Hey! Why Not Lend Your Pension Money to Fund Government Infrastructure?

The governor of the State of Washington and the premier of British Columbia just met, according to the New York Times. And what do you think they talked about as a way to tie Seattle and Vancouver into the Next Big Tech Corridor.

They proposed a $30 billlion high-speed rail link.

Oh great.

But the Euros have a better idea. According to Phil Gramm, once a US Senator from Texas, since the Euro governments are all tapped out, debt-wise, they want to tap the insurance companies to fund infrastructure investment.

Oh great. If I were a Euro I would go straight into the streets to object. Because if they don't the governments will spend their retirement savings on climate change boondoggles. If they are lucky.

Hey! Did you see that the vitally important wind-farm infrastructure in lefty South Australia just crashed the electric grid with a total blackout? Who could have seen that coming?

All this leads me to suggest Rule One.

Rule One: No government may borrow except to fund a war -- a real shooting war, not a war on poverty or a war on global warming.

Everything else should be funded privately. Of course, there are important government functions and buildings that need to be built. Great. But if a government building needs to be built, let it be built by a crony capitalist with private money, with the government paying for it out of today's tax revenue. Then, if the project is a white elephant the risk is taken, as much as possible, by the private sector and the evil crony capitalist.

So we want to build a high-speed rail link between Seattle and Vancouver? Let it be a private venture. If eminent domain is necessary to acquire the right-of-way, then let the government acquire the land. If there needs to be a subsidy to make the project viable enough for risk investors to put up the money, then let the subsidy be paid out of tax revenue.

There is a real advantage in crony capitalism for infrastructure investment. It is easier for the politicians to walk away from the crony capitalists if the project goes south. It is impossible to dump the US Postal Service, but who cares about FedEx and UPS? It is impossible to reform government education because of Our Teachers. But who cares about private colleges? Sue 'em and run them out of business; the Obama administration just did, and the liberal media is cheering it on as it deals with "shady for-profit colleges."

The point is that all government programs, every one from the Defense Department down to the local public utility, is a bloody mess of waste and failure. Of course they are. If there was money in it, the private sector would have picked it up and made money with it. The more we let government borrow the more it can hide its messes and put off the day when it has to cry Uncle and shut down the waste, fraud, and abuse.

Then there are the other government programs, from Social Security to Medicare. It seems like they benefit the people, you and me, but you can be sure that there is somebody getting in line ahead of you and making off with most of the loot before you get there.

It's the old story. If you are in a poker game and you don't know who is the sucker, then the sucker is you.

The Problem with the Obama-Clinton Administrative State

The problem with a Hillary Clinton presidency, according to Victor Davis Hanson, is that Clinton will continue the huge expansion of presidential power that President Obama has practiced over the last eight years.

OK, so what? If Congress won't go along with the president then surely it is up to the president to get things done. If Congress won't act to end the rape culture on campus, then the president must act through the federal administration. If Congress won't act to fight climate change then the EPA must act to shut down carbon polluting coal power plants.

This, of course, is the model of government championed by the educated elite since the Civil War. First, the idea was government by the "best men." Then, in the Progressive Era before World War I, the idea was government by educated experts who would apply natural and social science to the problems of the day. Now the idea is championed by the so-called "globalists" that want to marginalize nation states and replace them with an interlocking network of global institutions that will administer a kind of world government by piercing the shell of national sovereignty.

There are three things wrong with this model.

The first thing is the old, old question: quid custodiet custodes? Who will guard the guardians? Or, as I say, what happens when things go wrong, when the ruling class decides to implement a program that simply does not work, or does not work very well, or could work better? The problem with having government do complex tasks that need constant revision and adaptation is the government doesn't do revision and adaptation. The only thing it does is do or die. The top-down administrative nature of government means that government just keeps on doing what it is doing until it completely crashes and burns.

