Change: Billionaires Want to Change the World

Friedrich Hayek's last book was title The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism. In it he labels as the "fatal conceit" the idea that "man is able to shape the world around him according to his wishes."

Now comes Karen Hunt at American Greatness in "Know your Enemy" like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and Jef Besos and others that think with a bit of technology they can change the world.

These elite firmly believe they are so smart, so wise, so all-important that they have the right—indeed the obligation for the good of the planet—to exploit everything and everyone, right down to the last pound of flesh and even our most private thoughts.

Funnily enough, they already did! Inadvertently, with their PC operating systems and their iPhones and their online buying. They changed the world by accident, and then, a billion or so dollars later decide they want to change it by design.

In A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles Thomas Sowell takes another tack. He says that our modern elites have two different visions. Some of them have a "constrained vision" that believes we don't know the half of it. The others have an "unconstrained vision" that believes we can remake the world using our logic and reason and science. Thus the Age of Reason.

In Sowell's narrative the father of the modern unconstrained vision was William Godwin with is 1793 book Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. For Godwin it was a crime not to use all our logic and reason to make the world a juster place. We could say that the father of the constrained vision was Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments. In this vision there is a lot more respect given to the unseen wisdom of habits and cultures and ways of life that develop unbidden in society.

The interesting thing to me is that today it is the conservative man in the street that talks about logic and reasonn and the lefty that talks about "lived experience." And yet the lefty is still trying to upend society with his "fundamental change" and the conservative that is still saying: Whoa Neddy.

And yet, the lefty still wants to redesign society. Because justice.

I suppose we should just be grateful for the Law of Unintended Consequences. La Wik has a history starting with John Locke -- who discussed the unintended consequences of interest rate regulation -- through Adam Smith, Engels, and Robert K. Merton. Today it is, of course, the commonsense of every conservative that every new liberal program is wrecked by unanticipated consequences of gubmint mucking around where it don't belong.

We see the weakness of the lefty approach to life right now in the utter disaster of the Biden administration that thought it was going to shut down oil exploration and fossil fuel electric generation and push electric cars and have a war in Ukraine and shovel money at its supporters and fight racism and transphobia and not think for a moment that everything would blow up in its face.

I wonder if the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of the world appreciate that they got their billions because they had an idea that worked, and that other people got a say. Because we wouldn't have Apple and Microsoft bestride the world if the world hadn't decided, one purchase at a time, to buy into their brilliant ideas. Nobody forced people to buy iPhones and Microsoft Windows back in the day.

I like to say that the difference here is the change created by Anybodies, where one in a million has an idea that changes the world, and the change created by Somebodies, where the ruling class and its stooges tells the world to change, or else.

The point is illustrated by the business startup culture. Lots of people come up with ideas that they are convinced will change the world and they try to put them into practice. But very few of them actually end up amazing the world.

There is no reason why the same should not apply to political and cultural ideas. Lots of people have great ideas for changing the world. But how do we decide which of them are any good?

When the Recession's on the Democrats' Watch

Dp you realize how rare it is for a recession to occur on the Democrats' watch?

2008: Great Recession was on President Bush's Watch. Cause: blowup of Dem cheap mortgage policy.

2000: Tech Bubble broke in 2000 but wasn't felt until 2001, on President Bush's watch. Cause: probably excess enthusiasm from tax rate cuts plus the easing of credit in the 1998 Russian bond default.

1990: Recession took place on President Bush I's watch. "Worst economy in last 50 years," said Candidate Clinton.

1980: Stagflation on President Carter's watch but recession on President Reagan's watch. Somebody had to curb 10-20 percent inflation.

1969: Recession on Nixon's watch. Hangover from LBJ's double wars: on poverty and Vietnam.

But I think we are staring at a recession that will be 100 percent on Biden's watch. And do you know what I think? I think that nobody in the Democratic Party has a clue about what to do. Because the Democratic Party agenda is always a new round of spending that they advertise as a boost the economy, but which really boosts Democratic constituencies and voters.

There has never been a time in my adult life where Democrats have authoried a policy that would curb the loot and plunder getting shoveled out to their supporters.

