How to Talk to Liberals About the Obamacare Meltdown

Let's jump the gun a little and imagine that Donald Trump wins on November 8. What are we going to say to our liberal friends over Thanksgiving dinner?

I think that the best thing would be to blame the whole thing on Obamacare -- more in sorrow than in anger, of course.

The whole problem, I'll say, is that liberals don't want to learn the science about administrative government, from socialism to the administrative rule of the experts. If I were a liberal, I'd say that liberals were in denial about the settled science on socialism and administrative government. But since I'm not I'll just say that you could look it up. It's all out there, in books not yet banned by the SJW book burners.

Look, everybody does this. It's not just Christians denying the fact of evolution.

Take the Marxists. I've noticed, reading Marxist tomes, that there is remarkably little interest in the marginal revolution of 1870. Karl Marx wrote his Capital around the apparent contradiction between the idea of use value and exchange value. Food is useful, yet it is cheap; gold is useless, but it is dear. What gives? So Marx built a whole world view on the notion that the change from working for use to working for wages resulted in alienation from the real world into an imaginary world where labor was nothing more than a commodity sold on the market. The idea of marginal value explained all this by saying that people live and work and exchange on the margin. They ask: do I want to work some more or would I rather go to the pub? Do I want to buy this gold ring at this price, or for a slightly lower price.

Why would a Marxist want to learn about that? It would destroy the whole elegant system that Marx set up. And so, a century later and more, Marxists still prattle on about commodification and alienation as though the marginal revolution never happened. Millions have suffered and died in consequence.

The same thing happened to the world view of the rule of the "best men" and the rule of the experts through administrative government programs that got going in the late 19th century. In 1918 Ludwig von Mises published a paper "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth" that argued that socialism couldn't work because it could not compute prices. Then 30 years later his student F.A. Hayek reminded the administrative left what this meant for them. It meant that bureaucratic government could not work because of a bandwidth problem. A few thousand bureaucrats and their ukases could not out-perform a million consumers and producers and their prices.

The point is that prices tell consumers and producers whether or not to change their behavior. If prices go down they tell consumers to buy more. If prices go up they tell producers to find an innovation to make things less expensive.

The point about a government program is that the bureaucrats and the program clients do not change their behavior when things change, because of the absence of prices. And so government programs always fail.

Obamacare is a program based on the world view of administrative government. Just set up an administrative system with the right people in charge and you can deliver lower-priced health care to the 30 million without health insurance. That is the idea.

OK, Sherlock, so what is the problem with Obamacare? Let me count the ways.

1. It doesn't make sense for many people to buy health insurance. The whole point of health insurance is to protect your assets from a catastrophic expense. So health insurance makes sense for people with retirement assets and homes. It does not make sense for young and poor people without assets, because if they get huge health bills they can just declare bankruptcy. It does not make sense for millionaires that can afford a million or so in health expenses. This means that most of the 30 million do not have health insurance because it does not make sense for them, and that employers were right to offer mini-plans to their young employees who just needed a bit of help with their medical bills.
2.  A big administrative system like Obamacare cannot adjust to changing conditions. That's because it is an administrative system that does not respond to price signals.
3. A big administrative program like Obamacare ends up being Springtime for the Special Interests. It was passed with a handout to hospitals and insurance companies, and is falling apart now that the government is trying to claw back the "risk corridors" that bought the support of the insurance companies.
4. Program beneficiaries learn how to scam the system. The people signing up are the people that are eligible for subsidies. Unfortunately they still face big deductibles and they hate that. Most beneficiaries of government programs think that free is the only fair price for a government program.
5. Most people already have health insurance and they hate having to pay for other peoples' insurance as well.
6. The difference between insurance and government insurance is that government insurance has free stuff up front. This helps pass the program (just listen to President Obama in his speeches defending Obamacare) but it just raises the cost overall. For instance, science says that preventative medicine doesn't improve health outcomes. Tell that to a liberal.
7. Single-payer is not the answer. Single-payer just means that the whole health care system will be freed from price signals and turn into extremely expensive bureaucratic mush. That is what the science says.