The second thing is that a top-down administrative government loses the consent of the governed. This is illustrated magnificently in Tocqueville's The Old Regime and the Revolution. France under Louis XIV and Louis XVI was a pure administrative system, run by the king's chief administrator in Paris. Nothing could be done, not the repair to a village church or the repair of a road, without the say-so from Paris. The result, according to Tocqueville, was that the French lost the art of working together to solve problems. And when the monarchy got into trouble and ran out of money, it found that it had no support among the people.

The third thing is that a top-down government just does not have the bandwidth to do all the things it wants to do. The reason that the administrative government gets started in the first place is, of course, that the ruling class gets frustrated by the very low amount of governance that is possible in a legislature of 535 prima donnas. So, just like President Obama, it decides to bypass the slow and corrupt Congress and rule by administrative fiat and by executive decree. But administrative government suffers from exactly the same problem as the legislature. In a nation of 300 million people there just is not enough bandwidth in a system of 1,000,000 bureaucrats to get things done. That's because the bureaucrats cannot act without the approval of the Big Boss, because the point of being the Big Boss is that you get to call all the Big Shots. That's why they call it Monarchy.

The solution is obvious. You don't do big administrative government, because of the three things above. You start by saying that anything that requires a complicated administrative apparatus is a bad idea, because a big complicated administrative government apparatus just won't work. You decide that, whatever the problem, it has to be solved through the market system which just happens to be a social system that constantly adjusts to deal with problems and changing situations. Then you say that anyway a centralized system is a bad idea because it reduces the people to the status of serfs waiting for the lord to give orders rather than treating them as competent responsible people that can and ought to work out their problems with each other without constant centralized supervision.

And finally, you say that the great complexity of national affairs cannot be concentrated in a central government because government cannot respond when things go wrong. We already have a system that responds instantly when things go wrong. It is called the market system and it constantly and daily forces people to fix their mistakes and improve their products and services. Or else they go out of business.

The way to understand government is that the only thing it knows to do is to fight a war. That is because government is force. Government is not the name for things we do together, as President Obama has said. Government is the name for things we do by force. You can tell that this is true because government has a habit of calling everything it does a war. On the military side this is obvious as we fight wars against fascism and Communism and now are pretending not to be fighting a war against violent Islamism. But the same is true in domestic politics. We fight wars against want, or ignorance, or injustice, or racism, or sexism or drugs, And now we are fighting a war against global warming.

The tiny little problem at the heart of modern administrative governance is that fighting a war is probably not the way to deal with poverty, ignorance, racism, sexism and climate change. Probably, the way to deal with these things is not to mobilize the people for war and enroll them in an army and pay them out of taxes for their support. Probably the way to deal with these things is for the best people to get together with the educated people to get together with the ordinary people to get together with the poor people to cooperate and work their differences out and keep politics and its division and government and its force out of it.

The tiny little problem with the modern administrative state is that the whole idea is to teach people to fight with each other for the spoils of the government's wars. Once the ruling class has taught people to fight with each other it becomes impossible for the government to rally all the squabbling factions together. That is what Louis XVI found out in the run-up to the French Revolution.

On my view we should see the government on the Obama type getting into more and more difficulties with its administrative model. Not only will it not have enough money to fix things but it won't be able to fix things because government doesn't do fixing. In fact, as we all know, what government does when things go wrong is not try to fix things but to look for a scapegoat instead.

If the government wants to fight a war it needs to foster unity. That's why World War II was such a success. If you don't succeed in fostering unity you get the Vietnam and the Iraq wars, where set-backs were immediately followed by division and name-calling. Indeed the opponents of the wars were waiting for setbacks so they could call the whole thing off. You can see that recent government initiatives that have been implemented without getting unity, from Obamacare to climate change, are bound to end in tears.

Working to foster unity is a big job. It has to start with the whole ruling class reading from the same page. There needs to be almost no opportunity for dissenting voices to sow dissent. And in World War II, after Pearl Harbor, there was no dissent. Men were drafted and sent to war and wounded and killed and nobody objected. Goods were rationed, wages were fixed, and nobody complained, not publicly. And after it was all over, everyone agreed that World War II was a Good Thing. Except for a few lefties who said that the A-bomb was a Bad Thing.