But the current economic nightmare has many authors:

1. President Trump jawboning the Fed not to raise interest rates in the fall of 2019.
2. The administrative state's lockdown policy response to COVID.
3. The Fed's print-money response to COVID.
4. The reluctance of the administrative state to end lockdowns and travel restrictions.
5. The Biden administration's belief that Obama didn't stimulate enough in 2009.
6. The Green New Deal policy of shutting down fossil fuel exploration and use.
7. The Fed's delay in returning to a post-COVID monetary policy.

Yeah. All in all, I'd say that the combination of all these economic errors is not going to be any fun.

But here's my point, going back to the list of recessions in my adult lifetime. In none of these recessions were the Democrats in charge while the thing was developing. In almost all cases, Republicans were the ones having to take the unpopular policy decisions needed to fight inflation or curb an excessive boom.

Obviously, President Biden is the last person you would choose to be president in such a time. Heres's a guy that sat around in the Senate for 50 years and never did anything serious in his life. Plus, his administration is staffed by a bunch of DEI appointments chosen for their race or gender or sexual orientation rather than for their competence in rallying an army on a stricken field.

It's easy to say that it serves them right. But, of course, it isn't the ruling class that suffers during inflation and recession. It's ordinary people, especially the lower class people I call Subordinates.

And it's easy to tell ordinary people that it serves them right for voting for Democrats. But our society basically teaches everyone that Democrats are the people that care about people like them; that's what Curtis Yarvin's Cathedral is all about. You have to be an ornery old cuss to break with The Narrative handed down from on high at the altar of the Cathedral.

But someone is going to have to come up with the ideas and the policies and the intestinal fortitude to lead us out of this mess with the least suffering for the American people. And I don't see that leader coming out of the Democratic Party.

Put it this way. If someone asked you to name the go-to guy in the Democratic Party that everyone regards as a safe hand on the economic tiller, what name would you come up with?

I rest my case.

Panic at Activist Organizations

Now, as never before, because Trump etc., progressive activist organizations need to be effective so they can fight injustice. And yet, progressives worry, today's activist organizations are becoming totally ineffective. Said a progressive organization head:

[there are] millions of people depending on these [progressive] organizations to stave off the crushing injustices coming our way.

But, it's as if the right wing had deliberately succeeded in sabotaging them.

Progressive leaders cannot do anything but fight inside the orgs, thereby rendering the orgs completely toothless for the external battles in play. … Everyone is scared, and fear creates the inaction that the right wing needs to succeed in cementing a deeply unpopular agenda.

This is in an article by Ryan Grim at The Intercept about how progressive advocacy groups are so embroiled in making the organization itself a just place -- and free from racism, etc. -- that they have abandoned their sacred duty of making the world a better place. He starts with meetings at the Gutmacher Institute, the pro-abortion research organization in the wake of George Floyd.

Heather Boonstra, vice president of public policy... talked about the role systemic racism plays in society and the ways that Guttmacher’s work could counter it. Staff suggestions, though, turned inward... Staffers suggested additional racial equity trainings.. With no Black staff in the D.C. unit, it was suggested that “Guttmacher do something tangible for Black employees in other divisions.” 

In other words, the cancel, safetyist, self-care culture is not just ruining the effectiveness of our schools and colleges and woke corporations, but the very social justice organizations that are trying to create a better world. It has resulted in "wrenching and debilitating turmoil in the past couple years" in organizations like "The Sierra Club, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, the Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time’s Up, the Sunrise Movement." Oh no!

But my interest in the article was really the taken-for-granted idea that progressives today are fighting like never before against a tsunami of injustice.

• In the wake of George FLoyd progressives were united in "a reckoning with racial injustsice".
• In mid 2021 the Biden administrations program of "transformational change" stalled as organizations broke down into "internal strife and internal bullshit" instead of fighting for "reproductive justice, or jobs, or fighting climate change."
• "Trump’s shock victory sharpened the focus of activists and regular people alike... A period of mourning turned into fierce determination to resist."
• "The ACLU alone collected almost $1 million within 24 hours of Trump’s election and tens of millions more over the next year."

Know what I think? I think that when social justice organizations are as focused on the internal justice of an organization it means that the threat of injustice from those monster racist-sexist-homophobes of which you've heard tell is not that urgent.

That's the way humans are programmed. When there's an emergency, and our lives are threatened, we all come together and we subordinate ourselves selflessly to the self-appointed leaders.

But when the emergency recedes a bit, then we start to want to renegotiate our place in the hierarchy and demand that the boss is nicer to us. And whatabout that promotion he promised in return for a job well done!