But the big problem is the big problem with all government programs. It is impossible to reform them. Of course it is, because the reason people like them is the free stuff, and they will hang onto their free stuff even while the world collapses around them. People should pay for their own pensions, for their own health care, for their kids education, for the relief of the poor in their town. Anything else is theft.

There's another bit of science that my liberal friends seem never to have heard of. It comes from Buchanan and Tullock's The Calculus of Consent. The book is an analysis of legislative voting systems. What happens is what we all know. The proposers of any initiative find that they must buy the votes of people on the fence. So, with majority voting, the proposers must buy the votes of the legislators in the middle to get a majority. And the minority that doesn't stand to benefit from the program gets to pay without getting any benefit. Buchanan and Tullock discovered that there is one voting system that does not screw the minority. It is the system of unanimous consent. With unanimous consent, the proposers are forced to pay the minority for the costs they impose on them. I think there is a word for that: justice.

Now, if liberals had listened to all this, and got themselves up to date on the settled science they could have avoided the disaster of 2016 and they would be settling in for a generation of Democratic majorities. What a pity that they just couldn't bear to crack those books and learn their lessons like good little boys and girls.

Clinton Crime Family? Of Course

One of the benefits of the Clinton e-mail scandal and the broader Wikileaks disclosures -- not to mention books like Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer -- is that they rip the covers off all politics.

The pay-for-play operation that Hillary Clinton seems to have run out of the State Department seems egregious, but that is the way all politics operates. It is not that way because of the particular venality of the political operators. Politics attracts that sort of person.

It is really very simple. Human communities need protection from robbers and invaders seeking loot and plunder. So communities need guardians, armed and trained to prevent anyone from looting them of their product and their savings.

But once a community has a corps of armed guardians, what is to prevent the armed guardians from taking a cue from the robbers and invaders and doing a spot of rape and pillage on their own account? Not much, except the goodness of their hearts. In fact their hearts teach the guardians that that they deserve a bit of loot here and there. That is why St. Augustine wrote

Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made of of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed upon. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it hold places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity.

That is why people write satirically about the Clinton Crime Syndicate, or the Clinton Crime Family. Just as the residents within the territory of an urban criminal gang have to pay protection money to make sure that nothing bad happens to their nice little business, so aspiring crony capitalists need to pay off the Clinton Foundation against the loot potential in a Clinton presidency. Rich donors pay good money to rising politicians. And workers pay payroll taxes for the right to work, and professionals pay license fees for the right to practice.

There is no difference between a crime family and a guerrilla insurgency and a government, except the degree of "impunity." All of these regimes occupy territory, tax the inhabitants for the right to go about their business, and all of them reward their supporters out of the product of the inhabitants they tax.

Now the great success of the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years has been in innovation, also called "permissionless innovation." Entrepreneurs have been able to initiate new products and services without asking permission and as a result they have flooded the world with prosperity before the ruling class figured out what was happening. What was the decisive element? Probably that the entrepreneurs could keep most of their profits and the customers most of the benefits of the innovation without paying off the godfathers of the various crime syndicates, from the local mob to the national ruling class.

But in the Obama era we have seen a relapse to loot and plunder. Obamacare was a carve-out to various interests including hospitals and insurance companies. The costs were borne by workers forced to buy overpriced insurance and employers that had to work overtime to figure out how to avoid the costs. Green energy has been a bonfire of the special interests, with subsidies and credits being handed out to wind and solar and electric cars. And zero interest rate policy puts innumerable warps upon the financial system, all to get the government and the banks out of a jam.

If you need to wonder why economic growth has been so slow in the Obama years, look no further.

That is the point of limited government. It proceeds on the faith that almost all use of political power and government force will be harmful, so the less of it the better.

Of course, Donald Trump is not going to end all this. Here's piece in the British center-left Independent writing about how 94 percent of steel jobs left Weirton, West Virginia, after NAFTA, and how the residents are all in for Trump.

But.

Those steel jobs were union jobs, and the union workers were getting paid way above market rate. That's because of the crony deal, decades before, to give labor unions special privileges to combine against employers as part of their "rights." Sitting on their rights they never had to adjust to market realities, until it was too late. So now their good union jobs at good wages are gone.

But there are still steel companies in the United States. We have one right here in Seattle. It is a plant operated by Nucor, with 320 jobs. They used to call the Nucors "mini mills." A 2014 Seattle Times puff piece calls the plant "efficient, agile, smart."