Today our present ruling class attempts to foster unity by name-calling. Anyone that disagrees with its race policy is a racist; everyone that disagrees with its women policy is a sexist; everyone that disagrees with its climate policy is a climate denier. You can see the difference between World War II and today. Back then unity was established by a process that seems to be a consensus; today unity is established by shaming the dissenters.

My argument is that people are going to start objecting to the name-calling policy, and then the ruling class will have to decide whether to ramp up the name-calling to actual repression.

I have one word of advice for the ruling class on that. Don't.

The problem is that our ruling class is already in too deep. It cannot retreat without losing face and power. And if it turns name-calling into repression is will multiply the number of its enemies.

So it is all bound to end in tears. And that is a tragedy. Because we know better.

What to do if a LIberal Talks Climate Change in the Hot Spring

I know I shouldn’t care when a liberal art historian from San Luis Obispo says that he’s known about climate change since 1998.

Because anything you say is just going to spoil the relaxed atmosphere around the steaming pool fed by sulphurous hot water at Sol Duc Hot Springs here in the Olympic National Park in western Washington.

What are you going to do? Everywhere you run into them the privileged members of the ruling class are going to do their cultural imperialism bit with a little microaggression to make you feel uncomfortable and to remind you who has the whip hand in America. And no safe spaces in sight.

And really, what good would it do to remind your friendly local art historian that according to settled science we are presently in an Ice Age. That’s why they call the current climate an “interglacial.” Or that you worked as an environmental engineer for 30 years. Or that you’ve created and worked with computer models man and boy, and you’ve always made sure that the computer model doesn’t make you do something stupid.

Because, after all, you can always tell a liberal, but you can’t tell him anything.

What about some other ripostes?

To the “97% of scientists agree” we could say that 97% of scientists like a big budget. The biggest budget they ever got was for making a bomb, and they only felt regret after they had spent the money and they knew that it worked.

To “climate deniers” we could ask if liberals really regard disagreement on science into the scientific equivalent of anti-semitism.

To the idea that the climate might spin out of control, we could argue that if so it would have done so billions of years ago when carbon dioxide was a much bigger proportion of the atmosphere.

When it’s all about saving the planet, we could say that we thought that salvation was a religious concept.

But all this is beside the point. Right now if you tell a liberal what you think they are going to be outraged, because the whole point about being a liberal is to be in the in-crowd. The truth is that we non-liberals are all Aunt Ems. For twenty years we have wanted to tell liberals what we think of them but because we are decent people we can’t.

And anyway, first we change the culture, then we stop the racist, sexist, homophobe insults. And then we win the politics. Anything else is just a meaningless culture of complaint.

Three Peoples: What If Most People Want to be Peasants?

In my Three Peoples theory, there is a basic assumption. In today's world, people start out as People of the Subordinate Self, workers and peasants. But each in their own way, people are not content with the life of the subordinate; they struggle upwards and become People of the Responsible Self, and start to contribute to society and the world as responsible individuals, not as subordinate peasants and working stiffs.

But what if this is wrong? What if people are perfectly content to sit on their behinds, doing what they are ordered to do and not a jot more, forever complaining about "them," yet forever waiting for "them" to solve their problems rather than solving them themselves?

That is what has crashed in upon me with the Trump phenomenon. Donald Trump is promising to Make America Great Again. Not the American People. Not business owners and entrepreneurs. Not responsible individuals each doing his or her share. And the white working class, dying of despair in the ruins of the old manufacturing economy, has rallied to his promise of good jobs at good wages.

Maybe this is the last hurrah of the white working class before it succumbs to the verdict of history, which is always oblivion. Because everything is born to die, humans, jobs, cities, towns, nations, civilizations, religions. Even gods die, Nicholas Wade has written, when people stop believing in them.