Which goes to prove that the existential threat of injustice is not quite as bad as we've been told.

Don't Do Anything Stupid, Rulers

Last week President Biden blamed Putin and Republicans for inflation.

President Biden on Tuesday blamed Russia’s war in Ukraine, corporate greed, the pandemic and the policies of “ultra-MAGA Republicans” for causing record-high inflation...

“It’s not because of spending,” Mr. Biden said when asked whether he is to blame for inflation. “I think our policies help, not hurt.”

OK. So how do you tell when a politician is lying? The answer is because his mouth is moving.

Plus, my little maxim: Why do politicians lie? Because we the voters insist upon it.

Now, I don't know if President Biden really thinks all those stupid things he is saying in his speeches. He is lying because if he didn't then the only thing to do would be to resign.

By the way, how are you Fact Checkers doing these days? Somehow I haven't heard much from you lately.

What I am starting to worry about is that, with everything going wrong, the Biden administration will do something stupid.

It looks like the Ukrainians are losing the war in the Donbas. Which means that Biden and the Europeans could do something stupid, so they don't look bad, and start World War III.  

It looks like the stock market and the economy are totally screwed, with inflation and recession occuring at the same time, even as the Fed is determined to raise interest rates. Which means that Biden might do something stupid so that he looks like he is "doing something."

It looks like we are having a meltdown on the crypto front, with Bitcoin down from $68,000 to $22,000, and I read that "One of the biggest lenders within the crypto market, Celsius Network, is struggling as the booming sector turns sour." Hey, Chairman Powell of the Fed, and all the Euro ships at sea. You do know that you guys are the "lenders of last resort," right?

It looks like the Democrats are going to get wiped out at the midterms in November. So what are they doing? Running J6 show trials and threatening to indict President Trump. That would really solve all our problems, right?

It looks like there is a bit of a cock-up on the China front, with:

China's High-Speed Rail Network is a Trillion Dollar sinkhole

The run on regional Chinese banks, plus people losing their down payments from Evergrande 

The CCP "order a few weeks back for top party officials to keep all their money in China." But what about nephews and nieces?

Suppose China had a real economic crisis, and invaded Taiwan to distract attention. Could the Biden administration avoid doing something stupid?

It looks like "minorities and women hardest hit" in the baby formula crisis. Imagine if Biden & Co. decided to nationalize baby formula to solve the crisis.

But really, what could go wrong?

Journo Tells Us Why Dems Screwed the Pooch on Inflation

At The Atlantic James Surowieki want us to know "How Did They Get Inflation So Wrong." And I must say, the Dem-operative-with-a-byline really helped me understand why the Biden guys made such a staggering mistake with their various stimuli and BBBs and whatever in 2021.

The reason that the Dems overcharged their winter 2021 stimulus package is that they were still smarting from the failure of the Obama stimulus back in 2009.

After the steep economic downturn over those two years, the U.S. economy grew at a very slow clip... And this happened even though... Democrats had passed a $787 billion stimulus plan, which at the time was the biggest such package ever enacted.

So, the Dems were determined not to make the same mistake twice. No Sir!

The lesson that policy makers drew from that experience was that if you wanted to get the economy moving and keep it moving, you needed to err on the side of going big.

Ah yes: "policy makers." Going Big.

Hey Dems! Here's a word to the wise. "Policy makers" don't know from nothing! And you have learned the wrong lesson from 2009. Here is my analysis of what went wrong.

First, it may very well be that there was no way to have a quick recovery from the Great Recession of 2008. The 2008 crash was a once-in-a-generation (we hope) disruption of the credit system. Rather like 1929. My guess is that you don't recover from that with a quick $787 stimulus bill. It takes longer than that for the various economic actors to recover from the hit they took in the Crash.

Second, I remember reading, in the conservative media, that the Obama stimulus failed to stimulate the economy because it was mostly handouts to Democrat special interests, notably the teachers. In other words, it wasn't designed to restart the economy but rather to hand out loot to Dem supporters. For instance, in FY2010 federal education spending jumped $50 billion from $90 billion to $140 billion. You think that education spending "stimulates the economy?" I gotta bridge... 