And that tells the story exactly. Capitalism asks -- demands -- each one of us to be efficient, agile, and smart, and not imagine that political power and connections will keep us in the money forever. Because they won't.

When you sign up with the local crime syndicate for protection you are certainly buying the right to rest on your laurels for a while. But in the end you'll have to get with the program. That is what has been happening to the folks that luxuriated in the special privileges that government gave to certain workers a couple generations ago.

But the trouble about being the "little darlings" of the local crime syndicate is that one fine day the music stops, and you have to go out and find a job. If you have been coddled for 20 years by the local Big Man, you are going to find the experience utterly demoralizing and unjust.

The solution is never to get started into a life of cronyism. Stay efficient, agile, smart, and adjust to the world and its endless changes.

And keep the Clinton Crime family down in Arkansas, where it can only do limited damage.

What are the Turnout Models Telling Us?

I just read a couple of reports on early voting, and they seem to show that Republican voter turnout is up, compared to 2012, and black turnout is down. Only, if your read the MSM reports, they show the Dems ahead. Go figure.

So, are all the media polls adjusting their turnout models to reflect on-the-ground data from actual voting? Or are they waiting for more data?

As I understand it, the whole trick with polls is the turnout model, trying to estimate from respondents' answers whether they will actually vote in the upcoming election. If you are a political actor you want to influence the poll-takers to oversample your supporters and give the impression of an unstoppable tide. Equally, you want to discourage your opponent's supporters in the hope that they won't even bother to vote.

Up to now the pollsters really haven't known how turnout was going to go. They have been using turnout models from previous elections. But, of course the 2008 was a downer election for Republican supporters because of the Bush failures. And 2012 was a downer election for Republican supporters because Democrats brilliantly presented the kind and gentle Mitt Romney as an uncaring capitalist.

But today white working class Americans are clearly enthusiastic about Donald Trump, and African Americans are clearly not feeling the Hope and Change. That's why the Dems had to gin up the Black Lives Matter rage.

So the question is: what about the women? Now it is clear that women have been targeted in two ways, using the "I can't believe that he/she said that" concept that is central to the women's Culture of Complaint. On the one hand we have conservative women targeted by the revelations of Donald Trump's locker-room talk; no doubt millions of them will not vote. But then we have the Hillary revelations, culminating in the connection between her and the sexting Anthony Weiner through the sainted Huma Abedin. Surely liberal women must be saying to themselves: "I can't believe he did that."

By the way, I'm inclined to believe that it is principally educated middle-class women that are offended by gross male behavior. My reason? Twenty, thirty years ago, I remember going to the ice show here in Seattle -- Peggy Fleming and all that. But what shocked me was that about 15 minutes into the show the bathroom humor -- big women skating around with balloons for boobs, etc. -- came out and the downscale audience loved it. Just saying.

So I wonder if the educated woman turnout is going to take a hit this year. And I wonder if the polls are factoring that into their results.

By the way, if you are upset that the election has been about everything except the issues, the reason is that the big battle is over turnout: getting your side's voters to the polls, and discouraging your opponent's voters from getting out of bed on Election Day.

Another Proof of God's Existence

Obviously, in retrospect, the Clintons bet the election on the 11-year-old tape of Donald Trump doing locker-room talk with a Bush scion. And it worked, as women all over America reacted, as they were supposed to, with eye-rolling "I can't believe he said that."

But now we have a Clinton scandal that combines the Clinton e-mail scandal with sexual salaciousness. You remember the Clinton e-mail scandal, how Hillary Clinton set up a private email system in violation of the law and common sense. And then the FBI let her off the hook.

But now God has intervened, with the discovery of Huma Abedin's emails on her husband's desktop computer that the government seized in connection a sex crime allegedly committed by her husband, the former Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner.

I tell you, only God would think of that: neutralizing the Clinton campaign sex meme with another that combines the sex meme with the e-mail meme. And it certainly goes to prove that God has a sense of humor, and a kindly regard for the NY Post and its love of a good headline.