On this view, the People of the Responsible Self are a subculture, squeezed in between the vast rabble of subordinate workers and peasants. The real cultural and political action is the Patron/Client relationship between the People of the Creative Self -- who used to be warrior landowners but are now the ruling class of the educated elite and the Social Justice Warriors -- and the People of the Subordinate Self, the foot soldiers in the social justice army. The first provide the ideas and the leadership; the last provide the votes and the street muscle. The first enjoy the money, power, and the love of beautiful women that come with primacy; the second get a modest competence, and such free stuff as the social justice lords distribute to their loyal servitors.

Is that all there is? I would it were not so.

For instance, the whole point of the modern world and modern capitalism is that people go out and innovate; they create new products and services for their fellow men, acting without permission from the lords, and create the Great Enrichment. Where would we be without these creative, responsible souls that have brought us so much. And yet these inventors and business creators have been roundly excoriated as robber barons and exploiters.

And yet, as Eric Hoffer writes, there are two options in the world. Either people work to the command of a master, or they are responsible for figuring out what to do and doing it. Economics and the theory of the market and the experience of socialist states tell us that the boss-driven economy cannot work. Because, as Ludwig von Mises wrote, the socialist command economy cannot compute prices.

And yet, as Hegel says, in the Patron/Client or Master/Slave relationship, despite appearances, it is the Client or Slave that learns through his work how to master the world and make it serve his needs. The Master sits around, enjoying the perks of money, power, and the love of beautiful women while the Slave acutally learns how the world works.

And yet, as the market participant learns, the way of the world is to find something that other people want and give it to them, in products and services.

And yet, despite the rhetoric of the liberal Patrons that teaches everyone to kow-tow to their Masters or be flayed alive as racists, sexists, and homophobes, in fact almost everyone pitches in with a good grace, and with a live-and-let-live attitude, and almost everyone contributes willingly to the common good, and accepts with a good grace the verdict of the market.

In other words, despite the temptations of subordinate helplessness, people do not wait around for the boss to call the big shots, as bosses like to do. They get on with things and make decisions on their own without waiting for the big guy to tell them what to do. This has been the theme of the modern era both in the civil economy of the industrial revolution and latterly in the just-in-time culture developed by the Japanese. It is also the theme of military doctrine, because the lethal battlefield inaugurated with rifled guns has forced soldiers into hiding where they cannot easily be ordered around by officers and NCOs. Instead, soldiers must be resourceful and self-motivated; otherwise the army cannot function.

There is in this a profound contradiction, and expression of negativity, of two principles wrestling with each other. And that, according to Hegel, is how the world works

Indeed, if all the world's problem were resolved tomorrow it would be the end of life as we know it. The whole point of life is that we do not know the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything."

And we never will.

So it may be that, however much we humans seem to be tempted by the Patron/Client relationship, our fate is that we must, like Adam and Eve of old, leave the Garden of Eden and go forth into the world of uncertainty and risk. Because we have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge and can never go back to the bliss of ignorance and instinct.

Out In The Woods: America's Big Problem Is Liberals

Here I am out in the woods -- OK I am staying at Sol Duc Hot Springs Resort in the Olympic National Park -- and I don't have a clue what happened with The Debate last night.

Did The Donald raise the delicate question of the President and the Secretary of State emailing using an unsecured private server and lying about it? Did he mention how if anyone else working for the federal government had done such a thing they would be vacationing right now at Camp Fed?

Did Hillary push the line that all the Democratic operatives with bylines have been pushing: the desperate national problem of Trump Lies?

I don't have a clue, because I am out in the woods, with no cell signal and no wifi. The last hint of cell signal was about 10 miles back down the road. But what about data?

So I am going to write about the bigger question, the question that faces us whether Trump wins the election or Hillary wins the election.

It is the problem of liberal hegemony. Simply put, it is the problem that today in America if you dissent from the liberal line in thought, word, or deed, you are branded as a racist, sexist homophobe.