Third, don't forget the reason for the Crash of 2008. It was because of half a century of Dem-driven easy credit for home mortgages, principally by laundering mortgages through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and using the credit of the federal government to price mortgage interest rates. And then there were the Liar Loans, and low-down loans to blacks and Hispanics -- who got hammered by the Great Recession. The debt of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac went from nothing in 1938 to about 50 percent of GDP at the peak in 2008. If you think of the regular federal debt at about 100 percent of GDP, this means that Fannie and Freddie represent another huge chunk of national debt. Only it's sorta off-the-books.

Fourth, the Crash was made into a real crash because Little Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, didn't do his job as "lender of last resort." He let Lehman Brothers go broke, whining that he didn't think he had the authority to bail them out. Ben, oh Ben.

My point is, Democratic office-holders, and aides and staffers, and "policy makers" and media scribes, you screwed up in 2021 because you failed to learn the real lessons of 2008. Not to mention the bigger lesson that you really don't want to be screwing around with the credit system because you don't understand it.

But that's OK. Chances are we'll have a Republican president and Congress in 2025 with a real mandate to fix things. Because you guys screwed up. Not because you are corrupt, although you certainly are that. But because you didn't go your homework.

And one of the ways a political person does their homework is by talking to the opposition. Funny thing about oppositions. They tend not to have a view of events that excuses the party in power from its mistakes and stupidites.

Hispanics Joining the Middle Class and GOP

Back in the day, you'll remember, the Democrats were going to own the future, The Emerging Democratic Majority, courtesy of Judis and Teixeira. It would be composed of the educated, women, the young, and minorities.

I have a different theory, my reductive Three Peoples theory, that says that the upper class of creatives and the credentialed tends to vote its interest with the Democrats, the middle class of responsibles that go to work and obey the law tends to vote Republican because its interest is a growing and stable economy, and the lower class of subordinates tends to vote Democrat because that's who is offering loot to the lower class.

If you walk around my überliberal neighborhood in north Seattle, the heartland of Rep. Pramila Jayapal's congressional district where she won 83 percent of the vote in 2020, you notice that there are a ton of Hispanic roofers and construction workers and yard-maintenance workers slaving away all day, every day. No blacks to be seen. OK, a couple.

In my racist-sexist-homophobic way, I interpret this to mean that Hispanics are working their way up into the middle class. And blacks are not.

Therefore I would say that we should expect Hispanics to be moving in the the Republican Party in battalion strength. But blacks, not so much.

Hey, I was writing about this eight years ago when the Republicans won Congress back from the Dems in Obama's second midterm. And what I said was that the Democrats were turning the Democratic Party into the Black Party. And that would alienate Hispanics and Asians (except for high-caste South Asians like Chair of the Progressive Caucus Jayapal). And there was this:

Hispanics think blacks are lazy. That's when they are not actually expelling blacks from their neighborhood.

Not to mention, I wrote, that liberals would not do themselves a favor with anti-police rhetoric. Because the middle class expects the police to protect them from lower class thugs, from the days of Dickens' Bill Sikes to today's gangbangers shooting into a crowd when they've been dissed. 

Now comes Andrew Abbott at AMAC writing about "The Vanishing Permanent Democratic Majority" and the "precipitous decline" in Biden support.

Nowhere is this clearer than with Hispanic Americans, who now disapprove of the job that Joe Biden is doing as President by a whopping 60%-26% margin.

And even black support is down from 85 percent to 63 percent.

The reason for this, of course, is that liberals have persuaded themselves that the Republican Party is a "white" party.

The belief among liberal elites is that the Republican Party exists explicitly to service and promote the policies and principles of “white America” and that, since the 1960s, the party has been rooted in white isolationism, nativism, and resentment of minorities. Thus, as the country becomes more diverse, the white Republican vote will gradually be destroyed via diversity, or so the theory goes.

As opposed to my theory that the Repuiblican Party is now the party of the ordinary middle class. Actully, I"d say that the Republican Party is the party of ordinary people whereas the Democratic Party is the party of "special people," special because of education, credentials, or victimhood.

And most of those victim are "fake" victims, dontcha know, from LGBT to corporate snowflakes to Muslims. They are either members of the ruling class in good standing or the pets, the Little Darlings, of the ruling class.

And, of course, if you are an ordinary middle class person you might get "resentment of minorities" that get the special care and feeding of the ruling class. But that would be wrong.

