."
4. The Issue of Inequality We have a "coercive social system that favored the professional class over the working class." Imagine having lockdowns during COVID if ordinary workers had a voice.Yeah, it's not the capitalists vs. the workers, but the credentialed vs. the workers.
5. The Mob Think mask-shaming, etc. It teaches us that tyranny is "about a whole-of-society takeover by a manufactured mania."

But, thinking back to the French Revolution, there obviously have to be several fractures in the body politic for "change" to occur.

Notice how our liberal friends use the rhetoric of revolution in their notion of "change" to refer to ordinary accumulation of power by the current ruling educated elite. We are not talking about that kind of "change," dear liberal friends. We are talking about anything that promotes helpless horror in the educated ruling class.

For instance, if this year we not only have Gov. DeSantis whacking Dis-en-ey for its wokiness by removing its special tax situation for Dis-en-ey World. I'm sure our liberal friends are in shock

And suppose the January 6 Committee hearings turn into a bust, and raise the wrong kind of questions, like just who were those people that seemed to encourage the crowd at the Capitol to enter the building but mysteriously have not spent the last year in the DC Gulag in solitary confinement? Could they have been FEDS? And just how many weapons were the "armed insurrectionists" wielding? As opposed to the chappie with a gun arrested early this morning close to the home of Justice Kavanaugh.

And suppose that Republicans win really, really big in November. Right now it seems that the conventional  wisdom is that they will gain about 30 seats to yield a 40 seat majority. But suppose they win 60 seats. Or, Gaia forbid, 80 seats like in 1938?

And suppose the inflation drags on and there's another housing crash. And a recession. On your watch, Joey.

And suppose American women all get to feeling that the government doesn't protect them?

And what if Elon Musk decides not to buy Twitter because bots?

Thing is: I really don't want everything to come unglued. Millions of people will suffer. And yet, usually there is no other way. Because there is no other way for the rulers to lose the Mandate of Heaven.

You'd think that wise rulers would know they were screwing up and have the decency to hand over the reins of power to someone else. But somehow they never do until it is too late. I wonder why.

Prediction: The J6 Committee Hearings Won't Move the Needle

Let us concede that the Watergate hearings of 1973 were a tactical masterstroke. They got rid of the monster populist Richard Nixon and all who sailed with him.

And then Democrats won the 1976 election, which would be a normal change election after two presidential terms with the other party in the White House.

Then the Democrats lost it in 1980 because stagflation (and actually probably because, a day late and a dollar short, the Fed was finally starting to fight inflation).

Stagflation. Gosh, that sounds familiar. I wonder why.

So tactically, the Dems won one in 1973. Strategically, it was a wash. And I would like to suggest that, maybe, if there hadn't been a Watergate hearings then Ronald Reagan would not have won in 1980. Just sayin'.

So, what exactly is the J6 Committee hearing all about? To blacken the Republican Party? To "get Trump?" To flush out all the lizards of the Trump administration? To stop the Proud Boys in their tracks? To win the next presidential election?

See, it would be one thing if Trump were still in office, and presiding over double-digit inflation, and, in the opinion of all right-thinking people, had completely messed up the COVID response. But you chaps got rid of him, by fair means or 2000 Mules foul, back in November 2020. So your Dem partisans got the red meat they wanted already. And GOP partisans are all energized by the Big Lie -- you know, the one about the 2020 election begin completely above board, nothing to see here and if you object you are an armed insurrectionist.

Oh, and this just in from The New York Times. "Fox News Doesn't Plan to Carry Jan. 6 Hearings Live." Waat? How Dare They!

And that's another thing to consider, Dem partisans. Back in 1973, all good people were shocked, shocked by the Watergate break in and coverup. And there was only one narrative available, on CBS, NBC, ABC, PBS. Today, GOP voters don't believe a word they hear from MSNBC and CNN and The New York Times. And with the advent of cable and streaming, people just aren't watching the three networks any more. Not like they used to. They have important streaming series to binge on.

Thse other thing, which I am sure you strategic geniuses have all thought about, is that if you "get Trump" with the J6 Committee then you have cleared the path for Ron DeSantis in 2024. Are you really sure you want that, in preference to having DeSantis and Trump duke it out? Frankly, I'd say that you don't want DeSantis to be the GOP nominee in 2024. That guy seem to have a tactical and strategic sense that even Bismarck would respect.

And there is this. When gas prices have doubled in a year, I dare say that the average "punter" -- as the Brits say -- isn't that excercised about armed insurrectionists burning down the Capitol. He's worried about the cost of filling up his F-150 truck.

And I'd say that beating up the oppostion is not good politics. Not in the long term.

See.you in November, old chap.

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.