We conservatives have been joking about Hillary Clinton's "deplorables" remark, but we shouldn't.  What was amusing was the clumsiness of her remark. The way the pros do it is not to actually categorize half of Trump's supporters as deplorables and irredeemable. You are supposed to be much more vague, to make racism, sexim, homophobia into a vague infection of the body politic. Because Rule One in politics is that you don't insult the voters.

By the way, "irredeemable" is a religious term. It means that the people in question can't be saved by Christ the Redeemer. So what in the world is Hillary Clinton, the globalist progressive, doing using terms more appropriate for the sawdust trail? Is that her famous Methodism rearing its head?

Here's the problem. If you want to talk about racists, then the chaps you need to work on are the racist black Reverends and the well-born racist activists running Black Lives Matter. Only you wouldn't dare.

If you want to talk about sexists, then the chappettes you need to talk about are the feminists that have escalated the age-old war between the sexes into an all out Armageddon. And the problem with the feminists is not merely political; it is existential. Under the influence of the feminists and progressive politics women are having a ton less children. In fact, in most rich countries women are not having enough babies for population replacement. If you don't think that is a problem then you don't have a clue. But you better not mention this.

If you want to talk about bigots, then you need to talk about the virulent bigotry coming from the LGBT chaps. Look, the bushes may be full of homophobes, but they aren't organized politically. Gays and lesbians are organized, and they are ready to pounce on anyone that dissents from their LGBT orthodoxy.

As I have written in my latest AT piece, there is a reason that the globalist progressives do their racist, sexist, homophobic accusation thing. To make their globalist governance thing work they need to devalue and destroy the culture and the politics of the nation state. They need to destroy the loyalty that people have for the flag, and for the idea that America is the best country in the world and the American people are the best people in the world. That is why liberals insist on the right of a black football player to disrespect the national anthem but run a white baseball player out of town for tweets opposing the black Charlotte Rioters. That is why they are out accusing everyone of Islamophobia, to the extent that people are afraid to report suspicious Muslim terrorist behavior. That is why people don't have the guts to tell black racists to take it where the sun don't shine. The globalist-progressives need to divide America in order to conquer it.

Un bel di, one fine day, a politician is going to crack the code on this, and the corrupt and vicious globalist-progressive cabal will collapse like a house of cards.

But meanwhile, we are living under the cruel and unjust rule of the Hillary Clintons and the Barack Obamas, and the country is splitting apart.

What we need, of course, is a nice little war to unify us. Bismarck did it, first with a nice little war against Denmark(!), then a war against Austria-Hungary, then a war against the French. All very clean and surgical. At the end of it all, he had unified the many German states into one German nation. Here at home in World War II, FDR unified all the Irish and the Italians and the Jews, the immigrant wave of 1900, into a single American nation. It took 20 years, and the rising generation of the Sixties, to start the process of splitting us all apart.

Now we need someone to unify blacks and Hispanics into the single American nation, in the teeth of opposition from our globalist-progressive ruling class.

If you haven't figured it out, I will explain what is going to happen. Sooner or later, our leaders will have to unify us to fight a war against global Islam. What will happen is that, just like with the German-Americans in World War I, Muslim-Americans will go all quiet. Because, apart from a few crazies, they want what America provides; otherwise they wouldn't have come here.

In One of Ours about World War I, the incandescent writer Willa Cather creates an incident, in passing, with a couple of Germans out in the heartland that got a bit shirty during World War I, because they still had a loyalty to Germany. The local authorities brought these doughty German farmers up in court, and the judge was kind to them. He said to the German Americans: cut it out, or we will have to throw the book at you. And that was the end of that. I dare say the same thing would work with America's Muslims.

America's real problem is not racist, sexist homophobe conservatives; it is not racist blacks, or sexist femininsts, or bigoted LGBTs. And it is certainly not the poor bloody deplorable white working class.

America's Big Problem is liberals.

The Downside of Government Programs

I hadn't heard of Edward Conard before, but apparently he worked with Mitt Romney at Bain Capital. So he should know a thing or two, being as how Bain was what you might call a corporate repair shop. Its job seemed to be taking in beat-up corporate jalopies and doing a complete makeover, before sending them back on the road, all fixed up and slicked up.