And let me tell you: if you have been noticed by the ruling class and declared to be a victim, and richly rewarded for voting Democrat, You Are Not A Victim, cupcake.

And then Trump. Liberals knew that Trump could never get minotiry votes. But he did, and then in 2020

Not only had Trump held onto his minority support, but he actually won a more significant share of black male and Hispanic voters than he did the first time. 

As I say, there is no mystery or conspiracy theory needed to explain this. The Republican Party is the party of the ordinary middle class. And it looks like Hispanics are rapidly ascending, by hard work and enterprise, into the middle class. Ergo, they are voting Republican.

 And, I suspect, Hispanics and to a lesser extent, blacks, are being royally screwed by the Biden inflation.

But don't tell Rep. Jayapal.

Philosophizing about the Next Regime

Everyone who isn't a deep-state liberal is thinking about how we ditch the present regime, which goes by the name of liberal democracy but is anything but.

Many of the alternative philosophies are efforts to imagine a new philosophy without thinking about the practical process of getting there. Zman criticizes libertarianism and also the revival of the Catholic idea of "integralism" for this. As he says:

Integralism is the principle that the Catholic faith should be the basis of public law and public policy within civil society. 

But what if the majority of people aren't Catholics? Then you don't have a chance of basing society on a Catholic basis. Then Zman goes on to critique the history of the Right in the 20th century, even the deification of the Founders and their Constitution. The Consitution was a political compromise by practical politicians, he writes, not a sacred truth.

But the Constitution was very much a thing of its time, representing the rising bourgeoisie against the old regime of feudal monarchy.

In fact, I would say that the politics of the last 500 years has always involved a rising class wanting to take its rightful place in the public square and its power.

Let us consider Henry VII in England as simply a feudal faction beating up on the old regime and taking power.

What did the Tudors achieve? Well, they spawned the Elizabethen era that we regard, even now, with a golden glow.

But a century and a half later the English Civil War definitely involved the rising middle class, its Puritan ideology, and its refusal to pay "ship money" for the king's foreign advantures.

What did the Puritans achieve? Well they got the Dutch to invade and they taught the Brits how to finance a Second Hundred Years War against the French and make a mighty British Empire.

And the French Revolution definitely involved a rising class of thinkers and middle class inspired by another ideological movement, the Enlightenment of Voltaire and Rousseau and Montesquieu.

What did the French Revolution achieve? Well, it led to the end of France as the top dog in Europe. Sorry about that.

And the 20th century's socialism and administrative state definitely involves a rising class of would-be educated supervisors of society and the economy and the culture inspired by Marx and Fabianism and the idea that evolved, educated people should supervise the chaotic injustice of industrial capitalism. And teach the Robber Barons, the malefactors of great wealth and the economic royalists a lesson.

What did the evolved educated class achieve? I'd say two world wars, monstrous regimes in Russia and China, and a program of domestic lootinug unparalleted in human history. What else to you call a state spending 35-50 percent of GDP this year and every year on government loot and plunder?

You would think, wouldn't you, that there would be people starting to get restless unde the boot of the evolved, educated class, and you would be right.

I'd say that this is a rising movement of the ordinary middle class. We only really understand this movement through the pejoratives of the current ruling class, as "populists" and "racists" and "white oppressors" and "gun nuts." But what they are is ordinary middle class people with ordinary middle-class lives and they want a society and social norms that value ordinary middle-class people and their ordinary lives of obeying the law, going to work, and following the rules.

And I say that we have seen three presidencies in the US already that have represented these people: Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump. That is why all the right people have all agreed that Nixon was a monster, Reagan was an amiable dunce, and Trump was a Russian stooge. All agreed?

I say that the current woke-ism is actually a sign that the evolved, educated ruling class is in trouble. A ruling class that's firmly in the saddle doesn't have to resort to censorship and canceling and purging of heretics from the Cathedral of education and media. You only get reigns of terror and virtue and J6 Committee show trials when things are going wrong for the rulers. And they "cain't stand 'im" as a famous American philsopher once said.

But whatabout the Zman's concern for a ruling philosophy or political formula that the new regime will base its power upon?

Honestly, I don't know. But you know what I do think? I think that once the new regime is in place then all kinds of unconnected facts and people and ideas will come together in a new narrative. And it will all be obvious. And everyone will say that they saw it coming all along.