OK, I know. The guys behind the latest bombshell are the FBI rank-and-file. Their esprit de corps has enraged them into forcing the hand of the FBI Director. They hate, absolutely hate, the Clintonian corruption of their agency, and they have obviously maneuvered FBI director James Comey into a position where he understands that he has a nice little job here, pity if something would happen to it.

And wouldn't you know, today we have PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel making a speech at the National Press Club where he articulates his support of Trump with an analysis of the last 20 years as three big bubbles: the tech bubble, the war bubble and the real-estate bubble. And since it was the best and brightest, the experienced and the seasoned, that got us into the three bubbles, maybe it is time to go with an outsider. Because maybe the insiders in the ruling class don't know what they are doing.

Of course I think it is worse than that. I think that our present liberal ruling class has gone completely off the rails with both Obama and Clinton being enthusiasts for Saul Alinsky. Alinsky, and the left generally, believes that there is a profound difference between good lefty activists and the system and that permanent street war on the system is the answer. The opposing Anglo-Saxon tradition is that while there are obviously injustices and oppressions, the idea is to soften the conflict by formal elections and that in between elections we put our political weapons away and compromise based on the relative political strength of each party established at the last election.

And the whole point of having a First Amendment is that people with unpopular ideas get to spout them without being named and shamed into silence. And this is not soft-hearted but as Macchiavellian as can be. We don't want dissenters pushed into the shadows where we have no idea what they are doing. We want them to announce their marginal ideas in the full light of day, on Facebook, Twitter, and conspiracy websites.

Let us remember every day that the present political stance of the Democratic Party and its elite supporters in the Cathedral of the media, education and the bureaucracies is based on the Frankfurt School modification of Marxian class politics into race and gender identity politics. The idea is that there are unresolvable differences between the races and the genders that can only be resolved by force.

This is of course a recipe for the Hobbsian war of all against all, and utter folly in the industrial world of today where everything is for sale and everyone is treated as a responsible agent, and there is no need to attack the neighboring tribe to get our hands on their food-bearing land.

And, the way that the election is turning out, it looks like God thinks that a bit of divine intervention is warranted. Never forget, as Bismarck noted, there seems to be a special Providence that looks after children, drunkards, and the good old US of A.

Max Weber and the End of the German Miracle

We have all been taught to believe that Germans are Nazis and anti-semites, potential Teutonic brutes every one.

So it has taken me a lifetime to build a full appreciation of the Germans. The fact is that after the Brits maxed out with David Hume and Adam Smith in the late 18th century, it was the Germans that took over and invented the modern world: not just in philosophy but in automobiles, diesels, relativity, quantum mechanics.

Hume said that we cannot prove causation, only correlation. But it was Kant that made sense out of that and proposed that even though we can't prove cause and effect we operate in the world by creating a mental model of the world in our brains, in concepts by intuition and concepts of understanding. By proposing that the world outside could be different from the world inside the brain, I think that Kant laid the foundation for the German-led physics revolution in the early 20th century. Then Fichte proposed that the entity building the mental model of the world was das Ich, the Ego, and we were off to Freud and modern psychology.

Adam Smith started economics on its modern journey, but it was mostly Germans like Karl Menger that solved the problem of the dual track of use value and exchange value in the marginal revolution of 1870 -- which Marxists have still not dealt with.

The last two bright stars in the German firmament were Georg Simmel and Max Weber, sociologists that died in 1918 and 1920 and that did their best work in the years before World War I. If they had lived... Well the world might have been very different. Or maybe, like the rest of the German intelligentsia, they would have been forced to flee to Britain and the US.

Right now I am reading a translation of Max Weber's introduction to his sociology, titled The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. It is part of the work that was unfinished at the time of Weber's death, so it tends to be fragmentary and sometimes confusing.

But Weber's work is clearly post-Marxist. He has read and understood Marx, but knows that Marx is stuck in a time-warp of pre-marginal economics. In Weber's Theory he fully understands the marginal revolution of 1870 and entertains and discusses the theory put forward by Dr. Otto Neurath about the possibility of economic calculation under socialism. There is a footnote that references Ludwig von Mises' paper of 1920, "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth" that denied the possibility of economic calculation under socialism and that developed into Mises' book Socialism.

It makes you think: what if Weber had lived and put his encyclopedic authority on elite German thought in the 1920s?