Conard's first book was Unintended Consequences, "which set the record straight about the financial crisis of 2008 and explained why U.S. growth was accelerating relative to other high-wage economies." In other words, it wasn't the banks' fault.

Now in The Upside of Inequality: How Good Intentions Undermine the Middle Class Conard shows how how pretty well all the standard nostrums won't work to get the economic moving again.

Yes, he says, inequality has been increasing, but only at the very top end. And how are the 0.0001 percent getting rich? We all know the reason. It is chaps like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates coming up with long-shot technology startups that can grow into $500 billion corporations with very little additional capital.

The thing to understand about today's knowledge-based economy, compared to the old manufacturing economy of old is that it doesn't take much to scale up to a global scale. In the old economy a Rockefeller or a Ford had to borrow money and/or sell shares to scale up; a Steve Jobs or a Mark Zuckerberg doesn't. He gets to keep all the value for himself and his startup buddies and early VC investors.

Aside: Someone once told me that they had encountered Bill Gates in a store just after Microsoft had gone public. He asked Bill why he did it. Gates answered: to share the company with the employees.

But who cares about the inequality? Zuckerberg isn't hurting anyone except when he is buying the houses close to his place in Palo Alto. He is making money just like an entertainment star does, because people all over the world love his product.

The basic proposition in the modern economy, according to Conard, is this. To succeed in the modern economy you need two things, "properly trained talent" and a capacity for risk-taking.

And the reason that the US has been growing faster that our high-wage pals in Europe is that we have been doing the knowledge economy thing better than they.

That doesn't necessarily mean "education." Most people going to college are majoring in things that have nothing to do with the new economy. And according to Conard, pretty well all the usual suspects to fix education aren't going to make a difference. Most useful training takes place on the job.

And most people don't want to put their savings at risk. That is why we have banks. Banks take risk-averse savings and lend them to people that are taking a risk. Of course, lending is supposed to be properly collateralized and credit-worthy. But sometimes you get a Black Swan and the banks go south.

So how do you mobilize risk-averse savings? You have to balance it with equity. That just means that the startup guys need equity capital to provide a cushion against failure for the risk-averse folks. The more equity out there the more risk-taking propositions the economy can address.

Here is where Conard introduces something I didn't know. Apparently one of the provisions of Dodd-Frank is to make it harder for the Fed to act as lender of last resort.

Rather than strengthening the Fed's ability to act more effectively as a lender of last resort in a bank run, policy makers have done the opposite. They have made banks more responsible for bank runs by intentionally weakening the Fed's ability to act in a panic. Banks pulled back by raising credit standards.

Hello! The "Intellectual Yet Idiot" class provoked the Crash of 2008 because the Fed felt it could not rescue Lehman Brothers under current law. So the Fed is still stupid like it was in the 1929-33 crash. The whole point of the Fed is to be a lender of last resort that lends whatever it takes to keep the financial system afloat, as per Lombard Street by Walter Bagehot. And then worry about the fallout later. Period.

In the event, not just the Fed but the US government ended up guaranteeing just about everything in the financial system, as my TARP bailout page shows.

The point about the banking system is that is really is doing a conjuring trick. It is taking risk-averse savings and making it into semi-risk capital. Of course that proposition goes south every now and again.

But the big message of The Upside of Inequality is that there really is not much that government can do about inequality or indeed anything else. Yes, we should help the poor, but we should not expect to get much result. We should fund education, but it is not going to have much result.

What we could do, in a chapter called "Real Solutions," is this:

• Encourage "ultra high-skilled immigration." Because that would help the "properly trained talent" problem. 
• Lower the marginal corporate tax rate, to attract employers back to the US. 
• Demand balanced trade. Not to save manufacturing jobs but because when we run a trade deficit we import a lot of risk-averse capital that gets invested in government bonds. Not good. We need more risk capital. 
• Increase bank guarantees, not reduce them. 
• Don't enact a middle-class tax cut. That would slow growth.

Of course, after reading a 250-page policy book I rather wonder about the premise of policy analysis books. They are always recommending some sort of pushme-pullyou hydraulic replumbing of government to get the right pressure to force growth -- or equality or justice -- out of a sputtering jalopy.

But what do people really want? The working class of 200 years ago was walking from starvation to wage jobs in the city. The immigrants from Mexico have been doing the same.

But once everyone has got to the city and has got a half-decent job, what then? Most people just want to sit back and live a modest life and blame "them" if and when things go wrong. They don't care about "growth" except when their part of the world is declining, and the kids have to move away to get a job. But they do want that free stuff the politicians keep offering.

Really, nobody has thought about what comes next. What you might call the Downside of Government Programs and free stuff.

OK. We know what comes next. The whole big-government edifice crumbles to dust because its free-stuff concept has completely wrecked the economy and the culture.

But after that. What do we do then?

Come on geniuses. Give it your best.

Reticent Voter? I Don't Think So

The guardian of the conventional wisdom, Peggy Noonan, says that 2016 is "The Year of the Reticent Voter."

Not after this CBS News item about rust-belt Democrats leaving the sinking ship.

And not after yesterday. I was in line at the supermarket and a 50-ish white guy started rambling pro-Trump asides about Trump and Clinton. In the heart of Washington State's 7th Congressional District, one of the most Democratic districts in Congress! With women and minorities present!

Imagine someone daring to mention the name of Trump in the middle of Liberalville! Where the special snowflakes and the SJWs roam! The noive!

After leaving the store I realized that I should have sat him down, bought him a cup of coffee, and de-briefed him for the benefit of my readers.

No. I don't think this is the year of the reticent voter. I think this is the year that the Republican Party truly becomes the party of Middle America.

They used to talk about "country-club Republicans," and I suppose the insult had a grain of truth in it. Certainly, the GOP was heavily influenced by Buckley's National Review, by free-enterprise advocates, and latterly by the Religious Right.

And that meant that the "Reagan Democrats" could never really belong to the GOP, because, as we are seeing this year, the white working class wants the government to take care of it. It wants a degree of Patron/Client relationship, and if the old GOP stood for anything it was that it stood against Patron/Client politics.

(If you want an unsettling comparison of Patron/Client with Master/Slave and Lord/Serf, you could read this piece that a lefty calls a defense of slavery.)

But the truth is that in a country where the Patron/Client government programs of Social Security, Medicare, and government education are sacrosanct, then the championing of a government of personal responsibility is a dead letter.

That is what Donald Trump has demonstrated. And that is why the NeverTrumpers are so annoyed.

I've been watching recent Trump speeches, such as this one in Chester Township, PA, and can appreciate what he is doing. He is saying that when he is president he will care for everyone. He riffs off the Charlotte Riots by advocating for the decent folks that have to live in the riot-torn cities, trying to build a life of work and raising and educating children. Think of them, he says.

This line was startling to me, because the default conventional wisdom of the past decade has been to care about minorities and women -- as minorities and women -- and completely leaving out the ordinary non-minority-and-women people that are also struggling in these times. For Trump "inclusivity" means everyone, not just outreach to the previously "excluded."

You can see why the white guy at the supermarket would have been touched by this. Democrats haven't cared about people like him since before Archie Bunker was dispatched to Outer Slobbovia as a racist sexist bigot. But Republicans haven't cared either. They have appealed to people that obeyed the law, went to work, and followed the rules and didn't expect nuttin' from government. But people like my white guy want the government to care about people like him.

Well, Donald Trump has changed that, and he has changed the Republican Party.

It means, in the future, that the Republican Party won't be trying to do serious reform of the welfare state. Not until it is well and truly broken and the people demand that the government "do something" about it.

That's a pity, because when the welfare state breaks, it will be women and minorities -- and the white working class -- hardest hit. As usual.