All that stuff went into the shadows in the inter-war years, and only flourished again when German refugees like Mises and Hayek got noticed in the Anglo-Saxon world after World War II. Meanwhile, the biggest contribution we got from Germany has been the identity politics of race and gender ginned up by the Frankfurt School as a substitute for the failed class politics of Marx.

Yet there is hope, and today you can read about a successful entrepreneur like Bob Luddy, CEO of CaptiveAire, talking about learning Austrian economics and unlearning Galbraith.

In recent years we have heard a lot from liberals talking about settled science and the deniers that deny it. Only, of course, climate science is a very new science and is full of uncertainties and dueling theories. It isn't settled, and the proof is that the climate models can't model the climate.

But our liberal friends are remarkably uninterested in any science that challenges their faith in top-down administration of society by a corps of unelected experts. Who would guess that the science is settled on most of this. We know that top-down government-administered programs are a nightmare. Government programs can't adapt to changing situations, and they cannot be reformed short of disaster. And they are brutally wasteful, both of human talent and national treasure. And that is because of the German ideas that socialism cannot work because it cannot compute prices, and bureaucratic government cannot work because it just does not have the bandwidth to, e.g. administer the whole health-care system.

The point of knowledge, I feel, is that it offers a more efficient model for human action than raw trial-and-error. When you ignore or deny knowledge, you are insisting on doing it the hard way, in war, and famine, and revolution.

Yes, But What Do We Do About It?

Here's George McGovern´s pollster Pat Caddell speaking at Hillsdale College. Yeah, he's now almost a conservative. His February 2016 poll reported that:

• 72 percent of Americans think there is a two-track economy, where "most Americans struggle... and where the huge corporations get all the rewards." 
• 66 percent of American believe the country is in decline.
• 78 percent of Americans think the two main parties are too beholden to special interests to do meaningful change.
• 72 percent agree that the problem comes from "corruption and crony capitalism" in Washington D.C.
• 74 percent think that the biased media is part of the problem.

Well, yes. But what do we do about it? Do we smash the corporations, as bankruptcy attorney Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) wants us to do? Or do we renegotiate NAFTA and fine corporations for sending good jobs abroad, as Donald Trump wants us to do?

Or is the problem that government taxes corporations and individuals a total of $6 trillion per year? Could it be that entitlement spending has pounded the heart out of America? Could it be that $1.5 trillion a year in dysfunctional government health-care spending and $1.0 trillion a year in dysfunctional education spending are part of the problem?

Could it be that we have not got a foot out of the Garden of Eden since the dawn of history, where the politician "tempted me and I did eat?"

Let us think about what politics would naturally look like when the politicians had given us all the seed corn to eat and there were no more cheap answers, not even "smash the corporations."

The politicians would be distracting us and dividing us by tribe and by identity. They would be telling workers that the corporations were robbing them blind and giving their jobs away to China and India. They would be telling women that all men were filthy sexual harassers. They would be telling blacks that the police were out to get them. They would be telling gays that haters were out to get them. They would be telling the poor that the rich should be made to pay their fair share. They would be telling the taxpayers that the poor should get out and get a job.

But the people would never believe rubbish like that...

Notice what nobody is saying?

Nobody is saying that maybe all these entitlements were a mistake. Maybe we should gradually scale them down, so that almost everyone funds their own retirement, that almost everyone pays for their own health care, that all the mothers in the neighborhood get together to educate their children, that we relieve the poor with the old ABCDEFG method used by charity workers in the 19th century.

Nobody is saying that we should think about the universal garnishing of workers' wages with payroll taxes and income tax withholding.

Nobody is proposing to lift the huge weight of government wage-and-hour regulation, including the minimum wage, from off the brow of labor.

Nobody is proposing to stop corporate subsidies for their favorite projects.

Nobody is saying that we need a constitutional amendment to stop government dangling free stuff in our faces.

Nobody is saying that we should get government out of the pension business completely and make government bureaucrats fund their own retirement.

Nobody is musing that maybe more government force will not be the answer to the accumulation of a century of government force where business and the economy are concerned.

None of this should be surprising. It is, after all, only a couple hundred years since the eternal advice of Gerald O'Hara that "land is life" has been invalidated by the rise of capitalism and the market economy. Now it doesn't matter who owns the land. The only thing that matters is that everything is available to buy and sell in the marketplace. So the need to aggressive defend your land or conquer other land is no longer important. All you need to do is to offer your services and ideas on the market.

But we humans still instinctively know that it is force, and force only, that rules. Power and possession are the only realities. Smash the invader! Smash the corporations! Smash the cops! Smash the patriarchy! Smash the lesser races! Smash the racists! Smash the ruling class! Smash the politicians! Oh, and smash the media!

Obviously, we are not yet near the End of History, whoever wins the election on November 8, 2016.

A House Divided Cannot Stand

In his Clash of Civilizations Samuel Huntington argues that the world, following the centuries of western hegemony, is now divided along civilizational lines. So if you are a politician in Singapore or China, you extol the obvious superiority of Confucianism, and if you are a political leader in a Muslim country you extol the obvious truth of Islam and the Prophet, peace be upon him.

Huntington believes that the ideological age, in which half the world was run on socialist ideas, is over, and that we are reverting to a religious age, with cultural rather than ideological cues. International and intranational conflict, he writes, now occurs along civilizational -- actually religious -- fault lines, not ideological fault lines, as during the Cold War.

Except that the ideological fault lines were religious, if we accept that socialism/communism/progressivism is a secular religion.

On this view, the leaders of the West should be extolling the virtues of Christianity, as the rest of the world extols their Axial Age religions; only they are not. In fact, the West is divided between a nominally Christian capitalist side and a progressive/secular religious side.

The interesting thing is that the progressives use not their religion, but tribal cues, to rally their voters. Thus they have spent the last 50 years raising racial and sexual consciousness among women and minorities. This is palpable in the current 2016 election cycle as Democrats rally women against the sexual harasser Donald Trump and blacks against the police with Black Lives Matter.

Notice that our Democratic friends are not raising issues; they are raising race and gender identity. Now, nominally, this race and gender politics proposes the white male as an "other." But really, behind the screen, they are attacking our Christian, capitalist, limited government culture.

Against this progressive push, Donald Trump openly wraps himself in the flag and the nation. Although, of course, his core voters that show up at his rallies are overwhelmingly white and ordinary middle-class.

If Trump were the racist, sexist that our Democratic friends want him to be then he should be openly making a racist, sexist pitch for his Trumpster votes just as Democrats are unashamed as making a sexist pitch for "nasty women" and a racist pitch by endorsing the racist Black Lives Matter.

But here is the thing. If Huntington is right, and the coming fault lines across the world are going to be religious, then the divided West better get its act together. Because in any conflict the side that is united has a huge advantage over the side that is divided.

To raise the question is to answer it. Right now, native Westerners across the West are starting to rise up against their globalist rulers, and they are doing it over the question of religion. People in the west are clearly stating that they do not want a Muslim minority in the West that achieves strategic concentration.

As this Muslim issue develops it will put pressure on the western women who are clutching their pearls this season over Donald Trump's locker-room talk. And the Muslim issue will put pressure on African Americans that are more worried about police shootings than about the cultural collapse in the black majority inner cities and the threat that rising Hispanic and Muslim numbers represent to their special status as liberals' favorite victims.

For years I have worried about how conservatives can possibly push back against liberal identity politics -- i.e. sub-national tribalism -- because how can you do the politics of division when your basic line is that Americans are the best people in the world and America is the best country in the world? Where is the encouragement for rage and coming out to vote out the corrupt rascals?

The basic thrust of Huntington's Clash of Civilizations argument is that wars on the fault lines between civilizations force secondary actors to decide which side they are on, and usually they side with their co-religionists. So you can see that as the fault lines develop in the coming years, they are going to force the West to decide which side it is on, and the current divide between Christian capitalists and progressive identity believers will have to be resolved one way or another.

But there is another question, that Huntington doesn't address. He talks about fully westernized politicians like Lee Kuan Yew putting on the armor of Confucianism when running for office in Singapore. But was that just a blind?

Put it this way. How much of the western cultural agenda is optional if you want to be a leading civilization that can carry a big stick in the world and win fault-line wars? Capitalism? Limited government? Democracy? Rule of Law? Christianity? Tolerance? Science? Free speech? You tell me.